End of the World Blues

The thing about doomsday is that it's always the end of somebody's world. "Eschatology" is a big word for a commonplace experience that comes for everyone eventually. As I write this in the dwindling months of 2020, huddled away in my house like I'm taking refuge from a zombie apocalypse during a plague year that is this generation's great calamity, I've been feeling that old millennial unease settle into my bones. The world really does feel like it's winding down, like the people I know are the last generations of humankind before pestilence and climate change wipe the world clean with fire and hurricanes and Covid-19, to say nothing of the other man-made ills that afflict the planet and the body politic. As always, the horror movies of the present moment reflect and interpret this reality, presenting apocalypses both small and personal and cosmic, with a range of flavors in between.

One such film is Starfish (2018, directed by A. T. White). It plays like an indie drama gone slumming in genre-ville, but it circles around the end of the world throughout its running time, embracing the end in terms that are personal, cosmic, and meta-cinematic by turns. It provides red meat and monsters for the horror crowd, but it's wrapped its narrative in layers of grief, regret, and redemption. It's an ambitious film for a production of such modest means, so it can be forgiven if it loses its way in the end.

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Cuts Like a Knife

Knife + Heart (2018, directed by Yann Gonzalez) begins with one of the horror genre's better visual jokes. The slasher film and the giallo mystery before it are notorious for their use of knives as the weapon of choice for their mad killers, presumably for their phallic symbolism. Knife + Heart takes this out of the subtext and makes it literal by hiding a stiletto in a dildo. It's right up front, too, at the start of the movie. It would be pretty funny if the murder involved wasn't so nasty. Knife + Heart is a movie that connects the fetishy nature of the giallo mystery with their black-gloved killers and posh bougie chic fashions with the equally fetishy world of gay porn, all while taking the "bury your gays" trope to such a height that it collapses on itself in the end. It works surprisingly well, mostly because satirizing and deconstructing the slasher/giallo movie isn't all that it has on its mind.

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Doing the Islands

Sweetheart (2019, directed by J. D. Dillard) is a model contemporary low budget genre film. It's efficient, it provides all the genre thrills a horror movie requires, and it even makes a stab at psychological depth, all inside a compact eighty two minute running time. Its first act is laconic. There's barely any dialogue. Its storytelling is conveyed entirely through the actions of its heroine, who must carry the weight of the narrative for the duration of the film. Depending on the actor, this kind of gamble can fail spectacularly. The filmmakers have chosen wisely in Kiersey Clemons who is more than up to the challenge, but anyone who has seen her in other films knows that already.

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An Unwanted Heirloom

There's an old interview with director David Cronenberg that has stayed with me in which the interviewer asked Cronenberg what scared him. Cronenberg said, "When I go to pick up my kids at school and they're not there waiting for me." That something so mundane would scare a man whose business was scaring people is telling. Most of the things people fear are in the everyday of their lives, not big sweeping things like zombie apocalypses or robot uprisings or mutagenic television signals. Most really good horror movies connect with something that real people actually fear from day to day. Sometimes, they do it in abstract ways. Sometimes they do it pointedly and on the nose. The challenge is in finding something that enough people fear to pull it off and in making that fear real for an audience. A surprising number of horror movies fail at this, either from a failure to face that fear head on or by burying it too deeply under the tropes of genre. This isn't a problem for Relic (2020, directed by Natalie Erika James). It puts its finger on a set of existential terrors that real people face every day that are close to universal, then follows them to their logical conclusion. It's an unsettling movie.

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I Could a Tale Unfold...

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:

--William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.

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I wish I could have seen The Mortuary Collection (2019, directed by Ryan Spindell) in a movie theater with a big crowd of teenagers. Alas, the Covid-19 pandemic put the kibosh on that even if the realities of contemporary distribution wouldn't have accomplished the same thing. I am green with envy for the Fantastic Fest audience that saw the film in September of 2019, but that seems like another world from this distance. In any event, The Mortuary Collection is an audience film if ever there was one, and I feel like the world is all the poorer for having to view it on Shudder in the solitude of our living rooms, however nice our home systems might be. It's a fun film, with set pieces designed to goose an audience but good.

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Departmental Politics

In 1943, Universal Pictures teamed up with the then-popular Inner Sanctum radio show to brand a series of modest low-budget thrillers. There were six of these films in all, all of them starring Lon Chaney, Jr. Chaney was Universal's bell-cow horror star in the 1940s--or, at least, he's who Universal wanted to be their bell-cow star after showing Lugosi and Karloff the door. Chaney had made his horror debut in The Wolf Man in 1941, and in short order had played the Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein and Dracula in Son of Dracula and Prince Kharis, the Mummy, in The Mummy's Tomb, in addition to his more lycanthropic duties in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, et al. Prior to his career in horror movies, he had been a bit player in Westerns, and had played perhaps the role of his career as Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Chaney was not a natural fit for horror movies, and after the horror boom had ebbed in the late 1940s, capped off by Abbott and Costello, Chaney went back to Westerns both on the big screen and the small. Even so, horror would follow him for the rest of his career. That's what comes of being the son of Lon Chaney.

The Inner Sanctum mysteries are clearly influenced by the Val Lewton films at RKO. Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie had been a gigantic hits on minuscule budgets, and Universal must have reasoned that they could do that, too. They were the home of horror movies, after all. It was their bread and butter. In Weird Woman (1944, directed by Reginald de Borg), the second of the Inner Sanctum mysteries and today's topic, even borrowed one of Lewton's stock player in Elizabeth Russell, who memorably played the woman who approached Irina in the cafe and asked "Moya sestra?" in Cat People. Weird Woman takes its source material from Fritz Leiber's novel, Conjure Wife, a story that is tailor made for the epistemological ambiguity and mounting terror in which Lewton and his directors specialized. Without Lewton's guiding hand, the results are less than satisfactory.

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Burning Down The House

According to his autobiography and many many interviews over the years, Roger Corman made the first of the Poe films, House of Usher (1960), out of a sense of exhaustion. He had been making three and five day wonders like Little Shop of Horrors, The Creature from the Haunted Sea, and Bucket of Blood for a couple of years at that point and he was tired of the go go go nature of that kind of filmmaking. He wanted to slow down. More, he wanted to make something that was aesthetically a cut above the films he was making. Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson, Corman's nominal bosses at AIP were amenable. The kinds of films Corman had been making were starting to play out to diminishing box office and they were keen on the next big thing for the drive-in theaters that were their primary market. To hear Corman tell it, they weren't keen on Poe, but Corman was persuasive. They gave him a shooting budget of $200,000--a fortune compared to their usual budgets, but modest compared to the industry--and let him have his head. That's the official story, anyway. I think what actually happened was somewhat different. I think Corman, Arkoff, and Nicholson looked covetously at the box office returns of Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula and decided that the Gothic horror movie on the Hammer model was the next wave and acted accordingly. They weren't alone in this, either. Filmmakers in Europe and America were already eyeing a Gothic revival and Gothics came to dominate the horror marketplace during the first half of the 1960s. Don't think Corman wasn't aware of this. He was quick to poach Barbara Steele for his second Poe movie. Whatever the actual origins of the Poe movies, Corman started work on House of Usher in late 1959. It took him fifteen days to shoot it in January of the next year for a summer release. It was a huge hit.

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The Saw is Family

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, directed by Tobe Hooper) was always likely to be a fiasco over and above the inevitable comparisons to the unrepeatable original film. It was a troubled, unstable production, one whose budget ebbed and flowed depending on the box office of whatever films the feckless Cannon Films had in theaters at the time. Tobe Hooper was a reluctant director who originally intended only to produce the film before landing in the director's chair when no suitable director could be found for the money producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were willing to pay. Golan and Globus wanted a very different film from what Hooper wanted to make, too, and were horrified when he delivered not the intense bloodbath they expected, but rather a pitch black comedy. Even so, Hooper leaned into the original film's unearned reputation for extreme violence, resulting in a film that had to either accept an X-rating from the MPAA or go out unrated. Cutting the film wasn't even in the discussion. The film's problems with censors were a worldwide mountain to climb. Cannon was stuck with marketing a film it did not like or understand, but even so the teaser trailer was killer ("After ten years of silence, the buzz is back!") and the one-sheet was hilarious. Critics, like the producers, expected something else and excoriated the film for it.

And yet...somehow, the film managed to make a profit in its original theatrical run and slowly developed a cult following on home video. Rob Zombie has been trying to reverse engineer the film for years with indifferent results. For myself? The first time I saw it I knew it had more on its mind than its sick jokes and elaborate gore gags--though the sick jokes and elaborate gore gags were occasionally inspired. To quote another cult film from the 80s: it had a philosophy

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Tools of the Trade

I've been thinking about the career of the late Tobe Hooper this month, in part prodded by Catherine Stebbins's yearly top ten project which had many nice things to say about Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion for her 1990 edition. The last of Hooper's films that I wrote about, apart from his Masters of Horror episodes, was his remake of Toolbox Murders at my old web site in 2005. Here's that review--somewhat revised--to kick off Halloween season. I haven't changed my mind on any of this upon re-watch, so there you go. I'll be visiting with more of Hooper's films as the season goes on.

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Toolbox Murders. 2004. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Angela Bettis, Brent Roam, Brent Travis, Rance Howard, Juliet Landau,

Synopsis: Nell and Steven Barrows have taken advantage of a "remodelling" special to move into the Lusman Building, a crumbling Hollywood apartment building with a dark history. Pretty soon, they discover that not all is well at the Lusman. Some of their neighbors have been disappearing. Nell hates the place and would do anything to break her lease. She's quick to note that something is very wrong in the building, and gets a reputation as a kook when she calls the cops on a scene she misinterprets as bloody murder. But bloody murder IS happening around her, and as she investigates the building's sinister past, she gets drawn through the looking glass into a world of horror she could scarcely imagine...

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