The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  THERE HAVE BEEN many attempts to explain Luis Buñuel’s collaboration with fellow surrealist Salvador Dalí, all of which have been in vain, for when they first conceived this script, they freely acknowledged one simple rule: “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted”. To their minds, the symbolism in their work could only ever be interpreted by engaging the precepts of deep psychoanalysis and even then any findings would be frustratingly inconclusive. However, as they openly defied convention in their approach to this new art form, their now infamous dreamlike sequence detailing the slitting open of a woman’s eye inadvertently had a considerable influence on the visceral excess of the latter years of the twentieth century. This was the first time such an extreme piece of gore had been committed to celluloid, and would act as precedent for directors such as Dario Argento, who applied it in those excruciating scenes from Opera (1987), Lucio Fulci notably in The Beyond (1981) and The New York Ripper (1982) and later still Takashi Miike in the agonizing needle episode from Audition (2000). Buñuel, could lay claim to being the cinematic pioneer of this dehumanizing mode of torment, as he set out to shock his audience with the violence in this seminal injury to the eye motif.

  This sequence, however, was beset by a strange paradox that proved intrinsic to the subversive nature of this piece. Buñuel was intent on making imagery the focal point of his experimental short feature, wantonly disregarding the recently discovered approach to dialogue and casting aside any notion of plot; yet this same imagery conspired to remove our one chance to behold the dreamlike qualities in his work. When viewed in the context of the next eighty years of cinema, his disturbing vision which was so far ahead of its time, inevitably became the cause of much scandal when it played before the audiences of 1929. Coupled with this violent episode came an intimation of exploitation as male hands were seen to touch a woman’s bare breast. Such salacious scenes were not deemed suitable for public consumption in the world of 1929, even though in those clandestine quarters there was already a market for pornographic cinema. Almost a century later Un Chien Anadalou contains a powerful legacy with its eternal themes of love, life, sex and death each diffused into Buñuel and Dalí’s bizarre vision.

  THREE COLLEGE STUDENTS, Terry (Laurel Munson), Nancy (Sara Ansley) and Gloria (Barbara Lusch), are driving through a storm on their way to a music festival. The radio carries an ominous portent, telling of young girls going missing in the area. They take in a little pot and share their hankering for certain young men and then as the rain begins to drive down the car skids out of control and crashes into a ditch. When they climb up to the road they realize they are stranded in a forest and Gloria is badly injured. Thanks to a handyman (John Morrison) they are taken to the sanctuary of a rambling old house owned by two women; they offer to help the girls, but it will be a few days before the girl who has been maimed can leave. The younger of the two women, Marion (Janet Penner), is delighted to see these new faces. Her elderly mother (Virginia Settle) sits in her wheelchair reminiscing about days gone by and warns of the evils that come with the male species, particularly her former husband. As she continues to ramble, she reveals herself unduly disparaging of her seemingly innocuous daughter.

  In the confines of the house the tension slowly builds with one of the girls finding a tooth on the floor and then they are both sure they catch sight of someone staring at them through the windows as they undress. As she makes her way through the woods in a bid to find help, Nancy is hacked down by a figure bearing a scythe, in what is a shockingly vivid slaying. When Nancy doesn’t return Terry becomes anxious. She is sure she can hear someone breathing heavily and begins wandering around the house. She comes upon a child’s room adorned with old black and white pictures of two very young children and observes an old tool belt and a machete. She returns to her room only to see a grimy old man at her window, the same figure she has seen before. The shock of his appearance causes her to start screaming hysterically; Marion comes to comfort her and reveals that the old man is her abandoned brother Carl, whose mind is that of a five year old. The following day Gloria regains consciousness, only to have her head split open with an axe. Only Terry is left; she will soon discover what lies in the shed and confront the twist that would be used again in April Fool’s Day (1986), which turns Psycho on its head and elevates Gronquist’s film above so many of its contemporaries.

  While the acting in Don Gronquist’s feature was not of the highest calibre, he distinguished himself in creating a lingering sense of suspense and shocked his audience with only the use of occasional but effective gore. The body count may not have been particularly high, but the shed, replete with severed bodies and jars of eyeballs, ably made up for this lapse. Unhinged retains a typical grainy, ill-lit look, which reflected its minimal budget. This film could have been forgotten if it hadn’t been included on the list of the UK’s video nasties and during the furore made an appearance on the BBC’s news following its release to video in 1983. In the early eighties scenes of girls indulging in soft drugs, full frontal nudity and gore were considered a little too strong for British palates. It was later removed from the list in May 1985, but wasn’t submitted by the distributors again until 2005, this time to be passed uncut.

  ACOUPLE OF GAMBLERS slug it out in a ferocious fight with one of them left for dead; his body is doused in petrol and then set alight. The perpetrator then goes on the run in a bid to escape the investigating detectives. The Untold Story moves forward eight years to reveal a number of severed hands lying on a beach. In a change of scene the pitiless murderer witnessed at the beginning of this film, Wong Chi Hang (Anthony Wong), has had a change in lifestyle and is now the owner of the Eight Immortals Restaurant. However, he has fallen under the suspicion of the comedic police authorities, as the family who had until recently owned the restaurant have been reported missing. In his time with the restaurant Wong has built a reputation for serving up the most delicious pork bao, much to the delight of his customers in the neighbourhood. When the disappearances continue the police have no option but to take him in for questioning and half way through the film in the aftermath of a brutal interrogation he begins to divulge a rather disconcerting story. The grinning Wong was no stranger to rape and murder, and thought nothing of the slaughter of the restaurant owner after a game of cards and then doing the same to his wife. In the most distressing scene in the film, he also took a meat cleaver to the owner’s terrified children. He didn’t stop there; an innocent woman was brutally violated with chop sticks and then murdered in an unnecessarily protracted sequence, the intensity of which is rarely ever experienced in western filmmaking. His victims’ bodies, he discloses, were sliced up to make the tasty pork bao, the delicacy for which he had carved such a standing with his customers. While in police custody, Wong tries to take his own life as, in an about turn, The Untold Story succeeds in eliciting sympathy for this psychotic felon.

  Danny Lee and Herman Yau joined forces to create one of the most notorious Category III films of the decade. Their production was made even more disturbing when they revealed the source of their tale was again based upon an actual occurrence. It was the violence, however, that made this film so shocking, particularly the slaughter of the family, which thrived upon every single grisly detail. The involvement of the young children in these scenes was distressing to say the least and revealed an obvious polarizing of attitude when comparing eastern and western approaches to filmmaking. Lee and Yau sought to immerse their film in an excess of blood and guts in the telling of their story and for the bona fide gore-monger it was manna from heaven, but in the creation of this blood bath they demonstrated a customary callous disregard for human life. As the blood swashed around his kitchen, there was an uncanny disquiet to Anthony Wong’s portrayal of this murderous psychopath, with time taken to dwell on his nonchalance as he tossed away the unwanted body parts of his victims and then prepared for his next episode of nastiness. These interludes would be counteracted by
a person whose penchant for extreme violence bordered on utter madness and yet the brutal display of the interrogating police officers forced the audience to re-evaluate their opinion of this man, which would add to the impact of Lee and Yau’s uncompromising feature. The Untold Story would see release under a variety of guises, Bunman: The Untold Story, Human Meat Pies: The Untold Story, Human Pork Chop, The Eight Immortals Restaurant: The Untold Story and The Untold Story: Human Meat Roast Pork Buns, each of which characterized the unique excess of Hong Kong Category III cinema.

  JENNIFER MARSH (DIANE Lane) works in the FBI’s cyber-crime division with her colleague Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) in the fight to thwart identity theft. An anonymous call takes them to a despicable website calling itself “killwithme.com”. The introductory streaming video shows a kitten being horribly tortured and killed. This is only the beginning for in a world aroused by torture porn the site’s owner (Joseph Cross) knows those who visit his site will want something a little stronger. He lures his new members with the promise of human quarry. The more people who log onto the website, the quicker and more violently the victim will die.

  While Diane Lane was praised for her strong performance, Untraceable was criticized for its duplicitous indulgence in the world of torture porn, although it avoided so much of the grisly excess observed in Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). The more graphic scenes detail a man slowly bleeding to death, another unfortunate being fatally burned while exposed to deathly heat lamps and a man’s skin blistering and peeling as he is submerged in a vat of sulphuric acid.

  ON A DARK, rain-soaked new England night, college student Michelle Mancini heads in the direction of a petrol station, unaware that someone is hiding in the back of her car. We never get to see his face, but the tension is shattered by the blow of his axe, which sees Michelle quite literally lose her head. Meanwhile on the campus of nearby Pendleton University, a student gathering hangs onto every word of a disturbing tale going all the way back to 1973 when an aberrant psychology teacher slaughtered six students in one of the university’s halls of residence. The following day the whole campus gets to know about Michele’s murder; her death is emblazoned across the headlines of the university’s student newspaper. In a quiet woodland area, one of the girls from the previous night’s discussion, Natalie, confides in her friend Damon, telling him there was a time when she knew Michelle. Recognizing that Natalie is in need of comfort, Damon comes on a little too strong and is summarily rejected. Annoyed he takes off into the woods; as he urinates in the bushes he falls prey to a shadowed attacker, and is later found hanging from a tree. Although no one will believe her, Natalie is convinced there is a murderer stalking the campus whose unique modus operandi is derived from the tales of urban legend. Very soon, staff and students alike are falling to this cunning killer as a variety of red herrings work to distract the audience, casting suspicion on an ever-changing group of suspects and building to the all-essential twist at the finale.

  As he looked to emulate the triumph that had been Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), Jamie Blanks succeeded in securing a very talented team. These included scriptwriter Silvio Horta, who created a feasible narrative albeit with the inescapable bunch of teenagers, each of them predictably ripe for the ensuing slaughter, and cinematographer James Chressanthis, who made this film visually embody the seventeen million dollars that been made available to terrorize the cinema-going public. This wasn’t the first time a good-looking young cast had been butchered on a university campus at the hands of a killer whose strength bordered on being supernatural, but murder by urban legend was a new turn on a formula that had seemingly been exhausted more than a decade before. Banks could be accused of using every cliché in the book as he threw in both the comedy and the splatter, but he created a series of very scary moments and maintained the mystery in his film until the very last moment. His success would lead to a directorial role on a slasher for the new millennia, Valentine (2001) with Urban Legend being granted a sequel in 2000, Urban Legends: Final Cut.

  AT THE VALENTINE’S Day dance of 1988, one of the school’s nerds, Jeremy Melton, endured a whole series of rejections as he asked four of the most popular girls of his year to dance with him. An insecure slightly overweight girl finally agreed to a dance and sometime later the two were found passionately entwined by a group of the school’s bullies. In her embarrassment, the young girl claimed that Jeremy had attacked her, so the gang strip the poor boy and lay into him in front of the entire school. Thirteen years later with Valentine’s Day only a matter of days away, the five girls who caused Jeremy so much anguish are now trying to address their ever-fluctuating love lives. One of the girls, whose date goes horribly wrong, falls prey to a killer wearing a Cherub-styled mask. Chillingly, she had been sent a death threat in a Valentine card only days before she was murdered. The rest of the girls then receive similar cards with the killer lying in wait to carry out his deathly threat. With each card being signed J. M., suspicion understandably focuses on the now mature Jeremy, with those around him convinced he is still out to avenge that horrible day from more than a decade past. As one of the girls plays hide and seek with her blind date, she takes an arrow shot to the stomach and so they all become ensnared by this lovelorn assassin.

  Having mastered the slasher movie with Urban Legend (1998), Jamie Blanks returned with another teenage horror comedy, lampooning the blueprint that had been so successful during the 1980s and, thanks to Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson, was beginning to gain popularity at the dawn of this new decade. Blanks’ writing team loosely based their tale on Tom Savage’s novel, but altered the characters and settings to fit with the basic precepts of their planned slasher. So many of the clichés were in evidence, but this proved to be a well-observed movie, which wanted nothing more than to entertain an audience who were once again becoming excited by this teenage slaughter. There was a lush veneer to the photography that reflected the movie’s doting premise and the kills were as inventive as they had been twenty years before and managed to blend the insanity of the eighties with the more polished approach of the twenty-first century. The slasher refused to lie down and die as was evidenced by another killer clown in Drive Thru (2007), a return to Halloween in The Pumpkin Karver (2006) the demonic Satan’s Little Helper (2004) and Japan’s Slashers (2001).

  AS JEFF HATHCOCK’S descent into misogynistic exploitation begins a woman on a staircase takes an axe to the face, while another is butchered with a machete and then a man in drag thrusts a knife into a woman’s back as she leaves her apartment. The scene shifts with an awkward moment of editing to a young couple making love in a forest; they are attacked by a couple of men who have just staged a robbery, with the boyfriend being killed and the girlfriend beaten and raped.

  The story doesn’t actually get going until four young girls are seen heading into the desert for a weekend of camping and geological study. They encounter a couple of unsavoury individuals while filling up at a petrol station, Peter and Eric, who could have carried out the killings detailed in the movie’s first fifteen minutes. The girls quite rightly feel it best to move on. Soon after the viewer is granted a few moments of gratuitous nudity as the girls enjoy themselves in the water, but this frivolity abruptly ends when they sense someone close by spying on them. As they try to put this incident behind them, Peter and Eric show up, now armed with rifles. They begin to intimidate the defenceless girls before turning to rape and torture. The desert echoes to the sound of the screams of the four girls as they look to escape these sadistic perverts. A series of flashbacks from Vietnam, including an unexplained Asian woman in a darkened room, attempt to temper the villain’s despicable crimes, but for them there will be no escape.

  Jeff Hathcock’s rape revenge feature would be his first entry into the world of the sleazy slasher and would pave the way for a long career in both film as well as cartoons. His movie utilized obvious aspects of plot from Last House on the Left (1972), I Spit On Your Grave (1978), and Mother’s Day (1980), but due
to his inexperience and lack of funds was devoid of their technical merit. His debut has been lambasted for being both trashy and hateful; these, however, proved to be the facets that would endear it to the long-time devotees of grindhouse cinema. All these years later we can only wonder if it was originally intended for these fleapit cinemas, as the substandard writing, cinematography and acting suggest this film was made considerably before 1985.

  STEVEN EMORY AND his wife have recently moved away from New York to start a new life running a video rental store. They are both surprised and delighted to learn nearly everyone in town has a video recorder, even in the video-mad world of 1987, but there is more to this VHS overload. Their customers display an uncomfortable obsession with slasher and splatter movies, along with a sampling of porn. When one of their employees discovers a returned case containing a grisly snuff movie Steven turns to the police for help. When they return to the store the offending video has been replaced and his employee is nowhere to be seen. These crudely produced films, depicting the slow torture and murder of innocents passing through the town, continue to appear in the store. Steven is now forced to carry out his own investigations only to find himself up against a town of psychos.

  Gary Cohen’s Video Violence remains one of the most widely distributed shot-on-video horror movies of the period and with regard to its technique is considered to be way ahead of its time. Having owned a video store, Cohen created his low-budget feature, made for only a few hundred dollars, to explore the casual viewer’s affinity for bloodthirsty violence. When the cable station where he was editing his film became aware of the sordid nature of his film they immediately asked him to leave. His film, however, went on to see release and he unwittingly became one of the pioneers of a new form of home entertainment. While everything about this film is cheap, his story moves at a fast pace, making use of understandably cheap gore effects which are cleverly reserved for the snuff video scenes. Video Violence very quickly acquired cult status and sold out, before going on to a second pressing. That same year the derisive carnage returned in Video Violence 2. It didn’t end here; the queasy premise of both would surface many years later in the big-budget Vacancy (2007).