by Adam Rockoff
But I digress . . . So I was with my business partner Alex and Lance Hori, a friend of mine from college and fellow television producer. We were waiting to buy tickets for one of these haunted houses in a strip-mall parking lot in some nameless suburb. A middle-aged father chaperoning his teenage daughter and her friend stood behind us in line. The girls were yapping about the The Osbournes, which that March had become the hottest reality show of the season. It introduced America to Ozzy’s dysfunctional but lovable brood and recast the Prince of Darkness himself as a tatted-up, unintelligible Ward Cleaver. “You know,” said the father, playfully admonishing them, “Ozzy didn’t always used to be a joke. He was once in a band called Black Sabbath that scared a lot of people.” The girls considered this for a moment, pondering how the perpetually confused TV dad with whom they were familiar could have ever scared anyone. Then the daughter’s friend looked up, as if something clicked. “Oh, yeah,” she said hesitantly. “I think my mom has some Black Sabbath albums.” Her fucking mom! My rapidly receding hairline spontaneously pulled back a few centimeters more. Moms were supposed to listen to Sinatra or Engelbert Humperdinck. I pictured my own mother rocking out to “War Pigs” and shuddered.
Now, twelve years later, this story doesn’t sound so funny. Or scary. I’m now the father of an eight- and ten-year-old. And when I listen to the shit they have on their iPods—and “shit” is an apt description, not a synonym for “stuff”—I realize that moms, and dads, do listen to Sabbath.
Thirtysomething years ago I bought my first Iron Maiden album because, as one of our greatest pop songsmiths once sang, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. The sinners are much more fun.”
I guess that’s what getting old means. You end a chapter on heavy metal with a quote from Billy fucking Joel.
* * *
I. In his autobiography, Sabbath’s mutilated-fingered guitarist Tony Iommi refutes the direct appropriation of the film’s title. Although he admits that he and bassist Geezer Butler used to watch horror films at the cinema across from Earth’s rehearsal space, he states that neither he nor Butler had ever seen Black Sabbath at the time.
II. It’s somewhat ironic that Caldor was the place where I discovered metal. In 1993, it refused to carry Howard Stern’s autobiography, Private Parts, because of the book’s objectionable content.
III. In another metal/movie parallel, Maiden founder Steve Harris wrote the album’s title track following a nightmare caused by watching Damien: Omen II.
IV. Fastway was named for its founders, “Fast” Eddie Clarke of Motörhead and Pete Way of UFO. The duo’s previous bands are two of the most respected early metal outfits.
V. “Suicide Solution” is about the dangers of alcohol; in this context, “solution” is used as a synonym for “liquid.” “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” is about eternal love. “Shoot to Thrill,” like 99.9 percent of AC/DC’s other songs, is about fucking.
VI. I don’t really know why I feel compelled to include this here, but one of the most unintentionally funny things about the hearing—at least to me—is that in one of the supporting documents the band Dokken is referred to as Kokken. I guess this just says more about my sophisticated sense of humor than anything else.
VII. Apparently, this exchange wasn’t nearly as funny as I first thought. Denver was a huge supporter of NASA and desperately wanted to secure a spot as a civilian on a shuttle mission.
VIII. As someone who grew up with MTV, all I can tell you is what we talked about on the playground. And we talked about the videos of Twisted Sister. I’ll concede that “Thriller” was groundbreaking, but it was also bloated and pompous. Plus, call it unfair, but I can’t even look at Michael Jackson anymore without thinking about his nose falling off. As far as Love Is for Suckers goes, even the band doesn’t hold it in very high regard. On their greatest-hits album, they have a cover of a Stones song but nothing off Love Is for Suckers. I don’t care; I still love the album.
CHAPTER SIX
Making Steak from Sacred Cows
I’m ashamed to admit it, but growing up in a predominately Catholic town, there were plenty of times when I wished I wasn’t Jewish. It had nothing to do with the religion itself, mind you. Quite frankly, I found the secular strain of Judaism that we practiced far more sensible than what I heard was going on at the church down the street; before I had any understanding of the symbolic nature of the Eucharist, you can only imagine what the horror-obsessed nine-year-old me thought when a bunch of my friends swore that each Sunday they would eat the body of their Lord and Savior.
No, my reason was far more egocentric. While all my friends would worship together at a handful of churches nearby, I was shipped off to an adjacent town three times a week for Hebrew school, where I was thrown together with a bunch of misfits whose idea of fun was making up silly lyrics to Jewish folk songs.
But there was one thing I never envied about my gentile friends: confession. They were forced to take a weekly pilgrimage and spill their guts to a mere acquaintance. I, on the other hand, had only to unburden myself once a year, on the High Holy Day of Yom Kippur. Plus, since masturbation isn’t a sin in Reform Judaism, I didn’t really have much for which to apologize.
Still, I can appreciate the cathartic nature of confession. So I’m going to admit some things that will undoubtedly brand me a heretic in the exceptionally protective horror community. Things that would be inconceivable for any devotee to utter without getting their horror card summarily revoked. After all, so ingrained are these truths for the horror community that it’s almost like challenging the tenets of a religion. So in keeping with the religious theme, I’m going to play Martin Luther (not King Jr.). And here are my grievances.
Horror Commandment: The Exorcist is the scariest movie ever made.
Grievance: Not only is it definitely not the scariest movie ever made, but in some places it’s rather funny (and not by design).
Let me clarify. Obviously not everybody feels The Exorcist is the scariest movie ever made. Lots of people of my generation, including my wife, will point to The Shining. Then you’ll have the old-timers, for whom nostalgia is more powerful than any semblance of common sense, who might cite a Universal classic or Hammer film. These are the same kind of people who maintain that the 1945 Army team, with Mr. Inside, Doc Blanchard, and Mr. Outside, Glenn Davis, is the greatest college football team in NCAA history. At the time, maybe they were; I’m not qualified to argue. But anybody who thinks for even a split second that any Division 1 team circa 2014 wouldn’t completely annihilate the ’45 Black Knights doesn’t know the first thing about football. The players today are just so much bigger, faster, stronger, and more athletic that it would be a massacre—and not a proverbial one; somebody might actually die. At the very least, today’s teams would score on every single play and Army would have negative net yards both passing and rushing.
You also have those people who project their own fears onto a film, so that one particular scene or aspect of it takes on a disproportionate degree of importance. These are the people so terrified of clowns that they cannot bring themselves to watch Poltergeist or It. Entomophobes who feel the same about Them!, The Swarm, or Empire of the Ants. A claustrophobic might even name the 2010 Ryan Reynolds film Buried.
However, it’s safe to say that 95 percent of those asked will choose The Exorcist. The remaining 5 percent will place it in their top five. When it was originally released in 1973, just in time for the Christmas holiday, many in the audience vomited. Some fainted. Others had to seek therapy or religious counsel.
I’ll fully concede that The Exorcist is a terrific film and certainly deserves all the accolades bestowed upon it. I’ll even concede that it might be the greatest horror film ever made, an absolutely devastating treatise on the loss of faith, the limitations of science, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. But scariest? Not by a long shot.
It is possible that as a non-Catholic the metaphysical under
pinnings of the film failed to resonate with me. Or to put it another way, if you don’t believe in the devil, how can he frighten you? But this explanation doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. At least not when applied to me. I don’t believe in ghosts, possession, or any form (neither spiritual nor corporeal) of an afterlife, and I still find The Changeling, Audrey Rose, and the Paranormal Activity films scary as hell.
Even for true believers, the kind of Bible thumpers for whom life is nothing more than an eternal struggle for the soul, the demon in The Exorcist leaves quite a bit to be desired. This is an entity whose power is second only to that of God himself. So one might assume his dastardly deeds would fall mainly in the realm of genocides, natural disasters, and human suffering on a grand scale. But instead, the best he can do is make an adolescent girl say “cock” and “cunt.” I understand his disdain for, as he tells Father Karras, vulgar displays of power, but this torrent of profanity still seems like something concocted by a mischievous twelve-year-old, not the Antichrist.
I also understand that most commentators on the film agree that Regan is not the demon’s ultimate prize. She’s just a conduit to get to Karras, a vessel through which the demon can decimate the priest’s already shaky spiritual foundation. Even if this is true, again, I have to ask, why settle for a single man when humanity is ripe for the taking?
My opinion of The Exorcist’s dwindling power was somewhat validated when the film was rereleased in 2000. This was big news, mainly because the originally excised but long-rumored “spider walk” sequence had been reinserted into the film at the behest of William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel the film was based on as well as the screenplay. My wife and I attended a sold-out midnight showing, as this was still early enough in our marriage where she would indulge me with things like this.
The first disconcerting thing I noticed was the inordinate number of families with young children. I don’t mean teenagers. I mean kids two, three, four, five years old. Admittedly, my wife and I are pretty anal about sleep schedules; when they were that young, our kids both went to bed extremely early and, whenever possible, in their own crib or bassinet. Still, I can understand those people who drag their infants everywhere with them; since babies basically sleep all the time anyway, who am I to judge? But who the fuck brings a child to a midnight showing of The Exorcist? The obvious answer is that these were shitty parents, ill equipped to understand the possible consequences or too selfish to care. The more I watched them, however, the more I realized this wasn’t the case. Most of them were loving, attentive, and fairly hands-on parents. As long as I live I’ll never forget the spectacle of a mother feeding her toddler a handful of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish while the kid asked, “Mama, what’s an ex-nist?”
Then I considered the possibility that maybe the majority of these folks didn’t actually know what the hell the film was about. But really? These people weren’t ignorant. Plus, since the majority of them were Hispanic, and most likely Catholic, they were probably at least vaguely familiar with the exorcism ritual.
So what explains the discrepancy between being a responsible parent and taking your underage kids to see The Exorcist in the dead of night? I found out once the film began. The audience laughed when Regan’s head spun around 360 degrees. They howled with glee when she projectile-vomited pea soup. Call me a prude, but I was more than mildly disturbed watching a preteen girl jab a crucifix into her vagina; however, this didn’t seem to faze them in the least. The bottom line is that they just didn’t find any of it that scary. In fact, the only part of the film during which they were visibly uncomfortable was when Regan undergoes a battery of medical tests to rule out a physical cause of her condition (Blatty also found this scene the most upsetting).
For what it’s worth, I happen to find 1990’s The Exorcist III absolutely terrifying. I’m not saying it’s necessarily superior (although it is a great film), but it does make the hair on the back of my neck stand up in a way that Regan and co. simply don’t. Although I may be crazy, I’m not alone. Legendary New York Times film critic Vincent Canby actually called The Exorcist III a better film than its predecessor. Of course, he also hated The Godfather: Part II, so maybe he just doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.
Horror Commandment: Suspiria is Argento’s masterpiece.
Grievance: Suspiria is overrated and far from Argento’s best work.
I discovered the great Dario Argento when I stumbled upon his 1985 film Phenomena, which was retitled Creepers for its US release on VHS. Creepers is an interesting film; fans usually place it in the middle of Argento’s body of work, although the more dreadful his current films are, the more it’s pushed toward the top. It’s something of a hybrid, a combination of supernatural fairy tale and straightforward giallo.
Like many pivotal moments in my horror education, my mother was inadvertently responsible. I had been watching so many horror films that I think she suffered a crisis of confidence, second-guessing her decision to allow me to rent R-rated ones. In order to mitigate the potential danger of a diet of on-screen murder, rape, and other antisocial behavior, she implemented a new rule: going forward, I could only see horror movies in which animals or monsters killed people. Man-on-man violence was no longer allowed. I wasn’t too concerned. After all, I could still watch The Thing, Nightwing, Orca, Grizzly, or any number of nature-run-amok films from the seventies. And truth be told, like most of my mother’s other rules, I figured this one would last like half a day, at most.I
However, during this particular trip to the video store, the rule was still in effect. Therefore, I chose Creepers, since the VHS box had a picture of a girl whose face was half-eaten by bugs. The tagline promised, It Will Make Your Skin Crawl . . . I got home expecting Squirm. Boy, was I wrong. Creepers certainly has plenty of bugs, but it also has a decapitation, torture, and a razor-wielding chimpanzee. Them! it ain’t. I didn’t love Creepers—although I appreciate it far more today—but even then I knew there was something different about it. The garish colors, the stylized violence, the plot that was completely wacked. I knew I was in the hands of a maestro. After that, I sought out everything I could from Argento. It wasn’t until a few years later that I got my hands on the film that is generally considered his masterpiece: Suspiria.
The film stars Jessica HarperII as an American ballerina boarding at a prestigious ballet academy, which, as she soon discovers, is a front for a coven of witches. One would think they’d choose far less obvious digs than the world’s preeminent dance school, but whatever. The plots of Argento’s films generally fall into two categories: complicated to the point of being impenetrable, or so flimsy as to be inconsequential. Suspiria falls into the latter camp. Not that it matters much. Argento has always been accused of favoring style over substance. It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with his work and a criticism also leveled against my favorite American director, Brian De Palma. Still, you would think that Argento’s crowning achievement would manage to meld the two much more cohesively than it does. But if you’ve come only for the style you won’t be disappointed. Suspiria’s opening airport scene is something out of a dreamscape—or a nightmare. The hiss of the automatic doors foreshadows the whispers of witches. When Jessica exits through them into a rainstorm of biblical proportions, reds, yellows, and blues explode across the screen. It does nothing to advance the story, but that’s what makes it so intriguing. American horror would never be so unnecessarily indulgent.
Once Jessica arrives at the academy, another of Argento’s limitations is on full display—the awfulness of his scripts. In an interview in Spaghetti Nightmares by Luca M. Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta, Lucio Fulci had this to say about his chief rival: “Everyone thinks he’s a very good writer and a very bad realizer, whereas, in fact, it’s the other way around.” Quite possibly there has never been a more apt characterization of Argento. In a completely telling but otherwise superfluous scene, one of the students taunts Harper and her friend, who are named Suzy and Sara, by saying that
names that begin with “S” are the names of snakes. Then she hisses in their faces. My eight-year-old daughter might find this juvenile. Some of this nonsense Argento explains away as a result of his battle with the Italian distributor; Argento scripted the girls in Suspiria as eleven-to-fourteen-year-olds, but the distributor wanted them cast much older. Such an excuse might be easier to accept if his other films weren’t filled with similar abysmal scripting. I don’t know why no one has ever taken him aside and said, “Listen, Dario. You’re a brilliant visionary. You paint the screen like an artist paints his canvas. But you should never ever write another script.”
I guess the main problem I have with Suspiria—aside from the fact that the ballet instructor, Miss Tanner, played by the great Italian actress Alida Valli, looks exactly like Jim Carrey in The Mask—is that its highlights have been surpassed in other Argento films. His sweeping camera is more evocative in Opera. The maggot storm and barbed wire pit-o’-death are combined to greater effect in Phenomena. I know that Suspiria was first, but that doesn’t make it better.
Most consider Suspiria the pinnacle of Argento’s career; I find it a worthy appetizer.
In case anyone is wondering, the Argento films I’d rank higher are, in descending order, Tenebrae, Opera, Deep Red, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. And I wouldn’t argue with Inferno or Phenomena either.