The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  The years roll on; it is now 1984 and Billy is eighteen years old. He now has a job at a local toy store and all seems to be going smoothly until Christmas comes along. In his time at the store, he has developed a liking for Pamela, a very amiable work mate. All, however, is not well, for in a dream he makes love with her, only to be stabbed as their passion begins to heighten. The past then comes back to haunt him when he is instructed to dress as the store’s Santa Claus. Later that night as the staff enjoy festive merriment, one of the employees, a young man by the name of Andy, attempts to rape his beloved Pamela. In these fleeting moments, Billy is consumed by a series of flashbacks showing images of his mother’s ordeal and the abuse he suffered in the orphanage. It becomes too much; he snaps and hangs Andy with the Christmas lights. When Pamela starts yelling at Billy, he stabs her with a box cutter, repeating the Mother Superior’s words, “Punishment is necessary Pamela, punishment is good”. The violence escalates as the owner is hit on the head with a hammer and his assistant manager is threatened with an axe before being brought down by a bow and arrow. Love-making couples seem to be his forte; one girl is impaled on mounted antlers and her boyfriend thrown from the window. Adorned in the Santa suit he continues on his murderous rampage, with a decapitation and subsequent head-rolling scene. Axe in hand, Billy makes his return to the orphanage to wreak his grisly kind of havoc.

  Silent Night, Deadly Night caused considerable concern on its Christmas release in 1984. The controversy focused on the disturbing images of a killer dressed as Santa Claus, which contradicted the seasonal goodwill. Large crowds of incensed families were known to have gathered at cinemas to express their disgust. In the wake of such pressure, the distributor TriStar Pictures removed their advertising for the film only six days after its November release. Shortly afterwards it was withdrawn. However, even though condemned as worthless splatter it went on to cultivate a huge following, adhering to that slasher predilection for the holiday massacre, which has never seemed to die away as recently attested by Deadly Little Christmas (2009). It was later re-released by Aquarius Films in spring 1986, replacing the original advertising campaign of “Twas the night before Christmas” with one referencing the controversy surrounding the film and edited close-up shots of Billy armed and ready in his Santa suit. In the United Kingdom, the movie was never submitted for certification and as such was never listed as a video nasty, nor was it privy to any form of official distribution. It wasn’t until 2009 when Arrow Films submitted the film to the BBFC for classification that it was passed without cuts with an “18” certificate.

  The film was to spawn four sequels: Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 (1987), Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989), Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990) and Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1991).

  UNABLE TO FIND a room on campus, Scotty Parker (Rebecca Balding) has to look elsewhere for suitable accommodation. She soon makes her choice and moves into Mrs Engels’ (Yvonne DeCarlo) creepy old mansion run by her son Mason (Brad Rearden), where three other college students are already boarding. The old house stands away from the town atop a cliff overlooking an eye-catching coastal area. Mrs Engels has her strange son attend to the boarders, as for reasons of her own she rarely leaves the seclusion of her upstairs domicile. As the evening draws in the students enjoy a few drinks, resulting in some harmless tomfoolery. None of them could have foreseen the murder of fellow student, Peter, who is later found stabbed to death on the deserted beach. A police lieutenant and his partner arrive on the scene to investigate the murder and begin to uncover the family’s hidden secret. Victoria (Barbara Steele) is Mason’s deranged sister, who was committed to a psychiatric institution fifteen years before. As Scotty nestles away in the seeming safety of the house in the company of Jack, she is unaware that there is a presence creeping around in its passageways.

  Filmed in 1977 this would be Denny Harris’s only time sat in the directorial chair, while his writers would go onto far greater success with Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004). The original cut of this much neglected film was so poorly rendered, the cast had to be called back to endure the trials of a second shoot, which eventually saw release in August 1980 just before the slasher phenomenon seized hold of America’s cinemas with the advent of Friday the 13th. This typically low-budget affair owed much to Psycho (1960) with its unhinged family protagonists and ominous setting, and saw Barbara Steele make her only film appearance of the 1980s. Harris may have had little funding for his film, but he infused a creepy atmosphere to this ageing manse, using the camera to glide through its halls and passageways in a series of suspenseful sequences. With only two murders to its credit, Silent Scream was heavily dependent on its adeptness in narrating a simple story, set against the air of gloom permeating the corridors of this mystery-laden abode.

  IN THE OPENING minutes of Fernando Di Leo’s film, a masked figure wearing a hood and cape stalks the grounds of a secluded asylum for wealthy women run by Dr Keller (Klaus Kinski), before quietly entering the building. As he advances on his intended victim, she phones for an orderly and without realizing scares him away. We are then introduced to the neurotic cast, one of whom (Rosalba Neri) is an insatiable nymphomaniac; the audience will never be entirely convinced that she is heartfelt in her search of a cure. The masked killers frenzy won’t begin until much later in the film, when we become privy to a series of gory and stylish set pieces that would characterize the more sleazy giallo of the day. After a series of highly erotic scenes, the girls are dispatched by the medieval weaponry on display in one of the entrance rooms as the black-gloved killer tries to exact his still undisclosed revenge. The most graphic of these murders details Jane Garret as she pleasures herself just before the killer sneaks upon her, at first stabbing her before slicing her abdomen from her neck down to her pubis. The scene was edited before the film was given a cinematic release in both the United States and the UK, although the uncut version is still thought to be available in France.

  Di Leo’s La bestia uccide a sangue freddo, also known as Asylum Erotica and Cold Blooded Beast, took complete advantage of the relaxation in film censorship that came at the end of the 1960s. Any element of credible storyline was sacrificed for the more seamy aspects of sex and bloodthirsty violence as Di Leo unlocked the door for the trashy exploitative cinema of the 1970s. The scenes of simulated sex and masturbation would have fitted perfectly within the context of any soft-core porn movie as some of Europe’s horror sex queens, among them Margaret Lee, Rosalba Neri, Jane Garret and Monica Strebel, rolled between the sheets to beguile their slavering audience. In the years that followed both Di Leo and Rosalba Neri would distance themselves from this film, but the director and his cameraman Franco Villa were bold in their experimentation, using the distorted angles and sinuous prowling shots that would become intrinsic to the slasher movies of the next decade.

  SURREAL ARTIST KAY (Sarah Kendall) and her husband David (Alan McRae) are joined by her brother and sister-in-law as they fly out to a remote island off the coast of Georgia to enjoy a family holiday. In her childhood years Kay was plagued by a recurring nightmare, stalked by a malevolent presence she has since called ‘the slayer’ to face death in the flames of a burning room. The terrors of her sleeping hours have continued and for the past few weeks, their increasingly disturbing nature has started to affect her entire life. Such is their intensity they have become the obsessive inspiration for her latest collection of paintings, each of which reflect an artist bordering on the brink of madness. Her concerned husband is a doctor and is convinced some time away from the pressures of everyday life will ease her troubled state of mind.

  The island is a wild and lonely spot and to augment the foreboding air as they make their way to the house, a storm rumbles away beyond the horizon. It doesn’t take long before Kay becomes aware that this is the place which has tormented her dreams. Her family do all that they can to calm her, but when night comes and she falls into a fitful sle
ep something on the island begins to change. In a cleverly conceived stalking sequence, her husband is trailed to the attic and finally decapitated by a presence in the shadows. The following day as the rest of the family try to find him, the unseen killer, now armed with a pitchfork, continues to scour the island. Very soon, Kay’s dreams will become a terrifying reality as she fights to stay awake and keep the fiend at bay. With all of her family having been brutally slaughtered at the hands of this monstrous entity, she must now confront a creature of her making.

  J. S. Cardone’s low-budget The Slayer, also known as Nightmare Island, would have probably drifted into the periphery of obscurity if it had not later invited interesting comparisons with Wes Craven’s dream-laden Nightmare on Elm Street, although by this time Craven had already penned his celebrated terror. The Slayer observed so much of what had gone before in the slasher fare of the previous two years, but now introduced a new concept in having the heroine come face to face with the horrors of her own psyche. As the storm moved in, so the impending sense of fear became heightened as Robert Folk’s orchestrated score worked to suffuse the ever-building tension. While the pacing was often slow, this was counteracted by the unsettling ambience permeating the house that made for a highly apt setting.

  While the gore effects were hindered by the constraint of a limited budget, The Slayer has acquired a quite gruesome reputation, particularly in the ingenious decapitation scene, which is yet to be copied. This set piece along with the graphic impalement on a pitchfork detailing the prongs jutting forth from the victim’s chest before being snatched back would attract the attention of the British authorities who placed Cardone’s film on the list of videos nastiest in October 1983 following its release in June 1982. It was later removed from the offending schedule in April 1985 and was released seven years later with only fourteen seconds of editing to the grisly pitchfork murder. By 2001, the film was passed uncut by the BBFC as it was prepared for issue to DVD. For political science graduate Joseph Cardone, this was but the beginning of a successful career in both writing and directing thrillers along with the occasional horror movie.

  AFTER AN OVERLY long shot of a rural home, the camera takes us within these four walls to observe a callous mother trying to silence her son, whom she finally locks away in a closet. She then starts to get rather amorous with her lover, unaware that a silhouetted stalker has crept upon them. In an effectively gory scene, that probably drained a substantial part of the film’s meagre budget, the lover is whacked on the head with a sledgehammer, with the mother soon to follow.

  A crudely made title card informs the audience ten years have passed as a van pulls up outside this now abandoned house. A group of stereotypical eighties college kids have come to party for the whole weekend. It would have remained a fun weekend if one of them hadn’t suggested holding a mock séance. In the shadows of their gathering, the house assumes a sinister air and a masked killer armed with knives and the requisite sledgehammer returns from the dead.

  While David A. Prior’s film contains so many clichés associated with the period, his killer was gifted with paranormal powers that allowed him to change from a hulking murderer to the young child seen in the movie’s opening scenes, and then completely disappear from sight. This was Prior’s debut in a long career as a low-budget director, which has led to him overseeing more than thirty films. Here, in this shot-on-video feature, he revealed he had the ability to engineer the tension, but there were long moments when his tracking was woefully slow. The goriest scene appeared during the film’s opening sequences but, alas, this was not to be matched, even though there was slaughter aplenty. The limitations of the camcorder made much of the filming noticeably blurry and the fadeouts observed a creative team yet to learn their trade, but Prior made perfect use of the light as he worked to create an air of terror in a plot that was guilty of meandering without pace. However, for all of its faults, Sledgehammer continues to attract the interest of homemade movie fans and those who wouldn’t mind getting behind the camera themselves in the hope of making their own film for next to nothing.

  WHEN A GROUP of teenagers cause a boating accident in the middle of a lake, which kills a father and son, the daughter, Angel (Felissa Rose), is taken to live with her peculiar Aunt Martha and cousin Ricky. Eight years later the still traumatized Angela is on her way to her first summer camp with her cousin, who has already made known the feelings he has for her. While at camp, the cook also displays an unhealthy interest in the young Angela. Very quickly, her quiet disposition makes her the butt of her fellow campers’ cruel jibes as the buffoonery begins to get out of control. While Ricky is quick to defend her, he cannot stop the bullying campers from being butchered by a mysterious prowler. The hapless Judy is brutally murdered, in a graphic episode, by a curling iron; then follows the slaying of four youngsters in their sleeping bags. Finally, Angela’s would-be suitor Paul is decapitated before the killer is revealed, axe in hand and completely naked.

  Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp invites immediate comparisons with Friday the 13th (1980) in having a murderer run amok in a remote camp, but its sexual psychology draws from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as well as Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976), to make this one of the most memorable slasher movies of the early 1980s. Here, the young Hiltzik creates an unnerving atmosphere as an unknown assailant sets about the cast in a series of highly original killings. This isn’t a particularly gory movie, but the climax is one of the most shocking screen revelations since Norman Bates’ admission some twenty-three years before.

  The first-time director had no idea he had created a film which would command such a dedicated following. When he scripted his sequel, it was considered too dark as the film industry sought a deviant villain on a par with the rueful Fred Kreuger. A couple of sequels would eventually come from Michael A. Simpson, Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) and Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989). Bruce Springsteen’s younger sister, Pamela, played the part of Angela, now a camp counsellor. Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor, directed by Jim Markovic, was never completed, but the footage that was filmed was released in the Anchor Bay/Starz Entertainment’s Sleepaway Camp DVD box set. Hiltzik, who had gone on to become a lawyer, scripted and directed Return to Sleepaway Camp in 2003, which, after so many setbacks in trying to find a distributor, finally saw release in November 2008. The Hiltzik trilogy will be brought to a close with Sleepaway Camp Reunion, which is still in production.

  AMY HOLDEN JONES was observed by many to be a purely feminist writer when she penned her satirical The Slumber Party Massacre; she introduces her film with a shower scene along with an ample display of bare breasts. Having grabbed her predominantly male audience’s attention she presents a delectable eighteen-year-old high school girl, Trish, who has been left at home in a quiet suburb of Los Angeles while her parents are away on holiday. When she meets up with her girls’ basketball team friends she invites them over for a slumber party. The guys in the theatres just couldn’t have believed their luck. Valerie, who is new to the group and doesn’t quite get on with everyone, decides to stay at home across the street with her annoying younger sister Courtney.

  Unknown to them, a maniacal murderer, Russ Thorne, has escaped the asylum. He was incarcerated many years before having slaughtered five people way back in 1969, the same year as the infamous Manson murders. While radio bulletins regularly announce his breakout he cleverly avoids discovery, and then catches sight of Trish and follows her home from school. Prior to arriving at the party, he kills an attractive female electrician and then appropriates her van, which contains the drill that will prove useful later in the evening. Fellow teammate Linda is also disposed when she becomes locked in the school. Hidden away in the darkness Thorne makes his way to the house and gate-crashes the party. Armed with his power drill he begins to terrorize the scantily clad girls for the last twenty minutes of the movie as they run from room to room screaming their heads off. Their only hope of rescue is the estranged new
girl who lives across the street.

  The highly amusing Slumber Party Massacre turned out to be an incredibly successful slasher movie and was the first of four films to see Jones at the director’s chair. In the years that followed, she would return to writing considerably more successful screenplays, but who can deny the obvious pleasure she took in lampooning the genre. Here she supplied every facet of the trope with a typically limited budget and left the boys more than satisfied. They couldn’t have been more delighted in being presented with a cast of hot teenage girls, some nudity and an abundance of splatter as the driller killer armed with his phallic implement ensured the body count began to rise higher and higher. The tension slowly simmered and then arose to boiling point with a devious set of manoeuvres that created innumerable deceptive shocks. It was Valerie, however, who made for the perfect final girl, innocent yet immensely resourceful and leaving the boys only guessing.

  The promotional material accompanying this film and the covers to the video and DVD have given this movie an unwarranted reputation for sleaze. It has also been rebuked for its violent stance against women. Jones’s detractors have always failed to appreciate her desire to parody rather than exploit. On its 1986 release to video in the UK, the BBFC insisted on a change of name to the Slumber Party Murders. It was, however, highly influential and spawned countless inferior copies, notably The Last Slumber Party (1988), the Bikini Bloodbath (2007–9) series, and all three entries in the Sorority House Massacre (1986–91) collection. In its wake, there came three sequels, Slumber Party Massacre 2 (1987), Slumber Party Massacre 3 (1990) and Cheerleader Massacre (2003) along with the documentary Sleepless Nights: Revisiting the Slumber Party Massacres made in 2010. Thirty years later, it remains a great favourite among fans of the genre.