I'm waiting for the day - surely in the not-too-distant future - when some horror fan born around '93 or so will write a book about the Golden Age of Horror as being from 2003 to 2007. You might find that an appalling - or at the very least absurd - thought but bear with me.
I don't think anyone would argue that the horror films that we see at an impressionable age are the ones that stay with us. That's just how it goes, right?
Being born in 1968, the years from '78 to '82 were my golden age for horror. The movies from those years are the ones that imprinted on me the most. I was old enough to see movies and understand them but yet young enough to not be jaded about them yet. It just so happens that those were very good years for horror by most objective standards but, at the time, there were also plenty of complaints from critics and adult fans about the slasher trend and the rise of splatter FX. It wasn't until fans of my generation got older that the virtues of, say, Friday the 13th or My Bloody Valentine were fully appreciated.
I think the mid-'00s are going to be a lot like that. Movies that may have seemed like forgettable junk to people my age are going to be revealed to have be defining movies for younger fans.
Which brings me to The Hills Have Eyes remake of 2006:
Boy, this movie is peak mid-'00s, isn't it?
That time just has an unmistakable vibe to it.
Everything seemed so hardcore then! Horror movies had been safe and tepid for so long all through the late '80s and the entire '90s and the 00's might well have continued on that same path but once 2003 came around with the Texas Chainsaw remake, Wrong Turn, Saw, Cabin Fever and House of 1,000 Corpses (I'm not saying all those movies are good, by the way, only that they came out around the same time!) it was like horror was suddenly back in the business of trying to hurt the audience again in a way it hadn't been in ages.
Was it due to our collective trauma from 9/11 and the Iraq War?
Maybe. Probably. I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine.
Point being, horror of the mid-'00s was all about being fucking gnarly and The Hills Have Eyes remake embraced and embodied that style.
Just as I have vivid memories of being traumatized by trailers and TV spots for slasher movies like He Knows You're Alone and Night School, I have to imagine the generation of kids who grew up in the '00s were convinced that every horror movie was a depraved orgy of violence.
How could they not be?
The generation before grew up with horror being jokey and semi-ironic. The horror films of the '00s, whatever their respective merits may be, wasn't about that. Movies like Hostel and The Hills Have Eyes were a long way from The Craft and Urban Legend.
Of course, like every trend, the appetite for torture porn faded out.
The Paranormal Activity films supplanted the Saw series as the big annual Halloween event and it was like the '00s had never happened. Kind of like when grunge got replaced by Britney Spears and 'N Sync.
When grunge was at its peak, no one thought music would ever go back to pop bullshit again but things can only stay so intense for so long, I guess. Sure, things aren't totally soft now. Some of that 00's vibe still lingers here and there but back then, it was like horror was on an united mission. There's no way the kids of that time don't think back to those days and say "man, remember when horror movies used to kick ass?"
That might seem silly to those who lived through that time as adults but, past a certain age, no one ever believes the time they're living through is going to be well-remembered. That's because the present always compares poorly to the memories of when we were younger.
I don't recall ever seeing the trailer to 1981's Deadly Blessing prior to its release. It just never played in front of any movies I saw at the time. But I can tell you this, I sure as shit saw all the TV spots for it.
One damned commercial in particular always seemed to know when I was alone in the house and it would ambush me every time and every time I was convinced this movie was far too evil for me to deal with.
Someone had gone and made a movie that was the devil personified.
Check it out:
See? Pretty evil, right?
Well, maybe you can't see it but when I was twelve, I sure saw it!
I saw it and I couldn't unsee it. Pure evil burned into film.
Oddly enough, the actual theatrical trailer - you know, the one that typically screened before grown adults who were ready to handle it - isn't nearly as ominous as that TV spot that any innocent pair of eyes could be exposed to.
For comparison's sake, here's the trailer:
Ok, pretty scary. But the TV spot is so much worse!
I didn't even have to watch the commercial to be scared by it. And believe me, many times I didn't watch it because I would run out of the room when it came on. But could hear it! That evil background music playing under the equally evil narration was enough to have me shaking.
"More chilling than nightmares. Blacker than the darkest corners of your mind. There is the unholiest terror of all. Deadly Blessing. Rated R."
The fact that it ended with "Rated R" is really what sealed the deal for me. That was back when I was genuinely intimidated by R-rated movies (what can I say, I was a very fragile young person). Some R-rated movies didn't automatically cause me to cower in fear at the mere thought of them but Deadly Blessing sure did. It seemed to be operating on a whole other level than, say Friday the 13th Part 2.
I think the main thing that threw me about Deadly Blessing is that, unlike most horror movies at the time, it wasn't a slasher movie. I couldn't immediately wrap my mind around what it was even about.
When I would see a commercial or a trailer for a slasher movie, I instantly got what it was. Someone in a mask and carrying a knife or an axe was chasing someone. And that's pretty scary, sure, but I can comprehend what I'm being scared of. I didn't have that luxury with Deadly Blessing. The fact that the commercial was so vague as to what was going on made it so much worse. I just got the impression of an unseen evil force stalking people and I couldn't handle it, man!
Another year or so down the road, though, and the spell that horror movies could cast on me was broken. I became old enough to still be excited for them, to still expect to be scared at times but they were now...just movies, you know? But in 1981, I was still young enough and naive enough to feel like a movie could be more than a movie, that it could be something crafted in a dark place by wicked hands, capable of taking you somewhere you didn't want to go.
I kind of miss that feeling. We all get jaded eventually, it's just the natural course of things. You can't say wide-eyed forever. But that brief time in your life when you were, that's a blessing to remember.
Director Wes Craven has made horror history many times over and, most impressively, done so over the course of several decades. He first changed the landscape of horror in the ‘70s with The Last House on the Left (1972), then in the ‘80s with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and again in the ‘90s with Scream (1996). With all due respect to those seminal shockers, though, my own personal favorites from Craven’s catalog tend to be the less heralded ones. Number #1 for me is 1981’s oddball offering Deadly Blessing.
Released at the height of the slasher craze, Deadly Blessing employed some stock elements that were already over-familiar from the sub-genre – a rising body count, macabre deaths, menacing POV shots, multiple red herrings, nubile females in peril (including a young Sharon Stone in her first film role), and, of course, the killer’s identity is concealed until the climax.
In those ways, Deadly Blessing is easily identifiable as a horror film that came out in the same year as Happy Birthday to Me and Graduation Day. It bears well-worn earmarks of the slasher genre that place it in its particular era. But beyond those familiar riffs, Deadly Blessing is much more idiosyncratic than the routine slashers that it shared marquee space with in ’81.
Set in an idyllic rural area, Deadly Blessing tells the story of Jim and Martha (Doug Barr and Maren Jensen), a loving young couple who have a testy relationship with an Amish-like religious sect called the Hittites that lives next to their property. Doug used to be a Hittite himself but he left the sect to marry Martha, earning the eternal wrath of his father Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine), who also happens to be the Hittite’s inflexible leader. Isaiah considers Jim to be an abomination in the eyes of God now and he forbids any of his people to communicate with him, including Jim’s mother and two younger brothers (the oldest of which is played by Jeff East, from Craven’s 1978 TV movie Summer of Fear).
The bad blood between Jim and his family goes forever unresolved as Jim falls victim to a mysterious “accident” while alone in his barn late one night, crushed to death by a tractor. Once news of the tragedy reaches them, Martha’s best friends – Lana (Sharon Stone) and Vicky (Susan Buckner) – come to support her in her time of grieving. On top of the tension brought by having a whole trio of liberated modern women roaming the countryside under the Hittite’s disapproving watch, there is also the matter of a killer being on the loose.
Even though Jim’s death is believed to be an accident, a mysterious figure in the barn that night was the one that loosened the tractor. And in true slasher movie fashion, whoever the killer might be, they could be one of a whole range of possible suspects. Is it the stern Isaiah, out to cleanse the world one sinner at a time? Is it William Gluntz, the strange young Hittite (played by Hills Have Eyes poster boy Michael Berryman) who shows a proclivity for being a Peeping Tom? (It’s doubtful that any genre fan would peg Gluntz as the killer – he’s a true slasher movie red herring a la Robert Silverman’s Prom Night janitor).
Or in some strange, psychological twist could it even be Martha herself?
If you haven’t seen Deadly Blessing yet, save your guesses about the outcome – it’s impossible to anticipate where this movie is going, except to say that the makers of 1983’s cult fave Sleepaway Camp might have been taking notes. As much as the killer’s reveal is an unexpected doozy, Craven manages to top that craziness by dropping a supernatural element (mandated by the studio) in at – literally – the last minute.
Not everything gels in Deadly Blessing but it scores points for being different – even at the cost of logic – and it has a couple of scary sequences that rank among Craven’s best. At a time when horror films were very much carbon copies of each other, Deadly Blessing had its own quirky angles to play.
An important component that ties Deadly Blessing’s scattershot nature together is the score by James Horner, then at an early point in his career but soon to become one of the most popular composers in Hollywood (despite his Oscar for Titanic, he’s probably best known to genre fans for his Aliens score). At a time when many horror films, especially low budget ones, had scores that simply mimicked Carpenter’s work on Halloween, Horner gave Deadly Blessing a creepy Omen-esque score, marked by ominous chanting.
Even though Deadly Blessing has been an often overlooked entry in Craven’s filmography and even though Craven is not the sole author of the screenplay (he shares credit with Matthew Barr and Glenn M. Benest), the clash of cultures embodied by the conflict between the Hittites and the “serpents” of the modern world places it on common thematic ground with Craven’s other work wherein different families or communities find themselves at deadly odds with each other (witness the degenerate Krug and co. vs. the accommodating middle class Collingwoods in Last House or the irradiated mutants vs. the vacationing Carter family – one “nuclear” family against another – in The Hills Have Eyes).
Deadly Blessing also comes across as something of a dry run for A Nightmare on Elm Street. Not only is an eerie dream sequence involving Lana the film’s most memorable moment (immortalized on Deadly Blessing’s poster) but there is also a suspenseful scene in which Martha is imperiled in a bathtub that Craven would restage in the first Elm Street.
Not really a hit at the time and kind of forgotten about today, even by many genre fans, Deadly Blessing nonetheless made an impression. Memorable episodes of both Friday the 13th: The Series (“The Quilt of Hathor”) and The X-Files (“Genderbender”) show an obvious debt to its influence, with each involving eerie goings on in strictly religious communities. Now that Scream Factory is due to be blessing fans with a Special Edition Blu-Ray of this film (due January 22nd), hopefully it will finally garner the larger fanbase that it deserves.
At the time The People Under the Stairs came out, it seemed as though the general mood towards Wes Craven among horror fans was one of wishing he'd get back to making the kinds of movies he first made his name on - raw, visceral stuff like Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. As time has gone on, though, his post-Elm Street, pre-Scream era has found more appreciation.
These are the Craven films I'm personally most fond of and this is the time and the style of moviemaking I wish Craven could get back to: when he was mainstream and more polished but was still quirky and subversive. Granted, he did try to get back to that with My Soul To Take (2010) but sadly things didn't come together so well there.
From the trailer, The People Under the Stairs looked as though it might mark a return to Craven's earlier brand of hardcore horror. In actuality, though, it was more satirical than scary. From the start of his career, Craven has dealt in social commentary but never as overtly as he did in The People Under the Stairs. Craven tapped into something in the air in regards to simmering tensions involving class and race and, perhaps attesting to that, five months after the film was released, the Rodney King verdict sparked the LA riots.
Most audiences who saw the film on Halloween weekend back in 1991, however (Halloween was on a Thursday that year and the movie was released on Friday, November 1st), were just looking for a good scary movie rather than a statement on race in America.
It was no more than a base hit on that first count but today the issues this movie deals with (racism, greed, urban misery) are as timely than ever. It's not 1991 anymore but twenty two years later, rich racist sickos are still making life miserable for the poor.
Released on October 27th, 1989, Shocker saw Wes Craven trying to stick it to New Line, who he was feuding with at the time, by creating what was hoped to be the next Freddy at a rival studio.
Even with a Halloween release to boost it, though, and a kick ass trailer to sell it, things just didn't pan out. I'm pressed for time today so I'll step aside and let Siskel & Ebert put in their two cents.
As much as they seemed confounded by horror movies, I miss those guys.
While I know exactly how terrible Deadly Friend is, watching this trailer makes me anxious to rewatch this botched Wes Craven effort. Not only that, but if Scream Factory announced they were doing a special edition of it, I'd have to preorder it. Because clearly, based on what I'm seeing in this trailer, I must not have given this movie a fair shake back in the day. I've become convinced that a fresh viewing will completely change my perception of it.
Then again, maybe I'm just getting a little carried away. I've been wrong about movies before, sure, but this is Deadly Friend we're talking about. It's probably best not to forget how bad it sucked.
You'd think that there'd be no wrong way to tell the tale of a precocious teenage boy who uses his knowledge of robotics to bring his dead girlfriend (played by a pre-Buffy Kristy Swanson) back to life. But hey, as it turns out there really is a wrong way.
The only time the audience I saw this with on its opening day of October 10th, 1986, ever perked up was when the old hag played by Anne Ramsey got her head vaporized by a basketball hurled at warp speed.
Of all the Wes Craven movies that have been remade in recent years - Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street - Deadly Friend is the one that could really benefit from being revisited but yet, for whatever reason, it doesn't seem likely to happen.
Maybe the bad experience that Craven had making this made him want to permanently turn his back on it. If so, that's too bad 'cause what this misbegotten movie really needs most of all is a friend.
At first glance, you might think that A Vampire in Brooklyn looks terrible. On second or third glance, you might be sure of it. But, really, it wasn't that bad. Now, admittedly, I haven't seen it since it opened on October 27th, 1995, but I remember being surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Or at least by how much I didn't hate it. While the box office was weak, the film itself was actually solid, if lightweight, and Eddie Murphy didn't play it campy at all. He's as sincere in his performance as Johnny Depp was in Dark Shadows.
Genre-wise, the fall of '95 was dominated by Seven and Copycat and compared to those two grim thrillers, a "comic tale of horror and seduction" looked way too corny to bother with and, in turn, most audiences didn't. Copycat, in fact, opened the same day as A Vampire in Brooklyn and was easily the bigger draw on Halloween weekend.
Both Craven and Murphy rebounded with some of the biggest successes of their careers - Craven with Scream and Murphy with The Nutty Professor but A Vampire in Brooklyn deserves a little recognition as an entertaining entry in both their catalogs - even if it doesn't have much of a bite.
I often have trouble trying to make any rational sense of why I love certain films and sitting high on that list of head-scratchers is Wes Craven’s Shocker. I caught Shocker in the theaters way back when and I’m not sure what my state of mind was on that fall night back in ’89 but clearly I was extremely open to what Craven was dishing out.
I was so open to it, in fact, that while it was still in theaters I would happily tell anyone who asked that, yeah, it was great – go see it! It was only once it hit video that it finally dawned on me that Shocker might not hold much appeal for anyone else – even if it did boast one of the best metal soundtracks of the era.
Shocker was intended to be, at least in part, Wes Craven’s strike back at New Line for the direction they took the Elm Street franchise. Craven and New Line never quite saw eye to eye on Freddy and as they owned Freddy down to the last thread on his sweater, they called the shots, leaving Craven to stew on the sidelines as his dream stalker was turned into an increasingly corny, MTV-friendly jokester.
With Shocker, made for Alive Films and distributed by Universal, Craven hoped to repeat the success he had with Freddy and create a new, sequel-ready horror superstar, this time around having full participation in the ensuing franchise. Unfortunately, despite the electronic affinities of its villain, Shocker didn't make lightning strike twice for Craven.
Shocker’s story involves Jonathan (Peter Berg), a college football player who, in a precognitive dream, sees the majority of his adoptive family slain at the hands of serial killer Horace Pinker (ferociously played by Mitch Pileggi, still a few years away from his most famous role as Skinner on The X-Files) the same night that the horrible deed happens and he uses the clues that he saw in his dream to help his police captain father (Michael Murphy) track the psycho to his dilapidated TV repair shop and bring him to justice, after which he is swiftly sentenced to death. While in real life, Pinker would've sat on Death Row for years while his lawyers filed appeal after appeal, in Shocker Pinker is sent to the hot seat in no time. However, throwing the switch on Pinker only turns him into an even bigger threat as he uses black magic to allow his spirit to survive his electrocution.
His new state of existence allows Pinker to transfer his essence from one living host to another and he zaps his way from one unwilling host – cops, little kids, etc. – to another as he tries to take Jonathan out of this world. Shocker grows increasingly daffy as Pinker’s powers in the electronic realm increase, climaxing in one of the most outlandish final chases in slasher history as Pinker and Jonathan both enter the electronic world and chase each other at length across every channel on television – running through news broadcasts of street riots, archival footage of the Hindenburg disaster, a religious program (hosted by Timothy Leary in a cameo role as a televangelist), rock concerts, and even Leave It To Beaver.
At one point, they spill out of the TV into a family’s living room where a mother squawks: “I’ve heard of audience participation shows but this is ridiculous!”
It’s often said that if you give someone enough rope they’ll hang themselves and that’s the case here as Craven sends Shocker off the rails in spectacular but fascinating fashion. That said, the sincerity that Craven shows towards his material is apparent. On one hand, Craven was trying to create another cash cow to rival Freddy, which is – on the surface – a cynical venture. But on the other hand, it’s plain to see that Craven was very genuine in regards to putting some heart and thought into Shocker. With its satirical jabs at television and the media culture, the movie is like a dig at the glib “fast food” mentality that New Line applied to the Freddy sequels. The fact that everything in Shocker doesn’t quite gel doesn’t diminish my admiration of the attempt. And if nothing else it also must be noted that Pinker crawled out of a TV screen many years before it became the signature move of Ringu's Sadako.
I no longer regard Shocker as being especially good but I do regard it fondly. It's kind of a mess but it bristles with its own lively brand of electricity.
The Ghostface disguise that each of the killers have worn in the Scream films was sold in the original Scream under the brand name of "Father Death" but in Scream 4, the invisible killer waiting in the wings is Father Time. Facing a string of psychopaths is no picnic but the simple passing of the years can be awfully arduous in and of itself.
The surviving cast members of the series - Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette - are all back, reprising their signature roles. Ten years after the events of the last film, Deputy Dewey is now Sheriff Dewey and Gale Weathers is now Gale Weathers-Riley. Sidney herself is now an author, having penned the tale of how she overcame her past in a book titled Out of the Darkness. As part of her publicity tour for the book, Sidney is making a stop in her old hometown of Woodsboro on the occasion of the anniversary of the Woodsboro massacre.
As usual, where Sidney goes, tragedy follows. Timed with Sidney's arrival in Woodsboro, two young girls are murdered and Sidney's niece Jill (Emma Roberts) receives taunting phone calls from a new Ghostface killer. Dewey is tasked with heading the investigation into this new murder spree while a frustrated Gale, unhappy with her retirement from journalism, is eager to spring back into action.
Surrounding Jill are her circle of friends, a group as young as Sidney and her friends were back in the original Scream. There's Jill's Billy Loomis-esque ex-boyfriend Trevor Sheldon (Nico Tortorella), her far-too-hot-for-high school friend Olivia Morris (Marielle Jaffe), her acerbic, movie buff pal Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere), and the founders of Woodboro High's cinema club, Robbie Mercer (Erik Knudsen) and Charlie Walker (Rory Culkin). Which of these characters will be hacked to pieces and which ones will hang around for awhile as potential suspects? Or, to put it in proper slasher movie terms: "who will survive and what will be left of them?"
Speaking of which, while many elements in Scream 4 call attention to the fact that this is a film of 2011 - Facebook, texting, twitter, and webcams - the change that horror fans will notice most is the increased splatter. When you see a graphic shot of a murder victim's intestines spilled onto the floor in this R-rated movie, that's when you know that this installment of the Scream saga is taking place in a much different era than the original trilogy. The original Scream was repeatedly slapped with an NC-17 but now Scream 4 - the bloodiest in the series yet - has apparently skated past the MPAA on it's way to an R with nary a single cut. That's what a decade's worth of torture-porn will do for you, I guess. Or, to paraphrase the film's tagline - new decade, new MPAA rules.
The first Scream arrived at a point in horror history when being edgier than Dr. Giggles (1992) was enough to turn the genre on its ear, now there's films like 2009's The Human Centipede to contend with. Never mind the Saw series, that's kid's stuff - in a world where horror fans can get their hands on a copy of A Serbian Film (2010) if they're so inclined, the return of the Scream franchise can't help but be more quaint than cutting edge.
But...sometimes quaint is ok. Franchises represent cinematic comfort food and there's nothing wrong with seeking that out. Yes, horror sequels can still be scary to a point but ultimately they're about recreating a ride that the audience knows and enjoys and on that count, Scream 4 does a solid job. In many ways, Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven are explicitly attempting to recreate the first Scream and while it doesn't come close to being as strong a film as the original, Scream 4 is arguably better than either of the previous sequels.
What makes Scream different from other ongoing fear franchises isn't its sense of self-awareness (that's a trait that the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series already possessed before the first Scream came into town) but that it continues the story of its protagonists rather than that of its villain. Typically slasher series would bring back the sole survivor of the previous installment only to kill them off (Alice in Friday the 13th Part 2, Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3). Occasionally, there'd be a little continuity from film to film - the character of Tommy Jarvis remained at the front of three Friday the 13th sequels in Fridays IV-VI and Andy Barclay was Chucky's nemesis in Child's Play 1-3. But yet there was never any doubt that Jason and Chucky were the real stars of those movies. With Scream, though, it's hard to imagine any sequel being successful without the involvement of Campbell, Cox, and Arquette.
As we see the old gang back together again in Scream 4, all of them inching closer to middle-age (or already there, depending on how you define "middle-age"), it occurred to me that the Scream series might be turning into horror's version of the original Star Trek movies. The ST movies featuring William Shatner and the original TV crew were all about rounding up the old Enterprise gang that fans loved and putting them through their paces, even as the aging cast members became increasingly wrinkled and slower moving. I'd get a kick out of seeing the same thing happen with Scream and - judging by Scream 4 - we're well on our way. As one character says to Sidney (I'm paraphrasing here), "let's face it - you're not the young ingenue anymore."
The extra mileage on Campbell, Cox, and Arquette gives their characters a sense of melancholy that may not be reflected so strongly in the writing but that can't help but seep through the performances - especially when they're surrounded by actors half their age.
I remember reading an interview with Sigourney Weaver at the time of Alien 3's release in which she made a remark about the character of Ripley, saying that after all she'd been through that "survival had lost its allure." That phrase came to mind for me during Scream 4 as I wondered if after fifteen plus years of facing off against one psycho after another - a series of brutal ordeals predated by the rape and murder of her mother - if Sidney Prescott should be exhausted with life altogether.
In real life, yes, anyone who's suffered the traumas that Sid has suffered would likely be - at best - suicidal. And Dewey and Gale probably wouldn't be faring so well either. But this is the movies, and more importantly, a franchise. That means these characters have to soldier on in the face of events that would leave others quivering in a corner. For a brief moment towards the end of Scream 4 it looks as though the movie might actually embrace a ballsy, bleak ending but then the film's real climax kicks in.
It's a move that's undeniably chickenshit on an artistic level but yet it's also an unavoidable affirmation that we're watching the fourth - and most likely not final - installment of a successful horror franchise. Had the movie ended at the earlier point, fans would've surely cried bullshit and let's face it - when you're making the fourth entry in a series, who the hell else are you even making it for if not for the fans?
As the credits rolled on Scream 4, though, I found it ironic to note that while the original Scream had belonged not just to its youthful cast but equally to the young generation that responded to the film's sensibilities, that this reboot of the franchise should not be interested in passing the torch to its younger players. The high school characters in this film are all but inconsequential (this is not entirely an unwelcome move, by the way - having watched the original Scream again just within the past week, it's amazing to me the difference in talent between that film's cast and the group of potted plants that populate this movie). Fifteen years ago, Scream was an upstart horror film that succeeded by leapfrogging past the staid franchises around it but Scream 4 makes it very clear that the franchise's allegiances lie firmly with the old guard and not with the new blood.
For a film referred to by many as a modern horror classic, the original Scream doesn't get much love from the horror community. Fans of the slasher sub-genre are an especially rabid bunch but they just don't have room in their hearts for Scream. Go to any horror convention and try to find anyone sporting a Scream T-shirt. You'll see plenty of fans proudly wearing their Halloween T's and even third-tier slashers like The Prowler and The Burning are represented but Scream? Forget it. I just wonder how well Scream would rank with horror fans had it never become such a hit. I'll wager a guess that we'd be hearing a lot of "man, people just didn't get that movie - you had to be a horror fan to really understand it!" whenever Scream was talked about.
But of course they can't say that because Screamwas an enormous hit - a great word of mouth success that introduced a new legion of fans to the genre. Everyone has their own "gateway drug" that got them into horror and for many, Scream served that purpose. But is it a good movie unfairly dismissed by hardcore horror buffs or just a painfully overrated exercise in smartassedness? A little of both but ultimately I'd say more towards the former than the later.
The worst thing about Scream is the aspect that brought it the most critical acclaim and notoriety - its self-referential, film-savvy dialogue. Critics (who, by and large, hate horror films) latched onto this aspect of Scream and used it to intellectually justify their enjoyment of what would otherwise be just another slasher film. But scripter Kevin Williamson, using the character of film nerd/video store clerk Randy (Jamie Kennedy) as his mouthpiece to explain the "rules" for surviving a horror movie, shows himself to be a lazy study of the genre.
Among the several rules that Randy tries to educate his peers about, the much-touted "virgin" rule holds no water. It's a myth that needs to be put to rest. I know that many have read John Carpenter's Halloween as some kind of essay on puritanical values with Jamie Lee Curtis' virginal babysitter Laurie Strode surviving where her more ho-ish friends did not. However, while one could perceive an underlying irony to the fact that Laurie is a repressed character who aggressively attacks her assailant with phallic instruments, it's a stretch to say it's anything more than a plot convenience to have Michael's victims preoccupied with fucking or with planning to fuck and it sure as hell didn't create some kind of hardline "rule" for subsequent slasher movies.
Even Friday the 13th, the other big flag bearer for the "have sex and die" school of thought, doesn't adhere to that rule. Laurie Bartram as Marcie was way more of a "good girl" in that film than Adrienne King's Alice was. Hell, Marcie was in bed by herself reading a book when Mrs. Voorhees lured her out for the kill. And come on, Ned's death alone immediately torpedoes the virgin rule. And Shelly in Friday the 13th Part 3? That guy got no action and he still ended up stone cold dead. One might argue that there's a sub-clause to the virgin rule reserved for practical jokers but Scream fails to address that possibility.
And before we move away from this topic altogether, let's just say that it's unconfirmed that Jamie Lee Curtis always played the virgin in slasher films. Not to be lewd about it but I'd argue that her characters in Prom Night, Terror Train and Road Games were far from being the same sort of virginal wallflower that Laurie Strode represented. So Scream's biggest convention-smashing moment, where Sidney (Neve Campbell) gives it up for Billy (Skeet Ulrich) and thereby makes herself into a potential victim, can't be considered to be a radical reinvention of slasher cinema or a liberating blow for Final Girls wherein they can now be sexually active but still achieve survivor status. I mean, fifteen years before Scream, Ginny (Amy Steel) in Friday the 13th Part 2 not only slept with her boyfriend but went out and got tanked at a local bar and still lived to tell the tale so it's annoying to read interviews with Williamson where he pats himself on the back for breaking the rules of the slasher genre. You can fool critics about this shit but not real horror nerds, man.
It's my feeling that Williamson should've really boned up on his slasher films before writing Scream - you know, bothered to take the time to give himself a little refresher course - but as Scream made him rich and famous and the toast of the town and all that, maybe it wasn't so important.
As a send-up or deconstruction of slasher cliches, I think Scream is a big bust. However, it gets other things right. For one, Wes Craven's direction is at the top of his game. This was the first film he shot in widescreen and he utilized the framing to excellent effect.
His direction feels energized here and one almost wishes that this could have been his farewell to the genre as it's a real high note to his career with the murders of Casey (Drew Barrymore) and Tatum (Rose McGowan) being classic set-pieces.
The cast is also outstanding. In past slasher films, there'd be a breakout performer or two that stood out as someone to take note of but Scream's cast is filled with sharp actors - Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy, Rose McGowan, Drew Barrymore, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette. I may find some of the characters grating (particularly the morose Sidney, with her perpetually pinched expression) but I couldn't argue that the performances were lacking (although it could be said that Arquette's comic tendencies should've been reined in some as they throw off the mood of the film on more than one occasion).
As for Williamson's script, while it gets a lot wrong in observing the genre, it succeeds on other fronts. Historically the bane of slasher films was always how to fill the time between kills. The answer to that was usually "have them do whatever." So as characters would wait for their turn to get slaughtered, if they weren't getting laid or getting high they'd be shown engaging in everything from Strip Monopoly, doing their laundry, skinny-dipping, or watching movie marathons on TV. Scream did away with that kind of wheel-spinning by adopting a more soap opera-ish approach - supplying Sidney with a tragic backstory involving her slain mother, thereby giving the characters a lot of plot information to convey and a ready antagonist in the form of tabloid TV journalist Gale Weathers. Sidney wasn't just an unassuming teenage girl like most slasher heroines - she was already the center of a media firestorm.
Unlike most slasher films of the past whose running times often felt padded, Scream truly moves. After the intense charge of the lengthy opening scene, the movie barely lets up and by the one hour mark, the characters have already arrived at Stu's house where the climax of the movie takes place. Essentially what follows is a forty-minute finale where the stakes are raised right off the bat with the murder of Sidney's BFF Tatum - a move that reminds the audience that no one is safe in this film - and then events quickly roll toward the final face-off between Sid and Ghostface and the resolution of the film's mystery.
The revelation of the killer's ID's is what really makes Scream. Not just the novelty factor of having the killer actually be two killers working together (a twist that let it be plausible that the killer could appear anywhere at anytime) but the fact that it was two peers of the characters and that their motivations were so purely sociopathic.
In past slasher films, the killer was either a figure of pure evil (like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger) or else their rampages were rooted in some personal humiliation or injustice (Mrs. Voorhees and Jason, or the killers in The Burning, Terror Train, Prom Night, or The Funhouse). Also, you had the occasional sweaty loner - as seen in Don't Go In The House, He Knows You're Alone, Eyes of a Stranger, Maniac, and Visiting Hours. Scream was different from all other slasher films in that its killers were directly from the protagonist's own immediate social circle and that they were so devoid of empathy and humanity.
One might say that killing is killing and that it's all evil but while that's true there's a difference between a character that's depicted as being the Boogeyman and someone who's supposed to have a real world motivation. And on that other level, there's a difference between a character like Terror Train's Kenny Hampson and Scream's Billy Loomis and Stu Macher. Characters like Kenny and the other "wronged" slasher villains have a kernel of humanity to them. They commit heinous, unforgivable acts but on some level we're invited to understand their position as victims of some kind of abuse. Mrs. Voorhees is a nut but she's also avenging her dead child. Cropsy of The Burning is a murderous psycho but some snot-nosed kids burned him into a misshapen lump so he's understandably got issues. Prom Night's Alex Hammond witnessed his beloved sister's senseless death so his killing spree seems pretty justified. But Billy and Stu...not so much. These two are not outsiders. In fact, they're part of the popular crowd. They both have attractive girlfriends. They come from well-to-do families. They've suffered no special traumas. Billy might be bummed about his parent's divorce but in the end, life is pretty good for him. And from what we see of Stu's life - it all looks like gravy. I mean, look at the friggin' house he lives in:
And yet these privileged kids have no qualms about murdering their friends.
Billy and Stu are chilling characters and Ulrich and Kennedy tear it up once the masks come off. Some might say that Lillard shamelessly overacts but I love his performance - especially as it escalates in Scream's final act. He's seldom given enough credit as being one of the great screen psychos. He's scary and pathetic all at once. There's something that rings appallingly true about the way he's capable of coldly butchering - or at the least, being an accomplice in butchering - people that he's known for years but snivels when wounded himself and whines at the thought of his crimes being exposed to his parents. Stu can't conceive of the pain of others, no matter how great, but is acutely sensitive to his own suffering, no matter how minor. That's a true sociopath and Billy has the same dead soul to match.
Finally, Craven and co. hit gold when they discovered the Ghostface mask.
Just as Halloween wouldn't have been the same had Tommy Lee Wallace not pimped out a William Shatner mask, Scream wouldn't have succeeded if that Ghostface mask not been found at one of the film's locations - left behind by the grandchildren of the home's owners. Even after it's been parodied in the Scary Movie satires, I still find that mask to be incredibly creepy. As slasher disguises go, I consider it second only to Michael Myers' mask in being able to conjure an instant feeling of unease.
For some horror fans, Scream will always be disdained. It revitalized the genre but that failed to earn it much gratitude. It's too clueless about the horror and slasher conventions it seeks to knowingly tweak to be a great film in my book but it does kick a little ass here and there. If nothing else, it's miles better than Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), a post-modern slasher film so inane makes Scream positively shine in comparison. Horror fans like Behind the Mask a lot because, you know, it seems to be made just for them but in this case, I'll side with all the teenage girls who go for Scream.
Denial plays a big part in my outlook as a horror fan. You can call it optimism, if you like, but denial is closer to the truth. Optimism is when you have no facts to go on but yet, based on a sense of faith, you still hold high hopes for whatever new situation you're facing. Denial is when you're given cold hard facts but choose not to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
You see, even when a movie has every sign of being atrocious, I convince myself that it might actually turn out to be good. I'm so adept at bending my head around reality that I'm ready to believe a movie that has been on the shelf for ages, gone through multiple reshoots, post-production 3-D conversion and a title change to boot might actually be a winner.
So even though Wes Craven's latest outing, My Soul To Take, fit all of the above criteria to a "T" and was also denied critics's screenings, I still figured that Wes wouldn't let me down. Having now watched My Soul To Take, though, I realize that I didn't have the one crucial piece of information beforehand that really would've told me what was up. I knew about the troubles with the movie, sure, but what I didn't know is that Wes Craven had totally lost his mind.
It's a big surprise to all of us, I know. I mean, he's produced two of the best remakes of recent years - The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and The Last House on the Left (2009) - so you don't think a guy like that is going to make a movie like My Soul To Take but there you go. It's a crazy world we live in, that's for sure.
Seriously, I don't even know where to begin with this one but here goes: a serial killer called the Riverton Ripper is found out by the police and killed during an escape attempt. On the night he was killed, seven children - including his own son - were born. Sixteen years later, these kids have to contend with the frightening possibility that the Ripper's soul may be living inside one of them.
I like the basic set-up. Unfortunately, Craven went off the deep end with the telling of his tale. The biggest problem is that no one in this film behaves as though they come from this planet. There's a disconnect from reality here that's just jarring. For example, at the high school, everything that happens is controlled by "Fang," (Emily Meade) an adolescent dictator who has her doting minions inexplicably following her every instruction - even down to administering daily beatings (referred to as "punitives" in the film) to those that Fang deems deserving. Fang is still in high school at age nineteen, by the way. This is usually the kind of person that would be roundly mocked as a loser, not be calling the shots. We're also supposed to believe that for a school show and tell session, two of the Riverton Seven - the troubled, possibly schizo, Bug (Max Thieriot) and his best bud Alex (John Magaro) - create an elaborate California Condor costume, one that's capable of spewing fake vomit and shit on their classmates. I know that at age 70 or whatever, Craven is a long way from his teen years but his bizarre - almost surreal - take on high school life is worrisome.
Then there's the issue of the identity of the Ripper, a mystery that's never engaging. Maybe because the movie is so full of nonsense, it never seems worth getting interested in unravelling the story. After all, how much can you care about what happens in a film when a blind character - Denzel Whitaker as Jerome - is able to make it unassisted to someone's house, climb a rope into a second story bedroom window, and fight the Ripper? We don't see any of this happen, mind you, we just have it related to us in a lengthy monologue from Jerome after he's been discovered severely wounded in the closet.
Listening to Jerome's credulity-defying (as well as dramatically inert) description to Bug of how he ended up in his closet, all I could think of is "why the hell is this character even blind to begin with?" Not only does Jerome's disability not play any role in the plot but thanks to Craven apparently not understanding what the hell "blind" means only adds to the sense that Craven is off his nut. Yes, I know that blind people are very capable and they can do a lot without any assistance but come on now. Maybe Craven got all his info on the blind from watching Daredevil, I don't know.
I'd like to be able say it's heartening that MSTT is the rare modern horror film with a real personality to it. As a bid to try and launch another franchise character there's some obvious market-minded thinking involved but yet this isn't the processed garbage found in a Platinum Dunes remake - it's evident that Craven is pouring some real spirit into his work. There's plenty of talk about the human soul and of good and evil and morality that make it clear that even after all these years of toiling in the genre that horror isn't just an easy buck for Craven. He cares, he respects his audience, and he's still putting a little of his deeper self into his films. This is the first original script he's penned since 1994's A New Nightmare and it fully bears his imprint. But then there's the inescapable fact that it's lousy.
Craven has always gotten into trouble the more metaphysical his material is. Down and Dirty is where Craven shines (The Hills Have Eyes, The People Under The Stairs). Anything Goes Craven (Shocker, this crap), not so much.
There's a germ of a good movie here but Craven never finds it past the clutter of his ideas and his faltering dramatic instincts. I did like some of the performances, Emily Meade in particular. But overall, My Soul To Take is just Too Much To Take.
When I was in junior high, I had a friend whose parents were way more permissive than mine when it came to R-rated movies. I couldn't even see them on cable but this kid saw all the new horror releases on the big screen. When we got together at the beginning of school in the fall of '81, the first movie I asked him about was Deadly Blessing. The TV spots and newspaper ads for it had terrified me over the last month of summer vacation and I had to know if I was right to be pissing in my pants over it. Having gone to the drive-in to see it with his parents, he assured me that it was one of the best horror movies he had ever seen, reserving high praise for the spider-in-the-mouth dream sequence.
When I finally saw the movie for myself on VHS, I was not disappointed. It remains such a terrific shocker (rewatching it just the other week, there was a 'gotcha' scare involving Sharon Stone's character in a barn that 'got me' so badly - even though I knew it was coming - that I damn near sprained my neck!) and it's such a key movie in Wes Craven's filmography (bringing dream imagery into his work in a big way) that I'm puzzled as to why it hasn't been given a Region 1 DVD release.
Whatever the reason for its absence on disc, here's hoping that one day it'll get the exposure - and the wider fanbase - it deserves.
To read my full Deadly Blessing review click here.
By introducing surrealism into the staid n' stagnant slasher formula in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), writer/director Wes Craven put to bed the cycle of copycat cinema that had dominated the horror genre since the success of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). In place of a prosaic, everyday world where overall-clad killers lurked behind shrubbery, hid in closets, and raided kitchen drawers for knives, there was a fantastical new 'rubber' reality.
Freddy Krueger wasn't just some lumbering party crasher, invading our space...
Instead, he forced his way into our world, stretching it out of shape.
Post-Halloween, slasher films had stuck to the same old tricks...
With A Nightmare on Elm Street, the slasher genre dramatically shed its skin, ripping its way free.
It was a call to action...
...For horror filmmakers to wake up and start dreaming again.
That nothing like that happened and that - rather than leading to adventurous films out to follow their own individuality - A Nightmare on Elm Street simply inspired imitations, shouldn't be a surprise. Horror has eternally been a genre cursed by sleeping potential...and lulled by borrowed dreams.
There's something undeniably odd in seeing the most notorious horror films of the '70s - films that were once controversial staples of drive-ins and grindhouse theaters - brought back decades later as slick entertainment for the multiplexes. It's difficult for horror to be transgressive when films that were once examples of entertainment going beyond the pale are now regarded as venerable brands to be exploited and I belive Last House on the Left is hands-down the strangest choice of a remake so far. Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween...while I questioned the wisdom in trying to give any of these films a contemporary make-over, at least I could understand the commercial potential in each case. If you want to immediately have an audience for your zombie film, your slasher film, or your survivalist horror film...those titles are the ones you'd want to go after. Last House, however, is such an ugly tale that I have to wonder why Wes Craven and his fellow producers thought that the world was clamoring to see an updated tale of rape and revenge with better production values. You know, was this really the kind of thrill ride that was worth recreating? It was a milestone for its time, yes, but does the audience of 2009 need their own version? Based on the new film and its initial box office reception, I guess the answer is 'kind of'.
I'll be explictly discussing the ending of this film later in this review so if that's something you care to avoid, you should stop reading after this paragraph. The short answer for me on Last House '09 is that it was generally about as good as a remake of Craven's classic could be. It doesn't do much to try and improve on what Craven and Sean Cunningham did (except for making the film's tone more consistent - there's no moments of awkward comic relief here), it just tells the same age-old story with minor alterations (courtesy of writer Carl Ellsworth). A pair of girls still run afoul of heinous criminals, they're still cruelly violated, and although one girl lives through this ordeal where her character did not in the '72 version, the gang of dirtbags still unknowingly seek refuge in the household of the girl's parents and by the end of the night, the truth of their deeds is out and a vicious payback is served. It's a storyline that's hard to fuck up as long as it's played with conviction and director Dennis Iliadis and his cast don't disappoint on that count.
Among the cast of Last House '09, Garret Dillahunt is a real standout as the despicable Krug. The original film's David Hess left a lasting impression as a scumbag for the ages but Dillahunt is a memorable Krug in his own right. All the performances here are strong and this is easily the best ensemble cast for a horror film in some time - definitely since Frank Darabont's adaptation of The Mist (2007). As the daughter who survives Krug and co.'s abuse, Sara Paxton is very good, showing a sense of resiliency even when she's been as degraded by her attackers as she can get. There's been some consternation in fan circles about having this character live but I think for the purposes of this film it works and the dramatic way that Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn play their reactions to their daughter's condition and their urgent need not just to avenge her violation but to protect her from further harm and safely get her medical attention adds a layer of drama and suspense missing from the original.
As a director, Iliadis goes in the opposite direction of Craven's raw approach. This is a much more polished production - befitting its $10 million budget - and I think that was a wise move. It'd be disingenuous to try and purposely recreate the grainy, guerrilla filmmaking vibe of the first film. In tandem with cinematographer Sharone Meir, Iliadis creates many strikingly pretty moments amid the nasty events that unfold. But when the violence comes in, it's full-on.
My main complaint with the new Last House as it moves into its second half and the gang of criminals receive their comeuppance one-by-one is that I thought there could've been more thought into how these characters are dispatched. I missed the sense of planning and preparation that went into the parent's revenge in the original film. Here, it just seems like a lot a flailing around as the parents get into prolonged struggles with the individual gang members and that isn't as impactful as seeing the parents showing some cunning. I also think that an opportunity to make this film more troubling and morally complicated was forfeited. The presence of Krug's teenaged son Justin (Spencer Treat Clark) offered a chance to have a character who wasn't evil and who committed no crime himself have to suffer for his inaction. Although Justin never does anything to harm Mari or her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac), I thought it would've been dramatic to have him be included in the parent's retribution - that the parents are so enraged to know that this character did nothing to intervene while their daughter was being raped (and while her friend was killed) that this would be enough to make them unload on him. To kill Justin in cold blood would be something that the Collingwood's would surely instantly regret, but it would be an act that was committed out of pure anger and instinct - just a gut impulse to cleanse the world of everyone who was involved in what was done to their daughter. I believe that should've been the last scene, rather than the microwave kill which is prominently featured in the film's ads (not that I don't appreciate a film closing on a shot of a head exploding!). To see Emma Collingwood suddenly shoot Justin point blank just as the audience thinks the movie's over as the surviving characters are all on their way to safety wouldn't be an act of revenge that everyone in the audience would agree on (and it might even be one that the father would've been surprised by) but I think that's an element this film needed - some moral ambiguity and a chance to question how far the audience believes these parents are allowed to go. It would've allowed the ending of the film to resonate, rather than just go out on a crowd-pleasing moment.
As is, this is well acted, well directed, but uncomplicated - making the parent's revenge out to be unambiguously gratifying. For what it is, though, it's good. I'm not sure who I'd recommend it to but if you have to see one movie this year where a young girl suffers a prolonged rape and the people responsible for this crime are made to pay the ultimate price for it, then Last House on the Left is second to none.
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