Category Archives: Review

Lesbian Vampires Part III – More Modern Examples

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So here’s a little look behind-the-scenes on ye old blog. Since starting this thing, I’ve been compulsively checking Google Analytics to see if anyone is reading it.  Most weeks I get about 15-30 visits. On a low week it can hit single digits and on my best ever, I managed 77. And so I have some sense of what visitors seem to respond to. One other interesting metric I check is how often different posts have been viewed over time. It’s here that I came upon something interesting the other day. Back in August, I did two posts on the often artsy, sometimes exploitative, always beloved subgenre of the “Lesbian Vampire” film. Far and away, “Lesbian Vampires – part II” has somehow gotten more action than anything else I’ve written (far more, for some reason, than part I).

Well, as all the films I covered in those two posts were from the seventies or earlier, and I had long been planning on returning to check out some more contemporary fare, I’m going to follow what seems to be the will of the people and dig into a few more Lesbian Vampire movies – this time, all from the 1990s or later. These will all be first time watches for me, so I’m curious about a few things. Something I love about the films previously discussed is how they take place at what I think Stacie Ponder (of the blog, Final Girl, and the podcast, Gaylords of Darkness) termed the ‘intersection of arthouse and grindhouse’) – at once gorgeous, deeply felt art pieces and trashy b-movies peddling flesh and blood. Does that enticing aesthetic still carry into future endeavors? Most of the older work clearly falls within the bounds of ‘exploitation cinema’ and however much those films may (and I think they often do) carry out a progressive/feminist/emancipatory project, they were all clearly made by men for the titillation of a presumably straight male viewership. In more recent times, does the work still maintain that typical perspective of a ‘male gaze?’ Does it somehow upend it? Can you actually find a good Lesbian Vampire movie written/directed by at least one LGBT+ female-identifying person (I want to cast as wide a net as possible), and if so, beyond it being good for people to be given the room to tell their own stories, does it change anything in how those stories are told?

So, let’s find out…and, as always, there will probably be some spoilers, so be forewarned…

Nadja (1994)

This one had been on my radar for quite a while and I’m glad to have finally checked it out. But I’m also relieved I didn’t do it before last summer when I wrote about Dracula’s Daughter as it is a direct remake. Really, it’s an interesting case in terms of looking at film history, and specifically this subgenre. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda (and with David Lynch tellingly signed on as an executive producer – he also has a small cameo), this is a surprisingly faithful retelling of a film from the 30s, which embraces the dreamy qualities of a subgenre from the 70s, but is so much a product of its time – an early 90s black and white arthouse picture, frequently talky and surreal, some of it shot on a lo-res toy camcorder (when not really striking high contrast cinematography), alternatingly dwelling in genuine existential angst and cool ironic detachment. It is groovy and surreal, philosophical and pretentious, dreary, dreamy, and often quite funny. It’s a little bit of everything.

And generally, I’ve got to say it works, though in the beginning, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. Especially the first time there was an ultra low-res sequence (they seem to coincide with moments when a character is under vampiric influence), I wondered if I had it in me to get through the whole thing. But somehow it is really very watchable, even captivating – striking a delicate balance between its circuitous but deeply felt philosophizing and its offbeat sense of humor. It’s atmosphere is just as rich as any of the beautiful seventies pictures that come to mind when I think of Lesbian Vampires, but it is a different kind of richness: more a heroin chic fugue state, the mind impossibly trying to muddle its way through essential questions of death and love and hate and attraction, trailing off and staring into the middle distance for a time, before sardonically joking it off and lighting another cigarette.

In terms of plot, it is very similar to its source, but there are some modernizations, some additions, and some subversions along the way. Among other things, the attraction between Nadja (the titular daughter of Dracula) and Lucy is able to be explicitly acted on in a way that would not have been possible in 1936 (the MPAA rated it R for “bizarre vampire sexuality”). Lucy is married to Jim, the nephew of Van Helsing, who (as in the original) starts the film having just been arrested for driving a stake through the heart of this seemingly harmless immigrant from Transylvania (using public domain shots of Lugosi from White Zombie).

Lucy also describes how she has lost all contact with her family as they didn’t “approve of her lifestyle” but now she’s married so they should be ok with her. She and Jim, especially under the heightened emotions of hunting and being hunted by the undead, repeatedly declare their love and need for each other, but their marriage feels barren and empty. In one night of real attraction (if not passion), she gets bound, physiologically and emotionally, to the magnetic, soft spoken Nadja, striking beneath her cowl, who happens to be into a bit of menstrual blood play. Not entirely happily (no one in this film is ever really “happy” – it’s not that kind of picture), Lucy falls under her spell.

And the film as a whole casts a mesmerizing spell as well, especially in terms of its look and sound and feel. It can be just so sumptuous sometimes, inky blacks and ivory whites cast into stark relief. Visually, it harkens back to its 1936 progenitor while also prefiguring A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (maybe I’m overstating it and it’s just that all three are b/w movies about a vampire girl in a cowl). But also, the toy camera sequences which had initially distanced me can be very effective, creating a hazy, deeply pixelated effect, which is ugly and modern, but produces a visual fog familiar for a contemporary viewer. It’s utilized in moments when a character is not in control of their mind, of their perception, and it successfully pulls the viewer into that muddled, frustrated headspace. It’s not “pretty,” but it is effective.

Returning to comparison with the 1936 film, though more explicit, this feels less focused on the element of sexuality. In that film, Countess Zaleska was driven by her relationship to (and abhorrence of) her vampirism, and her blood lust was clearly a metaphor for other desires that might have been deemed ‘unnatural’ at the time. The implication of her attraction for the fairer sex dominated the film – both forbidden and alluring – never directly spoken of, but so, so present, and her whole focus was freeing herself from her ‘curse.’

In this more recent outing, Nadja goes home with this woman who probably never should have married a man and their relationship doesn’t need to be coded. Even though Lucy speaks of past trouble with her family, in the eyes of the film, the sexuality of their encounter feels more commonplace and therefore less significant, less dominating. When her father dies, Nadja speaks of being able to make a fresh start, but I never really get the sense that she wants to stop being a vampire – or to stop being attracted to women. It’s nice that she doesn’t have to be a tragic closeted person, desperate not to be herself, but there is an erotic charge missing – being tempted by the forbidden. I wonder if in our more enlightened times it is still as possible to generate the allure of the taboo. In Nadja, we rather dig into the allure of ironic cool and poetic ennui. Ultimately, Nadja perhaps gets a better ending than Zaleska – she at least lives, but in the body of her brother’s lover, her identity now subsumed into that other woman’s. Maybe continuance is worth it, and maybe it would have been better to be murdered by her familiar and die as herself.

Ultimately, I don’t know that this moody, poetic piece really caused me to plumb the depths of our modern listless existence, but I did rather appreciate the viewing experience. Just as much a reflection of the time and place in which it was produced as Vampyros Lesbos or The Vampire Lovers, this is both a solid 90s experimental film and a surprisingly fun little vampire flick.

Blood of the Tribades (2016)

This ultra-low budget feature (approx. 20,000 USD) from Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein took me a bit by surprise. Clearly an homage to the work of Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, and Hammer Studios, it is a crowdfunded labor of love, full of crumbling stone edifices, diaphanous gowns,  bloody breasts, and gendered violence. It may not succeed on every level, but its love for the source material is obvious and the filmmakers do a lot with what they have. As described on their Kickstarter page, the intention was to embrace the style and atmosphere of the early 70s subgenre, while including explicit socio-political messaging. Generally it is successful on both counts. It is also one of the very few examples I’ve been able to find of a Lesbian Vampire flick (co-)directed by a woman.

The film’s premise is that 2000 years ago, the vampire Bathor established a small town of vampires as a kind of utopia and then went off to conquer the continent. Since then, the undead residents have lost their way, dividing along gender lines and seemingly having purged the village of racial others. A group of men (who all drink from a fountain of Bathor’s blood, which seems to actually be making them sick) have started hunting down the women for causing their illness, being irreligious harlots, tempting them with their flesh, and not giving them sufficient offspring. For their part, the council of women’s leaders underplay the threat and try to keep the peace, though their members keep getting crossbow bolts in their hearts whenever they disrobe. Finally, two women escape the carnage with some outcasts (who I believe had been excluded based on race), and we learn that one of them can actually read the ancient words of Bathor and return the community to its founding values (if she doesn’t get staked first).

Socio-politically, it’s not subtle (men, and at least one woman, motivated by religious zealotry, attacking women for their sexuality, murdering them for making them feel inadequate – a (white) women’s movement, which fails to include women of color and pushes for a kind of moderate incrementalism, thus enabling the men’s violence – religion being corrupted and weaponized to subjugate minority populations and punish sexual/gender expression), but it more or less works. One thing I would take issue with though is the implication that the political element is a novel addition. I think the filmmakers behind the classic 70s Lesbian Vampire films may not have brought very intentional messaging to their films, but regardless, the films themselves were deeply infused with politics, often expressing feminist sentiments, even if a given director was just trying to make something lurid to sell tickets, or simply indulging in his own personal peccadillos. For example, the climax here is directly political in its language, but at the same time, it seems to directly recreate the blood ritual of The Blood Spattered Bride, a film whose politics may have been ambivalent, but no less urgent – the politics was always there.

The question this prompts for me is how much weight should be given to intent. If Franco or Kümel created something just because they wanted it to be beautiful or sexy and along the way it happened to communicate emancipatory feminist ideals, is that less valuable than a work where that was the intention from the get go? Or is art more ‘pure’ when made without seeking to make a statement (even though a statement can so freely be read therein)? I honestly don’t know.

If anything, the film’s body politics is given increased parity. For example, while there are plenty of bosoms on display, there is easily as much male nudity. The vampiric men’s rights activists have a tendency of assailing one of their own for being insufficiently fervent in his misogyny, stripping him down, strapping him to a large bondage X and whipping him bloody with roses. It all has a vibe of repressed desire being redirected into a kind of homoerotic sado-masochism, and along the way, there are rather a lot of penises (one even flies through the air, impaled on a crossbow bolt).  On the other hand, until the final, more bloody, sexual, and tragic-romantic ritual between the two remaining ladies, while the women are often nude, there was surprisingly little suggestion of eroticism (the “tribades” of the title being an archaic word used before the inhabitants of Lesbos became unanimous with the idea of female same-sex attraction) – rather, there is a lot of child-like frolicking about. Now, did this circumvent a male gaze, freeing the female vampires from objectification (though when in this state, there are usually leering male figures, waiting to kill them) or does it infantilize the women, robbing them of sexual agency? I’m not sure, but it is a change, one which many critics focused on, stating that the film ‘subverted the sexist tropes’ of its progenitors.

One other difference is the lack of seduction. A recurring trope of the earlier films is the older Lesbian Vampire (often Carmilla) luring the young ingénue to the dark side of both vampirism and sapphism, along the way, turning her against the (often abusive) man in her life. While seductive and freeing, this could also be read as presenting an older, predatory lesbian, preying on and turning younger women. That element is wholly lacking in this case, particularly as every character in the film is already undead. There is perhaps a political merit to this, but I regretted the absence of temptation.

I came to rather like this one, but I think it’s important for a viewer to comprehend its budget in advance and therefore temper expectations. I was initially put off by what I’d deemed the “cheap” look of the film – there is some exterior photography that’s quite attractive, aided by the available locations, but the interiors suffer, particularly the men’s headquarters in which the walls are just covered with sheets, masking whatever modern space they had to work in. Past that, reading the performer’s bios, it seems that most came out of the local Boston art community, specifically, the burlesque scene, and that few had much previous film acting experience. However, knowing more about the project, I appreciate its successes more and can more easily overlook its failures. To be fair, many of the early 70s films also had quite low budgets, but benefitted from working in Europe, where there’s a desolate castle around every corner, and shooting on grainy film, which can cover shortcomings in an artful haze. It’s harder to pull off this kind of picture in the States on high def digital.

The only criticism, I would really make is that there is rather a lot of world building (the whole history of the vampire village, its founder, the religion, etc.) and I think a strength of the originals was their disinterest in logically explaining anything, instead dwelling in a space of Eros-Thanatos psycho-sexual tension. While this film commits to its inspiration’s vibe, often succeeding far better than the toy crossbows might suggest, I think the exposition undercuts some of its potential power.

Still, this was a charming watch – doing so much with limited resources, and evincing an understanding and love of what made those 70s films so special. The passion that went into the project feels somehow more palpable than with many more polished, higher budget creations.

Bit (2020)

Brad Michael Elmore’s film is just tremendous fun. If I was missing the element of seduction in the previous film, this one has it in spades. However, it is less about the allure of some mysterious woman (though there’s a bit of that), than it is that of vampirism, of power, of ‘the night’ – and the night life. Temporarily leaving aside the “Lesbian” part of the equation, something I always appreciate in my “Vampire” content is fun. I remember slogging through Interview with the Vampire, irritated with Louis’s constant moaning, only to then pick up the second book, The Vampire Lestat and feel such a breath of fresh air – Lestat loved being a vampire – it’s sexy and powerful and a really good time and he wasn’t complaining about having those things. Elmore’s movie takes a similar tack, also bringing to mind such films as The Lost Boys and The Craft.

As in those two examples, the film centers around a young person, Laurel (Nicole Maines), who comes to a new city and falls in with a gang of exciting, young supernatural types (in this case, a group of radical, feminist, lesbian vampires who (mostly) hunt predatory and/or irritating men). We understand that Laurel has been through a hard time, particularly during her just completed, final year of high school. But it’s never exactly stated what that hard time was. I’d assumed coming out, but having read later that the actress is trans, I suppose it could have been transitioning. Either way, it’s clear that leading up to this, things had been emotionally and psychologically hard and that, unsure of the direction she wants to go in her life, she needs to take some time (in this case, crashing with her older brother in LA) to find her way.

When Laurel finds herself a vampire, and further, in a like-minded community, it is thrilling and empowering – it’s also just fun. Sure – she’s a protagonist of a teen vampire movie, so she’s reluctant to kill people and comes slowly to the whole blood drinking thing, but being a part of this group just feels so good. There’s a lovely scene where after some bad stuff has gone down and Laurel has had her first kill, thus completing her transformation, she’s on the roof with the leader of the group, Duke. After filling Laurel in on some personal history (and essential exposition for the narrative), Duke offers to show her one more thing. Laurel declines, saying she can’t handle any more changes tonight, but Duke insists, saying something like, “you’ll like this – everyone likes this.” And then she shows her how to fly. And it is so sweet. It’s Lois and Superman. It’s Peter Parker swinging around the city for the first time. It is a young person who’s been through such difficulties feeling lifted and free and strong.

And before this, I have to say, I actually loved the exposition (not a sentence I often write), which was all presented in a kind of disco dance sequence as we learn of Vlad, Duke’s sire. An ancient vampire, he’d held her, and a bevy of other ‘wives,’ in his thrall for decades before she was finally able to overcome him and free herself. I loved how lame he seemed. We keep cutting to Vlad on the dance floor, surrounded by his collection of sexy ladies who have been magically made to love him, with their costumes changing periodically over the years, and he just never looks cool. There is no way he could be surrounded by women without magic. On one level, it’s just funny, but on the other, it underlines the domination, the slavery at work – which is at the heart of Duke’s socio-political drive. She’s learned the hard way that power is not safe in the hands of men.

Of course, there needs to be a story, so as in The Lost Boys and The Craft, our protagonist has to be thrust into conflict with the leader of the pack, in this case, Duke. I would rather that hadn’t been necessary, but where the story goes is still enjoyable, so ok – I’ll take it. And I appreciate how the arc of the vampire storyline is rooted in emotional character issues. Laurel struggles to balance her need to find and live her truth and fulfill her responsibilities. We learn of past suicide attempts and know that she’s had a support system of family and at least one close friend. But there is a tragic inability to do right by those that have stood by her if she is to go off and become her own complete person.

Caught up in the joys of her new un-life, she irreparably fails a dear friend. Reluctant to give into her newfound bloodlust (not letting herself fully be herself), she tries to repress it and accidentally strikes out at those she wouldn’t have normally chosen, ultimately hurting a member of her family. In refusing to hunt as Duke and the others do (going after, e.g., rapists, right wing internet trolls who tweet at young girls to kill themselves, and pretentious faux ‘allies’ who talk a big feminist game for cultural cache), Laurel inadvertently ends up breaking the key rule of ‘bite club’ and turning a man (the biggest no-no for Duke – who has a nice line about how nice it would be ‘to make every woman a vampire and let men be scared to jog at night’), which pushes the story into its final act conflict. While I would have loved to stay in the space of joyful power and sexy discovery, I do like that this turn really grew out of the character in emotionally significant ways.

Another aspect I really enjoyed is that though efforts were made to film the women and their relationships and attractions without a lecherous ‘male gaze,’ the film does not feel neutered. There is still an element of desire and sexuality. Elmore is able to establish and dwell in a space of sexual tension, playing out the flirtation and seduction without it feeling like the camera is leering. It’s a tightrope walk and I think he’s quite successful.

This is a crowd-pleasing (for the right crowd) take-back-the-night party, and it does as well by its vampirism as it does by its diverse LGBT+ characters. It’s also striking the extent to which it manages to wear its socio-political viewpoint on its sleeve without ever feeling preachy or propagandistic. Balancing the emotional truth of its protagonist, the dictates of its narrative, and its progressive perspective, it successfully delivers an equally entertaining and moving, contemporary Lesbian Vampire picture.

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So, there we have a few ‘modern’ examples of the genre. To answer my question from earlier in this post, I didn’t really find any made by a female and LGBT+ identifying person, which is a shame, but I’m glad I did watch these three. Still, I know I’ve skipped a great deal and there is still more homework to do. There is a huge gap between 1994 and 2016. I have the impression though that the Lesbian Vampire kind of disappeared into a general late night Cinemax “sexy vampire” for a stretch of the 90s and early 2000s (and many of those flicks just don’t look that interesting/good); however, she’s somewhat resurfaced of late. Also, recently, between social advancements opening doors for more people to tell their own stories, and the extent to which digital has made filmmaking so much more affordable, leading to a boom of micro-budget independent work, there is so much more explicitly ‘queer horror’ (though, for whatever reason, still vanishingly few “Lesbian Vampire” movies made by out-queer women). I wonder if this sub-genre, with one foot forever in 70s exploitation cinema, has much of a place in the current filmmaking landscape, or is it only approachable as something to either subvert or homage? I don’t know, but there are still a few other examples from the last 15 years I’d like to check out. But I’ve also watched very little Jean Rollin, and life is so short…

Elvira’s Haunted Hills: Camp, Shtick, Homage, and Boob Jokes

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The last couple of weeks have entailed a series of connections. Thanks to a Christmas present, I went on a run of Vincent Price movies. That led me to take in some of Price’s work with Roger Corman. And in turn, watching some of those great old Poe pictures, I got an itch to revisit something I’d first seen only a few months ago, a loving parody of those films, Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001). When I first watched it in October, featured on the Joe Bob Briggs Halloween special on Shudder, with Cassandra Peterson (the performer behind Elvira) as a guest, it took me quite a while to get into it. I was enjoying the interview portions of the show, hearing Peterson’s stories of her career and the hard and costly road of making the movie, but the humor of the film just wasn’t landing. But somehow, over time, I started to get it. I hadn’t seen the movies it was lampooning (generally, the Corman Poe cycle, with a pinch of Hammer Horror thrown in), but I started to catch what was being sent up and by the end, I kind of loved it.

Having finally watched a few of Corman’s flicks, I really wanted to give this another watch and see how it played with more knowledge of its inspiration.  So, that’s what we’re doing today. There will be some spoilers, but I think that is less troublesome in a work of parody such as this.

Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001)

Elvira is an interesting figure in the horror landscape. A horror host since 1981 (before that having worked with a wide range of big names, from Elvis to Fellini), her act walks a line between Borsht Belt shtick with endless cheesy one liners; a kind of camp sexuality wherein she puts on exaggerated characteristics of femininity in a manner not dissimilar to a drag queen, all the while making a constant joke of it – at once, selling and sending up the “sexiness” (there’s no situation she won’t turn into a joke about her chest); and always warmly, lovingly celebrating the Halloween of it all – the fun play with spookiness and the macabre.  It’s an odd and unique balancing act, and maybe it doesn’t always work, but that’s where the camp comes in – I think it isn’t always supposed to work – the joke not landing is sometimes part of the bit (and sometimes the failed joke is the actual gag) – there is an irony at the heart of it all that shines through even when a superficial laugh falls flat (insert boob joke here).

Generally, that all applies to this film – it is cheesy. The jokes often fizzle. It goes for the lowest hanging fruit possible – both in its “parody” and in its “bawdiness”; but there is a secret kernel hidden at its center: something knowing, a genuine love of the movies it purports to make fun of, a brave, open-hearted willingness to do the absolutely stupidest things for a laugh. All of this makes it kind of infectious, and surprisingly loveable.

We follow Elvira (basically as her anachronistic “valley-girl” inspired self) travelling to Paris to star in her can-can revue, waylaid at a spooooky old castle filled with nods to (and direct rip-offs of) characters from the Corman Poe films (having only seen the three so far, I can’t track every reference, but it draws largely from House of Usher and Pit and the Pendulum). Family patriarch who can’t stand loud sounds? Check. Someone walled up in the basement? You betcha. A spot of catalepsy? Better believe it! Torture chambers, the dark burden of family history, revelation of marital betrayals, a crumbling ancient mansion, tainted by genealogical evil, waiting to sink into the ground, and prose as purple as sweet plum wine? You want it – we got it! Even the opening credits, with abstract paintings undulating behind the text, suggests the kind of thing Corman was doing in the early 60s.

It turns out that Elvira is a dead ringer for Lady Elura, the first wife, ten years dead, of the long suffering Lord Hellsubus (Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror Picture Show), but she also seems to sometimes actually be Elura reincarnate, or somehow her descendant – it’s not quite clear, which sets in motion a series of attempted murders, explorations through hidden, cobweb infested passages, and shocking reveals. All the while, Elvira is simply trying to catch a ride to continue on to Paris to do her show (though she is happy to be momentarily delayed by hooking up with the ridiculously hunky and poorly dubbed, Fabio-esque stable boy). By the end, she is of course tied to a slab with a sharpened pendulum swinging above her, but also of course, as the rope tying her down goes over her ample bosom, it gets cut before she does and she manages to escape (there really aren’t any “haunted hills” in this film – that’ s just another boob joke too).

But this movie is not that focused on plot, so much as setting up scenarios to indulge in the silliest gags imaginable. Lord Hellsubus can’t endure loud sounds so there’s a slapstick routine of Elvira and her assistant, Zou Zou, bumping into every suit of armor, knocking over ever vase and hitting every gong. Elvira runs through a graveyard, only to see a spider in its web and scream, see a raven fly past her head and scream, see a bunny sitting sweetly in front of a tombstone and scream.

After having Zou Zou add more bubbles to her Jacuzzi (by blowing into a hose), Elvira is about to get out of the bath when she admonishes the camera operator to look away cause she doesn’t want to “blow the rating on this picture.” She even gets a big, music hall number, with singing and dancing and an applause sign on her tush.

Some of this is pretty funny, and regrettably some of it isn’t. It’s a bit strange, but I think I actually enjoyed the movie more on my first watch when I’d not yet seen the films it was referencing. Having watched them so recently, some of the referential comedy comes off as just that – trying to get a laugh for recreating exact scenes and dialogue from its referents without always coming up with its own jokes. Text frequently feels directly pulled from House of Usher or Pit and the Pendulum. It’s closer to Mel Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It than it is to his superior Young Frankenstein; the later really making its own characters and comic situations out of the source material, and the former depending much more on recreating (in a silly fashion) specific moments from Dracula films (generally Coppola’s 1992 picture).  When I didn’t know the original films, I picked up on the joke that it was sending up a kind of film, a kind of melodramatic, over-the-top, old fashioned, but beloved work. Now, it feels more like it is just redoing bits (but with more slapstick, boob jokes, and sound effects that go “boing!”). It is still enjoyable and lovable in its intentional ridiculousness, but it doesn’t feel as inspired in its stupidity as I’d originally taken it to be.

Also, some elements suffer in comparison. The first time I watched it, I’d imagined that O’Brien’s Lord Hellsubus was affectionately aping a kind of performance one might have found in the originals, and I really got a kick out of just how madcap he went, his performance really growing on me over the film and staying with me afterwards. He was going on a wild ride, and I loved going there with him. However, having just watched some of the Corman movies, I can see how the big choices O’Brien is making are actually the opposite of what Price had done 50 years earlier with a parallel role. Where Price gets quiet, O’Brien gets loud; where Price stays grounded, O’Brien goes round the bend; where Price tenderly touches emotional depths, bringing forth a horrific, subtle shudder, O’Brien waves his arms about and shouts his head off.

That said, I don’t want to be unfair to this actor – what was he supposed to do? Try to recreate Price’s performance beat for beat (and almost certainly fail) – isn’t it better to go in his own direction? And what he’s doing is unquestionably appropriate for the loony tunes world his role exists in – something as gentle and whole as Price had done could have been lost amidst the sight gags and double entendres. Maybe playing it this way just serves to better homage Price’s talent (the movie is dedicated to him), highlighting the surprising and oh-so-successful choices he made by showing the path not taken.

 As a whole, this movie is such an odd duck. I really do have affection for it, but I wonder who they thought they were making it for. It has a goofy sense of humor that perhaps a nine year old could best appreciate while it revolves around references to a series of movies no nine year old is likely to have seen. It’s full of allusions to horrific acts (with just a little bit of cartoony gore thrown in at the end), but it is not remotely scary. It leans hard on sex jokes but it still comes off as entirely wholesome. It approaches its source material with such inane absurdity, but it is obvious how much it adores those earlier films. It really does feel like a labor of love, which I understand it was for Peterson and her team. Apparently, she had trouble getting financing, poured loads of her own money into getting the picture finished (partly funded by mortgaging her home), and then couldn’t really get it distributed and took a huge financial loss – in the end, she mostly ended up screening it as a part of AIDS fundraisers she was involved with.

Of course, before she gets stretched out, a character appreciatively comments, “nice rack!”

In the end, for all its faults, I still feel like championing this picture – I think it’s been little seen and while the cohort who will really appreciate it is probably quite small, I really hope those people find this movie. Their inner vaudevillian, sixties-horror-loving child will thank them for it.

Catching Up With Vincent Price

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I’ve been a horror fan for quite a while and take some pride in having reasonably expansive knowledge of the genre. And yet, I must admit some significant gaps in my horror education – films which somehow I’ve just never gotten around to. For example, I’ve only taken in a handful of Hammer horrors; I’m always out of date on the most recent releases; and I’ve seen precious few films starring Vincent Price (I have many more gaps of course – this is merely a sample).

That last one particularly stands out for me as this Christmas I received a thoughtful gift from my folks. Unbeknownst to me, Price had a cooking show back in the 70s and also published a few cookbooks. Knowing my love of both horror and cooking, I was given one of these, “Cooking Price-Wise.” And yet, I could probably count on one hand (maybe two) the number of his films that I’ve seen.  All of them I’ve really enjoyed, or at least I enjoyed him (House on Haunted Hill, Witchfinder General, Dragonwyck, and Theatre of Blood all made deep impressions), but though growing up in the 80s, he was always around – a lovable, velvet-voiced public character inextricably linked with the macabre, he is still a huge blind spot for me (he made over 100 movies and I’ve seen perhaps 10).

So this week, I want to start remedying the situation and finally catch up on some of his most known works, thus assuaging my guilt for not having seen them thus far while having the gall to label myself a ‘horror blogger.’ Be warned that there will be spoilers.

House of Wax (1953)

As I understand, Andre DeToth’s film, the first color-3D and stereo movie produced by an American studio (and only the second studio 3D film ever), kicked off the second wave of Price’s career, in which he became a horror icon. He had worked in film since the 30s, playing a range of parts from young romantic leads to drug addled roguish villains (again, Dragonwick is striking), and he had been involved in some Universal horror films (Tower of London and The Invisible Man Returns), but it wasn’t until House of Wax that his silky gentility was first fully tapped in service of horror. And serve it he does – in his unique fashion. The root of horror is the Latin ‘horrore,’ meaning to shudder or tremble, and while this is not a terrifying film by any means, it, and specifically Price’s performance, do get under the skin, delivering a delicate and delicious occasional shudder.

Throughout the role, he brings a kind of warmth, not overselling the villainy, and this element is key to his success. At the beginning, he is Prof. Henry Jarrod, a kindly sculptor of wax figures who only wants to capture beauty, refusing his partner’s demands to produce crowd pleasing torture chamber scenes, but who is also more than a little off. He loves his figures as his own children, talking to them sweetly and seeming to hear them respond. Again, he doesn’t overplay it and in the first scene where he speaks lovingly to his prized figures in front of a potential new investor, it plays like quirky, sweet idiosyncrasy more than anything particularly off-putting. But when his partner burns down his creations for the insurance money, leaving Jarrod for dead in the blaze, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to him completely snapping and becoming a psychotic monster.

The initial burning is quite shocking – one of the biggest horror set pieces of the film. Though they are only wax figures, watching them char and melt, their glass eyes dropping out of their sockets, is still disturbing and grotesque, and seeing the callous way that Jarrod’s partner tries to kill him in the bargain so that he alone can collect the insurance kicks off the film on a bracingly dark note.

It isn’t long before Price’s sculptor, his hands ruined, returns as a burned monstrosity, no longer shying away from scenes of sensationalistic violence, now murdering those whose likenesses are well suited to his wax subjects so that he can dip them in paraffin and use them to people his new exhibit (as well as murdering anyone who get in his way – they too can go in the wax). Seeing him (and of course, listening to him), in typically affable, urbane fashion, lead an audience around the displays, affectionately describing his newest artworks (which we come to understand are actually posed corpses) is both delectable and honestly creepy (reminiscent of the vocal work he would later do for Alice Cooper’s “The Black Widow”). When inviting the female lead, Sue, to model for his new rendition of Marie Antionette, “what I need is you – nothing else will satisfy me,” his manner belies none of his true intentions (she won’t actually be modeling so much as she will be the model). His gentle sweetness is not in quotation marks. But as we understand him more fully (and as she already has her doubts about his new Joan of Arc figure which far too realistically resembles her murdered friend, Cathy), it is all the more chilling.

Past that, it’s a fun spectacle of a movie, a crowd pleasing bit of Grand Guignol which is at once an elegant period piece, a gimmick laden, schticky 3D flick which outdoes Friday the 13th part 3 for ridiculously out of place moments of objects flying at the screen (such as two scenes with a paddleball wielding barker, whacking the ball at our faces or an extended can-can girl performance which gets pretty up close and personal with what’s under their skirts), a periodically exciting thriller with Price’s deformed killer chasing Sue through the streets at night, a surprisingly lurid picture with (implied) nude female victims screaming, bound to a table to be coated in boiling wax, and high melodrama as Price waxes poetic (see what I did there?) on how these deaths are justified to bring his art to life.

My only gripe is that in the final, climactic moments, I wish Jarrod had been able to go down more grandly. I mean, of course you know he has to die – in 1953, the Hays Code was still in full effect –bad guys couldn’t win until ’68. But after such a rich, textured performance, where so much could be savored, I felt he was finally dispatched with so little fanfare and I wanted more. Regardless, this was tremendous fun and I expect it will be one to revisit over the years.  Also, it’s fun seeing a young Carolyn Jones (Morticia from the Addams Family TV show).

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

This is an interesting piece – not always entirely successful, but when it is, it’s quite chilling. The first filmic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (which I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never read…), it carries notes of post-apocalyptic ennui, zombie movie spooks, personal tragedy, and a Twilight Zone-esque final act reversal of perspective. We open on an empty city, littered with corpses. The city is never named but has a monumental feel (I’d first thought it was DC, and later learned it had been filmed in Rome – more on that later). This sort of imagery just always seems to work, whether here or in something later like Night of the Comet or 28 Days Later.

Price plays Dr. Robert Morgan, a scientist who had been researching the plague which has basically eradicated humanity, including his wife and young daughter. As far as he knows, he is the only remaining living person on earth, with everyone else either killed off or reduced to shambling, undead monsters (here they are presented very much like zombies, but I understand in the book and the 2007 film with Will Smith – I’ve never seen the Charlton Heston fronted The Omega Man – they are more like quick moving vampires). Three years into his isolation, his days consist of acts of mere survival – eating bland canned foods, keeping the generator running, carving new stakes, clearing the corpses out of his driveway and burning them in the local mass grave, and hunting down at least a few more vampires each day before they can harry him by night, when he locks himself in and drinks till sleep comes.

The first act of the film is, I think, the strongest. Watching Morgan go through his days in desolate loneliness, boredom, and bouts of drunkenness, with the looming doom waiting outside his boarded up door, it is easy to get caught up in the gloom. Also, the way he carries out some of his more grizzly tasks, like collecting and burning corpses, brings an ugly weight to it all. And to top it all off, while one clearly sympathizes with his need to hunt down the undead by day, it looks more like he’s just murdering poor derelicts as he hammers stakes into the hearts of these daylight enfeebled ‘creatures.’

But then we hit the second act and an extended flashback to the before times as the plague was hitting and he was somehow spared, and all of a sudden I started to notice how out of sync the sound was. This is when I discovered that this was filmed in Rome with a mostly Italian cast and crew – of course the dub is bad! Regrettably, this middle stretch drags. Whereas the first act consisted of basically wordless action with Price’s rich voiceover giving narration, now there are extended scenes of people stiffly speaking with each other and while the actual story that plays out is at turns tragic and horrifying, the atmosphere and energy of the filmmaking takes a significant dip. I read that Matheson was so underwhelmed with the finished project that he had his name taken off as screenwriter (apparently he’d been told that Fritz Lang would direct – that clearly didn’t happen). He also reportedly felt Price had been miscast, though he’d valued his performances in their other collaborations (Matheson also wrote the screenplays for many of the Roger Corman produced Poe adaptations that Price starred in).

Not having read the source material, I can’t say for sure, but I can imagine a different intended vibe for the character – more of a typical sci-fi leading man perhaps. But I really like the qualities Price brings to the table – he is a weary, broken figure, given to drink and dulled to violence. In the final act, he finds one other survivor, a woman who is infected and not yet turned. She initially runs from him, but convinced she thinks him one of the vampires, he chases her down, shouting that he’s not going to hurt her. The image of this older man chasing this terrified younger woman, grabbing her and dragging her home, where he essentially detains her against her will, is disturbing. But I think this works in the film’s benefit. There is no intimation of possible romance between these two remaining humans – he is just desperate to grab hold of another living being, but he is really a domineering threat. He is, in fact, the monster. The legend told among what has become of humanity that kills by day, hunting down weak, innocent people, some of whom have not yet turned. In the final twist, we learn that a new society is developing, built by the infected who have learned to live with their condition and there is no place in this world for this violent, dangerous relic who will never be able to accept them as anything other than mutated freaks.

I think Price brings a kind of sad menace to the role that ultimately, even if not what the author had originally intended, serves it. His Dr. Morgan is not a good man, and the journey we go on with him is richer and more horrific thanks to that. This was a fascinating, if uneven, watch, with strong notes of horror and an oppressive, fatalistic weight – I think Price’s contribution is a large part of its success.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

What did I just watch? What is this film? I mean, it is…interesting, filled with so much baffling, committed, over the top weirdness. But it’s also static and utterly lacking in dramatic tension or momentum. In the end, I think the glory of its peculiarity outweighs the leadenness of its dialogue and drama, but it is an odd duck to say the least. Set in 1925, it took me a half an hour to realize that fact as it began with a colorful sequence that just felt so very 1970s, like something out of Flash Gordon  or Doctor Who. For the longest time, I was wondering why their cars were all so old fashioned…sometimes I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

We start the film with a 10 minute wordless sequence. A shiny, hooded, cloaked figure rides a pipe organ up out of an underground chamber, pounding it dramatically while bathed in red light. Then he descends into his lavish Art Deco ballroom, turns a key and conducts his clockwork orchestra before a woman in a fantastical white dress enters (I guess it could be period appropriate – but it could also be from a sci-fi movie). They dance a bit before he lowers a covered birdcage into a hole in the ground where the same woman, having instantaneously undergone a costume change, receives it, packs it into a car and chauffeurs the cloaked figure away. Next we see a man cozy in his bed. The skylight opens, and the birdcage is lowered in and out of the room, having been opened. A shadow flits by and then another. The man is scared. He looks down and sees one (fruit) bat crawling up his chest. Another is on the pillow beside him. A look of absolute terror. A series of close ups on the bats faces – and they’re real cuties – not scary at all, just wriggling along, licking their noses with their adorable little tongues. Look of abject terror. Cut to black. Back at the homestead, the clockwork band strikes up again. The mysterious man rides his organ back into the ground as the woman silently watches. The next morning, a housekeeper finds the former sleeper in his bed, surrounded and devoured by bats.

This might, maybe, sorta give some small taste of what this film is like. Past that, when we finally see Price (who utters his first line 32 minutes into the film and largely gives a silent performance), it’s clear his face is not his own, having been crudely spirit gummed into place. His silent assistant is a mystery – I had expected her to be a more sophisticated clockwork, but by the end of the film, when she dies in surprising fashion, it’s evident she’s been a real girl all along. Who is she? Why doesn’t she speak (we come to understand why he doesn’t)? Why is she helping him murder all these people? Furthermore, motivated to revenge by the death of his beloved wife, why is Phibes carrying on with this young woman anyway? What’s with the little vignettes and dance scenes the two of them periodically share? Also, Phibes is taking his revenge on the 8 surgeons and 1 nurse who unsuccessfully tried to save his wife’s life four years earlier, killing them in the style of the 10 Plagues of Exodus – but while there can be some variation in tellings, I’ve never seen a Haggadah (the text recited on Passover) with a plague of ‘bats.’ And isn’t ‘death of the first born’ typically last, and not ‘darkness?’

Frogs are pretty standard though.

But all of the above is really what makes the film such a great, singular ride. I had an acting teacher my first year of college who always insisted that we should “dare to fail gloriously,” and I can’t help but love any artwork that follows through on that ethos. Sadly, it shares the screen with an unfortunately clunky police procedural, riddled with attempts at humor that (for me) simply didn’t land, such as Investigator Trout often being mistakenly called “Pike.” Hilarious, right? The problem with this half of the film is that it seems to exist only to give us the exposition of why Phibes is doing what he’s doing. We just go from one murder to the next, meeting victims for the first time in their death scenes such that we never know them or particularly care that they die, and it never feels like there’s any chance that the police will somehow be able to intervene. Thus, we end up giving over maybe 40% of the run time to characters who have no real narrative agency. They just show up after the fact and help us understand the whys and wherefores, but they can’t really do anything. On the other hand, we do get the police sergeant uttering the classic line, “A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon – words fail me gentlemen.” (You know, from the plague of unicorns!) So that’s something.

But I really don’t want to come off as negative – while the film is far from exciting, it has so much in it that is unique and special, even if it never clicked for me as a story. And, as the whole point of this was to dig into Vincent Price’s oeuvre, he really delivers a mad, zany, delightfully arch, and yet still sophisticated and controlled, performance. As I mentioned, he mostly doesn’t speak and when he does, it is by holding a cable to his throat (his mouth can’t move – he also drinks a martini through a tube in the side of his neck – this is a weird movie…) and what we hear is actually overdubbing. Thus, he really is giving a silent performance and it is very effective.

Some of the best moments of the film are when he has some small, subtle reaction: a passing look of disdain, a moment of sadistic appreciation, an expression of satisfaction with his baroque methods of vengeance (such as an exquisite frog mask that crushes the wearer’s head, or coating a sleeping nurse in plant-based goo so that locusts eat her face down to the skull), or a look of tragic despair as he sits at the altar of his dead wife, pledging that his work will summarily be done and he will soon return to her side in the darkness. He manages to balance two extremes here – on one hand, all of his gestural and emotional work is so delicate, careful, and nuanced – and on the other, it is all so very, very, very over-the-top and melodramatic. The inherent tension of those two poles makes for a captivating performance. Sadly, the rest of the film didn’t have any real tension to match it. But maybe that doesn’t matter and we should just appreciate the diamond we’ve found and not complain that it’s surrounded by coal.

—

And so there we have our first foray into the works of Vincent Price. He really is a fascinating screen presence – so consistently classy with just the right amount of camp, bringing solid emotional work while maintaining a calculated, almost cerebral mannerism, not always chewing on the scenery (though for that, do check out Theatre of Blood (1973)– it’s great!), but often nibbling on it, savoring every little bite.

And so, let’s keep going. Next week, I plan to continue filling this gap in my classic horror knowledge and also kill a second bird with this particular stone as I have, shamefully, never watched any of Roger Corman’s 1960s Poe flicks. As Price was in 6 out of 8 of them, and these are some of his most iconic works in the genre, I think I should watch a few post haste.

You Probably Shouldn’t Give Exotic Pets as Gifts – Gremlins

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So, I write this cruising at 23,500 feet on a flight from Poland (where I live) to the US (where I’m from). It’s a couple days before Christmas and thus, one makes the annual pilgrimage to family, wherever that might be. Just one of many holiday traditions, like roasting chestnuts (which smell nice, but always seemed inedible to me), decorating a tree (didn’t get one this year since I’d be travelling, so I decorated a windowsill – it looks a bit like Christmas vomited all over the houseplants), or tiptoeing around any potential triggers of familial conflict – Happy Holidays, All! But regardless of how, or if, you mark the occasion, I think it’s pretty common to indulge in some kind of seasonally appropriate movies.

For some, that means Miracle on 34th Street or Elf. For others, that means Krampus, A Christmas Horror Story, or Better Watch Out. Just as an aside, it’s not my focus this week, but I recently watched Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 and ye gods, what a hoot – Mickey Rooney as an angry, drunk toymaker (he apparently had protested the first film – what is he even doing here?), effects work by Screaming Mad George (who always has zany, surreal, weird ideas), killer toys, an odd yet wonderful mix of hokey and sleazy, and the mystery of who is trying to murder this little kid (who is doing a lot with his face), that actually kept me fully engaged until the reveal. I really recommend it. (I know it’s on Shudder in the States, but is hard to come by in the UK – I don’t know about the rest of the world.)

But for tonight, following my stroll down memory lane a couple months back, trying to reconstruct how I got here, I thought I would brave the sometimes fraught waters of nostalgia and revisit a beloved film of my childhood (which I haven’t seen in ages), one which I didn’t even think of as horror when I was little, but I can’t imagine a reasonable generic definition which could exclude it from the canon now. I write, of course, of Joe Dante’s 1984 Gremlins. Now, I think there’s always a risk when going back to something you loved when younger – that it won’t hold up, that it may even be cringe inducing and you question how you could ever have thought it was anything more than embarrassing. I am so happy to report that this was not at all the case here. What an absolute delight! I expect I appreciate different things as an adult than I did long ago, but this stands as a tremendously fun ride, and somehow, in spite of a wide range of reasons one could expect it wouldn’t, it really does work. So, let’s get into it. (Note – I’m writing this assuming you’ve seen it. If you haven’t, go treat yourself – where I live at least, it’s on HBO max.)

Gremlins (1984)

I think that it’s easy to detect the presence of the three main creative voices behind this movie. From director Joe Dante (whose earlier film, Piranha (1978), Spielberg had called the “best of the Jaws rip-offs”), there is a madcap energy and an evident love of 50s B-movie sci-fi/horror. Individual camera set ups are not often showy, but the camera movement is so playful, often twisting from one slight angle to the next, granting an off-kilter, weird vibe. The old time monster movie of it all is just so much melodramatic fun, such as the scene in which Stripe, the leader of the gremlins jumps into a pool to spawn a horde of scaly, clawed compatriots. Bright green light suffuses the pool as fog spills out and light flashes. The young protagonist, Billy, backs away in fearful knowledge of the nightmare soon to spew forth (Zach Galligan, who would go on to a long career in cheap horror movies and thrillers – my favorite listing of his on IMDB is from Hellraiser III as “Boiler Room Patron Getting Stabbed with a Pool Stick (uncredited)”).

Or in the science classroom when the teacher who’d been experimenting on a mogwai returns to see what has hatched from its slimy cocoon. As he enters the room, the film projector still turns, bathing the room in a faint flicker, while he stands in a slowly turning silhouette of the film reel. At a slight Dutch angle, he goes into the shadows in search of the experiment gone wrong which will soon end his life. It’s just delicious.

From screenwriter, Chris Columbus (who went on to write The Goonies and direct Adventures in Babysitting and the Home Alone movies, among many others), there is a fun “Boy’s Own adventure” to it all, replete with Rube Goldberg machines of threat and mayhem. It is interesting though, given his later “family friendly” oeuvre, to read that his original script had been MUCH darker – Gizmo (the cute, lovable heart of the movie) would have transformed into the lead Gremlin (ala Stripe) and would have then been responsible for killing Billy’s dog and beheading his mom. Wow…

Finally, from producer, Steven Spielberg, there is a commitment to balancing all of the scary monster movie harshness with something soft, loveable, cute, and utterly bankable. I expect the original script in Dante’s hands, without Spielberg’s mainstream influence, would have been a fun, weird, crazy, and much less successful film. And sure, there is fun to be had with a hard R movie featuring grotesquely comic little monsters attacking people (Gremlins kicked off a wave of such movies: Ghoulies (1985), Critters (1986), Munchies (1987), and Hobgoblins (1988), all of which spawned further sequels), but the way Gremlins has its cake and eats it too is unique. Somehow its disparate elements (B-monster movie melodrama, Christmas movie schmaltz, kid movie cuteness, and horror movie threat and brutality), which seemingly should cancel each other out, undercutting each other’s power, instead work together, and each element has that much more of an effect. The cute is cuter and the scary is scarier. Of course, this wasn’t appreciated by everyone – there was a blowback of parents appalled at how violent this “cute” movie was that they’d brought their kindergartner to. Apparently, it was following the reaction to both this and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) that led the MPAA to adopt the PG13 rating just a few weeks later. While I love the movie, I understand how parents could be upset – it swings abruptly from nigh saccharine moments of heart-warming goodness, to shockingly dark fare.

Perhaps the most iconic tonal shift is when, after escaping from the bar where she works (overrun with drunk gremlins), Kate (Phoebe Cates as the love interest) takes shelter in the bank with Billy and, this Christmas Eve already going somewhat poorly (murderous green monsters everywhere), she finally explains why she’s always hated Christmas and how she “learned there was no Santa Claus.” In short, it involves finding her father, dressed up as old St. Nick, dead with a broken neck, rotting in the chimney days after not making it home for Christmas. It is so dark, so tragic and horrifically ugly, especially for a film largely targeted at young kids. But it’s also hilarious in its extremity.

Without losing the weight of the moment, a kind of irony surfaces – here we have a late in the story dramatic monologue wherein this central character reveals deep, hidden emotional truths of her character. It feels like some kind of play with “drama” schtick, and the fact that it goes so hard on the shocking darkness somehow makes it simultaneously awful and much funnier. The next second, we cut to Billy’s dad trying to sell a malfunctioning “smokeless ashtray” to a gas station attendant as he tries to make it home for the holiday, unaware of the chaos going down. The emotion was there – it’s not overplayed or laughed off, but there is no beat to dwell in that feeling. We’re off to the next thing. I’ve read that Spielberg and Warner Brothers demanded that the scene be excised but Dante had final cut on the film and stuck to his guns. I’m glad he did. It’s kind of the whole tone of the film in a nutshell.

In line with this tonal play, I think what stands out most to me is the aforementioned mix of moviemaking tropes and tools, to which Dante regularly tips his hat. It’s telling that we see on TVs in the background excerpts from both Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the gremlins’ pupal stage pods directly borrowing their look from that earlier film, and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), from which Gremlins borrows the Christmas movie trope of the mean old bank owner who is crushing the poor average Joes of Small Town America, and at Christmas, no less! Also, both films end with the main character running down the streets of town shouting at everyone (“Hello you old Savings and Loan!” “They’re here! They’re already here”!).

Following It’s a Wonderful Life, everything here happens in Christmas Movie Land – a loving father, who just can’t catch a break, but is out there chasing that American dream, comes upon a sweet little creature in a shop in Chinatown and brings it home as a Christmas gift for his son (I’m pretty sure in the original script, Billy would have been a young teenager, such that it made sense for 13 year old Corey Feldmen to be his best friend – instead of a 20-something working at a bank).

Of course, though Billy is a good, loving “owner” to Gizmo (does anyone really “own” a pet? But I don’t know what other word to use), everything goes wrong, no one follows The Rules (Keep them out of bright light. Don’t get them wet. And whatever you do, never ever feed them after midnight), and the town is overrun with monsters. Also from Christmas land, the cruel old lady running the bank where Billy works is foreclosing on everyone’s homes and businesses and doesn’t care how many children starve. Plus, she wants to murder Billy’s dog.

Then by the end, the final image of the film is the old Chinese man from whom Billy’s dad had basically stolen Gizmo, having retrieved the gentle creature, walking off into a matte painting of the town that is an absolute Christmas card. The interesting thing is that I feel like this isn’t exactly a horror movie, a Christmas movie, or a horror-Christmas movie, so much as a horror movie that’s set in a Christmas movie, it’s locations and tropes and characters all straight out of Christmas town. Then it adds monsters. Scary, bloodthirsty, mischievous monsters.

And yet, somehow I didn’t find it scary when I was little (at least I think I didn’t – I’d have to ask my parents I guess) – and just two years earlier, my father’d had to carry me, screaming, out of E.T. (government scientists are pretty scary). Having the adorable little, squeaky voiced Gizmo at the center of it all somehow made it ok, made it feel safe. Also, some of the violence and threat gets pretty cartoony, but it’s a fairly severe cartoon. But no matter how gross and goopy the gremlins were, how sharp their claws and teeth, how many people we see them gleefully murder, I never realized I was watching a horror movie because a sweet little furball saved the day in the end, driving around the department store in his tiny pink remote control car before pulling the blind, letting in the sun, and destroying the villain.

But as an adult, Gizmo recedes a bit and I get the horror movie – a cute, sweet, funny one, but a horror movie no less, one which joyfully revels in its horror, just as it also revels in its slapstick, Looney Tunes puppet show and its endless genre and film homages and references. But when it wants to be scary, it is.

Case in point – Billy’s mom hears a sound upstairs and creeps up to her son’s room where that morning they had discovered a set of large, gross looking cocoons. Coming up the ladder, fog drifts down and she can see something’s wrong. The camera follows her and then opens up to reveal that they have all hatched and are now empty. She’s already unnerved but then, in the stillness, ringing through the house comes Bing Crosby, singing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” She freezes. It’s creepy. Next, having come downstairs to turn off the record player, in one non-showboating, totally effective tracking shot, we see her edge across the living room and peer down a hallway as, unbeknownst to her, a shadow of a gremlin appears and disappears in the kitchen doorway before she makes her way into that room.

What follows is probably the horror centerpiece of the whole movie. Turning the corner, she sees a gremlin (and for the first time, we do fully as well) sitting at the table munching on her gingerbread men, their yellow icing disgustingly smeared all over its face. It discovers more cookie dough in the food processor and dives in head first to glut itself before she whips around the corner and turns the machine on, sucking the critter into its blades and shooting green blood all over the cabinets.

Then she’s hit in the back and turns to see one of these little monsters throwing things at her. Whatever these kitchen items are may not be that dangerous, but the sense of life and death threat is real – it is a scary looking beast and it is malicious. Using a tray as a shield, she braves the assault, makes her way to her assailant and stabs it repeatedly with a kitchen knife, shouting, “Get out of my kitchen!” The way her own violence is so rattling for her makes it all the scarier. And then (here it comes – this is the big one) another one attacks, she forces it back by squirting bug spray in its eyes until it stumbles into the microwave, she turns it on, and after a few moments of bubbling and screaming, it pops wetly.

It’s gross and awesome and surprisingly rough for a kids movie starring an adorable, wide eyed ball of fluff. Then she goes into the den, is attacked by one more hiding in the Christmas tree who gets the better of her and almost strangles her before Billy comes home and cuts off its head with a sword that had been decorating the wall, sending that head spinning into the fireplace where they watch it burn. Wow. It is all violent, thrilling, gory, gross, and really funny.

But something I noticed watching it a couple times this week is that while there is a lot of violence, we only see its direct effect on the gremlins. They get stabbed, microwaved, decapitated, electrocuted and melted into puddles of skeletal, burbling goo, they bleed and explode; they suffer.

However, while they do kill a number of people, we never see the exact final moment. When they drive the snowplow into the house of Mr. Futterman (the always lovable B-movie mainstay, Dick Miller – easy to love even when playing grumpy, drunk xenophobes, complaining of foreign-made goods, full of “gremlins”), crushing him and his wife, we cut between the Futtermans’ reaction shots and the gleeful critters in the cab of the plow until finally we see the Futtermans scream, cut to the Gremlins one last time and then see a jolt as if they’ve just made contact, running into or over the couple. We don’t actually see what happens to the people.

Or, in another scene, the bank owner, mean old Mrs. Deagle is distracted by Gremlin Carolers outside, singing the most excellent theme to the film, “The Gremlins Rag,” all bundled up with song books in hand – just lovely. She takes a pitcher of water to throw on what she thinks will be irritating children and finds them instead and runs back inside to go upstairs to safety– in the meantime, Stripe has sabotaged her electric chair. We see her screaming in terror as it malfunctions, shooting her up the staircase way too fast, and we see her thrown out the window and subsequently fly through the air. But we don’t see her hit the ground. That happens just barely out of frame. The fact that we see violence to humans but not exactly humans dying does soften things somewhat. Often I wouldn’t want my horror movie ‘softened,’ but in this case, it works.

And then there are the gremlins themselves, another element the film gets just right. Their design is properly creepy – long spindly, almost insect-like limbs, their slimy, reptilian green skin, their long claws and sharp teeth. They are gross and goopy (at one point, Stripe blows his nose in the curtain, like you do). They are vicious and bloodthirsty. And they are just unabashedly delightful in every way. Seriously – I know when I watched this as a kid, I loved Gizmo – he was there for me. I was five (I had a little Gizmo doll and everything). But now, I unconditionally love the Gremlins. While scary and disgusting, they are still cute in their way. I mean, they are just fun loving rascals who love playing around, dressing up, eating junk food, and watching movies – just kids really. Dangerous, out of control, deadly children, but children who you can still love, who are still cuties when you catch them in the right light.

For example, I love the moment when Billy and Kate realize that all of the gremlins are off the street and must have gone someplace dark, so they check out the cinema.  We see them happily filling the seats, gobbling up popcorn and Junior Mints, and generally just having a pretty wholesome, if raucous, good time. Billy pokes his head in and when Kate asks him what they’re doing, he replies, “They’re watching Snow White. And they LOVE IT!” And they really do.

The main villain, Stripe only survives Billy and Kate burning down the cinema because he had gone across the street for candy as the concessions stand was all out of popcorn. “Yum yum?…Yum yum!” I mean, sure, later he tries to eviscerate Billy with a chainsaw, but how can you not love this guy?

As they are just effectively kids, the real weight of responsibility for all that’s happened truly falls on Billy’s dad, who should never have ignored the old Chinese man’s warnings in the first place (The Chinese shopkeeper is admittedly quite an exoticized stereotype, but that was the era, and he does come across pretty positively at least). If you want to read something into these proceedings, the dad can be taken as a symbol of America – optimistic and good intentioned, blithely chasing his dreams and unthinkingly seizing natural resources that aren’t for sale, trying to do right by his family with no thought of larger consequences – irresponsible and spawning monsters. When the old shopkeeper, known only as “Grandfather,” returns at the end to take Gizmo back to safety, the dad sincerely apologizes. Though “Grandfather” politely accepts this apology (and a malfunctioning smokeless ashtray), and it is heartfelt, it really feels hollow. It doesn’t matter how he feels. People are dead. But, you know, he’s a nice guy – what are you gonna do?

That reading aside, this is just such a deliriously fun movie and I’m glad I took this opportunity to revisit it. It’s also a great addition to the Christmas Horror list – may it brighten your season!