Tony Curtis makes THE MANITOU (1978), Shire a PROPHECY (1979)

When I was growing up in the 70s,  back in Lansdale, PA, if I used my kid's telescope out my bedroom window on a dark clear night I could see the glow from one of the Montgomeryville Drive-In screens, down the hill, the bottom obstructed by tall fir trees, the top by the screen's roof awning.  away as they may be, the lurid drive-in ads in the daily paper (above the comics and puzzles) were coming to life right down the hill. This left me continually spooked all through the 70s, but I especially remember being especially so spooked by the ads for THE MANITOU, a film that promised (via the damning newspaper reviews), an Indian medicine man dwarf growing out from a lump on a woman's back and people getting skinned alive! I couldn't imagine the series of seizures and nightmares that would afflict me to see more than the faraway corner of such a thing... really I couldn't.

I was also riveted by the commercials, ads, and reviews for PROPHECY, a year later, an eco-horror film starring Talia Shire and with even more Native American mysticism. It was a time for eco-awareness and nothing said eco like the PSA chief (left) on the litter-strewn highway shedding a tear. Man, that image really worked. We stopped throwing our fast food trash out the window and everything! But there was still the hole in the ozone layer, so we had to stop using aerosol cans. And aluminum ripped up pelican feet so we had to stopped having pull tabs on our beer cans. Few of us even remember when these things were around now. Combine this dawning mainstream eco consciousness with JAWS' breakout appeal and it all congealed into a late 1970s horror cinema landscape of white industrialists cutting corners and eventually (hopefully) being devoured by the fruit of their shoddy clean-up methods.

And in these two 'tail end of the cycle' efforts, the shaman sees it all, and shakes his rattle 'til it all goes away.

Every review I read at the time about either PROPHECY or THE MANITOU said they were pretty bad, and that's what kept me waiting all this time, over 30 years, to see them. It took the death of Tony Curtis to finally put down my telescope and head down the hill, so to speak. Here I am!

In MANITOU, Curtis plays one of those semi-phony 'frisco spiritualists who've been fleecing lonely Nob Hill widows since the 20s. Though he wears a wizard robe when 'consulting' in his tricked-out apartment, his alleged mystical air is undone by a greying buzzcut. That aside, he moves and acts a lot like I do now. We both entertain older ladies in our flats and seldom leave to put on 'outdoor' attire. We're both on good accord with our ex-wives--his has a slowly forming dwarf Native American medicine men roused from a 400 year sleep on her back, waking to wreak havoc on the white man's world (and mine has an Argentine socialist education); we both have cool stereo systems and we dance with a hard-won sense of existential jubilation the way Jean Paul Belmondo does in Pierrot le Fou. Now you know something about me. Now, madame, let me tell you something about... you.

As the plot matures, the western doctors try and cut off Curtis's ex-wife's shamanic growth. It fights back by making the doctor cut his own wrist.  Next they use lasers, but the laser goes Star Wars nutso, slicing off limbs and halving valuable laser equipment. Finally Curtis sends for a cool Native American medicine man, John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara, who underplays beautifully).

Now, maybe it was because my expectations were so rock bottom, but I really liked the laid-back edge and rousing frozen hospital wing sci fi-vibe of THE MANITOU. It's almost like an extended episode of Kolchak the Night Stalker with a climax at the Fortress of Solitude. In its touch all-bases round of influence-tag, it bounds past 2001, THE OMEN and even prefigures ALTERED STATES and I especially like that there is remarkably little antagonism between the Native American shaman and western medicinal culture. Usually half the film is spent with boring subplots of medical injunctions and the AMA throwing up its hands. Here, suspicion turns quickly to vague interest from the white doctor as he gives up the reigns of treatment to John Singing Rock and eventually they even work together, like a medicinal version of THE DEFIANT ONES. 

Giving the film some staunch method cred, Susan Strasberg plays the afflicted ex-wife, spending the bulk of the film in bed with Blair hair and EXORCIST oxygen tube but returning in time to go topless for the finale, grinning like a maniac while shooting laser beams at the cosmic cyclops, or something, and of course riding some of the far-out visuals that Srasberg's big STP trip in PSYCH-OUT sadly failed to deliver. The spirit of the 70s shines, through, as Curtis and Strasberg lack any of the overwrought drama that would sink an amicable divorce like theirs today.

In other words, MANITOU is a low budget yet ambitious balls-to-the-wall hack job that leans on Tony Curtis to carry it the way the Monogram horror films of the 1940s used to lean on Bela Lugosi. In both instances they made a good choice. Curtis plays it like an Italian working class Bob Hope in taking-it-serious-but-not-inordinately-so CAT AND THE CANARY mode and carries the ball just as well as Darren McGavin in THE NIGHT STALKER, and that's no faint praise.

The following year's PROPHECY (directed by John Frankenheimer!) is much better as far as photography and music, maybe even acting... but it's nowhere near the ditzy fun of MANITOU. With its ALTERED STATES-cum-2001 visuals, Godsquatches, lizard demons, lasers, and Native American 'old' magic vs. machine age magic ("the typewriter has its own manitou!"), MANITOU is a blast, and, not to worry - the torn flesh of Strasberg's back (presumably) makes it looks like she's wearing a pink shower curtain liner. That's just fine with me. I've already imagined far worse, all through the 70s. (i.e. as with any William Girdler film, you need to bring some detail-filling in imagination and expectation).

PROPHECY meanwhile is too busy looking scared and preaching to an imagined audience of gluttonous white capitalists to remember if and when it should be scary or funny or anything else monster movies are supposed to be until almost 1/3 of the way into the film. Until then, Oscars are strove for in scenes involving pregnant Talia Shire listening to her sanctimonious bearded EPA mouthpiece of a husband express outrage at the poverty of the ghetto he visits early in the film, and then double outrage up in Vermont at the mercury leakage that's made tadpoles grow two feet long and an old medicine man go blind. So no, he doesn't want to bring a child into this fucked-up world right now, honey!

She hears all this while waiting to tell him the 'good' news (she's pregnant) as he plays back his dictation elaborating on all the horrible mutations that afflict fetuses subjected to mercury poisoned salmon, which of course they ate only the night before. The scene unspools slowly enough that we don't need to be told what she's thinking about her baby's chromosomes. This is a pretty great scene, full of unspoken dread and drama, all but building a six foot-long tadpole mutant baby human monster in our imagination, but it still drags on forever. Frankenheimer wants to make sure we get every last goddamned nuance (you got she ate the salmon, right?)

Supplying the Native American voice of crying-at-litter enviro-reason, Armand Assante smolders his way through a turn as the local 'Original People' chief. Rather than a real Native American he reminds us of , how you say? Ah yes. Antonio Banderas. In a good... 'way'? Reminding us that method acting, somber mood and low key lighting reigned supreme in the 1970s, PROPHECY broods like it wants to be the horror version of THE GODFATHER, also with Shire (Francis Ford's sister), which lest us forget started out just another adaptation of a drugstore best seller.

So while THE MANITOU is gaudy like those great early Marvel monster comics, PROPHECY is more GRIZZLY meets TAXI DRIVER this side of DELIVERANCE, with gloomy photography, tiny children thrown against trees while still in their star-shaped sleeping bags; heads bitten off; humans waiting and listening in tunnels as the monster trashes the camp above; detailed tours through the paper milling process at a factory downriver of an unseen Maine lumber camp (entry point of the mercury). However, after about the third self-righteous tantrum of our EPA doctor, and the endless caterwauling of the eventually forgotten mutant baby (not Shire's), you just want to press the button on all of humanity and get it over with. Dude, we gave at the office.

Finally deciding to balance its interests, PROPHECY becomes like the windbag at the bar who senses he's going to finally have to let you talk and so he bails out the door on some hurried excuse (there's a lot of them in Al-Anon, too). Compared to the merry everything-but-the kitchen sink Space Exorcist Odyssey-ish whizzbangery of THE MANITOU, PROPHECY's solemn messages about man's polluting the wilderness with his toxic runoff seems punitively bleak. One crying Native American by the highway was enough to seriously change America's garbage-tossing habit, but some bearded leftie guilt-tripping his wife for forty minutes is enough to change it back. Nobody goes to a monster movie for a glum environmentalist harangue.

That said- there's a few good things afoot in the PROPHECY: thee sustained wide shots of the monster trudging inexorably across the lake towards the cut-off survivors adds something genuinely new and strange to horror.

Despite the similarities in the end these two films are like the polarity of only choices for an alcoholic when the truth is too unbearable to ignore: go to AA and get sober or go to the bar and pass out underneath the stools. Do you want to clean up the mess of your polluted life, give the forest back to the Native Americans and ask the mountains for forgiveness? Or do you want to throw typewriters at dwarf medicine men and watch with agog wonder as your ex-wife shoot lasers at giant space eyeballs?

I thought so.

Then again, you could do like I did, make 'em a double (feature that is). Just remember to keep that nonjudgmental childhood telescope trained on the partially obstructed drive-in screen of bemused tolerance and low expectations rather than the 'big picture'. Sometimes the complete picture can be downright detrimental.

Keep watching THE FOG (1980)

(for the John Carpenter Blogathon at Radiator Heaven)

THE FOG's location setting of Antonio Bay is right up there with Bodega Bay (of THE BIRDS, top, 2nd down) as an example of the Northern California coastline providing the ideal setting for mass non-human invasion. Elements of Hitchcock's THE BIRDS (1963) refract all through THE FOG: the unmanned pump leaking gas into the street, the collecting of survivors in a local tavern, and the matriarchal infrastructure that dominates the main characters (Bodega Bay is even referenced in the dialogue; and several of the scenes are filmed in the same wharf).

Note the resemblance between the respective shot of Suzanne Pleshette and Adrienne Barbeau above! (I'm so madly in love with that dark hair, dark red color combination) and the weird fissures of inter-relationship twixt the two films: Hitchcock's PSYCHO star Janet Leigh as the the mayor of Antonio Bay, mirroring Jessica Tandy as the queen bee in THE BIRDS; Nancy Loomis as the mayor's perky sarcastic assistant mirrors Veronica Cartwright as the little Brenner girl. Leigh's real-life daughter Jamie Lee Curtis is the visitor/interloper who seems to bring the destruction with her, ala Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren). But none of these similarities draw attention to themselves the way a Brian De Palma film would. It's subtle.

Even without birds or avenging ghosts, Northern California's coastline highway is the perfect setting for a spooky story -- each little town isolated connected only by a small, winding road and shrouded in the mist and dark against windswept rocks looking out to a spooky, uninviting Pacific. With a simple, ominous synthesizer refrain, Carpenter makes an empty beach in daytime into something genuinely eerie. He knows when something's spooky enough on its own, when less is more - and to create a feeling of forlorn dread rolling slowly in from the sea all he needs a note or two on the synthesizer and a row of fog horns along a deserted beach. All the protagonists are hip enough, for the most part, to know when to just run rather than say stupid things like: "You stay here, I'm going to go check out that noise." Or "it must have been your imagination," even as half the people they know have been murdered in the same week. They don't have to yell at each other how this stuff "can't be happening." They just accept the weirdness as a given. It was the 1970s after all, and Northern California. If the weirdness is to be accepted anywhere, it's there, then... when things had a chance to be weird and casual right there even in the small fishing villages.

John Houseman in a seafaring cap, for example, opens the film telling campfire ghost story to a group of children, suffusing the tale with concise solemnity ala his work in THE PAPER CHASE; the camera pans up from the fire to the sea behind them and onward into the coolest credit sequence in horror film history: no music except the jazz on the radio, just weird sound effects and strange electrical shit happening all over the town between midnight and one o-clock; Adrienne Barbeau's husky DJ voice coming through the fog, the warm glow of radios mysteriously humming to life: "It's Stevie Wayne and I'll be keeping you warm through the midnight hour," playing vintage (i.e. royalty free library jazz) music.... oh my yeah.

Meanwhile, Carpenter's camera plays off the POV ideas in HALLOWEEN, but much more mysteriously. We don't know who in the story-- if anyone-- is 'seeing' what we are seeing: deserted stretches of town at night, souvenir shot glasses and key chains rumbling in the gas station convenience store; mysterious knocks at the doors of sleeping people who get up to answer as the fog rolls up; all between the hour of 12 and one AM... music rising warm and eerie from the turned-on radios, Stevie's sexy rasp-- the counter-irritant to the feeling of menace--carrying its cozy benevolent charge -- who is she talking to, if the radio is on and no one is listening? Soothing and maternally sexy as she may sound, Wayne's voice floating around with no one to hear carries a charge of ghostly Lynchian-style "no hay banda" audio mimesis.

The movie is ample proof that everything you need to make a horror movie is right there, in the dark. Like Val Lewton, Carpenter knows how to use the night and shadow. If you've ever been outside alone in the dark, on mischief night with a few friends, dressed all in black, armed with toilet paper and soap, hiding and still and alert behind shrubbery as a friend runs up and rings the doorbell then runs off, like your ears and eyes are plugged into the night itself, then you might get as I did a shiver of uncanny Halloween recognition:

Horror iconography is a fickle and strange mistress. Some little motifs get picked up and used ad nauseum and Carpenter invented a lot of them: the killer who falls but isn't dead, the slow thump thump of a knock at the door, the killer's face in the window when the person's not looking, but luckily Carpenter's an inventor not a follower, and his inspired use of a sexy husky voiced female DJ alone in a lighthouse broadcasting booth, looking out over the water and having an on-air freakout about the glowing fog moving in and pleading for someone to rescue her son "trapped in the fog" is totally inspired and hasn't really been turned into a cliche by lesser hands in the years that followed, so it still has a creepy cool charge all its own.  Barbeau's DJ mom has roots in the lighthouse keepers of horror past, such as in the famous Arch Obler Lights Out radio show, "Three Skeleton Key," or the two salts ("What I love are the ballads") in BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, but the update of making the lighthouse keeper a sexy single parent DJ from Chicago, moving out there to get free of the grind and a lousy husband, breaks free from convention. She's tough, but alone, and when she coos into the night "It's 12:43 and I got four in a row for ya, right here on KBB," you feel both comforted by her voice and worried for her soft flesh aglow in blue soundboard reflections, alone up against the sea like the last bastion of humanity; the drowsy generic soft jazz she plays perfect background music, just soothing enough to almost dispel the boogeymen, but impossible to lose yourself, to escape in.

In Carpenter's hands, a shot of a kid running along a deserted beach with just howling wind and surf on the soundtrack is suddenly very scary and forlorn. Or my favorite shot is a long shot of Barbeau walking down a set of winding steps to the sea in early afternoon, preparing to DJ all alone in her lighthouse, isolated, yet strangely protected by the power of magnetic tape. It's one of my favorite scenes in the film and nothing happens: no music, just the sound of the wind and her tape of radio tags, "This is KBB, your voice for Antonio Bay!" over and over, in different vocal styles with different music coming out of her portable tape recorder. Barbeau even makes being a mom driving to work in an bright orange Kubelwagen with big hair and big sunglasses seem cool. She's her own girl, no mix of cliche'd mom SUV stuff, or hot Jaguar-driving cougar stuff, just Adrienne... It took me many viewings to even notice details like the way the driftwood switches from saying "Dane" to "6 must die" when it catches fire and then changes back, or the way Jamie Lee brings her beer with her when they head out to the truck.

Mrs. Korbitz: 

So... are you going to give the benediction?

Father: 

 Antonio Bay was built on murder!!

Sandy (dryly): 

"Is that a no?"

Even though it crosscuts constantly between its major players--the priest, Mrs. Kobritz and Sandy, and manly boat owner Nick (Tom Atkins) and Elizabeth, the pretty hitchhiker he picks up (Jamie Lee Curtis)--THE FOG never feels confusing or cheap. Endless cutting from one scene to another can become an excuse to mask mismatched shots for lesser directors, and this approach undermines a lot of today's horror films (WRONG TURN comes to mind) but in Carpenter's hands, the cross-cutting actually heightens suspense as it stretches time out, and yet keep minute-by-minute account of the hours after midnight. Like HALLOWEEN, the film unfolds in almost slower-than-real time, as in we don't lose events, so five minutes of elapsed mise-en-scene time, cutting back and forth between three different scenes/characters would take closer to 15 minutes, rather than five or less, if that makes sense, and it shouldn't, but it works. That's Carpenter's genius...

I love that Nick picks up Elizabeth--a total stranger--and she looks at him strangely, as if uncertain whether he's a serial killer, not helped perhaps by the fact that he's drinking a beer while driving (gasp!) oh wait this is still the 1970s:

Nick: 

Want a sip?(offers beer)

Elizabeth:  
(suspiciously)

Can I ask you a question... Are you weird?

Nick:

(pausing to think over the question) 

Yes... (nods) yes I am weird.

Elizabeth  (relaxing): 

Oh, thank God! (takes swig of beer)

 The next scene of them they're in bed having already presumably had sex, and he's looking over her sketchbook. That's so hot!! They barely know each other but hey, what is there to know? It's 1979 and they're cool Californians and he seems older than her but hey, old enough to not be a dick about things. By the time of the 21st century remake, every single adult in the film will have long been weeded out, so instead of thirtysomethings who are happy to have a 20 year-old hitchiker spend a few days with them, like Nick we have WB pretty boys who wouldn't know a girl's sketchbook from a hole in the head, or an honest day's work, and are too busy gelling their hair and sulking to be anything but a brooding soapy snot.

Like the westerns of Hawks, you don't notice how great the FOG, how perfect, noble, witty, and durable it is, is until enough repeat viewings bring out its finer subtleties, while at the same time it never feels like it's trying to be much good at all. It's just trying to be a decent horror movie to take your date to on a Saturday night. Maybe that's the secret to its glory: in not trying to be art it's allowed to rock. In not trying to rock, it's allowed to be sexy. In not trying to be sexy it's allowed to breathe. In being allowed to breathe it becomes genuinely scary on a ghost story spookshow level... in not trying to be anything but a campfire ghost yarn, it becomes everything we love about the movies.

Let the Right One KILL, BABY, KILL (1966)

The Right One, you already let her in, and good for you. But now who's gonna creep you out... tonight?  I'll be coming at you with ideas all month, so relax and let it happen.  This is KBK's own Stevie Wayne wishing all of you in Antonio Bay a very merry... Keep watching! Keep watching the skies, the tube, the fog, and KILL, BABY, KILL, a 1966 Italian spook show with class appeal and atmosphere that's cozy warm fire perfect from maestro Mario Bava.


It take a few viewings to really appreciate KILL BABY; it's not as highly regarded as some of Bava's other work, which is probably due to a history of bad prints and title changes. A Victorian Gothic Italian rural villa ghost story, KILL, BABY, KILL's Italian title was OPERAZIONE PAURA! (Operation: Terror!). We don't blame them for changing it, but why make it sound like a giallo spy thriller? The similar sounding film FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL came out the previous year, and was a film that set the bar for outre grooviness, but grooviness hadn't even been invented in the BABY's Victorian Age setting. Instead there are beautiful 'old master lighted' bowls of fruit, great wind effects, sedatives ("give her 20 drops") and an array of strange and wonderful women, including an Anna Magnani-ish bruja (Fabienne Dali), a terrified innkeeper's daughter (Micaela Esdra), a stylish and terrified med student named Monica (Erika Blanc), and Melissa Graps, a ghost girl with blonde hair (to tie the film even deeper into RIGHT ONE, she's played by a very spooky boy, Velerio Valeri). She's so weird, like Italy's Victorian era version of THE BAD SEED times the SHINING's murdered twins divided by Norman Bates in "wouldn't hurt a fly" drag.

It's interesting that the hero and heroine of this film are the most puddin'-headed when it comes to the supernatural, making it the opposite of DRACULA, where the smartest guy in the room believes in vampires and the victims and dupes cling to out-finesse'd medical science. Here the two outsiders refuse to budge from their skepticism even as it costs the lives of everyone around them and they themselves see some real gone daddy freak-outs. Hey, I can dig it; that's how science rolls, and it makes sense. Exclusion-based ideologies will always dismiss or ignore what they have yet to incorporate, and when it comes to the supernatural, a refusal to believe is actually a pretty good defense.

The film's only fault (if it truly has one) may lie in  the way Bava's slow pans and zooms around cobwebbed villa interiors and moonlit exteriors can be a bit too lulling and repetitive for the easily bored viewer expecting visceral thrills and cheap shocks. But a visionary like Bava deserves to indulge himself fully since every foot of this film is pure visual poetry, and the score and the wind sound effects are as soothingly eerie as October itself! Who needs be riveted when you have this much atmosphere? It's the ideal film to fall asleep to, almost like a white noise machine.

In fact, I've seen this movie five times now and it gets better every time, even when it does put me to sleep. In order for a film to be 'hypnotic' on its fifth viewing, which this certainly was, first it has to first be 'boring' - that's the  nature of hypnotism as I've come only recently to realize. Since BABY tells only one story, it's not as relentlessly scary and blackly comic as Bava's 1963 trilogy BLACK SABBATH (Which will have you and your viewing comrades calling each other "Stanka!" for weeks on end). KILL, BABY, KILL  can seem padded here and there with repeated shots of bells tolling and gloomy ghost-eye exteriors. Cool scenes of victims returned as undead servants of the evil spirit, foreshadowed all through the first 2/3 of the film never materialize. Did Bava run out of undead make-up? Is that the reason the film is so slow, and yet over so fast?

It doesn't even matter, honey. It's the right one so let it in. Just make sure you get the Anchor Bay DVD version, in Italian with English subtitles and colors so beautifully autumnal and dream-like you feel like you're walking through the Italian Victorian Gothic wing of a museum on a crisp fall evening. Look at the painterly lighting of this creepy scene below:

That's painterly, right? You can barely see the old lady in the right-center of the frame. And watching the film itself seems to attract spiritual energy if you have any ghosts in your apartment, as I do. Right as I was thinking the ghost girl Melissa should be represented by one of those bouncing white orbs I'd been reading about (orbs turn up in a lot of 'ghost pictures'), her little white ball bounced down the stairs and rolled past our stunned hero. I got creeped out. Dude, what is with those orbs? How did Bava know to show the bouncing ball right at the very same moment I was pondering this unexplained mystery? Dude, if you don't believe there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in mere coincidence, then it's you who are superstitious. Accept the truth: the spirit world is all around us! I feel them! They are restless this month. Sleep tonight in a barbed wire nightshirt, for your mother's sake, and for Tura Satana's sake: Operazione Paura, begin! Again!

Are you serious? The terror of ambiguity

If March starts with a lion and ends with a lamb, October starts with a sinister wind and a touch of orange in the leaves and ends with blood in the streets and monsters in the hall. But hey, people! Are our horror filmmakers ever going to get back to being actually scary instead of just gory/intense? And that brings me to the topic of today's sermon, BURNT OFFERINGS (1976), and its justifiably famous pool scene, which I don't want to spoil, but will say it may have been lifted from LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971), and/or, for my book the single freakiest scenes of violent and death ever, in Sam Peckinpah's BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE (1970).

The thing is, often in real life scenes of (potential or actual) violence, there is a bizarre "is this really happening or isn't it?" feeling, and if one is being threatened, an "are they just kidding or not?" aspect. A bully's first defense is often, "I'm just fuckin' with ya." This strategy plays like a drunken drummer upon our deeply rooted insecurities from childhood about "reading the situation" correctly. We watch the way anger, lust, humor and resentment all swirl around the banal conversations of our parent's bridge game. What the hell do they mean when they say stuff? Who knows if the dad driving you home from soccer is actually kidnapping you?

The opening scene in HOGUE is about such a misreading, as Hogue is fighting over the last of the water with his two prospector buddies, and Hogue gets the drop on them only to lose it when one ingeniously makes Hogue think they're all just joking around. Peckinpah excels at creating these vibrant, terrifyingly enigmatic situations where sudden outbursts of violence seem ready to erupt at any moment, but none of the characters really want it to happen, or know quite when it will. Peckinpah was the master who reminded us that in areas where lawmen have to ride days to find a suspect, everyone needs to keep a gun handy and be ready for the unfamiliar face to suddenly make his move, smile of innocent friendliness still firm on his face.

For example, lets remember the scene LETHAL WEAPON 2 when Mel Gibson charges onto a film set to foil an assault because he didn't realize it was "all pretend." Now reverse that idea, and have Mel charge onto a real crime scene and convince the perp he's making a movie. One certainly doesn't want to retaliate with brute force if there is a way the assailant can be made to re-imagine their assault as merely "playfulness." This is also a key to dealing with drunk aggressors, as they may be able to be convinced that they themselves are only kidding when they weren't (to begin with). Living in Brooklyn, you learn these tricks early, since any false move or betrayal of fear or panic can get your head smashed in during what might otherwise be a relatively harmless mugging. It's the first punch that is the hardest to throw, once the melee is on, even the scarediest little punk in the gang can find the nerve to run up and give you a kick in the ribs when you're lying there bleeding and unconscious.

I bring all this up so idiot horror film makers will stop just marching in each others' boot prints and realize they need to branch out and look deeper in the woods for scares because at this point, hockey masks and chainsaws aren't even worthy of a nostalgic shudder. HALLOWEEN used to be the scariest thing there was a kid could imagine, and now it plays on the Disney channel (1). This weird nebulous realm of violent ambiguity is one of the last barely explored frontiers of moviemaking. The fantasy of pure good vs. pure evil is gettin' old, we got art now, we got to unearth ambiguity where we left it in the graveyard of the 1970s, put a sledge hammer in its hand and bring it back to the head of the table.

Action movies like AEON FLUX, RESIDENT EVIL and assorted comic book and video game adaptations usually suck when they forget this ambiguity, making movies that instead create distance so the bloodletting is no more exciting than watching someone else play a video game. In reality, violence is like fire, it's hard to start it, and once it starts it spreads indiscriminately, almost a relief, covering the terrifying inability to know your neighbor's heart and allowing your inner killer to finally come out and eat your mind. That I can only think of these three films where this ingeniously terrifying ploy is used (2) shows the filmmakers are either afraid themselves or just don't think enough of their audience that they'll 'get' it.  Maybe we should kill them! You know I'm kidding, right?

NOTES
1) Not really, just fuckin' with ya! 
2) Though I can't remember particular scenes, certain actors like Richard Widmark and directors like Howard Hawks and Quentin Tarantino are master of it.