IN THE DEPTHS of a cave on a faraway island, researchers are about to bear down on a native voodoo ritual. During the ensuing melee, the voodoo priest (James Sampson) is killed as he conspires to open the Third Gate of Hell, all in the hope of giving life to his recently deceased daughter. In the throes of death, he invokes a curse from the ancient “Book of the Dead”, whose incantation reaches across the entire island to return the dead to life. Within minutes, four people’s faces are torn asunder and bloody carnage ensues. As a family chase through the mist of the forest trying to escape this insanity, they are confronted by a freshly resurrected zombie. Within seconds, the father’s neck is savagely gorged and the mother is taken down and eaten alive. Only their young daughter Jenny (Candice Daly) manages to escape, protected by her mother’s amulet.
Many years later, Jenny returns with a friend and a group of mercenaries. She is intent on learning the circumstances that led to the death of her parents and seek to become free of the island’s curse. As their boat draws into shore, the engine cuts out leaving the party marooned. In a change of scene, three backpackers are observed exploring the same island; they wander into the cave where the high priest and his followers had previously been killed. One of them, Chuck (Jeff Stryker), opens “The Book of the Dead” and accidentally revives the spell that once again resurrects the dead. Only Chuck makes it from the cave; soon after both he and the mercenaries are heavily embroiled with this new wave of the walking dead. Those who fall to this unusually animated horde undergo an all too familiar transmutation to join the ranks of those who have already become zombies, as Jenny and Chuck desperately fight on in the hope of survival. They know the only way to end the curse is to seal the gateway that leads to Hell, so the two of them trek back to the cave. As they explore the cavern, Jenny comes upon a mirror that reveals the flesh melting from her face and, in an exquisitely executed close up, her eyeball is plucked from its socket. As this terrifying transformation takes place, Stryker has to confront the mindless zombies and falls as one of them repeatedly thrusts its hand into his stomach, leaving him to an agonizing death. Before the credits begin to roll, the camera turns its attention to Jenny, whose face has now completely disintegrated to reveal she too is now one of this atrophied breed.
After Death or Oltre La Morte was another part in the obsession for Italian zombies, and saw release in the United States as Zombie 4: After Death and here in the United Kingdom as Zombie Flesh Eaters 3. These titles are typically confusing, as the film bears no narrative connection with either series. Claudio Fragasso, under the pseudonym Clyde Anderson, returned from Zombi 3 (1988) to direct this low-budget shocker with its implausible plot but distinctive splatter of blood and guts. His film proved a little too dependent on the gore factor, and when to his disdain it was censored, it was robbed of a considerable part of its intended impact. However, its fast pace and succinct editing combined with the handmade zombie effects succeeded in producing a movie that appealed to the bloodthirsty and invited much discussion as to the interpretation of its ambiguous denouement. The statuesque Jeff Stryker, credited as Chuck Peyton, had already starred in a plethora of gay and bisexual pornographic features and would go on to make many more. Fragasso would continue to direct low-budget ventures, which the following year would see him work on the haunted house feature La Casa 5 and the film denigrated as one of the worst of all time, Troll 2.
WITH HIS COLLEAGUES having left for the night, the partially disguised mortician (Pep Tsor) is left alone in the morgue with only the bodies of the recently deceased as company. An autopsy is explicitly detailed; then this troubled employee begins to fondle the corpses. One corpse in particular attracts his attention, that of a young woman who has just been brought in following her death in the impact of a car crash. He tears off her clothes, then slices open her body, becoming aroused as her raw flesh is exposed before savouring his necrophilic lust by climbing astride her lacerated cadaver while taking pictures with an automated camera. Discarding his mask, he then leaves for the evening with his snap shots and the heart he has removed to feed to his dog.
There was no dialogue to Nacho Cerdà’s compelling thirty-minute portrayal of sex and mutilation, only a score of beguiling classical music, placing this film among the more disturbing realms of art house cinema. While there was a beauty to the serenity of the music that was facilitated by Christopher Baffa’s smooth-flowing camera work, this proves to be a sickening experience, which will live on with the audience long after the lights have gone down. The sense of realism observed in Cerdà’s short feature sought to unsettle, surpassing both Johan Vandewoestijne’s Lucker the Necrophagous (1986) and Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik (1987) in taking the act of necrophilia further than any director before him. While this wasn’t a film made specifically to titillate the gore-mongers, Cerdà consulted with both students and teachers of pathology to ensure he treated his subject matter with the utmost respect and then let the blood flow. During the planning stages, Aftermath was to have run to over two hours, expanding the number of autopsies and allowing for considerably more sex. With very little money at his disposal, the director was forced to reduce the scale of his venture and shot the film in only eight days. Aftermath was followed by another horror short in 1998, Genesis; it would be 2006 before he progressed onto his long-awaited first full-length feature, which came to the cinema screens as The Abandoned (2006). This ghostly portrayal would observe a similar beauty in its use of both photography and musical backdrop, but preferred suggestion as its means to frightening its audience to the graphic display that was featured throughout this film. Christopher Baffa’s work didn’t go unrecognized; he worked on the shelved Fantastic Four movie of that year before embarking on a lucrative career behind the camera in television.
THE COMMERCIAL SPACESHIP Nostromo travels through the darkness of space on its return voyage to Earth, with its crew of seven resting in suspended animation. An unknown transmission forces the ship’s computer to awaken the crew and then following the instructions of their corporate employers they land on the planetoid on which the signal has been traced. On the surface of the planetoid, the decaying hull of an alien vessel can be seen, and within, the landing party, led by Kane (John Hurt), discover the long-dead pilot, a huge alien life form whose ribs seem to have exploded. As the team make their way around the derelict ship, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) determines the transmission is actually a warning. Meanwhile, on board the alien ship the exploratory team descend into an enormous chamber laden with a cargo of strange eggs. As Kane examines the cargo, a creature bursts from the egg and envelopes his face. His colleagues’ efforts to remove the creature prove unsuccessful until it detaches of its own will and then dies.
At first Kane seems to be fine, but as the crew enjoy a meal before returning to deep sleep he begins a series of uncontrollable convulsions while sitting at the table and then, in one of the most astonishing scenes in cinematic history, a creature erupts from his chest. Kane’s upper body is only ever briefly seen; it has been completely ripped apart and the creature scurries away to hide somewhere in the bowels of the Nostromo. If they are to survive and return to Earth the crew must hunt down this alien entity, but this will become far more than a game of cat and mouse as Ripley has to fight for her life and overcome this predatory killer to become the final girl in what has been described as a science fiction slasher.
Dan O’Bannon had written the screenplay for Alien while he was still only a student. In his time at the University of Southern California, he also collaborated with John Carpenter and concept artist Ron Cobb to make the cult science fiction movie Dark Star (1974). As a longtime fan of science fiction and horror he has always been keen to share his numerous sources of inspiration. These included The Thing from Another World (1951), later adapted by John Carpenter, Forbidden Planet (1956), Planet of the Vampires (1965), Clifford D. Simak’s tale “Junkyard” (1953), a tale of a chamber full of eggs, in addition to EC Comics’ infamous line of science fiction and horror
titles, a series of comics similarly inspired by many writers of their day. His script became considerably more intense when he discovered the disturbing work of the dark surrealist H. R. Giger, and the creature began to assume a more terrifying magnificence. When Ridley Scott agreed to take on this film, he could see the horror permeating O’Bannon’s script, and conceived a very claustrophobic ill-lit design, which made formidable use of the camera’s lens to give the project an entirely new dimension. Through the eerie half-light, he would orchestrate the tension just as the slashers would in the not too distant future – the hunter becoming the hunted as this alien being ripped into the cast.
The man behind John Hurt’s chest-bursting scene was Roger Dicken, a special effects man whose early career brought him to the studio of Gerry Anderson and the cult television series Thunderbirds before moving on to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). When the alien exploded onto the set, no one knew quite how it was going to happen, thus the terror that wracked each actor’s face was very much real. The design team would include Ron Cobb and science fiction illustrator Chris Foss, both of whom O’Bannon had worked with on Dark Star, and just for a few days French comic book artist Jean Giraud, otherwise known as Moebius, was brought in to work on the space suite designs, which were then completed by British writer and designer John Mollo.
Alien went on to become an immensely influential film, spawning several imitators including the following year’s controversial Contamination and many years later the Gothic space terror Event Horizon (1997). The film’s success led to three sequel Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection (1997) along with Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). Heavy Metal would publish an adaptation of the film in 1979 and Dark Horse would continue the franchise with their Alien series with a story arc that began in 1988. Video games and toys continue to follow.
DR DAN POTTER (Dwight Schultz) arrives at Dr Leo Bain’s (Donald Pleasance) Haven psychiatric institute to take up a new position. Pleasance’s role as Dr Bain is redolent of his character Dr Sam Loomis from John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), but in this part he is just as crazy as the patients by whom he is surrounded, or as he prefers to call them, “voyagers”. He keeps the most dangerous inmates secured behind an electrically activated security mechanism up on the third floor; his forward thinking has seen fit to dispense with the iron bars found in facilities of a more conventional nature. Only a single guard remains on watch. Among the deranged third floor patients are the paranoid former Korean prisoner of war Frank Hawkes, (Jack Palance) and apocalyptic pyromaniac preacher Byron Sutcliff (Martin Landau), who believes himself to be the messenger of God. An overweight child molester Ronald “Fatty” Elster (Erland Van Lidth) and homicidal maniac John “Bleeder” Skaggs (Phillip Clark), whose nose bleeds as he goes in for the kill and refuses to show his face until very late in the film are also detained on the same floor. Hawkes convinces the others they must kill Dr Potter, rambling as to how he murdered his predecessor and in time will do the same to them.
As he lingers in Dr Potter’s office, Ronald Elster thumbs through the doctor’s mail. There he finds the doctor’s address and a photograph of his daughter. That same night the power supply fails across the entire city. On the third floor of the institute Preacher insists it is he who made the lights go out, which allows him and his psychotic brethren the chance to escape. As looters ransack a nearby shopping centre, the four inmates don new clothes and arm themselves with a crossbow, knives, a pitchfork, an axe and set of handguns. With a tip of the hat to Friday the 13th (1980), the “Bleeder” adorns himself in a hockey mask. Leaving a trail of slaughter, the four men head towards the doctor’s house, where his daughter is home alone.
Alone in the Dark was Jack Sholder’s directorial debut, and one of the first films to come from New Line Cinema. He had at his disposal a first rate cast, whose ability transcended so many of its contemporaries and added a distinct edge to the proceedings. Their maniac performances would make up for the shortcomings in the area of gore. Sadly for Sholder his film’s release went almost unnoticed, with his efforts written off as yet another in an ever-lengthening line of slasher movies. However, there was an underlying intelligence to this film, one not always observed among its grisly cohorts. In an ambitious piece of scripting, Sholder used a set of theories advocated by Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing, who recognized a bridge between mental dysfunction and existential philosophy, postulating on the difficulties of the psychotic to adapt to an already psychotic world. For the first half hour Dwight Schultz, prior to his later acceptance to the A-Team, and Donald Pleasance discuss in detail such aspects of psychiatry and the treatment of these mentally distressed people. Interestingly their dialogue was never used as an attempt to excuse the violent actions of his homicidal cast.
The storytelling coupled a mounting suspense with the exact degree of violence slasher fans had come to expect, although Palance was adamant in his refusal to carry out one of the killings staged in the original screenplay, considering it gratuitous and failing to add to his onscreen persona. Tom Savini boosted the film’s credentials, being drafted in for the make-up in a hallucinatory zombie sequence. A wicked sense of dark humour prevailed throughout, in what in its time was an unusual take on a gang of psychos escaping the asylum. The film was briefly banned in the UK, but was excused from the damning list of video nasties.
A PHONE RINGS AND a surly voice snaps at a young woman telling her to get out, the videotapes that have come into the caller’s possession have absolutely nothing on them. When he hangs up, a young prostitute is seen languishing in a hotel bedroom, a bundle of dollars lying at her side. Her client appears from the bathroom wearing only a towel; having carefully washed his hands, he rolls on a pair of latex gloves. The prostitute is eager to convey her heightened sense of arousal and assures her punter everything will be just fine. She is a little premature, for without a word of warning, the man uncovers a sharpened razor and then slits her throat.
In a scenario somewhat reminiscent of Paul Schrader’s film Hardcore (1979), the son of a prominent businessman Eric (Lawrence Day) uses the return address on a letter in an attempt to find his missing sister, Isabelle. When he locates her apartment, he is introduced to Dolly (Larry Aubrey) a transvestite, who professes it has been days since he/ she has seen the sister, he/she knows as Tonya. Eric’s investigations reveal his sister has been working as an exotic dancer in a number of sleazy clubs and has fallen into prostitution. Together with his newfound friend, dancer Louise (Lora Staley) and a detective (Michael Ironside), Eric begins to search for his sister coursing deeper into the sordid underbelly of this downbeat inner-city landscape. As they venture further into this squalid world of murder, blackmail, incest and lurid sex, the hookers, exotic dancers and other shady residents of this tawdry locale are being butchered by a modern-day Jack the Ripper.
Filmed in Toronto during 1981 and then shelved for a couple of years, American Nightmare walked the seamier streets of New York City. Don McBrearty’s was a change of pace to the run-of-the-mill teenage slasher that had become so much a part of the horror cinema of the day, owing its origins to the exploitation of the grindhouse fleapits with its lurid intimation of sex, lies and videotape. Drawing inspiration from the vicarious Italian gialli, McBrearty presented his audience with a gloved killer whose motivation remained obscured until the finale of what proved to be an intriguing murder mystery. As in many gialli, the police were portrayed as being hopelessly incompetent, leaving it to the hero to hunt down the psychotic killer. Disappointingly, the murders were not as graphic as those staged by their Italian counterparts, nor given the subject matter could they be described as unduly misogynistic. The grim setting, however, was comparable to the urban filth of The Driller Killer (1979), Maniac (1980) and The New York Ripper (1982) but the darkened shots made the erotica appear so very unattractive, which meant it never quite matched its counterparts’ potency for sleaze.
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The title American Nightmare would surface again in Jon Keeyes’ unrelated call-in show slasher of 2002 and the well-received documentary starring Wes Craven and George A. Romero examining the many extreme horror movies of the 1970s produced in 2000.
FAR AWAY FROM the murders and executions of the grime-ridden streets of The Driller Killer (1979), Maniac (1980) and American Nightmare (1983) was the superficial world of Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a deeply troubled Wall Street broker whose life of mergers and acquisitions has bestowed upon him the trappings of an incredibly rich and successful life. However, his good looks and polished lifestyle conceal a familiar dark secret, one that links him to the murderous individuals who had been prowling New York’s downtrodden locales more than a decade past; Patrick is a psychotic monster with a craving for blood and violence. Over the phone, he confesses to having murdered more than twenty people, dispatched in a variety of ways: chainsaw, stabbings, gunshots and sinking his teeth into his lovers during sex. His everyday routine is overly obsessed with the finest detail of perfection, which expands beyond his predilection for banal popular culture to the brutal sex and killing he savours with his countless victims. The blood flows almost unabated, but as the ambiguous finale alludes, is this grisly excess locked solely in Patrick’s twisted mind?
American Psycho was Mary Harron’s second time in the directorial chair. Some might have said that on this occasion she had been presented with a poison chalice, for Bret Easton Ellis’s allegory of the vagaries of corporate capitalism had caused uproar on its initial publication in 1991. Her script remained true to the original, using virtually every line from what had already been distinguished as a highly accomplished literary assault on the absurdities of the self-interested yuppie lifestyle of the 1980s. While Harron deftly harnessed the misogynistic portrayal expressed in Ellis’s novel, she wasn’t afraid to engage his attack on the perversity of the American dream. The result was a thought-provoking film that succeeded in intriguing the more discerning quarters of its audience rather than engendering revulsion, with Christian Bale excelling in his role as one of modern cinema’s most complex monsters. However, Harron was forced to remove several minutes of footage from the final cut, most of it of a sexual nature, to ensure a cinematic release. This of course would have served to claw back the money of those who had shrewdly invested in the project. When her film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival the audience was divided, but on its theatrical release it garnered a far more positive reception. A direct to video American Psycho 2 was made in 2002, directed by Morgan J. Freeman, which had little in common with the original.
The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books) Page 6
