FUNHOUSE

So the end result appears to be that Tobe Hooper’s best are his debut, the seminal "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and his adaptation of Stephen King's "Salem’s Lot", which remains a benchmark in TV horror. Hooper could do scary, in different ways. Even "Poltergeist" is a consummate example of family-friendly and toothless horror… with some scary. "Funhouse", another early Hooper horror, is ultimately disappointing. Apparently beset with production problems and interference that left subplots going nowhere, it’s a routine tale of "teens" not doing as they are told and uncovering terrible monsters at the local fair. It’s long on build-up, hobbled by pedestrian dialogue, characters and plotting and lacks for inventive killings. What it does have is a wonderful evocation of the carnival in all its detail and tackiness, a wonderful midway crane-shot, an unforgettable monster (some debate as to whether Rick Baker’s design is good or not: I say it’s scary, repellent and truly nightmarish), some lukewarm to above-average acting, and excellent set design. The funhouse itself is packed with garish lighting and mechanical monsters, seemingly bigger on the inside than the outside, full of genuine carnie adornments. Ultimately, it’s a routine slasher dressed up really nicely, and so it is more than acceptable when the milieu is so winning.

The most interesting aspect is that when we start off in the family home, our female protagonist Amy (Elizabeth Berridge) is getting ready to go out on a date, it quickly emerges that her prankster younger brother Joey (Shawn Carson) has turned as much of the place as he can into a funhouse of his own. Dummies, masks, cheap shocks… all present and correct, and damned if he isn’t engaging from the start in a thoroughly cheeky homage/rip-off of "Halloween" and "Psycho". In their respective funhouses, both attackers indulge in displays of violence from sexual immaturity: Joey attacks his sister in the shower with a decidedly limp fake knife, wearing a mask that makes him look like a demented old man; our hideous monster Gunther’s (!) premature ejaculation and un-fulfilment drives him to murder girl scouts and fortune tellers. Gunther and Joey both have excellent reveals when their masks are torn off to reveal… greater horrors than the masks traded in. In another "Halloween"-style gag, we see Gunther ( Wayne Doba) help run the funhouse wearing a Frankenstein’s monster’s mask long before the truth about his deformity is revealed (the patrons are deliciously clueless). But at base what "Funhouse" has is the kind of two-dollar sexual motivation and undertones of most post-"Friday the 13th" killer flicks, and exactly the kind that "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" didn’t trade in. On the one hand, sexual immaturity drive the confused to horrible crimes and pranks of passion, and on the other, it’s only the virgin seemingly rewarded with survival.

It is the carnie father and son that represent the family sticking together and surviving against the odds, despite also evidently being the foreign threat to small-town America. The father (Kevin Conway, adding much needed class) is both repulsed and loving to his hideously deformed son, given to bouts of cruelty but also not ready to let him be lynched like his mother or displayed as a sideshow freak like his brother. In comparison, the respectable middle-class suburban family are cold fish indeed, peddling in quick disdain, superficial concern and seemingly disinterest in one another. We can at least allow credentials of tragedy to the horrific monster and dad team, especially as mime artist Wayne Doba gives his best Karloff’s monster rendition to inscribe the Gunther with all kinds of pathos. There’s not much to care about in the double-dating couples who decide to stay overnight in the funhouse, just for chuckles and foreplay. Despite a nice realistic moment where an initial altercation between Amy and her slightly disreputable date sets the night off on the wrong foot, there is little of interest to the couples themselves.

Once these nondescript couples see Gunther commit murder and are hunted down, one might have asked for a little more inventiveness with the funhouse lay-out and props, what with them being so creepy, fun and fascinating. One might have wished for a more creative killing spree to compensate, although there is quite a convoluted castration for Gunther, with his midriff crushed in the gears of the funhouse… yet it never feels as excessive as it ought to be. …Meanwhile, our Joey has skipped out of home and is enjoying the carnie all by himself, and in a further state of impotence can’t get inside the funhouse, which is surely his spiritual home. One can argue that his side-story finally goes nowhere. We could also leave the funhouse asking who the real monsters are… and that’s your standard issue horror coda right there. It will probably always work.

Tobe Hooper, 1981, USA

HALLOWEEN

"Halloween":

Suburbia, Sex, Slashers

1: The Mystery of Michael Myers

It goes without saying that ‘faceless’, expressionless, silent killers terrify due to their apparent emotionless and impenetrable veneer. To this deliberate end, Michael Myers of John Carpenter’s "Halloween" has the gimmick of the mask - famously, a William Shatner mask. We see Myers’ face only twice: as a child, and as an adult in the frenzy of killing - and in the latter example he desperately pulls the mask back over his face. Once the mask becomes his true visage, he moves from Myers to the boogeyman, or The Shape, elevating to mythical and iconic status, before our eyes, within the film and across its fan-base. No definitive explanation is given as to why Michael murders his sister, and this too is deliberate ~ unlike "Nightmares in a Damaged Brain", it is not the confused witnessing of the sexual act that triggers him, the primal scene. Is it his suspicion of his sister’s sexual nature that activates him, perhaps? Prepubescent, incestuous jealousy? We assume it’s the deviant teenage sex, as we always do, but we really have little evidence. Or did he always intended to kill from the moment he approaches the house? Obviously this lack of motivation is essential to Myers: it matters not why he kills, only that he does, He’s the boogeyman.

Myers enters his own home like an intruder, by means of a definitive use of point-of-view hand-held camera, gliding and searching an unremarkable suburban home. And the camera goes out of focus at one point so we cannot identify the hand reaching for a knife, withholding the killer’s identity until the prologue’s shock revelation. (In fact, this is [producer] Debra Hill’s hand, which creates a far more mundane reason for this out-of-focus moment: to disguise the fact that it was not a child’s not for the sake of surprise revelation, but for purely practicality.) It is a seminal horror film opening: smooth, brilliantly executed, wry, chilling, thrilling and promising all the unspeakable terrors to come.

Far less politically charged than the new living dead, Texan cannibals and last houses on the left, "Halloween" nevertheless subversively laid bare the fragility of the post-Baby Boom suburban opulence. The old monster-on-the loose scenario was updated and rampant in your conservatively inclined leafy town, subtext relatively intact. Myers might just as well be a man in a rubber suit, so alien and inhuman is he. Just because you have a nice house, it won’t stop him, and he doesn’t roar and run so that you call the military in either. Nonetheless, Myers is a force of nature: that unleashed Id, dispatching sexually active young adults; a smalltown horror that doesn’t know to stay dead, finally transcending himself into a supernatural, mythical entity.

There is little realism to Myers: his sole redeeming feature is that he was once a child, but this is barely substantial: it is simply the first shock and twist. Even as a child, when his Halloween mask is first taken from his face by his parents, the face is equally blank and unreadable. His childness - I.e., his vulnerability and innocence - it’s an assumption he discards presumably as soon as he can. He suffers none of the detailed psychological disturbances of "Nightmares in a Damaged Brain"; he does not possess any knowing smirks like the variably human Damien Antichrist of "The Omen" series. There is no filling-in of Myers’ childhood; no distraught but insightful interviews with the parents; no concept that rehabilitation will redeem him, or that he even qualifies for it. Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is almost there simply to run around refuting Myers’ ability to be human, to declare the blank concerning ‘The Blank’. Loomis is not so far from Kevin McCarthy at the end of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers", trying to warn the impenetrable traffic of an alien invasion, bringing about the end of humanity. There is no attempt to endow Michael Myers with any sympathy or reasoning, and therefore he ends up forever the inhumane murderous child. Damaged children and mutant offspring have always been essential to the genre, as much as child abuse has created a large proportion of TV "tragedy" drama. Robin Wood has rightly identified childhood itself as a state of "Otherness"[1]. Myers is s parental, cultural and social nightmare. What is he the result of? Idealised but ineffectual Baby Boomer parents? The net result of repression in a Christian-Conservative-Capitalist society? The manifestation of virgin-babysitter Laurie’s fear of sexual punishment and the predatory male? Or is he just, you know, plain bad?

[1] The other states of Otherness is to be: other people; woman; the proletariat; other cultures; ethnic; alternative ideologies/politcal systems; sexually ‘deviant’ - & children. ~ Robin Wood, "An Introduction to the American Horror Film", in Movies and Method: volume II, ed. Bill Nicholls, (University of California Press, London, 1985) pg.199-200.

2: The Friends of Michael Myers

Sidestepping the slasher’s origins in giallo (like a disreputable pal to American thrillers, what with all that European explicitness), in its American horror context "Halloween" was released the same year [1978] as "Damien – Omen II" and "The Fury"; 1977 had offered "Audrey Rose", "The Exorcist II: the Heretic" and "The Island of Doctor Moreau". All these were mainstream expressions of the horror genre, all possessing monstrous offspring. Their subtexts were filtered through a middle-class, neo-Gothic setting and traditional Christian and conservative ethic, working on a vision that at once embraced and then rejected modernity in all its opulence, as well as contemporary science for solutions to spiritual questions and advancements. By contrast, the alternative low-budget scene offered the likes of "The Hills Have Eyes", "Night of the Living Dead" and "I Spit on Your Grave" alongside "Halloween". Unsurprisingly the big-budget horrors reaffirmed your basic status quo of Good and/vs. Evil, whereas the independents, in an post-Vietnam era, just weren’t so sure.

George Romero and Tobe Hooper had already clearly pointed out how horror had a natural affinity for documentary technique and aesthetic. Despite being low-budget and ostensibly modest, Carpenter’s "Halloween" helped point to how the new wave of horror could carry a modest but slick sheen too. Free from the demands of mainstream production, finding it increasing easier to at least get hold of a camera, the low-budget filmmakers were able to carve new paths through taboos, and their influences were permanent. Damien’s smirk in "The Omen" signifies the audience’s complicity in the enjoyment of such high-concept, absurd demonic shenanigans; but "Halloween’s" killer offspring is far too close to home, confirming our fears for our children left unsupervised there, confirming our worst fears about their promiscuity, about the realism of prowlers and murderers. Despite Myer’s supernatural evolution, it is his corroboration of our paranoia and worst fears that consolidates his mythic qualities. That’s no big secret, but nevertheless, despite its homage to the fun of fear, therein lies the poignancy of Carpenter’s film.

It is easy to see how Aurum concludes that "by sidestepping social or moral comment, [Halloween] offers a foolproof blueprint for bloody violence," [2] but Halloween offers very little blood and by-passes easy moralising in order to create a symbol of a very real and deep fear for a fresh-packed suburban generation. Myers is a moral void, ergo inhuman, ergo a killer. When he kills his sister, he watches himself stabbing her; later he will use the same gaze to study his victim as they hang dying upon the wall. It is as if he cannot understand or believe what he has done, his fascination very much like a child pouring acid upon a slug or smashing bottles. Y’know: just to see. And further to this, Carpenter, and his unsurpassed use of prowling Panavision camera toys with us and our nerves in the same way. And again it links the serial killer deeply with voyeurism, and therein cinema itself. What does it mean to watch someone being killed, even cinematically? In this way, Myers is the very passive-aggressive audience that simultaneously celebrates the fear he provokes in them. This alertness to voyeurism was always present in killer films, (e.g. "The Spiral Staircase") but Myers was a somewhat quieter and decidedly modern rendition of your Hitchcock killers or Peeping Toms. Pretty soon, serial killers were going to be a sub-genre all of their own.

Legend has it that from "Psycho" and "Halloween", a brand new batch of novelty murders were born. If "Psycho" was the sly entertainer, "Halloween" was the overachieving runt and "Peeping Tom" the despised black sheep, academically pointing to the phobias and perversions of his peers. "Psycho" leads to "Silence of the Lambs". "Halloween" led immediately to "Friday the 13th", whereupon the lineage immediately stunts itself, and to too many derivatives to speak of; latterly revived somewhat by post-modernism and post-MTV ‘cool’ of "Scream". "Peeping Tom" led to… "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer", "Man Bits Dog" and "Funny Games", perhaps. Arguably it was going to be David Fincher's "Se7en" that distilled all these into one fin de siecle package, and then Fincher's "Zodiac" that denied all the showbiz of the genre by treating it purely as police procedural and puzzle. The urban-legend-come-super-naturally true would give the world Freddy Kruger (a despicable but safely fantastic horror) and Candyman (ditto)… And so on. Nevertheless "Halloween" remains a truly entertaining and influential piece, a recognised classic and, due to its staking a claim on a seasonal holiday, classic and eternal.

[2] Halloween review, the Aurum Encyclopedia of Horror, pg. 329.

 

 

3: Myers is a Bad Date

It is impossible to avoid reflecting upon serial killer flicks without mentioning Carol J. Clover’s concept of ‘The Final Girl’: a masculinised heroine who survives or destroys the serial killer [3]; she is a homoerotic stand-in for the male audience, and thereby denies feminist reading. But it seems short-sighted to assume that any violent female reaction to a male threat immediately endows her with unquestionably masculine traits [4], or even that her use of a knife immediately endows her with a substitute phallus ~ sometimes a weapon is just a weapon (it depends upon representation, context, etc.). ‘The Final Girl’ also more-or-less sidesteps the erotic appeal of the female in distress to the male audience. The female body is threatened and damaged in the scenario, it is stabbed and slashed and revealed, pierced and bloodied; often taking the form of a stab-and-strip show. The Final Girl is not the only surrogate upon which the male gaze can project his own vulnerability and fears, apparently ‘feminine’ qualities. There are those also played out through male surrogates, the erotic appeal of the female left intact: these apprehensions are played out in an archetype which might be termed the Male Protector.

In many horrors, the desire for the male to protect the female is stimulated and challenged, and almost always they fail. Defending one’s loved ones is deeply fixed in the traditional male gender role, and slasher flicks - unlike action films - spell out how fathers, husbands and boyfriends can/will fail as the Male Protector. The threat is often another, stronger, homicidal male who wants to deny other males their sex-lives and to punish the females for theirs. Films like "Halloween" renders the male fear of being unable to save and safeguard the female body and feminine objects of lust and affection from superior male predators. This arousal and failure of the Male Protector, who is often dispatched early, symbolises all kinds of impotency. Other times the dynamic might change and become more complex when the threat facing the Male Protector is a mother ~ "Psycho", "Friday the 13th", "Deep Red", etc. In "Black Christmas", the final twist rests upon the Male Protector’s failure to recognise the female threat. These latter films also show the perceived homoeroticism of The Final Girl as failing to address female violence.

The slasher film also services rape-revenge fantasies for women. The surviving and central/final girl may not actually be violated, but her fear and the threat of it alone is enough to validate extreme self defence. After all, she must dispatch the killer in a gratuitous, graphic and inventive manner to satisfy revenge for having been stalked and humiliated. Oh, and the slaughter of her pals. Evidently, this also co-insides with the need for a show-stopping, sweaty, exhausted end to the cinematic experience, and we are often left celebrating female endurance and resourcefulness. Faceless or excessive male sexuality, often seen as violent, warrants extermination, or at least a good castration. In Abel Ferrara’s "Ms. 45: Angel of Death", the mere ability of men to breathe heavily upon the disturbed woman Thana is enough to earn their deaths (and she goes one better than wearing virginal white: she dresses as a nun!). Laurie in "Halloween" avoids symbolic rape, but she must pay back Michael Myers for what he has done to her friends, as if they were but rehearsals for her potential fate. This is why she must witness her friend’s corpses, in a moment of amassed horrific revelation and plot assemblage. Through these films, female protagonists are allowed the power to survive and eliminate the sexual abuses suffered by all sisterhood, past and present.

[4] Another key qualification of the masculine "Final Girl" that Clover states is their given unisex name: Laurie in Halloween, Marti in Hell Night, but this is obviously highly limited and easily dismissed once past a handful of final girl candidates.

4: Michael Myers is a Monster

William Schoell finds Halloween endowed with tedium, repetitious music, a rip-off of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (they are, of course, two quite different beasts, but…). He says: "Bloodless and pedestrian, Halloween just sits there when it should be doing something," despite its "nice premise." [5] Alternatively, "Halloween" anticipates the mythologizing of the modern serial murderer; the repetition of the score may be seen as a motif for the killer’s relentlessness [6]; its bloodlessness may reflect only a "comparative tastefulness" [7]. He is correct on the mythologizing and the score, but also misses the film’s reliance upon build-up, menace and suspense rather than cheap gory pay-offs, as used by its many imitators. Further, it is often the lesser known Bob Clark film "Black Christmas" (1975) that is often credited with forerunning the youth-orientated slasher genre, and is a far more identifiable forerunner for "Halloween" than "Texas Chainsaw", if only in atmosphere and use of a national ‘holiday’. Or, as Kim Newman puts it, "'Halloween' was about as original as an Italian Western remake of a samurai epic" [8].

Nevertheless Myers was a culmination of his killing predecessors, and for better or worse pointed the way ahead. The originality of "Halloween" is obvious: in near-definitive and timeless use of its widescreen Panavision streetscapes and of subjective camera; in its non-Gothic unmannered acting reminiscent more of Seventies neo-realist thrillers (all the camp is neatly distilled into Pleasance‘s Loomis); in bringing giallo traits to American killer flicks; in the thick but modernised shadows and sudden shocks; in truly giving the girls centre stage and a fighting chance for a feminised age; in bringing the slaughter to suburbia. Both in technical execution and entertainment value, it rewards study and repeated viewing. It remains seminal as a purveyor and portrayal of contemporary fears.

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NOTE: This article is a shorter version of a work-in-progress chapter for my intended book on horror/thriller cinema, "The Gory Id: essays on killer films".

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[5] Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower: the shocker film phenomenon, (Robinson Publishing, London, 1988) pg. 133.
[6] Carpenter has often said how the film did not frighten preview audiences at all until the score was added.
[7] Schoell, pg. 134.
[8] Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies, (Harmony Books, New York, 1988) pg. 144.