FirHorror.

fm Page I Sunday, March 18, 2001 2:45 PM

Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc

The Pocket Essential

HORROR FILMS

www.pocketessentials.com
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First published in Great Britain 2001 by Pocket Essentials, 18 Coleswood Road,

Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1EQ

Distributed in the USA by Trafalgar Square Publishing, PO Box 257, Howe Hill
Road, North Pomfret, Vermont 05053

Copyright © Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc 2001

Series Editor: Paul Duncan

The right of Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc to be identified as the authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission
of the publisher.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be
liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired
out or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form or
binding or cover other than in which it is published, and without similar conditions,
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publication.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1-903047-38-2

987654321

Book typeset by Pdunk

Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman
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For Alice, our little horror

Acknowledgements

Er, normally at this stage we thank lots of people for lending us resource materi-
als but we seem to be such reprobates that our collection spoke for itself. Thanks to
our parents who thoroughly disapprove of all the nasty films we watch and Marc,
who thoroughly approves of the films we watch. Thanks also to Paul Duncan, Steve
Holland and Elizabeth Billinger. A big hello to Tony, Andy, Lizbeth, Paul, Gary,
Kay, Elyse and Jim on the Camera Obscurer web bounce. To Flo and Mo, who
stalk the fields of Alderney and finally to Alice, who tortures and kills small furry
creatures and leaves their remains on the carpet...
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this is in white font to mislead adobe acrobat.

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CONTENTS
Introduction..................................................................................7
Silents Are Golden.....................................................................13
The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, Haxan: A History Of Witchcraft
Through The Ages, The Phantom Of The Opera

From Gold To Lead: The Thirties And Forties ........................18

King Kong, The Ghoul, Dead Of Night

You’d Be Paranoid If You Knew You Were Next: The Fifties.23

The Quatermass Experiment, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,
Les Yeux Sans Visage

Psychos And Swingers: The Sixties........................................28

Peeping Tom, The Masque Of The Red Death, Rosemary's Baby

The Decade That Taste Forgot: The Seventies.......................33

Theater Of Blood, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Suppression And Repetition: The Eighties.............................38

The Evil Dead, The Thing, Spoorloos (The Vanishing)

My, Aren’t We So Postmodern Now: The Nineties .................43

Braindead, Dust Devil, The Blair Witch Project

Ten Terrifying Auteurs

Tod Browning ............................................................................... 48
James Whale................................................................................. 51
Val Lewton .................................................................................... 55
Terence Fisher.............................................................................. 61
George A Romero......................................................................... 65
Dario Argento ............................................................................... 69
David Cronenberg ........................................................................ 73
Joe Dante ...................................................................................... 78
Wes Craven................................................................................... 82
Clive Barker .................................................................................. 86

Resource Materials....................................................................91
Books, Websites and a list of further films to watch
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Introduction

What Is Horror?
A fork of lightning traverses the moonless sky, briefly illuminating an
inhuman shape crouched before the fragile window pane. With the wooden
shutters banging in the screeching wind and the floorboards creaking under
some unseen strain you swear you can hear the sound of unfamiliar foot-
steps and something scraping along the ancient walls like fingernails
slowly being dragged along a blackboard...

Despite its reputation as lowbrow or mindless entertainment the horror

film has a rich literary and oral tradition that eclipses many other forms of
storytelling. Primarily, confrontation of fear in a safe environment
(whether it’s in a cinema, around a campfire or snuggled up in bed) works
at a primordial level to psychologically prepare an individual for life’s
hardships as well as acting as a cautionary source of morality. To this end,
the best tales are told in the dark or at night where the logical light of day
cannot disperse their phantasmagorical effect or mock their inherently
dubious premises. Ultimately, the horror film is a faerie or folk story, no
different to Grimm’s traditional oral tales, just presented to the audience in
a manner suited to our times. Throughout history, humankind has been fas-
cinated by the bizarre, the macabre and the horrific - from revelling in
ancient gladiatorial battles to modern motorists gawping at an accident, ter-
ror has always formed a part of our lives. The horror film offers a chance to
experience this fear and disgust within a fantastical and physically non-
threatening context. There is a catharsis within horror - to see victims deal
with a situation, jump at the scary moments and recoil at the grotesque, but
ultimately leave the cinema unscathed. It also offers an ideal date setting,
which is why it is so popular with teens - a scary movie is just the thing to
ensure that you both cuddle up close.
Other precedents for the horror film come from the work of artists such
as Bruegel, Bosch or the surrealists, the sublime canvases of the late 18th
century or the distorted realities of Hogarth. Mix this with psychoanalysis
and centuries of esoteric underground thinking and the resulting concoc-
tion is a miasma of subgenres and styles that make the horror film an
incredibly rich part of cinema’s heritage. However, they are often simply
dismissed as trash or unworthy of serious critical attention. Thomas
Schatz’s seminal work on Hollywood genres does not even acknowledge
the horror film, yet imbues the Western with a sense of mythicism, and

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despite some attempt to address the issue, horror remains the province of
the fan rather than the critic. Despite (or because of) this, its continued pop-
ularity indicates that people will part with their money time and again for
the privilege of being scared witless, just as they have from the start of cin-
ema and storytelling itself.

Order - Chaos - Reconstruction

The basic structural premise of the horror film is to show the restoration
or reconstruction of an order in a portrayed society. The opening act (ignor-
ing prologues which are designed to create tension or provide justification
for the disruption of order) generally sets the groundwork for a community
unaware of impending danger, either a ‘normal town’ (Halloween, Grem-
lins), an isolated group (The Thing, Deliverance, Friday The Thirteenth) or
an individual (Carrie, The Vanishing). The second act sees the arrival of
the monster, the breakdown of social order and change, the prologue often
gives a portent of this act (Halloween, Jaws, Friday The Thirteenth). The
final act resolves the issues, however swiftly, and restores order to the
community, which may be different from the order that opened the picture.
Most films follow this three-act structure although some, notably during
the Sixties and Seventies, try to break from it by employing downbeat end-
ings (Night Of The Living Dead, The Birds) that offer no solution to the
problem, effectively ending in Act 2. But even these have an abrupt inter-
nal resolution (the absence of audience identifiable characters in Night Of
The Living Dead, the probably temporary escape from The Birds). Some
films play with the template - Dawn Of The Dead is set entirely in Act 2
but internally follows the three-act structure. The reconstruction of order
does not necessarily mean that the new world is any better than the one that
preceded it and is often far worse (Invasion Of The Body Snatchers) but its
alteration and the process of reconstruction is what provides the genre’s
basic narrative drive.

The Monster
At the rotten core of any horror lies the monster, the perpetrator of the
dread and fear that elicits an emotional response to the film. The monster
need not be the obvious lumbering killer and neither does it follow that a
killer in a film must be the monster, the purpose is to provide a reason for
the chaos inflicted on the portrayed society. The monster falls into at least
one, often more, of four basic categories which typify the disruption of
order.

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Natural: Nature is a primal fear, it is chaotic, unpredictable and often as

violent as it is beautiful. Man’s insignificance in the universe is epitomised
by futile attempts at controlling the forces of nature. The greatest fear is
that which we cannot understand and nature is the first manifestation of
this. The ecological horror film shows the effects of nature on humankind,
either as punishment for meddling with it (with which it is crossed with the
scientific monster - e.g. the electrically awoken worms of Squirm or the
genetics tampering of Piranha or Jurassic Park), the primitive attacking
the modern upsetting the balance of evolution (Jaws, Grizzly), or the man
as insignificant to the greater purpose of nature’s slow cycle (Volcano,
Armageddon). Resolution in the natural horror film is often by scientific
means (The Swarm), confrontation which re-establishes the protagonist’s
link with his/her primitive self (Jaws, Moby Dick) or by nature just running
its course (Earthquake).
Supernatural: In some respects, the supernatural offers a much safer
form of horror. Although not tangible or simple to explain, it is far easier to
dismiss as fantastical because cold logic requires empirical evidence of
supernatural activity outside the cinematic environment. Ultimately the
monster is a fantastical bogeyman that cannot rationally exist and can
therefore be dismissed. Vampires, werewolves and zombies allow the audi-
ence to have their cake and eat it - they can enjoy the scares then dismiss
the monster at their leisure. Conversely supernatural monsters, because of
their unfathomable and enigmatic nature, allow the imaginative film-maker
to create horror and terror extended outside our waking reality. Clive
Barker’s Cenobites (Hellraiser) come from a twisted, distorted world far
beyond our comprehension. Supernatural creatures can come from any-
where and for any purpose, whether it be vampires taking over the world
(Blade) or motiveless demonic possession (The Exorcist, Stigmata).
Psychological: Perhaps one of the most terrifying of monsters, the psy-
chotic killer is based entirely in the real world. Sometimes these monsters
are given an excuse, a reason for their actions - whether it be abuse at the
hands of the father (Peeping Tom), a frightening Oedipal complex
(Maniac, Psycho), a lost love - or are simply driven to madness by such
mundane entities as noisy neighbours (Driller Killer). In these cases the
audience may not be able to identify with the monster, but can at least
understand it. Occasionally there is no obvious cause or explanation for a
killer’s crimes (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Henry Portrait Of A Serial
Killer) or the malevolent motivation of a killer wanting simply to know
how it feels to kill (The Vanishing) - the consequent alienation of the audi-
ence produces far more scary and sinister effects. These monsters are diffi-

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cult to dismiss. Today’s sensationalist press turn real life crimes into hard-
hitting stories that ultimately exploit the victims, but their effect on the
public psyche is hard to ignore. It is only when crossed with the supernatu-
ral that these killers become easier to deal with (Halloween).
Scientific: The reality of man-made disasters (plane crashes, Cherno-
byl) delivers a genuine threat to the audience. Many disaster movies of the
Seventies (The Towering Inferno, Airplane) reflect very real threats that
could “happen to anyone.” Another genre favourite is the mad scientist,
knowledgeable beyond everyday comprehension and fanatically driven
that can lead to all sorts of evil, whether it be accidental or intentional. Dr
Jekyll, Dr X, Fu Manchu, Professor Quatermass all created, in some sense,
terrifying offspring of science. Frankenstein’s monster is a product of a
man’s obsessive determination to create life from dead flesh, but who is
really the monster - the creation or the creator? Concerns about the threat
of the atom bomb and the destruction of the world through the clinical and
relentless pursuit of science, for example the atomic mutation film, are fur-
ther examples.

The Viewer: Voyeur, Victim, Violator

The complex relationship between viewer and screen provides a variety
of conflicts for the spectator that go towards creating the style of a particu-
lar horror film. Horror is not the only genre to do this, but the way in which
the viewpoints are mixed dictates the overall feel and makes the film hor-
rific. The three primary modes of audience relationship to the screen are:
Voyeur, Victim, Violator.
Voyeur: The privileged viewer can watch the acts of terror detached
from the proceedings. The enjoyment lies in the spectacle or the relaying of
the story. This can create tension in that the advantaged viewpoint allows
us to see a killer waiting patiently at the side of the room (Halloween), the
victim unaware of his presence. Linked with voyeurism is a scopophilic
urge relating to the events and a helplessness that derives from being out-
side narrative intervention. Conversely, the detached viewpoint can result
in a disinterested attitude, which allows the audience the luxury of viewing
the film at an aesthetic level whilst removing the personal attachment to the
characters. Although this position is generally undesirable in a horror film
there are exceptions - in Jörg Buttgereit’s Der Todesking this aesthetic dis-
tancing pushes matters into the arena of the art film and makes the morbid
events non-exploitational.
Victim: Empathy with the character and experiencing the action from
their point of view occasionally leaves the viewer the victim of the horror.

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While the advantaged viewpoint leaves the spectator helpless, there is at

least no direct threat, but from the victim’s point of view this is not the
case. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when Sally regains consciousness
we watch (as she does) the ogling faces of the cannibal family who have
captured her. In some sense we become her for that moment.
Violator: The camera as killer is a popular component of the horror film
from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom to Halloween and Wolfen. The viewer
sees as the killer and becomes implicit in the perpetration of the atrocity.
This aspect has created much of the outrage against stalk ‘n’ slash films of
the early Eighties, when it was argued that viewing through the killers’
eyes reinforced the misogynist attitudes of these pictures and somehow
encouraged the spectator to align with this way of thinking.
These three devices do not necessarily remain isolated. In John
McNaughton’s remarkable Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer the two kill-
ers, Henry and Otis, abuse and butcher a family. We see the scene, without
cuts, from the point of view of a camcorder that is recording the slaughter,
initially as violator (the camera begins as handheld) before becoming
detached voyeur (as the camera is abandoned so its operator can indulge in
violation). Sometimes all three techniques are used simultaneously
(although rarely) such as in the prom massacre sequence in Brian De
Palma’s Carrie - the scene is played in split-screen so we simultaneously
view the carnage from afar, from Carrie’s viewpoint (glancing off one part
of the screen another camera whip blurs to represent her viewpoint) and
from her victims’ perspective. Knowingly cinematic, the result makes the
viewer at once voyeur, victim and violator.

The Scare And The Thrill

As with all films, the director and editor have complete control over
what is revealed to the audience and when, but with horror this is key to
generating tension and pacing. It is often true that the viewer’s imagination
provides far more scares than is possible for a film-maker to depict – the
unseen can be any number of fears or phobias, personal to the individual. It
is the reason many of horror’s detractors have never seen a horror film -
their anxiety lies with what they may see.
Editing is the main device which creates the pace of a film, compressing
or extending time to accentuate the appropriate mood. There are fundamen-
tal differences between tension, suspense and shock. Hitchcock used sus-
pense in films that would not normally be considered horror pictures but
the effect remains the same. The device relies on giving the audience more
information than the character has, then progressing with the plot while the

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audience wait for the revelation/event - e.g. showing a character being

given a bomb and waiting for it to explode or not, aligning the viewer to a
subjectively omnipotent position. Tension is created by giving the audience
a hint of what could happen, but not letting on when or how. Horror films
tend to play tension one of two ways - the first is to slowly build the horror,
dropping clues and subtle hints, each confrontation becoming nastier right
up to the final showdown. The other device is completely opposite - show
all the nastiness right at the start of the film and confront the audience head
on. There is no need to show further terror, because the tension is estab-
lished - the audience know how nasty things can get, but are still com-
pletely in the dark as to how much worse it can be. Shock lies the realm of
the unexpected surprise, occasionally preceded by tension but distinct from
it. Red herrings are, naturally, obligatory in most productions - why go for
a complicated scare when a false alarm is just as effective? There is a term
for this known as ‘the bus’ which derives from Jacques Tourneur’s Cat
People. After an interminably tense walk through a park, the hiss of bus
brakes concludes the scene with safety for the character - a massive shock
for the audience who have expected the worst. Similar uses are made of
cats (Jones in Alien being the quintessential feline example) or, popular in
many modern horrors, the two people bumping into each other in a school
corridor, always accompanied by an accentuating musical ‘dah-dah!’

How To Use This Book

First we look at the history of the horror film from its inception to the
present day, giving an overview of the basic movements and looking at key
films in more detail. Then we examine ten people who have a reputation
for producing horror films, key movers in the field. We look at their lives,
films and influences. Naturally we could not hope to cover the scale and
number of horror films in a book of this size and sadly many classic films
have been reluctantly omitted, notably those outside Europe or Hollywood,
so your safety from Japanese ghosts, Chinese hopping vampires and Mexi-
can monsters is assured. Instead we have attempted to provide a rough
guide to a horror excursion, a package holiday, where you can take in all
the major scare cities and sightsee in a couple of backwater villages of
interest. If you enjoy your whirlwind stay you can always come back and
explore some of the multitude of areas in more detail. Enjoy your horror
holiday, it could be your last...

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Silents Are Golden

The horror film, the shock picture, is such a disreputable form that it has
been around since the dawn of cinema. Even before the development of
narrative cinema, the horror film had already thrilled and chilled audiences.
Georges Méliès, the pioneer of camera trickery, made many short films
that had supernatural or macabre punchlines; from films about Faust,
through a number of ‘magic’ illusions where Méliès himself would trans-
form people into skeletons or inflate a head until it popped. The medium
naturally progressed into the arena of storytelling. The Edison-produced
Frankenstein (1910) is an early example and is thought to be the first
appearance of the scientist’s monster. Around this time protests about the
effects of screen violence on the viewer were beginning to take hold, and
have never stopped. After a few years as a novelty, cinema became a regu-
lar part of people’s lives but, importantly, those people were generally
working-class. While the Russian film industry grew with the realisation
that film could be used as a powerful propaganda tool, elsewhere it was
viewed with suspicion - an irresponsible medium for depraving the inno-
cent mind. Some early examples of the kind of film that provoked such out-
rage now seem funny - the car running over a man’s legs that then get
detached is so ineptly executed (by today’s standards) the howls are now of
laughter, but there was a darker side too. Many successful early films
depicted executions or ‘foreign’ atrocities, what we now call mondo mov-
ies, and their popularity caused such concern that they provided the oppor-
tunity to ban other material as well, including fictionalised sex and
violence.
The first accepted classic of the genre was The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari -
ironic in that many contemporary reviews dismissed the film as crude and
sensationalist. Germany became the premiere producer of horror films,
their very silence making them marketable the world over. The use of
expressionist lighting and huge sets would have an enormous impact on the
future of the field - these films dealt with fractured psychoses, distorted
reality and emphasis on dreamtime. Der Golem (1920, there had been pre-
vious versions) makes full use of its locations as a clay creature is sum-
moned, goes on a rampage but ultimately falls foul of an innocent little girl.
In a poignant moment she casually removes the Golem’s ‘heart’ in an
influential scene reflected many years later in James Whale’s Franken-
stein. Nosferatu (1922), Murnau’s unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula remains a masterpiece of vampire cinema, a taut, surreal and foe-
tid exploration with a truly revolting monster (played by Max Schreck),

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driven by inhuman love. Murnau would go on to direct Faust (1926), a

reworking of the famous legend about a man who sells his soul to Mephis-
topheles, before moving on to non-genre projects. Fritz Lang gave us a
series of films based on the sinister Dr Mabuse, but remains chiefly
remembered for the complex and disturbing M (1931), starring Peter Lorre
as a child murderer. It was based on Peter Kurten, the Vampire of Düssel-
dorf - a brute whose legacy was still in the memories of contemporary
viewers. Germany was not the only country making horror films. Hungary
had been scaring audiences from word go and both French and English
productions, especially in weekly part works, emphasised sensational and
supernatural elements in their regular line up, in the literary shadow of Sax
Rohmer. Scandinavian cinema was also very well regarded at the time.
On the other side of the Atlantic Hollywood had not remained idle. Lon
Chaney terrified audiences the world over with his remarkable self applied
make-up in films such as The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1923) and The
Phantom Of The Opera (1925). London After Midnight (1927) featured
Chaney as a vampire, complete with painfully wired jaw and rows of
sharpened teeth. John Barrymore excelled as Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde
(1920), but the film came under criticism for its brutality - the scene where
he clubs a stranger to death is still shocking and sees echoes in the tramp
killing sequence of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). It also features
a truly creepy sequence where a giant spider is superimposed crouching
over a bed.
Silent cinema’s legacy was that it provided a visual reference for future
film-makers, relying on image to tell the story. By the close of the Twen-
ties the level of technology and skill was phenomenal, creating some of the
most potent images of international cinema. The coming of sound created a
decline in non-English speaking movie cultures. But there was another
bugbear around the corner to burden the unwary film-maker. Spurred by
adverse press reaction to the effects of media violence and lascivious
depictions of sexual promiscuity, Hollywood took it upon itself to clean up
its act, before someone else did. England had already instigated a series of
regulations in the shape of the BBFC but it was the Hays Code that would
cripple artistic freedom. Initiated in the mid-Twenties no one took much
notice initially, but by the mid-Thirties its Draconian edicts would see the
beginning of a decline in the sensationalist horror picture. In some ways its
effects are still being felt today.

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The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1919)

Dir: Robert Weine St: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt
At Holstenwall fair, Dr Caligari introduces Cesare, a somnambulist who
is kept in a coffin-like box and fed porridge by day. But by night Cesare
does Caligari’s insidious bidding, murdering or hypnotising townsfolk for
his own nefarious purposes, and it seems as though nothing can stop him.
A defining moment in cinema’s expression as an art form this was, at
the time, passed off as a stagy and unrealistic amateur nasty. Caligari
rejects any concept of realism in favour of a warped and fragmented ver-
sion of psychological or dream reality - the world seen through the eyes of
a madman telling a tale of unimaginable horrors. The incredible expres-
sionist backdrops and imaginative set design conspire to make the entire
experience disjointed; the mountainside is jam-packed with curvy triangu-
lar houses, Caligari’s caravan is buckled, the clerks’ chairs are imposing,
while the streets are serpentine in their undulating cobbles. The fair is dom-
ineering and claustrophobic, its merry-go-round at a skewed angle, spin-
ning so fast it shouldn’t work. That these remarkable scenes are bookended
by apparently normal moments in a lunatic asylum gives credence to their
illusory nature, but this fantasy world invades the asylum itself - the
inmates apparently connected by strings like human marionettes, overseen
by their own Caligari. It is as though this world is no more real than the tale
we have been told. Cesare may well kill Alan and stumble to the rooftops
with the swooning hypnotised girl but he is a pawn, as is everyone else, to
the dictatorial Caligari. Despite its poor initial reception the influence of
this film is immense; the whole German expressionist movement that
defined Europe’s finest silent horrors owe a debt to Caligari’s visual styli-
sation. Its combination of art and pulp psychology is what makes the film
so watchable. Its influence spreads out to Terence Fisher’s (c.f.) Franken-
stein And The Monster From Hell, The Crow (1994) and most notably in
the works of Tim Burton. Cesare is visually very much a precursor to
Edward Scissorhands (1990) while much of the distorted set work can be
seen in The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick, 1993) and Sleepy Hollow
(1999).

Haxan: A History Of Witchcraft Through The Ages (1921)

Dir: Benjamin Christensen
Doing exactly as its title suggests, Christensen’s film shows the history
and development of witchcraft, images of the devil and persecution
through the ages, sparing none of the details and remaining refreshingly

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frank in its tone. Starting as a lecture, the factual tone does much to dissi-
pate fears that this is an exploitation piece. To illustrate the world as seen in
the middle ages, the film branches out into an animated illustration of the
heavens before plunging into an awe-inspiring mechanical realisation of a
Boschian Hell with endless bodies being devoured by demons and queues
of people shuffling towards eternal torment. These images of mechanical
grotesquery would later find good home in the macabre animations of Jan
Svankmajer, whose aggressive animation style can also be seen in a breath-
taking sequence of self-arranging coins. If that were not enough, the screen
is set alight with dramatic reconstructions, proving to be far more than
merely illustrative. We see the Devil in his many guises from towering
obese horned priest, to sprightly Pan-clone and scaly beast, with a con-
stantly twitching forked tongue. These are remarkable creations of make-
up and acting; Maleus Maleficarum or Bosch brought to life. Neither is he
portrayed as a bit evil or a touch of a scallywag. The debasement of the
early texts is shown in full - a line of witches joyfully kissing his anus, cor-
rupting a convent or tempting monks to sex and their masters to enjoy flag-
ellation. The Sabbath sequence is the most renowned and controversial in
the film. Following the witches from their homes the sky is filled with
broom-riding women, capes fluttering, descending on a graveyard. There
they meet dancing demons, the whole event overseen by Satan himself,
clutching an unchristened baby from whom he squeezes the life blood and
tosses into a bubbling cauldron.
But the demons aren’t restricted to Satan’s side, the damaging effects of
the inquisition and religious fanaticism are also examined in sobering
detail. The systematic torture and executions of (mainly) women at the
hands of the inquisitors is dramatised and illustrated with reconstructions
of the use of torture instruments designed to extract ‘confessions’ from
unfortunate souls. If the film does have a failing it lies within the final sec-
tion’s need to rationalise ‘witchly’ behaviour in terms of psychoanalytic
theories on hysteria but this is a minor point. Overall, this remains an
affecting, fascinating, insightful work that manages to merge fact and the
fantastical. Three years in the making the camerawork, giddying special
effects and sensitive use of colour tinting make for a unique experience. If
possible seek out the full print rather than the truncated one with narration
by William Burroughs.

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The Phantom Of The Opera (1925)

Dir: Rupert Julian St: Lon Chaney
Deep in the catacombs below the Paris Opera lurks a hideous, vengeful
madman. He is Erik, the Phantom of the Opera. He does have a taste for
music though and exercises his powers of persuasion to ensure that Chris-
tine Daaé gets prima donna status in the opera’s production of Faust, pro-
viding she dedicates her life to her career and ditches her boyfriend Raoul.
But when she fails to attain the Phantom’s exacting demands, he decides to
bring the house down. Literally.
Gaston Leroux’s novel has had a long run on the big screen. The combi-
nation of grand scale, doomed twisted love, greed for the stage and a back-
drop of decadent Paris is irresistible, providing the perfect grandiose
melodrama and glut of scale that typifies both Opera and Hollywood big
budget film-making. We are in big set territory here - the opera house is
huge, the stage filled to the brim with ballerinas, wire work angels and
trapdoors. The audience stampede in terror as they flee the giant chandelier
crashing down upon them. The attention to design is second to none; sets of
Faustian Hells in the wings, the Phantom’s abode, from his austere coffin
to Christine’s boudoir, the black lake with its domineering arches traversed
by means of gondolier, and the statue-dominated rooftops. In one of the
film’s most celebrated scenes the huge staircase of the foyer is the setting
for the decadent Bal Masqué de l’Opéra, where the Phantom makes his
presence felt as a skull-faced figure of death resplendent in a crimson
cloak. To add greater impact and gravitas, the scene was originally shot in
two-strip colour which emphasises the opulence. Despite the Phantom’s
obvious negative points (he’s barking mad and homicidal) he still manages
to come across as a figure of some sympathy; he is after all, in love, genu-
inely believing that its redemptive powers will dissipate his hatred for man-
kind. He is also self-educated, in music and, gulp, the black arts. Chaney’s
make-up is as superb as ever with its stretched nose, sunken eyes and
corpse-like pallor, a commanding figure of fear.
Although lacking the avant-garde extremities and experimentation of
many silent horror films, The Phantom Of The Opera shows that a well-
crafted big budget film can hold an audience captivated, entertained and
scared. Its influence is more widespread precisely because of its grounding
in commercial sensibilities.

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From Gold To Lead: The Thirties And Forties

For Hollywood at least, the coming of sound started a Golden Age of
horror. A streak of inventive and impressive films ranging from subtle to
macabre and effects-laden extravaganza took the public by storm forcing
even studios unfamiliar with the genre (such as MGM) into the fray. Partly
this success can be put down to two films which blazed on the screens, Tod
Browning’s (c.f.) Dracula and James Whale’s (c.f.) Frankenstein. Both
were made for Universal Pictures. Scores of imitations and similar produc-
tions were authorised and both Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi became big
enough stars to sell pictures on the strength of their names alone. Interest-
ingly, audiences identified with the monster of the pictures rather than the
bland heroes.
Following his early success, Karloff starred in an astonishing number of
films. The Mummy (1932), an engaging tale of morbid love, saw him as the
returning Egyptian Im-Ho-Tep, imprisoned for forbidden love and seeking
the desecrators of his tomb. The slowly unravelling flashback structure
really helps to flesh the film out and prompted sequels and remakes right
up to the present day. The Ghoul, a British production, was even darker in
tone, eschewing exotic lands for a far more grizzly form of life after death.
Visually sumptuous with some extreme expressionist sets, The Mask Of Fu
Manchu (1932) takes the pulp action and xenophobia of the popular Sax
Rohmer characters and emblazons them across the screen with unbridled
fetishism. Torture has never looked so sexual as the unscrupulous Fu Man-
chu contrives increasingly devious devices to punish the infidels, while his
slinky daughter deliriously laps up every morsel of pain. Such blatant and
accentuated use of sadistic violence was, however, on the way out - even
non-horror films of the time would receive short shrift just a couple of
years later for their frank depictions of sex and violence. Its zenith came
with the stupendously violent but strangely moving classic King Kong, still
the ultimate monster movie. The Most Dangerous Game (aka The Hounds
Of Zaroff, 1932) starred the silver screen’s favourite scream queen Fay
Wray. The premise is so wonderfully simple it has been used in countless
remakes - a mad hunter seeks the ultimate prey, man himself. Another oft-
remade film started life as a vehicle for Peter Lorre; Mad Love (1935) fea-
tures a pianist who fears that his transplanted hands have a lethal intent of
their own, because they once belonged to an executed murderer. Lorre
returned to the moving hand theme in The Beast With Five Fingers (1947).
After the Hays Code got into full swing matters became more implied
(Dracula’s Daughter’s delicately underplayed lesbianism), fantastical

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(Bride Of Frankenstein’s little people also crop up in Dr Cyclops), rational

or comedic. But an even darker cloud was on the horizon - war. World War
2 changed the tone of films considerably, away from grim Gothic horrors
and into lighter, fantastical realms. Prestige productions vanished and films
became more rushed, more simplistic and far less interesting. Despite a
good enough start the popular comedy duo Abbot and Costello produced
an increasingly irritating range of horror comedies, blunting the edge of
Universal’s successes with escalating juvenilia and a tendency towards
slapstick. Thus Abbot and Costello met Frankenstein, the Mummy, the
(long-winded) Killer Boris Karloff, the Invisible Man and Dr Jekyll And
Mr Hyde - bleeding any horror and most humour dry. It was down to the
smaller studios to salvage the sorry situation. RKO hired Val Lewton (c.f.)
to produce a series of low-budget horror films which managed to stay (usu-
ally) within the letter of the Hays code whilst being scary and intellectually
stimulating. They also made money!
Once the War was over the studios still had a few barren years ahead
and the horror film was the first to feel the pinch. In the face of the cin-
ema’s biggest threat, television, the studios floundered and began to frag-
ment. Smaller companies came into the fray and these were not worried
about upsetting the status quo. More films were made in black and white
again, offering far more sensationalist material than could be watched at
home. Meanwhile the big names turned to epics and widescreen Techni-
color to win back a dwindling audience.

King Kong (1933)

Dir: Merian Cooper & Ernest Schoedsack St: Fay Wray, Robert Arm-
strong
Carl Denham makes sensationalist jungle pictures and boy does he have
a prime concept for his next one. Taking ‘love interest’ Anne to Skull
Island, his leading male is none other than Kong - god to some, big scary
monkey-thing to others. But his motives turn out to be even more devious
as he prepares to show the “eighth wonder of the world” to a rapturous
New York audience, a plan Kong is none too chuffed about.
From exotic tribal rituals to huge battling dinosaurs with multiple vio-
lent deaths and a massive primal beast ripping a bloody swathe through a
major city, King Kong has got the lot. Willis O’Brien’s exemplary special
effects provided an inspiration to masses of cineastes, from future stop-
frame guru Ray Harryhausen to a youthful Steven Spielberg. Its power has
hardly diminished in the seventy years since its execution because of one
thing - character. Kong never ceases to be a living entity, constantly sway-

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ing, scratching or responding inquisitively. He is the purest screen manifes-

tation of the male id. He hates with gusto, he loves and protects with gusto,
proving his worth to his ‘mate’, Anne, by wringing the life out of the island
dinosaurs with his bare hands. These sequences (O’Brien also did the
remarkable work on the superior 1927 version of Conan Doyle’s The Lost
World) show that the character traits are not lavished on Kong alone. Also
key to the film’s continued success are the characters created by Edgar
Wallace’s script, who are well-rounded and convincing. Fay Wray’s Anne
is not just the scream queen that her reputation suggests (if you faced a
multi-storey killing machine of primitive aggression wouldn’t you
scream?) but a gutsy, adventurous lass who is very capable of standing up
for herself, unless about to be sacrificed to a lumbering megabeast. By the
film’s close she has come to respect and even pity her captor, torn away
from his natural environment to amuse the thoughtless masses. When Kong
shrugs off his shackles and stampedes through the city, you cheer for him,
because by this time you have come to know him.
Other, inferior, Kong films were made including a memorable one-on-
one with Godzilla (Kong won in Western prints, Godzilla in Eastern) and a
truly atrocious De Laurentiis produced remake in 1976. O’Brien revisited
animated apes with the smaller scale weep-along Mighty Joe Young (1949).

The Ghoul (1933)

Dir: T Hayes Hunter St: Boris Karloff, Cedric Hardwicke, Ernest
Thesiger
Professor Morlant, Egyptologist or grave robber? He has in his posses-
sion the Eternal Light, a precious jewel that will grant him immortality if
the rituals performed after his death are correct. And die he does, watched
by his faithful God-fearing butler Laing and the decidedly dodgy solicitor
Broughton. With bickering cousins Betty and Ralph trying to get to the bot-
tom of things, Aga Ben Dragore and Mahmoud after the jewel, Kaney fall-
ing for the silver-tongued sheikh and a replacement vicar, things can only
get more complicated as the moon’s rays illuminate the professor’s tomb
and his corpse stirs at the prospect of rebirth.
Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb made the creation of Egyp-
tian-themed horror films an inevitability. American Universal gave us The
Mummy (also with Karloff) while the British Gaumont furnished us with
The Ghoul. Despite basic similarities (Egyptian theme, dead guy comes
back and kills) the focus of the two is markedly different - The Mummy
plays the macabre love aspect by having an ages old corpse manipulated
beyond his control, while The Ghoul has a man obsessed with his own mor-

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tality trying to cheat death. The Ghoul is a morbid and dark affair, Morlant
insisting that the jewel is bandaged into his hand so that when he dies it
remains with him. That it is stolen and hidden in a jar of coffee straight
after incarceration shows the futility of his actions. He is so ingrained in the
cultural trappings of an ancient mythology he risks his fortune on a maca-
bre dream, even taking on the looks of a mummified corpse before he is
dead. When he awakens enraged at the loss of the jewel (and the limited
time he therefore has to affirm his immortality) he becomes almost super-
human in power - he is defined entirely by his selfish desires. The other
characters are far more complex, particularly in the case of Laing, Brough-
ton and Nigel Hartley (the sinister parson) all of whom have varying moti-
vations that unravel as the film progresses. After such a grim opening, the
addition of Kaney, Betty’s dotty friend, is essential to lighten the tone,
which up until then is thicker than the London smog that dominates the city
scenes.

Dead Of Night (1945)

Dir: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Ham-
mer
Walter Craig is unprepared for meeting a group of people that he recog-
nises but has never met. They are part of his recurring nightmare and he
fears for the worst. As they relay increasingly strange supernatural tales, it
becomes clear that Walter’s nightly visions are demonstrative of actual
occurrences. So how do they stop the inevitable spiral into murder and
madness?
The horror anthology film is a staple favourite, popularised by Milton
Subotsky films like Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors and Vault Of Horror
right through to Creepshow I & II and Cat’s Eye. The format remains gen-
erally the same - take a linking story with a repetitive motif, tell the tales
and finish it all up with a twist. It allows the opportunity to take several
good tales but not let them outlive their welcome by stretching their pre-
mises. These are the cinematic equivalent of ghostly short stories, now
largely taken over by short horror/shock television shows like Tales Of The
Unexpected or Tales From The Crypt. Dead Of Night is an early example
of the subgenre and without doubt hugely influential. It is one of the few
examples of decent British horror in the Forties. The five tales, based on
works by among others Angus MacPhail (who also helped pen the screen-
play) and HG Wells, are of varying length, accommodating the screen time
for as long as necessary. There’s the racing driver who avoids being killed
in a bus crash following a premonition featuring the bus conductor as an

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undertaker, Sally’s “subconscious thingamajig” where she comforts a mur-

dered child, and the tale of Potter and Parrot, two golfers who play a round
for the hand of a girl, only to have the loser (Parrot cheated) commit sui-
cide and return as an irritated ghost. The story of Peter seeing the reflec-
tions of a different room in a mirror is both creepy and surreal, he slowly
loses his mind and adopts the persona of the mirror’s original owner. This
macabre tale was repeated in the Amicus omnibus film From Beyond The
Grave (1973) to lesser effect. The final tale stars Michael Redgrave as a
ventriloquist and is concerned with the takeover of personality. It also
inspired a remake in the shape of Richard Attenborough’s preposterous and
overlong Magic (1979). Blessed with some imaginative lighting and a drop
dead ending that is brilliantly executed (all Dutch tilts and surreal claustro-
phobic juxtapositions) Dead Of Night remains a fascinating experiment
from Ealing Studios.

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You’d Be Paranoid If You Knew You Were Next:

The Fifties
The Fifties saw America become a dominant force in world affairs.
After World War Two, a boom generation of affluent devil-may-care teen-
agers burst on the scene, upsetting their parents’ values and driving their
motor cars. This created the two primary themes in Fifties American horror
cinema – the teen drive-in flick and the McCarthyist paranoia film. Follow-
ing on from the high-profile trials against Communism that formed the
basis of the House Unamerican Activities Committee it was natural that
film-makers should turn to the fear of Communism as a theme for their
films. The dread of alien threat can be seen in Robert Wise’s thoughtful
plea for peace – The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) where human igno-
rance and intolerance of the alien almost causes the Earth’s downfall. In
sharp contrast Earth Vs The Flying Saucers (1956) sees the other as
oppressive faceless horde - the alien/Communist conspiracy to be fought
with patriotic verve by All-American men. Essentially fear of science and
fear of Communism are two sides of the same coin, representing the
unknown and being taken over by something beyond your control. To this
end, many horror themes approached science fiction but in reality just mir-
rored the fears of their time. This was not limited to the USA – Japan gave
us Godzilla (Gojira) which blamed America’s nuclear testing on the
destruction of society.
The American teenager market had an insatiable appetite for trashy
films. This was the birth of the drive-in generation. The exploitation films
provided the requisite hotchpotch of dreamy teen idols, frugging chicks
and gung-ho horror. Add a little rock ‘n’ roll to the piece and, voilà, bums
in Chevys. How To Make A Monster (1958) and I Was A Teenage Were-
wolf (1957) are typical examples of knowingly kitsch exploitation fodder.
Companies came and companies went, but one maintained a longevity that
many major studios would envy: American International Pictures. AIP’s
success lay in giving its undiscerning public exactly what they wanted, but
it also provided a rich pool of talent for the next generation of film-makers.
Its chief proponent was Roger Corman, who wrote, produced and directed
more pictures than he’d probably care to remember including It Conquered
The World (1956), featuring a giant killer cucumber and the cheesy Attack
Of The Crab Monsters (1957). Alongside Corman in the low-budget field,
director and producer William Castle was astonishing audiences with his
own unique brand of high concept exploitation and outrageous use of gim-
micks. Films such as The Tingler (1959), where the cinema seats were

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wired up to produce a mild electric shock, and The House On Haunted Hill
(1958), which featured an Emergo inflatable skeleton appearing from the
screen, are remembered as much for their campaigns as the finished prod-
ucts, which also offer much to enjoy.
In England, Hammer Studios adapted Nigel Kneale’s hugely successful
BBC television series The Quatermass Experiment for the big screen. The
international success of the film led the company to invest in colour film
stock for the first of their Gothic horror films, The Curse Of Frankenstein.
It made stars of long time actors Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The
pair were reunited in many of Hammer’s subsequent productions, includ-
ing Terence Fisher’s (c.f.) awesome The Horror Of Dracula. Hammer
would become Britain’s most prominent horror producer in the Sixties.

The Quatermass Experiment (1955)

Dir: Val Guest St: Brian Donlevy
“I launched ‘em and I bought ‘em back,” announces Professor Quater-
mass glibly, failing to mention that his rocket came back to the wrong
place, ignited half the countryside and has left two of the three astronauts
jellybabies. Worse, the survivor Victor is rapidly turning into a life-drain-
ing alien with a cactus for an arm.
Nigel Kneale’s television series had gripped a nation and provided
Hammer with an ideal vehicle for a cinema outing, giving them the oppor-
tunity to show what television couldn’t, especially as much of the original
programmes were broadcast live. The transition from small to big screen
was as much a burden as a benefit, the extended budget allowed Guest the
luxury of some impressive effects and backdrops - the crashed rocket is a
very powerful image of failed science while the final sequences in West-
minster Abbey are convincingly realised. Even better is the make-up work
which renders Victor a translucent, sick man undergoing a strange meta-
morphosis while the bodies of his unfortunate victims are hideously disfig-
ured, drained of all life. It is no surprise that the horrific element of the film
was played up. Guest playfully keeps the camera on the move, constantly
tracking onto objects or people to enhance the sense of urgency and is not
afraid to rely on audience genre knowledge to increase tension. Victor
meeting the little girl mirrors Frankenstein (another unwitting monster cre-
ated by science gone wrong and also titled through its creator not its cre-
ation) so that we assume that the child is going to die. But Guest fools us
and in doing so shows that there is a spark of humanity left in Victor, his
subsequent appearance as ‘all vegetable’ provoking a sympathetic reaction.

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The Quatermass Experiment suffers from two major flaws that deadens
its impact; the script has been cut down considerably, reducing the more
philosophical arguments of the original and then there is Prof Quatermass
himself. In an attempt to bolster international returns from the film it was
decided to cast Brian Donlevy in the title role, which was a big mistake.
Instead of a reasoned scientist wracked with guilt but compelled to push
the frontiers of human knowledge, we are given a loud, brash, thug of a
man without a single sympathetic characteristic. His transference of guilt to
anyone in sight is truly remarkable. Still there is enough of Kneale’s origi-
nal to make the film a classic and Guest’s direction makes the whole affair
eminently watchable. Two further Hammer Quatermass films were made,
Quatermass II (1957) and the superior Quatermass And The Pit (1967) and
Nigel Kneale would go on to script The Abominable Snowman (1957).

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

Dir: Don Siegel St: Dana Wynter, Kevin McCarthy
Miles is having a tough time getting through to people - they’re all veg-
etables. Literally. Cultivated from alien pods in greenhouses like giant
peas, only human, these leggy legumes are replacing their meaty counter-
parts while they sleep, assimilating their looks but not their feelings. It’s all
Miles can do to try and make the authorities believe him but, eventually,
everyone needs to sleep...
“At first glance everything looked the same, it wasn’t. Something evil
had taken over the town.” Siegel’s paranoid nightmare is a perfect example
of lean scripting and tight narrative focus, the apparent normality of it all
being the most horrific thing. The film has been seen by some as a vindica-
tion of the McCarthy witch-hunts of the Fifties, the perils of allowing your
neighbourhood to be overtaken by communists. On the other hand it can be
viewed as being for the rights of the individual to stand up against govern-
mental restrictions on its citizens’ freedoms. Regardless, the paranoia is
convincing, the prospect of “no pain ...born into another world...where
everyone’s the same” may bring comfort and support, but removes free
will and the ability to make mistakes as well as triumph. Siegel tightly
composes his images to show the world slowly closing in on Miles, filming
the mundane with a slight air of unreality, the truth dawning gradually on
both Miles and the viewer. The very blandness of the framing early on
means that when we are finally shown the pods in the greenhouse, the
extreme Dutch tilt makes the experience more horrific by its abuse of the
screen language used till that point. The pods themselves are wonderfully
sticky and their humanoid offspring chillingly devoid of identity until they

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have assimilated their victims. It is the speed with which they replace their
human doubles that provides the film with its shocks and increases the
paranoia to feverish levels.
Although themes from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers crop up time
and again, two direct remakes have sought to relate the film to their time.
Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version expands the running time, budget and
aspect ratio of the original to good effect although it remains less focused,
while Abel Ferrara’s overhaul unnecessarily places it in a military context
but is surprisingly watchable (and, for Ferrara, uncontroversial!)

Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without A Face) (1959)

Dir: Georges Franju St: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Edith Scob
Respected authority on skin grafting Professor Génessier needs to
rebuild the face of his daughter Christiane, mutilated in a car crash because
of his demonic driving. Assisted by Louise, a former patient, he uses kid-
napped girls as face donors. Hidden behind an expressionless mask, the
world thinks her dead and for the most part, Christiane wishes she was.
Les Yeux Sans Visage marks the thin boundary between pulp and art.
Combining the lurid excesses of the fantastique with a painterly eye for
Sadean beauty, the film leaves an indelible mark on anyone who sees it.
Despite being over forty years old and filmed in black and white, its capac-
ity to shock has hardly diminished - the scene of the Professor’s attempts at
grafting the face of a kidnapped girl onto his daughter is both surprisingly
graphic and takes an excruciating length of time. Being a melodrama the
sacrifices for Christiane’s face are in vain, we are shown her tearful deteri-
oration in a series of clinical photographs that chart her progress from
beautiful to irrefutably decomposed. Yet despite its sordid nature, this
remains at heart a symbolic art film with Cocteau-style dreamlike wander-
ings and beauty in the face of horror. The prevailing image is of Christiane
wandering in her mask a lonely figure, phoning her fiancé without speak-
ing and, finally, walking out in the sunshine, free as the doves that flutter
around her.
Louise commits atrocious acts for the Professor because he recon-
structed her face but she is no more important than the hounds that he
keeps for experimentation - her dog collar of pearls hiding her scar tissue
emphasises her status. Christiane too is a pitiful figure. Disfigured to the
point that only her eyes remain, she wears an emotionless mask. Denied
access to a mirror she can still see herself in windows or, frighteningly, the
blade of a knife. She doesn’t want to live but has no choice in her destiny,

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officially dead and at the mercy of her father. From the opening shot of a
raincoated woman dumping a naked body to the final shot of uncertainty as
Christiane stumbles into the beauty of the day, Les Yeux Sans Visage is a
near faultless combination of high art and popularist exploitation.
The film’s influence on Jesus Franco’s Dr Orloff films is marked but
there are also resonances in works as diverse as Tony Scott’s The Hunger
(1983), John Woo’s Face/Off (1997) and the works of Cronenberg (c.f.)
and Argento (c.f.). Franju’s most celebrated film fits neatly into that small
(but wonderful) body of French pulp melodrama that stretches from Feuil-
lade to Jean Rollin.

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Psychos And Swingers: The Sixties

The Sixties’ reputation as an era of permissiveness was ushered in with
two films that were critically derided as offensive and macabre. Hitch-
cock’s Psycho (1960) became a huge commercial success but the superior
Peeping Tom effectively ended the career of its creator Michael Powell.
Psycho’s strength lay in its intent to simply scare the audience. That we are
ultimately given a justification for Norman Bates’ barbaric actions does lit-
tle to diminish their effect. The impact of Psycho was immediate, the
twisted murderer film became a popular entry in early Sixties cinema. Its
more downmarket offspring can be seen in the stalk and slash films of the
late Seventies and early Eighties. Hitchcock’s next film The Birds (1963)
also proved to be inspirational in its depiction of nature gone mad. No
explanation is given for the birds’ attack and no solution is found by the
film’s close. It remains one of the most resolutely nihilistic of mainstream
cinema. Psychological horror developed as a form that could be placed in
the real world and therefore did not alienate mainstream audiences with
specific genre ideas. Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) dealt with a
young woman’s descent into sexual madness and Whatever Happened To
Baby Jane? (1962) featured remarkable performances from Joan Crawford
and Bette Davis as a pair of feuding sisters.
Roger Corman continued his stranglehold on the low-budget market but
was improving the quality of some of his more prestigious productions.
While Little Shop Of Horrors (1960) is unashamedly cheap, it nonetheless
benefits from witty scripting and an enthusiastic cast (including Jack
Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient) but it was with Fall Of The
House Of Usher (1960) that Corman made an intelligent horror film on a
small budget using full colour. This marked the beginning of his cycle of
films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe including the Pit And The
Pendulum (1961), the witty portmanteau Tales Of Terror (1962) with ster-
ling performances from Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone opposite Vincent
Price, and the more serious Tomb Of Ligeia (1964) and The Haunted Pal-
ace (1963). The horrific closing of X - The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963),
where Ray Milland plucks out his own eyes to stop his tormented visions
still has the power to chill, despite the essentially trashy concept.
Corman and his protégés represented the posh end of the low-budget
market. Other independent producers were not so discerning when it came
to taste, talent or imagination. Most renowned is perhaps Herschell Gordon
Lewis, a no-budget film-maker who introduced hard-core gore to unsus-
pecting and undemanding drive-ins when the bottom had dropped out of

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the nudie market. Blood Feast (1963) features such delights as splattered
brains, naked bathing models having their legs amputated and, most notori-
ously, a woman having her tongue wrenched from her mouth. His later
films continued to pile on the atrocities (Two Thousand Maniacs (1964),
The Gruesome Twosome (1967), The Wizard Of Gore (1970)) but their
inept handling render their excesses laughable rather than upsetting.
In England, Hammer were at the height of their technical and artistic
powers. This really was their golden era tackling everything from class
exploitation in John Gilling’s astonishing 1966 The Plague Of The Zom-
bies (a Cornish mine owner uses zombies as free labour, this film features
some remarkable dream imagery of corpse hands bursting from beyond the
grave) to the ritualistic aspects of black magic in Terence Fisher’s The
Devil Rides Out. The company couldn’t put a foot wrong. Further sequels
of popular Hammer films, particularly from the vampire (Kiss Of The Vam-
pire, Brides Of Dracula) and Frankenstein series continued to thrill audi-
ences. Hammer became glossier, gorier, more colourful and more camp.
However, by the close of the decade the company was clearly in decline.
Hammer’s death throes were long and occasionally embarrassing. Their
plot foundations in literature left them out of touch with a society brought
up on graphic images of the Vietnam war. They could not hope to compete
with the nastiness of US films or the sexuality of European ones.
Perhaps one of the greatest losses to British horror cinema was that of
Michael Reeves who had begun his trade in Italy, working on Castle Of
The Living Dead (1964) and Revenge Of The Blood Beast (1965) starring
Barbara Steele before returning to England. With Tigon Films he produced
The Sorcerers (1967), a grim and hallucinogenic tale of psychic links. His
final film Witchfinder General (1968) is one of the least compromising of
British films, a murky depiction of state-sanctioned torture and a hero who,
by the film’s close, has lost his woman and his mind. Sadly Reeves died in
1969 aged 25. Europe had taken Hammer’s period gloss and transformed it
into a colourful combination of art and kitsch. Leading the field were Ital-
ian directors such as Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava who were creating
the kind of sexy yet violent shockers that Hammer could only dream of and
Americans could only ban.
The swinging Sixties certainly showed a change in audience attitudes as
to what they were permitted to see and what they wanted to challenge.
Very much a transitional period - people were developing and maturing
away from Fifties’ ideologies - the genre was attracting increasing numbers
of film-makers. However it was a small black and white film made in Pitts-
burgh for a pittance that ushered a new era of graphic violence. That film

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was Night Of The Living Dead (1968), its director was George A Romero
(c.f.) and its success meant that even the big studios had to sit up and take
horror seriously once more.

Peeping Tom (1960)

Dir: Michael Powell St: Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey
Mark Lewis would kill to see a good movie. Actually he does, stalking
buxom prostitutes and ‘artists’ models’ with his portable camera, he films
them while they die. He is such a confused boy you see, and very shy too.
He needs a nice girlfriend to take him from this madness of death and cel-
luloid, which is where lodger Helen comes in.
Peeping Tom wasn’t so much derided on release, it was witch-hunted.
No one could understand how Michael Powell, one of the most idiosyn-
cratic but respected of British directors (normally working with Emeric
Pressberger) could have produced such a sleazy work. Cut by the censors,
mutilated by the critics it virtually ruined his distinguished career. Now it is
praised as a classic and often compared to Hitchcock’s Psycho. Despite
some similarities though, the films are poles apart; Peeping Tom derives its
psychosis from the father, is in glorious saturated colour, is more British
than the Queen and has characters that you actually care for. If Hitchcock’s
film is an exercise in manipulating audiences through the language of cin-
ema then Powell’s is about cinema full stop. Despite its immersion in Brit-
ish underculture (the kind we don’t tell outsiders about, like newsagent-
distributed pornography) Powell resolutely avoids realism in the quest for a
vision of voyeurism that is purely cinematic. In the opening sequence we
follow a prostitute to her death from the point of view of the perpetrator
implicating the viewer in the act, but drawing attention to the fact that we
are looking through a camera’s viewfinder. In one shot we are perpetrator
and audience, helpless to prevent a crime that has already happened. The
rest of the film is similarly strewn with images of cinema but the most dis-
turbing sequence is reserved for the films that Mark’s father took of him as
a child. Treating the boy as a guinea pig we watch dumbstruck as he is ter-
rified in the name of science (chillingly the father is Powell himself). If we
didn’t have sympathies for him previously, we do now. Unlike Norman
Bates, who seems a snivelling mummy’s boy, Mark is the result of an inhu-
man life at the hands of his father. His camera ties him to his past, a surro-
gate child for him to protect and feed with images of pain and suffering.
The relationship between Helen and Mark is moving because of its ulti-
mate futility - his crimes are so horrendous that there can be no redemption
for him. When Helen finds out the awful extent of his killings, the manner

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in which he subjects his victims to an endless loop of their own lives drain-
ing before them, the circle is complete. If cinema kills the viewer it can
also kill the maker. Powerful, chilling and beautifully shot, Peeping Tom
has at last regained its rightful place as a masterpiece of British cinema.

The Masque Of The Red Death (1964)

Dir & Prd: Roger Corman St: Vincent Price, Jane Asher, Hazel Court
Prosperous Prince Prospero considers the villagers rabble, even though
they provide his opulent trappings and desirable residence by their misera-
ble labour. He burns the village, tries to get pretty Francesca to bed him
and imprisons her father and boyfriend just to get a bit of leverage in the
nuptial department. Still, he was probably doing them a favour because the
excruciatingly painful red death is abroad, so view the incineration as a
precautionary cauterising. With all that grimness going on Prospero needs
a jolly good masque to cheer himself up. But with any decent bash there are
always gatecrashers...
While all Corman’s Poe films are triumphs of film-making over budget,
The Masque Of The Red Death marks the cycle’s finest hour and is a per-
fect realisation of Corman’s basic rule of exploitation cinema - give the
audience regular hints of nudity and/or violence. Aligned to this is the prin-
ciple that you put as much on the screen as your limitations will allow.
Thus The Masque Of The Red Death is in cinescope and full colour and
looks far more expansive and expensive than it actually is. Cinematogra-
pher and future director Nicholas Roeg saturates the screen with a chro-
matic intensity - electric blue mists with crimson cloaked harbinger monk,
brightly lit sunflower yellow rooms or a white rose engorged with deep red
blood. Price’s Prospero is unremittingly cruel, viewing peasants as enter-
tainment and even his guests as disposable playthings. He is open in his
worship of Satan - the masquerade provides further fuel for his ritualistic
excesses. The two most interesting characters are Juliana and Francesca,
the former and future companions of Prospero. Their relationship adds
depth to the film - Juliana has been usurped but ultimately Francesca just
wants to escape with her men. By the end though, her complicity in Pros-
pero’s atrocities ensure that the evil around her has changed her outlook,
she has become aloof because of his ceaseless striving for destruction. Juli-
ana has realised the error of her decadent lifestyle, “I am betrothed to the
Devil” but it is too late - her long-time devotion is rewarded by being sav-
aged by a huge bird amidst the loud ticking of an axe-pendulumed clock.
Corman manages to imbue the film with a Grimm air of fairy-tale decrepi-
tude mixed with Crowleyesque ethos of “do what thou wilt.” Add a rhyth-

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mic sacrificial dream sequence and a rainbow-coloured pretentious ending

where angels of death meet up after a tough day at the office, and the result
is a combination of knowing artiness and Grand-Guignol exploitative hor-
ror that makes it a classic. Not as subtle as Tombs Of Ligeia or as camp as
The Raven but a prime example of the Corman ethos at its finest.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Dir: Roman Polanski St: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes
“Let’s have a baby.” Rosemary and Guy’s approach to procreation starts
with a bang once they move into The Bramford, a sumptuous apartment
block. Guy’s an actor whose luck is coincidentally improving since neigh-
bours Minnie and Roman Castavet made themselves part of the household.
But as Rosemary’s happy day approaches, can she be sure that her oven
bun isn’t going to be appropriated for nefarious necromantic purposes and,
with strange chanting, grotesque dreams and dubious herby milkshakes to
contend with, who can she trust?
Rosemary’s Baby may well be nit-pickingly accurate to Ira Levin’s
novel but remains resolutely Polanski’s film. Taking the elements of abnor-
mal niceness hiding a dark undercurrent, Polanski manages to weave ele-
ments of the surreal and psychological that epitomise his best work. Like
Repulsion, we witness the slow psychological decline of the central charac-
ter and empathise with her by sharing her dreams and hallucinations. Rose-
mary’s dreams invade her ‘real’ space - her rape by the devil is shown in a
half-drugged state to the loud clicking of their clock as she is ritually
marked with symbols by her naked neighbours. It becomes more disturbing
when, upon awakening, her husband pretends it was he who molested her -
“It was kinda fun in a necrophile way.” The Castavets, especially the per-
manently grinning Minnie, are deeply disturbing individuals yet remain
believable as ‘innocents’ because of their age and amiability. The sleight of
hand from what we suspect (bad) and what is actually going on (also bad)
is classic misdirection but the final acceptance of Rosemary’s role in the
proceedings makes the film genuinely chilling.
Even now, the elements that make Rosemary’s Baby so disturbing have
not diminished - the fear of violation, psychological delusions and paranoia
that your friends are your enemies - and yet it remains very much a product
of its time. Polanski’s distinct and unsettling use of low, long, static shots
followed by intimate but deranged handheld work constantly keeps you on
the edge. Even though its infamy has paled after the huge success of The
Exorcist it remains a far more cerebral, mature and unsettling work that
plays subtlety over shock tactics... except when necessary.

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The Decade That Taste Forgot: The Seventies

The Seventies may have been an affront to taste when it came to fash-
ion, but that tastelessness also extended to the films of the period. Flower
power had gone sour and the boundaries of censorship were being broken
throughout America and Europe (Britain, however, clung on regardless).
Especially for America, the tone of its films took a turn to the darker side
and for once the studios were listening as well. Film production diversified.
The big players produced more confrontational, glossy and expensive hor-
ror films to compete with the plethora of independents who, in turn,
responded with even more visceral and challenging material. Approaches
to horror lay in effects realisation and production technology, which had
increased in leaps and bounds. Innovation such as this hadn’t really been
seen since the Universal pictures of the Thirties. The Exorcist’s pioneering
use of effects work and prosthetics launched the cult of the make-up man
as intrinsic to the final product. Rick Baker, Tom Savini and Stan Winston
would become stars in their own rights for creating the gruesome monsters
and the consequent carnage resulting from their actions.
Hollywood followed the success of The Exorcist (c.f.) with other
demonically based projects. The Omen (1976) is a portentous and over-
blown production about Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) slowly realising that
the son he has raised is not his, but the Devil’s. It works because it takes its
ludicrous premise seriously. It is also notable for its convoluted death
sequences that would plague horror films to the present day, including an
impaled priest, a suicidal nanny and a preposterous decapitation with a
pane of glass. It proved successful enough to spawn three sequels.
Environmental concerns were finding a voice in the most unlikely of
productions. Steven Spielberg’s snack-on-a-bather-fest Jaws (1975), is still
the most revolting PG-rated film ever passed. Irwin Allen, producer of
many an overblown and overlong disaster movie (Earthquake, The Tower-
ing Inferno) gave us the hysterical killer bee film The Swarm. Progres-
sively downmarket audiences were treated to such delights as Squirm
(electrically raised mutant worms), Night Of The Lepus (killer rabbits),
Frogs (tagline ‘Don’t go near the pond’), Phase IV (ants), Empire Of The
Ants (giant ants, this time ineptly beaten with a broomstick by Joan Col-
lins), The Giant Spider Invasion with a hairy spider covered van as the
main villain, and the killer rat films Willard and Ben.
Many of today’s most highly regarded and established horror directors
had their roots firmly planted in the Seventies. Both Wes Craven’s Last
House On The Left and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

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were considered unacceptable viewing for British audiences and effec-

tively banned. Hooper went on to make the backwater alligator and scythe
horror comedy Death Trap (1977), the creepy vampire TV series Salem’s
Lot (1979), and the overrated and anaemic Poltergeist (1982) before con-
tinuing his career in an amiable but ultimately lacklustre shadow of his
former glories. Others who found themselves carving out their careers
included Joe Dante (c.f.), Brian De Palma, Canada’s David Cronenberg
(c.f.) and John Carpenter. Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) was unusual in
that most of the murders, while surreal, were not excessively graphic. Car-
penter replaced the viscera of his contemporaries with tension, suspense
and silky smooth steadicam. The figure of ‘The Shape,’ convicted lunatic
Michael Myers, gives the film an urban mythic atmosphere that is empha-
sised by its holiday title. Set entirely on one night, it laid the ground rules
for virtually every stalk and slash film that was made in its wake. Carpenter
turned to the campfire horror The Fog (1979) and consolidated his ‘modern
master of the suspense’ status with a string of horror and science fiction
hits in the Eighties and Nineties.
As Hollywood was producing gloss, the ultra low market was producing
dross, proving that the spirit of Herschell Gordon Lewis was not gone.
Troma Films trail-blazed their unashamedly tasteless no-brainer horror
films to cater for a very specialised audience. A combination of cheesecake
nudity and hard-core gore, Troma films wallow in their B-movie status
bringing attention to their very cheapness. Their first film was the irrespon-
sible, puerile and unacceptable Blood Sucking Freaks (aka The Incredible
Torture Show, 1976) featuring a demented dwarf who tortures and muti-
lates naked women. Featured ‘highlights’ include disembowelments, dis-
memberment, a human dartboard and one victim having her brains sucked
out through a straw. Yuck. Their later films, such as The Toxic Avenger
(1985) became more knowingly funny but often no less sick.
Not that all the terror was restricted to that side of the pond - our Euro-
pean cousins were also hard at work. Spain’s Paul Naschy was single-
handedly producing a variety of work ranging from slapstick horror com-
edy to the dark unpleasantries of The Hunchback Of The Morgue (1972).
Another Spaniard, the prolific ex-pat Jesus Franco was continuing his
assault on the eyes and ears of the world with an increasingly eclectic mix
of sadism, torture and blatant pornography. His sheer output has meant that
at least some of it is watchable, Vampiros Lesbos (1970) and Succubus
(1967) being amongst his best. Italy’s indefatigable ability to purloin other
people’s successful formulae was matched only by its tolerance of artists
with grandiose operatic and sometimes just plain barmy ideas. Mario Bava

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continued his career with some beautifully shot, coloured and edited tales
of death. Twist Of The Death Nerve (aka Bay Of Blood, 1971) predates the
late Seventies slasher movement in its Agatha Christie derived succession
of bizarre murders and grotesque characters. Five Dolls For An August
Moon (1970) was in a similar vein, but he was at his best when dealing
with warped internalised necrophilic sexuality - in the much misunderstood
Baron Blood (1972) and Lisa And The Devil (1972). Bava’s tendency to
imbue his scenery with as much character as his cast finds its beginnings in
his remarkable debut The Mask Of Satan (1960) and can be seen in his
supervisory role on Dario Argento’s (c.f.) Inferno.
In Britain, Hammer may have been fizzling out but Milton Subotsky’s
Amicus Productions provided a combination of period anthology horror
films and misjudged funky modern-day shockers including The Beast Must
Die (1974) and Scream And Scream Again (1969). Other low-budget Brit-
ish films came from Peter Walker who gave us the mad judge classic
House Of Whipcord (1974) and the demented DIY tool murders of Fright-
mare (1974), while Norman J Warren produced the gratuitous Satan’s
Slave (1976), Terror (1978) and the tasteless Alien rip-off Inseminoid
(1980).

Theater Of Blood (1972)

Dir: Douglas Hickox St: Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Robert Morley,
Eric Sykes
“It’s Lionheart all right. Only he would have the temerity to rewrite
Shakespeare.” The members of the Critics Circle are dwindling, each grue-
somely murdered in a manner reflecting the works of The Bard. Edward
Lionheart’s reputation was consistently sullied by the critics - snubbed dur-
ing their awards ceremony he apparently committed suicide, leaving a
grieving daughter. But he lives, reinventing Shakespeare’s finest works for
a new, captive, audience.
“It’s hardly comedy sergeant.” Oh we beg to differ. Outrageous comedy
with lashings of gore and unexpected deaths Theater Of Blood repays with
every subsequent viewing. Consciously camp and hammy with a cast of
British comedy veterans, the often explicit proceedings are rendered hys-
terical because of the tone of the affair and a perfectly overblown perfor-
mance from Vincent Price. Add to that Hickox’s extreme use of deep
focused lenses to produce distorted and out-of-proportion framings and
you have an expertly weird Avengers-style black comedy that never flags.
The script is morbidly deadpan and soaring in its convoluted excesses. Like
the Dr Phibes films, Theater Of Blood takes a thematic approach to murder,

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a pulpy device that has served crime and horror writers well. Instead of the
plagues of Egypt from Dr Phibes Rises Again or the seven deadly sins of
Se7en, the murder ‘thème du jour’ is Shakespearean tragedies. It’s an
inspired idea that allows Price the full range of larger-than-life roles, the
opportunity for some gratuitously flowery dialogue with plenty of rolling
vowels and some outlandish set pieces. Maxwell is slashed to death by
Lionheart’s tramp troupe on the Ides of March, Snipe is grabbed, speared
and dragged behind a horse along the cemetery gravel (“He was meant to
be one of the mourners”) and lecherous Dickman has 1lb 2ozs, sorry 1lb, of
flesh removed. Arthur Lowe’s Horace Sprout has his head removed in his
own bedroom while his wife lies sedated beside him, in a wonderful scene
where Lionheart’s assistant mops his brow to some deeply inappropriate
(but very funny) dramatic music. Then poor old Meredith has his ‘babies’
(two poodles) force-fed to him in a pie. This would be all a bit depressing
were it not for the impishness of all concerned - Price as hairdresser
(“dishy, dishy hair baby”), Richard III, the chef on This Is Your Dish, the
saucy masseur of Diana Dors, a sinister bobby - a cornucopia of meaty
roles (rolls?) stuffed with ham and aplomb. Great fun.

The Exorcist (1973)

Dir: William Friedkin St: Linda Blair, Max Von Sydow
Chris seeks medical assistance for her daughter Regan, whose behav-
ioural problems are becoming intolerable. However, the psychiatrist she
initially consults has an unusual solution. She should call in an Exorcist to
rid Regan of her demonic curse.
Constantly ranked as one of the most watched of all horror films, The
Exorcist is the stuff of legends. Hyped to the max on its release, reports of
curses, mysterious accidents and related deaths enhanced the reputation of
the film before anyone had even seen it. Of course audiences flocked and
fainted in droves - they were so wound up by the long queues and the antic-
ipation it was inevitable. Ostensibly the main sources of The Exorcist’s
power remain the dogmatic belief in evil and the fact that the victim of a
motiveless possession is a normal girl. The addition of Rick Baker’s out-
standing make-up work and some truly believable special effects makes it
all the more unnerving. Whether levitating in her bed, invoking telekinetic
wrath, or spewing a stream of pea-green vomit, the shocks are relentless
and unnerving. The soundtrack, with backtracked animal groans, adds a
further shiver-inducing feeling and all this is rounded off by low-key pho-
tography that gives the film, at times, an almost documentary quality. It
fails, however, in the editing. Friedkin builds up a scene to feverish hyste-

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ria and then cuts abruptly mid-atrocity, which brings the viewer crashing to
earth, diminishing the overall intention. Also Regan’s possession seems to
be the least of her worries compared with the graphic experiments to which
she is subjected by parapsychologists. Still, it does retain a lot of its power
to shock, something that in all honesty can’t be claimed of the sequel,
Exorcist II: The Heretic. Writer Blatty himself directed Exorcist III which,
while unsettling, bears little direct reference to the first two.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Dir: Tobe Hooper St: Marilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen
Any similarities to the Scooby Doo gang are purely coincidental as a
group of bickering teens drive their own Mystery Machine into the heart of
Texas and the heart of darkness. Terrifying and true...
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the most notorious films ever,
with a fearsome reputation that ensured both its success and consequent
banning in the UK. The whole film plays on creating a myth for itself. The
title alone gives the game away, but also claims that the film was based on
a true story (it wasn’t, it was very loosely connected to the Ed Gein kill-
ings, but then so were Psycho and Deranged) affecting audience expecta-
tions before it has even started. The key to the tension is the excruciating
pacing once things get going. There is no stopping for breath at any point.
It is a relentless and disturbing roller-coaster ride - the chase scenes are
loud and frenzied, the quiet moments have an eerie atmosphere you can cut
with a knife. This is quite simply totally assured and thoroughly manipula-
tive film-making. If examined closely there is very little blood - the horror
lies in what the audience believe they saw, and that is far more powerful.
What makes it work is that it is completely over the top, everything is done
to excess. When the family capture Sally, and let grandfather have a bash at
torturing her, the scene is excruciating - egged on by everyone, he keeps
missing, extending her ordeal. It’s not without its moments of humour too,
although you’ll probably only spot them second time around. When Sally
finally makes it to safety, only to be recaptured again, she’s bundled up and
shoved into a van, but her perpetrator realises he’s left the lights on in the
shack and has to return to switch them off. The set design is superb, partic-
ularly the family’s house, with the macabre furniture made from bones and
feathers, and the tin door behind which Leatherface lurks. If Hooper never
entirely lived up to expectations in his later films he only has himself to
blame - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an audacious debut by anyone’s
standards.

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Suppression And Repetition: The Eighties

If the Seventies produced an uncontrollable gleeful free-for-all of
sadism and excess, the Eighties would see that kind of freedom mercilessly
suppressed. Starting the decade it was business as usual - William Lustig
provided us with the unbearably tense and occasionally unwatchably
graphic Maniac (1980) prompting a slew of criticism especially regarding
the treatment of women. Other stalk and slash films were likewise suffer-
ing from a combination of critical outrage and lacklustre box-office
returns. Even in mainstream movies such as An American Werewolf In
London (1981), the level and intensity of gore was substantial, certainly for
a film that was ostensibly a comedy. Landis’ finest hour was the product of
artistic freedom.
Lucio Fulchi took the opportunity (as did many Italian directors) to
jump on the ‘living dead’ bandwagon, following the success of Romero’s
Dawn Of The Dead (c.f.). Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) is sporadically beau-
tifully shot, but emphasises the nasty side of Romero’s work, as opposed to
the political one. While the oft-cut shot of a woman slowly having her eye
impaled on a pointed stick has been restored, many other scenes of canni-
balism and mutilation are usually cut. Fulchi continued in this visceral vein
with House By The Cemetery (1981), City Of The Living Dead (1980) and
The Beyond (1981), a surreal, convoluted and impenetrable but engaging
mash of every conceivable splatter idea.
Undoubtedly there were some very unpleasant films made during this
time (Cannibal Ferox (Lenzi, 1981) etc.) so inevitably the unfettered free-
dom and gruesome special effects were not to last. By the opening of the
decade the video cassette recorder had come down in price significantly so
videotapes for hire meant that these predominantly cinema-based films
were now available to view in the home. A smear campaign was orches-
trated against the so-called video nasties, which resulted in heavy cutting
and even banning of many horror films, following the 1984 Video Record-
ings Act. Additionally, America was undergoing changes to its rating sys-
tem which meant many films would become more restricted. As such, on
both sides of the Atlantic, film-makers were asked to compromise their
vision, to make adult films suitable for a family audience.
Tightening censorship didn’t necessarily mean that there was less vio-
lence or gore on the screens - it reduced the extension of pain and the
dwelling on the act of aggression. Along with the outmoded and misogy-
nist attitudes of the slasher flick, grimy film stock was also on the way out
- films as unpleasant as their predecessors suddenly looked, well, cleaner

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and even wholesome. Film-makers sanitised their product or turned to

comedy. Lamentably, horror’s role model became the quintessential frat-
flick Porky’s (1981) and proceeded to parade a sorry bunch of vacuous
teens through soft-core fumblings, icky prosthetics and conservative
morality. Fright Night (1985) remains one of the better of these - at least it
has the conviction to be scary, violent and have, heaven forbid, a subtext
amidst the atrocious make-up (on the actors that is, the vampires are fine!).
Vamp (1986), featuring a stripping Grace Jones vampire, starts with
enough seedy promise but swiftly goes the way of repentance and remorse
that so often typifies the genre – “I dallied with Evil, my friends are dead
and now I see how stupid I really was.”
Floundering, desperate producers set about recycling films and the
Eighties became the era of the horror franchise. Sequels and related films
were nothing new (Dracula, James Bond) but never before with such a
cohesive pattern of numbering. If The Omen had started it all, then lower
budget films would take it to its logical conclusion. John Carpenter’s ele-
gant, scary parable Halloween produced a sequel and an excellent but unre-
lated second spin-off before plummeting headlong into a savage decline,
resurrected fairly well in the Nineties with Halloween H20. Wes Craven’s
(c.f.) A Nightmare On Elm Street went from surreal and visceral dream
master to “please tell me it’s just a bad dream” disaster, although it too had
a brief stay of execution in its most recent incarnation. Even such relatively
mediocre box-office performers such as The Stepfather (a chilling, influen-
tial independent film) had a couple, as did the hugely enjoyable Tremors,
the downright stupid Puppet Master and any number of other killer doll/lit-
tle people films (Child’s Play). But pride of place goes to the Friday The
Thirteenth films. Started in 1980 by Sean Cunningham this nasty, incon-
gruous and tedious slasher produced eight wretched sequels, a dreadful TV
spin-off and the ominous promise of more to come.
However, there were still gems out there. Larry Cohen was producing a
range of eclectic movies from Q (1982), which featured an Aztec god in
New York, to The Stuff (1986), about killer dessert that comes from the
ground, and a Return To Salem’s Lot (1987), where the vampires snack on
coach parties when they think no one’s looking.
Another trend that tentatively started in the Seventies and continues to
the present day is that of the Stephen King adaptation. His prolific body of
work and commercial success has led to virtually anything he has penned
turning up in some form on cinema or television screens. From the surpris-
ingly successful low-budget The Children Of The Corn (1984), the limp
Cujo (1983), his own directorial debut Maximum Overdrive (1986), and

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Creepshow (1982), to television series such as Salem’s Lot (1979) and The
Stand (1994), he remains the modern horror film’s most influential writer.

The Evil Dead (1982)

Dir: Sam Raimi St: Bruce Campbell
Two guys, three girls. A break in a cabin in the country. Relaxing. Or
not. Cut off from civilisation by a rickety bridge, the surrounding woods
are host to a mightily evil entity that you really, really wouldn’t want to
summon, certainly not with an incantation gleaned from a spooky tape
recorder and a human-leather bound book. Ooops...
In the UK The Evil Dead became one of the most notorious films ever
made due to a vitriolic press campaign against it. Such was the furore that it
turned up on the DPP’s list as one of the original video nasties, a label that
has stuck to this day. So is it that bad? Funded by hawking the idea to local
businessmen, the entrepreneurial spirit and sheer persistence of the cast and
crew involved is breathtaking. The camerawork alone puts many multi-
million dollar films to shame, dashing around like a thing possessed,
swooping over cars and through the trees, smashing through windows and
doors. In realising an unstoppable force, the viewer’s vantage point goes
beyond that of the voyeur normally associated with horror cinema; there is
no cut from the prowl to the attack, the watcher becomes as possessed as
the characters. Not content with blistering camerawork Raimi fills his
frame with bizarre angles and distorted cartoon figures of fear. The sound
is uniformly great throughout, normally the big let-down of low-budget
films, with effective use of eerie slowed down tape and indescribable
moans. When the group start turning into cackling possessed killers things
really start hotting up. Fortunately for gorehounds these demons can only
be dispatched by “total bodily dismemberment,” so heads are lopped off
with spades, bodies chainsawed and all manner of atrocities abound. The
Evil Dead is problematic for viewers and censors because it is a great film
made by dedicated individuals trying to scare the bejeezus out of you. It
succeeds, but remains funny too.
Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn’s (1987) emphasis on Three Stooges-style
comedy mixed with overt gore makes it a less edgy remake but still a lot of
fun. In particular Campbell’s performance as Ash has become hyperactive
to the point of insanity especially when facing his own homicidal hand.
The third film, Army Of Darkness (1992) has Ash, caught in the vortex
from part two, battling his evil self in a mythic past. Played almost entirely
for laughs, the Harryhausen inspired skeletons and painful mini-Ashes go
together to produce an amiable fantasy.

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The Thing (1982)

Dir: John Carpenter St: Kurt Russell
The idyll of Arctic research is abruptly curtailed by the arrival of a
husky, hotly pursued by two wild-eyed gun-toting Norwegians. Man’s best
friend turns out to be a parasitic pooch, a malevolent mutant mutt created
from a prehistoric alien organism that assimilates host cells and occupies
its victims. Stranded, the twelve US boys become increasingly twitchy, not
knowing who is the thing, and who is its next victim.
John Carpenter’s remake of Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another
World (1956) could not be more different in visual effect. Where the origi-
nal features a barely glimpsed monster, relying on shadows and implica-
tion, Carpenter gleefully plays it all to camera in glorious widescreen
colour with added icky bits to go. Based more closely on Campbell’s story
Who Goes There?, The Thing replicates its victims so that it can kill again,
hiding inside the familiar. To this end no one is above suspicion,
MacReady even killing one of his colleagues who we later discover was
not possessed. Normally, visceral excess replaces tension in horror films,
but Carpenter pulls off both and throws in some substantial jumps - the
scene where the group are testing their blood together has provided a tem-
plate for ‘is he/isn’t he’ tensions in numerous subsequent films. Not that
Carpenter shies from plundering the back catalogue of horror films to get
the right effect - Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, The Quatermass Experi-
ment and The Haunting all get a look in. What sets it apart are the incredi-
ble prosthetics on show; dogs split open and whip around tentacles, human
heads consume other human heads, bodies are thrown like rag dolls, burnt,
mutilated and eviscerated. There are sticky alien autopsies, frozen suicidal
blood and the most jaw-dropping cardiac arrest scene ever. Ennio Morri-
cone provides a score that is Carpenter in all but name and Kurt Russell
plays, well, Kurt Russell. Surprisingly this was not a financial success, its
reputation developing well after the initial release. Twenty years since its
making, it remains a sticky romp and a lean, fun watch.

Spoorloos (The Vanishing) (1988)

Dir: George Sluizer St: Gene Bervoerts, Johanna Ter Steege, Bernard-
Pierre Donnadieu
Saskia keeps having dreams about herself and Rex being golden eggs
drifting in an empty void. Three years later Rex starts having similar
dreams while he is searching for her after she mysteriously disappeared at a
motorway service station. His devotion to finding out what happened has

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cost him dearly, a matter not helped by postcards he receives from a person
who claims to know about the vanishing. He is Raymond Lemorne and his
role in Saskia’s disappearance is even more sinister than his beard. And
believe us his beard is decidedly suspect.
Based upon Tim Krabbé’s The Golden Egg (he also supplied the screen-
play), The Vanishing is one of the most compelling and disturbing thrillers
ever made, lingering in the mind for days after viewing. Yet it contains vir-
tually nothing in its imagery or language to warrant a high rating - it’s the
psychological effect that is so devastating. The premise is so simple that it
is ideally suited to Sluizer’s matter of fact direction. (He also edited, co-
produced and co-wrote.) This economy of style is deceptive as the film
plays havoc with chronology. After Saskia disappears we are formally
introduced to Raymond but it is some time before it is made clear that these
scenes are set prior to her abduction. There are references to Saskia’s
dream throughout, although we are unaware until the very end that it is
actually a premonition of her fate. Golden eggs are symbolised not only in
the lighters that mark the claustrophobic conclusion, but the headlights of
cars, the lorry in the tunnel and two buried coins. What also sets the film
apart from a run-of-the-mill thriller is the concentration on the act of perpe-
trating a motiveless crime for the whim of “the spirit of contradiction,”
ironically where the film gains much of its black humour. Donnadieu’s per-
formance is as calculated as his character’s intentions, but in keeping with
the spirit he is also a figure of contradiction; a loving family man with two
daughters (“the only man in France without a mistress”) and a good
teacher. This attitude makes his self-confessed sociopath behaviour all the
more worrying because he is not a dismissable monster or even the product
of a traumatised childhood. Subtle, quiet and wholly convincing Spoorloos
is one of the most memorably nasty of psychological horror films, and
there’s not a drop of blood spilled.
In an almost inconceivably bad move, Sluizer remade the film in Holly-
wood five years later with Kiefer Sutherland and a painfully miscast Jeff
Bridges. Missing the whole point of the original and changing the ending,
this travesty should be avoided at all costs.

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My, Aren’t We So Postmodern Now: The Nineties

The early Nineties gave little comfort to genre buffs. Censorship on both
sides of the pond was beginning to relax slightly but not for horror films. It
was kept alive in the straight-to-video market where, in the UK, it suffered
more from the censors’ wrath due to its perceived availability to children.
Instead the action film boomed, as did comedy, and people started asking -
why should I watch a few dumb teenagers getting killed when I can watch
hundreds of grown men get wasted in a gunplay film? To some extent this
question remains unanswered, and although the market for horror did pick
up rapidly and remains healthy to this day it is difficult to see how a serious
horror film can match the extreme graphic excesses of Saving Private Ryan
(1998) or Starship Troopers (1997). Horror’s response was to become sub-
tle (The Sixth Sense), slapstick (Braindead), steep itself in knowingly self-
referential irony (Scream) or place itself in such a way that it was not con-
sidered a horror film at all (Se7en).
The Crow (1994), Brandon Lee’s final film, turned the idea of supernat-
ural vengeance on its head by having the wronged spirit back from the dead
as the hero of the film. Based on the comic book, its visual extremities and
pop video aesthetics would have an impact on far too many MTV-inspired
imitators. Similarly Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) reawakened interest
in dinosaurs by using Michael Crichton’s genetic reworking of King Kong
as a basis for PG-rated scares using expensive and groundbreaking special
effects. David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) was an unbearably grim and serious
reworking of the Dr Phibes films. Typified by a total absence of humour,
Konji’s crisply murky chiaroscuro camerawork and emphasis on the after-
effects of murder rather than its mechanics, Se7en was an unlikely success
story.
Realising a gap in the market, screenwriter Kevin Williamson updated
the slasher film in a way that would work for a ‘seen it all’ Nineties audi-
ence. Bearing in mind that the main audience for the horror film is 16 to
25-year-olds, the bulk of subgenres can easily accommodate a ten to fif-
teen-year cycle of resurrection and reinterpretation. To Nineties kids, the
‘stalk and slash film’ was a product of an earlier age. I Know What You Did
Last Summer (1997) was a basic reworking of the classic formula - pretty
kids, one mistake, nutzoid killer. As with most of its ilk the murderer has a
suitable dress code (here a sou’wester) and a modus operandi for the killing
spree (a fishhook). The film’s success probably had as much to do with its
cast as its content, which is little more than a couple of murders and a
Scooby Doo ending. However it was with Scream that Williamson shot to

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public attention (c.f. Wes Craven) a distillation of horror trivia, comedy

and some genuinely shocking murders. Suddenly postmodern was in, big
time. Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty (1998) put the fun back into Inva-
sion Of The Body Snatchers by mixing it with the ethos of Buffy The Vam-
pire Slayer, piling on the gore and icky special effects - its good natured
film-making and devil-may-care attitude making a great popcorn movie.
Urban Legend took the slasher revival to its tedious inevitability by being a
tired series of killings based on urban myths.
Not that it was only stalk ‘n’ slash films that got revived; The Haunting
(1999) was Jan de Bont’s antiseptic remake of Robert Wise’s classic that
managed to throw away some of the most imaginative set design seen. Far
cheaper, nastier and better was House On Haunted Hill (1999), a remake of
the classic William Castle shocker where a group of guests have to survive
the night in an austere futurist haunted house if they are to walk away with
one million dollars. The combination of plot turns, surprises and deaths
that are faked may well render the film preposterous but the plethora of
gruesome happenings and the macabre joie de vivre makes it a far more
satisfying, if intellectually undemanding, experience.
Meanwhile, showing that the ultra low-budget film was not a product of
the past, the ridiculously cheap The Blair Witch Project (1999) was a sur-
prising sleeper hit, prompting the inevitable sequels and an unfortunate
number of camcorder horror imitators.

Braindead (1992)
Dir: Peter Jackson St: Timothy Balme, Elizabeth Moody
Lionel is a mummy’s boy, it’s just that mummy isn’t too well. In fact
she’s dead, infected by the bite of a Simian Raticus. She’s in good com-
pany, sharing her cellar with an increasing population of braindeads. It’s all
Lionel can do to keep them fed, sedated and out of trouble, but to expect
him to keep up his relationship with pretty Paquita and maintain the lawn-
mower in peak condition is asking too much. To make matters worse, odi-
ous Uncle Les has decided to throw a party for all his hideous friends.
One of the goriest, most disgusting, entrails-spilling, headchopping
splatterfests to get a commercial release, Braindead is irresponsible and
gratuitously violent. It’s also wildly inventive, brilliantly designed and
very, very funny. Jackson’s previous film, the appropriately named Bad
Taste, similarly features a phenomenally high gore rating but is essentially
a comedy too - the excesses are more Monty Python than Lucio Fulci.
Braindead improves on this, using better pacing, a stronger script and a

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Fifties setting. Heritage splatter New Zealand style, with loads of refer-
ences to Her Majesty and The Archers. Never one to keep the camera still,
and always choosing the most grotesque angles with which to fill the
screen, Jackson ensures the audience stay on their toes. His characters are
all larger than life, from the pasty faced mother with her diminishing num-
ber of appendages, the vigilante vicar who “kicks arse for the lord” before
becoming a very randy zombie, the accommodating nurse with the almost
detachable head and the truly disgusting Uncle Les - and he’s still alive!
There are so many comic and gross sequences, but the highlight comes
when Lionel takes the zombie baby for a pram ride in the park. When the
party gets into full swing the violence reaches astronomical levels; half
heads slide around the floor like pucks, whole ribcages are wrenched from
bodies, heads split open, entrails strangle the living and the place is so
awash with bodily fluids that Lionel can’t run because the floor is so slip-
pery. But even that is topped by the outrageously Oedipal ending. If this
sounds revolting, it’s because it is, but it is made with such impish glee you
end up grinning wildly at every new atrocity. Fortunately the BBFC saw
the joke and released the film uncut, but the MPAA had a serious humour
bypass, savagely reducing the film’s running time. Sacrilege. Jackson went
on to make the remarkable Heavenly Creatures (1994) and the effects-
heavy horror-comedy The Frighteners.

Dust Devil (1995)

Dir: Richard Stanley St: Robert Burke, Chelsea Field
In Namibia bodies are discovered with signs of ritualistic abuse. They
are the work of a Nagtloper, a shape shifter who “feeds from the damned
and sucks them dry,” bound in flesh to walk the material world. Wendy has
just ditched her husband and is heading towards the sea to sort out her life
when she picks up the Dust Devil, putting herself at the mercy of a power
far greater than she can possibly imagine.
Richard Stanley’s enjoyable sf horror Hardware proved he could make
effective and impressive films on a pitiful budget and its success gave him
the opportunity to film a pet project, Dust Devil. Filming in Namibia was
harsh and the film’s troubled distribution came very close to complete fail-
ure were it not for the director’s determination to self-finance a new print
in line with his vision. And what a vision it is. The Nagtloper travels to
places where magic is still believed, finding itself in the harsh but painfully
beautiful desert. Its very existence lies in the cruelty and suddenness of the
wind, its purpose is entirely ritualistic and the modern world cannot explain
its primitive brutality. His first victim is killed mid-coitus. Her neck

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snapped, he divides her body into ritualistically determined portions, daubs

the house in bloody glyphs, inserts a pocket watch into her, takes her fin-
gers and torches the pad. Even Ben, a sceptical police officer, realises
immediately that he is going to need the help of a Sangomas (a kind of sha-
man) who provides him with a totem that will banish the demon. Ben and
Wendy, our central characters, question the existence of the supernatural,
but accept it because their environment forces this as a logical explanation.
Wendy’s romantic relationship with the Dust Devil begins when he
explains the creation of the land “home of the great snake father... created
by the thrashing of his coils” as the camera performs an astonishing heli-
copter shot to show the two of them as insignificant dots amidst a sublime
landscape. The climax is set inside a ghost town, the ending playing on the
theme of Leone’s classic westerns but Stanley imbues the Western mythol-
ogy with magick symbolism. This relies upon the cessation of pain and
exact timing, the Dust Devil’s pocket watches providing further credence
to the malleability of time. While there are many allusions to other horror
films Dust Devil is one of a kind - unflinching, grim, mythical and intelli-
gent. Shot with a glowing intensity that feels gritty yet otherworldly, it
sticks in the mind long after the credits have rolled.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Dir: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez St: Heather Donahue, Michael
Williams, Joshua Leonard
Three amateur film-makers decide to make a documentary about the
Blair Witch. Boy were they wrong. All that remains of their lame-brained
idea is an abandoned bundle of video tapes and some arty-farty 16mm
black and white stuff. But who were they? Heather, brains behind the
project; Josh, photographer; Mike, hyper-tense soundman. Together they
traipse through the Maryland forests but pretty soon become lost, unable to
escape back to their car. Food requires rationing and their night-time camp-
ing becomes disturbed by the sounds of screaming children and unidenti-
fied noises without apparent source. Piles of stones and twig effigies
appear outside their tents. Tempers fray. Josh disappears leaving what
appears to be a small lump of flesh while Mike and Heather descend fur-
ther into desperation and further into the forest.
The hype surrounding The Blair Witch Project, with its carefully
orchestrated advertising campaign through the internet make it, in percent-
age terms, the most successful horror film of all time, partly down to the
ridiculously low-budget. As a concept and experiment the film is flawless
and the acting surprisingly effective - we are led to believe the story

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because of the way the directors manipulated the actors and kept them up
all night - the heartfelt sobbing is decidedly uncomfortable. This creates a
sense of intimacy and claustrophobia with no possibility for distancing
from the action short of someone putting their camera down. That the three
film-makers who shot it have disappeared seeks further to convince you
that events portrayed are genuine. The twig effigies are intriguing and pro-
vide the film with its most arresting images, especially in the sequence
where we see them hanging ominously from trees, shot in 16mm black and
white to make a startling contrast to the grainy video footage. However,
despite this, and a subtle and implicitly nasty ending, Blair Witch fails to be
a good horror film because it’s just not scary. In the cinema the handheld
camerawork is far more nausea-inducing than the scenes of terror, it really
should have been unleashed straight to video where ultimately it has more
resonance. An interesting idea, dreamt up by ad-men (and as vacuous), the
end results are mildly diverting and no more. A modestly (as opposed to
no) budgeted sequel ditched the experimental approach and emerged as a
deeply dull post-Scream self-referential yawnfest. How post-post-mod-
ernly ironic. How dated. How Nineties.

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Ten Terrifying Auteurs

Horror is one of the few genres which positively encourages the auteur.
When compiling a list of the best, one has to remember those talented
directors that didn’t quite make it – Roger Corman, Tobe Hooper, John
Carpenter, Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi who have been omitted mainly
for reasons of space, but also because some have produced spectacular
films within other genres as well. We have tried to cover their work else-
where in the book, because they are emphatically worth watching for their
horror output.

Tod Browning (1882–1962)

Charles Albert (aka Tod) Browning was one of America’s first horror
auteurs, a man whose affinity for the grotesque led him to direct a number
of key genre films, although strangely his most renowned work is by no
means his best. After leaving home Browning joined a carnival as a maca-
bre side-show attraction ‘The Living Hypnotic Corpse’ where he would
remain in state, buried underground for people to gawp at. He became
involved with DW Griffiths, initially as an actor but later as an assistant on
the epic Intolerance (1916). This experience led him to write and direct a
series of adventure, melodrama and western serials before finding his true
vocation - horror. The Wicked Darling (1919) was the first of many fea-
ture-length collaborations with the great actor Lon Chaney, ‘The Man With
a Thousand Faces.’ Chaney had perfected the art of gruesome make-up to
transform himself into some of cinema’s most hideous, and occasionally
sympathetic figures, often at great personal discomfort. The pair clicked in
their ideas of representing internal psychological torment with external
physicality, appearances becoming as much representational as actual. The
Unholy Three (1925) features three carnival renegades, a dwarf, a strong-
man and an occasionally transvestite ventriloquist (Chaney) arranging a
cunning jewel heist, each adapting his unique skills to the task at hand. The
Blackbird (1926) and The Road To Mandalay (1926) followed, but more
deranged is The Unknown (1927) where Chaney plays a knife thrower in
love with a radiant Joan Crawford. Doesn’t sound too strange? Well Joan
rebukes his advances causing our unhinged cutlery chucker to spiral down-
wards into murder and self-abuse, culminating (some sixty years prior to
Jodorowsky’s dazzling Santa Sangre) in a last bid attempt for her affec-
tions by amputating both of his arms. London After Midnight (1927) was
Browning’s foray into the vampire genre with a top-hatted, cloaked
Chaney sporting a distorted mouthful of excruciatingly painful canine inci-

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sors that ripped his face into a demonic grin. It made Chaney the ideal
choice to play Dracula but sadly he passed away in 1930 (his son adopted
the name and carried on the family business, most memorably in a series of
werewolf pictures) and the part went to Bela Lugosi, who had played the
role on stage. Dracula has moments of macabre brilliance but it is clear
that Browning’s heart was not entirely in the project. The success of the
film launched the cycle of Universal horror films and gave Browning vir-
tual carte blanche over his next project, this time for MGM, a studio not
known for pushing the boundaries of acceptability. And what a project it
was. Freaks gave the studio exactly what they asked for but not what they
wanted, a horror film. Considered impossible to release (especially in light
of the Hays Code) the film was shelved with disgust and considerable dis-
belief. Browning’s career never really recovered although his final films do
maintain sparks of his former works. Mark Of The Vampire (1935), a con-
voluted but highly enjoyable vampire thriller, features incredibly dense set
dressing and lush, stylised photography. Lugosi is at his finest, bone-white
succubus bride by his side wandering through his cobwebbed castle or fog-
bound patios. Ostensibly a remake of London After Midnight, the astonish-
ing effects work, the Gothic grandeur and expressive sweeping camera-
work are sadly offset by some ill-conceived comedy sequences and a
disappointingly rational conclusion. The Devil Doll (1936) saw Lionel Bar-
rymore as a vengeful banker instigating terrible revenge on his deceitful
and crooked partners. He does this, occasionally in cunning drag disguises,
using miniaturised humans.
Browning’s sympathy with disadvantaged protagonists sees resonance
in the films of Tim Burton, as does his eye for the trappings of Gothic
melodrama. Although he made films in many genres his legacy remains in
the few sound horror films he made in the Thirties. Unfortunately his eclec-
tic visions clashed with the sensibilities of the age and he ceased making
films in 1939.

Dracula (1930)
Dir: Tod Browning St: Bela Lugosi, Dwight Frye, David Manners,
Helen Chandler
Renfield travels to Transylvania to sell Carfax Abbey to Count Dracula,
who makes him subservient to his will. As a result, upon his return to
England, Renfield is incarcerated at Dr Seward’s home for the criminally
insane. Dr Seward and his daughter Mina meet their strange new neighbour
at the opera. When Mina’s friend Lucy dies though, resident stake bearer
Abraham Van Helsing decides that something must be done...

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The success and influence of Dracula is so enormous that it is genuinely

difficult to view objectively. Without doubt though, it will be forever
remembered for Dracula himself. Lugosi had already played the role on
stage and despite not being first choice for the lead, the Hungarian actor
was made for the part. He played a very different vampire to the more vis-
ceral Chaney emphasising a doomed, romantic edge that would endear him
to female fans the world over. He draws the eye with raw power and con-
siderable charm - when he attacks men he is a savage to fear, with women
he is a passionate lover. Individual sequences remain enormously powerful
even now, and the mise en scène is nothing short of astonishing. Dracula’s
castle is a huge cathedral-like hall with streaming light, a dizzying stair-
case, colossal spiders’ webs and, inexplicably, armadillos. There are lash-
ings of ideas at the start – the bat-led carriage and the ghostly brides
stalking Renfield being of particular note. However, when the action
moves to England, it feels as though Browning has simply run out of
steam, relying on off-screen action and a good deal of exposition relayed
through dialogue, rather than continuing with the stunning visual ideas
promised at the start.

Freaks (1932)
Dir: Tod Browning St: Harry Earles, Olga Baclanova, Daisy Earles
Circus life. Midgets Hans and Frieda are all set to marry but Hans falls
for the manipulative, beautiful and ‘regular’ sized trapeze artist
Cleo(patra). Cleo is just after his substantial fortune, formulating a plan
with Hercules the strongman - she will wed Hans and slowly poison him.
But the callous couple don’t reckon on the strength of community spirit
that exists among the gentler circus folk for if you “offend one then you
offend them all,” and believe me, they are mightily offended...
Some films have reputations that precede them but few have the fierce
reaction that Freaks possesses. It was shelved by a disgusted studio, con-
demned by the few who saw it and banned for decades in the UK. Even the
titles find their way into the narrative space by being ripped open in front
of our eyes, before being hyped up by the master of ceremonies who relates
the tale in flashback. What makes Browning’s masterpiece so inflamma-
tory is that the ‘freaks’ are genuine, not some product of make-up and this
forces the viewer to reinterpret their aloof position - they are shown as nor-
mal people living out their lives. Films of side-show unfortunates were not
new but up until Freaks, and sadly afterwards as well, they existed in the
realm of monster movies or as casual scares. Freaks does not allow the
audience the luxury of distancing themselves from their emotions and life-

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styles - ultimately it was this that offended everyone at the time. It is easier
to dismiss them as grotesque side-show entertainment than contemplate the
horror of an active loving mind being subjected to the casual cruelty of the
gawping public. Even more shocking is the way in which these loving peo-
ple can turn into monsters, albeit temporarily, when one of their comrades
is threatened. With such an inflammatory title, the real freaks of the piece
are Hercules and Cleo, uncaring, shallow, and deformed on the inside,
defined entirely by lust, both sexual and financial. The traditionally mar-
ginalised characters are more complex and rounded. The film refuses to
become polemic or simplistic, both Venus and Phroso are basically beauti-
ful people, but are as much part of the community as anyone and a million
miles removed from the scheming duo. Even if the narrative hook, the
extortion of Hans at the expense of his true love, were removed you would
still be left with a fascinating insight into circus life and culture. Browning,
you will recall, spent some years in a circus and this is apparent in the mun-
dane representation of life behind the glitz; lives, loves, breaks, gambling,
practising, preparing new clown gags, stagehands ogling the girls, it’s all
here. Importantly we never see anyone perform, or see their audiences. In
some ways we have impinged on their world by being granted this intimate
viewpoint. Insightful, moving and compassionate, Freaks is a beautiful if
harsh work that has few peers. Its influence on, for example, David
Lynch’s The Elephant Man is profound.

James Whale (1889–1957)

Initially, James Whale pursued a career as an actor in Britain, but found
his talents drew him into theatrical set design and eventually direction. His
experiences in World War I made him the ideal choice to direct a stage ver-
sion of the controversial anti-war play Journey’s End by RC Sherriff, con-
cerning the futile loss of young life in the trenches. The success of the
production was such that he was asked over to Hollywood, serving as dia-
logue director for Howard Hughes on Hell’s Angels (1930) before getting
the chance to direct his first feature, reprising his theatre success with a
modest adaptation of Journey’s End (1930). Waterloo Bridge (1931) fol-
lowed but his big break came with Frankenstein, the first of four horror
films he made for Universal which sky-rocketed ex-vaudeville actor Boris
Karloff (Henry Pratt) into A-list territory. The influence of German expres-
sionism on his visual style is apparent in the sets and feel of his films, but is
tempered by softer use of camerawork and composition. Whale’s jarring
visuals come predominantly from his occasionally shocking use of editing
and attention to set detail rather than the distortion of his narrative space

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through camerawork. He relies on fluid movements to immerse the viewer

into scenes. Given free reign he produced the wickedly funny Old Dark
House. Staying firmly in Blighty (at least in setting) The Invisible Man
(1933) introduced Claude Rains as the titular scientist and set him on the
road to stardom, no mean feat as he spends virtually the entire time
wrapped in bandages or not there at all! The film’s playful visual nature
worked perfectly against the darker areas of the script, offering little hope
of redemption as Rains descends into madness and eventually death,
appearing fully just in time to catch the end titles. Not only is this a suc-
cinct, amusing and poignant film but it also boasts some of the most techni-
cally advanced special effects of the time; bottles are thrown by invisible
hands, shirts dance in mockery of the townsfolk out to lynch him, bikes
ride apparently without rider and Rains reveals himself by creepily
unwrapping his bandages, uncovering frightening nothingness. For some
sequences the black matted shirt collars and cuffs that run across the screen
were hand-touched frame by frame to disguise the effect (a similar tech-
nique would be used to remove the wires from Linda Blair’s levitation
scene in The Exorcist). The film’s success led to many sequels and spin-
offs but none have the eccentric, macabre charm and wit of the original.
The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935) continued his successful streak, remain-
ing his most often emulated film, homages of which can be seen even
today. It was to be the last horror film he would direct although much of his
later work contained the same love of morbid humour or sympathising with
the misunderstood or eccentric. The musical Show Boat (1936) showed the
compassionate but occasionally cruel side of his work. Remember Last
Night? (1936) was a witty and very sick thriller where the usual parlour
gathering of aristocrats have to solve a murder. What sets it apart from the
run-of-the-mill mystery is that they are drunk. He went on to direct The
Man In The Iron Mask (1939) and an early Vincent Price vehicle Green
Hell (1940). Sadly, disagreements with Universal forced Whale into retire-
ment in 1941.

Frankenstein (1931)
Dir: James Whale St: Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, Edward van Sloan
Henry Frankenstein has got it all: a beautiful fiancée, a hereditary title,
and a place in Goldstadt Medical College. Why then should he throw it all
away and shack up with a sadistic hunchback called Fritz with poor brain-
napping skills and a sideline in gratuitous eye rolling? Simple, Henry is
raiding the graves and gallows of the land to create a new being. His cre-

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ation is a success but his paternal skills are somewhat lacking and the con-
fused, vengeful beast escapes to terrorise the community.
Whale’s film opens in wonderful showman style with a warning that
what we are about to witness “might even horrify you,” a truly melodra-
matic touch. For such a short film this naturally takes enormous liberties
with Mary Shelley’s novel but as a story in its own right it stands up rather
well, especially the sequences where the deranged duo stalk evocative
graveyards as they acquire the monster’s requisite body parts. The tight
framing and morbid statues eke every morsel of ghoulish dread from the
viewer but at heart the film remains a comedy, albeit a very black one.
Skeletons bounce on rubber bands, dirt is shovelled unceremoniously over
monuments and much fun is to be had with any cadaver that pops into
view. Henry’s assistant Fritz is the archetypal lumbering companion,
relentlessly stupid, grovelling and sadistic. When retrieving a brain from
the medical college, this hapless hunchback not only smashes the one
marked ‘Normal,’ he even swaps it with the one marked ‘Abnormal’ and
neglects to tell the boss.
Karloff’s performance as The Monster (with groundbreaking make-up
by Jack Pierce that is synonymous with the creature’s look even today)
ranges from wild gesticulations to moments of poignancy. Despite his bru-
tality, we retain a great deal of sympathy with him. In the film’s finest
scene (sadly censored in many prints) The Monster is shown innocent com-
panionship in the shape of Maria, a little girl. They play with flowers, mak-
ing them float in the river but the creature, inspired by the simplistic beauty
of the drifting petals, throws the girl to a watery grave.
The film’s influence was immense, particularly with Frankenstein
becoming a cultural icon - recognisable seventy years on, his legacy on
film goes far beyond the scope of ‘mere’ horror. Mel Brooks’ pastiche
Young Frankenstein (1974) is a comedic love letter to Whale, even filming
in black and white and using the original sets (found in the designer’s
garage after forty years!) while the Spirit Of The Beehive (1973) uses the
film as a political metaphor and a gentle tale of growing up in the shadow
of tyranny.

The Old Dark House (1932)

Dir: James Whale St: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laugh-
ton, Raymond Massey
Torrential rainfall and devastating landslides strand Mr & Mrs Waver-
ton and their companion Penderel far from Shrewsbury. Their only source

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of shelter is an old dark house with its unhinged inhabitants the Femms and
the sinister Morgan. Self-made businessman Sir William Porterhouse, and
his chorus girl ‘friend’ Gladys join the unusual throng and suspicions begin
to run rife as to who, or what, is living on the third floor...
From the lightening strike that announces Whale’s name on the title
cards you know that this is not going to be a serious ride. Adapting J B
Priestley’s novel, the screenplay for The Old Dark House gives the rapid,
droll, black dialogue of Edwardian writing its first decent cinematic airing,
and Whale’s direction never shies from being scary at the same time. Dark
is definitely the operative word, much of the film taking place by stuttering
electric light (“We make our own electric light out here, only we aren’t
very good at it”) or flickering candle, where the shadows ‘act’ as much the
actors. Whale lets his performers and script tell the story, but peppers pro-
ceedings with some genuinely frightening set pieces. The variations in the
characters’ personae as they progress from apparently normal to deranged
is emphasised by wonderfully low-key lighting. Morgan, the scar-faced
alcoholic half-mute (“Even Welsh shouldn’t sound like that”) is an uncivi-
lised beast, but he’s also a handy electrician and makes an excellent joint of
beef. Horace Femm is wonderfully camp, paranoid and droll in contrast to
his sister’s wailing fanaticism. Saul is perfectly balanced as a sympathetic
madman with a destructive streak in homicide and pyromania. That ulti-
mately the family turn out to be just highly unusual is the final irony - all
the ostensibly ‘normal’ characters are either promiscuous, vacuous or
spend their normal lives bickering about trivialities. Despite being a Uni-
versal picture, this is as British as a stiff upper lip, playing upon excruciat-
ing interest in the minutiae of climate change and not saying what you
mean. Whale manages to find plenty of opportunity to relish in the rampant
decadence of an age in decline - with hellfire and brimstone dialogue about
sin, a very risqué mutual seduction and some of the most outrageous foot
fetishism outside of Buñuel’s work. Later Universal horror comedies,
while enjoyable, tended to concentrate on slapstick or puns. The Old Dark
House is far more acerbic and subtle than any of these, even finding time to
pastiche Jane Eyre.

Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)

Dir: James Whale St: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Elsa Lanchester
It’s alive! The monster has escaped the burning windmill while, back in
town, a woozy Frankenstein is atoning for his misdemeanours. Not for long
though, as silver-tongued madman Dr Pretorious and his jam jars of minia-
ture people persuade the baron that his errant creation needs a good woman

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to propagate a new race, a “world of gods and monsters.” The pair get
straight to work...
Only four years after the original stormed the screen but the changes are
immense. Karloff (single word) is given a pre-title credit showing that per-
haps the monster has become bigger than its creator. Rapid advances in
camera technology allowed Whale the freedom to employ gliding shots,
with plenty of opportunity to caress the huge soft-expressionist sets and
take in every wind-billowed gossamer dress. Most of the special effects
work is highly believable, Dr Pretorious’ little people are blended seam-
lessly with the actors in a manner that is quite astonishing. He steals much
of the limelight from Frankenstein, who is currently wracked with remorse,
because Pretorious is quite obviously insane.
However the effects of the Hays code become all too evident, the gal-
lows humour of the original is still there but not as voracious - becoming
more slapstick than macabre - “I need to speak with you on a grave mat-
ter.” Likewise, the introduction has become a camp explanation of the
story’s moral validity, emphasising the religious points in an attempt to
curtail censorship. That said, the cruel slaughter of little Maria’s parents at
the film’s opening is as grimly funny as it is brutal and unjust. The Monster
too is far less ambiguous - he clearly just wants the respect of others. When
he catches sight of his reflection for the first time he is repulsed but begins
to accept his right to be different when shown the joy of friendship with a
companion who is also an outsider. Events gallop along at a cracking pace,
the Monster is only incarcerated for about twenty seconds before he has
wrenched free from his shackles and barged the door down in ‘big id’ fash-
ion. That the climax is so abrupt is more than another joke, it’s a necessity
that allows the tantalisingly brief images to stay in the mind. Elsa Lanches-
ter’s appearance as the bride is so stunning it eclipses virtually everything
else we’ve been shown, a Gothic fantasy of pale skin, hospital robe wed-
ding dress, impossible hair and delicate mapwork of surgery scars.
Although filled with breathtaking imagery and excellent effects work,
Bride Of Frankenstein falls just short of its forebear by replacing single-
focused fableism with unnecessarily explicit moralising.

Val Lewton (1904–1951)

Traditionally theories of authorship have concentrated on the director as
guiding force when considering a canon of work. Val Lewton however, is
best known as a producer. What makes his work so interesting is not only
do the films bear the hallmarks of the directors who made them but that
they also remain irrefutably Lewton’s. Born Vladimir Leventon his family

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emigrated to the US from Yalta, Russia, when he was five, changing their
name to Lewton. Thanks to his mother Nina he landed a job in Hollywood
as story editor and general writer for, amongst others, David O Selznick. In
1942 he was approached by RKO Radio Pictures, who were going through
a bit of a lean patch. Needing to recoup costs they hit upon the idea of pro-
ducing cheap horror films as the minor parts of double bills. B-Features
received a percentage of the takings so providing the initial budget was low
enough, they couldn’t fail to make money. All Lewton’s unit had to do was
keep the length down and they were pretty much left alone - with one addi-
tional proviso that the studio would choose the title based on market
research. Thus the Lewton produced films have provocative titles and often
sensationalist posters yet paradoxically remain the most lyrical or poetic
films of the genre. Lewton’s role in the making of these films is far greater
than his producer status would suggest. He often provided the inspiration
for the tales, the literary aspects of the scripting, taking co-screenwriting
credits occasionally under the pseudonym Carlos Keith and certainly
imbued the films with their feel, tone and style. It helped to have such tal-
ented people working for him - Lewton’s films were nothing if not collabo-
rative efforts. Lewton gave three directors their first major stabs at the craft
and all would serve him well.
Jacques Tourneur had made short films and produced some second unit
work in both the US and France but the job of directing Cat People (1942),
the unit’s first film, was his first major feature. Critically and financially
successful it was followed by the evocative I Walked With A Zombie
(1943), a beautifully shot elegiac piece based in part on Jane Eyre. This
was Lewton’s trump card, instead of relying on penny dreadful horrors or
fairy-tale thrillers he turned to literary and artistic precedents for the
screenplays - the works of Bronte and Stephenson, psychoanalytic theory
and the poetry of Milton and Shakespeare. The yearning meanderings in I
Walked With A Zombie invoke an ethereal yet harsh romantic world far
detached from the standard B-movie pot-boiler. So impressed were RKO
with Tourneur’s work that they promised him A-list status should he com-
plete a third film. The Leopard Man (1943) was again full of the hints of
exotic ritual, superstition and folk tale undercurrents. After leaving the
RKO horror unit Tourneur made a substantial number of films noirs and
westerns (including the wonderful Build My Gallows High (1947)), return-
ing to horror for Night Of The Demon (1957), a taut intelligent working of
M R James’ Casting The Runes with glowing black and white cinematog-
raphy.

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Both Mark Robson and Robert Wise had worked as editors prior to their
association with Lewton, collaborating on Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane
(1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Robson had joined as an
editor on Cat People but Lewton was determined to put him behind the
camera, even at the expense of his own promotion. The Seventh Victim
(1943) features sumptuously shot sets amid mysterious satanic happenings
in Greenwich Village. Ghost Ship (1943) features a series of bizarre yet
atmospheric deaths aboard a ship captained by the paranoid Dix. Youth
Runs Wild (1944) was a departure for the unit but with Isle Of The Dead
(1945) Robson returned to the genre with a vengeance. Set on an isolated
and plague-ridden island, from the opening mist-clad shots of cartloads of
corpses being carelessly dragged to mass graves, the putrefied air never
clears. The primary concept is that one of the characters suffers from acute
narcolepsy and at one point is found apparently dead. The camera lingers
on her coffin as water drips rhythmically on its lid before finally an
extended piercing scream is let out. It is one of the most horrific moments
filmed and yet there is nothing to see. Robson’s final film for the unit was
Bedlam, a dense humourless offering with almost inconceivably highbrow
dialogue. He later went on to direct the disaster movie Earthquake (1974)
but his finest films remain understated and steeped in charnel house sensi-
bilities.
Robert Wise co-directed (with Gunther Fritsch) the sequel to Lewton’s
original hit, The Curse Of The Cat People (1944). Oliver has remarried and
now has a daughter Amy but the child’s insular nature leads to concerns
that she is similarly cursed. The Body Snatcher suffered the wrath of the
BBFC’s shears. Wise went on to make an extraordinary range of presti-
gious films in a wide variety of genres including The Day The Earth Stood
Still (1951) an impressive science fiction film about the perils of human
impetuosity and militarism, as well as two fine musicals West Side Story
(1961) and The Sound Of Music (1965). In 1963 he returned to horror with
The Haunting, still the finest haunted house film committed to celluloid,
with its ‘what you don’t see’ ethos and peerless black and white cinema-
tography.
Ultimately, the success of the horror unit led to Lewton becoming a pro-
ducer of non-genre flicks, but the results were not as successful due to
increasing studio interference. Much of the eloquence that had run through
his earlier films was excised in favour of box-office friendly simplicity.
Sadly deteriorating health led to an untimely death in 1951. Lewton’s influ-
ence on the psychological thriller and expressive use of language and liter-

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ary screenplays mark him as one of the more unusual figures of the field,
but one whose work has made it a far richer and more stimulating place.

Cat People (1942)

Dir: Jacques Tourneur St: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph,
Tom Conway
Irena’s Serbian background has led her to believe that she is descended
from a village of satanic witches and, when aroused, she will turn into a
lethal cat-woman. Marriage therefore seems like a pretty bad idea but she
ties the knot anyway with Oliver Reed. However her desire to be “really
Mrs Reed” is at odds with her fear of lycanthropic savagery and their mar-
riage is unconsummated. A solution in the arms of sinister psychiatrist (and
woefully poor keeper of confidentiality) Dr Judd is doomed to failure.
Meanwhile hubby Oliver turns to his colleague Alice whose love for him
has generated the wrong kind of feline attention.
“When you speak of the soul you mean the mind,” despairs Irena at her
decidedly creepy psychiatrist, and she is right. She represents the raw emo-
tional passion of the exotic European female in the cold light of the scien-
tifically logical American - her frigidity just as much down to the
difference in cultural outlook as childhood trauma. Whatever the cause and
whether she is a shapeshifter or not, the fact remains that the tragedy and
pathos in Cat People is entirely sexual. Perhaps it is Irena’s mystique and
mood swings that make her such a fascinating subject, the twinkle in her
eye, playing with the dead bird and feeding it to the panther - the need for
destruction. Tourneur is a master of light and shadow, evoking the claus-
trophobia of Irena’s world with tight, minimal lighting - especially on the
psychiatrist’s couch, an oval face picked out in a dark void. Wisely the
question as to whether Irena really is capable of becoming a panther is left
in some doubt - despite the climax there are elements of uncertainty that
keep the matter open-ended. Her tragic demise is foreshadowed from the
very start, her drawings of an impaled panther at the zoo mirror not only
her own death but also relate to the legend of King John and her fears about
sexual penetration.
The tension is at times unbearable, the anticipation is far more engaging
than the act. Alice being stalked by Irena on her way home is a superb
piece of editing and camerawork, keeping you on the edge of the seat, the
conclusion with the bus will make you jump a mile high, juxtaposing ani-
mal and vehicular sounds to great effect. The scene in the swimming pool
is, if anything, even more tense as a vulnerable Alice looks around her to
see marbled pool reflections on the walls and hears the unmistakable

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sounds of hungry predators. The horror of the unseen can be a double-

edged sword, when done properly the results are mesmerising and terrify-
ing, but occasionally the audience can feel cheated. Cat People never
cheats and provides tragedy and sympathy along with the scares. It was
remade in a far more graphic and incestuous manner by Paul Schrader in
1982.

The Body Snatcher (1945)

Dir: Robert Wise St: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi
Edinburgh, 1831. A city in the stranglehold of graverobbers so that even
grieving dogs aren’t safe. There is a purpose to all this nefarious necro-nap-
ping because the pilfered cadavers are put to good use as doctors’ training
aids. Dr McFarlan is one such man who uses Gray’s dark services, some-
thing his new assistant is having a moral crisis over. But when little Geor-
gina needs an operation he relents, realising the worth of the
resurrectionist’s trade, even if his first delivery seems a touch familiar and
a bit too warm...
In adapting Robert Louis Stephenson’s story Lewton has helped craft
one of his more morally complex screenplays, asking the question of
whether distasteful and distressing acts can actually result in good. Our
feelings are meant to lie with the young doctor, but it is the other characters
embroiled in the sordid business that are far more interesting. Dr McFarlan
is brusque and irritable - chiding Georgina he appears devoid of feeling.
But he develops from uncaring (it takes long enough to establish that his
housekeeper is really his wife) to psychotic, ready to kill in order to save.
Perhaps this is due to his unbreakable link with Gray, the creepy cabman
and night-time body snatcher. Gray is a complicated character, clearly
motivated by greed and impervious to the feelings of those whose graves
he desecrates. Nonetheless, he provides a service that will eventually bene-
fit humankind. Matters turn, however, when he murders the singer just to
supply her body and we realise just how far he is willing to go. But without
him Georgina would never have been cured, not only because of his night
job and direct request to Dr McFarlan, but for the kindness he shows her in
the shape of Freddie the horse - this gives her hope that motivates her far
more than the doctor ever could. Karloff is icy and callous in his portrayal
which makes the reduction of Lugosi to a snivelling lackey a sad sight,
murdered when he tries to blackmail Gray. Wise wisely (so to speak) keeps
his direction underplayed, to allow the subtleties of the script to shine -
when the street singer is killed we just watch Gray’s coach slowly move to
the archway and her voice stops mid-verse. Much of the film’s visual sensi-

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bilities are based around fogging instead of focusing to give a muggy feel
to the piece, accentuating the sense of dread. Gray’s snuffing technique is
shown in matter-of-fact detail, but the censors had most problems with the
dialogue. The UK print was heavily excised to remove any reference to Dr
Knox, Burke and Hare, quite some feat as Dr McFarlan emphasises several
times that he was actually Knox’s assistant.

Bedlam (1946)
Dir: Mark Robson St: Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Billy House
At St Mary’s Of Bethlehem they put on one helluva show, releasing the
loonies from their cages to perform ineptly for the aristocracy. It’s a real
hoot. You can even get your own tour for tuppence courtesy of Simms, the
Apothecary General. Nell Bowen, companion to the rumbustious Lord
Mortimer, finds Simms’ treatment of the inmates abominable, so she’s
quite clearly insane. Best lock her up with the rest of ‘em so she can pursue
her exercise in compassion as a non-paying guest at... Bedlam.
Robson’s (he also co-wrote) uncomfortable portrayal of life in the noto-
rious asylum is unusual in that its source material is a painting by Hogarth.
This may go some way to explain the overly static camerawork that frames
events rather than immerses the viewer. It may be unsubtle in its political
liberalism, but the scale of things necessitate a certain grandeur to nail
home the message - greed and power should never be allowed to dominate
compassion for a fellow man. To this end, the unlikely pair of heroes are a
feisty principled woman and a pacifist Quaker. Nell’s convictions see her
move from upper society to evicted campaigner to an incarcerated Florence
Nightingale figure, tending the pain of the abused inmates. She even ques-
tions her own values when she becomes accepted into the ‘Pillar Society’
that represents the asylum’s elite. The villains of the piece distance them-
selves from their atrocities by denying that the inmates have any humanity
in them; they are free to mock, prod and amuse themselves at the often piti-
ful actions of the ‘loonies.’ Simms, played with corpse-faced severity and
hair-pieced vanity by Karloff, is one of cinema’s most consummate sadists,
treating his ‘guests’ worse than any caged animal. Unlike the ignorant,
uncaring gawpers who part with their tuppences to ogle the inmates,
Simms derives pleasure from their misery. Robson’s films may lack the
pacy edge of other Lewton stablemates, but he compensates with an
immensely flowery script and attention to detail - the stuttering of the
dying gold boy, the ripped dress used to tend the wounds of a man in irons,
or the remarkable shot of pleading arms bursting from the darkness of their
cells. The trial scene at the end plays like a homage to Lang’s M and the

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premise of an exposé of abuse in asylums formed the basis for Sam Fuller’s
Shock Corridor (1963).

Terence Fisher (1904-1980)

Perhaps the most famous of Hammer’s directors, Terence Fisher began
his prolific career in 1947 when he directed a number of low-budget fillers.
These included Colonel Bogey, Stolen Face, Four Sided Triangle, The
Astonished Heart with Noel Coward and So Long At The Fair. However,
he shot to fame in 1957 with Hammer’s first colour gothic film The Curse
Of Frankenstein. It starred Peter Cushing as the dapper but immoral aristo-
crat scientist and Christopher Lee as the strangely sympathetic monster.
The collaboration of Fisher with scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster and producer
Anthony Hinds created a team that would go on to further commercial and
artistic glories. All five were reunited for Hammer’s next outing The Hor-
ror Of Dracula (1958) which starred Lee in his best-known role. Sangster’s
daring script deviates wildly from Stoker’s novel, but this is of no conse-
quence; the film is exciting, bold and dramatic. The climax depicting Cush-
ing chasing the increasingly elusive Lee, highlights Fisher’s superb pacing
of the action - true edge-of-the-seat stuff punctuated by some excruciating
comic relief moments. Surprisingly erotic and violent it is an absolute
must-see. The Revenge Of Frankenstein followed in 1958, this time with
Cushing creating a monster from Michael Gwynne. Frankenstein Created
Woman (1966) sees Frankenstein come to terms with the nature of the soul.
In Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) the brain of mad Dr Brandt is
transplanted into nice Dr Richter. Fisher plays upon the tragic nature of a
monster realising that he is a monster and still recognising his previous life.
The last film in the series was the much maligned but brilliant Franken-
stein And The Monster From Hell (1973). Knowingly comedic and gross it
features Frankenstein in an asylum, ostensibly a patient, but in fact carry-
ing on his dastardly deeds, creating a creature assembled from various bits
of inmates only to have it torn apart by a lunatic mob.
Continuing with vampires, Brides Of Dracula (1960) did not feature
Dracula himself, but his disciple Baron Meinster, although Peter Cushing
reprised Van Helsing’s character. This is an energetic romp with an aston-
ishing climax - Cushing receives a vampire’s bite only to cauterise it him-
self before racing on to destroy the Baron. Christopher Lee returned for
Dracula, Prince Of Darkness.
Many of Fisher’s films were produced quickly (sometimes two or three
a year), but his flair for visual style, bold use of strong colours and sense of
dramatic pacing ensured that no matter how familiar the story or monster,

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the finished film would have merit - The Hound Of The Baskervilles
(1959), The Mummy (1959), The Curse Of The Werewolf (1960), The Two
Faces Of Dr Jekyll (1960) and The Phantom Of The Opera (1962) were
among the best of his output. The same cannot be said for the lamentable
Stranglers Of Bombay, where a sect commit all manner of atrocities in
India. Fisher also directed The Man Who Could Cheat Death around this
time.
From the mid-Sixties his output decelerated in quantity. The Gorgon
(1963) scripted by John Gilling, featured Peter Cushing as a doctor whose
assistant falls for the last of the Gorgons and Christopher Lee as the cool
professor investigating the deaths. Another gothic and melodramatic hor-
ror, again the climax is thrilling and not afraid to defy cinematic conven-
tions – you are never sure who is going to survive. The Horror Of It All
(1963) was a horror comedy set in an old dark house. The Devil Rides Out
(1967), based upon a Dennis Wheatley novel, was not a commercial hit but
has gathered cult status over the years. Set much later than the Gothic hor-
rors and combining brilliantly saturated colour and lighting with precise
camerawork and editing, the film deals with conflicting opinions about
superstition, where real souls are at stake. Fisher also moved away from
direct horror at this time and directed some science fiction films including
The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), Island Of Terror (1966) and The Night
Of The Big Heat (1967).

The Mummy (1959)

Dir: Terence Fisher. St: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing
1895: Gammy-legged archaeologist John Banning is doing his bit for
inter-cultural relations by desecrating the Tomb of Ananka and hotfooting
it back to Blighty with a ton of ancient Egyptian swag. Three years later,
John is set to marry Isobel when his father is strangled by a mummified
corpse, currently adopting a none-too-convincing butler disguise at the
home of Mehetmet Bey. The bandaged one is in fact dallying priest Kharis,
entombed for his blasphemous resurrection attempts on the Princess
Ananka, who just happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to John’s dishy
fiancée.
Hammer’s plundering of Universal’s back catalogue arrived at The
Mummy in their most similar remake. Even the scenes where the Mummy,
spurred on by Bey, exacts his revenge, retains a distinctly Thirties feel. Per-
haps this is partly due to Hammer obtaining rights from Universal, Lee’s
make-up is almost identical to Karloff’s but paradoxically less frightening
in colour. Even if the mummy’s vengeance is a touch anaemic, Lee’s

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entrances certainly aren’t, rising from a murky swamp his impossibly tall
figure and unblinking eyes dominate the moonlit skyline. Being dead and
musty gives Fisher ample opportunity to show the futile attempts at hold-
ing back this juggernaut of destruction - shotgun blasts spray chunks of rot-
ten bandage around and he is even impaled (very convincingly) by a spear
to no detrimental effect. The climax is pure pulp as the shambling lover
holds his unconscious lookalike bride in his tattered arms, heading for the
swamp’s murky recesses. Fisher makes good use of the sumptuous Victo-
rian sets (although you’ll be seeing virtually every element in later Ham-
mer period pieces) and even manages some fairly convincing Egyptian
flashbacks.

The Curse Of The Werewolf (1960)

Dir: Terence Fisher St: Oliver Reed
Leon’s got a thing about goats. He likes nothing better than to rip their
throats out and savour the flavour. But there is a very good reason for his
unorthodox lunar activities, he’s a werewolf - “a body with a soul and spirit
that are still at war.” There are only two cures - love or a silver bullet. Nat-
urally, the latter option is a touch drastic, which is why you’ll be glad to
know he goes all droopy-eyed over Christina Fernando while working with
a wino Brit at the Fernando vineyard. Better still, Christina’s got the hots
for the hairy goat muncher too, but she’s promised to another. They’re
classes apart and the full moon makes prospects of wedding bells far less
likely than death tolls.
Werewolves have always been connected with fears of unbridled sexu-
ality and loss of control, considered to be unholy because of their inability
to curtail their base primal instincts. The beast also works as abnormal
from other angles - traditionally the werewolf is male and yet suffers the
same cyclic hormonal anguish as the female, emphasising the fertility
aspect of menstruation by mocking it. Fisher’s film manages to tackle the
sexuality of werewolf myths in a shockingly frank manner for the time,
showing the origin of the werewolf in more detail than its actual life. He is
an “affront to God” by being born on Christmas Day, yet is christened
Leon, the reverse of Noel. He doesn’t stand a chance. Leon’s conception is
melodramatic in the extreme; his mad beggar father, rotting in the dun-
geons of the Marquis, rapes the mute servant girl when she is thrown to
him for refusing the Marquis’ advances. She savagely beats the Marquis to
death on his chessboard, escaping only to die giving birth to Leon. His
adopted family are kind but know of Leon’s predatory moonlighting, bar-

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ring his room at that difficult time of the month. It is well over halfway into
the film before Reed makes his entrance.
This is a prestige production from Hammer - the village sets, including
the impressive bell tower, are superbly realised and the sweep of the narra-
tive placed real strains on the coffers. But it was worth it. Despite being set
in Spain and based on folk tales, Curse Of The Werewolf is resolutely Vic-
torian in its tone. It was deemed far too dark and much of the sexual and
violent content was trimmed to make it acceptable as an X-rated film at the
time but has subsequently been restored to its original glory.

Dracula: Prince Of Darkness (1965)

Dir: Terence Fisher St: Christopher Lee, Barbara Shelley
Two English couples on a tour of Europe are warned by Father Shandor
that they shouldn’t visit Carlsbad’s castle. Do they listen? Of course not.
Arriving at the castle, Alan is hoisted over Dracula’s ashes and his throat
slit reviving the Count. Helen is subsequently bitten and turns naughty nos-
feratu. Charles and Diana escape to find sanctuary at Shandor’s monastery,
but don’t realise that fly-crunching resident Ludwig is more than just a lit-
tle strange...
Christopher Lee returned to his most famous role, once again dominat-
ing the screen. The whole film is a tease from start to finish, Dracula not
appearing until well into the running time, but this is deliberate. British to
the hilt, the trappings of a horror film are used to depict the effects (albeit
allegorically) of extra-marital liaisons and repressed sexuality. Helen is a
frump with an annoying husband, but when freed from the restraints of her
relationship and heaving in a negligee for her demonic lover, she positively
glows. Of course such indiscretions warrant a phallic staking, but it was
one helluva fling. Diana comes close to succumbing to her desires - the
commanding Count wordlessly orders her to fling her crucifix away and
tears open his shirt, offering the malevolent blood blossoming from his
razor-sharp nail.
Where Fisher’s original The Horror Of Dracula made good use of pac-
ing, with a thrilling chase combined with comic relief, Dracula Prince Of
Darkness generally uses characterisation to drive the narrative. Father
Shandor is a classic eccentric, raucous and rude. He declares that warming
his posterior by the fire in public to be “one of the few pleasures left in life”
and quaffs wine with gusto. In contrast, Dracula’s butler Clove has the dri-
est wit imaginable - “Is your master indisposed?” asks Charles, “No, he’s
dead.” With such an eclectic bunch of individuals, Fisher can do no wrong.

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Visually stunning, the use of Technicolor enhances the period feel and the
melodrama, and the transformation of his castle by alteration in lighting
alone is astonishing. Totally dissimilar to the original (and sadly lacking
Peter Cushing), this is nevertheless another fine addition to Hammer’s
Dracula series.

George A Romero (1940-)

Film production in America may be centred on Los Angeles or New
York but there are film-makers who resolutely stick to home turf - John
Waters keeps the flag flying for Baltimore and George A Romero is Pitts-
burgh’s most famous director. Romero’s rise to fame came with his feature
film debut, an ultra-low budget highly-imaginative feature that shocked
cinema audiences: Night Of The Living Dead (1968). Romero’s style was
radical – looking at social issues in the context of grim entertainment.
Jack’s Wife (aka Season Of The Witch, 1973) viewed the frustrations of
domestically bound women by depicting a bored housewife dabbling with
the occult. The Crazies (1973) placed the horror of Night Of The Living
Dead into a more socially obvious context, putting a town under a brutal
militaristic regime, ostensibly to curtail the spread of a virus that causes
people to become ‘crazies.’ It becomes clear that not only were the govern-
ment aware of the problem, they probably instigated it. The power of face-
less white-suited storm troopers massacring families for the common good
is unshakeable. It would be with Martin that he would make his true mas-
terpiece and also with the second zombie film Dawn Of The Dead that he
would finally merge consumerist critique with visceral horror. After these
dizzy heights it would be difficult to please everyone.
Creepshow (1982) is perhaps his least understood film, focusing on the
comic rather than nasty gore, but really it is no great departure. Using his
obvious love of EC horror comics, this anthology takes its tales from sto-
ries in the non-existent comic Creepshow as written by Stephen King. King
plays a farmer who turns into a giant vegetable and blows his own head off
with a shotgun (don’t ask). Other tales concern: a grumpy old bloke back
from the dead (revived with spilt whiskey he croaks “I want my birthday
cake” before each kill); a gurgly couple back from their watery grave to
take revenge on Leslie Nielson; Adrienne Barbeau as an incredibly bitchy
bitch who becomes food for a crated monster; and some nasty cockroach
business with a man obsessed by cleanliness. Shot with extreme angles and
exceptionally lurid primary colours, the final frames of each story fade to a
comic book, complete with speech bubbles.

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Day Of The Dead (1985), the third ‘dead’ film, saw the humans very
much on the retreat, hiding in bunkers. In many respects this is another
anti-militarist piece, with the zombies portrayed as the misunderstood
mass, scientists even attempting to condition them. Despite the impressive
special effects, there is a sense that Romero is pulling the reins on the glee-
ful splatter of his earlier films, preferring to comment on the breakdown of
humanity.
Monkey Shines: An Experiment In Terror (1988) takes a reasonable
principle (monkeys to help injured or disabled people) which turns faintly
ludicrous by having a jealous serial killer monkey running amok. Surpris-
ingly the film remains restrained in graphic gore and high on tension, man-
aging to ride above the dubious premise with a solid cast and atmospheric
soundtrack. Two Evil Eyes (1989) was a joint effort with Dario Argento
(c.f.) based upon short stories by Edgar Allen Poe while The Dark Half
(1993) saw him return to Stephen King territory.
Romero’s contribution to the horror genre is immense, but like Argento
he is influential rather than vastly successful. His ability to place supernat-
ural horror in a wider socio-political context marks him as one of the more
important genre directors.

Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

Dir: George A Romero St: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea
A ramshackle group of people defend themselves from attacks by the
reanimated dead in a backwater house, whose previous occupants have
provided fleshy sustenance for the shambling cadavers.
What is so remarkable about this debut film isn’t so much the oft-touted
level of viscera but the fact that it’s well made, intelligent and unremit-
tingly bleak. People expect to be scared when watching a horror film - it is
part of the fun - but Night Of The Living Dead shocked with its barbarity
and lack of hope or even understanding. The use of black and white pho-
tography (a necessity of the restrictive budget) enhanced the horror - the
format has always seemed more real or documentary anyway. Socially, the
film could not have happened at a more opportune time - many have attrib-
uted its success to America’s increasing inability to cope with the Vietnam
war and there is also resonance regarding the casting of a strong black lead.
This is not to say the film is entirely social commentary - there are
moments of unnerving terror including the shocking sight of a recently
deceased little girl stabbing her mother with a trowel. The opening ceme-
tery sequence is straight out of the EC horror comics from which Romero

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derives so much of his visual inspiration. The heroine shatters all filmic
expectations by spending much of the remaining time in a virtually cata-
tonic state of shock. Corpses are found on the staircase, decomposing, half-
eaten and the attempt to escape in a pick-up truck goes disastrously awry -
it crashes and burns, the zombies eating the tepid remains. This last scene
is so real it still shocks - Romero had his extras wolf down offal and
assorted nasty bits to get the realism his budget could not afford.
Interestingly the funding of the film meant that to retain some copyright
control on his creation Romero had to remake the film with most of the
original crew. The ‘All New’ Night Of The Living Dead was directed by
effects man Tom Savini, produced by Romero and in full bloody colour but
lacks the gritty documentary punch of the original.

Martin (1977)
Dir: George A Romero St: John Amplas, Lincoln Maazel, Christine For-
rest, Tom Savini
Martin is a troubled lad, cursed by visions of his past he sedates women,
rapes them and drinks their blood. Cuda, his religious cousin, is duty-
bound to look after the boy, decking the house with garlic and crucifixes.
But is Martin a vampire or a delusional serial killer? Can he find love in the
arms of a waking woman? And is his need to air his problems on a cheesy
radio show a cry for understanding or a plea to be caught?
It was inevitable that Romero would be convinced to make a vampire
film, but naturally Martin is quite unlike any other within the genre. This is
a low-budget production – gritty and realistic, yet reluctant to provide
definitive solutions - even by the film’s close we are still unsure whether
Martin is a vampire. Murder is a messy and protracted affair: Martin calms
his victims before the sedative takes effect, he has to try several times with
his razor to obtain a sufficient blood flow to quench his thirst, and the
cleaning-up can take as long as the preparation - he fakes the deaths as sui-
cides. He is meticulous, his crimes calculated and protracted, the sedative-
filled syringes, held in his mouth like surrogate fangs, are chilling. Yet
despite this, he still retains audience sympathy - his boyish looks and cries
for help on the radio mean we want him to escape as much as we don’t
want him to kill. Cuda appears to be the real perpetrator, filling Martin’s
head with threats and curses and wasting no opportunity to abuse the boy.
He even hires an exorcist to cast the demon from Martin. Black and white
flashbacks provide Martin’s dreampoint prior to periods of stress or ela-
tion, which compound the uncertainty. A classic film in every sense, it can
be read on multiple levels, each subsequent viewing revealing more.

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Dawn Of The Dead (1979)

Dir: George A Romero St: David Emge, Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross
When there’s no more room in Hell the dead shall walk the earth.
Hordes of hungry zombies roam the country, hide in basements and hang
around apartments. Slow, lumbering but focused, these muscle-munching
ex-people can only be stopped by a short, sharp, shot in the head. Four des-
perate people dream of escaping, but find themselves setting up home in a
shopping mall, a fragile calm in the eye of the storm.
Financed for a pitifully small budget, especially considering the massive
amount of make-up effects work, Dawn Of The Dead remains the ultimate
zombie epic. Teaming up with Italian supremo Argento (c.f.) this is
Romero’s show (he wrote, directed and edited) but benefits hugely from
Argento’s production/distribution muscle and the music of Goblin. Even
before we reach the central shopping mall, we’ve had the opportunity to
witness a catalogue of atrocities - a basement full of zombies being annihi-
lated by hit squads, two undead children sprayed with machine-gun fire, a
helicopter blade scalping and rowdy rednecks culling zombies as a family
sport. Inside the mall, our heroes begin mopping up the resident living dead
and setting up home. There is a great deal of humour in these scenes, which
goes a considerable way to offsetting the endless parade of carnage. We see
zombies on ice, struggling on escalators and in one (perhaps too silly)
scene, zombies on the receiving end of extra-gloppy custard pies. The scale
of the slaughter is quite phenomenal, hundreds of Romero fans became
extras, putting themselves through make-up purgatory for the privilege of
being dispatched on-camera. Savini’s work ranges from entrails-spilling
disembowelments to lorry squashes and plenty of stringy-gored cannibal-
ism. Many have commented on the film’s approach to consumerism and
the critique of capitalist values, citing the zombies’ latent memories of
what was important in their lives as an indictment of self-centred mall cul-
ture. Really the film’s attack is more critical than even this would suggest,
the main four protagonists may well wish to rid themselves of the zombie
burden and head for a utopian Caribbean island but once they discover the
comfort of limitless consumer appliances, they become as lazy and brain-
washed as the zombies. They may well be disgruntled by the vulgar impo-
sitions of the motorcycle raiders (led by Tom Savini) but have no more
right to be there than anyone else. Stacks of inferior (and occasionally far
more graphic) clones were rushed out to cash in on the film’s international
success - Lucio Fulci’s notorious Zombie Flesh Eaters was even marketed
as Zombi 2 in some quarters to cash in on Dawn Of The Dead’s continental
title.

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Dario Argento (1940-)

Italian cinema has given us so many movers in the horror field that it is
difficult to select just one as a representative, but Dario Argento is perhaps
a good choice because he reflects everything that people both love and hate
about Italian horror. He is an accomplished visual stylist, drenching his
canvas with intense colours and employing a dazzling array of expressive,
expensive and innovative camera movements. Characterisation is second-
ary to the overall operatic grandeur of the whole. This is not an isolated
style - much of his vision has its gestation in the world of art (particularly
Delveaux and Bosch) and in other prime movers of the Italian horror film.
Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava are obvious predecessors - Argento shares
their love of sumptuous non-realist art decoration and stylistic excess. In
particular Bava’s Blood And Black Lace appears to hold a tight fascination
with him due to its giallo origins. Giallo are pulp crime novels (originally
published on yellow stocked paper) with often lurid depiction of crimes
and murder. Immensely popular but frowned upon, they were ideal mate-
rial for film.
Argento’s first jobs in the industry were as scriptwriter on numerous
projects in virtually every conceivable genre. In westerns alone this ranged
from the pulpy delirium of Five Man Army (1969) to the internationally
acclaimed Leone classic Once Upon A Time In The West which he co-
wrote with Bernardo Bertolucci and Leone (although only credited as Story
by). His first film as director, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970 -
L’uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo), features a number of women terror-
ised and stabbed by a black-gloved figure in a raincoat, opening with an
audacious sequence where the hero, Sam, is trapped between two glass
doors and is forced to watch as a terrified Monica is brutally stabbed in
front of him. Argento’s murderers almost always wear black gloves to dis-
guise their identity and also, quite worryingly, give him the opportunity to
do all the POV stabbing you see himself! Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971 - Il
Gatto A Nove Code) follows a similar thematic thread, but ditches any lin-
ear coherence in a convoluted plot about genetic research into criminal
behaviour and its relation to a killer at large. Four Flies On Grey Velvet
(1972 - Quattro Mosche Di Velluto Grigio), bears all the hallmarks of a
good giallo - impossible to guess the murderer, extreme violence and
highly convoluted plot. The title derives from the premise that the last thing
a person sees before death is indelibly recorded on their retina, in this case
the titular insects and their proximity to unfashionably coloured fabric.
Deep Red (1976 - Profondo Rosso, confusingly titled Suspiria 2 elsewhere)
is the pinnacle of the whole giallo genre and a blueprint for Argento’s sub-

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sequent work. Freed of the shackles of reality, Suspiria (1977) marked the
start of The Three Mothers trilogy (although the third remains unmade), a
delirious and hallucinogenic horror set in a girls’ school. Inferno (1980)
moved the action to New York with a virtually non-stop barrage of hyp-
notic colouring. In Tenebrae (1982 also unwisely monikered Unsane in a
butchered US print) another writer, Peter Neale, is promoting his crime
novel, the pages of which have been found stuffed in the mouth of a girl
hacked to death with a razor. Argento ditches extreme colours for some-
thing a touch more antiseptic but the strong transference of guilt and some
intense flashbacks pull this one back in line. Sadly the same cannot be said
of Creepers (1985 - Phenomena), a misguided return to flies with an
embarrassed wheelchair-bound Donald Pleasence spending a great deal of
time trying to hide behind a maggot-ridden head. Far better is Opera
(1987) which could quite easily be the title of any of his films but here it
provides the setting as well as the accentuated hyper-realist tone. Again
Argento’s eye for the visual beauty of violence and the mechanics of the
film-making process are the raison d’être of the piece with the highlight
being an incredibly tense sequence where Mira (Daria Nicolodi) is looking
through a keyhole only to be shot through the eye in a way both shocking
and strangely ethereal. Two Evil Eyes (1990 - co-directed with George A
Romero c.f.) is a passable Edgar Allen Poe film with Argento directing The
Black Cat section. However the consternation over The Stendahl Syndrome
(1997) made up for it. Argento’s decision to cast his own daughter Asia in
the film was not greeted with cries of nepotism, but incomprehension and
fury because her character suffers the attention of a serial rapist. Despite
some impressive camera tracking and, mainly blue, lighting it is not as aes-
thetically distancing as his best work, yet retains some of the coldness.
Argento’s films, despite their debts to Hitchcock and Bava, are unremit-
ting in their personal vision. He doesn’t follow fashion but continues, albeit
sporadically these days, to make films that favour aesthetics over realism.
His role as producer has helped launch the careers of, in particular, two
other directors - Lamberto Bava (son of Mario and maker of, among others,
the gloriously over-the-top splatterfest Demons) and Michele Soavi (Stage-
fright, The Sect and The Church).

Deep Red (1976)

Dir: Dario Argento St: David Hemming
Marc and Carlo are jazz pianists. Marc’s the bourgeois womaniser,
Carlo the drunken proletariat homosexual. One night, while Marc is trying
to sober up his friend he is witness to the climax of a particularly bloody

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killing. Soon he is embroiled in a maze of murder and intrigue, aided and

occasionally hindered by arm-wrestling seductress journalist Gianna.
Deep Red is a transition from the crime pulp origins of Argento’s early
work to the visual experimentation and aesthetic overkill of his later films.
To this end the body count is relatively modest but the intensity and atten-
tion to set detail overwhelm the proceedings. Despite its apparent basis in
the ‘real world’ of Agatha Christie-style murders, the air of the paranormal
is rife - the lecture on the telepathic power of insects and children, the
occult leaning of Helga’s wall paintings, the ghost house and disturbed
child’s drawings. Together they create a disjointed other-worldliness that is
exploited by occasionally jarring camerawork. Argento’s world is one of
psychological manifestation and symbology; the murderer is revealed to
the viewer using objects - blood red twine dolls, marbles and an assortment
of knives blown up to full screen size. The murders are protracted, pre-
ceded by unbearable tension and voyeuristically subjective camerawork
and then emblazoned in a raucous cacophony of intense music. Death is
never trivial in Argento’s films and takes on a beauty of its own, the cam-
era cutting into the wound, exploiting the privileged position that even the
most demanding voyeur would find hard to achieve. The identity of the
murderer is kept secret not just because it’s a mystery, but because in some
sense the viewer is the murderer. This is established during the opening
credits, with a children’s rhyme playing over the silhouette of a stabbing -
every time we hear the tune, like the murderer, we not only anticipate death
(as the victim) but demand it (as the perpetrator). Flamboyant, loud and
audacious both visually and aurally, Deep Red is so much the work of an
auteur it is difficult to see who is meant to be watching this. Far too violent
for the art crowd, and far too arty and formalised for everyone else, this is
another slice of visceral chic.

Suspiria (1977)
Dir: Dario Argento St: Jessica Harper
“Do you know anything about witches?” Suzy’s enrolment at a top
dance academy gets off to a bad start as the first pupil she encounters is not
only confused, but has very little time to live. Suzy’s stay on campus seems
doomed to failure. With her health deteriorating, maggots raining from the
ceiling and the teachers appearing to leave every night (their footsteps
going the wrong way), maybe there’s something connected with the acad-
emy’s past - not just a school for dance but of the occult as well.
The words subtle and realistic are not in Suspiria’s vocabulary. From
the start, Argento immerses the viewer in a strange, disturbing and vicious

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world. In one of the most intensely meticulous murder sequences ever, a

girl peers out of the yellow room into the blue darkness beyond. Two eyes
stare back, a hand smashes the window and forces her head against the
pane until it shatters. She is then pursued and stabbed repeatedly, the cam-
era cutting so close as to see the knife pierce her still beating heart before
she’s bound with twine and dumped onto a glass ceiling. The ceiling
cracks, her body falls and is jerked into hanging position inches from the
floor. The remnants of the ornate glasswork have, meanwhile, found their
way into the head of a passing student who is impaled to the floor like an
etymologist’s first display attempt. The sustained violence of the scene
with its astonishing brutality and ear-bursting volume, means Argento
doesn’t need to bombard us with further brutalities for a substantial time
and can get along with the mystery at hand. The powerful use of strong
coloured lighting gives the Academy a magical feel - we know that the
place is evil without the murders. Suspiria is about mood, style and execu-
tion; coherence and plausible dialogue are secondary.
Argento’s detractors often point to Suspiria as a basis for repeated accu-
sations of violence and bias against women and the disabled (Deep Red is
often cited as homophobic too). It is difficult to deny this but there is also a
sense in which they have missed the point. Argento’s cinema is entirely
about image. It is not factual, it is not realistic and does not campaign
hatred or violence to any group. Unlike the more distasteful slasher mov-
ies, these do not gloat about violence and empower the viewer to become
the violator, but are instead about the aesthetics of violence and the rela-
tionship between the voyeur and the crime. When the Academy’s secrets
are finally revealed we are really none the wiser; the process of reaching
the conclusion is far more important than the revelations themselves. Sus-
piria’s combination of tension, graphic violence and unrepentant
soundtrack makes for intoxicating viewing.

Inferno (1980)
Dir: Dario Argento
Rose is becoming obsessed with threes; ‘Three Mothers,’ three keys and
three buildings designed by disappearing alchemist architect Varelli. Her
brother Mark, a musicologist in Rome, gets an urgent call to see her but too
late - she becomes another victim in a line of savage murders that seem to
follow Mark like a trail of smoke to a cigarette. But what has this to do with
the mothers of sighs, tears and darkness, weird bookshop owner Kazanian
or murderous cats?

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Inferno represents everything that is wonderful and infuriating about

Argento’s oeuvre. A semi-sequel to Suspiria we learn a little more about
the Three Mothers, but not much. Narrative cohesion isn’t an absolute
necessity in a horror film (Fulci’s garbled The Beyond is in a similar, if less
elegant, vein) but does help to engage the viewer to visual ideas. Inferno’s
solid refusal to pander to audience needs for a narrative form distances the
viewer, turning them into coldly detached and uninvited voyeurs rather
than observers. What you are left with is a sumptuous European art film, a
poem of light and sound that enthrals with its sheer audacity and operatic
visual form. Every frame is splashed with lurid neon-bright colour, picking
out details and emphasising space at the expense of naturalism. The only
time Argento departs from this is when Rose retrieves the keys in the
flooded cellar beneath the house - and this is shot in such a stylised, murky
light that it is just as surreal. The set pieces are so tightly bound that they
flow from one to another - Rose’s underground dive kicking her way to
safety on the head of a decomposing body, a savage attack by cats cut short
by the shocking intervention of a tramp, eyes plucked and flaming bodies
falling through glass. What sets these, and other scenes of mayhem, apart is
not just the virtuoso camerawork and editing, or the graphic level of blood-
letting but the emphasis on the difficulty and variety of the kill. When Rose
meets her end she is pinned to a window sill and has a pane of glass shoved
onto her neck, not once, but twice. All Argento’s trademarks are present
and correct: black-gloved killer, lizards, lifts, insects and a pounding, ear-
splitting soundtrack. Visually and aurally this is nothing short of miracu-
lous but emotionally it is at best antiseptic and at worst utterly barren.

David Cronenberg (1943-)

The fiercely individual work of David Cronenberg has divided audi-
ences and critics alike. Despite being well respected, he tends to work on
lower budget films to maintain control of his projects outside of the conser-
vative studio system. To this end he collaborates with a core base of people
with whom he can trust his often bizarre and disturbing ideas - these
include composer Howard Shore, designer Carol Spier, cinematographer
Peter Suschitzky and costumier Denise Cronenberg. Working mainly in his
native Canada, he has been the centre of controversy over films that some
people find unpalatable or even obscene. What makes his work provoke
such strong reactions? He deals with uncomfortable subjects: diseases,
mutations, psychological deficiencies, car crashes, sexual ‘perversion.’ All
these subjects are uncomfortably close to home, filmed in an unflinching
and clinical style. He also refuses to compromise his intellectual integrity.

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You don’t understand what’s going on? Tough, he doesn’t care. He never
speaks down, patronises or provides simple solutions. His best work
remains on the peripheries of modern cinema, slick, thought provoking and
unremittingly ‘arty’ in tone.
Cronenberg began making shorts at university and continued with his
first feature Stereo, concerning telepathy experimentation that would later
provide a blueprint for Scanners. Crimes Of The Future similarly con-
cerned research experimentation. Neither film is conventional - with non-
synched sound, excruciating long shots and a tendency to dwell on futurist
architecture, they remain fascinating cult items. His first commercially
released film was Shivers (aka The Parasite Murders), and its success led
to Rabid (1977), starring Marilyn Chambers with a carnivorous sexual
organ in her armpit (seriously) that turns its victims into slobbering mur-
dering madmen. Cronenberg’s next film The Brood (1979) dealt with the
more disturbing side of motherhood and femininity. This brood of homi-
cidal dwarf things are children bred after medical experimentation on the
mother figure, physical manifestations of internal rage. This ethic of the
metaphysical realised would find its ultimate protégé in the shape of
Shinya Tsukamoto but remains at heart a psychological extension of the
folk lycanthrope myths and their concern with bestial sexuality.
Scanners’ (1981) occasionally unfathomable plot about duelling broth-
ers with frightening telekinetic powers is most famously remembered for
the astonishing opening sequence where a newsreader’s head explodes
through sheer mind power. It also features some extraordinary set work
including a huge hollow sculpture of a head. Videodrome (1982) remains
contentious - a masterpiece to some, an unfocused mess to others. James
Woods’ character is sent to investigate Videodrome, a television station
where people are taken to be sexually abused for the viewers’ entertain-
ment. What makes the film so edgy is Woods’ embroilment into the Video-
drome ethos eventually resulting in neither the characters nor the viewers
having any idea of what is real and what is hallucination. After such an
audacious work it is perhaps unsurprising that The Dead Zone (1983), a
Stephen King adaptation starring Christopher Walken as a man fresh out of
a coma discovering he has precognitive powers, was so insipid.
Following this, Cronenberg made a trilogy of unusual love stories - The
Fly, Dead Ringers and M. Butterfly (1993). He also moved onto some
ambitious projects, attempting to film the ‘unfilmable.’ William Bur-
roughs’ cult novel Naked Lunch (1991), a cross-cutting between biography
and fiction, succeeded admirably visually but ultimately failed to emote.
Then J G Ballard’s Crash (1996) allowed the characters to wallow in their

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deviant sexual pleasures, Cronenberg filming wounds and scars with the
touch of a pornographer, enticing the viewer to derive gratification from
the mutilation of the human form. After a press furore over the eventual
decision to pass the film uncut in the UK, hundreds of people went to be
‘revolted’ by this ‘obscenity’ and were merely bored. For those familiar
with Cronenberg’s output it was another wonderful film with a particularly
hallucinatory Howard Shore score.
eXistenZ (1999) was a far less contentious affair featuring Jude Law as a
man trapped (or not...) inside a living computer game that acts via an
umbilical jack plug inserted in the base of the spine. Unlike Videodrome
though, everything is explained by the film’s close. Eminently watchable
and a good, solid ride, it just lacks the cerebral depth of some of his other
films.
At his best Cronenberg is an innovator of dark, clinical films which deal
with human sexuality, disease and the mutation of physicality. Occasion-
ally, his precision can leave the viewer as cold as the films they are watch-
ing, but overall his commitment to intellectual but unflinching horror is
remarkable.

Shivers (1976)
Dir: David Cronenberg St: Paul Hampton, Lynn Lowry, Barbara Steele
Welcome to Starliner Towers, your new, safe home on Starliner Island,
a world away from the bustle of the city. We have plush, clean apartments
to suit everyone and our team of friendly staff will tend to all your needs,
be they medical or recreational. Enjoy the security and safety that only
Starliner can offer you. You can be sure that your neighbours will be peo-
ple just like you - happy, regular, decent people all willing to spread their
experimental parasitic venereal disease with liberal abandon and invite you
into their happy, pacifist word of glassy-eyed orgies and sexual experimen-
tation.
Shivers wasn’t released into cinemas, it was unleashed. Cronenberg’s
first ‘commercial’ (if that word can be used) feature is a gleeful orgy of
sexual violation and integration. Cronenberg is relentless and unflinching,
a voyeur looking from the doorways of the apartment block - it’s like star-
ing in on your neighbours. Even the opening has a strong sense of shock
and outrage as the mundane aspects of a couple purchasing an apartment
intercuts with Dr Hobbes’ savage attack on Annabelle. Annabelle is wear-
ing schoolgirl’s clothing and the doctor’s intentions are anything but clear.
It is only later that we find out she was a prostitute and by then he has

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strangled her, sliced her open, poured acid into her stomach cavity and slit
his own throat. All to no avail because Nick Tudor has contracted the para-
site anyway. Cronenberg filmed this queasy opening partly handheld. It’s
intimate and violent, implying the viewer’s active engagement. Dr Hobbes’
parasites were designed to replace unhealthy human organs, but his ideas
took a grandiose turn for the bizarre - “man is an animal that thinks too
much,” he reasoned and set about instigating world peace by creating a par-
asite that was “a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that
would turn the world into one big orgy.” It worked too. Before long, Nick
is tending his new parasites like pets as they visibly move around his stom-
ach area - a queasy effect that has subsequently been used many times,
from The X-Files to The Mummy. By the end, his body is riddled with an
impressive brood, all wiggling free from his smoking abdomen in bloody
eagerness to find a host. No one is safe, regardless of age (both hobbly old
pensioners and schoolchildren are up for a bit of French kissing), sexual
persuasion or gender; once you’ve got the parasite you become a bisexual
nymphomaniac. In one notorious scene (there are many, many of them)
Barbara Steele has a rather intimate bath-time encounter with a creature
from the plughole, thrashing around before succumbing to amorous bliss -
the image is exploited to the max in the film’s hysterically sleazy poster,
dragging in a larger audience than the promise of an arthouse film with
allusions to J G Ballard and Philip K Dick ever would. The parasites them-
selves are like phallic, bloody turds that leap into people’s mouths and turn
them into sex mad, uncontrollable but happy people. Yes they are savagely
attacked but, Cronenberg seems to be saying, aren’t they so much nicer
now? In many ways this is a pornographic film for lovers of disease where
“everything is erotic - disease is the love of two alien creatures for each
other.” The parasites cannot exist without their hosts, and the hosts are
blissfully healthy. So it’s a happy ending after all. Ahhh.

The Fly (1986)

Dir: David Cronenberg St: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis
Seth Brundle hates to travel - it’s a motion thing - which explains why
he wants to build a teleporter. After falling for journalist Veronica at a dull
party he continues trials with baboons and steaks until he achieves success.
Fuelled by alcohol and an unfounded concern that Veronica is ditching him
for her repulsive ex-boyfriend, Seth himself enters the telepod. Unfortu-
nately, so does a housefly resulting in genetic level splicing and he emerges
Brundlefly. Now he has a disease with a purpose - half benevolent, half

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malevolent - but can true love run its course as he gets progressively less
human and sheds more body parts?
Often dismissed by Cronenberg’s admirers as his ‘slight commercial
film,’ The Fly remains his most financially lucrative work. At heart it’s as
simple as you can get and a very emotional experience; boy meets girl, they
fall in love, something comes between them. Brundle’s world is so isolated
it is appropriate that we rarely venture from it; set mostly in one room, this
could have quite easily been a play. Goldblum is in his element as Brundle,
a geeky, twitchy guy with cringeworthy sense of humour and a line in iden-
tical suits. Until he is merged with the fly, that is. Then he becomes irrita-
ble, paranoid, superfit and a marathon shag machine (“Penetration beyond
the veil of the flesh”). All these changes are visible not just in the make-up
but also in Goldblum’s expressive mannerisms. Like most of Cronenberg’s
oeuvre, the disease is not seen in an entirely negative light by either the vic-
tim or the film - Seth isn’t better or worse, just different. The concern lies
with Brundle’s development - the rapid metabolism of the fly creates
bizarre side effects; he may need to walk on crutches but he can climb on
the ceiling, he might deposit his body parts in The Brundle Museum of
Natural History but he can leap through windows and carry people up stairs
without breaking into a sweat. The damage to Veronica is entirely psycho-
logical, she is forced to shotgun her man in the head and suffers horrific
visions of aborting a maggot (delivered by Cronenberg himself in a suit-
ably sick cameo). However, the film’s ultimate feelgood message is that
love can thrive no matter how someone looks.
A more violent, shallow but watchable sequel The Fly II (Walas, 1989)
was made but remains an inferior film, lacking the emotion that people
wrongly assume Cronenberg is incapable of showing.

Dead Ringers (1988)

Dir: David Cronenberg St: Jeremy Irons, Jeremy Irons, Geneviève
Bujold
“We make women fertile and that’s all we do.” Elliot and Beverly Man-
tle are identical twins. They are also gynaecologists. Oh, and Beverley is
going mad. He’s the quiet sensitive, psychotic genius while Elliot is the
confident public face of their international success. They share everything,
including patient Claire Niveau, an actress whose promiscuous desire for
offspring triggers the brothers’ descent into a downward spiral of drug
addiction, insanity and eventually death.

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Despite the absence of graphic bloodletting and low body count, Dead
Ringers still manages to be Cronenberg’s most disturbing film. Partly this
is due to it being based on reality, but mainly because of the matter-of-fact
way that he creates his tale - the morbid events are horrific enough, so he
wisely stays clear of any sensationalism (except for one particularly outré
dream sequence). The horror lies in the surgical treatment of women and
the normality of the surgery on show. Irons gives Oscar-worthy perfor-
mances as the twins, you never doubt who is whom and it’s far more than
Beverly wearing the fuddy-duddy jumper. The shots where the twins
appear together are remarkable for being unremarkable; there is no fanfare
as we casually view the two talking side by side while being tracked down
a corridor.
Matters turn to the surreal when the production and costume design is
given full reign; pillar-box red robes bleed against the clinical white of the
surgery and, most horrible of all, bizarre surgical instruments are manufac-
tured by an artist. These gnarled metal sculptures of surgical torture are the
film’s strongest image - intricate and possessing half-grasped concepts of
probing and pain. Perhaps deeper is the implication that women deprived
of the ability to reproduce find solace in self-abasement and degradation.
Claire confesses to being “extremely promiscuous,” demanding that she is
“bad and needs to be punished” which, for her sins, she is; tied up with sur-
gical appliances prior to coitus, unaware that she is the sexual plaything of
both brothers. There is a sense that the links between sex and death, cre-
ation and destruction are strong, the wound a source of pleasure as well as
pain. Elliot’s death at the hands of his brother may be surgical but is purely
sexual - he is splayed out like a dissected rat. The implications of using the
very instruments of his brother’s medical research to create a vagina-like
cavity in his body are all too clear. He is effectively feminized and brutal-
ised in one act. By no means a conventional film Dead Ringers rewards
subsequent viewing because of its subtlety and depth while retaining that
‘too close for comfort’ edge.

Joe Dante (1946-)

Born in New Jersey, Joe Dante’s unusual portfolio takes the language of
conventional Hollywood film-making and turns it on its head. Often
insanely surreal for mainstream pictures, Dante’s best work can be viewed
on many levels - either as a straight linear narrative, a subversive look at
American mores, criticising consumerist desires or as a rich source of
filmic in-jokes. This playfulness, using riddles, appropriated genre names
and visual references make Dante’s films fun to watch, like a roller-coaster

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and puzzle mixed together. As such he is among the first of the postmodern
horror directors. His lifelong love of cartoons and (especially Fifties) sci-
ence fiction/horror films permeates his work with cinephilic glee, as
though he is having as much fun creating and destroying his ‘toys’ on
screen as his admirers have soaking up the finished results of his labours.
Dante began his apprenticeship under Roger Corman, editing trailers
before co-directing Hollywood Boulevard with Alan Arkin, a parody of the
low-grade production company who funded the picture. This black come-
dic referential style would put him in good stead for his solo feature Pira-
nha (1978) which is more than the Jaws rip-off it was initially dismissed
as. Its deserved success gave Dante a bigger budget to make The Howling
(1980), a hip deconstruction of the werewolf film. By now he had secured
larger studio investment in his ideas, starting with the best part of the multi-
director portmanteau film The Twilight Zone. Again blending a love of car-
toons, violence and black humour, his segment features a boy whose fam-
ily and a passing stranger have to maintain a grotesque ‘happiness’ if they
are to remain unmolested by the phantasmagorical manifestations of car-
toon characters that police the heavily distorted house. Dante’s first smash
followed - the deeply irresponsible anarcho-horror-comedy Gremlins.
Then came a stint directing segments of Amazing Stories and the variable
B-movie spoof Amazon Women On The Moon (1987).
Explorers (1985) is an amiable tale of a pug-ugly alien who befriends an
all-American boy. What’s more, the alien can even speak English, but its
only comprehension comes from television shows whose ever-happy lines
he spurts out to the point of meaningless garbage. A better example of the
flip side of Spielberg’s world is hard to imagine. Dante is just as cruel but
seems to revel in the chaos as much as his hero Chuck Jones (a regular
cameo star of many of his films). InnerSpace (1987) was a visually impres-
sive but fairly lacklustre reworking of Fantastic Voyage (1966) and The
‘burbs (1988) took a twisted look at peculiar neighbours. Matinee (1993)
features John Goodman as a thinly-disguised version of low-budget film-
maker William Castle, promoting his cheesy horror films like a carnival
event, full of tacky gimmicks and tricks. It’s a nostalgic look at one of
America’s most eccentric film businessmen as Goodman goes about
financing, making and hawking his latest brainchild Mant! “Half man, half
ant, all terror.” Dante’s dedication to the B-movie process went as far as to
make Mant itself, used in part of the film. If it had been shot in Emergo it
would have been perfect. After more TV work including Eerie, Indiana,
Dante returned to the big screen with Small Soldiers (1998), reverting to
the consumerist pastiche of Gremlins, which simultaneously entertains
with its over-the-top violence and asides to American militarism.

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Piranha (1978)
Dir: Joe Dante St: Heather Menzies, Brad Dillman, Barbara Steele, Paul
Bartel
Those military types genetically manufactured an all-water, super-sav-
age, fast-breeding breed of piranha in order to win the Vietnam war. But
before they could let loose Operation Razorteeth’s ferocious fishies, the
conflict ended leaving them nothing to eat but the odd straying skinny dip-
per. Dizzy investigator Maggie is hunting for two such errant youngsters
but her reckless investigation unwittingly unleashes the snappy critters into
the river. With a summer camp packed full of kids downstream, it’s only a
matter of time before the nasty nippers gnaw at the noisy nippers.
John Sayles’ witty script has its tongue wedged as far in its cheek as a
piranha’s oversized jaw. Although comparisons with Jaws are inevitable,
Piranha stands out amongst the multitude of pretenders by its brazen disre-
gard for taste, playful exuberance and ante-upping manoeuvres on every
aspect of Spielberg’s earnest horror film. Jaws has a dead skinny dipper at
the start? Piranha has two. Jaws has one carnivorous fish? Piranha has a
school of ‘em. A kid on an inflatable gets it? A whole camp full of little
darlings get it. Instead of an inept vote-conscious mayor, we have the camp
(in more ways than one) leader played with gusto by cult director Paul Bar-
tel (Eating Raoul, Death Race 2000) who rules his adopted mob with
incredulous stupidity. Similarly the army deal with the matter in as over-
the-top way they can, by poisoning the water - “We’ll just pollute the bas-
tards to death.”
Dante films his killers with a frenetic pace and almost abstract intensity.
Partly this disguises the fact that they are clearly puppets but it adds a great
deal of vigour to the proceedings, masking the action with gallons of blood
and cutting swiftly between shots. Being small in size but large in number
the resultant injuries are horrific, no chewed-off limbs but lots of gnawed
gaping wounds. Everything escalates towards the conclusion, each attack
multiplying in on-screen ferocity to keep the audience’s attention. The
level of violence is high and often grizzly but it remains in essence cartoon,
the premise itself is daft enough to support this. The irony of it is that Pira-
nha is gorier, tighter, less pompous and funnier than Jaws and doesn’t
leave you freaking out at the concept of swimming.
Successful enough to spawn a sequel, Piranhas II: The Flying Killers is
more stupid than even the title suggests with winged piranhas massacring a
yuppie barbecue. Directed by James Cameron the film contains some simi-
lar underwater camerawork to his blockbuster Titanic.

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The Howling (1980)

Dir: Joe Dante St: Dee Wallace, Patrick MacNee, Dennis Dugan, John
Carradine, Slim Pickens
Top psychiatrist Dr Waggner, her employers and hubby Bill all agree
that TV journalist Karen White should take a break. After all, she has come
perilously close to being mutilated by Eddie the Mangler. What better
place for respite than the good doctor’s Colony in the country? Actually
there are lots of better places - the residents are bonkers, Marsha is a nym-
phomaniac with an eye for Bill, and there’s a cabin in the woods decked
out with animal remains. Good thing the place isn’t crawling with lycan-
thropes then...
It’s typical: you wait ages for a decent werewolf film to turn up (empha-
sis on decent, Werewolf Of Washington and The Beast Must Die do not
count) and then two come along at once. Although oft compared to An
American Werewolf In London (1981) the two are fundamentally different.
Landis’ finest hour is single focused, single werewolved, quadruped,
expensive and very funny while Dante’s is (relatively) cheap, ambitious,
multi-wolved, bipedal and a lot more disturbing. Within the space of a
commercial exploitation film, Dante has produced an eye-catching critique
of the watching process. Rather than centre on the obvious aspects of hor-
ror film’s fascination with voyeurism, The Howling confronts the ethics of
the entire viewing experience by bombarding the screen with images of
filming and its consequences. The flicker of the porno film with Karen’s
reaction flashed back on a camera lens pointing at her, Karen photograph-
ing pictures at the cabin while she herself is framed by a mirror and the
opening of video static all go towards questioning the nature of watching.
Then there are all manner of references to wolves in the media; the charac-
ters, notably Terry Fisher and Fred Francis, have names that affectionately
refer to werewolf film directors while the fully converted lycanthrope is
bipedal in the manner of that shown in the cartoon of the Three Pigs (which
plays in the background along with more orthodox wolf fare). These trans-
formations start out half-seen but impressive (as when Marsha and Bill
change during coitus) and escalate to full-on effects work, all bubbling
skin, ripping nails and protruding jaws. These are ferocious beasts; biting
mid-jump, slashing deep, severed arms shimmer back into their human
form, Eddie ejects a bullet from his head like he’s squeezing a spot, and the
pack relish their superiority. Indeed they are superior to the point of arro-
gance - they exhibit flagrant disbelief that anyone would have the foresight
to pre-pack silver bullets (conveniently purchased from a New York esote-

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ria emporium). The Howling delivers everything an exploitation horror

film should.

Gremlins (1984)
Dir: Joe Dante St: Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, Zach Galligan, Scott Bra-
dly
When Rand Peltzer buys a mogwai named Gizmo for his son Billy, he is
warned there are three rules that he must obey: keep it out of the light,
don’t let it get wet and most importantly never, ever feed it after midnight.
Naturally, Gizmo does accidentally have water spilled on him and five
furry new Gizmos spring from his back. Not so bad then. But these new
mogwai are very naughty, trick Billy into feeding them after midnight and
transform into Gremlins. Oops!
Gremlins is a great film - funny, silly and sick. It paves the way for the
Nineties horror film, with lots of emphasis of the rules, a good deal of fore-
shadowing and plenty of references to other films. Gizmo is the ultimate
bundle of fun, years before Japanese cartoons entered Western culture -
he’s all big wide eyes, little button nose and endearing squeaks. The grem-
lins though are a sharp contrast - scaly skin, pointy teeth and evil cackles as
they set about causing chaos. Because the film was produced by Spielberg,
the extra budget gave Dante the clout to have armies of homicidal pets run
amok in middle America. And what fun they have - they are completely
anarchic, so their executions are justifiably outrageous, but fun, particu-
larly those at the hands of Billy’s mum, who knocks one into a food proces-
sor and splats another in the microwave. Dante’s references here all relate
to Christmas – Gizmo is a present, Billy’s girlfriend Kate hates the festive
season because her father was found dead in their chimney dressed like
Santa Claus and there are nods to festive films such as Capra’s It’s A Won-
derful Life, and the wonderful Wizard Of Oz. The film’s combination of
splatter and cute has endeared it to as many people as were repulsed by it,
or dismissed it as being childish. A belated sequel Gremlins 2: The New
Batch was also directed by Dante and is just as much fun - think muppets
with gore.

Wes Craven (1949-)

The terms Wes Craven and horror are synonymous. For almost thirty
years, Craven has been scaring mainstream audiences and has been respon-
sible for creating a number of familiar horror icons. Although his reputa-
tion is that of shockmaster, his films are actually intelligent. There are

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certain themes that run throughout most of his work - teenagers coming to
terms with growing up, alongside parental conflicts or guilt transference.
Dreams play an important role - the merging of fantasy with reality not
only provides an opportunity to produce some stunning and surreal imag-
ery, but acts as a useful device to create scares or shocks. Starting his
career as an editor, Craven’s first opportunity to direct came from the Sean
Cunningham-produced Last House On The Left (1972). This vicious
exploitation revenge movie where a gang of rapist murderers are them-
selves tortured when a house they visit happens to be home to their vic-
tim’s parents is a modern-day version of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring
(1959). It remains banned in the UK and routinely condemned elsewhere.
Craven’s next project was the brutal The Hills Have Eyes (1977) concern-
ing a family of campers at the top of the menu when they bump into a
group of cannibals. The tension throughout is high, particularly a scene
involving a gun being shoved into a mouth and the trigger being sllloooow-
wly pulled. After spending some time working in TV, Craven directed
Deadly Blessing (1981) featuring a religious sect pursuing a woman. It had
some nice dream imagery, Sharon Stone and little else. The Hills Have
Eyes II (1985) couldn’t match its predecessor’s tense nastiness but revived
‘that bald bloke’ for another creepy outing. Swamp Thing (1982) based on
the DC comic was fun, silly and had its tongue firmly in its cheek, although
it was at times surprisingly moving. Adrienne Barbeau was the woman for
whom a giant mutant vegetable creature (once a scientist) would fall in
love. It was in 1984 that he consolidated his position as a mainstream hor-
ror director with the genuinely scary A Nightmare On Elm Street starring
serial slayer Freddy Krueger. Its timing and success ensured that sequels
would follow, and although Craven himself had very little input to the sub-
sequent films (save writing the only passable entry in Part Three), follow
they did. Just when Freddy had really seemed to have breathed his last,
Craven returned to him in 1994 with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, a
knowing self-referential nod to the series, that characterised many horror
films of the mid to late Nineties. After the first Elm Street, his movies
ranged from the weird and bizarre to rather trite mainstream - it was never
easy to predict how the next one would turn out. Deadly Friend (1986), a
typical teen Weird Science-esque shocker about a dead girl being given a
robot’s brain, was suitably brainless. The Serpent And The Rainbow (1987)
took Bill Pullman to Haiti, where he would search for a drug used by voo-
doo priests and encounter all sorts of creepy-crawlies and weird dreams.
The utterly barmy Shocker (1989) featured a serial killer who, as a result of
his electrocution, could travel through televisions and electrical wiring,
whilst maintaining a psychic link with a kid. Incongruous, occasionally

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very nasty it bounces like a mad thing from the tired prison horrors it pas-
tiches to slapstick scatological humour derived in part from Keaton’s Sher-
lock Jnr (1924). The People Under The Stairs was a quirky and paranoid
little number while Vampire In Brooklyn (1995) proved popular due to the
appearance of Eddie Murphy as a vampire seeking his true love. With a
preposterous script, and a few sick moments, this is one that relies on the
comedy and is better than expected.
The third era of Craven’s career began when he teamed up with script-
writer Kevin Williamson in the Nineties. Scream launched a new series of
horrors and created a template for many current postmodern horror films.
The combination of Williamson’s sassy and streetwise scripting with Cra-
ven’s considerable experience creating scares was an unmitigated success.
Two sequels followed with Craven making an unexpected diversion into
the bitter-sweet drama territory with Music Of The Heart (1999).
Despite his reputation as a modern master of horror, Craven’s films usu-
ally have an air of difference about them that has proven influential on his
peers. Even as producer on films like Wishmaster, his name is a ‘stamp of
approval’ on many video covers.

A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

Dir: Wes Craven St: Johnny Depp, Ronnee Blakley, Nick Corri, Robert
Englund
A group of friends are having nightmares, really terrifying ones that
seem to have a warped and twisted reality. Not long after, Tina and Rod are
killed in their sleep. Nancy begins to realise that dreams can come true. It
then becomes horribly clear that she’s up against child murderer Freddy
Krueger, who was burnt to death by vigilante parents some years before.
A Nightmare On Elm Street remains a defining point in Eighties horror
films; Freddy’s appeal having much to do with the cut of his costume - the
dirty sweater, the hat and, of course, the razor-endowed glove. Freddy is a
sadist and a child killer, but most importantly he is not tangible – he does
not exist in the real world and therefore seems unassailable. Craven com-
bines the inevitability of succumbing to sleep with the savagery of the
serial slayer. It’s an outstanding move, the victims must sleep eventually
(an update on Invasion Of The Body Snatchers), and the film can focus and
play upon on the blurring between reality and dreamtime, a theme that Cra-
ven uses regularly. The dream sequences make the whole film one
extended set piece, phasing in and out of alternative realities - Nancy fol-
lowing a trail of blood in the wake of her body-bagged friend, Glen sucked

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into his bed only to be ejected as a volcanic eruption of gore, Freddy’s

abnormally wide arms sparking the walls with his blades and the terrifying
sequence in the bath as Nancy drifts into sleep and the glove emerges
through the bubbles to drag her down. Craven never lets go - spooky kid’s
rhymes, half-grasped horrors and stilted whispers of unspeakable atrocities.
Iconic and influential, it spawned more imitators and sequels than were
strictly necessary.

The People Under The Stairs (1991)

Dir: Wes Craven St: Brandon Adams, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie
Poindexter’s family ain’t doing so good, facing eviction from their nasty
landlords. The only way ‘Fool’ Dexter can think of raising triple rent in
double quick time is to steal the money from the landlords themselves,
hence adding a sense of irony to the proceedings. Trouble is, a thirteen year
old burgling a house of two resolutely evil people doesn’t seem like good
odds and, what’s more, there are creatures that live under the stairs whose
idea of fast food is more human than bovine.
The US class system and prejudicial attitudes confronted allegorically
as a horror film with midget cannibals and the Hurleys from Twin Peaks
really shouldn’t work, but strangely it does. Poor little Alice is kept in line
by her ‘mummy and daddy’ who lock her in and chastise her for helping to
feed the people under the stairs. Told that “bad girls go to Hell” she is the
product of capitalist motivation and greed taken to its limits - she must be
seen to be good despite the atrocities within the house. The people under
the stairs have become the literal underclass because of their oppression
but do nothing to escape their plight. It is only when they are pushed too far
that they finally revolt, but by then what possible hope of humanity
remains? Craven’s typically surreal sense of horror is allowed full reign; a
deformed arm stretching out from the skirting boards, electrified doors,
Father’s gimp fetish suit and a dog with a severed hand in its mouth.
Because the film rarely ventures outside the walls of the house it maintains
a menacing air of claustrophobia. In some respects this is actually a warped
updating of Hansel and Gretel with Alice and Dexter as two children at the
mercy of adults, running away through a scary urban forest. Despite not
achieving commercial success, The People Under The Stairs is nonetheless
one of Craven’s most satisfying films.

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Scream (1996)
Dir: Wes Craven St: Neve Campbell, Drew Barrymore, David Arquette,
Courtney Cox
Sidney has been having a rough time since her mother died. Things
don’t get any better though when her boyfriend is thrown into jail, there’s
an irritating journalist hassling her and everyone she knows starts getting
stalked by a mysterious masked killer.
The movie that resurrected a genre, Scream owes a huge debt to its pre-
decessors from the Seventies and Eighties, but crucially doesn’t compro-
mise what made them so popular in the first place. Like Friday The
Thirteenth’s hockey mask and Freddy’s glove, the killer’s billowing black
cape and mask (very Munch) make for easy audience identification, and
simultaneously allow the killer’s identity to remain unknown until the very
end. The film’s a comedy and a quiz in one - genre devotee Randy lays
down the rules of the horror film to the assembled throng - don’t have sex,
do drugs and never say “I’ll be right back,” just before disappearing off on
his own. It never balks when it comes to the scares and the gore, so that
while the revelations are as obscure as expected, the tension remains.
Indeed the original cut of the film was deemed too scary, so some of the
murders (notably the opening killing of Casey’s eviscerated boyfriend) are
trimmed, but this doesn’t detract from your enjoyment - the build-ups and
red herrings are always the scariest bits anyway. Scream 2 capitalised on
the ‘rules of the sequel’ by increasing the body count and the elaborate
manner of the deaths but fortunately not decreasing the quality. The same
cannot be said of the passable Scream 3, a sign that being self-referential
can turn a film into a bore (it was not, incidentally, penned by Williamson)
between some admittedly fun set pieces.

Clive Barker (1952-)

Clive Barker shot to fame with his Books Of Blood, a series of horror
short stories and novellas notable for their attention to visceral minutia and
graphic descriptions of mythical horrors. These and the publication of
longer works placed him in the limelight as one of the world’s premiere
contemporary horror writers. But Barker is more than just a writer of sto-
ries, he has written theatre productions, scripts, is a talented (if disturbing)
artist whose works often adorn his books’ dustjackets and, of course, he is
a film director.
Barker’s first foray into the celluloid world began with the short Salome
(1973), an amateur black and white 16mm film concerning the last days of

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John the Baptist. Although cheaply shot, the influence of Jean Cocteau and
Kenneth Anger is apparent. The Forbidden (1975) is even more avant-
garde in its execution. Shot entirely in negative which further increases the
hallucinatory nightmarish aspect, like its forebear it remained unseen until
well after Barker had established himself as a mainstream director.
His first feature film production came with Underworld (1985), a tale of
medical mutants cowering in their own society, fearful of the evil doctor
who created them. The script was written purely for the screen but there are
certainly hints of Cabal (Nightbreed) present. Next came Rawhead Rex
(1986), adapted by Barker from his own short story concerning the awak-
ening of a nine-foot pre-Roman beast with an insatiable appetite for flesh.
Both of these films were directed by George Pavlou on pitifully low bud-
gets and went straight to video. Unperturbed, Barker adapted his story The
Hellbound Heart into a tight screenplay, showing that a visceral, believable
horror film could be made cheaply by directing it himself. The film was
Hellraiser and its success launched a franchise from which Barker would
reap rewards.
He continued as producer on the Hellraiser series but a far more suc-
cessful film resulted in the adaptation of his story The Forbidden as Candy-
man (Rose, 1992). Key to the film’s success is the slow, foetid pace of the
tale and the way that it remains unsettling, nasty and genuinely shocking,
remaining faithful to its source. Again sequels resulted.
Nightbreed saw Barker embark on a large scale studio project but the
final results were hacked by befuddled executives worried about how to
market the end result. Lord Of Illusions similarly suffered studio hostility.
Sadly he has not returned to the director’s chair but continues to exert a
huge influence on the media, introducing his A To Z Of Horror for the BBC
and continuing to write. His oft-mentioned affinity with fellow British
director James Whale led to his enthusiastic involvement in Bill Condon’s
moving film of the last days of that director’s life Gods And Monsters
(1998) as executive producer.
Barker’s work is replete with religious (often pagan) symbolism and the
links between pleasure and pain. The mechanics of death, mutilation and
the horror process are never shied from within his work and develop a mas-
ochistic aesthetic of their own. In Hellraiser the Cenobites are shown
“opening the doors of Heaven and Hell” to give their victim “pleasure and
pain indivisible,” and as a director and visionary Barker does nothing less.

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BodyHorror.fm Page 88 Sunday, March 18, 2001 2:54 PM

Hellraiser (1987)
Dir: Clive Barker St: Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Lau-
rence
Frank’s a very naughty boy, in seeking new thrills his body and soul
have been ripped asunder by the decidedly unpleasant Cenobites. It’s down
to his lover (and wife of his brother Larry) Julia to supply him with human
blood so he can reassemble his body and escape the supernatural clutches
of the sadists who want his very being.
Barker’s feature debut is an audacious display of extremely unpleasant
imagery, executed with astonishing special effects that are at times rather
too realistic for comfort. The plot is painfully basic but this is used to create
a mythical inevitability. In many horror films, the act of showing the mon-
ster dissipates the terror, but Barker’s depictions are so extreme they con-
front the viewer directly and, crucially, conceal a greater menace. When
the leading Cenobite intones “We have such sights to show you” the impli-
cations are all too clear - the atrocities we have seen are paltry hors d’oeu-
vres to a far more substantial main course. The main drive is the boundary
between sexual pleasure and pain; both Frank and Julia are consumed by
their sadomasochistic desires. Their victims are complicit in their own
demise, stupid sex-driven businessmen fuelled on their testosterone-
charged egos. The Cenobites are hideous caricatures of fetishistic
extremes, all flayed flesh, surgical implements and leather bondage gear.
Julia is shot in the style of a Forties glamour star with sparkling jewellery,
glistening eyes and iconographical backlighting while Frank is straight out
of a Kenneth Anger film, all tattoos and gay biker styling. The lighting
throughout maintains this blandness within the real world and a glossy styl-
isation whenever the Cenobites invade the drabness - blue rays cast
through shutters, catching the dancing dust. In terms of make-up and
effects work Hellraiser never puts a foot wrong - Frank’s resurrection as a
bloody skeleton emerging from a pool of viscera, the gradual muscle
regeneration like a gory reversal of Whale’s Invisible Man, or the chatter-
ing teeth of the Helnwein-style Cenobite. Barker softens the blow by plac-
ing the threat in a fantasy context - Kirsty’s solving of the puzzle reveals an
endless corridor patrolled by a horrendous beast, while the mysterious
locust-eating tramp regains the puzzle cube and transforms into a skeletal
dragon. Both of these sequences are highly reminiscent of the works of
Terry Gilliam, particularly Time Bandits and Jabberwocky. Likewise, there
are nods to Franju in the dream sequences and asides to Polanski’s Repul-
sion. Hellraiser plays as a very nasty moralistic fable which offers all the

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trappings of the genre and visceral excess to amuse and terrify the undis-
cerning, but with enough depth to satisfy those seeking more.

Nightbreed (1990)
Dir: Clive Barker St: David Cronenberg
Beneath the soil, beneath the corpses lies another world, Midian, where
the monsters go. Boon, tortured by nightmares, is receiving psychiatric
help from Dr Decker. Help in the loose sense of the word, because Decker
is a brutal, masked serial killer whose self-preservation goes so far as to get
Boon shot. Dead, Boon becomes Nightbreed, a resident of Midian whose
people are sensitive or different from the Naturals above ground. What’s
below stays below, but Decker wants entrance to Midian without the pain.
Fuelled by the critical and commercial success of Hellraiser, Barker
adapted another of his stories, Cabal, for the big screen. Unfortunately,
despite the grotesque imagery and graphic deaths, the studio was not
impressed. They wanted unambiguous and evil monsters, not complex or
sympathetic ones, so they recut the picture and provided a highly mislead-
ing promotional campaign that emphasised the horror, which was subservi-
ent to the fantastical drive of the narrative. What remains may well be a
poor relation to Barker’s original cut (we may never know) but is not the
unmitigated mess that some have levelled at it. Cronenberg’s Dr Decker is
clinically ruthless in his pursuit of knowledge through pain, his killer’s
mask a crude leather reworking of a gimp headpiece with a disfigured zip
grin. He is the real ‘monster’ of the piece, torturing without remorse to
achieve his horrendous ends. The inhabitants of Midian, no matter how
horrifying they are to look at, are either misguided, confused or normally
just scared and a little bit pathetic in comparison. Barker’s sympathies with
the underdogs appear like Browning’s Freaks but the resonance is deeper
than that. The Nightbreed actively engage in unusual, some would say
revolting, practices because that is how they are - different but not intrinsi-
cally evil. Boon becomes an inspiration to the denizens of Midian, inciting
them to forego their timid natures and fight for the right to be different.
Midian itself is a chaotic flame-lit city, its storytale reputation its greatest
defence. Again the protagonist (hero is not really a term you can use in
Barker’s oeuvre) becomes a pagan mythical figure by the film’s open-
ended close. In this respect Nightbreed becomes an adult fairy tale, whose
basically simplistic structure disguises a rich mythical undercurrent.

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Lord Of Illusions (1995)

Dir: Clive Barker St: Scott Bakula, Kevin J O’Connor, Famke Jannsen,
Daniel Von Bargen
Thirteen years ago Swann banished cult leader Nix to a very deep grave,
screwed a holding mask to his head and rescued a kidnapped girl called
Dorothea. Now Swann is a stage illusionist and his old colleagues are being
bumped off by two of Nix’s fanatical disciples trying to find their master’s
resting place so they can resurrect him.
Like Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, Lord Of Illusions seeks to merge film
noir with supernatural horror, hence “walking the path between trickery
and divinity.” Barker invests all the seriousness he can muster from the
outset; dead chickens, dust-blown bones, eviscerated dogs, arcane symbols
and the sound of flies in the air. By declaring that there are two types of
magic - illusory and genuine - the viewer is often left in doubt as to what is
real and what is fake but, thanks to some brief yet vivid flashbacks, is con-
vinced that real magic does exist. Nix’s rule over his followers is so com-
plete that they await his return for over a decade, but Butterfield and his
seemingly painless companion (who only stops moving when impaled on
an extremely phallic stage prop) take a more proactive role in resurrecting
their beloved leader.
In some ways Barker’s film is about eyes and the act of looking, as
though he too is the magician manipulating his audience, daring us to chal-
lenge the validity of what we see. Nix’s power seems to come from his
eyes: they are the first thing to be denied him prior to incarceration (in a
scene inspired by Bava’s Mask Of Satan), eyeballs are eaten, and Dorothea
hides her eyes behind her fingers but still peeps through. It is as though
Barker expects his audience to do the same. Indeed, he piles on the atroci-
ties with consummate attention to detail. Most astonishing is the resurrec-
tion of Nix, shown in a continuous shot as the camera tracks into a bullet
wound and through the body where we can see the regeneration of his
internal organs. The climax is a riot of surreal imagery, aided and abetted
by an appropriately ominous score from ex-Goblin Simon Boswell. Unlike
Hellraiser, in Lord Of Illusions the characters, whatever their faults, at
least mean something to us.

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Resource Materials

Books
Aurum Film Encyclopedia Horror, Ed: Phil Hardy, Aurum Press,
ISBN: 1-85410-384-9 Covering the entire horror movie genre in chrono-
logical order, this is the definitive (and heavy) film review reference.
Excellent coverage of some of the more obscure films and world horror
cinema.
BFI Companion To Horror, Ed: Kim Newman, Cassel, ISBN: 0-
304-33213-5 Covering the entire horror movie genre by subject, this is
another weighty tome. It deals with the movers and themes within horror as
well as key films.
Fragments Of Fear by Andy Boot, Creation Books, ISBN: 9-
871592-35-6 An illustrated guide to British Horror films. If you want an in-
depth guide to the wonderful worlds of Hammer, Tigon and Amicus or
more info on such directors as Michael Reeves or Clive Barker, this is a
super guide to all horrors British.
Censored by Tom Dewe Matthews, Chatto, ISBN: 0- 7011-3873-4
Covering the history of British film censorship, from the first banned film,
which comprised a salacious piece of cheese, right up to the Child’s Play
press furore, this is a fascinating guide about one of horror’s greatest chal-
lenges.
Nightmare Movies by Kim Newman, Harmony Books, ISBN: 0-517-
57366-0 Kim Newman’s passion for horror films is well known. This deals
with horror and scary films by subject or subgenre (e.g. ghost stories, clas-
sical gothic, psycho movies) and covers a huge range of films. Special
attention is given to such auteurs as Dario Argento, Larry Cohen, David
Cronenberg and Brian De Palma.
Broken Mirrors Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams Of Dario
Argento by Maitland McDonagh, Sun Tavern Fields, ISBN: 90-
9517012-4-X The book about Dario Argento. It contains analyses of his
films and an interview, filmography and reference section.
James Whale: A New World Of Gods And Monsters by James Cur-
tis, Kevin Brownlow Faber and Faber; ISBN: 0571192858 A super
biography of Frankenstein’s cinematic creator.
Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left: The Making Of A Cult
Classic by David A Szulkin, F.A.B. Press This is not only an excellent
guide to a notorious film, but also useful for learning about low-budget
film-making.

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BodyHorror.fm Page 92 Sunday, March 18, 2001 2:54 PM

Fearing The Dark: The Val Lewton Career by Edmund G Bansak,

Robert Wise, McFarland & Company, ISBN: 089950969X Pricey and
difficult to obtain, but a good guide to a fascinating producer.
Cronenberg On Cronenberg by David Cronenberg, Chris Rodley
(Editor), Faber and Faber,ISBN: 0571191371 Another of Faber’s series
of interviews. Always recommended.

Others
There are so many horror books out there it is difficult to know what to
recommend but a safe bet is anything by independent publishers Creation
(83 Clarkenwell Road, London, EC1R 5AR) or F.A.B. Press (P.O. Box
178, Guilford, Surrey) both of whom have an eclectic range of specialised
books for the horror aficionado.

Pocket Essentials
Yes, your favourite series of reference books come in more detailed fla-
vours, all connected with horror. You might think brand loyalty compels us
to mention these, but we have read (or written) every one and heartily rec-
ommend them.
David Cronenberg by John Costello, Pocket Essentials ISBN: 1-
903047-26-9 Excellent guide that delivers the lowdown on Canada’s most
intelligent and disturbing director from shorts and obscure TV work to big
budget features.
Slasher Movies by Mark Whitehead, Pocket Essentials ISBN:1-
903047-27-7 All your favourite slasher flicks dissected for your enjoy-
ment, plus a guide to surviving them should you ever need to...
Vampire Films by er, us, Pocket Essentials ISBN: 1-903047-17-X
Vampires are the most malleable of movie monsters and this guide looks at
early morsels right up to hi-tech Hollywood blockbusters, taking in vam-
pires from around the world as well. A light guide to the creatures of the
night.
John Carpenter by er, us again, Pocket Essentials ISBN: 1-903047-
37-4 We just haven’t had the space to write about one of the most respected
of horror and science fiction directors and the man who has been such an
important influence on the modern horror film. Discover all those missing
gems right here!

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Web Resources

Directors
Dario Argento: http://home2.swipnet.se/~w-20851/hemsida/dario.htm
Clive Barker: http://www.btinternet.com/~revelations/
Tod Browning: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~pringle/silent/ssotm/Jun96/
Wes Craven: www.wescraven.com
David Cronenberg: http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/2012/psycho.html
Joe Dante: http://eborisk.dusted.net/
Terence Fisher: http://www.icast.com/artist/1,4003,1010-249831,00.html
Val Lewton: http://www.acm.vt.edu/~yousten/lewton/
George A Romero: www.georgearomero.com
James Whale: http://www.sbu.ac.uk/stafflag/jameswhale.html

General
Hammer Films: www.hammerfilms.com
Troma Films: www.troma.com
Universal horror films: www.horroronline.com

Censorship
Censorship News (UK): www.melonfarmers.co.uk
UK Classification: www.bbfc.co.uk
US Classification: www.mpaa.org

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Also Showing...
Space has limited the number of films we could discuss, but should you
be seeking further scares and chills (with the odd chuckle) you could do a
lot worse than the following:

The Cat And The Canary, Leni, 1927

Fall Of The House Of Usher, Epstein, 1928
Vampyr, Dreyer, 1931
Murders In The Rue Morgue, Florey, 1932
The Black Cat, Ulmer, 1934
The Spiral Staircase, Siodmak, 1946
House Of Wax, De Toth, 1953
Bucket Of Blood, Corman, 1959
The Innocents, Clayton, 1961
Carnival Of Souls, Harvey, 1962
Terror Of Dr Hitchcock, Freda, 1962
Dementia 13, Coppola, 1963
Onibaba, Kaneto Shindo, 1964
Multiple Maniacs, Waters, 1969
Blood On Satan’s Claw, Hagard, 1970
The Devils, Russell, 1971
Hands Of The Ripper, Sasdy, 1971
Daughters Of Darkness, Kumel, 1971
Vampire Circus, Young, 1971
Death Line, Sherman, 1972
Blood Spattered Bride, Aranda, 1972
Don’t Look Now, Roeg, 1973
The Wicker Man, Hardy, 1973
Deranged, Ormsby, 1974
Rocky Horror Picture Show, Sharman, 1975
Phantom Of The Paradise, De Palma, 1975
To The Devil A Daughter, Sykes, 1976
Alien, Ridley Scott, 1979
Phantasm, Coscarellli, 1979

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The Shining, Kubrick, 1980

La Morte Vivante, Rollin, 1982
Basket Case, Henenlotter, 1982
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Clayton, 1982
The Hunger, Tony Scott, 1983
Razorback, Mulcahy, 1984
Ghostbusters, Reitman, 1984
Dr Jekyll Et Les Femmes, Borowczyk, 1985
Mr Vampire, Lau Kun Wai, 1985
Return Of The Living Dead, O’Bannon, 1985
Re-Animator, Gordon, 1985
The Hitcher, Harmon, 1985
Parents, Balaban, 1988
Arachnophobia, Marshall, 1990
The Reflecting Skin, Ridley, 1991
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Coppola, 1992
Society, Yuzna, 1992
Tetsuo, Tsukamoto, 1992
Cronos, Del Toro, 1994
In The Mouth Of Madness, Carpenter, 1994
Day Of The Beast, de la Iglesia, 1995
Bride Of Chucky, Ronnie Yu, 1998

95
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