The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  Alien writer Dan O’Bannon noted John Russo’s novel written in 1977 for his sequel to Night of the Living Dead (1968), and then abandoned the entire plot. In Russo’s tale, ten years had passed since the events of the original movie and the zombie contagion had been controlled, that was until a fatal school bus crash. O’Bannon used Russo’s premise, but chose to introduce a teenage cast to create a darkly humorous gorefest centred on a group of misfits who had more in common with the living dead than they had with any of their peers. The cult that surrounds The Return of the Living Dead regard this movie as a fitting homage to Romero’s work, although O’Bannon’s zombies differed from their predecessors in being unusually fleet of foot and quite capable of working together as Andrea Bianchi’s atrophied creations had been in his doom-ridden Burial Ground (1981). The result would be an epic blood bath rife with morbid slapstick and copious nudity where brains and intestines were greedily torn from all and sundry. The studio, however, had major qualms about releasing such an extreme movie and insisted on many cuts before they would consider it for theatrical release. When it did see release there was little in the way of a fanfare and its success at the box office was moderate at best. However, in the years that followed it was to become a cult favourite, which led to a series of sequels, Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988), Return of the Living Dead 3, (1993), Necropolis (2005) and Rave From the Grave (2005).

  FIVE YOUNG WOMEN travel through an isolated rural region on a coach from Buenos Aires to the Argentine town of Trinidad, one of them seeking an abortion. Images of an unknown girl being beaten after the discovery of a discarded foetus followed by another girl, whose eyes bleed as she stands before a burning woman, plague the guilt-ridden dreams of Theda (Elena Siritto). The bus drops them off in the small town of San Roman, where they find the train scheduled to take them to Trinidad has already departed. They walk through deserted streets to find the townsfolk congregated at the Catholic church, where a local woman is being exorcised in a bizarre ritual conducted by the town’s zealous priest (Oscar Ponce). The insane fervour of the ceremony unsettles the girls, but a seemingly kindly local, Nestitor (Rolf García), comes to their rescue, offering rooms for tourists at the large house he owns with his brother. The girls gratefully accept and trek to his secluded home.

  The camera work in the house enshrouds it with a disconcerting milieu, which deepens when one of the party is confronted by a figure standing at her window. Theda’s terrible visions return; a masked man now prowls through her nightmares, savagely butchering the women he encounters. When the girls go down to dinner Horacio, the obsessive priest, awaits them. His conversation turns into a sermon on morality and the evil that dwells in the heart of man. The evil becomes manifest in the darkest hours, when one of the girls awakens to be hacked and dismembered by a killer disguised in an ill-defined white mask, very reminiscent of that seen forty years before in Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964). Her piercing screams, the first of many, arouse the other girls, who discover they have been locked in a booby-trapped house with a bloodthirsty psychotic armed with a meat cleaver along with the two untrustworthy brothers. The camera stays close to each as they bid to escape through the surrounding darkness and, one by one, the screaming girls are taken down as the blood begins to flow. Each of them hides a secret and when the reason for their slaughter is finally revealed, it is steeped in an irony that reflects a country still very much in the sway of the Catholic Church.

  Filmed twelve months before Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), Adrián García Bogliano’s Habitaciones Para Turistas belied its modest budget to produce a black and white terror that surpassed so many of its visceral colour counterparts. The grainy monochrome cinematography worked to convey a claustrophobic sense of dread, which didn’t detract from the severity of the grisly attacks. Bogliano’s aim was to make a slasher movie of substance; this he did with a group of girls the viewer came to care about, set against a town wrapped in the clutches of an ambiguous Catholicism. There was potency to the violence throughout these ninety minutes with scenes of viciousness and a display of bloodletting that looked even more horrific on this deficient stock of film.

  A YOUNG MAN, FENIX, has been confined to a mental institution; within these walls he has retired to the safety of the upper branches of a tree. Through a series of flashbacks, we see him growing up in the circus in which his parents worked. His mother, Concha, was a trapeze artist, who Fenix watched as she prayed before the image of an armless saint, a deity who was abused as a girl. His father, Olgo, was a knife thrower, who consorted with a seemingly covetous tattooed woman. As the church of the armless saint, Santa Sangre, was bulldozed to the ground, his mother discovered her husband’s infidelity and in a fit of jealous rage poured acid over his crotch, prior to him severing her arms and then killing himself. His father’s tattooed lover was seen driving away accompanied by Fenix’s mute friend.

  Fenix returns to the present and is told he has a visitor, his mother. His vision of his mother is of an armless saint who has come to take him away from this domain of madness. On his return to the world beyond the asylum, he meets with his long-lost mute friend Alma, who has grown to become the most grave of women. Against his will, he has to become the arms of his mother. She insists he walks and sits behind her, his arms inserted into the sleeves of her dresses. His hands are forced to do her bidding, which will soon turn to a murderous campaign of revenge. At his mother’s request, he will use his father’s knives as he struggles to accept his mother has grown to become a spiteful woman whose desires border on the incestuous.

  Chilean-born Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre is a terrifying hallucinatory work of genius. When compared to his previous films it is probably his most coherent piece of cinema, yet remains difficult to define. In its kaleidoscope of vibrant colours and expressive imagery, it is evocative of horror, sensuality, madness and the blackest of humour. With the traumatized Fenix having spent so long away from the world we can never truly be sure if all we see is a product of his deluded imagining or his mother’s manipulations. The saddening sight of the elephant’s funeral offers the grimmest of realities while the mentally challenged children’s cocaine snorting reflects on a loss of innocence, all the while in this phantasmagorical dream vision, which just might be locked in Fenix’s illusory mindscape. Jodorowsky, a former student of Marcel Marceau, drew upon the more unsettling aspects of Luis Buñuel’s surrealism to create a film which broods in its violence and sexuality, and yet portrays a beauty and a tragedy reminiscent of an oedipal Greek tragedy. While many commentators have coupled Santa Sangre with Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), the works of Fellini, and that of Claudio Argento’s illustrious brother Dario, its artistic merits were overlooked when it was submitted for release in the United States and was originally rated NC-17 due to “several scenes of extremely explicit violence”. An edited version of the film was later released for public consumption with an R rating for “bizarre, graphic violence and sensuality, and for drug content”. Jodorowsky, who had endured similar criticism for his extreme classic El Topo (1970), would never have been distracted by such censure; his was a flamboyant vision that cared little for adhering to popular expectation. Santa Sangre was in essence a parody of what had become the self-parodying slasher movies of only a few years before, but its surreal splendour intimated something at variance with this premise.

  TWO BATTERED AND confused men, a surgeon and a photographer, awaken in what looks to be a grimy, disused public toilet. They are chained by their ankles to quite substantial pipes with a dead man lying between them, his corpse still holding onto a tape player and a gun. After finding cassettes have been placed in their pockets, they learn one must kill the other within the next few hours or their families will lose their lives. The hacksaws they find are not designed to cut into their chains, but it is obvious they can get through flesh and bone. These two unfortunates are the latest victims of the Jigsaw Killer, a predator who thriv
es on mind games and the slaughter of his victims using the most bizarre contraptions so far seen in a splatter movie. He never actually kills; rather, he traps his prey and creates a scenario where they have to kill to survive. The depravity of the man is highlighted in a series of grisly flashbacks. One in particular shows a girl bound to a chair, her head strapped into a bear-trap mask, which, when the timer goes off, will tear her lower jaw from her face. The key that will save her lies in the stomach of a half-dead man lying partially comatose in the same cell. Her fate rests entirely on her will to survive. As Jigsaw eventually reveals, his victims are not entirely innocent; their questionable morality and disdain for life has brought them to his sickening world. While the men fight to survive, two detectives, Tapp (Danny Glover) and Sing (Ken Leung), discover more of the killer’s victims.

  Both James Wan and Leigh Wannell had been involved in the obscure Australian terror Stygian (2000), which cultivated a degree of interest at the Melbourne Underground film festival of that same year. However, beyond those Antipodean shores it made precious little impact. Undeterred they produced a nine-minute short in 2003 simply entitled Saw; their intention was to get it into the hands of bigger producers who would hopefully listen to their ideas to produce a full-length feature. The short film placed Wannell in the bear-trap mask as he struggled to make his escape. Having been given the go ahead to create a movie, they shot their film in only eighteen days, but for all of their hard work it was only ever scheduled for release to DVD. There were those who thought its premise bore too many similarities to the highly influential Se7en (1995), and it had all been done before. However, during its pre-screening the merits in Wan’s claustrophobic direction attained some recognition and it was decided to give Saw a cinematic release, which subsequently attracted a far greater market than this creative team could have ever envisaged. They gave birth to the twenty-first century’s first enigmatic serial killer in a complex thriller that cast its audience into the most dismal of settings in a situation of curious plausibility. Such was the movie’s success there followed Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw IV (2007), Saw V (2008), Saw VI (2009) and Saw 3D (2010). Both Wan and Wannell have continued in their respective careers, with Wan directing and Wannell starring in two more horror films beyond the Saw franchise, Dead Silence (2007) and Insidious (2010).

  SCANNERS WAS NEVER intended to be a splatter movie; there was only one instance of effective gore in the entire film, but that one moment was one of the most shocking and most talked about scenes of its day. These shots were very cleverly used in the film’s trailer, enhancing David Cronenburg’s standing as a horror director of repute and in its wake had the gore fans of that generation queuing in their droves.

  In the futuristic year of 1985, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) ambles through a shopping mall foraging for leftovers and cigarettes. With one focused stare, he causes a woman to collapse and convulse on the floor, which immediately alerts a couple of undercover agents. In the ensuing chase a tranquilizer dart brings Vale down and he later recovers in a hospital bed funded by ConSec, a weapon and security systems corporation. Here he learns from Dr Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) that he is a Scanner, one of a select group whose mothers were treated with the drug Ephemerol to ease their pregnancies, but instead produced children with mind-reading capabilities and the lethal capacity to blow people’s brains apart. The birth defects caused by this fictional drug were a chilling reminder of the tragedy that followed the marketing of Thalidomide, an antiemetic prescribed to pregnant women during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

  A covert government operation has been set up to locate the Scanners, designed specifically to subdue their power and prevent a renegade group from taking over the world. While this discussion takes place, the megalomaniac Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) callously murders ConSec’s leading Scanner at a press conference in the infamous exploding head scene. He escapes from the building, killing five more people. Dr Ruth convinces Vale to infiltrate Revok’s Scanners with the intention of putting a halt to their plans for global domination. The film then spirals into one of paranoiac intrigue and the politics of corporate espionage rather than the horror upon which Cronenberg had previously established his reputation.

  Up until the release of The Fly in 1986, Scanners was David Cronenberg’s most profitable film, but this nightmare vision was also one of his most problematic undertakings. Due to the rather strange work practices endorsed by the Canadian film industry it was necessary to begin shooting with only two weeks’ pre-production; as a consequence there wasn’t enough time for the screenplay to be completed, forcing Cronenberg to write his script before shooting between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. each day. This hampered the production design team, who did not have the necessary time to build sets and there were occasions where the crew had to drive around looking for things to shoot. When it went to the cinemas, the critics didn’t take kindly to what some perceived as the foolishness in his dark vision, observing a blandness to this futuristic world and those who inhabited it. They failed to see that in the corporately engineered age that his film envisaged, this was the point he was trying to make. The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films took little note of this condemnation and duly awarded the film its Saturn Award in 1981 for “Best International Film”.

  Four sequels eventually followed; Scanners II: The New Order (1990), Scanners III: The Takeover (1992), Scanner Cop (1994) and Scanner Cop II: Volkin’s Revenge (1995). Neither David Cronenberg nor any member of his cast from the original film was involved with any of the sequels. For the past four years, a remake has been in discussion but so far there has been little progress in returning it to the big screen.

  WITH THE SUCCESS of Scream (1996), Robert Sigl released his slasher movie to his German homeland. It was his first time directing a full-length feature since his cult horror Laurin (1989), a film that had been made for German television. On the last day of school, a group of teenagers get together for their end of year party. While most of the students are there to enjoy the revelry, others have devised a series of shenanigans to upset the teaching staff. Maybe they should have been paying more attention to the radio broadcasts, for a perverted mass murderer has slipped away from the town’s mental facility. A teenage girl who had been driving her dad’s taxi has already gone missing. The killer has now arrived on the school premises to indulge his most depraved fantasies, and with the students trapped it becomes too easy for him track them down, picking them off one by one until only two remain. As the film builds to its exciting climax, the heroine of the proceedings discovers a clue to the killer’s identity, but will she survive to tell the tale?

  Schrei – denn ich werde dich töten!, or School’s Out as it became known in English-speaking countries, was imported into America by the horror film magazine Fangoria, and subsequently dubbed into English. The dubbing proved problematic and begged the question as to whether it would have been preferable to subtitle the film, although in Fangoria’s defence subtitled features have infrequently deterred many less discerning viewers. It is little wonder the magazine became interested in Sigl’s film; with the success of Scream, this was a chance to see a return to the slasher fare of the 1980s. The body count was high and was made all the more enticing due to the occasionally imaginative set pieces which led to a steady flow of blood, although the film was never particularly gory, as was the case with many of the more successful eighties slashers. There were facets to this film that made it comparable to Michele Soavi’s Stagefright (1987), notably its claustrophobic setting and the use of light in the darkened spaces, which were reminiscent of Soavi’s mentor Dario Argento. Schools Out evinced a menace, which took it beyond the realms of its intended teenage market; so much so, and as with many of its murderous predecessors, it attracted a television sequel, Das Mädcheninternat – Deine Schreie Wird Niemand Hören, in 2001.

  THE SOLITARY LOTHAR Schramm (Florian Koerner von Gustorf) seems like a pleasant fellow; his emotional state, however, is fragile and consequ
ently his psychotic predilections have taken control of his life. As the film begins, he dies following a fall from a ladder while painting over his bloodstained apartment walls. Rather than the pools of blood to which viewers of these films have become accustomed, Schramm lies in a pool of white paint. We learn from a newspaper report that he was the “lipstick murderer” and courtesy of a series of hallucinatory flashbacks there then unfolds this most peculiar tale. When he was alive, Lothar worked as a taxi driver, often escorting a neighbouring prostitute (Monika M.) while she attended to the needs of her undisclosed clientele in a palatial building somewhere close to the centre of the city. He secretly lusts after his exotic neighbour, but his inadequacies make him incapable of expressing his needs before her or any other woman. His only means of communication with women is through violence, although other than the slaying of a couple of door-to-door preachers, his brutality is never shown before the camera. After each of his killings he is revealed savouring his depraved fantasies, for Lothar’s world is one dominated by surreal fantasy; to one corpse he applies lipstick, one of his deceased victims is tied up while another’s legs are unceremoniously spread-eagled. When this isn’t enough, he masturbates with his blow-up doll, gratifying himself with the photographed corpses. His crimes, however, have made him desperately unhappy. Such is Schramm’s self-loathing he punishes himself by hammering a nail into his foreskin. This insanity is then tempered by visions of the beach he knew as a young boy and his dreams of returning to the innocence of childhood.