The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  The killer, whose face remains shadowed throughout, cunningly seeks to isolate and then murder the counsellors. Ned is lured into a cabin, beckoned by a strange voice. Marcie and Jack later enter the same cabin and enjoy sex in one of the bunks, unaware that Ned’s dead body is draped across the upper berth. When Marcie leaves to visit the bathroom Jack is set upon by the killer, who has bided their time beneath the bunk. The murderer forcefully drives an arrow up through the bed, perforating Jack’s throat, leaving him for dead. Marcie meets her end shortly afterwards in the showers, hit full in the face with an axe. The tension becomes unbearably taut as the body count begins to rise. Bill, Alice and Brenda indulge in “strip Monopoly” until Brenda remembers that she has left her cabin windows ajar. As she departs, she is drawn to the archery range, to be confronted by an unseen presence. Steve, the owner, returns with supplies; he too falls prey to the murderer, although he seems familiar with his attacker. Having heard Brenda’s screams, Alice and Bill leave the cabin to investigate, only to find a bloody axe in Brenda’s bed. The sense of isolation is complete when the phone lines go down and so follow the lights across the camp which plunges it into total darkness.

  Bill takes it on himself to check the generator, but fails to return. Alice then flees to the main cabin and tries to hide, but the silence is shattered when Brenda’s corpse is hurled through the window. In the aftermath, a car engine is heard and Alice runs out to find a middle-aged woman, who introduces herself as Mrs Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), the mother of the boy who drowned all those years ago and still blames her son Jason’s death on the two counsellors whose sexual antics blinded them to his plight in the lake. Mrs Voorhees becomes violent and pulls a large knife on Alice. A lengthy chase ensues with Mrs Voorhees speaking to herself in Jason’s voice, evoking memories of twenty years past and the schizophrenia that drove Norman Bates to murder in Psycho. Cornered in a storage shed, Alice deals her attacker a shattering blow with a cast iron skillet; Mrs Voorhees drops unconscious, seemingly dead. Alice escapes the shed and takes time to gather herself at the lakeside. She takes a little too much time for the deranged Mrs Voorhees is far from death’s door. Rushing from the darkness, she once again brandishes the machete and as the two of them wrestle at the water’s edge Alice seizes the blade and decapitates her hysterical attacker. Shocked, the young girl staggers towards a canoe and rows out to the middle of the lake, where she immediately falls into a deep sleep.

  The following morning Alice is awoken by several policemen who call to her from the shore. After almost an hour and a half of tension, there would have been sighs of relief around the cinema as Alice prepared to be rescued. None of them, however, could have anticipated the decomposing corpse of the long-dead Jason (Ari Lehman) as it ascended from the lake to launch a vengeful attack and then haul her from the canoe. In her desperation, Alice kicks and struggles to awaken in a hospital bed, where a police officer explains how they pulled her from the lake. When she asks about Jason, the officer informs her they never recovered nor did they see any sign of a boy.

  Such was his desire to overcome any potential legal problems with the name Friday the 13th, director Sean S. Cunningham advertised his film in international Variety magazine without a completed script. Cunningham was no stranger to the shocks of the modern-day horror movie, having previously worked on Wes Craven’s notorious The Last House on the Left (1972). It was the later success of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) that provided the inspiration for creating this particular feature. As with Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971), Cunningham and his writer Victor Miller sacrificed the intricacies of plot development for the grisly excess of an ever-growing body count. To their immense credit, there was more than enough of a story here to make it palatable for the majority of the movie-going public. Further to this, the frenzy witnessed in the ever-increasing body count would make this film the archetype for the slasher fare of the next few years. As he dispatched his victims in a series of excruciating set pieces, Cunningham carried his ace card in the guise of one Tom Savini. Savini had attracted a great deal of attention for his work on Dawn of the Dead (1978); it was his creativity and meticulous attention to detail that afforded such a gruesome credibility to these nine-five minutes of slaughter.

  The nature of the killings and the accompanying bloody display inevitably made this film one of the most controversial of its day, but this only added to the incredible success of Friday the 13th, and with this Paramount Pictures immediately acquired the worldwide distribution rights and began plans for a sequel. Although the films were never popular with critics, the media franchise is considered as one of the most successful in American cinema. There are now eleven films in the series, comprising Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), Friday the 13th Part III (1982), Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), Jason X (2002) and Freddy vs. Jason (2003), along with a remake of the original in 2009. A television series would follow with novels, comic books, documentaries, computer games and model kits. It is true to say Jason’s hockey mask would go on to become one of the most recognizable images in popular culture.

  IN THE OPENING sequence of black-and-white footage recording the events of 1957, Dorothy and Edmund Yates (Sheila Keith and Rupert Davies) are committed to an institution for the criminally insane: Dorothy for hideous acts of murder and cannibalism and her devoted husband for attempting to disguise her grisly crimes. Fifteen years later, they are released, with the authorities satisfied they are once again fit to take their place in society. With the fragile Dorothy’s case now closed, the couple retreat from the world to retire to the solitude of an old farmhouse somewhere in the English countryside.

  Edmund soon gains employment as a chauffeur, leaving his wife alone in the cottage, which begins to assume a progressively threatening air. With too much time on her hands, Dorothy’s blood lust once again comes to the fore. She plans to satiate her cravings by taking out an advert in a magazine offering tarot readings. Her visitors are the lonely, with no friends or family; as with so many of her ilk her cannibalistic yearning is legitimized by the firm belief she is doing them a favour. The earlier diagnosis now appears somewhat premature; for hidden away in this rather sedate setting, she violates her victims with a series of household implements and then engages a set of power tools that are the match of anything seen in The Driller Killer (1979), The Toolbox Murders (1978) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). She is no longer the feeble old dear whom the experts only recently declared sane; this is a manipulative monster with an overwhelming need to bask in her repulsive pleasures. When she returns to a corpse she has hidden away in the barn, Dorothy deploys a power drill to its head as if she had spent many years in the trade. As the ensuing visceral discharge drenches her wrinkled face, her expression turns to that of a grinning maniac. Miles away in London, Edmund’s daughter from a previous marriage, Jackie (Deborah Fairfax), has her own views on her stepmother’s mental condition. She is certain her psychotic relative hasn’t been cured and endeavours to convince her boyfriend (Paul Greenwood), who just happens to be an aspiring psychiatrist. Dorothy’s deep-rooted problems become more acute when she learns her unruly daughter, Debbie (Kim Butcher), who is supposed to be in Jackie’s charge, has inherited her cannibalistic urges.

  Pete Walker’s controversial descent into cannibalism in the sheltered domain of England’s home counties has been described as the UK’s answer to that same year’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, principally due to its bleak premise and obdurate attitude towards violence. While it may appear otherwise, this flesh-eating venture was really just another piece of exploitation, with Walker wanting only to shock his audience. The sensation seekers, however, were thwarted in their quest for such gastronomic immoderation, with Walker’s film choosing significantly more discussion on the joys of
human flesh rather than the extremes they desired. This, however, was 1974; cannibalism was a relatively new phenomenon for cinemas in the UK and even this director, straight off the back of the similarly exploitative, House of Whipcord (1974) and a series of stag movies, knew he was going to have to tread very carefully. Although Walker has always denied there was an underlying subtext to his film, he did appear to be questioning the aptitude of the authorities to be able to accurately appraise the nature of a person’s sanity and furthermore if it was possible to successfully rehabilitate such individuals. Walker himself had been abandoned as a child and had seen firsthand how those in authority dealt with the unfortunates in their care. Frightmare was a typically low-budget feature, but as with so many of these films the cinematography was used to magnificent effect, revealing an intense disquiet with inspired use of interior lighting, which afforded the cottage a suitably inauspicious air. This damning ambience was made all the more perturbing by Sheila Keith’s compelling performance as she chopped and changed between the weak and feeble-minded old dear before turning as the situation required to assume her true guise, as that of the calculating psychopath.

  WRITER AND DIRECTOR Xavier Gens felt nothing should be left to the imagination for his film Frontier(s), so be prepared for the excruciation of decapitations, severed limbs, prolonged death scenes and a plethora of torturous implements. The film’s creator has little time for the racist right wing that has cast its shadow over modern-day France and there is strong evidence of this reflected in his work. Frontier(s) takes itself very seriously, created against the backdrop of real socio-political unrest in Paris, which resulted in rioting between October and November 2005 after the deaths of two young suspects electrocuted in a power substation along with a similar skirmish with the police late in 2007. In his wrath Gens does not feed on the entrails of splatter past; this is a new breed that goes beyond the concept of gratuitous to wallow in the twenty-first century’s relish for torture porn.

  Protest riots spark across the chaos-ridden city of Paris following the election of a right-wing candidate to the French presidency, driving a group of Muslim teenagers, Alex, Tom, Farid, Sami and his pregnant sister Yasmine, to escape the city and head for Amsterdam with their ill-gotten gains seized during a robbery. However, in the melee, Sami is shot and the group are forced to go their separate ways. As Alex and Yasmine help Sami to the emergency hospital, Tom and Farid hold onto the money and continue to the border.

  As they approach the Dutch border, Tom and Farid book into a rooming house. They can’t believe their luck when hosts Gilberte and Klaudia offer free accommodation with the bonus of sex with two local girls of dubious repute; it’s hardly the best sex ever, but that’s not the point. Meanwhile the police have been notified of Sami’s gunshot injury, forcing a fearful Yasmine to make a run for it, knowing she must honour her brother’s dying wish and keep the unborn child. She takes off with Alex, contacting Tom and Farid and seeking directions to their address. Soon after Tom and Farid have spoken to their friends, they make a chilling discovery. Having escaped the violence of fascist Paris they face an even greater menace: their benevolent hosts are sadistic Nazi cannibals and they are not the first visitors to fall into their foul clutches. As part of his grand design, their deranged patriarch, a former SS officer and Nazi war criminal Le Von Geislerhe, looks upon Yasmine as the means to conceiving a new Aryan master race. Although brutalized, Yasmine has a chance of survival; the men, however, aren’t going to make it. They are subjected to various games of dehumanizing torture before they have no choice but to accept their demise, a despairing motif so much employed by recent torture porn. Alex is cruelly punished by the depraved von Geisler, pliers used to sever his Achilles tendons, while Farid is graphically cooked alive; the bloodcurdling carnage ensues with an assault armed with a bow saw.

  Initially, von Geisler wishes for Yasmine to enter an unholy matrimony into the family circle to continue the iniquitous bloodline, but when they learn of her pregnancy, she is entrusted to Eva. Eva will be her salvation, in a film that offers just a fragment of hope before the final credits begin to roll. It is Yasmine who they can’t break down, a girl who, while drenched in blood, fights doggedly for her life, impaling bodies and lacerating the throats of her merciless captors.

  The parallels with Hostel and Motel Hell are obvious, along with the saw-driven brutality running wild in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It is this gratuitous nature which subsequently consigned Frontier(s) to very mixed reviews when handed to the critics, unable to reconcile the appalling levels of violence with the underlying message. It was intended to be one of the “8 Films to Die For” at Horrorfest 2007, but the MPAA’s deliberations gave it an NC-17 rating, limiting it to ten US theatres unrated for one weekend before being released on DVD only a week later.

  Frontier(s)’ savage portrayal runs like a compilation for the most hardened gorefiend, with an assemblage of degenerates whose debased characters are beyond redemption, but director Xavier Gens insists there is a purpose to his enfant terrible, as he attempts to demonstrate his opposition to the extreme right that continues to infiltrate French politics.

  AS THE WAVES crash onto a beach, a superimposed image of Doctor Lil Stanhope (Renee Harmon) appears on screen to deliver a grim monologue. She speaks of how man has dreamed of immortality and his pursuit of eternal life has been devoured by death itself. A young couple’s late night swim in the privacy of their pool is interrupted by a hooded figure and for no apparent reason sets about their murder. Shortly afterwards an anxious Ann Gerrard (Lynne Kocol) phones her husband Tom (Wolf Muser) from a phone box just before he is attacked by two hooded men. One of his silent assailants injects him with a serum, but absconds when Ann arrives on the scene. She awakens the next day in a hospital bed insisting her husband has been murdered, but her friend Dr Lil Stanhope assures her that his death was the result of a heart attack.

  At the hospital, Detective Kevin McGuire (Thomas Gowan) questions Lil about the disappearance of two of her and Dr Sven Johnson’s (Lee James) students, but she claims she has no knowledge of their whereabouts. She later confides in Dr Johnson, revealing her concern about Ann’s persistence about her husband’s death. Following her discharge, Ann discusses her fears with the detective and when the scheming pair host a Halloween party, she decides to take a sneak peak in the basement. Here she discovers a laboratory and soon learns that Sven plans to murder her. In a bid to escape, she runs headlong into a refrigerated room, which holds the frozen bodies of her husband and the missing students. Only when cornered does Sven confess to their crimes and the process used to simulate Tom’s apparent death. They had hoped to use a serum to attain life immortal and resurrect the dead to use as their obedient slaves.

  Frank Roach and Renee Harmon were community college teachers of acting, whose project wilfully turned a blind eye to obtaining the necessary permits as they filmed around Los Angeles. In terms of production, it stood alongside the works of Edward D. Wood Jnr. with a suspect plot whose focus was cryogenics. Dream sequences were juxtaposed with the narrative flow, as if to distort the timeline, in a film that may well have been forgotten but for the video boom of the 1980s and the intervention of the DPP. The axe murders, one of which shows an offending implement embedded in a victim’s skull and the shard of glass to the eye, ensured a ban in the August of 1984 following its release in 1983. It was, however, dropped in the October of 1984, and has only very recently been issued to DVD. Together with its obedient zombie slaves it was the film that refused to lie down and die, as was H. Kingsley Thurber’s score, which was later used in Don’t go in the Woods (1982).

  HER FATHER INSISTED she stay away, but Amy Harper (Elizabeth Berridge), together with her new boyfriend Buzz (Cooper Huckabee) and friends Liz (Largo Woodruff) and Richie (Miles Chapin), are drawn to the gaudy allure of the travelling carnival show. Amy’s father had every reason to be concerned; only the year before several young girls had been found dead when the fair last visited town. T
he gang are not put off by these tales; instead, they revel in the excitement of this tawdry excess, riding the rides, taunting the freaks, mingling with various reprobates, and then they fall upon a sleazy circus-styled strip club. Dazzled by the thrill of the fair they fail to realize Amy’s younger brother Joey (Shawn Carson) has followed them. Wandering around alone he soon comes to see how scary the carnival really is, and of this group of revellers, only he can see the darkness secreted in its garish pageant.

  As the show closes down for the night, Richie stupidly goads the group into spending the night in “The Funhouse”. There in the shadows they witness the murder of a prostitute, killed by the unspeaking ride assistant, dressed as the Frankenstein monster. Terrified, the teenagers look to escape, but find themselves locked in the now sinister ride. When the murderer’s father, the barker, discovers his crime, the film delivers another shock. In the ensuing struggle, his Frankenstein mask is displaced to unveil a hideously deformed visage, a pallid inhuman freak with sharpened teeth. With the kids reeling from this terrifying sight, the barker immediately senses their prying eyes; he and his son then begin to stalk “The Funhouse” with grisly murder in mind.

  Tobe Hooper turned down the chance to work with Steven Spielberg on E.T. The Ex-Terrestrial (1982), having already committed to directing this atmospheric take on the carnival chiller. The Fun House gave every impression of the low-budget nostalgia of the 1950s, and then very shrewdly weaved this imagery with the popular slasher trend to reveal Hooper as a now matured director. The opening sequence paid tribute to both Psycho and Halloween in its suspenseful close-in trailing of the film’s heroine. Unlike The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, his latest offering wasn’t to over indulge with excessive displays of human entrails, although it did concede to the obligatory decapitation along with a drawn-out impalement. Hooper’s treatment of the monstrous Gunther was reminiscent of his chainsaw-crazed predecessor, with the audience being swayed to sympathize with his repulsively misshapen form. This would of course be transformed to sheer terror as he worked his way though this deathly carnival attraction to track down the innocent Amy Berridge after slaughtering her friend Liz.