by Wallace, Amy
Enter the New Generation. The kids reared on Fangoria and that Camelot period of the mid-eighties. Enter Rob Zombie and House of 1000 Corpses . Eli Roth and Cabin Fever, Edgar Wright and Shaun of the Dead, Don Mancini and Seed of Chucky (doing to Child’s Play what George and Tobe did to Dead and Chainsaw), Joe Lynch and Wrong Turn 2, Adam Green and Hatchet, me and 2001 Maniacs. And yes, enter Lloyd Kaufman protégé James Gunn and Slither, a cult classic the instant it premiered.
Highlight splatstick moment: With a fearless performance from Michael Rooker that does James Karen, Jeffrey Combs, and Bruce Campbell proud, Slither plays as much eighties horror as it does South Park, and that’s an interesting point, considering South Park’s gurus, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, also earned their wings at Troma. What could be more Troma and South Park than my highlight moment, in which the bewildered hicks come across an infected, bloated, giant Stella, looking like a cross between Jabba the Hut and Willy Wonka’s Violet Beauregard (“I’m so hungry, would you mind handin’ me a piece of that possum over there?”). Kudos to Gunn for foregoing CGI and using on-set, old-school effects, courtesy of Rob Bottin. This is pure tip-of-the-hat to forty years of splatstick, yet entirely its own brand-new model for the new millennium. Like his aforementioned brothers in blood, Gunn understands the cathartic joy to be had from laughing at absurdity, turning tragedy into comedy (for isn’t comedy tragedy plus time?), scares into social commentary. What else can one do in a world of 9/11, George W. Bush, and the so-called War on Terror other than finger paint with blood and guts? LONG LIVE SPLATSTICK!
STEPHEN VOLK’S TEN MOVIE FATES WORSE THAN DEATH
Stephen Volk is the creator-writer of the multiple-award-winning British TV drama series Afterlife and the notorious (almostlegendary)BBC-TV“Halloween hoax” Ghostwatch. As screenwriter, his credits include Ken Russell’s Gothic, William Friedkin’s The Guardian, and Octane, starring Madeleine Stowe. His first collection of stories was Dark Corners (Gray Friar Press), from which the short story “31/10” was nominated for a Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award and for a British Fantasy Award.
1. Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
Can anything be more terrible than Sutherland in the final shot? A fisheyed pod-person keening to the rest of his tribe, and pointing at the camera as he does so, as if to say: “You’re next!”
2. Tyrone Power in Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947)
Depression-era drifter Stanton Carlisle thinks he’s heading for the showbiz big-time with his fake clairvoyant act in this taut, excellently photographed film noir. But con-artistry is what you do while fate has other plans. And (ignoring the add-on happy ending) he ends up the very figure he abhors—the “Geek”—in this, the carny movie of all carny movies.
3. Nick Nolte in Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991)
Yes, Robert De Niro (as Max Cady) might be dispatched into the waves at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Biblical flood, but is it really a victory? The last we see of Nick Nolte, he is squatting like an ape-man in the primal sludge, with his head hung and his arms covered in blood. Cady has turned him into himself—a murderer.
4. Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
Thank God the Chief threw that water cooler through the window and escaped the madhouse, because without that scene, the brain-dead blankness in rebel Jack’s lobotomized countenance at the end of this brilliant satire would have been too much to bear.
5. Julianne Moore in Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)
A sneeze, an itch, a visit to the dry cleaner’s. Slowly, Carol White becomes allergic to everything around her and is drawn inexorably into a hell of her own creation (or is it?). The final frame, of her shielded from the outside world from head to toe, completely protected but utterly de-humanized, is abidingly chilling.
6. Jonathan Pryce in Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
In his imagination, bureaucratic drone Sam Lowry is a knight soaring with eagle’s wings in romantic bliss. In reality, in this Brave New World, his head has been fucked by his smiling torturer/friend Michael Palin. Bold filmmaking by the most terrordriven Monty Python member, soaring to his own heights of absurdist horror.
7. Everyone in Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)
Be careful if you go on this trip of trips with Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, and Ellen Burstyn. You know within the first few minutes it’s going to end badly; you can’t imagine how badly. A relentless spiral sucks them, and us, down where we don’t want to go. And their doom is all the more devastating for being undeserved.
8. Ray Liotta in Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001)
Perhaps the ultimate “look away” moment in recent cinema, this scene shows Anthony Hopkins’s increasingly camp cannibal living up to his nickname, and taking epicurean delight in serving up loathsome Paul Krendler a tasty menu of his own cerebral hemispheres—while, of course, he is still alive. Porridge, anyone?
9. Christian Bale in The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004)
In this wonderfully unstable concoction of a movie, you are never quite sure what is reality and what is in the mind of the protagonist, skeletal Trevor Reznik. (Personally, I like that.) But when the truth comes rushing in, it is so powerful you feel the agony of a man whose very soul was altered irrevocably by a simple act of fate.
10. Michael Gambon in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989)
You may not have much sympathy for despicable Cockney gangster Albert Spica after you’ve witnessed the awful way he treats his wife (Helen Mirren), his minions, and an angelic cherub of a child. But the finale of this Jacobean revenge tragedy, served up with operatic flair and painterly precision, entails his being forced at gunpoint to eat Alan Howard’s divinely cooked penis. Bon appétit!
REAL OR REEL? THE FACTS BEHIND FIVE HORROR FILMS
THAT CLAIM TO BE BASED ON A TRUE STORY
1. The Amityville Horror (1979): On November 30, 1974, twenty-three-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. killed his parents and four siblings in a house located at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. Thirteen months later, in December 1975, George and Kathy Lutz and their children bought the house (which had remained vacant since the murders) and moved in. Twenty-eight days after that, the Lutz family fled the house, claiming terrifying encounters with supernatural forces. Those are the events as recounted in Jay Anson’s bestselling book (subtitled “A True Story”), and in a blockbuster film that spawned a prequel (which fictionalized the DeFeo killings) and numerous sequels. While the murders are a matter of public record (DeFeo, in fact, is still incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York) and the Lutz family did hastily leave their home, the veracity of many details in the story has been questioned by researchers. The infamous house still stands in Amityville, although the structure has been extensively renovated, and the street address changed to discourage sightseers. A remake of The Amityville Horror appeared in 2005 that took even greater liberties with the facts than the original version.
2. The Mothman Prophecies (2002): An adaptation of John A. Keel’s account of his investigation of strange events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where an eerie, winged figure dubbed “Mothman” allegedly appeared to numerous locals and seemed to be a harbinger of doom. The film, directed by Mark Pellington, updates the real-life events (which took place in the sixties) to the present day, and streamlines the sightings of the Mothman into a conventional narrative structure. It also creates a more reliably cinematic (and entirely fictional) protagonist in Washington Post reporter John Klein (played by Richard Gere), although the original author is referenced in Klein’s initials, as well as in another fictitious character, played by Alan Bates, named Leek (Keel spelled backwards). The movie also eliminates the book’s digressions into UFO sightings and X-Files-like conspiracy theories, but it is chillingly powerful and accurate in its depiction of one of the key events in the real-life case: The tragic collapse of the
Silver Bridge between Point Pleasant and Gallipolis, Ohio, which occurred on December 15, 1967, and killed forty-six people.
3. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003): In fairness to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), cowriter/director Tobe Hooper, in interviews, cited only an influence from true events: the horrific crimes of “Plainfield Ghoul” Ed Gein. However, the 2003 remake, directed by Marcus Nispel, proclaimed on its poster that it was “Inspired by a True Story.” While certain details in both films correspond with the real crimes—in particular, cannibalism, and the use of human skin and body parts as adornments and fetishes—the Gein case occurred in Wisconsin in the fifties, not in Texas in the seventies. Further, there was no murderous “family” involved in real life as there was in the TCM films. And, most pointedly, there were no reports of the use of a chainsaw. The official-sounding opening crawl of the original TCM, and the pseudo-documentary footage in the remake (both narrated by actor John Larroquette), also helped convince many viewers that the films depict a “true” story. The Gein case also inspired author Robert Bloch in the creation of Norman Bates in his novel Psycho, as well as Thomas Harris’s serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
4. The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005): This surprise hit—promoted as “Based on a True Story”—was a loose treatment of the case of Anneliese Michel, a young German woman who reportedly suffered from demonic possession and died in 1976 after a Catholic Church–authorized exorcism. Her parents, along with the two priests who oversaw the exorcism, were prosecuted and found guilty of manslaughter in the girl’s death, since medical testing stated that the girl’s problem was epilepsy, not possession. Director Scott Derrickson’s movie set the story in the United States, renamed the girl Emily Rose, and featured the trial of one priest (and a profoundly different legal outcome). In 2006, German director Hans-Christian Schmid made the film Requiem, which was promoted as a more truthful (but still fictionalized) account of the case. Anneliese Michel’s grave in Klingenberg am Main, Bavaria, Germany, is reportedly a pilgrimage site for some devout Catholics to this day.
5. Wolf Creek (2005): This Australian shocker, concerning three backpackers in the Outback who are stalked and tormented by a serial killer, was marketed as “Based on True Events.” The events in question, however, did not take place near the Wolfe (note the actual spelling) Creek meteorite crater in western Australia as presented in the film, but rather in the northern part of the continent near Barrow Creek, in 2001. Two English tourists, Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees, were accosted by a drifter named Bradley John Murdoch, who killed Falconio and abducted Lees. She escaped and Murdoch was apprehended by authorities after a massive manhunt. In 2006, Lees published a non-fiction account of her ordeal titled No Turning Back. The film’s killer is also reportedly modeled on another Australian serial murderer, Ivan Milat, who kidnapped and murdered hitchhikers in New South Wales in the nineties.
—S.B.
MARK GOODALL’S TEN REAL MONDO MOVIE DEATHS
Mark Goodall is a lecturer in media communications at the University of Bradford UK. He is the author of Sweet and Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens (Headpress), and Crash Cinema (CSP), and a member of the advisory board for the Journal of Horror Studies. He is a founding member of the Firminists, an experimental writing group (http://firminists.blogspot.com/) and lead singer of Rudolf Rocker(http://www.myspace.com/rudolf rocker).
“Real” “mondo” death: surely a contradiction in terms? The “shockumentary” or mondo film is one of the most controversial genres in cinema history. Eschewing virtually all of the rules of conventional documentary cinema, the mondo film blazed its way through the grindhouse, the arthouse, the domestic VCR revolution, the torrent of reality and actuality TV, and the Internet with its montages of shocking and repulsive human/animal behavior. Most mondo films concentrate on bizarre rituals around the globe, both sacred and profane. Yet in order to amplify the terror of the real, the mondo director occasionally sneaks in some “actual” death footage to jolt the viewer. While death scenes in the mondo film are often faked, they appear convincingly real and, as this list demonstrates, are some of the most unforgettable moments in film history. Is the shockumentary film a horror film? If horror can lurk in the cold brutality of everyday life, then mondo cinema is the place to find it.
1. Animal Apocalypse
Despite previous manifestations of “offbeat” documentary cinema, the first mondo film proper was Jacopetti and Prosperi’s Mondo Cane (1963) from which the adjective “mondo” derives. A sequence in the film shows the disastrous results of atomic testing around the Pacific island of Bikini. The horrific effects of this contamination are demonstrated by the pathetic image of a turtle so disorientated by the pollution that she is unable to find the sea and is condemned to die slowly in the scorching sun. Mild stuff by today’s standards, but an upsetting hors d’oeuvre of what was to come.
2. Flaming Corpse
The first human death in mondo cinema occurs in the sequel to Mondo Cane: MondoCane2 (1964). The iconic and haunting ritual immolation suicide of Quang Duc, a Vietnamese monk, in protest against the persecution of Buddhists during the Vietnam War is rendered in glorious Technicolor accompanied by an ominous two-note organ riff.
3. Speared to Death
Some may argue that the mistreatment of animals—a frequent mondo motif—is less traumatic than human suffering. Try watching Jacopetti and Prosperi’s Africa Addio (1966), then. The shocking destruction of Africa by corruption and colonial neglect is symbolized by the emasculation and slaughter of the natural world. Lions lose their will to roar while hunters either blast elephants and crocodiles with high powered rifles or rip them to death with hundreds of spears. One of the worst scenes occurs when a hippopotamus is gradually speared to death by tribal poachers; in the end it resembles an enormous blooddrenched pincushion.
4. Shot for the Camera?
It’s not just animals that are destroyed in Africa Addio. The Italian film crew narrowly escaped execution, then joined a group of alarming mercenaries trying to retake a Congolese village from rebels. After the mercenaries succeed, one of the rebel leaders, alleged to have raped and murdered dozens of innocents, is summarily shot—right in front of the camera. After the officer has a second shot blasted into his head, he is dragged into the bush. The incident caused a storm in Italy, where journalists accused the filmmakers of “conspiring in genocide to get good pictures,” and the footage was sequestered.
5. Cannibal Deaths
There are close links between the mondo film and the cannibal and zombie films that exploded out of Italy in the late 1970s. The curious Italian/Japanese film Guinea Ama (L’isola del cannibali, 1974) includes convincing footage of cannibalistic practices as the tribal dead are suspended in slings, smeared in oils, and nibbled at. Some of this footage was later reused in the dire horror flick Zombie Creeping Flesh (1983), further cementing the link between mondo and gore cinema.
6. Death in America
One of the most intriguing aspects of mondo cinema is that the weird behavior captured by its lens is not just exotic and “Third World.” The violence and insanity of the American psyche, for example, is examined in Killing of America (1979), scripted by the late Leonard Schrader (brother of Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver). This somber shockumentary is packed with caught-on-camera shootings, sniper attacks, hold-ups, suicides, and police killings. Bleak, depressing, with a powerful political message . . . and as traumatic as “death as entertainment” should be.
7. Killed by Comrades
In addition to a host of fascinating death rituals from around the globe, Thierry Zéno’s superb film Des Morts (Of the Dead) (1979) captures the passing from life to death—and then to immortality. Amos Vogel praised the film for “breaking the last taboo,” and the most shocking if not the most bloody moment is a scene where a Philippine rebel accused of treachery is machinegunned by his former comrades. “He was a good friend,” says the chief exe
cutioner afterwards, which makes the protracted killing (the victim is seen gasping and twitching in the background) all the more obscene. The notion of letting death unfold in front of the camera lens has since been copied but to lesser effect. The directors of the film later excised this sequence—the only section they had “bought in”—feeling its shock aspect too contrived.
8. Absurd Deaths
Most horror fans who are aware of mondo cinema will know it through the notorious and successful Faces of Death franchise. Faces of Death (1979) was the first mondo film to achieve success through the burgeoning home video market, even more so when it joined the list of “video nasties” drawn up by the right-wing British government of Margaret Thatcher. Faces of Death is so depressingly spurious (its sequence of a “Far East” restaurant serving live monkey brains is infamous) that when real deaths, such as the police footage of the carnage caused by a terrible plane crash, are shown, the viewer is left simply numb.
9. Tragedy in the Sky
A real death in Sweet and Savage (1983), an otherwise mediocre mondo offering, demonstrates that the gore-aspect of a film does not in itself make horror. Legendary trapeze artist Karl Wallenda is filmed attempting a highly dangerous walk across two towers in Puerto Rico. The wire sways and bends in the fierce winds. Upon reaching the center of the rope, Wallenda stumbles and hangs—agonizingly—for a few seconds before plunging to his death. The way in which this death is spliced with French tightrope-walker Philippe Petit’s successfully negotiating his line makes the tragedy even more painful to experience: A horror that lurks in your mind long after you have witnessed it.