The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  When the slaughter begins, it is graphic to say the least, which is why this low-budget cult movie has attracted so much controversy. For the gore-monger it is the rarest of treats, with a misogynistic pickaxe point lunged at a woman’s breast and resultant copious flow of blood, along with later shots of a man stabbed up beneath his chin with the pickaxe which then pops out of his eyeball before it projects its socket. Among the many well-handled point-of-view shots, a scalding scene is detailed depicting a face starting to blister while submersed in a pot, in addition to a shocking nail gun to the head. Let’s not forget the imaginative impalement scenes using a pointed shower pipe driven through the back of a girl’s head and the double death drill bit.

  The unmasking of the killer at the finale by the heroine Sarah reveals one of the characters central to the tale: Axel is the deranged killer. A flashback reveals that all those years ago he witnessed Harry Warden’s murder of his father, who was one of the offending foremen. When the ceiling collapses, Axel is buried alive. In the restored version, he is shown slicing off his own arm to make his escape before running deeper into the mine calling out to Harry Warden, and warning that he’ll be back. As the screen turns to darkness, the audience can hear the sound of Harry Warden’s insane laughter, which abruptly comes to an end as the credits begin to roll.

  My Bloody Valentine remains one of the most underrated slasher pictures of the period, although it retains an element of notoriety due to the nine minutes of cuts demanded by the MPAA owing to its violence and gore. This severe editing would inevitably detract from the film’s impact, because it was a simple story, which relied heavily on the edits that had been made to its violent excess. There was absolutely nothing unusual about bloodthirsty cinema at this time, but it has been suggested that Paramount Pictures were insistent the footage they deemed to be more extreme should be removed due to the backlash they had already endured with Friday the 13th. Director George Mihalka alluded to another reason for the storm that raged over movie violence in general: the murder of John Lennon in December 1980. Rumours were rife that the film had been later issued uncut as a video to the Japanese market. However, Mihalka has always firmly refuted such claims. When Lionsgate secured DVD rights to the film they restored about three and half minutes on its release in early 2009.

  WHEN TERRY LOFTON and Bill Leslie joined forces to create The Nail Gun Massacre, the slasher movie had almost had its day with the sun setting on what had been a veritable golden age of hack and slash. There was, however, an ever-growing video market upon which they could pin their hopes. In the opening shots of their film, whose title is highly evocative of Tobe Hooper’s chainsaw-wielding terror, a girl is raped and many years later a killer garbed in a black motorbike helmet and camouflage gear stalks a small town armed with a nail gun and makes his getaways in a gold-coloured hearse. When he speaks his voice sounds robotic and he is prone to the nuances of a Fred Kreuger-styled wit as he readily terminates his victims. As the body count grows (it will reach fifteen before the end of the film), a dismayed Sheriff, Thomas (Ron Queen), sets out to track down the elusive killer and enlists the assistance of his friend Doc James (Rocky Patterson). They learn that those who have suffered at the hands of this nail gun assassin, among whom are a man who takes a nail to the crotch and a couple of girls who have their breasts impaled, have a connection with a reported rape case of many years past. As the sheriff and the doctor try to keep his potential victims safe from harm, they set themselves up for a surprise when the identity of the killer is revealed just before he literally walks off into the sunset.

  Lofton had worked for Warner Brothers on the Dukes of Hazzard television show, and while he was eager to make a film, he had precious little in the way of movie-making experience. Bill Leslie already had a production company, so the two got together to work on Lofton’s eighty-page script, soon to be reduced to twenty-five. The actors were only given the revised script on the day of the shoot, which meant there was a considerable amount of improvisation. This was seat-of-the-pants low-budget filmmaking with a few porn scenes thrown in for good measure and the killer’s two stunt doubles were noticeably of entirely different builds. To keep the expenses down, Lofton brought his grandmother in to play the old dear in the shop and played the part of a truck driver himself. However, he did take his time in hiring the topless girl from a number of gentlemen’s clubs in the area. This is far from being a classic of B-cinema, but its haphazard filming continues to attract new viewers.

  MARTIN (NIKOLAJ COSTER-Waldau) couldn’t have chosen a worse time to take on the position as a night watchman in the city mortuary, taking on the role to help pay his way through law school. Soon after he begins his new job, the scalped victim of a serial killer is brought in. This will be the first of many young prostitutes under Martin’s watch. As the list of victims begins to grow, he continues to endure a troublesome relationship with his girlfriend (Sofie Gråbøl), mostly down to his own shortcomings, and plays a dangerous game of chance with his friend (Kim Bodnia). Alone in the mortuary, the atmosphere becomes more intense as Martin stares at his reflection in a darkened window and he prepares himself to enter the poorly lit room full of corpses and confront a body that keeps moving around. An unusual relationship begins to develop between Martin and the detective investigating these hideous crimes, Peter Wörmer (Ulf Pilgaard), but when one of the victims in the morgue is molested, Martin immediately falls under suspicion. This leads to a shocking twist just before Nightwatch meets with its deathly finale.

  Humorist, television writer and stage director, Ole Bornedal made quite an impact with his stylish thriller Nattevagten, which was later released in the UK as Nightwatch. This was an astonishing debut, which was to suggest comparisons with the celebrated work of Alfred Hitchcock. In keeping with one of the grand masters of twentieth-century cinema, Bornedal meticulously elaborated his intricate plot and made use of virtually every single element referenced in the film’s opening scenes before expanding upon them and then introducing more than an occasional red herring. In a series of spine-tingling sequences, he heightened the air of suspense and introduced a humour of the darkest kind with cruel intimations of necrophilia. He had at his behest an excellent cast, who may not have been known outside their native Denmark but were revealed as an amiable well-defined bunch, each with their own particular eccentricities of character. Bonedal didn’t hurl bucket loads of guts onto his set, but his film’s few bloodthirsty moments were quite disturbing and left an impression on the audience. Three years later, he would direct an inferior American remake starring Ewan McGregor before returning to Scandinavian filmmaking, where his unique talent appears most appreciated.

  NEKROMANTIK OPENS WITH a close-up of a woman urinating. Minutes later, the same woman and her husband plough headlong into a fatal crash. The next day the street-cleaning team, among them the surreally deranged Robert Schmadtke, arrive on the scene to wash away their remains. When he arrives home his girlfriend, Betty, is relaxing in the bath, immersed in blood-stained water. As she bathes, Robert amuses himself with his collection of preserved human body parts and daydreams of a rabbit’s slaughter, which will become significant in the closing moments of what is an illusory finale.

  Elsewhere in another accident, a man is killed by his neighbour, who then seeks to dispose of the evidence. When his body is later uncovered, it is in a terrible state of decay. The same gang of street cleaners are once again summoned, and later on as the crew pack up for the day Robert absconds with the corpse. On his return home, he presents Betty with a hideous homecoming gift, which throws her into absolute delight. The corpse’s woeful decomposition is just perfect for this particular couple, who can now take pleasure in their bizarre fantasies and savour the succulence of an eyeball as it reels in its socket. In their sexually charged elation, they hack off a chair leg and Betty sinks it with such gusto into the cadaver’s crotch. Rolling a condom over the chair leg, she eases herself onto the corpse’s magnificent phallus, and then slowly kisses
its emaciated face with Robert similarly wrapped in the perverse ecstasy of the moment.

  As Betty luxuriates in the arms of her newfound lover, their world of necrophilic nirvana is brought to an unceremonious end when Robert is sacked from his job. The despondent necrophile now has to return home to tell his lover of this appalling state of affairs. Betty is a woman scorned and in her rage takes off with the randy corpse. Alone in the flat Robert takes his frustration out on the cat and is later seen bathing in blood, as a battered furry carcass hangs from the wall. Following an altercation at the cinema, our lovelorn hero attempts to commit suicide with a lethal cocktail of whiskey and pills. Unconscious, he dreams of rebirth from within a plastic bag, and a life as a corpse in which a girl presents him with a severed head.

  Aroused by the intensity of his hallucinations, he engages a prostitute, who he escorts to the cemetery. Try as he might, he cannot become sexually aroused, and in the ensuing struggle throttles the life out of her. As the girl lies dead at a graveside, he mounts her and enjoys the sexual gratification he so truly desired. He awakens to find her body at his side and an ageing gravedigger standing over them. Snatching his shovel, he decapitates the old-timer, leaving only his jaw hanging onto his crumpling torso. The scene shifts to reveal the screaming Robert sprinting along the coast, chasing all the way to the finale. Alone in his apartment, he craves that one last thrill and grabbing hold of a knife he thrusts it ever deeper into his bowels, thus intensifying the thrill of his ejaculatory death throes. As he departs this world, he is once again visited by the vision of the slaughter of the rabbit, now shown in reverse. Even in death, Robert will not find peace, for there are plans afoot for his corpse. A shovel is seen removing the soil from his grave, carried by a person wearing lady’s slippers.

  Jörg Buttgereit’s noiresque blend of love, despair and necrophilia came only twelve months after Johan Vandewoestijne’s underground Lucker the Necrophagous. In a similar way to its Belgian predecessor, its flagrant violation of one of the age-old taboos made it the source of much discord. Although banned in a number of countries, its outlandish dalliance between art house and gore would acquire a dedicated following which later inspired Buttgereit’s documentary Corpse Fucking Art and then led to a sequel with Nekromantik 2: The Return of the Loving Death in 1991.

  The grainy, low-budget tone shot on 8-mm film stock disguised many of the shortcomings with the corpse scenes but combined with a minimalist score to exacerbate the shock content of what was always going to be an underground film. There is a depraved sickness to the proceedings, but there are those who believe that this black comedy carries serious social commentary on the denaturalization and dehumanization of contemporary society. Society is presented as something that is slowly destroying Robert’s soul, impelling him to take refuge in this bleak world of perversion as a means of controlling at least part of his life. Sadly in death, Robert finally lost control, but established Buttgereit as a rising force in the world of European horror.

  AS THE CLOCK counts down, Diane Sullivan (Roz Kelly), or Blaze as she likes to be known, hosts a late hour New Wave New Year’s television show. The show is in full swing when Diane takes a phone call from a man calling himself Evil, who warns that as the clock strikes midnight over the four time zones he will kill a “Naughty Girl” and Blaze will be the last to die. The team in the studio begin to take precautions, but four hours away on the other side of America, a nurse has already been brutally murdered. In the build up to each of his kills, he appears calm but there is a strange look in his eyes, which turns to vicious malevolence as he trails his prey. While the killer’s identity is always known, the story throws in enough red herrings to mislead the audience into believing Blaze’s unstable son could be the killer, aggrieved by his mother’s indifferent neglect. As Emmett Alston’s second film rolled out to an uninspiring climax, Evil took on a gang of bikers. This fracas, however, wouldn’t be Blaze’s saviour, but would at last disclose the motivation behind this time-driven murderous spree.

  New Year’s Evil was but one of many films of that year hoping to feed on the success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), among them the holiday terrors Christmas Evil and Terror Train along with the frenzied Don’t Go in the House, Prom Night and Silent Scream. These were early days for the emerging slasher craze and the formula that would very soon take shape was still undergoing a process of fine-tuning, which in this instance meant there was a noticeable lack of gore and nudity. However, for all of its failings, Alston’s low-budget film certainly entertained as it juxtaposed an eighties rock score with a series of contrived killings, played out to the darkest of unintentional comedy.

  WHILE ON AN afternoon walk near the Brooklyn Bridge, an elderly man throws a piece of wood for his dog, who returns to his master with a decaying human hand. Lieutenant Fred Williams (Jack Hedley) learns the hand belonged to a call girl by the name of Ann-Lynne, who he discerns had arranged to meet a man whose telephone voice was alleged to have sounded like a cartoon duck, possibly a sly reference to Fulci’s earlier giallo, Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972).

  Elsewhere in the city, a young woman (Cinzia De Ponti) heads on her bicycle to the Staten Island Ferry. Before she arrives at the ferry, she gets into an argument with a hot-headed motorist after accidentally scratching his car. When the ferry sets sail, she descends to the car deck to exact her petty revenge but her actions are brought to a halt when, true to the giallo, an unseen figure appears on the scene. He speaks with the same bizarre Donald Duck-styled voice mentioned earlier in the story and then without a word of warning drives a switchblade into her stomach, before graphically disembowelling her. Lt. Williams soon after determines the modus operandi is very similar to that of the killing of Ann-Lynne. He now knows he has a serial killer on his hands.

  The scene changes to observe the attractive Jane Lodge (Alexandra Delli Colli) savouring the sleaze of a live sex show, while taping the moans of the two writhing performers. The recording will be later used to stimulate her husband, Dr Lodge (Laurence Welles). As she eases herself into her seat, she is watched by a disconcerting individual who is clearly identified by a missing pair of fingers on his right hand. Once the show is over, the performing girl (Zora Kerova) exits to the darkness of her dressing room. Back stage she hears a noise, but before she is able to call for help she is attacked by a shadowed knifeman, who disembowels her by forcing a broken bottle into her vagina and on into her stomach. At the home of Kitty (Daniela Doria), a prostitute of Lt. Williams’ acquaint, the detective receives a threatening phone call from the duck-voiced killer alluding to the murder in the sex club. It may be late but the killer still hasn’t finished his work; he trails a young woman through the subway after she has been menaced by the creepy fellow seen in the sex show. Although he stabs her in the leg and cuts into her hands, she manages to survive the ordeal. As she comes round the next morning in a hospital bed, her waking dreams are of being slashed by a handsome young man who looks very much like her physicist boyfriend Peter Bunch (Andrew Painter). The man the detective is now looking for has a mutilated right hand, but the same individual has just taken the sex-crazed Jane to a sleazy hotel room for a night of prolonged bondage sex.

  For thirty years The New York Ripper, which has also gone by the names Lo Squartatore di New York, Psycho Ripper and The Ripper, has continued to divide the followers of Lucio Fulci and horror movies alike. It is here, more than anywhere in his entire catalogue of films, he portrayed the human condition at its lowest. This was a downtrodden New York, emphasized by the camera work’s tawdry use of colour and grimy locales. Many of the audience had experienced these streets in The Driller Killer (1979) and Maniac (1980); they were the breeding ground for the extremes of irrational behaviour, this time directed specifically towards the female cast. The graphic excess would have it labelled as misogynist and it would be subsequently banned in Australia, Germany and Norway. In the UK, it was never registered as a video nasty, solely because the BBFC had the reels to t
his film escorted from these shores under the guard of Her Majesty’s Constabulary. The result of course would make this a highly desirable acquisition. For those who did manage to lay their hands on these forbidden contents, they would discover a level of violence comparable to that of the obscure Giallo a Venezia (1979), one of Mario Landi’s later films, William Lustig’s controversial Maniac and Dario Argento’s similarly divisive entry for that year, Tenebre.

  The grindhouse years had always threatened such a feature and Fulci was the man who finally did it. The violence inflicted on the women in this film was imbued with a realism that was to fuel the debate as to whether its existence was nothing more than a showcase of embittered misogyny. The camera’s lens was irrefutably voyeuristic as it captured every minute detail of the victims’ agonizing torment, with each murder becoming increasingly brutal, leaving the most explicit until the last. In the sadistic finale, the naked Kitty was tied and tortured by the killer, as he expertly engaged a razor blade to slice her body open, seemingly relishing her ear-piercing screams. A series of lengthy close-ups would dwell on the killer as he glided the blade over her breasts before dissecting her nipples, then, in a way that Fulci had mastered, his killer sliced into her eyeballs. The killer’s motive would be as bizarre as his blood lust, leaving many of Fulci’s fans to believe that this really was a film of misogynistic excess rather than the well-conceived giallo upon which this formidable director had previously built his reputation.