The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  There is some conjecture as to whether this was the first movie made for the home video market, because John Wintergate’s nubile terror Boarding House was thought to be the first real shot on video film dating back to 1982, although it did make it into several American cinemas. Blood Cult (also known as Slasher) has, however, garnered a trashy reputation on being the first of its kind and has since promoted itself on the auspices of being a bloody slasher. While there was indeed a sanguinary flow to the opening bathroom murder, the remainder of Christopher Lewis’s film was unusually devoid of the essential torrent of blood. However, in the film’s defence, the production values were appreciably more sophisticated than those of its bloodthirsty contemporaries, although the acting again betrayed the film’s amateur status. This was bona fide low-budget filmmaking and while the film stock supplied for Paul McFarlane’s camera work was at times grainy, it was to enhance the feature’s unwholesome aura and provided more than the occasional moment to savour.

  BLOOD FEAST WAS the first part of a collection of films the director’s dedicated following have christened “The Blood Trilogy”, with Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965) providing the remaining entries in this triumvirate. This is looked upon as the first true splatter movie, rivalled only by Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku, although there are those who look upon its content as being hopelessly amateurish with few if any redeeming qualities. In its defence, Blood Feast was made in only nine days with a hopelessly limited budget.

  In a suburban Miami house, an attractive young woman listens to her portable radio, which carries the announcement of yet another murder, one of several in only a matter of days. She turns off the broadcast to enjoy the soothing warmth of her bath, only to be rudely interrupted. At this point in his film Hitchcock conceived the memorable shower scene; Lewis opted for a soap-filled bath with a mind to titillating his audience. The nudity from these shots never made it to the final cut. A greying wild-eyed man suddenly appears in the bathroom and frenziedly stabs the hapless woman through her left eye. As she lies dead, he hacks off her left leg and then makes his escape with it. While not particularly well put together, this level of graphic violence was very new to American cinema; its sole intention was to shock and that’s exactly what it did!

  At Fuad Ramses’ catering store, a wealthy socialite has requested that Fuad arrange the catering for her daughter Suzette’s party. He readily agrees, explaining to his eager client, Mrs Freemont, his intention to present to her guests cuisine that hasn’t been prepared in over 5,000 years. The party is only two weeks away, leaving Fuad just enough time to acquire the last of his ingredients. In the storage room to the rear of the premises, he stands before a large gold statue of the “mother of veiled darkness”, the goddess Ishtar. He refers to her as being Egyptian, although she is actually of Assyrian and Babylonian origin, but her affiliation with sexuality is quite in keeping with Lewis’s lurid design for this film. The diabolical Fuad’s scheme is now revealed: he seeks the goddess’s resurrection by returning to an ancient blood rite and a concoction made up of the body parts of the dead women. The ensuing atrocities are inflicted on young girls from the surrounding area: a brain is removed from a teenager, a tongue severed from a young wife, and the face sliced from an innocent woman. Each become essential to the consummation of Fuad’s diabolical blood feast. The final victim is kidnapped, held hostage in his store and then whipped until the blood flows freely from her back, allowing the evil caterer to gather the final ingredient. Her body is disposed of and later found hacked to pieces by the investigating police.

  When his plan to sacrifice Suzette fails, Fuad goes on the run, with the police hot on his tail. There is to be no return for the villain in this piece; he falls to his fate, crushed by a refuse vehicle’s compacting blades. The heroic policeman, Pete, Suzette’s boyfriend, has the parting line, “he died a fitting end, just like the garbage he was”.

  The unhinged murderer Fuad Ramses, was described by author Christopher Wayne Curry in his book A Taste of Blood: The Films Of Herschell Gordon Lewis as “the original machete-wielding madman”, the forerunner to the characters that would slash their way through Friday the 13th (1980), Halloween (1978) and so many of their ilk of the 1980s. This, coupled with the claim to being the first splatter movie, gives Blood Feast a place in the history of the genre, but on its initial release the critics were far from kind. A Variety review of May 6, 1964 was venomous, describing the film as a “totally inept shocker”, “incredibly crude and unprofessional from start to finish”, and “an insult even to the most puerile and salacious of audiences”. Lewis’s film refused to lie down and die. Jack Weis used his ideas to create a partial remake in New Orleans, Mardi Gras Massacre (1978) and the DPP made it immortal by listing it as video nasty in July 1983 following its release to video in May 1982. It remained on the list until the end of the crisis. When it was submitted for its 2001 issue to DVD, cuts were demanded to the scene detailing Fuad’s final victim as she was chained and manacled along with her fatal whipping with a cat o’ nine tails. Only in 2005 were these edits finally waived.

  AMIDDLE-AGED MAN returns to his dimly lit home from a business trip and within seconds of him being indoors two shots are fired. He has just walked in to find his wife in bed with another man. Begging forgiveness, he then turns the gun on himself, unaware that a distraught young boy has seen everything that has gone on. As the boy’s world falls down around him, he finds solace in his brown flute.

  Many years later a patient (Frankie Avalon) is seen escaping from a mental institution; before he takes his leave, he checks he has in his possession a familiar small brown flute. At the same time, a young girl named Marion (Donna Wilkes), who is recovering from a horrific car accident, complains of a recurring nightmare in which a homicidal maniac plays a strange tune on what she can only describe as a mouth instrument; he then carves up several innocent people. Marion fears that these are far more than just dreams; they are a premonition of doom. Her visions also reveal the same murderer planning to bury one of his victims in parkland adjacent to a beach. Those around her think that her abusive father, Frank (Richard Jaeckel), is beginning to affect her mind but elsewhere the escapee, Paul, has buried a hatchet into the face of a driver who offered him a lift in his van. With his flute playing acting as an uncanny overture to his penchant for brutal murder, he then strangles his female partner before beginning to stalk Marion, who is somehow linked to him following a blood transfusion.

  Blood Song, also released as Dream Slayer, is another near-forgotten slasher of the period, which included in its cast former teen idol Frankie Avalon, who gave a credible performance as the menacing mass murderer Paul. Philadelphia-born Avalon was only twelve years old when, trumpet in hand, he first appeared on US television and a decade later after a string of hits went on to make teen-oriented beach comedies. His role in this film was a marked departure from his days as a teenage heartthrob, but revealed an obvious talent in his grim portrayal of this unhinged psychopath. Blood Song was also distinguished in being co-produced by former professional wrestler Lenny Montana, who had played Luca Brasi in The Godfather (1972), in this, one of his last films.

  Robert Angus and Alan J. Levi’s film was not the typical slasher, although part of its more intriguing premise placed it in the same camp as Romano Scavolini’s Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981) and J. S. Cardone’s often surreal The Slayer (1982). While it was not as graphic as much of its ilk, the violence was unduly cruel and its dreamlike qualities would have it one day regarded as a precursor to Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).

  AQUIET FAMILY WHO reside in a remote area of Sweden suffer at the hands of the drunken father whose bullying behaviour has driven them to the edge of despair. When his abusive behaviour crosses the line, his wife finally comes to the end of her tether and retaliates leaving her husband for dead. The family flee their home, retreating to an abandoned mine high up in the mountains. There they remain in solitude for the next tw
enty years, and as time goes by they endure an alarming transformation to devolve into grotesquely misshapen savages.

  The arrival in the area of the big-haired glam rock band Solid Gold, played by Sweden’s eminent glam metal band Easy Action, accompanied by their dubious entourage for the video shoot of their new single “Blood Tracks” brings considerable excitement to this ski resort. However, calamity follows with the first shoot, as an avalanche crashes down the mountainside. Having survived the deluge of ice and snow the video director takes the shoot to the darkened mine shaft and its surrounding buildings, seen at the very beginning of the film. It doesn’t take long for the cannibal family to discover there are unwelcome intruders in their domain. Slowly but surely, they hunt these trespassers down amidst the darkness of the disused machinery, dilapidated furnaces and a labyrinth of passages and walkways suspended over a bottomless abyss. There will be no escape as the members of this murderous family make it to the band’s ski cabin and drag their victims’ bodies back to the mine, keeping some of the women alive for later. At the finale only two survive, rescued by a helicopter as an Easy Action power ballad plays over the bleak landscape. When Kee Marcello of eighties glam metal band Easy Action, and later stadium rockers Europe, approached Mats-Helge Olsson with a view to producing a film, the director was still sat in a prison cell serving the last few months of a sentence for financial irregularities. Upon learning the band had a deal with Warner Bros., B-movie specialist Olsson became very interested and so followed a Swedish heavy metal slasher, strangely reminiscent of Hans Hatwig’s all-girl rock blood feast Blödaren (1983), which was later packaged as The Bleeder. Olsson’s film, made on an impossible budget, contained themes previously observed in both Death Line (1973) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), which followed the latter in its lust for violent bloodshed. The photography and overall style tried their utmost to appear American, but in so many ways the film failed, appearing awkward with an unappealing assembly of characters and after so many years of slaughter across the United States and Canada the storyline was now somewhat predictable. However, as his film drew to a close, Olsson created an ambiguity rarely seen in such gorefests, one that would invite many questions and ensure his film would never be forgotten. There was no ambiguity to the make-up and effects, which proved a high point, as did the film’s semi nudity, and the killings excelled in being at times quite ingenious. Such was the bloodlust in the original edit, four minutes of gore had to be left on the cutting room floor before the video could see release, although an eighty-five minute print of the film is known to exist. Easy Action broke up in 1986 after making two albums, but, as in so many of these tales of terror, they returned from the dead in 2006.

  AS THEY FOOL around among the gravestones a couple of high-spirited teenagers soon become rather amorous. Feeling certain it will be safer to continue their aroused display away from prying eyes, they climb down into a recently dug grave. The boy’s lust, however, is cut short when he is beaten to death with a shovel and his girlfriend is then strangled with a skipping rope.

  In 1970 in the small town of Meadowvale, California, as the moon eclipsed the sun, throwing the world into temporary darkness, three babies were born. This solar conjunction obscured the planet Saturn, the astrological body holding sway over human emotion. Because of the eclipse, the three children came into this world as a group of uncaring souls, devoid of emotion. Ten Years later, the kids (Billy Jayne, Elizabeth Hoy and Andy Freeman) embark on a violent killing spree, which sends shock waves through this sleepy backwater. Their innocent appearance means the townsfolk never suspect them until it is too late. Those who stand in their way are summarily slaughtered, beginning with their father, bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, then their schoolteacher, gunned down, and finally they take on the local police. They also demonstrate a fascination for prying on naked teenagers, soon after disposing of them. However, a young boy and his astrology obsessed older sister (Lori Lethin) soon discover their crimes, only to become the new targets of this evil brood. As the body count mounts, the police authorities become increasingly certain a psychotic killer is stalking the town. Following the denouement only the daughter evades arrest; as her mother drives her away to a new life, she promises faithfully to be a good girl. However, as the credits begin to roll the camera frames her latest victim, a murdered truck driver. This low-budget obscurity would have been forgotten if it had not attracted the attention of the killer kids’ fraternity, predating Children of the Corn (1984) and standing alongside the superior Village of the Damned (1960), Children of the Damned (1964) and The Bad Seed (1956). It traded the habitual visceral excess for some rather disturbing images, as the unwholesome triplets wilfully engaged in an assortment of weaponry. Their murderous ingenuity was such that they were able to make use of virtually anything they laid their hands on, including in their arsenal a sprinkling of rat poison smeared over the icing of a cake. Their activities were then dutifully recorded in a macabre scrapbook, bequeathing an odious testament to their merciless accomplishments. The murderous endeavours of these psychotic cherubs went much further than the misdeeds of the killer kids that had come before them, thus ensuring Ed Hunt’s Bloody Birthday would disconcert its viewers for decades to come.

  MIGUEL’S (ALEXANDER WAECHTER) life has been consistently blighted by his severely disfigured face. He doesn’t help himself when he disguises himself with a Mickey Mouse mask and attempts to have sex with a girl who mistakes him for her boyfriend. The rejected Miguel is thrown into an uncontrollable rage, which results in him repeatedly stabbing her with a pair of scissors. This unsavoury episode is skilfully guided through the eyes of the mask, using one of the highly favoured traits of the slasher years, the close-up point-of-view camera. After his trial, Miguel is locked away for a five-year period of detention in a mental institution, to be eventually released into the care of his sister, Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff). His doctor, however, like many before him, has grave reservations as to his mental state.

  Assisted by her wheelchair-bound mother, Manuela runs an isolated boarding school for young women that specializes in foreign languages. As Miguel becomes fascinated with the delightful Angela, intrigue surrounds a power struggle over the ownership of the school. An element of sleaze is then introduced as we learn Miguel and Manuela became involved in an incestuous relationship five years ago. Miguel has designs to resume their affair, which is revealed in several dubious moments of erotica. It was this clandestine relationship that led to his breakdown and could only continue “if we could get rid of everyone”. Very soon, death stalks the school corridors as these desirable young girls fall to a maniac killer and Angela is thrown into a fight for her life. Before the curtain falls on Bloody Moon, she would have to face the sight of her friends’ bodies laid around her chalet as the killer crept stealthily through the shadows.

  That prolific master of exploitation Jesus Franco, a director with over 190 films to his credit, couldn’t resist sampling some of the success enjoyed by Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). Bloody Moon was released in Spain as Colegialas Violadas, which literally translates as the emotive Raped Schoolgirls, and would have faced an inevitable backlash as it tried to get past the censors in virtually any country in the world. His film copied elements from one of the earliest slasher movies, Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971), particularly the killing of the vulnerable woman in the wheelchair. This came prior to the killer moving without relent through the female cast, thrusting a knife up behind a woman to show it protruding through her breast, then burning one of his victims, before resorting to a screwdriver stabbing and strangulation by metal tongs. Franco capped it all with the infamous decapitation using a circular saw, while a seemingly willing girl was tied to a concrete block. The beheading on the concrete block inspired the German title for this feature Die Säge Des Todes or The Saw Of Death. On this outing, Franco replaced his customary sleaze with an excess of graphic gore, but in between the kills his movie struggled to maintain any sense of p
ace.

  On its cinematic release in the UK, a minute and thirty-eight seconds were removed from the scene showing the girl’s decapitation with the circular saw along with the bloodstained breasts shown earlier in the film. Its subsequent release to video would see it banned as a video nasty in July 1983 for another two years when the furore finally acquiesced. Further cuts were demanded for its reissue in 1993, which included the murder by scissors, two stabbings being merged into one, with the gory close-up removed, deletions to the knife protruding through the girl’s breast as well as the subsequent flow of blood, the snake decapitation and the saw decapitation scene, which was completely removed. These cuts did untold damage to what should have been a tawdry piece of exploitation, making the release of 1993 an unsatisfactory addition to the genre. Finally, in 2008 the film was made available to the British public without these encroaching edits.

  THE INTRODUCTION TO John Wintergate’s film goes straight for the jugular, revealing bloody murder in The Hoffman House. While one chap is pushed into a swimming pool, another unravels his own intestines and then a shady figure in giallo-styled black gloves drives a woman to hang herself. Each murderous scene is alternated with a computer-styled screen that discloses every person who has entered this remote ranch house since 1972 has met with a gruesome end. The next people to sign on the dotted line for this cursed house are a telekinetic fellow and a gang of shapely young girls. Once they settle in the girls are plagued by unsettling nightmares and then fall victim to the black-gloved killer. The body count peaks during the pool party and leads to the final scene placing the killer and two survivors in stand-off telekinetic battle, somewhat reminiscent of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western.