The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  LONELY MIDDLE-AGED Molly (Millie Perkins) works by night as a barmaid at a seaside bar and spends her days babysitting her nephews, telling them seafaring stories where her father is always portrayed as the hero. Her tales hint at an obsession with the ocean and sailing lore, which seek to fascinate and in time reveal a discernible sense of self-loathing. It becomes obvious that her sister, Cathy (Vanessa Brown), is not entirely at ease with her company, but for the moment we are not sure why. From the beach, she admires the muscular guys as they work out and parade before their on-looking admirers and then drifts into fantasies about their powerful physiques. Her fantasies display violent tendencies as she lures these burly men to her home and in a dreamlike scene has sex with two of them and then ties them up before castrating them off screen, leaving blood pouring over her own naked body. The following morning Molly learns her visions are far more than fantasy when two dead bodies are uncovered. Her friends are aware that she is deeply troubled and are very protective of her. They can’t believe she would do such a thing, but Molly is hopelessly tormented by vivid memories of abuse and molestation at the hands of her sea-going father.

  Amidst the exploitative excess of the grindhouse years came this almost forgotten gem. Shot in 1971, this was a typically low-budget affair which not surprisingly contained some rather dubious acting, but was saved by an intriguing psychological slant to its script and the photography of the aspiring Dean Cundey, who would go on to work with Steven Spielberg. For Matt Cimber, Jane Mansfield’s third husband, this was a remarkable change from the exploitative excess with which he had for so long become associated. Robert Thom’s script allowed Cimber to pace the development of this disturbed character and then shock his audience with Molly’s incestuous past, rather than the bloody display so routinely demanded by the drive-ins and grindhouse cinemas. Her descent into madness would lead to several gory scenes, but the horror in this film concerned Molly, not the men she sliced up in the privacy of her home. Millie Perkins, who assisted with the script, turned in a fine performance as she teetered on the very edge of madness, but this wouldn’t save this film when it was handed to the distributors. It took another five years before this feature received a cinematic release and even then it wasn’t given an especially long run before disappearing into obscurity. The audience for which it was intended couldn’t get to grips with its psychological premise and the lack of sleazy nudity certainly didn’t help either, while mainstream cinema was reluctant to handle such a challenging theme. Finally, film historian Walter Olsen and his brother Bill traced the original set of negatives and The Witch Who Came From the Sea was granted a deserved reissue, which will afford a new generation of film watchers the chance to savour this hidden treasure.

  Its scenes of extreme sexual violence would lead to worldwide bans and further hinder its already problematic distribution. In 1983, the Director of Public Prosecutions included Cimber’s film in its list of seventy-two video releases that had avoided BBFC certification and declared it prosecutable for obscenity. It was banned in August 1984 but was removed from the list in the wake of an unsuccessful prosecution in June 1985. However, it wasn’t made available in the UK until June 2006.

  TELEVISION PRESENTER SHELLY Carson (Judy Cler) takes her reluctant boyfriend, sports columnist Jack (Wayne Ratay), along to a magic show staged by Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager). For his finale, Montag performs his pièce de résistance by sawing a female volunteer in half as she lies helpless in his magic box. The audience gasp in horror, only for the girl to appear completely unharmed to cheers and a hearty round of applause. Days later, when the applause has died, the girl will be found dead, bearing wounds identical to those she would have sustained during the act. The murders continue, with the volunteers’ deaths mirroring the endless illusions carried out on stage. In quite graphic scenes a metal spike is hammered into a girl’s head, which ruptures her eyeball, swords are eased into their mouths, another is squeezed to death in a press and one poor girl is set ablaze, while another has to endure a drill being driven into her stomach. While the police investigate the crime scenes, they are unable to find any evidence to link the murders to the crafty magician. Shelly asks Montag to consider performing on her show, to which he readily agrees. As her suspicions grow, she prepares to reveal his villainy during his television appearance; only then can the slaughter be brought to an end.

  As unconvincing as it may have been, Herschell G. Lewis has considerably more gore on show in this film than was in evidence in his infamous Blood Trilogy. His ambitious but incoherent storyline relies on a series of episodic set pieces, which involve young female volunteers being brutalized during the course of the magician’s act. How could Lewis have known that he was inadvertently paving the way for the torture porn of the twenty-first century, where the premise of the film is to slaughter rather than engage the audience with a well-told tale? The film, it has to be said, did have an interesting conclusion, but the inconsistencies leading to this finale were woeful. The bloodthirsty in the audience would have forgiven the storyline, for this level of gore in The Wizard of Gore’s day would have been truly shocking, particularly the eyeball scene. However, it would have been completely over-staged by the ridiculous acting, which ensured these films would only ever be looked upon as camp entries to the genre. For the two weeks of filming, a couple of sheep’s carcasses were used to enhance the gory scenes; each had to be kept on the set at all times, making for quite an unpleasant stench. Lewis’s film was never forgotten and went on to inspire a remake in 2007, when torture porn had become all the rage.

  WRITTEN, CO-PRODUCED and directed by Greg McLean on his first outing, the independently produced Wolf Creek was inspired by the murder of Peter Falconio and the assault on his girlfriend Joanne in 2001 by Bradley John Murdoch in Australia’s Northern Territory. Murdoch’s trial was still in session when the film saw release in Australia, which resulted in concern it could influence the proceedings. The Northern Territory court consequently placed an injunction on the film’s release across the whole territory. Other killings were later referenced as being intrinsic to the research for McLean’s film, including the backpacker serial killer Ivan Milat, but his feature would be maligned in many quarters for using the killing of an innocent to create cinematic entertainment.

  The story takes place in 1999, when friends Kristy, Ben and Liz purchase an old car to take them on a dream adventure across Australia’s Outback. This likeable bunch travel to the scenic Wolf Creek National Park. While there, they plan to hike to a spectacular meteor crater, which is breathtakingly photographed, as is so much of the terrain in this film. Mclean and his cameraman, Will Gibson, permeate this dreamlike vista with an eerie atmosphere that harks back to the air of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Even though swathed in the reverie of this panoramic landscape, danger is never too far away. Their encounters with the locals are appreciably unnerving, some of whom you’d be well wise to stay away from. If you can still recall the oddballs observed on the road to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Wrong Turn (2003), then you’ll get the picture. As they get closer to Wolf Creek the sense of isolation and the immensity of the Outback, become all the more daunting.

  Upon returning from their arduous walk, they are frustrated to find their car will not start. As the rain begins to pour, they have no choice but to spend the night wrapped up on its seats. As they prepare for an uncomfortable few hours of sleep, along comes bushman Mick Taylor, who pulls up his truck and offers to help the stranded trio. After examining the engine, he diagnoses the problem as a faulty coil and in his amiable patter suggests towing them to his camp, where he can then make the repairs. When they accept, the ecstasy of the last few days is cruelly shattered. Unbeknown to them their drink has been drugged and when they awaken, they are plunged into a nightmare world of torture, sexual abuse, grisly dismemberment and death. These are not the obnoxious youth of the halcyon slasher years; these are a set of congenial kids with the rest of the
ir lives lying before them. This ultimately serves to make the horrors to which they are subjected even more real. The audience want them to make it, but Mick Taylor’s unhinged tenacity has other ideas.

  The epilogue to Wolf Creek continues to exasperate so many who endured the torment inflicted on this blighted group of friends, but let’s remember McLean was crafting a horror movie and closure is rarely an option in such films. After having spent four months in custody, Ben is finally released due to a complete lack of evidence and is cleared of all suspicion. Silhouetted in the sun, cinema’s new monster, Mick Taylor, rifle in hand, ghosts into the dying embers of an unnerving sunset.

  Despite the film’s commercial success, its reception among the critics was somewhat mixed, many of whom were uneasy with its incessant brutality. There are sequences towards the end of the film that are indeed difficult to watch, principally the shed torture, which is shocking in its realism. During the shooting of Kestie Morassi’s torture, the fervour borne in her distressed screams was such that it caused considerable discomfort among the crew. There were reviewers, however, who recognized this movie as a departure from the norm, one that would live on with its audience and force horror cinema to re-evaluate many of its accepted precepts. These were the people who acknowledged McLean’s worth as a filmmaker; they weren’t alone. Wolf Creek was nominated for seven American Film Institute awards, including Best Director.

  While on location, one of the settings used during the drive to Wolf Creek had not seen rainfall in over six years. However, once the crew arrived, it rained non-stop for three days. McLean and his young cast responded by amending the script to accommodate this unexpected downpour. When filming commenced at the quarry where Mick inflicted his atrocities, the locals vented their rage, as this was the site of a real-life murder. The aggrieved community were convinced the film was exploiting this particular unsavoury episode.

  In September 2010 a sequel was announced, returning to the Outback and the monstrous Mick Taylor, with production to commence in 2011. As with its precursor, the story will be partly based on actual events.

  DR JAMES MORAN (George Coulouris) and a business partner embark on a journey to the Amazon jungle in search of a tribe with the power to return the dead to life. They encounter the aforementioned tribe as they become lost in the performance of an unholy ritual, where a woman is sacrificed to a monstrous tree. Moran is later found suffering from the delirium of jungle fever, while his colleague is less fortunate, slain by a native’s spear. Several years later Moran returns from his travels to London with a member of the strange tribe, Tanga (Jimmy Vaughan), who he keeps hidden in his creepy basement with the hideous plant seen earlier in the film. Tanga is endowed with the dubious talent of being able to hypnotize buxom women, who are than offered to the constantly hungry plant. Moran savours the delectation of Piccadilly Circus and Soho, having little time for the prostitutes, preferring instead women with a quite specific allure. After he buys a young lady a drink she is escorted to his manse where she falls to the mercy of his despicable tree. Moran looks on, still living in the hope the tree will return these nubile gifts with a serum, which he has been told can rejuvenate the dead.

  While there was an absence of blood and guts in this almost forgotten British treasure, The Woman Eater bristles with so much of what would, in a few years, become essential to this sanguinary genre. The audience would have had a pretty good idea as to what was going on at Moran’s house, but the sight of the carnivorous plant devouring its prey the producers felt should be left to their imagination; such a spectacle would have been far too much in the Britain of 1958. This overlooked B feature pulsed with an underlying lurid sexuality, particularly the “dance of death” and the tearing of one victim’s blouse. These scenes will appear tame to modern eyes, but just over half a century ago they were far from commonplace in British cinema. The misogynistic Moran’s pursuit of women is a trigger for violence, which culminates in the weird thrill he derives in seeing his murderous plant consume its victims. The film was shown in British theatres as part of a double feature and then exported to the United States before being summarily dismissed. This was one of a couple of low-budget horror films, the other being The Man Without a Body (1957), made by Guido Coen and Charles Saunders, who had established a reputation for crime thrillers. Saunders would very soon go on to direct Britain’s first nudist film, Nudist Paradise (1959), and Coen found a lucrative finale to his career producing sex comedies. Their film, as with so many others of this ilk, was poorly financed, but the shots tracing a potential victim through Soho’s ill-lit streets would be repeated a couple of years later in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), albeit with considerably more intensity.

  In his fifty years in the film industry George Coulouris was a regular in the films of Coen and Saunders, regularly cast as the villain of the piece. He also made appearances in some of the finest films of the twentieth century, including Citizen Kane (1941), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) and Papillon (1973), and found work in television, including appearances in Doctor Who in 1964 and Danger Man (1967).

  TWO COLLEGE STUDENTS, Halley (Yvonne Gaudry) and Rich (Joel Harris), run into trouble on a rock climb in the West Virginia Forest. Rich is thrown from a cliff by an unseen figure then Halley, after trying to escape, trips over a piece of barbed wire and is hauled screaming into the woods, just before her throat is slit.

  The scene changes to fresh-out-of-school medical graduate Chris Flynn (Desmond Harrington) driving through the same area to a job interview. He is forced to take a detour due to an accident on the road, and in truth his own impatience. In a scene very reminiscent of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), an old man at a near-derelict petrol station directs him to a dirt track that will bypass the accident. In his haste, he soon after loses control of the car and ploughs into a stranded Range Rover. The car was carrying a group of young hikers, Jessie (Eliza Dushku), Carly (Emmanuelle Chriqui), her fiancé Scott (Jeremy Sisto) and another couple, Evan and Francine (Kevin Zegers and Lindy Booth). Their tyres have been punctured by a sturdy piece of barbed wire, stretched across the road. Chris, Jessie, Carly and Scott venture into the forest in the hope of finding help, leaving Evan and Francine to attend to the cars. Left alone in the middle of nowhere the two indulge in some sexual foreplay before they hear a sound in the woods. When Evan doesn’t return Francine goes into the dense woodland to investigate. She soon discovers her boyfriend’s shoes and then his severed ear; it is now she realizes something is seriously wrong. As she staggers from the scene, she is overcome by an obscured figure who binds barbed wire around her mouth.

  Chris, Jessie, Carly and Scott come upon a ramshackle mountain cabin, surrounded by vehicles, which again harks back to Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece. Within they find an untidy hotchpotch of barbed wire, car keys and, most alarmingly, human body parts. Three disfigured mountain men can now be seen striding towards the cabin, forcing the four to hide in the visceral filth. As they enter, Francine’s dead body is unceremoniously hurled onto a table. The friends try to hold back their horror as she is callously butchered in preparation for the family’s bloody repast. Theirs will be a bid for survival as they desperately attempt to escape these inbred cannibals; the film follows their efforts to survive as they chase through the darkened woods.

  Wrong Turn was commended for bringing something fresh to the screens on its 2003 release. It is, however, a return to the outlandish families observed in the horror cinema of the 1970s, whose moral perversity freely espoused slaughter and the delicacies of cannibalism. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) had first introduced these ideas to the big screen, with Andrew Davis’s The Final Terror returning to the wilds in 1983. Rob Schmidt’s film shot in Hamilton, Ontario, attempted to bring these ideas to a new audience. In what is a fast-paced thriller, the group are picked off one by one in a wilderness that captures the spirit of John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), with the most annoying being dispatched first. The moment
um doesn’t relent as the cannibals’ arrows bring the hikers down and an axe is thrown in for good measure in an imaginative decapitation scene. The thud of a body can be heard as it falls from a tree through the darkness; the head, unmoving, remaining firmly before the camera’s gaze. The closing credits are disrupted by a deputy sheriff being strangled by “Three Finger”, who survived the climactic explosion. The scene returns to the credits and the insane laughter heard at the very beginning of the film once again rolls from the screen. The success of this film allowed it to be continued with the 2007 release of the direct-to-video Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, which brought a group of celebrities together to fight for their lives in the guise of a real-life television show in these same Virginia backwoods. Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead was released direct-to-video in October 2009.

  SAM (PHILLIP SAYER) and his young son Tony’s (Simon Nash) game with the family’s pet dog is brought to an abrupt end by the appearance of a huge white light, which abducts Sam. Three years later Tony is still traumatized by his father’s inexplicable disappearance; little does he know the white light has returned his father, or rather, what used to be his father. For the moment, Sam has been transformed into a crab-like alien. It doesn’t take long before this creature tracks down a lone woman and then attacks her before placing a tentacle deep into her mouth. When she wakens from her ordeal, she sees her dog devouring the body of the alien. Still in shock, she makes her way into the kitchen, and then her stomach begins to swell. Unable to control her body she falls to the floor and in a series of horrific shots gives birth to a fully-grown Sam. It doesn’t take long before he finds his way to London where he is reunited with his son and tries to explain to Rachel (Bernice Stegers), his now ex-wife, that he doesn’t know where he has been for the past three years. Her new boyfriend is immediately suspicious and although Sam tries to live a normal life, his son very soon learns of his alien powers. Sam makes a gift of them, allowing his son to animate his toys. These powers, however, have a sinister edge, melting telephone boxes, and in time will maim and kill. The hapless babysitter (Maryam d’Abo) soon becomes the object of Sam’s desire and finds herself cruelly used as the surrogate for a new generation of alien beings.