As a follow-up to Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, I felt like taking another trip to the nuthouse by way of the 1972 Amicus-produced omnibus Asylum. With a screenplay by novelist Robert Bloch of Psycho fame, Asylum has one of the best framing stories ever concocted for an anthology as Dr. Martin (Robert Powell), a candidate for the position of new director of the Dunmoor Institute for the Incurably Insane, is met by Dr. Rutherford (Patrick Magee) and given a bizarre test in lieu of an interview. Dunmoor's former director, Dr. Starr, has lost his mind Dr. Rutherford tells Dr. Martin that if he can interview the institute's solitary confinement patients and deduce which one is the ex-director then the position will be his. Each patient's tale is a separate segment and the wrap-around story comes to a satisfying conclusion of its own.
The framework of Asylum holds up wonderfully. It's an ingenious set-up and Asylum is still a neat little movie (it's amusing to see Rutherford and Martin engaged in the same psychiatry vs. surgery debate that's so key to Shutter Island) but I have to admit that I was thrown off by the age of the cast. It's nothing negative towards Asylum - just the opposite, in fact - but while I thought I was fully aware of how youth-orientated horror movies have become in recent years I found myself really taken aback to see how filled with old or middle-aged faces Asylum is.
Take a look and ask yourself: Would we ever see a horror film cast with actors like this today?
Not a chance.
Even the few young people cast in Asylum - such as Powell, Britt Ekland, or Charlotte Rampling - look damn near ancient by today's standards. What's really jarring to me in watching Asylum now is knowing that when I first saw Asylum on TV as a kid, it never occurred to me to notice the age of the actors because a cast like this was normal then. It didn't seem odd or unusual to me at the time to see this many mature faces in a horror movie. It was invisible to me then but now it immediately jumps out as being so different than what we've become used to.
I'm all for horror movies centered on teens and twentysomethings (hell, I'll probably be buying the Sorority Row remake on DVD today) but I lament the fact that somewhere along the way, horror movies (and, to be fair, the entire culture) became myopic to anything that isn't young.
Older actors automatically gave films like Asylum a sense of character, a sense of gravity, a sense of life lived. Now it seems like the only thing too scary for modern audiences to bear is the reality of aging. It makes for a rueful comment on today's mania to appeal to the very young that Asylum has come to look more like a nursing home.
Older actors automatically gave films like Asylum a sense of character, a sense of gravity, a sense of life lived. Now it seems like the only thing too scary for modern audiences to bear is the reality of aging. It makes for a rueful comment on today's mania to appeal to the very young that Asylum has come to look more like a nursing home.
