Day Thirty-One: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)
And so we reach the end. I, after some debate, have decided to conclude our little month long thing here with one of my very favorite movies of any genre, John Carpenter’s The Thing. There’s a strange thing about Carpenter’s film, I re-watch it once a year, and I always forget some of the surprises of the movie, the identity of some of the attackers, the timing of some of the scares. The Thing is an almost incomparably satisfying shocker, and it’s a horror movie that keeps on giving throughout the years.
I remember that creepy VHS cover of The Thing in the video store when I was child, showing a man in a heavy coat with a face that appears to be a pure beam of light. The cover promised the ultimate in alien terror, and I was too young to find that honor dubious. I also remember early conversations with my father regarding The Thing; he considered it a gory, junky reworking of a movie he held dear, the 1951 Howard Hawks film of the same name. At the time my dad’s opinion was scripture, and I assumed that it was some mental infirmity that kept me from understanding that the 1951 version was better when the Carpenter movie chilled me so much more.
The mental infirmities issue may have never been entirely worked out, but it has nothing to do with preferring the Carpenter approach to the story. I don’t wish to have a Thing cage match here, I think the Hawks version is very good, and holds up remarkably well. But Carpenter’s is scarier, and takes a track similar to one of the incarnations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or perhaps an early Cronenberg film, the thing isn’t a giant vegetable space man. It’s you, or your buddy; unless it’s provoked and forced to reveal an ever changing true form that’s an incalculably hideous combination of every specie it’s come in contact with.
Carpenter’s film doesn’t have the deeper sociological scares of a Cronenberg or Body Snatchers movie; it’s a mean, single minded thing that’s only interested in scaring you. Carpenter is a long time Howard Hawks aficionado, and he’s revisited Hawks subject matter time and time again, so it’s a wonderful bit of poetic justice that he finds his masterpiece in a remake of a Hawks film. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Thing is one of those magic movies where everything goes right. Carpenter’s usual habits, which can be mannered and overly ticky in lesser films, serve him in The Thing.
The bare character development fits the limited time frame of the story, and adds an element of impersonality that makes the thing’s assimilation that much scarier. The clean, uncluttered, very obviously composed framing suits the wide open Antarctic desolation beautifully, the minimal (usually synth) score (by Ennio Morricone, though he’s been directed by Carpenter to do a Carpenter impersonation.) is the best to grace a Carpenter film. I remember humming both The Thing and The Shining scores at an early age, I couldn’t get them out of my head.
Russell gives his most authoritative performance here as MacReady. It’s inarguable that Russell is, disappointing filmography be damned, one of our definitive badasses. It’s also no accident that he was asked to do a John Wayne impersonation in Death Proof. Russell has the same man’s man vibe; an I don’t give a shit because I don’t have to give a shit electricity that can’t be faked. Russell is also a better actor than Wayne, funnier, looser, and can play more of an everyman without compromising said badassery.
MacReady is more effective than Snake Plissken because there’s no quote marks around him, MacReady isn’t a goof, and his motivations are fueled by a basic, unglorified self-preservation that this picture’s script builds to quite elegantly. Russell has a few great tough guy lines here, my favorite (I’m paraphrasing) being his response to Wilford Brimley’s plea that he doesn’t know who to trust: “Trust is a tough thing to come by these days.” It’s a very movie line, but it’s delivered as a desperate throwaway, Russell’s attempt to keep face in an increasingly terrifying situation.
Hawks famously said that a good movie should have three good scenes and no bad ones. This is the one Carpenter film that passes that test. Besides the exchange I just mentioned between Russell and Brimley, there’s the justifiably famous “alien blood test” scene, and the ending, which is one of the best of all horror movies. Russell and Keith David sit down in the snow and watch as the remains of their compound, their only shelter and means of heat, slowly die. They have a drink, and smile, and slowly drift towards death themselves. After all the carnage that has taken place, these two are allowed the dignified demise of a Howard Hawks hero. Except one of the heroes may not be human, and he may not be dead. Only contagious.
★★★★
Day Thirty: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper’s film opens with a bit of narration (courtesy John Larroquette) and then fades into a series of news reports explaining a bizarre series of grave robbings. We then fade into an image of a corpse real close, and pull out to reveal that the corpse has been perversely dug up and rearranged on top of a tombstone. We then cut to the title: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
No further than three minutes into his picture, Hooper has set the mood, and established a tone that he will masterfully maintain for another seventy nine minutes. I haven’t read the script, but I would imagine that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would read like a slightly above average example of the kind of movies that have been popular ever since: A group goes where they shouldn’t, receives a little off the track vengeance, the end. Hooper’s film though is one of the masterpieces of the genre, and that’s because it’s an unusually precise, evocative exercise in pure terror.
The characters continually talk about the unforgiving heat, and Hooper makes you feel it. You can feel the sweat beading up on the character’s skin, the filth under their collar. You feel the clutter, rot and chaos in the deranged Sawyer family’s house, you feel the weeds blowing in the scant wind the environment will allow. Like many films that would follow, Hooper takes his time setting up the carnage the title promises, but it doesn’t feel like he’s padding a slim running time. The deliberateness of the film sets us up for a fall, leaves us vulnerable, with the title we obviously know we’re in a horror picture, but we don’t know when we’re going to get a horror picture.
Ten minutes in, the lead characters, a group of early twenty somethings, pick up a hitchhiker on the side of the road. Hooper plays with us here, we feel that we’re meeting one of the villians of the picture, but we can’t be sure, it may just be one more stop on the seemingly unending tour of backwoods weirdness. The dialogue is natural and unforced, the dread mounts with an unsettling lack of calculation. Then, before we’ve caught up, we realize that we’re in one of the scariest scenes of the movie, and a scene that will come back to haunt the characters in surprising ways.
This Texas town feels like no other weird little town in the horror genre. We don’t sense an art director high fiving a cinematographer immediately outside of the camera’s periphery. We wonder why the hell these dumb kids want to see their grandparent’s old house so bad. When an older gentlemen says “You may want to be careful, some folks don’t like you poking around, and aren’t afraid to let you know about it”, you laugh at the delirious understatement. This is a chaotic, apparently lawless town that’s inspired, not by hundred other movies, but by an authentic fear of the tearing of social fabric. Some people just don’t fucking like you, and they’re not afraid to show it.
Let’s go back to word authentic. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is so damn good because it feels real, uncalculated, unscripted, untested against a hundred age groups to see if it’s the next Saw, it just feels like it’s always existed somewhere waiting to be found. Thank God it was found before the idiotically overused catch phrase “torture porn” was coined.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was probably a happy accident, Tobe Hooper certainly hasn’t made a film ever again of it’s caliber, but that doesn’t matter. Hooper probably set out to make a little shocker that would get his foot in the door, and he accidentally made true art that remains relevant and unshakably disturbing, regardless of how many times it’s ripped off or remade. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a cathartic, relentless, black comic realization of the most familiar of nightmares: the one where you are chased by people you don’t know for no reason, and you can’t ever seem to get away.
★★★★
Day Twenty-Nine: The Shining (1980)
I read in a Stephen King interview somewhere that claimed Stanley Kubrick aimed to make the scariest movie of all time with The Shining. He certainly made one of the most interesting, one of the most debatable. I’ve always been mixed on The Shining, it’s a very effective piece, but I thought the traditional emotional remoteness that goes with a later Kubrick picture sabotaged him a little here. In other words, I was with the Stephen King guys who said that Kubrick had undermined the humanity of the novel in favor of something more cynical and abstract.
It’s not surprising that Kubrick said that he wanted to make the scariest film of all time, Kubrick certainly had that chutzpah, but he doesn’t seem to like horror movies. The Shining feels like a professor’s doctorate on the limitations of the horror film. Kubrick doesn’t believe in anything, and he doesn’t want to really get his hands dirty. He’s Stanley Kubrick the Great American Filmmaker after all, why would he lower himself to make a typical haunted house movie, based on something by that novelist Stephen King of all people?
The above would have represented my thoughts on The Shining up until about a year ago. In high school, I revered Kubrick because I was supposed to. Then in college I wondered why I was supposed to and began to resent the idea that I’m supposed to like anything if I’m to appear well read. I began to dislike the films, and was frustrated by Kubrick’s overly deliberate technique, which I viewed as posturing to maintain his acclaim and nurture the legend. I preferred earlier, livelier work like The Killing and Dr. Strangelove, films that seem to be blessedly free of such pressure.
A year or two ago I began to revisit the films, and, excluding 2001, which I can’t bring myself to pretend to like on any level, I’ve gotten to a place where I authentically love the majority of Kubrick’s work. Both prior viewpoints were the posturing of an insecure child. Now I’m an insecure child who likes Stanley Kubrick movies. His films are remote, are chilly, but there’s an element of friction, particularly in the masterpiece, Barry Lyndon, you where sense the presence of two Kubricks on the set, the cynical intellectual, and a more approachable guy who’d like to believe in things beyond cruelty and isolation.
The Shining, upon revisitation, has a similar friction. This is Stanley Kubrick’s Death of the Family picture, and viewed in a particular light, it is a supremely moving achievement. Yes, Jack Nicholson appears to be crazy from the outsight, that’s one of the bigger cliches that detractors use to dismiss the film. But let’s think about that, yes, it subtracts something from the story that King wrote, but it adds something to the film that Kubrick made. That the Jack Nicholson character is crazy in the beginning is the point. The life of this family is a charade, and it’s through the intervention of The Overlook Hotel that the family is forced to realize it. This is a more original, more daring take than the story that Stephen King wrote (and I say that as an admirer of the novel.)
As in other Kubrick films, the only emotion that comes through with any real conviction is the malice of the Nicholson character. The nicer words, the exposition are plain and flavorless and delivered as so. The Nicholson character’s relationship with his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) is a farce of the father/son dynamic, and some of the most unsettling material in the film. The Shining is about Danny’s realization that the world is a violent, dangerous place, and it’s one of the least sentimental coming of age stories I’ve personally seen.
Wendy’s (Shelly Duvall) relationship with Jack is even worse. Jack addresses Wendy with naked contempt before they get to the Overlook, though she turns a frequent deaf ear to it. Jack’s hostility is a little harder to ignore when he picks up an ax. Here Kubrick again plays a different note than expected, Duvall’s character IS shrill, IS annoying, her sunny side up exterior a very real defense again her husband’s introverted self-absorption.
It’s a mark of The Shining that we’ve gotten this far before even mentioning the supernatural goings on that fuel the second half of the film. Again, Kubrick’s conflicted attitude powers the picture. He evidently didn’t believe in the supernatural, and it shows, the film has an uncertainty, a lack of conviction in the subject matter, that actually enhances the dread. Again, it does feel more like a college doctorate on the horror film, removed, aloof, a Godless world where anything goes, safety is guaranteed nowhere, particularly in your family.
Let’s go back to the cliche of the Nicholson casting, which is partially legitimate. Nicholson’s performance is problematic not for the “insane at first glance” reasoning, but for the “insane in a chic, stylized way” reasoning. Nicholson is doing his cool cucumber Nicholson thing here, and it’s a bit too much for the movie. We watch The Shining and think, “yeah that’s pretty cool, so cool in fact that Nicholson would spend twenty years doing it”, but it doesn’t mesh with the other performances, particularly Duvall, who is terrific. I’ve never much warmed to Shelly Duvall, but she’s fearless in playing someone so afraid; this is strong, raw work, and one of the best performances in the later Kubrick canon.
If The Shining had absolutely nothing going on beyond Kubrick’s technique in realizing it, then the picture would still be worth seeing. The amazing tracking shots have been endlessly elaborated upon, so I won’t belabor the point, but they accomplish a sense of geography that is rare in the horror film. Kubrick’s vision of The Overlook is amazing, the building is a timeless creature that waits to swallow it’s inhabits whole. My favorite shot is the very first, the God’s Eye View as we watch Jack drive to his interview as that iconic score sounds. The credits sequence is impressive the first time you watch it, the second and third and fourth it’s quite moving. There’s a mourning to be found in these opening images, an unforgettable inevitability.
★★★½
Day Twenty-Eight: A Bucket of Blood (1959)
I first noticed Dick Miller as a reoccurring supporting performer in the films of Joe Dante. Miller has one of the best scenes in Dante’s Gremlins as a man who seems to know more about the creatures than anyone else in town and subsequently pays for it with a bulldozer through his living room window. Miller is also terrific in a small part in The Howling, which we discussed earlier in our celebration, as one of the only people who respects the delicacy of werewolf execution. Dick Miller is always the guy in the know, the seasoned character kinda badass actor who’s never the star because he’s too competent. He’d kill the monster in fifteen minutes, and we’re conditioned to expect that it take our heroes at least ninety.
Dick Miller was called Walter Paisley in The Howling, and that name turns out to be another of the dozens of horror movie references to be found in that very endearing film. Paisley may be a small town bookstore owner looking to make a buck in The Howling, but he was once a very troubled young man who bussed tables at a pretentious cafe, where he hoped to one day make an impression with it’s self-absorbed, hypocritical patrons, particularly a sweeter girl in the group played by Barboura Morris. Paisley wants to be an artist like the others (who seem to talk of creating art more than actually creating it) but he’s painfully untalented. Then he discovers that sculpting is a breeze when you kill the subjects and just dump a little plaster on them. Quicker that way too.
Roger Corman directed A Bucket of Blood and my typically half assed research indicates that it’s the only film to feature Dick Miller front and center as the star. Miller was only twenty nine or thirty when he made A Bucket of Blood, and it’s a bit jarring to seem him devoid of some of the wrinkles that the years would eventually carve. That no-nonsense tough guy rasp is softer too, Miller sounds a little like Jerry Lewis in his nerd days, and, murder subtracted, it’s a similar kind of part.
A Bucket of Blood is charming and self-aware, not afraid to be a little (ok, a lot) goofy. The film’s idea of Bohemians is hilariously broad (very much in the “ok daddy yo” line of caricature) and it’s hard to separate the intentional from the unintentional. Corman keeps things zipping along, and, we find ourselves rooting for Miller’s serial killer to get the girl and rescue her from all of that blinding self-importance. The film has one very inspired line, a sorta poet approaches Miller and tells him that his work might net him twenty five grand. Miller looks at him, incredulous, and says that he thought money didn’t matter. The poet, startled, considers this and replies “of course money doesn’t matter, but this is twenty five thousand dollars!”
We’re in the middle of a remake craze now, mostly unnecessary, but I would like to suggest to Hollywoodland that A Bucket of Blood get the remake treatment. The film is a one joke movie, but it’s a funny joke, and one that could really be explored in a sharp satire of the various artistic putons that critics, artists, and viewers put themselves through on a daily basis. I only have two requests, an exec producer credit and Dick Miller again as the lead. Surely he can put the Gremlins and werewolves aside for a moment to stick it to the artistic elite again, old school style, with, of course, new school rules.
★★
Day Twenty-Seven: The Old Dark House (1932)
James Whale’s horror films (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) age better than most other movies of the era, even the good ones. This has something to do with Whale’s sense of humor, his dry wit, Whale manages to tweak the genre without playing as if he’s above it (truly having your cake and eating too). I’ve recently said that horror and comedy shouldn’t be mixed by amateurs, Whale may have been the ultimate pro in this regard, and The Old Dark House is one of the most purely enjoyable of his work.
The story is simple and well traveled. A group of travelers (including Gloria Stewart, Melvyn Douglas, and Charles Laughton) get lost in a storm and stumble into a creepy, old mansion that looks to be abandoned. Lucky for us though, it isn’t, it’s occupied by Boris Karloff (in a much smaller role here), Ernest Thesiger (Bride of Frankenstein) and Eva Moore in one of the film’s funniest performances as a deaf, superstitious woman who’s given up on anyone taking her frequent warnings seriously. Throughout the film we discover other inhabitants, but to reveal more would diminish some of the fun.
The Old Dark House doesn’t quite have the lunatic sting of Whales’ Bride of Frankenstein (there’s no moment here to equal Karloff’s final words in that film) but House is equally effective in a more free form, shambling way. The film is a revue of haunted house cliches, a buffet that bounces from one joke and character bit to another. Like other Whale horror films, the pace is superbly even, the tone sustained remarkably well. There are no groaners, no long stretches, this is well-performed tonic by a master of low key dread and quiet chuckles. The Old Dark House of The Old Dark House, is little more than an insane asylum, but the desperation rarely undermines everyone’s good manners, which is, of course, Whale’s ultimate joke.
Ironically, legendary ham Charles Laughton lends House one of its subtler performances. He has a wonderful scene, played relatively straight, where he defends his ambition, his aim for what others see as profit above all else. Laughton’s character has never gotten over his lost wife, and he loses his new girl too over the course of the picture. His acceptance of this, and his ultimate character, compliments the farce of The Old Dark House with something sadder, he shows you why one would consider living in such a place.
Day Twenty-Six: The Roost (2005)
The Roost is an exceptionally low budget shocker that concerns a group of young adults (heading to a friend’s wedding) who run afoul a deadly roost of vampire bats. This would be awful enough, I’d imagine being eaten alive by killer vampire bats to be extremely unpleasant, except, the bats also turn you into a sort of zombie upon biting, and then the zombie can turn another person into a zombie, and before long we’ve got more bats and zombies than we know what to do with.
The Roost is not very good, in fact, its so poor in places that it plays more like a film you’d see on campus than a real theatre. The writer-director, Ti West, is obviously trying to pad a short into a feature film, and the result is some of the longest 78 minutes you’ll find at your videostore, or mailbox, or however you come about meeting your viewing needs. Among other things The Roost features a particularly pointless framing device: Tom Noonan (always welcome) appears in the beginning, middle and end to comment on the story like a host from one of those 1970s specials, or the Crypt Keeper. What this has to do with vampire bats and zombies is beyond me. The first five minutes of the film is the camera almost literally spacing out around Noonan’s castle. You may not make it all the way through this one.
Still, there’s some potential here. West is very young, and I imagine he had little to work with, and there is the occasional image that works. West has also found a slightly different menace and an effective setting for his film. The horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden executive produced and appears in The Roost, and he did the same for West’s forthcoming Trigger Man, which has already received some very favorable notices. West is also currently finishing Cabin Fever 2. If West makes it, perhaps The Roost will one day be a bizarre curiosity, until then though, its something you’d watch five minutes of before flipping the channel.
Day Twenty-Five: The Mummy (1932)
Bowen’s Cinematic’s 31 Days of Horror has largely been a catch as catch can affair. No master plan, no attempt at writing a horror canon. I always knew there would be a Karloff film though, and I always knew it wouldn’t be Frankenstein. Nothing wrong with Frankenstein at all, actually there’s quite a bit right with it. But we all know Frankenstein. We all know The Mummy too, but how many of you have actually sat down and watched The Mummy?
The Mummy was directed by noted German cinematographer Karl Freund (he shot Metropolis, Dracula, Key Largo, among others) and he lends this film, as expected, an assured visual tone that resembles the crumbly, dusty, old as the ages look of the mummy himself. Freund’s framing is cramped, stuffy, entombed, impressive. Watch how Freund handles the marvelous opening scene, a mummy resurrection scene as suggestive as any of the feline shenanigans in Cat People, we see the young moron laughing madly, and we pan to a strip of the mummy’s wrapping disappearing out the door. The most terrifying part has already happened though, and that’s the opening of the great Karloff’s eyes.
It’s fitting that Freund shot Dracula, because The Mummy is essentially a remake of that film with a different creature. Unfortunately, The Mummy inherits Dracula’s flaws too. Both films devote quite a bit of running time to the spouting of various romantic banalities by the boring heroes, and both films keep the monster off screen for far too long. Dracula was stilted and obviously lifted from the stage, the superb atmosphere by Freund and the legendary Tod Browning its only real asset. Dracula himself, as embodied by Bela Lugosi, has always been a bit of bust for me. I think he’s one of the more overrated approaches to the monster. He’s overdone, clownish, and not nearly as frightening as some of the other vampires of the time.
The Mummy may have the boring heroes, the laughable dialogue, the creaky pace, but it has a wonderful monster. Karloff’s work here isn’t as showy as his (also brilliant) work as the Frankenstein’s monster, but he’s no less interesting. We nearly sympathize with his aim here, his single minded urge to find his love, but Karloff’s portrayal is couragously unsentimenal. Karloff’s Imhotep may have began his quest with a romantic desire, but the ages of unrewarded pursuit have whittled him down to pure, malignant rage. He truly is a corpse, a forgotten relic who refuses to surrender to the inevitability of time.
Beyond this performance, the film is hit or miss. The other performances are largely awful, and the story is, as I said earlier, Dracula all over again. The Mummy setting up shop in the museum is rather nifty, as is Imhoteps’s scheme in the beginning of telling the archaelogists where the ruins are so they can dig them up for him. It’s also worth noting that the only real mummy shot is near the beginning, the rest is Karloff. I was reading a bit and playing with the extras on the DVD, and it was said that Karloff was so huge after Frankenstein the year before, that all the marketing had to say was “Karloff….Mummy”. Karloff more than justifies the fervor here.
Day Twenty-Four: Braindead (1992)
I miss Peter Jackson from the early days, the unhinged horror comedy filmmaker who hadn’t yet conquered the world with a certain fantasy trilogy. I am quite fond of Lord of the Rings, but King Kong lost me somewhere in the two hours it takes for Kong to show up, and I wondered what happened to the Jackson who would’ve had a baby eating a person’s head in half that running time. I miss Jackson’s indulgences of the NC-17 variety.
Bad Taste is impressive primarily from a wannabe filmmaker standpoint. You respect how much Jackson does with so little but the movie, by movie standards, leaves you wanting. Meet the Feebles is foul and gloriously deranged. Braindead, though, is Jackson’s doctorate in the genre, it’s no wonder he left “splatstick” after this one. I’m not sure what else there would be left to do. Zombie sex? Check. Pus mistaken for custard? Check. Climactic set piece requiring a football field’s worth of plastic body parts? Check. Baby zombies? Check. Baby zombies ripping heads apart? Check. I know I already wrote that one, but “baby ripping heads” or “baby eating heads” are surprisingly fun phrases to type, they make the coffee go down that much easier.
The gory cartoonish horror comedy is harder to pull off than it may sometimes appear. The danger (I feel I wrote this somewhere before, my apologies) is that the comedy and the horror moot one another and yield just another exercise in filmmaker attitude that doesn’t make it as a real movie. Braindead works so well because it’s devoid of any attitude to begin with. Braindead isn’t chic, isn’t hip, isn’t cool, its the bubbly collective of Jackson’s daydreams while watching every possible monster movie he could get his hands on. Jackson is a wit and a talent, and he recognizes both the absurdity and the essentiality of these fantasies. The viewpoints of “absurd” and “essential” bounce off one another like billard balls in Braindead and yields what could be called a junior Buster Keaton cover of the zombie movie.
The zombies that Lionel (Timothy Balme) has to nursemaid throughout the movie are not that much worse than taking care of the human version of his mum (Elizabeth Moody), whom he has a conflicted, Norman Bateish relationship with. Jackson shoots the human scenes the same way he does the carnage that eventually ensues: in jarring, three ring circus style close up. The sound effects that accompany human Mum’s actions are also stylized and digusting. Lionel handles the zombies so well because he’s had experience with the vaguely living dead, and this isn’t that much of a stretch.
The madness that Jackson orchestrates toward the end of Braindead has to be seen to be believed, but part of me wishes that the film played in the “having to shield zombie Mum from society” sandbox a little longer. There is one truly uproarious scene in this vein: a dinner sequence with Lionel, Mum and a couple they need to impress. I won’t ruin the various grotesqueries that Jackson unleashes, but the obviousness of Mum’s condition, and Lionel and the couple’s determined obliviousness, is inspired. Part of my (mild) regret stems from Moody’s performance, she’s too good to be so quickly discarded in favor of a plastic zombie.
For all its violence, Braindead is surprisingly square and dorky, lovable even. Whatever your taste, Jackson’s passion is too damn pure to dislike. There’s a romance here, and it’s naive in a very old school silent movie way. Jackson’s playful indulgences are still evident in his more recent films, but he’s polished now, put on his tux so to speak. The little rugrat genius who throws mud at your windows and dreams of different ways to blow up a corpse occassionally returns in fits and starts (the T-Rex/Kong three way for instance) but he’s in disturbingly short supply these days .
Day Twenty-Three: A Mild Romero Sermon Masquerading as a Review of Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Essential. Iconic. Let’s go ahead and say a few more unoriginal things about George A. Romero’s debut, Night of the Living Dead. The film is one of the greatest of all horror pictures, and, unlike some, I respect the importance of such a statement. Night of the Living Dead is one of those perfect, wonderful accidents where the usual disadvantages of a making a movie (any movie, much less one of a significantly low budget) are blessings.
Dead looks like a home movie you might find in your attic one day. Something that documents an attack that went undocumented amongst all the other outrages of the time, such as Kent State, or the assassination of Martin Luther King. Imagine your grandfather, in the midst of boring you with a family history, suddenly saying “and this was the day your aunt ate your grandmother on your father’s side.”
This sort of macabre humor permeates Night of the Living Dead, though, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it doesn’t defuse the horror. The film has a strong script that feeds you bite size portions of exposition at just the right moments, amping the dread and violence as the dead slowly close in on our heroes. I’ve seen many films that attempt to dramatize the falling apart of a group, but few are as convincing as Dead. It has something to do with the total lack of artifice here, the performances are clipped and efficient, the dialogue unshowy. People say what they might actually say in this situation, not what a screenwriter needs them to say to ensure that his name is remembered for another project.
Romero would go on to push it further in subsequent films, but I find the scene where the ghouls eat whats left of the characters that have blown up in the truck to be one of the more unsettling scenes of violence I’ve ever seen, much less of Romero’s oeuvre. The gore is there, but its teasingly just out of sight. The creatures munch the guts in the shadows, and you catch a little glimpse of something and wonder if that was a stomach lining you just saw the creature eating. In Dawn, or Day, this question is resolutely answered.
With Dawn of the Dead, Romero would begin to push the series towards a more purposeful satire. His zombies are as much a joke as menace here, and he manipulates the tones with the seeming ease of a master. I’m a little split on the Dead pictures, I think Dawn of the Dead is the best film of the series, while Night is the sweat inducing, pretense free, single minded shocker of the bunch.
The satire or subversiveness of Night never takes reign over the story, and some have claimed that the pereceived commentary that Night offers on 1960s war torn, racially cancerous America was largely arrived at by accident anyway. This doesn’t really matter much either way, Romero made a film that caught the zeitgeist at the time, and could fuel one hundred different imaginations to go one hundred different ways with it. He didn’t have that level of trust in the other pictures, and it finally got a little out of control with his most recent, Land of the Dead, a God awful preachfest that was inexplicably acclaimed in certain circles.
A zombie learning to speak (sort of) English and recognizing that he has rights? Not scary. A zombie that’s a feral thing that’s all lumbering instinct that looks like your sister? Scary. A zombie that actually is your sister that you catch eating your dad in the basement? The stuff that nightmares are made of. We don’t need to have our nightmares rationalized for us, the nightmares and the real co-mingle in a way that’s best, at least in art, left in the realm of the sub-conscious. Romero once knew that, and his crude, low budget, little shocker is the one of great American horror movies. It doesn’t matter if the zombies are eating us out of social protest or not, what matters is that they’re eating us.
Day Twenty-Two: The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
What are we to make of The Devil’s Rejects ? I admit that I didn’t much care for Rob Zombie’s film when I first caught it over summer of 2005. I thought the film reveled in a certain vile killer chic, and laughed along with its band of madmen (who seem to be modeled after Charles Manson) as they indulged in relentless, prolonged scenes of torture. Zombie even perversely denies us the pleasure of a good guy, the cop pursuing them is just as insane as they are, the fact that he’s on the right side of the law seems to be more by accident than design.
I thought House of 1000 Corpses, his prior film as writer-director, was stylish, a more watchable than usual entry in the neverending chain that is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff. Rejects is interested in more though and I got on its wavelength in subsequent viewings. The film has an appealing lunatic bite, a flamboyant sting of lawlessness to it, and it’s in this acknowledgement of lawlessness that the film’s one truly great scene emerges. One of the killers, (Bill Mosely, in a performance that should get him more work) notices a potential victim praying to God, and laughs, and screams to the sky, if there is a God then strike me down with lightening. For a moment, we’re dealing in the pure, primal, animal fear of breakdown, of chaos that powers most great horror films.
You sense, like many recent horror directors, Zombie’s infatuation with past horror junk, but Zombie’s too head over heels in love with the tropes of the genres to overly intellectualize it or quote mark it like other filmmakers who’ll remain nameless. Zombie gets carried away and roots for the bad guy because the good guy’s squareness is repellent to him. He’s too busy embuing The Devil’s Rejects with a hellfire energy to instill it with any moral compass, and I dig the lack of hypocrisy, the cojones of Zombie. This thing rocks and rolls, and seems to be entirely uninterested in anyone’s opinion beyond it’s creator’s.
It also helps that Zombie has a found a mildly more original schtick this time. If Corpses was TCM, then Rejects is TCM part 2 as remade by Sam Peckinpah. The MTV splatter is gone here, and replaced by a dry, oversaturated Western cinematography that’s a breath of fresh air for the genre. We open with the mentally diseased Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe, if you’ve thought he’s chewed scenery in the past, you’ve seen nothing yet) opening fire on the Firefly Clan’s home, the family from Corpses, who murdered his brother in the prior film. Right away Zombie lays on the hyperbole: killers dressed in homemade armor, shotguns blazing with no apparent kickback, a Sheriff who walks in the line of fire like the Terminator, the mayhem reaching a gorgeous crescendo when a character fails to off themselves to spite someone else. Cue the Allman Brothers.
Zombie’s zeal is both his greatest asset and strongest limitation. One can’t tell where the satire ends and the misguided begins. Zombie lays on the purpilish dialogue, the Lynard Skynard, and the Tarantinoish digressions (though Tarantino would probably never sideline from the plot long enough to consider chicken fucking) and you’re left wondering if this filmmaker has any self-consciousness at all. That is, ulimately, the thrill of a Rob Zombie movie, or at least the first two Rob Zombie movies.
A teensy bit of self-consciousness might help though. Zombie could stand to learn that certain moments don’t need slow-mo to sell them or that some people don’t talk like ironically articulate white trash sailors (a much bigger problem with his Halloween) but, even as he is, Zombie is something to appreciate, he’s seemingly untouched by doubt, and he’s the only person working who’d showcase Sid Haig in something that could be called a star performance. What’s a matter honey? Don’t you like clowns? Don’t you think they’re fucking funny?
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