by Adam Rockoff
Still, before I put the kibosh on the project, I managed to wrangle up an interview with Scavolini. Because his English isn’t particularly strong and my Italian is nonexistent, we decided to conduct the interview via e-mail. I sent him a list of mundane questions that could have been conceived by any reasonably intelligent third grader. The kind of questions that “artists” detest answering because they limit their ability to pontificate on their delicate genius. Of course, these are exactly the types of questions that are instrumental if we are to draw a complete picture of the film in question. What was the genesis of the film? How was it financed? Where was it shot? Describe your working relationship with the cast. With the crew. Any on-set anecdotes? When was the film released? How much did it gross? Scavolini gamely answered every one of these questions. And then, in signing off, he wrote: Adam, Keep digging. You may be onto something bigger and more important than you could ever imagine. Admittedly, at first, I was kind of creeped out. What the fuck was he talking about? For a fleeting second, it even crossed my mind that I had uncovered some sort of deeper conspiracy, not unlike the plot of the film, where looking too closely into the particulars of Nightmare would sow the seeds of my own destruction. Then I remembered something . . . the Italians are completely nuts.
Because the next two clips from The Slayer and City of the Walking Dead were so boring, I thought it might be a good time to get back to the matter at hand (job). By now, Krista was nestled into me, and at some point, most likely during the Cathy’s Curse segment, I began feeling her up. The only reason I remember this at all is because she wore one of those underwire bras. Getting underneath was no less difficult than wedging your hand into a closed door. Most of the other couples had lost interest in the movie following the opening credits and had wandered off to find a secluded spot of their own, so I placed Krista’s hand on my crotch. It was fortuitous timing: the construction worker, lasciviously sucking on a toothpick or matchstick, had just requested some T & A. Mitchell obliged, so we were treated to an orgy from Vampire Hookers, some more erotic weirdness from The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, and a striptease from Nightmare that pushes its protagonist over the edge.
Because I assume Krista didn’t want to jerk me off in the middle of the living room, even if there was no one left but the two of us, she suggested we retire to one of the unoccupied bedrooms. I took her hand and was about to lead her out when City of the Walking Dead caught my attention. A zombie stabs a woman in the breast and slices off her nipple. I sat right back down. I don’t know what this reveals about me, that I would rather have seen a nipple removed on-screen than exposed in person (and frankly, I don’t even want to speculate), but Krista left in a huff. And I’m glad she did, because the next clip was from Color Me Blood Red.
In a scene that reeks of a 1960s aesthetic (at least as I imagined the sixties to be), a Bettie Page–looking woman berates her underachieving painter boyfriend. But instead of meekly enduring her insults, he stabs her in the fucking face. Then he smears her bloody maw across his canvas. When a pompous art buyer shows up—and we know he’s pompous because he wears a beret—he proclaims about the painting, “There may never be anything like it!” A sentiment that could easily apply to the film’s director, Mr. Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Throughout his illustrious career, H. G. Lewis has been bestowed with a number of monikers: the Sultan of Sleaze, the Baron of Blood, the Mad Hatter of Splatter, and the most enduring, the Godfather of Gore. And these all fit him to a T. But Lewis was, more than anything, a contradiction.
He was a soft-spoken and erudite English professor who, oh, just happened to make the most depraved films up to that time. An exploitation pioneer who had little passion for cinema, especially for the genres in which he plied his trade. A spectacularly sadistic showman who, under the surface, was a rather prudish family man. If those who discover Lewis for the first time are disappointed in the discrepancy between the man’s films and the man himself, they can find solace in his longtime business partner, David Friedman. Friedman was everything Lewis wasn’t and everything an exploitation film producer was supposed to be. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he was a former carnival barker who, with his omnipresent cigar, traveled across the South making pictures for the drive-in circuit. Once they teamed up, this dynamic duo made a few classic “nudie cuties” before quickly realizing that mainstream cinema was breaking out of its puritanical cocoon, making the bare breasts on which their films depended less of a novelty. Always eager to exploit or, quite often in Lewis’s case, initiate a new trend, the two set out to create a new breed of fear film.
Lewis’s first gore film, the revolutionary Blood Feast, came along barely three years after Psycho. Yes, Psycho traumatized audiences. They screamed, they fainted, they refused to ever take showers again. You have no idea how many horror directors have told me that as a result of seeing Psycho at a young age they still only take baths. I’ve never had the guts to question why lying naked in the water offers any additional protection from a knife-wielding maniac than standing upright under a spray. I can certainly appreciate Psycho’s cultural significance and can easily understand how it might have shocked unsuspecting audiences in 1960 (I find it less easy to believe that theatergoers in the 1930s actually passed out cold from watching Frankenstein). But come on, it’s still an exercise in restraint and subterfuge—classic Hitch—over explicitness.
Lewis, on the other hand, doesn’t fuck around. Blood Feast opens with a young woman relaxing in a bathtub (she must have seen Psycho!). A minute later, some lunatic breaks into her home, hacks off her leg, and gouges out her eye. Following this, we are treated to a scalping, some back-room open heart surgery, and in the film’s most notorious scene, an impromptu tongue removal. Lewis’s later films Two Thousand Maniacs! (the next clip in Terror on Tape), The Wizard of Gore, and The Gore Gore Girls, in which a woman’s nipples are snipped off only to squirt out regular and chocolate milk, are even more deliriously gory.
Conventional wisdom holds that even isolated from its sociological impact—Psycho quickly became a part of mainstream culture while Blood Feast was relegated to a drive-in oddity—Psycho is a much more terrifying film because of its realism. Oh, really? Let’s put aside the plot of both films for a moment and agree that they’re both absurd. And before anyone has a conniption, I’m well aware that Psycho was adapted from the Robert Bloch novel, itself based on the real-life case of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein.III But if I tried hard enough, I guarantee you that I could find a host of ritualistic murderers who killed for reasons no less laughable than in order to create an Egyptian feast to resurrect a long-dead goddess, which is the story line of Blood Feast. So when critics discuss realism, what they really mean is the way that the two directors, Hitchcock and Lewis, utilize the tools of their craft to reflect the authenticity of the events within the film. Now, would anyone dispute that Hitchcock was a brilliant visionary while Lewis was a two-bit hack? Probably not. But I’ll tell you something equally indisputable. Blood Feast is a much more realistic film than Psycho.
The shower scene in Psycho is the most overanalyzed and deconstructed three minutes in the history of cinema. This one scene is the subject of entire books, documentaries, and even a memoir. It was painstakingly planned and meticulously executed, requiring more than a week of shooting to accommodate the more than seventy-five camera setups. As I mentioned before, its effect on theatergoers was unprecedented.
It’s also totally overrated.
I realize that Hitchcock was somewhat at the mercy of the censors, but never once does Norman’s knife really look like it’s making anything close to contact with Marion’s body. The frenetic editing tries to create the effect of steel piercing flesh, but if we examine it objectively (trying to ignore the fact that we’re talking about a revered director at the height of his powers), it fails miserably. After Norman hacks away a good six or seven times, there’s still no sign of an entry wound. In fact, the only thing we see is Marion’s unblemished torso. Is she t
hat adept at fending him off with her flailing arms? Is Norman such an inept mama’s boy that he completely misses her with every slash? Even the blood doesn’t look like blood, especially in black and white. It looks like Hershey’s syrup, because it is. The entire scene, especially divorced from Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking violins, is one big letdown.
Now let’s take one of the aforementioned scenes from Blood Feast. (I just called my eight-year-old daughter into my office and asked her to pick one of four words: “bathtub,” “brains,” “heart,” or “tongue.” She said “tongue,” and with the egocentricity of someone her age, didn’t even ask what this nonsense was all about.) The killer, Fuad Ramses, tackles a young woman onto a bed and rips out her tongue with his bare hands. Rumor has it that the actress was cast solely because her mouth was large enough to accommodate the sheep tongue used for the effect. Ramses holds up the organ, now dripping with bright red blood. It looks like a tongue because, well, it is. The victim, still alive, but ostensibly in shock, rolls around moaning as blood pours from her mouth. Granted, I’ve never been privy to a tongue extraction. But my elementary knowledge of anatomy tells me that the crimes in Blood Feast are far closer to reality than the shower murder, and not just because they’re shown in glorious Eastmancolor while Psycho was famously shot in black and white.
Again, I’m not oblivious to the fact that social mores change, and what is acceptable content at one time would have been completely inappropriate at another. This is the reason that Mae West can exude as much sexual tension as Brando sticking his butter-covered fingers up Maria Schneider’s ass. But again, Psycho and Blood Feast were made three years apart. Although I guess the Beatles were laying the groundwork for the flower power juggernaut, things hadn’t yet changed that much. The fact is that Hitchcock, by this time universally acknowledged as a genius par excellence, didn’t push the envelope nearly as far as he receives credit for. And Lewis, a footnote in film history, had a set of balls that even AC/DC would covet.
At the risk of shattering the illusion of Lewis as the avuncular and cultured elder statesman of exploitation, I feel compelled to offer up a personal anecdote about the Godfather of Gore. In 2011, Lewis was in Chicago as the guest of honor at a horror film festival put on by local impresario Rusty Nails.
Rusty has always been extremely generous to me, often inviting me to conduct Q & As with the directors he flies in for events. I’ll never forget the experience of hosting a Friday the 13th panel with actors Adrienne King, Betsy Palmer, and Ari Lehman, and score composer Harry Manfredini, in front of a packed house before a screening of a new thirty-five-millimeter print of the film. So I figured it was the least I could do to take Lewis, Rusty, and a few of Rusty’s friends out to dinner before a screening of Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore.
Dinner was delightful. At eighty-two, Lewis had a memory that was far better than mine and he regaled us with tales from his days in the trenches. At the table behind us was a family with a small child. Granted, the kid was rambunctious, yelling out at random intervals as kids are prone to do. It wasn’t too distracting. Not only has my tolerance for such things increased exponentially after having children of my own, but we were in a crowded pub on Saturday night.
Apparently, Lewis didn’t feel the same.
After one particularly loud shriek, Lewis stopped—midsentence—and screamed, “Would somebody shut that kid up!” At first I thought he was joking. After all, the guy is like the grandfather whom everyone loves. But after waiting for his mouth to turn up in that trademark grin, which it never did, it became clear he was dead serious. I giggled nervously and looked at Rusty. He just shrugged. Luckily, it was so loud I’m not certain the parents of the child heard. Or at least, they probably couldn’t believe it came from the nice old man sitting behind them. Lewis, for his part, composed himself and continued on with whatever story he was telling.
I’ve yet to meet a single person who knows Lewis describe him as anything but a gentleman and a scholar. For the remainder of the festival, he was characteristically humble and patient with the throngs of fans who wanted to meet their hero. So the dinner episode really doesn’t change my opinion of the man. What it does do, however, is make me kind of curious about his 1967 children’s film The Magic Land of Mother Goose. I always assumed it was typical kid’s stuff. But maybe it really harkens back to the source material, where the old lady in the shoe can’t deal with all her children so she puts them on a low-calorie diet, beats the hell out of them, and then sends them to bed.
But back to Terror on Tape. The next customer to arrive at the ol’ shoppe is Michelle Bauer, an eighties scream queen probably best known for her roles in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (and yes, these are real films; I’m not clever enough to make up such ridiculous titles). She’s dressed like a vamped-up dominatrix and, in the horror equivalent of Deep Throat, is on a quest to find a film so terrifying it will induce orgasm. Barely able to contain himself, Mitchell queues up some additional clips, mainly from films he’s already shown the two other goofballs: death by pitchfork from The Slayer, a film that many think Craven ripped off for A Nightmare on Elm Street; highlights from Lewis’s first three horror films, affectionately dubbed The Blood Trilogy; a scalping from Scalps; the climax of Nightmare, in which a woman is decapitated in flagrante delicto and spews a geyser of blood onto the lover between her legs. Apparently, these scenes do the trick because Bauer promises to “do anything” if Mitchell will rent her a copy. Terror on Tape concludes with Bauer clutching a VHS cassette of the eponymous film against her ample bosom, moaning in ecstasy as Mitchell cackles wildly.
I’m well aware that normal people might have a difficult time understanding the transformative nature of Terror on Tape. Looking back, the entire episode probably sounds like nothing more than a night of shitty horror movies and blue balls. But the video was my perfect gateway drug. It was a window into a weird and wild world I never knew existed. A world of circular logic and dreamscapes. Ambiguity and nonsense. Every -philia in existence and many that weren’t. Alice in Wonderland as distilled through the prism of knives, tits, synthesizers, pills, and black magic.
Now, sitting alone in the living room, my friends long gone in search of their own carnal pleasures, I was ready. Ready to be indoctrinated into a world of films that wouldn’t have made sense for the majors to release but that were the bread and butter of fly-by-night distributors with delicious names like Gorgon, Wizard, Thriller, and Midnight.
And if turning down a hand job was the price of admission into this exclusive club, that was a small sacrifice to make for a lifetime of celluloid perversion.
* * *
I. So as not to incur the wrath of angry film students, I feel compelled to give a shout-out to Luis Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, which begins with an eyeball sliced open by a razor.
II. This isn’t exactly what happens in the film itself. But the way it’s cut together in Terror on Tape, it sure seems like it. Either way, this is how I perceived it.
III. Gein has served as the inspiration for so many fictional madmen that it’s hard to believe he was only responsible for two murders. Nor was there any hard evidence that he was a cannibal or a necrophiliac. That said, I still wouldn’t want him as a neighbor.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sounds of the Devil
Horror movies and heavy metal have been inextricably linked since that fateful day when an English blues band, inspired by a Mario Bava film, changed its name from Earth to Black Sabbath.I
If Altamont represented the spiritual demise of the 1960s, then the release of Black Sabbath was the decade’s sonic deathblow. The eponymous single from this eponymous album was more than a shot across the bow of contemporary rock, it was a fucking guided missile. The song doesn’t even start with a melody, just the sound of softly falling rain. Next, the somber toll of church bells. Then a sinister clap of thunder, warning us this ain’t no sun shower. Then feedbac
k. Distortion. Until lead singer John “Ozzy” Osbourne plaintively wails, “What is this that stands before me? Figure in black which points at me.” To steal the tagline from Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, if your skin doesn’t crawl, it’s on too tight.
Since the beginning, the debate has raged over which was the first true heavy metal band, Sabbath or Zeppelin, with some trying to get cute by throwing Deep Purple or esoterica like Blue Cheer and Uriah Heep into the mix. It’s a ridiculous argument. Zeppelin can be as heavy as anyone (“Achilles Last Stand,” “Immigrant Song”) and downright creepy (“No Quarter”), but there’s nothing scary about them. The “red snapper incident” aside, they weren’t a dangerous band. For all his name-checking of Mordor and Valhalla, Plant was still a zonked-out hippie singing about going to California to meet a girl with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair. Ozzy, on the other hand, was certifiably insane. At a 1981 meeting with CBS Records executives he bit the head off a live dove. At a concert in Des Moines the following year, he bit the head off a bat. Had PETA been more visible at the time, there’s good reason to believe he would have bit the head off Ingrid Newkirk.
In The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, the collective memoir of Mötley Crüe, Nikki Sixx cites a particularly extreme display of the Ozzman’s lunacy. The Crüe were opening for Ozzy on his Bark at the Moon tour. During a stop in Lakeland, Florida, following an afternoon of heavy drinking, Ozzy proceeded to snort up a column of ants marching across pavement, as if the scurrying insects were nothing more than a line of finely cut Colombian blow. Following the aperitif, Ozzy took a piss on the ground and lapped it up.