The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  Haute Tension was released as High Tension in North America, and when it entered the UK it was given an appropriate release as Switchblade Romance. The original American theatrical version was instantly cut by several minutes owing to the film’s graphic content. An element of this can be attributed to the welcome return of one of horror’s former masters, makeup artist Giannetto De Rossi. Many years before De Rossi had worked under Lucio Fulci, with his last entry in the macabre coming at the height of Italian horror boom on Fulci’s own House by the Cemetery (1981). While De Rossi once again excelled in his bloody craft, he couldn’t take all of the blame for the censor’s wrath. From its opening scenes, Aja’s film was just too violent for mainstream audiences, exultant in its ferocious intensity, which would continue without relent for the entirety of the excessive proceedings.

  As with many of its explicit predecessors, the plot was sacrificed for the purpose of sadistic carnage, but the tension in its claustrophobic embrace held the audience firmly in its grasp. The camera work combined with the fast-paced direction to overwhelm the limitations in narrative and then ten minutes before his tale came to its damning finale Aja revealed he had been hiding something, throwing in an inexplicable twist that tossed the whole film on its head. The denouement observed a commonality with so many facets of modern French cinema and among fans of this specific genre was lauded for the effect in its final delivery. The reviews were understandably mixed, with many critics being appalled by the prolonged brutality; many raised questions about that which transpired at the denouement, while others drew unhealthy comparisons with Dean Koontz’s novel Intensity, first published in 1995. Alexandre Aja, however, had shown that a small French production company could shock even the most bloodthirsty hack and slash enthusiast and produce horror at its most visceral.

  TWO YOUNG WOMEN are so engrossed by the tension of a slasher movie they fail to take notice of a man who slinks into the seat behind them. The onscreen slaughter is of little interest to him; he seeks his own thrills and, just to prove the point, lurches forward to stab one of them through the back of her seat. The killer (Tom Rolfing) has a homicidal appetite for blushing brides, having murdered his intended some years before when she stood him up at the altar. Ever since he has been trailed by the man she had hoped to marry, policeman Len Gamble (Lewis Arlt).

  The stalker turns his attention to young Amy Jensen (Caitlin O’Heaney), whose future husband Phil is away on his stag weekend. Amy and her likeable friends, Joyce and Nancy, are getting together with friends for the excitement of the hen party. The girls may not be about to walk the aisle themselves, but all too soon they become the killer’s prey. As she tries to save herself, Amy has to turn to her former boyfriend Marvin (Don Scardino), who now works in the morgue, a locale which provides for a thrilling climax.

  Armand Mastroianni’s entry to the slasher years rehashed themes already observed in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), but his creepy direction and clever pacing ensured his audience never became bored. The execution of the point-of-view camera shots heightened the menace as Mastroianni worked to disguise the killer’s face and, as in Halloween, the splatter factor was kept to an absolute minimum, no doubt at the request of MGM. There was thankfully one particular gruesome moment which has lived on with the movie’s fans: the chilling sight of a severed head immersed in the depths of a fish tank. The creativity shown in his opening scenes wasn’t to go unnoticed; Wes Craven later used it in the introductory sequence to Scream 2 (1997). The main score, however, was just a little too reminiscent of Carpenter’s synthesized theme, but worked to similar effect in evoking the requisite air of suspense. He Knows You’re Alone also marked the debut for a young Tom Hanks, who gained his very first couple of scenes before marching on to one of cinema’s most successful careers.

  AMIDST A COLLEGE’S partying, the president of the Alpha Sigma Rho fraternity commands that four pledges, each attired in fancy dress, stay at Garth Manor until dawn on Hell Night to ensure they fulfil their initiation rites. As the four students are escorted to the abandoned manse, a story is told of how twelve years before, Raymond Garth murdered his wife and three of their deformed children; legend would have you believe one son managed to survive. In despair, the father later hung himself in the confines of the family home. With this chilling account still fresh in their minds, the pledges begin to settle for the night waiting for dawn in a house that, although deserted for more than a decade, appears remarkably well furnished. They are completely unaware that the other members of the fraternity will attempt to frighten them using some of their own special effects. However, the lofty pranksters are set upon by an unseen figure; one of them is hauled screaming into a trench and then decapitated, another has his neck broken and the president is eventually impaled on a scythe. There is more to the legend than the pledges have been told and very soon they learn there are two killers in their midst. The pace accelerates as the imaginative slaughter continues in the tunnels situated beneath this ageing hall, and true to the slasher trope only the final girl will survive.

  Hell Night took the popular slasher theme of the day and swathed it in the mystery of an ageing haunted house. Tom DeSimone had learned his trade in adult films and in what was only a forty-day shoot he, along with his crew, produced a very creepy episode. His film was immersed in the atmospherics of the autumnal clime and the enormity of the imposing Gothic locale. Such was the allure of this house he didn’t need the pools of blood that were already congealing in so many cinemas of the day. The murders for this movie were frequently carried out off screen and were cleverly worked to fuel the audience’s anticipation rather than cause frustration. The script then deliberately played down the conventional juvenile sex and nudity of these films, choosing instead to flesh out the characters of the four pledges. Among the novices was Linda Blair, who had been the centre of so much attention following her role in The Exorcist (1973). Strangely the two actors who played the killers were never listed in the film’s credits; their real names have, for over thirty years, become something of a mystery.

  FRANK COTTON HAS an insatiable lust for life’s pleasures, the more bizarre the greater his sense of personal gratification. When he is offered a small puzzle box in an exotic foreign market place, with the promise of pleasure beyond the ken of mortal man, he eagerly accepts. He has no conception of the demonic Cenobites, a sadomasochistic breed that dwell beyond the gates of the box and take a perverse delight in entrapping their victims to render them to an eternity of exquisite pain and torture. Frank disappears without trace and months later leaves his suburban home to his brother Larry and sister-in-law Julia. While Frank was a thrill seeker, his brother lives a quite pedestrian life and his wife is an uncaring woman with little comprehension of life’s little pleasures. Her only sense of arousal comes from the memory of her sordid affair with Frank.

  Somehow, Frank managed to escape the Cenobites’ agonizing clutches, but his body has been ripped and torn beyond recognition. When Larry injures himself and his blood spills onto the attic’s wooden floor, Frank is returned to life, but he needs more if he is ever to be completely regenerated. Once she has overcome her disgust, Frank finds a willing ally in the heartless Julia. She uses her guile to attract the men she meets in the pubs and bars of the area and brings them home to the attic space to allow her former lover to feed on their life force. With each new victim, he comes closer to returning to the world of living flesh. However, Julia’s erratic behaviour has aroused the suspicion of Larry’s daughter, Kirsty. When she ventures into the attic room, she discovers her stepmother’s dark secret and only just escapes with her life. As she breaks away from her treacherous uncle, she triggers the puzzle box and sets in motion the elaborate process that opens the gates to the domain of eternal torment and brings her face to face with Pinhead and his debauched cohorts. They see only the smooth flesh of a new victim and prepare to drag her into their darkened world of pain and suffering, but true to the heroines of slasher lore she remains strong i
n their presence and enters into a bargain to lead them to her uncle in exchange for her life. She now has to use her cunning to avoid her duplicitous stepmother and return Frank to the torment of the puzzle box.

  In this, his stunning debut as a director, Clive Barker brought to the silver screen one of his darkest creations, mischievously toying with the more dubious delights of sex and death. In the UK, his film attracted an “X” certificate; the BBFC were appreciably perturbed by this cruel flirtation with sadomasochism. The black leather and fetish wear of the Cenobites was certainly not the customary fare of the average British cinema, even though the more astute would have discerned Barker was narrating a very subtle tale of romance, albeit diabolically macabre. The script was based on his short story The Hellbound Heart, an account inspired by a meeting with the English industrial band Coil, who he later hoped would write the score for his film. Among band member Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson’s collection of pornography were a number of masochistic gay magazines; the images provided the glimmer of an idea for the torturous dominion of the Cenobites. Their vicious display was balanced by a warped surrealism that seeped through the atmosphere of this tale set in an English suburbia inhabited by so many Americans, each of whom, true to Barker’s original, revealed themselves as well-rounded characters able to hold the viewer’s attention. While nowhere near as gory as so many of its contemporaries, the scenes of Frank’s torment were excruciating and served as a reminder of the hedonist’s descent into a hell of his own making.

  The leather-clad Pinhead would continue to emerge from the sickening horror of the puzzle box, to become a lucrative horror icon and spawn seven sequels Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), Hellraiser: Deader (2005) and Hellraiser: Hellwood (2005) along with a series of comics published by Marvel’s Epic imprint and later Boom! Studios.

  ANAKED WOMAN LIES dead in a field. The camera follows the path of the impassive Henry (Michael Rooker), juxtaposed with images of other murder victims, their terrified screams reverberating to disturb the viewer and prepare them for the unhinged madness that is about to follow. Henry has trailed an unsuspecting woman, watching in the distance as she enters her home.

  By day, Henry works as a pest exterminator, sharing an apartment with Otis (Tom Towles) and his sister Becky (Tracy Arnold). Garbed in his work clothes he has little difficultly in entering the homes of his victims and is seen returning to the home of the woman he followed shortly before. Soon after, her dead body is revealed with an electric cable choking her throat; cigarette burns can be seen running down from her neck to her breasts. Otis reveals he met Henry while serving time in prison; although Henry never talks about it, he killed his mother. However, he eventually does open up to Becky about his mother and her cruelty, although his story is strangely confused. He recalls how she made him dress as a girl, and was then forced to watch her engage in sex with her seedy clientele. Unable to endure further humiliation he claims to have stabbed her and then insists he shot her. Henry’s grasp on reality is obviously not all that it should be.

  When the two men travel to a seamy part of town and pick up a couple of prostitutes, Henry turns on the women and strangles them before breaking their necks. Initially Otis appears shocked, but he too has killed in the past and the following night they murder a shady trader who deals in stolen electrical goods. Henry stabs him with a soldering iron and then smashes a television set over his head. Otis then takes great pleasure in plugging in the set and electrocuting him. They then help themselves to a video camera, which they use to record the rape and slaughter of an entire family. Later they are seen savouring their grisly activities in their apartment, just as the voyeuristic Mark Lewis had previously done in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), with the sickening Otis taking considerably greater delight in their escapades than his brooding partner.

  As the body count continues to rise, the police appear alarmingly ineffectual. Henry believes himself to be clever enough to evade capture as he continually alters his modus operandi and keeps on the move. The film takes a turn when Otis becomes his next victim. Henry walks in on him to find him attempting to strangle Becky, having already raped her. Otis’s death is typically brutal and soon after Henry is observed calmly dismembering his former accomplice in the bath, before disposing of his remains in a river. As the psychopath leaves town with Becky, she confesses her love. Henry dispassionately admits to feeling the same way, not that he has any understanding of human emotion – his mother saw to that many years ago. In the harrowing finale, he dumps a suitcase by the side of the road. The camera homes in towards the abandoned case, which is revealed stained in blood. The film ends as it began with the sounds of a desperate struggle and screaming as Henry now drives away to continue in his life of murderous crime.

  The inspiration for Henry came from the confessions of the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who admitted to more than 600 murders between 1975 and his arrest in 1983. An investigation undertaken by the Texas Attorney General’s office invalidated the vast majority of his claims, leading to Lucas being convicted of eleven murders. John McNaughton’s film based its premise on Lucas’s violent fantasies rather than the crimes for which he was actually found guilty. Lucas’s appalling childhood never gave him a chance. He murdered his abusive mother in 1960, a violent prostitute who frequently made him watch her while she had sex with clients, and for his matricide he served ten years in prison before eventually being paroled. Following his conviction, he was sentenced to death for the murder of an unidentified female victim known only as “Orange Socks”. In 1998 the Governor of Texas, George W. Bush, commuted the sentence to life in prison, three years prior to Lucas dying of heart failure.

  McNaughton’s disturbing film was shot on 16-mm film in less than a month with a budget that amounted to a meagre $111,000. He kept his costs to a minimum by employing family and friends, with Mary Demas excelling as she played three different murder victims. The diminutive budget afforded the film a bleakness that befitted its sordid nature, with the city of Chicago assuming a depressingly downtrodden guise. Only Gerald Kargl’s unrelenting portrayal of the Salzburg serial killer Werner Kniesek, in his controversial debut Angst (1983), has ever exceeded McNaughton’s psychotic depiction.

  The movie’s violent content coupled with the producers’ concerns over the quality of the final cut meant it would be another four years before McNaughton would see his film released devoid of a rating. Before the film was submitted for classification in the UK, thirty-eight seconds were removed, without his approval. The scene had depicted a half-naked woman sitting on the toilet with a broken bottle lodged in her mouth. The BBFC then insisted a further twenty-four seconds had to be cut from the family massacre, making specific reference to Otis groping the mother’s breasts before and after killing her. Only then was this film considered suitable for a cinematic release. Further cuts were ordered when it was later submitted during the 1990s, this time moderating the impact of the murder of the shady salesman and once again the distressing butchery of the family. It wasn’t until 2003 that an uncut version of the film was classified for British DVD release. Chuck Parrello was offered the chance to direct a sequel; Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2 was to continue the slaughter in 1996.

  AN OLD MAN (John Steadman) is observed readying himself to leave his home in the desert. As he loads his truck, he gazes out across the arid wasteland as if trying to trace an unseen presence. There is not a soul to be seen, so he continues in his preparations, only to be confronted by a ragged young girl (Janus Blythe). Unable to restrain his annoyance, he chastises her owing to the activities of her kinsfolk. The girl protests, claiming their ambush of a nearby airfield was simply to assuage their hunger. When she pleads with him to take her away, he refuses, knowing she would never survive in the world beyond the desert. A sound in the background interrupts their discourse, prompting the girl to take co
ver.

  Retired detective Big Bob Carter (Russ Grieve) and his family are holidaying in a trailer in the arid vastness of the same desert. When they the stop at an isolated gas station they are advised to keep to the highway. Bob, however, knows best and takes a short cut through a former nuclear test site. There is an air of inevitability leading to the seemingly accidental crash. The damage to the vehicle’s axle leaves the family stranded in this unforgiving wilderness. Bob and his son-in-law, Doug (Martin Speer), set out to find help completely unaware that they have been lured into a trap by an inbred cannibalistic family eager for human flesh. Wes Craven carefully builds the tension to fever pitch in the hours before nightfall; then the psychotic family begin to close in on their city-dwelling prey. The ensuing slaughter is brutal. If they are to survive, the remaining members of this family will have to match the depravity of their persecutors. As the closing frames fade to red, Doug is seen in close up, still stabbing and kicking the dead body of one of his cannibal assailants, a scene that was cut for its initial release in the UK.

  In 1977, Wes Craven revisited the theme of family vengeance, a premise he had used to deliver such a shocking impact five years before in Last House on the Left. Although he had resisted several offers to return to such a degree of violence, personal finances left him with no other option. The Hills Have Eyes is a gruesome exploitation film so typical of the period, yet Craven’s craft went that one step further in creating a cult classic unhinged by a rawness to its intensity and resultant harrowing brutality. His simple narrative drew upon the dubious tale from the sixteenth century of the incestuous Sawney Bean clan, who are alleged to have committed similar atrocities along the coastal pathways of Ballantrae, Ayrshire. He went on to evoke his interest in Greek mythology, attaching such names to the clan as Juno, Pluto, Mercury and Mars, and in a similar way to these epic tales revealed how good and evil could become obscured, with the good having to fall to the ways of evil if only to protect themselves from the encroaching malevolence. The grainy edit and claustrophobia that was evident, even in such an immense landscape, combined to augment the sense of dread, ensuring that this was a film which would live on with those exposed to its savagery.