BOO (The Darker Saints of Cinema)
An Article in Eight Reels with Intermission
By Dave Hontiveros


Intro

Craven. Carpenter. Romero. Argento. Raimi. Cronenberg.

During the glorious, heady era of the 70’s and 80’s, these names were synonymous with horror, these were the auteurs of the gruesome and the macabre, and if you were inclined towards that end of the cinematic spectrum, these were the names of darker saints, writer-directors whose celluloid visions served to both enlighten and disturb, 24 frames per second.

But the 90’s came and went, horror donning “gentler” masks and going underground, still there, most definitely, but far subtler than the gore-soaked, blood-drenched films of the 80’s. And then of course, when American high school violence reached its most media-visible in the Littleton, Arkansas shootings, genre material like Scream and (bizarrely enough) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, became Senate hearing scapegoats.

In all of this, those of us who grew up with these horrormeisters, and somehow lost touch with the scene, could wonder, Well, where the hell are they now?

Reel One
Bursting from Canada in the mid-70’s with his chilling visions of mind/body conflict, independent revolutions of the flesh, and societal decay, Cronenberg’s most recent films were the controversial adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s auto-erotic Crash, and 1999’s study of the nature of reality (virtual and otherwise), eXistenZ. Both were excellent and unsettling pieces from cinema’s undisputed master of organic horror (once called “Canada’s King of Venereal Horror”).

To my mind, beginning from 1976’s harrowing Rabid * (which stars porn queen Marilyn Chambers, in case anyone’s interested), Cronenberg has only really disappointed me once, with his curiously drab take on M. Butterfly, with Jeremy Irons (who gave a truly stunning performance as twin gynecologists in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers).

Currently, Cronenberg is working on something called Spider (to be scored by long-time collaborator Howard Shore, who just won the Oscar for the musical score of The Fellowship of the Ring). To the best of my knowledge, Spider is a psychological horror film, and we all know how downright disturbing Cronenberg’s forays into the mind can be (Crash and Dead Ringers instantly come to mind), so I’m anticipating this one with extreme relish.

* (I have yet to find a copy of Cronenberg’s debut feature, 1975’s They Came From Within, which is the only film of his I have not yet seen.)

Reel Two
Sam Raimi slammed his way onto the horror scene with 1983’s in-your-face exercise in extreme horror, The Evil Dead, but took up most of the ‘90’s co-producing direct-to-video sequels of his 1990 hit Darkman, as well as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. (So, from a certain angle, one could say Raimi’s to blame for inflicting these shows upon us. As for me, I figure, they poured a heap of money into his bank account, and the truth is, an artist needs money to keep himself—and his family, if he has one—clothed and fed while he’s off chasing his muse; I may not have been a fan of either show, but I’m nonetheless happy for Raimi’s success.)

Regarding his film work, Raimi took a conscious step away from genre material with 1998’s A Simple Plan, which earned him critical acclaim as he proved himself capable of directing a film without Evil Dead zombies or a Darkman running through its scenes. (Billy Bob Thornton’s well-earned Oscar nomination for his performance in A Simple Plan was the proverbial icing on an already delectable cake.) He followed that triumph with the excellently-acted, though rather lethargic The Gift, where the always divine Cate Blanchett played a psychic pulled into the disappearance of wealthy socialite Katie Holmes.

Now, Raimi is making a sizeable splash by helming one of this year’s summer monsters, Spider-Man, which should benefit from his kinetic camera-work and the intriguing possibilities of Tobey McGuire’s first brush with the mainstream Hollywood popcorn machine.

Reel Three
Italy’s Alfred Hitchcock (or so he’s been called), Dario Argento, has been working on a relatively steady basis over the past years, though the tenor of his current work is a far cry from the technicolor phantasmagoria of 1977’s Suspiria and 1980’s Inferno. His most recent offerings were The Phantom of the Opera (an undertaking he’d first talked about in the late 70’s), and 2000’s Sleepless.

Though I feel Sleepless is the better of the two, it still seems a pale echo of Argento’s past films. The train and nightclub murders are tame compared to the classic Argento setpiece of sustained stalking, culminating in a violent flurry of bloodletting (setpieces apparently inherited and given a boost of Hollywood adrenaline by Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven in the first two Scream films). The dazzling, bravura camerawork, most eivdent in ‘87’s Opera, is gone as well (also apparently inherited, this time by David Fincher and his trusty computer, in Fight Club and this year’s Panic Room). It’s strange that Sleepless looks so bland, since it was shot by the Oscar-winning cinematographer, Ronnie Taylor, who also shot Opera.

On the plus side, there is still the almost reflexive self-reference (characters’ attitudes towards their fictional creations mirror Argento’s towards his own characters—as in Tenebrae—again brushing against the misogynistic label the director has been tagged with, just as Hitchcock has). There is also a shadow of the “animal trilogy” (Argento’s first three films, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cat O’Nine Tails, and Four Flies on Gray Velvet—1969 to 1971) in the nursery rhyme central to the Sleepless murders (a rhyme written by Argento’s daughter, Asia).

On the whole though, Argento’s latest is a passably involving thriller with thematic continuity to the rest of his body of work, but is ultimately burdened by a naggingly unsatisfying climax, and the shades of Argento past.

Reel Four
Humble recommendations: Clearly, David Cronenberg and Sam Raimi are still on their game, so there is nothing I might have to say to better their already exceptional work.

Cronenberg has continued to study and scrutinize his by-now familiar obsessions in his impressive body of work, while Raimi was garnered critical acclaim outside the genre and currently courts the spotlight of the Hollywood maintream. (Cronenberg’s various critical accollades, particularly for his stunning 1986 remake of The Fly, are still firmly grounded in the boundaries of the genre, even as they transcend those self-same boundaries.)

And while Dario Argento displays echoes of his past work in Sleepless, it basicalle treads the same ground of the madnesses of killers and the faceless frailty of victims. Unlike Cronenberg, who has consistently managed to apply his recurring themes, his personal predilections in different cinematic and narrative contexts, Argento has gone from film to film travelling the same labyrinth of the insane he first mapped in the “animal trilogy,” merely taking different routes to arrive at its bloodied center. And though it would be interesting to see Argento return to his former gore-soaked glories, I’m not sure the current social atmosphere would appreciate his operatic cinema of violence.

But as you so insightfully pointd out to us in Opera, Signore Argento, we are compelled to gaze upon your crimson visions; the voyeuristic impulse is already there. So we are with you; we will always be with you, in the black, waiting, breathless, for the truths that only the dark can tell.

Intermission
In the cool dark of the theater, a spear of light stabs through the black, illuminating a screen, casting images upon its white plane. There are certain films though, whose lights cast another sort of darkness onto the screen, blacker, more disturbing than the dark that surrounds you.

Reel Five
Alternately scorned and praised for the relentless savagery of his early work on Last House on the Left (1972) and 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes (for which he was described as “a director making a serious attempt at social criticism within the horror genre”), Wes Craven hit a career high in 1984 with A Nightmare on Elm Street, which introduced to pop culture the horror icon Freddy Krueger, he of the burned counternance and razorblade glove.

Unfortunately, Craven wandered rather aimlessly afterwards (for which he was, in turn, described as “a real if not always successful artist”). With ho-hum entries like 1988’s The Serpent and the Rainbow and unmitigated dreck like Deadly Friend (1986) in the interim, it wasn’t until 1996’s post-modern paean to the slasher film, Scream, and the following year’s Scream 2, that Craven hit that perfect pitch once more. (The dismal Scream 3 is best forgotten, save perhaps for Parker Posey’s hilarious turn as the Gale Weathers of Stab 3, the film’s meta-movie.) Craven also directed the Meryl Streep-starrer Music from the Heart, which bagged her an Oscar nomination but apparently did nothing for Craven’s reputation beyond the horror field.

Reel Six
George Romero (whose name will be forever associated with the word “zombie,” having been responsible for the Dead trilogy, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, 1979’s Dawn of the Dead—co-written with Dario Argento—and 1985’s Day of the Dead) wasn’t very visible in the 90’s. He actually pointed to the box-office success of Scream as the reason why Hollywood became interested once more in what horror—and by extension, he—had to offer cinema.

He popped up in 2000 with Bruiser, a story closer to the psychological terrain he explored in 1988’s Monkey Shines, and his adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Half (1991). In Bruiser, we have a virtually invisible man (played by Jason Flemyng of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, The Red Violin, and From Hell) stepped on by nearly everybody, who is liberated by a featureless mask that he wakes up wearing one morning, and finds he can’t take off.

There is a lot of metaphor in this movie; the metaphor is so thick, you’d need a cleaver to work through it. Which is not bad in itself, mind you. Anyone who knows me is well aware I am enamored of the metaphor. But you also need to tell a good story, and sadly, Bruiser just doesn’t make that grade.

Flemyng’s character doesn’t suitably convey the Everyman aspect which he should (unlike, say, Edward Norton’s nameless Narrator in the astounding Fight Club), nor the invisibility of the anonymous (as with Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman in the wry ‘80’s satire, American Psycho). Which is not to fault Flemyng, since I feel the main problem lies in Romero’s script, rife as it is with annoying stereotypes (Flemyng’s boorish boss and bitchy wife come to mind) and predictable plot turns (guess who swindled the poor schmuck out of all that money).

And though Romero’s name was floated during the build-up to the filming of the Playstation hit, Resident Evil, that film eventually landed in the lap of Paul Anderson, director of (gasp!) Mortal Kombat. Sad, since as you may recall, Romero = zombie.
Oh well.

Reel Seven
John Carpenter, meanwhile…

Let’s see. 1978’s Halloween remains one of the best of the slasher genre (it did, after all, spark off the trend); his adaptation of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1982’s The Thing) remains one of the best science-fiction films ever made, with physical on-set make-up effects that are still eye-popping and jaw-dropping after two decades; 1987’s Prince of Darkness is officially the last horror movie that genuinely scared me.**

So, yeah, he rated once. He rated big time. But what has he done lately? Vampires? Ghosts of Mars?! (Where Clea Duvall and Jason Statham are just wasted, by the way.) Good God! There isn’t anything in these two sad and sorry excuses for films that we haven’t seen him do before. Creative fatigue is one thing, but this…. This is creative coma!

Look, the man once said, “… I went on and made other films and always thought, `Maybe this is the film where I’ll be taken seriously and wind up in a magazine like Film Comment.’” With Vampires? With Ghosts of friggin’ Mars ?! Not likely!

By now, one must surely sense the vehemence, and I’m truly sorry, Mr. Carpenter, but the new stuff is just tired and isn’t terribly interesting. In two words: it sucks. (And there. The greatest tragedy. I’ve fallen into hip monosyllables.)

** (Which is not to say there haven’t been any good horror movies since 1987; hell, there’ve been great horror movies since then. There just haven’t been scare-you-silly-so-you-sleep-with-the-lights-on sort of horror movies in the past fifteen years, at least not for me.)

Reel Eight
Humble recommendations: Despite Wes Craven’s success with the first two Scream films, the collapse of the third cements the fact that Kevin Williamson’s sly scripting had a significant role in what made these movies work. (The third Scream was scripted by Ehren Krueger, also responsible for the flawed Arlington Road.) Craven’s last film as writer-director was 1994’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, a gutsy, but horribly bungled attempt at post-modern horror. From the Scream example, it seems what Craven needs are solid, ingeniuous scripts to galvanize his directorial skills. (Of course, Craven has recently turned his attentions to writing, with his debut novel Fountain Society. What that bodes for his film work is unknown to this writer at this time.)

And George Romero, all kidding aside, does not need shambling, brain-eating zombies on set to make interesting films. Monkey Shines was a taut, disturbing movie, and his E.C. horror comic tribute Creepshow, was a blast (though that did have some walking corpses in there too). Like Craven, I just feel that Romero needs stronger, tighter scripts to work on.

Now, John Carpenter’s particularly troublesome. Who am I to presume to say, If you’re just gonna make crap, then don’t make anything at all? I suppose the problem is, when you’ve seen the glories of an artist’s peaks, it makes it that much harder to view the valleys. But, like I told Signore Argento last time, Mr. Carpenter, I’ll persevere, as I can only hope you will, and pray that the next time we meet in the cool dark, the flickering beam will illuminate those dark, towering heights I so fondly remember.

Outro
But you can be sure that when the screaming starts, and when the bloodletting commences, and when the axes descend toward human necks, and when hideous, stomach-wrenching alien creatures slither through gooey fluids to claim our souls, I shall be there.


Somewhere on the periphery of the shadows.
Scribbling notes.
Tallying bloody body counts.
Observing socially relevant issues.
And loving every bloody moment of it.
-- John Stanley
“The Career That Dripped With Gore”


Incidental note: of the half dozen horrormeisters we’ve looked at in Boo, three of them have adapted Stephen King: Cronenberg (1983’s The Dead Zone), Carpenter (Christine, from the same year), and Romero, who’s done the King shuffle twice (The Dark Half and 1982’s Creepshow).