The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  The plot to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, the first of the “Three Mothers Trilogy”, is very simple. Although true to the Italian terrors of these years, Argento refuses to adopt an entirely linear narrative; instead he makes an assault on the senses with an intensity of colour, contrasted by deep shadows that threaten and lighting that evokes an air of the surreal as this hell-bound institution seeks to haul you asunder. Accompanying this vivid display is a typically disturbing soundtrack from Goblin, which is probably the most unsettling score in the history of horror cinema. Suspiria is a stylized sensual masterpiece, suggesting menace at almost every turn, yet these lurid hallways and corridors were influenced by the seeming innocence of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a film that made such an impression on Argento as a child. The script to what has been described as a perverse fairy tale was inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s drug-induced fantasy, Confessions of an Opium Eater or Suspiria De Profundis, and was to take place in a children’s school, but had to be amended owing to concerns about the controversy it would have undoubtedly caused.

  Argento once again proved himself the master of horror cinema and unlike so many of his contemporaries he raised the tension from the film’s opening frames, engaging a series of visual shocks before traumatizing the audience with two characteristically elaborate death scenes. Their graphic portrayal was to live on with cinemagoers, but unlike so many of the gialli movies of the period, this excess was only repeated when Sara became encased in razor wire while being pursued through the attic. Suspiria allowed Argento to explore his fascination with witches and in so doing he created this multi-layered magnum opus that will invite examination for many years to come.

  NEW YORK AUTHOR Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) flies out to Rome to promote his new murder mystery “Tenebrae”. He is met by his agent Bullmer (John Saxon), who has been busy lining up an interview on a talk show. As he arrives in Rome, a woman is caught trying to steal a copy of the book from a shop. Although she convinces the security guard to turn a blind eye, someone is discreetly watching her. When she returns to the comfort of her flat, she is attacked by an assailant who forces the pages of the stolen book into her mouth and then slashes her throat with a razor. The razor is very similar to that which is referenced in Neal’s book. Following the discovery of the body, the writer is questioned by Detective Germani (Giuliano Gemma). Soon after he receives a letter and then a grating phone call from the killer, whose mission he reveals is to eliminate those he considers perverts. It’s not long before two lesbians are murdered by the black-gloved killer, whose modus operandi again emulates the murders in Neal’s latest bestseller. As murder follows upon murder Dario Argento saves his goriest scene until the last, in a stylish sequence that would one day draw comparisons with Saw (2004).

  When he set out to write Tenebrae, which has also gone by the names Tenebre, Unsane, Shadow and Sotto Gli Occhi dell’Assassino, Dario Argento put aside his intriguing “Three Mothers Trilogy” to direct one of his most stylish films of the period. His latest movie harked back to a plot device first seen twelve years before in his landmark giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). There would be the customary twists to the tale, along with an abundance of red herrings, which remained true to the format of these vaunted Italian mysteries. Inspired by Andrzej Zulawski’s art house terror Possession (1981), he combined his visual mastery with the photography of Luciano Tovoli to create a washed-out cityscape with muted colours that were the antithesis of the shadows intimated in the film’s title. This bland vision was also very much at odds with the decadent splendour observed in both Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) and left the impression of an urban sterility lying in a world without soul. Only when the blood began to flow did the audience get a taste of the deep red hues of his previous films. However, even these appeared somewhat restrained until the murder of Veronica Lario just as the film coursed to its suspense-filled denouement. This was a return to the Argento of a few years past, as Veronica lost her arm to the killer’s axe and blood spurted freely across her apartment. Tovoli excelled with his long smooth-flowing panoramas, and then moved in to introduce the close-up shots that delivered the visceral shocks Argento fans had come to expect. Goblin returned to write the score and once again captured the atmosphere Argento and his team worked so hard to create.

  Their hard work was unfortunately cut by four seconds by the BBFC prior to the film’s cinematic release in 1983, specifically to Veronica holding her bloody stump following the arm-chopping scene. Worse was to follow when this cut version was transferred to video later that same year; it was cited as one of the offensive video nasties in March 1984 and remained on the list until the panic was finally forgotten. Poor Veronica’s blood bath wasn’t to see an unedited release until 2003.

  ACOLLEGE FRATERNITY DREAMS up a bizarre initiation game by arranging for one of their girlfriends, Alana (Jamie Lee Curtis), to lure a naive young pledge into bed then switch with a corpse at a New Year’s Eve party. Wrapped in the cold embrace of the cadaver, the poor fellow quite literally goes mad and has to be hauled away to a mental institution. Several years later, it is graduation time and, the fraternity holds a fancy dress party on an old steam train. While the wealthy college kids enjoy their masquerade, a killer slips aboard and all too soon embarks upon the slaughter of the revellers, donning their costumes and the accompanying array of masks once he has disposed of them. For Jamie Lee Curtis this will be yet another chase through the shadows and a life or death showdown with a masked killer.

  Terror Train was made soon after Halloween (1978) and similar to Carpenter’s original relies on building the atmosphere rather than the gore of that same year’s Friday the 13th. For Canadian director Roger Spottiswoode this was this first of many appearances in the director’s chair, having already worked as an editor for Sam Peckinpah, most notably on Straw Dogs (1971) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). He was lucky enough to have British cinematographer John Alcott on his team, a man who had excelled alongside Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980). The pair would ensure this was a claustrophobic entry to this fledgling genre, which managed the suspense particularly during the chase sequences and kept much of the bloodshed to the imagination of the assembled audience, although the severed head was still quite graphic for the day. True to slasher lore the killer hid away behind a mask as a series of red herrings were thrown in, amongst them a young David Copperfield who appeared as a menacing magician. For Jamie Lee Curtis this wouldn’t quite match the success of Halloween, The Fog (1980) and Prom Night (1980) but it would acquire a recognition as one of the more stylish slasher releases of the period, although the obvious lack of gore almost saw it consigned to obscurity.

  TOBE HOOPER’S LEGENDARY movie opens in the stifling temperature of a Texas summer. There are reports of graves being violated and corpses assembled as gruesome sculptures in a distant cemetery. Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her wheelchair-bound brother, Franklin (Paul A. Partain), take it upon themselves to visit the cemetery to ensure their grandfather’s grave has not been desecrated. They travel with three friends, Sally’s boyfriend Jerry (Allen Danziger), her best friend Pam (Teri McMinn), and Pam’s boyfriend Kirk (William Vail). The grave, they learn, has not been defiled, and safe in this knowledge they decide to continue to the old family homestead.

  As they drive deeper into this isolated rural wasteland, Tobe Hooper builds the sense of foreboding with references to an abandoned slaughterhouse, soon after which their van is smeared with blood by a demented hitchhiker. The sense of unease persists when they attempt to fill the van with petrol; the strange attendant issues a warning about returning to their former home. The house, it turns out, was left deserted years ago. Undeterred, the kids explore the area and in the oppressive heat come upon a large farmhouse surrounded by dozens of abandoned vehicles. Kirk walks up to the dismal house with his girlfriend Pam; his knock, however, goes unanswered. Convinced he can he hear the sound of a
distressed animal he enters the ill-kept hallway. Within moments, a huge masked man (Gunnar Hansen) we will come to know as Leatherface stands before him. This masked ogre raises a sledgehammer and slams it into his head. This assault of the senses takes place in mere seconds. Kirk’s lifeless body is dragged away into the back room, his fate unknown.

  When Kirk fails to return, Pam goes into the house to trace his whereabouts. She screams in terror when she discovers sculptures suspended from the ceiling fashioned with human skulls, furniture decorated with bones and skulls and the floor littered with bones, feathers and traces of blood. She becomes Leatherface’s next victim, a meat hook gouged into her back. This scene presented the most brutal slaughter of a female character in a commercially distributed film and significantly altered the boundaries in what was acceptable in relation to cinematic violence. Hanging aloft, she is forced to watch her boyfriend’s dismemberment at the hands of this mindless brute and his incessant chainsaw.

  When night falls Leatherface’s sledgehammer dispatches Jerry as he tries to save Pam, who is barely alive in the freezer. Franklin is the next to meet his maker, this time slaughtered by the psychotic giant’s chainsaw. Only Sally is left; frightened for her life she takes flight with Leatherface in hot pursuit. She manages to escape his chainsaw, but is later captured at the petrol station by the outlandish attendant and escorted back to the infernal house. Bound to a chair she once again finds herself in the company of the hitchhiker and now has the pleasure of being introduced to his dysfunctional family, the petrol attendant, an age-old grandpa and the silent figure of Leatherface.

  So begins a night of torment, climaxed by a main course of human flesh served by a now feminized Leatherface. Against all odds, Sally escapes by throwing herself through the window. Armed with his noisome chainsaw, Leatherface and the deranged hitchhiker give chase, but the hitchhiker is killed by a truck. When the driver pulls up and tries to help, Leatherface mounts a frenzied assault on the cab. Only when the driver hits him full in the face with a wrench does the pair escape, with Sally narrowly eluding death in the back of a passing pickup truck. Just before the curtain goes down, she is seen laughing at the sight of the aggravated Leatherface, the unremitting buzz of his chainsaw still desperate for human flesh, bathed in the first light of a new dawn. Sally it would appear has completely lost her mind.

  Filmed in a gruelling schedule lasting only four weeks, the highly controversial yet hugely influential The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was portrayed as a sequence of true events. This brought the sensation seekers out in their droves and added to the film’s success. It was, however, a ruse employed by Tobe Hooper to misinform his audience, just as he felt the American government had when they misled the country over Watergate, the petrol crisis and the atrocities of the Vietnam War. The sensationalism of everyday news reports had come to alarm him; he saw humankind attempting to hide behind a mask, one that obscured the true face of the monster. The grotesque Leatherface was incarcerated in his own mask; this monstrous visage, however, disguised the anguish within and consequently engendered a bizarre sense of pathos. Other observers would later note the underlying commentary in the desolate landscape symbolizing the end of the American dream. As sadistic as the film most certainly was, it was forthright in its use of social commentary, and was the first horror movie to address such concerns.

  Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein provided an element of Hooper’s inspiration. It was the moral schizophrenia, observed in the case of Houston-based Elmer Wayne Henley, that really caught the director’s attention. As a teenager, he had been involved in the abduction, rape and murder of almost thirty teenage boys, some of whom were his friends. When arrested, Henley admitted to the crimes and freely accepted he must be punished; this ethical perversity became the basis for Leatherface and his deranged family, although Henley’s lawyers did later appeal against his sentence. The idea for letting a chainsaw loose in his film came to Hooper in the hardware section of a crowded store; it provided the quickest means of getting through the throng. Icelandic–American actor Gunnar Hansen took the preparation for his role as Leatherface a little more seriously; he visited a school for those with learning disabilities, where he could study the pupils first hand and create the character both he and Hooper had discussed.

  Hooper struggled to find a distributor for the film. Even though he had minimized the gore, it was still considered far too violent which in turn made it a potential risk. Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) had already demonstrated such extremes were viable at the box office, in a film in which he had also engaged a murderous chainsaw. Bryanston Pictures finally took on the distribution; their terms almost resulted in disaster for Hooper, with his cast and crew going through the courts to ensure they were paid. When the company folded in 1976, due to Louis Peraino being convicted on obscenity charges following his involvement with Deep Throat four years before, New Line Cinema acquired the distribution rights. They were a little more amenable in agreeing to pay a greater percentage of the gross profits. Hooper’s problems, however, were far from being over. The critics were none too pleased with the excess and as a result his film was banned in many countries, including the UK. It did eventually see a limited release owing to the actions of more forward-thinking local councils that were prepared to grant a licence. At the time of the film’s banning, the word “chainsaw” was prohibited from the title of any film, resulting in many producers changing the title of their low-budget money earners.

  It wasn’t until 1999, when the artistic worth of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been accepted, that the BBFC passed the film uncut. With the tabloid press headlines well in the past, critics now applauded the “bloodless depiction of violence”, as they had done with John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Its historical relevance was reappraised, acknowledging its part in laying the foundations for the terrors that had already followed. Hooper’s ingenuity originated several key elements in the slasher genre, principally the use of the power tool as a murder weapon and the portrayal of the faceless killer. While the female protagonists were subjected to sadistic violence, the spotlight was thrown to the final girl scenario, the chaste heroine who would become the sole survivor and outlive her male counterparts. Ridley Scott paid tribute to the film in its inspiration for Alien (1979), while Alexandre Aja has been keen to extol on its impact during the early years of his career.

  Five films would follow, three of which were sequels, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (1986), Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) and The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1994), which is also known as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation; and more recently, a reimagining of the original, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), and the prequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006). A video game was created for the Atari 2600 shortly after the film’s release to video in 1982. Its violent nature caused considerable controversy and many stores refused to carry it. It wasn’t until 1991, at what was a low point in comic book horror, that Nothstar Comics published “Leatherface”. Avatar released their version of a comic inspired by the film in 2005, and in 2006 the DC Comics imprint Wildstorm started publishing a series of stories using Hooper’s premise.

  THE THIRTEEN WOMEN were once members of an exclusive girl’s college sorority. Although they have gone on to new lives they have kept in touch and now write to a clairvoyant swami (C. Henry Gordon). He sends their horoscopes by mail, each strangely predicting a terrible death. Little do the women know the clairvoyant is under the hypnotic influence of his secretary, the desirable mixed-race Eurasian Ursula Georgi (Myrna Loy). In the days when she was a student at the college, she was rejected by the sisterhood because of her mixed race. This sensuous creature now plots her revenge. The mysterious letters continue to be delivered, with the women completely unaware they are being manipulated by the person they once wronged. The doom-laden prophesies inevitably begin to become true. Some of the women band together, led by Laura Stanhope (Irene Dunne), to try to stop th
e sinister swami, not knowing they are the victims of a meticulously crafted plan. There will be those in the group who are deceived into killing themselves or each other. The clairvoyant also falls quite literally into Ursula’s grasp; he commits suicide before an oncoming subway train. At the last, only Laura remains alive. She also has fears concerning her horoscope, but hers is somewhat different, as it predicts the death of her son Bobby before his birthday in three days’ time. Ursula resorts to more direct measures to ensure Bobby’s death comes to pass. With the help of Laura’s chauffeur, she tries to kill young Bobby first with poisoned candy and then an explosive ball, but to no avail. Laura realizes someone other than the swami is behind these deaths so she now gets in touch with the local police. Sergeant Barry Clive, who is already familiar with the case, gets involved and is determined to keep Bobby from harm. As the film charges to a climax so befitting these years, the detective catches the dagger-wielding Ursula as she accosts Laura on a train. She flees to the rear carriage before falling to her own death.

  George Archainbaud’s Thirteen Women was also known as Hypnose, and sadly only fifty-nine of the original seventy-three minutes are still known to exist of this classic psychological thriller, which contains so many hallmarks of the later sorority slasher. On its release, not even the beautiful art deco design, or the intensity in Max Steiner’s score, or the low-cut clinging gowns could assuage the poor reviews. This forced the legendary producer David O. Selznick to take the film out of the theatres and edit fourteen minutes, giving the version that we have today such an unsatisfactorily sudden ending.