The Slashological Strata of Fate: HALLOWEEN to THE TERMINATOR (1978-1984)

The early 80s --the dawn of and height of the slasher craze --was for many impressionable, alienated teens like myself a time of fear, paranoia, isolation and frustrated sexual awakening; it all pooled together to form a budding fascist militarism within our ranks. Slasher films were an inescapable part of the landscape even if you avoided them: TV commercials, newspaper print ads relentlessly ogling cowering or showering girls from the perspective of killers --there was no escape. And it was before internet, so we couldn't really find like-minded pre-PC people, the ones who, like me, thought women very very vulnerable and felt horrible for being too small and young to protect them and to naive to realize that women weren't turned on by guys who made themselves miserable worrying about them. We developed an anti-misogyny, a misandry. We sneered at humanity in general and how sex and booze made them sloppy and indifferent to their own self preservation. We tried to absolve ourselves by thinking well, any bitch dumb enough to sleep with so-and-so, to fall for his dumb line and drink his gauche drinks, deserves all she gets.... Jason was to us what the Monster from the Id was to Morphius in Forbidden Planet. My poor Krell...

We'd later get sloppy drunk too but for now, age circa 12-16, the borderline to forbidden knowledge was heavily patrolled by a legion of masked, silent, shambling butcher knife wielding, unkillable automatons.We who saw the line dared not cross. Instead we carefully quietly armed ourselves for future battles, stashing mom's old butcher knife under our pillow and a bat under our bed, preparing for the time when we would need to battle the shambling slasher and jock armies.

Get thee to a gunnery...

The automaton killer who won't die who comes out to suburbia and stalks kids originated in Halloween (1978). I hadn't even seen it but I was still traumatized just from the clip Siskel and Ebert showed on the special episode of Sneak Previews devoted to "Dead Teenager" movies, wherein they taught me to turn my queasy dread onto outraged feminism, where it would remain until I read Carol Clover's Men Women and Chainsaws and learned that was the whole point... I didn't have to afraid for girls, or of girls, I could be afraid through girls, the only way to fly.

Meanwhile, the main dread was that the slasher would get us in our sleep, or when we were alone, and we all thought of what we would do if he came home, as Halloween's tag line read, and the thought he was never going to die held us in a giddy grip that made it necessary to keep the TV or radio on, and a nightlight, to drown out the scrapings of trees against the house, and the creaking footsteps we couldn't be sure we heard as we tried to sleep.  My fear never stopped until I learned after watching Battle of the Bulge one night that just thinking about WW2 eased my fear. It could occupy my brain and all the armaments made me feel secure in the way armaments will, even if it was only in my imagination, that's where the monsters were too, so it worked. If that's not an encapsulation of the rise of 80s action movie militarism I don't know what is. So, retrace the steps and wonder... did Halloween indirectly cause the Iraq war?

The thing you have to remember though is that poor Laurie Strode didn't have a Laurie Strode before her to teach her to not drop the knife by the killer just because he's temporarily playing dead. Myers was the first of this type, this emerging breed of mute, indestructible automaton killers patrolling suburbia and in the first Halloween, Jamie Lee doesn't yet know he's got nine hundred lives and you need to take drastic steps like defenestration, or what I eventually determined was an unbeatable and less messy course of action: thumb removal (no thumbs, no strangling or holding weapons, all he can do is lunge and snap like a turtle).

Every kid had their own late night strategy for tackling a Michael Myers / Jason variety killer and in hindsight it's clear Laurie Strode's ignorance was the root force for the 80s action movie surge. The new heroes killed their enemies eight dozen ways at once, obliterated them. Sometimes they even tangled with indestructible psychos personally: Chuck Norris went on a round of futile karate kicks against a modified killer in Hero and the Terror (1988); Charlie Bronson tangled with a freaky psycho who kills while buck naked in Ten to Midnight (1983); Clint tangled with a kinky leather man in Tightrope (1984). We all thought The Terminator was--based on the previews--Arnold's contribution to the by-then passé formula; it looked like an low budget Italian knock-off slasher/action sci fi hybrid based on that preview. There he was, our Conan now dressed like he should be riding a scooter in Rome, using a laser sight at a phony looking 'Tech Noir' bar. We figured he had really gone off the A-list with this one, that he'd be doing dinner theater next. So we were stunned with incredulity when we read the glowing reviews and heard the record box office. Seeing the film a few weeks later I understood why: this time the opponent knew all the unstoppable killer's tricks before the movie even started, so it was like the final girl finally had a guy who understood her. There would be no more dropping butcher knives, ever.

Won't get fooled again: Blue Steel, Escape from New York, Aliens

The idea that kept us up at night was there there might be some crazy killer who has us earmarked for death for reasons beyond understanding: maybe your friend called him a creep when he drove past you on the street, but what allowed us to sleep was the idea that for every Moby Dick monster there would be an Ahab or Dr. Loomis and vice versa. In Halloween the same essential dynamic takes place, just substitute Donald Pleasance's quiver-voiced shrink for Michael Biehn.

To help lay all this out I've assembled the following horror strata map Most crap horror film directors never get past the topography, while a few get all the way down to the bottom, which is the universal top, for this pyramid:

Topographical: Mise en scene; iconography: The mask. axe, chainsaw, screaming woman, corridors advanced down stealthily, shocks around the corners, cowering, rising up, sudden face in the bathroom mirror, closet doors being peered through. A killer presumably killed sitting slowly up and turning his head,
Textual: Condemnation of lustful behavior; warning to never take your security for granted; taking the 'safety bars' of our first world social order consumerist entitlement for granted  (i.e. Marie Antoinette letting them eat cake).
Subtextual: Feminism; homophobia; collapse of the American Family; critique of sexual repression; man's inherent savagery; castration anxiety; Marxist ideology, psychosexual pre-genital jouissance
Structural: The uncanny rhythm of slowed down time and sense of danger erupting from even normal things as they exist in an unsteady relation to language and perception, closet doors, darkened laundry rooms, cars, darkness, bushes outside the house, staircases, mirrors, telephones, porches, windows
Core: Death Drive; initiation from child to adult through endurance and conquering of fear; the learning of aggression; rise to violence / fascism inherent; the encouragement of militarism; distrust of neighbors and people walking past your house (i.e. itchy trigger-finger neighborhood watches)

It's in this last one we see how, in its way, The Terminator, Rambo, and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, are all illegitimate sequels to the slasher movie craze, and just maybe so is our modern trend of abducted daughters, torture porn, and NRA zealotry.

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So that was the first half of the 80s. Maybe we never had a midnight visitor with a laser sight or a knife but it hardly matters now. I still can't sleep in dead silence. I need a white noise machine, old radio shows, a whirring AC, the TV left on all night on low volume, or all of the above; I moved to the city that never sleeps--which after seeing The Warriors and Escape from New York I vowed to never do--but the crime of the 70s was my boon, because dead bolts, steel doors, small apartments on high floors all made one's safety from outside monsters easily secured. Meanwhile my "little" brother has a gun locker and lives in a city that encourages concealed weapons permits. Is this all the fault of Michael and Jason?

I would say, maybe.

The personal freedom of the 70s ended coincidentally the same time slasher movies were widely available on video where moms and little kids could see them despite the R-rating. Most of the violence was innocuous, even laughable, but the cumulative effect--the sheer number of R-rated violence available, even just looking at a shelf of the covers--was traumatizing. I could be traumatized by catching the end of Looking for Mr. Goodbar on The Movie Channel thinking it was Annie Hall one year, and get refused admittance to see Creepshow (1982) at the local cinema the next. Funny how fucked things are.... maybe it's in our nature to destroy oah-selves, but it's also in our nature to then get preachy about how destructive we are, and refuse admittance to teenagers for films perfectly suited to sick children.

At least one good thing came of all that fear and mistrust: Woman got a gun and learned to be her own Dr. Loomis. She kept watching the dark, and would never fall for a killer playing possum ever again. By Terminator 2, she had arsenals stashed away in Mexico just waiting... the fan was shit-caked and the Blockbusters were busted. There was nothing left now to scare us... not even the bomb.
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For further reading on the Tick-Tock Momentum and the Halloween: A Clockwork Darkness: Hawks, Subjectivity, Halloween

Mr. Sandman (Slight Return): Halloween II

The Tick Tock Initiation: Phantasm

Friday the 13th Killed my Childhood

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"If only all of Rome had just one neck" - CALIGULA (1979) and Guccione's Goombah Grandiosity

If you were alive in 1979 maybe you remember the avalanche of seedy press for CALIGULA, Penthouse mogul Bob Guccione's rose garden funeral of sores: tales of the countless bored and abused extras; the rants of unfair treatment by inserted porn stars; furious British stage thespians; and writer Gore Vidal. It all trickled down into your local newspaper, which you read after your dad tossed it down by his feet, where you crouched reading the funnies and looking for bra ads. It seemed like a neo-pagan bacchanal was going on, drowning all concerned in flames of sin and aggravation.

Now that DVD, internet and--'choke'-- sobriety are here, we have a model for this situation -- CONTEMPT (1966): Guccione would be Jack Palance; Tinto Brass would be Fritz Lang; Gore Vidal would be Homer. But then you would need to stretch the shooting and reshooting schedule of the diegetic Odyssey to around two years, and add a lot of sensationalistic excess, far more lurid than Lang's topless mermaids. It was the sex and violence entwined that made CALIGULA stick out amidst the legion of past gaudy Roman spectacles of vile excess and pretentious overblown grandeur like SATYRICON and SIGN OF THE CROSS (and later PASSION OF THE CHRIST). It was trying to be genuinely dirty, not just titillating but unapologetically irredeemable --to capture the genuine decadent excesses of the time.  It carried a queasy anticipation that shockmeisters like Peter Greenaway and Michael Haneke would spend their lives trying to instill, only to fall back in the waves of pretentiousness so many critics mistake for art.

Playboy, for all its 'dirtiness,' couldn't really expand past Hef's limited-if-larger-than-most idea of sexuality; the magazine's idea of sexual content was frozen at the bawdy. But Guccione liked to smash taboos, his own sexual preferences be damned. If it turned him off, if it made him sick, well that was his problem, throw it in anyhow. Print the legend. That took guts! And guts like that can only come from Roma or Italian New York City. Oh if only there was someone other than Donald Trump (and the Grand Prospect Hall commercials, "we make-a your dreams come true!") to represent that kind of goombah grandiosity in today's world!

Let's set the scene: 70s New York City was not unlike the Rome of Nero, of Caligula, with the then-legendary Plato's Retreat, the then-beginning to boom rise of VHS rental, Giorgio Moroder, disco, glitter, cocaine, perms, shoulder pads, Sylvester Stallone, Travolta's chest hair, it all congealed into CALIGULA. Chances are it wouldn't even make it to our local theaters but we knew it had some sick, gaudy mojo working, beyond good and evil, beyond taste and vulgarity, into some ultra violent energy expenditure and grand guignol excess as a generator for black magic cine-alchemy.

Of course I wouldn't see it until eight years later or so, when I was reasonably bloated and debauched (from being in a rock band) myself. It was the wintry Halloween of 1988 in ancient Syracuse, where wind freezes the snot while it's still in your brain. My band was playing a Halloween party at some dismal frat house. The cold was in our bones no matter how many flat kegs we suckled, or windows we covered with plastic tarps, we were freezing down to our souls. We had to sharpen up, get mean, get psychedelic. So we rented a VHS camera and CALIGULA to you know, do some VCR-on-VCR butt-leg action, because cameras back then came attached to VHS tape recorders in strap on bags that you slung around your shoulder while you recorded, or trusted the equipment to some shaky friend to film your band for you.

Even in 1988, after years of wide XXX availability, CALIGULA had a rough reputation. Sick shit like that wasn't just floating around youtubes for all the world to slowly grow jaded via. It still had currency beyond merely making you depressed for all humanity and sick in the pit of your stomach; there was an extra, sexually-charged frisson to the old ultra-violence. None of us had seen it, but we knew CALIGULA had a big budget and real name actors in a historically accurate but soul disparaging world where somehow ancient Rome has neon lights and the entire world was like some end-of-the-night Studio 54 bathroom. As writes Cinema de Merde's CdM.Scott:

"...the story already includes a lot of sex, and to include all that sex, making the film disreputable porn, means that it can go in any direction, explore any topic, without having to tiptoe around it. And the result is a movie that maintains an excitement throughout, because we are acutely aware that ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN."

Dude! I totally remember feeling this watching the film for the first time

So we begin with a title telling us it’s Pagan Rome, 37-41 AD. We see Caligula and his sister Drusilla cavorting... He is called to see Tiberius, the current ruler and Caligua’s adoptive grandfather, played by Peter O’Toole. He’s all pale and his face has bloody sores, seriously such a horrifying figure I was really hoping he would die sooner than later, because his presence made me so uncomfortable. He forces Caligula to “do your dance, boy” which Caligula resists. Tiberius makes him do it, and it’s this highly-stylized military thing that you can tell he’s been doing since he was five and finds horribly humiliating. However, we see the first glimmers of Caligula’s character when he snaps into this almost psychotic wide-eyed smile, seems to turn his mind off, and throws himself into his performance with maniacal glee

 Dude, that's about as good a description of this film as I can get...

not only is it difficult to understand what’s going on and who all these characters are, but the whole alien world of Ancient Rome, which results in the pleasant moviewatching experience of truly having no idea what you’re going to see next.

That's right, bro... so anyway, the gig at the dismal frat house over, we come home and, lo and behold, it didn't record. We wasted the whole 3 hour stretch of our initial viewing for nothing; so we had to try again. It was painful enough the first time and we were too busy with pre-show jitters to pay close attention, but now... well.... and to make matters 'worse,' someone had relieved my nervous anxiety of playing in this crowded frathouse basement about five hours earlier with a chunk of a beer coaster that had been dipped in liquid acid, which had kicked my brain into lightshow nirvana in a BIG way right as we started playing Pink Floyd's "Echoes." I needed a roadie/keeper just to help me out of my rig at the end I just stood there, dumbfounded as my face melted onto the beer-soaked wooden plank stage and my girlfriend, in full lizard girl makeup, beckoned, hideously, the sweat and makeup congealing in swirls of muddy desire so terrible that even now in writing of it I cringe like a sailor in Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom."

So now dawn is coming up and our duping of CALIGULA is still slogging away, and I'm feeling guilty and scared of my girl upstairs in my room, beckoning even through her snores, her lizard makeup off, exposing her alabaster perfection (she was Italian-American, from Carmel, NY, the type with pale blue eyes and perfect white skin) and finally I see the infamous death wall scene...and Caligula throwing the tomato at his foe, who is buried with his little head waiting in the dirt like a single cabbage for the approaching blades. And Caligula's immortal line, "If only all of Rome had just one neck!"



I crawled up to sleep around dawn, with the girlfriend waiting, asleep but sexually hungry as always, even in sleep, her lips reaching up from the warm earth like a flower in search of the sun on a foggy day, but everything about her was too beautiful, her alabaster Roman skin and jet black hair now swathed in my deep red sheets in what looked like endless permutations of still-beating hearts. When I closed my eyes all I could see was bright bands of red, the heart patterns forming from rushing blood in my ears and the sounds of dozens of televised screaming executions echoing from tinnitus feedback and her yearning with every breath, her pulling me towards her, her big legs grinding me up like a sticky Venus fly trap snapping shut, its perfume not beguiling but freaking me out. I close my eyes and melt into her arms and there are these big mower blades coming for me, the wall of death... the blades, the black blood-stained earth, the red wall, the jeering, the light rain, the mist, if all of Rome had just one neck..

It's never stopped, that LSD-vision of death whilst wrapped in sleepy white arms and red sheets on a cold Sunday morning... it's my VERTIGO cliff ledge, my Joe Black chess game on the beach from which no Spassky goes unfunneled... it's there like the guardian at the gates of my coveted guest list hell. I don't want to go but there I am in line... and there that wall is... now it's even closer.

Because a week later, Max rented the 'other' edition. We apparently had got the wrong edition of CALIGULA, it had been re-edited and stuff added and other stuff removed and either way we hated it but it just... would... not stop. That "just one neck" line made it into our daily parlance to express nearly anything we hated or wished to devour --it summed up perfectly our LSD-addled desire to crush our enemies and hear da lamentations of der wimmen, to devour and encompass, to rule them all, or at least ourselves, or at least keep warm against the coming upstate NY winter, to reclaim some modicum of glorious and even arrogant power over our own lives, to not get old, and swollen, and engorged like a snake eating our own selves. It was too la--

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