This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some horror movie recommendations to help you celebrate Shocktober.
Freaky is not a scary movie but it is a very entertaining one. There is enough here to satisfy any horror fan and the comedy angle is likely to bring in some viewers wouldn’t typically watch a horror movie. The premise is so simple you wonder why it hasn’t been done before and the result is so fun you’re glad it was finally done. A big, hulking serial killer and his intended teenage victim switch bodies by way of a plot devise in the form of a mystical dagger. A body switch movie needs excellent leads and Freaky certainly delivers on that front with Vince Vaughn as the killer known as The Butcher and Kathryn Newton as Millie, the unfortunate teen.
A title card with a familiar font informs us that the date is Wednesday the 11th. A group of teenagers talk about murders that
supposedly happened but also comment that those urban legends are invented to
scare teenagers out of having premarital sex. These teens meet with gruesome
and overly elaborate deaths: a wine bottle down the throat, a broken tennis racket slammed back together with someone’s head in the middle (this teen
was on a tennis court so what else could they expect to happen). The killer
wears a mostly featureless mask reminiscent of Jason from the
Friday the 13th Part 2 (before Jason donned the famous hockey mask in part 3) and Michael Myers from the Halloween movies.
The teenage actors overall are pretty convincing as teens, especially Millie and her friends. Kathryn Newton plays both of her roles very well. Millie has the standard traits of a horror movie protagonist: dealing with grief and trauma (the death of her father and her mother’s new dependence on her company), struggling at home and at school, shy, and bullied, but with a few loyal friends. Newton is able is bring some spark and real sympathy to what would be a cliched character. After the switch, Newton as the Butcher projects the right amount of menace and glee at his newfound situation. The Butcher’s menace is mistaken for Millie's newfound confidence and leads some to amusing moments. There’s nice and subtle dark humor in watching the Butcher (as Millie) scan a room for the best way to kill someone. It’s also refreshing to see that the Butcher’s strength did not transfer, so he becomes frustrated with Millie’s petite body and lack of strength. This forces the Butcher (as Millie) to be more creative with his kills.
The casting Vince Vaughn was a very shrewd and wise choice. Vaughn is an all-around solid actor, has well proven
comedic talents, and has a very imposing 6’5” figure. Vaughn is excellent as
Millie, humorous but believable. Millie in the Butcher’s body has
what ends up being an emotional conversation with her mom and Vaughn is
believable in this moment too, which never really sheds its comedic setup. As Millie gets used to her new oversize body there are some funny moments and Vaughn plays a gentle, clumsy giant well. A scene of Millie in Butcher’s
body getting to know her crush is what you’d expect but it works: the
humor leads to tenderness which leads to humor which makes the characters more
sympathetic and relatable.
Freaky is a self-aware horror movie that thankfully never
stoops to pandering in place of cleverness. There are visual
references to other horror movies like Halloween, the Friday the 13th
movies, Hellraiser, The Shining, but aside from the font of the dates resembling the Friday
the 13th font, the movie doesn’t make a big deal about them. The
characters are aware of horror movie tropes and Freaky is better for it. When
Millie’s friends are being chased by the Butcher (unaware of the body swap) Josh (Misha Osherovich) shouts to Nyla (Celeste O'Connor), “You’re black, I’m gay. We are so dead!” Her friends don’t
exactly have inner lives but they feel like full fledged characters thanks to the young performers.
Freaky has plenty of bloody violence. The kills are graphic
and over the top, another nod to the slasher genre (the later
Friday the 13th movies in particular), but doesn’t revel in them.
Freaky is something pretty rare, a character driven horror movie more concerned
with its characters than kills. Director Christopher Landon, who co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Kennedy, blends comedy and horror in just the right way. There’s a definite love for the genre
running through every scene. Freaky understands that horror movies can be fun and puts that front and center.
This
is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has
arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month
long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of
horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down
upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that,
admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like
comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days
leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary
movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.
Night 4: Wes Craven Memorial Night, “All that blood and
violence. I thought you were supposed to be the love generation.”
Like many movie lovers, I was deeply saddened by the recent
passing of Wes Craven, one of the true masters of horror. He had a long and
impressive career, and while he had mediocre films and misses, when his films hit
they hit hard. The Last House on the Left is Wes Craven’s first film, made in 1972, but it
comes across as having been made by a skilled and seasoned filmmaker. The movie
has the look of a low budget exploitation movie, but there are no cheap thrills
to be found here. This is an intense, visceral thriller about the cruelty and
violence of which human beings are capable. The horror in The
Last House on the Left has nothing to do with the supernatural, it comes from the
uncomfortable realism of the horrible, violent acts we see.
The first time I saw this movie was purely by chance. I was
in college and my roommate and I were sent out by our friends to Blockbuster to
pick some horror movies for the group to watch. It was Halloween night, so the
horror section was well picked over. My roommate picked up the case for The Last House on the Left; neither of us had heard of it before, but it was directed by Wes Craven
and the box had a quote from Roger Ebert: “sheer and unexpected terror.” I can’t
remember the other movie we rented or if we even watched it. All I remember is
how we all squirmed and turned our faces and swore at the TV. I remember one
girl got up and left the room. I remember
becoming mildly obsessed with the movie and reading as much as I could find
on the film. I’ve only seen it one time since then and that was a week
ago to prepare for this blog.
The Last House on the Left says it is inspired by true
events, but it is actually a loose remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. The plot follows two young girls from the country that go into the city
for a concert, but are kidnapped by a gang of ruthlessly cruel criminals.
The girls are sadistically tortured, raped, and murdered. Then, by sheer coincidence, the
criminals seek shelter for the night with the parents of one of the girls. When
the parents find out, they unleash their own brand of revenge. The Last House
on the Left was meant to be an exploitation film, loaded with violence and sex to sell tickets. It was produced by Sean S.Cunningham, who would go on to direct Friday the 13th in 1980, a
movie primarily concerned with kills and special effects. There’s certainly
nothing wrong with slasher films like Friday the 13th and its many
sequels that revel in gory moments and nudity, as long as they still entertain and commit to their lack of substance.
The Last House on the Left certainly has all the elements of a sleazy, low
budget exploitation film, but in going from script to screen it became
something substantial and frightening.
The Last House on the Left has a grainy, unglamorous look
and a cast of unfamiliar faces that give it a feeling of realism that becomes
uncomfortable as the film unfolds. This is a violent film and though the gore
we see is nothing when compared to modern horror films, it is far more effective, awful, and
terrifying. When one of the girls is being stabbed we don’t see
the knife stabbing her, instead there are sharp, quick musical cues which
somehow make the stabbing worse. One of the criminals is aware that what they
are doing to these girls is absolutely wrong, but he’s helpless to stop the
others. Afterwards, there is a scene where a quiet moment passes among the
criminals as they seem to realize the deep cruelty of what they’ve done. It
was a scene that Craven says audiences hated because it humanized the killers.
I think that humanization, slight as it is, is important because it forces the
audience to accept that human beings, not monsters or devils, did these
horrible things.
Watching The Last House on the Left is a tough experience.
There are other horror movies with more blood, more gore, and more death that
are easier to watch. The Last House on the Left, unlike slasher movies, takes
no joy in the death scenes. Even when the parents exact their revenge, it’s not
as victorious a moment as audiences would expect. Craven does not shy away from
showing us what we already know but don’t consciously think about: it is a
horrible, terrible thing to kill another human being. Craven has said in
interviews that he is fascinated by what can come out of ourselves. He says
that the Vietnam War was a big influence on The Last House on the Left. During
that time it became normal to see dead bodies and lists of dead American
soldiers on TV, and to see photos of, or hear about, atrocities committed by
Americans. It’s never good when any of that becomes normal.
Just after Wes Craven passed, NPR’s Fresh Air re-aired a series of interviews in which Terry Gross asks him about The Last House on the
Left.
I always enjoy watching or hearing interviews with Wes Craven because he comes
off as such genial, normal, and even shy person that knows a great deal about
films and filmmaking. He tells a story of when he was a young boy and had a bow
and arrow. He would go hunting for rats and usually never found any, until he
did and shot one with his arrow. The arrow hit but did not kill the rat. It let
out a horrible scream and bled and thrashed. It fought so hard for its life but
it was wounded mortally, and the young Craven was forced to put it out of its
misery. If that rat fought so hard for its life, Craven thought, then surely it deserved to live
and if rats deserve to live unharmed then so do people. The Last House on the Left
is so intense and disturbing because it has a message, and it is a simple one
that Craven does not hit us over the head with or bury in symbolism. He lays it
out plainly resting just below those moving images: human life is precious and
we should all act accordingly, otherwise violence begets more violence and
there is no victory for anyone in that.
“I didn’t mean to put an end to the sexual revolution, and for that I deeply apologize.” -- John Carpenter, on Halloween
It’s hard to find praise for a subgenre that became such a crystallized formula in the 80’s and has since devolved into what has been dubbed “torture porn.” The formula is simple: a masked man (sometimes a woman) with a knife or bladed weapon kills young adults one by one until only the lead female character (whom pop culture has dubbed “The Virgin”) is left alive and she kills the slasher, or the male lead comes in saves her. From the plethora of films that simply followed this formula it became just a fact that the teenagers that did drugs and had sex were the ones to get killed and only the “good girl” would get to live. This led to these movies being likened to campy urban legends intended to keep teens away from premarital sex. But these 80’s slasher movies weren’t aiming for any kind of moral commentary; they just lifted the plot of Friday the 13th. In Friday the 13th Mrs. Voorhees is killing the counselors having sex and doing drugs because Jason drowned while the counselors were having sex and doing drugs. Her motivations make sense in the story of the movie. In Halloween Michael Myers is a psychopath obsessed with killing his sister; the other teens he kills were just doing what teens do- having sex and doing drugs.
Pop culture has also erroneously dubbed Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho the first slasher movie. I can only pretend to see links between Psycho and the slasher genre: the killer uses a knife, that’s it. Prototypes for the slasher movie come with Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), all of which are good, effective movies, but it wasn’t until John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978 that the slasher film as we know it came to be. Not only was Halloween the first real slasher movie but it may also be the only one of real quality. John Carpenter, rather than going for blood and effects, uses almost Hitchcockian techniques to set tone and atmosphere and build suspense.
The structure of Halloween was taken and used effectively, though on a campier level, a couple years later in Friday the 13th. That movie went more for shocks and thrills, but it did its own thing. That’s more than can be said for Sleepaway Camp; My Bloody Valentine; Silent Night, Deadly Night; Prom Night; He Knows You’re Alone; Happy Birthday to Me (which actually has a great final image and closing titles song); and the anti-slasher movie April Fool’s Day. Most of those have been remade and most were named after dates.
Slasher movies have since turned into geek shows like the Saw and Final Destination series where gore effects and gruesome scenes of horrendous violence are more pivotal than story or characters. As much as Eli Roth’s Hostel is reviled I believe it’s a well made film and has a story that unfolds, like a movie should. Unlike in the Saw franchise where the slim plot exists only to frame the scenes of torture and gore.Slasher movies have always walked a fine line between campy entertainment and exploitation, but in the last decade they've lacked such quality and merit that they can only be exploitation films. I think my friend Gene Siskel would agree.
I think the appeal of slasher movies is that for all the slicing and dicing at the end of the day the villain is just a person wearing a mask. If you get close enough to take the mask off you’ll find a flesh and blood person that can be killed just like anyone else. Even Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger can be killed, till the next movie anyway, and that, for what it’s worth, can be comforting.
