I so often say this (and it doesn’t come true), but my intention is for this to be a short post. I just got back from a two week vacation in Greece (fancy, huh?) and I really want to get some quick thoughts down on paper and return to them later to go more in depth (hence, “Pt. 1”). We’ll see how that works out…
I particularly enjoyed in Greece periodically being at some ancient site where it was possible to ignore the modern world and let my imagination spark. To be fair, this was not always the case. So often, significant ruins exist amidst the hubbub of a modern city and it’s hard to visualize the significance of what would have been a grand temple to a god people fervently believed in when you’re looking at two pillars standing bare, next to a busy, noisy street. But there were a few locations where I was able to make the imaginary leap, and in that, there was a special kind of magic. I’ve long been a fan of mythology (for a great retelling of the Greek stories, I highly recommend Stephen Fry’s three volumes of Greek myths and legends, written in a very modern, engaging, exciting, and often funny idiom: Mythos, Heroes, and Troy), and so, frequently it was the mythological significance of a given location that ignited my fancy, but more often it was a link to ancient drama.
The gate at Mycenea, the seat of Agamemnon and hence, the setting of many tragedies.
I came up in the theatre and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides loom large in my understanding of dramatic forms and structure. Walking up the hill to the palace complex at Mycenae, there was a delicate frisson of magic in visualizing Agamemnon returning victorious, Cassandra in tow as a spoil of war, having been stolen away from what had been the richest, most opulent city in the Greek world (Troy) and dragged to this politically and militarily powerful, but otherwise remote, strange land, screaming all the way about how her captor was doomed to meet his death at the hands of his wife and her lover (in revenge for sacrificing their daughter so the Greek ships could set sail), her cries of warning falling on deaf ears, all this more than 3000 years ago. Driving from Corinth to Thebes and then to Delphi, a trip of 200 km, often through craggy mountains, it was fascinating to consider Oedipus making such a journey on foot to learn the disturbing prophecy concerning his parentage, leading him to take every step to prevent it from coming to pass, which of course only hastened its fulfillment (Greek tragedies often prefigured time travel movies, teaching us that you can’t – and really shouldn’t try to – mess with a timeline).
From a 19th century Dutch production of Oedipus Rex, shortly after he stabs his own eyes out.
But this is a horror blog – why am I going on about old Greek plays?
Well, I’ve long had it in mind to dig into the notion of ‘tragedy’ (as an aesthetic concept – not as merely a very sad thing that can happen to someone) and how it relates to ‘horror,’ as I feel there’s a connection and that, in fact, the latter may be the true modern inheritor of the former. For a long time, tragedy was one of the very few genres of dramatic art (in the European context at least). From the Greeks, to the Romans, to Shakespeare – for millennia, we didn’t divide narrative entertainments into westerns or war films or horror, but generally into comedies and tragedies (sometimes histories, morality plays, or sex farces too, but the point is, tragedy was one of the biggies).
Now, in our modern times, perhaps thanks to the advent of nuanced naturalistic performance and writing, more focused on ‘normal people’ rather than larger than life ‘heroes,’ tragedy as a genre has fallen out of vogue. The old ones are still performed, but I think they now more often fall under the umbrella of ‘drama.’ However, I do find it striking that in the horror genre, a critically underappreciated field of artistic endeavor, certain key elements of tragedy live on today.
So I’d like to examine this. I think this first text will be on the short side, as I’ve been away on vacation and my mind is fuzzy, but I hope to return to this idea over the next months a couple more times to flesh it out more fully.
Pity and Fear
I love horror (or I wouldn’t pay for hosting this blog) and I also love tragedy – two genres calibrated to make the viewer “feel bad.” But while tragedy is overwhelmingly associated with ‘high culture,’ horror tends to be viewed as ‘low.’ Still I think they go on a similar journey: In classical tragedy, the protagonist is often given cause for at least concern, if not full on dread – they operate for much of the run time of the play under this pervasive sense of doom – they push on, true to their character, until they recognize what is often a terrible, unbearable truth (what Aristotle termed “anagnorisis”) – which ultimately drives them to a final, heroic, self-destroying (but possibly also defining act) act. Aristotle argued that all of this should come together to inspire pity and fear, calling them the “proper pleasures of tragedy.” By subjecting themselves to this terrible, though fictional experience, the audience can exercise their deepest, most unsettling emotions and in the end, exorcise them as well, undergoing a cleansing “catharsis.” While not every detail maps to every modern horror film (honestly, they didn’t really map to every tragedy in Aristotle’s time either), I think this concept should feel familiar for any horror buff.
Horror fans understand that pity and fear can be a source of great pleasure. We choose to watch, and are able to enjoy, fictional matter intended to be terrible, intended to inspire at least terror, but often much worse. We know the peculiar pleasures of sitting through cringe inducing, gasp eliciting horrors, knowing the laughter that can often follow a good scare or moment of revulsion, knowing how when horror really works, it can leave you feeling fresh, alive, perhaps “cleansed.” Wes Craven is quoted as saying that horror is “like a boot camp for the psyche” and that “horror films don’t create fear – they release it,” and I think for horror lovers, that’s true (mileage may vary – there are people in my life, people I love, who just can’t do horror – for them the tension is never released, catharsis doesn’t occur, and rather than being cleansed, they just continue to feel bad for a long time).
But for those who partake, when it works, it really sings. And I feel I’ve experienced very similar feelings at the culmination of good tragedy and good horror. I love what I think of as the ‘tragic pinch’ – the moment when a tragedy all comes together and just hurts so good – when all that is good and all that is terrible is somehow thrust together and something in the soul cries out in response to unbearable beauty – the drama revealing some terrible truth. This brings to mind my favorite definition of tragedy, coined by the 19th century German philosopher, Hegel, who described it as “the conflict between two mutually exclusive goods.” For example, both Antigone and Creon act out of unyielding moral purpose and are thus thrust into irreconcilable conflict. Whereas the action of the play may lead to their downfall, for the audience, a kind of reconciliation of moral impulses can occur. Personally, I don’t know about what reads as a prescriptive call for “a new moral synthesis via the dialectic of the drama,” but his descriptive analysis of effective tragedy living in the conflict of two “good” things really rings true for me.
And finally, to once again bring this back to our genre of choice, this particular juxtaposition of conflicting goods that both lead to bad, I contend, can be found in so much horror work, delivering the horrific shudder of something quite akin to my “tragic pinch.” When at the culmination of The VVitch, Thomasina signs the devil’s book and rises, laughing, into the night, she is finally free from unbearable deprivation, hardship, and puritanical oppression, but to get there, her whole family had to die and she had to sign away her soul. At the end of The Cabin in the Woods, forced to choose between the good of her own life and that of her friends and the good of the whole world, Dana chooses to value her friends most, and the world is lost. For a very common example, so much horror turns on the notion of “yes, you’ve made it through the night, but at such cost”; watching Sally ride away in the back of that pickup at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, covered in blood and laughing maniacally, one doesn’t have much hope for her future – she’s still breathing, but what remains? Like the poster says, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”
Or furthermore, how many movies feature a character become truly monstrous in order to survive? In 28 Days Later, Jim seems to embrace his own rage (sans viral infection), dropping from the rafters to brutally gouge out the eyes of a rapist soldier, to rescue Selena –and in doing so, something of his humanity seems to be sacrificed. Sarah’s turn to the monstrous, rising out of a pool of blood with death in her eyes and leaving Juno to die in The Descent follows a similar track. In all of these cases, and so many, many more, the height of not just simple scariness, but full on ‘horror’ consists in this moment of excruciating, exhilarating moral tension. I root for Thomasina and glory in her emancipation; I love Dana’s vengeful decision; I want Sally to escape; and I can roar along with Jim’s and Sarah’s animal rage – and at the same time, I feel the weight of loss and sacrifice and madness that accompany all of these ‘goods.’ Even as I cheer the choices, there is a clench in my gut as well – the dark consequence/cost still lands. And it is often the movies that give me this “horror moral tension” that I love the most.
Don’t mess with a god
Back to the Greece trip, I was particularly happy to make it to Thebes. Little remains at the archeological site of the palace – just a hole in the ground in the middle of a small, contemporary Greek city, but at their rather well organized historical museum, I was struck to be at another site where so many of the old tragedies took place – Oedipus Rex and Antigone are two prominent example, but most notable for me is one of my favorites, The Bacchae by Euripides. And while we were there, I was struck with the realization of how well that play parallels one of my favorite horror films, The Wicker Man. So I think it could be interesting to go through them to see how they both manage to land that moment of the “tragedy pinch,” or the “horror moral tension.”
I’ll start with what may be the more unfamiliar work for the horror crowd. The Bacchae is all about the cult of Dionysus (a new god at that time, not yet established in the pantheon) coming to the city of Thebes. In a way, Dionysus was from Thebes. His mother, Semele, was a Theban princess and a lover of Zeus, compelled by a jealous Hera to beg him to reveal himself to her in his true form. Reluctant, he acquiesced, and thus struck by a lightning bolt, she exploded. Zeus found the fetus of his new child amidst the charred wreckage of his lover and sewed it up in his thigh to grow to term – this grew to be Dionysus, the god of wine and theatre, of wild frenzy and orgiastic abandon. His new cult developed in the east and he eventually brought it to his home town where his cousin, Pentheus was now in charge.
Vase showing the birth of Dionysus out of Zeus’s thigh.
When the play begins, the cult of Dionysus has been gathering in the nearby mountains for some time, drawing the women of the city out into the wilderness to get wasted and act all mysterious and wild – Theban society is totally disrupted by this and there is a conservative moral panic – what should be done about this hedonistic, new, drunken orgy cult? Won’t somebody think of the children! Pentheus isn’t having any of it and has Dionysus apprehended, humiliated (for example, cutting off his long hippy hair), interrogated and imprisoned. Refusing to accept the claimed divinity of this new presence, Pentheus is tricked by Dionysus into dressing up as a woman and going off to infiltrate the Bacchae (the female followers of Dionysus) in the mountains to see what’s actually going on. While he’s there, the worship grows more and more fevered until, caught up in an inebriated trance, the women go all bloodthirsty, tearing apart goats and cows with their bare hands. Finally, they turn on Pentheus, and it is his own mother, Dionysus’s aunt, Agave, who rips off his head and carries it triumphantly back into the city of Thebes.
Pentheus about to be pulled apart.
And here comes the horror. When she arrives, she’s still kind of worked up, high on the rush of the kill, of the lust, of the wine. She proudly approaches the chorus, declaring how she’s brought back the head of a lion that she, an old woman, managed to kill, as proof of the power bestowed upon her by her new deity, and she demands that her son be brought to her so that she might show him this glorious evidence. There is a solid scene of the chorus trying to get her to really see what’s in her hands before the horrific realization finally dawns on her. And when it does, it is terrible.
Image of Agave carved on an ancient jewel.
Something I love about this play is how for the vast majority of it, Pentheus just comes off as a dick. He is a prude, a moral scold who doesn’t like long haired hippies and is just trying to be a massive buzzkill for everyone else’s fun. Both the chorus and some of the city elders try to get him to see the light, warning him that you shouldn’t mess with a god, and going on to praise the wonders this new god has bestowed on them – inebriation, drunkenness, the ability to find respite from the endless troubles of life in the sweet forgetfulness of the fruit of the vine. And yet, in the end, those elders and that chorus are uniformly horrified at what comes to pass. They want to look away. While Pentheus was an unreasonable jerk, and Dionysus was a real cool guy, and everyone was having a really good time, the power of the god is also terrible and inhumane and unforgiving. The play ends with that horrific tension I love of getting what we want to see, but it’s awful. We had an amazing time last night at the party, but in the cold light of day, with a terrible hangover, we don’t like ourselves anymore. Maybe we have a problem.
The Wicker Man
Which brings us to The Wicker Man. Like Pentheus, Sergeant Howie is an unbearable, puritanical moral scold who cannot accept the pagan ways of the community he finds in Summerisle. We can go along with him in trying to find a missing child who may have been murdered, but he is constantly a jerk to the seemingly fun folk he encounters in this small, Scottish island town. Everywhere he turns, he brings the supposed authority of the Church and the State to bear, shouting at teachers, children, librarians, and people hanging out in a de-consecrated cemetery or singing in a raucous pub about how wicked they are. For the audience, the people of Summerisle come off as rather lovely – lusty, earthy types whose faith isn’t really any weirder than Howie’s Christianity. They seem a fun lot – hearty and having a really good time, with a nice, sex-positive attitude and catchy, bawdy folk songs. Like Pentheus, Howie meets their wild reveries with a moralistic, judgmental attitude. They are both difficult protagonists to like.
But at the end, when the penny finally drops and, after going in disguise to infiltrate their revels (remember, Pentheus largely did the same), Howie is captured, put in a giant, wicker man (we have a title!), and burned alive as a sacrifice to recover the island’s failed apple crop, it is suddenly horrific. As he screams from within the burning effigy, calling out to his Christian god, the people sway in colorful costumes on the cliff side, belting out a joyful hymn, celebrating their sacrifice. It is still beautiful. They are still lovely. But the very thing that makes them so lovely, also makes them premeditated murderers, who have lured this man to their little island with the express intention to kill him in such a terrible fashion.
I’ve never felt The Wicker Man is at all a scary movie, but it stands as one of my all time absolute favorite horrors. The horrific tension of this final moment is just so rich – such overwhelming warmth and loving ‘good’ so inseparably linked to such implacable, cold-blooded ‘bad’. It sings. It screams. It pinches. It is what I want from horror. And tragedy. And, interestingly, its final moments resonate quite loudly with those of The Bacchae.
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So this is a start. Thanks for bearing with me as I try to order my thoughts about this meeting of two artistic loves of mine. Focusing on my recent Greek vacation or 5th century BC Athenian dramatic literature are both perhaps odd choices for a horror blog during “spooky season,” but these ideas have been scratching at me for a while and I’m itching to birth them into the world. Like a fetus stuck in my thigh. Next post, I imagine I’ll hit something more classically “Halloweeny,” but in the future, I hope to dig into this further…
A while back, I wrote about my long journey to becoming a horror fan. I certainly wasn’t one from the beginning – I just got scared too easily. I have a distinct memory of being seriously disturbed out on the playground of Ocean City Elementary while some kid detailed (to other kids, not even directly to me) the kill scenes in one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies (from what little I remember, I think it was probably part 5, The Dream Child). And yet, around this time (I would have been 10 or 11), I did discover something that was more my speed: cult classics, B-movies, flicks that were “so bad, they’re good,” films that didn’t take themselves seriously enough to frighten me, but were still chock full of outrageous, fun, gratuitous, over-the-top, schlocky, campy material: Attack (and later, Return) of the Killer Tomatoes, Elvira – Mistress of the Dark, Big Trouble in Little China, Frankenhooker, Ghoulies, My Mom’s a Werewolf, so many titles I can’t even remember, and of course, today’s two cinematic gems, Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) and The Toxic Avenger (1984).
At the time, I remember how that not-seriousness really let me enjoy them. I wasn’t yet up for what I understood horror to be, but I could really get a kick out of gory dismemberment as long as it didn’t feel too real (even if realistically shown, it was ok if it didn’t feel too serious, hence scary). Returning to at least these two films as an ‘adult’ is interesting. They both still have elements that I can enjoy on their own merits, but neither is something that I’m often in the mood for now, even if I could watch them on repeat 35 years ago. But the nostalgia is strong in them. They both take me back to a time and a place, and a memory of dipping my toes into material that I might not have been fully ready for, but that was part of the appeal.
But more than the stroll down memory lane, I also find them both fascinating to consider, especially as I have fully become a horror fan, and what’s more, someone who is interested in thinking and writing about horror, about categories (are they Camp? Trash? Satire? Exploitation? Do these terms even matter – are they useful?), about aesthetics, and about the pleasures I (and presumably others) derive from content that others would find distasteful, unpleasant, or even abhorrent. I no longer describe a movie as ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ – that feels unnecessarily belittling now, but in addition to the truly great masterpieces of horror which are so rightly praised (and, to be fair, tend to be my favorites) as ‘good’, I still have a really warm place in my heart for fun, cheap, trashy, unpretentious excess (unburdened by ‘quality’) – and I think it can be enjoyed for what it is and not only as a work of nostalgia or sociological-theoretical interest.
So, let’s get into these. There will probably be spoilers, as well as descriptions of some pretty absurd stuff, so you’ve been warned. Also, on the other side of the ‘reviews,’ I have a bunch of thoughts on cult movies/camp/sleaze, so I cordially invite you to stick around for that (this is a long post – make sure you’re hydrated).
Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)
Primarily special effects and Claymation artists who have worked on a wide range of projects from Robocop to Critters, from Elf to Team America: World Police, the Chiodo brothers (Stephen, Charles, and Edward) have written and directed only one feature film, giving them free reign to create outlandish, ridiculous, gloriously silly things, and it was, of course, Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Following the model of a 50s sci-fi monster movie (The Blob (1958) is all over this thing), what it lacks in narrative drive or acting that might traditionally be deemed “adequate,” it makes up for in genuinely inspired set dressing and matte panting, very effective, if low budget, effects work, and endless creative, absurd, clown-horror gags. Also, it has one of the all-time great eponymous closing credits songs, written for the film by The Dickies (in my book, it’s right up there with The Ramones’s Pet Sematary).
In short, a young couple up at Lover’s Lane sees what looks like a meteor strike in the nearby woods and they go to investigate, finding a circus big-top set up in the middle of nowhere – which is also a spaceship – filled with bloodthirsty clowns who have seemingly come to earth to eat everybody, cocooning most of their victims in something like pink cotton candy so they can insert laughably long twisty straws into the rose colored concoction and suck out their blood. The young couple tries to get the police involved, but encounters difficulty from both the older officer (because he’s just a mean, abusive, awful cop) and the young deputy (because he’s the girl’s ex). But eventually the deputy witnesses a clown eating some citizens, he comes on board, and having learned that the clowns can be killed by puncturing their big, red, confetti filled noses, they all team up with some goofballs in an ice cream truck to send the alien jesters packing.
But really, this is not about the story, or the characters. Most of the performances are perfunctory at best (and some don’t quite make it that far), and the narrative goes about where you would expect it to. And that is all fine. As prefaced, this is a pretty ‘campy’ movie (a term I mean to be at least somewhat distinguished from ‘camp’ as one might discuss in terms of Oscar Wilde, John Waters, Susan Sontag, or Ed Wood, Jr.). It knows how silly it is and it just doesn’t sweat elements of ‘quality’ that are not its focus (i.e., clown based menace and mayhem).
So what does it have, you may ask? How about a sequence where one of the titular clowns quickly crafts a balloon animal dog to track the young couple, it’s inflated head sniffing about, hot on their trail? A big creepy clown disappearing in plain sight by copying the stiff, regular movements of an animatronic gorilla outside a drug store? A puppet theatre for an audience of one, a kind of Punch and Judy show that culminates in the single viewer being fatally wrapped in candy floss? The terrifying sight of too many clowns getting out of one tiny car? An amusement park security guard who is pied-in-the-face to death, one of the clowns leaving a giant cherry on the pile of cream that is dissolving his flesh, leaving only his bones and a badge? A motorcycle gang making fun of the littlest clown for riding a funny tiny bicycle with training wheels, leading one of them to destroy his bike, so he jumps out of frame and jumps back in with boxing gloves. The jerk who broke his bike mockingly says, “What are ya gonna do? Knock my block off?” and so he does, the thug’s bloody head flying off of his shoulders.
And it’s not like the clowns only target ‘bad people.’ We get a scene outside a clown-themed burger place (that is not McDonald’s) with a big, freaky clown luring a little girl outside, a giant mallet gleefully held behind his back – her mom yanks her back inside before the clown gets to mutilate her, but even if that isn’t shown, the suggestion that it might be is already planted in the imagination.
Similarly, this is a PG-13 movie and therefore can’t offer the kind of gratuitous nudity it might otherwise, but it does tease it. There’s a shower scene where we see the girl of the young couple undress, implying that evil clown stuff is coming her way (some particularly animated popcorn on her discarded clothes threatens to do something though we don’t yet know what). The camera stays at her feet as she undresses, and on her face in the shower. Then it cuts away to another scene, and when we finally see her attacked in the bathroom, she has finished the shower and is fully dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater, even wearing her sneakers already. I can’t help but think that this is all intentionally playing with audience expectations, teasing what isn’t shown.
But when the attack comes, it is weird, gross, playful, funny, and kinda great. The popcorn has somehow sprouted into fanged clown heads on wormy, phallic bodies that shoot out of the hamper, the medicine cabinet, and the toilet, chomping at her as she fights them off with the shower head and curtain (I guess they’re not that tough). She then runs out of the bathroom to hear her boyfriend’s voice at the door, but when she opens it, it’s a big, scary clown! The door slams and she runs to her bedroom window, seeking escape, only to see a clown fire patrol below, eager to catch her. Finally she turns and sees that another has found his way inside, who shoots her with a clown gun that captures her in a giant yellow, polka dotted balloon, now needing to be rescued by our heroes.
But the pièce de résistance of the whole film has got to be the shadow puppet scene. It is certainly the bit that I’d best remembered through the years, and on re-watch, it absolutely holds up. A bus passes a stop to reveal a big, old clown that wasn’t there a moment before. He gets the attention of those waiting at the stop and starts to make shadow puppets of increasing complexity and delight: an adorable bunny, a trumpeting elephant, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, and a sexy belly dancer. Everyone watches and laughs and claps, loving the show. It’s sweet how much they like it, and also funny how the clown’s big sausage fingers couldn’t possibly be forming these amazing images. Finally, as the clown directs a sinister chortle at the camera, the shadows take the shape of a red eyed tyrannosaurus which, with a mighty roar, bends down and gobbles up all of the once enchanted, now terrified and screaming viewers in its umbral maw, devouring them whole. It really is a joy. Check it out here.
So, yeah – this is not a film about the story, but is rather an excuse to have a series of almost completely unrelated monstrous clown gags. And they are fantastic unrelated monstrous clown gags, easily making up for any of the film’s (many) shortcomings. But I want to return to one of those. Earlier, I commented on how this movie doesn’t expect much of its actors, but I must say there is one exception: John Vernon, who plays the mean, awful police chief, is just great in this part. I know him best from Animal House, where he plays the mean, awful dean, and as I understand, he really made his career playing wholly unlikeable, comically nasty characters. That’s just what he does here, and every time the camera is on him, he really brings the scene to life, along the way, adding a surprising note of something like social commentary to this deeply silly movie.
He is a bad cop, and what’s more, he is a symbol of everything that’s wrong with policing. He directs his energies at those he preemptively suspects of wrongdoing (in his case, “young people”), while completely ignoring the calls of help of people being murdered by clowns, convinced that everyone is just trying to make a fool of him, both under and over policing his community at the same time. He is abusive to those he arrests, joking about their lack of rights now that they’re in ‘his’ territory. He only attacks, threatens, and belittles, refusing to see where the real threat lies. He makes fun of his deputy for how his ‘police academy training’ causes him to care about idiotic things like “civil liberties.” But when he gets his comeuppance, it’s a treat.
Earlier in the film, convinced that everyone was just pulling his leg with this clown nonsense, he’d declared that they weren’t ‘going to make a dummy’ out of him. So, of course, that’s eventually what happens. The deputy returns to the station, finding clown prints everywhere (big and red, and climbing the walls), and eventually his crooked boss propped up on the knee of a clown that has gorily shoved its hand into his torso to pull his internal strings as one would a ventriloquist’s dummy. His cheeks are rouged (with blood), and trickles of the red stuff at the side of his mouth suggest the articulated mouthpiece of such a doll, as the clown uses him to tell the deputy not to worry because “all we wanna do is kill you.” It’s the only time a clown gets anything like words, the rest of the time just uttering funny little squeaking sounds, and it is cool, creepy, and intimidating. Plus, Vernon does it so well.
My grandparents had cable and I remember one summer when this was just on HBO constantly. As the film had come out in ’88, I can only assume this would be the summer of ’89, making me ten at the time. And it was just perfect: funny, silly, gross, and creative, with some pretty outrageous stuff in it, but still tame enough to be shown on TV at noon on a Tuesday. It was filled with moments of horror (the clowns do kill a lot of people, the image of the clown sucking blood out of the candy cocoon was disturbing, and the aforementioned dummy scene was pretty creepy), but the campiness made it all fun for me. I remember some friend having the Friday the 13thgame for Nintendo and that I didn’t like playing it cause it felt scary (even though it was an 8-bit system and you could barely see anything – Jason was effectively a purple and white blob chasing you around the screen), but this movie was a blast and I couldn’t count the number of times I watched it. It’s a pleasure to have returned to.
The Toxic Avenger (1984)
If today’s first film was TV-friendly, this next one was decidedly not (though it somehow got a cartoon version for kids, so go figure). From Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz of Troma Entertainment, The Toxic Avenger is crude, cheap, and ugly, with nudity that precludes it from being shown in the middle of the day as well as gory, sometimes shocking violence that is so over-the-top (though also frequently quite silly) that some viewers will just not be able stomach it. Positioned somewhere between a superhero satire and a monster movie, between mean-spirited schlock and loving camp, this is a wholly independent movie that you had to go to the video store for.
Now, though I didn’t take quite as much pleasure in returning to it as I did with the first feature today, there was still a charge of nostalgia, and beyond that, it has really prompted a lot of thoughts about camp and exploitation, about the concepts of taste and aesthetics, about how we watch a film and about how a filmmaker can push and/or play with our boundaries. Troma successfully builds and maintains an absolutely loyal fan base for their weird, little pictures that are as far from mainstream Hollywood as can be imagined – and that wouldn’t happen if these movies weren’t quite special in their intentionally ugly, utterly idiosyncratic way – if they didn’t invite the viewer to a uniquely loveable viewing experience (even while viewing horrible things).
As with many a superhero origin story, we start with a put-upon weakling, in this case, Melvin, the scrawny, gawky mop boy at Tromaville Health Club, where he’s ill-treated by everyone, but especially a quartet of bullies who, when they’re not chain smoking in the gym while pumping iron, are chugging whisky as they speed around town, actively trying to run down pedestrians for points. As with many a slasher film, things really get kicked off thanks to a prank gone wrong. One of the bullies convinces Melvin that she wants to leave her boyfriend for him, so he should meet her by the pool in a pink leotard and tutu. This he does, only to have the lights turned on, realize he was making out with a lice infested sheep, and be chased by all the laughing customers of the club until, in terror and shame, Melvin leaps out of a second story window, landing in an open vat of bubbling green toxic waste on the back of a flatbed truck, stopped by its drivers so they can do an insane amount of cocaine.
Melvin goes through a pretty gross transformation sequence, becoming a giant, greenish brown monster, covered with boils, forever stuck in his now filthy leotard and carrying weaponized mops. He is also instilled with an overwhelming urge to destroy evil wherever he finds it. And it so happens that his small New Jersey town of Tromaville is full of depraved scumbags. From the 80s stereotypes of punk-street gangs to the nefarious Mayor that they all directly report to, who is furthermore making deals to line his pockets by poisoning the town with toxic waste, this is not a nice place to live. And yet, it’s also implied that the town is filled with ‘good people’ who would be able to live their lives in peace if only some kindly monster would brutally tear apart all of the ‘bad guys.’
Along the way, Toxie (as he will later come to be affectionately called in the sequels), rescues and falls in love with a nice blind girl Sara, who moves in with him in his lean-to shack at the toxic dump site, adding that feminine touch that makes a toxic dump shack feel like a home. By the end, the corrupt mayor calls in the National Guard to take out this vigilante monster, but the good people of Tromaville show up to protect their toxic defender.
I feel that the seed of the story is satirization of the classic superhero narrative, a genre of fun kids’ entertainment which often carries quite reactionary messaging about how the world is full of dangerous elements and that the only way for them to be dealt with is by masked vigilantes who carry out a form of extra-judicial justice.
I think that vibe is right on the surface in something like Batman, but even in the more kid-friendly Spider-man comics, there is an impression that the city streets are full of gangs and muggers that normal people are being victimized by. It’s one thing to fight colorful supervillains, but the presentation of our modern cities as such threatening hellscapes in order to justify a ‘hero’ having someone to fight, someone who deserves to have violence used against them, definitely carries a message.
This is a theme that some comic books and later some comic book movies would eventually pick up and interrogate, but that generally followed Alan Moore’s seminal Watchmen books which were published 2 years after this was released.
Thus, The Toxic Avenger offers criminals that are so reprehensible, such unforgivably monstrous people (vicious, racist, drug addled rapists, murderers, and gleeful sadists), that the hero of the piece can be even more of a monster – absolutely physically brutal in how he dispatches them. For example, among other things, the “good guy” of the movie crushes a drug dealer’s head in a weight machine, stabs out another guy’s eyes with his fingers, blends an assailant’s brains with a milkshake mixer (along with milk, whipped cream, and a cherry of course), deep fries a robber’s hands until he dies of shock, bashes heads together until brains ooze out, rips another guys arm off and beats him with it ala Beowulf and Grendel, burns one bully girl’s butt off on hot sauna stones, takes scissors to the other bully girl (weirdly, it happens off screen, but as we don’t see it, we assume the worst – in one longer cut, he just cuts her hair), disembowels the mayor with his bare hands (in front of a crowd which cheers with joy as the mayor tries and fails to push his guts back in before dying), and murders a seemingly nice old lady (who we learn after the fact was a slave trader) by locking her in a hot dryer and then crushing her in a steam press, all of this earning him the love and loyalty of the good people of the town.
I think that in its exaggeration, the movie shows how this superhero “kids’ stuff” was not that dissimilar to conservative fantasies like the Death Wish or Dirty Harry movies. But in its ludicrous excess, I feel Troma’s movie communicates a different message, rather showing the absurdity, the silliness of both the fear mongering and the violent response of “the good.”
Now, while I wasn’t into horror yet when I first watched this, I was absolutely a Marvel Comics kid and I don’t think the satire of reactionary messaging made it through to me. I just got the joke of ‘it’s a comic book super hero origin story and there are bad guys and isn’t it funny that it’s all so extreme?’ And obviously, this is not a “message movie.” It’s a movie having grotesque fun with taking awful things beyond where you thought they could go. But still, the reactionary-as-absurd reading feels very present.
But like I said, this really is not a movie about a message. It’s also not a movie about making do with a limited budget and making ‘artful’ decisions to create something ‘beautiful,’ perhaps by showing less and implying more, ala a low budget, gorgeously shot Val Lewton joint. Nope, Troma rather follows an exploitation film ethos of showing you what you couldn’t see in a ‘Hollywood’ picture because they don’t have to follow any dictates of commercial ‘good taste.’
It wears its low budget proudly and rather than ‘overcoming financial limitations’ with clever cinematography or nuanced performances, it instead embraces a home grown, rough hewn look and feel, featuring outlandish acting that exists somewhere between Pink Flamingos,The Three Stooges, and a skit on Saturday Night Live as played by middle schoolers. This description may come across as negative, but I don’t mean it to be so. I think the anti-style of the performances is key to the film’s success, underlining the campy not-to-be-taken-too-seriously-ness of the whole proceedings.
Some of this comes from the performers themselves, dialing everything up to eleven and mugging for the camera, and some is a filmmaking choice, such as Toxie, after his transformation, always sounding as if he’s been poorly dubbed by the most polite, square jawed, good guy imaginable, when he isn’t grunting and growling. He also periodically takes a break from gutting baddies to help little old ladies cross the street or rescue a baby caught in a tree.
But it’s not always so simple as the violence and cruelty being artificial, just a silly act, and therefore more of something to laugh at than be shocked by. Sometimes, the envelope is pushed far enough that even if an effect is clearly unrealistic, the fact of what is being played can still elicit a strong response. While I remember really liking this movie when I was maybe 12 (give or take – I’m not sure), and in many ways it is the perfect movie for a 12 year old, there was one scene that always got to me and that really delivered the horror.
Early on, we see the four bullies from the health club out for a night drive, swilling booze and playing their favorite game. One of the girls reminds the driver of the rules – how many points he gets for running down different kinds of minorities (all of whom are described with racist epithets). Then, to all of their joy, they come across a kid on a bike and slam into him, the kid flying over the car and lying bloody in the street. You don’t get any points if he lives, so the driver backs up, steering the tires directly over the kids head, crushing it with a wet pop. The two girls run out of the car and gleefully take Polaroids of the dead kid for their collection (we later see one of them getting off to these photos in the sauna). The fact that the effect is clearly fake (a melon in a wig, filled with corn syrup and food coloring) doesn’t detract at all from the overwhelming wrongness of the scene. I remember around when I first saw this, some yahoos in a pickup running me off the road when I was on my bike and this scene always connected with that genuinely scary memory for me. And the idea of such terrible people having so much fun targeting someone like me just for kicks was real horror – the kind that stays with you – the kind that teaches you something unbearably sad and scary about the heartlessness and cruelty of the world.
And at the same time, as the whole film constantly goofs around with extremity, having a punk rock, offensive blast with poor taste, I feel even this scene is kinda played for laughs. It’s all too much – villains so beyond believable humanity that it is a joke. But it also shook me to my core. This movie is silly, and it’s horrible, and it feels fake, and it feels real, and it’s fun, and it’s deeply, disturbingly wrong, and sometimes it’s even hilariously sweet (especially in the absurd romantic scenes played out between Sara and Toxie – walking among toxic waste at sunset, hula hooping, decorating their shack, making tender love – all to delightfully cheesy music). A line is walked between sincere feeling and a kind of camp detachment. In many ways (aesthetically, in terms of special effects and acting, even “morally”), it is all intentionally ‘bad.’ But that is where a camp appreciation comes in. Even if it is bad, that doesn’t mean it can’t be loved (and not in a superior, so-bad-it’s-good) sense, but as its own, weird self.
Somehow, in probably just trying to make a fun, crazy, cheap movie and turn a profit, Kaufman and Herz created something special. It is both ‘the thing’ and ‘not the thing,’ both sincere and ironic, mean and sweet, naïve and jaded. In terms of horror, it mostly follows the tropes of another genre (superheroes), but it features one of my most memorable instances of kindertrauma, and therefore one of my strongest ever experiences of ‘art-horror’ (as opposed to ‘real life-horror,’ like learning about Nazi death camps or something). And yet, it was also just a really funny, stupid good time that I watched again and again, along with its sequels, when I was exactly the right age to enjoy it. It’s an irony that when one is old enough to handle its violence, one is probably too old to fully appreciate its humor.
Re-watching it for this post, I felt perhaps that time had passed – that it was harder to laugh at it as much as I had more than thirty years ago, but I still found it fascinating, and maybe more than anything else, I respected the chutzpah that went into making it. It can be hard to commit yourself so wholly to making something that most people won’t like. That takes courage and will and not just anyone can do it. These days, I feel a bit inundated by the trolls of the world just out to get a rise out of people and therefore don’t have too much hunger for such button pushing, but it’s weird how a movie like this can feel almost innocent in its juvenile, perverse love of serving up shock and disgust and slapstick and inane jokes and all manner of gratuitousness. The grotesquerie is real. But so is the love.
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The last few months, I’ve been hung up on a question of aesthetics. When writing about Fulci’s Murder Rock, I noted how its sleazy vibe excused any failings and offered its own peculiar pleasures. I went on a run of 50s ‘teensploitation’ movies, enjoying them both as cultural artifacts of their time, and specifically digging those elements which, from a certain perspective, might not be deemed ‘good,’ but are there to be reveled in. I found real enjoyment in a couple of Lesbian Vampire movies that really fit into an erotic-Euro 70s ‘sexploitation’ mode. And in this post, it has been interesting to take this trip down memory lane to two movies of my adolescence that both edge into realms of campy exploitation and which were both key steps on my path to eventually falling in love with the horror genre. In all cases, I have been wondering: what exactly is the appeal of what might be deemed “sleaze” or “trash” or “exploitation”? There is a distinct aesthetic quality that I catch a whiff of but I can’t put my finger on.
Also in the last couple of months, I’ve read Calum Waddell’s book analyzing American exploitation films from 1955-1977, “The Style of Sleaze” and a book of essays edited by Jeffrey Sconce, “Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins on Taste, Style, and Politics.” I’ve read Susan Sontag’s “On Camp” and a thesis written by James W. Macdonald, “The Art of Trash: Evaluating Troma Entertainment as Paracinema.” And through all of these, I still haven’t pinned down what that artistic quality is that I find reflected in these works, which feels so aesthetically satisfying. Now, it’s not exactly “camp,” but camp is part of how I enjoy them, and it’s worth touching on.
However, I don’t even want to attempt a definition of “camp.” For all that her essay was iconic, I don’t think Sontag was all that successful, herself, some qualities just defying definition (quick – define art!). But some elements I find helpful are Sontag’s description of life as an aesthetic posture, a section from Charles Ludlam’s manifesto for his “Ridiculous Theatre” company about how “Bathos is that which is intended to be sorrowful but because of the extremity of its expression becomes comic. Pathos is that which is meant to be comic but because of the extremity of its expression becomes sorrowful. Some things which seem to be opposites are actually different degrees of the same thing,” and the moment on the 1997 episode of the Simpsons, Homer’s Phobia, when the John Waters voiced character describes ‘camp’ as “the tragically ludicrous, the ludicrously tragic,” and Homer responds, “Oh yeah, like when a clown dies.” In addition, I think it’s key that a camp appreciation is ironic, but isn’t mean or judgmental. It celebrates failure with a genuine joy in the failed thing as opposed to mocking it with a disaffected smirk. Camp distinct from snark.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space doesn’t care about its ‘failings.’ It just wants to make crazy clown horror gags and can shrug off the rest. The Toxic Avenger takes it a couple of steps farther and actually celebrates what one might term its own ‘crappiness.’ Thus, I think much of how I might enjoy some of the described material is through a camp lens – but that describes my way of watching and appreciating, and not the qualities which I find worthy of appreciation in the given work. So, there must be another element to identify: in low budget material that might be deemed ‘sleazy,’ there is often a direct, honest attempt to deliver something to the audience. You can see the strings, and it might all be pretty slapdash, but they promised to ‘turn you on’ or ‘gross you out’ or ‘shock your sensibilities’ and without any shame, they are damn well gonna try (and may or may not succeed, and as discussed, failure can be lovely).
I came up in the theatre and have a deep love of overt theatricality – theatre that leaves room for the viewer’s imagination to do its work: shows made out of cardboard and duct tape and bodies and passion in a poor medium that depends on the audience to show up, forever doomed to make art in a world of commerce and die if no tickets are sold. How could I not love to see that spark of struggling-to-create so visible in the final product? In Sconce’s book, he includes an essay of his own, “Movies: a Century of Failure,” wherein he writes, “Much of the romance of exploitation cinema stems from this valorization of film production itself as an elemental struggle against the conspiratorial forces of the universe. For many trash cinephiles, this is the essence of the art form, a medium of exploitation that has always been less about realizing some idealized, artistic vision than the act of creation itself, transforming the cinema as a whole into an existential metaphor of affirmation in the face of chaotic absurdity.” He describes so well something I’ve always loved about making theatre – that sense that you are in a noble battle against reality to pull something into being – for a moment and then it’s gone. It is a romantic, Quixotic notion. Maybe the element I’m finding in this sleaze-trash-cult-exploitation work is just ‘theatricality’?
I feel this element can be found in both of today’s films. What they may lack in ‘traditionally understood quality,’ they make up in an unmistakable joy in the act of their own creation, of committing to the ridiculous idea, of abjuring half measures and always using one’s whole ass. Returning to the notion of camp, I found it striking that Troma Entertainment was referenced in the two abovementioned books and in neither case positively. I feel there was a judgement that it doesn’t satisfy as a kind of camp pleasure because it is done too intentionally, and thus fails (and though neither volume mentioned Killer Klowns, I have the sense it would have been viewed similarly harshly). For me (and I admit I am no expert), I feel that misses a key point. If, as Sontag wrote, camp views life as an aesthetic posture, then a ‘put on’ is no less real.
From a theatrical perspective, from a camp perspective, in terms of many (though certainly not all) tenets of gender theory, queer theory, and notions of “performativity,” we are what we play (as well as the ones who play – forever both and neither), and identity is all performed. The mask we choose to wear is as revealing, if not more so, as the face concealed beneath. Now, it is fair to say that an artist’s intention to adopt an artificial, “campy” mode does change how we understand their work – we appreciate it differently than work accidentally resulting in those ineffable qualities appealing to a camp sensibility, but I think it is needlessly limiting for that sensibility to close itself off to the pleasures found in material thus intentionally crafted. Honestly, it’s just weirdly snooty to look down on films (or anything else) for ‘trying too hard.’ If artifice weren’t a legitimate route to the ‘authentic,’ Wes Anderson wouldn’t have a career. These movies can be dumb on purpose, and thus can be dumb and, at the same time, be very clever and fun for how they choose to be dumb. Ambivalence can be delicious.
This seemingly paradoxical aesthetic tension describes a whole segment of horror works, often fan favorites, which will never win an Oscar, and which never need to – they’ve already served their audience, and their creators have gotten a nominal payday and can go on to try to make more. But though they will always exist outside of the purview of a mainstream “Academy,” and even also outside of the appreciation of many of the lettered scholars of exploitative trash, for whom I guess they’re not trashy enough or in ‘the right way,’ odd little treasures like Killer Klowns from Outer Space and The Toxic Avenger surely deserve to be celebrated – and I think, by at least certain people, they always will be.
Wild animals! Violent hoodlums! Roaming the streets in packs, eager to harry any good, upstanding citizen, causing damage or worse to person and property, denigrating all that is moral and wholesome and proper, the so-called “teenager,” under the influence of rampant hormones, alcohol, the ‘devil’s weed,’ or worse, is a scourge on our society that must be brought to heel if civilization is to have any hope of survival! Take your heads out of the sand! Open your eyes! See the danger that is all around, and start taking action before it’s too late!!!
So this week, I’m doing something a little different. The films I’m tackling would not generally be considered “horror” by most, but I think they comprise a fascinating artifact of the social fear of a certain mid-century America, making them richly worthy of consideration as, if not ‘horror’ per se, then horror-like works that reflect significant anxieties in their fictions. Harnessing the eternal distrust of the young (who don’t respect their elders, and worse, are coming to replace them), but funneling that through the rigid culturally specific tropes of the era when they were most produced, what may be termed “JD” (juvenile delinquent) films, propaganda-hygiene films, or simply “Fifties Teensploitation,” reveal the deep-set fears of a generation as much as films like King Kong, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (any version), or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre so clearly do.
It’s easy to see how people could fear teens like the ones in The Blackboard Jungle (1955).
Doing My Research
I’ve found myself drawn to this topic as I’d like to do something creative with it myself. I have previously made mention of my collaboration with La Folie Retro Cabaret Show, a group I work with in Kraków, Poland, and specifically of a piece I particularly enjoyed building that paid homage to the style and glamour of horror from the 20s and 30s. As an upcoming performance will be rooted in the 40s and 50s, I thought the tight sweaters and fast cars of this film cycle could be a fertile source of inspiration, and thus have started diving into the oeuvre. I can’t claim to have exhaustively studied the field, but in the last week, I have gone through eleven works, collecting patterns and observations about them. For the most part, they were all made between 1954 and 1958, though one comes from as early as 1938 and one as late as 1968.
They are: Reefer Madness (1938), Girl Gang (1954), Blackboard Jungle (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The Violent Years (1956), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Blood of Dracula (1957), Reform School Girl (1957), High School Confidential (1958), and She Mob (1968). Many, if not all, are available on Youtube.
My family moved a few times when I was growing up. I’m glad I never had to transfer to the school in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
Though they all revolve around the same subjects and themes, they are also fairly varied. Three were actually released as “horror,” including a supernatural/sci-fi element, one is an earnest work of early anti-drug propaganda, some are “legitimate” studio pictures, some are cheapie “exploitation” flicks, one is a very idiosyncratic sexploitation movie, and one is a genuinely great, iconic film, rightly famous. All, however, engage with the idea of the then recently named ‘teenager’ as a monstrous hybrid of youth and adulthood, a monster intent on great social disruption (which seems right in line with Noel Carroll’s horror taxonomy in which he claims an essential characteristic of a monster is that it breaches categories).
And sometimes, as Freud said, the monster is just a monster. I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957)
It’s not my intention to review all of these films here, or even detail each in some way. Rather, I’d like to try identifying and discussing some trends that seem to recur or some elements that stand out as seemingly unique and noteworthy.
But First, a Bit of History.
I’m taking a lot of this from a Saturday Evening Post article. You can read it all here. As I understand it, the term “teenager” wasn’t even coined until the 40s and didn’t come into regular use until the 50s. That said, what we know as the teenager really began to form in the first decades of the 20th century. Before that, for most of human history, human development was essentially divided into childhood and adulthood. Few people stayed in school beyond the 5th grade and those who did studied in single room schoolhouses with kids of all ages. Except for the very privileged very few, most completed their education at the end of “childhood” (if they even made it that far) entered the workforce, and started taking on adult responsibilities, providing for their families. It wasn’t uncommon to marry and start having kids by 15 or 16 and before that, most rituals of courtship occurred in the home, under the watchful eyes of parents.
Though in High School Confidential (1958) courtship still takes place inside the home as the main character’s busty aunt (played by blonde bombshell, Mamie Van Doren) won’t stop hitting on him.
It wasn’t until the late 19th/early 20th century that society really started cracking down on child labor and one way that was done was to extend the period of mandatory education. Furthermore, as automobiles were invented, it was possible to create consolidated high schools, bussing students in from a wider geographic area, putting all these teens together all day every day, creating an unprecedented social dynamic, a roiling pot of hormones and ego, making all the teenagers within more like each other and less like children or adults. Finally, when cars became common, “dating” as it is now known became a thing, away from the family, as did “teen culture”.
But in Reform School Girl (1957), they don’t have much fun in the car – it’s all just arguing and vehicular manslaughter.
A period of new affluence and comfort birthed a new commercial demographic. Teenagers had to study, but generally had a new kind of free time and disposable income. They could work, but didn’t have the same financial responsibilities of previous generations and could spend their earnings on records, clothes, hanging out at the soda fountain, and judging from the movies I watched this week, switchblades, lots of switchblades.
Teachers sometimes get stabbed in Blackboard Jungle (1955). Fortunately, I teach online.
They were also getting into trouble in cars, getting in accidents, getting pregnant, experimenting with drugs, and getting into fights. And people freaked out, as can be seen in films of the times. In the 30s, there was a boom of ‘hygiene’ films and ‘propaganda’ films, warning against new dangers targeting the youth of the time. For this collection, I watched the classic Reefer Madness, a very self-serious (if often laughable) entry, showing how rapidly young lives could be devastated by just one puff of marijuana. Unscrupulous pushers target nice, clean-cut young teens, inviting them back to their drug den to party. Before you know it, there are hit and runs, deadly gunshots fired in a hallucinatory haze, suicidal leaps out the window, and loads and loads of maniacal laughter. All of it is framed by a high school principal addressing parents at a PTA meeting, trying to drive home the message of how these dangerous threats could come for their very own children if they don’t act immediately.
Yup, sure wouldn’t want your kids to have as much fun as the ones in Reefer Madness (1938), though to be fair, this shot doesn’t include any of the murder, suicide, or madness.
Recurring Trends
The main thrust of Reefer Madness represents one key trend I saw in these works – sometimes, the kids are really “good” kids, but wicked people are out to corrupt them, to take advantage of them, destroying them in the process. And even if pushers aren’t actively trying to hook your kid on smack, all it takes is for your daughter to take a joy ride in a hot car with the wrong boy, one who would kill someone in a hit and run and let her take the fall, for her to become a Reform School Girl (though to be fair, in that case, the girl in question already had a bad home life with her aunt who resented her and her uncle who lusted after her – all of which pushed her into the arms (and passenger seat) of this dangerous delinquent). These films suggest that parents today are willfully blind to the deadly temptations their kids are facing. Reefer Madness is one of these, but there are many, many more (about drugs, about sex, about violent crime). And while this film was quite earnest in its messaging (produced by a church group that really was worried about marijuana’s corrupting influence), many others were rather exploitation fare, promising moral instruction and preventative education in order to get around the Hays Code and feature lurid subject matter like sex and drugs and their often violent and tragic consequences.
Consequences like becoming a Reform School Girl (1957).
And this trope of the world (and especially high school) being much more dangerous than parents are willing to imagine continued for quite some time, still going strong in 1958’s High School Confidential, in which drug dealers are trying to work their way into a high school market, starting the kids first on weed, but rapidly moving them on to the hard stuff. The school is already run by a gang when the protagonist arrives and the first half of the story involves him taking over and making a connection with the local heavies who can supply the junk he wants to sell. I find it interesting that this moral panic about pot serving as a ‘gateway drug’ had such staying power. When I was a teen in the 90s, I was encountering much the same rhetoric. Things change slowly if at all.
Toking up before moving on to needles and prostitution in the abandoned warehouse/crashpad in Girl Gang (1954).
In the 40s, while those just a bit older were away at war, a generation of teens was really on their own and free in an unprecedented way. And people were worried about what they were getting up to. I didn’t watch anything from this era exactly, but I think this was when the “youth runs wild” picture was born (and in 1944, a film exactly bore that name). I believe many of these can be grouped loosely under the umbrella of “film noir,” often with teens falling under the influence of gangsters and criminals. Whereas films like Reefer Madness posited innocent teens being preyed upon by unscrupulous pushers, this era started to present the tale of “good kids gone bad,” seeing teens not only destroyed by their brush with the dark side, but also showing them go bad themselves, becoming criminal, becoming violent, becoming animals.
Or sometimes, they just become vampires and attack girls with shovels in graveyards as in Blood of Dracula (1957).
And then, by the 50s, one of the biggest trends I see is just presenting the teens as dangerous criminal animals from the get go. Girl Gang (1954) begins with the eponymous group of teen girls carrying out a car-jacking and leaving the driver for dead on the side of the road before going to get their fix. To let another girl join, they inform her she first has to have sex with five boys who are “friends” of the gang, prostituting her in exchange for membership. They don’t need to “go bad.” They are bad already (though much of the rest of the run time focuses much less on the girl gang, and much more on an sinister drug pusher getting nice high school kids hooked on junk, who then have to resort to violent crime to maintain their heroin habits).
The pusher explains that it’s best for girls to shoot up into their upper thighs so no one can see the track marks in Girl Gang (1954). Really, the film spends a surprising amount of time having him explain heroin best practices.
Blackboard Jungle (1955) features a well-intentioned young teacher going to an inner city, multi-racial school where the kids are presented as wild and dangerous from the very beginning. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) isn’t about juvenile delinquents the way some of these other films are, but it sure features them. On the first day that James Dean’s character comes to his new school, his car is vandalized, he’s pushed into a knife fight he doesn’t want to be in, and he is challenged to a cliff edge game of chicken with deadly consequences. He is actually a nice kid (who just doesn’t fit in to such a dishonest, superficial world), but generally the teens he meets are a pretty rough bunch.
But everyone looks cool in a teenage death race in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
And some of the roughest characters are probably the gang of seemingly good, proper teen girls in the Ed Wood penned (though he was uncredited) The Violent Years (1956). Exploitation through and through, this film doesn’t seek to warn that your kids could be preyed upon, or turned to the dark side. Rather, it indicates that your sweet, loving daughter could just be waiting for you to go to work so she can rally her gang of cop killing teen girlfriends (it seems that there were a lot of ‘girl gang’ movies –just more shocking I guess) to knock over gas stations, attack couples on lover’s lane (trussing up the girls and outright raping the boys), and carrying out acts of vandalism on their school at the behest of an unnamed international interest (which is clearly the soviets). This trend was still going strong by the late 60s with She Mob in which the girls aren’t explicitly teens, but they are still a dangerous gang, led by their sexuality to acts of kidnapping and murder (it is also a very weird little movie, but oddly fascinating like some kind of strange insect – a bit like crossing John Waters with Russ Meyer). And it’s hard to find a more ultra-violent presentation of teen life than in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), so this is an idea with staying power (though this is both out of the era and geographic focus of my selections).
It’s fun to rob gas stations in The Violent Years (1956).
I don’t actually know the stats on violent crimes committed by youth in the fifties, but I can’t help but think that it wasn’t as bad as people imagined. Still, with films like these (and it seems that there were loads of them in a pretty short period) representing the contemporary mindset, it’s not surprising that J. Edgar Hoover was ringing the warning bell in a 1953 FBI report about the “appalling crimes” he was expecting teens to commit in the coming years, or that Dwight Eisenhower called for federal legislation in the 1955 State of the Union to deal with the scourge of juvenile delinquency.
If you aren’t careful, you may discover that your kids have been monsters all along – and it’s obviously your fault for not paying more attention sooner! These were the original teenage ‘super-predators.’
A very literal example in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957).
And speaking of monsters, we do have the three entries that are actually horror films: I Was a Teenage Werewolf (which I wrote about at somewhat greater length in my last post), I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, and Blood of Dracula (which is essentially a gender flipped version of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, with a girl becoming a vampire instead), all released by AIP in 1957. Really aimed at a teen audience, these are a bit kinder to the “teenager,” setting up a manipulative adult (therapist, scientist, teacher) as the true villain of the piece, who is experimenting on some teen against their will, bringing out the monster within (which will apparently somehow save humanity), but still, they all suggest that every teen has that inner violent, powerful monster tucked away inside, just waiting to be released by a well-intentioned, if quite evil, mad scientist. And I suppose they’re also a warning that if you drive recklessly, some British guy might steal your corpse and turn you into a monster, so there’s that…
The monster is pretty close to the surface in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). Fun fact: Whit Bissell also played the mad scientist in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, released that same year.
Some Reflections
I think often when we look back on the past, we naively imagine something quaint. Especially in terms of the 50s, much of the pop culture that has stayed in the public eye seems so sanitized. This was a time when married couples were always shown in separate beds and apparently no sitcom family’s home came equipped with a toilet. But of course, we have always been violent; we have always been getting into trouble. The teenager as we know it is a more modern concept, but people have been documented complaining about ‘youth today’ since at least Socrates. From the 30s to the late 60s, there was more censorship (at least in American pop culture, but I expect that was also true in other countries as well), and this means that the cultural documents we have (film, TV, etc…) tend to paint a picture of a world that never was. The reality was probably just the opposite.
In the reality of High School Confidential (1958), cars that flip over in drag races have a unique relationship to physics.
By all accounts, “kids today” are engaging in adult activities (sex, drinking, drugs, work, and driving, among other things) later and later. Comparatively, the teens of the past really were running wild and getting into much more trouble than young people do nowadays. Whereas once society was terrified that teens were forming packs to roam the streets, preying on the vulnerable, now people just complain that teens spend too much time inside, looking at their screens – now parents might be concerned their kids aren’t getting in enough trouble. And oddly, just as young people now may hold on to aspects of childhood longer, I dare say that the current young generation is probably more plugged into what is going on in the world than in most previous eras. With a dread of a world irreparably environmentally ruined by those that came before, with a newfound insistence on all people being treated with full respect, regardless of race, creed, sexuality, gender expression, etc., and with a tragically reasonable terror at the prospect of being gunned down on the way to algebra class, my impression is that teens now are a pretty serious minded bunch.
Sadly, these days, I think they have more to legitimately fear from and for the world than the world has any reason to fear them…
Exploitation
One final thought: operating in horror spaces, there is often much mention of “exploitation” films. I always kinda get what people mean by that, but it also feels a bit nebulous. Where exactly is the line between “exploitation” and “legitimate” filmmaking? Does it depend on the budget? On the studio? On just how titillating the subject matter is? Watching this set of films was interestingly illustrative in marking the differences.
A kidnapping victim is made to feel comfortable in She Mob (1968).
Don’t get me wrong – I really do appreciate an actually “great” movie, and from this set, that is clearly Rebel Without a Cause. It is just a beautiful, interesting, rich film and Dean’s performance is truly special. However, generally among these movies, it was the more ‘exploitation’ fare that I found most enjoyable, and honestly, less moralistically uncomfortable.
The young ladies in Blood of Dracula (1957) are not terribly welcoming to the new girl.
Case in point: Blackboard Jungle is a very well-made film, from a bigger studio (MGM), and stars some actual names (not to mention featuring prominent up and comers – it was a young Sidney Poitier’s first film). Thus, while it is a ‘JD’ flick, you wouldn’t call it an ‘exploitation’ picture. But the presentation of high school kids as threatening animals felt kinda icky. This is a film that is good enough to actually communicate a sense of reality and the one it was pushing – of the horrific monstrousness of ‘kids today’ – is reasonably ugly when effective (I wonder about a comparison with the far more exploitationy Class of 1984 (1982), which is basically a remake). Of course, by the end, the idealistic young teacher hangs in there and makes a difference, but along the way, there is a real demonization of the young that lands in a different way than in some of the cheaper, less highly produced flicks.
A high schooler attempts to rape the new female teacher in the library in Blackboard Jungle (1955). These kids are the worst.
On the flip side, a movie like The Violent Years makes a point of showing teens as so very, very horrible, and yet it is just oddly watchable and fun, and doesn’t turn me off with its moralizing, even though it explicitly does so much more of it. There is something to the fact that any messaging it has about the dangers to and of youth are so transparently just cashing in on a trend and using it to titillate. This results in a peculiar aesthetic pleasure. I’d rather indulge in the singular charms of honest sleaze over the genuine moralistic scolding of a “well-made film” any day.
The girls in The Violent Years (1956) take what they want when they want it.
And the “exploitation” of films like Girl Gang, Reform School Girl, or The Violent Years also feels closer to the horror genre – which I’m supposed to be writing about. For all of their superficial moralizing, it feels obvious that they are actually just using that faux preachiness to justify salacious entertainment, having fun with the concept of the teenage monster. And they are kinda a blast.
But also, do yourself a favor and watch Rebel Without a Cause. It’s just a beautiful piece of work. I loved it!
She, on the other hand, loves getting high and playing the piano. Reefer Madness (1938)
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And there we are. I acknowledge that these movies really aren’t “horror” and even more, I feel I barely described them. But still, I think they do something that horror does: they take a fear that is on the minds of society and distill it into an entertainment – to exorcise that fear, to oppose the source of that fear, or simply to capitalize on that fear to make a quick buck, thus effectively preserving a valuable social document – a lens through which to examine a past moment in time. And thus, on my horror journey, it’s been interesting to take this little detour, and I think I’ve collected some fun stuff to feed into creative work of my own. Thanks for indulging me in some slightly off brand commentary this week. Next time, perhaps I can just talk about one good scary movie. Let’s see what happens…
For a horror fan and blogger, I must admit I’m not great at keeping up with new releases. Sure, I would like to, but somehow there just isn’t time and while I could check out the new movie getting buzz, I often end up filling some gap in my horror knowledge with an older film I’ve long meant to see, or I just re-watch something I already know I enjoy. I mean, there’s just so much coming out all the time, and since it’s pretty much impossible to see everything, the percentage of horror films released that I’ve seen grows ever smaller.
But this week I actually managed to catch up on three new films that came to streaming services in this last year and I was struck by a recurring theme that runs through all of them. Fresh (on Hulu in the States, but carried on Disney+ in much of the rest of the world), Run, Sweetheart, Run (on Prime), and A Wounded Fawn (on Shudder) all center on a woman going on a date (or something that comes to feel like a date) with some seemingly nice guy, ignoring passing moments of aggression, domineering behavior, or just gut feelings of weirdness that might have warned her away, ending up at his luxurious home, and then, finally, finding herself in the middle of a crazy-stuff-is-going-down horror film. Let’s call it “red flag horror.”
Of course, it’s nothing new for horror to feature women threatened by vicious men. Rape-Revenge movies, from Bergman’s The Virgin Spring in 1960, to 1978’s I Spit on Your Grave, to more recently, the 2017 French movie Revenge, have long done just that. 80s slashers featured so many images of women being stalked by masked male figures that many came (rightly or wrongly – a discussion for another time) to view the sub-genre as quite misogynistic. And more recently, movies like The Invisible Man (2020), Men (2022),Assassination Nation (2018), the Black Christmas remake (2019), or Promising Young Woman (2020) have all foregrounded women navigating a minefield of dangerously entitled, possessive, abusive men. Another big release this year, Barbarian (2022), also turned on whether or not a female character listens to her gut or takes a chance on a guy she doesn’t know not being a psycho or a rapist (in the beginning, she’s so very careful, but when she stops being careful, she really stops being careful and then it’s time to start shouting at the screen). There have been so many of late that it really feels like a trend, but these three that I watched this week, all released close enough together that I can’t imagine anyone copied anyone else, follow key story beats so closely – it just has to mean something, right?
Maybe it’s that, five years after #MeToo first trended, public awareness has simply grown of the exhausting degree to which so many women need to be on guard to protect themselves in everyday situations and therefore, more writers and directors are centering on that experience, tapping into a fear fresh in people’s minds to make successful horror that rings true with people’s lived experience (just as it has long been observed that, e.g., filmmakers in the 50s made alien invasion/giant bug movies that were all about communism). But it’s not like the menace a woman can feel going to a remote cabin with a man she’s just been seeing for a short time is at all new; it’s only new that it’s so openly and frequently discussed – so is it maybe just that producers see an opportunity in investing in work that is very “now,” ripped from the headlines in a utterly opportunistic money grab? Both can certainly be true.
Either way, I find it fascinating to note this repetition of not just theme, but specific actions – a nascent trope taking shape. And so, let’s have a quick look at these three quite dissimilar films which all rest on strikingly similar foundations. There will be significant spoilers, so be forewarned.
Fresh (2022)
Written by Lauryn Kahn, Mimi Cave’s feature debut starts with its heroine, Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), enduring the myriad indignities of app-based dating. Between jerks who tell her how much nicer she’d look in a dress and the endless, roiling sea of dick-pics, she’s not having a very nice time. Then she has what seems to be a chance encounter with Steve, a nice, funny guy (and a doctor, no less), in the produce aisle and she feels cautiously optimistic for the first time in ages that she might have actually met somebody she likes. Somebody with no social media profile that she can look up. Somebody who asks about her friends in an offputtingly wary fashion. Somebody who suggests that even though they’ve just started dating, they should throw caution to the wind and go away for the weekend together – to a beautiful but remote area with poor cell phone reception.
But he’s a super warm, goofy, charming guy and, ignoring the many vetoes of her best friend Mollie, Noa agrees. Then, on the way out of town, he explains there’s a problem and they’ll need to leave in the morning, so why don’t they stay at his place (which she’s never seen before and is way out in the middle of nowhere – but a different middle of nowhere than she’d told her friend she’d be in, also with no good reception) for the night? The next thing she knows, her wine drugged, she wakes up chained to the wall in a nicely finished cell in his basement (next to the cells of a few other girls), being kept alive so that he can cut off bits and pieces and sell them to unbelievably rich cannibals who want only the freshest meat.
And yet, there is still a kind of chemistry – he is still noticeably interested in her and while she now knows him to be a sociopathic, woman-eating killer, he is no less charming and funny (Sebastian Stan, who I only knew before as Marvel’s Winter Soldier, really threads a needle here – at once so likeable and so awful). Thus, after a period of despair, and losing one round roast in the name of haute cuisine, Noa continues the date, hoping to placate Steve and stay alive and relatively whole until she finds an opportunity for escape.
Edgar-Jones delivers a really nuanced performance. As she dines with him, makes cannibal jokes, flirts, and bides her time, you get the sense that she is full of contradictory emotions. She’s terrified, but he’s also surprisingly easy to spend time with. She hates him and what he’s done to her and the other women being held prisoner, but the food (though morally repugnant) is actually delicious, he makes her laugh, and if you could just forget the whole false imprisonment and involuntary surgery, there is a genuine spark between them. Or she’s just acting the part to a tee. Just playing him until she gets her chance. It’s never clear and it feels as if it might not even be clear to her either – maybe everything she does is calculated and in control and maybe this is an example of how it can be so hard to leave an abusive partner. It can’t be overstated how enjoyable the interchange is between these two performers. It is a delicate dance.
I will say this is a really fun watch: blackly comic without robbing its subject matter of its weight, and rooted in real world problematics, from gender based violence to late stage capitalism. Noa’s plight is never less than horrifying, but Cave uses a pretty light touch, and while Noa chooses to ignore signs she shouldn’t have, it’s easy to go along with her decisions. Nothing is glaringly amiss before she wakes up in the basement. He never explodes in anger. He doesn’t stare at her fingers, licking his lips and talking about how tasty she looks. But it’s clear that even the gentlest, funniest guy could be a monster, and if your best friend tells you not to go, you probably shouldn’t.
Run Sweetheart Run (2022)
Shana Feste’s film follows Cherie (Ella Balinska) a secretary and single mother who is sent by her boss to entertain Ethan (Pilou Asbæk), an important client, due to a scheduling conflict. She assures her baby sitter that it is not a date, but dresses in such a way that she can choose later to keep things business-like or go for a sexier look. Picking him up at his home, she finds him living in an amazing, temple-like mansion and they head out to dinner. He is rich, handsome, and charming, and one moment notwithstanding when he shouts at someone whose dog gets too close to him, explaining he had been seriously bitten as a child, she has a good time and the evening moves closer and closer to date territory.
Of course that one moment of screaming at a stranger in a restaurant was aggressive and kinda scary. And he seems a touch too smooth to believe. And maybe a bit on the dominant side, but there is an attraction, and when she drops him off back at his place, he invites her in. She almost doesn’t do it, almost listens to that little voice inside and goes home to relieve the babysitter, but it’s been a nice night so far and she wants to go for it, so she does.
At this point, we get our first clear sign that Ethan is more than just a run-of-the-mill creep. Before following her into his house, he holds up his hand, stopping the camera from following him (something like this will happen a couple more times, suggesting a control he maintains over the narrative). The door closes and the camera just watches it. Faintly, we can hear shouting and some kind of crashing until, about a minute later, Cherie bursts through the door and escapes into the night.
Without her phone (everything is in his place), she goes looking for help, but is everywhere met with suspicion, and when she goes to the police, they arrest her for public intoxication (she had a glass or two of wine, but all bloodied, she apparently looks suspicious). Eventually, we learn that Ethan is some thing of great power and that her boss had given her to him as a “tithe” so that he could hunt her, chasing the smell of her blood (and of course, her period’s just started). I will say that when we finally get an explanation of what he is and what he is doing, I was underwhelmed – it was all a bit too on the nose – awkward fantasy world building and political messaging so explicit as to render the remaining run-time strictly allegorical. But until then, it was a really intriguing, exciting, frustrating chase. There is a moment when, backed into a church, he tells Cherie that she ‘will always lose because people believe in me’ before showing her his true form (which we can’t see). In the moment, I wondered if he was Jupiter? If he was God-the-father? If he was the concept of patriarchy made flesh? I kind of wish the question hadn’t been answered because it was much richer not knowing.
But with the exception of this one element, so much of the rest of the film really works. From the moment when she’s leaving the Police Station in the middle of the night and each figure on the street could be Ethan (tension), but isn’t (relief), but is still some man she doesn’t know (tension again), to the discovery that she is but the most recent girl that her boss has sent to Ethan over the years, the film paints a dark picture in which a woman can reasonably trust no man, in which every guy on the street is a potential threat, in which the men of the world conspire together to preserve their own power.
It’s in that last point that I think the film overreaches in a way that serves neither its story nor its mission. I could be wrong, but I doubt patriarchy is perpetuated by men so explicitly, with some powerful leader definitively ensuring that “men keep all the power” (all while twirling his mustache). I feel making a motivation that obvious, that intentional, that comic book supervillain-esque effectively masks real systemic/psycho-social factors at play, whereas a monster could be used to embody them and hence, bring them to light (something horror is uniquely good at).
A Wounded Fawn (2022)
This is Travis Stevens’s third feature and also his third film to highlight women abused, targeted, or undervalued and unfulfilled by men (I particularly enjoyed his second feature, Jakob’s Wife). Here, we meet Meredith (Sarah Lind), who works at a gallery and has recently recovered from a particularly bad breakup. She’s excited to tell her friends that she actually has plans for the weekend as she’s going away with this guy she’s started seeing to his cabin. She’s had a hard time of it and it’s been difficult for her to open up again, but she’s been making the effort and he’s really nice.
Of course, the first time we see him, we know he’s bad news as we already watched him murder a woman in the cold open, an art dealer who beat him at an auction in buying a statue of the three furies harrying some hapless fellow. He seems to have been compelled to carry out his attack by some mysterious, golden, owl headed figure for reasons unknown, but this doesn’t stop him from keeping the coveted statue for himself.
In the car on the way out of town, there are So Many Red Flags. While driving, he puts his hand on her knee in a proprietary fashion. He drifts off into strange silence when she describes her thesis in university (how women artists have been stolen from and erased from history). He gets weird when she asks about his family. And when Meredith asks to stop at a roadside market to use the bathroom, he gets angry at her because ‘they’re almost there – can’t she hang on just a bit longer?’ It should be noted that it’s the afternoon when this happens and when they arrive, it’s full on night time. Also, as a clear visual pun, when they drive past the market without making the requested stop, the camera pans over to a string of red flags, flapping in the wind above the produce.
What follows is a very uncomfortable sequence in which Meredith clearly does not feel safe, but is now out in the middle of nowhere with this guy who has revealed an explosive temper. Still, she tries to relax into the evening and enjoy herself, or at least manage not to set him off. Finally, after a series of odd occurrences (apparently unrelated to him), she puts her foot down and demands that they go back to the city. Of course, that’s when the owl “makes” him try to kill her and the film takes a major turn for the weird.
The rest of the run time is given over to Bruce. Having come to after she’d knocked him out with the statue, he is hounded by the furies himself, their faces and voices provided by his recent or attempted victims (the art dealer from the cold open, Meredith). As he keeps deflecting blame to the force that makes him kill, the thing in his head that’s not him, the owl spirit, the furies attack him mentally, physically, and spiritually (it gets pretty trippy), demanding that he finally take responsibility for his own actions.
Was there really a mythic owl-headed force making him kill, or does he do it cause he wants to and this is how he justifies it to himself? Is he being hounded by Greek Eumenides, or is Meredith somehow doing this and his insane imagination just processes it this way? This final act is interesting and boldly creative, but also difficult and could try one’s patience if not exactly in the mood for it. Regardless, the first act is a powerhouse, layering tension upon tension, Meredith alternating between listening to her gut and telling herself it’s ok and trying to make it work, between desperately wanting to leave and being so careful not to say or do the wrong thing around this man she no longer trusts.
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And so, there we have three recent films, all of which could have been cut short if the woman at their center had just trusted her instincts sooner and not gone along with this rich, handsome, charming, but somehow-something’s-not-quite-right-about-him man. Is it merely a coincidence that they all came out within a few months of each other? Does it rather tell us something about how we as a society are currently viewing the dynamics between men and women? About our current fears? Does it speak of a kind of progress in terms of a growing understanding of social inequalities that need to be remedied? Maybe. It’s possible. That would be good.
But to be fair, those inequalities, those dangers that have traditionally and disproportionally fallen on one half of the population have been around for a long time, at least that half the population has always been all too aware of this fact, and both halves have long been willing to turn blind eyes to keep business running as usual, so I don’t know that some parallel plot points in three direct-to-streaming horror flicks can really be taken as evidence of a real sea change. Of all of the powerful men that got ‘cancelled’ in the heat of the #MeToo moment, many have returned to their former work or positions (though some ended up in jail, so that’s something).
That said, however, one of the things I love about horror, especially lower profile, lower budget work that never really takes the spotlight, is the way that it can reveal things people are thinking about. Maybe these films speak to that – these and the many others previously listed that have come out recently and which carry a more modern awareness of the enduringly persistent violence of power-gender dynamics. And on top of that, they are fun, weird movies. If I haven’t completely spoiled them for you, I suggest checking them out.
