THE WICKED WEST

 

A few years ago, I decided to write a followup to my 2004 book Nightmares in Red, White and Blue, a cultural study of American horror films. 

At first, I imagined it as a book about horror remakes, reboots and “re-imaginations”—because those were dominating the genre at the time.  (This was somewhere in the lull between “torture porn” and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY.)   I outlined the book, started doing research, and even wrote a first chapter… then changed my mind.

When I came back around to the project a year or two later, I decided to make it a book entirely about supernatural / metaphysical horror films—focusing especially on films made since the mid-1980s.  I had been working for several years on a Discovery Channel series called A HAUNTING, which seemed to be in line with the latest trends in the horror genre, and I had strong opinions about why and how such stories work.  So I started writing.  Again I created a full outline, did some in-depth research, and completed a first chapter.  I was feeling pretty good about it, but somewhere along the line I got distracted.

One of the things that distracted me was exploring L.A.  Every weekend, my wife and I would go hiking at scenic spots in and around the city, and I quickly realized that every scenic spot in and around L.A. has been featured in a movie at some point.  Many of the more remote locations have a long history of use as filming locations, especially in westerns.  Although I had never been a particular fan of westerns—I naively thought it was a genre built on clichés—visiting these filming locations prompted me to start watching some studio-era westerns I'd never seen.  I found a great old-fashioned video store called Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee that had a lot of stuff never released on DVD.  After that I was hooked.

Somehow, over the next few years, my prospective horror book became a book about westerns.  Initially, I thought of it as “a book about the other great American film genre about violence."  I had an idea that westerns generally presented a very conservative perspective on violence, while horror films are more liberal.  But that simplistic notion disappeared once I actually started watching the movies.  My hope is that end result of my cinematic exploration will be a compelling introduction to the genre for people like me: members of a certain generation (raised on action, horror and sci-fi films) who have never really given westerns a chance. 

2015 was a big year for westerns.  Films like THE HATEFUL EIGHT, THE REVENANT, and BONE TOMAHAWK made a big impression on younger moviegoers—in part, I think, because they aren't what we expect from westerns.  They are adventures, thrillers, horror films.  But still westerns.  Personally, I don’t believe that any genre is ever pure.  I can’t write about the horror genre without also writing about psychological thrillers and dark sc-fi, and sometimes even comedy.  I don’t think anyone can, or should, write about westerns in this day in age without also considering “hidden westerns” that are more readily identified with other genres.  (I borrow the term "hidden westerns" from filmmaker John Carpenter, who has made more than his fair share of hidden westerns.) 

When I started obsessing about westerns, I noticed that the most comprehensive and authoritative books on the subject tend to assume that the genre basically died in the mid-1970s, with maybe a few gasps of new life in the early 90s and late 2000s.  Being a horror fan, of course I love the idea that the western genre is undead… returned from the grave, somehow transformed by its years in purgatory.  Hence the title of my book: The Quick, The Dead and the Revived.

It’s not a book about horror-westerns.  It’s a book about the most intelligent and influential western films from 1939 to 2010, in the same way that Nightmares and Red, White and Blue was about the most intelligent and influential American horror films from 1931 to 2000.  I tried to examine all of the classic A-westerns.  There are three chapters alone on the 1950s, the decade that produced the most iconic films in the genre.  There’s also a chapter on spaghetti westerns, as well as chapters on urban westerns of the 1970s, space westerns of the 1980s, neo-westerns of the 1990s, and the postmodern westerns of the 2000s.  I think the book proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the genre remains vital—if still somewhat hidden and underappreciated.

Now, because I know that my name on a book cover is probably not going to draw my fellow horror fans to the western genre, I want to point to some places where the two genres overlap in interesting ways.  I think most horror enthusiasts are vaguely aware of the more overt attempts to blend the two genres—mostly B-movies and DTV features about ghosts, vampires and zombies in the Old West.  Stuff like CURSE OF THE UNDEAD (1959), BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966), Charles Band’s GHOST TOWN (1988), DEAD NOON (2007) with Kane Hodder, etc.  I’m not a big fan of that type of horror-western.  I prefer more subtle overlaps.

Gary Cooper and Boris Karloff in UNCONQUERED

For example, I can’t watch Cecil B. DeMille’s western UNCONQUERED (1947), which stars Boris Karloff as the villainous Chief of the Seneca Indians, without thinking about how DeMille typecast Karloff as another “monster.”  (UNCONQUERED is a very un-PC movie.)  In a similar way, I can’t help but think of John Carradine’s performance as a rather effete Dracula (in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and HOUSE OF DRACULA) when I watch him in westerns.  And Carradine was in a lot of westerns, including some of John Ford's best work.  Likewise, Lon Chaney Jr.—best known for his performance in THE WOLF MAN and its sequels—made more western films than anything else, right up to the very end of his career.  Even Vincent Price dabbled in the genre, most notably in Sam Fuller’s THE BARON OF ARIZONA (1950).

My favorite early horror movies are those that came out of RKO in the 1940s, under the auspices of producer Val Lewton and directors Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise.  So I was thrilled to find that Lewton’s only western, APACHE DRUMS (1951), plays like a forerunner to George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.  (I was, in fact, so excited that I emailed Romero to ask if he’d ever seen it.  He said he hadn’t.)  Tourneur and Wise also made their own forays into the western genre.  Tourneur’s STARS IN MY CROWN (1950) is only marginally a western, but it’s a personal favorite of mine.  I think of it as an Old West version of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, although STARS was made a few years before Bradbury wrote his novel.  Wise directed one of my favorite noir westerns, BLOOD ON THE MOON (1948), starring Robert Mitchum, as well as one of the most intense westerns of that time period, TWO FLAGS WEST (1950).  And speaking of noir westerns…

There are some obvious crossovers of film noir and the western films.  Hardboiled detectives on dusty streets, that kind of thing.  But I don't want to name them, because much prefer straight westerns that have a streak of dark naturalism or fatalism in them.  I love vaguely metaphysical westerns like PURSUED (1947), YELLOW SKY (1948), and COLORADO TERRITORY (1949), so I wrote an entire chapter about these psychological / noir westerns in my book.  

Robert Mitchum in the noir western BLOOD ON THE MOON

Once you get to American cinema in the 1950s, it’s almost impossible to avoid talking about westerns.  It was by far the most popular genre of the day, in film and in television—although science fiction gave it a good run for its money.   That said, it should come as no surprise that some of the best-known sci-fi and horror filmmakers of the day made some pretty innovative westerns. 

Andre De Toth is primarily remembered as the director of the 3-D Vincent Price vehicle HOUSE OF WAX (1953), but he was actually more of a western enthusiast than a horror enthusiast.  John Ford personally recommended him to direct RAMROD (1947), and De Toth cast his wife Veronica Lake in the lead female role, opposite Joel McCrea.  De Toth went on to make six more western films with screen cowboy Randolph Scott in the 1950s, plus one with Gary Cooper (SPRINGFIELD RIFLE, 1952) and one with Kirk Douglas (THE INDIAN FIGHTER, 1955). He rounded out the decade with one of my personal favorites, DAY OF THE OUTLAW (1959)—a particularly bleak film featuring one of Robert Ryan's best performances.

Andre de Toth

Jack Arnold—the man behind Universal’s monster movies IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), and TARANTULA (1955)—made MAN IN THE SHADOW (1957) starring Orson Welles as a cold-hearted rancher, Audie Murphy’s best western NO NAME ON THE BULLET (1959), and the blaxploitation western BOSS NIGGER (1974) with Fred Williamson.

William Castle and Roger Corman each made several westerns in the 50s, although the merits of those films are debatable.  Some have argued that Corman’s directorial debut, FIVE GUNS WEST (1955), was the inspiration for ensemble action movies like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and THE DIRTY DOZEN.  Corman himself, however, was quick to abandon the genre—although he later produced two compelling westerns from director Monte Hellman, THE SHOOTING (1966) and RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND (1966), both starring Jack Nicholson.  And I’ve always been fascinated by Corman’s claim that he helped to develop the Gregory Peck vehicle THE GUNFIGHTER (1950), one of the most iconic westerns ever made, when he was still a lowly script reader at Fox. 

Jack Nicholson and Millie Perkins in THE SHOOTING

Edgar G. Ulmer is not as well known as Castle or Corman (although his following seems to grow every year) but he made a western that is more interesting than anything either of them did in the genre.  I’m not sure what to say about THE NAKED DAWN (1955), except that if you are a fan of Ulmer’s work (which includes Universal’s THE BLACK CAT and DETOUR), you should definitely check it out.  It's a unique film in the genre.  Ditto Ray Milland’s directorial debut A MAN ALONE (1955), a very strange—eerily effective—little western.  And while we’re on the subject of strange…. Did you know that Rod Serling wrote a western?  It’s called SADDLE THE WIND (1958), and it’s pretty good…. Although not as good as some of the western episodes Serling wrote for THE TWILIGHT ZONE.   Serling also reportedly wrote an early draft of Marlon Brando’s ONE-EYED JACKS (1961), but we probably shouldn’t give him credit—or assign him blame—for that one.

Gene Fowler Jr. is another name that is familiar to classic horror fans.  He directed the cult classics I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957) and I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958).  He also directed SHOWDOWN AT BOOT HILL (1958), a respectable B-western that gave Charles Bronson his first lead role and paved the way for Roger Corman to cast Bronson in a comparable breakout role in MACHINE-GUN KELLY (1958).  Even more striking are Fowler’s credits as an editor.  He worked on Fritz Lang’s WESTERN UNION (1941), Sam Fuller’s RUN OF THE ARROW (1957) and FORTY GUNS (1957), Clint Eastwood’s first American western HANG ‘EM HIGH (1968), and the controversial A MAN CALLED HORSE (1970).  

Charles Bronson and John Carradine in SHOWDOWN AT BOOT HILL

Italian westerns are, of course, some of the most violent and horrific westerns around, reflecting a backlash against the genre in the late 60s and early 70s.  Horror icons like Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci were part of the trend.  Bava directed one of the many pseudo-sequels to the immensely popular RINGO (RINGO IN NEBRASKA, 1966), as well as the western-comedy ROY COLT AND WINCHESTER JACK (1970).  Not his best work, but entertaining.  In addition to creating storyboards for the opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968), Argento co-wrote the Zapata western THE FIVE MAN ARMY (1969) and the ultra-violent CEMETERY WITHOUT CROSSES (1969).  According to some sources, he was also involved with CUT-THROATS NINE (1972).  Fulci likewise has three hyper-violent westerns to his name: MASSACRE TIME (1966), FOUR OF THE APOCALYPSE (1975) and—depending on who you ask—A BULLET FOR SANDOVAL (1969). 

As far as I’m concerned, FOUR OF THE APOCALYPSE is the nastiest postscript on the spaghetti western subgenre—although Sergio Corbucci’s THE GREAT SILENCE (1968) remains the best.  Others point to DJANGO, KILL! (1967) as the darkest Italian horror-western.  It's certainly the weirdest.  And there’s no question that DEATH RIDES A HORSE (1966), one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorites, is filled with indelible horror imagery.  These films all influenced increasingly dark and bloody American westerns, like WELCOME TO HARD TIMES (1967), THE STALKING MOON (1968), SOLDIER BLUE (1970) and Robert Aldrich’s ULZANA’S RAID (1972).  

Did I mention Robert Aldrich’s other westerns?  The filmmaker who gave us WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962) and HUSH… HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964) also gave us APACHE (1954) and VERA CRUZ (1954), both starring Burt Lancaster.  I remember when I went to the Deaville Film Festival in 2009 with my NIGHTMARES IN RED, WHITE AND BLUE documentary, the thing I was most excited about was the fact that they were screening all three of Aldrich’s major westerns.  The French still appreciate this genre, even if most (younger) Americans don’t. 

I could go on.  Christopher Lee co-starred in a British-Spanish western that pioneered the rape-revenge subgenre (HANNIE CAULDER, 1971).  Charles Bronson starred in a Native American version of JAWS (THE WHITE BUFFALO, 1977).  PSYCHO’s Anthony Perkins made an excellent law-and-order western with Henry Fonda (THE TIN STAR, 1957).  HALLOWEEN’s Donald Pleasance played terrifying villains in the revisionist westerns WILL PENNY (1967) and SOLDIER BLUE (1970).  John Carpenter has written several westerns, including an early script that was optioned by John Wayne’s production company (and later made--badly--as BLOOD RIVER, 1991).  I’d argue that Wes Craven made a western (THE HILLS HAVE EYES, 1977).  George Romero's most recent Dead movie (SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, 2009) was an homage to the Gregory Peck western THE BIG COUNTRY (1958).  The list goes on and on, and I’ve included many these titles in my book. 

So, horror fans… welcome to The Wicked West.  Read on.

MOVIES MADE ME #44: JOHN CARPENTER'S THE FOG

A few weeks ago, I was trying to figure out some of the visual storytelling techniques used in PET SEMATARY, one of my favorite horror films of the 1980s.   (I’ve decided that the superimposed image of the Pascow ghost must have been shot at a different film speed for grainier shadows, giving him a dreamlike quality.)  This week, I’m obsessing about the aural storytelling techniques that John Carpenter uses in THE FOG.

The first time I saw this film, it was in black and white.  I was seven or eight and the movie was playing on late-night TV.  I wasn’t technically allowed to watch it, so I had to sneak bits and pieces on a small, black and white TV in my bedroom.  I couldn’t turn the sound up, so I had to sit close to the speaker, with my face practically pressed against the screen.  I caught the final act, where Blake’s spirits attack the church and the lighthouse, in its entirety.... and those images of the fog swallowing up the coastal town of Antonio Bay were seared into my memory.

 

A few years later, I read the novelization by Dennis Etchison and found that I couldn’t get Carpenter’s music out of my head as I was reading.  The music was such a vital part of the story that I couldn’t even separate it from words on the page.   By the time I was in high school, I had come to think of THE FOG as the ideal supernatural horror film (I had not yet discovered Val Lewton) because it did something that most horror films in the 1980s didn’t do.  It focused primarily on atmosphere, rather than shock and sensationalism, to scare its audience.  Like several of Carpenter’s films, THE FOG is a masterpiece of brooding fatalism, and its sense of fate is conveyed largely through music and sound design.

It’s no secret that Carpenter struggled with THE FOG, and regards it as one of his less successful films.  When I interviewed him for NIGHTMARES IN RED, WHITE AND BLUE, this is what he had to say about it:  

“I kind of fucked it up the first time through.  I finished the film and it wasn’t very good, so we had to go back and fix it.  Do some re-shooting, change some things, change the music.  It made it slightly different than what I had originally wanted.  The idea was to make an old-fashioned ghost story.  Turned out that the first version of it was too old fashioned.  It just wasn’t very interesting.

I looked at it and I thought, What is wrong with this thing?  It’s just not working.  So I went back to the head of the studio at the time and I said, “I need to do some more work on this thing.  It’s just not frightening.  I need to pump it up.”  So I got back in there and started to re-cut it and figured out what we needed.  I remember shooting a big long scene that took place [below deck on a boat].   Tom Atkins and Jamie Lee Curtis come aboard and they go downstairs and Tom tells this ghost story.  That wasn’t in the original version.  [I added] things like that.  And also amplified the ending, made it a little bit more seat-gripping.  A little more tension-filled.  But it never was the movie I wanted to make.  It was too diverse.  Too many ghosts.  It wasn’t focused enough on one or two people. 

Plus I’m not altogether sure that ghosts as we know them are all that scary.  What do they do?  They walk around, walk through walls....  Japanese ghosts attack you. American ghosts usually just appear as a vision.  Well, big deal.  You might as well be talking about the image of the Virgin Mary on a cheese sandwich.  Or Jesus in some rhubarb.   So what?   What does it do?  Doesn’t do anything.”

I agree that old-fashioned ghost stories are a tough sell these days, but maybe not simply because the ghosts are passive.  The old-fashioned ghost stories that I find most engaging are stories that undermine and ultimately transform a person’s worldview.  When I was working on the Discovery Channel TV series A HAUNTING, I always started conducting interviews the same way -- by admitting that, if I ever personally saw a ghost (and couldn’t dismiss it as a hallucination), the experience would force me to re-think my foundational beliefs about the nature of reality.   My assumption is that, on some level, it would be a bit like becoming a kid again, without a firm grasp on the way the world really works.  That’s where fear comes in.  And that’s the reason that a ghost story should focus on only one or two people.  The audience has to closely identify with a character’s worldview in order to be shaken up when that worldview is threatened. 

The theatrical version of THE FOG doesn’t adhere to this idea.  For that reason the film may not achieve the type of cerebral horror that Carpenter was aiming at, but in my opinion it is still a very accomplished piece of storytelling.  While the film occasionally resorts to shock and sensationalism (it had to compete, after all, with the glut of slasher movies that followed Carpenter’s previous film HALLOWEEN), it never falls short on atmosphere.  Carpenter’s score and sound design imbue the fog with a menace that is just as powerful and unrelenting as that of Michael Myers.  Carpenter turned Myers into a face-less force of nature.  The fog is already a face-less force of nature.  Both draw their strength primarily from music. 

In an excellent essay entitled “Hearing Deep Seated Fears,” K.J. Donnelly defines Carpenter’s music as “primal” and “inhuman” because it is minimalist, repetitive and entirely electronic.  Donnelly also points out that, as the director, Carpenter is able to integrate music and sound design as “an essential component of the overall conception of film as an organic object.”   In other words, Carpenter’s music is much more than a backdrop for his stories.  Rather, the music is the soul -- or, perhaps more to the point, the lack of soul -- of his films.  Try watching HALLOWEEN or THE FOG with the sound off, and you’ll see what I mean.  For that matter, try watching Carpenter’s most recent film THE WARD.  In my opinion, it just doesn’t feel like a John Carpenter movie because it lacks a John Carpenter score.  (I got excited a while back when Carpenter announced that he was going to provide an original score for an e-comic.  Unfortunately, the e-comic turned out to be a John Carpenter score in the absence of a John Carpenter story. I digress.)

Anyone interested in Carpenter’s work -- or horror films in general, for that matter -- should really read Donnelly’s essay.  I won’t try to paraphrase his observations here, because frankly I don’t have a strong enough grasp on musical terminology to do it justice.  What I will do is point to a few scenes in THE FOG that help to illustrate just how integral the music is to the film. 

First and foremost is the opening scene around the campfire.  Carpenter cast John Houseman, a classically-trained voice actor, as his prologue storyteller “Mr. Machen” (a nod to horror author Arthur Machen).   This is one of the scenes that Carpenter added in re-shoots and it does an exceptional job of establishing the brooding atmosphere, as well as embracing the kind of “old-fashioned” oral storytelling that Carpenter was aiming for.  Right off the bat, we can tell that THE FOG has more in common with horror radio shows of the 1930s and 40s than it does with horror films of the early 1980s, due to its overwhelming reliance on music and sound design.  The slow, deliberate pacing of Houseman’s delivery in the opening scene is augmented by a sublime musical overture that samples all of Carpenter’s themes to come... a subtle rumination on Fate.

The following sequence unravels the ominous events of the night before Antonio Bay’s 100^th birthday.  I’m not sure if this sequence was part of the re-shoots or not, but it sets an equally eerie tone and establishes another oral storyteller.  Whereas Houseman’s character functions mostly as a character outside of the main story (though he too is a citizen of Antonio Bay), Adrienne Barbeau’s character Stevie Wayne functions as our narrator within the story.   She quite literally narrates the show -- telling us everything we need to know through voiceover, without shattering the illusion that we are experiencing the story firsthand.   This is another example of Carpenter’s ability to adopt classic storytelling techniques and make them his own.

Of course Carpenter is also a very strong visual storyteller.  He chose the Point Reyes Lighthouse in Central California as the location for Stevie Wayne’s radio station, and I can’t image a better setting.  This location gives our narrator (and us, by extension) the best possible vantage point from which to assess the threat of the fog.  It also makes Stevie Wayne potentially the most vulnerable character in the story... because that lighthouse is about as isolated and dangerous as a place can be. 

Last year, my wife and I drove out to the filming location and it was so far off the beaten track, so far from the coastline, that we nearly ran out of gas.   Once we got there, we had to walk down 300 steps to get to the lighthouse itself.  When the fog rolled in, both the ocean and the land disappeared.  Alone in such conditions, it would not be hard for a person to feel like they were the last person on earth, and to recognize that they are completely at the mercy of Mother Nature.

When I watched THE FOG recently, it got me thinking about a 1950s monster movie called THE TROLLENBERG TERROR (a.k.a. THE CRAWLING EYE), in which a small group of scientists get stranded in a shack in the Alps and surrounded by a mysterious fog.   After a series of mysterious decapitations (!), it becomes clear that something bad is lurking in that fog.  The most memorable scene is comes when one of the scientists opens the door of the shack and sees "the terror" waiting outside.  If what she sees doesn’t shatter her worldview, I don’t know what would. 

Carpenter’s reveal in THE FOG can’t really compete with THE TROLLENBERG TERROR.  His threat is strongest when it remains mysterious -- a strange, spectral glow within a white shroud.   The fog doesn’t just conceal the threat.  The fog is the threat: a living, breathing monster.  I suspect that Carpenter’s original intention was to not reveal what was inside the fog... or, at least, to not reveal it entirely.  (THE TROLLENBERG TERROR ingeniously found a way to have its cake and eat it too... but if I say any more, I’ll be ruining the moment for those who haven’t seen it.)

THE FOG loses some of its momentum whenever the threat takes a human form.   For example, one of Carpenter’s added scenes features Jamie Lee Curtis in a morgue with a body that is apparently possessed by dead pirates.  It’s a well-crafted scare scene, but not a moment of horror that's worthy of the likes of Arthur Machen or H.P. Lovecraft.  Why?  Because the real horror has no physical form.  It is, like the fog, formless.  The real object of horror is the Unknown.   

Carpenter may have occasionally resorted to the simpler shocks and sensationalism of knife-wielding (or, rather, hook-wielding) slashers, but it remains clear throughout THE FOG that he still understands where the real source of horror lies... and it’s not Jesus in the rhubarb.   Ambient music and the lonely sounds of a foghorn constantly reinforce a child’s sense of isolation, wonder and fear-without-object.   When the fog attacks, the music becomes primal, mimicking a fast-paced heartbeat.   Carpenter then manages to do with music what most horror filmmakers try to do with fast picture edits... he chases us.   

We watch helplessly as the Fog overwhelms the Seagrass, the weather station, Andy’s house, main street Antonio Bay, the old church and finally the lighthouse.   We intuitively understand that there is no escape -- not just because we can see how unstoppable the fog is, but because we can hear how unstoppable it is.  The music is unrelenting, unforgiving, inhuman.  How can we fight something like that?  We can’t.  All we can do is run or stop and stare in awe.

MOVIES MADE ME #42: Larry Cohen Double Feature

This spring, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition entitled “Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico” (see photos below)... which naturally got me thinking of Larry Cohen’s movie Q: THE WINGED SERPENT.

Yes, I’m reducing a significant cultural event to a movie reference. Because that’s what I do.

For the uninitiated, here’s the quick history lesson: Quetzalcoatl is an ancient Aztec deity, worshipped for hundreds of years in the Mesoamerican region. The name means “plumed serpent”... but, as Cohen advises, you can just call it Q... because “that’s all you’ll have time to say before it tears you apart!”

I didn't discover this movie until I was in college. I'd seen the VHS box a few times when I was a kid, but I never rented it because I thought the monster looked cheesy. And it does. But that doesn’t mean that Q: THE WINGED SERPENT is a cheesy movie. Let me put it this way: Either you like stop-motion animation monster movies or you don’t. If you do, you’re in hog heaven. If you don’t, there's still plenty to love about this film, because Q is a surprisingly intelligent satire on religion.

At the center of the story is Michael Moriarty -- surely Larry Cohen’s most charismatic leading man. Despite very different personal politics (check this out), the actor and director established an instant rapport on this film, before moving on to THE STUFF, IT'S ALIVE 3 and A RETURN TO SALEM'S LOT. Cohen says, “We do have a very similar sense of humor. And he’s very tuned in to me. When I’m working with him on a picture, I can make up new dialogue, I can make up jokes, I can make up new lines and I can give them to him on the set while we’re working, sometimes even while we’re shooting. And he won’t even blink an eye... He’s such a completely disciplined actor that he can take these ad libs and work them into the scene and make them feel organic to the scene.” No doubt this ability to improvise was particularly helpful in the making of Q: THE WINGED SERPENT, since the project was hastily put together in a matter of weeks... and by a writer/director with pretty high standards for monster movies.

When I interviewed Larry Cohen in 2008, he confessed that he never particularly liked the monster movies he grew up with (minus rare exceptions like THEM!). He said, “To me they were awful because the actors were so bad. I mean, they always had some broad with big tits and they’d say she was a nuclear physicist and you’re supposed to believe that this actress who’s obviously screwing some studio executive to get the job was right for the part…. And then the leads were always these dull men, John Agar types that had no personality. And it was a stage wait until the monster decided to show up. Then, after you saw the monster for a couple of minutes you said, Now what? And there was nothing else.”

“When I made those kind of films later on, I tried to instill them with characters that were rich and vibrant and had many levels of emotion, so that in my monster movies, the monsters were the least important thing in the picture. The actors were the most important thing in the picture.”

This is certainly true of Q: THE WINGED SERPENT. What works for me is the story of Moriarty’s savvy, cynical and emotionally vulnerable thief. The actor’s humanity and humor (not to mention his scat-singing) helps to sell the reality of story about a prehistoric monster in midtown Manhattan... because his character reacts the way any sane person would react: by going a little insane. Once he has stumbled onto the nest of Quetzalcoatl at top of the Chrysler Building, Moriarty gets downright loopy. White jazz gives way to the high-strung mania of a man who’s seen more than he can take. In any other film, a character this eccentric would be relegated to a supporting role, but Cohen keeps him front and center and makes him seem even more eccentric by pairing him with two straight men, David Carradine and Richard Roundtree.

Carradine is this monster movie's Roy Scheider and he gets to deliver most of the expositional dialogue -- as well as a few digs at organized religion. Confronted with the possibility that the “giant bird” is being worshipped as an Aztec deity, he casually responds, “Wouldn’t be the first time in history that a monster was mistaken for a god.” Roundtree is equally sarcastic. Standing over a body that has been “peeled like an orange” by Q worshippers, he champions modern religion: “Luckily all we have to do these days is take the wafer and drink the wine. That’s what I call being civilized.” A relatively minor character delivers Cohen’s ultimate statement on religion in Q: “What else is God but an invisible force we fear? For centuries we’ve tried to make it into our image. Give God two legs, a pair of hands, lips, eyes. Perhaps it’s only our vanity.” In other words: Maybe God is really a monster. That’s a pretty hard-hitting theme for a nostalgic monster movie. But then Cohen is no stranger to high-concept genre films.

A few years earlier, he explored the same idea in GOD TOLD ME TO -- a brilliant sci-fi thriller about alien abduction and the Second Coming. In Tony Williams’ woefully out-of-print book Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker, the director explains that his original idea for the film was to tell a variation on the Superman myth: “Imagine a creature from another planet born and brought up here, not knowing his origins, realizing that he has supernatural powers enabling him to control people. This alien might begin to believe that he is God, particularly in a Christian society like ours where it is preached that God came to Earth in human form with unique powers.”

The finished film muses on the psychic fallout of this scenario. When ordinary people commit acts of murder in the name of God, they feel a sense of pride and satisfaction... even peace. A father kills his wife and young children without remorse, because he believes that God “wouldn’t ask me to do anything that wasn’t right.” He even invokes the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to justify his actions -- a speech that challenges the individual viewer’s religious beliefs. For Christians, it begs the question: What kind of God would ask us to kill our own child? For Christians and non-Christians alike, it begs another question: Is this kind of faith a serious threat to law and order?

In 2008, the director said, “People thought that GOD TOLD ME TO was kind of touchy because it dealt with religion… but I always say, ‘Hey, look at THE EXORCIST. Here’s a movie where the little girl’s masturbating with a crucifix. I mean, this is really disgusting stuff. And they had real priests on the set as technical advisors. What the hell were they doing there, lending credence to this movie... just because it was a bestselling book?” THE EXORCIST, of course, is a very different film with a very different agenda. Author William Peter Blatty’s tale is practically evangelical: he wanted to scare people into believing in Ultimate Good and Ultimate Evil. Director William Friedkin was obviously more concerned with scaring people than converting them, but the effect was the same. GOD TOLD ME TO, on the other hand, doesn't make the distinction between Ultimate Good and Ultimate Evil. One character asks, “What do you think would happen if people believed that God was actually exercising His will on the city streets?" Whereas THE EXORCIST sent moviegoers scrambling to church, GOD TOLD ME TO shows the people of New York scrambling aimlessly in the streets, with nowhere to run.

When I re-watched GOD TOLD ME TO last night, I realized that Cohen had mimicked one of the final scenes in THE EXORCIST. In Friedkin's film, Jason Miller finds Max von Sydow lying dead on the floor, and promptly throttles the possessed Linda Blair, ordering the devil to “Take Me!” In GOD TOLD ME TO, Tony LoBianco’s character aggressively interrogates a fatally-wounded killer who seems to be (in a less literal sense) possessed by the alien Christ-figure. As the dying man struggles to utter the words “God told me to,” LoBianco pounds on his chest, saying, “Fight Him!” When the killer slips away, the detective screams (at the invisible demon), “Kill Me!” The staging of two scenes is almost identical, but Cohen has turned von Sydow's righteous priest into a homicidal madman and Miller's guilty priest into a self-loathing alien.... which I guess is one way of summing up his position on organized religion. It goes back to that very simple concept: If God's followers can do such monstrous things in His name, then maybe God is really a monster.

Cohen says he got the idea for Q while wandering the streets of Manhattan. “I was looking up at the towers of New York,” he said, “and I thought, These things look like temples. If our civilization was suddenly destroyed by some cataclysm, and then unearthed a thousand years from now, and archaeologists began to dig it out and they found the Chrysler Building, they’d say, Obviously, people worshipped these things. The whole side of the building is covered with images of birds and the top of it is kind of feathered. And it gleams in the sun. So I said, ‘If some giant bird came to New York, it would want to nest at the top of the Chrysler Building, because it looks like it’s been built to be a nest.’ Then I said, 'What kind of giant bird would it be?' Well, there’s Quetzalcoatl, the ancient bird god of Mexico... What’s he doing in New York?”

The director fell in love with the idea of placing a monster in mid-town Manhattan -- not just because it gave him a chance to create his own version of King Kong on the Empire State Building, but because it gave him a chance to play out a feature-length Hitchcockian scenario. When I spoke to Cohen about his filmmaking influences, he admitted that he had always been impressed with Alfred Hitchcock’s knack for making the most unlikely people and places seem dangerous. That simple concept became the basis for many of Cohen’s films, as he himself explains: “If you’re going to have somebody killed, why not do it in the midst of 5,000 policemen... in the middle of the biggest parade that New York has? [see GOD TOLD ME TO] If you’re going to create a monster, why not make it a baby? [see IT’S ALIVE] If you’re going to sell something dangerous, why not make it ice cream? [see THE STUFF] If you’re going to show something terrifying, why not make it an ambulance? [see THE AMBULANCE] If you’re going to have a killer, why not make him a cop? [see MANIAC COP].”

GOD TOLD ME TO provides the ultimate example: If you’re going to tell a story about a mind-controlling terrorist, why not make him Jesus Christ? Richard Lynch plays the part as a glowing, unisex hippie with unsettling burn scars. (The scars were real -- permanent reminders of a day when the actor set himself on fire in the midst of a bad acid trip.) Taking this concept one step further, Cohen’s hero is the man who eventually kills “Christ.”

When was the last time you saw a monster movie with that kind of chutzpah?

MOVIES MADE ME #41: CHRISTINE

“I have told you that it is impossible to be objective about that ride; if there was a logical progression of events, it is lost to me now, blocked out. That journey through the cold black night really was like a trip on a boulevard through hell. I can’t remember everything that happened, but I can remember more than I want to. We backed out of the driveway and into a mad funhouse world where all the creeps were real.” - Stephen King, Christine

When I was a teenager, Christine was one of my favorite Stephen King novels - not because it’s his best-written novel or his scariest, but because I could identify with the characters. To me, Christine was not a novel about a killer car. It was a story about best friends, Arnie Cunningham and Dennis Guilder, and the way their friendship gradually falls apart. I could relate to Arnie’s anger as an outsider, and therefore his attraction to Christine. I could relate to Dennis’s sense of loss, and even fear, as the dynamic changes. In short, I found the novel much more powerful than King’s glib description of it as “HAPPY DAYS gone mad” would suggest.

I also love John Carpenter’s feature film adaptation of the novel, even though it’s a very different beast. Everyone talks about the differences between Stephen King’s The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING -- how the filmmaker turned the conflicted father Jack Torrence, struggling against the malefic influence of the ghosts in the Overlook Hotel, into a man who has been and always will be batshit crazy. Kubrick’s film, as brilliant as it might be, decisively eliminates the good versus evil struggle that is the core of King’s novel. (Hence King’s desire to make a new screen adaptation in 1997.)

John Carpenter’s CHRISTINE does something similar. It eliminates the idea that Christine is infested by the spirit of Roland LeBay, and that LeBay subsequently takes possession of Arnie. Carpenter’s model of the killer car is simply “born” evil. In the very first scene (a scene invented by screenwriter Bill Phillips, not drawn from King’s novel), Christine claims her first victim -- a hapless factory worker -- just moments after she rolls off the assembly line. LeBay and Arnie become her subsequent victims. And, like Kubrick’s Jack Torrence, they never really have a chance.

I spent this past weekend at the Mad Monster horror convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, where my friend John Muir and I got into an extended conversation about how the most successful films based on King’s work come from visionary filmmakers who hold true to their own personal obsessions, rather than being slavishly loyal to King's intentions. THE SHINING is an obvious example, as are Brian DePalma’s CARRIE and David Cronenberg’s THE DEAD ZONE. These films fit more easily into substantive discussions about the sensibilities of the filmmakers than into conversations about the thematic concerns of Stephen King. Kubrick, DePlama and Cronenberg take ownership of the material, which is to say that they don’t just reinvent the story aesthetically... They reinvent it thematically (with a little help from their humble screenwriters, of course).

According to various interviews over the years, John Carpenter had a vision for adapting Firestarter. That’s the project he was working on in 1982, when THE THING came out and briefly hobbled his filmmaking career. Though it has since become one of the undisputed classics of modern day horror, Carpenter’s monster movie remake was an unmitigated commercial and critical disaster at the time of its release -- and the experience remains a bit raw for the filmmaker, as I learned when I interviewed him in 2008. He reflected: “Boy that movie was hated. Wow! And by fans! By the fans! Boy, they turned against it. It was unbelievable. It was an unbelievable experience to go through it. It was stunning. I could never figure it out. What did I do? What was so terrible about it? Why do you hate this so much? I don’t know. It was like I raped their mothers or something.” Universal executives responded to the backlash by firing Carpenter from his next project. “I was gonna do FIRESTARTER,” he remembers. “We had a screenplay. We were scouting locations at Universal. After THE THING’S performance, they pulled the plug on it... Somebody else did FIRESTARTER, for a lot less money.”

I for one would be very curious to hear how Carpenter intended to make FIRESTARTER his own. I re-read the novel last year, and I can say that the most interesting thing to me was the father/daughter relationship in the first third of the book, which is not only under stress from external forces (government agents who want to study Charlie's gift and use her as a weapon) but from internal forces as well. Charlie’s power is growing as she matures sexually. When she starts a fire, she is literally ecstatic (in the original sense of the word: “standing outside of oneself”), and the narrator tells us that she burns her victims from the inside out. In other words, Charlie literally gets inside of people before she kills them. And what’s even scarier: she likes it.

It’s not hard to view Charlie as a prepubescent version of CARRIE, and I have always wondered what might have become of Charlie as a teenager. I discount the half-hearted sequel FIRESTARTER 2: REKINDLED entirely, because Drew Barrymore should have rekindled the role. Just imagine a pyrokinetic version of the seductress she plays in POISON IVY! Since Stephen King is currently writing a sequel to THE SHINING, can I also request a real sequel to FIRESTARTER? But I’m getting off track here...

Carpenter's previous film was entirely about men and male-on-male conflict (the tagline for THE THING: “Man is the warmest place to hide.”), and I think it would have been interesting to see him follow up with a film about female empowerment -- something that might have related to Laurie Strode’s character arc in HALLOWEEN. Whether Carpenter's take on FIRESTARTER worked or not, I think we can all safely assume that it would have been more engaging than Mark L. Lester’s. Unfortunately, THE THING transformed Carpenter from Hollywood’s wunderkind (HALLOWEEN had been the most successful independent film of all time) to box office poison.

Ironically, however, there were so many Stephen King projects circulating in Hollywood at the time that he was able to jump onto another adaptation. He made CHRISTINE, he admits bluntly, because “I just couldn’t get another job. It was the only job that was offered me.” From the beginning, he had problems with the story: “I wasn’t a fan of the haunted car stuff. I thought, Well how are we gonna do this? This could be sort of silly.”

In other interviews, he has said that he regrets making the decision to get rid of the Roland LeBay character. In the novel, the spirit of the sadistic LeBay is alive and well inside Christine (and eventually Arnie). He even appears, as a rotting corpse, in the back seat of the car. Sounds like a perfect horror movie image, right? But Carpenter was worried that it would be silly instead of scary. I agree that talking corpses is a tricky conceit. Tom McLoughlin’s SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK later adopted this Stephen King story element and did a pretty good job of balancing horror and humor, but I'd argue that it's pretty hard for anyone who's ever seen AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON to take this stuff seriously. What it comes down to, I think, is whether or not the storyteller can convince himself that what he's showing us is real. If he can’t do that, then he probably can’t convince an audience that it's real and he should steer clear of the idea. King has said that he gets so wrapped up in the reality of his stories that he has to sleep with his bedroom light on. Carpenter, however, had to replace LeBay’s ghost with the idea that the car itself is evil.

Personally, I think this idea is an even tougher sell. A "haunted car" or a demonic possession story is one thing, but the idea of an inanimate object being inherently evil doesn’t really jive with Western religious ideas... so it takes a lot more convincing than the typical ghost story. Carpenter's change requires a new internal logic to explain Christine's "evil." His shot selection implies that Christine is responsible for Dennis’s crippling football accident. We could interpret this to mean that Christine is indirectly responsible, because she brought Arnie and Leigh to the game and thereby “caused” the distraction that led to his injury. Or we could interpret it to mean that the car exerts a direct influence on the world around it. At this point, we might think that Christine's power manifests itself as “bad luck”... like a black cat crossing your path. Before long, however, it's clear that Christine has her own distinct consciousness. She selects her victims and methodically hunts them down. She seems to gain power as she "feeds," until -- in the final reel -- she can even power down a bulldozer by flaring her headlights.

So what exactly is the consciousness inside Christine and where does it come from? I don’t need all the answers, but I need a little bit more information than Carpenter's film provides before I can get scared. Maybe Carpenter did too, and that’s why he has regrets. In a 1991 interview with Cinefantastique writer Mark Wood, he said, "I made a big mistake by taking out Roland LeBay's rotting corpse in the back seat. I guess I was just tired of rotting corpses at the time, and tried to do it all with the car. I failed." Looking back on the film in 2008, he said, “We did the best we could with CHRISTINE. I just gave it my all. I don’t know that I’m passionately in love with that film. It’s okay.”

Aside from the glaring “possession problem” at the heart of the story, I still -- as I said -- have a soft spot for the film. It might not affect me on the same level as the book, but it's nevertheless a fun ride. The main reason is the captivating performance of Keith Gordon. Today, Gordon is a well-established writer/director. After acting for more than a decade, he made a couple of very respectable independent films, THE CHOCOLATE WAR (1988) and A MIDNIGHT CLEAR (1992), before moving into television. Most recently, he’s directed several episodes of Showtime’s DEXTER. In an interview with Mike White, however, he says he is still recognized as the nerdy hero in Brian DePalma’s DRESSED TO KILL (1980), “nerd gone bad” Arnie Cunningham in CHRISTINE (1983) and Rodney Dangerfield’s son in BACK TO SCHOOL (1986).

As Arnie, he is pitch-perfect. He captures the character’s nervous energy in the beginning and exudes menacing cool in the second half. There are two scenes in particular that have always impressed me. One is the dinner table confrontation with his parents. Arnie, distressed by the recent attack on Christine, casually and cruelly tells his parents (who are at their most sympathetic in this scene) to go to hell. His delivery is not that of a petulant teenager. He is composed and deadly earnest, which makes him seem like a sociopath. Moments after this conversation, he forcefully grabs his father by the throat -- the ultimate transgression for a teenager. It’s a clear and decisive threat that demonstrates two things: (1) a redistribution of power, from father to son, (2) Arnie’s now-complete lack of conscience. Arnie walks away smiling, satisfied with his newfound power and independence. His father stays behind, obviously terrified at what his son has become.

The second scene that always gets me is when Arnie draws the battle lines of the future for Dennis. He's pounding beer as he drives Christine down a dark highway at 100+ miles per hour... except, as Dennis learns, Arnie isn’t really driving at all. Christine is driving. There’s a faint blue light on Arnie’s face in this scene. It comes up from below and makes the actor’s eyes look old and sunken in. Keith Gordon is able to do the rest by flashing a look of sadistic glee from inside those dark pits, as he toasts, “Death to the shitters of the world in 1979.”

This is as close as the film gets to showing us a corpse in the back seat. Arnie is as dead inside as Roland LeBay, as hopelessly crazy as Jack Torrence in Kubrick’s THE SHINING. His struggle is already over... which is unfortunate, since it leaves us only Dennis (played by John Stockwell) and Leigh (played by Alexandra Paul) to empathize with... and neither one of them are particularly interesting. Stockwell and Paul do get a little help from their fellow thespians. Roberts Blossom is wonderfully sleazy (you can almost smell the booze on his breath) as George LeBay, Robert Prosky is entertainingly gruff as Will Darnell (though he deserves a better death scene), and Harry Dean Stanton is amusingly quirky as Detective Junkins. All three of these characters help to place us in a bitter world that perhaps deserves to burn.

I once attended a sci-fi convention where an attendee was continuously asking people what they thought of the movie CHRISTINE. It didn’t matter if the question was irrelevant to the setting. A panelist might be talking about BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, and this guy would ask about CHRISTINE. What made this indiscrepancy so unnerving was the fact that this guy looked like he should have been one of the sleazy supporting characters in Carpenter's movie. He would have given Blossom and Prosky a run for their money, with his dirty tan trench coat, scruffy beard, indoor sunglasses and labored speech. Maybe it was the ghost of Roland LeBay. Which is why I'm writing about what I think of CHRISTINE, so he doesn't come for me next.

Again, I digress... This story makes my mind wander. I suppose Stephen King could say the same thing. The basic idea of a car consuming an insecure teenager’s identity obviously made him remember some of the sordid details of his own past, his own personal “HAPPY DAYS gone mad.” There is a haunting dreamlike quality to the novel -- it reads like a recurring memory of some horrible event that can never been changed or erased. Christine is the vehicle of fate. I remember one scene in which she emerges from a violent snowstorm, headlights shining like demon’s eyes, and crashes through the wall of one character’s house. She is, in a word, unstoppable. I pictured this scene taking place at the house I lived in when I was a teenager. I could even picture the car... because my neighbor owned an old Plymouth Fury. It was a huge car that took up the entire driveway. When she started it up, the exhaust system rumbled like distant thunder. The car was painted blue, or I would have been really nervous.

This past weekend, at the horror convention in Charlotte, I met the owner of one of the only two surviving models that were used in the filming of CHRISTINE. When I first approached him, I asked, a bit awe-struck, “Do you own this car?” He smiled and responded sharply, “No. She owns me.” Obviously this a guy who understands the power of the story.



When I drove home that night, I could hear John Carpenter’s pulse-pounding theme music playing in my head. In the film, that main theme kicks into high gear at the moment when Christine turns into a literal killing machine. I like to think that's also the moment when the story itself took the reins from author Stephen King, when he couldn’t steer the writing anymore. The monster was loose, and Christine was going to go wherever the hell she wanted to go from there. The author once said that’s how he likes to write. No outline. No road rules. No speed limit. “I’m driving through thick fog with the pedal all the way to the metal...”

Nightmares in Red White and Blue on VOD and DVD

Gravitas Ventures has acquired the Video-on-Demand rights for Nightmares in Red White and Blue. Beginning on July 1, the documentary will be available across North America through Warner Bros. Digital Distribution.

Lorber Films has acquired all theatrical and DVD rights in the U.S. and Canada for Nightmares in Red, White an Blue. The company plans to release the documentary in additional film festivals, specialty theaters and college venues starting in July, prior to a DVD release on September 28.

The Monsterfest Report

Thanks to everyone who came out for the screening of NIGHTMARES at Monsterfest on Saturday! It was great to see so many friends from M2 Pictures, New Dominion Pictures, Dr. Madblood, Scary Monsters Magazine and The House Between. I arrived early and chatted with Rob Floyd and Jim Blanton, founders and directors of Monsterfest, and Craig Eckrich, who provided “special security” (I won’t ask…). This was the sixth year of Monsterfest, and they had a pretty good turnout.

Right away, my old friend Dr. Madblood pulled me aside for an interview that will appear in his upcoming Halloween special. I met the infamous mad doctor of Pungo back in 2004, when I was working at a production company in Norfolk. I had just published “Nightmares in Red, White and Blue,” which gave me the confidence to approach Jerry Harrell (the man behind the wig) and introduce myself. We had a long conversation about how we each got interested in horror films, and Jerry offered a succinct explanation of why he had first donned the wig. Quite simply, he wanted to reassure kids that it was okay to be different. He’s been a personal hero of mine ever since. Soon after that, I started showing up for weekly tapings of the Madblood series and met the rest of the cast and crew – a fantastic group of people, who are just as funny off-screen as on. They put me to work on a few episodes as the “Brain-wrangler” (if you’ve seen the show, you know what I mean), and treated me like family. I am grateful to Monsterfest for providing a chance to catch up with Jerry and several of his cohorts: Kristen Harrell, Craig T. Adams, Debra Burrell, Carter Perry and Bill Davidson.

The Virginia premiere of NIGHTMARES IN RED, WHITE AND BLUE followed a lineup of short films including an all-puppet version of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (!), and we had a lively Q&A afterwards. Director Andrew Monument and I also sat for a lengthy interview with Jason Bayless, Josh Browning and Paul Casper (who composed the score for NIGHTMARES), which will appear on their internet radio program – Zombie Popcorn – later this month.

NIGHTMARES was followed by the world premiere of the documentary VIRGINIA CREEPERS. I bought a DVD copy of the “special Monsterfest edition” of the doc – which I assume is a bit longer than the final version will be. At 2 hours, it offers an exhaustive overview of horror show hosts from the Old Dominion. Particular focus is given to The Bowman Body, Count Gore de Vol, and Dr. Madblood, but I was especially excited to learn more about some of their lesser-known predecessors (Jonathan, Ghoulda, Ronald the Ghoul, and Hazel Witch) and their internet successors. Documentarian Sean Kotz clearly loves his subject, and the lower-third titles throughout the film prove that his sense of humor is as biting as the creepers.

By the end of the day, nearly the entire cast of THE HOUSE BETWEEN had gathered for the all-night movie marathon. Tony Mercer and Lee Hansen were on hand for a panel discussion on the history of Godzilla movies… and these guys know their stuff. They had so much to say that they only managed to get up to GODZILLA VS. MEGALON (1973) before running out of time. There is already some speculation about continuing the conversation at the Fantasci convention in the spring. (In the meantime, I think they should write the book.) Until next year…

Monsterfest VI

Festival founder Rob "Wolfman" Floyd and the monsters from his closet

MADBLOOD director Carter Perry and a recently-returned veteran of the Iraq War (no kidding)

Dr. Madblood and Me

NIGHTMARES director Andrew Monument with Ro-Man

The director's son, in disguise

The cast of BUBBA HO-TEP 2?

Attending cast members of The House Between… minus Phyllis Floyd, who somehow managed to avoid the camera but who must be acknowledged because, well, Phyllis is awesome. From left to right: Craig T. Adams, Lee Hansen, Craig Eckrich, Kim Breeding, Tony Mercer, Rob Floyd, and Jim Blanton.

The Shriekfest Report

Shriekfest kicked off the Halloween season in Los Angeles this past weekend with a lineup of 14 features and 26 short films – including the west coast premiere of NIGHTMARES IN RED WHITE AND BLUE. Attendees included filmmakers Mick Garris and Tom McLoughlin, both of whom are featured in the documentary, and Eileen Dietz – best known to horror fans as the face and voice of evil Regan (a.k.a. Captain Howdy, a.k.a. Pazuzu, a.k.a. The Devil) from THE EXORCIST. This was the first time I’d met Eileen, and I’m thrilled that she was there to add her devilish humor to the mix.

If you’ve seen NIGHTMARES, you already know that there is a rather lengthy section on THE EXORCIST. Tom McLoughlin talks about the effect the film had on American culture and on his own circle of friends in 1973. What didn’t make it into the documentary are the details of how director William Friedkin crafted this masterpiece by using very subtle filmmaking techniques (including subliminal sounds and images) to convince audience members that they were experiencing true evil. One of the many tricks he used was replacing actress Linda Blair with Eileen Dietz at key moments in the film. It’s these appearances, seamlessly interwoven with Blair’s scenes, that make the possession seem so real.... because we are, in fact, seeing two different people without being consciously aware of it. Looking back now, I realize that many of the images from THE EXORCIST that haunted me the most on initial viewings were images of Eileen Dietz, rather than Linda Blair… and what made them so frightening was that I knew, on a subconscious level, that I wasn’t seeing Linda Blair.

Here’s a test. See if you can identify the actress in each of the following images…






The answers: 1) Linda Blair, 2) Eileen Dietz, 3) Eileen Dietz, 4) Eileen Dietz’s face super-imposed on Linda Blair’s face, 5) actually, this one is tricky… it’s neither Blair nor Dietz, but a dummy created by FX artist Dick Smith. Here’s another interesting fact from the world of THE EXORCIST: Tom McLoughlin was originally slated to direct the prequel, before either Paul Schrader or Renny Harlin got involved. I, for one, would have liked to have seen that version. But I digress…

Shriekfest offered a wonderfully eclectic batch of films. I only saw about half of them, but every one had something to recommend it. The variety of the films made me realize just how many different types of horror there are these days (thus indicating how many different types of horror fans there are these days). There’s the traditional monster movie (see Michael Emanuel’s MANEATER, which is chock full of blood, breasts and beasts), the pseudo-religious ghost story (I love the Spanish because they aren’t afraid to use blasphemy as a plot device, as evidenced by Elio Quiroga’s NO-DO), and the tongue-in-cheek rollercoaster ride (Darin Scott’s DARK HOUSE trumps the similar Dark Castle productions of the early 2000s).

A couple of films inadvertently served to illustrate points that are made in the NIGHTMARES documentary. The thread about the American dreamer-turned-nightmare visionary (which starts with Hannibal Lector and continues with AMERICAN PSYCHO and SAW) plays itself out in Luke Ricci’s film HOW TO BE A SERIAL KILLER. On the small screen, the Showtime series DEXTER has taken this idea to its utmost extreme, by prompting us to completely empathize with the killer -- not just as a vigilante, but as a family member, a co-worker, a boyfriend, a father figure. HOW TO BE A SERIAL KILLER adds self-help guru to the mix, and plays everything for laughs rather than drama. I was surprised at how well it works, thanks to the performances of charismatic actors.

Mick Garris suggests, in the documentary, that the future of horror may be found in the dark fantasies of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, the man behind THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE and PAN’S LABYRINTH. Robert Beaucage adopts that myth-making style in his “gothic fairy tale” SPIKE – which reminded me more of Jean Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946) than of anything that’s come along in the past few years (excepting del Toro’s work). I was thrilled to see such a passionate blend of fantasy and horror… something that’s been sorely lacking from mainstream horror films in the past few years.

My personal favorite of all the films I saw at Shriekfest was Gregg Holtgrewe’s DAWNING. This one is harder to talk about, because it is purely and simply about the Unknown, and it thrives on tone and atmosphere rather than plot. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a filmmaker do so much with so little, but Holtgrewe has the good sense to realize that the most disturbing horror films are often the simplest ones. DAWNING (in its current edit) is a lean 72 minutes, shot in one location with a handful of actors and very sparse dialogue. Darkness and relative silence are all the filmmaker needs to hypnotize the viewer and hold us captive for over an hour. The minimalist sound design forces us to pay close attention to every detail, and the filmmakers have carefully crafted a sense of mystery for each character and every little turn of events. If you like the slow-burn approach of films like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and THE STRANGERS, and can appreciate the metaphysical underpinnings of works by directors like David Lynch and M. Night Shyamalan, then DAWNING will be a very welcome discovery.