It’s obvious that within horror (or anything for that matter), certain trends occasionally pop up and can dominate for a while before fading away. Some are truly short lived, and some are evergreen. Vampires come and go. So do slashers or haunted houses or zombies. The list goes on. But there is one little trend that always seemed so unlikely, so weird, and therefore, so charming. I just love the idea that some horror franchise, after a few iterations of its own formula, would shrug and suggest, “what if we do what we always do, but in space?”
Honestly, there aren’t that many of these (I’m writing about three here – there could be three more), but the fact that there is more than one seems of note, seems like enough to justify viewing this as a peculiar sub-sub-genre, and so today, let’s take a look at Jason X (2001), Hellraiser: Bloodlines (1996), and Leprechaun 4: In Space (1997) (Sorry Critters 4 – I can only do so much). Spoilers will abound. As will Space Marines, dimly lit spaceships, perfunctory nudity, deceptive holograms, liquid nitrogen freeze kills, and a faithful adherence to formula.
The notion of moving a series to the stars just seems to offer the delicious promise of hilarious laziness and joyful stupidity. That said, having watched these three for today’s post, I’ve gotta say that each in its own way comes across better than I’d expected. It just goes to show you should always give things a chance – you never know what you’re gonna find out there in the vast expanses of space.
Jason X (2001)
Ah, the Friday the 13th franchise. So beloved, so iconic, so … repetitive? I must admit, it is not my favorite series of films, though there are a few that I love (Part 2 is just great). Still, there is a kind of comfort food pleasure in the endless recurrence of their tropes and iconographies. While there were many changes and innovations over the years (from a movie about a crazy lady killing off camp counselors because some teens were screwing around when Jason, her disabled son, drowned, to a series of variations of that son (not dead after all, eventually supernatural) as a backwoods killer and later a kind of bulked up, particularly mobile zombie, willfully encapsulating every trait ascribed to the slasher film, true or not, and eventually going on some odd side quests, like when Jason fought Carrie, or the other time when he passed from body to body in a weird little worm thing), there is always a constancy – watching a F13 movie, you sort of know what you’re gonna get – it’s kinda like travelling internationally and eating at McDonalds – it might not be the most interesting, culturally specific experience, but it’s unlikely to give you a stomach bug (unlike the enchiladas in Part V).
And I feel that there is something interesting about how these movies present themselves. They were constantly attacked as violent, immoral, exploitative trash back in the heyday of the early 80s slasher boom, often subjected to censorship, leaving plenty of gore on the cutting room floor. And I feel, perhaps in response, they leaned hard into the Reagan era morality of the time (as Scream put it, the “sex equals death” equation of the classic slasher – which isn’t necessarily actually the case with many slasher flicks), almost saying, “yeah – we’re exploitative and violent, but see, the killer is only going after teenagers who are doing drugs or drinking or screwing around, so that makes it ok, right?” But now, from the perspective of 2025, I think it’s that old fashioned hypocritical “morality” that is the bigger turn-off and in a weird way, now the ugliness of this sex negative punishment can be excused away by saying, “come on, it was all just a ruse to let us make violent movies with lots of nudity in them,” the commercial exploitation actually softening the blow of the reactionary moralizing.
Even hanging out next to half-defrosted hockey masked zombie maniacs can’t kill the mood.
And so it came to pass that after about 20 years of killing teenagers on earth, it was time to get on a spaceship full of scientists and space marines, but yes, also horny teenagers, and do a bit more of the same among the stars.
Chekhov’s giant drill bit – if someone sharpens a giant drill bit in the first act, when he’s later dropped onto it, someone has to remark, “He’s screwed!”
But released in 2001, far from the cultural context of the original films, Jason X repeats many tropes (horny kids and a hulking, masked killer who’s explicitly triggered by sexuality) without carrying their original semantic values. Rather, it is done with a kind of ironic distance (which was, at the time, perhaps the contemporary way of saying, “look, we’re not actually saying these kids should be punished for being horny, AND we’re not just giving you gory kills and topless girls to titillate, NO, it’s all ironic, we’re all in on the joke,” but it’s just another line – at the end of the day, they just wanted to make and audiences just wanted to watch attractive young people get eviscerated, cause sometimes you do…
I feel like this one is often derided, but really, aren’t most of them? The original was critically panned (and it’s not like the critics ever changed their tunes with later entries), the 3rd was a gimmicky 3D cash grab, the 5th didn’t satisfy some fans on the killer reveal, the 6th is popular but some don’t like its comedy, the aforementioned 7th (fighting a psychic girl) seemed to some like jumping the shark, the 8th is supposed to be set in Manhattan, but everyone complains that it all takes place on a very slow moving boat, and the 9th features the weird worm thing – that was odd. The point is that as much as fans like watching Jason pick off a group of (not always, but often, sadly) forgettable young people who just want to have a good time, I think fans also enjoy moaning about how “this one has some good kills, but it’s stupid that – fill-in-the-blank.”
So yeah, I can’t say this is a great movie by any stretch, but it is basically fun. Coming in the post Scream era, it has a lot of self-aware humor, which some love and some find grating. For my part, I’ll say I enjoyed that, such as the character early on who, in delivering some expository dialogue, explains that Jason had been captured some time ago and should probably just be put on ice (cryogenic deep freeze), but he was too valuable to simply file away – if executives can make a bit more money, dust him off and give that man a machete!
Or of course, I think the most famous sequence in this flick has to be when Jason is distracted on a holodeck by a couple of virtual, topless teen girls expounding on how much they love ‘beer, pot, and premarital sex’ – of course he has to stop chasing his actual targets and beat them to death in their virtual sleeping bags. It is done with intentional, and I think successful humor, clearly poking fun at the tendencies of the series to date, while still getting away with perpetuating said trends, having its cake and eating it too. Cheap gag? Yeah. Does it work? Yeah!
In short, the plot sees Jason cryogenically frozen in 2008 and found by a group of students on an expedition to the now defunct “Earth I” in 2455. They bring him, as well as his most recent victim (who’d successfully turned on the deep freeze before getting stabbed), up to their ship, taking them both back to Earth II as exciting archeological finds. Of course, seemingly woken in a rage by the sense that some young people, somewhere, are having sex, he thaws out and wreaks his typical havoc until just a couple remain. Along the way, he gets a cyber upgrade and a futuristic new look.
It’s all deeply indebted to Alien/Aliens, and generally that works for it. A specimen is brought onto a spaceship – it starts hunting everyone – it might have been left behind, but it was too valuable not to take. In this case, the students are accompanied by a regiment of space marines, which really ups the body count with a stretch in the middle where well-armed people, actually prepared to fight, go after the undead, machete wielding killer, as opposed to having him picking off young people unaware that anyone else has been hurt. But it doesn’t matter – he makes quick work of the soldiers and before long, we’re down to a smallish group of students and scientists, as well as a kung fu kicking, sexy android – cause it’s the future.
I don’t think there was much in terms of scares, but it has tons of creative kill sequences (liquid nitrogen, giant drill bits, getting diced by floor grating while being sucked out into the vacuum of space, etc).
And they often come with a touch of textual comedy, such as the tough-as-nails sergeant who gets stabbed through a door and responds, “It’s gonna take more than a poke in the ribs to put down this old dog,” then a giant blade comes through his chest and he continues, “Yeah, that oughta do it.”
It’s funny, at least enough to put a smile on my face, if not to laugh out loud. Also, I was startled in the first scene to see David Cronenberg there – I mean he was really just on screen long enough for me to write in my notes “David Cronenberg is in this movie?!?” before he got a spike through his chest, but that was a fun cameo – one of the most serious minded horror directors of the era popping up in a deeply silly space set slasher sequel.
There it is.
And maybe that’s the whole film – more or less enjoyable. I imagine a long-time fan of the series might have been irritated with it back in 2001, but as I wrote above, I think that just comes with the territory for F13 fans. Come to it without too much baggage, and there is fun to be had…in space!
Hellraiser: Bloodlines (1996)
While I can’t say this was a good movie, it wasn’t bad in the way that I expect a fourth franchise entry which decides to go to space to be. In concept, and at least for the first act of the film, I’d say this was a serious, horrific, very “Hellraiser” flick and I was really there for it. It had good ideas, did better justice to the mood and thematics of the franchise than the third film had, and offered an enjoyable expansion on the mythos, while also freeing itself up from the deadly franchise trap of boredom-in-repetition by virtue of taking place during different eras, hundreds of years apart, much of it predating the cenobites as we’ve come to know and love them, and thus offering quite a different story. It really felt fresh for a while there.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I liked it. Was it perfect? Certainly not, and somewhere about the halfway point, I found it really ran out of steam, largely due to the story getting muddied and confusing (more on that in a bit). But even with its weaker second half, this feels special – ambitious in scope and theme (even if hamstrung by execution), full of stuff to love (decadent French monstrous aristocrats doing dark magic, Doug Bradley’s “Pinhead” getting to wax malevolently poetic more than usual – and filmed to look as good or better as he ever has in the franchise, solid, inventively gory practical effects, and a surprise appearance by a young Adam Scott, who I hadn’t known was in this), and most importantly (something which becomes increasingly less true in the Hellraiser series), it really feels like a Hellraiser story.
There is so much to do with a compulsive drive – in the form of game or sex or sensation play or lust for power or the simple urge to unlock something, solve a puzzle, unravel a truth, get all the pieces to fit into place, meeting in a nexus with architecture – of a building, of a soul, of a spaceship, of desire. Narratively, this all gets confused and is ultimately unsatisfying, but the (especially initial) inference of it all is exactly the sort of intriguing psycho-sexual, metaphysical, boundary exploring, horror themed, S&M dressed vibe that I want from a Hellraiser flick. It actually feels like it had Clive Barker’s involvement (apparently the last to do so until the recent reboot), and it is all, for lack of a better word, cool.
I just wish the story worked better. And made a bit more sense. And didn’t lose me in the back half. But hey, you can’t have everything.
In short, over the span of about 5 centuries, the film follows the line of the toymaker, Phillip LeMarchand, who is commissioned by a wicked French libertine to create the iconic puzzle box at the heart of the series, the solving of which unlocks a gate to Hell (or at least some hellish otherworldly dimension – as I’ve discussed before, something I’ve always appreciated about Barker’s world building is that it allows for a satisfying tale of the demonic without having to accept Christian metaphysics, and particularly, Christian moralizing).
Not knowing what end he’d been serving in crafting his creation, LeMarchand would reverse engineer it to undo its horrific results, but he’s killed long before he has a chance. Thus, the film will go on to track two of his descendants – an architect in the 90s and an engineer in the 22nd century, as their dreams are haunted by the family’s dark past and images of the work they might yet do.
In the box’s first use, the eeeevil aristocrat who’d commissioned it summons a demon named Angelique into the body of a sacrificed peasant girl (in a pretty cool sequence of dark magic – flaying the victim and filling her emptied skin with the malevolent spirit). For the third sequel in a series, I’d say as a villain, she is a breath of fresh air, and as long as she is the only malicious entity in the game, I think the film really works. Eventually though, when we hit the second act (in the 90s), Pinhead shows up and the film hits a narrative speedbump.
We have an impression that he and Angelique are very different types of monsters, with very different methods. He has a nice line to her, on first meeting, “Hell is more ordered since your time, princess, and much less amusing.” However, while it is clear that they are in conflict, it was never particularly clear why. Who is attempting to do what and why? For all his talk of order, is he just too impatient to let her play her seduction game? Or do they just fight and betray each other cause evil demons gonna demon? At a certain point, I felt the film makers had lost the plot. Finally, by the end of the second act, Angelique is in thrall to the hellpriest, just another cenobite to cause trouble in the third segment.
That’s her on the right – all Cenobited.
I feel this was all a missed opportunity – she had been an intriguing, enjoyable new element, and Doug Bradley’s performance is as charismatic and rich as ever – if the story is actually to do with their conflict (which is a story I’d really like to watch – how do their methods/philosophies/politics really diverge?), I want to understand it – I want to dig into that, let it breathe, but it’s all given short shrift. Similarly, while it is a pleasure to listen to Bradley utter every line of dialogue, it is sadly pretty empty pseudo-poetic/philosophical hokum. But again, he delivers it with such gravity and sly pleasure that it’s ok if it doesn’t actually mean anything.
When in the third act, we watch them hounding LeMarchand’s final descendent who has been able to craft his ship as a massive puzzlebox that will finally close the gate and defeat them once and for all (or at least until the next sequel – there would be 6 more before the reboot, though, to be fair, all take place at an earlier time, so none of them undo this ending), though that storyline is still a neat idea (and a not at all silly explanation for why we’re in space), the film had already kinda lost my interest (I’ve read that there was heavy studio interference, adding a lot of new scenes in reshoots and cutting 20 minutes of material – I’m curious what it had been on the page).
So in the end, it doesn’t ultimately add up to as much as I’d like it to, but I must say, for a film that I watched just because it’s funny when a horror franchise decides to go to space, it had a lot of great, atmospheric, thematic, gory, and creative stuff. And when I went through it a second time to collect pictures for this post, I found myself digging the film even more. Far from the best of the series, but also faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar from the worst, if you like Hellraiser material, this is really worth an hour and a half of your life. I expect that if I had been a big Hellraiser fan in 1996, I would have been disappointed and exasperated, possibly even full of rage. But coming to it in 2025 for the first time, I’m happy to overlook its not insignificant flaws and rather love the sights it has to show me.
Leprechaun 4: In Space (1997)
Ok – this is it, the big one. The one I’ve been waiting for – a sequel so baldly capitalizing on the ridiculousness of taking its franchise to space, that it even proudly proclaims the fact in its on the nose subtitle: “In Space”! I’ve long been curious to check this one out, and with St. Paddy’s Day around the corner (I’m writing this on March 16th), what better time to watch an offensive Irish stereotype kill a bunch of people while nattering on about his gold? I doubt there is a more “in space” horror sequel than this one, so I’ve saved it (if not “the best,” than at least “the most”) for last. Let’s go!
And space has rarely looked cheaper.
And…it is not a good movie.
But on the other hand, I’m quite certain it isn’t meant to be.
Sometimes a movie has a low budget, but you wouldn’t know it. That’s not the case here. Rather, I feel this movie wears its low budget as a badge of honor. It’s not ashamed of the fact that it looks like it cost half the amount of an episode of Dr Who. No – it is loud and proud about being a deeply silly cheapie doing something patently absurd. And for all that it does not look expensive, there are some fun looking, creative practical effects and makeup applications (as well as some god-awful mid 90s digital effects).
About to explode in the vacuum of space…
I can’t honestly say that I loved it, but I didn’t hate it either – and in writing that I really don’t intend to damn with faint praise. Rather, I think I was probably watching it under the wrong circumstances – alone, sober, on my computer, considering it as an artefact of possible value for consideration on my oh-so-wordy blog. I can only imagine that this works much better in a kind of party atmosphere, under the influence of something or other, everyone’s incredulity amplified by the shared experience.
I can’t possibly imagine that director Brian Trenchard-Smith was trying to make an Oscar contender, but just fell short. I think this was exactly the movie he’d wanted to make. And he did. And, in its way, it is periodically fun, and I expect it could be more so if you’re watching it in the right spirit. And boy is it “in space!” I dug how at no point did it try to explain the transition to the cosmos either. Nope. It’s just some time in the 21st century and we find the eponymous green clad killer in the clearly plastic tunnels of some alien world wooing a space princess so that he might be crowned king. And we go from there.
Why do these plastic alien mine walls look so intestinal?
For the third movie in a row, space marines show up – and these are the “marine”-iest space marines to date – all “hooah!” and chanting while they march around their spaceship, with a hard as nails lieutenant shouting in their faces cause he just wants them all to come home in one piece. It’s so over the top that it comes off as a bit of marine “drag” (and there’s even a part later on when the Leprechaun ensorcells the lieutenant such that he has to do a drag floor show while attacking his brothers-in-arms).
They are sent to the planet to find the creature disrupting the local mining operation, come across the little fella, armed with an emerald green light saber, and blow him up real good.
But then one of them decides to victoriously pee on the Leprechaun’s exploded corpse, the mythological creature’s essence sneaks up the stream and hangs out in the space marine’s penis until he goes off to hook up with another soldier back on the ship, and the marine is killed in a case of premature leprechaun ejaculation. It’s that kind of movie. Now on the ship, the Leprechaun starts hunting down marines, as they try to hunt down him. It unsurprisingly works out better for him than them as he murders them in variously creative fashions.
Yes, that is a Leprechaun climbing out of a Space Marine’s exploded crotch.
Along the way, there’s also a subplot with the nefarious cyborg scientist (Dr. Mittenhand) running the show who gets transformed into a giant-space-spider-scorpion-thing (renamed “Mittenspider”), the Leprechaun gets hit with a reverse shrink ray and becomes a giant, now reveling in turning the tables and calling his enemies “short”;
We see that this Space Marine ship with maybe 7 marines and three scientists has a dance club where the marines drink out of dollar store plastic glasses and dance listlessly with each other;
Mittenhand’s assistant gets hit in the head with a big plate and his face is flattened into a giant disk; when someone requests entrance to the space lab, there is a “ding dong” like a doorbell in the suburbs; Warwick Davis gets to wax Shakespearian while plotting how he’ll eventually murder the space princess and keep both the crown and his gold for himself (“I’ll wed her, bed her, and bury her all in one day”); during a self-destruct sequence, the computer announcement is rather blasé about the urgency with which the crew needs to leave (as if to say, “look, the ship is going to blow up soon – you might want to be going”); and finally, after being sucked out an airlock and exploding in the vacuum of space, in the very end, the Leprechaun’s hand floats by the main windshield of the spaceship and flips off the few survivors.
Again, not “great,” but there were plenty of moments when my jaw literally dropped open and I was rather surprised by what I was looking at, and at no point was I bored. Plenty of the intentional comedy worked – and I trust that any cheesy moments or exaggerated performances were always conscious choices rather than accidents or failures.
Also, on a genre love level, I was tickled by the presence of Miguel A. Núñez Jr. (Spider from Return of the Living Dead and Demon from Friday the 13th Part V – he of the cursed enchilada) as one of the marines. I just looked him up on IMDB – wow, the man works (151 credits to date)! Anyway, this is not my favorite kind of horror flick, but there is a certain pleasure in its unabashed trashiness. Also, in describing the last two films, I supposed that many fans at the time might have been nonplussed with their spaciness. I’m sure that was not the case here. I’m sure anyone who rented this back in the day (it was released direct-to-video) got exactly what they were looking for.
Sometimes a movie doesn’t have to go so far as to be “good.” Sometimes it’s just enough to understand the assignment. This is one of those.
—
And so that’s franchises in space. Are these top-tier entries? Are they classics for the ages? Are they particularly scary? Generally not, though again, Hellraiser: Bloodlines has an awful lot going for it. But even the silliest, cheapest, self-knowingly cheesy of them has some fun to offer. You’ve gotta be in the right head-space, but none of them do I regret watching.
For years of being a horror fan, I’d been loosely aware of Jean Rollin and his whole vibe, but I had never ventured in to check it out. Happily, with this blog compelling me to follow my completionist urge to better know my genre of choice, a few years back, I finally took in my first of his films, The Shiver of the Vampires (1971), and I was immediately struck. Weird, artsy, bold, idiosyncratic, surreal, and clearly deeply personal and deeply felt, he was an auteur with a very specific individual imprint. Since that time, I’ve gone on to watch quite a few of his other works, at least from the first half of his career (later films, not having the budget, were shot on video, and I fear it didn’t well serve his aesthetic), many of which I’ve written about here (such as Grapes of Death, Living Dead Girl, and Requiem for a Vampire), and I must say, I’m a fan. I may not always be in the mood for what he has to offer (slow, dreamy, artful), but when I am, it can be a warm, hypnotic pleasure. That said, I think many of his films feel less like horror movies than avant-garde forays into the fantastique (this is certainly true for the film under consideration today), but there are sufficient horror markers (vampires, crumbling castles, blood and death and flesh) and well as rich, haunting atmosphere and an exploration of themes invested in the stuff of horror (need, loss, death, sex, decay, persistence, obsession, madness) to earn his oeuvre a place of honor on this here blog.
Sometimes I want the comforting glee of horny teenagers getting creatively picked off at a summer camp and sometimes I want a wistful exploration of doubted memories at the nexus of Eros-Thanatos life-death drives.
And that’s just what we’ve got today! As always, spoilers abound, but while there is actually, believe it or not, a coherent story here, this film, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, is not focused primarily on narrative, so it really doesn’t matter. Read on, and then maybe go seek out the singular, beautiful, iconic work that is:
Lips of Blood (1975)
To write about this, I watched the film twice, separated by about two weeks, and I find it interesting that I had quite a different read the second time through. After my first viewing, in my notes, I jotted down, “Dreamy, gorgeous, barely narrative, evocative.” I’d loved it, but I’d also needed a couple of strong cups of coffee to stay focused throughout. But on second viewing, while it was no less dreamy, gorgeous, or evocative, I realized that the story was actually surprisingly clear and straightforward – but the oneiric qualities had simply dominated to such a degree that the narrative felt more dreamlike, situation sliding into situation, context and character in a constant state of flux. It’s kinda striking to watch it again and feel that wasn’t actually entirely true.
In short, the film follows Frédéric, who sees a photograph of a ruined castle in the poster of a perfume advertisement at a party (“scents are like memories – the person evaporates, but the memory remains”) and it unlocks a forgotten memory of his childhood in which he’d met a ghostlike girl at that castle and slept the night within its walls before returning to his mother. Once remembered, the memory haunts him – he doesn’t recall his early years at all, and he feels that something is being kept from him. His mother councils him to let it go – that she gave him the best life she could after they lost his father – he should stop asking about this castle, this girl, and live his life.
But he can’t. A vision of the girl keeps appearing to him, and he is pulled into the night to find her and the ruined chateau of his youth. He finds the photographer of the poster and she promises to tell him the location he seeks, but she’s assassinated before she has a chance. The assassin chases Frédéric to eliminate any witnesses, but he is saved by the bevy of half-naked vampire girls he’d inadvertently freed from their tomb earlier in the night. He’s approached by some woman who claims to be the girl of his memories (all grown up, with a pet frog), but she’s clearly lying – then the vampires eat her. He confronts his mother who has him locked up in an asylum, but it turns out that the nurses are the same vampire girls and they set him free. Finally, the vision of the forgotten girl leads him to a blind postcard seller, from whom he learns the name of the castle and he immediately boards a train.
At the castle, Frédéric’s mother reveals that they used to house a teen girl who was actually a vampire terrorizing the countryside, turning other local girls into bloodsuckers – and she also killed his father. The mother begs him to finish what she couldn’t, behead the vampire, and be done with this all. But the sweet longing is too strong – he lies about killing the girl, sends his mother away, gets bitten, and in the end, Frédéric and the girl climb naked into a casket on the beach and are pulled away by the roaring tide. Like you do.
But like I said, this isn’t about story. It’s much more quiet, more tender than that. While the narrative tracks (clearly the mother has paid people to cover up the past to protect her son from being pulled back into it), this is not a movie where we wait in suspense to find out what is going to happen next. And yet, there is a compelling, if slow, forward momentum. As in a dream, both we and Frédéric feel the urge to move ever steadily forward, to scratch the itch, to satisfy a curiosity (about what, we don’t even know).
Hanging over everything is a mood of the erotic and the romantic, but specifically defined. “Erotic” here, for all that there is plenty of naked flesh, rarely feels particularly “sexual” (that would imply “heat” and everything here is more of a lingering, alluring, magnetic “coolness”), and there is a lot of nudity without feeling very titillating. But there is a quiet, almost private pleasure in the body, and in being-in-an-environment (empty Parisian streets at night, a crumbling chateau, an aquarium after hours). This is typified by an early scene with the photographer. She’s introduced taking pictures of a nude model. The model poses in one way and another, perhaps having trouble settling on a natural state to relax into.
And then, slowly, she begins to touch herself. The photographer doesn’t react at all. The model smiles and relaxes – seemingly having a kind of private moment. Still, the photographer continues to snap photos, neither asking for more of this or guiding the girl back to less explicit material. Finally, the doorbell rings (it’s Frédéric, here to inquire about the picture of the castle), the photographer lets the girl know that they’ve finished, and she gets dressed and leaves. This intimacy was given space to exist, and nothing was pushed. The moment was explicit, and yet so gentle and light. The photographer is warm with Frédéric and before long, she’s disrobed and is embracing him – but that embrace is just that – it doesn’t feel like sex, per se – but it is intimate and warm and longing – as is the whole film.
The other illustrative scene in this vein (ah, vampire movies and unavoidable puns…) is the final one with Frédéric and the girl (who does have a name – I should start using it: Jennifer) – and this brings me to the term “Romantic,” but I use it not in the sense of Valentine’s day, but rather the 19th century artistic movement. There is a transcendent presentation of nature into which the self is subsumed. At the end, after so much silence in the film, when Frédéric has freed Jennifer and there is no concern that any will return to again entomb her, there is a moment when she is on the cliffs by the sea in silence and she shouts out, “Music!” Suddenly the sound of the sea and the wind and the gulls fills the soundtrack in an exuberant burst of chaos. Frédéric and Jennifer embrace, naked as the noise washes everything else out and there is an erasure of ego, a surrender to the natural. In this new nudity, again the sexual is lacking – it feels rather innocent, a kind of undead garden of Eden.
They speak of the idyllic days and years to come – they will be carried in their shared coffin (it matters not how long it takes to get there – they have infinite time) to a small island where they will, together, lure sailors to their doom.
They climb into the casket together, with warm care, Frédéric guides on the lid, and the waves pull it out to sea. For a time we see it crashing in the surf and then the water is peaceful and we see them no longer. Have they been dragged below? Will they reach their destination? These questions don’t seem to matter – reunited, together they have given themselves over to the white noise of the waves, to the immensity of the ocean, to time and water and salt and flesh and decay and the tender static of oblivion.
It’s not a happy ending – but it’s not sad either. There is a sense of completion, gently spiced with a pang of what? Loss? Wistfulness?
For years Jennifer had been lying in her tomb, waiting to be remembered. The perfume ad triggered a sense memory, teasing something long forgotten back into the edge of Frédéric’s mind. Half remembered – misremembered – invented – an uncanny fantastique that cannot be fixed as real or unreal, it fascinates, there is a steady obsession that can’t be turned away from. Something he is compelled to pursue – something without which he could not feel complete, could never be satisfied.
He finds satisfaction, but that also brings a kind of death, a warm oblivion, a loving sadness. I am no expert – I’ve seen like seven of his films, but this bundle of themes just feels so very Jean Rollin. Gorgeous and artful and cheap and shabby (for an auteur filmmaker that returned to the well of vampires time and time again, it feels like the fangs could be bought for 2 dollars in a joke shop and he was never interested in scares or gore), it feels like both an exploitation flick and high art.
And along the way, there are so many other surreal elements and images that feel like symbols – but ones that need not impose a hard meaning. Much of the film takes place in Paris, and it is so often entirely, impossibly empty and monumental – in haunting fashion – a looming dream labyrinth. The other vampires (particularly the twins, Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castle, who are in a number of Rollin’s films), their characteristically diaphanous gowns fluttering in the night wind, feel less like characters than alluring personifications of seductively available femininity and hauntingly attractive death in life – offering an invitation to disappear into something beautiful – dangerous and self-destructive, but nonetheless attractive, soft, yielding, accepting.
Which does bring me to one element of note – this identification of ‘nature’ / ‘death’ / ‘fascination’ with the “feminine” does feel, let’s say thematically dated. It’s hardly a “feminist” project, this male protagonist, an obvious stand-in for the filmmaker, chasing these girlish symbols of the ineffable into the night, giving himself over to them, having them thrust upon him, those figures more symbols than three dimensional characters. And yet, I still find it all rather lovely.
This feels like it comes strongly from one individual artist, who, even if he’s leaning on the kinds of tropes at which one could roll their eyes, in this case, it is so heartfelt, carried out with an earnestness that feels anything but artistically cheap. I could imagine one deriding it as naiveté (which I’m sure occurred in his native France – I understand French critics had little love for Rollin’s obsessions with genre, just as American critics could deride his art-house inclinations), but I can’t imagine being that hard-hearted myself.
Also, on the gender politics of it all, it is interesting to me that this seems to be just about the only work in Rollin’s early filmography with a male protagonist – he almost always focused on women (though that didn’t necessarily make them more characters and less symbols). This is probably a facile reading, but I somehow have the impression that, in doing this, he was rather centering himself for a change.
Apparently, it crushed him that this was such a financial failure – losing so much money that to recoup expenses, the producer forced him to film additional inserts and recut it as a hardcore porn film, Suce-moi vampire (“Suck me, vampire”), with an entirely different story. Fortunately, over time, the film found its audience who have given it no small measure of artistic respect – in that sweet spot between sexploitation, B-movie grindhouse and haute-culture, niche viewership arthouse.
It really is something special, though it won’t be for everyone. Maybe it’s for you though – if you can find it, check it out (as of today, in the States, it’s on Kanopy). Some will be put to sleep. Some will sigh in exasperation. But some will fall in love.
I mentioned last year when doing my annual “Top 10 New To Me” post that I had absolutely fallen in love with the Chucky TV series – I hadn’t had access to it yet and when it showed up on Shudder, I was so happy to find myself getting more into a new show than I had for just about anything since I’d first discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer way back when. It’s playfulness, its audacity, its twisted little heart, the way I care about the characters – both the ‘good ones’ and the ‘bad ones’, and the ways that it commits to actual puppetry and practical effects and can actually elicit a squirm from me in its glorious moments of extremity, I really love it. I love its vast storylines with characters that reach back to the very first films, and I love how willing it is to make big changes – just about anyone (any lovable character, any innocent child, any polar bear) can die at just about any time, and yet, I don’t lose interest (always a danger if you feel like it isn’t worth investing emotionally in characters who might not make it). And so, especially since I just got to watch the third (and due to cancellation, sadly, final) season, I’ve really had a hankering to revisit the films that preceded it, and now that 6 out of 7 have landed on Shudder, I think this is the time.
It’s been a while since watching most and I remember enjoying them all, but to varying degrees and in different ways – an interesting feature of the series being its wild stylistic shifts while maintaining unbroken continuity of narrative and character. Each has left a certain impression in my mind and I’m curious to return to them as a whole and look at it all as one piece. For now, I’m just going to do the films – for all that I love the show, watching three seasons of TV is just too much for one post (as if watching 7 films weren’t already pushing it). I’d originally thought I might also check out the recently released Doc of Chucky(2024), but again 7 films is already a lot… So I look forward to watching it when this is all over, but I don’t have a plan to write it up.
I’m renting the first one today and then I expect I may only have until the end of the month before the rest leave Shudder, so here’s hoping I can burn through this all with great alacrity. Wish me luck. And obviously, I think it should go without saying when digging into so many films, but spoilers will abound…
Child’s Play (1988)
So, this movie made a big impression on me well before I ever watched it. I was ten when it was released, and really not into horror yet, and I remember that the trailer wormed its way into my brain and really freaked me out. I had this talking ALF doll at the time that unfairly took on the brunt of my fears – I ended up tying it up and taping it up and putting it in a box, which I taped up again, and hid it in the closet, the terrible idea having been planted in my impressionable young mind that a beloved toy could come to life and try to kill you. Freaked. Me. Out. Finally, years later, I did watch the movie and I remember being impressed with how well it all worked. Let’s see how it holds up now.
This is the very doll – doesn’t look scary at all. I guess that’s the point.
—
Ok, it holds up great! Wow – what a tight, fun, scary, even emotionally grounded little movie. I love when a horror flick taps into a simple, unsettling idea – the monster who can kill you in your dreams and from whom you can never be safe, the urban legend waiting to appear behind you in the bathroom mirror, the unseen and unknowable killer who is never explained and never caught who is calling you from inside your own house, and in this case, as frightened me so as a child, the idea that a marker of childhood, such as a toy, could simply be evil – and target you, a child. To be fair, all dolls can be at least a bit uncanny – with a human form, but not human, dead, glassy eyes, always wide open, clearly inanimate, but what was that movement out of the corner of my eye? Probably nothing – just my mind playing tricks on myself… It is creepy, it feels wrong, all presumed safety and innocence merely a mask for cruel intent. It’s just an object, easy to overlook, easy to discount, but it’s watching and waiting and when you least expect, it can try to kill you and everyone you love.
In short, a mother gets her little boy the wrong doll for his birthday – it’s possessed by a voodoo practicing serial killer – and it murders everyone around him, ultimately trying to insert its soul into his young body before being permanently trapped in that of the doll. When weird and deadly things start happening, Andy, the boy, keeps telling everyone “It was Chucky,” but for some reason, no one believes him (go figure), making him appear at best disassociated, and at worst, possibly psychopathic – could he be the one who hit his babysitter in the head with a tiny hammer and made her fall out a window to her death? Could he have killed the boy’s psychiatrist and a former associate of a notorious serial killer? I mean, that would be pretty weird, but he was there…
Writer Don Mancini, director Tom Holland, and the whole crew take this simple, scary idea and just execute it so well on every level. I love how we don’t really see Chucky move or speak (as himself, not with the pre-programmed phrases of the doll) until halfway through the movie. Until then, there is so much effective tension in POV shots of the unseen murderer, mixed with still shots of the doll, perhaps in a new location and simple reaction shots of those being stalked – fearful, but also laughing at themselves as there is seemingly no real danger, until there is. It’s a bit like holding off on showing the shark in Jaws.
The fact that we don’t show him move until so late also opens up that little seed of doubt that none of this is happening, and that Andy, the little boy, is in fact crazy and maybe even murderous – a notion at least somewhat entertained by more than a few characters in the movie, and a particularly horrific thought for his mother, Karen. I don’t think it ever fully takes hold for her, but you can see her resisting the terrible idea. And for the audience, I don’t know – I mean everyone who bought a ticket back in 1988 knew they were going to the ‘killer doll’ movie, so no one could seriously doubt what was happening, but the fact that there is a kind of plausible deniability for so long did something for my viewing experience as well, if nothing else, on the level of the mother’s horror in having to even entertain the possibility that her son could be crazy and even possibly dangerous.
I really believe in her love for him – how hard she’s trying – a single mother doing her best, struggling to get by and give Andy every little thing she can to make his young life a happy one after the death of his father, even going so far as buying the yearned for ‘toy of the season’ for him from a peddler in an alleyway with a 70% discount on account of being possessed by the soul of a serial killer (like you do). Also, I believe in Andy’s sweetness and vulnerability – I think the director, Tom Holland, really hit the jackpot when he cast young, Alex Vincent as Andy, only 6 years old at the time. There’s a moment early on when he lays waste to the kitchen making his mom breakfast in bed and proceeds to wake her up at 6:30 in the morning – something anyone could be expected to be at least irritated by, but when she tries to roll over and go back to sleep and he counters, “but it’s such a beautiful day!” yanking open the curtains and letting the sun shine in, you can see her heart warm, and it is lovely. You go to a movie like this for the killer doll, but I think it wouldn’t work half as well without this sense of love, their relationship grounding this big, explosive, successfully scary movie.
And then, after 45 minutes, when he is finally fully shown to be animate on screen, crudely swearing a blue streak and trying to tear Karen’s face to shreds, it is startling and disturbing, and also funny – the incongruity of something so obscene and violent exploding so suddenly into the film (all voiced by undersung national treasure, Brad Dourif – I mean Exorcist III alone…). And from then on, there is such excellent puppetry on display, mixed with a variety of filming methods that make Chucky feel truly alive and threatening – shots where I expect a little person was used so that the walking can look totally natural, but where we only see his shadow, close ups on a hand with a knife, eliding the full image of the killer doll: an eye here, a reaction there, and occasionally top-notch puppetry that brings it all to life. The film makers don’t’ overplay their hand, saving the shots of Chucky fully moving for maximum effect. And he is effective – whether as a menacingly saccharine toy with eyes that seem to follow you, as a knife wielding murderer, or as a resurrected killer looking to implant his soul in the body of a 6 year old boy. It all works.
There’s not an ounce of fat on this 87 minute, horrific, playful, suspenseful flick, and it frequently goes big – showing its roots as a 1988 film by virtue of the fact that things so regularly blow up. But seriously, it is really highly produced, and in the end, when they just can’t kill this little monster and he gets burned and shot to pieces and just keeps coming, he is effectively grotesque and scary in his burnt, melted state, internal metal structures left sticking out of his formerly plump little fingers like claws.
Finally, in singing the film’s praises, why doesn’t Chris Sarandon have a higher profile? His dry sardonic charm is such a treat, and between this, Fright Night, The Sentinel, and the Resurrected, not to mention voicing Jack Skellington in the Nightmare Before Christmas (and, not horror, but come on, The Princess Bride), it seems like he should be a huge star. I mean, I see that he has been working consistently for the last 50 years, but I don’t necessarily hear about him that often. Also, how has his character never shown up on the Chucky TV show – which managed to bring back just about any significant character who ever showed up in one of the films? Now that it’s been cancelled, that’s forever off the table, but who knows, maybe a future film? But I digress.
Seriously, this was a great movie – I’m so happy to have rewatched it, and you can see how it could spawn a franchise – even one that would eventually come to take such wild stylistic turns. Ok, on to part 2!
Child’s Play 2 (1990)
This was an era of sequels and franchises and I’m so glad that Chucky’s creator, and writer of the whole series (who later became its director and the showrunner of the TV show), Don Mancini didn’t follow the lead of so many other 80s slashes in primarily following the villain as he finds a new set of characters to slaughter, but instead stays focused on Andy (at least for now – later the focus would shift more to Chucky, but that will accompany a major stylistic change). That said, Andy is the only recurring character as I guess Catherine Hicks (who played Karen in the first installment) wasn’t available (I read she was pregnant at the time of filming); her character is institutionalized for telling everyone the truth of what had happened to them and Andy is put into the foster care system, where eventually Chucky (not so dead after all) comes to find him, still intent on stealing Andy’s young body before he’s forever trapped in that of the doll. I think the Chucky films and TV show probably have some of the best continuity in horror, and that begins here.
In many ways, this feels like a standard sequel. It’s not entirely necessary, but it is fun, it has some good suspense sequences, a couple enjoyable characters (such as Kyle – the older foster sister who will return on the TV show, or the mean teacher who gets beaten to death with a ruler), and a top notch ending sequence in the toy factory where the Good Guy dolls are made. I don’t think that final scene is scary per se, but it is tons of fun; it is exciting, and colorful, and just as burned up Chucky at the end of the first movie is gross and creepy looking, melted, deformed, legs ripped off, knife handed Chucky is really grotesquely fun, and then he blows up. Cool.
I also enjoy the not-exactly-satire, but let’s say “bite” of the opening scene with the owner of the company that produces the Good Guy dolls dealing with the fallout of bad publicity from the much publicized case of a little boy saying their doll had tried to kill him. The owner is such a bastard and, by extension, there is clear editorializing about the self-serving greed and cruelty of modern business – it’s really not at all what the movie’s about, but it has fun making the owner of this toy company so very schmucky.
I feel like the second and third films are both a bit typical as sequels go, but at least this one holds up as a fun watch, even if the suspense of the first half of the first film couldn’t possibly be recreated as we’ve already seen the pint sized killer, and in this one, we see much more of him from early on. If I do have a criticism, it might be that we see him too much and whereas the first movie had such a good effect from teasing a hand here, a shadow there, in this case, he’s always running around and it’s hard for the puppetry to really make us all that scared of him.
But also, the more we get to know Chucky, probably the less scary he gets. I mean, he’s always a brutal killer, and he’s not at all a nice guy – he’s rather a total jerk, but at the same time, he is fun – and he has fun. He’s crude and mean and downright evil, but always an enjoyable screen presence, cracking wise and taking joy in his work. I suppose there’s a bit of shared DNA with Freddy Krueger – so many of the 80s slasher killers were some silent stalker in a mask – but Freddy and Chucky are both mouths – they just keep talking, joking, taunting, screaming. And both are really enjoyable murderous assholes. You don’t like either of them in the sense that you’d want to be friends or get a coffee or something – they’d kill you and mock you the whole time, but they are both fun to watch. Honestly, of the two of them, I feel Chucky is the weirder character, and I think one could have some ambivalence about him – but I think that will more come into play in the 4th and 5th films – for now, in the first two movies, he just has a couple elements that I wouldn’t expect to go together:
So, before he was a doll, he was a human killer, Charles Lee Ray, aka, “the lakeside strangler.” When we first meet him in Child’s Play, running from the cops with some kind of criminal partner, he looks kind of like a petty gangster, and his gruff personality and vulgar argot seems to match that. But he’s also a prolific serial killer, suggesting some kind of intelligent lone wolf predator. And also, we eventually hear that his murders all had a ritual voodoo element to them, such that he could magically install his dying soul in a doll and kick off this long running series, implying an altogether different, supernatural, even spiritual, focus. These three angles feel like they could be three different characters, but they come together to make him specific, unique.
I don’t remember how much that develops in the third movie (which I don’t recall being a series highlight – I see a “trivia note” on IMDB saying that it was Mancini’s least favorite as it was rushed into production so quickly that he didn’t have time to come up with new ideas), but it will really explode in the 4th and 5th. So with that, ever onward…
Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking (1991)
Ok, so admittedly another rapid turnaround sequel, capitalizing on the success of the first flick, but I must say I enjoyed this more than I’d expected to. Following the first, it takes better advantage of the tension that comes when we don’t see the doll move – and there is a whole new set of characters who have no reason to suspect this toy might slice their throat open. Following the second, it sets up a really fun, visual stage for the finale, moving the proceedings to a carnival, specifically inside the most impressive ride through haunted house I’ve ever seen – it’s a fun place to put this big final conflict, even if it is a bit of a beat by beat recreation of what’s come before. It’s got some enjoyable casting, such as the great Andrew Robinson (Hellraiser, Dirty Harry) as a creep barber, far too interested in the state of his young charges’ hair, who gets a real close trim. And while much of the story is a bit rote, it does hit a couple notes of, if not exactly satire, then at least viewpoint.
Following the opening of the second film, we start again with the toy company that produces the good guy dolls, deciding once more that no one remembers or cares about Andy Barklay and his killer doll and that they should put these ugly toys back on the market. Clearing the mess of the last film’s climax out of their factory, some blood from the previous Chucky doll drips into the vat of melted plastic and that’s apparently enough for Chucky to find new life on the production line, and the first thing he does is kill the evil CEO of the company. This is an enjoyable start, and perhaps it taps into the new direction the series will take, with a greater focus on Chucky himself – he is still an evil little bastard, but when we’re given such a jerk for him to kill first, we are invited to enjoy Chucky all the more (later, we won’t exactly be rooting for him to kill a bunch of kids – or maybe you will – I don’t judge).
And then we have the new setting of the film – it is years later (though this film was already in production before number 2 was released) and Andy (now recast as an older, teenaged actor), having bounced around the foster care system for close to a decade, is now enrolled at a military academy. The military isn’t exactly demonized, but neither is it shown in a particularly pleasant light, and I feel like that is an element of the abovementioned viewpoint – this institutional environment, fueled by hierarchy and bullying and authoritarian power games is not a healthy place for anyone, and its demand to ‘be tough’ or ‘be a man’ calls for a suppression of feeling that reflects the world’s refusal to believe what Andy experienced as a young kid and is still haunted by.
As Andy is older and not so vulnerable, I think we do see a shift of perspective to Chucky beginning here which will come to greater fruition in future films. He’s not a protagonist or anything, but he’s also not just an attacking killer – we see him get frustrated – try things and be balked by obstacles, make a new plan and target a new victim (a new, younger kid whose body he can try to steal). This also allows him scenes where he doesn’t need to move so much and thus, the puppetry can sustain a greater degree of verisimilitude than some moments in the second film.
But, by the end, the story goes pretty much where one might expect it to, we have a big showdown in a cool setting, and Chucky gets cut to shreds by a giant spinning fan – though having seen him return from much worse, I don’t think anyone would have reason to believe he wouldn’t be back. Honestly, I found it surprising that we didn’t have some final scare stinger to indicate as much, but also I guess it ended up being a longer period before the next film and perhaps its fate wasn’t so certain at the time. So let’s move on as the series really takes a turn, changes its naming convention, and Mancini injects some fresh new life into the franchise.
Bride of Chucky (1998)
So the first three films are all “Child’s Play” movies. With the fourth, they really become “Chucky” movies (or “_______ of Chucky,” to be precise), both in name and focus. But while many of the big 80s slashers seemed to care more about following their famous killers from film to film than their victims, they never took the time to get to know those killers like we do here. This is something different, and really fascinating, not to mention, a hoot. If there wasn’t enough time to come up with something new between the second and third film, in the 7 years between 3 and 4, Mancini was able to innovate. While they were still “Child’s Play” movies, the series mostly wanted to scare the viewer with its creepy, foul-mouthed, doll-inhabiting killer, but with Ronny Yu’s Bride of Chucky, that element of suspense is all but abandoned in favor of the kind of horror inherent in a black comedy, in the delicious fun of perversely getting to know and love the little murderer, plus his newly introduced paramour. I don’t think it really goes for many scares, but it commits to its violence and gore, and I think there is still something of horror in the film encouraging us to hang out with, and to some extent, root for its leading couple.
From the get go, the movie takes on a much more comic tone with a sight gag of the markers of many other famous horror icons being stored in a police evidence locker (a claw glove, a hockey mask, etc) before a garbage bag filled with the shredded remains of the Chucky doll from the third film is identified and purloined. And when the thief (a dirty cop after a quick payday) is bloodily dispatched by the newly introduced Tiffany Valentine (Jennifer Tilly at the height of her powers, right after Bound, and not long after her Oscar nominated turn in Bullets over Broadway), a whole new vibe is ushered in with her breathy, sexy-baby voice and her hyper-femme persona – Tiffany brings an entirely new, campy kind of fun into the world of these films.
She resurrects her long lost lover (she and Chucky had been an item before he ended up in the doll), he in turn almost kills her and traps her in a doll body as well, and they set off on an adventure to retrieve a lost voodoo amulet that will help them secure new bodies and carry on their romance/life of crime. This means hitching a ride with some teenagers running away together, who are leaving a trail of bodies in their path that each suspects the other is responsible for, before finally discovering that they’re being held hostage by Bonne and Clyde in doll form. The teens survive and seemingly defeat their plastic captors, but we know Chucky and Tiffany will return (and furthermore, having physically reconnected earlier in the film, the movie ends with the surprise birth of Tiffany’s bloody, sharp toothed doll baby – so there is still someplace new for the story to go).
The teen couple is fine, and their story of young love, hounded by a controlling stepfather (a very enjoyably dickish John Ritter) and harried by a series of mysterious and disturbing murders, tracks reasonably well, but unlike Andy in the first three movies, it is hard to feel like they are really the main characters. Rather, the film is all about Chucky and Tiffany and their tumultuous love-hate relationship. He’s terrible to her and she imprisons and tortures him (and periodically, over the course of four films and three seasons of TV, tries to, and even periodically does succeed at killing him), but they also love each other (and are turned on by each other – 4 movies in, this R-rated horror franchise has its first sex scene, and it’s between dolls, of course). We are in new territory and watching and enjoying it all in a new way.
Most, though not all, of their victims are somehow shown to be “bad people” (the controlling stepdad, a crooked cop, a lame, wannabee serial killer, a couple stealing from unwitting newlyweds) and ala some other horror franchises, the kills get more creative (a bunch of nails in the face, a champagne bottle shattering the mirror over a waterbed in a honeymoon suite), inviting us to enjoy the bloody mayhem with little reservation. The killer doll couple are rebuilding their relationship the best way they know how, and though they can be awful and petty and cruel, and frequently hate each other, they also bring out the best in each other and always eventually rekindle their love (of course, the “best” they bring out is “the best killer they each can be,” but that’s the wicked fun of a movie like this). The tension and heat of their relationship is where the film lives, and though it’s all explored with a kind of playful, campy distance, it still lands. This is something that will stay with the Chucky material through the remaining films and shows, even when the tone eventually goes back to being a bit more serious and scary.
I am not an expert on this, but I think it must be rare for the screenwriter to be so synonymous with a series. Often it happens with the director of the first film, even if they have little to no involvement in subsequent efforts. If you think Nightmare on Elm Street, of course you think Wes Craven, or you associate Halloween with John Carpenter, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Tobe Hooper, and I think all quite rightly so. Even if they had only peripheral connection to the rest of the films in their respective franchises, they all left a creative stamp on the originals that set the path for all to follow. But in the case of Chucky, though I think Tom Holland did a great job with the first film (as he did with another favorite, Fright Night), it is writer Don Mancini that I primarily connect with this series. He has been shepherding the story and the character along for more than 35 years, and I think it’s in this entry that he made his identity and aesthetic more present. To be fair, Ronny Yu does a really nice job, and there is some real style occasionally on display, but I think in this film, the writer is asserting himself, and will soon come to fully dominate the material.
This movie came along during a time when, following the success of Scream, horror was getting more self-aware and self-parodying. Now, I don’t think Bride rises to the level of self-parody, but there is a change of tone that feels very of this era (and at least one or two meta-jokes, such as when, asked to explain how he came to be like this, Chucky says that if his life were a movie, it would take 3 or 4 sequels to cover it all). Still, I think that the introduction of this relationship at the heart of the story, twisted and dark, and quirky and fun as it is, is a unique element, which will only deepen in the next flick, and for which I’m hard pressed to think of parallel examples (no matter how much it directly cites Bride of Frankenstein). I sure wouldn’t want a relationship like Chucky and Tiffany have (I’m a much more low-drama type), but I really do enjoy watching them in it.
Seed of Chucky (2004)
This film is probably not for everyone, but I rather love it. Mancini continues further in the direction he’s been going, for the first time taking up the mantle of director himself, and creates a weird, fun, very campy, very outré, very over-the-top, gory, meta, absurd, hilarious, queer, and even occasionally touching family drama. I think all notions of scariness are temporarily abandoned in favor of following these relationships down a rabbit hole and reveling in a playful, bold, audacious extremity. It is still a horror film, both in terms of how many eviscerations, acid melts, and decapitations it offers and in terms of the newly introduced Glen/Glenda’s traumatic struggle to come to terms with the violence of their parents, a violence which they have, at least in part, inherited.
In short, the killer baby doll born at the end of the preceding film has grown to adolescence unaware of its patronage, a captor of a prickish British ventriloquist. One day, they see a featurette on TV about a “Chucky” film being made in Hollywood, based on the infamous urban legend of a killer doll linked to a string of unsolved murders, and starring Jennifer Tilly as the doll’s love interest. The doll escapes and makes the trek out west to find their parents (and is able to resurrect them out of animatronic dolls on set as they still have the magical amulet from the last film). Reanimated, Chucky and Tiffany learn they have a child who is struggling with gender identity issues (born, as a doll might be, without sex organs, they don’t know who or what they want to be – it’s somewhere between a trans and non-binary narrative, but let’s say culturally specific to the smooth-crotched-doll community). Chucky wants a boy and Tiffany wants a girl, so they settle on Glen/Glenda and make an attempt to be good role models and kick their murder addiction (unsuccessfully), while making a plan to put Tiffany into the body of Jennifer Tilly (who will be impregnated with Chucky’s seed (we have a title!) so that Glen/Glenda will have a human form) and put Chucky into the body of Rapper-Director, Redman (who may be casting Tilly in his upcoming biblical epic). Little, of course, goes to plan, but along the way, there are genuine character developments, and a fun ‘coming out scene’ by the end.
Don Mancini is an out gay creator, and as far as I know, that wasn’t being hidden before, but following the elements of camp introduced with Jennifer Tilly’s Tiffany in the last film, I’d say that this is the first time the series is really explicitly “queer.” Glen/Glenda’s story is entirely focused on a bundle of identity issues: there is the obvious question of gender (which will only deepen as the series progresses), but also, they really struggle with a question of who and what they are as a child of this killer pair. Are they also a killer? Is that something they were born with and can’t change, and should come to accept and love about themselves, or is it a choice they can turn their back on? Beyond that, though Chucky more or less comes to be as supportive of his gender-non-conforming kid as one can hope for (he’s still a murderous bastard, but after some time, gender is no longer an issue), Glen/Glenda initially has to deal with a father intent on making them accept ‘masculine traits,’ who is determined to make his child a ‘boy’ – we see them close to cracking under the stress of parental expectations and demands, and by the end, when Glen/Glenda cuts off their father’s limbs and head, shouting “are you proud of me now, daddy?” it is easy to see represented, the collected rage of many an effeminate little boy lashing out at a father who couldn’t accept his child.
Of course, the film also just takes on a much more ‘camp’ tone here. It never goes fully in the direction of parody, and it does maintain its own sense of reality, but there is an ‘extra’ quality to both performances and filmmaking that infers a kind of ironic distance (not to mention how Jennifer Tilly, voicing Tiffany, can speak both so deferentially and so bitchilly about ‘Jennifer Tilly,’ the real life actress – such as a moment when the doll has to drag Tilly’s unconscious body across the floor and complains about how fat she’s gotten). This camp quality is underlined by the inclusion of director, John Waters in a small cameo (his face gets melted off with acid as a kind of father-son bonding experience – but it’s ok; he’ll come back in a different role on the TV series).
But ultimately, the most enjoyable queer-adjacent – coming to love yourself and being proud of who and what you are – development belongs to Chucky himself. For four films, spanning 14 years, he has been trying to get out of this doll body and be human again. Finally here, on the cusp of completing the plan (though Redman is now dead and Chucky would be ending up in the body of Tilly’s chauffer), at the last moment, Chucky decides that he likes who he is and there’s no need to change and be a human again. He is a killer doll and he likes being a killer doll – he finally fully embraces his own ‘othered’ identity and proudly ‘comes out.’ It’s not exactly a moving moment (though Glen/Glenda does get some of those), but it is a fun moment, an “ah, I see what you’re doing there” little twist that I certainly appreciated. And seriously, good for him. We all love him as a killer doll – if he were human, he’d just be a murderous jerk (as we will see in the next film).
All of this may sound heavy handed or overly serious, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. For all that the film plays with these issues of gender and identity, it does so in a wild, free way, which I think could come off as too much, or even insensitive to a contemporary Gen-Z crowd – but isn’t that part of the joy of camp? Being able to go so over the top, being able to offend, but all with a playful irony – we can enjoy the “badness” of it, but no one is advocating for any of these things actually being “good.” There is a rich frisson in that paradox which makes it all the more enjoyable (and which also separates this sort of work from the kid of straight-out, ugly edge-lording one might bump into on Twitter). This is the least scary, but probably the goriest film of the series to this point. It has more sex and nudity, by far. It has a puppet masturbating to an issue of Fangoria magazine. It has Brittney Spears being exploded in a car crash. It has a head being garroted off someone’s body as puppet lovers get spattered with his blood and share a genuine romantic moment. It has Oscar nominated actress, Jennifer Tilly being inseminated against her will by a doll with a turkey baster. It has a perspective about social matters, but it expresses that perspective in an absurd, gleefully violent and perverse way, and it is all the more lovable for it.
From time to time, there is a horror movie that wears its socio-political perspective on its sleeve so much that it gets blowback. While I generally find the kind of people who would complain about, for example, the feminist messaging of a movie like the 2019 Black Christmas unpleasant jerks, I can agree that a film can suffer from being too on-the-nose – I can appreciate a message and still feel that themes are better explored in dramatic action than voiced as polemic artificially put into the mouths of characters by a well-meaning author. But I must say that in this case, while the perspective of the creator is obvious, it is also handled with an ironic humor and so covered in eviscerations and beheadings that I think it comes across so much more enjoyably than it otherwise might.
Perhaps not every little thing works perfectly – some jokes may feel obvious, and what exactly was with that “made in Japan” thing, given that we know the Good Guy factory was in or near Chicago in the first two films, but little failings notwithstanding, this one is rather a delight. Sadly, it was the last one released cinematically.
Curse of Chucky (2013)
Following the progressively higher camp of the last two entries, Curse of Chucky (again written and directed by Mancini) takes a hard turn back to straight horror territory (but not too straight – there’s at least one lesbian couple), initially feeling so different as to seem like a bit of a soft reboot (though by the end, all of the story is woven together and this is clearly an expansion and continuation of all that has come before). But stylistically, it feels completely different, and is the first time in decades that a Chucky film has been particularly scary.
Key to that (beyond filmmaking that definitely takes on a darker, more menacing tone than the last few films) is the fact that for the first time in quite a while, we are aligned with new protagonists who are not Chucky et al.; nor are they anyone who knows who Chucky is or has fought him before (as was true for Andy in the first two sequels). Primarily, we have Nica Pierce, and her family which has come together following the seeming suicide of her mother (the night after a Good Guy doll was delivered to her, sent by an unknown person). Of course, we know who Chucky is and that he is clearly behind the deaths that start piling up, but these people don’t, and just as in the first film, Chucky isn’t shown to move or speak of his own accord until approximately halfway through the runtime, which really promotes scariness.
Past that, it is quite a successful, tight little bottle movie – over the course of just more than 24 hours, in this one house, the doll is delivered, the mother dies, the family comes together, and, one by one, just about everyone else is picked off until pretty much only Nica remains, following a pretty classic slasher formula (which hasn’t been the case for earlier films in the series), before revealing a much more personal story at its core. It is dark and suspenseful, well shot and scored, and it plays with the dramatic irony inherent in the audience knowing much more about this doll than the characters. That said, there is still a bit of a dark, comic tone, such that some characters seem simply doomed by virtue of how humorously unpleasant they are. Thus, as with a pretty standard slasher, there is some fun to be had from worrying that a character might be killed, but there’s also fun to be had, waiting for some jerk or another to bite it. Past that, for a loyal viewer, it is quite mysterious – for most of the film, we are left to wonder what Chucky is doing here – what is he after? Why is he targeting these people specifically? After spending so much time with him as a viewpoint character, having his intentions suddenly closed off to us, creates a sense of intrigue, and I think also makes him scarier again, leaving us far more in the position of his potential and eventual victims.
Furthermore, when we finally learn what the connection is between Nica’s family and Chucky, how far back it goes and how each has cause to blame the other for their respective fates (rightly or wrongly – I think Nica stands, so to speak (she’s spent her life in a wheelchair – because of him) on far more solid ground here), Chucky comes off as a more menacing, uglier character than he has in some time. We have flashbacks to the series of events that led up to him being chased by the police at the beginning of the first film when, at the edge of death, he put his soul into the doll. In those flashbacks, Chucky is less a hilariously crude and violent puppet, and more a cruel psychopath who would hold a pregnant woman hostage, creepily pitching woo at her while murdering her husband and threatening her family, before leaving her to die with a knife in her belly, such that the baby she births (Nica) is born paraplegic. He’s not fun – he’s disturbing and frightening. And yet, when we flash back to the present, in doll form, he’s still a good time – that’s how movies work.
There’s also a fun bit of behind the scenes family connection as Nica is played by Fiona Dourif, daughter of Brad Dourif, who’s been voicing Chucky since the very beginning. And she’s great – a very warm screen presence, giving us a character who will go through a great deal before all is said and done (and who will later in the franchise be called on to deliver a solid vocal impersonation of her dad).
And then, after feeling like such a standalone movie for 80 of its 97 minutes, so much so that it could even feel like some kind of reboot, so disconnected from everything else, the penny drops and everything slams into clarity. This is still a series, and the ending of this movie both reaches back and looks forward, setting up a new context for what is next to come. In short, it doesn’t end well for Nica, but she’s still alive, and she and Chucky and Tiffany (as well as at least one key character we haven’t seen in ages) will all be back in the next film, and on three seasons of TV.
This really was a good time, and it is interesting how the series of films really seems to occasionally reinvent itself, all while continuing a larger story, relatively consistent in its history (though maybe not always in its rules of “how possessed dolls work” – why doesn’t Chucky bleed anymore?). Ok, only one more to go…
Cult of Chucky (2017)
An interesting change that applies to both Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky is that unlike earlier entries in the series, Chucky has now been active for years between the installments. At the end of the first 4 films, Chucky was melted or exploded or ripped to shreds or burned and shot – each time, he was at least seemingly dead. Not so at the end of Seed. That time, he survived and went off to do whatever he was going to do for years until resurfacing in Curse, with a plan obscured to us. The same is true for Cult. Obviously, so much must have happened between the two films, and while some of it is inferred, we will never know everything, helping to build both mystery and a sense of a larger life passing beyond our view – this is only one moment in a bigger story, and we won’t ever get to see the whole picture. Thus, this movie feels the most like an entry in a serial, laying the groundwork for the TV show to come, both in terms of characters and important plot developments, as well as in the forward momentum of this kind of continuing narrative. That said, this is also, beat for beat, one of the most engaging movies in the series – I would have been happy if it had felt a bit more complete by the end, but moment to moment, I was totally in, and ate up the unfolding story.
In Cult, we at least touch base with a significant character from each era of the Chucky franchise. Andy (from the first three) returns, played once again by Alex Vincent, all grown up himself, but is also joined by Tiffany (from the next two) and Nica (from the sixth) (plus, the post credits sequence reintroduces a key figure from Child’s Play 2). And in combining all of these significant figures, Cult carries forward something of each era’s tones. We once again have a scary story about someone who knows that a little doll is responsible for all this murder and mayhem, but whom no one believes, this time not because they are a child, but because Nica, following the events of the first film, has been held responsible for the deaths of her family and imprisoned in an insane asylum. But added to that genuinely scary context and style, we still retain something of the camp-adjacent black comedy of Bride and Seed, and I think this might be the funniest Chucky himself has been for the whole series to date (“Ok, let me explain something to you. I am a vintage, mass marketed children’s toy from the ’80s, standing right in front of you, holding a very sharp scalpel”). And then there is the newfound serial hook of it all, which I feel has particularly come to play in the final two films, and which sets up much of the feeling of the TV show. The second and third films, while both fun in their ways, had felt a bit like retreads of the first – the next two went off in a wild, totally different direction – now the story is really moving forward, developing and changing significantly from one feature to the next.
And as a lead to anchor it all, Fiona Dourif shines. I feel for her plight, both in terms of her Cassandra-esque nightmare, and in her survivor’s guilt, which has allowed her terrible, abusive therapist to gaslight her into accepting that she was actually responsible for the deaths in the last film, though she very clearly knows differently. And then, by the end, when Chucky successfully hops into her body, somehow miraculously, at least while he’s in possession of it, healing her of the paraplegia he’d caused her in utero, she makes Charles Lee Ray an enjoyable human villain for the first time, imbuing herself with the play inherent in the doll, which hadn’t fully surfaced in other portrayals of him in his non-evil-doll form. As she plays it, his wicked delight is simply infectious – I mean, he’s always cackled in evil madman fashion (I saw Mancini on Shudder’s Queer for Fear documentary citing the original Invisible Man as a direct inspiration), but this may be the most I’ve vibed with it.
And there are new twists and turns, namely, due to the fact that between films, Chucky leaned a new voodoo spell that now lets him split his soul into multiple vessels, letting him animate many killer dolls at the same time – and letting them hilariously bicker with and praise and/or mock each other. Furthermore, the reintroduction of Andy into the story, as he advances his own plots to get revenge on the doll that stole his childhood, adds a wildcard to the mix. Many elements are in play at all times, and anything can happen.
As with the previous entry, much of the runtime functions as a standalone film, frequently scary and gory in ways that got a couple of gasps or cringes out of me, but also consistently funny, and almost always intriguing, with small touches of gothic mystery layered atop the cold, clinical, creepy setting of the institution, with the main gestures towards larger serialization coming primarily at the end. Also like the last movie, this is a very contained story – almost all taking place in the asylum during a relatively set period of time – and it gives room for some very enjoyable performances from both Dourifs, father and daughter, as well as the other denizens of the hospital, and of course, eventually, Jennifer Tilly. During a post credit sequence, we even meet Kyle again (the older foster sister from the second film), so just about the only significant figures still absent are Glen and Glenda (who will return on TV) and Andy’s mom – who we’ve seen him speak to on the phone, but who never made it back onto screen (also, as written above, I would love to see the return of Chris Sarandon’s Detective Norris from the first film, but I’m not holding my breath).
All in all, the film series, as it stands, goes out on a high point, and leaves things set up for TV to carry the story forward (while also introducing new main characters, all with their own storylines and main preoccupations).
—
Well, this was a fun little project – it’s been a blast to revisit these all, and I can’t really express how much I appreciate the narrative and stylistic variety on display. There are a few other, “bigger” horror franchises, but for me, this one holds up the best as a whole, picture to picture. Sure, I may like the first Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street more than many of these, but the level of quality running through this whole series, the sense of larger continuity, and the visible artistic play that’s allowed the series’ creators to take on such wide ranging approaches have all kept the series both fresh and fun, while also being so consistent and rooted in continuing characters, raising this series up above the pack.
Sometime I will watch both the recent doc, which I just don’t have time for right now, and rewatch the show, which has been some of the most fun I’ve had watching TV in years, but for now, I think seven films is enough to hit publish on. Hope you’re all having a good November out there.
Golly – where do I even start with this? When approaching a film this big, this significant, it can be daunting. Books have been written about it – it has been discussed ad nauseam by academics and bloggers and youtubers and horror fans for half a century – it was banned in many countries and is in the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – what could I possibly have to add to the conversation? And yet, I know that as it’s hitting this big anniversary, countless other bloggers, podcasters, and journalists will be praising it, analyzing it, dissecting it, and discussing its importance for the genre, and possibly for the art of cinema writ large, and hey – if all of those people get to do it, I can too. I pay my hosting fees here – I can do what I please.
So yeah – this month we’re digging into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) on the advent of its 50th anniversary (which will come about two weeks from today). I wouldn’t exactly call it one of my favorite horror films, but in a strange fashion, that’s only because it is so damn good. It is disturbing and awful in all the right ways, such that it hasn’t fallen into a kind of comfort food rotation for me. I like to preserve its power with rare viewings, lest it be merely appreciated for its significant value rather than recoiled from as the nightmare it is. But that said, I do think it is one of the very best works of horror committed to celluloid – rankings are pretty futile and silly, but I can’t imagine a Top Five that didn’t include it.
One caveat here, though – besides the inevitable fact that this text will include significant spoilers (if you somehow are the kind of person who would read this blog and you haven’t seen this movie, go watch it right now – it’s a classic for a reason – it’s also a quick (if exhausting) watch and it’s streaming all over the place), as mentioned above, this is a piece that has been broadly discussed, and often by writers or presenters who have done far more original research than I (by which I mean ‘at least some’). I know that over the years, I have been exposed to so many other people’s interpretations – and I do not know from whence my own readings come. I intend no plagiarism, and will try to base my words primarily on my personal viewing experience, but I simply can’t guarantee that seeds planted during my last roughly 25 years of being a horror fan and reading about movies haven’t grown to fruition in the form of accidentally recycled notions. But hey, I’ll do my best… so here we go…
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper’s second film marks the high point of his career. He went on to make plenty of other works that were enjoyable and worthwhile (at least one of which I wrote about here), but nothing could approach the queasy, awful power of this early entry. It only runs a tight 83 minutes, but feels so much longer. In most cases, that would be a harsh criticism, but I mean it as high praise. The events of its story span one full day, from dawn to dawn, taking its sole survivor on a harrowing descent into terror and madness, and I think it can feel that way for the audience as well. I remember the first time I watched it, just wanting the screaming to stop, wanting to catch my breath – it was a trial to endure – not a fun movie, but really effectively horrific.
Oddly, having just watched it twice in rapid succession for this post, I find it gets less jarring and more enjoyable on each subsequent viewing – so much of it just works so very, very well – and that is exciting and fun, when taken with a certain critical distance. Daniel Pearl’s grainy 16mm cinematography is frequently gorgeous, as well as smart and effective. The editing and discordant score likewise. It is lean and mean when it needs to be, but it will also stretch things out beyond any remnant of comfort when it chooses, yielding sickly, disturbing fruit. Its structure is perfect – easing us from something approaching real naturalistic cinema vérité at the outset, down a long dark rabbit hole of terror and insanity, surreal and maddening, over the course of its three clear acts, at some points feeling far more like a hellish, nigh abstract art film – but it does this all so unpretentiously, and therefore, all the more succesfully. It might have the best five minutes to be found in any horror film ever (which of course we’ll get into). And for something so earthbound (entirely human killers picking off some nice young people in rural Texas), it comes closer to presenting true “Lovecraftian-mind-shattering-horror-at-the-revelation-of-unbearable-reality” than any flick I’ve ever seen that features slimy tentacles (with much of the credit for that, beyond the filmmaking, going to Marilyn Burns – whose Sally really goes through Hell – and whose eyes express so much).
It is a film of contradictions that achieve a captivating internal tension: It is gritty, sweaty, disgusting, and all around unpleasant to endure – but it is also beautiful. It is truly horrific – but sometimes also genuinely funny, even if you don’t actually laugh cause it would feel wrong. It is naturalistic – but it is also surreal, absurd, and over-the-top. It feels gory and cruel and awful – but there is barely any blood or explicit violence in the whole film. As a viewer, it feels like you are not in safe hands, like the filmmakers themselves are dangerous, irresponsible, crazy – but it is also so expertly crafted at every level of production – and that is rather a joy to watch.
They, however, do not enjoy what they’re watching.
But the fact that it is growing more enjoyable as I dig into everything that works so well in it means that once I’m done writing this, I probably shouldn’t let myself watch it again for at least another ten years. It deserves to retain its shocking horror, and I fear that can be lost in familiarity…
From the very beginning, with its corpse art at sunrise, mechanical whirring sounds that could be chainsaws or cameras, John Larroquette’s clearly fraudulent ‘based on true events’ voiceover, and its opening credits in searing red and black (what is it? sunspot photography? I don’t know – but it feels ugly and hot and foreboding), before cutting to the 5 young people in a van, driving to the cemetery where Sally’s grampa was buried to make sure that his corpse hasn’t been tampered with in the recent wave of grave robberies and desecrations that local law enforcement claim are the work of elements from “outside the state,” absolutely everything is hot, sweaty, gross, and doom laden. As they head down the road, Pam reads from a horoscope book about how Saturn is having an evil influence on the world. You don’t get the sense that any of them buy into this, but it is a part of the shared mood. They are just a group of normal kids out for a trip together, and they want to have a good time, but in this sweltering heat, and given the state of things (analysis of the film often cites Watergate and Vietnam as big influences – trust in American order and even ‘goodness’ having been well eroded at the time), it’s hard to imagine that their state, their country, their world isn’t an entirely evil place, and it’s hard to relax and enjoy yourself under such conditions, though they do their best.
At the cemetery, given the ruckus raised by the grotesque reports of corpses being stolen and fashioned into macabre, decaying statuary, the place is crowded with drunk locals out to enjoy the carnival atmosphere. One old man who can’t hold his head up goes on about how he sees the things that happen around here that no one talks about, that they all laugh at him. This is not a good place, but presenting as typical “small town America,” the rot at its heart goes undiscussed. It’s hard to feel that this isn’t a stand-in for every small town across the country – just ‘normal’ folk going about their lives, being “neighborly,” but underneath it all, something is sick, wrong, menacing. Sally’s grampa’s grave may be undisturbed, but a disturbing miasma suffuses the air and poisons the land.
Just a typical small town family preparing dinner.
Not to go scene by scene, eventually Sally, her wheelchair bound brother Franklin, and their friends, Jerry, Pam, and Kirk, end up going to visit Sally’s grampa’s house, long abandoned. She and Franklin used to visit and play there as kids, and this is familiar, nostalgic territory for them. I think this is an important element. Often in this sort of horror, you get the sense that the young people are somehow trespassing in a world that is not their own – invading a rural or wooded space that they are wrong to venture into. But in this instance, when they all stop at a gas station that has no gas and the barbeque cook (hereinafter, “the Cook”) who runs the place tells them that they shouldn’t go messing around in other people’s houses (does he originate the trope of the “Harbinger”? Probably not – I expect that should go to the villagers in Nosferatu – but the Cook does embody it perfectly), Franklin can answer that his daddy owns this homestead. They’ve been away, but they are locals too.
I think this is partly key to how scary this movie feels. It turns out that it is a neighboring house to grampa’s old place that houses the family of Ed Gein inspired cannibals/artists. Franklin and Sally swam in the watering hole down past the shed as kids. Sally slept in her room decorated with zebras right across from the house where she will soon undergo untold torment. This isn’t the suburban comfort of Haddonfield, but though remote, isolated – somewhere you can run through the woods screaming all night, being chased by a madman with a live chainsaw, and no one will hear you, there is still a presumption of familiarity, of safety, of normalcy – which hides unfathomable darkness. These killers are a just a nearby family, neighbors – and they could be yours.
Grannie and her pearls.
Also, watching with 2024 eyes, following endless think pieces since 2016 about the disenfranchised, post-industrial, white, non-urban, working class rage which has metastasized in America with resoundingly destructive socio-political results, it’s hard not to see echoes of that in this family who ‘has always been in meat,’ former slaughterhouse employees put out of work and abandoned by the economy and society thanks to advances in automated meat production. This clan of insane weirdos is monstrous, terrifying, and dangerous – but in their way, they are also pitiable, lost, just barely getting by, doing their best. Back when their Grampa worked at the slaughterhouse, a veritable star with the sledgehammer, were they cannibals and madmen, or did that happen to them when the work dried up and the world moved on? I don’t know. They film doesn’t tell us, but I feel there is something there. Being lost and forgotten breeds resentment, and resentment and bitterness breed monsters.
And that sense of resentment, of things not being fair and carrying a toxic anger in response, goes beyond the killers. We saw that with the locals at the graveyard. We felt that with the guy at the gas station staring into the sun, wasting away. And we get such a strong example of it in Franklin. Sally’s brother gets a bad rap – often described as one of the most irritating characters in horror, someone that fans love to hate. But honestly, he has a really rough time of it. He’s been dragged along on this trip by his sister only to be stuck with a bunch of her friends who have no patience for him and don’t say it, but would rather not have to deal with him and his disability, not to mention his anger and trolling. He is not well cared for and frequently gets hurt – his chair rolling down into a ditch while he’s trying to pee, the Hitchhiker targeting him, being subjected to various bumps and scrapes along the way (and of course, in the end, getting eviscerated by a chainsaw – he has a really bad day).
Now, to be fair, he’s not not incredibly irritating, blowing raspberries and whining all the time, but I can also really sympathize – left behind, mocked, only nominally put up with. You can see all of that result in his bracing personality, and at the same time, there is a kind of kinship between him and the killers. When the kids pick up the Hitchhiker early on, whom we later learn to be part of the crazy family next door, Franklin alone shows a legitimate interest in his story of family history at the local slaughterhouse. Franklin doesn’t immediately look down on him and mock him – he even makes respectful conversation – until things go way too far, the guy creeps them all out and slices Franklin with a straight razor, and they kick him out of the van.
So, of course, eventually, after about 35 minutes of the vague sense that things are not going to end well for them, the kids start dying, kicked off with what I described above as one of the very best five minutes in all of horror. I am not the first to describe this scene in minute detail, but both times that I watched it for this post, I had to pause afterwards and just sit in mind-blown appreciation of its perfection. So it’s worth describing one more time. Bear with me:
Kirk and Pam, having found the promised swimming hole to have dried up (just one more way that the film allows no relief for anyone), notice a nearby house with a generator, and go over to see if they can buy some gasoline as their van is running low. Approaching the house, Kirk notices cars hidden under a camouflaged canopy – which feels like a flag, but not enough to rise to the level of concern (one can only assume these to be the vehicles of previous victims – but the couple knows nothing of any past violence – so why worry?). After some horsing around, Pam sits on a swing out in the front yard as Kirk bangs on the door, trying to get the attention of someone within.
He opens the screen door to knock and doing so causes the main door to swing inward, the shot reversing to within the house, seeing the light and the young man appearing at the beginning of a dark hallway. We reverse the shot again and see what he sees – at the end of the dimly lit corridor, beyond a doorway, there is a red wall decorated with animal skulls. There’s an odd sound from within, something like the squealing of a pig and the film cuts twice, each time getting closer and closer to the skulls, to the sound. We reverse again to see Kirk intrigued, debating entrance, calling out ‘hello’ again and again to no response, and then eventually, kind of running into the place, to get to the end of the hall and find the source of sound. Reverse shot again so we see him from behind as he jogs forward, trips a bit and suddenly the doorway is filled with a hulking figure wearing a strange mask. Closeup on Leatherface – disturbing and grotesque – his mask a dead man’s face. The figure whacks him on the head with a sledgehammer and Kirk goes down twitching.
Multiple cuts to see his body in spasm before the sledge comes down again and his body is still (exactly as deaths at the slaughterhouse were described earlier). Leatherface yanks Kirk’s body in and slams a heavy metal door shut, leaving us in a dark, silent hallway once more. From first hearing the odd noises to seeing the door slam, only 35 seconds have passed. There was no music at all, either of ominous building threat, or a stinger on the jump scare – it is absolutely shocking, and startling in its oddness, simplicity, almost silence.
But then, with Kirk locked within, a low rumble of danger begins in the score and we cut to Pam outside on the swing, calling after her boyfriend. First we see her face in closeup and consternation, and then we cut to the shot – the most famous in the film, and for good reason. (I couldn’t find a Youtube clip for the whole scene, but here, at least, is this shot.) The camera starts behind the white wooden bench swing that she’s sitting on, but as she rises to walk towards the house, the lens glides beneath the seat to follow her low from behind. We now know what she’s walking towards, and she looks so soft and fleshy – she’s wearing short shorts and a backless swimsuit, and feels uncovered, unprotected, and filmed from this angle, the house looms above her like a hungry thing. She walks forward, up the stairs and towards the door, seeming to be consumed in the frame by the building, an otherwise normal house.
These two stills don’t do justice to how effective this moment is – go watch the dang movie!
We view her from inside, her face distorted by the screen door. Low, scary tones in the soundtrack accompany her into the bad place, shots alternating between closeups on her worried face that don’t let us see what might be coming and her POV as she scans the hall ahead. Coming around a corner in the dark, she trips over something and falls into a room filled with feathers and bones. A chicken is suspended in a too-small cage, clucking. Her point of view, intercut with horrified reaction shots, slowly scans from one disturbing bone-art-installation to the next – and these are clearly human bones – femurs, jaws, rib cages. Slowly the camera pans from a skeleton’s foot, up a bit of wood, to a hand, past a shoulder blade, to a skull, and we cut to a wide view of a skeletal sofa.
After a few moments of stunned revulsion, she scrambles to get up and flee, but as she turns into the hallway again, the metal door bangs open and the massive, lumbering figure runs out to grab her – she barely makes it out the front door of the house before he catches her around the waist and pulls her back in, screaming and kicking and fighting for her life. Down the hall and into the next room.
We cut to a view within the kitchen, the camera placed behind a meathook, and we see Leatherface carry in the shrieking, struggling girl. Cut to behind Leatherface as he lifts Pam and approaches the hook. Quick cut to the hook view with her uncovered back nearing the point, and cut again to behind him as we see him give up her weight. One more cut to Pam’s face as she is pierced, her arms feebly rising to try to pull her body up and off of the hook, but it’s impossible.
We see Kirk’s body lying on the table in the foreground and Leatherface in the middle as he examines his work. He meanders slowly over to pick up a chainsaw. There is a bucket beneath Pam’s feet to catch her blood when it is drained, as one would do with a butchered pig. We have a couple of shots of Leatherface carefully, if clumsily, handling his chainsaw to go about the project of segmenting Kirk’s body as Pam screams in the background, before the film cuts outside to a weather vane spinning, backlit by the cloud obscured sun – a moment of peace after this terror, but with the faint sounds of the chainsaw running in the background. A sound that, heard from afar, would raise no alarm.
In these last five minutes, we barely saw any blood – we don’t see the meathook break the skin. We don’t see the chainsaw blades touch Kirk’s body. And much of this is accomplished with a series of pretty simple reverse shots – this side, that side, this side, that side, but ye gods is it effective – startling, terrifying, brutal, and weird and so, so real. Every choice is perfectly calibrated to shock – to tell the story, to batter us with horror, down to that spinning vane in the end. I am hard pressed to think of another scene in any other horror film so flawless. It exhausts and thrills in equal measure.
In the next 15 minutes, the rest of Sally’s friends will die, and she will be thrust into a final act that is pure, mad nightmare. But first, on those other deaths, I think there is at least one important element which I am far from the first to note. Ok – terrible things are happening to these youths, but the impression is also that Leatherface is having a terrible day. It’s even a little funny and pitiable how, after he kills his next victim, Jerry (who has come into the house looking for the others, having seen Kirk’s towel outside), he runs to the window to look outside, before collapsing into a chair in terror and frustration himself. He is wordless, but you imagine him feeling “where are they coming from? How do they keep getting in?” like he’s fighting a losing battle with some infestation.
He’s been left responsible for his home and it keeps getting invaded, and he seems out of his depths, and so upset to be failing. Sure, he is strange, off putting, and genuinely scary, but in this moment, he is both pitiful and pitiable, though we’ve just seen him, in his power, destroy these three young lives. This ordeal is happening to him too. This is also not to mention his clear developmental disabilities. He has a hard time of it.
A striking difference between this film and many slashers to follow is that, in Sally, we have a survivor – a final girl – one who goes through such torments and comes out the other side, but, unlike most from Laurie Strode onwards, Sally doesn’t really get to fight. She is a victim, one who runs and screams and escapes and lives, but she’s not a ‘hero.’ She doesn’t have enough agency for that. Things happen to her and she simply struggles to stay alive. But on the flip side of that, while Leatherface is a kind of human monster, he also lacks a kind of agency as a villain – he’s not going out hunting these kids – they come to him, invade his home, and he is just trying to get through this terrible, meaningless day as well. Thus, on both sides, everyone is stuck reacting to a world that doesn’t make sense and that doesn’t afford them choice in their own destiny. It is bleak as all get out, and in that, it is all the more chilling (if something this hot and rancid can chill – I don’t know – it chills like the chills you get from food poisoning).
And so, in the third act, we are off to the races, and the nightmare explodes around us. Sally is chased, screaming at the top of her lungs through the woods for what feels like hours (it’s only 8 minutes), Leatherface in hot pursuit, getting so close with those spinning blades. Finally, she finds momentary respite back at the gas station with the Cook, before discovering that he is also part of this demented family (and what was in that barbecue they’d eaten earlier?), and he ties her up to bring her back to the house. It’s also at this point that a wild, manic, shocking absurdity comes into the proceedings. As she struggles against her bindings on the floor of his truck, he keeps poking her with a broomstick, only barely keeping her under his control, as he laughs, saying, “I hope you’re not too uncomfortable down there.” Strangely, it even feels like he means it, and that somehow makes it worse – he can sympathize, but that doesn’t mean he won’t bring her to her doom – he says he’s never liked killing, but that doesn’t mean he’ll help her to live. People just can’t be trusted or depended on.
He picks up the Hitchhiker on the way, who, soon, back at the homestead, along with Leatherface, now in a matronly role, working in the kitchen, wearing a dress and a woman’s face and hair, carry their grandfather downstairs. Grampa is so old as to appear mummified, and at first doesn’t seem to even be alive – until Sally’s finger is cut and he is given to suck like a baby, her blood reviving him like a vampire.
Carroll’s tea party has nothing on Tobe Hooper for a scene of madness around a table. Sally awakens and starts to scream – and the men howl and laugh and bray in response. They are certainly going to murder her, but first, they are apparently playing with their food, torturing the poor girl, but not physically – rather, they abuse her with their own weirdness. It is disgusting, and disturbing, and it feels like reality has come unmoored. Along the way, the camera spends so much time with her, focusing on the moments in which her mind seems to snap – as she struggles and cries out, her eyes roll in her head and the camera gets closer than one might think possible – here a face, here an eye, here just the white of an eye, here a capillary. They are great shots, and Marilyn Burns gives so much that her shattered psyche becomes our own. We have all gone off the deep end.
It is horrific, but watched from a certain angle, it’s weirdly funny as well – which doesn’t make it any better – rather than offering comic relief, the farce only makes the grotesque scarier, more incomprehensible, more unhinged and threatening. The Cook, The Hitchhiker, Grampa, even Leatherface are all ridiculous, oafish figures – they could be laughable if they weren’t so sad, scary, and murderous. There is a pathetic, wretched comedy of errors in the boys trying to help Grampa relive his glory days at the slaughterhouse by holding Sally’s head over a bucket and trying to put the sledgehammer in his hand for him to finish her off – he can’t even support its weight and keeps dropping it. This comedy elicits few laughs, and those are uncomfortable. The zany silliness of the boys and their patriarch only serves to sap Sally’s plight of any respect – if they at least were taking this seriously, that would be one thing, but she isn’t enough of a person to them to even warrant the dignity of menace. She is, at worst, an inconvenience – in the wrong place at the wrong time – that needs to be taken care of, and at best, she is a gift to Grampa, a cow for the slaughter. But in their wild hooting and hollering, she is not a person. They even seem to be having a kind of wholesome good time together as a family. It is upsetting.
But, in the end, she struggles out of their chaotic grasp, jumps through her second window in a few hours, and escapes to the road where she manages to get into a pickup truck speeding away, covered in blood, laughing, crying, mad, and utterly broken (as the tagline on the poster famously read, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” The answer is “not much”), while Leatherhead dances with his chainsaw in impotent rage on the road behind her as the sun rises on a new terrible day. It is another beautiful shot and then, as abruptly as anything else in this non-stop nightmare, it is over. The credits roll.
It is quite the film.
And it is even a bit strange to me how great I think it is. Since its release, it has had myriad imitators, and their ilk do not represent my favorite kinds of horror movies. Gritty, gross, sweaty, depressing, hopeless – that all has a place and I can appreciate it, but it’s not exactly my go to vibe. Still, I’m sure that beyond the films that have clearly riffed on this masterpiece (e.g., The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Wrong Turn (2003), or much of Rob Zombie’s oeuvre, among many, many others), so much of the genre writ large was advanced by the new depths that Hooper et al. managed to plumb. But while much that came after Texas Chainsaw was indebted to it, I think very little could hold a candle to this wholly original piece, which at once feels as insane and sloppy as its killers and also, paradoxically, is just perfectly orchestrated, artfully crafted, exquisitely built to achieve its horrific, bleak, shocking effect. This movie is really something special – a horrid delight, a flawless abomination. It was honestly a great pleasure to re-watch it a couple of times for this post.
