by Adam Rockoff
Although the videos on Couture’s website have production credits at the end (hardly what you would add to a super-secretive snuff film), an Austrian pathologist determined that the photos showed “possible manslaughter.” This was enough “evidence” for Interpol to pass the information on to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
As word of the arrest began trickling out, Couture’s plight became something of a minor cause célèbre for the horror community. Editorials and articles detailed the perceived injustice while blogs posted relevant updates. Tom Savini lent his support and the 2011 documentary Art/Crime focused on the case. A website was created to collect donations in order to help defray the cost of Couture’s legal defense, which ran into the tens of thousands of dollars. T-shirts were printed with the slogan “Art Is Not a Crime,” as were G-strings emblazoned with the phrase “Corrupt Me.”
In December 2012, the case finally went to trial. A seven-woman, five-man jury acquitted Couture on all three charges of corrupting morals by distributing, producing, and possessing obscene material.
He narrowly avoided up to two years in prison—for being too good at his work.
Although they were certainly no proponents of outright censorship, somewhere, Siskel and Ebert were smiling.
* * *
I. Argento’s English leaves much to be desired, so there’s always the question of spotty translation. However, this quote has appeared in so many sources that it must be somewhat accurate.
II. Anyone who guesses the inspiration for this pseudonym gets reimbursed for their purchase of this book. Just kidding, but it is horror related.
III. Between Wicked Lake and I Spit on Your Grave, I also wrote a sappy movie for the Hallmark Channel. So make of that what you will.
IV. Ebert unknowingly foreshadows one of the greatest taglines ever conceived: By Sword, by Pick, by Axe, Bye Bye, from The Mutilator.
V. I have no idea why I always use Des Moines as the representative middle-America city. But I mean no disrespect. I’ve been there once; it’s a lovely place.
VI. For whatever reason, this acronym has always reminded me of NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, an organization I still can’t believe is allowed to exist, since it advocates for child rape. Through either research or out of curiosity, I’ve probably Googled every legal sexual perversion known to man, and visiting NAMBLA.org is the only time I’ve literally felt sick to my stomach.
VII. In the absence of any “official” list, the following are the films generally cited as the initial thirty-nine video nasties: Absurd, Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, Anthropophagous, Axe, The Beast in Heat, Blood Bath, Blood Feast, Blood Rites, Bloody Moon, The Burning, Cannibal Apocalypse, Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Man, The Devil Hunter, Don’t Go in the Woods, The Driller Killer, Evilspeak, Exposé, Faces of Death, Fight for Your Life, Forest of Fear, Gestapo’s Last Orgy, The House by the Cemetery, The House on the Edge of the Park, I Spit on Your Grave, Island of Death, The Last House on the Left, Love Camp 7, Madhouse, Mardi Gras Massacre, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Night of the Bloody Apes, Night of the Demon, Snuff, SS Experiment Camp, Tenebrae, The Werewolf and the Yeti, and Zombie Flesh Eaters.
CHAPTER THREE
Horror High
I love lists. They’re the reason I still cite Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as the greatest album ever made,I even though I actually think it’s only the sixth-best Beatles album.II
Sometimes when I’m having trouble sleeping, which is often, I will seek out random lists of things in which I’m interested. In the last year alone, I’ve Googled “Greatest Heavy Metal Album Covers,” “Most Beautiful Swimming Holes,” “Greatest Professional Wrestlers,” “Top 10 NCAA Football National Championship Teams,” “Longest Underground Rivers,” “Most Underrated Led Zeppelin Songs,” “Coldest Temperatures on Earth,” “Top 10 NBA Centers,” “Greatest Horror Movie One-Sheets,” “World’s Deepest Caves,” and “Most Painful Diseases.”
So it would stand to reason that there needs to be a chapter in which I combine my love of lists with my love of slasher films. But then I figured, there has to be a more compelling way to celebrate these films. I mean, would you be surprised that Black Christmas, Halloween, and Friday the 13th would be vying for the top spot? Or that Canadian imports like Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, and Happy Birthday to Me would be rounding out the top ten? And how would I account for precursors to the slasher film, like Psycho and Peeping Tom? Plus, my opinions on these films change all the time, influenced by a variety of factors. Today, I might prefer The Burning to Terror Train, while tomorrow I might be high on He Knows You’re Alone or Night School.
I started thinking about the most common characteristics of these slasher films, from their formal elements (final girl, revenge-minded psychopath, ineffective authority figures) to their stylistic flourishes (POV shots, jump scares). It occurred to me that with only a handful of exceptions (I’m looking at you, My Bloody Valentine and Curtains), the main characters in slasher films are in either high school or college. And what encapsulates this particular time better than a yearbook? Because the typical categories—Most Popular, Most Athletic, Class Clown, Most Likely to Succeed—aren’t really applicable, I had to get a little creative. So sit back, crack open your brand-new copy of the Slasher Yearbook, and Keep in Touch . . . that is, if you manage to stay alive!
GREATEST KILLS
Slasherdom is chock-full of films that contain a single unforgettable murder. The decapitation in The Mutilator seems to be the only reason for the film’s existence. But if we’re going to choose one film that best represents the crème de la crème of slasher slayings, it would be a sacrilege to pick one not blessed by the work of Tom Savini.
Horror fans are as familiar with Savini’s biography as they are their own. As a child, he would save the money he made from shining shoes in order to buy makeup. His experience as a combat photographer in Vietnam, where he found a measure of safety behind the camera, informed the realism of his later work. His makeup effects in Friday the 13th are iconic. In Maniac, infamous. In The Burning, the murders were too realistic for the censors and were subsequently watered down. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter continues his Crystal Lake carnage, and the demise of Jason might be his most impressive set piece.
It’s somewhat ironic, then, that it’s one of Savini’s lesser-known films that contains his best work. The Prowler is a tour de force of the master’s magic. A bayonet is driven through the top of one unlucky victim’s head, slicing through his cranial, sinus, and oral cavities until his eyeballs roll back into white and the blade emerges from beneath his chin. This scene concludes with a bloody pitchforking in the shower. There’s also a cringe-inducing neck slashing in a swimming pool and a final exploding head that exceeds a similar effect in Maniac. Genius, all of it.
Distribution issues kept The Prowler from achieving the same notoriety as similar slashers, until Blue Underground gave it a proper DVD release twenty years later. For the collectors out there, the film’s Mexican lobby card—on which it’s called Rosemary’s Killer—features some gorgeous artwork of the murders.
MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED (BUT DIDN’T)
If only there were a surefire formula for box office success. But until someone comes up with a viable sabermetrics-like system, the closest thing we have to a Rosetta stone is William Goldman’s famous adage “Nobody knows anything.” The truth is, there’s oftentimes no discernible reason why some films succeed while others fail. It’s like trying to understand the logic behind Molly Ringwald’s becoming a sex symbol in the eighties while the girl from Can’t Buy Me Love couldn’t get arrested. After all, any red-blooded teenager who had his first orgasm during the Reagan administration who says he didn’t beat off at least once to Cindy Mancini is either lying or secretly in love with Patrick Dempsey.
Even the slasher film, the most formulaic of genres, can’t beat the odds every time. Some films strike a chord while others don’
t. Some get picked up by a distributor that knows exactly what it’s doing, while others are allowed to wither on the vine. But sometimes you see a film that for all intents and purposes should have done better. And The House on Sorority Row is one of those films.
We start with the perfect slasher setup. After a brief prologue of a traumatic pregnancy twenty years earlier, we jump to the present (in this case, 1983), where a bunch of sorority sisters are holding a final party before their house is closed for the summer. A practical joke (though I would use the term loosely) goes awry and their hated housemother, Mrs. Slater, is killed. Rather than turn themselves in, the girls realize the show (er, party) must go on! During the festivities, the girls are killed off one by one. Could Mrs. Slater have cheated death? Or is it her homicidal son, Eric, the baby from the prologue, who is very much alive and has been living in the attic all these years?
Director Mark Rosman was Brian De Palma’s first assistant director on Home Movies, a forgettable film De Palma made between The Fury and Dressed to Kill. Right from the beginning of The House on Sorority Row, it’s obvious the young acolyte learned well at the master’s knee; an early tracking shot through the sorority house is vintage De Palma. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it horror’s Touch of Evil, but it’s a classy bit of filmmaking for a genre in which class is a rare commodity. There’s also a languid pan across the guilty faces of the partygoers that recalls Carrie’s ill-fated prom. If subtle camerawork isn’t your bag, there’s also a nice head-in-the-toilet gag that I’m surprised hasn’t been ripped off more frequently.
Looking back, I’m blown away by how well The House on Sorority Row actually did at the box office. Released by exploitation specialist Film Ventures, as opposed to one of the majors, it took in over $10 million, beating out that year’s better-known horror titles like Amityville 3-D, The Hunger, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. So why then do I say it didn’t “succeed,” when clearly it made back its budget multiple times over? Probably because it never felt like a success.
Released in January 1983, at the tail end of the slasher cycle, The House on Sorority Row was never spoken of with the same reverence as a My Bloody Valentine or a Prom Night. Or even lesser but earlier entries like The Burning, Graduation Day, or Night School. The poster art never beckoned to me from the shelf of the video store; it looks more like soft-core porn than horror. In fact, before I wrote Going to Pieces, I had seen the film exactly one time. That said, I have no doubt that if Sorority Row had hit theaters in the months following Friday the 13th, the name “Eric” would be as infamous as “Jason” or “Freddy” (or at least “Cropsy” or “Harry Warden”), and sequels in which a new crop of giggling coeds move into the vacant sorority house would have been churned out. The film was a victim of circumstance, as opposed to incompetence, which I suppose is the fairest thing you can say about it today.
MOST FUTURE STARS
Admittedly, slasher films are usually far from acting showcases, hardly training grounds for budding Oliviers. They are, however, perfect vehicles for young thespians looking to break into the business. The list of slasher alumni who have gone on to bigger and—at least in most people’s eyes—better things is fairly impressive: George Clooney (Return to Horror High), Brad Pitt (Cutting Class), Kevin Bacon (Friday the 13th), Johnny Depp (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Renée Zellweger (Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation).
So which slasher film had the best farm team? After a hard-fought battle, the victory goes to The Burning. Other films might have had bigger future stars—He Knows You’re Alone featured Tom Hanks in his film debut—but none had so many solid prospects. This summer-camp slasher, which was cowritten by Miramax cofounder Bob Weinstein, stars Best Actress Oscar winner Holly Hunter, future Seinfeld funnyman Jason Alexander, the always solid Fisher Stevens, and, although he never did much else, Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s lovable nerd, Brian Backer.
Runner Up: The Final Terror (a.k.a. Campsite Massacre), with Rachel Ward, Adrian Zmed, Joe Pantoliano, and Daryl Hannah.
BIGGEST WTF MOMENT
It’s not the ending of Sleepaway Camp. That would be too easy. After all, the film traumatized a generation of kids and became well-known—even to those who never saw it—as the one with “the chick with a dick.” Oh, and in case you were worried about the young actress’s well-being, they didn’t strip her down and add a six-inch (I’m being very generous) pecker to her thirteen-year-old anatomy; it was an actor (so the penis was real) wearing a mask.
Luckily, there are plenty of other candidates, as the genre is filled with more than its share of head-scratchers, scenes that make you sit back, throw your hands up in submission, and just say, “What the fuck?” Scenes such as the finale of the Xmas slasher Christmas Evil, where the killer Santa makes his getaway by driving a van off a bridge—but instead of plummeting to his fiery death, he defies the laws of gravity (and coherent filmmaking) and continues flying toward the winter moon. Or what about the rocket scientist in Slaughter High who, after watching her friend’s intestines explode from his stomach, somehow finds a working bathtub in a deserted high school and decides to strip naked for a soak! Solid choices for sure, but it’s probably the ending of the survivalist slasher Just Before Dawn that takes the cake. The film’s final girl, Constance, faces off against a backwoods behemoth by the light of her campfire. It shouldn’t be much of a fight—a petite blonde against a hulking maniac—until Constance literally shoves her tiny hand into the killer’s mouth. She keeps pushing until her arm is halfway down his throat, eventually suffocating him. Constance is all fucked up after she realizes what she’s done and the film ends on this rather downbeat note. You almost can’t believe what you just saw. I guess it’s a little less shocking today, where you have plenty of websites seemingly created for the sole purpose of proving that the human forearm can in fact fit into orifices you never thought imaginable.
Director Jeff Lieberman cites Just Before Dawn as his favorite among his films. It actually owes far more to movies like Deliverance than it does the slasher film. But the timing of its release (1981) and its stylistic trappings place it firmly in the slasher canon. Lieberman also directed the nature-run-amok (more accurately, the worm-run-amok) film Squirm (my favorite of his films) and the LSD-themed Blue Sunshine, which I guess makes the hallucinatory ending of Just Before Dawn all the more understandable.
BEST HOLIDAY SLASHER
Even as a Jew, I love everything about Christmas. I love the songs. “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is wonderfully creepy, “Carol of the Bells” sounds like metal,III and I have a soft spot for “The Little Drummer Boy.” I love the idea of mistletoe, that you can con a girl into kissing you by holding a parasitic plant above her head. I love the fact that the holiday’s color scheme looks like Freddy’s sweater. I love the pageantry, and as an unapologetic capitalist, I even love the crass commercialization of the holiday. If that offends the devout few, and you’d prefer to spend December 25 (even though Jesus was almost certainly not born on that day) dicking around a manger instead of tearing through presents and getting fucked up on eggnog, have at it.
As such, I feel a little bit like the Grinch for not choosing one of the many Christmas slashers for my favorite holiday horror. After all, most of them have something to recommend. Black Christmas is an indisputable classic. Christmas Evil is nutty. Both Don’t Open Till Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night are sleazy fun. Silent Night, Bloody Night is a historical curiosity, while David Hess’s To All a Goodnight proves, at the very least, that the man who immortalized Krug Stillo wasn’t actually a criminal.
That said, they don’t hold a (votive) candle to My Bloody Valentine. As the most popular of the so-called Canadian tax shelter films, Valentine was produced by John Dunning and André Link. In 1962, this legendary Canadian duo cofounded Cinépix (which would eventually become Lionsgate Films) and were responsible for some of the very best Canuxploitation, including Cronenberg’s early films and the Last House on the Left–ish
Death Weekend. Excuse the shameless name-dropping (although it’s not like I’m tossing around Spielberg and Lucas), I knew Dunning very well before his unfortunate passing and am also friendly with My Bloody Valentine’s director, George Mihalka, so the film will always have a special place in my (bloody) heart.
But even without the personal connection, Valentine must be at the top of every self-respecting slasher fan’s list. It has everything you could ask for in this type of film. The cast isn’t comprised of clueless teenagers, but young adults struggling with life in a blue-collar town; think All the Right Moves with mines instead of mills and a pickax-wielding madman instead of Craig T. Nelson. The script is lean and economical, Mihalka’s direction flawless, and the fact that it was shot in an actual mine (though closed down at the time) lends an air of authenticity that couldn’t be duplicated on a soundstage, at least not on the film’s budget. You also have a cheesy theme song that I have to imagine was done in jest but actually sounds like (or at least not worse than) fellow Canadian Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” When an Irish alt-rock trio christened themselves My Bloody Valentine, it also became the best horror film to lend its moniker to a rock band, although with the other contenders being White Zombie and Two Thousand Maniacs! (inspiring 10,000 Maniacs), there wasn’t too much competition.
THE WORST . . . THE ABSOLUTE WORST SLASHER
It’s embarrassing how much time I’ve spent considering the options.
From past experience, I narrowed down the finalists to New Year’s Evil, Home Sweet Home, and Don’t Go in the Woods. I have no idea which of these three celluloid atrocities is the genre’s absolute nadir. To say all are stupefyingly bad is an insult to other awful films. This trio elevates ineptitude to an entirely new level. I guess the most remarkable thing is not that they were made at all—after all, a chimpanzee can make a film—but that anybody picked them up for distribution.