30th July 2010

Polymorphous Perversity

Who doesn’t love David Cronenberg? The question is a rhetorical one since, unlike the more straightforward (and I realise that term itself is a complex and loaded one) visceral pleasures of the slasher film or its red-headed step-sibling “torture porn” (did anyone come up with name for this sub-genre that isn’t contentious, yet? If so, answers on a postcard to the usual address, please…) the generic elements of a Cronenberg picture are so inextricably linked to the subtext and psychology of the twisted characters in the play.

On more than one occasion I’ve heard folk complaining that A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE was dull literally because, they said, it contained less of a plot than a Chuck Norris picture. Of course, in response, I resisted the urge to reduce the complainant’s head to a Stephen McHattie mush and simply slapped my own forehead, burying myself in the consolation that enough people got that picture to make it Cronenberg’s second most profitable and, hey, we all got to see an emotionally damaged, Janus-like hitman take a guy’s toupee off with a single shot. Now, I love SILENT RAGE but Norris never got to do that to Ron Silver.

But then, Cronenberg has always been somewhat of a “difficult” director for the casual horror fan to grapple with. Less a household name (relatively, and depending on which house) than Wes Craven or George Romero and not one the regular horror nerds eulogise in quite the same way they do Sam Raimi or John Carpenter, he was, from his first foray into the genre, a very grown-up filmmaker. Not content with tongue-in-cheek moralising about the perils of illicit pre-marital sex and drug-taking (although there’s a barrage of these activities in ever increasing extremes running like a vein through his career) he was more at home tackling the limitless biological impulses of the human body to fuck, to kill, and to metamorphose into a virulent, mutated entity that would destroy the very thing that invariably created it: our own very conscious being.

Which is certainly less “fun” than (***WARNING: spoilers for Joseph Zito’s THE PROWLER***) Tom Savini blowing Farley Grainger’s head into chunky pieces but there you go. It’s also far more invigorating and fascinating for the adventurous horror fan because it lives beyond the onscreen depictions of violence. And this is where it gets intriguing because, for a filmmaker so outwardly and boldly cerebral and so interested in what’s inside our heads, he’s one of the most outward and bold proponents of showing us, well, what’s inside our heads. And our throats and our arms and our torsos and every perimeter of every cell in the human body.

For a science major from Toronto, he took up an unusual position in the wake of uncompromisingly heady yet visceral pictures such as THE BROOD, VIDEODROME and THE FLY: he became a poster boy for Fangoria readers the world over (Fangoria’s launch coincided with the explosion of special make f/x as a discipline. Says Antony C Ferrante in his article ‘The State Of The Art’ in Fangoria’s 200th Edition, “in some respects it was FANGORIA’s debut in 1979, along with the introduction of the competitive Academy Award makeup category in 1981, that signalled the official beginning of the special makeup f/x era.”

Cronenberg and his make up f/x teams, from Joe Blasco (older readers will fondly remember idolising Blasco in the ads for the ‘Joe Blasco Make Up School’ which appeared in Fangoria with pictures of Joe delicately applying maggots to the ravaged face of a victim in ILSA SHE WOLF OF THE SS and he also did the, albeit primitive, makeups for SHIVERS and RABID) to Stephen Dupuis and Chris Walas, gave a generation of emerging horror geeks the perverse thrill of polymorphous bodily horror. Alongside the hot parade of young, fearless, astonishingly talented and spectacularly deranged minds like Rob Bottin, Screaming Mad George, Stan Winston, Tom Savini, Greg Cannom, Carl Fullerton, Steve Johnson, Jennifer Aspinell, John Vulich, Everett Burrell, Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger, Wayne Toth, Gino De Rossi, Dick Smith (the grandfather of all), Rick Baker, Tony Gardner, Alec Gillis, Tom Woodruff Jnr, Mark Shostrom, Tom Sullivan, Todd Masters, Tom Burman, John Carl Buechler, Kevin Yagher, Gabe Bartelos, Bob Keen and no doubt a host of others whose names I’ve shamefully forgotten or misplaced, Cronenberg’s band of merry f/x technicians were the rock stars of the golden age of special make up f/x.

They were the names I looked out for, before the Bruce Campbells or Jeffrey Combs or Dick Millers, before the Stuart Gordons or the Jeff Burrs or Anthony Hickoxes (actually that last one’s a lie; I *always* look out for the Hickoxes) as an indication that the film would at least deliver excitement on a literally gut level. They were the names that made the impressionable teenage me into a rabid horror fan and the Fango journalists who wrote about them with such infectious affection were the distant friends I had yet to meet but with whom I shared the thrill of those great horror films.

This, by way of a brazen attempt to shoehorn in a brief paean on one of the horror greats, is what I wanted Good Scream to celebrate in this edition. The book ‘1001 Films You Should See Before You Die’ doesn’t shy away from the genre and Cronenberg features no less than three times. R Barton Palmer’s entry on VIDEODROME eloquently -- and inadvertently -- sums up exactly the fascination of the wild f/x side of the genre. Barton says:

“In many ways the most audacious formal incarnation of Cronenberg’s characteristic themes, Videodome begins as a fairly standard commercial thriller, only to be transformed, at midpoint, into subjective fantasy of the most outrageous and unusual kind. Visually rich, Videodrome is also thought-provoking for its startling meditation on both polymorphous perversity and the interpenetration between the public and subjective realms of experience.”

Anti-intellectuals are free to tune out for a second, but it’s a scientific fact that a group of more than two film theorists gathered together will fall over themselves to dissect the why and hows of the horror audience’s desire to see their projected selves dissected onscreen -- no subsection of film theorists is more prone to this kind of discourse than horror nerds. I should know; my university dissertation was undertaken in the guise of a scholarly study of that very thing, when in actual fact it was a ruse to gather together as much banned horror material as I could for my own personal use in the name of academia. Any committed fan of PSYCHO or PEEPING TOM will be well aware of the sadistic, indulgent lure cinema has on the masochistic viewer, supposedly safe in the dark as their very worst fears of exposure to violence and pain unspool relatively harmlessly on the screen in front of them.

If this is true, if we admit to ourselves why we do this every time we watch a horror film, if we proudly declare our fearlessness in the face of our darkest desires, then the make up technicians who conjure up these horrors are surely the most righteous sado-masochists of them all. And deep down, every horror nerd who ever opened up a copy of Fangoria, Gorezone (the real one, sister of Fango), Cinefantastique, or Cinefex wishes they could be one of those merciless rock stars of horror.

So excuse me while I get all misty-eyed and lead you through a brief scopophiliac look at 10 of my favourite f/x sequences of a golden age of blood-letting and truly shocking artistry. I won’t claim these are all the best, necessarily but they are, to me, some of the more memorable.

So here’s to you, great men (and women) of special make-up f/x; here’s also to Bob Martin, David Everett, Anthony Timpone, Philip Nutman, Anthony C. Ferrante, Paul Sammon, Michael Gingold, Maitland McDonough, Mark Shapiro, Tom Weaver, Ed Naha, Don Kaye, David J. Schow, Bill Warren, Michael Rowe our very own Alan and any horror journalist who wrote for those diaries of deadliest pleasure over the years.

1) REANIMATOR: Subduing The First Cadaver (Anthony Doubin/Mark Shostrom)

In Stuart Gordon’s ne plus ultra Lovecraft adaptation, the brilliance remains in the characterisation invested in the picture by the alumni of the Organic Theater Company of Chicago, who had, amongst many other more experimental endeavours, premiered works by a young playwright called David Mamet. The quiet impunity with which humanity is so scathingly thrust under the microscope in Mamet’s work must have rubbed off on Gordon and writer Denis Paoli. They found a riotously misanthropic vein of similar darkness to mine in the works of Howard Philips Lovecraft.

It’s this dedication to the bleakest of black comedy that forms the backbone of much of the first act of REANIMATOR. Oh sure, it’s grotesque from scene one, pulling the comparatively quaint, though gaudy, Technicolour bloodletting of Terence Fisher’s analogous FRANKENSTEIN Hammer pictures screaming into the post-Savini splatter age. It’s not until 38 minutes in that the blood really splats the fan in Gordon’s film. Courtesy of technicians including Everett Burrell and the legendary John Carl Buechler, it really has some momentum.

In their first collaborative reanimation of a dead human, Herbert West and Dan Caine are using the medical school mortuary to mine suitable cadavers. The first experiment seems to have failed but as they turn to leave, and as the doomed Dean Halsey awaits to pounce on the unethical pair, the cadaver springs to life giving rise to the first great set piece of Gordon’s illustrious career as one of horror’s premier mayhem makers.

As Halsey’s fingers are cleaved by a reanimated mouth (great effect #1), West grabs the nearest implement to hand, a bone saw, and before you can say “Dan, look out” he’s upon the cadaver, ably lancing the creature through the chest in a sensational full body prosthetic shot that delights and compels to this day (great effect #2).

2) HELLRAISER: Resurrection (Bob Keen)

If asked to choose just a single f/x sequence from horror as emblematic of my love for the genre, without hesitation Bob Ken’s exceptional work on this most engrossing sequence of 80s horror would be it.

Barker’s tastes have always run to the gothically perverse and this putrid birthing of one of the great horror villains is testament to the entire crew’s dedication to that grotesque directorial aim, even at that early stage in Barker’s career.

As brother Larry’s unwitting blood sacrifice leaks into the floorboards of the house where Frank met his untimely end at the hands and hooks of the Cenobites, impregnating the Hellbound heart that seems to lurk there, the black magic with which Frank lived his life sets in motion a breathtaking, dread-filled sequence of practical and optical trickery that has rarely been equalled in horror since for sheer visual power.

Propelled by Christopher Young’s majestic score (sorry Coil fans, but a minimalist industrial dirge over this picture would have been far, far less effective), Keen and his team use techniques previously so well used in picture such as THE EVIL DEAD (see: the final demonic meltdown) -- reverse photography, bladders and good old fashioned sculpting -- to create an indelible sequence, all twitching brain stems and gelatinous layers of flesh. It’s a picture that, with very few exceptions on the practical side, consistently belies it tiny budget to produce grand and elegant horrors.

3) THE CURSE 2: THE BITE: Black Snake Man (Screaming Mad George)

Every 80s horror fan’s über crush Jill Schoelen stars in this cheap, rather shoddy, in-name-only follow-up to the forgotten David Keith-directed (and some say Lucio Fulci ghost-directed) THE CURSE. Italians, being an industrious bunch, decided to spin a dull Lovecraft adaptation starring Will Wheaton into a series (it lasted three unrelated episodes, the third being equally misplaced BLOOD SACRIFIC, featuring a bored-looking Christopher Lee). Of course the logical direction for the second film to take was virulent, mutant snakes.

Schoelen and her boyfriend, J. Eddie Peck (yes…me neither) are on a road trip through the Arizona desert when they run across a sea of snakes, rendered radioactive by the ever present Cold War threat of nuclear testing. Of course, he is bitten and spends the remaining picture becoming ever more aggressive, his hand wrapped in a suspiciously pulsating bandage as the rogue doctor who treated him by the roadside with some, naturally, experimental drugs tries desperately to hunt them down and assuage his malpracticing conscience. Too late for him, and Scholen, the rampage Peck eventually goes AWOL leading to one of the most audacious sequences in 80s exploitation.

The Italians’ trump card was in hiring one man for their crew: Screaming Mad George. It’s not just a clever name. The man once known as Joji Tani was a legend for horror fans in the heyday of makeup f/s in the 80s and 90s with everything from Greta’s cockroach transformation in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 4 to Alex Winter’s menagerie of FREAKED freaks springing from his fevered imagination.

Here, in this otherwise unassuming little b-movie, the climax is quite something to behold. Peck, on the run from the law (represented by exploitation legend Bo Svensen) finds himself astride the front of his hysterical girlfriend’s truck, his arm now fully transformed into a mutant snake. He then vomits up his own tongue and has his eyeballs eased from their sockets by a mass of writhing baby serpents in a gelatinous sac. Crashing into a derelict building site, he vomits up a larger snake, finally falling to his knees and, in a rather pitiful lift from THE FLY, jams the scaffold pole Schoelen is using to weakly defend herself into his chest to end it all. But whichever snake is so incongruously controlling at this point him has other ideas. As Schoelen reaches up to tearfully caress his cheek, it splits apart, the whole top of his head lolling back like it’s on a moist hinge. From the stump bursts an even larger snake, emerging just in time to be blown to smithereens by the tardy police force.

Welcome to the world of Screaming Mad George.

4) VIDEODROME: Vaginal VHS (Rick Baker)

There’s a wonderful moment in the 1991 Channel 4 documentary FEARS IN THE DARK, where a fresh-faced Clive Barker, smoking a massive cigar, gleefully recounts the delight in hanging out with a veteran f/x crew, all unpretentious artistry, who are whole-heartedly committed to finding exactly the best way in which to execute a particular effect. Refuting Robert Bloch’s assertion that the brain is able to cook up a spicier specimen than any special effect could and lauding the cinema’s ability to be as explicit as the imagination will allow, Barker goes onto assert that, of course, a man could come onto the screen and describe, with a shocked look on his ace, the vaginal slit in James Woods’ stomach into which he inserts VHS cassettes. But it couldn’t be quite the same a seeing it.

There are very few things I’ve encountered in all my years as a film fan that I agree with more than this sentiment.

As I wrote in the introduction to this list, Cronenberg, for all his infection-based psychology and intellectual shucking and jiving, dreamt up some of the most indelible images of 20th century horror; some blunt and to the point (SCANNERS’ opening cranial detonation or THE FLY’s agonizing arm-wrestle) others gloopily surreal (Samantha Eggar’s BROOD of pyschoplasmic offspring and EXISTENZ’s bone gun). None, though, has quite the horrific potency -- both literally, metaphorically; textually and sub-textually -- as VIDEODROME’s signature image which was conjured up by the genius Rick Baker: James Woods, wrist deep inside his own stomach cavity, wrestling with the pistol that metamorphosises into the cassette that either alters his life irrevocably, or that his irrevocably altered life has selected as the means with which he can bring about a sensory revolution. As a single effects sequence, it’s a metaphor that drives the spatter era, that encapsulates at the most primal level the very fascination we have with horror; that proximity to danger and violence, that addiction to the dark and perverse desires of the genre which we all feel every time we sit down to watch a horror picture. It validates every impulse cognisant horror fans have about our collective enthrallment and it confirms every fear held by those who would seek to censor it, may they rot in hell. It is as emotionally truthful as horror gets.

5) SOCIETY: Reverse Pull-Man (Screaming Mad George)

As THE BITE indicates, Screaming Mad George isn’t one to shy away from vulgar invention. He would go on to enjoy an association with Brian Yuzna, wrangling surreal creature f/x for FUAST and the sequel BRIDE OF REANIMATOR. But the year previous to BRIDE, and the same year he unleashed those ferocious serpents, he created what is perhaps his most bizarre, unpleasant and thoroughly engrossing piece of prosthetic trickery.

Freshman buck Billy Warlock is a regular, rich nerd who one day discovers that his entire existence has been engineered by his family for a single purpose: to sire similarly privileged young upstarts in their affluent Beverly Hills suburb with which to indulge in bizarre, heavily dismorphic, spasmodic, flesh rending sex with everyone from friends and neighbours to parents and siblings. Understandably disturbed upon encountering one such polygamous/polymorphus orgy involving his mother, father and sister, he immediately stumbles upon another similar tryst involving seemingly everyone he’s ever known, including one particularly vicious queen of a jock who has hounded him since childhood. In the face of further taunting, Warlock decides to take somewhat drastic action.

Reaching inside the jock’s rectum, he forces his arm up through the length of his torso, into his skull, popping out each eyeball and with a flick of his wrist, an athletic tug of his arm, turns him completely inside out.

It goes someway to describing the screaming madness, as well as the legendary creative impulse of George

6) THE THING: Defibrillation (Rob Bottin)

Dick Smith and THE EXORCIST begat Rick Baker and so Rick Baker begat hirsute, reclusive genius, Rob Bottin. Absent from our screens for nearly a decade, in the midst of the CGI onslaught that pervades genre films of all budgets, now more than ever their brand of the grandest illusions is sorely missed. There was a controlled mania to Bottin’s ingenious designs for THE HOWLING, done at a time when Baker was breaking similar ground with AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON for which he won the Academy Award. For the ever respectful sensei, the gauntlet seemed set down; on his next project, Bottin went for broke. If make up f/x artists are the rock stars of the film industry, Bottin was Freddie Mercury, Gene Simmons and Ziggy Stardust all wrapped up in one flamboyant, staggeringly accomplished and intangible package.

Young and hungry, working for a master of horror like hard-boiled Carpenter, the very opposite of a mischievous, playful spirit like Joe Dante on THE HOWLING, on a story of the ultimate illusion and old-fashioned body horror afforded Bottin the license to go wild. And how. Drawing on a consummate craftsmanship and a devotion to the genre garnered working under one the f/x greats, he challenged every effects artist working in the field, then and to this day, to stretch the limits of their imagination and then go a giddy step beyond.

Of all the creations for Carpenter’s tale of extraordinary madness, none is more memorable than the spider-head sequence, justly revered and it’s dialogue oft-quoted by horror nerds and post-modern horror screenplays for the last 25 years. It’s the lead-up to that scene that I find the kicker, a true jump scare and one that succeeds quite like no other before or since.

Norris, undergoing what appears to be a cardiac arrest, is hoisted onto a gurney. Dr Cooper standing astride his chest, defibrillator raised, brings the paddles down to restart his colleague’s heart. Except it’s not his colleague anymore and the shock of 1000 volts wrenches the Thing out of its concealed form; chest opening up like a stygian maw and ghoulish teeth, dripping with viscous fluid, hack off Cooper’s arms above the elbow as Norris’s head writhes and distends and spits and howls as it comes away from the body, sprouting legs and scooting off into horror immortality.

The first time he did it, Bottin managed to destroy the room as noxious fumes from the myriad prosthetic parts caught fire. The second time, they got it in the can and it ignited in the imaginations of a million horror geeks a feeling of such unbridled verve and unhinged ingenuity that it reverberated though the proceeding decades of monster movie madness like a virus.

7) SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE: Death By Chest Of Drawers (Giannetto De Rossi)

It’s sadly rare that the classic Italian exploitation realm bleeds into modern horror in any meaningful way. The mid-late 1980s and 1990s were replete with failed attempts by a dwindling Italian horror scene to break the bonds of state controlled film/TV lockdown and bring their A-game back to the genre. None of the greats of Italian horror ever really accomplished this, but one relic of that era was Giannetto De Rossi, progenitor of some of the most memorable scenes in all of exploitation: the splinter in the eye from ZOMBI; the robust shotgun blast to the stomach in CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE; the vicious bloodletting of THE BEYOND; and the indelible horrors wrought by Freudstein in HOUSE BY THE CEMETARY…he was Fulci and Co’s greatest hit maker.

Come the mid 2000s, European horror was set for another shake up in the shape of Italy’s neighbour, France. In the space of a few years, a gaggle of tyro filmmakers cut a swathe through anaemic studio horror and more full-bloodied but increasingly repetitive contributions of the indie circuit. FRONTIER(S), MARTYRS, INSIDE, ILS gave rise to a movement, but it was arguably Alexandre Aja who broke the interest in this gruesome Nouvelle Vague at an international level.

As a statement of intent to horror fans, his boldest move was to hire every hardcore horror geek’s hero: the man who revelled in spirited excess, Giannetto De Rossi. And for all the severed-“head” (in all senses of the term), throat gouging, buzzsaw lopping juiciness on display, the piece de resistance De Rossi brought to Aja’s guignol hysteria was a startling and unexpected use for household furniture.

Philippe Nahon’s bulky intruder, skulking around the house like a razor-wielding monolith, slings the father of the family down the stairs, mercilessly beating all reason and hope out of him, forcing his head through the banisters. Calmly walking to the base of the stairs, Nahon heaves the bulky wooden chest to where the father’s head lolls and slowly, effortlessly wrenches the beaten cranium from the man’s neck, fountains of gore pumping life from the limp torso.

So matter of fact in execution; so efficient in it’s old fashioned makeup effects magic.

8) PHANTASM 2: Ball-to-the-wall (Mark Shostrom)

Don Coscarelli really has a single signature, somewhat weather-beaten, gag but it’s a good one. Those flying spheres have no logic to them, but they’re as potent a genre mascot as Krueger’s glove, Vorhees’s hockey mask or Brundle’s telepod: they’re soul food trinkets for horror fans and they’ve all lead to some of the great f/x moments in horror.

Mark Shostrom makes his second appearance in the list, showing his versatility and skill with a host of gags involving the celebrated returning balls (helped by KNB and Everett Burrell with sphere designs by Steve Patino, a member of Shostrom’s shop).

Kept incongruously inside a small coffin in a mausoleum patrolled by The Tall Man and some random priest, the spheres are called into action after a piece of minor blasphemy inflicted on the meddlesome man of God by Angus Scrimm’s eloquent villain. Pursuing the priest around the labyrinthine corridors, initially lopping off an ear with its bladed weaponry, the ball eventually corners the priest drilling fountains of gore to the floor.

Later, in a rather glorious piece of make-up trickery, the balls are set upon our heroes by a sinister mausoleum attendant, only to have them turn back on him, rampaging though the man’s body and it jerks and spasms up the wall. Mining all the way up his torso and into his throat, the ball eventually, Mike discovers, becomes lodged firmly inside the man’s mouth, monstrously distending it, the razor-shaper blade still buzzing as it attempts to dislodge itself from it’s victim’s mouth.

Simple, effective and highly entertaining.

9) FRIGHT NIGHT – The Lonely Death Of Evil Ed. (Steve Johnson/Randall William Cook)

Makeup f/x are usually memorable because of the intense provoking of shocked or gleeful revulsion in an audience. In some instances, however, they go beyond effective into the truly affecting. THE FLY and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON are perhaps the best examples of this type of transcendent make-up; pathos wrought through prosthetic artistry. But in 1985, the team at Entertainment Effects Group (including Randall William Cook, who later created creatures for LORD OF THE RINGS and who wrangled and wore himself some terrific special make-ups for Tibor Takacs underrated I, MADMAN) created one on the great emotionally affecting f/x sequences of the 80s in Tom Holland’s sensational old fashioned monster mash reworking of REAR WINDOW.

The makeup work in question comes during the bombastic climax, proving thrilling, inventive and genuinely moving amidst the mad onslaught occurring around the Dandridge house. Evil Ed’s reverse-transformation from werewolf back into slain mortal weirdo is a classic piece of slight of hand trickery and mastery of the form; cutting back and forth from a variety of mechanical and prosthetic appliances as the wounded Ed weeps in pain in front of a helpless Peter Vincent weeping in pity; this is new ground for the monster and for the monster slayer, a confrontation of what all this death really means for both.

And like the best cinema trickery, it’s completely sold to us by truly fabulous performances from Stephen Geoffreys and Roddy McDowell.

10) ROBOCOP: The Toxic Death Of That Bastard Emil (Rob Bottin)

There are some make-ups which, no matter the extent of nauseating abhorrence, you just want to stand up and whoop with sadistic, giddy delight. Whiz kid RobBottin proved his stomach-churning mind's eye was as inspired as ever with a raft of spectacularly violent effects work that marked ROBOCOP out as a bold, uncompromising comic fantasy to be reckoned with. The star of the special make-up show was undeniably the demise of punk gang member Emil Antonowsky (ace character actor Paul McCrane, who would have an equally memorable death in Chuck Russell’s marvellous THE BLOB the following year -- for a while, 80s American cinema’s whipping boy; its very own Giovanni Lombardo Radice).

Plunged headlong into a vat labelled “Toxic Waste” in letters so large that you could see what was coming from the theatre screen next door, his van doors fly open, spilling out what looks a little like the balding, leather-clad scumbag we’ve come to love covered in the steaming, noxious liquid. Then his face looms into the camera and we see someone who looks as though they’ve been exquisitely sculpted from rancid porridge. It’s a sensational, grand-standing piece of prosthetic work, so tactile, so tangible in its putrid, perished, wet decay. McCrane sells it fabulously too, with his best John Merrick slur, lolloping across the junkyard into the path of, first an amply startled Ray Wise and then something harder and faster: Kurtwood Smith’s brand new 6000 SUX.

The result is an orgiastic spray of contaminated viscera, an instance of playful, gleeful indulgence unleashed on an unsuspecting audience who can do nothing but submit to the horror.

And delight in every festering drop.

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