October 1
#1 Cry of the Banshee (1970)
October 2
#2 P2 (2007)
October 3: The Madison Horror Film Festival
#3 The Landlord (2009)
#4 “You’re Next: Pajama Party Massacre 3″ (2007)
#5 Re-Animator (1985)
October 4
#6 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Every year I treat October as a month-long celebration of Halloween, and my horror movie viewing starts on the first of the month and often continues past midnight on the Day Itself.  Whether or not to blog about it is always a matter of internal debate, not the least because every film I watch is not necessarily worth the blogging (like some of the entries listed above).  But this year I have a specific goal in mind, so I figure it’s worth chronicling, to hold myself to that goal:

Last year I watched 28 horror programs.  (I say “programs” because I include short films and TV episodes or specials, and even live theatrical events, alongside feature films as perfectly valid Halloween-horror celebrating.)  This year it seems only reasonable to shoot for 31, one for each day of the month.  Naturally I don’t expect to have time each day–despite everything I’ve written above, I do have a life of some sort–so to make this goal achievable I’m allowing myself to cram more than one horror program into a single day.

My enthusiasm for the holiday kicked in early – by the middle of September I was already itching to start my horror movie marathon. (At this point I feel obliged to explain just what inordinately attracts me–a bookish English major, Francophile, and lover of split pea soup–to this much-maligned film genre. But I can save that for later. For now, take it for granted that I will be blogging about horror films to an absurd degree for the next month.) Really my marathon began with Rob Zombie’s adult animated film The Haunted World of El Superbeasto a few weeks back, and…or, wait, maybe we should actually begin when I revisited Jacques Tourneur’s superb Cat People in July…

Okay, you know what? Let’s start on October 1st.

I recently got a Tivo. If you knew that I don’t actually have cable or satellite dish–that I, in fact, get about twelve channels–you might think this a little ridiculous. What is there to Tivo? Antiques Roadshow? (Yes, actually. I’ve got three episodes I still need to watch. And tons of Family Feud.) The reason is that I have one of the older HD televisions, the kind without an HD receiver built in. Last year my wife and I were industrious and bought a digital converter box early, one with an HD receiver. It broke last month, and apparently no one carries those anymore. Someone at American laughed at me. Let me underline that: someone who works at American laughed at me. When one is already questioning one’s rocky career path, such an event can be traumatic. I had a standard, non-HD converter box set up for another television in our home, but, being a man who lives in 2009, I find that my eyesight can no longer properly register non-HD programming, reducing it all to an unintelligible blur, like trying to watch TV after removing my glasses and being struck about the cranium with a blackjack. Surely some enterprising grad student should conduct a study on this twenty-first century condition. My wife, who handles all online shopping research in my household, quickly determined that we had two options for viewing HD television again. We could purchase online, used perhaps, the same HD digital converter box we once owned, eagerly anticipating breakage. Or we could get an HD Tivo, which has a built-in HD receiver. And it is marvellous. Oh, there’s this little guy who looks like a TV, and he fidgets nervously while you go through your twelve or thirteen channels, and the word “Tivo” I think appears on his face–I’m at work right now, I’m not sure. And you can even “pause,” “rewind,” or “fast forward” a program. You can also “record” a program, which means, as I gather, that you can capture a program and (through the use of magic, so far as I can tell), watch it again later. Thank God I’ve completely blocked out all memories of VCRs so this can all seem so wondrously new and leave me in a state of childlike joy.  When you hit a button, Mr. Tivo goes, “Ba-bink!”  My television-watching device is adorable.

So here I was, browsing through the infinite variety of program listings which my antenna can provide (this is the future, so they are not rabbit ears–they are round, like robot rabbit ears), and lo and behold there’s a late-night screening of the 1970 Vincent Price film Cry of the Banshee. I tape it–excuse me, Tivo it–and it becomes my inaugural horror film of this month’s marathon.

It’s not very good.

In fact, it’s rather depressing, an American International impersonation of Hammer horror. It’s a costume drama in which each character seems to be costumed for a completely different period and country. It’s a film in which the “banshee” of the title actually just appears to be a werewolf. (That’s right–a mere werewolf!) Vincent Price looks only mildly engaged, as if he’s been hoodwinked into appearing in a community theater production. The sex is of the whip-and-chains variety which may or may not be your preference, but the smut is pretty dreary nonetheless. Or perhaps I should say “bleary.” It’s been a long while, I now realize, since I last watched a theatrical movie edited for television, and it was quite alarming to learn that women as a people do not have breasts, but rather a large cloudy region, as if a dirty old man had breathed on the glass. More specifically, it is exactly like watching naked women on non-HD TV.

Cry of the Banshee has some historical interest for being one of the few examples of a non-Monty Python animated sequence commissioned from young Terry Gilliam (he would have been working on Monty Python’s Flying Circus at the time). But this only means you need to watch about one minute of the film, and can switch it off early. It is the rare Vincent Price film which can almost turn me off his output entirely–I should watch The Pit and the Pendulum or The Masque of the Red Death to cure these blues.

One of the great things about Tivo is that, if you have a Netflix account as I have, you can stream a select number of films and TV shows through your television. This works surprisingly well.  It also threatens to derail my monthlong horror marathon in favor of “Mythbusters”-on-demand.  I added to my Netflix streaming queue all the horror films of interest that I could find, and it’s strangely heartening, if not downright heartwarming, to know that the yeti-rampage film Shriek of the Mutilated will now always be at my fingertips.  This month’s first on-demand horror film is the almost determinedly-mediocre P2, a parking garage thriller which threatens to give a bad name to parking garage thrillers.  All right, it’s not so terrible.  But I will confess that I watched this film only because Video Watchdog told me it had “that girl from The Woods,” and I was disappointed to learn it was actually “that other girl from The Woods…sorry.”*  Wes Bentley plays a presumably psychotic security guard in an underground parking garage, who ties up Rachel Nichols and forces her to have a low-key Christmas Eve dinner with him.  ”Presumably,” I say, because Wes Bentley’s idea of “psychotic” is just acting endearingly sweet punctuated by moments of sudden screaming; as a performance it seems inadequate, although it does the job just fine in my personal life.  If I could provide a blurb for a Blu-Ray release, it would be “This is not the most dire of modern horror films.  It passed the time!”

The Second Annual Madison Horror Film Festival, spotlighting independent horror films, took place this weekend, and I attended a wee bit of it, which is to say most of Saturday evening’s programming.  Booked into one of the screens at the Market Square Theatre, which is Madison’s budget theater, it was actually well attended, lively, cheery, and fun.  (Well, most of it–more on that in a moment.)  We arrived just in time to see Wisconsin legend Bill Rebane (Giant Spider Invasion) receive a lifetime achievement award.  He did not seem impressed, and took no questions, but he was smiling, at least, as he quickly fled the theater with his plaque.  What was most interesting about the subsequent screening of the zero-budget, shot-on-video-and-it-looks-it Chicago production The Landlord was the reaction of the audience, which was respectful silence, interrupted by either respectful or genuine laughter.  No one laughed at the film, but accepted its obvious limitations and appreciated what it managed to do well.  Usually I’m the nice one, but I had to giggle here and there at the special effects (which are on the level of an early 70’s Sid and Marty Croft show) or the awkward editing; that my giggles echoed through the theater left me chagrined.  The story is actually quite clever, if unnecessarily busy: a Chicago landlord must share his apartment building with demons from Hell, who occasionally feast upon his tenants; he’s left to hide the bodies and dodge questions from the cops.  We learn that he and his sister have both been aware of just how many demons occupy Chicago (a secret infestation, it seems) since they were children–their parents were part of a devil-worshipping sect–and while his sister, a corrupt and adulterous cop, has learned to strike bargains with the murderous demons to mutual advantage, he’s muddled along miserably with his supernatural burden.  The script delivers some strong comedic moments, even in bizarre digressions, such as a little sketch set in the lobby of the world’s sleaziest motel; but it struggles with the changes in tone, and the director never lets the material rise to its potential, allowing the pace to eventually fall into the somnambulistic.  But those effects!  During the freakout finale I tried to imagine I was watching a Kenneth Anger film from the late 70’s–Landlord Rising!–and found myself enjoying the silliness much more.

We came back from a popcorn break to find two women in lingerie telling each other scary stories and striking poses.  What at first seemed like a brilliant parody descended all too quickly into an ugly rape-and-slaughter fantasy.  At least it was over in about 10 minutes.  Who says the short film is dead?  Apparently somebody made three “Pajama Party Massacre” shorts. 

But at last came the main event of the festival, a screening of an indie horror classic Re-Animator with director (and onetime UW-Madison student) Stuart Gordon in attendance.  Gordon is one of the most talented of the so-called “Masters of Horror,” and his most recent film, Stuck, a black horror-comedy starring Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea, received some of the best reviews of his career.  As much as I enjoyed that film at last year’s Wisconsin Film Festival (which Gordon also attended), I doubt he’ll ever make a more perfect film than Re-Animator.  It is his Greed (but shorter).  How strange, after The Landlord and “You’re Next,” to see a first-time director demonstrate a perfect grasp of mise-en-scène, editing, suspense, and a pitch-perfect deadpan humor.  Granted, Gordon had lucked out with his casting call: after seeing this film, you cannot imagine anyone else but Jeffrey Combs inhabiting the role of Herbert West, “Re-Animator,” a young med student more brilliant than his instructor, Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale, also perfectly cast).  Herbert West is the kind of student who knows his talent, with little patience for anyone who might waste his time with their mediocrity; but Combs delivers his lines as though he’s 1940’s Katharine Hepburn.  He’s found a glowing-green formula for reanimating dead tissue, which has more unpredictable results than Dr. Frankenstein ever encountered.  Beside such a sensational performance, Bruce Abbott, as his roommate and reluctant co-conspirator Dan Cain, can only play straight man, but he’s every bit as sympathetic, and as valuable as the viewer’s surrogate, as he needs to be.  Barbara Crampton, meanwhile, is Gordon’s secret weapon; playing a pillar of virtue as the dean’s daughter (well, sort of–she’s sleeping with Cain), she finds herself unexpectedly confronting her dead cat re-animated into a screeching, pulpy mass–and, in the film’s key notorious moment, tied to a table while the severed head of Dr. Hill leers and drools blood upon her completely naked body.  Find me a braver actress who will go to greater lengths for a gross-out gag (or pun, really, if you know where that scene goes).  But Gordon is an equal-opportunity purveyor of nude bodies, and the finale is apocalyptic insanity in the spirit of both H.P. Lovecraft and E.C. Comics, with a good half-dozen nude corpses running riot in the hospital.  God bless the man; there is little in this world more gleefully insane than the last ten minutes of this film.  Gordon has used the momentum gained from Stuck’s positive reception into the production of another pet H.P. Lovecraft project, this an adaptation of “The Thing on the Doorstep,” due to begin filming next year; which is a good thing, as Gordon is, to date, the best director to attempt to bring Lovecraft’s peculiar “cosmic horror” to the big screen, with Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon, and the Masters of Horror episode “Dreams in the Witch-House.”  On a parallel track is his obsession with Poe, and as a companion-piece of sorts to his Masters of Horror episode “Black Cat,” which starred Combs as an uncanny Poe, he has cast Combs again as the doomed, alcoholic author, in a stage production called Nevermore, which he is hoping to put on the road.    

Sunday we bought pumpkins and apples at two separate farms outside Madison, and walked through a muddy corn maze, motivated on through the tall stalks of corn by a card of movie and TV trivia we held in our hand, so that when we reached a numbered post, we were to read the respective numbered question on our trivia card.  If we answered the question correctly, it would take us on the correct path out of the maze.  But, come on…”Who starred in The Wizard of Oz?”  This is the best you can do, Schuster’s Playtime Farm?

Naturally that night I decided to watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

I was perhaps partially motivated by a question during the Stuart Gordon Q&A from the night before.  (Question: What are the three greatest horror films?  Answer: Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.**)  When I first saw this film, I was a freshman in college, and my friend T-Bone and I rented two films we hoped would make for a suitably scary evening: Hellbound: Hellraiser II and Tobe Hooper’s 1974 cult classic.  At one point during Hellbound, the lights in the room began to flicker ominously for several seconds (right when we see the labyrinth of Hell for the first time); during The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, my nose began to bleed.  Or maybe it was T-Bone’s.  Either way, the film was eeeeeeevil!  It left its mark upon my psyche, and a few years later I dared watch it again on the Independent Film Channel.  IFC then showed the film again, this time with the audio commentary by Hooper, cinematographer Daniel Pearl, and “Leatherface” Gunnar Hansen.  The curtain opened: suddenly I could see the gears of the fear machine exposed, and I was fascinated.  This film was actually good.  Not a force of good, perhaps; there’s a distinction.  But a damn good film.  I also realized, for the first time, that it was funny, albeit in the bleakest possible way.

Now that I’ve visited it again, another six years later or so, I am seeing even more.  For a low-budget piece of scrappy filmmaking, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has layers and layers that are surprisingly rewarding, and earn its reputation in unexpected ways.  This is a proper film, a great film.  Yet so much has been written on the subject already (the persistent solar imagery, and the slaughterhouse motif; the surprisingly careful use of blood, and almost complete absence of gore; the cannibal family representing an older, ugly America, repressed from memory but very much alive) that it leaves me exhausted of insights, except for this minor one: this film, which I once thought was so ugly, is unerringly beautiful from one shot to the next.  Often it’s a terrible beauty, or a grisly one, but it is striking and undeniable upon close study.  Every shot is carefully constructed, from the Hitchcockian P.O.V. glimpses into the Old Dark House (a staircase, a frighteningly red room off to the left–bones hung on the wall–both menacing and inviting), to the chilling shots of characters isolated in the frame just as they’re isolated from society (the wheelchair-bound Franklin most of all); from a boiling sun that slowly obliterates objects and characters in the foreground, to the brief flashes, in the darkness of a car on a night drive, of a kidnapper’s perversely fascinated face.  Even in the darkest moment in the film–Sally Hardesty flipping out while in the captivity of the cannibal family–the delirious extreme close-ups of her eyeball, and then the bloody-red edges of her eyeball, are so unexpected, and so unhinged, that they perfectly fuel the madness.  What’s behind all this but Hooper, working in extreme heat and extreme conditions, following his instincts and peering at every angle–the sculptures of bones and chicken feathers, the poorly stitched-together mask of human flesh–like a documentarian with a masterful eye.  As much was accomplished in post-production, Oscar-worthy editing (restricted to an alternate universe where the Academy would notice such things) and an experimental, jarring soundtrack which sounds like it was composed by Krzysztof Penderecki at his most avant-garde.  All of this in service of a plot which consists of (1) innocents get killed, and (2) one teen runs, and runs, and runs, and can never quite lose her pursuer.  It is not a plot but a nightmare–I have had this dream, over and over.  And yet it’s a nightmare you can analyze, that you can revist and wonder over.  It gives up some secrets: Leatherface, for one, gets more comical and less frightening on each viewing, as do all the family members; and Franklin, so annoying on first viewing, becomes more sympathetic in light of his endearing, and misguided, attempts to connect with the psychotic hitchhiker on the subject of slaughterhouses.  Some of the film’s secrets it keeps to itself.  If John Carpenter made the ideal Halloween film, Tobe Hooper made a film which captures horror, and turns it over, and gazes unblinkingly into it.  There are few finer films on the subject. 

 * The Woods is a film directed by Lucky McKee (May).  It’s much better than P2, but did not receive a theatrical release, presumably because the lead actress does not get soaking wet in an evening gown while trapped in an elevator.

** My answer: Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, and Suspiria.