Death Proof

When most horror fans think of the '70s, they immediately think of The Exorcist or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. While I think of those classics too, being as young as I was at the time, I wasn't all that aware of those films during the '70s themselves. Back in the day, '70s horror for me was symbolized by PG-fare like Empire of the Ants, not The Hills Have Eyes.

If you had asked me then what my favorite horror movies were, 1977's The Car would have ranked right near the top of my list. It's the kind of movie I surely would have (foolishly) scoffed at as an adult - and probably even as a teenager - but as a young kid I was entranced by it. Chronicling the small Utah town of Santa Ynez's death duel with an ominous, and apparently hell-sent, black Lincoln Continental whose driver is never seen, The Car is simple and direct and does not sell its title character short. If you want a movie about a killer car doing killer car things, The Car is not going to disappoint you.

Written by Michael Butler, Dennis Shryack, and Lane Slate and directed by Elliot Silverstein (Cat Ballou), The Car has been perennially pissed on since its debut but Gen-Xers have always held it in high esteem as one of our generation's great guilty pleasures. Adult critics and genre fans saw only a low-brow rip-off of Duel crossed with The Exorcist (or even, "Jaws on wheels"). Kids saw a movie that was kick-ass from start to finish. We're simple that way.

For years I went along with the notion that The Car only seemed good to me because I saw it when I was so young and impressionable. Seeing it now, though, I've gotta say "screw that" - it's a flat-out cool movie. Sure the dialogue is occasionally hokey but the cast (including James Brolin, Ronny Cox, and R.G. Armstrong) never winks at the camera or condescends to the material - to a one, they all try to keep their reactions true to their situation. And the action is choice. When The Car does a barrel-roll in order to wipe out two approaching police cars at once, it's still spectacular.

Abetted by cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld (Young Frankenstein), Silverstein takes great advantage of the scenic, panoramic locations (it was an inspired choice, by the way, to have this film take place in a dry Southwest town so the Car can kick up dust clouds everywhere it goes). Many scenes benefit from the sense that with such wide-open vistas, with nothing but road or flat desert, there's no safe place for The Car's victims to flee to. It's a strategy that really pays off when one victim to-be does get inside their house but to our shock we see that it might as well have been made of matchsticks.

The Car was pimped out to be a horror superstar, ready to roll into sequels (the end credits show us that The Car has survived the fiery finale and is now cruising the highway alongside an unspecified city) but apparently no one cared about that back in 1977 as it played to poor box office (the fact that Star Wars opened just twelve days after The Car may have caused the movie to be overlooked). But man, The Car makes the shark in Jaws look about as lethal as a goldfish. From its tank-like design to the distinctive blare of its horn to the sizable body count that it racks up, The Car was custom-made to be a horror heavyweight.

Thanks to its opening quote by Church of Satan leader Anton LaVey, The Car has always been seen as a film that was riding on the dying fumes of the post-Exorcist wave of horror but I also think it deserves some credit for anticipating the slasher craze yet to come. Some might say the fact that The Car is, well, a car disqualifies this film from being categorized as a slasher pic but yet while films like Psycho, Texas Chain Saw, and Black Christmas are more obvious antecedents of the slasher sub-genre, as a body count movie featuring creative kills, with many scenes of the killer stalking its victims - complete with POV shots as we witness events through the hellish tint of The Car's windshield - The Car resembles assembly line slasher moviemaking as we came to know it. More importantly, The Car introduced what would become a key component of slasher cinema - the notion of the supernatural-based, invincible killer.

Like popular slasher icons to come such as Jason, Freddy and Michael Myers, The Car is impossible to kill and displays an uncanny talent for showing up in impossible places - as when it suddenly appears parked in Brolin's garage. In talking about Death-Proof, his contribution to Grindhouse (2007), Quentin Tarantino claimed that he wanted to do his version of a slasher movie but with a car as the weapon but The Car got there first.

The killer car is a familiar horror staple, appearing in films like The Hearse and Christine. But no other movie in this sub-genre has ever been as purely driven as The Car. I can't say that it ranks high alongside the '70s true masterpieces (the '70s was an incredible decade for horror, after all) but my nine-year-old self would be happy to know that, unlike many other films from my childhood, I don't look at The Car as a camp classic at all but as a damn fine ride.

The Car

Steven Spielberg's acclaimed TV movie Duel (1971) is generally regarded as a haiku of road rage. But is Duel the tour de force that it's been made out to be? Does it really make the most of its premise? Well, yes in the sense that cat and mouse games don't come much more tense than Dennis Weaver's distraught efforts to keep his Plymouth Valiant ahead of the mysterious trucker who has a death wish out for him.

But as nerve-wracking a movie as it was, and as much of an Everyman that Weaver played, I always felt that Duel was the story of one chump's bad luck, with a cautionary note about truckers and proper road etiquette attached. It didn't do anything to scare me off the road, in other words. Instead it was another, much less lauded film, that made me forever wary of other vehicles - 1977's The Car. As far as my traumatized nine-year-old self was concerned, when the rubber met the road, The Car was by far the better drive than Duel.

A head-on collision between Duel and The Exorcist (the film opens with a quote by famed Satanist Anton le Vey), The Car was deemed a jalopy by most critics and fans at the time of its release, not fit for scrap metal. But I don't know a single kid who grew up in the '70s who doesn't have the blare of The Car's hell-spawned horn branded into their consciousness.

The tight-knit community of Santa Ynez is a quiet Utah town until the day a tank of a black sedan arrives and gets a taste of blood on its bumper by dispatching two carefree young bicyclers. From there, The Car proceeds to out-maneuver all efforts of the local law to stop it as it runs roughshod over as many hapless victims as it can. Can James Brolin as cycle-riding cop Wade Parent beat The Car with just his two wheels and a kick-ass moustache?

The scariest aspect to The Car is how The Car can strike at any time. You wouldn't think a black sedan could be so stealth but this one is. It can even get into your garage without you knowing about it. And even when you see it coming a mile away, you're just as dead. Duel was merely about a trucker chasing one panicky middle-aged dude for miles upon miles and then he even fails to scrub that one dude. If The Car could laugh at that, it would because The Car knows how to deliver a body count.

All the time, horror movies are referred to in terms of what they'll make you afraid to do once you seen them. You know, you'll never shower again, you'll never go to the beach, you'll never go in the woods - and so on. Well, The Car might be the only horror movie I can think of that literally gives you a reason to be scared to do anything. Don't bicycle, don't hitchhike, don't cross the street, don't drive, don't run, don't walk outside, don't stay in the house. Whatever you do, you're in a world of shit if The Car is around. You're just not safe, period. As a kid, this movie even made me scared to be sleeping on the second floor. Because I knew that the Car could easily bring the whole house down.

We never see who's behind the wheel of The Car, but director Elliot Silverstein and writers Michael Butler, Dennis Shryack, and Lane Slate don't give you a long list of suspects. The Car all but has a license plate that says HEL-666. Why the Devil would be driving a black sedan and running down, say, hitchhikers who play the French horn is unexplained but that just makes it scarier, right?

Even though its hard to upstage the Car itself, the cast of The Car is one of my favorites of the '70s with James Brolin, Ronny Cox, and R.G. Armstrong being the most recognized names. But I particularly love Brolin's onscreen squeeze, played by Kathleen Lloyd. As Lauren, the local school teacher, Lloyd was like every groovy grade school teacher I had during the '70s - from Ms. Metzeger to Mrs. Cosgriff.

She was a character I completely recognized from my own experiences. She was cool, she was funny, and she wasn't one of these sad characters you often see in movies that take place in small towns who are just itching to get out and start a real life. You know, you always felt that by staying in Bodega Bay that Suzanne Pleshette's school teacher Annie Hayworth in The Birds was consigning herself to an unfulfilled life. But that's not the case with Lauren. Santa Ynez is totally her town. And her and Brolin are definitely Santa Ynez's It Couple. Lloyd isn't just playing the disposable love interest here, she's one boss chick (major bonus points to Lloyd S. Papez, The Car's art director, for the inspired touch of including an oil painting of Wade that's clearly the work of Lauren's amateur hand among the objects in her house). So when Lauren is singled out for The Car's most personal attack, it really is a devastating shock. In a movie that doesn't lack for outrageous moments (like when The Car deliberately flips itself over at top speed to roll over two oncoming police cruisers at once - killing every officer on board), Lauren's close encounter with The Car is ultimate proof that The Car will not wait for its victims to meet it out in the streets. Instead it provides its own drive-thru service.

When Quentin Tarantino made Death Proof (2007) with the claim that it would be a slasher movie where the killer's weapon was a car, I figured he'd be looking to outdo - or at least compare with - the car-nage of The Car. But as it turned out, Death Proof amounted to little more than thirty seconds of Driver's Ed footage. When it comes to making a horror movie about a car, The Car is still the uncontested King of the Road. Over thirty years later, it still gets better mileage.

And in closing, a big honk of the horn to Final Girl for inspiring this blog as part of her Film Club Day.