The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  Eli Roth’s darkly comedic splatterfest was written in 1995, when horror was in the doldrums awaiting the rejuvenating arrival of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996). Cabin Fever was styled on the liberal excess that had made the horrors of the 1980s so successful; fuelled by an abundance of gore and gratuitous nudity, it also introduced a paranoiac undercurrent seen in so many B-movies from the 1950s. In this, his directorial debut, Roth evoked memories of The Evil Dead (1981) in the isolated cabin scenes and gave a sly tip of the hat to George Romero’s zombies. It was a bad experience in Iceland when Roth developed a serious skin infection that sowed these infectious seeds, which gave fruition to a highly successful movie. On its theatrical release the response, given the subject matter, was remarkably positive and spawned a Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever in 2009.

  A COUPLE’S AFTERNOON of bird watching turns to passion in the woods in the vicinity of Camp Blackwood. As they become more fervent, a man adorned in a clown’s mask bursts onto the scene, with other ideas on his mind, and very quickly lays them to the slaughter. The film moves on to introduce four campers who have a rendezvous at Camp Blackwood. In a similar way to so many of their predecessors who were trailed by a plethora of killers during the 1980s, they are warned to stay away from the area by an obvious madman, in this case one Bromley Thatcher. Typically, the group refuse to pay any heed to his well-meaning advice and journey on into the woods to be greeted by their female guide, the manly Harris. As the day comes to an end, the teenagers settle down for the night, to awaken next morning to the sight of Harris’s charcoaled remains lying on the embers of the camp fire. With their guide now dead the group are at the mercy of the clown, who appears to be in league with the unhinged Thatcher. Only Tricia survives the killer clown’s insane rampage, but she comes round to find herself seemingly sectioned in a mental institution. After receiving a tranquilizing injection, she begins to hallucinate and in her delirious condition has to face the clown as he cunningly slips into her room.

  Brad Sykes’ film falls into the category “so bad it’s good” as he joined the wave of directors attempting to rejuvenate the passion for the slasher of two decades past. While the acting was in keeping with its B-movie status, his script was often very humorous and captured so much of the golden period that had reached its zenith during the early eighties. Sykes received his first Hi-8 video camera at the age of fifteen and knew his calling was a life in film. Before going on to write and direct the equally no-budget sequels, Camp Blood 2 (2002) and Camp Blood 3: Within the Woods (2005), he turned his attention to the living dead with the Zombie Chronicles (2001).

  LOOKING TO COMPLETE her college thesis, graduate student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) has become heavily involved in research into urban myth. As she furthers her studies, she comes upon a tale in the locality of the murderous Candyman. According to legend, those who stood before a mirror and chanted his name five times would see the long-dead slave appear before them; however, they would pay for their transgression with their life. That same evening, Helen and her friend Bernadette make light of the story and recite the Candyman’s name before the mirror in her bathroom. As they had expected all along, nothing happens.

  Eager to broaden her studies she ventures into Chicago’s infamous Cabrini–Green housing project. Here, she is told the tale of a child who was only recently gouged and mutilated close by the projects; the locals believe it to have been the work of the Candyman. As she continues to look for more information, Helen is attacked by one of the project’s more notorious gang members who, armed with a hook, has assumed the guise of the Candyman. Although Helen survives the attack and the lowlife is arrested, she begins to hear the echoes of a distant voice that whispers her name. As her sense of unease intensifies, another man approaches her; he also lays claim to being the legendary Candyman. Helen refuses to believe him, but he is resolute in showing her that he is something more than a figure of urban myth. Unable to take anymore, she slumps to the ground only to awaken in the apartment of a woman she had spoken with earlier; there she lies covered in blood, beside a decapitated Rottweiler and then learns the woman’s baby has gone missing. Helen is arrested and led away by the police to be later bailed by her husband. The Candyman is now on her trail. He next appears in her apartment and engages his hook to slice open her neck, before slaughtering her friend Bernadette. With no one else having been in the apartment, it looks as if she is the murderous culprit.

  With her world slowly beginning to disintegrate, Helen tries to convince her psychologist that the Candyman is very much real, which the urban legend proves by appearing in his office and disembowelling him. Helen knows she has to escape, but when she returns to her apartment, she finds her husband alone with one of his female students. She now has no choice but to return to the projects, for a final showdown with the Candyman.

  With the excess of the 1980s teenage slasher phenomenon having burned out some years before, mainstream horror cinema needed something new and original to reinvigorate its flagging premise. This came with Bernard Rose’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s The Forbidden, a short story first published in 1986 that reinvented the centuries-old myth of Bloody Mary. Set amidst the grim reality of Chicago’s failed Cabrini-Green housing project, Rose’s villain was to take on far greater proportions than the fanciful conjecture of urban myth, in a film that dared to challenge his country’s attitudes on inner city racial conflict. This wasn’t the horror feature of a decade past aimed solely at a teenage market heading off to the drive-ins; rather, this was a tightly plotted adult movie, which wasn’t afraid to deftly pace its narrative flow before delivering the shocks. While Tony Todd’s Candyman meted out ample portions of blood and guts, London-born Rose looked to exploit well-healed society’s fears of being stranded on the wrong side of town. Poor Helen Lyle would find herself wrongly accused of a series of brutal crimes very much like the heroines of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, but she was about to pay the ultimate price for invoking this dread villain of urban myth. The eerie music of Philip Glass and the adept photography of Anthony B. Richmond would ensure this was a film that lived on to haunt its audience long after the closing credits.

  While the UK’s Channel 4 has been known to show the uncut version of this film, the VHS release of the 1990s and the DVD of 2006 have suffered from the edits insisted on by the MPAA. These include a more graphic shaking of the psychologist where he violently head butts the table prior to the Candyman tearing into his flesh as his hook then emerges from his stomach. The screams at this point were also played down along with the subsequent discharge of blood. This wouldn’t prevent a sequel from going into production in 1995 to appear as Candyman: Farewell to Flesh.

  THE VIETNAM WAR had been over for five years, but Norman Hopper (John Saxon) is still being tormented by frightening flashbacks. He is terrorized by the image of a pit holding two of his men who are avidly gorging on the charred body of a Vietnamese woman. When Hopper discovers the pit, he extends his arm to hoist them from their incarceration only to be savaged by Charlie Bukowski (John Morghen), who has been infected with a virulent cannibalistic virus. Hopper then awakens from his nightmare to the sound of the telephone. On the line is Bukowski; he has just been released from a psychiatric clinic and is all too eager to meet up for a drink. Hopper, however, is very aware of his former comrade’s predilection and anyway his thoughts are on his young neighbour, Mary (Cinzia De Carolis). As he rolls over to indulge in oral sex, he bites into her tender flesh. The unsuspecting girl is saved by a call from Hopper’s concerned wife, who tells of a Vietnam vet who has barricaded himself in a mall. It’s Bukowski; he has gone on the rampage and locked himself away in a department store having lost control of his urges and bitten into a woman’s neck. As Hopper gets into his car, Mary reveals that she quite enjoyed the bite; hers will be the film’s finale once Atlanta has fallen to the insanity of this cannibalistic infestation.

  Antonio Margheriti was a veteran of Italian science fiction, action and western films, whose first s
creenplay had been written as early as 1956. Having worked only a few years before with some of the biggest names in American cinema he now turned to the cannibal craze that had already enjoyed several years of tremendous success in a film, which later went by the names Invasion of the Flesh Hunters and Apocalypse Domani. Rather than return to the jungles of Fulci and Deodata’s features he set his flesh-eating cannibals lose in Atlanta, inviting comparisons with George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). His feature was an unusual hybrid, seen to revel in the bloodthirsty excess of the day, and yet evoked concepts that had made both The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) such landmarks in the post-Vietnam era. The notion of a contaminating virus was also reminiscent of David Croneburg’s Rabid (1977) and surfaced twenty years later in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002).

  There are many gore-mongers who have suggested this film should have had more blood and guts, but when effects wizard Giannetto De Rossi was allowed to pour on the blood, he did it in the worst possible taste. As with Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City (1980), a girl was shown having one of her breasts torn off and then greedily devoured, a doctor also had his tongue bitten out, then a mechanic had his thigh clean sliced while Bukowski met his end with the graphic decimation of his stomach, which the intrusive camera so wilfully savoured. As was expected, Margheriti’s film was banned in the UK in July 1983 during the Video Nasties scare, only twelve months after it had been made available in its uncut form. This came much to the relief of John Saxon, who was never entirely enamoured with the film’s excess. Cannibal Apocalypse was finally released in the UK in 2005 with only a two second shot being removed from the sewer shootout, as rats were burned with napalm, contravening the UK’s legislation on cruelty to animals.

  A TEENAGE GIRL JOGS through suburban streets tuned into the sound of some nondescript 1980s synthesized pop music. It doesn’t take long before she falls prey to a man wearing a jetfighter’s helmet. The prologue, which has nothing to do with what follows, suddenly comes to an abrupt end. In a complete change of direction, four college students are trailed as they travel to a weekend of camping, even though they have been warned to stay away from the area. The group seem to be having so much fun, but one of the girls appears troubled. She has to choose her moment before telling her boyfriend that she is pregnant. Her situation will deteriorate still further when the group make the wrong turn, which leads them straight into the path of three backwoods brothers, one whose face remains obscured by a mask, only to be revealed during the downbeat finale. While the group are understandably wary of the brothers, none of them realizes the clan’s true desire is the satisfying of their cannibalistic craving. As they stalk and abduct the youngsters, we come to learn the reasons for their love of human flesh. From an early age, their mother refused to let them eat either processed or packaged food, because she feared it was preserved with unhealthy chemical products. In its place, she would only recommend the freshest of meat. So follows a weekend of carnage as the four friends are graphically dismembered, disembowelled and then sliced and diced in preparation for the cooking pot.

  Jon McBride’s shot-to-video movie continued in the tradition established a decade earlier with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and would go on to include Wrong Turn (2003). He was one of the many young filmmakers from the period who saw the potential in shooting films to video, overcoming the problems that came with acquiring suitable and affordable film stock. Equipped with his recently purchased camcorder he set out to make his debut feature with only a few hundred dollars and a young cast who were happy to work without pay. McBride’s enthusiasm for the project would see him take on some of the writing, as well as directing, acting and then editing twelve hours of footage down to a watchable ninety minutes. At the outset, his film was only going to be viewed by his own close circle of friends, but he succeeded in signing a nationwide distribution deal at a time when small independent films were gaining a following in the increasingly popular video market. Such was his success he returned with the darkly humorous The Woodchipper Massacre (1988) at the beginning of a career that has seen his shot-on-video efforts acquire a considerable fan base, especially among aspiring filmmakers.

  NEW YORK ANTHROPOLOGY student Gloria along with her brother Rudy and friend Pat journey deep into the Amazon jungle, with Gloria determined to challenge and disprove the tales of tribal cannibalism allegedly being practised in the region. Little do they know, callous drug dealer Mike Lawson and his fugitive accomplice are laying low in the same locale, having escaped the New York mob and criminal charges for murder and drug dealing. Even in this remote spot, the merciless Lawson looks to exploit others, using the natives to mine for emeralds and harvest the coca plant. When the cocaine-crazed villain tortures and kills several natives, among them the chief’s daughter, to gratify his sadistic sense of amusement, the tribesman vow revenge and begin to track them down through this tropical forest. As the two men look to escape, they come upon the three students and the group are soon surrounded and then subjected to the most horrific torture by the indigenous warriors, who exhibit a taste for the succulence of human flesh.

  Umberto Lenzi’s low-budget Cannibal Ferox has also gone by the name Make Them Die Slowly and in Australia was entitled Woman From Deep River to appear as a sequel to one of the director’s previous cannibal movies Sacrifice! (1972), which had seen release in the Antipodes as The Man From Deep River. While Sacrifice! can lay claim to being one of the earliest cannibal exploitation films, Cannibal Ferox proudly proclaimed to be “The most violent film ever made” and fairly revelled in its supposed ban in thirty-one countries. It will come as no surprise to learn the video release made it to the UK’s list of video nasties; the sickening scenes of animal killing, along with the castrations, the slicing of the head and the hooks being driven into Pat’s breasts all felt the wrath of the BBFC, and to this day Lenzi’s film remains heavily cut. Cannibal Ferox, which proved to be one of the last cannibal exploitation movies, has a deserved reputation for its gritty edge, and to this effect followed in the footsteps of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) in its use of washed out documentary styled visuals. Its portrayal of the human condition was indeed harrowing, refusing throughout to relent as the degree of violence became all the more acute. The cannibal tribesmen, while presented as an ominous collective with a compulsion for retribution, appear detached, acquiescent adherents to the laws of nature and the claustrophobia of this enclosed jungle terrain. This wasn’t the verdant rainforest advocated by those who continue to campaign on behalf of the Amazon Basin; instead the audience were led into an oppressive domain, cleverly contrasted with the police investigation in the harsh urban jungle of New York City. Lenzi’s direction in this inner-city terrain works to confuse, giving the impression these scenes have been designed with another film in mind, but viewing his feature as a whole they combine to make this a memorable addition to cannibal cinema.

  A TELEVISION PROGRAMME conveys the heightening concern for an American documentary film crew who disappeared months ago while on an expedition to the Amazon rainforest to produce a film on the cannibal tribes of the area. New York anthropologist Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) now leads a team to learn the fate of Alan Yates (Carl Gabriel Yorke), the director; Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi), his girlfriend and script girl; along with their cameramen, Jack Anders (Perry Pirkanen) and Mark Tomaso (Luca Barbareschi). With the help of two local guides, Chaco and his assistant Miguel, the professor treks to the village of Yacumo. Monroe is aghast when he learns how the unscrupulous documentary team caused nothing but trouble among their people. When he journeys deeper into the rainforest, he encounters the Yanomamö, who eventually lead him to the bones of the missing crew and the surviving reels of film.

  On his return to New York City, Monroe is shown Yates’ previous documentary, “The Last Road to Hell”, and learns how the director staged much of what was seen on the lost reels of film, with the intention of exciting his
thrill-seeking audience and bolstering his reputation. The television executives try to overcome the professor’s unease, offering him the chance to host the new documentary, which discloses how the crew created this misleading footage while terrorizing the Yacumo village. When they encounter the Yanomamö, the men of the team rape and later impale a native girl, again to add a deceitful substance to the documentary’s unsavoury ethic. Soon after, the girl’s fellow villagers discover her fate; enraged they begin to track down the crew. Deodato’s film now turns; the killing, rape, decapitation and cannibalizing of the crew become its focus, with every grisly detail captured on grainy film by the unprincipled Yates. As the camera falls to the ground, the reel reaches its finale as Yates’s bloodied face stares blankly at the camera’s lens. Twenty years later, this same image would be repeated for a new audience in the incredibly successful The Blair Witch Project (1999). The scenes prove too much for the profiteering television executives and they insist the footage is destroyed. However, we are later informed that the projectionist secretly removed the reels, which he then sold for $250,000.

  Cannibal Holocaust is still looked upon as one of the most sickeningly graphic atrocities ever committed to film. The viciousness in its content ensured its ban in many countries yet Ruggero Deodato’s film transcended its seemingly exploitative roots to confer a powerful eulogy on the cruelty inherent to our flawed species. While the film crew were literally torn into shreds and then devoured, with a penis being ripped off, followed by scenes of rape and decapitation, the audience’s sympathies lay with the victimized natives, who were to be portrayed as an amusing distraction for a seemingly civilized western audience. This truly was a horror movie, a far cry from so much of the darkly humoured slasher fare that was by then in its ascendancy.