The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  The film was reasonably well received with John Beal’s creepy score gaining universal commendation. Unfortunately, its video release wasn’t particularly well timed, coming as the scourge of the video nasty befell the UK. The BBFC proved a little too quick in applying the label video nasty, as it was discovered to have been confused with Roger Watkins’ exploitation masterpiece The Last House on Dead End Street (1977), which also went by the name The Fun House. A novelization of the screenplay was written by Dean Koontz, which, due to delays in the production process, saw publication prior to the film’s release.

  THE PROLOGUE TO Andy Milligan’s film, which was set in the latter part of the nineteenth century, follows two lovers whose peaceful stroll is interrupted by Colin (Hal Borske), a retarded hunchback who wastes no time in dispatching the romantic pair. He gouges out the man’s eye and turns to the camera holding an object almost the size of a tennis ball. We are then introduced to three sisters and their husbands who have received a letter from the family lawyer, H. Dobbs (Neil Flanagan), requesting they attend a reading of their eccentric late father’s will. The reading demands that each couple spend three days in the sinister family home of Crenshaw House, located on a secluded island and bring the “sexual harmony and marital love” that it had never come to know. Only then would the inheritance be settled. The retarded Colin bids the three couples welcome by killing a rabbit before their eyes and then feasting on its raw innards. Hours later the remains of the rabbit are found smeared across one of the beds with a scrawled message proclaiming “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit”. So follows a series of grisly murders engaging pitchforks and hatchets that result in disembowelment and a decapitated head served at the dinner table as the three-day retreat reveals a dark secret from the sisters’ past.

  Cult filmmaker Andy Milligan staged his first horror movie, later entitled Blood Rites, in his own Victorian home on Staten Island. Fans of trash cinema have for a long time placed his techniques alongside those of Ed Wood; and as with his predecessor, this tortured director’s films are distinguished by an inimitable charm. Filmed on a hand-held 16-mm camera, his slasher mystery feature resembled a homemade movie, appearing fifteen years before the shot-on-video phenomenon ascended to popularity. His framing has been the source of much criticism, chopping the heads and limbs off his cast, in addition to leaving members of the crew in shot. The sound was also intermittently muffled and, on other occasions, Milligan’s voice could be heard as he strived to keep the proceedings under his control. A closer examination of the gore effects would reveal they were inspired by his theatrical background; unfortunately these enthusiastic efforts were found wanting when transferred to the cinema screen.

  At this time there was a growing trend in exploitation cinema to feature forays of gratuitous nudity, but as with so much of this film, it was so badly shot. In conversation some ten years later, Milligan revealed he had used Hostess Sno-Balls to create the infamous eye-gouging episode. This admission came after he had produced a more competent remake of the events recorded in this film, which saw release as Legacy of Blood (1978). The Ghastly Ones may well have drifted into obscurity, as did most of Milligan’s catalogue of films from the period, but when it was released to video in the UK in March 1983 it acquired a newfound notoriety, becoming one of the DPPs video nasties in August 1984 and remaining there until the panic came to an end.

  AT DEWITT COLLEGE in Ohio, the victorious basketball team are returning to their dormitory rooms in readiness for a night of celebration. One of the victors seeks consolation following a break up with his girlfriend and learns that many years ago another student found his girl had been cheating on him and went berserk, killing her in his ensuing rage. The preparations for the party, however, continue – a party that will build to the excitement of a scavenger hunt. As the students begin to strut their funky stuff, the crazy who killed his roving girlfriend escapes the asylum. With the disco sound echoing around the college, the killer takes on a unique disguise, one never before seen in any slasher movie; he slips into the costume of the basketball team’s bear mascot, discarding the fake plastic claws for sharpened knives that were unusually reminiscent of the glove that Fred Kreuger was to brandish later that year. He then begins to stalk the basketball team’s cheerleaders, phoning the school radio station whenever he rips out one of his victim’s throats. The school’s security guard, it is revealed, is the father of the murderer’s first victim from all those years ago, but he will be hard pressed to bring this killer to justice.

  Robert Deubel’s film was originally shot in 1982 under the title The Scaremaker, but wasn’t to see release until 1984. With the relative success of several other campus slashers such as Prom Night (1980), Final Exam (1981), Graduation Day (1981) and Night School (1981), the distributors recognized the potential in the more lurid moniker of Girls Nite Out. Deubel’s movie was the standard slasher fare of the period, although the bear costume did make for some mild amusement, at least until the killings started and the audience came to realize just how hateful this maniac really was. Although it promised much, Girls Nite Out offered little in the way of gore and nudity, but Deubel was no slouch when it came to creating suspense, particularly in the film’s final half hour, where it bordered on becoming a detective story, before delivering an unexpected twist. Girls Nite Out was saved by its fast-paced direction, coupled with Joe Rivers’ ability to engineer the ill-lit shots, which were to facilitate a brooding atmosphere and augment the tension as the movie hacked its way to the finale.

  TO THE LYRICS “everybody wants to be a winner”, the Midvale High School athletes go through the motions as the camera juxtaposes between their various excursions before finally coming to rest on Laura Ramstead, whose incredible acceleration pushes her on to victory in the 100-metre dash. Her moment of glory, however, is short lived; she collapses and dies on the spot; Ash her coach (Christopher George) and boyfriend (E. Danny Murphy) race towards the scene but are unable to save her.

  Laura’s older sister Anne (Patch Mackenzie) arrives home from her Naval detachment, having been invited to collect her sister’s award at the school’s graduation ceremony. Soon after her appearance, a jogger is murdered by an unidentified figure carrying a switchblade and stopwatch. The slasher convention was now a few years old, and Herb Freed’s story adhered to its principles dispatching the remaining members of the track team, one by one, this time at the hands of an assassin garbed in a tracksuit and fencing mask. The image may not have evoked the same level of dread as that of Michael Myers, but this style of mask made a return in John Ottman’s Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000). The slaughter went on to include the obligatory decapitation, which was not the most convincing episode but was later followed by an inventive slaying using an American football, armed with a protruding sword. The killer was seen to launch the ball from afar and as it descended it ripped into the victim’s stomach. In the aftermath of these murders, scarlet lipstick has been left on the face of the victims gathered on a once-proud team photograph. This inference throws suspicion on Anne, who could be using her military training to avenge her sister’s unfortunate death.

  Former rabbi, Herb Freed had been involved with making adverts for much of the earlier part of his career, but between 1977 and 1981 he turned to making horror movies, principally Beyond Evil (1980) and Haunts (1977). When he conceived the idea for Graduation Day with writer Anne Marisse, he made use of every element of the slasher trope that was now in vogue. His film is now very much of its time and has become a nostalgic journey for those who were lucky enough to have been there. There was no escape from the roller-disco and the heavy metal sound that excited the youth of these years, and the delightful heroine as ever managed to keep her clothes on, unlike several members of the cast; in addition she also gave the audience some seasoned martial arts moves just for good measure. It worked; Freed’s movie captured the imagination of cinema-goers across the whole of the US and it went on to be a huge commercial success. The presence of
Christopher George no doubt gave his film a boost and a young Linnea Quigley was also to be found among the cast in what were very early days in a long and successful B-movie career. An ear piercing performance from Vanna White didn’t do her career any harm; two years later she went on to host the US version of Wheel of Fortune.

  AFORMER GALLERY CURATOR named Akiko (Makiko Kuno) has secured a position with the prestigious Akebono Corporation. Her new role is to assist and provide advice on its acquisitions of highly valuable artwork, with a view to selling them on at an astronomical profit. When she arrives on her first day, the security guard has no knowledge of the department for which she will be working. To add to her sense of unease, radio broadcasts tell of the escape of the deranged “Sumo Killer”, who is standing trial for murder. He had apparently beaten his girlfriend and a fellow wrestler to death. That same day a towering security guard (Yutaka Matsushige) also assumes his new duties with the company; he very quickly reveals his penchant for violence. When she finally does get to her office, Akiko’s boss reveals himself as an ill-tempered tyrant, while her immediate colleagues are an awkward set who appear intent upon making her life unnecessarily difficult. Within days, they become the security guard’s new targets as he begins to stalk the stairways and corridors of this corporate edifice. With Akiko locked in a document room and the building’s lighting no longer working, the stage is set for a murderous finale.

  The Guard from the Underground, which was also entitled Jigoku No Keibiin on its release and later went by the name Security Guard from Hell, has been described as a fast and cheap homage to the slashers of a decade past. For director Kiyoshi Kurosawa it marked his return to Japanese cinema following four years in the wilderness. Having agreed to create a piece of soft-core pornography, he presented his backers with a philosophical treatise portraying very little in the way of sex. The financiers were far from impressed. This direct-to-video film was his chance to restore the industry’s faith in his ability before going on to direct more significant works, which would include Cure (1997), Charisma (1999), Pulse (2001), Bright Future (2003) and his internationally acclaimed Tokyo Sonata (2008). Here, with very limited funding, he proved himself unusually inventive, creating a series of set pieces amidst these dimly lit corridors and annexes as the killer’s indeterminable actions spiralled into abject mindlessness. This isn’t a film in any way concerned with the subtleties of character development; rather, its design is to slaughter as many of these corporate types as possible. Strangely, for a movie of its kind the violence is not especially explicit, albeit with one notable exception involving a locker.

  THE CARNAGE ON display in the Guinea Pig or Za Ginipiggu series of short films had regularly been threatened during the grindhouse years of exploitation, but no one ever dared take it quite so far. Over twenty years after they first appeared, these six films are still considered the most excessive movies to see production in Japan. Their relish for agonizing pain and gore recorded between 1985 and 1989 would be instrumental in the rise of the torture porn that has tormented western cinema for the last decade. Their notoriety stemmed from the furore that arose in the wake of the first two features, which forced producer and acclaimed horror manga creator Hideshi Hino and fellow creator Satoru Ogura to prove that no one had been harmed during their making. So shocked was actor Charlie Sheen in 1991, he panicked after watching Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), believing he had been given a genuine snuff movie. He reported the film to the FBI and then informed the MPAA in the hope of preventing the global export of this sickening series. In the UK, a horror fan who had arranged for a copy of the film to be posted to him from abroad faced jail when he was accused of being in possession of a snuff movie. Only when the true nature of the film was established in a courtroom was his sentence reduced to a £600 fine. The Hino-directed Mermaid in a Manhole (1988) was also found in the huge anime and horror video collection of Japanese child serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, when he was arrested in July 1989. The series was once again the focus of much unwanted attention, which would inevitably heighten its infamy, although confusion remained as to whether Miyazaki had been acting out the gratuitous scenes from Flower of Flesh and Blood. Such was the mounting controversy surrounding the series, which had already been considerably toned down, it was forced out of production in its native Japan, although it has now been reissued in the United States to an ever-growing fan base. Miyazaki was eventually executed for his crimes in June 2008 and while the Japanese film industry has produced its fair share of blood and guts in the years following the Guinea Pig series, rarely has it gone to such extremes. This, however, changed with Kôji Shiraishi’s Grotesque (2009), which in its unsavoury depiction of the acute sexual torment, humiliation and torture of its male and female victims, stooped to far greater depths than the indulgence so far observed in the recent craze for torture porn. Shiraishi’s film offered absolutely nothing by way of narrative or development in character and as such found itself subsequently banned by the BBFC.

  The reviled initiation to the Guinea Pig series, Devil’s Experiment (1985), which has also been packaged as Akumano Jikken and the excruciatingly appropriate Unabridged Agony, along with the second feature Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), or Chiniku No Hana, work in a similar way to Shiraishi’s Grotesque. Each of these cheap-looking productions was devoid of storyline and offered nothing by way of characterization; their creators’ sole intent was to shock the viewer into believing they had in their possession a snuff movie, and as we now know they certainly succeeded. There were claims that Hideshi Hino had received a similar video through the post, which acted as the catalyst for the series, but the outcry in Japan was such the films that followed, while extreme, returned to conventional use of plot and introduced fully fleshed characters. The Japanese fascination for the snuff video refused to go away; it surfaced a few years later in The Evil Dead Trap (1988), a film that at first glance appeared to jump on Sam Raimi’s lucrative bandwagon, and whose depiction of the barbaric practice of eye popping gave Lucio Fulci a run for his money.

  Satoru Ogura had become disillusioned with what he saw as being the banal horror of the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s. Guinea Pig: The Devil’s Experiment (1985) allowed him to create his kind of terror and marked the first of the series to see public release. A gang of three men have kidnapped a young woman and then embark on a torturous experiment to see how much pain her body can endure. For the duration of these unbearable forty-three minutes this hapless soul was verbally abused, punched and kicked, clawed, then had one of her fingernails removed before boiling water was poured over her arm. As it began to blister, maggots were forced into the wound and then scattered across her battered body, one of which crawled under her eyelid. The so-called experiment then demanded this unholy trio insert a needle into the poor girl’s eye. As the violence and beatings became more protracted, the inevitability of the young girl’s fate was all too obvious.

  Flower of Flesh and Blood or Chiniku no Hana (1985) was inspired by an unmarked parcel that had been sent to Hideshi Hino in the post. It was alleged to have contained an 8-mm film along with fifty-four photographs and a nineteen-page letter explaining the atrocious scenes in the contents of the package. After watching the film, which apparently documented the appalling torture of a woman, he handed this vile subject matter to the police. For less than £20,000, he went on to make this forty-two-minute documentary-styled re-enactment of what he could remember from the tape, which bears a close resemblance to a tale from his own manga series. A man dressed as a samurai (Hiroshi Tamura) uses chloroform on an unsuspecting woman (Kirara Yûgao) in the less populated suburbs of Tokyo and then takes her against her will to his home. She awakens to find herself tied to a bed in a darkened room that, as her eyes begin to focus, reveals the splattered stains of dried blood strewn across its walls. Before he begins to dissect his victim, the sadist stands before the camera and details that which will follow. He then proceeds to butcher her body and adds her body parts to his gr
uesome collection. Hino’s film has been described as horror in its purest form; the youth of Japan certainly loved it, giving it a top ten position among the country’s video releases. This video also made it into the hands of American horror journalist Chas Balun, who copied it and introduced it to the underground horror cinema that was already discreetly operating in the United States. These bootlegs soon became treasured collector’s items and the Guinea Pig series acquired a hush-hush popularity. Hino’s ideas have continued to influence other modern creators, surfacing in Argentine Mariano Peralta’s controversial Snuff 102 (2007), which resulted in the director being attacked following a screening at the Mar Der Plata Festival.

  Flower of Flesh and Blood was an extreme piece of filmmaking and its success allowed Hino to continue his Guinea Pig movies. The series, however, was taken over by JHV, who refused to tolerate a repetition of the public outcry that had followed in the wake of the release of the first two films. Directed by Masayuki Kusumi, He Never Dies or Senritsu! Shinanai Otoko (1986) ran to forty minutes and with an increased budget finally introduced the vaguest element of plot and rudimentary characterization. The series, which had established its unrelenting reputation on an almost incomprehensible nihilism, now turned to comedic gore. A heartbroken young man, whose girlfriend has ditched him for one of their smarmy colleagues, is then sacked by his boss. Having also fallen foul of his family, this despairing chap turns to suicide. However, when he slits his wrist he is shocked to see the blood stop flowing and the gash heal. Feeling no pain, he then cuts deeper and soon realizes he is “the man who cannot die”. In contrast to the first two entries in the series, this man inflicts pain on his own body and then plans an amusingly elaborate revenge on his former girlfriend and her new lover.