by David Byron
Regardless of the version you watch, Leatherface has stood the test
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of time and will continue to do so. Perhaps it's because he's a little more real than the nearly immortal likes of Freddy or Jason. Perhaps because his story is based on a true one. Or maybe it's the chainsaw, with the distinctive sound and inherent fear that comes with it. All totalled, he is relentless, demented, and the kind of boy next door that would send you running for the hills... just as long as those hills aren't in Travis County, Texas.
INTELLIGENCE - 5: He's a good boy. He's just misunderstood. VERY misunderstood. POWER - 8 : Appears to be stronger than the average man. VILENESS - 10: So much blood... So much gore...
SWAY - 3: The chainsaw does all the talkin'.
PURITY - 9 : Albeit completely insane, deep down he is a human being and feels pain, unlike what Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers have become.
PHYSICAL - 10: With the macabre face he wears, he's the neighborhood butcher from Hell.
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Chucky
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Chucky For a long time, this doll was nothing more than a Jason-wannabe, a poor man's Freddy. He did his movies, killed lots of dumbass victims, but he had no respect. Indeed, he's been in some embarrassing situations, like that whole kid's military school thing and the endless plot holes and storylines that make no sense.
But beyond the Child's Play Chucky himself is clearly a unassuming form spells trouble for those not familiar with the exploits of Charles Lee Ray in his otherworldly form, and since he usually finds himself with children, the possibilities are even more frightening.
However, there's just a few too many negatives in the way of Chucky being one of the top Mojos. His size and lack of power are big ones. He is evil and he is crazy, but trapped in the form of a bad Good Guy shorter than the majority of his victims, he is indeed cursed.
INTELLIGENCE - 5: Utilizes his average intellect to outsmart totally dumb victims. Does have knowledge of the occult as well. POWER - 2: Even with the occasional voodoo power, Chucky is way too limited to be taken seriously physically.
VILENESS - 9: Here's where he scores big. Offs his victims in a multitude of tasty ways, too many to list here.
SWAY - 4: Can be scary occasionally. Needs dramatic music and heavy winds to really pull it off though.
PURITY - 9: Either he wants to kill and have fun or plans to return to human form. Either way, he's damn focused. PHYSICAL - 8: Keeping his psychotic side hidden as a doll is perfect. That is, until he gets ripped to shreds (see above). sequels and their shortcomings, Mojo to be reckoned with. His
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Norman Bates
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Norman Bates Many people enjoy the independence and pride that comes with running their own small business. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) was hardly independent though, running a little motel off a country road under the ever watchful eye of his overbearing, controlling mother. The Bates Motel was off the beaten path, so it was with some surprise that a young woman stopped by on a rainy night looking for a room.
Her name was Marion Crane, and she had brought a few secrets with her to the motel. Intrigued by this young woman - and no doubt sexually repressed - young Norman hands over the key to Room #1 (the one with the peephole) and watched Marion as she undressed to take a shower. Moments later, Norman had run off home and Marion received a visitor of her own while in the shower. A dark figure with a large kitchen knife surprised her and stabbed her dozens of times, leaving her for dead on the floor.
Upon discovering the body, Norman knew his mother had done the deed. He placed the body in the woman's car and sank it into a nearby pond. This would cover up the murder only temporarily, as others came by looking for the woman. Apparently, she had left town quite suddenly, and taken a lot of stolen money with her. Norman knew nothing of the money, of course, and it wasn't really important anyway. Covering up the misdeeds of his mother was. As the outsiders became suspicious and snooped around, Norman's mother struck again, sending a private detective down a flight of stairs to his death. It wasn't until one of them discovered a hideous secret in the basement of the Bates home that they realized what and who they were dealing with. The rotting corpse of Norman's mother was found, poisoned by her son, and Norman stormed in, wearing a wig and one of his mother's dresses, hoping to kill anyone else in his way.
Norman would be subdued and later find himself committed, with a psychiatrist calling him the poor victim of a split personality disorder. Unable to come to terms with the murder/death of his mother, Norman began to adopt her personality, bringing her back to life, so to speak, to fill the void. The mother personality continued to suppress Norman and his desires, however, and the
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only way to keep Norman down was influences: young women being one of happened to Marion Crane. And now, the mother personality had taken over completely. Norman Bates was no more.
INTELLIGENCE - 5: Norman is a mama's boy, unable to think for himself, but he's capable of carrying out her wishes. POWER - 5: He's a tall drink o' water but not incredibly strong. VILENESS 8: Mother's jealousy fueled an incredible rage capable of committing murder.
SWAY - 3: Very shy and overpowered by his Mother, Norman has held his tongue far too often.
PURITY - 10: You can almost hear the cuckoo birds singing inside his head.
PHYSICAL - 5: Norman's not strange-looking until he puts on the wig and dress.
TOTAL: 36
to eliminate the bad them. This is what
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The Tall Man
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THE TALL MAN ALIAS: Jebediah Moringside
SEX: Male
RACE: Human (only in appearance)
DATE OF BIRTH: Unknown
BIRTH PARENTS: Unknown
LOCATION OF BIRTH: Unknown
RESIDENCE: The "Red Planet"
HEIGHT: 6'8" (maybe taller)
WEIGHT: Unknown
EYES: Blue
HAIR: Gray/Brown (shoulder length)
SPECIFIC APPEARANCE:
• He wears a black suit, tie, and boots.
• He has a very dead, pale complextion, and is quite gaunt / lanky. IDENTIFICATION MARKS:
• Yellow fluid for blood.
OCCUPATION: Mortitian, Lord of the Dead
MOTIVE: Unknown
WEAPONS OF CHOICE: Dagger, Sentinels (the flying spheres) PEOPLE WHO'VE DEFEATED HIM & SURVIVED:
• Mike Pearson
BIGGEST RIVALS:
• Mike Pearson
• Reggie
WHERE IS HE NOW: Unknown
NUMBER OF FILMS: 4
ACTOR WHO HAS PORTRAYED HIM:
• Angus Scrimm (real name: Lawrence Rory Guy)
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Columns and Opinions Slashers & Splatterpunks
The Splatterpunk Trend, and Welcome To It By Kenneth Tucker From H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King, modern horror fiction has been concerned with the scariness of the unseen -- of evil spirits and the rustling sound in the back of a dark closet, of ghostly moans and overactive imaginations. Over the last few years, however, there has been a significant shift in horror fiction; the genre's traditional jolt of fright now is provided by acts of violence described in elaborate, gruesome detail. The results, at their most artful and bold, have included the serious popular fiction of Thomas Harris, whose novels "Red Dragon" and "The Silence of the Lambs" are full of a careful measured dread. At its most snobbish and callow, the new horror has led to Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho": class animus as a slaughtering ground. And with the rise of so-called splatterpunk fiction, an aggressively grubby underground movement now seeks to compete with more conventional horror writers like Mr. King, Peter Straub and Dean R. Koontz. Most of this new horror fiction trades in the scariness of the seen, the notion that a reader
will be frightened -- and entertained? -- by the explicit depiction of horrific acts, including murder and every sort of mutilation of the body.
The writer commonly credited with coining the term splatterpunk, the novelist David J. Schow, put it this way, "It's not enough to see the shadow behind the door -- people want to see what's making the shadow, what it looks like and how it comes apart." In splatterpunk, ghosts have given way to serial killers; "boo!" has been replaced by "yuck!"; things don't go bump in the night -- they emit wretched, agonized howls.
Splatterpunk is a mocking echo of cyberpunk, the label applied to science fiction's hard-boiled, high-tech underground movement a decade ago; it is also a conflation of splatter films (the slang term for excessively violent movies like the "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" series) and punk rock (the willfully crude pop-music revolution sparked in the late 70's). In his anthology "Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror," Paul M. Sammon offers the movement's deceptively serene manifesto: "Like surrealism before it, splatterpunk was a specific revolt against an artistic establishment -- in our case, the traditional, meekly suggestive
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horror story." Accordingly, "Splatterpunks" is full of fiction unconcerned with spooky atmospherics or suspense; most of the collection's stories are about cruel humans and the violence they commit.
Here is a street fight in Bath, England, as described in Philip Nutman's "Full Throttle":
"Staff stumbled to his feet and kicked. His foot hit Hougan's chest, snapping the youth back, slamming his head to the pavement. " 'He's mine!' Alex screamed, diving as he brought his right fist down like a piston, spreading Hougan's nose across his face. . . . "Hougan was dead.
" [ Alex ] felt nothing.
"No remorse, panic, no residue of the nausea he'd felt [ earlier ] . . . "His head was unnaturally light and clear.
"He'd killed him."
As this suggests, a great deal of splatterpunk is not much more than a rougher, cruder version of pulp fiction. And as befits a time when even every pop-culture phenomenon has its pretensions to respectability, most of the writers who create this stuff do not like being tagged as splatterpunks. "I like publicity for my fiction, of course," Joe R. Lansdale, perhaps the genre's most interesting stylist, a Texas writer with a healthy sense of black humor and moral outrage, has stated. "But I ain't no splatterpunk and dislike the label. I like to be thought of as my own label."
In his novels and short stories, Mr. Lansdale condemns sexism, racism and the threat of nuclear extinction by setting most of his tales in a post-apocalyptic landscape peopled by irradiated rednecks who loot, rape and murder with terrifying abandon. Mr. Lansdale's overriding idea is that we are becoming desensitized to violence, a problem he speculates will only get worse. In "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert With Dead Folks," he writes: "The last time [ Wayne ] had been to Law Town he'd bought a front-row ticket to one of the executions and watched a chronic shoplifter, a redheaded rat of a man, get pulled apart by being chained between two souped-up tractors. . . . Wayne had been put off by the whole thing. It wasn't organized enough and the drinks and food were
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expensive and the front-row seats were too close to the tractors. He had gotten to see that the red-head's insides were brighter than his hair, but some of the insides got sprinkled on his new shirt, and cold water or not, the spots hadn't come out."
One reason splatterpunk exists is that it is horror fiction's natural response to what is going on around the edges of pop culture these days: not only bloody exploitation films but also the hyped-up world of rock-music videos and the new raunchiness of many comic books (the often all too aptly named "graphic novels") aimed at adults. Much of this work assumes that subtlety is pointless; that part of the thrill of the esthetic experience is to be hit in the face by it. Splatterpunk is the print medium's latest attempt to compete with ever more sophisticated visual images, and if you take comfort from nothing else about this fiction, it is a measure of print's enduring vividness and power that violence seems even more punishingly assaultive and nasty in splatterpunk than it does in other media.
That said, splatterpunk is not about to take over horror fiction any time soon. This material has been around as a distinct subgenre for at least five years, and none of it has ascended to the best-seller lists. (Only Clive Barker, included in "Splatterpunks" as a thirtysomething granddaddy of the form, has enjoyed notable commercial success, with a parodic variation on this sort of thing.) The vast majority of splatterpunk books are published in paperback, and few of them ever reach your local chain bookstore, which tends to fill its horror section with Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, V. C. Andrews and other reliable brand names. Splatterpunk is also sold in comic-book stores and science-fiction specialty shops, and has inspired its own little subculture of independent publishers and fan magazines - Cemetery Dance and Iniquities ("The Magazine of Great Wickedness and Wonder") are two of the more professional-looking. Basically, splatterpunk bears the same relationship to horror fiction that punk rock did to rockand-roll -- it is a radical gesture that shakes up the genre, that shifts the balance slightly but significantly. Splatterpunk does not have mass appeal, but it does inevitably influence other, more mainstream writers, who respond to its sheer gall, its refusal to be conventionally commercial even as it inspires to great commercial success.
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Splatterpunk's extremes are defined not only in its depiction of violence and death, but also by an intense alienation from the body. In David J. Schow's short story "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy," the corpulent title character is described thus: "His surplus flesh quivered and swam, shoving around his clothing as though some subcutaneous revolution was aboil. Pasty and pocked, his belly depended earthward, a vast sandbag held at bay by a wide weight lifter's belt, notched low. The faintest motion caused his hectares of skin to bobble like mercury. Wormboy was more than fat. He was a crowd of fat people."
Mr. Schow's prose delivers an undeniable sick kick; it is a nauseating cheap thrill that succeeds in its desire to revolt. Much of splatterpunk fiction operates like pornography, seeking to provoke a strong, immediate response, unconcerned with literary effect. But does this genre aspire to anything more? Yes, occasionally. Along with Mr. Lansdale's best novels, "The Drive-In" (1988) and "Savage Season" (1990), there is "The Scream," a 1988 novel by John Skipp and Craig Spector that is a sustained satire that proceeds from a juicy, amusing premise: What if there really is a rock band out there that worships Satan, inserts hypnotic messages into the microchips of its recordings and uses its popularity to influence thousands, perhaps millions, of young people to commit mayhem?
In the novel, a hard-rock band called the Scream inspires rabid fans who call themselves Screamers; the climax of the book occurs during a concert in which the band sings its latest hit, "Stick It In," and a group of Screamers pull out knives and stick them into the backs of other audience members. Anyone who has ever attended a big, rowdy rock concert will be shaken by the novel's precise details and plot. It is paradoxical that perhaps the most effective anti-rock book ever written should have come from Mr. Skipp and Mr. Spector, enthusiastic rock fans whose nonfiction -- notably a defense of splatterpunk called "On Going Too Far" that appears as the introduction to the 1989 horror anthology "The Book of the Dead" -- goes to great lengths to condemn the sort of pop-culture censorship advocated by rock's enemies.
Splatterpunk may be a humanist's nightmare -- defending its prose is difficult if you want clearly stated morals or uplifting lessons in your fiction -- but it has many humane sentiments. Mr. Sammon maintains that splatterpunk first surfaced in the mid-80's, "erupting
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through . . . a period of social repression -- specifically, the vicious conservatism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher." The works of Mr. Lansdale, as well as J. S. Russell in his story "City of Angels," offer appalling visions of the aftermath of nuclear w
ar; by describing the effects of nuclear bombs in obscene detail, these writers hope to inspire outrage against such weapons.
ITS supporters also argue that most splatterpunk fiction does not share the salient trait of so many contemporary horror films -misogyny. Frequently this means little more than the fact that in splatterpunk stories men are maimed and killed as frequently as women -- equal-opportunity pain -- but Mr. Sammon deplores "the emphasis on female stereotyping" that is "depressingly insistent" in a lot of mainstream horror fiction, and the better writers in the genre create strong female characters who defeat their evil foes. In John Skipp's "Film at Eleven," a man who beats his wife is offered up as the monster he is, while the woman is portrayed as a sympathetic, complex character who is shown to have a sad history of abusive relationships.
Edward Bryant's "While She Was Out" presents its central character, Della, as a female version of Charles Bronson in "Death Wish" -- an ordinary citizen who fights back when attacked. Della takes on a thug who jumps her in a shopping-mall parking lot: "There was no question of asking him nicely to let go, of giving warning, of simply aiming to disable. Her self-defense teacher had drilled into all the students the basic dictum of do what you can, do what you have to do. . . . With all her strength, Della drove the screwdriver up into the base of his skull. She thrust and twisted the tool until she felt her knuckles dig into his stiff hair."