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There was an interesting meme going around on Facebook recently which asked you to name the most “game-changing” movies you’d ever seen, so today I decided to cross-apply that idea in terms of horror (and considering the single largest folder of DVDs I have is all horror, this should really come as no surprise to anyone). The criteria for game-changing, IMHO: Did it teach you something? Do you revisit it periodically? Do you see different things, when you do? Do you believe it to have been literally formative for you--ie, to have shaped your ideas about horror itself, rather than just being spooky comfort-food? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either...)
Top of the list for me would have to be Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983) and Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), plus Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (all 1987), all of which I first saw on my own, in theatres which were almost completely empty. Of the five, Hellraiser is probably the best-known (which is why I’m not going to go into it today), closely followed by Manhunter for being both the original adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and the first filmic appearance of serial killer icons Francis Dollarhyde (“I am Becoming. Do you see?”) and Doctor Hannibal Lecter (here, for some weird reason, spelled “Lecktor”). Most people who catch up with it today tend to write it off as being irretrievably mired in Eighties style--the music and use thereof (Mann was the guy behind Miami Vice, remember), the editing tricks, the fashions and hair, etc. Personally, I think that’s about as stupidly reductionist as calling out 1930s films for being shot on sound-stages, 1940s films for not all being in color or 1950s films for using rear-projection to imply stationary cars are actually moving down a street, but whatever; you’re either into great dialogue, the existential dread of whether or not we’re controlled by our impulses and/or upbringing (let alone whether “if one does what God does enough times, one becomes as God is”) and amazing performances from both a very young Brian Cox and a hunkily pre-CSI William Petersen, or you aren’t.
(I’m also a big fan of Petersen in John Frankenheimer’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), BTW, along with the rest of that movie. But even I’m sure not going to attempt to argue it’s any variety of horror film.)
Still name-checked after all these years in certain circles, meanwhile, are The Hunger and Near Dark, probably because of the vampire factor: The Hunger has that famous lesbian sex-/blood-scene between a very juicy Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve, plus David Bowie, plus “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, while Near Dark has pre-Heroes Adrian Pasdar in a cowboy hat, Eric Red’s best script, and the unholy post-Aliens trinity of Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jeanette Goldstein. Both are primal examples of how music (by Tangerine Dream for Near Dark, mixtape-eclectic as Miriam’s memories for The Hunger), editing and mis-en-scene can be used to drive a concept from the realm of the impossible into the realm of the surreally hyper-real, and both are frankly, startlingly adult in their concerns (sexuality infuses everything, along with what was an amazing amount of offhand gore for the time), though Near Dark wins out overall for me--I used to show the shitkicker bar sequence in class, much to my students’ dismay, because I think it’s one of the most beautifully-conceived things ever put before a camera. And I love that throughout the entire movie, they never say the “v-word” even once.
Which brings us to Angel Heart.
Now, you have to understand a couple of things, going in--at the time, Alan Parker was still “that guy who made Fame”, in most people’s eyes. And the movie itself was being sold explicitly as a noir (which it is) and a historical P.I. film (also true), without any real supernatural angle attached; I personally figured it out from the first trailer, but that’s only because I’d read William Hjortsburg’s Fallen Angel, the book it was based on, the year before. Mike Mignola was just starting to break into the comics business, doing inking for Marvel and covers for D.C.--he wouldn’t jump-start Hellboy ‘til 1994. And looking back, that’s what the tone Parker hit here most reminds me of...that same fatalistic, filthy-gorgeous palookaville vibe which pits man against fate knowing man will inevitably lose and sees magic and religion as equally cultish shell-games, with the Devil lurking dapper behind every funhouse door.
Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is a low-rent New York private dick who surfs on the fact that people usually find his name first when they open the phone-book, then don’t bother shopping around. He mostly does divorce cases and surveillance, some fraud; he was in World War II but got “fucked up pretty quick”, cashiered out on a combo of wounds and PTSS, lives alone, has bad hygeine, a smart mouth and “a thing about chickens”. One day, he’s hired by a high-class attorney to meet with Frenchman Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro), a rich weirdo who claims he’s owed collateral on a loan that he hasn’t thus far been able to repossess for helping out former crooner Johnny Favorite (born Leibling) at the start of his career. Supposedly, Favorite was drafted into the SES, caught a bomb-blast in North Africa and was committed to an asylum upstate with severe facial scarring and amnesia, rendering his contract with Cyphre null and void...or was he?
Though initially unable to even properly pronounce Cyphre’s name, Harry ends up taking the case, and plunges neck-deep into a tangle of cons inside of cons, upper-class Satanism plus New Orleans voodoo-hoodoo horse-shit, weird dreams, a particularly infectious earworm that turns out to be one of Favorite’s biggest hits (Girl of my dreams, I love you/Honest, I do/You are...so...sweet...), and an ass-load of dead bodies. Almost everyone he talks to ends up getting murdered in mysterious and horrific ways, all of which tend to implicate him. And throughout, his own identity becomes increasingly both bound up in and challenged by this investigation: Has he simply stumbled on a nest of crazy people doing crazy things for crazy reasons, like Johnny Favorite trying to cheat his way out of Hell through black magic slaughter, or is the simplest answer--yet most disturbing, especially for its implications about what consequences our own actions may net us in the hereafter--actually the most accurate? And what does that say about this thin skin of normalcy Harry’s always thought was “real life”, if so?
Of course, anybody with an ear for homonyms can easily figure out where all this is going, so long as they’re not Harry Angel. Yet much like the Greek tragedies it references (“Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise,” Cyphre comments at one point, quoting Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex), Angel Heart spins out in ways that continue to entrance, if not surprise--and not least because you often get to see Lisa Bonet (as 17-year-old hereditary mambo Epiphany Proudfoot, Johnny Favorite’s illegitimate daughter) extremely naked throughout, way back in her only-just-post-Cosby Show phase. It’s the gravity of the whole thing that continues to resonate most, though, with me...that sense of personal monstrousness, of the desperation of hope without self-knowledge. The nigh-impossibility of any redemption at all, in general.
So there we go: The building blocks, for me. I think their influence on my stuff is fairly obvious, but hey, forest for the trees. You?
P.S.: Thanks to everyone who commented the other day, because it helped. I'm just really tired, should be working instead of writing muse-y crap like the above, and probably sick, too--Steve has something that's kept him home all day, pretty much guaranteeing I have it/am gonna get it. Cal's fairly happy, though, thus far.;)
Amended to add: Oh, and John Carpenter's The Thing, of course. OBVIOUSLY. But I guess it's just so obvious I skipped over it--it's like it's engrained on my DNA, or something. (Wait...that sounds bad.;))
Top of the list for me would have to be Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983) and Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), plus Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (all 1987), all of which I first saw on my own, in theatres which were almost completely empty. Of the five, Hellraiser is probably the best-known (which is why I’m not going to go into it today), closely followed by Manhunter for being both the original adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and the first filmic appearance of serial killer icons Francis Dollarhyde (“I am Becoming. Do you see?”) and Doctor Hannibal Lecter (here, for some weird reason, spelled “Lecktor”). Most people who catch up with it today tend to write it off as being irretrievably mired in Eighties style--the music and use thereof (Mann was the guy behind Miami Vice, remember), the editing tricks, the fashions and hair, etc. Personally, I think that’s about as stupidly reductionist as calling out 1930s films for being shot on sound-stages, 1940s films for not all being in color or 1950s films for using rear-projection to imply stationary cars are actually moving down a street, but whatever; you’re either into great dialogue, the existential dread of whether or not we’re controlled by our impulses and/or upbringing (let alone whether “if one does what God does enough times, one becomes as God is”) and amazing performances from both a very young Brian Cox and a hunkily pre-CSI William Petersen, or you aren’t.
(I’m also a big fan of Petersen in John Frankenheimer’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), BTW, along with the rest of that movie. But even I’m sure not going to attempt to argue it’s any variety of horror film.)
Still name-checked after all these years in certain circles, meanwhile, are The Hunger and Near Dark, probably because of the vampire factor: The Hunger has that famous lesbian sex-/blood-scene between a very juicy Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve, plus David Bowie, plus “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, while Near Dark has pre-Heroes Adrian Pasdar in a cowboy hat, Eric Red’s best script, and the unholy post-Aliens trinity of Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jeanette Goldstein. Both are primal examples of how music (by Tangerine Dream for Near Dark, mixtape-eclectic as Miriam’s memories for The Hunger), editing and mis-en-scene can be used to drive a concept from the realm of the impossible into the realm of the surreally hyper-real, and both are frankly, startlingly adult in their concerns (sexuality infuses everything, along with what was an amazing amount of offhand gore for the time), though Near Dark wins out overall for me--I used to show the shitkicker bar sequence in class, much to my students’ dismay, because I think it’s one of the most beautifully-conceived things ever put before a camera. And I love that throughout the entire movie, they never say the “v-word” even once.
Which brings us to Angel Heart.
Now, you have to understand a couple of things, going in--at the time, Alan Parker was still “that guy who made Fame”, in most people’s eyes. And the movie itself was being sold explicitly as a noir (which it is) and a historical P.I. film (also true), without any real supernatural angle attached; I personally figured it out from the first trailer, but that’s only because I’d read William Hjortsburg’s Fallen Angel, the book it was based on, the year before. Mike Mignola was just starting to break into the comics business, doing inking for Marvel and covers for D.C.--he wouldn’t jump-start Hellboy ‘til 1994. And looking back, that’s what the tone Parker hit here most reminds me of...that same fatalistic, filthy-gorgeous palookaville vibe which pits man against fate knowing man will inevitably lose and sees magic and religion as equally cultish shell-games, with the Devil lurking dapper behind every funhouse door.
Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is a low-rent New York private dick who surfs on the fact that people usually find his name first when they open the phone-book, then don’t bother shopping around. He mostly does divorce cases and surveillance, some fraud; he was in World War II but got “fucked up pretty quick”, cashiered out on a combo of wounds and PTSS, lives alone, has bad hygeine, a smart mouth and “a thing about chickens”. One day, he’s hired by a high-class attorney to meet with Frenchman Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro), a rich weirdo who claims he’s owed collateral on a loan that he hasn’t thus far been able to repossess for helping out former crooner Johnny Favorite (born Leibling) at the start of his career. Supposedly, Favorite was drafted into the SES, caught a bomb-blast in North Africa and was committed to an asylum upstate with severe facial scarring and amnesia, rendering his contract with Cyphre null and void...or was he?
Though initially unable to even properly pronounce Cyphre’s name, Harry ends up taking the case, and plunges neck-deep into a tangle of cons inside of cons, upper-class Satanism plus New Orleans voodoo-hoodoo horse-shit, weird dreams, a particularly infectious earworm that turns out to be one of Favorite’s biggest hits (Girl of my dreams, I love you/Honest, I do/You are...so...sweet...), and an ass-load of dead bodies. Almost everyone he talks to ends up getting murdered in mysterious and horrific ways, all of which tend to implicate him. And throughout, his own identity becomes increasingly both bound up in and challenged by this investigation: Has he simply stumbled on a nest of crazy people doing crazy things for crazy reasons, like Johnny Favorite trying to cheat his way out of Hell through black magic slaughter, or is the simplest answer--yet most disturbing, especially for its implications about what consequences our own actions may net us in the hereafter--actually the most accurate? And what does that say about this thin skin of normalcy Harry’s always thought was “real life”, if so?
Of course, anybody with an ear for homonyms can easily figure out where all this is going, so long as they’re not Harry Angel. Yet much like the Greek tragedies it references (“Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise,” Cyphre comments at one point, quoting Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex), Angel Heart spins out in ways that continue to entrance, if not surprise--and not least because you often get to see Lisa Bonet (as 17-year-old hereditary mambo Epiphany Proudfoot, Johnny Favorite’s illegitimate daughter) extremely naked throughout, way back in her only-just-post-Cosby Show phase. It’s the gravity of the whole thing that continues to resonate most, though, with me...that sense of personal monstrousness, of the desperation of hope without self-knowledge. The nigh-impossibility of any redemption at all, in general.
So there we go: The building blocks, for me. I think their influence on my stuff is fairly obvious, but hey, forest for the trees. You?
P.S.: Thanks to everyone who commented the other day, because it helped. I'm just really tired, should be working instead of writing muse-y crap like the above, and probably sick, too--Steve has something that's kept him home all day, pretty much guaranteeing I have it/am gonna get it. Cal's fairly happy, though, thus far.;)
Amended to add: Oh, and John Carpenter's The Thing, of course. OBVIOUSLY. But I guess it's just so obvious I skipped over it--it's like it's engrained on my DNA, or something. (Wait...that sounds bad.;))
