Horrors, adolescent division

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• Dave Umbricht says:

  May 3, 2010 at 2:47 pm

  Let’s not for­get “Black Christmas”. Was it just me or was SCTV’s Andrea Martin kind of attract­ive in it?
  Dave
  @dumbricht on twitter

• Chuck Stephens says:

  May 3, 2010 at 4:18 pm

  This is an unfor­tu­nate lapse in taste, GK: “…that fairly ris­ible 1957 Michael Landon film…”
  But to con­strue your dis­taste for Herman Cohen’s films as a dis­missal on Carlos Clarens part is just wrong. If you’d con­tin­ued read­ing down the page from which you quoted, you’d find Clarens pro­noun­cing TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN “inspiredly absurd”, and includ­ing him­self among the “soph­ist­ic­ated audi­ence” who very much *got* (and con­tin­ue to get) Cohen; he even goes so far as to quote the film’s fun­ni­est line!
  (I post this as a long­time fan of the present tri­um­vir­ate – Glenn Kenny, Carlos Clarens, Herman Cohen – and I’m not try­ing to start a fight, honest!!)

• bill says:

  May 3, 2010 at 5:53 pm

  This was an inter­est­ing art­icle, Glenn. My prob­lem is that the auto­mat­ic asso­ci­ation of hor­ror with teen­agers is very tire­some to me. Not that this is your fault, or any­thing, and I real­ize why it has come to pass, and even if I did­n’t you just told me why in the art­icle, but, well, any­way. I’m just grousing.
  Plus, who am I to talk? I’ve been watch­ing a LOT more of this stuff than I used to. I’ve even thought about pick­ing up some of the ELM STREET sequels I’ve nev­er seen. And I don’t even like the ori­gin­al. Or LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. Or much of THE HILLS HAVE EYES. Or any­thing else Craven has ever done or had his name asso­ci­ated with.
  What was the first “slash­er” movie, any­way? Or what would be con­sidered the ur-slasher film? Something from Italy, prob­ably? It’s my under­stand­ing that BLOOD AND BLACK LACE was the first real giallo film, but I have my doubts that Sean S. Cunningham ever saw that, but what do I know?
  In any event, I think it’s abso­lutely bey­ond doubt that in American film, the slash­er film as we know it – I’m not count­ing TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE for some reas­on, just because it some­how seems apart from everything else in the genre at the time, a thing unto itself – BLACK FRIDAY is the crown­ing achieve­ment. Better than HALLOWEEN, even.

• bemo says:

  May 3, 2010 at 6:16 pm

  “What was the first “slash­er” movie, any­way? Or what would be con­sidered the ur-slasher film? Something from Italy, probably?”
  The mighty Bava, maybe? (aside: Glenn, have you ever writ­ten any­thing sub­stan­tial about him, incid­ent­ally? I know of your form­al­ist admir­a­tion but am blank­ing on if there is some­thing more sub­stan­tial you’ve produced)

• otherbill says:

  May 3, 2010 at 7:07 pm

  If memory serves (it fre­quently does­n’t), Bava’s TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE is often cited as the first “slash­er” or “body count” movie. Large chunks of it are ripped off fairly whole­sale in the first FRIDAY film (13^th not Ice Cube/Chris Tucker). It even got rereleased in the US as LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT II.
  @bill- NIGHTMARES 3, 4, and 5 provide some goofy mid-80s fun. They’re basic­ally there to set up grand guign­ol set pieces for Freddy, who’s now the hero of the series in a lot of ways. 2 and 6 are god-awful and prof­it­ably avoided unless you’re bound and determ­ined to “enjoy” a Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold cameo. NEW NIGHTMARE is inter­mit­tently inter­est­ing and suc­cess­ful. It does include a great moment I’ll not spoil that- had they ended the film right there- would have turned the entire series into a sort of cine­mat­ic moebi­us strip. So there’s that.

• Stephen Whitty says:

  May 3, 2010 at 8:58 pm

  @otherbill and bill, too – “Twitch of the Death Nerve” is influ­en­tial, true, but yes, I’d agree that the “giallo” genre goes back even fur­ther to “Blood and Black Lace,” a Bava film of style and sad­ism from ’64. And, of course, it’s got Cameron Mitchell too, which is always pretty incredible.
  The line from Bava (whom, I’d sug­gest, was always a bril­liant cinem­to­graph­er but aver­age storyteller) to Argento is pretty easy to draw. The line from movies like “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” and “Suspiria” to “Last House on the Left” and “I Spit On Your Grave” is a lot more fragmented…

• Paul Johnson says:

  May 3, 2010 at 9:43 pm

  I’ve got to put in a word defend­ing ‘I was a Teenage Werewolf’ as well, which is genu­inely invent­ive and witty, and an entirely dif­fer­ent beast from ‘I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.’ (The lat­ter really is a piece of junk, though I still love it.) Gene Fowler dir­ec­ted ‘Werewolf,’ and every film I’ve seen by him is at least inter­est­ing – espe­cially ‘I Married a Monster from Outer Space.’ He was an edit­or for both Fritz Lang and Sam Fuller, and his work plays like a crazy amal­gam of both of their styles (but not as good, I’ll admit). His movies are moody, styl­ish, sensationalistic,funny, and extremely well paced. He dir­ec­ted Charles Bronson in two films in the late 50s – ‘Gang War’ and ‘Showdown at Boot Hill’ that did much to define his act­ing per­sona. The former in par­tic­u­lar plays like the ’58 ver­sion of ‘Death Wish’ (and is much super­i­or). ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf’ is a smarter than it or Michael Landon looks, and the bal­ance between ham fis­ted satire (I’m think­ing of the great, silly, smutty scene where the film inter­cuts between a girl doing gym­nastics in her tights and a des­per­ate Michael Landon let­ting his hor­mones get the best of him) and sweet sin­cer­ity is the kind of thing many more ambi­tious movies bungle.

• bill says:

  May 3, 2010 at 9:55 pm

  @ bemo and Stephen – Well, I did men­tion Bava, and even BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, though not as any sort of defin­it­ive answer. I’ve heard the film described as the first giallo, but not as the first giallo AND the first slash­er film, so I wondered if maybe the genre stretches back even further.
  “whom, I’d sug­gest, was always a bril­liant cinem­to­graph­er but aver­age storyteller”
  I’m glad you said it, Stephen, because that’s my impres­sion as well. I really enjoy some of his work, though, with “Twitch of the Death Nerve/Bay of Blood” top­ping the heap, if only for that ending.
  @otherbill – What you say about those par­tic­u­lar ELM STREET sequels is some­thing I’ve been hear­ing a lot lately, and I’ll no doubt even­tu­ally crumble. The idea behind NEW NIGHTMARE always intrigued me, but I’ve tried watch­ing it twice, and damn if that thing does­n’t seem like ama­teur hour, at least in the first 20 or 30 minutes. I’ve just nev­er been able to hang with it, because the act­ing and film­mak­ing, and the style, and everything, is no bet­ter than the first ELM STREET, a movie which I really dis­like. And if everything looks and feel pre­cisely the same in NEW NIGHTMARE, then the post-modern game just feels like a half-baked idea with no visu­al boost to sep­ar­ate it.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  May 3, 2010 at 10:28 pm

  @ Chuck, and Paul J.: Yes, it was ill-advised of my to not have split the dif­fer­ence at least between ris­ible and witty/knowing with regard to “Teenage Werewolf.” All the more unfor­giv­able as I’m not just an admirer of the dir­ect­or but of his dad, author of the immor­tal “Minutes of the Last Meeting.” That’s the prob­lem with writ­ing these think/historical sur­vey pieces: short­hand. Ah well. Now I wanna look at the damn thing again.
  As for the Bava/first slash­er film debate, well, it’s inter­est­ing. I sup­pose strictly speak­ing that the first “body count” thrill­er would have to have been “And Then There Were None,” when you think about it! But it’s “Twitch of the Death Nerve,” or maybe more spe­cific­ally, its American ad cam­paign, that most overtly influ­ence “Friday the 13^th.” From Michael Weldon’s invalu­able Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film: “[‘Twitch’] includes ’13 peri­ods of intense shock’ (a.k.a. gore murders) and when ori­gin­ally released theat­er pat­rons were warned ‘face to face’ about the content.”

• Fuzzy Bastard says:

  May 4, 2010 at 8:18 am

  @ oth­er­b­ill: I admit to a real fond­ness for (the ter­ribly writ­ten, ter­ribly dir­ec­ted) NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2, purely for its grimy early-80s col­or (any­one know what film stock pro­duced that won­der­fully filthy palette?).
  I was struck by the invoc­a­tion of BLAIR WITCH as a teen hor­ror film—I’d nev­er con­sidered it as such because it isn’t a slash­er (and there’s so few vic­tims), but like all the best in the genre, it’s very much about gen­er­a­tion­al con­flict (the cam­cord­er gen­er­a­tion vs. stare-at-the-corner fun­da­ment­al­ist par­ent­ing). And like the ori­gin­al HALLOWEEN, much of its great­ness is a product of its will­ing­ness to just hang out with its prot­ag­on­ists long before any­thing scary starts happening.

• Stephen Whitty says:

  May 4, 2010 at 8:59 am

  @fuzzybastard, et alia
  Speaking of a “will­ing­ness to just hang out with its prot­ag­on­ists long before any­thing scary starts hap­pen­ing” – which I agree, is an import­ant thing that many new hor­rors, includ­ing the new “Nightmare,” aren’t will­ing to do – I’m won­der­ing what folks thought of the recent “House of the Devil,” a mod­ern but very retro babysit­ter horror?
  Struck me as almost sort of the greatest-‘70s-horror-film-not-actually-made-in-the-‘70s I’d seen, from the title typo­graphy to Mary Woronov. (Hell, first time I ever even liked Greta Gerwig.) But now THAT was a movie which really took the wait-for-it — no, no wait-for-it – kind of pacing about as far as you could.

• Jason M. says:

  May 4, 2010 at 11:01 am

  Glenn – Not to be THAT guy (OK, screw it, I’m totally being that guy), but it’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, not Kiroshi. And yes, it’s a real shame that more teen-horror films aren’t dir­ec­ted by him, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.
  Nit-picks about spelling aside, it’s a great art­icle about an inter­est­ing genre that I’ll admit I too often dis­reg­ard out of hand these days, often for reas­ons sim­il­ar to what bill men­tioned above. The auto­mat­ic asso­ci­ation of teens and hor­ror simply gets tire­some after awhile.
  And as an aside, Glenn, you clean up real nice. You should keep it up every now and then.