‘They pledge themselves to be young, stay young… and die young’

The Initiation is a 1984 American slasher film directed by Larry Stewart from a screenplay by Charles Pratt Jr.  The film stars Vera Miles (Psycho; Psycho II), Clu Gulager (From a Whisper to a Scream; Feast), Daphne Zuniga (The Dorm That Dripped Blood; The Fly II), James Read, Marilyn Kagan and Hunter Tylo.

Wikipedia | IMDb

By the time The Initiation appeared in 1984, the slasher boom was over, at least as far as mainstream audiences were concerned. A few years on from the box office success of films like He Knows You’re Alone, Prom Night and Friday the 13th, the genre had been reduced to second division efforts that could nevertheless make a decent profit through video sales – certainly, I seem to remember seeing this film clogging up the shelves of video rentals stores, never quite looking interesting enough to actually rent.

This second wave of Eighties slashers effectively followed the template laid down by those earlier films, cheerfully trotting out what were already clichéd ideas with their fairly formulaic storylines, and The Initiation is no different. For much of this film, it feels like watching a slasher film constructed by numbers, from the opening synth drone on the soundtrack onwards. A childhood trauma leading to later retribution? Check. Horny teens you look about thirty? Check. An unseen killer? Check. Gratuitous shower scenes? Check. Yet the film does try to offer a little more – not much, but there’s an attempt to add some genuine mystery to the story (though the experienced horror viewer will quickly spot the heavy-handed pop psychology clues) and it at least has a few decent performances, some impressively gory deaths and the odd witty line of dialogue – which is more than we can say for the likes of Girls Nite Out.

Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga) is one a four sorority pledges undergoing initiation to join Delta Ro Kai house (and please, let sororities and frat houses remain a strictly American phenomena – bad enough we have prom nights in the UK now), involving the girls breaking into what is referred to as her father’s department store – though in fact it’s that popular Eighties horror location the shopping mall. Kelly is plagued with nightmares involving her stabbing her father and a man on fire – and it soon turns out, thanks to hypno therapy from boyfriend and psychologist Peter (James Read), that these are in fact repressed memory. Soon, the past starts to catch up with Kelly as her friends fall victim to a mysterious killer in the empty mall. But who might it be? The escaped looney with unconvincing burn make-up on his face? Or perhaps the schizophrenic Kelly? As I said, anyone who has seen more than a handful of horror movies will probably see the final revelation a mile away.

Of course, for many viewers, much of the fun in a film like this is its immediate familiarity. Characters shouting out for friends to ‘stop fooling around’, false jump scares and a selection of grisly murders are grist to the mill for genre enthusiasts, and I’ll admit that under the right circumstances, The Initiation is probably something of a guilty pleasure. It has spectacularly gratuitous nudity, a couple of unexpectedly graphic killings, a terrible band performing at an unconvincing teen party and a couple of old hands – Vera Miles and Clu Gulager – slumming it… and for many people that’s probably more than enough. But it also has characters who are a little more rounded than you’d expect from such basic fare and keeps its ‘teens’ just on the right side of annoying. Not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but above average for what it is and certainly a welcome, and unexpected release on Arrow Video DVD in the UK.

David Flint – Strange Things Are Happening

Deranged is a 1974 Canadian-American horror film written and directed by Alan Ormsby and Jeff Gillen. Produced by Bob Clark (Black Christmas; Murder By Decree), in the US it is also known as Deranged: The Confessions of a Necrophile.

On July 7, 2015, Kino Lorber release Deranged in new Blu-ray and DVD versions featuring audio commentary by Alan Ormsby, audio commentary by film historian Richard Harland Smith, a new featurette and the film’s trailer.

Buy Blu-ray from Amazon.com

Review:

You’ve got to hand it to Wisconsin necrophile, cannibal and murderer Ed Gein – his insanity-soaked criminal exploits have inspired a lot of films over the years, including Psycho (1960). But the early 1970s in particular were a great time for Gein-flavoured movies, possibly because it was the first time his twisted crimes could be more explicitly explored. Thus we had the likes of Three on a Meathook, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre … and Deranged, the film that came closest to telling the real story until more recent biopics.

Deranged takes most of the facts of the case, but changes the names and the details to create a black comedy that is reminiscent of EC comics with its mix of humour and ghoulishness. Here, Gein is reinvented as Ezra Cobb, played brilliantly by character actor Robert Blossom. Middle-aged Ez lives with his aged, religiously fanatical mother (Cosette Lee) in their remote farmhouse, and when mother dies – haemorrhaging blood while reminding him that “the wages of sin is syphilis, gonorrhoea and death” and that only fat women can be trusted – he begins a slow descent into madness. After a year, he digs up his decaying mother to bring her home and soon she’s joined by several other corpses that Ez is using for ‘repairs’. Soon, his grave robbing turns to murder, as Ezra’s sinful desires and madness collide.

Deranged is, even now, a remarkably potent horror film, light on gore (sensibly, as Tom Savini’s early special effects are often a tad too red to be convincing) but high on gruesomeness. The story is told by an on-screen narrator who turns up, Rod Serling style, in the middle of scenes – something that adds a curious theatricality to the proceedings and perhaps takes the edge off the horrific nature of the story. This narration – straight-faced but bordering on the camp – is a novel touch, one that reinforces the film’s connection to horror comics and their hosts, and is sensibly used less and less as the film progresses and the events start to speak for themselves. The snow-covered, wintery locations stand in marked contrast to Texas Chain Saw‘s blistering Texas heat and add a bleakness to the story that reflects Ezra’s fixation with death.

Blossoms is amazing as Ezra – he’s at once an innocent, a comic character and sympathetic, yet at any moment he will give a sly look that suggests he is sharper than he seems to be and during the murders – especially of barmaid Mary (Micki Moore) – he’s a genuinely monstrous, sadistic character. This killing, the centrepiece of the movie, is remarkably creepy as Mary stumbles into the room full of corpses, only for one of them to be revealed as Ezra in full necro-transvestite mode, wearing the skin, hair and clothes of a dead woman.

Turning a true crime story into a black comedy is always going to be a difficult thing to pull off successfully, but Deranged manages it. The sick humour comes not only from the twitchy performance of Blossoms, but also the absurdity of the situation. If you’ve read anything about Gein, you’ll know that the whole story really does seem like a ghoulish comic strip, right down to him cheerfully confessing his crimes to people who just assume he’s joking (something recreated effectively here). But the film doesn’t make light of his murders – in fact, the movie makes a point of allowing us to get to know his victims, making their deaths all the more horrifying, and the film’s ending is a quietly unnerving moment of psychotic horror.

I’ve seen Deranged several times and it’s never looked as good as the Arrow Video Blu-ray – even the theatrical print I once caught was vastly inferior. In fact, it’s quite unsettling to see the film looking so sharp. This new Blu-ray edition is also the first time the film has been released uncut in the UK, complete with the often missing brain scooping scene.

David Flint

Buy on Blu-ray + DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Bates Motel is a belated 1987 television movie spin-off of the 1960 suspense/horror film Psycho scripted and directed by Richard Rothstein (Human Experiments; Death Valley) The film was originally produced as a pilot for a TV series based around the Bates Motel; however, it was never picked up by any network. With the financial failure of Psycho III, Universal decided to continue the franchise as a television series; taking inspiration from the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street TV series.

Norman Bates is portrayed by Kurt Paul, who previously stood in as a stunt double for Anthony Perkins in Psycho II and Psycho III. Perkins declined involvement in the project and even heavily boycotted it. The film was subsequently released on VHS in various territories, including the UK, but has since vanished.

Plot teaser:

Alex West (Bud Cort) roomed with and became close friends with Norman Bates at the state lunatic asylum for nearly 20 years. After Bates’ death, Alex finds that he is named in Norman’s will as the inheritor of the Bates Motel, which has been vacant since Norman’s arrest. Alex travels to Bates’ California hometown (which this film has inexplicably renamed Fairville from the original film’s Fairvale) and with a little help from teenage runaway Willie (Lori Petty) and local handyman Henry Watson (Moses Gunn), Alex struggles to re-open the motel for business, only to have strange things happen.

Wikipedia | IMDb

Reviews:

‘It barely feels like a Psycho film and instead plays out like an inspirational story of how one can successfully renovate and reopen an establishment whose previous owner was a maniac. The tone is ultra-cheesy and sappy, with tender moments often accompanied by soft piano music that felt like it was ripped from an after-school special.’ Brett Gallman, Oh, The Horror!

‘Sincerely, this is a horrible, horrible movie that doesn’t even deserve to be aired on midnight television. It doesn’t even deserve to be called campy —  you have to earn that. This movie does not deserve to exist; it is lazy, stupid, and an insult to the brand of Psycho.” Charles Beall, Anti-Film School

Christmas is generally seen as a jolly old time for the whole family – if you are to believe the TV commercials, everyone gets together for huge communal feasts while excited urchins unwrap whatever new toy has been hyped as the must-have gift of the year. It is not, generally speaking, seen as a time of horror.

And yet horror has a long tradition of being part of the festive season. Admittedly, the horror in question was traditionally the ghost story, ideally suited for cold winter nights, where people gather around the fire to hear some spine chilling tale of ghostly terror – a scenario recreated in the BBC’s 2000 series Ghost Stories for Christmas, with Christopher Lee reading M.R. James tales to a room full of public school boys. That series was part of a tradition that included a similar one in 1986 with Robert Powell (Harlequin) and the children’s series Spine Chillers from 1980, as well as the unofficially titled annual series Ghost Stories for Christmas than ran for much of the 1970s and is occasionally revived to this day.

The idea of the traditional Xmas ghost story can be traced back to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, where miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts in an effort to make him change his ways. It’s more a sentimental morality tale than a horror story, though in the original book and one or two adaptations, the ghosts are capable of causing the odd shudder. Sadly, the story has been ill-served by cinematic adaptations – the best version is probably the 1951 adaptation, though by then there had already been several earlier attempts, going back to 1910. A few attempts have been made at straight retellings since then, but all to often the story is bastardised (a musical version in 1970, various cartoons) or modernised – the best known versions are probably Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol, both of which are inexplicably popular. A 1999 TV movie tried to give the story a sense of creepiness once again, but the problem now is that the story is so familiar that it seems cliched even when played straight. The idea of a curmudgeon being made to see the true meaning of Christmas is now an easy go-to for anyone grinding out anonymous TV movies that end up on Christmas-only TV channels or gathering dust on DVD.

Outside of A Christmas Carol, horror cinema tended to avoid festive-themed stories for a long time. While fantasies like The Bishop’s Wife, It’s a Wonderful Life and Bell, Book and Candle played with the supernatural, these were light, feel-good dramas and comedies on the whole, designed to warm the heart rather than stop it dead. TV shows like The Twilight Zone would sometimes have a Christmas themed tale, but again these tended to be the more sentimental stories.

Buy Dead of Night on Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.co.uk

The only film to hint at Christmas creepiness was 1945 British portmanteau film Dead of Night, though even here, the festive themed tale, featuring a ghostly encounter at a children’s party, is more sentimental than terrifying. Meanwhile, the Mexican children’s film Santa Claus vs The Devil (1959) might see Santa in battle with Satan, but it’s all played for wholesome laughs rather than scares.

Santa Claus vs The Devil

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the darker side of Christmas began to be explored in movies, and it was another British portmanteau film that began it all. Based on EC Comics, the Amicus film Tales from the Crypt (1972) opened with a tale in which a murderous wife played by Joan Collins finds herself terrorised by an escaped psycho on Christmas Eve, unable to call the police because of her recently deceased hubby lying on the carpet. The looney is dressed as Santa, and her young daughter has been eagerly awaiting his arrival, leading to a suitably mean-spirited twist. The story was subsequently retold in a 1989 episode of the Tales from the Crypt TV series.

Buy Tales from the Crypt + Vault of Horror on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Buy Tales from the Crypt on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

This film would lead the way towards decades of Christmas horror. Of course, lots of films had an incidental Christmas connection, taking place in the festive season (or ‘winter’, as it used to be known). Movies like Night Train Murders, Rabid, Umberto Lenzi’s Eaten Alive! and even the misleadingly named Silent Night Bloody Night have a Christmas connection, but it’s incidental to the main story.

A dead Santa in David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977)

Those are not the movies we are discussing here. No, to REALLY count as a Christmas film, then the festive celebrations surely need to be at the heart of events?

Buy Black Christmas on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Two distinct types of Christmas horror developed. There was the Mad Santa films, like Tales from the Crypt on the one hand, and the ‘bad things happening at Christmas’ movie on the other. The pioneer of the latter was Bob Clark’s 1974 film Black Christmas (aka Silent Night, Evil Night), which not only pioneered the Christmas horror movie but also was an early template for the seasonal slasher film.

Some critics have argued, with good cause, that this is the movie that laid the foundations for Halloween a few years later – a psycho film (with a possibly supernatural slant) set during a holiday, where young women are terrorised by an unseen force. But while John Carpenter’s film would be a smash hit and effectively reinvent the genre, Black Christmas went more or less unnoticed, its reputation only building years later.

In 2006, Black Christmas was remade by Glen Morgan for Dimension Films as Black X-mas in a gorier but less effective loose retelling of the original story. Interchangeable ‘eye-candy’ victims add nothing to a concept that was creepily effective in the 70s but now seemed like death-by-numbers, albeit with a gruesome back story.

Buy Black X-Mas on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Preceding Black Christmas was TV movie Home for the Holidays, in which four girls are picked off over Christmas by a yellow rain-coated killer who may or may not be their wicked stepmother. A decent if unremarkable psycho killer story, the film was directed by TV movie veteran John Llewellyn Moxey.

Buy Dead of Night from Amazon.co.uk

Also made for TV, this time in Britain, The Exorcism was the opening episode of TV series Dead of Night (no connection to the film of that name) broadcast in 1972. One of the few surviving episodes of the series, The Exorcism is a powerful mix of horror and social commentary, as a group of champagne socialists celebrating Christmas in the country cottage that one couple have bought as a holiday home find themselves haunted by the ghosts of the peasants who had starved to death there during a famine. While theatrical in style and poorly shot, the show is nevertheless creepily effective.

1980 saw Christmas Evil (aka You Better Watch Out), a low budget oddity by Lewis Jackson that has since gained cult status. In this film, a put-upon toy factory employee decided to become a vengeful Santa, putting on the red suit and setting out to sort the naughty from the nice. It’s a strange film, mixing pathos, horror and black comedy, yet oddly it works, making it one of the more interesting Christmas horrors out there.

Buy Christmas Evil on Arrow DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Also made in 1980, but rather less successful, was To All a Goodnight, the only film directed by Last House on the Left star David Hess and written by The Incredible Melting Man himself, Alex Rebar. This generic slasher, with a house full of horny sorority girls and their boyfriends being picked off by a psycho in a Santa outfit, is too slow and poorly made to be effective.

The most notorious Christmas horror film hit cinemas in 1984. Silent Night Deadly Night  was, in most ways, a fairly generic slasher, with a Santa-suited maniac on the loose taking revenge against the people who have been deemed ‘naughty’.

The film itself is gory fun but is nothing special — essentially the same premise as Christmas Evil without the intelligence — and might have gone unnoticed if it wasn’t for a provocative advertising campaign that emphasised the Santa-suited psycho and caused such outrage that the film was rapidly pulled from U.S. theatres.

Buy Silent Night, Deadly Night on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Nevertheless, it had made a small fortune in the couple of weeks it played, and continued to be popular when reissued with a less contentious campaign. The film is almost certainly directly responsible for most ‘psycho Santa’ films since – all hoping to cash in on the publicity that comes with public outrage – and spawned four sequels.

Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 is notorious for the amount of footage from the first film that is reused to pad out the story, and was banned in the UK (where the first film was unreleased until 2009). Part 3 was directed, surprisingly, by Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) and adds a psychic element to the story. Part 4, directed by Brian Yuzna, drops the killer Santa story entirely (!) and has no connection to the other films beyond the title, telling a story of witchcraft and cockroaches, while Part 5 – The Toymaker – is also unconnected to the other movies.

Buy Silent Night, Deadly Night 3-disc set from Amazon.co.uk

Tales of the Third Dimension (1984) was another of producer/director Earl Owensby’s 3-D productions shot in North Carolina. The black comedy horror anthology features a final tale about a murderous granny who tries to do away with her grandkids on Christmas Eve. She uses kitchen appliances and cutlery, poison and a rifle to try and kill the pair of unfortunate kids but the tone is silly rather than nasty.

Also made in 1984, but attracting less attention, Don’t Open Till Christmas was that rarest of things, a 1980s British horror film – and one of the sleaziest ever made to boot. Starring and directed by Edmund Purdom from a screenplay by exploitation veterans Derek Ford and Alan Birkinshaw, the film sees a psycho killer, traumatised by a childhood experience at Christmas, who begins offing Santas – or more accurately, anyone he sees dressed as Santa, which in this case includes a porn model, a man at a peepshow and people having sex. With excessive gore, nudity and an overwhelming atmosphere of grubbiness, the film was become a cult favourite for fans of bad taste cinema.

Buy Don’t Open Till Christmas on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

The third Christmas horror of 1984 was the most wholesome and the most successful. Joe Dante’s Gremlins is all too often overlooked when people talk about festive horror, but from the opening credits, with Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) belting out over the soundtrack, to the carol singing Gremlins and Phoebe Cates’ story of why she hates Christmas, the festive season is at the very heart of the film. Gremlins remains the most fun Christmas movie ever made, a heady mix of EC-comics ghoulishness, sentiment, slapsick and action, plus some of the best monsters ever put on film.

Buy Gremlins on Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Gremlins would spawn many knock offs – Ghoulies, Munchies, Critters and more – but only Elves, made in 1989, had a similar Christmas theme. This oddball effort, which proposes that Hitler’s REAL plan for the Master Race was human/elf hybrids.

When the elves are revived in a pagan ritual at Christmas, only an alcoholic ex-cop played by Dan Haggerty can stop them. Alas, it’s not as much fun as this brief synopsis suggests.

Family horror returned in 1993 stop-motion film A Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick and produced / co-written by Tim Burton. This chirpy musical sees Pumpkin King Jack Skellington, leader of Halloween Town, stumbling upon Christmas Town and deciding to take it over. It’s a charming and visually lush movie that has unsurprisingly become a festive family favourite over the last twenty years and now comes with a 3-D conversion to boot.

Buy A Nightmare Before Christmas on 3-D Blu-ray | Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Buy Santa Claws on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Rather less fun is 1996’s Santa Claws, a typically rotten effort by John Russo (Night of the Living Dead), with Debbie Rochon as a Scream Queen being stalked by a murderous fan in a Santa outfit. This low rent affair is pretty forgettable.

It is one of several low/no budget video quickies that aimed to cash in on the Christmas horror market with tales of killer Santas – others include Satan Claus (1996), Christmas Season Massacre (2001) and Psycho Santa (2003).

Buy Psycho Santa and Satan Claus on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

1997 saw the release of Jack Frost (not to be confused with the family film from a year later of the same name). Here, a condemned serial killer is involved in a crash with a truck carrying genetic material, which – of course – causes him to mutate into a killer snowman. Inspired by the Child’s Play movie, Jack Frost is pretty silly, but the outlandish concept, knowing sexism and a mix of black comedy and horror made it popular enough to spawn a self-mocking sequel!

Buy Jack Frost on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman set on a Tiki-themed holiday Hell tropical island. Less confrontational than the original, the second “cold-blooded killer” outing features Warners Bros-style cartoon violence that includes one victim killed by a frozen snow anvil and possibly the world’s first and only point-of-view shot from an ice cube!

Buy Jack Frost 2 on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

A headless killer snowman also turned up in the ‘A Scooby-Doo! Christmas’ episode of animated TV series What’s New, Scooby Doo? Scooby and his pals arrive in a town where Christmas is not celebrated because a headless snowman terrorises the residents, so the amateur sleuths set out to solve the mystery…

That might seem as ludicrous as Christmas horror goes, but 1998 saw Feeders 2: Slay Bells, in which the alien invaders of the title are fought off by Santa and his elves. Shot on video with little money, it’s a film you might struggle to get through.

Buy Feeders + Feeders 2: Slay Bells on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Rather better was the 1999 The League of Gentlemen Christmas Special, which mixes the regular characters of the series into a series of stories that are even darker than usual. Mixing vampires, family curses and voodoo into a trilogy of stories that are linked, Amicus style, it’s as creepy as it is funny, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that Mark Gatiss would graduate to writing the more recent BBC Christmas ghost stories.

Buy The League of Gentlemen Christmas Special on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

The League of Gentlemen

Two popular video franchises collided in 2004’s Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys, with the great-nephew of the original Puppet Master battling an evil organisation that wants his formula to help bring killer toys to life on Christmas Eve. Like most of the films in the series, this is cheap but cheerful, throwaway stuff.

2005’s Santa’s Slay (“Violent Night, Gory Night”) sees Santa reinvented as a demon who is forced to be nice and give toys to children. Released from this demand, he reverts to his murderous ways. Given that Santa is played by fearsome looking wrestler Bill Goldberg, you have to wonder how anyone ever trusted him to come down their chimney and NOT kill them.

Buy Santa’s Slay on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Also in 2005 came The Christmas Tale, part of the Spanish 6 Films to Keep You Awake series, in which a group of children find a woman dressed as Santa at the bottom of a well. It turns out that she’s a bank robber and the kids decide to starve her into handing over the stolen cash. But things take a darker turn when she escapes and the kids think she is a zombie. It’s a witty, inventive little tale.

Buy 6 Films to Keep You Awake on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

2006 brought Two Front Teeth, where Santa is a vampire assisted by zombie elves in a rather ludicrous effort. Equally silly, Treevenge is a 2008 short film by Jason Eisener, who would go on to shoot Hobo with a Shotgun. It’s the story of sentient Christmas trees who have enough of being cut down and displayed in people’s home and set out to take their revenge.

Bikini Bloodbath Christmas is, unfortunately, a knowingly sub-John Waters Troma crass abomination that ranks as one of the genuinely worst films of all time. This psycho Santa’s homicidal holiday intervention is most welcome as he decimates most of the bitchy amateur-class cast!

Aside from being set on Christmas Eve, when normally busy places can be scarily empty, P2 is not very festive, being the story of a workaholic young executive trapped in an underground car park with a fixated stalker psycho…

Also set on Christmas Eve, the obscure low budget 12/24 is about a group of disparate characters heading home for the night when the dead begin to rise and seek human flesh. Low rent Scream Queen Tiffany Shepis stars.

The undead wearily cropped up again in Joe Zerull’s knowingly self-referential comedy horror A Cadaver Christmas, also known as Zombies at Christmas (2011).

Recently, the Christmas horror has become more international, with two European films in 2010 offering an insight into different festive traditions. Dick Maas’ Sint (aka Saint) is a lively Dutch comedy horror which features a vengeful Sinterklaas (similar to, but not the same as, Santa Claus) coming back on December 5^th in years when that date coincides with a full moon, to carry out mass slaughter. It’s a fun, fast-paced movie that also offers a rare glimpse into festive traditions that are rather different to anything seen outside the local culture (including the notorious Black Peters).

Buy Sint on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Finnish film Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, on the other hand, sees the original (and malevolent) Santa unearthed during an excavation, leading to the discovery of a whole race of Santas, who are then captured and sold around the world. Witty and atmospheric, the film was inspired by Jalmari Helander’s original short film Rare Exports, Inc, a spoof commercial for the company selling the wild Santas.

Buy Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale on Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.co.uk

But these two high quality, entertaining Christmas horrors were very much the exception to the rule by this stage. The genre was more accurately represented by the likes of 2010’s Yule Die, another Santa suited slasher, or 2011’s Slaughter Claus, a plotless, pretty unwatchable amateur effort from Charles E. Cullen featuring Santa and the Bi-Polar Elf on an unexplained and uninteresting killing spree.

Bloody Christmas (2012) sees a former movie star going crazy as he plays Santa on a TV show. 2009 film Deadly Little Christmas is a ham-fisted retread of slashers like Silent Night Deadly Night and 2002’s One Hell of a Christmas is a Danish Satanic horror comedy. Bikini Bloodbath Christmas (2009) is the third in a series of pointless tits ‘n’ gore satires that fail as horror, soft porn or comedy.

And, of course, the festive horror movie can’t escape the seemingly endless low budget zombie onslaught. Besides the aforementioned movies, 2009 saw Silent Night, Zombie Night, in 2010 there was Santa Claus vs. the Zombies, in 2012 we had Christmas with the Dead, Stalled was set in a ladies toilet during a Christmas Eve party, and Silent Night of the Living Dead is currently in pre-production. Most of these films, except perhaps the more cynical Stalled, are likely to fill you with the spirit of the season.

Buy Silent Night, Bloody Night: The Homecoming on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

So although we can hardly say that the Christmas horror film is at full strength, it is at least as prolific as ever. With a remake of Silent Night Deadly Night, now just called Silent Night, recent British movies Silent Night, Bloody Night: The Homecoming and Christmas Slay, it seems that filmmaker’s fascination with the dark side of the season isn’t going away anytime soon.

Buy Silent Night on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Article by David Flint

Alan Ormsby has been something of a jack-of-all-trades in the film industry: not only a highly successful and award winning screenwriter, but also director, actor, make-up effects technician and author. And although his career has taken him far from the world of the horror movie, it remains a genre for which he has fond feelings.

As a child, Ormsby grew up watching classic horror and fantasy films like King Kong and Disney’s Pinocchio, and was fascinated by animation. His early ambition was to be a cartoonist, and would hold strange garage shows for the local kids where he told stories and displayed illustrations on huge sheets of paper. After a while, Ormsby graduated to shooting these garage shows on 8mm film, and slowly his interests moved from cartoons to film-making, and acting in particular.

In the late Sixties, he met Bob Clark whilst the two of them were attending the University of Miami. Clark was an aspiring playwright and Ormsby too was developing his writing skills. Before long the two of them were working together on plays, sometimes writing, sometimes directing, sometimes acting. It was the start of a working relationship that would last several years.

When Clark raised a pittance to make a low budget horror film which would become Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, he turned to Ormsby to help him. Although mainly written by Clark, Ormsby would rework elements of the screenplay enough to secure a co-writer credit. He also took the lead role in a cast that was mainly made up of friends and family (Ormsby’s wife Anya took the female lead). On top of this, he also provided the make-up effects for the film, which not only included the expected gore effects but also several zombies. These walking corpses looked surprisingly effective given the low budget and lack of time available.

Children… was successful enough to bring Clark and Ormsby to the attention of a Canadian production company who hired them to make another horror film. This time, Ormsby wrote the screenplay for a movie he called The Veteran. Unlike the jokey Children…, this was a dark, fairly low-key tale inspired by J.W. Jacobs’ classic story The Monkey’s Paw, transposed to 1970’s America. In Ormsby’s version of the tale, a soldier killed in Vietnam is wished back to life by his mother, only to return as a zombie in need of blood to live. The film was retitled several times – at one point known as The Night Andy Came Home, it eventually saw release as both Deathdream and Dead of Night in 1972.

In 1974, Ormsby worked with another Children… alumnus, Jeff Gillen, on Deranged, a fairly accurate retelling of the crimes of serial killer Ed Gein, the inspiration behind Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Although the Gein character was renamed Ezra Cobb, the film stuck mainly to the facts, told with a strong sense of gallows humour. A fine twitchy performance from Roberts Blossom and gore effects by a young Tom Savini (supervised by Ormsby) have made the film a cult classic over the last thirty years.

In 1975, Ormsby wrote a book called Movie Monsters: Monster Make-Up & Monster Shows To Put On, which gave kids instructions on mixing fake blood and horror make-up, plus details of how to run effective garage shows, much like those he used to run himself. He also created the doll Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces (a reference to Lon Chaney).

In 1977, Ormsby would provide the make-up for Ken Weiderhorn’s Nazi zombie film Shock Waves (aka Death Corps).

Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, Ormsby would work as a writer on a wide variety of films and TV shows. He won acclaim for his screenplay for My Bodyguard in 1980, and returned to horror a year later, writing Paul Schrader’s controversial remake of Cat People. He also worked again with Bob Clark on Porkys II: The Next Day in 1983.

For TV, he wrote science fiction film Almost Human (1987) and thrillers Indecency (1992), The Disappearance of Nora (1993) and Deadly Web (1996), the latter an early cyberstalking tale.

In 1991, Clark asked Ormsby to write and direct Popcorn, a modern horror film that he was producing. Unfortunately, there were a series of disagreements between Ormsby and studio executives, and he left the project (his screenplay is credited to Tod Hackett). In 1996, he wrote crime thriller The Substitute, about a Vietnam vet who goes undercover as a teacher to root out gang violence. Amazingly, the film has spawned three sequels!

Ormsby’s work has slowed down in the last decade, suggesting that he is now enjoying retirement, though he still pops up for interviews about his early work.

David Flint, Horrorpedia

Creepshow III (aka Creepshow 3) is a 2006 American horror film directed by James Glenn Dudelson and Ana Clavell (Day of the Dead: Contagium). It is a sequel to the 1982 horror anthology movie Creepshow, by Stephen King and George A. Romero. The film, like the original, consists of five tales of comedic horror, although there is no EC Comics angle this time around. The film was made in 2006, and was released in early 2007. No one from the production of either Creepshow or Creepshow 2 was involved.

Wraparound story

Unlike the first two Creepshow installments in which the wraparound element linking the stories was a horror comic, Creepshow III takes an approach similar to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, in which characters from each story collide with each other during the film. There is also a hotdog stand as a common element in the movie. Brochures, ads and other things from the hotdog stand are peppered throughout.

Alice

Alice (Stephanie Pettee) is a stuck-up, snotty teenager who comes home to find her father meddling with a new universal remote control. Whenever she presses one of the buttons on the device, the whole family except for Alice changes ethnicity (i.e., the “Color and Hue Settings” button makes her family turn African-American, and the “Subtitles” button makes her family turn Hispanic). During this, Alice gradually mutates into what is supposedly her “true form”. Just when Alice thinks everything is back to normal, her father presses another button, revealing Alice’s true form. Her family is absolutely horrified. The story ends with Professor Dayton, the mad scientist from down the street, using another remote control to turn Alice into a white rabbit. Notable in this story is the obvious link to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

The Radio

Jerry (A. J. Bowen) is a part-time security guard who buys a radio from a homeless street vendor; however, this mysterious new radio is far from ordinary as it can have a conversation with Jerry. Very soon Jerry is stealing money and murdering people, all at the whim of his new radio. After escaping with a hooker who lives in his building, Jerry is told by the radio to kill the hooker or she will kill him. He refuses and destroys the radio. Right after, the hooker finds his gun in the car and shoots Jerry, killing him. Moments after she kills him and wipes the gun clean, she is shot in the head. The shooter is revealed to be the pimp living in the same building as Jerry. When the pimp returns to his car, another radio tells him to go and start a new life.

Call Girl

Rachel, a murderous call girl, receives a request from a shy man named Victor, her newest client. Rachel thinks he will be just another easy victim. When Rachel gets there, scenes of a murdered family with their necks ripped out are flashed on-screen, and there is no evidence of Victor living in the house. Rachel then chains him to the bed and proceeds to stab him in the chest, suffocate him by a pillow over his face, and then has a quick shower. She then keeps hearing Victor’s voice saying, “You killed me.” Rachel removes the pillow and reveals a gruesome creature with a large, toothy mouth…

The Professor’s Wife

Two former students come to visit Professor Dayton and meet his fiancee, Kathy. Having been victims of his practical jokes in the past, they suspect that Kathy is actually a robot, which the professor has supposedly spent the last 20 years working on in his laboratory. She also behaves like a robot and does not eat or drink, which further indicates that she is probably mechanical. When the professor is out of the house, they decide to dismantle Kathy to see what she looks like on the inside. To their utter horror, they learn that Kathy really was a human being after all…

Haunted Dog

A cruel, miserly doctor, Dr. Farwell, is working a 30-day court-ordered sentence at a free clinic, where he is very insolent and rude towards his patients. He even goes as far as to show no sympathy towards a young girl with abrain tumor and mocks an elderly woman who is going blind. One day he buys a hot dog. Dr. Farwell accidentally drops it on the ground. He sadistically decides to give the dirty hot dog to a homeless man. The homeless man dies after taking one bite, and he returns to haunt the cruel doctor. The story ends with the doctor having a heart attack from having had too many encounters with his ghostly stalker…

“Those who appreciated the retro-quirk of the first two Creepshow films (and the awesome graphic novel illustrated by Bernie Wrightson) will probably find themselves tempted to smash their faces into a well shortly after this third entry begins. The filmmaker’s have somehow managed to suck everything that was fun about the first two movies out of this third entry and replaced it all with horrible, forced comedy, bad effects, crap acting and a shoddy script. The direction is uninspired, the gore effects decidedly mediocre and the whole thing feels like nothing more than an attempt to cash in on the name in hopes of milking some cash out of the fans of the first two films.” Ian Jane, DVD Talk

“Had Creepshow III been less farce and more camp it might have gotten over how long the stories take to get going, lack of shocks. While there’s some reasonable stuff in here (the gore) as it stands it’s more of a crap show.” R.J. Bayley, Popcorn Horror

“Creepshow III‘s scare factor suffers from its lacking narrative. Most of the stories open with sequences that build towards nothing and add little to the story, serving more to pad out the film than establish anything relevant. What’s funny is that the writer could have used the film’s many instances of downtime to flesh out the characters even a little bit. With the exception of AJ Bowen’s character in the second segment (which was arguably the only good performance in the entire film), all of the characters are flat, dull, and lifeless.” Joe Shaffer, Realm of Gaming

“Stay away from Creepshow 3, especially if you saw and enjoyed the first two. The second story may be half-decent but overall the film is a complete insult to the series and should have been shit-canned at the idea-gathering stage.” Chris Scullion, That Was a Bit Mental

“I didn’t get angry at it for trying to pass itself off as a Creepshow film – it’s fairly obvious in the first five minutes or so that this thing was not going to be nearly as charming as the original film. So I calmly put that out of my head and just let the movie be what it was, which is to say a convoluted mash-up of five of the most retarded quasi-horror stories I’ve ever seen. The stories are thinly strung together; the acting is at times like watching a bunch of hyenas bouncing around throwing poop at each other; and the writing and direction show all the skills of a schizophrenic on acid… BUT, it still has mild entertainment value at some points simply because of its silliness. You also cannot take it even the least bit seriously, and again, remember that it is a Creepshow movie in name ONLY.” The Girl Who Loves Horror

Wikipedia | IMDb

Man Bites Dog (French: C’est arrivé près de chez vous, It Happened in Your Neighborhood) is a 1992 Belgian darkly comic crime-mockumentary written, produced and directed by Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde, who are also the film’s co-editor, cinematographer and lead actor respectively.

The film follows a crew of film-makers following a serial killer, recording his horrific crimes for a documentary they are producing. At first dispassionate observers, they find themselves caught up in the increasingly chaotic and nihilistic violence.

In modern day Belgium, a small amateur film crew are filming the exploits and philosophical musings of a very ordinary man, Ben (Poelvoorde, A Town Called Panic) who happens to be a serial killer. In between pointing out the intricacies of the local architecture and nature of the chattering classes, he dons a suit and kills people for both fun and profit, however small. Accompanying him on both his killing sprees and visits to his mother and grandparents, the film crew view their subject at arms length, shooting the minutiae of his family life with the same unedited, cold glare as his barbaric and heartless murders. We are distantly introduced to Ben’s girlfriend, who he reminisces about meeting when he was 17 or 18 and she was 10…

Ben explains, matter-of-factly, that he likes to begin his week by killing a postman (which we duly see in close-up) as, not only does it supply him with a cache of un-banked giros, it also alerts him to potentially rich elderly folk in the area – the elderly being his favourite prey due to their lack of resistance and habit of surrounding themselves with their accumulated wealth. Masquerading as a film crew documenting the lives of the elderly, they enter the residence of an old lady in a tower block apartment and before she can fully answer the first question, Ben bellows in her ear, causing her to have a heart attack. He advises both the crew and the watching audience that his keen eye spotted a bottle of tablets relating to heart complaints on the table as they entered, his observation skills allowing to him ‘save a bullet’ whilst still serving as a perfect opportunity to loot her house. He guides us through the rooms, highlighting the places he finds hidden cash, which indeed he does. He has already taught the crew the science of ballasting a corpse with the correct weight according to the gender and age of the victim, detailing the importance of considering the very old or very young (less weight due to their “porous bones”) and even the optimum amount for a midget.

The documentary crew become more complicit as time passes – from simply observing, they begin to aid in the killings in small ways (adjusting lighting, helping to bundle the corpses in rugs and throwing the evidence into canals and quarries) and when they run out of funds, Ben returns the favour by offering to pay for the remainder of the shoot, his ego and vanity now truly out of control. We realise Ben is not only hateful of society generally but has special contempt for immigrants and women. When goaded by the reporter, Remy (Belvaux) during what become regular, Bacchanalian meetings, as to why he only attacks the most vulnerable and defenceless members of society, he is greatly angered and suggests they head to the suburbs for a more challenging task.

Ben’s bravura performance is thrown by the slaying of a young man and woman in their house being interrupted by a small child who witnesses his parents being killed. After a chase in the nearby woods and the assistance of the crew, the child is returned to the house and suffocated. To follow, a ‘standard’ kill also goes awry, one victim fleeing from the car he was ambushed in and taking shelter in a factory. He is eventually shot dead but not before the crew’s sound recordist is also killed in the cross-fire. Incredibly, on the way out of the factory, they stumble upon another camera crew, a virtual matryoshka doll of a film covering a film covering a film. It goes without saying that the new crew and quickly and decisively dealt with.

Although visibly shaken, Remy is certain his dead colleague would have accepted his fate and that they all realise their jobs come with ‘occupational hazards’. Further footage of his family’s somewhat humdrum problems are punctuated by a house invasion by Ben and the crew, a young couple rudely interrupted in flagrante. Any comedic elements to the film are resolutely trampled upon as the film-makers and subject gang-rape the girl, Ben still offering his thoughts and tips whilst he takes his turn. The pair are later murdered and gutted. Ben’s violence becomes more and more random until he kills an acquaintance in front of his girlfriend and friends during a birthday dinner. Spattered with blood, they act as though nothing horrible has happened, continuing to offer Ben presents. The film crew disposes of the body for Ben. After a victim flees before he can be killed, Ben is arrested, but later escapes. At this point someone starts taking revenge on him and his family. Ben discovers that his parents have been killed, along with his girlfriend: a flautist, she has been murdered in a particularly humiliating manner, with her flute inserted into her anus. This prompts Ben to decide that he must leave. He meets the camera crew to say farewell and in typical manner begins to poetically conclude the documentary with his now well-rehearshed panache but it seems he has made one too many enemies along the way…

Depending on your viewpoint, it was either incredibly fortuitous or horrendous bad luck that Man Bites Dog appeared within months of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant and Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video, all examples of film-makers pushing the boundaries of cinema and being unafraid at the depiction of violence and showing the perpetrators of crime as being essentially unremarkable, often likeable people. Shot in black and white and using only diegetic sound, Man Bites Dog still made a huge impression upon release in 1992, the graphic and unflinching violence made all the more savage by the brevity and simplicity of the kills – although there are few lingering shots, there is no flinching from the murder of neither elderly ladies nor small children. The casting of the film-makers themselves in the main parts – with Poelvoorde as the assassin, and each of his co-writers playing the crew members – helped make this low-budget black-and-white picture affordable, the almost unthinkably low budget of around £15,000 being raised amongst their friends, families and French-speaking Belgian Film Trust. The somewhat blurred lines near the beginning of the film as to whether what we’re seeing is real, film or documentary are mirrored by the crew themselves who forget their intended role as both the charisma of Ben and the thrill of the attacks consume them.

Unusually, the murders are mostly gun kills, an unusual tack for a serial killer to take (The Town That Dreaded Sundown is another rare example) but the swift dispatch is entirely in keeping with Ben’s view of society and the many expendable groups who blight his life – a black security guard is chastised for ‘camouflaging’ himself in the dark due to his colour. Though known as being darkly comic, it’s not a film you should expect to be laughing at, the absurdity of the premise being a little too close to real life, especially with the subsequent rise of reality television and ever-unblinking news reports of any manner of horrors. It might be reading too much into the film to query how on Earth the faux documentary-makers ever intended to cut the film for actual public consumption.

Upon release, the film received the André Cavens Award for Best Film by the Belgian Film Critics Association (UCC), played at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992, where it was awarded the SACD award for Best Feature in the Critics’ Week, and went on to win prizes at the Toronto Film Festival and from the French Syndicate of Film Critics. It was a box-office success in its home country, where it out-grossed Batman Returns and was only just held off the number one spot by Lethal Weapon 3. Man Bites Dog was not without its critics, most of them armed with scissors – the film was heavily edited in America and Australia, the film booker for the Tokyo Film Festival fired for simply trying to screen it. It was banned outright in Sweden whilst in France, the poster, originally depicting a baby’s dummy flying out of the assassin’s gun, being replaced by a set of dentures. Perversely, the film was released uncut in the UK.

The magnificent Poelvoorde went on to have huge success in his native Belgium in rather more salubrious fare and also a lead role in the Oscar-nominated, Coco Before Chanel. Rémy Belvaux never shrank from his enfant terrible tag and achieved further notoriety in 1998 for throwing a custard pie at Bill Gates whilst he was visiting Brussels. Tragically, Belvaux committed suicide in 2006 at the age of only 39 after a long struggle with depression.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia.

Skywald Publications was a 1970s American publisher of black-and-white comic magazines, primarily the horror anthologies Nightmare, Psycho, and Scream.

Skywald’s first publication was Nightmare #1 (Dec. 1970). The company lasted until early 1975, with Psycho #24 (March 1975) being its final publication. Nightmare published 23 issues and Scream put out 11 issues.

The company name is a combination of those of its founders, former Marvel Comics production manager Sol Brodsky (“Sky”) and low-budget entrepreneur Israel Waldman (“wald”), whose I. W. Publications (also known as Super Comics) in the late 1950s and early 1960s published comic book reprints for sale through grocery and discount stores. Skywald was based in New York City.

Brodsky, who also served as editor, brought in Al Hewetson — briefly an assistant to Marvel chief Stan Lee and a freelancer for the Warren Publishing horror magazines and others — as a freelance writer. “Archaic Al”, as he later jokingly called himself in print, quickly became the associate editor, and when Brodsky returned to Marvel after a few months, Hewetson succeeded him as editor. Hewetson, aiming at a more literary bent than the work of industry leader Warren Publishing, developed what he called “the Horror-Mood” and sought to evoke the feel of such writers as Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and Kafka.

Comics professionals who produced work for the Skywald magazines include writers T. Casey Brennan, Gerry Conway, Steve Englehart, Gardner Fox, Doug Moench, Dave Sim, Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman, and artists Rich Buckler, Gene Day Vince Colletta, Bill Everett, Bruce Jones, Pablo Marcos, Syd Shores, Chic Stone, and Tom Sutton. Many who also contributed to rival Warren employed pseudonyms. Future industry star John Byrne published his first professional story, a two-pager written by editor Hewetson, in Skywald’s Nightmare #20 (Aug. 1974).

Editor Al Hewetson, in an interview given shortly before his death of a heart attack on Jan. 6, 2004, asserted the demise of Skywald was caused by:

“…Marvel’s distributor. Our issues were selling well, and some sold out. Such returns as we received were shipped overseas, mainly to England, where they sold out completely… When Marvel entered the game with countless [black-and-white horror] titles gutting [sic] the newsstand, their distributor was so powerful they denied Skywald access to all but the very largest newsstands, so our presence was minimal and fans and readers simply couldn’t find us…”

Buy Skywald: The Complete Illustrated History of the Horror-Mood from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Wikipedia | Image credits: Comic Vine | Pinterest

J. D.’s Revenge is a 1976 US blaxploitation horror film produced and directed by Arthur Marks from a screenplay by Jaison Starkes. It stars Glynn Turman, Lou Gossett, Joan Pringle, Carl W. Crudup, James Watkins, Fred Pinkard, Jo Anne Meredith, Alice Jubert, David McKnight.

Plot teaser:

Isaac Hendrix (Turman) is a young college student studying law and a taxi-cab driver in New Orleans. While out on a night of fun with his friends and wife, Christella during a hypnosis act, he becomes an unwilling host for the restless spirit of J.D Walker, a hustler killed during the 40s.

“Ike” gradually finds his own personality gradually being taken over by the sociopathic Walker, even eventually going so far as to adopt his hair and fashion style, mannerisms, and psychotic tendencies (including an attempted rape on his wife after she mocked his J.D. haircut).

With the spirit of J.D. in complete control he turns his attention toward wreaking vengeance against the man responsible for killing his sister, Theotis Bliss. Ike commits havoc all over town along the way before making his way to the church where Theotis’ brother works as a preacher, where he finally reveals himself and instructs Elijah to tell Theotis to meet him “on the killin’ floor”.

Meanwhile, Ike’s wife goes to her ex-husband, a cop who is out for Ike’s blood believing him to be a simple psycho hiding behind a false persona — until he mentions to the Chief that Ike claimed his name was J.D. Walker, a man who was not only real, but had died over 30 years ago…

Reviews:

‘What makes the movie work, to the degree that it does, are the performances by Turman, Lou Gossett and Joan Pringle. Turman, in particular, has fun transforming himself from the mild-mannered law student to the zoot-suited 1940s two-bit gangster that J.D. used to be, complete with straight razor.’ RogerEbert.com

‘To its credit, the ending is pretty clever and slightly alters your perception about some of the characters. J.D.’s Revenge also becomes progressively more entertaining as it unfolds and you realize this isn’t just Black Caesar done up in horror digs. Most of the gangster elements are subdued, and, with the exception of a few flourishes (such as the requisite funky score and the fashions), J.D.’s Revenge doesn’t constantly announce itself as Blaxploitation fare either.’ Brett Gallman, Oh, the Horror!

‘Mark’s movie has a lot of sleaze appeal mostly with the abundant nudity and several dream sequences featuring a cow being slaughtered, but it doesn’t have the level of violence found in so many other movies of the genre. This is predominantly a character study and all the better for it. It’s one of the best, if not the best representations of blax-horror…’ Cool Ass Cinema

‘An efficient and effective piece of blaxploitation, the film is very much in the Southern gothic tradition and uses its New Orleans locations to great effect to create an atmosphere of incipient, imminent violence. Turman’s slow transformation has its welcome moments of humour and the film is crisply photographed and tightly directed, with a fairly liberal helping of blood scenes.’ Phil Hardy (editor), The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

Buy on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Choice dialogue:

“That was the best fuckin’ I ever had.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna cut you every which way but loose!”

Cast:

• Glynn Turman as Isaac aka Ike
• Louis Gossett Jr. as Reverend Elijah Bliss
• Joan Pringle as Christella
• Carl W. Crudup as Tony
• James Watkins as Carl
• Fred Pinkard as Theotis Bliss
• Jo Anne Meredith as Sara Divine
• Alice Jubert as Roberta ‘Betty Jo’ Bliss
• David McKnight as J.D. Walker
• Stephanie Faulkner as Phyllis
• Fuddle Bagley as Enoch Land
• Earl Billings as Captain Turner
• Paul Galloway as Garage Man

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image thanks: Blaxploitation Pride

Do You Like Hitchcock? – original title: Ti piace Hitchcock? – is a 2005 Italian television giallo thriller film directed by Dario Argento. It stars Elio Germano, Chiara Conti, Elisabetta Rocchetti, Cristina Brondo and Ivan Morales and features a score by Pino Donaggio (Tourist Trap; Dressed to Kill; The Black Cat).

Plot teaser:

In 1990, as a boy, Giulio was chased through the woods by two women after spying on them practicing witchcraft. Now a young film student in Turin, he watches his neighbors in the flats across from his third floor apartment, especially Sasha when she’s naked or arguing with her mother. Giulio’s girlfriend is disgusted with his voyeurism, but, after a murder occurs, Giulio is convinced that two relative strangers, just as in Hitchcock and Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, have agreed to murder each other’s bête noir. He follows his suspects, ends up with an intruder and a broken foot, and may be in real danger. Is he more than a peeping Tom?

Aside from Strangers on a Train (1951) and Dial M for Murder (1954), there are several references to Hitchcock films in this movie: the attempt to murder Giulio in the shower is a reference to the famous scene from Psycho (1960), the protagonist’s broken leg and window-peeping are a reference to Rear Window (1954), and the scene on the roof is very similar to the ending of Vertigo (1958).

Buy Do You Like Hitchcock? on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“Do You Like Hitchcock? is an ambitious attempt by Dario Argento to deconstruct the narrative trappings of the giallo genre and to question the nature of voyeurism. It is, at the same time, a bloody and bare chested romp with plenty of twists. While no way his best work, it is no doubt an interesting little experiment.” Horror Digital

“The scenes that are the most appealing in the film are the ones in which Giulio spies on the various characters who are integral to the murder mystery. It is amazing what Argento is able to achieve when one considers that it was made for television. Overall Do You like Hitchcock? is daring and provocative film that exceeded my expectations.” 10,000 Bullets

“Had Do You Like Hitchcock? carried the name of an unknown director, its reputation would be sturdier, perhaps as something of a minor gem. With Argento at the helm, however, expectations unfairly raise the bar. While there is no way this one can compete on the level of his early works — the so-called “animal trilogy,” in particular — it is a satisfying thriller exuding real love for the movies and the voyeurism they inspire.” Flick Attack

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

Edward Theodore “Ed” Gein (August 8, 1906 – July 26, 1984) was an American murderer and body snatcher. His crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered Gein had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin.

Gein confessed to killing two women – tavern owner Mary Hogan on December 8, 1954, and a Plainfield hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, on November 16, 1957. Initially found unfit for trial, he was tried in 1968 for the murder of Worden and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he spent in a mental hospital.

His case influenced the creation of several fictional killers, including Norman Bates of the movie and novel Psycho and its sequels, Leatherface of the movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Jame Gumb (Buffalo Bill) of the novel The Silence of the Lambs, Ezra Cobb of the movie Deranged, Bloody Face of the TV series American Horror Story: Asylum and Eddie Gluskin of the video game Outlast. The 2000 film Ed Gein (also known as In the Light of the Moon) starred Steve Railsback as the serial killer. Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007) cast Kane Hodder (best known for playing Jason Vorhees in four Friday the 13th movies and Victor Crowley in the Hatchet trilogy) as the eponymous murderer.

Buy Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Deranged

Gein’s father was an alcoholic who died in 1940. His mother died on December 29, 1945, at the age of 67. He was devastated by her death; in the words of author Harold Schechter, he had “lost his only friend and one true love. And he was absolutely alone in the world.” Gein held onto the farm where they lived and earned money from odd jobs. He boarded up rooms used by his mother, including the upstairs, downstairs parlor and living room, leaving them untouched; while the rest of the house became increasingly squalid, these rooms remained pristine. Gein lived thereafter in a small room next to the kitchen. It was around this time that he became interested in reading death-cult magazines and adventure stories, particularly those involving cannibals or Nazi atrocities.

Buy Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho book from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

On November 16, 1957, Plainfield hardware store owner Bernice Worden disappeared, and police had reason to suspect Gein. Worden’s son told investigators that Gein had been in the store the evening before the disappearance, saying he would return the next morning for a gallon of anti-freeze. Upon searching Gein’s property, investigators discovered Worden’s decapitated body in a shed, hung upside down by ropes at her wrists, with a crossbar at her ankles. The torso was “dressed out like a deer”. She had been shot with a .22-caliber rifle, and the mutilations were made after her death.

Searching the house, authorities found:

• Whole human bones and fragments
• A wastebasket made of human skin
• Human skin covering several chair seats
• Skulls on his bedposts
• Female skulls, some with the tops sawn off
• Bowls made from human skulls
• A corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist
• Leggings made from human leg skin
• Masks made from the skin from female heads
• Mary Hogan’s face mask in a paper bag
• Mary Hogan’s skull in a box
• Bernice Worden’s entire head in a burlap sack
• Bernice Worden’s heart in a saucepan on the stove
• Nine vulvae in a shoe box
• A young girl’s dress and “the vulvas of two females judged to have been about fifteen years old”
• A belt made from female human nipples
• Four nose
• A pair of lips on a window shade drawstring
• A lampshade made from the skin of a human face
• Fingernails from female fingers

Buy Ed Gein: Psycho by Paul A. Woods from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

When questioned, Gein told investigators that between 1947 and 1952, he made as many as 40 nocturnal visits to three local graveyards to exhume recently buried bodies while he was in a “daze-like” state. On about 30 of those visits, he said he came out of the daze while in the cemetery, left the grave in good order, and returned home emptyhanded. On the other occasions, he dug up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother and took the bodies home, where he tanned their skins to make his paraphernalia.

Gein admitted robbing nine graves, leading investigators to their locations. Because authorities were uncertain as to whether the slight Gein was capable of single-handedly digging up a grave during a single evening, they exhumed two of the graves and found them empty (one had a crowbar in place of the body), thus apparently corroborating Gein’s confession. 

Soon after his mother’s death, Gein apparently decided he wanted a sex change and began to create a “woman suit” so he could pretend to be female. Gein’s practice of donning the tanned skins of women was described as an “insane transvestite ritual.” Gein denied having sex with the bodies he exhumed, explaining: “They smelled too bad.”

Buy Ed Gein starring Steve Railsback on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Waushara County sheriff Art Schley reportedly assaulted Gein during questioning by banging Gein’s head and face into a brick wall. As a result, Gein’s initial confession was ruled inadmissible. Schley died of heart failure in 1968, at age 43, before Gein’s trial. Many who knew Schley said he was traumatized by the horror of Gein’s crimes and this, along with the fear of having to testify (especially about assaulting Gein), caused his death. One of his friends said: “He was a victim of Ed Gein as surely as if he had butchered him.”

Gein’s house and property were scheduled to be auctioned March 30, 1958, amid rumors the house was to become a tourist attraction. On March 27, the house was destroyed by fire. Arson was suspected, but the cause of the blaze was never officially solved. When Gein learned of the incident while in detention, he shrugged and said, “Just as well.” Gein’s car, which he used to haul the bodies of his victims, was sold at public auction for $760 to carnival sideshow operator Bunny Gibbons. He later charged carnival goers 25¢ admission to see it.

On July 26, 1984, Gein died of respiratory failure due to lung cancer at the age of 77 at the Mendota Mental Health Institute. His grave site in the Plainfield Cemetery was frequently vandalized over the years; souvenir seekers chipped off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. It was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is now in storage at the Waushara County Sheriff’s Department.

Buy Psycho 50th Anniversary Blu-ray from Amazon.com

Buy Deranged on Arrow Video Blu-ray + DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Buy The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Seriously Ultimate Edition on Blu-ray Disc from Amazon.co.uk

Buy The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Ultimate Edition Blu-ray Disc from Amazon.com

Wikipedia | Related: Fred West (serial killer)

Horrorpedia on Social Media: Facebook (Follow) | Facebook (Social Group) | Pinterest | Tumblr | Twitter

‘A new dimension of terror’

Secrets of a Psychopath is a 2014 American horror film written and directed by veteran Bert I. Gordon (The Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. the Spider, Empire of the Ants, The Food of the Gods) who was 92 years-old when production began!

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

The film was released on DVD in the US on September 22, 2015 by Cinema Epoch.

Bert I. Gordon

Cast:

Kari Wuhrer (Anaconda; Eight Legged Freaks; Hellraiser: Deader), Mark Famiglietti, Mia Serafino, Hilary Anderson and Ty Fanning.

Official synopsis:

Two siblings lure unsuspecting victims to their house through a dating site for games and slaughter. It’s Psycho meets the Craigslist Killer…

Trailer:

IMDb | Bert I. Gordon on Twitter | Bert I. Gordon on Horropedia: The Amazing Colossal Man | Attack of the Puppet People | Beginning of the End | The Cyclops | Earth vs. The Spider | Empire of the Ants |  The Food of the Gods | King Dinosaur | Necromancy | Picture Mommy Dead | Tormented | War of the Colossal Beast

Horrorpedia on Social Media: Facebook (Follow) | Facebook (Social Group) | Pinterest | Tumblr | Twitter

New and Upcoming Horror Releases

Must-See Horror Movies

Worst Horror Films of All-Time

Highest-Grossing Horror Films

‘Demons long locked on the depths of the mind come out to destroy the weak and the believing!’

Point of Terror is a 1971 American psycho thriller directed by actor Alex Nicol (The Screaming Skull; The Night God Screamed; A*P*E) from a screenplay by Tony Crechales and Ernest A. Charles, based on a story by Chris Marconi and producer and star Peter Carpenter.

It was distributed in the US by exploitation specialists Crown International.

Main cast:

Peter Carpenter (Blood Mania), Dyanne Thorne (Blood Sabbath; Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS; House of the Witchdoctor), Lory Hansen, Leslie Simms, Joel Marston, Paula Mitchell, Dana Diamond, Al Dunlap, Ernest A. Charles, Roberta Robson, Tony Kent.

Reviews:

“Rampant fashion violations, loud musical numbers, obscene checkered furniture, violent dream sequences, ratty wigs, equal opportunity nudity, saturated primary color lighting years before Suspiria, and reams of purple, sex-obsessed dialogue will keep even the most seasoned trash fanatic giddy with disbelief.” Mondo Digital

Some male nudity… for a change

“Playing a lounge singer at a seaside dump called the Lobster House, the often shirtless [Peter] Carpenter manages a decent approximation of Tom Jones’s sweaty charisma in this lurid neo-noir that rips off The Postman Always Rings Twice and half a dozen of its contemporaries.” Stephen Bowie, World Cinema Paradise

“It’s more or less a slice of melodramatic sleaze and at the same time very much a vanity piece for Carpenter, whose struggling recording artist/stud character beds three very beautiful women during the course of the film’s soap opera-inspired shenanigans. The players drink too much, commit adultery and deceitfully murder…” George R. Reis, DVD Drive-In

” … it’s a pretty dry melodrama whose various twists and turns aren’t very effective, especially the film’s final reveal, which is eye-rollingly bad and groan-inducing, to say the least. Director Nicol throws in some stylistic flourishes here and there in an attempt to make things look interesting, and he sometimes succeeds on that level.” Oh, the Horror!

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Choice dialogue:

“Who’s your decorator, Bela Lugosi?”

“Martin, I have a headache THIS big, with your name on it!”

“I didn’t even know I drank until one night I came home sober.”

“If she has one more drink Tony, she’ll start stripping. I know she’s done it before.”

IMDb | Image thanks: Critical Condition

‘One by one they will meet…’

The Slayer is a 2016 American slasher film written, produced and directed by former actor Reuben Rox (Return to Witch Graveyard; Screams of a Summer Day; Lurking Evil) who also stars.

The film should not be confused with the 1982 film of the same name.

Main cast:

Catherine Franklin, Rachel Wise, Teresa Reed, Jade Michael LaFont, Luc Bernier, Sarah Hubbird, Ryan McKinnon, Randy Robinson.

Plot:

Summer camp counsellors fall prey to the vicious killer lurking in the deserted grounds…

Filming Locations:

Southern Oregon, USA

IMDb

Robert Albert Bloch (April 5, 1917 – September 23, 1994) was an American fiction writer, primarily of crime, horror, fantasy and science fiction, from Milwaukee,Wisconsin.

Bloch is best known as the writer of the 1959 novel Psycho, the basis for the 1960 film of the same name directed by Alfred Hitchcock. His work has been extensively adapted for the movies and television, comics and audio books.

His fondness for a pun is evident in the titles of his story collections such as Tales in a Jugular Vein, Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of and Out of the Mouths of Graves.

Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over thirty novels. He was one of the youngest members of the Lovecraft Circle. H. P. Lovecraft was the young writer’s mentor and one of the first to seriously encourage his talent. However, while Bloch started his career by emulating Lovecraft and his brand of “cosmic horror”, he later specialized in crime and horror stories dealing with a more psychological approach.

Bloch was born in Chicago, the son of Raphael “Ray” Bloch (1884–1952), a bank cashier, and his wife Stella Loeb (1880–1944), a social worker, both of German Jewish descent. Bloch’s family moved to Maywood, a Chicago suburb, when he was five.

Formative Years and Early Career

At ten years of age, he attended a screening of The Phantom of the Opera (1925). The scene of Chaney removing his mask terrified the young Bloch and sparked his interest in horror.

In 1929, the Bloch family moved to Milwaukee. Robert attended Lincoln High School, where he met lifelong friend Harold Gauer. Gauer was editor of The Quill, and accepted Bloch’s first published work, a horror story titled “The Thing” (the “thing” of the title was Death).

Bloch’s first professional sales, at the age of 17 (July 1934), to Weird Tales, were the short stories “The Feast in the Abbey” and “The Secret in the Tomb”. “Feast…” appeared first, in the January 1935 issues which actually went on sale November 1, 1934; “Secret in the Tomb” appeared in the May 1935 Weird Tales.

Bloch’s early stories were strongly influenced by Lovecraft. Indeed, a number of his stories were set in, and extended, the world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. These include “The Dark Demon”, in which the character Gordon is a figuration of Lovecraft, and which features Nyarlathotep; “The Faceless God”; “The Grinning Ghoul” and “The Unspeakable Betrothal”. It was Bloch who invented, for example, the oft-cited Mythos texts De Vermis Mysteriis and Cultes des Goules. Many other stories influenced by Lovecraft were later collected in Bloch’s volume Mysteries of the Worm.

After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, which affected Bloch deeply, Bloch broadened the scope of his fiction. His horror themes included voodoo (“Mother of Serpents”), the conte cruel (“The Mandarin’s Canaries”), demonic possession (“Fiddler’s Fee”), and black magic (“Return to the Sabbat”). Bloch visited Henry Kuttner in California in 1937. Bloch’s first science fiction story, “The Secret of the Observatory”, was published in Amazing Stories (August 1938).

In an Amazing Stories profile in 1938, accompanying his first published science fiction story, Bloch described himself as “tall, dark, unhandsome” with “all the charm and personality of a swamp adder”. He noted that “I hate everything”, but reserved particular dislike for “bean soup, red nail polish, house-cleaning, and optimists”

In 1944 Bloch was asked to write 39 15-minute episodes of a radio horror show called Stay Tuned for Terror. Many of the programs were adaptations of his own pulp stories. A year later, August Derleth’s Arkham House, published Bloch’s first collection of short stories, The Opener of the Way. At the same time, one of the first distinctly “Blochian” stories was “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”, which was published in Weird Tales in 1943.

The story was Bloch’s take on the Jack the Ripper legend, and was filled out with more genuine factual details of the case than many other fictional treatments. It cast the Ripper as an eternal being who must make human sacrifices to extend his immortality. It was adapted for both radio (in Stay Tuned for Terror) and television (as an episode of Thriller in 1961 adapted by Barré Lyndon).

Bloch followed up this story with a number of others in a similar vein dealing with half-historic, half-legendary figures such as the the Marquis de Sade (“The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”, 1945) and Lizzie Borden (“Lizzie Borden Took an Axe…”, 1946).

Bloch’s first novel was the thriller The Scarf (1947). (He later issued a revised edition in 1966). It tells the story of a writer, Daniel Morley, who uses real women as models for his characters. But as soon as he is done writing the story, he is compelled to murder them, and always the same way: with the maroon scarf he has had since childhood.

With the demise of Weird Tales, Bloch continued to have his fiction published in Amazing, Fantastic, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Fantastic Universe; he was a particularly frequent contributor to Imagination and Imaginative Tales. His output of thrillers increased and he began to appear regularly in such suspense and horror-fiction magazine projects as Shock.

Jack the Ripper

Bloch continued to revisit the Jack the Ripper theme. His contribution to Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions was a story, “A Toy for Juliette”, which evoked both Jack the Ripper and the Marquis de Sade in a time-travel story. His earlier idea of the Ripper as an immortal being resurfaced in Bloch’s contribution to the original Star Trek series episode “Wolf in the Fold”.

His 1984 novel Night of the Ripper is set during the reign of Queen Victoria and follows the investigation of Inspector Frederick Abberline in attempting to apprehend the Ripper, and includes some famous Victorians such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle within the storyline.

Psycho (1959 novel)

Norman Bates, the main character in Psycho, was very loosely based on two people. First was the real-life serial killer Ed Gein, about whom Bloch later wrote a fictionalized account, “The Shambles of Ed Gein”. Second, it has been indicated by several people, as well as allegedly by Bloch himself, that Norman Bates was partly based on Calvin Beck, publisher of Castle of Frankenstein.

Bloch has also, however, commented that it was the situation itself – a mass murderer living undetected and unsuspected in a typical small town in middle America – rather than Gein himself who sparked Bloch’s storyline. He writes: “Thus the real-life murderer was not the role model for my character Norman Bates. Ed Gein didn’t own or operate a motel. Ed Gein didn’t kill anyone in the shower. Ed Gein wasn’t into taxidermy. Ed Gein didn’t stuff his mother, keep her body in the house, dress in a drag outfit, or adopt an alternative personality. These were the functions and characteristics of Norman Bates, and Norman Bates didn’t exist until I made him up. Out of my own imagination, I add, which is probably the reason so few offer to take showers with me.”

The novel is one of the first examples at full length of Bloch’s use of modern urban horror relying on the horrors of interior psychology rather than the supernatural. “By the mid-1940s, I had pretty well mined the vein of ordinary supernatural themes until it had become varicose,” Bloch explained to Douglas E. Winter in an interview. “I realized, as a result of what went on during World War II and of reading the more widely disseminated work in psychology, that the real horror is not in the shadows, but in that twisted little world inside our own skulls.” While Bloch was not the first horror writer to utilise a psychological approach (that honour belongs to Edgar Allan Poe), Bloch’s psychological approach in modern times was comparatively unique.

Bloch’s agent, Harry Altshuler, received a “blind bid” for the novel – the buyer’s name wasn’t mentioned – of $7,500 for screen rights to the book. The bid eventually went to $9,500, which Bloch accepted. Bloch had never sold a book to Hollywood before. His contract with Simon & Schuster included no bonus for a film sale. The publisher took 15 percent according to contract, while the agent took his 10%; Bloch wound up with about $6,750 before taxes. Despite the enormous profits generated by Hitchcock’s film, Bloch received no further direct compensation.

Only Hitchcock’s film was based on Bloch’s novel. The later films in the Psycho series bear no relation to either of Bloch’s sequel novels. Indeed, Bloch’s proposed script for the film Psycho II was rejected by the studio, and it was this that he subsequently adapted for his own sequel novel.

Buy: Amazon.com

The 1960s: Hollywood and screenwriting

TV work included ten episodes of Thriller (1960–62, several based on his own stories), and ten episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1960–62). In 1962, he wrote the screenplay for The Cabinet of Caligari (1962), an unhappy experience.

In 1962, Bloch penned the story and teleplay “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The episode was shelved when the NBC Television Network and sponsor Revlon called its ending “too gruesome” for airing. Bloch was pleased later when the episode was included in the program’s syndication package to affiliate stations where not one complaint was registered. Today, due to its public domain status, the episode is readily available in home media formats from numerous distributors and free video on demand.

Bloch wrote original screenplays for two movies produced and directed by showman William Castle, Strait-Jacket (1963) and The Night Walker (1964).

Freddie Francis directed British production The Skull (1965) was based on his short story “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade” but penned by Milton Subotsky. Bloch went on to write five feature movies for Amicus Productions: The Psychopath, The Deadly Bees, Torture Garden, The House That Dripped Blood and Asylum. The last two films featured stories written by Bloch that were printed first in anthologies he wrote in the 1940s and early 1950s.

In 1968 Bloch contributed two episodes for the Hammer Films series Journey to the Unknown for Twentieth Century Fox. One of the episodes, “The Indian Spirit Guide”, was included in the TV movie Journey to Midnight (1968).

The 1970s and ’80s

During the 1970s Bloch wrote two TV movies for director Curtis Harrington – The Cat Creature and The Dead Don’t Die. The Cat Creature was an unhappy production experience for Bloch. Producer Doug Cramer wanted to do an update of Cat People (1942), the Val Lewton classic. Bloch says: “Instead I suggested a blending of the elements of several well-remembered films, and came up with a storyline which dealt with the Egyptian cat-goddess (Bast), reincarnation and the first bypass operation ever performed on an artichoke heart.” A detailed account of the troubled production of the film is described in Bloch’s autobiography, Once Around the Bloch.

Buy: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Meanwhile, (interspersed between his screenplays for Amicus Productions), Bloch penned single episodes for TV series Night Gallery (1971), Ghost Story (1972) and Gemini Man (1976).

His numerous novels of this two decade include horror novels such as the Lovecraftian Strange Eons (1978); the non-supernatural mystery There is a Serpent in Eden (1979); his two sequels to the original Psycho (Psycho II and Psycho House), and late novels such as the thriller Lori (1989) and The Jekyll Legacy with Andre Norton (1991). Omnibus editions of hard-to-acquire early novels appeared as Unholy Trinity (1986) and Screams (1989).

Bloch’s screenplay-writing career continued active through the 1980s, with teleplays for Tales of the Unexpected (one episode, 1980), Darkroom (two episodes, 1981), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (one episode, 1986), Tales from the Darkside (three episodes, 1984–87) and Monsters (three episodes, 1988–1989 – “Beetles”, “A Case of the Stubborns” and “Everybody needs a Little Love”). No further screen work appeared in the last five years before his death, although an adaptation of his “collaboration” with Edgar Allan Poe, “The Lighthouse”, was filmed as an episode of The Hunger in 1998.

In 1994, Bloch died of cancer at the age of 77 in Los Angeles after a writing career lasting 60 years, including more than 30 years in television and film.

Wikipedia | Image credits: Too Much Horror Fiction

‘… He loved the girls to death.’

Sweet Kill is a 1972 American psycho thriller written and directed by Curtis Hanson. The film was Hanson’s directorial debut and was produced by Roger Corman’s former assistant Tamara Asseyev for distribution by New World Pictures.

The film stars 1950s heartthrob Tab Hunter and was actress Isabel Jewell’s last film. Future Phantasm icon Angus Scrimm [billed as Rory Guy] has a small role.

Curtis Hanson had got to know Roger Corman while doing on set rewrites on The Dunwich Horror (1969). When that film was completed, Hanson said he wanted to direct a film he had written and Corman said he would be interested in a motorcycle movie, a women in prison movie or a nurses movie. Hanson was unenthusiastic, so Corman then said he might also be interested in a modern horror film.

Hanson wrote the script originally with the killer as a female. Corman liked it but asked that the killer be changed to a male. The ensuing production was filmed as A Kiss from Eddie for $110,000. The apartment where Tab Hunter’s character lived in Venice Beach, California, was owned by Hanson’s grandmother. It was submitted to the MPAA in 1971 as Sweetkill (sic).

On release throughout 1972, the film did not do well at the box office, so Corman added two additional sex scenes to try to increase its appeal and the film was re-released as in January 1973 The Arousers with no mention of Tab Hunter on the poster.

Hanson later described the entire experience as a “very unhappy” one. More happily, he went on to direct psychological thrillers The Bedroom Window (1987), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and the award-winning film noir L.A. Confidential (1997).

Plot:

Eddie Collins (Tab Hunter) is unable to perform in bed with women because of repressed memories of his mother. After accidentally killing a woman while trying to sleep with her, he finds that he is able to get aroused by her dead body. This leads him into a chain of luring women into situations where he can kill them for sexual gratification…

Reviews:

“Sweet Kill is essentially another grindhouse riff on the themes made popular in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), with Mother problems, impotence, rage and bathroom murder (here near the end) all on the menu. Hunter is excellent as the deeply disturbed teacher, whose good looks are like a honey trap for the ladies – and somewhat bizarrely has a never explained connection to pigeons! He has to be admired for trashing his image quite so fully.” Justin Kerswell, Hysteria Lives!

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“Maybe the intended audience just wanted breasts and stabbings, and not Hanson’s uncomfortable visual schematic of isolation and insanity, with the dark, oppressive hallways and apartments of Hunter’s spooky apartment building contrasted nicely against the sunny beaches outside. It’s always hard to say why a movie didn’t connect with audiences, but with Sweet Kill, it seems pretty clear that a fuzzy screenplay, a critical mis-cast, and an unexpectedly (and perhaps unwanted) sophisticated mise-en-scene kept Sweet Kill … necessarily obscure.” Paul Mavis, DVD Talk

“What keeps the film afloat is the quality of the acting, with a bug-eyed Hunter effective in the ‘Norman Bates’ role and Nadyne Turney genuinely touching as the forever lonely next-door neighbour Barbara, who just wants Eddie to notice her (and is knifed in the shower for her trouble, as if the Psycho connection were not already obvious).”Christopher T Koetting, Mind Warp!: The Fantastic True Story of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“With the film’s shoestring budget apparent and the proper quotient of sex and sleaze that New World Pictures required present, director Hanson wisely used a very dreary and rundown looking Venice, California as an ideal downbeat setting. While a number of supporting characters and some of the plot padding seems disposable, there’s an amusing scene involving a young woman reporting her roommate missing …” George R. Reis, DVD Drive-In

Cast and characters:

Offline reading:

Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen and Candy Stripe Nurses – Roger Corman: King of the B Movie by Chris Nashawaty, Abrams, 2013

Mind Warp!: The Fantastic True Story of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, by Christopher T Koetting, Hemlock Books. 2009

The Movie World of Roger Corman, Ed. J. Philip di Franco,Chelsea House Publishers, 1979

The Arousers trailer is among this selection:

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image thanks: DVD Talk

Posted in tribute to Curtis Hanson on the announcement of his death

Psycho is a suspense novel by Robert Bloch. It was first published in the United States in 1959 by Simon & Schuster. The story was adapted into Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal 1960 film of the same name. Bloch later wrote two sequels, which are unrelated to any of the film-sequels.

Ed Gein:

In November 1957 — two years before Psycho was first published — Ed Gein was arrested in his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin for the murders of two women. When police searched his home, they found furniture, silverware, and even clothing made of human skin and body parts. Psychiatrists examining him theorized that he was trying to make a “woman suit” to wear so he could pretend to be his dead mother, whom neighbors described as a puritan who dominated her son.

At the time of Gein’s arrest, Bloch was living 35 miles (56 km) away from Plainfield in Weyauwega. Though Bloch was not aware of the Gein case at that time, he began writing with “the notion that the man next door may be a monster unsuspected even in the gossip-ridden microcosm of small-town life.”

The novel, one of several Bloch wrote about insane killers, was almost completed when Gein and his activities were revealed, so Bloch inserted a line alluding to Gein into one of the final chapters. Bloch was surprised years later when he “discovered how closely the imaginary character I’d created resembled the real Ed Gein both in overt act and apparent motivation.”

Buy: Amazon.co.uk

Full plot:

Norman Bates is a middle-aged bachelor who is dominated by his mother, a mean-tempered,puritanical old woman who forbids him to have a life outside of her. They run a small motel together in the town of Fairvale, but business has floundered since the state relocated the highway. In the middle of a heated argument between them, a customer arrives, a young woman named Mary Crane.

Mary is on the run after impulsively stealing $40,000 from a client of the real estate company where she works. She stole the money so her boyfriend, Sam Loomis, could pay off his debts and they could get married. Mary arrives at the Bates Motel after accidentally turning off the main highway. Exhausted, she accepts Bates’ invitation to have dinner with him at his house, an invitation that sends Mrs. Bates into a rage; she screams, “I’ll kill the bitch!”, which Mary overhears.

During dinner, Mary gently suggests that Bates put his mother in a mental institution, but he vehemently denies that there is anything wrong with her; “We all go a little mad sometimes”, he states. Mary says goodnight and returns to her room, resolving to return the money so she will not end up like Bates. Moments later in the shower, however, a figure resembling an old woman surprises her with a butcher knife, and beheads her.

Bates, who had passed out drunk after dinner, returns to the motel and finds Mary’s bloody corpse. He is instantly convinced his mother is the murderer. He briefly considers letting her go to prison, but changes his mind after having a nightmare in which she sinks in quicksand, only to turn into him as she goes under. His mother comes to comfort him, and he decides to dispose of Mary’s body belongings and car in the swamp, and go on with life as usual.

Meanwhile, Mary’s sister, Lila, tells Sam of her sister’s disappearance. They are soon joined by Milton Arbogast, a private investigator hired by Mary’s boss to retrieve the money. Sam and Lila agree to let Arbogast lead the search for Mary. Arbogast eventually meets up with Bates, who says that Mary had left after one night; when he asks to talk with his mother, Bates refuses. This arouses Arbogast’s suspicion, and he calls Lila and tells her that he is going to try to talk to Mrs. Bates. When he enters the house, the same mysterious figure who killed Mary ambushes him in the foyer, and kills him with a razor.

Sam and Lila go to Fairvale to look for Arbogast, and meet with the town sheriff, who tells them that Mrs. Bates has been dead for years, having committed suicide by poisoning her lover and herself. The young Norman had a nervous breakdown after finding them and was sent for a time to a mental institution. Sam and Lila go to the motel to investigate. Sam distracts Bates while Lila goes to get the sheriff—but she actually proceeds up to the house to investigate on her own. There she finds various books on Occultism, Abnormal Psychology, Meta Physics, and one containing pornographic images in his bedroom, During a conversation with Sam, Bates says that his mother had only pretended to be dead, and had communicated with him while he was in the institution. Bates then tells Sam that Lila tricked him and went up to the house and that his mother was waiting for her. Bates then knocks Sam unconscious with a liquor bottle that he’d been drinking from. At the house, Lila is horrified to discover Mrs. Bates’ mummified corpse on the floor, in the fruit cellar. As she screams, a figure rushes into the room with a knife—Norman Bates, dressed in his mother’s clothes. Sam regains consciousness, enters the room and subdues Norman before he can harm Lila.

At the police station, Sam talks to a psychiatrist who had examined Bates, while the county high way crew is out dredging the swamp to uncover the automobiles revealing the bodies of Mary, Arbogast, and the countless numbers of missing persons, confirmed to be motel guests that Norman, over the years had murdered, and sometimes eaten or molested after death. Then disposed of, in the quicksand to cover up what he often considered his mother’s crimes. He learns that, years before, Bates had murdered his mother and her lover. Bates and his mother had lived together in a state of total codependence ever since his father deserted them. Along the way, Norman became a secret transvestite, and fascinated with the Occult, Spiritualism, and Satanism. When his mother took a lover named Joe Considine, Bates went over the edge with jealousy and poisoned them both, forging a suicide note in his mother’s handwriting. To suppress the guilt of matricide, he developed a split personality in which his mother became an alternate self, which abused and dominated his alternate child self as Mrs. Bates had done in life, while the third alternate adult self tried to keep both personalities concealed to continue functioning in the outside world. He stole her corpse from the cemetery and preserved it and, whenever the illusion was threatened, would drink heavily, dress in her clothes and speak to himself in her voice. He would even have sex with the corpse. The “Mother” personality killed Mary because “she” was jealous of Norman feeling affection for another woman.

Bates is found guilty of several counts of murder, cannibalism, incest, Satanism, necrophilia, and one grave robbing without trial. Declared insane, and put in a mental institution for life. Days later, the “Mother” personality completely takes over Bates’ mind; he virtually becomes his mother. In a double-twist ending, the Mother reveals she had to take over, as Norman’s personality was in fact the murderous one, and she in fact couldn’t hurt a fly.

Sequels:

Bloch wrote two sequels, Psycho II (1982) and Psycho House (1990); neither was related to the film sequels. In the novel Psycho II, Bates escapes the asylum disguised as a nun and makes his way to Hollywood. Universal Pictures allegedly did not want to film it because of its social commentary on slasher films. In the novel Psycho House, murders begin again when the Bates Motel is reopened as a tourist attraction.

Wikipedia

‘There are no serial killers in this country! Is that clear?’

Strangled – original title: A martfüi rém – is a Hungarian psycho thriller written and directed by Árpád Sopsits, who also stars. It was produced by Gabor Ferenczy and Attila Tozser for Focus Fox Studio.

Having premiered at the Warsaw Film Festival, the film was released in Hungary on 10 November 2016 and is being sold internationally by the Hungarian National Film Fund.

Main cast:

Zsolt Anger, Rita Dévényi, Árpád Sopsits, Gábor Szabó, Zsolt Trill, Attila Tõzsér, Zsófia Szamosi, Károly Hajduk, Mónika Balsai, Zoltán Kovács, Péter Bárnai, Gabor Ferenczy, and Gábor Jászberényi.

Official synopsis:

Based on real-life events, this psycho-thriller is set in the provincial Hungary of the 1960s, when a series of atrocious murders shock the small town of Martfü. A psychotic killer is on the prowl, who continues to slaughter young women while an innocent man is wrongly accused and sentenced for crimes he could never have committed.

A determined detective arrives on the scene and soon becomes obsessed with the case while under pressure from the prosecutor to see a man hang. Stuck in the suffocating social, political and psychological world of socialist Hungary, we soon find ourselves entangled in a web of intricate conspiracy and disturbing drama.

Review:

“Brilliantly directed, most notably thanks to the remarkable work of director of photography Gabor Szabo, with its striking nocturnal scenes and an excellent reconstruction of the times in which these events took place, Strangled is a thriller not without formal qualities and intensity, built on a screenplay that moves forward relatively astutely along three trajectories (those of the innocent man, the investigation and the killer).” Fabien Lemercier, Cineuropa

Filming locations:

Martfu, Hungary

IMDb | Source: Screen Anarchy

‘The nightmare is about to begin… again’

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is a 1987 American black comedy horror slasher film edited and directed by Lee Harry from a screenplay co-written with Joseph H. Earle.

It is the sequel to Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and was followed by Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989).

Plot:

Ricky Caldwell, the eighteen-year-old brother of the first film’s killer, is now being held in a mental hospital, awaiting trial for a series of murders that he committed.

While being interviewed by the psychiatrist Dr. Henry Bloom, Ricky tells the story of the murders his brother Billy committed throughout a series of several flashbacks using extensive footage from the original film.

These flashbacks include new shots to make Ricky appear in more of Billy’s original story…

Main cast:

Eric Freeman (Ghost Writer; Murder Weapon; Children of the Corn), James L. Newman (Celia), Elizabeth Kaitan [as Cayton] (Necromancer; Friday the 13th Part VII; Silent Madness) and Jean Miller (Escapes).

Review:

“Although nowhere near as much fun as its predecessor, Part II does have some fine moments, once you’ve waded through all the reused clips. It’s worth watching just to see the nun get her final comeuppance. Skip the first forty five minutes and watch immediately after seeing the first instalment.” Jim Harper, Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“Director-editor Lee Harry succeeds in making this one of the most mean-spirited slasher films ever made.” John Stanley, Creature Features

“Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is the epitome of a bad movie, yet it has that ridiculous bad movie charm to it that makes it a great choice to invite friends over for a Mystery Science Theater type showing … It can be looked at as good, even one of the best… if you’re into that special kind of bad.” Ronnie Angel, Slashed Dreams: The Ultimate Guide to Slasher Films

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.ca

Reception:

Due to the excessive use of footage from the original movie, the film was panned by critics. However, the film does have an audience with slasher fans/horror fans, and has gained a cult following as an unintentional comedy due to Freeman’s over-the-top performance.

During Ricky’s suburban shooting rampage, he kills a neighbour that is taking out trash cans, shouting “Garbage day!” before firing on the person. The scene has become an Internet meme due to the seemingly non-sequitur nature of the scene as well as the comedic cheesiness of the line’s delivery.

Meanwhile, Ricky’s murder of a mobster by stabbing him with an umbrella, then unfurling it with the victim hoisted against the wall, has also become a popular horror movie death, and was the inspiration for the horror reference book, Death by Umbrella! The 100 Weirdest Horror Movie Weapons.

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“So what is good? Well beside Ricky’s “garbage day” delivery…there are some cool deaths. Ricky’s size and imposing demeanour make him seem like a viable threat so it’s not surprising he can kill other men with ease…it’s just a pity that it’s backed up with that horrible laugh.” Games, Brrrraaains & a Head-Banging Life

Release:

The film received a limited release theatrically in the United States in 1987. It grossed $154,323 at the box office. It was subsequently released on VHS by International Video Entertainment in 1987.

On December 4, 2012, the film was released alongside Part 1 as a two-disc “Christmas Survival Double Feature,” containing the same archival bonus features as a 2003 DVD release.

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

In the UK, it was banned by the BBFC when submitted by Trans Global Pictures on 22/12/1987 and has not been re-submitted since.

Choice dialogue:

Toy store owner: “I just remembered. Lots of ‘ho, ho, ho.’ Try not to scare the little bastards.”

Cast and characters:

• Eric Freeman as Richard “Ricky” Caldwell
  • Darrel Guilbeau as Ricky at 15
  • Brian Michael Henley as Ricky at 10
• James L. Newman as Doctor Henry Bloom
• Elizabeth Kaitan as Jennifer Statson
• Lilyan Chauvin (archive footage) / Jean Miller as Mother Superior
• Corrine Gelfan as Martha Rosenberg
• Michael Combatti as Morty Rosenberg
• Jill K. Allen as Mrs. Rosenberg’s Friend
• Ken Weichert as Chip
• Ron Moriarty as Detective
• Frank Novak as Rocco the Loan Shark
• Randall Boffman as Eddie
• Joanne White as Paula
• Lenny Rose as Loser
• Nadya Wynd as Sister Mary
• Kenneth McCabe as Rent-A-Cop
• J. Aubrey Island as Orderly
• Jeremiah Sird as Gregg
• Randy Post as Loudmouth In Theater
• Kent Koppase as Cop #1
• Michael Marloe as Cop #2
• Larry Kelman as Cop #3/Paramedic
• John Fitzgibbons as Kid At Play
• Scottie Simpfender as Kid At Play
• Erin Darini as Kid At Play
• Lara Darini as Kid At Play
• Brian Darini as Kid At Play

Wikipedia | IMDb

78/52 is a 2017 American documentary film written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe (Doc of the Dead). It looks at the iconic shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the “man behind the curtain”, and the screen murder that profoundly changed the course of world cinema.

Synopsis:

Fifty years after its initial release shocked an entire generation of unsuspicious moviegoers, Psycho remains one of the most intensely discussed and analyzed movies of all time.

78/52 explores that intangible “cinematic space” between the shots. It delves into Hitchcock’s genius in unprecedented fashion, to become the first feature-length investigation into the art, craft, and influence of a single extraordinary scene – one which forever changed the course of popular cinema, and continues to inspire some of the greatest filmmakers of our time. A 78 shot / 52 cut slice of cinematic heaven: the “shower scene”.

The film features interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, Jamie Lee Curtis, Guillermo del Toro, Danny Elfman, Bret Easton Ellis, Mick Garris, Karyn Kusama, Neil Marshall, Bob Murawski, Walter Murch, Oz Perkins, Marli Renfro, Eli Roth, Scott Spiegel, Richard Stanley, Leigh Whannell, Elijah Wood and others.

Reviews:

“While it’s a bit disappointing that 78/52 doesn’t look beyond the shower scene to see how the total film come together, it’s ultimately not a movie about Psycho as much as it’s about the shower scene. It’s the double-edged sword of focusing on a few moments at the neglect of what surrounds those moments. Thankfully, that deep dive is such an enjoyment to watch and a thoughtful approach to Hitchcock’s direction that it’s difficult to complain that the documentary leaves us wanting more.” Matt Goldberg, Collider

” …the director would seem to disclose his base-line sympathies through the preponderance of youngish horror film makers and enthusiasts whose often manic and jargon-filled ejaculations of avidity for Psycho suggests that Hitchcock’s achievement lies less in pioneering (however unwittingly) the cultural shift signposted by 1960 and more in cracking open the door to a later generation of filmmakers to make gruesomely unrestrained horror films…” Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter

“78/52 is powered by captivating stories, like the one about how Hitchcock tested out the death-cut sound of knives slashing through a hundred different varieties of melon (having decided, he finally said “casaba” with matter-of-fact authority, and left the room). Or how, amazingly, when he saw the first rough cut of Psycho, he thought that the movie played so badly that he decided to scrap the entire project and boil it down to a one-hour episode of his weekly TV series.” Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Offline reading:

Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cinema’s Most Famous Scene by Philip J. Skerry

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

IMDb