In It For The Kills: Horror Perspectives

Eye Gouge AKA Giving The People What They Want

No, there's not a movie called Eye Gouge of which I am aware, but if there was it would probably make more money than Titanic. There is no other Google search through which people find my blog more often than "eye gouge." So as my Christmas gift to you, the readers, here are seven eye gouging/eye popping death scenes.

First of all, the scene which inspired this post, Ted Raimi's death in Midnight Meat Train. I did not even know you could hit someone so hard their eyes would pop out, so let this be a lesson to all you idiots who think a donkey punch would be, like, totally erotic. Sorry, but I couldn't find a version with embedding enabled, but it will open in a new window. One day I will get motivated enough to start editing clips myself so I can get just what I want, but right now it's 12:41 AM and I just spent the whole day entertaining my kid and two of his cousins and Mommy is tired.

Next on the menu is the eye vs splinter scene from Zombie.

Now Martha's death from The Beyond, followed up by Joe the plumber's death.


 

Here we have the baptism/murders from The Godfather, because I couldn't find just the scene where Moe Greene is shot through the eye. What the hell; nobody ever gets tired of this scene, right?

 

Now comes Rick's death and then Vera's death from Friday the 13th Part 3

 

So, Merry Christmas from all of me at In It For the Kills, and remember, if you get a BB gun for Christmas, you're probably too young to be reading this blog!

Bloodsucking Freaks (1976)

If you like naked women, you’ll LOVE Bloodsucking Freaks! It’s full frontal naked nude women being tortured on stage, torturing someone else on stage, torturing/being tortured off stage for fun, eating people, nude, nude nude!

So you may gather that this is an exploitation flick, but it does not leave one with the feeling of unhappiness after it is over, so I believe it was intended to be a comedy as well. It certainly is funny. I am still working my way through the movies that were in the boxes that scared me as a child looking at them on the shelf and that cross-eyed bleeding dead guy to your left still does the trick.

Unlike many 70s boobs and blood epics, this one has a linear plot. Sardu is into S&M and he kills people on stage; he also traffics in white slavery. Interestingly, the women he keeps around to torture him are black. Yes, Sardu goes sub at times, a change he signals by moving his keys from the right side of his belt to the left. In between scaring people for intimidation and putting on shows, Sardu and Ralphus like to play darts. The bullseye is a woman’s butthole.

Now for what there is of the plot. A famous art critic, athlete and prima ballerina all attend the show one night. Sardu does his best to entertain, even letting his dwarf assistant Ralphus tear out and eat one victim’s eyeball. But the critic snubs Sardu after the show, saying he won’t review it because it’s trashy and he doesn’t want even a bad review to send business Sardu’s way. Then Natasha the ballerina praises the actresses but tells her dumb boyfriend Tom Maverick within Sardu’s earshot that she has to go home before she pukes.

Well, it seems Sardu doesn’t take constructive criticism too well. He has the critic and the ballerina kidnapped by sending the dwarf out to use a blowgun (yes, a straw in his mouth) to shoot tranquilizing darts and the big dominatrices bring the quarry home. The athlete is too dumb to tell the cops the girl’s disappearance just may have to do with the weird place in Soho where they went slumming, so a shrewd cop blackmails him so that Maverick won’t be the prime suspect.

The critic is chained up and fed human flesh for dinner, which he keeps eating after the revelation. Surely a statement on critics, Mr. Filmmaker? Natasha is treated by a doctor, who then is invited to get his freak on; he pulls out another girl’s teeth, drills a hole in her head and sucks out her brains with a straw. The looks on Sardu and Ralphus at this point are hilarious; the doctor is too gross even for them and so they feed him to their cage full of feral naked women. One of them rips out an organ and rubs it all over her breasts, giving us the holy grail of exploitation: bloody boobs. Then Natasha is forced to watch horrors such as another dancer dragged into the room with her feet cut off, but nothing really happens to Natasha herself. This is not exactly MK Ultra here, but she must have had it in her to be a freak anyway because she consents to do the show and when her boyfriend and the cop try to save her at the end, she says she has to go back to her master Sardu. Who is about as convincing a master as that guy from Manos.

I liked this movie and found it tame by today’s standards. I hate to think what that says about me. The most disturbing part in my mind is that somewhere on earth, right now, someone is masturbating to this film, and somewhere else is another guy who doesn’t think it’s as hardcore as his regular Saturday night thing.

The Wish AKA Negai (2005)

Tomorrow the complete collection of comic book artist Kazuo Umezz's Horror Theater comes out on DVD in the US. Tonight, we try to make sense of one of the six hour-long films that comprise the anthology. Not because The Wish is hard to understand, oh no. I'm sure it would have been crystal if only I could have found it with English subtitles.

I kid. The story is a perfect dark children's fairy tale, and it speaks to the strength of the story that I was able to enjoy the story so much without understanding one word of the dialogue. If my interpretation that follows is overly simplistic it is because the story seems to me to be on a level for children (or dumb foreigners who only speak English).

A friendless schoolboy who looks to be around middle school age walks home from school every day alone, after being taunted at the gate of the school by the other children who are happily walking home in pairs and groups. Obviously he is ashamed rather than angry about his plight, because he ignores his mother's questions when he comes home and goes silently to his room. He is too proud to ask for her help, choosing instead to do what countless lonely horror protagonists before him have done: he builds himself a friend.

Because this is a horror movie, naturally his friend is a hideous looking life-size wooden puppet with sharp carpenter's nails for teeth. And because the boy does not know how to act with a friend, he has the puppet sit silently beside him at his desk every night as he used to do alone. Typical of a parent in a child's story, we see his mother spending a lot of time alone during the day vacuuming, because a parent is often reduced to his or her repetitive actions in a child's world. One day, she finds the horrible puppet sitting in her son's desk chair before the boy comes home from school. Her reaction is to scream of course, but her expression and the camera angle on her face makes me think there is some dark humor here which may be the only element I'm missing because of the language barrier. Her son comes in just at this moment and angrily yells at his mother. It becomes apparent from her body language that not only is she afraid of the puppet, she is starting to fear her own child.

She begs her husband for help and he finally agrees to send the boy to a new school. The location cure seems to work. He finds a human friend in the girl who sits next to him and brings her home to play after school. He is even considerate enough to hide the puppet in the closet. But chillingly, the camera shows us a POV shot from inside the closet and we know what is coming next. At first the puppet isn't seen in motion but he is found in different places than the boy left him. The boy sneaks out and buries the puppet at a construction site. However, he feels remorse for having cast aside his first friend and goes to retrieve him the next day. Unfortunately the construction is finished and the puppet is gone forever. Yeah right.

First the boy and his new girl friend have a little tiff at school and she falls down the stairs. The boy looks up the stairs and to his horror sees the puppet disappearing around the corner. The boy was not standing in a position in which he could have pushed her and it was obviously the puppet.That night the boy has nightmares about the puppet and he goes to sleep with his parents, reaching out to them for the first time. But this wouldn't be a fairy tale without a lesson. Because he waited to long to ask for his parents' help, and because he created the situation with the evil puppet, he alone has to solve the problem. I believe the character, who has learned the trait of self-reliance from his years of isolation, wouldn't be happy any other way.

He comes home from school the next day to find that his mother has disappeared in the middle of cooking dinner. Then the power goes out and the boy hears glass breaking upstairs. The puppet has climbed in through the upstairs window and is now not only walking, but biting. The puppet would be no match physically for the child if the boy was not so frightened. Finally the boy becomes brave enough to attack it back and beats it to death with a chair. In doing so he kills his old timid and shameful self and gets what he most wants: to be confident and brave. Then we see the note he overlooked from his parents. They were out picking up his girl friend, who has recovered from her fall. As his parents and friend enter the room the boy flings himself into his mother's arms as his father kneels beside him and his friend looks on in concern. The boy has learned that he doesn't have to be alone to stand alone.

The Ten Worst Horror Movies of the 00s

I don't know why, but for some reason it's more fun to bitch than it is to gush. The hate train is never late. So, all aboard.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

The ONLY things I remember about this movie is that the house could only be accessed by a bridge, and that at some point in the movie a creepy looking girl was walking across the bridge with the jerky movements we now recognize as a ghost cliche. Because this was the first time I had seen the technique, it freaked me out a bit. I have just read the entire plot in preparation for this post and it is as if I read the plot of a movie I'd never seen. Usually I might forget parts of a movie but then my memory would be jogged if I read a synopsis. Worst of all, the plot includes the bridge but not the ghost girl. If you can't remember watching a movie even after reading the spoilers, that means it's pretty damn bad.

Kairo

I know that this is one of those movies that inspires its fans to call you a dumbass if you don't like it. In their rational world, you don't like the movie because it's too deep for you to understand. How about I didn't understand it because it made no sense. Sorry, fans. There never was a satisfactory explanation of what the hell was going on, the characters seem to come and go from the story at random, I can't tell any of the characters apart, the connections between them never surface, and it was just fucking depressing. Why were the people working with plants on that roof? You can have ghosts coming out of the computer or a plague that makes everyone want to die so badly that they disappear, but if you're going to combine the two I need to know what one has to do with the other. And please don't expect me to believe there was a college student walking this earth in 2001 who had to go to the computer science department at the school to find out how to get online. Again, there was a creepy ghost woman moving in an unnatural way. Yes, she was freaky, but it's not worth two hours spent watching an entire movie just for that one scene. Look up the scene on YouTube if you wanna get your scare on.

Wishcraft

I usually give a movie 30 minutes. I had to turn this one off after about 10 minutes. This movie is now my fallback joke/example for my hypothesis that every movie, no matter how bad, must have some fan somewhere who thinks it's the next best thing to Casablanca.

Gothika

How can you be a psychiatrist who works with the criminally insane yet have no clue that your husband and his best friend are homicidal maniacs? This movie was a major disappointment to me and proves that a cast and a budget mean precisely jack shit.

The Forgotten

April Fool! We kidnapped your kid, made everyone around you forget that you ever had a kid, we made everyone believe you were crazy, we made all our other test subjects actually forget about their kids (but your tenacity and red hair were too much for us somehow) and as a deus ex machina we did it all for science. It's as if an infinite number of studio execs threw an infinite amount of poop at an infinite number of movie screens and this movie was the result.

Mortuary

I can't believe I could be so let down at the end by a movie that never allowed any tension to build in the first place. Are there zombies AND possession AND evil townies AND a deformed killer? What a mess! The worst part is that I actually bought this movie, so if I die, someone will find it in my house and remember me as the kind of person who would own this movie.

Rest Stop: Dead Ahead

We made a crappy movie, now let's make a crappy sequel to explain all the parts that didn't make sense in the first movie. Oh does this not make any sense either? It should be totally cohesive since we wrote the script using a magnetic poetry kit.

The Messengers

Little kids can see stuff the rest of us can't. Just read one of them the plot of your movie before you make it; they will be able to see that it sucks worse than a breastfeeding baby with teeth. I'm supposed to accept that a guy would randomly move from Chicago to BFE to grow sunflowers? And FYI, nobody would let a stranger who just walks up out of nowhere move in with them unless they want to die. Also, anyone who has ever seen a horror movie before will know that the person who shows up at your house randomly is the killer waaaay before you movie characters do, so the twist ending definitely got ironed flat here. But hey, there's nothing like being almost dragged to his death in a cellar by dead people who pop up out of the ground to make an already traumatized mute kid start talking away and magically become well adjusted and happy!

100 Feet

Oh my. When the ghost of your violent ex husband is spending his afterlife still beating the shit out of you, by all means invite the grocery boy over to fuck you while the ghost watches. The ghost won't mind. And faking your own death by fire is an awesomely foolproof way to run away and start a new life. Just ask the producers of Forensic Files. They can tell how many corpses are in the house, dipshit. They can even identify them.

Jenifer

That ugly bitch could not get laid in a prison even if she was naked and carrying a pound of pot. So please don't ask me to believe that that is an irresistible succubus, Dario Argento. Are you senile? What happened to the director who famously said, and I paraphrase, "so what if I like to film beautiful women getting killed?" Did the part where you followed that statement up with "and I like to watch hideous ones eat people" go off the record?

Dan O'Bannon's Death and Thai Movie The Unborn, Somehow Grafted Into One Post

As you all know, Dan O'Bannon died this week. A lot of fans are sad about this. I wonder how many horror fans are religious. If we're brought up religious, we're supposed to be happy when someone dies because they are going to a better place. But we never are (unless we hated them) and we even have elaborate send-offs for them where we do everything from giving a speech to jumping on the casket and riding it down into the ground. In theory, grieving for the dead is self-pity because we miss the person being here.

So what we're looking at here is a bunch of people who enjoy watching movies in which people die in gruesome and frightening ways, being sad because someone died. I bet none of us would like to see a video of Dan O'Bannon dying or pictures of his death scene or autopsy. Or would we? Is the fascination with horror a safe way of experiencing something we're all curious about, with nothing to lose? Do horror movies promote a fear of death or do they make us less afraid? What would Dan O'Bannon think, if he is looking down? Is he pissed off to be dead? Does he wish it could have been choreographed differently? Is he glad to be out of this world of pain and suffering?

Personally I feel nothing for O'Bannon either way because I didn't know he existed until he died. I have however cried like a big damn baby several times over the death of Patrick Swayze, Swayze being a man I would likely never have met anyway and would have only had his movies and shows through which to experience his talent and sexiness. The only thing different is that now there will be no more Patrick Swayze movies.

I truly wonder about death a lot of the time. Not only the metaphysical questions but the mechanics of embalming and burial, the customs, the manner of death, pictures of real death, stories about detectives solving murders and stories told by ER doctors. I don't know why. I know that I'm not alone in this, because for example on the Find a Death message boards one of the longest threads I ever saw was one in which a real undertaker offered to answer ANY question we had. And we asked a million of em. I haven't looked at that board in awhile but I'm willing to bet that thread is still going.

I don't know if all this interest in death is maladaptive on my part. I've seen the pictures of Porsche Girl. I've looked at countless pictures of dead celebrities, either at the death scene or their leaked autopsy photos. I've seen the picture of Otis Redding hanging off the hook as they dragged his body out of the water. And if pictures of Dan O'Bannon were on a clickable link in front of me, I'd probably click. I looked at three of my grandparents in their coffins and a friend of my ex husband in her coffin, a woman I hated who hated me when she was alive. In those cases I was not curious at all but felt it was what society expected of me. I do not want to see death pictures of Patrick Swayze. I'm a huge fan of Otis Redding too, but I clicked that link. I don't know why.

I think the death fascination is the reason why my favorite horror movies are always ghost stories, even though it's cool to watch movies where people get killed in over the top ways and ghost movies rarely have death scenes unless you count Freddy, Jason, those mother/son killers from The Grudge and good old Sadako/Samara. I know I would like to know what happens after we die.

Recently an acquaintance of mine, who was Thai, dropped dead at work. I am sad about her death, but mostly because I know her friends miss her. I also feel sad for the dead woman because she died thousands of miles from home working a shitty job and was too poor to have been to the doctor in years. Now she gets to go home, but in an urn. I know little of Thai culture and in typical "me" fashion I've watched some Thai horror movies to find out more. That's where The Unborn comes into this car wreck of a blog post. It's based on the true story of a woman who died pregnant and how her community refused to allow her to be cremated until the baby was removed because they didn't want either her or the baby to haunt them. I understand a lot of Thai believe in ghosts and black magic. I don't know if the woman haunted her community in real life, but in the movie she appeared to another pregnant woman who narrowly escaped death in the same lake where the ghost had drowned. In the movie the ghost was gruesome and the living pregnant woman was frightened until she finally confronted the ghost to ask what she wanted. The ghost grabbed the woman by the head and showed her in pictures that basically she wanted her baby back. The woman felt she was supposed to help the ghost. I think maybe death is easier for grieving Thai people because they are certain that there is an afterlife. At least they know how they feel because they think they know whether the deceased has gone on to the right place and apparently they have done everything possible to make that happen.

Sometimes I wish Americans had a more cohesive national culture/set of beliefs, but traditionally the one we have had has been based on very negative actions. I do hope that wherever and whatever Dan O'Bannon is now, he is resting peacefully and enjoying a reward for bringing his fans so much joy.

Four Songs to Pee Your Pants By

I'll admit it. Horror movies still scare the hell out of me, and anyone who says they're never frightened by scary movies is a killjoy. Sometimes it's not even the violence or the jump scares, but something more subtle. Specifically, a song that is repeated throughout the film and usually signifies the appearance of a ghost or someone's impending demise. So let's get started.

4. Lullaby from Profondo Rosso

There is something inherently creepy about children singing in a scary movie. I have no doubt it is the juxtaposition between the sweet voice of a child (which invokes society's myth of their total innocence) and the violence in the film. Although it's a common technique it seems to achieve the desired effect on the viewer every time. In this case, the killer plays the song right before he/she kills.

3. Singing clown doll in Ghosthouse

I love this movie, but I can't watch it alone at night. Again, the song signifies an upcoming death and sounds like a mix of backmasking and the Holy Hell Tabernacle Choir. The lyrics are pretty much unintelligible to me, but similar to instances of listening to ghost EVPs (I can never understand what those are saying) I rely on the interpretations of others. Therefore, the best I can come up with for the lyrics, because I read this interpretation and now my brain hears it too, is "play around, be bad, be bad, be bad." Whatever it's saying, I can't watch this movie when I'm alone in the house. Even in the daytime.

2. O Willow Waly

The first time I saw The Innocents, I was watching it on Netflix instant view and I turned it off immediately because there was sound but no picture in the beginning. I thought the problem was with the Netflix Silverlight player. I caught it two years later on AMC and realized that's the way the movie begins, with the little girl Flora singing and a black screen. Thank God for AMC, because this is now one of my favorite movies. It is infinitely watchable and debatable, and you get something new out of it with each viewing.

But back to the topic. It is a beautiful song, if a bit melancholy, but I like sad songs. Then you realize the lyrics are "we lay my love and I/beneath the weeping willow/and now alone I lie/willow I die/willow I die." OK, so that's inappropriate enough for a child to be singing. Then you find out that Flora learned the song from her governess Miss Jessel, who ultimately drowned herself in the lake after the death of her illicit lover Mr Quint. A lover who may be possessing Flora's brother Miles. In order to continue his relationship with Miss Jessel. Who may be possessing Flora. We also get implications of sexual abuse by both adults of both children before the two freakazoids shuffled off the coil, we know that Miss Jessel taught Flora the song and we know that Miss Jessel and Flora used to dance together while the song played. The song also plays on a music box that Miss Jessel gave Flora. To me, music box music is frightening in any situation. But in the case of this song, whether it's played on the music box or sung by the little girl, it always signifies the appearance of a ghost. So it all adds up to one seriously disturbing song.

P.S. If you write to me and say there were no ghosts and it was all in the new governess's head, I will not only delete your comment, but I will haunt you when I die. The Innocents was a straight up goddamn ghost story people!

1. Poltergeist 2: "God Is In His Holy Temple"

I know I may catch some flack for this one. After all, it's an inferior sequel to an extraordinarily good film. But that damn Reverend Kane scarred me for life when I saw this one way back in middle school. I can't even watch this movie now, 20 years later. I like my ghosts as a shadow, maybe a touch on the shoulder or a playful game of "lets hide your stuff so you can later find it in some place you yourself couldn't possibly have put it." Ghosts are not, repeat NOT supposed to walk up and knock on your door looking like a live human being and demanding to see your six year old daughter. Kane incessantly sang the hymn "God Is In His Holy Temple," forever ruining the song for me which sucks because it actually is a hymn sung in protestant churches. So sometimes I HAVE to hear it in a situation where I can't hit pause or run out of the room. Also, my friend Victoria knows that all she has to do to ruin my day is walk up and start singing the first line. She gets away with it because she's pretty, but anyone else would deserve a punch in the gonads.

P.S. The only version of Kane singing I could find is on his myspace page (I know, I know). If you scroll down there is an ad for a Henry Kane ringtone (WTF!!!!) and you can play the sample. I promise to look for a better version when I have time.

The Top Five Possibly Unintentionally Funny Horror Quotes

Some horror movies contain purposely funny dialogue. About others, I have my suspicions.

1. The House By The Cemetery

[Ann is kneeling on the floor, mopping up a huge pool of blood]

Lucy Boyle: "What are you doing?"

Ann, the babysitter: "I made coffee."

2. Burial Ground

Prof. Ayres: [to an attacking zombie] "No, stay back! I'm your friend!"

3. Carnival of Souls

Mrs. Thomas, owner of the boarding house: "You can take all the baths you want."

4. Exorcist III

Detective Kinderman, in a dream where he sees the murder victim he knew from the boys' club: "I'm so sorry you were murdered, Thomas. I miss you."

5. Prom Night 1980

Jude, after losing her V plates to the hambeast known as Slick: "Ya know, I'll remember this night for the rest of my life."

Honorable mention. Bad Dreams

Ralph, as he kills himself with two scalpels: "Later."

The Other Side (2006)

Cross and the Switchblade. A Thief in the Night. Jack Chick tracts. We've all been exposed in some way to the concept of a supreme being who loves you but has no problem sending you to burn for all eternity.

Conversely, we have The Other Side, the first truly uplifting quasi-Christian scare film I've come across, which proposes another possibility. What if you could escape from the hell you sent yourself to by breaking God's commandments, come back to Earth and be redeemed anyway after your death? Now that's a theology I could get behind.

Part gruesome bloodbath, part mystery, part love story, The Other Side is a B-movie that works. Sam North (Nathan Mobley) is about to graduate from Columbia and come home to Georgia to marry his girlfriend of six years. But as he waits for her to meet him in their special place by a waterfall, a mysterious white van comes out of the night and pushes him off a cliff to his death. Sam wakes up in hell and experiences some truly terrifying hallucinations before being swept along by a tide of escapees.

He wakes up in a hospital as his cohorts from hell sit up in the morgue. But his ordeal is far from over as his best friend tells him that his girlfriend, Hanna (Jaimie Alexander), is missing. To make matters worse, bounty hunters from hell have inhabited fresh corpses from the nearest funeral home and are on their way to send everyone back to hell. These demons can't kill the living (that is, those who have not died and come back) but they can slaughter the newly resurrected with swords, guns, crossbows, throwing stars or a simple neckbreak. Worst of all, the born again sinners have identical tattoos received in hell which allow the bounty hunters, or "reapers," to locate them like a lojack. So the escapees have to stay on the move.

Along with two survivors of the hospital attack (Poncho Hodges and Cory Rouse) who want to help Sam in order to redeem themselves (one has escaped from hell and been sent back five times) Sam has to dodge the reapers while looking for Hanna and trying to solve his own murder. And you will not figure out who is responsible for Sam's death until the movie is good and ready.

I give this one extra points just for being filmed in my beloved home state of Georgia. The acting is solid and the effects are excellent for the budget. Besides the fake blood, all they needed was makeup for the never ending supply of new corpses the reapers jump into once one body is killed. And this town is simply crawling with perfectly unmutilated, young dead people. Not a zombie granny in the bunch.

If I had any criticism, it is that the story is a bit melodramatic. But I was surprised to see everyone get their comeuppance and it even has a somewhat happy ending. And I was elated to find that the reapers could be stopped with a little luck and a whole lot of repentance. Because, really, if you know from the get go that the killers are unstoppable and everyone is doomed, what's the point? When you watch a Saw or Friday the 13th movie, it's kind of like listening to a fundamentalist Christian preacher. No matter what, you're hopeless. Not so in writer/director Gregg Bishop's imaginary world. He likes his heroes to have a chance to fight for their lives, and that's just the kind of plot I enjoy. So if you're a B-movie fan, you'll find that this one is at least a high quality cubic zirconium of a film.

P.S. Bishop went on to make Dance of the Dead, the good one where zombies come a calling on prom night.

Fade to Black (1980)

Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher) is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. His elevator does not go all the way to the top floor. He is not firing on all cylinders. He is going on a trip with an empty suitcase. He is Not Quite Right. Despite his obvious social anxiety and symptoms of schizophrenia, everyone bullies Eric unmercifully, from his guardian/aunt to a movie producer who picks him up hitchhiking (and subsequently steals Eric's script idea).

And for their trouble, he kills them in nasty ways while gallivanting around Hollywood in costumes inspired by old movies. Random hooker refuses to render her services? He dresses up like a vampire and flips into the alternate universe in which, in his mind, he is Christopher Lee and chases her until she impales herself on a white picket fence. A coworker played by Mickey Rourke welches on a bet? Eric dresses up like Hopalong Cassidy, becomes Cassidy in his mind and shoots Rourke dead.

At first I did not find Eric to be a sympathetic character because he is just so darn unlikeable. He's unbearably cringeworthy to watch except when he goes into one of his hallucinations; during his "scenes" he exudes confidence and in some cases sexiness. Then I realized that two people are kind to him: another deludenoid (Linda Kerridge) who thinks she's Marilyn, and Tim Thomerson's police psychiatrist, the cocaine-snorting harmonica-playing Jerry Moriarty. Both can empathize with Eric and therefore he does not kill them.

This is not a horror movie about a murderer. In fact, the death scenes are humorous, doubly so because the victims all had it coming. There's even a notable Psycho nod when Eric breaks into Marilyn's bathroom and asks her for an autograph. The ink runs slowly down the drain, making me laugh out loud. But I digress. This is a horror movie about the way our society ignores, exploits and stigmatizes the mentally ill. It is about the horror of what lifelong abuse will do to a person. It is about all the sad cases where no one does anything to help these people, who are telegraphing their need for intervention, except to help them into a jail cell when they finally snap. So remember kids, for the nth time: don't pick on the shy weirdo at work or school. He just might think he's James Cagney and fuck you up one day.

Christmas Horror! Silent Night, Bloody Night

via www.youtube.com

Don't confuse this with Silent Night, Deadly Night! A man inherits a house from his grandfather, but when he tries to sell it he finds out the secrets that come with the house can't be bargained away. This one has it all: sinister town officials, a scumbag lawyer and mental patients carving up doctors! But that's nothing compared to the ancient family drama that will make your messed up family look like the Cleavers. Obviously made in the 70s with that grainy look I love, this cult film stars Mary Woronov and John Carradine. Look for Woronov's Warhol Factory cohort Candy Darling in the climactic flashback scene.