Young Jack in the Post-Poe Po-Mo Hellman Hole: THE TERROR, THE SHOOTING

The legendarily muddled Roger Corman Poe-ish Gothic horror THE TERROR (1963) famously came together spur of the moment when, supposedly, Corman still had two days on Boris Karloff's RAVEN shooting schedule and-- not wanting to waste them--shot Boris in a different wizard costume, walking around in various parts of the same castle sets, interacting with RAVEN co-star Jack Nicholson,  talking about killing his young bride after coming home from the war, and now her ghost is around, or being tormented by her ghost in the nicely lit family crypt, trusting a film could be built around it with minimal effort. He was right about the minimal, but that's just part of the film's shaggy dog-eared charm, its inscrutable but eerily poetic ambiguity. Corman sent Francis Ford Coppola up to Big Sur to shoot some exteriors and add some folk horror realism, and then later, Jack Hill as writer and Monte Hellman as director came along to reshape, rework, and reconfigure, shooting in and around Playa del Rey, Leo Carillo Beach, and what was then the AFI. So there's a lot of hands in the mix here: the final product hits all the traditional Corman/Poe Gothic beats but adds something else, too, the voice of a younger generation who could keep one foot in Roger's Gothic/Poe dream wold and one in the zone of artsy mid-60s California mythopoetic magical realism (the zone that also gave us INCUBUS and NIGHT TIDE).

There are some critics who dismiss THE TERROR as a jumbled mess, they're right that it's jumbled, but they're wrong to dismiss it. Maybe they never saw the complete version in the right environment, and in the right mood, and on the right print, and in the right edit, in the right aspect ratio. Seen 'correctly' it's more than the sum of its occasionally contradictory parts. One shouldn't get hung up on what the correct 'sum' is, as there isn't any way to know; there's no clear single auteur by which we might decode it. Or is there? Maybe we can find the auteur stamp via a process of elimination. Corman's hip-but-never anachronistic Poe-Gothic voice is partly there but there's no existential Matheson wit or silvery Price slink; Coppola's voice isn't quite formed yet, aside from a focus on art school naturalism; Jack Hill's future balls-out stealth feminist drive-in moxy isn't there yet either...

But Monte Hellman's vanishing point identity and existential narrative-dissolution? That emerges, like a 4-dimensional pupa. 

In fact, THE TERROR fits beautifully in the Hellman canon; and his two later acclaimed existential works, THE SHOOTING (1966) and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971) actually become easier to read as well, the three click together like puzzle pieces to form graspable mythic trilogy; they become scrutable!

Jack and an enigmatic girl in The Shooting layered under Jack and an enigmatic girl in The Terror (by me)

While the Hellman style wasn't yet a recognizable 'thing' in 1963, after seeing his more well-known works you feel that innate "Hellman-ness" in THE TERROR's dreamy 'edge of forever' tide pools, spinning compasses, the ambiguity of relationships, and the fluidity of feminine identity. Hellman's female characters tend to be nameless (billed in the credits as "the woman" or "the girl") and this anima ambiguity perfectly fits the ghostly figure played by Sandra Knight in THE TERROR as she appears to lost Cavalry officer Lt. Andre Duvalier (a young Jack Nicholson) at various points along the shore or cliffs, sometimes luring him to near to death like a siren (to quicksand or rockslides), sometimes swooping or circling overhead as a falcon, or --depending on who's turn it is at the auteurist telephone game--she's either an air elemental hawk/girl spirit, a normal human girl who thinks she's a ghost thanks to hypnosis coordinated by the mother of the son who the Baron killed when he found her in bed with Ilsa, or the spirit of Ilsa incarnated through the witch's black magic as a kind of bewitching golem/ghost combination). If that melange of answers seems a vague nebula, remember that Hill and Hellman were coming in for the second half of a project begun by Corman as a straight Poe-ish Gothic and, rather than unifying and completing/circumscribing it with Coppola's witch hypnotist revenge folk tale, brought it farther out into the murky depths, wherein fantasy, reality, love, and dehydration-spurred hallucinating become inseparable, the relentless ocean tide whiplash a mirror to eternity's corrosive caress.

Part of the weird sway THE TERROR has on classic horror fans such as myself is that it never seems to tell the same story twice so it can be rewatched endlessly. In order to understand how and why you just have to dial your focus out and consider the film's post-release history (the differing hands at the helm being just one of many aspects). As a title that's long been lapsed into public domain, it has been aired, screened, and sold constantly. It's appeared on diegetic drive-in screens in TARGETS and HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD; it's been on $5 video tapes sold on dirty sidewalks and down in record store basements; it's in nearly every budget classic horror collection (the 100 for $10 variety) on the market, next to THE DEVIL BAT and WHITE ZOMBIE. And since there's no quality control, the film often appears edited on TV, duped to blurry streaks, with out-of-order (or missing) reels, faded color, cheap VHS tracking issues (carried over onto cheap DVD burns), scenes cut and added from different prints of different quality, etc. As a result, if you're a classic horror fan, you've seen THE TERROR dozens of times, maybe never even by choice... and seldom all the way to the end without dozing, or being distracted due to its murky opaque quality.  But as the films of Jean Rollin prove, what's wrong with dozing while watching a movie? Some movies are amazing that way. Since it's been around on TV and college horror festivals forever, it's gained an amorphous ability to fade into background, not unpleasantly, as a kind of 'baseline' Gothic horror movie, as ever-present and free of narrative linearity as a white noise machine, makes it perhaps the benchmark for what we fantasy and horror fans call dream logic. Because it's so atmospheric, and fun on so many levels--especially considering Nicholson is so young and sometimes confused--it's endlessly re-watchable even if you're not really watching. You can fall asleep to it real easily, and dream your way right into its unconscious landscape.

Young Jack with then-wife Sandra Knight - THE TERROR;
Middle Jack with Maria Schneider - THE PASSENGER

This has helped in making the film 'great' in the sense that you can watch it a dozen times and never understand it or have any idea you've seen it before, and it never gets boring (or exciting), making it a great gateway into the work of dream logic extremists like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. And if you're a filmmaker of any caliber, TERROR is a call to just grab a camera and go. It's a prime example of how our mind fills supernatural landscape gaps, and how our unconscious savors the randomness our conscious minds resist. From the loftiest Kubrick enigmas to the accidental Brecht of half-listening as your child babbles at you about a film they saw in school while you half watch TV commercials with the sound muted, until they blur together, it all is just a mirror by which one may gaze at the Medusa of one's unconscious mind, a gorgon that, if faced directly, as in a bad acid trip, will turn you to stone, or a babbling schizophrenic.

Hellman finds the third route, neither right nor left but purple; not forwards nor backwards but bird. A viewer can become totally lost in between logical narrative and the placeless locus where dreams cohere and dissolve into a cloud of slow-mo exploding books lapping into seahorses, or a Napoleonic officer separated from his regiment winding up on the coast of Northern California without ever even seeing a boat.

Karloff, making three movies at once just by standing there

And all that is my way of defending the loopy narrative of THE TERROR. I now know, watching it on Blu-ray, trying to understand the plot, that it's the daughter of Isla being hypnotized into seducing her father to kill himself by posing as her own mother, whom he killed 20 years ago... did I get that right?... Erik posed as the count after killing him in an effort to assuage his remorse? And she's actually a ghost because... he killed her too, as she and the count were having an affair? I mean, Erik?And the witch is the girl's mother who brought her spirit back from its hawk habitat to wreak revenge or is she Erick's mother? Is young Jack like one of those smitten lovers who winds up alone as his vampire lover vanishes in the waves at the end of a typical Jean Rollin vampire movie? (or LaRuocco in THE LACAN HOUR?) Supposedly Sandra Knight's Helene isn't really 'Isla, the Ghost of the Baroness von Leppe' but Eirk's real daughter (or wife) whom he tried to kill and so an old witch keeps her around... hypnotizing her? But who is Karloff, then? The servant or the Baron? Substitute a dotty old handyman for the witch, and that's the plot of the similarly elegiac Monogram Lugosi film THE INVISIBLE GHOST (1941), another PD title we all saw constantly on TV back in the 70s and which made no sense at all for kids too young for 'nightmare logic' or Jungian archetypal psychology. But since we didn't understand a thing, in a way, we understood perfectly. The arcane occult coded language of adults was something we had to take on faith would make sense to us eventually, for now we just soaked it up and waited for monsters, if any. Sometimes we came home empty-handed. For GHOST, the best we got was Lugosi killing people by putting his coat over their heads while they slept. Sometimes Lugosi was enough for us all by himself, but not this time. The one thing that registered: how sad it was to see him eating by himself, talking to an empty chair. And meanwhile it never occurs to him the ghost outside might really be his wife, not dead after all.

One guilty patriarch's mad wife in the attic is another's ghost on the lawn

So, yeah, there's a lot of the same contradictions and cross-current enigmas in THE TERROR, but such things make semiotically inquisitive post/modernists like Monte Hellman come alive. And the final cumulative impression of THE TERROR, when you finally do see the whole film, after all these centuries, on remastered Blu-ray, sober as a judge and mature from all your Antonioni and Bergman Criterion discs, is that it's a weird bittersweet reverie on death, memory and how film disintegrates when washed in a salt water flood tide lapping up against moldy stone.

Correct!

Because in the end there is no right answer to what's really going on or who these people are, and that's the Hellman difference. Hellman is cool with it, he knows how to work enigmas. Every thread doubles back on itself, refusing to pick a side, until the strange and haunting ending, where it's just yet another beautiful girl's youth and beauty slowly peeling away in the tide to reveal eternity's twisted waxwork skull as the soul flies free as a predatory bird in the SEVENTH SEAL dawn. When all is revealed as melting clay returning to the sandy foam of the Pacific, then the world will be seen as it really is, not meaningless but so packed to overflowing with meanings and counter-meanings and alternative deconstructions and author intents and last minute story changes that all meanings are there at once, exposed on the forked rocks.

Ironic then that it had to be pulled from the sludge, cleaned up and digitized before we could savor its analog tactility.

from top: TERROR, SHOOTING, TERROR, SHOOTING, TERROR, SHOOTING

If "Monte Hellman's THE TERROR" still doesn't resonate with a profound metatextual dimension, consider its ambiguous 'collapse of identity' aspect as not accidental, but as creating an ancestry, a back story, for Hellman's acclaimed existential western THE SHOOTING (1966). It was Hellman's first western, and he filmed it back-to-back for Corman (but without Corman's influence or presence), with the more recognizably 'genre-specific' RIDE THE WHIRLWIND, out in the Utah desert. With colors recently remastered for the Criterion Blu-ray, under the eye of Hellman himself, the two films look better than they probably ever have, even on drive-in screens (where they were created to be, as a cowboy double feature). They were the first films Hellman had made in the States since working on THE TERROR (he made two films, also starring Jack Nicholson, in the Philippines). Warren Oates stars as a bounty hunter recruited by an enigmatic young woman (Millie Perkins) to find his brother who supposedly ran over a kid back in town; their journey takes us from nowhere to farther out into the desert wasteland, until all is abstract, and the only constant is death by dehydration or the gun Jack Nicholson a hostile young turk in black who's clearly along to kill Oates' brother, maybe. He's not saying and there's never any connection between Oates and the girl. Oates agrees to handle it, but does she think he did it? Did he and just has amnesia?  Is he really going to let her kill his brother or try to talk her out of it en route? Or does she plan to kill him deep in the wasteland where no witnesses but vultures can see?

She stays a mystery. In this it especially echoes THE TERROR in the way the characters seem adrift somewhere between life and death, outside the normal confines of civilization and its consensual notion of reality. It starts in a recognizable location, a mine, with a tent nearby, but there's never any 'town' with a sheriff, nor bar fight, nor whore house (that we see). There is only alien primordial terrain, characters hoping their forward movement will mask their amnesia. Like Karloff's character in THE TERROR, Oates here may be finding his brother for the alleged crime or he may actually be the guilty one and can't remember, or won't tell us, and one regularly wonders if even he knows the difference. Meanwhile he's threatened by young punk Jack Nicholson, who is clearly enamored of the unknowable 'woman' to the point of murder.

It's this terrain-based amnesia that makes THE TERROR and THE SHOOTING readable as parts one and two of a very strange textural existential genre meltdown Hellman trilogy (along with 1971's TWO-LANE BLACKTOP), a strange mirror to Antonioni's trilogy of BLOW-UP (1966), ZABRISKIE POINT (1970) and--also with Nicholson--THE PASSENGER (1975). In TERROR,  the plot twists are layered back on themselves, then unwound back to separate fibers as if time's moving diagonally backwards; THE SHOOTING's movement is outwards, never back, never up or down, just out into the white blankness of the desert, until its far too late to turn around (or reach any outpost civilization); TWO-LANE BLACKTOP by contrast manages to keep in almost constant motion along America's back roads and highways without going farther than a few inches inward or outward. A marked step up in art house complexity from THE SHOOTING (which was itself a step up from TERROR), in TWO-LANE Warren Oates is back, as a GTO driver who sees each new hitchhiker as a chance to change his backstory. The plot hinges on a weird friendship / cross country race between GTO (as Oates is called in the credits) and the "Driver" (James Taylor) and "Mechanic" (Dennis Wilson). They have no backstory at all, but when the dust finally settles on 70s cinema, it will be TWO-LANE BLACKTOP that wins the pink slip. All else is vanity. (See Stillness in Motion: CALIFORNIA SPLIT / TWO-LANE BLACKTOP).

Mystery thy Name/less Woman

Sandra Knight ("Helene / Isla The Baroness Von Leppe")  - THE TERROR (1963)

Millie Perkins ("Woman") - THE SHOOTING (1966)

Laurie Bird ("the Girl") - TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

Again as in THE SHOOTING and TERROR, the enigmatic multiple readings confound but intrigue. This time we wonder whether Hellman's love of open-ended existential landscape wanderer identity-collapse was fueled maybe by Antonioni's 60s films, or was there the need to situate Corman's low budget 'shoot first make sense later' raw material in some kind of framework, and nothing lets you cut corners like being 'enigmatic'? When you're falling, dive! Did Julian Schnabel break a dish by accident, and decide to use it in a painting, or did he break the dish on purpose? Answer: Crash!

Either way, a style is born.

"The Patients and the Doctors" (detail - c. Julian Schnabel)

By the end of Hellman's trilogy, we know for sure that he's finally reached the 'break with breaking' point as TWO-LANE BLACKTOP runs into an abrupt and final apocalyptic projector jam celluloid burn (which one day, far in the future, will mean nothing to audiences who've never even seen a film projector, but for whom this movie glows as if brand new), the ultimate fusion of experimental, narrative, pop culture, and metatextual Mecha-Medusa media formatting.

But it's been a long road to that apotheosis along those two fronts, the meta one being a result of the first two films enduring decades of public domain (or in SHOOTING's case, pirated) dupes, and BLACKTOP encountering legal troubles due to lapsed royalties on a Doors song heard for less than a minute, mirroring the decomposition and erosion of Helene's face (or rather, Corman's drizzling carmel syrup on Knight's face to save money on make-up effects) mirroring the billion year-old erosion of the stones in the Utah desert and its scorching emptiness in THE SHOOTING, which mirrors the vacant highways of BLACKTOP, mirroring ever more blurry and washed-out duping, now recently replaced by gorgeous remastered Blu-ray. The vistas in THE SHOOTING are now staggering, dwarfing the people traveling through them while mirroring their actions in the way the stars predict our fates and vice versa.

THE SHOOTING: In nice remastered form

that old Madacy dupe

I remember seeing the shitty SHOOTING Madacy disc awhile ago and imagining how great it would look if ever seen in the proper formatting and with colors restored instead of the muddy muffled blur it was on that crappy disc (Madacy may you die a thousand deaths). But now that this has been done and I have both THE TERROR and SHOOTING Blu-rays, I can't help but feel they miss something that those blurrier 4:3 crops had, and what they miss is the protective fog, the boozy cushion of crumbling, outmoded non-digital reproduction, the protection from real life offered by the abstracting bath of video to video to video-to-video, that oceanic whip of disintegration, the law of the universe of everything disintegrating into chaos until all is white as snow and wan and gone...

From HD to PD: THE TERROR (1963)

If I had the artsy time, I would edit a 'dissolution edition' of THE TERROR into a cohesive 'unfinalized' cut. I'd make an edit that starts for the first half hour or so with the new widescreen HD remaster, then devolves to the widescreen new DVD, then the old shitty PD dupe, and my copy of that old PD dupe, and so on down the ladder of quality and formatting... until it's as impossible to see as those old dupes of dupes that Max and I made in college, while drunk, from our two connected VCRs and then never watched, and eventually threw away. I think, then, it would all make sense, kind of like Bill Morrison's DECASIA, but in reverse:

What initially appears to simply be a surface effect that is not a feature of this world rapidly begins to suggest otherwise: that the decay we see twisting faces, burning bodies, and cutting holes in the world is not just the effect of time on nitrate film stock, but rather an inherent feature of the world itself rupturing the imaginary divide between then and now. The ravages of time apparent on this film are also the decay inherent in the world it depicts, and a part of the world that produced these images." - Michael Betancourt [Dread Mechanics: The Sublime Terror of Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) - Bright Lights 1/14/15)

In other words, as media moves forward into clarity of HD, the past moves into a murk, the dissolving coherence of the image mirroring in nitrate clouds Hellman's vanishing point ambiguity. I'd add that the Blu-ray of DECASIA itself might be factored into this. Very old celluloid after all decays in very trippy ways which on Blu-ray are impossibly beautiful, abstract in ways no lifetime spent learning After Effects or Final Cut could match. The compromise of the media formats of lesser quality in the century between the nitrate of the '10s and the Blu-ray of the our new '10s aren't as aesthetically gratifying: streaky, not aesthetically pleasing or artsy in the DECASIA sense. In fact there's just such a video! VHS GeneraTion LOss! It has its own weird poetry...this is my generation!!

But even that stays incomplete.

The eternal flow will never dry,

but drip Knight flesh-like,

clips from the drive-in TERROR

 intertextually screened there

by Peter Bogdanovich

during the Aurora-esque 

drive-in 

in

TARGETS (1968).

And THE TERROR's exquisite cadaver
refracts ever further from its border.
There's no melting Baroness can end
Post-Modernism's funhouse lathered mirror runoff.
Only Orlok /Karloff, stepping down
from limo seat and screen to
cane crazy Bobby, stalls the carnage.

Even then, no end,
any more than an ever-forking 

hydra capillary river
which--even dried to the flapping whirling played-out reel
and the white block of screen mean an end to all film.
Flooded to the gyre-circled cliff's stark edge,

it never unspools in full,
even breaking the apparatus
only makes a broken apparatus po-mo sculpture display,

destined to run long past it original length, permuting

past its 20s gallery opening, its wrong bent
long since

ceased to shock
and now just boring art history freshmen,
one of interminably endless screened
slides.

And still its taloned hawk truth

affixes anima anchor barnacles

to the Big Sur Prometheus, stuck deep into crack.
Hear the groaning and sloshing of the seagull tides
up his old crevasses, and through his cavern eyes?

How twisted deep the bloody shadow path
between his glossy, mossy rocks?
His liver,
like the liquor,
is gone
but still post-modernism's waves
lap / screech on.

 Rewarding only stereogram-staring patience:

the perfect meditation-intent-determination-entheogen-paranoia combination

the perfect showtime...
one night a decade.
Oh Young and Saucy One,
Oncle Promethesarus,
here comes the Orlocked projector...

free yourself with fire, white dupe!
BLAM! BLAM!
BLAM... "Blam"

You are forgiven
in advance
for living past
the living past.
Whatever you are or aren't,
not while one spare bulb somewhere
in this cold closet waits,
unpecked, unlaid,
unlit,
for thy cold lens' threading glow--like crows
staving for the gore
of Prometheus' greatness--
there is no end
to decay's grand show.

The Tick-Tock Initiation: PHANTASM (1979)

Tick-Tockality: (i.e. tick-tock momentum) The sense of dread created in a good horror film through use of prolonged real time (or slower) narrative pacing (where five minutes of real time crosscut between three characters would take closer to fifteen). Much use is made of the magic hour and the dread it conjures of oncoming night, and the big areas of deep darkness in which anything might be hiding. First seen in the films of Val Lewton (in their 'spooky nighttime walk sequences, always their centerpiece highlight), and later in John Carpenter's Halloween, and The Fog and Don Coscarelli's Phantasm. The desired effect is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming and/or unseen, imbuing even innocuous details with uncanny unease.  

Part of the success of this strategy may stem our familiarity from childhood with historical dramas, wherein whole decades fly by between busy but static tableaux of eventful key moments (coming-out parties wherein the news of war first breaks out, and Scarlett and Rhett first dance, and she's wearing red even though her fiddle-dee husband just died, etc. in Gone with the Wind. We become used to the idea that we wouldn't see something if it wasn't foreshadowing and advancing to the story. With this 'training' of our ability to 'read' a film, slower movement within a single 'ordinary' scene --where nothing special seems to be happening (such as Rhett's daughter's riding her pony around on the track while her parents watch) fill us with dread i.e. there's only one reason they'd linger on a close-up of the bitchy star as she walks down the dressing room stairs in wobbly heels, step-after-step, in a 30s show biz musical with her nicer, younger understudy waiting in the wings. Tick-tock momentum subverts our familiarity with this tactic and wrings maximum juicy suspense from it:  just keep showing foreshadowing details like the ankle, and keep going from there, each slow step, building the suspense with a progression of possible foreshadowing so that even innocuous minor details are imbued with uncanniness and anxiety about the coming of the night, helping us appreciate what may be our last moment, like the sweet beauty a good cinematographer can get at magic hour making the sky blaze pumpkin orange, making the coming night all the more dreadful for the lack of light. 

Maybe you need to have been an impressionable, easily-spooked kid in the latter part of the drive-in's heyday (the 70s). Terrifying commercials for R-rated horror movies at the local drive-in would play during local TV's endless comfortingly goofy old monster movies, making our blood run cold. The drive-in was not to be taken lightly. But when you got to go, you were usually with your parents, seeing something a little more family-ready, but we could still feels giddy apprehension as we all parked and watched the setting sun, eager for the darkness to come but scared of it anyway. And then the trailers. You might be seeing some big blockbuster with the folks, but the trailers were free to make you freeze up with fear.

Such a movie was Phantasm I don't remember what movie we were saying but I vividly remember seeing the trailer while the darkening sky still had some orange. had seen a lot of scary trailers (When a Stranger Calls' was my nadir) but nothing this utterly weird. That steel ball in that sterile grey bathroom-style mausoleum, the long-haired little burnout kid, the mysterious man in black with the long arms. It seemed terrible yet terrifying. No one element was itself scary, but it lingered in the mind of every kid who saw it

Halloween (1978) (which was still circling drive-ins as a second feature when Phantasm opened), may have launched a thousand slasher film imitators come the 80s, but few of them caught how to make a movie scary on this 'seeing deeper' tick-tock momentum aspect. They got the topography right--knives, teenagers, blood, masks--and never bothered to capture the 'deeper' vision --the inexorable pacing Carpenter mastered, i.e. the deeper perception of being fully in the moment, and playing eerie synthesizer music during a slowed down suburban idyll until the unease and anxiety of nightmares formed out of thin air. 

No one would ever make a movie like Halloween now because so little actually happens until the last 25 minutes. Carpenter and co-screenwriter Debra Hill spend a lot of time establishing what girl is picking up what guy to come over to whomever's house once it's free free of parents (with Hill taking the time to provide accurate, real life girl dialogue) at which time, checking in on the phone with each other--but it's still scary just from music and camera POV location; that's the tick-tock momentum. Imagine how much less scary it would be if they showed other random people getting knocked off, stressing the blood and body count over character... then you'd have crap like Halloween 2.

Ruscha gets it

I mention this because prior to directing and writing Phantasm (1979), Don Coscarelli was shooting kid movies, like Kenny and Co, in which he showed a real knack for connecting with 70s-style sci-fi fan reprobates -- the ones like me-- who would have punched you in the face rather than admit they cried at Benji (1974).

Phantasm's genesis began when Don wanted to adapt Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes but then Disney snagged the rights. So Coscarelli crafted his own dark fairytale about a tall strange visitor who comes to town and steals souls, setting it in a mortuary instead of a carnival and making the central relationship not between various members of a small town, but the relation between a recently orphaned kid, his cool older brother, and their cool friend, Reggie, an ice cream truck driver (any kid's ideal friend for his older brother). We kids generally hated to see kids in movies, but scrappy kids who could throw down in a fight were OK. And we could relate that the real nightmare for this kid is being abandoned as his older brother--his sole caregiver--is immanently going to drive off and leave him all alone in their suburban 70s shag carpet home.

Rated R as Phantasm may be, this is clearly a kid's nightmare: macabre as Burton or Roald Dahl, but with more genuine menace, guns, cool cars, and garage lab gore. It's Over the Edge meets It Came from Outer Space. As boys learning about it from our own older brothers and babysitters, the film became the ultimate myth-a film about us but denied us until we were old enough, or until it showed up on TV, its fangs plucked for prime time. This time the kid isn't a sap; he's good with cars and knows how to make a gun from a shotgun shell, a thumb tack, and a hammer. He rides a dirtbike and has long wavy hair. He tapes a hunting knife to his ankle, drinks beer, and is smart enough to use a lighter to keep a coffin lid propped up just high enough see out of without drawing attention (and cool enough to have a lighter in the first place and have it be no big deal) and he knows how to drive, and his brother throws him the keys, and gives him a shotgun and doesn't tell him to keep it unloaded and practice gun safety like a mom would, but that he should shoot it only if he means to kill, with no warning shots "are you listening to me? Warning shots are for bullshit"). 

And the car his brother drives is a badass Plymoth Barracuda. Dude but that is a seriously bossed-out car (as we used to say - boss is probably equal to "lit" or "clutch" today)

Plus, what a neighborhood. No one seems to live anywhere, but there's an old lady fortune teller neighbor, and great little bits, like when Reggie drops by with his guitar for a quick porch jam. It always seems to be either late night or late evening in that tick-tockable early fall kind of way, where the darkness seems to rush up on you way too soon and when it does, everything is jet black darkness and very quiet. Aside from the memorably but perhaps overused score it's a film quiet enough you can hear the wind rustle in the graveyard trees. We hear about a sheriff, but we never see him, nor anyone other than the brothers, Reggie, and the girl with the star on her cheek, her blind grandmother psychic, and a girl who runs an antique store (the only thing apparently open in the entire town, it's comforting colored lights sticking out in the dark like a vulnerable oasis. 

Story-wise, the weird secrets of the other dimension and dead soul enslavement make a nice contrast to these cool moments, providing a fine metaphor for not just where parents go when they die but where they work, the void they disappear into for most of the week, before they come back beaten and bowed low. The big fear is where older brothers go when they're off doing cool adult shit and you're not allowed, following him anyway, giving us a POV window into the adult world we barely understand (Mike's binoculars see all sorts of things he shouldn't). Just as we dread the dark secrets our older brother is up to, yet crave to be let in on them, we fear having to get a job out there in that mysterious void one day, a day coming slow but inexorable towards us, like we're on an escalator and afraid of being sucked under its jagged teeth.

In the Spielbergian make-over of children's horror films in the 80s, kids lost that edge of looming responsibility, quick-thinking and readiness for violence, but in the 70s we knew we weren't safe, parents were far more lax, and so we felt exposed to the dangers around us. They wouldn't protect us, but they wouldn't bother us either. The freedom made us sharp. All the joys of life were outdoors, ideally at night. We didn't have cell phones. When we had to sleep we clutched toy guns like rosaries. Today's parents think any kid with a gun is going to cause a Columbine, that anything too scary will give them nightmares. So fucking what if they do?! They should have nightmares. If they have any brains, they know enough to be scared. Shit is scary out there and you're too little to do much about it except run. When you're a young kid, most women are stronger than you in a fight. We can't do much except cringe, run, or suffer. Spooky movies just remind us to stay on our guard, to not let the sameness of modern life trick us into slackening our grip on that plastic trigger.  Let the adults take the facade of death, the mausoleums and funerals, at face value, as kids we saw deeper, we noticed the little details didn't add up, and we knew nothing was ever as secure as the funeral director's measured tones tried to make it. We could feel the real terror of pain and anxiety of 'anything can happen,' feel it in the skin of our knees and the electricity fooding our lower spine. 

MYTHOS, baby, it's Mythos. And NDEs.

In its fuzzy horror glory, Coscarelli's Phantasm's mythos is totally unified even its freeform reversals and misdirections. Once can connect it to Lovecraft as well more recent 'nonfiction' writers like David Icke, Nigel Kerner, who theorize that after death our newly separated souls might be intercepted by a demonic force before we reach the white light, and then used as fuel for UFOs, or ground up for experiments and recycling. Our souls could be picked over like the bloodless cattle mutilations. The main Phantasm bad guy (Angus Scrimm) known only as The Tall Man turns souls into weapons (the spiked, silver balls) and stores the crushed down bodies into kegs for easy shipping home to his dimension through a tuning fork gateway --the use of sound vibrations to transfer between dimensions is also legitimate weird theory, 'acoustic levitation' which ascribes the building of pyramids by using sound vibration to convert huge stones to weightless floating states. 

A great example of a real case near-death experience (NDE) that fits this bill pretty well can be found in Nick Redfern's Final Events. "(Paul) Garratt said that he was confronted by a never-ending, light blue, sandy landscape that was dominated by a writhing mass of an untold number of naked human beings, screaming in what sounded like torturous agony" the sky was filled with pulsing flying saucer crafts, he watched them stop above the people

"then bathed each and every one of them in a green, sickly glow.... small balls of light seemed to fly from the bodies of the people... which were then sucked up into the flying saucers."

"At this point, an eerie and deafening silence overcame the huge mass of people, who duly rose to their feet as one and collectively stumbled and shuffled in hundreds of thousands across the barren landscape--like in a George Romero zombie film--towards a large black-hole that now materialized in the distance." (99)

I don't know if Coscarelli has read up on NDEs or not; perhaps his vision originated in a zone of his unconscious where the dark (but subjectively interpreted), coupled to some direct film references, which to his credit Coscarelli doesn't deign to hide: the tall man's evil minions look like jawas (Star Wars was only three years old); the way darkness laps at the edges of the screen and the tick-tock score echo Halloween (the year before); an old lady fortune teller works one of those hand-in-the-box Dune fear-control tests on Mike. What Coscarelli does originate is bringing an edge of brotherly surrealism, removing any sense of inequality between waking and dreaming life: Mike's sudden wake-ups from nightmares don't carry the feeling of a cheap scare for no reason like they do in American Werewolf in London or Cat People (1982), for example. With Coscarelli, like Lovecraft, Lynch, or Bunuel, dreams are just as valid as the waking life, maybe even more so,  He's not just sticking references in there to try and cover all his bases and provide weird trailer moments, Coscarelli's mythos is straight from the land of mythos, of fairy tale Jungian crypto-archetypal unconsciousness, a cross between a Hardy Boys book and a dime bag of dirt weed.

COMETH THE SEQUELS

If you go all the way through the first four films of Phantasm seriess, you wiull have to dig the rapid aging of the cast, because the four main principles from the first film -- the kid, A. Michael Baldwin (as Mike, though he's played as older by a different actor in part 2 (James Le Gros), Bill Thornbury as his older brother Jody, Reggie Bannister, and as the sinister tall man, Angus Scrimm -- all stick around for the subsequent installments, which were released over a 20 year period but may be set only months apart. It's a shock to see what is supposed to be merely a few days or hours later within the overarching narrative take such a massive toll on their faces, hair, and body shapes. Myriad worry lines drain Reggie's Jeremy Piven-style charimsa until all that remains is a sad guy trying to get laid in a world full of yellow blood vomit hell cops. He looks beaten but still fixing up sheds to look like seduction zones, moseying up to strange women in ghost towns, and wearily quipping after killing foes of various sizes. Action movie qui[s grew stale by the late 90s, but Reggie didn't get that memo. But if you let it be, such things are part of the series' charms, the Phantasm series never gets any memo.

Young Mike (top); Old Mike (bottom) - IV

THE TICK-TOCK INITIATION

Maybe all children have to learn to be masochists just to survive, so small and helpless are they, and part of that may come from our ancient use of male initiation ceremonies to demarcate the line between manhood and boyziness: girls don't need initiation since nature has menstruation to traumatize them, forever; but male initiatory tribal ceremonies understood the psychological need for such trauma in boys as well. It only survives today in the form of, alas, fraternity or military hazing, but those are rites initiated by choice; a boy in a tribal society has no choice--it's inescapable, and that dread's allowed to build and build. We then lost that sense of inescapable dread/initiation until the 70s when it was gratified by our dread of the gore in our first R-rated movie. We who trembled at the coming drive-in night were unique in that respect: R-rated films didn't even exist when our parents were kids, and then video arrived during our teenage years, making it suddenly possible for our younger siblings to rent Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead and watch them over breakfast with our moms. Any fear of R-rated gore never has any time to generate.

But in the 70s, just knowing  hard stuff was only out there, at theaters that we couldn't get into, launched an electirc gravitic dread in our spines, like I get now only when looking straight down while leaning over a tall building without a handrail.

The ad that scorched my 6 year-old mind

The most terrifying commercial ever for me in that regard was Torso (1973). The raspy male voice that used to hiss "Rated R...." after shocking 2-3 second snippets of scenes---like this sexy girl pleading and crawling through the mud in her nightgown while a masked killer advances on her with a hacksaw-- burned into my soul, and I'd get that sickly sexual twisting feeling, the type I only get now from looking over a dangerous ledge or plunging down a log flume.

But with VHS, that giddy terror gave way (for me at least) into depression from watching too many bloody horror movies instead of being outside playing, and from a kind of negative misogynistic osmosis, as well as a crushing disappointment that no amount of pan and scan TV room horror could ever compete with what we had imagined. And yet we had already seen too much, that was the problem - there was just sooo much of this stuff that it became dreadful. We lost our faith in our fellow man and the feeling of being safe in our suburban houses at night. It had really begun, for me, probably with renting A Clockwork Orange (the first movie I ever got mom to rent) and seeing the rapes and violent videos Alex sees, all raw and shocking yet dull and flat, they seemed like, real, as if a fake movie within a fictional film somehow created a double negative, and so these films played real. (the way they do with the snuff films found in the film, Vacancy [4])

So yeah, I attribute the rise in overprotective parental hysteria and nanny state fascism almost entirely to the arrival of video and the sudden availability of every movie we ever heard of, movies we knew we'd never see on TV, or if we did, all the 'bad' stuff edited out. We gained overexposure to imaginary danger at the expense of exposure to actual physical kind; in the process we also lost the rite of initiation. If the minute after hearing about some gruesome scene in a movie you can watch it on your phone in class, well, you don't have time to get scared, so there's nothing to have to use courage to overcome. It's just a lot of fake blood and acting. There's no initiatory fear and catharsis. You might be building a tolerance for violent images, but that's not going to help with the initiation rite your soul hungers for and your mind and body fear. There's no ceremony to mark your courage, i.e. your first R-rated movie. The first one I saw? Outland (1981), at 14. Alan's very cool, muscle car driving older brother bought us tickets. We heard guys exploded from exposure to space sans suits, and that's where the dread came from. It was something to boast of. The older brother regarded my trepidation without snickering, admiring my feint of courage, telling me "you'll be fine." (And of course I was, but the fear of gore made the experience of an otherwise ho-hum sci-fi movie transformative).

Now of course anything even approaching some sort of hazing as a passage to becoming a man is considered a crime, but even the shockmeisters knew that engendering the fear of what was coming was more important than the thing itself. Generating fear helps us realize there was never nothing there to fear in the first place. Facing it, our older cooler friends feel obligated to be nice to us, to let us into the cool world. (see Dazed and Confused.) Running away from the fear stifles you and earns contempt. Seeing Mike and Jody roaring down the road in their '71 'Cuda (below) brings that back. This was a time when life was dangerous, and most importantly, so were we. (See also my analysis of the best movie about being a kid in that era, Over the Edge).

This. This you can trust. 

Awash in desolate suburban blight, dark, twisting woods, empty plains, fire-damaged barns, cobwebs trailing down from street signs, Phantasm leaves us with the feeling one has crossed somewhere back from banal day reality into unreal nightmare. These landscapes do exist, even more so now. I saw this desolation most in western Oregon. Every storefront along the road closed and boarded up and not a soul for miles and miles, yet you feel your car is being followed some tall shadow you try to tell yourself is only a tree in the dark of your rearview. Your tank's been on 'E' for an hour and when you see that white light in the distance you know it's a 24-hour Exxon station dropped from the sky by God's Jesus's own flying saucer. Every fellow traveler you meet smiles at you, for they too have survived the swallowed darkness of the empty expanses of highway and the feeling the world has ended and together you are grateful in a profound deep way only spooked lost travelers riding on empty through abandoned countryside know, or people leaving a very scary movie as one quivering mass edging towards their cars.

To get back to that frame of mind, where the setting sun strikes you with giddy drive-in terror and you long for the woodsman Exxon deliverer, first you have to surrender your 80s guns and your 90s disaffection and your 00s sincerity. Return to the time horror movies created far more dread with a single modulating synthesizer than any overthought orchestra, when R-rated movie storytellers worked each other into frenzies of fear, describing events from films they'd seen or heard about, lingering over the traumatic scenes and embellishing on what they heard as needed for petrifying effect. (2) This is what Phantasm is all about, the fractured but impelling rantings of an imaginative child's mind as he hears the scraping of the branches on the window and tries to sleep; it comes to us as a half-dream hybrid myth, already re-spun by a telephone game's worth of spooky child imagination, it's fiction for the boy seeking initiation into guns, beer, muscle car engines, cigaettes and more beer--the lore of the cool American older brother. It's fiction, yet it still feels truer than anything contemporary adulthood has to offer.

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NOTES:
1. The 'blanks' --such as the fate of the captured girls (Reggie just says he found them and released them but we never see it) were probably a result of drastic cuts made by Don himself. According to the trivia notes on imdb: "This film's original running time was more than three hours, but writer/ director Don Coscarelli decided that that was far too long for it to hold people's attention and made numerous cuts to the film. Some of the unused footage was located in the late 1990s and became the framework for Phantasm IV: Oblivion. The rest of the footage is believed to be lost. " -Now that'a a damn shame, even if the unused footage is brilliantly mixed into IV and does save it from the edge of crappiness.
2. I'm still finding movies I remember hearing about from other kids, like Five Million Years to Earth, and Phenomena, movies I was sure were made up by their teller, or wildly exaggerated,
4. See: 2004: Collateral Torture (Bright Lights After Dark)

Favorite Film Critics: Joseph A. Ziemba & Dan Budnik (Bleeding Skull)

When I was around 12-16 I made a lot of super 8mm films with my friend Alan: lots of stalking and combat and little kids from the neighborhood outfitted in my dad's giant worn out suits, and fireworks special effects. I drew the explosions in with a pin on the emulsion, the old fashioned FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE way! On my super 8 projector you could do overdubs onto the finished celluloid. I'd que up the right section of CAT PEOPLE (1982) in the background as I banged pots to get the perfect Giorgio Moroder score. Alan's job was the guns, the casting, the dummies to throw off the roofs. We filmed for a week at his grandparents. His grandparents loved our movies, unconditionally. We could have shown them home movies from Mars and they would have adored them. We showed them over and over and they never wearied.

Good movie criticism then is about being a grandparent, not a snark. One should arm their reader with the insight/angle of vision by which you did enjoy or possibly could have enjoyed the film, for it becomes your job as a critic to enjoy films, to have a base-line to your rating curve that rests on your uninhibited enjoyment of all types of films (unless it's your job to warn your narrowed demographic of readers what not to waste money on at the multiplex that weekend, ala local paper journalists). If the film is a dumb sex comedy you could applaud that "for whole lengths of time the image is gloriously in focus," for example, and get laughs and applause where if you mentioned parts were not in focus, you'd stir butterfly tsunamis of bad karma.
But when the films get so bad that not even Alan's grandparents could love them... then you are in trouble.

That's when Joseph A. Ziemba and Dan Budnik come in.

No one seems to embody that beautiful gandparent truth in their film criticism more than Joseph A. Ziemba, in whose eyes the most appalling, haphazardly-shot cheapo horror pic can finally become the CITIZEN KANE it was meant to be. Ziemba's all about pulling away from any sort of expectation, beyond even the Brechtian meta-textual realms of Godard at his dullest, beyond Stan Brakhage abstraction and beyond even EXORCIST 2 level odiousness and into something Ziemba calls "grating, sub-arthouse anti-entertainment."

He'll still be there, til the last of the credits have rolled.

More matter-of-fact but just as insane, Skull's co-creator Dan Budnik focuses what you should actually bother to see rather than just read about. Budnik isn't afraid to tangent off on the step-by-step process of falling back in love with the final girl in HE KNOWS YOUR ALONE. Budnik is the Jon Stewart to Ziemba's Stephen Colbert, the Paul to his John, the Wyatt Earp to his Doc Holliday.

Bleeding Skull  started in 2004, had a hiatus, and is now back. I'm still digging around their archives, so might not even have yet found their recent stuff.  I particularly like their old VHS reviews, with their relishing of horrible blurred, faded color and unholy contrast levels, blurry tracking, and muffled sound. For Bleeding Skull, it is all part of the artistic meta-experience.

I didn't even go into their flawless choices in screenshots, and the dryly hilarious captions... Hell, y'all need to just go there with me now, to the source of some random quotes, first from Ziemba :

The Incredibly Strange Creatures that Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies...

What's that spell? Imagine Serge Gainsbourg meeting up with The Chordettes at a showing of The Weird World Of LSD, then stopping off for sno-cones at Coney Island before heading off to sleep." 

 Dark Night of the Scarecrow:

Although the template-driven plot and extended runtime can't match the taught anxiety of Bad Ronald, Scarecrow still consumes you. Performances? Definitely flawless. Imagery? Repeatedly frightening. Fat guys running through a field? Slightly humorous. The Halloween party and warbling synths enriched the Autumn aura and paved the way for a cryptic climax that could only leave a smile in its wake. 

Satan's Storybook (1989): (image atop)

A small void exists between "Super Mario Brothers On Ice" and an evening at Medieval Times. Consider it filled. Satan's Storybook is meant to be taken seriously. I think. Therefore, by the power vested in thine camcorder, the defective structure, theatrics, and presentation run tantamount with that sincerity. This unlikely collaboration leads to an experience that originates on Mother Earth, but clearly ends up in galaxies unknown. And that's what we want. While SS is nothing compared to the prodigious sweat-psych of Boarding House, the constant close-ups, grim tone, and ambitious-yet-crappy costumes resonate with that familiar stench. Even when you're half-asleep.

Blood and Lace (1971)

Ellie, the lovely mod. Tom, the drunken handyman. Colby, the horny cop. And, of course, "Old Man Mask", the burly hammer-killer.

I think I'm in the right place.

That's what it's all about, isn't it? The right place. The right time. The right feeling. Collectively, that's what we search for. A perfect B.L.T. at lunch, an evening headphone session with "Nilsson Sings Newman", a late-nite tryst with The David Steinberg Show; they all pave the road to many Rights and very few Wrongs. Of course, that depends on who you are. Do you have a thing for hammer POVs and rubber-limb gore?

Blood And Lace knows the answer. Welcome to the right place.

 Sinthia, the Devil's Doll (1970)

So there's the gist. When you add the frequent triple-exposures, warbled easy listening LP music cues, and a reliance on confined spaces, Sinthia reveals itself fully. Aimless. Dumb. Pretty boring. It's a superb example of grating, sub-arthouse anti-entertainment. Of course, that's the very reason why it's worth experiencing.

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And Now, Dan Budnik... who blew my mind with this:

Demons of Ludlow:

"A haunted piano is delivered to the town of Ludlow just in time for their bicentennial. Of course, when the men deliver it, they don't say "Here's your haunted piano. Where do you want it?" The haunted part is a surprise. It's a gift from the man who founded the town. And that man was a jerk."

The Hungan

I mean, here's a beautiful example: the guy throwing the party introduces Cry Wolf. They start playing a song, pure-80's hair band. The camera sits on the other side of the room pointed at them. The song starts and folks begin to dance. In front of the camera. They all move in front of the camera. You can barely see the band. This goes on for two minutes. The great thing about the film's length is that this scene will not preclude something like this happening again in ten minutes. It does not mean that we won't get a long scene where the campers chat amongst themselves (sometimes incoherently) as they stroll to the campgrounds, with a strong whiff of Blood Lake  mixed in. It does not mean that we won't get a long scene where some waitresses' chat about a date one of them had. It means we get it all. 

And, it's all great. 

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Dude, BLEEDING SKULL is all great! Even if (like myself) your natural decency doesn't permit you to enjoy these sorts of films, you owe it to yourself to be informed. May Cry Wolf and Sinthia have mercy on us all in the future. Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, Just drop by when it's convenient too, be sure to call before you do (read that sung by Nilsson) and goodbye burdensome sanity.