Tag Archives: Slashers

Roots of a Genre – and Questioning Genre

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Happy Friday the 13th! (At least, that’s the date as I sit down to start writing – we’ll see what day I actually post – ok, now it’s Sunday) Whether or not one is a fan of that particular series, this always seems like a little horror holiday, worthy of some manner of observation.  Furthermore, these days summer is coming on, everything is in bloom, and there is this atmosphere redolent of the end of school, of vacation, of coming freedom. And so, I think it is appropriate to take a filmic holiday to a beautiful wooded hideaway, next to a serene body of water, where thirteen people happen to get skewered, hanged, speared, decapitated, burned, and just generally knocked off in all manner of gruesome ways. But today we’re not actually going to Crystal Lake (I’ve already covered my favorite of the F13 movies, part II); let’s take a little trip to Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood. Warning – there are many twists that could be spoiled, so enter with care.

I imagine that this will also be a jumping off point for a few other things I’ve been thinking about, so please bear with me.

A Bay of Blood (1971)

Bava’s film was also released as Carnage, Ecology of Crime, Chain Reaction, Blood Bath, The New House on the Left, and the most excellently titled Twitch of the Death Nerve. Quite shocking at its time, I think its violence holds up pretty well today and can still elicit some real gasps from a viewer. Solidly within the giallo tradition, it also went on to deeply influence what would become the American slasher, most notably the first two Friday the 13th movies (which draw on its location and atmosphere, and even directly recreate a couple of its kills), and subsequently, their imitators. There had certainly been juxtapositions of the beauty of nature with human violence before, and I can’t say for sure that it’s the first “body count film,” but Bava does it so well here as to effectively codify many of what would go on to become the slasher tropes, just as Carpenter would further do seven years later with Halloween.

But it is a bit of an odd duck. At only 84 minutes, it is a tight little thriller that races along at a clip, but it’s also sometimes languid and pastoral. It is quite bare bones, more interested in setting up murder set pieces than fleshing out any of its characters, but it is also surprisingly complex, requiring the viewer to really pay close attention (there are at least six different killers, each working separately and at cross purposes). It relishes in mutilation and gore, but it is also beautifully filmed and artfully composed. The acting is stilted, the writing is strange, the dubbing is terrible (typical for Italian films of the era), but it is also captivating and exciting, and it still somehow comes off as a kind of masterpiece, superior to many of the copycats that would follow in its bloody wake.

The story, while riddled with double crosses, reversals, and shocking revelations, focuses on a simple MacGuffin: the property around a bay which could be developed at a profit, or preserved in its natural beauty (an interesting note on the nature – the filming location had only a couple of trees and they needed a forest, so Bava reportedly just bought some branches at a garden store and had them held in front of and behind the actors – and it’s totally effective – you’d never know it from what’s on screen). The film starts with the old woman, the owner of the land in question, being killed and her suicide faked, and then it’s off to the races with everybody and their surprise step brother killing each other to acquire the inheritance.  In fact, as soon as this matriarch is dead, the film delivers its first big twist. You might expect that, having seen the black gloved hands leave the fake note, that killer would slink back into the shadows so we might wonder at his or her identity for the rest of the film. You’d be wrong. We pan up, see his face, and then immediately see him stabbed in the back.  All apparent rules are out the window – anything can happen – anyone can die, and almost all of them (13 out of the 15 people that appear on screen) do.

While story is decentered, the rest of the filmmaking is creative, propulsive, and endlessly stylish, circling a visual theme of pristine nature balanced against avaricious humanity, corrupt and murderous. People don’t come off well here at all. If they aren’t egoistic killers, they are generally ineffectual, shrill, greedy specimens who will go wholly unmourned, the only exception being some young people who have the misfortune of happening upon the property and getting killed on the off chance that they might stumble onto some kind of evidence (but even there, just the two girls seem kinda decent – the guys, not so much). This pessimistic view of humanity is nicely encapsulated in a dialogue between Paolo, who collects and studies insects and Simon, who criticizes his hobby:

Simon: I don’t kill as a hobby like you do.

Paolo: Good lord, Simon. You make me feel like a murderer.

Simon: I’m not saying that, Mr. Fossati, but if you kill for killing’s sake, you become a monster.

Paolo: But, man isn’t an insect, my dear Simon. We have centuries of civilization behind us, you know.

Simon: No, I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

In all fairness though, I’m pretty sure that Paolo kills no human beings in the film and Simon is responsible for at least 5 deaths (maybe 6), so his moral superiority comes with a grain of salt. Regardless, neither of them are particularly nice guys. It is to Bava’s credit that the film can hold attention so well in spite of being peopled almost exclusively with unpleasant characters.

Perhaps this is the origin of horror films filling their dramatis personae with irritating, disposable youngsters who only exist to satisfyingly die (a trait I’m rarely a fan of – I rather appreciate when they avoid this very thing, but it works here). An effect of this is that the murders don’t horrify so much as thrill – they startle, they impress with their ingenuity, they attain a visceral quality, but it’s all in good fun and there is a streak of black humor running through the whole affair up to, and particularly including, the very last moment before the credits roll.

This is but one of the many links between this influential giallo and what would later become the slasher. We also have the degree to which it structures itself specifically around the kills, then showcasing the gore to the best of the effects artist’s abilities (sometimes with more success than others). Bava even has a group of young people with absolutely no connection to the plot show up just so that someone will go skinny dipping and the body count will be that much higher (and it’s their deaths that get directly borrowed in the first two Friday movies, notably the couple speared together while in flagrante). We even have the scene in the final act when a girl walks into a room only to find all of the people who had been murdered earlier horrifically arranged. This is all extremely familiar but is housed within the work of a giallo director working in high cinematic style.

For a fan of the genre, it’s really worth giving it a view. So much is clearly in its debt.

A Crisis of Genre

This preoccupation with genre (horror – thriller – giallo – slasher) brings me to a topic that’s been on my mind of late. I haven’t personally had a chance yet to see the new Dr. Strange movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but I would like to. I enjoyed the first one and hey, Sam Raimi is directing (of Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, Darkman, The Gift, and the first three Spider-Man movies, among many others). In the lead up to its release, it was promoted in some circles as being Marvel’s first foray into horror. Tellingly, in other circles, it was not. And now that it’s out, it is being met with a) mixed reviews (too bad, but not what I’m interested in here), and b) a small crisis of genre classification.

I’ve seen a fair amount of headlines questioning whether it is horror or not and whether it’s too scary. Not having actually seen it, I don’t exactly have an opinion of my own, but I think the debate is interesting in terms of who makes which case and what their stake is in the matter. I think Disney is trying to both have and eat cake here. Before release, this was going to be a horror movie – the novelty was a selling point; after release, and being criticized, of course this isn’t a horror movie – you can bring your kids, fun for the whole family! There are plenty in the horror sphere making the distinction of ‘containing horror elements, but not being classifiable as a horror movie.’ Possibly when I finally see it, I may fall in this camp, but in such things, I always hesitate for fear of falling into a kind of snooty gatekeeping. Personally, Silence of the Lambs, a movie I really like and respect, doesn’t really feel like horror to me (as I wrote about here), but who am I to tell someone who considers it their favorite horror movie that they’re doing it wrong?

Most tellingly for me, a kid that I teach (English as a foreign language) saw it a few days ago and was fuming to me about it afterwards, during our class. He did not appreciate the horror of it. He had gone to a comic book movie and was angry at having been scared. He didn’t want to watch a horror flick and was offended at the intrusion of a genre he doesn’t like into “a cartoon for kids.” I’m not going to venture into whether it’s too scary or not (again – haven’t seen it) and I remember plenty of pretty horrific stuff from PG movies that I loved when I was little and really not into horror (the face melting in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first ghost in the library in Ghostbusters, all of Gremlins, a movie that I LOVED). But it seems to me that if he and other young viewers receive it as horror, that’s what it is. Dismissing their experience seems inexcusably presumptuous. In a similar vein, a podcast I follow, Horror Queers, just did an episode on Who Framed Roger Rabbit – when I first saw that, I was puzzled, but both hosts remembered being disturbed by it when they were little in a way that felt just like a horror film – both by the rather intense and gruesome content of its climax (when the judge is slowly crushed by a steam roller, screaming till the end) and its simple, inherently uncanny mix of animation and live action.

Horror is a tricky thing to pin down. Is it about a set of featured tropes? Which tropes? How many? The net will inevitably be cast too wide or too narrow. Is it just about being horrified? That doesn’t work – a holocaust drama probably shouldn’t be thus classified. To be a comedy, it’s easy; a movie just has to make you laugh. With horror, we might not be able to do better than Justice Stewart’s definition of obscenity (“I know it when I see it”).

To a large extent, genre is just a marketing tool allowing producers to target sales of a product to the consumers who will most want to buy it. For academics, it can be an important tool for focusing a subject of inquiry, contextualizing it in terms of the history and features of similar works. For the rest of us, why is it at all important how we classify Doctor Strange or Silence of the Lambs or anything else? Are we just hungry for categorization? Is it an aspect of how we form our identity? I am the kind of person who likes these things and doesn’t like those things. I am different than the person who likes those and doesn’t like these. If I don’t know what kind of thing this is, if it can’t be clearly labeled, how can I use it to understand and thus, enact the kind of thing that I am?

This may be overreaching – I doubt that loads of people are thrust into existential crisis because they don’t know if Marvel just released a horror movie or not, but the fact that there is any controversy at all over something so seemingly trivial seems to reveal an investment in the matter that may speak to deeper significance.

But people are somehow still arguing about which two colors that dress was – so who knows?

Not Accepting a Life You Don’t Deserve – X

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So, starting this blog, it wasn’t my intention to be a ‘journalist,’ staying abreast of and giving my opinions on the most current developments in the genre, and thus I’ve focused on older movies which I’ve found interesting, or which I’ve felt deserve some more attention. But today, for the first time, I’d like to write about something relatively new, something still in cinemas (it actually just opened a week ago where I live), something I just got to see and loved: Ti West’s X. Now, I’m aware that I’m late to the party – it opened about 6 weeks ago in the States and a lot of ink has already been spilled on it, but I really liked it and I’ve successfully avoided reading any reviews so I could give my thoughts untainted by other opinions. I can’t promise, therefore, that those thoughts are novel, but if its characters can be so insistent on getting what they want, I can excuse myself for devoting some bandwidth to this today.

X (2022)

Especially given the fact that this is still a new release, be forewarned that herein lie spoilers.

In short, the film follows a group of young, aspiring pornographers into rural Texas circa 1979, where unbeknownst to the elderly couple from whom they’re renting a farmhouse, they plan to make a “really good dirty movie,” thus kicking off their respective futures of wealth, comfort, indie cinema, and fame. However, of course, this being a horror movie, they’ve come to the wrong farmhouse, and said elderly couple, driven by a resentment of the young flaunting what they feel age has unfairly stripped away, set upon them in pretty brutal fashion. It is a playful, gory, sexy, and surprisingly emotional outing, and it is also a satisfyingly cohesive piece, held together by the confluence of hopes, dreams, and flesh.

I think comparisons to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Boogie Nights are inevitable, justified, and limiting. It’s probably impossible to hack up young people in such gorgeous southern heat without bringing Hooper’s film to mind (and at least one sequence, in which Maxine is filmed looking through the screen door of the house from deep down the dark interior hallway before tentatively venturing inside, seems to be a direct visual nod to Pam in Chainsaw doing the same). That said, X has a totally different character than the earlier film. Whereas Tobe Hooper’s classic presents America as a pessimistic nightmare, West offers, in spite of the plentiful blood and guts, a disarmingly hopeful tone. This is a film explicitly about the American dream, and it is peopled with dreamers, chasing their own respective stars. Some have been soured by dreams that didn’t come true, and have thus, bitterly, turned to violent cruelty, but the film as a whole retains a rare and sincere optimism. And even the villains of the piece, who do some awful things, are sympathetic in their way.

This essentially humanist take on a group of young people, enjoying their own and each other’s bodies, unconcerned with society’s judgment, chasing success, does bring to mind Anderson’s opus of the porn industry at the turn of the 70s and the 80s, particularly in terms of both films’ central characters’ pursuit of stardom and their tendency to tell themselves in the mirror just how much of a star they are. But Boogie Nights doesn’t feature any eyes being stabbed out, nails through unshod feet, heads being chomped by swamp gators, arterial spurts (though it doesn’t lack blood – anytime a character is wearing all white, it just seems like something bad is destined to happen), pitchforkings, axings, or crushed heads, so that’s something different. Still, another similarity of the two films is their bravura cinematic style and their use of an ill-respected genre (adult film) to lovingly showcase independent filmmaking behind the scenes.

In further contrast to Chainsaw, which moves from a place of sinking dread to a point of sustained, shrill insanity, truly horrific to endure, X is perhaps closer to an 80s slasher, full of sex and violence, but ultimately made to entertain in a way Chainsaw seems unconcerned with. X can startle sometimes with some fun jump scares, builds suspense well and is playful with setting up and denying expectations, has great gory practical effect work, and is exciting, engaging, and even occasionally scary, but while it has thrills aplenty, it doesn’t exactly horrify (and I don’t think this is a failing – like the filmmakers within the movie, I think West really just wants to show you a good time). But neither, really, (in my opinion) did any of the Friday the 13th movies and that doesn’t mean they aren’t a hoot. Also, like an 80s slasher, it is preoccupied with sex, even featuring killers hunting the young explicitly for their sexuality (an easy read of many Reagan era “bodycount films”) but here there is a significant difference.

While films such as Pieces (1982), Blood Rage (1987), or Nail Gun Massacre (1985) may feature gratuitous nudity and a killer somehow obsessed with or haunted by sex (and can be fun in their unapologetically exploitative fashion – I certainly don’t mean to disparage them by comparison), X is actually about sex in a way they are not and, therefore, nothing here is gratuitous. Rather, it is essential to the story, to the thematic, to the emotional arcs of the characters. It is certainly at the core of The Farmer’s Daughters, the film within a film that has brought them to this ill-fated farm.

As experienced sexual performers, Maxine (Mia Goth) and Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), both of whom presumably have been working as strippers for some time but have never made a film before, are defiant in their sexuality, in embracing and enjoying it and the work they do, unashamedly and proudly. Jackson (Kid Cudi), having filmed his first scene, feels he’s found his calling, standing before the window, naked and beaming. Finally, Lorraine (Jenny Ortega), the sound technician and girlfriend of RJ (Owen Campbell), the director of the Farmer’s Daughters, initially uncomfortable in this company, finds herself called to participate, allured by the inspiring sexual freedom, the infectious positivity, and the sense that they are, in fact, making something good that she wants to be a part of. This leads to a telling point of conflict with RJ, who does not want her in the movie, casting doubt on the possibility of actually being so free of hang ups as the group claims.

On the other side of things, Pearl (also Mia Goth, in heavy old-age makeup) and Howard (Stephen Ure), the old couple who are unknowingly providing the setting for this on-location shoot, have their own sexual hang ups to wrestle with. Their relationship is loving, but physically distant, and that distance takes a heavy toll on Pearl. Due to his heart condition, Howard is unwilling to approach intimacy, though he is apparently willing to occasionally chain up attractive young drifters in the basement to satisfy Pearl’s needs, or blow interlopers away with his shotgun. Pearl is pitiable in her physical loneliness, frail and desperate for affection, for touch, to be seen and wanted. It is creepy and invasive when she takes an opportunity to brush against Maxine’s uncovered ribs, even more so, when she strips down and climbs into bed with her as she sleeps; and the whole naked dead guy locked up in the cellar is certainly not ok – but she is really not unsympathetic and the film does not demonize her or present her as horrific merely by virtue of her age or the fact that she still has sexual desire.

The whole film turns on Maxine’s determination to parley her youth and beauty and sex into the life she dreams of and Pearl’s assurance that, “It’ll all be taken from you. Just like it was from me.” There is a bitterness turned violent in Pearl’s assertions, but also a wistful sadness that seems rooted in a life hard lived, in countless tragedies, failures, and disappointments that have atrophied the spirit. There is really nothing left for Pearl to lose and if she can find some satisfaction in the visceral execution of the young, in the physical satisfaction of bloodlust, if, covered in blood, she can finally dance again, following the ever present TV preacher, why should she accept a life she does not deserve?

Maxine (who, in a coda, we learn has a strong tie to said preacher), delivers the same line. She is young now, and strong, certain in the righteousness of her desire, the drive of her body. When she makes it through the night, doing what she has to do to survive, ultimately ruthless in overcoming her octogenarian assailants, her bloody victory inspires. Two dreams clashed and in the end, the one that has not yet gone sour triumphs. Maxine driving off into a glorious sunrise, followed by the comic epilogue of police investigating the blood drenched scene the next day, cements the hopefulness of the ending. For a very, very bloody flick, featuring killer alligators, broken dreams, and, one assumes, sex crimes in the basement, it is a really upbeat note to end on.

And past that, the whole film is just fun. Good editing is often invisible, but West fills his film with really showy cuts and absolutely beautiful shots, relishing the vibrancy of youth, nature, sun, sweat, and enticing danger (an overhead shot of an alligator effortlessly floating towards an unsuspecting skinny dipper typifies the balance of beauty and threat on display here – such a balance bringing us right back to Chainsaw – it’s really hard to escape).

From moment to moment, the film delivers. The comedy lands. The scenes filmed for the Farmer’s Daughters, though they play on a stereotype of cheesy porn dialogue, are coyly seductive with a real, tactile sensuality. And it does have some scares that work, all adding up to a tremendously satisfying, entertaining, and even touching bit of horror cinema. At the end of the day, it is a fun body count film, but one not without heart, and not without a mind at work.

Three from the Woods – Just Before Dawn, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Eaten Alive!

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So, I try to ensure a degree of variety here. Two weeks ago, I published my silly poems – which was a lot of work and a lot of fun, but not really scary. Last week, I wrote about yet another Polish film which has a relationship to the genre, but however excellent of a film it is, it’s not quite what one would generally think of as a horror flick. So this week, I felt it was time for something kinda grotty, something that could be described as nothing less than horrific. I even found myself with a bit of time on my hands and was able to check out a few flicks I’d been meaning to get around to for a while. In the end though, while I appreciated everything I watched, I’m not sure if I have enough of a take on any of them to fill a whole post, so this week, let’s take a short look at three weird, violent little filmic oddities, all of which might convince you to stay out of the woods, avoid secluded lovers lanes, and maybe just steer clear of Texas entirely.

Just Before Dawn (1981)

I was prompted to give this one a chance by the main character of Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, who waxes enthusiastic about it and its final girl, Constance, and I’m glad I did as there is a lot here to love (and some other stuff to wade through until you get where you’re going).

It’s a pretty standard backwoods slasher setup: a group of young people head into the deep woods of Oregon despite the warnings of the quirky forest ranger (an enjoyably odd George Kennedy) for a weekend of drinking, skinny dipping, and carrying on. They don’t all come out again. Along the way, there’s some pretty languid pacing, surprisingly bloodless kill scenes, strange tonal shifts (from pastoral, to a bit goofy, to rather intensely brutal), and a “twist” that doesn’t feel all that shocking when it’s revealed.

However, it also features Mike Kellin (Mel from Sleepaway Camp) as a drunken voice of doom, an effective score by Brad Fiedel (composer for Terminator and Fright Night, among others), a beautiful location, well filmed and well utilized in service to the horror set pieces, and a twist which, while admittedly not very surprising, does set up solid tension based in dramatic irony as the only characters who had learned this information are dead, and those remaining are led to a false sense of safety.

In fact, pacing issues aside, Just Before Dawn offers a lot of really playful and potent teases – letting the audience see something or know something while (very obviously, but no less entertainingly) contriving reasons for the characters not to. Early on, the kids (let’s call them kids anyway) are all driving through the woods in a camper. One girl re-angles the rearview mirror so that she can do her makeup; the driver objects, but she’s like, ‘come on – there’s no traffic – what do you need it for?’ A moment later, we can see the killer (who had recently leapt aboard) climb across the back, clearly visible in the rear window, but unseen by all of the kids. A particularly fun scene later hinges on a character having lost his glasses and mistaking the figure moving towards him. These gags are hardly subtle, but the audience is invited in on the joke and there is a fun game of suspense in how it all plays out.

And finally, as this film came so strongly recommended by a fictional character obsessed with final girls (I’m sure I’ll write about My Heart is a Chainsaw sometime soon – for now, let’s just say it’s worth your time), it has a greatly interesting presentation of one. Constance (Deborah Benson) comes across as some kind of thesis statement on the idea of the final girl, which is notable as the director, Jeff Liebermann, didn’t seem to list slashers as his primary influence, but rather claimed inspiration in Deliverance and the work of Ingmar Bergman. She starts off as a very reasonable character – possibly the only one who’s actually dressed appropriately for hiking and camping – who has experience in the great outdoors and is mildly irritated by the goofball irresponsibility of her boyfriend and compatriots. She might have some wine, but she doesn’t overindulge, and if anyone’s going to pull off their top and jump into the water, it’s probably not her. So far, so standard fare.

But then something kind of interesting happens. Some of the boys who had gone to the camper for more wine play a prank on those who’ve stayed behind to make camp. Just out of sight, in the woods, in the dark, they make some noises, scaring the others by the fire (who had all ignored the drunk guy ranting that he’d been chased by “demons” and come here anyway). Though her friend Megan picks up a knife and is ready to stab at one of the boys as he jumps out of the shadows, Constance freezes up – and over the course of the next day or so, really reacts against her failure to take action. She’s so capable – she knows how to survive in the woods, but when there was a threat, she felt helpless. And so, she begins a transformation, borrowing Megan’s makeup and clothes, making herself into less of a ‘responsible-boring’ type and more into an impulsive, proactive, powerful woman. In all honesty, perhaps the director simply wanted to get her into skimpier clothing, but from a contemporary perspective, in light of what became the standard patterns of the sub-genre, this really subverts expectations in an intriguing way. Either way, this change coincides with her need to rise and do battle with the killer.

And what a battle! I mean really – it’s not very long and it doesn’t really have much in the way of gore, but it is just jaw dropping in its intensity (and without wanting to spoil the big finish, pun intended). I find it an interesting spin on the still being established tropes (filmed in 1980) that the ‘final girl’ first visually turns herself into a character who might be expected to die first (the over sexualized girl) and that while no killer in this film wears a mask, in effect, she does. The makeup that she keeps applying gives her a totally different face, and it seems that it is only once this mask is complete that she has finished her metamorphosis into the kind of person who could take down the killer in such brutal, spectacular, screaming fashion.

It probably could have gotten there faster (though I suppose it’s thematically appropriate to sometimes feel like it’s wandering aimlessly in the forest), but the destination is 100% worth it.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

This second film is rather a curiosity.  If Just Before Dawn has some shifts of tone, this swings so wildly back and forth that it feels like at least three different movies. One is a procedural true crime docu-drama about a police hunt for a serial killer in Texarcana in the 40s. The next is a really savage proto-slasher with increasingly weird and genuinely scary scenes of stalking and assault. Finally, somehow it’s like the Keystone Cops are on the scene, with zany slapstick sequences set to banjo music. This is one odd duck.

Directed by Charles B. Pierce (who also portrays Patrolman Benson, A.K.A. “sparkplug,” the main source of police themed comic-relief), the procedural elements here suggest a precursor to Fincher’s Zodiac. Loosely based on a true story, the film focuses on the police investigating a killer who targets couples in secluded areas (lover’s lanes and such) and toys with the police, taking pleasure in the media circus and public terror in response to his crimes. The structure is somewhat non-narrative, rather approximating a kid of reportage as we shift from killing to killing, interspersed with the police’s attempts to build a profile of the killer and follow the extremely limited clues they have to work with. By the end, the killer’s identity, motives, and whereabouts are still undetermined (true to the historical record, though most of the film apparently plays fast and loose with the facts), suggesting that though these attacks had all happened about 30 years earlier, the killer was still walking the streets of Texarcana, free and at any point could kill again. He could be sitting behind you in this very cinema as you are watching this film right now!

The less said about the comic elements, the better. While not quite as off putting as the bumbling police in, say, Craven’s Last House on the Left (which along with Just Before Dawn also claimed a Bergman film as an influence), the inclusion of the cop-comedy is unfortunate. It’s not even terribly done per se, but it feels like the procedural and the proto-slasher really could have successfully co-existed in one film, but the utter goofiness of this slapstick really undercuts both of them. Still, I suppose the oddness of its presence is one of the weird little details that make this flick rather memorable.

But, of course, in terms of the focus of this blog, it is the scenes with the killer that are most significant. Released in 1976, two years before Halloween would kick off the slasher boom, the killer here matches so many of what would become the conventions. He is masked (a sack with eye holes, suggesting both the Klan and a menacing killer scarecrow, or a precursor to the Jason of Friday the 13th, Pt. II), silent except for heavy breathing, a stalker in the shadows who kills for reasons totally obscure to both the audience and his victims, and grows more creative in how he carries out his crimes.  At first, his primary weapon seems to be a simply a silenced pistol, but as the film progresses, he improvises, using what is at hand, such as a pitchfork, or in one rather disconcertingly off-beat kill, a bladed trombone. He is scary and the scenes of him hunting and setting upon his prey are tense, visceral, and frightening.

Again, this is a weird, idiosyncratic little picture. It is filmed beautifully, but some performances and choices seem amateurish. It adopts a tone of Dragnet-esque “just the facts,” down to the voiceover narration, but also features sequences of both such over-the-top silliness and atmospheric horror that sap its pretense of factual reporting of any authority. It’s kind of hard to guess who they thought they were making this film for; but that is also, of course, its charm. There is no clean, successful formula at work here. The film is what it is. Part of that is an engaging study of police process. Another part is honestly pretty stupid. And finally, about a third of it is a really great scary movie.

Eaten Alive (1976)

At the end of The Town that Dreaded Sundown, the killer disappears into Texas swampland. So it is fitting that today’s final film, from the same year, takes place in those same Texas swamps and is also loosely based on another historical serial killer, this time Joe Ball, A.K.A. the Bluebeard of South Texas, A.K.A. the Alligator Man. Beyond that point of connection, it seems that more than the rural settings or early slasher vibes, the main thread running through these three films is their unbridled tonal fluctuations. Tobe Hooper’s 1976 follow up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an absolutely bizarre nightmare that weirdly bridges the grindhouse and the arthouse.

The story, if you will, centers on a series of people unlucky enough to stay at the Starlight Hotel, someplace in a swampy stretch of Texas. The place is run by Judd (Neville Brand, who delivers a spirited, committed, pungent performance) , a mumbling, threatening, utterly unhinged nut job who’s seemingly in the habit of murdering everyone under his roof and feeding the bodies to his pet crocodile. First we meet Clara, a young runaway who has just been kicked out of the local brothel. Seeking refuge, she comes to exactly the wrong place and is never heard from again. Then a young couple shows up with the family dog. Once Snoopy ends up inside the same reptile as Clara, Angie (the young daughter, played by Kyle Richards a couple years before Halloween) freaks out and her parents check in to calm her down. It’s not long before the father is Croc food, the mother, Faye (Marilyn Burns, returning from Texas Chainsaw to scream her lungs out again), is tied to a bed with tape round her mouth and young Angie is being chased through the crawlspace by Judd with a scythe. A local sleazebag (a young Robert Englund) and his girlfriend check in to pay by the hour; unsurprisingly he gets eaten. Finally, Clara’s father and sister, Libby, show up looking for her. He doesn’t make it, but once she rescues Annie and Faye, the three of them escape into the swamp where Judd unsurprisingly is eaten alive!

So that is the series of events, roughly as they occur, but it does the film a strange injustice to suggest that this all somehow forms anything as pedestrian as a “plot.” It rarely feels like there is much connection between events from one moment to the next, suggesting either inept editing or a thoroughly intentional nightmare logic. As opposed to Chainsaw, this was all filmed on a soundstage and it makes no effort to mask that fact, rather embracing artifice throughout. This is true from the deep, rich theatrical colors of the lighting, to some eccentric acting choices, to an absolutely abrasive sound design. This film seems to have no interest in following any rules of “good film making.” This may sound like a criticism, and I suppose anyone with little tolerance for such things should be forewarned, but I think it is all part of what makes this one noteworthy. This is a unique, strange, utterly non-formulaic, very personal exercise in horror. It may be rooted in a kind of amateurish failure, but it feels like genuine experimentation and expression.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its vacillating tone (again, a running thread through these three movies). Many of the scenes take on a cartoonish vibe, supported by the color palette and some broadly stylized performances. There is an unreality permeating it all which can be really unsettling, but also funny and engrossing.  There are times that I found myself just in shock, wondering what on earth this thing was.  But in that cartoonish grotesquerie, the film establishes a madcap hellscape – a horrible place filled with terrible people who are all at best “off,” and at worst, monsters.

And then, just when the film is at the height of absurdity, of a kind of shrill, wild, laughable insanity, it can turn on a dime and be absolutely brutal. In the moments of actual violence, there is nothing light – there is no room to breathe, there is only a sustained scream of terror and mindless, uncontrolled wrath. It is genuinely intense, successfully scary, and bleak and dark as all get out.  It is clear that this was made by both the same creator as Chainsaw as well as its much zanier sequel which he would direct ten years later. More so than anything else he did in the 13 years between, I think this bridges the gap between those two totally different films.

I can see a lot of people not taking to this one. It would be easy to discount it as a failure on a wide variety of levels, but I suspect artistry in it, a mind at work, taking a dim view of humanity and the world, and painting a mad picture of the cruelty people are capable of and the petty, impulsive irrationality that drives them. It is not exactly a ‘fun’ picture, but in a peculiar way, it is satisfying, especially in its commitment to its own project, its own dark, loony vision. Sometimes you may hear it said that a certain film from the past ‘just couldn’t get made today’ and that might actually be true in this case, but it’s not about the exploitation elements of sex or violence. Rather, I think these days there might just be too much pressure to make a “well-made film,” which could quash the kind of creative self-expression so weirdly and gloriously on display here.

A Christmas Treat

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Well, it is Christmas time, and with it comes the expectation, sometimes unfulfilled, that we will all gather together with family and friends to share in the warmth of community and close contact.  It’s time to travel home, wherever that might be, to come together with those you most care about. To warm yourself by the fire, or just in the glow of colored lights, while outside the cold and the dark press in. And it is a time for indulgence – to treat yourself to something sweet, something rich, a bit of luxury, with the grey expanse of January and February stretched out before you. Not to oversell it, but today’s film is just such an indulgence—a classic about which I seriously doubt I have something new to offer, but writing something anyway is a gift I give myself. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out before reading as spoilers abound. At the time of writing, I know it’s on Shudder.

Black Christmas (1974)

Bob Clark’s holiday proto-slasher classic (which I’ve previously touched on here) is such a stunning piece of work that it’s shocking to think that it was rather poorly received on release.  It seems that reviewers of the day saw it as nothing more than a sleazy bit of pulp – just a killer picking off sorority girls one by one in grotesque death scenes, just producers cashing in on the juxtaposition of the holiday atmosphere with violence and death. And to be fair, it is all of those things, a paragon of pulpy body count cinema, full of tension, discomfort, and some real scares, but it is also such a deeper film experience, full of life well observed, alternatingly hilarious and tragic and terrifying and horrifying, all in a tightly constructed little package. What a holiday treat!

I think what most stands out about the film is the degree to which its characters are given room to breathe (until they’re not).  There is a lived in quality to the sorority house and in the relationships between the girls who live there. In an early sequence, the camera moves around and within the house, suggesting the perspective of the killer even when it isn’t directly giving us his POV (which it also does), catching glimpses of the young women and the points of connection or conflict between them.  Amidst the warm cacophony of their little pre-Christmas gathering, we overhear fragments of a conversation between Barb (Margot Kidder) and her mother – who it seems she won’t be spending the holiday with – a moment that will have a domino effect for the character throughout the rest of her time in the film, fueling her bitter, angry drunk behavior, but also telling us something of what hides beneath her tough demeanor.

We also get many establishing moments for the other girls, meeting them a bit – the sweet, doomed Clare (Lynne Griffin), saying goodnight to her boyfriend, excited and a bit scared at the prospect of introducing him to her parents; Phyl (Andrea Martin) lovingly embracing her big, shaggy mustachioed boyfriend, who will later make such an impression as a foul-mouthed Santa; all of the girls forcing the house mother, Mrs. Mack (Marian Waldman) to put on the ugly nightgown they’ve bought her before she goes off to find some of the bottles of booze she’s strategically hidden around the house; and significantly, Jess (Olivia Hussey), fielding a call from her problematic boyfriend Peter (Kier Dullea), wherein we start to catch wind of the possible discord between them and of his emotionally abusive tendencies.  Even in the case of some characters who are more roughly sketched out, there are small details, subtleties which help them feel more solid, more present, more real.  These are never disposable teens, waiting to get picked off; they are likeable young women who care about each other, who are sometimes cruel to each other (I’m looking at you, Barb), who have lives and hopes and dreams.

Of course, none of them will make it home for the holiday – none of them will survive at all.  One after another, they are all killed by somebody, a killer who we never really see, and about whom, we never learn a single thing. We don’t know why he’s in this house, or why he kills, what his name is, or what he wants at all.  And that is scary. After each murder, he calls the girls, using what we learn late in the film is another line in the house, and vocally unloads his unhinged psyche.  It is in these phone calls that the film first approaches the horrific.  There is something so threateningly beyond understanding in his psychotic stream of consciousness psycho-dramas; the phone calls feel like a violation, like an assault from the beginning, and it only gets worse. I have heard others wrestle with the text of the calls, trying to glean some sense of his story, but I think it is ultimately futile, and for me, it is so much more satisfying to have such an absence at the center of the action.

There is an interesting comparison to be made here with many other slashers, especially for those that spawned franchises.  Often, even when we don’t know the killer’s true identity, that killer takes focus, occupying the center of the frame. It is often the killer who gets fans. It is often only the killer who returns for the next installment.  This film is the opposite – the girls are the protagonists from start to finish and while the killer intrigues (and we are given at least one significant red herring to suspect), we never learn enough about him to connect to something – he never gets ‘cool.’

Instead, we have a bunch of young women to connect to, to root and fear for, and to lose.   And the film takes their side, though many characters who should do so as well, fail to.  We see all of them navigating inequities and dangers that seem startlingly contemporary (I suppose, highlighting how little progress there has been in some areas): presumptuous romantic partners exhibiting a potential for violence; police officers who don’t take their concerns seriously (such as when Barb reports Clare’s disappearance, but it isn’t until Clare’s boyfriend storms into the station that the police decide to start an investigation); and assumptions that their bodies and what may be growing within their bodies are not their own to make decisions about.

Made one year after Roe v. Wade, it is striking how straightforward the abortion subplot is presented. Jess is pregnant. She doesn’t plan to have the baby. Peter really doesn’t figure into this decision at all.  She has her own life plans, and changing them to satisfy this moody, piano destroying man-child is simply off the table. Interestingly, Clark has said that the film wasn’t attempting to make a political statement, but it is inherent nonetheless.  The intention may have been simply to set up a character who both Jess and the audience could grow suspicious of – someone we’ve seen get angry, even violent, someone who seems out of control, and has a motive, but in taking Jess seriously, and in never making her question or regret her own decision, the film perhaps accidentally stakes out a position concerning bodily autonomy and agency of character. Sadly, while she may overcome Peter’s attempts to control her body, to cancel her will, she is doomed to a more final violation of self, even if we never actually see it happen.

But what we do see, and hear, is so effective.  The movie is just tight as a drum, constantly setting up elements which pay off spectacularly, editing moments together for contrast or build in such effective, riveting sequences.  Of note for me is a short stretch when, while taking part in a search party for a missing child and/or Clare, an unnamed young lady sees something terrible and starts to scream. We see our protagonists start and run in the direction of the sound, but Clare’s father, who has been trying to find his missing daughter, gets there first. We see a look pass over his face – shock and horror –then relief –then sadness, right before the young girl’s mother comes running up, sees her own child, inhales to scream and – we cut to a phone ringing in the sorority house. It’s the killer, who will subject Jess to more of his horrifying psycho-sexual carrying on, having just killed Mrs. Mack. While she’s on the phone, the camera shows so much empty space in the house all around her. He could be anywhere. She is alone. A shadow falls on the stairs that she doesn’t see. Then feet appear and – it’s Peter – not the killer –unless he is –but he’s not –but is he? He’s here to tell her that she will be carrying the baby to term because he has decided that they are getting married and that’s just that (the killer might have been more pleasant). It all takes about two and a half minutes; and it is all so rich with nuance and real sadness and danger and suspense and character. It is a microcosm of the whole film.

I love all kinds of horror movies, but I particularly appreciate when films in which a lot of people die actually make some space for grief, when films filled with terrible things can allow characters to reckon with them, to have regrets, to be human. This is so present in the Barb arc.  Early on in the film, stinging from the conversation with her mother, Barb lashes out at Clare right before she’s killed.  As the film progresses, we see Barb get more and more drunk and inappropriate, sometimes hilariously so, but it also becomes obvious that underneath her prickly exterior, she blames herself. She drove Clare away to who knows where and is responsible for whatever has happened to her.  She lashes out at the others, screaming at them to stop laying this blame at her feet, but I don’t think they ever have. It’s only her own guilt manifested, projected. Finally, Jess puts her to bed to sleep it off, and it’s moving to see the tenderness with which Jess cares for her belligerent, troubled friend. Finally, it is awful when drunk and defenseless, she is stabbed to death in her bed with a crystal unicorn as carolers sing downstairs, covering her screams. Again, we have a feast of character and suspense and deeply felt emotion and terror.

I could go on endlessly, describing other well-constructed and brilliantly acted sequences, other well observed nuanced life details (I love that Claude the cat jumps up on the lap of poor, dead Clare and starts licking the plastic bag on her face that suffocated her – because sometimes cats lick plastic – it’s just a weird thing they do—maybe Bob Clark’s cat did), but it probably serves the movie better, would serve you the reader better to just go watch it again (I really hope no one is reading this first –too late now, I suppose). It’s Christmas. Treat yourself.

Also, in the spirit of the season, take care of yourselves out there.  May your coming year be free of psychos in the attic shouting obscenities at you on the phone!