The Horror of It All

by Adam Rockoff

  Nor did it help that horror’s reigning grand masters failed to produce anything close to the quality of the films that made them famous. Wes Craven whiffed with Deadly Friend and a few episodes of the revamped Twilight Zone. John Carpenter had Prince of Darkness and They Live, which were both considered huge disappointments at the time. I don’t even know what the fuck George Romero was doing after Day of the Dead other than the tepid Monkey Shines. There were, however, a few stellar remakes. David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Chuck Russell’s The Blob were big improvements over their B-movie progenitors. But these were single movies, nothing that spoke to the long-term viability of the genre.

  Another devastating blow to the horror genre was the rise of the psychological thriller. Using 1987’s Fatal Attraction as the blueprint, these films appropriated horror tropes but scaled back the blood and supernatural undertones, allowing them to target a much larger audience. For the next five years, it felt like these were the only types of films in theaters. I saw Pacific Heights, Unlawful Entry, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Single White Female in packed houses. By contrast, I endured Popcorn alone and The Lawnmower Man with a homeless person who I assume snuck in before the theater opened and proceeded to fall asleep in the back row.

  None of this is to say that there were no good horror films made between the years 1986 and 1996. Near Dark, Dead Ringers, and In the Mouth of Madness would have been solid in any year. But the truth is, I had to struggle to come up with just these three names. And really, none of them have the gravitas of a Halloween or a Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or even an Evil Dead or a Re-Animator.

  For me, the one good thing about this “lost decade” was that it coincided with my college years and allowed me to become a pretentious asshole. A lack of new horror films meant that I was forced to dabble in other genres. So on one hand, I was exposed to some wonderful films that previously I would have ignored. On the other, I said things like “All real films have subtitles,” and claimed my favorite movie of all time was Battleship Potemkin.

  Still, I was never able to fully escape my horror roots. My junior year in college, I took a class in advanced film production. For the final project, we had to make our own five-to-ten-minute student film. Inspired by whatever historical film movement we were studying that week, most of the kids chose to channel their inner Truffaut and make some unintelligible piece of shit. Besides myself, the only two exceptions were Lance Hori, my future haunted house buddy, who made an excellent film, and one strange girl who used this assignment as an opportunity to explore her own sexuality. For the majority of her moody black-and-white film, she crawled around a forest half-naked with the handle of a whip shoved up her ass. Of course, I giggled uncontrollably the entire time. When the lights came up, most of us were speechless. Our professor said it was one of the bravest examples of filmmaking she had ever seen. Then she glared at me and added it was unfortunate that some members of the class were not mature enough to handle it.

  Naturally, I chose to make a horror film. It was called Quid Pro Quo. The flimsy, unoriginal plot followed three roommates who accidentally kill their fourth. As they’re arguing about what to do with the body, it disappears, only to reappear later, very much alive, and take its revenge. Writing this, it actually sounds far more interesting than it was. I borrowed music cues from Psycho, The Shining, and Children of the Corn, and re-created some of my favorite shots from famous horror movies. As one of the actors walks down a darkened hallway in a long shot, I zoom in as fast as possible at the exact moment the killer jumps out of the shadows; it’s an homage to one of the all-time best “jump scares,” from The Exorcist III. From Black Christmas, I cribbed the slow zoom into the killer’s eyeball as he’s hiding behind a door. And of course, I had to re-create Psycho’s shower scene, which in my film was about six times as long and charitably 0.00001 percent as effective.

  When the film was over, after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, it was time for my fellow auteurs to weigh in. Finally, one dude spoke up. “Well, I guess we know who’s going to Hollywood,” he said. The entire class erupted in laughter and for a few seconds I beamed—until I realized they were all making fun of me. In Advanced Video Production, “going Hollywood” meant that I had sold out. I was a fraud, a hack, because I dared make a film that was commercial and fun (albeit terrible) rather than suffering for my art by inserting objects into my rectum. It’s too absurd to even be pathetic, but most of the students in my class really did believe that they would go on to change the face of cinema like their uncompromising heroes. Only the cloistered world of academia could foster, and encourage, such delusions.

  I’m not going to pretend this episode didn’t bother me. My feelings were hurt. But I decided then and there that never again would I be ashamed of my love of horror. As David Crosby would say, I was going to let my freak flag fly. After all, my sloppy, ridiculous, inept, and sad little slasher film was infinitely better than any of the sloppy, ridiculous, inept, and sad little wannabe art films my classmates made.

  I like to think that I got the last laugh. After graduation, most of these kids went home to their farms in Oshkosh, Sheboygan, or Appleton. If they were lucky, maybe they got an unpaid internship at the local PBS affiliate. Or a firsthand look at the exciting world of public access. I went to New York City. And eventually sat down with Bobby Cohen to plot the future trajectory of the horror genre.

  The genesis of Scream is one of those stories that has been told so many times it has become apocryphal. Struggling screenwriter Kevin Williamson was house-sitting for a friend when he saw a Barbara Walters special about the Gainesville Ripper, a serial killer who murdered and mutilated five Florida coeds in the summer of 1990. Alone and terrified, Williamson called his pal David Blanchard for some moral support. Blanchard told him that there was a very real chance that Freddy, or Michael, or Jason, could be waiting right outside the window because, well, that’s what friends do. The good-natured ribbing turned into a trivia contest, with Williamson and Blanchard quizzing each other about horror films.

  Williamson survived the night. Now inspired, and with the kernel of an idea, he took off for Palm Springs and sequestered himself in his hotel room for the weekend. By the time he resurfaced, he had written a script titled Scary Movie, as well as a five-page treatment for the second and third installments of what was always planned as a trilogy. A bidding war ensued for the script—which would eventually be rechristened Scream near the end of production—with the Weinsteins besting Universal, Paramount, Morgan Creek, and a not-yet-clinically-insane Oliver Stone. Wes Craven signed on to direct after initially passing. In one of their characteristically ballsy moves, Miramax (technically Dimension) released the film over Christmas, and Old St. Nick rewarded their gamble with a $100 million payout. A new horror franchise was born, the first legitimate one since Child’s Play nearly a decade before.

  Scream was a bona fide blockbuster, which meant that despite being a horror film, it couldn’t be dismissed so easily. It was also the right kind of horror film, tailor-made for critics who practically trampled each other in an effort to overuse the term “postmodern.” What they meant, of course, was that Scream was self-conscious. It was aware of itself, playfully acknowledging that it was not only a horror film, but a horror film that belonged to a specific lineage of similar films.

  This self-reflexivity is on display from the get-go. In the opening scene, slightly reminiscent of When a Stranger Calls, Drew Barrymore is terrorized by a prank caller. Along with the requisite threats of disembowelment, the caller challenges her to a horror trivia quiz to save the life of her boyfriend. She gets the first question right (the name of Halloween’s villain) but boots the second by incorrectly naming Jason as the killer in Friday the 13th, as opposed to Jason’s mother, Mrs. Voorhees.

  Craven was praised for having the cojones to cast a recognizable star in Barrymore for the scene, only to knock her off in explicit fashion. The comparison was made to Psycho, although in Hitchcock’s film
Janet Leigh is not murdered until more than forty-five minutes in, while Barrymore is dispatched in just over ten.

  Then there’s Jamie Kennedy, the resident film geek whose main purpose is to lay out “the rules” of slasherdom to his fellow characters: 1) you can never have sex, 2) you can never drink or do drugs, and 3) never ever ever under any circumstances say, “I’ll be right back.” Again, critics found this meta shit unspeakably clever. I found it much more entertaining to try to spot all the other in-jokes peppered throughout the film, such as VHS tapes from other Miramax releases strewn all over the set.

  What nobody seemed to remember was that Scream was hardly the first horror film to actively reference the films that preceded it. Abbott and Costello were meeting all sorts of famous monsters in the forties and fifties, while Young Frankenstein proved that a comic genius could understand the genre as well as anyone. Much more recently, the early eighties were rife with slasher parodies. What was unique about this batch was that they spoofed contemporary films, which, looking back, is probably the reason none of them were too successful. After all, the slasher film was at its peak, still years away from the point where saturation gives rise to satire.

  It is a shame, however, that most of these parodies have long been forgotten. As individual films, their importance is debatable; as a group, they’re invaluable for understanding just how pervasive the slasher had become.

  The first out of the gate, in 1981, was Student Bodies, written and directed by (at least according to the opening credits) Mickey Rose, a close friend and early collaborator of Woody Allen. Rose actually met his wife on a blind date facilitated by Allen, as she was close friends with Allen’s wife at the time (not Mia Farrow, or the daughter he’s currently fuckingII). However, Student Bodies was probably codirected and produced by Michael Ritchie (taking the pseudonym Allen Smithee), who found far more success with a bigger spoof a few years later in Fletch.

  Student Bodies takes place at Lamab High, where a killer dubbed “the Breather” has been knocking off promiscuous students in a number of unusually creative ways, using items such as paper clips and an eggplant. There’s no shortage of suspects. Could it be the shop teacher who’s obsessed with horse-head bookends? The school psychologist, played by actor Carl Jacobs, who has exactly zero other film credits to his name and is as good a straight man as Leslie Nielsen? Or most memorable of all, Malvert the janitor, who has the “IQ of a handball”? Malvert is played by an actor known only as “the Stick.” He reprised the same type of imbecilic role on Nickelodeon’s early Dave Coulier–hosted sketch comedy show, Out of Control, giving credence to the idea that he was actually a moron. I had never heard of Out of Control, even though it was targeted to my exact demographic, but after watching an old episode on YouTube it seems to have been made for the type of people who think Full House is the height of comedy.

  The jokes in Student Bodies are more perceptive than outright funny. For example, the movie is set on a number of important dates: Halloween, Friday the thirteenth, and, wait for it . . . Jamie Lee Curtis’s birthday. Looking back, it’s remarkable that by 1981 Curtis’s reputation as a scream queen was already solidified; Halloween, Prom Night, and Terror Train had been released, with Halloween II hitting theaters a few months later. Another running gag is that after each murder, the number of the victim is flashed over the scene, a commentary on the high body count of the slasher. If this kind of stuff gets your goat, you might find Student Bodies hysterical. Personally, I never even found Young Frankenstein that clever, so I might not be the best judge of comedy.

  In fact, I was much more amused by a scene in which a horny couple can’t go all the way because the girl’s mother found her diaphragm. I’m not trying to be funny, this is a serious question: has anybody actually ever used a diaphragm? Does anyone even know anybody who’s used one? In health class, we learned that as a mode of contraception the diaphragm was revolutionary, since it allows the woman to take a more proactive role in her sexual health, but the entire idea of such a device seems more suited to the realm of late-night talk shows and edgy sitcoms. The crazy thing is that because my parents were very open-minded about sex and furnished me with a seemingly unlimited supply of “what’s happening to my body” books, I actually knew a lot about this Byzantine device. What I can’t imagine is how anyone ever thought it was a good idea. A condom is annoying enough but, as we all know, a necessary evil and not too difficult to slip on. But is there anything more potentially mood-killing than a rubber ring that you have to fill with some sort of spermicide and then shove all the way up against the cervix? The only device I find more unwieldy is the dental dam, which, in layman’s terms, is basically a sheet of cellophane that is placed over the vagina in order to prevent the transmission of pathogens during oral sex. Unless your fantasy is to pretend your partner’s genitals are Thanksgiving leftovers, this seems like a lot more trouble than it’s worth.

  The next of these early slasher spoofs, Pandemonium, was created ostensibly as a vehicle for Tom Smothers, which is curious since he’s hardly in it. I didn’t know much about Smothers, other than he was one of the Smothers Brothers, a comedy team whose Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour aired on CBS in the late sixties. Apparently the show was quite controversial at the time for its antiestablishment bent. Unfortunately, there’s nothing nearly as interesting about his role as a Mountie investigating a series of murders at an Indiana cheerleading camp. In fact, the only thing even remotely noteworthy is that his sidekick is played by future public masturbator Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Reubens. Still, in addition to the requisite sight gags, puns, and complete inanity, there really are some fairly clever inside jokes. For example, Carol Kane plays a Carrie White–like student whose mother references her “dirty pillows.” But here, they’re actually filthy pillows, not breasts. And bringing the joke full circle, they belong to a bum played by Sydney Lassick, who was Sissy Spacek’s high school teacher in Carrie. There’s also a nice homage to Kevin Bacon’s death in Friday the 13th, only it’s pom-poms, not an arrow, that make the fateful deathblow. The best part of the film, however, is its refreshingly politically incorrect humor that would never fly in today’s climate of nervous production executives and diversity czars. Case in point: when Judge Reinhold is shot into the stratosphere by an exploding trampoline, he comes across a plane full of Japanese tourists who, upon seeing a human projectile, naturally giggle excitedly and start snapping photographs with their ever-present Nikons.

  The slasher parody with arguably the most star power is, ironically, one of the least known. Wacko features Joe Don Baker as an obsessed and unhinged detective tracking down the pumpkin-headed Lawnmower Killer (years before both Pumpkinhead and The Lawnmower Man, neither of which have anything to do with this). George Kennedy plays an incestuous doctor (it’s as weird as it sounds, and hardly funny) and in the best surprise, Andrew Dice Clay—credited here just as Andrew Clay—is greaser Tony Schlongini. It’s a role no different from the persona that would one day make him famous as the Dice Man. In fact, he’s nearly impossible to watch without anticipating his trademark “Oh!” after every one of his lines.

  Alex once pointed out to me that Dice’s enduring legacy is to have ruined—or improved—Mother Goose for an entire generation of parents. No one I know can ever read these bedtime tales to their kids without thinking about Old Mother Hubbard bent over, Mary’s hairy snatch, or Little Boy Blue sucking cock. There was also that bizarre incident when Dice broke down and cried on The Arsenio Hall Show and the equally strange 2003 CNNfn interview where he became irate with an interviewer for asking him about managing a gym. Still, I prefer to remember him as the filthy, leather-clad, chain-smoking troubadour of old. A couple of years ago, Dice went on a rant about Charlie Sheen, so I have even more respect for him today.

  Besides being a bit wackier (pun intended), Wacko is no better or worse than its fellow slasher parodies—although having the Birds of Alfred Hitchcock High School suiting up for rival De Palma’s Knives is a ni
ce touch.

  National Lampoon’s Class Reunion was made at a time when National Lampoon films were still funny. But sandwiched between National Lampoon’s Animal House and National Lampoon’s Vacation, Class Reunion suffered by comparison. Hated by critics and virtually ignored by moviegoers, the film hastened writer John Hughes’s metamorphosis from parody scribe to chronicler of teen angst. It takes place at the ten-year reunion of Lizzie Borden High School’s class of 1972 and uses virtually the same plot as 1978’s similarly named but off-the-wall Class Reunion Massacre. Despite everything said about it (or not said about it), Class Reunion is nowhere near as bad as advertised. If anything, its fatal flaw is that it can’t out-Airplane! Airplane! That and the fact that it’s afflicted with a severe case of “Grease syndrome.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, this condition is characterized by the casting of actors no less than a generation older than their on-screen personas. Have you seen Grease recently? Olivia Newton-John was pushing it as a high school senior and John Travolta was patently absurd. But the most ridiculous had to be Stockard Channing, who, at the time, might have even been older than her costars Eve Arden and Sid Caesar.

  Speaking of getting old, I can’t believe we’re approaching Scream’s twentieth anniversary. I recently watched it again and it was all the more apparent why I disliked it so much. There’s something so off-putting about it. A smarminess that, as I would later tell Bobby Cohen, looked like a slasher film, quacked like a slasher film, but had art house pretensions.

  Less apparent is why I was so charitable in Going to Pieces. I wrote, “[Scream] walks a fine line between poking fun at the classic slasher films and paying homage to them.” Okay, I guess you could make that argument. “The dialogue was witty, self-referential, and seemed to capture the authenticity of modern teenage jargon.” Hardly. It was more mean-spirited than anything. The characters all joke about the deaths of their friends who were brutally murdered over the weekend. Even the biggest assholes I know wouldn’t be this tone-deaf. “The characters were well-drawn and three-dimensional, hip enough to understand the conventions of the slasher film and still young and naïve enough to ignore them.” Nope. In fact, Scream has some of the most unlikeable characters in any teen-laden film. In the lineage of distinguished douche bags that stretches from Damone in Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Stifler in American Pie, Matthew Lillard’s Stu might be the douchiest of all. His weird twitchiness is more performance art than acting and I honestly have no idea how he managed to get through the shoot without any of his costars physically attacking him. Skeet Ulrich’s character isn’t much better. On the anniversary of the murder of his virgin girlfriend’s mother, he basically tells her it’s time to get over the loss and just fuck him. Then after he finally convinces her to give it up, he reveals he’s actually her mother’s killer! For crissakes, Wes, even Last House on the Left had a more uplifting ending.