The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  When Daly later discusses the tune with a psychiatrist friend, the analyst hypothesizes on an association with a harrowing event from the killer’s past. Using this information Daly continues with his investigation, tracing the music to a novel, “House of the Screaming Child”, written by Amanda Righetti (Giuliana Calandra), which makes reference to a murder. Minutes before he makes her acquaintance, Righetti is stabbed by the silent assassin and then drowned in a bath of scalding water. As she dies, she manages to scribe a message in the condensation on the wall of the steamy bathroom. As she had hoped, Daly finds the message, but how could the killer have known he was on his way to see her? It is almost as if he is being shadowed. Undeterred he lays his hands on a photograph of the novel’s haunted house to further his quest in determining the whereabouts of this mysterious domicile. We soon learn the house has been deserted for more than twenty years. As he rummages through the rooms he comes upon a young child’s drawing of a little boy standing over a dead man, a bloodstained knife held firmly in his hand. The picture contains a vital clue, but the murders won’t stop until Daly finally confronts this psychologically disturbed killer.

  Dario Argento’s film was first released in Italy as Profondo Rosso, and would later acquire the name The Deep Red Hatchet Murders. This landmark giallo is considered by many to rate alongside Suspiria as his finest masterpiece. In its day, it was looked upon as an engrossing murder mystery, enthralling in its use of Gothic visuals, while engaging with an abundance of ingenious set pieces each brought to life by skilful cinematography and an atmosphere augmented by the outlandish discord of the Goblin music score. However, even though Argento unnerved his audience, disturbing them in often baroque settings, and encouraging his well-chosen supporting cast to heighten the degree of perturbation, his work was dismissed by critics as being a disjointed mess. His detractors failed to comprehend the elaborate nature of his approach to both violence and suspense. Throughout this feature, he demonstrated an acute precision in building his audience’s sense of anticipation and then delighted in the cruelty of the kill. True to the giallo he drew out the murder scenes, relishing Righetti’s scalding and the psychiatrist’s brutal beating, culminating in his being stabbed by the customary long-bladed knife. The splatter fan would lick his lips as throats were lacerated and teeth collided with solid marble, but he would also be conferred an intriguing narrative with intricate twists and turns.

  TWO MEN ARE seen hurling a corpse into the Mississippi River. They return to their car and drive away into the night. Elsewhere in St Louis, Susan Narcross (Debi Chaney) arrives home from an evening out to find her roommate Jenny Thompson (Pat Knapko) impaled to a door with a spear. Jenny had brought back a rather creepy looking fellow to the apartment for sex, but he was unable to overcome his impotency and when taunted stabbed her to death. Detectives Sergeant Paul Dollinger (Nick Panouzis) and Larry Mead (Terry Ten Broeck) are handed the case and their interview with Susan reveals her friend had dated a man named Charlie (Turk Chekovsky), who had been in the girls’ office earlier in the day looking for a job. As the detectives try to find their man, Charlie has stolen a car and picked up a long-legged hitchhiker (Letty Garris). When they arrive at the beach, she decides to take a swim in the sea. Charlie has other things on his mind; he follows her into the surf and throttles her. As he continues on his journey, he meets a young farm girl who seems to enjoy flirting with him. Her enticing behaviour is rewarded with a pitchfork through the neck. The scene is then set for the slaughter of a woman in her bath, but he ends up stabbing her delivery boy. While working at her office, pretty Susan uncovers a link between the psychopathic Charlie, a Vietnam vet, her boss Andrews and a secret organization of vigilantes who have served in Vietnam and are intent on bringing their own kind of justice down on those who would disobey the law.

  Delirium was one of the first slasher movies to follow in the wake of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and would have received greater accolade if it had not been such a confusing hybrid. The first half of the movie reveals Charlie as an unnerving killer, a man who evokes fear, but the storyline completely threw its audience to become a post-Vietnam action thriller. The early scenes in this film were bitterly misogynistic with themes reminiscent of the following year’s Maniac and Don’t Go in the House, but the change in pace halfway through the proceedings made it likeable to a poor man’s Star Chamber (1983). Peter Maris made graphic use of his killings almost a year before Friday the 13th, but because of his film’s confused script and poor production it was forgotten and never credited for its explicit display. The sexualized murder and gore were to attract the attention of the British authorities, as was the bizarre use of the tune “Approaching Menace” written by Neil Richardson and used in the long-running quiz Mastermind, when it was released to video in July 1982. The vicious misogyny placed it on the DPP’s list of video nasties in the November of 1983; it wasn’t removed until May 1985. It was later released to video in 1987 as Psycho Puppet with a wide range of cuts, and as a piece of weird cinema is yet to see official release to DVD. While Delirium is regarded as a failure, Maris would continue in a fruitful career as a low-budget film director.

  THE CAMERA ZOOMS from within a skull to bring the focus onto a man who is chatting ever so politely on the telephone. As the conversation unfolds, a knock comes to the door and thus enters a zombie. Ever so calmly, the man picks up his gun and places a bullet into the creature’s head. The conversation resumes as the camera pans onto the adjacent cemetery.

  The man on the phone is Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett), the caretaker of Buffalora’s cemetery, a town with little appreciation for this man and his work. The townsfolk have a cruel habit of teasing him about the lack of love in his life. Every night, with his mute assistant Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro) at his side, he disposes of the living dead who inexplicably climb from the grave seven days after their burial. Francesco’s isolated lifestyle does have its moments; he falls in love with many women (each played by Anna Falchi) but his passionate affairs never seem to end particularly well. The first of his loves is recently widowed and still has a voracious appetite for sex. When her dead husband comes back from the grave, the dastardly fellow ends her life in a fit of jealous rage. Dellamorte mourns her death but she is later consigned to his cemetery, before the seven days are over, so she very soon makes her return. This causes much concern for the cemetery’s keeper. Then there follows the mayor’s personal assistant, with a rather cynical take on politicians, and the amorous college girl. Surrounded by such intensity, Dellamorte is driven to the point of madness. In his deranged state, he threatens those who had once made fun of him; but someone beyond the cemetery is murdering the people of this town.

  On its release in the United States, this film was known as Cemetery Man and sadly failed to attract much attention. However, in subsequent years it was to garner a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to Gianni Romoli’s episodic interpretation of an Italian comic book series and Michele Soavi’s enigmatic direction. His vision breathes a life into the screen, freely fashioning wide angles and then engaging a precision in detail engendered by the expert use of slow motion. Soavi had been a strong protégé of the celebrated Dario Argento, but regrettably would only direct four films before retiring and becoming distanced from the film industry. In this his final film, he reflected on life and death invoking an unlikely blend of horror, comedy and romance. He also brought out the best in the aspiring Rupert Everett, a name not normally associated with horror, but who nonetheless portrayed a man bordering on madness with a tenebrous sense of wit.

  Another name coupled with Dario Argento was also at work in this film: special effects man Sergio Stivaletti. He was assigned to create the mist that loomed over the graves, making this a suitably atmospheric locale, and then went on to produce the gore and an assemblage of zombies who truly looked as if they had spent seven days buried beneath the ground. Dellamorte Dellamore is a unique deliberation on life and death, one that t
ranscends this frequently grisly genre.

  ON THE BERLIN subway, a young student Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) tries to evade a mysterious pursuer disguised in a demonic mask, who to her surprise offers her tickets for the reopening of the ageing Metropol cinema. She talks one of her friends into going along, even though she has no idea as to what to expect on the night. While they stand in the excited crowd they meet George (Urbano Barberini) and Ken (Karl Zinny) and decide it might be a good idea to tag along with them. As they hang around in the lobby, a woman is observed trying on a mask similar to that seen in the film’s introductory sequence; it leaves a series of scratches on her face. When the assembled throng finally get in to see the film, it opens with the camera panning over an eerie graveyard where Nostradamus was said to have been laid to rest. The on-screen terror becomes increasingly disturbing as a demonic species violently rip and tear into their defenceless quarry, stripping them of their humanity to transform them into murderous beasts. The woman who was cut by the mask leaves her friend to the film’s grisly excess, while she exits to the bathroom. The scratches on her face has started to worry her; as she examines herself in the mirror, festering pus explodes and she is thrown into a tumultuous transformation. When she leaves the bathroom, she is no longer human, having been turned into one of the onscreen demons. The creature makes her way to her seat and then savages her friend. Within minutes, her brutalized companion endures the same transmutation to emerge as one of the demon spawn and sets about the slaughter of the screaming crowd. Those who can escape dash to the exits, only to find they have been bricked up. As the massacre turns into a splatter frenzy, the demonic infestation spreads on through the cinema and out into the streets of Berlin, leaving the youngsters to fight for their lives.

  With the triumph of Dawn of the Dead, Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava were eager for further success in the United States. Their film Demons was to epitomize so much of the cheesy teenage culture of the 1980s but did have a rock soundtrack that included music from the big names of the day – Saxon, Accept, Mötley Crüe, Billy Idol and Rick Springfield. Their songs played out to a diabolically amusing horror movie riding on the most meagre of plots, whose sole purpose rested on having another set of zombie-like creatures run wild and swell the gore factor of this already bloodthirsty decade. The mystery man from the beginning of the film was played by Argento’s protégé Michele Soavi, who would soon rise as a director to complete his masterpiece Dellamorte Dellamore (1994). The idea of the film within a film would take a different turn a couple of years later when Bigas Luna’s almost forgotten Angustia saw a preposterously limited release. Argento and Bava’s film proved popular to the point where a sequel was released the following year, Dèmoni 2 L’Incubo Ritorna also known as Demons 2. A confusing series of unofficial sequels flooded the market during the years that followed to take advantage of the franchise: La Casa Dell’Orco or The Ogre House or Demons III: The Ogre (1988); Soavi’s own La Chiesa, The Church, Demons 3 (1989) and Umberto Lenzi’s Dèmoni 3 (1991) also known as Black Demons. Then came Soavi’s La Setta or The Schism or Demons 4, The Devil’s Daughter (1991); the remake of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) entitled La Maschera del Demonio, The Mask of the Demon or Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil (1989) and Il Gatto Nero, The Black Cat or Demons 6: De Profundis / From The Deep (1989).

  ROBERT-ADRIAN PEJO’S The Road to Eden wasn’t going to need endless sessions on the casting couch, but its unsettling content may well have been inspired by Nacho Cerda’s Aftermath (1994). His documentary was an elegy to those who have passed from us and revealed the procedures that take place in the time immediately after death. In a similar way to Aftermath, a mortician steps into the spotlight; this time, however, he will examine real corpses and will observe a solemn respect for those laid before him. Janos Keserü is a senior dissector and mortician in Budapest; death has been at his side since childhood for his father was dedicated to the same profession and from him he learned the intricacies of vivisecting a body and putting it back together again ready for the family funeral. The law in Hungary stipulates the cause of death be determined for everyone who dies. This entails that every corpse is very carefully dissected. While Pejo filmed Keserü`s routine in an impassive manner, the images detailing the removal of the brain and the deep incisions into the torso are far more gruesome than those we have relished in this selection of splatter movies. In these eighty minutes, we come to acquire both knowledge and respect for Keserü and his sombre trade; sadly, this record of his work is a rarity, and is only available on VHS with distribution limited to Germany.

  BY 1974, THERE had been insane killers by the drove cutting and hacking their way through so many almost forgotten celluloid features, but this was the first film to try to tell the true story of Ed Gein, the man whose traumatized life story provided the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Ezra Cobb is a hopelessly damaged individual who continues to look after his domineering mother somewhere in the American Midwest. His mother’s religious fanaticism has turned to become mean and spiteful, exhibiting an unhealthy contempt for women. Even though he is subjected to her bitter cruelty on a daily basis, his mother remains the font in his downtrodden life.

  When she passes away, Ezra is inconsolable yet even in death he can still hear her voice whispering through the rooms of the family homestead. It has been a year since his mother died, but his condition has already become delusional. Such is his deranged state he exhumes her body and returns her to the comfort of their home; for Ezra things are now just the way they used to be. The sound of her voice seems ever stronger as his cold gaze becomes all the more distant. He takes to digging up other corpses, lovingly restoring and embalming them, before sitting them at his mother’s side. He also borrows another leaf from Gein’s book, using them as internal decor and then develops a taste for cannibalism.

  It doesn’t take long before his pursuits turn to hunting down live victims, in the hope of appeasing his mother’s endless scolding. As he relaxes in this newfound perverse domesticity, his neighbours introduce him to a woman whose husband has recently passed away. In a darkly comedic episode, she attempts to seduce him and then pays the price. So follows the barmaid, who is tied to a chair and entertained at a dinner table attended by rotting corpses in a scene akin to that same year’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The distraught barmaid is then privy to the sight of Ezra garbed in the skin of a dead woman, seventeen years before The Silence of the Lambs.

  Having raised the money to produce Deranged from promoting concerts for bands such as Led Zeppelin, Tom Karr immediately ran into difficulties. Bob Clarke, the director of Black Christmas (1974), declined the offer to assume the director’s chair fearing the subject matter in Alan Ormsby’s script was just too disturbing. On its American release, the distributors were shameless in their exploitation of this disturbing feature, renaming Jeff Gillen and Ormsby’s low-budget feature Deranged: The Confessions of a Necrophile. While In the Light of the Moon (2000) was a more accurate portrayal of Gein’s life, Deranged was appreciably darker, conveying a far more chilling sense of unhinged realism. It was never to be described as a particularly gory movie, although its kills are still acknowledged to have been well observed, and while it was immediately overshadowed by the visceral power of Tobe Hooper’s seminal movie, it set the tone for the generation to come.

  This was one of special effects artist Tom Savini’s earliest assignments and coupled with Jack McGowan’s cinematography that melded the depth in the shadows with muted lighting they helped to form an unsettling portrait. Together with his director, McGowan was able to create a suitably creepy atmosphere and when required he captured the desperation that came with the frantic chase scenes. It was, of course, Roberts Blossom who brought the man at the centre of this film to life. He produced a genuinely credible portrayal of an unstable mind with a capacity for both intense brutality and heartfelt pathos. Following its release to the drive-in cinemas in 1974, Deranged disappeared almost without trace with the
negative feared to have been lost. It was later recovered in Florida, but wasn’t completely restored which meant much of Savini’s gory effects were omitted until the 1990s. In 2007, a Thirtieth Anniversary Collector’s Edition was released in Germany; unfortunately the US version had to remove a brain-scooping scene to receive its R rating.

  LAURA CRAWFORD’S CAREER as an actress/model is rudely interrupted by a gang of kidnappers as she prepares for her latest role in South America. They steal her away into the jungle and demand a huge ransom. To ensure she doesn’t escape, the nubile Laura is guarded by a totem pole-styled monster who calls himself “The Devil”. She is forced to endure an unholy amount of degrading torment at the hands of the monster before the gang get their ransom, and then has to watch as bound maidens are offered to the beast, one of whom he greedily devours very early on in the film. Finally Peter Weston (Al Cliver), the devil hunter, assisted by his Vietnam vet friend, fly by helicopter into the heat of the jungle to stage a rescue.

  Jesus Franco returned for another piece of Eurotrash in a film whose original title Sexo Cannibal left little to the imagination. For almost the first half hour, the rushed script made very little sense, but Franco’s eye was set on exploiting the sleaze and capitalizing on the cannibal craze, which was still in its prime. The gore was by no means as intense as that splattered across its contemporaries, with the obvious exception of the labia eating scene, but the nudity of the dancing natives and the two female leads gave the sleaze-mongers a peak at the bare flesh they so badly craved. The scenes of violence were rife with the brutality that had become intrinsic to these features, while the locations were unusually stunning and indeed added to any sense of atmosphere. The pacing, however, was typically tedious and hampered further still by unnecessary sub-plots. Franco was obviously keen to get his shoot completed as quickly as he could, to allow him to move onto his next money-making venture, because there are numerous errors in continuity and Al Cliver actually took an impromptu tumble. For Franco fans such clangers were nothing new, and it wasn’t surprising when this film, also known as The Man Hunter and Mandingo Manhunter, attracted the concerns of the DPP, although it had been around for almost three years when it was added to the Video Nasties list in August 1984. Franco’s film was to become one of the collectable DPP39s but modern audiences can now view his lurid contrivance without cuts.