The terms “zombie” and the “living-dead” were never used in this film; this rabid breed were something very different, distancing 28 Days Later from Romero’s atrophied minions. Danny Boyle brings a brooding atmosphere to his creation, particularly in the iconic scenes trailing through an abandoned London, originally shot on digital video and filmed during the early hours of the morning. He then injected the necessary action to keep his viewers on the very edge of their seats. Zombie die-hards were be treated to much flesh eating with the infected throwing up blood and the newly contaminated going through a shocking metamorphosis in a mere matter of seconds. The post-catastrophic images of London were vaguely reminiscent of John Wyndham’s imagining of The Day of the Triffids, first published in 1951, which Garland later revealed as a great source of inspiration.
Danny Boyle’s film proved to be a commercial triumph and received numerous awards including Best Horror Film from the US Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, Best British Film (Empire Award) and Danny being awarded the Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film in Silver and an International Fantasy Film Award. His film would continue in the sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), along with a graphic novel and a series of comic books. In March 2007, while being interviewed by an Irish radio station, Danny admitted to an interest in adding a third film to the series, “28 Months Later”.
THE SEQUEL TO 28 Days Later brought Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to the director’s chair and from the very offset he escalated the tension before throwing in a pulse-pounding sequence of fast-paced action punctuated by the slavering gore of its illustrious predecessor. In what should have been an idyllic countryside location, very close to London, Don (Robert Carlyle), his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) along with a few survivors have withdrawn to a barricaded farmhouse. Their existence is shattered when droves of the infected besiege the house. Don panics and in the chaos is unable to save Alice as he tries to find a means of escape. Consumed with fear he takes flight, leaving behind him a scene of utter carnage and his wife about to be consumed by the rabid mob.
It is now twenty-eight weeks since the viral outbreak that almost wiped out the entire population of Great Britain. London has been declared safe with the infected believed to have died of starvation. Those who survived now make their return under the heavily armed surveillance of the American military. Don, now a caretaker, is reunited with his children, Tammy and her younger brother Andy. Although they ask about their mother, he finds it impossible to be completely honest about her final moments. Locked away in a sanitized compound on the Isle of Dogs, the children think only of their mother and, in a bid to rediscover their past, they slip away scurrying through the wreckage of the streets they once knew. When they locate their house, it is in a terrible state, but in the disarray they find some old family photographs. As they prepare to leave, Andy makes a startling discovery: his mother is still alive.
As they leave the house, they are sighted by US soldiers, who escort them back to the safety of the compound. Here Alice is tested and declared infected, but she exhibits an unusual immunity to its more ravaging effects. In the hope of being reunited with his wife and expressing his overwhelming remorse, Don bypasses the internal security. As he holds her in his arms, their kiss damns him for his abandonment and the contamination once again begins to spread. The immediate butchery of his beloved wife reveals him as the most savage of this new breed. The rabid Don will rip his way through the entire compound on a course that will lead him to his own children. The grainy epilogue chases through the darkness as the infected stream forth from the Paris Métro Trocadéro station before the Eiffel Tower, the distorted focus alluding to the catastrophe to come.
While the tone was darker than that of its precursor, 28 Weeks Later was released to enormous critical acclaim, with Fresnadillo praised for his unusually skilled craft. Amidst the despairing scenes of devastation, and the threat of the blood-foaming infected, can be heard the dissident voice of protest. This undercurrent cleverly subverts the blood-craving zombie to the post 9/11 psychosis; ambiguity surrounds the American military presence, their policies being depicted as aggressively insensitive and foolishly complacent. The vision is bleak, with napalm ripping from the skies, the innocent caught in torrents of bullets and streets littered with the remains of the dead and discarded debris. Whether it’s the terror of a confined crowd thrown to the mercy of Carlyle’s foaming rage or survivors stumbling through the pitch black of an underground station, the combination of impending doom and surging violence makes this a singularly disturbing cinematic experience.
A MAN IS SEEN walking through the desolation of a snow-bound landscape; in the background is the darkened boat from which he has just stepped. His path takes him to the distant settlement of Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in the United States, almost eighty miles from the nearest outpost. Once the sun has set in the deepest winter of this northerly region, it won’t appear over the horizon for another thirty days. This darkened world is the ideal setting for a band of ruthless vampires, who have made their way across the ice and snow towards this isolated locale, ready to feed their bloodlust on an unsuspecting population. At first the kills are slow and intermittent, but the residents can feel something is wrong and all too soon they begin to fall to these sadistic predators, who take an unseemly delight in tracking down and tearing into their prey. Only a small group of survivors remain, each of whom looks to the local sheriff, Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) and his wife Stella (Melissa George) to save them from thus unrelenting malfeasance. It will be days before the light of day pours over this beleaguered town, to force their tormentors into hibernation.
30 Days of Night began life as a comic book series published by IDW during 2002, written by Steve Niles and lavishly illustrated by Ben Templesmith. It was a sharp departure from the romanticized vampire lore of the period, which readily returned to the vampire breed of the Hammer years and Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963). David Slade’s film remained true to Niles’ original concept, retaining the sense of isolation and then hurling the inhabitants of this remote town into a completely hopeless situation as these evil creatures ransacked the streets and houses, ruthlessly stalking their prey. The audience were never privy to the thoughts and personalities of the vampire horde; they only ever knew that this was a vicious and cunning influx, with a single-minded desire to satiate its unholy craving. Their discourse was guttural, conversing in a dialect that made them appear all the more inhuman.
With this film only a few minutes old, the violence ascended to an immediate intensity that continued to the terror of the finale, which included a series of incisive decapitations and the regular splatter of blood strewn across the snow. The cinematography in this world without light worked to tremendous effect, using close-up visuals to enhance the suspense and never allowing the audience to forget the intention of this and Niles’ original: nobody gets out alive.
AN ELDERLY MAN is seen meandering across a seemingly deserted beach as the sun fades into the horizon. This blissful scene is shattered by the grisly antics of a psychopathic hippy. When he stumbles upon a young couple making love he removes the head of the young man and then rapes and butchers his girlfriend. This slasher is infinitely more depraved than your everyday psychopath; he has a hankering for necrophilia and very soon we learn the rape was committed after the girl’s death. As terror begins to sweep across the town other young lovers fall before the maniac’s blade, each of the female corpses enduring the same indignity as the first. The killer’s modus operandi reveals a connection with another series of killings; they follow an identical pattern occurring in the fifth month of the year, for five consecutive nights once every five years. The brusque detectives are now on the case, openly arguing with a female journalist, as they track down their only suspect, a war veteran in a safari shirt. False leads come and go as the boobs and gore intensify the sleaze in this exploitative shocker. As 555 draws to an end, the killer is wracked by a bizarre sequence of flashbacks, each of
which repeats so much of the footage already seen in this film.
Wally Koz’s family-produced bargain basement slasher was shot on one-inch video tape in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village. After being disappointed by so many slapdash horror movies, Koz was convinced that with very little money he could come up with something of far greater worth. He had absolutely no experience as a filmmaker, but such minor trivialities were not going to get in his way. He envisioned distributing this film himself before progressing to new features; sadly, this wasn’t to be. For these ninety minutes, however, he revealed the lengths to which independent film productions were prepared to go in the hope of mustering an audience. 555 was unabashed in its excessive indulgence of misogynistic sleaze and gore, so much so it was never going to be endorsed by the MPAA. They did everything they could to seize every copy in the hope of denying potential viewers its graphic content. Their vigilance put an end to Koz’s dreams and made his film a rarity for VHS collectors across the globe. It came as a great surprise to Koz when his film received a review in the pages of Variety and for a video of this degenerate ilk garnered a reasonably favourable review. This was one of the very few occasions that Variety ever cast their eyes over such a despicable feature.
The cheap gore typically managed to hold the film together and included two memorable moments of cinematic splatter. When one unfortunate has his fingers scythed, his screams are never heard as his head is almost immediately removed. For a film blighted by such meagre funding, this scene remains the source of much discussion among those gore mongers whose endeavours have succeeded in tracing this video. If this wasn’t enough, a machete was driven into a victim’s throat, probably using the remainder of the film’s budget. However, Wally Koz knew how to save a little bit of money, as he used the same pre-recorded scream for every one of the female victim’s murders. For sure it was low-budget exploitation, but no one could deny the Koz family’s boundless enthusiasm.
ORIGINALLY RELEASED AS Reazione a Catena and also known as Ecologia del delitto, Bloodbath, Carnage, Twitch of the Death Nerve and Last House on the Left II in the United States, A Bay of Blood is considered one of Mario Bava’s finest works. Its significance in slasher folklore cannot be underestimated for this minor masterpiece is now acknowledged as being the precursor to Friday the 13th (1980) and the generation that followed. The story struggled with an incoherent plot that was sacrificed for the madness of the movie’s predilection for murder, as those at the centre of this tale attempted to dispose of anyone who stood in their way of a family inheritance.
Locked away in her remote mansion overlooking an inland bay, Countess Federica (Isa Miranda) wheels herself through the forlorn shadows. Dwelling on the rain pouring against her window, she fails to notice the presence of her scheming husband Filippo Donati (Giovanni Nuvoletti), who slips a noose around her neck before kicking her from her wheelchair. Ailed by her weakened legs, the countess is unable to stand and the rope around her neck becomes ever tighter as it strangles the last breath from her body. However, Filippo immediately gets his just deserves at the hands of a mysterious killer hidden behind a curtain, who then drags his body away. The discovery of a suicide note, stolen from the countess’s diary, satisfies the police that she has taken her own life, but Filippo’s death goes strangely unnoticed. So follows the arrival of other relatives and family members, each prepared to do whatever it takes to secure the family inheritance.
The introduction of an almost inconsequential sub-plot was the key feature that would acquire Bava’s movie its interminable reputation. The bloody developments observed in this episode were to provide the dynamics for the evolution of the slasher genre that began with John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), before descending into the mayhem of the 1980s. Unbeknown to them, the murderous family are joined at the bay by a group of excitable teenagers. Wanting nothing more than a little bit of adolescent fun, they have broken into a vacant cottage on the estate, hoping to find some alcoholic relief and a take-it-easy with their stash of dope. There are teenage kicks aplenty until one of the group, Brunhilda, decides to go swimming in the bay and runs in with the badly decomposed body of Filippo Donati. In shock, she stumbles through woodland to the cottage to tell the others of her grisly find. However, she is chased and attacked by an unidentified maniac wielding a deathly machete. It doesn’t take long before he has her in his clutches and his weapon is buried into her throat. Then it’s the turn of one of the boys. Robert opens the front door of the cottage to be confronted by the machete; he takes it full in the face. The killer, whose guise is still obscured, has only just started to get going. He lays his hands on a fisherman’s spear and impales the two remaining teenagers, Denise and Duke, who are in bed enjoying their last moments of passion.
This wasn’t the finale for this murderous spree, for the family inheritance was still very much at stake. The body count would rise to thirteen, making A Bay of Blood Bava’s most violent of the twenty-three films he directed. This graphic display, particularly the senseless murders of the teenagers in what appeared to be an idyllic backwater, would leave a legacy to inspire an entire generation of horror cinema. The impact of these grisly killings was such that they would be repeated again and again as the slasher and splatter phenomenon ascended to unparalleled popularity less than a decade later. The first two instalments of the Friday the 13th franchise would make ample use of Bava’s ingenuity, particularly in Friday the 13th II (1981) when both the machete to the face and the impaled lovers were fondly rehashed. On its release in 1971, the reaction to what was just another low-budget movie was anything but flattering, leaving one of the leading horror actors of the day, Christopher Lee, aghast at its content. The critics’ disgust was the grindhouse theatres’ and drive-ins’ manna; they were eager to retain it on their itinerary for the next few years under its American title Twitch of the Death Nerve.
While Mario Bava suffered under the critics’ wrath, one man on his crew was acclaimed for his exertions, Carlo Rambaldi. He was brought in as the special effects man and assigned with the task of designing the makeup for the bloody death scenes. The 1971 Avoriaz Film Festival jurors awarded the film the Best Makeup and Special Effects Award, and in that same year, he went on to earn a “Special Mention” Award at the prestigious Sitges Festival. His career then took off, leading to work on King Kong (1976), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Alien (1979), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Dune (1984).
BRUNO (ANDREA OCCHIPINTI) has rented a huge villa in a quiet rural locale somewhere in Tuscany, to help him get into the right frame of mind to produce the ominous score for Laura’s (Fabiola Toledo) forthcoming horror movie. Prior to his arrival the villa had been rented to a woman by the name of Linda, who had apparently departed in rather uncertain circumstances. Soon after meeting his neighbour Katia (Valeria Cavalli), who is still unsettled by Linda’s sudden disappearance, she is attacked and killed by a giallo-styled assassin. In the days that follow, Bruno discovers traces of blood around the villa and then finds Katia’s diary, which reveals she has learned the enigmatic Linda was concealing a terrifying secret. When his girlfriend Julia (Lara Lamberti) arrives, Bruno seeks to investigate the strange disappearances, but other women visiting the house also go missing, one in a brutal bathroom scene that would attract a considerable amount of controversy. Each new murder seems to echo those committed in the script of Laura’s new film. When Anne (Anny Papa) turns up to collect the completed score, she finds herself trapped in the villa with Bruno and Julia, and a killer hiding in the darkness.
Shot in just two weeks and originally intended as an extended television drama, Lamberto Bava’s stylish film was a late entry to the once popular giallo, but gained acceptance from a new audience owing to its narrative that adopted the now fashionable American slasher. Although his feature wasn’t entirely original, Bava carefully constructed a mystery around his killer, leaving few clues as to the motive for this brutal spree, while racking up the tension with a series of shadow-laden stalk
sequences leading to some explicit kills that exhibited a graphic relish for the depiction of sharpened knives penetrating human flesh. A Blade in the Dark was Bava’s second appearance in the directorial chair, following his well received dalliance with necrophilia in Macabre (1980), and revealed a man whose intense portrayal was highly influenced by the grand master of Italian terror, the esteemed Dario Argento. The viciousness exhibited in the bathroom murder was never going to be acceptable to the BBFC, who insisted on one minute and fifty seconds of cuts to this scene and further edits to some of the more bloodthirsty episodes before the film could be released to video in 1987. For Lamberto Bava, these were early days in what would be a long and successful career in the director’s chair.
A YOUNG WOMAN, VICKI Kent (American porn actress Samantha Fox), has been released from a mental institution after the inexplicable murder of two boys. While these murders occurred, members of her family were busily killing other relatives. A sister is butchered in the bathtub followed by an impalement on an axe. It doesn’t take long before an aunt is killed in the privacy of her garden by an assassin in the employ of her husband. The guilt-stricken husband confesses to his crime and bows out by hanging himself. This entire succession of murders takes place in the mere matter of minutes the film has been on screen.
Vicki’s resentful brother and sister have already embarked on a scheme to drive her to the very edge of madness in the hope that she will once again be committed. They lure her into a darkened bathroom, where they fondle her breasts and smear her body in blood, which is noticeably conspicuous by its absence when she escapes screaming to her bedroom. This is only the beginning; they won’t relent until Vicky is hauled away in a straight jacket. Their ploy continues with the most bizarre episode in their grand plan: the brother disguises himself as a zombie and chases Vicki through the woods. If this wasn’t enough, her so called boyfriend Frankie is involved with her sister and has another willing girl at his behest, who isn’t averse to a good old soft core styled romp. The erotica continues with Vicky’s sensuous hallucinations, shots of lovers’ bodies writhing over superimposed images of crashing waves set against a dreamy psychedelic vista. These intense images are countered by Vicki’s sister’s dreams, which are more in keeping with the film’s title; a knife is shown in close up repeatedly stabbed into her throat, head and upper body. Frankie doesn’t dream his death; he really does get to die, hacked to death by a cleaver.
The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books) Page 4
