Retro-Shock Theater: My Bloody Valentine (1981)

In the late ‘70s and early ’80s, in the wake of Halloween’s record-setting success, producers were madly scrambling to grab any remaining holidays to center their own slasher movie around. As slasher films typically hinge on payback for some perceived (or actual) past betrayal or wrong, Valentine’s Day – a day famous for fostering bitter disappointments and hurt feelings – was an ideal candidate for the slasher treatment.

One of several slasher productions made in Canada in the early ‘80s (along with Prom Night, Happy Birthday to Me and Terror Train), My Bloody Valentine proved easy for slasher buffs to adore, even if the MPAA – then on a crusade to neuter the new wave of splatter films – demanded heavy cuts be made before it awarded MBV an R-rating. To have the film released with all its bloodshed intact would’ve been nice but what makes MBV work is its attention to character and atmosphere so its FX didn’t have to be its key selling point.

An uncut version of the film was finally released on DVD in 2009 in time for the release of the 3-D remake, but while it was nice to finally see more of FX master Tom Burman’s work, as it turned out it didn’t really improve upon the version that fans were already familiar with. In its original, R-rated form, MBV was all it needed to be.

Following the trend of most slashers at the time, screenwriter John Beaird and director George Mihalka lay out a whodunnit storyline involving the possible return of crazed coal miner Harry Warden to the town that he terrorized many years before. Back in the day, Warden was the sole survivor of a mine collapse (triggered by unsafe methane levels ignored by supervisors eager to get to a Valentine’s dance) which left his co-workers dead and himself trapped with their bodies for weeks.

When rescuers finally got to Harry, they found that he’d had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Not the kind of thing one easily bounces back from. The next Valentine’s Day, Harry took his revenge on his former supervisors, hacking them to death with a pickax and leaving a warning to never hold another Valentine’s Day dance again.

Harry became a boogeyman figure that haunted the town’s collective memory, with his grim vow being enough to keep Cupid at bay in Valentine Bluffs for at least a generation. While the town’s elders successfully squelched holiday festivities for years, those who were only children when Harry conducted his rampage have come of age and want to forget the superstitious fears of their parents and have a Valentine celebration of their own.

Believing that enough time has passed, the mayor has given his permission but that will prove to be a heartbreaking decision. Days before V-Day, the mayor and sheriff receive a heart-shaped candy box containing a torn-out human heart along with a rhyming taunt warning them to stop the dance. After receiving this, the panicked mayor and sheriff cancel all celebrations while trying to keep the grisly truth from the rest of the town.

Even though all signs point to the return of Harry Warden, the sheriff isn’t having any luck locating Valentine Bluff’s most infamous son. The asylum to which Harry was committed to has lost track of him due to bureaucratic ineptitude – not being able to determine whether he is still a patient, was released, or has died. That makes the job of the sheriff and mayor all the more difficult as they work to root out the killer, even as the maniac claims another victim.

For their part, the young people of Valentine Bluffs are blissfully ignorant of the danger they’re in and are caught up in their own personal dramas. Appropriately for a movie built around Valentine’s Day, the kids of MBV are concerned with matters of the heart above all else.

Sarah (Lori Hallier) has been dating miner Axel Palmer (Neil Affleck) since her previous boyfriend (and the mayor’s son) Jesse “T.J”’ Hanniger Jr. (Paul Kelman) abruptly left her many months ago to go build a new life for himself in the big city, beyond the slim opportunities of Valentine Bluffs. Now that the big city has served him some humble pie, T.J. has returned with his tail between his legs, back working in the coal mine with hopes of picking up where he and Sarah left off.

This notion doesn’t sit so well with Axel and the competition over Sarah looks to be a potentially bloody one. Both Axel and T.J. are surly types, prone to outbursts of violence – surely one of them could be the gas-masked slayer (an outfit that’s among the most imposing in slasherdom) stalking the town. Or maybe it’s old Hap, the cranky bartender who doesn’t care for the way these rude-ass kids don’t respect the legend of Harry Warden. As it turns out, there are plenty of red herrings to go along with all the red hearts in Valentine Bluffs.

Of course, given that My Bloody Valentine is one of the most popular slashers ever, it’s safe to say that most of you (likely all) already know who the killer is. For those rare individuals who might not, though, spoilers ahead.

In classic slasher fashion, MBV’s mystery is resolved with a climatic flashback that explains everything – sort of. Some nagging questions I’ve always had: first, why would everybody be so cavalier in discussing Harry Warden around Axel when his father was one of Harry’s original victims? We as viewers only find out at the end that Axel’s dad was one of the supervisors Harry murdered but yet the way it’s mentioned, it seems to have been common knowledge among the characters. You’d think that would’ve been an earlier point of discussion.

And the idea that Axel would want to emulate the man that had slaughtered his father seems, um, curious from a psychological standpoint. Wouldn’t he hate Harry and want to take revenge on him rather than want to carry on his legacy? But hey, so what if the logic is completely screwy? It’s a slasher movie – somebody’s got to be the killer and that’s that.

Slasher movies commonly leave room for a sequel but My Bloody Valentine left fans more primed than usual for a follow-up with the wounded but very much alive killer lurching off into the mine shafts vowing his revenge on the whole damn town. Sadly no sequel ever materialized.

On the upside, though, the 2009 remake was one of the finer remakes of recent times and came off like a genuine love letter to the original and to the slasher genre in general. The original is still unarguably the most preferred of the two MBV’s, though. Apropos to Valentine Bluffs’ major industry, it should be said that you’d have to have a real heart of coal not to have a soft spot for My Bloody Valentine.

Originally published 2/14/13 at Shock Till You Drop

Miner For A Heart Of Gold

Recently it occured to me to wonder what kind of pressure there must be to find love in Valentine Bluffs. I mean, everyone wants to find a connection in this world but when you live in Valentine Bluffs it must especially suck to be single. Then again, could there be a less romantic place to name Valentine Bluffs? When you decide to name a town Valentine Bluffs, you'd think it would have to be an area that was plainly condusive to romance, a place that had some real poetry in its landscape. Somehow, a dreary coal mining town just doesn't fit that bill. It's more a place where you just count the days until you die.



Oh sure, it's not all misery. I mean, thank God for alcohol.



But once you get to a certain age, forget it.


For all the decorations in Valentine Bluffs - for all the paper hearts and streamers - it still looks like a dead man's town. Or maybe you just have to see it through rose colored glasses to appreciate what it has to offer. After all, every place has its endearing qualities.


Doesn't mean you can find any love there, though. In the end, life's disappointments will find you no matter where you live. It's nothing to lose heart over. These things, they all come out in the wash.

The Horror Of A Long Time Ago

Early on in the 1981 slasher fave My Bloody Valentine, after the sheriff and the mayor of Valentine Bluffs have gotten the heads-up that crazed ex-coal miner Harry Warden might be back in town to resume the killing spree he started in 1960, an administrator from the mental hospital that Warden was committed to two decades earlier comes up empty in the search for Harry's files and tells the exasperated sheriff "Look, in twenty years any number of things could've happened!" as though she'd been asked to exhume records from the 1800's.

For all the times that I've watched MBV, I never gave this scene any notice - it's simply meant to drag out the mystery of whether Warden is alive, dead, or still institutionalized - but watching it recently, the suggestion that twenty years is such an enormous span of time made me more aware that I was watching a movie that was now over thirty years old.

As Richard Harland Smith pointed out in an interview with Final Girl's Stacie Ponder, the slasher cycle of the late '70s/early '80s is now approaching middle age. It doesn't seem possible that so much time has passed by and yet it has. And it doesn't seem possible that those films are so old now and yet they are. If you went back thirty years from the early '80s, you'd be talking about the stuff my mom watched as a kid, Atomic Age favorites such as Tarantula and Them! - movies that were percieved as cornball by most kids of my time (the first generation of Fangoria readers). It makes me wonder how kids today regard the slasher films from my day. For today's twelve and thirteen year olds, even the first Hostel is probably starting to look old.

The folksy ballad that plays over MBV's end credits sings about Warden's original 1960 murder spree as "the horror of a long time ago" but yet going back twenty years from today would be 1992. Would we refer to that as being "a long time ago?" No...we wouldn't, would we?

But when you realize that Dr. Giggles was released in '92 and that it turns (choke!) twenty this year, the answer is "yes." A sad, bitter "yes." That was a long time ago. Somehow knowing that Dr. Giggles is a twenty year old film makes me feel even older than knowing that Happy Birthday to Me celebrates its thirty-first birthday this year. At least I was a kid during the era of Happy Birthday to Me and the rest of that slasher cycle. But I was an adult when Dr. Giggles came out.

And, as it turns out, in twenty years time any number of things can happen - before in fact you even realize that twenty years have gone by.

Remembering A Miner Masterpiece

In the early '80s I was too young to see any R-rated movies in theaters but that only caused the films of the slasher cycle to loom all the larger in my imagination - often helping pedestrian films take on legendary proportions.

Films like Terror Train, Friday the 13th, and My Bloody Valentine weren't the kind of horror films that I had grown up watching afterschool on The 4 O'Clock Movie or on the Saturday Creature Double Feature. This wasn't Godzilla stomping Toyko, or Peter Cushing's Van Helsing sticking it to Dracula. There was no element of fantasy to be had. I had already seen Psycho by then (although I wasn't even aware of films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House on the Left) but Psycho had that buffer of being, well, old. It was scary, yes (as a latchkey kid in the '70s, I watched Psycho for the first time on afternoon TV alone in the house with literally one foot out the front door during the film's scariest parts so I could feel I wasn't 'shut in' with the movie), but it was a "classic" - meaning that it was in black and white and that I read about it in books long before I saw it. I mean, my mom saw it when she was a kid - or at least a teenager - herself so I knew I'd be ok, no matter how scary it got.

But these new slasher films were changing the game. It was like a mean season had come. By reputation, slasher films were nothing but one brutal death after another. And from the TV commercials I'd been exposed to for the likes of He Knows You're Alone, they didn't even have that gloss that I always associated with movies - even by the standards of the more realistically-shot movies of the '70s, slasher movies seemed to be even more void of artifice. Without fail, every TV spot for a new slasher film would leave me traumatized. They never looked hokey to me, only harrowing.

Appearing more harrowing than any of the others was 1981's My Bloody Valentine. From the TV commercials, it looked hardcore - even before I was inclined to use words like 'hardcore'. There was something instantly unnerving about the killer's miner gear outfit with the gas mask and the blinding flashlight mounted on his helmet (which had the effect of freezing his startled victims like deers in headlights). This guy wasn't trying to look 'spooky' or to play hide and seek behind some shrubs, he was dressed to get in there and end you. And the clip from My Bloody Valentine that I saw on Siskel and Ebert's Sneak Previews was terrifying to me. It was the scene where Mabel, the old lady at the laundromat, is murdered. Seeing how helpless this tiny old woman was against the killer really disturbed me. Unlike most of the horror films I was used to, there wasn't anything 'fun' about that scene. I had seen many people victimized in horror films before, of course, but seldom did it seem so mean-spirited. So, well, heartless. And it because it was an older woman as the victim, there was nothing even titillating about it - it wasn't a 'damsel in distress' type of scene, it was just vicious.

The victims in Psycho never had time to plead for their lives (although the suddenness of the attacks in that film is what makes them so frightening), but the victims in slasher films always seemed to. Often times these characters had plenty of time to know exactly what was in store for them and go through the whole gamut of emotions. Scenes like this were new and upsetting territory to me. Sure, I had seen victims whimper and beg in terror before but usually it was in the presence of something absurd like a giant ant or whatever. But to see a hulking dude with a pick-axe attack an old woman and to hear the character react with real fear to this inexplicable thing happening to her ("What do you want?! Go away!") was chilling. By 1981 this was far from anything new to horror films, of course, but at my age I was seeing it for the first time. To my mind, My Bloody Valentine was a lock to be the scariest movie ever made. Hell, I couldn't even get through the 30 second TV commercial without leaving the room.

I don't remember when I eventually saw My Bloody Valentine in its entirety but I know it was on home video, which would've likely made that the mid-'80s for me. Inevitably it wasn't quite the terrifying experience I had expected (of course I had already become a jaded splatter fan by then!) but I still loved it. It followed the cliches of the genre enough to make it an archetypal slasher film but it had its own characteristics, too, like the working class atmosphere of its mining town and its love triangle subplot (a familiar movie staple but one rarely seen in horror films). But even if the movie itself didn't rewrite the book on horror, when I think of My Bloody Valentine I always think of how my earliest glimpses of it represented a new kind of horror film to me - one that would take no prisoners. In reality, it was very far from being that but to feel so threatened by a movie upped the ante and forever changed the way I thought about horror.

Next month, not only is the 3-D (!) remake due to hit theaters (coming in on a wave of positive notices) but the original will finally be able to be seen in all its uncut glory. I'm not sure which has me more excited. But while the original My Bloody Valentine may not have been the ruthless film I expected to see when I was eleven and fleeing from the TV commercials, it continues to have a place in my heart. Like the lyrics of "The Ballad of Harry Warden", it reminds me fondly of "the horror from a long time ago."

Blood Will Tell

Seeing that the long lost cut scenes from the slasher favorite My Bloody Valentine (1981) are finally due to be reinstated into the film courtesy of a special edition DVD arriving next January (see the above ad, as posted by Shock Till You Drop) made me think about what a different experience it is for fans today to grow up in the era of DVD. This uncut edition of MBV is something that fans of my generation have been waiting to see for close to thirty years now, ever since reading in the pages of FANGORIA about the film's tragic truncating at the hands of the MPAA. Until this new disc was announced, I thought the most we'd ever see of MBV's deleted gore shots would be those few pics that made it into Fango at the time of MBV's original release. So to be able to lay eyes on this uncut version is a true event for legions of Gen-X gorehounds - and that's a kind of fanboy excitement that the younger fans of today will never know.

The way studios market their genre films on DVD now largely revolves around providing fans with the uncut versions of movies. Even for the lamest of PG-13 efforts an unrated DVD with scenes "too intense for theaters" is standard issue. Never mind that today's R-rated films already get away with so much more than the films of the '80s (I can't imagine how the MPAA of 1981 would've reacted to the likes of Hostel or Saw - or to The Passion of the Christ, for that matter) but no matter how graphic an R-rated film can be now, it's guaranteed that any bloodshed left behind will find its way to the DVD. Today's fans will never have to wonder what they're missing from the films they've been growing up with (well, not in terms of gore, at least). For them, there's no such thing as not being able to see all of Zack Synder's Dawn of the Dead remake or Eli Roth's true version of Cabin Fever. There aren't any 'lost' or incomplete films among the new wave of splatter pics. There's no legendary cut scenes that today's fans will have to wait decades to see, if ever. Call me nostalgic but I think there's something sad about that.

When the Friday the 13th remake is released next year, I'm guessing that it'll be a bloodier Friday to begin with than any of the previous entries in the series but on top of that, the DVD will include anything that may not have made the R-rated cut. That's a very different experience than what fans went through back in the day with the original Friday films. Imagine how it would've been to be able to see the infamous double impaling from Part 2 on home video just a few months after seeing the theatrical cut? Or the alternative ending to Friday the 13th 3-D where Dana Kimmel's character loses her head to Jason? But I have to wonder - would that have taken away some (if not all) of the mystique that we've attached to these otherwise ordinary films?

There's something about anticipation, about having something withheld, that fuels passion. My Bloody Valentine is certainly a solid movie but how much of the intense devotion that fans have for it is due to that missing material? Sometimes it's what you don't see or what you can't see that makes you a more avid fan. And never mind the question of cut footage, just having immediate access to a film can make a difference. For example, I doubt if I'd love The Boogens (1981) quite as much as I do if I had been able to own a copy for myself the same summer I saw it on HBO or The Movie Channel or where ever it was that I first watched it. It was less the film itself than it was the waiting over ten years to see it again that stoked my love for it. If it hadn't been out of reach for so long, I'd just regard it as a pedestrain monster movie and that would be that.

But when films fall between the cracks, when scenes are removed against a director's wishes - that's when interest is piqued; that's when legends are formed. And if sometimes the legend proves to outshine the actual film, that's ok. Real classics are few and far between. It's the irrational feelings we develop for a film that end up making the difference. Anything that can help a film seem larger than life is fair. Maybe that's why the films of today have such a hard time competing with the likes of My Bloody Valentine. It's not that today's films are so inferior - after all, there's a big streak of average to be found in MBV. But it just feels wrong not to love it.

A 3-D Ride To Hell!

This poster for the upcoming release of My Bloody Valentine 3-D isn't particularly good in the sense that it's goofy as shit. On the other hand, for the exact same reason it's one of the best posters I've ever laid eyes on! I am pumped, brother! Sure, it would've been nice to see a more dramatically designed poster, one that kept more of a horrific mood, like the kind that accompanied the resurgence of 3-D in the early '80s:

...Even House of Wax's 1982 re-release boasted a cool new poster with a dark-clad figure thrusting a melting candle out from a movie screen to hold dripping over a screaming audience. So compared to those, this My Bloody Valentine poster isn't in the same league - or maybe that's just nostalgia getting the better of me.

But yet it promises something that's sorely been lacking in genre films lately, and that's fun. I can't think many horror films I've been genuinely excited to see recently - either in the theater or otherwise. Even if it's a film I end up liking, the anticipation wasn't quite there. But I guarantee that I'm counting the days till this arrives on the big screen. I remember watching Beowulf last year and wondering how long it would be until someone put the new 3-D technology to use on a horror film and the fact that My Bloody Valentine will be the first of at least three (R-rated!) 3-D horror films next year (Piranha and Final Destination 4 being the others) makes me ecstatic.

Questions of quality aside, just the knowledge that we'll be sitting in theaters next year ducking pick-axes and flesh-eating fish is to know in advance that 2009 will be a banner year.

I just hope that 3-D will eventually be put to its proper use in the service of a 3-D Phantasm remake. If the day never comes when the Tall Man's flying silver spheres can soar off the screen, then history must ultimately judge 3-D as having never reached its full potential.

Coal Miner's Slaughter

Given the affection I still have towards the early '80s slasher films I grew up on, it's a little dispiriting to see favorites like Prom Night now being remade and aimed at a generation too young to have even seen Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer in the theaters but for me the upcoming My Bloody Valentine remake is the real heart-breaker.

I vividly recall the TV spots for My Bloody Valentine terrifying me back in the early months of 1981. I was a latchkey kid, alone in the house after school until my working parents came home around 6 o'clock each night. And in the weeks leading up to My Bloody Valentine's Febuary release, it never failed that at some point after it got dark but before anyone else was home, a commercial for My Bloody Valentine would come on with its shots of a pick-axe wielding killer stalking through tunnels in his miner gear. This was before the days of remote control (at least it was in our household) so to change the channel, I'd have to actually approach the TV, which I couldn't bring myself to do as long as the commercial was playing. My alternate solution to that was to simply scurry out of the room. These spots were likely only 30 seconds long but to this scared shitless kid they seemed to last a tortured eternity.

When I eventually saw MBV a few years later on HBO, I really dug it. Sure, it wasn't quite as nerve-frying as its commercials had me expecting but it was a solid effort, comparing well to the other modern horror movies I'd seen up to that point. And as I've revisited it over the years, I've found it to have a much healthier shelf life than almost all of its slasher contemporaries.

What I continue to enjoy about MBV is that director George Mihalka and his cast made a real effort to bring a sense of realism to their film's blue collar community. The mining town of Valentine Bluff ("the little town with the big heart") is a convincingly dead-end piece of Nowhere and even the most attractive cast members here don't look too Hollywood (which would be strange if they did, seeing as this was a Canadian production - but you get my meaning).

Scripter John Beaird has been quoted as saying that MBV was striving to be the "Deer Hunter of horror films" in that, like Deer Hunter's steel worker protagonists, this was also about close-knit, working class characters. Most slasher films of the time featured protagonists on the cusp of promising futures - either high schoolers as in Halloween, Graduation Day, and Prom Night or college students as in House on Sorority Row, Hell Night, and The Dorm That Dripped Blood (even Terror Train centered around the final good times of a graduating college class) - but MBV was different. It was about kids (twentysomethings, actually - another break with the slasher norm) with no futures to look forward to. For these characters to live their adult lives in Valentine Bluff meant working in the local coal mine with no prospects of breaking the cycle of their parents (the one character who does try to get out - Paul Kelman's 'Jessie' - fails to make it on his own and has to return home shamefaced to work in the mines). And that focus on these working class heroes continues to mark MBV as being a different type of slasher movie.

I don't know what direction the remake's script will take but I'm anticipating that they'll entirely abaondon the original's mining town setting and if that's the case, then it isn't My Bloody Valentine in my eyes. It was unique at the time of the original's release to see a horror film take place in a community like this and it's even rarer now. In fact, it's become almost impossible to see blue collar characters in any form of entertainment any more. TV used to be filled with ordinary people who lived paycheck to paycheck but now for a character to be the center of a TV show means that they must be either a lawyer, a doctor, a cop, a CSI invesigator, or a TV writer. The days of people working as mechanics, bar tenders, taxi drivers or waitresses are extinct (with the notable exception of The Office, virtually the only time you see everyday people on TV now is when they're grasping for their fifteen minutes of fame on reality shows). And movies aren't any better in this regard. I mean, I know movies are all about escapism but in recent years, it seems like there's been a new-found aversion towards characters who live within modest means. Even middle class characters are being pushed aside - for example, it's just been reported that the family in the remake of Last House on the Left are now due to be vacationing at their lakeshore home!

Although current trends aren't in its favor, I hope that the new My Bloody Valentine won't abandon its blue collar roots in favor of flashier folk. If the only place I can see regular people is in a slasher movie, then so be it.