The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books) Read online

  Peter Normanton edited the Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics along with twenty-eight issues of the horror comics fan publication From the Tomb. He is currently writing a series of short biographies for PS Publication’s fifteen-volume Harvey Horrors.

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  Constable & Robinson Ltd

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  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Peter Normanton, 2012

  The right of Peter Normanton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library

  UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-036-5 (paperback)

  UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-041-9 (ebook)

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  First published in the United States in 2012 by Running Press Book Publishers, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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  US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4596-7

  US Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939125

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  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

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  Contents

  Introduction:

  A Born-Again Slasher

  Blood on the Walls:

  An Overview of Sixty Years of Blood and Guts

  An A–Z of Slasher and Splatter Movies

  The Directors:

  Blood on their Hands

  The Video Nasties They Tried to Ban

  Chronology of Movies

  Index of Directors

  Introduction:

  A Born-Again Slasher

  WAY BACK THEN you could scream all you wanted, but it was never going to make them stop, as for an entire decade the doors to the madhouse were thrown open to a plethora of hack and slash killers who were free to slip into school dormitories, college campuses, the woods, shopping malls or for the very unlucky their local neighbourhood. Each was armed with a sharp knife, with bloody murder in mind. There never was a decade quite like the eighties. Whether it was food, drink, fashion, music or film, these years can only be described as unique. And we took it all in, thriving on an excess of cheese (the cheesier the better), no more so than in the insanity of the slasher and splatter cinema that suddenly became so popular. As the newfound video market began to expand, so did the excess and we just couldn’t get enough of it.

  When we first discussed putting together this compilation of slasher and splatter movies, memories of a Monday evening in the pub way back in that sweltering summer of 1984 came to mind. Quite a few of us were serving our time on Thatcher’s ever lengthening dole queues as recession continued to ravage an already declining British industry, so a night in the pub was something of a treat. As the miners fought pitched battles with the police in the grim hope of preserving their livelihood, we were hunting down the video nasties that back then were all the rage. If these films hadn’t acquired such notoriety we probably would never have bothered with many of them; in fact more than a fair share of them were just plain boring. But did that stop us? No it certainly didn’t. That evening the conversation had drifted from how good Van Halen had been at Castle Donnington and the prospect of a new Rush album to the grisly murders in our favourite slasher movies. Needless to say after a few pints of Burtonwood’s finest ale our recollection of the gruesome episodes that had been the driving force behind these films had become a little distorted; who killed who and how was now confused. Ironically, given the content of the tome you now have in your hands, I was the one who started to ridicule this excess, delighting in deliberately muddling the butchery of Friday the 13th Part II with The Boogeyman and Happy Birthday to Me. After four years of unrelenting blood and guts, we had completely overdosed on this gore-ridden pageant. It seems odd when I look back, but I never went to see the sensation that terrorised the cinema-going public in the latter months of that year, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. The poor dubbing, dodgy acting, along with the screaming scantily clad girls and the endless masked killers had finally numbed my senses, and at that moment I needed something different in life. While my interest in horror movies never entirely waned, the gore-mongering passion that had possessed me during those truculent years of my late teens and early twenties had begun to fade.

  In the ensuing years, I was all too frequently found stalking the back streets of Manchester city centre rummaging through boxes of old comic books, in search of more horror. A lasting memory of these shops was the racks of videos, and what a lurid display they were! There were many films on show in these shops to which I had never before been privy, and they looked every bit as deranged as the terrors I had previously been watching. The real nasties of those years,
however, were conspicuous by their absence; it would be years before I finally understood why I never had the chance to see a copy of Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper, and later in these pages if you live in the UK you will discover exactly why. My interest in these kill crazy movies was revitalized soon after I got married, and no it wasn’t the sight of my wife hacking into a tender loin of beef; rather, it was Bob Clarke’s Black Christmas, which was being given a late night showing on Channel 4. Why I had never seen this film escapes me, but it had me on the edge of my seat. I was hooked all over again and just couldn’t get enough of this splatter-filled madness, especially if it was a dubbed Italian feature.

  During the conversations that took place at the very beginning of compiling these films there were thoughts about presenting a section on the very worst of the slasher and splatter genre. Let’s be honest, if you have watched enough of the films you will have seen plenty of howlers, and as I said earlier in this introduction there has been nothing in the history of film, music or fashion that has ever quite matched the cheese of the eighties. However, once I started to research these films, it became obvious this would have been a little unkind, because many of the people who were involved with these productions were doing it for very little pay and for the most part had neither the cash nor the experience to create another Halloween or Night of the Living Dead. It didn’t stop them though and in their own way they have become every much a part of the genre as Messrs Carpenter, Raimi, Romero, Fulci and Argento.

  Before I let you tuck into these blood-strewn pages I have to confess this is far from being a comprehensive list of these films. I have managed to squeeze in just over 250 entries into the A–Z reference section, which focus mainly on the golden years of the slasher and splatter excess from the late seventies through until the mid-eighties, with over 500 films included in the accompanying index at the end of this book. At the end of my research, there were well over a thousand movies that were deserving of a mention. If you can’t find your own personal favourite, or the film you worked on isn’t here, I sincerely apologize. As my research continued, it became obvious there was no way I was going to be able to fit every single film into these pages. With that in mind, I prefer to think of this selection as the good, the bad and the ugly of the slasher and splatter genre.

  Finally, I would like to thank all of my family and friends along with my colleagues at work for putting up with all of this gory madness for the past nine months. A special thanks goes to my mate of many years who was in the pub that night (what’s new?), Glenn Royds, who took the time to read over and correct so many of these entries, and also to Raoul for alerting me to so many of these amazing movies. Last of all, a big thank you to the love of my life, my wife Mary, who has put up with all of this madness for almost twenty-seven years. I couldn’t have written this book without her.

  Enough of all that, it’s time to sharpen the blades again.

  Peter Normanton

  September 26, 2011

  Blood on the Walls:

  An Overview of Sixty Years of Blood and Guts

  In the beginning . . .

  At around the same time as the first horror movies were being made in France at the very end of the nineteenth century, Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol opened in Pigalle, not far from the centre of Paris in a building that had once been a chapel. When it opened its doors in 1897, it shocked its audience with a series of presentations of what it termed naturalistic horror shows. Of the theatre’s entire programme, the horror stories proved the most popular with their effusion of cleverly conceived gory effects and bloodthirsty finales. This stage show excess would eventually be returned to life in such films as The Ghastly Ones (1968), The Wizard of Gore (1970) and the inflammatory The Incredible Torture Show (1976), but never quite with the theatre’s dramatic panache. Much of Hammer’s garish portrayal from the late fifties through until the mid-seventies was also attributed to the years of Grand Guignol and countless gorefests in their wake would often be referenced alongside this almost forgotten form of entertainment.

  The term splatter was first coined by George A. Romero when he attempted to describe his new film Dawn of the Dead (1978). Visceral movies had been shocking their audiences for more than twenty years following Hammer’s discovery of the lurid premise that came with Eastmancolor, which proved invaluable as they brought life to their adaptations of some of the classic tales of horror from the distant past. Although these films appear tame when compared to the excess of the current crop, their grisly display was something very new and caused considerable concern for the censors on both sides of the Atlantic. By the mid-sixties, Herschell G. Lewis and William Castle embarked on the work pioneered by Hammer as they streched the boundaries of acceptability even further. Lewis’s low-budget films rarely went to mainstream cinemas; their destination was the drive-in theatres of the more rural locales of the United States. Drive-in theatres had started life in New Jersey back in 1932 and by the time Lewis was producing his low-budget exploitation features, they had reached their nadir in popularity. Many of the youngsters who turned up at these outdoor shows couldn’t have cared less about the content of the features laid before them – they had other things on their mind – leading to these theatres being labelled passion pits. By the 1970s, many of these drive-in theatres had become associated with the growing market for exploitation films, which were a precursor to the excess of the splatter and slasher movies that began to proliferate horror cinema towards the end of the decade. Sadly, the rise of the video recorder would see the demise of the drive-in cinema. While splatter’s evil twin the slasher observed a much slower evolution, Romero’s film had already turned splatter into a veritable art form with a plethora of directors soon eager to follow suit.

  The slashers, splatter and bloody exploitation of the past fifty years are in cinematic terms relatively new developments. Horror movies have been with us since the dawn of film, but not until Hammer in 1957 did anyone dare venture into the domain of blood and guts. The reasons for this rest to a degree with the limitations of black and white film stock, although Alfred Hitchcock would overcome this with Psycho in 1960 as would many of his low-budget successors. Public sensitivity and film censorship, however, were of far greater significance in restraining the development of the more gory aspects of the horror movie and, as we shall now see, the censors eventually came to exert a tight control over the studios and their directors.

  Censorship in the United States

  Censorship has plagued both filmmakers and cinemagoers since the dawn of the twentieth century. Before the censors began to scrutinize the film industry there were very few horror films on show, the most notable of which were Le Manoir du Diable (1896), possibly the first horror film, and La Caverne Maudite (1898). Japanese filmmakers had also demonstrated an interest in creating horror movies with Bake Jizo (1898) and Shinin no Sosei (1898). It wasn’t until 1910 that the Edison Studios terrified their audiences with a cinematic version of Frankenstein.

  While these were early days for the motion picture industry, by 1907 censorship had already become a serious issue in Chicago, although the pressure to introduce local by-laws had nothing to do with the few horror movies that were being made at this time. Their misgivings focused on the nickelodeons that were appearing over the length and breadth of the city. With children slipping away from their parents to frequent these establishments, there was mounting concern as to the suitability of many of the films on show. The city issued an ordinance declaring that all films had to be screened before senior police officers to ensure the appropriateness of their content.

  In New York, the newspapers sensationalized an arrest that was made when it was discovered children were shown a film depicting a Chinese opium den, leading to the city’s police commissioner withdrawing the licences of over 550 film venues on the Christmas Eve of 1908. A few months later the film industry, which was then based in New York, funded a Board of Censorship to legislate for residents of the city. Other cities and st
ates followed suit, most notably the Los Angeles-based organization The Motion Picture Producers Association, which in its remit looked to defend the industry from attacks on its own morality; this precipitated the industry forming its own national regulatory body in 1916, which became known as the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry. They prescribed a set of thirteen points covering the subjects to be avoided in forthcoming storylines, with no reference to any form of visceral carnage; their design was to prohibit the sexual content in these films. Unfortunately, these early guidelines proved powerless in controlling the subject matter presented in the films of the period. As early as 1916, sex was already a great seller, while any sanguiney excess was appreciably conspicuous by its absence.

  At the beginning of the 1920s, it was obvious Hollywood wasn’t quite as glossy as its publicists tried to paint it. These were the Roaring Twenties and gossip surrounding certain actors, directors and producers was rife, the most notorious of which was the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle rape and murder scandal, which led to further allegations of Hollywood orgies. The studios had also produced a number of risqué films, with the stag movie A Free Ride dating back to 1915, which I hasten to add was never considered for major theatrical release. Twelve months later D. W. Griffith’s epic masterpiece Intolerance was released, resplendent in the allure of a gathering of delightful young ladies bearing their breasts in the opulent surrounds of an ancient Babylonian temple. Griffith’s film also contains the first decapitations and a spear being forcibly driven up through a soldier. Although the Fox Film Corporation’s The Queen of Sheba directed by J. Gordon Edwards was lost during the 1930s, a few ageing photographs remain of the provocatively dressed lead actress Betty Blythe. Her attire was somewhat salacious, exposing her breasts to emphasize the film’s tagline “The Love Romance of the World’s Most Beautiful Woman”. Such was the country’s unease at the nature of these features, over 100 bills were introduced across the states of America during 1921, each designed to censor an entire range of films. Something had to be done, so the Hollywood studios enlisted Will Harrison Hays Sr., the recent chairman of the Republican National Committee and Postmaster General to improve their tarnished image. During his time as Postmaster General, Hays had overseen the stipulations of the Comstock Act of 1873 barring obscene material from being sent through the post. In 1922, he became the president of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and embarked on the monumental task of trying to clean up his country’s film industry.