Monstrous Teenagers in the Fifties

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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…

First Impressions – My Week in Horror

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Sometimes, I make plans that don’t quite work out. I watch something expecting it to connect with other works in a certain way, and it doesn’t. I check out a film or a book I think I’m going to really like and have thoughts about, and it leaves me lukewarm. I choose a film I really did like and find interesting, but when I sit down to actually commit words to the page, I find myself drawing a blank, with little to say really, other than that I’d enjoyed it. And sometimes it’s just so easy to procrastinate – a nice, but also dangerous, thing about having this blog is that watching a horror movie always feels like a productive use of my time – even if I don’t choose to write about it, I’m expanding my knowledge, doing my homework – indulgence easily justified as education.

This has been one of those weeks (more like a week and a half at this point). I watched a ton of stuff (much more than usual), but while I enjoyed most of it, I’m having trouble finding, let’s say, a thesis. So, in lieu of that, maybe I’ll just run down everything I saw, as plenty of it is really worth seeking out. 

These were first time watches, and even if something didn’t exactly live up to my hopes or forever change how I look at the world, I’m glad to have seen them all. That said, these will all be rather short reviews and I’ll endeavor to keep them spoiler free.

Murder Rock: Dancing Death (1984)

Coming off a run of some of his most significant pictures, this is the last film Fulci would make before illness forced him to take a break, sapping much of his creative energies (the 2 year break was apparently really hard on him – in the preceding 10 years, he’d made 17 films). I can’t say that it’s his best picture, but it’s far from his worst, and it is a fun, stylish, sleazy little giallo in its own right. More of an 80s dance infused erotic thriller than a horror piece, I think Fulci’s eye is still evident. There is a certain flair, especially in terms of kill scenes and dream sequences, all tied up in a sweaty bundle of flesh and fear. Set at a NYC dance studio where the students are all competing for a career making break, someone is mysteriously picking them off one by one, chloroforming them before driving a long jeweled pin into their heart – all as the lights flash and the music pulses.

In classic giallo fashion, the story is twistingly plotted and I was genuinely engaged in the whodunit throughout, but also typical for gialli, the plot is subservient to just making it all as sexy and cool as possible. At the same time, its gritty 80s New York setting plays counterpoint to its slick Italian panache, resulting in a sordid vibe which is no less enticing. Some elements might be a bit ridiculous (even in the high-80s, did dance students bop into the showers naked save for their leg warmers?), but it’s all part of the charm. Somehow elements that could irritate in a contemporary film, or at the very least, make my eyes roll (such as a particularly leering camera in the dance scenes) come across as oddly lovable, encapsulating an old fashioned, sweetly naïve exploitation cinema aesthetic of sleaze (Is that a thing? I feel like that’s a thing). 

That said, for an “erotic thriller,” there’s plentiful nudity, but very little actual sexuality. The film is happy to show skin, but is far more interested in Thanatos than Eros. Nevertheless, the overall tone, the tactile excitement of the filmmaking, is sexy in its own way. The interstitial segments of dialogue and “acting” may strain credulity (a strength of Fulci’s more supernatural fare is that the surreality of the horror elements somehow justify what could otherwise be considered lapses in acting or dialogue), but when it gets cooking, it is thrilling, with a fully satisfying final act reveal.

Siege (1983)

I’m not sure why I finally pulled the trigger on this little Canadian b-movie with an uninspiring poster of people in sweaters holding guns (I guess that’s Canada for you), but I’m so glad I did. The premise is that during a police strike, a gang of militaristic right wingers show up at a gay bar to cause trouble. They’re murderous bastards and, without going into too much detail, only one guy gets away, who then proceeds to hide out in a run down apartment building with some folks who refuse to hand him over. At that point, it becomes a siege movie (hence the name) as the right wing militants try to get in and kill the guy and everyone else fights back to kill them. It’s tense and rough and kinda great.

Also, it is disturbing how much it feels totally about the world we live in now – I mean, the villains are basically proud boys, and there is a final shot that screams ACAB. I feel that there was a trend of scary-crime-in-the-city movies in the 70s and 80s that were very reactionary, and often more than a little racist, but I feel like this is the reverse of that. Maybe the scariest thing is how ‘normal’ the bad guys are – not visually intimidating “gang members” (ala a Death Wish or Police Academy movie), but just “normal” working class middle aged white guys who are sick of how “woke” everything is (in 1981, when it was filmed) and have assault rifles (it is really sadly familiar). Similarly, while the police strike raises the threat as there is no one to call for help, information revealed late in the film suggests that even if the cops were around, they might not be on the right side.

I could see how someone could object to the representation of the one gay character (everyone else is heroically fighting neo-nazis and he’s hiding in, of all things, a closet), but after what went down in the first scene, I get it. For me, it’s reminiscent of Barbara in the original Night of the Living Dead – she gets criticized as a misogynistically weak representation, but in her circumstances, I expect I’d break much like her and not rise to be some kind of hero…I think most people would. Also, on a representational level, I was surprised at how the bar at the beginning is shown. I would expect a movie like this to go for shock value, but Cruising this is not – the “gay bar” is just a normal bar with gay people in it, just trying have a normal enjoyable evening without getting shot.

Anyway, if you are up for enduring the ugly homophobia of the villains in order to have the satisfaction of seeing them all get got, I really recommend it!

The Black Phone (2022)

A hit in cinemas last fall, I was excited to see this show up for rent on a streamer I’ve got access to and I was really looking forward to finally checking it out. Unfortunately, I must say that this dose of throwback supernatural stranger danger didn’t completely do it for me, but I appreciate it being a weird little movie that really found an audience. A nice success story even if I didn’t love it.

In a small town in the late 70s, young boys have been disappearing. No one knows what’s going on, but somehow all the kids are still totally free to wander about on their own. Finally, our main character, Finney, who we see bullied at school and in fear of physical abuse at home, is abducted and thus we get a glimpse of where all the others have gone before, as well as the mysterious “grabber” (Ethan Hawke) who’s taken them. Finney finds himself trapped in a basement, held hostage by this enigmatic, masked killer who seems to toy with him, while on one wall, there is the titular black phone, periodically ringing and connecting him to the voices of the grabber’s past victims, giving advice, but also sometimes seeming to speak in riddles. At the same time, Finney’s younger sister, who has a degree of precognitive ability, is going into her dreams, trying to find and save him. Throughout, there is a pervasive sense of mystery and implications of the supernatural that may or may not pan out.

Based on a story by Joe Hill and directed by Scott Derrickson (Sinister, the first Doctor Strange), this is a movie with some intriguing ideas, which was interesting to track and see how it all came together (and it does come together in a satisfying way, though I’m not convinced it would hold up to scrutiny after the fact). But it just didn’t quite click for me. Maybe part of the problem is that I’d seen a lot of hype about it being “really scary” and while I am really not one to say that a horror movie needs to scare me to succeed, I did go to this one looking for that and didn’t find it. Still, I did enjoy the period and the mean roughness of the world of the kids. And I always appreciate Ethan Hawke’s commitment to keeping a foot in genre – he could have a career exclusively in indie artsy films, so it’s nice to see him make a horror flick every couple of years.  Plus, cool mask.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

I came to this one late. I was tired, but not ready for bed, and my wife was working. I just wanted something low commitment and short and silly, so my expectations were low. But this was really a great little movie. I mean, it kinda has everything: It starts with a really intense, well-choreographed and kinetically filmed schoolyard fist fight. It’s got the campy pleasure of absolute earnestness in its dialogue concerning the volatile juvenile delinquency of the main character, Tony (a young Michael Landon, later of Highway to Heaven). It’s got an amazing song and dance scene at the teenagers’ Halloween party at the old “haunted house.” It’s got an absolutely eeevil mad scientist in the form of Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Brandon, who wears a mask of rational civility, but while he is purportedly helping Tony “adjust” to social requirements, really he seeks to regress him to a more ‘pure,’ animalistic state to save humanity from the debilitating weaknesses and vices of modern civilization – you know, by making him a werewolf. And it of course has the promised teenage werewolf – his makeup might not be the best (did the designer ever actually see what teeth look like?), but the couple of sequences of stalking and killing are surprisingly effective – intense and shockingly brutal in their after-effects.

A youth-running-wild picture, filtered through a then contemporary obsession with psychology, mixed with a don’t-play-god – dangers of science run amok flick, and finally, bubbling up into a full blown monster movie, could a film be more of the 50s? Seriously, it’s a lot of fun, with high drama, real horror threat, and a solid dose of unintended humor that manages not to undercut the story’s impact. As I understand, it kicked off a whole subgenre of “I-was-a-teenage-_______” movies (AIP released two more the very same year: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula, which flipped the gender of the main character but is reportedly almost exactly the same story, beat for beat) which quickly fell into self-parody, but this first one is a peculiar little classic.

Smile (2022)

Another cinema hit from last year that I’m just now getting around to, this one is easy to put down as a jump scare filled cash grab, playing lip service to the now omnipresent notion of “trauma” while actually being little more than a shallow exercise in startling the audience.

But I thought it was great.

Is it particularly deep in its treatment of how witnessing or experiencing awful things can really mess us up inside, causing us to, in turn, perform actions that hurt others, perpetuating a cycle of psychological damage, of, shall we say, ‘trauma’? No, it is not, but who cares? It’s a solid premise to build a scary movie around, and the idea does invite scenes and contexts that lend emotional heft to the proceedings, while, yes, also making us jump. There are upsetting moments along the way that land emotionally (justice for Moustache the Cat!) and the concept is woven into a narrative that tracks consistently and makes for an intriguing mystery. And at the end of the day, this is a scary movie that is exactly what it says on the tin. I jumped. I was startled. I then laughed, cause it’s fun to get scared. That’s what I came to the movie for and it’s what I got.

The basic idea is that a therapist, Rose (Sosie Bacon), sees a first time patient who is in manic terror of an evilly grinning visage that is hounding her, telling her she’s going to die. She then proceeds to start smiling maniacally herself before slitting her own throat right in front of Rose. Then, as Rose starts seeing similarly disturbing images, she learns that the patient had seen another man kill himself only a few days earlier under similar circumstances, and that this trail of suicide-witness-suicides goes back and back and back. She therefore comes to understand that she has limited time left before the same fate befalls her…

I’ve read criticisms of how it just rehashes earlier films like Ringu/The Ring or It Follows, but that seems weird to me. I think it’s just that as an entry in a smaller sub-genre (the curse movie), some might only connect its story with a couple other similar films, but it is a concept at least as old as the 1911 M.R. James story, ‘Casting the Runes,’ enjoyably filmed as Night of the Demon (1957) (surely, it is a much older idea –that’s just the first version of it that comes to mind). Passing a curse from one person to the next is a narrative conceit that goes back a ways, and it’s solid. The claims of unoriginality could be similarly applied to any subgenre – just another ghost, just another masked killer, just another vampire – but much of the fun of following a genre is iterative – how does it play out this time?

My only criticism is that it does set up one thread that it didn’t return to. While Rose doesn’t kill herself in front of her nephew, in her terror and madness, she does rather traumatize him, and it seemed that the film was going to go somewhere with that, but never got around to returning to him. It was just a bit of a missed opportunity.  Anyway, I doubt I’ll feel drawn to revisit this over the years, but it was a good watch that delivered what it promised.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

I really did a lot of catching up on fall 2022 releases this week. While sold as a horror-comedy, I can’t say that I found this one especially comic, but it was a cool, energetic mix of an old fashioned ‘who’s the killer’ slasher with something modern, a work of social satire in an era obsessed with surfaces and social media fame.

A work of social-discomfort horror, we largely follow Bee (Maria Bakalova, who made a splash in the recent Borat movie) who is accompanying her girlfriend to a hurricane party with a group of her old, wealthy, very-hip friends. It’s immediately uncomfortable. A working class kid from an immigrant family, Bee clearly does not fit in, but past that, these so-called “friends” clearly detest each other and the notion of spending a weekend with them as the storm rages outside is not remotely appealing. Everyone is cool and pretty and rich, but the passive aggression and sniping is thick enough to cut with a knife. Once the storm starts, they play a game of “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (basically identical to “Werewolf” or “Mafia”), wherein one person is secretly assigned the ‘killer’ and everyone has to puzzle out who it is. Immediately the tension of the game brings old grievances to the fore and everyone turns on each other. This is only exacerbated when people actually start dying. And almost everyone dies – it is not a fun party.

Personally, the satirical elements targeting the current “image obsessed, ‘virtue signaling,’ tik tok focused” youth culture didn’t wow me – it’s kind of obvious stuff (also, there’s a late revelation that didn’t exactly surprise, but I don’t know if it was really supposed to or just confirm suspicions with a dark laugh), but regardless, I really liked the film. The core notion of the friends who are not friends thrust into a stressful situation that brings out the worst in everyone is well realized, and the young, vibrant energy of it all is fun. Lots of the early slashers were more in this model of Ten Little Indians mystery than that of the silent masked killer, and this is a nice, contemporary spin on something like April Fool’s Day or Graduation Day.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

On one level, this Spanish-Portuguese co-production from Armando de Ossorio is a creepy, attractively filmed spookfest, working in an atmospheric, slow, nightmarish euro style (which is my jam) – as if combining Romero with Rollin and Franco, but that’s reductive… likening it to work I’d deem superior, but also eliding elements unique to this film, both good and bad.

There were aspects that I’d call great: generally everything about the Blind Dead themselves: Satanic Knights Templar who had been excommunicated and executed, hanged from trees for the birds to peck out their eyes, now haunting an abandoned medieval village that all locals know to steer clear of, ready to rise from their titular tombs, ride horses in spooooky slow motion, and hunt by sound (cause they’re, you know, blind) to devour some pretty young woman who’s made the mistake of wandering by. They have a totally different character from a standard zombie – more akin to the vengeful ghosts in The Fog than most typical shambling corpses – decrepit skeletal figures in rotting robes, moving with intention if not sight, and I rather enjoyed elements like the old train engineer being unwilling to even slow down when travelling through Blind Dead country. It all feels ominously folksy.

There are also aspects that don’t make much sense, but we accept in a movie like this. Why does the first victim we see reanimate in the morgue (these not being infectious ‘zombies,’ but rather cursed ancient knights) to attack the sadistic and seemingly necrophiliac morgue worker and then go after the protagonist’s assistant? Who knows, but it’s cool and scary. What really is the point of the characters spending the night in the abandoned village? It’s not like winning some inheritance depends on surviving the night in a haunted house or something. But if they didn’t do it, the Blind Dead couldn’t attack them; and what would we do then for the whole final act?

Finally, there are some aspects that just don’t seem to go anywhere, which are button pushy, and which at best, feel like missed opportunities. We begin the film with the revelation of a romantic, or at least sexual, history between our protagonist, Betty and her old friend, Virginia. Discomfort about that is what causes Virginia to jump off of the train near the doomed village, thus setting events in motion. We never exactly return to this relationship after Virginia dies, but it is suggested that Betty has been consistent in her sexuality and has never slept with a man. Later there is an implication that, when alive and performing their infernal blood rites, the Blind Dead went after virginal sacrifices. Does this set Betty up as a special target? Nope. Not mentioned again. Then late in the film, Betty is raped by an unsavory character she’d bafflingly chosen to go for a late night walk with to the haunted cemetery. Does this somehow bring us back to the issue of “virginity” in terms of the ghost-knight-zombies? Nope. Doesn’t come up. It feels like these three elements were written to connect somehow, but they never do, and that leaves the relationship between the two women hanging and makes the rape sequence even more unpleasant as it is not connected to anything else in the story – at all. It’s just an ugly thing to be, you know, ugly I guess.

But, it must be said that the subsequent scene of Betty fleeing the carnage and running to the train that never stops in this area, really sings. And the ending is beautifully chilling, probably worth the price of admission. So, it’s a mixed bag.

Though I’d heard of it before, it particularly got on my radar as a podcast I listen to, Gaylords of Darkness, recently did an episode singing the praises of the third installment in this series (four movies in total), and I wanted to start at the beginning. Perhaps out of a sense of completionism, if nothing else, I do plan to watch the other three, and I’ll see what they offer.

The Guest (2014)

Not a horror film per se, Adam Wingard’s (You’re Next) thriller-cum-action movie is dripping with tense horror throwback 80s vibes. Riding on a synthwave groove, I’ve seen it aptly described by a user on Letterboxd as “John Carpenter’s Rambo” – an evocative, synth infused thriller about a soldier who’s returned from war and can’t stop doing what he was trained to do. I’d heard it was cool, but wow. It really is COOL, like – I couldn’t go to sleep last night after watching it cause I was so keyed up.

The Peterson family is still deep in mourning for their soldier son, presumably killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.  So when David (Dan Stevens), a young man who says he served with and was a friend of their son, knocks on their door to relay a final message from the battlefield, they end up welcoming him in. Then, ala some kind of 90s family thriller, he proceeds to seduce everyone, one by one, while some secretive menace lurks beneath his cold, piercing blue eyes. But while he is “seductive,” it isn’t generally sexual – though the whole movie has a really sexy atmosphere – David’s seduction is more personal than that. He sits and drinks with the father who confides about his insecurities; he beats the hell out of the jock bullies who make high school so hard for the younger son and encourages him to stand up for himself; with the mother, he shares warm reminiscences and helps out around the house – hanging laundry to dry, picking the kids up from school. And suddenly, things seem to be improving for everyone. For example, the father’s boss mysteriously dies, earning him a promotion. Hmmm – terrible, but also a spot of luck…

The only one who isn’t pulled in is the daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe), whose drug dealer boyfriend gets picked up by the cops after an anonymous tip. Duly suspicious, she calls an army helpline to get info on David, setting in motion the film’s more action oriented second half.

Again, this is not a horror movie, but David is horrific. His human mask can be so warm, so personable, but there are moments where we glimpse what Dr. Loomis would have called “the Devil’s eyes” – cold and empty like a shark’s. But even though we’re privy to those icy, threatening moments, he still seduces us simply by virtue of being really damn cool. There can be such a pleasure in a capable, efficient villain who does what needs doing unhampered by remorse, who when asked if he has the money to buy illicit goods, can simply smile and explain that he won’t be paying for them because he’s just going to kill everybody present. And then he does.

The action is tight. The vibe is killer. There’s tension up the wazzoo. And while again, it’s not horror, it is clearly made by one who loves the genre. The climax happens at a school gym decorated for the Halloween dance, the score really does bring to mind Carpenter, and there is even an Easter egg for Halloween III: Season of the Witch that made me laugh out loud on sighting it. What a blast! Now I need to revisit You’re Next.

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And there we have it – I’m late getting this post up, but in the last week and a half I did watch 8 movies for the first time that are at least horror adjacent and most of them were pretty great – so I am now that much more learned and experienced, right? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I just justified letting myself watch too much TV. Anyway, now it’s time to choose something for next week. Gotta keep that wall wet…

The Shining Compared – Book and Film

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It’s odd that two works you love can be thrust into conflict with each other. But hey, that’s a lot of the discourse that circulates online – fans of one film feel compelled to oppose those of another; liking or disliking a work of fiction mysteriously causing people to hate you to the core of their beings – and for some stupid reason, we all feel compelled to have an opinion about everything (I write on my blog). We live in strange times. Usually, I find these conflicts fruitless and frustrating (as I’ve written about before), but every once in a blue moon, there is an interesting discussion to be had. Case in point – Stephen King reportedly hated The Shining – not his own book, of course, but Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation thereof. In a clash of two creators, both of whom have put out really valuable work (both these two pieces and in their careers writ large), I think it’s fascinating to look at the differences of approach and see where each is coming from – to look at both pieces on their own terms, appreciating what they each offer, while still considering how and why they differ.

And so that’s what we’re going to do today – look at King’s 1977 novel and Kubrick’s 1980 film. Both are, in my opinion, great works of horror, and they share many surface similarities of plot, location, and character, but in some ways they couldn’t be more different. There are many reasons for this, but the claim I’d like to make is that their essential difference is in the point of reader/viewer identification – though both works shift viewpoint between Jack, Wendy, Danny, and Dick, I think Jack is the main lens through which one views the book, while his son, Danny, serves this function for the film, and this makes an essential difference.

The Novel – The Shining (1977)

It came first, so we’ll start with the book. Jack and Wendy Torrance have relocated to Colorado with Danny, their young son, after Jack lost his teaching job back east for assaulting a student. In flashbacks, we learn of Jack’s longstanding problems with drinking and anger management, but also about the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his alcoholic father, as well as the emotional abuse Wendy received from her mother. Spending time behind both of their eyes, we feel how scared, and how conflicted, both of them are about the potential danger Jack poses to his wife and son, how neither wants to become their respective, problematic parent. At the start of the story, Jack’s been dry for a while (after drunkenly breaking Danny’s arm in a moment of impatience), and he is doing his best to hold it together, repair their relationships, and rebuild trust with Wendy and Danny. It is obvious that he does love them and lives in fear of failing and/or hurting them, but the anger and the resentment is still always there, roiling under the surface. Having shown some promise as a young author, he is trying to finish a play which is inspired by his experiences as a teacher, but is having trouble sorting it out, haunted by the insecurity that he may not be able to fulfill his early literary promise.

And then there is Danny – a very aware, very mature young child, who also happens to have psychic abilities – sometimes privy to knowledge he shouldn’t have, catching echoes of the future or the past, reading thoughts, or just knowing things. He loves his parents, but he also sees them more clearly than they would probably like – aware of when his father is thinking about “the bad thing” (drinking), knowing when his mother is scared or angry at Jack. These abilities warn him not to go when his parents plan to spend a winter taking care of The Overlook Hotel – a beautiful remote mountain resort, but sadly that’s not his choice to make. Of course, the hotel is haunted. Or if not haunted exactly, it is clearly a very bad place – malicious and aware, filled with the residual traces of countless murders and crimes that have taken place there, hungry to consume this young family, particularly Danny, who with his power, would make a real tasty morsel.

Thus, the lion share of the story consists of Jack being seduced by the hotel, plied with drink (which doesn’t really exist – but is no less addictive), and most importantly given his insecurities, a sense of belonging and importance – he could be “management material” – in order to turn against his wife and son and ultimately kill them, feeding the bad place, as we know a previous caretaker had done to his wife and daughters some years back.

Along the way, there’s a bunch of genuinely scary stuff. As with an early scene in It, King captures that sense of having to go down into the dark basement to get some batteries, only to scare the hell out of yourself for no reason and go running back up the stairs to the relative safety of the afternoon light. You know there was nothing down there, and you feel silly, but that makes it no less terrifying. There’s an awful scene with a wasp nest (I’m allergic so yikes!), topiary animals and fire hoses seem to spring to malicious life, a creeping unseen presence hunts after Danny in the playground, and a dead woman comes for both him and his father in the iconic Room 217.

But while we spend a great deal of time with both Danny and Wendy (not to mention Dick Hallorann, the cook who shares a sliver of Danny’s abilities and makes a heroic journey to come save the day), this is clearly Jack’s book through and through. It is his emotional struggle with his own past, with his experience of idolizing and fearing his own alcoholic father, of pitying and despising his also abused mother who failed to protect him, of struggling with his own resentment, his own self-doubt, his compulsion to dull his fears and frustrations with anything that will do the job.

He is seduced by the hotel – it plays at respecting him, at being the good bartender – listening without judgement as he voices his hidden frustration and anger towards his family. The hotel will give him what he wants – even offering up its own deeply sordid history as a fascinating new writing project which could bring him the literary acclaim he so craves – respect to prove that he is not just a flash in the pan drunk, now doomed to menial labor and a lifetime of growing smaller. It will also serve him all the martinis he likes, loosening his tongue, wearing down what resistance he still has until he’s finally willing to act on his darkest, most shameful impulses and serve his family up to the hotel’s gaping maw.

King in ’77

While material with the other characters is enjoyable and effective, it is the time we spend with Jack that feels most personal and emotionally grounded. Maybe this is a bit of projection, knowing something of King’s biography, but it really doesn’t feel like a stretch to suppose that this author, writing his third novel after some early success and still feeling a need to prove himself, who has said that around this time, he’d been drinking a case of beer a day and worried about the welfare of his wife and son, might have identified most strongly with the character of Jack – investing more of himself in his struggles and crafting a story that in addition to being scary, is ultimately a terrifying and moving tragedy – the story of Jack failing, giving into his worst self – and doing what he always feared he might – becoming his own father, and much worse. It feels deeply autobiographical – it feels meaningful. It feels. It is a book with feeling, about a father who loves his family but still tries to destroy them.

The Film – The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick’s film is very simply, a totally different beast. Whereas the book is warm and emotional, the film is icy cold and alienating. Whereas the book serves up scary sequences in a traditional horror sense, the film removes almost all of them and really doesn’t look or feel like any kind of standard ‘haunted house’ flick. And whereas the book delivers emotional and psychological horror in addition to its scares, the film elides psychology, back story, and much of the context, resulting in a masterpiece of atmospheric horror in an almost Lovecraftian “cosmic” sense – there is an overwhelming impression of sanity-rending wrongness – both weirdly fascinating (like some dangerous, beautiful insect) and deeply unsettling.

So let’s look at King’s criticisms: “The movie has no heart; there’s no center to the picture,” he said. “I wrote the book as a tragedy, and if it was a tragedy, it was because all the people loved each other … here, it seems there’s no tragedy because there’s nothing to be lost.” As best as I can tell, this is the essence of his objections – he wrote a book that was all heart – and that heart was his, bared, fully rooted in his own personal fears, experiences, and doubts. We spend time behind the eyes, with the thoughts and intentions, of all of his characters. We know what Wendy is thinking – her calculations as she decides whether or not to stick it out with the potentially dangerous man that she loves. We see Danny’s view of his parents and even in the final moments, he and his father are allowed one loving interaction before it all comes crashing down. I can sympathize with King taking personally Kubrick’s excision of this deeply personal, heartfelt material (but to be fair, I also remember reading King propagating the old chestnut of writerly advice – “you have to murder your darlings” – but I guess it really chafes when someone else does it).

Kubrick’s film comes from a different, much colder, more inhuman space. The stunning opening helicopter shots, as the credits role, show Jack’s VW as a miniscule, insignificant object, utterly dwarfed by the surrounding mountainous landscapes, and this sense of scale, of human smallness and powerless carries through the film. Once odd, menacing things start happening at the hotel, we have no context for them – neither we nor the Torrences understand what is going on or why. Compare this with the book where between Jack’s research into the hotel’s history and the stories Dick Halloran tells Danny, we get a sense of the historical episode that is recurring whenever a character experiences something weird. The film gives up none of that, keeping many of those details but explaining none of them and thus crafting an overwhelming experience of the uncanny (which I’ve heard in German translates roughly as “un-homely” which I think is fitting – the hotel is a house – in every way it looks like a place to live and be comfortable, but it is not a “home”). Everything is somehow alien; things seeming more or less ‘normal’ but are clearly not, and the what, how, and why of it all are forever beyond our meager human capacity for comprehension.

In the book, Dick Halloran makes his long, heroic journey and really helps save Wendy and Danny. In the film, like some dark cosmic joke, he makes the same heroic journey only to find himself on the end of Jack’s axe within moments of entering the hotel. The universe does not love us and nothing and nobody is coming to help – we are on our own and it’s only getting colder.

King fairly complained that the characters lack an arc, but that is natural in something so unconcerned with character – and does every film need to be? They do have an experience, and it is an enveloping and disturbing one that we share with them, but it is more like an encounter with nature – or something beyond nature: cold, hostile, unapproachable, and cruel – than it is like a ‘story’ in a traditional sense.

Reportedly King also hated Jack Nicholson’s performance: “When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he’s crazy as a shit house rat. All he does is get crazier.” And he’s not really wrong, but I feel this is a choice rather than a failing (Kubrick was famously obsessive about every little detail in his films – it’s hard to imagine anything being an accident). And this brings me back to my main theory of where the works diverge. If Jack is the key to the novel, Danny is the key to the film.

Danny is a very young child, maybe 4 years old, growing up in the shadow of an alcoholic, rage filled, deeply resentful father, basically just a sad loser and angry about it. (Has this version of Jack ever actually written anything (we never hear about it)? Will he? Why did he lose his teaching job? Could he recover any sense of self or is he doomed to be a small, violent man forever blaming the world, and especially his family, for his own failings?) Danny’s father has hurt him at least once and very easily could again. Danny’s browbeaten mother has not been physically abused yet as far as we know, but has obviously suffered emotional trauma in this relationship, and while she does her best to protect Danny, she’s already been reduced to such a state that she is generally ineffectual in this regard (though I must disagree with King that she is misogynistically presented as weak – in fact, I’d say she does the most – The book’s Wendy was pretty tough from the beginning, but seeing Shelly Duvall’s mousy Wendy grow from this small, broken, nervous woman into someone who fights back is, for me, more moving – and  her newfound strength is all the more inspiring for how hard it is for her to claim – also, she’s been doing Jack’s damn job the whole time while he sits around going crazy – she is more than she seems).

Especially with his psychically heightened sensitivity, Danny witnesses so much more than he is ready for – and while the book makes this kind of intellectual (hearing verbal thoughts, understanding things he shouldn’t be able to understand), the film doesn’t give us such details, and we can only assume a more emotional, spiritually impressionistic experience, leading at one point to a kind of self-defense catatonia. In fact, his awareness of the emotional threat in his family unit, without being able to really understand it, is a fair parallel for our uncanny experience of the film as a whole.

Danny loves his father, but lives in terror of this mercurial, angry, sad man – and while he sees and hears and feels so much more than he should ever have to, he doesn’t understand what he’s experiencing or why his father is so angry, so dangerous. And that is the film in a nutshell – we get the generalized terror but we don’t get the understanding. We see Jack as Danny sees him – a mystery, a sword hanging by a thread ready to snap at any moment. He isn’t the sympathetic tragic figure of the novel, but rather a force of threatening nature that can’t really be communicated with – that can perhaps be escaped, but which can never really be placated. Jack is basically crazy from the beginning, but he hasn’t quite broken yet and the bad vibes of the bad place of the Overlook Hotel, along with simply being locked in with the wife and child he so resents just pushes him over the edge to which he’d already been dangerously close.

Our experience of the film as a whole parallels Danny’s relationship with his dad – we can’t really understand what is going on, but while we are drawn to keep watching, the film itself looks back at us with a sense of cold menace, as if, like Jack, like the hotel, it sees us as small irritants to crush. It is, from the first frame, a beautiful, fascinating film that you don’t want to look away from – just as Danny does love his father and wants to be close to him, to be loved by him – but both the film and the father represent truly ineffable threats. We are enraptured, but never shake the feeling of being cruelly appraised by the object of our fascination. It is all beautiful, but we are lost in its maze (like the hedge maze that doesn’t even feature in the book), just as Danny is engulfed by the hypnotic carpet.

King’s Shining is a moving, tragic, terrifying horror story about a family in what is essentially a haunted house. Kubrick’s is a unique film, so unlike most horror cinema (or any other genre as well) with its singular style and cinematic vocabulary, and yet truly horrific in a cold, Lovecraftian way, and like in Lovecraft’s writing, there is little character or narrative really. When thinking of my favorite horror films, this doesn’t always make the list, and yet every time I sit down to watch it, it blows me away again, beguiling me, enfolding me in its icy inhumanity, baffling me with things I’m not meant to understand, but which, for all that, never feel arbitrary – everything resonates, feeling horrifically real, but just beyond my ability to wrap my head around.

King wrote an excellent, scary, sad horror novel and Kubrick made an amazing, truly horrific horror film. And they could not be more different. I understand why King hated the adaptation – I can see how he could take it personally, but I think this is a case where outside of his personal, well-justified reaction, we need not choose sides, setting our house against itself – life is hard enough as it is. I’m glad to have them both. I’m grateful to both artists for their contributions. I hope that’s ok with you…

Post 100 – One Hundred Years of Horror Films

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So here’s a bit of a milestone. A little more than a year and a half in, this is my 100th post on this here blog (and also marks passing 200,000 words – a decent length book). In that time, I’ve reviewed 112 movies and 8 books (reading goes more slowly), I’ve composed 50 poems, and I’ve done essays on a range of topics from trying to define the genre and tracking how I got into horror to the often sadly toxic nature of fandom and issues of gender or queerness in horror. I’ve also put together quite a few lists.

And as 100 is a nice round number, that is what we’re going to do again today. I thought it could be fun, or at least interesting, to build a list that somehow looks back on the last one hundred years of horror films, highlighting one from each decade. I’m not making a claim that these are the “ten best” horror films or that each is the “best” of its decade, but rather, I’d like to draw attention to one film that is worthy of consideration, that might be a bit off the beaten path, and that might be somehow representative of the time in which it was made (also, I’m not allowing anything I’ve written about previously – which will sometimes rule out a film I would have otherwise chosen). I might not succeed on all counts for each entry (when it gets to the 30s and 40s, I just haven’t seen enough films to really offer a hidden gem that most people haven’t seen), but I’ll do my best. And hey, I’m the one paying for hosting, so let’s say that’s good enough.

So, here are Ten Great (or at least pretty good) Possibly-Underseen-Possibly-Representative-Films from Ten Decades (that I’ve not written about before). With catchy headings like that, how have I not taken over the internet?

2020s – Freaky (2020)

It’s still early in the decade, but I do think this one stands out as worth mentioning. For one thing, this combination of Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th, with Millie (Kathryn Newton), a shy teen girl accidentally swapping bodies with a Jason-esque slasher killer (embodied by Vince Vaughn), is just a ton of fun. It’s a great, high concept premise and it takes both its Teen Comedy and its Slasher tropes seriously, committing to both the laughs and the violence. But in addition, I do think it’s a good example of a recently identified trend.

In one of my earliest posts, I discussed a presentation at an academic conference given by Dr. Steve Jones on what he termed the “metamodern slasher.” Whereas from the mid-90s through the early 2000s, many slashers took an ironic, postmodern turn, resting on a self-referentiality that made a joke of its own subject matter (see, e.g., Jason X (2001) and its holodeck scene), recently there has been a recurrence of (still self-aware) emotional sincerity and Freaky is a good example of that. This is a funny movie, and while I don’t know how scary it is, per se, it is violent and gory. But it is also very emotional. Much of Millie’s story revolves around her father’s recent death and what this has done to her relationship with her mother and older sister. The film does knowingly play with genre tropes for comic effect, but the journey is actually one of healing and reconciliation. And along the way, Millie is rooted in friendships with other young people whom we are meant to like and hope won’t get killed, no “disposable teens” here.

There are still (and I expect always will be) actually scary, hard, disturbing movies being made, so I don’t think this trend threatens the bona fides of the genre, but I think it’s great that there’s also a place for work with as much heart as this. Kudos to Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, who directed and co-wrote, respectively.

2010s – Bliss (2019)

It’s hard to choose a characteristic film from this decade. I think the biggest trend was probably films like The Babadook (2014), The VVitch (2015), or Hereditary (2018) reminding everybody that horror can deal with serious ideas and strong emotions, and feature significant performances and artistry (this is nothing new of course, but I guess from time to time, non-horror-fan pop culture writers need a refresher), launching the much derided phrase, “elevated horror.” And I really love all of these, but I feel like everyone knows them already and thus, they don’t need much support.

Joe Begos’s Bliss is a smaller film that may not be on as many people’s radar, but I think should be. The premise is that a young artist whose trouble finishing a commissioned painting coincides with her sobriety, after getting some bad news, goes on a bender, and in the process of doing a lot of drugs, happens to become a vampire. The metaphor of “vampiric bloodthirst as addiction” is not novel, but the addition of the artistic drive to the mix clicked for me. The film finds the parallels between the self-destructive, self-erasing drive of drug addiction, the outwardly destructive violence of being a vampire, and the mesmerizing thrill of being lost in creativity – of a place where the line between subject and object is obliterated and the action of making is the only thing that remains – the artist lost in the art – creation as oblivion.

This makes it all sound philosophical or heady, but it must also be said that this low budget flick goes hard. The violence and gore is intense and well executed. And the whole ride was very satisfying for me as a vampire story, all artistic pretensions aside. One of my favorite recent discoveries, I definitely want to check out more of Begos’s work (I also rather enjoyed his Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022), which was just released for the last holiday season.) Finally, in works that revolves around a painting like this, we usually don’t really get to see it, but in this case, the artwork, painted by Chet Zar, is present throughout, and I found it so refreshing to see it evolve with the main character. Plus, it’s pretty cool looking.

2000s – Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

This is another case where the dominant trends of the decade don’t seem all that necessary to get into. We know that there were loads of slick/gritty remakes of classics from the 70s and 80s, and past that, everyone was talking about “torture porn.” There were also a bunch of great movies that didn’t fit either of those categories. The Descent (2005), The Strangers (2008), Shaun of the Dead (2004), and the House of the Devil (2009) are all stand out examples, but I want to focus on an earlier film that I suspect is underseen.

Shadow of the Vampire tells the story of F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich) filming the iconic, essential, early vampire film, Nosferatu (1922), but posits that rather than hiring a professional actor who had performed with the acclaimed Max Reinhardt company (as happened in “real life”), he sourced an actual old world vampire (Willem Defoe) to lend the production authenticity. It is a fun, often hilarious, premise, but though it’s frequently quite funny, it is all played straight. Joining the ranks of the real Max Schreck and Klaus Klinski (who was great in Herzog’s 1979 remake), Defoe’s vampire is genuinely creepy, while still evoking real pathos. It’s a carefully crafted, very physical performance, and it may be one of my favorites.

While the vampire is a direct physical threat, the actual villain of the piece is Malkovich’s Murnau who is so intent on creating his art that he’s more than willing to sacrifice his actors and crew to that end. The rest of the cast is just great (Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, and Udo Kier are a treat), and the film is quietly haunting, even if it’s not short on laughs along the way. It is beautiful and funny, and occasionally even a bit scary.

1990s – Cemetery Man (1994)

The 90s are oft-derided as a poor decade for the genre, but of course some flicks have stood the test of time. In the wake of Scream (1996), there was a fresh teen slasher cycle. Before that, there were a number of reality benders that all have warm places in my heart such as Jacob’s Ladder (1990), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), not to mention what may still stand as my favorite horror film of all time, Candyman (1992). But instead I’d like to focus on a quirky, weird little treat: Michele Soave’s Dellamorte Dellamore, released in America as Cemetery Man in 1996.

Based on an Italian comic by Tiziano Sclavi, this was my introduction to Italian horror well before I’d heard of Argento, Fulci, Bava, or Soave himself for that matter (who’d earlier made one of my favorite horror films of the 80s – Stagefright). It was even before I was particularly into horror movies – I mean, I’d watch them occasionally, but wasn’t really a fan yet.

I’ll always remember seeing this with one of my best friends in high school. We’d checked the newspaper to find out what was playing at the mall and while every other film came with a short description, this had nothing. When we got to the cinema, there was no poster and the title of the film was just written on an index card with a magic marker. We soon found that we were the only two people who’d come to see this mystery of a film and in the first few minutes of weirdness, assumed that we’d found some silly, bad B movie and figured at least we could crack jokes with each other. But we soon shut up because it was freaking amazing!

Set in a small Italian village, Francesco (Rupert Everett) is the cemetery caretaker whose main responsibilities include waiting for the dead to rise, as they always inevitably do, shooting them in the head, and re-burying them. He falls in love with a young widow at a funeral who is unfortunately bitten by her husband’s reanimated corpse as she and Francesco make love on her spouse’s fresh grave. He then has to kill her again and again and again; but she always seems to return.

It is an odd film to say the least. Gory, funny, sexual, morbid, poetic, and phantasmagoric, it somewhat defies description. But in its absolute weirdness, it is really something fresh and fun and challenging. It is a cheap b-movie. It’s also an existential meditation on living and dying. It’s also full of political subtext. It’s also dreamy and beautiful. I’m so glad we rolled the dice and went to see it. 

1980s – Intruder (1989)

I think it’s obvious that the 1980s were the era of the slasher. There were of course, the big franchises, but also literally hundreds of smaller pictures capitalizing on the simple premise of some (generally human) madman stalking and killing a hapless group of young people.

But rather than focus on any of the big names, I’d like to draw your attention to the deliriously fun late 80s supermarket-set entry, Intruder. Directed by Scott Spiegel, one could be forgiven for thinking it just might have been filmed by Sam Raimi, given how prominently his name was featured on the poster (he plays a small part, along with his brother, Ted, as well as the always enjoyable Bruce Campbell – I guess Spiegel worked on Evil Dead I and II, and all of them had been friends in high school). But the style feels quite similar as well – high praise indeed.

This is a pretty simple set up – the young workers of a small grocery store are doing a nightshift inventory when they all get locked in with a killer who picks them off one by one. But however straightforward the premise, it is filmed within an inch of its life. The creativity and energy that suffuse every shot is thrilling, making it a really fun, exciting movie, full of over the top murder set pieces, and a few actual twists and turns as you try to unravel the mystery of who is behind the killings and why. The camera is always finding new surprising places to watch the action from, and the bloody, bloody practical effects are great. This grimy little “dead teenager picture” was clearly made with love and glee, and its creative enthusiasm is unmistakable. One of those films that feels like it’s so much better than it possibly needed to be, it really deserves to be seen.

1970s – Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is one of my favorite kinds of horror movies: hard to pin down or categorize, uncanny, and just beautiful. Is it a vampire movie? Maybe. A ghost movie? Possibly? A psychological drama about a woman struggling with mental illness, desperate to keep a grip on an ever more slippery reality? Definitely, but it’s probably those other things too. It is also an exemplary sample of where horror cinema was in the 1970s.

Along with such stand out films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Messiah of Evil (1973), this is a deeply unsettling, independent feature with a real artistic, poetic sensibility. There is a story, and an emotionally affecting one at that, but more than anything else, this movie is a mood. The atmosphere is so hazy, eerie, and beautiful, and I adore dwelling in that space.

The film follows Jessica (Zohra Lampert), recently released from a mental institution as she, her husband, and their friend, Woody, relocate from the stress and anxiety of the city to the supposed peacefulness of a run-down farm house upstate, only to find it currently inhabited by an intriguing, alluring drifter named Emily. All free-love, counterculture types, they let her stay on and things get immediately uncomfortable as Emily seems to be seducing both of the men. Also, she just might be a vampire/ghost who’s resided in the house for over 100 years, holding the creepy, elderly, seemingly exclusively male denizens of the town in her thrall.

Or Jessica is just paranoid, letting her mind run away with her. With frequent voiceover on her part, the whole film clearly has an unreliable narrator and nothing we see can fully be trusted. But something is definitely wrong (besides the clouds of poison they’re spraying in their newly purchased apple orchard).

The whole ordeal is a mesmerizing death trip, both seductive and threatening, and it’s clearly worth a watch if you have the patience for its languid, spooky, and ultimately unresolved vibe.

1960s – Repulsion (1965)

Speaking of mental instability, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion is really at the top of the game. In choosing a film that encapsulates this decade, my first impulse was his Rosemary’s Baby, easily one of my favorite horror films, but everyone already knows how good it is, and I think this striking, black and white piece from just a few years earlier might not be on as many people’s radar. Nonetheless, its exploration of urban paranoia amidst an epoch of great social change and shifting sexual mores is equally captivating.

Primarily taking place within a small London apartment, we follow Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a quiet young woman, left alone for some time as her sister has gone away on holiday with her lover. She seems tormented and repulsed by male attention and the notion of sex (for reasons that seem apparent by the end of the film), and left to her own devices, starts to unravel. Beset by recurring nightmares of rape and assault, Carol retreats into her domestic space, but even that does not feel stable or inviolate, its boundaries breached by men either blithely oblivious to her fears or explicitly predatory, its walls seeming to crack open, allowing in the external masculine threat. By the end, plenty of blood has been spilled and her mind has been shattered.

It is a boldly filmed, emotionally intense piece, clearly the work of a hungry young artist, eager to show off his vast potential. I remember the first time watching it, thinking, “Why aren’t films shot like this anymore – so expressively, making such strong choices?”  And past just being a triumph of style and technical prowess, the psychological terror really lands. Carol may have stronger, less controlled reactions than many, but the danger she feels is real. The world is full of men who will not respect her limits or her agency, who will force their wills upon her, men like the director himself perhaps.

1950s – The Giant Claw (1957)

So, this decade is a bit tricky as I just haven’t seen that many 50s horror films. Furthermore, I’ve already written about many of my favorites, such as The Bad Seed (1956), House of Wax (1953), Godzilla (1954), or Les Diaboliques  (1955). And so, rather than write about a good terrifying movie that was made in the 50s, I want to write about a terrifically fun movie that might typify a dominant trend in those years. Hence, we have one of the most deliriously enjoyable, silly, red-threat adjacent monster movies of the time, The Giant Claw.

Do we have a giant alien bird from an “anti-matter galaxy” as big as an aircraft carrier that can only be defeated by the square-jawed American military? You betcha! Is the monster puppet as lame as could be hoped for, with eyes that can never focus in one place? Oh yeah! Is the film’s gender politics hilariously out of date, featuring such delightful tropes as the “lady mathematician” whose primary role is making sandwiches for all the very-serious men, and who responds to what today would be considered mild sexual assault by falling in love with the guy? But, of course!

Apparently, there is an unsubstantiated report that the marionette of the interdimensional beastie was made in Mexico City for only $50. While that hasn’t been proven, it isn’t much of a stretch to believe. But I don’t want you to think that I’m saying this is a bad movie. I mean, it is. But it’s also a great movie. At least, if a film can be judged not by abstract, and perhaps outdated, aesthetic concepts like ‘quality,’ ‘logical consistency,’ and ‘technical adequacy,’ but rather, by how much unadulterated joy it can instill in its viewers, then this is a masterpiece for the ages.

1940s – Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Again a decade that I’m not that deeply versed in – what stands out most for me would be the Val Lewton produced pictures made for RKO like Cat People (1942) or I Walked with a Zombie (1943), but I’m already in the middle of a series of posts about them, so let’s look in another direction. Coming at the tail end of Universal’s second horror cycle, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is one of the earliest and best horror comedies. Truth be told, it is pretty much exclusively a comedy, with the horror elements all played for laughs, but it is genuinely funny in ways that have held up well through the decades, and it is so steeped in the horror films that came before to make it a a treat for any lover of the classic monsters.

Bela Lugosi returns as Dracula, the mastermind of a nefarious, multi-monster plot. Lon Chaney Jr. reprises his doomed Lawrence Talbot, the wolf man. Karloff had long since stopped playing Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange, who’d played the monster twice before, stepped in), but Vincent price does ‘show up’ as the voice of the invisible man, a suitably silky replacement for Claude Rains. And of course, there’s Bud Abbott and Lou Costello bumbling in and out of danger. I’ve read that its success was blamed for the downturn the genre took in subsequent years, the formerly terrifying monsters reduced to a series of jokes, but it really is funny, and I can’t imagine being angry at it. When I was a little kid I wasn’t ready to seriously be scared, but I loved monsters. This is the perfect film for that. I can establish no certain causal link, but I wonder if without this, we would have ever gotten such kid-friendly, fun, horror-themed works as The Munsters, Scooby-Doo, or, The Monster Squad.

1930s – The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

In previous entries, I often tried to choose some underseen treasure, but here I’ve just got to go with one of the biggies. Honestly, I think any of James Whales’s films for Universal could qualify as exemplary of the era, but I’ve already at least briefly discussed The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933), and in my opinion, The Bride of Frankenstein is just untouchable.

In it, I think Whale takes everything that he’d already brought to the first entry and dialed it up to eleven: its gorgeous gothic atmosphere, its wicked, subversive sense of humor, and its real pathos for the creature – a figure of both fear and pity. Also, it is just really, really weird. I mean, just consider Dr. Pretorius’s collection of tiny jar people – something Mary Shelly somehow failed to include in her seminal work.

It is such a fun, funny movie. From the high camp of Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorious, to Una O’Connor’s hilarious screaming/fainting servant, to the bizarre, aforementioned miniature jar-folk, the film sustains a wild comic streak. But in spite of that, it is also creepy, sometimes a bit scary (for its time), and surprisingly heartfelt. I can’t imagine someone watching this without sympathizing with the poor creature, however many bereft villagers, still mourning the death of their children, he strangles. A lonely outcast, shunned and hated by society, he stands in for the disenfranchised writ large and the return of the repressed, and Karloff shines (as he generally did – he was outstanding) – his performance physically expressive and emotionally nuanced. And of course, when the Bride finally appears (my only gripe being that the absolutely iconic title character, played by Elsa Lanchester, is barely in the film), she is granted a kind of tragic agency. She may have been constructed solely to wed the creature, but on first seeing him, she recoils and screams. It is heartbreaking for him, but at the same time, oddly empowering to see her allowed her own will, her own desire – or lack thereof.

It is a sad, haunting, odd, dramatic, very funny film. What a combination – just whistling through the graveyard. It also feels quite personal. James Whale was an out gay director working in Hollywood in the era of the Hays code and morals clauses. Knowing a bit about his biography, it is impossible not to view this film through that lens – the monster a social pariah, feared and hated for what he is, seeking companionship and community (not to mention the film’s campy sensibility and that the driver of the story is Dr. Pretorius coming to his old colleague, Dr. Frankenstein on his wedding night to take him away from his new bride so they can create life in their own special way, without recourse to the womb), this queer reading ascribing further depth to what was already a moving, unique picture.

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And so, there we have ten films from ten decades that I wholeheartedly recommend. Some are big hitters in the genre, and others are a bit more off the beaten path, but all are great in their way, and all demonstrate some characteristic features of their era.

And also, there we have one hundred posts, covering the last roughly year and a half. This blog has been and continues to be an interesting project for me, and I still have plenty of ideas of what I might write about in the weeks and months to come. That said, I must admit that I sometimes feel I’m throwing words into the void. Google Analytics tells me I have visitors, but I don’t really know who any of you are, so if you feel like it, maybe drop a comment and say hi (it will be a nice break from the endless Russian Spam-Bots pushing online casinos and porn). What would be on your list of highlights form the last ten decades?

But also, if you don’t feel like commenting, no worries. Thanks for being here. I’m honored to have you.