Matt Thorne was born in Bristol in 1974 and is the co-founder of the literary movement The New Puritans, whose manifesto ditched flashbacks and authorial asides, and called for simplicity and contemporary relevance in British fiction. He is the author of a critical study of Prince (Faber & Faber, £12.99) and six novels, including the semi-autobiographical 8 Minutes Idle (Phoenix, 2001), which has just been made into a film. The dark, romantic comedy, directed by Mark Simon Hewis, is set in a Bristol call centre, inspired by Matt’s stint manning the phones on the night shift; unlike the film’s hero Dan, Matt didn’t take up residence in the office stationary cupboard. Eithne Farry
8 Minutes Idle was released in UK cinemas on 14 February 2014.
I find it quite hard to identify with characters in most Hollywood films, as they tend to be men of action rather than procrastination. This runs in my family. I remember my father being disgusted when Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing smashed a car window to get to the keys inside, rather than fashioning a noose with a coat-hanger, hooking it through the window and trying to pull up the lock, no matter how much screen time this might have taken.
But there are a few characters I connect with. They tend to be the protagonists of noir films or screwball comedies; people who end up in trouble largely through no fault of their own. There were a few of these characters in the early 80s, like Tom Hulce’s C.C. Drood in Slamdance. I identified with Graham Dalton in Sex, Lies and Videotape, because he carries only one key as he doesn’t want to complicate his life, but I can’t choose him because I don’t go around videotaping women talking about their sex life.
So it has to be Paul Hackett (played by Griffin Dunne) from Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. A ‘word processor’ in New York, he has a certain impatience with life (when a temp starts telling him about his literary magazine, he just gets up and walks away), but it’s hard to blame him when every reassuring thing around him turns out to be scary. [SPOILER] He meets a waitress in a café who shares his taste in literature, but when they go home together she tells him distressing stories about her ex and commits suicide. He meets a nice guy in a bar who offers to help him, but he turns out to be the boyfriend of the waitress. [END OF SPOILER] I’m not saying my life is quite that dramatic, but I identify with the regular guy using his wits to get out of a trap.
It was because of After Hours that I sought out an office job when I started to write, and my own experiences as a temp influenced 8 Minutes Idle. But whereas Paul Hackett was just trying to get home, Dan Thomas is homeless and forced to live in his office, and the experiences he goes through are even more comically extreme than those experienced by Hackett. I suppose I identify with characters who do nothing more daring than stay up late looking for love on the wrong side of town, only to discover that’s a far more daring adventure than anything Indiana Jones ever experienced.
More information on Matt Thorne and his books can be found here.
Fuelled by childhood nightmares and memories of a haunted house, Gazelle Twin (aka Elizabeth Bernholz) makes eerie, dark, distorted electronica. After her 2011 debut album The Entire City, she returns with Unflesh, to be released later this year. Continuing her exploration of the human body through costume and disguise, she has created a new persona, a hooded, faceless girl (inspired by The Brood), to accompany the creepy vocals and menacing beats of her new material. Her new single, ‘Belly of the Beast’, is released on 3 March on Anti-Ghost Moon Ray Records. It will be available for a limited time as a free download. For more information please visit Gazelle Twin’s website. Below, Elizabeth Bernholz picks the 10 films that have most thrilled and inspired her.
Watch a teaser clip from ‘Belly of the Beast’:
1. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
I’ll get straight to the point: Alien (1979) is a far superior film in every way possible, but because I encountered Aliens so young, it has a very deep nostalgic significance for me. Between ages 9 and 19, I used any chance I had to watch it. Anytime, anywhere. Now I’m 32 and I still talk about it on a daily basis. It is about as Proustian as a film can get – the sheer excitement I get from the rain-soaked, half-eaten donut, the motion tracker sound effect, the fatty gloop of the Queen laying her eggs, the click of the buckle on the ‘loader’, Bishop’s milky blood – I could go on and on… I now realise that there are many more elements that appealed to my subconscious as an ‘outsider’ kid, and later as I endured the lonely terror of puberty, like the feral, clever character of the orphaned Newt surviving alone against all odds, and Ripley, a powerful maternal role model with a flamethrower. The film planted many integral seeds in my brain, and they’re just starting to sprout.
2. The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
I don’t know of a film as beautiful and heartbreaking as this. The story, the set design, the make-up, the acting… It’s a perfect film, and for me, the perfect subject matter. I based one of my costumes on Joseph Merrick’s silhouette through the sheer love of this film. I am always surprised by the fact that it was only made possible (and with Lynch’s final cut) because of the support of one of its ‘silent’ producers, Mel Brooks. If only the case had been the same for Dune…
3. The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979)
If psychosis took on a physical form, what would it look like? Of the horror films I’ve seen that feature child demons/monsters, I find this the most disturbing and visually lingering. There’s something extremely disconcerting about the brightly coloured snowsuits and matching, pastel, bedtime onesies worn by the ‘brood’. Together with their synchronised movements, they are the stuff of proper, unfiltered nightmares.
4. Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
Aside from its industrial soundscape, visionary art direction and profound anxiety, what I love most of all about Eraserhead is that Lynch’s sense of humour remains present in all aspects, even the most physically disturbing scenes. And, like almost all of his films, the ‘making-of’ story behind it is just as thrilling as the thing itself.
5. Alice (Jan Švankmajer, 1988)
In his Decalogue, Jan Švankmajer claimed, ‘Obsessions are the relics of childhood’, and this is another of mine. There’s so much sensuality and imagination in this film, it’s as if Švankmajer is able to inject MORE life into his props than he could in real, moving things. I’m mostly obsessed by the foley, which sometimes seems to be at odds with the visuals (but that’s what makes it all the more appealing to me). The crunching, scuttling, dripping, ticking… the out-of-sync English overdubs on the close-up of Alice’s mouth (speaking in Czech)…
6. The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
The atmosphere of loneliness, panic and human weakness that is created in this film is unrivalled. The extreme horror is kept so brilliantly close to a comic-book portrayal of a story, with just enough comedy to maintain a balance. The Morricone score is one of my favourites, especially as it is still rooted in Carpenter’s minimalist synth drone world. I’ve made so many references to this in my own music that it’s verging on the obsessional.
7. Walkabout (Nic Roeg, 1971)
I have always been interested in the meeting point between tribal and urban life. This film makes something very special out of the collision of social circumstances, very particular to its setting. There are many more themes entangled in the story, most of which are never really made explicit. All the viewer ever really has to go on is Roeg’s compelling use of juxtaposition – universal harmonies and discordances.
8. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
It’s hard to accurately describe the nauseating, nightmarish, psycho-surrealist atmosphere this film creates, and all with complete subtlety and surprise. It’s a feeling close to sleep paralysis or a night terror – a sort of inert doom without any obvious source. It harbours pretty bold socio-political, anti-fascist messages that are revealed in pleasingly pagan-like symbols (mostly animals – alive, or the remains of) and is summed up best by Roger Ebert’s review from 1997: ‘They’re trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac’.
9. Who Can Kill a Child? (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1976)
Somewhere in between The Wicker Man (1973) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), this film is possibly rendered more terrifying because of the time in which it was made. There’s something slightly MORE gruesome about 70s fake blood and 70s foley; films of this era seem to induce a particularly depressing effect on me (which I like). It’s the message in the screenplay that really intrigues me though. The idea of revenge as a collective instinct that has evolved out of the need to protect oneself, and revenge not just for personal trauma, but for humanity itself. I’m fascinated by studies of evolution in psychology, and this explores a hypothetical situation to the very extreme.
10. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
Bergman is one of my all-time favourite philosopher/directors, and this was his last feature film. He said it summed up his entire life, and so the full, five-hour version is a real voyage to experience. It has many similarities to Night of the Hunter (1955), which was a very strong contender for my tenth film. It’s a brilliant depiction of childhood, where dreams and fears merge with fantasy and desire, to the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish either.
Bleeding Skull: A 1980s Trash-Horror Odyssey
By Joesph A. Ziemba and Dan Budnik
Headpress
223pp. £25
Xerox Ferox: The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine
By John Szpunar
Headpress
799pp. £29.99
Looking at Movies
By Richard Barsam and Dave Monahan
Norton
616pp. & DVD £34.99
As I compose this instalment of Cine Lit, I have wafting in the background the mellifluous tones of Miles Davis, from the superlative third box-set of Jazz on Film recordings, which this time covers the French New Wave from 1957 to 1962. Jazzwise writer Selwyn Harris’s continuing labour of love in bringing us these terrifically remastered gems from vinyl obscurity is to be lauded and applauded, and, like the other two sets, receives top ratings in this column. This new addition features The Modern Jazz Quartet’s scoring of No Sun in Venice, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ Les liaisons dangereuses and Des femmes disparaissent, Miles Davis with his classic soundtrack to Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold, Michel Legrand’s beautifully constructed score for Eva, Martial Solal’s unforgettable Breathless compositions and Barney Wilen’s Un témoin dans la ville. Essential and unmissable, the recordings are enhanced immeasurably by Selwyn’s well-researched and stellar accompanying text.
There have been a number of recent publications for consideration, ranging from the sublime to the (near) ridiculous. In the former category is The Film Festival Reader, a collection of essays and speculations that should be considered required reading for anyone planning to dip their toes into the relatively new cinematic waters that are forming around the academic discipline of ‘festival studies’. The editor, Dina Iordanova, has been a key player in contributing to the field as a lecturer at St. Andrews University, where in-house publisher St. Andrew’s University Press have provided considerable and commendable support to FF Studies in a similar way to that of the University of Amsterdam Press, where Marijke de Valck – another key player in FF Studies – is based. Indeed, both have contributed essays to this book, which serves as a sort of ‘state of the art’ survey of work in the area. All of the essays have been previously published in various journals and are collected together here for the first time. Rigorous, informed, challenging and thought-provoking, it puts the emphasis on the historical, sociological and anecdotal, without too much excess baggage, from the usual academic suspects such as Deleuze, Žižek, Foucault, Bourdieu et al. In short, an approachable and informative read.
Which brings me to the (near) ridiculous, and I mean this in a most approving way. Headpress – as readers of this column will be aware – are specialists in trawling (crawling!) through the transgressive and liminal spaces of cinematic geography, with a deliciously perverse approach that favours the experiential over the theoretical. Their authors are cinematic miners at the coal heap of trash, extreme and libidinous film. Two recent publications provide further evidence of this commitment, with fulsome tomes adding to this ongoing agenda of providing the reader with information about filmic texts and activities that they didn’t even know they wanted – or needed. Bleeding Skull is a geek’s bible of 1980s trash-horror films that have been recorded – very cheaply – on VHS and obsessively collected by the authors. The entries in this collection were culled from their website and these 300 reviews range from 555 to Le lac des morts vivants. The publisher has also given us the Szupnar book, Xerox Ferox: The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine, which documents the diehards who introduced many of these films into the culture by way of the pre-internet, pre-blog punkish energy of the fanzine. Utilising illustrations, interviews and discussion, the book maps out the territory from Famous Monsters to Rue Morgue and to the further shores of luridness exemplified by the likes of Gore Gazette and Sleazoid Express. Shelve these books alongside your copies of Slimetime, Offbeat, X-Cert and Land of a Thousand Balconies.
Finally, a brief word about Looking at Movies. I met with some film student readers of ES who asked – given text book prices – what might be the best value book for a comprehensive overview of movie methods, analysis and history. The standards, of course, are Bordwell/Thompson or Cook or Giannetti – all excellent – but in terms of price, breadth, and with a very useful DVD explaining key ideas and filmmaking methods, the Barsam/Monahan is hard to beat and remains my choice. By the way, don’t let the student designation fool you, there is plenty within for all of us.
Although he doesn’t have the status of Italian filmmaking pioneers and favourites like Mario Bava, Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci, Aldo Lado is often considered one of the most interesting directors in Italian cult cinema, mainly because of a handful of giallo-inspired thrillers he directed in the early 1970s: Short Night of Glass Dolls (La corta notte delle bambole di vetro, 1971), Who Saw Her Die? (Chi l’ha vista morire?, 1972) and Night Train Murders (L’ultimo treno della notte, 1975). Prior to his directorial debut, Lado worked as a scriptwriter, contributing to Maurizio Lucidi’s Hitchcock-inspired giallo The Designated Victim (La vittima designata, 1971), among others.
Like Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970), Short Night of Glass Dolls is a remarkable debut feature, and one that shows a talent already well-developed. The film was co-written by Lado himself and Ernesto Gastaldi, the genre’s pre-eminent scriptwriter, responsible for a number of classic gialli, including most of Sergio Martino’s films.
Unlike the majority of giallo films, Short Night of Glass Dolls is not constructed around elaborate set-piece murders, although it does feature a typical giallo hero in Jean Sorel’s Gregory Moore, an American journalist living in Prague. When his girlfriend (Barbara Bach, The Spy Who Loved Me) disappears in the middle of the night Moore begins questioning anyone who might have spoken to her on that last evening, as well as looking into several similar disappearances. In a bizarre twist, all this is related by Moore in a series of flashbacks as he lies on a mortuary slab, having apparently died from heart failure. While the doctors try and figure out why his ‘corpse’ is still warm and why it hasn’t gone into rigor yet, Moore looks back on recent events in an effort to understand what’s happened to him.
In most giallo films the journey is more important than the destination, and the pay-off is often something of a disappointment, although some of the finest efforts manage to construct a climax worthy of the rest of the film (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, for example). Short Night of Glass Dolls definitely falls into the latter camp and features one of the genre’s most memorable conclusions, both in resolving the mystery of the girl’s disappearance and in Moore’s eventual fate. Although it appears to be inspired by a classic episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Lado takes the film in another, more exotic direction, one which it is doubtful that Hitchcock could have conceived of.
Watch the trailer for Short Night of Glass Dolls:
Although it’s very successful in purely horror terms, Short Night of Glass Dolls also works on a number of different levels. It can be assessed as an overtly political film, with an American journalist struggling to solve a mystery in a society that does not tolerate dissent and hides its secrets behind a corrupt bureaucracy. Because of this approach Lado was able to secure funding from pro-western sources; ironically, he also received financial support from pro-communist groups, who interpreted the film as a parable about the way the wealthy, upper-class elite prey upon the working classes like parasites. On a more abstract level, it’s also concerned with the fleeting nature of youth, and its exploitation by those desperate to recapture their own youthful vitality. This theme is reflected in Lado’s frequent references to butterflies, whose brief lifespan has made them a popular metaphor for youth and mortality. After the director’s original title, Malastrana, was rejected by the producers, it was changed to Short Night of the Butterflies, an appropriate enough choice, but that was altered because it was considered too similar to the title of another giallo released at roughly the same time, Duccio Tessari’s The Blood-stained Butterfly (Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate, 1971).
Despite its continued critical acclaim Short Night of Glass Dolls has not been widely influential, but does seem to have inspired a handful of later films. Both Sergio Martino’s All the Colors of the Dark (Tutti i colori del buio, 1972), which was also (co-)scripted by Ernesto Gastaldi, and Francesco Barilli’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Il profumo della signora in nero, 1974) feature secret groups and sinister activities. In contrast with Lado’s film, they focus upon female characters played by actresses with a solid giallo heritage, Edwige Fenech and Mimsy Farmer, allowing both films to portray their heroines’ collapsing mental state, much like Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). Neither film is entirely successful; All the Colors of the Dark is compromised by a hysterical central character and doesn’t stand up to Martino’s other gialli, while a solid performance from Farmer in The Perfume of the Lady in Black isn’t enough to remedy a slow-moving plot and a largely event-free first hour.
Lado’s second film was another giallo, but a more traditional one, this time co-written by Lado, veteran scriptwriter Massimo D’Avak, and Francesco Barilli. Although it’s not as effective or original as Short Night of Glass Dolls or Night Train Murders, Who Saw Her Die? is still an interesting example of the genre, with a few unusual aspects that make it worth watching. A compelling introductory scene shows a child being murdered by someone in a black veil. Four years later, sculptor Franco (played by George Lazenby, the forgotten Bond) and his estranged wife Elizabeth (Anita Strindberg, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, 1971) are living separate lives in Venice. When their daughter Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi, Deep Red, 1975) is found murdered, Franco tries to track down her killer, uncovering a web of paedophilia and sadomasochism.
With a grieving father exploring the baroque and otherworldly city of Venice, trying to understand his daughter’s death, it’s not surprising that many commentators have seen connections between Who Saw Her Die? and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), although Lado’s film came out more than a year before Roeg’s. It’s never been established whether Roeg was familiar with Who Saw Her Die?, but the similarity of certain shots, locations and events suggest that he might have been. While Lado’s film is respectable enough, Don’t Look Now is still the superior film.
Watch the trailer for Who Saw Her Die?:
Like Short Night of Glass Dolls, Who Saw Her Die? is a window into a world of clandestine societies with secret agendas, and it’s also concerned with the themes of youth and mortality. The final revelations are less effective here, partly because they’re considerably less exotic, but also because it’s an altogether more traditional film, one that rarely strays from the established giallo pattern. It’s certainly technically accomplished, boasting excellent cinematography from Franco Di Giacomo, who had recently worked on Dario Argento’s long-elusive third giallo, Four Flies on Grey Velvet (4 mosche di velluto grigio, 1971). Like all of Lado’s early films, it boasts an excellent Ennio Morricone score. The composer downplays the jazz-rock tendencies and abrasive strings that characterise most of his giallo soundtracks in favour of choral pieces that predominantly feature children’s voices. This works for the most part, tying well into the film’s subject matter, but some of it seems too light for the material. Ultimately, despite its qualities, Who Saw Her Die? doesn’t stand up to Lado’s other films.
The final effort in Lado’s loose giallo-esque trio is 1975’s Night Train Murders, an unofficial remake of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972). One of the most notorious exploitation films ever made, The Last House on the Left depicts the rape and murder of two young girls, and the subsequent bloody revenge taken by the parents of one of them. Although Craven wrote the script, the movie takes its plot and its central themes from the Ingmar Bergman classic The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukä;llan, 1960). Despite its notoriety, Craven’s film was a commercial success and gave rise to its own sub-genre, the ‘rape-revenge film’, including Meir Zarchi’s misogynistic I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Takashi Ishii’s mournful Freezer (2000) and Lado’s Night Train Murders, arguably the finest of the movies inspired by The Last House on the Left.
Night Train Murders begins with school friends Margaret and Lisa, played by Irene Miracle (Inferno, 1980) and Laura D’Angelo; having stayed with Margaret’s parents in Munich, they are travelling to Italy to spend Christmas with Lisa’s family. Although their journey starts out well enough, the presence of two pretty young girls attracts the attention of thug Blackie (Flavio Bucci, Suspiria, 1977) and his junkie friend Curly (Gianfranco De Grassi, The Church, 1989). Margaret and Lisa switch trains to escape from them, only to discover their attackers have done so too. By this time Blackie and Curly have been joined by a well-dressed Woman (Macha Mßril, Deep Red) whose obvious status and wealth conceal a nature every bit as sadistic and brutal as her new friends. They imprison the girls in a deserted carriage and subject them to a barrage of sexual, physical and psychological abuses. Eventually Lisa dies at their hands, and Margaret tries to escape out of the carriage window, but ends up dying on the rocks below. The three killers leave the train at the next stop and unwittingly accept an offer of a lift from Lisa’s parents, who have come to the station to pick up the girls. When they discover what has really happened, they turn upon the killers with surprising ferocity.
Although it devotes less screen time to the protracted rapes and assaults than most films of its kind Night Train Murders still makes for extremely uncomfortable viewing, thanks to a number of scenes that raise the bar for cinematic nastiness. The effect is compounded by the fact that Lado takes his time with Margaret and Lisa, allowing the viewer to understand and sympathise with them before their ordeal begins, roughly halfway through the film. They’re sweet, good-natured girls about to cross over into womanhood, but still childlike in many ways: secretly stealing cigarettes, flirting with boys and exploring their own nascent sexuality. It’s this innocence that draws Blackie, Curly and the Woman to them, with the corruption and destruction of this innocence being their primary motivation, as if rape and murder (and their own personal sexual satisfaction) were secondary considerations. All three of the killers seem genuinely surprised when one of the victims dies; this incident shatters the folie à trois, and they soon begin to turn on each other.
Blackie and Curly are garden-variety thugs. Under the opening credits we see them snatching purses, beating up a market stall Santa, slicing up an expensive fur coat and jumping onto the train to escape from the police. They leer over Margaret and Lisa, attack a navy officer who attempts to help them and generally make a nuisance of themselves. No motives are provided, although Curly is a drug addict, which in a horror movie means he’s capable of anything. The well-dressed Woman is a different matter. We know she is intelligent, well informed and clearly wealthy. Beneath that respectable veneer she’s also a merciless sadist with a high sex drive (she carries pornographic photos in her handbag) and a dominant personality. Blackie’s attempt at rape quickly becomes consensual, with the Woman taking the lead over her surprised would-be attacker. Blackie and Curly revel in violence, but the Woman derives a sexual thrill from watching the rape and torture of two young girls. Her obvious intellect and imagination make her capable of acts of depravity that her cohorts could not conceive of.
Watch the trailer for Night Train Murders:
The Woman’s monstrous sadism is well hidden beneath a middle-class exterior, however, just as her face is concealed by her veil. Blackie and Curly look the part, but few would suspect the Woman of being responsible for a pair of vicious murders. One of the core aspects of the rape-revenge movie is the meting out of justice (or vengeance) upon the responsible parties, but Night Train Murders is one of the few films of its kind in which not all the killers are punished. [SPOILER] Instead the Woman (wearing her veil again) is able to claim that she had been kidnapped by the two thugs, and the credits roll after Lisa’s father has killed Blackie and Curly, with no apparent intention of killing her at all. It’s an incredibly cynical ending, but one that’s in keeping with the rest of the film. [END OF SPOILER]
Set in Germany and Italy, Night Train Murders takes place against a background of violence and revolution. Europe is still reeling from the last war, in which Munich played an integral role. Not everyone has managed to move on yet, as we can gather from the cabin full of German businessmen in suits, happily singing the archetypal Nazi hymn, the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, even though it’s been illegal for 30 years. Like the Woman, their secrets hide beneath a semblance of respectability. Meanwhile Italy is locked in the middle of the ‘Anni di piombi’, the Years of Lead, a two-decade period characterised by political turmoil and violent unrest. The nihilism and anger of young people like Blackie and Curly is being channelled towards political ends, although whether the end result will be any different remains to be seen. Margaret and Lisa’s train is stopped after a tip-off that a bomb has been placed upon it, forcing them to take another train and eventually bringing them into contact with the trio of killers.
Despite some flaws – Lisa’s parents, played by veterans Enrico Maria Salerno (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and Marina Berti (What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, 1974), are essentially just cardboard cut-outs – Night Train Murders is still one of the best Italian cult movies from the 1970s, and comfortably superior to almost every other rape-revenge film, with the exception of Wes Craven’s trailblazing original. It even inspired its own knock-off, Ferdinando Baldi’s awful Terror Express (La ragazza del vagone letto, 1979), which pads its brief running time with soft-core sex scenes that try to be controversial or shocking but usually end up being laughable instead. At the other end of the spectrum, Franco Prosperi’s Last House on the Beach (1978) was another stylish, well-made rape-revenge movie based on a story by Ettore Sanzò, who co-scripted Night Train Murders and What Have They Done to Your Daughters? The last twitch of the Italian rape-revenge cycle was Ruggero Deodato’s House on the Edge of the Park (La casa sperduta nel parco, 1980), a rather unpleasant film that cemented Deodato’s reputation as one of the most extreme Italian exploitation directors. It’s the opposite of the taut, economical plotting of Night Train Murders, and a somewhat ignoble end to one of the more notorious aspects of Italian cult cinema.
London-born artist and composer Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, creates genre-defying experimental sound pieces, influenced by everything from film scores to architecture and fashion. He’s composed work from found mobile phone conversations and the hidden noises of the urban environment, and has staged installations and performed at venues from Vienna to Vietnam. This week sees the re-issue of The Garden Is Full of Metal/Homage to Derek Jarman, a sound portrait made of recordings from spaces that Jarman inhabited, on the 20th anniversary of the artist-filmmaker’s passing. A live album recorded in a Dresden amphitheatre in Germany, Electronic Garden, will also be released on 24 February 2014. For more details on both albums and to buy them, please visit Scanner’s website. Below, Scanner chooses 10 films that have inspired and entertained him.
1. Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)
A mind-blowingly inventive film that touches on memory, appearance and history, and most definitely a work that can’t be written about in one paragraph. Is it fiction or reality? As a student, I saw this when it was first shown in London at the ICA, and I remember leaving the cinema as if in a spell. Indeed, when it was first shown on Channel 4 the following year, I recorded the entire film on cassette so I could just listen back to this expansive free-form travelogue.
2. Mauvais sang (Leos Carax, 1986)
I saw this at the Metro Cinema in London when it was released, with no expectations at all. Super stylish, with a central love story between a young, animated Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche, the film exhibits beautifully detailed directorial touches, such as the marks on her skin from the sheet when she wakes up in bed. It’s a hymn to Paris with a love of Godard in every scene.
3. Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983)
Again I discovered this at the ICA, initially drawn to the film having read that the esteemed David Cunningham of The Flying Lizards composed the score and performance artist Stuart Brisley made an appearance. A film about ‘ghosts’ in our everyday world, it’s a thought-provoking and haunting film, with an unforgettable cameo by the late, great Jacques Derrida in a smoky Parisian café.
4. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
A film that has frequently been referenced with regard to my earlier work exploring scanned mobile phone calls and the invasion of privacy. Long before the net and social networks took precedence, this film, about a surveillance expert who is destroyed by his own obsession, focused on the limitations of sound and how we listen and interpret. Gene Hackman plays his role with a lonely passion for his job, yet filled with angst and caution about everyone he meets.
5. Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)
I could easily have chosen Lynch’s Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, but this twisted film is bewildering and surreal, where the rational needs to be left at the door. Characters swiftly morph into others, while locations urgently switch from one to another. I love how Lynch plays with his own reputation, as he sends characters into dark corridors with a sombre industrial soundtrack and they emerge again unscathed. Best use of a David Bowie song (‘I’m Deranged’) in a film since Mauvais Sang too.
6. Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)
A war film that is more about retreat than attack, and arguably one of the strongest war films of all time, where sorrow and failure take priority over dominance and a sense of conquest. As the remarkable soundtrack mirrors the devastation of the war on the young man, with ever increasing noise in the score, we are made true witnesses to all that is the horror of war. It’s an uncompromising and heart-breaking film that always makes me think of Klimov’s short film Larisa (1980), an elegy to his late wife, Larisa Shepitko.
7. The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)
As with most of my choices here, images remain burnt into my retina long after seeing the film, and this one in particular features harrowing scenes, notably the execution scene where we witness the fierce, unblinking stare of a boy looking into the eyes of condemned men. Seen alongside Come and See by Shepitko’s husband Klimov, this film is heroic in ambition, and it is a tragedy that Shepitko died so young. The score by Alfred Schnittke is transcendent and as cold as white snow.
8. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
A film that divided many people. I remember watching this in the splendid Art Deco Tuschinski cinema in Amsterdam, and had never seen so many people leave a film screening until I was left as one of a handful of mesmerised viewers, enraptured by this prayer to the image, to the soul. Within the opening 20 minutes I had tears in my eyes, as the John Tavener score soared to spiritual heights, the dreamlike editing and stunning images taking me with them on this elegiac journey into childhood and the afterlife.
9. Starsky & Hutch (Todd Philips, 2004)
We all have guilty pleasures, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve seen this film around a dozen times and still find it affectionate, playful, deliberately formulaic in its narrative and reliably amusing. A kind of paean to 1970s cinema and all the baggage that this brings with it in the most enjoyable way.
10. The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1988)
As with many of the other directors I’ve mentioned here, I could just as easily have chosen Jarman’s The Garden, The Angelic Conversation or Caravaggio, but The Last of England is the vision of an angry Jarman, raging against the system of the time, with visceral, kinetic images that push the viewer to make a real commitment to this dreamlike tale. Given that he died before the advancements in digital filmmaking and mobile technologies, it still saddens me to wonder what magic Jarman would have been producing if he were still with us today.
After a strong, ambitious programme in 2013, which proved that there is still very much life in the 60-year-old festival, this year the Berlinale felt like a step back. But while the Competition line-up in particular left much to be desired, the festival on the whole included attractive events (including special screenings of Snowpiercer and Nymphomaniac) and terrific guests such as Nick Cave and Lars von Trier, all radiating an unflinching sense of excitement about the of future editions.
One of the most enjoyable entries in Competition was Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land. A nihilistic neo-Western road movie comedy thriller, the film was originally shot in 2009, but then held by censorship authorities and rescheduled several times over the past few years because of its allegedly negative portrayal of the police. After at least three official resubmissions and endless editing and re-cutting, the version of the film presented here was the one that had finally been released theatrically in China in 2013. Yet, it came as a welcome surprise that, except for its newly attached, and effectively arbitrary ending, Ning Hao’s wildly cynical (and frequently bonkers) fable remains tightly paced and eminently fun to watch, if nothing more substantial.
Scratching a little deeper beneath the surface of China’s social malaise, it was bizarre frozen noirBlack Coal, Thin Ice by fellow countryman Diao Yinan that was deemed worthy of the Golden Bear for Best Film. And, much to everyone’s surprise, the jury also honoured its star, Liao Fan, with the Best Actor award. The story begins in 1999 in northern China, where Zhang (Liao Fan), a washed-up, recently divorced cop, is tasked with investigating a murder case after some body parts were discovered in a number of coal shipments in the area. But rather than solving the mystery, Zhang eventually loses his place on the force until, five years later, a chance encounter with an old colleague leads him to become entangled with the case again. With nothing else in his life to cling to, he quickly becomes obsessed, both with the investigation, and with the widow (Gwei Lun Mei) around whom it all seems to revolve. What becomes clear in the course of increasingly irritating events is that, while a truly extraordinary visual experience, Black Coal, Thin Ice can’t disguise the conventional heart that beats at the centre of the narrative. Still, in the context of a fiercely underwhelming Competition, it did make the film engaging and puzzling enough to stand out from the rest.
Watch the trailer to Black Coal, Thin Ice:
A similar plot problem prevented Hans Petter Moland’s In Order of Disappearance from being anything more than average, fun crime fare. Convincing embodying a man whose resolve is sorely tested, Stellan Skarsgård plays Nils, a reputable snowplough driver by profession, more at ease with action than words – especially if he is upset, or angry, or both. Devastated when his son suddenly dies of a heroin overdose, he decides to take revenge. Although the filmmaking is assured and the pace correspondingly brisk, keeping in line with its hero’s spirit, there is no denying that Moland also reworks an all too well-tested formula here, which places his playful slice of Nordic noir at risk of running idle.
Watch the trailer to In Order of Disappearance:
It was Andreas Prochaska’s rare Austrian Western The Dark Valley, presented out of competition as part of the Berlinale Special strand, which turned out to be one of the most debated revenge chillers of the festival. A former editor for Michael Haneke, Prochaska first gained credit as a director with slash horror flick Dead in Three Days (In 3 Tagen bist du tot, 2006), but The Dark Valley is a different kind of beast entirely. Based on the 2010 bestseller by Thomas Willmann, the film is set in a distant higher region of the Tyrol Alps in the 19th century. Grim-faced Greider (Sam Riley), a storybook-style lonesome horseman, arrives in a remote village just as winter sets in, isolating the place from the rest of the world. Introducing himself as a photographer intending to capture the impressive landscape and its inhabitants, the mysterious, quiet American is greeted with distrust but eventually finds shelter with Luzi (Paula Beer), the narrator of the story, and her widowed mother. It comes as no surprise that Greider’s true intent is nothing less than vengeance, in this case against old Brenner (Hans-Michael Rehberg), an uncompromising patriarch who has ruled over the women in the village for decades by claiming droit du seigneur over any newlywed brides, including Grider’s beloved mother. It’s not long before blood is shed and once the cards are on the table, things move slowly towards a final showdown. While the film has been widely criticised for its clumsy storytelling, flat, cliché-ridden characterisation and uncompromising, grim stolidity, its advocates suggest that The Dark Valley is well worth a second look as it stumbles into that small canon of films that dare to relocate the tropes and texture of the Western genre to some bleaker bolder, more eccentric climes. There is no denying that, aesthetically and conceptually, Prochaska aims high here, but while he dazzles on the former level, he is not as successful on the latter. Still, you have to admire Riley for keeping a perfectly straight face throughout his fierce revenge frenzy, while Prochaska and his cinematographer Thomas W. Kiennast make excellent use of the snowy landscape that serves as an appropriate setting for a staggering war of retaliation.
Watch the trailer to The Dark Valley:
One of the true standouts this year was Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s intriguing and vastly inspiring Nick Cave portrait 20,000 Days on Earth. Following on from the short films they made to accompany the albums of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the artist-filmmaker duo have created a beguiling, artistic and spirited look at the life and work of a man who, celebrated as a musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor, never seems to rest.
Through a vivid collection of memories, archive materials and conversations with those who have affected and inspired him, both professionally and personally, the film explores Cave’s very personal views on the world in general, and his everyday life and creative process in particular. If there was one thing to take away from the film, and perhaps the festival on the whole, it was that dazzling feeling of awakening and the incentive to work hard for your passion and dreams – to suffer the pains and savour the victories.
Zoe Pilger was born in London in 1984. She is an art critic for The Independent and currently researching a PhD on romantic love and sadomasochism in the work of French artist Sophie Calle. Her debut novel, Eat My Heart Out (Serpent’s Tail, £11.99), which started life as a short story, is a wild and wicked rampage through the psyche of a lost young woman as she looks for answers in London’s more outré offerings. Eithne Farry
In François Ozon’s 2003 French-British film Swimming Pool, Charlotte Rampling plays Sarah Morton, a famous crime writer, now middle-aged. She wears dark glasses, smokes, drinks whiskey alone in dingy London pubs. Her hair is cut marmishly short but she retains that Rampling look, those cheekbones, that staggering, dark sexual power.
Sarah lives with her elderly father in a dusty house full of books and heavy curtains. There is the suggestion of a long-term, painful affair with John, her smarmily elegant publisher, played by Charles Dance. It is John who suggests that she go and write in his empty holiday house in the south of France.
What follows is the most visually serene but murderous of stories about the creative process. Sarah is unexpectedly joined in the house by John’s 20-something daughter, Julie, played by the blonde, bronzed and crookedly beautiful Ludivine Sagnier. Sarah is the uptight English ‘spinster’; Julie is the lascivious French ‘slut’. Sarah binges on plain yoghurt with artificial sweetener, while Julie devours foie gras and charcuterie. Julie becomes Sarah’s muse; when Julie eventually commits a dreadful act of violence, she says that she did it for Sarah’s book. The message is clear: creativity requires sacrifice.
I first watched the film when I was at university; I have watched it at least 10 times since. I love it. While I was writing Eat My Heart Out, Sarah and Julie emerged in my imagination as complementary poles of a particularly female experience. In order to get the book done, I had to live like Sarah sans the whiskey: shutting myself away from the world and focusing all on the story.
But my novel’s heroine, Ann-Marie, is more like Julie: she is desperate for male attention, she plays the game. She is raw and intelligent and wounded. She will survive at all costs; she will do violence to survive. While Sarah and Julie are both classic feminine types, Ozon gives them a grace and depth that is not typical. They help each other; indeed, they need each other.
In autumn 2013, acclaimed horror film director George A. Romero visited London to conduct an on-stage interview and special screening of Night of the Living Dead as part of the BFI’s Gothic season. Alex Fitch caught up with the director to talk about his career so far, concentrating on his genre-defining zombie hexalogy, which began in 1968.
Alex Fitch: This year is the 45th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead.
George A. Romero: Don’t remind me! (laughs)
It’s astonishing how influential and continuingly popular the film is from generation to generation. I wonder if part of that is the political resonance that the film has, whether that was something you intended in the first place or not. If you look at the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s, the students’ strike and other political unrest, these are themes in society that keep coming back, even in the present day.
Yeah. Certainly the racial aspect was not intentional, it was purely accident, because of the actor. He was the best actor from among our friends who we could get on the phone, and when he agreed to do it we consciously didn’t change the script. When we wrote the script, we never described his colour, and exactly the same things would have happened to him if he was white. So there’s that aspect of it…
Right when we finished the film, we were actually driving the first answer print of the film to New York, and that night we heard on the car radio that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. So, obviously, it then resonated that much more. When we were working on the film with Duane Jones, he was sensitive to it. We were all saying: ‘Come on, it’s 1968, we don’t have to worry about that’, but he was conscious of the fact that putting a black man in a role that wasn’t written for a black man was unusual. He thought it was bold, and we never recognised any of those issues, except only in conversation with him.
After Dr King was shot, did you think at all about changing the ending, or actually whether that happenstance made the film more powerful?
We had conversations in the car that night. We never talked about changing the ending, but in fact Columbia – who were the first ones who were interested in the film when we screened it on that trip, and wanted to distribute it – insisted that we change the ending, and we boldly said: ‘No! Of course not!’ We left New York without any distribution and then it took us a while to find some. We had to hire a producer’s representative to represent the film and he only found Walter Reade after Dr King was no longer in the headlines. I guess they weren’t as sensitive to it.
Most of the atrocities that were taking place in Vietnam at the time wouldn’t come to light until 1969 and beyond, but I assume you still felt that you were tapping into the zeitgeist.
It did, it felt that way. The documentary The American Nightmare (2000), puts the relevance right in there. There are some interesting parallels. There were some things we recognised, were conscious of. When I was shooting hand-held stuff, everyone was talking to us about the film as if it were like a newsreel. I was actually completely encumbered by the fact that we were using a ‘Blimp’ 35mm camera that you couldn’t move at all. We had no Dolly, so I think it’s a very static film, but that same camera would come out of the Blimp and you could hand-hold it with a pistol grip in one hand. In the posse scenes at the end of the film, that was where I was running around like a newsman, and consciously trying to make it look like news footage – the stuff with the dogs coming out of the wagons, the posse coming across the fields and all of that. I was conscious that I wanted those scenes to look like news footage, but that’s the only part of the film that looks that way.
You finally got to realise the idea of doing a movie in the style of cinema vérité when you made Diary of the Dead in 2007 – shooting it as if it was found footage that might have been distributed on the internet. Was it that new technology finally got around to bringing you the kind of equipment that would allow you to make a film that way?
No, it wasn’t that. The idea came from doing a piece on ‘citizen journalism’, which is something I find dangerous! So, that’s really where that came from. The second thought was, ‘let’s actually shoot it that way,’ and I developed the concept that these kids are out shooting a film and that’s how the plot develops, through their use of portable equipment.
Watch the original trailer for Diary of the Dead :
But since you have been cast as a political filmmaker, whether by intent or design, it seems that some of the found footage that you also included in that film – such as bombs being dropped on people in the Middle East and so on – is commenting on how on the internet you can quickly go from channel to channel and have someone’s self-aggrandizing YouTube video be followed by horrendous atrocities from across the globe.
Yes, and we were conscious of that. We were cherry-picking from archives all over the place – Getty and all the standard images that we could afford on our budget. Unfortunately there are too many of them out there, but we were very conscious of trying to do that. I’d say that I get too much credit for being a political filmmaker, but I do care about that. I also want to have something to say, even if it’s just simplistically said.
Not with the first film: with Night we were only concerned with the disintegration of the family unit – things like that. That’s what we were rapping about. We were living in that farmhouse. It was never about race, and largely I think that was the big thing that made Night noticeable.
Based on the success of that though, you cast another charismatic black lead in Dawn of the Dead (1978).
Oh, I did. That was conscious! Dawn of the Dead I had resisted doing – people were already writing about Night as if it was ‘important’, so I thought, ‘I’ve got to have some kind of an idea before I think about trying to make a second one’. The idea came from the shopping mall. I knew socially the people who developed that mall, and it literally was the first one, the first indoor temple to consumerism that we’d ever seen, the first one in Pennsylvania.
When people talk about malls in Britain in the present day, they’re regarded as a bit of a scourge – they open these things on the outside of towns and then the town centres start to disintegrate.
Like Milton Keynes! (laughs) That is a mall, a city that became a mall!
That sort of potentially malign influence, was that something already present at that time?
Not at all. Like I said, this was the very first one. Once it was up and operating, that was the very beginning of young people hanging out there instead of on street corners. Soda shops disappeared then and everyone started to hang out at the mall. Even within the film, the characters don’t know what it is. When they’re looking down on it from the helicopter, one of them says: ‘It’s one of them new shopping malls, or something’. None of us had any idea that the mall culture was going to develop the way it did. I was responding to just the idea of this. Instead of a small farmhouse, it was all about having people holed up in a supermall – at that time it was a supermall, nowadays some of them are way more elaborate than that one – where you can buy anything you ever wanted.
It’s interesting that people mainly credit Night and Dawn in creating the modern zombie movie, but I think The Crazies (1973) also, in its own way, is responsible for some of the more recent films that use the idea of a pathogen spreading, of the enemy being a fast, mutated people. Do you think that film is appreciated for its legacy as much as your Dead movies?
Not that much. It’s amazing that my films have such a shelf life! When I go to these conventions – horror conventions and so forth – there are fans of all of the films, and that’s really great. I love talking about them with people, people who are discovering films that no one went to see in the first place. I don’t know about The Crazies… It has its fans – people who really like it a lot – but I don’t know about its legacy. Certainly the remake, that was a zombie movie, but I never thought of it that way. Thematically, I was sort of doing the same thing with The Crazies as Night – people responding to a situation, except there I made them mad!
Watch the original trailer for The Crazies :
It’s not easy from our modern standpoint to think of the cultural resonances that might have influenced The Crazies at the time. Were there concerns in the media about bioweapons, chemicals and the spread of diseases?
No more than at any other time. I would say that it was heightened, there was Vietnam and all that going on, so it was about Agent Orange, napalm, that kind of stuff. There wasn’t any particular concern at that point, as there is today, about dirty bombs, sarin and whatever else.
But, in terms of the military and scientists being responsible, or at least exacerbating a bad situation, Day of the Dead (1985) seemed to pick up on some of the themes of The Crazies and develop them still further: this is all that’s left and we’re stuck with the people who were responsible for it in the first place.
Yeah. Well, that’s exactly what the idea for that film was. Originally I had written it bigger in terms of the script, but the finance company wouldn’t do it unrated. They said, ‘we’ll pay to shoot this, but it’s going to cost a little bit too much to risk releasing it without a rating’, so they asked if we could do it for $3 million. They’d go for $3 million without a rating and there were negotiations based on the ratings, so I said, ‘sure’. I chose then to go for the unrated version and cut the script back. It’s essentially exactly what it was and that’s the theme of it: that the military that caused the infestation are preventing the people who were trying to cure it from solving the problem.
I think the claustrophobia really works in the film’s favour. If the apocalypse happens, it is just going to be handful of people in a hole in the ground…
…somewhere! Unfortunately, it’ll probably just be the President and his cabinet!
In the 80s, you got into adaptation as well, particularly stories by Stephen King, films like Creepshow (1982), Creepshow 2 (1987), and The Dark Half (1993). What was it about his books that attracted you?
I think it was being comfortable with Stephen himself, and we became friends. We were introduced by Warner Bros., years before, because they had seen Martin (1976), and in typical studio fashion they reasoned that Martin was about a vampire in a small town, Steve had just written Salem’s Lot, which was vampires in a small town, so they thought we should meet! They sent me up to Maine and we hung out. My doing an adaptation of that book never happened, but on that visit Steve gave me a copy of The Stand and said: ‘Let’s make this!’ and I said, ‘sure…
…but how many movies is this going to be?’
Quite. So, I never did make The Stand, but at that time, Steve didn’t want to do it for television because they’d water it down too much, and he never made a film deal to produce it. In the end he did do a television version, with my ex-producing partner – Richard P. Rubinstein – who we’d worked with on the Creepshow films. So, it was just really being comfortable with Steve and having access to him. When he wrote Pet Sematary, right away he called Richard and me, and said: ‘What do you think about this?’ That’s how that relationship went.
Watch the original trailer for Creepshow :
The Creepshow movies are the first obvious example of your interest in comics in your career. Had you been interested in EC Comics’ horror comics in the preceding years?
Under the covers, with a flashlight! They were the forbidden fruit! Of course that’s before the 1950s Comics Code Authority came in. The censorship code busted EC Comics and turned Mad into a magazine instead of a comic book. At least that lived on, but Tales from the Crypt and other comics like that were thought to be amoral! Stephen, in fact, wrote a tagline for Creepshow: ‘A Laurel Comic is a Moral Comic’!
In them, I always thought the bad guys got their comeuppance, good basically triumphed over evil, even though the Crypt Keeper always was there to chuckle, and there’s that dark humour… It’s funny, the humour was an important part of those comics. Even though it’s so hard to convince people today that humour is the flipside of the same coin as horror – they don’t like to mix it.
You’ve had elements of that mix of horror and slapstick comedy in your more recent zombie films. A particularly memorable scene in Diary shows an Amish character stabbing himself in the head with a scythe! It seems that when you can put in a gag, there’s no reason not to…
There is no reason not to, and I can’t resist doing it! Also, there’s that fire extinguisher gag in Survival of the Dead (2009), with the eyes popping out; that’s completely like a comic book. I love comics, and actually as a defence against all of these zombie things that are out there now, I’m writing a 15-issue Dead story for Marvel Comics right now. Hopefully when the zombie furore dies, if it ever does, I can come back and turn the comic into another film.
I certainly can’t do what I used to do. I used to be able to hide in the corner somewhere and bring the zombies out once in a while, when I had something I want to talk about. But for now, it doesn’t work. In order to sell a zombie film these days, you have to promise that you’ll spend $250 million at least!
…and with a comic book you can show what a $250 million zombie film looks like…
Though the words ‘hell is a teenage girl’ may have been the first line of dialogue in the 2009 Diablo Cody-penned horror movie Jennifer’s Body (directed by Karyn Kusama), it was over 30 years before in Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) that Hollywood’s penchant for depicting damaged, dangerous and deadly female teens began to make its mark on the genre. Previously fodder for all manner of monstrous villains, the teenage girl began to transform on screen into a character to be feared with the arrival of Carrie White, whose tormented existence was so memorably portrayed by Sissy Spacek. The ugly duckling outsider possessed of supernatural powers, who wreaked a terrible revenge on the peers who made her life a living hell, opened the doors for future representations of teen killers of the female persuasion. Of course, Carrie White also engendered feelings of pity, sympathy and lust, muddying the waters in regard to audience identification. She was monstrous, but she was also lonely, put upon and wholly insecure. The female teen killer in horror movies flits between naivety, cruelty, seductiveness, deceptiveness, awkwardness, hormonal angst and outright murderous aggression. Are they projections of a patriarchal fear of females becoming more powerful in society? A humorous riposte to the countless depictions of females being helpless damsels in distress and/or objectified, sexual playthings? Do they break down the gender barriers, allowing for identification across the male/female boundaries? They’re a mixture of all of those things, and they make for complex, fascinating ‘monsters’.
On screen, the menstrual cycle, peer pressure and social status, bullying, sexual awakening, pushy parents and good old teen angst have driven a motley collection of adolescent girls to explode with vengeful fury. Off screen, second-wave feminism, tired genre conventions, changing cinema-going demographics and a growing fascination with the ‘cult of youth’ have all played their part in teen females morphing from always being the victim to just as easily being the victimizer perpetrating the horrors depicted. Sure, it hasn’t been a wholesale change by any means; teen girls still get slaughtered by the dozen in horror movies, but now there are a sizeable number of witches, psycho-bitches and the supernaturally gifted ready to seek revenge, cause chaos and generally flick the bird to the notion of adolescent females being any kind of weaker sex. Whether they are seen in TV movies, low-budget oddities, cult hits, slashers, body horror comedies, sequels or remakes, these contemporary daughters of darkness critique, reflect and exaggerate the fears, fantasies and troubles experienced by female adolescents in the modern world.
Watch the trailer for Carrie (1976):
Within two years of Carrie hitting the screens, producers eager to cash in on the unexpected success of De Palma’s breakout hit had given us the TV movies The Spell (Lee Philips, 1977) and The Initiation of Sarah (Robert Day, 1978; remade by Stuart Gillard in 2006), as well as the low-budget, big screen offering Jennifer (Brice Mack, 1978), with all three revolving around supernaturally gifted outsiders. A bullied, overweight teen, a belittled fresher and a poor girl among rich peers respectively may all be cardboard cut-out Carrie-lite figures bent on righting the wrongs inflicted on them, but they reflected the wider changing representations of females of all ages on the silver screen. The other unifying factor between them was that audiences related to them, not to their violent actions you’d hope, but certainly to the alienation, peer pressures and insecurities they displayed and experienced. Damningly, aside from Carrie, The Spell and Jennifer are two of the only films where the central figure genuinely looks like an ‘outsider’ or someone who doesn’t conform to the idealised ‘look’ that a patriarchal media is so keen to push on us, as most directors still cast pretty young starlets in the leading roles.
The 1980s were a fallow period for the female teen killer, in a decade dominated by alpha male action heroes and dream stalking killers, but in Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzik, 1983), social misfit Angela (Felissa Rose) blew a complex hole in the gender balance of male/female killers and slasher genre conventions by being… well, if you’ve seen it you know, and if you haven’t I won’t spoil it. Two decades later, in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (Jonathan Levine, 2006), the slasher genre’s conventions were again toyed with, as Amber Heard‘s popular, titular figure proved to be less wholesome than she first appeared.
Watch the trailer for Sleepaway Camp:
Fast forward to the early 1990s, a few years after Winona Ryder’s Veronica Sawyer helped cause chaos in Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988) and Drew Barrymore, then a 17- year-old hellraiser in real life, turned up in the lead role of Poison Ivy (Katt Shea, 1992). [SPOILER] Though not a horror movie, Poison Ivy deserves a mention, as Barrymore’s Machiavellian teen, a poor white trash ‘bad’ girl, inveigles her way into the affections of a wealthy family before offing the mother, attempting to kill the daughter and seducing the father. [END OF SPOILER] Ivy was a ‘monster’ in very human form; seductive yet deadly and a cold-blooded killer bent on getting what she wants, when she wants it. Ivy fits the mould without possessing the telekinetic powers or gifts/afflictions seen in other killer teen girls, her actions are grounded in reality, and that makes for a very dangerous ‘monster’ indeed.
Two more non-horror movies, Swimfan (John Polson, 2002) and Suburban Mayhem (Paul Goldman, 2006) continued in Poison Ivy‘s vein. Swimfan gave us Erika Christensen as Madison going into full blown Fatal Attraction mode after a one night stand with the object of her affection/obsession, while Suburban Mayhem, loosely based on a real Australian criminal case, saw Emily Barclay’s manipulative single mum Katrina plot to have her father killed. Ivy, Madison and Katrina stand out from many of the other unhinged characters seen across the spectrum of genres specifically because of their age and gender. What demons push ones so young, and ostensibly of the ‘fairer’ sex, to the edge and beyond? Though the real life rise in violent crime committed by adolescents (especially against other adolescents) is largely male driven, their onscreen female counterparts still reflect the unease at this grim statistic.
Perhaps the queen of the psycho-teen females, Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy), crashed onto our screens in 2009’s Ozploitation horror The Loved Ones (Sean Byrne). A demented, vicious and tongue-in-cheek spin on teen horrors and high school movies, The Loved Ones placed Xavier Samuel’s Brent in the, very dangerous, hands of Lola and her equally twisted father. Ivy, Madison and Katrina are mere amateurs in comparison to Lola Stone, whose monstrous behaviour stems from her father’s besotted, incestuous, attitude towards his ‘Princess’. An equally disturbing vision of female adolescence gone awry came in 2012 with Richard Bates Jr’s Excision. Replacing The Loved Ones‘ dark comedy with an hallucinogenic, nightmarish tone, Excision also flips its parent/child power play, as the desperately troubled Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) sinks to horrific, surgical-based lows, to win the approval of her cold, domineering mother.
Watch the trailer for The Loved Ones :
Though the psycho-teen females are a striking bunch, those with supernatural abilities or body horror issues are more sizeable in number, in some cases proving to be catnip for both genre fans and academics. As the horror genre evolved, the representation of witches and witchcraft eventually moved away from traditional period pieces and into the modern world, and Andrew Fleming’s The Craft (1996) presented us with a coven of high school girls embracing their new found supernatural powers. The high school or college is, understandably, a central element to many of the films featuring adolescent females going gonzo, as it is often their whole world; a status-conscious battleground, fashion catwalk, tangible psychological minefield and potential mating ground.
Seductive and deadly, the girls in The Craft were no white witches, but ones putting their powers to use for their own selfish, sometimes murderous, gain. A spate of similar movies followed in its wake, including Little Witches (Jane Simpson, 1996), Kill Me Tomorrow (Patrick McGuinn, 2000), Birth Rite (Devin Hamilton, 2003) and Tamara (Jeremy Haft, 2005). Tamara upped the ante somewhat by having its central figure, a vengeful witch, carry out her monstrous acts from beyond the grave; in Haft’s movie even a dead teen girl is something to be feared. Veering in quality from OK to awful, these low-budget offerings all riffed off teen girls being ‘evil’, manipulative and selfish. Ostensibly disposable entertainments they may be, but the view of female adolescents as inherently dangerous is both troubling and intriguing.
Lucio Fulci returned us to the realm of telekinesis and psychic powers in 1987 with Aenigma, which nods its trashy, Euro-horror head to both Carrie and Patrick (Richard Franklin, 1978). Comatose teen Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic), victim of a prank at the girls school she attends, uses her telekinetic and psychic abilities to control the mind of fellow pupil Eva (Lara Lamberti), compelling her to carry out Kathy’s vengeful bidding. Kathy may have virtually disappeared from our collective movie-going consciousness but Carrie White is still very much alive. To underline the lasting resonance – culturally and financially – of Carrie (both King’s novel and De Palma’s adaptation of it), Katt Shea directed the less than stellar The Rage: Carrie 2 in 1999. Three years later a TV adaptation of King’s novel, starring genre regular Angela Bettis in the lead role, appeared, and last year Kimberly Peirce updated the story for the smartphone generation in a wholly unnecessary quasi-remake-cum-adaptation with Chloë Grace Moretz, somewhat miscast, as the outsider telekinetic teen.
One of the few horror movies, other than Carrie, to overtly place the menstrual cycle as a key narrative element was 2000’s Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett). The psychological and bodily effects of the transition from childhood to maturity are symbolically aligned with lycanthropy in Fawcett’s movie, as Katherine Isabelle and Emily Perkins’s sisters discover that ‘the curse’ is worse than they could possibly have imagined. More bodily horrors were experienced in Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth (2007) and the movie which kicked off this piece, Jennifer’s Body. A teen with vagina dentata in Lichtenstein’s comedy-horror and a possessed cheerleader in the Cody-Kusama movie cut a bloody swathe through their respective male gene-pools as sexual dominance and appetites, high school cliques, gender stereotypes and adolescent anxieties played out in both films in bloody, graphic fashion.
Watch the trailer for Teeth:
In a world where ever younger females are bombarded by ‘ideal’ body images by an unscrupulous media, social media sits in ever more savage judgement and society’s corrosive fascination with youth continues, these slices of pop culture remain pertinent and provocative. If hell is a teenage girl, then society as a whole has made her that way, and the movies in which teen girls go loco do a good job of reminding us of that.
I have a confession to make. I haven’t seen the movie that this score is taken from. For one reason or another Kiss of the Damned has just eluded me…
I first heard the score when director Xan Cassavetes emailed me asking if I’d like to release it. She sent me the (then unfinished) music and I instantly fell in love with it. I wanted to release it on my label, Death Waltz, but schedule-wise I couldn’t make it work.
Kiss of the Damned is released on DVD in the UK on 27 January 2014 by Eureka Entertainment. Watch the trailer here.
It’s interesting to review this because I have none of the usual markers in place (the piece of music fits this scene perfectly, etc, etc) but this is a record I listen to all the way through, from start to finish, several times a month. Steven Hufsteter (Repo Man) delivers a quite frankly gorgeous, sleazy and sexy music that conjures up blue and orange-lit rooms, writhing bodies on beds viewed through fish tanks and all manner of things you shouldn’t do in public – in fact, Jess Franco would most definitely be using this if he was still alive. It’s beautifully orchestrated and delicate too, with flashes of Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone, and some very cool smokey jazz stylings thrown in there for good measure. This alone is enough to recommend it, but music supervisor Dina Juntila also dropped in tracks from HTRK, Jane Weaver and German punkers Der Fluch, who all add a contemporary edge to the score, bringing it right up to date.
Its inspiration is obvious, of course, but it’s the execution that makes this a step above a simple retro nod to the great masters. The ‘KOTD Love Theme’ has a break so crisp you can imagine Ghostface Killah spitting a verse over it; ‘Vapeur’ stands proudly with any experimental electronica of the 1970s; and ‘Bath of Tears’ is a beautifully down tempo baroque piano piece.
The score works so well as a stand-alone record that I don’t know if I’ll ever see the film. When I listen I conjure up my own images and story, and it is so vivid that I’m not sure anything would live up to it. This is the perfect example of a soundtrack you can listen to without knowing anything about what it accompanies – this is no putdown of the film either; in fact, it’s testament to all the creative talent involved in it.
All in all, Kiss of the Damned is a rare instance of a contemporary score standing proudly with its inspirations and holding its own with very little effort indeed. It also manages to be very fucking cool and aloof doing it.
Spencer Hickman
Spencer Hickman is the founder of Death Waltz Recording Company, the leading soundtrack label specialising in horror and cult films. Forthcoming releases include the scores to Ms. 45 and The House of the Devil.
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