Category Archives: Horror
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 25: Friday the 13th (1980)
Director: Sean S. Cunningham
Writer: Victor Miller
Cast: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson, Jeannine Taylor, Robbi Morgan, Kevin Bacon, Ari Lehman, Peter Brouwer
Plot: Camp Crystal Lake: a typical place of fun and frolic for children during the summer… and a typical place for the teenage councilors to engage in various acts of debauchery. Such was the case in 1958, when a pair of the councilors were murdered while having sex — the scandal shut down the camp, seemingly for good. Flash forward to 1980. Crystal Lake has earned the name “Camp Blood” among the people of the town, but a young girl named Annie (Robbi Morgan) is hitchhiking there to begin preparing to re-open. On her way, Annie learns about the camp’s history – the murders in ’58, the drowning of a boy in ’57, a series of tragedies and mishaps with no explanation. The rest of the councilors arrive (including a young Kevin Bacon) and begin pitching in on the repairs to the run-down cabins and facilities. One of them, Alice (Adrienne King) has a history with the camp’s new owner Steve (Peter Brouwer) and is unsure she wants to stay, but he convinces her to give it one more week before making up her mind. Annie, is picked up by a green jeep, but the driver races right past the camp entrance. Annie flees, but the driver captures and murders her. Unaware of this, the rest of the teens go about the equally-important tasks of fixing up broken stuff and engaging in copious sexual activities and the frequent smoking of “the pot.” During a rainstorm that night, a shadowy figure begins picking off the teenagers one at a time – an arrow here, an axe to the skull there, usually in moments right after they’ve engaged in some sort of unwholesome behavior.
Eventually, we’re down to two survivors – Alice and Bill (Harry Crosby). With the power out, the two begin investigating the camp, finding the bloody murder weapons and, eventually, the corpses of their friends. Bill is killed with an arrow to the face, and Alice is left alone, terrified. When a Jeep pulls up, she runs out of the cabin, thinking it’s (the now-dead) Steve. Instead, she finds Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer). She tells Alice the story of a boy named Jason who drowned because the counselors that should have been watching him were having sex. Jason was her son, and today – Friday the 13th – is his birthday. Alice realizes Mrs. Voorhees has been killing her friends as some sort of mad retribution for her son’s death. Alice escapes, finding even more corpses, and getting caught in a game of hide-and-seek with Mrs. Voorhees. In the film’s climax, Alice beheads the old woman with an ax, seemingly putting an end to the horror of Camp Crystal Lake. Or does she? Even after she is rescued, Alice still has horrible dreams… not of Mrs. Voorhees, but of little Jason, rising from the water of the lake to exact his revenge.
Thoughts: Friday the 13th certainly didn’t invent the trope of using a slasher killer to exact vengeance on the sinners of the world (typically teenagers). We’ve seen it in several movies so far – Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween, for example. But Sean Cunningham’s movie – and its endless chain of sequels – raised that idea to an art form. While the murderer (Mrs. Voorhees in this film, Jason in the sequels) is clearly a lunatic, there is an element of schadenfreude to the deaths of the teenagers who were engaged in Naughty Behavior: sex, drugs, even a game of strip Monopoly. On the other hand, the film subverts this concept slightly as well – at least one of the councilors, Brenda (Laurie Bartram) dies because Mrs. Voorhees plays upon her best instincts, imitating a child in the storm and calling for help, then murdering the girl when she tries to come to the rescue.
Considering how ubiquitous Jason Voorhees has become in common culture, it’s really easy to forget that he wasn’t the killer in this first film (and even easier to forget that his signature hockey mask didn’t show up until part three). So casting your brain back to 1980, when the movie first came out and nobody knew about it, the idea that the killer could be an old lady was pretty shocking. Having been weaned on to the slasher through those movies I mentioned before, where the killer was always a hulking, brutish man, it was nearly impossible to see the revelation coming. Cunningham increases the tensions by showing many of the death scenes in the killer’s point-of-view, or from other angles that hide her true identity. Looking through the eyes of the murderer, you never suspect it’s a woman, making the final reveal even more effective. Granted, some of the fleeting glimpses we see of the killer slashing seem to imply that Mrs. Voorhees has a serious case of Man Hands, but that’s something we can live with for the sake of a great revelation.
I’ve mentioned musical scores a lot over the course of this experiment, and I think that’s important. Music is an extremely effective way to set mood, and whether it’s used properly can make or break a film. Harry Manfredini did it well here. We do get moments of rambling, good-time music (such as when the councilors are on their way to the camp), but that’s reserved for scenes where such a mood is appropriate. When things get serious, so does the music – creepy and chilling, with a chanting undercurrent that’s supposed to echo the madness in the mind of the Voorhees family: Ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma… You hear that six-syllable chant in any circumstance and it calls to mind a series of murders in the woods. (In the woods in the rain. How often have we seen characters in these horror movies die during nasty weather? It’s like nature itself is sending down the killer’s fury in their final moments.)
This movie definitely takes more care with its characters than most of the sequels would do. Many of the subsequent Friday movies (and slasher movies in general for that matter) would reduce the pool of potential victims to a group of caricatures at best, with only the main Survivor Girl or Hero Boy getting even a cursory attempt at development. In this early effort, most of the characters are at least given an opportunity to stand out from the others. Granted, we don’t necessarily like them all – we’ve got the obnoxious prankster frequently making a fool of himself, for example – but that’s not a bad thing in a movie like this. You root for the characters you like, you have a brief, visceral thrill when the characters you hate get stabbed through a mattress. Alice, as expected, turns out to be our sole survivor, which again is a common horror trope today. Sadly, the sequel also participates in one of the horror tropes I like the least: starting a franchise horror movie by killing off the survivors of the previous installment. I hate that – it makes the character’s struggle in the previous film seem pointless. (For other particularly egregious examples, see Alien 3 and, worse of all, Halloween: Resurrection, which committed the unforgivable sin of killing off the greatest Survivor Girl in horror movie history, Laurie Strode.)
Speaking of Survivor Girls, Alice again manages to maintain the tone established by Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. She’s the “good girl,” even though she’s clearly had a sexual relationship with Steve in the past. In a way, she’s the “reformed girl” – she’s rejected him, although she hasn’t completely discounted the possibility of a reconciliation, but at the same time she’s trying to be part of the group. Even then, she doesn’t partake in the sort of devilish behavior that marks her friends for death. Even in the strip Monopoly game, she’s the only one still fully clothed when a burst of wind blows the door open and calls it quits.
In the early part of the movie, writer Victor Miller spends a lot of time on little scenes that don’t really add to the story – one of the councilors nearly drowning, the girls freaking out over a snake in their bunk, and so forth. This may have been intended to come across as building the tension, making us worry that the killer is going to choose that moment to strike, but few of those cases actually achieve that particular goal. There may be some parallelism – Jason drowned in the lake, the knife they use to kill the snake is similar to one used by Mrs. Voorhees, and so forth – but even that may be giving the movie a little more credit than it really deserves.
Things pick up really quickly once the bloodbath begins, though. At the 40-minute mark, less than halfway through the picture, we pan up from the bed where Jack and Marcie (Bacon and Jeannine Taylor) are having their fun only to see prankster Ned (Mark Nelson) lying with a slit throat. We didn’t see his death explicitly, so the exposition of his body is a shocker. These days, I don’t know if a filmmaker would be unable to resist showing him getting cut and ruining the shock, but in this case it works perfectly and sets the tone for the rhythm of chase sequence/death sequence that makes up the rest of the film.
Kevin Bacon’s death is particularly effective – he’s lying in bed, having just had himself a little teenage sex, when a hand reaches up from underneath and grabs him. He’s held in place and a point juts from his throat, erupting in a fountain of blood that reveals an arrowhead being driven into him from underneath. As far as horror makeup effects go, it’s extremely well done, looks very realistic, and kicks off the murder spree.
Mrs. Voorhees herself, once revealed as the killer, can come across a little hokey at times. In a way, she’s a reverse Norman Bates, speaking for her dead son as though he’s compelling her to commit the murders. The intent could easily have been that she was simply a woman driven crazy by her son’s death, although the dream sequence at the end seems to imply that even at this early stage, Miller and Cunningham were thinking of sequels, and the way “Jason” pops out of the lake at Alice hints at a shred the supernatural even there. Whatever the case, listening to Betsy Palmer talk to “herself” – first in Jason’s little boy voice than in her own – isn’t as effective as the assorted voices Alfred Hitchcock used for Norman Bates’ Mother during his own legendary run as a serial killer. The ending itself is also a bit too extended – Mrs. Voorhees is revealed as the killer with nearly 20 minutes left in the film, and only one potential victim left. The cat-and-mouse game that follows probably could have been more memorable if it was quicker, but instead you’re just left waiting moment after moment for the inevitable final confrontation.
The fake-out at the end works pretty well, though. After she kills Mrs. Voorhees, Alice drifts out onto the lake in a boat. We see her next in the morning as the police arrive, and we hear some music that seems to indicate the nightmare is over… until a decaying corpse leaps from the water and pulls her under. It seems like the terror is beginning again, but Alice wakes up in the hospital. Did Jason really attack, or was that just a dream? It’s clearly a sequel hook, in retrospect, but if there had never been another film (a laughable notion now) it would have been simple enough to write this off as the last moments of terror trying to resolve themselves in Alice’s dreams.
The franchise that eventually grew from this relatively simple film is remarkable. It starts off as a very down-to-Earth, effective creepy film about teenagers starring in their very own campfire horror story. Later on, we get a supernatural killer, a Superzombie if you will, that cannot be destroyed and winds up with a link to Hell. It eventually leads the way to Jason X, where the character is cryogenically frozen, thawed out in the future and kills a space station.Quite a long way from Crystal Lake, isn’t it? Still, the legacy of the original continues today, and if nothing else, the original Friday the 13th gives a bunch of actors who never really worked again an easy link in the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game.
We’re staying in the woods tomorrow, this time to a cabin that, itself, is a gateway to Hell. Join us for The Evil Dead.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 24: The Shining (1980)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writer: Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Joe Turkel
Plot: Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a desperate writer, takes a job as the winter caretaker to a mountain resort hotel. Jack and his family – wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) — move to the hotel for the long, isolated winter months, during which there will be little or no contact with the outside world. Even before arriving at the hotel, Danny (via his imaginary friend, “Tony”) has visions of a pair of horrifying twin girls and a river of blood gushing from an elevator. The family makes the long drive to the hotel and meets the outgoing staff, including the chef, Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers). Halloran senses Danny has a psychic gift, and reveals to the boy that he shares the same power, something Halloran’s grandmother called “Shining.” Halloran tells Danny that the hotel has its own “shine,” including some bad memories, and warns him to stay away from room 237.
After a month in the hotel, Jack is struggling with his writing and thirsting for alcohol (he’s been fighting his alcohol addiction since it previously cost him a teaching job and nearly his marriage, when he hurt Danny in a drunken stupor). Fortunately, while the hotel is well-stocked with food for the winter, there’s no booze left in the Overlook. A storm rolls in and knocks out the phone lines to the hotel, and Danny’s visions grow more horrific, while Jack’s behavior grows more surly, abusive, and erratic. When Wendy finds bruises on Danny’s neck she blames Jack, driving him to the hotel’s ballroom, where a friendly bartender ghost (Joe Turkel) pours him his first drink in months. Wendy suddenly bursts in, saying that Danny told her his wound was really the act of a crazy woman in Room 237. Jack investigates the room, seeing a dead woman rising from the bathtub even as Danny – and far away in Miami, Dick Halloran – has horrible visions of the same. Jack lies to Wendy, reporting that the room was empty and that Danny must have bruised himself.
Jack returns to the ballroom, now full of ghosts in a full-on 1920s soiree, and goes for another drink, only to encounter the ghost of a previous caretaker, who advises Jack to “correct” Wendy and Danny. Halloran decides to return to the Overlook, flying in to Denver and renting a Snowcat to get there. Wendy discovers the “work” Jack has been doing – page after page of nothing but the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” She knocks him out and locks him in the pantry, but learns he damaged their own Snowcat, making escape impossible. As Jack returns, Danny escapes, but Wendy is unable to follow him. He hides in the kitchen as Halloran arrives. Jack kills the old man, and Danny’s scream as he “feels” the death alerts him to the boy’s location. Danny flees into the hotel’s hedge maze and Jack follows him, but Danny manages to trick his father by backtracking over his own footprints. When Wendy arrives, fleeing the ghosts of the hotel, she and Danny take Halloran’s Snowcat and run for safety, leaving Jack to freeze to death in the maze. As the film ends, we see an old photograph of Jack, smiling… in a hotel party from 1921.
Thoughts: The statement I’m about to make will firmly divide everybody reading this, so let’s just get it out of the way quickly: I don’t like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. And the thing is, it’s not because I don’t think it’s a good movie – it is, for many reasons I’ll discuss in the next few paragraphs. The reason I don’t like it is because I think it’s a poor adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. I understand that it’s necessary to change some elements of any book when you make it into a movie – some things that work on the printed page just flat-out don’t work on the screen. I get it. But as the sort of person who always comes down on the side of the original storyteller, I think it should be the job of the filmmaker to at least capture the spirit of the original as much as possible. Kubrick took the skeleton of King’s novel and twisted it around, the ending in particular, to make something far more bleak and pessimistic. The amazing thing about King is (with a few exceptions, most of them written under his pseudonym of Richard Bachman) he’s actually a pretty optimistic writer. Good usually wins in his stories, although evil is rarely fully defeated, and the hero usually has to pay a pretty devastating cost. But he ends things with a grain of hope. In the novel, the story ends with Jack Torrance managing to overcome the demons that have him in their grip long enough to blow the Overlook Hotel’s massive boiler unit, destroying the hotel and sacrificing his own life to save his family. The way Kubrick ends the story, with Torrance freezing to death as he tries to kill the son he’d professed such love for earlier, strips the story and the character of Jack Torrance of any element of good he had. If he had done that with his own characters, that’d be fine. Doing that with someone else’s character, to me, is practically a crime.
Okay, enough of that. Let’s talk about why this film is considered to be a classic by many people. Kubrick was a very effective visual storyteller. Even though he downplayed the supernatural elements in favor of having the sense of danger emanating from Jack (were it not for the telepathic moments with Danny and Halloran and Wendy’s brief encounters with the ghosts at the very end, you could almost dismiss everything as the product of Jack’s insanity), he did managed to craft a very expressive Haunted House story, along with all the necessary tropes. The characters are completely removed from outside help – in their case by geography and, once winter comes, weather. Even when Halloran attempts to come in to help out, he has to get a snowmobile and winds up getting killed for the effort. The supernatural elements are introduced fairly early, then used as part of the story’s very slow build-up, with some characters ignoring their existence and others showing a particular sensitivity to the ghosts of the hotel.
The story does lose a point for going with the rather clichéd “Indian Burial Ground” excuse for the hotel’s nasty disposition, but there’s at least a theory that Kubrick tried to use that to make a statement on the plight of the Native American. It’s kind of a strained metaphor, but if you squint really hard and tilt your head a little bit to the left, you can sort of make it out. The other cliché is much more on-the-nose, though. When Jack makes his way to the ballroom, he actually offers his soul for a beer, verbally, out loud, in case the Faustian elements could possibly be lost on the audience. Then again, when Lloyd the Ghost Bartender pours him a drink, he gets bourbon instead. Perhaps this was a subtle cue that the contract wasn’t entirely fulfilled? That Jack – at this point in the story – was still in rudimentary control of his own destiny? Perhaps I think about this a bit too much?
The hotel itself is nearly perfect – a gorgeous, classic-looking setting that changes very easily to a place of sheer terror. The film has a very slow build – we’re over a half-hour into the 144-minute running time before the Torrance family is finally left alone in the hotel, and with the danger implicit therein. Even once we’re alone, Kubrick uses slow techniques to build the tension, such as the long steadicam shots following Danny as he roams the hallways on his Big Wheel bike or the images of Wendy and Danny wandering the hotel’s hedge maze, juxtaposed with the terminally blocked Jack as he wanders the hotel itself.
King reportedly was against the casting of Jack Nicholson, on the grounds that audiences familiar with his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest would anticipate him going crazy too early. That may be the case, but he still plays the descent into madness well, if a bit too abruptly. Once he starts going loco about 45 minutes into the movie or so, he’s on a pretty straightforward plunge. Again – and I apologize for harping on this – this is a problem for me. We rarely get the sense that Jack is fighting his descent, or that he’s trying to cling to the love of his family. The scene where he tells Danny how much he loves him could have been played as a man who wants terribly to fight back the darkness, and is losing. It’d be a tragic scene in that case. But instead, you get the feeling right away that at this point he’s already completely Looney Toons and he’s going through the motions, even as the madness creeps through his eyes. To Kubrick’s credit, the next scene does show him waking up from a dream, horrified at the vision of himself murdering Wendy and Danny. It’s a rare moment where Jack is legitimately the victim of horror instead of the source. Later, in the ballroom, Jack bemoans Wendy’s lack of trust, claiming he’d never harm Danny and confessing to the one time Danny was injured by him – a “momentary loss of muscle control” when he yanked the boy up too hard by the arm. Again, this is an attempt to humanize Jack a bit, make him less of an out-of-control outlet for evil, and it’s appreciated. It would just be appreciated more if we saw some of that when he was actually with Danny.
Shelly Duvall – who was by many accounts brutalized by Kubrick on-set to get the performance he wanted – works as a woman who is clinging to a dying hope, then sees it shatter. Danny Lloyd is okay – not particularly memorable amongst the pantheon of child actors but not particularly offensive either. And Scatman Crothers? Hell, there isn’t anything in the world that couldn’t have been made 83 percent cooler by the addition of Scatman Crothers. In truth, I’ve always felt the Halloran character was somewhat wasted in this story – after a fairly epic run where it seems like he’s going to play the cavalry, he instead dies moments after entering the hotel, serving no purpose other than to reveal to Jack where Danny is hiding and to provide a second Snowcat – which, once Jack is dead, is kind of unnecessary. He’s a great character, and gets thrown away pretty much for nothing.
The pop culture footprint of this film is enormous, of course, and I don’t just mean that one SimpsonsHalloween episode that parodies it. Danny’s refrain of “Redrum” and the steady typing that gives us “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” have both become milestones, shortcuts to demonstrate horror in parody. Images like the blood flowing from the elevator and the frozen Jack in the hedge maze, too, are iconic at this point. Although perhaps the most recognizable moment of the film – Jack bursting through the door with a fire axe and exclaiming “Here’s Johnny!” was an ad lib by Nicholson on the set. It’s funny how things like that can happen – a moment of playfulness by Jack Nicolson makes it into the nightmare highlight reels for the next 30 years.
Moving on, it’s time to get to some of the real boogeymen of the 80s, the characters that kept my generation up at night (either scared or laughing, I’ll leave you to be the judge). Tomorrow we look at the first Friday the 13th.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 23: Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto
Plot: In the far future, the mining ship Nostromo is making a run to Earth, hauling a refinery and 20 million tons of ore for a Corporation. The ship’s computer awakens the crew from its cryogenic sleep, and they expect they’re approaching hope. Captain Dallas (Tom Skeritt) informs the crew they’re only halfway to Earth, but the ship has intercepted a strange transmission that may be of intelligent origin. The ship is damaged upon landing on the planetoid, and Dallas, Kane (John Hurt) and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) go off to search for the source of the transmission while Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Ash (Ian Holm), and engineers Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (Yaphet Kotto) remain behind to monitor them and make repairs to the ship. Kane’s team discovers an alien ship in ruins. The body of the creature inside the alien craft is enormous, and was apparently destroyed from the inside-out. Kane discovers an alien egg, which bursts open, allowing a tiny creature to affix itself to his face. Dallas and Lambert return him to the ship, but Ripley initially refuses to allow him to enter the ship, citing quarantine regulations. Ash defies her and allows them inside, where he tries to examine the creature. Dallas and Ash try to cut the creature off, only to discover it has acidic blood. The creature dies and Kane wakes up, seemingly in good health. As the crew sits down to dinner, though, he begins going through horrible convulsions. He falls over on the table and his chest explodes, setting free a tiny creature that escapes into the ship.
Hunting for the beast, Brett and Dallas are killed in short order. Ripley investigates the ship’s computer, only to discover that Ash is acting under special orders of the Corporation that sent them into space in the first place. They were deliberately sent to the derelict to find an alien organism and return it for study, and the crew is considered expendable. Ash attacks Ripley, displaying extraordinary strength and leaking a strange white fluid when wounded instead of blood – he is an android. Parker and Lambert save Ripley and destroy the mechanical man. Parker and Lambert go off to retrieve coolant while Ripley preps the escape shuttle, planning to blow up the ship. The alien kills Parker and Lambert and Ripley rushes to activate the ship’s self-destruct mechanism herself. She manages to fight her way to the shuttle and escape the Nostromo before it is destroyed, unaware the alien has boarded the escape craft with her. She comes across the creature sleeping, puts on an atmosphere suit and opens the hatch, blasting the creature into space. As the film ends she records a message to anyone who finds the ship and climbs into suspended animation, hoping she is found sooner rather than later.
Thoughts: I’ve largely avoided science fiction movies in this list, mainly because I hope this “story structure” experiment will be something I can do again and again, and science fiction most certainly deserves its own category (if not several). However, out of all the movies that straddle the fence between science fiction and horror, there are a few that keep to the horror side so firmly that to not include them in this project would be a disgrace. Hence, Ridley Scott’s Alien.
In essence, Alien is a haunted house movie in outer space. It meets the tropes of that genre very nicely – you’ve got a small cast in a confined area from which they cannot easily escape or summon outside help. (How many good Haunted House movies take place in a remote location, during a power outage, or in some sort of horrible weather? There’s always a reason the people trapped in the house can’t just leave, otherwise they look like idiots.) As they run around the “house” (or in this case, spaceship) they make their way through enormous labyrinthine hallways, find evidence of a creature that is beyond human that appears with greater, more violent, and more alarming frequency, and are picked off a few at a time until a single or small group of survivors finally manages to escape. You see parts of the monster, or shadows of its inhuman shape, long before you see the creature in all its glory, building the tension and the fear as you go along. This is why Alien had to go in this list – not only does it fit every Haunted House trope other than the ghost itself, but it does so brilliantly.
Aside from Ridley Scott getting great performances from his actors, much of the credit for this film’s success has to go to creature creator H.R. Giger. Giger’s artwork helped inspire screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, and thus he really was the logical choice to design not only the alien creature itself, but also the environments found on the alien spacecraft. There are scenes, admittedly, where you can tell you’re looking at a matte painting, but it’s an H.R. Giger matte painting, and that automatically makes it 99 percent more awesome than any other matte painting you’ve ever seen, including the one you helped color on your 11th grade production of Oklahoma.
Even certain things that could have looked terrible under other circumstances really work in this film. When Dallas is attacked in the air vent, the beast thrusts its arms at him. If you do a freeze-frame on the image, it’s kind of goofy… the creature throws out jazz hands like it wants to give Tom Skeritt a big, motherly hug. When you only get a glimpse of it, though, it’s scary as hell. And like all good scary movies, you get caught up in it enough that you forget some of the logical holes, like why the ship’s self-destruct mechanism is so damn far away from the escape shuttle. (Seriously, The Corporation? Talk about a design flaw.) Or the fact that we can hear the big ol’ Nostromo explosion in the vacuum of outer space, which is impossible… and this from the film that uses that little nugget of science in its own tagline: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”
The English teacher in me also has to give O’Bannon credit for abandoning the film’s original title, Star Beast. This was 1979, both Star Wars and Star Trek were heavily on the public consciousness and going with the “Star” title probably would have made the film successful. But Alien is just flat-out a superior title. It works both as a noun – describing the creature that hunts the crew of the Nostromo – and as an adjective, describing the fact that the thing they’ve found is utterly unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the universe. It’s a nice bit of wordplay that I think helps the movie just a tad.
When the time came, inevitably, to make a sequel to this film, the filmmakers realized it would be nearly impossible to replicate the terror of the original. After all, much of what makes Alien so scary is the fact that you don’t really see the adult creature in full until the near end of the film, allowing the deadly power of the human imagination to do its work. By the time Aliens went into production, the creature was already pretty much public knowledge, so James Cameron took the film in another direction: instead of making an awesome sci-fi/horror movie, Aliens was an awesome sci-fi/action movie. This, of course, was followed by Alien3, a film that was a hybrid of science fiction and “a movie so poorly conceived and directed I got disgusted with the whole franchise and, to this day, haven’t seen the fourth one.” There are also, of course, the two Alien Vs. Predator movies, of which there isn’t much to say. I am looking forward to Ridley Scott’s upcoming film Prometheus, though, which is apparently going to be connected to Alien, although how tightly or in what way is something he’s still playing very close to the vest.
Tomorrow we return to Earth, Stephen King, and the more traditional haunted house idea with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 22: Halloween (1978)
Director: John Carpenter
Writer: John Carpenter, Debra Hill
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, P.J. Soles, Nancy Loomis, Nick Castle, Peter Griffith, John Michael Graham, Bryan Andrews
Plot: In Haddonfield, Illinois, 1963, a 6-year-old boy named Michael Myers inexplicably murders his older sister on Halloween Night. Michael is sent to a mental institution where, for 15 years, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) attempts to treat the boy for his psychosis. Eventually, Loomis surrenders, believing the boy to be beyond redemption, and turns his efforts towards containing the monster that has grown up to become a brute of a man. On October 30, 1978, Michael (Nick Castle) escapes from the institution and begins a trek back to Haddonfield.
The next morning, the day of Halloween, high school senior Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) drops off a package at the old, empty Myers house as a favor to her realtor father (Peter Griffith). She and the child she babysits, Tommy Doyle (Bryan Andrews) relate the legend the Myers story has become, unaware that a now-masked Michael is watching them. Laurie and her friend Annie (Nancy Loomis) encounter Annie’s father, Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers), who informs them about a break-in and theft of a Halloween mask from a store in town. Loomis recruits Brackett to help him both in searching for Michael and in keeping his presence in town a secret.
That night, Annie and Laurie are both on babysitting jobs until Annie drops off her charge with Laurie and Tommy across the street so she can spend the evening with her boyfriend, only to return to what she thinks is an empty house. Naturally, it’s not. Soon afterwards, Lynda (P.J. Soles) and her boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham) come over and find the house empty, seeing a free reign for some amorous activities of their own. Instead, they simply give Michael two more victims to add to his count. Still-nervous Laurie, across the street, decides to check out the unnaturally quiet house, only to find Michael’s victims, including Annie laid out in a gruesome tableau beneath the stolen headstone of Judith Myers. Laurie screams, tries to flee, and winds up taking a tumble down the stairs to escape Michael. Hurt, she staggers across the street to protect the children, but Michael follows her. In the final scenes, Laurie and Michael engage in an incredible cat-and-mouse game for her life, until finally she sends the kids out to seek help, drawing Loomis’s attention. He arrives just in time to save Laurie, shooting Michael and sending him falling from the window. A shattered Laurie asks Loomis if it really was the Boogeyman. Loomis confirms that it was… as he looks out the window and sees that Michael is gone.
Thoughts: Not the first “slasher” film, of course (we’ve already discussed at least two others that fit in that category), John Carpenter’s Halloween is truly the one that created the template future slashers would follow. In a simple 20-day shoot, on a shoestring budget, Carpenter gave us the synthesis of the mysterious figure, the slow build-up of one death after another to lead to a final confrontation, the use of the killer as some sort of karmic punishment for teenagers that get wrapped up in the evils of sex and drugs and alcohol, and of course the Survivor Girl in Jamie lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode.
Carpenter also uses visual tricks to great effect. The long opening scene is a single-take shot, all from the point of view of little Michael, as he watches his sister with her boyfriend, waits until she’s alone, and makes his first kill. The audience doesn’t even realize it’s a point of view shot for the first minute or two, until we see Michael’s little clown-clad arm reach out and grab the kitchen knife. Once he puts on his mask, our vision is impaired and reduced to a pair of small eye-holes, which covers up just enough of the brutality of his sister’s murder to make it all the more horrifying. He bookends this at the end of the movie, after Michael’s disappearance, with images of the empty rooms and exterior of the house where the rampage took place. Although we don’t see Michael again at this point, the idea that we are again looking through his eyes strikes you immediately.
For pure horror atmosphere, Halloween is undoubtedly one of the greatest films ever made. Some of the earlier slasher prototypes – here I’m specifically thinking of Last House on the Left and Texas Chainsaw Massacre – spent a good deal of time on mundane or even goofy nonsense before delving into anything horrifying. Halloween starts with a murder, and although it’s some time before Michael kills again, there’s a pervasive feeling of dread and terror that lasts throughout the film. Carpenter also composed the movie’s theme, which has really become an iconic piece of scary music, right up there with the themes to Psycho and Jaws.
In fact, Carpenter obviously draws on the history of Psycho in several places: his killer is obsessed with slaying women, particularly those of his own family; Dr. Sam Loomis is named after the John Gavin character from Psycho; Michael’s knife –his stance – echoes “Mother” and her weapon as she stalked Marion Crane; even his heroine is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, real-life daughter of Janet Leigh, who played Norman Bates’s most famous victim. I’m pretty sure the film’s original title was The Babysitter Murders (or) I Love Hitchcock. In a curious bit of pre-reflection, the babysitters and their charges spend Halloween night watching the 50s sci-fi chiller The Thing From Another World, which Carpenter himself would remake a few years later, and which we’ll actually discuss here in a few days.
Michael, in this film, is almost omnipresent. He’s an enormous, white-faced ninja, appearing at random times, able to pop up from virtually anywhere, and always, always watching. When you consider how relatively little violence there is in the film – the death scenes are few and brief – it’s amazing how effective Michael’s presence is at creating the overwhelming sense of fear. At the same time, there’s an odd sense of innocence to the character… or at the very least, confusion, like he doesn’t fully comprehend anything he’s doing. Bob’s death in particular demonstrates this: Michael pins the boy to the wall hard enough to leave him dangling there in his death-gurgles. As he’s dying, Michael tilts his head at him, almost quizzically, like a puppy looking at a stranger he can’t quite figure out.
Oddly enough, the family obsession isn’t actually that clear in this first film, except for the fact that Michael’s original victim is his older sister. There’s no reason at this point, though, to believe that his madness is anything other than a random killing spree. Halloween II, also written by Carpenter and Hill, is probably one of the all-time great horror sequels. It picks up immediately after the climax of this film and the entirety of the action takes place on the same night: Halloween 1978. If one views the two of them together, as if it was one long film, you get a richer story and uncover much more about the Myers family – namely the fact that Laurie was adopted by the Strodes and is, in fact, Michael’s younger sister. I have no idea if Carpenter and Hill were thinking along these lines when they wrote the original screenplay, but in the sequel they pull out a revelation that makes the earlier installment better by adding a totally different subtext. (Contrast that to the Star Wars revelations: no matter how much you love the original film or Empire Strikes Back, don’t you always feel a little squicky now when Leia plants a wet one on Luke Skywalker?)
As much as Michael Myers became emblematic of the horror movie boogieman, so did Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode come to embody the Survivor Girl trope – the one girl who remains (relatively) clean and innocent while all her friends are busy drinking, smoking (anything they can get their hands on), and engaging in lots and lots of teenage sex. We go back to the old Horror Movie As Morality Play idea, as these other teens are picked off one at a time, leaving only the clean, sober, virginal one to make the final stand against the killer. And truly, Curtis’s final stand is one of the best ever. She’s scared, but she’s also tough and determined, more so to protect the children than to protect herself. At every step of those final scenes, while Michael stalks her through the house, her first concern is to protect the kids, then herself. It’s a heroic stance that makes us sympathize even more than we would have originally (and the Babysitter Versus the Boogeyman idea is already one that wins her a great deal of sympathy from the audience). When she’s scared, you buy the terror on her face wholeheartedly. When she’s angry, you wouldn’t want to be the one to cross her.
And yes, like every horror movie in the history of ever, you’ve got those scenes where you want to just scream at her to turn around, dammit, he’s right behind you! But you usually say this while laughing, knowing the teenager is going to bite it and you’re really just there to see how it’s going to happen. This is one time where you really want her to turn around before it’s too late.
The series went off the rails with its third installment, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which didn’t feature Michael at all. The idea was to try to turn Halloween into an annual Tales From the Crypt-style anthology series, each installment telling a totally different scary story. It’s not a bad idea and it may have worked if it wasn’t that Halloween II had already cemented Michael as the star of the franchise and if Halloween III wasn’t such a hot mess. Future installments never quite matched the original two, drifting Michael further and further down the road of the supernatural, which undermined what made the original so great in the first place. In the first two films, Michael is a terrifying figure because he represents a hidden dark side that could exist even in the most seemingly innocent person, a darkness that could erupt at any time and become the shadow in the window or the boogeyman behind the closet door. Once you make Michael the victim of a curse or a demon, you lose that. So go out and watch the first two Halloween films as part of your seasonal festivities, and ignore the rest.
From the terror in the house next door, tomorrow we’re going to the depths of deep space for perhaps the greatest blend of science fiction and horror ever made: Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 21: Susperia (1977)
Director: Dario Argento
Writers: Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
Cast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé, Alida Valli, Joan Bennett
Plot: Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), an American ballet student, is attempting to enroll in a prestigious dancing academy in Freiburg, Germany. When her flight in from Munich arrives late on a terribly stormy night, though, she is unable to enter the school, and must spend the night around town. As she searches, a student who has been expelled from the academy, Pat Hingle (played by Eva Axén, although I find it hysterical that the character has the same name as the actor who played Commissioner Gordon in the Tim Burton Batman movies), takes refuge with a friend, but both girls are brutally murdered by a strange, largely unseen creature. The next morning, Suzy returns to the academy and meets Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett) and Miss Tanner (Alida Valli), as the school is buzzing about Pat’s death. Suzy is sent off-campus to live with another student , Olga (Barbara Magnolfi. When a dormitory room is made available, she declines the offer. In her first dancing class, Suzy suffers a fainting spell, and wakes up to find that she’s been moved into the dorm room anyway, and the doctor wants her to eat bland foods with a glass of red wine at every meal for a week. When maggots suddenly fall from the ceiling, supposedly due to a box of spoiled food in the attic, the girls are forced to sleep in the academy’s practice hall. There, Suzy’s friend Sarah (Stefania Casini) recognizes a whistling sound as the snore of the school director, who is supposedly out-of-town. Suzy and Sarah search Pat’s room for notes, but Suzy falls asleep, leaving Sarah to be lured, alone, into a trap of razor wires, where the unseen creature returns and slits her throat.
The next morning, finding Sarah missing, Suzy seeks out a psychologist (Udo Kier) who tells her that the academy was actually founded by a Greek woman believed to be a witch, and that her coven cannot survive without their queen. Suzy returns to the school and finds that all of the students are missing, having gone to the theater. She follows a mysterious set of footprints to Blanc’s office, where she finds the staff plotting her death in a horrible ritual. She flees, encountering the school’s director – the original witch who founded the school . The witch sends Sarah’s reanimated corpse to kill Suzy. Suzy fights her way out, and the building burns to the ground with the witches inside, Suzy barely escaping the horror.
Thoughts: This is one of those times where I really must stress the importance of taking care of and pride in your work. Susperia has a place in the hallowed ranks of horror, but its effectiveness was seriously damaged for me by the shoddy presentation. The DVD release available through Netflix was absolutely terrible, with picture and sound that both appeared to have been ripped directly from some ancient VHS tape that had long since begun to degrade. If a movie like this doesn’t deserve a quality restoration, why even release it on DVD?
This isn’t the fault of the film, of course, but it does detract from one’s enjoyment. Trying to get past that, we look at the strong points of the film. Sadly, considering how poor the video quality of my copy was, this is a movie that is largely remarkable for its visual style. Dario Argento sets the film in bright, primary colors –red hallways that have an almost velvety texture to them, blue walls in the main hall, and ubiquitous use of yellow in the dance studio and other places. When the deaths happen, the precise shade of red is so bright and eye-popping as to be almost unrealistic, while at the same time giving the film a very different look that most of the other films we’ve discussed on this list. The blood in, for example, Last House on the Left probably looks more realistic, but the blood in this film is more memorable.
The makeup is also impressive towards the end of the film. Sarah’s corpse, done up in a horror mask for her terrible attack on Suzy, is in fact the stuff of nightmares. Although Sarah isn’t really referred to as a zombie, she’s not far off from the original Haitian concept of the creature: a deceased person brought back to a semblance of life to serve the bidding of a master. In this case, it also plays on the most evocative fears of the zombie trope, the idea of taking something familiar and safe and transforming it into something horrible and deadly.
One of the weaknesses, though, is that the movie often tries too hard to inject fright in mundane scenes. Suzy’s constant encounters with creepy members of the staff at the ballet academy are often punctuated with loud, hypnotic music that succeeds in creating the desired mood. When combined with the looks of the characters, though, it starts to feel a bit much, like we the audience are being beaten over the head with the fact that something EEEEEEEVIL is going on around here, consarn it, and we’re gonna take notice whether we like it or not. Back to the music for a moment – it’s really very good. It’s scary and evocative, and I could imagine it being a Halloween standard like the themes to Psycho and Jaws if not for the fact that the main theme is played approximately 18,921 times throughout the course of the 92-minute film, robbing it largely of its effectiveness.
What’s more, the story isn’t particularly strong. Go back and read my synopsis again. Does it seem like a kind of bizarre, disjointed story here things happen for no reason and nothing really seems to make sense in the context of anything else? Excellent: I have successfully conveyed the feeling of watching Suspiria.
Contextually, I find it interesting that 1977’s great Italian horror film goes back to witches, a topic which had largely lapsed in the United States at this point. Perhaps I’m projecting – I’m an English teacher, remember, and at the time I write this particular analysis my 11-grade class is deep in study of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – but it’s difficult to think of an American audience of the late 70s putting this much stock into the concept of witchcraft. In Italy, who knows? Maybe it was different.
The marketing certainly was different – look at the tagline on the movie poster. “The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92.” Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but isn’t that essentially saying the end of this film isn’t as good as the rest of it? If that’s the case, it’s true. Except for the creepy attack by the ex-Sarah, the ending is horribly anticlimactic, with a weak appearance by the head witch and Suzy pretty much just waltzing out of the academy just before it bursts into flames for no apparent reason.
Except for the visuals, honestly, I’ve got nothing to recommend this movie. Thank goodness tomorrow’s film is, for me, a proven commodity: John Carpenter’s classic Halloween.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 20: Carrie (1976)
Director: Brian DePalma
Writer: Lawrence D. Cohen, based on the novel by Stephen King
Cast: Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, William Katt, Nancy Allen, John Travolta, Betty Buckley, P.J. Soles, Piper Laurie
Plot: Slow-to-develop Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is a high school senior, the frequent scapegoat of her classmates due to her sheltered life and the oppressive nature of her mother (Piper Laurie). Carrie’s troubles are compounded on the day she gets her first menstrual cycle, without any idea what it means. The other girls torment her mercilessly, and Carrie is sent home. But along with the changes to her body, something is happening to Carrie’s mind as well. In moments of stress or anger, she finds herself moving objects without touching them. When her mother learns about the incident, she tells Carrie the “curse of blood” is punishment for sin and locks her in the closet to pray. The girls who mocked Carrie are given a harsh detention with the gym teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley). One of the girls, Sue Snell (Amy Irving) feels guilty about tormenting the girl, and convinces her boyfriend Tommy (William Katt) to ask her to the prom. The ringleader, Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen), wants to get back at Carrie for her trouble, and convinces her high school dropout boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta) to help her get a brutal revenge. Carrie agrees to go with Tommy, but her mother forbids it. Carrie lashes out wither powers, declaring that she’s going to go and sending her mother into fits of prayer. Billy and Chris, meanwhile, set up a bucket of pig’s blood above the stage of the gym, waiting for Carrie’s big moment. At the prom, Carrie unexpectedly finds a measure of acceptance from her classmates, who treat her as just any other girl – something Carrie has wanted all her life. Her joy is shattered when Chris springs her trap: she’s rigged the prom election so Carrie will win, and just as she comes up to the stage, the pig’s blood spills on her. Tommy is knocked unconscious when the bucket itself falls and strikes him in the head, and the audience erupts in laughter.
If you’ve ever watched a horror movie, you probably recognize this as the point where the students made a particularly stupid mistake.
The already-fragile Carrie snaps, locking the doors to the gym and setting it on fire, trapping everybody inside. When she leaves the burning gym, Billy and Chris try to run her over, but Carrie simply flips the car and causes it to explode. Returning home, Carrie cries to her mother, who now believes her daughter to be the product of the devil. Margaret White stabs Carrie, and Carrie uses her powers to hurl dozens of blades at her mother, killing her. Finally, Carrie destroys her mother’s house and kills herself in the process. The film ends with an image of Carrie crawling from her own grave, but it’s only a bad dream for survivor Sue Snell, whom one suspects will never have a good dream again.
Thoughts: I became a fan of Stephen King in high school, probably when I was about the age of Carrie White in the film, but I didn’t get around to reading his early works until many years later. In fact, by the time I actually read Carrie or saw the movie, I was already a high school teacher myself, so I think I have something of an odd perspective on the story. King was ahead of the curve when it came to depicting the victims of high school bullying becoming monsters in their own right (he explored a similar theme, sans the supernatural element, in his novel Rage), and these days when I see a kid in the sort of dire straits Carrie finds herself in, I feel particularly strong about trying to help them before it goes bad. Sometimes, though, you just can’t do anything.
It’s hard to see Carrie White as a monster, though. She lashes out, and she causes an incredible amount of death and destruction, but it’s hard to say that anyone else wouldn’t have reacted the same way in her situation. Her overbearing mother is a chilling creature, and would drive anyone mad.
Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie make the film, Laurie being cruel and sadistic, Spacek being a broken, shattered creature even when we first meet her, which makes those moments when Chris snatches away her brief moment of happiness all the more tragic. In fact, if Carrie’s rampage had ended with the deaths of her tormenters instead of spreading out to the rest of the school, the audience likely would sympathize with her entirely. The deaths would be understandable, if not entirely justified. But at that point, she can’t control herself. She gets her tormentors, but she also gets Tommy and Miss Collins, the two people who have never been unkind to her at all (even Sue, the lone survivor of the massacre, joined in on the initial mocking of Carrie at the beginning of the film). Sometimes you’ll see that the one person who treats the “monster” well is spared its wrath. Not so, in the case of Carrie White. By then, Spacek’s face grows hard and her eyes empty, as if she’s no longer even in control, just an uncontrollable force of nature being used to guide the chaos all around her to its horrific end.
Even then, though, she’s never as horrible as Piper Laurie in her final moments, walking towards her daughter with a bloody knife in the air, smiling with the confidence that she’s doing God’s work. The last moment of horror comes when Carrie slays her, pinning her up in a sort of grotesque crucifix that mirrors the unsettling one her mother forced her to pray under in the closet.
The story itself is actually very simple – I’m pretty sure this is the shortest plot synopsis I’ve written in weeks – but that doesn’t make it any less effective. Sometimes it’s those simple beats that hit close to home. We see the archetypes here – Carrie as the victim-turned-killer, her mother as the iron fist that squeezes until her child pops, Chris as the cruel one, Sue as the guilty party that tries to make good. We recognize all of the characters, and that helps us get into the story easily. There isn’t much of a backstory behind Carrie’s powers, but again, one isn’t really needed. She’s telekinetic, and at this particular time in the 70s that was something that was making the rounds of speculative fiction.
The film draws from interesting sources to create its mood. The musical sting we hear whenever Carrie uses her powers is inarguably reminiscent of the legendary shower scene from Psycho, for example. It’s Carrie lashing out, but the music brings Norman Bates to mind. Otherwise, the music is fairly unremarkable – perhaps even a little too soft and lyrical most of the time. It’s there to disarm you, of course, to prevent you from being prepared for the incoming horror, but it doesn’t really succeed.
The odd moments in the movie are when Brian DePalma works in a few moments of comedy, particularly as Tommy and his friends try on tuxedoes. For some reason that still doesn’t make any sense to me, he goes into fast-forward just for a few seconds, speeding up the conversation so the boys sound like the Chipmunks. It’s a bizarre moment that doesn’t fit at all with the atmosphere of the rest of the film. DePalma also works really hard to artificially draw out the tension. From the time Carrie steps on stage until the blood falls on her head we’ve got a long, protracted scene of Sue discovering the prank and trying to warn Miss Collins, all stretched out due to slow-motion and made a little more horrible by the lack of audio. He goes into split-screen at this point, alternately showing Carrie herself or various points in the gym as she begins to trap her victims. Strangely, the split screen works very well, allowing you to see more of the terror and give it a sort of real-time element. I’m reminded of the TV show 24 whenever it breaks this way, although whether the producers of that show were specifically influenced by Carrie, who can say?
The measure of any movie is really the way it’s remembered, of course. Carrie is still considered a landmark horror film, with echoes in every story of high school terror that came afterwards, everything from A Nightmare on Elm Street right down to The Faculty. Horribly, you can see the reactions in the real world as well, any time some high school outcast snaps under the pressure and turns on his classmates. How many times have you seen a story like that on television or in the newspaper that compares a real-world killer to Carrie White? Carrie should have been a simple little horror story. Instead, it became part warning, part social commentary, part prophecy. I liked it better when it was just a horror story.
We’ve spent most of our time on this project in America, mainly because I don’t really know the history of foreign horror enough to speculate on it. But there are a few foreign films with a large enough footprint to make it on to my radar. Tomorrow, we go to Italy, for Susperia.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 18: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writer: Tobe Hooper, Kim Henkel
Cast: Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, William Vail, Teri McMinn, Allen Danziger, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunnar Hansen, John Dugan
Plot: The film opens with grisly images and a radio news report of some horrific “sculpture” found by police, made out of bodies stolen from their graves. As the radio continues to talk about the case, we meet a group of young people on their way to visit the grave of Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns)’s grandfather. On the way home, they pick up a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), who proceeds to cut himself and slashes Sally’s wheelchair-bound brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) before they throw him out. At a run-down gas station, Franklin asks for directions to his father’s old property, but the manager (Jim Siedow) tries to warn them away. Instead, they decide to check out the old place and return later after the transport refills the station’s gas tanks.
Kirk (William Vail) and Pam (Teri McMinn) decide to set out to seek a nearby swimming hole, but instead find a house full of animal skulls, hide, and heads. Kirk enters, only to be confronted by a giant man (Gunnar Hansen) wearing a horrible mask of human skin. When Pam enters to search for him, she finds the house full of skeletons – both animal and human – arranged in bizarre, horrible tableaus. The man with the mask snatches her too, impaling her on a hook and making her watch as he dismembers Kirk with a chainsaw.
Back at the van Jerry (Allen Danizger) sets out to search for Kirk and Pam (breaking the cardinal rule of horror movies – don’t go anywhere alone). With the sun going down arrives at Leatherface’s house and enters, finding Pam barely alive and locked in a freezer chest. Leatherface kills him, because that’s what you do when you’re wearing human skin. It’s after dark now, and Franklin begins to panic over his missing friends and the fact that they have the keys. Sally and Franklin go through the high grass and shrubs, calling for their friends… until Leatherface appears with his chainsaw and hacks up Franklin. Sally runs for her life but, unfortunately, runs right to his house. Instead of help, she finds decaying, partially mummified bodies set up in a terrible sort of diorama. She escapes by leaping from a second-story window, running back into the darkness, screaming. (Hey Sally, pro tip for you: when you’re running from the chainsaw-wielding maniac into the darkness of the night, stop making noises that let him know where you are.)
Sally makes it to the gas station, where the owner knocks her out and ties her up. Driving her back to Leatherface’s house, they encounter the hitchhiker – Leatherface’s little brother. Inside, Leatherface is now wearing a dress and wig, preparing the “family” for supper. The brothers bring down “grandpa” from the attic – the desiccated old man Sally found before. But he’s not a corpse – he’s still alive. The family decides to let grandpa (John Dugan) kill Sally, but he’s too weak to hold the hammer, and she manages to escape, jumping through (another) window to find it’s now morning. She flees into the road, the brother behind her. An 18-wheeler comes around the corner, killing him. Sally leaps into the bed of a passing pickup truck, leaving Leatherface flailing about in the road.
Thoughts: It’s another entry in the “no, really, this actually happened” category of horror films. In truth, the story and characters were a complete fabrication, although Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel were reportedly inspired by real-life serial killer Ed Gein (also the inspiration for Robert Bloch’s original novel of Psycho – there’s a little trivia for you).
Unlike some of the later horror icons (Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers), Leatherface never really grabbed me. Part of it may be his choice of victims – Pam is an airheaded hippie, Franklin is a self-pitying lout, and Kirk and Jerry come across as rather cold and heartless. Even Sally has moments of cruelty towards her brother, although considering the stress she’s under at that point, it’s a little more forgivable. Still you want to have somebody to root for when the killer is busy hacking people to shreds.
The thing that makes this movie effective, if not to my personal tastes, is how abrupt much of the horror is. The hitchhiker is weird, sure, but you’re still shocked when he grabs Franklin’s knife and cuts into the meat of his own palm. The house Kirk and Pam find is bizarre, but you’re simply not expecting it when Leatherface leaps out and pounds him in the head. When the horror begins, Tobe Hooper avoided the telltales that Something Bad Is Happening – no ominous music, no creepy sound effects, no shadows moving in the background. It just goes from one minute looking at a weird little house to, the next, finding yourself getting attacked by a monster. Again, as Franklin and Sally push through the weeds in the dark, Leatherface appears without warning. Movies aren’t made this way anymore.
This movie does, however, give birth to many of the other slasher film clichés: the “Last Girl,” the girl who can’t outrun the killer despite his enormous size, the victim who runs up the stairs instead of running the hell away and so forth. In truth, most of those clichés are embodied in Sally who – although terrified – really isn’t the smartest horror movie character you’ve ever seen. Think about it, Sal – the killer was right outside the door, then vanishes when the creepy old man opens the door again to get his truck? To her credit, she does figure out that something is wrong, but way too slowly.
As for Leatherface himself – maybe it’s decades of exposure to horror movies, but the horror mask doesn’t really unnerve me all that much. What’s creepy is the face beneath the mask. Gunnar Hansen is wearing enormous, jagged teeth, and his eyes dart about whenever you see him in close-up, as if his brain is flitting about in his head, ready to pop out at any moment.
It’s a fast-paced movie, which is to the good. The running time is short – only 84 minutes – but even taking that into account, things move along at quite a clip. We’re deep into the movie before Leatherface appears, but you don’t actually feel how long it has been. Amazingly, by the time Leatherface disposes of the first four victims and only Sally is left, there’s still a half-hour left in the film.
Hooper also works in a little macabre comedy towards the film’s end. The father’s reaction to how Leatherface chopped up the door could have come from an exasperated TV father. He may as well have said, “We just can’t have nice things!” Leatherface prancing around in the dress, cringing from his angry father, feels like Hooper took Norman Bates and twisted him into an even weirder configuration. The thing is, once Leatherface puts the wig on and allows his father to browbeat him, he ceases to be menacing and becomes an object of ridicule. Well, for me, at least. Sally probably felt different. The horror comes back when “grandpa” makes an appearance, and actually recovers pretty well considering how the rhythm of the piece had been disrupted seconds before.
The film is inconsistent with its characters, too. The father alternately claims he takes no pleasure in killing and there’s no sense in torturing Sally before she has to die, then switches to giggling and mocking her along with his warped sons. He even jumps up and down with glee as grandpa tries to hammer Sally in the head. There’s no real reason for these inexplicable shifts, save perhaps to pad out the film a bit, as it is accompanied by long scenes of Sally screaming, with close-ups of her eyes cut with shots of the laughing family (including dad).
Even the film’s conclusion is terribly abrupt, with Sally’s savior coming out of nowhere and whisking her away as the credits roll. There’s no follow-up here, and this is a film that kind of needs it. Sally must have alerted the police – was the family still there when they arrived? Were they attacked? These are the sort of things I suppose may have been addressed in the sequels, but I’ve never seen any of them and, honestly, I’m not really compelled to.
From terror of the human variety, we’re going to face off with the nastiest predator of the animal kingdom. Tomorrow, you’re going to want to stay out of the water, because we’re watching Jaws.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 17: The Exorcist (1973)
Director: William Friedkin
Writer: William Peter Blatty, based on his novel
Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max Von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb, Jason Miller, Mercedes McCambridge
Plot: In Washington, DC, we meet Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), whose faith beginning to crumble as his mother lies dying. Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is an actress who in town to make a movie. Her marriage is dissolving, but she’s clinging to her young daughter, Regan (Linda Blair). Regan begins to exhibit strange behavior, beginning with disrupting a dinner party by announcing to one of the guests, “You’re going to die up there,” and urinating on the carpet. Later that night, her bed begins thrashing wildly, terrifying girl and mother alike. Although Chris initially seeks out a medical explanation for Regan’s odd behavior, the horrible events persist, increasing to violent outbursts, exclamations of profanity and blasphemy, and even levitation. Meanwhile, the local church has been desecrated, and the director of Chris’s movie dies in an apparent accident, assuming one can “accidentally” turn his head around 180 degrees.
Believing Regan’s symptoms to be psychosomatic, a psychiatrist suggests an exorcism, reasoning that if she believes she is possessed by a demon, she may be cured by making her believe she is freed. Chris turns to Karras, a psychiatrist as well as a priest. When he sees how desperate Chris has grown, he agrees to examine the girl. Karras splashes Regan with Holy Water and records the strange words she howls in pain. He later reveals to Chris that he lied – the water was unblessed, which supports the case that everything is in Regan’s mind. When he later plays the tape backwards, though, he hears Regan speaking clearly, threateningly, menacingly… in English.
When Karras turns to his superiors to request an exorcism, they summon Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow). Merrin and Karras begin the ritual of exorcism. As they pray, the demon inside Regan assaults them, first verbally, then physically by hurling things around the room, cracking the ceiling, and finally striking Karras from behind. Karras leaves the room, returning to find Merrin seemingly dead. He attacks Regan, viciously striking her and commanding the demon to take him instead. It leaps from Regan into Karras, and he hurls himself from the window, falling to his death on the steps below. In an epilogue, Chris and Regan leave town, Regan having no memory of her ordeal, hoping the demons of all kinds stay behind them.
Thoughts: This one was a lock as soon as I decided to try this little project. The Exorcist has turned up on just about every “scariest of all time” list I’ve ever seen, and with good reason. The scenes of Regan’s slow deterioration are expertly staged and performed. Linda Blair begins as a charming, gregarious child, transforming stage by stage into a real monster in innocent form. Blair also is very effective as a physical actress, going through her terrible convulsions, flapping her tongue menacingly at the priests, and thrashing about like a madwoman.
The special effects are rather impressive for 1973 as well – the scene where Regan’s head turns backwards is still creepy as hell today. The classic scene with the projective-vomit pea soup is a little cheesy by today’s measure, but you fall right back into fright just moments later when you see Regan, caked in her demon makeup, soup dripping from her chin, and a look of utter hatred and madness in her unnaturally green eyes. And of course, Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” remains one of the all-time great horror movie scores. Those haunting chimes, even today, are enough to give anyone who has seen the movie a chill.
However, coming back to the film for the first time in several years, it’s interesting just how different it is from modern horror films. The first real supernatural occurrence – the shaking of Regan’s bed – doesn’t happen until 40 minutes into this 122-minute film! Blatty spends nearly a third of his running time on exposition and character before he actually gets into the meat of the storyline, a technique that a modern movie studio would consider absolute poison. It’s another full 35 minutes before Chris and Karras meet for the first time, and Karras doesn’t see Regan for the first time (in heavy make-up and strapped into a bed that has been heavily padded – in a very effective visual) until the movie hits the 80-minute mark. Merrin himself – the titular exorcist – doesn’t really factor into the story in any substantive way until the final 30 minutes. It’s also hard to imagine a movie today ending without little Regan engaging both priests personally, physically, hand-to-hand, with lots of overdone CGI, instead of allowing her demonic powers to do the work for her. And let’s not forget the most horrific thing in this film that would never, never turn up even in the most soulless, horrific perversion of cinema in 2011: the scene where the doctor lights up a cigarette in his own waiting room.
Terrors.
Speaking of the doctor, the film also continues the proud cinematic tradition of having people in authority be absolute idiots. “She’s thrashing wildly, throat is bulging, eyeballs turn white… oh, and her entire bed is levitating. It must be psychosomatic.” Sure, there’s an effort to justify their disbelief by cooking up the old stories about tiny women lifting up cars in times of stress, but that really feels like quick lip service to get us past the perfunctory need for these characters to exist.
Like all great horror films, it works because it taps into genuine fears of the time. The idea of the devil is nothing new, nor is the idea of possession. This movie – and the novel it’s based on – hit just when people were ready to fear these classic horrors again. Besides the religious implications, the film works because it taps into the fear that comes with changing the familiar into something unfamiliar. Taking a child – particularly a little girl, perhaps the most innocent form of human life one can imagine – and turning her into an object of terror is a very effective way to gut the audience. If it didn’t speak to something primal in the human psyche, it wouldn’t have done so well, nor given birth to so many imitators. In terms of influence, this film kind of kicked off a rash of movies about children possessed by (or embodying) the supernatural: The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, Poltergeist, and Children of the Corn all come to mind. Each of those, and many others, bear the fingerprints of this tale in one way or another.
Once again, we see the fears of America shifting from the supernatural to the demons within. Tomorrow we tousle with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 15: Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Director: George Romero
Writer: George Romero, John Russo
Cast: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Russell Streiner, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley, Kyra Schon
Plot: Barbara (Judith O’Dea) and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner) are visiting their mother’s grave outside of Pittsburgh when they are attacked by a lumbering dead man. Johnny is killed and Barbara flees, surrounded by a flock of the dead who have somehow regained animation and seem to hunger for other human beings. Barbara finally finds herself in a near-catatonic state, trapped in a house, barely escaping the swarming dead. When Ben (Duane Jones) arrives, fleeing the ghouls, Barbara has been shocked into muteness. To their surprise, they find more survivors – a family and a young couple have been hiding in the cellar of the house the entire time. Ben gets into an argument with Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman) about whether it’s safer to try to fight in the house or to hole up in the cellar, and eventually the Cooper family bolts itself downstairs while the young couple, Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Ridley) stay up top with Ben and Barbara.
Downstairs, Cooper and his wife (Marilyn Eastman) repeat Cooper’s argument with Ben, this time with their ill and unconscious daughter Karen (Kyra Schon) lying between them. Ben and Tom decide on a plan to help them all make for a rescue station, but they will have to brave the undead outside to get to a shed with gas pumps. Tom and Judy die in the attempt and Ben is almost killed when Cooper is afraid to open the door and let him in.
Back inside, Cooper reveals his daughter’s illness came about when she was bit by one of the creatures, while on TV a mob of armed men discuss their efforts to kill the ghouls… a shot to the head is the surefire way to do it. Cooper takes advantage of the situation to go for Ben’s gun, but Ben wrestles it away and shoots Cooper in the side. The invading zombies grab Mrs. Cooper, and her husband staggers back down into the cellar, where his daughter has died, reanimated, and kills her father. Barbara snaps out of her shock and saves Mrs. Cooper, but she too rushes downstairs where her daughter is waiting, and hungry. Barbara is grabbed and pulled into the swarm of zombies by her own dead brother, Johnny, leaving Ben alone to fight off the rest of the horde. Karen emerges from the cellar, but he escapes through the cellar door, kills the re-animated Mr. and Mrs. Cooper, and holes himself up for the night. When morning comes, the zombies have gone and Ben exits the house. A group of roving hunters has shot them all, freeing our hero… until one of them mistakes Ben for another zombie, casually puts a bullet in his head, and throws his body into the funeral pyre with all the rest.
Thoughts: This is one of those films that flat-out defines a genre. George Romero didn’t invent the concept of the zombie, and in fact the word “zombie” is never actually used during the movie, but Night of the Living Dead has shaped the way that we envision this particular menace from beyond the grave ever since. Prior to 1968, cinematic zombies were either of the Haitian voodoo variety (people who had their will stripped from them, forced to do the bidding of a living master) or the occasional alien-controlled mindless husk. It was Romero that took the Haitian concept of the body brought back to life to the extreme of having his heroes battle actual, lumbering corpses, and it was Romero that first gave zombies their hunger for human flesh. (Flesh, mind, you, not brains. That comes later.)
Once again, we see how effective black and white is for these horror films. The scenes – particularly at night – stand in sharp contrast. The characters live in a world of white, while the darkness seems intent to close in on them, and ultimately consume them. The colorized versions – even the particularly good colorized version from 2004 – loses so much of the atmosphere as to make it totally ineffective. The scenes where they zombies gobble up what’s left of Tom and Judy – even thick, ropy intestines – are by far more gruesome than anything else we’ve seen so far in this little horror project. The bar was raised as to how graphic on-screen violence could get, and although Romero certainly had to fight detractors, once that particular Pandora’s Box was opened there was no going back. Even the credits sequence is disturbing – a series of still photographs showing the hunters using hooks to drag Ben’s body to the bonfire where the zombies are being destroyed for good.
Romero and Russo have an interesting structure. With most horror films, you’ll start with a large group of characters, then whittle it down one or two at a time as people are picked off by the monsters. In this case we start with a “sole survivor” in Barbara, then add to the group one or two at a time. Once we reach full strength, with the Cooper family and the teenagers joining Ben and Barbara, the whittling can begin again.
Much of the film has become legendary. The amount of gore depicted on-screen – both in the death scenes and just in images of bodies lying around – was far beyond what one expected from a movie in 1968. Little things – Johnny’s “They’re coming to get you, Barbara…” have lapsed into the public consciousness. If you say that with the right intonation (“They’re coming to get you, Baaaaaaar-ber-aaaaah…”) people who haven’t even seen the film will recognize the line. That idea of a small group of survivors in a boarded-up house, trying to hold off the horde… here’s where it comes from.
Even the way zombies move in this film are what we base every zombie walk on today… slow, shambling, and relentless. This movie is the reasons purists like my girlfriend refuse to accept films like the 2005 Dawn of the Dead remake as a true zombie film – because “Zombies don’t run!” And there’s some truth in the basic idea here. As easy as it would be to escape or kill a single zombie for any able-bodied adult, what makes zombies truly terrifying is the way they just keep coming, the way they march on through any injury short of the destruction of the brain itself, and the way they can start to swarm upon you. The “zombie apocalypse” idea is here, but it’s in its infancy. This is a small film, focusing on a small group of survivors, but we get a radio news commentary that informs us that the phenomenon is happening across the eastern part of the United States, and growing more widespread. Later filmmakers and authors (including Romero himself) would run with this idea and make our zombies just one of the ways the world ends… not with a bang or a whimper, but with a low moan and a gnashing of teeth.
One of the things that many zombie movies – certainly the best ones – have taken from this film is the way there’s no attempt to explain the supernatural. The dead are rising, and there’s a little lip service paid to it in the form of a short newscast reporting on “radioactive contamination,” but there’s certainly no sort of definitive explanation for why the dead have chosen this particular moment to rise. In truth, the “why” doesn’t really matter – there are monsters, they want to eat you and turn you into one of them, so who cares why they’re doing it? Just run! Zombies (thanks largely to this movie) have become such an all-pervasive aspect of culture that there’s really no reason to muck about with explaining it. Just get straight down to your plot, your characters, and if necessary, your social commentary.
Speaking of which, Romero also gets credit for making the zombie film a commentary on society. Many of his films – and dozens of imitators – have tried to use zombies as allegory for everything from consumerism to the military-industrial complex to the war on terror, all citing Night of the Living Dead’s commentary on racism as their justification. And it’s easy to do – the character of Ben is smart, competent, but utterly helpless to save all of the white people around him who either die thanks to foolish mistakes or self-destruct out of fear or distrust. And then poor Ben, sole survivor, dies at the last second, shot down by a gun-toting white man who thinks Ben is just another zombie. Commentary, right? Except that, to hear Romero tell it, it was never intended. The role of Ben was never written specifically with a black actor in mind, it just so happened that Duane Jones was the best man for the role. The social commentary that people have salivated over for decades is largely a case of people projecting their own issues on to the film. Still, it’s a credit to the film that such projection is even possible, and so convincing when it happens.
Because of a ridiculous blunder on the part of the film’s original distributors – a failure to place a copyright notice on the print – the movie is in the public domain. So it’s really easy to find a copy of it on DVD. But there are very few really good prints of it out there. If you’re hunting out the DVD, do yourself a favor and try to get the “official” one, approved by Romero. And stay away from the “reimagined” 30th anniversary edition released by John Russo in 1999. The less said about that version, the better.
Tomorrow, it’s taken us until 1972, but we’re getting to some of the goriest films we’ve seen yet. Is blood really necessary for suspense? We’ll talk about it in our look at the original version of Last House on the Left.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 13: The Haunting (1963)
Director: Robert Wise
Writer: Nelson Gidding from the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Cast: Richard Johnson,Julie Harris, Ronald Adams, Claire Bloom, Lois Maxwell, Russ Tamblyn
Plot: Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) and a team of paranormal investigators win the opportunity to spend a few weeks in Hill House, an old manor with a history of tragic deaths amongst its inhabitants. One of them, Eleanor “Nell” Lance, goes behind the back of her overbearing sister to gain access to the car she helped pay for in order to make the trip. Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn) is the nephew of the owner of the house, sent along to gain an appreciation for the property he hopes to inherit one day. She befriends a fellow investigator named Theodora (Claire Bloom), whose interest in Nell seems more than academic. As the house begins to “greet” them in its own way, Nell starts to feel a certain attraction to the house, despite its terrors. The spirits seem to be summoning her, even calling to her, taking advantage of a woman who has no real direction in her life following the death of her invalid mother. Luke, meanwhile, is interested in the house only as a moneymaking scheme – what parts he can sell, what parts he can renovate, even to the point of planning to use the spiral staircase scene of a famous suicide as a nightclub.
Nell finds herself attracted to Markway, only to be devastated when his skeptic wife (Lois Maxwell) arrives and insists on joining the hunt. Nell suggests she sleep in the nursery – the sealed-off and most mysterious room in the house – but immediately regrets it. The locked room opens by itself, though, and Mrs. Markway decides to stay. After the rest of the group finds itself cornered in the parlor, loud noises and bulging walls coming in upon them, they find Mrs. Markway missing. As the others begin to tear apart the house searching, Nell (who now believes herself destined to be a part of this house) begins to roam the mansion, joyfully seeking out the spirits, finally finding herself at the wobbly, unstable staircase, climbing to the top. Markway coaxes her down, but Mrs. Markway leaps out and terrifies her, causing her to faint. Markway declares an end to the experiment and orders them all home, but Nell tells them she has no home, refusing to return to her sister and begging to stay at the house. She drives for the gate, losing control of the car and seeing a white figure leap in front of her just before she strikes a tree, killing her. The white figure turns out to be Mrs. Markway, who got lost in the massive, confusing house. Markway reveals the tree Eleanor struck was the same one where the house’s first victim died in an “accident.” He returns to the house to collect their things knowing he’ll be safe. The house has want it wants… for now.
Thoughts: From the very beginning, it’s interesting to note how different filmmaking and storytelling is today compared to 1963, when the movie was made. The film begins with Markway narrating an extended flashback sequence, detailing the history of the house and the gruesome deaths of those who have been associated with it. All this before we know who Markway is or what his association with the house actually is. A modern film is far more likely to begin with Markway begging for permission to go to the house, with the backstory being uncovered later. It’s debatable which approach is better, but since this is my little project I’ll tell you: it’s the latter one. Kicking things off with a infodump – scary as it is – takes some of the momentum out of the film from the very beginning.
The events that happen inside the house are exactly what you come to expect in Haunted House stories – odd noises, doors that close themselves, doors that open thanks to convenient gusts of wind, cold spots, and strange writing that appears on the wall (specifically “Help Eleanor come home,” a message that scares poor Nell half to death.) We deal with exceedingly creepy statues, the skeptics who try to debunk the supernatural nature of the house, the caretakers who refuse to stay in the house at night and so forth. Theo seems unnaturally perceptive about Nell, making offhanded comments about her and her life that border on the telepathic. Nell’s sensitivity to the ghosts of the house also mark her. Characters in these stories with special gifts or powers has become another trademark of the genre.
You know all of these tropes because every haunted house story uses them, but all the others were really mimicking this original. Basically, if you’ll excuse the pun, this story is the blueprint from which all other haunted house stories are built. It’s one of those stories that has been redone – in whole or in part – over and over again over the years to the point where the original almost seems derivative, even though it’s exactly the opposite. Not to say that all of these elements were 100 percent original even when Shirley Jackson wrote the novel in 1959, but her novel and this movie pulled them all together and fused them into a genre in a way that no other film had.
Interestingly, this is one of those movies where it’s what you don’t see that’s most effective. There’s no blood in the film (although I understand there’s one scene in the novel with a message written in blood which the filmmakers excised), and although you see the evidence of the spirits, you never see the spirits themselves. Even the “ghost” that startles Nell at the end turns out to be the very living, very confused Grace Markway.
In one bit of infodump that actually works, Markway takes some time to explain to the ladies why the house is so confusing – it’s constructed specifically to be that way. The doors are off-center, none of the angles are at 90 degrees, and the entire structure is built in such a way to make it nearly impossible to find your way around. Watching the film, it’s a credit to the set designers that you really do get that sense. It’s hard to tell for sure, watching only those elements the director wants us to see from the angles he wants us to see them, but the house looks incredibly confusing. There are so many doors that anybody could get confused quickly, the mirrors are all hanging at strange angles that give you peeks into obscure corners of a room that you wouldn’t expect to see in normal circumstances. Purely from a visual standpoint, the director has more than succeeded in making the house look bizarre as hell, and it’s very easy to imagine yourself getting lost in its halls.
Some of the simplest scares work the best. While the entire cast is assembled in the parlor, tremendous rumbling noises elsewhere begin to torment them. It gets worse when the doorknob begins to rattle (easily accomplished by a crew member tinkering with it slowly from the other side), then the door itself begins to bulge inward impossibly, stretching like rubber instead of wood. It’s a very simple effect, but far more effective than the expensive CGI version of the effect we saw in the 1999 remake of the film.
The ending is suitably bleak for a haunted house film, no happy ending and no real chance at redemption for the house or for the sad, broken characters. It’s not a bad film, but not nearly as good as some of the other films we’ve discussed recently. (It’s not much of a follow-up to Psycho, for instance.) Still, I think it’s notable in and of itself. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a good movie, and it leaves a cinematic footprint that is clear, vivid, and continues even today.
Next is Audrey Hepburn in a classic chiller, Wait Until Dark.
Reel to Reel 