The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  Former giallo director Sergio Martino’s La Montagna del dio Cannibale, also known as The Mountain of the Cannibal God and Slave of the Cannibal God, resembled a matinee adventure movie of the period, but contained the additional spice of the comely Ursula Andress along with gory scenes of native cannibalism. While the exploits of this cannibal tribe was not as shocking as their counterparts in Cannibal Holocaust (1980), the uncut version of this film was not without its share of violence and nudity, which included an exposed brain and the topless Andress. Martino’s film acquired a degree of notoriety when it was added to the list of video nasties in November 1983 after being released to video in 1981 as Prisoner of the Cannibal God; this was because of many scenes of animal cruelty. It was later removed from the list in May 1985, but its latest release in the UK still has over two minutes of edits to the offending scenes of thirty years past.

  AS FOUR CHILDREN play a game of hide and seek in an abandoned building, young Robin wants to join in. However, the four youngsters have something else in mind and seek to intimidate her. As she is forced against a window ledge to escape their taunts, she loses her balance and falls, plummeting several storeys to her death. The children Wendy, Nick, Jude and Kelly vow solemnly never to tell anyone about what has happened, but someone hidden in the shadows has seen everything. Robin’s father (Leslie Nielsen) and the police deduce that Robin was the victim of a known sex offender and they set out to track him down.

  Six years later Robin’s sister Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her brother Alex (Michael Tough) stand beside their parents at their sister Robin’s grave. Shortly afterwards those who had been present when poor Robin fell to her death receive the first of a series of disturbing phone calls, warning of the horrors that will transpire on their forthcoming prom night. The call causes considerable alarm to Kelly, while Jude and Wendy simply laugh it off, believing it to be nothing more than a prank. Unbeknown to them, the man who was arrested that day, Leonard Murch, has escaped the asylum that has kept him from the world for the last six years. His scarred body has never recovered from the burns he received that day as the police pursued his car. Like Michael Myers before him, he heads back to the town where it all happened to mete out his revenge on what will be his victims’ prom night, the anniversary of Robin’s death. In accordance with the rules being laid down for this emerging genre, Kim will find herself stalked as the final girl, while her friends are slaughtered in the corridors of their school at the hands of a masked machete-wielding maniac.

  For Liverpool-born Paul Lynch this was an early episode in what was to become a highly successful directorial career in both film and television. It was also early days for the slasher movie, but his film became an archetype for what followed, embracing so many of the aspects that are now associated with the genre. In the hope of securing extensive distribution, Lynch minimized the gore and, in the spirit of John Carpenter’s Halloween, chose dimly lit settings in the execution of his murders. In leaving much to the audience’s imagination, he kept them hooked until the very last. He had encountered many problems while at the negotiating table as he hoped to realize sufficient financial backing for this feature; only when Jamie Lee Curtis agreed to take the lead role did the money finally come his way. Paramount had shown an interest in the distribution of Prom Night, but were only prepared to put it into 300 theatres, while Avco Embassy Pictures were prepared to open in over 1,200 theatres, which would see Lynch’s film go on to generate $14 million. As the consultation continued, Paramount chose instead to release Friday the 13th.

  Such was the success of the film, three sequels were later released: Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987), Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990) and Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1992). A re-imagined Prom Night was made for $20 million in 2008, which invited almost universal derision from the critics, yet still went on to make in excess of $43 million.

  IN A DARKENED Phoenix hotel room, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and her lover Sam Loomis (John Gavin) squabble over their future. Marion wants to marry, but Sam does not have the money to support her. On returning to the office where she works, Marion impulsively takes off with $40,000 from a property sale. On the second night of her journey to Sam’s hometown, the rain pours heavily making it impossible to see the road clearly. After turning off the highway she spots the Bates Motel, overshadowed by an old house, inspired by Edward Hopper’s “The House by the Railroad”; she decides to take shelter for the night. There she is greeted by the reserved proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). She signs in under the name Marie Samuels, hoping to avoid attracting the unwanted attention of the police. As she chats with Norman, a man who appears dominated by his ageing mother, she resolves to return to Phoenix with the money. However, she feels it best she spends the night at the motel. Before retiring to bed, she prepares to take a shower. In a lingering moment of voyeuristic perversity, Norman removes a picture from the wall and peers through a peephole, which allows him to watch as Marion undresses. Once she enters the shower, the bathroom door opens. In the film’s pivotal scene, the obscured figure of an old woman pulls back the shower curtain. She reveals a large kitchen knife, and as the blade lifts and strikes so follows one of the most memorable scenes in the history of film, made even more terrifying by composer Bernard Herrmann’s fervently screeching string section. Hitchcock had shocked his audience in more ways than one, having killed off his main character and star name at such an early stage in the film.

  A week later Marion’s sister, Lila, arrives at Sam’s store in Fairvale to bring him the bad news that Marion has disappeared. Together with a private detective, Milton Arbogast, they begin searching the area and eventually come across the Bates Motel. Just as he nears the top of the stairs of the house, Arbogast becomes another victim of the old woman’s blade. Hitchcock’s film now races to its shocking climax. With Lila exploring the house looking for the whereabouts of her murdered sister, Norman heads upstairs. Lila takes the opportunity to slip through the cellar door and makes her way down the steps to a storage room where she sees an old woman sitting in a chair facing away to the wall. When she swings the chair around, she reveals an emaciated corpse dressed in the clothes of an old woman. Hitchcock continues with another highly acclaimed shot, focusing on a single point as a bare light bulb swings from side to side, exposing young Norman dressed in his mother’s clothing.

  During the epilogue, Lila, Sam and the sheriff wait to hear from a psychiatrist who has been called to examine Norman. The psychiatrist has listened to the whole story, but not from the mouth of Norman, for he no longer exists; rather, it has come from his mother who has assumed complete control of his mind.

  Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho carried a theatre poster clearly stipulating a “no late admission” policy, for what was billed as a psychological thriller. His film would go on to set a new standard in horror cinema, one that has been much emulated but rarely matched. It has also been considered the first true slasher movie. Adapted from the Robert Bloch’s novel of the same name, published in 1959, it was based on the crimes of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein. Hitchcock’s magnum opus initially garnered mixed reviews, but with subsequent box office success and popular acclaim, it went on to receive four Academy Award nominations.

  Executives at Paramount were not pleased with Hitchcock’s choice of subject matter, insisting it was “too repulsive” and were categorical in their refusal to advance him the necessary funding. The director decided to film Psycho as quickly and cheaply as he could, offering to finance the film himself and shoot it at Universal-International as long as Paramount would act as distributor. He also deferred his director’s fee of $250,000 for a 60 per cent ownership of the film negative. This eventually proved acceptable to Paramount. However, he was then confronted by resistance from producer Herbert Coleman and Shamley Productions executive Joan Harrison, who had major doubts as to the viability of such a film. Further budget reductions forced Hitchcock to film in black and white; this would lessen the bloody impact of th
e shower scene, but would allow him to play with a thematic use of black and white motifs to express the changes in his film’s tone. This thematic approach was inspired by George Clouzot’s innovative use of black and white in Les Diaboliques (1955), a film for which Hitchcock had much admiration, and as with Psycho had forbidden late entry.

  There were episodes in Psycho that proved a direct challenge to the Motion Picture Production Code in the representation of sexuality and violence, with Sam and Marion shown very early in the film sharing the same bed, and Marion wearing only her underwear. The censors claimed they could see one of Leigh’s breasts as well as her stand-in’s buttocks. Amazingly another cause of concern was Marion’s flushing of the toilet, with the torn toilet paper being fully visible. Further criticism came after the film’s release, from those who felt it encouraged other filmmakers, as would be evidenced by Herschel G. Lewis and William Castle, who wasted little time in hurling bucket loads of blood and guts across the cinema screen. Psycho was to usher in a generation of slashers, none of which, however, would ever be the match of Norman Bates.

  Three sequels followed, Psycho II (1983), Psycho III (1986) and Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), the last being a part-prequel television movie, with a remake of the original in 1998.

  THE REMINGTON FAMILY members have gathered together at the mansion of their elderly aunts to celebrate their birthday. There is no hiding the fact that they all have a strong dislike of one another, but goodwill ensues because the family fortune is at stake. After the evening meal, the aunts open a present sent by an estranged family member who has an uncanny affiliation with the dark arts. As soon as the aunts open the package, they are possessed by demons and turned into flesh-eating monsters. One of their shocked guests is killed immediately at the table, as the rest scatter to find a place to hide in the mansion’s endless rooms and corridors. The cackling aunts begin their search in this bloodthirsty game of hide and seek.

  With precious little in the way of money, Emmanuel Kervyn directed a movie that drew upon the slapstick violence of The Evil Dead (1981) and pre-empted the visceral craziness of Peter Jackson’s Braindead by almost four years. As with Jackson’s cast, Kervyn made absolutely no attempt to create a likeable crowd, thus there was a delirium to the anticipation of these imaginative kills. Rather than assembling his country’s finest actors, the director lavished his funds on the splatter, hacking off one man’s limbs before impaling him on a pike, leading to a rotund fellow having his backside chewed off and, in probably the film’s most shocking scene, luring and then sadistically dismembering the aunts’ young niece. The torture would continue and in a rather poignant episode, the wicked aunts trap a priest with a shotgun and give him the choice of suicide and eternal damnation or the tortures they will duly inflict on him. As the aunts gleefully tossed their avaricious relatives’ body parts around the hallways of their home there was no denying the black humour underlying the bloody carnage. Many versions of Kervyn’s film have been heavily censored, but its fans insist the only way to enjoy its content is with the excess remaining entirely intact, as evidenced in the European version.

  WHILE WORKING IN Austria, eccentric medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) synthesizes a serum with properties that can resurrect the dead. He returns to America and locates in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts, where he takes a place at the Miskatonic University. In the basement of a house that he rents with Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), he continues in his bizarre experimentation to perfect his eerie green concoction. The girl of Dan’s dreams, Megan (Barbara Crampton) cannot shake her sense of disquiet in the presence of the obsessive Herbert, which is compounded when her cat disappears and then turns up dead in his refrigerator. Dan later sees the cat very much alive and in throes of violently sinking its claws into Herbert. The pair are once again forced to kill the shrieking creature. Herbert now recognizes a kindred spirit in Dan and invites him to work alongside him, which takes their research to the town’s morgue with typically disastrous consequences. Very soon, with Herbert’s helping hand, the dead are seen to rise from the slab, which results in bloody mayhem as the envious Dr Carl Hill (David Gale) attempts to steal West’s formula.

  Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Re-Animator, the blend of horror and comedy in Stuart Gordon’s film went on to draw favourable comparisons with Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), particularly in its graphic use of comic book-styled excess. While his movie excelled in its craft, the film as a whole refused to take itself too seriously and brought to celluloid the cult figure of Jeffrey Combs playing the most deranged scientist since Victor Frankenstein. Combs’ portrayal of the compulsive West has enthralled audiences for more than a quarter of a century and his reckless experimentation gave them just what they wanted as a series of cadavers stumbled out of control to splash 24 gallons of fake blood across the screen. There were many enthusiasts of the time, who considered this one of the goriest films to come out of this visceral decade. Special effects man John Naulin had never had to use so much blood on any of his previous films and found himself a little more involved in the creation of the corpse designs than he would have liked, using photographs of actual cadavers shot in his local mortuary.

  Stuart’s love of the works of H. P. Lovecraft would see him go on to make several other films featuring the writer’s deathly tales, including From Beyond (1986), Castle Freak (1995) and Dagon (2001) along with the Masters of Horror episode “Dreams in the Witch-House” (2005). The success of Re-Animator would be followed by Bride of Re-Animator (1990) and over a decade later Beyond Re-Animator (2003).

  AFAMILY DRIVING ACROSS an isolated region of America become immersed in a toxic gas, and its vapours mutilate their dog. When the father goes out to investigate, he returns with half of his face torn away. In a gory sequence, which creates an element of intrigue and would hopefully set the tone for the remainder of the film, something foul then rips into them, leaving them all for dead.

  The scene shifts to five students making their way to a festival, driving across a similar desert expanse, with an offended drugs dealer supposedly somewhere on their tail. True to form, their car breaks down, this time in what appears to be a mysteriously deserted diner; I say mysteriously because an hour ago this place was positively thriving. With the highway closed, they have no choice but to stay in the limbo of the aptly named “Halfway Motel”. Shortly afterwards the mother from the film’s prologue is seen, her mouth now severely disfigured, carving “Tell my son I love him”. This is no ordinary motel and there is the distinct impression that they are not alone. Their suspicions are alerted when they run into an awkward individual by the name of Henry (Michael Ironside), who is searching for his wife. For the moment, he is not the one they need to fear, as he is very quickly suffocated by a shrouded figure. It’s not long before the kids are afflicted by images of the dead and a cloaked, gas-masked killer with a deadly assortment of fashioned implements begins to chalk up the body count. This particular assassin has the ability to become invisible, but can be traced by his terrible smell, hence the name Reeker.

  On the surface this looked like another occasionally amusing teen slasher movie, with a group of likeable, if not empty-headed youths waiting to be bumped off by a malevolent presence in a desert setting reminiscent of The Hill Have Eyes (1977). Dave Payne succeeded in engineering an additional upset at the finale when the protagonists face the cloaked figure of death, with vague echoes of Final Destination (2000). On its release, Reeker received a reasonably positive reception, but in terms of the development of the genre for a twenty-first century audience, it provided little in the way of progress; but then maybe that was the whole point as it joined a whole raft of films trying to rejuvenate the slasher madness of the 1980s. Sadly, while promising to put the fun back into horror, it lacked much of the necessary pacing that had epitomized so many of its more successful predecessors.

  THE PROLOGUE TO The Return of the Living Dead makes a familiar claim, insisting the events in this film ar
e based on something that actually happened and then, in scenes inspired by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), reveals several drums containing a discarded experiment once carried out by the armed forces. This experiment had apparently gone hopelessly wrong. The bungling foreman Frank (James Karen), while giving Freddy (Thom Matthews) a tour of the basement to the warehouse where they work, accidentally releases one of the drums and the escaping gas pours into the room giving life to a corpse. In its reanimated state it resorts to type and goes completely wild, before Frank and Freddy finally succeed in its subjugation. They then escort the zombie to the town’s mortuary to put an end to its existence in the flames of the cremator.

  Meanwhile, Freddy’s friends are waiting for him in the town’s graveyard. His girlfriend Tina (Beverley Randolph) becomes impatient and decides to return to the warehouse, where she is set upon by a zombie the audience will come to know as Tarman. Over at the mortuary the first zombie has now been incinerated. However, as the smoke rises from the vents it turns into a deadly gas that contaminates the air and then poisons the rainfall. The scalding rain compels Freddy’s friends to take refuge in the warehouse where they find Tina desperately trying to fend off Tarman. As they barricade the basement door, one of the group is killed and very soon they are forced to go back through the cemetery in the hope of finding Freddy. As they make their way through the graveyard, they see the dead beginning to crawl from their graves and in the panic they become separated, making them easy quarry for this flesh-eating horde. Before they can get to Freddy, his situation has taken a turn for the worse; both he and Frank have become infected. They now begin to endure a transformation that will see them join the ranks of the living dead. The finale proved to be cataclysmic and in turn created the seed for yet another movie franchise of the 1980s.