POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not a movie. It is a force of nature. Where Night of the Living Dead took 1960s horror past giant monsters and gothic monsters into modern concerns within the conceit of zombies. This film doesn’t need to exist within the supernatural. In fact, it’s so outside the realm of the unreal that so many people think it’s based on a real story. Or even is a real film, years before movies like The Blair Witch Project tried to pull stunts like that.

The real stunt of this movie is that it was made in the first place. Filmed in an early 1900s farmhouse in Round Rock, Texas on a small budget, the crew shot the film seven days a week, 16 hours a day, with temperatures that reached 110° F. Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, was really a poet. A poet wearing a dead skin mask for 16 hours a day for over twenty-five days straight. 

The house was filled with real animal remains, animal blood from a local slaughterhouse and furniture made from animal bones. As you can imagine, keeping all these dead things trapped within a poorly ventilated house led to conditions which were anything but fair to the actors.

Director Tobe Hooper envisioned this film as a PG-rated film, so he made each cut work so that you never see any of the actual carnage. But it backfired — as a result, the film’s entire feel is one of brutality. It’s actually hard to watch unless you properly prepare yourself for it.

“The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular, Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin.” That opening dialogue, by future sitcom actor John Larroquette for the price of a joint, suggests that the film you are about to watch is true. While it has some basis in the stories of Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley, there never really was a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was invented by Hooper and writer Kim Henkel. Yet there’s always someone willing to convince you that there was.

It’s actually a pretty simple film. A vanful of hippies comes face to face with a cannibal clan who are being forced out of their way of life by industrialized improvements to the meat processing industry. Despite their astrology, peace and love, they are utterly annihilated and even the strongest of them is driven insane by the end.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a film that ignores the rules of the hero’s journey and characters needing to undergo some personal growth. Everyone is lucky if they survive and even the villains and heroes that do won’t make it for long. Modern highways will push their way into the backwoods. Police procedures will improve. And the only work this clan will have is just trying to keep their way of life alive.

You can see the bloody influence of this film on nearly every horror film that came in its wake. Hell, Rob Zombie has made an entire career out of trying to remake something a tenth this good. This is a film that oozes malevolence and ill will from the very moment it begins to play.

I’m always struck by the fact that hardly anyone involved ever made their money back. The film’s original distributor was Bryanston Distribution Company, which turned out to be a Mafia front operated by Louis “Butchie” Peraino, who used Chainsaw to launder money that he had made from Deep Throat. The investors did make their money back, but the crew only made $405 each, scant pay for the hell on Earth they went through (Edwin Neal, the Hitchhiker, claimed that this film was more miserable than being in Vietnam and he’d wanted to kill Hooper for some time). After an arrest for obscenity, the cast and crew filed suit against Peraino and were awarded $25,000 each, which came from new owners New Line Cinema.

There’s a sequel to this film which exists in its own universe. I love that it’s everything that this movie isn’t. It’s a middle finger to expectations and ends with a final shot that is at least the equal of this film.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: Nightbreed (1999)

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I decided to go with the unfairly maligned Nightbreed, a movie that I haven’t seen since it played in theaters in 1990. Directed by Clive Barker and based on his 1988 novella Cabal,  this movie was a commercial and critical failure. Barker has always claimed that the producers tried to sell the film as a run of the mill slasher, when it is anything but. In 2014, he finally was able to release a director’s cut that fixed many of his issues.

Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer, Fire in the Sky) dreams of a place called Midian where monsters are accepted. His girlfriend Lori has convinced him to start seeing a psychotherapist named Dr. Phillip Decker, who is ably played by David Cronenberg of all people. All along, Decker has been setting Boone up for the murders that he’s been committing, giving his LSD instead of lithium and filling his head with details of the murders.

Decker urges Boone to turn himself in, but he’s hit by a truck and sent to the hospital where he meets Narcisse, another man who knows about Midian. He explains to Boone how to get to the hidden story while he cuts off his own face.

Boone makes his way to Midian, where he meets the creatures who make it their home like Kinski (Nicholas Vince, the Chattering Cenobite from Hellraiser) and Peloquin, a demonic creature who smells Boone’s innocence, letting him know that there’s no way that the murders could have been his doing. He bites Boone, who runs into a police trap led by Decker and is shot and killed.

He’d be dead if it wasn’t for Peloquin’s bite. Soon, he returns to life in the morgue while his girlfriend decides to come looking for Midian herself. Boone becomes part of the Nightbreed thanks to their leader Dirk Lylesburg (Doug Bradley, Pinhead himself) and from the touch of their god, Baphomet.

What follows is a battle between the police and clergy versus the Nightbreed, ending with Boone rallying the supernatural creatures and destroying their home to stop the attacks. Decker is stopped, Baphomet discusses that this was all part of the prophecy and he renames Boone Cabal.

There are two different endings of the film, depending on the original and director’s cut that change the story significantly. One raises Decker from the dead while another places Lori into the Nightbreed. Both set the stage for further adventures that never happened, sadly.

Barker wanted this to be the Star Wars of horror films and envisioned a trilogy of stories. But the film wasn’t marketed well and never made back its budget. Barker said that the producers expressed a concern that “the monsters are the good guys,” to which he replied, “That’s the point.”

Marvel’s Epic imprint put out several comic books and there were several video games, but soon the film slid away into obscurity, Luckily, with the excitement around the director’s and Cabal cuts of the film being released, SyFy, Morgan Creek and Barker have announced an entirely new series based on the movie.

Interestingly enough, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky spoke well of Nightbreed, calling it “the first truly gay horror fantasy epic”, as he saw the movie being all about the “unconsummated relationship between doctor and patient.”

There are plenty of music ties in this film, as the role of Ohnaka was first intended for singer Marc Almond and Suzi Quatro was in the film, but her scenes were cut. It’s also one of the first films that Danny Elfman scored after Batman. Barker stated that “The most uncompromised portion of that entire movie is the score.”

Nightbreed has more than held up, reminding me of the convention season of 1990 when you could see buttons and shirts of this movie everywhere. My excitement was at a fever pitch and I thought, “This is going to be huge.” Shows how smart I was.

Nightbreed is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: Don’t Look Away (2023)

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A gang of criminals unintentionally unleashes a supernatural force — a killer mannequin! — and a young woman named Frankie (Kelly Bastard) knows that it’s coming for her. In fact, the first time she sees it, she accidentally kills a trucker. And once you see the mannequin, it only stops stalking you when you’re dead.

The scariest part of the male mannequin killer is that we never see it move or kill. We only see its handiwork, as it only attacks when no one is looking. Directed by Micheal Bafaro, who also wrote the script with Michael Mitton, who also plays Jonah, the man who tries to help Frankie and earns the anger of her boyfriend Steve (Colm Hill).

There are some frightening moments, even some kills at a nightclub near the dancefloor, and the idea of the unstoppable creature following our heroine echoes It Follows, but this is very much its own film. Frankie has almost no luck, as the mannequin keeps showing up everywhere she goes, killing people and making it look like all of these crimes have one thing in common: her.

If you get freaked out by mannequins, by all means, this is going to make you ruin your pants.

I watched Don’t Look Away at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: A Wandering Path (The Story of Gilead Media) (2023)

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Featuring interviews with the members of Thou, Neurosis, Enslaved, Panopticon, Emma Ruth Rundle, Yellow Eyes, Couch Slut, Blood Incantation, Krallice, Mizmor, Weigedood, Hell, Leech, Mania, Inter Arma and many more, as well as performances by several of those artists, A Wandering Path is really the story of Adam Bartlett, who started the Gilead Media record label in 2005.

His label may have started small, but is now a well-known source of the best noise rock, doom and black metal artists in the world. He also works with Dave Adelson from the record label 20 Buck Spin to celebrate Migration Fest every two years, with the 2018 version being right here in Pittsburgh, PA.

Michael Dimmitt has directed a movie that pays as much attention to the reasons for the music as the music itself. You’ll discover how several of these artists have used the power of this dark form of music to get past the pain in their lives. I was most impressed by Austin Lunn of Panopticon. His band’s music combines black metal with bluegrass and folk with Appalachian instruments such as banjo, fiddle, bells and acoustic guitar breaking up the expected distortion and thundering drums. In the same way that Norweigan black metal bands drew upon the past of their country for inspiration, his work draws upon issues and themes unique to his Kentucky home.

This is a difficult subject to make a movie about as just getting into who the label is, what Migration Fest is and each of these bands, not to mention the genres that all appear, could all be their own films. Dimmitt has played in bands like Disassociate, Mutilation Rites and Overdose as well as working as an editor, including on a film that tried to explain black metal, Until the Light Takes Us.

The main issue is that this is such a niche subject — it’s similar to making a documentary on a deep cut exploitation director like Franco or Rollin — that it may not be able to make much sense for newcomers. And for those who are already well-versed in this music, it may seem like it’s glossing over its subject. There’s also a fair amount of “we’re all a family” scenesterism, but that happens any time you get metal folks together. It’s genuine, even if from the outside it may not feel like that.

Is this movie successful? It caused me to look up several of these bands and listen to their work. I think that’s a very clear case of it working quite well.

You can learn more at the official site.

I watched A Wandering Path at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972)

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Shot with new permits or budget on the very real streets of New York City, Fleshpot on 42nd Street starts with two sex workers, Dusty Cole (Laura Cannon) and Cherry Lane (Neil Flanagan in drag), trying to make it in the world. But it all gets to be too much for Dusty, who quits the nightlife and tries to move on to the straight life with Bob (Harry Reems!). But as you know — or you should — this is an Andy Milligan movie. Things have a way of not working out.

Once Dusty and Bob hook up, this movie moves from a realistic world where two sex workers rob everyone they can to stay alive while being truly honest with one another about it to another where a man comes in and seemingly saves the day but not caring about his lover’s past.

Maybe that brief respite from a tough world of fighting to stay alive every day is echoed by how Milligan felt, back from London and still making movies for nothing that hardly anyone would see on the rough streets of NYC. But even 42nd Street was about to change, going from simply dangerous in places to absolutely harrowing in the wake of crack by the end of the decade. And even in 1972, the movies playing there went from just plain old exploitation to full penetration.

If you hear some people discuss the films of Milligan, they’re either dismissive or outright mean. I don’t know what they’re looking for, but unlike his horror work, this feels authentic and true. It’s got a downer ending that 1972 Hollywood would have embraced, even if there’s no way they ever could have.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)

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Released as a double feature with Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers finds Andy Milligan making another one of the classics. Sweeney Todd to be exact.

Sweeney Todd (John Miranda) and Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) come together to kill off their customers, steal their money and valuables, and give the bodies to Tobias Ragg (Berwick Kaler) to disposal. After a few kills, they start getting way into murder, so they decide to start using the bodies to make meat pies, including one that has a woman’s entire breast in it.

Shot in London, this actually feels like it could be in its time period, unlike the New York City Milligan movies where you can see modern buildings and hear the traffic. Milligan made five movies in 1970 alone — Torture Dungeon, Nightbirds, Guru the Mad Monk and The Body Beneath are the other films — and it’s pretty wild that he was doing so much so often. Then again, to the casual viewer, these movies are overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod, but to those who love these movies, well, they’re also overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod. Perspective is important.

TV Guide said that Bloodthirsty Butchers was a “gory and typically cheap retelling of the Sweeney Todd legend.” One star.

I may have ranked it much higher.

You can watch this on Tubi.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: House of Seven Belles (1979)

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The description of this movie on IMDB: “The seven sisters of the outcast LeFleur family try to survive in a post-Civil War Deep South.”

My wife’s description: “What is all that screaming downstairs?”

There’s a version of this movie online and it’s as complete as it can be. Milligan ran out of money before he could film the last scenes and the ending. So how should it have ended? No one is sure, as the only surviving shooting script ends at the same point the film does. So who is the killer? Who knows! The only part of the ending that is known is that the mansion was going to burn down.

In 2019, this premiered on byNWR, Nicolas Winding Refn’s free cult movie streaming website. Jimmy McDonough, Andy Milligan’s biographer, had the only surviving copy of the workprint, given to him by the director before he died. Whatever survived was restored, along with another unfinished Milligan movie, Compass Rose.

Who else would film a Southern gothic in Staten Island other than Milligan? And who else would have people stabbed in the neck with a pitchfork, a face burned with acid and decapitated heads rolling around in the midst of a talky — well, screamy? — blast of a family in decline, repeatedly slapping and spitting and yelling at each other? Not to mention voodoo and costumes that are so good that they stand in defiance of the actors attempting to get all they can out of the overly detailed dialogue!

Seven sisters try to survive the South with a serial killer on the prowl. Write your own ending while you’re at it. You’ll get an Andy Milligan No-Prize or something.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Night Gallery Season 3 Episode 11: Something in the Woodwork (1973)

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Molly Wheatland (Geraldine Page) left her husband and found the bottle. But at least she has somewhere to live, a place that was cheap because everyone thinks that Jamie Dillman (John McMurtry) was shot by the police there when his criminal career ended. He’s been in the attic ever since, but Molly doesn’t care. She kind of likes having him around.

Directed by Edward M. Abroms (who directed tons of TV and also edited Street Fighter, Cherry 2000 and You’ll Like My Mother) and written by Rod Serling based on the story “Housebound” by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, “Something In the Woodwork” has Molly push and push Dilman to kill her ex-husband Charlie (Leif Erickson) until she goes too far and gets what she wants.

Geraldine Page was in three Night Gallery episodes (along with this one, she’s in two episodes in Season 2, “Stop Killing Me” and “The Sins of the Fathers”) and she really makes this one of the best stories of season 3. Abroms mostly worked as an editor — he edited the pilot — but he really shows some great work here, particularly some handheld shots that look quite good.

Night Gallery Season 2 Episode 21: The Sins of the Fathers/You Can’t Get Help Like That Anymore (1972)

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I apologize.

As I was working on Season 2, I totally skipped this episode.

And how could I? It’s one of the most memorable in the entire series.

Anton LaVey specifically called out this episode. But more importantly, whenever people talked about the scariest movies that they had watched, my father always went back to “The Sins of the Fathers.”

“The Sins of the Fathers” was directed by series workhorse Jeannot Szwarc and written by Halsted Welles from a story by Christianna Brand. It stars Geraldine Page as Mrs. Evans, the wife of the Sin Eater of the town of Cwrt y Cadno, Wales. What is a sin eater and his task? Well, they must eat a meal in the company of a dead person, taking on their sins so that the deceased can go to meet God with a clean conscience.

Her husband is too sick to perform the ritual, so her son Ian (Richard Thomas) must go in his place. He fears the pain of accepting all of these sins, much less feasting from the chest of a dead person. But Mrs. Evans and her family have been hungry since the plague has taken Mr. Evans, so she comes up with a plan. Ian will conduct the ritual but hide the food, bringing it home to her family.

Ian barely escapes from the funeral rite and the widow (Barbara Steele!) who wants to watch him conduct the ceremony. The tragedy is that he arrives home to a dead father and must now consume that food — and the food around his lost patriarch — and now take on the sins, the many sins, of the Sin Eater.

Working with art director Joseph Alves, Szwarc pretty much made a legitimate theatrical experience with this short story. NBC wasn’t sure they would even air it, so for once I have to give credit to series producer Jack Laird, who stood behind his talent and pushed for the episode to air. Beyond talent like Page, Thomas and Steele, he also had Michael Dunn as a servant obsessed by the food.

It’s probably the most memorable Night Gallery episode. It has no blood, no special effects and just mood and theatrical acting by all. It just plain works.

“You Can’t Get Help Like That Anymore” was directed by Jeff Corey and written by Rod Serling. It has quite the cast — Broderick Crawford, Cloris Leachman, Lana Wood, Severn Darden — and a great story. The Fultons (Crawford and Leachman) take their rage out on everyone around them, including their robotic maids, which often come back to the Robot Aids, Inc. storeroom in pieces. Dr. Kessler (Darden) worries that soon the robot help will evolve to the point that they turn the tables on the couple.

He’s right, as Model 931 (Wood) responds to the pinching sexual impropriety and outright physical attacks of the Fultons by decimating them. By the end, the robots have even replaced Kessler with a new model and are quietly sending their models into the suburbs to take over the world.

I love the 1970s future that appears in this story too. The makeup gave the production issues, but you’d never know it, as I really love just about everything in this Serling parable.

Again — apologies for missing this episode. I honestly feel like it’s the best of the entire series, so I appreciate you waiting for it.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: The Ghastly Ones (1968)

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Shot on short ends, made with costumes designed by director and writer and Andy Milligan, decorated with animal organs for special effects, The Ghastly Ones was made for all of $13,000 in a country estate somewhere in Staten Island. It may as well have been made in another dimension.

Also known as Blood Rites and refilmed again by Milligan in 1978 as Legacy of Blood, this movie is all about Veronica, Victoria and Elizabeth, the daughters of a man who has ordered them to stay for three nights in his home before they learn what he has left to them. I mean, how dangerous can that be? It’s not like his hunchback butler hasn’t already killed two people before the credits and torn a rabbit apart, leaving it in the bed of Veronica with the note, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit.”

What follows are family members and their husbands sliced in two, stabbed with pitchforks, beheaded and even smashed directly in the face with axes. Yes, there’s something here for everyone, if by everyone you mean people who can deal with Andy Milligan films, which have been critically destroyed for years, by people like Stephen King who said it was “the work of morons with cameras.”

It’s also one of the original video nasties, even though that list was made a decade after its release.

You know why I love it? Because the costumes and story say centuries ago while the traffic outside the windows say late 60’s. Because you can hear Milligan end some of the scenes. And because, well, it feels like another world, another place, an escape from this day in day out work work work.