For Good Men To Do Nothing: Poor Pretty Eddie and the history of the "Evil Town"

For Good Men To Do Nothing: 

Poor Pretty Eddie and the history of the "Evil Town"

Poor Pretty Eddie (1975) aka Black Vengeance, aka Redneck Country Rape (!), aka Heartbreak Motel

Dir. Richard Robinson, David Worth

Written by B.W. Sandefur

Starring Leslie Uggams, Shelley Winters, Michael Christian

 On the surface, POOR PRETTY EDDIE is barely even a horror movie. There’s no slashing, no ghosts, no stop-motion monsters, almost no blood or violence. Heck, it’s barely even an exploitation movie: there’s no leering nudity, no action or stunts or explosions or anything. Heck, it has an Academy Award-winning actress in it (Shelly Winters, THE SILENCE OF THE HAMS [sic]), and not in some bullshit Ray Milland “well, he did win an Oscar back in 1945!” kind of way; she had already won two, and was nominated for another that very year (for THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE. Must have been a slow year). In fact, for quite a bit of the front half, I thought I might have fucked up and just picked a drama with some mild thriller elements, and missed the horror genre entirely.

            But no, POOR PRETTY EDDIE is a horror movie. It doesn’t have slashers or ghosts or monsters, but it has horror. Horror in the most austere sense of the word; not fright, not shock, not even terror, but horror. It’s a horror that lives in the gut and makes the world seem to press down on you with the accumulated weight of all its sins over all the years. A kind of horror that comes not from things that go bump in the night, not from the unknown, but rather from things we know only all too well. Things that go on, every day, right out in the open, where everybody can see, and yet no one ever stops them. Nowadays that might as well be called “The News,” but POOR PRETTY EDDIE manages to take a lot of the feelings of horrified powerlessness many Americans are experiencing right now --and a significant subset have been experiencing for much, much longer-- and synthesize them into nightmarish little parable about the collective psychosis of “civilized” society.

            The movie begins, appropriately enough, with the National Anthem. Sung in a football stadium, no less (this meticulously researched behind-the-scenesarticle from Temple of Schlock specifies Atlanta Stadium on November 4, 1973, where the Atlanta Falcons took on the Los Angeles Rams [the Falcons won 15-13]). But it is the singer (Leslie Uggams, at the time best known as a singer and stage actress, but now best remembered for her roles in Roots, Empire, and most recently the DEADPOOL movies), one Liz Weatherly, who commands our attention more than the mileu. First, she is a black woman. Second, though she is clearly a gifted singer, she is performing The Star-Spangled Banner with a brisk, martial pace, instead of wrestling each note to the ground, strangling the life out of it, and leaving its corpse for the buzzards (as has become the style in subsequent years), which immediately puts us on her side.

And she’s gonna need us on her side, because when her car breaks down between gigs in some godforsaken backwoods country, she finds herself at the mercy of the three residents of a run-down lodge known as “Bertha’s Oasis”: Aging former cabaret star Bertha (Winters, LOLITA), quiet, scarred giant Keno (Ted Cassidy, Lurch from the Adams Family TV show) and Eddie (Michael Christian, HARD KNOCKS), Bertha’s handsome ‘kept man,’ who fancies himself an aspiring superstar in the mold of Elvis.

At first, these oddballs seem eccentric and a bit insensitive, but harmless enough. Still, the enormous gulf between the wealthy, successful black woman and her poor, uneducated and ignominious white hosts is so vast that none of them even need to speak it aloud     for the situation to feel profoundly uncomfortable, and ignoring that gulf, even in an apparent effort to be friendly, only makes things worse. Eddie is clearly somewhat star-struck by this beautiful, famous person who has appeared on his doorstep, and attempts to be a little too chummy with her, much to the obvious anxiety of alcoholic, insecure Bertha. Liz, for her part, is openly uninterested in making the acquaintance of these Flannery O’Connor yokels, to the point of rudeness. Uggams herself would later describe Liz as something of a diva, with a cold and selfish demeanor. You could read that in her performance, but in light of what happens later, I prefer to read her standoffishness as a matter of self-preservation. As harmless --even obsequious!-- as these backwoods weirdos might seem, she understands intuitively that a place like this is inherently dangerous for a person like her, and she intends to utilize every bit of the power that comes with being wealthy and famous to protect and insulate herself and make sure they know who’s boss, until she can get the heck out.

 She knows how tenuous her position is here, but we, the viewers, do not --especially if we, the viewer, happen to be a white man, which is the case in this instance. And so when they drag her out to a family dinner with Bertha, Keno, Eddie, the local Sheriff (Slim Pickens, DR. STRANGELOVE*) and his son (who is, as they say in the South, “a bit touched” [Lou Joffred, THE HITCHIKERS]) everything still seems OK. Sure, the Sheriff racistly assumes she’s from Baltimore (ironic, since white actor Michael Christian, who plays Eddie, actually is from Baltimore), but he’s Slim Pickens, and he just seems so folky and good-natured and harmless that you’re ready to give him the benefit of the doubt; come on, he’s just an old country bumpkin without a lot of worldly experience, he doesn’t know any better, and hey, he’s definitely trying to be neighborly, right? It’s easy to think of racism as angry white people screaming at a little girl who’s just trying to walk into school, but these white people aren’t doing that, they’ve invited Liz to have dinner with them, they’re engaging with her, they’re friendly, obviously even a little awed by being around someone famous. They’re also kind of doing all that against her obvious wishes to be left alone, but then again, they’re an eccentric lot, they’re probably just excited and missing her signals. Even when they force her to listen to a bashful, beaming Eddie sing a country song (complete with late-Elvis jumpsuit), despite her clear discomfort, you’re ready to forgive them and not think too much of it. It still seems like hey, maybe if we all got to know each other we’d find out we’re not so different.

On the way out to the car after the meal, the Sheriff, half jokingly, half clearly projecting his own sexual fantasy, teases Eddie that Liz has been making eyes at him. He drives off, thinking nothing of it, but Eddie, we can see by his expression, is startled by this idea, which has not occurred to him. And the more he thinks about it, the more he likes it. He’s been a bit cowed by this famous person, but this puts the power right back in his hands. Yes, now that he has a moment to reflect, it all makes perfect sense, after all, he is the hottest shit anywhere around, even has poor old Berta begging him to stick around no matter how bad he treats her, and he’s gonna get a big recording contract soon, he’s sure of it. So he confidently makes himself at home in Liz’s room, and when she rebuffs his advances, he violently rapes her.

           

            The next day, she’s shaken, but unbroken. She plans to go to the police, even as Bertha coldly threatens that she’ll lie in court to get Eddie off the hook. But Liz can’t even get to the police until Eddie fixes her car, and he makes it increasingly clear that he has no intention of doing that. When Bertha bribes a guest to smuggle the interloper out of the picture, Eddie follows them, kills the driver, and brings Liz back. And even when Liz steals a car and drives to the police station, she discovers, to her horror, that despite their assurances of impartiality, the authorities are more interesting in hearing the explicit details and examining her body than they are in pressing charges. As she’s bravely describing the details of her assault, the Sheriff is making lewd drawings on his notepad. When they go see the judge (Dub Taylor, 256 credited acting roles, including BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE WILD BUNCH, and GATOR) he makes her strip in a public bar so he can “view her injuries” in front of a ogling, hooting crowd of hostile drunken men (flanked on either side by a giant American flag and a giant Confederate flag, natch. I never said the movie was subtle). And even when furiously Eddie assaults the judge, they forgive everything and send her back home with him in exchange for the promise of free beer at their imminent wedding.

            So that’s what we’re dealing with here; a woman desperately trying to hold onto her dignity and sanity as she attempts first to get justice, then simply to get help, and finally, just to get out alive.

            Obviously this is a story for our time. It was a story for 1975 too, of course, but I think back then we could look at this as what they used to call “hicksploitation,” where we city people get to gawk at the venal, savage country folk and validate our anxieties about them. Everyone in 1975 would have recognized the racial and misogynist overtones of the violence as a bad thing, but I think back then we could get away with thinking it was their bad thing -- those shifty, inbred Jim Crow Southerners, with their backwards ways and Confederate sympathies and debased aristocratic decadence. Yes, this was a problem, but it was their problem, not our problem. We’re the good guys, we’re on this poor lady’s side.

            But nowadays, it’s impossible to watch this movie and feel so safely removed from its condemnation. Nowadays, there’s no escaping that this isn’t just a “few bad apples,” as the apologists always contend -- the problem is the whole damn barrel. We’re all part of this horror. We’re all complicit in it, we all feed into it, we all are saturated by it, all damned by it. It takes a village to create a victim.

That’s the horror at the heart of POOR PRETTY EDDIE; sure, Eddie is a deranged, sadistic psychopath, but it would be a simple matter to stop one rampaging lunatic… if we wanted to. But nobody does. Everybody here is getting something from Eddie; to Bertha, he’s the last vestige of her former glory, to the Sheriff he’s a means to vicariously live out his fantasies of virile youth, to the Judge, he’s a source of free beer and wild times. Everybody knows he’s a vicious maniac; they’re even a little apologetic to Liz about everything, but they’re certainly not going to mess up a good thing just to protect some stranger. And hey, sure, maybe he raped this poor girl, but he’s an OK guy overall, come on, he never did nothin’ to me, I’m sure he didn’t mean it, or he won’t do it again, maybe it’s really a little bit her fault too for leadin’ him on, or maybe it’s just none of my business and after all, it’s just her word against his, right? The excuses might be couched in the high rhetoric of justice, they might be simple, uncaring dismissals, but they are all excuses, just words we say to try and weasel out of doing anything that might endanger our comfortable acquiescence.

            And yeah, it’s easy to think of Trump here, there’s no way around it. But I’m guilty too. Look at these clothes I’m wearing. I got no idea where they came from, but I can damn sure tell you that whoever made them was probably getting fucked over by someone. Probably not even by the company I bought them from, probably by a subcontractor for a supplier for a global wholesale chain, somewhere a dozen people and a few thousand miles removed from me. Were these pants sewn by some poor woman getting raped by her foreman every night, who can’t afford to quit and can’t afford to get fired, and who knows that the shift supervisor she could report this to doesn’t want trouble with his bosses and knows that his safest bet is just to make the whole thing go away without filing any paperwork, and will see her as the problem? I’ve been insulated by layers of comforting, impersonal supply chain management from seeing what it took to make these pants, but I’m no idiot, I know that the odds of my being part of some kind of ugly exploitation are high. And it ain’t just clothes. What are the odds the people who picked the oranges that make my mimosas have access to health care, or education, or any hope of justice? Hell, even if I get the fancy organic kind, half the time it’s still the same evil corporation hiding behind a smug-faced nesting doll of brand names, and you know what, I bet the workers don’t see much of that extra two bucks I paid.

And I know I could have done something. I think maybe if I had to actually see these people who are getting the life squeezed out of them so I can have cheap oranges and pants (and some guy running a corporation out of a tax shelter somewhere can get rich), I’d have no choice but to do something. But then I remember that I had to step around a homeless guy laying in his own piss to get to the movie theater last Saturday, and I realize that no, there’s probably almost no level of cruelty and inhumanity that I couldn’t get used to. Not like, of course, but just accept as The Way Things Are, because to consider anything else would be to admit that I could do something, and I choose not to because it would be too much effort.

            And that’s how you and I end up at Liz’s forced wedding to her sadistic, psychotic tormenter, and know that this isn’t great, feel bad enough about it to try not to make eye contact with her, maybe fret about it a little in private to people we know and trust. But do we grab a shotgun and start blasting people until the world is purged of evil? We do not. We sit there and drink the free beer and thank God that we’re us and not her, and then we go home. Heck, maybe we even kind of hope somebody will burst in with a shotgun, and it doesn’t even occur to us that we’ve already chosen a side, and it’s not the right one.

            POOR PRETTY EDDIE, whatever its flaws, understands this, and understands it better, I think, than its viewers did at the time. Its evil genius is to completely sympathize with Liz, but also to perpetually tempt us to like and trust in the characters who are actively conspiring to destroy her. I mean, I’m not made of stone, I’m constitutionally incapable of not finding Slim Pickens folksy and delightful. Maybe he’s a little ignorant about systemic racism, but come on, surely he doesn’t mean any harm, surely if she can just reach him he’s gonna help her, right? But he won’t. When push comes to shove, he’ll be defending Eddie instead of his victim. And what about poor Bertha, poor desperate, miserable Bertha, haunted by memories of faded glory, and wretchedly trapped with this narcissistic asshole who she imagines is the last person who will ever make her feel like she’s worth a damn. She’s funny and vulnerable and pathetic, a broken person, but exactly the kind of entertaining character we would root for in a movie. Surely, in a way, she and Liz are in the same situation, uniquely able to see beyond Eddie’s pretty exterior to what a monster he is underneath. Surely, as a fellow woman, she’ll come around and help Liz out. But she won’t. When push comes to shove, she can think only of keeping Eddie for herself.

The movie teases us with our expectations that entertaining characters will ultimately be worth rooting for. We expect our villains to wear black hats and make malevolent speeches. We don’t expect to see them funny and vulnerable and earnest. But much of the worst evil is done by people who are just that. Nice people --and genuinely so!--  just so long as you fit neatly into their comfortable little world. These folks don’t wish Liz any harm, particularly. Maybe they even like her. But they’re all complicit in what happens to her, because they all see it right there in front of them, and none of them does a damn thing to stop it. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. And how good are, they, really, if they do nothing?

And that’s you and me, and it’s the filmmakers here too, for that matter. How complicit are they in the very thing they’re attacking? Well, they themselves were more than willing to engage in a little bit of moral relativism for a quick buck, recutting the movie for TV as HEARTBREAK MOTEL, and reframing it as a romantic comedy (?!) (they “play down” the rape, by not showing the whole sequence, and apparently replace the final bloodbath with a tender goodbye as Eddie gets a recording contract and has to leave town[!?]). Which is to say, even the film’s own producers were willing to overlook Eddie’s narcissistic viciousness when it suited them, and were confident that with a few minor story tweaks, TV audiences would, too. That’s genuinely chilling. I doubt they were happy about it, but it was financially expedient, and hey, this is a business. So they did it.

That also probably says something about the level of professionalism on the project in general; co-director and cinematographer David Worth was a reliable exploitation hand who began his career in porn (behind the camera) and worked his way up as high as directing Van Damme’s KICKBOXER and Cynthia Rothrocks’s LADY DRAGON before regressing to zero-budget hell, where he was still active as recently as 2014 (he shot PUPPET MASTER VS DEMONIC TOYS). Co-director Richard Robinson, who seems to have been the primary creative force here (judging from that Temple of Schlock retrospective) also began his career in porn, but basically stayed there (POOR PRETTY EDDIE is his sole non-Adult directorial credit, and his last credited film of any kind except for a story credit on the Troy Donahue western THE LEGEND OF FRANK WOOD in 1977). I can find no other information on him of any kind, so I’m going to assume POOR PRETTY EDDIE did not turn out to be the career-maker he might have hoped for in his big move from porn to films starring Academy-Award winners.

And yet, despite the low budget and questionable pedigrees of the filmmakers, I concede, it’s actually a pretty well-made film. All the leads acquit themselves beautifully, the authentic backwoods location looms menacingly all around (aided by the lovely all-bluegrass soundtrack), and the editing, by Worth and Frank Mazzola (who had, according to IMDB, already worked uncredited on PERFORMANCE, and would go on to DEMON SEED) is flat-out experimental at times, warping some moments into endless slo-mo, breaking simple sequences into impressionistic frenzies of images, and juxtaposing disperate moments together, most notoriously during the rape scene, in which they intercut a bunch of locals cheerfully breeding dogs with the brutal slow-motion horror show playing out in Liz’s cabin. This has been almost universally hailed as a way-over-the-line bad taste moment, celebrated by lovers of trash cinema and condemned by the arbiters of good taste, but both groups miss the obvious point the film’s trying to make by implicating the audience in watching this kind of dehumanizing spectacle for a cheap kick.

In fact, a lot of people seem to miss the point of POOR PRETTY EDDIE. It’s nearly always describes as trash or exploitation cinema (which, to be fair, is the way it was marketed) when in fact it isn’t really either one. It’s provocative, certainly, and in treading the razor-thin line between grueling misery porn and grotesque dark comedy, it definitely finds itself flat-footed from time to time (case in point: although I get what they were going for with the intercut editing in the rape scene, people are right, it’s way too much, and the point gets lost in the shock).

But you know what, for my money, the important part works: it perfectly captures the feeling of some kind of feverish bad dream, where everything is exaggerated and heightened and distorted, and maybe when you try and describe it to someone later it doesn’t make all that much sense, but you know exactly what it meant. It’s a nightmare about paranoia and powerlessness, where every step you take away from the danger just circles you back to it, and every person you run to for help ends up turning on you. Whatever else it does, it gets that right, and that’s what matters most. I can certainly see how someone might find it tonally inconsistent, with its attempts at broad black comedy and southern gothic character drama mingling uncomfortably with its bleak thriller plot, but the wild clashes in tone add to that sweaty, brain-fevered nightmare quality, with all its associated grotesques. Lots of movies can make you feel scared; few can make you feel trapped and helpless and queasy and half-insane. POOR PRETTY EDDIE has that power, and for what it’s attempting, that’s enough.

END OF PART I. Keep scrolling past the checklist for the thrilling second half!

* I wonder if Pickens and Winters ever reminisced about working with Kubrick while on the set of a movie produced by one of America’s most prominent porn kings?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

SEARCHING FOR BLOODY PICTURES

TAGLINE	IHe Does All The Things You Like… To Forget. No argument there.
TITLE ACCURACY	It is a line from the film, obviously used ironically.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	“Hicksploitation,” Evil Town, Paranoia
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Shelly Winters! Holy shit! And Slim Pickens certainly had some high-profile roles. And while Leslie Uggams wasn’t really an established actress yet, she was already a hugely successful singer and TV personality.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Ted Cassidy, if you consider THE ADAMS FAMILY horror, which I think we do.
NUDITY?	None, not even during the rape scene, thankfully.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yeah
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No, this is a purely human problem
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No, but it does have something of a conspiracy angle
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None, which supports my claim that it’s not as sleazy as they say.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Oh boy, where to begin here?

Probably a little too rough to be a classic, but too weird and potent to ignore.

********************************************

Part II: A Brief History of the “Evil Town”

Which is, of course, why I chose it to start this year’s annual CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018: SEARCHING FOR BLOODY PICTURES. Feeling helpless and queasy and half-insane is something we can all very much relate to. We’re in a pretty bad place these days, however you slice it. Heck, whichever side of the political spectrum you’re on, I think we can all see that this world isn’t working right. I don’t think anyone has much hope anymore, or much trust in the institutions of our government, our society, our or fellow man. It’s an ugly world out there, an angry world, a world which is lashing out or just plain doesn’t care. And if we didn’t already suspect as much, we’ve got a media screaming from both sides that they’re out to get you.

Since I am doomed to view everything through the lens of horror cinema, I wanted to use this year to consider this state of mind as a distinct strand of horror film. In the past, we’ve discussed the psychological necessity of horror, and the role of transformation, voyeurism, repression, and childhood. This year, though, I’m interested in the Paranoid Style in Horror Cinema. Cases roughly in the shape of POOR PRETTY EDDIE, where our protagonists enter a situation wherein they are surrounded by conspirators, working silently and invisibly in some hidden purpose, most likely drawing a sinister web around our heroes even as they attempt to untangle the mystery and make sense of the secret forces being leveled against them.

Interestingly, conspiracy fiction in even the broadest sense does not seem to have a tremendously lengthy history in Western literature (the area with which I am most familiar). The earliest I can readily identify is Things as They Are: or, the Adventure of Caleb Williams by William Godwin, first published in 1794, and concerning a wealthy landlord who conspires with various agents in government and the criminal underworld to frame and persecute an underling who has accused him of murder. Two years later, we also find The Horrid Mysteries: A Story From the German Of The Marquis Of Grosse, by Carl Friedrich August Grosse, published in 1796. It deals with a hero who, in wikipedia’s words, “finds himself embroiled in a secret revolutionary society which advocates murder and mayhem in pursuit of an early form of communism. He creates a rival society to combat them and finds himself hopelessly trapped between the two antagonistic forces.”

I’ve never read either book, so I don’t know how closely they hew to a more modern concept of a conspiracy thriller, but it’s interesting that the very idea seems to have entered fiction so late. Conspiracies, of course, were nothing new; the royal courts of Europe were already more than familiar with various secret cabals grappling for power behind the scenes, there had been the famous Gunpowder plot in 1605 England, and hell, the American Revolution itself began with something of a conspiracy. Examples of paranoid conspiracy theories are rampant far back into history -- as Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Karen M Douglas note in their excellent Conspiracy theories as part of history: The role of societalcrisis situations “...in Medieval times, the European Jewish population was a target of conspiracy theorizing, including being blamed for setbacks during the Crusades and for causing disease epidemics, such as plague. Even back in the Roman era, there are prominent examples of conspiracy theories, and these are typically connected to major crisis situations… (see Brotherton, 2015)”. Conspiracy tracks like Abbé Augustin Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism in 1797 or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 prove that promoting conspiracy theories in writing is by no means a modern phenomenon. Indeed, periodic panics around allegations of witchcraft or black magic (The Salem witch trials in 1692; the Satanicpanic) are an obvious testament to the pervasiveness and durability of paranoid groupthink (a rare early example in modern fiction is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 Young Goodman Brown, wherein the title character has a vision of his entire village secretly performing a Satanic rite).

 It’s curious, then, that much of the earliest fiction (or at any rate, the earliest accounts written to be read as fiction) I can identify on the subject are about those who are perpetrating conspiracies, rather than the victims of them: Horrid Mysteries finds its protagonist creating his own secret society; Robert W. Chambers’ Repairer Of Reputations (published in 1895) finds its central character imagining he is in control of one. Crucially, the conspiracies proposed in these stories (both malevolent and benign) almost always have political or social goals; they do not target an individual specifically, meaning that while they do propose conspiracies, they are not paranoid and persecutory in the way subsequent fiction would be. The conspiracy is primarily a tool to eact a set of goals, not the crux of the conflict itself.

This important aspect of the paranoid style would have to evolve independently. Where, then, would one naturally feel like an anxious outsider at the mercy of incomprehensible, large-scale social forces? The obvious answer might be travel to an unknown and potentially hostile locale, which would become a feature of many such stories (including POOR PRETTY EDDIE) but seems to have materialized fairly late. One must imagine that the impetus for stories about strangers who enter an unpredictable and threatening domain has something to do with the feeling of being out-of-place in an alien culture, simply a less common experience until modern times, as travel was difficult and moving into to a completely new culture was unlikely. Seen in that light, 1897’s Dracula suggests itself as an early example of this sort of story, as Jonathan Harker travels to a foreign land where Count Dracula has many subjects subtly under his power, working against the interloper in ways which are not immediately evident to him (or, if not directly working against him, certainly aware of the danger and refusing to intervene). (Intriguingly, in keeping with Grosse and Chambers, Dracula will also arrive in a foreign land [England] to find there is a secret cohort assembled against him).

The scenario puts Harker in the position to be an early literary victim of an obscure conspiracy which targets the protagonist personally.* While the concept of hidden cabals secretly influencing events is very old, the idea of a community conspiring against a specific individual --and especially a common person with no special power or title-- seems, perhaps, of somewhat more recent vintage. As near as I can tell, it appears in fiction only at the very end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. This was a time rife with conspiracy theory; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion first saw print in 1903, and paranoia about Freemasons, anarchists, communists, and immigrants was rampant. But it was also, I would suggest, a time of nascent individualism, resulting in a subtle shift whereby the usual broad anxieties about conspiratorial others began to manifest themselves in stories of individual persecution, rather than socio-political malfeasance. That certainly percolated into the fiction; John Buchan’s 1915 The 39 Steps (later adapted into a Hitchcock movie of the same name) is an early example, wherein the “wrong man” becomes the target of a gang of spies.

A major evolution came in 1924 with Dashiell Hammett’s short story Nightmare Town,  which might be the first truly paradigmatic example of conspiracy fiction in its modern form: in it, a detective slowly comes to realize that the town in which he’s pursuing his investigation was founded to act as a cover for a criminal enterprise, and the residents are all in on it. Finally, we have a case where it’s not just a secret society hiding behind the scenes; everybody’s in on it, and they’re targeting a specific stranger who has wandered unaware into their midst. A year later, Kafka’s The Trial similarly proposed a society which seems to be composed entirely of hostile co-conspirators, though one in which the victim already resides, rather than an alien one he must enter.

With the advent of World War II and the ascent of cloak-and-dagger spycraft stories to the forefront of the popular imagination, a significant wave of conspiracy fiction took off, mostly related to the incipient Cold War or the recently-defeated Nazi Germany. Graham Greene, with Ministry of Fear and The Third Man, seems to have inaugurated this type of conspiracy thriller. And by this time, cinema had already gotten in on the game; Hitchcock’s first version of THE 39 STEPS had premiered in 1935, and MINISTRY OF FEAR was adapted 1944. Still, these remained stories of largely political, or at least criminal conspiracy.

Around the same time, though, H. P. Lovecraft’s 1931 A Shadow Over Innsmouth began to unite the strains of supernatural paranoia present in Young Goodman Brown with the xenophobia of Dracula (a angle Lovecraft was certainly not going to ignore) and the tales of urban criminal conspiracy found in Nightmare Town, among others. As in the Hammett book, the protagonist of A Shadow Over Innsmouth is an outsider who arrives in an insular town peopled by secretive inhabitants who do not take kindly to prying strangers. Lovecraft had dallied with similar conceits before, perhaps most notably in his indefensibly vile The Horror at Red Hook (which is not to suggest any of his stories are particularly defensible), but it was with Shadow Over Innsmouth that he introduced a few key plot mechanics which crystalized the familiar setup into something which I think we can fairly term a distinct subgenre of fiction, which I have dubbed “Evil Town” fiction (after a 1987-released film of the same name which shares many of the key features).

Those key plot elements are all in evidence in A Shadow Over Innsmouth in their most pristine prototypical form. An “Evil Town” story, to my mind, has five relevant and distinct features which define it (and consequently define the subgenre itself): a protagonist 1) arriving at an insular foreign locale 2) peopled by subtly, but not overtly hostile inhabitants 3) who share a mysterious secret the protagonist is not privy to, 4) the pursuit of which will gradually tighten the noose around the person chasing the answers. So far, Lovecraft’s story is merely a supernatural variant of Hammett’s. But there is one more element he adds, something of a secret ingredient: 5) nearly always, the conspiracy in question centers on the protagonist in a personal way; the interloper has not simply stumbled onto a devious enterprise which is already in progress (as is the case in Horror At Red Hook and Nightmare Town) but is the direct target of the shadowy conspiracy in some obscure but intimate way which has strong overtones of fate. No matter what they do, they are bound in some way to this hidden plot, inevitably drawn into it by destiny itself. This sense of fatalism, of course, has a very long history indeed, and just like the title character in Oedipus Rex (to name perhaps the most pertinent example), the more the protagonist struggles against the tightening web of conspiracy and fate being leveled against him or her, the more inexorably they are drawn to their doom.

Post-WWII, even with the Cold War and McCarthyism and fear of the “Red Menace,” it doesn’t seem that Lovecraft’s social paranoia resonated much in fiction. The paranoia stories of the day, especially in film, mostly utilize an entirely different plot mechanic: infiltrators, as in 1951’s THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD and 1962’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, or invaders, as in 1956’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.** But that changed, as near as I can tell, with two movies: ROSEMARY’S BABY in 1968, and THE WICKER MAN in 1973. Both brought back the centrality of the protagonist to the conspiracy, and emphasized the fatalistic aspect of the story: the more the hero twists, the more the web tightens around them. Those movies proved a precursor to a trend; SERPICO (1973), THE CONVERSATION (1974), THE PARALLAX VIEW (1975), THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975), THREE DAY OF THE CONDOR (1975), THE TENANT (1976) and THE OMEN (1976) all followed on the heels of THE WICKER MAN, not so much inspired by it, I imagine, as resulting from the same cultural factors in the chaotic early 70’s (Watergate, the counterculture, Vietnam, lingering doubts about the JFK assassination) that led to widespread feelings of alienation and (as President Carter would term it toward the end of the decade) malaise. Not all of them exactly embody the “Evil Town” archetype (and several are political thrillers rather than horror movies), but all, or nearly all, foreground the personal relationship of the protagonist to the conspiracy.

The 1980s saw this trend wane somewhat (though 1983’s VIDEODROME and 1989’s SOCIETY aptly demonstrate that it never entirely departed, and that it was flexible enough to manifest and find meaning in a new generation of technology)*** but it came roaring back in the 1990s, with the scope of the conspiracy expanding beyond a single geographic area to encompass whole countries (The X-Files, THE ARRIVAL, ENEMY OF THE STATE) and even reality itself (DARK CITY, THE MATRIX), though, oddly, to the best of my recollection it seems to have almost completely missed the horror genre. 1999’s THE 9th GATE --from the director of ROSEMARY’S BABY-- is the only clear-cut example I can dig up, but even the other potentially conspiracy-themed horror movies of the 1990s (THE FACULTY, for example, and probably IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS) tend to lack the themes of individual persecution and inexorable fate which, to me, make this particular strain of conspiracy/paranoia fiction distinct.

But the turn of the century brought back Lovecraft’s misanthropic/xenophobic persecution fantasy in full force. It’s tempting to link this to the rise in general xenophobia brought on by the War on Terror; for the first time since the Cold War, Americans had a new conspiracy of hostile, nebulous others to center their anxiety upon, with a new racial dimension that shifted the anxiety away from the “silent invasion” fantasies of the 50’s and 60s, and towards something perverse and tribal which would likely have seemed entirely familiar to the famously racist Lovecraft. That’s a convenient and appreciably direct explanation, and it’s certainly part of the mix, but it doesn’t explain why the pendulum swung back from the huge-scale, impersonal conspiracies of the 1990s (The X-Files, THE MATRIX) to the intimate, fatalistic persecution fantasies defined by Shadow Over Innsmouth. But it clearly did, and has continued to do so for going on two decades now. A few examples: THE 9th GATE (1999), DAGON (2001), OLDBOY (2003), THE WOODS (2006), THE WICKER MAN REMAKE (2006), THE REAPING (2007), HOT FUZZ (2007), SHUTTER ISLAND (2010), THE SHRINE (2010), KILL LIST (2011), WAKE WOODS (2011), PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 (2011), CABIN IN THE WOODS (2011), LORDS OF SALEM (2012), PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (2012), THE CONSPIRACY (2012), OLDBOY REMAKE (2013), STARRY EYES (2014), ROSEMARY’S BABY TV REMAKE (2014), GET OUT (2017), and HEREDITARY (2018).  

I would like to propose three factors which I believe contributed to this shift. First, I would be remiss if I did not also mention an essentially practical factor: the rise of the indie horror movement, which probably has its origins in the Post-Tarantino indie boom of the 1990s, but didn’t really locate itself in the horror genre until the early 21st century. This is worth noting for a a simple, prosaic reason: paranoia movies are easy and cheap to make. You don’t have to build yourself a giant alien puppet or invest in a lot of fancy pyrotechnics; you just shoot people staring ominously at our protagonist, slap some atonal drones over the soundtrack, and whammo, you got yourself a movie which is technically a genre film without so much as a bloody squib. I’m not accusing people in the indie horror scene of being a bunch of lazy hustlers or anything, but film is a business, and when we see it trending in one direction you can usually count on money being, at the very least, an important contributing factor.    

Still, I’m more interested in the cultural motivators in play, so the second factor I’d like to point to is the gradual migration of conspiratorial thinking from the political Left (which had, more or less, a stranglehold on the topic since Watergate, and possibly even since the end of the McCarthy era) to the political Right, where it has gradually metastasized into something of an all-consuming death cult. The Left, after all, tends to see things with a collectivist bent; they saw (often correctly!) conspiracies in everything from Watergate to Iran-Contra to Cointelpro to CIA crack-trafficking, and finally, starting in the late 90s, in corporate globalism (explaining, I think, the increased scope of many 90’s conspiracy films). These forces tended to be vast and impersonal, closer to the socio-political conspiracies which first defined conspiracy fiction than the smaller-scale, more personal Nightmare Town mode. This sort of anxiety produces a subtly different kind of conflict, since, as with The Horrid Mysteries all the way back in 1796, such forces are best combated with competing social movements, lending themselves to a  revolutionary, rather than fatalistic, outlook, and consequently a noticeably different story mechanic.

As conspiratorial thinking captured the political Right, however, --riding on a wave of emerging Conservative media personalities racing to see who could be the most breathlessly Apocalyptic-- the anxieties, in keeping with a general trend in Conservative thought towards individualism, became more personal. “They” were coming not for “us,” but for me, for mine. Leftists had been fighting for ideals; Conservatives framed the conflict as one for the survival of their very identity. Increasingly, their position was framed as that of a persecuted minority (the “War on Christmas,” for example), a mindset which lends itself much better to Lovecraft’s model (and way of thinking, I might pointedly note). Consequently, the identified villains remained large scale and primarily socio-politically motivated (the government, academia, Islam, immigrants), but the way in which the conflict was framed shifted to a mode which was vastly more accommodating to personal persecution fantasies. Horror fiction has often been chided for being philosophically conservative (see, Carol J. Clover’s paradigm-shifting Men, Women, and Chain Saws) but I don’t see this shift as signaling that the horror genre is especially political; rather, I think the zeitgeist of horror fiction is generally influenced by all rising cultural angst, which finds its way into fiction even via artists who may not necessarily share specifically Conservative anxieties or political philosophies.

And of course, the shift was not only political; while Conservatives moved to occupy the axis of conspiratorial thinking, the culture at large began a not-yet-completed transition towards an all-consuming obsession with identity-shaping, mostly propelled by the advent of social media. As people’s lives became increasingly public and open to scrutiny, the feeling of being constantly under observation, perpetually left out, moved from a pathological ailment to a fundamental condition of everyday life (it was already in the air as early as 1998’s THE TRUMAN SHOW). In such an environment, we are all, to some degree, strangers in a subtly hostile foreign land, being quietly observed by unseen and potentially hostile forces. This, I believe, had the effect of altering the onus of fiction (and particularly horror fiction, which is the perennial repository of our collective anxieties) toward more personal fears: social anxiety, psychological frailty, personal weakness. The perpetual act of self-creation necessitates an obsession with self, and the fictional landscape shifted to accommodate that fact (I hasten to add that the two major recognizable waves of persecutory conspiracy fiction came at two other such cultural tipping points centered on individualism: first, the turn-of-the century shift away from traditional ruralism to a more socially fluid cosmopolitanism, and second, the emerging counterculture of late 60s and early 70s). The result is an increased prevalence of horror stakes which are situated around specific identity. 1980’s genre-defining FRIDAY THE 13th is not a film about identity; Jason doesn’t care who you are, it’s not personal with him, he just kills whoever is around. GET OUT (2018), on the other hand, is deeply invested in the perpetually mutating permutations of personal identity and belonging. You can certainly identify counterexamples, but the extreme proliferation of this strand of horror in the last two decades represents a trend which is too pronounced to entirely ignore. In fact, I would say that we ignore it at our peril.

Which brings us back to POOR PRETTY EDDIE; or rather, brings us forward and then back, since it was part of the initial 1970’s wave of “Evil Town” movies, along with THE WICKER MAN (released the same year). It is interesting to note that story types tend to come in waves, and that if the wave receded in the 80s and 90s, it’s returned with full force in the past two decades. A cursory look at the years in question suggests something which should maybe already be obvious: these “Evil Town” scenarios resounds with people when social trust and cohesion is at a low ebb (the dark reflection of the fraught search to establish identity which is also fundamental to these periods, I should think). They make sense to us when we’re frightened, when we feel out-of-place and unmoored, surrounded by inscrutable, vaguely hostile “others” who always seem to be one step ahead of us. That pretty well describes our current state; in a 2017 poll, 41% of all Americans agreed with the statement “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” We no longer need to go to some alien land to experience extreme alienation; the “Evil Town” is all around us (indeed, the hostile foreign locale has never consistently been an integral part of the formula; ROSEMARY’S BABY, for example, takes place nearly entirely in the protagonist’s own apartment building). That was Lovecraft’s natural state with the world, and the fact that we share it on a large scale is a frightening indictment of our current prospects indeed.

But I like POOR PRETTY EDDIE, because, especially if you are a white man, as I am, it offers a unique opportunity to reimagine your place within this system. Are you the victim of the persecution, or are you part of the conspiracy of silence working against the victim? We’d all like to think we’re the good guy. But what if we’re not? What if we’ve already sided up with the villains, perhaps without even really considering that we were doing so? Would we even realize it? What does it feel like to be inside the cabal, looking out? This perspective is shockingly rare; in fiction, we are virtually exclusively asked to identify with the interloper to the conspiracy. How often do we get the chance to identify with, or examine the mental state of, a participant? Julius Caesar springs to mind, I suppose, and some of those earliest works of conspiracy fiction which concern perpetrators, rather than victims, of conspiracies (The Horrid Mysteries, Repairer of Reputations). CABIN IN THE WOODS, which intentionally alters the formula. And... I don’t know that I can lay hands on a single other example. Certainly, these movies can end with the standard villainous monologue explaining the diabolical scheme, but we are very rarely ever expected to seriously consider their point of view, let alone wonder if we might be tempted by it. POOR PRETTY EDDIE, however, offers us the possibility of examining our own complicity simply by making its conspiracy one of indifference, rather than malign action, and stagnancy, rather than ambition. We are unlikely to identify with a coven of witches, or sentient computers, or any group that would want to cover Nicolas Cage with bees (or Tony Todd, to draw a parallel to another rare horror film willing to explicitly confront racism). But a group of folksy fuck-ups, who don’t really mean any specific harm, but are too busy wallowing in their own victimization to stand up to evil when it harnesses them as its mechanism for legitimization… well, that we might just be able to identify with, if we’re paying attention.****

Because, after all, we’re not fated to be here. We have other choices. For all the unease I have about mass identification with the misanthropic/xenophobic overtones of “Evil Town” stories, the aspect I worry most about is fatalism. I name-checked Oedipus Rex already, but another conceptual horror story looming just outside the circle of The Shadow Over Innsmouth is Robert Heinlein’s 1958 All You Zombies, the great progenitor of the now grotesquely-overused (spoilers) “time loop” trope, whereby a person from the future, hoping to alter the past, instead finds their intervention only ensures the outcome they originally hoped to prevent. This is the great darkness lurking at the heart of these stories; not only are we besieged by arcane enemies, but we have already lost, the fight was over before it even began, we just don’t know it yet. All our thrashing about trying to escape is for naught, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. In the most extreme cases, this leads to entirely passive protagonists, who are never even fully aware of what is happening to them, let alone able to resist it (LORDS OFSALEM, THE LEGACY).

I say fuck that. It makes a dull story, for one thing, but for another, it’s also a way to let ourselves off the hook. If the fight is a foregone conclusion, well, there’s no sense in trying. It’s easy to despair. God knows I’ve done it. But this is no time for that kind of nonsense. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. And it’s time to do something, by god. Now, more than ever, is a time to decide that we must refuse to be Lovecraft, we must reject his perspective on humanity (although we’re forced to admit we love his tentacled monsters and stuff), and that we will not be LORDS OF SALEM’d into an ignominious defeat. A time to recognize that we are all, to some degree, both conspirators and victims, but that fact alone should tell us we are not as alien and alone and besieged as we might sometimes feel --we respond to these stories because we have shared anxieties, anxieties which are sometimes rooted in truth and sometimes in neurosis, and sometimes a little in both. But we share these things, and therefore we can empathize with each other, and if we can do that, we can stand together as allies and companions. This is a time -- it is the time--for us to come together -- to throw off oppression, to be sure, but also simply to not be so alone and afraid in this huge, frightening world. It is a time to plot together, to bring each other in instead of pushing each other out. To be each other's’ co-conspirators. To make the Evil Town into Our Town.*****

It is also, in a smaller but no less important sense, a time to watch horror movies. Some great ones, some forgettable ones, certainly a lot of really bottom-of-the-barrel awful ones. All of which say, in some small way, something about us, about what we fear, about what we aspire to. And also serve as a good chance to get together and get blasted on Mad Dog and check out the latest Chucky sequel.

And so, I welcome you, my friends --and you must truly be my friends, if you’re still reading at this point-- to join me, to conspire with me, as we plunge into

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018: 

SEARCHING FOR BLOODY PICTURES

THE END.

* Early detective fiction like Things As They Are or the Sherlock Holmes tales The Five Orange Pips occasionally feature victims of criminal conspiracies, but they typically have open antagonistic relationships with their tormentors. Holmes stories like The Red Headed League and The Stockbroker’s Clerk do feature uncomprehending dupes of a criminal conspiracy, but in both cases the person the charade revolves around is not actually the intended victim but a peripheral part of a crime unrelated to them.

 ** A notable exception is Shirley Jackson’s excellent The Summer People from 1951, a rather perfectly distilled vision of this trope hewn down to its most primal core.

*** And also 1988’s THE AMERICAN SCREAM is, if it is anything identifiable, a prime example of the phenomenon.

**** And not even exclusively white or male Americans. No matter how oppressed you are, you better believe you’re still participating in systems that victimize others. The world economy, for example.

***** Like what I did there?

Appendix A:

An Incomplete List of “Evil Town” Movies, updates as I think of more or you tell me what I’ve missed:

CITY OF THE DEAD (1960)

ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)

POOR PRETTY EDDIE (1973)

THE WICKER MAN (1973)

SERPICO (1973),

THE PARALLAX VIEW (1975),

THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975),

THREE DAY OF THE CONDOR (1975),

THE TENANT (1976)

THE OMEN (1976)

VIDEODROME (1983)

EVIL TOWN (1987)

THE AMERICAN SCREAM (1988)

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1994)

THE ARRIVAL (1996)

ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998)

DARK CITY (1998)

DISTURBING BEHAVIOR ? (1998)

THE FACULTY (?) (1998)

THE MATRIX (1999)

THE 9th GATE (1999)

DAGON (2001)

OLDBOY (2003)

THE WOODS (2006)

THE WICKER MAN REMAKE (2006)

THE REAPING (2007)

HOT FUZZ (2007)

SHUTTER ISLAND (2010)
THE SHRINE (2010)

KILL LIST (2011)

WAKE WOODS (2011)

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 (2011)

CABIN IN THE WOODS (2011)

LORDS OF SALEM (2012)

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (2012)

THE CONSPIRACY (2012)

OLDBOY REMAKE (2013)

STARRY EYES (2014)

ROSEMARY’S BABY TV REMAKE (2014)

GET OUT (2017)

HEREDITARY (2018).