To kakó, or Evil as it was billed outside its native Greece, was the country’s first encounter with the zombie apocalypse. When three construction workers stumble upon a hidden cave, they are attacked by an unseen force that rushes towards them in a sequence, which invites comparison with Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981). Although the team manage to escape the cave, none of them can remember what actually happened down there and it is obvious something in their demeanour has changed. As evening falls, the three go their separate ways only to undergo a shocking metamorphosis to rise as zombie-like creatures with an insatiable need to feed upon human flesh, turning their victims within seconds into the walking dead. In a few short days, the entire city of Athens falls to the ensuing carnage, while a few survivors try to escape this mindless bloodthirsty frenzy, leading to a truly dark finale that is rarely observed in American zombie cinema.
There was some genuine humour observed in this film, some of which was inspired by Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992), but it was essentially a brutally violent offering very much in the mould of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). With a hopelessly limited budget, Yorgos Noussias’s effects team returned to the seminal Dawn of the Dead (1978) in blowing away zombies’ heads, and then dishing up decapitations and disembowelments galore as they set out to annihilate anything that lived. His film moved at a fast pace even though the zombies can only shuffle through the Athens streets tracked by inventive camera work and split-screen editing. The cast eagerly embraced their roles, insisting the viewer roots for their escape from this infernal nightmare, but the denouement seeks to disturb, offering a doom-ridden finale. Noussias returned with more backing for a highly praised prequel, Evil – In the Time of Heroes (2009), starring Billy Zane, in which many of the actors apparently worked without pay.
THE EVIL DEAD was first introduced as a virtually unknown feature in 1978 entitled Within the Woods, created with the purpose of enticing potential investors to fund Sam Raimi’s idea for a horror movie. This short film had similarities with the motion picture it later spawned and included among the cast one Bruce Campbell. The Evil Dead was Raimi’s debut as a director and although its comic book-styled horror proved hugely controversial, he immediately distinguished himself, making an extraordinarily powerful movie with a very restrictive budget.
Five college kids, Ash (Bruce Campbell), his girlfriend Linda (Betsy Baker) and their friends Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss), Scott (Hal Delrich) and Shelly (Sarah York), spend the night in an isolated mountain cabin set in a deep forest. The cabin is strangely similar to the refuge shown in the classic Norwegian terror of 1958, Lake of the Dead (De Dødes Tjern), directed by Kåre Bergstrøm. As they make themselves comfortable, they find an ageing tome scribed in hieroglyphics sitting beside a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The tape, recorded by a professor of archaeology, warns of the evil incantations entered in the Sumerian “Book of the Dead”, and their power to invoke a malevolent force hidden in the woods. This force has but one desire, to possess and then corrupt those that it encounters. Once the malignancy has taken hold there is only one way it can ever be exorcized, by bodily dismemberment.
The students foolishly take little heed of the professor’s warning and all too soon the evil in the woods begins to sweep around the cabin, with Shelly the first to be affected. She is transformed into a murderous crone. Poor Cheryl is then lured into the woods; chasing through the darkness she stumbles and is horrifically tree-raped by a demonically possessed branch. This single incident would in time arouse the wrath of censors across the globe and assure the film’s notoriety. It is now the students realize there is no escape; the bridge leading back to town has been torn down. One by one each of them falls foul of this destructive presence, and turns into a deranged abomination. When Linda succumbs to the evil force, Ash can’t bring himself to take the chainsaw to her neck, so instead he buries her in the woods. This isn’t the best idea he has ever had and when she returns the evil within has become so much more intense. Blasting and chopping, Ash makes it all the way to the shattering finale when he catches sight of “The Book of the Dead” falling into the fire. As the flames destroy the book, its demonic creations are seen to disintegrate. He now staggers to the door, the sole survivor of this frenzied assault. As he gathers his thoughts in the calm of the early morning light, the evil once again rises from the earth. Gathering pace through the woods its malevolence bears down on Ash, who turns to the camera, his face wracked in terror, just before the screen goes black.
Despite the limited resources and the eighteen months of filming, Sam Raimi produced a fast-paced shocker that terrified his audience and ultimately proved a milestone in horror cinema. The outrageous overacting combined with the excessive gore saw this comic book-styled extravaganza push back the boundaries, and all for $375,000. However, by inadvertently challenging the acceptability of such violent excess, Raimi alarmed the distributors and in due course provoked the censors. There were major concerns regarding the misogyny in the tree rape, a scene Raimi has since admitted he regrets. The film’s graphic penchant for violence and gore caused many American distributors to stay well away from its excessive premise and not until the Cannes Film Festival did The Evil Dead acquire a distributor. The film was championed by Stephen King but predictably ran into serious difficulties in the UK, even though it was duly recognized for its parody of horror and almost passed uncut, but was then burdened by even more problems in Germany. Its inevitable inclusion on the list of video nasties, with Sam Raimi prepared to defend his film in an English Court of Law, further added to its notoriety and generated an enthusiastic following on the black market. A heavily edited version was later made available in 1992 but in recent years Anchor Bay Entertainment has been able to release the film unrated.
The film was followed by the sequels, Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, with a third in the planning for 2013. A stage musical has also been produced along with a comic book adaptation published by Dark Horse.
AGROUP OF SPANISH monks accompanied by well-armed Conquistadors make their way along a southern Californian beach as their cohorts unload crates from the incoming rowboats. Their path takes them to a hooded figure bearing a sword. This man is Lorenzo Esteban, a heretic exiled from his native Spain and excommunicated from the Catholic church who has at his beck and call a fanatical set of followers. He refuses to renounce his pursuit of evil and is soon after seen rousing his frenzied disciples. As their chant rises to an impassioned crescendo, Esteban stands behind a partially clad young woman, raises his sword and brings it down to remove her head, which flies through the air to land, as the scene changes, as a football in the present day of 1981.
In a military academy a game of football is taking place and well-intentioned Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard) is about to hand victory to the opposition. This will gain him even more abuse from a bullying gang led by Bubba (Don Stark). Stanley is an easy target, a downtrodden orphan whose clumsy ways have made him an outcast at West Andover Academy. Here he is humiliated by Bubba and his lamebrain associates, and suffers similar torment from the teaching staff, the coach, the colonel, as well as the reverend. As a punishment Stanley is sent to the chapel to clean a darkened cellar; there he finds a book in a secret room that details the Black Mass. The book, written in an age-old language, is revealed to be a journal kept by the evil Esteban. Stanley becomes obsessed with this and the other strange artefacts hidden away in this old room and uses a computer to translate the incantations. In so doing, he unleashes an evil force to take revenge on those who have for such a long time plagued him. Estaban returns to possess Stanley’s body and as he once again seizes hold of his sword to inflict a bloodthirsty carnage, a pack of murderous wild boars pour forth from the bowels of the earth. For the last ten minutes of this film, Stanley enjoys his moment only to be damned to an eternity locked in the computer’s memory.
This was the beginning of Eric Weston’s time in the film and television industry and Evilspeak also known as Evilspeaks and Comput
er Murders, proved a rather amusing gorefest. While his movie adopts so many of the accepted clichés of the day, following on from the bullying observed in Carrie (1976) he introduces a new monster, a home computer that becomes the villainous tool of the piece. This was at a time long ago when such technology was only just beginning to encroach on our everyday lives. From Joseph Garofalo’s script entitled “The Foundling”, Eric Weston brought in the possessed computer and then shot his film over a three-week period, in a condemned South Central Los Angeles church, which burned to the ground only three days later.
Clint Howard had already been in film and television for eighteen years when Evilspeak went into production, but this was his first major role in a performance that had the audience firmly on his side. His murderous display was the gore-monger’s delight and when it was released uncut to video in August 1983 it was eagerly snapped up. However, when the Video Recordings Act entered the statute books its excessive finale coupled with Satanic themes saw it banned as a video nasty in March 1984. It wasn’t to see release to video until 1987, when the BBFC insisted on a multitude of edits running to over three and a half minutes, beginning with the prologue’s decapitation. There then followed edits to a neck breaking in the basement, the boars’ attack in the bathroom and the subsequent devouring of guts, the reverend’s nail to the head, Stanley splattering the head of one of his teachers and the boars consuming the students, along with numerous other decapitations. The BBFC’s stipulations were to diminish so much of the impact of Weston’s original idea; but in 2004, an extended version of the film was released, thankfully restoring every single moment of gore.
THE OPENING SCENES reveal a suspiciously paranoid Paul Martin (Udo Keir) putting on a pair of rubber gloves before having sex with his girlfriend Suzanne (Fiona Richmond). Following the success of his first novel, Paul has withdrawn to a quiet house in the Essex countryside in the hope of bringing his next work to completion. His agent needs another bestseller and hires a beautiful secretary, Linda (Linda Hayden), to work with the self-possessed writer. Linda is a highly sexed young woman and, when away from her employer’s instruction, is taken to openly masturbating in the fields that surround the house and is seen to have an enflamed lesbian encounter with the statuesque Suzanne. There is, however, something very strange about Linda and it isn’t wise to cross her path as two youths discover after they have raped her. As the body count begins to rise, Paul learns to his cost that he has made a huge mistake in bringing the psychotic Linda into his home.
Exposé, which has also assumed the names Trauma and The House on Straw Hill, played as a psychological thriller and with its profusion of sex and violence was counted as part of that decade’s lust for cinematic exploitation. Partly financed by adult entertainment and property mogul Paul Raymond, the publicity surrounding the film promised “Nothing, but nothing, is left to the imagination . . . ”, casting British sex queen Fiona Richmond in her first major role. Although her part in the script was secondary to that of Linda Hayden, Richmond’s popularity in Raymond’s line of top-shelf men’s magazines automatically gave her the bigger billing. Hayden, whose acting ability throughout surpassed her colleagues’, later distanced herself from the film as she pursued a successful career in the theatre and national television. Her role was reminiscent of Susan George in Straw Dogs (1971), with her murderous revenge on the low-life rapists coming two years before Camille Keaton’s bloody reprisal in I Spit on Your Grave (1978).
The low ceilings were matched only by the diminutive budget, but the house afforded the film a claustrophobic feel, while the miles of open fields evoked a sense of hopeless isolation, allowing director James Kenelm Clarke to focus on the development of his characters and expound his plot by way of a series of highly compelling scenes. By modern standards, the violence appears tame, but the throat slitting, along with the bloody shotgun murders and the slashing of the naked Fiona Richmond in the shower as the blood poured across her breasts, down past her vagina, were a cause for concern among the authorities. On its initial cinematic release, over three minutes were removed from both the sex scenes and stabbings to make it suitable for distribution as an “X”-rated feature. Following the video explosion of the early 1980s, an unedited version made its way into the country around March 1984 only to be almost immediately banned as a video nasty. The current DVD release is still missing fifty-one seconds, with edits to the rape scene, which still contains a suggestion that Linda was seen to be enjoying her ordeal, as well as the blood dripping onto Suzanne’s breasts. Exposé remains a popular entry for horror enthusiasts on these shores, but it is has been largely neglected across the rest of the world. It is in essence a very British affair, albeit mean-spirited, trying to find a place among the more exotic Euro-exploitation of the mid-1970s.
AMURDEROUS RAPIST stalks the night of Miami in search of the vulnerable, abusing them with sordid telephone calls before dispatching them with an array of oh-so-familiar sharpened weapons. While the calls are not quite as sinister as those that terrorized Black Christmas (1974), they still serve as a chilling calling card. A woman’s dead body is soon discovered in swampland and then Debbie Ormsley (Gwen Lewis) and her boyfriend Jeff (Timothy Hawkins) are butchered in the privacy of her home. Local news reporter Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes) begins to suspect her neighbour, Stanley Herbert (John DiSanti), whose behaviour has become strangely erratic. The killings continue with Herbert seemingly leaving evidence for Jane to discover. No one will listen to her, and to make matters worse Jane fears for her defenceless younger sister, Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The child’s psychosomatic injuries have left her deaf, blind and mute as a result of her abduction several years before. Jane will discover facets of her own hitherto undisclosed personality before this game of cat and mouse is skilfully drawn to its climactic finale.
Eyes of a Stranger would be director Ken Wiederhorn’s second horror movie following Shock Waves (1977), which only ever saw very limited release; he later returned to frighten his audiences with Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988) and seven episodes of Freddy’s Nightmares between 1989 and 1990. Here, Wiederhorn managed to create a suspense-charged movie very much in the Hitchcock vein containing key elements of the brutality and voyeuristic sleaze that had already enticed the growing army of fans for this kill-crazed cinematic experience. The filming techniques and cleverly staged lighting combined to leave a grimly washed out tone, which reflected his movie’s intentionally disreputable character. This was never more so in evidence than when the killer’s distorted image was observed pressed up against the glass of the shower prior to Wiederhorn building the tension to deliver his feature’s closing scenes. The violence was excessive, particularly during the episode when a woman was attacked and then raped in her own apartment, followed by the blood bath in a lovers’ lane washed down with the memorable head in the fish-tank. On its release, much of Tom Savini’s expertise was once again censored, which was to dilute so much of the film’s vicious impact. The uncut version was recently released in Warner’s Twisted Terror Collection, giving horror fans the chance to see Wiederhorn and Savini’s grand design just as it should have been three decades before. Eyes of a Stranger will also be remembered for a young Jennifer Jason Leigh, who in her first major role in film produced a highly credible performance.
DR GÉNESSIER, TO his friends and associates, is a highly reputable skin graft surgeon; his basement surgery, however, hides a terrible secret. Young girls have also been going missing on the streets of Paris. The culprit it turns out is the doctor’s daughter, Louise, who by day works as an assistant at the family clinic. She scours the streets of Paris looking to befriend young girls, before leading them to their macabre fate in the lower echelons of her father’s remote mansion. Once the doctor has incapacitated these hapless girls, he surgically removes their facial skin then transplants the tissue onto the face of his other daughter, Christiane. The unfortunate girl has been horribly disfigured in an accident some time before, an incident for which he
r father was responsible. The scars are so unsightly she is forced to hide herself away in the darkened manse and secrete her injuries behind a white mask. In his search for perfection, the guilt ridden Dr Génessier continues to fail and more young girls soon lose their lives.
Les Yeux Sans Visage represented a first for French cinema; up until this time, no one else in the country had seriously considered making a horror movie. British horror films such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958) had already proved very popular with French filmgoers and in their wake Jules Borkon looked to profit from this recent wave of grisly interest. His director, Georges Franju, was always at odds with those who looked upon his film as little more than a horror movie; his vision, he insisted, was one of “anguish”. The abhorrence detailed in each skin graft was reminiscent of the many incarnations of the Frankenstein creation, but the more discerning would have also distinguished a similar pathos between the so-called monster of the Universal years and that of Christiane.
Splatter purists would be disappointed by an appreciable lack of blood in evidence in the doctor’s basement; but in its day this would have been far too much for the squeamish French censors. Its premise, however, still worked to disturb and was intensified by the cinematography of Eugene Schüfftans. He was inspired by the darker elements of German expressionism, imparting the Villa Génessier an air of tenebrous despair, with superlative use of light and shadow, to create the impression that this was a prison from which there was no hope of escape. For all of his craft, Schüfftans would be rebuked by French reviewers, who were now drawn to the new wave and tired of what were considered outmoded techniques. Franju, in turn, employed a subtlety to shape a nightmarish air that echoed the truly reprehensible nature of Génessier’s misguided toil. Only when necessary did he deign to shock. You can only imagine the dismay felt by his audience as the doctor sliced into the beauteous faces of his many victims. The seeming success of the operation would have momentarily served to assuage this jolt to the senses, only to see the anguish to which Franju referred fracture Christiane’s delicate features as they tear apart only weeks after her operation. These scenes ingeniously reflect the cruelty of the Génessier described in Jean Redon’s original novel, a trait Franju had to play very carefully so as not to offend the censors in both France and Germany. The result, however, was one of heartbreak for the distraught Christiane, whose tragedy was cast at the very centre of this morbid drama.
The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books) Page 21