Tag Archives: 80s

Permeable Bodies and Minds in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I’ve previously made mention of how Clive Barker played a key role in bringing me into the horror genre. Though I’d always loved Halloween, monsters, and the gothic, I really wasn’t a horror kid. I enjoyed themes of supernatural otherness, of dark modern fantasy, of a reversal of expectations wherein what seemed bestial is actually noble and what seemed good and just is in fact cruel, but I wasn’t ready for horror per se – I had an active imagination, and I was just too easily scared. And so, it seems somewhat surprising that a “splatterpunk” author whom Stephen King had crowned the “future of horror” ended up serving as my gateway to darker fare.

One day I happened upon a copy of Barker’s epic novel, ‘Imajica’ while grocery shopping with my parents, and a door was opened. This was not, mind you, a work of horror, so much as dark modern fantasy/mythologizing, spanning many realms of being, doing deep, weird, intriguing world-building, centering on a kind of amnesiac Christ figure who goes on a journey of supernatural otherness, and comes into his own, ultimately rebelling against the cruel, patriarchal, fascistic authority of the many worlds (it was right up my alley). It occupied such an ambitiously large canvas; it was surprising and transgressive in the extremity of its events – narratively, sexually, in terms of violence and action, and also in how character did not seem totally fixed, but was somehow more fluid, in flux, as was everything else in existence. And the writing was cinematic and visual and striking. My imagination was captivated. I’m sure I read it multiple times in those first years and I tried to push it on others – people needed to know about this strange, wonderful book.

From there, I first tore through the other large scale weird fiction epics Barker was writing at the time (‘Everville,’ ‘The Great and Secret Show,’ ‘Weaveworld’) before venturing into the work that had made him most famous, his horror fiction, such as his collections of short stories, ‘The Books of Blood (Volumes 1-6),’ ‘Cabal’ (on which Nightbreed was based), ‘The Damnation Game,’ and ‘The Hellbound Heart’ (on which Hellraiser was based). And I loved it all.

How much I loved it was quite the surprise given how I hadn’t thought of myself as a horror fan yet. I might watch a horror movie occasionally with some friends, but I didn’t really seek it out. In fact, I clearly remember renting Candyman (based on Barker’s story, ‘The Forbidden,’ collected in Volume 5 of the ‘Books of Blood’) with a friend in high school and being so scared part way through that we had to turn it off. But when I finally read the original story, I was so enamored of its gorgeous central conceit (an embodied urban myth seducing the protagonist to willingly be his victim, living eternally in beauty, as story, free of the burdens of being, a cautionary tale told to children, a reason for lovers to clutch each other more tightly in the dark) that I finally returned to the film and fell for it as well (it stands as one of my favorite films of any genre).

Something that struck me as I worked my way through his horror writing was how little it scared me. It was clearly horror – incredibly gory and gleefully perverse, transgressing any and all boundaries of propriety, morality, flesh, or reality, but while it could frequently elicit a delicious shudder of disgust or tragic appreciation, it never made me scared of what lurked in the dark under my bed. It really took a different approach, implicitly introducing me to the fact that horror need not scare to be ‘good’ (thankfully, as these days, I’ve watched so much that new scares are truly hard to come by).

Cenobite concept art by Barker.

And so, this week, I’d like to dig into Barker’s work a bit, and to do so through the lens of one of his most known works, namely Hellraiser (1987), which Barker wrote and directed (his first feature film) based on his own aforementioned novella, ‘The Hellbound Heart.’ Honestly, I don’t exactly consider these the most “Clive Barker-esque” works of his oeuvre, but they clearly contain representative samples of the elements that make him so special, and what’s more, given how large Hellraiser looms over horror cinema (as a great film of its era, as a long running (mostly not great) franchise, as a source of iconic horror imagery), I think it is worth focusing on a piece that is simply this well known. I’ll start with the book and the first film, but will also dig into the first sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) (to which Barker contributed a story treatment), and the most recent entry, Hellraiser (2022) (a strong reboot that I feel does justice to Barker’s ideas and gets a lot of things right). There will be spoilers for all works, so you’ve been warned…

Hellraiser (1987)

As I’ve seen reported, Barker wrote “The Hellbound Heart” with the direct intention of later filming it. He’d had a couple stories adapted and hadn’t been satisfied with the result, and thus set out to write a story that he could pull off as a film – something contained that could be made with a low enough budget that producers would allow him to direct, though he’d never made a feature before. Thus, Hellraiser is a strikingly faithful adaptation, the two works being alike in tone, theme, and with one big exception, narrative.

Hellraiser is often mistakenly grouped in with the slashers – I think because it was a gory product of the 80s, it had a poster featuring a creepy, pale faced killer (with nails hammered into his head), and it spawned a franchise (as 80s slashers were in the habit of doing), but at the end of the day, it (and the book it’s based on) is more of a darkly fantastical haunted house tale, rooted in family drama. Furthermore, the threatening character on the poster (the being who would come to be nicknamed “Pinhead”) is less the main ‘bad guy’ of the story than a kind of force of nature (or something alternative to nature) – an implacable spirit who is not ‘evil’ so much as dutiful in the performance of his admittedly excruciating responsibilities (though he does clearly enjoy them – when he utters the iconic line, “we have such sights to show you,” he sounds genuinely proud of his work).

No, I think the true villain of the piece (who could also be argued to be the protagonist as well) is Julia, a woman languishing in a deeply unsatisfying marriage to a nice enough, dependable fellow for whom she has no passion (Rory in the book, Larry in the film). Of course, she should have known better given how, shortly before their wedding, she had fallen into bed with his brother, Frank, a sleazy, hedonistic, criminal ne’er-do-well, with no redeemable qualities other than the fact that he turned her on. Years later, Julia and her husband move into an old family house where Frank had previously, unbeknownst to them, performed an arcane ritual in search of sensual pleasure beyond all limits, resulting in him being torn apart by extra-dimensional beings called “Cenobites” and pulled into a kind of hell dimension (like you do).

The main story concerns Julia, chasing the dragon of the way he’d made her feel those many years ago, luring men home to murder such that Frank might feed upon their bodies and their lives, thus rebuilding a body for himself, and finally escape from the realm in which he’d gotten himself trapped. Along the way, I think Julia comes into her own, the flush of life returning to her cheeks as she brutally dispatches her victims and courts her returning lover, a half-formed, skinless man – raw, bloody, and domineering, but no less charismatic and enticing for her than he ever was.

The big change from book to film is in the final character of significance, Kirsty. In the novel, she is a coworker of Rory’s, and is perhaps similarly milquetoast, and thus, a seemingly better romantic match for him than the imperious, demanding Julia. In the film, Kirsty is Larry’s daughter from an earlier marriage, casting Julia into the part of “wicked step-mother.” In both cases, Kirsty becomes the secondary protagonist, an audience surrogate pulled into a twisted tale of murder, betrayal, resurrection, and interdimensional sadomasochistic hell-priests, who alone survives the ordeal. And she’s fine – a solid “final girl” (though, again, this is not a slasher) who gives us a “good character” to root for – but I think there is a narrative tension between the external-threat-final-girl-type-horror film Kirsty represents and the internal-threat/fascination-horror-tragedy-dark-tale-of-obsession-and-becoming film that Julia represents (and nothing against Kirsty, but I unreservedly prefer the latter).

The main praise I would lavish on both the film and the book is to do with their content (themes, characters, ideas), but I expect neither really gets enough credit for its technical quality. Barker was famously a first time feature director who spoke of going to the library to find a book on how to direct a movie, but he was surrounded by professionals who really knew what they were doing, thus enabling him to confidently steer the ship creatively and make something unique and special. It really says something that even with some studio interference (e.g., the unfortunate demand, after it had been shot in the UK that some actors be re-voiced with American accents – the dubbing is…not great) and cuts required to get an R rating (with substantial reductions to both sex and violence – both integral elements of the work), this still somehow feels like such a whole, uncompromised, artist-led, serious-minded piece of work. Even though it has its moments that don’t land for me (cricket eating guy, the weird winged demon at the end, the extra spectacle of Kirsty being hounded by Cenobites after it feels like the story’s already finished), it shines as an absolute classic and casts a long shadow (can it both shine and cast a shadow – does that make sense?).

And in terms of the novel, wow – the prose is just gorgeous: propulsive, evocative, and encompassing. The opening scene alone, of Frank first opening the puzzle box and finding how drastically his notion of pleasure diverged from that of those he’d sought to summon, is exciting and sensual and wickedly, playfully sinister. I’d first read the book probably 30 years ago, but when I read it again last summer, I had to go back and re-read the whole first chapter, such a joy it had been. Then to write this, I just went through it once again and its pleasures were undiminished. And as a novelette, you can really tear through it all in one sitting. So, yeah – both are truly great – I won’t go on ad nauseam about this shot or that special effect (but, wow), but they are all pretty special.

I titled this post with the phrase “permeable bodies and minds” and I think that is a dominant theme in Barker’s oeuvre that can clearly be found here. He is a creator unafraid of getting his hands dirty – this is one gory, disgusting, bloody, goopy piece of work. Flesh is hooked and rent; bodies are literally ripped apart (as souls are likewise threatened to be); other bodies are held in eternal states of extreme experience, opened, stretched, reformed, maintaining a transcendent state of pleasure-pain; skins are removed and worn as a disguise (sometimes more convincingly, occasionally less so), their identities stolen and perverted; or skin is gone without entirely, the raw self bared to the world, unshielded from sensation, not masked by artifice or civility: unguarded and whole. The physical border of the body is far from inviolate – it is in play.

And just as there is so much focus on the violent penetration of the body, so too is this a deeply sexual work; another mode of penetration – the points at which the borders of the self are opened/passed/transgressed. But interestingly, there isn’t actually a lot of explicit “sex” in it (partly due to the MPAA, partly because the sexuality of the film is not so obvious). Rather, the focus is on the desire that drives one to act, a physical hunger for more. This surfaces clearly in Julia’s lustful willingness to murder strangers to bring Frank back, but it is also the same drive that pulled Frank into the hands of the Cenobites to begin with, those “explorers in the further regions of experience” whose look is so directly inspired by the leather/S&M/piercing/body modification scene at the time.

One thing that it isn’t though (in my opinion) is terribly scary. This is a different kind of horror. Whereas much in the genre concerns a scary danger from without endangering the protagonist (which does happen, as mentioned above, with the character of Kirsty), I think Barker is often more interested in following the character who meets this darkness and embraces it, and is thus changed by it. We go with them on that journey and there is a delicious attraction/revulsion in vicariously sharing their story (as we do with Julia). I think the first Hellraiser stands as a testament to the fact that great horror need not deliver the “scare” to be horror.

All of these ideas live in the character of Julia. It is clear from the beginning what a mismatch she and her husband are, and we get the sense that if her tryst with Frank had lasted much longer, she might have found him wanting as well, but as it stands, she’s been left yearning for this scumbag who made her feel something, and I think it’s hard not to sympathize. She is not a “nice person,” but she doesn’t need to be for us to understand her very real, human frustration with having settled for a life that does not satisfy. When the accidental spilling of blood brings Frank back, however partially (in the beginning, he’s little more than a slimy brain stem with arms), her hunger/lust/addictive impulse is contagious – though the object of her desire is so abject (even she is disgusted by him, but she also craves his touch). An itch that has so long needed scratching finally can be, and therefore, must be scratched. The need for something outside of the self pulls and redefines the self, causing it to open, to potentially change, to become.

I love the first scene when she brings a man home for Frank to feed on. She’s gone out to a bar in the middle of the day and brought back an unpleasant character, some schmuck in a suit who’d thought he’d been the one picking her up. They both seem somewhat hesitant upon passing the threshold of her house, but he immediately becomes aggressively entitled when she balks at a kiss, strengthening her resolve to take him upstairs to the killing floor. Everything about the scene that follows is awkward and halting until, pants around his ankles, he turns his back on her and she takes up her hidden hammer. The two or three brutal strikes that follow obliterate his mouth and lay him out. It all happens in the matter of a couple of seconds, but when we cut to Julia’s reaction, we are brought back to that sexual element.

Covered in the red stuff herself, Julia’s blood is up, she’s breathing hard, there’s life and lust and power in her eyes – it’s hot. When she goes to wash up as Frank sucks the stuff of life from the corpse, a mad grin breaks out on her face. Returning to the room, Frank is more whole but far from complete, and she finds herself both pulled to and repelled by his still fleshless form. But before they can go any further, her husband comes home and she has to go cover her deception. It’s a great scene and Clare Higgins couldn’t be better in it, bringing nigh Shakespearean notes to the performance.

Ultimately, Frank betrays and discards her, resulting in them both being (re)claimed by the Cenobites who have been put on his trail by Kirsty, and though Julia makes an engaging return in the sequel, it too sadly passes her by in the end (as we will get to in a moment), but she is the beating, bloody heart of the story (well, I suppose her, and the literal one we see beneath the floorboards). Watching her claim ownership of her desire, though it take her down a dark, gory path, we see her flourish; just as Frank must knit himself back together, growing sinew, nerves, and bone, we see her build herself as well. Kirsty gives us the “good person” we can root for, who gets to survive to the end of the story, but I really think that story belongs to Julia: Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Dr. Frankenstein, and Madame Bovary wrapped into one – you know, just a typical, disposable teen slasher flick.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

Released only one year later, directed by Tony Randel and written by Peter Atkins, Hellraiser II retained a connection to Clive Barker in that he served as an executive producer (which could mean anything) and, probably more significantly, he provided a story treatment. And while I don’t think it could be argued that this film is anywhere near as good as the first, it does feel so deeply, deeply Barker-esque? Barker-ian? Barker-y – so much so that when I first watched both films many years ago, I kind of preferred this one. I wouldn’t still say that’s true now, but there are elements in here that are deeply cool, as well as some stuff that is off the wall wild and fun, and then some other parts that are, shall we say, regrettable.

The story picks up immediately (like the next day) after the first film, with Kirsty in a mental hospital, shattered by the events she’s just experienced. It’s a shame though that she was brought to this hospital, because it’s run by one Dr. Channard, who just so coincidentally happens to collect Cenobite summoning puzzle boxes (small world, huh?), using his corral of mental patients as Guinea pigs to try to solve them, thus gaining him all the forbidden occult knowledge he desires. When he hears Kirsty’s story, he uses connections in the police force to get his hands on the blood-stained mattress on which Julia was killed and sets out to bring her back as she had done for Frank in the first film. Concurrently, Kirsty sees a vision of a skinned man whom she believes to be her father, begging for her help and believes that she needs to go to hell to rescue him. 

Much of the rest of the movie takes place in the otherworld of the Cenobites, referred to as “hell,” but bearing no relation to any Christian interpretation of such. I think it’s just a convenient concept to throw at this realm – a land of eternal torture and pain – but it should be said, with no concept of punishment or justice. The whole place is lorded over by a sky-spanning, darkness emitting, diamond shaped presence which Julia refers to as ‘Leviathan,’ “god of flesh, hunger, and desire…the lord of the Labyrinth.” We also learn that all of the Cenobites we’ve met were once humans who were not destroyed by their encounter with the box, but rather thrived and ascended to their current status. It is in this exploration of this very weird and specific other realm that the film feels so like a Barker property. As mentioned earlier, the first books I read of his were contemporarily-set weird fiction, spanning strange other-worldly spaces, mythic in scope and filled with inversions of what might be deemed ‘natural.’ They could also get quite goopy.

This aspect of the film evoked some of the feelings I’d first had in discovering Barker’s fiction, and though I wish the film went further with its world building in this regard (in this whole hellscape, there seems to be just the same four or five Cenobites that we’ve already seen on earth – and a whole lot of hallways), I do treasure the cosmic horror on offer, and when the matte painting is filmed from above, it has more than sufficient grandeur. It is so big and alien and unique. And I love (as I do with a writer like Lovecraft) being given a vision of the demonic freed from the moralistic ugliness of religion – there is suffering aplenty, but no thoughts of damnation or salvation – only the serving up of experience beyond endurance.

The Cenobites have their own creed and ethos – one of pleasure and pain and leather and chains, worshipping a massive, impassive shape in the sky – weird, but hey, good for them – at least they don’t proselytize or try to encroach their faith on secular affairs (if only other fanatically religious types would so fully stay out of politics).

Sadly, the movie as a whole has some real story issues and, in my opinion, goes off the rails in the final act when Dr. Channard is made into a Cenobite (great sequence), dispatches all the other Cenobites (weird and unsatisfying choice – undercutting their power rather than making him seem strong, but it is intriguing when we see them all transform in the moments of their deaths back to the humans they’d once been – one of them was just a kid – what was his story?), and becomes a wise cracking monster chasing Kirsty around hell and his hospital, making endless cheesy doctor puns until she bests him with cleverness (I’m almost shocked we never get a full Bugs Bunny “Eh…what’s up doc?”).

Also, and I think this is the worst thing about the flick, after raising her from the dead, and allowing Julia a series of chilling scenes where we really see her as something powerful and frightening and cool, the film randomly and abruptly kills her off before we even hit the final act (really –it’s almost as if she steps into an open man-hole cover and, whoops, is never heard from again), freeing up her loose epidermis for a last minute surprise.

I’ve heard that the plan had been for her to really rise as the big bad of the series, but that Clare Higgins hadn’t wanted to do any further films, so I guess they eliminated her to make room for other monsters, but after making such a big deal out of her, it is such a letdown to have her slip away with so little fanfare.

But, all the same, Randel’s film does have some tremendous imagery and sequences that well serve Barker’s thematics, such as when Kirsty finds Frank in “hell,” tortured by endlessly unattainable, sighing, sometimes bloody female forms writhing beneath white sheets. Even at the end, when the penis-headed Channard-Cenobite is twirling his mustache and spouting lame one liners, there are inspired touches of idiosyncratic glory like when his hands birth phallic tentacles and each opens to reveal a new surprise – like a blade, an eye ball, a finger gesturing ‘come here,’ or a pretty flower – I don’t know what all that is, but I sure do like it.

Before that, the sexual tension/power exchange between skinless Julia and the good doctor is rich and dynamic, and her attic abattoir, replete with chained corpses hanging from the ceiling that she’s drained to rebuild herself, is properly horrific, but the standout scene of the whole film for me is that of her resurrection.

While an unwitting witness hides behind a curtain, coming dangerously close to getting caught, Channard brings into his office one of his patients, a poor fellow who sees his body constantly covered with bugs. Channard sits him down on the bloody mattress salvaged from the house of the first film and hands him a straight razor. It gets pretty rough. As Channard watches on with clinical disinterest, the patient (played by Oliver Smith, who also embodied skinless Frank in the first film) begins to desperately slice himself open, leaking torrents of blood onto the filthy mattress until arms shoot up out of it, legs follow, and soon he’s being straddled, chased, and finally devoured by a half formed Julia – all muscles and veins. It is an intense struggle as she takes him down, sinks her hands into his neck and begins to feast on his essence, his blood, and his flesh, all inches away from the poor witness behind the curtain, holding his breath not to be noticed. It is gory and suspenseful and triumphant and slippery and messy. For my money, it’s the best moment in a movie full of great moments which simply fail to cohere into a satisfying whole.

But it all still has a strong Barker flavor, which would soon diminish rapidly in the subsequent entries as the original author/director ceased to be involved in any way. The third and fourth films are not great, but have their fun moments (the Cenobite who’d been a DJ and is now a walking CD changer, not to mention going to space), but then it goes way downhill with six subsequent direct-to-video movies, many of which weren’t even written as Hellraiser flicks, but just had the name tacked on and Pinhead inserted into a couple of scenes to retain rights to the property. It wasn’t until 2022’s “reboot” that Clive Barker again had his name attached in any way to one of these films (for which he’s listed as a producer and reportedly had at least some creative input). So let’s take a look at that one as well (though I did already make some mention of it a couple of months back).

Hellraiser (2022)

Other than hitting the festival circuit, David Bruckner’s film (with writing credits for Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (i.a., Super Dark Times), as well as David S. Goyer (i.a., Dark City) – some real pedigree there) was released primarily to streaming, which really was a shame as some of its visuals are quite striking and would have benefitted from a cinematic release. But I’m just glad it got made. It was labeled a ‘reboot,’ but it’s not like it retells the original story in any way. It could pretty much be another entry in the series (ignoring the fact that some mythos is reworked, but enjoyably so), and quite a good one at that. Honestly, I’m not sure which I prefer, this or Hellbound. There are stylistic changes (most of which I really dig, and aspects of which I understand some people’s issues with), but the film really felt like Clive Barker, and it was so good to have that again after such a long time (there have been plenty of adaptations of other works in the last decade or two, even some based on a few of my favorite stories like “Dread” or “The Midnight Meat Train,” but none of them have quite connected with me).

I think I don’t want to risk spoiling too much as this is a more recent movie, so I’ll keep it general. We follow Riley, a recovering addict trying to hold things together, but clearly hooked by the dull pull of self-destructive compulsion. Through a series of circumstances, she finds herself in possession of a mysterious puzzle box that, upon being solved, shoots out a blade, which she narrowly evades. But the box will have its blood and so if she won’t be its victim, as she falls into a narcotic stupor, chains shoot out of her heart, reaching across the city and pulling to her the only person about whom she still cares. He becomes a sacrifice in her place, leading her down a dark road of discovery as, seeking to save him, she learns about the box, the Cenobites it summons, and Roland Voight, a rich sybarite and the box’s erstwhile owner, who has built his own puzzle box of a mansion to serve his nefarious ends.

The story is engaging and exciting, though there is a stretch in the latter half where it is reduced to a siege with people trapped in a house getting picked off by monsters which is a bit less interesting, but in spite of some pacing issues and running longer than think it needs to, it sticks the landing. I like the new mythos – the box needing to be manipulated through a series of configurations, each requiring a fresh sacrifice, until it finally grants a boon to the one who holds it. And I love the visual design of it all.

I’ve heard some complain about a “de-sexing” of the Cenobites. In their original presentation, they were all leather and hooks and kinky, messy blood play. Here, their bodies have been pulled and stretched and folded almost beyond recognition, but there is a cleanliness to it all, a cold, perfect puzzle-like order to their forms that reflects that of the box in its many configurations. I feel they do right by the concept of the Cenobites, bodies eternally held in extremis as a kind of meditative, transcendent prayer of pleasure-pain, but whereas their original look was reminiscent of a contemporary fetish community, the new look is more alien – less bloody monsters/kinksters, and more unknowable, unrelenting presences, personifications of a concept. It is a different approach, but I think it really works.

Similarly, whenever the box is opened and they appear, the world shifts and slides and reveals hidden depths exactly as the box does. This reflects an effect in the original films where the walls split open, but it takes it further. Between the box, the look of the Cenobites and the opening of worlds, there is a thematic consistency that I really appreciate.

Also, Roland Voight is so a character out of a Barker story: A wealthy bastard, desperate for extreme experience, pleasure beyond anything he can find in the mortal world, builds a complex temple to his obsession, manipulating those he considers below him to sacrifice themselves at the altar of his lust. And in the end, without going into too many details, he both gets a kind of comeuppance and passes a threshold, approaching something akin to glory. Walking that line between horror and holiness is a key offer of Barker’s and we really get it here. In the original versions, I feel we only see characters who expect facile notion of pleasure and discover torment in its stead. In this case, I feel we see Voight pass through torment into…something else, something searing and bright, angelic even. That feels like Barker.

Finally, I really like the element of addiction in the protagonist, though I do wish we got more of it. The box is an object of overwhelming fascination and desire, and it caters to those with the strongest obsessions. When Riley first sits down to explore the puzzle, having relapsed and had an explosive and emotional falling out, her initial interest feels so right. She acts out of a self-eliminating compulsion, and that is inherent in the box’s solving, making her the perfect kind of person to unlock its mysteries. Perhaps this will overtake her chemical dependencies, but it will certainly not serve her any better. In the end, she is given a motivation to keep working the box that is more altruistic (salvation of a loved one) and we don’t exactly follow her down the rabbit hole of an even more destructive addiction, but I at least appreciated that moment early on when it seemed like we might – and it also felt very much like something out of “The Books of Blood.” I wish we got more – in the end, she is more of a Kirsty than a Julia in shaping the narrative, but I still appreciate the echo.

So yeah – there are significant changes, and it is a completely different story than the original – also it is a new cast (plenty of irritating online fanboys had strong objections to “Pinhead” not being played by Doug Bradley, and what’s worse, being played by a woman – forgetting that Bradley hadn’t been in the previous two films and that in the book, the lead Cenobite is never gendered male, but rather is an “it” with a girlish voice), but Jaimie Clayton is tremendously good in the lead Cenobite role – there is a cold pleasure to her delivery that is just so tasty. In one scene, when a soon to be victim claims to pray for salvation, the Hell Priest replies, “And what would that feel like? A joyful note? Without change, without end? There’s no music in that,” and we catch the Apollonian aesthete: a chilling, but also beautiful approach. Yeah – in so many ways, I think this Hellraiser absolutely does justice to Barker’s style and themes and vibe. How satisfying!

—

Of the three discussed, I think the first still stands as the most significant, the self-presentation of a fresh, vibrant artistic voice in the world; a work that, grounded in human drama and strong emotion, takes itself and its horror seriously, while delivering jaw dropping (and jaw shattering) moments of horror and glorious excess. But both Hellbound and the 2022 Hellraiser bring valuable elements to the table, and both feel (even if he only served as a producer and an inspiration) like extensions of Clive Barker’s expression, and hence I consider them gifts, as he hasn’t been publishing as much of late (and what has made it to print has, sadly, not been his best work (I’m looking at you 2015’s “The Scarlet Gospels”)). Maybe someday we’ll finally get his purported next novel, “Deep Hill.” One can hope.

A Sleazy, Sweaty, Brutal Masterpiece – Maniac (1980)

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I like a bit of variety on this here blog, and after last post’s discussion of three classy, classic Dracula films, I thought it would be good to go in a completely different direction and take on something cheap and grotty. I’m no gore hound per se and I’m not the kind of horror fan who is constantly hunting for the roughest stuff I can handle, but I do really appreciate when something works – when the effect actually gets to me – when the horror of a piece can linger in my mind and my mood. Today’s film is clearly one of those. Filmed to the brim with top notch suspense sequences, viscerally disturbing violence, and gritty, dangerous atmosphere, and furthermore grounded by a totally committed, unhinged, and scary central performance from Joe Spinell, William Lustig’s Maniac is really one to watch… if you’re up for it – and, to be fair, not everyone will be.

Maniac (1980)

On paper, this doesn’t necessarily seem like a film that might top a lot of lists: following a creepy weirdo with mommy issues around NYC as he hunts down young women, kills them, scalps them, and nails their hair onto his collection of mannequins. Writing about it, I have to look up synonyms for “skeezy.” It’s the sort of movie that might make you want to take a shower afterwards (but maybe you’ll feel vulnerable there – at the very least, you may want to open a packet of moist towelettes). Ugly and mean, with an uncomfortable conflation of sexual desire and violent impulse, as well as a really downbeat ending – this is a “feel-bad movie,” and I kinda love it.

Made during the first big slasher boom (though I don’t think I’d actually call this a slasher), Lustig’s film turns the still gelling conventions of the sub-genre on their head by focusing entirely on the killer himself rather than his victims, such that the real horror of the piece is more in its character study of its pitiable, if no less frightening, protagonist, Frank Zito, as embodied (and largely written) by character actor, Joe Spinell. There are wonderfully executed chase and kill scenes here that would shine in any early eighties slasher, but while they are really scary, their horror pales in comparison to just spending an hour and a half inside of Frank’s fevered mind. This situates the film closer to a work like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) or Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel, American Psycho, but whereas both of those examples follow a central killer who is at least outwardly cold and in control, Frank Zito is hot and tortured, and Spinell keeps his performance’s engine solidly in the red for most of the film.

Really, it seems like it shouldn’t work so well. The performance should come off as over-the-top and melodramatic. Frank’s backstory (growing up with a sex worker mother who alternatingly neglected and abused him resulting in his compulsion to prey on attractive women for their sexuality as he gibbers and mutters – a fevered exchange between the traumatized child he was, the mother who maltreated him, the adult killer he’s become, his victims, and the mother he has recreated and asserted control over via the bloody wigged mannequins he surrounds himself with) should come off as at best facile, and at worst, offensively reductive in its armchair psychology rooted in misogynistic tropes. The plotting should come off as nonsensical and unrealistic. This feels like it shouldn’t rise above being a run of the mill, grungy, cheap little body count movie, memorable primarily for its squalor (and, to be clear, there can be value in films such as those, but I think there is so much more here).

But this is one of the reasons I really do love this genre. All of those accusations are basically true, and it is still a great film: intense, moving, uncomfortable, and wholly worthwhile. Though it seems to have been made largely in an exploitation mode, all involved mainly just trying to put something together that would be shocking, exciting, and sell tickets, the talent and total commitment of the creative team just shines through, resulting in a scary, disturbing, rough art object. Lustig put all he had, financially and otherwise, into getting his first non-pornographic feature off the ground, and it shows. Spinell was a great character actor (who also co-wrote and developed the piece, investing all of his salary from Cruising in it as well), but he’d never had the chance to lead a film before, and his work here is so emotionally grounded even while he plays for the cheap seats. Tom Savini had no budget to speak of for the effects, but everything is set up to be filmed so perfectly, making simple “right out of the kit” solutions (as I’ve seen him describe them in an interview) land with visceral power. At every turn, the love and passion and talent and hunger that went into this ugly little picture is just so abundantly clear. This all yields a commitment to the material that elevates it far above what it could have been, without adding a hint of pretension.

The film begins in typical fashion with a cold open kill scene – a young couple sleeping on the beach are murdered by a giant, looming figure that has been watching them while hiding among the reeds. The girl is dispatched quickly with a scream and a slit throat, but when her boyfriend returns with more firewood, his death takes time – garroted and held aloft by the killer, the camera focusing on his feet as his body jerks and twitches and finally falls limp, blood pouring down from above as the wire cuts through flesh. It is effectively savage, but could fit in many other films of the era, but then in the next shot, the film reveals its uniqueness as we cut to the main character, Frank (recognizably the killer from the first scene), waking up in bed as if from a nightmare. He is drenched in sweat and panting in misery and fear. Was this a dream or a memory? Did he actually kill them? The title card announces “Maniac” and we get a gist of how we are going to spend the rest of the run time. As the opening credits roll, we are shown something of his living situation. His cramped room features a candle lit shrine to a photo of a woman (his mother, as we will come to understand) and is otherwise filled with objects of art – some merely abstract and some disturbing, but the one that catches out attention is the mannequin revealed to be lying in the bed behind him, with what looks like a bloody wig nailed onto her head. This guy is clearly not well.

Shortly thereafter, we see Frank go upstairs with a street prostitute one trick away from making her rent and calling it a night, and what follows is so awkward and naturalistic as to initially feel sad and sweet, though always with the edge of fear – we can only assume he is actually a killer and she is in great danger. She seems nice and genuine – warm with him, but also clearly just doing her job and trying to upsell him out of economic need. He is clearly uncomfortable with physical intimacy, but also plainly wants it, at first asking her to model for him and leave her clothes on before finally getting more physical. The scene takes its time as she tenderly coaxes him out of his shell until he is capable of participating more fully, and it is strangely affecting, but at the same time, the tension is so thick; we know how strange he is – even if he isn’t actually a killer (and he probably is), he is quite off.

Thus, it’s not terribly surprising, but still shocking and awful when he rolls on top, grabs her by the neck and starts squeezing the life out of her, the camera largely zoomed in on his flushed, murderous visage, the sweat pouring down his face, until her body stills and his expression changes from rage to sorrow before he has to run to the bathroom to vomit. He is so dangerous, so scary, and at the same time, he does not seem to take any pleasure in his activities – he acts out an unwanted compulsion – he is a long suffering victim of his own impulses as well as a perpetrator of horrific acts. But of course, the viewer’s sympathies are tempered by the fact that he returns from the bathroom with a razor blade and proceeds to scalp the poor, dead woman.

Much of the film is relatively low on plot after that – we see many more scenes of Frank hunting and killing and suffering and fighting with himself (as he speaks for the myriad voices that fill his head). But for all that it reiterates a similar scenario, I don’t feel it wears out its welcome or becomes repetitive. Also, it is surprising how much it never feels exploitative – the victims are primarily women (he kills men too, but only when they get in the way), and the violence is certainly gendered, but the filming is never leering and the violence doesn’t feel sexualized. In each instance, I find myself really caring about the given victim or victims, honestly more than in many a slasher flick wherein they can so often feel two dimensional and disposable. Here, we aren’t given much in the way of background information, but I do believe in each of these women, filmed as actual humans and not objects, sexual or otherwise – I worry for them – and I hold my breath, waiting for the possibility that this time he won’t do what he always does, that this time he won’t succeed – he is, after all, not some mythical embodiment of evil, but just an overweight, middle aged guy with mental health issues.

And the play of identification is a really interesting aspect of the film that sets it apart from the pack. Though Frank generally dominates our point of view, we meet each of his (potential) victims as authentic people with depth and nuance and lives, and we temporarily live and fear vicariously through them. At no point do I ever root for Frank or cheer his violence (as might happen in something like a Friday the 13th or a Halloween film where the masked killer is the main draw). There are drawn out sequences of one young woman or another encountering his threat (sometimes understanding the danger she’s in and sometimes not until it is way too late) wherein Lustig teases audience expectation so expertly: Why is that door cracked? Is Frank there? No. Ok. Is he coming now? Yes, but he doesn’t see her. But does he and he’s just waiting for a better moment to strike? Maybe – but where is he now – the room is empty. Will he get her in the bath? No, but he’s still got to be in the apartment, right? I think so, but I don’t see him – he could be anywhere. She lowers her head to splash water on her face and oh no – he’s going to be in the mirror standing behind her, isn’t he? And, Bang! He appears and brings the scene to its nigh inevitable conclusion. Most famously, there is a standout chase scene in the subway that could hold its own against any other in any thriller, but the movie is full of similarly well-crafted scares. And all of those scares are so much more effective because Lustig lets us feel for those in danger before they are dispatched and we must once again accompany the killer back into his apartment and his mind and his fevered madness.

And that is not a pleasant place to be for him or for us. Past that, one feature separating Frank Zito from many a slasher killer is how deeply uncool he is. We endure him and even pity him, but I don’t think we are ever meant to like what he’s doing, and the film never endorses his violence. He is not some kind of aspirational anti-hero and his post-Norman Bates, proto-incel motivations and madness do not feel like they speak with an authorial voice. Sure, the whole “pathetic, misogynist killer obsessed with mommy” thing feels particularly skuzzy and played out, and I can’t say that I enjoy it, but honestly – it does feel rather realistic and therefore, so much scarier. I don’t believe that the shadows contain many masked killers with “the devil’s eyes,” but it goes without saying that the world is filled up with unhappy, emotionally and psychologically screwed up men who will target and hurt women to assuage their own pathologies. Frank really could be around the next corner.

Also interestingly, we don’t really know just how deep his insanity goes, and as his is the perspective we mostly see the world of the film through (as Ellis did about ten years later with his novel), I read it all as through the eyes of an unreliable narrator – though that is never really confirmed. We begin with a moment that could either be a memory or a dream. There is one scare with his mother rising from her grave that clearly didn’t really happen, as well as a horror set piece finale that must be taking place in his head. On top of that, there is a whole act of the movie that feels like it might be wholly, or at least significantly, imagined.

One day in the park, Frank notices a photographer snap his photo and he follows her home. She, Anna (Caroline Munro), is in the middle of developing said photograph when he rings her bell and introduces himself. She never asks how he found her home, but in a very friendly manner, she invites this stranger in to examine and discuss her photography, seemingly delighted to have the company. Over the course of the next half hour, interspersed with more scenes of murder (including a model friend of Anna’s), their relationship grows and deepens. In a strange little movie, this is perhaps the strangest part, and I think it is key.

Whenever Frank meets with Anna, he is so much more together – he dresses well; he looks clean; he isn’t constantly breathing hard and talking to himself; he is, if not charming, then at least a seemingly pretty “normal” guy, and it really appears that she enjoys spending time with him – perhaps romantically, or perhaps just as a friend, but regardless of the exact nature of the relationship, these scenes show that Frank can relate – he can be a person – he can control himself and there is some kind of hope for a “normal” satisfying life, free from his compulsive, miserable killing (a hope that will inevitably be dashed on the rocks). It is all kind of – nice – which is more than a little bizarre.

So bizarre that one could just chalk it up to bad writing, simply an entirely unbelievable turn of events – but I don’t. Though the film never outright explains this one way or another, for me, the whole Anna relationship, a significant portion of the movie, tells me that all is not as it seems. Either she isn’t real – or at least she isn’t really the way we see her. No one could be that nice to this creepy stranger – no one could be that available, always willing to drop whatever she’s doing any time he calls on her. No one would ask if a guy they’ve just met has a picture of his mother with him and not find it a little odd that he apparently always does in the pocket of his jacket. She seems like a fantasy – everything to him that his mother never was. So maybe she isn’t real…. Or, maybe she is real and the killings all happen in his mind – the clammy madman, bathed in perspiration and grunting insanely is his true inner life, while on the surface, he appears to be a totally “normal” person, passing through society undetected every day. Is that a more frightening scenario? This doubt in my mind as I view it is never resolved and it lingers after the film is done.

Unsurprisingly, Maniac came in for no small degree of criticism on release, often seen by film reviewers as a vile, irresponsible, reprehensible film, a symbol of how our culture had degraded itself. Gene Siskel, for example, announced in his televised review that it was one of only two films he had ever walked out of (after only thirty minutes), he and his partner, Roger Ebert, no friends to the slasher film in the eighties. While I can understand a person being put off by content like this (and I can easily accept that someone wouldn’t want to spend this time with Frank, wouldn’t want to be in a position of having to pity such a monster, or to be reminded of how commonplace, and thus terrifying, this kind of gendered violence can be), to so flatly dismiss its admittedly queasy artistic value is short sighted at the least, and not worthy of serious criticism.

That said, it is sometimes a rough watch and is clearly not for everybody. But if you are ready for its unpleasantness, Lustig and company will take you on a real horror ride – sometimes enjoyably scary and suspenseful, sometimes sickly and uncanny. You will be confronted with ugliness and tragedy and pain, but also, strangely enough, I think it’s always evident how much, for its creators, this low budget gem was a true labor of love into which they poured their whole hearts. In that, there is beauty, just as in the depth of the film’s grotesque abattoir, there still resides something of humanity.

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

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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

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

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

Gremlins (1984)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Friday film on Friday

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Lest it seem that I’m only writing about great, older, classy movies, here’s a discussion of a great, older, trashy movie.

Friday the 13th, part 2 (1981)

A cheap cash grab. A totally uninspired, throwaway slasher flick. A body count film. A dead teenagers movie. All of these could be ascribed to Steve Miner’s film, and I expect they have.  They would even be accurate. Doesn’t matter.  This is simply a terrifically entertaining movie that knows exactly what it is, and has great fun doing it.  It delivers solid suspense, scares both cheap and earned, a generally likeable group of young people that you mostly don’t want to see eviscerated, teasing play with audience expectations, and one of the all-time great final girls, who you really want to root for. And on top of all that, in spite of the fact that it seems to so knowingly draw on slasher conventions that it almost seems to be sending them up (coming out at the height of the post Halloween slasher boom—there were at least 30 released in 1981 alone), it also actually takes its antagonist seriously—probably the only Friday the 13th film in which there is any real psychological underpinning to the character of Jason.

The story is as simple as can be. After a cold open wherein Alice (Adrienne King), the lone survivor of the first film, replays nightmare memories in her head, recapping the key points of the first outing of the series (a lot of camp counselors getting killed, the revelation that the killer was Mrs. Voorhees, the mother of a developmentally disabled boy, Jason, who drowned while some counselors were having sex, Alice decapitating Mrs. Voorhees, Jason rising out of the water of the lake, apparently less dead than had been thought), she wakes up and, in a genuinely suspenseful sequence, gets creeped out exploring her apartment. Oh, it’s just the cat being thrown through the window. Whew—nothing to worry about…Nope, actually she finds a head in her refrigerator and then gets an ice pick to the noggin.  The opening titles literally explode and we’re off to the races.

This time we find ourselves across the lake from Camp Crystal Lake at the Packanack Lodge Camp Counselor Training Center where a nice bunch of youngsters have come to learn to be better camp counselors, and generally drink and screw around in the woods.  With one exception in the form of a sleazy, sexually aggressive dude who eventually gets his comeuppance for consistently harassing one of the girls by being hung upside down and having his throat slit, the rest of the trainees are nice kids that are easy to spend time with. It’s a shame that they find themselves in this movie, but oh well. 

The last to arrive is Ginny (Amy Steel) who rolls in late and gives Paul (John Fury), the owner of the Center, a good natured hard time. It’s clear that they’re an item and in this, we immediately get something a bit refreshing for the genre.  For all that the tropes have been pretty well established by this point and that this series never shied away from the regrettable Reagan era Sex = Death slasher formula, Ginny does not quite fit the mold of the ‘final girl’.  I mean, sure, it is technically possible that she is a virgin—it’s never explicitly stated, but the sense is that she is a self-possessed young woman, in a relationship and free to express her own sexual desire, who has a life and interests beyond mere survival (she’s studying childhood psychology—which becomes relevant by the end of the film); and she does survive in the end by trading on her wits, education, and empathy and not only running  and taking up a penetrative phallic object to use against her assailant (though of course, there’s plenty of running and stabbing).  In a crowded field, she stands out by really feeling like a person.

Anyway, most of the rest of the plot requires little description.  One by one, the kids start getting picked off until only Ginny remains.  She stumbles upon the shack in the woods where Jason has been holed up, building a candle lit shrine to his dead mother’s head and nice, chunky knit sweater, surrounded by the corpses of recently murdered teenagers.

 In a bit of quick thinking, she uses her child psychology super powers to get inside his head and, donning said sweater, speaks to him as his mother, gaining an advantage.  At the end of the day, everyone else is dead, Jason gets away (there are still 9 more films to come, after all), and Ginny seems pretty traumatized, but she makes it through.

Most of the plot itself simply ticks boxes and fulfils viewer expectations.  But moment by moment, the movie takes real pleasure in subverting some of those expectations.  Time and time again, the audience is teased with the suggestion of prurient subject matter which then doesn’t pay off (in the sense of shower scenes and kills, this one is much less explicit than you might expect), and then there are solid jumps when suddenly the knife flashes into view or the wire wraps around the throat, or the spear…, well, you get the idea.  It really feels like the film makers are playing with the form.  And it is fun and funny when the movie successfully pulls one over on you.

And there is plenty of comedy throughout, particularly in the editing. Visual gags abound, such as when a cute little dog comes across Jason in the woods.  We don’t really know his policy on canines as opposed to humans, but we assume it will end badly for the pup. 

Quick cut to hot dogs roasting on a grill.  Later, at the end of the movie, just when it seems that everything is finally over and Jason has been killed, Ginny hears a sound outside. Oh no—what will she do? Wait. It’s just the dog.  Oh, good—it was ok all along. CRASH! Jason jumps through the window behind Ginny, grabbing her as we cut to black.  These little tricks seem so obvious, but when obvious works, it can’t be faulted.

Beyond this sense of play, and well executed cattle prod cinema, eliciting jumps and laughs at appropriate (and inappropriate) moments, a real strength of the film is that Jason gets to be an actual person, and for my money, that makes him scarier here than in any of the later installments.  In the first film, he basically doesn’t exist.  He’s a sad story—an impetus for revenge on all the naughty teenagers of the world who dare visit this lake.  In later films, he is an evil tank.  Wearing his characteristic hokey mask and mostly standing menacingly when he isn’t skewering somebody, he is the beefed up uber-version of the silent masked killer archetype. 

In this film, wearing a sack over his head and seen running, scrambling, desperate, angry, wild, he is a broken, dangerous human being—nothing supernatural.  Just a person who has had a terrible life and grown into a vicious killer, filled with rage over the death of his mother, the only one who cared about him.  The film sees him, and Ginny can empathize.  To be fair, this is repeated with Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldmen) in the fourth part, but it really lands here.

No one could make the claim that the sequel to Friday the 13th, itself, a cheap American retooling of Bava’s Bay of Blood, is some kind of classic of world cinema, but it does what it does excellently and in my opinion, is the scariest, most fun flick this series has to offer. Miner went on to direct the next sequel one year later (in 3D: Dangling yo-yos! Eye balls jumping out of sockets! Popcorn kernels popping!) and managed to produce another fun movie, but for me, failed to quite catch lightning in a bottle the second time around.