The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  This occult-laced feature was based on the scandalous novel of the same name by Tiffany Ellsworth Thayer, who himself had been an actor and was also the co-founder of the Fortean Society in 1931. Archainbaud’s film was the Psycho (1960) of its day and in its relish to dispatch its cast one by one in a succession of highly stylized death scenes, it provides an interesting precursor to And Then There Were None (1945) and the slashers of the 1980s. While the film avoided the lesbianism of the novel, Ursula’s sexuality was used to suitable effect, luxuriating in her role as the femme fatale. In the next few years, The Hays Code would soon put an end to such lurid displays along with the story’s obvious racist slant. Thirteen Women was relatively unique in its exploration of inherent racism, which, given the fact the industry was at this time prone to ridiculous racial stereotypes, was an appreciably bold move.

  FOUR ATTRACTIVE YOUNG girls are on their way to a camping holiday in a wooded Lakeland area. After a lengthy skinny dipping session in the lake, they prepare to continue on their journey, but their car breaks down. A young farmer’s boy by the name of Billy arrives, and offers to lend a helping hand. He then invites them to stay at the isolated farmhouse where he lives with his father. Little do the girls know, young Billy had interrupted his leisurely day of fishing to spy on them as they splashed around in the cooling lake. His father, who is a butcher famed in the locality for his sausage meat, is furious when he arrives home with the four girls. He reminds his son, “You know what happens to you when you get around women.” A little more than twenty minutes into the film, the four girls each meet with a grisly demise, one in a bath, another stabbed in the back, one shot and the other decapitated by a hatchet.

  The following morning Billy is unable to remember anything of his murderous frenzy and this isn’t the first time this has happened. His father solemnly lectures him, telling his son he should have listened. In an attempt to appease his anguished son he places some money in Billy’s hand and tells him to go and “catch a movie”. Strangely, the shot of this troubled young man as he ambles along the neon-lit street is not suggestive of a murderous lunatic, but after what has previously happened, he is still a serious cause for concern. While in town, Billy stops off at a bar and takes in some music. Although he has a little too much to drink, he manages to befriend the barmaid. When he eventually passes out, she offers to take him home. As he awakens at her side in the morning light, the alarm bells begin to ring; she has just noticed the wet patch on his jeans. Surprisingly, Billy calmly takes this in his stride and the two begin to develop a close relationship. When he takes her back to the farm it looks as if history will once again repeat itself; only now does he discover the truth about his father and his long lost cannibalistic mother hidden in the barn.

  Who could resist a film by the name of Three on a Meathook? William Girdler’s film was a gritty low-budget piece of grindhouse exploitation inspired by the tragedy of Ed Gein. Its grainy depiction of brutal murder and cannibalism predated both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Deranged by almost two years, yet contained very similar themes. While this movie was nowhere near as bloodthirsty as inferred by the title, there were some quite horrific kills, which belied the film’s low budget. Such was its grainy appearance, Three on a Meathook attracted the plaudit, “it looks like a home movie a serial killer would make”. Sadly, Girdler died in a helicopter crash soon after shooting his final feature Manitou in 1978. In less than five years he brought nine films to the drive-in theatres of North America, with an unfulfilled promise of so much more.

  IT WAS ALMOST time to break up for Christmas at the Calvin Finishing School for Girls, and the students were getting excited about going home. In the joyous hysteria, one of the girls was chased around the dormitory by her friends. When she escaped out onto the balcony, she lost her balance and fell to the floor below.

  Two years later the Christmas holidays beckon again. Some of the girls have decided to stay on and enjoy a private party. Among them are the shapely Melody (Linda Gentile), the well-spoken Trisha (Angela Bath) from England, the man-mad Leia (Judith Bridges) and the innocent heroine of this tale, Nancy (Jennifer Runyon), who has no desire to be mixed with this bunch. The girls invite a group of young men over, who fly in from wherever, and soon after a psycho dressed as Santa begins killing off the revellers in the empty rooms of the school dormitories. Several of the gang die very early on in the film, but their friends foolishly fail to realize just how serious the situation has become. Although the police offer to track down this lunatic, their efforts prove hopelessly ineffectual. Whoever is behind his slaughter enjoys using sharp objects that can be turned into weapons; an arrow, a knife, an axe and a propeller are all employed in the murder of these teenagers, with a decapitated head making its way into a shower scene. With most of the cast buried in the school grounds, Nancy finds herself as the last girl leading to the film’s customary twist ending.

  Last House on the Left’s David Hess stepped into the director’s chair to create one of the earliest festive slashers that stayed very closely to the formula of the period. Christmas Evil appeared around about the same time, but Hess’s atmospheric film was to become the lesser known of the two, suffering with poorly lit night photography that obscured so much of Mark Shostrum’s gory effects. As would have been expected of Hess, the killings were imaginative, particularly the incident with the propeller, but he struggled with a frustratingly limited budget as many director’s did when making these films. Four years later Silent Night, Deadly Night caused considerable outrage in having a killer dressed as Santa, but Hess’s costumed killer was to attract very little attention.

  ORIGINALLY ENTITLED PARA entrar a vivir, Jaume Balagueró’s short film was made for the Spanish horror television series “Películas para no dormire” (Films to Keep You Awake). Balagueró had already become a director of international repute with his addition to a new generation of cinematic terror, REC, in 2007. To Let affirmed his eminence as a veritable director of the nail-biting horror rollercoaster ride.

  Having just sold their apartment, Mario and his pregnant girlfriend Clara have only fifteen days as they try desperately to find a new abode. Fortune seems to smile on the couple when Mario finds an advertisement for what looks to be the perfect home, folded into his mailbox. He persuades Clara to come along and look the place over. In torrential rain, they journey to what turns out to be a dilapidated building in a neighbourhood that has seen better days. At this point, many couples would have turned around and gone home, but Mario and Clara are on the edge of a domestic crisis. Typically the realtor is a little too keen to make the sale, but in its run-down state they know this is not the right place for them. However, they find it hard to shake the feeling that something hasn’t been right since they set foot in the building; their suspicions are confirmed when they enter one of the apartments to find their personal belongings including their photographs. The realtor’s psychotic tendencies are now revealed and the two are forced to stay, imprisoned with several other unfortunates, one of whom is not quite what he appears.

  The claustrophobia permeating the darkened corridors and stairways of this building is characteristic of Balagueró’s work on both REC movies. With the restrictions placed on television running time, he has little more than an hour to unfurl this perturbing drama, ensuring that the narrative runs at an adrenalin-injected pace with shocks waiting at each turn. Soon after Mario and Clara have entered the apartment building, the story begins to run in real time with the tension rising to an unbearable fever pitch taking us through to the film’s cruel finale. The gore junkies among you will not be treated to an outrageous body count, and there remains uncertainty as to whether anyone actually dies in this film, but the blood does flow and it will make even the most hardened wince in anguish. In August 2008, Lionsgate released this along with the other episodes in this television series as a box set of horror movies under the name “6 Films to Keep You Awake”.

  IN A LOS Angeles apartment complex, the young female
residents are being stalked and slaughtered by a killer who disguises himself with a ski mask. He uses a variety of tools in the undertaking of his grisly crimes, among them a hammer, a drill, screwdrivers and, in the most graphic killing of them all, a nail gun. For the first twenty-five minutes, the atrocities in this film go a long way to making it a grindhouse classic, but all too soon we learn the man responsible for this trail of death is the complex’s owner (Cameron Mitchell). He has taken it on himself to rid the world of immoral women following the death of his daughter in a car crash after falling into a life of sex and drugs. As he continues in his bloody quest, he becomes obsessed with an innocent young girl, Laurie (Pamelyn Ferdin), who lives with her family in the complex. His twisted mind begins to envisage her as surrogate child and, in his unhinged state of mind, he kidnaps her and ties her to his bed, all the while stalking the apartments of the complex. The latter part of the film is almost a eulogy on the fragility of innocence, before the harrowing twist at the finale.

  Following the overwhelming success of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), there was a spate of films that sought to capitalize on Tobe Hooper’s excess. Among them was television director Dennis Donnelly’s The Toolbox Murders. As with its illustrious predecessor, Donnelly’s film was dogged by controversy, generating anger among feminist groups and getting a spot on the long-running television news magazine 60 Minutes in a piece on violent misogynist imagery in popular entertainment. This news report conveniently forgot to mention two of the writing team were women. On its initial cinematic release in the UK during 1979, the BBFC insisted on just over two minutes of cuts to Kelly Nichols’ bathtub masturbation sequence and substantial edits to the murder scenes along with shots of the blood-stained bodies before it was passed with an “X” rating. This version was later released to video in November 1981, but was doomed to become a reviled video nasty in November 1983, even though it had previously had BBFC approval. It wasn’t removed from the list until May 1985 when it was accepted it was the same version that had been approved six years before. While The Toolbox Murders has never been officially made available in the UK without cuts, it can lay claim to being a major influence on the tool-driven mayhem that soon followed, particularly The Driller Killer (1979) and The Nail Gun Massacre (1986). It also imitated Tobe Hooper’s false claim that the film was based on actual events.

  While Donnelly had hoped to follow Tobe Hooper’s sensation at the box office, it was Hooper who was asked to direct the remake of his film in 2004. Donnelly would continue an already highly accomplished career in television going on to direct Charlie’s Angels and The A-Team.

  JON WRIGHT’S FILM opens at the well-heeled grammar school Fairview High with Oxford-bound head girl Justine (Tuppence Middleton) eulogizing at the funeral of one of her classmates Darren Mullet (Calvin Dean), a boy she barely knew. After her hollow oration, she will learn that the overweight Darren was considered a loser by his tormenting peers and it was their malicious onslaught which finally drove him to suicide. A few days later, Justine is invited by another schoolmate, Alexis (Dimitri Leonidas), to a party at the house of his friend Bradley (Alex Pettyfer). She gets to hear how Darren had a crush on her, and to her horror discovers that he was being bullied by Bradley and his gang of insufferable friends, among them pretty boy Alexis. Not long after, Bradley’s reprobate friends receive a series of text messages warning of their impending deaths; the messages are traced to Darren’s phone. One by one, this privileged gang of bullies are dragged to their deaths at the hands of an asthmatic zombie who has returned from the dead to mete out the most cruel of revenges. The grave certainly hasn’t dulled his imaginative streak as he fervently severs hands with a paper cutter, removes heads with a shovel, strikes another victim with a paddle to propel their eye from its socket, before making use of a screwdriver and crucifix.

  Stephen Prentice’s screenplay may not have been entirely original, but it was indeed a very British take on the American slasher, created for a new generation set against a suburban backdrop in the West Midlands. The dialogue and characterization possessed an energy that has long been missing from this hack and slash genre, and was not without its sense of humour, albeit at times very dark. Jon Wright was born in 1971, and was lucky enough to be of an age where he grew up with these movies when they were at their peak. Backed by BBC Films, who have a worldwide reputation for tightly budgeted yet exemplary filmmaking, this tale of a bullied schoolboy’s revenge contained the finest production values with a cast who, on the international circuit, would have been relatively unknown. This anonymity, combined with their obvious talent, only enhanced the impact of a film that was at times poignant as well as being rather spooky.

  HAVING DEVELOPED CAR problems, young Woody comes upon a museum filled with wax dummies. He enters in the hope of finding help. He will come to wish he hadn’t; objects fly from shelves, and mannequins appear to come alive and poor Woody never gets out alive. His friends, college students Becky, Molly, Eileen and Jerry, set off in a jeep to try to trace his whereabouts. Their trail takes them to “Slausen’s Lost Oasis” owned by the reclusive Mr Slausen (Chuck Connors). He agrees to help them out, but against his wishes some of the girls make their way up to his house hoping to find a telephone. In her search Eileen wanders into a room to be confronted by the creepy mannequins; her sense of unease is heightened when she feels an unseen force around her throat. The sensation begins to tighten and she is left for dead, the victim of a freak with telekinetic powers. As objects are hurled across various rooms and the mannequins again begin to return to life, the teenagers are lured to their deaths by this shady presence. Although the killer’s purpose isn’t initially clear, he demonstrates an unusual relationship with the mannequins, each of which evinces unsettling human traits. His face remains hidden behind a mask fashioned in the guise of a doll, evoking memories of that worn by Michael Myers twelve months before in Halloween. Molly comes to assume the role of the final girl and finds herself the object of the psychopath’s affections. In the closing shots she escapes in the jeep, accompanied by four figures that no longer appear to be human.

  Tourist Trap was a re-working of a short film David Schmoeller had originally directed three years before, entitled The Spider Will Kill You. This low-budget terror proved to be the beginning of a highly successful career that would see him return using a similar premise in The Puppet Master, a feature that went straight to video in 1989. There was a perverse pleasure in watching the mannequins come to life, at times laughing in a way that would make your skin run cold, then returning to the silence of this forgotten house. Their presence gave this movie an unnerving chill and, along with Chuck Norris’s intense portrayal of the unhinged Mr Slausen, made this one of Stephen King’s favourite horror movies. It was only the beginning of the slasher’s rise as a cult phenomenon, but the creation of a killer with psychic powers was highly original.

  Schmoeller was still learning his trade and it is obvious he had taken note of some of the key moments in Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Carrie (1976). He paced his film, creating the tension that would lead to some quite shocking scenes, including the image of a woman’s face being transformed into a plaster mask. On its original American release it was given a “PG” rating, which unfortunately worked against the film’s interests, making it a failure at the box office. Several years later, it was re-evaluated and given an “R” rating, which was a fair reflection of the film’s disturbing nature. Tourist Trap has since gone on to become another cult favourite.

  HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS’S film was inspired by the 1947 Lerner and Loewe musical Brigadoon. As the residents of Pleasant Valley, Georgia, are joyfully celebrating their centennial, they lure six tourists into the town. All seems well with the group as they are treated as guests of honour. However, things are not what they seem; the centennial in question dates back to the town’s annihilation at the hands of a group of Union soldiers during the Civil War. All these years later, the townsfolk still crav
e revenge. Once separated the tourists are forced to participate in a diversity of horrific games, which result in their blood-splattered deaths. Their grisly demise was considered quite extreme for the mid-1960s: one of the women was dismembered with an axe before being roasted on a barbecue; a mock horse race saw a man torn limb from limb; another victim was rolled downhill in a barrel lined with nails; and finally one of the women was crushed by a boulder in a mechanism reminiscent to a carnival dunk tank. After discovering the townspeople’s terrible scheme, the two remaining tourists manage to escape. They soon return with a local sheriff, only to discover the town has disappeared from sight. The film ends with two of the residents looking forward to the next centennial in 2065, when Pleasant Valley will once again rise to resume its vendetta against the hated Yankees.

  This low-budget splatter movie marked the second instalment in what became known as “The Blood Trilogy”, led by Blood Feast (1963) and concluded a year later with Color Me Blood Red. Lewis’s film has attracted considerable attention among the gore fraternity owing to its bloody and torturous scenes, although it was hampered by B-movie direction and the wooden acting that was to became characteristic of so many of these minor gorefests. The trilogy and its director went on to attract a cult following, largely due to the outrageous portrayal of violence and the flamboyance of the villains. Shot in only fifteen days, early in 1964, Two Thousand Maniacs! could boast almost the entire town of St Cloud, Florida, had participated in its production. The film’s star was the 1963 Playboy Playmate Connie Mason, in her second appearance in the trilogy. A remake followed in 2005, this time starring Robert Englund.