by Adam Rockoff
Sometimes I think I just don’t understand irony. For example, I’m pretty sure the Janis Joplin ditty “Mercedes Benz” is meant to be ironic, right? I mean, why would the quintessential hippy chick be pining for a Benz? But I’ve heard the song literally hundreds of times and listened closely to the lyrics. And to me, it sounds like nothing more than a girl who wants a luxury automobile.
This must be the reason I prefer all the irony-free slasher films that followed Scream. For one thing, critics hated them just as much as they loved Scream, which in turn made me appreciate them even more. With Scream, they could at least pretend it was something more intelligent than a typical slasher (just as they did with Halloween nearly twenty years before), while completely dismissing the new crop as derivative crap (as they did with Friday the 13th and its clones). Although the laziest of the tastemakers grouped all these films together under the umbrella of “postmodern slashers,” it was clear to even the most casual observer that I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, and Valentine were much different. They didn’t wink at the audience or go for knowing laughs. Although they didn’t perform as well as Scream at the box office, they still brought in an impressive take, giving credence to the idea that it was the Weinsteins’ marketing muscle more than anything that was responsible for Scream’s success.
One unfortunate result of the critics’ renewed hatred of slasher films was that the directors who made them got a raw deal. And none more so than Jamie Blanks. The Australian wunderkind actually received some nice notices for his Hollywood debut, Urban Legend, mainly because of its clever premise: a killer murders his victims based on well-known urban legends. When Blanks chose the more traditional Valentine as his follow-up, the critics pounced. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about Valentine, but it certainly didn’t deserve anywhere near the vitriol it received. To use an analogy from the golden age of slashers, it was a Terror Train, a Night School, or a Graduation Day—fine films that defined but didn’t transcend the genre like a Halloween or Friday the 13th. To those who were watching—and cared—it was obvious that Blanks’s real sin was not following up Urban Legend with a project the critics deemed worthy. For his trouble, Blanks was sentenced to purgatory until 2007, six years later, when he directed the underrated Storm Warning, which played various festivals before receiving a release from Dimension Extreme. The very next year, Blanks took a thankless job—the remake of Long Weekend. Admittedly, few films warranted a remake less, as the original is a brilliant Australian gem that nearly thirty years later still doesn’t feel the least bit dated. It’s as unsettling a film as you’ll find, mainly because nothing really happens and yet up until the very last frame it’s impossible to shake the feeling of impending doom. With the remake, Blanks was shrewd enough to leave well enough alone. He understood implicitly which scenes not to touch and which would benefit from a small tweak. I’m not going to go as far as to say that Blanks’s version is superior, or even concede that a remake was in any way necessary, but I can’t imagine anyone tasked with the assignment doing a better job. In recent years, Blanks has worked on two of the very best documentaries ever made about exploitation films, Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! and Machete Maidens Unleashed!, about the Filipino film industry.
I’m fairly certain that Santayana could not have foreseen the rise of the slasher film when he wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But if he did, he probably would have included an addendum that said, “And those who do remember it can profit handsomely.”
Just as the early-eighties slashers spawned the first wave of spoofs, so did their late-nineties progeny. The big difference was that thirty years ago, the spoofs were a fraction as successful as their targets; combine the lifetime grosses of Student Bodies, Pandemonium, Wacko, and National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, and you’d have the domestic take of a mediocre slasher of the time. But when 2000’s Scary Movie took in more than $150 million—50 percent more than Scream—Dimension knew it had a new golden goose.
Created by the Wayans brothers—Keenen Ivory, Shawn, and Marlon—the Scary Movie series spoofs whatever the most popular horror films are at the time; the original focused on Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, while the most recent entry, Scary Movie 5, targeted Mama and Paranormal Activity.
Objectively, the Scary Movie films aren’t as terrible as you would expect something featuring multiple Wayans to be. Like any spoof, each has its moments. In Scary Movie 2, James Woods plays a Father Merrin–like priest who takes Regan’s exhortations of “Fuck me” literally and, well, fucks her. It’s a little uncomfortable in light of Woods’s fondness for much younger (but legal) girls but, if you’re not easily offended, kind of funny. Scary Movie 3 opens with a scene in which Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy are dressed as Catholic school girls. And because Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy are dressed as Catholic schoolgirls, I completely forgot what it’s a parody of. Also for Part 3, David Zucker replaces Keenen Ivory Wayans, who directed the first two installments. Not only does he bring in Leslie Nielsen, who does what Leslie Nielsen does best, but he’s not even above throwing in a sly Airplane! reference or two. In 2013, Marlon Wayans produced and starred in A Haunted House, a new horror spoof that mainly targets the Paranormal Activity films. Although Wayans won’t call the film a parody, it’s virtually indistinguishable from the Scary Movie franchise in which he made his name (and fortune).
If Scream can lay claim to one thing, it’s igniting the current horror Renaissance, which, nearly two decades later, shows no signs of abating. Young horror fans have absolutely no recollection of a time when the fields of horror were anything but bountiful. Rod Gudiño is often asked how he keeps Rue Morgue relevant in times of famine. His response: “There are no times of famine.” And for a magazine that premiered less than a year after Scream’s release, there really haven’t been.
But the geezers among us remember all too well. We would wait months and months for a new theatrical release—only to be given Dr. Giggles. “In the late eighties, early nineties before Scream, we’d be pulling our hair out trying to find a movie to put on the cover of Fangoria. It was really slim pickings a lot of months,” recalls Tony Timpone. “If it wasn’t for Scream, we wouldn’t have had this flood of product.”
This is why all of us who hold this genre dear owe Scream a debt of gratitude. And if I could go back in time, I’d have a completely different answer ready for Bobby Cohen. Asked what I thought about his company’s new movie that was taking the country by storm, I’d look him in the eye, smile, and say, “It sure beats a sequel to Dr. Giggles.”
* * *
I. My career at the Cardinal came to an ignominious end. I was assigned to cover the making of the Keanu Reeves starrer Chain Reaction, which was shooting at the Wisconsin State Capital on campus. However, it was an early-morning shoot and by the time I woke up the production had long since wrapped for the day. My editor was not amused and I was never asked to write another review for the paper.
II. Before all the Allen apologists—a pathetic group that includes many of Hollywood’s most famous faces—completely freak out, I concede that Allen isn’t technically fucking his daughter (although if you believe the recent allegations of his adopted daughter, Dylan, he may very well have molested her). Instead, he slept with, and then married, the multiple-decades-younger adopted daughter of his longtime girlfriend. Nothing untoward about that.
CHAPTER TEN
A Decade That Dripped Blood
Bob Adelman loves horror movies.
He sees more of them than anyone I know who isn’t professionally involved in the industry. As a successful lawyer with a family, he obviously doesn’t have that much free time. So a few times a month, once the wives and kids are asleep, we head out to our local theater to catch the last show of the night. We’ve been doing this for over a decade now and have seen plenty of modern classics (Paranormal Activity, The Last Exorci
sm), just as many stinkers (Primeval, Dead Silence), and everything in between.
Usually, we’re the only two jokers in the theater. After all, how many people are going to go see Saw VI at a suburban multiplex at 10:20 on a Tuesday night? We have dissimilar tastes; as a rule, I’m creeped out by movies about ghosts or the occult, while Bob is terrified of flesh-and-blood murderers and home invasion films. Still, we’ve had a lot of fun together. And there’s no one else I would rather have had as a wingman for the last ten or so years to witness the genre’s evolution.
What’s unique about horror in the first decade and a half of the millennium is its variety. We all know that genres are cyclical. But in the past, every decade seemed to be defined by a single type of horror film. There were the Universal classics of the thirties and forties. In the 1950s, horror melded with sci-fi for a slew of alien-invasion and atomic monster movies that everyone agrees were fairly blatant allegories for Cold War paranoia. The sixties were a mishmash—it seemed like the decade’s cultural upheaval was reflected in its idiosyncratic horror output—while the seventies conjured up Satan in various forms and Mother Earth sought revenge with nature-run-amok warnings. Slasher films dominated the eighties before horror, as we saw in the preceding chapter, went into hibernation.
But following Scream, the genre rose from the ashes like a phoenix—or more appropriately, a hydra, where from every stump there sprouted multiple new heads of cinematic terror. And the amazing thing was that none of them overshadowed the others. Instead, it was as if the various subgenres fed off of one another, creating something far greater than the sum of its parts. Think of it as a giant storm front, comprised not of a single cell but dozens of separate squalls spinning at their own speed but still contained within a larger weather system.
That said, a few of these trends have had a much more profound cultural impact than others, and none more so than the humble zombie. Vampires have placed a close second. However, I’ve never seen a Twilight film or a single episode of True Blood or The Vampire Diaries, and have never read so much as a paragraph of any pop-lit teen vampire novel. As much as I loved 30 Days of Night and Daybreakers, I know very little about bloodsuckers, pubescent or otherwise. If this pisses you off, go out and pick up Liisa Ladouceur’s How to Kill a Vampire: Fangs in Folklore, Film and Fiction. I assure you, you’ll learn more about the undead than I could ever offer.
On the surface, zombies seem like a strange choice for the monster du jour. They don’t have the literary pedigree of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. Nor are they rooted in history or myth like the Mummy and the Wolf Man. Instead, their emergence can be traced back to the slave trade, when West Africans were rounded up in their homeland and shipped across the ocean to work the Caribbean plantations. The island colony of Haiti (then Saint-Domingue) was especially fertile ground for this particular fiend and its accompanying magic, known colloquially as voodoo, thanks in large part to French king Louis XIV’s decree that upon arrival all slaves abandon their African religions and convert to Roman Catholicism. As a result, a wonderfully colorful potpourri of African mysticism and Christianity was born.
I always assumed that pre-1968 the entire zombie subgenre was comprised almost solely of the Bela Lugosi starrer White Zombie and the Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton collaboration I Walked with a Zombie, which is far classier and less exploitative than its title would lead one to believe. However, Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (as accurate a subtitle as you’ll ever find) disabused me of that notion. Turns out, Hollywood’s Poverty Row studios were actually churning out zombie films throughout the 1940s with titles such as The Ghost Breakers, King of the Zombies, Revenge of the Zombies, and Voodoo Man.
Even more interesting (at least to me), it seems that White Zombie’s most important contribution to pop culture wasn’t the eponymous band it inspired but one of the first instances of experiential marketing. When White Zombie opened at New York’s famous Rivoli theater, actors dressed as zombies walked along a platform above the theater’s marquee performing a “series of thrilling dramatic sequences.” Apparently, thousands of onlookers packed the sidewalks to gawk at the spectacle, which also included sound effects of “the screeching of vultures, the grinding of the sugar mill and the beating of the tom toms and other nerve wracking sounds.” It’s not too hard to draw a line from this early PR stunt to the ubiquitous zombie events of today.
Then, in 1968, Night of the Living Dead happened. If you need me to explain what this means, why the hell are you even reading this book? (My apologies to friends and family who are doing so out of interest or obligation.) Even after Night’s phenomenal success—not to mention that of its sequels Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead—zombies remained something of a blue-collar fiend, appearing mainly in ridiculous Italian gutmunchers. There were exceptions along the way. Spanish expat Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is always a favorite among zombie buffs, though I find it overrated. The Blind Dead films of Amando de Ossorio—Tombs of the Blind Dead, Return of the Blind Dead, Horror of the Zombies, Night of the Seagulls—are also beloved, but to me they’re tedious and dull. Two of Bob Clark’s early films, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and Deathdream, are both zombie films, the former explicitly while the latter much more subtly, although the main character does die and then returns as something much different from what he was before.
But now, zombies are everywhere. Like, well, a plague of zombies, munching their way through pop culture and carving out their place as the first great monster of the millennium.
The modern zombie Renaissance can be traced back to two films, Resident Evil and 28 Days Later. Based on the blockbuster video game franchise of the same name, Resident Evil initially started out as a vehicle for George Romero. After nearly a twenty-year hiatus, the king was returning home, back to the ghouls whose fortunes were inextricably linked to his own. The homecoming lasted all of one draft of the screenplay. Eventually, Paul W. S. Anderson took over the project. Anderson was an avid gamer who had cut his teeth on Mortal Kombat, another film adapted from a wildly popular video game. Unsurprisingly, Resident Evil’s flaws were a result of its source medium. It was sprawling and sterile. And although it eventually spawned four sequels to date (with a fifth currently in development), it was considered something of a joke among horror fans and was not nearly as successful as generally assumed (domestically, it barely made back its budget). On the other side of the coin (and the pond) was Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, a British zombie film about the outbreak of a man-made virus. 28 Days Later was down and dirty, like a modern-day Dickens novel, albeit one with zombies who moved fast. This analogy sounds a lot less ludicrous after recent mashup novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters found an audience by grafting horror elements into public-domain works of classic literature.
If Resident Evil and 28 Days Later were the sparks that ignited the zombie apocalypse, then Romero himself was the gasoline. At first, it was indirectly. Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead was a remake in name only. A big, glossy Hollywood popcorn flick with plenty of style, it divided the horror community down the middle; some embraced it as a brilliant reimagining, while others remained loyal to Romero’s plodding proletariat. The traditionalists didn’t have to wait long. Later that year, Romero’s long-rumored Twilight of the Dead—eventually retitled Land of the Dead—was finally released. Where Night had touched on race relations, Dawn on consumerism, and Day on the military industrial complex (to really simplify the underlying themes), Land was a commentary on social class.
Whereas Romero needed three decades to make his first three Living Dead films, he only needed the better part of one to make his final three. After Land, Diary of the Dead (2008) and Survival of the Dead (2010) were released in (relatively) short order. Diary of the Dead is shot in the first-person documentary style that was the flavor of the day. Romero has never exactly been subtle about his politics,
but Diary feels almost like a polemic, a blatant critique of America’s media-saturated culture. This heavy-handedness does not serve the story, as the characters act more disturbed by the filming of the zombie atrocities than by the atrocities themselves—as if only by capturing them on video do they become real and, by extension, exploitative. In stark contrast to Diary, possibly Romero’s most nihilistic film since The Crazies, Survival of the Dead is a zombie retelling of the Hatfields and the McCoys, for some reason set on an island off the coast of Delaware. Romero wanted Survival to be the wackiest of his zombie films. Mission accomplished, George. It’s also his worst, by far.