Category Archives: Projects
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 33: Ringu (1998)
Director: Hideo Nakata
Writer: Hiroshi Takahasi, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki
Cast: Nanako Matsushima, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rikiya Otaka, Yoichi Numata, Hitomi Sato, Yuko Takeuchi
Plot: A pair of teenage girls (Hitomi Sato and Yuko Takeuchi) are telling scary stories to one another, about a video tape that warns its viewer they will die in seven days, followed by a creepy phone call. One of the girls claims to have viewed the video a week ago, but then laughs it off as a joke. Minutes later, as one of the girls is alone, the television turns itself on… and there’s a flash of light. The scene shifts quickly to a television news reporter, Reiko Asakowa (Nanako Matsushima) interviewing a series of teenage girls about the urban legend of the deadly video tape. Her niece Tomoko – one of the two girls in the opening scene — and three other friends recently died all on the same night, their faces warped into a horrible visage of fear. The girl who was with her, Masami, has been sent to a mental institution and is afraid of television sets. According to the police autopsy, Tomoko and the others who died did so because their hearts simply stopped. Reiko discovers that Tomoko and her friends had vacationed in a cabin the previous weekend, and finds photographs of them with their faces blurred out. She goes to the cabin and finds an unlabelled video tape. She watches the tape, filled with bizarre and unnerving imagery and ending with an image of a well. When it ends, she’s startled by a reflection in the television, and the phone rings. She answers it and says, horrified, “One week,” then takes the tape and flees.
Scared, she summons her ex-husband Ryuki (Hiroyuki Sanada) and tells him the story of what happened. She makes him take a picture of her, and her face comes out blurred, confirmation that she has been cursed like her niece and the others. Although Reiko objects, Ryuji watches the tape, but says there was no phone call. The next day, Reiko makes a copy of the tape for Ryuji to study and try to trace the origin. Together, they begin to study the tape frame-by-frame, beginning to notice oddities about it. A woman is brushing her hair in a mirror at an angle that should reveal the cameraman, and garbled sounds over an image of a man with his face covered, pointing by the water, turn out to contain a hidden message. Ryuji tracks the clues to a volcano connected to a great psychic named Shizuko Yamamura, who committed suicide when she was accused of being a fraud. Before they can investigate further, Reiko finds that their son, Yoichi (Rikia Otaka), has watched the tape.
Ryuji and Reiko check out an inn run by relatives of Yamamura, where they find the mirror from the tape. Ryuji confronts Yamamura’s relative and sees a psychic flash of her daughter, Sadako, telepahtically killing the man who accused Yamamura of faking her abilities. Ryuju deduces that the tape was made by Sadako’s vengeful spirit, and that she is the one who killed the teenagers. With one day left for Reiko, they return to the cabin where the tape was found. Below the floor, the find the well from the video, sealed up. A vision informs them that after her mother’s death, Sadako was murdered by her own father and thrown into the well. They open it up and discover Sadako’s body. When Reiko’s time passes and she lives, they believe the curse is broken. The next day, though, as Ryuji is home alone, his television turns on by itself, showing him the well. Sadako climbs out of the well, then out of the television, and Ryuji dies of a heart attack, just like the others. Reiko realizes that finding Sadako’s body isn’t what saved her – the curse was lifted from Reiko when she copied the tape and showed it to Ryuji. To save Yoichi, she plans to have him copy the tape and seek out a new viewer, realizing this cycle can never end.
Thoughts: I only became aware of this movie after seeing the American remake starring Naomi Watts. And while I thought The Ring was a decent enough horror movie, I didn’t really think of it deserving status as a classic. But since it came out, the influence of its parent movie, Ringu, on American horror culture has become undeniable, so I knew I’d have to include this original in my horror project.
The footprints this movie left on the horror landscape are pretty enormous. For the past ten years, two of the most popular subgenres of American horror movies have been those films light on gore but heavy on supernatural scares (in other words, PG-13 horror), and those that remake foreign horror movies. Very often, those two subgenres overlap. On a purely personal level, I have to admit that stuff like this creeps me out a lot more than most other horror. Blood and guts, torture porn, demons in your dreams… I can take it all. But there’s something much more fundamentally disturbing to me about the sort of slow, impending doom this film promises – and delivers on. It might be that idea of knowing, of waiting… Sure, Jason may kill you, but most of the time you’ll never see it coming. With this killer, you’ll have a whole week to brood about it before she makes you literally die of fright. For a professional worrywart like me, I think that would be the far worse death.
But I digress. Whatever the case, after this movie came out we got nailed with films like The Grudge (another Japanese import-slash-remake) and films from France, Germany, and elsewhere in the world that tried to capture lightning in a bottle again. In Japan, there were two sequels (one based on a sequel to the novel, the other not) and a prequel, and in the US there has been one sequel so far with another one announced, plus remakes in other countries around the world. And that’s not even counting the number of “original” ideas produced in the last few years that tried for PG-13 terror. Some of them worked. Many of them did not. Even the American The Ring tried to ratchet up the horror in the wrong way, burying the first victim under horror makeup that made the scene more grotesque, but in a way less actually frightening than showing a natural expression of terror.
The film, like many great horror movies, builds its terror slowly. After the opening scene there’s much discussion of the tape and a few deliciously creepy images of one of the dead girls, her face frozen forever in terror, but it’s still nearly a half-hour in before Reiko finds and watches the tape herself. Even after that, much of the film plays out more like a procedural instead of a horror movie, with Ryuji and Reiko playing detective and occasionally getting psychic images to remind us that this is, in fact, a ghost story at heart.
As I’ve been saying from the beginning, terror is cultural. What one society deems frightening may not hold true elsewhere, and cultural differences may derail attempts. The scene where Reiko finds the tape amongst a rental shelf at the cabin is accompanied by a creepy musical sting and a zoom in, but as I can’t read anything written on any of the tapes, the effect at that point was lost on me. Similarly, the tape itself uses a lot of words, which worked when I watched the American version, but have less of an impact when I needed to look down at the subtitles to see what creepy caption I was supposed to be scared of. (Incidentally, this may be the only place where the American version was inarguably more effective to me, but that wouldn’t be true of someone who understands Japanese.) It also should be pointed out that the expectations of a movie studio in the US are quite different from those in the rest of the world. The scene where the murder victim is found in the remake is a brilliant, special effects-laden scene clearly intended to make you believe that the characters have completed some noble quest and ended the evil of the spell, even though this turns out to not be true. Not so much in this version – the well scene is dark and creepy as anything else. We get Reiko actually cradling the skeleton, hair sloughing off it, slime flowing from the sockets like tears… it’s downright gross. Yeah, there’s also a skeleton in the American version, but in this case, I’m going with the Japanese version. It may not work quite as well in terms of a fake-out, but it maintains the feel of the movie much better.
Perhaps the best trick the movie pulls, though, is the way Reiko saves herself. It’s a horrible idea, that a person’s salvation can only come at the expense of some other innocent person. How many people could do it – knowingly put someone else in mortal danger in order to save their own lives? Even more importantly, how many people would be strong enough to resist? It’s a chilling idea to end the movie on, and it survives the film in a way many of the other elements do not: in the Saw franchise. Jigsaw forces his victims to do terrible things to themselves or someone else to survive, and it isn’t a stretch at all to believe Ringu (or one of its remakes, sequels, or other successors) was weighing on the minds of the screenwriters when they came up with that concept.
Finally, I’ll chime in with the obvious question that one almost feels compelled to ask. Culture isn’t dependent only on place, but also on time period, and even though this film is a mere 13 years old, technology has advanced at a remarkable rate since then. You’ve got to wonder, in a world of DVR, DVDs, Blu-Ray, movie downloads and digital photography, if the basic premise of this film would work if they tried it today. It would, I think, there’s a simple enough undercurrent of fear here, but it would be fun to try to work out the mechanics of such a thing.
While Ringu was changing horror overseas, a tiny little production was about to hit the States in an enormous way. Tomorrow, we tackle The Blair Witch Project.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 32: Scream (1996)
Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Kevin Williamson
Cast: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courney Cox, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan, Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy, Drew Barrymore, Liev Schreiber, Henry Winkler, Roger L. Jackson, W. Earl Brown
Plot: At home alone, a girl named Casey (Drew Barrymore) gets phone calls from a mysterious stranger (voiced by Roger L. Jackson). Although friendly and flirtatious at first, the caller starts to get angry and violent, finally revealing that he’s outside her house and he’s got her boyfriend taped to a chair. He forces her to play a sadistic horror movie trivia game for her boyfriend’s life, but she gets a question wrong (it’s a question that you, dear reader, should be able to answer correctly if you’ve been paying attention to this little experiment) and Steve is slashed. Casey tries to run, but is caught by a cloaked figure in a Ghost-faced mask who stabs her and leaves her dangling in the trees for her parents to find.
The next day we encounter Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), one of Casey’s classmates, who is having trouble dealing with the upcoming one-year anniversary of her mother’s death at the hands of a man named Cotton Weary (Live Schrieber). At school the next day, Sidney’s friend Tatum (Rose McGowan) tells her about the murders, and the media descends upon the campus. Sidney and Tatum’s boyfriends, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) are overly enthused about the killings, while their film buff buddy Randy (Jamie Kennedy) mocks their cavalier attitude. That night, the killer calls Sidney, claiming to be outside her house. She is saved when Billy arrives, but when he drops a cell phone, she thinks he’s the killer (remember, kids, this was before every person on the planet had four phones in their pants). Tatum’s brother Dewey (David Arquette), a police deputy, arrives and arrests Billy. As Sidney leaves the police station, she is accosted by Gail Weathers (Courtney Cox), a TV reporter who built her career with a hurtful expose about the murder of Sidney’s mother. Sidney punches Gail and goes to Tatum’s house for the night, since her father is out of town. (What is it with horror movie parents who leave town when their kids are being stalked by murderers? Craven pulled this in Nightmare on Elm Street as well.) The next day, Gail and Sidney are confronted again, Gail espousing her theory that Cotton is innocent of Maureen Prescott’s murder, and further suggesting the new killer is related to her case. Billy, meanwhile, is released from jail when an examination of his phone records proves he didn’t call Sidney that night. As she broods, the killer attacks her at school. She escapes, but Principal Himbry (Henry Winkler) cancels all classes until further notice. Unfortunately, Ghostface doesn’t obey school hours – Himbry is his next victim.
Gleeful over the school cancellations, Stu throws a horror movie party at his house. Just about everybody is there, including Gail and Dewey, watching the place in the news van through a camera they hid in the living room. Tatum goes to the garage for more beer, and winds up encountering – and being killed by – Ghostface. Billy and Sid retreat to Stu’s parents room (again, where are the parents?) and she confesses she’s terrified of turning into a “bad seed” like her mother, who was having an affair with Cotton. As they “make up,” downstairs Randy schools the crowd (and the audience) on the rules of surviving a horror movie:
- Never have sex.
- Never drink or do drugs.
- Never, ever, ever, under any circumstances say, “I’ll be right back.”
Naturally, all the rules are being broken all over the place.
The party empties out as the kids discover Himbry’s death, and Randy is left alone. Upstairs, the killer strikes, stabbing Billy and coming after Sid. She tries to run, but he seems to be everywhere, and she winds up climbing onto the roof and falling to the ground. She flees to the news van, where she and Gail’s cameraman (W. Earl Brown) watch the killer creep up on Randy… then run when he hears Sid screaming 30 seconds earlier. The camera is on a delay – one that turns out deadly for the Kenny the Cameraman. Sidney returns to the house, where Dewey staggers out, a knife in his back. Randy and Stu appear, both accusing the other of being the killer, and Sid locks them out of the house, where Billy is staggering around, bloody but alive. He opens the door, lets Randy in, tosses out a Psycho quote and shoots the film geek. Stu comes in through the side entrance with a voice-changer, and Sid finally realizes the game: Billy and Stu have both been killing, taking turns slaughtering their friends. Billy admits it’s all been a revenge game – Sid’s mother had an affair with Billy’s father, which is why Billy murdered Maureen and framed Cotton, and why he’s targeting Sid now. Stu produces Sidney’s father, tied up, who they’re planning to frame for their crimes, leaving the two of them as the heroic survivors, but they’ve got to injure each other first to make it convincing. Billy stabs Stu too deep, though, and he begins dying of blood loss. Gail arrives with a gun, but she’s forgotten to turn the safety off, allowing Billy to disarm her and knock her out. While the killers are distracted, Sid vanishes. She leaps out wearing the mask, stabs Billy with an umbrella, and then battles Stu, finally smashing his head with a TV showing the finale of Halloween. Gail, Randy and Dewey turn out to be alive, but Billy pops up and attacks again. Gail takes him down, though. This time, she remembers to turn the safety off.
Thoughts: Believe it or not, this is the first film on this entire list that I saw when it was actually a new movie. Like I said waaaaaaaay back in the introduction, I never really watched scary movies when I was a kid. In college, my buddy Jason got me to give them a try, and this was one of the earliest. As such, I didn’t quite know all of the tropes and jokes this film is crammed with. But it shows you just how powerful these elements of storytelling have become that I still got enough of them to not only understand this movie, but really enjoy it.
Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven really did usher in a new era of movies here. After Scream, cinemas were deluged with a new wave of teen horror films and slasher flicks that tried to imitate the rapid fire dialogue and self-referential nature of the movie while completely missing the heart. What they didn’t seem to get is that the filmmakers were doing the greatest kind of parody: the kind made by people who genuinely love that which they lampoon and, at the same time, create a masterful example. The film is full of references to other horror movies (including Wes Craven’s own back catalogue), and contains a now-legendary discussion about the “rules of horror movies” that we’ve been discussing in this project all along. Whether it was Craven or Williamson who’s responsible, the movie is packed with comments about Nightmare on Elm Street, including a Wes Craven cameo wearing a Freddy Krueger mask. Then of course, there’s the greatest Nightmare reference of all: Skeet Ulrich really looks like a young Johnny Depp in this flick.
Craven doesn’t flinch from acknowledging the works of other horror masters, though – the key question in the first scene is a Friday the 13th reference, and The Exorcist’s Linda Blair makes an uncredited cameo as a reporter. We also see numerous Halloween references, including the kids watching that movie on the night of the party, Ghostface giving Sidney a “head tilt” oddly reminiscent of that Michael Myers gives one of his victims in the original film, naming Billy Loomis after Dr. Sam Loomis (who, in turn, was named after a character in Psycho – it’s the circle of life, people) and the highly metatextual exchange when Randy (played, remember, by Jamie Kennedy) yells at Jamie Lee Curtis that the killer is behind her… while the killer is behind him.
Randy, by the way, is a fantastic character. He’s smart, terribly funny, and full of self-referential humor before lesser filmmakers overused it to the point where it’s gotten tedious. Jamie Kennedy was great in this part – what the hell happened to him?
Anyway, back to other horror movies. The problem was, too many of the imitators took Randy’s “rules” as some sort of iron clad set of commandments, and any creativity they may have displayed evaporated. Scream, instead, used those rules as a framework, then layered a particularly clever and rich mystery on top of them. It was a really long time since a horror film succeeded by causing the audience to question whothe killer was or which characters they could trust. This film works as a horror movie that brings in a nice element of comedy as well, but I don’t think it gets the credit it deserves for bringing real mystery back to horror. The fear at the end of the film, during the four-way standoff with Sidney, Randy, Billy and Stu, comes from the fact that Sidney has no idea which of these three boys she can trust (and the totally innocent Randy almost pays for it with his life).
While the body count isn’t enormous in this movie, especially compared to other slashers and gorefests like the Saw films, the kills are really very memorable. Casey’s death was shocking, as the movie was heavily promoted as a Drew Barrymore film and nobody expected her to die in the opening scene, and Tatum’s murder via garage door opener is pretty darn clever. It really makes you want to be careful never to get Kevin Williamson or Wes Craven mad at you.
Ghostface, as a character, is a great addition to the pantheon of horror movie killers. Even though seven different characters have worn the mask in four different movies (as of this writing), it’s almost as if they’re wearing a single character’s entire persona. No matter who Ghostface is, his style of attack is the same, the way he can pop out of anywhere like a damn ninja, the way he takes legitimate damage when his victims fight back but he keeps coming anyway. And the way he never talks in person makes it all the creepier, because unlike Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, you know he can talk. Get him on a phone with a voice changer and he chatters away like a talk show host. But in person, he’s the strong, silent, stabby type.
This film really has one of the great horror movie finales. Lots of movies have a sort of battle of wits in the end between the murderer and the Survivor Girl, but Halloween and Friday the 13th eliminated the pool of potential victims far too early. The great thing about this finale is that once the killer shows up at the party, there are still plenty of people around, and any one of them could be a victim or a murderer. In fact, the only thing that exonerates some of them from being a suspect is getting killed themselves. This, of course, wasn’t the case for Billy Loomis. It’s also notable that the film has a lot more survivors than we’re used to in horror movies. Not only are there two killers, but Survivor Girl Sidney is joined by survivors Gail, Dewey, and Randy. In fact, except for Randy (killed off in memorable fashion in Scream 2, not in a cheap “get ‘em in the first reel” way like I’ve said so many times I hate so much) all of the survivors of this movie have made it four movies into the franchise. That’s got to be some kind of record.
As great a movie as it is, the fact that it was so cutting edge at the time leaves it looking a little dated now. The fact that Billy even had a cell phone was enough to make him a suspect at this point. And of course, the stacks of videotapes (and the fact that Randy works in a video store) both seem kind of quaint already. Plus, y’know… landlines. Phones with cords. Wow. How did we ever live?
Tomorrow we’re going to head overseas for one more trip this month. It was a Japanese film that not only launched an American remake, but a host of imitators and a host of American remakes of imitators. Let’s take a look at Ringu.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 31: Misery (1990)
Director: Rob Reiner
Writer: William Goldman, based on the novel by Stephen King
Cast: James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Francis Sternhagen, Lauren Bacall
Plot: Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a novelist feeling weighed down by the success of a series of bodice-rippers featuring the character Misery Chastain. Celebrating a new work, unrelated to Misery, Paul is driving down a remote mountain road in a snowstorm and winds up crashing his car. A woman named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) finds and rescues him, telling him the phone lines are down and she’s been unable to go for help. She also happens to be a big fan of Misery Chastain. Paul’s legs are severely damaged and he’s unable to walk, but Annie – a nurse – is slowly nursing him back to health. Annie asks if she can read the new book he had in the car with him, to which he graciously agrees. After beginning the book, Annie finds herself uncomfortable with the swearing, and almost spills scalding soup on Paul.
Paul’s agent (Lauren Bacall) has called the local authorities about his disappearance, and the Sheriff (Richard Farnsworth) and his wife (Francis Sternhagen) begin a search. Annie comes in from town with Sheldon’s newly-released Misery’s Child and tells him she spoke to a doctor and his agent, and that an ambulance will be sent for him as soon as the road to the hospital is dug out of the snow. When Annie realizes that Misery dies at the end of the new book, she goes berserk and nearly bashes Paul’s head with a table. Instead, she smashes it against the wall and reveals she lied about calling for help – nobody knows where Paul Sheldon is. She later forces him to burn the only copy of his new novel as a sort of sick penance, then returns with paper and a typewriter, insisting Paul write his “masterpiece”: Misery’s Return. When he requests a different kind of paper – a ruse to make her leave the house – she smashes the box of paper down on his injured legs, but leaves. Alone, Paul explores the house in his wheelchair, finding an unnerving shrine to his work and Annie’s stash of medication. He steals some pills to go along with pills he’s been hiding in his mattress, but is almost caught sneaking around when she returns.
The Sheriff finds Paul’s smashed car, which has been buried under the now-melting snow, and the state police assume he has died, but the Sheriff realizes from the dents on the car door that someone pried him out of the wreck. Back at Annie’s, she forces Paul to start over Misery’s Return, claiming the way he brings her back is a cheat (something she feels particularly angry about, going on a wild tangent about how an old movie serial once cheated her in a similar way). He goes back to work, turning out page after page of Misery’s Return… and getting his hands on a knife. The night before he plans to strike, Annie drugs him and straps him to the bed, revealing she knows he’s been wandering the house and has found his knife. As punishment, she hobbles him, breaking his legs with a sledgehammer. A chance encounter with Annie leads the Sheriff to suspect her, and he comes out to her house; she drugs Paul and dumps him in the cellar. He wakes up and calls for help, and Annie kills the Sheriff. Strangely unaffected, she tells Paul she plans to kill him, then herself, but he manages to delay her by tempting her with the end of Misery’s Return. At the final moment, just before she can read the end of the book, he sets the manuscript on fire and attacks her with the heavy typewriter. The two grapple and, in a bloody standoff, Paul manages to kill her. Eighteen months later, we see him back in New York, with a new novel about to hit. His agent suggests he try a book about his ordeal with Annie, and Paul tries to shrug it off… but he’ll never be rid of her entirely.
Thoughts: This is one of my favorite Stephen King novels and, in fact, is also one of my favorite film adaptations of his work. (To this day I’m not sure if I love the movie because I love the novel or in spite of the fact.) Admittedly, the story hits home for me as a writer. The scene where Annie makes Paul burn his new book (to his way of thinking, the best thing he’s ever written) is more terrifying to me than any legion of slashers, zombies, madmen or monsters you can create. I did find myself screaming at the screen on occasion – “It’s the 1980s, Paul! To hell with superstition! You have the technology to make a copy!”
This is, again, one of those rare instances where the Academy Awards really got it right. Kathy Bates got an Oscar for this movie – to date the only major Oscar a Stephen King adaptation has won, although they’ve been nominated for a few more – and you can tell why from the earliest scenes. She goes from creepy to dangerous slowly, gradually, eventually becoming terrifying in the process. By the time she’s casually sloshing lighter fluid around the bed and insisting Paul burns his book, you’re really starting to fear her. The transformation is remarkable and subtle and really the work of a master thespian, and it’s made even more effective by keeping the core of the character consistent. Even at the very beginning, where she’s gently taking care of him, something about the character just seems off. As that odd “off” feeling slowly takes over her persona, the sort of naïve quality she has at the beginning is never entirely eliminated – no matter how furious she gets, she still speaks in an almost childlike manner, refusing to use profanity and sticking to homespun colloquialisms that you’d expect coming from somebody’s grandmother.
James Caan, meanwhile, plays off Bates perfectly. He comes across as someone who’s a little self-involved, a little narcissistic, and to a degree he can even see his time with Annie as a sort of punishment for that. Even before Annie truly starts to scare him, there’s a level of discomfort he displays that really goes far beyond that of a humble writer who doesn’t know how to deal with a gushing fan. As Annie grows more dangerous, the relationship between the two of them transforms from that of a nurse and patient to a pair of adversaries in a truly lethal chess game. Annie grows to see Paul as hers, as something that belongs to her, and he has to find unexpected wells of ingenuity to get out alive. Perhaps the bravest move Stephen King made in crafting the story, though, is that he never particularly tries to make Paul into a hero. Even by the end, there’s no real undercurrent of nobility to him. Sure, he’s the victim and you sympathize with him (it would be impossible not to sympathize after you see the incredible, impossible angle his foot goes in when she smacks it with that sledgehammer), and you even root for him in those last blood-soaked moments of revenge, but he’s still kind of a jerk.
To a large degree, this is a two-person show (and in fact, in the live action stage version that was produced, only Paul and Annie’s characters are ever seen on-stage). The subplot about the Sheriff’s search for Paul, while included in the book as well as the novel, isn’t really that essential – in fact, the way the Sheriff dies without really affecting the plot reminds me very much of Dick Halloran in The Shining – and it would have been fairly easy to lift the whole thing right out had the screenwriter so desired. But William Goldman is a better writer than that. (If you recognize his name, he’s also responsible for the classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and, one of my personal favorites, The Princess Bride.) Goldman knew just how to balance the two to prevent Annie from ever going so far that the audience couldn’t take it. In fact, in the original novel, Annie chops Paul’s legs off instead of just breaking them. In his 1995 book Four Screenplays, Goldman explains that he changed that scene because it would have been too much for the audience to take, that they would never be able to forgive Kathy Bates the Actress as opposed to Annie Wilkes the Character. And y’know, I do believe he was right.
The relationship between Paul and Annie echoes Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in a few key ways. Although Paul isn’t related to Annie and has no allegiance to her, he’s stuck in a wheelchair and cut off from the outside world, leaving himself totally dependent on her for his survival for as long as she remains sane enough to not slice him open like a fish and leave his guts in a steaming pile on the floor. King even picks up a little 1,001 Arabian Nights, with Paul playing Scheherazade, using the finale of Misery’s story to extend his own life.
Annie is a great villain, perhaps the best, most fully-realized one Stephen King has created. Although it strikes me that, for all her lunacy, I don’t know that I think Annie was completely crazy. Those old movie serials did cheat an awful lot.
Tomorrow we move forward in the 90s, as the man who changed horror twice before changes it again. It’s 1996, and Wes Craven brings us Scream.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 30: Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Director: Dan O’Bannon
Writers: John Russo, Rudy Ricci, Russell Streiner, Dan O’Bannon
Cast: Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Matthews, Beverly Randolph, Linnea Quigley, Miguel Nunez, Allan Trautman
Plot: At the Uneeda Medical Supply company, manager Frank (James Karen) shows around trainee Freddy (Thom Matthews), and asks him if he’s ever seen Night of the Living Dead. Showing off, Frank tells Freddy the film was based on reality. A strange chemical called Trioxin animated corpses in Pittsburgh, but the truth was suppressed… and the bodies are being stored right there in barrels of the chemical. Frank shows the barrels to Freddy, but accidentally causes a leak of the gas, dousing both men and reanimating the dead bodies – even the parts of dead bodies – kept in storage at Uneeda. Freddy’s friends – a group of punk teenagers who look like the 80s threw up leather and piercings all over them – decide to kill time in a nearby cemetery while waiting to pick him up from work. As they proceed to party in the graveyard, Frank and Freddy wake up from their encounter with the Trioxin gas feeling sick. One of the barrels has broken open and is empty, and Frank assumes the body melted. They soon find the rest of the corpses (human and otherwise) throughout the warehouse animated and hungry.
Back in the graveyard one of the teens, Trash (Linnea Quigley) begins to fantasize about the more horrific ways to die, leading to one of the most bizarre and gratuitous striptease sequences in horror movie history. Frank and Freddy summon their boss, Burt (Clu Gulagar), about the cadaver screaming and banging on the walls of cold storage. Remembering Night of the Living Dead, Burt tries to kill the cadaver by driving an axe into its brain, then cutting off its head, but it doesn’t kill the monster. They reach a horrible revelation: the movies lied to them. Burt decides to bring the cadavers to his pal Ernie (Don Calfa) at the crematorium, hoping to destroy them that way. It works, but the smoke that spills out of the oven seeds the clouds above, and it begins to rain on the graveyard. The water filters down through the soil, into the coffins, and the dead begin to claw their way to the surface.
Frank and Freddy are getting sicker and sicker, and Ernie calls an ambulance. Meanwhile Freddy’s girlfriend, Tina (Beverly Randolph), has made it to Uneeda, where she finds the place seemingly deserted. As she searches for Freddy, she encounters the zombie that escaped from the first barrel, a slender figure that has become known as Tarman (Allan Trautman). The rest of the teens arrive just in time to save her, but Tarman gets his first snack of brains in the process. The paramedics arrive to treat Freddy and Frank, but are unable to find a pulse or blood pressure in either one of them, and their bodies are room temperature. The teens are attacked in the cemetery, and three of them (Tina included) make it to the mortuary, while two more get back to Uneeda. As the paramedics return to their ambulance, they hear screams and try to call for back-up, only to be attacked and devoured by the swarming dead. The survivors in the mortuary board up the place to hold out the zombies, and Freddy begins experiencing pain as his body goes into rigor mortis. One of the zombies manages to make it into the mortuary and Ernie straps it down, questioning it. It tells the survivors they want to eat brains because it relieves the pain of being dead. Burt locks Freddy and Frank in the mortuary chapel with Tina, who insists on staying with Freddy. Burt, Ernie, and Spider (Miguel Nunez) begin to seek an escape, while in the chapel, Freddy attacks Tina, hungry for brains. Spider and Burt make a run for the police car, fighting the zombies on the way. They drive the car to the door to collect Tina and Ernie, can’t get through the mob and drive away for help, but a swarm of zombies traps them at the Uneeda warehouse. Not wanting to become like the rest of the zombies, Frank turns on the crematorium, says a prayer for forgiveness, and climbs into the oven. Burt calls the army hotline on the Trioxin barrel and reports what has happened, and the army activates its contingency plan. Ernie and Tina hide from Freddy while the survivors at Uneeda protect themselves from Tarman, and just as everyone makes a final stand, the army drops a bomb on the whole damn city of Louisville, Kentucky, wiping it – and the zombies – off the map. But as the zombies burn, the smoke rises… and the rain starts to fall.
Thoughts: This movie has perhaps the strangest pedigree of any film on this list. George Romero – writer and director of Night of the Living Dead – got into a disagreement with co-producer John Russo about the direction of the franchise. Russo walked away with the right to use the “Living Dead” name for his own franchise, and this was the result: a world where Night of the Living Dead was a movie, but was based on its own reality. It’s a weird premise, to be sure, and I was at first reluctant to include this movie in my little horror movie project, mainly because I think it may be more deserving of a place in the eventual horror/comedy project I intend to present in the future. But I decided use it for two reasons: first, like Night of the Living Dead, this movie helped influence the way zombies are portrayed in popular culture even today, and second, I’m not really convinced that all of the comedy in this movie was intentional.
The zombies (with the exception of Tarman) are all kind of silly, particularly the first, fresh cadaver, where the actor seemed to just be stripped, shaved, and painted yellow. And a lot of the violence seems to be played for laughs. Trash’s legendary tombstone striptease isn’t really scary or sexy, just weird. On the other hand, the parts that probably were intentionally funny (such as the hungry zombie calling for “more paramedics” on the ambulance scanner) are legitimately funny. Even the 80s-style montage (in this one the characters are barricading themselves in the mortuary instead of training to win the big ski tournament) is funny enough, juxtaposed against a goofy rock ballad about the Living Dead.
The characters in this movie really are jokes, especially the teenagers. They’re all caricatures, and the way one of them (I don’t even remember the characters’ name, making it impossible to look up the actor, that’s how generic they are) gives a speech about how his leather and chains is a “way of life” and not a costume is groan-inducing, and the way they resist calling the cops (because they’ll “kick our ass”) even as one of their buddies is having his brain eaten takes them from the realm of stereotype to the land of the remarkably stupid. It’s really no loss when any of them gets turned into a zombie hors d’oeuvre. As for naming the two old chums “Burt” and “Ernie”… really, O’Bannon? Sesame Street was pushing 20 years old at the time you wrote this script, you can’t tell me that wasn’t intentional.
There seems to have been an ill-fated attempt at poignancy with “Trash,” who proclaims early in the film that she believes the worst way to die would be to be eaten to death by old men, but seeing as how she says that immediately before she begins taking off her clothes for no apparent reason, it’s doubtful most audience members remember that bit. Frank’s suicide is a little more satisfying from an audience standpoint – it’s the one point in the movie where someone shows anything like a little human regret – and the moment where he dies is a good capper to what little of a character arc there is.
The zombies in this movie are different from Romero zombies in many ways. First off, they’re more intelligent, with the ability to speak and reason (although later Romero films did start to show zombies exhibiting a few higher-order skills). Second, they can’t be killed by a simple bullet to the brain, and in fact, dismemberment does no good as each individual chunk of the zombie continues to move of its own accord. Finally, and most importantly to popular culture, this is the movie that gave us zombies obsessed with braaaaaaaains. A Romero zombie (and those of most of his imitators) is perfectly happy with any chunk of living flesh, and it’s these zombies that we still see in most movies and TV shows. If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, you’re watching a Romero zombie. But whenever you see a zombie that wants specifically to chomp on a brain, you can thank John Russo and Dan O’Bannon.
From the perspective of a horror movie fan, there’s nothing in this movie as scary or visually cool as Tarman. The first zombie, one whose flesh has mostly melted into slime from years of Trioxin storage, is a grotesque, slimy creature that could give anybody nightmares. Allan Trautman, who played the character, is rather underappreciated in the strata of horror icons. His slim frame and marvelous physical performance created the best monster from this movie, and one of the most memorable single zombies of all time. While the other zombies aren’t nearly as recognizable or as entertaining, there are a couple of cool scenes. The moment where the rainwater filters down through the ground into the coffins and the dead claw their way out to the surface, for example, looks really great, and the zombie Ernie interrogates is a nice piece of puppeteering, even if the movement of its mouth doesn’t remotely match the words she’s saying.
The end of the movie is almost as literal a deus ex machina as one could hope for. There’s a short bit earlier where someone from the army shows a bit of concern about the barrels (which have been missing for sixteen years thanks to some sort of paperwork screw-up), but it seems tacked on to justify a conclusion that otherwise would come totally from out of the blue. While I give the filmmakers credit for going for the nuclear option (pun intended), it makes everything else in the movie feel somewhat hollow.
While Return of the Living Dead is by no means the only movie to use the “we swear it’s a true story” gag, it’s by far the least convincing. And although there’s fun to be had in watching the movie, it’s horror movie fun at its cheesiest. It’s hard to imagine this film being sincerely frightening to any adult, but there’s still room for enjoyment in watching it. Just don’t go into it looking for a scare.
Stephen King makes one more appearance tomorrow, with one of his most down-to-earth tales of horror… and, I admit, one of my personal favorites: Misery.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 29: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Wes Craven
Cast: Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp, Nick Corri, Amanda Wyss, Ronee Blakley, John Saxon
Plot: Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss) is being plagued by a dream in which some maniac with knives on his fingers is stalking her through a boiler room. The next day, she discovers that her friend Nancy (Heather Langencamp) has been suffering from similar dreams. Nancy and her boyfriend Glenn (Johnny Depp) come over that night to make her feel better while she’s home alone, but Tina’s boyfriend Rod (Nick Corri) crashes the party and coaxes Tina into her mother’s bed. Tina falls asleep and is again attacked by the man with the knives in her dream. This time, as she fights him in the dream-world, in the real world her body is tossed about the room, cut and broken, and she dies. Rod, the only witness, flees in terror, but is arrested the next day and charged with her murder. Nancy falls asleep in school the next day, and has a vision of Tina’s blood-covered corpse being dragged around the school in a bodybag. Nancy finds herself in a boiler room, pursued by the man with the knives, who introduces himself as Freddy (Robert Englund). In terror, she puts her arm against a hot pipe, the pain jolting her awake. Freddy attacks her again when she falls asleep in the bathtub, but she again manages to wake up in time. After a third dream-encounter, Nancy and Glenn rush to the police station to visit Rob, but at that same moment he has fallen asleep. Freddy hangs him in his jail cell.
Nancy tells her parents (John Saxon and Ronee Blakley) about the dreams, and they bring her to a doctor who observes her while she sleeps. She has a violent reaction to the dreams, cuts appear on her arms, and a white streak appears in her hair. In her bed, she finds the battered hat Freddy wears in the dreams. She confronts her mother with the hat and the name written in it, Fred Kruger, and Marge breaks down and tells Nancy the truth: Krueger was a child murderer in the neighborhood that escaped justice on a technicality. Marge and the other parents of Elm Street tracked him to his hideout in a boiler room and lit the place on fire, letting him burn to death. Now he’s back, seeking revenge on the children of the parents who murdered him. Marge, heavily drunk, locks Nancy in her house, and she is trapped across the street as Glenn falls asleep and is killed, sucked into his bed by Freddy, and then expelled back into the room as a geyser of blood. Setting up traps around the house, she finally allows herself to fall asleep. She manages to bring Freddy into the real world, where she leads him through her gauntlet of traps and eventually trapping him in the basement – on fire. As her father arrives, Krueger escapes the basement and kills Marge, drawing her blackened, burned corpse into the bed. Her father leaves her alone, and Nancy confronts him one more time. This time, though, she refuses to give in to her fear, breaking his power, and he vanishes. In the morning, we see Nancy and Marge step out into the sunlight as Glenn, Rod, and Tina drive up. Nancy gets into the car, but the top (with Freddy’s distinctive red and green stripe pattern) closes and drives them away.
Thoughts: If you’ll recall, I was less than impressed with Wes Craven’s first entry in this experiment, Last House on the Left. Twelve years later, he more than redeemed himself with this horror classic. Freddy Krueger was a game changer for slasher movies. For the most part, previous films about some madman stalking people were grounded in reality. Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface and the sort were all human, if a bit hard to kill. It was Freddy that brought slashers into the supernatural, and a large number of the imitators that have come since then have embraced the supernatural elements wholeheartedly. Even some of those psycho killers that preceded Freddy made the switch to supernatural after a few movies, some successfully (Jason Voorhees became a Superzombie in Friday the 13th Part 6 and never looked back), and some not (there have been a few attempts to make Michael Meyers possessed by a demon or some other rot, all of which wound up simply undermining the character).
The modern slasher is often pictured as some maniac killer who dies and returns to a semblance of life in some hate-fueled quest for blood, and this is where that comes from. Even Tim Seeley’s excellent comic book series Hack/Slash uses this as its core – this series focuses on a “Survivor Girl” who gets pissed and decides to start hunting supernatural slashers, many of them creepy enough to stand right next to Freddy or Jason, and on one memorable occasion even encountering the maniacal Chucky from the Child’s Play series. Without this vision from Wes Craven, it wouldn’t have happened.
Also like many other films on this list, we get a great argument for the use of practical effects over CGI. The 2010 remake of this movie tried some of the same gags using computers, and they just weren’t as effective. When Freddy leans through the wall at Nancy, Wes Craven simply had Robert Englund pushing against a rubber membrane to terrifying effect. The remake went CGI, and it looked terrible. The fountain of blood in Johnny Depp’s death scene? Again, something that just wouldn’t look as good with computerized blood as good old-fashioned red corn syrup (or whatever they used).
It’s not just the quality of the effects, though, it’s how creative Craven is at conjuring up images that seem like something that would come straight out of a dream, like the centipede that comes from Tina’s mouth or the stairs melting away beneath Nancy’s feet. Even now, the image of Tina’s bodybag being dragged around the school by some unseen force is among the creepier images I’ve seen in a movie. It’s this kind of imagination that makes the movie work, that and the fact that Craven taps into one of the most primal fears a person could have. Regardless of age, sex, religion, or culture, everybody sleeps, and everybody dreams. That moment when you’re asleep, you’re the most vulnerable, but we survive by knowing that nothing that happens in a dream can actually hurt us. For Nancy and the others, Craven takes away that last bit of security, creating some genuine terror for the characters. Nancy is now living in a world where she has to sleep or go insane, but the moment she falls asleep she knows she can be attacked by a madman.
Nightmare helps to reinforce a great number of horror tropes. The first victim, Tina, dies immediately after having sex: we have slasher-as-morality police. Nancy’s parents don’t believe her at first: the clueless authority figures. Then, it turns out Nancy’s mother knew the truth all along, while her father still resists the truth: the useless authority figures. And then there’s Nancy herself, one of my favorite horror movie Survivor Girls. Sure, Laurie Strode is the prototype, but for my money Nancy Thompson is the character all girls who want to survivor horror movies should aspire to be. Laurie shows guts, but she’s largely reactive. Nancy investigates, hunts the killer, even going so far as to lay traps for him, and when she returns to the series in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors (the best of the film’s many sequels), she has evolved considerably. She uses her trauma to help other people, and makes the transformation from Hero to Mentor figure, something which very few horror movie characters ever get a chance to do. Even though Nancy dies in that film, she dies with a purpose, escaping that much-hated “survivor dies in the first five minutes of the sequel” plague that hit so many of her peers.
If I may tangent a moment here – the scene of Nancy booby-trapping the house evokes the similar scene Craven used in Last House on the Left. Exactly why Craven saw fit to use such a similar sequence in two different movies, I don’t know, but it works much better here. In Last House it felt silly, reminding me of nothing so much as Home Alone. Here, possibly because Nancy has already proven herself as a true survivor, it works.
Freddy himself breaks the mold of the monolithic, quiet slayers we saw in Leatherface, Michael Meyers, and Jason Voorhees (once he took over his franchise from Mommy). Freddy is a smaller figure, slender, and wiley. He isn’t quite the chatterbox he would become in the sequels, but he’s already taken to taunting his victims – both verbally and physically – as part of his game. And it is a game to him, make no mistake. Michael and Jason are driven to kill by their respective madness. In a way, Freddy is scarier. He kills because it’s fun. Robert Englund raised this character from a one-note killer to a horror legend, the kind of character that took over the franchise and that audiences actually started to root for after awhile. That’s a testament to his skill as an actor and the charm of the character, but whenever someone starts to cheer for Freddy, I feel somewhat compelled to point out that the guy wound up in this predicament in the first place because of that whole “molest and murder small children” thing he had going on there.
I am not, to be honest, a big fan of the ending of the movie. The ambiguity of Nancy’s final confrontation with Freddy doesn’t quite work. We’ve seen other films in this project with ambiguous endings that worked very well – Ash’s final scream in The Evil Dead, or Joan Crawford’s lingering mortality in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But here we get the feeling that Wes Craven (who didn’t have sequels in mind when he wrote this script) wanted to make it more definitive, and give the film more of a down ending, while the studio (New Line Cinema, which until this point had only been a distribution company and was actually producing its first film) wanted things a bit more open-ended. As a result, we have something that leaves the movie feeling unfinished, and as the second film in the series (in my opinion the worst film in the series) doesn’t touch upon Nancy or her fate at all, except to find one of her old diaries, the audience was left wondering until Craven returned to help write the story for Part 3. And that, frankly, isn’t very satisfying.
Although he made many more horror movies, it’ll be another 12 years before we see Wes Craven turn up in this project again. As for now, the 80s seemed to be the era of things returning from the dead. Aside from Freddy and Jason, the zombie film really seemed to hit its stride in this era, and one of the more memorable of the entries in that group comes up next. Join us tomorrow for Return of the Living Dead.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 28: The Thing (1982)
Director: John Carpenter
Writer: Bill Lancaster, based on the story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell
Cast: Kurt Russell, Donald Moffat, Wilfred Brimley, T.K. Carter, David Clennon, Keith David, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, Joel Polis
Plot: An American antarctic research station is rocked when a Malamute dog rushes onto the base being pursued by a Norwegian helicopter, whose pilot is throwing explosives at the dog. The helicopter lands, but one of the two men on board fumbles with an explosive, blowing up himself and the helicopter. The remaining Norwegian opens fire on the dog, injuring one of the Americans, and is finally brought down with a bullet to the head fired by the base commander, Garry (Donald Moffat). Base pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) and doctor Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) decide to take their own helicopter to the Norwegian base to investigate what happened, while the rest of the Americans adopt the abandoned Malamute. Arriving at the Norwegian base, they find it devastated – burned, holes blown in the sides, an axe embedded in the wall and more. They also find a strange organism frozen in ice and another strange, semi-humanoid body burned to a husk. They bring the burned body back to their own base so Dr. Blair (Wilfred Brimley) can perform an autopsy, but all it shows is that its internal organs appear to be normal. As the Malamute begins to get underfoot, Clark (Richard Masur) puts it in with the other dogs. The Malamute suddenly transforms, its body splitting open and strange appendages attacking the other dogs. As Clark comes to investigate the barking, the dogs flee, and he sees the tendrils of the Thing. Seeing the creature, MacReady hits the base’s fire alarm and tells somebody to come with a flamethrower. He tries shooting the beast as it assimilates the other dogs, but part of it ultimately escapes by breaking into the ceiling. The flamethrower arrives and Childs (Keith David) burns what’s left of the monster.
Blair examines the body and declares it’s some sort of creature with the ability to absorb and imitate other life forms… and what’s worse, the Malamute was free to roam the base for a full night before it was kenneled. A film retrieved from the Norwegian camp shows a spot where they blasted a hole in the ice, and MacReady takes off to investigate. In the hole the Norwegians blasted, they find what appears to be an alien spacecraft, which could have been buried for over 100,000 years. Blair runs some computer projections on the creature’s reproduction rate and, calculating that it could take over the entire world in three years if it reaches civilization, kills the remaining dogs and sabotages the base radio and helicopter. The creature assimilates its first human, and the rest of the crew kills him, rounds up all the bodies, and torches them. While they try to clean up, they find Blair with a gun and an axe, holding off the rest of the crew. Once he runs out of bullets, they manage to overpower and sequester him, but he warns MacReady – watch Clark. Copper proposes testing each person’s blood to prove if they’re really human, but finds that the Thing (whoever It is) has destroyed the supply of untainted blood needed for the test. The men begin hurling accusations at each other, each suspecting the others of being the Monster in disguise. MacReady logically argues that they can’t all the disguised creature, and sequesters Garry, Clark and Copper, the most likely suspects, while Norris (Charles Hallahan) prepares to test them. With a storm approaching, a fuse is blown, Fuchs (Joel Polis) disappears and MacReady separates the crew into groups to search. They find Fuchs’ body, burnt, in the snow, and Nauls (T.K. Carter) finds some of MacReady’s clothes, shredded. He returns with dynamite and the crew debates his fate. In the middle of the standoff, Norris explodes into a creature, killing Copper. MacReady torches the Thing, but the question of who among them may be infected still hangs in the air. He orders the men to submit to a test, but kills Clark when he tries to attack. MacReady’s test is to draw blood from each person – including the dead – and burn it, having learned from Norris’s Thing that each piece of the creature will react. The test begins to exonerate people, including the dead Clark, but when he tests Palmer (David Clennon)’s blood, Palmer transforms into a Thing. MacReady torches It and blows up the body in the snow. The four remaining men – MacReady, Nauls, Childs and Garry, all test clean, and plan to go test Blair, but his shed is empty. They find a tunnel beneath, where Blair has been trying to reconstruct the alien ship. Realizing they can’t risk the creature surviving or even freezing again, MacReady declares they have to blow up the base, even at the cost of their own lives. After a final explosive confrontation, only MacReady and Childs remain. Sitting by the fire, waiting to freeze to death, they decide to wait… and see what happens.
Thoughts: Although a great number of the movies on my list have been remade at some point or another, this is the only time I’m going to discuss the remake of a movie in lieu of its original. John Carpenter’s film is far more faithful to John W. Campbell’s original novella “Who Goes There?” than the less-remembered 1951 Christian Nyby movie The Thing From Another World (which, you may remember, was the movie the kids were watching in Carpenter’s previous entry on this list, Halloween). I picked the remake for several reasons: it’s a better movie, first of all. It’s far more memorable than the original. And pretty much every cultural reference made to this story today is based not on the 1951 film, but on this 1982 outing. Simply put, people remember Carpenter’s film. They don’t really remember Nyby’s. Carpenter himself hasn’t turned out many impressive films in the last few years, but this and Halloween give him two very well-deserved spots on this list.
This is different from a typical horror movie in several ways, beginning with the setting. The Antarctic location is different enough in its own right (let’s not forget many of the films we’ve looked at lately have been set in the woods or suburbia), and the constant snow makes it look very different than any other film, even the similarly snowbound The Shining.
This is another one of the few entries in this experiment that crosses the line between science fiction and horror, but this is even easier to place in the horror camp than Alien was. Whereas that film is sci-fi through and through, its only the extraterrestrial nature of the monster that puts this movie in the science fiction category. Had it been supernatural instead – a change that could have theoretically been made without substantially altering the plot – the movie would be a pure horror romp. As it is, it fits in the horror category without any trouble.
Like the best horror, John Carpenter uses fear itself as the core of the movie. The fear actually doesn’t come from the unknown this time, though, but from the perversion of what is known. Before anybody realizes the true nature of the monster that threatens them, it’s already begun to infect the population of the camp. Suddenly any living creature – any of the dogs, any of your fellow researchers – may in fact be a monster in disguise (and this time in a far more literal sense than old Norman Bates was). That fear that something you know and trust can be perverted and turn on you is chilling under any circumstances… and even more so in a setting like this one, an Antarctic base where there’s no way to contact the outside world and no hope of rescue.
Of course, let’s not discount the effectiveness of a great makeup and puppeteering department either. The first inkling that we’re dealing with something inhuman is the corpse at the Norwegian base – a horrible thing that looks like two separate human bodies were somehow melting together. When we see the dog-creature actually alive, actually moving, it gets far worse. Sometimes, hiding the beast works better. In this movie, where the monster can perfectly imitate any lifeform, there’s not really a “true form” to reveal, so showing it in mid-transformation gives us a jolt of horror that carries us through when we start to wonder what – or who – has been subject to that very process. The Thing that bursts out of Norris is especially grotesque and powerful – it’s an ugly beast that has a very realistic way of moving (considering that its primary means of locomotion is an absurdly long tongue, anyway). But nothing is as mind-bendingly horrible as the creature’s final form, where it attacks MacReady as a sort of horrible biomass in which we can see the trace elements of the different people and beasts it assimilated over the course of the movie. These are the kinds of effects that you know – you know – most filmmakers today would try to create with CGI, and which wouldn’t be one iota as effective.
The new version of The Thing, released just a couple of weeks ago, I find somewhat odd. It’s not a remake of the remake, but supposedly a prequel that shows what happened at the Norwegian base, using all of the visuals Carpenter created in this movie as its blueprint. It’s not a bad idea, and I’d certainly rather see that than watch them try to remake this one, but why call it The Thing again? That’s just going to lead to confusion, my friends. This is why subtitles were invented. On the plus side, from my understanding the creators of the new movie are insistent on using practical effects – makeup and puppets – instead of relying on CGI, and for that at least, they’ve earned my respect. And quite possibly the price of my admission ticket.
Brr. I think we need to warm up tomorrow, don’t you? We’re going to leave behind the frozen waste of Antarctica for the warmth of hearth and home and a scorching boiler room… in a nice, quiet community where dreams are growing disturbed. We’re going to have a bit of a Nightmare on Elm Street.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 27: Poltergeist (1982)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor
Cast: Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Heather O’Rourke, Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robins, Zelda Rubinstein, Richard Lawson, Martin Casella, James Karen
Plot: The film begins simply enough, with a television playing the national anthem and going to static (reminding us of those quaint days when television stations actually went off the air). As her father Steven (Craig T. Nelson) sleeps in front of the TV, little Carol Anne Freeling (Heather O’Rourke) wakes up, walks to the flickering TV, and begins to speak to it. The next day, the family’s pet bird dies, and mother Diane (JoBeth Williams) is forced by Carol Anne to give it a proper cigar box funeral. The older children, Dana (Dominique Dunne) and Robbie (Oliver Robins) are nonplussed by the loss of the bird. Robbie is, however, disturbed by the gnarled tree outside his bedroom window. The next night, when a storm scares Carol Anne and Robbie into their parents’ bed, the static appears on the television and again summons Carol Anne. This time, a spectral hand reaches out of the screen and rattles the room, waking up the Freelings and prompting one of the most famous lines in scary movie history: Carol Anne’s, “Theeeeeey’re here!”
The next day, Diane begins to notice strange phenomena around the house, such as a spot on the kitchen floor that sends objects sliding across the room. The fun evaporates, though, when Robbie’s gnarled tree comes to life and snatches him. As Steven and Diane try to save their son, the closet blows open with an intense white light, and little Carol Anne is sucked in and vanishes. After a frantic search for the girl, the family hears her voice coming from the television set. Steven turns to a group of paranormal investigators for help. The investigators: Ryan (Richard Lawson), Marty (Martin Casella) and Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight) find the children’s room in a state of chaos – the bed spinning, objects hurtling through the air, the closet glowing.
The investigators believe the events to be the work of a poltergeist instead of a traditional haunting, which means it could stop at any time and the missing Carol Anne – whose voice they keep hearing coming from… somewhere – could vanish forever. With a time limit, the family and investigators grow more desperate and begin conducting experiments to find the girl even as her disembodied voice cries for help. Steven discovers from his boss, real estate developer Mr. Teague (James Karen) their house was built on the remains of an old cemetery. They send the other children away and bring in a medium, Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein), who believes the spirits in the house are attracted to Carol Anne’s “light,” and thus are keeping her captive. There’s a demon, “the Beast,” using her to restrain the other spirits, who don’t realize they’re dead and flee the Light that would send them to the next world. Tangina proves that the portal in the closet eventually comes out in the Freelings’ living room, and Diane ties herself to a rope and plunges into the abyss to find her daughter. When he realizes Tangina is trying to use Carol Anne to force the demon into the light, Steven pulls on the rope and finds himself face-to-face with the Beast. With the creature distracted, Diane and Carol Anne fall free, and Tangina declares the house “clean.”
The family decides to move (because people just don’t have the guts to stand up to a supernatural infestation anymore). In their last night in the house, Diane is left alone with Robbie and Carol Anne. Robbie is attacked by a demonic clown doll and the Beast assaults Diane, preventing her from getting to the children. As the closet begins to transform, Diane rushes outside for help and falls into the muddy pit the family had dug for a swimming pool, only to find herself facing the rising corpses of the graveyard Steven’s company built over. Diane makes it back into the house and gets the children away from the closet, but the corpses – and their coffins – begin rising everywhere as Steven and Teague arrive. Dana gets back from her date just as the rest of the Freelings escape, and the house itself implodes in front of the whole neighborhood, disappearing in a flash of light. Exhausted, but together, the family checks into a hotel for the night… and Steven shoves the television out onto the balcony.
Thoughts: Like The Exorcist and, to a lesser degree, The Shining, Poltergeist makes childhood a target of the supernatural. That idea is something that comes back on us time and again over the years, and with good reason. Childhood is supposed to be the time of innocence, the time when we’re protected from the nasty things in the world by Mommy and Daddy. Even when you’re an adult, seeing a symbol of innocence corrupted by a monster can terrify you. The filmplays on our fears by tapping into a very normal situation – a standard suburban family – and throwing it into the grip of something horrible. And Hooper and Spielberg work hard to make this family as typical as possible, while still showing off a little geek cred – the younger Freelings’ bedroom is rife with posters for Sesame Street, Star Wars and Alien, there’s a Los Angeles Rams helmet in the corner, Nelson’s character reads a biography of new president Ronald Reagan, and so forth. This is a film that wears its early 80s time frame as a badge of honor. (There’s so much Star Wars, in fact, you’d suspect the producer was buds with George Lucas or something.)
Speaking of the producer, there are stories that Spielberg had a much heavier directorial influence than the filmmakers admitted (and, in fact, probably only skipped directing it himself because he was busy with E.T. at the time). Spielberg’s fingerprints are all over the movie. Yes, technically it’s a supernatural horror flick, but the tone of the story and the quality and type of the special effects all fit in very neatly with the Spielberg sci-fi films of the time period. This movie doesn’t look like The Shining, it looks like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This isn’t a bad thing, though. So much horror – even great horror – tends to have a very similar flavor to it. It’s refreshing to see a Spielberg come in every once in a while and tell a ghost story that doesn’t feel exactly like every other ghost story out there.
That said, although the movie is a lot of fun, it’s fun in the way that a lot of 80s family adventures are: you watch the film, you think how awesomely authentic the portrayal of the children are, and you wish you could experience the cooler moments of the story. Granted, this movie doesn’t have as many moments a person would actually want to experience as, say, Goonies, but it’s hard today to find this PG-rated fright flick actually scary. In fact, it’s very much the kind of ghost story a parent could feel comfortable sharing with some children. (I’ve got to stress some children here – let’s face it, there are kids who get nightmares at the slightest provocation, and this movie would most definitely give them that provocation. But if you’ve got a slightly older child that has proven he or she can handle a little bit of a scare, this movie would be okay.)
Once the film does start going for more traditional scares, it can be a little cheesy. The scene with the maggots bursting from a raw steak isn’t bad, but a few seconds later when Marty starts peeling his face off, it’s terribly obvious that you’re looking at someone ripping make-up from a mannequin head – the hands clutching at the face don’t even look like they’re coming from the proper angle. It jerks you out of it. Later on, when Robbie gets attacked by the Clown doll, it’s really effective – Hooper got a nice fake-out by making you expect to see something under the bed. But that doesn’t make the doll itself less cheesy. Other scenes seem to want to mine a little bit of comedy – when Steven’s boss visits him to find out why he hasn’t been coming to work, Steve’s efforts to prevent him from noticing the ghostly goings-on are a little funnier than they probably need to be.
It’s the last third of the film that’s the scariest and the most effective. Once Tangina enters the picture, the intensity increases significantly and you start to fear for the rest of the family, the child, and the investigators throughout the house. Tangina’s actually a magnificent creation – she’s Yoda with a southern accent, (ah – Star Wars again) making Steven and Diane do whatever they need to do to get their daughter back, up to and including threatening her, growing angry with her, and manipulating her into laying a trap for the Beast. She’s an awesome character that helps the film work, serving the same function as Father Merrin in The Exorcist (in fact, many of the scenes where the parents and investigators try to tap into the spirit world evoke a much more special-effects heavy version of The Exorcist). She’s the Mentor, even if she’s a Mentor who doesn’t show up until late in the game, and she brings just the right touch of awesome to make the movie work. The climax – except for the clown doll – is also great. The corpses bubbling up out of the pool are creepy as hell, the telescoping hallway adds to the feeling of hopelessness and desperation that Diane has to defeat, and the effects on the gaping maw of the closet… scary stuff. We’re getting into Spielberg-Gremlins here. (And in fact, some of the fleshy appearance of the portal is very similar to what Spielberg and Chris Columbus would do in that other little monster movie a couple of years later.)
In the end, we still get the expected Spielberg feel-good ending, but that’s okay. This is a scary movie, but not in the same vein as most of the others we’ve watched. This is a chill for everyone, something that parents and kids can watch and both hold on to each other a little tighter.
From the warmth of the family to the cold of Antarctica – tomorrow we see the return of John Carpenter to this list with a sci-fi classic – his 1982 remake of The Thing.
Mutants, Monsters, and Madmen Day 26: The Evil Dead (1981)
Director: Sam Raimi
Writer: Sam Raimi
Cast: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, Hal Delrich, Sarah York
Plot: Five college students head out to a cabin in the woods, looking for a short getaway. From the very beginning, though, the trip seems to be in trouble. The bridge they have to take is crumbling and their car almost gets stuck. The cabin isn’t in any better shape than the bridge itself. And something, some presence in the woods seems to be watching them for some malevolent purpose. Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss), while sketching an old clock, finds her hand seemingly possessed, and draws a crude image of a book with a face on it, then sees a trapdoor rattling in the corner. She dismisses her experience and returns to her friends, where her brother Ash (Bruce Campbell) lightens the mood with a stumbling toast that’s interrupted when the trapdoor is thrown open. Ash and Scott (Hal Delrich) investigate the cellar, finding some horrific artifacts, including an ancient book wrapped in human skin and inked in blood, The Book of the Dead, and a tape recorder. When they play back the recording, they hear a message from the cabin’s previous occupant – an archeologist who was studying the Book of the Dead and the demons it can summon. The voice on the tape recites an old chant and a horrible light glows from beneath the ground. Horrified, Cheryl storms off. Ash is left alone with his girlfriend, Linda, and gives her a necklace with a magnifying glass pendant. Cheryl, believing she’s being watched, walks out alone into the woods (a stupid move that girls in horror movies had been doing for years and would keep doing for years to come), only to be attacked by a demon in the trees. (Literally, in the trees.) She demands Ash drive her back into town, but the bridge they used on the way in has been destroyed. Returning to the cabin, Cheryl suddenly transforms into a “Deadite” – possessed by a demon, possessing strange power. She attacks, stabbing Linda with a pencil and throwing Ash into a shelf before Scott manages to lock her in the cellar. Shelly (Sarah York) is next, transforming and attacking Scott, and he kills her to save himself.
Scott wants to leave the injured Linda behind and look for a way back to town, but Ash refuses, so he wanders off alone. Linda’s injury spreads, transforming her into another Deadite, and Scott reappears, horribly wounded by something in the woods. While the possessed girls taunt them, Scott tells Ash there’s a trail in the woods. The girls suddenly become themselves again, but when Ash goes to free Cheryl, she breaks through the floor and tries to strangle him. He escapes and drags the again-possessed Linda outside, and returns to find that Scott has died. The girls attack and Ash kills Linda. Remembering that Shelly didn’t stop until her body was completely dismembered, Ash chains up Linda and is about to cut her up with a chainsaw when he sees her pendant. Grief-stricken, he carries her outside to bury her intact, but she reanimates and attacks him again; he finally beheads her. Returning to the cabin, he finds that Cheryl has escaped and arms himself with a shotgun. As he barricades himself in, Scott reanimates and Ash loses the gun. He gets free of Scott as Cheryl breaks in, and the two Deadites try to hold him down and kill him. Ash manages to use Linda’s necklace (which somehow, miraculously appeared at the right time) to grab the Book of the Dead and hurl it into the fireplace. The two Deadites deteriorate before his eyes, collapsing into piles of gore. As the sun rises Ash – broken, battered, and covered in blood – stands up, alive and victorious. But as he steps into the light, something else approaches… and attacks.
Thoughts: To be perfectly, frank, this isn’t a masterpiece of a movie. Sam Raimi is still very raw as a director at this point, with ineffective angles and stiff performances from his actors. But the film is significant nonetheless in that we can see the germ of greatness in here. Raimi, who has gone on to do a great many very good movies, was cutting his teeth at this point, and was learning the basics of telling a story. Campbell was not yet the tongue-in-cheek master of camp that he would later become.
Some scenes, in fact, are downright awkward. The scene where Ash pretends to be asleep to give Linda the necklace, for example, includes a weird game where the camera keeps doing close-ups of Campbell and Baker’s eyes while she tries to decide if she’s going to take the box and keeps feigning sleep, while watching her at the same time. It’s supposed to be sweet, but even for the audience, it’s kind of uncomfortable. And while that feeling fits in with the rest of the film very well, in this scene it somewhat undermines the intent. Ash himself has a long way to go before he becomes the badass we know from Army of Darkness. When Shelly attacks, he’s actually paralyzed with fear, leaving Scott to take care of dismembering her himself.
But one thing that was effective right away was the mood. Raimi managed to put together scenes that combined shadow, nice tricks of the camera, and haunting music to make you feel that the characters’ fear was justified, even if it wasn’t presented in a flawless manner. There are several moments where the viewer is placed in the eyes of the Evil itself, as it zooms in on the characters, watches them from the woods, and otherwise stalks them.
By the time we reached the sequel, 1987’s Evil Dead II, both Raimi and Campbell had improved dramatically. In fact, the sequel is little more than a more successful remake of the original – it tells the same story, but injects it with superior storytelling, a healthy dose of black comedy, and a much stranger ending, making it a true classic of the horror/comedy mashup genre. (If and when I do the follow-up to this project about horror/comedies, you can bet Evil Dead II will occupy a place of honor.)
That’s not to say that none of the scenes work, though. The scene of Cheryl’s “possession” (which, let’s be honest, is a nice way to say she’s “raped by a bunch of freaking trees”) is horrible in all the ways the filmmaker wants. Considering that so much of it is dependent on our ability to believe that the branches and sprigs that are wrapping themselves around her body are acting of their own accord and not being manipulated right off-camera by a guy in a sweaty t-shirt, it looks very convincing and pretty horrifying. In fact, the makeup and gore effects on the whole are very well-done. There’s also some impressive stop-motion animation at the end, as the book burns and the two Deadites decay.
Speaking of them, the Deadite makeup is instantly frightening, and the scene where she stabs Linda with the pencil is convincing as all hell. And man, man is there a lot of blood in this movie. Every wound, every cut, every scrape absolutely gushes, and it all looks real enough for me. It multiplies when Ash hides in the cellar – pipes drip with blood, electrical outlets, blood flows into a lightbulb, drips down the lens of a movie projector… Raimi must have spent half his budget on corn syrup and food coloring. This does, however, lead to some amusing continuity errors. At one point, Ash bashes the possessed Cheryl’s hand in the door and it explodes with blood – in the next shot he slams the door shut and the door and frame are totally clean. Similarly, the pattern of gore on Ash’s increasingly dirty face and clothes changes noticeably from shot to shot. It’s a small thing, but when you notice it, it takes you out of the film.
The ending of the film is particularly – if justifiably – bleak. Ash, who has managed to survive all the horror around him – is attacked once more as we cut to black. Raimi’s philosophy for the movie, he says, was “everything dies,” and if he had stopped here, that would have come across very well. Of course, in the sequels we learn that not only does Ash live, he rules. But that’s neither here nor there. If nothing else, we owe this film and Sam Raimi an unending debt of gratitude for giving the world the awesomeness that is Bruce Campbell. And even though you know the forthcoming remake has both Raimi and Campbell’s stamp of approval, there’s just no way it capture the thrill of watching Ashley Williams become one of the great cult movie heroes.
After spending a couple of days in the woods, let’s get back to civilization… a nice little house in the suburbs. In a film called Poltergeist.
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.
Reel to Reel 