THE FILM PATROL

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

HORROR HARVEST: Part Ten: The Three C’s – Craven, Carpenter and Cronenberg (OK, and Hooper and Raimi)


John Carpenter's "They Live" -- existence as conspiracy.

What happened? Why were the last 30 years of the 20^th century the most fruitful, penetrating and transgressive years for American horror cinema?

A lot of factors fed in to the widespread success of the horror film period (and the subsequent writing of countless studies, dissertations and theses on same). The graphic intrusion of the horrors of Vietnam and domestic crimes visa television lowered the resistance of the potential audience to explicit terror. By the end of Nixon administration, the American dream had begun to sour and curl at the edges, and it was hard not to be caught up in a feeling of hopelessness and ennui.

On more a practical level, there were more teenagers to frighten. The 1970s saw the coming of age of the tail end of the Baby Boom – the last generation to date to experience material well-being and economic abundance as a group to date. Additionally, advances in movie technology in terms of makeup, prosthetics and effects (pre-CGI) made it possible to stage more ambitious and convincing scenes of horror.

"Videodrome" -- disgusting virtuosity.

Finally, the time was right -- to question EVERYTHING. Whatever cultural, political or psychosocial reasons are given for their popularity, these films represented a catharsis and a way to think through implications of reality onscreen that were powerful and influential.

Carpenter’s deep suspicions about society, systems of belief and consensus reality come to the fore in “The Thing” and “They Live”; his out-and-out solid cinematic abilities make “Halloween” a classic film text that would serve as a template for countless others. “Prince of Darkness” and “Mouth of Madness” would push his sensibilities into even more breathtaking territory – one in which the dominion of evil was only a flip of perception or an accident of fate away from the world.

Cronenberg delves even further into the underlying terrors of existence, especially the fragility and unreliability of the human body. His “body horror” palette is broad enough to tackle numerous levels of meaning on any given project, and has pushed him, like Carpenter and Raimi, into more mainstream and “legitimate” projects.

Of the five directors listed in this chapter, it seems clear now that only Carpenter, Cronenberg and Raimi will be canonized (and Raimi will be praised primarily as a stylist, not as a “thinker”), while Craven and Hooper will be seen as opportunistic journeymen. This seems odd. Craven’s “Last House on the Left,” along with Friedkin’s “Exorcist” three years later and Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” broke all the filmmaking taboos -- and made tons of money doing so.

"The Exorcist" -- no safety anywhere.

Unfortunately, lesser talents could only see the gore on screen, not the even more disturbing ideas behind them. “Last House on the Left” would not be remembered an essay on the senselessness of revenge, but as a precursor of torture porn. “The Exorcist,” although it contains a redemptive ending, merciless tormented a child and her family. “Massacre” offers a perverted All-American family, and lingers on the savaging of women. This misogyny and sadistic Puritanism would continue, sanctified by financial success. Horror was leaving the drive-in and entering the multiplex.

Last House on the Left

Wes Craven

1972

The Exorcist

William Friedkin

1973

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Tobe Hooper

1974

The Hills Have Eyes

Wes Craven

1975

They Came from Within

David Cronenberg

1975

Rabid

David Cronenberg

1977

Halloween

John Carpenter

1978

Salem’s Lot

Tobe Hooper

1979

The Brood

David Cronenberg

1979

Scanners

David Cronenberg

1981

The Evil Dead

Sam Raimi

1981

The Thing

John Carpenter

1982

Poltergeist

Tobe Hooper

1982

Videodrome

David Cronenberg

1983

The Dead Zone

David Cronenberg

1983

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Wes Craven

1984

Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper

1985

The Fly

David Cronenberg

1986

Evil Dead II

Sam Raimi

1987

Prince of Darkness

John Carpenter

1987

The Serpent and the Rainbow

Wes Craven

1988

They Live

John Carpenter

1988

Dead Ringers

David Cronenberg

1988

Darkman

Sam Raimi

1990

The People Under the Stairs

Wes Craven

1991

In the Mouth of Madness

John Carpenter

1994

Scream

Wes Craven

1996

Crash

David Cronenberg

1996

Vampires

John Carpenter

1998

eXistenZ

David Cronenberg

1999

Sunday, November 6, 2011

HORROR HARVEST: Part Nine: Eurasian Horror, post-WWII

"Blood and Black Lace": the marriage of sex and death.

While American horror films were moving by and large into sci-fi territory after World War II, Europe and Asia began to see more possibilities for the horror film. Small genre streams began to flow and widen.

Germany did not have flat-out horror films (they seem to have lived enough real-life horror from 1933-1945 for that), but a series of “krimi” criminal thriller films, based on the works of English mystery novelist Edgar Wallace, were popular during the 1960s. These usually featured a masked killer, violence against scantily clad women, and a fogbound English atmosphere.

Klaus Kinski makes a special appearance as a severed head in the 1960 "krimi" film, "The Avenger."

In France, Pre-New Wave French directors such as Clouzot and Franju were able to summon the spirit of Feuillade, Lang and Murnau with their creations. Japan was mostly known for its kaiju (giant monster) and kaijin (supervillain) sci-fi/horror films. There studios such as Toho, Tsuburaya, P Productions and Toei created highly successful film and TV franchises based on those premises. However, moody, disturbing yokai (ghost) horror films began to appear – “Jigoku,” “Onibaba,” “Kwaidan,” and many elements in the hallucinatory output of Kinji Fukasaku. These pioneering efforts would lead to an explosion of Japanese horror in the 1990s and 2000s.

Italy produced the most distinctive and influential subgenre, the giallo. This bloody marriage of erotic and violent content was launched by Mario Bava and perfected by Dario Argento, with major contributions by directors such as Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi. The graphic horror/thrillers, often pessimistic, misogynistic and just plain nihilistic in plot and tone, would provide a template for the American slasher series of the 1980s.

Last but not least, several directors outside easy categorization brought increasingly bizarre mixtures of physical, psychological and sexual terror to the screen. Spain’s Jess Franco and France’s Jean Rollin freely intermixed horror and pornography, many times in the same films. Jose Mojica Marins of Brazil also tread heavily in the exploitation circuit, scoring most memorably in the horror genre with his “Coffin Joe” trilogy.

Jose Mojica Marins as "Coffin Joe"

The supreme figure from the era, unaccountably unknown outside Europe, is Paul Naschy. The Spanish actor created such a storm of adulation for his central role in “The Mark of the Wolf Man” in 1968 that he not only made 11 more werewolf films, but went on to play Dracula, the Mummy, Jack the Ripper, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Phantom of the Opera and many other macabre figures.

Paul Naschy in his signature role, as the tormented antihero Waldemar Daninsky -- a werewolf.

Like his cinematic forbearer Lon Chaney, his sympathetic characterizations made him a true King of Horror.

The keystone of almost all the films of this period is the reinforcement of the disturbing trend of violence against women. Peeled back by the relaxation of censorship laws, the identification with the female sex as a source of or inspiration for evil becomes more and more blatant. In keeping with Western horror traditions, women are either victims or love objects -- but now that love/hate relationship is explicit, and it seems that each film seeks to outdo all previous ones in shocking and transgressing. It's as though the collective unconscious needs a bigger jolt to stir it -- but each jolt makes it more numb. It's a self-reinforcing spiral, and soon it will populate American screens as well.