The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  Hideshi Hino returned to direct the fourth short feature in the series, Mermaid in a Manhole or Manhoru no naka no Ningyo (1988), which had an extended running time of fifty-seven minutes. His tale of a grief-stricken painter (Shigeru Saiki) was based on one of his own manga. Having recently lost his wife, the painter returns to the river he played in as a child only to find it has been turned into a foul-smelling sewer. There he meets the mermaid (Mari Somei) who inspired him all those years ago. She has been stuck in the sewer for so long she has become infected, so he takes her back to his home in the hope of reviving her in the clean water of his bath. As she writhes seductively in the water, her illness soon takes a turn for the worse and the boils on her skin become pus-ridden bloody ruptures. Taking body art to the extreme, the artist uses the discharge from these lacerations to commit her portrait to a peculiar canvas, but her health declines and she eventually dies.

  That same year Guinea Pig ventured into splatter-drenched science fiction in the Kazuhito Kuramoto directed Android of Notre Dame or Nôtoru Damu no andoroido (1988), which ran to fifty-one minutes. Kuramoto had already carved a reputation in the Japanese porn industry and on this outing told the disappointing story of a diminutive scientist by the name of Karawaza (Toshihiko Hino) who had struggled to discover the cure for his sister’s (Mio Takaki) failing heart. Up until this point, his research had been limited to experimenting with animals, but his endeavours now required a human guinea pig. A phone call from a man named Kato (Tomorowo Taguchi) provides the offer of the body of a recently deceased young girl in return for a substantial sum of money. The body soon turns up in a cardboard box! The experiment is again unsuccessful, despair turns to rage and then he hacks the broken body to pieces; Karawaza knows he needs a fresh corpse. When Kato reveals his true colours, the scientist is forced to escort him to his laboratory and he finally gets his live specimen.

  The final tale in the series, Devil Woman Doctor or Pita no akuma no joi-san (1990), from director Hajime Tabe, whose background was in computer games, amounted to little more than fifty-two minutes of comedic gore sketches. In tone it had more in common with the third Guinea Pig, He Never Dies (1986), including in its cast one of Japan’s leading transvestites Pîtâ, also known as Shinnosuke Ikehata in the part of the female doctor of the feature’s title. She has been assigned to a bizarre surgical enterprise that has been designed to treat only the most extreme cases, which necessitates a regular dosage of mutilation, blood, guts and, true to Guinea Pig’s original premise, death. If the first of her patients becomes anxious, his head explodes; her next victim, I mean patient, is plagued by an exploding heart. And so the slapstick would continue in a tale that was as far removed from the series’ graphic origins as could be imagined, but it still attracted a huge following. A seventh video Guinea Pig 7: Slaughter Special was released in 1991, collecting some of the most gruesome moments from the previous films, but the end alas was nigh.

  ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT 1963, police were called to a Victorian-styled house in the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois. There they found the body of seventeen-year-old Judith Myers, stabbed to death by her six-year-old brother, who, having returned from trick-or-treating, found her in bed with her boyfriend. The eerily silent child was incarcerated in the Smith’s Grove Sanatorium under the care of psychiatrist Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), the one person who recognized the evil locked in his soul. After being institutionalized for fifteen years and knowing he faced a life of imprisonment, Michael Myers (Nick Castle) escapes just days before Halloween. Only Loomis knows his patient is heading home to Haddonfield. Soon after his arrival, Michael slips off with a white mask. These impassive features proved an unwitting stroke of genius and bore an uncanny resemblance to the mask that haunted George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960). This would in due course make Michael’s deadpan presence all the more ominous.

  As bookish Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Michael’s younger sister, discusses plans for Halloween with her world-wise friends Lynda (P. J. Soles) and Annie (Nancy Kyes-Loomis), she is certain that someone just out of eyeshot is watching her. Unbeknown to her dismissive friends they are also being observed. Later that evening while Laurie babysits across the street, Annie is confronted by Michael, who, without a word of warning, strangles her and then slits her throat. When Lynda appears at the seemingly empty house accompanied by her boyfriend, they seize the opportunity to slip upstairs to the bedroom. This would be their last, for shortly afterwards both are killed by the masked Michael, Lynda as she tries in desperation to call Laurie. Perturbed by Lynda’s incoherent telephone call, Laurie crosses the street to the now darkened house. There she discovers the three dead bodies and Judith Myers’ tombstone. What follows is a game of life and death as the amoral sadist stalks the innocent heroine of the piece, while Loomis and the Sheriff frantically try to bring him down. The film bows out with a shot of the Myers’ house and Michael’s heavy breathing, his face still concealed behind his mask. The image carries a warning; Michael Myers is still out there, alive and intent on the kill.

  Filmed in only twenty-one days in the spring of 1978, John Carpenter’s Halloween is a masterpiece of cinematic horror. Carpenter had already directed two acknowledged cult classics with Dark Star (1974) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976); this time with co-writer Debra Hill he created a film that would assume the mantle as the first in a long line of slasher films, which drew its inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s time-honoured Psycho. Executive Producer Irwin Yablans had aims to make a horror movie to rival The Exorcist, and with his business partner, Moustapha Akkad, toyed with the idea of a psychotic killer that stalked babysitters. Based on this, Carpenter and Debra Hill prepared a script they called “The Babysitter Murders”. Yablans then suggested using a Halloween backdrop; thereafter the film became Halloween.

  Carpenter’s film both instigated and cleverly re-worked the principles that would become the blueprint for the slasher movies of the next decade. The first-person camera perspective was one of the many hallmarks of this feature and was used to disquieting effect as the silent assassin came to the fore, as he had four years before in Black Christmas. These houses weren’t the Gothic manses of horrors past; everyday settings were now the norm, and the audience were introduced to the chaste female heroine, who proved invariably more resourceful than her male counterparts. Unlike many of his successors, Carpenter chose restraint in his portrayal of graphic violence, thus embracing Yablans’ request “that the audience shouldn’t see anything. It should be what they thought they saw that frightens them”. To this effect, Carpenter conjured with the light and shadow, deceiving his audience as Michael prowled in the shadows akin to a childhood’s monster under the bed.

  The film succeeded in garnering a positive response from the audience for which it was intended, with comparatively very little advertising. The impression made by Carpenter’s moody, yet unsophisticated score was similar in effect to that of Mike Oldfield’s prelude to The Exorcist (1973) and Bernard Hermann’s strings for the Psycho (1960) shower scene and became synonymous with the movie’s unsettling premise. The columnists, however, proved more reticent. The movie’s detractors regarded Carpenter’s ideas as derivative, sourcing too much from Hitchcock, De Palma and Lewton; further there were those who felt it lacked the erudition observed only a few years before in Carrie (1976) and The Exorcist. Later analysis questioned the extensive use of the peeping tom-styled roving camera, which aroused fears of the audience identifying with the villain, as it had done before in José Mojica Marins’ Coffin Joe series and would do again in the Friday the 13th franchise as well as A Nightmare on Elm Street. There were those commentators who felt the film mirrored the declining moral values of America’s youth, inferring an allegorical connotation between sexual awakening and, at the hands of Michael Myers, the death of innocence. Carpenter has always been quick to dismiss such scrutiny.

  Halloween was the surrogate to seven sequels, along with a remake in 2007 followed by a 2009 sequel to the rem
ake entitled Halloween II, which has no bearing on the original released in 1981, which was the highest grossing horror movie of that particular year. The sequels, with the exception of Halloween III, were to continue the legend of Michael Myers but were continually censured owing to their explicit display of violence and gore. A mass-market paperback by Curtis Richards, entitled Halloween, was published by Bantam Books in 1979, followed by a video game for the Atari 2600 in 1983, and later a series of comics were published by Chaos Comics in 2000 and, more recently, Devil’s Due in 2008.

  VIRGINIA WAINWRIGHT HAS everything going for her; she is young and beautiful, and her fellow classmates would have you believe she is one of Crawford Academy’s most popular seniors. She has also earned a place in a rather elite crowd, which includes among its membership some of the most affluent seniors at the school. The self-styled Top Ten gather each evening at the Silent Woman Tavern located somewhere near the Academy. While making her way to the tavern one of the clique, Bernadette O’Hara, is beset by an unknown figure. She manages to repel his attack and while making her escape, seeks help from a student with whom she seems acquainted. Her appeals fall on deaf ears as the unseen student takes a blade to her throat.

  The Top Ten spend too much time playing elaborate shenanigans and this night is no different. After dunking a pet mouse in an offended drinker’s beer, the group dare one another to hit the accelerator and take their cars over a rising drawbridge. Although the car in which Ginny is forced to travel makes it over the bridge, she vents her anger at being coerced into such a precarious jaunt. She continues on her way home, but unknown to her is followed by someone who enters her bedroom and makes off with her panties. We now learn that Ginny is trying to pick up the pieces of her shattered life after narrowly escaping death as she traversed a similar drawbridge some years before. Ever since the accident, she has had to attend regular therapy sessions, but her memories of the incident remain somewhat vague.

  In the days that follow the angry scene at the drawbridge, her over-privileged friends are murdered in a variety of grisly and imaginative ways; two of them seemingly at the hands of the disoriented Ginny. Her confusion is heightened when in a series of flashbacks she recalls the death of her mother and the betrayal by her friends. With only days to go to her eighteenth birthday, Ginny contacts her psychiatrist (Glenn Ford) in the hope of uncovering more of her past. When he insists he can no longer help her, she responds by taking a poker to the back of his head. Several days later her father returns home for her birthday celebrations to find his wife’s desecrated grave and the corpses of the butchered Top Ten seated at the family dining table, which looks just as it did four years before on the night of Ginny’s betrayal. His daughter then enters, carrying a large cake, quietly murmuring “Happy Birthday”. This, however, isn’t the finale, far from it, for there will be a series of further twists before J. Lee Thompson brings his film to its shocking climax.

  Having already made a whole string of highly successful movies, including The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Cape Fear (1962), Bristol-born J. Lee Thompson put together this cult slasher, which carefully adhered to the precepts of this lucrative cinematic trend before culminating in one of the most unexpected twists so far ventured by the genre. Thompson was a well-respected director, whose finest work was arguably during the 1950s and early 1960s, with a reputation for working very closely with his cast. In so doing, he got the very best out of his team, placing Happy Birthday to Me leagues ahead of so many of its contemporaries. A high level of competence was observed in both the direction and cinematography, with a skilled manipulation of the set’s lighting to ensure this feature did more than just chill the spines of its assembled audience. Although his film can boast six rather bizarre killings, including the infamous skirmish with the shish kebab skewer, Ginny’s graphic brain surgery rates as one of the most stomach turning episodes of the entire period.

  In the United States, the MPAA called for the editing of certain scenes, but surprisingly the print issued for cinematic release in the UK, along with the 1986 RCA/Columbia video, opted for the gorier footage, which included the weight-lift and shish kebab death scenes. This release also contained a haunting music score, which, for contractual reasons, was replaced with a disco soundtrack for the DVD of 2004. The DVD annoyed fans still further in returning to the edited print first released in the United States in 1981. Happy Birthday to Me may not have been very popular with many of the critics, but among horror film regulars this film is one of the essential entries of the period.

  HATCHET WAS ANOTHER attempt to build on the success of Scream (1996) and emulate the golden years of the eighties slasher. As they fish in a backwater swamp, two hunters, Sampson (Robert Englund) and his son Ainsley (Joshua Leonard) are slaughtered by a hideous entity. Some miles away in the Mardi Gras celebration of New Orleans, a group of friends set out with an inexperienced guide, Shawn (Parry Shen), on a haunted swamp tour. On the same tour are a couple of topless girls, Misty (Mercedes McNab) and Jenna (Joleigh Fioreavanti) along with their seedy director, Shapiro (Joel Murray).

  Soon after entering the swamp, a hobo warns them to stay away from the area, but Shawn continues to take them further into this swampland where they come upon several derelict houses, one of which was home to the deformed Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). Many years ago young Victor was hidden away by his protective father until, one Halloween, a group of teenagers threw fireworks into their house, which resulted in a huge fire. As his father took a hatchet to the door to save his son, he accidentally killed him as the blade hit him full in the face. Victor’s father never recovered and died of a broken heart. Local legend tells of a vengeful spirit that murders all those who enter the swamp. One of the girls sees someone in the trees, and then Shawn crashes the boat leaving the party in this alligator-infested terrain standing before the house of Victor Crowley. Very soon, Victor will continue his vengeful wrath.

  After making commercials for cable television and fronting the heavy metal band Haddonfield, Adam Green returned to the slasher formula of the 1980s in what was an amusing homage, which saw guest appearances from horror legends Robert Englund and Tony Todd. While there was nothing new in his film, his script threw in the one-liners, contained enough topless shots to delight the male element of his teenage audience and ran at a fast pace as the kills came in ever so typically graphic fashion. Hatchet 2 appeared in 2010 and followed on from the unsatisfactory finale, which, true to the slasher trope, had left this original outing open for a lucrative sequel.

  FROM THE OUTSET, Alexandre Aja’s film had but one desire and that was to shock, initially allowing the camera’s lens to dwell upon a girl wearing only a hospital patient’s gown whose back has been severely lacerated. We are then thrown into a change of scene, as a fearful young woman chases through a forest to meet with a road where a car’s headlights reveal a nasty gash to her stomach. In a matter of minutes the audience have been sufficiently warned. What will happen in the next hour and twenty minutes will take them a lot further than the average horror movie; Aja will go out of his way to sicken using every means at his disposal.

  Marie (Cécile de France) and Alex (Maïwenn Le Besco) take their time as they enjoy a leisurely drive to Alex’s family home in the country in the hope of getting on with some exam revision. As they continue on their journey, a seedy fellow (Philippe Nahon) is observed reclining in the seat of his truck. His expression is one of perverse delight as he wallows in the heightened ecstasy of fellatio, then soon after discards a severed head from the window of his vehicle before promptly driving away. It is not until much later that the girls arrive home and after the long drive yearn for nothing more than a solid night’s sleep. There is already a suggestion Marie has a hankering for Alex, but such thoughts are swept aside when a loud banging comes to the front door. Alex’s father hurries downstairs to be confronted by the intimidating figure from the truck and the incisive slash of his razor. He isn’t finished yet; once inside the house the killer forces his
quarry’s head through the slats of the stairway then decapitates him with a bookcase. The girl’s mother is then exposed to his murderous rage; her throat is cruelly sliced open to be followed by an effusive splatter of blood. In desperation, Marie tries to find somewhere to hide as the killer’s blade is heard carving into his victim; her hands are later revealed to have been severed.

  Cocooned by her earplugs, Alex has remained completely oblivious to the furore that has besieged her home. That is until she awakens and finds the killer’s knife poised at her throat. While this is going on Marie attempts to phone for help as Alex’s little brother escapes into the fields. The killer, now brandishing a shotgun, follows the child from the house. Marie seizes the opportunity to come to the aid of her friend, but fails as she bids to free her from her chains. Refusing to be deterred she lays hands on her weapon of choice which takes the shape of a razor sharp kitchen knife. The killer continues to work at an alarmingly quick pace and by now has already removed Alex to the rear of his truck. Discreetly, Marie secretes herself at the back of the vehicle and then they set off, eventually stopping at a petrol station, where the silent assassin’s bloody spree summarily continues. The petrol assistant takes the full force of an axe, then the forecourt’s cameras reveal a strange sight: all is not quite as it at first seemed.