Thriller

The King of Pop dead, age 50. Less than 24 hours later, news shows have managed to round up old sycophants and pals who haven’t had more than passing interaction with the fellow in years. But who would? Jackson’s weirdness was weird even to the weeeeiiiird of pop-stardom. A former Jackson attorney (of all bloody things) said to CNN that Mr. Jackson was the most lonely person he’d ever met. Fantastic for an individual said to have been loved by so many millions.

Thriller is the main reason to mention any of this. Vincent Price’s voiceover of the beautiful John Landis zombie mini-film/music-video is still a pleasant watch. It was one of those passing instances when horror was really mainstream, if only for a moment – kind of the way Halloween is one day of the year in the US and Canada. Thriller served as a one of the most exposed single works of horror in the last 30 years, despite not being a "film". And Mr. Jackson himself was also a gruesome tale, a human horrorshow made paradoxically worse by his strongest qualities: innocence, creativity, and the drive for perfection ...all taken to the crazed, drug-addled extremes of a mega-rich recluse. Like a lot of monsters, it’s easy to get a sense that the guy, despite his money, never quite got a fair shake at some aspect of life. Definite threads of horror in that.

More on Children and Horror

My four-year-old and I watched Dracula a few weeks back. Tod Browning's and Bela Lugosi's 1931 black and white masterpiece, that is. He loved it of course (though we fast-forwarded through some of the more dialogue-y sections), and after the viewing he had a hundred questions about the specifics of vampires, the creation of film, metaphysics, and the lands of Transylvania and London. Heavy stuff for age four. At certain points I saw the beginnings of nervousness while we watched. Dracula stretched out his arm and commanded "Come here!" Those eyes were enough to take seriously; the child was in a trance. But as expected there were no bad dreams because we talked about the whole thing.

This comes on the heels of our viewing of Frankenstein, also from 1931. The monster was scary enough to require plenty of discussion. I put it into perspective: "He's good, but because he looks scary, everybody thinks he's bad. Is that fair?" Hell no, thought my dear boy. In fact, he was feeling so sorry for the monster I had to hold my laughs of pride back. Even watching the little girl being thrown into the water was a tragic misunderstanding that a four-year-old could put into perspective with interpretation. An honest mistake. The monster didn't mean to be bad.

The slow, intelligent introduction of the darkly fantastic is a continuing experiment in my house. Following my previous post on this subject, violence seems to be a much more difficult element than even the most gruesome and horrific tale. Kids simply can't square seeing violence with not being violent themselves (and in this, the Ninja Turtles are worse than the Wolf Man). Sadly, this puts off our viewing of Dawn of the Dead for a few years. On the other hand, tales that focus on emotions, situations and ideas, can be discussed objectively. Some fear and empathy may even do a little good.

Re-Animator Television Series? “There’s Your Meatball!”

There’s some excitement out and about over a proposed Re-Animator television series – much of it positive, or at least open to the idea. Hard for me to emphasize how strongly I disagree. My reasons abound.

Start with the photos. A half-dozen attractive post-teens standing around a young Herbert West. Remember in Wayne’s World, when they hijacked Wayne and Garth’s show, shined it up and re-presented it in a corporate-brand-vision? Look at those kids: what would any of them be doing with a freak like either the Gordon-West or the Lovecraft-West? Dr. West doesn’t need friends – maybe an assistant, a grave-digger or hatchet-man, but no friends. The West we know and love has little but disdain for human relationships. This cast is a foreign element …unless they are simply a group who dies in a drunken auto wreck in the first episode, and West revives them and has to deal with that through the series. Such might actually be alright, but from the description, this doesn’t seem to be the plan. Everybody’s hot, nobody’s dead except for the re-animated dead woman …who also happens to be hot.

Let’s get deeper and consider the description: "Herbert West, a dark and mysterious young man, arrives on campus, instantly shining as a brilliant young student and the object of many of his female schoolmates’ desires." Is this Miskatonic University or Sweet Valley High? Have the writers of this nonsense ever read Lovecraft, or been in a university setting? Intellect is not generally an aphrodisiac among post-teens, and Dr. Herbert West is the polar opposite of any imaginable heartthrob. The description goes on about West’s experiments being “sexy.” Really? Re-animated corpses are sexy? This hunky, youthful Herbert West they have in mind seems to be altered enough to not have to pay royalties – maybe the whole thing’s a satire? Here’s the worst line in the whole bloody spiel: "Alliances will be formed and broken—forbidden relationships will develop and complicate." Sounds goddamn awful …like they want to take a modern classic of horror and turn it into another boring, depressing, post-teen soap-smut for bored and depressed post-teens.

Hating the very idea of this isn’t about protecting what’s sacred, or being a conservative horror geek. It’s about another wonderful work being relegated to a dumbed-down, sugar-coated, sex-obsessed, anti-literate format for reasons that can only have to do with pathological greed and willful stupidity. Why does this project need to be done? A quick buck. Cthulu damn those involved, and Fangoria for enabling.

The Monster Slayer Archetype

Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer is only the latest in a tradition as old as storytelling – the heroic, monster-slaying archetype. It is, in a sense, a direct descendant of ancient stories. Perseus defeated Medusa and then a great sea monster to save Andromeda, Hercules defeated several beasts and challenges, and St. George (and his regional variants) fought and killed dragons. We see in each of these a peculiar pattern of a burdoned start, a rise and conquest, and then return to innocence. Jack Brooks follows this track quiet well. In fact, the archetype is of particular interest to horror, and has come to us in several cinematic forms in the genre.

Strangely enough, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche can guide us here. In the first part of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra there’s a segment called “On the Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit.” In it, he preaches that, in growth, the human spirit symbolically metamorphs into a camel, then a lion, then a child. Considering this with Jack Brooks, we start with the camel, a beast of burden. Jack seeks answers from his psychologist. His question is, what do I need to do in order to move on from my childhood condition? The psychologist rambles mumbo-jumbo and Jack knows it’s bunk. It isn’t until he goes to assist his teacher with some plumbing way out on the edge of town that the camel’s back is broken. Nietzsche mentions stepping into “filthy waters that are waters of truth,” which connects neatly to plumbing, and “going into the desert,” which we can maybe read as out at that old house.

Then his metamorphosis into a lion begins. Jack is at his low-point, and suddenly his teacher becomes a monster – a thing of Jack’s own unknowing creation. After an initial shock, Jack retreats to his van and decides to confront the creature, to become the master. Fittingly enough, the monster is his teacher. In Nietzsche, the dragon that the lion must kill is called “Thou Shalt.” To counter “Thou Shalt,” Jack must become “I Will.” Only after this has happened does the monster (and do his minions) become slayable.

This is when we come to the third stage in which the lion, after defeating the dragon, becomes a child. In the film, Jack’s childhood horror is put to peace and his future becomes instantly clear. We see him revisit and slay the childhood creature in the forest that killed his family, and then we are brought back to the first scene of the film. The tribal people (perhaps a symbol of innocence to the western world) beg Jack to destroy their monster. Jack comes out, dressed almost child-like in a leather loincloth, and moves to kill the beast.

According to Nietzsche, this is the way forward to change and evolution. Who knows if the writers of Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer were thinking of Thus Spoke Zarathustra or ever even considered any of this - probably not. Likely it was a subconscious happenstance, as makes perfect sense with considering an archetype in the first place.

Few of the other monster-slayer horrors I can think of are so clear with the above archetype formula as Jack. Ash from Evil Dead and Army of Darkness is a decent prototype – we see and feel the exact moment when he takes charge in the cabin and becomes “I Will.” Ripley from Aliens certainly qualifies. Buffy the Vampire Slayer or maybe even Blade qualify, but they don’t have the humble “camel” start that Ash and Ripley and Jack have. Some tough guy just killing stuff isn’t quite what we’re getting at here – but surely there must be many variations.

One variation may be the monster-slayer who is a sort of holy man tasked with destroying a single, specific monster. We could include the many incarnations of Van Helsing (to use yet another vampire example), or the priests in The Exorcist or Absurd (titled Monster Hunter on US video releases). Kolchak the Night Stalker is a very modern take on this type – not religious, but religiously devoted to getting his story. All of these seem to fit parts of Nietzsche’s take on the phenomenon. Kolchak, being a serial, presents a problem in lacking the metamorphosis. He’s a monster-slayer of sorts in the pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword way, but he is no camel, lion, or child.

Another variation is the group that goes about doing the same thing. This includes everything from the Ghost Busters to the Brothers Grimm to the Fearless Vampire Killers. Friday 13th the Series is another fine example. On the other hand, in serial in which every episode presents a new monster or cursed person for the antique store trio to defeat, we're again missing the metamorphasis. Still, a series feels ideal for the monster slayer sub-genre - if only because it allows for a lot more monsters.

Four Modern Zombie Films

Having decided to watch four new zombie films in short succession, I believed there’d be little to show for it but disappointment bordering on anger. It turns out I was half right. We all know the sub-genre’s a Mecca for bad filmmakers, and yet there are still pleasant surprises out there. Problem is, how to know what’s worthy and what’s waste? Unknown, but I feel damn lucky breaking even with these four. The films were, in order, Day of the Dead (remake), Automaton Transfusion, Zombie Strippers, and Zombie Diaries.

Anybody who’s seen more than a few post-90s zombie flicks could come up with their own huge list of flaws common to many of them. Here’s the worst of mine:

1. Running, wall-crawling, superhuman-speed zombies. Suspense is murdered, and there’s no considering how re-animated dead things can move like that. Ghosts or demons, ok …but zombies?
2. Endless eXtreme shots. Grainy, scratchy, jumpy filming techniques – why? Ok, yes, it’s edgy and weird, but what does it add? Like the gore, if there’s no restraint, all mood is lost. Scatology consumes.
3. Loud, poorly-chosen music. Overwhelming and needless, this pox shows, more than anything, how tasteless the minds behind a bad work really are – as if further proof were needed.
4. Dialogue. Characters with no character forcing idiotic lines through all the wrong scenes. Script writers take note: when most folks would be traumatized wrecks, only the most stupid or psychotic would make clever jokes or sexual innuendos. Usually the acting is nowhere near as bad the dialogue …why?
5. Cast ages. Often, over 90% of the cast is aged 20-30. In reality, this group makes up the world’s secretaries, service industry, and drunk college fodder – not protagonists. Hard to suspend disbelief with such an incestuous cast-crew-audience cluster.
6. Gun abundance. Where do they get all the guns? How do city kids know how to load and use them? How do they regularly hit their targets with pistols?

There are more to add but the list is too long already. In diving into this quartet, the entire 3.5 hours of the first two films conformed to all of the above flaws, and some I haven’t listed.

I started with the remake of Day of the Dead, maybe to get the sacrilege of its existence out of the way. With no resemblance to the original beyond a few character names, and nothing new in story or idea, it was a genuine time-flush. The film’s clean and professionally done, but it’s hollow. As in many such films, there’s plenty of effort spent on the virus-explanation and “character development,” but no time for an actual tale. So, who cares? I didn’t. Even with plenty of digital-looking digital-gore and eXtreme zombies, the best thing was that it reminded just how wonderful Romero’s Day of the Dead is.

Next was Automaton Transfusion, a positively vacant film and surely the least of the four. Big groups of zombies running, eXtreme shots, bored college kids, fluff. The director seems to have wanted serious but the scenes come off juvenile and nearly scatological. To be fair, not everybody has guns, and the gore has its moments. Also, one or two scenes could have been fairly horrific if the film had had a story and less vacant-extremity. But this is charity. The film is awful and I do want my time back.

With expectations lowered far below six feet, Zombie Strippers began. Far and away this film is the master of the four. There’s a Bordello of Blood feel to it, or even a tempered Troma feature. Honesty at last. A comedy without ego and just what the title says: zombie strippers. Clearly it’s in cahoots with the bizarro zombie-porn-fetish sub-genre that can be found on websites and at conventions. The story goes (yes, there’s an actual story to this one), Nietzsche-reading strippers succumb to the pressures of the horny male crowd that wants zombie pole-dancing. Robert Englund is priceless as the strip club owner: “If this gets out I’m fucked!” In short order, my common flaws list above is shattered. This may be as good as a zombie celluloid gets circa 2008.

The approach to Zombie Diaries was hopeful but mixed. From Manchester Morgue to I, Zombie, there’ve been few reasons to attach zombie-trust to the UK and its often melodramatic takes on zombies (28 Weeks Later being a mean exception). But from the first shot Zombie Diaries is refreshingly real. The army guys and the diesel truck sounds weren’t the soapy-clean shite of technically-good, aesthetically-bad film-student horror. Also, the zombies were those scary, slow-moving kinds that actually evoke a reaction of dread – and some gritty, atmospheric scenes followed. What kills the film is the hand-cam shots of lengthy, in-the-dark running scenes that amount to filler. That said, the good stuff is good, and realism and good acting keeps the attention. This one’s a great example of how a low-budget zombie film can be done.

Not that it should be, unless it’s behind a brilliant or hilarious idea, which never seems to be the case.

Love’s Forms in Horror

For all its sunshine, love can be so abysmal. It’s a delicate thing, and the line between enrapture and repulsion is always but one misstep or misunderstanding away. Love is myopic (or, with Cupid, blind). The slightest deviation from a very dull, socially-proscribed script brings forth aghast –just recall that kiss between Angelina Jolie and her brother that seemed to last a bit too long. Immediately we see an abomination …and only awkwardness and nervousness are bigger turn-offs than abominations. Love is viciously conservative, and so works well with horror. Endless eyebrow-raisers remain despite modern freedoms. Gay or “inter-racial” pairings still get categorized with free love, polygamous love, or the notorious adult-child loves of ancient times. In twisted instances, love is even a punishment. Consider Married With Children. Better, did you hear about the Ethiopian man who, after getting caught having sexual relations with a goat, was sentenced by the local court to marry the goat as punishment? Lovers in still other parts of the world show their possessive devotion by splashing acid into the face of their object. No doubt this is the most nefarious and horrid love of them all.

Variations on love show up so much in horror that it might surprise the gorehound on the street. Taken into account, disfigured love can make a monster’s cruelty understandable and even anti-heroic. It can also contribute to a victim “deserving” what they get. More to the point, it can be a source of unbridled evil. In horror, love is a screamingly pure force. Sex or even sexiness, on the other hand, nearly always demands retribution (a brutal death). Modern horror films are playing with the concept more and more, but it’s still the mainstream that sex, even with love, is a sin. Endless teenager-deaths come to mind but a more grisly example comes out in the money-shot scene from Nightmare in a Damaged Brain, when the boy very colorfully hacks up the adults in bed with the axe. This is not only anti-sex, it’s borderline misogynistic. In love, whether in horrific cinema or real life, women often seem to get a raw deal. We see it again in Maniac, Bloodsucking Freaks, and even the anti-altruism of Carrie.

A mainstream ideal of true, soul-mate love can exist in horror, though it tends to require a twist of death. In The Abomidable Dr. Phibes, Cemetery Man, and Evil Dead 2, a man lives in torment that his true love is dead. The first of these is vengeful and romantic, but in the latter two otherworldly and evil forces compound the torment. A worse version of this set might be Gaston Leroux’s original Phantom of the Opera, in which the tragic phantom has fallen for a woman, and she’s nearly fallen for him, but the worldly (not the otherworldly) make it impossible. There are plenty of heroic, coming-of-age sorts of love, as in Night of the Creeps, but the most genuine sort of soul-mate love in horror may well be that of Psychos in Love. Though this isn’t high-romance, in-the-eyes love, it is modern love – finding somebody who shares what’s important to you.

Something quite different is the possessive sort of love. This kind is a bitter, twisted, nerd-view of love that shines as brightly as acne-pocked skin under the fluorescent lights of a high school hallway. The girl is an object of purity, a dove, a treasure. Boxing Helena is a fine example – the small man prunes his “love” down to an abdomen and head, and still she’s stronger than he is. In Re-Animator, Dr. Herbert West’s headless rival is another example. Not even alive anymore, he’s nevertheless got to have a taste of the dean’s daughter – even as West laughs on, “Trysting around with some co-ed!” Let’s also consider (recently mentioned in another post) the film Spookies, in which a cruel weirdo with supernatural powers tries to get the blonde in white to fall for him. But she is not worthy of the true gentleman beneath the surface of his chalky-evil beneficence – and so she too is expendable. This seems to be the point in possessive love. Bloodsucking Freaks is a more extreme example: “Now will you dance for me?!”

Innocent love can be an even more powerful force still. There’s motherly love that comes out in films like Mother’s Day and the Friday the 13th saga, and in these the point really is love for mommy. The killing is almost a defensive matter in the eyes of the killers. More innocent still is the monster who is perhaps inherently good, but is simply so awkward, inept, or unusual that they cannot connect naturally with the rest of the world. Frankenstein is our prototype here, and 2002’s May and 2003’s Love Object are our modern and realistic examples. These are monsters for who we can feel deep pity. Then, the much sharper end of this sort of love is the notion of vengeance for destroyed innocence. Maybe we can’t quite consider I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. .45 films that deal with matters of love, except in whatever absurd connection one finds between love and rape. But who can blame these women for anything they do? A similar case with the parents in Last House on the Left. Yet another classic about to be remade for no good reason.

Horror Films as Fall Guys

We live in a big world with a lot of crazy people, and for all of those crazy people there aren't (at least in the U.S.) near as many resources as there would be if we were decent. So, every once in awhile, some poor fool goes nuts and does something horrid - a school massacre, a bit of cannibalism, or maybe a single murder.

Following one of these events, it often comes out that the antagonist had a thing for horror films, devil music, and shoot-'em-up video games. And why wouldn't he/she? There's plenty for even the best of us to empathize with among the monsters, the lyrics of the troubled, and the thirst for destruction on a fantasy-level to counter the endless, excruciating structures of modern life.

Occasionally it may seem to be the case that a horror film has something to do with real-life horrors. The individual criminal could even claim as much. There are so many, but a few fairly recent such happenings include the teenager who killed a homeless man after watching American Psycho, or that Scream copycat after the Scream films. Then there was that schmuck who built his own Freddy Kruger glove and sliced up his sleeping friend.

Japan's Suicide Club is said to be based on real (though not nearly so sensational) situations. And at least once, life has imitated art and a horror filmmaker has taken his genre obsession to real-life murder (the particular incident in the link sounds almost like a Dario Argento film). Most notoriously of all may be Cho Seung-Hui'sinfamous photo images that copy scenes from Oldboy, taken only shortly before his rampage last year. Surely there are dozens more examples, but these will suffice.

Fact is, this is an old phenomenon. Since at least the time of Goethe's Die Leiden des Jungen Werther (Sorrows of Young Werther), crazy young people have been copying the stories they're told. In the case of Werther, it was forlorn lovers who began shooting themselves. The result, of course, was to blame the book and ban it ...and how many books and movies and musics have been banned on the grounds of a mere fear of just such possibilities? The millions of German teens forced to read Werther who didn't shoot themselves must account for something.

A great lite-horror film on this theme is 1980's Fade to Black. The story follows a young cinema-obsessed man who murders those who've wronged him. He's clearly mentally disturbed and cut-off from those around him, and he really brings to life the 90s adage that horror movies don't make killers - horror movies just make them more creative.

But the idea has still not gone mainstream and, once again, a horror film is the fall guy. Another mentally-disturbed young killer has been exposed as a fan of the Saw films - though this has, strangely, fallen a bit below the national radar. Nancy Grace has crazier fish to fry, and the economy is more terrifying than even murder. Fiction gets a rare break.

Double Feature: The Story of Twisted Souls and Spookies

There is plenty of hearsay about this/these films and the details of what exactly transpired between 1984 and 1986. What can be agreed on is that the final product, Spookies, is bizarre, not the least bit sensible, and thoroughly entertaining as a tryst. A feast of horror archetypes with some serious atmosphere, the following is no doubt one of the more coherent accounts of how it came to be.

In autumn 1984, a pair of directors named Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran wrapped up production of a humble film that was to be called Twisted Souls. The intent was a comedy-horror about partygoers in a house full of ghosts and monsters and, had it gone only that far, most of us would likely never have heard of it. The raw footage went to post-production and was mostly complete by early 1985 ...but then there was a grand schism involving legal entanglements and the devil knows what else.

The details in gossip-land are sketchy and full of opinion and emotion, but somewhere along the way, producer Michael Lee fired the original directors and co-producer/co-writer Frank Farel. A new director was to be hired and new scenes and cast were to be added. There’s no good info on why this occurred but there’s definitely some bad blood between the parents of both halves of the final product, and more than a few conflicting takes on the events.

Enter Genie Joseph, mother of the Spookies half. Her task was to generate a new film using the 45 minutes of what she found usable from the original footage, and then another 45 minutes of new footage that she would have to film. Sources inform that there is a perfect 50/50 split in new and old footage in the film, and that it can actually be timed. As an added challenge, the cast and crew in the original footage were friends of the original directors and so, naturally, they refused to return for filming with Genie at the helm. There would be no collaboration with the original directors in any way and, save for a couple thwarted makeup employees who had been fired by the first directors, the crew had to start from scratch. The new director went to work with a co-writer, putting together a new story that could use what she deemed the salvageable footage.

This could not have been a particularly easy task - and on only $500K! - though the result appears clean enough, or at least as coherent as any peer horror film. Twisted Souls was transformed completely, and the only way to get an idea of what Faulkner and Doran had in mind is to know what parts remain from their footage: the partygoers and most of the monsters. On the other hand, the cat-boy with a hook, the old man and his white bride, and the zombies, are all the product of Genie Joseph's production of Spookies. Despite rumors, we can be relatively sure that there is no uncut version of Twisted Souls in existence.

Here are a couple more examples of the changes between the original and final versions of the product: The opening scene for Twisted Souls had a homeless guy in the cemetery looking for a place to sleep. Apparently he headed into the mansion, got torn-up by some ghosts, and then ran off. It's all been cut, and it would have been a big difference from the more mean-spirited situation with the birthday boy in the opening of Spookies. To follow, the original ending of Twisted Souls had ghosts coming out of the cemetery instead of zombies. The tombstones melted and the house sort of vaporized (possibly like the mansion in Phantasm), pulling the ghosts in with it. One or two of the partygoers were to actually have survived this. In Spookies, nobody gets out.

An commentary by Spookies director Genie Joseph can be found here.

Valentine's Day Weekend

A record's been broken by good old Jason Vorhees. This past weekend the remade mutant-zombie-golem-slasher grossed $42 million, topping the box office and (thankfully) butchering titles such as Confessions of a Shopaholic and He's Not That Into You. Considering it cost $19 million to make the film, that's wonderful news, and we have no reason not to expect a sequel ...or will it be a remake of the original part II?

But it makes perfect sense. The Valentine's Day holiday is one of utter misery for many people, and not only because they haven't found their soul mate. The ubiquitous synthetic, capitalistic love-pushing tends to come off as cynical. We all know the rituals - flower, candies, Victoria's Secret - and there's a robotic feel to them. Like everything in our society, they seem dated and like they should be discarded and replaced - but with what? And then there's altruism - just taking the day as a reason to love mankind. That definitely isn't for all people.

Considering these, something like a slasher film strikes an unexpectedly harmonious balance. Not only that, it's a universal aphrodisiac. A couple goes to see something scary and they find themselves closer together. When the bodies are cozied up and the reservations are loosened in light of some terrific mythological beast like Jason Vorhees, strange though it may be, Cupid has one wing in the door. It's just as Reuters UK put it this morning, "Nothing says 'I love you' like Friday the 13th."

Misery, Mood, Billy Drago

There’s a distinct western gloom to the horror-side of Billy Drago. While his horror credits are short, they’re sharp, and in them he manages to evoke a decidedly sinister atmosphere. His thin-lips smile, that short, dry laugh, and the way he very naturally mutters something like, “I said your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Now you think about that when I beat the rap.” No surprise his roles have tended toward the non-heroic.

A lot of Drago’s early work was bit parts on television shows. Then, in the 80s, he moved on to a handful of quirky sci-fi and action movies, including the likes of Invasion USA and the above-quoted Untouchables. For our purposes, an early hit worthy of mention is the campy, nearly-cult flick Vamp. Though I’ve heard this film compared to From Dusk Till Dawn more than once, it's a comparison that's very loose, particularly with the presence of college boys and Grace Jones. On the spectrum of the genre, Vamp leans more to black comedy than the absolute and grisly dark. Nonetheless, Drago certainly leaves the impression of the latter as needed. In fact, he's almost too bleak for even a stylized henchman in an over-the-top comedy. Personally, I find him out of place anywhere near where I might glean a laugh.

It seems there was and remains little agreement on this. Though Drago appeared in an assortment of other horror films and shows through the 90s and early-00s (Demon Hunter, Mirror Mirror IV, and a recurring role on Charmed), most of his repertoire were films blending western and action elements (Walker Texas Ranger or with Bruce Campbell in Brisco County Jr.). While the horror films are sadly below par, the worse thing is that other genres have a way of capitalizing on a strong horror presence that turns it into something like odd or even laughable, rather than powerful. God damn if they didn't do it to Bela Lugosi - and just compare the talent of Jeffrey Combs in horror against anything he's done in a television series. On the other hand, what the western genre gets right by a man like Drago is the fiction of an indisputable dichotomy of good and evil. Manichaeism is the fairest situation for an actor in possession of such an ability to appear evil.

So, things sunk to the point of Drago doing a Sci-Fi Channel's Original, Tremors 4. And then, along came Takashi Miike’s one-hour Masters of Horror film Imprint. At last we get the actor at his height - as far a horror is concerned. This, of course, is possibly the first time in which Drago had the lead role. Fittingly, it’s got all of his finest elements at work: historical backdrop, a western feel (in spite of being set in Japan), and an intensely gruesome mood and story. Drago’s character, a 19th century American who has returned to Japan to fulfill his promise of rescuing a prostitute, comes to learn of layers of dark secrets surrounding the woman and her fate. In hearing of how awful things really were, he becomes the picture of whining misery. His sadness is sick – that sort of deep romantic that echoes death (a la Romeo and Juliet), and there he is, laying wasted over a broken promise. The screen spoon-feeds us his frustration over the brutalities of a life he couldn’t save. What's worse, we see how hopelessly entangled the thought of the poor woman with so much evil becomes in the Yankee's mind. The result is like disinfectant against purity.

The end is something out of Lovecraft or Poe – the man is mad and imprisoned, with only ghosts for company. But the lead up to this is so queasy, so creepy, that it seems as though we may have passed into new territory. One is hard-pressed to come up with a single more miserable take on love that’s ever been put to film. Too disturbing even for Showtime! In at least one interview with Takashi Miike, he mentioned his conscious attempt to evoke the Japanese style/genre/sense of kaidan, the traditional Japanese scary story. From what one reads of western-translated definitions of kaidan, it’s a very deep source of horror perhaps most akin to something like a black fairy tale in the west. Billy Drago feels like a perfect fit for such a style - but sadly this style is rarely en vogue.

Since Imprint, Drago starred as Jupiter in the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and in The Dead One, and a few others. It's hard to imagine another instance in which he might be both in the lead, and in a film with the most appropriate atmosphere to suit his very distinct person.

Rollinade

In Paris, on May 10 of 1968, around 2:15AM, thousands of police and leftist students went to war, producing hundreds of injuries and a big mess. Iron-fisted police tactics earned sympathy for the youngsters, and workers' unions nationwide began striking. France was darkened through the summer, and the De Gaulle government soon found it was on the way out. This, it seems in hindsight, was part of an international trend that grew into the 1970s and then sputtered and died sometime around 1985, reversing itself exponetially on through the Bush II era.

Were I to take a time machine to the Paris of May 10 of 1968, partaking of the above would be a distant second on my agenda. Rather, I'd head straight for a cinema. Because of the social-political volatility at the time, the French film industry had a moratorium on new releases, waiting for stability to return so as to avoid poor receptions. At least one second-tier film went on to play anyway - Le Viol du vampire (Rape of the Vampire), a horror film by surrealist ex-porn director Jean Rollin. Rollin films aren't for everyone, even in France ...and rumors persist that early viewers threw trash at the screen while the film played. Nevertheless, this low-budget, non-sensical, gothic-psychadelia fare became the number one film in France for the year ...something the French may wish to forget.

But I haven't. I'd have a coffee in an outdoor cafe for a few gritty early-morning hours, take in the Siene while avoiding the poodle-droppings, then promptly purchase my ticket and find a good seat. At all costs I would avoid the students and the police. Much ado about nothing, as it turned out. Black and white vampire chicks, naked and spouting poetry - that on a big screen would be an experience.

Gringo Nightmares

Close as Mexico and Latin America are to the United States, there’s a certain exotic fear that other neighbors like Canada or most Caribbean nations don’t quite hold in the Yankee mind. No doubt there are many facets to it, but the biggest three in relevance to horror appear to be:

Historical – The long history, from the ancients to the European conquerors to Latin America …and all the hundreds of wars and rebellions and ghosts that follow.

Natural – The dusty deserts of the north, the crawling jungles of the south, the seas to either side. Vacant realms and dark bowers, and all that hides therein.

Cultural – All of the different peoples and their intermingled beliefs. In particular, the archaic details that confuse or frighten Yankee senses of decent and modern, such as ornamented cemeteries or the predominance of skulls in holidays not celebrated by Anglos.

This last point in particular (but all three, really) goes to an older film that might not initially come to mind as a gringo nightmare, the excellent low-budget film Q: The Winged Serpent. A monster film in guise of a police-detective story, Q centers on a modern-day (1982) incarnation of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent from Aztec mythology. In the film, the creature is biting the heads off of sunbathers and window-washers on New York’s skyscrapers while a human devotee is running around town sacrificially skinning city folk alive. Without the violence there would almost be a Scooby Doo feeling to the whole thing because it is an investigation, but coated in schlock. One way to consider the creature itself is as a less-subtle form a Montezuma’s revenge. New York is an odd choice for this revenge though, as mentioned in another post, all monsters go to New York. The bizarre religious side is there, but even by 1982 it may be dated. The notion of a pagan priest doing crazy religious things for shock (or schlock) value feels so very colonial-era. Then again, what was 9-11 if not this? – and again, in New York.

Another not-so-subtle attack on Yankees, this time set in the Latin world itself, comes nearly a quarter-century later in the film Turistas. It’s very sad how characters have declined in quality while gore has only become more extreme, even if it is strangely absent through much of this film. Turistas follows student travelers into Brazil where they soon discover the region to be as degenerate and dangerous as that of Hostel. The message? Southern peoples want to rob you and maybe even hack you up, and all that nature (underwater caves and jungles) is just plain deadly. Go home, and stay there.

More recently, The Ruins says essentially the same thing but with a bit more strength. Drunk students on holiday in Cancun make the terrible mistake of straying outside the hotel zone. As expected, they pay with their lives. This time it’s a mix of natural and cultural terrors: A way-out, human-eating plant lives on an ancient temple and local Mayans (who don’t even speak Spanish, sweet Jesus!) erect a quarantine without explanation. Again, not a ton of gore but for a few shock scenes (the man shooting the kid struck me a lot more than the German losing his legs). But shock seems to be part of the recipe in a gringo nightmare – as if, to drive the point home, we need to see a man skinned alive or amputated to bits. This may get back to the idea of nature at its worst, a bloody, cruel, shocking mess.. Enough to make one think of Cannibal Holocaust.

There’s little reason to discuss Sci-Fi Channel’s less-than-stellar All Soul’s Day: Dia de los Muertos, other than to point out that it’s getting at what’s been discussed above – a bad southern holiday with hidden and dangerous properties. Vampires: Los Muertos is almost laughably the same in terms of description (and title!), though this time we’ve replaced one overused and cliché-ridden horror sub-genre (zombies) for another (vampires).

Vampires south of the border isn’t a really old idea, but by the year 2002 it was already exploited beyond recovery. The idea of a sucking sound to the south seems to have originated sometime around the 1992 US election cycle, in which Ross Perot argued against NAFTA with just that description. It alludes to the notion a few Yankees hold that any relationship between the US and its southern neighbor will be unavoidably parasitic. This thought may be at least as old as the US-Mexican War of the 1840s, in which Yankee troops marched on Mexico City but decided against keeping it due to all of the problems it would entail (keeping less-populated California and the southwest states, on the other hand, was fine).

No film has done Yankees terrorized by vampires in Mexico anywhere near as good as Robert Rodriguez did in From Dusk Till Dawn – and the timing of 1996 was about right. A character-driven crime story more reminiscent of Q than the other films mentioned above, From Dusk Till Dawn follows a pair of bank robbers and their hostages as they cross the border and stop in a bar in the empty desert. A full half of the film shows little sign of horror – and then it erupts into an all-out splatterfest that lasts up to the final scene. The elements are here: an ancient temple, the seclusion in the desert, and the almost orientalist dance of the vampire queen.

Surely there are many more gringo nightmares out there, and plenty more to come. It may not be possible to escape the patterns above, given how culture works. One possible route is if Mexico or another Latin American country produced a great horror in which Latinos faced some symbolic evil in the United States or Canada. What that might be, only some artist with a Latin cultural program in their head could say.

Post Mortem Mysteries Revealed

In Nacho Cerda’s notorious film Aftermath, we get a glimpse of one of the seedier, more ghoulish modern (and transatlantic, apparently) urban legends – the morgue worker who has sex with corpses when nobody else is around. “Shocking” as this may be, few films of the horror genre are bold enough to explore what else occurs after the moment of death. Aftermath suggests the bleakest possibility, nihilism, and even the hardiest of us might rather not face such certain unpleasantness. Death means you’re (in this case, literally) fucked. But this speaks to the corpus and nothing spiritual or other-worldly - you’re reduced to your most utilitarian, slab-of-meat worth, and the world goes on.

Most horror films are on par with the bleakness of Aftermath, though few are so sharp (Nekromantik comes to mind). Really any incident of a character needing to dispose of a body similarly dismisses human value. Even with zombie films, only the best of them make the viewer pause to wonder at depths like, are they us and we them? The typical case in genre films is that at worst the dead are a problem to solve, at best they’re a source of gruesome entertainment. One man may cross himself and another may mention voodoo, but the onscreen universes evoked usually imply such rituals are relics that won’t and can’t really help the situation. The hope that there must be an afterlife, a better place, is the same wishful thinking that says the police will arrive to help in time ...and we know they won't.

The terror of the abyss, and the thought of physically crossing over into the beyond, has only scantily been touched on in horror cinema. The Poltergeist films and The Beyond and Prince of Darkness skimmed it in different ways but there doesn't seem to have ever been a full, bold exploration such as in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s an odd omission, considering how many horrors suggest that there is a beyond and that things can and do come back from it. Peasant superstitions are “re-imagined” in endless ghost and haunting films. Chucky’s return in the Child’s Play movies or the puppets and dolls in various Full Moon films show an almost Frankenstein-like re-awakening of a unhappy spirit into an inanimate body. The opening scene in Prom Night 3 shows the shackled legs of Mary Lou dancing in Hell, but we get no glimpse of what Mary Lou actually sees down there.

Just a few films do approach a sort of scientific-explorer curiosity of what awaits after death, though both do it with the same fuzzy vision as you’ll get out of any schlocky Sylvia Browne-like TV psychic. In the 1990s, Flatliners offered us a tale of several medical students putting everything on the line in order to experience “death”. Suspending the disbelief that 20-somethings smart enough for medical school would behave with such juvenile abandon, we end up with something of a moral warning at the end – and the feeling that death has sort of been put off indefinitely by choice. The viewer wonders how the characters will handle death when it really comes and their friends aren’t there to bring them back to life. This journey, unfortunately, is not taken.

More recently, White Noise suggested that the dead may be able to communicate with the living through television. Not a totally new idea – we’ve seen it with telephones in the Twilight Zone and radio in at least one non-horror film. Surely there is a social statement possible in doing it with the trance-inducing television. Alas, even with Michael Keaton, the film disappoints. The deeper potentials devolve into a bogeyman who feels too J-horror. There’s no soul-searching or wonder …but sources inform me there is a sequel en route.

In-between, there are occasions when we've been given the immediate moments of death and the terror of the edge. Examples include the fellow in the Tales From the Crypt episode Abra Cadaver who can feel his own autopsy, or the other fellow in the Nightmares and Dreamscapes episode Autopsy Room Four who nearly gets the same. The best example of this sort of point-of-death limbo is probably Jacob’s Ladder. A creepy, wonderful horror - but again there’s no real look at the afterdeath. Only the miserable delirium leading up to it.

Why is it that so few films take the risk of being bold enough to peek through the mirror of death? Why is it that, to my knowledge, none have ever stepped through and gone for a stroll? Maybe it has to do with modern cynicism and fear of no suspension of disbelief in audiences ...but that doesn't explain previous decades. More likely, it’s a lack of imagination and outside-the-box thinking. But then, this explanation's always a critical crutch for the genre's faults. Scares, shocks, and gore are easy, and there's less and less that can be done with these things that are not cliche. Beyond that? The consensus so far is clear. There’s little willingness, whatever the reason, for the genre to explore in straightforward fiction what exactly happens post mortem. Maybe it's too freaky - or maybe there really are no ideas. A few blurry and unfriendly instances would seem to betray an empty-handedness.

When will we see something as sinister, creative, and introspective as even that most innocent Twilight Zone episode, The Hunt? A hunter arrives at a cloudy gate and a man introduces himself as St. Peter. St. Peter says the man's dog can't enter heaven and the hunter says that he don't want in if his dog can't join him. The hunter continues down the road and another man approaches and explains the man just passed the gate to hell - and yes, of course his dog can join him in heaven, which is dead ahead.

Our Darkest Hour?

BloodyDisgusting.com's website, as of this posting, is dominated by news of the following five films:

A Nightmare on Elm Street Remake
Friday the 13th Remake
Halloween 2 Remake
My Bloody Valentine Remake
Last House on the Left Remake

What year is this? What is wrong with the industry? Is horror about to sink into a Great Depression ...or is it already there? If a film is good enough that they want to remake it, it shouldn't be remade!

Hype and Heartbreak Cycle

Way behind in new horror, I finally got around to Cloverfield. I fast-forwarded through the first thirty minutes of post-teen drama-refuse because, as expected, it had little true bearing on the film. A monster film, as a rule, should go for the leanest and meanest cuts possible in dialogue and characters …but of course none of them do. Still, I watched on. The Statue of Liberty’s head landed only a few meters from the party-people and I was sure I’d been cheated by hype. So many questions came to mind, but here are just a few:

Theme: Why is post-teen drama so powerful in a film in which a monstrosity never-before-seen in human history is destroying the city of the post-teens?

Setting: Why is every big monster or disaster film set in New York? Why was Godzilla there? Or The Day the Earth Stood Still? Or The Happening? Or Independence Day? Why can’t we get even a sliver of creative edge by hitting another city, like Miami, Moscow, Shanghai, or Antananarivo?

Realism: Why were the military guys so convenient with information when real military guys would more likely brush the whiny post-teens aside so they can do their jobs?

Medium: Why was the perspective of the film through the lens of a camera? What did it add? The idea’s clear with Diary of the Dead, but here it seemed a mere matter of unneeded, fast-becoming-cliched style.

Form: Why does the monster look so much like Aliens? A blob would have been better, or something that looks like a giant bush, or angry chopsticks, or a flying aluminum foil sheet, or Clifford the Big Red Beast from Hell. But no, Aliens. Cloverfield is even conscious of it. One of the characters actually points the similarity out, but then still they went with it. Why?

I stewed through these and other questions but, slowly and surely, Cloverfield did get better. In fact, by the time I spotted the stealth bomber I was fully enjoying it. Things could have been much tighter, yes, but it felt good by the end. A real air of destruction was conjured up, and the shaky, messy camerawork was part of that. I sat back and made what I could of my thoughts:

1. Film is hyped, starts weak, I gush negative pissy-ness toward it.
2. Film improves, I concede hasty judgment, I feel like hyping it myself.
3. Film finishes, I reconsider, I don’t trust my opinion of it.

This reads like the thoughts of somebody who has suffered no small amount of celluloid abuse.

Lifetime Channel Brutes

Older posts have made the point that a lot of what is shown on the Lifetime Channel is arguably horror material. The cliche villain in many of the channel's select is a sociopathic man who seems charming and good, but then turns on the woman - and only in the end gets some of what he deserves. There is the lack of gore and the fantastic, but other clear horror films ranging from The Hand that Rocks the Cradle to Flowers in the Attic are generally consistent with what you might find on Lifetime when it isn't the Holiday Season.

Charlize Theron's Monster is also a well-told horror film that fits the criteria. The fact that it's been so warmly received by the mainstream has always seemed ironic on several levels to me. It's not so distinct from any monster film. The killer is someone you can feel empathy for, yet she can never be a part of the world around her. In a sense she has been forced into her destructive behavior - tres Lifetime. The victims are often hateable enough to give the viewer the conflicted feeling that they "deserve" their deaths. But when the monster violates even her own morality - and we can see this turning point very clearly in the film - what little is left to fall apart does so with haste. It is a classic monster-horror recipe that is both aptly named and beautifully crafted, brought to us at the cost of one poor soul (not counting victims).

Another poor soul is sacrificed a second time around for drama's sake in Star 80. Once-Playboy Playmate of the Year (1979) Dorothy Stratton, star of the ho-hum sci-fi film Galaxina, met an exceedingly gruesome end at the hands of her estranged boyfriend in 1981. A quick search will generate ample nauseating details of the murder, the aftermath, and then his suicide, and then how the neighbors found them. But this Hollywood murder is made the worse when we get a look at the genuine human charm Stratton exuded, which is not simply the hot-chick or even the mysterious-hot-chick sort that a mainstream pinup shoots for in 2D sheen. Rather, her charm was of a more soft and tender yet very potent sort - not quite the Playboy speciality. Numerous tribute sites and films exist for Stratton, despite her minuscule career, and this speaks to the loss. As if it weren't enough that any person in their prime were miserably done in by sheer sleaze. A horror, truly.

Perhaps the closest undeniably horror film I know that is total Lifetime material is Stepfather. Terry O'Quinn plays a great crypto-crazy man as the title role (more recently you may have seen him in Lost), and the story is a well-told suspense piece. As far as horror goes, we're only a few bloody steps removed from any Lifetime Channel original. To follow, the stepfather is done away with very easily in the film, not considering the sequels - and somehow it is the sequels that are what put this film squarely into the corner of horror and not "Lifetime: Television for Women." Watching the video version recently gave the added bonus of one of those great early-90s anti-drug commercials on it at the beginning: "No one ever says, 'I wanna be a junkie when I grow up...'"). You can't find that on Lifetime.

Beauty, Beast, Blood – Joe Spinell vs. Caroline Munroe

Contrasts are key when we look at films like Maniac and The Last Horror Film. The us-versus-them principle in these goes to the marrow of our humanity. It’s more than teenage emotion, troubled lovers, or something as precise as two sides in a war. Inside every man, woman and child is the most civilized and beautiful deity; simultaneously, an ugly, rotten, vicious scumbag of a bastard licks his chops. Beauty and the beast are halves of a single heart while the man and the woman in the story are simple metaphors.

I’ve found considering this pair of films in such terms to be highly rewarding. Both have a seemingly similar basic premise: a lowly psychopath makes real his fantasies of joining the beautiful upper class and, as he schemes to do so, people die. The details take the two films to very different conclusions and, in the end, we’re left with two totally distinct feasts: Maniac ends filthy and sad, The Last Horror Film ends cute and sweet – and yes, I believe that is Mr. Spinell’s actual mother asking him to pass the joint.

The late Joe Spinell, born under the surname Spagnuolo in New York’s Little Italy, played variants of the Mafioso lowlife in a slew of movies in the 70s and 80s. He had the look, no doubt – those eyes, that hair, that belly! When Joe dons the look of the artiste in Maniac and The Last Horror Film - the photographer or filmmaker, respectively - he becomes both pitiful and comical. A hilarious tragedy but abysmally dark when we viewers recall his true nature. This was Spinell's speciality, to defy himself. Every moment we see the cool, intelligent, refined artiste, we know there's a ghoul inside; likewise, we can look at the blubbering maniac in full messy splendor and be assured that Mr. Spinell, the actor, really was quite sane, and brilliant. Still waters ran deep.

Caroline Munro is different, though not in any bad sort of way. She plays the 80s star without devolving into so much feathered hair and synthetic fabric. She's a cover girl, but there is some intelligence in her eyes - evidenced, some might say, in her turning down nude roles and even a Playboy spread. Her career started when she won a model contest as an adolescent, but she had no formal training in acting. She was thrust in, playing everything from the poster girl for a brand of rum to the dead wife in The Abomidible Dr. Phibes. In some ways she is an ideal victim for Spinell's characters' sorts of lunacy: she stumbled into new world with no idea what creatures lurked in the dark.

Nearly back-to-back, Spinell starred opposite Munroe in three films - but we will not discuss Starcrash here. The Last Horror Film, also titled Fanatic, is the superior film in regard to contrasts - at least in this maniac's opinion. Vinnie (Spinell) is a genuine Horatio Alger seeking the American dream - in Cannes, France. He's a forty-year-old living in his mum's apartment, obsessed with an actress and possessing the drive to act on his dream. His character is uneven, unbalanced, and uncouth and starkly counters the calm, rational, lovely character played by Munroe.

In Maniac, things are much more bleak. Spinell's delusional, emotional, pathetic character is much further gone. He lives alone with mannequins and a doll in a birdcage. He is certifiably sick, needs help, knows he's doing bad things (to say the least) - but he can't control it. This is the polar opposite of the goon with more heart than is good for him in The Last Horror Film. Through both films, Munroe's girls sport fabulous 80s hair and clean skin while Spinell sweats through a permanent and inescapable state of dishevelment. She runs with a higher crowd, albeit in dirty businesses, and is oblivious to the depths of reality for Joe's characters. There's a certain anti-hero taste a la Taxi Driver to Vinnie's dreams of the snotty film industry folk in The Last Horror Film - they're so disgusting, you want him to get them.

In both films, Joe's characters fantasize about being an artiste, and in both he goes so far as to impersonate such types. Also, he has mother issues in both films. In Maniac she's dead and he's merely crying before a stone whereas in The Last Horror Film she's telling him she loves him on the phone - does this make all the difference in the psychopath? The irony is that the Maniac gets close to Caroline Munroe's character, but we never really see a connection established in The Last Horror Film - even after the guy has saved her from the real killer.

A sequel to Maniac titled Mr. Robbie was planned, and the trailer can even be viewed online. Unfortunately, with Joe's untimely death from a bloodclot, the project was buried with him. Caroline Munroe, on the other hand, was acting as of 2006.

"What’s your favorite horror movie?"

"What’s your favorite horror movie?"

If you've ever expressed yourself as a fan of horror cinema, you’ve been asked this, given an official answer, and then later mulled it over - maybe even questioned it. There’s no accounting for taste, and the more bizarre your answer, the more horror-refined you may well be. Of course, popular horror films are occasionally popular for good reasons. But age and experience does matter. In my early years as a horror fan-child, my favorite horror was undoubtedly Evil Dead II. A mindblowing horror experience for me (age 8?), I watched it over and over like toddlers watch their cartoons, introducing it to dozens of other horror-virgins over the years. And it seems I wasn't the only one - the entire bloody world knows who Ash is at this point. But by the age of 12 or so I discovered Dawn of the Dead ‘78 and for the next several years that was my celluloid Mecca. I remember pestering video stores and companies in the early 1990s for the Director’s Cut on VHS long before it was widely released (or before the advents of the internet or DVDs!) The film's still close to the heart and Romero’s still a hero.

However, as tastes evolve and one's entanglement with horror gets more complicated, the eclectic heart strings turn down twisted paths. For me, this brought me to a nostalgia-foreign taste which led to my favorite horror film of the last decade, The Devil’s Nightmare. I’d nearly forgotten about it when I saw a version of it for sale for one dollar in a closing video store under the title The Devil Walks at Midnight. Watching it brought me back to the USA Channel's circa 1990 show Saturday Nightmares, and served as my template for the shifty, quirky, aesthetic realm of Eurohorror.

The Devil’s Nightmare is overlooked in the greater horror genre and, despite my fondness of it, feels like almost generic Eurohorror. Attractive women, creepy men, violent deaths, a dash of religion and a campy theme to the murders (the seven deadly sins) - all shored up by harmonium-jazz tunes and a Technicolor-gothic atmosphere sauteed with late-60s sexual liberation. As with a lot of Eurohorror, the imagery's like a Jungian dream. The priest-demon combo played by Jacques Monseau and Erika Blanc, respectively, breaks archetypes down to their essentials: The enchanting succubus, murder and lust pouring from her eyes, slithers in circles around the troubled young priest who ends up being proud enough to believe he can trick the devil. This is set against a background of a family curse and the lingering bleakness of just-post-WWII Europe. Decidedly grim.

My fascination with this film has led me to strange lengths. While living in various parts of Europe I tried desperately to find the castle used to portray that of Baron von Rhoneberg. I scoured books of pictures of Belgian castles and estates - you would be surprised to know how many of these there are - but later learned that looking in Belgium was the problem. The film was actually shot in Austria near a village called Hohenstein ...or so my best sources have informed. How hard it is to find good info on a film like this - and even when you find it, you may well be dealing with rumor, misspelling, or mistranslation.

Jacques Monseau, I've read but can't confirm, died a few years back. Blanc, on the other hand, is confirmed alive and well. She still acts and also speaks on behalf of animal adoption on Italian radio. The brooding baron, played by Belgian actor Jean Servais, died in 1976 - only about five years after the film's release. Also genuinely dead, Daniel Emilfork, who played the very memorable incarnation of the devil. He passed away two years back. As for director Jean Brismée and the other actors and actresses, one can only guess. I once read that Mr. Brismée was a university professor who decided to do a horror film - but where I read that, I'll never know. I also understand he published a book on the Belgian film industry years back. No doubt this and other juicy details are out there for whoever has the time, travel funds, and patience.

Still, though the details add depth and romance, what’s important is that a film stands on its own - in its various incarnations. By chance (and for bargain prices) I've gotten my hands on several versions of The Devil's Nightmare on video and DVD. How many titles does this film have? The short list goes:

Au service du diable
Castle of Death
Nightmare of Terror
La Notte piu lunga del diavolo
La Nuit des pétrifiés
Succubus
La Terrificante notte del demonio
The Devil Walks at Midnight
The Devil's Longest Night
Vampire Playgirls
O Demonio Sai a Meia-Noite
Yö paholaisen linnassa
La Plus Longue Nuit Du Diable

Having seen several versions, I've come to the conclusion (no matter what the DVD cover or video wholeseller might tell you) there’s no truly complete version available. All have different cuts, and though the Redemption DVD seems to be the most visually complete, the sound quality of this version is awful - in fact, most video versions do it better ...which defeats the purpose of DVD. This is an important issue when we consider the music of the film. The central piece by Alessandro Alessandroni (a pillar of the spaghetti western genre) is a dark, haunting tune. Music from the film is available on two different Lounge CD collections: Women in Lounge (Cinedelic Records) and A Doppia Faccia (Lucertola Media).

Without a doubt, my favorite thing about the film is the finale. The priest awakes to find all was a dream and that the devil has not really taken the souls of his companions ...but only his own. Then, at the last instant, while all travellers are again in a state of mortal sin, the bus plunges off the cliff and explodes. The priest hugs the succubus, who grins to the devil. And all is well in Hell.

LGBT Characters in Horror

As said in previous posts, a big theme in horror is being different, and this is often taken to extremes well beyond standard teen awkwardness and angst. After all, it's the standard, "normal" teens who are usually the victims of the genuinely different individual. On occasion, the genre tends to wisdom that defies the awful acting and plots of thousands of the films that inflate it. This is not necessarily the case with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) characters.

There may be reason here that goes beyond obvious bigotry or simple misunderstanding. While the struggle for equal rights and acceptance of LGBT people slugs it out with social conservativism, we must keep in mind that the latter politique is undoubtedly that of the vast majority of horror baddies. Think of the killers in God Told Me To or the original Toolbox Murders. Could Freddy vote for Obama? Is Randall Flagg from The Stand hoping Al Gore gets a say? This contrasts with the importance of individuality in horror, a LGBT societal factor that should translate better than it does. After all, the essence of the LGBT civil rights comes down to individual freedom. This radical notion, as in any other era, is hard to see through the cultural blinders of the day.

And speaking of struggles, it's a real struggle to come up with LGBT characters in horror - particularly ones who come off as anything approaching normal. The overall pattern thus far in cinematic history might sum all of these groups up as abomination, which may or may not be better than the purely comic relief (patronizing?) status of such characters in more mainstream cinema and television. The lack of such characters in general is social-historical, and it remains to be seen if such characters can get a break any time in the near future.

Let's first consider probably the most prominent LGBT horror film character: Angela Baker from the Sleepaway Camp films. A transgender male living as female, we are presented her backstory in the first film of the series in a fashion of 100-proof creepy. Scary lullaby music and dark scenes of two men laying in bed, petting each other juxtaposed against one of the men's two children (a boy and a girl) pointing at each other and seemingly blurring identities. This, we are reasonably led to believe, is a major part of Angela's later homicidal tendencies. How? The child lost a fundamental sense of reality and, in so doing, took the moral weirdness of his/her aunt to a psychopathic level. However odd the backstory, the sideshow aspect of the film is arguably what made the series (franchise?). Without the shock full-frontal nude of Angela's pre-op body in the final scene, it's hard to believe we would have seen a sequel.

A comparable sideshow-aspect of transgenderism in horror occurs in the very underrated Hide and Go Shreik. Again, the killer shows up near the end, in this instance a gay male in drag, former prison-lover to the man who appeared to be the killer up to that point. The intended effect is shock at the weirdness of it. There are mannequins, some ooooo'ing, and a little sexy dance from the jealous, thwarted transvestite lover-turned-murder. The purpose is gross-out, as if gay were the eleventh of Stephen King's ten bears.

The abomination theme comes through even when the LGBT characters are not the monsters. The long lesbian scene cut from most versions of The Devil's Nightmare reinforces the two of the Seven Deadly Sins of the pair involved: One, a bisexual girl with an insatiable sexual appetite (Envy), the other, a sleepy and apathetic girl who might do anything asked of her (Sloth). Each, of course, pays for their sin by the end of the film, and the more rational members of the audience are left to ponder, they got killed for some petting and licking? Seriously?

Seriously. Many other horror films feature lesbianism purely for the sex appeal. This is the lesbianism of male fantasy, no doubt, and far from reality - but again, all the lesbians die. Many Eurohorror films from various countries come to mind, but a mere two Jess Franco films will suffice: Vampyros Lesbos and Les Avaleuses. The former is a self-explanatory title while Les Avaleuses is truly racy and cheap a la the finest Belgian-Spanish 70s porn film you'll find. Long, voyeuristic, blurred close-ups of the bisexual countess in the bathtub make little but sex of the entire film.

It is odd that things are no further along than this considering how long homosexuality and horror have mingled. Even if we limit ourselves to the post-industrial age, one can detect an undercurrent. Joseph S. Le Fanu's Carmilla, an Irish novella of the 1870s undoubtedly influenced the vampire genre. The story centers on a female vampire and a young woman who is, essentially, falling for her. Another Irish work, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, centers on a male artist's infatuation with the beauty of the title character, and the magical portrait he has painted of him. James Whale, director of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, posthumously had his gay life portrayed in the biographical Gods and Monsters. Approximately the same year, Johnny Depp played in a bio-film on the transvestite director of Plan 9 From Outer Space, in the subject-titled Ed Wood. One also hears interpretations of the Invisible Man as being a crypto-gay metaphor, the idea being that he can stand in the middle of any crowd on earth and nobody can actually see him.

The 60s and 70s saw a taming of the artistic and metaphoric takes on LGBT characters in horror, and simultaneously no real opening up of their culture in the genre. In Psycho, Norman Bates dressed as his mother, and in the already-mentioned Eurohorror-porns, lesbianism ran rampant. Daughters of Darkness, another West European lesbian-vampire film, updates the Elizabeth Bathory legend - but there's no update on a gay girl's place but as a sex symbol for male viewers. A few male crossdressers show up in the horror of the 70s (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eyes of Laura Mars), but by-and-large there's little to talk about.

With the 80s and 90s there seems to be a slight opening to the "male" side of LGBT in horror. Aside from Sleepaway Camp and Hide and Go Shriek, certain scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and The Lost Boys scream gay, as does virtually all of Interview with the Vampire. Another, lesser-known but very creepy horror, Clownhouse, has some decidedly gay overtones. Unfortunately, it also has some decidedly pedophile overtones that eventually resulted in the director's prosecution for child molestation. Klaus Kinski put on lipstick for no good reason in Crawlspace, and Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs is shown in drag in at least one scene. A comedic play on the subject comes in Curse of the Queerwolf - a low-budget, intelligent and genuinely funny film which features an uber-heterosexual male who becomes gay/transexual under the light of the full moon. While being a fun watch, in this film and those mentioned above it we again see LGBT elements used as devices intended to highlight and exaggerate the weirdness of the horror being viewed - the dark, taboo, anti-social depths to which things have sunk. At the end of the 90s, Harry Benshoff wrote a book called Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film to address this, but one academic text on a matter like this is unlikely to make even the smallest dent on a genre which deems itself on the outside, yet often behaves with the restriction of a dark age Catholic nun.

The current decade, still in progress, has not shown whether or not the old trends are to continue. From what's come so far we have an iota of reason to believe not. The wonderful French horror Haute Tension features a frustrated psychopath lesbian infatuated with another young woman who believes they're only friends. In this, the murderess is actually a split personality, with the killer side being a repulsive and brutal interpretation of the animus. The only other recent LGBT horror (or rather horror-lite) this gorehound's aware of is 2002's Make a Wish. Billed as lesbian horror making fun of lesbian horror, the consensus one gets from perusing reviews is that the film is not a horror fan fave so much as a decent gay-horror film. There is also 2007's Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, and this sounds more promising, though again this gorehound has not seen it and, again, it may be more a gay-cult-film than straight (no pun intended) horror. Either way, in a genre currently obsessed with remakes and sequels, different can only be better.

Horror Films for Children

Horror can offer a lot of perspective to a young mind. If approached with adult guidance, a stark introduction to the difference between reality and fiction is possible. This can be exciting and even relatively interactive (to the degree a viewer can interact with film). Interesting conversation is sure to follow any child's experience in dealing with fear - but safely, at home. Such discussion may stir the otherwise thickened imagination of child and adult alike. The one thing to remember is that horror is more fear and menace than violence. Consider this article on horror movies and young children before introducing Freddy Krueger or Dead Alive.

Every Halloween newspapers and other media provide the world with chintzy, ill-researched lists of family Halloween films. Mainly these consist of light-hearted comedies that we can't quite call horror: Ghostbusters, Adams Family, Arachnophobia, The Burbs, and even The Wizard of Oz (Return to Oz is undoubtedly the better choice). A Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Edward Scissorhands, The Witches, and Beetlejuice are other safe bets for toddlers and comedy-seekers.

But while these are decent films that the kiddies ought to see, they're not quite the same as serious horror. If we tighten the belt one notch, we come to films like Poltergeist 1 or 2, Gremlins, Monster Squad (though you'll have to explain what a virgin is), The Frighteners, or any television series along the lines of Twilight Zone (and Twilight Zone: The Movie). Very easy horrors, minimally violent, maybe with a few laughs sneaking in. I've seen the film Tremors on at least one other family-horror-films list - really no more violence in this choice than in Jurassic Park. For the most part, monster films are probably as safe a choice as any of the above.

Getting a little more serious, we come to horrors made before about the 1960s. The best part about considering these is that, if you can find them, they're probably classics ...and for a reason. Many modern horror enthusiasts don't give themselves the opportunity to become acquainted with the classics and they don't know what they're missing. The Universal horrors in particular are wonderful for this. Powerful imagery and themes, with little enough violence you can watch them with an eight-year-old. A film like The Haunting may be a bit heady, but the House on Haunted Hill or The Old Dark House have some scenes that still work. Many family Halloween horror lists include Hitchcock's The Birds or even Psycho. I'd disagree as these are more talking heads and kids may not have the attention span to sit through an hour of dialogue they don't fully understand. Better to go with The Mummy or Dracula or Bride of Frankenstein. All have massive entertainment potential if approached correctly.

Fairy tales offer another perspective here. They gush with darkness and doom, so it's no surprise that horror-film versions of Snow White: A Tale of Terror, Pinocchio, The Brothers Grimm, and Hansel and Gretel (South Korea, 2007) are probably too much for the tykes. My personal favorite example of this is Klaus Kinski's anguished performance in Fairy Tale Theatre's Beauty and the Beast. His screaming is maniacal and bloodcurdling and I have witnessed firsthand that this confuses a child more used to Disney-level emotion in their programming. Of course, for exactly that reason it might be a perfect choice for any child. Something Wicked This Way Comes, written by the great Ray Bradbury, is a near-morality play on giving in to desire and overflowing in horror archetypes. Other folk and fairy tale horrors on the edge might include Pan's Labyrinth, Sleepy Hollow, or Troll. The films produced by Full Moon, particularly the Puppet Master series, offer more possibilities.

A few more ideas for horror films worth considering for an eight-year-old include the original Stepford Wives, The Omen films, or Invasion of Body Snatchers (1956, maybe 1978 ...but not 2007's The Invasion). Again, these will work best for patient, heady children. Mid-level-attention children could probably handle M. Night Shyamalan's films or The Others, or even The Orphanage or The Devil's Backbone if they could be found non-subtitles. For kids needing to really be walked through, try The Gate or Neon Maniacs or The Stuff.

Everybody recalls some of the first scary cinema they saw. For me, specific scenes from Cujo, Christine, and Invasion of Body Snatchers (1978) come to mind. Doubtful they altered me in any way but for a few lessons: don't forget that animals are always animals, don't be a bully, and things are not always as they seem. Ghosts, monsters, boogeymen and magic are part of every human culture. It makes no sense to deprive a child of these concepts - especially in a world in which reality and virtuality are getting more blurry by the moment and critical analysis is in danger of becoming a lost art.

Brigitte Lahaie - A Fine Line

The French... mon dieu, what can we say? In sex and horror, they are so good ...and so bad. Could it be a Gaullic blood quantum that brings these two matters so seamlessly together? Perhaps it is tragedy itself which, after all, is so often a perfect mix of the two: The heart and the genitals against the whisper and the knife.

As this blog has pointed out in previous entries, sex films and horror films meet and even overlap in many ways. Their mutual sources are a weird blend of perversion, desperation and passion. They are frowned upon by decent society. Also, they thrive in the dark - strange flowers for strange folk. These commonalities play out in a cross-fertilization of ideas and themes, as well as in the work of industry persons.

Which brings us to Brigitte Lucille Janine Van Meerhaegue, better known to both genres as Brigitte Lahaie. Born in 1955 in the small French town of Tourcoing, one would assume from her autobiography, Moi, la scandaleuse, that the details of her younger years are laid out in full. Sadly, this book is as yet unavailable in translation outside of French, so we can only imagine. It will suffice to mention here that her CV would list dozens of adult films before age 25, and that she does not regret this fact in the least.

Our focus begins in about 1978 when Brigitte began taking to the edges of the horror genre. In addition to roles in numerous pornographic films that year, including the intriguing nazisploitation film Bordel SS, director Jean Rollin secured her a place in one of his own ventures outside the adult genre, Le Raisins de la mort (Grapes of Death). Brigitte's appearance was powerful stuff to lend to a director with a special talent for imagery. The young woman is simultaneously sexy and innocent on film, and yet, standing with her dogs under the torchlight, she exudes menace. Rollin must have felt as much, for the following year she appeared in his next horror, Fascination. A world away from pesticide-induced zombies, this film is a WWI-era piece that provided Brigitte (and the broader genre of Eurohorror) with one of its most enduring images - the blonde in black with a scythe on the bridge.

As with all Rollin films, imagery remained the soul of the third meeting of the pair, La Nuit des traquees (Night of the Hunted). A psychological horror in which most of the characters are unable to retain any memories for more than a few moments, here Brigitte drops the menace for a pure sexual innocence that would be difficult to reproduce. The menace is in the head of the viewer, and so the starlet, shameless as she is (the film does contain a full-on six-minute sex scene), has an amplified innocence ...which adds even more to the draw of her image.

Through the early 1980s Brigitte took a break from horror, returning to her adult roots. Somewhere along the way she met sleaze god Jess Franco who convinced her (along with Caroline Munro and Telly Savalas) to appear in 1988's Faceless - another mess of an installment of Dr. Orloff. Through the early-90s she appeared in a few action films, one of which was another Franco feature. It wasn't until 1997 that her collaboration with Rollin resumed in Les Deux orphelines vampires (Two Orphan Vampires), albeit as a cameo role, and then again in 2002 with La Fiancée de Dracula (Dracula's Fiance). Both films have a strong presence of nuns and, in the latter feature, a short-haired Brigitte plays the role of a sort of wolf-woman. Taken as a whole, we have the sacred and the bestial, a culmination of her bridge between horror and porn. It would be wonderful to see more down this primeval track.

But we may never get that. Her most recent appearance in a horror film, riding on something of a new rise in the French industry, is a tiny role in 2004's Calvaire. On seeing this, one gets the sense we have witnessed nearly the last of Brigitte in either genre - but who knows? An unfortunate reality is that with directors like Jean Rollin and Jess Franco there are far too many other 18-year-old women in the world - so the question is, for what does nostalgia count?

In addition to continuing in other recent projects such as small film roles, voice-overs and a short singing career, Brigitte has been hosting a French radio show called Lahaie, l'Amour et Vous - a love and sex talk show. For such potentially murky subjects, the role of expert may well be the most fitting she has yet had.

African Horror

In a survey a few years back involving 65 nations, the UK’s New Science Magazine discovered that Nigerians are the most “happy” people on the planet. To many of us outside of Africa, this may counter what we think we know about Nigeria - or any other country in Africa. War, AIDS, poverty, and a long list of caveats to these trail on the older Euro-centric notion that Africa is the dark, jungle-covered, wild continent. Of course, the dark and the wild are where we attribute all of our primitive terrors …as if somewhere in the backs of our heads we actually remember being monkeys, screaming down from our trees at the blood-stinking lions and hyenas.

While this kind of romanticism is more than a little slanderous, it's also prime turf for horror in fiction and celluloid. But then the specific cultures of the varied regions of the second-largest continent offer many more layers to the potentials of Africa in the horror genre than what is limited by western psychological fancies and fears. A detailed survey could be very long, but let’s consider the surface, region by region, of what might be had by the wider world insofar as the African horror:

North Africa - Start in Egypt, land of the mummy and its Orientalist mythologies, a sub-genre onto itself. Between Boris Karloff and Brandon Fraser there are at least a few dozen mummy horror films, but 1932’s classic The Mummy really and truly remains the visual and spiritual gem of the lot. Of course, this is an American film. Egypt itself has done little in regard to horror as the west knows it (though subtleties in drama may produce aghast effects on Egyptian audiences).

Crossing over to the Maghreb, we find a similar situation. The long history of European colonialism, right up to WWII, leads to an awful Jess Franco film that hints at so many possibilities: Oasis of the Living Dead. Nazi zombies eating treasure-hunting Europeans - if only it were as good as it sounds. Unfortunately, any symbolism gleaned from the film is likely to be a simple mistake on the part of the viewer.

Continuing westward, across civil-war-torn Algeria and into Morocco, lay the shifty stereotypes put to work in Casablanca. Good luck finding The Beast of Morocco, a British film of ghosts and vampires in a Moorish castle. Like Oasis of the Living Dead, this film also points to a new world of horror - but yet again, no local filmage has followed.

To the south of all of this, then, is the enormous Sahara …an empty, dead place that was long ago green and flourishing, and today retains both a sense of the ancient and the elemental. Having been in the Sahara, where everything looks the same no matter which way you look, just the thought of suddenly losing your direction is deeply frightening. But sadly, this is as far as North African horror has gotten - a western thought, a western fear.

East Africa – Somali piracy makes the news almost daily, but the real horror stories are on the mainland. The ongoing civil war, perpetrated by warlords and wild young men high on a native stimulant known as qat, and maybe charged with religious fervor, is the perhaps American-specific horror documented in Blackhawk Down. Nearby Ethiopia and Eritrea have a connection to this, but also a potential with the mysterious where the Nile splits and the ancient remnants of places like Lalibela still wait to be discovered by the wider world. Kenya and Tanzania bring to mind the dismal and murderous imperial era as captured in a film like Kitchen Toto, wherein a small native boy serves as a faithful servant to white colonials, only to end up dead in a gully.

Along the coast, the Indian Ocean coastal islands, and particularly Zanzibar, give an altogether different feeling that, again, westerners might consider mysterious. With the Arab and Ottoman influence in the region, one might be tempted to think of Vampyros Lesbos, and the island on which murky Soledad Miranda's vampire lives in exotic solitude on edge of known civilization. As far as I know, there’s nothing remotely of the sort in film or fiction of the region. East Africa, like North Africa, is virgin territory for the horror film.

Western and Central Africa – Here’s where we get our jungle. Starting in Senegal and going across the small nations of the immediate sub-Sahara, we’re in the neighborhood in which voodoo emerged. One senses other regions of the world which have produced horrors based on dark and cryptic pagan religions (possibilities include Haiti and Serpent and the Rainbow, or New Guinea and Cannibal Holocaust, or even Night of the Sorcerers - which I believe was actually filmed in Spain).

Down to Nigeria, the most populous nation on the continent, and the happiest, we return to the themes of impending civil war and religious violence, along with petro-corruption ...and witchcraft. The latter wins out in what Nigerian horror cinema has come out so far (an interesting academic discussion of which can be found here). But the other elements, the petro-corruption and scent of civil strife, make the thought of a Nigerian Sam Spade very pleasing. Just such a mix of criminal and witchcraft can be found in the film The Last Occult (don't bother trying to find a copy - you can watch the entire film in segments on YouTube).

Moving on to the dead-center of the continent, the Congo region offers us the worst sorts of horror including genocide and an all but recognized third world war that has been occurring for two decades now. Of course, this does not yet begin to overshadow the entire coastline’s long history of slavery. No horror films on slavery? How can it be? Ravenous has shown us that horrors of the period can be down quite well. Yet as far as I'm aware, Spielberg’s Amistad and Herzog’s Cobra Verde come about as close to horror as we've got.

Southern Africa – Here is the region from which most horror films of the continent have come, mainly due to the nation of South Africa. Relatively speaking (as in, relative to any European of North American country), we’re talking about a minuscule amount of films here, hedged gingerly by a few more from surrounding countries. With the exception of American or British films that were simply shot in South Africa, we're left with a handful of genuine South African horrors. Apart from a few very dull, un-recommendable slashers (but look them up if you wish: City of Blood, The Stay Awake, Return of the Family Man, Slash), of worthy mention we have a trio.

Jannie Totsiens, released in 1970, has been described as an avant-garde take on the South African political situation of the early 70s - but done in the decidedly horror tone of insanity. From what gushing reviews I've read of of the film, I get the sense that it may stand somewhere between (or around) Roman Polanski's Repulsion and Zulawski's Possession, with some Robert Rodriguez thrown in.

Then, we have a 1987 film titled The Stick which deals with soldiers during a border war with Angola. Again, critics have called it (and I haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing it) a brilliant (and horrible) take on combat, personal ghosts, and South Africa itself - in Afrikaans language. Like with Jannie Totsiens, good luck finding it stateside.

Our third South African horror film is readily available in the US and probably in the Canada and the UK. Dust Devil, released in 1992, is an atmospheric, spooky film concerned with a sort of demon who hunts down and lives off of suicidal women. Surely there is social commentary here, but what struck this viewer was the desert - the idea of an edge, with nothing beyond. A small, local factor that looms large to those of us not used to an elemental barrier.

Despite its humble numbers, South Africa does take horror quite seriously - at least in relation to the rest of the continent. In fact, Cape Town hosts what may be the only annual horror convention on the continent. That alone says something.

In Sum - Throughout the continent, the volume of real-life horror contrasted with the absence of horror cinema suggests that Africa is a virtual opposite of Europe or North America (which in a roundabout sort of way might explain Nigerian happiness). There are so many factors as to why this may be, but the point is that there is no tradition of local flavor in invented phantasmagoria for any of the regions considered above. Rather, Africans end up with the run-off of western culture once again, as happens with clothes, weapons, and pharmaceuticals. What this means for those of us interested in horror is that several universes of potential expansion of the genre in these realms are being lost as local culture is diluted by pre-fabricated Yankee and Euro ideas that don't really fit. I see a similar situation in Russia, where much of the horror that comes out feels like tasteless, thoughtless American trash - but in the native language. Time will tell where things will go.

Return to Sleepaway Camp ...finally!

"You're all monsters!" says the girl.

That sums up Return to Sleepaway Camp. Having waited faithfully, patiently, and painfully for more than a decade, we get Angela again and it really does feel a little bit like time-travelling to about 8th grade ...on several levels.

This film is vulgar and brutal. It's true jungle law. The ugliest scenes you ever saw in middle school are all here, exaggerated, and set to a pace that makes the film soar on teenage awkwardness, social terror, and pity. In particular, the torture of Alan, a certifiably emotionally disturbed young man, is almost as hard to watch as the brilliant death scenes - in particular the scene with the wire, the Irishman, and the jeep. The tension build-up was far above what you may be used to in your regular diet of mid-to-late 2000s horror.

Through the first part of the film, Alan is hopelessly disgusting and far from someone the viewer can feel anything for. Amazingly, by the end, you may find yourself actually feeling sorry for him. We know the genuine moral watchdog is present because there's not the least bit of concern or sorrow for victims, but only a sense that they got what they deserved. By the credits, only the misunderstood and tragic figure of the monster (and in this film we're led to believe there are two) is worthy of any positive sentiment from us. Alan is reduced to a fetal position, showing himself to be in fact another camper and harmless - nothing compared to the beastliness of Angela Baker.

Having seen the other Sleepaway Camp films, you will note there are at least four actors from the original film but none from parts 2 or 3. Short of Pamela Springsteen, there weren't many to survive to make an appearance, so that makes sense (the fact that this film is supposed to be a direct sequel to part 1 is immaterial). The original-actors who did show up are a bit rusty, not having played much in the last quarter century. This is wholly forgivable because we're happy to see them. We want this absurd soap opera to go on.

The real force behind it, however, is all of the fresh faces and their lovely/terrible characters. This film has life because the actors do. These actors make some scenes look so much like caricatures of bad teen years that one is reminded of the extremes of Troma films. This may be due to the rarity of heart as a commodity in the torrent of films out in the last decade. And how rare it is also to be able to say, Finally, a sequel that does the original some justice!

Sycophancy

A sad truth about horror genre publications such as Fangoria and Rue Morgue (and even online horror news sources like Bloody Disgusting) is that many of the films covered, and particularly those that are advertised, are known full-well to be awful wastes of time and effort which should never be viewed by self-respecting horror film fans …or anyone else. This situation is, however, a necessary evil. The ads pay the bills, the positive reviews and cheerleading maintain a cordial connection to industry insiders, and the simple fact is that much of the genre truly is unwatchable garbage …but then one man’s unwatchable garbage is another man’s David Lynch film!

I’ve tussled with the idea of being a genre sycophant – that is, trying to love (or at least see) every horror film in existence merely because they are part of the genre. But even mellowing it down to open-mindedness doesn’t work with a lot of things I’ve found myself viewing, especially those films that have sounded great ...and then have turned out to be abysmally bad (we could have a loooong list here: The Crucifier and Catholic Ghoulgirls and Vampire Hookers all come to mind immediately). Then again, Intruder sounded awful when I first heard about it …but I couldn't have been more wrong. There is a certain give-it-a-shot attitude that one must bring to horror. I see it even in teenagers at the video store picking up random shockers that I know full-well are terrible. Bon chance, my friends …Virgin Among the Living Dead my sound both sexy and disgusting, but you’d best learn the hard way that horror isn’t always about getting what you expect.

Brains and the Inner-Peasant: Feast vs. Evil Dead vs. Faces of Death

We’ve all got an inner-peasant looking for the red when we drive past a traffic accident, or wanting to hear the nastier details of a nasty story. For most people, the inner-peasant sits in the far back of the brain, in the dark, with all the other immoral desires and thoughts and feelings; but for some people, the inner-peasant has a better seat, maybe next to artistic- or humor-oriented parts of the brain, or even fully in charge of all tastes and attitudes.

Faces of Death, which ultimately gets categorized as horror due to its awful credentials as a documentary, is a starter here. This film and the legion of others of the sort of death documentary genre are popular despite having no stories or decent excuses for existence. I believe it was in Shocking Asia where I watched grinning European tourists hammering a live monkey’s head so they could eat his brains. Whenever I’ve seen something like this, real death, human or not, I’ve gone through a short re-assessment of the kind of trash I’m watching. Why would I shell out cash and waste time staring at something like that?

This kind of low-level seediness is what turns a lot of people off with horror. I get the feeling a lot of non-horror enthusiasts have gone out to see “horror” films, hoping for a good scare, but instead getting 1.5 hours of sadistic or even misogynistic gore. Afterward, they shake their head at how brainless horror movies are - like the old kid’s show Double Dare, but with blood and guts and, like the death documentaries, no real story. Years back, I took a non-horror-enthusiast girlfriend to see Final Destination. While there was a story in this, it was less than compelling and hedged by scenes of over-the-top violence. I’d been imploring my female companion earlier in the day to consider the thinking sort of brains behind horror films …only to drag her to the splattering sort. The good name of the genre was little improved by Final Destination. Where was the film’s attempt to actually be scary?

Consider the much better example of the film Feast (and soon its sequel). The premise is a bunch of people stuck in a bar battling unexplained, sex-obsessed monsters. Overblown, un-funny introductions to every individual serve in place of thoughtful character development, and then, minutes later, these same people are shredded like the low quality paper they were written on. The pool's not just shallow in this ...it's not even wet. The viewer gets 1.5 hours of unruly 2D viciousness, crescendoed in the devouring of the poor latchkey kid in front of his prostitute mother. For what? Even this scene isn’t horrible because it’s so brainless, so lacking in thought. More sensibly handled, with fundamental brainwork behind it, a child’s death could be more powerful than Superman. Yet not even a dark laugh is induced here as the film is too conscious of its own attempts at humor (the humping monsters, the dialogue). I also wouldn’t consider it worthy of being “bad” as in Ed Wood bad either, because it’s too slick and not quite low-budget. In the end, my best summation is negatively obnoxious.

So, does a good horror film require some heavy intellectual-social statement behind it? Horrors have been both pushers of hard morality and low-blow critics of it. Rich people and smartasses and bad apples almost always get it in the end in this genre. For priests, who are often closet drunks or cowards in horror, or parents, who are often hypocrites or simply absent, special punishments are also meted. Anti-heroism and selfishness are ever-present, and these traits are often requirements of survival. How many good girls have had to kill the bad guy? Has the writer, director, and actor of the film always thought out these aspects, or are they just making what they make because that’s how it’s done?

Back to pure sadism and gore – how about the gore? Is gore enough to make a film great on its own? Most classic horror has no gore at all and tends to be a better watch than a lot of what's new at Best Buy every Thursday. How about something that's all sadism, a pure shock, like Nacho Cerda's Aftermath? I would dare say there's some statement in that one somewhere. And what about Argento’s films: what would they really be without the artistic death and gore scenes? Or the now-popular example of the Saw films, which are heavy on the gore and a few clever new tricks, but not much else? Some scenes from these films might shock people who don't spend much time with horror cinema, but when I saw the first Saw I felt like I was watching a bunch of filler. Filler-horror, and I was bored!

So, back to Evil Dead, a modern giant with no meaning other than getting through the night. How is it really different from Feast, other being more simple and clever? Bruce Campbell’s character Ash is no deeper than Kolchak in The Night Stalker series, played by the late Darren McGavin. The actor is part of it – there’s an undoubted charm to both Bruce and Darren. We empathize with their characters because they weren’t merely introduced as stats – they’re like real guys who’ve stumbled into a situation. Once we come to actually empathize with them, the splatstick (or in Kolchak’s case, the campy horror tale), becomes fun to watch. I once read an interview with Bruce Campbell in which he stressed how important it is to read the classics. At horror conventions, or in reading interviews, it’s striking how thoughtful people like Robert Englund or Jeffrey Combs or Angus Scrimm really are…

This does appear to make a difference. It seems we have no choice but to acknowledge that blood-drenched splatterfests are better when founded on some sort of (albeit twisted) intelligence. Nobody needs to be told that Peter Jackson’s gory films Dead Alive and Bad Taste are brilliant. But we must also keep in mind that there is a darker side which doesn’t give a damn about story or statement, but aims instead for pure emotion. The grue of Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 is as putrid as the final scene of Bloodsucking Freaks is painful. There is a difference between a horror of psychological shock and a junkfood horror in which Karo syrup is the writer, actor, and director: the former stays with you while the latter drains into the floor and is soon forgotten.

Being Doomed

To be utterly doomed is a defining characteristic to horror. Hope dies last, and when that's gone ...there's nothing. Even in horror, we don't quite always get that sense of the absolute misery of the abyss (no matter how loud they scream in Slumber Party Massacre 2). It's hard to conjure up on film, and hard for the viewer to take in without shutting it off from the brain. Simultaneously intellectual and emotional, doom is like the anti-love in that it brings out our base animal instincts (screams) mingled with spiritual wonder (head-shaking awe). All else becomes momentarily insignificant. But knowing you're completely doomed is something we can only witness third person ...'cause dead men tell no tales.

The Descent was a great film that could have gone right into the crapper at the end. Thankfully, it didn’t - and what we ended up with was a glimpse of sheer doom. When the last surviving woman was climbing out of the hill to become the true survivor, and then suddenly, horribly realized that her escape was a mere hallucination and she was still underground ...ah, it was like sugar 'n milk to blackest coffee! No happy, or even traumatized-but-surviving, ending ...just doom, and underground, no less. It was genuinely cruel, mean-spirited and sadistic. But while laughs might well be had in a horror film with cruelty and sadism, The Descent was also unhappy - and so there were no laughs. This reminded me of feelings after watching more serious, sort of sociological horrors, like Henry or I Spit on Your Grave. At the end, you find yourself in a thoughtful mood. Who'd have thought a horror flick could do that?

Sticking to this contemplative track, the word doom comes from various old European languages and, in former times, had a definition closer to judgement. We see traces of this in everything from numerous witch-hunter films such as Mark of the Devil and its sequel, all the way to the old Twilight Zone episode in which the man dreams over and over that he's on death row - and can't wake up. This situation, in which the individual is caught and knows his fate, and has no hope of escape, is perhaps as pure as it gets.

Doom can be very personal and subtle in horror. Consider the classic tale Turn of the Screw, in which the nanny tries to protect the child from a ghost by inadvertently turning him into one, or even the older, ancient Greek tale of Niobe, a woman with seven sons and seven daughters who boasts she is more fruitful than the goddess Leto ...only to anger the goddess, who then kills her entire family but spares Niobe to lose her mind to grief. This sort of story feels fit for Tales from the Darkside or Masters of Horror. A moral, and then a punishment from which there's no real escape.

Then again, sometimes there is no moral. What have the victims done to deserve their fate in The Beyond or Demons? But then, these are Italian films, with Roman-Catholic-raised directors behind them. The religious takes doom to a dizzying, artistic pitch, and in this particular religion's case, we're all doomed with guilt from birth. John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, Rosmary's Baby, and the Omen films, as well as Wishmaster, and arguably even Hellraiser, play off fears of a sort of ultimate boogieman to implement the punishment. A divine creature, impossible to stop once set loose, bent on human destruction. The more subtle form of this, but no less imbued with religious awe and terror, is the zombie. I recently watched one of my all-time favorites, Burial Ground, and was even more struck than usual by the son-mother breast-eating scene. To have a child, the symbol of hope, turned backwards like that (more effectively then in Pet Semetary), definitely has doom to it. In short order, the cast is wiped out in gruesome ways, and the scene is quiet.

Which brings us the most popular take on doom: the apocalyptic. Betraying the world, inadvertently or not, is an especially interesting side to what we're considering here. They Live, a humble masterpiece of John Carpenter, considers this as a struggle in the same way Stephen King's The Stand and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend do (and remember, there are now three film variations on this latter tale, each worse than the last: Vincent Price's The Last Man on Earth, Charlton Heston's Omega Man, and now Will Smith's I Am Legend). We love our apocalyptic scenarios. David Bowie and then Nirvana used to do a song called The Man Who Sold the World. The song comes from an ancient Persian poem about a man who sold the world for just one penny (or the Persian equivalent, some kind of proto-dinar). This sort of treachery on a global scale (and bigger) has more recently been visited by the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica in the form of Dr. Gaius Baltar - a man who accidentally sold out the human race for ...sex? Compare this to the killing of all the world in The Quiet Earth, in which a new weapon has wiped out virtually all human life but for a London love triangle.

Returning to zombies, particularly the two versions of Dawn of the Dead, we get doom and damnation in the big American way, with all the gory-symbol-crashing and the spiritual terror - which is why these films are so popular. Romero’s version provides a wonderful take on having it all, being prisoners of that, and being surrounded by a harsh reality that has been kept at bay. Remake-Dawn, on the other hand, carelessly dispatches its characters and shows all signs of the creative laziness that currently infects the genre ...so there's no real story, but only a series of situations. The original ending of Dawn ‘78, as many of us know, had Peter committing suicide and Fran having her head taken off by the whirlybird blades. That may have been too much for a film in which the entire world had already become zombies. Remake-Dawn, on the other hand, has no qualms about all-out death, and the end credits even make humor of it. More bitter from the beginning, Remake-Dawn, with the running zombies, and the zombie-neighbor-girl, and then the pregnant-zombie, is positively tasteless - but without Romero's brilliance. It does have doom, however. The explosion in the computer generated zombie crowd says it all: the individual does not matter (whether zombie or human). The herd’s the focus, and the film's all about herd-culling in crazy ways, more a vague glance at people than an intimate two hours with persons.

To the horror purist, whenever we get the equivalent of Brad Pitt's character receiving that head in the box, there's the twitch of the nerve that sends out those cathartic chemicals to which we're all addicted. We embrace doom and damnation in fantasy every bit as the really sick ones embrace it in reality. The difference is, we can always shut off the tele and shake our heads when we've had too much. With horror cinema, experiencing doom can be temporary, safe, and even insightful.

Pop Horror - A Continued Discussion of Genre Banality

When folks who are not generally horror-people get giddy over horror films, I get cautious. Recalling years back when I saw the film Scream in the theater, I didn't suspect a thing ...but by the time the first sequel had come around, I knew exactly what would follow: a long, genre-plundering pig-out. Sequel after sequel, each worse than the last, with the only good being that the momentum got some older horrors re-released onto the then-new DVD market. That was a decade ago, but it still doesn't feel like the Scream-gravy-train has finished. More remakes and crappy teen-splatter flicks keep coming, endless cash cows for a living-dead trend. Little wonder there's developed such nostalgia among some veteran horror fans for all horror pre-mid-90s - particularly, the 60s, 70s, and 80s trash that we might group into that broad category of grindhouse.

Actual history aside, the grindhouse notion is that there was a magical time before horror films melded so openly, so profitably with the mainstream. Technically, we're speaking of inner city theaters of the aforementioned era in which, in-between pornos, with audiences of drunks and degenerates, played disgusting, violent, misogynistic films. The actual film Grindhouse (and especially the trailers) attempted to capture the essence for those of us who weren't even born until after most such places were long-closed. Of course, Grindhouse was much more entertaining and interesting, and less genuinely depraved, than most real celluloid of this sort.

Mother's Day or Silent Night, Deadly Night are fine examples of what we're talking about here. Sick stuff, pure exploitation - the sort of thing Oprah Winfrey and Tipper Gore might have once raised hell over. But it seems that by this point, despite using the term grindhouse, what was started in seedy theaters had already evolved into the young home video market in the mid-80s. The mom and pop early video stores were, for those of us venerable enough to recall, semi-underground in their own right. Strange smells, bizarre collections, novel rental procedures, weird living-caricatures manning the register ...and usually that curtain to the adult section only steps away from the horror section. Wasn't it great in the bad old days when horror films were almost shameful?

But then something happened. Maybe it was in the late-90s, or maybe earlier. The mom and pop places closed as the chains moved in - cleaner, shinier, more expensive and soulless. Simultaneously, horror films also began becoming more expensive and losing their character. Compared to many of today's gold-plated horror films (which have the production funds to force widespread distribution) the quasi-classics of the 70s and 80s seem almost befuddled. A gruesome film like Maniac, which was so loathed in its release that even Tom Savini is said to have wanted to distance himself from it, has nothing like the gore of today's horror film. Expensive, terribly gory, and yet not very good: these are the qualities of pop-horror. But while cheap-o independent horrors are still being made, they've changed as well. If I had a dollar for every shot-on-digital-camera crap-fest I've heard some schmuck compare to Evil Dead, I'd produce my own pop-horror film!

So, what happened? Why is almost everything we see nowadays worse than almost anything we would have found in a video store in 1989? Has everything been done? Is it a lack of passion and art? I'm tempted to blame the popularity of horror on its own victories. One night in the late-90s I saw The Blair Witch Project in some Midwestern theater and was pleasantly surprised (though I do empathize with those who had motion sickness through the entire film). A wildly popular film, with genuine gore-free terror to it, and a production cost of nil. It seemed fairly genius, playing surgically on our society which so hungers for any sense of the supernatural, silly as that is.

Army of Darkness had come out a short time before this, and it was fast becoming a cult film - which has thereafter vicariously led every man, woman and child on earth to the Evil Dead films. This trend continues to grow. Friends of mine who are certainly not horrorhounds have seen Evil Dead: The Musical not once, but twice. Another extension of the genre's current popularity are Zombie Walks, which are populated by mainly punks and bored youths, horror fans or not. A short time back, a serious film studies teacher told me about Fido (to be fair, he lives in Toronto, which predisposes his tastes somewhat - thank you Rue Morgue for that). We could say that the global rise on Halloween holiday spending agrees with this as well. Sweet devils, I love all of these things ...but again, there's my cautious side that understands such factors to be part of a huge transformation of the industry.

Why is horror a popular (or even acceptable) subject for decent, un-twisted people? Is it more than Paris Hilton being decapitated, or the black comedy of our age that's making every cynical thing more palatable? Zombies have become laughable - what does it say about us when the seriousness of death has been reduced to idiotic stumbling and chuckles? Not long ago, only sick people would laugh about living-dead flesh-eaters. Are we all sick and shameless now?

When Freddy vs. Jason came out a few years back, a former co-worker told me how stupid she thought it was. That made me happy. It should be stupid to her, and to most people - that's part of why gorehounds like me are into it. And maybe this is only a trend that will die-off like all trends. Considering the long arch of horror's history, we can see that something like this has occurred during at least one other time in the past. After the massive popularity of the Universal Horrors pre-WWII, there was a swathe of chintzy, cheap, mini-cash-cows (sequels and the like) for a decade or more, and then a big slowdown and bust. Slowly the genre built back up. It might be convenient to think that Freddy, Jason, and the 80s and 90s monsters were the crest of this new wave, but the truth is that we're still building up. The genre is in a slow-motion explosion, and not just in the U.S. and Canada. There seems to be more money and more eager filmmakers than ever before, if not new ideas.

I'd like to think that it could be worse, and maybe it could. The sheer volume of horror flicks coming out over the last decade has meant many fine new films, and surely many more I'm not even yet aware of. But Hollywood now clearly holds the reigns of the industry and, like with our banking industry, the pig-out bubble will eventually burst and leave a crater. In addition to the importance of understanding that the love of money is the root of all real-life evil, the current captains, first mates and ensigns of the horror industry have forgotten the following:

1. Character is important
2. Less can be infinitely more with gore
3. Sequels and remakes are only better than the original 5% of the time or less
4. Digital gore always looks shitty
5. Digital films always look even shittier
6. What's implied is more powerful than what's seen
7. If all you've ever watched is horror films, any horror film you make will be an intense mediocrity

Phil Fondacaro - From Brother Elf to Chihuahua

The name Phil Fondacaro may not be immediately apparent, but if you've paid any attention to the horror cinema since the early 80s, there's little chance you haven't seen at least a couple of this New Orleans native's twenty-or-so genre films.

We start in 1983 with Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is often classified as a family film but is, in fact, a genuine (if largely gore-free) horror film. This role fits all stereotypes for the role of a little person in a classic sort of horror: the creepy henchman, shadowy, quiet, menacing. Mr. Fondacaro's roles through the decade would follow this track, and would mainly include varied fantastic creatures (at least once as a costumed, uncredited role) in films like Troll, Ghoulies II, Phantasm II, and Meridian.

Troll in particular is worth mentioning because it was a double-role, with Fondacaro playing both the costumed title creature as well as an apartment tenant who manages to connect with the possessed little girl, Wendy, due both to the reality of his physical stature and the power of his imagination. One expects the role might have been at least slightly existentially fascinating: an actor who is a little person, playing a little person who tells fairy stories to a child, and then is himself turned into a fairy creature-child (Brother Elf) - all of this while simultaneously playing the role of the evil dwarf Torok. The context of the apartment tenant character seems to be consciously insightful into the social position of a little person at a time when there was still little such discussion in celluloid. No doubt being different is a comfortable theme of the horror genre.

In the 1990s, Fondacaro appeared in several episodes of the wonderful horror TV shows of that decade like Tales From the Crypt and Tales From the Darkside, as well as a few Charles Band films such as Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, The Creeps, and Blood Dolls. In Blood Dolls (1999), Fondacaro's character is very much like another he played three years earlier in Bordello of Blood: a villainous rouge out only for himself. This fellow seems almost to be a modern (or possibly an Americanized take) take on the Igor or henchman character - a free agent, uncompromising, but as sordid as any horror character creep. We can almost see an evolution of this same character into the one we see in 2005's Land of the Dead: a straight-up gangster named Chihuahua who is nobody's side-kick and not even connected to the main source of evil (the rich Mr. Kaufman, in his tower). Instead, Chihuahua is his own source of evil in the world and must be defeated early in the film in order for the hero to save the lady.

The last decade has led Phil Fondacaro to more Charles Band and Fred Olen Ray films, ensuring his status as a symbol in at least one stratum of the vampire sub-genre. His most recent film, Immortally Yours, is a combination of romance and horror, and this might tend to lead into his next role - a reprisal of his character Malcolm for a remake of Troll. Remakes almost always murder any nostalgia one might have for the original. Of course, so long as it is not done in the spirit of Troll 2, there is hope. But the bigger hope would be that we'll see Mr. Fondacaro in more roles that bring out both the very innocent side we saw in the original Troll, and the cutthroat criminal scum we saw in Land of the Dead ...not as a remake, but as something completely new.

On November 8, Phil Fondacaro turns 50. Happy birthday, Phil!

Tisa Farrow and Pamela Springsteen - Kid Sisters Finding Their Way

The arts run in bloodlines, or so it sometimes seems, and as far as the arts go, many consider horror to be that sort of least-appealing element in the extended family - a sick old uncle or a hidden genetic trait that keeps coming along every so often.

On the other hand, fans of horror are among the most endearing, true, and occasionally delicate people on the planet. Because of this, horror stars are beloved in a deep way that the mainstream simply doesn't allow its stars (the "love" of People Magazine is seldom more than a glossy, synthetic, fickle glance). Just ask Bruce Campbell, or George Romero, or Jamie Lee Curtis about fan devotion in the horror genre. Nevertheless, most shock stars and starlets don't stick around for many films, and probably never consider themselves horror-folk in their own minds - even if celluloid has a way of lingering.

Today we consider two women dear in certain horror-hound corners, each of whom happens to fit this latter profile and be the sister of a more mainstream figure: Tisa Farrow and Pamela Springsteen. Both women were in a mere pair of horror films, and each is relatively well-known in her respective flavor of the genre considering that ...and yet neither seems to have ever had any ambition for involvement in horror cinema, and both concluded their acting careers directly after their horror films. What that might mean is up for debate, but a closer look does seem to indicate a pattern.

Tisa Farrow, sister of Mia Farrow, began her decade-long film career in 1970. After a few comedies and dramas, Tisa moved into a busy and slightly darker territory around 1978, acting in five (yes, five) features in 1979, including a film on Patty Hearst, a Woody Allen picture, and a film based on a book by Richard Condon, who wrote The Manchurian Candidate - but these were minor roles.

The last (and, some might say, least) of her 1979 films provided her not only a central role, but also her lasting notoriety in the worlds of Eurohorror and zombie fandom: Lucio Fulci's Zombie. Also widely distributed as Zombie 2 (as in, unauthorized sequel to Zombie 1 - the European name for Romero's Dawn of the Dead '78), svelte Tisa played a young woman looking for her father on a zombie-infested island. It was an ideal role for her physical person: a woman of petite stature, soft voice, determination but also vulnerability. The viewer gets a simultaneous mousiness and heart from her character. In horror, as we all know, heart is important. But there is also a sort of detachment, and I'm tempted to view this as simple lack of character depth. Zombie, after all, is not about the characters - it's about doom.

And so was Tisa's other Eurohorror the following year, Anthropophagus. A ghoulish film as notoriously difficult to track down stateside through the 1990s as any Eurohorror, the tale revolves around an insane (and quite tragic) cannibal beast who has wiped out an entire Greek island ...and the tourists who stumble upon him. Some of the nastier scenes got this film banned in various realms, and the final minutes in particular are somewhat stunning: Tisa Farrow's character stands before the beast as he bites into his own exposed entrails and collapses.

Today, word on the web is that Tisa works as a nurse in Vermont, though there's no more backing this than any rumor. New England nursing, however, seems hard to square with Caribbean zombies and Greek cannibal beasts. In any case, she no longer acts.

Pamela Springsteen takes us about a decade into the future. Sister of the Bruce Springsteen, Pamela's early career is stunningly comparable to Tisa's so long as we translate 70s cultural style to that of the 80s. Again, Pamela's early films are a list comedies and dramas (and a few TV shows), including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, My Science Project, and Reckless. Each of these are virtual cult films, though Pamela's roles, like those of Tisa, are all quite minor. But then, when we get to the end of the decade, we find Pamela turning to the dark for her lead.

Filmed back-to-back around 1987, Sleepaway Camp 2 and Sleepaway Camp 3 were released in 1988 and 1989 on the direct-to-video market. The original US video covers, I can personally attest, made them irresistible to young gorehounds. And the Sleepaway Camp series has since proved such a twisted hit that another back-to-back pair are about to be released ...though neither will happen to include Pamela Springsteen, who is our focus here.

Sleepaway Camp 2 starts with campers spooking each other out with the legend of Angela Baker. In the midst of this, who should show up to crash the mood but ...Angela Baker! Angela, of course, is incognito, playing a moralistic, preachy, un-fun camp counsellor. Pamela plays this double-character in a way that would only work for comedy - shallow, witty, pissy, rolling her eyes and always at the edge of tolerating the campers to live even a minute more. The darker, creepy psychology of Angela Baker remains largely buried under low-brow laughs.

We get a bit closer to the character in Sleepaway Camp 3, when Angela returns to the camp years after the slaughter of part 2. Now as a camper again (though looking to be in her mid-thirties), Angela suffers some nostalgia, which translates well for an audience that misses the summer camp horror films of the late 70s and early 80s (Friday the 13th or The Burning or even Summer Camp Nightmare). But then, the comedy again covers all matters of psychology. Pamela plays Angela as busy, devoted fully to the cause, even to the point of rising from the gurney in the back of the ambulance to kill the medical personnel in the final scene. "Just takin' care of business," she says to the driver, and the credits fall.

Having also returned to private life, the best source we have for Pamela's current whereabouts and do-abouts is that she's working as a photographer. Again, a disarmingly normal-sounding profession for a person that too many film viewings have forced me to associate with gore and the absolute dark.

Watery Graves

Ranking earth, air, fire, and water in terms of horrific-ness, water's probably tied for last place with air. A moment's consideration, however, shows water to be an often ghoulish facet of horror. The above title of this entry alone says it: Watery Graves. It's one of my favorite phrases in the English language. The imagery is so colorful you can smell the stink. Not only the darkness, what can't be seen, but also the depths ...the abyss which might have anything in it. Should be the name of a cocktail, if it isn't already. Just add imagination for pure, madcap horror.

Water’s common enough to our existence that it’s no less than a foundation of horror. Ancient stories from around the world mention haunted lakes, rivers of the dead, and legions of terrible old gods and monsters lurking beneath the surface. The oceans served as a physical great beyond into which men dared not pass. And then there are stories like Atlantis, the powerful island nation of legend, swallowed up by the sea - erased.

Pagan societies recognized the symbolic power underneath the gentle, flowing, lapping waves. By extension, the notion that evil beasties (like demons and vampires) cannot cross rivers has been well-documented in older vampire films, and even more recent stuff like Night of the Demons. Let's also not forget the power of holy water as a purifying force in tales that play by the more superstitious of Judeo-Christian rules (something of a joke in modern horror, evidenced by From Dusk Till Dawn's holy water Super Soaker).

To consider the notion of the terror of the depths, we must first consider the huge sub-genre of monster movies surrounding water - from oversized animals like in Lake Placid or Orca or even Pirannha, to straight-up sea-monster abominations (often with an eco-message) of a thousand Sci-Fi Channel creature films since Godzilla. The giant sea monster idea may now be as thin as the plastic costume (or digital FX), but this fits with classical mythology in that the monster was simply a force to be defeated by a hero - a personified obstacle for one great man to overcome. The monster was not its own story, but part of the hero’s. Of course, like everything else today, we've got it backwards. Modern tales hold the monster as the centerpiece and the people, even if they win, are nearly unmentionable extras. Who remembers the name of the man who killed that death-machine Jaws?

Another great facet of watery horror is the notion of the ghost ship. No doubt there are earlier legends of this, but it seems the Flying Dutchman is a good one to start with. In a common version of this tale (not the one re-told recently in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films), the Flying Dutchman was a ship that carried around a ghost crew and a cursed man who could only set foot on land for one night every ten years. On that night, the man had to find a woman to fall in love with him - or it was back to the ship for another decade. Spooky perhaps, but ghost ships in horror films have been slightly less romantic. Consider the Poseidon Adventure as a sort of disaster horror, for example, but then move on to Ghost Ships of the Blind Dead, which is a bit like a zombie film on a ship, though the zombies are more like ghosts. Crossing sub-genres a bit more, there's 1980's Nazi-haunted Death Ship (and 2002's Ghost Ship, which uses virtually the same video cover art as Death Ship). Haunted ships floating at sea, as adrift as the zombie boat in the opening scene of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.

These films segway us into the underwater-Nazi zombie sub-sub-genre, which includes at least two films worth knowing about, albeit for very different reasons: Shockwaves and Zombie Lake. The former is an excellent film about an SS experiment still inadvertently active as of 1977. In it, Nazi super-soldiers crawl out of their underwater ship and attack stranded tourists on a mysterious island. Zombie Lake, on the other hand, is a Jess Franco-Jean Rollin joint ...and this might sound irresistible to some. Better you see it and know for yourself: naked nymphs, and famous underwater scenes in the lake that were clearly shot in a pool: you know it's low-budget Eurotrash going into it, so sleaze and silliness is to be expected.

Summer-camp-at-the-lake horror films, as well as beach or other seaside horror films, might skim the edges of what we're getting at with Watery Graves. Dredging up Jason Vorhees or the beast in Anthropophagus, both of whom sort of begin their horror-careers in the depths, we find a common thread of the water itself as the source of the evil. The more recent Beneath Still Waters plays to this, as does Dagon, which shows not so much a modern "infecting" of evil, but rather an ancient evil returned - in standard Lovecraft nostalgia. Coming full-circle, we arrive at Creepshow 2 and the short titled The Raft. Some kind of pollution of maybe even natural event has left a bizarre, flesh-eating oil slick on a peaceful lake far from civilization ...and frisky teens have incurred its wrath.

As in ancient times, man still has his concerns with water. Scientists report that huge areas of the oceans are turning into dead zones, and the idea of rising seas is more than dreadful if you happen to live on a coast. Eye your glass of water with suspicion.

Genre Banality

What makes a horror film a horror film? Is it so tricky? Go to any video store and you’re likely to find crossover with every other category the store recognizes. In particular, if there’s a mystery/suspense section, you’ll find absurd, cruel omissions or inclusions. Is the film Monster a horror film, or a Lifetime movie? How about Giallo films? And what of other genres – is Army of Darkness a comedy? Is Battle Royale an action film? Is Monster Squad a children’s film? Does it matter that almost all but the most wretched films have some trouble fitting into strict categories?

We’ve been categorizing our stories since ancient times, though things are more (or possibly less) complex today than Tragedy and Comedy. Genre works stress a style, and style can only exist if we’re talking about large quantities of works. A lot of films today stress style before anything character-driven, which is the real difference between a genre work and what we’d consider literature. Genre is defined by average, the common measurements (and maybe the most mediocre parts). But in something more akin to literature we see that the most human parts of the characters or stories cannot be boxed-into a particular style. The more you get into a character's or story's depths, the more the genre-box breaks down. Film has the option of being more than a pre-packaged tale, but it does call for some thought – and we all know this isn’t necessarily the defining trait in horror.

Which is why it’s depressing, in a way, to hear horror fans call for more horror films. Yes, of course we all want that, but there’s not nearly as often a call for a higher quality of ghastly tales to be made. A lot of horror fans simply want “tits and blood,” to quote an endearing genre fan in Sleepaway Camp III. Plenty of hounds would be happy for 1.5 hours of gore and screaming and metal music, one film after another, all the way to hell. To follow, I read today an argument that PG-13 films do not deserve to be considered “in” the genre. I couldn’t feel more different. To me, horror is nothing more than a word used very broadly to describe cinema which looks into man’s darker side. It’s not an exclusive club, and it certainly has no pre-condition of blood quantum. If we concluded that gore was the defining quality of horror, we would be excluding the soul of the genre completely, including virtually all horror before the mid-70s, from Dracula to Halloween I and II (not enough blood to fill a coffee cup between the two of them). The most original ideas, the real sources, tossed out like vagrants.

What about that mythological-subconscious side of horror? The gloomy, creepy, ghostly edge that makes the hairs stand up? Has corn-syrup gore ever done that to you? In terms of American-produced horror, the last couple times I recall anything like goosebumps was during my first viewing of The Haunting (1963, not 1999), and then a few years later with The Others – two ghost stories that may as well be rated PG, neither with a drop of blood. I’ve seen stacks of horrors since, but few outside of some J-Horror films have even approached this. There is still a grasp of the importance of the spooky side of horror across the Pacific, it seems, which is great news - but then, sadly, this is lost in translation. The American version is quickly made as a cash cow, castrated of its soul, poorly casted and easily forgotten, and then fed to an entire generation that's probably never met the horror film that genuinely scared them.

Watching recent horror films feeds that thought. True intent to scare seems to no longer even be considered. Examples abound, but I’ll address Wrong Turn 2, which I finally watched only a couple nights back. No surprises with this one. Ingredients: crazy outback mutant cannibal family, just enough twenty-somethings for 1.5 hours, and gallons upon gallons of guts. Also, not a thing I haven’t seen before. I can begin listing the rip-offs I saw before you nod your head in agreement. The biggest missing piece was, undoubtedly, was the horror itself. Where was the horror? The mutant faces were funny, not ugly, and made more funny by goofy things like the mutant-incest scene. It was like a Jackass horror movie. You could feel them smirking on the other side of the camera, and though I smirked along with them, I wondered if it was really horror I was watching, or something else.

Gore was not the problem. Lack of depth and imagination was the problem. Gore can be very powerful in measures, when it’s applied with careful thought. Dario Argento proves it over and over. But gore aside, what of emotion? When’s the last time you saw somebody die in a horror film and you actually felt the loss? Thinking for a few moments, the best I could come up with was Roger in Dawn of the Dead …and I was like ten when I first saw that film. Has all of my viewing since then been so emotion-free? I thought I watched horror films for the chemical rush, the catharsis of a good shock. But if I can’t come up with any examples of knowing when this rush has hit, maybe there’s no such thing anymore …and I’m an addict by habit, not by chemical. Why subject oneself to murder and derangement if there’s nothing deeper than a bad image, like demonic porn?

That would be a true disappointment. If it were so, I could no longer consider horror in my blood, but only in my head, and I’d likely ditch the habit. Thank Sheetar I know better, though it is harder and harder to find as the volume of horror films increases with every passing year. In any case, I’d take one Bela Lugosi Dracula over the last 1,000 strictly genre horrors (including every sequel and remake) that have come out in recent years. And when we’re talking about trades like that, maybe it’s time to reconsider the notion of genre altogether.

The Church and Horror

A Christian friend once told me she found difficulty in understanding why she’s drawn to dark material like horror films. I argued that the material in the Bible is the single biggest source of horror cinema. This was a surprise for her, but a long relationship with horror has made this very clear to me. It would not be unfair, perhaps, to say that many horror-filmmakers were dowsed in Catholicism or something equivalent in their youths, raised to understand just how bad consequences can be, and how sometimes the moral watchdog (God) is actually the most beastly one of all. A Catholic school survivor myself, it was never lost on me that the slasher went after the bad kids, the sinners. It's common knowledge. In this, horror films may be direct descendants of the morality plays of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, where supporting characters are reduced to some deadly sin or another. Italian horror (my personal favorite) is famous for its bringing a "Hell on Earth" element to the screen ...scenes so horrific, they remind one of early Renaissance paintings of demons torturing people in Hades. Disgusting scenes which say you reap what you sow, sinner! Of course, there’s also the original zombie, Jesus Christ (handled in an earlier post). Returning from the dead is waaaaay old school. It plays into our deepest parts: a creature that has been to the beyond and returned. The notion stupifies us. A simple snoop will show you that horror cinema is full of religious elements.

The Church's role in horror, through the lens of those who were influenced enough to consider it (but probably didn’t like it, if they’re into horror films), comes off in a mainly negative light - stone-cold and indifferent at best, but still a source of power, and almost something political. God himself is never around (I can’t come up with a single instance of a personalized God in a horror film – which is not the case with the Devil), and so there’s something like awe (or nihilism) in the absence. But the church's people are around, priests and the like, lurking about on the edge of the horror. This rings true with real life when one considers the various genocides that have occurred in history, in Rwanda, or with the natives in the Americas, or the European holocaust and earlier inquisitions. The Church was fully present in all cases, and it’s hard to say it wasn’t part of the problem. In horror cinema, the churchmen play roles that are probably more comparable to real-life horrors than we’d like to think. They enable, they make mistakes while showing that shining certainty of God, and on occasion they redeem, though this is almost by accident.

Considering church-folk who enable the horror in horror cinema, the first priest that comes to my mind is the drunk from Phantasm II. A coward and hypocrite, it seems he stands for that most sordid side of holy men, those men that are revealed in increasing numbers as pedophiles or crooks – a comparable priest is in Pumpkinhead. Other enablers are the religious father-figures such as in Martin or American Gothic who feel justified in meting out punishment for God. Another personal favorite enabling holy man is the young priest in The Devil’s Nightmare. His fatal flaw is pride, and this delivers the souls of all of his companions directly to the Devil. Christian mythos and the essentially unfair whims of an Old Testament sort of supreme being are the enabler-problems in the endless string of pseudo-religious horrors like The Prophecy, The Sect, The Omen, Stigmata, Constantine, and a zillion others.

Worse than the enablers are those religious folk who turn out to be a source of evil in themselves. Father Julius in Prom Night IV and also the priest in Don't Torture a Duckling kill youngsters in order to save them before they can sin, and Mr. Cain in the Poltergeist sequels wants to be a messiah even after death. In Gates of Hell, a priest's suicide opens the doors to Hell, while films like Tombs of the Blind Dead and Burial Ground show that the Church never forgets. Michele Soavi’s The Church is a twist on this, in which the victims of a 12th century massacre (committed by the Church) are the source of evil. Nuns also get into the act, though it’s usually the Devil working through them via possession (most independently strong females in horror are positive characters) – The Other Hell is an endearing example.

The idea of the Church as a redeeming factor against evil is always played serious and stiff. This seems to be an outdated concept, from the era of the likes of The Exorcist or the old Hammer vampire films (or any film in which a cross or holy water is a weapon). But they keep coming out, though Dracula 3000 and The Exorcism of Emily Rose seem to indicate that development beyond this is stunted, at best (with the exception of the insanity of The Passion). On the other hand, there’s the sort of white wizardry in something like the Warlock films, but in this the Church has lost the reins to New Age. Is that where the Church and Horror is headed? In virtually all of the recent stuff I see, the Church is fairly absent - though it's hard to claim a trend without more hindsight. But lately, it's not even the deranged background ramblings of the religious fanatic on the Iowa radio in Children of the Corn. In the outright deluge of horror coming out these days, the Church seems to bring a dull sigh of boredom when contrasted with the past. But who is to say there's no future to it as a source of horror? Dawn of the Dead’s famous “When there’s no more room in Hell…” still has the power to creep us out. And Christian horror-filmmakers seem to share the opinion as well. This absolute font of horror may not yet be dry.

As for humor in the Church and Horror, as alluded to above, this does not bring true redemption. Fine examples include “I kick ass for the Lord” from Cemetery Man or the nun-chucks nun in Night of the Demons II, or even the sexorcist in Curse of the Queerwolf. But there aren’t many examples of this and one might speculate that horror-filmmakers are generally more ready to bite the hand that once fed them the communion wafer than to frolic with it. Horror film humor is a lot more bitter than church coffee.

I think it’d be common, and wrong, to consider the treatment of the Church in horror films as purely rebellion. Just the opposite. Horror pushes us closer to our superstitions and the great beyond, much the way the Church used to be able to do. Long ago, all religious matters in Christendom were handled in Latin, the language of the angels. There were rites and unquestioned rituals that invoked a true sense of other-worldliness ...but no longer. Man, do we modern nihilists want a taste of that again! The problem is, we're too cynical, we believe in nothing because we feel like we can explain everything. Changes have come so fast, we haven't been able to update our mythological or religious beliefs. Many wonder if we need them at all. If we do, horror may fill part of the gap. It gives the catharsis, the taste of the beyond, and a nudge to consider our mortality – all within a framework of our modern world, and not some dusty village in the Palestinian outback of 0 A.D. The Church lines up fairly well with a lot of horror films, though with an extreme emphasis of the negative aspects. Satan was not talked about as much as God when I was in Catholic school, but I imagine in other places at other times, it may have been different. Satan's a great classic horror monster. He's tragic, and has a real grievance. Also, if he'd won in his mythological rebellion, people would pray to him instead: he'd be the good guy ...same as Hitler, another classic monster who fascinates us. Consider the point of In the Mouth of Madness, that everything could easily be turned upside down and look mostly the same. Frankenstein touches on this too. All great monsters do ...they're high drama, taken to total extremes, usually to be pitied on some level, often the moral watchdog or simply certain of the "goodness" in the evil they're doing. Look at Jason Vorhees, still protecting his beloved Mommy after all these years ...still that poor little boy in his head. The teens he hacks up don't evoke anything near this kind of sadness. This is not rebellion: this is playing the role.

Even without a devil, the Christian god's full of dark, horrific contradictions. Why did this god make SIDS, or tooth decay, or napalm, or child rape? A list of horrors, and it all comes down to "Because he loves us." Sounds like a horror film to me.

Note: I leave Islam and Judaism out of this discussion due to the simple fact that there are virtually no traces these religions in any horror films I’m aware of. Pakistan and Indonesia, so far as I’ve seen, tend to non-religious horror themes or things like witchcraft and superstition outside of the big religions.

Age

Horror is usually the domain of the young, on all levels. The teenage wasteland notion is a generational universal in horror, as in all of western culture. This theme is the slasher genre. Behind the camera, it is often young directors who make horror films and later move on to something more mature (though the best of them stick around). Horror casts are rarely outside the 18-25 range, and that tends to be the same range of the audience. It is to this audience that the themes play: a conflict of young versus old and evil, a pitting of freedom against conservatism in a changing world, a youthful notion that this point in life is the only point that matters. The rule is occasionally reversed, and the old are sometimes plagued by the young: Children of the Corn, Village of the Damned, Bloody Birthday, and Clive Barker’s recent The Plague. But this is a twist. In any case, let’s be clear that the horror genre reflects a vast swathe of ignorance, boredom, poor focus and mumbling …but with a few money shots, like the average nineteen-year-old. It is more impoverished than porn, and tends to be tasteless while lacking any sense of aesthetic. Nevertheless, with the energy and intelligence of youth, brilliance makes its way through.

We know this because, for one thing, there is such a thing as classic horror and horror maestros. Older directors like Argento (aesthetic) and Romero (social commentary) and Craven (everyman) continue to work, and new obscure, intelligent, and beautiful horror-filmmakers keep coming along, such as Guillermo Del Toro of Pan’s Labyrinth. These men, no longer young (but for Mr. Del Toro), now bring a sense of wisdom and stability to the genre. To see George Romero including the Shaun of the Dead guys in his work is pure hope. And horror plus brains is quite powerful …the unfortunate stereotype is that the two are incompatible. Like all stereotypes, to see it smashed is cause for celebration.

I think of the film Gods and Monsters when I consider geriatric horror. It’s a layered, intelligent, classy, and slightly disturbing film. In strictest terms it isn’t a horror film, but it’s important to the genre because it dissects the source, the darkside of waking life, those miserable instances like memories of the dead, the realization that you’re getting older, the grandiose evil of something like war. Ed Wood is comparable and also very good, and I'd even go so far as to consider something like Fade to Black in comparison. Who doesn't have conflicted emotions when Lugosi's put into the ground in the Dracula costume? Aging itself is such a horrific thing. By the time we human beings figure anything out, we’re falling apart. There’s loneliness, fear, new aches and pains, and so much uncertainty …it creeps in and then, one day, the candle goes out and you’re in that ghastly cemetery, late at night, alone and surrounded by hundreds of other dead folks. It’s hard to consider anything more horrific.

In the hands of the young, old age in horror is dealt with rigidly. On occasion, it’s held as a source of comedy. One might recall Rabid Grannies, Bubba Ho-Tep, the old lady-monster in House on Tombstone Hill, or the other old lady who gets it in the stairs-chair in Gremlins. Then, there are instances in which older characters are good but prove to be inadequate in helping younger characters against the monster or source of evil. In Night of the Creeps, the old detective heroically blows himself up in a bid to fry all the slugs …but some manage to escape (no worries, the young geek gets the girl). In The Shining, the old man travels all the way back to the hotel to help Danny …only to be hit with an axe on arrival. In Troll, the old woman upstairs must become young again to defeat the troll. In each of these, if the problem is solvable at all, it requires youth. The gray-haired sheriff showing up at the end of the film, after Jason’s hacked through a baker’s dozen campers, can’t do more than shake his head. Old age as impotence, and maybe another social comment or two.

Sometimes we find that the older characters are a facet or even the actual source of the horror itself. The ancient creature Dracula drinks the blood of the young to stay alive, and the Mummy is desire after his time (and so are zombies). In Nightmare on Elm Street, it’s the parents of the neighborhood, and in Phantasm it’s the Tall Man (dear Angus Scrimm has looked old since the 70s). The grandfather in Silent Night, Deadly Night gives a warning to his grandson that sets up his mind-snapping, and there’s a certain generational dysfunction between Norman and his mother in Psycho. One can almost hear “Where’s my cake Bedelia?” from Creepshow, or “Sometimes Dead is Better,” from Pet Semetary.

As an old man, I plan on spending my golden years catching up on horror films in the middle of the night – it’s gonna be great! But I wonder, will my tastes change over time? Humor dissipates with old age, or so says modern medicine. I think of the “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” notion and can’t help but question my coming relevance, or part, or interest, in horror. Then again, an old man geeking out over horror films on a hot summer’s midnight sounds hilarious …maybe that’s the route to shoot for.

The Sam Neill Horror Hits: Possession, Event Horizon, In the Mouth of Madness

Though more popularly known for his role as a dashing archeologist in Jurassic Park series, or for his strange interpretation of Merlin for TV, New Zealand’s Sam Neill is arguably a much more creepy persona than these parts can possibly credit him. A trio of wonderful horror films stand out to showcase this: Possession, Event Horizon, and In the Mouth of Madness.

Possession (1981) came out the same year as another Sam Neill horror, Omen III: The Final Conflict. Both films hark to the doomsday sentiment of the height of the Cold War combined with (perhaps) the ongoing wilds of social and sexual liberation of a pre-AIDS and just-post-disco America (though Possession is anything but American). It was the beginning of the Reagan-era, a dark time of new extremes and fears, when nuclear obliteration was a phone call away (still is!), and even E.T. wanted only to call for his ride to get the hell off this mad planet.

It's a cold, grim film, meticulously cut and photographed so that every scene is iconic. Even without the socio-politico overtones it would be a beauty to watch. Neill, a jealous husband of a cheating wife, has maniacal energy that he keeps just-barely under control for the love and well-being of his son (though this “concern” seems to be nothing more than a tool for leverage with his wife). Neill’s wife happens to be cheating with a demon and this coincides with increasingly strained relations between the West and the Soviet Union. The tale is set in West Berlin, which adds the lovely layer of politique to the film ...which horror films are usually disinclined to do. As the relationship finally crumbles and the father fails to listen to the child, World War III approaches. The final scenes often a frightening, crazy vision that may leave you thinking for days afterward ...unless thinking's not your thing.

In Event Horizon (1997), Neill moves into the sort of sci-fi-ghost-story sub-sub-genre (I'd include Solaris in this - Tarkovsky's, not Clooney's). An experimental vehicle developed by a genius to travel to other dimensions takes off and is not seen again ...several decades later it's found mysteriously adrift in deep space. Video shows the final hours on the ship after its maiden voyage to have been literally hellish, as hell is apparently where the ship went. Now, the longer the retrieval crew stays on board, the weirder things get. This film, which came out the same year as Neill’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror, has an atmosphere that’s genuinely creepy, even scary. Neill’s brilliant inner-tension energy seen earlier in Possession are still present, barely contained behind that calm face. Still waters running deep seems the fitting descriptor.

Returning to earth (or not), In the Mouth of Madness (1995) takes Neill into the realm of Lovecraftian horror via the direction of the great John Carpenter. The plot involves the works of a writer interfering with reality …which may at first sound a bit lame or even clichéd, but don’t let it throw you. This film delivers hot and fresh on the creepy and, as said, delves into horrors you’d expect in Lovecraft’s works. But don’t let that throw you, either. Lovecraft-based films aren't exactly the cream of the crop. Many have tried and failed miserably to get it (Unnamable comes to mind), but this isn’t one of them.

Nuclear Horror

Though the Cold War has only been over some sixteen or so years, anyone under 30 may have little real memory of the underlying threat of unimaginable destruction and doom that these decades presented our shared earth. When I was young I knew an older kid who once claimed that a Russian missile was coming as a loud plane flew overhead. Other than this I have no recollection of fear of the bomb. Nothing but what cinema from the era can remind me of …and though there isn’t much, what little there is illustrates with ghoulish persistence and imagery what could have (or could still) come.

Two films in particular stand out: The Day After and Threads. The former set in Kansas and the latter in the UK, both deal with global thermonuclear war and its aftermath, not via science fiction or creatively construed twists for the purpose of entertainment. No no, these films rather seek to showcase as close to what science at the time (the mid-1980s) predicted would likely really happen. If you have never seen either film, they could be described as structurally similar to any disaster movie, at least in the onset. Quickly, however, the viewer learns that there is no hope of rescue, no end to the storm or situation, and no conclusion to the tale that is even remotely happy for anybody. Anywhere. Oh readers, this is truest, purest, most bitter horror. Both films end on notes of a collective nightmare for humanity, permanent and unapologetic to the troubled viewer. When it’s over, groups I’ve watched with have always been serious, quiet, and introspective. Horror that’s so horrible it’s genuinely thought-provoking, even depressing. When's the last time you had that?

I enjoy watching these films, again and again. Not because I’m a masochist or a depression-monger. People wonder why I care so much about seeing and showing such things. Rubble, dirt, blood, charred bodies, radiation sickness, starvation, dehydration, madness, blindness from burnt retinas, the dusty fallout, the pregnant girl …once a symbol of hope, now a tragedy atop infinite tragedy. Because it’s the Red Bull-vodka of horror, that’s why. At the end of the day, few things are as scary as the end of the world. We joke, but to really get sharp a glimpse of it is jarring. The destruction, the poison, and the climate change to follow. Scary things, as much so today as in 1980.

When you're a horror connoisseur, a lot of silly people ask you what your favorite horror movie is. I’ve had a few different answers for that (as discussed in a previous post), but in the sort of Hellfire Club inner circle of my favorites, I lovingly include these two nuclear horrors. To watch a film such as Threads, to consider how close it was and still is afterward, is enough to genuinely make me sick with fear. Evil, pointless and absurd, hard day-mares follow viewings. Passing a large school or dentist or grocery store, I imagine a desk, discolored from heat, on a pile of bricks, or food in cans, clean but too irradiated to eat. Soot everywhere. Water bubbling from a broken pipe onto a charred skull.

There was that acronym during the Cold War that made too much sense even for cynics: MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). If you’ve never heard of it, I only wish I was the cruel artist behind it and that it was fiction. MAD: the ultimate combat, war at its purest. Its effects are likewise as punishing of both sides. We also can see from history that wars tend to birth more wars. They travel in groups, brought out by the lasting effects of one another. Conflict over cooperation is the way of all empires and hierarchies (even those in your workplace). As long as there is this and nuclear weapons, the specter of the pure war is our shadow, walking with our generals into the Pentagon, messing with our marines in their barracks, napping with our kindergartners on mats on the floor. The worst is that we know how horrible nuclear weapons are, we have shown ourselves the expected images, yet we keep the weapons around and continue to produce and further “perfect” them. We’d shrug our shoulders as the mushroom cloud came up, I’m sure.

I try not to shrug my shoulders or ignore. Rather, I saturate myself with the traumatic images and thoughts that come from films like The Day After or Threads (or any horror movies really) if only to keep myself the absolute opposite, aware and terrified of war …even war with just guns. The wide rings of its effects, the potentials if it gets too far out of hand (if it is not outrageous to say war could get any further out of hand), are too much. Innocents are always destroyed by war. Children are killed and maimed, young women are raped, and so many babies lose their mamas and papas before they’ve known them.

On the eve of the Iraq invasion, when it was very unpopular to question what the US was about to do, that was the time to say this. I did as so a university student, writing a couple of letters to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader newspaper in 2002 talking about the nature of war and how it would get out of hand with misbehaviors of some US troops (I predicted rape and torture, right on both counts, along with accidental killing of innocent children and civilians). Didn’t one international group recently say more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since the US watch began? I think of limbless Iraqi children I’ve seen in photos, arms and legs that won’t grow back, a life of no arms ahead for a kid of just eight years. Fuck. In my pair of angry-old-man letters I left out nuclear weaponry, but as a student with student friends, I remember talking about it. In particular, I recall discussing (with disgust) the US nuking of Japan in the 1940s. America’s greatest shame. How come we students were talking and worrying about these things, predicting the horrible occurrences in Iraq while our leaders expected (and still expect) a rosy outcome? Four years ago, I told my old man that I was sure the United States would leave Iraq in a few years with its tail between its legs. The child should not be telling the parent this! Especially the Vietnam-era parent!

We have to ponder war, horror, and our nearby nuclear doom before we have any right to relax. Every one of us would do well to watch Threads and The Day After once a year, to bombard ourselves collectively with these gruesome images and thoughts, to give ourselves nightmares so we don’t add to helping those nightmares become reality. Schoolchildren should watch both films and then discuss the Pentagon’s insistence on developing bunking-busting nukes.

Some say Bush is stuck like Hitler now, with nothing to lose and everything to gain in more crazy gambles. The old men on Sunday morning talk shows chatter about nuking Iran while the mommies and daddies sleep in with their babies. True, stupid, evil and old horror. The possible end to all that every one of our human ancestors has worked for since climbing down from the trees; every construction, piece of music or art, bit of knowledge or feat of engineering, and every horror film, could be erased on the whim of a dry drunk’s gamble. Or a blunder, a pathetic accident that would put the lights out forever and render earth quiet, like in The Quiet Earth or at the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

Of course film cannot compare to reality in terms of horror. I invite you to Google the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima for images that may well do what only drive-in cinema would have promised in the past: give you nightmares forever. The Hills Have Eyes II will surely be a good time too, but the real horror's in reality.

Why do Americans love horror so much?

You know what Eurohorror and J-horror are, but you've never heard the term Yankeehorror. Why? Why doesn't the USA gets its own moniker for the most highly unique phantasmagoria of all? This isn't nationalistic whining, and I can't possibly be the first to use this term (or maybe I am ...a Google search for it produces nada). The only reason I can guess is that, because American horror is horror to the point of being the standard, we Yanks have oversaturated the world horror market to the point of drowning. And in such a situation, only the minorities get the extra-cultural designations.

But why do we do that? Why do we love horror so much more than any other country? A few posts back, I noted that Yankees are responsible for an inordinate amount of modern horror, despite perceptions (mine, anyway) of an increasingly worldly diffusion of horror cinema. Total East Asian horror for 2006 was about a baker’s dozen compared to the US of A’s many hundred fresh titles. Who says we need to be afraid of China?

Clearly, horror thrives in America today. Historically speaking, it is hard to tell if peacetime or wartime is fuel for horror. I've heard arguements both ways, but remain skeptical. It seems anytime's a good time for horror in this country. Today we’ve got a war, a sketchy economy, an uncertain future (domestic and globally, in a multitude of ways), wretched leaders and outdated religions ...and the horror numbers grow. Seven years ago our situation was mostly the opposite, and the horror numbers only grew from there. The political climate is clearly not silver bullet explanation.

Perhaps it could simply be the culture. Non-Yanks especially have a hard time understanding this. More than once I’ve witnessed an international visitor in total aghast at American Halloween stores with their boxes of limbs and evil toys and costumes. It makes sense that much of the world would feel that way. America is not like anywhere else. A box of limbs is hilarious here, and jokes of death and dismemberment are not uncommon. Could it be that we are so far from the reality of something like that, it comes off as a natural edge to our cynical humor? Maybe, if Americans did not die like everybody else, and if we didn't have wars and cancer and child-killers like everywhere else ...but we do. Another cultural factor is that we, increasingly, continue to behave as recklessly as students well into our 40s. A 45-year-old man playing video games is nothing particular in America. This is probably a closer explanation than anything about our being removed from real-life horror.

Decadence is another explanation that you may have heard. Like the Romans with their bloody games, we love the red stuff, true. But cinema is not reality, and the red stuff we love is food coloring and Karo syrup. Americans are as horrified by the an accident as anybody from any country on the globe. Still, our taste for the ghoulish may actually be a sort of sadism-lite. I don’t think the average gorehound is anything more than a peace-loving Frenchy surrender-monkey like myself, but I don't know the depths of their hearts, so I could be wrong. Maybe I’ve known too many vegetarian horror film fans. Like everybody, Yanks have a dark side, and they usually want the envelope to be pushed in all things.

This is all conjecture, and that's about all we can do with this discussion. As I explained in a previous post, love can be strange. People ask me how the hell I could use the word love to describe my feelings for something like American Gothic. Love is never having to say you’re sorry. There's no other way to possibly describe my attraction to that film.

A Scholarly Subject?

While one can’t say that Mutant Shakedown is an exactly scholarly discussion of horror (“enlightened” may even be generous), there do exist a few (very few) sources of scholarly research into horrific cinema. One I’ve noticed recently is a book called Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (2004), by Barry Grant. The cost ($36) is slightly prohibitive, but next time you’re in Barnes & Noble or Borders or wherever, you may check to see if they’ve got one to at least browse through. It is yet another book on the subject written in the form of essays which, though fascinating, might throw its core source of readership. Most horror fans are hardly essay-reading-types. A more philosophical examination of the aesthetics of horror is available in the book The Philosophy of Horror (1990) by Noel Carroll – also not for all fans of the genre, but probably more for students of the random class on horror celluloid (or rather, for professors of those classes to assign).

But don’t let this mention of scholarly discussion of horror let you think that this is any kind of a common thing in academia. The field (except for a handful of films like Poltergeist or Dawn of the Dead ‘78) is mostly virgin to scholars. The problem is, horror has a robust, and occasionally deserved, lowbrow reputation. Only porn is taken less seriously (but then, sexual relations-studies are growing so fast, things could soon change). Film scholars for the most part disregard completely the many thousands of horror films that exist. Look at the faces of the Ebert and Roper guys when any horror film makes it onto their show. Even trash as awful as the latest Hugh Grant movie aren’t treated with such contempt. Roper gave Land of the Dead a thumbs-down merely for being a zombie film, disregarding its artistic and social qualities on that. About like dismissing Van Gogh's Sunflowers because it uses too much yellow.

It could be that horror cinema is not taken seriously because it so often does not take itself seriously – ok with comedy, but not with tragedy? Also, a serious film with horrific elements usually gets spun into some other genre, such as dark drama. The film Monster, with Charlize Theron, was a pretty straight-forward horror film. So was Schindler’s List. Remember The Others? I found that in the drama section at a local video store. Too good for horror with Nicole Kidman in the cast. And speaking of, what about the Stepford Wives as a horror of suburban sex slavery (but let’s speak of the original if we do, please)? Horror with a sci-fi edge, not vice versa, but again not drama.

For what it's worth, my personal favorite book of any scholarly value into horror cinema has long been Immoral Tales by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs. When it first came out in 1995, it was my real introduction into Eurohorror, and a whole new perspective on horror itself. A beautiful, classic book, available widely for under $20.

The Horror Anthologies

An important and sometimes overlooked sub-genre within horror cinema is the horror anthology. We’ve all seen at least one, and it was probably Creepshow. The principle, of course, is to showcase a set of horror shorts. Before, in-between, and after these shorts, there is usually some other story that sort of ties the stories together (more or less …usually less). This makes the film anthology different from the literary anthology, in that there is a transition (literary anthologies don’t work well for some because of this lack). The horror anthology film is also great because, in the past, other than the horror TV shows from Twilight Zone to Masters of Horror, it has been really the only way to get filmed short horror stories to a mass audience. An ongoing problem.

Below is a fairly comprehensive list of horror film anthologies. It’s apparent that production of anthology horror has been rather consistent, with a slow increase since the 1960s and then a slight bump since about 2000. Looking at the films on the list, you can actually see the development of horror from the tendency toward more traditional works such as Poe and artistic stuff like Fellini, to the almost campy sort of 80s revival of Twilight Zone-style tales, and then to the more brutal (and cheap) stuff of the late 90s and early 00s. It will be fascinating to see where Creepshow 3 takes us later this year. As always, let us know if there’s anything missing.

Dead of Night (1945)
Tales of Terror (1962)
Black Sabbath (1963)
Twice Told Tales (1963)
Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)
Torture Garden (1967)
Spirits of the Dead (1968)
The House that Dripped Blood (1970)
Asylum (1972)
From Beyond the Grave (1973)
Vault of Horror (1973)
Tales that Witness Madness (1973)
Trilogy of Terror (1975)
The Uncanny (1977)
The Monster Club (1980)
Creepshow (1982)
Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)
Nightmares (1983)
Cat’s Eye (1985)
Night Train to Terror (1985)
Deadtime Stories (1986)
The Offspring (1987): AKA: From a Whisper to a Scream
Creepshow 2 (1987)
After Midnight (1989)
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)
Grim Prairie Tales (1990)
Campfire Tales (1991)
Twisted Tales (1994)
Necronomicon (1994)
Tales from the Hood (1995)
Freakshow (1995)
Twisted Tales (1996)
Trilogy of Terror 2 (1996)
The Asylum (2000)
Dark Stories: Tales from Beyond the Grave (2001)
Cremains (2001)
Cradle of Fear (2001)
Dark Stories 2: Tales From Beneath (2002)
Dark Stories 3: Tales from the Grave (2002)
Tales from the Grave (2003)
Trapped Ashes (2006)
Hood of Horror (2006)
Frightclub (2006)
Creepshow 3 (2007)

Kino Mutante Yuk-Yuk Double Feature: Blood Diner and Psychos in Love

Blood and humor make for a strange pair, and decent people can’t often laugh heartily when both are present. There’s a lot of misunderstanding. Even in the horror crowd, Blood Diner and Psychos in Love are not films that bring broad support. This is especially true for those who might call themselves horror-experts or horror-purists. While many can appreciate the humor of something like Bad Taste, other great comedic horrors (we’ll not use the term splatstick, which doesn’t quite fit here) often go dismissed or unknown. There’s no accounting for taste, good, bad, or swirled.

Blood Diner is exactly what we’re talking about. The video and DVD boxes are misleadingly quiet, as the film is campy, crazy, and overflowing with bodies. Director Jackie Kong, whose other few films are 80s comedies in the vein of Police Academy, mixes Wagnerian opera music with the revival of the goddess Sheetar, in what can only be described as Fred Olen Ray-meets-Spielberg. But things are more calm before this. Two goofy killer brothers operate a vegetarian restaurant that, of course, serves parts of their victims. They’re involved in a lot of oddball things that lend to any preconceptions you have of southern California, including a wrestling match with Hitler, a nude aerobics massacre with Ronald Reagan, punks and disco freaks, archeology and a floating brain. If this sounds like simple USA Up All Night trash, don’t be fooled! It’s too smart and too well done for that. You need only meet Uncle Anwar hear about the Glee Club massacre in the first five minutes to be hooked.

In an aside, featured in the climax of the film is the singer Dino Lee. I looked for his music in any form for years before finding a live vinyl album (in Dresden, Germany, complete with German liner notes - excellent). This rivals only my other great quest for the music from Babel, featured in The Howling II, which some anonymous and friendly ghoul sent to me a few months back. Missions complete.

But where were we? Ah yes, Psychos in Love! A plot that’s been repeated many times over by now: two psychotic killers who learn each others’ “secret” fall in love. Their methods are vicious, their motives beautiful (killing people who like grapes because they hate grapes sooo much …there’s even a song, played to a Casio keyboard: Grapes, we hate ‘em, grapes, we hate them purple and green…). Joe and Kate go through all the problems of married life, with the added culture of psycho-killing on the side. A rival begins killing (and eating his victims) in town and soon there’s a sort of threesome element that must be resolved. Director Gorman Bechard is responsible for some arguably atrocious (Galatic Gigalo) and grand (You Are Alone) works. Psychos in Love, while we can describe it, must be experienced in order to be grasped. It is low-budget, but overfull of victims and awesome gore. The humor is sick, but then if you’re reading this, you’re sick, so it may be right up your alley.

Chiller

Just came across yet another possible future horror television channel called Chiller. The most information I can find for now comes from the Wikipedia entry (yeah, well). Supposed to be up and running in March, but not likely to be on anything like standard cable for a long, long time.

Russian Horror

A glance at Russia’s cruel history gives ample material for endless horrors. Indeed, one could decipher that deep horror is familiar enough to Russian culture to be indistinguishable from other genres. Russian literary tradition has its more stern connections to horror (look at the title character’s suicide under a train in Anna Karenina, or indeed many events in the works of giants such as Tolstoy or Dostotevsky or Lermontov), but we also see almost comedic phantasmagoria in something like Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, in which the first scene involves a Moscow man being almost humorously decapitated by a street train after a conversation with the Devil (indeed, this book is full of dark-humor horrors).

The Soviet Union was a fascinating place in which a perfectly happy life could be turned upside down in only a few moments, and yet on the surface there was a very pleasant appearance. But the gulags were real, and so were “disappearances,” even until the very end of the empire. The Russia of today, run almost exclusively by former KGB elements, makes for consideration. Like most of the world outside of the Anglo-North America, at night there aren’t many street lights in Russian cities. The shadows are long and dark, and all around you. You hear about things like bandits in the provinces. Smiles are rare on the street because, as I’ve been told, Russians view a smiling person on the street as either crazy or evil. Well, that makes perfect sense. Why the hell do Americans smile so much anyway?

Back to the point, Russia has a history and an atmosphere groomed and gorged on varieties of horror, and yet, bizarrely, we find that over the last few decades very few actual horror films have been produced in the country. How is that? One possibility is that many horrors are simply being categorized outside of the horror genre proper, counted as dramas or mysteries …with that cold and vicious Russian bite. The horrific is often mixed with the dramatic, and so maybe western video-store genre categories simply don’t translate to what Russians produce and consume. Or perhaps the pure-horror genre doesn’t exist in Russia for other cultural reasons. While Yankees and other westerners have no reservations in talking about crazy and horrible things, in Russia people are still careful in whatever they talk about (because you never know who could be listening).

Whatever the case, there is no slasher or monster-movie tradition in Russia. There are no comparable figures to Dracula, Frankenstein, Freddy or Jason. There is no drive-in or grindhouse history, and no video store culture even today. What’s modern Yankeehorror without these things? To get an idea, let’s look at the small handful of Russia horror films that have been released outside of Russia:

Vampire Woman (Zhenshchina vampir, 1915): Black and white and silent, this may be the only Russian “horror” film before about the 1990s. Interestingly enough, it occurs on the eve of the revolution and the founding of the CCCP. In being a single entry it cannot indicate a pattern, but the lack of horrors between this and the 90s begs the question: is capitalism part of the fuel for horror? More likely, film censors in the CCCP stunted development in this direction altogether.

Dark Waters (1994): An Italian and UK co-production, this film seems to place Russian horror style clearly in the Eurohorror universe. Words like “masterpiece,” atmosphere,” and “creepy” pop up in a lot of reviews of this film, and all are indicative of the Eurohorror attitude. According to descriptions of the film, there is an island on the Black Sea that a young girl goes to while investigating her recently deceased father, and there she finds something akin to a cult of nuns and a horrible monster. The cinematography is supposedly astounding (though I can’t say I’ve yet witnessed this potential gem in person). Sounds more Italian than Russian, but the Black Sea elements and the partly Russia cast may lend something.

Nightwatch, Daywatch and Duskwatch (Nochnoy dozor 1-3, 2004-2007): The vampire trilogy with distinctive Russian qualities. In 2004, Nightwatch became the number one movie in Russia, breaking box office records. In the west, the films are received with cries of brilliance or something more like patronizing insult (“to be fair, considering the fact that russia has a smaller film industry than the uk, it is a good atempt and shows alot of ambition in the film makers”[sic]). They’re interesting, to be sure, and much more aligned with the tactics of the Eurohorror than the Yankeehorror (style over structure, if that’s fair to say). If you haven’t seen the first one, it may be the best (and possibly only) introduction to Russohorror you’re likely to find.

Dead Daughters (Myortvye docheri, 2007): A ghost story that is yet to be released outside Russia. Director Pavel Ruminov is being described as Russia’s Spielberg-Kubrick, and after seeing the film, U.S. group Gold Circle Films has already purchased the rights to remake it (and probably kill all of its best qualities in doing so).

There are a handful of other Russian films that seem to have had some outside-Russia release, including the Witches of Yatrinskaya, Fantom Kiler 2 and some other co-productions which seem to have almost no Russian influence. There are also another handful of films classified as horror that we can find only in Russian, with no international/English title, and no net information to be had. Altogether, you get more of a sense for what Russian horror is by what isn’t. Body counts and buckets of blood do not fit into the Russian mould. What horror Russia has produced in fiction seems to twist with drama and daily life, and is deeper than the yuks of 90s Yankeehorror Freddy spin-offs. In short, Russian horror may be un-definable by Yankee standards. It is its own unique cultural creature, and only time will show us where it’s really going.

Hot as Love

There seem to be several horror celebrity websites popping up here and there on the net, and I've just come across one for my all time favorite's, Reggie Bannister! Do check it out if you want some info on Reggie, his band (The Reggie Bannister Band ...you can even listen to a few songs, which I know you want to do), or are looking to purchase Phantasm goodies or even a guitar. Hot as Love.

Versus Horrors

A few years ago, when Freddy vs. Jason was announced, and then actually filmed and released, I was absolutely giddy. A lot of boars and ghouls were. It was the first time since about the 1940s that two horror titans had been thrown together to face one another in a feature (I wouldn’t call Dollman VS Demonic Toys quite a match of horror titans, but maybe we won’t completely dismiss this and other Full Moon combos). By contrasting the legends of Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, both were strengthened; and even though the story and support characters are of no more depth than any in a typical Nightmare or Friday film, I can nevertheless watch Freddy VS Jason with complete satisfaction. The same can not be said for Alien VS Predator).

After Freddy vs. Jason came out, there was a lot of mumble in the horror corners of the net about other versus films, including sequels to Freddy VS Jason, occasionally adding Michael Myers or Ash from the Evil Dead movies. Fans always want more, even if it will kill the idea. Like red meat in polarized politics. Today we look at some other possibilities:

The Reanimator VS Planet of the Apes: Dr. West is sent on an exploratory space mission only to end up in the far future. The idea of ape zombies doesn't excite me, and for sure this would overstretch even the Reanimator’s charm.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Family VS Class of Nuke ‘Em High: A Tromaville High School field trip …to Texas! Surely the film would be disgusting and violent, but probably also not very good. We could also substitute The Hills Have Eyes Family and the state of Nevada, or the Children of the Corn and Iowa.

House on Tombstone Hill VS Bubba Ho-Tep: The old woman from the much-underrated House on Tombstone Hill would prove a hearty challenge for Elvis and JFK.

Cujo VS Zoltan, Hound of Hell: Just a dog fight unless there’s a really clever script. Probably no better than Pigs VS Frogs or Bees VS Ants.

Prom Night VS Night of the Demons: Mary Lou and Angela. There’s some real potential here, especially if the actual plot involves a slumber party or sorority.

Phantasm VS Evil Dead: Bruce Campbell and Reggie Bannister together, kicking deadite ass all over the Pacific Northwest. Sounds like something Quentin Tarantino ought to consider.

Terminator VS Dawn of the Dead: A special effects extravaganza, but probably as terrible as the aforementioned Alien vs. Predator.

No matter what we combine, most possibilities likely wouldn’t even be considered by any producer. It’s about money in the end, and while the idea of more versus-horrors get scattered weirdoes’ geek-sucking hearts pumping, that’s about all the idea’s ever likely to do. Sad. I can almost see Ash and Reggie cruising through the desert in an old Cougar, passing another town emptied by the Tall Man. Load the four-barrel shotgun, and let's stop in Gatlin for some gas for that hand-chainsaw.

Native American Horror

To consider the Native American position in horror demands a look at Native American history in general because, like people of ethnic Jewish origin, genocide has had an overwhelming and catastrophic effect on both past and present. For Native America, horror has been attached to reality for centuries, and many would argue it continues to linger. Obviously the level varies in every individual man or woman, but the socio-historical connection is there. Look at native poet Sherman Alexi’s poem “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”:

I have seen it and like it:

The blood,

the way like Sand Creek

even its name brings fear,

because I am an American

Indian and have learned

words are another kind of violence.

Despite Alexi’s (and, by implication, all Natives’) deep understanding of horror, Native Americans have largely been pigeon-holed or relegated to the background of the genre proper. In more classic horror, or anything from the Lovecraft-Poe-Blackwood literature days, a Native character could only be a superstitious drunk, or some other simple plot device, like an archeological wonder to evoke the dark, mysterious past. Change has not yet come, and we can, essentially, find but two main forms in which Native America shines in modern horror: Monster-Myth and Place-Vengeance.

The Native Monster-Myth strain entails a little diffusion in form, but not much. First, there’s the sort of woodland monsters sub-genre, including werewolf offshoots (Wolfen, Ginger Snaps Back, Wendigo) and other bizarre or fantastic creatures (It Waits, the Masters of Horror episode Deer Woman, the killer bat movie Nightwing, or even the cannibalistic blend of native and white legend in Ravenous). These are monster movies of a violent sort, all a bit incestuous within the entire werewolf-vampire strata of ideas. In these films, particularly in concern to werewolves, we find a great deal of Euro-Native cultural blurring. For the most part, wolves are not negative creatures in Native mythology. European folklore views wolves as horrible creatures, and this may in part come from the plagues that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages, and the huge wolf populations that would thrive on things like devouring the abundant bodies, or even snatching up small children from their village homes. Remember, Central Europe was once an enormous forest, and only in the last few centuries were wolf populations contained and effectively wiped out. But, like the vampire, the werewolf is one of those legends that has seemed universal enough to countless Euro-descended artists, and so it has been blended with the mythologies of distant cultures as though it were. If you want to see something closer to genuine Native American mythology on film, you probably should ignore werewolf cinema; consider instead Dreamkeeper. It is to Sioux myth, perhaps, what Clash of the Titans is to Greek myth (even if it isn't quite horror).

While Native Monster-Myth films point at the horror of the wilderness and the mysterious (still powerful phobias in North America), the Native Place-Vengeance branch of horror is focused more on actions and consequences, all stemming from the original sin of Columbian conquest of the Americas and European appropriation of Native land. We’ve seen it play out nicely in the Poltergeist films and Pet Semetery, and even the older Death Curse of Tartu. At this point, in fact, it is a cultural cliché that we’ve seen parodied in the likes of South Park (the pet store from hell), and soon in a full-length feature by Troma titled Poultrygeist (about a fast-food restaurant built on a burial site). Again we see it, slightly altered, in the segment from Creepshow 2 titled Old Chief Wooden Head. This time it’s a Native who’s paying for what he’s done.

So we’ve got the fear and we’ve got the punishment, check and check. Other horror centered on Native America is hard to pin down. There is a very intriguing essay on The Shining as being full of metaphors about white conquest and native genocide. Then, like a one-man band, there’s Lou Diamond Phillips, a guy who’s been in at least a dozen horror b-films and television shows, beginning back in 1990 with The First Power, a cop and Satanism flick that might be best described as part-Se7en, part-Shocker, part WGN Saturday afternoon action movie. Phillips is, in fact, 1/8 Cherokee, along with a little bit of everything else. But hey, while blood quantum counts in government policy, it certainly does not in horror cinema.

The Worst

If you watch a lot of horror movies, you’ve seen a lot of movies that make you an expert on what does not work in cinema. Poor dialogue, acting, lighting, sound. A crappy monster costume, or a story that makes no sense. Maybe a physically impossible murder scene, or humor that wouldn’t work even with a laugh track in the background. Oh, there are so many, many things that can make for ingredients to a bad horror film. Today we look at those full-length feature pieces of garbage that round out the bottom five horror films based on votes in the Internet Movie Database.

At number five we have the 2005 BTK Killer. Slated as a biography, this may be one of those true low-budget pieces of hackwork. Comments include “Boring Terrible Krap,” “Stop in the name of all that which does not suck…,” and “I want my time back!”

At number four, Voyeur.com from the year 2000. From the turn of the last century, when we all thought Y2K would destroy the earth. A lot of sort of techno-movies came out at this time it seems, all of them outdated the minute they hit video. From IMDB users: “Beneath any possible criticism of a normal film,” and “complete with plot holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through.”

Number three takes us all the way back to 1970 with a film called Bigfoot, which tells a story of girls captured by the legendary beast and their biker boyfriends who save them. Sounds alright actually, but 205 voters can’t be wrong: “This was punishment …this movie caused a terrible trauma for me,” and also “so-dumb-it’s-numbing.”

Second place for worst horror movie comes as no surprise to me: Club Vampire from 1998. I have witnessed this pitiful work of self-loathing firsthand. Vampires and club folk, badly done (and it’d be bad enough if it were done perfectly). Plenty of “Worst film I’ve had the misfortune to see” criticisms. Also: “It makes Zombie Lake look like The Sound of Music,” and very simply “Jesus Christ.”

First place is a bit of a surprise. Not because it isn’t bad …I’m sure it is. Maybe it’s because, at first glance, Die Hard Dracula sounds like a 70s porno-comedy-horror, and thus that it should be forgiven for being terrible. Alas, the film is 1998 (a poor year for horror, it seems), and 413 users have judged it something to “avoid like the plague.” One user blames this film for the poor reputation of independent cinema, another calculates how many Slurpees he could have got instead of buying it (roughly 3). Weird as some horror fans are, however, a few gave it a positive nod: “I can only imagine why this one had 3 different actors play Dracula. That alone is a good reason to see this thing!” Well, if you’re into Plan 9, then there you have it.

Goodnight, Vampire Mom

This week we bid farewell to actress Yvonne De Carlo, best known for her role as matriarch Lily Munster in The Munsters. Canadian-born De Carlo, a popular beauty queen throughout the 1940s (and Miss Venice Beach in 1938) had dozens of mostly uncredited roles before landing better (such as Princess Scheherazade, Salome, and the wife of Moses in Ten Commandments …but Calamity Jane!?) In the mid-1960s, De Carlo took up the Munsters role and, though she played dozens of other diverse characters over the next few decades, her pop culture link never let go. Drive-in and horror fans may recall her part in the disco-Dracula comedy-horror Nocturna (1979), or the more serious Silent Scream (1980). In the 80s, De Carlo continued to the track of video B-Horror with Play Dead, American Gothic (one of my personal favorites), Cellar Dweller (with Jeffrey Combs), and Mirror, Mirror, all done virtually back-to-back. Happily, one of De Carlo’s final roles was in a 1993 Tales From the Crypt episode. The following year, however, this was followed by yet another Munsters reunion TV-movie - that pop-culture grip once again. Miss De Carlo, 84, died Monday (Jan.8) in Los Angeles.

Family

Horror is a place for family, though you wouldn’t believe it from the precarious familial situations of horror titans such as Freddy Kruger, Jason Vorhees, or Michael Myers – or from the recent Masters of Horror episode titled simply Family. In Family, we get a great example of the profound and ludicrous importance that family takes in horror, encapsulated into one ghoulish hour. All the killing is for the ideal of the family, sacrifices to the altar of Hera almost, even in the twist at the end of the episode. The nonchalantly-placed picture of VP Dick Cheney at the beginning of Family connects this pseudo-religious track to modern American conservatism. That may not be entirely fair, though we could look at US political nepotism and see that the film Society still fits very well, almost 20 years on, especially with the current administration.

In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels, we hear that “the saw is family.” Indeed. Family is crucial in the need kill. It exists to kill, an immoral morality tool. But why? Excellent examples of the same phenomenon exist in several horrors, including the recent Wrong Turn and The Hills Have Eyes, and the slightly older American Gothic. There’s a kind of almost mutant madness in the first of these, then a sort of revenge theme in the second, and then a sort of puritanical moralism in the third. Check, check and check! What is important to all is the other, and this seems to be where the brass tacks are. Malachai in Children of the Corn called them interlopers, and that pagan xenophobia is precisely what we’re seeing. There’s that ancient sense of the clan, along with whatever leftover collective memories we have of wiping out the last of the Neanderthals so many, many eons ago. But in horror the universe is backwards …the Neanderthals are on top, physically and morally superior. You can almost taste the beyond-the-grave lust for revenge in these families.

Families are occasionally dealt with defensively in horror, a la Poltergeist or the Amityville Horror or even Stepfather (mother and daughter versus the horrific Neanderthal invader within), but it seems more often we have a situation like Mother’s Day, or House of Wax, or Blood Diner, or something all messed up in-between, in which the traditional pseudo-religious importance of the family spells death for the younger generation in search of redefining exactly what it wants in life.

The Psycho Cop Films

Little known and low-budgeted horror from the 80s and 90s are where I personally feel most at home. The smart-assed and asinine dialogue is so my generation, and so is the curious and unique methods of the killers and the always ridiculous premises. In the Psycho Cop films, the entire story's as simple as a satanic cop who kills partiers - that's it! Officer Joe Vickers and his religious beliefs are explored in almost no detail, which is what you’d expect and, indeed, how it should be. He’s the embodiment of all that terrifies those with only the most naïve perceptions of the devil. The 666, some hatred, a gritty laugh, and even crucifixion …every bit of Devil crap they could think of but Ozzy. To follow, Vickers has supernatural powers (which are somewhere on par with Michael Myers) to help him punish all the bad boys and girls. These powers fail him most notably at the end of part II when the bar people beat him in the street ...but this scene is perfect. A mob from the land of vice strikes down the devil’s adjutant who happens to be in guise of a cop. The confusion between moral authority and the rescuing of a latter-day sort of Mary Magdalene from her come-uppance makes one certain that, if Jesus were here today, he’d find good in Psycho Cop 2.

The first Psycho Cop, as said, takes place in a cottage full of partying teens. Very standard, possibly boring stuff, except for the bizzaro nature of Officer Vickers and the unintentional comedy that follows. In the sequel, which occurs in an office building, the comedy is no longer unintentional, falling clearly in line with that early 90s style of smartass-dumbass horror, with the witty remarks from the killer and the painfully stupid or annoying victims. Fun stuff with some great quirky acting. Officer Vickers' cop car in the opening scene of the sequel will hook you, no doubt.

You may have trouble finding these two. They’re supposedly not out on DVD stateside, even though I have seen a copy of Psycho Cop 2 which is heavily-edited, under the title Psycho Cop Returns. Beware of that! Also, do not confuse these films with the Maniac Cop series. The Psycho Cop films are very different and, in my view, superior trash.

Where’s the Caretaker? – The Psycho Cop Drinking Game! (works only with the original film): Get lots of booze and a few friends and crank up the Psycho Cop. Every time one of the teens says, “Where’s the caretaker?” take a drink! Warning: do not play this game with anything stronger than beer or you will end up in the hospital having your stomach pumped (seriously, they say "Where's the caretaker?" like a thousand times).

Fangoria Weekend of Horrors, San Jose

Fangoria’s Weekend of Horror’s 2007 in sunny San Jose, California just wrapped up and I’m left a bit shaken by the ordeal. But let’s be straight, I was a newbie going into it. Having recently fled the Midwest (where no such thing as a horror convention would brave show its face), my heart was pumping. Jeffrey Combs, Ken Foree, and – sweet gods – George Romero were all to be on hand. These are important heroes in my corner of the universe. Inside me things got all squirmy. I got my room on the executive floor of the Doubletree Hotel and marched forward into the dark.

Going to one of these conventions, if you haven’t been to one before, gives you an excellent perspective of the crowd that shares your ghoulish tastes. Breaking it down cleanly into stereotypes never really works, but I tried anyway. The categories were:
1. Metal-Folk, with tattoos and piercings and an obvious taste for either metal music or goth;
2. Punks of the old school, with some kind of generic standout punk-feature like a spiked belt or a mohawk, coupled with a t-shirt of some garage band you’ve never heard of;
3. Pure Geeks of the sort you’d expect more at a Star Trek convention, looking as though they’re incapable of functioning in mainstream society and who probably haven’t left their basements for months prior to coming to the event;
4. Costumed Weirdoes who may look cool but sadly come off as being pretentious, whether they are or not;
5. Normal-Looking People who probably work for the industry.

Admittedly, most of this crowd felt alien to me, but they were my people, so I embraced them. It’s great to wander around a nice hotel and randomly see the cast of 2,001 Maniacs at the bar in the early afternoon, or a crowd of five zombie vixens walking through reception before dozens of puzzled vacationers, or hear the theme to Halloween being played on the lobby piano …and see that the player is a mutant monster! Surprises await when wandering, especially in the dealer pit. Heavy-set guys reminiscent of the comic store worker in the Simpsons with high-end collectibles. Not quite the feast of freebie promo giveaways I’d hoped for. I didn’t see a single deal I liked, though I did come across a beautiful Klaus Kinski Nosferatu poster from Thailand …but $45 for a poster? No student discount? Bah!

Then, as your heart gets a little slow and down, you suddenly turn and nearly bump into some guy that you know you saw in several movies but can’t place him. He’s signing stuff next to a guy you know you’ve never seen, but who’s also signing stuff. Then, you turn again, and there’s Ken Foree, bigger than life, sitting alone and looking bored. When this happened to me, I stared at Ken for a moment in disbelief and wondered why he didn’t see me and smile back. I’d been watching the guy since I was in my single digits. The man was a sort of macho role model …and for a boy, that’s a powerful, all-consuming force. But that force, that magic, is killed a moment after you encounter the actor in person. Not because of any disappointment or bad kind of shock. No, I asked Ken for his autograph and he was very friendly and cool about it. “I’m just having fun,” he chuckled, and that made me feel silly about paying $20 for a poster and his personal scribble (even though the going-rate for the poster alone is usually $20). I thanked Ken and shook his hand, and he plugged his website kenforee.com (with, among other things, some interesting thoughts on topics such as racism …well worth checking out). Ken Foree’s such a normal guy (albeit a guy with hands as big as my head), and when you’re expecting a SWAT-team zombie-ass-kicking near-legend, well, you can only walk away wondering about your own naivety. It was time for a drink already.

I moved on to the first speaker, Robert Picardo, who’s been in such beauties as Gremlins 2 and the now-classic Masters of Horror episode Homecoming (as well as Total Recall as Johnnycab, ha ha). I’m always pleasantly surprised how intelligent the players of the horror industry are. Picardo was such a measured speaker, particularly when the subject turned to politics and some goon in the crowd suggested actors shouldn’t express their politics because they’re only actors. You could feel a chill in the room when this occurred. The crowd was there for fantasy, not grim, sordid, miserable reality. Picardo steered us right through it, and soon the overflow from the Trekkie conventions were asking their questions about Voyager. Fair enough, the horror fans were just a bit too bloodthirsty it seemed.

And I should mention why that may have been. Turnout for the San Jose convention (on Saturday, anyway) was disappointingly low according to one of the Fango guys who wore a tie instead of a costume. That’s not good for San Jose’s future as a venue for horror, and also wasn’t good for the general mood of the convention. Don’t get me wrong …it kicked a lot more ass than most weekends, but you could sense some missing energy. The low attendance perplexed me at first. The names on the bill weren’t bad, especially with Romero! I had expected the place to look like Ikea on Boxing Day. But then I looked at my schedule of events. Wait a minute, where was Romero? I scoured the booklet again. And why was Adrienne Barbeau on for Sunday in his place? I found a Fango worker and demanded an answer. Sadly, she informed, a crew member for Romero’s current production Diary of the Dead had actually died, and so Romero skipped Weekend of Horrors for the real-life horror of a funeral. I’m not religious so I had no prayer for that poor individual, but I’m glad Romero didn’t skip out on him on account of our den of dorky horror slime in San Jose.

It was time for that drink. The last swallow still in my mouth, I decided to catch some actual celluloid. On the other side of the hotel was a little room with about 75 chairs and a screen about 6’X10’ showing movies. Most of the full-length films I’d heard of, but I knew no details. They were: The Quick and the Undead, Sheitan, Death Row, and Driftwood. Of these, I caught part of Quick and Undead and couldn’t help but quickly dismiss it as more incestuous zombie trash (seriously, watch something other than horror movies before making a horror movie). Then there was a short special on director Fred Olen Ray that made me almost tearfully nostalgic for USA Up All Night. Following this, we got into the Fangoria TV presents Short Film Showcase. My low expectations were happily mistaken, as the shorts (in this order: Anonymity, Grace, Take Out, and Zero the Counter) were all pretty damn good. You don’t get to see many horror shorts unless you get to a convention (the only other place I’ve ever seen one – in German – was in Europe, before the film Scream II). Nice treats. But this was only the beginning, as the following full-length feature, Sheitan, was even better. Sheitan, a French entry into the genre, was such a perfect concoction of great Eurohorror elements: hilarious dialogue, pretty Euro-girls, creepy Euro-guys, perversion and incest on the fringes, a dash of the devil, and some very disgusting and painful scenes. The crowd was laughing almost wildly through much of the film. A good indicator with that crowd. Personally, I thought it was the best horror film I’ve seen in months. Very impressive.

After that, I went for more drinks. And by the time I wandered back over to the convention-side of the hotel, I found that I was right about it being Miller Time. The air reeked of beer. Punks had overwhelmed the hotel. Empty bottles were laying around all over, on banisters, behind plants, and in the middle of hallways. Every ghoul and boar seemed to have a bottle in their hand, and more of them were coming in the reception doors, each carrying a 24-pack apiece. Horror drunks.

I had a mini-buzz, but I’m no Hunter Thompson, so I didn’t push it. I wanted to be sober for the wisdom of the Reanimator himself, Jeffrey Combs. I sat down at the tail end of a trio of young guys serving as the Driftwood panel. Then, to the music of Psycho (changed for Reanimator), Jeffrey Combs entered the stage. Because of the low turnout, the auditorium had a hundred of open seats, but it was a bigger showing than for anything else so far. Many of the crowd, being the anti-social weirdoes that they are, sat scattered in the back rows. I was up in row three, directly behind the empty VIP section, and to the side of the gold- and silver-pass fans. These folks had paid like $149 for their assigned seats, and I had a better spot than most of them. But they got the autographs and the after-convention “dessert party,” so hey, it’s a deal for the most part.

Jeffrey Combs is a total Californian, which is hard to reconcile with his various characters. He must have said dude several dozen times, and he was throwing glowing green Reanimator pens into the crowd for good questions. In sum, Combs’ favorite horror film is Shawn of the Dead, and he’s very skeptical about any more Reanimator films because time is running out for the Bush Administration (and the planned new Reanimator films, in connection to this, are also running low on time). As for being a fan a Lovecraft, Combs didn’t even know the name when first taking the role of Herbert West. But he has come to appreciate Lovecraft’s writings since, though he’s a bigger fan of Edgar Allen Poe, who he will actually be playing in an upcoming Masters of Horror entry titled The Black Cat. Another cool, intelligent, easy-to-love guy.

After Combs, I spent the last part of my day at the convention watching a Fangoria TV “game show” with trivia questions from the genre (I didn’t return on Sunday because, without Romero, I couldn’t justify $20 just for a few films and the opportunity to blow even more money in the dealer pit). There were only a couple dozen folks still scattered throughout the auditorium. A pretty ghoul-girl spun a wheel and the host, a cross between a theatre geek and the séance guy in Beetlejuice, asked questions. The sound on the mics kept going out and there were numerous little technical problems, but still, despite the mess, it was a happy show to watch.

From there, tired of crappy jokes, expensive trash, pretensions and screams, I settled into my room and ordered Borat on pay-per-view. What an awesome end to a glorious, beautiful, unmatchable day.

The Journal of Horror Studies

By random chance I came across an interesting website (www.thehorrorjournal.com) claiming to be developing an ongoing journal dedicated to the academic study of Horror in film, television, literature, games and culture. Very intriguing, do check it out.