13 Nights of Shocktober: Martin (1978)

by A.J.

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 7: George Romero Memorial Night
“A real live honest to goodness vampire”

Martin (1978) 

A decade after director George Romero changed horror cinema and pop culture forever with his landmark film Night of the Living Dead, he tackled another iconic movie monster: the vampire. Martin is not like any other vampire film, and the titular character is not like any other movie vampire. Martin (John Amplas), a shy 17-year-old, believes that he is a vampire—not the creature of folklore and movies, but a real-life vampire. He doesn’t sleep in a coffin, can be out in daylight, and doesn’t have fangs, but he craves human blood. He goes to live with his kind cousin, Christine, and his fanatical grandfather, Cuda, who swears to cure Martin of vampirism.

This is a most unusual movie. it contains nothing supernatural. As Martin says many times: there is no magic. The atmosphere is low-key and subdued emphasizing the odd nature of Martin’s delusions and making the scenes of violence especially stand out. The third act is just as unusual, involving a car chase and a big bloody shootout. However, even this sequence somehow does not break the movie’s low-key tone.

Martin has the grainy, low budget look of many movies from the 1970’s giving it a quasi-documentary feel. Romero had originally intended to shoot the entire film in black and white. The film's producers insisted that the movie be in color, but the flashes of Martin’s fantasies are in black and white. These short scenes have a dreamlike quality thanks to the black and white photography. The fantasy sequences mirror the events of the movie giving a brief glimpse into Martin’s mind and how he experiences those moments.

The blood and gore in Martin are mild compared to other horror movies, even other horror movies from the 70’s, but they may still make the squeamish turn away. This was legendary special makeup effects artist Tom Savini’s first movie as both a makeup artist and an actor. He originally auditioned for the role of Martin but was given a smaller role and hired for special effects instead. This movie is also Savini and Romero’s first collaboration. They would go on to work together on Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Creepshow, Monkey Shines, and Two Evil Eyes. Romero eventually gave Savini a much larger acting role in his odd Renaissance fair motorcycle movie, Knightriders. The recipe Savini used for the blood in Martin was the same recipe for stage blood  and the result was a bright orange-red blood. It doesn’t look entirely realistic on film, but it does give the movie a stylish feel similar to Italian horror movies of the same era. Savini also ended up doing stunts and can be spotted getting hit by a car.

Martin may lack big scares but its approach to the vampire makes it incredibly interesting. The score, cinematography, direction from Romero give Martin a lyrical, dreamlike quality at times. This is the sort of movie you could watch with someone that doesn’t like horror movies since it’s secretly an offbeat drama about a disturbed young man. Unfortunately, Martin is a very rare film. The DVD is out of print and expensive to purchase, but if you ever get the chance to see Martin I highly recommend watching it for Shocktober. 

13 Nights of Shocktober: Get Out (2017)

by A.J.

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 3: Social Horror

“I told you not to go in that house.”

Get Out (2017)

You might be surprised to learn that Jordan Peele, of the comedy duo Key and Peele, is the writer/director behind the tense and thrilling horror film Get Out. You might be even more surprised to learn that this excellently crafted thriller is Peele’s directorial debut. Even so, the result is a horror film that broke box office records, earned enthusiastic praise from critics and audiences alike, and even sparked conversations about the possibility of Peele earning Oscar nominations (fingers crossed). Get Out was released in theaters earlier this year (it’s now available on home video) and it will very likely make an appearance on my Best of 2017 list.

Get Out opens with a young black man lost in an affluent suburban neighborhood at night. There shouldn’t be anything for anyone to be afraid of in such a neighborhood, but this is a film about danger hiding behind a benign surface. A car slows down and the young man is abducted. The movie then introduces another young man black man, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), preparing to go on a weekend trip with his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), to meet her parents for the first time. Chris is nervous because Rose hasn’t told her parents that he’s black. She tells him not to worry; her parents are very liberal and progressive. Her parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), are indeed progressive and are very welcoming and polite to Chris…uncomfortably welcoming and polite. Dean tells Chris that he would’ve voted for Obama for a third term and Missy offers to help Chris quit smoking through hypnosis. Chris declines the offer but then wakes up one morning to find that he suddenly no longer has any urge to smoke. Adding to the strange and unnatural atmosphere are the family’s black servants: a groundskeeper, Walter, and maid, Georgina. Both exhibit strange mannerisms as though they are in a trance.

Though this is Peele’s first film he makes masterful use of the language of cinema. A few film critics compared the style of Get Out to John Carpenter’s Halloween and the comparison is not unwarranted. Peele draws inspiration not only from John Carpenter, but also Hitchcock, and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Like those films and filmmakers, Peele makes the audience squirm in their seats by building suspense. He uses closeups for claustrophobic tension and lets the actors show us how scary a scene is through their performance. He opts to unsettle the viewer through the strange behavior of the characters instead of gory imagery. This approach also underlines the idea that the disturbing horror of modern racism is that it has coated itself in a veneer of deceptive and insincere nicety. Horror movies have always been excellent mediums for indirectly addressing social issues (such as Night of the Living Dead, which featured a black man as the hero and subtlety addresses the Civil Rights movement and counter-protests of the 1960's). In Get Out however, race and racism are at the forefront. Chris has been singled out, “chosen,” because he is black, though the sinister characters say in calm and almost convincing tones that race has nothing to do with it. Perhaps they actually believe that, despite the obvious truth.

Get Out is the kind of horror film that builds and builds tension and then finally has a bloody climatic release. Up until this point in the film, you might have forgotten that you were watching a horror movie. Though the film does get bloody, it is not very gory or explicit. Like great horror filmmakers before him, Peele suggests more than he shows and lets the audience scare themselves. The blood and gruesome imagery of the climax is not the source of the movie’s scares or horror. They are merely set dressing. The horror comes from the situation Chris is in, the characters he is surrounded by, and how believable it feels.

Get Out is not without humor—Peele is a comedian after all—but, the humor does not feel out of place.  Chris’s friend, Rod (LilRel Howery), is top notch comic relief and catches on quick to the situation in which Chris is trapped. Though Rod was able to figure out the secret evil plan, I was not exactly sure how the scheme worked. Fortunately, the details don’t derail the story.  The most important thing is what we understand most clearly. Chris needs to get out of this place, as soon as can, as fast as he can.

13 Nights of Shocktober: Night of the Creeps

by A.J. 

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 12: Spooky Fun Night, “The good news is your date is here. The bad news is…he’s dead.”

Night of the Creeps

The first time I saw the cult classic Night of the Creeps was on TCM as part of TCM Underground. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, on TCM of all channels, but I was very entertained and glad TCM included it in their programming schedule, uncut and commercial free. It is a cheesy 1980’s B-film of a horror movie but it is also a thoroughly entertaining love letter to cheesy 1950’s sci-fi/horror movies. Even a sharp observer will have to hit the rewind button a few times to catch all of the direct and indirect references to other horror movies and horror filmmakers.  

Right away Night of the Creeps lets you know what kind of movie you’re in for. It begins with two aliens with ray-guns on a spaceship chasing after a third alien carrying a cylinder. When the aliens speak, their dialogue is subtitled in both English and, what I assume to be, their alien language. The aliens are so obviously short men in suits and masks that I think that is what director Fred Dekker must have intended since the special effects later in the movie are pretty good. Dekker would go on to direct another cult classic with great effects, The Monster Squad, which is either a terrible or great film depending on what age you were when you first saw it. I think it’s great.

The mysterious alien cylinder is shot into space and lands on Earth in 1959. The first scene on Earth is in black and white and looks like a clichéd scene from 1950’s teen horror movie. The setting is sorority row and not that far away a boy and girl are in a parked car. From the alien cylinder a wormy slug springs into the mouth of the boy who left his date alone in the car. While an alien parasite worm is jumping into his mouth, an axe wielding escaped mental patient is attacks the girl. After this scene you should definitely know that Night of the Creeps is campy, over the top, self-aware fun. The movie then jumps to 1986 during "Pledge Week." We meet Chris and J.C., two college freshmen. Chris talks J.C. into pledging a fraternity with him because he is desperate to impressive the very pretty Cynthia, who he thinks (for no reason at all) is only interested in frat guys. Cynthia’s boyfriend, Brad, is the head of the fraternity and gives them the pledge task of stealing a dead body from the university medical lab. Chris and J.C. accidentally unfreeze the body of the college boy infected with the alien parasite back in the 50’s. They freak out and run away. The infected zombie body walks out of the university, but not before attacking a young scientist played by a young David Paymer. 

The zombie body walks to the sorority house where its head splits open and releases more parasite slugs. The slugs enter into a body then eat at the brain turning a person into essentially a zombie until their head explodes to spread more slugs. The special effects are great old-school practical effects. Some effects, like the slugs and zombie make-up hold up better than others, like the animatronic zombie dog and cat, which still look pretty cool and scary. The effects do get pretty gross, but they are meant to scare and entertain you, not just shock you and make you feel queasy. Night of the Creeps has fun with its effects too. When a bus driver sees the decaying zombie dog in the road, his eyes bulge out of his head, like a cartoon.

Night of the Creeps is a movie you watch for the fun, gross effects, but there are some good characters to go along with the effects too. Chris and J.C. are supposed to be geeks, but there’s nothing much geeky about them other than that they’re not jocks. Chris Romero, our main character, is unfortunately blandly average. His only motivation is to impress the pretty girl because she is pretty. The characters around him, however, are pretty interesting and entertaining. His goofy friend J.C. (James Carpenter) Hooper, is more socially adept and aware and is, overall, a more well-rounded character. The character that steals the movie is the hardened, self-destructive Detective Cameron played by Tom Atkins. He walks into a crime scene and says “thrill me” and constantly refers to Chris and J.C. as Spanky and Alfalfa. When he shoots one zombie in the head he says, “It’s Miller time.” It doesn’t make any sense but it’s great. My favorite scene with him is when he tells Chris a haunting story of revenge from his past. It’s a serious and intense speech in the middle a campy movie and an awkward moment for Chris. Somehow, this character isn’t laughable but is still fun and fits right in with the rest of the movie.

My favorite character is Cynthia Cronenberg, the object of everyone’s affections, played by Jill Whitlow. To say that the female roles in 80’s comedies, especially 80’s teen comedies, are lacking in substance would be a gross understatement. Cynthia, however, is not a trophy or a doll. She’s not impressed with Chris at first since he sent J.C. to talk to her for him. She puts together that the attacks happening around the college are related to the missing body from the medical lab and has to convince Chris and J.C., who are skeptical. At the climax, when a busload of slug infested zombie frat guys descend upon the sorority house, she fights them off along with Chris and Detective Cameron to protect the rest of the sorority. Shooting the zombies stops them, but then the slugs inside just explode out and scatter. The only thing that kills the slugs is fire, so Detective Cameron gets a flamethrower from the police armory (because of course they have a flamethrower). It’s Cynthia who uses that flame thrower while wearing her formal gown to kill off the alien slugs, and she is as badass as she sounds.

This movie is as much a tribute to the whole horror genre as it is a send up of 50’s sci-fi/horror movies. If the characters last names sound familiar it is because many characters are named after horror and science fiction directors like: David Cronenberg (Shivers), James Cameron (Piranha II, Terminator), Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13^th), Steve Miner (Friday the 13^th Part II and III), Sam Raimi (Evil Dead), John Carpenter (Halloween), Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead). The characters all attend Corman University, named after legendary producer Roger Corman, who made many, many campy films. When the sorority house mother is attacked she is watching Plan 9 from Outer Space on TV, perhaps the campiest film ever made by the man once voted worst director of all time, Ed Wood. 

Night of the Creeps was a flop when it was released in theaters but has since gone on to build a cult following. I can understand why. This movie has everything: horror, comedy, aliens, sorority girls, awesome horror effects, zombie jocks, a zombie cat, a zombie David Paymer, scenes in black and white, a scene with Dick Miller (who appears in several 80's horror movies), a suicidal cop on edge, a montage of college kids getting ready for a dance, and, best of all, a badass sorority girl with a flamethrower. Night of the Creeps is lots of fun and even a little scary. It’s a perfect movie for horror movie fans, people that like campy movies, and people that just want to have a spooky good time. 

13 Nights of Shocktober: Targets

by A.J.  

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 10: Meta-Horror Night, “You know what they call my films today? Camp! High camp!”

Targets

Targets is a very peculiar film. It is more of a slow burn thriller than a traditional horror movie, but it is partly about horror films and meditates on both horror movies and real life horrors. Targets is director Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature film. He made the film in 1968 for legendary producer Roger Corman, whose only requirements of Bogdanovich was that he use actor Boris Karloff (who owed Corman two days’ work), and use stock footage from Corman’s 1963 film, The Terror (starring Boris Karloff). The story could be about anything. Bogdanovich wrote the screenplay with then wife Polly Platt, who was also the production designer. The result is a dual story, low budget movie that moves slow, but is interesting.

Boris Karloff plays an elderly horror movie legend named Byron Orlok who wants to retire against the wishes of the studio executives and the director of his latest movie, played by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie begins with the stock footage from The Terror (which also stars Jack Nicholson) doubling for footage of Orlok’s latest movie. It is a horror film with a castle, period costumes, and a terrible thunderstorm. It’s the kind of horror movie that Karloff himself made throughout his career, and like the films made by Hammer Films. Orlok is unhappy watching a preview of the film and decides to retire. He says that he feels like an anachronism and says the world belongs to the young. 

The second story is about a seemingly average, normal, clean cut looking young man named Bobby Thompson, played by Tim O'Kelly. He is a veteran and likes to collects guns. We see his home life; he and his wife live with his parents. He starts acting strangely. When out shooting at cans with a friend he lets the sight of his gun linger on the other person while their back is turned. He is distant from his wife and smokes in bed with all of the lights turned out. Then he types a cryptic note in red ink on his typewriter and begins a killing spree. He takes his rifle and some other guns, finds a high place, and starts picking off people.

The stories are not related directly but you know that they will eventually intersect. Bogdanovich works subtly to meld the stories together. The first time we see the Thompson is in a gun shop across the street from where Orlok screened his movie. The young man puts Orlok in his gunsight and lets it linger. It is safe to assume that the two men will have a confrontation at the premiere of Orlok’s movie at the drive-in theater where he will make his final public appearance before retiring. 

You can tell that Bogdanovich really wanted his movie to be 90 minutes long. Scenes play out a bit longer than they should and sometimes that helps the narrative, sometimes it doesn’t. There are several extended scenes of the Bobby Thompson’s average home life as he is becoming slowly and quietly unhinged. These scenes don’t really build character, but when they work, they have you searching for clues for why he’s cracking up. Even then, however, these scenes could still be shorter. The most effective of these lengthy scenes happens when Thompson is up on a refinery tower and unpacks his lunch. It’s an odd, humanizing moment (even psycho killers need to eat too), and it means that he planned ahead enough to pack a lunch, which is unnerving.    

The scenes with Boris Karloff work purely because it is interesting to watch Karloff playing a character loosely based on himself. He spends his scenes either with his assistant contemplating retirement or with Bogdanovich, who is trying to convince him not to retire. I get the distinct feeling that their scenes together exist just because Bogdanovich wanted to hang out with Boris Karloff. I can’t blame him; I would’ve done the same thing. The best scene of Targets by far is of Karloff telling an audience an old ghost story about a man encountering Death.

This movie was made at a time when the country was changing, culture was changing, and all the while the Vietnam War raged in the background. Targets is not explicitly about gun control, mental health, or even Vietnam, though the specter of each looms over every scene. It seems fairly obvious that the young man is based on Charles Whitman, who killed several people from the University of Texas tower in Austin only two years prior. That very year, 1968, would see two American political figures, each a symbol of promise and hope in their own way, gunned down by assassins: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. If you read books about film history, Targets will likely be in more than one of those books. It is not a landmark film like Rosemary’s Baby or Night of the Living Dead but it is a notable part of the shift that began to occur in horror films in the late 60s.

Up until this time in film history nearly every horror film was set in the past, in a faraway land, or a large spooky house or castle. The most notable exception to this was a few horror films produced by Val Lewton in the 1940s and 50s. That changed in 1968, the same year Targets was released, with movies like Rosemary’s Baby and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead that set the supernatural in a modern setting subtly and believably. As George Romero continued to make horror films, soon joined by Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, and David Cronenberg, horror films moved further and further away from costumes and monsters in castles. The most interesting aspects of Targets are its juxtaposition of real and movie horrors, and its awareness of the fading out of fashion of Gothic, fantasy horror movies in the character of Byron Orlok. Karloff as Orlok sees newspaper headlines of shootings and murders and becomes depressed. “Nobody’s afraid of a painted monster,” Orlok says in one scene. His horror movies can’t compare to the horrors in the newspaper and, soon, he feels, the public will feel the same.

13 Nights of Shocktober: Shivers

by A.J.  

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 3: Dial C for Cronenberg, “Biology is destiny.” –David Cronenberg

Shivers

Whether he is working with a big budget or a small one, master filmmaker David Cronenberg uses ideas to disturb his audience and make them squirm. No matter how graphic or gross the special effects are, they always emphasize an idea or serve as a metaphor. A special effect is never just an empty thrill in a Cronenberg film. This is true even in 1975 Cronenberg’s debut feature, Shivers, in which the budget is low and effects are sparse and even tame when compared to his later films like The Brood and The Fly.  

Shivers takes place in an ultra-modern, nearly self-sufficient, luxury high rise apartment building called Starliner Tower on an island in a lake just outside of Montreal. In the opening scene we see an older man struggling with a teenage girl in a school uniform. He cuts her open on a table then kills himself. Very little is shown, but the sound effects we hear more than make up the lack of blood and guts. We find out later that the man was a scientist who created a parasite that would make people think less and be more sexual with the ultimate goal of turning the world into "one beautiful mindless orgy.” He changed his mind and was trying to kill the parasite he infected her with, but the parasite worked too well, and by that time she had already spread it to a few different men in the building. The scientist’s idea seems outlandish until I remember that the era of Vietnam War protest signs reading “Make Love Not War” had only recently ended. 

With a premise like that, you might expect Shivers to be an exploitation film and though there is a fair amount of nudity, this film does not have a lascivious gaze. Shivers unnerves its audience so well because it does not take a stance on whether spreading the parasite is good or bad. Cronenberg has said in interviews that the parasite is a metaphor for any idea that takes hold. A dramatic and severe change is spreading through the high rise building and Cronenberg is ambivalent about that change, but he is aware and direct about his ambivalence. He does his best to show that “…things might be dangerous and wonderful at the same time, that things might be disgusting and beautiful at the same time.” He says that the movie takes the viewpoint of “straight society” but “emotionally and viscerally” the audience was with the infected people. 

Shivers is an interesting take on the on the zombie film, which had only recently been reinvented by George Romero in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. “Straight society” is represented by Dr. Saint Luc (played by Paul Hampton) who works in the building’s medical clinic with his girlfriend, Nurse Forsythe. They respond to reports of tenants acting strangely, and attacking other tenants. Some of the infected people act crazed and bizarre like the bellhop who obscenely eats a slice of pie at a mother and daughter in an elevator. Others act only slightly odd and suspicious like the woman who consoles her upset friend by seducing her. The number of infected grows and Dr. Saint Luc is soon being pursued by a horde. It seems as though everyone has gone mad and he is the last sane person. When he runs down a hallway, every apartment he looks into has something strange happening. It reminded me of the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining where Shelley Duval runs though the Overlook Hotel and finds something horrifying at every turn. The final scene finds Dr. Saint Luc at the Starliner’s indoor pool seeing an infected Nurse Forsythe rise up out of the glowing waters. It is a haunting image that is equal parts alluring and frightening.

Shivers is a low budget horror film that makes the best of what is available. Cronenberg shows great skill at making a believable self-contained world in Starliner Tower. The special effects are simple but effective. The parasites themselves, little slug-like creatures, are not shown very often. The cast is solid though there is some overacting from the minor characters but that hardly harms the movie.

The original title of Shivers was The Parasite Murders. In the U.S. it was released as They Came From Within, which is a title that Cronenberg actually liked and felt fit the theme of the movie. Change and revolution have seemingly external beginnings, but the ultimate change in person from one way of thinking to another happens within. As an idea spreads and other people embrace it, the world may seem like it is turning upside down, until you come around to embrace the same idea. Sometimes the change is for the better, sometimes it is not. Sometimes change just needs to happen. 

My favorite scene of Shivers happens after Nurse Forsythe has been infected with the parasite. She tells Dr. Saint Luc about a dream she had days before that had been troubling her. What follows is a beautiful, haunting, exciting, and frightening speech excellently written by Cronenberg and wonderfully delivered by actress Lynn Lowry. It is also a sort of thesis statement for just about the entirety of David Cronenberg’s body of work. She says that in her dream she was trying to make love to a man, but he was old and dying and repulsive: “But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual… He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully.”