Tick-Tockality: (i.e. tick-tock momentum) The sense of dread created in a horror film through use of prolonged real time (or slower) narrative pacing, originally created in westerns by John Ford and Howard Hawks and used first in horror by Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton in The Leopard Man, and perfected in the early films of John Carpenter. The ideal tick-tockalism begins anywhere from 24 hours to the late afternoon before the climactic anticipatory moment that night, i.e. Halloween or Carrie's Prom. The desired effect is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming at the onset of the darkness. (Named from the Silence of the Lambs quote, "Pity about poor Catherine, though. Tick-Tock")Maybe you need to have been an impressionable, easily-spooked kid in the age of drive-in 70s-80s to resonate to the setting sun's weird power, the anticipation of scares, and of being able to say you'd seen it. Parents opening their coolers of beer and lawn chairs as the sun's last rays streaked away over head; shaky summaries of other horror movies whispered about by the swing set; the unsurmountable escape wall of white screen overhead, a magnet for the white of our eyes; the booming dim echo of the speakerboxes. A child's imagination can be more real, more vivid, than an adult's reality, especially if that child grows up before cell phones or VCRs. The films of the drive-in era seemed to understand this, to know their stories would be embellished a thousandfold as recess gossip, so the special effects needed only suggest things. We filled in the blanks and in the process merged them into our own nightmares. Such a movie was Phantasm; no one had seen it, but none of us could stop talking about how scary it was.
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| Ruscha gets it |
Anyway, we had seen the trailer.
I mention this because prior to directing and writing Phantasm (1979), Don Coscarelli was shooting kid movies, like Kenny and Co, in which he showed a real knack for connecting with 70s-style sci fi fan reproabates -- the ones like me, who would have punched you in the face rather than admit they cried at E.T.
Phantasm's genesis began when Don wanted to adapt Something Wicked This Way Comes but then Disney snagged the rights. So Coscarelli made his own tale about a tall strange visitor who comes to town and steals souls. Rated R as Phantasm may be, it's clearly a kid's nightmare, macabre as Burton or Roald Dahl, but with more genuine Grimm Brothers menace and garage lab goo and gore than either. It's Over the Edge meets It Came from Outer Space. Here children run, hide, and fire shotguns through the sun roof of their older brother's Barracuda, and wonder about where the adults are. The weird secrets of the other dimension and dead soul enslavement makes a fine metaphor for not just where people go when they die but where they work, the void they disappear into for most of the week, before they come back beaten and bowed low. We dread having to get a job out there in that mysterious void, the way an old person dreads death, a slow but inexorable escalator into the abyss. And in its way, death is no more or less permanent or terrifying in its uncertainty than the first day of employment.
In the Spielbergian make-over of children's horror films in the 80s, kids lost that edge of looming responsibility and being faced with inescapable due dates with destiny. But in the 70s we knew we weren't safe, and felt exposed to the dangers around us, but it made us sharp. All the joys of life were outdoors, ideally at night. When we had to sleep we clutched toy guns the way priests clutch crosses in the thick of an exorcism. Today's parents think any kid with a gun is going to cause a Columbine, anything too scary will give them nightmares. So fucking what if they do?! They should have nightmares! Kids are already scared, if they have any brains. Shit is scary out there. Spooky movies just remind them to stay on their guard, to not let the sameness of modern life trick them into slackening their grip. Let the adults take the facade of death, the mausoleums and funerals, at face value, as kids we saw deeper, we noticed the little details, and we knew nothing was ever as safe as it seems.
Halloween (1978), which was still circling drive-ins as a second feature in '79, may have launched a thousand slasher film imitators, but few of them caught how to make a movie scary on this 'seeing deeper' tick-tock momentum aspect. They got the topography right--knives, teenagers, blood, masks--and never bothered to capture the 'deeper' vision --the inexorable pacing Carpenter mastered, i.e. the deeper perception of being fully in the moment, and playing eerie synthesizer music during a slowed down suburban idyll until the unease and anxiety of nightmares formed out of thin air.
In its fuzzy horror glory, Coscarelli's Phantasm's mythos is totally unified even its freeform reversals and misdirections. Once can connect it to Lovecraft as well more recent 'nonfiction' writers like David Icke, Nigel Kerner, who theorize that after death our newly separated souls might be intercepted by a demonic force before we reach the white light, and then used as fuel for UFOs, or ground up for experiments and recycling. Our souls could be picked over like the bloodless cattle mutilations. The main Phantasm bad guy (Angus Scrimm) known only as The Tall Man turns souls into weapons (the spiked, silver balls) and stores the crushed down bodies into kegs for easy shipping home to his dimension through a tuning fork gateway --the use of sound vibrations to transfer between dimensions is also legitimate weird theory, 'acoustic levitation' which ascribes the building of pyramids by using sound vibration to convert huge stones to weightless floating states.
A great example of a real case near-death experience (NDE) that fits this bill pretty well can be found in Nick Redfern's Final Events. "(Paul) Garratt said that he was confronted by a never-ending, light blue, sandy landscape that was dominated by a writhing mass of an untold number of naked human beings, screaming in what sounded like torturous agony" the sky was filled with pulsing flying saucer crafts, he watched them stop above the people
"then bathed each and every one of them in a green, sickly glow.... small balls of light seemed to fly from the bodies of the people... which were then sucked up into the flying saucers."
"At this point, an eerie and deafening silence overcame the huge mass of people, who duly rose to their feet as one and collectively stumbled and shuffled in hundreds of thousands across the barren landscape--like in a George Romero zombie film--towards a large black-hole that now materialized in the distance." (99)I don't know if Coscarelli has read up on NDEs or not; perhaps his vision originated in a zone of his unconscious where the dark (but subjectively interpreted), coupled to some direct film references, which to his credit Coscarelli doesn't deign to hide: the tall man's evil minions look like jawas (Star Wars was only three years old); the way darkness laps at the edges of the screen and the tick-tock score echo Halloween (the year before); an old lady fortune teller works one of those hand-in-the-box Dune fear-control tests on Mike. What Coscarelli does achieve all on his own is the way he removes any sense of inequality between waking and dreaming life: Mike's sudden wake-ups from nightmares don't carry the feeling of a cheap scare for no reason like they do in American Werewolf in London or Cat People (1982), for example. With Coscarelli, like Lovecraft, Lynch, or Bunuel, dreams are just as valid as the waking life, maybe even more 'true.' He's not just sticking this references in there to try and cover all his bases and provide weird trailer moments; Coscarelli's mythos is more paranormally cohesive than any of his predecessors' and more brave. They don't dare answer the big, final curtain question, the one children ask and adults never answer.
Coscarelli answers it, and he goes all the way.
Now, you don't need all that parapsychological theorizing to dig the mortal coil dread going on in the Phantasm series, in fact you can just dig the rapid aging of the cast, because the four main principles from the first film -- the kid, A. Michael Baldwin (as Mike, though he's played as older by a different actor in part 2, a decision probably made due to Baldwin's non-movie star face and the bigger budget allowing the hiring of James Le Gros in the role), Bill Thornbury as his older brother Jody, Reggie Bannister, and as the sinister tall man, Angus Scrimm -- all stick around for the subsequent installments, which were released over a 20 year period but within the narrative span only a few weeks or months. These actors don't ever appear in much else, so it's a shock to see what is supposed to be merely a few days or hours later within the overarching narrative take such a massive toll on their faces and body language. Myriad worry lines drain Reggie's Jeremy Piven-style charimsa until all that remains is a sad guy trying to get laid in a world full of yellow blood vomit hell cops. He looks beaten but still fixing up sheds to look like seduction zones, moseying up to strange women in ghost towns, and wearily quipping after kills foes of various sizes. Quips were stale by the later films, but Reggie didn't get that memo, but that's part of the series' charms, the Phantasm series never gets any memo.
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| Young Mike (top); Old Mike (bottom) - IV |
Maybe all children have to learn to be masochists just to survive, so small and helpless are they, and part of that may come from our ancient use of male initiation ceremonies to demarcate the line between manhood and boyziness: girls don't need one since nature has menstruation to traumatize them with, tribal ceremonies understood the psychological need for such trauma in boys as well. It only survives today in the form of, alas, hazing. But in the 70s our archaic need for initiation was gratified by the dread associated with our first R-rated movie. We who trembled at the coming drive-in night were unique in that respect: R-rated films didn't even exist when our parents were kids, and then video arrived during our teenage years, making it suddenly possible for us to rent Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead and watch them over breakfast with our moms. Nowadays nothing can scare kids except absence.
But in the window right before then, just knowing hard stuff was only out there, at theaters that we couldn't get into, launched a vertigo body drop dread in our spines.
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| The ad that scorched my 6 year-old mind |
But with VHS, that giddy terror gave way (for me at least) into depression from watching too many bloody horror movies instead of being outside playing, and from a kind of negative misogynistic osmosis, as well as a crushing disappointment that no amount of pan and scan TV room horror could ever compete with what we had imagined. And yet we had already seen too much and our faith in our fellow man and the feeling of being safe in our suburban houses at night. It had really begun, probably with renting A Clockwork Orange, and seeing the violent videos Alex sees, all raw and shocking yet dull and flat, they seemed like, real, as if a fake movie within a fictional film somehow created a double negative, and so these films played real. (the way they do with the snuff films found in the film, Vacancy [4])
So yeah, I attribute the rise in overprotective parental hysteria and nanny state fascism to the arrival of video rentals. We gained overexposure to imaginary danger at the expense of exposure to actual physical kind; in the process we also lost the rite of initiation. If the minute after hearing about some gruesome scene in a movie you can watch it on your phone in class, well, you don't have time to get scared, so there's nothing to have to use courage to overcome. It's just a lot of fake blood and acting. There's no initiatory fear and catharsis. You might be building a tolerance for violent images, but that's not going to help with the initiation need that's stifling your soul; there's no ceremony to mark your courage. The first one I saw? Outland (1981), at 14. We heard guys exploded from exposure to space sans suits, and that's where the dread came from. It was something to boast of.
Now of course anything even approaching some sort of hazing as a passage to becoming a man is considered a crime, but even the shockmeisters knew that engendering the fear of what was coming was more important than the thing itself. Generating fear helps us realize there was never nothing there to fear in the first place. Facing it, our older cooler friends feel obligated to be nice to us, to let us into the cool world. (see Dazed and Confused.) Running away from the fear stifles you and earns contempt. Seeing Mike and Jody roaring down the road in their '71 'Cuda (below) brings that back. This was a time when life was dangerous, and most importantly, so were we. (See also my analysis of the best movie about being a kid in that era, Over the Edge).
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| This. This you can trust. |
To get back to that frame of mind, where the setting sun strikes you with giddy drive-in terror and you long for the woodsman Exxon deliverer, first you have to surrender your 80s guns and your 90s disaffection and your 00s sincerity, back before VHS and Betamax and cable. Return to the time horror movies created far more dread with a single modulating synthesizer than any John Williams-ish overthought orchestra, when R-rated movie storytellers worked each other into frenzies of fear, describing events from films they'd seen or heard about, lingering over the traumatic scenes and embellishing on what they heard as needed for petrifying effect. (2) This is what Phantasm is all about, the fractured but impelling rantings of an imaginative child's mind as he hears the scraping of the branches on the window and tries to sleep; it comes to us as a half-dream hybrid myth, already re-spun by a telephone game's worth of spooky child imagination, it's fiction for the boy seeking initiation. It's fiction, yet it still feels truer than anything adulthood has to offer.
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NOTES:
1. The 'blanks' --such as the fate of the captured girls (Reggie just says he found them and released them but we never see it) were probably a result of drastic cuts made by Don himself. According to the trivia notes on imdb: "This film's original running time was more than three hours, but writer/ director Don Coscarelli decided that that was far too long for it to hold people's attention and made numerous cuts to the film. Some of the unused footage was located in the late 1990s and became the framework for Phantasm IV: Oblivion. The rest of the footage is believed to be lost. " -Now that'a a damn shame, even if the unused footage is brilliantly mixed into IV and does save it from the edge of crappiness.
2. I'm still finding movies I remember hearing about from other kids, like Five Million Years to Earth, movies I was sure were made up.
4. See: 2004: Collateral Torture (Bright Lights After Dark)
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