The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  When the film was released to the theatres of the United States as Horror of Dracula, certain scenes had been removed, most notably the onset of the impaled Harker’s decomposition, which had already been censored in the UK. A considerable part of Count Dracula’s putrefaction as he met his end was also consigned to the cutting room floor, only to be seen by audiences in South East Asia. In the forthcoming years Christopher Lee would return to this role on a further six occasions while Peter Cushing was to play the part of one of the Van Helsing family four more times. Lee had followed in the footsteps of Bela Lugosi, creating a monster for a whole new generation.

  DIRECTOR ABEL FERRARA assumed the lead role in his film The Driller Killer, to give a crude but nonetheless effective performance as Reno Miller, a struggling New York painter. Reno’s world is slowly disintegrating and as it collapses, so his sense of frustration begins to intensify. Early in the film, he denies knowing a derelict in a church who it turns out is really his father; his constant sarcasm provokes arguments with all and sundry; he is behind on the rent on his flea-bitten apartment and has bills that he can never pay. In this grimy downtrodden part of Manhattan this man is being pushed to the very edge and his deteriorating state of mind isn’t helped by his roommates, Carol (Carolyn Marz) and the drug-addicted Pamela (Baybi Day). They are on show to provide an element of sleazy eroticism, with their sexual proclivity and lesbian frolickery, which was a rare sight for the general cinema-goer in the late 1970s. To make matters worse, just as he is trying to complete his masterpiece a punk rock band moves in nearby. The noise gets louder and louder and Reno’s frustration begins to turn to rage. Even as he sleeps, his dreams are plagued by blood-strewn imagery and the deafening sound of drills. When he finally snaps he doesn’t take it out on the band; instead he cuts loose, murdering the down and outs in the surrounding area with a recently purchased cordless drill. The first gets it in the chest with Reno gleefully laughing. With the filter on the camera’s lens now glazed in scarlet, this night becomes one of slaughter as the vagrants are drilled down one by one. The following day an infuriated Reno bores a derelict’s hands into a wall, in a scene of suffering symbolic of a mock crucifixion; he then delivers his victim to eternal salvation. When his painting fails to sell to Dalton, a gay gallery owner, Carol packs her bags and leaves him, condemning Reno to the inescapable maws of insanity. Dressed in black with lips smeared in blood red, an unstable Reno then invites Dalton over to his apartment. Reno’s new image is striking but it will be the last Dalton ever gets to see. With Pamela dispatched off screen Reno’s drill-crazy trail leads to Carol and her estranged husband for what will be a nail-biting conclusion.

  Abel Ferrara’s low-budget psychodrama has been described as “a bargain basement Taxi Driver”, a sensationalized observation of a man’s descent into madness, in essence the victim of a decaying urban landscape very similar to Eloy de la Iglesia’s Cannibal Man (1972). The budget was such he had to film in his own Union Square apartment and shoot on the surrounding streets. While not regarded as a true slasher picture, the extremes in violence leading to the climactic finale have rarely failed to excite that breed of horror connoisseur seeking an objectionably dark movie, and there is a notable absence of light in these grimy locales. This film makes you aware of the violence contained in this grisly horror, without needing to supply a body count of blood-soaked torsos. The soundtrack was also a blast back to a singular moment in history, the late seventies New York punk scene led by the Ramones, New York Dolls, Television and Patti Smith.

  Although well received on its American release in 1979, it was to provoke unprecedented concern in the UK, and was duly hounded by the country’s self-appointed moral guardians. This was primarily due to Vipco’s advertising campaign, which in 1982 endorsed the shocking image of a man being drilled through the forehead by the Driller Killer. The British public were rarely privy to such graphic imagery and as a result the film was damned by the wrong kind of attention. There were numerous complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency and further opposition in the national press. National outrage backed by the tabloid press was quick to blame The Driller Killer and its bloodthirsty ilk for a decline in social values, which was ironically fundamental to Ferrara’s original narrative. Few of its persecutors would have ever seen the film, but the attention grabbing sensationalism of the advertising campaign had completely backfired. According to Mike Bor, the Principal Examiner for the British Board of Film Classification: “The Driller Killer was almost single-handedly responsible for the Video Recordings Act 1984”. The film was listed as a video nasty and banned in the UK. It wasn’t until 2002 that this movie was officially released uncut to what by then was a new generation of horror enthusiasts in the UK.

  IN THE OPENING sequence of Jody Dwyer’s Dying Breed, the early nineteenth-century Tasmanian legend Alexander “The Pieman” Pearce escapes his penal colony confinement to seek refuge in the island’s forests and turns to cannibalism. Almost two hundred years later four young adventurers arrive on the island, one of whom, Nina, is solely intent on carrying on with the research her sister started prior to her death eight years ago while looking for the last remaining Tasmanian Tiger, a species acknowledged to have become extinct in the first part of the twentieth century. In a similar way to Wolf Creek (2005), there are references to missing backpackers and the local inhabitants are just as unsettling. Nina and her companions soon discover that her sister was yet another victim of the cannibalistic inbred descendants of Alexander Pearce. This family will do all that it takes to ensure the survival of their deviant bloodline, resulting in a desperate fight for survival for these young explorers.

  First-time film director Dwyer explored the legends from Tasmania’s past, and twisted them very subtly for his own purposes. The real Pearce, after being sentenced in Ireland to penal transportation for the theft of six pairs of shoes, had escaped with seven other prisoners and when captured admitted to cannibalizing some of his fellow escapees as a means of survival. The judge refused to believe his grisly tale and he was again imprisoned only to escape with another inmate, whom he also readily consumed. This time he was convicted and was hung in July 1824. His fictional descendants have much in common with the inbred terrors of Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Wrong Turn (2003), with Rebecca (Melanie Vallejo) strung up and savagely dismembered in a way that was reminiscent of Ruggero Deodato’s hugely controversial Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Dwyer was very assured in his direction, affording his tale a pace and then raising the tension amidst the ominous backdrop of this verdant forest, before delivering the visual torment that has become intrinsic to the modern-day horror movie. The cast would include the already prolific writer and actor of Saw (2004), Leigh Whannell, as Nina’s boyfriend Nat, who true to form made a convincing addition to a film, which was hell-bent on becoming ever more vile as it journeyed deeper into this eerie terrain. The excruciating sequence with the bear trap in the mineshaft compounded by the close-in shots detailing a pickaxe to the head would delight the slavering gore-mongers, but the film’s notoriety was ensured when the promotional poster was censored by an Australian company specializing in bus shelter advertising. Its depiction of a half-eaten pie, containing an eyeball and the remains of a finger, was just a little too much for them to stomach.

  A DARK, GREEN-TINTED moon hangs over the Louisiana Bayou as Clara Wood (Roberta Collins) wanders the streets after being dismissed from the town’s brothel. The downtrodden girl had refused a dubious proposition for sex from a sodomy-loving punter known as Buck (Robert Englund) and now makes her way through the misty swamp to the secluded Starlight Hotel. The place it has to be said has seen better days. When she enters the rundown reception area, she is met by the maniacal owner Judd (Neville Brand) and his pet crocodile languishing in the swamp close to the porch. Judd, we soon learn, has severe difficulties in being able to communicate with ordinary people. When he discovers Clara worked as a prostitute, he flies
into a maddened rage and attacks her with a pitchfork before feeding her to the crocodile. It isn’t long before an irritable couple and their daughter arrive at the hotel. They have to watch as their pet dog is devoured by the crocodile. So follows Harvey Wood (Mel Ferrer) and his daughter, who are looking for his missing daughter, Clara, the prostitute seen at the beginning of the film. They are accompanied by the local sheriff. Each will eventually meet their fate at the hands of the psychotic Judd and his insatiable pet.

  There is little in the way of plot to Tobe Hooper’s low-budget follow-up to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974); rather, the viewer is presented with a raw and nasty nightmare damned by an overriding sense of inevitability. The cheap sets and swampland mists enhance the unsettling atmosphere in a tale based on the mass murderer Joe Ball, who it is alleged in the 1930s fed over twenty of his female victims to the alligators in his bar. True to its exploitative nature, Hooper’s film has been passed off under a variety of different names, including Death Trap, Horror Hotel, Horror Hotel Massacre, Legend of the Bayou, Murder on the Bayou, Le Crocodile de la Mort and Starlight Slaughter, and has also been marketed as his lost movie.

  In the United Kingdom on its 1978 release, it was censored to make it palatable for a British audience, but managed to get into the country as an uncut video in July 1982. With Mary Whitehouse taking a personal dislike to the movie, it was predictably listed as a video nasty in July 1983, but was later removed in December 1985 following several unsuccessful prosecutions. When it was again released to video in 1992 a total of twenty-five seconds were removed to limit the film’s excessive violence.

  KAI (ANTHONY WONG Chau-Sang) is deep into his sex with the boss’s wife. When his boss catches him in the act, he is threatened with castration. This doesn’t seem to bother Kai; he slaughters his boss and his associates along with his wife and then flees to South Africa. Ten years later, still in his self-imposed exile, he endures a lowly existence as a poorly-paid employee in a Chinese restaurant. While trying to buy meat for the restaurant from a Zulu tribe he rapes an unconscious woman, who we learn is infected with the Ebola virus. His frustrations begin to mount in the restaurant and once again his temper gets the better of him and he murders his boss and his wife after raping her. His sick mind then tries to hide the evidence of his crime; he chops up their dead bodies and turns them into hamburgers, which he offers for sale in the restaurant. The virus begins to spread. As the police dragnet begins to close, he returns to his native Hong Kong and continues in his scurrilous activities. The Ebola epidemic begins to hit the streets of Hong Kong.

  The opening sequences to Herman Yau’s The Ebola Syndrome feature a violent intensity rarely experienced in western cinema; this is gruesome B-movie horror all the way from Hong Kong, inspired by its twisted predecessors Dr Lamb (1992) and The Untold Story (1993). Although some of the sex is suggestive, the rape scenes are horribly brutal; the enigmatic Kai is at heart one vicious individual. The gore levels are the equal of anything the South East Asian film industry has to offer, which includes a series of highly innovative scenes as bodies are butchered to make hamburgers and eyes are avariciously chewed out of a living head. The depiction of the Ebola virus is probably the most disturbing element in this film; for the infected their lives will become one of unfathomable horror. However, Yau’s film, although controversial, manages to play out as a macabre comedy with Anthony Wong shining in his portrayal of the demented Kai.

  IN THE REMOTE community of Paddock County, North California, a killer freely stalks the homes of the local female residents, chopping them up with a sharpened axe. When a dead body is discovered in the ceiling of a local tavern, the sheriff dismisses it as suicide. This lax attitude only encourages the killer as he wantonly plies his brutal trade, even during the hours of daylight. One of them of particular note takes place in a car wash, in a violent episode inflicted by a figure whose face remains hidden by a white mask, not unlike that worn by Michael Myers. The sheriff displays little interest in the escalating severity of the murders, still choosing to play their significance down. A series of red herrings are thrown into the proceedings, including the creepy pastor and a newly arrived pianist. The most likely suspect remains young Gerald, who is enamoured by Lilly, the cute heroine of the proceedings. As the body count continues to rise, they take it on themselves to investigate these crimes and are certain they know the killer’s identity. Then it becomes their turn as the killer begins to prey upon them. This game of cat and mouse reaches absolute fever pitch when the film comes to the most abrupt of ends, with the killer’s identity having only just been very subtly disclosed.

  José Ramón Larraz had already carved a reputation with his lesbian Vampyres movie in 1975. Edge of the Axe continued his association with horror, this time with a modest low-budget slasher, produced when these films had fallen from favour. His direction, while slow between kills, was carried out with gusto, thus affording the attacks an unbearable degree of ferocity and in their wake dissipated an unsettling ambience across an isolated town firmly caught in the grip of fear. The photography shone throughout, savouring the kill and then surprising the audience with some quite beautiful backdrops. The director had a reputation for casting and using the camera’s lens to adorn his films with some rather beautiful women; Edge of the Axe was no exception. However, contrary to the slasher trope, these girls remained fully clothed, which duly caused howls of derision among the genre’s teenage addicts. Visually Larraz’s killer was reminiscent of Michael Myers in Halloween and as with this psychopath before him prowled though this film with a disturbing air of menace. The BBFC removed a reported twenty-six seconds of footage when they gave it an “18” certificate, making certain murder scenes appear awkward, suggesting individual frames had gone missing; this appears all the more likely when comparing the ease with which the camera flows during the remainder of the film. Over twenty years later conjecture continues as to whether an unedited gory version of Edge of the Axe actually does exist.

  IN A DARKENED room, an intimidating voice (Hector Alterio) instructs a lone man (Manolo Solo) to sit down and attach himself to an electrically wired chair, which stands in the beam of a single spotlight. His air of confidence gives the impression he is willingly participating in a scientific experiment; this seems all the more likely when his arms begin to bleed and he appears completely unaffected by the flow of blood. However, just beyond the shaft of light he begins to become aware of a build up of indiscernible noise, which as it increases in intensity starts to undermine his self-assurance. As his ordeal persists the resonance becomes more threatening, but the darkness continues to veil its mysterious source. As the fall of the light becomes more focused, his imagination conspires to deceive his mind, yet still he fights to retain his composure. A hand then seizes his shoulder. He turns to be confronted by a masked figure adorned in a butcher’s apron and then to his horror realizes a severed finger has been placed on his head. Tearing the wires from his body, he breaks free of the chair.

  While all of this has been going on the taunting somewhere in the background has continued without relent. The masked menace now stands astride him; it is obvious something is seriously amiss. In only a matter of minutes, his situation has gone through a drastic change as laughter is heard from an audience obscured by the shadows. The man at the centre of the experiment withdraws to the apparent safety of his chair as a stream of blood drips onto his body. His would-be assailant then uncovers a severed head, and tosses it into his lap. Reeling in terror, he then has a gun forced against his head. In the darkness, a group of excited onlookers steadily count down to zero. At the allotted moment, the gun goes off and the man crumples to the floor. There he lies, dead. Light suddenly floods the room as the camera draws back to reveal it is almost empty. The man in the mask is seen as he is ushered away, his face wracked in self-recriminating torment.

  A year after its release the highly original El Tren de la Bruja, which has also been passed off as Spook House, became the recipient
of the Grand Prize for Best European fantasy short film at the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival and also gained recognition as the Best Spanish Short at the San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival. It is hard to believe this intense piece of storytelling was completed in only two days. Koldo Serra would eventually move on into a successful career in television, and his film could well have drifted into complete obscurity if it had not been for the impact of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). There are many who believe this short feature provided the inspiration for Roth’s blockbuster. Unlike Roth, Serra kept his audience guessing, refusing to make it clear as to whether this was truly an experiment, or, as in Hostel, it was really a sinister game of torture and death to entertain those of incomparable affluence. Rather than relying on the graphic nature espoused by its successor, Serra made adept use of light and sound to create a sense of atmosphere and ultimately instil in both his audience and the protagonists on screen a sense of fear. He also had the good fortune to attract an actor of the calibre of Manolo Solo, who in only eighteen minutes endured a remarkable transformation in character.