The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  Before it could be seen in the cinemas, several of the more graphic takes had to be removed with the footage left on the cutting room floor, now believed to have been lost. In the weeks after its release, this low-budget terror proved to be a surprising success, and in the years that followed went on to acquire cult status. After working on A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven was given the chance to direct a sequel in 1985, The Hills Have Eyes Part II, although he later disowned it. In 2006, Alexandre Aja directed the remake, with a new telling of The Hills Have Eyes II following in 2007 scripted by Craven and his son Jonathon.

  YOUNG HAROLD HAS an innocent crush on Susan, one of the girls in his class, but takes things just a little too far. He just won’t stop harassing her, and when she laughs at his Valentine card he completely loses control. Breaking into Susan’s house, he takes his rage out on her brother, killing him by breaking his neck with a coat hanger. The last we see of the lovelorn murderer is the image of him running away from the scene in fits of hysterical laughter.

  Nineteen years later Susan (Barbi Benton) has married and been divorced. She leaves the new man in her life in the car as she goes into a Los Angeles county hospital for a routine check up. However, events in the hospital take a strange turn. Unbeknown to her a mysterious figure disguised in a surgical mask has placed a set of false test results in her medical file. From that moment on, the staff in the hospital begin to treat her as if she is very seriously ill. They detain her by forcibly restraining her in straps and keep her locked away in private wards while the medics subject her to a series of humiliating examinations. Some of these assessments can only be described as sleazy and are obviously played for effect, as Barbi Benton had been a Playboy cover girl some years before. As she endures these often shameful procedures, she is pursued by the maniac in the mask as he stalks the hospital wards, slaughtering anyone who crosses his path with a variety of surgical tools that would inspire Dr Giggles when he embarked on his rampage in 1992. Hours later, her boyfriend finally gets out of the car and starts to search the near deserted hospital, only to be decapitated and have his head presented to Susan encased in a box of Valentine’s Day pastry. Shock followed upon shock as Hospital Massacre coursed to its climactic finale with the screaming Susan having to come face to face with the man in the surgical mask.

  The original working title for Boaz Davison’s obscure terror was Be My Valentine, or Else . . . which might just have given too much of the game away. Davison returned to the surgical world of Halloween II to create another low-budget shocker, in the hope of rehashing its predecessor’s premise to produce something the audience would never forget. While college fraternities and sororities had been played to death, the hospital setting had yet to be fully explored. This typically illogical film made a few hours of medical carnage resemble the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, using a seasonal day of celebration as the backdrop for yet another slasher’s modus operandi. There were countless holes in the script in addition to so many obvious red herrings, but Davison laid on the suspense and kept his viewers chewing away on their fingernails. This wasn’t a film that relied upon reels of gore, although there was a worthy axe to the head and an over-sized hypodermic syringe that did its fair share of damage. Much, however, was left to the audience’s imagination to guess just what the crazy guy in the mask was really up to. All these years later few enthusiasts remember this film; it’s still to see release to DVD, but it certainly did Davison very little harm as he furthered his career and went on to far greater things.

  A COUPLE OF AMERICAN tourists, Paxton (Jay Hernandez), a law graduate, and Josh (Derek Richardson), an aspiring writer, and their Icelandic companion (Eythor Gudjonsson), enjoy the highs and erotic pleasures of Amsterdam. For a man of the law, Paxton displays little in the way of morality; ruled by his desire for hedonistic pursuit he experiences everything the city has to offer. They eventually meet up with Alex, who recommends a hostel in Bratislava, a city almost bereft of young men following the ravages of war. If these three men had taken the time to read up on the history of the region they would have known the war had ended some sixty years before and the last invasion of Czechoslovakia had been in August 1968, when the Warsaw Pact had laid siege to the country. Such trivialities are not their concern and they make the journey to Slovakia and quickly find the hostel, where a dubbed version of producer Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction plays on a portable television in the reception. Alex’s story appears to be true, for not long after their arrival a host of young lovelies make themselves readily available. Then the film takes a rather dark turn and the amorous tourists become the exploited. The hostel is a cover for a bizarre organization, where the wealthy exchange huge sums of money to indulge their darkest fantasies. This affluent gathering has moved on to the extremes of sadism and murder, to satiate their burned-out sexual craving. Chainsaws, knives and drills complemented by an acetylene torch are the order of the day as this claustrophobic nightmare begins to engulf the hapless tourists. The finale that takes place in this dungeon-like world becomes one of revenge as Paxton bids to escape from one of the most black-hearted films of its generation.

  With the release of Hostel, torture porn had come of age. Eli Roth had promised much, and his movie turned out to be a resounding box office success, but in its wake caused utter dismay among his audience. There was a dark sense of inevitability hanging over the last hour of this film, which traumatized its audience, using an effective sequence of agonizing torture scenes in sets that left no doubt as to the cruel fate awaiting those who had been hurled into this remorseless domain. However, he fell into the trap of the slasher movies of twenty years past with the focus of his film resting too heavily on the sadist’s torturous lust, forfeiting any conceivable indication of character development. As a satire of a world obsessed by the excesses of consumerism, it was reminiscent of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978); but in its grisly exposition, it was infinitely more brutal. Koldo Serra’s acclaimed short El Tren de la Bruja (2003), in which a man agrees to be tormented while strapped to a chair in a darkened room, is thought to have inspired Roth’s script for his film. Having been inspired by the gore of Lucio Fulci and especially Alien (1979), he would in turn go on to influence a succession of films that revelled in the pain and suffering of their victims, but as with Hostel they were found equally wanting in their failure to elicit a due sense of empathy. In the months after its release, many people in both Slovakia and the Czech Republic were openly angered by his depiction of the region, but in truth it had never been Roth’s intention to cause such offence. His was a film that explored the depths of human depravity and exposed just how little his fellow countrymen knew of the world beyond their borders, hence the trip to war-torn Slovakia. Two years later Roth pandered to a new set of sadists, producing a sequel Hostel: Part 2, this time throwing a group of delectable young ladies into this unrelenting world of torment.

  RELEASED IN ITALY as Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero, Lucio Fulci’s atmospheric tale, partially inspired by the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, begins with the camera’s gaze falling on the softness of a naked young woman (Daniela Doria). This doesn’t last; soon there will be the customary bucket load of bloodthirsty carnage, as Fulci was enrolled alongside Herschell G. Lewis to become “the Godfather of Gore”, in this the final part of the “hell’s gate” trilogy. Secreted in a deserted old house the girl dresses after sex and calls out for her lover. She receives no response. She learns why when she stumbles upon his mutilated corpse. The shocks continue when a sharp knife is forcibly thrust through the back of her head. We are never privy to the killer’s identity; all we see is her body being dragged through a doorway leading down to the cellar.

  Several months later, Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) with their son Bob (Giovanni Frezzi) prepare for their move to New England. Young Bob cannot take his eyes away from the photograph of a creepy old house, in which he can clearly see a young girl warning him not to go there. When they enter their new
, but dilapidated, home the cellar door, observed in the film’s opening sequence, has been locked and nailed shut. The following day, flashlight in hand, Norman descends the cellar stairs only to be attacked by a huge bat, which tears into his hand. In an effort to defend himself, he brandishes a knife and vigorously lunges at it. Blood oozes from its body as it dies on the kitchen floor. The gore continues to spill when the property agent, Mrs Gittelson, arrives at the house. The viewer only ever gets to see an emaciated arm that attacks the poor woman with a poker and then into her breasts before frenziedly ripping her neck open.

  While trying to find Bob, Anne, the babysitter, ventures into the cellar; but is set upon and graphically decapitated by the still-obscured murderer. The child now appears, only to see Anne’s severed head rolling down the metal stairs. That night the boy returns to the cellar. The door slams shut and in the shadows, a glowing pair of eyes can be seen, their gaze refusing to leave the terrified child. Petrified he begins to scream, awakening his mother, and then Norman returns and takes an axe to the cellar door, while Dr Freudstein (Giovanni De Nava) holds Bob’s head against its wooden panels, inviting yet another decapitation. Instead, we are treated to a vivid hacking of Freudstein’s left hand.

  How no one ever discovered the cellar’s grisly secret remains one of the films many mysteries. A charnel house containing the mutilated cadavers of his abducted victims is thrown open to the light, littered with surgical apparatus and a blood-stained pathologist’s slab. While there are so many memorable moments in this film, the appearance of Dr Freudstein surely must be its crowning moment, now turned into a putrescent corpse. Using the dismembered body parts of his victims, the deranged surgeon has succeeded in keeping himself alive. His body, however, is disgustingly maggot-ridden; they erupt when Norman drives a surgical knife deep into his stomach. The blow fails to stop him. Enraged he tears out Norman’s throat and then turns to the escaping Lucy. He unceremoniously drags her down a metal ladder, battering her head against each of the rungs. Finally, as he splatters her skull into the concrete floor, there is a violent discharge of blood and brains. Only Bob survives. He is saved by Mae, the girl from the picture, who now stands at her mother’s side, Mary Freudstein (Teresa Rossi Passante). She leads both Mae and Bob from the house and through the wintry grove on into the netherworld.

  An abundance of motifs inspired by many previously successful horror films are in evidence in Fulci’s movie, notably The Shining (1980), The Amityville Horror (1979), The Haunting (1963), The Omen (1976), The Exorcist (1973) and of course the many incarnations of Frankenstein. His craft allowed him to instil a creepiness to the house and its grounds, providing enough scares to keep his audience on the very edge of their seats. While the acting may have appeared occasionally wooden, it wasn’t to distract from Fulci’s vision as he showed himself to be a veritable maestro of splatter, devising a succession of imaginative death scenes in one of his most unsettling features.

  House by the Cemetery has endured many difficulties with the BBFC; the cinema version was edited to remove the poker murder and the slashing of Ann’s throat. Its release prior to the Video Recordings Act saw the film banned amidst the hysteria of the campaign against video nasties. Although it was to gain official approval in 1988, it was again edited to remove the cinema cuts and had the first stabbing removed, then saw cuts to the bat attack, Norman’s throat being torn out, and tracking shots of the mutilated bodies in the basement climax. Over seven minutes were later censored in 1992, making this particular presentation virtually unintelligible. However, the 2001 Vipco DVD issue restored nearly all of the previous edits, with fewer changes to the poker murder and one of the throat cuttings. Although the BBFC were finally prepared to release Fulci’s masterpiece without cuts, the film was again prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act following the discovery of bootleg copies of the uncut version from January 1983. The BBFC once again had little choice but to demand further revisions. Finally, the cuts were waived for the 2009 Arrow DVD.

  MARK ROSMAN’S STORY begins on a stormy night in 1961, as a doctor arrives at a rather sinister-looking house. His patient is the pregnant Dorothy Slater (Lois Kelso Hunt), who is now in the agonizing throes of childbirth. Complications follow and when Mrs Slater comes round the doctor can only offer his condolences. An ominous air of mystery hangs over the trauma of this night; all is not as it seems.

  Twenty-two years later, having just graduated, an excited group of sorority sisters are seen packing away their belongings. They start drinking ready to party, discussing boys and anticipating the excitement of their lives ahead. Mrs Slater, now a sorority mother, returns home and an altercation with the intoxicated girls ensues. She is adamant that they must leave the house by morning. Supported by her cane she climbs the stairs to the toy-filled attic; her demeanour would suggest she is on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. Downstairs the girls are blissfully ignorant of her deteriorating mental condition and prompted by Vicki conspire to avenge her outburst with the assistance of her boyfriend’s gun. However, during the course of their charade the weapon goes off leaving the troubled Mrs Slater slumped on the floor, dead. In their distress, the girls try to wrap her body in tarpaulin, hoping to hide it by sinking it to the bottom of the swimming pool. Their callous behaviour has not gone unnoticed; a few hours later someone takes Mrs Slater’s robe and then walks away with her trusty cane.

  The girls have no choice but to go ahead with their party; any change in their plans just might arouse suspicion. With the celebrations in full swing, an inebriated college boy becomes the killer’s first victim as the cane is forcibly rammed through his throat. He crumples to the floor, blood freely spurting from his neck. Then one by one, each of the girls suffers a similar fate.

  The uncomplicated plot has offered comparisons to Friday the 13th, and in that respect contained very few surprises, even when at the film’s claustrophobic finale the heroine breathed a sigh of relief oblivious to the tortured murderer’s eyes once again flickering to life. Although it wasn’t a runaway success on its theatrical release, The House on Sorority Row was to emerge as a cult favourite among the VHS-addicted slasher buffs and went on to attain a quite worthy reputation. It is now considered superior to many of its sorority brothers and sisters, largely due to Richard Band’s haunting score and a well presented cast who were tormented in the ever-mounting suspense, along with a suitably gory assemblage of kills. Rosman’s interests, it turned out, didn’t lie with horror, as he later admitted; he used this film to further his career, having previously learned much from working with Brian De Palma. His work didn’t go unnoticed, as elements in his tale paved the way for the box office hit of 1997, I Know What You Did Last Summer. The film was remade in 2009 under the title Sorority Row with Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher cast in the role as the housemother.

  PRIOR TO THE opening credits beginning to roll, the thuggish Alex (David Hess) is seen driving around the streets of New York. When an attractive young woman pulls up alongside him, he tails her and then cuts her off. His movements are incisive, giving absolutely no hope as she is raped and then strangled in the back of her car. As he leaves her body, Alex takes a trophy and steals his victim’s locket. Shortly after, he meets up with his slow-witted friend Ricky (Giovanni Lombardo Radice); the pair is set for a night of dancing to the New York City disco beat. Their plans change when they come to the aid of an affluent young couple whose car has broken down. Ricky soon traces the fault and they find themselves invited along to a party. Before long, Alex and Ricky are in the company of a set of rather well to do young people, but find themselves belittled for their obvious lack of class. The superiority of this repulsive gathering angers Alex, so much so the ruthless psychopath within him once again comes to the fore and he draws his straight razor. He and his slime ball friend then turn this upmarket party into a night of violence, humiliation and rape. Little do they know a twist awaits them; one their dullard imagining could never have conceived.

  Shot
over a three-week period for relatively little money, Ruggero Deodato’s violent descent into exploitation genre rekindled unsavoury memories of David Hess’s brutal portrayal from Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972). Under Deodato’s direction, Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino’s scripting of Hess’s character was given considerably more depth than that of Krug Stillo in Last House on the Left, but he remained at heart a psychotic lout whose only means of communication was by way of violence. When Deodato first saw the script he felt strangely unusually uncomfortable; his first impression was that its content was far too violent. However, he translated his unease to heighten the film’s psychological impact and engineered some quite remarkable shots to suggest a film befitting a more substantial budget. He then drew upon the unattractive qualities of his well-heeled party-goers, intimating they may have deserved some of their discomfiture, but when innocent young Cindy (Brigitte Petronio) joined the proceedings the acute distaste in Hess’s character was finally laid bare. The House on the Edge of the Park then assumed the hateful guise for which it is still remembered, and not surprisingly was rejected by the BBFC when it was submitted for certification preceding its intended release to cinemas across the country. In the October of 1982, it was made available on video but was only on the shelves until July 1983 when it was cited as a video nasty. It was to remain on the list until the furore came to an end. On its submissions for release in 2002 and 2009, Deodato’s film struggled before the UK’s censors with eleven minutes and forty-three seconds of cuts demanded to the rape and assault scenes, heavily prescribed edits to the razor-slashing of Cindy and the opening murder scene, along with the removal of shots to a head being slammed onto a table top. In 2006, the BBFC commissioned a group of academics at Aberystwyth University to conduct research into responses to films that contain scenes of sexual violence. The House on the Edge of the Park was one of the films the team were asked to examine and Deodata attended a forum to discuss this in addition to many other of his films that have attracted the censor’s scrutiny. Thirty years after the event he remains committed to directing a sequel, still starring both David Hess and Giovanni Lombardo Radice. Across the Atlantic, the USA Media Blasters’ release is available without cuts, running to the full ninety-one minutes.