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Lesbian Vampires 4: “Naiveté in the Seventies” Double Feature

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Glen — No Comments ↓

The last time I did one of these, I mentioned that my previous entries detailing the sub-genre of the “Lesbian Vampire” film have far and away been my best sellers (if I actually had anything for sale). But as the information I get from Google Analytics is limited, I don’t exactly know why. Are these films simply more popular than others? Do they have a lurid appeal that catches readers’ interest? Do they straddle a line between legitimacy and exploitation, art-house and mainstream horror such that many have heard of them, but not all have watched them, and people want to know more? Are people just looking for girl on girl vampire porn and they stumble onto this blog only to be disappointed (I assume – maybe then they discover a strange artsy movie they didn’t know they’d be into)? Hey – as I’m assuming this post will drive traffic as others have before it, feel free to drop a comment and let me know what brought you here. Whatever it was, welcome!

Also, if you’re interested, you can check out Part I (Dracula’s Daughter, Blood and Roses,The Blood Spattered Bride, and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary), Part II (The Vampire Lovers, Daughters of Darkness, The Shiver of the Vampires, and Vampyros Lesbos), and Part III (Nadja, Blood of the Tribades, and Bit).

In any case, following last week’s pride month – Queer Horror rundown, I thought I might thematically hop, skip, and jump back over to this idiosyncratic (and apparently quite popular) collection of beautiful, rich, weird, atmospheric films, generally run through with nominally LGBT+ characters or themes, but mostly filmed through the lens of a totally cis-het male gaze, and yet which still surprisingly feel quite feminist and revolutionary and artfully decedent. In Part III of this series, I touched on some more modern examples, but really the heyday of this material was undoubtedly the seventies and there are still so many films of note to examine therein. And so, that’s what we’re going to do…

I had planned to cover four films this week, but found that I had rather a lot to say about the first two and decided to just focus on them: Requiem for a Vampire (1972) and Alucarda (1977). Having watched them now, I must say that both are only barely Lesbian Vampire films, but I believe there are enough details to merit inclusion in this series and boy, oh boy are they worthy of discussion. As usual with longer write ups such as these, there will be spoilers, but I genuinely don’t feel that would really ruin one’s appreciation of either of these films.

Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

It was only about a year ago that I finally watched my first Jean Rollin film, The Shiver of the Vampires (1971), which I thoroughly loved. Before that, Rollin had always been a blind spot for me, an artist with whom I was intrigued, but also felt somewhat daunted by. So artsy, so dreamy, so poetic and, for lack of a more descriptive word, so French. But then Shiver really impressed me – weird and artsy, sure, but also fun, funny, sexual, morbid, visually striking, and confounding in a way that enriched the viewing experience rather than detracting from it. Since that time, I’ve caught up with Grapes of Death (1978), Fascination (1979), and The Living Dead Girl (1982), all of which showed a progression towards what might be considered more “normal” narrative horror cinema, while maintaining Rollin’s characteristic visual and textual poetry.

Thus, I was interested what I might find in what he’d called his favorite of his own movies – a film he’d written in a couple of days and then rushed into production before he could second guess himself, a piece he reportedly loved best for its purity: intentionally naïve, a series of events that flow one into the next without even lip service to the demands of commercially friendly story telling (though with enough naked girls that his American producer, $am $elsky (as his name is written in the credits), said he’d still be able to sell the picture – more on that later).

Requiem for a Vampire (AKA Caged Virgins) was Rollin’s fourth “lesbian” (or at least female) vampire film, and though I’ve only seen a handful of his other films, it does feel like a boiled down reduction of the elements and qualities that make his films stand out as undoubtedly his own.

We follow two girls, dressed as clowns, on a high speed chase through the countryside as they trade fire with the police car behind them. They escape, but the man they’re with is killed. They burn him and the car and walk through the tall grass until they find a place to wash off their clown make up. They steal a motorcycle, and then some French fries.

One accidentally gets buried alive after falling into an open grave, but her friend pulls her out. They’re stalked by bats and, mesmerized, led to a crumbling chateau inhabited by bestial men who chase them and try to sexually assault them, two female vampires who try to bite them, and one older male vampire, the last of his kind, wearily hanging onto eternity, though it long ago lost all meaning or him, and at least a little in love with death.

The girls have a bit of time to strip down and gently fondle each other in bed before they are told they need to lure victims to the castle the next day, which one happily does, feeding on him and beginning her transformation, while the other understands that her “virginity” is important for the process and instead finds a man to take it from her, thus sabotaging the plan of the undead. When it is apparent what she’s done, her friend must torture her to find the whereabouts of this man, but in the end the old vampire releases them and locks himself in a tomb to waste away as the girls walk off into the night.

Written out thus, it has a semblance of narrative flow, but this description does no justice to what it feels like to watch the film. Let’s try it this way: two female clowns look at a dying man as the lights fade, when the light returns, their faces are spattered with blood. Water shifts from clear to white to red to brown in stop motion. A girl approaches a roadside food stand and smiles. The proprietor chases her into the forest. He catches her and pins her to the ground, grabbing at her breasts. Bored, she allows him to for a moment before throwing him off, hiding behind a tree, and impishly thumbing her nose.

A girl falls into an open grave which the grave digger keeps flinging dirt into though he should really be able to see her. Then he drinks some wine and goes home. Everywhere the girls turn, bats watch them from the trees, eliciting shrieks of terror, before latching onto their necks and holding perfectly still, like furry bow ties, sapping them of their will. Later a similar bat clamps onto a naked woman’s crotch, making little sucking sounds as she squirms in what is probably terror and pain, but could be read as sexual pleasure.

A striking female vampire plays a grand piano in a cemetery, surrounded by candles (the image Rollin reportedly imagined first and built the rest of the action around). Scenes of gentleness and tender touch between the girls bleed into an extended rape sequence, then into a playful, even goofy, scene of seduction-chase-vampiric feeding, and then finally into another of sexual awakening and genuine pleasure, as fake looking fangs hang loosely from ancient lips, and one friend strips the other and, weeping, whips her, the tortured friend responding only with understanding and forgiveness. But this series of images also fails to capture the feeling.

So, how did I feel watching it? Languid, fascinated, tickled, morose, occasionally (but not too often) bored, amused, indulgent, mystified, softened, delicate, playful, amorous, melancholic – these were some of the emotions that passed over me at some point – does that help at all? If you haven’t worked this out yet, I find it a tough movie to wrap my head around.

It’s easy to toss around the word ‘dream-like’ when discussing a filmmaker like Rollin, but this really is a full surrealist piece. There is little reason for one event to lead to the next, but as it does, it feels utterly natural, the film washing over you in an almost wordless wave of impressions, emotions, archetypal images, and disruptive, chaotic actions, both whimsical and brutal (the film is mostly played without dialogue; this review has 500 more words than are spoken in the whole movie).

The two central girls are often tranquil, accepting each new turn of events without comment or reaction – and yet, they do feel present – our avatars in this tone poem of a film. For all that their bodies are obviously put on display, and the camera takes pleasure in looking at them, I feel they remain a subjective presence, with wants and interests, as much or more as any other figure in the film.

I must admit that on first viewing, I didn’t immediately love it as I had his others, but I could surely appreciate the commitment to a personal vision, the refusal to make anything other than exactly the art-work he felt compelled to capture on film. But on a second watch, I already found it growing on me. Knowing what to expect allowed me to open more to taking in the rich curiosity on offer. It must be said though that this can be a difficult watch, and I don’t recommend it as an introduction to Rollin. It feels a bit like the concentrated syrup you would add carbonated water to in order to produce a different Jean Rollin movie fountain beverage.

If you like his work, you’ll probably really like this. If you don’t like it, you’ll probably hate this. If you haven’t seen anything by him yet, this is not the best place to start. However, if you’ve watched a few of his films and find that he works for you, this really is a sumptuous, intriguing, whimsical, disturbing dream to lose yourself in for a time – a melancholic, hypnotic romp through an overgrown meadow of absurdity and death, gender and violence and sex.

But on that front, a warning – as mentioned above, there is a very long rape scene which I personally found trying, not least because it doesn’t connect with anything else in the ‘story’. The girls come to the castle and are taken down to the dungeon where bestial men rape nameless women who are chained up there for what feels like an interminable time. Then we move on and it’s never mentioned again.

On one level, this was reportedly called for by the producer to have more salacious content, making this possibly impenetrable art film more marketable as sleazy exploitation, but it does also play into themes the film dreamily revolves around. When so engaging with death and sex and violence, this content does not come out of nowhere – in contrast to the placid gentleness of the girls and the exhausted ennui of the ancient vampire, down in the dungeon of the subconscious, there is brutal, corporeal, sexual life – desiring and taking and hurting and fearing and suffering and fighting. While it is indeed hard to stomach, it doesn’t feel accidental that right in the middle of this meditative reverie, there is something so ugly. Still, the fact that these discordant measures do make a kind of musical sense inside of the symphony as a whole doesn’t make them any easier to listen to, or more to the point, to watch.

But that sequence aside, I find the rest of the film a distinct pleasure, and while I enjoy some of his later, more straightforward (but, to be fair, not that straightforward) works, I’m so glad Rollin had the opportunity to craft this specific, singular work of self-expression. It’s not the most “Lesbian-Vampire” of the Lesbian Vampire movies I’ve written about (the girls share some naked caresses and a kiss and vampirism is present, but it doesn’t feel like these features are really the focus of the film, so much as simply being some of the many images of eroticism and death and need that flash before our eyes), but elements are there, and it really is a very special piece worthy of consideration. I look forward to continuing through Rollin’s catalogue.

Alucarda (1977)

Directed by Juan López Moctezuma, this Mexican lesbian-vampire-satanic-cult-nunsploitation movie, also released as Innocents from Hell has been on my watch list for quite some time, and I’m so glad to have finally seen it. I was surprised to realize that I’d already covered one film by Moctezuma, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary back in my first Lesbian Vampire post, and now I’m eager to check out another film of his, Mansion of Madness, which I know is currently on Shudder.

I’ve had a very interesting experience of watching this twice in the last week. My first viewing, I came away tickled and enamored. It was all just absolutely unhinged: crazy, over the top, glorious excess at every turn. I hadn’t found it to be a work of great technical proficiency, or you know, “good” in the conventional understanding of the word, but it just felt so exciting in its weirdness, in its stylistic maximalism. Then on second viewing, I found myself watching a surprisingly heartfelt, even angry movie – rich in imagery and feeling – for some reason, the second time I found myself taking it much more seriously. But the takeaway is that, in vastly different ways, both times I loved it.

To give the story in short, Justine (Susana Kamini), whose mother has just died, is brought to a convent that looks like it’s been carved out of a subterranean cave in 1850, somewhere in Mexico. Her roommate, who seems to appear out of a shadow, is an intense, young girl named Alucarda (they are both supposed to be 15, but the actresses are in their upper 20s – for the best, given how often they’re naked). Within moments of meeting each other, Alucarda (Tina Romero) becomes madly intimate and the next thing you know, the girls are rolling around in the woods, giggling, and declaring eternal love.

That shadow in the background will be revealed to be Alucarda. It’s a nice shot.

Almost immediately, they swear a death pact on the grave of Alucarda’s mother, releasing grunting, snorting, heavy breathing spirits into the air, followed by a Satanic ritual (first led by a forest spirit/central European gypsy/travelling tinkerer and later overseen by a goat headed representation of Satan himself) in which their breasts are cut and they drink each other’s blood, kissing it from their lips as outside, the thunder roars, it rains blood, some people have an orgy, and the only nice nun in the convent has a levitating, lightning shooting, blood spattered prayer session.

Shortly thereafter, they start defying god, declaring their love and obedience for the Devil, and generally wreaking blasphemous havoc. The church responds by torturing Justine to death in an exorcism ceremony. She briefly becomes a shrieking, bloody vampire who sleeps au naturel in a blood filled coffin, and Alucarda goes on a Carrie-at-the-prom-esque pyrokinetic revenge streak, igniting most of the priests, nuns, novices, and the convent itself with her vengeful stare, before crumbling into dust out of a sense of guilt and overwhelming grief.

You know, your usual vampire movie stuff…

One of the first things I appreciated was how wildly Moctezuma packs in every possible thing he can – every literary or filmic reference, every shocking display, every effect (special or otherwise), every supernatural element. Le Fanu is listed as one of the writers and there are extended bits of dialogue taken directly from Carmilla, particularly bits around the funeral procession, the tinkerer, and some intense love language (Alucarda comes on pretty strong). “Alucarda” is “a Dracula” backwards and Alucarda’s mother was named Lucy Westenra, Nina’s best friend from Dracula.

The way the gypsy/spirit/tinkerer pops in and out of existence seems like something directly out of a silent movie from the 20s, like Häxan (1922). The scenes of nuns writhing about in the church, going crazy brings to mind many other films, such as Ken Russel’s The Devils (1971) or the Polish film, Matka Joanna od Aniołów (1960), and as I already mentioned, the ending seems a direct rip off of Carrie. And I think it’s all great. Sure – take whatever you can and cram it together to make something personal and special and unlike anything that’s ever been made before. Not every inclusion works, but it feels like nothing is held back – like every idea that Moctezuma had, he included. And this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach, while lacking in Hollywood polish, feels wondrously pure in its unique way.

Perhaps it’s because in writing about Requiem for a Vampire, I read how Rollin had intentionally wanted to make a work of naïve cinema, but I had naïve or outsider art on my mind while watching this, a label which I don’t think could even be fairly applied to Moctezuma (this was his third film and I really don’t know about his career or the Mexican film scene, so I don’t want to presume). But there is a simplicity here that is akin to such work – simplicity of technique, certainly not of theme or style or plotting – it’s full of all of that stuff. There are things that do not “work” (some peculiar synthesized sounds that seem out of place in 19^th Century Mexico, the snorting, huffing, possibly flatulent noises that accompany any Devilish influence on the girls, some dramatic reactions such as when the chief priest declares, “We must perform………an Exorcism!” and a hundred nuns gasp in unison), but when these elements surface, my impulse is not to laugh at them as B-movie failings, but rather to clap in delight because it’s just so delicious. There is no “good taste” based shame or shyness holding this movie back and its earnest commitment is infectious.

This quality is even more present in the performances. Tina Romero’s Alucarda is always dialed up to eleven in every emotional moment. She meets Justine and in seconds is sharing all her secrets with her. When she’s angry, she spins and writhes in fury and rage, shouting to the heavens, her dark eyes cutting through and cutting down all she sees. And Kamini’s Justine goes along with it. More subdued than Alucarda, she nevertheless acquiesces to her paramour’s emotional needs. Perhaps she’s not so into the blood play and wishes that Alucarda would stop talking about death all the time, but when, atop her mother’s grave, Alucarda exclaims (with very few interjections from Justine),

“Are you afraid of dying? (…) I mean dying loving each other – dying together so we may live as one forever, with the same blood always flowing through our veins. Darling, darling Justine, I live in you; would you die for me? Oh I love you so. I have never been in love with anyone. And never shall, unless it’s with you! (…) You don’t know how dear you are to me. The time is very near when you will love me as much as I do you! You will make me cruel and selfish, but love is always selfish! You don’t know how jealous I am. You must love me to death! (…) Let’s make a pact – if we ever depart from this life, we shall do it…together,”
(much of this, I believe, being directly lifted from Carmilla)

Justine simply responds, “Alright, if it makes you happy,” whereas most normal people with a healthy sense of self-preservation would probably have already slowly backed out of the room, terrified by how obsessively crazy Alucarda seems to be. But that isn’t the kind of movie this is. I’m never one hundred percent sure of Justine’s full feelings in all this (sometimes she is hesitant, or screams, or cries – but who doesn’t?), but it’s a filmic world in which she can be open to picking up what Alucarda is laying down.

And I couldn’t talk of this movie without getting into the subject of religious horror. I have mentioned before how religiosity is one of my least favorite currents in horror fiction. So often, stories of possession and devils and exorcisms just come off feeling like advertisements for the church, as if they are trying to convince me to tremble before the terrible threat of radical evil, and open myself to ‘The Lord’ as my only hope of salvation. It’s a big turn off.

When I watched this the first time, I was puzzled at how much the religious elements didn’t put me off, and I chalked it up to the film being just so crazy that I couldn’t help but love it in spite of its content and thematics. But on second viewing, I just connected so much more strongly to how angry the film feels. Like with many works of ‘nunsploitation,’ the dominant horror of the piece consists in the actions of the ‘good people’ of the church. The film shows the “satanic” elements to be ‘evil,’ sure. But the crimes of the priests and nuns by far seem worse. And it is in the kinky and/or sinister ceremonies of the church that the film has some of its most effective staging, that it shows the most stylistic flair.

For example, after witnessing the girls acting so impiously, the whole convent has a giant orgy of flagellation. The main priest is in the center of a circle of nuns, and everyone’s clothes are torn open at the back. All of the nuns whip him with flails, and in turn, all of the nuns are whipped by an outer circle of monks. Compare this with the satanic orgy that happened in the forest and only one is drenched in gore (there’s also a pretty funny moment later when a doctor comes to investigate the disappearance of Justine’s body – the nuns explain that no one noticed the reanimated corpse get up and walk away because they were all too busy flagellating themselves – it makes you think, “well, next time, don’t do it, and you don’t have to get whipped,” but the thing is, they really like getting whipped – and hey, that’s fine – no judgement, but they could do it while murdering fewer teenagers). All of the nuns wear very characteristic habits, more like the white wrapped bandages of mummies. When we first meet them, it’s puzzling why they always look so dirty and unevenly red. Later, you realize that they’ve been stained with blood the whole time, because they are doing this sort of thing non-stop.

Even on a much lighter level, the church does not seem like a good place. The first time we see a service, the priest is going on about damnation and hellfire and all these young girls are crying and screaming, terrified of what is going to happen to them, of how doomed their souls seem to be. Sure, when Alucarda and Justine start talking about Devil stuff, it is creepy, but everyone’s response of getting terrified and running away screaming only happens because they’ve already been well primed by the priest.

And then there is the exorcism ritual, with both girls, one in white and one in black, strapped to giant crosses, surrounded by hundreds of candles, ominous black robed holy men, and blood soaked nuns, writhing on their knees as the holy spirit animates them. Alucarda lashes out, vowing to kill them all until she’s knocked out. Then Justine’s clothes are ripped from her body and the priest drives a long needle into her flesh again and again, until finally, he finds her heart and she expires – you know, cause these are really ‘good people.’

On the other side, you know, with the “Devil,” we saw, um, a dramatic, naked ritual with the two girls and a goat headed devil and kissing and, sure, a bit of blood, and stuff, and we saw some people having sexy times in the forest. Later, after Justine rises from the dead, the only kind nun in the convent finds her vampiric, blood filled resting place and Justine initially lashes out at her, clawing at her face. But after a beat, she registers who it is and ceases her attack, only for the ‘good guys’ to start throwing holy water at her, causing her, in her suffering, to rip out the throat of the only person at the convent to have shown her any kindness, Sister Angelica.

Then the first and only time we see the Satanic powers causing real violence is when Alucarda takes her pyrokinetic vengeance out on the monastery. And who could fault her? These people murdered her love (before she fell for a cute blind girl, but she also died – like I said, Alucarda moves fast). I think the film’s heart is really with the girls – there may be irreligious creepiness in all the devil stuff, but the moralistic institution is the real monster – and its cruel wielding of power could be metaphoric of any dominating authority – church, state, or otherwise.

But then again, it is hard to say, and that kinda makes me love it all the more. Is this an anti-clerical, anti-authority film, decrying the bloodthirsty hypocrisy of those who would police our morality? Is this a religious horror movie about two young girls being corrupted by evil forces and going on a killing spree, with heroic churchmen doing the hard things that must be done? Is this a folk horror masterpiece, revealing deep cultural truths? Is this a cheesy B-movie with terrible special effects, melodramatic acting, and bizarre soundtrack choices? Is this a sleazy sexploitation flick, foregrounding what are meant to be seen as young girls as they are stripped and sexualized and tortured? Is this a madcap, insane spectacle of cinematic excess and joy? The answer to all of that and more is probably, “yes.”

—

And there we have it: two films that, if we are to be honest, only barely fit into the genre of the Lesbian Vampire film, but both of which seem really important and great in very divergent, and yet somehow related, non-Hollywood ways. Both walk a line between exploitation and high art. Both center the relationship between two young girls. Both have a smattering of vampirism here and there. And both are, well, pretty weird. They’re both also pretty special and unique little features.

As I said at the beginning, I had chosen 4 films for this week, but this is already quite a long post, so the next two (which are, without a doubt, 100% Lesbian Vampire movies) will have to wait until next time. A couple months ago, I fell into a routine of publishing bi-monthly, rather than once a week, but I think I’m on a roll and I should be able to get this next post up sooner than that. So please join me next week as we continue this series… See you soon.

Queer Horror II: A Small Shudder Roundup

Posted on June 30, 2023 by Glen — No Comments ↓

Chasing the annual event calendar, I think I’m just barely going to slide in under the line to do a Pride Month post for June (though last week’s film did have a clear queer reading, so that’s something). I do try to mark occasions of note, and as discussed last year, I have an appreciation for “Queer Horror,” the argument easily being made that with its focus on the outsider/the abject/the other/the outré, Horror as a genre is usually fairly “queer” (both in the original sense of the word and as a self-identifier used by those who have historically been othered for their sexual/gender identity). That said, I must again admit that I am not of the LGBT+ community and come to this from without, using the term “Queer” with all intended respect in reference to a film classification, a body of theory, and an identity.

Historically, much of the canon, so to speak, consists of pieces with gay-coded characters, or from LGBT+ creators (who may or may not have been open about their sexuality) fueling queer readings of the films even when sexuality is not explicitly present, but I think in contemporary times, the work has really opened up – it’s easier to find explicit LBGT+ characters and stories, and elements of “queerness” have spread through much of popular culture (though I feel camp as an aesthetic is still pretty niche). So, briefly, this week I’d just like to go over a few films I’ve recently watched (one of which I’d seen before, but rather love and would happily watch again). Somewhat coincidentally, these are all on Shudder (I pay for this service and do try to get my money’s worth). They are, in the order of watching: Spiral (2019), Knife + Heart (2018), and Death Drop Gorgeous (2020). I rather enjoyed all of them (in sometimes very different ways), and I think they represent very different approaches to how a contemporary film might present as “queer horror.”

Spiral (2019)

On one level, this is a fairly rote supernatural thriller. Sometime in the late 90s, a couple moves, with their teenage daughter, to a small town where everyone seems quite friendly, but there is clearly a sinister plot at work under the surface. Odd, spooky things start happening which only one member of the couple is witness to. That one starts panicking that a nefarious cult is targeting their family and that they are in grave danger if they stay, but the other partner sees nothing wrong, and is even irritated at all the craziness. Finally, head swimming with conspiracies and threats, the first partner takes drastic measures, there is a revelation of occult shenanigans, and things go real south real fast, landing with a severe, downbeat ending.

This summation could surely be applied to countless films, but this one comes with one small difference – the couple are two men (crazy, right?). On paper, this choice seems like it could have come from a calculating studio exec, seeking to tap into the current moment and exploit the real life difficulties such a couple would face relocating to small town America, making easy emotional hay out of real traumas to which they might have previously been subjected thanks to their identity. And after watching the film, I read plenty of negative user reviews which said exactly something to that effect. However, I’ve got to say that for me, it really clicked.

We see in multiple flashbacks how Malik (Jeffrey Bowjer-Chapman, who’s great), the partner who sees the danger, was attacked for being gay when younger, seeing his lover murdered before him. This early trauma has shaped him in many ways: making him more of an activist than his current partner and possibly giving him an impulse to live more openly, proudly embracing his identity in defiance of those who would abuse him for it, but it has also disillusioned him of any expectation that others can be trusted, that he will ever really be safe. He knows that though some things have seemingly improved, the world is still the world and there are still people who hate him (because he’s gay, because he’s black, because he’s an outsider from the city invading their small, insular town), who would hurt him (or worse) and his family if given half the chance. His partner, Aaron (Ari Cohen), has just not had the same scarring experiences and thus plays the role of the disbelieving husband demanded by a film like this.

The supernatural-paranoia-cult movie of it all generally works fine (though I suspect some plot elements might not hold up well to scrutiny, and to harp on just one of my least favorite genre tropes, when oh when will helpful ghosts finally learn that the way to issue urgent warnings to a protagonist is not to jump scare out of the shadows, making a creepy elongated face, and shrieking? It. Is. Not. Helpful.), but the addition of the “gay” element really makes the whole film feel like so much more. Malik’s apprehension and dread is palpably grounded in the very realistic possibility that he/they are actually being targeted for being gay (and early on, he does have to deal with their living room being vandalized with homophobic graffiti). This social-emotional grounding lends weight to everything that happens, taking this straightforward cult movie and turning it into a social horror that feels like it’s “about something.”

But this doesn’t reduce the whole film to a mere drama. It is still a horror movie and Malik’s justified and understandable fear, informed by his own terrible experiences, really does make it all scarier, granting a kind of instant pathos as we feel how close these fictional creepy events could be to something all too real and terrifying, as well as giving his character realistic reasons both to trust his gut terror and to deny it, knowing that he could easily just be paranoid following his earlier trauma. Our viewpoint character, we are with Malik as he fears for his family in the face of this looming, mysterious menace, and we are also with him as he doubts his own senses, memories, and judgements – coming unmoored, ‘spiraling’ out of control. We have no better idea of what is real than he does, and his alarm is contagious.

In the end, we learn that they have in fact been targeted for being gay (though not hatefully as one would expect, so much as coldly and opportunistically), that there is actually a dark magic at work, and that Malik was both paranoid and right, and then the movie crashes to a close with a greater commitment to horror than I’d expected of it, both on the immediate, personal level and writ large.

From what I read online, I have the feeling that this one wasn’t super popular with audiences (which quite surprised me given how I’d taken to it), but I have to say it worked for me – both as a supernatural and a social horror film. Admittedly, the first half played better when I was still unsure what was going on and was quite pulled in by its emotional weight, but after growing somewhat shambolic in later scenes, in the last minutes, it stuck the landing. Also, I think this offers an interesting example of one way to do “queer horror” – a more or less by the book horror movie, following the tropes of its given sub-genre, but the central characters are gay, and that gayness is actually part of the plot and not simply incidental. This may still be a case of blatant opportunism following the success of a film like Get Out (I didn’t find much about Spiral’s development), but even if it is, I still found it quite moving, at least a bit scary, and consistently engaging.

Knife + Heart (2018)

Described as a French “neo-giallo,” this is a beautiful, erotic, brutal, confounding, hypnotic, peculiar film that is alternatingly blisteringly intense and dreamily hazy. It gets all the adjectives. Some adverbs too. Set against the backdrop of the French gay porn scene of the late 70s, we largely follow Anne Parèze (Vanessa Paradis), a director of low budget, but artistically ambitious, gay porn films as her actors start getting picked off one by one by a mysterious masked killer in often disturbingly sexualized fashion. It is all stylish and atmospheric as the day is long: moody scenes at night in the rain, neon lit discos, a constant play of light and shadow and color and sweat, and so, so many cigarettes.

Directed and co-written by Yann Gonzalez, this can be bit of a difficult film. Anne, and through her, we are led on a wild goose chase that takes some weird turns here and there (one key to her investigation turns on feathers found at the crime scenes that a bird psychic with a twisted claw hand identifies as being from the seemingly extinct birds of a forest out of an old legend where she then travels, wanders drunk into the woods until finding an expository graveyard, and learns the killer’s history – ok, sure, why not…) and furthermore, Anne, while magnetic on screen, is a hard protagonist to like. Much of the film revolves around her abusive, drunken, obsessive stalking of her ex-girlfriend, who still works as her editor and puts up with a lot from her. As a viewer, it’s difficult to process this often unpleasant person, so driven by want and artistic ambition, but also so clearly harmful to this woman she purportedly loves (and in one scene sexually assaults) and so coldly willing to exploit the deaths of her ‘friends’ as fuel for her filmmaking (as her co-workers are being hunted down, she begins making her new film – all about a masked killer stalking gay men, recreating the real life deaths of her employees and really upsetting some of the survivors in the process). She is a complicated person whom we spend the whole film with but who is always a bit unknowable. And she’s just not a ‘nice’ person.

Past that, as referenced above, this is a movie that in dreamy fashion is very willing to take its time. It has periodic bursts of violence and flashes of passion, but more often moves at a rich, molasses like pace. This is not to say that it is boring or poorly paced, but you have to be in the right mood to go on its particular ride (and the first time I saw it, back when it was released, I wasn’t quite there). Much of this plays out in Anne’s investigation, one feature that links this to the giallo genre – wherein so often an artist or writer finds themselves, for some reason, investigating a series of murders you might otherwise expect to be police business. In this case though, it is clear why it falls to her – the victims all gay men or trans women, porn actors and prostitutes, the police will not work this case. It’s a joke for them. And as the fear grows around her, Anne finds herself the only one who will make the journey into understanding.

All of that said though, I love it, and I’m so glad I watched it again for this post. I love any film that can so envelop me in its mood, in its setting, in its vibe – however ambivalent that might be. I love the places where it touches horror – there are some absolutely top shelf sequences and we’ll deal with them shortly. I also love a quality here that I’m having trouble putting my finger on – though it sometimes feels like a long walk to get there and some character motivations and emotions feel obtuse, somehow it really got to me and in a final coda (featuring an impossible reconciliation and a loving warmth absent from much of the preceding film) I found myself in tears and not even really understanding why. It’s as if the gestalt of the film’s play of mood and look and mystery took me on an emotional journey more powerful than that of the plot or characters. There is an almost subconscious emotion suffusing it all that I found very affecting.

But it is in the places that horror meets queer that this movie shines. Central to the killer’s story and motivation is a mixture of repressed homosexual desire, self-hatred, and resentment for those he lusts after, those who can live in the world, as themselves, without shame. Thus, all of the kills are infused with an erotic charge and also a deep emotional weight. Every kill is exciting and scary, as is fitting of a horror/giallo, but it is also terribly sad, a tragedy that does not go unmarked. Generally in your classic slashers, everyone died before the final girl had any inkling that anything had happened. Here, a community is threatened, and they know it. Their friends are dying horribly, and there is room for mourning and dread (though not so much room that Anne can’t take advantage of the tragedy to inspire her new pornographic opus, “Homo-cidal”).

Two deaths bookend the film, making such a deep impression at the beginning and the end that I’d probably love it regardless of whatever else happened between them. Early on, we see a young man in a dark, seedy club, the music pounding, half-heartedly dancing with a couple of guys while he makes eyes with the mysterious figure across the room in a kinky leather mask. He goes with the stranger into a back room and there is a frisson of want, desire, and risk – the thrill and alluring sexiness of putting yourself in the hands of a stranger. He finds himself stripped and tied down to a table, still unaware that anything is awry, so turned on, so up for the sexual adventure. And then it all goes wrong and as he’s being savagely stabbed, the sounds of his dying bring tears to the eyes. Trust given is betrayed. Desire led to vulnerability led to death. It is rough, violent, and sexual; and it just breaks your heart.

All of the intervening deaths have a similar blend of horror and eros, need and trepidation, beauty and tragedy and it is really something special. This leads (via a long and winding road) to a final death, the dispatching of the killer in a porn theatre, where he had been stalking his next victim in a dark room in the back. Having finally unraveled the mystery of who and what and why he is, Anne identifies him and the men in the cinema close in. This is the killer who had been terrorizing their community, and knowing how the police had been so uninterested in offering protection, they move to eliminate the threat themselves. It’s not important that they understand his internalized homophobia, that they sympathize with his childhood trauma and mutilation – they have to defend themselves and each other against those who would erase them from existence – and they do. Finally, one young man, similar in build to the first victim, picks up a knife the killer had dropped, approaches him, and tentatively presses the blade into his chest, before continuing to stab and stab and stab. As he kills the killer, the young man whimpers and cries, echoing the sounds of the first victim’s death. There is tragedy not only in the dying but also in the killing, in the horror he must carry out to know that he and his community will be safe, or at least safer.

It is just freaking gorgeous. And sad. And it sings with pain. And is just so very, very cool. Not all of it feels like a horror movie per se, but the parts that do are extraordinary, and the film as a whole is really special – a rich, sad, evocative piece that worked on me in ways I can’t quite puzzle out, but which left a deep and lasting impression. Beautiful.

Death Drop Gorgeous (2020)

On some levels, this has similarities to the previous film. Again we have a story centered entirely around a queer community, with both LGBT+ victims and killer. Someone is murdering employees and visitors to a drag club in Providence, Rhode Island, and no one knows who or why. But past that, these films couldn’t be more dissimilar. Whereas Knife + Heart is highly produced, artful, and deeply earnest in its emotion and weight, Death Drop Gorgeous is totally independent, low budget, enjoyably trashy, and entirely camp, which is more or less the opposite of earnestness.

From the Providence based queer gore film collective, “Monster Makeup,” this is real indie, regional cinema. Reportedly crowd funded and filmed over a year and a half of weekends, with the writers, director, editors, sound mixers, and producers all playing leading roles, thus minimizing costs, this is clearly a labor of love – it may be a bit rough around the edges and the performances may be broad, but in many ways, they are supposed to be. Plus, the filmmaking is quite strong (really, better than the trailer had led me to expect) and the camp of it all justifies any other apparent weaknesses.

Basically, in high camp style, this is a classic whodunit slasher, though in the final act it takes a turn for the supernatural. The kills are all executed at a high level, both in filmmaking and in practical effects, and they’ve got a surprisingly realistic, visceral quality that I hadn’t expected given the deliberate unreality of much of the rest of the film, making this a stronger slasher than I’d hoped for. In many ways, the kill scenes could have come out of any conventional slasher (but some of the content therein, such as a penis being thrust into a glory hole only to graphically get mulched in a meat grinder, might not be featured in more mainstream fare).

On the mystery level, we’re presented with loads of red herrings as to who the killer might be. Is it the aging drag queen, in danger of losing her edge, who feels pushed aside by a culture and clientele obsessed with youth, beauty, and novelty? Is it the young bartender with a short temper? Is the sleazy, coke pushing club boss somehow behind it all? Could it be the aspiring, but untalented performer who faces rejection at every turn? The movie does maintain a degree of suspense for quite a while, and my only real criticism is that I wish it had waited to reveal the actual killer a bit longer as I felt diminished tension from that point on.

But once we do know the identity of the murderer, the film shifts in surprising fashion, adding a kind of Elizabeth Bathory, drag-vamp note to the final proceedings, which also includes an extended fight scene that goes much longer than one might think, bringing to mind the alley fight in They Live. And when this happens, in spite of the inherent irony of the camp, there is a depth of feeling rooting the killer’s murderous rage. In fact, the film manages to drum up some legitimate emotion all along the way among its cast of comically overplayed queens, pushers, dreamers, and club boys.

Whereas Knife + Heart felt like it was recreating a real community in a time and a place (Paris, the gay porn scene, 1979), Death Drop Gorgeous feels like it comes from a real community in a time and a place (Providence, a group of queer artists, 2020). It may not be realistic in its presentation of community, but it feels truly rooted in the lived experience of its creators. And its ‘faults’ make it all the more lovable. The presence of so many ‘non-professional actors’ (a term which, as someone who has long worked in a kind of pro-am theatre scene, kind of irks me) brings an amateur charm (by which I do not intend ‘unprofessional’, unskilled, or untrained, but rather, following the etymology of the word, from the Latin “amator,” or ‘lover,’ from “amare,” ‘to love,’ I mean to say one who does an activity for the love of that activity as opposed to purely for a profit motive). Though charm is also brought by the surprising cameo of 80s horror mainstay, Linnea Quigley (who’s brief presence really took me by surprise).

There are also other elements that could seem like a fault, but learning more, just give the film more character. Notably, as so much of the drag performance involves lip syncing, I was puzzled at first that the sound seemed out of sync a number of times during the drag shows (and at no other times) – weird given that it makes it seem that the performers are not lip syncing particularly well – and then I read that the performers had done songs they didn’t have (and couldn’t afford) the rights to and that the filmmakers had to record new songs to match their lips as best they could – which is rather a loveable element that I enjoy more than perfectly synced lips (necessitated creativity more interesting than boring perfection). Also, there are precious few “death drops” in the film (a move from ballroom voguing involving the dancer falling back very suddenly, which should apparently more accurately be called “dips” but come on – “death drop” works better for a horror title), but the one that occurs earns its name.

In the end, this is a fun, personal, idiosyncratic movie that manages to deliver some emotional heft through the campiness. Furthermore, that camp offers value in and of itself, bringing a stylized-vulgar-comic-grotesque-fabulous and inherently queer aesthetic to the film which, regardless of how much more common LGBT+ characters have become in popular media, is still rare and characteristic. This film is all the way over the top, embracing every flaw as a feature of high art. And finally, it really does commit to the horror, going for the gore, for the intensity of the kill in a variety of inventive, gruesome, and delightfully cringe inducing ways. It’s a good time.

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And so there – I’ve caught up with a few films from the “Queer Horror” collection on Shudder. And there are many other titles there worth the watch, some of which I’ve already discussed here, such as Daughters of Darkness and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary. I also recommend there After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (an odd French sci-fi trip), Demons of Dorothy (also French – very campy short), Hellraiser (a classic though I think mainly considered “queer horror” due to its maker), All About Evil (a fun quasi-John Waters-esque romp starring Natasha Lyonne), Tammy and The T-Rex (a surprisingly gory kids movie), and Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl (an intimate chamber piece of modern gothic). It’s a good collection and there are others I still intend to check out one of these days.

Also, I’ve managed to publish this while it’s still June – so hey, good for me. Now to figure out what I’m writing about next…

The Dreamy Allure of the Night Tide

Posted on June 15, 2023 by Glen — No Comments ↓

So, this week I’m writing from a new location. Typically, I’m based in Poland, but every May/June, I come back to the States to help my parents in Ocean City, MD as they prepare the performance they will give throughout the summer at Jolly Roger Amusement Park (they write, produce, and perform an original short pirate musical every year – with magic, and juggling, and new locations that need to be realized on the outdoor stage – this year, I made a cave). It’s just the three of us doing all the work, and thus it is always a huge undertaking (hence why there’s been more time than I would like between my last post and this), but it’s also satisfying to be able to help my folks out. I’m an only child and I happened to move very far away. Also, it’s a pleasure to spend my days doing physical work (painting/scenic carpentry/prop-building, etc.), whereas much of my labor at home revolves around the computer. It’s an exhausting, but nice, change of pace.

Ocean City is a summer resort town with all your typical features: boardwalk, beach, overpriced chintzy goods (t-shirts, flip-flops you’re gonna lose, etc.), roller-coasters, ferris-wheels, and carnival games where you can win a stuffed pig or something, and I must admit that for years I didn’t have the greatest relationship with the place. We’d moved here from New York when I was a kid, and at the time, the area was much more rural than where I’d come from – I just didn’t feel like I fit in.

But the rides and arcades were fun. And I always loved this ride through haunted house.

But that was middle school – when no one fits in – anywhere – and in the years since, Ocean City has changed, and so have I. The town underwent development of a double edged nature. On one hand, the presence of chain stores and sidewalks makes me more comfortable – it’s nice not to feel so much like some yahoo in a pickup truck is going to run you down when you’re trying to cross the road, and being able to pop into a Starbucks or Panera offers a comfortable place where I can set up with a laptop and relax a bit. On the other hand, I think it’s safe to say there has been some loss of local color. Color I didn’t always appreciate when I was eleven, but outlet malls bring less cultural specificity than something like, say, the kitschy “Shanty Town,” specializing in sea-side souvenirs, one used to pass when walking to the bridge that goes over to the beach.

But as I said, I’ve changed too. Once upon a time, my main association with this place was the natural awkwardness of middle school and the fact that we’d moved somewhere that kids hunted and fished and used racial slurs, and that really was not my scene. Now, as an ‘adult’ (I’m only 44 – am I really an adult?) my association is doing this creative and physical work for my parents, and also just the beach – the ocean – the image of the carnivalesque boardwalk at night (even if I’m not so likely to visit as I’ve rather lost my taste for crowds). And the ocean does have a draw. It’s surprisingly easy to ignore the tanning throng and let the crash of the waves wash over you. It captivates, and mystifies, and intimidates, just going on and on, so much bigger than comprehension, and only ever showing its surface. When I come in the summer, there’s little time for it, but I do value those brief moments when I can go take it in (as I did today to take some of the pictures above). And when I come in the winter, that’s the best – the town empties out and it feels like you have it all to yourself.

And so, to bring things around to the raison d’etre of this blog (in case you were wondering if I ever would), I wanted to focus this time on a bit of coastal horror, taking a look at a special little film, which I suspect is underseen, set in a locale similar to where I currently find myself.

Night Tide (1961)

Directed by Curtis Harrington, distributed by AIP, and set at a seaside boardwalk fun fair (my connection to OC – I imagine this must be similar to what things looked like here 60 years ago), Night Tide was released on a double bill with Roger Corman’s The Raven (which I may write about some day when I return to my series on Corman’s Poe films). Though not actually based on a work of Poe’s, it takes its title from his poem, ‘Annabel Lee,’ (about a lovely young woman who’s died – I know, what a twist! – but seriously, give the poem a read – it’s fun with something like the cadence of an old murder ballad) showing a fragment of the text before the closing credits begin (as one might see in a 60s Corman-Poe joint). It’s also Dennis Hopper’s first starring role and it might be my favorite thing I’ve seen him do. Often carrying a kind of bombast, here he is so understated, simple, and direct in his performance and it is quite captivating (I mean, I also love him running around like a madman with a chainsaw in each hand in Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, and this is pretty much the opposite).

As for the film, it is difficult to classify, but certainly a real treat. You could say it’s fantasy, or a psychological thriller, or a dream piece. You could even say it’s horror – kind of (and I will – I practice big-tent horror classification). On one level, it is the story of Mora (Linda Lawson), who works as a sideshow mermaid, but fears that she is a real monster (a siren), that she has killed men before, that her new beau may not be safe with her; and yet, she feels the call to be who she really is in spite of all this, to answer the call of the ocean, of nature, even if that brings darkness. That’s horror, right?

And it is the story of Johnny (Dennis Hopper), the young man who, having joined the navy to see the world, falls in love with her and goes on a surreal journey into a watery mystery, warned on all sides to cut off involvement with this fascinating young woman, told time and time again that he is in ‘grave danger,’ whether due to the police investigation concerning her dead boyfriends, the ominous implications of a tarot reading, or the old sea captain who explicitly tells Johnny that his girlfriend is literally a sea monster. That also seems like horror.

Finally, the atmosphere is just so enveloping, mysterious, and seductive, pulling you into its cinematic pleasures: the taste of sea salt, the feel of the surf splashing your cheek, the smell of cotton candy, and the janky, upbeat sound of the carrousel calliope. It is such a vibe – this dark mix of the sensory overload of the carnival and the majesty and raging power of the endless sea, all of this hinting at a dark threat born in nature, or madness, or something beyond the grasp of our limited understanding. That too seems like a horror film. And atmospheric work such as this is one of the things this genre offers better than any other, which I really love.

And yet, in spite of all this, I hesitate to call it horror outright (but again, I will). The flow of the story is just different somehow. Though there is fear, and there are stakes, and there is this encounter with an unknown and unknowable something that cannot be accepted, but also cannot be overcome, the rhythms of the story play out much more like those of a dream than a nightmare. Johnny, however much he is driven by love or fascination or fear, seems more to flow from one encounter to the next, pulled deeper and deeper into the oneiric spell, his experience sometimes bleeding over into a literal dream. The result is hypnotic and captivating, but it’s not scary – even when his lover’s arms become clammy tentacles, pinning him down, even when his life is actually in danger, or hers has ended too soon.

I think the genre category that best captures the film is probably fairy tale (though let’s hold onto horror as well so I feel justified in devoting a post to it on my horror blog). A defining element for me of many fairy tales is the evenness of their telling. It’s important that the frog found at the root of the rotten tree can only speak the truth, but it’s not particularly noteworthy that he talks (he’s a talking frog –what else would you expect him to do?). It’s not weird. In a fairy tale, there can be so many plot turns or character choices that to us seem odd, but nothing in the tale itself, for those who inhabit it, is ever weird. It just is. And then the next thing is. There can be monsters, but their existence doesn’t break the world for those that meet them. I wrote about this element when discussing another siren/mermaid movie, The Lure. It seems that these seductive watery characters of myth and legend can’t help but bring the characteristic tone of those legends with them. And beyond the flow of the narrative, the dialogue here all has a simple, unadorned quality like that in a fairy tale as well. Everyone (and especially Johnny) generally speaks in short, direct sentences. There is a stylistic flatness to their delivery – and by this I don’t mean to imply a deficiency of the performances, but just to describe a defining quality.

But it’s interesting – while the story moves in this unhurried fairy tale fashion, the drama is explicitly about the fear that this fairy tale could be true, about resisting it or denying it, about one’s comprehension of reality not being able to square with this new information. In a relatively late scene, once Johnny has been told what Mora is (or at least what she thinks herself to be), she pushes back against his disbelief, saying,

“You Americans have such a simple view of the world. You think that everything can be seen and touched and weighed and measured. You think you’ve discovered reality. But you don’t even know what it is.”

And this is, I think, the heart of the film. By the end, things have been mostly explained away. The fairy tale has been reduced to a story of petty human manipulation born of loneliness and insecurity. But there is still more than one seed of doubt. We have spent all but the last five minutes immersed in this sense of mystery, confronted with the awareness that there is magic in the world – that it is all more than we think, that we could all be more than we imagine – that the night is alive and that the sea has a call. Five minutes of psychologizing at the end cannot erase that. We are left with enough cause to disbelieve the rational explanations. There are still unanswered questions – and they will remain unanswered. Even if Mora wasn’t actually a mythical creature, there was more here than meets the eye – even if only in the depths of the psyche. We wake from the dream, reading about poor, beautiful, dead Annabel Lee, unsure of what was real and what was imagined, but sure of the spell we’d been under.

And somehow, in the final moments, it is as if Johnny also wakes up and just moves on with his life, seemingly unperturbed (the mood lingers, but only just) by what he has been through, by what he has lost (though, to be fair, perhaps having your lover try to drown you takes the bloom off the proverbial rose).

And it’s a great performance. This is a completely different Dennis Hopper than I’ve seen before. His Johnny is so small, insecure, and lonely. He’s also open and sincere and utterly lacking in guile. His behavior wouldn’t fly in today’s climate (his refusal to take no for an answer when he first meets Mora is creepy and could be experienced as quite threatening), but I can’t help but like him. I can’t help but feel for him: so alone in the world and unsure of himself – constantly fidgeting, he reminds me of a puppy that has had a growth spurt and just doesn’t know what to do with its newly large paws and gangly legs. He feels like the young boy protagonist of a tale from the Grimm brothers. Again – taken one way, Johnny does so many things wrong (disbelieving the woman he claims to love, denying her own lived experience), but he still comes across as, if not sweet, then innocent. He’s really into Mora, but he doesn’t understand her – he doesn’t have the capacity to understand (and maybe that absolves him somewhat of his faults).

I wonder about Mora’s reaction to him. When first they meet, she’s trying to listen to a jazz band in a café and he won’t stop trying to chat her up. He then proceeds to walk her home though she tells him not to. Finally, he forces a kiss on her cheek, against her wishes. And still, when he asks when he can see her next, she invites him to breakfast the next morning, leaving him dancing along the boardwalk railing in the night air as she goes upstairs. Why? Does she fall for his boyish charms? Is she really a siren and does she have some compulsion to draw young men to her rocks, even if they’re over-pushy?

From the next morning, she seems to enjoy his presence, to want him around. She also seems so much older (even ancient, or ageless) than him in spirit. There is a sadness within her. He moves through life in naïve simplicity, but she seems to carry the weight of knowing. And maybe that is his appeal for her. Pulled towards the depths by the anchor of her truth, his straightforward lightness could appear as a buoy.

At one point, Mora and Johnny come across a raucous beach party, drummers banging under torch light. One, who seems to know her, asks Mora if she will dance for them. And she does, giving such an interesting performance – her movement vacillates between organic flow and jagged lurches forward or back, up or down. She spins madly, but can also stop on a dime. It feels quite modern, but also free – without specific form. I feel the whole dance expresses her internal tension between the wild and keeping control, between her interior nature and her will. But in the end, she is overcome with the dance (and a vision of the mysterious woman – perhaps another siren- who haunts her, reminding her of her true self and where she must finally go, what she must finally do) and she collapses. The appearance of the other siren brings to mind the wedding scene in Cat People (1942), when the other Serbian woman (who one assumes is a cat person as well) recognizes Irena as her sister, calling on her to be herself, to join her.

A promotional still rather than a screen shot, but a nice pic nonetheless.

It’s probably already obvious, but as with Cat People, there is also a very strong and very obvious queer reading here (hey – June is Pride Month). I think whenever in a horror movie, a character lives in fear of giving in to their true nature and becoming the monster they know themselves to be, giving in to an alluring call that they abhor and abjure, but can’t deny, the reading is a given. And the fact that Mora reaches out, trying, like Irena in the earlier film, to establish a relationship with a man (not to mention the two dead boys before him), using him to hold her in the ‘normal’ world she’s trying not to stray from, surely does not detract from this reading. Also, apparently the director, Curtis Harrington, is considered “one of the forerunners of New Queer Cinema” (which I must admit I know nothing about – this is just what Wikipedia tells me).

And there is some comic queer coding as well, such as the scene where Mora has sent Johnny to the bath house for a steamy massage from the big, beefy, cigar chomping, towel wearing Bruno. While working out Johnny’s tension, Mora’s boss and father figure, Captain Murdock pulls a sheet aside and seems surprised to find Johnny there in the back room. Bruno looks up and asks, “Ah, Captain, you want me to pound you later?” to which the captain responds with British accented erudition, “Now, am I likely to forego a pleasure like that?” Then we go back to warning Johnny to get away while he still can, but the scene seems like a pretty big wink.

Still, it is sad that where this reading takes us, given the film’s conclusion, is that there is no possibility of living authentically (whether in terms of sexual identity or anything else) in this world. Giving in to nature does not end well for Mora or those around her. Even in a fairy tale, you may not get a happy ending. And the lack of that happy ending is not surprising here, given the degree to which the whole film leading up to is has been suffused with a dreamy melancholy. There may be real, beautiful magic in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be happy. It’s more likely to be lachrymose or simply mad. And then it might try to kill you…

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And that is Night Tide – a lovely little film that is really worth 80 minutes of your time: a bit of a dream, a bit of a fairy tale, a bit of a glimpse into the seedy beauty of this early 60s beach town. It’s even a bit of a horror film. Just not the scary kind.

Monstrous Teenagers in the Fifties

Posted on May 31, 2023 by Glen — No Comments ↓

Wild animals! Violent hoodlums! Roaming the streets in packs, eager to harry any good, upstanding citizen, causing damage or worse to person and property, denigrating all that is moral and wholesome and proper, the so-called “teenager,” under the influence of rampant hormones, alcohol, the ‘devil’s weed,’ or worse, is a scourge on our society that must be brought to heel if civilization is to have any hope of survival! Take your heads out of the sand! Open your eyes! See the danger that is all around, and start taking action before it’s too late!!!

So this week, I’m doing something a little different. The films I’m tackling would not generally be considered “horror” by most, but I think they comprise a fascinating artifact of the social fear of a certain mid-century America, making them richly worthy of consideration as, if not ‘horror’ per se, then horror-like works that reflect significant anxieties in their fictions. Harnessing the eternal distrust of the young (who don’t respect their elders, and worse, are coming to replace them), but funneling that through the rigid culturally specific tropes of the era when they were most produced, what may be termed “JD” (juvenile delinquent) films, propaganda-hygiene films, or simply “Fifties Teensploitation,” reveal the deep-set fears of a generation as much as films like King Kong, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (any version), or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre so clearly do.

It’s easy to see how people could fear teens like the ones in *The Blackboard Jungle* (1955).

Doing My Research

I’ve found myself drawn to this topic as I’d like to do something creative with it myself. I have previously made mention of my collaboration with La Folie Retro Cabaret Show, a group I work with in Kraków, Poland, and specifically of a piece I particularly enjoyed building that paid homage to the style and glamour of horror from the 20s and 30s. As an upcoming performance will be rooted in the 40s and 50s, I thought the tight sweaters and fast cars of this film cycle could be a fertile source of inspiration, and thus have started diving into the oeuvre. I can’t claim to have exhaustively studied the field, but in the last week, I have gone through eleven works, collecting patterns and observations about them. For the most part, they were all made between 1954 and 1958, though one comes from as early as 1938 and one as late as 1968.

They are: Reefer Madness (1938), Girl Gang (1954), Blackboard Jungle (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The Violent Years (1956), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Blood of Dracula (1957), Reform School Girl (1957), High School Confidential (1958), and She Mob (1968). Many, if not all, are available on Youtube.

My family moved a few times when I was growing up. I’m glad I never had to transfer to the school in *Rebel Without a Cause* (1955).

Though they all revolve around the same subjects and themes, they are also fairly varied. Three were actually released as “horror,” including a supernatural/sci-fi element, one is an earnest work of early anti-drug propaganda, some are “legitimate” studio pictures, some are cheapie “exploitation” flicks, one is a very idiosyncratic sexploitation movie, and one is a genuinely great, iconic film, rightly famous. All, however, engage with the idea of the then recently named ‘teenager’ as a monstrous hybrid of youth and adulthood, a monster intent on great social disruption (which seems right in line with Noel Carroll’s horror taxonomy in which he claims an essential characteristic of a monster is that it breaches categories).

And sometimes, as Freud said, the monster is just a monster. *I was a Teenage Frankenstein* (1957)

It’s not my intention to review all of these films here, or even detail each in some way. Rather, I’d like to try identifying and discussing some trends that seem to recur or some elements that stand out as seemingly unique and noteworthy.

But First, a Bit of History.

I’m taking a lot of this from a Saturday Evening Post article. You can read it all here. As I understand it, the term “teenager” wasn’t even coined until the 40s and didn’t come into regular use until the 50s. That said, what we know as the teenager really began to form in the first decades of the 20^th century. Before that, for most of human history, human development was essentially divided into childhood and adulthood. Few people stayed in school beyond the 5^th grade and those who did studied in single room schoolhouses with kids of all ages. Except for the very privileged very few, most completed their education at the end of “childhood” (if they even made it that far) entered the workforce, and started taking on adult responsibilities, providing for their families. It wasn’t uncommon to marry and start having kids by 15 or 16 and before that, most rituals of courtship occurred in the home, under the watchful eyes of parents.

Though in *High School Confidential* (1958) courtship still takes place inside the home as the main character’s busty aunt (played by blonde bombshell, Mamie Van Doren) won’t stop hitting on him.

It wasn’t until the late 19^th/early 20^th century that society really started cracking down on child labor and one way that was done was to extend the period of mandatory education. Furthermore, as automobiles were invented, it was possible to create consolidated high schools, bussing students in from a wider geographic area, putting all these teens together all day every day, creating an unprecedented social dynamic, a roiling pot of hormones and ego, making all the teenagers within more like each other and less like children or adults. Finally, when cars became common, “dating” as it is now known became a thing, away from the family, as did “teen culture”.

But in *Reform School Girl* (1957), they don’t have much fun in the car – it’s all just arguing and vehicular manslaughter.

A period of new affluence and comfort birthed a new commercial demographic. Teenagers had to study, but generally had a new kind of free time and disposable income. They could work, but didn’t have the same financial responsibilities of previous generations and could spend their earnings on records, clothes, hanging out at the soda fountain, and judging from the movies I watched this week, switchblades, lots of switchblades.

Teachers sometimes get stabbed in *Blackboard Jungle* (1955). Fortunately, I teach online.

They were also getting into trouble in cars, getting in accidents, getting pregnant, experimenting with drugs, and getting into fights. And people freaked out, as can be seen in films of the times. In the 30s, there was a boom of ‘hygiene’ films and ‘propaganda’ films, warning against new dangers targeting the youth of the time. For this collection, I watched the classic Reefer Madness, a very self-serious (if often laughable) entry, showing how rapidly young lives could be devastated by just one puff of marijuana. Unscrupulous pushers target nice, clean-cut young teens, inviting them back to their drug den to party. Before you know it, there are hit and runs, deadly gunshots fired in a hallucinatory haze, suicidal leaps out the window, and loads and loads of maniacal laughter. All of it is framed by a high school principal addressing parents at a PTA meeting, trying to drive home the message of how these dangerous threats could come for their very own children if they don’t act immediately.

Yup, sure wouldn’t want your kids to have as much fun as the ones in *Reefer Madness* (1938), though to be fair, this shot doesn’t include any of the murder, suicide, or madness.

Recurring Trends

The main thrust of Reefer Madness represents one key trend I saw in these works – sometimes, the kids are really “good” kids, but wicked people are out to corrupt them, to take advantage of them, destroying them in the process. And even if pushers aren’t actively trying to hook your kid on smack, all it takes is for your daughter to take a joy ride in a hot car with the wrong boy, one who would kill someone in a hit and run and let her take the fall, for her to become a Reform School Girl (though to be fair, in that case, the girl in question already had a bad home life with her aunt who resented her and her uncle who lusted after her – all of which pushed her into the arms (and passenger seat) of this dangerous delinquent). These films suggest that parents today are willfully blind to the deadly temptations their kids are facing. Reefer Madness is one of these, but there are many, many more (about drugs, about sex, about violent crime). And while this film was quite earnest in its messaging (produced by a church group that really was worried about marijuana’s corrupting influence), many others were rather exploitation fare, promising moral instruction and preventative education in order to get around the Hays Code and feature lurid subject matter like sex and drugs and their often violent and tragic consequences.

Consequences like becoming a *Reform School Girl* (1957).

And this trope of the world (and especially high school) being much more dangerous than parents are willing to imagine continued for quite some time, still going strong in 1958’s High School Confidential, in which drug dealers are trying to work their way into a high school market, starting the kids first on weed, but rapidly moving them on to the hard stuff. The school is already run by a gang when the protagonist arrives and the first half of the story involves him taking over and making a connection with the local heavies who can supply the junk he wants to sell. I find it interesting that this moral panic about pot serving as a ‘gateway drug’ had such staying power. When I was a teen in the 90s, I was encountering much the same rhetoric. Things change slowly if at all.

Toking up before moving on to needles and prostitution in the abandoned warehouse/crashpad in *Girl Gang* (1954).

In the 40s, while those just a bit older were away at war, a generation of teens was really on their own and free in an unprecedented way. And people were worried about what they were getting up to. I didn’t watch anything from this era exactly, but I think this was when the “youth runs wild” picture was born (and in 1944, a film exactly bore that name). I believe many of these can be grouped loosely under the umbrella of “film noir,” often with teens falling under the influence of gangsters and criminals. Whereas films like Reefer Madness posited innocent teens being preyed upon by unscrupulous pushers, this era started to present the tale of “good kids gone bad,” seeing teens not only destroyed by their brush with the dark side, but also showing them go bad themselves, becoming criminal, becoming violent, becoming animals.

Or sometimes, they just become vampires and attack girls with shovels in graveyards as in *Blood of Dracula* (1957).

And then, by the 50s, one of the biggest trends I see is just presenting the teens as dangerous criminal animals from the get go. Girl Gang (1954) begins with the eponymous group of teen girls carrying out a car-jacking and leaving the driver for dead on the side of the road before going to get their fix. To let another girl join, they inform her she first has to have sex with five boys who are “friends” of the gang, prostituting her in exchange for membership. They don’t need to “go bad.” They are bad already (though much of the rest of the run time focuses much less on the girl gang, and much more on an sinister drug pusher getting nice high school kids hooked on junk, who then have to resort to violent crime to maintain their heroin habits).

The pusher explains that it’s best for girls to shoot up into their upper thighs so no one can see the track marks in *Girl Gang* (1954). Really, the film spends a surprising amount of time having him explain heroin best practices.

Blackboard Jungle (1955) features a well-intentioned young teacher going to an inner city, multi-racial school where the kids are presented as wild and dangerous from the very beginning. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) isn’t about juvenile delinquents the way some of these other films are, but it sure features them. On the first day that James Dean’s character comes to his new school, his car is vandalized, he’s pushed into a knife fight he doesn’t want to be in, and he is challenged to a cliff edge game of chicken with deadly consequences. He is actually a nice kid (who just doesn’t fit in to such a dishonest, superficial world), but generally the teens he meets are a pretty rough bunch.

But everyone looks cool in a teenage death race in *Rebel Without a Cause* (1955).

And some of the roughest characters are probably the gang of seemingly good, proper teen girls in the Ed Wood penned (though he was uncredited) The Violent Years (1956). Exploitation through and through, this film doesn’t seek to warn that your kids could be preyed upon, or turned to the dark side. Rather, it indicates that your sweet, loving daughter could just be waiting for you to go to work so she can rally her gang of cop killing teen girlfriends (it seems that there were a lot of ‘girl gang’ movies –just more shocking I guess) to knock over gas stations, attack couples on lover’s lane (trussing up the girls and outright raping the boys), and carrying out acts of vandalism on their school at the behest of an unnamed international interest (which is clearly the soviets). This trend was still going strong by the late 60s with She Mob in which the girls aren’t explicitly teens, but they are still a dangerous gang, led by their sexuality to acts of kidnapping and murder (it is also a very weird little movie, but oddly fascinating like some kind of strange insect – a bit like crossing John Waters with Russ Meyer). And it’s hard to find a more ultra-violent presentation of teen life than in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), so this is an idea with staying power (though this is both out of the era and geographic focus of my selections).

It’s fun to rob gas stations in *The Violent Years* (1956).

I don’t actually know the stats on violent crimes committed by youth in the fifties, but I can’t help but think that it wasn’t as bad as people imagined. Still, with films like these (and it seems that there were loads of them in a pretty short period) representing the contemporary mindset, it’s not surprising that J. Edgar Hoover was ringing the warning bell in a 1953 FBI report about the “appalling crimes” he was expecting teens to commit in the coming years, or that Dwight Eisenhower called for federal legislation in the 1955 State of the Union to deal with the scourge of juvenile delinquency.

If you aren’t careful, you may discover that your kids have been monsters all along – and it’s obviously your fault for not paying more attention sooner! These were the original teenage ‘super-predators.’

A very literal example in *I Was a Teenage Werewolf* (1957).

And speaking of monsters, we do have the three entries that are actually horror films: I Was a Teenage Werewolf (which I wrote about at somewhat greater length in my last post), I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, and Blood of Dracula (which is essentially a gender flipped version of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, with a girl becoming a vampire instead), all released by AIP in 1957. Really aimed at a teen audience, these are a bit kinder to the “teenager,” setting up a manipulative adult (therapist, scientist, teacher) as the true villain of the piece, who is experimenting on some teen against their will, bringing out the monster within (which will apparently somehow save humanity), but still, they all suggest that every teen has that inner violent, powerful monster tucked away inside, just waiting to be released by a well-intentioned, if quite evil, mad scientist. And I suppose they’re also a warning that if you drive recklessly, some British guy might steal your corpse and turn you into a monster, so there’s that…

The monster is pretty close to the surface in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). Fun fact: Whit Bissell also played the mad scientist in *I Was a Teenage Frankenstein*, released that same year.

Some Reflections

I think often when we look back on the past, we naively imagine something quaint. Especially in terms of the 50s, much of the pop culture that has stayed in the public eye seems so sanitized. This was a time when married couples were always shown in separate beds and apparently no sitcom family’s home came equipped with a toilet. But of course, we have always been violent; we have always been getting into trouble. The teenager as we know it is a more modern concept, but people have been documented complaining about ‘youth today’ since at least Socrates. From the 30s to the late 60s, there was more censorship (at least in American pop culture, but I expect that was also true in other countries as well), and this means that the cultural documents we have (film, TV, etc…) tend to paint a picture of a world that never was. The reality was probably just the opposite.

In the reality of *High School Confidential* (1958), cars that flip over in drag races have a unique relationship to physics.

By all accounts, “kids today” are engaging in adult activities (sex, drinking, drugs, work, and driving, among other things) later and later. Comparatively, the teens of the past really were running wild and getting into much more trouble than young people do nowadays. Whereas once society was terrified that teens were forming packs to roam the streets, preying on the vulnerable, now people just complain that teens spend too much time inside, looking at their screens – now parents might be concerned their kids aren’t getting in enough trouble. And oddly, just as young people now may hold on to aspects of childhood longer, I dare say that the current young generation is probably more plugged into what is going on in the world than in most previous eras. With a dread of a world irreparably environmentally ruined by those that came before, with a newfound insistence on all people being treated with full respect, regardless of race, creed, sexuality, gender expression, etc., and with a tragically reasonable terror at the prospect of being gunned down on the way to algebra class, my impression is that teens now are a pretty serious minded bunch.

Sadly, these days, I think they have more to legitimately fear from and for the world than the world has any reason to fear them…

Exploitation

One final thought: operating in horror spaces, there is often much mention of “exploitation” films. I always kinda get what people mean by that, but it also feels a bit nebulous. Where exactly is the line between “exploitation” and “legitimate” filmmaking? Does it depend on the budget? On the studio? On just how titillating the subject matter is? Watching this set of films was interestingly illustrative in marking the differences.

A kidnapping victim is made to feel comfortable in *She Mob* (1968).

Don’t get me wrong – I really do appreciate an actually “great” movie, and from this set, that is clearly Rebel Without a Cause. It is just a beautiful, interesting, rich film and Dean’s performance is truly special. However, generally among these movies, it was the more ‘exploitation’ fare that I found most enjoyable, and honestly, less moralistically uncomfortable.

The young ladies in *Blood of Dracula* (1957) are not terribly welcoming to the new girl.

Case in point: Blackboard Jungle is a very well-made film, from a bigger studio (MGM), and stars some actual names (not to mention featuring prominent up and comers – it was a young Sidney Poitier’s first film). Thus, while it is a ‘JD’ flick, you wouldn’t call it an ‘exploitation’ picture. But the presentation of high school kids as threatening animals felt kinda icky. This is a film that is good enough to actually communicate a sense of reality and the one it was pushing – of the horrific monstrousness of ‘kids today’ – is reasonably ugly when effective (I wonder about a comparison with the far more exploitationy Class of 1984 (1982), which is basically a remake). Of course, by the end, the idealistic young teacher hangs in there and makes a difference, but along the way, there is a real demonization of the young that lands in a different way than in some of the cheaper, less highly produced flicks.

A high schooler attempts to rape the new female teacher in the library in *Blackboard Jungle* (1955). These kids are the worst.

On the flip side, a movie like The Violent Years makes a point of showing teens as so very, very horrible, and yet it is just oddly watchable and fun, and doesn’t turn me off with its moralizing, even though it explicitly does so much more of it. There is something to the fact that any messaging it has about the dangers to and of youth are so transparently just cashing in on a trend and using it to titillate. This results in a peculiar aesthetic pleasure. I’d rather indulge in the singular charms of honest sleaze over the genuine moralistic scolding of a “well-made film” any day.

The girls in *The Violent Years* (1956) take what they want when they want it.

And the “exploitation” of films like Girl Gang, Reform School Girl, or The Violent Years also feels closer to the horror genre – which I’m supposed to be writing about. For all of their superficial moralizing, it feels obvious that they are actually just using that faux preachiness to justify salacious entertainment, having fun with the concept of the teenage monster. And they are kinda a blast.

But also, do yourself a favor and watch Rebel Without a Cause. It’s just a beautiful piece of work. I loved it!

She, on the other hand, loves getting high and playing the piano. *Reefer Madness* (1938)

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And there we are. I acknowledge that these movies really aren’t “horror” and even more, I feel I barely described them. But still, I think they do something that horror does: they take a fear that is on the minds of society and distill it into an entertainment – to exorcise that fear, to oppose the source of that fear, or simply to capitalize on that fear to make a quick buck, thus effectively preserving a valuable social document – a lens through which to examine a past moment in time. And thus, on my horror journey, it’s been interesting to take this little detour, and I think I’ve collected some fun stuff to feed into creative work of my own. Thanks for indulging me in some slightly off brand commentary this week. Next time, perhaps I can just talk about one good scary movie. Let’s see what happens…