BUTCHER KNIVES & BODY COUNTS, published by dark scribe press, is now available for purchase.

unlike most books on the subject, this is not a simple list of films with rehashed commentary or a straight-forward history — instead it’s a collection of essays from over 70 authors,covering more than 80 films, the sum of which is an incredibly in-depth study and analysis of the slasher genre. given the focus of this site, if you’re a visitor here, that probably means you fall squarely in the cross-hairs of the demographic for this book, so you should probably stop reading and go grab a copy at amazon now. go on, i’ll wait.

as you may remember me mentioning a while back, an essay i wrote about my own personal childhood experience with THE PROWLER was accepted into BUTCHER KNIVES & BODY COUNTS. while my name may not be enough to get you rushing out to the book store, some of the others might (Jack Ketchum, Adam Rockoff, Adam Green, Stacie Ponder, Anthony Timbone… and dozens of others).

editor Vince Liaguno also recently did a 3-part interview about the book for FANGORIA, a small portion of which i’ve excerpted below.

(full interview: part one, part two, and part three.)

Related posts:

1. Butcher Knives & Body Counts
2. Hammer Glamour
3. The Last Horror Film and Shuttle
4. Welcome

A Review of “Pop-UP Book of Death,” by Chad Helder (Rebel Satori Press, 2010)

Given the focus of this site, it should surprise no one that I love horror; however, I have a greater love that I don’t get to talk about as much here, and that love is poetry. The worlds of horror and poetry sometimes meet, as in the case of Edgar Allan Poe’s sublime verse, or the groundbreaking work of Baudelaire. But so-called “horror poetry” is often gimmicky. In fact, whenever I teach creative writing, I tell my students that they’re forbidden to write any genre literature until they’ve mastered the basics of their craft. For the beginning writer, it’s too easy to use the conventions of genre as a crutch. Chad Helder’s “Pop-Up Book of Death” makes enough references to zombies, disease, and dismemberment to satisfy any fan of the horror genre, but this is real poetry written by someone who knows his craft, and Helder uses the conventions of horror to do what good poems always do, whether or not they make reference to the horror genre. These artfully written poems offer fresh insight to the darker and more absurd aspects of the human condition.

The intriguingly short poem “The Void” appears early in the collection and sums up its tone and tenor. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Don’t allow children under the age of ten to stare at this page unsupervised.

And with this, I knew that Helder was up to something interesting. The idea here — and it is manifest everywhere in this collection — is that our language is not static, and lifeless: there are horrors, oddities, and monsters beneath even the most innocuous phrases and utterances. Take “The River,” for example. It’s a poem describing an imaginary pop-up book about a group of mourners standing on a riverbank:

A clever optical illusion:
the lines of the river trick the eye into seeing
relentless current, which
continues to flow in a blink
like the echo of a flashbulb.

So much is seething just beneath the surface, and we’re playfully invited to “Pull the tab” of this nightmarish pop-up book and let its hidden crocodile nip “the thumb of the reader with a sharp cardboard edge.” And in the next poem, entitled “Origins of Burial,” a “Neanderthal corpse rises from the page” to teach us the “miracle of decomposition.” These are intelligently unsettling poems that suggest our histories and our imaginations are dangerous terrains that can’t be bounded by the printed page.

Perhaps the darkest poem in the collection is playfully entitled “Birthday Cake.” It’s about a home invasion in which the intruder transforms into the narrator’s boyhood dog. However, to make matters worse, the dog “is old and sick.” When the narrator decides that the gun he planned to use for self defense must now be used in an act of mercy killing, he discovers that “the chamber is clogged with birthday cake.” I love the dark, surreal comedy of this poem. What could be safer and happier than memories of your childhood dog and birthday cake? But memories are unreliable and dangerous. They distort what was once real, and they can’t always be trusted.

Even love, our most sacred and foundational of human emotions, is contested terrain in this collection. “The Day We Met” is a love poem, and I find it strangely endearing, even if the narrator proclaims to his lover that on the day they met he “escaped the body bag” and “cut down all the nooses tied to the rafters in the garage.” This isn’t Hallmark greeting card stuff. And thankfully so. These poems insist that real love, like real childhood, is strange and transformative and scary, and not always innocent.

I enjoyed this book for many of the same reasons I enjoy a good horror film. I don’t watch a horror film just for cheap thrills and scares, but for the immersion into a strange world that blurs my vision, and challenges me to re-think the world around me a little when I exit the theater. This book does just that.

You can check out more of Chad Helder’s writing at his blog, Helder Horror (http://helderhorror.com/)

Related posts:

1. Three Poems That Are As Effed Up As Any Horror Film
2. Villanelle Review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part Two
3. Horror Community Highlights – April 23, 2010
4. Review of EYES OF A STRANGER (1981)
5. The Bloody-Disgusting Horror Blogger Awards

1. Literature: The Ninth Gate (1999)

Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman are terrific works of literature that I eventually learned to appreciate, but reading them in high school nearly made me catatonic. If it wasn’t written in comic form, I simply wasn’t that interested. I would have learned to appreciate literature much sooner had I seen Polanski’s The Ninth Gate in high school. For one, it’s a horror film that explores both the glamor and dark underbelly of the rare book business. It actually makes books, bookstores, and book dealers seem incredibly cool. It’s also a film that suggests presumably boring, old-fashioned pursuits such as research and reading can offer unique experiences (such as getting laid by a very sexy she-devil) and possibilities for achieving power that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

2. Philosophy: The Saw Franchise

In his introductory essay on existentialist philosophy, Sartre argues that “existence precedes essence” and therefore “man is responsible for what he is.” We are the product of our actions and decisions, and it is only through the sum of our actions and experiences that we can formulate our subjective sense of self. In other words, you aren’t really “you” until your actions define you as such. But the Saw franchise explores this with more nuance and clarity than I can offer here. Aside from his beef with the medical profession, Jigsaw is a philosopher who wants to prove that his subjects have a distorted and artificial sense of who they are because they have not acted according to their full human potential. Does Jigsaw really free Amanda Young to choose who she wants to be, or does he simply torture her into a distorted version of her true self? The franchise could also be used to explore Schopenhauer’s classic inquiries as to whether we are motivated by the forces of self-preservation or by an innate regard for others.

3. Shop Class: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

When I took shop in high school, we learned how to make ashtrays and birdfeeders from a textbook called something like “Modern Woodworking.” Nancy uses a far more interesting textbook called “Booby Traps & Improvised Anti-Personnel Devices” to lay traps all around her house to help in her fight against Krueger. In doing so, she demonstrates some impressive skills, such as carefully drilling a hole into a fragile light bulb, installing a bolt on her bedroom door, engineering a trigger mechanism for her sledgehammer trap, and making a tripwire. Her creations are, of course, far deadlier than birdfeeders, but probably more useful.

4. Driver’s Ed: Duel (1971)

Nothing in Steven Spielberg’s first feature-length film is as horrifying or bloody as Highways of Agony, the film I saw in my driver’s education class, but Duel is a taut study in psychological horror and an arguably better primer for any student wanting to learn the rules of the road. During the film, the road-weary David Mann must learn how to safely pass a wildly unpredictable motorist, how to handle a narrow, curvy road, what to do if your bumper gets stuck in a school bus, and how to maintain proper engine temperature while driving at a steep incline.

5. Art History: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Robert Wiene’s film is widely regarded as a foundational moment in the horror genre. It’s also a visually engaging introduction to the development of expressionism and surrealism. With its hand-painted sets that depict an exaggerated and askew world, it’s the perfect introduction to the expressionist idea that that external is a representation of internal psychological states. And with its emphasis on somnambulism and altered states, it’s also a good introduction to the surrealist aesthetic that our lives are far stranger, but also more interesting when we escape the confines of our rational, bourgeois trappings.

6. Biology: Rabid (1977)

When I took biology in high school, we dissected formaldehyde soaked frogs. While I still remember marveling at just how tiny a frog’s brain really is, I didn’t really learn anything that impacts my daily life or how I think about the human condition. David Cronenberg, on the other hand, has made a career out of making biologically-themed horror films that explore the fact that our existence is far more radically viral and prone to contamination than we’d like to think. In particular, his film Rabid would make a great introduction to viral biology and the logistics of immunology. And because the film stars Marilyn Chambers, it could also be used in health and sex-education classes.

Related posts:

1. Films That Defined My Childhood
2. Stuff I’ve Been Watching — The Power of Expectation Edition
3. Stuff I’ve Been Watching (Zombies and Demonic Real Estate Edition)
4. Stuff I’ve Been Watching (Human Centipedes and Boring Zombies Edition)
5. Stuff I’ve Been Watching (Saw VI Gets Smacked Down by a Ghost Edition)

given this extensive resume, had he chosen another profession other than ‘really, really incredibly complex death-trap designer,’ he surely would have succeeded. personally, after listening to his various recorded messages left for victims which are often delivered in beautiful and flowery prose, i think john “jigsaw” kramer may have missed his calling as… (wait for it)… a greeting card writer.

sure, maybe he would have made more money as an architect, locksmith or interior decorator… but i really think this is a profession where he could have really excelled. below are a few examples (using dialogue from the first film) of what it might have looked like, had he followed this career advice.

No related posts.

Films Covered:

• Thirteen Women (1932)
• Terror Aboard (1933)
• The Ninth Guest (1934)
• And Then There Were None (1945)
• Peeping Tom (1960)
• Psycho (1960)
• Blood and Black Lace (1964)
• Corruption (1967)
• The Fiend (1971)
• Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971)
• The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
• The Last House on the Left (1972)
• Theater of Blood (1973)
• Black Christmas (1974)
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
• Deep Red (1975)
• Schizo(1976)
• Assault! Jack the Ripper (1976)
• The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
• Suspiria (1977)
• Halloween (1978)
• Savage Weekend (1979)
• Inferno (1980)
• Mother’s Day (1980)
• Maniac (1980)
• Don’t Go in the House (1980)
• He Knows You’re Alone (1980)
• Prom Night (1980)
• Terror Train (1980)
• Motel Hell (1980)
• Friday the 13th (1980)
• Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981)
• Nightmare (1981)
• The Prowler (1981)
• Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
• The Burning (1981)
• The Funhouse (1981)
• Night School (1981)
• Hell Night (1981)
• Halloween II (1981)

• The Fan (1981)
• Visiting Hours (1982)
• Humongous (1982)
• Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
• Curtains (1983)
• Sleepaway Camp (1983)
• The House on Sorority Row (1983)
• Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1983)
• Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)
• The Hitcher (1986)
• April Fool’s Day (1986)
• Opera (1987)
• Blood Diner (1987)
• Stagefright (1987)
• Intruder (1989)
• Candyman (1992)
• Dr. Giggles (1992)
• The Untold Story (1993)
• Scream (1996)
• Urban Legend (1998)
• Psycho (1998)
• American Psycho (2000)
• Valentine (2001)
• Session 9 (2001)
• House of 1,000 Corpses (2003)
• Saw (2004)
• Hellbent (2004)
• Hostel (2005)
• Wolf Creek (2005)
• Hatchet (2006)
• Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
• Halloween (2007)
• Sweeney Todd (2007)
• Prom Night (2008)
• My Bloody Valentine 3-D (2009)
• The Hills Run Red (2009)

Contributors:

• Anthony Timpone
• Don D’Auria
• Harley Jane Kozak
• Kim Paffenroth
• Bryan Norton
• R.B. Payne
• Scott Bradley
• Nate Southard
• Michael Louis Calvillo
• Mark Onspaugh
• Jason Walters
• Lucien Soulban
• Martel Sardina
• R.B. Payne
• Shawn Rutledge
• John W. Morehead
• Steve Rasnic Tem
• Carl Hose
• Michael Hacker
• Jason V. Brock
• Michael Potts
• Tory Lowe
• Adam Nakama
• Stacie Ponder
• Jason S. Ridler
• J.C. Hay
• Dominic McDonagh
• Paul Milliken
• Jeff Allard
• Amanda Reyes
• John Michael
• Mike Petrucelli
• Ross Horsley
• Corey Lafferty
• John Chandler
• Camille Alexa
• S. Michael Wilson
• H. F. Gibbard

• Michael G. Cornelius
• Andrew J. Wilson
• Adam Rockoff
• Adam Green
• Jack Ketchum
• Lee Thomas
• Stephen Graham Jones
• John Skipp
• Cody Goodfellow
• Jeff Strand
• Gregory Lamberson
• Lisa Morton
• James Lowder
• Peter Tennant
• Gary McMahon
• John Llewellyn Probert
• Lynne Hansen
• Mike McCarty
• Garry Charles
• Paul Milliken
• JG Faherty
• Richard Dansky
• Connie Corcoran-Wilson
• Dustin La Valley
• CJ Lines
• Mike Bracken
• Lance Vaughan
• Jude Wright
• David L. Tamarin
• Nick Cato
• Amanda Bumgarner
• Stephen Bacon
• Joe Nazare
• Rachel Kendall
• Aliya Whiteley
• Johnny Kalangis
• Jesse Baget

Related posts:

1. Butcher Knives & Body Counts — Available Now
2. Horror Community Highlights – April 2, 2010
3. Impressions of a Black Christmas Virgin
4. Horror Community Highlights – August 21st, 2009
5. Biggest WTF? Sequels in Slasher Film History

Even though I have been a fan of Adrienne Rich, for many years, I’ll admit that I don’t know if this poem has a particular back-story to it. Nevertheless, it’s a harrowing poem whose depiction of anger transcends mere revenge into something far more radical than a simple act of bloodshed or physical violence. In this poem, the anger is thoroughly political, as well as personal—a razor sharp tool that transforms both victim and perpetrator into something raw and primal.

If this poem were a horror movie, you’d shelve the DVD between:
I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left

We all know that the dead can speak to us and influence us, if only in our memories or in the DNA we inherit from our parents. Often, this is a source of happiness and stability. But in this poem, a dead father literally crawls from his grave to speak to his daughter, and, in a far more horrific manner, makes it clear that his flesh is still very much alive in hers. It’s a powerful statement about the fact that we are inescapably made of flesh, and all the more noble or emotional impulses that might also define us are always secondary.

If this poem were a horror movie, you’d shelve the DVD between:
Dead Alive and Return of the Living Dead

This poem is an emotionally arresting and brutally honest account of Sylvia Plath’s own suicide attempts. But what makes it so intriguing and powerful is the way Plath artfully depicts the various transformations and personas that emerge from the experience. She seems possessed by supernatural forces that render her both victim and also an aggressor with an eerie sense of defiance. It’s as if each suicide attempt is a desperate and violent act to re-assert her independence from those who have hurt her, and from those who presume to understand her pain.

If this poem were a horror movie, you’d shelve the DVD between:
Suicide Club and Jennifer’s Body

Related posts:

1. iPhone Horror Film — DEAD iSLAND
2. Horror Community Highlights – April 23, 2010
3. Review: “Pop-Up Book of Death” by Chad Helder
4. Horror Film Quotes With The Word “Pants” Inserted: The Exorcist Edition
5. Horror Film Quotes With The Word “Pants” Inserted

• Illustrations for the Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe
  Golden Age Comic Book Stories
  Edmund Dulac’s illustrations complement Poe’s work, but they’re brilliant enough to also stand on their own.
• Zombie Holocaust (1980)
  Planet of Terror
  I’ll give a shout out to any website that rates movies according to these categories: Fear, Gore, Entertainment, Creepiness, and T&A Factor.
• Visceral Visionaries: The Cloisters
  The Vault of Horror
  B-Sol’s photos from his tour of a collection of medieval artwork proves why the phrase “going medieval” means really horrific things are about the happen.
• Horror Bloggers Reveal Their Weaknesses
  HorrorBlips.Com
  Read this to find out what scares even the most hardened horror bloggers.
• Paradise Profiles: Mental Kavity
  Paradise of Horror
  This is the first in what I hope is an ongoing series that profiles the online horror community.
• The Thing: Fully Sweded
  Kindertrauma
  They’re Norwegians, Mac.

email suggestions for next week’s community highlights to jon@evilontwolegs.com

Related posts:

1. Horror Community Highlights – October 2nd, 2009
2. Horror Community Highlights – October 16th, 2009
3. Horror Community Highlights – October 29, 2009
4. Horror Community Highlights – December 11, 2009
5. Horror Community Highlights – October 9, 2009

after a very complicated and technologically sophisticated random selection procedure (i.e., i put everyone’s name on a scrap of post-it note, placed them in a plastic bowl and had a co-worker pick one), we’ve decided on a winner for our hammer glamour book give-away!

in addition to running one of the most stylish and polished websites i’ve ever seen, micah from reeldistraction.com is also now the proud owner of the ladies of hammer horror book, hammer glamour! congrats, micah, and thank you to all that entered!

for those of you that are not micah, hammer glamour is now available to be purchased at amazon and, i’m fairly certain, other fine bookish-like-object retailers everywhere.

Related posts:

1. Hammer Glamour
2. His Name Was Jason Contest Winner

titan books was kind enough to send us a preview copy of their upcoming book hammer glamour. the book details a bit of the history of hammer studios before giving a comprehensive list of the starlets that made the films famous. each actress is given their own filmography and biography, complete with gorgeous photographs and images from their films. i’ve rarely been as impressed by the design of a published work as i am by this hardcover coffee table book.

the book can be pre-purchased through amazon or, even easier, you can win a copy from us for nothing but the cost of the time it takes to write an email! simply send an email to me at corey@evilontwolegs.com with something like “I WANT THAT BOOK” or “GIMME GIMME GIMME” as the subject line, and you’re automagically entered into the contest. or just leave a comment on this post (be sure to fill in your email). what could be easier?

win it or buy it, this is a ‘must-have’ for anyone with an interest in the hammer horror films, their history and their leading ladies. or even those just interested in vampire twins.

[contest ended... see the winner here!]

Related posts:

1. Hammer Glamour Winner
2. A Nightmare on Elm Street (remake) Blu-Ray/DVD Give-Away!
3. F13 Megapost – Jason Contest – Crystal Lake Webcam – New Logo
4. Halloween 2 Blu-Ray Giveaway
5. Slumber Party Massacre: The Poem

Related posts:

1. Bella and Jacob and the Magical Twilight Pizza Wrench
2. Buffy vs Twilight: Buffy meets Edward
3. The Best of Twilight Rifftrax
4. Vampire Showdown: Twilight vs Let the Right One In
5. Golden Turkey: Top Five Silliest Things About Twilight

My name is Russ Thorn. You probably know me as the driller killer from Slumber Party Massacre, but lesser known are my many, many works of poetic literature, including Taladro Bella, my collection of Petrarchan love sonnets. Petrarch liked to compare love with warfare and affliction, and he dedicated all of his sonnets to Laura, the object of his unrequited love. Petrarch knew that while noble, love isn’t for the faint of heart. My sonnets are dedicated to Trish, the beautiful slumber party hostess. It takes a lot of love to write something like this. You know you want it. You’ll love it. Yes…

Sonnet #929, by Russ Thorn (for Trish)

I thought of you, my dear, after today’s horoscope:
“Your power with the opposite sex will get you ahead.”
This is wonderful, because I love your pretty head.
So this is the day, the hour, the moment when my hope
in love will be found, as if seen through the scope
of a high-powered rifle. I see your friends asleep in bed.
But you’re the prettiest by far, so I choose you instead.
Now my heart, my darling, is racing, as if down a slope.
Think of me as your love burglar. I’ll enter your heart,
as if it were a low-rent apartment. With my steel-tipped quill
I’ll write my poems across your skull. It takes lots of skill
to love this well. Even while flowers are ripped apart
by clippers, they know they want it. Affection can sometimes kill.
Any man can make love to you, but only I can do it with a drill.

Related posts:

1. Villanelle Review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part Two
2. The Fashion & Aesthetics of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

It’s been a while since my last poetry review, so to kick start the series again, I’ve decided to review Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2. Of course, his original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a major milestone in horror history, but I’ve always been partial to the sequel. It’s really a dark comedy about the plight of small business, the decline of family values, and the violent clash of cultures in post-Vietnam America. The film is a garish, unrelenting mixture of the absurd and the grotesque, with bits of western allegory added in such characters as Stretch, the spunky and leggy damsel in distress, and Lefty, the bad-ass cowboy who’s hell-bent to rescue her and also find the savages that killed his niece and nephew years earlier. Plus, it features one of my all-time favorite psychos and Lefty’s perfect foil, Chop Top, the burnt-out hippie-Vietnam-vet with a metal plate in his head who loves music and murder with equal gusto.

What is a villanelle? Villanelles originated in France during the 1500s and originally meant “country song.” They were simple narratives about folk heroes and peasant life, in contrast to the more refined and ornamental verse being developed by the French aristocracy. Centuries later, English poets such as Oscar Wilde re-discovered the villanelle and transformed it into an elaborate and exotic form of poetry with complex, interwoven lines. Modern villanelles are 19 lines long and use an ABA rhyme pattern in which the first and third lines of the first stanza alternate as the third lines of the remaining stanzas until they culminate as a couplet in the final quatrain. This unwavering blend of the rural and the urbane, or the straight and the crooked, makes the perfect formula for a tribute to the hero and villain of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part Two.

Related posts:

1. The Fashion & Aesthetics of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
2. Stuff I’ve Been Watching (chainsaw edition)
3. Slumber Party Massacre: The Poem
4. Stuff I’ve Been Watching (Saw VI Gets Smacked Down by a Ghost Edition)
5. Welcome

dario argento’s the phantom of the opera (1998) looked to be tailor-made for my fiancée and i. the last few weeks i’ve been on an argento kick, but i’ve been watching them by myself since she’s not the biggest fan of horror films to begin with — let alone surreal, incoherent italian ones. she is, however, a huge fan of the phantom of the opera, whether it be the musical or a straight narrative version. so when she mentioned she’d added the argento version to her netflix queue, it seemed almost too perfect to be true — a giallo version of her favorite story; this was going to be great!

and, in a way… it was. but probably not for the reason argento intended. i doubt he hoped his audience would laugh through the whole thing and rewind scenes because they can’t actually believe what they saw is as ridiculous as what they thought they saw. i must admit, the experience of watching the film was largely entertaining — but the film itself is not. this is a bad, bad film and you should stay far, far away from it. argento fans will hate it. phantom fans will hate it. unless your name is asia argento, you will hate it. watching it would only leave you feeling puzzled and that you’d wasted a spot in your netflix queue… but luckily, you don’t need to watch it. i already have.

Netflix Description: Italian horror master Dario Argento puts his macabre stamp on Gaston Leroux’s story of a madman living inside an opera house. Though not physically disfigured this time around, the Phantom (Julian Sands) harbors internal scars, having been raised by telepathic rats in the opera house basement. The musically talented Phantom finds his muse — and object of obsession — in a talented, young singer named Christine (Asia Argento, Dario’s daughter).

if i’d read this description before watching this film, i doubt i’d have been as surprised when things took a turn for the craptastic. there are more than a few red flags contained in this short paragraph. ‘not physically disfigured’ is a pretty big one. what kind of opera phantom isn’t scarred? removing the physical disfigurement removes one of the big reasons for the phantom to need to live in secrecy under an opera house. this quickly moves the phantom from the ‘romantic, tragic hero’ category into the ‘homeless, weirdo stalker’ one.

the biggest red flag, though, is contained in two small words: telepathic rats.

really, dario? that’s the best you could come up with? the phantom was raised by a family of psychic vermin? the film opens with baby-phantom being sailed down the river, moses style. the oh-so-realistic-looking rats drag the baby off. we’re left with no real explanation of what happened between that moment and the phantom’s adult life, but i like to believe the rats stuck him in a johnny jump-up made of dirty rags and fed him nothing but gorgonzola for 35 years.

next we meet christine (asia argento) who, you know, can’t act. or sing. she can, however, show her nipples through her skanky french dress in her daddy’s big movie, so i suppose that will have to do. she does a lot of lip syncing to a real opera singer’s voice… although, to my untrained ears, even the dubbed voice often sounded like a dying cat. i can only imagine what the actual sound coming out of asia’s mouth sounded like on the set.

the phantom (julian sands in full rockstar-desperately-in-need-of-pert-plus mode) instantly falls in love with christine after seeing her dress and hearing her sing scales for 10 seconds. he soon becomes jealous of christine’s other suitor, a character whose name i can’t recall and am not going to bother to look up, but who looks a lot like prince.

soon after that, we get the film’s biggest “wtf!?!” moment. we catch a glimpse inside the phantom’s troubled mind and see two distinct images… the first is fairly predictable and completely solidifies the phantom as a character with pure motives — he imagines christine in an even skankier outfit apparently made out of a ball of tangled yarn (perhaps a rather dumb cat/rat metaphor?) coaxing him towards her. and then comes the shot we rewound quite a few times… we see that the phantom is imagining a bunch of people dressed in pink leotards trapped on a flaming mousetrap. not much else i can add to that visual, so i won’t try.

phantom of the opera gets far more predictable at that point as the phantom starts killing lots and lots of people in really unrealistic and gruesome ways, usually for little to no reason. the film also features a lot of nudity and has at least one really graphic sex scene where julian sands’ creepy buttocks get to do lots of thrusting against asia (a scene which becomes even creepier when you remember the film’s director is her father). there’s also a bizarre scene where the prince guy goes to an orgy and attacks a bowl of fruit with his cane for no discernible reason and another where a rat catcher is compelled to push his own hand down on the spikes of a rat trap (this is the only scene i recall where the rats demonstrated their telepathic skills).

when not looking at herself in the mirror, screeching or taking her clothes off, asia likes to wear hats with different dead animals glued to the front.

there’s also a surreal subplot involving the rat catcher and his midget assistant. they collect the tails of every rat they kill and keep them in formaldehyde. in an effort to boost the production of rodent-tail-filled jars, the rat catcher builds a tiny brass car very reminiscent of gene wilder’s wonkamobile (the one that went through the wonkawash). this car is outfitted with vacuum hoses and spinning blades and seats two comfortably. in the rat catcher’s defense, when they try the car out, it seems to work remarkably well… although i’m not sure what kind of rats simply line up along a path and don’t scamper away when a huge, loud machine to come along and suck them up. all seems well in the rat catcher’s world until the car crashes, decapitating his already vertically challenged assistant by one of the aforementioned spinning blades.

i believe the film ends with the phantom being shot and/or drowned to death while christine escapes with prince. i can’t recall exactly because i was still in shock from a scene late in the film where christine discovers the phantom’s ‘family.’ she peeks into the phantom’s secret lair and sees him covered in rats. the phantom removes his shirt in a rather suggestive way, allowing the rats to crawl all over his chest. in one of the most merciful cuts in cinematic history, we cut to christine’s reaction just as julian starts unbuttoning his pants and a rat begins moving in that direction.

so, that’s it. one of the classic characters of horror reduced to a creepy, oily, long-haired stalker whose interests range from bad opera singing to bestiality.

terrific. way to go, italy. i hope you’re proud of yourself.

Related posts:

1. Play The Mist for Me
2. Seven Killer Songs

stephen king’s the mist hit dvd this week in a regular single disc and a two-disc collector’s edition. i would overwhelmingly recommend getting the latter as the second disc contains the entire film as frank darabont originally intended — in black and white.

i’ve seen the film both in color and black and white and i’d suggest watching the b/w version to both those new to the film and those that saw it in the theater. it’s a completely different experience without color. i personally never had a problem with the majority of the creature effects in the film, but those that did will find that the creatures are more convincing and altogether creepier in this version.

the color version of both dvds features a commentary from darabont that has largely changed my opinion on the controversial ending to the film. originally i liked the ending but had a few issues with it… now i’m almost completely in the “i love the ending” camp. he explains his rationale for it and reminds readers that there is a passage in the original book which points to this being the logical conclusion to the story. i won’t ruin the ending here, but feel free to spoil it in the comments section as i’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on it.

in any case… if you haven’t seen it, i’d suggest you pick it up or throw it in your netflix queue. if the latter, here’s a link to the 2nd disc with the black and white version on it. it doesn’t specify that it’s included there, but it is. unfortunately the commentary is only on the first disc… so commentary fans may want to queue both up.

Related posts:

1. The Mist
2. Let the Right One In Blu-ray With Commentary

Bob Denver, look out!
Three-Finger and Saw-Tooth live
in West Virginia.

Wrong Turn (2003)

In the first slasher,
Leigh dies first. Bates is in drag.
There’s no final girl.

Psycho (1960)

I prefer Jason’s
knife and mask, but the raft scene
is Savini’s best.

The Burning (1981)

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1. Jon’s Haiku Reviews
2. Butcher Knives & Body Counts
3. Review of The Burning (1981)
4. Corey on The Burning
5. Horror from the Mountain State

“the long walk” is my favorite stephen king story, but “the mist” is a close second. so i was prepped and ready to hate the film version when i went to see it this weekend. surprisingly, my preparation was in vain. king translates well to the screen only rarely, but i’m glad this is one of those times. the script is tight and remains focused where it should — as a study of fear and how easily society can break down. the monsters are largely effective, and a few are exactly what i had always imagined them to be. the acting was great (the character of ollie in particular).

there’s a lot of talk about the ending, which i won’t blatantly spoil here. my feelings on the film’s final moments are complicated, but here’s what i believe the theme of it is — at the end, a person walks into the mist to face the scariest thing imaginable. however, what comes for them is so much worse than anything they could have imagined. when i think of it like that, i appreciate it more… and despite king’s approval of the new ending, part of me still misses the ambiguous ending of the original story. if anyone else has seen it… what’d you think?

The Mist (2007)

Related posts:

1. Play The Mist for Me

10. “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917) by Wilfred Owen

…If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,– My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen was only twenty-four when he wrote his most famous poem, which he based on his first-hand experiences with chemical warfare during Word War I. As evident in the closing section of the poem above, his imagery is brilliant and still shocking. Special effect artists could do a lot worse than this poem as a manual for how to make a believable zombie. In fact, when I visualize this poem, I imagine George Romero’s zombie series, but there are plenty of other monsters in this poem, including devils, witches, and madmen.” All of it points to the ugly truth that war is the ultimate act of horror and produces hordes of the living dead even as it produces heroes. It’s no coincidence that some of the best practitioners in the horror genre have either experienced war firsthand (e.g., Tom Savini) or were significantly impacted by it during their formative years (e.g., George Romero). In fact, nearly every zombie movie I can think of has at least a tangential link between zombie-hood and the politics of our modern industrial military complex. If “Dulce et Decorum Est” weren’t horrifying enough without its graphic and relentless imagery, it’s worth noting that Owen died in battle just after he wrote it, and one year before the war ended.

9. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945) by Randall Jarrell

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

This little five-line poem is probably the most widely anthologized piece from this countdown. As with Owen, Jarrell writes from first-hand experience. He served in the air force during Word War II, and his poems also pulse with the same visceral and haunting imagery as Owen’s. Jarrell’s imagery is particularly monstrous in its combination of initial tenderness and then sudden inhumanity. The speaker begins in simple animal existence, then transforms into little more than a state apparatus, and then reverts back again to a more grotesque form of flesh and bone. The way the speaker is so bluntly and so thoroughly reduced to either raw flesh or indifferent machine is reminiscent of Cronenburg. Films such as The Fly illustrate that technology can provide some promise of transcendence, but never beyond the confines of the physical animal in us all. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” likewise depicts the grisly way in which technology, especially during war, becomes a perverse nightmare when it replaces our better, more humane natures. Jarrell survived the war, but was never the same. He had a brilliant career as a writer and teacher, but he suffered from lifelong depression and died under mysterious circumstances by apparently walking into oncoming traffic in Chapel Hill, NC.

8. “Jerusalem” (1804) by William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England’s pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold: Bring me my arrows of desire: Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire. I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land.

William Blake was better known in his own day for the brilliant artwork that accompanied his poetry. In fact, one can really think of Blake as being an early manifestation of the graphic novelist. His most famous illustration, “The Great Red Dragon,” was made even more famous by its use in Brett Ratner’s 2002 Red Dragon, the prequel to The Silence of the Lambs. Blake’s “Jerusalem” was written on the heels of the French Revolution and has been performed numerous times as an anti-fascist anthem by musicians such as Billy Bragg. Like Bragg, Blake was intimately involved in revolutionary politics, the energies of which he marshaled toward a bitter indictment of his own England. In “Jerusalem,” Blake offers a harrowing prophetic warning against what he takes to be England’s crass imperialism and brutal industrialization (the “dark satanic mills”), which have endangered the English spirit. His vision is equal parts righteous indignation, divine prophecy, and proto-Marxist politics. It’s not that far from the sort of nightmarish, dystopian vision that one finds in such films as City of Men and 28 Days Later in which a beleaguered human spirit must claw and fight its way against the horrors of tyranny and political oppression.

7. “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (1799) by William Wordsworth

A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

This short, eight line poem has been traditionally used by young literary critics to sharpen their analytical teeth. In that regard, it serves the same purpose that Hamlet does for budding actors. Wordsworth was a contemporary of Blake and one of the founders of the English Romantic movement. He is often thought of as being the kinder, gentler member of that particular group, which also includes Blake, Percy Shelley, and Samuel Coleridge. Wordsworth is famous for poems that explore the promise of transcendence amid lost innocence, although this poem is altogether different. Written after the heartbreaking death of his young daughter Lucy, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal” works, also like Hamlet, as a bitter gravestone epitaph and meditation on death. The “she” of the poem returns to “nature” after her death, but it offers no solace. Nature is instead a cold, indifferent force that renders us helpless as much in life as in death by turning us into mute, powerless apparitions. The entire poem has the eerie feel of a ghost story, as if to say that our dead are well beyond our reach, but they won’t quite leave us. They no longer move with us, but are instead moved as lifeless things and “rolled” by the earth’s indifferent course, along with the equally inanimate rocks, stones, and trees. A similar sense of utter futility and dread operates in such films as Ringu and Ju-on: The Grudge .

6. “The Second Coming” (1910) by William Butler Yeats

…Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Screenwriters invariably steal from the language of “Second Coming” any time they need a serial killer to sound both cryptic and scary. For instance, Chris Carter stole freely from this poem in writing his largely underrated show Millennium. This shouldn’t be surprising as Yeats, like Blake, was thoroughly steeped in apocalyptic fin-de-siecle prophesy. But he was also involved in the bitter political struggle for Irish independence. Yeats’s “Second Coming” imagines a world seemingly beyond redeeming. Politics have failed to save his Ireland, an aristocratic spirit has failed to lead the masses, and art has failed to inspire humanity, all of which leaves one last option. The loosely biblical “second coming” does not herald peace, love, and understanding, but a cosmic-scale ass kicking. This poem has the same other-worldy, esoteric menace that you’ll find in such films as Stuart Gordon’s Dagon, which also depicts a monster that slithers its way toward a final reckoning with human kind. Modern pundits have taken to using “The Second Coming” to talk about the concept of blowback – the idea that we reap what we sow, and that our current mess in Iraq is the result of historic problems with our foreign relations. That’s a smart way to think about the poem. But I like to think of Yeat’s “rough beast” as part Damian, part Cthulhu, and part Godzilla.

5. “Howl” (1955) by Allan Ginsberg

…What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war!…

Before Ginsberg became the grandfather guru of the 1960s counterculture revolution, he helped define the 1950s beat generation. In the midst of the 1950s culture of conformity and blissful suburban normalcy, Ginsberg offered this brilliant, rambling, blood curdling, prophetic, and brutally honest assessment of the freaks, psychotics, geniuses, poets, and artistic outsiders that operated within the fringes of American culture. Ginsberg is heavily indebted to Blake and presents a harrowing vision in part two of “Howl” in which American culture sacrifices its brightest and most creative minds to the industrial, materialist, soulless demon Molloch. Ginsberg takes the name “Moloch” from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, but I think the raw, animal, and sometimes aggressive energy of his poem with its mystic overtones is perhaps better embodied in such films as Wolfen and The Howling. Ginsberg’s poem is something that you don’t read softly and quietly. This poem wants you to listen to your inner beast and defiantly scream the poem aloud to the next full moon.

4. “The Flowers of Evil” (1857) by Charles Baudelaire

…If poison, arson, sex, narcotics, knives have not yet ruined us and stitched their quick, loud patterns on the canvas of our lives, it is because our souls are still too sick. Among the vermin, jackals, panthers, lice, gorillas and tarantulas that suck and snatch and scratch and defecate and fuck in the disorderly circus of our vice, there’s one more ugly and abortive birth. It makes no gestures, never beats its breast, yet it would murder for a moment’s rest, and willingly annihilate the earth. It is BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together. You know it well, my Reader. This obscene beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine– It is you, hypocrite reader, my double, my brother!

Romantic poets drew their energies from divine nature; Victorian poets drew their energies from the refinements of culture; Charles Baudelaire drew his energies from the urban gutter. Baudelaire’s profound influence on literature, art, and modern culture cannot be overstated. Every would-be rebel outsider-artist from Patti Smith to Jim Morrison to hordes of high-school goth kids are in his direct debt. His poems have the attitude of a defunct and reckless aristocrat who’s gone slumming for the night. As the twentieth century approached, Baudelaire argued that culture needed to at long last modernize. Victorian-era culture had produced thoroughly industrialized masses that were, in his assessment, too banal, too bourgeois, and too boring. If art were too matter again and show some real signs of life, then its subject matter needed to free itself from polite society and its language needed to free itself from stifling conventions. The filth, energy, and excitement of the modern world inspired Baudelaire to daringly draw upon the more obscene and infernal aspects of the urban landscapes around him as a new model for poetry. And, in an even more striking gesture, he dares his reader not to enjoy it. The introduction to Baudelaire’s opus, The Flowers of Evil, is called “To the Reader,” and in its conclusion, quoted above, the lurid and voyeuristic detachment that permeates Baudelaire’s work is suddenly and thrillingly cast upon the reader. Reading his work reminds us that poetry need not be the stuff of boring classrooms, but a fearless and shameless art that turns our most obscene vices into the guilty pleasures of spectacle. If you’ve ever caught yourself in your weaker and perhaps more honest moments enjoying such exploitation films as Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust or Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! then you just might have Baudelaire to thank for it.

3. “Daddy” (1963) by Sylvia Plath

…If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two– The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Written just before Plath committed suicide, “Daddy” belongs to the confessionalist school of poetry that dominated the 1960s with its interest in self-empowerment, self-expression, and self-liberation. While confessionalist poets sometimes border on so much narcissistic navel-gazing, Plath avoids mere solipsism by welding her fearless introspections with larger cultural myths. “Daddy” derives much its power from the fact that it’s Plath’s personal act of psychic exorcism from her oppressively patriarchal influences, but it’s presented in terms that are as familiar and public as they are horrifying. For instance, in the poem’s conclusion her complex relationship with her tyrannical father and equally problematic husband is rendered in terms of a classic vampire story. Both of them continue to haunt her and hold her in their sway, even after her father has died and after she’s left her husband. Film critics invariably point out that the venerable Count Dracula is traditionally presented as fiendish, aristocratic, overly-sexualized and dripping with masculinity. Vampires, in other words, attract even as they repulse, and Plath knows that these sort of complex, deep-seated psychic apparitions can only be exorcised with an old-fashioned, metaphoric stake through their heart.

2. “Pike” (1958) by Ted Hughes

Pike, three inches long, perfect Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold. Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin. They dance on the surface among the flies. Or move, stunned by their own grandeur, Over a bed of emerald, silhouette Of submarine delicacy and horror. A hundred feet long in their world. In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads- Gloom of their stillness: Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards. Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds…

Hughes is supposedly the “vampire who said he was you” in Plath’s poem “Daddy.” While it’s risky to extrapolate too much biographical information from works of literature, both Plath’s “Daddy” and Hughes’ own poem “Pike” attest to the fact that Hughes was no stranger to the more infernal aspects of human culture and psychology. After World War Two, British poetry evolved into two distinct camps. Poets such as Philip Larkin developed a stoic and empirically based poetry that attempted to avoid glamour, violence, and other excesses they associated with the spectacle of war. Poets such as Hughes and Plath, too their art in the opposite direction, used poetry to stare down the apocalyptic tendencies in the human condition and confront the roots of our aggression and violence. The pikes in Hughes’ poem are metaphors for the vestigal, brutish impulses found within the depths of British history and the human psychology. The fact that Hughes’ encounters them while fishing in a pond next to a monastery is a reminder that no matter what refinements or religions our culture may produce, there are monsters beneath its surface. What makes this poem so horrifying is that Hughes insistence that such monsters won’t stay submerged. His “Pike” is either a miniature version of Jaws, but with a more subtle and eerie menace, or a singular version of Piranha, but with far less parody and camp.

1. “Annabel Lee” (1849) by Edgar Allan Poe

…For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Poe is arguably one of the most recognizable and widely read American writers, yet, ironically, in his own day he was famous in France and largely ignored by the American public. This is perhaps due to the distaste for the macabre and the creepy in mainstream American culture, but also because the French recognized that beneath the stories of ravens and madmen, Poe’s best work was an avant-garde critique of middle-class, bougeiouse society and an example of the decadent, liberated symboliste literature practiced by such French poets as Baudelaire. Poe’s most interesting work, like that of the French symbolist tradition, is much more than a scary story or simple narrative. The language of “Annabel Lee” is elusive, evocative, and suggests far more than it denotates. The poem seems to provocatively shimmer somewhere between the angelic and the devilish, the sacred and the profane. Poe’s “Raven” was a strong contender for this spot in my countdown, but I think that “Annabel Lee” is more indicative of Poe’s conflicting impulses, which eventually defined the predominate literary aesthetic of his day. The strange mixture of sensuality and morbidity and the fact that the speaker doesn’t let a little thing like death prevent him from enjoying his beloved is reminiscent of Re-Animator and the thousands of Hollywood ghost films that trail behind Poe’s long shadow.

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“Draw to one point, and to one
centre bring Beast, man, or angel, servant, lord, or king.”
–Alexander Pope, from “An Essay on Man”

“It’s like death on a cracker!"
–Choptop, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic
subject in the world"
–Edgar Allan Poe, from “Essays on Composition”

When Edgar Allan Poe famously declared that nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman, he did not simply mean that poetry is voyeuristic or an act of sublime spectacle. He intended his statement to be a corrective on the crabbed, stuffy poetry being produced by the likes of such neo-classical poets as Alexander Pope. In particular, Poe disagreed with Pope’s argument that poetry should reflect the virtues of a “Golden Age” populated by iconic shepherds. In his “Essay on Criticism,” Pope explained that poets are “not to describe shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been when the best of men followed the employment.” He envisioned a utopian garden in which poetry could unite man and best, angel and devil. Lute-playing Shepherds in gardens of perpetual spring who sing and pitch woo in perfectly measured dactylic hexameter may be the stuff Poetry (that’s with a capital P), but not, Poe would later insist, the stuff of real poetry—an art form that strips language and meaning down to its unaccommodated and fundamental nature. For Poe, this fundamental nature is, to put it eloquently, the death of a beautiful woman; or more bluntly, it is sex and death. Poe helped orient poetry away from the pretentious fictions of a golden age and instead toward the truer, albeit darker heart of the human condition. He called for an art without pretense, an art that would not shy away from voyeurism, exploitation, spectacle, and the twin principles of attraction and repulsion that have been the foundation for all of our glorious as well as inglorious history. Sex and death, love and war. Poetry lays bare our most human of impulses.

Fifty years later, at the turn of the century, Thomas Edison would offer the same corrective for the newly invented medium of film. The first exhibited films on record, all from the late 19^th century, were little more than curious parlor tricks that would adorn store-front windows or serve as two-minute intermissions during vaudeville acts. They were patently genteel, tame, and boring. The 1888 film entitled Roundhay Garden Scene by Luis le Prince is credited as being the first actual “film” and features, as one might imagine, a garden scene in which the actors (if one can call them that) briefly walk across a richly decorated yard and laugh. Likewise, the films of the famous Lumiere brothers from the same period typically feature gardens, fountains and other scenes of bourgeoisie bliss. When not inventing light bulbs, Edison was the consummate salesman who understood that spectacle, as much as ingenuity, fuels the American economy. His first films, some of the earliest in America, gave consumers what they really wanted: sex and death. Consider the first titles he produced: Muscle Dancer (1894), Ella Lola, Turkish Dancer (1898) The Electrocution of an Elephant (1903), and Frankenstein (1910, directed by J. Searle Dawley). With his emphasis on voyeurism and spectacle, as well as other forms of visual attraction and repulsion, Edison helped transform film from a polite and gimmicky storefront distraction into a nascent form of American cinema that would eventually evolve into the modern day horror film, particularly those that appeal to the more primitive impulses of the spectacle. The history of American cinema is, in other words, a history of the slasher film.

For instance, consider the particularly strange, but ultimately canny, logic behind the sequence of his first films. Edison’s first two films (Muscle Dancer and Ella Lola, Turkish Dancer) are pure exploitation. Both are under one minute in length, but feature enough gyrating flesh to satisfy even the most insatiable voyeur.

Edison, I would argue, understood the innately exotic appeal of the moving picture. Not content to film pretty, but static English-style gardens, Edison instead offers an aesthetic that visually moves both its subject and its audience. And part of the appeal of Edison’s first films, aside from the gratuitous flesh, is precisely this invitation to shamelessly gape at what is at once familiar to us (the human body) as well as strange (belly-dancing and body-building were still exotic occurrences at the turn of the century). In other words, both of Edison’s first films mix the eroticism of old-fashioned sex appeal with a sense of the unfamiliar. Both the Muscle Dancer and Ella Lola are seductive, but also strange enough to be unsettling.

The same kind of binary impulse is at work (albeit more aggressively) in classic slasher films, as evident in the images below.

The first image (a poster for the 1983 film The House on Sorority Row) features a depiction of Kate McNeil in a pose that is both seductive and menacing. She is on display as both odalisque and sacrificial object. The second image (a poster for the 1987 Sorority House Massacre) depicts a voyeuristic killer (a staple of the slasher genre). The killer watches his victim as she undresses. We watch them both. As their posters suggest, both of these films invite us to gape, even if doing so is as ultimately deplorable as it is pleasurable. We are invited to share in the slasher’s guilty and unsettling act of voyeurism, becoming both his victim and his accomplice. This is the logic of the spectacle. They attract and satisfy even as they horrify us. For instance, film critics have routinely called attention to the fact that slasher villains—from Michael Myers to Freddy Krueger—often play the dual role of psychokiller and moral avenger. They kill off the least likable and most morally corrupt characters first and spare the virtuous “final girl,” who in turn defeats the slasher This is an ambivalence that moves the audience in several directions at once. And taken together, the images above underscore this mixture of attraction and repulsion that defines both the slasher and Edison’s early aesthetic of the spectacle.

Edison’s 1903, The Death of an Elephant, marks an advance in the early development of this aesthetic.

This disturbing film depicts the real-life execution of Topsy, a Coney Island elephant that turned dangerously, violently rogue. Edison filmed the event as an attempt to discredit Westinghouse and Tesla, his rivals in the commercial development of electricity. As a marketing ploy, Westinghouse and Tesla suggested the use of their patented Alternating Current system of electricity as a humane and practical mode for executing the elephant. Edison decided to film the event as an attempt to market his own Direct Current by dramatizing the dangers of AC. Edison’s film failed as advertising propaganda and AC became the standard. However, once released, The Electrocution of an Elephant became a sensation and helped popularize the still-new medium of film while generating considerable profit for the struggling Edison Manufacturing Company. The spectacle of the electrocution, it turns out, was actually good for both business and film.

Of course, the fact that such a film could generate so much revenue is startling, and perhaps shameful, even if it documents what was intended to be a humane solution to an unfortunate problem. But it also points to several incontrovertible facts: 1) people love spectacle and will pay to see it; 2) cinema, as Edison proved, is a natural medium for spectacle; and 3) we are fooling ourselves if we think that we, or the art of film, can (or perhaps even should) be beyond this. Sex and death, dance and disease – these are innately human impulses.

Edison’s recently recovered 1910 version of Frankenstein, which he used to revitalize his newly established film studio, is both an important monument in cinematic history, as well as a near-perfect synthesis of the impulses of attraction-repulsion that Edison sought to develop in the spectacles of his early films.

Of course, Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein established the iconic version of the monster with its bulging neck bolts and big shoes. But Edison’s version is not only truer to Mary Shelley’s concept of the creature, but also contains some of the roots for the horror genre’s more exploitative and subversive offspring. For instance, Whale’s version establishes the conventional fire-and-pitchfork ending of the classic monster movie. The creature is a fiend, an inhuman abomination who must be destroyed and who warrants only the thinnest amount of sympathy or attraction. Edison’s version, on the other hand, features a surprise ending in which it is implied that Victor Frankenstein and his creature are actually one and the same, or at least mirror images of each other. At the conclusion of Edison’s film, the creature gapes at its image in a mirror before vanishing, leaving only the mirror images. Victor enters the room and sees the creature’s after-image in the mirror before it transforms into his own. The implication is that when Victor (and by extension the audience) gapes in horror at the creature, he also gapes at his own monstrosity. Roger Ebert has pointed out that the influence of the slasher film has led to an increased use of a subjective point-of-view that encourages audiences to identify, albeit uncomfortably, with the slasher. But the influence originates further back in film history. Unlike Whale’s Frankenstein, Edison’s 1910 version is not a monster movie. It belongs, along with the slasher films that would arrive more than half a century later, in the darker, older heart of cinema where monsters are our kindred spirits.

Edison is exploiting the newly fashionable field of Freudian psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the dual nature of the human mind in order to make a buck, but he’s also establishing the foundations for American cinema. An emphasis on this sort of crude dual psychology has been the feature of American films from Birth of a Nation to Beetlejuice. Born out of an ingenious capitalist’s penchant for spectacle, American cinema has always derived its appeal from an unapologetic exploration of the seemly and the unseemly, the attractive and the uncanny. That this binary of attraction and repulsion finds its perfection in the iconic struggle between the knife-wielding killer and the nubile college co-ed is therefore hardly surprising. But it still irks film critics such as James Berardinelli, who insists that the cheap exploitation of From Dusk ‘Til Dawn might be “great fun, but not great art.” His assumption is that real art can’t involve such cheap thrills and chills. Poe would say otherwise. The history of American film suggests otherwise as well. American film does not hark back to a lost Golden Age, nor does it unite man and beast, as Pope would undoubtedly have it. Poe insisted that poetry is the raw stuff of love and hate, lust and loathing. These are the same impulses that get us into theater seats. Art doesn’t necessarily make us angels. Edison knew this dirty little secret, too. At its roots, American film is slasher film.

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3. Biggest WTF? Sequels in Slasher Film History
4. The Faces of Jason Voorhees: A Visual History Part I
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