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‘My Best Friend Is a Vampire’ and ’80s Queer Horror

When My Best Friend is a Vampire first came out in 1987, it was just one of many teen monster movies that made up a very specific genre of horror comedies. It opened in less than 200 theaters across America, grossed just under $175k, and was promptly forgotten by audiences, even as films like Fright Night and Once Bitten developed their own cult followings. But while these other films serve as more well-known examples of how the teen vampire film explores burgeoning sexuality, My Best Friend is a Vampire not only examines the same themes, but expands upon them. It uses vampirism as a metaphor, however clumsily, for not just teen sexuality, but queer identity.

Jeremy Capello (a pre-Dead Poets Society Robert Sean Leonard) is every inch a typical teenage boy. He agonizes over girl problems with his seemingly more experienced best friend Ralph. He holds down a part-time job delivering orders for a local grocery store. Oh, and he also has a recurring dream about a girl from his high school that is continually interrupted by a mysterious older woman (Cecilia Peck). Normal boy stuff, right? But when he meets the woman from his dreams in real life and almost immediately begins an affair with her, everything changes. 

Jeremy tries to deny it at first, but the mounting evidence makes it impossible to ignore: Jeremy is turning into an honest-to-goodness creature of the night. It’s only with the aid of older, wiser vampiric mentor Modoc (Rene Auberjonois) that Jeremy begins to adapt to his new reality, and is able to fend off attacks from Professor Leopold McCarthy (David Warner), the most determined of vampire hunters.

From the very beginning of the film, Jeremy’s sexual anxiety is on full display. He has a dream that starts as a fantasy about two very attractive girls from his high school, and ends with him being castrated by a nun wielding a gigantic pair of gardening shears. You don’t have to be Freud to realize there’s something going on there, subconscious-wise.

Jeremy is deeply uncomfortable with himself as a sexual entity, and his inexperience makes him a target for Nora, the female vampire who seduces him. This is a repeated motif in vampire movies, especially those made in the 1980s which have a tendency to feature virgin (or, in the case of Jeremy, at least sexually inexperienced) teenage boys who are preyed upon for their innocence by alluring, dominant female vampires. 

What we see here is a marked contrast to the way that women are often treated in horror films. The trope of the final girl usually entails a teenager surviving in part because she clings to her chastity as though it were a talisman capable of warding off evil. That’s one of the oldest mantras in horror cinema, isn’t it? “Virgins never die.” But interestingly, in these vampire films, the exact opposite seems to be true of teenage boys. Where virginity provides protection for their female counterparts, it’s essentially a liability for a teenage boy to be chaste — it actively puts him in danger. 

It’s precisely because of his innocence that Nora is so easily able to lure Jeremy in, turning him into a vampire and setting in motion a chain of events that will see him in grave peril. His transition to vampirity, by contrast, presents fairly straightforward images of virility. His hunger for blood and raw meat reflect a desire for the flesh, and his newfound affinity for telepathy and mind control have overtly sexual connotations.

But My Best Friend is a Vampire goes beyond this concept of vampirism as a metaphor for budding sexuality. Instead, it uses Jeremy’s introduction to vampire society as a way to capture the experience of a teenager first encountering a distinctly LGBT subculture of the 1980s. When Modoc gently guides Jeremy through everything he needs to know about being a vampire, it’s with a kind and compassionate air. He wants to prevent a younger version of himself from being scared and confused as they attempt to mentally navigate a massive revelation about themselves. When Jeremy becomes overwhelmed by the implications of what being a vampire will really mean for his life, Modoc is quick to recount the positives of vampirism. And when Jeremy meets other vampires, they’re presented as a supportive community instead of a pack or coven.

Modoc doesn’t just help Jeremy come to terms with his identity, he teaches him the specific things he’ll need to know as part of a demographic that is very much under siege. The parallel is made abundantly clear as Modoc warns him of the vampire hunters and the danger they pose. Professor McCarthy and his bumbling henchman Grimsdyke (Paul Willson) have no clear motivation for why they’re so insistent on eradicating the vampire population. We aren’t treated to a backstory that could explain their all-consuming hatred, so an argument can be made that they hunt vampires simply because they don’t understand them. These hunters feel threatened by the way bloodsuckers live their lives.

My Best Friend is a Vampire is spectacularly unsubtle as it continues the vampirism-as-homosexuality metaphor in Jeremy’s relationship with his parents. It starts when Modoc appears at Jeremy’s house to give him some vampiric advice: his mother is convinced that she heard a man’s voice in his bedroom. The stranger Jeremy acts, the more his parents begin to suspect that their son is hiding the fact that he’s gay. Refreshingly, they are quick to accept this, and unreservedly support him. 

But this is still the 80s, after all, and the film is unwilling to fully commit to the concept. Jeremy introduces Darla to them as his girlfriend, and they’re a little too pleased, in a “we loved you when we thought you were gay but we’re really happy now that we know you’re straight” kind of way.

My Best Friend is a Vampire is perhaps not as self-assured as other films from the same era that have gone on to richer and more popularized legacies, less committed to the ideas it presents. But it deserves some credit for dipping a tentative toe into subtext altogether different from what we were seeing at the time. It creates a vision of the vampire that is not just about sex and power, but unmistakably about identity, building a compassionate if occasionally bumbling throughline from the scared young man who has just realized he’s a vampire to the scared young man who has just realized he’s gay.

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Reading the Female Body in ‘The Autopsy of Jane Doe’

Against a black backdrop, wind howls. Leaves rustle. Twigs rattle and snap. Welcome to André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe. A vacuous suck on the background score drains the film’s title card, giving way to a blurred shot which itself needs to be rotated right side up for the image to come into focus. A tree. A house. A couple brutally murdered and an unidentified woman’s body found buried in the basement. A female officer reads the scene: no signs of a break in. She hesitates—something is amiss. Warily, she offers that someone might have been trying to break out. 

The film’s void-like introduction, where ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are muddled and confused, serves to establish Jane Doe as a film about corpses. Bodies that are absent of life. Bodies that, in Freudian terms, lack. The only other kind of body that could parallel the corpse in its uncanny, disturbing absence is perhaps that of a woman. Gender theorist Lucy Irigaray suggests that the term ‘woman’ on its own signifies nothing but the deficiency of man; woman means un-man, anti-man, or non-man. Irigaray terms this patriarchal phenomenon as “woman as absence.” Women are like gaping wounds, their obscurity both curious and frightening, like a scab that might heal if only you could stop picking at it.

But Jane Doe does not obscure gender so much as it genders obscurity. Men alone are the rational, scientific readers of bodies. Women are bodies to be read. Jane Doe initially creates a hierarchy of gender relations based on the characters’ respective inexplicability. It then reverses this order to show the consequences of a patriarchal society that creates the very woman it claims to abhor. What happens, the film asks, when men are not defining or regulating this gendered absence but instead are helpless against it? What if absence was not a wound, but a strength?

Jane Doe’s setting, the Tilden family morgue, is an all-male space. Its female cofounder is deceased. Even the pussy (cat) is named Stanley. As a homosocial site of exclusively male bonding, the morgue is naturally set to be passed down from father, Tommy Tilden (Brian Cox), to son, Austin Tilden (Emile Hirsch). In the morgue, Tommy and Austin are centered yet closed, their own bodies both dominating and protected from the autopsy process by medical gowns, glasses, masks, and gloves. The corpses they pry apart like book pages, by contrast, are perversely exposed. It is clear who “wears the pants” in this space.

The introduction of a ”Jane Doe” (Olwen Catherine Kelly) into the Tilden morgue stymies the father-and-son duo. Her name, or lack thereof, foreshadows her gendered absence. She has no outward signs of injury, not even a broken nail. She has no identifiable fingerprint. Her lungs are blackened as if her skin were covered in third degree burns. Her organs have been stabbed but she bears no flesh wounds nor scars. Her body defies all male discourses of science, medicine, and rationality. She is virtually unreadable.

The more Tommy and Austin dig into Jane Doe’s body, the more inscrutable she becomes. As they probe deeper and deeper from orifice to organ, unexplainable phenomena begin happening around their morgue. The radio turns to static. Light bulbs flicker and burst. The electrical generator breaks. With every slice into Jane Doe, Tommy and Austin are both literally and metaphorically “losing power” to their space. And in the darkness that progressively envelops them, the men can no longer count on their eyes.

Jane Doe’s trauma, like all women’s, is invisible to the naked eye. “Imagine all this internal trauma was reflected externally…What would she look like?” Tommy asks. Imagine if the outward signs of being a woman—shaved skin, thin features, a good figure, fashion-conscientiousness—were clearly and truthfully reflected. What would women actually look like? Our feet would be bruised, blistered, and swollen from high heels. We would be emaciated by dieting. Our ribs would be squashed like an accordion from waist-trainers. Our shaved and waxed skin would crack and peel. We would be, as Austin replies to his father, “disfigured beyond recognition.” The corpse is merely an exaggerated version of an already ideal womanhood.

Like Jane Doe’s injuries, the real trauma of womanhood is buried. “You can’t kill someone this way without leaving a trace on the outside!” Austin remarks. How does the world brutalise women like this without leaving a mark? As Tommy and Austin continue their search for Jane Doe’s cause of death, their radio keeps mysteriously playing a children’s song that serves as the film’s answer to my question: 

So let the sun shine in
Face it with a grin
Smilers never lose
And frowners never win
Open up your heart and let the sun shine in.

The painful pursuit of a woman’s body is done always with a smile. If you aren’t smiling, you will be told to. To complain about or challenge this system in any way is to risk being read as a bitch. It is a wound that is only absent because it is concealed. It does and does not exist. 

Aptly then, the film’s twist is that Jane Doe is a witch. Afraid of her power, Tommy and Austin set Jane Doe on fire, reenacting the violence of the Salem witch trials. But Jane Doe does not burn. “There’s some…energy. Call it what you want, something is keeping her going,” Tommy says. That something is nothing. The patriarchal society that put Jane Doe to death only “created the very thing they were trying to destroy.” She becomes a fiction created by the society that claims to be frightened of her. The witch is afforded a greater power with an even wider reach in death—the greatest absence of all. Magical womanhood is lack incarnate.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is a warning against the patriarchal ritual of men reading women’s bodies. Released in 2016, Jane Doe preempts the #MeToo movement and its focus on believing women’s own shared experiences rather than men who abuse their power and speak for them. As the witch is a female monster who became a symbol of reclaiming female power (signs at #MeToo-inspired women’s marches often read “We are the granddaughters of the witches you could not burn”), Jane Doe asserts that narratives can be changed. When Jane Doe psychically transfers her internal trauma to Tommy, killing him, absence becomes her weapon rather than her wound. The Tilden morgue, a microcosm of patriarchal America, becomes a crime scene. Death comes for men who tell women’s stories. Jane Doe’s cause of death was her womanliness. But her womanliness is the rebirth of our cause.

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How Gregg Araki’s ‘The Doom Generation’ Steered My Queer Identity and Filmmaking

Upon its release in 1995, Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation was lambasted by critics. It received a D grade from Entertainment Weekly, while Roger Ebert infamously gave the film a zero-star rating. Since then, it has become a cult classic, championed for its surreal production design, iconic costumes, and killer soundtrack. The Doom Generation influenced my burgeoning queer identity when I first saw it on VHS as a young teen and continues to inspire my filmmaking to this day.    

The second installment in Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, The Doom Generation follows juvenile lovers Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) and Jordan White (James Duval) as they pick up a dangerous, handsome drifter named Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech). After accidentally killing a QuickieMart owner, the trio embarks on a nightmarish road trip punctuated by profanity, junk food, kinky sex, and comic book violence that reaches a tragic and shocking climax.  

Despite the subtitle, “A Heterosexual Movie By Gregg Araki,” The Doom Generation is inherently queer. Araki is recognized as a pioneer of New Queer Cinema, a term coined by B. Ruby Rich to describe a crop of films from the early 1990s—such as Araki’s The Living End—that seemed to share a common style and attitude. His not-gay-as-in-happy-but-queer-as-in-fuck-you sensibility fuels The Doom Generation.

“Teen is a Four Letter Word”

When the opening credits announce that a film is presented by “The Teen Angst Movie Company,” and “fuck” is uttered as the first word of dialogue, it is evident that subtlety is not the aim. And subtleness wasn’t what I wanted when I first saw The Doom Generation while coming to terms with my queerness. I was sick of the casual homophobia and GAP khakis prevalent in my suburban high school. Reading Dennis Cooper and listening to Portishead, I was alienated and sought an alternative representation of adolescence contrary to Clueless. 

The first “fuck” is spoken by Amy. With her perfectly painted potty-mouth, dark bob haircut that was definitely not inspired by Uma Thurman’s look in Pulp Fiction, and “Eat, Fuck, Kill” button, she is one of my favorite film characters. Amy is everything I wanted to be: assertive—literally and figuratively—behind the wheel, adventurous and unapologetic about her sexual desires. She also fucks Xavier, my ultimate 90s crush. When bullied, I drew strength from her confidence and attitude. At the film’s grisly conclusion, she is no damsel in distress. Amy emerges as the blood-splattered final girl, freeing herself, saving Xavier, and fiercely fighting back against their attackers. I pay tribute to her in my short film, Monster Mash, where a queer male character dresses up as her for Halloween. 

Referring to herself and Jordan, Amy observes, “There just is no place for us in this world.” This line is significant and resonated with me. Delivered with solemnity, it identifies Amy and Jordan as outsiders. Lacking out queer peers or role models, I felt the same way. Important enough to be included as the intro on the film’s CD soundtrack, the line also proves to be painfully prophetic. 

Araki and Sexuality

Xavier crashes into their lives as his body smashes against the windshield of Amy’s car. He is fending off a Gang of Goons played by Skinny Puppy, who pointedly use “cocksucker” as their insult of choice. This obscenity is noteworthy. It situates Xavier, Amy, and Jordan within a culture that views sex acts between two men as abhorrent and reprehensible. It also foreshadows Xavier’s gruesome fate. Oozing blood and bad boy sex appeal, Xavier hijacks Amy and Jordan’s vehicle. He is the most overtly queer character in the film and derails their monogamous, heteronormative-seeming relationship. With his seductive swagger and anarchic outlook, Xavier catalyzes sexual experimentation. He propels Amy and Jordan beyond the limits of mainstream society.  

The filmmaking language of The Doom Generation emboldens my work. Techniques of classical Hollywood cinema are subverted or reappropriated to serve the queer narrative. Araki positions Jordan and Xavier closer than two males are typically seen together on screen. It always looks like they are just about to kiss. The male figure is eroticized and admired, where traditionally, the female body is objectified in cinema. Though Amy’s breasts are bared throughout the film, the scale of nudity is balanced with Xavier displaying his muscular physique for most of the movie. Amy’s buttocks are glimpsed through her coveted transparent raincoat in the penultimate scene, whereas Jordan bends over and exposes his naked ass twice, and Xavier reveals his ass once. 

Rose McGowan and James Duval hit the road in Gregg Araki's 'The Doom Generation.'

In Amy’s absence, the camera slowly pushes in on the young men. Jordan and Xavier are framed in a two-shot usually reserved for the heterosexual leads of a rom-com love scene. Jordan interrupts this charged moment to urinate, but it seems to have aroused him enough to enable the consummation of his relationship with Amy. Subsequently, Jordan and Amy’s passionate bathtub sex inspires Xavier to masturbate. In a series of sensual close-ups, Xavier pinches his erect nipple. The camera lingers on the dark, coarse hair of his treasure-trail. When he closes his eyes and leans back to ejaculate, the image drifts dreamily out of focus, enhancing the swooning ecstasy of this release. The carnal sequence concludes with Xavier licking his semen off his hand. 

Flickering Myth claims, “I could have happily gone through life without having seen James Duval’s arsecrack and ballbag and…certainly could have gone decades of happy years not watching Johnathon Schaech eating semen.” But this was just what I wanted to see. Araki’s favoring of the male form—and his subversive approach to depictions of sexuality onscreen—revealed my own desires. His queer gaze made me feel less alone and implied the existence of other viewers like me.

The sex scenes in The Doom Generation are galvanized by a dynamic editing rhythm, shifts in perspective, and various framing choices, but the camera is never predatory. The actors are not ogled like the cast of a Larry Clark film. Self-pleasure serves as a means of identity exploration, and sexual fluidity is celebrated. Araki’s approach to sexuality in The Doom Generation informed the masturbatory fantasy sequences in my short film, After.

 Araki and Horror

Seven and Kids may have scared audiences in 1995, but The Doom Generation contains the year’s most horrifying and disturbing scene. It occurs at the climax of the film. On the lam, our Bonnie and two Clydes have confronted chaos at every rest stop, leaving a trail of maimed limbs and broken hearts. Played by sets of identical twins costumed in matching suits, the FBI is also on their case. The weary band of outsiders seeks refuge for the night in an abandoned warehouse. 

Here, the garish, saturated lighting of the rest of the film is replaced by the warm glow of a campfire. Hyper-stylization is traded for subdued realism. Jordan, Amy, and Xavier have finally escaped the relentless threats of the outside world. The prospect of a pansexual, polyamorous utopia seems possible, if only within the protective ring of firelight. Unlike the animalistic coupling earlier in the film, the ensuing throupling is treated tenderly. Crossfades beautifully blur bodies and faces together. The soundscape is stripped bare except for an undulating mix of sighs and panting. Unfortunately, the call of nature interrupts again. Amy exits to urinate, leaving Xavier and Jordan together on a dirty mattress. 

Gregg Araki's 'The Doom Generation' explores sex and violence with its queer characters.

The screen boldly goes black for 46 seconds as a menacing, echoing male voice recites a homophobic rhyme. A flickering strobe light reveals that three men have invaded. They previously harassed Jordan, Xavier, and Amy in a record store and now appear naked, aside from tube socks over their genitals and swastikas painted across their chests. Amy is raped first by one of the men, then with a religious statue. Jordan is castrated with a pair of gardening shears, and his severed penis is shoved in Xavier’s mouth. The sexual outlaws are punished for their transgressions. Only Amy and Xavier survive.

Desensitized by the preceding farcical violence, the viewer is utterly unprepared for the extremity of this bloodbath. It is devastating and made overwhelming by Araki’s barrage of horror cinema techniques. The disorienting strobe lighting harkens back to the swinging naked bulb of the cellar reveal in Psycho. Paired with the layering of Jordan’s shattering, amplified screams, the scene also recalls Laura Palmer’s strobe-lit murder in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me released just three years earlier. The Doom Generation deserves more credit for its effective horror elements. The anger and urgency that drive this scene similarly motivate my short film, Family. 

‘Family’ and Araki

Family mobilizes elements of the horror genre to critique heteronormative ideologies of family. Film theorist and critic Robin Wood observes that in horror cinema, “normality is threatened by the Monster.” Throughout film history, queer people and people of colour have been characterized as the abject or monstrous “others,” representing a threat to white, heterosexual normality. Family resists and reverses this convention as does The Doom Generation. 

In Family, an interracial gay couple is presented as the norm, terrorized by a grotesque representation of traditional family values that threatens to absorb and erase through assimilation. The monster is the nuclear family, and its intrusion is rendered violently in the film. When the gay couple is physically attacked and the lead is struck in the head, the film itself suffers a blow, abruptly cutting to black. Using darkness and manipulating sound as in The Doom Generation, the viewer viscerally experiences horror and the damaging effects of normative social influence with the characters. 

Araki’s rebellious spirit and unapologetically queer approach to filmmaking encourage me to defy expectations and challenge conformity in my own work. Genres can be blended; labels can be abandoned. My films similarly focus on outsiders searching for love in hostile environments while inspiration is drawn from Araki’s use of music and his provocative visual stylizing.   

Conclusion

Entertainment Weekly wishes viewers “good luck searching for meaning” in The Doom Generation beyond “blood and epithets.” Yet, the brutal conclusion makes a powerful statement. Araki unsubtly condemns the oppressive, conservative ideology and homophobia of an America intent on annihilating unconventional sexuality.    

The film has been criticized for its nihilism, and I agree that the ending is heartbreakingly bleak. Shellshocked, Amy and Xavier drive toward an uncertain future as Slowdive’s haunting “Blue Skied an’ Clear” rises on the soundtrack — one of cinema’s best music cues. But I accept Araki’s defense in Filmmaker Magazine that The Doom Generation is “also very much about love and its transcendent power.” For Araki, naïve and sensitive Jordan embodies the “purity and idealism” motivating all of the characters. “That’s why he’s the literal lamb of the slaughter at the end,” Araki explains, “because he personifies the kind of unselfish innocence that’s doomed in a cynical world.” 

At a time when I was reluctant to rent a video with suggestively queer cover art for fear of being outed, The Doom Generation was my gateway to queer cinema. Veering far from the middle-of-the-road, it is the wild ride I wanted to take as a young teen. Like the best (road) trips, it was transformative, steering my queer identity and filmmaking.  

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The Alien Horror of Gregg Araki’s ‘Nowhere’

In 1997, Gregg Araki’s Nowhere unleashed a loud contemporary soundtrack and rowdy teenage behavior on unsuspecting video stores across the country. Its minimalistic cover didn’t tell you much about the film; in fact, one might think it just another Soderbergh-esque indie about taboo subjects. Instead, the film is a hybrid genre weirdo, a mix of Angel (1984) and Fire in the Sky (1993). Nowhere manages to be corny and disturbing, with an emphasis on bodily horror. Your body has been tampered with; it is no longer your own.

In the decades before Araki’s films, queer representation was often tied to the horror genre. Queer themes and characters hid beneath the surface of films like The Old Dark House and Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker. As the genre suffered post-slasher, many filmmakers moved to theater-safe thrillers. Meanwhile, queer creators took their shot at being taken seriously with more reality-based films. While the late 80s/early 90s boasts a robust canon of dramatic cinema, queer horror fans were left wanting.

Representation being what it was, Araki balled-up the quiet pain of queer folks into art he could hurl back at Hollywood. Araki’s punk sensibilities spit in the face of a queer “mainstream” scene increasingly-dominated by straight actors. Much like the UK’s Derek Jarman, Araki used film to show how these citizens were made to feel like aliens: unable to exist except as a special effect or performance. Araki gave the victims of the AIDS crisis names and faces. He also gave them knives and guns.

Released in the wake of New Queer Cinema—an early ’90s movement of independent films made for and by the queer community—Nowhere was the final entry in Araki’s “Teen Apocalypse” trilogy. The Doom Generation is the most well-known of the three, thanks in part to its iconic cover featuring Rose McGowan. McGowan sets the tone for Araki’s universe, pointing a skull ring straight at you from the VHS case—a promise that Queers were as scary and strange as TV evangelists wanted the masses to believe. Doom Generation, the second film in the trilogy, resonated with a searching counterculture reeling in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death. 

By the time Nowhere was released, Araki was already known for his color-bathed teenagers that either stand doe-eyed or punch and fuck anyone within reach. As the trilogy’s closer, Nowhere’s story revolves around Dark (James Duval), an aimless kid who seems to have survived the aggressive world that Doom Generation built. If that film was the apocalypse, Nowhere is the aftermath, a bleak landscape where nihilism is resigned to the occasional cat-call. Adolescent sex proves an unreliable escape; in keeping with the New Queer Cinema tradition, sex can kill you via partner or possession. Araki’s films are lush with pastel vibrance and beautiful figures, but the results are as ugly as they should be when someone is hurt.  

During its runtime, characters make earnest requests for love while others brutalize their peers. Heads are pulped with blunt weapons; one scene features a particularly memorable use of a tomato can. Characters are eviscerated across bed sheets with rigid legs pointing towards the sky. Look close, and you might spot a space lizard grabbing a beer from the fridge. These tonal shifts from heartfelt desires to tragicomic violence sent signals to queer youths who could recognize the sadness behind the absurdity. If you were going to die, you might as well laugh yourself into the grave.

For context, films showing a same-sex kiss were marked NC-17, which meant most theater chains would not carry them. Gay Panic was all-too-real; early in his career, actor Will Smith requested special effects for a same-sex kiss because of its damage to his reputation. No movie featuring a male-on-male directorial gaze was going to place high in a US cinema—not that Araki cared. This is especially the case for a film as weird as Nowhere. Throw in a few cosmic lizards, and Araki seemed hell-bent to deliver upon Midwestern fears.

On the surface level, Duval, a mainstay in Araki’s films, seems ripped from the violent but serene world of My Own Private Idaho. For many queer viewers, Duval’s turns as Jordan and Dark provided an iconic vessel, one destined to fail in a straight-binary world. Duval’s earnest delivery and innocent charisma made that ill-fated journey somehow easier to bear.

Dark bounces from conversation to conversation as others relate alien abduction stories. Having been burned by his FWB love interest (Rachel True, The Craft), Duval discovers a connection with Montgomery (Nathan Bexton), another boy who seems to have insight into Dark’s problem. Surprisingly, the chaos leads to Dark and Montgomery finally alone together. It’s a peaceful moment. The audience lets out a sigh of relief because the horrors have passed.

But this is a Gregg Araki film. Boy meets boy. Boy tries to kiss boy, but boy violently explodes into goo as a giant insect emerges from Montgomery’s body. “I’m outta here,” it says. 

While TV adverts were declaring the dangers of premarital sex, Araki knew teens didn’t need any help conjuring up fears. Forget the inevitable Kafka interpretations—this scene parodies how queer narratives must end in tragedy, with Araki delivering a horrifically comical end to his film. Nowhere thumbs its nose at tragic story conventions, devices that straight directors continue to use as punctuation for queer tales.

To clarify, this isn’t to suggest that Araki’s films damaged the LGBTQAI+ community by playing up conservative fears. Realistically, these horrors were going to be present regardless, and many were used to it. Queer viewers had to find onscreen representation alongside the violence and humiliation of those characters. It was typical for gay characters to experience sexual assaults or emasculation, reinforcing the idea that punishment is an inevitable outcome (2018’s Knife + Heart addresses this trope in a way that Araki might appreciate). 

Even while straight-made films like Cruising drew outrage in San Francisco for stereotypes, isolated viewers searched out this same content because it was the only way to see yourself onscreen. While Crusing offers a strong lead performance, it’s precisely that: Al Pacino dons the make-up of a gay man in the same way Lon Cheney becomes a werewolf (or mummy, take your pick). A prestigious film does not make the real horrors or homophobia any easier to accept or understand. You’d have a better chance spotting a UFO than reckoning with anti-queer motivations.

Araki’s legacy is one of queer representation that stood up to the stereotypes of a weak, dying breed. Doomed or not, there would be a fight. Californian aesthetics aside, the alien horrors of Nowhere are especially relevant to anyone living in Bible Belt areas with no Act-Up or community centers to offer teenage guidance. Nowhere captures a critical time in both LGBTQIA+ history and the evolution of Hollywood. Some of us grew up on The Breakfast Club, but me and mine grew up on Gregg Araki. Nowhere is proof that hands-on representation will find an audience, no matter what planet they’re from.

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Episode 33: Jonathan Barkan on ‘Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse’

When you think of the prototypical Certified Forgotten film, you probably don’t think of a movie like Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse. The big-budget sequel to an international success, Angels of the Apocalypse featured a stellar cast, a high-profile screenwriter, and Jean Reno, an actor almost as popular in the United States as he is in his native France. So what caused a film with this much going for it to fall through the cracks?

In this week’s episode, the Matts are joined by Jonathan Barkan, a horror critic, producer, and executive who knows a thing or two about the ups and downs of international cinema. Barkan shares his own harrowing entry into the horror genre and describes how his love of music – not movies – is what helped launch his career in the industry. Before long, the conversation turns to Barkan’s undying love for this over-the-top (and smarter than you think) sequel.

02:55 – Jonathan Barkan shares his earliest memories of the horror genre.
11:36 – Barkan explains how his background in music production led to a long career as a horror journalist.
32:21 – Introduction to Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse and why Barkanchose it for this week’s podcast.
40:36 – Discussion on how Angels of the Apocalypse fits into the greater trend of 2000s French genre cinema.
45:12 – Discussion on why Angels of the Apocalypse manages to prove that bigger is sometimes better.
48:41 – Discussion on how Angels of the Apocalypse connects the dots between post-war France and modern-day fascism.
59:22 – What caused Angels of the Apocalypse to be forgotten by audiences (despite its blockbuster pedigree)?

Want to learn more about Barkan’s work in the horror industry? Follow him on Twitter at @JonathanBarkan.

While Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse is not currently available to stream, you can find copies of the film on DVD on eBay and at the home video reseller of your choice. Check out the rest of our podcast episodes on our Podcasts page.

Simon Sprackling’s ‘Funny Man’ Puts Freddy To Shame

Forget Freddy Krueger. The Funny Man is the wisecracking supernatural killer we need. Making a glove out of razor blades and invading people’s dreams is all well and good, but dressing up as a duck hunter to kill Velma from Scooby-Doo? Constructing an entire strip club just to entrap your next victim? Now that’s commitment.

But it’s not just the elaborate, theatrical kills that make Funny Man a magnificent (if mostly-forgotten) gem. Simon Sprackling’s 1994 low-budget horror-comedy is the natural evolution of the slasher film, a genre that, Italian Giallo aside, started to embrace its own ridiculousness.  

It’s easy to forget that the first Nightmare on Elm Street was a straight-laced horror movie; it wasn’t until the sequels that things got a little silly. You’d go in rooting for Freddy, eager to witness the macabre quips he’d fire off as he murdered the teenage “heroes.” There might be the odd jump scare or two, but with Robert Englund under the makeup, you were always in for silly, bloody fun.

Funny Man takes that concept and dials it up to eleven. Filmed on a budget of roughly £50,000, Funny Man was a labor of love for the cast and crew, many of whom worked for free or did a job several levels above their pay grade. It’s a glorious blend of comedy and gore, set in an ancestral mansion that’s home to the titular Funny Man. When Max Taylor wins the mansion in a card game, he moves his family in, little suspecting the nightmare that awaits him. On top of that, his brother drives down with a group of oddball hitchhikers, ensuring the Funny Man won’t be short of victims.

Funny Man doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as it does knock it down with a bulldozer before clambering out to elbow you in the ribs. When Freddy killed a hapless victim, there was always the sense the viewer was in on the joke; here, there’s absolutely no doubt. “I’ve got me arse-kicking boots on tonight!” the Funny Man grins as one victim takes a seat, one of many, many asides to the audience. Deadpool, eat your heart out. 

It’s no coincidence that the Funny Man is a fusion of court jester and Mr. Punch; it wasn’t just some random costume pillaged from a fancy dress shop. Sprackling, who wrote and directed the film, drew inspiration from Shakespearean fools—which often directly address the audience—as well as The Wicker Man’s off-putting jester. He also drew on traditional Punch and Judy shows, once a common sight on British beaches.

Christopher Lee – yes, that Christopher Lee – helps kick off the graphic events of the film

The movie employs its influences to great effect. It’s sheer pantomime, more so than even Nightmare on Elm Street. There’s even a kill that takes place inside a Punch and Judy tent as the Funny Man cheers enthusiastically from a deckchair. It abandons any pretense of having a proper story; the Funny Man is here to entertain you, and that is all that matters.

Like Nightmare on Elm Street, Funny Man wouldn’t be half as much fun without a strong lead performance, and Tim James steals the show. In his hands, despite the character’s murderous plans, the Funny Man becomes oddly charming. At one time, Sprackling intended Funny Man to be more of a conventional horror icon, but it was James’s performance that molded the film into its final, comedic form. One minute he’s electrocuting an inattentive teenager who’s engrossed in her Game Boy—proving once-and-for-all that video games do cause violence—and in the next, he’s dispensing well-meaning wisdom.

As Sprackling explains it, he’s the friend you’re not really sure you want. James’s performance and sense of timing elevate the already absurd set pieces into pure art. The strip club scene has the Funny Man dressed like a bouncer, stripper, and disgruntled husband of the same stripper, all so he can cram a high heel into a man’s eye. At times, Funny Man is two steps away from turning into a sketch show.

Tim James isn’t the only standout turn in Funny Man, however. His amiability is balanced out by the more sinister presence of Callum Chance, played by Christopher Lee. No, really. Dracula, Saruman, Count Dooku, Willy Wonka’s dad. That Christopher Lee. It might be surprising to see Lee in a film made on a shoestring budget; the crew frequently had to re-jig scenes because the resources they originally wanted simply weren’t available. However, thanks to a lull in Lee’s career, Sprackling was able to get him for a surprisingly low price. 

It’s obvious that Christopher Lee’s scenes were shot all at once, but it’s a neat way to bookend some of the scenes and—coupled with the poetic nature of some of the characters’ fates—makes Funny Man feel a little like a lost Amicus anthology. However, in an interview featured on the film’s UK Blu-Ray release, Sprackling claims that Lee found one of the death scenes particularly offensive. When he wouldn’t remove it, the actor refused to endorse the movie. This apparently led to the bizarre situation where Lee was flown to Cannes, having agreed to publicize Funny Man but, if asked, wouldn’t speak positively of the film. 

As entertaining as Funny Man is, there are darker implications to all the fourth-wall-breaking. You could at least pretend that Freddy Krueger was slaughtering people for the sheer fun of it and that you, as an audience member, were a horrified (if unapologetically amused) bystander. By comparison, Funny Man’s asides make you a more active participant in the carnage. 

Sure, the Funny Man is having the time of his life, but he knows that you’re watching and getting as much of a kick out of the gore as he is. When Velma’s grey matter flies across the screen, glasses still attached, he turns to you and gives you a respectful nod. Alright, mate? Was that what you were looking for? You see that? You made that happen.

Funny Man is everything you could want from a ’90s slasher but streamlined. The Nightmare on Elm Street movies insisted on nonsense like character development and plot. But who needs a love interest when you’re going to be introduced to the business end of a blunderbuss? Funny Man knows why people watch stalk-and-slash movies, and it delivers in droves.

It’s a real shame, then, that Funny Man never got a sequel or achieved the level of horror notoriety it so-clearly deserves. The film is far from perfect; there are times, for example, that it feels just a little too disjointed. But it could easily have spawned a whole horror comedy franchise, putting Freddy Krueger’s tongue-in-cheek rampages to shame. He’d probably even coax a chuckle out of Jason Voorhees.  

Instead, it sank into the swamp of bland, generic slashers spawned throughout the 90s. With so many horror distributors in the market, your best bet might be to cross your fingers for a Blu-ray restoration so you can experience the blood-drenched lunacy yourself. After all, you’d be a fool not to. 

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Video Essay: The Art Of The Female Cannibal Movie

One of horror’s most taboo subgenres is cannibalism. It was a subgenre for the exploitive, often taking cultural traditions and grotesquely displaying them on screen, fueling xenophobia. But with the incredible success of The Silence Of The Lambs, cannibalism seemed to morph into something else in film. 

It became less of an exploitive subgenre and more of a tool for high brow horror.

Cannibalism tempted art house auteurs, like celebrated filmmakers Claire Denis and Fruit Chan. The hunger for human flesh became a rich way to explore humanity’s dark core, from coming of age drama to political hot topics, but moreso: cannibalism found a feminine edge. The final girl was no longer just wielding a phallic shaped weapon, but drenched in blood she sank her teeth into her victims.

SAPPHIC

The two women in Park Chul-soo’s sapphic horror-drama 301/302 each have complex relationships to their food: where one woman vomits at the sight of it, the other fully indulges in rich, beautiful meals. For both women, their past traumas are intertwined with their relationships to food, which is depicted in flashbacks throughout the film.

In the 90s, South Korea had a number of lesbian horror films, but like most of the genre these relationships were coded in subtext. 301/302 is no exception — the two neighboring women are never explicitly romantic, however to consume another’s body in horror is a sensual practice, thus coding these women as lovers. Director Park and writer Lee Seo-goon twisted the cannibal subgenre, creating a fresh and new take where women could release their past trauma by indulging in each other.

LUST

Fresh after her celebrated success Beau Travail, Claire Denis surprised her growing arthouse audience with a horror movie. Similar to 301/302, Trouble Every Day is a challenging film, and like many of Denis’ films, it demands the viewer’s patience. Denis utilizes cannibalism as a tool to explore a toxic love affair: two scientists who were once obsessed with each other are now sick, one luring men to fields to eat them, and the other having violent fantasies about his fresh new wife.

Cannibalism is an exquisite metaphor for lust, especially the taboo lust of adultery. 

In Aamis, a married doctor falls in love with a PhD student who is researching eating habits in northeastern India. Their affair takes a dark turn when he begins to feed her himself. Both Trouble Every Day and Aamis depictions of lust are savage, and the women in them are haunted by their sickness. 

They feast on the flesh of lovers like an addict until satiated, but the quell of their hunger never lasts, and the only conclusion is to destroy themselves.

BODY AUTONOMY & CLASS STRUCTURE

Fruit Chan’s Dumplings is…a complicated movie. It tackles incest, abortion, and the feminine fear of aging all in one. Although abortion has been legal in Hong Kong since 1981, both the stigma and the cost forced young women to turn to the black market. Dumplings is an indictment of class structure, and at its center is Mrs. Li: a wealthy older woman whose desire to be attractive to her cheating husband leads her to consuming aborted fetuses in the form of Aunt Mei’s special dumplings.

The dumplings, though, are a double edged sword: a fountain of youth that syphons from a pool of the underprivileged. Although Mrs. Li’s intentions originally aren’t completely selfish, they soon become so, and her cannibal practices become a necessity that lead her down a dark road.

THE MATRIARCH 

In many films, cannibalism is a family affair, like you see in the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. However, where Tobe Hooper’s family of cannibals is patriarchal, recent films like Macabre and We Are What We Are are matriarchal. Similar to Dumplings, in Macabre cannibalism keeps you young, bestowing immortality on the consumer. 

This theme can trace back to Elizabeth Bathory, who was rumored to bathe in the blood of virgins to retain her youth. In Macabre, the family is led by its matriarch, Dara, a strange woman who looks as young as she does old. Macabre is a bloody, cruel film that is gleeful in its massacre, including the murder a pregnant woman. Although it contains a final girl, the film itself takes pleasure in its brutality against women, therefore its messaging about female power structures is unclear.

Although not as grotesque as Macabre, Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are explores a family’s restructuring after their patriarchal figure dies. In the film, the eldest daughter, Sabina, attempts to take lead of the family’s sacred ritual and guide her brothers, but a finger found in the father’s autopsy leads detectives to them.

Jim Mickle’s remake is a bit different, and more female-forward.

Steeped in midwestern Americana, instead of killing the father, the film opens with the mother’s sudden death. Left with his two daughters and young son to take care of, the father struggles to lead the family ritual while consumed with grief, much like Patricia at the beginning of the original Mexican film. His daughters begin to come of age, and they question their family’s history. In an act to retain his patriarchal power, the father murders one of his daughter’s sexual partners.

This creates a catalyst for the daughters to push back on their father, and in a wild dinner scene they eat him alive, thus consuming his power. In the original film, Sabina is the only one to escape to continue the family tradition. However, in the remake, all the children escape, and the question of continuing the ritual is left unsaid.

COMING OF AGE

Coming of age is the metaphor du jour for cannibalism, peaking with Julia Ducournau’s beloved first feature Raw, but it didn’t begin there. Although a little more fantastical, I consider Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body a film about cannibalism. And she’s not just eating humans: she’s eating boys. Teenage boys. 

Similar to Dumplings and Macabre, the consumption of boys keeps Jennifer youthful and sexually alluring — an object of the male gaze. However, it’s the film’s approach to young female friendship that makes Kusama’s addition to the subgenre interesting. The film’s protagonist is Jennifer’s best friend Needy, whose relationship with Jennifer is reminiscent of many tumultuous teen girl friendships. Jennifer’s Body is a millennial deconstruction that empowers women, utilizing cannibalism as a demonic power to bring suffering to toxic teen boys.

The Neon Demon, like Jennifer’s Body, focuses on the sexualization of the female form, but also dives into how those societal pressures stem from the fashion industry. Because cannibalism is tightly wound to the human body, it’s a perfect metaphor for the unrealistic pressures put on women’s bodies. Director Nicolas Winding Refn made the film inspired by his wife Liv Corfixen’s career, and it’s a stunning whirlwind of his traditional neon visuals that both celebrates the female form while exploring the sinister world of modeling that pits females against another.

It seems like everyone’s favorite cannibal movie is Raw, and there is good reason for it. Heavily inspired by Denis’ Trouble Every Day, Raw takes the film’s arthouse influences and molds them into the coming of age genre. A mix of sisterly bonding and self exploration, Raw is entirely a femme film, which is why it feels so personal to so many. It combines family tradition, body autonomy, lust, and female friendship: everything that’s individually been explored in each of the films previously mentioned.

CONCLUSION

Cannibalism is not exclusively feminine, but the recent trend of personal female stories has made the subgenre unique. Cannibalism represents femininity in many forms, whether it be power structure or desires. Women will eat you alive.

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Finding Strength in Illness With ‘The Silenced’

Here’s to the endless streaming menu scroll. Some nights, I choose to forgo critical consensus, or even word-of-mouth, and instead opt to enter the wild west of thumbnail images and two-sentence summaries in the “horror” category. Sometimes I stumble upon unexpected scares. More often, I find total duds. And sometimes, if I’m really lucky, I uncover something like The Silenced (2015), the third feature from Lee Hae-young. This film (in Korean, Gyeongseong Hakgyo: Sarajin Sonyeodeul) is a thrilling genre hybrid that stands head and shoulders above its horror-roulette competition.

Imperialistic Horrors

The Silenced is a boarding school-set story that takes place in 1938 Korea, when the nation was under Japanese rule and World War II was imminent. Initially presenting itself as a coming-of-age drama, The Silenced follows chronically ill Shizuko (Park Bo-Young) as she joins the class at an all-girls boarding school. Soon, Shizuko begins to notice that something’s amiss in her new home. The students—most of whom are either sickly or orphans—all take blood-red pills at the cruel headmistress’ (Uhm Ji-Won) command.

In place of traditional tests and courses, the girls learn to embroider cherry blossoms and practice jumping as far as they can, all in hopes of winning a prize trip to Tokyo. Strangest of all, Shizuko learns that a student mysteriously withdrew from classes just before she arrived, and her Japanese name was Shizuko too.

Hae-young, who co-wrote the film’s script with Yoo-jin Kim, doesn’t initially draw attention to the story’s political and historical context, but he alludes to it at every turn. Rich red accents turn up in nearly every scene, dangerous and emphatic. At first, they seem to symbolize female adolescence, but when a Japanese military official appears on screen for the first time, the red on his uniform gleaming, the parallels become obvious.

In one scene, a girl even splits open a ball of white rice with red filling inside, perfectly mirroring the geometric visuals of the Japanese flag. The girls may be controlled by domineering school officials, but their homeland is under outside rule as well.

What starts off as an apparent coming-of-age story soon evolves into a Gothic mystery, then a queer-coded romance, then a thrilling horror-sci-fi mashup. While juggling multiple genres can sometimes make a film weaker, The Silenced expertly folds in each new angle like a baker folds in dough; the final product is smooth and satisfying.

Tenderness in the Dark

The sleekly edited, intricately designed film calls to mind Gothic classics like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, but it perhaps shares the most cinematic DNA with the works of Guillermo del Toro. It’s light on traditional scares, but isn’t afraid to make you jump, gasp, or cringe when the situation calls for it. As with del Toro’s best works, it also empowers outsiders, laying bare the world’s strangeness and injustice all the while.

New girl Shizuko soon finds her counterpart and sole ally in Kazue, played with transfixing charisma by Parasite’s Park So-dam. The pair’s relationship is charged from their very first meeting, when Kazue touches the spot on Shizuko’s face where the headmistress just slapped her and declares that her face is still warm from the sting. Kazue then feeds Shizuko a bright red candy, placing it tenderly in her mouth.

From there, the two strike up an intense friendship. The scenes in which Shizuko and Kazue find refuge from the school’s danger together are some of the film’s atmospheric best. They steal away to a secret garden that’s shrouded in cobwebs. They sneak away to a moss-covered boat on a serene pond. They share secrets and whispers in the dark.

“Why are you so nice to me?” Shizuko asks at one point, to which Kazue answers, “Because you look weak, and because you are very odd.” At its most idyllic moments, The Silenced is about the beauty that comes with weakness and vulnerability, but as it unfolds, it also finds horror in the way physical weakness is treated.

The Power of Caretaking

A classmate is rocked with grotesque, unnerving seizures, then disappears from the school entirely. Shizuko begins to see a specter of a drowned girl, a gwisin, and school officials respond to her panic by upping her drugs. Kazue’s backstory, when finally revealed, takes on the shame and fear that often go hand in hand with illness.

Horror films often reckon with mental illness, but rarely address physical disability with any particular degree of success. The Silenced, on the other hand, centers physical disability, with much of its core conflict coming from the headmistress’ attempts to control the girls under the guise of curing their illnesses. Shizuko never puts a name to her own sickness, but a classmate witnesses her bloody cough and assumes it’s tuberculosis. 

As someone who lives with chronic illness, I found myself empathizing with Shizuko’s frustration at her physical shortcomings and relishing the idea of Kazue’s answer to her question. In a world that isolates and manipulates those perceived as “weak”—which in The Silenced, includes not only the ill, but also the female, queer-coded, and the culturally colonized—these two girls build a relationship based on caretaking and mutual appreciation.

Theirs is an innocent romance, but it’s presented as a romance nonetheless, one that thrives on meaningful gifts and shared solitude. While The Silenced eventually veers into the climactic violence expected of a genre film, its thoughtful treatment of chronic illness and disability shouldn’t be forgotten.

Conclusion

Shizuko is eventually given a specialized treatment that makes her stronger than she ever expected, leading the film into a truly surprising—and best left unspoiled—final act. In one scene, she flexes during intravenous treatment, and her blood briefly flows up backwards into the IV tube. It’s a simple image, but one that deftly encapsulates the film’s themes of strength and weakness. She’s fragile, but she’s also capable.

So much of The Silenced is like the above scene: immersive and surprising, visually striking and emotionally resonant. Lee Hae-young’s Gothic tale audaciously presents a half-dozen different major themes, each with a haunting tenderness that lingers as the credits roll. Fair warning: once you discover this hidden treasure, you might find yourself doomed to endlessly scroll through streaming sites, forever searching for its equal.

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How ‘Dark Ride’ Helped the Slasher Survive

Recent releases like Happy Death Day, The Strangers: Prey at Night, and Hell Fest have prompted the horror faithful to wonder if we’re due for another slasher resurgence. Given how resilient the subgenre has been over the years, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Long synonymous with unkillable madmen and plucky final girls—and the occasional final boy—slashers consistently take their licks at the box office and manage to return from the dead, even during eras that were perceived as down years. 

Consider the new millennium. The mid-aughts aren’t exactly renowned for their slasher output, as the genre was in a post-Scream malaise that saw some filmmakers exploring new torturous realms forward (Saw, Hostel), others looking in the rearview (House of Wax, Black X-Mas, Halloween), and still others crafting homages that fell somewhere in-between (Hatchet, Behind the Mask, The Hills Run Red). 

But look beneath these headliners and you’ll find that the traditional, no-frills slasher was still clinging to life in all its unpretentious glory, notably taking shape in the inaugural After Dark Horrorfest with Dark Ride. It’s a relatively unremarkable offering, one that feels like it’s simply been stitched together by the remnants of its more noteworthy forbearers—which is exactly what makes it remarkable.

Back to the Basics

If the previous decade was spent ripping apart the slasher formula, then Dark Ride is committed to piecing it back together. Writer/director Craig Singer practically employs a checklist in telling the familiar tale of an Asbury Park dark ride that was closed down due to a grisly murder. A prologue set in 1989 (check) makes the audience privy to the gruesome death of twin sisters in the amusement park. Soon the action jumps ahead fifteen years; the story has become the stuff of legend (check), now casually retold as campfire lore. 

When a group of debauched college students head out on spring break (check), they take a detour when they learn the attraction is set to reopen. After picking up a hitchhiker (check), they decide to go one step further and spend the night in the ride, where drama (check) and pranks (check) ensue until they learn the legend is still very much alive and is hellbent on resuming his grim reaping. 

When a character (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) says her love life “reeks of cliché,” she might as well be referring to Dark Ride itself. There’s very little here that hasn’t already been done before, and it’s easy to see how it would be dismissed as the same old stuff because it very much is. But, in an unexpected twist, that’s what distinguishes it from many of its contemporaries: it doesn’t take notice of any of this, nor does it seek to upend expectations. 

It’s not an update or reimagining of a classic title with popular young actors—Sigler would have been the most recognizable thanks to her stint on The Sopranos—and it doesn’t announce itself as a winking throwback full of obvious nods and homages. True, Patrick Renna plays the obligatory movie geek, but he only references highbrow stuff like The Deer Hunter.

Dark Ride is simply an original slasher, or as original as one could be in 2006. This release would have inevitably drawn comparisons to the likes of The Funhouse, April Fool’s Day, and even Halloween thanks to a subplot involving an escaped mental patient returning to the site of his childhood carnage.

Embracing the Traditions

Slashers that evoke such greatness without completely capturing it are nothing new, of course. Dark Ride is an addition to that pantheon of solid slashers that deliver the expected thrills without upsetting the apple cart. While this does sound like old hat, this is one of the unspoken agreements of the genre: sometimes, the formula is exactly what the audience wants, and slashers like this one have been traditionally eager to deliver it.

Numerous titles in this subgenre have been celebrated for decades, but for each film that expands the canon, there are at least three more that were deemed formulaic and disposable. These titles were left for cult fans to champion—until they, too, became canonized with deluxe home video releases. Eventually, die-hards grew tired of renting Halloween for the umpteenth time and turned to the likes of Sorority House Massacre or Offerings, a pair of unabashed rip-offs whose familiarity is part of the charm.

Movies like this weren’t innovative, but they didn’t have to be; this genre’s reputation is synonymous with its prolific output. An absurd number of slashers dominated video store shelves for decades, enticing audiences like fast food meals: sure, it’s not good for you, but it’s also kind of the best. There’s something to be said for a movie like Dark Ride, which does exactly what you want it to do by making mincemeat out of nearly every cast member and doing it with enough panache to leave an impression.

Dark Ride is in that tradition, and, like many of those forgotten slashers that hacked their way to prominence, it also does just enough with its meager premise to warrant mention. While somewhat derivative of The Funhouse, its titular setting is a natural slasher habitat, and Singer takes full advantage of his spooky digs. The prologue captures the ride in its vintage glory—full of delightfully hokey animatronics and chintzy effects—while the bulk of the movie unfolds in the bowels of the semi-dormant attraction.

Now the ride’s candy-colored glow accents the demented carnival atmosphere. Not every movie can be Halloween, but any movie can feel like Halloween with the right amount of neon hues soaking a rickety production design. Even a derivative slasher like Dark Ride. There’s a reason haunts have become a popular setting for slashers in recent years—they’re just damn fun and lend themselves to the type of mayhem audiences crave.

Buoyed By the Body Count

Singer delivers in this respect, too. He recognizes that this cast is disposable and dispenses them with gory vigor. Dark Ride boasts a sizable body count thanks to some gratuitous padding: not only does the group pick up a hitchhiker, but the script tosses in some scumbag orderlies that totally deserve it when the killer, Jonah (Dave Warden), paints the walls red with their intestines. Singer stages some top-notch splatter movie theatrics, relying on gooey practical effects every step of the way as Jonah separates his victims from their various body parts. 

The gags rank from legitimately unsettling—one kid is twisted into a macabre marionette, his severed limbs loosely dangling as his face is contorted with a deathly pallor—to downright silly (let’s just say “getting head” takes on an entirely new meaning at one point). The great thing about slasher movies is that this is often all they need: they can stumble in other respects, but as long as the gore satisfies, it often leads to success as it does here. 

https://youtu.be/WQN3Ap8DxYI

Granted, there are times when Dark Ride loses its balance between homage and cliche. The characters in the film are irritating and expendable even by slasher standards, with Andrea Bogart’s hitchhiking hippie providing a few highlights with tangents about Phish concerts and other drug-assisted observations. A long stretch is fairly dry as the kids explore the dark ride and carry out an elaborate prank. The entire plot hinges on the convenient fact that Jonah’s escape just happens to coincide with the kids’ trip, and its climactic twist is a bit of a groaner that only enhances the deja vu.

But couldn’t the same be said about a lot of vintage slashers, which similarly painted over its flaws with garish Karo syrup? Dark Ride might not wear its love for this genre on its sleeve like some of its contemporaries, and it’s more of a faithful update as a result. If not for the minor presence of cell phones and Alex Solowitz’s unfortunate frosted tips, Dark Ride could have just as easily taken place in 1986 or 1996.

Conclusion

I know it sounds like I’m going to bat for a fairly mundane movie that achieves what countless other slashers have, often with more revitalization. It’s true: Dark Ride doesn’t reinvent the wheel as a sturdy slasher with appealing production values. But, ironically, that makes it something of a rarity during this era. Where so much of the output from this period is eager to flash its credentials by winking at the audience or polishing old stories with a studio sheen, this one just sets itself to being a gore-soaked thrill ride without pretense.

There should always be room at the table for slashers like this, and I hope to never be too good for a movie where a psycho in a baby mask splits someone’s head in two. If we are in the midst of a slasher renaissance, I hope filmmakers will keep this in mind, too: horror audiences—and especially slasher audiences—are quite forgiving as long as the blood flows at a reasonable (and practical) pace. We don’t always need the artisanal option; sometimes, the Quarter Pounder is just what we want.

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Three Nights of Death: Folk Horror in Mosfilm’s ‘Viy’

The popularity of The Babadook, The VVitch, and Midsommar in the past five years tells us that folk horror films still interest both creators and consumers. I say still because this horror subgenre dates back to the industry’s dawn with The Phantom Carriage and Nosferatu. It has cropped up in every decade since then, and horror fans recognize the previous examples – The Wicker Man, The Blair Witch Project, and numerous others – as classics. They transcend their era and influence modern filmmakers like Robert Eggers and Ari Aster.

However, another exemplar of this subgenre languishes in obscurity: Konstantin Ershov and Georgiy Kropachyov’s Viy (1967). Also known as Spirit of Evil, the movie portrays a vast, absurd, and often tragic world in the spirit of traditional “fairy tale” storytelling. Yet Viy also boasts vintage special effects and an acute critique of its society’s patriarchal narrative. 

The History of ‘Viy’

Based on the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s short story of the same name, the film opens in 19th-century Kiev. Dismissed for summer holiday, the dissolute-but-cheerful seminary student Khoma (Leonid Kuravlyov) travels with two friends into the countryside. When night falls, they receive shelter from an old peasant woman. Thereafter, she pounces on and bewitches Khoma, “riding” him as he flies across the night’s sky.

Khoma prays for protection and the two land in a field, whereupon he fatally beats the crone. She turns into a beautiful maiden (Natalya Varley), and Khoma flees. Back in Kiev, he learns that a rich landowner’s daughter made a dying wish for him to deliver her last prayers. Khoma travels to the landowner’s village and discovers that the deceased maiden is his “peasant” witch. And to keep his daughter’s final wishes, the landowner forces Khoma to pray over her corpse the following three nights – alone, in the village chapel. 

While not mainstream, Viy has cult credentials. Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and Letterboxd users chatter about it; even Certified Forgotten co-founder Matthew Monagle gave it a glowing review in Brooklyn Magazine. Indiewire named it #89 in its “Greatest Horror Movies of All-Time” countdown. It also holds enviable provenance and peerage. Not only the first horror film made in the USSR, but one produced by Mosfilm Studios, the same behind numerous Andrei Tarkovsky films as well as Elem Klimov’s Come and See.

Finally, Viy comes from the same Gogol story that served as a basis for Mario Bava’s epochal Black Sunday (1960). Yet Bava’s film takes more cues from British horror and Hammer Studios’ Dracula than Gogol’s story, and its protagonists uphold patriarchal conventions of social hierarchy and gender roles. Viy sticks closer to Gogol’s text and demonstrates that men never controlled these things in the first place.

Russian Folklore in Film

Viy focuses on laboring class characters, so its folklore comes from the mouths of Cossack footmen, the impoverished, and farmers. This fits historical trends: literary scholars tell us that folktales originated with “common” people rather than high society. Illiterate laborers had limited knowledge of their world, so their stories fulfilled an explanatory function. Since cruelty and tragedy loomed over their lives, they populated laborers’ legends and horrors too.

Gogol cast his tale as “a specimen of such folk-lore” in its epigraph, which the film paraphrases into a voiceover. “Viy is a colossal creation of the imagination of simple folk,” a voice shares. “The tale itself is a purely popular legend. And I tell it without change, in all its simplicity, exactly as I heard it told to me.” 

Despite this claim, modern scholarship indicates that Gogol fabricated many of his tale’s folkloric elements. Nevertheless, his novella and the film do feature a dominant figure in cultures worldwide: a witch. She’s a disturbing symbol to any society dominated by a patriarchal ruling narrative since she can exist therein, unbound to its rules. Viy’s witch thus horrifies and fascinates the laborers. The Cossack footmen not only suspect the landowner’s daughter but gossip about her when out of their master’s earshot.

They tell Khoma how she bewitched a local hunter, “a man with a heart of gold.” According to the men, after he fell “hopelessly in love” with her, she climbed onto his back and rode him away. So even the best of these laboring men capitulate to the demonic “other” – alone, their patriarchy’s morals cannot withstand her. 

The image of a maiden “riding” a laborer may frighten and amuse us – it’s dreamlike and senseless to our rational logic. But fears aren’t rational. No inherent danger exists in darkness, but it frightens many people because of what it may contain. And this ambiguity epitomizes folk horror. It compels commoners to live in squalor and ignorance. Though their society’s administrators – like the seminary rector and the rich landowner in Viy – hoard goods, they also offer protection.

These circumstances also make Khoma an ironic administrative agent: he lacks their moral knowledge and rectitude. For instance, when a footman demands to know what seminarians are taught, Khoma evades his question. After the landowner suggests that he leads the life of a saint, Khoma protests, “you can’t know what you’re saying. . . . I slipped over to the butcher’s wife right in the middle of Lent!” 

The Spectacle of the Undead

While Viy critiques social conformity, it shows greater concern in narratives that afford such consent. This scrutiny intensifies during Khoma’s three nights in the chapel, when he depends upon patriarchal blessings for protection against the witch. These nightmarish sequences stand out as Viy’s best and strangest. Director Kropachyov’s knowledge of production design comes to the fore: the besmeared and cobwebbed church, riddled with images of a frowning deity, contains the action.

Rather than a house of light and worship, it appears a sepulcher with a jet-black coffin at its center. After the Cossack footmen lock him in on the first night, Khoma tells the corpse, “I have prayers to protect me. . . . no demon can possibly harm me.” He lights the chapel with candles, reads a few prayers, and takes a bit of snuff. Then the witch rises. 

The sight is uncanny: a beautiful girl – pale with death, wearing a flower wreath and a white shift – sits up slowly with arms extended. She removes her shroud, steps out of her coffin, and floats to the floor. Then, seeking Khoma, she walks blindly through the church, and he draws a “sacred circle” with chalk and shouts prayers, enacting a transparent and impenetrable barrier.

Despite its visual absurdity, this supernatural aegis fits the film’s logic – faith in authority preserves Khoma. The witch cannot upend this blessing (alone). Then a cock crows and she – with eerie, shaking fury – lies back down in her coffin. Although the “night” runs no more than five minutes, the time displacement fits Viy’s fairy-tale logic. Afterwards, the dazed seminarian represses his fear and conceals the otherworldly protection he received.

Not that the seminarian feels renewed faith. On the contrary, Khoma indulges in vodka throughout the following day and begins his second night exhausted and terrified. After he stumbles through an opening prayer, the witch’s coffin rises and flies its occupant around the room. This sequence pushes the film’s absurdity to a fault, though it’s unnerving to hear the witch cry out, “Khoma!”

Hysterical, he conjures the sacred-circle protection, which the witch’s coffin cannot break through. The cock soon crows, but the witch curses Khoma as she lies down, blurring his vision and turning his hair white. His task thus robs him of youth and innocence, and his reticence cracks. The following day, he tries to escape and begs the landowner for release, saying that his daughter has been bewitched by Satan. Of course, Khoma is sent back for the final night.

This scene constitutes Viy’s go-for-broke finale: the patriarchy’s nightmare comes to horrifying life. First, Khoma draws his sacred circle and drunkenly prays, “Let me not yield to the temptations of the evil one.” Then the witch arises and summons fiends: disembodied hands reach out from the walls, skeletons chatter in the shadows, creatures peek around corners, and demonic humanoids creep into the chapel. A demon wind shrieks; bats flutter through the room; the witch laughs and commands her demons forward.

She finally cries, “Bring the great god Viy! I summon Viy!” and out stomps a great rock-like demon. Khoma tells himself not to look in the creature’s eyes or best lost – yet the cock then crows, and the seminarian smiles and turns. “I see him!” Viy declares, setting the demons on Khoma. Before the cock crows again, our hero lies dead on the floor. 

Conclusion

It’s a bleak end to a movie with an awful lot of absurd comedy – a blend that also characterizes fairy-tale storytelling. The finale suggests that, whether one lives as part of or in opposition to it, this patriarchal narrative provides little comfort. But just like other great folk horror movies, Viy illustrates how storytelling helps people find their way through their world.

In 19th-century Russia, most folks’ lives were short, brutish, and uneventful. They held senseless tragedies: fathers buried daughters, good people passed without reason, and peasants packed into shacks while administrators lived in palaces. Surrealistic, absurd stories let them suggest why. To this day, folk horror allows us to create meaning for suffering – which, perhaps, is the first step to overcoming it.  

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