Michele Soavi’s late 80’s Italian slasher has got to be one of the most fun entries in the subgenre. A killer wearing a giant owl mask stalks the theatre where a troupe is rehearsing a weird, terrible, doomed musical, ostensibly based on his life and crimes. As their compatriots are slaughtered one by one, the actors really should leave, but between the fact that none of them can afford to lose this job and that the director has locked them all in so they’ll have to keep rehearsing through the night, the only egress is death—by power drill, by chainsaw, by axe, by golly (with apologies to The Mutilator).
This is a film of pure excess—a delightful juxtaposition of 80s slasher exploitation sleaze and classic Italian artistry growing out of a Bava/Argento-influenced giallo style. Cats jump out of places they have absolutely no reason to be, the lighting is more colorful than could ever be realistic, and the actors are all poorly dubbed. Really, I’m having trouble selling just how much fun it all is. Plus, it does actually succeed in the suspense and startle department, all while looking and sounding fantastic.
And I think one of the things I most appreciate about it, coming from the theatre, myself, is its presentation of a theatre group making something bad. Deep down, they must all know how bad, how unsalvageable it is. The director can see it—it’s clear in the disdain with which he watches every absurdity play out on stage, and yet, he keeps trying to make the small adjustments to make it just a bit less awful. The obvious failure that looms is more horrifying in its familiarity than any feathered madman haunting the catwalks could hope to be.
A perennial favorite that never grows old. I’m sure one day, I’ll return to it at greater length – but for now this blurb will have to suffice.
Sometimes, maybe you’re not up to writing a whole long text on something, but you want to populate the movie review archive of your blog. In times like those, you need a blurb. On your blog. Blargh.
The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
Lon Chaney stars, co-directs, and of course, does all his own makeup work in this classic of the silent era which manages to still deliver some solid thrills almost a century later. And it is a big piece of work. Huge crowd scenes, a striking setting, endless underground catacombs and waterways, two scenes of painted color that really pop (first, the masked ball, and then a really gorgeous scene on top of the opera house where Christine and Raul plot their escape as the phantom watches from beneath a giant gargoyle, his cape billowing crimson in this otherwise monochromatic film). Some set pieces are enjoyably creepy and/or funny, notably as ballerinas run around terrified of shadows, and the phantom takes Christine on like 5 forms of transport (an exaggeration, but a slight one) to get from the opera house to his underground apartment in the catacombs.
There’s even some good action and derring-do as Raul and his friend venture underground to rescue the damsel in distress and get caught in the phantom’s various traps which seem like they could exist in an Indiana Jones movie. Though there is some oddness to their approach as they are convinced that he could at any time drop a noose round their necks and walk around constantly with their hands in the air to prevent this. That doesn’t happen, but everything else does. Perhaps, they could have just…been careful and paid attention to their surroundings.
From a modern perspective, the pacing can sometimes drag and I think the screenplay really depends on this being a well-known story in the public consciousness and, therefore, skips over some important details here and there, but on the whole, the film stands up and makes for very pleasant Sunday morning viewing.
Back in August, I had the opportunity to take part in something really special, the Slasher Studies Summer Camp, as organized by Daniel Sheppard and Wickham Clayton.
I have long been fascinated with academic readings of horror films (of which there are a great deal) and some of the seminal texts have focused on the Slasher subgenre. This conference (online and free to attend—one nice thing to come from the pandemic), featuring three days of paper presentations (more than 40, most of which I was able to watch), keynote speakers, and industry guests, sought to delve into some of the rich research and analysis currently being undertaken by a very international coterie of scholars.
And it was amazing.
I was continually struck by its live-ness, by the instant community, by the fact that, sans-pandemic, had this taken place at a physical university in England, there is no way I ever would have been able to attend.
I’m sure I’ll probably return to some of these papers in these pages, but today, I just want to highlight a few that really struck me at the time.
Tools of the Trade: A Statistical Analysis of Slasher Hardware
This paper, written and presented by Marc Olivier offered something that I think can be lacking in cultural analysis: numbers. This quantitative analysis mapped out, based on a very large sample of slasher films, exactly which items have been used how many time by what kind of person to kill what kind of person. I hope this is going to be published as I think it is really useful fuel for focusing analysis. He described a ‘chainsaw effect,’ wherein some items carry an outsized impression of their use. Notably, chainsaws have barely killed anyone at all in the vast corpus of the genre.
The numbers really destabilize some expectations about who the killers are, who the victims are, and what the character of the slasher film is.
While there is a great deal of theorizing about what is intended by creators or perceived by viewers, I think it’s pretty rare to get this kind of hard data. Kudos. I plan to pick up his book, linked to above.
“There are certain rules that one must abide by: An Examination of the Problematic Relationship Between Conservative Morality and the Slasher Film”
Every since Carol J. Clover coined the term ‘final girl’ in her essay, “Her Body, Himself,” there has been a fixed cultural idea of who and what this character was, which has flavored much of how the genre is perceived. The final girl is a “good girl” who doesn’t drink, who doesn’t do drugs, and who doesn’t have sex. This is in obvious opposition to her friends who do, and who subsequently don’t survive the film.
And in turn, this establishes a rather conservative viewpoint of the genre: sex = death.
This is just what the author, John Kavanagh, set out to disprove. Presenting a sizable collection of exceptions to this pattern, drawn from many films, he laid out the thesis that really the most likely victims are not those who ‘misbehave,’ but simply those who are distracted (which is very much how John Carpenter described the difference between Laurie and her friends in Halloween, a film which really helped establish the slasher tropes), and that final girls are even very likely to have transgressed when it comes to drugs, alcohol, or sex.
Personally, I found his tone to be kind of defensive, a fan protecting the honor of the genre, but I think fair points were made. The title draws from a key scene in Scream in which Randy lays out the “rules” of surviving a horror movie, a scene in which he explicitly presents the sex-death equation, a scene which serves as an object lesson in how the genre has accepted and now reifies said formula.
But did that formula really exist, or do we all just perceive it because we’ve been told that it’s there? Did Clover, or probably more to the point, others who selectively read Clover, ignoring her larger concerns, create this trope, rather than the film makers of the first Slasher cycle of the late 70s-early 80s?
It is food for thought.
The Metamodern Slasher Film
Dr. Steve Jones, the first keynote speaker presented an analysis of many cycles of the genre. First there was the original cycle in the early 80s; then it became more supernatural and perhaps silly in the late 80s; in the mid 90s, there was a cycle of ironic, self aware, ‘postmodern’ slashers; and most recently, starting in the 2000s/2010s, there has been a cycle of what he terms the “Metamodern Slasher,” following Mas’ud Zavarzadeh.
Whereas the postmodern slashers made fun of the tropes of the genre (the above mentioned speech by Randy in Scream or Jason in Jason X killing two holographic campers after they enthuse how much they “love having pre-marital sex,” the metamodern brings a new sincerity to the genre, while often still having a playful awareness of those tropes.
Some examples might include Happy Death Day and its sequel, The Final Girls, The Cabin in the Woods, or Freaky. All of these are very funny takes on slashers/horror-in-general, which deliver some legitimate violence/gore, but also have real heart.
Jones discussed how, whereas the 90s were a time of ironic detachment, our present moment is very sincere. Youth culture today, i.a., takes things seriously, takes offense easily, is focused on fighting climate change before it’s too late, and is very keyed into issues of social justice.
This sincerity is notably present in many recent slashers.
All of this really rings true for me and I really like all of the films that he cited, or that others proposed as fitting the pattern. I appreciate it when death means something in a horror film, when there is room for mourning, for weight. And a lot of these really land comedically.
But this is this other thing I wonder about: As this cycle continues and we get more and more slashers featuring well drawn, believable characters who we feel for, who we root for, as there is more of an earnest heart to the proceedings, as the sub-genre becomes more ‘humane,’ does it suffer a loss as well? Many of these films feature gore and some have solid jump scares, but none are what I’d consider ‘hard.’ They may startle me and they may make me cry or laugh, but they don’t horrify.
Maybe that’s ok, but it’s a trend I notice.
And to be fair, this is nothing new. The postmodern slasher cycle of the mid 90s-mid 2000s was slick and sometimes well produced, but also, with its recognizable casts of TV pretty young stars, never felt hard, never felt all that horrific. As described already, the slashers of the later 80s/early 90s, with Freddy killing teens with a Nintendo power glove, or Leprechauns in space, got pretty goofy. And some of the first cycle were such instant cash-ins on a financially successful craze, that they instantly fell into self-parody.
At least, e.g., Freaky is a good movie. But I wouldn’t want to lose the meanness, and the menace of something being made by someone with at least a touch of ill intent.
Still, Jones’s presentation was captivating and I certainly want to follow him in the future.
So, I’m going to do a number of different things on this blog. Sometimes I’ll want to expand on some bit of theory. Sometimes I’ll give a quick response to a film I’ve just seen or a book I’ve just read, and sometimes I’ll pop in a longer film review to dig into something I think is worth spending more time with. So to kick things off, let’s have a look at a real gem.
Messiah of Evil (1973)
Willard Huyck’s and Gloria Katz’s film (which they both co-wrote and co-directed) is a confounding masterpiece of style. Tightly composed, rich in color and contrast, and at once hypnotic and jarring, characters are silhouetted against deeply saturated colors, odd groups of locals wait by bonfires, looking out to sea and snacking on rodents, painted faces watch characters from all sides as they attempt to sleep, and the hands of the dying fill the frame for one last moment before being pulled down into a mass of hungry bodies. The fact that the central story is perhaps the least consequential aspect of the piece may be due to its creators’ avowed lack of interest in the genre. The plot may not be a significant expression of their artistic talents, but the strength of the rest of the film certainly showcases them.
As for the plot, I am not the first to describe it as seemingly influenced by H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The protagonist comes to a small seaside town, filled with strange inhabitants worshipping and awaiting the return of something ancient and evil which will come from the sea. Here, we follow Arletty (Marianna Hill) as she enters Point Dune (though it sure sounded like ‘doom’ the first time it’s mentioned), looking for her artist father, who no longer answers her letters. The people of the town are odd and standoffish, until she meets Thom (Michael Greer), a playboy folk legend enthusiast and the two women traveling with him, Laura (Anitra Ford) and Toni (Joy Bang).
The trio invite themselves to stay with Arletty at her father’s abandoned and highly stylish beach house/home gallery and Thom shares some of what he has gathered about the legends of this town where once the moon turned blood red and a mysterious, sinister stranger walked into the sea to return a hundred years later when the world would be ripe and ready for his wickedness. Some light is also shed on this from Arletty’s father’s diary. It seems that the town somehow infects its inhabitants, causing a variety of physical symptoms (bleeding from the eyes or ears, loss of sensation) and apparently a hunger for human flesh and the tendency to dress rather conservatively.
Also, possibly the inability to be killed—or are they all already dead—it’s never really explained. First Laura and then Toni grow jealous of the attention Thom is paying to Arletty and go off on their own to inevitably be killed by the townspeople in rather striking sequences (Laura in a supermarket after coming across the townspeople dining in the meat aisle, and then Toni in a cinema which first seems empty, but which slowly fills in behind her until it is far too late).
Eventually, Arletty starts to show the telltale signs of Point Dune’s contagion and after a conflagratory confrontation with her father (she burns him to death), who had been hoping to keep/drive her away from this horrible town, already damned himself, she and Thom attempt to escape. Ultimately Thom is lost, but she is permitted to leave, carrying with her the warning of the doom that is coming from the sea.
It’s a little hard to follow and this synopsis is neither entirely accurate nor complete, leaving so many questions to investigate which I won’t be delving into here, but these are the broad strokes.
And again, the story is really not at the heart of this little gem of a picture. While the narrative may somewhat bewilder, the atmosphere, the mood, the sense of unease, of the uncanny, of creeping doom suffuses practically every frame. This is, in no way, a direct Lovecraft adaptation, but it really captures so much of what worked in his writing—that growing sense that something, some place, some people, just feel wrong somehow, off.
Point Dune feels empty and threatening. The people, when they can be communicated with at all, have odd tics. The stores look, on the surface, totally normal—no strange lighting or colors or shadows, but in their clean emptiness and apparent normalcy, there is an eeriness. Arletty’s father’s house is gorgeous to look at, but does not look comfortable to inhabit. It doesn’t look designed for living in. The bedroom (where the bed hangs from chains) is filled with giant murals featuring figures (the dead? the townspeople?) watching from every angle. The town itself feels barren, though there are people; it is devoid of life, of the normal noise and bustle of living.
And I feel that it is somewhere in this that a visual theme of the film comes to life. Point Dune is at the seaside, somewhere on the California coast. It’s at the edge of the continent, of the country; from a certain (Western/American) perspective, it is at the edge of civilization, of the inhabited world. Along the coast, lies nature. The sea, the crashing waves, the unknowable depths, where the horizon disappears and the blood moon is reflected upon the black water.
And at the border of all that, Arletty finds herself living in an art gallery—surrounded by the artificial, by 2 dimensional paintings, and in a town filled with buildings, filled with the relics of society, but no people, no life, no nature. She also finds herself at the center of a film which is, itself, quite consciously artistic. Every shot is arresting and the colors are intensely vibrant—and I find it striking that in such a colorful film, little of this effect comes from lighting as it might in a Bava or Argento inflected piece. Rather, the color comes from physical objects—paintings, wallpaper, carpeting, bed sheets, costumes. Everywhere you look, there is some actual, physical, produced art-object. On the other side, the waves are breaking.
It is in this meeting of the dangerous, unknowable wild of the sea and the dead, arid town, filled with relics of life and art and artifice, that this dread filled picture is most effective. What is living and what is dead? What is authentic? In a late scene, Arletty’s father first throws bright red paint across the walls of his home murals before falling among his paints, where his own unrealistically red and viscous blood mixes with the vivid pigments.
This is before the silhouettes of the townspeople, mirroring the people of the murals, begin to fill the windows and finally attack—as if the figures on the walls are coming to life.
In the end, Arletty is in an asylum, mad and broken, knowing that she will never be believed and that what is coming cannot be stopped. This juxtaposition of real and unreal, of human-product and the natural world, of what we can understand and what is beyond us is sustained throughout and offers a delectable ambience for viewers who take pleasures in such things.
Huyck and Katz, who went on to write American Graffiti, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Howard the Duck, both apparently disparaged this early film and never again worked in the genre, but even if accidentally, they managed to produce a beautiful and ominous treasure.
