INSTALLMENT 13: 2 JULY 81
PUBLISHED 20 OCTOBER 81 FUTURE LIFE #31 COVER-DATED DECEMBER
REPUBLISHED IN EXPANDED FORM 22–28 JANUARY 82, L.A. WEEKLY
As I was saying. Knife-kill flicks. The subject of a new book titled SPLATTER MOVIES. You like that a lot? Splatter movies. Cute.
Though there are exceptions the apologists will always cite, the bulk of the violence—total, psychopathic, sudden and seemingly the only reason for making these films—is directed against women.
Oh sure, there are a few men who get whacked in these films; the merest wetwork; but their deaths are usually sort of pro forma; almost as if they were reluctantly added to the script against the advent of just such criticisms as these; so the righteous director (who is usually egomaniacally, but inaccurately, logged on as co-scripter) and the producer can justify slaughter by saying, “Well, hell, didn’t you see the guys who got snuffed? How can you say we hate women?”
But that’s misdirection. Afterthought. It’s like George Wallace talking about state’s rights when what he really means is let’s keep the niggers in chains. It’s on the moral and ethical level of those who excuse Nixon’s criminal acts by saying, “Hell, everybody does it!”
No, what we’re dealing with in nifty little films like Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Blow Out is a concerted attack on females.
Females burned alive, hacked to ribbons, staked out and suffocated slowly, their limbs taken off with axes, chainsaws, guillotines, threshing machines, the parts nailed up for display. The deification of the madness Jack the Ripper visited on pathetic tarts in Spitalfields in 1888.
As a man who hit a woman once, early in his life, and swore never to do it again, I reel back from these films where hatred and brutalization of women is the uncontrolled engine, the governing force of plot. I’ll admit it, I cannot watch these films. I get physically ill.
But they must be drawing an audience. More and more get made each season. Saturation advertising on television pulls you to them. They make money. And money begets money; and the begetting sends even greater numbers of minimally talented filmmakers to the form. They proliferate. And the sickness spreads.
You wonder why the Moral Majority has some coin with otherwise rational Americans? It is because they fasten on festering sores like the spate of knife-kill films and they argue from the solitary to the general: moral decay, rampant violence, rotting social values. Joining with these latter-day Puritans on a single issue, though one may despise what they’re really trying to do, is the downfall of all liberals.
Even so, their revulsion at these films (which they patronize like crazy) is the healthiest thing about such movies. Everything else, from motivation for making them to artistic values, drips with perversion.
I have a theory, of course. Don’t I always.
These are not, to me, films of terror or suspense in the time-honored sense of such genre definitions. The Thirty-Nine Steps, North by Northwest and Gaslight are classics of suspense. Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and Alien are classics of terror. The lists are copious. Rosemary’s Baby, Knife in the Water, Repulsion, The Haunting, The Innocents (from Henry James’s TURN OF THE SCREW), Psycho, The Birds, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dead of Night. Add your own. You know which ones they were that scared you, held you helpless in the thrall of fear, gave you memories that chilled not sickened you. From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Parallax View and Carrie.
It was always the scenes leading up to the violence that you remember. You needn’t watch the death…you had been wrung dry before it ever happened.
What do I consider a terrifying scene? Here, try this: *
* And, no, you’re not going crazy: yes, it actually is an excerpt from my essay “The 3 Faces of Fear” to be found in OVER THE EDGE. When I wrote this column originally, the pieces in OVER THE EDGE were out of print, including that essay. And so, because it was the perfect example I needed to make the point, I excerpted this bit from the longer study. When EDGEWORKS I came out, nobody caught the repetition; but now, as we go to press with the trade paperback edition of El, I felt it behooved me to point out the repetition, just so you didn’t think you were losing it, or that I had only one metaphor in my bag. We calls it punctiliousness.
Chill beneath a cadaverously-gray autumn sky, the tiny New Mexico town. That slate moment in the seasons when everything begins to grow dark. The epileptic scratching of fallen leaves hurled along sidewalks. Mad sounds from the hills. Cold. And something else:
A leopard, escaped, is loose in the town.
Chill beneath a crawling terror of spotted death in the night, the tiny New Mexico town. That thick red moment in the fears of small people when everything explodes in the black flow of blood. A deep throated growl from a filthy alley. Cold.
A mother, preoccupied with her cooking, tells her small daughter to go down the street to the bakery, get flour for father’s dinner bread. The child shows a moment of fear…the animal they haven’t found yet…
The mother insists, it’s only a half block to the bakery. Put on a shawl and go get that flour, your father will be home soon. The child goes. Hurrying back up the street, the sack of flour held close to her, the street empty and filling with darkness, ink presses down the sky, the child looks around, and hurries. A cough, deep in a throat that never formed human sounds.
The child’s eyes widen in panic. She begins to hurry. Her footsteps quicken. The sound of padding behind her. Feet begin to run. Focus on darkness and the sound of rapid movement. The child. The rushing.
To the wooden door of the house. The door is locked. The child pinned against the night, with the furred sound of agony rushing toward her on the wind.
Inside, the mother, still kitchened, waiting. The sound of the child outside, panic and bubbles of hysteria in the voice, Mommy open the door the leopard is after me!
The mother’s face assumes the ages-old expression of harassed parenthood. Hands on hips she turns to the door, you’re always lying, telling fibs, making up stories, how many times have I told you lying will—
Mommy! Open the door!
You’ll stay out there till you learn to stop lying!
Mommy! Mom—
Something gigantic hits the door with a crash. The door bows inward, and a mist of flour explodes through the cracks, sifts into the room. The mother’s eyes grow huge, she stares at the door. A thick black stream, moving very slowly, seeps under the door.
Madness crawls up behind our eyes, the mother’s eyes, and we sink into a pit of blind emptiness…
…from which we emerge to examine the nature of terror in the motion picture. Fear as the masters of the film form have showed it to us, and fear as the screen has recently depicted it, with explicit vomitous detail, with perverted murder escalated from awfulness to awfulness. Having seen the deaths of dozens, one is spiraled upward to accept the closeup deaths of hundreds. Knives are not enough, they’re old hat. Razors are not enough, that’s been done. To death. Meathooks are not enough, that’s a cliché. Has anyone squeezed that bag of blood called the human body in a car crusher? Yeah, well, we can’t use that. How about a paper pulping machine, a blast furnace, a rubber stamper, a meatgrinder, a Cuisinart? What’s more ghastly than the last piece of shit? Acid? Rat poison? If we use acid or rat poison we have to show the victim writhing, vomiting, tearing her own throat out, the burns, the drool. Hey, is there something that’ll explode the eyeballs right out of their sockets? Then we can show the raw red pulpy brain behind the empty holes. Now that’s fresh, new, inventive, state of the art. Maybe we can call it Scanners. Or Outland.
The scene just described, a scene shot for the small theater screen, in black and white, with a minimum of production values, with unknown actors, shot with misdirection (in the sense of that word as magicians use it) and subtlety is from a little-remembered 1943 RKO Radio Picture, The Leopard Man, based on a brilliant Cornell Woolrich thriller, BLACK ALIBI (1942). I offer it as a fine example of cinema terror in its most natural, unsullied incarnation, from the oeuvre of Val Lewton. To students of terror in films, the name Val Lewton will be familiar. Had I wanted to be less precise but more chic, I’d have cited the early Dassin or Hitchcock.
But as a more reliable barometer of the centigrades to which artful horror can chill a filmgoer, I find no equal to what Lewton produced in merely eight films between 1942 and 1946, with budgets so ludicrous, achievements so startling, and studio intentions so base, that they stand as some sort of landmark for anyone venturing into the genre, whether a John Carpenter or a Brian De Palma.
Using the foregoing as yardstick, and comparing the knife-kill flicks against them, I submit that what we’re getting these days are not films of terror or suspense or even horror. They are (and here’s my theory) blatant reactionary responses to the feminist movement in America.
Surely there are no great truths being propounded in these films, no subtext that enriches us with apocryphal insight, no subtle characterizations that illuminate the dark night of the soul, no messages for our times…unless the message is that every other person you pass is a deranged killer waiting for you to turn your back so he or she can cut your throat.
No, I’ve convinced myself, even if you might have trouble with the theory, that this seemingly endless spate of films in which women are slaughtered en masse, in the most disgusting, wrenching ways a diseased mind can conceive, is a pandering to the fear in most men that women are “out to get them.”
In a nation where John Wayne remains the symbol of what a man is, the idea of strong women having intellectual and sexual lives more vigorous than men’s is anathema. I submit that the men who go to see these films enjoy the idea of women being eviscerated and dismembered in this way. They get off on it. In their nasty little secret heart-of-hearts they’re saying, “That’ll serve the bitch right!”
The audiences that go to these films, that queue up to wait an hour for their dollop of deadly mayhem, are sociopaths who don’t know it. Beyond that, and I have no way to prove it, I think these films serve no purgative, cathartic end. They merely boil the blood in the potential rapist, the potential stomper, the potential knife-killer.
Last week’s editorial in these pages proffering clinical substantiation of the theory that splatter movies, knife-kill flicks, raise the tolerance level of men for violence against women merely adds to the already existing body of such evidence that self-interested film makers and tunnel-visioned kneejerk liberals like me have refused to acknowledge.
They are the twisted dreams from the darkest pit in each of us, the stuff against which we fight to maintain ourselves as decent human beings.
I leave it at that. For the moment.
But next week I want to relate what happened when a few responsible people tried to do something about these films. It was an adventure among airheads. Knees jerked, hot air filled the land, writers who’ve spent their whole lives fighting against censorship were pilloried as being self-appointed censors…oh, it was spiffy.
And it encapsulates more than we wish to know about the nature of self-blinding fear that produces a moral vacuum, masquerading as courage. Next week I stop being polite.