In the first half of the fifties horror continued to be sidelined, with audiences showing a marked preference for science-fiction themes in their fantasy films. There were several films occupying a middle-ground between science-fiction and horror, to be sure (it’s hard to argue that The Thing From Another World doesn’t borrow heavily from Frankenstein), and a fair number of noir-ish thrillers were produced, but little in the way of traditional horror films appeared. This trend reversed itself spectacularly in the later half of the decade, with Hammer films in England bringing back a variety of Gothic monster films and AIP in America churning out a long stream of exploitation films with horror plots. Both studios, and their imitators, benefited greatly from relaxed censorship standards, and horror films began to amp up the amount of onscreen blood and gore and, of course, nudity and eroticism. Hammer’s success owes as much to the decolletage of its leading ladies as it does to the magnetism of Cushing and Lee.

One of the more restrained efforts of the era is Jaques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon. Like his earlier film Cat People, Tourneur favors an air of ambiguity for most of the film, and while the reality of the supernatural is always clear to the audience, for the characters there is always a question of whether or not this is all in their minds or not. Loosely based on the M.J. James story “Casting the Runes”, the film opens with Professor Harrington, a psychologist and skeptic, racing to the home of Julian Karswell (aka “Not Aleister Crowley”) begging him to call off an impending threat. Karswell promises to do what he can, but it is clear that Harrington’s fate is already sealed, and shortly after the Professor returns home he is killed by a demon that materializes out of the night. Or he hallucinates a demon and crashes his car into some power lines. It’s clear that the film wants the reality of the demon to be in question, but showing a giant demon crashing his foot down on a person is probably not the best way to go about that. Shortly, American skeptic and psychic Dr. John Holden flies out to take Harrington’s place at a psychological conference focused on debunking the paranormal, with a denunciation of Karswell’s “devil cult” the centerpiece. Holden discovers that the annoying woman who sat behind him on the plane is Harrington’s niece Joanna, who is convinced that her uncle was killed through supernatural means, and she begs him to call off his speech, just as Karswell calls him and implies that the same fate that met Harrington will be his if he doesn’t stop investigating him. Karswell and Holden meet several times, with Karswell demonstrating abilities he claims are supernatural and generally acting the genial sociopath, as well as slipping a paper bearing strange runes into Holden’s papers without Holden noticing, with Holden becoming increasingly unsettled but sticking to his skepticism, despite Karswell’s insistence that Holden will die in three days. Holden and his associates decide the key to exposing Karswell lies with Rand Hobarth, a farmer convicted of murder and confined to an asylum in a catatonic state, and also a member of Karswell’s group. Under hypnosis, Hobarth reveals that the power to kill lies in the runes, and the only way to prevent the death is by returning the cursed parchment bearing the runes to the person who gave it to the intended victim. Holden follows Karswell, who has kidnapped Joanna, to a train, and as the time Karswell has set for Holden to die approaches he becomes increasingly nervous. In the confusion of a police confrontation with Holdren, he manages to slip the parchment back to Karswell, who discovers it just as a wind whips it from his hand and down the train-track. Unable to retrieve it in time, Karswell is killed by the demon. Or, run over by a train, from the perspective of the onlookers. The film ends with Holden and Joanna realizing that, when it comes to the supernatural, it is sometimes best not to know the truth.

Despite the complications of the plot, the film moves along briskly. Tourneur’s direction aids in this, but the script by Charles Bennett and Hal Chester handles issues such as exposition deftly. The performances also are commendable, with Dana Andrews playing the lead as a ruggedly arrogant American, even if his “tough guy” persona does lead to some raised eyebrows at the notion of playing an intellectual. The real stand-out is Niall McGinnis as Karswell. He’s an extremely charismatic and likeable man, even putting on parties for the local children, but he shifts from clown to menace quietly, and his resolve is magnetic. An especially effective and illustrative moment occurs when Karswell and Holden discuss a game of Snakes and Ladders some children are playing. Karswell observes that he always preffered “sliding down snakes” to climbing the ladders. The religious metaphor is obvious, and it’s vital that Holden misses it, joking instead that Karswell “likes to lose.” Karswell’s shift from clown to sorcerer at that moment is eerie as he tersely informs Holden of just how wrong he is.

As with Tourneur’s previous work, the film is filled with shadows, dramatic lighting, and hints of things lurking just outside of vision. The central conflict between Holden and Karswell, rationality vs. superstition, is mirrored in the uncertainty over whether the events of the film have supernatural origins or are, as Holden argues, simply tricks of the mind. The appearance of the demon, both at the beginning and end of the film, would suggest a definite answer that, yes, the supernatural is real, and dangerous. Both Tourneur and Andrews in interviews both claimed to be disappointed by the demon’s appearance, insisting that it was a requirement of the producers, who believed that audiences would want to see the monster. But it’s also worth noting that, when the demon does appear, no one sees it but the victims, and their deaths are explainable as accidents. The final appearance at the trainyards does a particularly good job of undermining the notion that the demon is real, as the clouds of smoke that the demon appears from closely resemble the steam coming from the smokestacks of the engines. It’s a striking visual and ties the physical and the supernatural together at the film’s close in a compelling way.

The forties are an interesting period for horror films. The genre had largely started to die off in the late thirties, and though there was a brief flurry of revivals and sequels at the start of the decade, horror had started to become somewhat “kiddified” as the decade wore on, with novelty pictures such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and the later sequence of Abbot and Costello films were they meet with various horror icons. It seems like audiences were having trouble taking monsters and ghouls seriously (understandably, given the war) and sophisticated audiences were looking increasingly towards crime thrillers and noir films for scares, human monsters feeling much more plausible than magical European beasts. Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People is perhaps a reflection of those changing tastes. Originally conceived by RKO bosses and producer Val Lewton as a cheap, quick money maker with a catchy title, it surpasses it’s exploitative origin as a means of recovering some of that money that Orson Welles kept costing the studio.

Serbian fashion designer Irena has a romantic comedy “meet cute” with engineer Oliver at the zoo. She’s sketching panthers, he’s creeping on girls. After a brief, sudden courtship that catches Oliver’s friends off guard (notably his gal-pal “office wife” Alice and her lecherous psychologist friend Dr. Judd) Irena and Oliver wed, but some challenges to their relationship arise almost immediately. Irena is haunted by a legend from her homeland about evil women who transform into cats when their passions are inflamed, driven into the mountains by King John (images of whom mid-cat spearing occur throughout the film, notably in Irena’s home decor). A chance meeting with a strange, cat-like woman at her wedding dinner cements the notion in Irena’s mind that she is one of these cursed women as well, and she rejects the physical consummation of her relationship with Oliver, locking herself in her room at night. Oliver enlists Alice in arranging for Dr. Judd to take on Irena as a patient, a marital faux-pas so jaw-dropping it beggars belief and makes Alice’s later play for Oliver come as no surprise. Dr. Judd’s therapy proves ineffective, driving Oliver right into Alice’s arms, and shortly Alice finds herself stalked by a mysterious cat-like creature that seems to follow her in the shadows. Convnced now that Irena really is a cat woman, Alice persuades Oliver and Dr. Judd to have Irena committed to an asylum. Oliver and Alice are menaced by a panther in their office, while Dr. Judd waits for Irena in her apartment. When she finally appears Judd makes his lecherous intentions towards her quite plain. When he forces her to kiss him, Judd is horrified when Irena does transform into a cat and kills him. Seemingly distraught over shedding blood, Irena runs to the zoo and release the panther from its cage, and it kills her in its escape, leaving Alice and Oliver free to live their lives together.

Cat People is pretty firmly in the sympathetic monster camp. It helps that Irena is pretty much the only sympathetic character in the film. Dr. Judd is an aggressive creep, Alice pretty openly steals another woman’s husband and Oliver is so devoid of backbone he pretty much just goes along with adultery because Alice asks him to. Not only is Irena struggling against the darker part of her own nature, but she’s completely surrounded by people either actively hurting her or taking advantage of her. You feel great sorrow at her death, not only for her, but also because she didn’t take more of these horrible people with her. Most of the film plays like a melodrama, with heavy emoting and dramatic reactions, with the reltionships between Irena, Oliver and Alice driving most of the story forward. The horror elements become remarkably subdued, and Tourneur mostly keeps the reality of Irena’s transformations ambiguous. We never see a physical transformation, when we do see a cat it is almost always in shadow, and apart from an ill-considered sequence showing cat prints changing to shoe prints, the monster is mostly off-screen. The horror then comes from Irena’s psychological struggles to contain her animalistic impulses, and so despite the seeming inevitability of her transformation, we still feel for her, that her husband’s adultery basically triggers her transformation and ultimately her death. It’s easy to imagine a happier ending; one in which a less sexually inhibited Irena comes to a happier end, and the “happy ending” coming to a man who essentially cheated on his spouse is odd for the period, but understandable in light of the “the foreign and unnatural must be destroyed” morality of the era.

The Castle of Otranto, 1963 ed., Horace Walpole
Classic Gothic novel, complete with secret passages, ghosts and a giant. Whose helmet crushes the villain’s son to death.
It’s a bit weird.

The 1930′s was one of those pivotal times for horror films. Even though many of the tropes and types had appeared in earlier decades, this was the era that horror films hit big as a genre, and many of the iconic figures premiered. It’s also where many, many, many of the cliches are birthed. A brief look at the films of the decade shows just how many of the important films in the genre have their roots here; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Mummy, Island of Lost Souls, White Zombie, The Invisible Man, and the infamous Freaks. There’s a lot to unpack with all of those films, and it’s little surprise that they’ve all been extensively and exhaustively written about. So I’m more interested in the “also ran” films of the period. Which brings us to James Whale’s The Old Dark House, produced after Frankenstein but before Bride. It’s based on a novel by British dramatist and wartime broadcaster J.B. Priestly, and, well, it’s not one of his works that’s kept in print, if that gives you any clues as to what we’re dealing with.

The film opens with a scene that would come to typify many horror films to come, and could almost be counted as an early example of “tourist horror”-those films where urbane travelers must protect themselves from savage locals/natives-as a young couple, Phillip and Margaret Waverton are driving through a storm in the Welsh mountains with their friend Roger Penderel, a cynical World War One vet. The road washes out behind them and they are forced to take shelter for the night at the home of Femms; Horace, a pale effete dandy and his sister Rebecca, a religious fanatic spinster. Also in the house is Morgan, the mute butler played by Boris Karloff, and Sir Roderick Femm, the 102 year old family patriarch, now confined to his bed after a lifetime of decadence. The Femms are reluctant hosts, but well-bred enough not to turn away visitors, even when more travelers arrive, tycoon Sir William Porterhouse and his “companion” Gladys Perkins. Much sitting around and talking ensues until the storm worsens and a drunken Morgan releases Saul Femm from his attic prison, and the madman attacks the guests, dying in a confrontation with Penderel.

The film is oddly static, and has that “filmed play” vibe for long stretches that isn’t uncommon for early films. Very little of Whale’s trademark visual inventiveness is on display, save for several shots of the large, highly shadowed staircase from below and a disconcerting sequence of shots of Rebecca Femm filmed in distorted mirrors, talking about sex and corruption. Most of the film’s strengths are in the blackly comic tone and sense of unreality, though an over long and ridiculous romantic subplot between Gladys and Penderel dominates the middle of the film and completely destroys the pacing. By the time Saul finally does appear, you almost find yourself hoping he’ll remove some of these extraneous characters.

Like many other films of the era, The Old Dark House is an early example of, if not the birth of, many of the cliches that would come to haunt the genre, notably the “madman in the attic” trope (though, to be fair, that is an even hoarier literary device…thanks for nothing, Jane Eyre), notably in Black Christmas, House of Long Shadows, and of course The Simpsons. And as I said earlier, the theme of urbane, sophisticated travelers being menaced by weird locals would become a particularly annoying horror cliche. But what strikes me the most about Whale’s film is it’s very careful use of subtext as a vehicle for horror. There’s a lot of sex in this film, in which there is of course no actual sex. There’s Sir William and his “companion”, of course, despite Gladys’ transparently false insistence that all Sir William does is “sit on my bed.” There’s also the dissolute history of the Femm family itself. There was another Femm sister, long ago, who died, and Rebecca comes just shy of implying that either her father or her brother or both was involved in an incestuous relationship with Rebecca. This is suggested further by the near revelation of what, exactly, Morgan is to the Femm’s, particularly Saul. A mute servant prone to frequent drunken rampages is a bit much to buy, especially when he habitually beats or frees the lunatic upstairs. It’s never going to be explicit, but the suggestion is clear that Morgan is Saul and Rebecca’s son. Horace is awfully effete and shows a more than healthy interest in just how jaded Penderel is, though the true blending of sexuality occurs with the casting of Sir Roderick. The patriarch of the Femm family is actually an old woman, a fact that goes completely unremarked upon by the entire cast. This is probably Whale’s idea of a joke, but it adds a fluid sense of gender and sexuality to a film that’s already heaving with implications and innuendo.

Benjamin Christensen’s silent opus is an interesting film on a number of levels. It’s an early enough film that many of the conventions and narrative devices that modern audiences simply accept at face value are still new, and indeed there are many points in the film where you can see that Christensen is “feeling out” a technique or method. The bulk of the film takes the form of something halfway like a documentary and halfway like a lecture. It opens with a mix of title cards and still slides of medieval woodcuts depicting witchcraft or demons, as Christensen (as I will refer to the narrative “voice” of the film for the sake of convenience) presents the introduction to his thesis; that belief in witches and demons was a peculiar example of superstitious ignorance and social pressure…only not entirely. Only the occasional pointer moving in the frame reminds us that this is in fact a “moving” picture and not a multimedia lecture. As Christensen delves into the historical explanations for this thesis, though, he slowly introduces film of mechanical toys depicting Hell and a rather impressive stop-motion animation of the medieval cosmological model of the universe and man’s place in it in relation to Heaven and Hell. It is only after this that Christensen drops the lecture mode entirely and switches almost entirely into a dramatic recreation of a medieval Danish village beset by a witchcraft panic and we transition into one of the earliest “horror” films.

Christensen starts out by showing us a “typical” witch’s cottage, and it soon becomes clear what he thinks of the idea of witchcraft. A woman comes seeking a “love potion” in order to tempt a priest, and we are treated to the sight of a fat monk stuffing his face while leering lecherously at the woman. Magic doesn’t seem particularly needed in order to get this particular holy man to break his vows, and every other request the witch is greeted with, including an extended and surreal depiction of a witch “dreaming” of a visit to a magical castle in the sky which includes some impressive visual effects and stop motion animation, at this stage is clearly intended to be viewed as wishful thinking more than magic. As if Christensen wasn’t clear enough, we are then treated to two medical students conducting a clandestine autopsy who are then denounced as witches by their neighbors. Christensen’s meaning is clear: witchcraft in general is a mix of superstitious wish fulfillment, particularly for those who practice it, and a dread of the unknown by those who fear it. Behind all of this is the specter of Satan himself, presented by Christensen as a manifestation of religious fervor and dread of the unknown and the different.

The lengthy middle section of the film mostly abandons the lecture pretense and becomes a different sort of film entirely. The film becomes a straight forward narrative drama about a village destroyed by witchcraft panic, when folk magicians use dowsing methods to “prove” than an old woman is guilty of creating a mysterious illness in a town figure. The Inquisition is called, and again we are shown a corrupt and morally questionable clergy, as a young priest becomes sexually drawn to a grieving wife and older, more experienced priests take delight in torturing and tricking the ignorant peasants. Things snowball when the accused witch in turn accuses her accusers, which ends in the entire household, and soon the entire village, being tortured or killed by the church. The highlight, and the real draw of the film for many people, is an impressive re-enactment of the witch’s “confession,” featuring elaborate costumes and special effects depicting an impressively bloody and lewdly profane dark Sabbath. It is this sequence that almost certainly led to the film’s rerelease in the 60s for the head-culture audience with an extremely ill-considered narration by William S. Burroughs, and the idea of people timing their drug dosages to kick in just as witches start flying through the air is depressingly plausible.

At the end the film slightly derails itself, mostly because Christensen tries to hard-sell a moral lesson, one that wasn’t entirely suggested by the film preceding it. Instead of ending on a note of skepticism towards moral authority and religious superstition, Christensen instead tries to contrast witchcraft fears and the persecution of those suspected of practicing witchcraft with modern prejudice against the mentally ill. Christensen is very unclear, though, on how exactly the two are linked. While his argument that outbreaks of mania in medieval nunneries that were popularly blamed on witchcraft at the time were more probably mass hysteria caused by profound social repression is compelling, Christen seems to want to argue that, in contemporary society (well, for 1922) that people who fail to treat the mentally ill with compassion are like hysterical, superstitious villagers but that doctors who treat the mentally ill are no different from the Inquisition in their callous treatment of sufferers. This would be forgivable if Christensen presented anyone as having a clear conscience on the issue, but he instead throws up his hands at the sorry state of the world. His film then, as a polemic, he fails to deliver. It’s still entertaining, and although not a conventional horror film by any means, his methods invite comparisons to the popularity of the “found footage” school of horror and his imagery is unassailable.

The Keep, 1986 ed., F. Paul Wilson
Wilson is one of those writers I’ve tried to warm up to a number of times. His “Repairman Jack” novels sound precisely like what I want in supernatural fiction, after all. But I just can’t quite bring myself to really like his work.
This is probably the closest I can get. It’s hard not to like a book about Nazis being horribly murdered in a Romanian castle. Just try to ignore the odd inclusion of Howardian High Fantasy heroes and villains by way of back-story.

So, if you created an instant horror classic, which was a massive commercial success, and spawned the equally rare well-received and contextually appropriate sequel, what do you do for a threepeat? Well, if you’re John Carpenter and Debra Hill, you ditch everything that your audience wants to see in your franchise for a surreal pagan-themed thriller that casts the Irish as a race of child-murdering lunatics, alienating both the general public and hardcore fans and leaving those few who are actually willing to give your film a shot completely baffled at your film’s nonsensical plot.

It makes a certain sort of perverse logic, actually. Halloween really was an instant classic and it represents the strongest bridge between the slasher genre and the mystery genre. (Setting aside the almost as brilliant, and earlier, Black Christmas, which Halloween certainly owes a debt to, because sometimes doing it right is more important than doing it first.) Unfortunately, after two films all that really could be said about Michael Myers had been said, and every subsequent sequel only confirmed that more and more. Not to mention that the success of Halloween inspired so many, frankly, utterly shit imitators and wannabes, and it’s not hard to see why Carpenter and Hill would maybe want to back away from that particular legacy. The downside to that, though, is that when you have control of a potentially lucrative franchise like that, you don’t want to just abandon it entirely. The devised solution, turn the “Halloween” brand into an anthology series, which each film continuing the themes of Halloween horrors, but with a new plot and characters periodically. And, actually, it’s a really good idea. The film itself, though…that’s where the problems set in.

The film opens with a man holding a Halloween mask running away from well-dressed men. He takes refuge in a gas station, and gets taken from there to the hospital, where his head is split open by a well-dressed man, who then sets himself on fire. Attending physician Dan Challis finds this whole situation awfully suspicious, especially when the pretty and half-his-age daughter of the dead man, Ellie Grimbridge starts asking questions as well. Their investigation reveals that just before he died, Ellie’s father was set to pick up a delivery of Halloween masks from the Silver Shamrock festival in Santa Mira, California; a novelty company in a sleepy mid-state town populated by Irish immigrants. The Silver Shamrock masks are the must-have item this Halloween, with their curiously tame and retro designs and maddeningly aggravating jingle which also promotes the “Horrorthon Giveaway” Silver Shamrock is hosting on television Halloween night. Challis and Ellie contrive to join a private tour of the company given to their top salesman and his family, and while on it Ellie sees her father’s car hidden in a warehouse. That night she is kidnapped by the security personnel from the company and Challis breaks in to rescue her. He is quickly captured and Conal Cochran, the company’s charismatic owner, explains his plan; to return Halloween to a night of terror and death in celebration of his Pagan heritage, by using chips from a megalith stolen from Stonehenge which have been placed inside the masks and, when activated by an electronic signal hidden in the Silver Shamrock commercial, will burn the heads of children wearing the mask and cause them to vomit up snakes and insects. Challis eventually manages to escape with Ellie, destroying the factory and Cochran in the process by causing the megalith to overload, but before he can warn the world about the commercial he is attacked by Ellie.
Because she’s a robot built by Cochran. Which pretty much destroys the entire plot and internal logic of the film.
The film ends on pleasingly ambiguous and downbeat note with Challis able to get the commercial removed from only two of the channels broadcasting it, with the fate of the commercial on the third channel (this being 1982) left unresolved.

The kernel of the idea here is actually pretty good: Pagans returning Halloween to its roots because it is their holiday, dammit. It’s a clever tweaking of the attitude some Christians take to secular Christmas celebrations. But then, it’s a Nigel Kneale idea, the man behind Quatermass. Unfortunately, his name doesn’t appear on the film because he had it removed, rather than live with the studio-mandated inclusion of several gorey, and incredibly silly and not at all necessary to the plot, scenes included in order to justify an R rating and satisfy the demands of the target audience. Who, as I said earlier, really only wanted yet another slasher film with sluts being sliced up, not a satiric riff on The Wicker Man set in California. It’s a case of the audience not quite being worthy of the material they’re being presented with, and the film suffers because of its desire to please them. Which isn’t to say that it would be a perfect film without the gore-hound pandering. The plot holes in this film are legendary. The film implies that the Horrorthon is rolling out cross-country. But if it’s being simulcast, no self-respecting kid on the West Coast is going to give up prime Trick-or-Treating hours to watch a commercial. And if it’s going time-zone by time-zone, of which there are four in the continental United States, than again, only the kids on the Eastern time are going to die. Maybe Central. But surely by the time it gets to Mountain the link between the commercial and kids fucking dying would be noted. About the only hole that’s addressed is the question of how a Stonehenge megalith was transported from Salisbury to somewhere near Gilroy, and even that is only by so purposefully lampshading the problem as to make it moot.

So, no, not good. But I’m strangely inclined to give them points for effort.
Except for the robot thing. That’s just fucking stupid.

Sometimes screenwriters turn out to be good directors as well. Sometimes actors turn out to be good directors as well. In 1988, make-up and special effects artist Stan Winston got to try out being a director with Pumpkinhead. I suspect it’s probably safe to say that the jury is still out on whether or not make-up artists are cut out for direction. Pumpkinhead did spawn several sequels and developed a cult following, but then, it’s a horror film from the 80s with a distinctive and marketable monster and it starred Lance Henriksen. It would probably have been more surprising if it had somehow not developed a cult following.

I say the jury’s out because, while the film has a couple of charms, this is pretty much its most subtle scene:

The film opens with a flashback to rural grocer Ed Harley’s childhood, when his family refused to give shelter to a man being pursued by a creature for a crime he may or may not have committed. We then cut to Ed and his son doing chores and leading a pretty satisfying life, alone in the mountains just getting by. Later, at Ed’s grocery store, some brash young city folk stop off to buy food and play with their dirtbikes. While Ed is briefly away, his son is killed when he runs after his dog onto the field where the teens are dirtbiking. The teens are split as to whether to leave or call for help, and eventually all but one go before Ed returns. Ed, reminded earlier in the day of the creature, called by the mountain folk Pumpkinhead, takes his son’s body out into the mountains to a woman reported to be a witch, asking her to unleash the creature to exact revenge. This turns out to be a less than ideal plan, as Ed soon discovers that not only is the guilt for the accident equally shared, but that the creature simply doesn’t care and Ed must experience each kill himself. The teens, meanwhile, find themselves in the usual spam-in-a-cabin scenario when Ed decides to take the creature out himself. After much chasing of teens and monsters through the woods, Ed eventually figures out what was obvious to the audience all along, and kills himself, since the creature is fueled by his own need for revenge. The film ends with the witch burying Ed’s body in the same pumpkin patch which birthed the demon, his final fate to be the body fo the creature the next time it is summoned.

The primary problem with the film is a basic lack of imagination. The creature itself bears more than a passing resemblance to the creature design from Alien, including spiky shoulders, elongated heard and prehensile tail. Oh, the color is different, but the orangey-flesh tone of Pumpkinhead only serves to make the creature somehow even more penis-like. And a penis with Lance Henriksen’s face is just disturbing on any number of levels. There’s also the question of the pacing. The film starts slow. Then it builds to a long middle section. Like, a really long middle section. Minute after minute of people talking. Or driving. Or digging. And it goes on. And on. And then on some more. Which pretty much just leaves the last act of the film for Pumpkinhead to actually show up and start killing people, thus largely negating the tension of wondering when the monster is going to appear. It also doesn’t help that, despite some of them being culpable in a child’s death, the majority of the teen victims are far more sympathetic as characters than Ed Harley or any of the other mountain folk. From the beginning, during the flashback, it’s established that the existence of Pumpkinhead, much less his use, is a sign of the “unchristian”-which here we can read as incapable of compassion or mercy-nature of the people in the community. That Pumpkinhead chooses as his first victim the only teen who did actually stay and try to help Ed’s son drives that home.

Aside from those issues, there are some interesting things the film does manage to do. It’s not quite the inversion of the “evil rednecks, virtuous city-dwellers” that I still would really like to see in a horror film, but at least it manages to offer a more nuanced view of both groups. Yes, that Pumpkinhead’s existence is tolerated by the locals, to a certain degree, is an indictment of them, but at least some of them understand that this is wrong. And while at least some of the city kids qualify as full villains, there are those who attempt to do the right thing. It’s also pretty close to an American entry in the “folk horror” category of films. It’s a genre that tends to mostly appear in British and European films and novels, since they’ve got the pagan backgrounds that usually serve as backstory. But America has folklore and folk traditions too, and it’s easy to imagine a Pumpkinhead like figure serving as a regional boogey-man. It’s something pretty different for American horror, so I feel obligated to give the film some credit there.

I may have been too harsh on The Blob. This 1984 werewolf film from Claudio Fragasso goes to even greater depths in its dedication to being absolutely terrible than that particular opus. At least the people responsible for the remake of The Blob presumably intended to make a good movie. I’m not entirely sure that such a consideration even occurred to Fragasso.
Because Claudio Fragasso made Troll 2, you see.
Yeah…

The film opens with what is quite possibly the worst music video of all time. I’m sort of dumbstruck by it, because it is just so amazingly banal as to defy description. About the only thing that’s remarkable about it is that, yes, that really is Alice Cooper. I can only presume that it was just as cost-effective to actually hire Cooper to appear in the film as it was to license a song. From there we go to Cooper, playing Vincent Raven, and his crew traveling by van to the remote house where Vince lived as a kid, and witnessed his father brutally murdered by the locals for being a werewolf. By a remarkable coincidence, just as Vince arrives in town, packs of wild dogs have been terrorizing the countryside. We then get some blurry, badly lit scenes of people scaring themselves in the woods or the old house, including a long and protracted dream sequence. The highlight of this sequence is a book Vince reads late into the night about the “scientific truth” about werewolves…featuring a photo of Lon Chaney Jr. from The Wolf Man. An odd inclusion, but also a bad sign, given the maxim to never remind the audience of a good movie in the middle of your bad movie. The next morning, the crew assembles to film another video, and things pretty much go to hell when the locals show up. From there we get the locals killing one of Vince’s friends, Vince killing the locals, wild dogs killing the remainder of Vince’s friends, Vince killing the werewolf, and Vince’s girlfriend killing Vince because, yes, it turns out that he’s a werewolf too.
And then, just to make sure the producer got their money’s worth, the opening song plays again, over clips from the film.

You would think a Italian werewolf movie starring Alice Cooper would at least have some camp value. But, no, even camp requires a certain amount of competency in film-making to work. This is just a series of loosely connected events, framed around the idea of a werewolf stalking the countryside, maybe. Even the one possible moment of originality, when the film-makers decided that it would be a really good idea to mix An American Werewolf in London with Deliverance isn’t pulled off. It occurs too late in the film to be an effective twist. And how I wanted it to work. I hate, with a passion, that sub-genre of horror concerned with how the horrible, evil rednecks terrorize the good, wealthy city-folk, and I really wanted to see a satisfying hillbilly horror plot develop. Because it would have meant at least that some kind of plot was developing.

You can pretty much miss this. If the fact that it’s by the folks who brought you Troll 2 doesn’t warn you off, and you absolutely must see a movie in which Alice Cooper kills red necks with a shotgun, I’m really not sure what I could say or do to dissuade you.

Except show you this: