Gone With The Wind

 

Gone With The Wind (1939)

Dir. Victor Fleming, George Cukor (uncredited), Sam Wood (uncredited)

Written by Sidney Howard, from the novel by Margaret Mitchell

Starring Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard

 

I first watched GONE WITH THE WIND back in the heady first year or so of my transition from casual movie-goer to active cinephile, when I was trying to familiarize myself with some of the acknowledged classics of the medium that I had never encountered in my youth. That puts my sole previous viewing about twenty years ago, and my memory of it was pretty fuzzy; I remembered that it was startlingly racist, and that it was otherwise boring. That’s pretty much it.

 

I think my younger self was probably alienated by the stagey, dated melodrama, the rhythms of which would have been wholly unfamiliar to me at the time. And besides, what teenage boy was going to sit with rapt attention through a three-hour will-they-won’t-they relationship drama, no matter how epic the backdrop? But at any rate, revisiting it two decades later, I find that my original take was only half-right; it definitely is still startlingly racist, but it's also definitely not boring. In fact, even with the epic runtime, it’s pretty densely packed with incident. Much of that incident does not play the same way to modern eyes that it would have in 1939, of course, but that probably makes the movie more interesting, on average, rather than less. Enough so that this viewing left me wondering if the movie is possibly a little more nuanced –and perhaps even subversive?-- than it generally gets credit for. In some ways. Maybe.

 

I realize that’s a pretty bold suggestion to make about one of the most outwardly regressive movies that is still watched with any regularity, and there’s certainly a danger in minimizing the film’s moral odiousness. And make no mistake, it is odious, in plenty of ways which are by this point so obvious and extensively documented that I feel the need to mention them only in passing, confident that an in-depth accounting would be familiar to the point of tedium for any modern viewer. But all the same, there is, I think, a case to be made that the film may not be quite so straightforward an act of revisionist propaganda as it might at first seem. The root of this interpretation is drawn from the film’s strangely contradictory nature. In short, the disconnect between what the film says and what it depicts is sometimes so extreme that it’s hard to reconcile as anything but subversive.

 

The most obvious example is the very heart of the film itself. Despite being billed as the "greatest romance of all time," it's almost unbelievable what a horrible, disturbing relationship Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler have. She is a profoundly selfish, unlikable character, and he's slightly more likable only in that he provides the audience with a surrogate to constantly mock and demean her. She openly hates him, and he doesn't appear to think much better of her, except that he wants to fuck her. The only rationale ever offered as to why these two repellent prigs should be together is that they are kindred spirits… in the sense that they're both shameless, ego-maniacal grifters who will do anything to get ahead. And they don't even seem to relate very much on that level. Perhaps the single most positive interaction they have in the whole movie is when he violently rapes her and the movie makes sure we know she loved it. The word “passion” is appropriate only in the sense of “passion play.”

 

I'm sure when I first saw the movie, I assumed all this was a terrible miscalculation: man, I can't believe they thought we'd identify with these sociopaths. Today, this seems more like a feature than a bug. If audiences ever took this to be a swoony romance, they did so in direct defiance of what the movie is overtly depicting. In fact, the movie seems to more or less openly present Scarlett as an anti-hero, a poisonous black hole of a human who will destroy anyone she comes in contact with in the vain, single-minded pursuit of a meaningless, materialistic delusion, more along the lines of THERE WILL BE BLOOD's Daniel Plainview than TITANIC's Rose. The movie is interested in Scarlett's long, miserable journey of self-destruction, but I don't know that it's necessarily sympathetic; at the very least, it is very closely attuned to (some of) the harm she's causing, and makes certain the audience is equally aware. In fact, it has a real penchant for kicking her while she's down; even at moments when we might be tempted to at least feel sorry for her (the end of her harrowing journey through war-torn Georgia, the final scene when she's thrown away everything that had any hope of offering her some happiness) the arc of the scene inevitably builds to a reveal of what a delusional monster she is. At the very least, the movie is clear that Scarlett is entirely the author of her own misery. Even the tribulations she isn’t directly responsible for – the desolation of her family homestead, for example—have the direct effect of making her a worse person, rather than bringing out the best in her.

 

If the movie is a critique rather than a celebration of its protagonist, is it too much, then, to wonder if the movie also harbors doubts about the story's much-celebrated veneration of the Old South? Is it possible that one of the most famously reactionary movies of all time is actually a little bit more ambivalent than its reputation might suggest? After all, Scarlett's destructive obsession (which the movie more or less unambiguously presents as a character flaw) stems from her romantic fixation --one can hardly call it love-- with Ashley Wilkes, positioned by the movie as the avatar of the chivalrous, gentlemanly high-society Southerner whose passing the narration lachrymosely laments. But surely I am not the only person who questions if the movie feels the same way. Wilkes is, in fact, portrayed as an almost unbelievably pathetic character, and played with all the charisma of a sodden slice of unbuttered whitebread (actor Leslie Howard reportedly hated making the movie, and it shows; never has an erstwhile romantic lead looked so miserable and defeated). He’s fretful, utterly ineffective, unable to fully commit to either his dull marriage with his sexless, naïve wife (Olivia de Havilland) or to the torrid affair Scarlett is begging him for, ultimately ending up a cowed lacky, dependent on Scarlett’s largess. What exactly is supposed to be appealing, here? And speaking of appealing, let’s refresh our memory about the unhappy circumstance which keeps Scarlett from her ideal man. Why, it’s his semi-arranged marriage… to his first cousin, under the rather profoundly disturbing theory that “like must marry like”! Surely no 20th century audience would be expected to be nostalgic for that quaint little custom of the halcyon days of the genteel South, not even in 1939.

 

 

And there’s more: Southern high society is consistently shown to be ruthlessly hierarchical and populated mostly by petty, hypocritical pedants, obsessed with restrictive social status. The movie’s most sympathetic characters are the outsiders and outcasts, including Rhett, brothel madam Belle (Ona Munson, THE SHANGHAI GESTURE), and even enslaved woman “Mammy” (Hattie McDaniel; we’ll get to her later), and most of the turns the movie presented as “victories” come from Scarlett’s fearless defiance of the restrictive social norms around her. In fact, even Scarlett herself is clinging to a system which was at best ambivalent to her from birth; as the daughter of an Irish Catholic, even her wealth and whiteness can’t entirely mask the suspicion and contempt her neighbors have for this family of “outsiders.”

 

But at least she’s rich; that much keeps her out of the ranks of the one group that the movie truly, openly despises: poor people. Poor whites, in particular; the movie doesn’t have a sufficient concept of black personhood to hold them in contempt for their poverty, or at least doesn’t feel comfortable excoriating them for it (which is arguably even worse, but as I said, we’ll come to racism in due time). But it has a revulsion for poor white people which makes its cartoonishly villainous portrayal of Northerners look mild by comparison. Even the enslaved people sneer in contempt at the “white trash” around the aristocratic slaveholders who are the only group afforded any concept of personhood. Indeed, it is Scarlett’s intense, all-consuming desire to never sink to their level which motivates the entire second half of the film. And well she should try to avoid that fate; in one of the story’s most mutely startling sequences, she is accosted by two ruffians while riding through what is essentially a homeless encampment. She is saved by a heroic former slave (!) who happens to be nearby, and no harm is done. She is confused, then, when the men in her life all vanish that evening for a mysterious “political meeting” which obviously has something to do with her experience during the day. We don’t find out until she does that their goal is simple and somewhat shocking: they’re going to murder the homeless people living in this shanty town. A population, I should stress, which until that morning also included former slave Big Sam (Everett Brown, KING KONG [uncredited]) who just saved her life.

 

Again, the story and the characters around Scarlett treat this turn of events as natural and inevitable. But there are little cues that make me wonder if the movie expects the audience to feel the same way. For one thing, it’s one of the few times we see Scarlett genuinely a little cowed by the furious indignation the other women direct at her over having inspired this dangerous misadventure. They hold her responsible, which she seems to find genuinely surprising and perplexing. That means the dramatic crux of the scene is on her feelings of chagrin and unfair persecution – a typically selfish framing for the character, except that for once, she really does seem to be unfairly blamed for something she couldn’t have predicted. This framing suggests that even if the movie never asks us to seriously consider the horror of the murders our male characters have just perpetrated, it does ask us to see this incident overall as a bad thing, the result of a brittle, inflexible “honor culture” which makes dehumanizing, irrational demands of its adherents and then places itself beyond question. Rhett, generally positioned by the film as the voice of reason, all but says as much. In that sense, the incident is a microcosm for the movie’s perspective on the American Civil War itself, which it portrays as the result of arrogant fools spoiling over a fight to prove their macho bona fides. It is certainly worth noting that the only thing that Ashley and Rhett ever agree on is that the war is an obviously bad idea, even if their own entanglement in Southern “honor culture” demands that they participate in it, anyway. 

 

 

None of this is to say, of course, that GONE WITH THE WIND is in any way enlightened, or even presents a recognizable moral landscape to the modern viewer.* In fact, I think there is a more prosaic explanation for these moments of potential criticism, which seem so odd in a movie that literally begins with the on-screen text “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South… Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow.” The explanation is simple: the movie was made by a bunch of rich Hollywood sociopaths who could give two craps about some nostalgic drivel about rich inbreds two generations and a continent removed from them. They knew Americans were buying it, though –the novel was an instant bestseller just a few years earlier-- and were more than happy to provide them with any desired product in exchange for becoming wealthy beyond their most extravagant dreams. But that mercantile motivation makes it more of an interesting watch; a sincere, deeply committed love letter to Lost Cause nostalgia might be a noxious cultural curio, as with BIRTH OF A NATION. But a cynical, mercenary effort to sell America a love letter to Lost Cause nostalgia, spearheaded by a first-generation immigrant, and a Jewish one at that – now that’s interesting.

 

It means that much of this incendiary material is presented without the ardent personal investment which might cause a true propagandist to turn defensive. A true believer might, I think, carefully soften up some of the less palatable details in the service of creating a more sympathetic story. Under the auspices of cynical Hollywood rich guys, with barely a single native Southerner in the whole cast, the only investment is financial, and so startling little details like the Wilkes’ incestuous marriage are just left out in the open, to defend themselves, while the movie steams on with the narrative. Thus, the finished film has an odd, almost postmodern edge to it: it is the simulacrum of Lost Cause Apologia, a reflection of the aspects of this particular fantasy that Hollywood thought Americans would want to buy (correctly, it turns out), rather than a committed philosophical manifesto being offered for approval. As such, a source material which is, by all accounts, earnestly celebratory of the “Old South” is very lightly warped into something more dispassionate and, perhaps, revealing.

 

This approach, of course, takes you only so far; producer David O. Selznick probably didn’t harbor a great deal of nostalgia for the mythologized Old South of the opening narration, but the book’s –and therefore the movie’s-- racism was something of a different story. That was still alive and well, and very much a part of everyday life in Hollywood, and the movie is much more comfortable with its casual, dehumanizing racism than it is with the more baroque nostalgia for 19th-century Southern culture. In fact, it takes it utterly for granted. And yet, it is also not wholly unaware that this has the potential to be a problem; as the astute HBO introduction by University of Chicago professor Jacqueline Stewart points out, Selznick was well-aware that the book was broadly considered racist, and went out of his way to assure skeptics that his movie would handle the subject sensitively. And I think it likely that sensitivity genuinely was his intention, even if it was for purely practical public-relations reasons. And it may have been more than that: as the son of Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants, he may even have felt more keenly than most Americans the potential for harm in racially-charged media; responding to a socially-conscious Rabbi who warned him about the indefensible content of the book, he wrote “I hasten to assure you that as a member of a race that is suffering very keenly from persecution these days, I am most sensitive to the feelings of minority peoples.” 

 

 

But even if his intentions were completely genuine –and you don’t get to be a big-time Hollywood producer without learning how to be at least a little disingenuous—the end result is absolutely painful to behold. Still, there’s the unmistakable sense that the movie is trying to be sensitive about race. Failing, granted, and spectacularly, but you can actually see here the first feeble flickerings of thought that the way African-Americans are portrayed on film might be a subject worthy of consideration. This was more or less entirely new to the mainstream Hollywood system. Everett Brown, who plays “Big Sam” here, had previously enjoyed a career almost entirely composed of threatening “native” characters in xenophobic jungle tales (for which he mostly went uncredited, including in KING KONG just a scant six years prior). Not so in GONE WITH THE WIND! Here, the movie presents him in an almost obsequiously positive light; he’s perpetually cheerful and good-natured, strong but gentle, and heroically saves Scarlett from what is clearly the threat of rape (he is rewarded with a spectacularly patronizing “you’re a good boy, Sam,” and then is never mentioned again, but the movie clearly agrees that he’s “good”). It is, from the perspective of the white filmmakers, obviously a role that no black person could object to, or see as racist – he’s a hero!

 

In fact, the movie is awash with black characters that it clearly likes; in the rare cases we see black characters portrayed negatively, the movie very deliberately moves to insulate itself from the hateful caricatures of BIRTH OF A NATION (a movie just 24 years old in 1939, the same age as JERRY MAGUIRE is right now). When the camera disapproving pans by a group of “uppity” newly freed former slaves, foolishly agreeing to vote for smarmy Northern carpetbaggers, the movie very carefully puts its disapproval on the face of the conservative Mammy, while Scarlett walks by with a very cultivated nonjudgmental detachment. Likewise, when Scarlett is accosted in the shantytown, it’s by a mixed-race pair, one white, one black. There is no thrilling threat to the virtue of Southern White women without some racial animus, but the movie again deliberately and specifically demonstrates that the homeless white man is the ringleader and the more aggressive villain; the black guy is just his sidekick. See? Nothing racial about it! And hey, she’s saved from one bad black man by another, good black man! No negative stereotyping here!

 

And that, of course, brings us inevitably to Hattie McDaniel and “Mammy,” perhaps the quintessential paradigm of old-Hollywood racial depictions. And it also, in a way, brings us to the heart of what is so loathsome –and yet instructive, from a scholarly perspective-- about the film’s racial depictions. See, GONE WITH THE WIND likes Mammy; it likes her a lot more than it likes most of its white characters, in fact. Rhett, who rarely has anything nice to say about anyone, calls her “a smart old soul, and one of the few people I know whose respect I’d like to have.” And the movie wholeheartedly agrees; that he manages to win her respect is an integral part of the movie’s case that we’re allowed to respect him too, despite his disreputable rakishness. Consequently, the movie positions Mammy as the voice of folksy, grounded sensibility. It imagines her as an island of stability in a chaotic world, a generous presence who will tolerate no nonsense but is ultimately a source of great comfort and warmth.

 

 

What is cannot imagine, alas, is that she has any interior life whatsoever. And that’s the problem; the movie takes great care to avoid being hateful, but it simply lacks any concept of actual black personhood. Mammy –the only African-American character the movie has even a little bit of interest in; the less said about Butterfly McQueen’s** mortifying clownish “Prissy” the better – is, in fact, essentially a “magical negro,” existing wholly as a reflection of the white characters’ lives, never independent of them. That she has any thoughts or opinions whatsoever about any topic other than lives of the white people she is serving is completely outside the film’s ability to comprehend. And that laces the movie’s affection for her with a corrosive implication that her enormously likeable sensibility and warmth arise intrinsically from the very fact which today identifies her as oppressed and exploited: she “knows her place.”

 

It is this underlying assumption that makes GONE WITH THE WIND so pernicious. The movie is not, perhaps, willing to mount a full-throated defense of slavery: very noticeably, the one single time the subject comes up for debate, the pro-slavery argument is put into the mouth of Ashley Wilkes, making a characteristically pathetic attempt to justify his discomfort with white slave labor*** after Scarlett mocks the former slaveowner’s sudden squeamishness. “Well, that was different. We didn’t treat them [poorly],” he sputters, a defense so transparently ridiculous and self-serving that Scarlett doesn’t even bother to acknowledge it (he reluctantly agrees to go along with white slavery anyway after being told paid labor is too expensive. A true paragon of Gentlemanly virtue). As near as I can tell, that’s the only explicit commentary on the subject of slavery as an institution in the whole movie; the word appears ten times in the 256 pages of script, but only six times in actual dialogue, and most of those aren’t in reference to chattel slavery (Scarlett whines, “I slave all day…” for example, a choice of words that would today be described as “unfortunate”). Discounting the opening narration which bemoans the loss of an Old South with its “Slaves and Masters,” the only other direct mention of slavery comes from a pre-war argument between Rhett and a roomful of Southern aristocrats spoiling for war. Scarlett’s own adorable Irish father makes plain what the war is about: “''We've borne enough insults from the meddlin' Yankees. It's time we made them understand we'll keep our slaves with or without their approval.''**** Yikes. But Rhett responds less bullishly: “I’m saying very plainly that the Yankees are better equipped than we [are]… All we have is cotton…and slaves… and arrogance.” Hardly a full-throated condemnation, but in context certainly difficult to read in a positive light.

 

It is, in fact, the absence of direct discussion of slavery that speaks the loudest. It is a subject the movie seems eager to avoid, which, given the context, becomes conspicuous very quickly. And the reason for that reticence is pretty clear: GONE WITH THE WIND may be a little uncomfortable with “slavery” as an institution, but it lacks even the vaguest interrogation of white supremacy. Consequently, once you begin pulling on threads, you quickly discover here's not much difference at all between outright slavery and a very slightly more ambiguous arrangement of racial hierarchy which the movie is enthusiastically comfortable with. So, better to leave that whole subject as unexplored as possible. That Mammy and “Pork” (Oscar Polk, UNDERWORLD [not the vampires vs werewolves ones]) were enslaved is not something the movie wants to discuss, because that would mean it had to address why, even after they’re technically “free,” their station in life does not appear to change at all. They remain on the plantation, working the same jobs, and if they’re getting paid now there’s no evidence of it. Slavery might have been something of a misstep, but the basic hierarchical arrangement of the races, with blacks solidly at the bottom of the caste system, is something the movie accepts as so natural and inherent that it does not even warrant a comment. It’s not just that these black characters seem completely comfortable with slavery as an institution; it’s that the movie doesn’t even seem to consider that they might not. That is what white supremacy looks like; that even with slavery gone, Scarlett –and the white movie producers 66 years later—can’t conceive of a world where black people don’t naturally respond to white orders. 

 

 

And this is still deeply relevant, because in many ways GONE WITH THE WIND set a tone in the popular culture which is only now being seriously challenged on a large scale. While it obviously wasn’t the sole factor to define what the better part of a century of cinematic representation would subsequently look like, one can’t help but imagine that becoming the top-grossing film of all time (a title it holds to this day; adjusted for inflation, it made ~3.7-3.8 billion, with a “B,” dollars) had to be a pretty big hint to future directors and producers that this was a pretty good template for success. And what followed, to the dismay of many but to widespread public acceptance, was a continuation and extension of its basic guiding philosophy on racial depictions: the explicit avoidance of racial animus. No rapacious, bestial BIRTH OF A NATION characters, or, if that can’t be avoided, at least a nice minority supporting character on “our side” to balance things out, and maybe even an explicit condemnation of violence white racism if we’re really in the mood to feel saintly (and all else failing, a pity Oscar to a black actor to prove there are no hard feelings. McDaniel is fine in the part, but come on, there's barely a character here). These rules have been bent and broken at times, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, sometimes for provocative artistic purposes, sometimes not. But the exceptions are of less interest than the remarkable stability and duration they’ve shown. There have always been activists and critics who deftly pointed out the limitation of these "rules" (as, indeed, there was plenty of contemporary criticism of GONE WITH THE WIND even upon its release) but these arguments seldom made any large-scale impact or got much cultural purchase outside academic and activist circles. And so it was that these rules –and the complete absence of almost any meaningful cinematic nonwhite perspective-- broadly served as a cultural template for the remainder of the 20th century, remaining robust, if not longer quite hegemonic, even to the present.

 

Indeed, it feels appropriate that GONE WITH THE WIND would have such an outsized cultural impact on the past century: is almost a perfectly representative movie for 20th century America, and in ways which go even beyond is frustrating racial ignorance. It is, after all, ultimately a movie about wanting the wrong things, for the wrong reasons, and being willing to destroy oneself and everything else in single-minded pursuit of those empty dreams. And within that tale of tragic miscalculation are nested a seemingly endless series of contradictions: an ostensible love story about a miserable, mutually corrosive pair of lovers, an earnest paean to a departed culture which gives every impression of being a miserable, soul-crushing dystopia, a work of historical fiction which misses everything important about that history, and all that the product of opportunistic hustlers calculating the best way to sell America a love letter rhapsodizing the time it almost destroyed itself. No wonder 20th-century America loved it; it is, I suppose, the movie 20th-century America deserved: a beautiful, charming shell wrapped about something utterly empty and meaningless. (And also, if I may offer one actual bit of legitimate cinematic criticism in these 4,000+ words, one which suffers from serious momentum problems in, like, the seventh act or whatever, when Scarlett and Rhett actually get together and end up stagnating for far too long before a series of clumsy duex ex machinas can come along and finally break them apart for good). Americans have always had a curious capacity to believe in any fantasy sold with enough confidence, and here is perhaps the ultimate expression of that tendecy, because to all available evidence, audiences throughout the decades have simply accepted what the movie tells them, and have rarely seemed interested in the disconnect with what it actually shows them.

 

Its enduring popularity simply proves that all these years later, the audience, like Scarlett herself, has still managed to stay delusional, is still desperately pursuing the wrong things for the wrong reasons, still clings furiously to a fictional past even while a genuinely promising future tenuously pulls at its sleeves. That the movie (if not necessarily the audience) so clearly sees this in its lead character, but not in itself, can make for a frustrating, even infuriating watch. But not, it turns out, an uninteresting one. Twenty years after my initial, dismissive viewing, I found the experience of revisiting GONE WITH THE WIND to be absolutely engrossing. Again like its central character, the movie is a contradiction: compelling, repulsive, pitiable, at once startlingly prescient and profoundly ignorant, part feckless brat, part steely visionary. But it’s definitely not boring. Right-wing fantasies about banning it aside, I hope its repellent politics don’t discourage future generations of filmgoers from revisiting it. It’s a movie which has a lot to teach America about itself, even if we don’t much like what it has to say about us.

 

 ****************************Fin

 

 

*Or anyway, to any modern viewer I can imagine having anything in common with; it retained the top spot in a list of America’s “favorite movies” as recently as a 2014 Harris Poll, for reasons I’m genuinely scared to delve into. (It didn’t do as well in readers’ polls conducted by Entertainment Weekly, Time Out, and others, although it still cracked the top twenty in each one.)

 

** Worth noting: McQueen herself seems to have been quite a fascinating, thoughtful person worthy of learning more about.

 

*** Crucial but widely unknown historical detail: the 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. In a totally unrelated coincidence, more than century of mass incarceration of African-Americans followed.

 

**** Weird, I could have sworn all these modern-day neo-Confederates thought the war was about “States rights,” but not the right to do anything specific, just sort of the general principle. I guess they must not have seen GONE WITH THE WIND. 

 

 

(just kidding)

Vengeance of the Zombies

Vengeance of the Zombies (1973) aka La rebelión de las muertas

Dir. León Klimovsky

Written by Paul Naschy

Starring Paul Naschy, Rommy, Mirta Miller

            Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina Álvarez) seems like a good guy. He was the kind of dude who tried his hand at a lot of different things in his youth; he was a pro weightlifter, a comic book artist, a Western paperback novelist, an album cover designer, and was alternately working as a wrestler and actor well into his 30’s. But it was when he sold a script about an errant werewolf titled La Marca del Hombre Lobo (THE MARK OF THE WOLFMAN) and ended up getting cast in the title role (the Wolfman, not the Mark) when Lon Chaney Jr. turned the part down* that he saw his true destiny: he would become “The Spanish Lon Chaney,” a horror icon of many faces, and a genre icon in his native Spain and around the world. And so it was. He was a prolific worker; nearly always writing his own scripts, often producing and occasionally directing as well, over the course of a lengthy career he cranked out dozens of low-budget horror and action pictures, including no less than 16 werewolf movies. I like this guy.

            I like him so much that I wish I liked his movies better, especially since I spent something like a hundred bucks on his two available Blu-Ray anthologies and am now doomed to watch them all. Which is not to say that they’re completely worthless; there’s a lot to like about them! In keeping with his Lon Chaney image, they usually have Naschy himself in some kind of weird makeup or disguise, there’s almost always a couple scenes of nasty (though unconvincing) gore, and there’s never any shortage of pervy, leering nudity. In theory, all that should add up to fun, feisty little slices of Euro-sleaze, but in practice his movies tend to be oddly inert, somnambulant experiences, grinding in slow motion through deadening scenes of generic noncharacters sitting around in poorly-lit apartments droning on about nothing, only occasionally punctuated by a few minutes of weird, dreamy horror footage.

            Alas, that describes VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES pretty much exactly. There’s enough effort being made that it doesn’t feel like a total insult, but not enough to ever add up to much. It’s the kind of movie that you finish, and then your girlfriend asks how it was, and you try to describe it but you just feel like you’re relating some kind of hazy, half-remembered dream, and the more you try to explain, the more confusing it becomes until now you’re not really confident about what you just saw, and she’s trying to be polite but it’s clear this is not interesting and so you just kinda peter out in embarrassed frustration.

            Speaking of which, the plot is pretty simple and easily explained, because basically there’s this woman Elvira (Romy [no last name, and amusingly misspelled “Rommy” here], THE KILLER WITH 1,000 EYES) who has a nightmare about her father being killed, and then he is killed, and then for some reason she goes to live with some kind of Indian guru (Naschy, in unfortunate Indianface), at his estate, run by his intimidating second-in-command (Mitra Miller, EYEBALL), but then there’s also some kind of giallo-esque killer going around wearing a cape and black fedora with his face obscured by variety of unfortunate ethnic stereotype masks, and sometimes he stabs or strangles people or just kind of lurks around various London locales, and sometimes he also seem to use Voodoo to command a couple of female zombies to kill people? And there’s some guy, (Victor Barrer, credited as “Vic Winner,” IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH and a Naschy regular) who’s always wearing suits, he’s definitely going to nondescript rooms and talking to people, I know that much, and then I think there’s like a scene in a morgue where the masked guy comes in and murders a guy eating a sandwich, and then all the corpses sit up and they’re all women wearing transparent gowns, and they run off with him, and um, let’s see, there’s this part where someone has a dream where Paul Naschy is a bare-chested goat-horned devil, that was cool. I think there’s a twist where he has an evil twin or something? There’s definitely at least one more Paul Naschy in there, I’ll tell you that much, and also an indeterminate number of pretty European women who sit or stand in sparsely furnished rooms and take their clothes off, or maybe it was just one and she does it a couple times? And I seem to remember they’re trying to do something with Voodoo, and wasn’t it because they wanted revenge on the British because of colonialism or something, it seems like it didn’t make a lot of sense but it struck me as probably pretty racist, I remember that much and... um, I think something else happens to, I’m not really sure. Yeah. Hmm. Anyway, did you have any dreams?

            There’s definitely a few highlights in there, but even on Blu-Ray, looking about as pristine as you’re ever going to see it, a lot of photography is way too dark for you to really make out what’s going on (and the rest is ugly), the sound mixing is a muddy mess, the music (by Juan Carlos Calderón, who has a song in TOMMY BOY?) is all wildly inappropriate funky jazz-fusion (it might even be a fun score in livelier movie, but in something this slow it just highlights how much fun you’re not having), the story is vague to the point of nonexistence, and even the subtitles have a bunch of grammatical errors which reduce the already incoherent dialogue into nonsensical gibberish. It’s not like we’re translating from Nepalese to Cherokee guys, you’re telling me it was too hard to find someone fluent in both Spanish and English? I don’t think that’s too much to ask here.

            In a lot of ways this is, then, a pretty objectively bad movie, and yet, there’s something there. Maybe it’s just because I’ve already invested so much in collecting Paul Naschy movies that I’m lying to myself, but Naschy himself remains a compelling presence, and the movie definitely picks up whenever he’s on-screen (in fact, a big part of the problem is that even with three roles, he’s not around nearly enough). And even if the direction fails to make much of it, I can’t fault his instincts for solid horror imagery. His masked giallo slasher is totally standard, but an effective design, his dream sequence devil is an inspired creation, and his treatment of the chalk-faced Voodoo zombies (while obvious deeply rooted in some very problematic straight-up racist tropes) is about as classic as horror iconography gets. It’s also kind of interesting in itself to see the ol’ Voodoo zombie model --a relic of a handful of astoundingly racist black-and-white cheapies from the 30’s and 40’s which were never particularly prevalent and had been almost entirely killed off by the advent of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD five years prior-- show up in swingin’ 1973 London. If nothing else, the addition of nudity adds a queasy psycho-sexual dimension to the otherwise decidedly old-fashioned images of glassy-eyed ghouls rising from their graves.

            Like many Paul Naschy movies, when you type all that out, it seems like you must have just described a good movie, or at least a fun one. Alas, everything good about the film is almost completely negated by its draggy, flat direction (by León Klimovsky, an Argentinian dentist who had emigrated to Spain in the early 50’s to become a director, and had become Naschy’s go-to guy since 1970’s La Noche de Walpurgis) and its aimless anti-narrative. This final complaint falls squarely on Naschy; from what I’ve seen of his work, his intuitive grasp of horror tropes was consistently hobbled by his total inability to craft even rudimentary narratives to showcase those horror tropes. The whammy is actually mostly there, but it desperately needs better structure for it to have the impact that it ought to. His movies tend to lack even crude, vestigial character arcs, completely neglecting any kind of framework that could meaningfully be called a “story.” In some cases, such as HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB, this is taken to extreme, almost absurdist levels, where not a single character from the film’s first act appears in the climax. In this case, it just means that there's no identifiable protagonist of any kind, and even though the film begins and ends with Elvira, she never actually accomplishes anything or has any conflict, she's just sort of around being vaguely menaced by who-knows-what-exactly. Finely-tuned writing is a rarity in the horror genre, and seldom particularly germane to a film’s success, but without any story structure at all, films like VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES struggle to build momentum, resulting in a ungainly string of largely disconnected moments which end up being less than a sum of their parts.

People often complain about the horror genre being too derivative, but frequently the ability to draw from a basic story template (slashers, for example, with their rigid story structure**) allows the genre faithful to focus on the monsters and murders that are their real interests and their real talents, without getting bogged down in reinventing a formula that works. Naschy largely abandons basic horror formulas; the result is some genuinely unique plots (can you think of another horror movie about a Hindu cult leader who may or may not moonlight as a Voodoo zombie avenger?) but, unfortunately, not too many that actually work.

But oh well. I’m still rooting for Naschy, and with 100+ movies in his filmography, there’s sure to be at least a few where it all comes together. Even Jesus Franco had a couple of good ones. This one’s more miss than hit, but it’s an interesting enough oddity to be worth my time, if not yours.  

* Or was passed over because of age, illness or infirmity; sources seem to differ

** See Vern’s “Blues Theory of Slashers” 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	A Modern Day Gothic Tale Of Horror And Fear.
TITLE ACCURACY	If I understand the killer’s motivations correctly, Vengeance does have something to do with it, though the Zombies are just henchmen who aren’t really getting vengeance on their own behalf.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	Naschy made a handful of other movies with Zombies in them, but none seem directly related to this one.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Spain, though shot in England
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Zombies (Voodoo variety), Slasher, Evil Cult
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Naschy.
NUDITY?	Yup
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	He impales two people while they’re doin’ it
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Zombies
POSSESSION?	Yeah
CREEPY DOLLS?	Voodoo dolls, though they’re more practical than creepy.
EVIL CULT?	Yes, though ironically if I understood this correctly (spoilers) the main cult guy is actually an innocent victim of a different cult.
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Maybe, I dunno.
MORAL OF THE STORY	I think I’d have to understand the story better than I do to come up with a moral.

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).