The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  YOUNG THERESA (CRISTINA Galbó) arrives at a school run by Madame Forneau (Lilli Palmer) located somewhere in a remote region of southern France. The Madame, she will soon learn, is a strict disciplinarian and although Theresa tries to befriend her adolescent son (John Moulder-Brown), he displays some rather unsettling voyeuristic tendencies. She should be sure to tread very carefully because his domineering mother will not have him mixing with these dubious young women. He spends his days strolling around the perimeter of the school and traversing its labyrinthine passageways waiting for a girl “just like his mother”. The girls who have been sent to the school have somewhat chequered pasts, being considered wayward, and there are suggestions of heated lesbianism. While under the Madame’s watchful eye, their various transgressions are meted out by an agonizing series of punishments, each of which are captured before the camera’s lens. For much of the early part of the film, the pacing appears a little slow, but becomes charged when the girls seemingly begin to escape the school by night. However, murder is afoot in this oppressed manse, and as the girls sleep a silent assassin treads the corridors with slaughter in mind. As the suspense mounts, one of the girls is tracked to a greenhouse in a slow-motion killing that culminates in a climactic finale in the attic.

  Uruguayan Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s directorial film debut came with La Residencia, which outside Spanish-speaking countries was known as The House that Screamed or The Boarding School. Throughout the early sequences of his film, he was steadfast in observing the development of each character with a view to garnering empathy for every one of these ill-fated young girls. He drew upon the Gothic styling of Mario Bava’s past masterpieces and then in his atmospheric moulding of both archetypal and modern terror was to provide the inspiration for Dario Argento when he later conceived his tour de force, Suspiria (1977). Juan Piquer Simon would also look to this almost forgotten film when he commenced shooting his gory but much maligned slasher of 1982, Pieces. There was a subtlety observed in time-served television director Serrador’s menace that was enhanced by cinematographer Manuel Berenguer’s stealthy camera work. He glided along the corridors and on through the attic spaces to make the audience believe the killer was poised to spring from the shadows at any given moment. While the murder scenes were suitably stylish they couldn’t be described as gory; Serrador instead preferred to augment the tension in the magnificence of this Gothic setting. His film was a welcome departure from the Euro-sleaze of the period, tempting with eroticism rather than the visual tease of his European contemporaries. He would take another break from his work in television to direct the cult favourite Quién Puede Matar a un Niño (1976) also referred to as Who Can Kill a Child?, Death is Child’s Play and Island of the Damned, where possessed children were murdering their elders.

  AFTER WINNING A beauty contest, Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her friends, Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Barry William Cox (Ryan Phillippe) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.), combine their graduation celebration with the fourth of July festivities. In the closeted world of this quiet seaside town, the four friends head off to a party and then as night falls make their way to the beach. Barry, who has had far too much to drink, lets Ray drive his car home, but as they take a bend on a cliff-side road, they knock down and seemingly kill a man walking by the roadside. While they try to work out what to do with the corpse, Julie’s friend Max Neurick (Johnny Galecki) arrives, but they manage to convince him that everything is fine so he carries on his way. However, when the four friends try to dump the body, it returns to consciousness and lunges at Helen. They finish him off and in the hope of safeguarding their futures agree never again to mention the events of this night. A year later, Julie receives a note in the post, containing the words “I know what you did last summer”. All is no longer well with the former friends and they each in turn receive a reminder of what occurred that night twelve months before. They now know their precious futures are in jeopardy and someone saw what happened that night; they set out to trace their persecutor, with characteristically alarming consequences.

  Following his success in writing Wes Craven’s cleverly referenced Scream (1996), Kevin Williamson returned with a story loosely based on Lois Duncan’s book, I Know What You Did Last Summer. While time-served Lois’s story was essentially a morality tale, Williamson chose the slasher root and together with director Jim Gillespie was gifted a huge budget to make this film just that little bit special. With its all-star teen cast, this feature offered much for a new generation of slasher fans, but for veterans offered little that could be considered new. British director Gillespie, on his first Hollywood outing, produced a rather beautiful looking movie that even in the politically correct world of the 1990s wasn’t afraid to savour a series of fairly gruesome scenes. Although the enthusiasts who had taken so much pleasure in the mass slaughter of the previous decade denigrated Gillespie’s film, trashing it as an entertaining mystery, along with Scream it had a key role in returning the teen slasher to movie theatres and generated enough excitement to command a sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998).

  A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN is powerless to prevent her abduction at the merciless hands of a psychotic serial killer. He isn’t looking for ransom; his needs are purely sadistic as he inflicts a series of agonies on his victim, drawing out the torment as he has done so many times before. In a succession of excruciating shots, he wreaks numerous blows to her head with a hammer and then dismembers her lifeless body. Kyung-chul’s (Min-sik Choi) victim was the fiancée of Kim So-Hyun (Byung-hun Lee), an undercover operative with an assassin’s instincts; she was also the daughter of the former Chief of Police. The despairing Kim So-Hyun, a man of few words, embarks on the hunt that will lead him to his fiancée’s killer and ultimately see him become a vengeful psychopath. It doesn’t take long before he locates two potential suspects; repeated beatings, however, reveal they had no involvement in his fiancée’s murder. His search eventually reveals the true culprit, the psychotic Kyung-chul. Rather than putting an end to Kyung’s worthless life, Kim beats him to a pulp and then gives him the chance to escape. Kim takes a perverse delight in the knowledge he can do this time and time again, for he has forced the killer to swallow a transmitter. He will be able to trace Kyung’s every move and now has the opportunity to exact his cruel revenge. The killer will come to know the pain suffered by his victims as Kim dedicates his every waking moment to the miscreant’s unending torture, each time allowing his quarry to survive and lick his bloodied wounds, only to repeat the vicious process all over again. Battered and bruised, Kyung’s tenuous grip on reality refuses to simply lie down and die; very soon, he turns the tables and strikes back setting the scene for a brutal finale.

  The violent confrontation between Kyung-chul and Kim So-Hyun that would have ordinarily climaxed such a film came unusually early in this tale of bloody retribution. Hoonjung Park’s story, however, was more concerned with the dehumanizing nature of revenge and in a noiresque narration revealed the depths to which an honourable man would stoop in the grim hope of relieving his utter desolation. Director Jee-woon Kim, who had already made his mark internationally with the acclaimed A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) and A Bitter Sweet Life (2005), deliberately used the violence in this ferocious revenge thriller to make his audience experience the most profound discomfort. There was nothing in the slightest way gratifying about this merciless portrayal. Dismemberment, decapitation, jaw breaking, screwdriver attacks, an icepick to the cheek, the severing of an Achilles tendon and a beating to the head with a pipe were just some of the brutal episodes endured by the cast. However, even amidst this unrelenting violence there was a beauty observed in Mogae Lee’s cinematography, which became almost simplistic during the gritty fight scenes. Such aesthetic considerations were not to save Kim’s film from the scrutiny of the Korea Media Rating Board, which demanded he edit his feature prior to it being approved for its release to cinema, objecting to the violent content as an offence to human dig
nity. Kim acquiesced for if he had failed to follow their directives his film would have been given a restricted rating, thus forbidding it to be seen in theatres or released on DVD, making it a prospective entry to the less lucrative world of underground cinema.

  JENNIFER HILLS (CAMILLE Keaton) drives from her home in New York City to the upstate countryside to write the manuscript for her first novel. She soon settles in the idyllic lakeside cabin that she has rented to pursue her writing. Her arrival in town unfortunately attracts the wrong kind of attention, in the guise of Johnny (Eron Tabor), the local garage owner, and his two friends Stanley (Anthony Nichols) and Andy (Gunter Kleemann). Stanley and Andy trace Jennifer’s cabin and begin to cruise by in their speedboat; at night they prowl unseen, taking in as much of the house as they can. A few days later as Jennifer relaxes on the lake, they surprise her in their speedboat and tow her to shore. The scenes that follow detail Jennifer’s graphic rape at the hands of the contemptible trio and Matthew the mentally impaired grocery boy. The dialogue in this prolonged unpleasant sequence, lasting almost half an hour, is almost non-existent. The gang instruct Matthew to complete their dirty work and kill Jennifer, but he is unable to bring himself to do it. He later lies, claiming to have stabbed Jennifer to death.

  In the ensuing weeks, Jennifer’s mental state becomes impaired as she goes over the events of that terrible day. As she stands in church, she begs forgiveness before vowing to kill the lowlifes who have caused her this pain. She is no longer the happy-go-lucky girl who drove from New York City; the scars this gang of degenerates have inflicted run deep and in her inevitable psychosis she begins to plan her bloody revenge. Turning the tables, she now stalks her violators. The halfwit Matthew is enticed into sex beneath a tree; he fails to see the noose until it is too late. In the soothing comfort of a hot bath, Jennifer then removes the aroused Johnny’s genitalia and savours the moments as he bleeds to death. When Stanley and Andy learn that Johnny has gone missing they take their speedboat to Jennifer’s cabin, worrying something might have happened to their worthless cohort. Axe in hand, Andy leaves the boat, but Jennifer’s guile relieves him of it and she buries it squarely into his back while the drowning Stanley is soon after disembowelled by the boat’s propellers. As Andy and Stanley’s bodies descend into the lake, the avenged Jennifer is observed with a twisted smile as she speeds away in the boat.

  Day of the Woman, now known by its re-release title, I Spit on Your Grave, has also gone by the names I Hate Your Guts and The Rape and Revenge of Jennifer Hills. It remains one of the most controversial films of the twentieth century, inspiring Arthur Jeffreys’ Demented (1980), before attracting an unofficial restyling in 1985 as Naked Vengeance, and then being subject to a remake in 2010. When it was first released in 1978, as Day of the Woman, such was the level of violence it had to be considerably toned down to comply with the stipulations made by the Motion Picture Association of America. The film’s explicit content forced Zarchi to undertake his own distribution, releasing it on limited runs to rural drive-in theatres. Sadly, for all of his efforts he struggled to make it break even. In 1980 the Jerry Gross Organization, a company associated with several grindhouse movies, including Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), agreed to give the film a wider release. They reinstated many of the cuts and insisted the feature carry a new title, one that matched the notoriety of its unsavoury content, I Spit on Your Grave. The poster accompanying the movie’s release made Zarchi’s efforts resemble one of the countless exploitation features of the period; it would go on to acquire a similar notoriety.

  On its new release, the critics condemned the film for its brutal portrayal and outrageous depiction of gang rape. Across the globe, the censors would ban this repackaged feature from their cinemas, uncomfortable with its seeming glorification of violence against women. However, it eventually did find its way into many of these countries, when it was cut to video. This gained Zarchi’s film a new audience, which reappraised his film, considering it an indictment of male sexuality, albeit rather heavily handled. It soon became known that Zarchi’s need to make this film had come about when he came to the aid of a woman who had been raped in New York. He saw firsthand the trauma that came with such an abhorrent crime and was then horrified by the incompetence of the police authorities. It was never his intention to make an entertaining distraction; indeed the nihilism exhibited in this movie is as far removed from any notion of entertainment as could be imagined. His mistake, however, was to hand it to a company who had made their name in exploitative cinema.

  Although the Canadian government initially prohibited showings of Zarchi’s film, in the 1990s they allowed each of the provinces to determine whether to permit showings. In the United Kingdom, the film was cited as a video nasty. It remained on the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list of banned films until 2001, when provision was made for a heavily censored DVD release, with almost three minutes of the rape scene thankfully consigned to the cutting room floor.

  I CHI THE KILLER, which translates as Killer No. 1 from the original Japanese, became a manga comic book phenomenon soon after its release in 1999, written by the man behind the camera, Hideo Yamamoto. The innovative Takashi Miike boosted its cult status taking this deviant yakuzza war story to considerably greater extremes. While not conceived as a horror movie, given its partiality for gore, it would be impossible to deny it a place in any celebration of the splatter movie.

  Set in the disreputable Shinjuku gangland district of Tokyo, the leader of the Anjo gang has seemingly gone missing, taking with him a substantial amount of the gang’s money. His number one hit man and sadistic partner, the facially disfigured blonde Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), is anxious to locate his whereabouts. Suspecting Suzuki, another hit man, knows more about the boss’s fate, Kakihara systematically tortures him in the hope of gaining information. He suspends Suzuki from a ceiling, using metal hooks to pierce the man’s back, and then thrusts metal yakitori skewers through his body. Still unable to get Suzuki to talk, his predilection for the sadistic commands he pours boiling oil over his victim. Suzuki it turns out is innocent. Kakihara has gone too far, so much so he is subsequently dismissed from the gang. His severing of the end of his tongue as he departs in an almost masochistic peace offering confirms he is anything but a run-of-the-mill street thug.

  Intimating she has clues as to the killer’s identity, nightclub hostess Karen (Alien Sun) tells Kakihara where he might be found. However, the pair is oblivious to the fact that a duplicitous gang informer, Jijii (the old man), is the mind behind Anjo’s disappearance and has already gathered his own band of assassins, among them the deranged Ichi. The profoundly psychotic Ichi, a man who murdered his own parents, is paradoxically also a quivering wreck. In a further twist to the tale, the cunning Jijii has placed Ichi in a hypnotic state, in which he has been convinced he was the victim of bullying as a child and failed to prevent the rape of a girl who saved him from harm. He now believes he must punish anyone he considers a bully and, to add to his volatility, sexual arousal is invariably a precipitant to bloody murder.

  Having assumed control of Anjo’s gang, Kakihara searches the streets with a handful of assassins desperate to find his boss. It is not long before word of the enigmatic Ichi and his death-dealing martial arts skills comes to his ear; there is also mention of a set of death-dealing blades concealed in the lining of his boots. While Kakihara goes to great lengths to hunt down Ichi and the double-dealing Jijii, his nemesis is relentless in his slaughter of this Yakuza. When he learns that Anjo was killed by Ichi, Kakihara’s lust for the perverse intensifies; he now begins to nurture a homoerotic attraction for his adversary in a theme reminiscent of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987). Could this disturbed assassin finally satiate his masochistic craving to bathe in the most exquisite pain imaginable? The answer is delivered during the finale on the rooftops of Shinjuku. In this action-packed clash, Kakihara engages his metal skewers, driving them into Ichi’s ears to drown his cries, before seeing the psychotic assas
sin slice the head from one of the surviving gang members. As the film climaxes Ichi impels one of his razor-bladed boots firmly into the middle of Kakihari’s head. Kakihara falls to his death, basking in the perversity of this the greatest feeling in his entire misbegotten life. However, when Jijii stands over his body, there is no wound to his head; Ichi’s assault had been a hallucination. Kakihara had jumped to his death while Ichi fell to his knees in tears.