The Wicker Man

THE WICKER MAN

(1973)

Dir - Robin Hardy

Overall: GREAT

 

When something is dubbed "The Citizen Kane of horror movies", one's eyebrows are likely to raise.  Such a bestowing from Cinefantastique magazine may seem highfalutin, but consider that in the five plus decades since Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man was released, its reputation has steadily increased from a forgotten genre film made by a financially fledgling company to one of the finest works in British cinema, horror or otherwise.  It has also been lost and found in a plethora of versions, the complete film negatives possibly gone for good.  One should never say "never" though as episodes of classic Doctor Who seem to sporadically show up in random vaults over a half a century after being wiped by the BBC.  Amongst all the "Final Cuts" and "Director's Cuts" of The Wicker Man, the version that most of the people involved in its filming have long claimed to be the superior, (and ergo complete), one may yet be unearthed in our lifetime.

 

The movie's troubled production and even more troubled post-production has become interwoven with its legacy, and it should be lamented that it existed under the radar for as long as it did.  Genre buffs and overall cinefiles have long been hip to its brilliance, the film was theatrically released and in print after all, be it in mangled versions.  Plus, its cast and crew have long sang its praises, Christopher Lee going as far as to say that it was the finest film he was ever in, as well as how much of a travesty it is that it remained, (and still remains), technically incomplete at the time of the actor's death in 2015.  Yet when it comes to discussing the genre's crème de la crème, The Wicker Man has seldom been mentioned in the same breath or with as much frequency as say The Exorcist or The Shining.  There may be another reason for this though besides the movie being disregarded due to its production company British Lion Films going belly-up when it was made, and fellow distributors either treating it with disinterest or demanding various cuts that forever tarnished it, depending on who you ask.  This other reason is that The Wicker Man itself does not behave in a manner befitting to conventional horror films.  As would could guess though, (and like a handful of other seminal works in the genre), this is largely what makes it so impressive.

 

Men who were on a mission to keep the camp level nonexistent, per example.

Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer initially devised the script as a straight adaptation of David Pinner's 1967 novel Ritual, itself originally envisioned as a screenplay before it was rejected as such and turned into a book.  Shaffer, director Robin Hardy, producer Peter Snell, and attached star Christopher Lee, (himself wanting to get into more serious projects and desperate to step away from the lousy horror vehicles that he was almost exclusively offered), all found Pinner's source material to be incompatible with the film medium, thus they only took the basic premise and plot outline while changing many of the details.  These were heavily researched by Shaffer, who consulted various texts on Celtic paganism to give the project a much-needed aura of authenticity.

 

Folklore and ancient religion scholars will be able to pick up on the barrage of influences scattered all over the place, many of which stem from different centuries and alleged practices, several of which may or may not have been actually partaken of all those centuries ago.  Considering that the film is set in modern day and that the intended theme was to clash conventional Christianity with abandoned paganism, the fact that the latter is presented from a hodgepodge of sources is something that works narratively.  When the story transpires, the inhabitants of the fictitious and remote Summerisle, (located in the Hebrides island cluster off the west coast of Scotland), have reintegrated such ancient rituals into their community over the last century, so it makes sense that they would be made up of various pagan tidbits.  May Day celebrations, the Green Man Inn, the long sword dance, the maypole, our doomed protagonist Sgt. Neil Howie, (Edward Woodward), disguising himself as the Fool in a Mr. Punch costume, naked fertility dancing over an open fire, and of course the title sacrifice at the end are all cobbled together from a variety of texts, and Shaffer cherry picked the best of them to create a steady stream of images for Woodward's devout Christian Sgt. Howie to be alarmed at.

 

Nothing at all to be alarmed at.

When Woodward's police Sergent arrives at Summerisle, the tomfoolery begins in earnest.  Most of the villagers refuse to hide their smirks as they endlessly mislead him, denying the existence of the missing child that he is investigating, or faking confusion over his inquiries into her alleged disappearance.  Lee's horribly-wigged Lord Summerisle is cooperative and eagerly tells the tale of his ancestors settling the village and setting up its chief export of apples, proudly trying to sell Woodward on their vibrant pagan community while seeming unphased by the Sergent's concerns.  The structure is that of a mystery, a police procedural actually where Woodward knows something curious is going on and spends the majority of the movie trying to piece together each desperate clue that he finds.  One of the film's most interesting aspects is the unorthodox way in which it unsettles.  The story catches our interest from the get go, (a missing girl amongst a town of oddly indifferent or clearly lying people is something that we want to get to the bottom of as much as Woodward's protagonist does), but the Summerisle location is one that deliberately does not seem diabolical.

 

There are no cobweb ridden catacombs, no dark and stormy nights, no superstitious and forlorn villagers spouting ominous warnings, no conventional scary music cues, no nightmarish visuals that may or may not be psychologically induced.  Instead, Summerisle is full of people smiling, dancing, singing rambunctious songs, and slyly avoiding questions with nod and wink politeness, all while the Spring setting wields aesthetically fetching results.  The island community looks like a downright pleasant place to vacation, let alone live.  Everyone seems be on the same jovial page, the scenery is lovely, the women are lovely, the children are happy, and it all appears to be the last place in the world where a young girl would go missing under nefarious circumstances.  Of course this contributes directly to how intriguing the mystery is.  Something is...not right on Summerisle.  Even for viewers who go in blind and with minimal expectations, (which is always ideal), one can gather that sinister forces may be at work.  Either that or everyone is playing a lighthearted gag on Woodward, conning him as part of their May Day festivities, merely fucking with an out of towner who takes his job and his religion too seriously and ergo is ample fodder for pranking.  The hilarious part is that, technically, this is in fact exactly what everyone on Summerisle is doing to him.

 

Sgt. Howie, you ole dope you.

The film skews expectations further by making Sgt. Howie a borderline unsympathetic lead character.  He is pompous and lacks a sense of humor, ergo making him the perfect stick-up-his-ass law enforcement stereotype.  He is also an over-zealous Christian stereotype.  This brings the budding heads of two different cultures to the forefront.  The Summerisle folk behave in a manner that seems wacky and carefree to viewers who do not share Howie's self righteous outrage, their pagan hippy ways serving as a sort of counter culture alternative to the type of strict and stodgy dogma that Howie and conservative ole England follows.  Woodward acts appalled at the things he sees on Summerisle, never censoring himself and spouting his concern as if it is common sense and not merely a surrogate viewpoint to all of the animal masks, phallic symbols, liberal sexual education, weird cakes, naked dancing, and frogs in the mouth that he witnesses.  Howie can not only NOT accept this lifestyle, he has to instinctively condone it to the faces of the people practicing it.  This makes him a self righteous Debbie Downer, a guy who could not loosen up and enjoy himself in such a setting if his life depended on it.  As it turns out of course, it is all part of the scheme against him, the Summerisle townsfolk systematically testing him to make sure that they have the right do-gooder, virgin, authority figure doofus to utilize in their final ritual to usher forth a rich and profitable harvest come Summer.

 

Along the way, the score by Paul Giovanni, (the only such film soundtrack that he ever composed), was just as researched as Shaffer's script.  It is a combination of traditional folk songs and originals, all preformed by the characters in the movie, thus technically making this a musical, (yet another aspect that contradicts it to horror conventions).  The collected works of folk scholar Cecil Sharp served as a basis for the lyrics, Giovanni, Shaffer, and Hardy working closely together to authenticate them.  When various Summerisle residents burst into song, it appropriately jars the viewer and provides another element that seems buoyant on the surface, yet concerning considering the serious mystery of the missing child that is still underway.  When Woodward arrives from the mainland saying that he received a complaint about a possibly kidnapped or murdered kid that no one seems to fess up much information about, (and they just sing songs about the landlord's daughter or said landlord's daughter dances seductively naked while beckoning the Sergent to come roll in ze hay with her), something is again...not right.

Thy maiden's horny nakedness knows no bounds.

The film's disconcerting nature is steadily maintained by Hardy.  The tone never becomes too ridiculous to break verisimilitude, though it does teeter on this edge.  Of course anyone viewing it for the first time who is expecting either a viscerally frighting or tongue-in-cheek Gothic romp will be confused to say the least by all of the happy naked pagans singing and gyrating around in settings that purposely avoid horror window dressing.  One can chuckle at the absurdity of it all while still being on board to find out what indeed is going on.  The creepiness, well, creeps up on you.  More to the point, it comes from a singular form, where things that should not be worrisome on paper become worrisome as we progress.

 

For awhile, it appears that the clues which Woodward unlocks could merely lead to playful shenanigans on the part of the Summerisle villagers, but again, that is both accurate and not accurate.  Everyone smiles and seems pleased with themselves as they enjoy their May Day, pleased with themselves as they lead Woodward on, pleased with themselves as they tease and tempt him, making him the butt of one joke that has an all too serious payoff.  Yet even during the triumphant finale, the people of Summerisle are in joyous harmony with each other.  It is their jolly nature which becomes terrifying, their end game one of the most harrowing in any film.

Christopher Lee wearing...whatever the hell this is = clearly unwholesome.

Much has been said about the ending to The Wicker Man, and it is an ending that is so impactful that it would otherwise deflate the movie on repeated views if not for several factors.  One, (and this is the case with many twist finales), audience members can revisit the film after knowing where it all leads by looking out for the clues.  We can see all the places where Woodward's Sgt. Howie went wrong, all the places where everyone was pulling his strings and challenging him to find out if he would slip up in his favor or theirs.  Shaffer's script is so well-structured and Hardy's direction so meticulous, that we can bask in how many subtle hints are there from the onset, not to mention all of the blatant hints now that we know what we know.  It makes for a different viewing experience of course, but after all, we can only experience a story for the first time once.  All of the detailed research here wields something that authenticates the paganism of yesteryear while simultaneously making it both appealing and then terrifying by film's end.

 

Another factor to consider is that Woodward's performance during the closing moments is nothing short of outstanding.  This may be a hyperbolic statement sure, but no matter how many times one views the movie and no matter that we know what is coming, when the Wicker Man is finally revealed, (in a handheld shot from Woodward's POV no less), the actor's aghast horror still hits the audience like a freight train.  Woodward screaming "Oh god...oh Jesus Christ!" while the camera quickly zooms onto his terrifying face is downright chilling, as is the rest of his procession towards his doom, as well as his endless pleas that fall on deaf ears.

 

Dude, the look on your face was priceless!

For roughly eighty to ninety minutes, (again, depending on what cut of the movie you are watching), The Wicker Man has been playing a quirky mystery game, one that we only gradually get the sense may lead somewhere malevolent.  Up until it does though, there is still hope that Woodward may be spared his horrible fate, or that the Summerisle resident's persistently festive nature is after all merely in jest.  Yet as the film inches its way to the closing credits and Woodward protests in vain, we realize just as he does that this is indeed what the whole con has come to.  It is at this moment that the movie's central theme of paganism vs Christianity comes full circle, and we are disturbed at the implication.  An entire people cut off from the societal norms of the modern day live an animated and communal existence, one that is idealistic in the sense that everyone is happy, everyone is on the same page.  It is a bona fide utopia of sorts, but it is one that works on a certain principal to keep it going that spits in the face of love and harmony.

 

Well, or so it would seem to us and so it would seem to Woodard's devout Christian, but not how it seems to the Summerisle folks.  They sing "Sumer Is Icumen In" while the Wicker Man is set ablaze, swaying in full unison with each other as Woodward screams and then excepts his awful fate.  Rarely in cinema has such a juxtaposition sent us home, the unbelievable and terrifying commingling with the buoyant.  Summerisle is wholly confident that their efforts will bare literal fruit, they embrace their religion with the same unwavering glee that they have exhibited throughout.  At the same token, Sgt. Howie's own zealous beliefs have doomed him, and they are just as steadfast while he prays to his god as the flames engulf him.  Neither he nor the Summerisle folks can cohabitate in such a setting, neither can hear the other side out.  In effect, an atrocity has been committed, one that one side celebrates while the other suffers.  It is a powerful final image of intolerance, of assured dogmatic alliance, of humanity's inability to coexist.  What can be more disturbing than that?  Speaking of it as a horror film, what can be more horrific than that?

 

Oh "happy" day!

Psycho

PSYCHO

(1960)
Dir - Alfred Hitchcock
Overall: GREAT

Likely the most analyzed and lauded film to ever fall under the horror umbrella, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho begat so much that it is interesting to remember that at the time, it was a gamble.  Hitchcock was already a household name and probably the most famous filmmaker on the planet, (a title that he largely still holds), decades into his career and hot off the success of North by Northwest and his hit television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents which was already five years running.  So adapting Robert Bloch's down and dirty voyeur murderer novel of the same name and pushing the boundaries of what kind of taboo subject matter he could get away with while the Hays Code was in full swing was a risky maneuver.  Paramount executives wanted nothing to do with the project, (considering it "too repulsive" and "impossible to film"), refusing Hitchcock's proposals which grew more and more small-scale until they approved of it only after the director gave up his usual salary for a stake in the film negative, and agreed to shoot it in black and white, within three months, and with his television crew.

 

The project was a deliberate left turn from the type of film that Hitchcock had by then positioned himself to make.  Inspired in part by low budget B-pictures that were turning a profit, he thought of what one might be like if it was done by someone who was actually good.  No need for Hitchcock to be humble as he had the clout to get any available A-list actor to work with him and virtually any project that he wanted off the ground.  Psycho was further an anomaly for him though since most of his movies were in color and his subjects were usually upper-class people caught up in murder, crime, or a combination of both.  While Psycho certainly had its fair share of murder, and Janet Leigh was certainly an A-lister, (Anthony Perkins within the A-lister realm as well), it hardly featured characters who were in the upper echelon of society.  Leigh's Marion Crane is a secretary who runs off with $40,000, (nothing to sneeze at, but a far cry from the kind of high-end jewels that Cary Grant made an illegal career out of snatching in To Catch a Thief), and Perkins' Norman Bates runs a secluded and perpetually vacant motel that hardly seems to have enough clients even to cover the monthly electric bill for the place.  These are average Joe protagonists and antagonists, living far outside the sophisticated circles that Hitchcock himself frequented.

 

Because of course, only such average Joe's would willfully eat candy corn.

Though the director had previously made movies featuring characters who the modest-income viewer could more easily relate to, (Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat, The Trouble with Harry), he was still more accustomed to cinematically portraying aristocrats, people with exciting professions, or just plain old wealthy folk.  The one rich guy that we meet in Psycho does flaunt his wealth around, (proclaiming that he is buying his daughter a house as a wedding present), but he is in a single scene and merely provides the film with its MacGuffin, meaning the money that Janet Leigh runs off with on a whim.  He is hardly a central player.  The film instead focuses on Leigh's character, famously doing away with her before we even hit the thirty minute mark.  At that point, things switch to Perkins who is someone that the audience roots for until the equally famous twist in the finale.

 

One of the often talked about aspects of Psycho is how it not only shifts its main player focus, but also how it sets us up for that twist where the awkward, lonely, covering-up-for-his-mother's-kills fellow running the hotel winds up being the violently deranged one.  Putting the audience on the side of the villain was nothing new during the Golden Era of Hollywood, and Hitchcock himself had done it a handful of times already, (Rope, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt again), but it was rare to not reveal that said villain WAS the villain until the closing moments.  Though an expert manipulator of course, never had Hitchcock lead the audience in one direction only to gobsmack them to such a degree.

 

After all, he wouldn't even hurt a fly.

The movie in effect establishes two sought after motifs then, to eventually make the sympathetic main character the bad guy and to kill off the other main character early on, letting everyone know that unspoken narrative "rules" were not to be obeyed and in effect, anything could happen.  This aspect of killing likeable characters was present in Bloch's novel, but Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano's decision to keep the focus away from Bates for so long while propping up Crane's ultimately unimportant arc was an even more extreme rug pull.  For the Master of Suspense that he was, such a shock tactic was tailor made for Hitchcock to exploit since it puts the viewer on the edge of their seats from that shower scene until the film is wrapped up.

Psycho is all about such manipulation, leading the viewer in one direction and then throwing them a curve-ball in as hair-raising a manner as possible.  Only two people are murdered on screen, but each kill scene, (or would-be kill scene including the finale when Vera Miles discovers what has been going on the entire time and John Gavin emerges in the nick of time to apprehend Bates), hits us out of nowhere, everything being meticulously choreographed by Hitchcock along the way.  Generally in horror, if there is a persistent musical score, it drops out when a jump scare is about to happen.  While Hitchcock technically does the same thing here for Leigh's murder, he deploys misdirection in a different manner for that of Martin Balsam's private investigator.

 

Dude never knew what hit him.  Didn't even notice the rear projection behind him.

When Balsam returns to the Bates Motel and house to snoop around, Hitchcock knew that extinguishing the music once again as he did with Leigh could likely signify to the viewer that this character was now also doomed.  So wisely, he lets Balsam roam around while Bernard Herman's score continues its unsettling business, be it in a low-key and mood-setting manner.  We see Balsam enter the Bates mansion and slowly ascend the staircase, and even cut away somewhere to a door opening up a crack which heightens the tension, but the killer gets him so suddenly with those shrieking strings interrupting the soundtrack that it still provides a jolt.

 

For Leigh's murder, the bamboozlement is more of a psychological nature.  When she decides to shower, it represents a cleansing of not just her body, but her moral compass.  It is clear that she intends to return to her job and face the music as far as her crime is concerned, her sudden stealing of the $40,000 being something that she has been emotionally struggling with the entire time.  Her casual chat with Perkins in his office over a humble dinner of milk and sandwiches leads to the discussion of people being "trapped" by certain circumstances in their lives, and this seems to reaffirm her inkling that taking the money was wrong and that she will forever be hounded by that rash decision.  She seems happy for the first time when she undresses and begins to wash herself.  It seems an ideal moment to murder her for maximum impact, but considering the more innocent time that this was made, (and again, because this is our main character Janet Leigh that we are talking about), audience members would trust that the film would not do that to them.

 

"Wait, Janet Leigh is dead and this movie still has HOW many minutes left?"

Hitchcock coming up through the silent era, having directed several episodes of his own television series, and so well-versed in his craft that he could work around any budgetary or censor constraint all proved to be advantages within the more minuscule production aspects that he was working with here.  Shooting it in black and white allowed for him to show flowing blood during the shower scene since he could experiment with different substances that appeared good on camera, ultimately going with chocolate syrup which obviously would have looked like a different bodily fluid pouring out of Marion Crane's corpse if it was shot in color.  Also if if was shot in color, Paramount would have balked at the the idea of any overt "gore", as comparatively tame as it is.  After all, Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast was still three years away, and that guy was hardly working within the confines of a major studio that would disapprove of such tactics.  Hitchcock was working within such confines, but he knew how to position his camera to not only get the blood flowing correctly, but also to obscure the nudity during Leigh's shower murder.

 

In Bloch's novel, Crane was decapitated instead of merely stabbed.  This detail also had to be reworked for the screen, another and more prominent being Norman Bates' entire personality.  Middle aged, overweight, and unlikable in the book, Hitchcock suggested to screenwriter Joseph Stefano that they cast Perkins in the role, something that changed the character's entire persona.  Good looking and charismatic, Perkins' Bates was the type of guy that an audience could get behind.  This was further made possible by eliminating most clear indications on how disturbed Bates was.  In the book, he is an alcoholic who goes into murderous rages as his mother when drunk, and he is also shown to be a fan of the occult and pornography.  Alcohol does not play into the screen version of Bates at all, and when Crane's sister Lila, (played by Miles, who was originally groomed to be the leading lady in Hitchcock's Vertigo), is snooping around the Bates residence, she comes across some literature that is never shown to the audience.  Instead, we only see her making a concerned face at her discoveries.

 

As it turns out, she would find something much more concerning in the basement.

Bernard Herman's score likewise makes ideal use out of him taking a smaller fee for his work.  Utilizing only strings instead of a full orchestra, it created a less lush and in effect more permeating soundtrack.  Coming right out of the gate during Saul Bass' opening titles and all through the first act where the only white-knuckled moments are whether or not Leigh is going to get busted for stealing the money, (in other words, no signs of murder anywhere to be found), Herman goes big.  Working within a menacing melody, the strings are sharp and ergo "stabby", which is helped by Bass' titles flashing strict lines, (or "slashes"), across the screen.  It sets the movie up to be a high-tension thriller even though it does not deliver on that set up until Crane's murder.  Herman's score continues to be heavily utilized throughout, never delivering anything tender or lovely, only creating steady unease or outright panic when those instantly recognizable stings bombard the audio during the kill sequences.

 

Of course one cannot discuss Psycho without also discussing its more boundary pushing aspects.  A toilet being flushed on screen, the film's opening depicting two unmarried people having just finished some lunch hour/hotel room hanky panky, Leigh being shown in lingerie two different scenes, (not to mention being naked of course for her fatal shower), and the reveal of Bates being a murderous "transvestite", these were the types of taboos that made Paramount hesitant from the beginning.  They were also the taboos that Hitchcock was interesting in putting on the screen, again going for a more down-and-dirty film than the ones which he had previously done.  Psycho is still slick in its construction since its director was too detail oriented and skilled to do anything otherwise, but it deliberately has a more dingy and unsettling tone than any of his prior works.  It is not slick in the sense of portraying such freakishly attractive actors like Grace Kelly or Cary Grant in flattering and romantic manners, making sure that their wardrobes are impeccable and that they shine on the screen.  No, here we have Janet Leigh in her undergarments and Anthony Perkins in drag while wielding a knife.

 

How scandalous!

This brings us to the fact that Psycho is one of the rare Alfred Hitchcock films that can be considered horror.  From across the Atlantic in England, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom was released several months before and coincidentally dealt with a similar premise of a disturbed young man with parental trauma who murders women and is also a voyeur.  Both movies can be seen as precursors to the slasher film, along with various Edgar Wallace adaptations that had been made since the silent era and would then get a boom starting the same year with Anglo-Amalgamated's series of forty-seven of them.  These would lead directly into Italian giallos and a handful of American and Canadian serial killer movies from the 1970s, John Carpenter's Halloween having the most immediate impact on the unfolding sub-genre.  Though Powell's film, a handful of those giallos, (particularly Dario Argento's), and of course Carpenter's are all expertly done, none are as influential as Hitchcock's.

 

Due to the movie's enormous popularity from the moment that it was released until today, (assisted by Hitchcock maintaining complete control over its marketing, keeping it away from critics and preview audiences in order to make sure that none of the plot twists would be leaked), likely every future filmmaker has seen it.  As far as swiping any of its ingredients, it is almost impossible NOT to be influenced by it.  Like other directors who dabbled in horror sparingly yet knocked it out of the park when they did, (Stanley Kubrick, William Friedkin, Werner Herzog, Andrzej Żuławski, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Adrian Lyne, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Masaki Kobayashi), Psycho represents the work of someone proficient yet also someone challenging themselves within the confines of a genre.  In his intention to make one of those low budget movies except actually good, Hitchcock also made one of those horror movies except actually great.

 

A man who was gonna show us how it's done.

Dracula

DRACULA

(1931)

Dir - Tod Browning

Overall: GREAT

 

Universal's Dracula is of course not the first horror movie ever made, and it owes much of its look and mood to German Expressionism, not least of all from F. W. Murnau's earlier unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.  Dracula's cinematographer Karl Freund had even collaborated together with Murnau seven years previously on The Last Laugh.  Yet all of the macabre cinematic works that proceeded Dracula, (several like the aforementioned Nosferatu being masterpieces in their own right), were setting the stage for what Universal would do here.  That is to say that this is the granddaddy of horror talkies, and a film that solidified the genre's popularity as well as nearly a century's worth of on screen vampire iconography.  So much came from the movie that we can easily take it for granted.  It is also easy to look past the film's shortcomings since it remains an atmospheric triumph, not to mention the fact that it features one of the screen's most memorable performances, that of Béla Lugosi's in the title role.
 
As the world entered the 1930s, was knee-deep in the Great Depression, and sound films had just recently become the norm, Universal's then boss Carl Laemmle had no interest or faith in anything "horror" related.  Thankfully, he had delegated his son Carl Laemmle Jr. as studio head around this time, and Junior was ambitious to say the least about bringing Stoker's novel, (as well as Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston's stage play of the same name), to the screen.  He purchased the rights to both in order to hold a monopoly on the property, and originally envisioned it as an A-production full of various locations, sets, extras, costumes, and one that would adapt most aspects of Stoker's source material.  The initial, (and unused), script by Louis Bromfield even featured the idea that Dracula would be played by two different actors, one old and gnarly looking, another younger and more dashing as his blood intake increased.  Yet because Papa Laemmle had reservations, (and that whole global recession thing was going on), everything was scaled back.  This in turn made the finished product more accommodating to Deane and Balderston's play, which streamlined many of the original story's aspects and allowed for a significant portion of it to be shot as a drawing-room drama.

"Fuck Dracula" - Carl Laemmle (citation needed).

Because the film was ultimately done in this matter, it invites criticism whenever we cut away from Lugosi to let the rest of the cast talk in unassuming wide or medium shots in heavily-lit interiors.  While many can argue that this slows down the pacing and provides an unfortunate contrast to the fantastic and eerie mood setting in the first act, such a breather is far from a bore.  This is for two reasons.  One, Lugosi never stays off screen for too long, and he is so effortlessly dynamic that one is easily captivated by him when he appears again and again, even when it is in one of those heavily-lit interiors.  The other reason that the movie maintains momentum once the setting switches from Transylvania and the doomed schooner to contemporary England and Carfax Abbey is because the film as a whole does not feature a musical soundtrack.
 
This was both a cost-cutting measure at the time and a product of those times.  Since talkies were a new medium in many respects, the industry was still working out the kinks just to get dialog recorded and mixed properly.  Adding a musical score to the proceedings would complicate matters, as well as inflate the already tight budgets being utilized.  This mattered because again, the Great Depression.  In only a few short years, full-fledged dramatic scores would become, (and stay), the norm.  1933's RKO's King Kong demonstrated this with a vengeance, per example.  Yet in 1931, restraint was mercifully utilized, and Dracula, Frankenstein, and Paramount's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde all benefited from the minimal amount of music that was thrown onto them.

 

Just imagine how much Christopher Nolan would ruin such a moment if he were behind the lens and drowned everything out with Hans Zimmer's help.

 

As would also be the case in Universal's Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mummy, (both released the following year), an excerpt from Act II of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" is utilized over the opening credits, which provides a romantic introduction that simultaneously hints at the sinister.  Some Wagner and Schubert sections briefly pop up as diegetic music during the opera scene where Dracula introduces himself to his new neighbors, but otherwise, the film's soundtrack is exclusively made up of set noise and whatever the actors are saying.  This gives it an intimacy that conventionally scored movies by design can never have.  We lean in during every quiet pause, during every transition, and all without any orchestral hoopla dictating what we are supposed to feel.  Freund's visuals do that for us, as do the actor's portrayals, some who lay on the appropriate amount of melodrama, some who are more reserved, some who provide a few comic relief moments, and of course Lugosi who seems either plucked out of another planet or from a bygone era.
 
Everything has been said about the Hungarian thespian's performance here, the one that made him a household name, typecast him, and solidified his Hollywood legacy.  Lugosi had been working on the stage and in films for nearly fifteen years already once he landed the title role here at the age of forty-nine.  His acting chops well-tuned then, (not to mention the fact that he had already been portraying the Count on stage for more than two years by the time that shooting on the film began), Lugosi also had the advantage of being from the same area of the native country, (roughly), where Dracula was from.  Also, English was a second language to him.  In other words, this made Lugosi both look and sound the part, and boy did he do both.

 

None more Dracula than he.

Consider that before this movie was made, Dracula was just another book, one that was popular yet hardly in the zeitgeist.  Max Schreck's turn in Nosferatu was worlds removed from Lugosi's, as Murnau chose to design him as a rodent-faced monstrosity and someone who could only lurk in the shadows and emerge at night.  Which is to say someone who could never suavely charm the pants off the English public while walking amongst them.  Lugosi on the other hand utilized his own face, his own voice, and his own stilted English, not to mention his own intentionally patient mannerisms.  Blessed with a movie star face to begin with, his natural good looks coupled with that unearthly delivery of his dialog all enhanced his intimidating European nobleman swagger.  Lugosi had charisma in spades, and it was never suited better than as the evil, sexy, determined, and fascinating Count.  He could hypnotize you by his piercing stare, (heightened by the over-the-top eye light that Freund routinely gives him), make you hang on his every word as he slowly and almost phonetically delivered them, and also looked like a man that would take over a room just by entering it.
 
It was not the Dracula of Stoker's novel who changed appearances, had a thick flowing mustache, and spoke without an accent, but the cinema is not the books.  Lugosi made the role his own, (to coin a cliche), and no matter how many other reinterpretations of the source material or screen variants of the Count we have had in the near century since this film came out, Lugosi's voice, look, and behavior is still what most people associate with the character.  That is one hell of an accomplishment, one that few other actors have been able to do with any other role.  Sure, the flat-topped, bolts-in-the-neck, eyes barely open appearance that Boris Karloff had as the Monster in Frankenstein likewise solidified the look of THAT character, but that was mostly due to make-up man Jack Pierce.  Lugosi's Dracula is all him, and it is a wonder to think that as a mere bit player who was little known in Hollywood, he had to lobby for a part that Universal originally considered numerous other actors for.  How different Sesame Street and breakfast packaging would be if they went that route instead, one can only ponder.

 

Somehow Paul Muni would just look all wrong on a cereal box.

 

Of course Dracula is not limited to but one scene-stealing performer.  Dwight Frye was another character actor who had a fine career on the stage when he scored the role of Renfield here, and he was another character actor that just like Lugosi, did such a good job that casting agents from that point on could only see him in such a part.  Frye's transformation from a polite and effeminate real estate agent that is unfazed by superstitious warnings or the dilapidated state of Dracula's castle to that of a wide-eyed, pathetic-yet-terrifying, cackling, bug-eating lunatic is one of cinema's most memorable.  Frye is more overtly creepy than Lugosi, the latter utilizing his foreign magnetism to get in close with his victims while Frye's Renfield is about as far removed from charming as you can get.  Yet just as Lugosi defined the on-screen vampire for eons to come, Frye did the same with the demented stooge, delivering a wacky and heightened performance, elevated that much more due to the overall low-key, (and again, music-less), presentation.
 
Though Tod Browning was the official director on Dracula, accounts vary as to how involved or even enthusiastic he was about the assignment.  Actor David Manners, (playing John Harker more as a dead fish than anything), went on record as saying that he barely recalled Browning even being around, and that he took any direction that he got from cinematographer Freund.  Browning was no slouch from behind the director's chair mind you, having done a number of successful collaborations with Lon Chaney who was the initial choice to play Dracula until his quick demise due to lung cancer permanently squashed that idea.  Browning would also go on to make Freaks of course, a film that was infamous for decades and tanked his career, yet also one that has been rightfully reappraised as his most personal, quirky, and disturbing.  Yet as many from the era were, Browning was more comfortable with silent films and allegedly, he was not fond of elaborate shots or non-stationary camera set ups.  We can conclude then that the film's several flowing camera maneuvers were the work of Feund, a director of photography who was literally German and knew the ins and outs of Expressionism.

 

Because any many who could also shoot I Love Lucy clearly knew a thing or two about Gothic horror.

The first act of Dracula which takes place in Transylvania is where Freud shines best, and it is easily the film's most memorable, establishing a mysterious aura during Renfield's trek through the mountains before we visit the catacombs where the Count, his brides, some bugs, and even armadillos emerge from their coffins.  Then of course we see the outside and inside of Castle Dracula itself, a crumbling abode that set the template for every creepy and ancient horror location from there on out.  The horror eye candy is popping off the screen during these moments, and when Lugosi finally emerges with his illuminated eyes before bidding Renfield welcome and walking through a spider web off screen, the film has already established its legacy for uncanny mood-setting.
 

Later on, various other shots are sprinkled throughout that equally evoke such spookiness.  Renfield cackling with his locked grin as he is discovered with the cargo on the schooner, Lugosi emerging from his boxes of native soil underground as wolves howl in the distance, the strange look in Helen Chandler's eyes when she is under Dracula's spell and about to pounce on Manners, Lugosi slowly maneuvering towards Frances Dade as she slumbers, Renfield crawling towards the fainted maid, etc.  In contrast, we even get a few nyuck nyucks delivered by Charles K. Gerrard as the mental hospital orderly who is constantly confounded by Renfield's bug-munching antics, though such moments of deliberate comedy are minuscule and underplayed.  This shows a level of determination on producer Laemmle Jr.'s part to make this a "serious" picture that had a paramount supernatural theme, not one that would be undone Scooby-Doo style in the finale to let audiences relax, (see Browning and Lugosi's London After Midnight remake Mark of the Vampire from 1935).  Count Dracula was the real deal when it came to being a vampire, and the events of the film can afford only sporadic chuckles along the way to emphasis this.

 

A comedic duo for the ages.

There are several lines of dialog in the film that were exclusive to it at the time, not found in Stoker's novel yet lingering in Dracula mythos ever since.  "For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you're a wise man, Van Helsing", "Rats! Rats! Rats! Thousands! Millions of them!", "There are far worse things awaiting man than death", and "I never drink...wine", are a handful that stem from Garrett Fort's screenplay.  Also, the scene where Renfield pricks his finger upon meeting Dracula in his home and the Count zeros in on the wound with a noticeable blood-lust in his eyes comes from Murnau's Nosferatu, not the novel.  Like in the Deane and Balderston play, the plot changes much to compact things, but the small scale production benefits from these tweaks.  It even afforded Universal to make a Spanish language version at the same time, shot at night and with the same script and sets yet with an entirely different crew and cast.  The Spanish Dracula is nearly thirty minutes longer and has its own advantages over Browning's, (the shot construction is more elaborate, the sexuality more pronounced, the plot more fleshed-out), and much of the cast deliver equally solid if not superior performances, sans Carlos Villarías who does fine work as the Count, yet obviously had no prayer of holding a candle to what Lugosi did in the role.
 
As stated, Dracula maintains a level of chilled eeriness throughout, not just during its opening and most explicitly gothic sequences.  The fact that so much of it unfolds silently only draws the viewer further in, Browning, (or whoever one wants to credit), being able to evoke subtle suspense without the use of bombastic music or hectic editing.  Dracula only runs for seventy-four minutes, and the spry running time means that there is little room for dilly-dallying.  Even when Edward Van Sloan is delivering his stern exposition as to the nature of vampires, (information that is obviously redundant to modern viewers), Lugosi and an overall sense of dread is never too far away.  There are precious few horror films from this era that were allowed to permeate with such dread sans a score cluttering things up, but Dracula was not only the first, but also the best of them.  The genre would likely be different without it, yet thankfully it is as influential as it is enjoyable all these decades later.

 

By all means Mr. Lugosi, bid us welcome.

Santa Sangre

SANTA SANGRE
(1989)
Dir - Alejandro Jodorowsky
Overall: GREAT
 
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a filmmaker unlike other filmmakers.  In fact, he does not consider himself a filmmaker in the commercial sense, instead labeling himself an artist who happens to make movies when he has something to make.  He has stated that he puts his entire soul, his entire being into his films and feels depleted afterwards, at which point he needs to experience life more to find whatever ideas are out there to put on celluloid again.  Jodorowsky has also stated that he does not make movies from his intellect but from his unconscious, opening himself up to the moment and following the muse into whatever wild avenues it takes him.  He is a filmmaker, (or, we should say, an ARTIST), that is in tune with a type of boundless imagination that makes his work singular and stimulating.  No one makes movies like him, no one makes art like him, and because of that, we have a film like Santa Sangre that no one else could have delivered.

 

It is interesting to note that as textbook Jodorowsky as Santa Sangre is, he did not birth the script for it initially.  It was in fact brought to him by producer Claudio Argento who developed the story with screenwriter Roberto Leoni, the latter inspired by his time spent working in the library of a psychiatric hospital where he had first hand contact with those suffering from debilitating mental illness.  This may seem like a place of tragedy for such a concept to emerge, but Leoni discovered something unexpected and uplifting in his time spent there, coming across people who had violent thoughts yet were able to suppress them.  When Argento and Leoni then contacted and met with Jodorowsky, (who both wisely considered to be the best man for the job), something serendipitous occurred.  While working as a cartoonist from his long downtime between projects, (Santa Sangre would be his first movie in nearly a decade), Jodorowsky has claimed to have met the infamous Mexican serial killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández by chance, learning that the former murderer had become fully rehabilitated and was living as a free man with a family and a law degree.  Thus a spark was fired, and Jodorowsky was able to contribute his own concepts to Leoni's story, concepts which ran parallel in taking a sympathetic approach to someone committing heinous acts.

 

Jodorowsky: A man inspired.

Having worked with his famous brother Dario consistently, Argento was sticking with what he knew, wanting to make a movie where a lot of women were brutally murdered on screen.  He settled for only two, as well as a musclebound man in drag, but more on that later.  Despite Argento having more of an exploitative agenda, Leoni and Jodorowsky's collaborative finished screenplay offered up something that steered clear of mere misogynistic violence.  It instead went into psychological terrain while humanizing the perpetrator of such violence, which was ideally suited to Jodorowsky's penchant for exploring the unconscious and putting an endless stream of wacky and, (if need be), controversial images on screen.

 

In Santa Sangre, we get a Folk Catholic cult who worships an armless girl that was raped and murdered while baptizing themselves in a pool of sacred blood.  We get an elaborate funeral procession for an elephant which is ritualistically dumped into a quarry where hundreds of local scavengers excitingly rip apart the carcass for its meat.  We get an overweight, drunkard, adulterer, hypnotist knife-thrower who gets sulfuric acid poured on his genitals by his wife when caught in the act with a fully tattooed woman, at which point he slices off the arms of said wife before slitting his throat in full view of his now permanently traumatized son.  We get a handful of people with down syndrome who snort cocaine, dance with cross-dressing prostitutes, and then party with an overweight prostitute.  We get our main character providing the arms for his now armless mother, slipping into her wardrobe behind her and doing everything from performing, to crocheting, to playing the piano, to eating breakfast, to murdering women.  We get our main character dressing up as the Invisible Man in his thwarted attempts to create a potion to actually turn into the Invisible Man.  We get our main character burying his victims while delicately covering them with white paint.  We get our main character luring a male wrestler with fake tits who is supposed to be a woman into a solo performance before attacking him/her.  We get clowns and a dwarf who spontaneously show up whenever our main character manifests them.  We get a giant python that emerges out of our main character's pants when he is aroused.

 

We also get Axel Cristóbal Jodorowsky doing whatever the hell he is doing here.

As one could gather from such an assortment of head-scratching set pieces, there are even more to be found in Santa Sangre.  This is Jodorowsky's M.O. after all, his former cult films Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain each littered with unforgettable images that are equal parts provocative, absurd, off-color, disturbing, insane, and hilarious.  Yet comparatively, Santa Sangre is a more straightforward movie in Jodorowsky's oeuvre up until this point, not counting his 1980 film Tusk which was made for children and had a noticeable lack of castration, blasphemy, gender ambiguous characters, murder, and nudity.  Narratively, we can easily follow Jodorowsky and Leoni's script and even guess the twist ending since the allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and the improbability of many instances are readily apparent throughout.  In other words, it utilizes the "unreliable narrator" trope, almost exclusively showing us what our disturbed protagonist Fénix sees and experiences as opposed to what everyone that he actually encounters is experiencing.

 

As far as that disturbed protagonist is concerned, Fénix is portrayed by Jodorowsky's son Axel, the director's other sons Adán and Teo also appearing.  While Teo merely has a minor role as a pimp, Adán gets significant screen time as Fénix as a child, and both brothers look nearly identical to each other.  As opposed to almost every film which does not have the luxury of casting siblings as younger and older versions of the same character, Santa Sangre does, and it provides the movie with an eerie sense of believably that clashes wonderfully with how otherwise surreal and expressive the rest of it is.  Outrageous stuff may be happening in nearly every scene, but the casting makes it seem as if Jodorowsky was able to shoot the first act at one point in time, and then was able to wait about twenty years to shoot the rest.  Yet also consider that other characters from both timelines appear and seem to have not aged, which signifies to the audience that they may or many not exist in the "real" world and instead only in the tortured world of Fénix', something that proves to be all too true by the end.

 

A (bizarre) family affair.

This is a crucial element to psychological horror in general, providing images and scenes that disrupt the audience's expectations about how tangible reality works, throwing into question everything that we are seeing.  It is a surrealist tactic of course, and Jodorowsky being a surrealist knows how to offset the viewer as good if not better than most.  In Santa Sangre, he does this while treating his subjects with a level of compassion, and not just because it is his own offspring that we are seeing on screen.  Fénix is a tragic character across the board, one who was brought up in the circus life and treated brutally by both of his parents, (Guy Stockwell and Blanca Guerra, respectively), one who murdered the other before murdering himself all within eye-site of the young magician.  He is largely neglected by parents, painfully tattooed by his father in order to graduate and "become a man" and then beaten and made to worship the armless girl by his mother, a mother who has an open disdain for the father of her child and seems to only be sticking around due to said father's ability to hypnotize her.  Most of these dysfunctional family dynamics are deliberately left vague as the first act is more concerned with providing us with mere crucial plot points to get to the insinuating tragedy that sets Fénix off on his harrowing arc as a young man.

 

Providing some details is important, but providing ALL of the details as to how Fénix comes to such a fate is not a necessity.  After all, this is a feature-length movie, not a novel or a twelve-part miniseries.  Yet answering all of the "whys" is not something that Jodorowsky is interested in in the first place.  In the commentary track for Santa Sangre, journalist Alan Jones repeatedly tries to get the artist to open up in order to provide some rhyme and reason for any number of moments within the film.  Paraphrasing, Jodorowsky hilariously starts to fire back at him after awhile, saying things like "Why why why. Why?  Because I like it" or "Because that's what it is".  One could say that Jones should know better than in asking a surrealist to explain themselves, but he takes it in stride and after all, Jodorowsky himself went into considerable detail on his earlier commentary tracks for his other films, cluing us in on the specific symbolism that he utilized.  So it is not that ridiculous for Jones to question him as to the, well, ridiculousness of the work.  Of course sometimes though, the "whys" are not important, and in fact having the artist provide all of the justifications for things only robs the viewer of doing the work themselves.

 

And one has their work cut out for themselves here.

Also and as stated, Santa Sangre is a different experience than Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain.  Jodorowsky said that up until this point, he had never dealt with human emotions in his films, thus Santa Sangre was his attempt to explore such things.  His earlier movies were more like challenging and symbolic acid trips, done, (by Jodorowsky's own admission), by a man who was ambitious with his own pretensions.  Various Eastern philosophical influences were at the crust of Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, each movie dealing with spiritual enlightenment as their character's arcs had a forward momentum towards ascension.  We were not made to feel so much for the people on screen in these films; they instead served more of a symbolic purpose for the overall agenda to defy conventions and expand minds.

 

One must also remember that Jodorowsky is an absurdist as much as he is anything.  For almost a century now he has made it a point to say and do outrageous things to get people talking about him and his projects, and he does this while being a kooky goofball, no matter how eyebrow raising his statements are or how eyebrow raising his work is.  “Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles," “I was raping Frank Herbert but with love," “God does not exist, God is not good. All that awaits us is the cat who will urinate on our grave," etc.  There is such an absurdist stream running through Santa Sangre that is unmistakable, which is to say that the movie is not accidentally funny simply because of its eccentric nature.  The moments that are impossible NOT to chuckle at are there by design.  This aligns it with Jodorowsky's agenda to explore human emotions, since laughter is one of the most pleasurable and universal emotions that we all experience.  “Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together," another of his quotes that sums this up accordingly.

 

Comedy and tragedy, together indeed.

One can take a cynical look at the man and just write him off as a wacky eccentric, but there are way more quotes from him that affirm his optimism, his ambition, his belief in the power of art to change people and in effect change the world.  “Have a dream. Fight to do a dream. Don’t ask if it is possible to do something or if not possible. Try to do it!”, “Words don’t heal. Art heals!”, “Art gives to you a new conception of reality, opens your mind, opens your heart, opens your desire of action.”, etc.  So along with all of the absurdity is an agenda to create something uplifting, and in the case of Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky does this by presenting a scenario where a killer can be redeemed, where a killer can evoke sympathy even more than his victims, where a killer's tragedy can be alchemized into something beautiful.

 

Fénix is possessed by his mother's all-consuming spirit, broken off from reality and living in his own warped version of it where anything that arouses him and therefor challenges her must be brutally slain.  He provides his mother's hands, reaping her revenge or reaping what he perceives to be her revenge based on what he witnessed when he was a wee lad.  It is only through the one innocent person from his past entering his life again that he is able to break free.  The mute Alma is that person, portrayed as an adult by the actual hearing-impaired actor Sabrina Dennison.  She has likewise lived a troubled existence post her and Fénix's circus upbringing, being prostituted by her mother, the tattooed lady from all those years ago who provided the straw that broke the camel's back between Fénix' parent's dysfunction.  Once Alma is freed from her mother by Fénix murdering her in his possessed state, the two are eventually reunited, their union shattering the spell that his mother has had on him the whole time.

 

Whole lotta bird symbolism up in this movie.

 

After so much chaos and so much craziness, Santa Sangre ends as a lovely allegory of atonement.  When Fénix and Alma emerge from him being able to finally "kill" the influence of his mother and regain his own sense of self for the first time in his life, the police are waiting there to apprehend him.  Fénix will be captured and he will be punished for his crimes, a sense of justice will be attained.  Yet what does Fénix do when he is told to put up his hands in surrender?  He slowly looks at them in comprehension that at long last, yes, they are indeed HIS hands and not his mothers.  He smiles as he begins to lift them, content, at peace, and optimistic.  The story is over, the camera pulls back, the credits roll, and the audience is left dealing with a barrage of emotions, human emotions just as Jodorowsky intended to examine.

 

It is one thing to just make a film where a bunch of insane things happen that run the gamut between shocking, sickening, strange, and silly.  There can be no rhyme or reason to such things and one can still get a reaction out of an audience by using them.  With Jodorowsky though, there is always a reason.  Whether it is with the endless tarot references in The Holy Mountain or the Judeo-Christian arc in El Topo, Jodorowsky is exploring the human experience and reaching for something grand.  He does it with shock tactics to be sure since his small filmography is loaded with more unforgettable, unusual, and taboo-breaking images than most movie-makers would deliver with dozens more works under their belts.  Yet when Jodorowsky finally does get around to making a film, he does not fuck around.  Santa Sangre hits us on a handful of levels, presenting a full journey of one man overcoming the trauma of his childhood.  The road to get there is full of abnormalities, full of images from a warped mind, (both Jodorowsky's warped mind and that of his protagonist Fénix), full of moments so ridiculous that we can giggle in perverse enjoyment over them.  The film is a thing of beauty though, a masterwork from a French-Chilean renaissance man with ambition to change the world, an ambition that we can all applaud.

 

No matter who's hands are applauding.

Shivers

SHIVERS

(1975)

Dir - David Cronenberg

Overall: GREAT

 

The best Canadian horror film ever made continues in the tradition of humble beginnings, Shivers being the first non-experimental movie from up-and-comer David Cronenberg.  Like George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, it was an unassuming genre movie done on the cheap and helmed by a largely inexperienced director, yet it was also a movie that had a seminal impact on its genre.  Comparatively, Shivers is the more overlooked out of these examples, all works that came in the wake of both the New Hollywood movement and the era where regional filmmakers were taking chances and pushing boundaries with more harrowing, naughty, and eyebrow raising material.

 

While respected on its own merits, Shivers is still mostly seen as ground zero for Cronenberg's increasingly successful career as the godfather of body horror, with many pointing to his later and more technically advanced films such as Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, and History of Violence as being his finest.  Shivers belongs in the conversation though, since its low budget shortcomings were turned into advantages, and also because its director, (despite his inexperience and reservations during filming), proved to have a fully formed aesthetic right out of the gate.

 

As Horatio McCallister would say, "Rrrrrr, I don't know what I'm doin'."

Shot on a meager $179,000 Canadian dollary-doo budget and with most of it coming from the tax-payer-funded Canadian Film Development Corporation, (hence the movie's infamous early review by Robert Fulford where he proclaimed to the local reader "You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it"), Cronenberg was given an entire crew, a couple of established actors, and roughly three weeks to shoot everything at the grandiose Tourelle-Sur-Rive complex on Nuns' Island in Montreal.  It was a larger production for the director that what he was used to on every scale, yet still one that was low-budget by conventional means.  The subject matter was Cronenberg's own, (i.e. not a preexisting screenplay and/or something that was based on a novel), exploitative, and something that the Cinépix Film Properties distribution company, (described by Cronenberg as the Canadian version of American International Pictures), was interested in getting their hands on since they wanted to break into the U.S. market with something besides nudie flicks.

 

Though he had done two full-length movies in 1969 and 1970 respectively, (Stereo and Crimes of the Future), they were not narrative works and were instead shot silently and presented as avant-garde quasi-documentaries with Ronald Mlodzik narrating over them.  As the head of the Starliner Towers complex, Mlodzik and his effeminate lisp would be on board here as well, (as well as in a handful of other future Cronenberg films), but the movie oddly has no real star power or even any lead characters that it focuses on.  Sure Barbara Steel was brought in as a deliberate draw for horror aficionados, and Paul Hampton serves as the main protagonist, but this was more by default than anything, since he was merely the last man standing.  Shivers is not about the plight of the people on screen though, their individual arcs made inconsequential by the film's eerie concept of the human body being simultaneously invaded and freed by a man-made parasite.  This forms the core of what is frightening about it, that at the end of the day, something by our own design can be unleashed upon us to wipe out our troubles while sexually liberating us in the process, (both "good" things), yet also giving us a collective one-note consciousness that robs of us our individuality and in effect, our humanity, (both "bad" things).

 

As Frank Booth would say, "Baby wants to fuuuuuck!"

As opposed to other properties that have a similar premise at its core, (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, the Pluribus television series), there are differentiating layers to Shivers.  These mostly stem from the means in which the victim is infected by an organic and disgusting organism that intentionally looks like a cross between a dick and literal piece of shit, yet also one that finds its way into the body by the human host attacking them in a sexual frenzy.  The act of love making is then rendered repulsive and dangerous, (hello sexually transmitted disease allegory), something that is then emphasized by the film's dingy and low-budget production values.

 

As far as the cast goes, it is made up of interesting faces, some attractive, some unique, some ordinary, and some not so attractive, but there is nothing sexy about they way in which they become zombified.  Instead, people rip off or seem to be falling out of their clothes, writhing around each other, smearing food or other substances around them, and slowly lumbering at people like drunkards.  Their mannerisms are clumsy, their bodies often homely, and their behavior a combination of odd, funny, and terrifying all at once.  Most of the victims do not even realize the extent of what danger they are in until it is too late.  It is not like these "zombies" look like such; they are just normal people on the surface, just ones that are behaving in a concerning manner that allows people to stare at them curiously, thus allowing the infected to get up close and way too personal.

 

Yup, nothing unwholesome going on here.

Cronenberg litters the film with bizarre and deliberately off-putting moments.  There is an early scene where Fred Doederlein attacks and then slices open a young woman before slitting his own throat with the same device, neither of them exchanging dialog.  We see secondary characters doing disturbing things like an elderly man caressing his daughter and saying how much Hampton's Dr. St. Luc would enjoy her, a heavy-set woman in garish makeup lurching at a delivery boy and proclaiming that she is "Hungry...for love!", two nearly naked children being walked around on leashes, a horde of horned-up tenants inexplicably emerging out of storage units as if they were merely waiting for the director to say "Action!", Cronenberg coincidentally even appearing as one of those horned-up tenants.

 

Alan Migicovsky acts like a gross creep throughout the film, puking up parasites, beckoning them to frolic around in his stomach, acting like a total douchebag to his wife Susan Petrie, (the extent of his behavior which may or may not be entirely due to the parasite's influence since we realize that he was also having an affair with Doederlein's victim, hence his infection), and then trying to get her in the sack before his stomach turns into a nest of critters.  It is at this point when Joe Silver is attacked, the acidic parasites burning his face as Migicovsky tries to shove them into his mouth, both actors stumbling around a modern kitchen in a pool of bright red blood.  Hampton then bursts in and shoots the poor bastard, relieving both himself and the audience of any more of that particularly grotesque display of phallic turd creatures doing their nasty business, though there is plenty more to come.

 

Probably a good idea NOT to watch this movie when you sit down for dinner.

This only scratches the surface of what kind of nauseating horrors are unleashed in the film, but even the less over-the-top moments are given a permeating sense of ickiness.  Not surprisingly, the budget was not sufficient enough to hire a composer, but amazing, the library-cued music makes for ideal atmosphere setting.  Mood is crucial to any horror film of course, and the soundtrack plays a pivotal role in establishing this mood, whether it is going for deafening nightmare screeches like in Suspiria, the prepared piano ambiance in Kwaidan, no musical score at all in The Birds, or the goth punk new wave songs that clutter up Return of the Living Dead.  In Shivers, the assorted musical cues are underplayed, lingering beneath the surface while more alarming and ridiculous things continue to transpire on screen.  It provides a strange juxtaposition, clashing with the the ugly eroticism, crude gore and special effects work by Joe Blasco, as well as the contemporary setting of a luxury apartment complex serving as one that is otherwise pleasing to the eye.  It in fact comes off as charmingly dated now, with some loud decor in some of the rooms that the actual tenants of the location allowed the production to shoot in.

 

This gives the movie yet another layer, similar to Philip Kaufman's 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  It is a critique on the 70s "Me" generation of baby boomers who gravitated towards convenience after Watergate, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War had traumatized a nation.  Shivers takes place in a luxury apartment complex where the diabolical twist is that everyone gets trapped there by their own design.  The parasite is able to get to everyone not just because the human bodies that it inhabits can easily get within range and attack quickly, but also because everyone there is complacent, everything that they need is on site.  There is little desire for anyone to be out and about, little desire for anyone to flee at an earlier opportunity.  Usually when they are pounced upon or about to be, everyone just runs back into their apartment or tries to find a place to hide, and the audience can laugh at the futility of this since we know as well as they do that this will hardly keep them safe for long.

 

They even have a golf course, sign me up!

The film opens with a montage of still images as Mlodzik once again does his narration shtick, selling us hard on how the place has everything that one could want in today's comfort-seeking society.  He also ominously states that even though Montreal is only a twelve and a half minutes trek, "The noise and traffic of the city may as well be a million miles away".  This plays out while the soundtrack mildly yet menacingly caresses Mlodzik's voice, wasting no time in establishing that mood and directly implying that all of the modern niceties are going to come back and bite everyone in the ass by the time that the film is over.  When the doors are locked, the garage is locked, the phones are cut off, and all the occupants just want to get in your pants, you may as well be a million miles away from normal civilization indeed.

 

Though David Cronenberg's Crash is not a horror film even by a stretch, it does bare similarities to Shivers.  Both movies feature characters who are psychologically driven by perversity, ultimately to their doom.  Yet they also each contain performances that have a type of warped haze to them.  This is more pronounced in Crash where every person that we meet seems to be on a mixture of sleepy time tea and Spanish fly, but many of the roaming, infected tenants of Shivers also appear to be hindered by their newfound sexual appetite.  As stated before, this is what makes their behavior zombie-like, apart from the mere idea that like Romero zombies, they contaminate those whom they attack.  It would be less unsettling if they were jacked-up on horny juice, running towards their victims at full speed while flaying their tongues around and caressing themselves.  Instead, the infected in Shivers stumble around and take their time, which heightens the idea that they are on an island and can strand themselves there until the parasites have properly overtaken everyone.

 

"Eh, we'll get this guy later.  Ooo look, another tasty morsel!"

It is at this point in the closing scene where Hampton is finally overtaken by the horny horde, a fantastic look of desperation on the actor's face as Steel pulls him down into the pool, dozens upon dozens of residents enter from the outside, and the curiously alluring Lynn Lowry casually approaches him, delivering that final parasitic kiss as the frame slows down almost to a series of still images, much like the movie opened.  Then in the morning, the Starliner folk pair up in their vehicles with content smiles on their faces, venturing out into Montreal to spread the love.  Like many post-Night of the Living Dead horror films, Shivers has no happy ending.  Well, not a happy ending in a conventional sense, since once again we are left to ponder the question of the film's evil, its nature to turn the world into one "giant, mindless orgy".  Is this such a bad thing?  More to the social commentary point, is it the culmination of a sexual revolution that fought for free love?  The parasite victorious, it is now time for every human out there to lose their inhibitions, all taboos to be shattered, and in a sense, a warped, gross parasite-ridden, and naked form of peace on earth shall be achieved.

 

Cronenberg with his little Canadian tax dollar-funded B-movie that originally went under the title of Orgy of the Blood Parasites, (eventually being released as The Parasite Murders, They Came from Within, and Frissons, in addition to Shivers), asks some profound questions.  It also does so while winking at the audience, never shying away from its exploitative nature, delivering its singular mixture of nastiness, silliness, and freakiness.  The filmmaker would continue to explore the concept of the human body evolving and turning against itself, but Shivers is the first and perhaps best example of this, its lingering questions just as uncomfortable as its unflattering images.  It is a product of its era for sure, but it remains chilling, funny, and provoking all these years, (and more slick productions from Cronenberg), later.  Sometimes less than $200,000, a perverse script, and a nifty apartment complex is all that you need.

 

 

The man, the myth, the nice Canadian fella who makes gross stuff awesome.