The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  A YOUNG GIRL, LUCIE, is seen escaping from an abandoned warehouse where she has been imprisoned and tortured following her kidnap some time ago. With the authorities unable to identify her captors, she is summarily placed into care. There she meets a young girl named Anna, who learns that Lucie is haunted by the figure of a horribly emaciated woman.

  The film jumps forward fifteen years to see Lucie bursting into a family home, brandishing a shotgun, which she engages to send each one of them to the grave. She then contacts Anna to inform her that she has caught up with those who abused her as a child and now needs help to dispose of the bodies. When she meets up with her friend, Anna is plagued by very grave misgivings, fearing that Lucie may have slaughtered a family of innocents. Soon after, Lucie is again accosted by the scarred woman who has tormented her nightmares. Anna watches as her troubled friend fights alone, banging her head against the wall and gashing herself with a knife. Lucie continues in her struggle, pleading with the unseen figure and begging forgiveness for having left her behind all those years ago. Even though she has avenged their maltreatment, she realizes she will never be free of this anguished image and takes a blade to her own throat.

  The following day a distraught Anna sets about cleaning the house and after finding a concealed cellar makes a shocking discovery. Hidden in the shadows is a blindfolded woman with a metal contraption riveted into her head. She attempts to free her and cleanse her wounds, but as she does so she is interrupted by a band of strangers, who arrive and shoot the woman. Anna is then hauled away to meet their leader, an elderly woman they call Mademoiselle. The woman is a member of a covert group seeking to discover the truth about life after death using subjects she terms martyrs. These martyrs are tortured in the mistaken belief that their suffering will provide a view into the next life. However, their cruel experimentation has so far failed. Anna is now imprisoned and brutalized. In her suffering she sees Lucie, who tells her she must “let go”; only then will she be free of the fear of pain and death. Anna has progressed further than those who came before her and after surviving being flayed to the point of near death, she whispers the innermost secrets of her ordeal into the Mademoiselle’s ear. The old woman now summons the members of the society in what will be a shocking finale.

  Pascal Laugier wrote the script for this shocking experience while enduring a fit of deep depression; its bleak landscape attests to his troubled state of mind. Martyrs has been compared to much of the torture porn of the past ten years, particularly blockbusters such as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). However, this film owes more to the French Extreme Wave of the past decade, which includes cinematic masterpieces such as Sombre (1998), Irreversible (2002), 13 Tzameti (2005), Haute Tension (2003), À L’Intérieur (2007) and Frontier(s) (2007), each of which fail to attain the recognition they so truly deserve. These films, along with Martyrs, do not intend to seek merely to entertain with their effusion of visceral nastiness; rather, they indeed evoke a gut reaction but frequently appear distanced from their grisly subject matter. In a similar way to his contemporaries, Laugier challenges the existing boundaries of filmmaking and as those before him steadily pushes them further back. The early part of this feature plays out as an extreme tale of revenge set against an unforgiving backdrop while using a ghostly figure to torment an already deeply disturbed lead character. Then Laugier subtly turns his film, edging between nihilism and a paltry chance of salvation. The torture themes of Saw and Hostel are taken to extremes for these villains are truly detached, seeking only to further their own misguided scientific research. There is nothing in the slightest way of titillation on show here; rather, the lasting impression is one of sadness. As soon as Anna has been introduced to the Mademoiselle, the narrative becomes dispassionate, making it so much more disturbing than its predecessors and as with all contentious filmmaking will continue to divide its audience.

  Laugier, a young director who owes so much of his inspiration to Dario Argento, is now looking to build on the success of his controversial Martyrs and his earlier terror, Sainte Ange (2004), with an American-produced version of this film, which may not be quite as dark as the original.

  BY 1983, THE microwave cooker was becoming increasingly popular in kitchens across the globe; it was only going to be a matter of time before the slasher and splatter generation included them on their inventory of murderous implements. Microwave Massacre’s principal selling point has been its assertion to being the worst horror movie of all time, which, given some of the disasters we have all endured in this domain of cinema macabre, makes for quite a claim. Wayne’s Berwick’s deliberately inept direction introduces Donald (Jackie Vernon), who works by day as a labourer in the construction industry. Poor Donald has had enough of his domineering wife May’s (Claire Ginsberg) flamboyant culinary skills, craving only the basic sustenance relished by your ordinary average guy. After a night on the beer, he finally snaps and puts an end to her nagging ways. He sets about chopping her into pieces and then conceals her dismembered, foil-wrapped body parts in the freezer. Sometime later, he helps himself to a snack from the fridge and inadvertently picks up her severed hand. Before he realizes it, he has popped the hand into the over-sized microwave, which was one of his wife’s many purchases. It doesn’t take long to heat up and as soon as he has savoured his wife’s flesh he becomes hooked and his newfound cannibalistic urge comes to the fore. Licking his lips, he goes off in search of something younger and more succulent. It’s all too easy; he lures a gamut of hookers and lusty good-time girls back to his place for sex and a spot of microwave home-cooking. He gets such a taste for these juicy morsels he can’t resist inviting his pals Philip (Al Troupe) and Roosevelt (Loren Schein) over to share in the fun. As this gastronomic excess comes to an end, Donald’s house is shown with a “For Sale” sign, with an electrician busying himself on the much used culinary implement. The camera then draws in to focus on the fridge, revealing May’s eyes radiating an incandescent orange.

  The voice of Frosty the Snowman was given the chance to return to his comedic roots, as Jackie Vernon savoured every moment of Donald’s relentless assault of ridiculous one-liners. Donald has since acquired a cult following thanks to this feature, which was designed solely to reduce its audience into fits of laughter. There’s an eyeful of gratuitous nudity, gore effects that will have you in hysterics along with yet another disco soundtrack. Microwave Massacre can certainly lay claim to being so bad it is actually good!

  ACOUPLE OF TROUBLEMAKERS return to the local mortuary, from where one of them has just been fired. Down in the basement they hear voices and try to find out more, only to stumble upon a black magic ritual arranged by Hank Andrews (Christopher George), the mortuary’s owner. In the ensuing panic, they become separated and one of them is killed by a fiend adorned in a long robe, whose makeup would one day resemble the mask in Wes Craven’s Scream (1996).

  Christie Parson (Mary Beth McDonaugh) has been plagued by nightmares and bouts of sleepwalking ever since her father’s (Danny Rogers) supposed accidental death. Contrary to her mother Eve’s (Lynda Day George) belief, Christie is sure he was murdered. She is also plagued by the image of a figure wearing a cloak bearing an embalming trocar, but in her frantic state of mind no one is prepared to believe her. This changes when her boyfriend (David Wallace), seen entering the mortuary at the beginning of the film, actually catches sight of the imposing figure. The two take it on themselves to investigate further and Christie makes the shocking discovery her mother is implicated in a witches’ coven. Their search leads to Hank Andrews’ mortuary and his crazed son, Paul (Bill Paxton), who conceals a dark secret. As the killer stalks the town, with his over-sized embalming needle, so the victims begin to fall to the soothing sound of Mozart.

  Mortuary was also known as Embalmed in the United Kingdom and was one of eleven films directed by Howard Avedis in a fourteen-year run that began in 1972. He had made his reputation as a low-budget exploitation director and on this outing brought the wholesome Mary Beth McDon
ough, who up until a few years before had been gainfully employed as Erin in the long-running television series The Waltons, to his world of sleaze. While Mortuary has been accepted as a slasher movie, it didn’t quite adhere to the recognized formula; the victims were not directly associated with the heroine and the killer’s identity was disclosed halfway through the film. While his feature wasn’t to be reliant on gore, it did create a sense of intrigue for the first hour of its running time and true to Avedis’s previous work presented plenty of bare-breasted young girls, some of which weren’t always alive. His cinematographer for this film was the prolific Gary Graver, who had been a protégé of Orson Wells; his ever-changing career took him from the echelons of high art to the world of shady pornography. He professed he knew “how to make a movie without much money”, which made him very good company for Avedis.

  THREE YOUNG WOMEN, Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), Jackie (Deborah Luce) and Trina (Tiana Pierce), get together each year and take off for a weekend of camping, deep in the wilderness. In a series of flashbacks, we are given excerpts of their lives, making the traumatic events that soon follow all the more harrowing. The area is almost deserted, except for one cabin occupied by a domineering mother (Rose Ross) and her halfwit offspring, Ike (Holdem McGuire) and Addley (Billy Ray McQuade). When they are not savouring the oracle of television and modern-day consumer goods, their maniac mother sends her sons into the woods to train for combat, for she lives in fear of her equally twisted sister Queenie, who lives a similarly reclusive life somewhere in the forest. Their way of life thrives on the kidnap of hitchhikers and backpackers with mother inciting her sons into acts of rape, violence and murder. When the girls are captured Jackie is systematically brutalized and doesn’t survive for more than a night. Her friends manage to escape and vow a vicious revenge on the dysfunctional family, one that will witness death by television.

  After a short spell learning his trade on the periphery of soft-core porn movies, Charles Kaufman turned to the potentially profitable exploitation shocker. Mother’s Day was a low-budget backwoods rape and revenge movie, which followed in the path of the seminal Deliverance (1972) and then used the driving force that impelled the controversial Last House on the Left (1972) and Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to their violent finales. His movie was made considerably more disturbing by the presence of the deranged mother and his staging of some of the excess away from the prying eyes of his audience, leaving certain more gratuitous scenes to the imagination viewer. There was also an element of very dark satire in its social commentary on consumerism, which was rarely ever ventured in such manipulative features. For what was in essence a sleaze-fuelled horror movie, his film did contain very reasonable character development, which would lead to a successful decade writing for low-budget films and then national television shows. In a remarkable change of career, he established the highly respected bakery and cafe Bread and Cie in San Diego and later joined the Board of the California Restaurant Association.

  When Mother’s Day was presented to the BBFC in December 1980, it was banned from sale in the UK; it has yet to see a certified release on these shores. In 2010, a remake of Kaufman’s film starring Rebecca de Mornay was completed and released to cinemas in April 2011; the former director and his associate producer brother Lloyd were invited to make cameo appearances.

  FLASHBULBS ILLUMINATE THE corpse of a naked woman. We are then introduced to the musclebound photographer (Sven Garret) who by day adopts a role as a fashion photographer and spends time with his attractive girlfriend Charlotte (Valerie Baber). However, when night falls he takes to the neon-lit streets of Las Vegas, kidnapping, raping, torturing and murdering naked women, most of them strippers and prostitutes. In a repeat of Maniac’s Frank Zito, the photographer also has had a troubled relationship with his mother; this unhappy childhood becomes an excuse for his gratuitous relish for dehumanizing women. Director Nick Palumbo tries to weave the 9/11 psychosis as an added justification for what is nothing more than a sexploitation flick, harking back to the excess of the grindhouse years. The story comes alive when the suspicions of Charlotte’s younger sister Jade (Jade Risser) are aroused and so begins a familiar game of cat and mouse.

  The film’s excessive bloodlust and unrelenting violence towards women would guarantee its ban in many countries across the globe. When submitted for release in the United Kingdom, the BBFC refused to grant it an “18” certificate, thus making it illegal on these shores. They were adamant in their rejection, referencing its sexual violence and violation of UK obscenity laws. In the United States, it saw release to select theatres with an NC-17 certification. When issued on DVD by Lionsgate, it attracted an “R” rating with approximately twenty-two minutes of cuts, removing a series of intense sexually violent and torturous scenes. During filming the police were called out several times for alleged disturbances and Palumbo was almost arrested when one film-processing laboratory became concerned they had in their possession a snuff movie and scenes of child abuse. Three film-processing labs refused to take on this film. Even though surrounded by the kind of controversy that makes such films legendry, and having mustered a two million dollar budget, there are those who would still place Palumbo’s misguided effort among the worst splatter films to see the light of day.

  A FTER SEVEN YEARS of constant slash and stalk, the novice Buddy Cooper came up with a highly original premise for his movie. Young Ed is seen diligently working away cleaning his father’s rifles; unbeknown to him one of them is loaded and he accidentally fires, killing his mother. When his father arrives home in anticipation of his birthday celebrations, he finds his wife lying dead on the floor and flies into an uncontrollable rage. He picks up one of his shotguns and points it at his terrified son, forcing Ed to flee the family home. The disturbed father takes a bottle of whisky, pours some of it into his wife’s mouth and then downs the rest. Ten years later young Ed is a teenage college student and the events that follow adhere very closely to what was by then the firmly established slasher trope. He receives a letter from his father telling him that he needs to go over to their beach house to lock it up for the winter months. Ed thinks this would be a good opportunity for him and his girlfriend, along with two other young couples, to have a few days of fun and relaxation. What Ed doesn’t know is just how deranged his heavy breathing father has become, still dreaming of slicing open his son’s throat. When the kids get to the beach house, the unforgiving father is lying in wait armed with an axe, pitchfork, chainsaw and numerous fishing hooks. His victims will soon find their heads impaled as trophies as the last girl struggles to get the car started with daddy descending to remove her head.

  Buddy Cooper seemed to take an age in building his characters in a screenplay he admits in hindsight could have done so much better, but his team successfully generated an unsettling atmosphere that would on more than one occasion have their audience jump out of their seats. Cooper was the man who just wouldn’t give up; at the time he was practising law and along with a friend came to realize that making a horror movie could be a worthwhile money-spinner. The original estimate for the movie was $84,000, but the costs on what was still a low-budget feature spiralled to $450,000, with Cooper’s bank taking a considerable risk in loaning him much of the balance. The shoot took twenty-nine days with an invaluable six months in post-production, which would give this movie a very polished appearance, although Cooper knew nothing about this stage of the editing process. The Mutilator has since been remembered for Mark Shostrom’s gruesome effects, particularly the bloody decapitation and one of the girls being impaled by a huge fish hook, which was edited following the film’s submission to the BBFC for its release to video in 1993; this would be waived when it was re-submitted ten years later. Only five years into his career, Shostrom would continue to develop as a special effects make-up artist, to make him one of the industry’s most sought after creators.

  ORIGINALLY ENTITLED THE Secret, My Bloody Valentine followed the slasher trend for seasonal holi
days, on this occasion beginning in 1961 in the isolated town of Valentine Bluffs. Five miners were trapped in a shaft following a methane gas explosion, doomed by the foremen, who left early to attend the town’s Valentine’s Day dance. Six weeks later Harry Warden was pulled out alive; having survived on the flesh of his dead colleagues. The torment had driven him to insanity, leading to him being sectioned to a mental institution. Twelve months later, he escaped to attend the Valentine’s Day dance. There, he killed the negligent foremen, warning that if the town ever again held a Valentine’s Day dance he would make another return.

  Twenty years later with the legend of Harry Warden all but forgotten, some young miners and their girlfriends make plans for a Valentine’s Day party. However, as the night of the dance draws near a figure wearing mining gear, pickaxe in hand, creeps into town with bloody murder in mind. The town sheriff and mayor still remember Harry Warden, but are unable to confirm his whereabouts. Finally, on the night of the dance the miner appears and so begins the killing spree. Amidst the mayhem, the party continues into the mine, with the miner in pursuit. It is now we learn that Harry Warden has been dead for more than five years.