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Vampire Cheese Board

vampirecheeseboard

Cheesy: Trying too hard to be good, unsubtle, and inauthentic.

A vampire movie is like a cheese, I think. Processed, cheap, strong or stinky, it is almost impossible for a vampire movie to escape that wince inducing cheesy moment. Combine an obsessive fascination with these creatures who do not die, who live in the dark where we cannot see them, and who feed off of our life essences makes vampires one of the most enjoyable gambles Hollywood revisits through the ages.

I am always particularly interested in the ways our silver screen story tellers explain how vampires came to be in the first place. Did they start human and through sheer will power and meanness transcend our yoke of mortality to live forever and feed on what it once was, infecting others? Were they mutated by a horrible plague centuries ago? Are they descendant of Judas who was forever cursed to walk the earth? Are they Cain who was marked so that his human brethren would know him on sight? Or are they children of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who gave birth to all the monsters of the world and would steal children by night and drink their blood? Actually, I’ve never seen a movie with Lilith as the explanation for vampirism, but wouldn’t it be pretty good?

There are as many options for how vampires look, how they live, can be killed, and what extra powers they may have as there are for how they were made. Movies wallow like little piggies in the infinite possibilities of something that is still automatically recognizable by people all over the world. To make this cheese board a little easier to digest, I will break the multitude of types into flavors:

Loud and Melodramatic

These are your sharp and salty cheeses, the ones that pair well with red wine, fish pastes, and olives. The vampires in these movies have been aged over centuries of artistic license. They are your cheddar, Fontina, Parmesan, and Fontinella. Bram Stoker’s Dracula story has inspired several adaptations and several character appearances in other movies. From Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi before him, to Gary Oldman, the Dracula story has been the cornerstone of vampire lore for celluloid ages. He is powerful, ancient, and deeply wronged. He is what humans wish they could be – strong enough to overcome any obstacle while still holding on to their broken, tragic, and terribly human past which somehow keeps them from becoming complete monsters. And yet, there something about Dracula, even as seen in Braum Stoker’s Dracula, that cannot avoid the cheese. Each of the male suitors is a caricature; the two female leads are complete opposites and almost entirely divisive. In fact, I will venture to say that the only really developed character in the whole thing is Dracula himself. And oh boy, that Dracula!

It is maybe the hardest thing in storytelling to capture a rage driven overflow of emotion without sounding kind of funny. We are prone to melodrama, speaking poetry aloud, bemoaning our fate, and cursing the heavens. We imagine these same traits in vampires because we recognize vampires came from us. Let’s face it, it’s funny – especially out of context, and it is cheesy. Even more so with an accent, see Van Helsing’s Dracula. Here we see Dracula almost as a caricature; a desperate polygamist husband seeking to appease his shrewish wives so they don’t bother him so much. The only powerful and mysterious card this Dracula is holding is more knowledge of Van Helsing than Van Helsing himself.

Speaking of rage driven overflow of emotion, how about some Interview with a Vampire and Queen of the Damned, though Interview… really does take the cake on bemoaning fate. Perhaps seeing the terrible monsters suffering is part of what allows us to think them sexy as well. I mean how cliche can a subplot get? 1.) girlfriend is afraid boyfriend is going to leave her 2.) girlfriend makes sure she gets pregnant so boyfriend will never leave her 3.) boyfriend stays for a while, but relationship gets more and more twisted. Only in this story, Lestat is the girlfriend, Loui the boyfriend. Get it? Queen… takes on a different cliche: I can save/change him romanticism. And after all that reminding the vampire monster that he was still attached to the gypsy violinist, who really changes at the end? Huh, Jesse?

Hissing and Sleazy

Vampires give us a whole spectrum of cheese, however, they are undead after all. Why shouldn’t they act like undead and slink around covered in cemetery fertilizer wearing their monster faces? Or haunt back-alleys and shadows, building their own criminal underworld? Vampires like Santanico Pandemonium, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Deacon Frost, Blade, are less sexy than they are porny and they’re the ones that are nice to look at – the velvita and canned cheese spray. As are Dracula’s ubiquitous mistresses in Dracula 2000, Kit from The Forsaken, and everyone in Vampire Circus.

Not so nice to look at, and a little stomach turning the closer they get to your mouth are your limburger, and royal blue Stilton vampires from Salem’s lot, John Carpenter’s Vampires, Blade II, and Nosferatu. These cheeses have been aging so long that they’ve lost their sexy. Oh they can try and dress it up a little, put on a nice parchment paper wrapping, but in the end they have a bouquet reminiscent of horse apples. Lest we forget Razor Charlie and Sex Machine in From Dusk Till Dawn. I must at least give props to Nosferatu for predating the all too common vampire phenomena of sexy blood play. Count Orlok was a scary walking corpse monster dude; he just got a little old. Jittering, skipping old black and white movies require a different type of suspension of disbelief than do any of our modern celluloid fair, and for most of us violence desensitized folk, are just not that scary anymore.

Sexy and Full-bodied

On balmy summer evenings when the thick warm air is filled with the tang of fresh cut grass, the breeze moves just enough to keep the bugs away but not enough to dispel the hazy blanket of moisture around every streetlight, you might be looking for something equally as sensual in your vampire movie. You are drinking heavy sweet wines and munching on brie, Gouda, and goat cheese. You are watching Vampyros Lesbos, The Hunger, Vampyres or Daughters of Darkness, movies that capture the elusive mystery of dark creatures and replace our natural fear of death with an unhealthy and obsessive fascination.

I might be tempted to say that this class of vampire movie is lacking in cheese, but then I’ve already mentioned the ridiculousness of sex and vampires. It makes them human, makes them understandable, brings them down to our level (or up to it). As beings who prey ruthlessly on humans, a vampire’s sexual allure is more akin to the rotting smell given off by a carnivorous plant in order to attract a victim with the promise of food.

Amid this group of cinema are also tales of temptation and darkness that conjure up fantasies of youth. While I wouldn’t say that the child protagonists in stories like The Moth Diaries and Let the Right One In are sexy, they have in them the nebulous and trembling odor of danger that suffocates us in youth and later gets smothered by puberty. Lost Boys starts this way as well, though carries with it a smattering of other flavors as the story unfolds.

A Battle in the Mouth

But sometimes you want some salsa in your cheese dip; you want jalepeno cheddar and pepper jack to dip your crackers in. Sometimes you want the vampire action movie. Movies like Underworld I, II, and III, as well as Blade I and all, take with them a little bit of the vampire cheese while reaching for some action cheese to mix it with. In the action movie, the vampire mystique is paused on like love scenes in between improbable leaps of physics and loud noises.

Vampires are perfect for action movies because they’re invulnerable and superhuman. Where other movies have vampires lurking in the dark, brimming with power but only ever wielding it in the pre-dinner struggle, vampire action movies turn the ever living bodies into catalysts for stone pulverizing, ceiling running acrobatics.

Mild and Romanticized

And finally, when the week is over and you are lounging on Sunday afternoon watching Golden Girls and pondering what you aren’t too lazy to make for lunch, you might have a cheese sandwich with American, provolone, mozzarella, and Swiss. You might watch the happy, unchallenging, teen movie variations on vampirism like Once Bitten, Love at first bite, and My best friends a Vampire. Vampires in these movies are only scary at all because of how the characters react to them. They never seem really dead and, as in My best friends a Vampire, aren’t necessarily dead at all. Here vampires are simply misunderstood and mistreated outcasts of society. They don’t even hunt! They buy at blood at the butcher, instead. They are the vegans of vampirism; for them, it is just another way to diet.

Among these teen movies you may end up with stories like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which hardly depicts vampires as the new worrying parental problem, but has a little bit too much bubble-gum to make them a threat.

I was recently thinking about the human tendency to put things in their power place, to make situations and relationships about dominance. You can see it everywhere. Perhaps the vampire myth exploded from a need to feel as though there is a predator out there for us. It’s almost as if we find it unbalancing being at the top of the food chain. We are uncomfortable in our place when we have only an anchor on one end.

But being the creator, we just couldn’t get beyond building a little of ourselves into the vampire. This is what makes them cheesy. We have imbued them with our own faults and shortcomings; we have given them an Achilles’ heel. We have basically undermined their ability to be really terrifying. If their dangerousness were genetalia, we have castrated them. They are geldings because even while we wanted to feel that something had power over us, we needed to build in a fail-safe so that we could still retain power. We are the cheese.

Hainted Memories

haintedmemories

I think my first “horror” memory is of my mom letting me stay up very late one night, (it had to be at least 9:00!) and watching Star Trek with me. It was “The Enemy Within” episode where the transporter malfunctions and it splits Kirk in two. One, his weaker indecisive self and the other assertive and aggressive. Now, this wasn’t horror per se, but the “evil” Kirk running around, sweaty, concealing a scar on his face, having his way with mini skirted cuties and trying to take over the ship was terrifying to this five year old. Thanks Mom! Knowing I was up too late, my pulse quickening when Evil Kirk was on screen, wondering when Spock would surely figure it out, when Scotty would fix the transporter and beam up the freezing away party that was stranded on the planet below, this, friends, was unexplored territory!

Now as I said, this wasn’t exactly horror. But then again sometimes things that are laughable as an adult just don’t seem right to children. When Christopher Lloyd is revealed as a helium voiced cartoon in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? , I was horrified. When in Young Sherlock Holmes, the bad guys are revealed to all be bald, it totally freaked me out. I’m not sure at exactly what age it was that I went from being fine watching Bela Lugosi in his evening attire to screaming out in the night because ‘They’ were sure to get me through the television; just like they did that little girl in Poltergeist. Don’t even get me started about Poltergeist II. That creepy old preacher still to this day makes a few appearances yearly in my dreams.

I was Count Dracula for 4 years running at Halloween. This was inexpensive to achieve, some cheap white face paint, fangs, a little fake blood, and a black trash bag for a cape. One year Mom slicked my hair back with Vaseline. It was a good effect. Now to prospective parents of little Count Draculas, I cannot recommend this as I spent my Halloween night not gorging on Twix bars but in the bathtub trying to get Vaseline out of my hair. So Mom was no Tom Savini but we did discover hair gel the next year.

I loved ghost stories as a kid. I still do. Adults will tell little kids ghost stories while simultaneously not letting them watch horror films. My younger cousins will beg me to tell them ghost stories and I will regale them with ridiculous tales such as The Haunted Bakery and the Baguette of Blood or The Greenhouse that Screamed or Kindergarten of Doom, while they groan and roll their eyes. Recently in an evil mood, I told Austin, age 6, that Michael Myers grew up in his house and after murdering scores of teenagers he was put away in an insane asylum where he cooled his jets for 10 years only to break out and come back to his familial residence. I said that I drove by and saw him lurking about. Austin did not appreciate this; nor did his mother. My great-grandfather told me a story of where a “haint” chased a man over and over. The man would get ahead and sit down and the haint would catch up. After a few times the haint caught up with the man and sat down beside him. The haint said, “Mister, we sure have had a good run.” and the man replied, “Yes sir, and we are about to have another one!” I would beg him to tell me that story over and over.

I once knew a lady that had a few in her repertoire that always had a religious ending. They were usually centered on a young married couple that didn’t attend church and old Satan had possessed their cat. They always ended in someone rebuking the evil spirit in the name of the Lord. I always enjoyed these because she, in her endeavor to make the payoff more rewarding, did not skimp on the scary. These sort of morality tales have been told forever in one form or another. My dad’s ghost stories were always the best. He had a great setup, followed through with excellent details and he brought the spooky. Then he dashed your hopes with a perfectly scientific explanation like, “and the barometric pressure mixed with sunspot activity made the swamp gas look like a ghost coming through the woods!” My love of ghost stories, from anyone foolish enough to tell me they knew one, led directly into my love of horror from every quarter.

When my aunt and uncle first got married they lived with my grandparents for a while. One day I was over there watching “Tales from the Darkside” and my Aunt Vickie came home. It was the episode where a girl rents a room in a house and there is a little mysterious door in her room. While it was on a commercial break she said that she had seen that one and it was very scary. Then she chased me around the room and tickled me till I was exhausted. It came back on, she left the room, leaving me alone again and I was petrified. Turns out there was some sort of monster living within the walls or something but it was even scarier than it would’ve been because Vickie had hyped me up and then wore me out by tickling me within an inch of my life. It’s funny how these things stick in your mind years later. Some days I can’t tell you what I had for lunch, but me and Vickie in 1985, that’s crystal. That’s one of my favorite horror memories, one of the better episodes of “Tales from the Darkside”, my aunt, and a defense destroying tickling. I ended up seeing that episode when I was in my late 20’s in a hotel room somewhere in the Carolinas. It has held up pretty well. Of course no one there was big enough to hold me down and tickle me, but you better believe I called Vickie when it was over.

My generation grew up in the golden era of horror on cable television. My Dad had stayed up late in the 60’s and early 70’s watching Universal Monsters, low budget horrors, sci-fi, Italian horror imports, and the like. My uncle loved the Creature Features. I did too, but I also had something else: I had USA. USA was where I experienced The Omen, Tourist Trap, Friday the 13th Parts 1 through 26, The Thing, Ghost Story, and many, many others. There may never have been a simpler time in my life than sitting in front of a TV tray with cookies and milk, terror unfolding on the tube before me. Some of this happened on Saturday afternoon, but the really scary stuff seemed to be reserved for Saturday night. Long after wrestling had gone off, the “my husband beat me and took my baby” TV movie was over, the 10 O’Clock News read, my grandmother would go to bed, and the real fun would begin. It is dark in here. What was that? Did I hear something? Can’t they see that Damien’s nanny is obviously as evil as the day is long? David Warner’s lost his head. Pity. Then it would be over and time to creep into bed for round 2 and whatever my mind could conjure up. Sometimes this was worse than the movies. In your dreams, there are no contracts to sort out and no rival film companies that have licensing conflicts to work out. So Frankenstein’s monster has no problem teaming up with Michael Myers. Jason and Freddy had no problem working together in their attempts to kill me while I ran out of the Overlook Hotel through wet concrete, thank you very much.

Tourist Trap. Now that was a stunner. It’s some sort of weird slasher/supernatural hybrid with mannequins. And perhaps there’s a dash of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a dollop of 80s slasher, and some telekinesis thrown in for good measure. Chuck Connors is supposed to be helpful. It is the kind of film that creates nightmares that have nothing to do with the plot. But you know, it planted the seed. It’s still eerie and well, just wrong.

My grandmother walked in on the climax of Sleepaway Camp. I didn’t know which paragraph to put that in. But it was awkward.

Which brings us to Friday the 13th Part 2. I remember seeing 2, 3, 4, and 5 on USA and 2 was the one that really grabbed my attention. First of all, I thought the pillowcase/potato sack Jason was/is way scarier. It had one eyehole. He was clumsy (one eyehole?), falling off chairs, jumping out and missing people, and he wasn’t 7 feet tall and practically invulnerable like he was later. I know the hockey mask is iconic, but there is something just backwoods hillbilly creepy about the pillowcase/ potato sack. The pre-credit sequence is the best of the whole series, Alice getting only a temporary reprieve. The kids aren’t unbearably obnoxious, Steve Miner’s direction is good, and there is 100% less Kevin Bacon. And I still shiver a bit when Jason rises out of the bed with the axe. But let’s get down to a big reason why 12 year old and 30 year old Brad prefer 2 to the rest of them. Amy Steel. What a cutie. And the best Final Girl of the series in my humble opinion. I wish she had made more movies (I love April Fool’s Day too). So Amy if you read this, I married a lovely young lady whom I love dearly. You missed your chance. But seriously, call me.

I think that I first saw The Fog on USA as well. By the time this is done, you will think that I’m a John Carpenter shill. I once met a video store clerk that said he was down on John Carpenter because everyone in Bowling Green is stuck on the end of his jock. Where are these people? Because I certainly haven’t run into them. Anyway, The Fog was terrifying for many reasons. The Fog could roll right into the room under the door. There was no getting away from it. And the cast, oh what an all-star cast! Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Janet Leigh, Nancy Loomis, John Houseman, Hal Holbrook, and the ever sexily voiced and (let’s be honest) bodied Adrienne Barbeau. Mood and atmosphere. Pun intended. Has anyone made three horror films in a row better than Halloween, The Fog, and The Thing? I don’t think so. The Fog reminds me of my childhood in a way outside of just remembering seeing it that I find hard to put into words. A much simpler time in my life for sure and a film that I would be willing to bet no one was counting on John Carpenter to make after the super successful Halloween. At heart, it is a simple revenge story, one that was in the E.C. Comics tradition, but it is spooky and (like quite a few of Carpenter’s early films) very classy. I watched it a few weeks ago and I could watch it again right now. I haven’t seen the remake if anyone is wondering, but I hope John got a ton of cash.

In 1988, if you had asked me what the scariest film ever made was , I would be quick to reply Witchboard. Not that I had even seen it all as someone was keen enough to notice that it was obviously scaring me and it was past my bedtime. My father is a Baptist preacher and I was already very aware of The Devil and had been warned away from Ouija Boards. I was sent to bed a little bit after the party scene, and in hindsight it might have better to let me watch the rest of it so I could have seen it all resolved. As it was, my mind conjured plenty of gruesome outcomes for the young lady who was foolish enough to play around with the board. Who was on the other side? I was savvy enough, even at the age of 9, to understand it wasn’t Casper the Friendly Ghost or it wouldn’t have been a movie. About a year or so later I saw the rest of it, and maybe I was better off not seeing the rest of it. But I was justified in my conclusions, because Casper was definitely NOT an axe murderer. And the psychic lady was thrown out of a window and impaled, so I learned another valuable lesson: Don’t try to help people who fool around with the occult. They won’t listen and will probably get you killed.

I, like many of my generation, was on somewhat shaky but still friendly-ish terms with clowns until Stephen King’s It. I mean if I saw a clown in the supermarket I’d give it a close look but it still got a sociable head nod or a polite wave. After Pennywise, uh-uh, no way. I swear I saw him on the toilet in the bathroom when I was a kid. And that is not fair, because you are definitely supposed to be safe in there. I wonder if Tim Curry has nightmares about himself. I kind of hope he does. We all float down here Timmy. We all float.

I was probably 12 or 13 when I first remember seeing Halloween. I’m from the Bowling Green, Kentucky area and picked up on some of the references. Later when I saw Psycho, I got some of those references too. But something clicked when I saw it. Most horror fans have an all time favorite. Halloween is usually considered a classic. Matthew’s is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carl’s is The Night of the Living Dead, I believe Richard’s is Phenomena, (if you don’t believe Phenomena is one of the classics, why are you on this site?). Mine is Halloween. This, my friends, is genius. I could go on and on about the killer’s point of view, the almost total absence of blood and gore, great pacing and suspense, and heady themes such as evil never dies; but can I add anything that 30 plus years of fandom and critical analysis hasn’t? Probably not but it is my favorite film of all time and it is one of those things that are rare in the film world. Perfect. And without this film we wouldn’t have Friday the 13th and the other countless slashers that came after it. Sidenote: My Uncle Tim met John Carpenter and Adrienne Barbeau in the 80’s. I doubt 4 year old Brad would’ve known what all the fuss was about.

Here is something else I bet I share with a few of you: Horror film fragments. I remember one where there was a room that it was clear that it was to be avoided. Some idiot ended up in there and he was hypnotized or something and ended up walking around and around in circles, staring up at a naked lightbulb with his hand outstretched to the ceiling. That’s it. That’s all I remember. I’m not even sure that that is 100% correct. I actually found the name of one of these horror film fragments a while ago. All I remembered was the ending which effectively ruined it but someone on an Amazon thread knew exactly what film I was talking about. For over twenty years I had carried around the ending of a film that I saw on a Saturday afternoon at my grandmother’s. It was called Nightmare and it starred David Hemmings. Imagine that, David Hemmings, also the star of my second favorite film Deep Red. I bought it and put to rest a mystery from my childhood. The internet can be a wonderful thing.

When I was 15, my friends and I scraped together 5 bucks and went down to Video Corner to rent 5 movies for 5 days for 5 dollars. First of all, it is hard to believe how difficult it was to find 5 dollars among the 5 or 6 of us. Second, though we didn’t know it, we were in the last days of the VHS tape, and of little Mom and Pop stores like Video Corner. I always thought VHS packaging had more charm than its DVD counterpart, the big clamshell cases with the sometimes cheesy covers. It is here I saw Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, Faces of Death, Night of the Demons and April Fool’s Day. It was a much simpler time, all of us spending the night at Bill’s house watching movies till early in the morning. There was no over thinking horror films at that point. Everything was judged on the basis of whether it was good or bad. We had very few real cares.

Carl and I met in 1994. He was a senior and I was a freshman. The day we met he said, “Hey, why don’t I spend the night at your house tonight?” We were fast friends. Carl asked if I had seen Prince of Darkness. I said no, I hadn’t even heard of it. He rubbed his hands together and said I was in for a treat. If I hadn’t already been a John Carpenter fan, I would’ve been right then. A low budget film that Carpenter undertook when Big Trouble In Little China flopped, Prince of Darkness is a Carpenter classic that is filled with his trademark pacing and sense of dread. I have read on the internet that some people find the idea of Satan as a liquid quite ridiculous when taken at face value and the film is a bit silly. I don’t want to know these people and Carl doesn’t either. Carl and I went years later to see The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen when it was released theatrically. When Regan spider-walks down the stairs we both squirmed. I had attempted to watch it when I was a kid, but I didn’t get past the stabbing herself in the crotch with a crucifix part. It was just too much to a twelve year old. I suppose it still is, I’m just more jaded now. I believe it is a classic horror film, but I also think it is just a tad overrated. And Richard, again, is right. The rip-offs are more fun. The Exorcist takes itself too seriously.

Carl was there when we went to see Event Horizon. We were both rather creeped. I don’t remember offhand if this came out before or after In The Mouth of Madness but Sam Neil was on a roll. So after we saw it we went to Waffle House and there was some crazy guy loitering outside. Carl and someone else that was with us (Bill?) had had some interaction with said crazy creepy guy before and were too freaked out by the film to even go in and brave talking to a lunatic so soon after Event Horizon. So the film had bled out into our world a little bit. I hope the guy didn’t rip his eyes out. This is what happens when you dick around in space.

My mother died when I was ten. It was sudden and I was there. She was playing the piano one night and she just fell over. A massive heart attack at 31, the age I am now. When I saw the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where she finds her mom Joyce dead on the couch, I cried. It is the closest approximation to death that I have ever seen on screen. The ambulance comes, they resuscitate her, the EMT’s congratulate Buffy on her quick thinking. You see Joyce sitting up in her hospital bed completely recovered, and then it cuts back to Buffy, sitting there with her still dead mother. I did that a lot. Daydream that she wasn’t dead. Then Buffy runs out the back door and she hears birds chirping and sounds of the world just going on, without Joyce, oblivious to Buffy’s pain. I had spent quite a bit of time following Buffy’s adventures, and I had grown very fond of the characters. I am not immune to or above that sort of thing. My tears came as a bit of a surprise to me. I am not an easy crier. Later when Anya just totally loses her composure, I cried again. I am for the most part a fan of Joss Whedon’s work. I’m not a “crazy” like some fans I have seen on the internet. But for this episode, I am especially grateful. They took something that had happened to a little boy several years before, put it on screen, and reduced a grown man to tears. I don’t have a lot of memories of my mom. Some I have shared in this piece. Time has a way of fading them as part of the healing process. You look for surrogate mothers and perhaps as crazy as it sounds (I know it is a TV show) Joyce was one in a way. Buffy carried on and so did I.

I grew up not caring much for zombies. I had seen Night of the Living Dead and a few pre-Romeros like White Zombie and the more traditional voodoo oriented films. But the genre had not really clicked with me. That is until Matthew threw in Dawn of the Dead late one night. Like many other classic films, there is unlikely to be anything I can add to the countless amount of words dedicated to it. But it was the first zombie film that I thought, “yeah, that WAS pretty good.” Matthew knew, and thankfully shared. I went on to enjoy many, many zombie films, domestic and well let’s face it- Italian. In there amongst my growing love for Return of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead, I first saw Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. I did not see what all the fuss was about at all. Zombie vs. shark? Stupid. And where are all the zombies? It took too long to get to them. I didn’t even finish it.

About two years later, Elizabeth and I were in our local F.Y.E. and I saw the Blue Underground version for sale. We had often talked about giving it a second chance as Fulci had quickly become a director we spoke of in hushed reverent tones around the apartment. Surely, we had missed something. We had of course, and it was like a completely different film. Fulci’s eye gag, the zombies, them taking over New York, it was great. I don’t know what was wrong with me but it just goes to show that a lot of the time it is a little hasty to judge a film after one (incomplete) viewing. Case in point: Elizabeth was looking for a Blu-ray to buy me for my birthday. She asked me what I thought about The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. I said that we didn’t think much about it when we saw it as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. She didn’t remember it at all and said it was too late anyway because she had already ordered it. I knew it would look great because Blue Underground does a great job on their Blu-rays. So it came and I wasn’t much excited. We finally got around to watching it and I was flabbergasted. Great setpieces and mood and the zombies were good too. What is wrong with me? It rivals Dawn of the Dead to me now and I probably would rank it above Dawn if it wasn’t for the fact that I have loved Dawn so much for so long. So now I am a card carrying member of The Zombie Squad. Drop by the house and we will watch The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. If you have time I’ll throw in Zeder. Good times.

Elizabeth didn’t like horror films. I thought there had to be something wrong with her. I am sure she has had the same thought about me many, many times since then. I asked her if she had ever seen Halloween. She hadn’t and I went on and on about how it was great and scary and my favorite film. She had never been over to my apartment, me being a guy and a slob and all. So I spent a day cleaning up and I went to buy a copy of Halloween (I know, I know, my favorite film and I didn’t even own a copy at the time.) Due to my total incompetence, I bought Halloween: 25 Years Of Terror, a documentary, thinking it was the film. It wasn’t but it is an entertaining film. So I went and found the actual movie and had her over. We had a great time. Elizabeth told me a while after that she went to the bathroom once during the film to calm her nerves. It wasn’t as bad as she thought and she has never looked back. Meanwhile there is still something wrong with me.

I had seen Suspiria when I was 21 or so when a couple of friends came up from Tennessee to visit. I don’t think I really absorbed the film the way I would later after another viewing. But one film I did take all the way in the first time was Deep Red. I had seen it at my local Hollywood Video (now sadly closed) but as Elizabeth had a lot to catch up on, we hadn’t got around to it. So one Friday night we rented it and Suspiria and watched them in succession. The opening just made me gasp. Why hadn’t I seen this before? I liked Suspiria but that had been before I had internet where I could have just Googled Dario Argento and see all his films listed. This was a Halloween-sized revelation. It’s not quite a slasher, more of a mystery, with fantastic set pieces and colors and Kensington Gore that looked exactly like it was supposed to. Each murder is foreshadowed and this really is more apparent with multiple viewings. In an age where you saw a film at the theater or nowhere, without the ability to rewind and go back, putting the killer in plain sight was genius, I’ve often wondered how many people have ruined it by going back and pausing it. The music is great and in some respects prefigures the Halloween theme, and there is even an attack with a knitting needle. Real or not I saw several parallels to Halloween. To me, Deep Red is Argento’s masterpiece. Suspiria is like Argento’s Psycho, it is a great film but is so well known that it transcends the genre and doesn’t really belong to Argento alone anymore.

After some internet research, I found Deep Red is part of a whole subgenre of horror: The giallo. My local F.Y.E. had the Blue Underground release of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Wow, this Argento fellow is brilliant. Another internet search led me to this very website and insightful, witty, intelligent, reviews of all kinds of giallos, among other films. Richard is right. If gialli strike your fancy, you are practically compelled to see every single one you can. Then came my birthday and copies of The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail and The Black Belly of the Tarantula. I was hooked.

When Elizabeth and I got married, we went honeymooned in Nashville. We bought a portable DVD player and went to the F.Y.E. downtown. It used to be a Tower Records and it always reminded me of a train station from the 40’s, with its two entrances and two levels. It’s just a beautiful old building, and I’m glad that F.Y.E. took it over when Tower went out. I bought a lot of important CDs and films there. But I digress. We took some, ok a lot, of our wedding cash and went on an Italian Horror shopping spree. Both Bava boxsets? Check. Stagefright? Uh huh. The House by the Cemetery, Seven Doors of Death (which we didn’t know was The Beyond), Don’t Torture a Duckling, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (we were Fulci heavy) the Death Walks at Midnight/ Death Walks on High Heels set, Mario Bava’s Shock (which has one of the best covers you’ll find on a horror DVD), The Bloodstained Shadow, Inferno, and Seven Bloodstained Orchids. And that was how we spent our honeymoon, in our hotel room, eating Italian takeout, watching Italian Horror on a tiny screen. It was brilliant.

Let me take a moment to discuss Lucio Fulci. The aforementioned Seven Doors of Death was the first Fulci film that I saw. I mentioned to Elizabeth that I thought that it was the same year as The Beyond (obviously) and that this Fulci must have been a busy character that year. So we put it in the DVD player in our honeymoon hotel room and were amazed. Richard has said that this is the definitive Italian Horror film and I wouldn’t presume to argue with that, but it is not my favorite of Fulci’s. That would soon be The House by the Cemetery. What a glorious mess of a film. I have often remarked that the Italians love to hold back certain things plotwise. This tendency in my opinion has been misconstrued by some spoonfed American horror fans as lazy or muddled filmmaking. I have found the Italians to be primarily concerned with the visual side of the medium. That being said there are parts of The House by the Cemetery that are left very satisfactorily unexplained. Why does everyone think that they have seen the husband before? What about the babysitter? She is obviously up to shenanigans. I have seen the film several times and I still can’t explain it. I prefer it that way. When a film makes you think months and months later, “What exactly was going on?” that is a film I enjoy. If you want to spend time on where the most annoyingly dubbed child actor in history ended up in the end, then be my guest. I have read somewhere someone suggested that Fulci didn’t have an ending and that is what he came up with. I reject that. I think the ending is one of the best in horror, period.

At this point, I had yet to see City Of The Living Dead. I ordered it from Amazon and patiently awaited its arrival. This to me is Fulci’s best film of his extremely fruitful 1977-82 period. It is almost like three or four separate films thrown in a blender and pureed into an unbelievable phantasmagoric nightmare. Priests that commit suicide in order to open the gates of Hell, psychics that are buried alive, town perverts that get their heads drilled through, zombies that can freakin’ teleport, girls that vomit up ALL their guts, tons of fog, atmosphere, and dread and an intrepid reporter that tries to make sense of it all along with the audience- masterpiece! In the end, City of the Living Dead is my favorite Fulci, but it could easily be The Beyond or The House by the Cemetery, Fulci was firing on all cylinders.

The Blair Witch Project was a big one. My friend Carl had heard about it and of it being purportedly a true story. This was still the early days of internet usage (at least for me). So we sat in rapt attention and stared at the twigs on the screen. This is the sort of grand pre-release hype that doesn’t happen anymore very often. Obviously, Paranormal Activity comes to mind. Would it be scary? What happened to those poor kids who were lost? Who/what was the Blair Witch? We had plenty of time to speculate and we were in full Blair Witch Mania by the time it came out. We saw it on the opening night. We actually bought tickets to some other film and snuck in anyway. I have to say it was worth the hype. I thought it was genius, not looking the horror straight in the eye. Stephen King said in Danse Macabre that sooner or later there has to be a payoff in a horror film and that you have to eventually show what is behind the door. For the most part I agree, but in this instance, I thought it was really effective. Later that night, we sat in a friend’s yard on the edge of the woods and listened to the sounds of the night. It was particularly memorable, twigs snapping, leaves rustling, crickets chirping, and all the little unexplained sounds. We went to see it again the next night and it was just as effective. In fact, I saw it again a week or so later. It’s funny to think that the only film I have seen 3 times in the theater was The Blair Witch Project, what with it completely saturating pop culture with the countless parodies. But I thought it could teach Hollywood a few lessons, especially as it came in a year that had The Haunting remake. That film was awful to the 100th degree. My friend Matthew and I went to see The Blair Witch Project 2: Book of Crap, knowing that it wouldn’t be any good and left the theater in slack jawed amazement at how it exceeded our wildest imaginations at being a total stinkeroo. I don’t remember it making any sense at all.

But maybe Hollywood did learn something, because I’ve got to tell you kids, I was pretty jazzed about Paranormal Activity when I read about it. A film that several folks said was “The Scariest Film Ever Made!” Now that is a lot to live up to. But they weren’t going to release it. There was a lot of me marching around making proclamations like: “Can you believe the nerve? They have what some are calling the scariest film ever made and they won’t release it? They are even talking about remaking it! You know they will just mess it up and we won’t even know how bad because we won’t be able to see the original. Ridiculous!” I think I read about it a year before it came out and I tried to spread the word. When the time came around I even demanded its release like the brilliant marketing campaign told me to. My wife Elizabeth and I were there the Saturday it opened, having bought our tickets online, expecting a crowd. It wasn’t really that full, mostly kids. Was it the scariest film ever made? No. But once again I found it to be very effectual. Everyone has heard unexplained sounds in their house. Everyone. Everyone has had things disappear in their house to later show up somewhere that you didn’t leave them. Maybe you moved them and forgot. Maybe your wife did. Or did she? In fact one of the best parts of the film to me was when a light went on in the backroom and was on for awhile before going off. What was in there? What was going on in there? That to me was scary because I conjured up all sorts of things in my mind. The fact that she stood there beside the bed and stared for hours was ubercreepy. And what did these things cost? The Haunting remake spent God knows what on CGI ghosts that wouldn’t scare anyone and here are some very simple things that cost next to nothing that were very effective. There is a similar scene in Session 9 where there is a figure standing in the darkness in a tunnel. Genius! It certainly sent shivers down my spine. And Session 9 is another great example of a lower budget film delivering when a major budget doesn’t.

Elizabeth and I haunted Hollywood Video. We were there all the time. It was close to the house so it was very easy to stop by on the way home. In fact it was the meeting place for our first date. We went the day we got married too, on the way home. She had not seen a lot of films that I thought she should’ve and of course I was indignant. So we were there a lot. It was here that I rented Suspiria, Deep Red, a slew of Friday The 13ths, countless foreign films, and smart comedies. We got to know some of the people that worked there and we got discounts from time to time. I recommended Michele Soavi’s The Church, his Cemetery Man. I begged people to rent Deep Red. I tried in vain to get people to rent The Orphanage and Pan’s Labyrinth even though Hollywood Video had to put up signs that said “This film is subtitled.” after complaints of folks saying, “I don’t want to read no movie.” (Their words, not mine.) So one afternoon I went and it was closed. Forever. It was very sad. It was sad because a place that held so many fond memories was gone. We had another Hollywood Video in town, but the people who ran it were jerks. I went over that afternoon and they made snarky comments about how 2 Hollywood Videos in town was 1 too many. They weren’t so snarky when it shut down 3 or 4 months later. They sold off the inventory and made statements about how they would have new releases after the New Year. I knew better but it wasn’t as sad by a long shot. First mom and pop’s, now corporations. I’ll own the Deep Red Super Hi Def Hi Fi 1080p Brain Implant when they roll that out and work out the kinks. But it won’t be quite as romantic to haunt some sort of download.

Matthew had told me about Session 9. He and I have been friends since our senior year of high school. We have had a lot of misadventures that will certainly not be recounted here. He played a huge part in my wife and I getting together, and for that I can never repay him. Matthew is a guy who I can call anytime and count on his help. And vice versa. He recently had a Brad-Austin moment when he showed a young nephew The Descent, with the permission of his father. There is a kid that will never go within 500 feet of a cave for the rest of his life. Matthew has excellent taste in horror films (and everything else) and I had filed away his raves about Session 9. One night at the video store, having exhausted possible rentals I saw a movie with a highbacked wheelchair on the cover. Session 9? That sounds familiar. So Elizabeth and I picked it up and off we went. David Caruso, huh? Now I haven’t seen Jade or any of the other films that he threw away a promising television career for, so I don’t harbor any of the bad will that he evokes in a lot of folks. This was another revelation of sorts. What a film! It has turned out to be seemingly everyone’s favorite “great horror film that you haven’t seen,” (although probably a lot of people have seen it now.) It is scary. Seriously creepy. In fact, the second time we watched it, I knew what was coming and it was still creepy. That kids, is a great horror film and my favorite of the decade. I remembered that Matthew had told me about it and man was he right: it heralded a very talented director in Brad Anderson. But to speak to people’s various tastes I lent it to my uncle Tim. He and my cousin Trevor watched it and they thought it was ok but kind of rather pedestrian. It does take different strokes to move the world after all.

Horror fans will sit through a horrible film hoping against hope for an interesting camera angle, a cool color gel, or a nice kill. Comedy fans don’t usually sit through a horribly unfunny film. We seem to have a high tolerance and high hopes. That being said I always try my best to like a film. We went to see the Friday The 13th remake on Valentine’s Day. It was a little better than I had expected. I always try to think of how critics in the 80’s, like Siskel and Ebert, hated, hated, hated, “dead teenager films.” Perhaps when I rail against some of the newer horror that I find stupid or a sort of letdown, there is a kid that thinks I am a curmudgeon. That being said I loved Rob Zombie’s Halloween and it’s sequel. I was the subject of quite a bit of vitriol for that last statement. How could the original Halloween be my favorite film ever and still like these remake abominations? We went to a Sunday matinee and my wife and I were blown away. Seriously. I thought the beginning to the middle was an excellent example of a modern day gritty grind house film. There is obviously something wrong with Michael, but he is also picked on and his mother’s boyfriend is abusive. Then Zombie switches gears and presents his vision of the original film. I even went back and watched it again with Matthew. Zombie was hired to present his take on Halloween and that is what he did, with Carpenter’s blessing and instruction to make it his own. Then the second one came out and the people who hated the first one went ravenously hysterical. He paid homage to the original second one at the beginning with the hospital scene and then again presented his own vision. People seemed shocked that Rob Zombie made a Rob Zombie film. If I had made a movie I would’ve put my wife in it. This does lead into an interesting question: Why are they remaking all these films anyway? Did we need a new Halloween? No, not really. Zombie could’ve made a film just as appealing to me that didn’t even have Michael Myers in it. But Hollywood is not interested apparently.

So what do you do after you run out of films that you know are good? After you have watched Evil Dead, Phantasm, Nightmare on Elm Street, and all the Fridays over and over. What about when you have seen The Hills Have Eyes, The Exorcist, and The Omen? You’ve watched all the Saw films in a row not because you love them but because it is nice to have a theme on a long Saturday. You have exhausted the classic slashers of 1978-1983 and have moved on to watch the Screams and the I Still and Will Always Know Forever What You Did Last Summers. When you know who the killer is in the first five minutes and that those two girls are really sisters, when you know that Old Man Jones killed his wife twenty years ago and he knows you know, when you have then blown through hundreds of films that were mediocre to ok, what do you do? You start looking for more and more obscure titles! I’m talking about the Lisa and the Devils, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgues, The Messiah of Evils, and The Let’s Scare Jessica to Deaths.

What is that on the rack there? Is that? Could it be? Yes sir, that is Let’s Scare Jessica to Death on DVD, right here in your little hometown for $9.99! This was exciting. I had read about this and I congratulated myself on my good luck. You see, this makes you part of a secret club. Like when you loved The Shins’ first album until everyone was playing it and your grandmother is wearing her Shins t-shirt. You have an experience that can be your own. People in the store that day buying Britney Spears and Jay-Z albums probably would have had no idea why I was so excited. I took it home and Elizabeth came over and at 11 or so I put it in. And it was great. Atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere. What a bizarre little film. I won’t ruin it for those who haven’t seen it, but Jessica is a treat. So you scour the internet to find the truly obscure films. You buy those Mill Creek multipacks that are a great investment, loaded with crappy transfers, muffled sound, and public domain films. This is where I first saw Silent Night, Bloody Night, an absolute stunner with its proto-slasher and giallo elements. The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave was in there. A Bell from Hell. Cut American versions of Tenebre and Phenomena. One of them even had an uncut version of Deep Red. And the TV movies! Don’t forget them! Moon of the Wolf and Snowbeast are excellent in their own way. I somehow doubt that made for TV films of the 90’s will be looked back upon as fondly without old standbys like Bo Svenson and Richard Jansen. Here you have gothic Italian horror with The Long Hair of Death, Hammer goodness with Count Dracula and His Vampire Brides ( The Satanic Rites of Dracula to you and me), Arch Hall Jr. and his villain for the ages in The Sadist, and let us not forget Manos: The Hands of Fate! I’ve seen it twice and I still haven’t recovered.

Now you are looking for even more obscure titles. I recently bought The Perfume of the Lady in Black after a little research and a thumbs up from Richard. An absolute dream in every way, the Italians can weave a web around my brain anytime. A little of Lisa and the Devil, a little Roman Polanski, and a whole lot of good old fashioned Italian thriller what on Earth is going on? If the economy hadn’t gone south I might have been able to pick this one up in a domestic release. But searching is part of the fun.

I had read about The House of the Devil on the good old internet. My curiosity piqued, I went and got it on Bluray the day it was released. I told my uncle about the premise and he said it sounded familiar. I said it couldn’t be as it had just came out that day, but he was sure he had seen it. Turns out he had watched it on video on demand. So we watched it that night. Hmm, it’s grainy like an 80’s film. Hey, there’s Dee Wallace! Freeze frame! This is going to be good. A slow burn (not shorthand for boring in my book) and that’s a bit of what we used to call “character development”. By the time she is left alone in the house I was on the edge of my seat. Ti West has been paying attention. I was gobsmacked. The ending to me was exactly what was needed. How could my uncle have seen this and not told me? How did he not go on and on about it? (Turns out Tim is an adult and I am not actually.) I was warned of satanic cults when I was a child. I was also warned about not licking stickers I had gotten from strangers in case they had been laced with LSD. (It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that unless someone was very sadistic, they were not wasting their acid on little kids.) Anyway, I was totally crazy about it. I searched the internet to find out what other people thought. I checked Cinema Somnambulist one day and there it was: praise from Richard. I took this as my opportunity to contact him and tell him how much I loved Doomed Moviethon and Cinema Somnambulist, (it was long overdue) and his remarks about The House of the Devil had pushed me over the edge.

So a few summers ago we had a Moviethon of our own inspired by Richard. I showed Blood and Black Lace, Stagefright, Tenebre, and for the evening’s final film: Deep Red. Carl was the only person to stay into the next day and we watched Inferno. Sadly, I can’t say it was a success. No one enjoyed Blood and Black Lace. I’m not sure why, it is a brilliant film. I was building up to the grand finale, kind of like making a mix tape, raising and lowering the tension, building mood. Perhaps it was too much to gather up all my friends, some from another state, and try to have everyone settle down. I had had grand illusions of an ongoing event. A Hitchcock retrospective, an Orson Welles marathon, etc. Oh well. I guess Elizabeth and I have our own moviethons now. She doesn’t have as far to travel to bed.

Why do I love horror films? I have asked myself that question a few times. They certainly aren’t the only films that I watch. I love screwball comedies, the films of Peter Bogdanovich, French New Wave films, Hitchcock, the films of Wes Anderson, the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest, and Jacques Tati’s comic masterpieces to name but a very few. Horror films are very embedded in my childhood. I don’t get scared anymore, maybe creeped out from time to time, but I still remember the feeling. And I’m always looking for it.

This has been my best attempt to explain why I love horror and how it is has affected my life. I hope that I have gotten that across. Elizabeth said that I could perhaps write twice the amount and not truly convey my love for the genre. Well, I tried.

Thanks to Richard for asking me to write what I have only half jokingly called my horror manifesto. He is an awesome duder (his term, which I have whole heartedly adopted) and Doomed Moviethon is the best. Happy horror viewing, and have a Doomed Moviethon of your own!

Here is a list of films that I think you should see if you haven’t, in no particular order:

Night of the Demon
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue
Carnival of Souls
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death
The Val Lewton Horror Films of the 40’s especially Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man
Messiah of Evil
Silent Night, Bloody Night
Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter
Lisa and the Devil
Horror Rises from the Tomb
Zeder

Duder Ex Machina: Yes I’m a Horror Weanie

dudeexmachina

When Richard initially asked me to contribute to Doomed Moviethon I was honored; and yet I was so daunted that I dragged my feet on the article for over three years. First there was the question on which film to write about; so many films in my youth, teen years, and adulthood have represented horror to me that I didn’t think I could do any specific one justice. That led to how to present my entry. Should I be funny? Should I be serious? Will I need a thesaurus? All this pushed me backwards into the quandary of how to even get started. Well, I decided when all else fails just be yourself and tell about what you know and tell it in the way you’re most comfortable. So, here I am. Typos, bad English usage, and all.

Hi, I’m Nafa and I am a casual sentence-writer, full of inappropriate verbosity, and have been weaned on horror. Yes, I am a horror weanie.

Horror films for me began at a very early age. I can’t tell you exactly when or what the first horror film to capture my imagination was, but there’s a good chance it was one of the Universal Classic creatures and more than likely it was Bela Lugosi’s suave Dracula or Boris Karloff’s misunderstood Frankenstein’s monster. I can say this with almost utter certainty because both creatures were featured in Abbott and Costello films, and I was all the Abbott and Costello fan as a child (and though the Frankenstein monster was played by Glenn Strange in Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein, Karloff did appear in Abbott And Costello Meet The Killer). And a steady diet of films on my black and white television where Hammer horror films, big rubber Toho monsters, 1950s B-movies, and early cinema silent creeps continued to feed my imagination.

The local theater had special engagements on the weekends and during the summer that my mom would take me to (she gets credit for having a huge influence on my love of monster movies). In between the screenings of Gone With The Wind or Doctor Zhivago (both favorites that I saw on the big screen and both had some pretty horrific scenes), they would show pseudo-documentaries about the supernatural (much like the “In Search Of” series). The stories about life after death, the search for Bigfoot, the curse of the Hope Diamond, and stories like that were much scarier than what was on my little TV because these things were real. (Anything with an Orson Welles-like narration is gospel, right?) The smaller television budget for the films meant that their vision of Hell came across as cheaper and grittier, and ultimately scarier. The Devil wears plaid not Prada, duders.

However, the biggest influences on my young psyche at this point lay in the stills from my mother’s film books. Lovely large bound tomes of Hollywood greats intermixed with images from all manner of scary film, both famous and lost and everything in between. Not having seen most of the films in the books, my mind would wander as to what the creatures in these pages would sound like, smell like, and move like. The imagination is amazing. I still have these books. The image of 1920s The Golem ranks high on my on my list if frighteners, not so much for his menacing size and foreboding manner but also for the fact that he looked very similar to a bully from school. Though I’ve never seen the actual film, Lon Chaney in London After Midnight remains an iconic standard of one the scariest moments on celluloid.

Actually, as a child I was fascinated by all things Lon Chaney and the many roles he created. And the literary influence didn’t end there. Thanks in part to my Chaney fascination, in kindergarten I was given a book about monster movie make-up and how to make you look like the classic creatures. I read it cover to cover and tried to emulate looks with one of my mom’s eyeliner pencils, but to little success. A few years later (around 3rd grade) I started reading biographies on Vlad Tepes, the real Count Dracula, and decided that I liked the Lugosi one better.

My first real brush with contemporary horror was on the early morning drives to Los Angeles International Airport so my father could catch the red-eye to Florida. On the route to the airport from the interstate (and in the shadow of the Mattel toy company building) someone had put up on the walls a seemingly endless stream of posters for the film Maniac. At 2:00am, the sleepy mind of a 10-year-old can make a simple movie poster in the mists of downtown LA the indelible measuring stick by which all horror films will be judged… even without seeing the film.

Fast forward a few years to my early teens. My family had just moved to the other side of the country and in our new house we had a wonderful new invention: cable television. Though we subscribed to HBO, my friend Chris taught me that neat little trick about how to rig the cable box to get other free cable channels with just a folded reader-response card from a magazine. Oh the tricks suburban American kids learn. I often wonder how they networked this kind of information in the days before the internet. But I digress. HBO opened up a whole new world to me, the world of the slasher flick. And as many of you know, the early 1980s was a very fertile time for scary movies, and HBO was my conduit to this arena.

So many films passed through late night cable and fueled our adolescent fright-receptors. A favorite was always the Friday The 13th series, especially Part 2. That played for what seemed like an eternity and Chris and I must have watched it a dozen times. One night when we were having a sleepover at our friend James’ house we convinced him to watch the film with us. Now James was a good foot taller than Chris and probably 4 inches taller than I was. In the climactic scene where Jason comes through the window we had convinced (probably paid) James’ little sister to jump out behind the curtains and lunge at her brother. She did, James freaked out, and Chris and I had to go home early. (On a related note: I have a lot to say about the role of the moral, even holy, warrior figure in horror and how Jason is actually doing God’s work but that’s a treatise for another time).

I would be at fault if I didn’t mention some of my other favorite stand out films of this era: Rawhead Rex (the priest is amazing in this), Evilspeak (complete with Satanic and murderous swine), The Keep (World War II demons and all), Happy Birthday To Me (one that I fell in love with again in the age of rentals), and Motel Hell (again, 1981 was a good year for horror-pork). Oh, and props to Kari Michaelson and the tub scene from Saturday The 14th – r-r-r-rowr.

It was several years before my family got a VCR and by then the trend was truly in full swing. (I do recall our first rental: Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.) Our card got good use at the Carrollwood Video View though it was mostly used for comedies and the occasional Sci-Fi classic. One rental worth mentioning was The Emerald Jungle, which turned out to be Umberto Lenzi’s Eaten Alive repackaged and trying to cash in on The Emerald Forest (a vastly different film). Something this film did teach me was that I did not care for the realistic exploitation genre. Though I would eventually sit through the entire series of Faces Of Death and Inhumanities (much better than FOD), I never found any joy or entertainment in the faux reality genre, and even less in animal cruelty.

This experience, however, did not curb my enthusiasm for horror as I found out when we got a new video store membership to Video Movie World. In the days before the chain video rental monopoly Video Movie World was the movie watcher’s Shangri La, and the centerpiece of their empire was not the curtained off room in the back (which I wasn’t allowed to enter until I was 18), but the back wall that was filled with shelf after shelf full of horror films – a full 6 feet high and 30 feet long. I didn’t take advantage of this new boon straight away, though Cyd, Heather, and I would indulge in theme weekends and tear through such titles as Chopping Mall, Night Of The Creeps, Sleepaway Camp, and Phantom Of The Mall: Eric’s Revenge. The art on the video boxes triggered that part of me that had been disturbed by the Maniac posters in LA, and to this day I vividly remember some of the box-art better than the actual films (Night Of The Demons, American Gothic, Q).

It wasn’t until I met my friend Scott that we decided to tear our way through the back wall. It took the better part of a year but we conquered most of it. From the early 1980s HBO-fodder such as Graduation Day (I’d like to buy a disembowel, Vanna) to the classics like The Exorcist (which we watched clutching Bibles and pillows…seriously) and Fulci’s Gates Of Hell (City Of The Living Dead – an almost untouchable film) to the films of the time like the Hellraiser series. In fact, it was during a viewing of the first two Hellraiser films that Scott and my friendship nearly came to a sudden end.

In between the two films, Scott and our friend Christina went out for a cigarette. I, being mischievous and a jerk, placed one of my guitar chords weaved in a thin aluminum chain up in a ceiling tile above Scott’s chair. A piece of string was tied to the end of the chain and threaded behind and under his chair. They returned and a few minutes in to the next film I tugged the string to make the chain rattle faintly, piquing Scott’s sense of alarm but not setting it off. When the first terror strike happened in the film I pulled the string, the ceiling tile gave way and the pointed end of the guitar cable came straight for Scott. He jumped, screamed, ran outside, and wouldn’t come in for about 20 minutes. Christina and I were in tears – at that point it was the most amazing thing we’d ever seen. Scott forgave me and learned to trust me again eventually, silly boy. As a strange footnote, Scott had that same reaction when I took him to see The Crying Game. Again… seriously.

Around this time as well, one of the clerks from the Alternative Record store (a very influential and important Tampa music store in the 1990s) had a horror film review show on the local public access channel. The show, Danse Macabre, was the only touchstone that most of us had to discovering independent films besides sending in a money order and the coupon from the back of Fangoria. On weekend afternoons and nights the show would replay highlights from obscure gems like Truth Or Dare (though honestly Madonna’s is more frightening to my soul) to classics like Zombi 2. Occasionally they would have an in-store viewing party. I have a vague recollection of there being an in-store show by the notorious GG Allin around the same time, but they may have been two separate events. Though short-lived, Danse Macabre brought the finest moments of otherwise unavailable horror straight to your television for free and I am probably one of many locals who are indebted to its existence.

In the mid to later 1990s, after Danse Macabre went off the air and Video Movie World closed for good, there was a lengthy time with little new or interesting horror films. I was relegated to Blockbuster Video selections, and there are only so many times one can watch The Serpent And The Rainbow or Prince Of Darkness. Even watching my beloved Friday The 13th series over and over grew tiring. Then, thanks to Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Dreams and an under-rented Blockbuster copy of Kwaidan, the door to the world of Asian horror was kicked open wide for me. All at once beautiful, grotesque, and frightening, it was just what I was looking for. I sought out all the Japanese, Korean, and HK films I could find and was in heaven. At first there was a small amount of difficulty locating titles, but thankfully it was close to a time when Asian horror was about to break into the mainstream which meant there would no more hit or miss about releases and no more paying $25 for a 5th gen VHS copy without subtitles (though there’s something quite charming about those bootlegs). It’s come a long way to the point where now I can go to Wal-Mart at 12:30am and pick up a car battery, orange juice, and a copy of A Tale Of Two Sisters.

And that pretty much brings us up to date. Hollywood is doing a good job of keeping up with the horror trend so there’s no dearth of tantalizing offerings. I’ve become a fan of Rob Zombie’s homage to retro classics and some of the recent remakes aren’t too shabby. It’s good to see that names like Romero, Miike, Argento, and Craven can garner a dedicated fan base, and people dedicated enough to make entertaining films for the sheer love of it (Freaky Farley, I’m looking in your direction). And thanks to Richard and his infectious love for good horror, bad horror, and intercoursingly amazing horror. I’m lucky enough to have a window seat as he pilots this vanguard known as Doomed Moviethon into the wild sangre yonder. Hooray for horror!

Satan’s Dish: The Purple and Red Horror of Horror Rises from the Tomb

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[This article contains a few spoilers.]

“You two will serve us during the day. And once the seven moons have gone by
and the rite is carried out, you will be our master Satan’s dish.”

Whenever life gets me down and I need to escape from reality, I turn to the king of Spanish horror, Jacinto Molina, better known to the world as Paul Naschy. This former weight lifter turned actor, writer, and director was one of the horror genre’s legendary figures. Best known for his always energetic portrayal of Waldemar Daninsky, a man suffering quite profoundly under the curse of the werewolf, Naschy first caught my attention when I picked up a copy of Werewolf Shadow from a sale bin somewhere. By then the hooks were in and I had to find more of his films. Little did I know how insanely prolific this barrel-chested badass was in horror filmdom.

Of Paul Naschy’s many, many horror outings, I always come back to Horror Rises from the Tomb. In it, he plays Alaric de Marnac, an evil cannibalistic nobleman (not a werewolf) put to death for his devotion to black magic. Alaric is not alone in his crimes and his mistress Mabille De Lancre (Helga Line) is executed along with him. Before they meet their fates, Alaric and his witchy woman curse Alaric’s brother (also played by Paul Naschy) and Andre Roland (Victor Alcazar) promising that their ancestors will suffer for their betrayal. Over 500 years later, Hugo de Marnac (Naschy again) and his friend Maurice Roland (Alcazar again) awaken the spirit of Alaric de Marnac in a seance. Woops. Andre and Hugo’s chicks get spooked so they all decide to visit the de Marnac ancestral home to prove that there are absolutely no supernatural things at work. Double woops.

Aside from nearly getting killed by some bandits and getting to witness some vicious backwoods justice firsthand, Hugo and company arrive safely at their destination. With the help of some suspicious villagers, Hugo begins digging up the land looking for some treasure but the knuckleheads find the still living and very fresh severed head of Alaric de Marnic which possesses anyone who meets its gaze. Meanwhile, Hugo rekindles his love for Elvira (Emma Cohen) and the two hook up while everyone is either dropping dead or vanishing around them.

Maurice becomes Alaric’s (non-love) slave and helps him return his severed head to his body and resurrect Mabille De Lancre. These two delightfully evil beings go right to work, ripping out the hearts of hapless villagers for sustenance. Hugo is shotgunned to death by Maurice but before he can do her in too, Elvira breaks the spell on the poor schmuck with a magical talisman. Now it is up to the survivors to bring Alaric and Mabille’s bloody rampage to an end. Maurice and Elvira steel themselves for a fight to the death (or undeath) against creatures with some pretty nifty magic powers like turning their victims into zombies and disappearing and reappearing at will. I wish you luck, you poor bastards.

The moment composer Carmelo A. Bernaola’s insane organ music comes screaming out of your TV’s speakers, you will know it is on. And by ‘it’, I mean ‘ass-kicking horror’. With its rampant nudity, gore, and straight-faced goofiness, Horror Rises from the Tomb is total immersion into the world of Eurohorror. I wish I could erase my memory of this one just so that I could rediscover it over and over again. While Paul Naschy can carry a film on his own, the scrumptious German cult movie queen Helga Line (The Vampires’ Night Orgy) is on hand to make sure that all the dudes in the audience are paying attention. And while there are several sexay womens populating this film, Helga’s only real competition comes from Emma Cohen. Don’t let that stage name fool you, Cohen comes from Spain and will lay you to waste with her enchanting good looks.

Even though director Carlos Aured’s film is 19 varieties of cheesy, it has one of my top 5 favorite supremely awesome seance sequences. As soon as the medium (played by Elsa Zabala) goes into her trance, the disembodied head of Alaric de Marnac materializes and begins to speak. Next thing you know a candelabra goes flying at Hugo’s head and it is freakin’ hilarious. There are other awkward moments, the best of which is when Maurice confronts Alaric with the disco talisman. These two grown men begin to jump from side to side as though they were in some obscure folk dance. Other moments of inexplicable goofiness happen and no one is winking at the camera. This is all delivered with the utmost seriousness and it is one of the many reasons why Horror Rises from the Tomb is a classic.

Once the evil starts in this purple and red nightmare of a film, it’s a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut that will fucking destroy the world one village at a time. In a couple of calm moments in the last half of the film, a sense of dread settles in and one wonders if the good guys might actually fail this time. I won’t say what happens but I promise that you will enjoy this film (unless you’re a complete dickhead!). Horror Rises from the Tomb is a macabre, chilling, and kinky flick. And yes, there will be many smoke machines and at least one (really impressive) zombie siege. Did I mention that Paul Naschy plays not one, not two, but three different characters in this one!? And that he wrote the screenplay?! Well, he does and he did. God bless you, Jacinto Molina.