Some days later on the Day of the Dead celebrations, Coffin Joe encounters the beautiful young Marta. He is certain she is the woman who will bear his children. In the late evening, he takes her home, only to be confronted by the gypsy who foresaw the deaths of Antonio and Terezinha. She warns the murderous undertaker his soul is already forfeit to the spirits of those he has murdered and Satan himself will come for him when the clock strikes midnight. Soon after leaving Marta in the company of her relatives, he is beset by the same ghostly figures of which the gypsy had foretold. In fear he turns and runs for his life, little realizing he has stumbled upon the vault where both Antonio and Terezinha lie buried. As his mind frantically races, he forces open their coffins in the hope of finding they are still dead. Their eyes stare back at him from within their darkened tomb as maggots immerse their wasted faces. Coffin Joe’s terrified screams can be heard away in the town. When the locals enter the vault, they find his horribly disfigured body with his eyes left opened wide to the world just like those he murdered. In the distance, the toll of a bell can be heard, ringing out the stroke of midnight.
Originally shot in thirteen days in 1963, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, (À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma) lays claim to being Brazil’s first horror movie. This marks the first instalment of Jose Mojica Marins’ existential “Coffin Joe trilogy”, to be followed by This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967), and Embodiment of Evil (2008). There were also three other entries to the Coffin Joe mythos, The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968), The Awakening of the Beast (O Despertar da Besta) (1969), banned in Brazil for twenty years owing to its treatment of drugs, prostitution and police corruption, and Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (Delirios de um Anormal) (1978). Marins’ creation has been considered as a precursor to the leering psychopath Freddy Kreuger and, in a similar way to his treacherous heir, would go on to become a celebrity figure, making it to the stage, screen and national television before going on to comic books. Marins not only wrote and directed the film; when he couldn’t find an actor who could take his creation seriously, he assumed the role himself, using an expressionistic style that harked back to the villains of the earliest days of cinema. With a pitiful budget, an amateur cast and only one studio in which all but a few of the scenes were shot, he put together a gruesome feature that was an unrepentant challenge to his country’s Catholicism. His film was shot in black and white, but after half a century, many of the darkened scenes are no longer entirely black. While this feature may have been shot in monochrome, it didn’t detract from the viciousness presented in certain scenes, with the intensity of the eye gouging coming fifteen years before Fulci’s predilection for this dehumanizing brutality. Later in his career, he would be forced to move into pornography when he produced the highly controversial yet lucrative 24 Hours of Explicit Sex (1985). As a cult phenomenon Marins is revered and his contribution to the world of horror should never be underestimated.
AFTER MANY YEARS of loyalty to the memory of his deceased wife, television producer Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) contemplates finding someone to share his life. He speaks of his loneliness to his friend Yasuhisha Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), a fellow producer, who devises a hoax audition for a film with the intention of finding Aoyama a new wife. Yoshikawa puts together a plethora of résumés and asks his forlorn friend to choose thirty women to attend the audition. Prior to the big day, Aoyama becomes smitten by one girl in particular, Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), a shy young woman dressed in virginal white. Yoshikawa finds her a little unnerving, but relents, knowing his long-time friend is completely besotted. Aoyama finds himself drawn closer to the girl, even though there are unanswered questions about some of her former acquaintances who are no longer to be heard from. When their relationship becomes strained, Aoyama decides to call Asami; her apartment appears empty, but her figure can be seen sitting by the telephone with a large canvas bag towards the rear of the room. When the phone rings, the canvas bag begins to violently twitch. The unfeeling inflection in Asami’s smile chills the viewer to the bone; Yoshikawa’s initial assessment of the girl would appear to have been correct. There is now a change in tone to Audition, as it becomes Asami’s account of the trauma she faced at the hands of an uncaring older man but it does not excuse one of the most excruciating scenes ever to be committed to celluloid.
Audition was but one of five films directed by the inexhaustible Takashi Miike during the year 2000, which for him was nothing out of the ordinary. When compared to so much of his immense catalogue of films this is by far one of his most challenging creations, bearing a narrative energy rarely seen in the horror genre. For much of the early part of his film, both he and writers Ryû Murakami and Daisuke Tengan almost convinced their audience this was a whimsical romancing; only Yoshikawa’s sense of apprehension ever suggested anything different. The last forty minutes proved to be some of the most unsettling in the director’s accomplished career, thanks to the writing of novelist Ryû Murakami and the disturbingly surreal screenplay of Daisuke Tengan, which Miike admits to having toned down. It has been insinuated that this is a feminist revenge story, but there are layers of subtext to this film, which continue to confound so many horror devotees; yet equally the violence in the finale has distanced the admirers of more cerebral cinema. The ambiguity surrounding the final third of the film raises questions as to whether this is truly Asami’s tale or Aoyama’s guilt-laden dreams for what he considers the betrayal of his deceased wife coupled with his treatment of Asami during the fake audition. The finale, however, remains one of the most graphic portrayals observed in horror cinema, largely due to the audience’s empathic bond with the distraught Aoyama.
A SEEMINGLY ORDINARY YOUNG man from the sticks, Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck), arrives in New York City and takes residence in a seedy Times Square hotel. In his possession is a large wicker basket hiding a hideous secret. Hidden within is his grotesque parasitic half-aborted Siamese twin, Belial, whose deformities are such that few people would ever consider him human. Belial resembles a twisted lump of gristle, armed with a pair of claws, yet retains a chillingly human face.
In a flashback sequence, we learn their mother died tragically in childbirth and consequently their father grew to despise them. Still embittered by the death of his wife and afflicted by the shame he feels for the freak-show to which he unwittingly gave life, he is driven to have the twins surgically separated. This would give Duane a chance of a normal life, but neither brother wants to endure this operation. Their father refuses to listen; instead he turns to three doctors of dubious repute. Not even they consider Belial to be human. When the procedure has been completed, he is declared dead. He then suffers the indignity of being disposed with the rubbish. However, he is far from being dead; and now he wants revenge.
After killing their father, the twins are raised by a kindly aunt until her death a few years later. This is where we join the film; the twins are in New York, now with telepathic abilities, seeking unholy retribution against the three doctors responsible for separating them. So follow three days of slaughter, each falling victim to Belial’s cruel claws. Belial’s final killing is a girl for whom Duane has fallen, leading to the finale, hanging from the window of their hotel room, before they finally fall. The quality of the gore may have been appallingly low in budget, but it was vicious and there was plenty of it.
When stripped down, the shoestring budget comedy horror Basket Case was a tragic tale of brotherly love and the jealousy that comes with it. Since its release to video, it has gone on to acquire a miraculous cult following which belies its diminutive status and is now considered a classic of exploitation cinema. Under Frank Henenlotter’s inventive direction, his story took advantage of the discomfort people find with human deformity and shifts from the plain ridiculous to grindhouse grim, scoured in neon reds and blues, making the sleazy surroundings dirtier and all the more grungy. Belial was a remarkable piece of design; while ludicrous in appearance, Henenlotter’s stop-motion gore succ
eeded in evoking an unexpected degree of threat. Basket Case was later known as House of Freaks and was to inspire a couple of sequels, Basket Case 2 (1990) and Basket Case 3: The Progeny (1991), both directed by Frank Henenlotter.
AT THE DAWN of the twenty-second century, Japan has fallen into social and economic turmoil. With unemployment spiralling out of control, Japanese youth begin to rebel and turn their back on school. The government’s reaction is to pass legislation designed to terrify the country into a semblance of order and so comes the draconian edict they call the BR Act. Its stipulations result in a group of forty-two students from a Japanese high school being ordered to compete in a new reality television show. They are each given a bag which contains a randomly selected weapon and some food and water. After collecting their bag, they are then sent to an isolated island to kill one another in a bizarre game that in three days’ time will leave only one survivor. An electronic collar fitted with explosives ensures that each of the students complies with the rules; any defiance means instant death. While Shuya, Noriko, and Kawada try to escape the island, their psychotic classmates begin to play this bloodthirsty game.
Veteran Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale was based on the controversial novel written by former reporter Koushun Takami. Although his book went on to become a bestseller in his homeland, its violent content led to its expulsion from the literary competition for which it had been intended. The judges were unable to see beyond the obvious excess in Takami’s thought-provoking work and failed to recognize the meaninglessness in his brutal portrayal. Sadly, for Kinji Fukasaku this would be his final film, having directed over sixty movies in an impressive career spanning forty years. When Battle Royale was being prepared for its Japanese release, Fukasaku insisted that its bloody display laced with the darkest of humour should be open for teenagers over the age of fifteen; he was resolute in his insistence that this age group should be aware of the damage they were causing across the country. The censors, however, were unhappy with its excess, fearing it trivialized youth violence, and would only make it available to the over-eighteens; there was also the fear this film could be the catalyst that stirred up riots among an already troubled Japanese youth. Fukasaku was incensed; he went away to produce an edited version so that a younger audience could become aware of the message contained in his film. He managed to convince the censors and the movie opened to audiences of fifteen and over, although many observers consider the edited version to be more brutal than the original. Due to its contentious nature, Battle Royale’s critical reception across Japan was somewhat mixed and following the Columbine High School killings of 1999 Fukasaku’s film had a troubled time in the United States. However, its success at the Japanese box office was to produce a sequel in 2003, Battle Royale II: Requiem. Fukasaku would shoot only one scene before his death; it was left to his son Kenta, who had written both screenplays, to bring this follow-up to fruition.
MORE THAN HALF a century ago in the year 1927, in scenes reminiscent of the classic Universal horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s, torch-wielding villagers descend on the Louisiana home of a painter named Schweick (Antoine Saint-John), a man who had stepped too far into the darkness. They force him down into the depths of the cellar, where he warns them that the house was constructed over one of the seven gateways to hell, and claims only he has the power to save them. The mob refuse to listen to him, and in a graphic scenes that had already become a trademark of Lucio Fulci’s cinematic work, they chain him up and take a whip to his body before impaling his arms and legs in an excruciating crucifixion.
Over half a century later, a New Yorker, Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl), inherits the same house, and prepares to refurbish the old place. As the build gets under way, there is a series of inexplicable occurrences. A painter falls to his death, another man suffers a broken neck and then a plumber uncovers Schweick’s atrophied corpse hidden behind a wall in the cellar. He may have met his death over fifty years before, but Schweick is still intent on revenge and is brutal in his gouging of the plumber’s eyes. Lisa is later advised by a blind woman, by the name of Emily (Sarah Keller), she must leave this accursed house. This same woman was also seen during the film’s prelude, in what was an appreciably Lovecraftian series of frames. Dr John McCabe (David Warbeck) and his assistant Dr Harris (Al Cliver) are baffled as they examine the two corpses found in the cellar. At the same time, McCabe finds himself attracted to Lisa and tries to help her in understanding these mystifying events. They soon have to come to terms with the shattering fact that the gateway to hell lies beneath the house and it has been thrown open to allow the dead to walk the Earth. A mob of zombies, in truth no more than half a dozen in what was a comparatively low budget presentation, are seen lurching towards the bewildered couple, calling for them to dart down one of the hospital’s many stairwells only to stumble into the basement of the hotel. Still hoping to escape this seeming hallucination, they climb through a hole in the wall, only to become lost on the shadowed plains of Hell, blighted by the knowledge they will never find their way home.
Lucio Fulci’s E Tu Vivrai Nel Terrore – L’aldilà has also been released as the disappointingly abridged Seven Doors of Death and marked the closing instalment in his zombie quartet, preceded by Zombi 2, also known as Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), City of the Living Dead (1980) and House by the Cemetery (1981). It is also acknowledged as the finale to his unofficial Gates of Hell series, heralded by City of the Living Dead and House by the Cemetery. Make-up man Giannetto De Rossi overcame the derisory budget to create an impressive series of effects that shocked the audience and ultimately accentuated the brutality in a feature that would have repercussions across the globe. The cast had their eyeballs gouged, were subjected to impalement, had their tongues ripped out, their heads blown off, and as in all Italian splatter movies of note gasped as their throats were duly severed. It contained the excess that fans of the genre craved and was enhanced by the surreal photography of Sergio Salvati, who observed a perception for the Gothic and enhanced the apocalyptic milieu with a succession of haunting images; yet when required he remained crisp and made extraordinary use of zoom focusing to exacerbate the shocks.
In his quest to make an “Absolute Film” where image and sound transcend the movie’s individual elements, Fulci adopted a nonlinear structure to his narrative, causing absolute frustration for the casual viewer. The plot at times appeared devoid of logic and was open in its defiance of convention, yet its visual splendour continues to beguile. Ideas once espoused by Antonin Artoud along with the writings of H. P. Lovecraft were to have a major influence on this feature; indeed Artoud’s controversial approach was evident in so much of Fulci’s work from these years. As founder of “The Theatre of Cruelty”, Artoud had looked to “Restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based on must be understood”. Fulci looked to use these ideas and succeeded in his damning vision that lay beyond the Gates of Hell.
His extreme visualization of violence again attracted the regulatory encumbrance of the censors. In the United Sates, his film was heavily toned down and issued as Seven Doors of Death. On its release to cinemas in the United Kingdom, it was edited by one minute and thirty-nine seconds, removing much of the film’s excess. Only eighteen months after its release to video, its explicit content had The Beyond pilloried as a video nasty in November 1983. It was later removed from the offending register in April 1985 but wasn’t to find distribution in its unedited form until 2002. Fulci has been the target of much criticism, but the influence of this movie can be seen in Sam Raimi’s exploits with The Evil Dead (1983) and it was also to have a bearing on images seen in both Hellraiser (1987) and Dellamorte Dellamore (1996).
SAM DALMAS (TONY Musante), an American writer working in Rome with his girlfriend Giulia (Suzy Kendall), witnesses the attempted murder of Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi), the wife of a galler
y owner, by a black-gloved assailant wearing a raincoat. Trapped between two automatic glass doors, Sam is unable to come to her aid and can only watch in horror as the villain makes his escape. The investigating officers are forced to take possession of Sam’s passport, believing he holds a piece of information that is key to leading them to the arrest of the man they suspect of several other murders in the city. Although Monica survived the attack, Sam can’t get the events of that night out of his mind and it is no surprise when both he and his girlfriend become pawns in the killer’s deadly game. When he receives a telephone call from the assassin he picks upon a particular sound, which turns out to be the cry of a rare species they call “The Bird with Crystal Plumage”. There is only one such bird in Rome and that resides in the city zoo. As Argento toys with his audience, the police go through the usual list of deviant suspects while Sam, who is living on the edge of his nerves, continues his investigation, culminating in a taut chase through a darkened building.
The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books) Page 8