The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  IT’S 1971, TWO years after the infamous Manson family killings, and a gang of Argentine biker chicks under the control of an uncannily similar character, are relishing their own version of Helter Skelter. As a drugs war rages in the city, an actress is being exploited by her sleazy porn-fuelled producer boyfriend. The leather-clad girls are instructed by their leader Satan (Enrique Larratelli) to slaughter the actress’s lover and prepare to make her fit to bear a child for their sacrifice. The tacked on final scene, filmed five years later in 1976, attempts to have the audience believe that they have been privy to the mutilation and real murder of one of the actresses seen in the film. While on set, she is stabbed and dismembered by the film crew, each of whom are then heard escaping the scene as the film runs out.

  Filmed in Argentina in 1971, the sleazy exploitation feature The Slaughter, written and directed by the husband-and-wife grindhouse filmmaking team of Michael Findlay and Roberta Findlay, drew its sordid inspiration from the Manson family tabloid frenzy of 1969. However, its poor script and dubious acting were never going to turn it into a raging success. Five years later, without the knowledge of the Findlays, independent low-budget distributor Allan Shackleton released the film, which included the now infamous finale. He had read about the allegations surrounding snuff movies being produced in South America and decided to use The Slaughter as his vehicle to exploit this myth. He released his film as Snuff, also known as American Cannibale, using bogus protesters to picket those cinemas that dared to show the film. Very soon, the radical feminist group Women Against Pornography, who were highly active during the 1970s and 1980s, joined these protests thus exacerbating the film’s unsavoury reputation.

  Shackleton’s publicity campaign certainly worked, for as bad as this film was, it continued to be the focus of much attention. The ending was certainly disturbing, but the effects were largely inspired by the antics of one Herschell Gordon Lewis. Four years before Ruggero Deodato was chastised by the Italian authorities for seemingly making a snuff movie with Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Shackleton faced the wrath of the mayor of New York. He saved himself from a long stretch in prison by presenting the supposedly murdered actress for all to see. In the UK, the uncut video was ready to be released in May 1982, but was cancelled only for bootleg copies to filter into the country. Not surprisingly, Snuff found its place on the list of video nasties in July 1983, and there it remained until the crisis came to an end. An uncut version was not approved until 2003. Three years later this lacklustre piece of exploitation would be referenced in the second season of the UK Channel 4’s The Dark Side of Porn, the episode entitled “Does Snuff Exist?” Unlike so many of the films in this collecton, Snuff refuses to be forgotten.

  LITTLE BETH’S FAMILY were killed by her brother; she only managed to escape by hiding quietly in the basement. He was then committed to an asylum, from which many years later he escapes. Like several mass murderers before him, he then sets off to return to his home town. Beth was brought up by her aunt, who has recently passed away. She has now grown up and is about to settle down in a sorority affiliated to her college. However, although her mind has blocked out the memories of that terrible night from her childhood, she is plagued by nightmares of an ominous figure and a dark house she doesn’t recognize. Little does she realize that the sorority house was once her childhood home and her evil brother has sensed her presence. Only when one of her sorority sisters places her under deep hypnosis do the recollections of her traumatic past finally return.

  The connections with Halloween (1978) were all too obvious, as Carol Frank for the one and only time in her career sat in the director’s chair after working as assistant director on The Slumber Party Massacre (1982). Once again, she had the girls chasing around a secluded house wearing only their revealing night attire while a deranged killer prowled around with a sharpened knife. The psychic link had been used elsewhere, but on this occasion it was handled with an element of flair. There were many amusing moments in this film, some of them not intentional, but the stalking sequences did make the audience fall deathly quiet. The kills were far from gory, however, and by 1986 were not considered especially imaginative. This was a slasher done by the numbers as the era slowly came to an end, but Frank’s film proved successful enough to generate a couple of sequels, Sorority House Massacre 2 (1990) and the raunchy Hard to Die (1990), also known as Sorority House Massacre 3.

  APATIENT MAKES A bid to escape from a New York City mental hospital, killing one of the orderlies and then donning his clothes. Three years later a University sociology professor is horribly murdered as he works late into the evening. Next semester his replacement Julie (Forbes Riley) is told by Father Perkins (Richard W. Haines) of her predecessor’s unfortunate death. It is obvious from the outset that Julie will be severely challenged by her dope-addicted, sex-obsessed students and her views on abortion become the immediate talk of the college.

  When their studies are over the class like to party, but their revelry is brought to an unceremonious end when a killer begins to stalk the campus. With the reports of both students and teachers being killed beginning to escalate, Julie becomes enamoured with a fellow lecturer. We learn he was dating a tutor who was only recently murdered, but the colleague who passes this titbit of information is then killed. Fearing the worst, Julie decides to leave her new life, but before she packs her bags her investigations reveal the psychopathic culprit is the escaped mental patient. Together she and her boyfriend try to stop his unforgiving onslaught through the corridors and hallways of the campus with tragic consequences.

  The title Splatter University typically left nothing to the imagination. As a slasher movie it runs with an air of distinct familiarity, but on this occasion does not observe the motif honoured to the final girl. In a well-crafted sequence the stalker’s presence becomes all the more menacing as he strides ever closer to the endearing Julie. There has been criticism of inadequate post-production dubbing, the kids wearing the same clothes and dead bodies that have been observed to move, yet Haines isn’t behind the mark when it comes to delivering low-budget blood, as breasts and crotches are sliced open and a disembowelment splurges off screen. Herschell Gordon Lewis would have been proud! Cheap thrills and shots of girls’ backsides in tight jeans abound along with an amusing scene where a flustered priest when about to meet one of the teaching staff discards his porn magazines. Splatter University came at a time when the slasher had been utterly played to death and for all its worth would have found it impossible to bring anything new to the table. Richard W. Haines, having ascended to his first role in the director’s chair, continued in a career that would eventually lead into film archiving.

  ALTHOUGH IT IS very late at night, a group of actors are still going through their routine rehearsing for a musical about a crazed killer they call “The Night Owl”. When the leading lady, Alicia (Barbara Cupisti), sprains her ankle, she and the wardrobe mistress, Betty (Ulrike Schwerk), quietly leave the theatre to find a doctor. The only hospital in the area is a mental facility, but an amiable psychiatrist is happy to attend to Alicia’s injury. Betty notices a patient lying restrained on a bed. He is the former actor Irving Wallace, a man who went wild and slaughtered more than a dozen people. As the girls prepare to return to the theatre, they are unaware Wallace has escaped after killing one of the attendants and is now secreted in the back of Betty’s car. On her return, the angered director (David Brandon) dismisses Alicia for having left the rehearsal. She storms out of the building only to find Betty lying prostrate on the floor of the car park, the victim of a cruel murderer.

  With two police officers assigned to stand guard over the car park, the pompous director has one of his cast hide the keys so that no one else can slip away from the theatre. He has also changed the script to his play, renaming his “Night Owl” killer “Irving Wallace”, and commands his team to continue working through the night so that they can familiarize themselves with the new material. As a thunderstorm rages in the world beyond the theatr
e, the real Wallace enters the building. He dons the owl-like mask and when mistaken for one of the cast willingly obeys the director’s instructions and expertly butchers the girl who has only just hidden the key to the building. In a series of suspense-filled sequences amidst the darkened passageways beneath the theatre, Wallace acts out his grisly fantasies in a succession of gruesome decapitations, a disembowelment and bodily dismemberment. Their only chance to escape this deranged psycho is for one of the cast to find the elusive key.

  As the horror industry in Italy continued to struggle, Michele Soavi, who had been Dario Argento’s eager protégé, stepped into the director’s chair to work alongside two of the most eminent figures from the halcyon days of Italian exploitation, producer Joe D’Amato and writer George Eastman. While learning his trade, Soavi had been assistant director on Argento’s Tenebrae (1982) and Phenomena (1985) along with Lamberto Bava’s A Blade in the Dark (1983) and Demons (1985), in addition to taking minor roles in Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead (1980) as well as Tenebrae, The New York Ripper (1982) and Demons. His stylish direction would engender a film worthy of the giallo of a decade past coupled with the slash and hack that had reached its nadir in the United States only a few years before. Eastman’s script preferred an accessible linear narrative, but Soavi’s adept cinematic approach revealed the apt pupil had ascertained much from his mentor, with imaginative camera work and atmospheric set pieces to distinguish his film with a flair commonly observed in more experienced directors. While there was plenty of blood-letting with the graphic exposition of power drills being forced into yielding flesh, there was also a claustrophobic tension to his film, which would leave his audience clamouring for more. This materialized in The Church (1989), The Sect (1991) and the acclaimed Dellamorte Dellamore (1994). Soavi wouldn’t be able to save the Italian cinematic horror, but just for a few more years he ensured it once again became highly entertaining.

  LUCY HARBIN (JOAN Crawford) returns home one evening to find her husband (Lee Majors) in bed with his former girlfriend. In a blind rage she creeps up to the bed and dispatches them with several blows of a sharpened axe, not realizing her young daughter, Carol, has seen the entire grisly incident. In the days that follow, Lucy is declared mad and sentenced to twenty years in the asylum.

  Years later, the cured Lucy is dropped off at the farm where her daughter has gone to stay; Carol appears unaffected by the trauma of that night twenty years ago. She has grown up to become a very popular young lady, engaged to one of the most eligible men in town. The following day Lucy and her daughter spend some time together shopping, which allows her to have a complete makeover that by magic makes her look twenty years younger. However, all is not well for, while in the store, Lucy is convinced she can hear a mocking voice that taunts her with nursery rhymes of her murderous past. During the night, she awakens to the sound of the same goading and then turns to see the shocking sight of two decapitated heads lying beside her. When Carol’s Uncle Bill enters the room, the heads are no longer to be seen. This shatters Lucy, who begins to appear increasingly unhinged, just as she had twenty years before. She doesn’t help herself when she tries to seduce her future son-in-law and then those who cross her, suspecting she is not entirely sane, soon begin to turn up dead.

  William Castle’s Strait-Jacket was undeniably influenced by Psycho (1960) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), in which Joan Crawford had also had a starring role. Following the success of the Robert Aldrich-directed Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Crawford, now in her sixties, took on the role of a twenty-nine-year-old for Strait-Jacket’s prelude. She then played the largest part of the film as a woman of forty-nine, giving a quite remarkable performance as a person unable to escape the catastrophic events of that one night of insanity. Castle, who had always relied on gimmicks to promote his earlier films, was looking to improve his reputation and now had one of Hollywood’s greatest stars at his behest. Such was her commitment she supervised the redrafting of the script, made changes to the supporting cast and selected her own wardrobe.

  Her presence elevated Castle’s direction and, thanks to Robert Bloch’s writing, he produced a macabre thriller with a twist ending set in an idyllic farmhouse that was revealed to be a thin veneer for the madness that lurked beneath this seemingly perfect family. When compared to his other movies, this film ran at a fair pace, and in its day those decapitations would have shocked its thrill-seeking audience, even though they offered little in the way of gore. Castle would continue with his B-grade schlock, but sadly the great roles would elude Crawford, whose later work was confined to low-budget features and television.

  IN THE ONCE quiet college town of Galesberg, Illinois, teenagers are being slaughtered by a group of unknown killers. One of the town’s police officers, John Brady (Michael Murphy), is convinced the killings are linked to the behavioural experiments being carried out at the university. In one of the university’s lecture theatres the scientist overseeing this shady experimentation, Dr Le Sangel (Arthur Dignam), continues to teach his young pupils via archival film; the doctor passed away from this world some years before. His successor, the aloof Dr Parkinson (Fiona Lewis), now continues with her former mentor’s bizarre experiments.

  Officer Brady’s son Pete (Dan Shor) needs to raise the money to cover his college fees, and the only way he can do this is by volunteering to join the research programme. His girlfriend Caroline (Dey Young) knows nothing of Dr Parkinson’s dubious machinations, but it is becoming increasingly obvious those students who enrol in this scheme are turning into mindless creatures with an inclination for slaughter. Brady, however, has a shady past, one connected with the mystifying Le Sangel.

  Michael Laughlin’s film came as Australian cinema was being revitalized following the success of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Gallipoli (1981). One of his producers, Antony Ginnane, hoped to begin a wave of low-budget Antipodean horror movies, which started with Patrick (1978), and continued with Thirst (1979), The Survivor (1981) and, that same year, Dead Kids, also known as Strange Behaviour, Human Experiments and Small Town Massacre. Filmed in Auckland, New Zealand, with a largely American cast, Laughlin’s homage to the horror movies of the 1950s witnessed a painstaking re-creation of the small town atmosphere of the American Mid-West. Co-written with Bill Condon, who went on to script Gods and Monsters (1998) and Chicago (2002), the imagery in Laughlin’s film continues to haunt with the murders seemingly played down to exacerbate the horror at hand. The effect is chillingly surreal as a Tangerine Dream soundscape adds to the heightening paranoia.

  After a reasonable reception among the critics, this was the first instalment of the ambitious Strange Trilogy, but was cancelled when the second feature Strange Invaders (1983) performed rather poorly at the box office. The audience of the day seemingly had little comprehension of such tributes to the nostalgia of 1950s science fiction and horror. When the film was first released in the UK as Small Town Massacre in 1986, it passed the scrutiny of the BBFC without being edited. However, subsequent releases saw increasingly more cuts to the suicide scene with the syringe to the eyeball also being slightly edited. Strange Behaviour, with its unusual science fiction premise, offers a unique play upon the in-vogue slasher of the early 1980s, one that recalls memories of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

  ACOUPLE OF DEPRAVED maniacs, making themselves out to be student filmmakers, kidnap hookers and then place them before the camera before torturing and killing them. While the brutality in the killings is never seen, the body parts are later discovered with the refuse in back alleyways across the city. Their victims’ agony is captured on tape and sold to a sleazy character as snuff videos. Officer Kelly Anderson is forced to go undercover in her high heels and stockings to put an end to these wretched crimes.

  Jeff Hathcock returns with another piece of shot-on-video slasher misogyny, which once again seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth. Its premise is both graphic and unpleasant with murky photography that works t
o enhance its unsavoury nature. The acting is typically poor and isn’t helped by the unbelievably contrived dialogue. While the bloodthirsty nature of the psycho’s activities is kept to a minimum, the level of violence is indeed shocking and adds to the film’s notoriety.

  AS THE RAIN pours down on this stormy night, an American ballet student Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives in Freiburg to join an exclusive ballet school. Her taxi journey from the airport seeks from the very outset to unsettle, becoming increasingly claustrophobic and heightening the sense of dread, which rises for the next twenty minutes to a climactic frenzy before culminating in a brutal double murder. When Suzy returns to the school in the warming light of day, she learns that the student seen chasing through the woods the night before fell victim to a vicious murderer. The head of the school, Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett), tries to assuage the novice student’s trepidation, but the severity in her assistant Miss Tanner (Alida Valli) puts her very much on edge. This isn’t the first student disappearance from the school and as the days go by it becomes glaringly obvious there is something amiss in this esteemed establishment. When Suzy attempts to mingle with her fellow dance students, they are not exactly welcoming, but she eventually befriends Sara (Stefania Casini), who then disappears after being stalked by an unseen malevolence. With her life in jeopardy, Suzy is now forced to uncover the dark secret that lies at the heart of this accursed institution.