"Tonight's Film Deals With The Supernatural..."

Above is the intro to The ABC Friday Night Movie's premiere of The Shining. That network airing on May 6th, 1983 was my first viewing of The Shining and this intro has been burned into my brain since. I never thought I'd have the opportunity to see it again - but here it is thanks to YouTube.

In those pre-VHS, pre-cable TV days I saw so many of my favorite horror movies courtesy of The ABC Friday Night Movie. They didn't exclusively air horror films but that's honestly all I remember watching on those Friday nights - movies like The Fog, the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Coma, The Legacy, the 1977 The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Warriors (not horror but a movie that I was definitely scared to watch thanks to its ad campaign). But my viewing of The Shining has always been an especially vivid memory.

The intros for The ABC Friday Night Movie were always so exciting with the dramatic voice of announcer Ernie Anderson - aka one-time Cleveland horror host 'Ghoulardi' and the father of director Paul Thomas Anderson - being a perfect match for horror fare. No other TV announcer ever raised my pulse for a movie like Anderson and his voice is permanently attached to many of my fondest memories of watching horror films.

When he introduced The Shining as "the ultimate exercise in terror", by God I believed him. How could I not? I think this intro stood out more than any other from The ABC Friday Night Movie just because Anderson's voice and Wendy Carlos' Shining score made an ideal tag-team. To this day, when I think about a perfect viewing of a horror movie - a movie seen at the right time, under the right circumstances, that airing of The Shining remains the standard for me.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow

Drenched in irony and justice darkly met, 1981's Dark Night of the Scarecrow boasts a level of writing, acting and atmosphere that belies its TV-movie origins. Populated almost exclusively with character actors closer to collecting their Social Security checks than their High School diplomas, the presence of such seasoned pros at the service of a script (by J.D. Feigelson) that evokes the feeling of a tale told at midnight establishes Dark Night of the Scarecrow as an accomplished autumnal treat. And the news that this cult favorite is due to finally make its way onto disc is cause for celebration.

The one youthful face found among Dark Night's older-skewing cast is child actress Tonya Crowe as Marylee Williams, a small town child whose best friend is Bubba - a kind, 36-year-old simpleton whose age and enormous girth hide a child-like intellect. The small but pivotal role of Bubba is played by Larry Drake, who went on to win accolades for his portrayal of another mentally challenged man in the '80s TV drama L.A. Law while genre fans will recognize him both as Darkman's Durant and as the mad medico Dr. Giggles. The innocent friendship Crowe's Marylee shares with Bubba is the tragic catalyst that sets Dark Night's events in motion.

The town mailman, Otis P. Hazelrigg (played by Charles Durning) spies on Marylee and Bubba at play and convinces his good ol' boy buddies (Lane Smith, Robert F. Lyons, and Claude Earl Jones) to see Bubba as a threat to Marylee. And so when the girl reportedly turns up dead after last being seen with Bubba, that's the only excuse Otis needs to organize his three friends into a bloodthirsty posse.

A terrified Bubba runs for protection to his mother's rural home and she tells him to evade Otis and his men by playing 'the hiding game'. But after a prolonged search, Otis and his men find Bubba disguised as a scarecrow hung on a cross in a field. We see Bubba's frightened eyes behind the burlap sack and the four armed men ruthlessly shoot the defenseless Bubba. Just moments later, the call comes in over the CB that not only is Marylee alive but that she was earlier saved - by Bubba - from an encounter with a vicious dog.

With the notion of coming clean not an option (and with its four friends guarding a guilty secret only to have it prove to be their undoing, this was the I Know What You Did Last Summer of its day), Otis makes it look like Bubba had a weapon on him (a pitchfork) and convinces his friends to back each other's lies.

This pays off when they're acquitted of any wrongdoing and walk out of the courtroom weeks later as free men. This miscarriage of justice only makes Otis and his pals all the more smug. But as Bubba's grieving mother tells them - "There's other justice in the world besides the law!". And so it is that before long, one of the four men sees a scarecrow take up grim residence in his field. The night after seeing the scarecrow, this man falls victim to a fatal accident involving the wood chipper outside his barn. One by one, the scarecrow will appear to each of them and herald a reckoning - unless they can track down whoever it is that's taken it upon themselves to make them pay for their crime.

One would think that Feigelson and director Frank De Filetta would've played up the potential mystery angle and offered up some viable suspects as to who could be the vigilante - like the outraged District Attorney who served as prosecutor at the trial, for example (the only person in the film who feasibly could be pursuing these men, ruling out Bubba's diminutive, elderly mother and Marylee). But no real red herrings are provided. Although the four men will look for someone to blame, the film gives us no reason to question that the specter of Bubba is pursuing them (as Marylee tells Bubba's mother: "Don't worry Mrs Ritter, Bubba's not gone - he's playing the hiding game ..."). And while the death scenes are to the bloodless standard of television censors in the early '80s, they're still satisfyingly staged. Filetta really lets us savor the terror of these men - their crime was heinous and none of them pay an easy price for it.

But even though the four 'protagonists' are all murdering bullies and cowards, thanks to the expert acting of its veteran cast we feel involved in their fates. Durning manages to portray Otis as despicable (we learn through the course of the film just how base he really is - with a suggestion that he may yearn to act on pedophile urges) and yet he imbues the character with enough charisma that we're able to - not sympathize with - but at least to feel we have a stake in his ordeal. And while this may be the best example of the slight but popular 'killer scarecrow' sub-genre (sorry, Scarecrow Gone Wild!), the irony is that we never see the scarecrow move (save for two shots left for the end of the film) or stalk its victims. This isn't like Scarecrows (1988), in which we see a whole gang of sack-headed slayers. Here it's all suggestion.

There isn't even a distinctive shadow seen creeping along a wall or a close-up of a straw-stuffed hand reaching towards a victim. Until the very last seconds of the film, we just see the scarecrow spread-armed on its cross in the field like a portent of doom. But it works. Like a horror movie that's so cannily edited that viewers will swear they saw more blood than was actually in the film, I'm sure many fans believed they saw much more of the scarecrow in action than is actually on screen in this film. I know that when I had a chance to see this again as an adult that I was stunned to realize how little of the scarecrow we truly see.

Originally aired on October 24, 1981, at a time when theatrical horror was in the midst of the '80s slasher boom, the restrictions of TV dictated that Dark Night of the Scarecrow be an example of 'classic' horror, relying on mood. And yet, it now feels far less dated than many of the more graphic films of its day. From its script, to its caliber of acting, to its atmospheric direction, Dark Night of the Scarecrow is best described as timeless. It remains one of the witching season's finest fables.

Always Carrie It With You

Stephen King was already a card-carrying member of the horror elite years before he appeared in this 1985 American Express commercial.

But this ad saw him at the height of his mainstream popularity, when King wasn't just authoring a staggering amount of books but the adaptations of those books were also crowding movie theaters. Of course, having strangers know you on sight isn't all it's cracked up to be and it's ironic to hear the same author who would go on to write Misery deliver a line like "when I'm not recognized it just kills me".

Don't leave home without it? With the world being such a scary place, it might be wiser not to leave home at all. Especially if you're famous.

"The Problem With Today's Horror Films Is..."

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers have invited its members to participate in a unity blog, with the theme being for each blogger to supply their own ending to this sentence: "The problem with today's horror films is..."

This is a topic that lots of fans have an immediate answer to, with plenty of vitriol to share about how horror is a diluted product now - just watered-down thrills made for an undiscriminating audience. Tips for improvement run the whole gamut of: horror movies should be R and not PG-13, there should be less of a focus on teenagers, and more original films instead of remakes and sequels.

But horror fans of every generation have typically made it a point to complain that the horror films of the present are inferior to whatever scare fare they grew up on. I imagine that even some ancient moviegoers who were raised in the silent days must have believed that the advent of sound was the death knell of true horror. Because, you know, movies are only scary when you have to imagine what a creaking door sounds like. And once black and white was replaced by color, I bet some fans never recovered from that because everybody knows that horror movies just don’t work as well unless they’re in black and white. The point being that every era has given horror fans something new to gripe about.

When I was a kid in the early ‘80s, all I ever heard was a lot of hyperventilating about how horror had fallen into a morass of blood and guts and how the slasher genre was destroying horror movies. Now, of course, that time is now thought of as some kind of golden age and films that were dismissed as outright junk like My Bloody Valentine and Happy Birthday to Me (both 1981) are considered (in some quarters, at least) to be classics and now it’s the turn of remakes like Prom Night (2008) to be blamed for ruining horror.

So if anyone ever asks me what’s wrong with horror today, my usual answer is “nothing”.

Sure, I don’t love every horror movie I see. With some films, I just don’t understand how they appeal to anyone. The Saw series baffles me, for instance - not because of the violence, but because of the inanity of the storylines. But what other people like doesn't bother me and every year I always manage to find some movies that I do enjoy. As long as that stays true, I can't say things are all bad.

If I could change anything, it’s that I'd like unrated and NC-17 movies to get wider theatrical releases rather than either going straight to DVD or receiving very limited runs. I was part of the last generation who got to see the unfettered likes of Pieces, The Beyond (aka Seven Doors of Death), and Demons in theaters and I think it's unfortunate that unless someone lives in or near a major market, the most extreme horror movies they'll ever experience on the big screen are R-rated fare. And it's also a shame that quirky independent pictures like Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter and Stuart Gordon's Stuck (among many others) don't have a chance of playing at most fan's local theaters. I'm glad these movies have an outlet to be seen uncompromised on DVD and cable but yet I wish they had greater opportunities for theatrical distribution.

But as far as the movies themselves go, even if much of the new crop is terrible I don’t see that as being any different from any other point in time. Most horror movies have always been poor at best. Even with good films, when they make a lasting impact, it’s usually down to the age that you first watched them. Burnt Offerings (1976) blew my mind because I saw it when I was around seven or eight years old. Had I seen it when I was thirty-five instead, well...that'd be a different story. That’s not to say I wouldn't like to see more horror films strive for greatness, or that it’s always about seeing a film at the right age, just to acknowledge that the movies I grew up with weren’t flawless by any means and yet my movie collection is full of films that critics - and most fans - once thought would be forgotten in a month. A lot of irrational attachments are made when it comes to horror films so it’s not my place to say that today's fans shouldn’t feel as connected to the movies that they’re growing up with as much as anyone else did to the movies of their eras.

Personally, I enjoy seeing how the genre changes each year. I like watching trends come and go. And I like the fact that the horror genre's prosperity is seldom up to the hardcore fans but instead in the hands of a larger mainstream audience who determines what movies become hits (even if it sometimes flies in the face of what horror fans approve of). The horror movies that we see may seldom be the kind that would be made if fans were left to call the shots but I don't see anything wrong with that. Instead I think it keeps things interesting. My feeling is that every age gets the horror films that it needs - although sometimes this is only evident in hindsight.

Ultimately, other people are probably better equipped than I am to tell you what's wrong with today's horror movies. More often than not, I'm happy to roll with whatever's out there. I even liked Mirrors, for crying out loud. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest problem with today's horror films is the same as always - they just don't make enough of 'em.

Brickbats For The Bat

Something bothered me about The Dark Knight when I saw it on its opening weekend but until now I couldn't zero in on what that was. At first, I thought it was its weak third act. No matter what kind of trauma he suffered, I didn't buy that Harvey Dent would go from being the most virtuous man in Gotham to a guy who'd put a gun to a kid's head. That was a leap that didn't feel convincing to me. I also felt that it was annoying for The Joker to promote himself as an "agent of chaos" while spending an inordinate amount of time thinking ahead and putting multiple plans in place but I was willing to go along with that contradiction. No, it was something else about the movie that felt 'off' to me. Then I saw it again and I immediately knew.

By putting Batman into a more reality-based world rather than the stylized stomping grounds of the comics universe, it puts a heavier onus on the filmmakers to justify The Batman's presence and - on reflection - I don't think The Dark Knight pulls that off. Specifically, take a look at The Batman's jailhouse interrogation of The Joker mid-way through the film - what exactly does Batman hope to accomplish here? What about his methods does a veteran cop like Gordon think will work? The only thing The Batman does is rough up The Joker. That's it. He doesn't do anything to The Joker that the cops couldn't do themselves by turning a blind eye to ethics and procedure. He doesn't utilize some illegal technology or experimental drug that's out of the hands of normal law enforcement. No paralyzing ninja nerve pinch, even. For shit's sake, he doesn't even brutalize Joker all that much. He just throws him around a room. The only thing that's different from anyone else shoving The Joker around is that The Batman is doing all this while wearing, well, a bat costume. That's supposed to be his edge in this situation - that he's wearing a bat costume (oh, and he has his growly voice, too). That's supposed to break The Joker.

After The Batman gets nowhere by throwing The Joker around, he seems confused that this hasn't prompted an immediate confession. Because, after all, he's wearing a bat costume - which should tell The Joker how serious the situation is. When Batman opens his best can of whup-ass on The Joker, the one labeled "Emergency Use Only", Gordon tells his fellow officers that the Batman is "in control". But in this world, what good is a dude in a Bat costume if he's in control? You need a psycho in that suit - someone who's willing to break a few human rights and a few bones, too. In the world of The Dark Knight, The Batman's interrogation methods need some serious stepping up. He's still relying on the costume and the voice to do all the work - like he thinks he's in a comic book or something.

And while his comic book counterpart has always stopped short of killing his opponents, that moral stance doesn't make the same kind of sense for the Batman of The Dark Knight. In the comics, there's an arch-reality to that world where constantly returning his incurable adversaries to Arkham Asylum can appear to be a sensible, even noble, move. But the more evil, depraved and real you make a character like The Joker, the bigger an idiot Batman looks like for not taking him out for good. In The Dark Knight, The Batman tells Gordon that he's "whatever Gotham needs him to be" but really, he's just talking out of his ass. He says "Either you die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. I can do those things because I'm not a hero." but yet he could've decided he wasn't a hero fifteen minutes earlier, dropped a pile of sociopathic scum twenty stories and have done Gotham a lot more good. Director Christopher Nolan establishes Batman as someone who won't do much more than yell at criminals. And if that doesn't work, he's all out of ideas. So what is this version of Batman then, other than a guy who gets his kicks from wearing a costume?

Nolan has been acclaimed for his efforts to give The Dark Knight the feel of a gritty crime drama but given the approach to crimefighting that he, his brother Jonathan, and David Goyer (all three collaborated on The Dark Knight's script) have given their version of the Caped Crusader, it's no wonder that Gotham is going to hell in a handbasket. They want the audience to accept that Gotham's Guardian is needed because he's, well, a superhero but yet they present him as a ineffectual, self-flagellating loser.

Nolan's Batman seems like nothing more than a professional masochist, more interested in bringing pain on himself than waging an effective war on crime. For instance, with all the technology available to him at Wayne Tech, are we supposed to believe that he can't start packing some kind of sonic device to ward off dogs? To be surprised once by dogs is acceptable. I mean, who could see that one coming? But once should be the one and only time that trick would work against him. I mean, really - even a mailman wouldn't be attacked twice by a dog on their delivery route. But yet at the climax of The Dark Knight, there Batman is again with a pack of dogs on top of him, like dogs are suddenly Batman's kryptonite. At the end of the day, this Batman is more about perpetrating his own suffering than being the best vigilante he can be. It's only fitting that the only copycats we see his deeds inspire are out-of-shape fanboys (Do the wanna-be Batmen seen in The Dark Knight represent a not-so-veiled dig at the stereotypical comic book fan? And wouldn't it have been more interesting to see at least one person who's actually capable try to give Batman a run for his money in cleaning up Gotham's streets?).

In the comics, Batman is the world's greatest detective. He also possesses an unmatched grasp of human psychology and his success as a crimefighter hinges on his ability to claim the edge in any given situation.

That isn't the dude Christian Bale's playing in The Dark Knight, however. I mean, even Adam West wouldn't have suffered the indignity of multiple dog attacks. I don't care if you drive a missile-equipped tank, that sort of thing can wreck your mystique overnight. Once criminals start posting clips on YouTube of Batman flailing on the ground with dogs tearing at him, even a third-rater like Egghead would feel less daunted.

The Batman of The Dark Knight is the champion of our present age - a half-assed hero for half-assed times.

Mirrors

Director Alexandre Aja's supernatural shocker Mirrors is likely to earn plenty of derisive hoots from both mainstream reviewers and the genre press. But I hope I'll have some company on the other side of the looking glass when I say that I got a really big kick out of this. If you're only going to see one bad movie about evil mirrors this year, please make it Mirrors because no one else is going to top it, believe me.

Aja first made a name for himself with his French shocker Haute Tension (2003) then successfully made the leap to the US with his remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2006). Both of those movies earned their share of accolades from the horror community but neither film quite did it for me personally. Yes, the violence was spectacular - but on both counts what should've been tense, gritty, close-to-the-bone tales badly unravelled. Mirrors, on the other hand, is a crock right from the start. To me, that makes it more of a party. This is a movie that can only get more and more inane. And by God, it does.

As Mirrors unfolds, it's clear that Aja intended this to be the premiere evil mirror movie, the final word on this subject (watch your back, Poltergeist III!) and anyone who wants to take a foolish dream like that all the way to the wall deserves to have me on their side. There's not a lick of an apologetic tone here. Aja is 100% committed to making the best scary mirror movie he can. He doesn't even want to stop at mirrors - any reflective surface is a potential way for evil to find its way into our world. In hindsight, Aja probably should've reined the screenplay (co-written with his regular partner Gregory Levasseur) in a bit and done a better job of establishing a clearer set of rules for how the evil presence in his film operates. But then if he had, this movie would've been a little less cracked (heh!) than it is and that's not a trade-off I'd have been willing to see. Mirrors' story is a complete pile of nonsense, but it's an entertaining pile of nonsense. It's the warped funhouse mirror reflection of a potentially better movie. Or possibly vice-versa. With mirrors, it's so hard to tell.

Kiefer Sutherland stars as ex-NYPD detective Ben Carson, who was dropped from the force after accidentally shooting a fellow officer and who now works as a night watchman at an abandoned, fire-gutted department store (stunningly depicted by production designer Joseph Nemec's sets) while temporarily crashing on his sister's couch. In the meantime, he's trying to mend his relationship with his estranged wife (played by Paula Patton) and their two kids. So this is the worst possible time for Ben to be dealing with a supernatural force trying to push its way into our world, using him as an unwilling conduit.

Had anyone else played Ben, Mirrors might've lost a good deal of its appeal. But for those, like me, who never tire of watching Sutherland explode ("Goddammit!"), this is gold. Some will write off Sutherland's performance here as a lazy continuation of his Jack Bauer shtick but for me, even if that's all he's doing, that's cool because there's no one else around to do it. I don't know why seeing Kiefer Sutherland in pissed off mode is so enjoyable to me, it just is. Mirrors wouldn't be half as much fun without him in the way that the original Amityville Horror (1979) wouldn't have been half as much fun without James Brolin. And while Sutherland's got some horrendous dialogue to deliver here, he never seems put out or embarrassed to be saying any of the dumb things he's asked to say - and that makes him a stand-up guy in my book. Aja's lucky to have him in his corner.

Initially, Aja probably meant for Mirrors to be a Shining-esque chiller, with a more psychological brand of scares than he'd gone for previously, but apparently he couldn't help but cover his ass with some gratuitous violence, which KNB's Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger deliver in spades. This was definitely a smart move on Aja's part as Mirrors' nastier highlights leave a strong impression. And Aja also can't help but ratchet up the action in the finale, which is totally jarring but in a good way. Sutherland's final throwdown with the evil behind the mirror might blow any chance of taking this movie seriously out of the water but that shipped had already sailed. If Mirrors' climax had been a low-key affair it would've made me think that Aja didn't really know what kind of movie he was making. Thankfully he totally did and that means we get to see Sutherland do his best Bruce Campbell as he battles what looks like the pit hag from Army of Darkness (it wouldn't have been out of place at all to hear Sutherland say "This is my boomstick!"). I also liked the film's coda, which delivers a hokey but satisfying Twilight Zone-ish sting.

Supernatural horror is clearly not Aja's forte, he's more of a visceral guy (next year's Piranha 3-D is going to destroy!) but after years of seeing one PG-13 remake of a J-Horror film after another pedal the same soft scares, Mirrors (a loose remake of the 2003 South Korean film Into the Mirror) automatically earns my gratitude for telling the likes of Pulse, Shutter and One Missed Call where to shove it. This may be a silly movie, for sure, but I was thoroughly entertained by it. A reflection of my own loose standards? Maybe. But when I looked into Mirrors, I liked what I saw.

Terror in the Aisles

It's hard to imagine that a film comprised entirely of clips from other movies would be granted a wide theatrical release but that's the case with 1984's feature-length compilation of horror and thriller highlights (hosted by Donald Pleasence and Nancy Allen), Terror in the Aisles. Presented as an overview of fear on film with an emphasis on modern terrors, Terror in the Aisles (directed by Andrew J. Kuehn and written by Margaret Doppelt - who's responsible for penning such insightful lines as "perhaps we invent artificial horrors to help us cope with the real ones") is at best a scattershot affair that lacks any kind of focus or insight. But yet for fans of a certain age, it remains a fondly remembered snapshot of a past era.

Younger genre fans who have - thanks to the advent of home video, DVD, and the internet - always enjoyed near-instant access to virtually the entire history of film might wonder how a film like Terror in the Aisles could ever be regarded as useful. But at one time even a poorly put-together compilation like this served a valuable function. Before almost every film was readily available on VHS (and before VCRs themselves were a common part of every household), Terror in the Aisles was an HBO staple and it provided many young horror fans an initial glimpse of films that remained out of their reach.

And as Terror in the Aisles didn't specifically note where each of its clips originated from, novice viewers were left to puzzle out for themselves what many of these films were. And even if they had the ability to identify which clips belonged to such lesser-known titles as Alone in the Dark and Ms. 45, it was unlikely that kids would have the immediate opportunity to see the complete films themselves.

Even if the presentation was lacking (the film leaps from one montage to the next with no rhyme or reason, making a series of unrelated points - People love villains! Hitchcock was the Master of Suspense! Crazy horror audiences talk back to the screen!), these clips still offered younger horror fans an intriguing taste of films that were largely unavailable to them. If only Terror in the Aisles had been assembled with a sharper eye towards the genre and had spent less time dwelling on thrillers like Nighthawks, Marathon Man, Klute, and Vice Squad (all great movies - but not horror).

Still, just for its host segments with Pleasence and Allen - who deliver their narration while sitting in a theater watching a film along with an audience that would give the seediest 42nd Street crew a run for their money (my favorite audience member is the fat Hispanic dude with the bandanna) - it's easy to harbor plenty of affection for Terror in the Aisles. With these host segments, it's clear that the makers of this film were out to caution viewers about the possibility of some real terror in the aisles as they portray the horror audience as being far scarier than the actual movies with narration that delivers digs like "There's no question about it - some terror films go too far. But so do the audiences." The irony is that as intimidating as the audience in Terror in the Aisles is supposed to be, they seem normal compared to Donald Pleasance. No matter how many thugs, stoners, and prospective serial killers they place around him, Pleasence is always more alarming than they are, blurting out lines like "It's only a movie!" at random junctures. Terror in the Aisles proves that Pleasance couldn't even host a compilation of clips without chewing the scenery and that alone makes it awesome.

The posters for Terror in the Aisles read "If you can handle more than one hundred jolts of one hundred percent pure terror, then you might be ready for Terror in the Aisles." but while that promised a film aimed at the advanced horror fanatic, Terror in the Aisles was more like a set of training wheels for those fans just learning how to get up to speed.