The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  As the trauma on the train continues, a Christmas Eve party takes place at the house of Margaret’s parents. On Christmas morning, they go to the station to meet the girls to see three strangers walking along the platform. One of them, the lady of the group, has badly injured her ankle. The couple invite them to their home to allow her time to recover; it is, after all, the season of good will. The father soon after discovers his daughter should have been arriving on the same train and Curly is wearing a tie that his wife knows was purchased as a Christmas present. The grief-stricken father soon exacts his revenge, repeatedly stabbing and beating the heroin-addicted rapist and then hunting down Blackie with a shotgun. Only the conniving lady survives his revenge-filled carnage, pleading she was at the mercy of these scurrilous villains.

  Aldo Lado had debuted four years before with the acclaimed thriller Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971) and then followed with the giallo Who Saw her Die (1972). L’Ultimo Treno della Notte is a variation on Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), moving from a leisurely paced opening to an intense brutality before the final violent confrontation between the distressed father and those who have abused his beloved daughter. Lado, assisted by his cinematographer Gábor Pogány, imbued the train with an insular air that became ever more acute as the girls realize the gravity of their terrifying situation. Craven’s violence was appreciably stronger than that observed here, but there is a darker potent evident in Lado’s direction. The producers feared his film would be persecuted by the authorities following its rejection by the Italian Board of Censorship and insisted it be burned. Lado wasn’t prepared to have his work discarded in such a fashion and offered to cut certain frames, but was careful not to damage the impact of his film. In Italy, the giallo had already cultivated an eager audience, but here Lado chose an exploitative vein with elements of the Eurosleaze that was beginning to arouse the American market; a sleaze attested by the mysterious woman’s predilection for pornographic images. It was she who proved the true deviant of this gathering, as Lado has maintained how those of influence and the affluent manipulate the less fortunate in society, invariably to fulfil their own perverse ends. His social commentary failed to impress the UK’s licensing body when it was submitted for certification as Late Night Trains in 1976. When it was distributed across the country as a video in November 1981, following a previous issue that had almost a minute of violence removed, it survived unscathed until July 1983, when it was then banned as a video nasty. It was later removed from the list in March 1984 to see release without cuts in 2008 when the BBFC announced changes in both media awareness and public knowledge of film styles had reduced the impact and potential for harm from the film’s scenes of sexual assault, which to their mind now appeared dated. Lado’s film has also gone by the names Don’t Ride on Late Night Trains, Last Stop on the Night Train and Torture Train.

  CARING PARENTS BILL (Gary Baxley) and Anna Lynch (Kay Kimler) have arranged for their three-year-old son Billy to be looked after by his Aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell), while they travel to the west coast on a visit to their parents. As they negotiate a mountain incline, the brakes on their car suddenly fail and they plummet down the mountainside into a fast-flowing river. Director William Asher was very keen to emphasize the severity of these death scenes, which presaged the terrors to come.

  Since the death of his parents on that day fourteen years ago, Billy (Jimmy McNichol) has been raised by his Aunt Cheryl. As Billy makes plans for college and dates his teenage girlfriend Julie, he is unaware of his aunt’s possessive nature and the lengths to which her incestuous desires will go to keep him under her wing. She has little time for young Julie and is far from happy about his plans to make a new life in Denver. Billy returns home one afternoon to find Cheryl covered in blood, clutching a kitchen knife. He has no reason to disbelieve her claims that the television repairman, Phil Brody, has tried to rape her. He isn’t aware that Brody rejected his aunt’s salacious advances and then paid the price.

  The police investigation led by the bigoted Lieutenant Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson), ably accompanied by Sergeant Cook (Britt Leach), reveals a homosexual love affair between Brody and Billy’s basketball coach Tom Landers (Steve Eastin). This casts increasing doubt on Aunt Cheryl’s claims of self-defence, but creates a connection between Billy and Brody. The homophobic Carlson looks to pin the murder on young Billy, convinced that the killing was brought about by the intrigue of a homosexual love triangle. As the lieutenant continues to harass the teenage boy, Cheryl’s obsessive nature becomes increasingly volatile and so the violence escalates.

  Night Warning, which also went by the names Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, Momma’s Boy, Thrilled to Death and The Evil Protégé, was an uncompromising attempt to examine the delicate issues of incestuous infatuation and homophobia in those unenlightened days when the slasher was enjoying its first wave of blood and guts. William Asher certainly made his mark in creating this cult attraction and would continue to direct in television, but never made another horror movie. As with many creators before him, he had cashed in on the moment but brought together an interesting cast, which saw Bill Bixby at an early point in his career, with the true star of the piece being Susan Tyrrell. In the confines of this dreary little house, she played a part that brought the audience face to face with an insanity rarely observed in films of the early 1980s. Her role was instrumental in the nomination for the Saturn Awards Best Low Budget Horror Film for 1982, although due to delays in production it didn’t see release until the early months of 1983.

  While there was a series of gory scenes later on in this film, which involved a tree trunk decapitation and then several stabbings as well as a severed hand, Asher’s film has never been considered as being a particularly gruesome affair. However, its gritty cinematography aroused the British tabloids, and following its release to video in April 1983 it was registered as a video nasty. It was eventually dropped from the list in December 1985, but has yet to be granted approval for issue in the United Kingdom. The continuing ban has inherently fuelled the film’s cult status, and it is yet to see release to the DVD format. It is, however, accepted that the BBFC would look favourably on any plans to resubmit its content for certification.

  FILMED OVER AN eight-week period in Italy and Spain, Nightmare City was originally entitled Incubo Sulla Città Contaminate, and has since gone by the names City of the Walking Dead and Nightmare of a Contaminated City as well as Invasion of the Atomic Zombies. Umberto Lenzi’s low-budget zombie movie is a possible precursor to the virus-infected creatures running amok in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) and was certainly an early example of a military backed assault on the zombie host, which for the duration of this film was capable of moving at considerable speed.

  While reporter Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) waits at the airport to interview a scientist, he looks on as a Hercules is forced to land. He can’t believe his eyes when the disembarking passengers turn out to be a horde of mutated, blood-drinking zombies, akin to the ghouls of horrors past. Only hours ago when their flight took to the skies these were a set of people. Now contaminated by the scientist exposed to radiation, which accounts for their burned faces, they have become a murderous mob. Mass slaughter ensues as these blood-crazed fiends rampage across the city. In an attempt to escape to safety, Miller and his wife must cross this imperilled region. However, with the military on one side and the contaminants beginning to spread across the other, this is going to be no easy ride. If these ferocious killers are going to survive, they will need as much blood as they can sink their teeth into to replace their damaged red blood cells. For the gore fan, Lenzi’s movie is a cheap action-packed zombie flick which, to be fair, contains more than its share of suspense. The violence is typically excessive, although Lenzi has always been keen to extol the social undercurrent to his film, particularly the notion of the psychological impact of a city under siege, torn between a powerless military and its mindless assailants.

  The scene in a television
studio during the filming of a dance show featuring spandex-clad beauties contains another kind of social relevance, and has been frequently criticized for its misogynistic content. There seems to be a rare delight taken in the exploitative carnage that ensues, which includes an unbelievable breast-gorging sequence. These women, as with the other female victims, are repeatedly stabbed as their blood flows freely across the screen, they have their breasts sliced off, eyes gouged and, if that’s not enough, have their clothes torn from their nubile young bodies. When they are not tearing women apart these zombies are shown to have a capacity for guns, knives and any other form of weaponry upon which they can lay their gnarled hands. They then employ this arsenal as they lacerate their quarry as an entrée for satiating themselves upon the blood that inevitably spills forth.

  The Groundhog Day conclusion continues to frustrate many fans of this film. As the couple make their escape clutching onto the helicopter’s swaying rope, Miller’s wife Anna plunges to her death. Mortified Dean screams in anguish, only to wake up in the safety of his bed. The cycle begins as he journeys to the airport to meet a similar appointment, and a Hercules is again seen to come in to land.

  GEORGE TATUM HAS only recently been released from the mental institution to which he has been admitted following his dubious doctor’s belief he has the cure to his violent bouts of psychosis. His doctor is convinced that a new miracle drug will help Tatum return to a normal life. George’s normal way of life takes him to a Times Square sex show where he soon begins to lose his grasp on the sleazy world around him and as his eyes roll and mouth begins to foam; he falls unconscious to the floor. This unnerving episode impels George to a better life in Florida, but he is still very seriously disturbed. Although Florida offers him a far warmer clime, he is still unable to escape the hallucinatory nightmares that have plagued him for so many years. They eventually reveal he murdered his father with an axe when he discovered him cavorting with a prostitute; at the time, he was still only a child. Back at the mental facility, the medical staff have become gravely concerned for they have come to realize they have made a serious error of judgement; the drug will never cure George’s deep-rooted psychosis. Far away in Florida George has started to stalk a family, a single mother he looks upon as being neglectful and her young family. One of the children tries to tell his mother he has seen a man loitering around the house, but she refuses to believe him until the phone calls begin, which leads to a shocking climax, as history is seen to repeat itself.

  From the outset former experimental film director Romano Scavolini sought to unsettle his audience using a rather creepy introductory sequence that suggested this would be a psychological terror, but not without a fair degree of violence. In a similar way to John Carpenter’s work three years before on Halloween, he developed a technique designed to focus at length on a particular object then drawing back to pan around the room, thus creating the impression that there was a malfeasance lurking only just out of sight. In this way, he cleverly augmented the tension without having to rely entirely on cold-blooded brutality, but when it did come, it was truly shocking, culminating in the climatic double axe murder that has become the stuff of slasher legend. Baird Stafford’s portrayal of George Tatum has been placed on a par with William Lustig’s infamous Maniac (1980) and John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). When Stafford undertook this role, he was never entirely sure if George’s medication was the cure to his psychosis or, as was equally likely, the cause of his problems. This he tried to encapsulate in his interpretation of his director’s script, resulting in a rather convincing depiction of a man who had completely lost his mind.

  Savolini’s film, which has also been entitled Blood Splash and Nightmare, aroused the attention of the British censors partly owing to the use of several gimmicks, which included a vomit bag being supplied with the video on its release in May 1982 along with a competition to guess the weight of a brain in a jar. In the July of 1983, the film was banned as a video nasty and remained there to become one of the DPP’s thirty-nine. In 1984 David Grant of Oppidan, the video company that had first released Nightmares in a Damaged Brain prior to the ban, was jailed for eighteen months, although later reduced to twelve, for releasing a version of the film in its uncut form. To this day, the complete brutality originally presented in this film has never been officially made available in the UK.

  A COUPLE OF YOUNG girls amble into a remote desert oasis, only to bid a hasty retreat as the living dead begin to rise from the sand. The only survivor of a ferocious World War II desert battle reveals he knows that over $6 million of gold is still buried in the same oasis. His avaricious partner, who wants to keep the booty for himself, then takes a syringe and kills the man who had once been his friend. The veteran’s son Robert (Manuel Gélin) soon after reads his father’s diaries and learns of the gold bullion. He convinces his friends to journey with him to Africa to retrieve this long-lost treasure trove. Even though they have been warned to stay away from the area, the group set up camp little realizing the gold is guarded by a horde of zombie German soldiers who had been tasked almost forty years before with transporting their cargo by convoy through the desert. When night falls, this putrescent detachment once again rises from their slumber to defend their riches, with the infiltrators forced to stave off an unrelenting attack.

  Jesus Franco’s mesmeric addition to the zombie craze of the early eighties has been described as one of the worst zombie movies ever made, probably only saved by the battle between the British and German soldiers seen early on in the film. These scenes were spliced from Alfreddo Rizzo’s 1971 war film The Gardens of the Devil, originally I Giardini de Diavlo. For the most part, his pacing appears slow and uneventful, but Franco has a reputation for being a sleaze-monger and a veritable master of exploitation. When the zombies rise from their desert graveyard each one of this desirable cast of young women are subjected to the slavering atrophied hordes in customary Franco style, while their male counterparts are summarily dealt with almost as an afterthought. This band of zombies is not necessarily interested in human brains; their cannibalistic urges will settle for any old blood and guts, which isn’t always in copious supply. The make-up used on the lead zombies proved quite effective, particularly the idea of having a worm attached to their emaciated faces. The charred Nazi uniforms added to the final effect as the long-awaited zombie resurrection from the shifting sand dunes supplied a much needed atmospheric menace. Among its many names, Franco’s film has been released as Blood Sucking Nazi Zombies.

  THE CAMERA TRAINS on the eye of a raven as it reflects the magnificence of an opera house; this will not be the last time the raven is seen in Dario Argento’s film. As the cast rehearse for an avant-garde performance of Verdi’s opera Macbeth, Betty is informed of the death of the lofty lead actress, which gives her the opportunity to step into the limelight in the role of Lady Macbeth. On the opening night, a stagehand is killed when a lighting rig falls to the ground as a shady figure is observed making his way into an empty box in the opera house. As the killer watches Betty from the shadows an attendant insists that he must leave, but is impaled with a coat hook in response. Thankfully, Betty knows nothing of these events and excels to the rapturous applause of the audience. After the performance, she decides to leave the back-stage party to celebrate at the palatial home of her boyfriend’s uncle. When her boyfriend, Stefan, leaves her reclining on the bed, Betty is seized from behind by a giallo-inspired masked figure adorned in black leather gloves, who wastes no time in tying her to a pillar, taping her mouth, and then placing needles directly beneath her eyes, making it impossible for her to risk closing them. She has no choice but to watch as the killer drives a blade up into Stefan’s throat and on through his mouth. As he falls dead to the floor Betty is untied, but the hooded killer is far from finished; his sadistic obsession will have her watch more of those who have been close to her die horribly at his hands.

  Dario Argento’s visually stylish Opera, released in the
United Sates as Terror at the Opera, traversed the line between the traditional giallo and the decade’s fading slasher. While the gloved assassin wielded his sharpened knife from the shadows, the customary clues and red herrings of the genre were no longer as prominent. Rather, Argento looked to concentrate on heightening the tension, cleverly using flashbacks and precarious edits to unhinge his audience as Betty’s traumatized past gradually came to the fore. As ever, Argento’s death scenes were resplendent in their originality, with the slow-motion gunshot to the eye before the keyhole acquiring an immediate notoriety upon the film’s release. Throughout the movie, the desire to destroy the eye created an intensity that exceeded anything he and his fellow Italian directors had so far attempted. Many of these graphic images were the work of Sergio Stivaletti and his stomach-churning special effects, which were every bit as shocking as Luis Buñuel’s surreal eye-slicing first seen in Un Chien Andalou (1929). This intensity appeared to be Argento’s response to the frustration he felt at those in his audience who closed their eyes as they sought to avoid the more grisly aspects in his films. In placing needles so close to Betty’s eyes, she was never given the chance to take her eyes away from the knifeman as he swiftly slaughtered her beloved Stefan.

  Under Argento’s experienced direction, Ronnie Taylor’s cinematography used point-of-view shots to sweep through the corridors and stairways of the film’s various sets, exacerbating the tension as Betty’s distressing past began to catch up with her. On its cinematic release in the UK, over thirty seconds of Argento’s film had to be removed, which included Santini’s skewered tongue, the knife ripping into Stefan’s neck and mouth followed by the repeated stabbing, and finally the close-ups detailing the killer forcing a pair of scissors into the wardrobe girl’s mouth.