USING A SERIES of creepy point-of-view shots, Marc Felperlaan takes his camera underwater to trail a predatory killer around the canals of the darkened city of Amsterdam. Armed with a cleaver taken from a Chinese restaurant he tracks down his first victim, the easiest of targets in such a city, a lady of the night. She never has a chance as he stealthily seizes upon her and thrusts the stolen knife deep into her flesh. He then drags her corpse into the water leaving behind a pool of blood. Her mutilated body is found the morning after, suspended upside down from a bridge.
Detective Eric Visser arrives on the scene with his partner, Vermeer, as a down-and-out woman is questioned about the horrific events of the previous night. She claims she saw a monster crawl from the water and kill the prostitute. The clues suggest a diver is skulking through the canals of this beautiful city. That night, a couple of environmental researchers are observed taking water samples from a chemical plant. They never get to see the morning light, both killed and again dragged below the water. Visser steps up his enquiries and meets the love interest in this film, Laura, a museum guide along with Martin Ruysdael, a former diver. The killings continue, even though a suspect who worked at the chemical plant is taken into custody. The tone changes following the death of one of the investigating officers as an action-packed James Bond-esque speedboat chase ensues between Visser and the killer. Eric pursues the assailant to a sewer only to be wounded in the shoulder by a harpoon. Just as you think he’s finished he shoots the killer’s masked face before coming round in a hospital bed. The finger seems to point to Martin Ruysdael, but is there a damning connection with the chemical plant?
With De Lift (1983) Dick Maas had shown he was capable of delivering an unsettling horror story set against a modern-day urban backdrop; five years later with the big budget Amsterdamned he singlehandedly created the Dutch giallo. True to the guile of Italian masters of this once popular genre, he intertwined a series of twists into his narrative with the darkest of humour, grisly death scenes and outrageous action. While his film may have seemed to be trying to be so many different things, it was never confused; rather, it glided with a fluidity that was symptomatic of an emerging talent. Setting his story in a city famed for its historic splendour, he presented an Amsterdam few have ever seen, one immersed in gloom that concealed a dark secret. In 1988 his movie was the third highest selling motion picture at the American Film Market, although it was dubbed in English for the video version. Maas continues to write and direct and, over twenty years later, remains the Netherland’s most commercially successful director.
RENÉ CLAIR’S MOVIE was based not on the novel Ten Little Niggers (soon after changed to And Then There Were None because of the disparaging inference in the word “nigger”) by Agatha Christie, but on the play she later wrote in 1943. The identity of the murderer remained the same in both versions, but the outcome as to who survives the murderer’s plot was somewhat different.
In his film of 1945 ten people, eight guests and two servants, are invited for a long weekend on an island somewhere off the coast of Devon. Although guests of the mysterious Mr and Mrs U. N. Owen, none of them has ever actually met. It is only after dinner, when their host speaks to them through a gramophone recording, that they learn why they have been invited to this remote island. They are each accused of being responsible for the death of another person or persons. As punishment, they will go to meet their maker before the weekend is out. There is no way of escaping the island, leaving the gathering with a killer in their midst, and each of them with the seeming aptitude for murder.
While searching the island for “Mr Owen” they begin to compare stories, but their camaraderie won’t put an end to the death toll, or stop the ten Indian boy statues from disappearing one by one from the centrepiece in the house. Each person with whom the group grow suspicious becomes the next to meet their demise, thus narrowing the list of suspects. Sound familiar? Axe wounds, knives, a hypodermic syringe, falling masonry, all making for a splatter fan’s delight, but remember this was 1945; there were to be no pools of blood or the severing of arteries. In the end it comes down to just two, the apparent hero and heroine of the piece, Lombard and Vera. Each of course suspects the other, but even they can’t deny a mutual attraction. Although they are in accord, accepting that neither was ever guilty, Vera still steals away with a gun and shoots Lombard as they stand on the beach. Surely it can’t be true – the delectable Vera the mass murderess? It is, however, nothing more than a ruse, a ploy to reveal the identity of the true killer, the man who would see Vera hang for her crimes. She walks up from the beach, only to discover a hangman’s noose has already been prepared for her. Judge Quincannon, who sentenced an innocent man to death, reclines in a chair, very much alive after supposedly falling victim to a gunshot wound to the head. As the film reaches its climax, his contemptible machinations are exposed. In his eyes, they are all guilty, for they considered themselves beyond the law. He is their judge and jury; having executed the entire party he would then prepare to commit suicide with a glass of poison. The eventual arrival of the police would find Vera alone with nine dead bodies and an inevitable death sentence hanging over her head. Lombard now appears to enter the scene, though it turns out he is only a friend of Lombard’s, and as the film comes to an end, the judge falls dead and he takes her into his arms.
Agatha Christie’s novel would become a bestseller, now totalling over 100 million sales, making it the world’s biggest selling mystery and one of the most-printed books in history. René Clair’s adaptation was also very successful, although not quite on the same scale, but his film provided so many elements for those writers and directors who would one day give rise to the slasher phenomenon. While there was no gore on display, nor the grisly aftermath of the death, the key ingredients were set in place: a madman with a mind for brutal murder, knives, axes, the hapless victims, a beautiful but isolated setting and the heroine we so wanted to survive this madness. The sensibilities of the audience of the day would have no doubt been shocked by this unrelenting onslaught. So much so, it was banned in Finland soon after its release, being the first of many such movies to be subjected to prohibition in this seemingly quiet corner of Scandinavia; that was until Tommi Lepola and Tero Molin’s snuff-based slasher Skeleton Crew (2009).
THE MYOPIC JOHN Pressman’s (Michael Lerner) time as an optician’s assistant has come to an unceremonious end; dejected, he returns home to break the terrible news to his domineering mother. In truth, he has no one to blame but himself; his mother Alice (Zelda Rubinstein), however, doesn’t quite see it this way. To her addled way of thinking, her darling child is a well-respected optician; although nothing could be further from the truth. She vents her rage by hypnotizing her incompetent son and then sends him out with his set of surgical tools to seek revenge on the woman responsible for his dismissal. The unfortunate woman’s death fails to satiate his mother’s psychotic tendencies, forcing Pressman to seek out more victims. Once he has slain his prey, he takes his scalpel and gouges the eyes from their sockets, before carefully secreting them away. He then returns to his mother who proudly places these trophies among her bizarre collection of eyeballs. She is convinced they hold the key to restoring her son’s deteriorating sight.
The film suddenly takes an unexpected turn and the audience realize they have just witnessed a complex showing of a movie within a movie, with Alice and John starring as the lead roles in the macabre presentation “The Mommy”. This terrifying film is part of a matinee performance being shown in a cinema somewhere in Los Angeles. Such a grisly showing so early in the day might seem a little farfetched, but George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) infamously premiered as a matinee, which traumatized many of its young audience. Sitting in this cinema is a pair of teenage girls, the feisty Linda and her friend Patty, who is of a somewhat delicate disposition. They become distracted when they realize one of their fellow horror buffs (Àngel Jové) is getting a little too involved with Pressman’s gruesome underta
king. His oafish figure is now seen entering a similar theatre armed once again with his surgical implements. As Harry O. Hoyt’s silent masterpiece The Lost World (1925) plays to a captive audience, he once again plies his foul trade, hacking into the onlookers while coolly detaching their eyes to return them to his insane mother’s ever-growing collection. His cruel savagery proves the catalyst for the darkened figure reclining amidst the Los Angeles audience; he now displays a pistol, which he fires into the crowd with a relish that echoes the on-screen slaughter.
Shot in Barcelona, Bigas Luna’s obscure Angustia or Anguish crafted a cleverly juxtaposed tale, which in the course of its narration related not one but two stories that came to immerse the surreal with a brutally violent reality. Although Luna had a little in the way of funds, his team laboured to create a convincing Californian backdrop using only a few sets, and then in one of the most original slasher movies of the past thirty-five years he manipulated the minds of his assembled audience. Lamberto Bava in his acclaimed Demons (1985) had made use of a similar idea, allowing the illusion of film to conspire with the real world, but Luna ventured further as he schemed to unhinge his audience’s perception, which would leave them as disoriented as the myopic John Pressman. His feature was a deftly choreographed exposition of anguish and terror, as his cast fought for survival in the darkened claustrophobia of this Los Angeles auditorium. The impact of Angustia has never altered; it remains a stark and uncompromising movie. The tide of blood that flowed unabated through each tale coupled with its ever-rising body count would have those with a delectation for the more sanguinary, slavering on the very edge of their seat.
HAVING TAKEN AN excursion to a remote Greek island, two of them in hope of meeting up with their French friends, a party of tourists become stranded when their boat drifts out to sea. The group are forced to seek help in a nearby village, but as they search the deserted streets, their mood turns to one of apprehension. With darkness now set to draw in, members of the party decide to stay at the house owned by Julie’s (Tisa Farrow) friends, who the viewers already know to be dead. Hidden away in the house the group find the French couple’s blind daughter. She is beside herself and knows nothing of the whereabouts of the islanders, but jabbers about a man whose body reeks of blood. The remaining members of the group continue in their search for signs of life and come upon a mysterious woman in black, who warns them to leave the village.
As they continue in their exploration of the island, the boat party slowly begin to disappear, falling prey to a terrifyingly misshapen man. A journal discovered in an abandoned mansion tells of a family who many years before were shipwrecked on the island. The father was driven to eat the flesh and blood of his dead kin and in his all-consuming despair fell into madness. Now completely deranged, he turns to killing the island’s inhabitants, feeding his newfound cannibal lust after dragging his victims into the shadows of the island’s catacombs. In the claustrophobia of the beast’s darkened lair the audience are privy to the film’s most notorious scene when he grasps a pregnant woman by the throat. During this frenzied strangulation, he tears the unborn child from her womb, and then, in full view of the camera, voraciously feeds upon its flesh. When this scene was first shown, it caused considerable dismay, so much so that D’Amato was later probed as to whether he had actually extracted a human foetus from the mother’s womb. With almost the entire group now dead, one of the survivors finally overpowers the cannibalistic maniac by driving a pickaxe into his stomach. As the creature falls to the floor, he is once again overwhelmed by bloodlust, but this time he is aroused by his own flesh and as the camera’s lens frames his ruptured stomach he begins to devour his intestines.
Joe D’Amato’s new terror, following the success of Buio Omega (1979), was essentially a bloodthirsty piece of exploitation whose subsequent reissues would go on to acquire a plethora of titles, among them Anthropophagous, Anthropophagous: The Beast, The Grim Reaper, Anthropophagus: The Grim Reaper, Man Eater and The Savage Island. While bereft of any true artistic merit, those horror fans who had only recently been led astray by the gore of Romero, Fulci and Argento, were only too eager to get to see the excess that was already being spoken of in this new offering. The film’s early pacing has been criticized for being overly measured, but it has also been suggested this gave the air of impending dread the chance to build before the monstrous figure of George Eastman revealed his disfigured face. The violence that ensued was then swift and merciless as he ripped into the throat of an unsuspecting victim before seizing the face of his quarry and dragging it through a hole in the mansion’s crumbling ceiling.
An uncut version of Anthropophagous: The Beast made it to video in the United Kingdom in February 1983. However, the severity of its content was such that it attracted the attention of the Director of Public Prosecutions, who duly labelled it as a video nasty, which led to it being prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act in 1984. The furore came largely as a result of the infamous foetus-eating scene and as the BBC News reported there were accusations that it was a snuff movie.
D’Amato’s film is still only available in the UK in its cut form, under the title The Grim Reaper. Almost twenty years after the original release first terrorized cinema screens, German low-budget cult director Andreas Schnaas produced an extreme re-telling as Anthropophagous 2000 (1999) to a somewhat mixed critical response.
WEALTHY COLLEGE STUDENT Muffy St John (Deborah Foreman) has invited a group of her friends to stay at her parent’s island home for an extended weekend of frivolity. Their arrival on the ferry on the day before April Fool’s Day is caught on a home video, conferring the film a strangely sinister introductory sequence. Very soon, the friends are involved in a whole series of amusing pranks. Their stay, however, is marred by the disappearance of one of the guests, and Kit (Amy Steel) remains convinced she caught a fleeting glimpse of his dead body. When the group try to make contact with the police, they learn the lines are down and the ferryman won’t be returning to the island for another few days. It isn’t long before other members of the party go missing and Muffy’s behaviour becomes a cause for concern. When Nikki (Deborah Goodrich) and young Harvey (Jay Baker) trek into the woods to draw water from a well, Nikki drops her flashlight. She descends into the well to retrieve the light and finds the lifeless corpses of her three friends.
Director Fred Walton returned to make his second slasher movie following his debut as a writer and director seven years before on When a Stranger Calls (1979). This would be the beginning of a long stream of directorial ventures, which would keep him on film sets well into the next decade. The executives at Paramount Pictures regarded Walton’s project as an opportunity to revive the bloodthirsty phenomenon, for which they had been instrumental six years before with Friday the 13th. Following the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the genre had fallen into a downward spiral of self-parody with Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985) momentarily bringing one of the studio’s largest franchises to a grinding halt. Producer Frank Mancuso Jr. wanted to revitalize the slasher movie and when he was approached by Danilo Bach, fresh from his success on Beverley Hills Cop (1984), he was very keen to give it a go. The script would adhere to a formula that had become accepted practice, reintroducing the holiday theme, throwing in the obligatory red herrings, toying with incredulous plot twists and revealing secrets at every turn before chasing through the house to dispose of virtually the entire cast. Bach, however, delivered a surprise ending, which in slasher circles still has many people talking. The mood for much of the early part of the film is naturally light, with good-natured antics abounding on a scene-to-scene basis. Slasher devotees, however, have always despaired of its unsatisfactory level of gore, which, coupled with its late entry to the field, probably led to it being almost instantly forgotten. The island setting, along with the unsettling revelations and continual disappearances have prompted innumerable comparisons with Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians”, and more specifically René Clair�
��s And Then There Were None (1945), an adaptation of Christie’s play. To their credit Frank Mancuso Jr.’s team captured the very essence of the slasher phenomena, but at the box office it was just a few years too late and maybe displayed a little too much intelligence. Following its release to DVD more than twenty years later, April Fool’s Day has finally found an appreciative audience and in turn justified Paramount’s faith.
IN AN ANONYMOUS Brazilian town, Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe, played by José Mojica Marins) considers only the perfect woman could ever bear him a child worthy of his bloodline. The Nietzschean Coffin Joe is the town’s bullying undertaker and is disparaging of the townsfolk’s fervent Catholicism. His only concern is the need to maintain the “continuity of the blood”. Sadly, his wife Lenita (Valeria Vasquez) cannot bear children, so Coffin Joe begins to look elsewhere. To further his pursuit he first murders his wife as the locals enjoy a religious festival, binding her up and leaving her to confront a poisonous spider. When her body is later discovered, the police have absolutely nothing to link him with the murder, leaving Coffin Joe free to continue in his quest. Fulfilling the predictions of a local gypsy (Eucaris Moraes) he brutally murders his best friend, Antonio (Nivaldo Lima), leaving his grieving girlfriend Terezinha (Magda Mei) ripe for seduction. In his efforts to win her heart, he buys her a canary and then, blinded by lust during the course of their conversation, he becomes a little too amorous. When Terezinha rejects his advances, Coffin Joe attacks and rapes her. Terezinha curses him, vowing to kill herself then return to drag his soul to hell. He retorts with a sneer, but the next day she is found suspended with a rope around her neck in the living room of her home. Coffin Joe’s activities haven’t gone unnoticed; the town’s doctor, Dr Rudolfo, now has his suspicions. When he becomes aware of the doctor’s reservations, he decides to pay him a visit. Soon after his arrival, he sets about the fearful doctor, finally gouging out his eyes with his long fingernails before setting his body alight.
The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books) Page 7
