SCREAM (2022)

For the longest time, when a filmmaker took a preexisting film and offered a new but familiar version, it was called a “remake.” At some point around the early 2000s, after the success of The Ring and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre opened the floodgates and inundated audiences with the maltreatment of their most beloved titles, that particular term became a profanity, so someone coined a new word for this remake evolution: “re-imagining.” Enter Rob Zombie’s woeful Halloween and Zack Snyder’s much better Dawn of the Dead — movies that contained mainstay characters, settings, and concepts of their originals but otherwise explored different directions utilizing different tones. Once movie fans grew wise to “re-imagining,” filmmakers began bending over backwards to avoid saying any of those R words, like the makers behind 2011’s The Thing who tried a new tactic of flat-out lying about what their movie was by hiding behind the false flag of “prequel,” but beyond giving most of its supporting cast Swedish accents (“They’re Norwegian, Mac”) and putting an ax through a door, it otherwise followed very closely in the snowy tracks of Carpenter’s movie, step for step and right down to its moniker. Following that, 2018’s Halloween came along to rebrand the term once more. After 1978’s Halloween had been sequelled to death, Halloween: H20 had softly retconned the series back to a cleaner jumping off point, Halloween: Resurrection had killed off Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, and Rob Zombie had made a prequel and remake in one shot, something newer was required: though generally called a “reboot,” its makers described it as a “recalibration” or, ugh, a “rebootquel” – something that resurrected an old franchise, retconned it just a tiny bit, and created a world where old met new. So what do you do when returning to a franchise like Scream when it’s been in on the joke this whole time? One constructed from the very DNA of the horror film and the many different faces it wears? What do you do when your horror franchise is the equivalent of the kid in the back of the classroom throwing insults at all the other horror franchises for all the ways in which they’re cliches? Well, you do what you’ve always done: embrace the warts of this wacky genre while giving it a fresh spin. And given the Scream franchise’s meta approach that saw it sending up slashers, sequels, trilogy cappers, and remakes, 2022’s familiarly monikered Scream necessitated a new term for a franchise rebirth that still acknowledged every single one of its previous entries. Anchored by a new primary cast with supporting duties from the old guard (including minor characters from previous sequels you’ve forgotten about), and with all of them being terrorized via phone by the gnarly voice of Ghostface once again, Scream ‘22 called itself a “requel.” 

But I’d call it a “redial.”

Whatever you want to call it, Scream '22 is a true return to form for the franchise and the best entry since 1997’s rushed-but-satisfying Scream 2. Free from the meddling hands of former rights-holders Dimension Films (aka the Brothers Weinstein) and under severe pressure to follow in the footsteps of Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Ready or Not) and writers James Vanderbilt (Zodiac) and Guy Busick (Castle Rock) have proven themselves eerie chameleons, recapturing Williamson’s snappy dialogue and mind-bending knowledge of the genre’s rules and Craven’s fastidious eye for creating misdirection and off kilter unease, right down to his dramatic Dutch angles. (Williamson serves as executive producer and creative consultant.) With a new cast that spiritually embodies that groundbreaking first film’s crop of savvy teen characters (brought to life by Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Mikey Madison, Mason Gooding, and Jack Quaid, among many others), but with a new and more psychologically complex (and sympathetic) layer, the Scream name is back, updated, and most thankfully, in capable hands. 

Though I grew up on a diet of ‘80s slashers mostly consisting of Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, even all of their newest entries were nearly ten years old by the time I’d discovered them. Before their own ‘90s-set sequels and retcons, those franchises were, for all intents and purposes, dead and buried – grandfathered into my world in the same way everything else in existence had been. Scream was entirely different. With that first film hitting in the ass-end of 1996, and with two sequels coming along at a steady clip (Scream 2 opened a mere seven months after the first film left theaters), Scream became the slasher franchise of my generation – one with several entries released during my teen years that gave me the opportunity to see them unfold in an auditorium of like-minded people in the same way other lucky folks had the thrill of experiencing Friday the 13th sequels on a yearly basis. For me, the Scream series was happening in real time – it was in-the-moment as opposed to once-was – which imbued a different experience but also a different set of expectations. Having watched Scream in 1996 and seeing characters who were modeled to be just slightly older than I had been landed differently than watching Scream '22 and seeing new characters who are twenty years younger. Seen from a young age, Scream '96 exaggerated the pains of the coming transition from adolescence to adulthood – think The Breakfast Club but everyone gets stabbed to death. To an adult, Scream '22 doesn’t have the same effect; as your adult mind is analyzing the motives of the newest killer(s), part of you can’t help but think, “Oh, brother,” finding difficulty in accepting the outcome. While the motive(s) of the newest Ghostface(s) is admittedly clever, it doesn’t carry the same emotional weight as the original…because this time it’s not personal. In Scream ‘96, Billy and Stu used horror movies as a scapegoat to achieve other ends; in Scream ‘22, the sanctity of horror movies themselves is the driving motivation. And that right there is the number one issue brought forth by sequels, remakes, or any other label that resurrects your favorite franchises: the impossible task of experiencing the natural extensions of the originals you love, but having to process them with a mind that now thinks and feels differently thanks to twenty years of horror’s evolution and one’s own accumulated awareness. You can fall in love with a movie after a first matinee showing, but it takes time, sometimes years, to understand why – to deconstruct the way that movie feels, isolate its DNA, and identify its essence. Scream ‘22 recaptures the largest and most important parts of that unique Scream essence, and though it doesn’t recapture everything, it seems superficial to pick apart its shortcomings.

Scream ‘22 also lessens the bloat the franchise accumulated over the years, which got a little too big for its britches with 2000’s uneven and unmemorable Scream 3, a production plagued by constant rewrites, leaked endings (the return of Matthew Lillard as Stu would’ve been WILD), and Craven and co’s over-willingness to have “fun.” (The Jay and Silent Bob cameo still makes me barf.) With this Scream story set back in Woodsboro, organically allowing for the presence of the next generation of characters with familial ties back to those from the first film (though it occasionally relies on soap opera hysterics to enable this), murder and mayhem is once again occurring in plain sight, beneath the bright sun, in broad daylight. The illusion of safety at which the Scream franchise always excelled has returned, whether it be in high school hallways, quiet suburbia, or your best friend’s rural farmhouse. But of course, no one is safe. 

From the opening scene, Scream '22 plays with audience expectations. Whether the series is old hat or a brand new experience, you never quite know what’s coming; similarly, surprises are in store for the old guard characters and the new, though for the old guard those surprises are going to register in more emotional ways. The kind of character who would most certainly die may just survive the night, whereas the kind of character who has always survived may not be so lucky this time. In spite of some minor plot contrivances, for the most part, once the characters know of the danger they’re in, they’re no longer running up the stairs but directly out the front door; however, once they discover their safe haven was never out that front door to begin with, that’s when the Scream series is most at home – and Scream '22 is the fresh and fun reminder that audiences and the franchise needed. Even the film’s score by composer Brian Tyler, taking the reins from former franchise keeper Marco Beltrami, acknowledges audiences are in new but familiar territory: the track that opens the flick is called “New Horizons,” which is not an eerie, ethereal theme we’ve heard before, but a soft and pensive ballad, and the score itself revisits some of Beltrami’s older themes while injecting some new ones into the mix. (Amusingly, it even adapts a theme famously used in Scream 2 that wasn’t an original composition, but had been lifted from Hans Zimmer’s score for Broken Arrow.)

Most interesting, while Scream ‘96 was a riff on Halloween ‘78, Scream ‘22 acknowledges Halloween ‘18 while adhering somewhat to a new set of rules brought forth by this newest craze of resurrecting old horror properties – the “requel.” Being that Scream ‘96 satirized the first wave of creators, appropriately, Scream ‘22 satirizes all the different ways in which those initiators of the genre come back from the grave, along with whoever's along for the ride. Seeing Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and especially David Arquette, who has always been the heart and secret weapon of the series, return time and again, even for the lesser entries, and even in the face of towering odds, feels right, and even necessary. A more traditional series would have eventually been forced to say goodbye to them, either by killing them off or writing them out, but Scream's own DNA doesn’t have that problem – that trio is an integral part of the mythos, and every new killer that comes along KNOWS this. If Ghostface is the Joker, then Sidney, Gale, and Dewey are Batman, and he is always going to make sure they’re involved, thematically, in his newest scheme. It’s just not Scream without them, just like it’s not Halloween without Jamie Lee Curtis. And upon Campbell’s first appearance in the movie, in which she says, “I’m Sidney fucking Prescott, of course I carry a gun,” one can’t help but picture a gray-haired Laurie Strode doing target practice in the back of her Haddonfield compound. There’s a symbiosis in the horror world, and one that’s potent enough to exist without the need for official but forced “shared universes.” That Halloween inspired Scream, Scream reverse-inspired Halloween: H20, and that Halloween ‘18 is considered not just horror canon but provides a means for dissection in Scream ‘22 is the ultimate proof of that. However, unlike the Halloween series, which had the luxury of wiping away forty years of nonsense and directly sequelling the first film, Scream, luckily, already has its own Halloween-like, in-universe franchise to mirror that: the "Stab" series, through which Scream is able to not only critique the genre in general, but also critique itself in fun but honest ways. (One of the flick’s best bits has some of its characters watching footage from "Stab 8" on Youtube, which shows a muscular Ghostface laying waste with a flamethrower, as they remark that the series has really gone off the rails.) Though seeming like a funny, throwaway moment, it actually embodies what this new Scream is about: the harrowing goal of making a fan-driven movie for fans while knowing they’re going to hate you no matter what you try. But it’s also about saving a fledgling franchise after the piss-poor Scream 3 and underwhelming Scream 4 and returning it to its former glory…by any means necessary. 

It’s been said that this newest crop of horror franchise rebirths – Halloween, Candyman, Ghostbusters, and now Scream – lean too heavily on fan service and nostalgia as a means of forcing an emotional connection with the audience that it might not have necessarily earned. (Halloween Kills is the guiltiest of this.) Regarding Scream ‘22, as with anything else, your mileage may vary. You may love the callbacks, cameos, and re-quotes, or you may think they’re lazy and heavy-handed. You may think the familial ties the new characters share with the old ones are bordering on eye-rollingly convenient storytelling, or you may remember that this is Scream, and if there’s ANY franchise that’s allowed to break those rules, you’re looking at it. Though I don’t think fan service and nostalgia is the scourge of modern cinema that others have been quick to proclaim, I will say it doesn’t sit well when it feels manipulative or uninspired. Scream ‘22 does the best at towing this line, and not just because its own genetic makeup allows for it. Regardless of how you may feel about each rebirth of your favorite horror property, I have no doubt each new generation of filmmaker genuinely loves the franchise they’ve resurrected, and were raised in video stores in the same way we all were, or even literally grew up on the sets of its previous movies like Ghostbusters: Afterlife director Jason Reitman. And when the filmmakers of this new Scream go to the trouble of bringing in a dozen cast and crew members from the previous films to lend their voices to a scene in which a fallen and aptly named friend is toasted at a high school house party, resulting in an emotional salute of “To Wes!,” the admiration for departed filmmakers, beloved characters, and long-running franchises can’t be justly denied. If you’re a fan, then you’ll know a small piece of trivia like that. Because you went looking for it. Because you read about it, or listened to a podcast, or watched an interview with the directors. It wasn’t on the screen and staring you in the face, waving to you from a place of plain sight. It was knowledge you had to earn, to validate your fandom, to know that little extra tidbit most others will never know – all to enrich this experience of revisiting a thing you’ve loved for so long.

Wes Craven may be gone, but he’s left behind an awfully large shadow. Against every odd, the makers of this new Scream were able to fill it. He would’ve been proud.

SUMMER OF FEAR aka STRANGER IN OUR HOUSE (1978)

Wes Craven based his entire career around teens in peril. This is a sub-genre that John Carpenter’s Halloween would essentially create, which would later pave the way for Craven’s seminal classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. But whereas Carpenter would eventually go on to focus on adults in horror (whoa!), Craven would continue exploring the angst of teenage fears, anxiety, adequacy, and sexuality and parlay that into a dependable career.

One of his earliest efforts was 1978’s Summer of Fear, based on the Lois Duncan novel of the same name. (If you’re unfamiliar with the author, think of her as the female prerequisite to R.L. Stine. If you’re unfamiliar with R.L. Stine, stop making me feel old.) Summer of Fear was a made-for-television movie back when that was just becoming a thing, as Steven Spielberg had just hit it big in this same format with his TV trucker creeper Duel, and was Craven’s immediate next project after The Hills Have Eyes. And this time, it’s The Exorcist’s own Linda Blair, who had just come off the disastrous Exorcist 2: The Heretic, playing the teen whose summer is fearful as she contends with her possibly witchy cousin. 

Summer of Fear is a very okay way to spend 90 minutes, though it’s hindered by a number of things, mostly that Blair’s distressed protagonist, Rachel, is sort of…unlikable. Even when the film hits its stride and definitely establishes Julia to be up to some sort of dastard, Rachel still manages to come off as whiny and self-serving. “My horse!” “My dress!” “My boyfriend!” My hives!” After a while, it’s all just too much. Not helping is that Blair’s hair is hilariously gigantic throughout, as if she’d undergone three consecutive perms prior to that day’s filming. Granted, her appearance wouldn’t matter in a less superficial world, but…come on. Just look at it. She looks like her head was used to test electric current. (Her character also keeps a framed photo of herself in a bikini in her bedroom — I guess so she can…look at herself in a bikini? It’s really weird.)

Most of Summer of Fear is very point-and-shoot, which, to be fair, was kind of Craven’s style in the early part of his career. Up to that point, he’d employed the use of the unrelenting long take, whether it was the rape of Marie in Last House on the Left or the strategically placed corpse of Mrs. Carter as bait in The Hills Have Eyes. He was more interested in what the camera could capture rather than how it might be used. Summer of Fear doesn’t really have the opportunity to deploy these kinds of tricks because much of the film is spent on Rachel piecing together the mystery, leaving Julia’s possibly witchy identity draped in ambiguity.

At some points you have to wonder if Craven is secretly making fun of the material, specifically during the “Rachel is pretty sad montage” which sees her flipping through a magazine called “The Horse Catalog” immediately following the death of her horse and her crying a lot about it, or Julia making out wildly with Rachel’s ex-boyfriend in the driveway as the camera pans over to show that Rachel is watching them sadly from her bedroom window. By film’s end, when Rachel and Julia are locked into a furious battle, throwing each other into bookshelves and grabbing each other by their gigantic hair, they look like two hooded Eskimos wearing bear-skin parkas engaged in warfare and it’s just the best.   

Still, as far as early TV efforts go, Summer of Fear is pretty entertaining. Never boring, and reasonably well made with an engaging enough plot, there have definitely been worse made-for-television movies, take it from me. For Craven completists, it’ll be interesting to see something more restrained from the filmmaker who usually went for the throat in his theatrical works. (Also starring Fran Drescher as basically Fran Drescher.)

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991)

The People Under the Stairs, though dressed up in weird BDSM leather and sporting sadistic mutilation, isn't exactly subtle satire on social class division. When a character wanders around the crazy couple's basement, discovers the super secret gold room, and remarks, "No wonder there's no money in the ghetto," odds are Wes Craven's intentions with this early-'90s effort wasn't to subconsciously plant the idea of "the 1%," choosing instead to have Everett McGill scream it into your face and blast you with his cartoon shotgun. The dangers of capitalism are a playground in which some of our other renowned horror directors have played (Carpenter with They Live, Romero with Dawn of the Dead), so Craven threw his hat into the ring himself, concocting this tale of evil white people, a victimized urban demographic...and incest, which is always fun.

If you can get past this quite direct take on capitalistic evil, The People Under the Stairs is impulsively watchable, if only to see how insane a film released by a major studio is able to go. How Craven ever convinced Universal to greenlight and fund his movie about a man dressed in full-body sex-leather costumes and chase tongueless boys within the bowels of his house, we'll never know, but if nothing else, the man deserves accolades simply for having pulled that one off.

For the uninitiated, The People Under the Stairs, with its poster of a gigantic skull looming over a creepy looking house, promises something quite different from what the film ultimately is. This image was one that caught the attention of legions of children as they wandered video stores away from the watchful eyes of their parents during the 1990s. It became one of "those" movies - of the dangerous variety that parents would forbid their children from watching. Even though twenty-five years later some of The People Under the Stairs plays kind of hokey, thematically, there are portions of the film that still manage to be pretty disturbing. The idea of this twisted brother-sister/husband-wife team (McGill and Wendy Robie also played a married couple in Twin Peaks) "adopting" child after child, only to "cut out the parts they don't like" and lock away what remains in the basement is pretty heavy even for a horror film, and especially for children, who no doubt are going to compare what they are seeing on screen against their own parents - their only basis of comparison. When Wendy Robie's nameless "mother" character accuses her "daughter," Alice (AJ Langer, Escape from LA), of doing questionable things with "Fool" (Brandon Adams, The Sandlot) and forces her into a tub of scalding water, leaving her to scream for mercy, it's a legitimately disturbing image, if because, unfortunately, that kind of stuff happens every day, behind the closed doors of homes where one would quickly assume everything was perfectly normal.

No one could ever say that The People Under the Stairs, heavy-handed messages about wealth and crumbling urbanization aside, isn't well-meaning. Craven honestly had something to say about the division of social classes, and of one minority of class feeding off another, increasingly larger one. The idea is so potent even today that the intention to remake The People Under the Stairs with Get Out's Jordan Peele producing is now on the horizon. Artistically, the remake game tends to disappoint, but perhaps these People will offer something equally relevant. Just leave the sex-leather at home, please.

SOME SORT OF ANIMAL: ‘THE HILLS HAVE EYES’ (1977)

In the horror film documentary The American Nightmare, Wes Craven talked about what it was like being in the presence of a “dangerous filmmaker.” What that meant was to be watching a film, directed by said filmmaker, that was willing to do anything — include any taboo — to unsettle the audience. In context, Craven was talking about his colleague Tobe Hooper and his Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but he easily could have been talking about himself. Hitting the ground running as a soon-to-be-legendary horror director with his first film, The Last House on the Left still remains the most controversial title in his career — one that features an extended rape sequence of a young girl, and which leads her parents to take bloody revenge. Craven followed up five years later (but in between, directed a softcore porn film about incest under the pseudonym Abe Snakes) with The Hills Have Eyes, semi-based on a true story, and which reined in (slightly) the disturbing shocks of The Last House on the Left while exploring similar territory: how do the civilized react when facing an uncivilized threat?

Based on the infamous Sawney Bean clan — a cannibalistic family who lived in a cave in the dusty west and who preyed on weary travelers before they were caught and tortured to death “for justice,” The Hills Have Eyes follows that concept beat-for-beat. A family on vacation takes a shortcut (no!) through abandoned desert land previously used by the government for atomic bomb testing and run afoul of cannibal mutants who like to eat people. And, like the history that inspired it, The Hills Have Eyes asks: at what point do the “good” people, forced to do what they think is right, become just as vicious as those victimizing them?

Hearing Craven speak of dangerous filmmakers conjures images of his first two films; and when it comes to The Hills Have Eyes, following the cannibal clan’s first attack on the sitting-duck family, during which one of their members is raped, and her baby taken, you realize that Craven is one of those dangerous filmmakers about which he muses. At that moment, the audience are terrified to see what becomes of the stolen child. Based on what they have seen up to this point, they throw in the towel and readily believe they are in the presence of a filmmaker who will do anything to shock them. The baby, in a real or unrealized way, becomes the focal point that binds the two families together — the only “innocent” one among them, both families are willing to do anything to possess her, and both for very different reasons.

Compared to The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes is more polished, and seems intent on telling a more accessible story. (I said “compared to,” mind you.) Having said that, The Hills Have Eyes is still an ugly film — one that’s willing to strive for certain “dangerous” goals, and show you a group of people who are willing to do anything to survive, including a heartbreaking scene where they’re forced to use one of their departed family members as bait for the cannibal family clan hunting them.

But Craven also wants you to consider the source of evil, and The Hills Have Eyes asks the question in reverse. A good family turns to evil to fight off their attackers; the attackers are forced to evil once their land becomes contaminated by government testing; and being that this was a late ’70s film, the recently ended Vietnam War was still weighing heavily on everyone’s minds — including filmmakers — so at what point does the government become evil while committing it in the name of good? The Hills Have Eyes suggests that the creation of evil is on an endless loop: what is evil will corrupt that which is good, and that former good will go on to corrupt, etc., until nothing good is left.

The Hills Have Eyes bares every bit of its limited budget, from its single shooting location, to its not-so-seasoned actors (including an early on-screen appearance from the most famous mom in cinema history, Dee Wallace of E.T., Cujo, and The Howling), to its filmmaker still honing his skills with the written word and behind the camera. The Hills Have Eyes may ride on a simple concept, but it asks a complicated question — one that filmmakers have been trying to answer since it was unleashed upon audiences forty years ago.

The Hills Have Eyes would go on to accumulate one sequel (which is infamously bad — I’ve somehow never managed to see it, despite it featuring a flashback experienced by a dog) and one very credible, if not superior, Craven-produced remake (which would inspire its own terrible sequel written by Craven and his son), along with a metric ton of rip-offs. Despite the series’ collection of strongpoints or shortcomings, none of them contained that element of danger of which Craven originally spoke. In that regard, The Hills Have Eyes has taken to the desert utterly alone.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

LET’S RAISE SOME HELL: ‘PET SEMATARY TWO’ IS A MASTERPIECE

[Spoilers follow for the entire Pet Sematary series.]

Oh, sequels. On paper, you’re so weird. You’re a continuation that was never meant to be. You’re glorified fan fiction sanctioned into existence by a producer or studio eager to continue a profitable story that was only ever meant to be just that story (unless, of course, your characters wear capes, because then we need thirty-seven of those, I guess). By now, it’s become common knowledge that most sequels are inferior retellings of their originators. Subsequent writers and directors who hop onto an existing franchise try to make their sequel as different as they can, but ultimately, they are still going to exist within the structure that’s already been established. No matter what else the sequel might try, we know that Terminators are going to travel back in time to protect or destroy, Michael Myers is going to kill, and Jigsaw is going to impossibly exist and rattle off dime-store philosophies while ripping money from your pockets and laughing maniacally.

Director Mary Lambert knows this better than anyone. With her 1989 adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, she nailed the holy trifecta of horror filmmaking: scaring the shit out of audiences, striking gold at the box office, and scoring a positive critical notice or two. Even today, it’s still considered newsworthy when a woman is put in charge of a major tentpole release, and though Pet Sematary wasn’t considered tentpole, it was still highly anticipated. It was, after all, the next in a long line of extremely successful King adaptations, this time inspired by what was deemed the scariest book he’d ever written. Could a—gasp—female director make a film every bit as dark, graphic, and taboo as the book written by a lovable man with a few loose screws? That answer was a resounding yes, and no one knew that more than Paramount Pictures, so when it came time for them to greenlight the sequel, they made sure Lambert was along for the ride.

I’ve had a strange relationship with Pet Sematary Two ever since seeing it at a young age. As weird and kid-inappropriate as it may sound, the first Pet Sematary was a childhood institution. USA Network used to run it back to back with another King title, Silver Bullet, and I would watch them every single time they aired. I was unrealistically scared of Pet Sematary, and never more than when Rachel’s bony sister, Zelda, was on screen. I eventually saw Pet Sematary Two a few years after it hit VHS, and even as a child, I could tell it was stupid. Beyond stupid. It had sacrificed anything legitimately creepy about the first film in favor of slasher-flick antics and sensational violence…but I can’t pretend I wasn’t scared of it at times, because I was. 

After recently shrugging my way through the pallid and lifeless Pet Sematary remake, I felt compelled to revisit this 1992 sequel I’d long ago dismissed in hopes of finding some new merit and satisfying the itch that the remake failed to scratch.

I’m so glad I did.

Pet Sematary Two is one of the strangest, darkest, and uncomfortably funniest horror flicks ever produced by a major studio—one directed by a woman, headlined by a 13-year-old kid with more star power than the guy playing his father, and which had absolutely no problem killing multiple children… and mothers… and kittens. (Though I didn’t find any of it remotely scary watching it with adult eyes, the parts that used to frighten me as a child still filled me with slight apprehension.) Originally, Lambert had intended on directly continuing the Creed story with a teenage version of Ellie (played by Blaze Berdahl in the first film), but in a stunning act of boundless misguidance, Paramount was leery about making a teenage girl the lead character in a horror film...even though the studio had just completed a successful eight-film run of the Friday the 13th series, in which the lead in nearly every single entry was…a teenage girl. In response, Lambert and screenwriter Richard Outten (Van Damme’s Lionheart) created an entirely new crop of characters, though obviously the action remained in the town of Ludlow—the site of the pet cemetery and the Micmac burial ground beyond it.

Meet the Matthews family: there’s Chase (Anthony Edwards, Miracle Mile), patriarch and veterinarian; his wife, Renee (Darlanne Fluegel, Once Upon a Time in America, which makes a cameo), actress of cheap looking gothic monster movies; and their son, Jeff (Edward Furlong, Terminator 2: Judgment Day), looking as exhausted and barely into anything as the actor normally is (or isn’t). A freak on-set accident sees Renee being fried to death by some “oops!” electricity, so Chase takes his son back to Ludlow to bury her in their hometown’s cemetery—and to hopefully start anew. It’s there that Chase encounters a cold Gus Gilbert (an all-in Clancy Brown), Ludlow’s sheriff and a former flame of his deceased wife, who's quick to remind the bereaved widower—after her funeral, no less—that he and Renee used to bang something fierce. Despite this, Jeff eventually befriends Gus’s stepson, Drew (Jason McGuire), and after his dog, Zowie, meets the wrong end of Gus’s rifle, the boys bury him in Ludlow’s whispered about burial ground. 

Things…escalate quickly. 

Tobe Hooper struck his own gold with 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so when Cannon Films came knocking at his door to direct the sequel, Hooper agreed, but decided to make as different a film as possible while remaining true to the basic components that the prior film had established. If the first Chain Saw were an exercise in pure terror, the second would be an exercise in black comedy quirkiness featuring ironically used Oingo Boingo and a duel-chainsaw-wielding Dennis Hopper. Lambert seems to have taken the same approach, because while Pet Sematary Two is a direct sequel in terms of concept and character dynamic, it’s not at all a spiritual follow-up with respect to tone, sincerity, or any attempt at mature horror (of which there is zero). Pet Sematary was trying to be a good film, whereas Pet Sematary Two is trying to be a fun film—and boy, it isn’t just fun, it’s fucking looney tunes, a gonzo masterpiece of weird characters, ace gore effects, befuddling dialogue, and with the purest, most palpable sense of, “Can you believe Paramount is giving us money to make this?” 

The screen story never strays too far from established structure, involving a family looking for a fresh start, a person burying a cherished pet in the cursed burial ground, and the ante being upped as dead human beings begin to replace dead animals as burial ground fodder. Pet Sematary Two even maintains the established archetype of the patriarch, but with a slight twist, turning him from a medical doctor to a veterinarian, which maintains the prior’s institutional and sanitized philosophy of death as normal and necessary (read: better) while doing it in a more on-the-nose way. (One of Chase’s first scenes has him gently putting a dog to sleep, telling its crying owners, “It’s better this way.”) (Read: dead.) And speaking of death, Pet Sematary's most defining, catalytic moment comes from the death of Gage Creed, the adorable four-year-old son of Louis and Rachel, which ruins what remains of Louis' sanity and directly effects the tragedy that befalls the Creed family by film end; though the visual presentation of this was considered a major taboo at the time, his demise derived from a total freak Orinco truck accident, a horrible but sadly realistic incident. Meanwhile, Pet Sematary Two straight up murders two children while aging them up a little so the act of doing so feels less soul-crushing and more deranged. Basically, when Gage Creed bites the big one in the first film, Lambert wants her audience emotionally pulverized to more easily buy into father Louis’s descent into madness, but in the sequel, when Drew and the local scarf-wearing bully, Clyde (Big’s Jared Rushton), both meet their untimely ends at the hands of a resurrected Gus, the audience isn’t that upset. Sure, it’s unfortunate to see Drew and his mother (Lisa Waltz, The X-Files) lose their lives, but as sad as that makes us, we’re even more glad about Clyde’s face being chewed off by his rear moped tire because he was such a dick. This, seemingly, is part of Lambert’s design: she wants her audience to embrace the gory death of that 13-year-old bully, and her design is correct, because we do. Clyde sucked! 

Wes Craven once mused about the difference between directors who scare their audiences legitimately, and those who make the audience believe that said director is “dangerous,” and willing to show them anything to elicit that desired scare. How far is this director willing to go? That’s the beauty of Mary Lambert and her approach to Pet Sematary Two: its goal is to break rules and encourage pure insanity; it goes freely with the flow and adopts every halfcocked idea someone on-set could muster. If there were any suggestions proffered during production that Lambert decided would be going too far, dear lord, I would love to hear them, considering the things we did get:

Monster/humanoid wolf-head nightmare sex — check.

Zombie rape — check.

Flesh-melting, pun-hurling, undead mothers — check.

A leading role for Clancy Brown — hard check.

Speaking of, no one has ever had more fun playing a psychotic undead murderer than Clancy Brown. He is Freddy Krueger, swapping out the Christmas sweater for a pair of sheriff beiges, but certainly keeping his knack for dark-humored kill-lines and vile sense of humor. (“Why did you dig up my dead wife?” Chase asks him during their final confrontation, to which Gus responds with a growl, “Because I wanted to fuck'errr.”) Brown seldom gets the chance to enjoy a lead role, so while that could be part of the exuberance behind his performance, it’s really because—as many actors will tell you—it’s so much more fun to play the villain, to be let off the proverbial leash and to go as big as you want. (Brown would go on to star as the villain in another King-inspired project soon after this one—The Shawshank Redemption—and I like to believe  director Frank Darabont saw his nutso performance in Pet Sematary Two and said, “Oh, definitely that guy.”) As the resurrected Gus Gilbert, Brown chews on every piece of scenery not nailed down, and it’s his legitimate testament as an actor that he doesn’t always have to go big to imbue his undead Gus with the strangest of personalities. One of his best scenes is a total skewering of the generic dinner table set piece, during which his undead muscles barely function and he ends up dropping a bowl of veggies on the floor. When his annoyed wife mutters and stoops to clean up his mess (and who, I might add, he’d necro-raped in a previous scene), he very subtly glares at her with narrowed eyes as if wondering what she's so sour about. Still, when Brown goes big, aw hell—what a blast to watch. The Cheshire grin he flashes while chasing down his family to kill them, sliding on his sheriff’s hat before he delivers their deathblow, is the stuff of cinemagic. 

Pet Sematary Two is filled with this kind of craziness—a collection of scenes so inspiring that they force you to stop and reconcile that, yep, you’re really seeing all this in a film made by Hollywood. Take the scene where Chase kills the undead Zowie and then finds Gus inside the modest Gilbert home, asking him, “What are you doing, Gus?” The resurrected sheriff looks down at the shot-dead Zowie, and then says, with detectable wryness, “Well, I was building a doggy door.” Sure, it’s a stupid line, throwaway in nature, but what makes this such a magical moment is that this hulking, demonic, undead corpse actually was building a doggy door for his hulking, demonic, undead dog. Forget all the warm-blooded people that demon Gus definitely wants to kill—that all momentarily stops to build a tiny door for his corpse dog. 

You guys, this is a movie where a young boy is being murderously pursued by his undead stepfather, and with the zombie-maniac hot on his heels, the boy races into his house, shuts and locks the door, and then CALMLY HANGS HIS HOUSE KEYS ON THE KEYHOOK BEFORE LOCATING A GUN TO SHOOT THE GHOUL MAN TRYING TO KILL HIM.

WHO WROTE THIS?

And that ending, holy shit. What morbid mastery. What unabashed fuck-it filmmaking. The fiery finale that concludes in the attic of the Matthews’ house, which features not one but two resurrected bodies trying to kill father and son and turn them into the walking dead, is a carnival sideshow of horror chaos. Undead Bully Clyde doesn’t just show up, but he shows up with a voice five pitches deeper, very little face, and grasping an ax, which he swings with the brute force of an able-bodied stuntman (you know, the one obviously playing him). The real showstopper of this scene, however, is the return of Jeff’s mother, which actually starts on a sad and creepy note: she beckons her son to join her in the afterlife, a moment that threatens to touch hands with honest-to-gosh pathos…but that’s before things descend into utter madness, which happens pretty quickly. The fire spreading around the attic soon begins licking at the ends of her burial dress as all the work her mortician had done begins to melt off her face, and she begins repeatedly screaming “DEAD IS BETTER!” in absolute, chill-inducing, operatic, Argento levels of unhingement until she turns into a fucking STANDING, BURNING, SHRIEKING SKELETON. 

Frankly, it’s the ending we needed and deserved.

No matter how much King’s output has declined in quality over the years, he’s never written anything as farcical as Pet Sematary Two, but that doesn’t mean the sequel doesn’t manage a handful of Kingisms. (King actually requested that Paramount remove his name from any marketing having to do with the sequel, so he was obviously not a fan.) First, there are the two shaky relationships between fathers and sons, which he’s explored in more than one of his novels (The Shining comes to mind), and then there’s the unrealistically evil bully who could give IT’s Henry Bowers a run for his milk money any day of the week. The first film was about a parent losing a child; meanwhile, the sequel is about a child losing a parent and navigating the grieving process, which King later explored in his excellent short story, Riding the Bullet. There’s also a nod to The Shining when Gus busts a hole in Drew’s bedroom door with a hammer, but instead of sticking his face through the hole and bellowing  “Heeere’s Johnny!,” he verbally ponders if Drew understands the Miranda rights he’s been rattling off, or if he’s “too fucking stupid.”

Ever since its release, critics and fans have derided Pet Sematary Two, and it’s a sure-fire inclusion on many “worst sequel” lists. (Amusingly, Variety “praised” the sequel, calling it “about 50% better than its predecessor, which is to say it's not very good at all.") Pet Sematary Two isn’t a patch on the original, and it’s so tonally different that the two don’t appear to be part of the same family beyond their titles, but I’ll be damned if Lambert and co. aren’t going for it, and that’s what makes it so special. Whatever Pet Sematary Two may be, it’s all part of Mary Lambert’s gloriously gonzo plan, and that’s all that matters. One thing is certain: 2019’s useless Pet Sematary redux proved it’s better to be a goofy, red-headed stepchild but still have your own identity than to be completely without one.  

SHOCKER (1989)

It's been just under five years since Wes Craven's death and it still feels very surreal and wrong that he's gone. On that sad evening in August, the news of his death began circulating throughout the web, especially on social media, and people were sharing their surprise and dismay that the man who had created so many nightmares (literally and figuratively) for legions of moviegoers was gone. Memorials and tributes began cropping up all over the place to examine the man's legacy, his fingerprints on the horror genre, and the films he left behind.

It's a strange, strange feeling to have experienced such a loss for someone many mourners never knew personally, but yet at the same time felt like family. How is that even possible? How can a perfect stranger, who did nothing more than create a handful of boogeyman and rob us from a few nights of sleep, leave a friend- or family-sized hole behind in the wake of his death? Because, for the horror genre, he's been an ever-constant presence in our homes. It was through his sensibilities as captured on film with A Nightmare on Elm Street or The Hills Have Eyes, or any number of documentary-driven examinations on horror in which he eagerly took part, that he became so well known to us all. There was no mistaking that soft-spoken voice, that kind and somewhat shy smile, and his incredibly nuanced and levelheaded approach to the genre, and why it was important.

In the fantastic horror documentary The American Nightmare, Craven had said:

“[Horror films are] boot camps for the psyche. It’s strengthening [kids’] egos and strengthening their fortitude… That’s something the parents never seem to think about… Even if [the films] are giving them nightmares, there’s something there that’s needed.”

In a really strange way, Craven became a father to us all - concocting on paper and then on film an array of boogeymen to scare us to our wit's end, not just so we could leave the theater laughing at the rush only a horror film can bring, but to prepare us for the real world...where things are much scarier, and much more dangerous.

In the days following his death, there was an appropriate amount of people who openly mourned, but there were also a faction of those who stated, unromantically, "Wes Craven actually made a lot of bad movies." And maybe that's true. Maybe many, or most, of Craven's films never managed to reach the scare-tinged heights of A Nightmare on Elm Street, the clever ingenuity of Scream, or the naked and honest brutality of The Last House on the Left, but no director on earth - living nor dead - is free of their own collection of mediocrity. One of the most celebrated genre directors ever to have lived, a man named Hitchcock, was not even free of such infallibility, and when he died, no Internet armchair critic was opining about all the bad films he made.

Which leads us, perhaps unceremoniously, to Shocker.

To call Horace Pinker a cheap Freddy Krueger re-appropriation wouldn't be a slight against the departed Craven, who has freely admitted over the years that his signing away of all rights to A Nightmare on Elm Street (which, in case you didn't know, generated enough money, along with its subsequent sequels, to establish the studio that would then go on to produce the Lord of the Rings trilogy) directly led to Shocker, in hopes that Craven could shape a new movie maniac with enough familiarity that it would create its own franchise which he could then control (and profit from).

That did not happen.

Man who comes out of your TV was no match for man who comes out of your nightmares.

Taken on its own merit, Shocker is very okay, if at times a little too silly, with an electric! (ugh) performance from Mitch Pileggi. Craven has always tried to mix humor into his horror films, and while this has often worked (Scream), other times the two very conflicting tones just don't work well together (Last House). For something like Shocker, in which a discorporated serial killer can travel through electrical circuits and end up on television shows, yeah, humor was to be expected. A silly movie would look even sillier if there wasn't a sly sense of humor throughout the whole thing.

Though you may not be able to tell by the finished product, Shocker was based on several distinct inspirations, from other films to Craven's own personal life. The construct of the film was inspired by a combination of 1951's The Thing From Another World and 1987's The Hidden, directed by Jack Sholder...who, quite ironically, had directed 1985's Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge. Personally, Craven has previously noted the tense relationship he had with his father, whom he described as "angry," and how the making of Shocker was an exorcism of sorts for his feelings toward him. Of the scene where Michael Murphy's recently possessed character tries to convince his son (Peter Berg) that he's fine, and that he's taken control, only to reveal that it was Pinker all along, Craven chuckled and observed, "I dunno, I guess I have trust issues."

The most striking thing about Shocker is how very similar it all plays out to A Nightmare on Elm Street - so much that Craven, while viewing the film for the first time since its post-production, admitted to being taken aback by all the similarities.

Shocker isn't a "great" addition to Craven's filmography, but in an odd way, it is essential viewing, if only to see a filmmaker retreading familiar ground in a different environment simply because that's where his sensibilities led him. However you may feel about Shocker, it's a pure, unfiltered Wes Craven film. And it's worth seeing for that alone.

Celebrate the catalogs of those filmmakers you revere. Lesser entries still have a lot of merit, and much to offer to completist viewers. Though it will never be spoken about with as much reverence as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Shocker very much contains Craven's aesthetic and sensibilities in every frame - not just in the usage of the dream relationships and walking premonitions, but in the power of the youth who are unable to depend on the nearest adult and have no choice but to take care of it themselves.

Father to us all, indeed.

Rest easy, Professor Craven. You are still very missed.

WES SAYS

UNSUNG HORRORS: THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre. 

So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now… one at a time. 

Dir. Adam Simon
2000
IFC
United States

“I think there is something about the American Dream…the sort of Disney-esque dream, if you will, of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white-picket fence, Mom and Dad and their happy children, god-fearing and doing good whenever they can…that sort of expectation, and the flip-side of it – the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not the truth of the matter. I think that gives American horror films in some ways kind of an additional rage.”


Horror genre documentaries have become all the rage as of late. Whether they focus on one horror franchise (Crystal Lake Memories; The Psycho Legacy), or one particular sub-genre (Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film), their aim is to break down and scrutinize this thing previously and often described as dark, threatening, unwarranted, unnecessary, and wrong. Horror, the least respected genre of all, is often misunderstood and condemned for the simple fact that sometimes a head gets cut off or a girl is fed to a lawnmower. A critic unwilling to shed his or her self-righteousness couldn’t sit down with a film like The Last House on the Left without dismissing it outright, labeling it pornographic and void of purpose.

This 2000 documentary from filmmaker Adam Simon (also responsible for the Bill Pullman head-scratcher Brain Dead), perhaps the first to openly discuss and celebrate a specific period of the horror genre (the 1960s/70s), might also be the first to let America’s most culturally significant filmmakers explain their thoughts and motivations behind their earlier work. The 1970s, perhaps the last truly celebrated decade of film, saw an uptick not just in quality storytelling, but also in anger, frustration, and sometimes hopelessness. Filmmakers like Frances Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Sydney Lumet, and so many others ran rampant, free from the type of studio constraints that have today become commonplace. And this kind of independent mentality naturally found its way into the horror genre.

Kicking if off was George A. Romero with his antecedent Night of the Living Dead (1968), to be followed by Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), David Cronenberg’s They Came From Within aka Shivers (1975), Romero's Night follow-up Dawn of the Dead (1978), and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Supporting these filmmakers’ highlighted bodies of work are director John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), special effects maestro Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead), and professional film historians/professors Tom Gunning, Carol J. Glover, and Adam Lowenstein.

Director Adam Simon has not only managed to gather together the modern age’s greatest horror minds for the definitive interview, but he’s also managed to create, hands down, the best examination of modern horror in existence. The previous horror documentaries earlier mentioned are all certainly well made in their own ways, and for the approaches that have been taken, they could certainly be viewed as definitive. But at the end of the day, they are just novelties – impressively expanded versions of IMDB trivia and Fangoria Magazine. Going to Pieces, for instance, is a hell of a lot of fun, and introduced me to films I hadn't previously seen, but beyond that, it doesn't have much to say – certainly not about our culture. It never feels “important” – it never makes the horror films we love feel like anything more than 90 minutes of titillation.

The American Nightmare lets its subjects do all the talking, in their own uncensored, unfiltered, and uncompromising voices. Their words will be tinged in anger, melancholy, and even disbelief. And you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into with the opening of the doc: A scary montage of the films being discussed, intermingled with real news footage of the Vietnam war – of chemical weapons, soldiers with completely brainwashed expressions, and presidents telling us the war is a worthy endeavor. But Vietnam is just one of the several issues discussed here, and whether the inspiring events be damnable (political assassinations, economic collapse) or commendable (the sexual revolution, economic rebirth), all have had their part to play in this collection of high horror cinema watermarks.

"I loved this idea of a revolution… It's a new society devouring the old, and just changing everything."

You all know this one – this story of a group of strangers barricaded inside a Pennsylvania farmhouse as they try to defend themselves from a growing army of the living dead. Since 1968, this concept has been appropriated literally hundreds of times for thousands of films, books, comics, video games, and now television shows – and they all owe it to one man. Shot and released during the height of America’s racial conflict, it had the gall, the audacity (read: the balls) to cast a black actor by the name of Duane Jones, not just prominently, and not just as the lead, but as the hero. And it has perhaps one of the most soul-crushing endings of all time.

Though Romero is quick to dismiss with great modesty anyone's commendation for him for having cast a black man as the lead in his seminal film by simply saying that Jones was the best actor they knew, filmmaker John Landis (interviewed here as a participant, not a subject) recalls having his mind blown at his young seventeen years of age, in awe that he was seeing a black hero on screen during one of the most turbulently racial times not seen since the Civil War. "I just went 'Wow!' because there's this black guy...and he's the lead. The movie was hitting me from all angles."

Complementing NOTLD's footage of lynch mobs assembling with their shotguns, and dogs on leashes barking furiously and pulling men across a field are Lowenstein's thoughts: "[As you watch NOTLD] you can’t not think of lynchings; you can’t not think of freedom marches in the south; you can’t not think of the Civil Rights struggle."

As for the why of it, Romero offers: “Obviously what’s happening in the world creeps into any work. It fits right in, because that’s where the idea comes from – where you get the idea in the first place.”

In a fit of awful irony, insofar as what the film would eventually go on to mean culturally, Romero somberly shares that after having completed the film, he threw it in the trunk, and he and his co-producer took a road trip to New York to try and sell it. On the way there, on the radio, they learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated.

“All of a sudden, you really don’t know – it certainly shatters your faith in what’s going on at the top. It really gives you a sense of fragility of things – not just your life, but the nation’s life.”

In the NOTLD sequel of sorts, Dawn of the Dead (also explored in the doc), the character of Fran peers down at a crowd of zombies and asks, "What the hell are they?"  But Romero has the answer this time: "Us. We know we're going to die, right? We're the living dead."

"It just seemed that there was nothing to be trusted in the establishment and everything to be trusted in yourself, and that was the context in which Last House was made." 

 

Likely the most infamous film in Wes Craven’s filmography, The Last House on the Left is an angry, disturbing, and at times vile reinterpretation of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Two young girls on the way to a concert run afoul of three convicts, who proceed to kidnap them and drag them into the woods, where they are then tortured, raped, and unceremoniously killed. Thinking they are free and clear, the convicts, through complete dumb luck, end up at one of their victim's houses, and are then slaughtered one by one by the girl’s revenge-seeking parents. The attack waged against the unsuspecting killers by the dead girl's parents comes close to (and perhaps successfully achieves) a reversing of the protagonists and antagonists roles, presenting a set of parents so bloodthirsty for revenge against their daughter's monstrous killers that they become monsters themselves by film's end.

Craven further explains the film’s tie to Vietnam: "Those kids running down the road, just screaming, naked, after the napalm attack; that was kind of my coming of age to realizing that Americans weren't always the good guys, and that things that we could do could be horrendous and evil and dark and impossible to explain." Examining the film and the young man who had made it, he remarks that it was "made by a man who had a lot more rage than [he] ever realized."

Though the infamous tagline of Last House was the reiterated "it's only a movie..." Lowenstein shares, "What's going on here isn't only a movie. It has everything to do with Kent State, the Vietnam War – that this kind of pain isn't a sick isolated episode. It has everything to do with the world I live in."

This segment is likely the most powerful of the entire documentary, especially after the talking heads somberly recount the war, how they say if you were growing up during that time, you were a veteran of Vietnam whether you were directly involved in the war or not. Even after discussing the film’s inspiration in broad strokes, Craven adds one chilling detail: You will know why he chose to have Krugg execute Marie in such a particular way at the tail end of Last House’s horrific rape scene. It wasn’t just posturing, or what looked good on camera. Instead it was reactionary; it was a real anger transforming into a cinematic one.

Capping off the Vietnam segment of the documentary is a brief but mesmerizing interview with Tom Savini, and there’s really no recounting it. His words are extremely powerful and raw. His remembrance of the awful sights he experienced and captured (as a war photographer) are incredibly difficult to process, but deeply affecting. He explains that, as a child, he would go to see the vintage monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man – and try to recreate them using his effects materials. And so in 1969, in the midst of Vietnam and mere feet away from dead bodies, and as a way to separate him from the reality of the conflict, he would instead study them, and concoct in his head what materials he would use to eventually recreate the piles of the dead around him.

As far as his eventual approach to special effects, he said, "If Vietnam did anything, it was: If it's going to be horrible, then it's going to be horrible the way I saw it. But you will never see it the way I saw it, which is [with] absolute fear; that if someone walks out of the jungle, he wants to kill you. He has a gun and he's going to try."

"My Wisconsin relatives told me about this guy [Ed Gein] that lived about twenty miles from them. [They told me stories of] these human-skin lampshades and I think maybe hearts in the refrigerator...but really the image I came away with, almost my entire life, was there was someone out there making lampshades out of people."

 

Perhaps kicking off the whole “kids in the middle of nowhere who run out of gas” plot device, Tobe Hooper’s Ed-Gein inspired film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, though we wish were plucked from someone’s imagination, was instead plucked right out of real life. Borrowing elements of the Gein case, along with a personal anecdote in which a medical colleague of Hooper's once wore a cadaver's face to a Halloween party, scenes from Chain Saw of a van rolling up to an out-of-gas fueling station is meshed with real-life footage of the 1974 gas shortage that occurred in America – of gas station officials and police waving off the lines of cars stretching down the street that were hoping to fill their tanks. How something as innocuous as a lack of gasoline could throw society into such disarray and instability directly compares to these kids whose van runs low on gas and forces them to pull over, thus throwing them into the midst of a cannibalistic nightmare. Normal, middle-class, and pretty kids (and Franklin) soon cross paths with a den of cannibals, starving, out of work, and improvising simply to stay alive.

“I was really scared at that time, and I had to find a way to work that out,” Hooper explains. He goes on to add that his film contains “…the stuff in the darkness, in the shadows, and in particular, the stuff we don't open the door on. And those doors start cracking open a bit, because you're forcing them open with images that really blow into the nightmare zone."

And he's very correct. Chains Saw feels more like a nightmare than any of the other films. Its documentary approach gives it the appearance of a well-staged snuff film, where a "real" family of cannibal deviants pray on and decimate a group of kids one at a time. The film takes the elements borrowed from real life and combines it with the anecdote in the next paragraph, and what we end up with is not just a seminal film or the beginning of a still-going-strong franchise, but about the collision of social classes bathed in the blood of middle-class kids traipsing where they ought not be traipsing. Still relevant today due to the current economic climate, it's easy to forget that a lack of good, high-paying jobs affects everyone, from the well-to-do rich right down to the lower class cannibals who rob graveyards late at night and dwell somewhere within the bowels of Texas.

Hooper’s interview segment ends with him explaining, "Mothra didn't scare me. Godzilla didn't scare me. It's people I'm afraid of." Hearing this, following the genesis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – in which he was at a Montgomery Ward’s hardware department store and slowly being surrounded by more and more shoppers, finding himself standing directly in front of a rack of chainsaws…and realizing, if he really wanted to get out of there, he knew he’d found a way – becomes deeply unsettling. That “normal” people have thoughts like these is scary enough…but there are people out there who don’t have the mental capacity or the emotional barriers to make them realize that doing something like that would be wrong. So you take that, and then take away their job stability and their right to make a home for themselves, then disaster can happen. “It’s people I’m afraid of,” indeed.

"That seemed to be where we were then, in the '70s. It was a different decade, it was a different time. Beginnings of prosperity. Major crises seemed to be over, and everyone was just dancing away."

 

On the run from a chaotic and bloody Philadelphia, four individuals from different walks of life somehow come together, commandeer (steal) a chopper, and get the hell out of dodge as the city burns behind them. They soon find themselves at a shopping mall, originally only stopping to find fuel and regroup until they can come up with a plan. But the longer they rest there, the quicker they realize they're sitting on a potential bounty of every necessity, and every comfort and convenience, they could ever need or want: gourmet food, top-of-the-line electronics, the finest fashion and jewelry – even an arcade! With one member among them pregnant and all of them exhausted, it seems like the most obvious choice to make. The plan is simple: Bed down, fortify a living area, and then clean-house, ridding the mall of the walking dead threat and securing every entrance. But, what begins as simple survival soon devolves into a life of opulence, and when danger comes their way – in the form of both looters as well as zombies – they refuse to give it up.

I've been to one public and several private screenings of the original Dawn of the Dead, and without fail, every time our survivors fly over Monroeville Mall and say, "It's one of those shopping centers; one of those big indoor malls," it always gets a laugh. And that laugh signifies: "Well, no shit – of course it's a mall." What the people who react that way don't realize is that, yes, granted, malls are part of every day culture now and have been for decades, but they were a new phenomenon in the late 1970s. During this time, the reign of mom-and-pop shops and corner stores had begun their decline in popularity while huge corporations moved in and constructed gigantic monstrosities filled with every specialty store you could imagine. What we take for granted as always having been part of American culture was a newborn back during Romero's second zombie film, which many would argue is his masterpiece.

"My zombies have gotten a taste of McDonalds and the good things in life," Romero notes with a grin. "And they can't figure out why it's not happening anymore. They're just sort of lost souls."

The materialism and consumerism aspects of Dawn of the Dead have been discussed ad nauseum over the years, by Romero et al. as well as film critics and film fans. While The American Nightmare's discussion of it is brief, it is discussed perhaps with the most openness from Romero that I have seen yet.

He sums it up rather well:

"Domesticity is not what it's cracked up to be and having all that 'stuff' winds up meaning nothing. There's always that underlining realization of how synthetic this is. 'I have this and that'...without thinking much beyond that."

"There really was [a sexual revolution]. The '60s were unprecedented in terms of openness and experimentation, and it was always political. The sex that you were engaging in had strong political overtones... Sex had meaning beyond sex... beyond the physical realm."

  

A Dr. Frankensteinian scientist is out to prove that humanity has lost its instinct, and so he begins a series of experiments in which he purposely applies a parasite of sorts into willing living hosts in hopes that the afflicted will begin acting on impulse rather than their rationale. The test patients' sexuality is suddenly awakened with an animalistic fury, leaving them acting strictly on impulse. Soon a sex plague of sorts begins to spread and it threatens to tear down society as a whole. In continuing with the Frankenstein theme, the scientist's experiment is ironically and unfortunately a success.

It's strange to think that the sexual revolution of the '60s, which continued into the '70s, actually took place in this, our country. Founded on this artificial ideal about wanting to live free of oppression, and with the freedom to pursue our own religious beliefs, our country has been terrified of sex since we first set foot on this continent. Funny, since we use sex to sell every imaginable product, service, food, or anything else you can think of. Sex sells films, television shows, books, music, make-up, underarm deodorant, and yep, even kids' clothes. Further, it's perhaps not widely known that John F. Kennedy's win over Richard Nixon during the 1960 presidential election is attributed to the nation's first ever televised presidential debate, and the American people got their first mass glimpse of the handsome and distinguished Kennedy versus the sweaty Nixon. But when it comes to our own sex – something private, shared between two consenting adults, it suddenly becomes a dangerous and ugly thing. Homosexuality, sodomy, polygamy – these things are suddenly looked down on, preached against, and even outlawed.

Leave it to David Cronenberg to attack this hypocrisy head-on with his first wide-release film, They Came From Within, in which he turns sexuality into an inescapable tangible and intangible force:

I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I'm having trouble you see, because he's old... and dying... and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully. 

While showing real footage from feminist and political rallies, angered verbal prose on abortion rights, as well as scenes from Cronenberg's infamous "body horror" portions of his filmography (They Came From Within, Videodrome, Rabid, The Brood), Cronenberg explains, "Biology is a course destiny... From beginning to end, biology is destiny. But it's a very human thing to want to derail destiny. Therefore it's a very human thing for us to want to derail biology. And many of my characters are in the process of trying to derail biology in order to derail their destiny as well."

Perhaps most tellingly, Cronenberg states that his own personal goal for They Came From Within was not only to avoid filtering out his ambivalence about his belief system that inspired the film, but to let that guide its events. He states that he believes things can be both dangerous and wonderful at the same time, disgusting and beautiful at the same time. Therefore, it's only appropriate that the parasite in the film that spreads from host to host is both an aphrodisiac...and a venereal disease.

Cronenberg says, "I, on a very very basic level, am afraid of revolution. I don't want to have to experience that. And yet I recognize that there are times when those things are absolutely necessary, because there's no other way to change things."

"My father came up to me and said, 'Look, if you hear the [air raid] sirens, I want you to go down this museum building into the basement. And if you see a flash or something, cover yourself up.'"

 

Halloween night, 1963. The parents are away, the little brother's supposedly out trick-or-treating, and the big sister is sneaking a quickie with her even quicker boyfriend. Someone, you – the audience – sneaks alongside the house, in through the back door, grabs a knife from a drawer, climbs a set of stairs, slips on a clown mask, and stabs that big sister to death. You hurry back down the stairs and out the front door, when you're accosted by the big sister's parents. You, the audience, the killer, are a six-year-old boy. You've just murdered your own sister, and no one will ever know why.

Halloween has long been thought of as the ultimate morality tale. John Carpenter's second film, shot independently, went on to make back its budget nearly 150 times. It created a sub-genre, kick-started the idea of the movie maniac, and established all the rules that are still adhered to in films today. Fuck and die, drink/do drugs and die. If you're the virginal type who prefers schoolbooks and quiet nights to sexual escapades and reckless teen behavior, you might not only survive, but perhaps help put an end to a Halloween night of terror created by that masked man Michael Myers.

This segment of The American Nightmare, and the last film to be discussed, eschews cultural and societal discussion in favor of a psychological one. After all, in all the other films discussed previously, each had its own political inspiration for existing – each came about as a reaction to something awful occuring in our world. Therefore it's only appropriate that Halloween – the most innocent film in the bunch – does the heavy lifting of explaining the why. Why do we like to be scared? Why do we come for this? What can be derived from seeing the innocent (and not so innocent) torn apart, vivisected, their life ended with a thick blanket of red stuff?

"People often say a horror movie is a roller coaster ride," Professor Carol J. Glover questions, "but what is a roller coaster ride?"

Professor Tom Gunning might have the answer, equating an audience's entertainment by a horror film to a protective membrane – something we use to screen out the real horrors of the world. If we invest ourselves in terror on the silver screen, it helps us to deal with the actual terrors that await us on city streets, suburban backyards, or in our own homes.

This was never more relevant than during the 1950s, when our filmmakers were just kids, trying to eke out a life in this nasty world bequeathed to them by their parents. And ironically, they were more scared than the audiences whom they would soon terrify with their bodies of work – a direct result from a period of international unrest known as the Cold War.

"There was a sense that we weren't going to make it," Carpenter remembers."There was a sense that all of us were going to die in atomic war."

"Every fourth Friday – every Friday of the month – we heard the air raid sirens," Landis adds. "And we did drop drills. We were told 'face away from the glass.'"

"If the bomb falls in the center of Manhattan, here's complete devastation, here's partial devastation, and here was radiation poisoning," Romero recalls, using his hands to emphasize how glibly the different devastation zones were discussed back then. "I think we were somewhere in the partial devastation zone."

"I started asking my mother and father, 'Is the world going to come to an end?'" Hooper recalls. "I didn't know if death was going to fall from the skies at any time."

So, after all has been said and done, why horror films? Why present these terrible ideas and images to audiences? Why challenge them and scare them, especially in a world that needs no help in causing fear and helplessness?

"[Horror films are] boot camps for the psyche," says Craven. "It's strengthening [kids'] egos and strengthening their fortitude... That's something the parents never seem to think about... Even if [the films] are giving them nightmares, there's something there that's needed."