A Nightmare on Elm Street

Rating: R

Run Time: 91 minutes

Director: Wes Craven

Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund 

Even now, after the passage of three decades, I can vividly recall the first time I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street.  A group of my friends and I had gone to the mall.  By 6 p.m., we had already hit the bookstore and the record shop and then struck out with the girls, all in about, oh say, fifteen minutes.  With nothing else better to do, I suggested the flick.  As I remember it, I did so with a rather bored air and a shrug.  Not once, never, in my short sixteen years had I ever, ever actually been scared by a horror movie.  Sure, I had been on the receiving end of a jump scare or two when my grandmother, Ev, had taken me to see a reissue of Jaws five years earlier (Richard Dreyfuss losing his shit when Ben Gardner’s head popped into the frame at the bottom of Verna Fields’s swimming pool; Roy Scheider’s first intuition that a bigger boat might be a good idea after seeing that monster head emerge from the waters of Martha’s Vineyard while he was ladling chum).

Never had a movie frightened me, much less left me witless with fear for its entire running time.  Yet, from the first moment of Nightmare, as Fred Krueger’s feet menacingly shuffled into the compressed frame on the larger rectangular expanse of the screen and he began to fabricate that awful glove of knives, I was scared shitless.  The eerie musical accompaniment of Charles Bernstein’s score, that short seven-note motif, heightened the effect.  Later relentless pulses of synthesizer at odd moments underscore the tension that inheres to the story.  That tension, for me at least, didn’t cease for an hour and a half.  I was at least figuratively on the edge of my seat from beginning to end, constantly concerned that that goddamned Freddie Krueger was going to pop out again unexpectedly. 

It was in his ability to do so with such frightening regularity that lies the genius of director Wes Craven’s idea.  Fred Krueger is a dream demon, and in a dream world, of course, anything can happen.  A slasher movie villain can even teleport without leaving us with that “WTF, I thought he was on the other side of the lake” feeling (you know what I’m talking about).  And let me tell you, Freddie does a whole hell of a lot of teleporting in the movie, and every time he did it back in 1984 when my insecure, pimpled sixteen year old self was nailed to my seat with hands clenched to the cushioned arm rails at my side, I jumped six inches.  Neither before nor since have I ever been that freaked out by a movie.  It was one of the best times I’ve ever had in a movie theater.

Being a bit more knowledgeable about the horror field now, I find it hard to believe that Wes Craven, a guy with a proven track record of putting butts in seats who had already directed a genre masterpiece in The Hills Have Eyes, would have had such a hard time peddling a “high concept” idea with the potential resonance that A Nightmare… clearly had, but fickle Hollywood time and again honors the greedy philosophy that you are only as good as your last picture.  Thank goodness for Bob Shaye and New Line Cinema, a production company with about three employees who wanted to extend themselves into the film business more by actually making their own movies.  And as far as New Line is concerned, thank goodness for Wes Craven.  The rest is history.

The story, while elegant, is a simple one: A small group of teenagers are experiencing a shared dream about a very nasty man with a severely burnt face, a filthy fedora and red & green sweater, and a glove made of knives.  Each unbeknownst to the others are finding it increasingly difficult to sleep at night.  The first of the friends whose experience we share is Tina (Amanda Wyss), who dreams she is being stalked along a long corridor that inscrutably leads to a darkened boiler room.  For a brief moment, she shares the corridor with a lamb, either an indication she is asleep and counting sheep or that she is being led like a lamb to slaughter: perhaps it is both.

Once Tina is in the red and black-shaded boiler room, she begins to see glimpses of the man who is stalking her.  As she meanders through the basement, his shadow plays across the walls of the furnace room and his awful glove screeches along horizontal metal pipes, producing that awful nails-blackboard sound that is so ear-piercingly irritating.  Just as she thinks he has left her, he (of course) leaps up from behind and she bolts upright in bed.  It was only a dream.  Her nightgown, however, has four parallel slash marks in it, a token of the power of this particular dream. 

In the next scene, we are watching a group of girls on the lawn who are playing jump-rope on a neat suburban lawn and hypnotically chanting a singular rhyme in a sing-song monotone (one, two, Freddie’s coming for you; three, four, better lock your door; five, six, grab your crucifix; seven, eight, gonna stay up late; nine, ten, never sleep again – trust me, its fucking creepy).  The town is Springwood.  A hazy patina of gauzy white envelops the screen, as if a thin film of misty fog had settled over the camera lens. The eye shifts to the right as three of our four leads drive up in a red convertible driven by Glen Lantz (a very young Johnny Depp in his film debut) and occupied by Tina and her bestest friend in the whole world, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). 

Tina tells them sketchy details about her dream and we get the first intimation that she is not the only one plagued lately by troubled sleep and vivid nightmares.  She is clearly apprehensive, so Glen and Nancy agree to spend the night at her house the same evening when Tina’s mom goes out of town.  The three are startled by the sudden appearance of Tina’s greaseball boyfriend (and heir apparent to the throne of Arthur Fonzarelli…..aaaiiieee Ritchie), Rod Lane (Nick Corri, or at least he was then).  Our quartet is complete. 

The same night Tina dreams of the pizza-faced boogeyman again.  Unfortunately, this dream interlude ends with her brutally violent death as we witness her writhe in pain and fear all over her bedroom (including the walls and ceiling); the scene has aptly been compared to a rape.  Rod, with whom Tina had just finished up engaging in some of the most vigorous fake sex moaning I have ever heard, also witnesses her death.  Realizing that, hey, he’s a bit of a hood, and knowing how exactly that will go with the Five-O when he tries to explain that he had nothing whatsoever to do with her death, Rod expeditiously gets the fuck out of there. 

I am going to take a brief pause to talk about the scene: it is a tremendously creative exercise in replicating dream logic and then translating it effectively to the screen.  There are five or six different aspects of just weird-ass dream structure here that all seamlessly blend to leave the viewer unsure of what exactly is happening and if it is real or not.  Just one instance occurs when a crucifix drops off the wall for no good reason above the headboard where Nancy is sleeping in Tina’s house.  Immediately after this, the as-yet unknown killer stretches through the wall and appears bent on grabbing the teenager; the figure then recedes into the wall.  She wakes, places the crucifix back on the wall, and knocks on it to assure its solidity; it’s as if she had sensed Krueger or the intrusion of the dream world into her sleep.  This small part of the larger scene focusing on Tina’s plight is a great symbolic representation of the unreality of dreams and the confusion they engender; inversely, though, it would seem that reality is itself no more logically navigable than the surreality of the dream world.  Nancy is looking for reassurance in the realness or solidity of tangible things.  She and the rest of her friends are right to question both the walking and unconscious world and to probe just how secure they really are, awake or asleep.

Whatever else may be true, one thing is certain: Tina’s graphic death is quite real.  This whole scenario ends at the police station, where we meet Nancy’s father, Lieutenant Donald Thompson (played by the great John Saxon), and her mother, Marge Thompson (played by the not so great Ronee Blakley).  Here’s a funny thing I’ve always thought about this part: Donald seems to be running the whole show at the Springtown PD, yet he is only a lieutenant; there’s gotta be a captain, assistant chief maybe, and a chief, too.  Where are they?  I don’t know.  The filmmakers should have just called the damned place a sheriff’s department and christened John Saxon as the High Sheriff himself. 

Anyway, Don’s pissed, Marge is pissed, and neither understand why Nancy was at Tina’s to begin with.  As Nancy tries to explain, she quickly senses her parents aren’t buying this particular line of shit.  There is a bit of that classic fairy tale cum horror movie expression of the idea that parental disbelief in the monster under the bed isn’t merely every child’s worst fear, but there is the further understanding that such disbelief can be as deadly to the child as whatever killed Tina in her sleep. 

After all this, Nancy decides (and you can’t blame her) that sleep is for suckers, so she devises a two-tiered system of stimulant ingestion and alarms to keep her awake so she can avoid sleep for as long as she can, and when she cannot withstand it any longer, she tries desperately to identify her dream attacker so she can prepare for him.  Nancy is no fool, certainly, and she becomes a worthwhile adversary to the phantom killer long before the film ends.  In doing so, she does of course learn his identity and just exactly why it is that his visitations are specific to her and her friends.  

For my money, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a great horror movie, a classic of its kind.  It is full of surreal set pieces like tongue phones and killer knife gloves appearing between the heroine’s legs as she bathes (and if you can avoid the innuendo in this short scene, congratulations; I don’t know what particular point the filmmakers are making with such a blatantly sexual image, but it is a blatantly sexual image…unless, in terms of visual perspective, that was just the best place to put the camera and the hole in the tub, in which case I’m wrong).  There are nightmare scenes of Tina haunting Nancy, enshrouded and blood-stained in her transparent body bag, a centipede falling out of her mouth and a mass of writhing snakes squirming in the mud at her feet.  We’ve got Johnny Depp dying in an explosively projected ocean of his own blood, its upward trajectory thoroughly defying gravity.  It’s got Freddie crashing through underbrush, Freddie crashing through doors, Freddie crashing through mirrors, Freddie crashing through just about any other fucking thing you can possibly imagine.   

It was Wes Craven’s original idea to tell the story half in a dream state and half in the waking world that is the brilliant stroke which allows these set pieces as dream images to exist in the film.  Whether or not he be an auteur, he is a canny guy whose output and continued work is always worth checking out.  And that dream idea, it’s inescapably arresting both for its visual and textual possibilities.  Freud’s ideas regarding the significance of dreams, involving recognition of actions like displacement or condensation, latent versus manifest dream content, are there in some form or another. In dreams, content (familiar to us when we are awake) becomes condensed, compressed, transmuted, irrevocably changed, altered.  People are other people; the female student hall monitor becomes Krueger.  Things are other things, both places and objects.  Phenomena occur that could not in the “real” world; a pebble used to wake a sleeper is thrown with such force as to become embedded in the glass of a bedroom window.  So there can be a killer who not only kills you in real life by invading and assaulting you in your dreams and who can only ever harm you when you dream. 

RANDOM THOUGHTS

THE ACTING

I must deal with what I consider to be a big elephant in the room here.  Many reviewers have absolutely raved about the performance of Heather Langenkamp over the years; she is consistently mentioned by a wide number of critics as one of the top Final Girls in slasher movie annals.  I cannot conceive of what it is these people see in the performance.  She wildly overacts when a little subtlety is the clearly preferable choice and she blandly underplays scenes where she ought to emote a bit.  It’s snotty of me to write this, I know.  I’m pretty sure I can’t act and I would embarrass myself trying.  But, motherfucker, neither can Heather, and someone should have done her the tremendous favor of telling her.  Why do I feel catty about opining on the subject?  It is generally known that the actor unfortunately acquired a very real stalker after this movie premiered in 1984 and she decided to stay away from acting to avoid just that sort of unwanted attention ever happening again.  Good decision; wrong reason.  (Still, I must admit that her acting in Part 3 is a quantum leap forward in quality from the original.   She had improved immeasurably between the two films and she improved even more for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.  Perhaps folks review her first performance with a retrospective generosity born of a consideration of the latter two films.) 

Even so, however bad she was in the first movie, even she cannot descend the depths of just the worse source of atrocious acting quite as adroitly as Ronee Blakley.  Simply, the woman is a fucking train wreck.  From her very first appearance, she looks and acts like a zoned-out druggie (the 19th nervous breakdown kind)…picture soccer mom and then imagine her antithesis.  In every scene she shared with Heather Langenkamp, a tiny part of my soul died.  Admittedly, perhaps Ronee was playing to character; Marge is clearly an alcoholic: in fact, if she had found one more bottle of stashed vodka around that house during the course of the movie, I had considered constructing a drinking game around it.   I understand we are to construe her intoxication as symptomatic of her daily struggle with the weight of Freddie’s death on her soul.  Well let me tell you what:  Never have I seen guilt wasted on a more unworthy person in all the annals of film I am personally aware of. Freddie?...the motherfucker had to go.  Marge, you’re a candidate for sainthood.  But that tan? She looks like a stoked orangutan.      

Wes Craven must share credit with Robert Englund for the film’s initial success and enduring status.  It is, apart from Nick Castle’s original Michael Myers, the best slasher villain turn in modern slasher history (a nod here for Tony Perkins and Carl Boehm).  The way he moves, that creepy low chuckle, the skulking motion when he walks, the scuttle-like run, the shoulder slouch and all-around bad posture, and his dramatic flourishes with that signature weapon, all are mannerisms that distinguish the character from the typical slasher monster.  The genuine glee he clearly derives from stalking and murder is chillingly appropriate to the characterization.  That first film’s performance is iconic for good reason.  It looms large over the majority of the sequels, where he so quickly devolved into the stand-up quipster most associate with the role now.  It’s a great role, and the relish with which he attacked it and the characterization that is uniquely his are brilliant, formidable, and all sorts of other hyperbole.

IDEAS  

Regarding the conceptualization of Fred Krueger, it has always struck me that Wes Craven made such a very smart choice by making his antagonist a child killer.  Who among us could conceive of a better poster child for absolute Evil than that?  Not mere villainy or wickedness, not funny, haha, Eeeeevil, but simply Evil.  He is every parent’s nightmare already, so how better to accentuate that vileness than to make him a ghost in the Elm Street children’s dreams, a dream monster that avenges himself upon the sins of the parents by exacting a terrible retribution upon the innocents (and innocence) of their children (as he had once done in life)?  A child killer, the sort of awful monster that lives in a cold and wet, damp place, a place and a state of being impenetrable to light or goodness, irredeemable. 

Well, apparently, there was something worse than a child killer and that’s…a child molester! 

WTF?  It would seem that it was originally intended that Fred Krueger be a molester, but that was apparently a bit too taboo for audiences who craved and slavishly consumed slasher movies like there was no tomorrow because they gave the people (read teenage boys) what they wanted:  voluminous quantities of tits and blood and tits and more blood.  The very morally dubious message would appear to be this: it’s okay for these movies to objectify women, demonstrating an only very thinly veiled misogyny and simultaneously depicting sexualized violence, but by God let’s not talk about molestation.  Here, then is my question for those who felt a child killer was okay but a child molester, well now, that was going just a biiiiit too far:  what the fuck do people think Freddie was doing to the Elm Street kids before he killed them?!?!  (Still, I seem to be in a minority on this one.  My own wife, no one’s dummy, understands this distinction while I cannot, so I’m wrong apparently.)    

Why does Wes use deliberate and specific Roman Catholic imagery in the movie…

Is Freddie a bringer of these nightmares?  Does he create or somehow induce the nightmares?  How, in any event, can he invade the dreams of others?                       

Craven used the red and green as colors for Freddie’s sweater because he had read that was the color combination hardest on the eye; damned if it doesn’t seem to be true.

The original conception for the dream killer arose from the fusion of a very frightening experience he had as a child with a creeper-like character who stared up at him from the street, into his bedroom, and a series of articles about young Southeast Asian males who died in their sleep (healthy young men who suffered heart attacks yet had no predisposition to such or any family history of heart disease; some of the men seemed to fear sleep).

CLASSIC LINES

At one point, Nancy looks in a mirror and says, “My God, I look twenty years old.”  Classic…

Another classic exchange: “What the hell are dreams?”  “We really don’t know.” – thanks, Wes, that clears things up nicely…

“Screw sleep!!” – right on, Nancy!

LOOSE ENDS

Someone needs to talk to Nancy about proper funeral attire, because she stands out like a lemon in a bowl of limes with that blue dress on…

Great value for a buck: on $1.8 million, the special F/X people created wonders with rotating rooms, sleight of hand, mannequin arms, specially-built bathtubs, Bisquick stair steps, and other cheapskate effects that somehow manage to avoid looking shoddy, too.

Earlier in the movie, when Nancy first conceives of the idea of staying awake to combat the dream demon, she asks the moronic Glen to stay alert when she cannot so he can pull her back out before it’s too late.  Well, of course, he fucks it up and falls asleep.  Later in the movie, instead of having learned her lesson the first time that Glen is an unreliable dumbass, Nancy turns around later and asks him to try again…is it sleep deprivation? 

Poor Glen…Balinese dream skills, my ass…

Where can I get one of those tongue phones?       

There’s a neat but long four-hour documentary on the Freddie franchise that covers every film in the series.  There are interviews with almost all the participants from all of the movies except for arguably the two most famous…Patricia Arquette and Johnny Depp.  They couldn’t be bothered to make an appearance in retrospect to acknowledge the films that began their careers?  Wankers…

A FINAL THOUGHT  

I hate the sequels.  Even Dream Warriors and A New Nightmare, highly regarding sequels among many, leave me cold; they are too contrived and the higher quality special effects are somehow incongruent with the DIY ethos of the first film. 

Still, I am so glad the original exists.  And I am very glad that I was there in that darkened dream-world of the movie theater thirty-one years ago, to share with my friends the experience of watching a film that became the cornerstone to the House that Freddie Built.  A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the greatest horror movies of all time.  How’s that for hyperbole.

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 10/10

   

                           

Count Dracula aka El Conde Dracula (1970)

Rating: PG

Run Time: 98 minutes

Director: Jesus Franco

Starring: Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Klaus Kinski        

Somehow, some way, Jess Franco and Harry Alan Towers managed to convince Christopher Lee that the Dracula they wanted to film would be definitive in the sense that it would most faithfully follow Bram Stoker’s source novel, at least more closely than any other movie had hitherto done.  To a degree, that is true.  The movie, to a point, follows the novel in broad outline, particularly in its opening scenes.  There are sections of dialogue and/or monologue that are taken directly from the book.  This subject was apparently something dear to Lee’s heart, and anyone who knows anything about the history of Hammer Films knows that he was constantly bitching about how shitty their Dracula films were increasingly becoming (he was right, I guess, although I still passionately adore them).  He’d show up in the next one, anyway, of course (Lee has never seemed terribly discriminating in his choices). 

Still, Lee was legitimately alarmed by how Hammer seemed to so disparagingly treat the literary character in the monster's iteration in each new film (he was right, there, too, because they were making him a buffoon).  Dammit, he was the King of the Vampires, after all.

So he must have been easy pickings in that regard, because he surely otherwise already knew what Towers and Franco were up to: cheap exploitation fare.  I think he’d by that point already been in more than one of their Fu Manchu flicks.  Oddly, however, that is not at all what we get.  Instead, we have subdued performances from everyone in the picture...including, and you will not believe me, Klaus Fucking Kinski as...and you will not believe me here, either, Renfield of all people, the most wacked out character in all of Stoker's epistolary novel.  No histrionics, no ham. 

Lee, who was always a physical match for the part, here plays him as depicted in the novel.  When we first see Dracula, he is a tall gentleman with white hair and long mustache, dressed entirely in black, just as Stoker described him.  He introduces himself to our Jonathan Harker, who arrives at the castle through travels and stops as also described in the book.  There in the castle, Harker is accosted by the three vampire brides, who are warned off by Dracula himself before their being satiated by an infant.  Harker awakens in his bed as if this had been a dream.  He does some exploring and discovers Dracula’s tomb.  Now, he does this by climbing out of the window to his bedroom because Dracula has locked him in.  The funny thing about this window is that it is clearly a small room he is climbing into, not the outside at all; this will not be the last sign of cheapness in the film, oh no.  Anyway, before too long, he is plummeting through a window in a free fall to escape an otherwise toothy demise.

The next time we see Harker, he is in the hospital bed of a sanitarium run by Doctor Van Helsing... not Professor Van Helsing, Doctor Van Helsing.  He is played by the inimitable Herbert Lom.  Harker is being comforted for the moment by Dr. Seward, who works for Van Helsing.  Also at the asylum are Jonathan’s fiancé, Mina, and her friend, Lucy Westenra.  Ms. Westenra’s fiancé is Quincy Morris, an attorney.  That’s right, everything’s kinda ass-backwards and nobody's who he's supposed to be; relationships are altered, etc.  Still, it is an admirable attempt to get in a nod to all the characters from the book (who are, besides Van Helsing, largely interchangeable anyway); Arthur Holmwood only is missing.  Even so, this is probably the point where Chris Lee began to suspect he had once more been suckered into appearing in yet another Dracula adaptation that was precipitously heading down the shitter again.   

As always, or pretty much always, Dracula first selects Lucy as a victim, making short shrift of her.  Now the puzzling thing about her victim status is that Van Helsing will later tell his intrepid group of vampire hunters that, as a student of the occult and black arts, he pretty much knew what was going on from the get-go and further that he also knew the author of their woe was Dracula himself.  But does he tell anybody?  Does he do anything constructive to save Lucy from a fate that's even worse from the one that's supposed to be a fate worse than death (If Stoker’s novel was at least in part an unconscious study of sexual repression in Victorian England, and if women always bore the worst brunt of that repression, then vampirization was tantamount to sexual assault)?  No, he doesn’t do a damned thing, that’s what.  But now that he knows what he’s dealing with, well, by God, let’s get down to business.  And then he goes and has a fucking stroke.

So, with Seward being around only to introduce us to Renfield, and with Van Helsing now wheelchair bound, guess who’s left of the intrepid vampire hunters?  Harker and Morris.  At any event, they are up to the task.  But first let me back up a little and discuss Renfield.  As I noted above, he is portrayed by Werner Herzog’s great actor, Klaus Kinski.  And what is more, I’ve seen him in other things, so when I say he plays Renfield in a subdued manner, I am saying all kinds of things about the movie.  Stoker’s Renfield was certifiable, a true lunatic.  He is here, too, I suppose, but Kinski’s performance is gentle and relaxed.  And he does not have a single word of dialogue; no, that’s not true, but more on that later.  The funny thing is, he really performs no function in the film in terms of moving the narrative forward.  Unlike the novel, where he is something like Dracula’s “man on the inside,” here he has only a rather tenuous psychic link to the vampire.  In one scene, Mina inexplicably goes to visit him in his cell because she thinks he may be able to illuminate this mystery.   I cannot tell you why, really, because he hasn't done a damn thing before then to suggest he knows fuck-all about what Dracula's up to.  But Dracula tells him to kill her, so he tries, unsuccessfully, to strangle her.  Then he just goes back to being gentle, relaxed, and quiet.  What is this shit?  If Lee was privy to this asinine business, he must have been about apoplectic at this point.

So, the intrepid vampire hunters (plus Seward), spurred on by the invalid, Van Helsing, traipse to Dracula’s haunts (I can’t remember if it’s his place in Carfax Abbey or his London digs).  There they are subjected to an attack by – wait, are you ready for this? - a menagerie of the world’s most vicious stuffed animals.  Yes, that is correct; no, I am not exaggerating.  This scene is, of course, justly famous among connoisseurs of shitty movies, and if you were harboring the illusion that this were anything other than a shitty movie, let me disabuse you of that notion right here.  What could they have possibly been thinking?  What is more, the filmmakers are not content to allow the taxidermied critters to maintain the dignity of merely remaining motionless as they snarl and threaten.  No, off-screen hands shake and move the little fuckers to simulate animation.  Because a shitty stuffed animal that is moving is infinitely more frightening than a shitty stuffed animal that is stationary.  I wonder what Lee thought about that scene?

While I’m on the subject of shittiness, let me say something about the writing.  It sucks.  And you know what, if I had been Herbert Lom, I would have walked off set, because he alone is singled out to deliver the most nonsensical, contradictory, cryptic garbledegook I have ever heard uttered in a movie in my life.  Remember, Lom is speaking English, so there is nothing lost in the dub, so to speak.  And, speaking of dialogue and moving us along to the end of this review, remember when I said Kinski did not say anything?  Well, he says one thing, “Varna.”

Varna, you remember, is the Eastern European port on the Black Sea that Dracula chooses to sail to when he cuts short his losses and attempts to return to his homeland.  Harker and Morris arrive before him, kill the vampire sisters, and sanctify Dracula’s crypt.  Dracula himself is just getting onto the grounds of his castle, led by an escort of gypsies (taken from the book), when the fearless vampire killers roll two large paper mache boulders over the castle ledge, momentarily pissing off a startled horse, yet apparently  killing two gypsy extras.  The two intrepid monster-killers then mount the trailer where Dracula’s body is found within its wooden box and set the vampire on fire.  Then they toss the box and body off yet another ledge.  The end.  I will say, not a bad ending as endings in bad movies go.

Was this movie bad, you ask?…yes.  Was it any worse than a lot of other stuff I’ve seen?...no.  Harry Allan Towers was a legendary producer of exploitation crap & Jess Franco was the absolute non plus ultra of exploitation directors, so this could have been far, far worse.  Still, I've seen Franco movies I thought were not too bad; I really don’t see why he is vilified quite as much as he is.  And, as I said, it was a serious, somber production.  Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, and Klaus Kinski are all of them capable of the worst overacting.  But they don’t do it here. And, barring the monstrosity that was Coppola’s Dracula twenty years later, this is actually one of the closest of adaptations I’ve yet seen.  Which is a sad commentary in its own right. 

Relatively soon after this movie was completed, Soledad Miranda, who plays Lucy, was killed in a car accident in Lisbon.  She starred in a number of Franco movies in the short period between 1969-70 and seems to have quickly become his muse during this time.  Anecdotal stories indicate he went into a years-long funk, heart-stricken over the loss of the woman he intended to make a star even outside of their native Spain. 

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 5/10

            

                      

The Strangers

Rated: R

Run Time: 86 mins

Director: Bryan Bertino

Starring: Scott Speedman, Liv Tyler, Gemma Ward

The Strangers is a film that seems to have many antecedents, some of them fictional and some at least pseudo-factual.  It is also a movie that borrows much from what must be considered an archetype of sorts within the horror genre which is so because many of us genuinely seem to have a fear of just this sort of thing: being stalked at the hands of predators who possess no supernatural attributes but who are nonetheless organized to a degree unheard of while still otherwise exhibiting no special advantages over the people they are tormenting…unless it’s that the people they’re stalking are as dumb as stumps, a not infrequent attribute of movie victims, and one that is particularly apt in this case.  These predators are preternaturally cunning and diabolical and, what’s worse, they never lose their cool.  They are cats toying with their prey until they tire of them; then they dispose of them unceremoniously.  And their selection of you as the target of their terrorizing is entirely random.

The movie opens with a disingenuous claim that it is based on real events.  My understanding of these real events is that the writer/director was once at home as a young man when a stranger came to the door and asked for someone who did not live there.  The next day, he learned there had been several burglaries in the neighborhood.  Whether or not there was a connection between the two events is, of course, unknown.  If, if the doorknocker was the burglar, it is clear he was looking for who was not at home.  It is equally certain that the strangers of the movie’s title are looking for who is home, which is a chilling thought certainly, but a far-fetched one.

I have read a review of The Strangers that challenged much of the criticism the film received for being immoral or otherwise without any redeeming merit either artistic or social which claimed that, hey, such things do happen.  Yes, they do, but only upon the rarest of occasions.  A clear source of inspiration (and one credited by the director) for the film are the Tate-LaBianca murders committed by the Manson Family in the late sixties.  The film’s killers are a man and two women; Manson’s goons were male and female as well, and the women were equally as vicious as Tex Watson.

Where the movie’s scenario becomes divorced from reality is in its depiction of the killers.  The lackies of Charles Manson were drug-addled, brainwashed hippies and runaways from conservative, sheltered homes via Haight-Ashbury.  The Strangers portrays them as calculating and unperturbed, wholly rational sadists who appear to be working from a script (“Okay, you knock on the door, Dollface.  Then I’ll knock down a trashcan and stand in front of the window.  Betty Boop, go sit on the swing and look creepy.”).  Maybe there is less of a gulf between these types of monsters than I think, but the likelihood of running across the latter kind is as close to zero as is possible outside the world of cinema; don’t ask me how I know this, but I’m telling you, this particular brand of antagonist is usually met only in the movies.  And what’s more, even these steely-eyed automatons are not undefeatable, unless you happen to be the absolute fucking idiots who are this movie’s protagonists.

We meet our two meat puppets as they drive home from a party.  Liv Tyler plays Kristen and James is played by Scott Speedman.  It’s clear something has happened between them and there is a visible rift.  The two are spending the night at James’s parents’ summer home.  They get there, she takes a bath, he eats some Blue Bell, they open some champagne, and they’re just about to do it when…there is a knock at the door.  A short blond-haired girl asks if Tamera is home.  Well, of course, Tamera does live there, our “heroes” know it, we know it, and dammit, so does the creepy short blond-haired girl.  When James goes outside, he notices the light at the front door is unscrewed enough that it does not turn on until he screws it back in.  Is this an accident?  I think not.  Does he notice this or understand its implication?  Hell no.  This is close enough to our first indication that James is a dumb-ass. 

Before long, the girl knocks again.  When they go to answer it (and why would they do that?), she’s no longer there.  So what do they do next?  Well, Kristen’s just about out of smokes, so she sends James to the store for another pack… -  Let’s recap:  A weird chick comes to the door and asks in a monotone, lifeless, soulless voice whether Tamera is there.  No, Tamera is not, and why is the damned light out?  There is another knock at the door; presumably the weird chick is back.  Whoops, there’s no one there, hmmm…  Fuck it, let’s go get some cigs.  Wouldn’t your alarm bells be going off here?  Theirs don’t.  Kristen is apparently as much of a dumb-ass as James.

Their next decision?  Hey, let’s separate.  And, of course, this is just where things start to go to shit…and quickly.  I’m not going to belabor the point that has already been made again and again, but were it not for our two characters’ seeming congenital stupidity, the movie wouldn’t last much longer.  They find a shotgun at one point, for chrissakes, and plenty of live cartridges.  Do they contrive a plan to counter their attackers?  No, no they don’t.  They just cower and simper and play into the hands of their antagonists.

Is there much else to say?  Yes.  The movie has some good jump scares, predictable ones that I still fell for.  There are compositions that are scary and creepy.  There is one particular shot you’ve likely already seen from the trailer that is reminiscent of the scene in Halloween when Laurie has just discovered the triptych of victims that were her friends and then Michael’s face looms behind her as if from nowhere.  It’s a rip-off, but it works.  In fact, there are a lot of shots of the hooded guy that duplicate the “oh, shit, there’s Michael behind her, she moves, hey now he’s gone” tactic employed by Carpenter to such great effect.  This movie rips them off liberally.  This, coupled with the fact that hooded creepy guys scare me (Friday the 13^th, Pt II & The Town That Dreaded Sundown), made the movie enjoyable. 

The few speaking lines of the villains (and I think only the blond-haired girl says anything at all), included to emphasize the random aspect of the encounter are unnecessary.  We understand this as an audience without having to be told.  But overall, The Strangers does its job well.  Despite their idiocy, we identify with Kristen and James.  The senselessness of their fates is offensive.  And we are left with that damned bad feeling you get in some horror movies, the sense that evil has triumphed over a weak but decent brand of goodness that is just not strong enough to overcome its more dynamic adversary.  This, I suppose, is likely what has upset many viewers and critics.  And I must agree with that sentiment, although I don’t think it renders the film morally bankrupt.  But why, oh, why has it become so de rigeur for horror films to show that, no matter how ordinarily decent we are, no matter how hard we fight, no matter that it looks like we have triumphed, in the end evil ends up fucking us anyway?  That’s just a bummer…      

RANDOM THOUGHT

What is the best home invasion thriller I’ve ever yet seen?  I haven’t seen Straw Dogs yet, but my money is on Wait Until Dark…  There the heroine (Audrey Hepburn) has a reason for being dumb, which is not strictly speaking the appropriate attribute, because she’s actually blind.  Still, you get the point.  And, she’s very resourceful indeed.  Moreover, as Harry Roat, Jr. from Scarsdale, Alan Arkin is a killer villain, a man creepy enough to scare even Stephen King.  You won’t recognize the profane yet affectionate grandfather from Little Miss Sunshine in his guise here.          

  

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 7/10