Tag Archives: Slashers

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

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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.

Catching Up With Christmas Horror

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Tis the season and all that. Thanksgiving’s behind us (though I still haven’t seen Eli Roth’s new movie) and we are therefore past the firewall that stops us from getting into holiday horror too soon and just ruining our appetites. So with December underway, I thought I might glut myself on killers in Santa suits, murderous toys, cannibalistic elves, and awkward family meetings – you know – Christmas!

There have got to be more horror movies set at Christmas than any other holiday, including Halloween. Maybe it’s due to the perverse pleasure taken in souring something oversweet, or the endless parade of symbols, decorations, traditions, and songs this holiday offers up to be wickedly repurposed, or the idea that it happens at the darkest time of the year – the longest night – with just a bit of light to get us through, or possibly the fact (and I am far from the first to observe this) that it is inherently creepy to tell children that there is a huge old man in a red suit watching them all year long, judging their every action, and on the darkest night he will break into their house and… do stuff. Naughty or nice, that’s scary.

Anyway, I do enjoy a good Christmas horror movie and have written about a few in the past. A couple years back, I touched on a couple of great Santa Slashers as well as one of my absolute favorite horror movies ever, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), and last year I revisited, for the first time in far too long, Joe Dante’s devilishly fun and surprisingly scary Gremlins. But as mentioned above, there are so many more that I haven’t seen. So I think I’m going to do a run through as many as I can watch in the next week or so. There will probably be spoilers – enjoy!

Blood Beat (1983)

Wow. I’d heard that Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos’s one and only film was worth my time, but when I first tried watching it maybe half a year ago, I just couldn’t get past the non-professional acting, but I am so very glad that I gave it another chance. It’s not what many would call a “good” movie. But it is kind of amazing, and I think I love it.

To give a short, superficial description – Sarah accompanies her boyfriend and his sister to do Christmas at his home in rural Wisconsin with his reclusive, psychic, abstract painter mother and her deer hunting boyfriend. On first meeting, Sarah and the mother experience some mutually unpleasant mental connection, immediately taking against each other, and you know this is going to be an uncomfortable holiday. There’s an immediately unsettling, ominous atmosphere (accomplished via a combination of surprisingly capable cinematography, a blaring soundtrack of weird, warbling synthy twangs and overwhelmingly loud and constant classical music – the climax is set to Carmina Burana – as well as ceaseless wind and nature sounds, and periodic disorienting editing and shots that suddenly appear in negative). This eerie, uncanny vibe builds and builds until the one thing this movie is famous for finally appears – that’s right, a blue, glowing samurai ghost that starts hacking up friends, neighbors, and ultimately, the family itself – seemingly linked to Sarah writhing about on the bed orgasmically. Fortunately, it seems everyone in this family is also psychic – or at least has the ability to make their hands glow and zap samurais with laser blasts – like you do, and in the end, the brother and his sister (who spends an inordinate amount of time running around in the Wisconsin woods at Christmas time in a sleep shirt and leg warmers – give this girl some pants) walk off into the morning light, the threat having been vanquished, if certainly not understood, and Sarah apparently dead under the samurai armor – Merry Christmas everybody!

But that doesn’t do justice to the experience of watching this odd masterpiece, so let’s just boil it all down: a freaking samurai, lasers, Christmas, psychics, abstract painting, an oppressive soundtrack, negative shots, eerie nature photography, peculiar psycho-sexual content, early eighties visual effects that have aged poorly and probably looked bad in 1983, amateurish acting, strained dialogue, a really uncomfortable family visit, bad romantic relationships with pushy, petulant, shouty men, an all-out assault on the notions of logic and causality – maybe that begins to communicate the film slightly better.

Now all of this may sound like “so bad it’s good” territory – and I can see how one might view it as such. It is not, by any means, a “well-made film” and I think people could have a really good time laughing at its faults, non-sequiturs, and absurdities – for all that it is weird and confusing as a summer day is long, I was never bored. My jaw was often hanging open in shock, but I was never less than fully engaged. What’s more, I found it to be so much more than just a “great bad movie.”

Honestly, and I imagine this was largely by accident, I felt it was kind of a great movie in its own right. Watching it, I had such a strong sense of a kind of folk horror – the setting and the atmosphere and the mysterious events all worked for me – and on top of that, I read it as a sort of captivating “naïve art.” Clearly, most of the people involved were not professionals in their positions – many of the actors never performed in anything else before or after this project. The writer-director-composer-editor had written one other film (directed by his dad), but this was his only directorial effort (produced by his dad). The cinematographer, Vladimir Van Maule, was actually quite proficient, but still, through a miscommunication early in the project, he’d thought they were shooting the film for TV and so he filmed it all in 4:3 instead of a more cinematic widescreen, so let’s say there were issues. But all of this lack of experience somehow allowed something weirdly pure to slip through. I think they stumbled backwards and blind into ‘art.’

Sure, these may not have all been professional film workers, but there were strong (sometimes nonsensical, but strong) ideas, there was a real feeling that connected, and there was an odd talent or drive or spirit at the heart of it all that got its hooks into me. And this somehow worked on all levels. For example, when I’d first tried watching this, as mentioned above, I just couldn’t get past the non-professional acting, but on this viewing, it all just seemed so naturalistic and unpretentious. Sure – not every acting choice was the most interesting, but it was so simple, unadorned, and earnest – and it got to me.

On a filmmaking level, it takes some big swings, working with a stylistic freedom that “better” films wouldn’t allow themselves, and there is clearly an eye there. There are very attractive shots and evocative staging that lets the characters speak for themselves, just by inhabiting space, such as one set up in the living room – everyone has something going on and the framing allows it to breathe. Other sequences really sing, such as the first appearance of the samurai, who shows up to slaughter some neighbors as Sarah twists and turns on the bed, panting and moaning. Why is there this sexual connection? Who knows? Why is the husband in the neighbor couple such a jerk to his wife, and why does she put a tray with tea service on the squishiest, least stable waterbed I’ve ever seen – doesn’t she need to sleep there later – is she a fan of sleeping on wet, tea-stained sheets? Their relationship is strained and strange, but still actually believable – sometimes relationships are weird (and these little odd details give their marriage a surprising degree of verisimilitude). The linking of Sarah’s orgasms with the samurai’s violence is utterly bizarre, but it clicks in the moment, and as the editing feverishly jumps back and forth between her arched back and the middle aged husband next door fleeing in his saggy, once white briefs from this mysteriously exotic, eastern killer, it just feels right – strange and baffling, but right.

In the end, it all felt more like successful, if impenetrable, “art” than a ‘bad horror movie.’ But this wasn’t art to communicate meaning. I don’t think there is something to be interpreted in this piece and any discussion of what it all means, for me, is pointless. But it worked – it did  something. My mind was enjoyably cracked open by the weirdness, but not so much that I lost interest. Was I moved? Maybe a little. Did I think? Maybe just “why?” But I did clearly have some kind of art experience – let’s say I was transported. Where to? I have no idea, but for a little less than 90 minutes, I was in for the ride and I’m so happy that I took it. It was a worthwhile, totally non-cerebral aesthetic encounter.

Now, as I’m including this as a Christmas movie, just how Christmasy was it? Not a ton perhaps, but it does all revolve around something that can be such a common holiday experience – going with your partner to their family home and not feeling right there. His family has different traditions. You feel his mother is judging you. Your boyfriend ignores your discomfort because for him, all of this is normal, and he keeps trying to initiate sex even though you can feel his mother’s weird psychic presence in the room, watching, thinking the worst – deeming you a tramp, or possibly the reincarnated spirit of a vengeful samurai. And of course, it all ends with katanas, lasers, howling wind, and Carl Orff. You know, Christmas…

It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)

This delightfully titled Christmas-movie-cum-slasher has oodles of pedigree. It was written by Michael Kennedy, the screenwriter of the playful and moving Freaky (2020), and directed by Tyler MacIntyre, the director of the rather cynical, razor sharp Tragedy Girls (2017). It’s got a great cast, including Joel McHale (Assassination Nation), Justin Long (Barbarian), and Katherine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps). And it’s got a clever, impish, high-concept premise – shuffling together the tropes of a Christmas movie, particularly of a Hallmark channel variety, with those of a masked-killer slasher. It’s a great collection of elements, and it all comes together to be a rather good time, if not particularly groundbreaking or life changing. That said, off the bat, I feel like I’m damning with faint praise, but I did genuinely like watching this movie, even if I do have my criticisms.

I have written before on the emergence of a newish sub-genre/approach – that of the “meta-modern slasher.” Working with a high degree of genre-awareness, these contemporary ‘dead teenager movies’ tend to consciously build on tropes and forms much as “postmodern slashers” such as Scream have done, but with new degrees of both genre play and emotional sincerity. In all cases that I’ve seen, there has been a ‘big idea’: what if Groundhog Day were a slasher? Or Freaky Friday? Or The Purple Rose of Cairo? Or Back to the Future? Or, in this case, a made for TV movie riffing on It’s a Wonderful Life? Working within both the forms of the slasher flick and whatever the given cinematic inspiration was, there is a lot of room for both knowing comedy and brutal kills, and at their best, the two genres complement each other, each bringing out the best in its unlikely counterpart. But what really distinguishes these movies is not the cute idea of pairing two seemingly opposite types of films, but rather, their glowing warmth and good heart. These works tend to offer the thrills of a violent slasher, but the end effect is really never one of horror; rather, they are ultimately stories of reconciliation, of family, of loss and love.

In the case of It’s a Wonderful Knife, I can’t exactly say that both the slasher and the Christmas film are perfectly served by the pairing, or that they are both executed to perfection, but they are both clearly present. Most importantly though, even if there are narrative lapses, unearned character turns, or moments that just didn’t add up for me, I can’t deny this film’s big, loving heart. I’d be lying if I claimed not to have cried by the end of this movie that sees sharpened candy canes shoved through people’s heads, beheadings, impalements, electrocutions, and lots and lots of stabbing (though I admit I was disappointed that at no point did someone pick up the killer’s signature blade and say something like, “I wish he’d stop killing townspeople, but I gotta say, it really is a wonderful knife! (Look at the camera with raised eyebrows! Freeze frame! Roll credits!)

We start with the Hallmark movie – in the picturesque small town of Angel Falls, an unscrupulous real estate developer is making Winnie’s dad work on Christmas Eve as he tries to buy up the last piece of land standing in the way of his new giant shopping center/condos/fill-in-the-blank tower of greed. Winnie and her family are sad about this, but for years, it’s been the norm. Ok – so now we add the slasher: Winnie finds herself facing a masked white angel who has already murdered a couple of her friends, and she unmasks and kills him. Merry Christmas! One year later, everyone in the town has progressed from the dark events of last Christmas and is trying to just dive into the holidays and commit to being happy. Winnie seems to be the only person incapable of moving on (I mean, she is also the only one who had to kill someone last year).

Thus, so distraught in her trauma, so isolated by everyone else’s carefree gaiety, she makes a Christmas wish to have never been born (for me – I believed her misery, but the leap to “everyone would be better off without me” seemed more than a little abrupt – almost perfunctory – to hurry up and get us to the premise – in It’s a Wonderful Life, I’m sure George doesn’t decide to kill himself until well after the 2/3 mark, and in this case, Winnie does so before a third of the movie has passed – and this makes a difference). And suddenly, before any bells ring or angels get their wings, no one in Angel Falls knows who she is anymore, and the no-longer-killed-a-year-ago masked angel slasher is back (since she never dispatched him, he has apparently been killing someone every couple of weeks for the whole last year). What’s more, the town has fallen fully into the grasp of the evil developer – now the mayor, and everything has just gone utterly to hell – like Pottersville on crack – literally – now many of her friends (who no longer know who she is) are junkies – maybe this is all a reference to Community, the show where most first saw Joel McHale – this is the darkest timeline. In an uncharacteristic turn for a whodunit slasher, she knows the angel’s identity, but no one believes her of course, and she has to team up with Bernie (a social outcast with whom she shares some chemistry) to try to set everything right. Along the way, the two girls both learn to value their place in the world, each playing Clarence to the other, as they furthermore fall in love.

Of this recent wave of heartwarming, genre bending, comic slashers (such as The Final Girls, Freaky, Happy Death Day, or Totally Killer), sadly, I can’t call this my favorite, but I did very much enjoy it. It takes some unexpected turns here and there, though so much of it depends on us already knowing how a certain kind of story must progress; many of the characters have a spark, and I just enjoy spending time with them; and the Christmas movie of it all generally lands (as I mentioned, it did get me to cry by the end – though I’m an easy mark) – but if at any time it didn’t, I knew it was ok cause someone was going to get stabbed soon. Also, I did connect with the central romance – there wasn’t necessarily a lot of story to hang it on, but the two lead girls did spark, and it was affecting seeing them connect.

And there were problems as well. Many beats don’t track, some moments left me really scratching my head (glowing eyed hypnotism – huh?), and it often felt rushed. I think the story could have benefited from even an additional ten minutes. It clearly combines the slasher not with Capra’s classic film, but instead with a more superficial spin on it, as get churned out every year for TV or now streaming (I heard in an interview with the director that it was even filmed in a town used for a great deal of Hallmark Channel movies and that much of the crew had worked on such films previously). And yet, I find myself pre-disposed to like it – I want to like it – it is likeable (if clearly flawed) – and so I do like it. Of course, if all of its elements worked a bit better, it could be really special. As it is, it is merely a frolic – a light entertainment that passes a dark, cold December evening with a bit of frothy warmth – an imperfect, but highly watchable 87 minutes, full of character, tons of positive representation (a surprising percentage of named characters being gay and/or people of color and/or people with some physical difference – it’s a very open film in that way), a ticklish idea, and, again, a whole lot of stabbing.

Will I watch it every year? Maybe not – but if it’s on some Christmas time, I wouldn’t object to watching it again.

Black Christmas (2006)

So, I know this was a much beloved and critically praised film when it was released back in 2006… by which I mean, people HATED it. Made right in the middle of the 2000s remake boom, it was everything that the original was not. Whereas the earlier film had been a character driven exercise in building suspense and terror while showing very little, following a group of girls you love spending time with, whose deaths you fear for and mourn, with a killer who is never more than an eye through a crack or a deeply off-putting, horrifically unhinged voice or set of voices on the phone, who we never know or remotely understand (and is all the scarier for it), the remake was a gorefest with thinly drawn, disposable characters who were sometimes difficult to tell apart (even if a few were recognizable, known actresses), filled with drawn out exposition, detailing every moment of the killer’s development, eliciting some gasps of shock or revulsion, but ultimately too incoherent to actually be scary. It was… not loved.

And yet, over the years, I’ve seen it experience a kind of reappraisal. With the distance of time, people have been more willing to look past the comparison with its superior namesake and find value in what it is rather than just slamming it for what it isn’t. Now, I never watched it back in the day, and thought this Christmas horror run down was a good opportunity to finally check it out. So what did I think?

Well, the criticism is not wrong. But neither are the people who adore it.

First of all, I would love, if I had the power, to issue a rule that people must stop naming movies Black Christmas. Bob Clark’s 1974 film is simply too good and anyone naming their new film after it is just shooting themselves in the foot (kind of a horror version of naming your movie Citizen Kane). That was true with this flick, which was actually a remake, taking and repurposing many iconic images, names, and elements from the earlier film (sorority house, Christmas break, weird phone calls, crystal unicorns, snow globes, drunk girls being put in bed to sleep it off, a killer named Billy/Agnes, Andrea Martin, etc.), but it was also true for the 2019, much derided, “remake” in name only – which seemed like a completely different story that some executive had slapped the name Black Christmas onto in order to make a couple extra bucks from name recognition. For the record, I did actually rather enjoy the 2019 film – probably much more than this, but I believe the name really hurt it – and it was so unnecessary given how if it’s actually remaking anything, it’s not Clark’s film, but rather S02E05 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer  – “Reptile Boy.” Watch them both and tell me I’m wrong.

But about this movie, I can’t say that I loved it, and I can’t say that its structural issues are insubstantial (there were moments late in the film when I really couldn’t follow what was happening from one moment to the next and it feels like almost a third of its runtime is expository flashback), but amidst what might honestly be deemed a total mess, there is some enjoyable horror to be had.

A classy film this ain’t. Rather, its dubious strengths lie entirely in outré moments of utter, shameless excess, whether in terms of gore, gooey gross outs, or sexual taboo. An incestuous, murderous mother, crispy Christmas cookies made of human skin – disgustingly dipped in a glass of milk before being munched upon, and so, so, so many eye balls pulled out of their sockets and squished or eaten or hung on a Christmas tree as festive ornaments – this movie cannot be accused of gently beating around the bush, too scared to commit to its horrors – advisable or not, it is always willing to “go there.”

And that can be fun. Even if it is often weighed down by its failings as a film writ large, this Black Christmas is an absurd, gross, cringe inducing good time that succeeded a couple of times in making me squirm in my seat when I wasn’t scratching my chin, wondering what on earth was going on. Furthermore, I don’t think it’s a film that could have been “better.” It very much is what it is. For example, the amount of time spent in flashback, giving us a backstory for the killer feels just deadly – how could this interminable exposition possibly go on so long? And just when it seems to have finished, a new character starts it up again and we’re back to another ten minutes of flashbacks. But, honestly, some of the best, most awful stuff is in those overlong flashbacks, so I wouldn’t want to cut them. Babies, bathwater, and such… It’s like the song says, “you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have” an abused child growing up to eat his mother and subsequently murder sorority girls for some reason…

So yeah – it’s not great – but there is fun to be had if you’re open to it. I’m not offended that it exists, and it does have some memorable moments of excess – which I always have a warm place in my heart for.

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So maybe that’s a good start on the season. These have been three very entertaining watches, even if none is exactly a classic for the ages. But having covered them, there are so many more seasonal films I still haven’t seen, so I think we’re going to stay on this train for at least one more post. Stay warm out there.

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…

Re-donning the Slasher Goggles: Don’t Fear the Reaper

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So this post is going up a little late. As I’ve much written about, it can be hard to choose my topic each week and this last one was no exception. I watched one early 80s folk horror about which I’d heard really good things, and while I appreciated aspects of its concept and enjoyed its madcap weirdness, certain weaknesses of its execution kept me at arm’s length and I just couldn’t get into it. I watched an absolutely gorgeous arthouse horror from a filmmaker I’d long had a blind spot for, but I need to rewatch it to order my thoughts before writing and while I loved it on initial viewing, watching it again immediately just felt a bit like homework (but I’ll do it soon – I promise). I even made it out to the cinema and saw Cocaine Bear, which I rather enjoyed, but don’t have sufficient thoughts about to fill a whole post.

Past that, I’ve been doing a bit of travel around Croatia, where I’m currently “workationing” (hooray for remote work), and that means lots of time sitting at cafes reading, and in the last couple of days, I burned through the end of a book and having enjoyed it so much, found myself going back to the beginning and almost re-reading the whole thing the next day. So let’s talk about that. Let’s return to Proofrock, Idaho for the second installment of Stephen Graham Jones’s “Lake Witch Trilogy,” Don’t Fear the Reaper.

Don’t Fear the Reaper (2023)

I think I’m going to have to do this in two parts. To do the book justice, it’s necessary to get into certain details which could rather spoil its reading. But at the same time, I really liked it and would like to offer some explication of its value to potential readers. Therefore, I will go into it first sans spoilers. And then, after a break, will discuss key elements and later revelations for a select readership that has already finished the book.

Last summer, during a few weeks of discussing the concept and some stand out examples of “the final girl,” I devoted a post to the first book of this cycle, My Heart is a Chainsaw. At the time, I had no idea that it was even part of a trilogy, so satisfyingly did it reach its conclusion (and from an interview I heard, I have the impression that it was written as a stand-alone piece, which the author later decided to return to and build on). When I heard this volume was coming out, I was even initially hesitant, feeling that the original hadn’t needed continuation (a sentiment that often arises when it comes to Slasher franchises), but I’m so glad I picked this up.  Graham Jones manages to really deepen and expand upon themes of the first work, very satisfyingly allowing characters to grow and mature, while also exploring how the effects of the first novel ripple through this town and the lives of its citizens, surfacing in a new explosion of violence.

And on top of that, the book just feels like a sprint. Whereas Chainsaw took its time, getting us behind the eyes of Jade, its narrator and eventual final girl, navigating us through a rich collection of characters and contexts that all set up possible causes of and motives for the deaths that were occurring, interspersed with her pontifications on Slasher theory, the lens through which she viewed her world, before Jade had to finally rise to the occasion, stepping into the shoes of the idealized role she’d never thought herself qualified for in a final act blood bath, Reaper just hits the ground running and doesn’t let up till it gets where it’s going. Full of intense, cinematic sequences, it is a page turner, as they say – an exciting, often gory, emotional roller coaster that left me pumping my fist in the air following its triumphant last sentence. In the lead up to releasing Reaper, I started seeing t-shirts with the slogan “Jade Daniels is my final girl” popping up on social media – for good reason. She’s an easy character to rally around.

Official shirts available here.

In many ways, this functions as a Slasher sequel, and it’s a good one. As Randy enthuses in Scream 2, there’s a bigger body count and it’s gorier with more elaborate death scenes. But in other ways, it gives space to elements that wouldn’t ordinarily be focused on (not to mention hosting characters with a degree of self-aware genre knowledge that puts poor Randy to shame). Four years have passed since the events of the first book and their weight hangs heavily on all those who survived. The town has generally recovered since the Lake Witch slayings and subsequent fire and flood, but beneath the surface, the town of Proofrock is haunted by those who were lost, by the horrors the survivors witnessed, by wounds that linger, both physical and otherwise. Into this space, Jade returns, having been subjected to a lengthy trial following her heroic and cathartic turn in the climax of the first book. No good deed goes unpunished.

Notably, Graham Jones has allowed her to change, to grow up a bit. Throughout the first volume, she sees everything through her “Slasher-goggles,” having embraced slasher films and tropes as a kind of coping mechanism to deal with a slate of traumatic experiences she’d been subjected to. In seeing things through as she does in the first book, she is allowed some personal resolution – some things are laid to rest, or at least are contained at the bottom of the lake. Though it is so unfair that she alone was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for her actions, the fact that the trial took her out of her once toxic context seems to have been good for her. She is in a more stable place. She doesn’t need to lean on the mythic resonance of her favorite films as she once had.

Ironically though, other characters have now done their homework, having lived through their own real life slasher film, and Jade (or Jennifer as she would now rather be called) is no longer the only one so versed in the lore of the sub-genre. In fact, she would rather not dwell on the material she once depended on, and resists others’ attempts to make her view new events through her old lens. Fascinatingly, these others each have a different relationship to the material. For one, it is research for survival – determined to endure whatever is thrown at her, she has obsessively worked through every slasher and tawdry thriller she can find. Another seems to have shared a similar history with Jade, living through childhood trauma and mythologizing the figures of slasher cinema, but whereas Jade was destined for the heroic, he has become a sleazy predator. Finally, a third character seems to have studied these filmic texts as models for their own cycle of murders – the movies, as Billy Loomis once said, not making psychos, but making psychos “more creative.”

Into the mix as well, comes the nigh-mythic serial killer, Dark Mill South, a hulking silent butcher right out of a later installment of Friday the 13th, Halloween, or Hatchet. He is an intimidating figure and the scenes in which Jade confronts him are some of the most gripping in the book. Also, just as her Native American (Blackfeet) heritage has done so much to shape (and sour) her relationship with her community and family, his has also contributed to the shadow he casts, particularly the implication that his many, varied, horrific killings are all to be taken as vengeance for the mass hanging in 1862 of 38 Sioux warriors, ordered by Lincoln. Dark Mill South is clearly a monster – he has done horrific things (and the time we spend inside his perspective does nothing to soften that view), but the sense that he could be enacting a kind of vengeance for such a violence of the past, that his crimes are in fact a form of justice, as brutal and implacable as an act of nature, helps contextualize him as a Slasher killer in a classic-mythic sense.

Thus, though she has successfully moved on in a number of ways, when high school kids start showing up dead all over town, just as she’s getting home, Jade is pulled back in, and will once again have to wade through a river of gore to protect those she cares about. But that is one thing that’s different this time. Four years earlier, she’d been so isolated, the weird horror kid from a “bad family” crying “slasher” to deaf ears, her relationships mostly antagonistic. This time, she does have a small community around her. Most of the town still may view her with suspicion at best, but she is now tied to some other survivors of the last massacre. She actually has a couple of friends and loved ones who she does not want to lose, for whom she will fight.

And perhaps at this point, before we get into any discussion of later developments, it’s a good time to stop if you haven’t read the book and think you might at all like to. If so, do start with My Heart is a Chainsaw. Enjoy.

This is Graham Jones – horror folk always seem so nice.

Ok, I’ll assume if you’re still here, you’ve either read both Chainsaw and Reaper or never will. So now I’m just going to geek out a bit. One thing I really appreciated was how in her roaring death cry to pierce Dark Mill South and “find the off switch,” I flashed on the mama bear at the end of the first book. Jade spent her young life failed by her family (and worse), but in this moment, she can do for her chosen family what wasn’t done for her. It’s a lovely moment. As is the denouement regarding Sheriff Hardy and Melanie. If only that meant the actual killer had been brought down.

In the first book, there is much discussion of red herrings in the Slasher genre, particularly in those that revolve around the mystery of the killer’s identity (which I’d hazard to say is actually most of them – the silent, named, masked killers cast a long shadow, but far more are unseen murderers waiting for a final act reveal).  The first time around, Jade, through her goggles, was endlessly trying to figure out what was going on. Theory after theory fell flat though because life isn’t a clean story and, well, there were actually a few killers to reckon with (in both cases, these elements are repeated). This time, even though clues are littered throughout the book, and Jade and Letha even have an extended discussion about “final girls who are actually the killer,” it’s still so easy to get distracted by the looming figure of Dark Mill South, who does, in fact, finish some kids off, but otherwise is a minor contributor to the mayhem, a convenient cover story who just happened to be brought in by the storm at just the right time. This misdirection begins before the story does, with the quote from Carol J. Clover about how the killer is invariably male.

In contrast, in both the Melanie/Spirit Elk and the Cinnamon/Ginger (or was it always only Cinnamon?) storylines, the past is coming to bear and revenge is being dealt, whether for complicity in one death many years ago (classic slasher stuff) or rooted in a twisted sense of balancing the scales following the last slaughter and a misplaced blame for the one person who actually managed to stop it last time. And while Dark Mill South is in the ground and Hardy and Melanie are reunited beneath the ice, Cinnamon is still out there, free and unaccused. It leaves things intriguingly open for the final volume. While at the end of the first book, I felt everything had been quite wrapped up, this time, I am rather waiting for the final installment, and wondering what new repercussions will follow from this one. Also – how much of a time jump will there be this time? It seems unlikely that Jade will avoid at least some length of a prison sentence.

I loved this book for many of the same reasons that I so enjoyed the first. It is both a successful, interesting, fun thriller, and at the same time, such a love letter to a much maligned genre that so many of us take so much pleasure and find such deep satisfaction in. I love how through Jade, and now also through Letha, Armitage, and Cinnamon, these “dead teenager pictures,” are revealed as emotional texts, as therapeutic, as inspiring, as art, as important. How many movies have shown some variant of sportsball as a metaphor for life, as a vehicle for a mythic hero’s journey, as the crucible in which identity is formed? We all find meaning where we do, and in finding it, create it.

And that is what we have here. It is so satisfying seeing a character like Jade, who has latched onto these works of fiction (which the general public and ‘reputable critics’ would scorn) for survival, go through so much, suffer but still be compelled to investigate, fight but also be driven to understand, and ultimately grow into a powerful woman who can and will do what is necessary, whether that means killing the killer with an appropriately phallic weapon, helping a loved one find peace, or taking the fall for a friend. It’s moving to go on the journey with her, to witness her becoming.

It’s also really fun.