The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  AS MARK LEWIS (Carl Boehm) attempts to solicit a prostitute, she has no knowledge that he is cunningly filming her using a camera concealed within his coat. The images on screen are detailed from the camera’s perspective, a technique pioneered by the cinema of the early 1930s. With the subject captured in such close proximity an unsettling degree of tension is created, which, to Powell’s credit, mounts as she escorts Lewis to her home. Even the voyeur of the day would have been shocked by the images of fear-stricken contortions wracking the face of a girl knowing she is about to die. Alone he later savours the film, surrounding himself with the sights and sounds of terror, his fresh-faced shyness concealing the monster within.

  The reclusive murderer works with a film crew, with ambitions of making his own films. When he is not at the studio, he is discreetly snapping candid photographs of glamour models, which he trades to a local pornographer. His double life continues at home, where acting as the landlord he rents out part of what once was his father’s house, while posing as a tenant. Although withdrawn, he cannot help but be fascinated by the engaging Helen (Anna Massey). He eventually confides in her, describing how his father used him as a psychological guinea pig, wilfully experimenting on the stimuli and effects of fear. Little does she realize Mark is tormented by his father’s experimentation, obsessed with the behavioural aspects of fear, specifically the visible impression on the human face.

  His sordid compulsion remains unabated and a murderous display ensues, this time at the studio. When the body is discovered, the police are quick to link the two killings, each victim having died with a look of stark terror etched into their faces. Mark soon falls under suspicion. Tailed by the police he is traced to the building where he takes photographs of a pin-up model, which ends in her death before his lethal tripod. Two versions of this scene were shot, one of which is credited as being the very first female nude scene in a major British motion feature. The model becomes yet another victim of Mark’s macabre fixation.

  With the police in hot pursuit, Mark discovers Helen watching one of his self-styled documentaries. He rants about his quest to make movies encapsulating the fear in his victims by using a mirror on his camera. Facing the distinct possibility of a life behind bars, Mark brings his life’s work to an appropriate conclusion, killing himself as he did the other girls, impaled by a knife attached to one of the camera’s tripod legs. His camera still runs, providing a fitting finale for this gruesome documentary. While there are those who once considered this a vile piece of voyeurism, which unfortunately led to his demise as an eminent director, Powell’s psychological masterpiece has since acquired a huge following. Finally recognized for its true worth, it is lauded as being very much ahead of its time. The camera work is assured throughout, guiding the audience through these sleazy scenes, warranting their eyes never leave the screen. He later noted in his autobiography, “I make a film that nobody wants to see and then, thirty years later, everybody has either seen it or wants to see it.” With attitudes becoming more permissive during the 1970s, the critics’ view of his film went through a radical transformation. It also attracted the attention of Martin Scorsese, who was very appreciative of its relevance. When it was released on US television it was given the less emotive title of Face of Fear.

  The sympathetic portrayal would be one of many comparisons drawn with fellow British director, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, released only a few months later. It would also have an unprecedented effect on some of the more vivid slasher films that terrorized cinemas towards the end of the 1970s. As with the many deranged killers plying their ruthless trade in these films, Powell’s lead was twisted by a murderous voyeuristic mania. The point-of-view technique used to such lurid effect in Peeping Tom would eventually be popularized by some the more influential slasher movies, principally Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978), and continued with Man Bites Dog (1992), The Last Horror Movie (2003) and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) along with The Blair Witch Project (1999).

  WHILE THERE ARE those who think Andrey Iskanov created the most graphically violent film ever to see the light of day, he remains resolute in his belief Philosophy of a Knife should not be looked upon as a horror movie, and maintains his aversion for the violence seen everyday across the globe. In four hours, much of it shot in black and white, narrated in two, two-hour episodes, he documents the disturbing history of a research laboratory created by the military police of the Imperial Japanese Army based in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, in what was Japanese-occupied China between 1937 and 1945. The facility was developed to research epidemic prevention and weapons of mass destruction. Within the complex, a unit of the chemical and biological warfare research team ascended to notoriety, to become known as the iniquitous Unit 731. The members of this unit conducted torturous and deathly experiments on Soviet, Chinese and, towards the end of the war, American prisoners. They were later prosecuted by the Soviet authorities and convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

  In this avant-garde terror, Iskanov leaves nothing to the imagination in a four-hour feature that depicts humanity at its most despicable. Such is the sensitivity of this dark moment in history the director was investigated by the Russian Federal Security Service. They carried out a comprehensive search of his residence, removed documents and film footage to determine just how he had learned about biological weaponry, and at the same time identify his source of information. Soon after his arrest, he was imprisoned in a military base. Here he was locked in a cell without a toilet and was forced to endure long periods of intensive interrogation, where he divulged much of his research material had gone back to the United States. We are left to wonder if the Russian authorities were concerned he knew a little too much, but was saved when he claimed his studies went only as far as 1956. Both those with a historical perspective and the gore mongers will find themselves both fascinated and repulsed by this film, which contains an estimated thirty minutes of contemplative snowfall. This seeming tranquillity, however, is overwhelmed by the horrific onslaught as vivisections and dissections are carried out without anaesthetic, while this butchery carries on a soldier is skinned alive, a foetus torn from its mother’s womb, a face burned by X-rays, and one unfortunate has her teeth removed in an agonizing mockery of dentistry. This film’s catalogue of atrocities appears to go on and on without end. Such has been the impact of his abominable epic, Iskanov has been the recipient of the highest praise and the most severe criticism for creating a film that is even more explicit than Tun Fei Mou’s controversial Men Behind the Sun (1988), which had previously recalled this moment from the past that for many should remain dead and buried.

  WAY BACK IN the 1940s a young boy is caught by his mother as he assembles a puzzle of a naked woman. When she takes his puzzle away, he loses his temper and drives an axe into her head. The film moves forward forty years to a university campus in Boston where a crazy has taken to chain-sawing the body parts of the young female students, before stealing away with certain pieces of their anatomy as he leaves the bloody entrails for the scrutiny of the authorities. Lt. Bracken (Christopher George) has been assigned to the case; he has arranged with the Dean for agent Mary Riggs (Lynda Day George) to work under cover as a tennis coach. Together with a young student, Kendall (Ian Sera), they try to track down the killer, whose audacity extends to stalking a half-naked student into a lift while trying to hide his over-sized chainsaw.

  Juan Piquer Simón was another Spanish master of low-budget exploitative cinema and true to the genre wasted little time in exposing his nubile young cast and throwing in some rather graphic violence and gore, too much of it to the sound of the disco beat! When a girl was stripped naked, you just knew she was lined up for the next kill as this psycho obsessed over their delightfully ripened body parts. There were plenty of suspects, including the creepy looking gardener, the Professor of Anatomy and even the Dean along with numerous red herrings, but Pieces has only ever been regarded as a piece of Euro trash produced to cash
in on the American slasher market. Its nonsensical script would never elevate it to being a true horror movie and even the excess of blood failed to convince its eager audience, but Simón’s direction did create a sense of sinister atmosphere and a mounting claustrophobic unease as the killer moved in for his prey. Thirty years later, these severed body parts still continue to raise a smile.

  FOR THE FIRST part of Paul Ziller’s film, a group of teenage pledges endure endless initiation rituals as they seek to enter a college fraternity during “Hell Week”, one of them strictly against his mother’s advice. Amidst the scenes of semi-nakedness, there is a series of amusing episodes along with much talk about hazing and the meaning of the college fraternity. The comedic element should have come to a halt when Acid Sid climbed from the toilet to begin killing the cast, but his entrance understandably detracted from what was to follow. Twenty years before in 1968, a young hippie fraternity pledge was accidentally burned to death in a tub of acid. Now his unforgiving corpse returns to savour his revenge on “Hell Week”. His retribution begins when his spirit possesses one of the pledges, who appears to have killed one of the fraternity brothers. Minutes later Acid Sid explodes from the stomach of another pledge as the body count once again begins to rise.

  As a blizzard raged at Rutgers University, New Jersey, in the January of 1988, Paul Ziller with very little money attempted to direct a movie that was to take him away from his recent work in pornography, with Anthrax’s Joey Belladonna starring as the young Sidney “Acid Sid” Snyder. As with so many cinematic hopefuls, he chose to put together a slasher feature, a phenomenon that by then had run its course. The wind and driving snow were to make the shoot far more difficult than it should have been, but would add to the film’s impact, as the cast played out countless scenes in falling temperatures that later felt the wrath of the censors. By the end of the 1980s blood and guts were fine, as were bare breasts, but the two were never to be shown together in the same shot. Pledge Night would go on to acquire cult status as Paul Ziller’s career ascended to new heights, seeing him move forward to work in both film and television.

  FROM HIS CAR, Mark (Sam Neill) looks out at his home city, a place that we learn, through the imagery of the landscape, has come to trouble him. His wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) rushes to meet him, but this isn’t a joyous reunion. Mark has arrived home too early from an undisclosed trip abroad where cash has been exchanged with a covert government organization. At first, Anna’s behaviour appears strange and then Mark discovers that while he has been away his wife has become involved with another man and their son is being cared for by their friend Margie. At first, she will not reveal her lover’s identity, but as their incessant rowing escalates into violence in a restaurant, she discloses that for the past year a man named Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) has been her sinister paramour. When the two come face to face in another violent confrontation, Mark realises the two lovers have not seen one another for quite some time. As their marriage steadily deteriorates, the mental states of both Anna and Mark are affected. Anna sees herself as the maker of her own evil and is later seen embraced by the tentacles of a Lovecraftian entity. Mark in turn borders on possessive madness, which manifests itself in the vision of his son’s teacher, who is the image of his tormented wife. She embodies the innocent creature she once was. His wife, however, has another nasty surprise in store for her estranged husband as his world of clandestine espionage clashes head on with the horrors of their marital discord.

  While Possession contains a series of exceptional gory and violent episodes, in particular, Anna’s slicing of her own neck with an electric carving knife and her miscarriage in the underground station, the unsettling surrealism that haunts this film distances it from many accepted perceptions as to the elements that constitute a horror movie. Andrzej Zulawski’s film could be interpreted as a reaction to the frustration he endured at seeing his brutal historical feature Diabel (1972) censored by his country’s government. He left Poland for France and then returned home to have yet another film withdrawn before it had seen completion. His crisis deepened when his own marriage broke down and was captured in the two hours that told the tale of Anna and Mark’s torturous separation in the divided city of Cold War Berlin. The bleak landscape that drew Zulawski close to the edge of rationality is reflected in the barbed wire of the Berlin Wall and the encroaching presence of the anonymous security guards. Under his direction, Bruno Nuytten’s unnerving camera work appears exceptionally nimble, as it moves from scene to scene in the decaying apartments of this oppressive cityscape.

  Zulawski had admired the work of Dario Argento, but now the master of horror cinema returned the compliment, lauding this assault on the senses for its vision and then captured its essence in his next film Tenebrae (1982). The performance of Isabelle Adjani was such that she went on to win a Best Actress award at Cannes that year as well as the César Award again for Best Actress and succeeded in re-launching a career which had been tempestuous up until then. Zulawski could also call upon special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who had previously worked on Deep Red (1975) before moving on to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and then Alien (1979), in the creation of the slime-ridden monster. In 1987 when Poland was beginning to shrug off decades of repression, Zulawski was invited back to his homeland to complete his unfinished science fiction film of ten years before, Na Srebrnym Globie or The Silver Globe, which saw release in 1988, although it remains largely unknown in English-speaking countries. Unfortunately, the controversial nature of Possession resulted in it being butchered in the United States, reduced to an incomprehensible eighty-one minutes. For a challenging art house movie of this kind, its reception in France was somewhat modest, and on its release to VHS in the UK in the September of 1982 it not surprisingly attracted the wrong kind of attention and was banned as a video nasty in September 1983. Twelve months later, it was cleared by a jury of obscenity in a jury trial and was subsequently removed from the list. It was finally released uncut in the UK in 1999, but still runs to only 119 minutes, unlike its European counterpart which contains an extra four minutes of footage.

  WAY BACK IN the 1940s a forest fire swept through a Colorado forest and burned to death a community of gypsies. One of the children, however, managed to survive. Almost forty years later, a couple of elderly campers become temporarily lost in the vastness of the same forest. While the wife walks down to the lake, her husband takes out an axe and begins to chop firewood. When the wife returns she finds her beloved’s decapitated body. Her screams can be heard echoing through the trees as the screen begins to fade.

  It’s a beautiful day and half a dozen teenagers – you’ve seen their type before in countless slasher features – arrive in the forest, having travelled for hours in their van. They are welcomed by the Park Sheriff before setting off to enjoy the surrounding woodland. As they head deeper into the overgrown forest, it becomes apparent they are not alone. Point-of-view shots and the sound of someone gasping for breath reveal they are being followed by an unsettling presence. After tracking the group for almost an hour the killer begins to bring them down in scenes that reveal a considerable element of carefully manipulated suspense and culminate in another decapitation by axe, the customary hacking of the throat, and a sleeping bag suffocation. This leads to the slow-motion-styled final girl chase by a hermitic man through the woods, a man who is now in need of company. Only in the final few minutes of this film would the audience get to see the giant gypsy’s badly burned features; his appearance was indeed disturbing and the denouement refused to bring the closure for which the viewers would have hoped.

  The Prey has been criticized, along with many other films of this ilk, for jumping on the Friday the 13th bandwagon, but was actually shot during 1978. It wasn’t released until June 1984 and lasted a little more than a week in the drive-in theatres across the United States, reaping in its wake rather negative reviews. The pacing proved too slow for the slasher audiences of the day, with an abundance of unnecessar
y woodland stock footage used as padding. To the director’s credit, his use of gore was impressive, but it was strewn just too late in a seemingly prolonged movie. The film was then cut by fifteen minutes, because the distributors felt such a movie could not hold the audience’s interest for more than eighty minutes. Rather than edit the unnecessary stock footage, the opening sequence explaining the killer’s unfortunate past was left on the cutting room floor. The Prey was released to video in 1988 but the original cut has never been seen, nor is it known to exist. Edwin Brown would soon return to a more gainful career in directing porn movies.

  WELL-HEELED SUSAN Stevenson’s (Ursula Andress) husband has vanished without trace on an island somewhere off the coast of New Guinea. Accompanied by a respected anthropologist (Stacy Keach) and her scheming brother (Antonio Marsina) they journey to the island to determine his fate. Susan and her brother have only one concern: the location of the uranium deposits that her husband was reported to have found. As the party make their way through the verdant jungles of the island, Susan is saved from a native attack by a newcomer, Manolo (Claudio Cassinelli). It now becomes obvious Susan’s husband has abandoned his quest for the uranium and gone in search of a tribe living on a remote mountain called Ra Ra Me, Mountain of the Cannibal God. Manolo has to take the lead when the anthropologist falls into a ravine, but he is unable to save Susan’s brother when they are cornered by natives. Manolo and Susan are taken away as prisoners as the natives disembowel her brother’s body and cook his carcass over the flames of their fire. The natives believe Susan to be a goddess, and there on the mountain she would have remained if Manolo hadn’t outwitted their captors and killed one of them allowing the pair to make their escape.