I Was Raised On The Slashers, Bitch

A splitting headache, slasher movie style.

     I was just coming of age when the slasher movie boom that began with Halloween (1978) and ended with A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) was storming the pop culture landscape.  Though I've developed a wide-ranging taste in horror movies over the years, slashers were the first horror movies to make my heart go pitter-pat.  You never forget your first love.

     At the time, slasher movies defined horror for me.  This was, of course,  a pretty narrow definition, but it's a great sub-genre for a budding horror fan to cut his teeth.  The simple charms of a slasher movie exist on the surface.  Slashers are so beholden to a fixed narrative template that it's easy for nascent film critics to perceive variations to the form.   The slashers display a conservative morality that fosters jump scares while avoiding any ambiguity that might render the story more profoundly disturbing.  If you do bad things in a slasher, you die - easy peasy.  Even the movies' characters tend to be recurring archetypes - jock, joker, slut, virgin - that are instantly recognized and understood. 

Kramer's got nothing on Jason Voorhees

     Once a viewer becomes attuned to the slasher movie paradigm the movies themselves become the cinematic equivalent of comfort food.  You know almost exactly what's being served and how it will be served to you.  The thrill becomes less about originality and more about seeing how the particulars will change in the interest of tarting up the hoary foundation.  In many ways, a slasher movie holds the same appeal one finds in a t.v. sitcom.  A visit from Jason Vorhees is akin to a visit from the wacky next door neighbor who does a variation of the same shtick every week.

There damn well better be cookies and milk . . .

     Luckily there were enough irate mothers and incensed community leaders railing against the slasher movies of the era to guarantee the maligned sub-genre's continued low and dangerous rep.  How so many morally upright pillars of the community failed to see what one presumes should have been  the attractive notion of a black and white morality displayed in the slasher movies they vilified still perplexes me.  The notorious Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) would have slipped beneath my radar altogether had a batch of overwrought PTA mothers not made enough noise about it to land themselves on Entertainment Tonight.  Since they did, I made sure to get to a theater before they succeeded in having the movie abruptly pulled from distribution.

A "shot" from Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970)

     Even otherwise perceptive movie critics didn't really get it.  Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert famously decried the entire slasher sub-genre on their show At The Movies (watch the entire episode in two parts, here and here).  Sure, they gave props to Halloween and made some cogent points about the exploitative nature of many of the slashers that followed in its wake, but . . . Take a look at Russ Meyer's wildly exploitative  Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970) - based upon a screenplay written by Roger Ebert - and tell me how Mr. Ebert's sensibilities become so delicate in the span of just a decade.

Bag of pot or murder weapon?

      As a youngster, though, the perception that slasher movies were deviated and dangerous - and therefore not fit for consumption by any decent person - only enhanced their appeal.  I still recall many a childhood night that I'd set an alarm to wake me in the wee hours of the morning so I could surreptitiously watch some promising slice-and-dicer airing on HBO or Showtime.  Almost everything about a slasher movie seemed designed to appeal to an adolescent boy.  Slashers were my gateway drug.

He Knows You're Alone (1980)

     This rumination was prompted by the realization that there are still slasher movies from this era that I haven't seen.  I was indoctrinated by the likes of Friday The 13th (1980) and My Bloody Valentine (1981), but I'd never seen He Knows You're Alone (1980), Happy Birthday To Me (1981), and The House On Sorority Row (1983) until recently.  Just this week I've watched both Curtains (1983) and New Year's Evil (1980) for the first time.  I've decided to embark upon a more in depth investigation of these movies and the era they sprang from, so more posts about the topic will likely be forthcoming.  We can talk about the FX superstars, the iconography, the gratuitous nudity, and perhaps even the curious mini-trend of custom made ballads celebrating the legends of the slashers themselves. 

     It's on.  Let's get wet . . .

Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart - My Bloody Valentine (1981)

       

     Fewer than half a dozen times in my entire adult life has Valentine's Day not been miserable for me.  It's a cynical non-holiday formulated to sell greeting cards and torment the lonely.  If you're with someone it's an obligation to try to bludgeon your sweetie with sentiment on a day fraught with expectations.  Do too much and humiliate yourself in the eyes of someone who doesn't care as much.  Do too little and reveal yourself as a callous jerk with no romance in your heart.  Well,  Valentine's Day can kiss my hairy heart-shaped ass.  Thank God for My Bloody Valentine (1981).

     I wasn't always this bitter.  In fact, when I first saw My Bloody Valentine as a fresh-faced 11 year old I fell in love with the iconic look of the pickaxe wielding killer rather than the movie's sour view of Valentine's Day.  My appreciation of that aspect came with adulthood, and it grew with each passing year like the clog that undoubtedly festers in my aortic artery.

Completely badass, right?

     In my youth, though, I always wondered why My Bloody Valentine didn't spawn a franchise like so many of its calendar based brethren.  I now know it was the victim of unfortunate timing, a topic that director George Mihalka elaborates upon nicely in the extra features on the Special Edition disc.  All of the goriest footage was left on the cutting room floor to ensure the movie made its release date without becoming mired in a ratings battle with the MPAA.  Then, of course, the footage was lost - for twenty-eight years.

The version to have - beware the still circulating Paramount release!

     Lionsgate reinstated most of that newly rediscovered gore footage when they released the Special Edition to capitalize on the release of director Patrick Lussier's 2009 3D remake.  The elements for the footage is understandably rougher looking than the rest of the movie, and yet the degradation serves to enhance the authenticity of the gore effects in a pleasingly grindhouse fashion.  Though not all of the lost footage was recovered, director Mihalka says the new cut represents about 85% of what was intended.  I can honestly say I had never been more excited to see the extended cut of a movie, and the footage truly delivers.

A little taste of the gorey goodness reinstated for the My Bloody Valentine Special Edition.

     The theatrical cut that I saw as a child was already a favorite, and the reinstated effects serve to push the movie into the realm of greatness.  I contend that if this version had made it into theaters in 1981 that My Bloody Valentine would have spawned a franchise to rival the long running dominance of the Friday The 13th series.  Slasher movies just don't get any better.

     I was open to Lussier's remake because I saw it primarily as an opportunity for My Bloody Valentine to get a do-over and at last become the success it should have been the first time.  Though successful at the box office, the 2009 remake has yet to produce a sequel.  I'm brokenhearted once again.  At least the remake itself turned out to be a rousingly good  time in 3D.  The only major misstep was letting the miner spend too much time out of the mine.

A custom cover for Lussier's remake.  Break out your anaglyph 3D glasses - it's totally worth it!

     The original made the mine itself a major character, and the dark and claustrophobic mine shafts add immeasurably to the effectiveness of My Bloody Valentine.  All of the underground footage was shot at Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, often as much as 900 feet underground.  The movie benefits greatly from the verisimilitude.

     Often overlooked in discussion of My Bloody Valentine is the well delineated love triangle at the heart of the movie.  The star crossed lovers are more identifiably human than usual for horror movies of this era, and that aspect lends the final reveal of the killer's identity a level of pathos absent from most other slashers.  *Spoiler*  That triangle is still intact at the end of the movie, which makes it even more heartbreaking that there was never a sequel.

For the key to my heart?  You can actually order this here.

     So if you find yourself alone this Valentine's Day, my heart truly goes out to you.  As oxymoronic as it sounds, you're actually not alone because so many of us are alone with you.  Do what I do each and every year, and make a date with My Bloody Valentine.  I hear she's a sure thing . . .

 

Movies At Dog Farm Retrospective: Friday The 13th Part II (1981) - Best Of The Friday Franchise?

     The original Friday The 13th (1980) scared the hell out of me when I saw it as an impressionable ten year old at the now long defunct Harrisonburg Drive-In.  It's funny, now, to imagine that I was ever frightened by a Friday, but I had no idea at the time that a movie could be so . . . graphic.  This was the first hard horror movie I'd ever seen, and make-up ace Tom Savini showed me things in great, gory detail that my innocent young mind had never imagined.  The arrow through Kevin Bacon's neck from beneath the bunk haunted me (dammit, I knew something was under my bed), and Jason emerging from the lake at the end (". . . then he's still there. . ." - echo and fade) worked on my brain like the finest campfire tale.

    The next year was a formative one for me.  Despite how terrified I'd been by the murders at Crystal Lake, I began to cajole my mostly obliging parents to take me to every new slasher movie that opened.  That was a lot of movies - this was the height of the early 80's slasher boom, after all.  I'll always be grateful for having discovered contemporary horror at such a pivotal moment in genre history.  Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the TV ads began running for Friday The 13th Part II (1981).  Oh, happy day!  I never dared dream that the body count would continue.  I'd toughened up in the interceding year, and I was ready to revisit the horror that started it all.  I conned my mother into taking me to the theater on opening weekend.  Lights go down, opening titles blow up, Henry Manfredini's iconic score kicks in, and we're off!

     Friday The 13th Part II always seemed to me to be the scariest of the franchise.  Undoubtedly, the peculiar mix of excitement and dread I carried into the theater with me gave it some added juice, but still . . .  To this day, I expect to find a severed head every time I open the fridge.  It always spooked me that Jason ventured out of the woods to track down and kill the only survivor of Part I, as well.  Think what we now know of Jason.  Premeditation has never really been his strong suit.  Then he takes the boiling tea pot off the burner after killing Alice?  These are the actions of a more deliberate and thoughtful slasher than we came to know later.  Jason had a very specific axe to grind in Part II, and his calculating nature made him a more formidable and frightening threat.  Hell, he'd even run after his victims if the circumstance dictated it. 
                                                                
     I know I'm in the minority on this point, but I always preferred Jason's The Town That Dreaded Sundown look to the now iconic hockey mask, as well.  This looked like the pick-axe toting hillbilly I wouldn't want to meet in the woods at night.  You just know something awful is going on under that potato sack - who wears a sack over his head otherwise? 

      Best of all, though, Jason begins to give us a clear indication of  his own moral imperatives.  He wouldn't kill a guy in a wheelchair, right?  Mark's machete-in-the-face backward wheelchair ride down a lot of stairs, never tipping over until the chilling freeze frame and fade to white, proves otherwise.     

       Jason's first two-for-one kill of copulating teens - trimmed to avoid an X rating, and very reminiscent of a murder set piece in Mario Bava's Twitch Of The Death Nerve (1971) - also betrays a very puritanical upbringing.  Seriously, imagine what kind of mother Mrs. Vorhees would have been.  The indication of some kind of inner life for Jason that drives his murderous impulses is way scarier than the hockey masked comic book character that came later.  As slapdash as much of Part II is, it gets a lot right.  Jenny's contemplation in the local bar of Jason's psychological state as dictated by the traumas he's endured humanizes him just enough to make him that much scarier.  Now we know he has an agenda.  
                                                                       
      . . . and speaking of things Part II gets right:  Jenny is easily the very best of the Friday Final Girls.  She's likable, smart, engaging, and entirely capable of handling her own pitchfork.  I remember being very disappointed that Jenny didn't at least make a pre-credit appearance in Part 3.  Then I remember watching the rest of Part 3 and realizing that was only the tip of the disappointment iceberg.  So was Friday The 13th Part II the best of the Friday franchise?  Well, The Final Chapter competes, but I believe Part II takes the prize.  Please discuss.