Screamplay

Screamplay (1985)

Dir. Rufus Butler Seder

Written by Rufus Butler Seder and Ed Greenberg

Starring Rufus Butler Seder, Eugene Seder, George Kuchar, Katy Bolger, George Cordeiro

SCREAMPLAY has two blatant red flags within its first 30 seconds: a Troma logo at the outset, and then --even more worrisome-- an actual executive producer credit for Lloyd Kaufman in the opening credits. So you can't even console yourself that Troma just distributed it; this is a certified, Lloyd-Kaufman approved Troma production, of which there are, what, maybe four decent ones? Out of thousands? Those are very long odds indeed.

But somehow SCREAMPLAY manages to beat the odds, and not just end up watchable (which was certainly the very most optimistic thing I could imagine for it) but actively good. I want you to pause for a moment, and consider just how fucking unlikely that was. I cold-watch upwards of 50 or 60 horror movies a year, and often go for YEARS without finding one which could actively be called good. Entertaining? Sure. Amusingly incompetent? Often. Crappy but eccentric enough to be interesting? Occasionally. But genuinely good? And with a Troma logo upfront? Absolutely unheard of. It's so unlikely that I spent nearly the first hour of the movie thinking there must be something wrong with me, because there was no possible way this was as good as it seemed. But here I am, more or less sober, with several days to think it over. And I can tell you with confidence: Yeah, I think SCREAMPLAY is the real deal.

If I have not taken leave of my senses and it really is fucking rad as hell, it is entirely due to one man: Director / co-screenwriter / star actor / editor / visual effects / matte painter / sound editor Rufus Butler Seder, a mysterious one-and-done first-and-only-timer in every single one of those roles.* If the movie is at all autobiographical, it’s certainly possible that such a laborious one-man production may have broken him down and made the prospect of a follow-up seem pretty powerfully unappealing. But I’m more inclined to believe his retirement from cinema was more in kind with that of the great Russian director Elem Klimov, who made the masterpiece COME AND SEE and then simply declared he was done with the medium: "I've lost interest in making films. Everything that was possible I felt I had already done," he said in 2000. OK, OK, SCREAMPLAY is probably not as a good a film as COME AND SEE. But what it has in common with Klimov is a distinct vision. They may be operating on different artistic levels and to different ends, but both movies have a very specific, unique tableau they wish to conjure. There’s nothing loose or haphazard about SCREAMPLAY; every element has been carefully curated to a specific end.

That end is something genuinely unlike anything I’ve ever seen before: A black comedy about the creative process, set in some kind of vague 1950s Hollywood, as filtered through German Expressionism. I’ve read enough reviews offering unwieldy lists of ingredients in an effort to describe it (“BARTON FINK meets SUNSET BOULEVARD in an ERASERHEAD world!”) to know better than to try that route myself; suffice to say, it involves screenwriter Edgar Allan (Seder himself, sporting a character name which just serves to further complicate the film’s taxonomy) arriving fresh in Hollywood with the intent of writing the great American screenplay (screamplay?). Recruited fresh off the bus by a down-on-his-luck agent (Eugene Seder, presumably a relative), he quickly finds himself stuck in a run-down apartment complex managed by the brutish Martin (underground film director and video artist George Kuchar!) and peopled by a menagerie of desperate Hollywood stock types, from the naive aspiring actress (Katy Bolger, only one other credit**) to the faded Hollywood diva (M. Lynda Robinson, “Newspaper Purchaser #1” in WITH HONORS) to the burned out ex-rocker (Bob White, SCREAMPLAY). As they each in turn visit their particular brand of toxic dysfunction on him, he pours his fury into murderous revenge fantasies in his screenplay, explaining that to make great art, he has to confront the darkness within himself. But this confrontation gets a little darker than he bargained for when the tenants start dying in exactly the way his screenplay describes.

That scenario makes for a perfectly adequate mystery-thriller setup, with just a touch of introspection about the dark side of making art (there are some notable similarities with Stephen King’s THE DARK HALF, published a few years later). In its basic form, it’s boilerplate enough to barely register, much less justify the kind of praise I’m about to throw at it. But like most great genre art, the premise is just a skeleton upon which to hang an aesthetic, which is the movie’s real interest. And what an aesthetic we have here! For reasons known only to its creator, SCREAMPLAY’s simple, Agatha Christie slasher plot has been meticulously visualized as a lost German Expressionist film from the 1920s. This is hardly the first horror film to draw on Expressionism as an aesthetic, but it’s not merely “influenced” or “informed” by the style of this era. It’s painstakingly recreated in every detail, from the broad, theatrical performances (Seder himself sets the tone perfectly, with his intense oscillation from cheerful earnestness to wild fury), to the wavering lighting, to the chaotically stylized sets, to the surreal, hallucinogenic compositing, to the fractured, freudian psychology. Isolate basically any frame and you could convince me I was actually looking at a lost film from the 20s.

...Except also, not quite. Because while the film is absolutely fastidious about recreating the look and feel of that era, it’s by no means some kind of wholesale pastiche. It’s also casually anachronistic in a million little ways, not the least of which being that it’s not a silent film. Characters speak aloud, and there’s sound effects and music and everything, no intertitles whatsoever. That alone should be enough to completely shatter the illusion, and yet somehow it doesn’t at all. The movie is so powerfully evocative of its chosen milieu that despite the spoken dialogue, mild explicit violence and sex (it is a Lloyd Kaufman production, after all!), and visual signifiers placing it somewhere in the vague 50’s or 60’s (James Dean-esque biker hunks, burned-out rockers, killer transvestites on roller skates [it is a Lloyd Kaufman production, after all!]) never for one moment does it seem phony or distracting. It doesn’t feel like an impossible mish-mash of incompatible culture detritus, however much it seems like it should; it just feels like a movie made in some bizarre alternate reality where cinematic style never evolved beyond the mid-20s. Sure, you couldn’t hear the voices in those old movies, but you get the feeling that this is what they would have sounded like. And sure, they didn't have scores, but the jazzy, off-kilter music of George Cordeiro and Basil J. Bova (both also actors in the movie) is an exactly perfect fit for the demented tone. It feels right. And I mean exactly right. Unlike the rash of 80’s pastiches which have recently proliferated, this doesn’t feel in the least bit nostalgic or satirical; it simply feels like the only correct way to tell this particular story. It’s doesn’t parrot an archaic aesthetic, it simply embodies it.***

The story itself is far less groundbreaking than the spectacular look of the film, but it’s sturdily constructed and finely-tuned enough to leave an impression, nonetheless. Like the curious George Romero trilogy of DARK HALF, MONKEY SHINES and BRUISER, it places the creator of dark, antisocial art under the spotlight and forces him to ponder why he's drawn to such art, and what it's for. And it is, I think, a little more honest and nuanced than many of its peers which address the same basic moral conundrum. Cheerful, optimistic Edgar arrives in LA with a childlike excitement about the great art he’s going to create.**** But as he gets shit on and abused more and more, he pours his incipient bitterness into the script, claiming he’s doing it to get audiences to “face a part of yourself that you’re unwilling to acknowledge.” Far from being disturbed by this, though, he sees it as a vital part of the creative process, arguing that channeling base instincts  --where human passion runs deepest and most fiercely-- is intrinsic to all great art. Experiencing monstrous feelings does not make us monsters; in fact, it makes us human. When his stoned neighbor claims he has the “hands of a killer,” he laughs “yes, to a degree they are!” (he is, after all, killing the characters in his script with his hands -- by typing them out of existence) but he goes on to declare, “but I’m not actually capable of killing anyone!”

That, of course, is open for debate, because as he begins to murderously fantasize about killing his neighbors, we’re mighty suspicious that he might actually be doing exactly what he’s supposedly writing about. But no, his “victims” are still alive and well when we check back on them immediately after he writes their death scenes. His “murders” really are just a means for him to channel his rage into his art… right? But “sins of the mind and sins of the body are as one!” someone tells him. And for a horror movie, SCREAMPLAY actually treats this idea pretty seriously, ending with an elegant but rather ingenious solution to the mystery that plays off its musings in a thoughtful, darkly funny way (right down to the elegantly perfect final line, with its sublime double meaning).

It’s not a perfect movie, of course; even at a perfectly reasonable 92 minutes, it might dawdle a little more than it needs to at the onset. And while the cast of mostly unknowns is astonishingly consistent and on-board with exactly the kind of intentionally stilted acting the movie obviously requires, there is a sleazy publicist character (Ed Callahan, only one other acting role, but 113 credits in the sound department, including on this film and a sampling of impressively high-profile Hollywood productions) who seems a little too contemporary and restrained to fit in with the broad, stylized and orphaned-from-time performances of the rest of the cast. But those are relatively minor concerns, mere momentary distractions from what is otherwise a stupendously assured and effective film, all the more impressive considering its unique vision was the product of a first-time director (and actor! And screenwriter! And editor! And matte painter! and…) on what was surely a budget that would barely cover the hairdressers on an AVENGERS movie. And I know I’m not the only one who thinks so: Lloyd Kaufman picked the film as one of five “Troma Unsung Classics” in his memoir, All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger. It probably deserves better company than that, but maybe like its protagonist, it drew some sense of purpose from its disreputable compatriots. Troma might not be any better at cultivating great art than Hollywood is, but at least real recognize real. Credit where it's due: Kaufman saw something special here, and for once in my life I can't argue with him. As a lover of cinema, I can't help but find it a great tragedy that Rufus Butler Seder never made another movie, but then again, this is a hell of a high point to retire on.

PS: Also, I didn’t know where else to put this in the review, but there’s a stuntman in here whose name is “Flip Johnson,” and I’m not making that up. I just thought you should know.

* Who later in life achieved some level of fame as the creator of a process called “scanimation,” a type of “barrier grid animation and stereography” which allows still images to appear to move, and he has successfully parlayed into a career as a best-selling book author/illustrator and mural creator. 

** A video short directed by her SCREAMPLAY co-star George Kuchar two years later!

            *** A good comparison point might be Ti West’s masterful HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, which also adopts a heavily stylized, somewhat outdated aesthetic because it is intrinsically the most effective milieu in which to situate the particular story being told. Though pastiche movies have become commonplace since then, most seem to be more interested in evoking nostalgia than telling a story which cries out for the period trappings.

            **** In fact, Edgar’s relentlessly cheerful demeanor in the face of the many indignities he endures reminds me quite specifically of Johnny Depp’s immortal ED WOOD (which came out almost a decade later). This in turn causes me to note a surprising amount of other similarities: they’re both 1) Hollywood satires about a enthusiastic amateur trying to break into the biz, 2) shot in black and white, 3) set in the 1950s, 4) feature strong elements of German Expressionism (though ED WOOD’s are admittedly more inspired by the Universal Horror films) 5) share a specific love of the Universal Horror cycle of the 1930s (the first thing Edgar Allan does in Hollywood is visit the walk-of-fame stars of Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and, yes, Bela Lugosi! But he also treats himself to a triple-showing of NOSFERATU, THE GOLEM, and CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI) and 6) concern their protagonist struggling with hidden urges which they perceive to be harmless but are a source of suspicion for those around them. Can I prove that Tim Burton watched SCREAMPLAY and then ripped it off and made his best movie? No, I can’t prove that. But remember that time he stole Kevin Smith’s idea for the dumbest possible ending to PLANET OF THE APES? I’m just sayin’ there’s precedent, here.