Chapter 11: The 80’s

Friday the 13^th (1980) – Sean Cunningham

Friday the 13^th was not very good but it was insanely popular. Fans of Scream know that killer in the original was not the hockey masked Jason, but his mother. The make-up effects by Tom Savini are terrific throughout. Sadly some of them were cut to avoid an X rating.

Friday the 13^th marks an early role for Kevin Bacon. Bacon is killed, as he’s enjoying a post-coital cigarette, by a spear that pierces his throat from under the bed. It’s a great death scene, one of the best in the series.   The only priorly known actor in the film is Betsy Palmer who plays Mrs. Vorhees. She had a career dating back to 1951.

Sean Cunningham, a shrewd marketer in the William Castle tradition, took out an ad in Variety, calling the Friday the 13^th “The Most Terrifying Film Ever Made!” before he even had a finished script.

Critic Gene Siskel hated the film so much he intentionally spoiled the ending in his first paragraph. He published the address of the Chairman of the Board of the Company that owned Paramount (the studio that distributed the film) so readers could personally write nasty letters. Friday the 13^th was followed by nine successful sequels, a crossover film with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and a remake.

The Shining (1980) – Stanley Kubrick

What is there still to say about The Shining? It’s the big macher of modern studio horror films. Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick’s mostly naturally lit period picaresque, didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. For his next film, Kubrick wanted something that would appeal to a wider audience.

Kubrick read through a pile of horror books to find his next subject. His assistant remembers him starting them and the flinging against the wall. She finally noticed it was quiet in his office, when she checked on him, she found him reading The Shining.

The shoot was notoriously difficult. Kubrick wanted everything perfect. He had his crew re-build quite a bit of The Ahwahnee Hotel in California on a soundstage in England. At this point Kubrick was scared of flying, so he would not leave England.

Jack Nicholson was Kubrick’s first choice for Jack. Nicholson, a method actor, cruelly ignored his co-star Shelley Duval. Kubrick ignored her too. He wanted her to wallow in the character’s alienation. She had a nervous breakdown of the set. Nicholson improvised the famous tennis ball scene. Kubrick constantly re-wrote the script. This annoyed Nicholson to the point that he only learned his lines a few minutes before a take.

The Shining was one of the first films to use the newly invented Steadicam for smooth tracking shots. The Steadicam shot of Danny on his tricycle meeting the two dead girls is suitably famous.

Stephen King didn’t particularly like the film. He famously said,

“Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others. What’s basically wrong with Kubrick’s version of The Shining is that it’s a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that’s why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.”

King has since come to terms with the film. Whether or not The Shining thinks too much and feels to little, it is a masterpiece of the cinematic form. Don’t be a dull boy…see the movie.

An American Werewolf in London (1981) – John Landis

“Hello David!” This is the great white horror comedy, and John Landis is at the peak of his powers. Two friends are attacked by a werewolf after a fantastically memorable scene in a pub right off the moors.

One of the friends is killed while the other, David, is sent to recover in a London hospital. His dead and decomposing friend shows up to warn him that he will become a werewolf during the next full moon.

David starts a relationship with a pretty nurse, which leads to the very popular shower sex scene. Horror fans like nudity. Especially when it’s Jenny Agutter. The friends later meet for a hysterical conversation at a pornographic theater playing the ridiculous porn flick ‘See You Next Wednesday’, which John Landis alludes to in all of his films.

Watch for the Academy Award winning werewolf makeup effects by Rick Baker, which were revolutionary for their time. Also keep an eye out for Miss Piggy and Frank Oz.

My other favorite horror comedy is the Steven Spielberg produced Gremlins (1984). Although not strictly a horror movie, the supernatural comedy Topper (1937) starring Cary Grant and Constance Bennett remains a perennial must-see.

Poltergeist (1982) – Tobe Hooper

“They’re Here!”  In 1982, producer Steven Spielberg brought the haunted house to the suburbs with Poltergeist and permanently scarred a generation of kids.  Before Poltergeist, haunted houses were dark decrepit structures that the average kid could easily avoid by crossing to the other side of the street.  

After Poltergeist, it was possible that your bright modern abode, and your quintessentially 80s bedroom, decked out with Star Wars toys, could be haunted by dangerous and angry spirits.  This was the first E-ticket (those tickets that would get you on Disney Land’s scariest and most exciting rides) haunted house flick.  Poltergeist is an intense rollercoaster of thrills that utilizes all of Industrial Light and Magic’s bag of trick to their fullest.

Steven and Diane Freeling live in a generic Southern California planned community.  The type where the houses are all stylistically the same.  They have three children Dana, Robbie, and Carol Anne.  One night, they find Carol Anne speaking to the TV set.  

Back in the 80s, TV stations used to sign off, and all you were left with was static.  Anyway, as the little girl is speaking to the ‘TV people’, there is a quick but violent earthquake.  After the earthquake subsides, Carol Anne turns to her parents and quite cheerfully announces, “They’re Here.” – One of horror’s most memorable lines.

Eventually Carol Anne disappears into the TV set and the Freelings contact a parapsychologist and a medium (the endlessly amusing Zelda Runbinstein) to free her.

Poltergeist is full of scary happenings.  Maggots burst out of a steak.  A man pull his own face off.  For me, and I’m sure many other people who saw this movie as a kid, the scariest involves a creepy clown doll under Robbie’s bed.

Poltergeist is masterful entertainment, filled to the brim with memorable pulse-pounding set-pieces and colorful well-developed characters (Watch how Steven and Diane feel distinctly off-center compared to the average suburban couple they pretend to be but no one actually ever is.  No director can capture the truth of the suburbs like Spielberg) .

While the movie is credited to Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper, many people believe it was actually directed by Spielberg, who was prevented from taking a credit by union rules because he was directing ET (1982) at the same time.  It’s full of the special Spielberg sheen, and Jerry Goldsmith’s top-notch score could not be me Spielbergian.

Either way, this is one of the very best 80s horror movies, and a major influence on recent horror hits such as The Conjuring (2013) and Insidious (2013).  The parapsychologist, Dr. Lesh, in Poltergeist was modeled on Lorraine Warren.

Pieces (1983) – Juan Piquer Simon

Bad Chop Suey! I first ran into Pieces on an all night Halloween marathon plan by Eli Roth, so I’ll let him describe it. Let me just say that there’s a scene where the protagonist is attacked by Bruce Lee impersonator Bruce Li (the star of Game of Death 2) before he comes to his senses blaming his out of control kung fu on bad chop suey.

Eli says: “It’s a Spanish horror film [1982’s Mil Gritos Tiene La Noche] that was released as Pieces here. It was made in Spain, but except for Paul L. Smith, it’s mostly Spanish actors with some really great bad dubbing. Pieces is one of my favorite early-’80s slasher films, in that it’s a chainsaw movie that gives you absolutely everything you want. It’s got amazingly cheesy acting, it’s got fantastic kills, it starts off right away with a flashback with a kid killing his parents.

It’s just a fantastic, low-budget slasher movie with a terrific ending that makes no sense. And it’s become a cult film, because there’s a great line where the really hot undercover police agent—who’s also posing as the tennis instructor—finds a girl who’s been hacked up in the school bathroom. She just shakes her fist and goes [High-pitched female voice.] “Bastard! Bastard, bastard, bastard!” If you ever watch it with an audience, everyone always cheers along during that scene.”

The film’s tagline was “You don’t have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw massacre.” Enough said.

Sleepaway Camp (1983) – Robert Hiltzik

This is a terrible slasher film. I mean it’s the genre at its most mediocre. The opening scene is so bad you think you’re in a satire. The best murder starts with a rape by curling iron. Which is severely sick because the victim seems like she’s sixteen at most.

Then there’s the ending. That last shot. I won’t give it away, but it’s the whole and only reason to watch this twisted film. The last shot will burn itself into your retina. I’m warning you. I will say that the stand-in in the last shot is a college student who had to get drunk before he was willing to do it. Or so the story goes.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) – Wes Craven

‘One…Two…Freddy’s Coming for You…’ A Nightmare on Elm Street is the most creative slasher film of the 1980’s. Wes Craven remembers, as a child, asking his mother if she could enter his dream to protect him from the boogeyman. She told him that “sleep was the one place we had to go alone.’

When Craven was ten he lived in a second story apartment in Cleveland. One night, there was a muttering and shuffling outside his window. Craven got out of bed to look. Down on the street stood an old man in an overcoat. The man stopped in his tracks and stared up at Craven. Craven dropped to the ground. When he got up again, the man was still leering at him. The man stared at Craven with an I-can-see-you grin. Craven woke his older brother, who grabbed a baseball bat, and with Wes Craven at his side, walked to the street. When they opened the apartment building’s door, the man was gone.

In Craven’s mind, this man became Freddy Kreuger. Freddy was a child killer, the parents of Springfield, Anywhere, USA burnt him when he was released on a technicality. The razor-gloved fiend lives on in the minds of the children. He is such a presence – a legend- that they have a jump-rope song about him even though none of the kids remember him. “Five…Six…Grab your crucifix…9….10 Never Sleep again.” Freddy has the power to invade their dreams and kill them when they sleep; the only time they are forced to be truly alone. In college, Craven studied Freud and Jung, both influences on his films.

There’s another story that influenced the creation of A Nightmare on Elm Street. A young man in Los Angeles suffered from horrible nightmares. He believed a monster was going to kill him in his sleep. He decided to stay awake.

He did not sleep for four days, then his parents brought him to the doctor. He was prescribed sleeping pills. In the middle of the night his parents heard screaming. They found him thrashing in the bed. Then he was dead.  He had not taken the pills. His mother followed an extension cord to a hot coffee maker in his closet.

When Craven heard that horrible tragic story he began to write. Craven named his monster Freddy, after a kid who had bullied him in school. Craven cast Robert Englund as Freddy. Englund was the son of one of the designers of the U-2 spyplane.

Nightmare on Elm Street

Nancy Thompson is my favorite final girl. She is smart, plucky, and vulnerable; yet courageous. She’s the girl next door. She’s the girl that sits at the edge of the popular table because she’s dating the football hero but is more comfortable around the smart girls.

There are few girls who rival her in the horror genre, certainly not Sydney Prescott or Laurie Strode. She’s an average girl in an extraordinary situation who is able to raise her game to defeat a monster that has all of the advantages.

I’m yet to mention Jacques Haitkin’s colorful soft-focus cinematography or Charles Bernstein’s famous score. It’s because A Nightmare on Elm Street is the one slasher where I care about the characters. I want to see Nancy defeat Freddy. I’m involved. The craftsmanship, as strong as it is, is secondary.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was followed by six sequels. The third film is the best of the sequels but I have a definite soft spot for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.  Nonetheless, all the sequels are a cut above the average slasher film. Wes Craven returned to direct the seventh film in the franchise, a post-modern meta-exercise that pre-figures his hit film Scream (1996).

Re-Animator (1985) – Stuart Gordon

Re-Animator is an extremely loose H.P. Lovecraft adaptation that is mostly an excuse for sleazy violence and gratuitous sex. It is very entertaining. This is a big open-hearted (literally) horror film that wears its influences on its sleeve.  For example, the score is derived from the score to Psycho, and when I say derived, I mean it’s basically the same.  Horror is a genre that loves homage, and may be the one genre where you can get away with such obvious lifts.

Anywho, Re-Animator revolves around the character Herbert West (a hilarious Jeffrey Combs) a medical student who has developed a glowing bright-green serum that brings the dead back to life.  West transfers to a college in New England and rooms with our protagonist Dan Cain, who is engaged to Megan Halsey, (scream queen Barbara Crampton) the daughter of the school’s imperious dean.  

Of course, all hell breaks loose after West starts testing the serum leading to hijinks both comical and extremely gory.  A particularly effective sequence of black comedy has West reanimating Dan’s dead cat.  Not surprisingly the gorgeous Ms. Crampton is often naked.

Iconic critic Pauline Kael hit the nail on the head when she praised the film’s “indigenous American junkiness”, she even claimed the film hits the darkly comic heights of the surrealists without their pretension.  Re-Animator is great trash and I mean that in the best way possible.  It is a work of striking talent and imagination all in the service of as much gore and nudity its creators could possibly pile on.

If that’s not worth a stream, I don’t know what is.

Hellraiser (1987) – Clive Barker

Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) is my second favorite final girl.  Like Nancy Thompson, Kirsty is a regular girl who finds herself at the center of extraordinary circumstances.  She’s not an uptight virgin like Laurie Strode or damaged goods like Sydney Prescott, nor does she have the calm calculating demeanor of Ellen Ripley.  Kirsty is a just a girl dropped into the most horrible circumstances possible, who finds a way through sheer courage and resourcefulness to triumph over the literal forces of Hell.

It all starts with a box. Frank Cotton is an evil man. A man willing to chase pleasure at any cost. A modern libertine so decadent that all possible excitements of the flesh have not tempered his lust.  In Morocco, Frank tracks down a puzzle box said to offer the ultimate pleasure – a level of decadence and depravity that cannot be attained in our world.  

Sitting naked in an attic in London, Frank solves the puzzle and summons the Cenobites, demons who offer eternal carnal pleasure.  The Cenobites rip Frank to pieces with chains in a perpetual S&M game.

Some years later, Frank’s brother Larry moves with his new wife Julia, and his teenage daughter Kirsty into the London flat that Frank inhabited.  It is revealed the Julia once had an affair with Frank and is still enthralled by him.  She is willing to kill to give him flesh once more.  No one, not even Julia, understands how far Frank is willing to go to escape eternal torture.

Hellraiser was was directed by award-winning horror novelist Clive Barker in his feature film debut.  Barker’s grotesque yet impressively imagined fusing of fantasy with sexually charged horror redefined the genre in the 1980s with his famed short story collection The Books of Blood, masterful debut novel The Damnation Game, and his epic fantasy triumph The Great and Secret Show.  

Hellraiser is a work of great creativity and low-budget ingenuity (after running out money, Clive Barker created the final monster himself out of papier-mâché).  It is a truly intense film, filled to the brim with haunting and taboo imagery. However, it is the narrative and the acting that holds one rapt.  Its the strength of the narrative that separates Hellraiser from the generic slasher gorefests that clogged theaters in the 1980s.  

The acting is terrific across the board, but stage actors Andrew Robinson (the Scorpio killer in Dirty Harry (1971)) and Claire Higgins must be singled out for their performances as Larry and Julia Cotton.

The Cenobite leader, Pinhead has since become an iconic horror character and Halloween costume.  Hellraiser was followed by nine sequels of rapidly diminishing quality and a comic book series.  The film is based on Barker’s 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart.  Although well-written and frightening, the book generally feels like a warm-up for the film; a treatment of sorts for the project in Barker’s heart.