The Horror of It All

by Adam Rockoff

  Horror Commandment: Red Dragon is a poor imitation of the classic Manhunter.

  Grievance: Red Dragon is the superior film.

  The amount of animus directed at Brett Ratner is so disproportionate to what the filmmaker deserves that I’m fully convinced the dude must have done something in a previous life to warrant this karmic punishment. Money Talks and the Rush Hour films aren’t your cup of tea? Okay, I get it. Not mine either. But there are many worse filmmakers who have made much worse films. Still, when it was announced that Ratner would be directing the fourth entry of the series based on Thomas Harris’s cultured cannibal, there was a collective gasp. The directorial lineage of the series thus far was Michael Mann, Jonathan Demme, Ridley Scott, and now . . . Brett Ratner.

  In 1992, when The Silence of the Lambs swept the four major categories at the sixty-fourth Academy Awards—the first time this occurred since 1975’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest—there was a rush to revisit Silence’s predecessor, 1986’s Manhunter, based on Harris’s novel Red Dragon. Soon came the whispers that Manhunter was actually superior to Silence. It was called an unforgivably ignored masterpiece that was finally receiving its just due. But although Manhunter could never usurp Silence in the public’s imagination—Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of incarcerated killer Hannibal Lecter all but exsanguinates Brian Cox’s—it could at least claim the mantle as the rightful adaptation of Red Dragon. So Ratner was fucked from the start.

  What’s interesting to recall, however, is just how irrelevant Manhunter was upon its original release. For one thing, it bombed, making back only $8 million of its $15 million budget. The critics also hated it, although it’s clear they were really using Manhunter as a way to critique Miami Vice, director Michael Mann’s television series that pretty much was the zeitgeist at the time. Looking back, I was surprised to see that Manhunter was released at the peak of Miami Vice mania. I could have sworn the series had by then long overstayed its welcome, and was even more shocked to learn that it actually ran all the way through 1990. Most of the criticism leveled against Mann alluded to his reputation as a self-indulgent filmmaker, a specious claim that meant he had the balls not to be boring. Not surprisingly, it’s the once-derided aspects of the film—lighting, sound design, acting—that were now championed by the revisionists.

  If there’s one thing Ratner is not, it’s stupid, and he was more than aware that both critics and fans would be out for blood. Anticipating such, he made a series of shrewd preemptive strikes with Red Dragon. Writer Ted Tally, who had won the Oscar for Silence, was brought in to script. Manhunter cinematographer Dante Spinotti returned with an entirely new aesthetic, replacing the cold blues of the original with a muted color scheme, especially in the scenes set in the Dolarhyde Nursing Home. It was the casting, however, that was the real stroke of genius. The roles were all filled with critical darlings—Edward Norton, Harvey Keitel, Ralph Fiennes, Emily Watson, and Philip Seymour Hoffman replaced William Petersen, Dennis Farina, Tom Noonan, Joan Allen, and Stephen Lang. Anthony Hopkins reprised his role as Lecter. It is in this pivotal role that Red Dragon far surpasses Manhunter. Brian Cox has his backers—mainly annoying contrarians—but he can’t hold a candle to Sir Tony. Half the time I can’t tell if Cox is British or recovering from a mild stroke. In fact, I actually prefer Hopkins’s interpretation of Lecter in Red Dragon to that in Silence. It’s less hammy. More manipulative. Irredeemably evil without the shtick. Providing the Tooth Fairy with Will Graham’s home address is a helluva lot worse than telling Clarice Starling she’s not more than one generation from poor white trash.

  One aspect of Manhunter that critics did laud, however, was Mann’s decision to portray Dolarhyde not as a caricature—some drooling lunatic—but as a deeply troubled human being. Noonan is always great, and at six feet seven inches he can’t help but come across as creepy as hell, but Fiennes brings a sense of pathos to the character absent in the original. Ratner takes extraordinary care in reminding us that Dolarhyde, as Graham says, “wasn’t born a monster” but “was made one through years and years of abuse.” This notion is reinforced by chilling audio flashbacks, played over contemporary scenes of Dolarhyde’s crumbling childhood prison, which detail snippets of the abuse he suffered at the hand of his sadistic grandmother.

  The biggest difference between the films lies in their endings, with Manhunter heralded as a tour de force of filmmaking while Red Dragon is dismissed as typical Hollywood pabulum. In Manhunter, Graham barges through a glass window and makes a beeline for Dolarhyde. It’s a moment of catharsis as much as strategy, as his obsession with the case has reached a boil. Shot in slow motion with the strains of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” played over the scene, it’s great cinema. It’s also a tad absurd.

  In Red Dragon, Dolarhyde fakes his own death, burns down his entire estate, and then sneaks off to Graham’s home to seek revenge. The fact that his final targets are those closest to Graham (his wife and son), whom the detective himself put in jeopardy by his actions, raises the stakes exponentially.

  I’ll concede that Dolarhyde’s Red Dragon death ventures a bit too close to Michael Myers/Jason Voorhees territory. That said, the way Graham disarms Dolarhyde as the killer holds his son at gunpoint is pretty inventive. The terrified boy has wet himself, and Graham mocks him cruelly. This triggers Dolarhyde’s memory of his own similar abuse and prompts him to refocus his rage on Graham, not his son.

  The bottom line is this: sometimes Hollywood doesn’t fuck it up. And if we’re willing to suspend our prejudice against Ratner, studio largesse, and unnecessary remakes, it becomes evident that Red Dragon is one of these times.

  Horror Commandment: Alien is brilliant.

  Grievance: Alien is boring.

  In the proposal for this book, which I put together in order to convince the publisher that my idea had merit, I included a summary of each chapter. For this one, I promised to point out how “Alien is an extraordinarily boring film. And worse, a rip-off of Mario Bava’s equally boring sci-fi epic, Planet of the Vampires.” The truth is, I had never seen Planet of the Vampires. But I had heard so many times about how it provided the template for Alien that I took it as a matter of faith. Eventually, I got around to watching it. Oh, my god. What an interminable piece of crap. So my apologies to Ridley Scott—he absolutely did not rip off Bava’s film.

  Having said that, Alien is still a snoozefest.

  Alien opens with one of the most boring sequences since 2001: A Space Odyssey, although mercifully much shorter.III While I have nothing against films with a slow build, the first “face hugger” doesn’t make its appearance until thirty-five minutes in. That’s a pretty long time to go with little to do but admire the scenery and get to know a rather unlikeable bunch of people. My biggest gripe, however, is that despite all things to the contrary, Alien isn’t really that scary. In fact, I happen to find Event Horizon much more frightening (no joke, it’s a criminally underrated film). Scott even undercuts the few appearances of the creature by telegraphing its presence with a stray tentacle or string of intergalactic drool. I’m now reminded of Hitchcock’s famous interview where he pontificates about the difference between suspense and shock (unsurprisingly, he prefers suspense), but in a movie as deliberate as Alien, you need a few good cheap scares. That’s why my favorite scene is the creature’s appearance in the airshaft with Tom Skerritt. Jesus Christ, check my underwear.

  I don’t mean to insinuate that there’s nothing to recommend about the film, which most consider the greatest sci-fi/horror hybrid ever made. The sound design is brilliant and the sets, awe inspiring. At a time when Star Wars claimed space as a world of childlike wonder, Alien proved that the universe was still filled with very bad things. The aliens themselves, designed by Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger, have become iconic monsters, the inspiration for an incalculable number of interstellar baddies. Even the archetype of Ripley, imitated so many times since that it’s become, well, an archetype, was relatively fresh in 1979. Her
transition from by-the-book company woman to all-around badass gave a generation of women’s studies majors fodder for term papers and a generation of fanboys a funny feeling down below.

  The scene that everybody remembers, and admittedly, the film’s crowning achievement, is when an alien baby bursts out of John Hurt’s chest and scurries away from the stunned crew. Allegedly, the cast had no idea this was going to happen, and their surprise captured on celluloid is as genuine as the audience’s. I never bought this. With the incredible amount of preparation such a scene would entail, are you going to tell me that no one knew, or thought to ask, how the scene was going to play out? After listening to the DVD commentary, however, I stand corrected. If we’re going to believe Ridley Scott—and I have no reason not to—the actors really were kept in the dark and certainly weren’t ready for the creature’s violent emergence. The entire “birth” was filmed in a single take with multiple cameras. So as good an actress as Veronica Cartwright may be, her blood-spattered look of utter shock is as real as it gets.

  The Alien franchise trudged on with 1986’s Aliens—The Godfather: Part II of horror, meaning many people feel that James Cameron’s sequel actually surpasses the original. Well, it certainly moves a lot faster. Alien 3 is today best known as the film that nearly ended David Fincher’s career before it started. I think there are a few more sequels—at least one in which the aliens battle the creatures from the Predator movies—but since I can’t remember a single thing about any of them, how much can there really be to say?

  Horror Commandment: Halloween is the greatest slasher film. Period. End of conversation.

  Grievance: Friday the 13th is better . . . or at least as good.

  When the drafters of the Declaration of Independence declared “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” clearly they did not mean that Halloween was the greatest slasher film ever made. That said, judging from the reaction of fans and critics alike, this is exactly what they meant. Don’t get me wrong. Halloween is a slasher film. And a remarkable film, period. I have referred to it at different times and in different places as “the first true slasher film,” “the granddaddy of slasher films,” and “the quintessential slasher film.” What I will say now is that it seems that as the stature of Halloween grows, that of Friday the 13th declines. And that’s a shame, because they’re both excellent films.

  Their plots are equally preposterous, or, at the very least, highly unlikely. Halloween asks us to believe that a virtual catatonic has waited fifteen years to bust out of prison and go on a rampage, while Friday expects us to accept something similar about the mother of a dead child. But from the way that critics cream over Halloween’s script, you would think it’s Beckett. It’s a good tight story, but certainly not markedly better than Friday’s.

  The characters in Halloween are no more complex or well defined than their Camp Crystal Lake counterparts. Yet again, if you listen to the pundits, Nancy Loomis and P. J. Soles are the second coming of Hepburn and Bergman, while Friday’s collection of unknowns are unworthy of a high school play. In fact, I’d actually make the argument that as fine as Jamie Lee Curtis is, Adrienne King is a much better actress. Although actually younger than Curtis, she brings a depth and maturity to her role as Alice that Curtis never approaches with Laurie Strode. As for the old-timers, sure, Betsy Palmer is hilariously over-the-top, but Donald Pleasence chews so much scenery that I’m convinced he’s really looking for Michael’s knife in order to extricate the wooden splinters from between his teeth.

  Why is Halloween beloved while Friday is despised (except by its hard-core fans)? One word: blood. Halloween is sterile; Friday the 13th is an abattoir. And if there’s one thing the critics hate, it’s gore. In Carpenter’s film, a victim is bloodlessly impaled on a door. Michael hides under a sheet, doing his best Casper the (Un)Friendly Ghost impression. A body is splayed out on a bed underneath a headstone. These are striking images to be sure, but hardly graphic. Cunningham on the other hand forgoes any semblance of subtlety. Jack gets an arrow through the neck, Marcie an ax to the face. And poor Mama Voorhees loses her head.

  By the time that Tom Savini joined Friday the 13th, fresh off of Dawn of the Dead, he was already something of a living legend. By comparison, I can’t even name the person who handled the makeup effects on Halloween. Simply put, you don’t hire Savini and then handcuff him, any more than you would buy a Ferrari and keep it in the garage.

  What’s unfortunate is that most people assume that a lack of subtlety implies a lack of suspense, which doesn’t have to be true at all. The first interview I ever gave was way back in the late nineties for the website Buried.com. I discussed watching Friday the 13th with Alex; the two of us were working for the same company but were not yet business partners. Alex is a casual film buff but certainly no horror nut. He did however first see Alien from an eight-millimeter print projected on someone’s basement wall, which I always thought was super cool. Leaving the movie, I asked Alex which was his favorite scene. His response shocked me. It wasn’t one of the unforgettable kills or the even more unforgettable ending, which made it a requirement for the maniac in all subsequent slashers to return for one last scare. Instead, it was a rather nothing two-minute sequence of Alice walking around the cabin, making coffee, waiting for Bill to return (which of course he never does). Before Alex brought it to my attention, I barely remembered the scene, but looking back, I was struck by how incredibly suspenseful it actually is. In the interview, I even invoked Hitchcock when describing it. A bit of hyperbole? Perhaps. But it does support my larger point that Cunningham never received his just due for these types of expertly constructed moments.

  Had Carpenter shot the exact same scene we’d still be talking about his uncanny restraint. Had it been Bob Clark, it would be his genius for suggestion. Romero, fuhgeddaboudit. Making coffee would be interpreted as a metaphor for the encroachment of modernity into the untouched wilderness. But Sean Cunningham? He’s just a hack who needs to fill some time between mindless murders.

  I have no idea if Cunningham is particularly bothered by this perception of him. I suspect not, since in interviews he usually mocks those who point to Friday the 13th as high art (or even those who refer to it as a “film”). Then again, this could be an elaborate defense mechanism born from years of being told your industry-changing movie is a piece of shit. Either way, Cunningham has always seemed to have a sense of humor about his involvement with the series. Which I suppose is a lot easier when you’re laughing all the way to the bank.

  Horror Commandment: An American Werewolf in London is the best werewolf film of 1981.

  Alternate Horror Commandment: The Howling is the best werewolf film of 1981.

  Grievance: Wolfen is as good, if not better, than both.

  To steal a quote from Clive Barker, “I like my horror dark.” You’d think this would be par for the course among my contemporaries, but you’d be wrong. Indeed, I’ve found that horror fans generally love nothing more than to inject a little comedy into the proceedings, from The Evil Dead to Return of the Living Dead, as long as it’s done respectfully, whatever that means. Not me. After a horror movie I want to feel like I’ve been punched in the gut, not tickled in the tummy.

  So you can understand why I wasn’t particularly giddy with anticipation when I started reading in Fangoria about two new werewolf films, The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, that promised to reinvent the moribund werewolf genre with as many laughs as scares. With coverage focusing almost exclusively on the makeup special effects, created by rising stars Rick Baker and his protégé Rob Bottin, it was clear these weren’t going to be your father’s Wolf Man.

  Both Howling director Joe Dante and American Werewolf director John Landis were first-generation Monster Kids, horror-savvy fanboys—long before the term was coined—weaned on Famous Monsters of Filmland and TV broadcasts of the Universal classics. Dante got his start in the business working for Roger Corman and had just finished Piranha when he decided to adapt
Gary Brandner’s novel The Howling for the screen. He originally had Baker slated to handle the effects, who at the time was best known for creating the creatures in Star Wars’s Mos Eisley Cantina. Although Dante and Landis were friendly contemporaries, when Landis heard this he allegedly freaked out, as almost ten years before, Baker had promised to work on his werewolf film.

  Way back in 1969, while working as a production assistant on location in Yugoslavia, Landis had witnessed a Gypsy funeral. It inspired him to write An American Werewolf in London. He had been trying to get the film made for almost a decade to no avail. Studios were flummoxed by the script’s unique brand of horror and comedy. They found it either “too scary to be funny, or too funny to be scary.” (This is my exact problem with the film, although history would prove both me and the studio executives wrong.) It wasn’t until Landis had built up enough goodwill with Animal House and The Blues Brothers that PolyGram decided to take a shot (according to David Konow’s Reel Terror, a $250,000 producer fee to company heads Jon Peters and Peter Guber didn’t hurt either). So even though Dante was further along than Landis, Baker kept his promise to his friend and signed on to An American Werewolf in London. As a consolation prize, Dante got Rob Bottin, which, in retrospect, was a helluva consolation.

  The Howling and An American Werewolf in London came out a few months apart in 1981. The werewolf transformations in both films were, and still are, as jaw-dropping as promised, and the films themselves are now considered classics. Although I find both of them deeply flawed, I prefer American Werewolf for the simple reason that it’s scarier. The most frightening part of The Howling is how casually Christopher Stone slaps wife Dee Wallace when she confronts him about his infidelity. In fact, at least for me, it’s much more fun to try to spot Dante’s numerous inside jokesIV than it is to focus on the film. American Werewolf star David Naughton should also get a special prize for agreeing to go full-frontal in the cold London winter.