The Horror of It All

by Adam Rockoff

  There’s an unintentionally dark moment in the special features on American Werewolf’s DVD release. Landis is being interviewed about the climactic scene in Piccadilly Circus when he says, “No stunt is worth hurting someone for.” One can’t help but flash back to the tragic accident on the set of Landis’s Twilight Zone: The Movie in which a stunt gone awry claimed the life of star Vic Morrow as well as two illegally hired child actors.V

  Between these two titans of werewolf cinema slipped in another entry, no less unconventional. Michael Wadleigh’s Wolfen took a completely different approach to lycanthropic lore. In it, transformation is a conscious choice on the part of Native American shape-shifters, as opposed to an unwanted condition inflicted upon them by some unfortunate accident. In a Fangoria interview, Wadleigh, a documentarian who won the Oscar for his epic Woodstock, calls Wolfen a “political thriller” and comes across as kind of an asshole. Despite the director’s obvious disdain for the genre, Wolfen is actually the scariest of the werewolf film troika. That the killers are actual wolves—albeit imbued with some Indian spirit—as opposed to a human/wolf amalgam, adds a layer of realism absent from similar films.

  This is not to say that Wolfen is a perfect film. Far from it. The ubiquitous thermal-imaging effect, designed to represent the wolves’ point of view and considered cutting-edge at the time, grows old fairly quickly. Half a dozen times I thought it was artifacting on the DVD. There’s also a rather extraneous subplot about an antiterrorism organization, which, Wadleigh explains, was watered down by producers and the studio brass at Orion Pictures. Wadleigh also blames Orion for what he perceives as their mishandling of the film’s marketing campaign, insinuating the studio’s dire financial straits clouded their thinking. No doubt Wolfen was a challenging film to sell. But since Orion didn’t declare bankruptcy until 1991, and didn’t close its doors for good until 1998 (picking up a handful of Best Picture winners on the way), Wadleigh’s complaints feel more like sour grapes.

  Those looking for something a little different from the tongue-in-cheek humor of The Howling and American Werewolf should really give Wolfen a shot. In addition to the surprisingly graphic murders—a severed hand here, a severed head there—and the distinctive urban setting, Albert Finney gives a wonderful performance as a veteran cop slowly coming to terms with the truth behind the carnage. Because Annie was one of the only VHS tapes my family had—I know, beyond bizarre for a family who owned a video store—when Wolfen finally hit cable it took me a while to get past the fact that Daddy Warbucks was a cigar-smoking, lovemaking, gun-wielding werewolf hunter. That said, if you can buy Gregory Hines as a karate-kicking coroner who moonlights as a sniper, this probably won’t be a problem for you.

  * * *

  I. Another of her arbitrary rules was that I couldn’t watch horror movies in which the victims were killed on camera. The aftermath of the killing was fine to show, but not the act itself. That rule lasted about fifteen minutes.

  II. Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s cowriter and sometime muse, originally wrote the starring role for herself, but the US financiers wanted an American lead instead. However, according to Asia Argento, Dario’s daughter, it was Dario who didn’t want Daria for the role.

  III. Apropos of nothing, in college when I couldn’t sleep, I would sometimes pop in a classic movie that I was supposed to love but that I really found ridiculously boring. 2001 was always a favorite for this purpose. Others were Nashville and 81/2.

  IV. Dante names many of the characters after famous horror film directors. There are also cameos by the likes of Roger Corman and Forrest Ackerman. Various references to other wolf-related ephemera are sprinkled throughout, like a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl and a cartoon of the Three Little Pigs.

  V. Morrow was decapitated by the blade of a helicopter when it crashed on him and the two children. After a nine-month trial, Landis was eventually found innocent of involuntary manslaughter.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Reality Bites

  Call me a killjoy, but I don’t find anything particularly funny about Charlie Sheen.

  I realize that most people think of him as a harmless buffoon. He pals around with a harem of porn stars, lays waste to hotel rooms, and babbles on about “Adonis DNA” and “tiger blood.” Unfortunately, the public at large—partly responsible for at one time making him the highest-paid actor on TV—and talk show hosts who continue to enable him (particularly nauseating is watching Jay Leno slobber over him, especially since Leno’s wife, Mavis, has done such wonderful work on behalf of disenfranchised women) have either forgotten or chosen to ignore his very recent psychopathic behavior. And I’m not even talking about the bizarre 1990 incident in which his then-fiancée Kelly Preston was accidentally shot, leaving her so rattled she was forced to marry John Travolta and become a Scientologist.I

  Sheen is a bigot and a serial abuser of women. In 1996, he was accused of beating girlfriend Brittany Ashland so badly that she needed stitches to close the wound, after which he threatened to kill her if she reported the assault. Years later, he called his ex-wife and the mother of his two daughters, actress Denise Richards, a nigger, wished cancer upon her, and threatened to kill her too. Only his most rabid defenders would have been surprised when two years later, according to a court filing, he told his estranged wife, Brooke Mueller, “I will cut your head off, put it in a box and send it to your mom!” During a well-publicized 2009 feud with producer Chuck Lorre, Sheen continued to refer to him as “Chaim Levine” (Lorre’s given name is Charles Levine). To some, it reeked of anti-Semitism. More disturbing to me was the complete lack of self-awareness by one Carlos Irwin Estévez.

  Bottom line: Sheen is just a pussy, much like other celebrity abusers (or any abuser for that matter), from Mel Gibson and Axl RoseII to that rapper who showed how tough he was by biting his girlfriend.

  But Sheen is also a fucking moron, which is how he plays into this chapter.

  As the story goes, in 1991 Sheen was at a party when he was given a so-called snuff film by Film Threat magazine founder Chris Gore. Somehow convinced the murder on the VHS tape was real, a rattled Sheen contacted the FBI, who informed him they were already on the case. According to numerous sources, the tape was then traced to an “early distributor” of the film, journalist Chas Balun, often referred to fondly as the Lester Bangs of the horror set.

  In Shade Rupe’s marvelous collection of interviews, Dark Stars Rising: Conversations from the Outer Realms, Balun gives the definitive account of this monumental misunderstanding. According to Balun, he was approached by an acquaintance who asked for a favor: for his birthday, would Balun send him the most outrageous tape from his extensive collection? Balun went a step further. He filled an entire two-hour cassette with cinematic atrocities, beginning with Flower of Flesh and Blood, the second film in the notorious Japanese Guinea Pig series. At the beginning of the compilation, Balun also included his name and the quote “Anything worth doing is worth OVERdoing,” attributed to himself. A couple of months later, Balun received a call from the acquaintance, warning him that the FBI would probably be contacting him (they never did, despite numerous stories to the contrary). You see, the acquaintance had passed the compilation on to Chris Gore, setting the events in motion.

  It didn’t take long for Guinea Pig’s veracity to be called into question, not least of all because of the accompanying documentary entitled Making of Guinea Pig. In fact, were it not for Sheen tripping over the role of good Samaritan, it’s doubtful very many people in America would have heard of the Guinea Pig films at all. Although a few of the films have what I guess could be called a plot, the majority of it is just ultra-graphic scenes of torture and mutilation. They were made in the 1980s by producer Satoru Ogura and adapted in part from the horror manga of Hideshi Hino, who also directed two of the films.

  As competent as most of the effects are, only someone without the most elementary sense of how filmmaking works could possibly think these films are real. And despite what one mi
ght think of Sheen as a person, or even as a thespian, he’s been around enough sets (and presumably he’s been sober on some of them) to know what’s what. Did it never cross his mind to wonder why a down-and-dirty snuff film would be shot from multiple angles? Or be edited at all, much less competently with establishing shots and close-ups? And why would somebody with no compunction about showing the graphic dismemberment and disemboweling of a woman still adhere to the arcane Japanese practice of avoiding showing genitalia?

  Of course, although Sheen might have been the most high-profile dupe, he was hardly the first to be fooled by cinematic slaughter marketed as the real thing. In 1976, a film was released whose very title was predicated on this constructed reality.

  It’s quite fitting that this sleazy tale begins five years earlier with the husband-and-wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay, among the most famous—and certainly most unique—exploitation duos. Although their bread and butter was sexploitation films like The Touch of Her Flesh, they also dabbled in the occasional horror item; their best known is probably the mad-Yeti favorite Shriek of the Mutilated. Roberta was also something of a maverick, graduating to hard-core pornography in the mid-seventies when a female director in the business was a rarity.

  In 1971, hoping to capitalize on the Tate-LaBianca murders, which were still fresh in the public’s mind, the Findlays hightailed it to Argentina, where they could exploit the cheap local labor and quickly film a story about a Manson-esque cult.

  Within a month, they had a film called Slaughter in the can. It was amateurish and practically incoherent, and would have undoubtedly died a quick death were it not for Allan Shackleton, a notorious exploitation distributor and lothario. Shackleton owned a small company, Monarch Releasing Corporation, and bought the rights to Slaughter in 1972. For three years, the film sat on a shelf collecting dust. Then Shackleton had a flash of pure huckster genius, inspired by current stories about snuff films from the Far East in which prostitutes were killed on camera.

  Shackleton’s idea was one of those for which the cliché “so crazy it just might work” was created. He grabbed Simon Nuchtern, a local New York filmmaker who had been reediting Monarch’s foreign acquisitions, and sent him off to shoot a three-minute coda to Slaughter in order to pass it off as a genuine snuff film.

  This new scene was shot in a bedroom set rented from porn star and director Carter Stevens—whom Nuchtern calls an “unattractive round man with a cockeyed eye” (insert your own porn joke)—who at the time was trying to go legit. Early accounts of the filming erroneously cite Stevens himself as the director. The new footage begins with a long shot of the production crew. The fictional director is speaking to one of the actresses, who we are supposed to believe is the actress from the previous scene (meaning the previous scene from Slaughter). The two banter about how they were both incredibly turned on while filming a murder; exhibiting the self-control of teenagers on ecstasy, they begin making out on the bed right in front of the entire crew. For some reason, the woman becomes extremely upset once she realizes they’re being filmed. So the director does what any reasonable person would do to placate her—he snips off her fingers with a pair of pliers and then saws off her entire hand, before finally stabbing and disemboweling her. He then holds up her intestines—which look like a twisted bedsheet smeared with Vaseline and food coloring—and shrieks as the camera runs out of film. The last thing we hear over black is the crew whispering to each other, wondering if they managed to capture it all.

  When the scene was completed, it was tacked on to the finished Slaughter and the entire enchilada was retitled Snuff. And this is when all the fun began.

  In an excellent 1999 article in Skeptical Inquirer, “The Snuff Film: The Making of an Urban Legend,” Scott Aaron Stine gives the most comprehensive account of the brouhaha over the film. He details how Shackleton paid off Findlay, who had eventually become aware of Slaughter 2.0, and then created a phony organization called Citizens for Decency to drum up faux outrage. But in one of those surreal intersections of life and art, a real group also called Citizens for Decency got wind of the controversy and latched on to it. Shackleton himself stoked the flames by telling Variety, “If it was real, I’d be a fool to admit it. If it isn’t real, I’d be a fool to admit it.”

  Finally, Snuff opened in January 1976, accompanied by the now-classic tagline Made in South America . . . where LIFE is cheap! Supposedly, it grossed more than One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest for three weeks during its New York run. One would think that once the film was out in the open, and its ineptitude apparent for all to see, continuing the hoax would be nearly impossible. But this didn’t dissuade those who were as disturbed by the idea of a snuff film as they were about the real McCoy. On February 15, 1976, about fifty protestersIII picketed the National Theater in Times Square, among them feminist author and activist Susan Brownmiller and US representative Elizabeth Holtzman.

  On March 10, 1976, the New York Times ran a brief piece reassuring the public that Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau had determined that Snuff was indeed fake. For some reason, I always find it funny imagining well-heeled Upper East Siders reading this story and freaking out at the possibility of a snuff film—an idea that never would have previously entered their minds. However, around this time, Shackleton also sent the actress who was supposedly killed on an all-expenses-paid Caribbean vacation to prolong the mystery of her identity. When the actress’s neighbors noticed her mail was piling up, they contacted the police, who then paid Nuchtern a visit. Nuchtern not only reassured the cops that the actress was alive and well, but he furnished them with on-set photos of her eating lunch on the bed—her guts strewn all around her—smiling and blowing kisses at the photographer. Shackleton’s generosity didn’t last forever. When the actress eventually returned—unharmed other than a probable sunburn—Morgenthau announced that there was no cause for prosecution (it’s not exactly clear who was prosecutable and for what). So as not to embarrass those who had made such a stink, he felt compelled to add that he was concerned the “film might incite or encourage people to commit violence against women.”

  The FBI came to the same conclusion as Morgenthau. In David Kerekes and David Slater’s Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff, the authors unearthed a fantastic gem in the form of a bureau report that proves, although it didn’t have the notoriety of the New York premiere, Snuff actually first opened on January 16, 1976, in Indianapolis of all places. According to the report, a source at Monarch Releasing claimed Indianapolis was the perfect American city to test the “playability” of the film. The source also admits to knowing whether or not the on-screen murder was real but is unable to say due to “legal reasons.” Although the source’s name is redacted, it’s clearly Shackleton. Accompanying FBI agents to the Indianapolis screening was a pathologist hired by the bureau to weigh in on the issue. The report concludes with the pathologist “doubting that an actual murder was committed.” Now, we don’t have the entirety of his remark, and certainly can’t hear the inflection of his voice, but how any trained medical professional could, after watching Snuff, be anything other than 100 percent convinced that it’s phony is mindboggling. If he really only “doubted” it, as in there was still some lingering suspicion or possible chance that it might in fact be real, Indiana’s entire medical licensing board should be called into question.

  What is so interesting about l’affaire Snuff is that all the players had an even greater interest than the filmmakers in maintaining the authenticity of the film. For the feminist critics and outraged citizens, an actual snuff film would validate their increasingly shrill warnings of artistic misogyny taken to its inevitable extreme. Law enforcement, from the DA down to the boots on the street, definitely wanted the film to be real. Which would you prefer? Smashing a nefarious criminal enterprise that preys on vulnerable young women, or chasing rumors to the satisfaction of a bunch of society busybodies? But Shackleton, he didn’t really give a
shit one way or another. Audiences could come expecting a real death, or they could come already in on the joke. All that mattered was that they came at all.

  For being an absolutely delightful man, Simon Nuchtern might actually be the Grim Reaper. In fact, if he were more well-known, the following events might be as famous as other horror movie urban legends, from the Poltergeist curse to the death of Brandon Lee. In May 1977, Michael Findlay had just left a brief meeting with Nuchtern, whom he knew casually, and was heading to Manhattan’s Pan Am Building, where a helicopter was waiting for him on the rooftop. As the craft was idling, its landing gear collapsed. This caused the copter’s blade to snap off, slicing five people to death (including Findlay, who was allegedly decapitated), before it plunged nearly sixty stories to the street, where it killed a pedestrian. A few years later, Nuchtern was scheduled to go jogging with Shackleton, who had since moved to Los Angeles but was back in New York for business. At the last minute, Nuchtern had to cancel. Shackleton went ahead with his run and dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of Central Park.

  So Guinea Pig and Snuff were fakes. Impressive fakes, at least to some. To others (meaning people not currently in a coma), ridiculous frauds. But both were created in the spirit of preserving the illusion of reality.

  But what about those films for which reality is no illusion? I’m not talking about films like The Entity, whose main selling point was that it was “based on a true story,” which were the most terrifying words ever spoken—that is, until I got my first real girlfriend and they became, “I’m late.”

  No, I’m talking about films—as well as specific scenes within films—for which the magic of moviemaking does not apply. Because there is no magic. There is only truth. And because this is a memoir about horror, there is death. Death in all its faces.