by Adam Rockoff
BEST FOREIGN INTERLOPER
As a rule, the slasher film has essentially been an American phenomenon. The cast, the setting, the insipid teen jargon—everything about them seems straight out of small-town USA. The irony, of course, is that many of the most popular slashers are Canadian made, but these all did their best to scrub away any trace of specificity to their home country.
Given the worldwide success of slasher films, what’s most surprising is how few international productions actually tried to jump on the gravy train. There was The Day After Halloween and Nightmares from Australia, and Bloody Moon from Spain, courtesy of Jess Franco, but none of these films gained much traction. This might have been because slasher films themselves drew heavily from foreign influences. Or maybe it was because these films were so distinctly American that they were hard to duplicate.
An obvious choice for this category would be Pieces, a film so wonderfully awful that it needed two legendary taglines: You Don’t Have to Go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre! and It’s Exactly What You Think It Is! This fan favorite was directed by Spaniard Juan Piquer Simón and shot predominately in his homeland. Even though it’s atrociously dubbed, relies on the “talent” of many well-known European faces, and rounds up extras who look straight out of old World War II newsreel footage, it still feels like a badly made American production—not unlike Slaughter High, another film from Pieces’s two American producers, Dick Randall and Steve Minasian.
On the other hand, Michele Soavi’s StageFright, while nonspecific about its geographical setting, could only have come from the country that birthed the giallo. Today, Soavi is best known for the 1994 Rupert Everett favorite Cemetery Man. But in 1987, he was ready to make his feature directorial debut following a successful career as an actor and assistant director with collaborators Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava. With shades of Happy Birthday to Me and Curtains, StageFright finds a group of rehearsing actors locked somewhat unbelievably in a theater—while being stalked by a murderer dressed up as the killer from the play. It’s actually less convoluted than it sounds. But you don’t come to StageFright for the streamlined story. As with the gialli that influenced it, you come for the visuals. The fact that Soavi hides his killer behind an oversize owl mask without it once approaching the absurd is a testament to his skill as a director. And the scene in which the big bird sits among his victims, posed in a gory tableau, as a fan blows random feathers through the air, is as beautifully surreal as anything composed by his esteemed former employers. The film’s final shot, of the impossibly alive madman winking at the audience—far more slasher than giallo inspired—is a nice shout-out to its American counterparts, which understood better than anyone that sometimes you just can’t keep a good maniac down.
* * *
I. According to Rolling Stone’s 2003 special issue “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”
II. For those who care, I prefer, in descending order, Abbey Road; Magical Mystery Tour; either Rubber Soul or Revolver, then the other; and finally the White Album.
III. The main reason I make this connection is because the Savatage song “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” is really just a hard-rock version of this carol.
IV. As I mentioned in the prologue, Thrower also wrote the definitive tome on Lucio Fulci, Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci.
V. One of my favorite pieces of trivia, which absolutely nobody believes, is Christie’s novel’s original title. It’s too offensive for me to even write but 100 percent true. Just go and Google it. Trust me.
CHAPTER FOUR
Terror on Tape, or How I Turned Down a Hand Job for Ninety Minutes of Bloodthirsty Mutants, Killer Kids, Homicidal Hillbillies, Demonic Priests, and Eurotrash
“Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to his friend the French physicist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy.
Evidently, Franklin knew a lot more about electricity (although if you think about it, one would have to be either daft or certifiably insane to fly a kite in an electrical storm) than he did about teenage boys. Because if there’s one absolute certainty, it’s that no self-respecting fourteen-year-old would turn down a hand job.
Yet that’s exactly what I did in the fall of 1988.
About eight of us were hanging out at Marcy Fillipelli’s house—her parents were either dead or out for dinner; I can’t remember which, but I don’t recall ever meeting them. It was my job to choose the movie for the night, and although we all understood that this was only a pretext to a night of dry-humping and hickeys, it was a responsibility I took very seriously. Only two types of films would be acceptable: a comedy in which some preppy dude dressed in tennis whites would inevitably be doused with mud . . . or oil . . . or garbage. (Today’s comedies are much raunchier, so there would undoubtedly be some sort of bodily fluid involved. But curiously, they showed a lot more bush back then. And it being the eighties, it was a lot of bush.)
Or a horror movie.
This, of course, was my domain. The girls might have preferred the high jinks of William Zabka and his Cobra Kai chums, but I wanted something that would hit ’em right in the amygdala. My motivation was self-indulgence, not sadism. The way I figured it, the more terrified they were, the better chance I had of getting my girlfriend at the time, Krista Vicenzi, to cozy up to me. The fear response, at least physiologically, is far closer to sex than is unbridled laughter. Sweating, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, versus the braying of a hyena.
There were no doubt some good reasons (although I can’t recall any of them) why I bypassed the usual staples of such teenage gatherings—Carrie, The Exorcist, any number of slasher films—in favor of Terror on Tape, an obscure compilation of clips from the great exploitation distributor Continental Video.
Terror on Tape casts Cameron Mitchell as the owner of the redundantly named Shoppe of Horror Video Store. Although Mitchell was one of the founders of the Actors Studio, the famed Manhattan collective that rose to prominence under Lee Strasberg and became a mecca for disciples of Stanislavski, he will forever be identified (somewhat unfairly) with Italian sleaze. And Terror on Tape is nothing if not wonderful, full-blown, glorious sleaze.
The film opens with a bow-tie-wearing rube wandering into the store and, after confusing a decorative skeleton for the proprietor, being greeted by Mitchell doing his best Grandpa Munster imitation. The customer asks for a recommendation, something scary but not too scary, as he suffers from what in layman’s terms can only be described as being a gigantic pussy. So Mitchell shows him an example of what he considers a “mild” horror film, thus plunging us into the film proper.
The first clip on tap is from 1983’s The Deadly Spawn, here retitled Return of the Aliens: The Deadly Spawn, allegedly in an effort to cash in on the success of Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece. How anyone could conceivably think that a bargain-basement independent feature about marauding alien “fish” that look like sperm with razor-sharp teeth could have anything to do with a 20th Century Fox release from four years earlier is beyond me. Questionable marketing decisions aside, and despite its inclusion on the Terror compilation—leading it off, no less—The Deadly Spawn is actually a superior creature feature, a heartfelt albeit bloody homage to the invasion films of the 1950s. What the makeup team managed to pull off on a virtually nonexistent budget is nothing short of extraordinary. Although I tend to think that practical-effects purists are a smug lot—the kind of folks who claim that Rick Baker’s astonishing transformation in An American Werewolf in London can’t hold a candle to Jack Pierce’s slow dissolves to more and more yak hair for 1941’s The Wolf Man—it’s tough to envision how CGI could have added anything to the expertly applied latex and Karo syrup of Spawn.
There was something else that struck me about Spawn, leaving me with a vague and inexplicable sense of unease. It didn’t look like any of the films I was used to. Even the cheap, ultraviolent ones. This was back before any idiot with a C-note could buy an off-the-shelf vid
eo camera and create their own Blair Witch Project. Making a movie, even a movie as inept as, say, Bloodthirsty Butchers (an actual film from Staten Island auteur Andy Milligan, arguably the worst director to ever get behind the lens), required some serious dough. Film stock, and by “film stock” I mean the strip of celluloid onto which photographic images are captured, was prohibitively expensive. Whatever one’s artistic shortcomings, if you could shell out enough to purchase a reel of thirty-five-millimeter (or sixteen-millimeter, or even eight-millimeter) your film was going to look like a film.
I had also seen enough behind-the-scenes photos in Fangoria to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the filmmaking process. Movies involved sets, klieg lights, and camera rigs. Yet The Deadly Spawn looked as if it was made in my basement, cast with my grandmother and some of her mahjong buddies. Years later, I met the director, Doug McKeown, at a horror convention. I was surprised to learn he was a fellow New Jerseyan, and was even more surprised to find out that this specific scene from Terror on Tape really was shot in a basement in New Brunswick, the town adjacent to my own. Rosemary’s Baby is often lauded as the film that removed horror from its Gothic trappings and placed it in a modern context. But unless you were John Lennon, the fictional Bramford (actually the Dakota) wasn’t familiar at all. Even though it was right across the Hudson River and up Central Park West, it felt foreign. The Deadly Spawn, on the other hand, felt like home.
The next bunch of clips was pretty forgettable. They came from Vampire Hookers, whose name is the most memorable thing about it; Blood Tide, which I’ve never seen in its entirety but stars James Earl Jones and seems to rip off scenes from Jaws wholesale; Cathy’s Curse and Madhouse Mansion, which looked equally dull, although the latter did star Marianne Faithfull; and Frozen Scream, whose clip ends with a man being held down in a hospital bed while a syringe is forced into his eyeball. The scene is shot from the perspective of the victim, so as soon as the needle touches his cornea (read: camera lens), fake blood is squeezed into the frame. I used this very same effect in a student film I made my sophomore year in college, although I honestly can’t remember if I was consciously referencing Frozen Scream (seems unlikely, because I had no particular affinity for the film), incorporating motifs I had filed away deep within my subconscious (even less likely, since my biggest concern was probably finding female classmates willing to go topless), or doing neither (almost definitely). What I do remember, however, and the proof is somewhere deep within the bowels of the University of Wisconsin’s Vilas Hall, is that I managed to carry out the effect just as (in)competently as the professionals behind Frozen Scream. And I was one of the least talented students in the class.
Just in case this memory has you yearning for ocular trauma done right, I would refer you to Gary Sherman’s Dead & Buried (a classic eighties creepfest even absent the relevant scene) and, of course, the granddaddy of all orbital obliteration, Lucio Fulci’s Zombi.I
After this, Terror on Tape began to pick up a little. In To the Devil a Daughter, Christopher Lee takes a pregnant woman in the throes of late-stage labor and ties her legs together, resulting in a spontaneously bloody birth. I thought it was pretty cool that the new addition to the family looks like the thing on the cover of Black Sabbath’s Born Again LP, but a whole lot cooler when the woman takes the demon baby and forces it back into her vagina!II Although To the Devil a Daughter was not actually the last offering from Britain’s Hammer Films, it is the one that put the proverbial nail in the once-esteemed company’s coffin. Aside from its general distastefulness, the film features a well-underage Nastassja Kinski going full frontal. I never understood how producers are allowed to get away with what would be considered illegal under any other circumstances, but apparently they can. Just look at most of Brooke Shields’s early career. I guess it’s like the old joke about how paid sex between two consenting adults is illegal, while paid sex between two consenting adults in front of a camera is a legitimate enterprise.
Nastassja Kinski is, of course, the daughter of deranged German actor/madman Klaus Kinski. Revered by cinephiles for his collaborations with Werner Herzog, such as Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and by horror and exploitation fans for his refusal to turn down almost any paying role, Kinski (who died in 1991) was recently accused by his oldest daughter, Pola, of sexually abusing her from the age of five to nineteen. When the allegations came out, Nastassja admitted her father tried to molest her as well.
Knowing what I knew about Kinski, I didn’t find any of this the least bit surprising. I bet he was guilty of even worse things—though there are few I find more repellent. In light of Werner Herzog’s close but complicated relationship with Kinski—they were, at different points in their lives, best friends and worst enemies—I figured there would be no one more qualified to weigh in on the accusations. In 1999, Herzog even produced a documentary, My Best Fiend, about his life and work with Kinski.
Strangely enough, I could not find a single statement from Herzog about the revelations that, at least for one news cycle, were lighting up wire services all over the world. His silence was particularly conspicuous since he is usually willing to weigh in on any number of social issues. But now, he had absolutely nothing to say. Not even a prepared statement about the horror of the allegations. Now, is there any reason to believe Herzog was aware of Kinski’s crimes and opted for willful ignorance? No. This is a man who positions himself as something of a conscience of the documentary community. He just made a critically acclaimed documentary about the inhumanity of capital punishment. Surely his sympathy for cold-blooded murderers must extend to innocent little girls?
Figuring the notoriously prolific Herzog might just have been busy, I reached out to him through his production company to request an interview. Were this not possible, I asked if I could send him a few brief questions to answer via e-mail. I didn’t have to wait long for a reply. The following was Herzog’s response through his spokespeople: “Due to his extremely busy schedule it is unfortunately impossible for Mr Herzog to answer questions. We hope for your understanding.”
I guess there’s just never a convenient time to talk about your once-best friend raping his daughter.
Meanwhile, on the Terror on Tape front, things were just getting good, helped by a gory crucifixion from The Eerie Midnight Horror Show that was a helluva lot more fun than the one in The Passion of the Christ. So it was unfortunate that the aforementioned bow-tie-wearing customer, now completely gray and crazier than Renfield as a result of viewing the tape, decides to leave the store.
A tough-talking construction worker complete with hard hat comes in to take his place. The dude claims to have seen it all and requests a good zombie film. So naturally, Mitchell shows him a clip from The Kidnapping of the President, which has absolutely nothing to do with zombies. For what it’s worth, I’m not entirely convinced that the clip is actually from President, although that’s how it’s labeled. I’ve seen President, and I don’t remember the scene at all. But since none of this matters anyway, I won’t perseverate.
Then came Nightmare, which was released theatrically (if barely) in October 1981, right in the sweet spot of the slasher cycle. Well directed, brimming with soft-core sex, and filled with some spectacular gore effects, the film seemed to have all the necessary elements. Even the plot was derivative of earlier slashers, which usually translated to success: a psychotic inmate in a mental institution, haunted by a gruesome nightmare, escapes to Florida to hunt down his ex-wife and young son, leaving a trail of bloody corpses in his wake. Unfortunately, the film also had a lot going against it. For one thing, it was financed by David Jones, a New York City gold broker supposedly using the film as a tax write-off. Nor was Nightmare ever acquired by a major studio that could use its marketing muscle and national distribution pipeline to maximize exposure. Maybe most importantly, it was directed by an Italian, Romano Scavolini. And as everybody knows, Italians—at least in the film business and especially in the horror genre—are complete
ly nuts.
Nightmare’s notoriety is based mainly on things that have absolutely nothing to do with the film itself, unfortunately, since it would make a perfect triple feature of Manhattan malaise alongside Bill Lustig’s Maniac and Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer. For the film’s British home video release, the distributor held a contest in which participants had to guess the weight of a human brain preserved in a glass jar; some swear the specimen was genuine, others claim it was a poorly made mockup. Either way, subsequent to this promotional stunt, David Hamilton Grant, company secretary at the film’s British distributor, bought himself a six-month stay in the pokey for releasing a film deemed obscene under the Obscene Publications Act. The film is also a bone of contention for Tom Savini, who, despite receiving on-screen credit as special effects director, categorically denies having anything to do with the film. Savini was riding a wave of success with Friday the 13th, Maniac, and The Burning, and claims that Scavolini just wanted to glom onto his fame. He maintains that makeup artist Les Larrain, who tragically took his own life shortly after the film was released, was the real wizard behind the effects (which even today hold up surprisingly well). Since I have a photo of Savini from the set of Nightmare, instructing the actors on how to properly swing an ax, he’s either lying or in the throes of full-blown dementia.
Shortly after I finished writing Going to Pieces, I began the research for what was to be my next book. The working title was Dissecting Depravity: Behind the Scenes of the Ten Most Controversial Movies Ever Made. In addition to Nightmare, the book was to include Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave, Nekromantik, Guinea Pig (the entire series), In a Glass Cage, Snuff, Bloodsucking Freaks, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Silent Night, Deadly Night. Just as DVD killed off VHS, these shiny discs also derailed my project. Because director commentaries were now de rigueur for every new release, I saw no reason why people would want to read my version of events when they could hear them firsthand from the filmmakers. And probably at a fraction of the cost.