Son Of Danse Macabre

The Modern American Horror Film As Junk Food: Part 12: Trick 'R Treat

2012-02-26T12:52:00.002-08:00

Perhaps no film better sums up the horror fandom of theaughts better than Trick ‘R Treat. A horror film for the mash up era. Kept onthe shelf for two years by a studio who was utterly baffled by what to do witha horror film that A) wasn’t a remake and B) had an actual color palette. Trick‘R Treat became a true from the ground up hit. As the film’s release date wasrelentlessly reshuffled, fan interested was first stoked, then kept alive by ahandful of screenings at influential cinemas like The New Beverly and The AlamoDrafthouse. Before the film was finally released with a shrug direct to DVD,where it promptly became a gratifyingly large sleeper hit.

It’s not hard to see why the film resonated anymore thanit’s tough to see why the studio was kind of scared shitless about the film.Trick ‘R Treat is a horror film by horror fans for horror fans in the truestsense of the word. Anyone not on its wavelength may as well be listening to adog whistle. Trick ‘R Treat makes most of the other films in the pastichemovement look like bland lobs towards main stream acceptance. While most of thepastiche films stayed tucked away in their subgenres; be they slashers,exploitation, gialli, or other. Trick ‘R Treat simply embraces horroriconography. All of it. At once. Forever. It doesn’t merely pay tribute to thehorror imagery of the past it positively fetishizes it. Though the filmcertainly owes a tremendous debt to Creepshow both aesthetically,philosophically and tonally, simply put I haven’t seen a horror film so in lovewith the act of telling a horror story since The Fog. Trick ‘R Treat simplyloves being a horror film.

Trick ‘R Treat is more or less an anthology film (there issome minimal intercutting between the segments to allow some Pulp Fictionesquechronological tomfoolery. But by and large the stories are self contained). Allthe stories take place on the same night in a town that’s notorious for it’sHalloween celebrations. The entire city becomes one big party and Trick ‘RTreat takes a look at the celebrations that are markedly more sinister than theothers. The first segment follows Dylan Baker as a middle school principle whomoonlights as a serial killer and has some trouble disposing of one of hischarges. The second a group of children whose cruel prank on an autistic girl,involving a town urban legend, goes awry. The third follows a “22 year oldvirgin” played by Anna Paquin whose search for a boy to bring to a party getscomplicated on both ends. Before wrapping things up with the story of a bitter,Halloween hating old man, with some serious skeletons in his closet who ends upin a showdown with the spirit of the season itself.

All of the stories strike the same EC Comics sweet spot,dead center. Telling stories of terrible things happening to terrible peoplewith a tone that is gruesome, darkly funny, tongue ever so slightly in cheek.The film strikes just the right tone, it plays hard but it’s never trulyupsetting either. Let’s put it this way, Trick ‘R Treat is probably thelightest film you will ever see in which literally dozens of children areslaughtered.

Anthology films are by their very nature one of the hardestsubgenres in horror to do. In an anthology film you don’t just have to tell onegood horror story, you have to tell several and avoid the pitfalls in each one.You’re basically giving yourself multiple opportunities to get it wrong. Itreally only takes one bad segment to tank an entire film. Trick ‘R Treat is oneof the few Anthology films that really doesn’t step wrong, though the secondstory does come dangerously close to snapping suspension of disbelief. Not thatI have any trouble buying that a group of kids would torment an Autistic girl,just that they would stage a pageant to do so. Cruelty is usually quite a bitmore banal.

For one thing the film is briskly plotted, at just over 80minutes each segment breezes by without getting a chance to overstay itswelcome. And while some purists may grumble that the film has too muchnarrative spillover to qualify as a true anthology, the cross over allows thefilm to also keep EC’s patented moral equilibrium. A character who gets awayclean in their own segment will likely get his just deserts in the next. Youcan practically hear the Crypt Keeper giving a hearty chuckle in thebackground. I’m sure the film’s own mascot, the instantly iconic Sam would offera laugh but he tends to stay on the silent side.

Which brings up the next thing about Trick ‘R Treat. It’sgorgeous. It’s unique look standing out all the more thanks to the fact that itcame from a decade of horror whose visual aesthetic can be summed up, “Slap afilter on that bad boy and crank up the Teal in color correction.” Trick ‘RTreat on the other hand has a rich autumnal color palette and a sense ofdesign, provided by The Director Dougherty, that is Burtonesque without beingderivative. Dougherty is playing with well known imagery here, creepy papermache masks, sinister jack o lanterns, burlap sacks, creepy children, none ofit’s new (The film even takes one very pointed swipe at one of the Sawfranchise’s key pieces of imagery), but that’s the whole point. Dougherty knowsand loves the imagery and is able to put enough of his own spin on it to keepit feeling fresh. Simply put Trick ‘R Treat is fun to watch in every sense ofthe word.

It helps that despite being an obvious tribute Doughertyplays things relatively straight. While something like Hatchet is technically ahorror film, Victor Crowley’s stalking sequences are not staged like thingsthat are supposed to frighten you. When Crowley say, pulls off a woman’s headwith his bare hands the reaction Green is looking for is not disgust, but thesame reaction that fans give when a Professional Wrestler pulls off asuccessful suplex. Though Dougherty clearly wants you to enjoy his horror film,he also wants it to work as a horror film. He has a knack for it, able to stagescenes with a real sense of geography and tension. Just as capable of payingoff a sequence with a big scare as a big laugh or trade either for anunexpected punch line.

There’s really not much to not like about Trick ‘R Treat, assaid the second story strains credulity just a bit, but not past the point of atale told round the campfire and the budget constraints do show a bit in thethird segment making its punch line a little less effective than it might havebeen. But these are quibbles, forthe most part Trick ‘R Treat is smart, fun horror that looks great and was madenot just with evident care, but real passion. What more can you ask for? It’ssolid genre filmmaking at its best.

The Modern American Horror Movie As Junk Food: Part 11: Saw 2

2012-02-21T19:05:00.000-08:00

Now I’m not one for armchair psychiatry but it doesn’t takemuch to notice that the horror franchise that was far and away the mostfinancially successful, most influential and most copied horror franchise ofthe decade; the film that resonated most fully with post 9/11 horror audiences,had at its center a boogeyman who was a sinister old man with health problemswho eluded authorities with preternatural skill, communicated with the largerworld through videos that broadcast his twisted world view and philosophy,lived in what can only be described as a bunker and had an army of fanaticaldevoted followers willing to commit atrocities and die for him.

Nope no real world corollaries here.

Because make no mistake love it or loathe it Saw was the 800pound gorilla of the horror genre for all of the 00’s. You might not think it’sworth a whole lot, and most of the time you wouldn’t exactly be wrong. But totry and ignore it would just be foolish.

If Eli Roth deserves credit for reintroducing R Rated horroras a commercially viable formatthan James Wan and Leigh Whannell were the first to provide a major hit. Thatsaid, as with Friday The Thirteenth I’m choosing to write about the secondinstallment of the franchise as it actually delivers a much more accurateportrait of the series as a whole than the original.

The first Saw is as much a detective film as a horror film.It’s a film that clearly is using Se7en as it’s template. Spending just as muchtime with the detectives working the case and Danny Glover as a cop who hasbeen driven round the bend by Jigsaw as it does on Jigsaw’s various games andthe main showdown between a shameless overacting Cary Elwes and a hacksaw.Jigsaw himself is hardly seen in the film, manipulating things by proxy andwith the occasional Deep Red rip off.

Saw 2 on the other hand establishes the template that therest of the franchise would follow . A spectacular opening death trapunconnected from the rest of the film where a one off character dies in somespectacularly gory and ironic fashion (for those of you unfamiliar withJigsaw’s raison d’etre, inspired by his own terminal cancer, involves snaringhis victims in sadistic contraptions and traps in which they must mutilate themselvesor others in a usually ironic way in order to survive thus either teaching thema very important lesson, or killing them. For example “You have neglected yourdental hygiene now you must rip out your own teeth with a claw hammer beforethis dental drill goes through your skull and into your brain. Most peoplenever really appreciate what it is to chew.”) We’re then introduced to our maincharacter who is soon trapped by Jigsaw in some untenable but survivablesituation. A trap that is only truly closed on them when either A) It isrevealed that they have more skeletons in their closet than we were led tobelieve. And/Or B) They ignore some crucial information that they wereexplicitly told not to.

While this formula began to break down almost immediately asthe foreknowledge that Jigsaw required for each of his traps to work increasedexponentially with each entry. Quickly going from improbable to insultingsomewhere about half way through part 3. But on its first run through it’s hardto deny that it was reasonably effective. For a franchise that to many horrorfans represents everything lazy and derivative about the horror films of thedecade, Saw II works surprisingly well if one is able to lay down the baggageof the approximate bajillion films that followed.

The film follows a cop played by Donnie Wahlberg who managesto capture Jigsaw only to find out that Jigsaw has kidnapped his son and trappedhim in a house that is filled with both Nerve Gas, and people that Wahlbergsent to prison with planted evidence. (That would be the “A” part of theformula) Jigsaw tells Wahlberg that if he simply sits and talks with Jigsaw fortwo hours his son will be safe. But as things grow more and more dire on thevideo feed coming from the house (it is naturally filled with death traps andJigsaw’s morality games as well) Wahlberg reverts to his old ways and attempts to beat the location ofhis Son out of Jigsaw (that would be the “B” portion of the formula.)

The film cuts between the two locations with an impressiveamount of tension building at both. The death traps in the house have neitherlost their shock value, nor reached the ludicrous levels of convolution theywould in later installments. Indeed the film contains what is perhaps thefranchise’s most unbearable moment, involving a pit full of dirty hyperdermicneedles and a key hidden at its bottom. And Bell’s lowkey manipulations feelgenuinely unpredictable. Add in not one but two genuinely well done plot twistsand you got yourself a pretty decent B-Horror film.

Really Tobin Bell deserves much of the credit for just howwell the movie works. As mentioned, he was hardly in the first film, but is oncenter stage for at least half of the sequels runtime. Yet his presence doesnot dampen his mystique one bit. With his pale emaciated frame and hushedsepulchral voice, Bell is eerily believable as a killer who is wasting awayfrom the inside out. No matter how much of an upper hand he has on his victimsthere is no escaping the fact that Jigsaw himself is caught in his own deathtrap from which he will ultimately not escape.

There is something inherently disquieting about being killedby something weaker than yourself and Bell certainly fits the bill. Dubiousmorality, apparent psychic ability, access to unlimited resources and tracts ofsoundproof urban real estate aside, he spends more of the franchise than not asa corpse.

The Saw franchise imploded somewhere around the middle ofSaw 3, despite the fact that it managed to lumber on like an unstoppable masterplan set in motion by a deceased madman for four more money grabbinginstallments. Much of the problem lay in the fact that unlike other horror filmswhich try to make their various entries as stand alone as possible, Sawembraced it’s continuity to a degree that was positively unhealthy. Everyinstallment found itself so entwined with its previous films plots thateventually spark notes became a prerequisite for watching each film. This mightbe fine if the Saw franchise had, say memorable characters, gripping stories,or some kind of larger narrative arc. But alas it did not.

Best for those curious about the franchise to stick to whenit was (relatively simple). Make no mistake, Saw 2 isn’t exactly a great horrormovie. It cheats worse than a riverboat gambler with a waxed handlebar mustacheand a derringer. But aside from one reaction shot that is not strictly speaking“possible” given the laws of physics and time as we know them, Saw 2 actuallycheats pretty well. And that you may agree is half the battle.

The Modern Horror Movie As Junk Food: Part 10: Mimic

2012-02-17T13:52:00.001-08:00

Let me make this perfectly clear. Guilmero Del Toro iswithout a doubt the richest voice to emerge in any medium in the genre ofhorror during the period of time that this book discusses.

His is a deep, richly creative voice that blends a knowledgeof folklore that Neil Gaiman would find intimidating with a baroque visualstyle that is down right sensual, with a deep humanistic sensibility and asheer love of story that is unmatched by his contemporaries. There are fewartists whose work I respond to in the deep instinctual way that I respond to DelToro’s.

And as luck would have it I am forced to write about theonly one of his films that can be called mediocre.

Believe me folks I tried, but Cronos, The Devil’s Backboneand Pan’s Labrynith are all technically foreign productions and Blade 2 and histwo Hellboy films are just too action oriented to qualify. I’m stuck with the odd man out of DelToro’s filmography.

Mimic was Del Toro’s attempt to adapt to the Hollywoodsystem rather than the other way around. It is the only one of his films wherehe doesn’t have story credit and it shows. The plot of Mimic would not be outof place in any of the 50's Big Bug movies or Bert I. Gordon “Things are larger thanthey should be” master work (Making it along with Andaconda one of the lastfilms to be old fashioned without being a throwback). One can easily imagine apaternal Hugh Marlowe in a white lab with a touch of gray in his hair coatmouthing most of the film’s dialogue (“My God They’re Getting BIGGER. If theyshould spread there’d be no stopping them!”) Watching Del Toro’s elegant styleput in service of such a plot is frankly bizarre. Mimic becomes almost anexercise in cogitative dissonance.

Mimic’s confused tone starts from frame one, with adisturbing credit sequence that could be described as not unlike Se7en or a bitmore to the point, “One of those late 90’s credit sequences that totally rippedoff Se7en” which juxtaposes bugs with shots of dying children. I mean how elseare you going to start a big bug movie amirite? It’s just the first of manyexamples of Del Toro treating the material with a solemnity that it alltogether doesn’t deserve. Instead of elevating the material he just getsdragged down along with it.

Now let me make myself clear, I’m not saying that Mimic is abad movie because “it’s just a big bug movie.” Del Toro himself would neverstoop to such condescension and I’m sure the man loves Big Bug Films. I’m sureDel Toro could make an amazing big bug movie. He’s currently hard at work onPacific Rim which rumor has it is practically a Kaiju film. I’m saying that hewasn’t given enough room to bend the material to his skill set. He was, inshort forced to make someone else’s big bug movie and the outcome was notideal.

It turns out the children are victims of a plague that isbeing carried by New York’s many cockroaches. The CDC turns to entomologistSusan Tyler (played by Mira Sorvino) who genetically engineers a predator bugthat takes care of the roach problem almost instantly until DUN DUH DAAAHHH!!!!SOMETHING GOES WRONG!!!! Despite the best efforts of F. Murray Abraham to addsome gravitas to the joint (a note F. Murray Abraham is billed as making “aspecial guest appearance” a few years later he would get Thirteen Ghosts all tohimself. Lucky Fellow) The film never gets remotely near surmounting thegoofiness inherent in the premise.

Sorvino discovers that her bugs have survived when they havebeen engineered to die out. And wouldn’t you know it now they’ve grown to thesize of eight feet tall and they’re snacking on the homeless, street kids,stray dogs and priests. Sorvino ventures into the deep abandoned Subways of NewYork to try to elimate the living plague of mutants she has created. Resultsare mixed.

As mentioned the odd thing about the film is that there is afair amount of Del Toro in this thing. The old subway station where most of thefilm takes place is a great environment, baroque and haunted, a place ofdilapidated grandeur that reflects Del Toro’s obsession with undergroundchambers and palaces. The film features one of his trademark courtly old worldgrandfathers (no gears though). The sight of the bugs in their first form (Thefilm’s gimmick being that they have developed a kind of camouflage that allowsthem to pass as human at a quick glance) is undeniably creepy. A largeshuffling mass with a face that is eerily just short of human. Indeed the bugs serve as a pretty good metaphor for the film as a whole. At firstglance they are gothic at disturbing. But once they reveal themselves they endup just looking silly. Remember when I talked about how surprisingly well the90’s CGI of The Frighteners has held up? Sadly that is not a statement I willbe making about Mimic.

The problem is that such idiosyncrasies that are the sourceof such delight to Del Toro’s faithful are few and far between. For the mostpart Del Toro is stuck delivering what the studio wants. Mimic is the only oneof Del Toro’s films that can be fairly called formulaic and Del Toro’s disdainfor said formula is laughably apparent, and includes both A) The most laughablyunconvincing flare up of maternal instinct I have ever seen in a film. EllenRipley Mina Sorvino is not and B) The male lead walking away from the most unsurivable explosion lived throughthat I have ever seen. As a manwho grew up on the films of the 80’s and 90’s I have seen more than my fairshare of giant explosions that miraculously leave the heroes unscathed. But Ihave never, ever, seen one that was so sublimely unbelievable as the one thatends Mimic. It’s as though Del Toro received a studio note, threw it on theground in disgust and then just decided to make it look as stupid as humanlypossible. If this is the case I commend you sir.

This is not a case like The Frighteners where an artistsvoice stayed more or less intact in a hostile environment after a fewconcessions. This is a complete override of said voice. Del Toro seemed torealize as much and his next film was made A) 5 years later (one of the manydepressingly long ellipses in Del Toro’s career) and B) Financed in Spain. Bythe time he returned to Hollywood it was on his own terms.

I don’t want to beat up much more on Mimic. It’s the worst kind of film to writeabout a bad film by an artist you love. It’s only value being that it’screation basically prevented any more Mimics in Del Toro’s career. The projectleft such a bad taste in his mouth that he willingly shut down his dreamproject At The Mountains Of Madness, and stepped off The Hobbit rather thancompromise on either. Every preceding film from Del Toro has felt like a gift.If the price of that is one you wish you could return that’s more than fair.

The Modern American Horror Film As Junk Food: Part 9: The Frighteners

2012-02-14T14:38:00.000-08:00

The transition from being a cult filmmaker to a mainstreamone is a difficult to make under the best of circumstances. Make a filmthat’s too bland and your loyal fans who have supported you up until this pointmay abandon you. Make something too idiosyncratic that fails to connect with alarger audience the studios may just decide you’re not worth the trouble andcut you off at one go. For every Sam Raimi and Guillmero Del Toro whosuccessfully makes the leap, there’s a Richard Kelly or Alex Cox, whose careersbuckled under the weight of so many Southland Tales and Walkers.

Few cult filmmakers have made the transition and found greater commercial and critical success with as much of their voice still intact as Peter Jackson. Yet even hefaltered somewhat while making the jump. His transitionary film TheFrighteners, though better than its maligned reputation suggests can at bestonly be graded a partial success. It’s the work of a filmmaker who is hedginghimself, working against his own impulses in order to get a shot at somethinggreater. Made directly after Heavenly Creatures, Jackson’s new found criticalfavor was squandered by critics who were befuddled by his horror movie past who had hoped he would grow past it, while his horror fans found the film a watereddown version of the films Jackson had previously made. Comparably tame both in style and content when compared to theinnovative gore cartoons that Jackson had made his reputation on. TheFrighteners ended up one of those unfortunate films that pleased nobody.

Which is not to suggest, as some have that it is not of apiece with Jackson’s work. Like Heavenly Creatures the film is concerned withthe mystery of the emotional landscape of an adolescent girl who is driven tomurder, like The Lovely Bones it’s a film that attempts to visualize theafterlife and a fair amount of Jackson’s puckish humor and innovative stylehave survived the transition to the mainstream, even if the most common fluidflying around is ectoplasm instead of gore. It’s even shot in New Zealand.

The Frighteners follows Frank Bannister, played by MichaelJay Fox. Who in the aftermath of his wife’s death gains the ability to seeghosts. A skill that he has been using to run cons on the unsuspecting with thehelp of a trio of spirits from different eras, who basically act out gags fromLonesome Ghosts until someone forks over some cash. This comfortable set up changeswhen a wave of supernatural killings begins and Bannister winds up the chiefsuspect of the FBI agent sent to investigate (Played by Jefferey Combs in a performance that mocks theeccentric FBI agent archetype of Dale Cooper and Fox Mulder that proved so popular in the decade).

What separates Jackson’s work from his contemporaries in thesplatter game, is a deceptive strain of sweetness, dare I call it humanism, inhis work that softens Jackson’s films in the same way that Sam Raimi’spalatable glee at his own virtuosity softens his. There is a care and affectionfor his characters even in his earliest most brutal films that you aresimply not going to see in the works of say Frank Henenlotter or Tom Six. DeadAlive works because it is among other things an improbably effective lovestory. His underrated King Kong remake, which plays like a child’s daydreamabout King Kong, works because of how much unabashed love that Jackson has forthe big ape. Even the sketchier Alien Busters in Bad Taste are viewed with akind of cockeyed warmth.

As a result Jackson invests an awful lot of screen time andweight trying to get you on Bannister’s side. Played likeably, if a touch tooglibly by Fox, Bannister is a manwhose daily encounters with death and its multitude of ghosts cannot erase thetrauma of the single death that defines him. Living in a half finished house hebuilt for his wife, as unable to move on as the spirits he pals around with.It’s here that the casting of Fox becomes something of a detriment; while heworks perfectly as the fast talking huckster he is less convincing as agrieving widower. Instead of a man haunted by death he seems like a maninconvenienced by it.

The Frighteners has plenty of opportunities to show off Jackson’s other talents.Namely stylistic innovation and first class splatstick. The film is actuallythe most boundry breaking of Jackson’s career. One of the earliest films to rely almost entirely on CGI for its effects. Jackson’s filmactually looks a far cry betterthan most of the mid 90s CGI abominations. Compare it to other Computer effects heavy horror films of theera, like the lamentable Event Horizon, or Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, andyou’ll see it as a film that has held up remarkably well. This is partly due tothe fact that Jackson’s ideas are simply more creative than his contemporaries.He’s dealing with ghosts after all and there’s a palatable sense of glee asJackson gets to portray these spectral presences with a technology that isequally ineffable. It’s a more cartoonish, stylized look that the film is goingfor and thus more achievable. The ghosts bulge out of walls and portraits (it’sa particularly nice touch that The Frighteners managed the CGI version of the old “Coming Out TheWall” trick that looks better and more realistic than A Nightmare On ElmStreet Remake did fifteen years later. HIHO!) completely unfettered by thebonds of reality. The “Reaper Spirit” (which bares a certain similarity toJackson’s version of The Nazgul) flutters and moves on the wind like a deadleaf. While it is true that The Frighteners does occasionally have a tang of“tech demo” about it (Robert Zemekis didn’t produce this for nothing) and occasionally its reach exceeds its grasp, it should be pointed out that itsgrasp fits its reach a surprising amount of the time, it's a good looking movie. Really TheFrighteners belongs on the short list of films that really pushed computereffects forward.

As for the accusation that the film is watered down Jackson,well yes and no. Like Army Of Darkness the film does represent a consciencedecision to tone down the manic style of the director’s previous work, making more cartoonish and less abrasive for widerconsumption while still retaining his voice. And like Army Of Darkness I’dargue that the film is largely successful (if not quite as successful). The main difference is that of tone, asThe Frighteners is more or less a recognizable horror comedy that tries to findthe balance between the two, while Jackson’s early films did not so much try tofind a balance between a two as it through out great heaping gouts of bothsimultaneously on screen. Still there is plenty of Jackson’s signature puckishgore. In one ingenious conceit the spirits of the dead decay at the same rateas their corpses. The fresh ones look alright, but those who have been deadawhile tend to have pieces coming off of them. A spectral hound dog chaws onthe ghostly jawbone of one of the supporting characters. A character’s headexplodes (wouldn’t be a Peter Jackson movie without one of those) and isimmediately replaced by the head of his spirit blinking in astonishment. Thegory remains of one spirit are sprayed all over an unknowing living person’scar. In one innovative set piece a character runs through a decaying hospital,attempting to evade a killer as his perception shifts between her stalking himin the present and a vision of her former killing spree in the past.

The Frightener’s real problem as a film is a lack of focus.The film gets sidetracked by subplots and red herrings. It never reallyincorporates the con man story into the film and though there are a few niftybits of misdirection the central mystery of the film is never all thatmysterious. Still with expectations kept in check The Frighteners is a betterfilm than its reputation would suggest. It’s a funny stylish film thatshowcases a director doing his best to keep his voice intact with larger stakeson an unfamiliar playing field and for the most part succeeding.

The Modern American Horror Film As Junk Food: Part 8: From Dusk Until Dawn

2012-02-13T13:32:00.000-08:00

Today it’s hard not to view From Dusk Til Dawn as anythingother than a dry run for Grindhouse. Though From Dusk Till Dawn doesn’t invokethe spirit of the 70’s exploitation aesthetic with the same sense of allencompassing hunger that Grindhouse does; it does contain the same retro genrestyling, the same hairpin shifts in tone from slow burn to cartoonish mayhem(albeit in reverse order) and the same desire to shred the envelope of goodtaste. It even features much of the same cast of seventies Icons, though onlyFrom Dusk Til Dawn features The Hammer.

From Dusk Til Dawn was Tarantino’s first paid work, an unproduced television script, originallycommissioned by KNB, which Tarantino expanded to feature length inthat giddy Post Pulp Fiction time when the studio’s would have happilybankrolled Tarantino’s laundry lists.

Tarantino passed on directorial duties to his friend/soulmate Robert Rodriguez and it’s that authorial split that is behind a lot ofwhat’s interesting in the film and a lot of what plain doesn’t work. Ultimatelythe film ends up a classic case of too many cooks. Had Tarantino remained hedominant voice it’s easy to see the grittier, nastier film that may haveresulted. Had Rodriguez been given a freer hand to tone down the moral greys ofTarantino’s script and amp up the mayhem, it’s easy to envision the energeticpure splatterpunk that could have been. Instead the film does not so much splitthe difference as it does jerk between the tones with the grace of someone learningto drive stick for the first time.

Though similar on the surface there are some crucialdifferences in style between Tarantino and Rodriguez. Tarantino’s great gift asa director is his ability to simultaneously play things over the top and on the level. His characters may be larger than life, deal withemotions of operatic scale and occasionally speak with the high formalism of characters in aJidaigeki. But sooner or later they creep up on you and you find yourself invested in them as realpeople. Rodriguez doesn’t have that ability. His characters remain completelyiconic, totally comic book. His best films are drawn in big vivid strokes.Films like Sin City, Once Upon A Time In Mexico and Machete power past viewer’sdefenses with clever plot, stylish setpieces and quirky striking style, but most of all with big primitive gouts ofenergy. Basically no matter how simpatico the two might be philosophically,aesthetically they’re always going to be mismatched. It’s no accident thatGrindhouse worked so damn well in part because the two men were quarantinedfrom one another.

It’s not like From Dusk Till Dawn is Tarantino’sstrongest script either. It follows The Gecko Brothers, two bankrobbers who runacross the border, taking a family hostage before they end up straying into anest of vampires. The problems start on the US side of the border. After anintroductory shootout, that alternates between tense dialogue and over the topviolence in the only scene where the synthesis of styles really works; thefirst thing we see The Gecko Brothers do is rape and murder a helpless middleaged female hostage, when the saner Seth, (played by George Clooney still intelevision star mode), leaves the psychotic Ritchie, (played by Tarantino in dress up mode; a move that can only be described as “ill advised”) unattended with her.

The purpose of the scene is clear enough, to generatetension during the following hostage sequences with the knowledge that Ritchieis capable of anything. In execution however, much is left to be desired. It isthe first time we see a scene that demands Tarantino and only getsRodriguez. The problem is thateven in this jaded age there are some things that are just tough for anaudience to get over, and I like to think that the rape and murder of ahelpless woman is one of those things. While Tarantino’s treatment of suchviolence has never been glib or free of consequence, as his detractors haveoften claimed, the same cannot be said for Rodriguez. His handling makes theproblematic material all the worse. While it’s easy to see how Tarantino wouldhave mined the event and its aftermath for queasy tension, Rodriguez simplytreats it something to be gotten past. Just another bump on the road to El Ray.

Perhaps this accounts for the way the shift in tone doesn’tquite come off either. Rodriguez seems distinctly uncomfortable with the crimematerial. Eager to get to the more cartoonish antics waiting at The Titty Twister. Weare quickly introduced to our family, headed by Harvey Keitel, a preacher goingthrough a crisis of faith and the only actor who seems to think he’s in aTarantino movie. It also contains Juliette Lewis, who in the interest of fulldisclosure I react to in the way some folks react to dental drills. They’retaken hostage in a motel (shades of the scene, with its sun baked palette, can be seen in The Devil’sRejects) and then they’re making a run for the border in the family’s RV.During which we are treated to lengthy dialogue sequences between Tarantino andLewis. Suffice to say William Powell and Myrna Loy they are not.

The best scenes of the film follow the arrival of the crewat the Titty Twister, a garish temple of earthly delights that serves as thevampires nest and venus fly trap. Launched by a gleefully profane monologue byCheech Marin, it’s the film at it’s most confident funny and tense. We know thetrap is set we just don’t know when and how hard the hammer will come down.We’re introduced to the film’s supporting cast including Tom Savini, FredWilliamson, Danny Trejo and Salma Hayek as the vampire queen SantanicoPandemonium.

The problem is that when the vampire attack begins, it likemost everything else in the film, just doesn’t fit in. While there is initiallysome effort to make the vampiresintimidating during their intial feeding frenzy, this is almost immediatelydropped in favor of splatterpunk gore shots (One could argue that the film,debuting four years after DeadAlive, the last real classic of the subgenre, From Dusk Till Dawn is the last film to take place inthat subgenre) and gags that wouldn’t feel entirely out of place at Disney’sHaunted Mansion. I mean its fine,there are some nifty practical effects, the set is cool, therre are some funny moments and a few goodsplatter gags. But It’s tough tofeel any real fear for these vampires when they are mostly presented as thingsfor Fred Williamson to practice his Kung Fu on.

Which would be all well and good in any other film. But thefact is that its out of step withthe tone that the film set foritself. You can’t make a film out of human monsters and expect the audience tocare all that much when the latex ones come out. Instead of focusing on whatwas in front of me, my mind kept flashing back to that motel room in El Paso,and what the Gecko brothers left there.

From Dusk Til Dawn is ultimately the work of two talentedpeople canceling one another out. It’s a missed opportunity. However unlikeother missed opportunities when given a second chance to get it right thingspaid off in spades.

The Modern American Horror Film As Junk Food: Part 7: Event Horizen

2012-02-10T13:30:00.000-08:00

It is conventional wisdom that Sci Fi and Horror mix aboutas well as oil and water. Despite the tendancy to end up in space in theirlater and lesser installments that so many horror icon’s exhibit.

This is not without reason. Hard Science Fiction embracestechnology and the possible. It appeals to the rational. Horror trades in the supernatural, andmore importantly preys on the irrational part of the mind, the part that invents horrors for itself.That sees terrible things, not oppurtunity, in every shadow. Even pulpier, more basic Sci Fi has distinctly different impulse behindit. Pulp Sci Fi tells us toventure boldly into the dark void and conquer. Pulp horror tells us to neverunder any circumstances venture into the dark, lest we end up devoured. It’stelling that despite the fact that they share a large amount of the same peopleas fans, the number of writers who write both horror and sci fi is minimal, andthe number who do so well even less. (Those who do master both genres tend tobecome legends, such as Ray Bradbury).

There is of course Alien, the great exception that provesthe rule. Alien is basically a Lovecraft story and like Lovecraft it draws its horror from the knowledge of the immense size of space. The insignificance thatsuch spectacular darkness and distance instills in the human heart. The starkterror of encountering a mind that is truly unknowable. The helplessness ofbeing in a place where human beings were never meant to survive. Despite the usual failure to mine it there is plentyof material for horror in space.

Unfortunately Event Horizon evokes exactly none of thesefeelings. Instead thanks to some truly dire 90’s CGI, bad writing parexcellance and a po faced seriousness Event Horizon ends up being the mostlaughably bad collision between the two genres since the halcyon days of Mr.Edward D. Wood Jr.

Risible as it may be though, things did not start entirelywithout potential. Event Horizonbegins when an experimental space ship that disappeared seven years ago suddenly reappears at the edge of thegalaxy. The Scientists who designed it and a small rescue crew are sent out to investigate.Soon it is revealed that the ship didn’t merely disappear, but disappeared INTO HELLLLLLLL!!!!! (Why not it worked in The Black Hole). Things goawry.

Now snarky capitalizations aside, this is a decent enoughidea for a horror film. A neat little update of the old Mary Celeste routine.An opportunity to do a haunted house film in space, a place infinitely moreisolated than the old house at the end of the dark country road. It doesn't panout.

The Core of the problem, beyond the leaden direction fromPaul “No not that one put in derisive joke here” Anderson (I would be remiss if I didn’t mentionhe’s particularly bad at making horror films. As he is responsible for the most risible horror franchise of this decade with thewoeful nigh unkillable Resident Evil series), beyond the unimaginative visuals, and horrific abusesvisited upon logic and CGI alike, is the fact that it’s cast of characters is made up of some profoundly stupid people.Even if we grade them on the curve by the lax standards of horror film character intelligence, thesefolks are bag of hammers, box of rocks level dumb.

At one point the smokingest crew in space (seriously theseguys light up so much that for amoment I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the film that Nick Naylor pitchedin Thank You For Smoking. The crew of The Bebop would advise them to cut back.)are played the last recording sent from The Event Horizon, a recording that ismade of nothing but screams and shouts in Latin, and no one raises an eyebrow. These are the typesof people, who when they come across a big black orb of floatingliquid evil, hovering menacingly in the middle of an isolated chamber, in a deserted ship, that has beenmissing for nearly a decade, after making their way through severalcompartments that have literally been soaked with gore, follow their first impulse and shovetheir arm into the mass up to their elbow. And then act all surprised when thebig floating pile of evil (from here on referred to as TBFPOE) sucks them in.Alan Quatermass would shit.

It helps not at all that the film assumes you are as dumb asthe characters. At one point when a spaceship explodes a crew member is senthurtling out into the void, onlyto turn the piece of wreckage he’sriding on into a surfboard, and uses his oxygen supply to hang ten back to thehaunted ship. I’d say it’s just as dumb as it sounds, but really I haven’t madeit sound nearly dumb enough.

The crew is lead by Laurence Fishburne as the captain of thesalvage ship, spending every moment as though he were auditioning for Morpheusand Sam Neill as the scientist who designed the Event Horizon, and between thisand The Mouth Of Madness was having a rather bad decade for stumbling across rips in reality that led to underwhelming unfathomable terror. No points forguessing that one of these two respected thespians will spend the third actsans eyes jumping out of dark corners yelling “Boogity Boogity Boogity”. Not togive anything away but the shame on Neill’s face is occasionally paltable, you can almost hear him thinking“I was in the fucking Piano a couple of years ago.”

Anderson directs with his usual leaden hand. It takes apowerfully bad director to make an environment like an abandoned hell ship atthe edge of space devoid of tension. But Anderson manages it. The ship itselfis of an eerie enough design, but anytime any tension threatens to develop.Anderson defuses things with a clumsy jump scare, crude badly written exchangebetween crew members, or some eye scalding CGI put directly in the foreground.

Anyway eventually everybody wises up to the fact that theship of evil is fueled by Satan. Just when you think things might actually getstarted, the ship manifests the crew’s darkest and most clichéd secrets,everyone gets a chance to run after their hallucinations, AFTER THEY ALREADYKNOW THEY’RE HALLUCINATIONS, in order to make sure that nothing remotely likecommon sense enters the picture. A man walks around on CGI fire for awhile andit never once looks remotely scary.

I decided to watch Event Horizon because I was eager towrite about a film I had no preconceptions about for this project. I hadn’tseen the film and had heard it referred to as Anderson’s best, which I can onlyassume was meant with deep sarcasm that I did not pick up on. I hoped that Iwould see an ambitious, underrated film from a lazy decade. Instead I got aperfect reminder of all that is wrong with the era. If Dracula is an example ofan ambitious artist losing the reins on his film, than Event Horizondemonstrates the exact opposite problem, as well as showing why the former willalways be preferable. It’s a deeply lazy film, made at a time when apathy wasconsidered the norm both for the filmmakers and the audience.

The Modern American Horror Film As Junk Food: Part 6: Bram Stoker's Dracula

2012-02-03T16:22:00.001-08:00

I am always at a loss whether Francis Ford Coppola’s versionof Dracula is the best horror film I hate, or the worst horror film that Ilove.

A superlative visual experience, equally abstract andtheatrical, with some of the most striking imagery to be found in a horrorfilm, Bram Stoker's Dracula somehow also manages to serve as perhaps the gauchest movie evermade. It is a film that maddeningly manages to be equalparts inspiration and grave miscalculation. At times it seems like a film notmerely at odds with itself, but one that is actively trying to destroy itself.

Dracula was not Coppola’s first foray into horror (nor alas,his last). That would be the Corman produced Dementia 13, a Psycho rip off seton a family estate in Ireland, that involves a contested will and an axmurderer. Coppola was able to give the film a neat little gothic twist. Addinga sense of baroque decay to what was essentially just another AIP cheapie.Moments in the film, such as when the would be Janet Leigh of the picturediscovers an underwater shrine have an eerie resonance that belie Coppola’snatural talent and genuine affinity for the genre.

Dracula strives for a similar sense of gothic operatics.When it achieves this, the results are downright exhilarating. When it fallsshort- well everyone just looks more than a little bit silly.

It all starts off splendidly though. With a prologuecharting Dracula’s origin that neatly sums the movie up. With sumptuous careerbest cinematography by Michael Ballhaus the prologue is strikingly abstract, inpart designed like a shadow play with dark silhouettes pantomiming in front ofa blood red backdrop, before it explodes into full blown baroque operatics withDracula renouncing God and an entire church bleeding with the force of hisrage. Wojciech Kilar’s haunting score rises to a crescendo and we arethreatened with something not seen since Kubrick’s The Shining, a truly horror epic.

Truly one really cannot oversell how startling the visualstyle of the film is. Particularly the excellent Special Effects, made beforethe era of CGI inflicted apathy on the audience. All of the effects arepractical, most of them are done in camera, silent movie style. Not only doesthis approach showcase Coppola at his most appealingly movie geekish, it alsogives the supernatural in the film a skin crawlingly organic feel (Witness thebackwards contortionist crawl of two of Dracula’s brides) not often achievedin horror and not at all in this more fantastic subgenre. (The film evenincorporates the advent of silent cinema in its plot, in one of the bestsequences Oldman stalks Ryder through an early cinema. An old form ofimmortality bowing to a new one.)

It’s a daring opening that marries high style and highemotion, a horror film done with only slightly less formalism than Kabukipresented on the level of Shakespearian tragedy.

And then as if to let us know not to get our hopes up, afterthe credits we launch almost directly into one of Keanu Reeves many, manymonologues.

Now as someone who has on occasion unironically enjoyedKeanu Reeves (Seriously, A Scanner Darkly is a very underrated film) it give meno pleasure to say that it is difficult to accurately judge how bad he is inthe film. It makes the casting of Sofia Coppola as Mary Corleone look like astroke of genius. It makes Keanu’s work in Even Cowgirl’s Get The Blues looklike his turn in My Own Private Idaho. He is saddled with the worst EnglishAccent since Dick Van Dyke croaked out, “Gorry Jee Merry Poakins” and is forcedto spend half of the film in a white fright wig that makes him look as thoughhe has mistakenly wandered onto the set from an Andy Warhol Biopic. He alsoends up being responsible for what is undoubtedly the worst reaction shot ofall time in which when faced with the sight of Dracula feeding an infant to hisvampire brides gives an expression that does not communicate terror, revulsionand existential distress so much as it does a severe harshing of his mellow.

Indeed when Keanu arrives at Castle Dracula and begins hisscenes with Oldman (now sporting his iconic blood red robe and decrepit snakelike old age makeup) The viewer is presented with the uncanny sight of twoactors who genuinely seem as though they are acting in separate films.

It is a schism that does not heal for the rest of the film.On one side of it lies Oldman, Tom Waits as a hauntingly desperate Renfield andthe film’s effects, costumes and music. On the other side lies Keanu, Anthony Hopkins in what is perhaps the broadest hammiest performance of his career (let that seep in for a second) anequally listless Winona Ryder (who manages to deliver the line “Take me awayfrom all this death.” As though she’s asking her boyfriend to drive her awayfrom a Goth Nightclub) and some moments that can only be described as supremelysilly.

For example, what to make of the moment where Draculatransforms himself into an ape creature in order to ravish Sadie Frost? And no,don’t tell me it was a wolf. Later in the film he turns into a wolf. You knowwhat he looks like then? A Wolf. That’s an ape creature.

On the other hand one is given such sights as the remarkableshot where a malformed Dracula forces a crucifix to burst into flames, moans“Look at what your God has done to me.” Ducks into a pool of shadow and isinstantaneously transforms into a pile of ravenous rats. This is Coppola’s CatholicImagination come out full force. 2000 years of imagining the worst casescenario combining to make on indelible moment.

Indeed the film’s preoccupation with Catholicism andDracula’s rejection and reconciliation with The Church marks it as perhaps themost personal film of Coppola’s career on this side of One From The Heart.Coppola’s Dracula is essentially an old guy who gets mad at The CatholicChurch and then comes back to it in a time of need. Needless to say this is areinterpretation of the text.

Nor is it the only alteration. Despite it’s title BramStoker’s Dracula pays its source material no particular fidelity. Coppola’smain innovation is to take all of the novel’s sexual subtext (of which there isan ample amount) and make it text. This has decidedly mixed results. When itworks you have scenes such as the sequence where Reeves first encounters TheVampire Brides, which crosses the line from sexual fantasy to sexual nightmareso gradually that it’s tough to pinpoint just where it happens. When it doesn’tyou are presented with scenes such as the aforementioned encounter between Ms.Frost and the ape creature.

The film also takes the step of making Dracula the film’sromantic lead, a prospect that Stoker would have found fairly galling to saythe least. Though thanks to Oldman’s remarkable performance Dracula manages tobe romantic without being robbed of his danger. Oldman’s is a great Dracula,with neither Lee’s Aristocratic entitlement, nor Lugosi’s sinister otherness.Oldman’s is a creature of passions. Driven either by feral rage, deep hungerand intense anger. When he sucks blood he feasts on it, when he turns someoneits nothing less than an act of vengeance. With Oldman it is always personal.

Though not as ubiquitous an archetype then as it is today.Coppola was hardly the first to feature the vampire as a romantic figure. Thefilm came out during Anne Rice’s heyday. He’s not even the first to turnDracula into a romantic figure, that would be John Badham’s miscalculated 1979version of Dracula which cast Frank Langela as a brooding darkly handsomeDracula. (One could go so far as to claim that Bela Lugosi’s Dracula was in aromantic vein, though his portrayal feels much more in the line of “SinisterForeigner” than “Exotic Lover”). No version of Dracula has ever been soobsessed with sex and love, though somewhat perversely, rarely at the sametime.

At the end of the film the movie tries to live up to it’sauthored title, following Dracula back to his castle for the final pursuit (andlarger supporting cast entailed by this) where few adaptations dare to tread.Things climax in a sentimental ending that Coppola cheekily punctuates with themost explicit gore shot in the film.

I end my viewing puzzled as ever. Should Bram Stoker’sDracula ambition, scope and visual imagination and virtuosic stretches of filmmaking earn it a pass? Is it a silent masterpiece thatsimply has the misfortune to contain a soundtrack? Could some judicious editing of the sound track and some intertitles reveal it for the work of art it truly is? Is it a bravereinterpretation or just a bunch of hogwash which crassly tries to break therecord for number of breasts exposed in a period film? Is it a diamond that I’mbeing too hard on? Or is it simply a very bad movie that looks very very good?

I don’t know.Honestly I don’t. All I can say is that I keep trying to find out. I saw thefilm at fifteen and swore I would never watch it again. Since then I have seenit perhaps over a dozen times. Each time I’m left with the feeling of befuddledwonder at this, this thing. I don’t know what it is. I only know I cannot stopwatching it.

The Modern American Horror Movie As Junk Food: Part 5: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

2012-02-01T14:14:00.000-08:00

(Shirt available from the good folks at T-Shirt Bordello)

They live on fear. They thrive on it. I ain’t got no fearleft.

-Lefty Enright-

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may just be the finest horrorfilm ever made.

It may also be the most alchemic. The Texas ChainsawMassacre is less the product of Tobe Hooper and his cast and crew than it isthe insane environment that birthed it. It’s the product of an actress tied toa chair for almost a full twenty four hours in the plus one hundred degree heatof the Texas summer. Plates of rotting meat set in front of her the entire timeas she was taunted by a table full of gibbering maniacs who were also in theprocess of losing their minds. It’s the product of another actress nearly beinggarroted when the nylon support that was meant to support her over a meat hookslipped. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a dangerous movie to make and it feelslike a dangerous one to watch.

There is something about the movie that goes pastnightmarish. Something that feels genuinely deranged. For most of it’s runtimeit feels like a movie you shouldn’t be watching. Horribly organic.

Which has made the attempts to replicate it even morepathetic than usual. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the ultimate one off. Itcan’t be reproduced. And it certainly can’t be done with a hack like MarcNispel at the helm and with a cast of Teen Soap refugees running back to theirair conditioned trailers between every take.

Tobe Hooper hadthe right idea from the start. Though his career post the original TCM canpolitely be called checkered, when his turn came for a belated big budgetsecond at bat with the film that made his name, rather than try to reproducethe stark despairing terror of the first film he made a movie whosesensibilities were the complete inverse of the original. The Texas ChainsawMassacre 2 bears almost no resemblance to the grueling endurance test horror ofthe original. Instead it is an over the top splatstick comedy that was more inline with the playful works of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson than the original’snightmare fuel. It’s rather unthinkable that the original would employ OingoBoingo songs. Indeed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 almost feels more like asequel to Motel Hell.

It took about twenty years for the shock to wear off. TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was mostly reviled on its initial release and formany years after. But slowly but surely it’s built a cult of its own. It’s hardto see how it could be otherwise. Equal parts Grand Guignol, dark comedy,cartoon, and painting made in a mad house The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is oneof the most defiantly odd horror movies ever made.

(Maybe this should have tipped them off)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 starts with the blood thirstySawyers, thoroughly mainstreamed. Beyond the surface frission of watching theunpleasant post hippies of the original TCM get chopped up by a bunch of inbred country folk, The Texas ChainsawMassacre was not a film with much in the way of political subtext. It was a mythic horror film through andthrough, fairy tale right down to the unwary children approaching the darkhouse full of terrible secrets. Its sequel on the other breaks with the fairy tale style andbecomes a horror film in full social mode. The Sawyer’s have embraced Reagan Era Predatory Capitalismand they find they fit right in. No longer skulking in the shadows off of dusty rural highways, The Sawyers run a robust catering businessand a theme park and win blue ribbons at the county Chili Cookoff (“The secretis in the meat.”)

As the film opens (and keeping with the film’s habit ofreversing the original the beginning of the film is shot in an area of Texas asverdant as the original’s setting was bleak) one of the Sawyer’s murders iscaught on audiotape. Giving Lefty Enright, a Texas Ranger on a personalCrusade against the Sawyers, theconcrete proof he needs to trap them. To do so, he enlists the help of the DJwho made the recording, effectively making her bait. Hopper is deadpanperfection, his character perfectly straddling theline between comic and genuine cool. A half crazed avenger whoin one perfect moment makes a room full of serial killers shit their pants with a rendition of“Bringing In The Sheaves”.

He’s not the only new blood to benefit the film. The filmfeatures one of the most appealing female horror leads of the eighties,Caroline Williams as Stretch, the tenacious DJ (and Holly Hunter dead ringer)who is put through more travails than the average Lars Von Trier heroine. Horroricon Bill Mosely makes his debut, as the Vietnam Vet Choptop (part of the everextending Sawyer family tree). There is something about Mosely that isinstinctively repulsive. In his best roles there seems to be something wrongwith him on a level that is positively biological and Mosely makes the most ofthe repugnant and foul role, which occasionally calls on him to snack on theskin growing over the metal plate in his head. Also newly present is legendaryTexas character actor the late Lou Perryman.

It is Mosely and Perryman who provide the film with it’smost indelible sequence of horror. During the Sawyer’s assault on the radiostation where Perryman and Stretch work, Mosely corners Perryman and beats himto death with a hammer. The sequence is prolonged, pathetic and terrible. Justwhen you think it’ll end, it continues. Just when you think it’ll cut away, itdoesn’t. It illustrates the key difference between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre2 and the splatterpunk films of the 80’s. Despite some goofy moments, Hoopercannot help but give the violencereal consideration and weight.

Juxtaposing such sickening moments with the more cartoonish beats(the opening of the film features Leatherface using the corpse of the“Hitchhiker” in the first film as a puppet and the aforementioned orchestrationby Oingo Boingo), dare I say occasionally surrealistic (Lefty noticesblood trickling out of the mouthof a mural of Daniel Boone, hekicks it in and releases a torrent of intestines) moments of horror in thefilm, has struck some as distasteful. In many ways the murder of Perryman issimilar to the killing of Drew Barrymore in Scream, a scene that just doesn’tfit.

It’s a point I can see but there’s one crucial difference.By putting the killing in the middle of the film instead of the beginning,Hooper does not set the tone but unbalances it. The murder gives the film a queasy power and genuineunpredictability. Here is a film that is not going to play by any establishedrules. Not even the movie’s own. The film’s slipperyness has to be credited inpart to Kit Carson who wrote the film as his follow up to Paris Texas(!). Andalso displays a subversive sense of humor not evident in Hooper’s other work(“Sex?” the squeamish elder Sawyer remarks, while trying to give “The Talk” to his psychotic younger brother who wears human faces thatare not his own, “Well… nobody really knows what sex is. But the Saw is family!”)

The film never achieves such a glorious unbalanced senseagain. Save perhaps some Hopper’s wonderful scenes as Enright the only characterin the franchise to voluntarily participate in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (whenhe finally comes face to face with The Sawyer’s he gently admonishes “Boys younever should have been doing this.” As though he is a teacher who has caughtsome pupils with Firecrackers). The film is at its best when it fully embracesits Grand Guignol aspirations. Even in the least of his work (of which therehas been a fair amount) Hooper has a genuine talent for the details ofenvironment that make his houses of horror stick in the mind to an unsettlingdegree. Be it the Sawyer’s more humble abode in the original, the bland suburbanhaunted house in Poltergeist, or the decrepit Carnival in The Funhouse. Even areal stinker like Eaten Alive is partially redeemed by the fact that thebackwoods motel it’s red neck murderer lives in is truly skin crawlinglysleazy. He has a field day with The Sawyer’s new domain. Trying to imagine whata family full of warped serial killers would do with money. It’s as if thewarped “shrines” in the original were forcefed growth hormone and sprawled outinto polluted obscene visions. It, as well as the radio station where so muchof the film takes place feels like a vivid lived in environment.

The movie is at it’s least when it explicitly references thefirst film (as it does during the surprisingly weak and literal recreation of“The Grandpa Scene” one of the most gut wrenching intense moments of theoriginal). Yet even this rule proves slippery. The film after all ends with acallback to one of the most famousshots of the original, theinfamous “Dance Of Death” is again performed at the end of the film. This timein triumph rather than insanity and rage, by the film’s hero instead of thevillain. It’s a great moment ofhorror cinema, genuinely exhilarating as well a more or less perfectencapsulation of what the movie does. It takes one of the greatest moments inhorror and keenly subverts it.

...

Should you wish to you can hear me rant more on this subject on this podcast recorded with Jose Cruz.

The Modern American Horror Film As Junk Food: Part 4: Night Of The Creeps

2012-01-23T13:20:00.001-08:00

Fred Decker is one of the most influential horror filmmakersof the 80’s. You might find it strange to ascribe so much importance to adirector who has only made three films, only two of which were horror (Thoughit’s his Goonies meets Abbot And Costello Meets Frankenstein mash up, TheMonster Squad, that is remembered most fondly by horror fans, it’s his 50’sthrowback Zombie film, Night Of The Creeps that I like best.) But when you lookat the pastiche based films that have flourished over the last decade you cantrace them directly back to Decker as patient zero. You can draw a direct linefrom Dekker to the Adam Greens, Robert Rodriguez’s, Joe Lynchs, Ti Wests,Michael Dougherty’s, James Gunns and all the rest of the folks who’ve been partof the pastiche movement over the last fifteen years.

Now arguably, you could trace this movement back evenfurther. At least Joe Dante and his tributes to the films of his youth with thelike of Piranha, Hollywood Blvd and Matinee. However, though the subject ofDante’s and Dekker’s preoccupation are similar, if not identical, they bothlove 50’s sci fi schlock, Universal Monsters, and old character actors (DickMiller has a tendency to show up in both of their films) their approach ismarkedly different. The key difference between them is that Dante approachedthe films of his youth with the mindset of a mash up artist; taking as manydisparate elements as he could and stitching them together in ungainlyFrankenstein monsters all while kidding them mercilessly. There is a sense ofanarchy in Dante’s films; they feel like some of the Wildest Mad Magazineissues ever put together. Though his films are preoccupied with the past, thereis simply put not an old fashioned bone in Joe Dante’s body.

Dekker on the other hand, approaches the Grade B schlockthat acts as his source material with a kind of reverence, which resonates downto his latter day descendants. Dekker never kids his material or for thatmatter the audience, the way Dante does. For better or for worse the iconographyruns too deeply in him to approach it that way. Even when Dekker is winkinghe’s serious and the filmmakers responsible for this last generation oftributes have followed suite. They like Dekker, don’t merely want to use theold school, the way Dante does, they want to recreate it.

The approach is evident from the opening of Night Of TheCreeps on. After an unnecessary and distracting prologue set aboard an Alienspaceship, we beam down to Earth to a nineteen fifties lover lane shot in blackand white that looks like its straight out of an early AIP film. All that’smissing is Nick Adams with a backwards baseball cap and Elsha Cooke Jr. linedup to get snacked on first. Somewhere, one feels, a Theremin should be playing.

Crucially though, rather than commenting on the chintzinessof the B-movie aesthetic the way say Larry Blamaire did with The Lost Skeletonsof Cadavera films, Dekker plays things entirely straight. Indeed there’s notreally commentary on the genre of any kind present in Night Of The Creeps. Justthe beats of a 50’s style “It Came From Space To Attack The Dormitory”transposed to the (then) modern era. It’s an odd fact that for a man whosemaking a movie that is based entirely on other movies Dekker seems not to havea meta bone in his body. He just likes old fashioned stuff.

He likes new fashioned stuff to. Night Of The Creeps becamea favorite among the fans of the splatter punk 80’s films (typified by theircartoonish aesthetic, dark sense of humor and extreme gore) like Evil Dead 2,Bad Taste and Return Of The Living Dead (a film which shares Creeps old meetsnew aesthetic, but given the amount of influence Night Of Living Dead has hadon the modern era has significantly less impact in that regard). While Night OfThe Creeps is a somewhat gentler film than any of the more punkish anarchicsplatter films, it doesn’t exactly skimp on the gore. It even manages to beatPeter Jackson to the punch with a zombie vs. Lawnmower gag that predates DeadAlive by six years.

Night Of The Creeps begins in the fifties, where as so oftenhappened in that era, something crashed into Earth and caused all manner ofanti social behavior. In this case it’s a nasty little parasite that causesacute zombification in those it infects, living or dead (In a clever and nastylittle twist on Zombie convention shooting them in the head is only half thebattle, the little bastard parasites are still alive and squirming and caneasily find another host). The authorities manage to get the infected creatureon ice, before making the questionable decision to transport it to a collegescience department. Where thirty years later two hapless nerds resurrect itwhile trying to pledge to a fraternity (as with the slashers the basic plot isjust another example of how closely the genre’s of B-Horror and B-Comedy wererelated in the era.) Problems ensue. But luckily there’s Tom Atkins(transferring over from The Fog) on the case as the hard bitten cop, whoencountered the creatures on that long ago night. Atkins was one of the lastgreat B Movie actors, as opposed to the Bruce Campbell school of “B-Movie”“Actors” and Creeps gives him his best role. Eventually the film builds to a suitably bloody zombie siegeof a Sorority House, in which many an exploding head and flamethrower areencountered.

Once again the thing that sets apart Night Of The Creeps isthe fact that the film, despite being about as feather light as horror filmsget, plays everything more or less straight. It’s not that the film is devoidof humor or can completely avoid the whiff of camp; Atkin’s dead panperformance has just the right amount of self aware archness and alone providesenough one liners for an entire franchise (“The good news it that you’re datesare here. The bad news is they’re dead.”) and as mentioned before there’splenty of gore shots and splatstick to go around. But neither camp nor mayhemis the film’s end. When the characters are confronted by the undead horror,they freak out, when their friend’s die, they’re actually sad. And Dekkerexpects you to be sad as well. Dekker God bless him, is working from theassumption that you did not buy your ticket in order to watch these people diebut to watch them survive. Whatcan I say; he is after all drawing on a more innocent time here. He’s also afairly capable director in other areas, able to stage a genuinely tense scaresequence equally well as a blood splattered punch line. He has a fair hand withhis cast as well and the lead’s evolution from nebbish to worthwhile personmakes for a sympathetic and believable through line. In short, Dekker possessesnot merely a love for the genre but a real knack for it as well. It’s a realshame that the disastrous Robocop 3 landed Dekker a permanent stay indirector’s jail. He had real potential and it’s a pity that his career was jutshort.

Unlike so many of his predecessors in the pastiche movement,the result of the Dekker’s tribute actually resembles its source. Dekker setout to make movie based on the fun B-Horror of his youth and he ended up withsomething that actually is a fun B-Horror film. Whodathunk? Though Dekker’scinematic progeny may be questionable, it’s tough to hold that against him. Hislove for old fashioned horror, may have metastasized (or is thatmeta-metastasized), but if his predecessors approached their genre basedobsessions with as much care and ambition as Dekker did, it may not have.

The Modern American Horror Film As Junk Food: Part 2 &3: The Burning and Friday The 13th Part 2

2012-01-21T12:43:00.000-08:00

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There is something of a generational divide when it comes toslasher movies. With genre scholar elder statesmen like Tim Lucas, Kim Newmanand yes Stephen King all viewing the subgenre as somewhere beneath contemptwhile most genre fans in their 30’s or under (Those who watched the films intheater at an impressionable age, or at the very least grew up staring at thebox art in video stores in other words) tend to view the subgenre with at thevery least some affection.

Of course it’s not exactly hard to see why the subgenre isso disliked. Only slightly less ruthlessly pattern driven than Noh Drama theslasher is horror at its most simple minded, predictable, derivative andunimaginative. It is the horror movie equivalent of a Big Mac, Fries and a Cokeand the nutritionists in this field are no less appalled by it than their realworld corollaries.

And yes, just as a diet of nothing but Big Macs could bepotentially lethal and at the ver least would lead to obesity. A dietconsisting of nothing but slashers would lead to an imagination that would beat the very least flabby. However, just as McDonald’s creates food that ticklesthe salt and fat pleasure sensors in the brain directly there is somethingindisputably fun about the slasher. As a diet it would be potentiallydisastrous. As an indulgence it is undeniably satisfying.

If I had to choose a pair of films to sum up the subgenreand its strange appeal it would be Friday The 13^th Part 2 and TheBurning (In my original outline I was going to tackle these as two separatesubchapters. But lets face it folks I’m going to be covering an awful lot ofthe same ground here.)

Friday The 13^th is of course synonymous with theslasher genre. The franchise acted as a virtual license for Paramount to printmoney in its heyday and gave the genre a big Hockey Mask Clad Face for thecritics and parents groups to point at. The Burning is a lesser known filmoutside of the genre. But has it’s own odd place in cinema history for beingthe first movie that the Brothers Weinstein produced (though not the first theydistributed) and serves as a fine example of their preternatural ability tomercilessly identify and assimilate trends.

The Burning contains everything you think of when you thinkof a slasher. First class Savini grue, celebrities before they were famous (youget a twofer with Holly Hunter and Jason Alexander) summer camps, old legendstold round the campfire, and copious amounts of wafting pot smoke and nudity.It’s as if the Weinsteins (Harvey has story credit, Bob shares a screenwritingone) scripted with a check list in one hand and a spreadsheet in the other.

Friday The 13^th Part 2 gets the nod over theoriginal entry given that not only is it in itself a perfect distillation ofthe tropes of the genre, but also serves as a reminder that sequels are just as much a part ofthe genre’s conventions as buxom young camp counselors who run from Machetewielding maniacs (an ample number of which also appear in Friday The 13^thPart 2.)

Friday The 13^th Part 2 (and Part 3 a personal favoritebad movie) also have the distinct advantage of being directed by the notuntalented Steve Miner. Though Cunningham who directed the original andproduced the early films of Wes Craven, undoubtedly established, or at leastcodified most of the tropes of the genre he was an awful clumsy filmmaker. It’s not so much that the Miner films are thatmuch better than Cunningham’s (Part 2 is Part 3 isn’t) it’s just that they act as a muchmore efficient delivery system for the base pleasures of the genre.

Miner does know how to generate a fair amount of eerie atmosphere from hisisolated wooded setting and empty pre season summer camp and Jason’s cabin andthe shrine therein where the finale takes place is another suitably creepysetting. He also certainly knows how to stage a jump scare for maximum impactand deliver the big unsavory moments the genre demands (The highlight in thisentry being the wheelchair bound counselor who gets a machete to the face andthen is propelled down a flight of stairs. Surely one of the most singularlytasteless moments in a singularly tasteless subgenre.) Mostly Miner’s skilllies in relentlessly moving the movie forward. Barely hitting eighty minutes ifone excludes the five minute prologue made of footage from the first movie,Friday The 13^th Part 2 is relentless as a goods delivery system.

The film begins with Jason killing off the last survivor ofthe first film, a common enough move now, given that horror sequels (with theexception of the Saw franchise which perversely embraces it) usually try to divest themselves of excesscontinuity as quickly as possible, but a real shocker then. The killer is ofcourse Jason Voorhes (ditching the nominal whodunit structure is just one ofthe ways that the film diverges from it’s predecessor and thus acts as a morerepresentative template for the slasher film.) Making his first real appearancein the franchise he would become synonymous with.

Voorhes of course is arguably the horror icon of the eighties. A hockey maskclad undead killing machine of varying hulking sizes. If Michael Myers was theultimate random killer than Jason Voorhees is the ultimate impersonal one.Voorhes is the ultimate blank. A literal killing machine. Let’s just go aheadand drop the nominal conceit that he’s doing these killings as some kind ofrevenge. Even at this rather early point in the series his victims are so farremoved from either the killers of himself or the killers of his mother thatit’s downright absurd. He doesn’t display any satisfaction, or even rage (untilKane Hodder who added a distinct streak of malevolence during his run) as a killer. It’s just a response for him, as automatic andunthinking as a stop light.

Of course this Jason is a slightly different incarnationthan the one usually thought of. Bag over his head in lieu of his trademarkhockey mask (which he would pick up in the next installment,) Jason bares acloser resemblance to the killer backwoodsman trope than his own brand ofmayhem. He’s slightly more in touch with the world (in one of the film’s mosttelling details, he pauses after killing a victim to turn off a stovetop when atea kettle begins to whistle. Normal Jason wouldn’t have noticed).

After its opening Friday The 13^thPart 2 puts itselfthrough the paces fairly quickly, differentiated mostly by a surprisinglylikable and resourceful final girl, played by Amy Steele (who dodgingconvention actually looks an acts like a full grown woman rather than avirginal waif) and a few moments of surprisingly effective gothic horror inbetween the gore shots.

The Burning on the other hand just takes every slasher tropeand turns it up to eleven. It's a film I have a fair amount of affection for. The film, like the original Friday The 13^thand approximately 80% of other slashers, opens on a prologue set in the pastthat sets the whole thing in motion. In this case a bunch of campers havedecided to play a prank on the camp’s mean old maintenance man. By putting aflaming decomposing skull on his bed side table. Alas such an innocent prank ofgrave robbing, breaking and entering and arson goes awry! The unluckymaintenance man sleeps with cans of gasoline at the foot of his bed. Not only that he has a huge pile of woodchips besidehis door, which he stops, drops and rolls in. Mere words cannot describe thebeautiful absurdity of this scene.

Ten years later and the unfortunate groundskeeper is beingwheeled out of the hospital, a black hulking mass that covers the right half ofthe frame in a shot over which it feels as though the Flash Gordon theme songshould be playing. He’s headed towards the summer camp, and revenge (once againgiven the fact that almost everyone involved in his burning is no longer atsaid camp, this seems a bit odd. Many slashers it seems could use a primerabout the concept of revenge.)

As mentioned before The Burning is a film that follows thetropes of it’s genre so relentlessly that there is little to differentiate itapart from how unremittingly stock it really is. Only the far above average TomSavini effects and make up and the fact that it is one of the few slasher filmsto focus on a Final Guy as opposed to a Final Girl set it apart.

But at the same time this highlights part of the reason thatthe modern day remakes have failed so dismally at capturing the tone and appealof these older films. There is an odd feeling of, well let’s just say it,innocence to the slasher films. Now I’m not talking about comparing theviolence in a Friday The 13^th to that of a Hostel or a Saw. I’mtalking about every other element in the film.

If you were to cut out the killing scenes in any givenFriday The 13^th film, you would be left with a film that resembledone of the many Meatballs ripoffs that served alongside the slasher film asprogrammer fodder in the eighties. Albeit one in which the cast grewmysteriously smaller. Still take out the violence and you have films that arebasically about a bunch of kids smoking pot and having sex. In other words,you’re left with a film about a group of friends having a good time.

Contrast that with say The Friday The 13^thremake, where everything from the visual look of the film to the cast ofcretinous characters who inhabit it, feels down right purposefully hateful.Even if you were to cut out the murder scenes the film would still be about abunch of obnoxious people getting together and having a bad time.

It’s not as though these early crop of slasher films werethese intimate character studies or particularly deep experience. But at thevery least they seem as if they were made by people who had the awareness thatpeople who paid money to go see a movie might want to enjoy the movie they wentto see, rather than dealing with a purposefully unpleasant experience. Andwhile yes arguably the spectacle of watching a dozen people or so gettingsliced up over the course of an hour and half shouldn’t be fun, if you’retelling me that Marc Nipsel makes his film dour and repulsive out of a feelingof moral seriousness I’ll laugh in your face. True these aren’t works ofserious horror, but then again neither are their remakes. And If your junkfooddoesn’t taste good than what is the damn point?

The Modern American Horror Movie As Junk Food: Part 1: The Fog

2012-01-19T11:43:00.000-08:00

The true horror film aficionado is like a prospector withhis panning equipment or his wash-wheel, spending long periods going patientlythrough common dirt, looking for the bright blink of gold dust or possibly evena small nugget or two. Such a working miner is not looking for the big strike,which may come tomorrow or the day after or never; he has put those illusionsbehind him. He’s only looking for a livin’ wage, something to keep him going awhile longer.

-Stephen King-

The grotesque is the natural expression of joy…When realhuman beings have real delights they tend to express them entirely ingrotesques- I might almost say entirely in Goblins.

-GK Chesterton-

The fact is that watching horror films is something that people expect you to be embarrassed about, it’s seen as adolescent and immature at best, down right sociopathic at worst. I don’t care who you are or what you do, if you’re a serious horror fan, you’ve been asked at some time in your life or another, by a girlfriend, boyfriend, parent, sibling, friend, or what have you, “Why? Why is it that you’re entertained by seeing people in terror, seeing people killed, seeing the worst that a filmmaker can dream up? What the hell is it that draws you to this?” And if you’re like me and you’re honest you’ve probably been at least a little stumped.

The film’s discussed in the previous chapter are allexamples of what I would term serious horror. They are movies that use fear andterror as an artistic tool. These are films that even the most right thinkingindividual can find it within themselves to approve of. They are movies inshort to whose artistic merit I would cheerfully swear to in any open court inthe country.

But we know that’s only half the story, don’t we my faithfulpartner? There are horror filmswhich cheerfully make horror the end in and of itself. Horror films whereartistic merit is the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. These are the filmsthat appeal directly to the wrong thinking individual. Horror movies that arein other words pure junk food.

And God we love ‘em don’t we?

Of course the question "Why do you like horror films?" is an unfair. You might as well say why do you like the color blue? Because it appeals to me. Why does it appeal to you? Who knows? I don’t think any of usreally know where our tastes come from. Why certain things strike cords withinus. Of course no one asks such things about our nice socially expectabletastes. Nobody turns to me in the middle of a conversation and asks me with anair of J’Accuse and demands to know why I prefer Chopin to Mahler. Or why Ilike the poems of Czelaw Milosz. Nobody says “How dare you edify your pervertedsensibilities with David Mitchell and Dennis Lehane!” I don’t catch peopleglaring at me when I wear a Ramones shirt the same way I sometimes do when I go out inone of my horror shirts.

But this is just dismissing the question rather thanaddressing it. Well if you stripaway all the lofty ideas and arguments you are left with the fact that I doubtthat even the most severe, straightlaced puritan would deny that under theright circumstances the sensation of being frightened is fun. Horror is fun. Being scared and out ofcontrol is a good time.

Of course smoking crack might also be fun but that doesn’tmean it isn’t bad for you. But I don’t think that horror is harmful in and ofitself. I think the genuine horror hound is wound a bit tighter than theaverage person. The horror fan is at his essence a man or woman who cannot stophis brain from saying “If…” Horror gives a release valve to that irrationality.Sometimes that release must be a serious attempt to engage in the fears thathave been brewing beneath the surface. When that happens you get a film likeone of the ones we discussed in the last chapter. But sometimes, that releasemust be a little wilder, a little crazier. Sometimes as Chesterton notes inanother essay, (“There is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin and bearit. The objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin.”) thegrotesque must wear the gargoyle’s grin. Marde Gras and Halloween and theaforementioned Michael Myersplushy. We take the face of what frightens us and we make it our own. And if wedo not smile as we do it, we are missing something crucial.

(There is another, more minor, reason to watch said horrorfilms. Simply because they are useful. A cinephile may not have to watch thefilms of Michael Bay to understand the films of Dreyer, but to the horror fan Ido believe that it is helpful for thehorror fan to understand what say Sean Cunningham does wrong in order to fullyappriciate what Bryan Bertano does right. Or as King puts it “For the horrorfan, films such as Exorcist II form the setting for the occasional brightgemstone that is discovered in the darkness of a sleazy second run moviehouse….You don’t appreciate cream unless you’ve drunk a lot of milk and maybeyou don’t appreciate milk until you’ve drunk some that’s gone sour.)

I chose The Fog to kick off this chapter because no filmbetter exemplifies what I desire from “fun horror”. Here my fellow horror fansmight wonder if I’ve lost my mind. Few would call The Fog Carpenter’s besthorror movie (nor would I). Most wouldn’t put it in the top five. Out of allthe stone cold classics that Carpenter has delivered to the genre, Halloween,The Thing or even Prince Of Darkness, why would I choose this ramshackledshaggy dog of a movie? Though the film contains many of Carpenter’s trademarks,working class asskickers facing upto a threat larger than they are, a shapeless ambigious force of evil, darksecrets of the upper class, and of course the trademark pounding synth score,it’s also a movie that was extensively reshot and shows it. A film whose owninternal cohesion is at best lax and only just hangs together as a coherentstory.

All true but I maintain that there is something wonderfulabout The Fog all the same. It’s an unabashed yarn. A film that containseverything I find pleasurable about the horror genre. An M.R. James like storyof excessive supernatural vengeance. The Fog shows what happens when a crew ofleprous ghost pirates come back for vengeance on the town that sent them totheir waterlogged grave on the hundredth anniversary of their death. If yourspine didn’t get a little tingle of joy at that description, there’s somethingwrong with your pulp receptors friend.

The Fog opens with an old man telling a campfire ghost storyto an audience of rapt children on a campout. As the man’s husky voice tellsthe story of the doomed ship that sank over on those yonder rocks, at this verybeach, a hundred years ago come this very night Carpenter cuts to raptexpressions of the children’s fire lit faces, their looks ranging from fear, toawe, to that elusive pleasure center in between. These ghost pirates, the oldfisherman implies in order to further traumatize the children, will almostsurely return to murder the campers in their sleeping bags before the night isthrough, sleep tight. Looking at the wide eyes of the shivering boy scouts, Ican’t help but give a smile of recognition. It’s the perfect expression for theexact emotion I seek in this type of horror. It’s the look on the inside of thehorror fan as he convinces himself that just this once, the monster will be as scaryas it seems on the poster, just this once the film will be as frightening asthe studio hype and parents groups claim. It’s a bold statement of purpose, Carpenter both defines the tone of thefilm from the get go and lets you know exactly what kind of mindset you have tobe for it to work. To my mind he achieves it. But it’s the pleasure ofstorytelling, that the scene captures and which the rest of the film contains, despiteits troubled shoot, that truly endear it and Carpenter to me.

As the hundredth anniversary of Antonio Bay dawns we meetour lead characters (who never quite seem as though they’re hanging out in thesame movie) a fine collection of B movie icons, including Adrienne Barbeau asthe operator of the town’s radio station, the great Tom Atkins, Jamie Lee Curtisas a resident of Antonio Bay and the drifter he picks up, and Janet Leigh andHal Halbrook batting clean up as the town’s elders who discover through an olddiary the complacency of their ancestors in the death of the leprous ghostpirates. As the supernatural ongoings ratchet up, the three groupsindependently uncover the dark secrets of Antonio Bay, just in time to face thefull brunt of ghostly revenge as the dense fog rolls in.

Things start off slowly, a thick fog rolls into the towncausing electronics to malfunction, cars to start, glass to shatter and allother manner of inconvenient things to happen. A child finds a gold doubloonthat turns into an old piece of wood bearing the lost ship’s name, before itbegins to leak water, a boat out late in the harbor is caught in the fog andthe crew meets its fate at the end of some meat hooks. Later one of the victimsis brought into the morgue and the pathologist solemnly informs our charactersthat the body seems like its been underwater for weeks (DUNDUHDUHDUNNNN!!!!)Night falls again and a more aggressive series of attacks begins. The film cutsbetween Barbeau, whose radio station is perched atop a lighthouse thatoverlooks both the bay and the town, tries to warn the people of the danger.Even as the fog rolls in and she finds herself stuck in one of Carpenter’ssiege films, (with Carpenter delivering some of the tensest sequences in thefilm as Barbeau comes under attack first in and then atop the lighthouse) andthe team of Atkins and Curtis as they attempt to escape the presence swarmingthrough the town.

Tonally The Fog strikes a midpoint between the atmosphereheavy, surrealist subgenre of horror films from the seventies, like Lets ScareJessica To Death and The MessiahOf Evil and the more sensationalistic brand of horror that the new decade wouldprovide. Just because the film deals in agreeable haunted house scares does notmean that it’s incapable of some truly eerie moments. Carpenter’s Fog is atruly ominous presence as are the muted lights of his characters strugglingthrough it (I can’t help but wonder if the film was another stylistic influenceon Alan Wake); even without the presence of ghost pirates it creates athreatening atmosphere. Though there are a few gore shots Carpenter scores hisbest hits off the power of suggestion. He never reveals the true number ornature of his ghost pirates. There could be anything lurking in that Fog.Anything.

Carpenter matches his disquieting mood with a score that may be pound forpound the best in his career. It’strademark rhythmic dissonant score that unravels into atonal bleats as thesupernatural pressure mounts. At one climatic moment, when the group finds themselvesfaced with an impenetrable wall of the fog, the score literally falls apartinto Carpenter just bashing on the key board. It’s down right avant garde. Thefilm also makes excellent use of it’s Northern California location, anunderused environment in film. The pastoral green hills that roll directly downto the shore are a completely different location from the sandy beaches ofSouthern California. Less touristy, more European. It looks beautiful yes, butas one gazes at the Ocean it leads to one can easily imagine it holdingsecrets.

The problem with The Fog and what it keeps it firmly on theB-tier of Carpenter’s work is that its internal logic doesn’t quite manage tohang together. The film was extensively reshot and sometimes does seem like twofilms, or at least the mythos of two films, stapled together. Sometimes thevictims of the ghost pirates rise from the dead to wreck their own brand ofhavoc, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the ghosts are after the descendants ofthe six people who betrayed them; sometimes they’ll go after whoever happens tobe around. It might seem silly to quibble about this kind of thing, but theinconsistencies do add up. I mentioned James earlier and if there was one thinghe was damn sure of it was that his spirits played by the rules.

Add up yes, but ultimately they don’t detract. In fact ifanything they add to the feeling of the film being a story told by campfirelight, perhaps by a teller whose mind has begun to wander a bit as he entersthe final stretch. Taken on its own terms The Fog is an entertaining, charmingmovie. The only way it could work better would be if John Carpenter came intoyour house and shone a flashlight under his face every time you popped in theDVD. And I’m sure that was only an oversight.

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text: Part 15: The Strangers

2012-01-18T14:36:00.000-08:00

When we have been talking about the horror films in theprevious chapter I have taken a little time to note whether the film we werediscussing was a film that preyed on social anxieties, or one that tapped intodeeper more mythic fears. For 99% of horror films that classification issufficient.

But there is a third kind of horror film. The rarest of therare, a kind of film that strikes us more deeply than mere subtext, even deeper than the fairy tale. The type of horror for which no metaphor will suffice.

This is the kind of horror that drives deeply into ourcollective memories and taps into our most primal survival based fears thatlive like unexorcisable ghosts all the way down at the core of our lizardbrain. The fear of being hunted. The fear of being eaten. The fear of our matesbeing taken. The fear of having our homes invaded. When these rare films thatcircumnavigate our cortex and strike right at the lizard jelly of our brainscome, they tend to create a feeling more akin to revulsion than fear.

The Strangers is one of those movies.

In many ways The Strangers is the film that the opening ofScream promised all those years before. A genre film played with a heretoforeunseen level of reality. The Strangers opens with at upper class houses seenfrom the point of view of a passing truck window (David Fincher would use asimilar shot to open Zodiac). The houses are isolated, but not remote.Separated from each other by wide yards and deeply wooded lots. Already afeeling of horrible randomness is established, one might as well hear “EenyMeeny Miney Moe” on the soundtrack.

From there we cut to later in the day, two children walkthrough the bloody disquieting aftermath of what’s clearly been a night ofmayhem. This creates a feeling of fatalism, so closely linked to the random; weknow the story will not have an happy ending. But just as importantly itcreates a feeling of specificity. This could have happened anywhere, but it didhappen here.

Finally we flashback to some hours before before. Ti Westhas spoken about how too many horror characters appear to be equipped to be ina horror film. Rarely have there been protagonists more ill equipped to dealwith horror than these two. . Dressed in formal wear, speaking in hushed tonestrying to dance around a new wound (she has just turned down his proposal ofmarriage) the two know each other intimately but not well. The first halfhour of the film could be a JohnCassevettes or Richard Linklater film. One can easily imagine the charactersdealing with their new emotional lacerations as they move around the house thathe has prepared for a celebration as the morning of their first day apartslowly dawns. This is key, if West has claimed that the characters of horrorare all too often prepared for horror, I would go one step further and arguethat horror films are all too often prepared for horror. They tip their handfrom the beginning. It is key to the film’s effectiveness that the horror inThe Strangers is an intrusion.

Stephen King put it another way when he was talking aboutJack Finney’s novel, The Body Snatchers, “I have used the phrase “off-key not”earlier on, and that is Finney’s actual method in The Body Snatchers, I think;one off-key note, then two, then a ripple, then a run of them. Finally thejagged, discordant music of horror overwhelms the melody entirely. But Finneyunderstands that there is no horror without beauty; no discord without a priorsense of melody; no nasty without nice.” Bertano is one of the few modernhorror directors who bothers to establish the melody. Which is first interrupted by a knock on the door as the twoare about to engage in some break up sex. A young girl, seen only dimly asks amumbled question and then departs. It’s the first discordant note soon to bejoined by many others. The attack begins subtly as an accumulation of wrong details (or discordant notes) a fire alarm moved, a door opened, a phone missing. Until finally they increase in number and intensity until the film escalates into a pounding Bartoklike assault. (Interestingly enough The Strangers is the rare horror movie thatrelies on incidental music instead of a score. The first song heard is a JoannaNewsom song. Literally a discordant note. As Tyler realizes she’s not alone forthe first time the record begins to skip adding even more disharmony.) The filmproceeds more or less in real time, and the sheer speed of the collapse is jawdropping.

The first of The Strangers is seen shortly after. The woman has been left alone while herboyfriend runs to grab her cigarettes. The girl pounds on the door again andasking the same question. Unsettled but not yet frightened Tyler retreats tothe kitchen. Behind her is aperfect column of negative space, a discernable absence after a few moments,the lead stranger identified only as “The Man In The Mask” steps in. It’s oneof the most perfect shots I know of in horror.

The way The Strangers are shot has its own unique signature.The masks the characters wear, a doll’s face a cartoon character, and what islittle more than a pillow case slightly darkened around the mouth and eyeholes, rival Michael Myers for minimalism. Though we do get a fair amount ofclose ups (and Bertano isn’t above giving us a quick jump scare with one oftheir faces suddenly looming on screen) They are much more often seen from adistance. Or not seen at all, just places of negative space where they easilycould appear as they did at the beginning. Even when The Strangers are in framethey are often out of focus. They are kept both literally and figurativelyindistinct, allowing us to project all kinds of things onto them.

The film continues switching between elegance and brutality.There are no meaningless kills in The Strangers. No groundskeeper or shop clerkto rack up the body count (the only other person to die in the film is adistinct subversion of that trope). Thus the lives at stake actually meansomething and the investment the audience has is much higher. Though we knowthe characters doom is a foregone conclusion, they crucially do not. Once theyunderstand the nature of the attack they make smart decisions, arm themselvesstick together. After all it’s not even as though they are outnumbered overmuch. Really it is only one ghastly piece of bad luck that keeps their plan ofsurvival from working.

It doesn’t work of course. We already knew that. What wedidn’t know was how it would end. Not with our heroes taken out in the heat ofthe moment, attempting to evade pursuit. But killed while tied to a chairhelpless and hopeless. Fully conscience of what is about to happen. Cruciallythis sequence takes place in daylight, and before they are murdered thestrangers remove their masks.

This two beat process in which our heroes are dispatchedbrings a clarity to the genre. It’s not a gag, it’s not a kill, it’s a murderperpetrated on two helpless people for no reason at all. When The Strangerstake off the masks there is nothing outwardly horrifying underneath. Nowaterlogged undead face. No John Doe Sermonizing. No Hannibal Lecterphilosophizing. No ghosts drive them. No demons possess them. They are onlyhuman. And that’s true horror.

Bryan Bertano has yet to make a film after The Strangers. Afair amount of his films, including a sequel to The Strangers (a prospect I’mambivalent about but open to) and a film that was supposed to be executive produced by SamRaimi, have wound up in development hell. And though a few of his screenplayshave sold, including a found footage film at Universal and a non horror filmcalled Plastic Jesus, which was directed by Erica Dunton. There are currentlyno films in production that would get Bertano back behind the camera.

If that never happens, then The Strangers will stand as oneof cinema’s greatest one offs. But I can only hope it doesn’t. Frankly it wouldbe a crime. I consider The Strangers to be the finest horror film that thedecade produced. And of all the films we’ve discussed I would only rank The Flyand The Blair Witch Project above it. It is a horror film that strikes directlyat the heart, which is exactly where the essence of horror lives.

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text: Part 14: House Of The Devil

2012-01-17T11:19:00.000-08:00

We continue along the casual chain of horror in the lastdecade with the pastiche movement. Just as the PG-13 horror boom caused theR-Rated push back which led to the remake glut, the remake glut flowedseamlessly into the pastiche movement, the perfect way to cap our singularlyself reflexive decade.

If as most horror fans agree, the various remakes thatclogged so many theaters for so much of the decade missed the point of themovies they were rehashing and failed to recapture their appeal, than thenatural counter is a series of films that are made to specifically try andcapture said appeal. Film’s dedicated to what was loved about those films. ThePastiche films were (and are) conscience throwbacks to earlier eras of horrorfilmmaking, made for no other reason than to capture a particular era’s orsubgenre’s flavor.

As varied a group of filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, RobertRodriguez, Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Larry Blamaire, Rob Zombie, Helene Cattet,Bruno Forzani, Fred Dekker, Scott Glosserman, Eli Roth, Fred Dekker and JasonEisener. You can even include Martin Scorsese in this mix if you consider, as Ido, Shutter Island to be his tribute to Val Lewton.

These filmmakers have all created throwbacks with varyingdegrees of charm. For every film like Grindhouse, Tarantino’s and Rodriguez’sjoyful ode to trash cinema. There’s a film like Adam Green’s Hatchet, which despiteit’s tagline “Old School American Horror” featured nothing particularly oldschool, American, or horrific. It played less like an 80’s slasher movie andmore like a frenzied description of one that Adam Green heard on the schoolyardthe day after a friend snuck a look at HBO. One that presumably went a littlesomething like, "Boobsngorengorenboobnmostersngorenboobsnboobs” Alas even sucha rich feast as this can grow tiresome when repeated ad nausem for 90 minutes.All too many of the throwback films feel like being expected to eat a 9 coursemeal composed entirely of sugar breakfast cereals. (In all fairness to Green hehas made some effective films outside of the throwback school. And Hatchet 2displayed considerably better command of its own joke.)

Though one can trace the pastiche movement back to the mid90’s with Robert Rodriguez’s original grindhouse throwback From Dusk Til Dawn,(as well as The Faculty, his underrated tribute to the 50’s AIP Teenagers savethe day films) and even further back to the films Fred Dekker made in the 80’s,The movement really exploded in the second half of the last decade.

Of the many filmmakers who made their debut in this niche,Ti West was and is by far the most impressive. Unlike so many others he hasinsights and a command of the genre and era beyond, “Gee it was pretty sweet.”And unlike so many others, mimicking the past actually was the fact thatunlocked West’s voice.

West’s debut film The Roost, was made by West when he wasstill in college and was produced and financed by Larry Fessenden. Though thefilm shows flashes of West’s promise and the talented innovative filmmaker hewould become, it also shows a filmmaker with a rather steep learning curve infront of him. To say the film is clumsy is not quite enough. The film hasproblems with basic blocking and editing that make the early films of KevinSmith look like the work of Howard Hawks. Matters are helped not at all by anamateur cast who allow more ellipses in their dialogue than the average JimJaramusch film and a moment that screams “I’ve just seen Funny Games” that ismore annoying than I can quite put into words.

Though the film does have some tense moments, effectivescares and is interesting for the fact that it shows West was interested inevoking horror’s past from the very beginning of his career, it is forcompletists only. West’s second film, Triggerman, is much the same. Though atleast it’s slow paced, naturalism is more fitting for its story of a group ofhunters stalked in the forest by an unseen sniper, than The Roost’s KILLER BATSscenario.

Afterwards West was hired to helm Cabin Fever 2. Theexperience did not go well and West attempted to Alan Smithee his name off thefilm, only to find, as he wasn’t a member of the DGA that he wasn’t allowed(Lionsgate opportunistically released the film after the positive hype of HouseOf The Devil and prominently featured West in its advertising).

Cabin Fever 2 is a hard film to judge as all compromisedmovies are. In any case it is markly smoother than either of West’s previousfilms and features some of the same flashes of natural talent that the othersdo. However the good moments aren’t the only ones that bear West’s fingerprintsand ultimately the question of how many of the film’s problems were the causeof studio interference and how many belong to West alone is an open one.

The point is that the leap from these films to House Of TheDevil is an astonishing one. Not the work of a different filmmaker but onecoming fully into his own. Any hint of the amateurishness that haunted West’sprevious work is gone. House is a work of almost painful control.

The gimmick of House Of The Devil was brilliant enough. Tomake a film that didn’t merely harken back to the spirit of another era (thesemi permeable borderline between late seventies and pre slasher early eightieshorror; the film has much more in common with the paranoid, zoom friendlyhorror of Let’s Scare Jessica To Deathand The Messiah Of Evil than itdoes say The Burning), thatdidn’t merely take place in said era, but looked like it was made in said era.House Of The Devil was a film designed to appear as though it fell through atime warp in 1983 and somehow ended up released in 2009. It’s not simply a matter of productiondesign. The score, film stock, cinematography and characterization all feelauthentically of the era. Even the lead looks uncannily like a young MargotKidder. (Interestingly enough The question of whether the film is a social orfairy tale horror film is also effected by the time switch. Today the filmplays as complete fairy tale, complete with a dark house in the dark woodsduring an eclipse. But given the film is a direct response to the “SatanicPanic” of the eighties, one can read it as social horror. Here is a good astime as any to note that the line between horror films that are about socialphenomenon and those that exploit said same is often exceedingly thin.)

House Of The Devil follows Sam, a young college girl who inorder to secure the funding to move into a new apartment away from aparticularly obnoxious roommate (it speaks well of West’s gift atcharacterization that said roommate seems ample reason to brave the wrath ofSatan) takes a job “babysitting” at a remote country estate. Once there, she isgreeted by the sublimely unsettling Tom Noonan (whom West had worked withbefore on The Roost), absolutely invaluable as the soft spoken Satanist. Noonanhas one of the most uniquely sinister presences of any character actor. Hemoves his strange elongated figure with courtly grace and is never at anymoment anything less than unfailingly polite, even as he is chasing the bloodsplattered Samantha through the woods after a series of unspeakable events heis able to keep the façade of a rational man. His voice never rises above ahushed whisper even when things are at their most dire.

It is Noonan who drops the bombshell that the baby sittingjob was offered under false pretenses. The job is not to watch a child butNoonan’s elderly Mother In Law. Though Sam initially balks she relents whenNoonan offers her 400 dollars for two hours work. Though the job seems too goodto be true and her instincts tell her to flee, it’s 1983 and The Gift Of Fearhasn’t been written yet, so she takes the job. West is obviously well versed inthe conventions of the era’s horror and the pleasures of House Of The Devilcome not only from the painstaking manner in which he recreates its milieu butfrom the canny and unexpected ways he subverts it as well.

West plays counter to the rhythms of the genre. When youexpect jump scares West lets the tension build. When you think you’re safe hehits you with a shocker. He breaks many of the unwritten rules of the genre includingthe use of guns in horror (a broken taboo carried over from Triggerman) togreat affect, I wouldn’t hesitate to go so far as to name one particularlyshocking moment the best use of a gun in a horror film period.

In one of the film’s finest moments West even has us beggingour heroine to break the cardinal rule of horror movie survival. Every horrorfan is hard wired to will the film’s leads not to venture through ominous doorsbest left unopened. But in a moment of malicious enginuity West pulls the oldHitchcock trick and lets us see what’s behind the door before his heroine doesand in the process A) clues us in to just how bad her situation is. And B)Reminds us that she has absolutely no idea how bad her situation is. It’s awonderfully clever moment.

By the end of the film West has wound us so tight andcreated such an atmosphere of tense dread that he is even able to make theimage of a group of hooded figures standing around an inverted pentagram,mumbling truly frightening. And that’s an image drained of it’s shock value ifever there was one. By the end of the film West has proven himself to be notonly a director of great style, but of considerable wit as well (Witness thepriceless introductory shot of Noonan).

House Of The Devil may ultimately be nothing more than agenre exercise. But it would be unfair to dismiss it because of that. It isindeed a very particular kind of genre exercise, one where the audience and theartist must both have the same knowledge of the subject matter in order for theeffect to be fully realized. West in many ways is like the Glenn Gould ofhorror filmmakers. Sure one can listen to and enjoy The Goldberg Variations,but it’s not until you listen to someone else play it that you realize the truegenius of his work.

West’s follow up film, The Innkeepers jettisoned House’scentral gimmick while retaining its meticulous style and ambition. As well ashis ability to link the anxiety of the day to day with the horrific. Ironicallyfor a director whose voice crystallized in a work celebrating the past, TheInnkeepers is a film that suggests that West is one of the few director’sinterested in pushing horror forward. West is doing more than making films heis drawing a conversation about what the genre is and what it means. It is aconversation I look forward to having for a long long time.

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext and Text: Part 13: Halloween

2012-01-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

With the R-Rated horror revival in full swing material wasneeded. Studios turned to the past and a glut of remakes began to flood themarket. While the appeal in the name recognition of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre,Friday The 13^th or Nightmare On Elm Street is evident enough,apparently no title was deemed to minor or obscure to receive the glossyPlatinum Dunes makeover. In some cases, given the scant connections to thesource material, this impulse was down right mystifying. Was Romero’s CounterCulture horror film, The Crazies really so beloved with teenagers that thegrosses of “Generic Military Zombies And Also Timothy Olyphant” were improvedby licensing the title? Did “Gas Mask Wearing Slasher In 3D” really need to becalled My Bloody Valentine?

These remakes were united in their uniformly dull darkfiltered look, young cast of blanks and an almost willful misunderstanding oftheir source material. They were on the whole about as bland, tasteless anddispiriting as a wad of chewed paper.

Love it or loathe it, Rob Zombie’s take on Halloween is theonly exception to that rule. The only one of this disreputable lot to featurean actual authorial voice. The only one that feels like the product of afilmmaker and not a gaggle of risk adverse studio execs. Of course this isprecisely why many hate Zombie’s film. To explore just why I think Zombie’stake on the material is successful, or at least successful-ish (I contend thatZombie’s film is at worst an intriguing failure, and at its best has a veryreal eerie power) you gotta go back to the beginning.

Of the big three franchises that powered the eighties,Halloween possesses what is easily the best initial entry and easily the worstfollow ups. While Friday The 13^th flatlined to a level of agreeablemediocrity pretty much from the get go and Nightmare On Elm Street bouncedbetween lows and highs (mostly lows) like an EKG, Halloween hit the basement onits second entry and somehow kept on tunneling.

The shoot of Halloween 2 was notoriously botched. With RickRosentahl infamously kicked off of the project so a pinch hitting JohnCarpenter could reshoot a still undisclosed portion of the film. It’s notexactly hard to see why Carpenter, nor anyone else, is all that eager to takecredit for Halloween 2. It’s a shapeless mess of a movie with none of itspredecessor’s eerie grace, which retcons an unwieldy back story onto the filmthat robs it of the original’s purity. (Indeed said unwieldy back story endedup being at the core of most of the series’ problems. With each subsequententry adding on more and more like increasingly ludicrous scaffolding).

After the good on paper, terrible in execution attempt toturn the franchise into a Halloween themed anthology series with the thirdinstallment Season Of The Witch, the series returned to Michael Myers andplummeted to new depths. Briefly improving for the merely incredibly dullHalloween H20 before plunging to ghastly new lows with Halloween Resurrection,the film in which Rosenthall, who let us recall had been kicked off the franchisein disgrace twenty years ago due to gross incompetence, was brought back togive the world a movie in which Michael Myers lost a Kung Fu fight to BustaRhymes on Reality TV. I desperately wish I were just making this up.

Short of having Myers costar in a movie with The Bowery Boysand a Brooklyn Gorilla its tough to think of a more ignominious ending for theicon. Myers was in other words, unlike so many of the films used for remakefodder, actually ripe for reinvention. His reputation didn’t merely needrehabilitating. It needed rescuing.

Credit the Weinsteins then for taking the risk of giving thefilm to someone who actually would reinvent it, rather than deliver another“Take Property X, add Camera Filters Y”.

Rob Zombie’s filmmaking can be defined by the fact that hemakes horror movies from the point of view of the monster. Rob Zombie’smonsters are not the misunderstood, wronged creatures of Zombie’s belovedUniversal films whom the viewer can comfortably rest their sympathies ineither. Zombies Monsters arecruel, unrepentant, uncontrollable well- monsters. This has led to someunfounded criticism of his work.

Zombie’s approach was clear from the beginning. Though hisdebut film House Of A Thousand Corpses nominally followed the point of view ofthe four young adults who end up making Corpses 997, 998, 999 and 1000,Zombie’s interest clearly lay with the murderous Firefly Clan who dispatchedthem, rather than the kids themselves. House Of 1000 Corpses was a mess. Morelike an issue of Famous Monsters Of Filmland crossed with a snuff film than an ordinary movie. Clearlythe result of someone trying to get as many of the things they’ve always wantedto see in a horror movie stuffed into one film lest they never have theopportunity again. A mess yes, but an exhilarating one and Zombie's talentfor atmosphere, framing and texture was impossible to deny.

The Devil’s Rejects, Zombie’s follow up was a maturation ofsaid talent. Stripping away the distancing garish theatricality of House infavor of a grubby seventies aesthetic. The Devil’s Rejects also ditched thenominal point of view characters, splitting the film between The Firefliesthemselves as they go on the run after having their compound raided and thebrother of one of their victims whose pursuit of The Fireflies leads him tosome dark places and deeds.

The Devil’s Rejects is a film that is entirely from theperspective of the monsters. But once again I consider it a mistake to assumethat that is Zombie’s perspective as well. Just because he positions his cameraover their shoulder does not mean he sides with them.

The key sequence in the film is the Firefly’s torture andmurder of a country band and their families at a motel where they’re hidingout. A series of murders the Fireflies perform for no other reason than boredomand malice. Unlike the blankvictims of House, the members of Banjo and Sullivan are clearly meant to besympathetic (or at least as sympathetic as Rob Zombie characters get) undeserving targets of The Firefly’scruelty and sadism.

In other words, though we are following the Firefly’sperspective in which five human lives have no more value than an afternoon’ssick entertainment, by no means are we supposed to be identifying with it.Zombie may be interested in The Fireflies, but he has no delusions about them.Should a member of the audience or Zombie himself be in the same room as TheFirefly Clan they would not be inducted into that merry band. No, they would gothe same way as Banjo and Sullivan.

This is the same approach that Zombie takes to Michael Myersin Halloween, though given that he is dealing with an established set oficonography and mythology instead of his own, the results are more mixed.

After all, this is Michael Myers we’re talking about, theultimate representation of pure, motiveless, random evil in horror. Trying to give a reason in horror is always a dicey proposition. But to seek toexplain him would seem counter productive at best, down right anathema atworst.

The thing is though I don’t believe that Zombie really doesexplain Myers all that much, nor do I believe that that was his aim. The filmis an origin story, beginning in Michael’s child hood, but there’s a differencebetween relating an origin and explaining it. Though Zombie does couch Myersbeginnings in a hellishly dysfunctional white trash family, rather than thetidy suburban home that Carpenter’s creation grew from i, hedoesn’t give this as the reason for Myer’s evil.

By the time we meet Michael he is already deeply disturbed.The first thing we see him do is first cuddle with and then kill a defenselesssmall animal. The day we join him is also the day he commits his (presumably)first murder. While this killing is given a token motivation, the victimtormented Michael and taunted his Mother. The casual, almost lackadaisical waythat Myers decides to kill most of his family (unlike in Carpenter Myersdoesn’t stop with his sister in this one) after crossing that line stillretains the chilling blankness of the original.

As Myers is institutionalized, begins to kill with lessprovocation and finally degenerates deeper and deeper into a near catatonia,it initially seems that there might be some attempt to cast Myers as thesympathetic monster in the Universal mode. But such claims don’t really hold upto scrutiny. True his rampage is set off when he kills two grotesque orderlieswho were raping a fellow patient in his room, but the way the scene is stagedthis is shown to be more or less incidental. Myers pays neither theperpetrators nor the victims any attention until they begin to mess with hiscollection of masks. All indications are that he would have let the attackproceed had they not touched his paper mache. (Obviously we’re talking aboutThe Director’s Cut here. The Theatrical Cut subbed in an alternate scene inwhich Myer’s killed a group of security guards with substantially lessprovocation. Oddly enough this seems to suit Zombie’s film much better than therape scenario. This is something of an ongoing theme with Zombie’s Director's Cuts. The flawed and deeply off putting but sortof fascinating Halloween 2 also worked much better in its theatrical form. As an aside I will mention that the cut Ioriginally saw at a screening with Zombie in attendance, was a work print thatkept much of the extra material of The Director’s Cut but which featured thealternate scenes of the theatrical cut, as far as I’m concerned it’s the bestversion of the film.)

To underline his ruthlessness his first act of freedom is tokill Danny Trejo, the only fully sympathetic character in the film and one whoshowed Myer’s nothing but kindness. The chilling brutality with which Myer’s kills him shows just how littleany perceived bonds register with Myer’s. He’s not a misunderstood creature whokills to defend himself. He’s a man so far gone that he seems to believe thebest way to reconnect with his long lost sister is to brutally murder a few ofher friends.

How successful this first part of the film is largelydepends on how effective you find Zombie as a filmmaker. There are moments, such as Myer's murder of a nurse in front of his Mother that are truly horrific and others that simply seem like Zombie on "two characters shout horrible things at each other" autopilot. The film contains all of Zombie’ssignatures, profane White trash patois, incongruous music choices, hisdistinctly saturated, stained and tactile style (indeed it’s this distinct vivid texture to Zombie's style that seems to upset so many of Zombie’s critics. Watching one of Zombie’s filmsis a down right visceral experience) coupled with a genuine talent for composition, his wax museum cast filled withflamboyant supporting characters (Ken Foree, Udo Kier, Sid Haig, Dee Wallace, and Clint Howard amongothers) and references and affection to all eras of horror. Say what you willabout him but Zombie is one of the handful of modern filmmakers whose films youcan tell on sight.

The second half of the film is a truncated version ofCarpenter’s Halloween, that vacillates between some very effective moments andsome very ineffective ones. He’s capable of staging some tense moments,including a real nail biter of a scene that features Laurie trapped in an emptypool with Myers. On the other handhis sequences where he mimics the original are usually unwieldy. In thedaylight portions he redoes Carpenters trick of slipping Myers in thebackground of several shots. The only difference being that Zombies 6’ 10’ twohundred and fifty pound Michael Myers is so laughably conspicuous (played byTaylor Mane who is otherwise fine) that the effect is unintentionally comic.

But this segment of the film also has the best scene in themovie and the one that helped bring Zombie’s career as a whole into focus forme.

To any who would term Rob Zombie a moral nightmare, with nosympathies for the victims of violent crime, I would challenge you to watch howhe stages the murder of the Strodes. The first time I saw the scene in theaterI had one of the most visceral reactions that I’ve ever had at a horror movie.The pit of my stomach just bottomed out. Not because I was about to seesomething “Fucked Up”. It was because I was about to see two people, twolikable, good people, have something horrible happen to them. And I did not wantto see that happen. It is bizarre if not downright sad, how few modern horrorfilms elicit that reaction. The fact that Zombie can achieve it, and does on aregular basis makes him a genre filmmaker of tremendous note.

The question to ask then is if the first half does notdemystify Michael Myer, or put us on his side what exactly does it do?Especially when the second half follows the original movie so closely. If it doesn't change the story, why change the context? Byfollowing Myer’s all the way through his journey Zombie frames it as his storyin which Laurie Strode features rather than Laurie Strode’s story in whichMichael Myer’s shows up. This changes things considerably. In the original filmMyer’s is an unknowable unfeeling force, but in this film as we watch him dofinally rampage across Haddonfield we understand what he is doing there.Pursuing, after the death of his mother and the retirement of Doctor Loomis thelast link to himself when he was something that almost resembled a whole humanbeing. When he finally comes face to face with her the person he has beendwelling on for the past fifteen years and finds no recognition and we watchthat last link snap it’s possible to feel- well not sympathy, he’s far too gonefor that and wouldn’t understand it anyway. But pity, not the pity that we feelfor Frankenstein’s monster trapped at the top of the burning windmill. But theinstinctive pity we feel for anyone who is so terribly doomed.

And it is there that it snaps into focus just what Zombiewas doing with Michael Myers. In the other franchise Myer’s is the force ofdoom, the random blank faced fate that strikes from nowhere. In Zombie’sHalloween is still a creature of evil who harms the innocent, but it becomesclear that he had little choice in the matter, as the tagline says "Evil has a destiny". In Zombie’s Halloween, it isMyers himself who is doomed.

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text: Part 12: Hostel 2

2012-01-10T06:35:00.000-08:00

The endless cycle of J-Horror remakes and other PG-13 horrorfilms that came in their wake created a natural push back with The Splat Pack.A crew of filmmakers dedicated to hard R horror. Though the group never reallyhad the thematic or stylistic cohesion that the magazine articles claimed theydid and in fact felt more like a blend of several movements like French NewWave Of Horror with Alexandre Aja and The Pastiche Movement (which we willtackle later) with the likes of Adam Green. The people who the label wasapplied to responded enthusiastically and soon a spokesperson emerged.

Eli Roth, handsome, well spoken, charismatic and with ahealthy sense of humor about himself (witness him playing his detractor’s worstimage of himself in one of the bright spots in Aja’s dire Piranha remake) was anatural fit for the job. From day one of his filmmaking career, when he gotLionsgate to release his debut film Cabin Fever through force of personalityalone, he emerged as something of this generation's William Castle. The personwho could talk the greatest game in horror. Whether he could back it up wasanother question.

At a time that no one was releasing R rated, let alone hardR-rated horror, in the theater it was hard to believe that Cabin Fever becamethe hit that it did. It is after all, a film that doesn’t look or feel all thatdifferent from your average Troma film, better sense of style notwithstanding.It was gory, funny and done with as much bad taste as possible and convincedLionsgate that there was still money in R-Rated horror (leading them togreenlight Saw among other things). But if Cabin Fever would make Roth popularamong horror fans then Roth’s next film would make him notorious among thegeneral populace.

It was after all Hostel, not Saw not The Devil’s Rejects notHigh Tension, that made David Edelstein write the article “Now Playing At YourLocal Cineplex: Torture Porn.” Which coined the term that gave a whole generationof kneejerk critics the very brick bat they needed. While Edelstein is anintelligent critic and his essay more considered than most of the hand wringing“Won’t Someone Think Of The Children!” “think pieces” that followed in its wake(read some of Dave Poland’s or Jefferey Wells pieces from the time if you wantto read two people having histrionic shit fits while simultaneously pattingthemselves on the back as hard as they can) even if we set aside his annoyinginability to give the horror filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, he doesindulge in a rather puzzling fallacy.

While something like a Rob Zombie film muddiesthe waters by nominally taking the killer’s point of view (though I thinkZombie’s viewpoint is a bit more complex than that, we’ll get there in his ownchapter) and you can even argue that the point the Saw films is to watch whatJigsaw will have come up with next, the term makes zero sense in Roth’s filmsas the sympathy and point of view are always, always, always with the victim.

In all fairness Roth himself fanned these flames. The first Hostelfilm was when Roth’s William Castle-esque skill at self promotion really cameinto full flower. He talked up his experience as something that would have eventhe most veteran of horror hounds quaking in their seats, unable to believewhat Roth had gotten away with. Hurry, hurry, hurry, tickets only ten dollars.

In reality, the first Hostel, though certainly not subdued only hasone shot that really goes beyond the pale as Roth promised. Hostel sets it’stone from the opening sequence of a man whistling off key as he washesblood, teeth and guts down the drain. We never see the man but from the tone ofhis song it’s reasonable to assume that he’s fairly detached. Occassionally wewill see shots of similarly employees of The Elite Hunting Club lookingequally bored as they go about there ghastly duties. When you boil it down,anything can become just a gig. It’s a slow building movie (I mean that in agood way) the tension and fear coming from the fact that we know that theprotagonists are in serious trouble long before they do, we see the trapclosing in on them and know by the time they realize it, it’ll be far too late.

Just when your guard is down Roth launches into the horror. Nowfirst off there is really only one sequence that can be called a torturesegment in Hostel, the death of the second lead. Brief flashes are seen ofwhat’s going on in the other rooms of The Elite Hunting Club as anincapacitated protagonist Paxton is dragged down the hall, true. But his ownsession is interrupted in comically grotesque fashion about half waythrough. The only other time we’rein one of the torture rooms is when Paxton returns to save a girl. In that casewe see the aftermath but not the event itself.

In short, there’s not all that much of said “torture porn” in thefilm and what is shot isn’t shot from the point of view of the killer in orderto look fun and gratifying, but from the view of the victim where it is shownto be a confusing, terrifying painful ordeal with the full human cost weighedin. It’s hard to imagine even the most desensitized sadists getting off on anyof this. Take away Eli’s hype and Edelstein’s hand wringing and you’re leftwith a film that is in the classic fairytale mode. A story of greedy, entitled,young men who have the tables turned on them. Young men who think nothing ofbuying sex and drugs, in other words sensation and thus in turn must learn whatit feels like to be bought, to become someone else’s sensation.

Hostel 2 is a bit more complex than that. It’s a better film thanHostel, smarter, more ambitious, better looking with stylish production designand nastier. Notably while Hostel was a fairy tale film, Hostel 2 is asocio-political one. (One could argue that since the question of torture was oneveryone’s mind thanks to The Bush Administration, featuring it was aninherently political move. But I don’t think that was Roth’s intent. It readsmuch more clearly as simply the ultimate taboo he could find.) The closest thatHostel gets to an overt political statement is the sly joke that everybody iswilling to pay more to torture an American. There are social issues present inthe original Hostel but they are decidedly dormant. Hostel 2 brings them to theforefront for a much richer more troubling film. Hostel 2 is simply put one ofthe best horror films of its decade, and gets better and moretroubling every time I see it.

The Hostel series works so well because it simultaneouslyplays on two distinct sets of deeply held fears and suspicions that the middleclass has.

1) That the very rich are morally vacuous cretins whoseappetites are monstrous and who have absolutely no compunction buying orselling you and other things that are not for sale.

2) The poor and the third world is full of people who envyand hate your comfort and should they ever be given the slightest opportunitythey will extract their revenge.

It’s a two part system, the poor lure and entrap you. Therich then sell, buy and use you. It is this element that Roth emphasizes inHostel 2 over the fairytale comeuppance that he served out to the protagonistsin Hostel.

Hostel 2 starts off much like Hostel (after a fakeoutopening that’s right out of Friday The 13^th Part 2) with threeAmerican students drawn from the main tourist hub to the country of Slovakia.They’re drawn to the Hostel by the promise that compared to the aggressivelyhyper sexed Italy it’s a testosterone neutral zone. Unlike their malecounterparts in Hostel, who were merely using Europe to get their fill ofdecadence, the girls in Hostel 2 are actually there to study (though there isthe requisite party girl among their numbers). They don’t deserve retributionfor anything. Their only sin is taking their safety for granted. It is enough.

Roth’s masterstroke is to split the film into two competingnarratives once the trap is sprung, taking us inside the inner workings of TheElite Hunting Club. The moment the girls arrive at the Hostel their passportphoto’s are scanned and the members of the hunting club notified so the biddingcan begin. The following montage, with nary a drop of blood in sight, is themost horrifying scene in Roth’s career. As we cut between the powerful men andwomen in Asia, Europe and America, Roth gives special time to close ups oftheir faces. Their expressions, which range from bored indolence, tofrustration, anticipation and almost embarrassed self conscience satisfaction,are the same faces of any group of thorough hobbyists. They could be bidding onMovie Memorabilia, or rare books, or World Of Warcraft swag. The expressionswould be the same. The worst part about the blasé way these people bid on andbuy what should never be contemplated being for sale is how true it rings. Thisis true horror not the gore shots.

As Roth jumps the narrative tracks we become fascinated bythe two new inductees into The Elite Hunting Society. Hostel 2 drew a lot ofire (this is putting it lightly, Hostel 2 was one of the biggest targets of thedecade) for it’s graphic violence against women. But beyond the superficialthis is an almost Feminist horror film, which looks about as kindly at the malesex as the SCUM Manifesto. In a lot of ways the film becomes almost a reverseStepford Wives. The film follows two upper class, suburban males from winningthe bidding war, to their journey to Slovakia, and preparation for the event,which they treat as a combination of guys night out and one of those executivepower meetings. The pattern is one we’ve seen before, in everything from NeilLaBute screenplays to Scream. That of a weak willed male bullied intoindefensible acts by a dominant posturing male, who justifies himself with abunch of pseudo Nietzchian/Objectivist cokehead nonsense philosophy (Uncoicedentallyboth actors were leads on the popular network Soap Desperate Housewives). Theyare the dark side of the Iron John self actualized males, who put on smiles inpublic and say nary an unPC word in public, but bitch about emasculation once put in a room filled with men andgiven access to a few stiff drinks. These are two men who have been waitingtheir entire life to take out their anger on a woman in a dark room withoutfear of repercussion. It's by putting feelings such as this vacuous unfeeling hatred, or paranoia, or good old fashioned fear out of their natural, day to day habitat and into a foreign place where we can see them for what they are that horror gets much of its power. Roth beholds them with open wonder and revulsion. How wasTodd, the gung ho aggressive one, told about The Elite Hunting Club. Did hefind it? Or did someone let him in on the secret. Just another milestone injoining the upper class. Audi, Vacation home, murder club. What was thereaction of Stuart when he first started to apply the pressure? When did hebecome convinced that this was not a joke? When the men are shown to a roomwhere they are given their choice of costumes and implements, they admire themin the same manner that other men their age admire Golf Clubs, campingequipment and running shoes.

The fact that one blanches the second they’re put in thesame room as their “fantasy” and the other responds to it with an unforeseennaturalness earns neither any quarter. It hurts when you kill your soul, but itis still dead.

This peak behind the curtain also affords us a look at TheElite Hunting Club’s upper management for the first time. The man who runs thecompany does it with neither a self aggrandizing Jigsaw like philosophy norcackling glee. Though he performs more than a few brutal evil deads in front ofthe camera and his collections suggest that he’s definitely a man with issues,for the most part the film views him as a tightly controlled businessmanrunning a high risk operation. No different, Bloodhound Fetish aside, fromanyone else who runs a business whose high stakes demands that everything bejust so.

Though these peaks behind the curtain give the movie theirmost chilling and unique sequences, we do not linger there longer thannecessary, as said before Roth’s instinctive sympathy and interest is alwayswith the victims. Like the first Hostel there’s only one real torture sequence,(the other girls both end up being truncated for very different reasons, asidefrom that we get some brief looks inside the other rooms at the Club when a“special offer” is given but nothing prolonged) but it is as they say, a doozy.It was the sequence of Heather Matrazzo strung up naked and cut open thatcaused much of the hysterics about the film. It’s an intense sequence no doubtabout it, cruel and hopeless, but beyond suggesting that most critics shouldtry and get a better sense of history, it’s just another classic case of adirector doing violence well. It’s an upsetting sequence, damn right it was anupsetting sequence, but if it had been the vicarious bit of blood letting thatmany criticized it as it most likely would not have been. The very fact thatthe viewer is upset by what they see presupposes that the sequence is not infact pro murder.

The film ends with a punch line as the maxim of the EliteHunting Club, that it is after all just a business, is proven in no uncertainterms. It’s a cynical ending in which no one gets away clean. Then again,though the heroine has bartered some of herself away it is unlikely that Hostel3 will begin with a shot of her headless corpse. It is a tradeoff.

Hostel 2 earns its reputation as one of the most notorioushorror films of the decade. One day I am confident that people will realizethat it is also one of the best.

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text: The Ring

2012-01-09T11:12:00.000-08:00

If we can define the horror of the nineties as a decade insearch of a theme, (setting aside the brief cycle of “WB slashers” that cameout in the wake of Scream, and the even briefer cycle of Gothic Horror that came after Coppala’s Dracula,) thenthe first decade of the 2000’s can be defined as a decade absolutely lousy withcycles. One seemingly couldn’t release a single successful horror film withouta whole slew of copy cats emerging in its wake. It was a decade of trends.

The first of these trends would be the J-Horror movementthat lasted from 2002’s The Ring to 2008’s One Missed Call. The Sixth Senseended up creating, or perhaps a better word would be uncovering, a market forPG-13 horror that American studios were eager to exploit (and with a domesticgross of nearly 300 million in Clinton era dollars it’s hard to blame them).The strange elliptical films that had just beginning to come out of Japanlooked to be perfect material.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, much of J-Horror’sappeal comes from its foreignness. Though you can find the influence of someAmerican films, like Jacob’s Ladder in J-Horror, much the same way you cantrace back to Disney’s influence in modern anime, the fact remains that suchinfluence has developed along its own track into a very distinct iconography oflong haired female spirits, solemn young male children, hushed scenes of urbanparanoia and decay, and manifestations of the supernatural in modernelectronics. This makes for an interesting case when we try and determine if these films are social or mythic horror films. Many of the themes they're dealing with, isolation, encroachment of the digital, generational shifts and break downs of familial structures, ARE social issues in Japan. To Westerners though the films, whether watched in their original forms or remakes the films are more apt to play as mythic. One of the smart moves that the remake of The Grudge made was to shift the subtext of the film, making the film about a westerner's sense of dislocation in Japan. In the remake the ghosts are just one more damn thing that makes Sarah Michelle Gellar feel out of place and uncomfortable.

Like any set of iconography J-horror can be a ripe target forparody when reduced to its base elements. But in the best of these films the culminative effect is something quitedifferent. The best of J-horror films like the master’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa’sPulse and Cure have a feeling of hushed, inarticulate dread unlike anything inthe genre (with the possible exception of my old standby Val Lewton).

Which is not to say that there are not some awfully hackyboilerplate movies produced in the J-Horror genre. Or that we shouldimmediately assume that The Ring is a bastardized Western version.

Both films follow a reporter’s search, in the wake of herniece’s mysterious death, for a cursed video tape that kills the viewer sevendays after watching it. As she follows the trail of the urban legend she beginsto think there may be some truth to it. Only to find when she actually watchesthe tape, that there is more than some. With her own seven day deadline tickingRachel seeks to track down the source of the tape with the aid of her callow exhusband, all the while haunted by signs of the countdown. Leading them to uncover the vengefulspirit of a little girl (Sadako or Samarra depending on your version)

In truth, I think it’s something of a toss up which versionis better. The Ring is an interesting adaptation. For the most part it is avery faithful adaptation, but there is enough variation around the edges to beinteresting. In some stretches The Ring is a scene for scene transfer, but italso adds scenes, reinterprets and reorders others, adds some interestingdetails and cuts out a fair amount of stuff that just doesn’t work. Of the two films The Ring is actuallythe more abstract take on the material.

It is also the more flawed film. Most of its problemsstemming from Ehren Kruger’s screenplay. Kruger is one of those guys who getsan awful lot of work in horror despite not having a real feel for it. He’sresponsible for this film and it’s woebegotten sequel, the anemic J-HorroresqueSouthern Horror film The Skeleton Key, Blood And Chocolate and Scream 3, whichis possibly the worst horror script I have ever read. The moment when the ghostof Sydney’s mother appears to Sydney, points her finger at her and moans,“You’re just like Meeeeeee!!!” in order to subtly convey that Sydney is afraidof turning out like her mother should have gotten Kruger banned from the genrefor life. If I had to point my finger to one common element that Kruger getswrong in his scripts its just that they’re so damned chatty. Compared to the hushed dread of Ringu, thecharacters in The Ring never shut up. Horror is in many ways, a genre that hasto be quiet at times and quiet makes Kruger nervous. The balance of thecharacters is a little off as well. Not much but enough to make you notice,Rachel, who in the original is a driven, if neglectful career woman comes offas strident and more than a little bitchy in the American version, despiteWatt’s charisma. Her ex-husband who she recruits to help deal with Sadako isturned from a sympathetic ally to a man child who is at turns dopey andannoyingly glib. Their child goesfrom solemn latch key kid, to creepy mini adult (once again this is post SixthSense, creepy kids were big).

Despite such flaws, there are some interesting choices thatThe Ring makes as an adaptation. As stated, it’s actually more elliptical andspells out less than Ringu. It also removes some of Ringu’s more distractingelements, such as the mother of Samara’s suicidal leap into a volcano, the exhusband’s latent psychic abilities and a clumsy sepia toned flashback to apsychic demonstration at which Sadako kills someone that recalls the oldUniversal Monster films and not in a good way. Verbinski also makes some smartadditions to the film, changing a character who was a random fisherman in theoriginal into Sadako’s (presumable) father, (played by Bryan Cox in the bestperformance in the film, as a man who has been completely frayed by long termcontact with the supernatural). He adds other effectively eerie scenes as well,including a trip to Sadako’s house where we see the strange miniature thatserved as her room and a horse’s suicide that is so insane and absurd that itcan’t help but be horrifying.

The real differences boil down to style and once again it’sbasically a split decision. Of course credit must be given to the original fororiginating the imagery. But Verbinski makes some interesting augmentationsthat are worth considering.

Verbinski is one of the more interesting mainstream visualstylists working at the moment. At their best, his films carry some of the samecomic anarchism as Sam Raimi’s more mainstream work. There is little sense ofthat Verbinski in The Ring (save the palpable glee that comes when he subvertsthe “ghosts just want to be understood” trope so popular at the time thanks tothe like of The Sixth Sense and The Others). But it does benefit from his boldvisual style.

Verbinski adds details like the water that puddles aroundSamara (a chilling reminder of her resting place at the bottom of the well)that acts as her precursor (though the nailless fingers that were sodisqueiting on Sadako’s hands). Nakata goes so far as to super impose flashingimages of the video over the reporter’s day to day life. Verbinski goes a moreinsidious route, by having imagery from the video (like a very distinctiveladder) show up in Rachel’s day, a much eerier suggestion of assertion of thesupernatural over the material world. Perhaps the scene that best sums up thedifference in approach between the two versions is the way that Verbinskihandles the faces of Sadako’s victim’s. Nakata’s effect is much more naturalistic,with the victim’s faces locked in a horrified Scream, faces pale, eyes wide.Verbinski goes for a much more artificial look, the face’s of Sadako’s victim’sactually mottled, their jaw’s hideously distended and their eye’s rolled backin their head. Delivered in flash cuts rather than Nakata’s long steady looks.Is it a more theatrical effect? Yes. But it’s hard to deny that it is also moreaffecting.

Most crucially of course is the staging of the haunted videoitself. Without which the film doesn’t really work. Both video’s are eerilyconvincing as the product of the supernatural in different ways. Like the filmit’s in the video in Ringu is much shorter and to point, with only one or twoshots (The mysterious black and white shots of faceless people crawlingbackwards, and a man with his face covered, pointing) not directly related tothe mystery. Like the film it’s in the video in The Ring gets more right but itgets more wrong as well. Though it features some truly creepy shots, like thesmash cut from writhing maggots to writhing humans, and more genuinely eerieabstraction, it also features some shots like that of a giant CGI centipedecrawling under a table that can only be described as extremely ineffective.

That being said, Verbinski does make one crucial decision inthe staging of the sequence that gives him a definite edge in this case. Nakatastages the video so that it’s full screen, the image given with no distraction.Verbinski crucially frames the shot with the edges of the TV still plainlyvisible. In short Verbinski changes the shot to a shared POV. Making the act ofwatching the video an act of audience participation, rather than just anotherseries of isolated images on the screen.

The other crucial scene of the film is the end. Most of thereason for The Ring’s popularity is that it features one of the best punchlinesin modern horror. The “O Henry twist down the mineshaft” that is the revelationof Sadako’s mode of attack works in both versions, though in this case Nakata’shas a definite edge. Verbinski shoots Sadako’s attack as very aggressive, withher crawling quickly towards her victim and then distractingly teleportingaround in bursts of static. Nakata shoots Sadako as implacable. When sheemerges from the television she just lays there for a moment, like a seacreature beached on the shore something out of its natural habitat. After sherecovers she drags herself slowly towards her victim on her fingertips. Shedoesn’t need to hurry, why should she? Nakata also makes a smart move, by only showinggiving us the slightest peek behind the curtain of Sadako’s hair. Verbinskigives us a full look at Samara’s decomposing face, in order to go for the bigmoment. Nakata only lets us see one eye, but that eye, mad and staring, drivenas far from reason as possible communicates much more, and what it says is muchworse. (Verbinski does wisely drop the oh so 90’s “flash to negative” thatNakata uses to signal Sadako’s attacks.)

Verbinski’s adaptation may be flawed, but it is also a stylish, intelligenttake on the material that brings its own distinct voice and point of view onthe material to the film. The Ring came just at the beginning of the remakeglut that would dominate so much of the aughts. But it was one of the preciousfew that you can say that about.

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text: Part 10: The Blair Witch Project

2012-01-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

To say that The Blair Witch Project was a phenomenon on itsinitial release is to understate it. Horror films don’t often cross over intothe mainstream, but when they do they tend to do so big. Like The Exorcist, TheSixth Sense and Halloween, The Blair Witch Project became one of those filmsthat transcended cross over hit status and simply became something thateveryone saw.

As is often the case this is a matter of timing as much asanything else. The Blair Witch Project was released at the tale end of the independentcinema boom, perhaps the only time that multiplex audience were down right usedto seeing semi improvised films without name actors on the big screen, butbefore the digital boom, which would have almost certainly seen it dilutedamong an oversaturated market and sold directly to its niche. As it was it wasone of the first times that a film was sold via new fangled Viral Marketing,with the film’s online presence nearly as famous as the movie itself.

To the delight of Urban Legend enthusiasts everywhere, TheBlair Witch Project presented itself less as a movie than as an alternate reality. Thewebsite leading not to standard press kits but to faked police reports and aconvoluted mythology only slightly in evidence in the film. That the BlairWitch was real was played with a straight face until the film was long intheaters.

The Blair Witch Project was of course also responsible forrepopularizing the found footage conceit. This movement has resulted in someextraordinarily bad films, the worst of them probably being George Romero’swoeful Diary Of The Dead and the unbelievably bad The Fourth Kind. Films thatfor some have retroactively tainted The Blair Witch’s Legacy (This is settingaside the vocal minority who declaimed the film as a con job on its firstrelease).

This is unfair for any number of reasons. Not least of allthat The Blair Witch Project is hardly responsible for the found footagesubgenre. People love to point to The Last Broadcast, about a public access TVCrew lost and killed in The Pine Barrens as the film that Blair Witch “rippedoff”. These theories usually don’t mention that The Last Broadcast is an unwatchably bad movie. A much clearerline of ancestry can be drawn to the infamous Cannibal Holocaust, whosedirector was forced to produce his cast in open court in order to prove that hehadn’t simply murdered them. (And no matter what IMDB had to say for a time,things never got that far for the crew of the Blair Witch). You can even drawthe line further back to Charles B. Pierce’s pseudo documentary The Legend OfBoggy Creek, which despite it’s mostly clumsy production draws a few moments ofeeriness from the stillness and isolation of it’s deep back wood’s setting thatare comparable to Blair Witch.

In any case, after a few big hits like Cloverfield and TheLast Exorcism, a distaste for these movies has grown, The Outlaw Vern may havesummed it up best when he stated, “These are videos I like films.” Continuedsuccess of The Paranormal Activity franchise aside, last year’s Apollo 18 andthis years The Devil Inside, which has had audiences booing the film nation wide,are perhaps the final straws that sends the subgenre dormant again.

However, two things immediately become apparent when youcompare Blair Witch to its inferior progeny. A) That Blair Witch unlike itsdescendants, despite its loose improvisatory style, is a very constructed filmand B) Blair Witch is something that could actually pass as a documentary.

Now it’s truethat the likes of Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield, present themselves asraw home video. Still the unspoken conceit in these films is that someone hasedited or at the very least assembled what we are watching. This is anagreement rarely honored by the filmmakers but it is central to The BlairWitch. As is the critical decision to have two camera’s in play thus providingtwo different simultaneous points of view and allowing for matching reverseshots. (Another crucial difference is that it makes the reason its characterswon’t put the damn camera down one of psychology rather than plot convenience).

In other words, the footage in Blair Witch does legitimatelylook like something that was made, found and put together. It is an artifact,and the story it tells is a terrible one. In other words as Stephen King said,“One thing about Blair Witch: the damn thing looks real. Another thing aboutBlair Witch: the damn thing feelsreal.”

The Damn thing does feel real. The film starts with a groupof college aged kids going off to make a documentary about an urban legend in anearby rural area (And let me just say As someone who has spent a fair amountof time on independent film shoots that start out in cheerful bonhomie and endwith everybody hating each other and wondering why they came, Blair Witch getsthe dynamic just right).

Too little attention is paid to just how effective theseearly scenes are. They set the tone just right, with the friendly chatting NewEnglander’s, some plants and some real townspeople, (so much more effectivethan the standard glowering “townsfolk with a secret” might have been) slowlyspelling out their doom. One of the best and not often remarked upon, partsabout The Blair Witch that adds to this feeling of reality, is just howfractured the mythology is. It’s never clear just what the story of The BlairWitch even is. Even setting aside such anecdotes as the fisherman’s claim tosee “a white mist” there are at the very least four competing urban legends atwork here. The disappearance and reappearance of a girl near the turn of thecentury who claimed to see the witch, a child murdering man who at one time lived in the woods, the appearanceand disappearance of unidentified bodies at Coffin Rock, and town eccentricMary Brown’s description of anencounter with “a woman covered in horse fur”. (Note that her description ofthe witch does not match the one supposedly given earlier by the missing girl.)These competing stories told with varying amounts of good humor, (a woman witha child merrily chuckles that she “Believes enough not to go up there” while afisherman who is the last person encountered before the crew heads in thewilderness stops just short of giving the standard “You’re doomed,” speech,while his friend claims the whole thing is a crock) tell us two things. That these stories having been passedaround the community for a good long while have probably fractured and caused competingmyths to sprout up and a fair amount of bullshit to creep in (note that alltheir interviews are anecdotal, they never delve into old news reports or othersources that could be considered objective). But secondly it brings to mind theold parable of the elephant and the blind men. It gives the feeling that thecharacters and the townsfolk are only pecking around the edges of somethinglarger. Something that all the stories are only glances at. Something too horrible to face dead on.

At first the film switches between portions of thedocumentary and home movie behind the scenes footage, as the crew interviewslocals, shoots landmarks and eventually moves into the woods. As the direnessof the situation gradually mounts and what was supposed to be one night ofcamping in the woods turns into six grueling never ending days, the crewfractures, first into bickering then into serious infighting and finally andmost horribly into a numbed, elliptical, borderline nonsensical collapse. It’sas if the film itself is having a nervous breakdown.

It’s only fitting. The woods themselves, through which thekids find themselves stuck in endless directionless loops, recall Lovecraft’sfamous Non Euclidian Geometry and the architecture of Hugh Crane. There is thefeeling that being within the woods of Burkitsville and the vicinity of TheBlair Witch is like being trapped within a mind that is unwell. The rules ofday to day reality simply do not apply. The characters find themselves walkingin odd perpetual loops, passing the same landmarks again and again, thecemetery they are trying to reach stays just on the horizon never getting anycloser, the wilderness shrinks and expands seemingly at will. What hope do youhave when south will not stay south? It preys on the minds of the characters aswell as the viewer. As the good natured banter first dries up, then curdlesinto bickering and then finally turns into a kind of half coherent mumblingstream of conscience that is only this side of sane (“I’m going to wash myhands now, just washing my hands, going to wash my hands”). No amount of parodycan make Heather’s final monologue as she begs for absolution anything lessthan chilling.

Things disintegrate rapidly from there. The Blair Witch hasdeveloped an unfair reputation for not showing anything, or to revisit ametaphor, “Being all sizzle and no steak.” While it’s true that we never seethe titular character, what we do glimpse seems bad enough. The days are bad(truly Blair Witch is comparable with The Innocents for being a masterwork ofdaylight horror) and the nights, where they are assaulted by strange sounds andsights from all directions, are worse. In the film’s most famous scene, it’simagery explicitly recalling Karl Edgar Wagner’s brilliant Sticks, they comeacross a series eerie stick figure totems left hanging in a grove. Three rockcairns appear outside their tent and after child’s handprints are clearly seenbeating against the sides of their tent one of their number finds his gearslathered in a kind of slime. Later he disappears and a bloody pulp of…something is found wrapped in his shirt like a gift. It’s one of the films fewgraphic moments and yet stands as one of its best moments of suggestion. Justwhat did Heather find? Tradition would say Tongue and Teeth (and tradition does count, needless to say this is about as mythic as horror films get), the popular answeron the internet seems to be Josh’s severed genitals, but you never see itclearly. Heather does though, and whatever it is it’s bad enough so that whenthe end finally does come a few scenes later, there is a terrible acceptanceabout it, a terrible feeling as Heather and Mike huddle together and share somefinal cigarettes with the solemnity of prisoners on death row. Not anacceptance that deadens the horror as her terrible shrieks that serve assoundtrack for the last ten minutes of the film testify, but the numbingdespair of a cow on its way up the ramp of a slaughter house. When it becomesall too clear that there is no exit.

Blair Witch is without a doubt the best horror film of thenineties. One that reaches past horror and revulsion and into terror. It endeda decade of low notes on a high one.

Bonus Post: The Scream Opening Scene

2012-01-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

(I posted this a while ago on my regular blog Things That Don't Suck. But I think it's worth another look.)

The opening of Scream is without a doubt one of the most iconic scenes in horror. It's a sequence that embodies and to a large extent makes up for, much of the series. It does so by running directly counter to much of what the series does as a whole.

First off the sequence plays long. Probably longer than you remember. Certainly longer than I remembered (when I wincingly calculated how much of my image memory this post would devour). The first three minutes of this could play out as almost a straight romantic comedy. It takes it's time before tipping its hand to horror, making it all the more effective when the hammer drops.

Secondly you like her.

It’s always shocking to me just how far out of their way some horror filmmakers will go to make their characters unlikeable guilt free fodder. Sure the vapid bros who populate say The Friday The 13th Nu Metal Remake don't "deserve" their grisly deaths by any real world measure. But by movie morality Jason is nothing less than the swift hand of justice. They may as well have filmed the mandals wearing crew barbecuing puppies.

When you consider just how much more effective it makes a horror film to care about the characters the lazyness is even more unfathomable. When you actually do get a likable horror protagonist (ala Alison Lohman in Drag Me To Hell) it’s almost a shock. It’s all the more surprising as Drew’s part shows here how easy it is to do. She's not playing a particularly well drawn or deep character, just a deeply and instinctively sympathetic one. Underneath it all is the lie that if you’re bad bad things will happen to you and if you’re good vica versa. This is especially damning because this is exactly the opposite of what the great horror films tap into. The power of the random to strike you any time anywhere, that shadow on your lungs in the X-ray, that Vodka fueled driver crossing the center line. Nice person? Kind to animals? Good to your kids? Fate really couldn’t give a fuck.

I love that little pan. The all important first real note of discord in the horror movie. That swing evocative with just the right amount of dread. A horror movie pillow shot?

A nice little callback to Halloween with the butcher block even before Barrymore underlines it.

And God look at those beautiful beautiful VHS. A nice moment of nostalgia for the viewer while Craven get's to participate in a nice little bit of self congratulation "Was that the guy with knives for fingers? I liked that movie it was scary."

"Yeah too bad the sequels blew."

Uh huh...

"I want to know who I'm looking at." We're almost four minutes into the sequence at this point. It's a wonderfully creepy moment.

Arguably no horror film has gotten better use of the architecture of suburbia since Halloween. The warm modernist prairie home design, meant to be inviting also gives an almost unlimited amount of foreground and background for the killer to be lurking in.
"Hang up the phone again and I'll gut you." This is an ugly real moment. Meant to hurt and terrify.

And it works. What makes the sequence so effective is that Barrymore acts like a real person. She's scared and desperate I'm reminded of what King writes in the new introduction to Danse Macabre (Talking about the new The Last House On The Left) "-we know it's really going to happen, we are filled with rage and sorrow (and if there's an emotion more foreign to a Friday The 13th movie than sorrow, I don't know what is)". Scream if only in this scene is that rare horror movie acquainted with sorrow. The focus is not on the excitement on wondering what the next gore shot is going to look like. Or even the terror of the moment. It's on just how pitiful it is. On what a sad, lonely and undeserving way this is to go.

This is also the first time that the "rules" are mentioned. But note how they're used to mock and hurt. Not as an opportunity for a clever reference.

I'm reminded of The Outlaw Vern's comment on Smoking Aces, about how he was surprised to see the characters get sad when people they cared about started to die. Instead of the blaise reactions to death that had become the raison d'etre in crime films of the era. Here it's a similar reaction. Barrymore doesn't know she's in a horror movie. Up until ten minutes ago she was in a romantic comedy. As a result she is acting with actual horror. It should be remembered that the ultimate source of horror is the subversion of the norm. The unraveling of things. Most clumsy modern horror never even bothers to establish a norm to subvert.

Now for years film fans have been using the Scream films as an oppurtunity to prove just how much cooler and well versed they are in horror cinema than the imaginary people who populate the film (Witness the shit fits thrown about The Peeping Tom reference in Scream 4). Yeah! Fuck you fictional characters!!! (This dubious enterprise may have reached its nadir last night in a review that I will not name but to which I must just say, "Wow".) Ignoring the inherent insecurity in such a reaction, let me just take a minute to point out that ninety percent of the audience is likely to have less of a background in horror than you. And aren't you glad about that? I mean if you put all this time an effort into loving horror, aren't you glad that you know a bit more than the average joe? Does that mean the average filmgoer shouldn't get to watch the movie? I mean if they're not well versed enough to get Lamberto Bava or Jacques Tourneur trivia then fuck em right?

The whole point of the trivia segements is to put the viewer in the victims place. For that to work you have to ask a question that they could plausibly answer. Or more importantly in the case of this rather obvious Friday The 13th question, plausibly get wrong. Remember, this is 1996. The last Friday had come out only three years before. Jason was still very much in the cultural lexicon at this point. Mrs. Voorhees not so much. While it is unlikely that the average Teenager would have seen Friday The 13th "Twenty Goddamn times" she would have seen it. And Jason would have been the first thing to pop into her head.

This is an effective moment but it’s also a bit of a cheat. The classic rule of the slasher (one not exposited by Randy) is that if the camera cannot see the killer then neither can the characters. No matter how visible the killer would be in the victim’s field of vision the killer reserves the right to jump in to the foreground and background at will with the stealth of damn ninja. Here it’s the same rule reversed. We hear the kill before we see it, which is how it’s excused. But The Killer would still need Speedy Gonzales like speed to evade detection, by Barrymore as the lights are off for only about five seconds. But the camera cannot see him thus he is invisible.
"Guess which door I'm at." The nastiest part of this is that knowing what we know about Billy and Stu there is no correct answer for poor Barrymore to give. Say what you will about Williamson's script but Scream is the rare horror movie that is built to hold up in hindsight.

The knife, the smoke, Barrymore going from victim to Final Girl. Part of what makes the sequence so effective is that it feels much more like the end of a horror film than the beginning of one.

Our first glimpse of Ghost Face comes nearly nine minutes into the sequence. It’s another neat inversion on the old slasher trope. The fear of slashers traditionally comes from their omnipresence. No matter how hard you run, Jason and Michael will keep pace with you without so much as breaking into a power walk, The Strangers will lurk in the background no matter where you go. Ghostface in most of his incarnations takes the exact opposite tack. Even when he’s in pursuit you’re never sure where.

Oh that is a bitch. Another surprisingly lazy thing about much of horror writing is how it treats the character's deaths as forgone conclusions. A little hope can go a long way.

Let us now praise famous Ghostfaces. Say what you will about 80's horror but there was no shortage of memorable monsters from the era. If you mark the beginning of modern horror with Scream, Ghostface remains really the only truly memorable creation. Jigsaw is the only modern monster who can claim similar iconicism and ubiquity. Though it is a bit of a stretch to put those two ghouls in the same genus. Sadako from the Ring is another contender. But technically I consider her more of a trope and she's not American. The only other iconic monsters I can think of are The Firefly Clan and let's face it they're pretty ghettoized in horror fandom. You show a picture Otis Driftwood to a normal they're not going to know who the fuck he is. Most of the Scream copy cats were content to put the killer in a black slicker and have them chase the nubile.

Ghostface is another matter. Like all of the great monsters he's simple enough to pray on your sub-conscience, yet iconic enough to be instantly recognizable add that to the way his appearance subtly mocks his victims...

Yeah that's a great design.

I've written some unkind things about Craven in the past. But only because I've meant them.

One thing I will give to Craven is that his horror across the board has a physicality to it. There is never death without struggle in a Craven film, when he's at his best, it feels real.

The fact that Ghostface has to look and line up his knife before plunging it in, gives this moment the clumsy, unglamorized look that pushes it into the bounds of true horror.

Once again this isn't glamorous, this isn't fun, this isn't cool. No one would think to grin and call this a great kill. This is pathetic, lonely, cruel and sad.

And prolonged and desperate...

That last shot of Barrymore, desperately trying to call for her mother, without even the strength to get it through her brutalized throat, is one of the most purely horrifying images I know of.

In the last moment Barrymore pulls off Ghostface's mask. And reveals something much more terrifying then whatever continuity ignoring reveal the makeup men on the latest Friday The 13th cooked up. It synchs up with the moment that Barrymore wounds Ghostface in the window scene. From the very beginning it is shown that he is not the implacable, invulnerable, supernatural slasher of yesteryear. The face she reveals is a human face. That is terror, not just horror.

Her parents listening to their daughter die is the last underlier that this is a sequence about suffering. Not Fear. It's like something from a Gialli without the distancing effect of theatricality.

And there's the punchline for you. Scream? I believe I will.

Of course after the credits, Scream becomes an entirely different movie. Not a bad movie, as I insisted for awhile (After all I did mark another moment from the film as one of my scariest moments). But just another slasher, albeit a well written and directed one. Ironic for a movie (rightfully) labeled the post modern horror film that Scream should start with sequence of such unabashed reality. That was what Scream promised, a horror movie played real. It could have been great, it settled for good.

Of course a film played entirely at that level could well be unbearable. Think Funny Games but without the comforting distance of being an intellectual exercise. And it certainly wouldn't have sold enough popcorn to guarantee a fourth installment. But I can't help but watch this sequence with the mixture of terror and pity it arouses in me and wonder what might have been had Craven and Williamson had the balls to follow through on the courage of their convictions.

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext and Text: Part 9: Scream

2012-01-05T07:22:00.000-08:00

“Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos morecreative.”

The problem with Scream is that it starts with the promiseof being a great horror film and ends up being a good horror movie instead.

In its superlative opening scene, one of the greatest ofall time and the best in Craven’s career by a wide margin, a very specific typeof horror film is promised. Namely a slasher film played for real. In the famous sequence a lone girl,played by Drew Barrymore, is stalked first playfully and then with graduallyincreasing ugliness by an unseen killer who narrates Barrymore’s own doom.

The focus of the scene, which in many ways bears closerresemblance to the emotional sadism of the Italian Giallis than the blunt jumpscares usually found in American Slashers (But without the Gialli's distancing theatricality), is as much on the emotional anguishas the threat of physical pain and death. More about the suffering of Barrymorecalling weakly for her mother through a crushed windpipe, and her parents helplesslylistening in on the last act of her murder, than it is about the fear generatedby jump scares and dark forms rushing in from just off camera.

There is nothing fun or self referential about Barrymore’sdesperate battle for survival. It’s selfish and cruel act; pathetic lonely andterribly sad. It should make the viewer angry as well as scared. The tone doesnot sustain and the film has no moments of comparable power. Contrast that withwhere the film ends up. Say, the absurd death of Rose McGowan about midwaythrough the film, which is treated after a few moments of tension as an out andout gag. It’s effective and well done for what it is, but any hint of a desireto challenge the viewer or make them the least bit uncomfortable has vanished.It’s a scene to which you could happily munch popcorn too, where as the openingscene makes you want to vomit out your popcorn in the corner.

In short the opening scene of Scream promises a movie betterthan it can deliver. Such a film would be tough to watch, perhaps nighunbearable but if it would have continued in that vein it would have mostlikely made one of the greatest horror films of all time. Though admittedlyit’d be one that people would be unlikely to make sequels to a full decade anda half later. Still after such apromising beginning it is disappointing when Scream shifts into a much morefamiliar genre exercise. There is nothing exactly wrong with Scream, but itreally adds up to nothing more than a slightly above average genre piecedistinguished only by it’s wit (Truth in criticism, Scream did do a lot to repopularize the horror genre. It speaks volumes on how far Horror's stock had fallen that the tagline on the poster insists that the film is a "mystery" while Wes Craven's credit it's called a "thriller" ANYTHING but a horror movie or a slasher in other words.)

Scream is of course, a pastiche on The Slasher genre. Thekilling in the opening scene is just the beginnings of a series of deaths,which the protagonists try to out wit, partially through their knowledge of thevery genre they now inhabit. The film literacy of Scream was it’s centralgimmick. Tarantino himself praised the film as the first (perhaps only) film tofollow successfully in his referential style’s footprints. That being said, for all themovie’s notorious intertextuality only a relatively small portion ofthe film is actually spent being self referential. While the sequels wouldfirst become preoccupied by and later obsessed with “the rules” in the initialentry they’re limited to two self contained scenes MCed by Jamie Kennedy and afew one liners.

Before we delve any further into the filmit’s worth noting that Scream isn’t just a pastiche of the slasher genre ingeneral, but is indeed a very specific kind of pastiche. One that brings to light many of the problemswith the film that would lie mostly dormant in this entry only to bloom when itturned into a franchise (surprisingly decent, and notably self contained 4^thinstallment notwithstanding).

Generally speaking you can divide Slasher films into twogenuses. The first, and I do not hesitate to say purist, is the type in whichthe protagonists encounter the killer randomly, through no fault of their own.The second is the one in which the principles have done something to deserve,or at the very least set in motion, their fate.

For example, in its original incarnation of Halloween Laurie Strode andher pals did nothing more to invoke Michael Myer’s wrath than cross his line ofsight. It was only the sequels that added the unwieldy retcon of Strode’s andMeyer’s familial bond (Which by the by is hardly an uncommon thing for horrorfranchises to do. The mythology tends to stack up thick and fast). The girls inBlack Christmas never asked for a psycho to take up residence in their sororityhouse. The people in the proto slasher Texas Chainsaw Massacre, might be awfulunpleasant but all they wanted from The Sawyers was a little help with theircar. And for all the jokes about weed and sex leading to gruesome death (mostof them stemming from Scream itself) the kids in Friday The 13^th areguilty of nothing more than choosing the wrong place to camp.

If on the other hand, the protagonists say kill one half ofa pair of identical twins (Prom Night). Or severely burned an angrygroundskeeper ten years ago (The Burning). Or helping to cover up the townsconvoluted dark past (My Bloody Valentine, The Prowler) then the principles areat least partially culpable in their fate. This version of the slasher filmreached its dizzying apex in the British slasher knock off Slaughter High, inwhich a group of students trick a nerdy outcast into thinking that the classbeauty wants to make out with him, before stripping him naked, spraying himwith goo while videotaping him, before stabbing his junk with a javelin,electrocuting him, shoving his head down the toilet, before splattering himwith hydrochloric acid and setting him on fire. These same charming individualsthen act all surprised when he came back for revenge at their class reunion.

I say this type of the subgenre is less pure because itstrips away the random element of the slasher genre that can give even theclumsiest examples their own uneasy power. The latter type of slasher insiststhat these kinds of things don’t just happen, that there has to be a reason forthis mayhem, no matter how unlikely or absurd. The former kind of slasherinsists that these things do in fact just happen. They happen all the time and there is precious little you can do about it. I'd say that's pretty damn close to the bedrock essence of horror.

Scream is a film firmly set in the second mode. The killers not only have their reasonstheir reasons have reasons, as those unfortunate enough to watch the filmssequels will find out.

This is the second aspect that keeps the film from beinggreat. It’s detrimental to the film even prior to the convoluted machinationsof the sequels. Rather than being motivated by the free floating malice,boredom and torment that spawned the Columbine Killers, Billy and Stu, asstated, have a very distinct motive. Motives create an explanation and nothingdrains horror of its potency quicker than an explanation.

In all fairness, the dynamic between Billy and Stu, that ofa dominant socipathic personality overriding a weaker one, does match theKlebold/Harris dynamic. Indeed it’s craven Stu (Matthew Lillard) manicallygloating over the helpless Sydney one moment, sobbing “My Dad’s going to be somad at me,” as soon as it becomes clear he’s going to be suffering theconsequences of his actions, who sticks in the mind much more firmly than Stu,who played by Skeet Ulrich glowers and rages in full teen idol fashion.

The film eventually focuses around Sydney Prescott (playedby a likable Neve Campbell as a heroine in full on Jamie Lee Curtis mode). Inseveral stalking sequences (including one where she is ambushed in a schoolbathroom that approaches the tension of the opening). Sydney survives; several ofher acquaintances do not. And everyone unfortunate enough to live soldiers onfor the sequels. In true slasher movie form order is restored and evilvanquished until the next installment, without so much as a stinger todiscomfort their audience on the way out the door.

And it can’t help but feel a little hollow. Ironically it isexactly because the film briefly touches greatness that it can’t help but feelmediocre. If the opening scene were snipped off it would be easy for me toaccept Scream as the fan favorite that it is. A smart, funny, creative fastpaced little programmer.

But a film cannot touch true horror and then blithely shrugit off. Its taint is present for the rest of the film.

The Modern American Horror Movie: Subtext And Text: Part 8: Jacob's Ladder

2011-12-30T10:57:00.000-08:00

(Spoilers. Seriously. If you haven’t seen this filmand have any desire too turn back now)

(Sorry for the weird formatting, I've been trying to get this article up for two days and blogger has been sending me some appropriately hellish obstacles to deal with. This is as close to readable as I have been able to get it.)

You’d be hard pressed to find a horror movie morebeloved, influential, and ambitious, that I like less than Jacob’s Ladder.Why does this film rub me the wrong way so? Many consider it to be a minorclassic. You’d be hard pressed to find a more serious minded film in thegenre from the nineties and it’d be downright impossible to find one sostylish. Yet the sensation I walk away with every time I watch the film is oneof being profoundly annoyed.

Jacob’s Ladder comes to us from AdrianLynne, the maker of such preposterous 80’s kitsch as Flashdance and Foxes (thelatter of which is some damn good camp it must be admitted). Who at the timeseemed to want to be a version of Roger Vadim who got just as turned on byviolence as sex. Though this is Lynne’s only out and out horror film he doeshave a backdoor connection to the genre. It was his Fatal Attractionwhich launched the adult thriller subgenre of the eighties and early nineties.The line between the slasher and the thriller can get awful blurry. This isless perplexing than it originally might appear as the template that Lynne cameup with was the ingenious idea of creating Slasher films that adults wouldn’tbe embarrassed to see and then buffering them with the kind of scenes thatcinemax winkingly refers to as “erotic content”. The subgenre probably hit itsgiddy highpoint with Paul Verhoven’s ode to bad taste and excess BasicInstinct, before William Friedkin totaled the subgenre like a drunkenteenager behind the wheel of an obscenely expensive Audi with Jade.

Jacob’s Ladder follows Jacob Singer, aVietnam veteran who begins experiencing terrifying hallucinations of demons,purgatory and hell. Has he been the victim of a military experiment and coverup? Or are his visions real?

And that right there is the core of my problem withJacob’s Ladder. The film proposes two scenarios that are not just atodds, but are completely mutually exclusive. It’s not that Lynne is playingthings ambiguously. It’s that he’s playing things ambiguously without meaningto. It feels like either Lynne is completely clear on what is happening andjust can’t communicate it. Or alternately, that Lynne shot each scene both waysand then cut different versions of events together at random.

Of course this is before, Lynne for the extralittle kick to the balls, decides that the real answer to the question posed is“None of the above.” In a twist that would have shamed Shyamalan, it turns outthat the entire film has been Jacob’s hallucination as he lays dying on agurney in Vietnam. You can argue that what Singer is experiencing isn’t theafterlife at all, but just the frenzied projections of a paniced dyingmind, fueled by “The Ladder” or no.

Lets set aside the sheer narrative cowardice of therevelation and instead focus on its profound stupidity. As there is no evidencein this ending that Jacob has actually been experiencing the afterlife, we’reto believe that what? Jacob has somehow hallucinated the nineties? That hisdying mind has been projected into the future and he’s brought back club musicwith him?

It is as though Lynne watched Alan Parker’s TheWall (from which Jacob’s Ladder’s iconic train station sequence is liftedbeat for beat) while he half listened as some random concepts of the ChristianAfterlife where vaguely explained to him by a man reading sparknotes andinterpersed with some New Age vagary. Then he took down the parts that henearly remembered and stuck them into the film at random in an attempt to beDEEP man. It’s easy to imagine how someone like say, William Peter Blatty mayhave taken the material and central conceit and worked it into somethinggenuinely intriguing and moving. But Lynne is far too preoccupied with keepingthe audience off balance with the cheapest ways possible to ever risk actuallybecoming invested in the story he is telling, let alone the theology. Likeeverything else in Jacob’s Ladder it’s there just for show.

The films other set of subtext, the feeling of betrayal and obfuscation by the government that American Citizentry felt in the wake of Vietnam, fairs a little better. Indeed at times Jacob's Ladder feels like the type of horror film that Oliver Stone would have made if The Hand proved to be a big hit. Supporting roles filled by the likes of Ving Rhames, powerful masculine people reduced to shaken shells in the aftermath of Vietnam, speak just as clearly to the dislocate horror of Jacob's experience as any number of head shaking demons. But the film abruptly drops that line of inquiry, after some standard conspiracy boilerplate. Like the religious subtext its easy to see how this COULD have made for rich material. Like Deathdream, Jacob's Ladder could make the act of "Homecoming" for a returning vet into a literal inescapable nightmare, the once familiar world turned harsh and threatening through unshakeable experience. But as with everything else in Jacob's Ladder it falls by the wayside. It's ultimately just window dressing.

Which is not to say that I’m entirely ignorant orimmune to the film’s better points. It cannot be denied that Lynne is skillfulat creating an environment and atmosphere that are at times genuinelyunsettling and imagery that is genuinely upsetting. There is a pervasive air ofhopeless that hangs over the movie like a pall. Lynne’s oppressively grey colorpalette and rotting utilitarian architecture manage to capture what being stuckin Purgatory might actually feel like, where the brief moments of respitemerely throw the awfulness of everything into sharp relief and the shapes thatcome looming out of the darkness are too awful to contemplate. There arescenes, including the infamous “hospital” set piece that serves as Jacob’sdecent into hell with a capital H, that are as intense and disturbing asanything I’ve seen in a horror film. A mesmerizing grotesque tableau ofBoschian squalor projected on the modern world. A vision of half seen, obscuredabominations, shot with a saturated, deep, disturbing pallet and edited with amaddening rhythm. If the film was as good as its isolated best momentswere, then it would be a true masterpiece.

It’s tough to over estimate just how effective andinfluential some of the imagery in the film is. Aggressively abstract,influenced more by Francis Bacon than the likes of Jack Pierce or Tom Savini,it is no exaggeration to say that Jacob’s Ladder legitimately created its ownschool of monster design. The look of Jacob’s Ladder has been extraordinarilyinfluence, most famously, though not exclusively in Silent Hill. Indeed, muchof the look and aesthetic that came to typify J-Horror in the late nineties andearly 00’s can be traced back to Jacob’s Ladder. Making J-Horror’s eventualstylistic influence on the last decade of American Horror somewhat ironic.

And yet for all the brilliance of its design thefilm resolutely fails to connect. Tim Robbins tries his best, making for asympathetic everyman, but he is marooned. The film repeats the same cycles ofevents ad nauseum, Robbins sees someone they talk awhile, he thinks they’re ademon, or they are frightened off by some faceless government conspiracy. They shoutat each other and then they depart the movie never to be seen again.Subsequently a faceless demon comes and shakes it head at Robbins and one feelsthat the Bauhaus should be in the background playing “Bela Lugosi Is Dead”somewhere. Eventually the events are not so much resolve, so much as they justfinally wind down before the final rug pulling that is.

I think of the pervasive feeling of doom that Jacob’s Ladderestablishes and then I think of the films of Val Lewton, whose films were ripewith decay. “Our movies do have a message.” Lewton once irately remarkedto a higher up at the studios, “And that message is, ‘Death is good.’” Try asit might, Jacob’s Ladder does not quite have the nerve to deliver that message.It does not understand as Lewton did, that death may not only be good becausewe may be delivered into the arms of the angels. Sometimes it is just enoughthat we escape the devils all around us on the Earth.

The Modern American Horror Movie: Subtext And Text: Part 7: Habit

2011-12-20T09:03:00.000-08:00

If the 90’s was a bad time for horror in general, with theestablished franchises that had powered the eighties losing an exponentiallyincreasing amount of steam with each entry and established horror Maverickslike Dario Argento, John Carpenter and Brian DePalma losing their verve with aspeed and totality that were down right disconcerting, then in terms of newvoices the decade was utterly bereft.

The great exception to the rule is Larry Fessenden, whoseparticular brand of naturalistic genre filmmaking made an unlikely fit with theindependent film boom of the nineties. It is not many horror filmmakers who canboast of cameos in Kelly Reichardt movies.

Fessenden himself has evolved along a similarlyidiosyncratic path into an elder statesman/patron saint of the horror genre.Though seemingly never quite into the filmmaker his fans wished him to be.Despite some flirtation with the mainstream, such as when he was briefly in line todirect the American remake of The Orphanage for Guillermo Del Toro, Fessendenhas never crossed over into the larger scale production and has been dissatisfyinglyunprolific. To look at his body of work is to feel the frustration of adirector who has not been able to live up to his full potential. For a man whohas such influence in the genre, and whose opinions and endorsements carry suchweight, it can be surprising to remember that Fessenden only has four featuresto his name (as well as an assortment of shorts and miscellanea, such as theaforementioned excellent Fear Itself episode, Skin And Bones) and that indeedhis most lasting contribution to the genre might be the mentorship andpatronage that he has provided for his protégé Ti West.

Still even if Fessenden’s voice never gets the chance todevelop and play to the audience that it deserves to, it is still a distinctand valuable one and Habit, though dated, remains an invigorating introductionto it.

Habit follows Sam (played by Fessenden) a bartender reelingafter the death of his father and a break up with his long time girlfriend. He’srapidly losing control of his drinking. At this vulnerable juncture, he meetsAnna, an exotic somewhat kinky woman with pronounced exhibitionist andsadomasochist tendencies who he becomes obsessed with. Strange things begin tohappen to Sam, a friend sickens and then disappears; wounds and sores suddenlyappear on his body only some of them attributable to his and Anna’s violentsex, he gains sensitivity to light and sound finding everyday sensationabrasive and Anna just can’t seem to stop biting him in bed. The film strikesjust the right tone, ambiguous without being coy, as it poses the question ofwhether Anna’s apparent vampirism is real, or the product of Sam’s alcohol frayedmind. The word vampire isn’t even used until the final fifteen minutes of thefilm.

Fessenden self financed the film and cast it with friends.He himself takes the lead role and does a convincing job of it. Looking like aman legitimately tattered by his life style before the possible curse of the undead is put upon him. Bythe end of the film when he really starts to unravel Fessenden is all tooconvincing as a man with no happy ending in store. Fessenden’s real find thoughis Meredith Snaider as Anna, in her only film role. Snaider, who looks about asthreatening as Natalie Portman in The Garden State for the most of the runtime,yet manages to give both all too believable sexual heat, and a truly unhingedferal look. This 98 pound PixieCut girl manages to feel like a real threat. It’s a remarkable job.

As we’ve already discussed, Vampires have been through somany permutations that it’s almost impossible to find an angle on them thathasn’t been done before. Fessenden certainly wasn’t the first to offer a visionof a deglammed Vampire, one need look no further than a genre touchstone likeGeorge Romero’s relentlessly mundane Vampire film Martin to find a film thatpredates it. Nor was it the first or the last to draw a parallel betweenaddiction and vampirism (Indeed just a year later, Abel Ferrara the patronsaint of independent, lo-fi, New York based, arthouse exploitation films wouldrelease a vampire film with the even more on the nose title The Addiction. Thefilm was shot after Habit was screened in festivals, but released before itgained a wide release. I’ve always suspected that a certain amount of jealousyat the new kid on the block may have inspired Ferrara in that case).

Yet it pays to remember that at the time the dominant imageof the vampire was more strongly tied gothic romanticism than it ever had beenbefore, thanks to the likes of Anne Rice, Neil Jordan and Francis Ford Coppala.Even if Fessenden’s version of the vampire wasn’t exactly original, hisnaturalistic 16mm blood sucker was certainly a bracing piece of counterprogramming when compared to the gauche baroque aesthetic of Jordan’s andCoppala’s films. Notable also for the way that it managed to seamlesslyincorporate the gothic school’s panting sexual heat into the more veriteversion.

Still though it’s an interesting debut, it is a flawed one.It shares two of the main sins of the nineties independent movement. Repetition(when we come to the eighth scene of Sam and Anna morosely pumping away it’shard not to wish that Fessenden had limited himself to four) and long scenes of“behavior” substituting for things actually happening on the screen. At just ahair under two hours Habit feels indulgent. Fessenden’s real problem is hislack of confidence in his own material. The film draws understated parallelsbetween Sam’s own problems with substance abuse, (his failure to quit drinking,a suggested oral fixation with the cigarettes he routinely promises to quit,Anna herself dubbing his behavior impulsive) and his incipient vampirism. AsSam comes to more and more resemble an exposed nerve, several of his friendsfirst mistake his sickness for a hangover. After a long Thanksgiving Weekend,Sam has his friend pull over by the side of the road so he can vomit, and eventhe viewer isn’t sure if this is the result of Anna feasting on his blood thenight before or the after effects of his drinking.

Alas, Fessenden is not sure that this is getting through soabout twenty minutes before the end he kindly stops the film so that Sam’s annoyinglyself conscience proto hipster friend can deliver a long, long monologue abouthow Vampirism is like everywhere in society, on the TV, in a bottle man, evenlike in Breakfast Cereals and I’m sorry but did he JUST BLOW YOUR PETTYBOURGEISE MIND!?!?!

Clumsy moments like this can’t be said to ruin the film, butthey do keep it out of the first tier. The lack of confidence keeps Habit stuckat the level of a good film rather than a great one.

The annoying thing is that Fessenden is a director capableof subtlety both in his scripting and in the staging of his creepilyunderstated scare scenes. Part of what so endears Fessenden to his fans is thathe’s a genre director who so obviously knows and adores the genre. For all thecinema verite styling in the everyday scenes, the feel of the horror in Habithas more in common with the Universal films than it does what had been made inthe twenty year prior. Fessenden employs, and employs well, such chestnuts asthe scary looking hand creeping over the unsuspecting lead’s shoulder and theapproaching figure who disappears than reappears in shadow. In one of the film’s best sequence’sAnna gives Sam an object at a party given in honor of Sam’s late Father, anarchaeology professor. One of hisfather’s friend’s happens to spot the object and is astounded by it. Noexplanation is given, no long winded “Why this is from that cult in Wales thatworshiped the Blood God Hugger Mugger!” It’s just a moment of suggestivedissonance that conveys much while making very little explicit. Where there afew more moments like it and a few less like his friend’s monologue Habit couldhave been truly great.

Habit must be content to be an ambitious, well meant,almost. Like the career of it’s maker Habit seeks to push the boundaries of thegenre and like the director it just falls short. But the both of them have myadmiration and affection for trying.

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text: Part 6: Candyman

2011-12-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

We move then, from Barker to Barker. Though he will befactoring much less in our discussion of this particular film, as hisinvolvement in this production as Executive Producer was much lesscomprehensive than his writer director role in Hellraiser and as such Candymanis not nearly as faithful a recreation of Barker’s short story “The Forbidden”,either narratively or aesthetically, as Hellraiser was of The Hellbound Heart.

What Barker does lend to the production and what ultimatelydefines Candyman as one of the most notable horror films of the nineties is itsseriousness of purpose. As I’ve mentioned before the nineties were a particularlydire decade for horror. Perhaps the worst on record, pretty much across theboard with every medium producing sub par work. Thusly Candyman becomes notablesimply because the makers do not act as though they are ashamed to be making ahorror film. Seen this way Candyman becomes something like a sprinter who winsa race because all his other competitors tripped at the starting line.

Candyman is one of those unfortunate movies that looks muchbetter on paper than on celluloid. On the surface it all looks great, a first rate cast, goodsource material, genuine talent behind the camera, and an admirable socialconscience. It has a score by Phillip Glass for the love of God (and a hauntingone at that), how’s that for ambition? Not to mention the fact that it givesTony Todd, one of the all too few genuine black horror icons, a role that isboth his signature and worthy of his talents (another unfortunate rarity inTodd’s career). Unfortunately while all the elements are brought together forsomething great, the execution is ultimately lacking.

Candyman follows Helen Lyle, a grad student doing adissertation on urban legends who stumbles upon the myth of The Candyman thathas taken root in Cabrini Green, one of the city’s most feared projects. Thestory tells of a black artist who was tortured to death after his affair with a whitewoman and comes calling for revenge when his name is spoken five times into amirror. In her investigation she comes across many real world corollaries tothe myth, further convincing her that this is just another piece of socialanthropology, only to find that as her investigation draws up more and moreinterest and talk about The Candyman, that the myth is gaining power and mightjust come looking for her.

To my mind, the most interesting thing about Candyman isthat it’s almost a perfect inversion of the films we’ve been discussing so far.While most of the films we’ve been talking about have a sociopolitical veneer,but are mythic at their core; Candyman is a film that purports to be aboutmyth, but whose core is really entirely sociopolitical.

Candyman is a horror film for the crack epidemic era. It’s afilm in which the specter of white guilt is just as active as any of the actualghosts who haunt the Cabrini Green Projects. Even the central figure of TheCandyman is less a product of myth than of sociology. The Candyman is a productof America’s unquiet racist past; unlike the slashers who haunted themultiplexes in the eighties the Candyman is not merely the result of any oneperson’s or groups wrong doing but an entire society’s attitude; even the way that he was killed, a lynch mob of hundreds suggests a vast general bodyrather than a specific group of people. He is literally the ghost of pastracial violence come to haunt the present.

Much is made as well, of the lead character’s presence as a“tourist” in the world that she is investigating. To her, Cabrini Green and therecent murders there are an interesting subject for her dissertation, to theresident’s it’s their day to day life. At the end of the day they can’t crossthe freeway and go back to their chic Condo. Most of the pre supernaturaltension comes from watching as Helen semi-ignorantly puts the residents in realdanger with her questions and explorations. Unexamined privilege becomes asmuch a danger as supernatural presence. Viginia Madsen gives a greatperformance, believably able to play a character both very smart and very naïve.

It is intriguing the way that the film layers in levels ofreality that have grown around the legend like sediment. The Candyman issupposed to appear through the mirror. It is discovered that the mirrors in thebathrooms of Cabrini Green simply cover holes that lead into the adjoiningapartment. It turns out that a local gang leader has partially adopted theCandyman persona, using his signature weapon to instill even greaterintimidation. In the film’s most effective sequence Helen stumbles into agraffiti covered room that has been turned into a kind of shrine/dwellingplace/peace offering, from the residents of Cabrini Green. In a sequence worthyof Val Lewton, filled with startling imagery Helen stumbles around the hauntedroom, adorned with a giant mural of the Candyman and inscrutable phrases. Thechamber in temperament and purpose resembles a Shinto shrine more than thetypical dwelling place of evil found in most horror films. It’s a fascinatingglimpse into the way the supernatural molds and forms the contours of lifearound it.

The entire environment of Cabrini Green, is perhaps the apexof the film’s aim to make gothic horror out of modern life. A hulking grey massthat seems to be made entirely out of despair and broken dreams, Cabrini Greenranks with Session 9 and The Shining as one of the great horror environments.The fact that The Green was a real housing project adds another level of uneaseand despair to the environment. Like Herzog’s films (and Brad Anderson’sexpiriment) Cabrini Green has “the voodoo of location”. Fear seeps out of itlike toxic vapor.

At the center of that presence is of course The Candymanhimself. That one kernel of unreality that refuses to be banished. Todd givesthe character an oppressive, indelible presence. Six foot five, with a solid“brick shit house” figure and a voice that reverberates on the exact frequencyto turn bowels into water Todd has a striking screen presence to be sure, aidedby character design that is equally remarkable, the cruel iron hook stuckunceremoniously into the center of his raw bloody stump, his immaculatelytailored coat and matching shoes, the bees that announce his presence, crawlingfrom the inside of his mouth and in one of the film’s few big special effectsmoment, bursting from his chest where an entire hive is housed. In an era whoselazy driving principles of design can be summed up with “Give him a big knife,”A character as singular and compelling, both visually and narratively as TheCandyman can’t help but stand out as a gem.

A ghost who is only as real as he is perceived to be hasbeen done before but it’s done particularly well here. Portrayed in graffitiart slipped into the corner of many shots Candyman is a literal presencein the entire movie. Yet he only manifests when Helen’s research begins to castdoubt on his existence (this perhaps being the ultimate expression in theseries of “well meaning white woman stirs up trouble” actions from her). TheCandyman’s actions can be read bizarrely as those of self defense. He onlybecomes present to ensure his existence.

With all of this rich material, thoughtful design andisolated scenes of greatness it is just a shame that it doesn’t work a little better as a whole. At it’s bestit’s horror provides a chilling dislocative feel. After her first encounterwith Todd, Helen wakes up in the midst of a bizarre crime scene apparently theperpetrator. At moments like this Candyman captures a truly nightmarish feel.

Unfortunately these are often countered with scenes likethat of the prologue, a telling of the Candyman legend that climaxes with adistracting Ted Raimi wearing a white fright wig mugging for the camera.

Candyman is a film that takes it’s time and not always in agood way. For a ninety nine minute long film it plays long. Slow paced andportentous it’s one of those unfortunate films that doesn’t trust its bestsequences to speak for themselves, and buttresses them with unnecessary scenesof people speaking in hushed voices in dark rooms about the crazy stuff theyhave just seen.

If Candyman must be contented with being only half of agreat film, it is at the very least a genre film made with real ambition,substance and style. Those should never just be dismissed. With the materialsthat it assembled Candyman could have been one of the greatest horror films ofall time. Instead it must settle simply for being one of the greatest horrorfilms of the nineties. A distinction, like being the smartest man in Turlock,that doesn’t amount to all that much. Still it’s only real sin is that itsreach exceeds its grasp and as always there are much worse problems for a filmto have.

The Modern American Horror Movie: Subtext And Text: Part 5: Hellraiser

2011-12-08T12:38:00.001-08:00

“I have seen the future of horror and it is Clive Barker.”

-Stephen King-

That was the quote that launched a million expectations.Stephen King anointing his heir apparent. A British art school grad, given todark omni sexual fantasies. It didn’t quite turn out. Though Barker achieved a level of fame well above most horror authors, even at his height in the late eighties/early nineties he never quite achieved either the household name status, nor the the lasting impact on the genre that King did.

In hindsight its obvious that Barker was far tooidiosyncratic to be the future of anything. How can one follow in the footsteps of Barker without being hopelessly derivative? Or for that matter even by being hopelessly derivative? Can you picture aweary publisher reading over yet another manuscript and saying “Oh God, notanother dark fable written in baroque yet aloof European prose that mixes omnisexuality, ultra violence, bizarre characters and an unorthodox but distinctlyTheistic Judeo-Christian philosophy. I suppose the author is another handsome renaissance man who is also anoutspoken voice for gay rights and open about his experimentations with sadomasochism. Yawn. Whenever will these stop coming in?”

I for one cannot. Barker is doing the toughest thing ingenre literature, writing with a voice that is genuinely his own.

Barker has one of the most distinctive voices in horrorfiction. And if it is all the same to you I’d like to leave the discussion ofthat voice and Barker's peculiar set of skills and weaknesses at that for themoment. Suffice it to say we will return to his written work later in thisbook. For our purposes at the moment it is important only to note that Barkerdescends from a distinctly separate lineage of the authors and filmmakers wehave been discussing. While nearly everyone we’ve discussed has descendedfrom Lovecraft’s brand of materialist horror, Barker like Lynch is much more inline with Arthur Machen’s brand of spiritual horror. There is the sense inBarker as there is in Machen of the material world breaking open to reveal thetrue forces of which our world is merely a pale shadow. All of his stories are about his ordinaryprotagonists breaking through the surface of the material world andencountering the forces beyond to their wonder or horror, finding their destructionor salvation there in. In Barker the former two are interchangeable and the latter two usually indistinguishable .

Hellraiser is perhaps the surest expression of this inBarker’s career. It taps deeply into old wells of power and myth. One doesn’t even need to determine ofBarker’s film is social or mythic. It’s as certainly a mythic horror film ashas ever been made. What is worth noting is how it is mythic. Not in a Grimmfairy tale way, like the other mythic films we’ve discussed. Barker’s Cenobitesare older than folklore. To find their source you have to go back to the oldeststories we have. And see the cenobites as the latest in a long line of mortalstransformed and made monstrous by their out of control appetites and hubristiccourting of the Gods. The four creature’s present in the film are obviously anddisquietingly human in origin. Only unrecognizably mutilated by their desires.Whether it’s the sexual connotations present in Pinhead and his consort, or thebloated leech like creature, whose pale fleshy face looks even more insectilethanks to its missing ears and eyes. The Greeks would have recognized themwell.

Hellraiser, adapted by Barker from his scant novella TheHellbound Heart, follows Frank a bored libertine who discovers a puzzle boxthat once unlocked promises to take him to new heights of experience. It does that and more when it summonsThe Cenobites, “Demons to some. Angels to others.” Beings dedicated to pushingthe humans they come across into new realms of sensation at the cost of theirbodies and souls. Quicker than you can say “Jesus Wept.” They destroy Frank,leaving the tattered remnants of his spirit in his family home. A home that Frank's brother Larry and his estranged wife soon move into.

After his spirit is resurrected with an inadvertent bloodoffering from Larry at the sight of the autoerotic vivisection, Frank is rebornas a terrible half formed mass of raw flesh, bone and tissue. He re-seduces hisbrother’s wife (they had an affair before the wedding) and coerces her intoseducing and murdering men; the sacrifices bringing him closer and closer tohuman form. Hellraiser becomes something like a Joyce Carol Oates novel of emotionalS&M, if Oates routinely wrote about characters who no longer have theirskin. But time is running out for Frank, his niece has attracted the attentionof the Cenobites once again and they are coming for him.

A word on those Cenobites, beyond their preternaturallydisturbing design the other remarkable thing about them is just how little theyare in the film. Those unfortunate enough to be familiar with the sequels,which became exponentially more unwatchable with each lamentable entry and followedthe tiresome rule “All Cenobites All The Time” may expect them to makeappearances throughout the film. Instead they only show up three times in thecourse of the movie. As a result after their striking initial appearance, Barkerallows them to grow in the mind off screen, giving them a feeling ofintimidating true otherworldliness not usually present in screen monsters. It’s not that he plays coy, in thethree sequences in which they are present they are seen clearly. It’s just thatBarker has far too much respect for his beings to trot them out for genericstalk sequences as though they are no more than run of the mill slashers. Theyare meant to be creatures who inspire awe not things to jump out of dark corners and scream "Boogity Boogity".

Another part of what makes Hellraiser such an unusuallyeffective adaptation, is that it recognizes and corrects the weaknesses of itssource material. Most crucially is the changed role of Kirsty, who in the bookwas a co-worker of “Rory’s” who harbored an unrequited crush on him and in thefilm is his daughter. As Larry’s character in both book and film is that of adoormat, bullied by his ice queen of a wife. His principle use to show howvirile Frank is by looking as much a milk sop as possible. By turning Kristyinto his would be lover, Barker had the dilemma of making his central character’sdefining attribute that they were in love with a milk sop. The writing of“normal” characters has never exactly been Barker’s strong suit; his interestis plainly in the horrific ongoings upstairs and beyond dimensions. But Kirstygoes above and beyond the call; in the novella she hardly rises to the rank ofplaceholder. Changing the relationship to a Father Daughter bond not only putsa stronger more believable bond at the center of the film as well as making hercharacter a good deal less pathetic.

Another aspect of the adaptation is how acutely Barker’scinematic style mirrors his prose. Slightly alien and aloof, highly sexual yetnot quite sensual. As in his prose he gets hung up on odd details, shootingordinary objects at odd, yet unforced angles. Bringing out the strangeness inthe everyday in a way that manages to feel natural rather than expressionistic.Also a hallmark of Barker is that the characters in the story are all pointedlyadult. Three of the four leads are conspicuously well into middle age (indeedthe changing of Kirsty’s role may have had less to do with narrative repairthan it did with a certain desperation to shoehorn someone young into thisthing).

Also translating well from one medium to the other isBarker’s somewhat abstract approach to violence. It’s a hard effect to put yourfinger on. While on the surface Barker uses just as much gore and latex as anyTom Savini opus, the effect is markedly different. Like the Cenobites there issomething compelling about the aftermath to the terrible deeds in Barker’sfilms. In short, Cronenberg’s gore makes you want to look away. Barker’s goremakes you want to look closer.

Perhaps it has something to do with the way that Barkerblurs the line between fantasy and horror, an attribute he has in common withthe aforementioned British New Wave of the late eighties. If Barker cannotrightly be said to be a member of said movement, he is at the very leastaesthetically sympathetic. And though Barker has written works that standfirmly in Fantasy (Abaret, Weaveworld) and horror (The Damnation Game,Coldheart Canyon) there is usually at least a bit of bleed over between thegenres. This is the case more so with Hellraiser than The Hellbound Heart.Parts as which, such as the scene where Kirsty first unlocks the box and opensa door to the cenobite’s world in her hospital room and discovers a waitingmonster, feel as though they have been imported from an exceedingly dark JimHenson film.

Also in keeping with the author’s style are the handful ofelements that are just plain not as effective as the Barker thinks theyare. Barker as an author tends tooverstuff his stories with one element too much for his poor suspension ofdisbelief to take. In this case we have the appearance of a cricket eatinghomeless man who turns into the winged demon from the end of Evil Dead 2, forthe film’s inexplicable denouncement. It is suffice to say an extremely sillyway to end the film. When Pinhead croons, “We have such sights to show you,”the spine chills with the implications of an unknowable torrent of worldsbeyond ours. When the unconvincing metamorphosis occurs to the homeless man itjust feels very silly. All ofBarker’s works contain such alternating moments of the sublime and ridiculous and God helphim the man seems to have no idea which is which… Ahem, but as I said, more onthis later.

If then Hellraiser falls short of a perfect film, it isnonetheless one of admirable ambition, made with no small amount of talent. Amore or less fitting summation for Barker’s career as a whole. As both anauthor and director the thing about Barker that keeps me coming back, no matterhow many baffled reactions I have to his work, is that he emphatically does notsee horror as something cheap. Does not even see horror as an end in itself. InBarker’s hand, horror is a tool. A tool for what? I’m not sure; I’d better keepreading.

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text: Part 4: The Fly

2011-12-06T11:13:00.001-08:00

Rarely has a director’s particular set of obsessionsdovetailed so perfectly with a work for hire film as Cronenberg’s version ofThe Fly. Cronenberg’s skill as a filmmaker has always been predicated on hisability to blend form and content. Presenting his disturbing concepts with achilly formalism that makes them all too believable. Yet nowhere, not even inhis most personal films, has his theme and imagery been better synthesized thanin The Fly.

Cronenberg’s films are driven by a true visceral horrortowards the physical. A strident intellectual he has an innate distrust of thebody. The flesh, new or otherwise disturbs him in that it is undependable andunquantifiable. The body in Cronenberg’s film is a stinking decaying meat suitthat eventually betrays and destroys the mind it is supposed to serve. Even inhis non horror films horrible things happen to it (look at the facial gunshotwounds in A History Of Violence). In their approach to the body Cronenberg’sfilms transcend mere violence and approach desecration.

It is interesting to note that though people tend to talkabout Cronenberg as if he is some sort of libertine (let us recall the nowfallen out of use nickname Dave Depraved) his films are incredibly distrustfulof sensuality. Even when characters are seen as physically enjoying themselves(think the shuddering, cooing flesh pods in Existenz, or the wound sex inCrash,) the sight appears to us to be repulsive. Though their approach wouldcertainly differ, a Calvinist preacher would whole heartedly agree with themessages found in the like of They Came From Within. Sex, both wouldagree, turns you into an out of control animal, completely divorced from yourhigher brain.

All the sources of horror in Cronenberg’s films come fromnatural organic function seen through a lens darkly with undisguised disgust.Sex in They Came From Within and Crash, injury in Rabid, pregnancy and childbirth with The Brood. Even priorto The Fly Cronenberg explored the theme of an intellect trapped in thewithering body that was betraying him with The Dead Zone (which for the recordgets my vote for best Stephen King adaptation). In The Fly we have theexpression of the ultimate insult the body has in store for the proud mind.Illness, decay and ultimately death.

In The Fly, scientist Seth Brundle (played by Jeff Goldblum)develops a transporter. After starting a relationship with reporter GeenaDavis, Goldblum tests the device on himself. Combining his DNA with a Flycaught in the transporter in the process. Rather than the instantaneoustransformation seen in the original story and film, this initially manifestsitself as an increase in strength and energy. The "disease with a purpose" only gradually reveals itselffor what it is as Goldblum begins a gradual deterioration in both body and mindas the insect DNA overrides his own.

When trying to determine whether The Fly is a social horrorfilm or a mythic one the answer can be surprisingly tough to pin down. Afterall, it’s tough to find a fear more universal than death and the way the storyis told taps into that fear in a very primal way. Change the transporter into awicked witch and make the slow process of genetic unraveling the result of acurse rather than a science experiment and you reveal a film that is as Grimmfairy tale at its core as Evil Dead. Whatever social vagaries you put on it thefear of death is immutable and therefore mythic by its very nature.

Yet there is something about The Fly that seems to cry outfor allegory. For years the rumor persisted that the film was “really” aboutCronenberg’s father’s death from cancer. This rumor continued despiteCronenberg pointing out, with increasing (and justified) irritation over thecourse of two decades that his Father did not actually die of cancer. Afterthis message finally got through people simply moved onto other allegories. Thefilm was really about AIDS, genetic engineering, mental illness, Cronenberghimself has claimed it’s about the aging process. Odd for a film with a core souniversal people have a desire to make it about something specific.

At least part of this is due to Goldblum, who makes SethBrundel such a unique individual. Though much (entirely earned) praise has beenbeen given to Chris Wallas’s amazing practical effects, they are only half ofthe battle. There is a particular, peculiar art on bringing life to latex DougJones is the modern masters, Ron Perlman is another who can pull it off. Someactors get behind heavy makeup and just freeze. Goldblum is a natural, even thoughthere is no comparable performance in his career.

It’s an intensely physical role, even before the prostheticwork begins. The way Goldblum shrinks from physical contact, the hyper sensitiveway he darts his head around always in motion, the way his body moves with theincreasingly jagged and erratic cadence of his conversation. His body languagebecomes gradually less human, first reduced to hobbling around like an invalidand later moving with a hideous grace and strength. Long before pieces of him startfalling off, Goldblum is all too convincing as a man no longer in control ofhimself.

Goldblum also brings with him a gallows sense of humor.Cronenberg has never exactly been a filmmaker in danger of earning the nickname“Chuckles” and most of The Fly is as stark as anything else in his oeuvre. ButGoldblum brings a despairing deadpan to the role. Whether through Brundlefly’sincreasingly unhinged monologues, or the cheery faux Mr. Wizard tone he takeswhen describing, then demonstrating his new digestive process. The punch lineto which, an utterly appalled reaction shot from Davis’s heretofore unflappableex, is as pitch perfect a moment of gallows humor as exists in the genre.

But despite his reputation as the master of Body Horror itis really the unraveling of Seth Brundle’s mind that I suspect hit closest tohome for Cronenberg. Bad enough to have an intact mind trapped in a body thatlets it down (The Dead Zone, Videodrome) or a untrustworthy mind trapped in a healthy body (Spider) but to lose both sides of yourselfsimultaneously that is real horror. As long as Brundle is able to document hisdeath with scientific detachment and gallows humor (Crystallizing in thehorrific Museum Of Brundle, a collection of shucked off body parts that hekeeps in glass jars in his medicine cabinet) there is still the sense thatthere is something to save. Once that starts to go Brundle is well and trulydoomed.

In the films key scene Brundle notes the turning point, “I'man insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over...and the insect is awake.” He ends the monolouge with a line, "I'll hurt you if you stay," that is as chilling in its blunt simplicity as the dispassionate way Goldblum says it, as though it is a matter of little importance to him. It is this quote that brings us to the core of thefilm. The spear point of horror, the loss of self and reversion to the brutal“core brain” self. To Cronenberg humanity is a dream and that core primalinsect brain that runs on brutal instinct that is the true reality. LikeLovecraft Cronenberg is not really drawing horror from the unnatural, but fromthe natural.

The Fly’s reputation only continues to grow. As Rue Morgueeditor Dave Alexander put it in his insightful essay on the film,

“ I’d go sofar as to say that The Fly is more topical now than ever because ourrelationship with our bodies has become increasingly antagonistic. Since thefilm came out, tattooing and pircing have become commonplace to the point whereyou can go to a shopping mall to be modified.,,Beneath the skin, the popularityof plastic surgery has skyrocketed, bringing us Botox injections and a stunningvariety of implants. Deeper still, we enchance ourselves with chemicals;specialty diets, supplements and even energy drinks are part of our dailyroutines.”

The point is well taken, and it’s true that The Fly is oneof the handful of horror films that has gotten more potent as time has gone on,not less. Social horror films trade on the fear of their time and their effectlessens when that time passes and the majority of people no longer shares thosefears. Cronenberg tapped into a deep area of unease in the relationship peoplehave with their bodies, and that unease is only accelerating as we begin tofind the tools that will make Cronenberg’s nightmares of New Flesh a reality.

Perhaps that is the true measure and power of the mythicfilm. It penetrates so deeply that it plays as social horror no matter what erait is viewed in. Cronenberg’s film taps into a very old fear; a fear that likeBrundle is metamorphosing before our eyes into something terrible and new. As one character so succinctly put it, “Beafraid. Be very afraid.”

The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text: Part 3: Day Of The Dead

2011-11-26T15:10:00.001-08:00

“This place is a fourteen mile tombstone. With an epitaphthat nobody is going to bother to read.”

In many ways Day Of The Dead remains the odd man out of thefour films that make up the main of Romero’s Dead Teratology. Neither assuccessful and iconic as Night Of The Living Dead or Dawn Of The Dead, nor aspassionately defended by its apologists as Land Of Dead. In a lot of ways it’sunderstandable. Despite the many treats it has for genre fans, including TomSavini’s career best makeup and a sense of ambition that is truly impressive,Day Of The Dead is an abrasive film, slow paced, claustrophobic, filled withpeople who are difficult to like. And while its certainly feels allegorical, itdoesn’t break down as neatly into metaphor as Dawn or Night. Yet it is thesevery elements that arguably make Day Of The Dead the ultimate expression of theApocalypse through dysfunction that Romero has spent his entire career makingmovies about.

Day Of The Dead takes place in asmall military outpost somewhere on the Florida coast. The timeline is muchfurther along than it was in either of the previous Dead films (Romero’soriginal script places it at five years after Night. But the film itself givesno specific date). At this point society hasn’t just collapsed, it hasimploded. The survivors the film follows, a mix of soldiers and scientists,divide their time between fruitless experiments and tentative searches forother living people. Though based on the glimpses of the outside world we get,a brief detour in a clearly abandoned city, it’s all too clear that these mighttruly be the last people on Earth. As their numbers dwindle infightingincreases. The survivors burrow further and further into their respectivefactions as the threat of all out war between the last of the living becomesmore and more likely.

When dealing with Day Of The Deadit is important to keep in mind that it is, to some extent, a compromised film.The film we have is the result of a rushed rewrite that Romero was forced toperform when the bulk of his financing abruptly fell through. Romero’s originalscript for Day Of The Dead was much more ambitious. Much closer in terms ofscale, narrative and theme to Romero’s later Land Of The Dead. It followed acrew of scavengers who stumble across a fortified tropical island that hasgrown a triangular society similar to the one in Land. Divided between it’sdecadent upper class “country club” boosters, their military enforcers, and thelower dregs of society who are literally used as food, fuel for scientistsexperiments to condition the zombies and are themselves distracted with heapingqualities of drugs, sex and violence.

It’s an interesting, ambitiousfilm. In terms of scope it’s massive, as large a leap in scale from Dawn Of TheDead as Dawn is from Night. In some ways it’s even more ambitious than Landended up being. Clearly the collapse of the project hurt Romero. He’s beenworking in images, concepts and even entire scenes from the film in all threeof the zombie films he’s made since.

It’s interesting to watch Day Of The Dead in wake of readingthe script as Romero did work in images, set pieces and even entire charactersinto the new framework but all are presented in completely different context.What he delivered in its stead is this claustrophobic exceedingly nasty littlemovie, as much about mental apocalypse as physical. The meltdowns inside thecharacters own minds as well as the world at large.Where the original is epic, Day isalmost intimate (Probably the only zombie film you could stage as a one act play), where Romero’s original script is unusually optimistic, a definite endpoint for his trilogy, the Day we ended up with is a bitter film, whileRomero’s script has a much clearer brand of class commentary, the Day we end upwith is a film uneasy about attempting to give any answers.

If its all the same to you, I would rather give thesociological subtext of the film a fairly wide berth. Partially because Night,Dawn and Land and even the woeful Diary Of The Dead have already been sothoroughly dissected in that regard that it seems a shame to turn to scalpel onthe only Romero film that has some level of mystique left, and reduce it tosomething akin to the pulsing forebrain that Dr. Frankenstein turns MajorAnderson into. All its inner workings laid bare for the world to see. Sufficeit to say that Romero is a social horror filmmaker if there ever was one. Nothat doesn’t go far enough, he is perhaps the social horror filmmaker of thelast half century. Not just in his zombie films either. The Crazies is a finepiece of military paranoia, Martin an underclass Vampire film, his underratedSeason Of The Witch as much a horror film of Women’s Lib as The Stepford Wivesor Repulsion. Day is no exception; I will merely point to the sheersatisfaction, if not relief, that Romero exhibits when this last vestige ofcold war power comes to its bloody end. It’s the same sort of relief that onefeels when an abscessed tooth is pulled; the spectacle of a bad thing coming toa bad end.

From the Kubrickian opening shot Day reveals its intentionsto be an archer more difficult movie than either of its predecessors. The filmsegways from the dream sequence, to a lone scene set in the outside world, adeserted city that has been claimed by the walking dead and is one of the mostimpressive sequences in a zombie film, showcasing Savini’s makeup, which as Imentioned before is career best. Finding no survivors, the group retreats backto the underground military base where they are stationed and descend below,where they will remain for the entire rest of the film.

A word on the environment as it isone of the most indelible I’ve ever seen in a horror film, right up withStanley Kubrick’s Overlook and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Sawyer house. A gift for establishing a sense ofplace has always been one of Romero’s skills. But the military base in Day isneither the intimate farmhouse of Night, nor almost homey environment that thesurvivors in Dawn make the mall. The cavernous space in Day is vast andutilitarian. An echoing, impersonal, white plaster and linoleum chamber ofhorrors. An environment thatmanages to simultaneously look like a place that could legitimately survive theapocalypse and a place that would make those who survived there wonder why theybothered. When we have a brief interlude in the trailer where the twohelicopter pilots who become our heroes in the back half of the film live, theviewer almost has to breath a sigh of relief. It’s the only environment we’veseen in the film where it looks like people could stand to exxist.

Psychologically imploding under the tension and the veryidea of being the last people on Earth, the ever decreasing population ofscientists and soldiers at the center of Day Of The Dead make the infamouslydysfunctional batch in Night Of The Living Dead look like The A-Team. The oneparty lead by the psychotic Captain Rhodes, the other by Doctor “Frankenstein”Logan who has clearly gone around the bend. All of Romero’s Dead films areabout people’s intrinsic inability to cooperate. Though Zombies are aformidable threat they are a manageable one. The characters in his films wouldall have been able to survive “if-“. It’s that “if” that is the key word. Ifthey would stop jockeying for position on who was in control of the house. Ifthey didn’t devolve into scavengers, or go into the ghetto guns blazing. If theentitlement of the haves wasn’t such potent fuel for the resentment of the havenots. If they weren’t so caught up making a document that no one would see. Iflong standing family feuds didn’t get in the way of cooperation.

In each of Romero’s films there isa pattern. An initial outbreak of chaos, followed by a briefly achieved stasis(The Farm House, The Mall, The Base, Fiddler’s Green, The RV) which turns outto be unsustainable simply because his characters cannot work together. Theyreact to each other with suspicion, fear, and act on their worst impulses. Thething that makes Romero’s best films so frightening is the knowledge that theliving dead are merely exacerbating things; the core of what he’s showing us isour day to day life.

In Day we are given the ultimatestasis and the ultimate collapse. The difference this time out is that Romeroclearly sees collapse as the preferable option. The two camps represented byFrankenstein and Rhodes are equally rotten. Rhodes is a fascist bully, but he’sright that Frankenstein’s experiments are a waste. Not only is Frankenstein’smethod’s morally reprehensible, what is even worse is that his plan is wildlyimpractical.

Sure after months of work in isolation Frankenstein canproduce a Bub, the docile trained zombie who is easily the most popular and iconicaspect of Day Of The Dead. But Frankenstein himself delivered a rather strikingspeech about the numbers of the dead. What does he plan to do? Isolate andcondition them one by one? The closest the film offers to something evenapproaching a moral choice is the idea of turning your back on the whole messduring John’s, the helicopter pilot, speech in the trailer

Day Of The Dead may have ended up smaller in scope thanRomero originally intended but it is ultimately no smaller in ambition. In itRomero does what he had been threatening to do for two films and takes us tothe ultimate end of our world. And the most subversive thing about it is whenhe arrives there; he breathes a deep sigh that sounds very much like one of relief.

The Modern American Horror Text And Subtext: Part 2: A Nightmare On Elm Street

2011-11-25T10:26:00.001-08:00

A Nightmare On Elm Street is an anomaly. It’s an elegant film in the oeuvre of a crude director,a deadly serious film in a franchise known for its uber camp, and a film thatis still genuinely scary from an era of horror that relentlessly played to thecheap seats with gore gags and endless nudity. A Nightmare On ElmStreet is playing so above its means thatit’s almost hard to believe that it’s the product of its creators, franchise,and time period. It remains against all odds, a genuinely great little film.

A Nightmare On Elm Street, is still so effective because at its core is a powerful concept simpleenough for even the dullest imagination to fully grasp. Honestly if you’re achild of the eighties do I even have to give a synopsis? For those of you whoaren’t children of the 80’s, A Nightmare On Elm Street follows a group of teenswho begin dying in their dreams. Eventually it comes to light that they arebeing haunted by the spirit of Freddy Krueger, a child “murderer” who waskilled by their parents in some good ole fashioned vigilante justice.

Like all great horror stories A Nightmare On Elm Streetworks because it taps in a very direct wayinto a very potent area of unease. In this case both sociopolitical and mythic.On one hand it’s not hard to read it as a story of generational distrust. Asthe upper middle class suburban teens of Elm Street find that there are some seriousskeletons hiding behind the “Just Say No” squeaky clean suburbs that theirparents have delivered to them. It's an element of the film that is not talked about enough, the children are not only in trouble because of their parents act of revenge but because said parents are actively withholding crucial information from them, even after they've seen evidence to suggest that their dirty secret has come back to bite them. But in the final analysis Nightmare On Elm Street is primarily a mythic film. Craven taps into the deep unease we have with what goes oninside our own head. A Nightmare On Elm Street taps into the deep well ofmistrust that the forebrain has for the deep, dark lizard brain at its core. AsDavid Foster Wallace said, “The mind is a wonderful servant and a terriblemaster.” The world of the subconscience, the world of dreams, is a place wehave no control over. It is an uneasy truth that the one place where we are notsafe is inside our own heads.

Of course Craven, has always had a certain genius forputting his finger directly on what bothered the average American Filmgoer. Theugly backwash of the love generation showed up with a vengeance for Last HouseOn The Left. The Hills Have Eyes showed the average American family unsure ofits potency in the wake of Vietnam. Its family helpless before a guerilla styleenemy that used the terrain as a weapon. Scream delivered the Columbine mentality to us years ahead of schedule.

The problem with Craven is that he has combined thispreternatural instinct for getting under people’s skin, with a blunt lack ofartistry in actually getting there. At best a kind of authenticity comes fromthe film because of this clumsiness. Something like The Hills Have Eyes or evenThe Serpent And The Rainbow have a blunt unpremeditated feel. Far moreregularly, this clumsiness results in a kind of amateurish schlocky feel thatis down right embarrassing. This isn’t something that Craven has gotten betterat over the years, or conversely picked up over the course of his career either. Theincomprehensible impulse that led him to include bumbling cops as comic reliefand the infamous “Mother gives blowjob to her daughter’s rapist,” scene in TheLast House On The Left, is the same brand of ineptitude that led to the jawdropping incompetent likes of Cursed, Scream 3 and My Soul To Take. Craven hasmade films, that would (and have) ended the career of other directors. Butalong with his talent for knowing what bothers people, he is also one of themost extraordinarily lucky directors of the modern age. Time and again Craven has made just theright movie to save his flailing career. A Nightmare On Elm Street itself madeup for the costly flop Swamp Thing. Scream resurrected him after Vampire InBrooklyn (a movie so bad that it manages to rank consistently as one of Eddie Murphey's worst films. Eddie Murphey thats the guy who made Meet Dave). Even Cursed,a film so ill fated that it had to be reshot twice, didn’t leave much of a dentas Craven’s unusually efficient little thriller Red Eye ended up becoming thesleeper hit of the year. The fact that Craven can still get a film greenlitwhen immeasurably more talented directors like Joe Dante and John Carpentercan’t is out and out infuriating.

This is to say that it wouldn’t exactly be out ofcharacter for Craven to come up with one of the most iconic horror icons of thelast century and then stick him in a movie that doesn’t work. But in Nightmare On Elm Street the stars alignand this once, just this once Craven was as good as his concept.

That’s not to say that the old clumsy Craven isn’tpresent. The kids of Elm Street all speak and act in a bizarrely anachronisticfashion, as if they’re in an unusually grim episode of Happy Days. There are afew cheap gags, such as one where Krueger’s face is torn off to reveal agrinning skull, that wouldn’t pass muster in a Tales Of The Crypt bumper. Thescore is wallpaper forgettable, carrying neither the idiosyncratic tinge ofCarpenter’s Halloween score nor The Herrman lite style that The Friday The 13^thfilms used. And Craven stages a few scenes with his usual awkward flair. Thefirst time we see Freddy he’s doing what can only be described as a StephenFetchit shuffle.

But these are the exception not the rule. For the mostpart Craven has never turned in a movie this good looking. There’s a richsaturated color palate to the film, deep Val Lewton shadows and creativeimagery. Crucially, the dream sequences in Craven’s film bare little resemblesto the FX reels that took control in the sequels and actually feel like dreams. Right down to the ending that is as anti logical as anything in Italian Horror cinema. There’s no spectacularspecial effects or surface ironies. Only the accumulation of odd detail,feeling of impending dread and sense of repetitive disconnect that marks actualnightmares. Familiar places and objects made unfamiliar and threatening, odddetails like dead leaves in the school hallway, the ground that suddenly givesway and of course Krueger, the pursuing force who no matter how far you run orhow well you hide will always be just astep a head of you.

When watching Englund’s performance in Nightmare On ElmStreet two things immediately spring to mind. A) It’s easy to understand whythis film made Englund the boogeyman of the 80’s. And B) His work here baresalmost no resemblance to the character he’s playing in the sequels.

For one thing he doesn’t speak. Freddy became famous for being a "quipping killer" but in this entry he barely has any lines at all, and what comes out of his mouth aren’t so much "jokes" as theyare as the awful outflow of a sick mind. His performance is all in the body.The way he cocks his neck as far from his torso as it will go. The eager way heshuffles forward. The way his jutting tongue flickers from between his charredlips. There is something genuinely vile about Freddy. Something repulsive bothin his design and the way that Englund brings him to life. He’s not thequipping latex covered VFX tech demo primarily in existence to allow you to seethe cool shit that KNB dreamed up this week. He is a genuine terrifyingthreat. When he holds up his claws and starts carving off pieces of himselfcackling, “This is your God.” Its not for chuckles but a genuinely diseasedaction. He’s a perverse, all powerful boogeyman without a shred of mercy.

Considering how pervasive the image of Jokey Freddy hasbecome, perhaps the thing to ponder isn’t that the later grinning VJ of killerhas diluted the power of Englund’s inaugural run on the character. Instead oneshould marvel at the miracle that after the relentless whoring of the characterfor the past twenty five years that Englund’s performance retains any of itsfrightening malevolent power at all.

Of course the dilution happened pretty quickly. NightmareOn Elm Street became one of the biggest horror franchises of all time toimmediately diminished returns. Of the sequels the third one, The Dream Warriors hasbeen elevated to a classic of its sub-sub-genre (said sub-subgenre being highconcept sequels to 80’s horror films) and does contain some kitschy fun. Whilethe only other entry in the series to be directed by Craven, the interesting intheory but profoundly miscalculated New Nightmare has its defenders.

Neither really holds a candle to the original though. Theyare only reflections of the very real fear that Craven tapped into and for oncewas able to bring into the film he was making fully intact.

The Modern American Horror Film Text And Subtext: Part 1: Evil Dead

2011-11-21T10:57:00.001-08:00

(I’m going to take a slightly different approach with thesenext two chapters. Rather than a general overview I’m picking five specificmovies from each decade for both chapters. Bringing it to a total of thirtyfilms. This has cast a surprisingly large net, I’ve managed to cover just aboutevery major horror filmmaker and every major movement in modern horror. Andwhile there’s certainly going to be aspects of film history, the focus here ismore on criticism.)

Evil Dead is both the perfect film to start off ourexploration of the modern American Horror Film and an oddly perverse choice. Onthe one hand it is almost certainly the first film released post Danse Macabrethat King would have included in the text. Evil Dead came out in 1981 Justmissing inclusion in Danse Macabre. A few months after the book went to press,King would write his famous Cannes Review, which would bring Sam Raimi and hisastonishingly assured debut, to the attention of horror fans world wide.

On the other hand this chapter is entitled, The ModernAmerican Horror Film Text And Subtext, and if there is a horror film that ismore blissfully subtext free than Evil Dead it escapes me at the moment.

King divides the horror story into two groups; those whoderive their horror from socio political tension and those who so called “fairytale” horror stories that derive their anxiety from deeper sources. As he says,

This second sort of horror film has more in common with theBrothers Grimm than with the op-ed page in a tabloid paper. It is the B-pictureas fairty tale. This sort of picture doesn’t want to score political points butto scare the hell out of us by crossing certain taboo lines. So f my idea aboutart is correct (it giveth more than it receivith), this sort of film is ofvalue to the audience by helping it to better understand what those taboos andfears are, and why it feels so uneasy about them.

Evil Dead is a film that is as firmly in the fairy taleleague as possible. Reduced to its simplest terms, the story of Evil Dead is aabout a group of people who go to a place and have something bad happen tothem. Not just anyplace but into the deep dark woods in true fairy talefashion.

It’s amazing just how many horror films can be reduced tothat simple synopsis. Travel is a naturally destabilizing action, we are allmuch more comfortable facing something on our home turf. Of course there arehorror films that derive their fear from the prospect of home invasion; TheExorcist, Halloween and The Strangers all spring to mind. But often times thereare twists here as well, lets not forget that in Halloween, Laurie Strode mightbe in good ole Haddonfield, but she’s having to fend off Michael Myers fromwithin a stranger’s house. The home that The Strangers besiege doesn’t belongto the couple who come there, it’s his family’s vacation house. Like Hansel andGretel, at the core of the fairy tale horror film the characters are sent fromhome, from what is safe and familiar, and into the dark wild woods wheresomething terrible and hungry is waiting for them.

In Evil Dead a group of friends comes to an isolated cabinin the woods where they accidentally summon the spirits of some KandarianDemons, who quickly possess some of the friends and make quick work out of therest. These Deadites, who in this entry act like a possessed Linda Blair onsteroids, torment Ashley (played by the immortal Bruce Campbell) who becomesthe last man standing.

It’s important when talking about Evil Dead to consider itseparately from the films around it. Thanks to its sequels Evil Dead is oftenretroactively branded a Horror Comedy, which it is certainly not. It’s not evenwhat you would call “fun” horror. There is an ambition to Evil Dead that isalien to most of the independent horror films that preceded it. Not just anambition of scope and scale, though there certainly is that but alsoLovecraftian immensity to the evil present (It is after all the Necronomiconthat is causing all the trouble). Let’s not forget that the signature shot ofthe series is a POV from a force so gigantic and horrifying that the cameradoesn’t even dare to try and take it in. The Deadites are no maniac in a mask,not even an irate spirit from an Indian Burial ground (as was the premise inRaimi’s proto Evil Dead short, Within The Woods). Instead these are immensecreatures of the outer dark who shrug on human bodies with the ease of warmhoodies and take about the same amount of care with them. They take their timewith Ash toying with him like a cat with a mouse, simply because it’s fun.Unlike the creatures in the sequels, there’s no real way to fight back againstThe Deadites. Even if you kill or maim them, they don’t really mind, it’s nottheir bodies that are taking the damage. They are in complete control, at onepoint, when it looks as though Ash just might live through this, going so faras to turn back the clock. Keeping the world in an endless night.

Evil Dead can be a clumsy film; Raimi’s talent is entirelyevident but still awfully raw. He builds an effortlessly eerie atmosphere withthe gradual accumulation of detail. The predatory camera gliding over the mistwreathed swamp, the porch swing beating like a death knell against the side ofthe camera, the yawning ominous bridge. His preternatural skill at Cameraplacement, blocking, staging and visual storytelling are all evident as well.His skill with actors, not so much, you can feel a tangible impatience in theearly scenes. A kid reluctantly plowing through his vegetables so he can get tothe good stuff. He relies mostlyon stalwart Bruce Campbell, who acquits himself well. Campbell (young andappealingly putty faced in his youth) is miles away from the blustering, cockycartoon he would play in the sequels. The tone he strikes here is one ofcomplete and utter bewilderment, he looks exactly like scared kid that he was.

The film, in other words, looks exactly like what it is. Ahandmade film made and acted by some extremely talented but extremely greenkids.

But it’s this clumsy quality that somehow enhances the film.One can laugh at the terrible matte shots and obvious stop motion. Not tomention the gaucheness of the infamous tree rape sequence, surely a contenderfor the gold in the bad taste Olympics (Or “taboo busting” as King might putit. Because don’t those both amount to the same thing?) But one cannot quite laugh them away.There is something about these cheap Deadites that are genuinely disturbing ina way that much slicker make up jobs (including their counterparts in thesequels) aren’t. Their pale mottled faces, black veins, husky terrible voicesand cataracted eyes stick with us, or how about the weird canine nose that thesecond male lead grows in the last half of the film. The effects in the filmhave a haunting organic quality. There is of course the surpassing nastiness ofthe pencil in the ankle, and nail through the cheek. But also the shot of thepossessed Linda, Ash’s girlfriend, twisting and contorting on the forest floor,like a fish landed on a boat deck. Despite the outlandishness of its premise,and the extremes of its style there is a feeling of unshakable reality to EvilDead. Raimi captures this insane, queasy blend of highly theatrical (“HER EYESMY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO HER EYES!”) and mundane reality that is truly unlikeany other horror film. There is a real sense that the supernatural is intrudingon the everyday world.

Which is why, despite filling hundreds if not thousands ofheads of horror fans swimming with visions of independently produced glory(including yours truly) Evil Dead remains a surprisingly unimitated movie. Theirs is far more to Raimi’s film thansurface virtuostics. Anyone can take a Steady Cam and run it at a dutch angle.But to create something truly skewed, well that takes something more.

Raimi’s remaining career as a horror director is aninteresting case. Though he’s never shied away from his horror roots, the wayso many directors do when they go mainstream. Only five of his films can reallybe considered horror and that’s if we grandfather in the slapstick Army OfDarkness and include the soft spoken southern ghost story The Gift. That said,there always has been a horror edge to Raimi’s films, Darkman can basically beseen as a horror film from the point of view of the monster, come back from thedead to gain vengeance against those who wronged him. His work in the Spidermanfilms in particular have shown a real horror edge in dealing with Dikto’sclassic rogues gallery. Particularly Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, whose hospitalroom awakening, was staged with an eye towards classic universal horror andshot with the aggression of any given scene in Evil Dead 2.

But for all of that, Evil Dead remains something of a oneoff. Not only in Raimi’s career but in the genre in general. There’s adissonance to it that manages to get under your skin if you give it half achance. Nightmarish is an adjective that gets thrown around all too freely, butEvil Dead really has that sense of unraveling mounting dread that a nightmarecan have. Or a fairy tale.

The Glass Teat Part 3

2011-11-17T14:06:00.001-08:00

After a few false starts, most notably The Others, anattempt to piggy back on The Sixth Sense whose early cancellation led to thesurprisingly gruesome conclusion of its entire cast dying horribly, the firstmajor horror show of the new decade was Supernatural. Which cannily debutedjust as Buffy was wrapping up its seventh season. Between its high productionvalue monsters and soulful, non threatening male leads, Supernatural managed tocover and snatch up a large portion of Buffy’s demographics with the brutal efficiencythat only network executives are capable of. The show followed the Dean and Sam Winchester, the two demonhunters you could take home to mama. After their mother was killed by a demonthe two were trained by their father to take on the forces of darkness. Theshow followed the now estranged brothers as they came together to search fortheir missing father, investigate the death of Sam’s girlfriend and took outany monsters they came across along the way, before inevitably being drawn intoa greater conflict against evil. As a show Supernatural never had Buffy’s ambition, nor did it haveWhedon’s skill at plotting, character and dialogue.

What it did have was its own brand of unassuming charm. Weekin week out the early seasons of Supernatural resemble nothing so much as a 40minute Roger Corman film with better production values. There’s somethingalmost laid back about the way the Winchester Brother’s toured around the backroads of the country in their muscle car persistently searching for the monsterof the week. Though it eventually traded in, this almost lackadaisical drive infeel for a more convoluted, yet more standard, mythology to its determent.

Somewhat tortured plotting aside, which is almost arequisite for any show that lasts more than four seasons, Supernatural’s biggestflaw was that it was always a bit too art directed to ever be truly scary.Supernatural had extremely high production values. So many miles in front ofthe chintzy Friday The 13^th that it’s frankly amazing to considerthat they’re both basic cable shows, barely separated by fifteen years.

Unfortunately everything looks a little too good, far too plannedto ever give the feeling of an organic threat. The show has that plasticPlatinum Dunes sheen (though even at its worst the show is far too good naturedto produce anything half as wretched as the average Platinum Dunes film).

A funnier show that unfortunately never got the chance toflourish that Supernatural did, was Reaper which also aired on the CW. Reaperfollowed Sam, the usual slacker stuck in a dead end job, who discovers that his parents sold his soul to Satan. As a result as of his 21st birthday it is now Sam’s job to track down escapees from hell at the behest of Old Scratch,while coming to terms with the fact that he may be the Anti-Christ.

Reaper struggled gamely for a season and a half beforefinally succumbing to low ratings. Which was a real shame. Reaper had a lot going for it. Including alikable cast, led by an avuncular Ray Wise who had an absolute blast as a funnybut genuinely sinister Satan, an interesting plot and a genuinely oddball senseof humor. It was a show that seemed built to last.

The show was of course a horror comedy rather than astraight horror story. Coming out just a few years after Shaun Of The Dead’sAmerican debut and it’s pretty clear that show creators, Tara Butters andMichelle Fazekas, had visions of Edgar Wright dancing in their heads when theywrote the pilot.

Hardly surprising, what is surprising is just how often theysucceeded at hitting that tone. Horror comedy is a notoriously hard genre to doright but Reaper hit the sweet spot more often than not. Balancing its funB-Movie plots with the continuously upping ante as Sam got in deeper and deeperwith the Devil, never forgetting just how high the stakes were for poor haplessSam.

It’s just a shame that we never got a chance to see ifReaper would live up to its potential, it was a genuinely entertaining showthat had the potential to become more. There have been few shows that I havebeen as sorry to see go as Reaper.

Another show prematurely cancelled was HBO’s Carnivale. An equally intriguing and pretentiousstory of Dust Bowl apocalypse, which blended its heady mix of Christian,Masonic and Gnositic lore with a large dose of horror.

In form Carnivale resembles nothing so much as the horrorinfluenced, dark fantasy comics that the British New Wave produced in theeighties. With its striking imagery, sweeping panoramic narrative based inreligion and history, its dense insular mythology and of course the requisiteTarot fetish.

Taking place during the dustbowl, The show followed duelingavatars of darkness and light destined to battle for the fate of mankind. Theshow starred Nick Stahl as the conflicted force of light and Clancy Brown asthe sympathetic, tortured avatar of darkness. They were backed by a supportingcast of cult actor ringers like Adrienne Barbeau, Michael J. Anderson and CleaDuVall.

Despite its ambition Carnivale was a flawed show, oftenconfusing “slow” with “stately” and taking its dear sweet time dispensingrevelations that we could more or less already guess. Still for all its flawsit’s easy to get swept up in the show’s ambition. In hindsight Carnivale, like Millenium seems a victim ofbeing ahead of its time. In a post Lost era its easy to imagine the showfinding a large enough audience willing to follow its cryptic mythology week inand week out. On a network that allowed Entourage to flourish for a full decadeits tough not to be a bit frustrated that such a committed strange show didn’tget a better shot.

Around this time there were a few network horror shows likepreposterously long tenured Ghost Whisperer and Medium. Neither of which meritsmuch consideration. Also worth noting is the popularity of Reality shows likeGhost Hunters and the like, both of which exploited a heretofore unknown andapparently insatiable appetite for shows primarily about people staring at EVPmeters looking scared.

More germane to our discussion is the fact that after a fulldecade and a half of the serial format dominating in horror the anthology showmade a comeback.

The brain child of Mick Garris (making it the best thinghe’s done for the genre by a good country mile) Masters Of Horror had a greatconcept, take a group of legendary filmmakers that hadn’t produced anything awhile, give them a million dollars, a two week shooting schedule and fullcreative control and see what comes of it. While Masters Of Horror was neverquite as good as its concept was (really how could it have been?) It managed toproduce some absolutely class A episodes during its run.

Most infamously, there was Joe Dante’s Iraqi War satireHomecoming, in which the recently dead of the military return for their rightto vote, which took Deathdream’s concept of returning GI as zombie and ran itto its logical conclusion (Dante’s other contribution, an adaptation of thelegendary short story The Screwfly Solution was unfortunately much weaker.Something of an ongoing theme with Master’s Of Horror). Dario Argentocontributed the bizarre Grand Guignol of Pelts, a story about a haunted raccooncoat that races so gloriously over the top that it stands as perhaps the onlywatchable thing Argento has signed his name to since Opera. Don Coscarelli delivered a great littlemeat and potatoes slasher movie with Incident On And Off A Mountain Road. AndStuart Gordon used the opportunity to deliver one of his Lovecraft films,Dreams In A Witches House, which like all of Gordon’s post Reanimator Lovecraftfilms is imperfect but interesting.

Best of all though was John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns. Abeyond welcome return to form for Carpenter, with a great script by DrewMcWeeney and Scott Swan (They’ll be popping up later). Cigarette Burns, whichconcerns the hunt for a film that has killed and maimed viewers at every one ofits screenings, is the ultimate morality play for cinephiles. A dark valentineto the organic process of searching for film, an art all but lost in the era ofdigital distribution and print on demand. It sees the true cinephile’s lotclearly as a junky’s quest, shot with style and written with wit. It’s the oldFaustian bargain but rarely has it been portrayed this well. The ultimate hitfor the ultimate price. Others, Tim Lucas, Theodore Roszak, Ramsey Campbellhave written about the dark power that some lost cans of film can have. Butnone have hit it with quite the right way that Carpenter, McWeeney, and Swando. There is awe when the lights go down in a movie house. There is love too.But there is also something darker lurking there with us. Something werecognize, that dangerously approaches hunger.

Unfortunately Masters Of Horror produced its fair share ofbad episodes too, and they probably out number the good at a two to one ration.Unfortunately one of the real dogs was the next outing of the aforementionedcreative team, the clumsy Pro-Life in which a group attacks the only cell phonefree abortion clinic in the United States. (In my favorite moment from thatone, Ron Perlman and his two sons shotgun their way through a security fenceand then stand gaping before a locked glass door with befuddled wonder before decidingthey have to find another way in. YOU STILL HAVE THE SHOTGUNS!!!). There wasalso Mick Garris’s Chocolate, Tobe Hooper’s twin strike outs and any othernumber of episodes too depressing for me to really want to wade into.

Still no matter what one may think of its individualepisodes, one at least has to give Masters credit for reenergizing a wideswatch of filmmakers. It got people like John Carpenter, John Landis and LuckyMcKee working again. If you can judge a show partially by what came of it,there is no way around the fact that Masters Of Horror has been damn good forthe genre.

One other thing that came from it was the spin off show FearItself, which attempted to replicate Masters Of Horror’s success on Network TV.Gathering many of the same filmmakers like John Landis, Brad Anderson, ErnestDickerson and Stuart Gordon. While making room for intriguing new members likeMary Harron. The series didn’t last long, debuting in the summer with lowratings, often preempted by the Olympics.

Though the series enjoys a mediocre at best reputation amonghorror fans and most of its episodes are uninspired, it did produce twoabsolutely fantastic episodes that rank with, if not above the best thatMasters Of Horror had to offer. Stuart Gordon’s Eater, which starred a pre-MadMen Elizabeth Moss as a rookie cop who finds herself alone in an isolated jailwith a serial killer, who for fairly obvious reasons, is known as Eater. It’s agreat tense piece of work, with Gordon operating at peak efficiency.

The real gem of the piece though is Skin and Bones, directedby the great Larry Fessenden and written by Swan and McWeeney, the team behindCigarette Burns (told you we’d get back to them). Skin And Bones tells thestory of a father, played by Doug Jones, who returns to his family and hobbyranch a changed man after being lost in the wilderness. It’s a great work ofhumanistic, slow burn horror. With an absolutely first class performance byJones, who gives one of his best transformations with minimal makeup. It’s absolutely chilling, I will go sofar as to say, without fear of hyperbole, that Skin And Bones the best work ofhorror ever put on Network Television.

The middling success of these shows (with the exception ofSupernatural) did nothing to prepare for the onslaught that kicked off the newdecade, The Walking Dead. I’ve already said most of what I’ve wanted to aboutDead in Four Color Fear. And though AMC’s version has diverged from it in termsof plot it has stayed relatively closely linked in terms of theme.

Suffice it to say that The Walking Dead has been a mixedbag. Capable of some great isolated episodes, including Darabont’s mini moviepilot the quality of which really cannot be exaggerated. Unfortunately, WalkingDead has also shown itself capable of some epic wheel spinning, confusingbecause say what you want to about Kirkman’s comic, but in terms of narrativemomentum it’s fairly relentless, moving from one scenario to the next with efficiency.The Walking Dead as a TV show is an absolute junkie for filler. Stripped ofnarrative momentum the show all too often devolves into people stridentlyshouting at each other, punctuated by occasional scenes of Zombies beingkilled. Though it’s hardly too late for the show to find its groove, with theunceremonious firing of Darabont I’m not exactly hopeful. .

Still the sheer size of its production is remainscompelling. The Walking Dead manages to provide a post apocalyptic world thescale of which is just plain impressive, which keeps me tuning in each weekdespite its flaws.

Of course the other horror show to gain a significantfollowing this year is American Horror Story. Which as a compelling narrativetelevision show is a complete mess, but as an act of huckersterism is reallysort of admirable, it’s like the ghost of William Castle produced a televisionshow and decided the time had come for smut. The show follows (and I use the termloosely) a family of dim bulbs who move into a house designed by a mad doctor,in which a series of bad things have happened that would make Amityville’sshingles curl. While there are a few isolated scenes in the pilot that suggestthat at one point in time there was some sort of attempt to tell an actualstory about recognizable human beings, but this is an ambition that AmericanHorror Story quickly abandons. Becoming not so much a “show” as an experimentto test the very limits of archness.

Of course that’s the failsafe that Ryan Murphy has built forhimself. Say that the show’s story is an incoherent mishmash. That’s the point.Find it doubtful based on the writing that Murphy has ever actually met aperson. Well duh that’s just “his voice.” Say the tone is a schizophrenic mishmash? Well it’s camp and it’s not Murphy’s fault if you’re too square toappreciate it.

Well as a matter of fact I do appreciate good camp andAmerican Horror Story is not exactly that. It’s far too self satisfied toqualify. It’s not a show in a conventional sense it’s a delivery service for“What The Fuck” moments. People are tuning in not because they are compelledbut because they literally cannot believe what they are seeing. And as enticingas the prospect of watching the show trying to top school shootings, gimp suitclad beings from beyond and brain munching every week, it is simply notsustainable. The foundations of this baby are already creaking some sixepisodes in and it will be a quick collapse. Mark my words if this showsurvives to Season 3 it’ll be a miracle.

It is not merely the ability to show that makes horror. Asin television as in any other medium what is truly needed to provoke real fear,rather than putting on a rubber mask and going “Boogity Boogity.” Is aseriousness of intent. All the gimp suits and “shocking” material in the worldcan’t give you that.

The Glass Teat Part 2

2011-11-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

Just as horror seemed to be finding its footing inTelevision a curious thing happened. It stopped being made.

The 90’s were a notoriously weak decade for horror. Perhapsthe weakest on record. There are many contributing factors, the Pax Romana vibeof the decade, a general sense of fatigue after the horror boom of theeighties. Whatever the reason horror dried up in virtually every medium andtelevision was no exception.

Virtually every TV show released at the time that can evenloosely be defined as horror was a hybrid. Twin Peaks was a horror show crossedwith a Soap Opera (following in the footsteps of Dark Shadows). The X-files a Sci-Fi show that occasionally dabbled inhorror. Buffy The Vampire Slayer a Superhero show that trafficked in horroriconography.

Genre Shows that were undiluted horror were rare and whenthey did turn up weren’t very popular. Rarely lasting for more than a season.

The first notable work of televised horror in the 90’s wasthe still popular and influential Twin Peaks. As stated Twin Peaks was ahybrid. Equal parts Soap, 50’sTeen Drama, and Cop show. Unlike the other shows of the era Twin Peaks isultimately a work of horror first and foremost. It’s images of dark cathedralforests, bodies wrapped in plastic, and cryptic images encoded in crimson andflame still have the power to unsettle.As does its story of incest, demonic possession and beingswho literally feed on human misery.

Twin Peaks opens with the body of Laura Palmer, the town’s homecomingqueen washing up on the banks of a river, dead raped, wrapped in plastic, andwith a typeset letter inserted under her fingernail (it was that final detailshown in wince enduing matter of factness that always disturbed me most). It’sa stark image to base a show around.

It soon becomes evident that Palmer had some seriousskeletons in her closet and so do most of the other residents of Twin Peaks,only some of them man made. Into their midsts comes Dale Cooper a mystic FBIagent who tries to unravel the web of intrigue, only to fall into the darkermystery surrounding the town.

While the first season focused on the procedural and soapopera aspects of the story. With some occasional asides like Dale Cooper’siconic dream sequence. It never fully escaped the dark shadow of the supernaturalimplied in its opening episode and the second season embraced it fully, beforea soggy run of episodes scuttled the show.

Much of Lynch’s approach to horror can be traced back to hissurrealist roots. In Lynch land horror and the supernatural refuse to apologisefor themselves, refuse to explain, they simply are. In perhaps the mosteffective shot of horror in the series entire run the demonic creature Bob, acharacter whom until this point we’ve only seen in furitive flashes, acharacter who is strickly speaking not supposed to exist on our plain ofreality, approaches the camera. Bob starts off in the middle distance andstarts walking towards us. Stepping through an open window and over a set ofsurburban furniture coming relentlessly closer to our POV. He is horrifyingsimply because he is. It’s a bracing moment of quasi fourth wall breaking.

Evil in Lynch’s oeuvre has always been an elemental force.Characters like Bob, Frank Booth, or Robert Blake’s Man From Elsewhere arecorrupt forces who exceed simple human venality. There is the sense of evil asbeing part of something bigger, both a natural force and a spiritual force. Inthat sense Lynch’s horror has more in common with Arthur Manchaen than thematerialist Lovecraft brand that most horror writers follow. The fact that helets good triumph over such a force so often in his filmography is asremarkable as anything else in his films.

Alas Twin Peaks is not one of those times. Whether byaccident or design the season finale of Twin Peaks is one of the bleakestthings ever put on Network Television. A final dizzying plunge into the BlackLodge, the dark nexus of evil in the heart of the Twin Peaks Universe. It’s asnasty and aggressive hour of pure horror, whose like has never really been seenbefore. And though I won’t spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it, letsjust say it is not a happy one. In a medium that was still dedicated to playingit safe at the time of airdate it is amazing how ashes in the mouth bitter thefinale of Twin Peaks is. Apparently the third season was supposed to delve intothe counter mythology of The White Lodge and offer the possibility ofredemption there in. But there is no such hint at the end of the show. Just acomplete and unambiguous victory for the forces of Darkness.

The next notable show of the decade was no less iconic.Though perhaps more of a product of its time. Deep strains of Oliver Stone runthrough Chris Carter’s paranoid vision of America in the deep grip ofconspiracy. The X-files followed pioneering FBI agents Mulder and Scully asthey investigated all the alien sightings, mutants, and sasquatches that restof the government tried to sweep under the rug. All linked in a grandconspiracy that never quite materialized, much to the consternation of itsfans.

There is something almost quaint about its vision of asinister, but competent government. It’s a show that only a child of Watergatecould conceive of, my generation found out that the government had difficulty covering up so much as a illicit blow job. Let us not forget that the plot of the first X-files moviecentered around the terrifying omnipotent power of FEMA. Which is a littletougher to take seriously when Katrina showed that FEMA could fuck up a cup ofcoffee and would thus probably prove equally incompetent at handing the countryover to our new alien overlords.

The X-Files was primarily a sci fi show, but it was science fiction that always had asinister edge to it. Mulder and Scully’s encounters with extraterestials andthe government consipiracies tied to them always felt much more like TheParallax View than Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

That said the series did veer into out and out horror morethan a couple of times. Probably the most iconic entry being the horribly paleand fleshy “Fluke Man” the result of a tapeworm and nuclear radiation gone bad. Another of the series horror creatures,and one of the few villains creepy enough to warrant more than one episode wasthe liver munching Jefferey Toombs, who hibernated in unsettling paper machelike nests in between his life extending bouts of cannibalism. The sight ofToombs stretching himself to fit through tight air ducts and get at hisvictims traumatized many a youngchild.

My own personal entry in the “saw it young was traumatizedfor life by it” canon would be the second season episode Blood. A masterwork ofparanoia about a laid off worker who suddenly starts receiving subliminalmessages that are attempting to make him go on a killing spree. The sight ofthe hapless guy in the electronic section of a department store, suddenlyfacing every screen in the place flashing threatening pictures and commands tokill that only he can see, has never quite left me.

Probably the show’s most infamous foray into horror was the “banned”episode Home, in which a group of children playing baseball uncover the buriedbody of deformed fetus, which ends up launching an investigation into an inbredSawyer like clan. It’s one of X-File's few unmitigated forays into horror,undiluted by any science fiction and it certainly ranks as one of the nastiestthings ever put on network television.

The thing about The X-Files and Horror though is that itwasn’t usually very good at it. Oh everybody remembers the classic episodes wejust talked about, but for every episode starring a Toombs Or a Flukeman youhave two like the one where Mulder got depressed and hung out with LA Vampiresfor an episode. Or the time they fought the space ghosts. Then there's the one about the evil Bettie Page tattoo, well you get the picture... Episodes in otherwords, unlikely to end up on anybody’s top five list.

One interesting off shoot of The X-Files was the spin offshow, Millennium a concentrated effort to do The X-Files with a much morepronounced horror bent. Set in the same universe as X-Files; Millenniumreplaced the boyish David Duchovny and sharp Gillian Anderson with the grimLance Henriksen and the search for ET with the grim pursuit of serial killersand premillennial tensions. The show followed as Henrikson chased serialkillers in Seattle and then Washington DC on the behest of the sinisterMillennium group.

Millennium started as a standard, if unusually bleak, policeprocedural, albeit with Chris Carter’s trademark obsessions with secretsocieties, inscrutable factions fighting for oblique ends and layers ofconspiracy. It’s second season started bringing in more blatantly supernaturalelements. Despite a strong start, like most horror shows of the era Millenniumwent off the air after a relatively quick three seasons, kept on that long moreby Fox’s desire to keep then golden goose Chris Carter happy than anythingelse. In that run it managed toproduce some good episodes and it’s easy to imagine that the show would havehad an easier time finding a following with our post CSI crazed audience.

Perhaps the most interesting and neglected horror show ofthe nineties was American Gothic. One of the few undiluted horror shows of thedecade it was an ambitious, much abused show backed by Sam Raimi. It triedto follow in Twin Peaks footsteps, with an eerie portrait of small town life, only to find audience apathy and out andout abuse from the network which aired episodes out of order and did the usualairdate shell game.

The show took place in a small Southern town held under thesway of a Satanic sheriff Lucas Buck, played by Gary Cole. The show followed Buck in his attemptsto gain control of a young child after killing his family in the Pilot episode.Despite a bold cinematic style and strong central performances by Cole, andSling Blade’s Lucas Black as the child, the show failed to find an audience.Though it did gain a small but passionate cult following afterwards.

The show that most people think of when it comes to 90’shorror would be Buffy The Vampire Slayer. At its core Buffy was a superheroshow. It borrowed as much iconography from Marvel Comics as itdid Hammer Films. (Not to mention a healthy dose of Whedon’s deft SoapOperatics. Deriving as much tension from the various “Will They Won’t They’s”as it did from its Vampire stalking sequences.) Just as importantly it alsoborrowed its pacing and narrative structure from comics with every season basedaround one long central story arc against a persistent threat, interspersedwith Monster Of The Week episodes. Similar to how comics divide their narrativearcs with stand alone issues.

The show’s standard template was to take the ordinarytraumas of adolescence and young adult hood and literalize them in demoniccounter parts. The Girl who no one noticed turned invisible; the boy whochanges after he sleeps with you really does become a monster. Drug addiction,abuse, alcoholism even internet addiction. The early episodes of Buffy couldresemble an after school special with a body count, were it not for Whedon's snappy banter and likable cast of characters.

Week in week out Buffy and her faithful crew of friendsfought the various demons drawn to Sunnydale by the Hellmouth, a center ofdemonic energy. Most of the time the show was more concerned with longsimmering showdowns and romantic tension then scares. While the show usedplenty of horror iconography the reality that while the characters werefighting demons and vampires most of the time they may as well have beenbattling Magneto.

Which didn’t mean the show wasn’t capable of creating a goodole fashioned slice of horror when it put its mind to it. The most famous andsuccessful example probably being Hush, in which a group of Demons known as TheGentlemen come to Sunnydale in search of hearts, and stealing the voices ofeveryone in town in the process. The episode was directed by Joss Whedon, whogives it a cinematic look, and is anchored by a great performance byDoug Jones as the lead gentleman making the most out of the minimalist makeup(Some of the best the show had to offer. Though that was always a notoriousweak point for the series). Ittakes a lot not to be creeped out by the eerie graceful Gentlemen.

While Hush was probably the best of the straight horrorepisodes there were other effective ones as well. The somber After Life andConversations with Dead People, the tense Helpless, and the surprisinglyeffective Killed By Death which had Buffy stalking a Freddy Krueger look alikein the children’s ward of a hospital.

Perhaps the most important thing about Buffy was that it wasactually popular and successful. The longest lasting horror series from thedecade lasted a mere three seasons, Buffy lasted seven and has maintained itscult following long after its departure from the airwaves. Though it might nothave provided horror stories in the traditional sense Buffy proved that therewas an appetite and a willing audience for televised horror. One that the nextdecade would exploit.