ESSAY: Terror for Tots: My Adolescent Fascination with Horror

Illustration by Jim Kay, from the novel A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Abstract: A personal reflection on the enchantment that horror movies held over one particular child's psyche during his developmental years. Why did he love monsters so? Was he a monster himself? (Well...) What did fictional monsters teach him about his own life? We reveal that his world felt a whole lot safer with fantastical cinematic monsters roaming around in it, as those creatures were easily vanquished when contrasted with the invulnerability possessed by the mundane horrors of growing up.

This essay features discussion of:

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) dir. Wes Craven

The Monster Squad (1987) dir. Fred Dekker

Little Monsters (1989) dir. Richard Greenberg

Gremlins (1984) dir. Joe Dante

Stephen King's IT (1990) dir. Tommy Lee Wallace

I can remember the exact moment when I stopped being afraid of monsters.

For most of my early childhood, my parents had been members of Moose International, which invariably meant that on Friday nights they would cart my two brothers and I over to Moose Lodge #644 on East Genesse St. for dinnertime and a couple of the surrounding hours. Typically, my younger brother and I would race through the bar area to the claw crane machine resting against the back wall near the bathrooms. We'd bust open a fresh roll of quarters and then try our skill (or was it blind luck?) at acquiring as many worthless stuffed animals as we could with the time and coins provided. We had a routine.

But one October, the week before Halloween, Moose Lodge #644 underwent a redecoration. When we arrived, we were ushered from the usual entrance to a new ramshackle facade leading directly into the dining area. We were told by those guarding the entrance that the dining area's stage and dance floor (which did indeed feature a disco ball suspended high above it) had been converted for the night into a haunted maze, populated by Moose Lodge members dressed in costumes and waiting patiently behind freestanding walls for the moment to jump out and scare us. The maze was providing tonight's only entrance into the Lodge. Naturally, I was terrified.

Even after being repeatedly reassured by my parents that those costumed creatures waiting for me in the dark were harmless diners and bar patrons whom I saw every week at the Lodge in their human forms, I refused to enter the maze. I'm not sure I knew what specific dreadful thing would happen to me if I did enter the maze, but I was certain I didn't ever want to find out.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Eventually, after much coaxing and probable bartering, a compromise was reached: my much braver older brother would traverse the maze first, soaking up all the scares and asking the costumed volunteers to refrain from jumping out at the next fearful travelers who passed them by. Those travelers were my father and I, with me in his arms, hugged tightly to his torso, head buried in his shoulder to escape the sight of whatever lingering horrors might remain in the maze. As we began our trek through, I was relieved to discover that my brother had done his job: none of the monsters were trying to scare us. After a few jolt-less twists and turns, I had enough confidence in my bear-hugged safety to open my eyes, if only for a brief moment, to examine my frightful surroundings. 

What I saw was Freddy Krueger hiding behind a wall that we'd already left in our wake. He was smiling and waving his clawed hand in a friendly, if somewhat mischievous, greeting. At me.

Deposited safely at the other side of the maze, I was stunned. I hadn't seen any of his movies yet, but, like every kid of the late '80s and early '90s, I knew Freddy Krueger. (Remember, this was the brief era when, even if I wasn't directly familiar with any of Freddy's screen adventures, something as innocuous as supermarket sticker vending machines would have had no trouble informing me.) Sure, I knew this Freddy was just some Lodge member in a cheap store-bought costume. But boy did it look convincing through half-shut eyes in the blood-red lighting dimly coloring the maze. If I wanted to, I could believe it really was Freddy Krueger, and that what he'd made at me was a gesture of civility, signalling peace between my world and the world of horrors he represented.

In a daze, I wandered over to my customary stool at the far end of the bar, near the unoccupied shuffleboard tables. Like he always did, Norm, the bartender, sauntered over and gave me a free Shirley Temple and a bag of Andy Capp's Hot Fries. "I just met Freddy Krueger," I told him. "He was a pretty nice guy."

***

I looked at monsters differently after that night. I'd always enjoyed horror movies, but like most children I harbored a vague fear of the monsters contained within them. Lying in bed at night, I was certain that the Blob was stuck to the ceiling above, waiting to drop down upon me and start slurping; most mornings, I knew for a fact that Jaws himself was swimming in the carpet under my bed, patiently awaiting the moment when I would foolishly stick my foot over the edge. These were far from crippling anxieties, but they were the sort of feelings that kept me at a slight distance from the genre, carefully (if subconsciously) metering out my exposure to these films so as to prevent any more nightmare creatures from entering the repertoire.

Detail of Monster in My Pocket - Monster Mountain packaging

But, soon after Freddy Krueger waved at me, my fascination grew. Horror-- in film, in print, as a feeling-- became my obsession. I'd spend what felt like hours browsing through the VHS box art in the supermarket video store's 'Horror' aisle, imagining what terrific treasures lay within those spools of magnetic tape. I would be glued to the television for most of the month of October, absorbing every Halloween-themed sitcom or commercial that aired. The only childhood birthday party I can remember being thrown in my honor was themed after Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series of horror folktales and urban legends. My favorite toys were the small, soft plastic figurines of the Monster in My Pocket toy line. What better evidence of my newfound fuzzy feelings towards monsters than the fact that I'd keep pint-sized replicas of them in my jean pockets at all times? Monsters didn't frighten me anymore; they'd become my figurative security blanket.

***

I suppose it's not surprising that my favorite childhood horror movies were those in which children befriended monsters. In Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad, a group of monster-loving adolescents become friends and allies of Frankenstein's monster (Tom Noonan) in a prophesied battle against all of the other classic movie monsters (Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, Gill-man). Little Monsters finds Fred Savage being pulled down into a netherworld of creatures both frightening and friendly by the monster under his bed (Howie Mandel). Gremlins features young Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) discovering that his adorable new pet monster has the unintentional ability to multiply and create a wicked horde of more diabolical devils. I think it's interesting that all of these films characterize monsters as beings that are simultaneously both good and evil, and capable of embracing either tendency at a moment's notice. Feed Gizmo after midnight and see if he's still a fuzzy sweetheart. Regardless, there's no denying that my childhood's monsters were demonstrative of a general weakening of the role of cinematic monsters in American culture. As I discovered, even Freddy Krueger was blurring the line between hero and villain in the later entries of his series, with his corny quips and cackling demeanor making him a rather perverse children's icon, worthy of being immortalized as squishy dolls and yo-yos.

What this child-proofing of the monster in late '80s and early '90s American horror cinema says about our culture at the time is probably worthy of another essay, but my affection for this new breed of monster is easily explained: I liked these gentler monsters best, in spite of the latent threat that remained within them, because they were a testament to the idea that the truly horrific could be revised into something more benign. I was never especially terrified while watching the movies containing these monsters; instead, I was comforted. In one sense, these horrific monsters had been tamed, and I knew implicitly that if any of their inherent monstrousness were to be unleashed, it would be adequately dealt with by the adolescent protagonists sometime in the third act, restoring the balance. I understood that these monsters were products of essentially happy narratives, and that any horror they wrought would be converted for me into entertainment or catharsis.

The Monster Squad (1987)

The only problem for me was that this sort of controllable monster was restricted to the VHS tapes that they came to me on. I can still remember the things that actually frightened me as a child. I remember when, in my adolescent desire to become more worldly, I dedicated myself to watching national news programs every night. What I saw was Waco, the Rwandan Genocide, the Unabomber, the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and the Oklahoma City Bombing. I recall watching true crime television programs like Unsolved Mysteries and being flabbergasted by the depths of human depravity they would detail. The real horrors of my childhood weren't contained in the monster movies I was spending all my time with, but were out in the world that awaited me as I grew up, like monsters lurking around a corner in a poorly lit maze, anticipating the fresh meat.

Perhaps my fascination with horror as a child was a naive form of psychic shielding through fantasy. Maybe I was maintaining a belief for myself that the horror in the real world could be controlled like it was in my movies, that it could be altered to a more pleasant outcome. Trapped in these films, I wouldn't ever have to face those everyday horrors of adult life, both the grave and mundane. I could tune out the news, and pop in my tapes. I could wish all the horror away. At the very least, I could wish it into a more cuddly form.

***

The desire to rid myself of the horrors of reality explains my reaction to the only film that ever really traumatized me as a child: Tommy Lee Wallace's made-for-TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's IT. The film scarred countless children of my generation, and it's not difficult to see why: its villain, Pennywise the killer clown (Tim Curry), is another, albeit more sinister, variation on the alternately comforting and horrifying monster. On the one hand, he's a dancing clown who blows balloons and cracks jokes; on the other hand, he eats children. But his confrontations with a Monster Squad-esque group of kids in a small Maine town play out far differently than the Squad's encounters with Frankenstein and the bunch: Pennywise becomes for the child protagonists a symbol of the horrors of growing up, deceptively personified as that most comical figure of adolescent innocence. As in life, the dancing clown of childhood leads you blindly into the gaping maw of adulthood.

Stephen King's IT (1990)

When I braced myself to watch the entirety of IT, I was thrilled by the climax of the first part, in which the children literally wish the monster away by refusing to believe in him. In that moment, they had the power my subconscious so desperately wanted and that I derived vicariously from all the monster movies I consumed. But then came my viewing of the second part of IT, and I was crushed (for far deeper reasons than the reveal of Pennywise as a giant alien turtle). The children's wishing away of the horror of reality had failed. The monster still lurked out there in the maze of life (or, concretely, in the labyrinthine sewer system of Derry, Maine). Worse yet, I was forced to reckon with the fact that these once so imaginatively powerful children had grown into aimless and depressed adults, living out horrible lives filled with humdrum horrors. One of them even kills himself to avoid facing the reality of his life and his failures. Was this what I had to look forward to as I grew up into the world? When added to all of the very real tragedies and atrocities littering the planet, it didn't seem like I had much to look forward to. It's no wonder I'd want to comfort myself through horror films, to reassure myself that the monsters could be controlled or wished away. Like Eddie Kaspbrak (Adam Faraizl), I wanted to feed battery acid to the slime of existence, and I wanted it to do permanent damage.

But it's not possible to wish monsters away. I think deep down I knew that, too. Wishing them away is also what Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) tries on Freddy in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, and her success doesn't last long either. Freddy would return time and time again in numerous sequels to haunt the dreams of her and others, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it as long as the films kept making New Line Cinema money (another reality of the adult world). Even horror movies with ostensibly upbeat endings had taught me while I was young that there's a certain fragility to the tranquility and happiness achieved in one's life at any age, as if those states have a built-in expiration date. Gizmo can't stay dry forever, the portal that sucked up Dracula will spit him out again in some distant century, and children from Derry, Maine will continue to go missing, even if all the clowns leave town. Given enough time, the monsters always emerge again from the dark of the maze to pounce upon the next weary traveler. And there are always more monsters deeper in the maze, biding their time, waiting to swallow you whole. The trick is in convincing them to smile and wave instead.

A friend.

ESSAY: No, YOU'RE Next: The Transformation of a Home Invasion Thriller

Abstract: A consideration of the possible influence one little-known home invasion thriller had on another, much more well-regarded home invasion thriller. A nasty case of plagiarism? Well, we wouldn't be shocked if the makers of the latter had caught a late night television broadcast of the former at some point. Regardless, this isn't a case of outright thievery; it's a demonstration of how a thriller film becomes a horror film, and of the fine line separating cliched earnestness and intentional self-parody in cinematic storytelling.

This essay features discussion of:

You're Next (2013) dir. Adam Wingard

Below Utopia (1997) dir. Kurt Voss

Allow me to describe for you a horror film. Help me to remember its title.

It goes like this: A young couple is driving to a family get-together. The man (a college English teacher) is anxious because his relationship with his wealthy family (though particularly his father) is strained due to their perception of him as a failure. The woman--the man's significant other--is also anxious, considering this will be her first encounter with his family. The couple arrives at this isolated family estate in the countryside, and many tense encounters are had between siblings and between children and parents. During dinner, a trio of ferocious mercenaries invade the home and murder most everyone inside. The young couple survive by evading the killers, and, eventually, they're able to turn the tables on their aggressors by way of borrowed weapons. In particular, the woman demonstrates her physical and emotional resilience to the terror surrounding her in this second half. 

The killers successfully done away with, a twist is tossed our way like a live hand grenade: the male half of this couple staged the whole grisly affair. See, he hired the anonymous assassins to murder his entire, much-maligned family so that he would be the sole recipient of their vast estate. (It appears that being an English teacher simply wasn't paying the bills.) He then decided to put his girlfriend through this harrowing ordeal so that she could serve as an innocent witness to the authorities concerning the senseless carnage and, thus, discourage any suspicion that might turn in his direction. But, now that she has learned the truth of her boyfriend's nefarious scheming and mass familicide, she has no recourse but to murder him in retaliation, which she does.

What movie am I thinking of?

You might be thinking that I'm thinking of Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett's recent home invasion horror film You're Next (2013). Actually, I was describing the film Below Utopia (a.k.a. Body Count, 1997), starring Alyssa Milano, Justin Theroux, Tiny Lister, and the incomparable Ice T. But you wouldn't be wrong, either, because what I've described above is the same basic story (and accompanying minute details) seen in You're Next. The two films are identical in this broad sense, separated only by their respective decades of release and the fact that if you're reading this blog you've most likely seen the one and never even heard of the other.

I'm hesitant to label the similarities between Below Utopia and You're Next as the product of an act of deliberate plagiarism by the latter against the former. Kurt Voss's Below Utopia isn't exactly startling in its originality, and it's possible that writer Simon Barrett was simply working from the cliches of the twisty, surprisingly long-lived inheritance scheme thriller genre when he was drafting You're Next, resulting in a film the travels the same well-trodden path. But I have a tough time swallowing that line. The two films are much too much alike for the resemblance to be mere coincidence, and I would wager that Barrett was influenced at least unconsciously by the earlier film, if not directly. Either way, I have no doubt that Barrett had seen Below Utopia prior to writing his film. This isn't a criticism. I'm equally as certain that Barrett and Wingard had seen The Strangers (2008), Funny Games (1997; 2008), High Tension (2003), Them (2006), Inside (2007), and numerous other contemporary home invasion thrillers before writing You're Next, too. In its postmodern self-awareness, Barrett and Wingard's film is striving to upset the expectations of its specific subgenre, and thus it requires a resemblance to (and familiarity with) those prior films within that subgenre. It's to be expected.

The complicating factor in all this is that Below Utopia isn't a horror film, despite the fact that the majority of home invasion films are. It's a thriller, certainly, perhaps a crime or a drama film, but it's not horror. Almost all of its violence happens off screen, with the emphasis being not on forcing the audience to gawk at the visceral images of a family being demolished but on encouraging that audience to follow the loopy plot twists and stay ahead of the action. The film's antagonists aren't shadowy, menacing madmen, but Tiny Lister checking the radio for basketball scores and Ice T cracking wise between gunshots. It's shot and edited in a flat, suspense-bereft late-'90s DTV style (despite it having received a theatrical release), and while you might run the risk of being absentmindedly entertained by the events on screen, being afraid seems unlikely.

You're Next transforms the same basic story into something that could not be mistaken for anything but a horror film. The film intends to shock, terrify, and amusingly astonish by the lengths to which it goes in sowing its mayhem. Frenetic handheld camerawork, palpable tension punctuated by cheap jump scares, iconic villains, unflinching brutality leavened by audience-rousing reprisals, buckets upon buckets of fake blood: it's all the things midnight movies are made of. Considering its foundational commonalities with the earlier film, You're Next is best viewed as a revision of Below Utopia, seeking to amend the errors of the "original" film's presentation. In a commentary track on You're Next's home video release, Barrett expresses that his desire in writing the film was to correct what bad home invasion movies got wrong. That it does. Despite its novel twists and turns (which You're Next co-opts as its own), Below Utopia is as typical as they come, with audible DUN-DUN-DUNs soundtracking its revelations and strained grasps at psychological complexity. Nevertheless, Below Utopia still presents the horrific concept of a man callously ordering the deaths of his entire immediate and extended family. Does not such a horrific concept deserve the casing of a horror film that You're Next provides?

But You're Next has value beyond this transformation of genre, whatever the truth is concerning its source. In that same commentary track, Barrett and Wingard agree that what is necessary in contemporary horror cinema is not necessarily new material, but new perspectives on that material. You're Next is better classified as an upheaval than a new perspective. Despite their claim that the film contains no overt "postmodern winks," Barrett and Wingard approach You're Next as self parody. The film lulls us into a sense of familiarity by beginning like an earnest slasher film and playing up narrative cliches like the motiveless thrill-killers and cinematic cliches like the sights and sounds of an unnaturally creaky old house. But it's not all that long before the film disregards our expectations and embraces the absurd, with blenders to the head and the apparent immortality of Joe Swanberg's character (another aspect mirrored, though without comment, in Below Utopia's similarly immortal brother character of Justin, as portrayed by Nicholas Walker). You're Next encourages its characters to blindly but knowingly play into genre cliches by splitting up and wandering into dark rooms despite the presence of murderous psychopaths and then milks these moments for dark humor. Simultaneously, the film creates characters and moments that subvert those cliches, like Final Girl Erin (Sharni Vinson), whose childhood training as a survivalist makes her beyond circumstantially resilient, in contrast to so many other horror movie heroines. In short, the film strives successfully to be as unpredictable as it is knowingly hackneyed.

This is because You're Next is pointing out the conventional flaws of films within the subgenres of the slasher and the home invasion thriller while self-consciously reveling in those flaws. To an extent, it's devaluing the earnestness of those other films and acknowledging how crudely fun they can be. It's a film that puts on lurid display its exhaustion with the cliche of horror narratives motivated by nothing but their villains' inherent sadistic evil (à la The Strangers) or hoary psychological derangement (à la Inside) by leading us towards those cliches and then making them vanish, much to our discovered elation. Like Scream (1996), which Barrett and Wingard strangely assure us their film is nothing like, You're Next allows us to feel smart for noticing its manipulation of conventions and its evacuation of faux-realism from a horror movie scenario that rests in absurdity.

Case in point: Below Utopia falls into the trap of faux-realism-through-cliche when it attempts to ground the reasoning for the by-proxy massacre in the sudden and inexplicable mania of Justin Theroux's previously sane character. It's amusing to watch Theroux ham it up as a secret psycho, but this attempted justification of the family massacre plot is far from a satisfying development, as it's trying too hard to explain away actions that are artificial and born of genre narrative necessity anyway. This phony realism, propped up by groan-worthy storytelling banalities, is the state to which so many home invasion thrillers fretfully strive. Why? Unlike most other horror subgenres, the home invasion thriller is constrained by its location. What could be more real or sacrosanct to us than our homes? It's for this reason that most audiences find the notion of home invasion skin-crawling, but it's also for this reason that filmmakers working within the subgenre actively forgo including levity or self-awareness in their productions in the interest of playing on those very real fears. Thus, home invasion thrillers are by and large dour, self-serious affairs, mired in their flimsy sense of authenticity, regardless of the level of preposterous genre fantasy they depict on screen. Like Below Utopia. (Or, for instance, Inside, in which the goopiest, goriest, stupidest blood fantasies are enacted without the trace of a smirk.)

In rebellion against this trend, You're Next embraces the artifice of its plot throughout, and pointedly (and humorously) recognizes the barbarity of its central inheritance scheme, with its mass familicide being ordered for no reason more complex than the accelerated transference of wealth between uber-greedy family members. Barrett and Wingard have re-structured their borrowed plot around the act of the wealthy swallowing up all those around them in the pursuit of more wealth, despite all good sense, placing these actions within a hysterical reality dictated by the logic (or illogic) of the conceit. What the filmmakers achieve is a state of genre filmmaking unadulterated by the restraints of verisimilitude that so many works of fantasy are hobbled with. They've taken a series of films set in its ways and liberated it for a receptive audience, but this insight is partially lost if it's never made clear to us what, specifically, they were taking to begin with, but for a chance encounter with it in the discount DVD bin. If the influence is there (which I suspect it is), it's frustrating that Barrett and Wingard have been so coy about it in the publicity surrounding the film. After all, it's sort of the point.

Robert Aickman Double Feature: "The Cicerones" (2002) & "The Swords" (1997) dirs. Jeremy Dyson; Tony Scott

Robert Aickman (1914-1981) is the master of a sort of fiction that remains nameless. You could brand his collected stories as 'horror,' but beyond the rare tale or two (like the prosaic vampire yarn "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" (1973)) you'd be far off the mark. His fiction lacks the visceral blood and guts, the outright breathless terror, and the classifiable supernatural presences of his contemporaries' work. Some of his tales first saw American publication during the early 1970s in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but neither of those genre labels feels somehow complete either. (Or do they? In a sense, Aickman's stories probe the boundary between mundane reality and horrific fantasy. And there's also no denying that his plots and fictional contrivances often disregard the laws of physics, of space and time.) Aickman himself termed his work "strange stories," and that appellation-- as oblique and indeterminate as it may be-- is the one that fits best. What else to call his quietly surreal tales but strange? 

The majority of Aickman's collected fiction (nearly 50 stories and two novels, published from 1951 until his death at the dawn of the 1980s) explores the modern human psyche through routes obscure in origin and destination, producing personal insights for and about its characters that are paradoxically ambiguous and trenchant. During this slow, queer process of narrative intensification, the reader of Aickman's strange stories is left in a state of inexplicable anxiety and mounting unease. What, precisely, is awry in the fictional world or what dilemma begs to be resolved remains unclear: all the reader knows is that escape (if one can call it that) will come only with the placement of the final period on the page. Reading one of Aickman's stories is to invite equal parts mystification and inarticulate understanding of the revelations held in store. The many narrative breadcrumbs he leaves for the reader ushers one into a forest vast and dark and nearly impossible to conceive of as a rational, coherent object. But only nearly so: blind as we may be, we catch the scent in the air of a candied house of horrors somewhere near the forest's center and know instinctively that all paths, no matter how labyrinthine, lead there.

Undeniably consequent of their elusive nature, Aickman's fiction has seldom been adapted for the screen. Though Aickman's prose is often clean and direct (in contrast to his story's themes and events), they almost entirely lack the sort of action that would render them so obviously enticing for a visual storyteller. His stories beg adaptations as cinematically complex as they are on the page, and a less talented artist runs the certain risk of  obliterating the singular subtleties inherent within them during the transition. Thus, Aickman's IMDb page remains sparsely populated. But those few courageous stabs at adaptation deserve examination, if for nothing else than their ability to help express in whatever small, circuitous way the unique quality of Aickman's perhaps unadaptable fictions.

"The Cicerones"

(2002)

dir. Jeremy Dyson

One of the briefest tales in Aickman's oeuvre, "The Cicerones" is nevertheless ripe with the sort of mind-bending suggestion and delirious ambiguity that defines his best longer work. First published in 1967, the story has since cropped up in numerous anthologies devoted to ghostly tales of the supernatural (including one edited by Aickman himself, The Seventh Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1971)). But, as is often the case with Aickman's fiction, such an easy paranormal explanation for the tale's strangeness is woefully insufficient. An initially straightforward account of a man taking a walking tour of an ancient Belgian cathedral after hours quickly devolves into an oppressive trip through another dimension, a plane of existence where silence reigns and time runs backwards or not at all, where the sacred and the demonic are one in the same, and where pagan saints are made and preserved in life and in art. Whatever it ultimately may be, "The Cicerones" is far from a simple Dickensian or Jamesian ghost story.

The tale's otherworldliness is preserved and expanded upon in a 2002 short film adaptation by The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss for BBC Channel 4. Both Dyson and Gatiss are avowed fans of Aickman, and their appreciation and understanding of his peculiar sensibilities is evident throughout the short's chilling thirteen minute running time. Gatiss assumes the role of Trant, an English tourist in a foreign land eager to gawk at the pieces of religious art written about in his guidebook. However, when he arrives at the Cathedral of St. Bavon he finds his printed guide superseded by a set of progressively younger human guides (or 'cicerones') who are eager to set Trant on a path of their own devising. Dyson and Gatiss's short is faithful to the letter, rendering many minute details of the original story with visual aplomb. The aesthetic palette on display places the film in line with the BBC's classic A Ghost Story for Christmas adaptations, but the inexplicable foreignness of Trant's surroundings (cobbled together from the interiors and exteriors of several monstrously Gothic English churches) and the inscrutable demeanor of his guides unsettle any sure footing we might try to find for the film in the common cinematic lore of the British supernatural.

The film, like the story, is wide open to one's most devious or sinister interpretations. However, a deliberate intensification of one of the story's elements through the addition of an original prologue does serve to tip our worst thoughts in one particular direction. The added opening finds Trant travelling on a train through central Europe to his destination at St. Bavon. He has a brief but significant encounter with an old woman and her two young, to-be married companions sitting across from him. He reveals his nationality and status as a bachelor to the woman before asking her for any info she might have about the cathedral. She quickly snaps at him that the cathedral is "a holy place" and then beckons him to say a prayer for the young couple on the eve of their wedding. Why would she desire Trant's particular blessing when he's a foreigner possessing a different belief system? In the corridors and secret galleries of St. Bavon we learn of the dark mixture of Christianity and pagan superstition worshiped within, of the virgin saints and martyrs dragged to hell by demons and venerated through transcendent portraiture, and we begin to suspect that the blessing of a sacrificial saint to-be is a valuable thing to have.

"The Swords"

(1997)

dir. Tony Scott

An earlier adaptation of Aickman's work is "The Swords" (1997), directed by the late Tony Scott as the inaugural episode of a British/Canadian anthology TV series loosely derived from the themes of and bearing the same name as his 1983 Whitley Strieber adaptation The Hunger. Its source material is the lead story in Aickman's 1975 collection Cold Hand in Mine, and it's among the author's most subtly repulsive. As written, "The Swords" concerns a young travelling salesman who is as-of-yet unacquainted with carnal activity. Attending a carnival in a small town, the young man witnesses a bizarre stage show in which a man in a seaman's outfit invites men from the audience on stage  for the chance to pierce with a ceremonial sword, for a small fee, the abdomen of a beautiful but silently obedient woman named Madonna, leaving her unhurt and the men perversely stimulated. The young salesman, refusing (out of bashfulness?) to participate in the communal act, is later approached alone by the woman's handler, who offers her total services and a private show to him for a reasonable price.

Aickman's protagonist acquiesces, and what follows-- his first sexual encounter, occuring in a cheap lodging house-- is punctuated by a peculiar bit of nastiness: his violent thrust for a greedy kiss wrenches the woman's arm right out of its socket and from her body, again without causing her any pain or bloodshed. Madonna, perhaps used to such an occurrence, merely snatches up her discarded arm from the floor and flees, leaving the seaman to return and collect her (or is it his?) fee. Through its morbid surrealism, "The Swords" acts as a melancholy but pointed social criticism of the way men use and violate women as if they were bloodless, fleshy objects. It illustrates how this attitude is enculturated through communal forces, and also how such an attitude's grim results-- loveless, violent, queasy, and crushingly lonely-- may dispirit or shame a young male like the story's protagonist, but only for a brief beginner's moment: "After the first six women, say, or seven, or eight," the narrator tells us, "the rest come much of a muchness."

Scott's adaptation of "The Swords" takes the basic skeleton of its source story and seals it into a flesh of its own devising. Aesthetically (and sonically, as evidenced by the tropical island score, despite a metropolitan English setting), Scott is working in his True Romance (1993) mode: all the bad boys and bad girls are dressed in candy colors and waxing purple poesy. And yet this half hour short would be better thought of as an antidote to True Romance's Love Conquers All (Even, If Not Especially, Death) mentality. The love (or whatever you'd call it) between James Chandler (Balthazar Getty) and Musidora (Amanda Ryan) ends in a tragedy bred not of too much affection but of too little, hinting at (though never quite achieving) Aickman's grasp of the cold detachment we sometimes feel towards other living bodies. Balthazar Getty's Chandler is a too-cool-for-anything recovering addict (of women and other substances) who floats into town to take a job selling cosmetics (for his boss, played by the great Timothy Spall, who comes off like an alternate dimension version of Alec Baldwin's Blake who quotes Naked Lunch during his sales pep talks). He encounters Musidora's stage show at a garish night club he attends with a couple of co-workers, and soon after his first viewing of her act he finds himself courted by her handler, Dean (Jamie Foreman), for a private show. 

It's at this point that Scott's film departs from the ghastly trajectory of Aickman's story and instead angles for overblown romantic tragedy. Chandler and Musidora have their hotel date, and-- one supposes because no limbs were lost the first time out-- proceed to go one several more dates. Musidora admits to falling in love with Chandler the first moment she spied him in the club; Chandler stares blankly ahead. She tells him that her growing affection puts her protective spell-- the one that keeps her from being skewered by the lusty swords of men-- at risk of being broken; he remains mute. Chandler's refusal to reciprocate emotional passion leads to an obvious rift between the lovers. However, he of course happily reciprocates physical passion until the bitter end, culminating in an aggressive, emotionless sexual encounter mirrored by the show-stopping stage stabbing she receives in the next scene, leaving her bloodied and (finally) wounded. Scott's thesis is plain: nothing spurs a man's crisis of masculinity quite like the notion of vowing commitment. Filmed in Scott's quick-cutting, whirling dutch-angled, operatic style, the sentiment appears a bit pat, but in truth it's not wholly removed from Aickman's own. Musidora, unlike her resigned and objectified literary counterpart, hungers for a connection deeper than the random, impersonal, and violent encounters with men that she's used to, and-- being disappointed by her one grasp outside of those confines of male-female relationships-- falls upon her sword. Chandler, precisely like his literary counterpart, takes only a moment to mope and weep crocodile tears before the numbness returns, coming much of a muchness.

Meltdown 09: Yellow Days of Summer (Part III)

Blood Link 

(Extrasensorial) 

(1982) 

dir. Alberto De Martino

The ultra-sleaze of this early '80s giallo is, well, unexpected. Two years after filming the delightfully insipid, MST3K-lampooned children's superhero film Pumaman (1980), director Albert De Martino returned under the pseudonym "Martin Herbert" to buck expectations by delivering Blood Link, a Michael Moriarty-starring giallo that primarily concerns itself with scenes of rape and exposed breasts. It doesn't reach Giallo A Venezia (1979) levels of sleaze, but one can't help but feel dirty watching Moriarty apply his usual amiable slimeball charm to truly horrific ends. Consequently, Moriarty doesn't shine as often here as he does in any of Larry Cohen's films, but he sure savors every moment he gets to play off himself while starring as a pair of once-siamese identical twins-- one a doctor, the other a psychopathic serial killer-- who have an inexplicable extrasensory ability that allows them to, on occasion, transmit visual images to each other with their minds. (In one scene, while speaking to his other identical half, Moriarty whistles through his grin, "I'm a very flip character.") When one twin, Craig, sees the vile, sexualized murders committed by his estranged brother, Keith, though his own eyes, he decides to travel to Hamburg to track down his long lost blood relative and prevent any more violence. Much confusion of identities follows as the police hassle Craig thinking he's Keith while Keith impersonates Craig in order to give a wobbly Cameron Mitchell a heart attack and rape/murder a woman that Craig was cheating on his girlfriend with in the hope of framing his not-so-goody-two-shoes sibling. It's often very amusing, in part-- Keith's murderous psychosis was caused by, of all things, seeing his parents making out in the garage when he was a child, to which he promptly responded by squishing them with the family automobile-- but on the other hand the bulk of it is downright unseemly. When Craig's girlfriend, Julie (Penelope Milford), is raped by Keith and, seemingly, enjoys it, we catch shades of a similar moment in Straw Dogs (1971). But De Martino is no Peckinpah: this is misguided titillation at its lousiest, where rape is considered a horrifying cinematic spectacle only if someone "gets hurt." 

So Sweet, So Perverse 

(Così dolce... così perversa) 

(1969) 

dir. Umberto Lenzi

Decades before he played a sad old man in Michael Haneke's Amour (2012), Jean-Louis Trintignant snogged and rode jet skis with Carroll Baker, his mysterious upstairs neighbor, because his character in Umberto Lenzi's So Sweet, So Perverse was really bored. Jean Reynaud (Trintignant) is a wealthy businessman suffering from the pangs of ennui that afflict all of those with too much privilege: he's bored with his mundane high-power job; he's bored with his marriage to his beautiful wife, Danielle (Erika Blanc), and no longer even interested in her "slice of cake" that she's been denying him in bed; he's bored with his mistress (Mabille De Lancré herself, Helga Line) who provides him all the slices of cake he could ever desire. "Life is so boring nowadays," he grumbles, so when the noises of his new upstairs neighbor, Nicole (Baker), being beaten and abused by another man (the ever-swarthy Horst Frank) filter down to his apartment below, Jean is quick to jump into the sleazy soap opera drama of her life and aspire to the role of the rescuing white knight. But Nicole is simply a diversion for Jean-- a beautiful image of the tortured woman who requires assistance-- who will in fact rescue him, however temporarily, from his dull, pampered existence. He's not really interested in the particulars of her sad tale: before she relays her story to him and becomes a defined personality, he admits that he's be more content if she remained a mute image for his fascination: "I much prefer your silence." It's this blind, uncritical pursuit of a seeming damsel in distress that leads our pathetic, bored hero into a bramble bush of trouble and murder as the film progresses. In the second half of the film, our attention is focused on Jean's wife Danielle, who attests early on that she's sick of the antiquated Victorian notion of the dominant male and attempts to rebel against it by denying her husband any of her love and carrying on a lesbian affair. Her story, which comprises the remainder of the film, is a little more typical of the subgenre (i.e. gaslighting galore), but her fate is more tragic than usual: we receive the sense that she actually did care for Jean and her guilt over the plot she enacted against him haunts her until her cruel death. The climax of So Sweet, So Perverse is about as delectably bleak and cynical as these things come, but the film's overall story feels diluted by the mid-point twist, which especially leaves Carroll Baker's intriguing storyline (that of a rape victim who remains psychologically attached and sexually aroused by her attacker) by the wayside. It's not Lenzi's finest or most thematically complete, but it does open with a killer track from the great Riz Ortolani, and that counts for something.

Love & Death on the Edge of a Razor 

(Giorni d'amore sul filo di una lama) 

(1973) 

dir. Giuseppe Pellegrini

I suppose that every movie marathon meltdown needs a dud at its center to remind you of the relative qualities of everything else you've been watching. Love & Death on the Edge of a Razor is that dud. Simply, it is the worst giallo I've yet had the displeasure of encountering. This is the only film directed by Italian screenwriter Giuseppe Pellegrini (who co-wrote Renato Polselli's early days Italian horror flick The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960)), and for this I am glad: I would prefer not to feel obligated to watch another film from this man. Despite possessing the most giallo-rific film title in the subgenre's history, Love & Death on the Edge of the Razor is not a horror-thriller. Nor is it anything else of note, besides a partial cribbing of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Forcing a label, it would have to be called, I suppose, a... romance crime drama? Perhaps, if one can earn that label without being romantic, dramatic, or action-packed. As the choppy editing telegraphs great spans of time between cuts, we are given the story of a boy (Peter Lee Lawrence) who meets a girl (Erika Blanc, or, as the credits amusingly re-dub her, "Blank") and who together fall madly in love until the girl dies in a car crash and the boy gets sad for a while but eventually picks up with another girl (Ivanna Novak), except it turns out that the first girl didn't actually die in a car crash but is now working as a journalist staging shady textile importation deals with gangsters because the boy's wealthy father blackmailed her into faking her own death in order to protect her own slightly corrupt father. This paucity of dramatic interest is approximately all that transpires in the film, except it's stretched out from a single overstuffed sentence into ninety minutes. Thankfully, the film concludes with an uplifting message: the power of love can save the lives of those people we hold dear who have large, gory gunshot wounds in their chests. Ugh. I'd rather have spent this lost time with my eyelids forcibly peeled open in front of The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance (1975) again. At least that one had some severed heads made from paper mache: Love & Death on the Edge of a Razor has reminded me to appreciate the simple pleasures.

The Red Headed Corpse 

(La rossa dalla pelle che scotta) 

(1972) 

dir. Renzo Russo

A hidden gem of early-'70s Italian gialli, The Red Headed Corpse takes a manic spin on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and sprinkles it with the aesthetic content (if not the social critique) of a few earlier troubled-artist-turned-murderer flicks like Corman's A Bucket of Blood (1959) and Lewis's Color Me Blood Red (1965). A slightly wizened Farley Granger plays a drunken, struggling artist named John Ward whose paintings are no longer in demand from the local dealers. He stumbles around town cursing his luck one day and happens to wander into a park full of hippies. He turns down their offer of a joint to smoke ("you like the world as it is?" one of the hippies asks in astonishment), but he does take home an expressionless female mannequin that the lead hippie gifts to him, with the endorsement that it's "better than the real thing: it doesn't talk back." John makes the mannequin his new art project, and he talks to her while he fixes her up into an object that's "lovely, pure, faithful. Everything a woman should be." Of course, he fails to notice that she's also a hunk of plastic, but that's not about to stop his deranged mind, which imagines the mannequin coming to life one evening as a real woman (Krista Nell), who is referred to in the credits as "The Subservient Doll." The term "doll" is appropriate because this animated female becomes John's mute plaything, embodying his notion of the ideal female who is to be seen (to spill champagne on her breasts, mostly) and touched but not heard. 

John and his doll's happy co-existence is one day shattered by John's haunting memory of the rampant infidelity of his former wife (Erika Blanc), who is referred to in the credits only as, interestingly, "The Sensuous Doll." The bulk of the film then occurs in flashback, showing us first Blanc's instrumental hand in gaining John some momentary success as a painter of nude figures with her as his model and then her constant betrayals of marriage by getting randy with just about anyone who asks, including a pimply 16-year-old teen boy on the beach. Her selfish actions eventually lead John to murder... or do they? The film is ambiguous on the point of what exactly is reality and what is the delusion of John's mind. How can John have flashbacks to events that he wasn't present for? Are his memories of his wife's infidelities merely the anguished, misogynistic delusions of some male cuckolding fantasy, one in which a women who says "no" always means "yes"? A man haunted by a bleeding sentient mannequin is not quite an authority on empirical events, so we're never sure what to make of the images and memories on screen. What is apparent is that John is a man torn between two false fantasies of women: he's neither satisfied with the faithful but dull subservient doll who "never asks for anything" or the untrustworthy sensuous doll, whose treachery (real or imagined) is as alluring as it is torturous (the film ends on the kooky but somewhat chilling image of Blanc's giant transparent ghost head imposed over a shot of the outside of John's dingy house, laughing at him merrily as he watches wistfully from the rear window of a car in which he's being carted away to the loony bin). One imagines John's position might have improved if he'd only stopped thinking of women as dolls.

The Devil Has Seven Faces 

(Il diavolo a sette facce) 

(1971) 

dir. Osvaldo Civirani

Osvaldo Civirani tricked me. With a title, poster, and trailer like that bestowed upon his film The Devil Has Seven Faces, is it any fault of mine that I believed I was being set up to watch a Gothic-tinged giallo starring the formidable duo of the ever-present Carroll Baker and that charming rapscallion George Hilton? My brain starts to drool at the very idea of such a movie existing. But Civirani, the lousy scoundrel that he obviously is, tricked me. Barring a pretty cool but aesthetically jarring scene in which Baker descends into a basement with only a lighter for illumination and discovers-- to her horror-- a cobwebbed corpse, The Devil Has Seven Faces is far from what you might expect. Sure, it borrows liberally from the giallo's cabinet of plot curiosities-- we have twins, duplicitous lovers, mistaken identities, concealed identities, frantic chases, wigs, and fakeouts and twists galore-- but there's no obscuring the reality that the film is, at its core, a diamond heist film. On that action-and-intrigue-oriented level, it's a kooky pleasure: I'll watch Carroll Baker climb ladders in tight black short-shorts and smoosh a crazed George Hilton under the wheels of a bulldozer any day. But it's a crap giallo, and yet Civirani, his producers, and his distributors sold it to me as something special. Shame on them. I will, however, give them credit for one thing, for their's is the only film that's allowed me to see Baker's impressive emotive facial acting on display from underwater while her head is being plunged into a tub full of watery torture by some villainous villains. Spoiler.

The Fourth Victim 

(Death at the Deep End of the Swimming Pool; La última señora Anderson) 

(1971) 

dir. Eugenio Martín

Carroll Baker makes her final flirtatious appearance of the day in Eugenio "Horror Express" Martin's Spanish-Italian co-production, The Fourth Victim. This fine, Lenzi-esque film concerns the unusual occupation of one Mr. Arthur Anderson (Michael Craig), described by a prosecuting attorney as "a professional widower": Mr. Anderson marries women, takes out large life insurance policies against them, and then collects his reward when they inevitably perish in one kind of "accident" or another. This unexpected gender reversal of the old "Black Widow" routine helps Mr. Anderson persuade a jury of his innocence when he's put on trail for the suspected murder of his latest wife. A well-to-do man who would lower himself so far as to kill his wife for the money? Who could imagine such a dishonest way for a man to make his living? That's (clearly) wicked women's work. These thoughts are those that-- ostensibly-- pass through the brain of Julie (Carroll Baker) when she embarks on a love affair and eventual marriage with Mr. Anderson (his fourth) soon after their first encounter during a quick dip she steals in his pool. Julie attests that she harbors no suspicion against Mr. Anderson, a claim which even he's skeptical of: it's only after she presents him with a life insurance policy that she's taken out for him in her own name that he agrees to their marriage. Naturally, Julie hasn't told her new husband absolutely everything about herself, and the arrival of puzzle pieces like secretive late-night phone calls, information about years-long psychiatric hospital stays, and a murder-happy Marina Malfatti serve to further complicate an already fairly loopy plot. Still, the film's most bewildering moment occurs in its denouement when, all deadly secrets and murderous intentions revealed, Mr. Anderson and the latest Mrs. Anderson blissfully decide to stay hitched, having taken out-- together-- a joint life insurance policy. This might be the most sneakily cynical ending of all time: happiness in marriage is always knowing that you can bump off that other lethal crook you call your spouse for fat stacks of cash at a moment's notice. Ah, love.

Fatal Frames

(Fatal frames: Fotogrammi mortali)

(1996)

dir. Al Festa

What was all that about gazing into the abyss and it gazing also into you? A bloated vanity project of epic proportions (it's over two hours long), Al Festa's Fatal Frames is both entirely baffling and weirdly satisfying. On the one hand, the film is obviously intended to prop up the career of its leading lady/director's lover/pop star prodigy Stefania Stella, which we can note due to her central presence in the film despite her possessing the acting talent of an exaggerated stuffed animal with googly eyes and her uncanny ability to mimic the sound of a slurred, drunken computer reading the phonetic pronunciation of words whenever she speaks. We also notice this obvious intention of the film during moments in which the action stops dead so that Stefania can flop around in a fountain and record a music video set to her mush-mouthed non-hit "Eternal City." And yet, on the other twisted monkey's paw, Fatal Frames is a loving tribute to the gialli of previous decades (though specifically those of the 1980s). It remains aesthetically consistent with those grimy, glitzed-out films from the likes of Lamberto Bava and Carlo Vanzina by featuring lots of fashion models, the odd seance or two, several male actors who look exactly like Furio from The Sopranos, pit stops for slinky photoshoots, and sleepy performances from a cavalcade of washed up genre vets. (David Warbeck, Alida Valli, Linnea Quigley, Angus Scrimm, and Donald Pleasence all fatally poke their sleepy heads into frame here, though Warbeck gives his performance a bit more energy than you'd expect. Sadly, Fatal Frames would be Pleasence's final film due to his death during production, leaving his performance incomplete. Naturally, Festa wrote him out of the film in the most tasteless of fashions). Fatal Frames should have gone terribly wrong, been insufferable even, but it's reined in enough that it's actually quite watchable and self-indulgent in all the right ways. Think of it as akin to a giallo helmed by Tommy Wiseau, only starring someone with even less of a familiarity with the English language than him. Stefania help me, I actually liked it.

Meltdown 09: Yellow Days of Summer (Part II)

Body Puzzle 

(Misteria) 

(1992) 

dir. Lamberto Bava

They're never the best of the lot, but it feels wrong to ignore a giallo from Lamberto Bava whenever one watches a whole pile of them in a row. Although they were all produced a decade or more after the subgenre had peaked, there's still something quintessential about his giallo films, or at least quintessentially '80s European horror about them, meaning they're cheaper, gorier, frillier, and more colorful and garish than their forefathers. From A Blade in the Dark (1983) to Delirium: Photos of Gioia (987), Lamberto's gialli forgo subtlety and style in favor of big blades and bigger hair. As the great Mario Bava's talent-challenged son, Lamberto chooses to overcompensate for his lack of cinematographic grace in all of his directorial efforts by piling on the decade-specific sleaze and cheese. And as in the cases of the two films mentioned above, this overabundance can be a lot of fun, as his gialli often border on a sensibility close to that of the frenetic insanity of his biggest horror hit, Demons (1985). But I have to suppose that by the early '90s, after several years of cranking out mostly Italian TV features, Bava had begun to mellow out. Body Puzzle, his chief giallo of the period, is an almost restrained effort, barring the inclusion of a few pieces of inspired lunacy (like a toilet bowl cam that watches from underwater as a severed hand plops down into the bowl, or when the snarling killer pops out from the interior of an icebox full of cubes and corpses). Through its restraint alone the film winds up tonally and aesthetically closer to the traditional gialli of the '70s than Bava had ever come before, and the result is a curious change of pace. Following the Columbo formula, we're presented early on with a killer (François Montagut) who listens to classical music through earbuds while he harvests donated organs from his assorted victims for conspicuous placement around the house of the recently widowed Tracy (Joanna Pacula), and it's up to the efforts of a dedicated police inspector (Thomas Arana) to unravel why. Many convoluted revelations concerning identity, sexuality, and vital statistics follow, along with some cameos from nearly unrecognizable older versions of Erika Blanc and Gianni Garko. Its constant, running-length-stretching plot twists and contortions keep the proceedings involving, but it's both amusing and beguiling to watch Lamberto play-- even fleetingly-- at building a classy production. I mean, consider who we're talking about here.

In the Eye of the Hurricane 

(El ojo del huracán) 

(1971) 

dir. José María Forqué

In the Eye of the Hurricane is a very Jean Sorel sort of film. It's an erotic thriller in the Diabolique mode concerning a handsome playboy who slyly plots the torment and hopeful death of a wealthy woman that he's romantically involved with in order to gain access to her vast funds. So, it's a lot like some of Sorel's other gialli: Parnoia (1970, written about below) and The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), in particular. As luck would have it, Sorel happens to star in this enthralling Spanish-Italian co-production too (hooray for type-casting!). I won't deny that I'm a sucker for this type of giallo, as I've found that much joy can be wrung out of the games of domestic treachery and double-crosses even when they're not all that creative in their respective approaches or implementations. But In the Eye of the Hurricane, I'll hazard to argue, holds a dagger of originality up to the sub-subgenre's throat and dares it to make a clever move, resulting in a film that's both more suspenseful and ultimately more satisfying than its formal typicality would initially suggest. 

In this type of giallo, the female protagonist is generally beleaguered and hysterical, driven to madness, beset by paranoia, and left without much hope of saving herself from her own predicament without outside aid. In contrast, In the Eye of the Labyrinth's leading lady, Ruth (Analía Gadé), overhears the unambiguous late-night scheming of her envious ex-husband (Tony Kendall) and her sexy yet duplicitous new boypal (Jean Sorel, naturally) about halfway through, and thus she uses this secret knowledge to shape the events that follow. We spend the rest of the movie observing Ruth's emotional waffling between silent heartbreak over her beloved's betrayal and her cool determination to foil the plans against her before her danged brake fluid is tampered with again. (This waffling isn't always graceful, but it is always enjoyable to watch: in one scene, Ruth pretends to lay asleep and bizarrely resigns herself to death while Sorel's character stands behind her and points a gun at her head, unaware of her cognizance of his presence and intention. The editing in this scene hits a fever pitch as it quickly cuts back and forth between extreme close-ups of their anguished faces waiting far too long for something to happen before it finally does: the bedside phone rings.) Our uncertainty about which perspective Ruth will ultimately align herself with (revenge or resignation) makes the last act (which mirrors Carroll Baker's blackmail home imprisonment at the hands of two nymphomaniacal siblings in Umberto Lenzi's Orgasmo (1969)) a riveting watch as Sorel sneers, a crazed Rosanna Yanni snarls, and the sexual torment commences. Without divulging too many details of the wrap-up, it should be noted that Ruth is a complex and capable female protagonist-- independent, strong-willed, and essentially faultless-- and these qualities alone set the film that rises up around her apart from the pack and their parades of tragic or guilty women. All this, plus a scene in which Sorel and Gadé perform an upside Spider-Man kiss on the beach while rubbing each other's tummies. This corpse is exquisite.

Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead 

(Tutti defunti... tranne i morti) 

(1977) 

dir. Pupi Avati

It's not an arduous task to place myself back into the frame of mind that once thought, "A giallo spoof from the director of one of the subgenre's finest entries (The House with Laughing Windows (1976))? How could this viewing experience possibly go awry?" But, as I was reminded of after watching Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead, one should probably never underestimate the enigma that is 1970s Italian comedy: it will always find new horrendous ways to baffle and repel. We are, after all, speaking of the cinematic output of a country whose horror-thrillers even end, from time to time, on the high note of an anal rape gag (see: Andrea Bianchi's uber-sleazy Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975)). Commercial Italian films of the period were in no way subtle or refined, and the comedies even less so. If you haven't seen any but would like a general idea of how they feel, then imagine the general tasteless tomfoolery of a Screwballs (1983), a Joysticks (1983), or any other lewd and crude American teen sex comedy of the '80s and then skew that exact same content towards a middle-aged audience rather than post-pubescent teens. So, in short: jokes about masturbation, loose women, the mentally-handicapped, little people, homosexuality, cowboys, and... book salesmen. The story concerns just such a bulbous-nosed book salesman (Carlo Delle Piane) who arrives at the Zanotti family mansion on the eve of their patriarch's funeral in order to sell that collected bunch of eccentrics and perverts a reproduction of an old manuscript detailing the finer points of their family curse and a prophecy promising treasure if nine corpses are accumulated over the course of one stormy night. One member of the household, seeing this prophecy, decides to don a fedora and black gloves in the hope of speeding fate along. Hilarity ensues? 

There are certainly some good jokes to be found in-between all the groan-worthy nonsense: I quite liked the exchange between a confused victim and his killer immediately after the latter has stabbed the former in his side: "What's that?" "A nice stab, can't you see?" "(groans, dies.)" The film contains a few of the warm, fuzzy Old Dark House laughs that you'll receive from watching similar yet superior slapstick murder mysteries like Clue (1987) and Murder By Death (1976). For example, when the power is cut by the killer, the perpetually clueless Inspector Martini (Gianni Cavina) shouts at the others assembled, "pay the bills, guys!" (when the lights flicker back on later in the film, he sighs, with relief, "so they paid it!"). The film's most amusing gag occurs when the gathered family members, led by Inspector Martini, attempt to instruct a pair of dogs to follow the killer's scent from one of his victim's severed hands that they've discovered. They toss the bloody hand to the dogs, who then promptly devour it. There's clearly something amusing about the giallo murder mystery ripe for skewering, but  Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead's parody is far from as focused as it ought to be. When's the last time you saw a giallo that featured death-by-electric anti-masturbation machine?

Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It

(Uccidete il vitello grasso e arrostitelo) 

(1971) 

dir. Salvatore Samperi

Salvatore Samperi's ultra-rare and ever-so-excellent Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It deserves a wider audience, for its peculiar cinematic tale would satisfy genre junky and art film connoisseur alike. Far from a straight-razor wielding giallo, the film has as much in common with one of Poe's darkly humorous Gothic family tragedies as it does the more eccentric, atypical products of the subgenre it has been lumped in with due to historical proximity. This sad but inevitable tale of the doomed Merlo family, who are plagued by ancestral madness, Oedipal complexes, incestual lust, and sibling backstabbing, holds artistic pretensions that would place it in line with the demented, sexually-malformed social commentaries of Samperi's compatriot Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film not-so-subtly posits that Italy's rich old families, who have built their vast ancient wealth on the destruction and murder of whole villages of those less fortunate than them, are diseased at the root and fated to poison themselves through desire and aggression turned back on itself now that there's no one left to subjugate. After the unexpected death (or murder?) of the family patriarch, youngest son Enrico (Maurizio Degli Esposti) begins an investigation that places his shady older brother Cesare (Jean Sorel, making his second appearance today) and his dryly seductive cousin Verde (Marilù Tolo) as the primary suspects. At the same time, Enrico also busies himself with creating a creepy shrine for his insane dead mother and carrying on an illicit affair of motherly affection with his cousin Verde, who has sex with him but also dresses in his mother's clothes before offering him her breast to suckle. Sublime, surreal Freudian weirdness runs high throughout: it's the sort of film that inspires one to jot down a note reading "boob/pudding jiggle juxtaposition." Eventually, Enrico wades deep enough into his family's deadly business that he begins to drown, forcibly. The film submits through its title and some internal dialogue that in this way Enrico is like an innocent calf among hungry wolves, but it also becomes clear through Enrico's damaged psyche and the story's grim conclusion that a calf too long among wolves grows sharp teeth.

Death on the Fourposter 

(Sexy Party; Delitto allo specchio) 

(1964) 

dir. Jean Josipovici

An Italian-French co-production, Death on the Fourposter (also known by the less striking title Sexy Party) arrived in cinemas the same year as Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964), a film of no small importance to the foundation of the giallo subgenre. Consequently, director Jean Josopovici's film doesn't have an ingrained giallo tradition to draw upon when concocting its own murder mystery, and so instead draws upon elements of the Gothic. And yet, those elements of the Gothic that Death on the Fourposter employs-- seances and mediums, chilly castles, returns from the dead-- would soon become as much a part of the giallo tradition as Bava's fashion models and gloved killer. This observation is not intended to give Death on the Fourposter (which is, after all, a rather obscure film) equal or even a significant amount of credit in the development of the subgenre, but it does make clear that Bava's film didn't appear out of the ether: it, like Jean Josipovici's film, was the product of an evolution of a long and storied tradition of murder mystery and Gothic horror cinema in Italy and throughout Europe. That these and other Euro mystery films were, by the mid-1960s, simultaneously beginning to include scenes of more blatant sexuality and bloody violence than those films of previous decades is a sign of the fast-changing times post-watershed horrors like Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960).

Through almost entirely deficient on the bloody violence count, Death on the Fourposter's proto-giallo cred certainly shines through in its sultry sexual content. There's none of the explicit sexuality or nudity of the '70s giallo canon, but the film's alternately titular sexy party certainly earns that designation. A band of irritatingly rich young men and women whose names invariably end in either "y" or "ie" descend upon a castle for a weekend get-together (one of them quips, "this is better than your father's castle") and their evening soon devolves into a string of naughty parlor games in which there is much seducing, teasing, partner-swapping, wagering, sexy dancing (set, off-time, to a special guest's new hit party record, entitled, naturally, "Sexy Party"), and shattering of illusions. This first half of the film is quite a lot of steamy fun, thanks in no small part to the bewitching presence of actress Antonella Lualdi as Serena, a sort of devilish socialite with devious charm and sex appeal to spare. Serena puts her fellow party guests on trial through her only ostensibly playful games, revealing the others' various hypocrisies and petty vices while she smiles all the while. Serena is such a strong and alluring presence in the film that the action takes a nosedive in its interest for the viewer after she's knocked off at the midway point. Who killed her? Why? Who's dead next? Where are the stolen rings? Who's going insane? These are all questions that the film spends the rest of its length answering, but I would have preferred to have seen some more of Serena putting chinks in high society's armor of respectability.

Cross Current 

(Un omicidio perfetto a termine di legge) 

(1971) 

dir. Tonino Ricci

Like In the Eye of the Labyrinth, Tonino Ricci's Cross Current twists and turns endlessly in its trashy attempt to simulate a Diabolique-inspired murder soap opera. (Also like in that film-- released in the same year, by gum-- the lovely Rosanna Yanni pops up here as a scheming sexpot who favors boogieing in miniskirts. No complaints.) Cross Current isn't as clever or as complex as that other film, but it certainly makes up for that lack in plot complexity. Most of the notes I took while watching the film were mostly intended to help me keep the details straight as it barreled along in its tale of boating accidents, gardener blackmail, midnight stranglings and the like. As is usually the case, everyone here has a hidden agenda and more than likely a hidden lover. More than a few of them "die" before popping up very much alive in order to enact some new nefarious plot. The rich plot and scheme, killing each other and themselves, all over measly business interests. This is the standard score, but Ricci and his crew pull an admirable job by maintaining its appeal. It's kind of hard to frown on a film that ends with a character being so scared by some spooky music playing on the record player that she trips, hits her head, and dies after guzzling down some J&B, only to then have it strongly implied that it was all part of the villain's plan. Ludicrously messy murder-plotting all in good fun, with the added benefit of providing our first sighting of the ever-smirking/ever-dashing Ivan Rassimov this month. No complaints at all.

Paranoia 

(A Quiet Place to Kill) 

(1970) 

dir. Umberto Lenzi

Carroll Baker is a race car driver. If you need me to continue, then your eyes must have skimmed past the previous sentence without fully gleaning its import. Paranoia, Umberto Lenzi's third giallo with the inestimable Ms. Baker and the only in which her character stars as a bonafide prizewinning race car driver, has driven a symbolic race car off of a cliff and into my heart. It might not be the best giallo that this power duo concocted together (my vote would still go to Orgasmo), but-- from its solarized, spoiler-filled opening credits to its closing ironic twist that dooms the villainous victors-- it's awfully close. Three years before the action of the film begins, Helen (Carroll Baker) had all of her money spent by her lazy European boyfriend, Maurice (Jean Sorel, again), before he split, forcing her to spend the next few years making drastic career moves (i.e. race car driving) in order to recoup her wealth and get over her heartbreak. When Maurice's new wife, Constance (Anna Proclemer), sends Helen an invitation to stay at their home in Maurice's name, Helen impulsively decides to take up the offer. What she discovers after arriving is that Maurice is still up to old tricks and that Constance wishes to enlist her help to rid him from their lives, preferably by strategically placed harpoon. However, Helen's rekindled passion for all things Maurice makes her decision a difficult one. A murder, a cover-up, and a guilty conscience later, the film reaches an entirely new level of delirious entertainment when Constance's sultry schoolgirl daughter, Susan (Marina Coffa), arrives at the estate and begins to sniff that something foul is afoot. We're then gifted with a parade of wigs, whiskey abuse, and exploding cars to close events out (complimenting the film's earlier parade of a carrier pigeon, bubble disco dancing, and a frumpy green bikini quite nicely).

There are many neat things to be found in Paranoia for the subgenre buff, but the neatest might be the film's pointed inversion of typical gender roles. It is the film's women, rather than its men, who are the providers. Both Helen and Constance are self-made women, using their earned wealth to lead extravagant lifestyles that cater to the whims and tastes of their hunky but penniless arm candy (like the unemployed Maurice). Helen and Constance both make clear that they've cycled through many young live-in playboys due to lust over the years, as if they've been irresistibly tempted by their masculine charms. This sort of domestic and romantic arrangement is totally typical in giallo films if you reverse the sexes, but Paranoia's evacuation of gendered expectations is unique, and, in a way, sort of total: when the car that Helen and Maurice are driving breaks down on the road, it's Helen who takes a peep under the hood and announces the car's failure while Maurice idles by helpless. Carroll Baker is a race car driver.