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Count Dracula uses bank ATM (advert)

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Dracula Abbey National

In 1985, British bank Abbey National advertised their Abbey Link cash/deposit machines with a slightly risqué advert that showed Count Dracula lusting after a young lady in a tavern with her cleavage on display. How could banks possibly be so immoral?

Abbey National busty barmaid



The Synth of Fear: Horror film soundtracks with synthesizer scores (article)

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Keith Emerson's sound-man gets to grips with the Moog

Keith Emerson’s sound-man at work…

Electronically produced sound has been available to adventurous film composers since the silent era. Among the earliest electronic instruments were the Ondes-Martenot (invented in 1928), which produced a characteristic quivering sound by varying the frequency of oscillation in an array of vacuum tubes, and the trautonium (1930), a monophonic synthesizer-like instrument in which sound generation was based on neon tubes and modulated by the action of fingers on a metal resistor wire.

Later, the clavioline (1947) was the first electronic keyboard instrument to reach a mass market, boasting a five octave range derived from a single tone generator; its rich buzzy timbre can be heard on Joe Meek’s classic single “Telstar” (1962) and the work of jazz maverick Sun Ra. Among the more obscure instruments, the ANS synthesizer (1937) was perhaps the most unusual: created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin, it modified sine waves photoelectronically by means of five glass discs, through which light shines as the player scratches patterns on an outer surface coated with non-drying black mastic. It can be heard on Edward Artemiev’s score for Andrei Tarkovsky’s sublime Solaris (1972) and the Coil album “ANS” (2004).

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The Theremin

The earliest and best known of these pioneering instruments is the theremin (developed in 1920), which produces a distinctively eerie tone shifting up and down in pitch according to the position of the operator’s hands in relation to a pair of magnetised antennae. It made its soundtrack debut in a 1931 Soviet film called Odna (“Alone”), for a sequence in which a women gets lost in a furious snowstorm. Miklós Rózsa was the first film composer to use the theremin in the West, in the otherwise orchestral scores for Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Spellbound (1945) and Billy Wilder’s drama about alcoholism Lost Weekend (1945). The theremin also turned up in Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1946) and was incorporated by composer Ferde Grofé into Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M (1950), after which it became strongly associated with science fiction, thanks to Bernard Herrmann’s influential score for Robert Wise’s classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The same year, Dimitri Tiomkin added theremin to his score for Howard Hawks’ The Thing (1951), which could be said to mark the first use of electronic sound in a horror movie.

Spellbound Concerto by Miklós Rózsa: Theremin played by Celia Sheen:

The first film to boast a completely electronic score was Forbidden Planet (1956), featuring sounds created by husband and wife team Louis and Bebe Barron (the latter a student of American avant-garde composer Henry Cowell). During 1952-53 the Barrons worked with John Cage as engineers on his first tape work “Williams Mix”, a four and a half minute piece which took over a year to complete. In 1956, having realised the limited commercial potential of avant-garde composition, they put feelers out to Hollywood and were commissioned to produce twenty minutes of sound effects for Forbidden Planet. When the producers heard the astonishing results they signed the couple up for the whole score. Using a variety of home-built electronic circuits, principally a ‘ring modulator’, the Barrons further manipulated the results by adding reverberation, delay and tape effects. Such was the sheer novelty of their work that, at an early preview of the movie, the audience applauded the sound of the spaceship landing on Altair IV.

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Forbidden Planet – spaceship landing:

Alfred Hitchcock turned to electronic sound again in 1963, for his innovative horror film The Birds. This time he decided to dispense with an orchestral score altogether and opted for Oskar Sala’s ‘Mixtur-Trautonium’ to create synthetic birdcalls, along with an abstract electronic soundtrack by Sala and Remi Gassmann.

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Alfred Hitchcock with Oskar Sala at the Trautonium

Sala also provided an extraordinary trautonium score to Harald Reinl’s 1963 West-German horror-thriller Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor ( aka The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle).

Distinguished by complex harmonic arrangements of pure electronic sound, and some striking approximations of brass and woodwind, Sala’s music for this better-than-average ‘krimi’ deserves more attention (a twelve minute suite from the film can be found on the Oskar Sala compilation CD “Subharmonische Mixturen”.)

Strangler of Blackmoor - poster

As a side note it’s worth mentioning the controversial, some would say misunderstood, film Anders als du und ich (1957) by Veit Harlan, a German director accused of working for the Nazi propaganda machine during the Second World War. Harlan denied this, claiming that his work had been tampered with by another director at Goebbels’ orders. If true, Harlan was an unlucky man: after WW2 he tried to relaunch his career with Anders als du und ich, which began life as Das dritte Geschlecht (“The 3rd Sex”), a film about the repression of homosexuals. Apparently this too was tampered with, at the instruction of the post-War German censors, to create a diametrically opposite story about the danger of homosexual influences on young men. The reason I mention this? One of the tell-tale signs of homosexuality in the film is an interest in electronic avant-garde music, as represented by none other than Oskar Sala’s Trautonium!

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A young man is ‘turned on’ to electronic music in “Anders als du und ich” (1957).

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Robert Moog at the controls

In the mid-1960s, American physics graduate and electrical engineer Dr. Robert Moog unveiled an invention that was to revolutionise the field. The first commercially available ‘synthesizer’ as the term is understood today, the ‘Moog’ was smaller, cheaper and far more reliable than previous examples. Before this the only synthesizers in existence were enormous, unwieldy, custom-built machines like the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, installed at Columbia University in 1957. Robert Moog, with the assistance of New York recording engineer Wendy (at the time ‘Walter’) Carlos, launched his first production model – the 900 series – in 1967, with a free demonstration record composed, recorded and produced by Carlos herself. (She created an even greater sensation in 1968 with “Switched on Bach”, an album of synthesized Johann Sebastian Bach pieces, and went on to record music for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining).

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Wendy Carlos with Moog 900 circa late 1960s.

1968 was the year in which George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences. And at the heart of this seminal modern horror film, electronic sound is deployed to suggest unutterable horror: when would-be heroic young couple Tom and Judy are killed, and zombies grab handfuls of their entrails in graphic detail, a deep, distorted oscillator drenched in white noise and reverb underlines the severity of the scene and amplifies the taboo-busting power. The rest of the score consists of library orchestral tracks, sometimes slathered in echo to add a hallucinatory edge; only this one key scene utilizes pure electronics. It’s an artistic decision that would reverberate through the genre for years to come, setting the seal on the synthesizer as the instrument of choice for representing abject physical horror.

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Tom and Judy devoured, in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead – the zombies eat human flesh:

Meanwhile, synthesizers were rapidly finding a place in rock music. San-Francisco based musicians Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause set up a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 to demonstrate the Moog, and soon found themselves in demand for studio session work, leading to a recording contract with Warner Brothers and a commission to provide electronic music for Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s psychedelic masterpiece Performance (1970). During production of Performance Mick Jagger recorded a Moog score for Kenneth Anger’s 11-minute short Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969); the giant Moog synthesizer seen in the Roeg/Cammell film is the one he used.

Mick Jagger (and Moog) in this rare promo film for Performance: 

Keith Emerson of prog-rockers Emerson, Lake and Palmer was another early customer; his personal feedback and consultation helped Roberg Moog to refine the instrument and probably paved the way for the Minimoog, a monophonic three-oscillator keyboard synthesizer launched in 1970. Portable and relatively affordable, it was popular with touring rock bands and soon found its way into recording studios used by film composers, thus becoming one of the first synths to feature on low budget movie scores.

A synth highlight from Keith Emerson’s score for Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980):

Prominent among the ‘early adopters’ to make a mark on the genre in the 1970s was Phillan Bishop, whose bleep-and-bloop approach lent avant-garde menace to Thomas Alderman’s The Severed Arm, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil and Chris Munger’s Kiss of the Tarantula.

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The Severed Arm, featuring music by Phillan Bishop:

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Carl Zittrer also deserves a mention; he went free-form crazy on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and then cohered a little for the superior Deathdream, both for director Bob Clark. By now a pattern was beginning to emerge; synthesizers signified madness, extreme situations, encroaching terror, and the chilly derangement of the psychopath. All of these elements come together in the score to The Last House on the Left, an assortment of country bluegrass tunes augmented by crude but effective electronics (from a Moog and an ARP 2600), played by Steve Chapin and the film’s lead psycho, musician-turned-actor David Hess.

last_house_on_the_left_poster_01Last House on the Left: Phyllis gets it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c576mmiWKeY

In 1973, Robert Moog associate David Borden was commissioned to record the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s soon-to-be smash The Exorcist. As it turned out, only a minute of his work was used, with Friedkin instead making the inspired if seemingly unlikely choice of Mike Oldfield’s progressive rock epic “Tubular Bells”. The enormous success of The Exorcist, and the impact of “Tubular Bells”, echoed through the film scores of the 1970s, and with synthesizers now part of the furniture in many a recording studio and film post-production suite, an explosion of electronic sound pulsated through the horror genre. In fact not only Mike Oldfield but progressive rock as a whole was a driving force in pushing synthesizers to the forefront of 1970s film composition; bands like Yes, Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer deployed electric organs, Minimoogs and towering stacks of ARP and Buchla technology, and this would inspire an Italian band who were to become one of the foremost exponents of electronics in film scoring: Goblin.

Goblin lent innovative jazz-rock stylings to Dario Argento’s brutal, beautiful Deep Red (Profondo rosso, 1976), but really hit the musical motherlode on their second Argento collaboration, Suspiria (1977), a tumultuous score built around a circling melody that drags “Tubular Bells” into a cackling synthesized whirlwind.

Their exciting, arpeggiator-driven scores for Luigi Cozzi’s grisly but loveable alien invasion flick Contamination and Joe D’Amato’s sleazy gross-out Beyond the Darkness considerably enhance the films, while the influence of disco (more on that later) supercharges their contribution to Argento’s masterpiece Tenebrae (only three members of Goblin play on this recording, hence the film’s ‘bit-of-a-mouthful’ credit to “Simonetti-Morante-Pignatelli”).

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Tenebrae LP

The advent of ever more affordable synthesizers locked step with the rise of the slasher movie, and the two proved a match made in low-budget heaven. In 1978, John Carpenter was putting the finishing touches to his third feature, Halloween. There was no way he could afford an orchestral score, but he was a dab hand with a synth (as his previous film Assault on Precinct 13 had shown) so he elected to write and perform the music himself.

The result helped a simple slasher film to become one of the biggest independent hits of the 1970s. For the main theme, Carpenter employed an insistent metronomic pulse, but with a twist; the piano taps out five beats to the bar (shades of prog’ rock again). Meanwhile, the synthesizer provides a rapid ‘ticker-ticker-ticker-ticker’ in the background, creating a jittery sense of things moving at the periphery of your attention, perfectly in keeping with Carpenter’s menacing widescreen framing.

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The template set by Halloween would sustain many of Carpenter’s future films, The Fog being an especially wonderful example:

It would inspire a new generation of soundtrack composers; in particular, Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave, whose breathtakingly inventive score for Phantasm (1978) drew on avant-garde electronics, progressive rock, Carpenter-style repetition, and even disco (an influential musical form when it comes to movie soundtracks, and one whose leading lights embraced the synthesizer wholeheartedly).

Tim Krog’s score for another surprise low-budget horror hit, Ulli Lommel’s The Boogey Man (1980), also deserves mention for its lush melancholic synth arrangements.

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Videodrome (1983) saw Canadian director David Cronenberg’s resident composer, Howard Shore, using a new computer instrument called the Synclavier to blur the line between synthetic orchestrations and a real string section. The resulting ambiguity mirrored the film’s unsettling philosophical core: were the characters having real experiences or hallucinations; were the instruments real, or artificial?

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As the 1980s got under way, the sampler emerged as the big new concept in musical composition, and the post-modern fallout of sampling has persisted ever since. One could argue that synthesizers were historicised by the advent of sampling, and it’s difficult now to escape a sense of nostalgia or deliberate quotation of the past when using the classic Moogs or ARPs on record. However, as recent films like Under the Skin (2014) have shown, electronic sound synthesis, whether based in sampling and software manipulation or ‘traditional’ synthesizer programming, continues to offer creative support to the extreme visions of horror and fantasy filmmakers.

The following is a partial list of horror film soundtracks featuring synthesizers either exclusively or prominently. The relevant composer is noted alongside:

1969 – Troika – David Johnson & Fredrick Hobbs

1971 – I Drink Your Blood – Clay Pitts

1971 – Let’s Scare Jessica to Death – Orville Stoeber

1972 – Season of the Witch – Steve Gorn

1973 – Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things – Carl Zittrer

1972 – Deathdream – Carl Zittrer

1972 – Last House on the Left – Steve Chapin & David Hess

1972 – The Severed Arm – Phillan Bishop

1973 – Messiah of Evil – Phillan Bishop

1974 – Nude for Satan – Alberto Baldan Bembo

1975 – Deep Red – Goblin

1975 – Kiss of the Tarantula – Phillan Bishop

1975 – Shining Sex – Daniel White

1976 – Death Trap – Wayne Bell & Tobe Hooper

1976 – The Child – Michael Quatro

1977 – Sex Wish – unknown

1977 – Shock Waves – Richard Einhorn

1977 – Suspiria – Goblin

1977 – Shock – I Libra

1978 – Halloween – John Carpenter

1978 – Phantasm – Fred Myrow & Malcolm Seagrave

1978 – The Alien Factor -  Kenneth Walker

1978 – Dawn of the Dead – Goblin

1978 – Terror – Ivor Slaney

1979 – Beyond the Darkness – Goblin

1979 – The Driller Killer – Joe Delia

1979 – Don’t Go in the House – Richard Einhorn

1979 – Zombie Flesh-Eaters – Fabio Frizzi

1979 – Terror Express – Marcello Giombini

1980 – Anthropophagus – Marcello Giombini

1980 – The Beast in Space – Marcello Giombini

1980 – Erotic Nights of the Living Dead – Marcello Giombini

1980 – Cannibal Holocaust – Riz Ortolani

1980 – The Shining – Wendy Carlos

1980 – The Boogey Man – Tim Krog

1980 – Contamination – Goblin

1980 – Fiend – Paul Woznicki

1980 – Forest of Fear – Ted Shapiro

1980 – The Fog – John Carpenter

1980 – Maniac – Jay Chattaway

1980 – City of the Living Dead – Fabio Frizzi

1981 – Strange Behaviour – Tangerine Dream

1981 – Don’t Go in the Woods – H. Kingsley Thurber

1981 – Prey – Ivor Slaney

1981 – Inseminoid – John Scott

1981 – Scanners – Howard Shore

1981 – The House by the Cemetery – Walter Rizzati

1981 – Burial Ground aka Nights of Terror – Berto Pisano

1981 – Possession – Andrzej Korzynski

1981 – Macumba Sexual – Jess Franco [as 'Pablo Villa']

1982 – The Deadly Spawn – Paul Cornell, Michael Perilstein & Kenneth Walker

1982 – Boardinghouse – ‘Teeth’

1982 – Mongrel – Ed Guinn

1982 – Tenebrae – Simonetti-Morante-Pignatelli

1982 – El Siniestro Dr. Orloff – Jess Franco [as 'Pablo Villa']

1983 – The Keep – Tangerine Dream

1983 – Spasms – Tangerine Dream

1983 – Friday the 13th Part 3 – Harry Manfredini & Michael Zager

1983 – Videodrome – Howard Shore

1983 – Xtro – Harry Bromley Davenport

1984 – Don’t Open Till Christmas – Des Dolan

1984 – A Nightmare on Elm Street – Charles Bernstein

1985 – Phenomena – Goblin

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia.


Graduation Day

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graduation-day

Graduation Day is a 1981 cult slasher film, directed by ex-rabbi Herb Freed (Beyond Evil) and produced by Troma Entertainment for Columbia Pictures. It stars Christopher George, Patch Mackenzie and Michael Pataki. Scream Queen Linnea Quigley makes an early appearance.

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Plot teaser:

After a high school track runner, named Laura, suddenly dies from a heart attack after finishing a 30-second 200-meter race, a killer wearing a sweat suit and a fencing mask begins killing off her friends on the school track team one by one. The suspects include the track coach Michaels, Laura’s sister Anne who arrives in town for the funeral, the creepy school principal Mr. Guglione, and Laura’s strange boyfriend Kevin…

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The blonde girl in the number 46 track jersey was cut out of the film as much as possible since she was fired due to refusal to fulfill the nudity requirements. Linnea Quigley was hired to replace her.

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The film grossed $23,894,000 in the U.S. against its $250,000 budget, making it a box office success.

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Buy Graduation Day on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk. The UK release contains an exclusive Scream Queens documentary

Reviews:

” …Graduation Day will never be remembered as a classic or even a good film. But this is a picture littered with strange little moments that I keep returning to when I need something just a little different while serving up the typical slasher mystery and tropes. Plus any Movie that has the sense to cast Christopher George as a cranky coach, Michael Pataki as a weird Principal, Linnea Quigley as the school slut and Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White as a giggly for-no-apparent-reason student is absolute tops in my book.” Cinema du Meep

“It is by no means the worst entry in the slasher genre. After all, there are countless efforts where the picture is too dark that it is almost impossible to make out what is happening on screen. But the fault lies with every aspect of the film, from its script right through to the score (composed by Arthur Kempel, who would later work on Wackoand Double Impact). Sadly, Graduation Day is not camp enough to be fun (like Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!) and instead simply comes across as boring.” Retro Slashers

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“The twist in revealing the killer to the audience, but not the other characters, is madcap, as is the final chase, and most of all, a creative game of dress up with a corpse.  The insane glee guarantees you will never forget Graduation Day. And that’s a good thing, as it’s a hoot.” Death Ensemble

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Wikipedia | IMDb

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David Hess (actor)

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David Alexander Hess was an American actor, musician and songwriter, best known for his appearances in a trio of extreme horror films in the 1970s, in which he played a variety of psychotic sex criminals.

Born September 19, 1936 in New York, Hess first had success as a singer and songwriter in the 1950s. Under the name David Hill, he recorded the original version of All Shook Up, later a hit for Elvis Presley. His own compositions from the era include Start Movin’, recorded by Sal Mineo, and several songs for Elvis, including I Got Stung, Come Along and Sand Castles. His song Speedy Gonzales was a hit for Pat Boone and Your Heart, Your Hand, Your Love was a popular Andy Williams number. Hess himself had two hit albums in the 1960s, and in 1969 became head of A&R for Mercury Records, where he co-wrote the successful rock opera The Naked Carmen.

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His film career began in 1972, when he took the lead role in Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left. It was a controversial choice for a man with a successful, if low profile career in music, and would – by his own account – result in him losing an agent and more mainstream work. The movie, which began life as a hardcore porn, hardgore violence hybrid, saw Hess playing Krug Stillo, the leader of a gang who kidnap, torture and rape two teenage girls before themselves falling victim to the vengeful parents of one of the girls. Hess was immediately impressive – with his own version of character acting, he put the fear of God into his co-stars and created one of cinema’s most memorable, terrifying bad guys. As he later commented, “little old ladies would suddenly cross the street when they saw me coming”.

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In contrast to his onscreen persona, Hess also composed the acoustic, folky soundtrack to the film, which stood in contrast to the violence on display. This would become a sought after score, released on CD in 1999 and on vinyl in 2014.

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Hess would play variations on this role in two Italian films. Hitch Hike (Autostop Rosso Sangue) was directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile and co-starred Franco Neo and Corrine Clery, both big name Euro stars at the time. Hess plays hitchhiker Alex, and escaped mental patient who terrorises the couple after they pick him up. It’s a less disturbing, more complex film than Last House, but nevertheless cemented Hess’ reputation.

In 1980, he appeared in Ruggero Deodato’s House on the Edge of the Park, a disco-era reboot of the Last House theme that was every bit as uncompromising as you might expect from the director who had just made Cannibal Holocaust. Hess, as Alex, teams with Ricky (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) to terrorise rich party goers in a remarkable and intense class war film that features some of the most outrageous moments ever captured on film.

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Around this time, Hess had moved to Germany, where he worked in film dubbing, and acted in supporting roles in films such as The Swiss Conspiracy and disaster movie Avalanche Express. He also claimed to have written the English language shooting scripts for such German directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Reinhard Hauff.

David-Hess

Returning to America in 1980, he directed his first – and only – feature film, To All a Goodnight. This Christmas slasher film proved to be a disaster artistically with poor lighting and weak direction.

Returning to acting, he was reunited with Wes Craven on Swamp Thing in 1982, and over the next few years had a solid career playing small parts and villainous roles in films and TV shows, including White Star, Armed and Dangerous, Knight Rider, Manimal, The Fall Guy and The A-Team. He also worked with Deodato again on the slasher film BodyCount in 1987, and appeared in Enzo G. Castellari’s 1993 spaghetti western Jonathan of the Bears.

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Generally though, the 1990s were a lean time for Hess. It wasn’t until a new generation of filmmakers emerged, knowing his work from the past and appreciating both his abilities and his cult status, that he began to find more work in low budget horror movies. While none of these films lived up to the great films of the past, Zombie Nation, Zodiac Killer, Smash Cut and others kept Hess in work. He also began to appear on the convention circuit and in 2000 toured the UK with Gunnar Hansen, where The Last House on the Left – still banned in Britain but allowed screenings by Leicester City Council and at film club venues – was paired with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

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He would also participate in documentaries and audio commentaries relating to Last House.

Hess died of a heart attack on October 7th 2011. At the time of his death, he was scheduled to appear in the still-unfilmed Despair in the UK.

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IMDb


Leviathan (1989)

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Leviathan is a 1989 science fiction horror film about a hideous creature that stalks and kills a group of people in a sealed environment, in a similar vein to such films as Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982). Leviathan was directed by George P. Cosmatos, and stars Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Daniel Stern and Amanda Pays. The film’s story was written by David Peoples and Jeb StuartStan Winston was the producer for the creature special effects.

Leviathan monster

 

On the dark and forbidding ocean floor, the crew of a deep-sea mining rig discovers a sunken freighter that harbors a deadly secret: a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong. With a storm raging on the surface and no hope of rescue, the captain  and his team are propelled into a spine-tingling battle for survival against the ultimate foe – a hideous monster that cannot die…and lives to kill!

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Leviathan is one of many underwater-themed movies released around 1989, including The Abyss, DeepStar Six, The Evil Below, Lords of the Deep, and The Rift (Endless Descent). It ended up the second highest grossing of these films with $15.7 million at the US box office.

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Buy Leviathan on Blu-ray from Amazon.com

 “It’s better than Deep Star Six, and it lacks the swollen running time of Spielberg’s sleepy-time lullaby for mainstream popcorn munchers. Plus, you get a little gore, some crazy mutations, and Peter Weller delivering one of my all-time favorite one-liners. It’s stupid, it’s pointless, but God bless him, Peter Weller knocks it out of the park like a champ. Cosmatos may suck at directing everything else, but he managed to make Leviathan a fun, light-hearted attempt at sci-fi horror.” The Film Fiend

“Now here is the dilemma I face: Is this film mediocre because of its implausibility and accompanying predictability, or is it a result of its blatant similarity to its superior counterparts? Fortunately, the film is entertaining enough to recommend, so you should discover for yourself.” The Parallax Review

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“Something of a minor cult favourite amongst sci-fi-horror fans, Leviathan is a film which doesn’t have a shred of originality running through its body. But it’s a polished production with enough goo, gore and gratuitous hamming up by some of the cast to keep it entertaining, rarely dull and with an odd moment which promised a whole lot more.” Popcorn Pictures

 

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Leviathan poster

 

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Wikipedia | IMDb

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Mother’s Day (1980)

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US one sheet

Mother’s Day is a 1980 American horror-thriller film, directed, co-written and produced by Charles Kaufman, brother of Troma Entertainment co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, who served as an associate producer for the film. It stars Nancy Hendrickson, Deborah Luce, Tiana Pierce, Holdem McGuire, Billy Ray McQuade and US TV star Rose Ross.

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Plot Teaser

Abbey, Jackie , and Trina, who reunite every year to take a camping trip. Once while setting their vacation up in the woods, they find their trip turns into their worst nightmare when they are captured by a group of two partially insane punk/”hillbilly” hybrids: Ike  and Addley. The punks lead a comfortable life, living along with their mentally abnormal mother in an occult hovel situated amidst the wood. All through the movie, their mother goads her sons into acts of rape, violence, and murder. Eventually one of the women is severely brutalized by Ike and Addley, and the remaining two escape before the first dies from her sustained injuries. They soon regroup, arm themselves, and set out for bloody revenge against Ike, Addley, and Mother. After the girls take their revenge at the end of the film, as they are about to leave the woods they are attacked by the mother’s deformed sister, Queenie…

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The United Kingdom’s film rating board (BBFC) rejected the film in 1980, banning it from distribution. The film was shown several times on the Horror Channel between 2006–08, with no cuts and is finally released on blu-ray uncut in 2014 by 88 Films.

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In Australia, the film was originally passed uncut with an R 18+ in 1983 by the Australian censors but was later banned when reviewed in 1985. Fourteen minutes of the film were cut in Germany in order to keep the film from an X-rating.

A remake came in 2010,

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Buy the blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk  and Amazon.com

Reviews

“Beautifully skuzzy and brazenly bizarre, Charles Kaufman’s original version of Mother’s Day is a deft mix of pitch black comedy and fairly effective and disturbing horror. The performances are wonderfully over the top and the locations amazingly filthy, giving this one a look and feel all its own.” Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop!

“Make no mistake...Mother’s Day is not for everyone. It’s a demented and revolting exercise in sadism that makes you feel very uncomfortable, yet it’s done with such brains and heart that it stands tall above its many comparable knock-off’s. It’s tight, fast-paced, and very well done for its type. You become very concerned for the three heroines of the story, and for me this alone makes it a winner. These are characters with short but potent personal histories, and you CARE what happens to them.” DVD Drive-In

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“While watching Mother’s Day, not only was I shocked that people have made a big deal about, but by the fact that anyone remembers it at all. Again, it’s similar to I Spit on Your Grave, but while that film was unflinching and sadistic in its depiction of rape and violence, Mother’s Day comes off as simply being cartoonish and weird. Yes, it’s unusual that Mother goads the boys into their strange shows for her entertainment, but the scenes are so weird that they become ludicrous. They are simply too odd to be disturbing.DVD Sleuth

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Wikipedia | IMDb

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Future-Kill

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Future-Kill  (aka Night of the Alien/Splatter) is a 1985 low-budget comedy science fiction-horror film directed by Ronald W. Moore, and stars Edwin Neal and Marilyn Burns from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Gabriel Folse. The poster for the film was designed by renowned artist H. R. Giger.

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Plot Teaser

Texas University frat boys are held responsible for the accidental killing of the Anti-Nuke Mutants’ leader and must flee through the hostile parts of downtown Dallas, aided by friendly Mutant Julie. They’re mercilessly hunted by the psychopathic Splatter (Ed Neal), the Mohawk sporting mutant seeking revenge for the killing of his leader…

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Marilyn Burns

Marilyn Burns was found dead by family members at her Houston, Texas home on August 5th 2014. She was 65.

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Buy Future-Kill on DVD from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

“Despite its numerous flaws, despite its general silliness, I still found myself enjoying Future-Kill. Why? I’m not quite sure. Was it the Texas Chainsaw alums? Was it the “pew pew pew!” title placard? Was it the Escape From New York-like plonky synth soundtrack? It could be all of those things, or it could be none of them. While watching, though, I got the feeling that the impetus behind this movie was someone simply declaring, “Hey! Let’s make a fucking movie!”…and then they all got together and they did it. I like that.” Final Girl

“So, is the movie worth seeing. No. It is not bad in any interesting way. There is a certain Ed Woods feel to the way the movie was made. When you look past the movie to some of the background you really get the feeling that Moore was part hustler/ part con artist. H.R. Giger who did the art work for “Alien” was somehow persuaded to do a cover for the movie, apparently he was moved by Moore’s tearful assertion that the movie would be nothing without great cover art. I have to disagree with that, the movie is still nothing even with great cover art.” Bleak Cinema

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“The list of what works in Future-Kill is far shorter than that of what doesn’t, so I’ll save the time of laying out all its flaws and just say that this is not a movie that has aged well by any stretch of the imagination. The acting is sub-par, the direction is bored, the music simply hurts to sit through and Ed Neal’s outfit is ridiculous. I really don’t get why he agreed to the role, other than to do a favor for a friend and try something different, since it’s so unlike Neal’s personality it’s almost laughable. A cold-hearted killer he is not.” Dread Central

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Wikipedia | IMDb

 

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Sweet Home (film)

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Sweet Home (スウィートホーム Suwīto hōmu) is a 1989 Japanese horror film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and produced by Juzo Itami. It stars Nobuko Miyamoto, Shingo Yamashiro and Nokko. Dick Smith supplied the extensive special effects. Producer Itami took the film from Kurosawa to reshoot and replace scenes for the video release and TV screenings.

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Plot Teaser

A small film crew visits the old, abandoned mansion of famous artist Ichirō Mamiya, who left several precious frescos inside his house. The team wants to restore and publish the paintings and film a documentary about Yamamura and his arts. The team includes Kazuo (Shingo Yamashiro), his daughter Emi (Nokko), producer Akiko (Nobuko Miyamoto), photographer Tagushi (Ichiro Furutachi) and art restorer Asuka (Fukumi Kuroda). After they enter the mansion, paranormal events betray the presence of a poltergeist. Soon, Asuka is possessed by the infuriated ghost of Fujin, Ichirō’s wife. The team discovers a makeshift grave where a toddler is buried. The boy is Ichirō and Fujin’s son, who fell into the house’s incinerator one day and burned alive. Since then, Fujin’s ghost haunts the mansion, killing any trespassers…

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FX Prep

 

The game of the same name and the movie were simultaneously released so it’s not really clear if the movie is based on the video game or vice versa. Further complicating the debate about which came first: Sweet Home’s trailer is both an advertisement from the movie, and a sales pitch for the Famicom game. It includes scenes from both.
Sweet Home has never had an official DVD release anywhere.
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Reviews

“Kurosawa shows himself fully capable of directing a fast-moving, sharply edited roller coaster of a film. It may not be terribly original, but the characters are engaging and the script is well written, providing an interesting variation on the traditional Japanese “vengeful female spirit” concept. The final third is fantastic, as Akiko takes on the role of surrogate mother, the only way she can hope to fight the grieving maternal demon that haunts the house.” Flipside Movie Emporium

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“Despite its unsurprising plotting, Sweet Home is action-packed, thrill-packed and effects-packed, resulting in a more than entertaining haunted house ride.” Tom Mes, Midnight Eye

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“I love this film a great deal. Its everything you’d want in an old schoolhaunted house tale. Hidden rooms, scary ghosts, dark secrets and just a touch of humor. Its a creepy little film, that has a few scares and more than it’s fair share of tension. Its damn near perfect. Honestly the film haunts me at times with the any shadows I see coming from a dark room making me wonder if they are going to claim me.” Unseen Films

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Wikipedia | IMDb

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Death Spa (aka Witch Bitch)

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Death Spa (aka Witch Bitch) is a 1989 American horror film directed by Michael Fischa and starring William Bumiller, Brenda BakkeKen Foree and Merritt Butrick.

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Death Spa was Merritt Butrick’s final film. He died of AIDS-related toxoplasmosis in March 1989. He also starred in Fright Night 2.

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Plot Teaser

The new fitness club in town has everything a health nut could ever want: a variety of workout machines, classes taught by friendly (and frisky) instructors, and a state-of-the-art computer control system for maximum client comfort. Unfortunately it s also possessed by the evil spirit of the owner s dead wife, and before long every dumbbell, leg press, and rowing machine becomes a deadly weapon for her to enact bloody vengeance on the club’s beautiful members…

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Buy Death Spa on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

 Reviews

“There is no redeeming value to Death Spa. No intrinsic message or moral we can take away from it, unless you count “don’t use workout machines tied to Skynet” as good advice. Is the movie any good? Not really, although as an hour and a half time waster you could do much worse. I give the filmmakers high marks for trying to do something different with the horror genre even if they don’t always succeed. Then again, there’s only so much you can do with a movie about man-eating treadmills.” DVD Verdict

“You have some good kills, gratuitous nudity including a great shower scene, and that special kind of cheesy goodness that only seems to come from 80’s movies.  And even when the movie completely shifted gears on me I still had fun with it.  This is one of those wacky movies that works well as a serious slasher movie and still works when it becomes more like a Night of the Demons cheesy gore fest.”  Gutmunchers

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“Delivering a generous helping of both gore and female nudity (lots of beauties in this one) is only half of the battle. The other half is defeated by an overly complicated plot, poor lighting, terrible acting and ridiculously awful dialogue, which turn this into a laughable mess in no short time. ” The Bloody Pit of Horror

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IMDb

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Nightbeast

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‘If you have the guts – he wants them!!’

Nightbeast is a 1982 American science fiction/horror film directed by cult Baltimore director Don Dohler. It is a remake/sequel of sorts to Dohler’s first film The Alien Factor. It stars Donald Leifert, Tom Griffiths and George Stover.

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Plot teaser:

Most of the cast of The Alien Factor reprise their roles in Nightbeast. It features opening credit effects by Ernest Farino (who created the title effects forThe Terminator, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day) and the creature was created by John Dods who has since provided special effects for Ghostbusters IIAlien Resurrection, and The X Files. Additional Makeup Effects were by Amodio Giordano. Parts of the music was written by J.J. Abrams.

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Nightbeast had a budget of $42,000, a relatively large amount for a Don Dohler film.

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A British VIPCO video release, the film was included on the lamentable Section 3 “liable for forfeiture” list as covered on Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide Part Two, Draconian Days

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 Buy Nightbeast with Blood, Boobs & Beast from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“If you’re looking for a serious sci-fi movie, you’d be looking in the wrong place with Nightbeast. If you’re looking for cheesy, schlocky, consistently low budget special effects and a montage of gunfire, then you can’t go wrong here.” Internal Bleeding

“Certainly, I shook my head a lot during this film, I even scratched it a few times, but at no point did I want to bash it off a wall. It entertained me and it didn’t outstay its welcome, to expect anything else of the movie would have been foolish. It’s far from a classic, it isn’t even very coherent, but with a just few thousand dollars Dohler made a movie that was much more entertaining and enjoyable than a lot of $100 million sci-fi movies I’ve seen.” To Obscurity and Beyond

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“Well Nightbeast is probably not going to change your life, but if you are in a serious need of some real 80s entertainment of the weird kind, you can’t go wrong with Nightbeast, cause they don’t make em’ like this anymore.” Hog-Wild Howls

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Wikipedia | IMDb

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The Final Cut: The Modern Mythology of the Snuff Movie (article – updated)

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Snuff videos showing scenes of murder, mutilation and cannibalism were on sale alongside Disney films at a children’s comic fair… Trading Standards officers believe the video shows genuine footage of chanting, half-naked Amazon Indians butchering a white man depicted as a jungle explorer.”

THE DAILY MAIL, April 1992

Many serial killers found an outlet for their vivid sexual fantasies in pornography. Ed Kemper scoured detective magazines for pictures of corpses and frequented ‘snuff movies’ in which intercourse is a prelude to murder.”

Newsweek, quoted in THE AGE OF SEX CRIME, Jane Caputi 1987

There’s a lot of gay people there, gay men, so they have young boys. You get a lot of rent boys there, because they’re offered a load of money, and then they become snuff movies.”

Janet’, quoted in BLASPHEMOUS RUMOURS, Andrew Boyd 1991

It’s the darker side of the film business – the claims that someone, somewhere, is producing films which feature genuine murder and torture. Films which are then sold or screened for vast sums of money to wealthy decadents, who are so bored with life that they can only get their kicks from watching the final taboos being shattered… or videos which are circulated amongst underground networks of child molesters and rapists, ensuring that the violation of the victim continues long after their death. The term for these movies is at once shocking in its cynicism, and unforgettable in the horror of its implications: Snuff.

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Nobody is entirely sure when the stories began. Some claim that rumours were circulating as far back as the Forties, but the modern fixation with the idea of the ‘snuff movie’ can be traced to that turbulent period as the Sixties crossed over into the Seventies, and long-held ideas of morality began to crumble. In 1961, a film-maker still risked prosecution for showing naked girls on film; a decade on, and cinemas across America were openly showing hardcore pornography. Nothing seemed taboo any more.

To moral campaigners, the idea of the snuff movie seemed both inevitable and useful. Inevitable, because after all, where else was there for the satiated pornographer and his audience to go? And useful, because it provided a potent weapon to use against the libertarians. Even the most liberal minded individual would, after all, consider freedom to murder a liberty too far, and might even be forced to rethink their deeply held beliefs about sexual freedom in the face of such material. And so began a mythology that has, if anything, grown in potency over the years, to the extent that even now, most people unquestioningly accept the existence of snuff movies as proven fact.

Which is odd. Because despite the hysteria, a single scrap of evidence confirming snuff movies has yet to be found.

What we do have are outright lies, assorted apocryphal tales, staggering cases of mistaken identity and several cases of genuine cinematic death which may seem to fit the bill at first, but don’t actually match the precise snuff movie definition.

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The first recognised tales of snuff movie production emerged in Ed Sanders’ exhaustive book on Charles Manson, The Family. Manson was known to be fond of filming Family activity, including sex orgies which he supposedly sold. He is also known to have stolen a van full of NBC TV equipment. In The Family, Sanders interviews an anonymous Family associate who claims to have witnessed the filming of what he describes as “a snuff movie” in which a naked girl is decapitated during a pseudo-occult ritual. Although the video equipment was recovered when police raided the Spahn Ranch, no snuff footage has emerged (other Family films have been seen, but consist of nothing more sensational than skinny-dipping). It was claimed that remaining Family members squirreled the footage away; if true, they hid it well. More than a quarter of a decade on, it still remains a secret waiting to be revealed. Sanders also hints at rumours that various members of Hollywood’s smart set were dabbling in animal porn, torture and snuff movies. Again, such footage, if it exists, has never emerged. Years later, the Manson connection re-emerged when writer Maury Terry tied the Family and snuff production into his exhaustive investigation of satanic connections to the Son of Sam murders in New York. Yet again, no videotapes were ever found to back up these claims.

After years of similar unfounded rumours, the snuff movie was dragged screaming into the public consciousness in the mid-Seventies with the release of Snuff. Hyped as being shot “in South America…where life is CHEAP!”. The film implied – no, almost boasted – that it featured a genuine murder, carried out for the camera. Wherever it played, the film was attacked by feminists, anti-porn campaigners and journalists, who had not long before reported on the case of a so-called snuff movie being intercepted by U.S. Customs en route from – where else? – South America.

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The protests were not, however, as spontaneous as they might have seemed. In fact, they were as phoney as the film itself. Grindhouse distributor Allan Shackleton was the warped genius behind the whole sorry scam. It was Shackleton who arranged the pickets and wrote the letters of outrage, Shackleton who planted the story of the Customs seizure (no such interception had in fact taken place), gambling that the negative publicity would ensure major box office returns before the film was run out of town. And it was Shackleton who created Snuff out of an unreleased movie called Slaughter.

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Slaughter had been shot in 1971 by husband and wife exploitation movie veterans Michael and Roberta Findlay. Attempting to cash in on the Manson Family headlines, it told of the exploits of a hippy cult leader who leads his followers to murder. It was indeed shot in South America (Argentina, to be exact), where film crews, if not life, were certainly cheap. Filmed without sync sound, the resulting movie was a sorry mess, and sat unreleased until 1975, when Shackleton – a hardened showman distributor with an eye for a good scam – picked it up and decided to revamp it into something that could make money. Noting its incoherence, he figured that the only way audiences would sit through the film would be if they were given a reason to accept – even expect – the amateur style. As a snuff movie, Slaughter’s lack of technical skill became a positive boon.

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The first thing Shackleton did was to remove the end of the film, presumably thinking that no-one would have bothered following the plot anyway. He also chopped off the opening and closing credits, giving the film a suitably anonymous appearance. He then hired Simon Nuchtern to shoot a new ending in a studio owned by hardcore adult movie director Carter Stevens, in which the cameras pull back from the action to show the studio set. The “actress” starts to get it on with the “director”, but is then assaulted by him. He reaches for a knife, chops off one of her fingers, followed by the whole hand, then disembowels her. The fact that this footage is considerably better shot than the rest of the film, that the actress bears no resemblance to the woman seen in the earlier footage, and that the special effects are somewhat rubbery didn’t matter. Shackleton knew that, for varying reasons, people would want to believe it was real. And they did. Many still do, despite the truth about Snuff being widely reported. Some believe out of ignorance; others out of cynicism. Anti-Pornography groups are certainly aware of the reality behind Snuff, but still hold it up as proof that women are being routinely murdered for the camera. It’s in their interests for people to believe that the porn industry routinely murders people for profit.

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In fact, Snuff was roundly condemned as a tasteless stunt by America’s pornographers. Producer David F. Friedman, who headed the Adult Film Association of America, begged Shackleton not to release the film. Sex film veteran Friedman, in David Hebditch and Nick Anning’s book Porn Gold, traced the snuff hysteria to early Seventies group called the Campaign for Decency in Literature, headed by Charles Keating, who claimed on TV to have evidence that X-rated film-makers were murdering their stars on film. The producer claims that he contacted the CDL and asked them to hand their evidence to the authorities, and, when nothing happened, contacted the FBI himself, who dismissed the claims.

Friedman also offered a $25,000 reward to anyone supplying evidence of snuff movies. It remains uncollected.

Snuff made Shackleton his expected bundle, and faded into history. But it provided new ammunition for pro-censorship groups and moral campaigners. Now, everyone knew that snuff wasn’t just something old men snorted instead of cocaine.

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Years later in Britain, where the film had – naturally – never been seen, it emerged on video with spectacularly bad timing. At the beginning of 1982, the first rumblings of what would become the Video Nasty tidal-wave of hysteria were appearing in the press. As the storm over the availability of uncensored video grew, Astra Video – already prime targets for prosecution after releasing the grossly misunderstood I Spit on Your Grave and David Friedman’s early Sixties splatter movie Blood Feast – added Snuff to their roster of titles, featuring the rather ill-conceived (if somewhat accurate) cover blurb “the original legendary atrocity shot and banned in New York… the actors and actresses who dedicated their lives to making this film were never seen or heard from again.” After an outraged Sunday Times article, Astra rapidly withdrew the film from sale, but not before a reasonable quantity had made it to the shops. Tabloid reporters invariably took the film at face value, and the circulation of a “real snuff movie” helped fuel calls for controls over violent videos.

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Ironically, slipping out unnoticed on video in Britain a couple of years earlier was a West German rip-off , entitled Confessions of a Blue Movie Star… although the original English language title, The Evolution of Snuff, was far less equivocal. This film was an uneasy mixture of soft porn, documentary and curious moral campaigning – it’s notable as one of the few anti-porn sex films ever made. Supposedly following the career of a German sex starlet who later took her own life, the film suggests that snuff movies are an inevitable symptom of liberal attitudes towards sex. Opening with interviews with various people (including Roman Polanski) who are convinced of the existence of snuff movies, the film reveals its true cynicism and lack of credibility at the end, when it features an interview with a masked “Snuff Movie maker” and then presents an extract from his film. This footage is shocking – grainy, shaky images of a woman seemingly being disembowelled. It looks far more authentic that the footage in Snuff. But it’s also far more recognisable. In fact, it has been lifted from Wes Craven’s brutal 1972 production The Last House on the Left. And although Craven’s movie was condemned by many critics for excessive violence, nobody would suggest that the killings were real…

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Although snuff movies would become a standard plot device for film-makers in the Seventies, providing the central or incidental themes in a number of films. Hardcore saw George C. Scott wallowing in the seedy world of pornography, trying to locate his estranged daughter, who he has seen in a porno flick and who, of course, ends up in a snuff movie. Coming from the religiously tortured mind of Paul Schrader, it was a decent film that sadly perpetuated the myth that the porn industry routinely kills its stars.

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Similarly, Joe D’Amato’s outrageous Emanuelle in America sees the titular character, played as always by Laura Gemser, investigating corruption and white slavery, at one point watching a ‘snuff movie’ as part of her investigations. The snuff footage in this film is remarkably brutal and realistic – quite what audiences expecting a softcore romp made of it is anyone’s guess.

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Last House on Dead End Street is a more impressively disturbing film about a porn producer who moves into snuff movie production. A weird hybrid of sleaze and art, the film for years was the height of cinematic obscurity, only available as fuzzy bootlegs and with no information available about director Viktor Janos. But in 2001, porn director Roger Watkins was revealed as both the director and the star, and the film – which began life as a three hour movie called The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell in 1972 before winding up in the current, thankfully shorter, version in 1977 – is now readily available on DVD. It’s quite unlike anything else you’ll ever see.

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1980’s Effects is considerably less interesting. Shot in Pittsburgh by Dusty Nelson and featuring several George Romero collaborators (Tom Savini, Joe Pilato, John Harrison), this is the tale of a horror film maker who decided real death will be cheaper than special effects. It’s a nice idea, but the film is unfortunately very dull and clumsily produced.

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Even worse is Australian film Final Cut, made the same year, in which a pair of journalists gain access to a reclusive media mogul who might be producing snuff movies for his own pleasure. Very little happens and the best thing about the film is the video cover.

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Snuff movies – or, rather, snuff TV – also featured in David Cronenberg’s hallucinatory Videodrome, in which the director played with a ‘what if’ idea – in this case, ‘what if the fears of the censors were true/’ in a tale of video-induced hallucinations via a signal hidden inside brutal torture and murder videos being beamed from (where else?) South America.

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While these films all explored the idea of the snuff movie, it wasn’t until the Eighties that the phrase and the hysteria would fully explode into mainstream consciousness. As the Seventies wave of liberalism gave way to the Eighties Thatcherite New Morality and hard-line feminism, it somehow became easier to accept that pornographers – evil, corrupt exploiters of women, every one of them – would cheerfully kill for the cameras. And by the 1990s, British newspaper hacks, bored with the term ‘video nasty’ were starting to use ‘snuff’ as a description for just about any violent movie, culminating in one tabloid notoriously referring to Japanese amine film Akira as ‘Manga snuff’. Now, apparently, even cartoon characters were being murdered for real, despite never having actually existed in the first place!

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Feminist writers and moral campaigners both routinely told tales of snuff movies which were dressed up as proven fact, but which were always vague enough to avoid scrutiny. No names, no evidence. Films that the authorities had been unable to see were apparently easily accessed by anti-porn fanatics. And invariably, the public followed suit. Everyone these days, it seems, knows someone who’s mate has seen a snuff movie.

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In many cases, these snuff movies turn out to be more indicative of the gullibility of the viewer – or, perhaps, their desire to believe. The Amazon snuff movie reported (in a cynically racist manner) by The Daily Mail, and quoted at the top of this article, turned out to be Ruggero Deodato’s 1979 production Cannibal Holocaust, a film which has been mistaken for the Real Thing in Britain more than once. At least that film, with it’s powerfully authentic pseudo-documentary style, looks the part; more ludicrous was the insistence by zealous staff from Liverpool Trading Standards and various media (including Channel Four News) that Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagous (a generally tedious horror movie about a cannibal killer lurking on a Greek island), seized during video nasty raids in 1993 was a snuff movie. Similarly, a scurrilous Channel 4 documentary series ran an episode on ‘satanic abuse’, claiming to show footage of killings in occult rituals – in reality, it was performance art footage by Genesis P. Orridge’s Temple of Psychik Youth.

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Flower of Flesh and Blood, an episode from the Japanese  film series Guinea Pig, has also convinced many people – including actor Charlie Sheen, who reported it to the authorities after watching aghast. In Britain, a National Film Theatre employee was taken to court after customs seized a tape of the film, and only narrowly escaped a jail sentence when experts declared the film to be a clever simulation. And indeed it is. Catering to the Japanese audience’s blood lust, the film is a carefully constructed fake snuff movie – devoid of any narrative structure, it simply shows a woman being killed and hacked apart by a man dressed as a Samurai. However, the film still features standard cinematic devices and full credits, which one would hardly expect to find on evidence of crime, and the DVD edition also comes with ‘behind the scenes’ footage exposing the whole artifice.

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In more recent years, the scuzzier end of US shot-on-video sleaze has seen similar ‘recreation’ movies. The likes of Snuff Kill and Snuff Perversions are virtually plotless collections of faked snuff movies, designed to look as real as possible – deliberately crude, basic and often minimalist, these films exist only to appeal to the warped tastes of ghouls who really want to see the real thing but who will, in its absence, settle for these reconstructions instead. There’s certainly no entertainment value to be had from such movies, but one can easily imagine them being taken for the real thing by newspaper hacks, politicians and censorial groups.

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Meanwhile, the improbably titled Very Very Sexy Snuff Movie is a low budget French addition to the continuing slew of ‘snuff’ titles. This anthology offering includes “a tale of three young East European women who are kidnapped by a sick producer of snuff movies and held prisoners on the movie set”. Its torpid tagline is: ‘Sexier dead than alive’. And, Sonrie – Snuff Inc from Argentina (‘where life is cheap” perhaps? Certainly where FILMS are cheap, given the $600 budget of this movie) is an alleged ‘snuff comedy’, though you might struggle to see where the humour is.

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Of course, a long-standing tradition of the snuff movie mythology was that such films were made in South America, where “Life Is Cheap!”. Unsubstantiated stories of prostitutes and children being smuggled over the border into the US, where they would be raped and murdered by organised rings of snuff film-makers, had circulated throughout the Seventies. By the Eighties, however, the mythology had developed to the extent where these films were happening anywhere and everywhere and were. One of the most insistent claims made regarding snuff movies relates to paedophile rings and satanic cults.

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In both instances, the evidence remains non-existent, but has been so widely distorted and exaggerated that most people genuinely believe it. The most recurrent individual tale concerns footage of the murder of Jason Swift and several other children at the hands of a group of paedophiles in the early Eighties. At the start of the Nineties, newspapers reported that the deaths of several children had been videotaped, although there was no evidence to support this. The reports would subsequently resurface with remarkable frequency; the raids which netted Anthropophagous were reported as possibly having found such footage. Not true. And the Powers That Be conveniently float the rumour whenever calls for stricter censorship are made. So it’s worth re-stating for the record: there is no evidence whatsoever that the killings were filmed for any reason, let alone for commercial purposes. No tapes found. No cameras found. No statements from the convicted killers. Nothing.

Various cases in which murderers have filmed their activities have been held up as proof of snuff movie production. In 1985, Californian police found videotapes of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng torturing and murdering several women. Many people took these as final confirmation of the existence of snuff movies, but they were wrong. These tapes, shot for the killer’s own personal gratification (much as the Moors Murderers audio-taped and photographed their victims) don’t fit the definition of films being produced for commercial reasons; of people dying on camera for the profit of shadowy underworld figures; of movies which sell to rich, jaded degenerates for thousands of dollars a time. And despite rumours, there is no evidence to suggest that the tapes had ever been seen by anyone other than the two killers.

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And tasteless documentary films such as Executions, Faces of Death, True Gore, Death – The Ultimate Horror, Death Scenes, Snuff – A Documentary About Killing and others don’t qualify either, featuring as they do news footage (or, in the case of the Faces of Death series, rather unconvincing reconstructions) of accidents and crime scenes. Salacious they may be; offensive, probably; but hardly snuff movies. The same is true of war atrocity videos (such as the Bosnian propaganda tape that was being sold on the streets of London at the height of the Balkan war), or various medical studies, ranging from surgical operations to post-mortem footage, that have entered into general underground circulation.

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Arguably, the closest we’ve come to real snuff movies are the shocking murder videos posted to the internet – be they jihadist executions, murderous drug gangs in Mexico – where life really DOES seem cheap – slaughtering those who have crossed them or Russian murderers filming their killings and then posting them online, these are very, very real. But snuff movies in the accepted sense? They are not being shot to order for money, so no. And tellingly, no-one seems to be calling these clips ‘snuff movies’. Perhaps it’s too trivial a term to be used for such obviously real atrocities.

Despite the overwhelming lack of evidence to support it though, the Snuff myth will never die. There are too many people with a vested interest in keeping it alive. Feminists see snuff as proof of the dehumanising effect of pornography – another level of the abuse of women. Moral campaigners cite snuff as proof that we need stronger censorship. Fundamentalist Christians use snuff as a way of backing their claims of widespread satanic abuse, which could only be stopped by outlawing Satanism. Yet all these groups seem to miss the point. Because even if snuff movies do exist, they exist beyond the law of every nation in the world, and no legal changes will alter that fact. Murder is already a criminal offence.

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In almost thirty years of hysteria, there has yet to be a single ‘commercially’ produced snuff movie found anywhere on the planet. And yet TV programmes like The Knock and CSI still feature storylines about the cracking of a snuff movie ring by customs, or the police, as if such events are common occurrences.

Mainstream thriller 8mm perpetuated the myth further (the very title of Joel Schumaker’s film shows the lack of intelligence at work – would actual snuff movie makers shoot on film, given the expense, difficulty and risks involved, when video cameras are widely available?) and has been at the forefront of a new generation of movies playing with the myth.

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Preceding it was Mute Witness, made in 1994 and set in Russia, where a make-up artist (Marina Zudina) who can’t speak finds herself seeing what appears to be a porno shoot taking place after hours in the film studio where she works, only for the shoot to turn nasty as the lead actress is murdered on screen. The authorities don’t believe her, but the snuff film crew (led by Alec Guinness, in scenes shot a decade before the rest of the film!) decide she must be silenced anyway…

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Possibly the interesting movie treatment of the subject is Tesis, made in 1996 by Alejandro Amenábar, a thriller that uses snuff movies as a way of examining our fascination with violence and murder, with Ana Torrent as a film student who finds a videotape featuring a snuff movie and decides to investigate its origins. It’s a solid thriller that is smarter than most.

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The ever opportunist Bruno Mattei (as ‘Pierre Le Blanc’) climbed on what little bandwagon 8mm spawned with 2003’s Snuff Trap, though the plot – a mother searches for her daughter who might have been involved in porno snuff movie production – is closer to Hardcore. As with most of Mattei’s later, shot-on-video films, this is barely watchable.

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Bernard Rose, director of Candyman, made Snuff Movie in 2005, where a horror film director exorcises the demons of his wife’s murder at the hands of a hippy cult in the 1960s (a neat tie-in to Manson) by shooting snuff movies, killing off auditioning actors. Grubbier than you might expect from the director, but fairly mainstream in its approach, Snuff Movie is a decent film but hardly innovative.

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Still, it’s better than the likes of The Great American Snuff Film or The Cohasset Snuff Film, all of which are throwaway SOV splatter movies that are frankly best avoided. None of these films offer any new insight and instead attempt to trade on the notoriety of the ‘S’ word.

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The Snuff mythology has crept into more mainstream movies recently too. 2007’s Vacancy saw Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson as a bickering couple who find themselves staying at a run down motel, only to find that the video tapes left on top of the TV are actually snuff movies. Worse still, they are snuff movies filmed in the very room that they are staying in! This begins a better-than-expected cat and mouse thriller, with the couple trying to escape from the snuff movie makers who run the motel and lure hapless guests to their on screen death. Vacancy 2: The First Cut follows the origin of the snuff movie ring and is less effective.

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The snuff movie myth also informs films like V/H/S and its sequels, which blur the line between found footage – which of course tries to pass itself off as an authentic document – and snuff movie mythology. Several other films have also touched on the subject, including The Brave, Urban Legends: Final Cut and Sinister, while the idea of internet snuff via live feeds – often tied to ideas of reality TV – have appeared in Live Feed, My Little Eye, ICU and Halloween: Resurrection amongst others.

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But let’s remember that these films, good or bad, are simply exploiting a public fear for profit. Like alien autopsy videos, they give a salivating public what it wants. The truth wouldn’t sell tickets at the box office or online rentals. And in the end, the truth doesn’t matter. Snuff movies will continue to make headlines because they make great headlines, and people will continue to believe in their existence, because people need to believe. It’s a sick idea that’s simply seems too good not to be true.

David Flint, Horrorpedia

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Stephanie Beacham (actress)

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Stephanie Beacham (born in Barnet, Hertfordshire, 28 February 1947) is an English television, radio, film and theatre actress. Her career began in modelling before she moved into television with roles in series such as The Saint, Callan, and alien invasion cult classic UFO. Her early film roles included The Ballad of Tam Lin (aka The Devil’s Widow), directed by Roddy McDowall.

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Other horror roles:

In Michael Winner’s SM-tinged The Nightcomers (1971), a bizarre ‘prequel’ to the events that occurred in Henry James’ novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’, she starred opposite Marlon Brando. Beacham appeared nude in one scene, during the filming of which Brando apparently wore Y-fronts and wellington boots under the bed clothes to ensure Winner did not film anything lower than was necessary.

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Horror would be a genre that Stephanie Beacham appeared often in during the 1970s, and she was subsequently cast as Jessica Van Helsing in Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972 alongside genre icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

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Her other horror film appearances are in Amicus period piece  –And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973), Pete Walker’s House of Mortal Sin (aka The Confessional Murders, 1975), Schizo (1976) and Norman J. Warren’s Inseminoid (aka Horror Planet, 1981),

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She was featured in the Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense episode ‘A Distant Scream‘ in 1984 before achieving worldwide fame in TV soaps such as The Colbys and Dynasty. In 2000, she appeared in supernatural fantasy Charmed TV episode “Reckless Abandon”.

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Wikipedia (click for non-horror roles)


Royal Jelly (short story and Tales of the Unexpected TV episode)

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“Royal Jelly” is a short story by Roald Dahl first published in the February 1983 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. It was included in Dahl’s books Tales of the Unexpected, Kiss Kiss, and also published as a standalone volume in 2011

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Although known by many as simply a famed author of childrens’ stories, Roald Dahl had long produced tales of varying lengths, the majority aimed very clearly at adults. His collection of short stories, Kiss Kiss, first published in 1960, saw the first appearance of “Royal Jelly”, two decades before it was to be recreated on-screen as one of the most chilling episodes of the long-running ITV series, Tales of the Unexpected. This collection is particularly notable for being one of Dahl’s most macabre collections, nearly all of the the stories going on to be adapted into other forms:

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  • “The Landlady” – later to be televised not only on Tales of the Unexpected but also Alfred Hitchcock Presents
  • “William and Mary” – later screened on the oft-forgotten Way Out and also Tales of the Unexpected
  • “The Way Up to Heaven” – featured as part of the TV series, Suspicion, produced by Alfred Hitchcock
  • “Parson’s Pleasure” – dramatised as part of a BBC Radio 4 series, featuring Charles Dance
  • “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat” – screened as part of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, directed by Hitchcock himself
  • “Royal Jelly”
  • “Georgy Porgy” – filmed for Tales of the Unexpected and starring Joan Collins
  • “Genesis and Catastrophe: A True Story” – televised on Tales of the Unexpected and made into a short film by Jonathan Liebesman, before he inflicted The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and Wrath of the Titans upon an unsuspecting public
  • “Edward the Conqueror” – adapted for Tales of the Unexpected‘s first series
  • “Pig” – sadly, this segmented tale has yet to be re-told – it is, in fairness, likely to upset many viewers
  • “The Champion of the World” – later expanded to Danny, Champion of the World, his well-loved childrens’ tale

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“Royal Jelly” is a story about the Taylor family: Albert, Mabel, and their newborn baby daughter. Mabel is frightened because the child won’t eat and has been losing weight since birth. Albert, a bee-keeper, devises a novel solution by adding royal jelly, used to make bee larvae grow, to the baby’s milk. The baby begins to drink ravenously, getting fatter. Albert admits to putting royal jelly in their daughter’s milk, and Mabel tells him to stop. However, despite his wife’s wishes, Albert continues to add royal jelly to his daughter’s milk, resulting in her growing larger. Finally, Albert admits that he himself ate royal jelly (something of an understatement, he’s utterly addicted)  in an effort to increase his fertility, which obviously worked as their daughter was conceived soon after. Mabel realises how much her husband resembles a gigantic bee, and their daughter looks like nothing but a big grub but with “yellowy-brown hairs” on her stomach. At the end of the story, Albert says, “Why don’t you cover her up, Mabel? We don’t want our little queen to catch a cold.”

 

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Filmed for television as part of Tales of the Unexpected, the Royal Jelly episode opened the second series. Dramatised by Robin Chapman and directed by Herbert Wise (famed for his adaptation of the TV movie, The Woman in Black), it starred Timothy West (husband of the actress Prunella Scales and star of Fawlty Towers and many other TV shows himself) as the ‘inventive’ father and Britain’s biggest female genre star of the 1970’s, Susan George (Die Screaming MarianneStraw Dogs, Fright) as his beleaguered wife. Both are terrific actors, even to the extent that the audience may not query how the gorgeous George has ended up with the significantly older, less attractive, West. Both budget and the actors’ skills negate the need for significant glimpses at the child, West’s ‘buzzing’, surely a goofy trait waiting to happen, is utterly chilling and somehow completely believable.Dahl, as is his wont, explains the story’s genesis in the episode’s prologue:

“Back in the winter of 1959, I saw in a shop window in New York a little white jar with a notice on it saying, ‘Royal Jelly, 2 ounces, $350′. I’d never heard of the stuff – the shop told me it had magical properties and it undoubtedly has…so I wrote a story about it.

Years later, Dick Van Dyke, who had read the story, sent me from France a box of small glass phials containing pure Royal Jelly. I drank them one by one but I’m not going to say what they did to me or I’ll ruin what you’re about to see now.”

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

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Aenigma (film)

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Aenigma is a 1987 Italian horror film. It was directed by Lucio Fulci and stars Jared Martin, Lara Naszinsky, and Ulli Reinthaler.

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Plot teaser:

Kathy is an outcast at an elite New England boarding school whom lands in a coma resulting from accidentally being hit by a car during a cruel practical joke against her by several car loads of her tormentors. A little later, Eva, a new arrival to the school, takes over Kathy’s old room and begins socializing with some of the girls responsible for Kathy’s condition. It turns out that Eva is a pawn under the control of the comatose Kathy from her hospital bed in seeing revenge against those whom did her wrong, while Kathy’s physician, meets and begins dating Eva whom also targets his latest girlfriend..

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The film was actually released theatrically in its native Italy in 1988. Lucio Fulci has a cameo role as a police detective at the crime scene of Fred Vernon’s death.

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Buy Aenigma on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

“In terms of sheer entertainment, however, the film simply flies by, feeling half the length of even some arguably better lesser Fulci efforts like Manhattan Baby. Its blend of eighties silliness and off-the-wall nastiness make Aenigma prime late-night viewing for Italian horror fans.” Anchorwoman in Peril

“The effects and makeup do effectively create an eerie atmosphere. In particular I’ll say that comatose Kathy resonates an aura of malice (as seen above), and anyone who is even slightly uncomfortable with bugs will be squirming at the slug scene. Though it is a far cry from one of Fulci’s greatest films, Aenigma is still certainly an entertaining watch.” Blood Sucking Geek

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“When Aenigma finishes the only reaction for the viewer is to let out a sigh and mumble, “well, that’s over I guess.” When that’s the only lasting impression of a film there’s definitely something wrong with the film in question. There’s plenty wrong with Aenigma, but not enough to really rile up the viewer. Aenigma fails to impress or enrage, it sits in the middle as a hollow and empty experience masquerading as a horror film.” Sound on Sight

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Buy Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb

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The Fly II (film)

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The Fly II is a 1989 science fiction horror film starring Eric Stoltz (Haunted Summer; Anaconda) and Daphne Zuniga (The Dorm That Dripped Blood; The Initiation). It was directed by Chris Walas from a screenplay by Frank Darabont (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3; The Blob) and Jim and Ken Wheat (Pitch Black) as a sequel to David Cronenberg’s 1986 film The Fly, itself a remake of the 1958 film of the same name.

Stoltz’s character in this sequel is the adult son of Seth Brundle, the scientist-turned-‘Brundlefly’, played by Jeff Goldblum in the 1986 remake. With the exception of stock footage of Goldblum from the first film, John Getz (Killer Bees; Zodiac) was the only actor to reprise his role.

On the DVD commentary track, Chris Walas, states his belief that screenwriter Frank Darabont wrote Bartok to represent the worst aspects of corporate America. The Fly II fared well financially, taking $20,021,322 at the US box office and a further $18,881,857 worldwide, but reviews were largely negative. Many believe that Walas (who was the special effects engineer for the Oscar-winning make-up and creature effects in the first film) set out to repeat the success of the original by relying more on heavy gore and violence than on plot and atmosphere.

However, it is appreciated by many horror fans for its great visual impact. Walas has stated that the film was designed to be much more of a traditional (albeit gory) monster movie than Cronenberg’s horror/tragic love film.

Plot teaser:

Several months after the events of The Fly, Veronica Quaife is about to deliver the child she had conceived with scientist Seth Brundle. Anton Bartok, owner of Bartok Industries (the company which financed Brundle’s teleportation experiments), oversees the labor. Veronica dies from shock after giving birth to a squirming larval sac, which splits open to reveal a seemingly normal baby boy.

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The orphaned child, named Martin Brundle, is taken into Bartok’s care. Bartok is fully aware of the teleportation accident which genetically merged Seth Brundle with a housefly, a condition that Martin has inherited, and he secretly plans to exploit Martin’s unique condition…

Reviews:

“The Fly II is produced with such conviction that it’s difficult not to enjoy its pantomime villainy and bloody excess. It’s not in the same league as its predecessor, inevitably, but there’s a sense that Walas knows this; while clearly respecting what Cronenberg did before (a loving tribute to the Canadian auteur can even be spotted in one scene, where a security guard reads a book called The Shape of Rage), Walas appears to understand that what he’s making isn’t high art, but a fun horror flick.” Ryan Lambie, Den of Geek!

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“Sadly all the action takes place in these colorless fake looking science labs where you don’t ever get a glimpse of the sun, but you do have to bump into Daphne Zuniga from time to time. There are plenty of mean scientists and security guards all over the place that act in such a way as to secure their own doom when Seth gets his insect on near the end of the picture and seeks revenge for his under a microscope upbringing and being secretly videotaped bumping uglies with Zuniga. There is nothing resembling a pace or even a pulse here, and you just sort of wait and wait for special effects artist turned director Chris Walas to get to the underwhelming finale.” Kindertrauma

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It’s bad enough when a botched experiment leaves a dog mangled and deformed, but how about when Eric Stoltz later discovers his old pet is still alive, living in a dungeon, barely able to lick food out of its bowl. It’s heartbreaking to watch the dog, which looks like living road kill, start to wag its tail and whimper upon sight of its old human friend. And even more heartbreaking when Stoltz ends its pain. Seriously. You want horror? Forget The Exorcist. Screw The Blair Witch. Try and make it through the dog scene in The Fly II. I dare you.” Into the Dark

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Wikipedia | IMDb



Cannibals (aka White Cannibal Queen)

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Cannibals (also known as Mondo Cannibale, Die Blonde Gottin, White Cannibal Queen and Barbarian Goddess) is a 1980 French/Spanish/Italian cannibal film by prolific Spanish exploitation director Jesús Franco which starred a 17-year-old Sabrina Siani . It is one of two cannibal films directed by Franco starring Al Cliver, the other being Man Hunter (aka Devil Hunter, aka Sexo Canibal).

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Plot Teaser

Doctor Taylor, his wife Elizabeth and their teenage daughter Lana go to an isolated hospital in the Brazilian jungle. They are attacked by savages and the doctor witnesses them kill and eat his wife, and abduct his daughter. Taylor manages to get back to civilization, but he needs psychiatric help; only Doctor Ana believes his story about cannibals, and takes the risk of going with him and a few rich people who can pay for a safari in the remote jungle. The cannibals decimate a number of the safari members in a succession of attacks, and only Taylor, Doctor Ana, and a photographer reach the cannibal tribe – only to discover that his daughter is now the wife of the tribe leader, and considered a goddess…

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The film is notable for the fact that it shares an amount of footage with Cannibal Terror. While many sources suggest that Franco’s footage was ‘borrowed’ for Cannibal Terror, a closer examination reveals that there are more connections than this between the two films. Both films share a number of locations, cast, and even dubbing actors. Some connections which suggest more than a mere borrowing of footage are:

Sabrina Siani is the eponymous White Cannibal Queen of Cannibals, and also appears (as a fully clothed adult) in a bar scene in Cannibal Terror. Several shots of the dancing cannibal tribe in their village are common to both films, and several shots appear only in one or the other. One actor with a very distinctive face and large Mick Jagger type of mouth is seen in Cannibal Terror in no less than three roles (two cannibals and one border guard) and is also quite visible as one of the cannibals devouring Al Cliver’s wife in Cannibals. Porn star Pamela Stanford plays Manuella in Cannibal Terror, and has the brief role of the unfortunate Mrs. Jeremy Taylor in Cannibals. She also appeared in a number of Jesus Franco’s other films around this time period, perhaps most notably, Lorna the Exorcist. As well, the actor who plays Roberto in Cannibal Terror is the captain of the boat at the beginning of Cannibals.

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Cannibals is considered even by Franco himself to be the worst cannibal film ever made, due to its slow pacing, bad acting, terrible special effects and awful camera work. Franco said that he only did the two cannibal films for the money, and admitted he had no idea why anyone would want to watch them. He said that Sabrina Siani was the worst actress he ever worked with in his life (second only to Romina Power) and that Siani’s only good quality was her delectable derrière which he shows off to good effect in this film.

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Reviews

“Franco’s film is no masterpiece by any means, but it certainly deserves its place in the pantheon of cannibal films that appeared in this period of exploitation film history. Omitting the animal cruelty, that seemed to be part and parcel of so many of the Italian entries, Franco actually brings in a reasonably competently made slice of cannibal mayhem without resorting to such shock tactics. The cannibal attacks are also quite nightmarish and unpleasant and very effective, as they play out in close-up slow motion.” Sex Gore Mutants

“This film is one of the most uninspired that I have seen in while from Jess Franco and I was totally caught off guard how tame and restrained he made the cannibals. Ultimately is you have climbed to the top of the cannibal mountain with films like Cannibal Ferox or Cannibal Holocaust then a film like Cannibals might be to tame and uneventful for you. 10,000 Bullets

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“If you are one of those people who clings to the misguided belief that Uwe Boll or Paul W.S. Anderson are the worst directors in history you need to watch more Franco. Seriously. Cannibals is a piece of shit, and is really for cannibal completists only. Not even rabid Francophiles will find much value from this bland atrocity.” Digital Retribution

Read : Jungle Holocaust: Cannibal Tribes in Exploitation Cinema

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Buy Murderous Passions : The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb

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Island Claws (film)

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‘A terrifying creation of the nuclear age!’

Island Claws (aka Giant Claws) is a 1980 American horror film shot in Florida and directed by Herman Cardenas and starring Robert Lansing (4D ManEmpire of the AntsThe Nest), Steve Hanks, Barry Nelson (The Shining) and Nita Talbot. Special effects were by Glen Robinson (King Kong, 1976)

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Plot teaser:

A biological experiment in Florida goes awry. The result: eight-foot long land crabs which roar loudly and kill everything in sight…

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Island Claws is set to be released on Blu-ray from Scorpion Releasing

Reviews:

“The movie’s not scary or exciting or very good at all, but it has a seedy Floridian atmosphere that I kind of liked, and it did work hard at creating characters and a story, which I respect even if it didn’t work very well and ate up a lot of potential crabtime! And the movie’s theme music is a jaunty piece of lounge-jazz that you’ll really enjoy!” Ha Ha its Burl!

Clip from Island Claws:

“Like a lot of ‘50s B-movies, Island Claws is neither scary nor strongly scripted. The only reason worth watching is for the campiness of the film; otherwise, these crabs won’t really tickle your fancy.” Horror News

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“Thrills are minimal until the monster crab attacks. The story (by Jack Cowden and underwater stuntman Ricou Browning) is predictable”. John Stanley, Creature Features

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Fear No Evil – film

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Fear No Evil is a 1981 American horror film directed by Frank LaLoggia (Lady in White) and starring Stefan Arngrim, Elizabeth Hoffman and Kathleen Rowe McAllen. In the US, it was released by Avco Embassy.

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Plot teaser:

Andrew Williams is a shy, awkward high school student with a straight ‘A’ average and a horrifying secret: He was born the Antichrist, the profane incarnation of Lucifer himself. While senior year can be Hell for some teenagers, Andrew unleashes the real thing bringing demonic carnage and the horrors of Satan to gym class and beyond. Now that the legions of the undead have risen, some very unexpected archangels are gathered and on the eve of the Second Coming the final horrific battle for the unholy soul of mankind is about to begin…

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Fear No Evil was 26 year-old writer/director/co-producer/composer LaLoggia’s debut, and had a budget of $840,000. The films origin came about when producer Charles M. LaLoggia discovered the filming location of the Boldt Castle in Alexandria Bay, New York. LaLoggia thought it was an ideal place to set a horror film and approached his cousin director Frank LaLoggia to write a film around the location.

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The film features a punk rock/new wave soundtrack with songs by Patti Smith, The Rezillos, Talking Heads, Ramones, Boomtown Rats, The B-52’s, Richard Hell and Sex Pistols. 

Avco Embassy Pictures apparently picked up the film for release solely based on the fact that zombies were featured.

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Buy Fear No Evil on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

“Overall, the film is a little too uneven to really recommend, but it has a few sequences which genuinely work up some grotesque dread, and even more that are memorably crazy if not entirely successful. Like its central antagonist, it can be hard to tell what it’s really trying to do, and even when it seems to know it’s not always great at pulling it off. But its still pretty interesting to watch something this weird develop, even if you can’t quite figure out what its going for. The mystery of whether or not LaLoggia is a director worth serious study remains unsolved, but I’d say this movie is a net gain for the world.” We are Cursed to Live in Interesting Times

“For all its impressive goals, the movie does seem amateurish in spots near the end, despite a game cast and some inventive staging. The climax seems hokey. The son of the Devil looks too glam rock to be truly scary—but who said the Dark Prince ever had any fashion sense? At least Satan once again gets it on with some babes, or at least his spawn does. It’s a strange mix of styles, culled from Italian horror and Hammer productions with a uniquely American twist. You have to give them points for going for broke with an unconventional twist on a tale that was also taken on—with a much bigger budget—by the Omen series.” DVD Verdict

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“Fear No Evil is the rare 80s horror movie that actually has a story. In fact, it has so much story that I found myself scratching my head at many points and yawning at others. I hate to say this is a bad thing — based on the number of mindless horror movies I’ve seen — but the pacing is so weak, by the time the zombies showed up I almost didn’t care. I say “almost” because the last 15-20 minutes is just great, it just seems like it takes forever to get there.” Exploitation Retrospect

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Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends: The Bride of Dracula! – TV episode

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Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends is an American animated television series produced by Marvel Productions starring established Marvel Comics characters Spider-Man and Iceman and an original character, Firestar. As a trio called the Spider-Friends, they fought against various villains, including Dracula.

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Originally broadcast in the USA on NBC as a Saturday morning cartoon, the series ran first-run original episodes for three seasons, from 1981 to 1983, then aired repeats for an additional two years (from 1984 to 1986).

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Plot teaser:

In the episode The Bride of Dracula! – written by Jack Mendelsohn – Firestar is hypnotised by the evil Count and kidnapped back to his castle in Transylvania. Spider-Man and Iceman rapidly give chase and fight off Drac’s minions, a werewolf and a Frankenstein’s monster-type of robot…

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Inferno (1980)

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Inferno is a 1980 Italian supernatural horror film written and directed by Dario Argento. It stars Leigh McCloskey, Irene Miracle, Eleonora Giorgi, Sacha Pitoeff, Daria Nicolodi, Alida Valli and Veronica Lazar.

The cinematography was by Romano Albani and Keith Emerson composed the film’s thunderous musical score. The story concerns a young man’s investigation into the disappearance of his sister, who had been living in a New York City apartment building that also served as a home for a powerful, centuries-old witch.

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A thematic sequel to Suspiria (1977), the film is the second part of Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy. The concluding entry, The Mother of Tears, was released in 2007. All three films are partially derived from the concept of “Our Ladies of Sorrow” (Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Tenebrarum) originally devised by Thomas de Quincey in his book Suspiria de Profundis (1845).

Argento invited his mentor, Mario Bava, to provide some of the optical effects, matte paintings and trick shots for the film. Some of the cityscape views seen in Inferno were actually tabletop skyscrapers built by Bava out of milk cartons covered with photographs. The apartment building that Rose lived in was in fact only a partial set built in the studio—it was a few floors high and had to be visually augmented with a small sculpture constructed by Bava. This sculpture was set aflame toward the end of production and served as the burning building seen in the climax.

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Bava also provided some second unit direction for the production. Film critic Maitland McDonagh has suggested that Bava had his hand in the celebrated watery ballroom scene, but that sequence was shot in a water tank by Gianlorenzo Battaglia, without any optical effects work at all.Bava’s son, Lamberto Bava, was the film’s assistant director.

Unlike Suspiria, Inferno received a very limited theatrical release and the film was unable to match the box office success of its predecessor. While the initial critical response to the film was mostly negative, its reputation has improved considerably over the years. Film critic Kim Newman has called it “perhaps the most underrated horror movie of the 1980s.” In 2005, the magazine Total Film named Inferno one of the 50 greatest horror films of all time.

Plot teaser:

A young woman called Rose (Irene Miracle) becomes curious about her gloomy apartment block having found a reference to it in an old book about alchemy called “The Three Mothers”. Increasingly spooked by her strange discoveries, she writes a letter to her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey), an American music student living in Rome. Mark’s girlfriend Sara (Eleonora Giorgi) sees the letter first and, intrigued, heads for Rome’s central library to look for the book Rose mentioned.

Supernatural forces menace Sara in the bowels of the building, and on her return home she and a neighbour (Gabriele Lavia) are murdered. Traumatised by Sara’s death, and worried for his sister’s safety, Mark travels to New York, however he finds that Rose has gone missing. In the course of his investigations he meets Rose’s friend the Countess Elise (Daria Nicolodi), a rich neurotic who lives in the same block, and a neighbouring antique dealer, the bad tempered Kazanian (Sacha Pitoeff), from whom Rose bought the book. Neither are much help, and soon Mark too is beset by occult forces. To survive he must attempt to decode a riddle pointing to an ancient evil hidden somewhere close by…

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Review:

If Dario Argento’s Suspiria had some critics backing off with their hands over their ears, its 1980 follow-up Inferno bamboozled them altogether. Taking the daring colour extravagance and shrieking rock music of Suspiria down just a few notches, and selecting a cast from areas as diverse as TV soap opera Dallas (Leigh McCloskey) and art-house classic Last Year in Marienbad (Sacha Pitoeff), Argento plunged deep into his most avant-garde cinematic labyrinth.

Inferno blends Gothic mystery and modernist abstraction into something utterly unique. The story, though watchable separately to Suspiria, is linked to its sister film by references to the opium-derived writings of 19th Century decadent author Thomas De Quincey. One piece in particular, from the collection of essays “Suspiria de Profundis”, provided Argento with a few tantalizing fragments on which to base his occult mysteries. “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow” told of the dominion of three female spirits, Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Tenebrarum. Argento eagerly adopted these manifestations and begins Inferno with a voice-over that relishes their names as a litany of evil.

Feuertanz lobby card

On first viewing, Inferno is complicated to the point of incomprehensibility. The storyline is gossamer-thin yet tangled, dissolving away as one tries to put a finger on its labyrinth of mysteries. The process of searching for clues is itself the theme of the film, so that the quests conducted by the protagonist and the viewer become enmeshed.

“What’s that, a riddle? I’m not good at riddles,” snaps one of Inferno’s gallery of grotesques, and viewers with a low tolerance for confusion and mystery may feel the same; Inferno communicates vital information with casual misdirection, while lingering enigmatically on facets that prove to be little more than weird, picturesque non-sequiturs. It requires our engagement beyond the level of narrative comprehension, and teases with the suggestion of codes to be deciphered and connections to be made.

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Argento, who suffered heavily with viral hepatitis during the shoot, took his fevered fascination with the occult to greater lengths here than Suspiria. The dominant theme this time is alchemy, not witchcraft, but nevertheless both films share the mystic’s mistrust of language. (“Wherever we have spoken openly we have actually said nothing. But where we have written something in code and in pictures we have concealed the truth,” attests the genuine alchemical grimoire “Rosarium philosophorum”, published in 1550.)

In both Suspiria and Inferno the protagonists find language inadequate and obstructive, whereas the breakthroughs are invariably conducted in silence. Inferno’s Mark, who is trying to solve the mystery of his sister’s disappearance in a rambling old New York apartment block, discovers little of value by quizzing the other occupants, and finds simple verbal exchanges fraught with opaque significance. Sharing a lift with a nurse, he tries to make small-talk about his study of musicology, only to have the chit-chat go askew when she persists in hearing the word as ‘toxicology’. Another inhabitant communicates from room to room by means of a network of air vents permeating the building – her voice, which at first seems to come from nowhere, drifts in and out of audibility as it is wafted by capricious air currents.

InfernoArrowBlu-ray

Buy Inferno on Arrow Video Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk

Inferno 1980 eyeballs

Elsewhere, telephone calls are broken up by static, a mute character struggles to pass on a secret message by scratching with his fingernail, and an attempted seduction is pointillised by a loud classical record switching on and off, fitfully in synch with a flickering power failure. Even the clearly heard lines sound like the efforts of aliens to fake the English language: “He says it’s his heart. We must give him some heart medicine,” announces a gargoyle-faced woman when Mark suffers a mysterious collapse.

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Mystics believe that truth can be heard “more freely, distinctly or clearly [...] with a silent speech or without speech in the illustrations of the mysteries, both in the riddles presented with figures and in words” (C. Horlacher, “Kern und Stern der vornehmsten Chymisch-Philosophischen Schrifften”, 1707). This is a theme to be found in both Suspiria and Inferno.

During the films’ respective climaxes Suspiria’s heroine Suzy and Inferno’s Mark advance along the route to knowledge in silence (although Suzy has her every move accompanied by a raging score from Goblin and Mark rides pillion with prog-rocker Keith Emerson’s ‘switched-on Verdi’ ).

Mark in particular, in a film filled with music, makes a key discovery by looking in silence at a drawing of the building where his sister disappeared, and by quietly observing an ant disappearing into a tiny hole between the floorboards of her old room. Meanwhile, on a visual level, Argento fills the screen with images of ravishing beauty. There are rooms and spaces and characters and situations in this film that feel like the syntax of dreams caught on celluloid. Argento may have fallen from grace over recent years, with a string of dubious or dreadful films, but really, who can complain when he gave us something as bold and strange and magical as this?

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Inferno sits in the middle of the most intense and inventive period of Argento’s career, and in many ways can be seen as the high watermark of Italian horror. Revelling in the creative freedom afforded by the massive success of Suspiria, Argento was free to explore his vision without restraint: the result is the most daringly avant-garde horror film ever to emerge from his native country.

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia

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Buy Inferno on Blue Underground DVD from Amazon.com
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Buy Inferno on Arrow Video DVD from Amazon.co.uk
Inferno Emerson LP

Offline reading:

Dario Argento The Man The Myths and the Magic

Dario Argento: The Man, The Myths & The Magic by Alan Jones (FAB Press) – Buy from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Dario Argento by James Gracey (Kamera Books) – Buy from Amazon.co.uk


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