MY LIFE IN HORROR: I’M THE TYRANNY OF EVIL MEN

I was a bundle of raw anxiety, proper fear sweat on, absolutely no fucking idea what was about to happen.

It was brilliant.

My Life In Horror

Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.

This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.

This is my life in horror.

I’m The Tyranny Of Evil Men

my life in horror: I’m The Tyranny Of Evil Men
by kit power

There’s a lot I don’t know.

I knew the director by reputation. His first movie had been infamous, with That Scene the topic of delighted playground gossip and exaggeration, but I’m pretty sure, at this point, I hadn’t seen it. For a horror kid I could be oddly squeamish, and the notion of a straight up torture scene in a movie triggered my squeam.

So I’m pretty sure this movie was my first experience with this director.

What I can remember is that I bought it on VHS without ever having seen it.

That was a pretty serious commitment, by the way. It was a recent release, so it will have cost £10 brand new, and back then, a tenner was a tenner - four packets of fags, or two bottles of cider from the local pub that would serve anyone who could see over the bar plus one packet of fags. Big money.

And I remember interrogating my dad about it over the phone, who’d said it was both brilliant and horrible, and also brilliant. And then, well, there’s that goddamn poster, right? Surely one of the great pieces of static image advertising of all time; the book cover, the gun, the burning cigarette, and that beautiful pale face framed by that exquisite black bob.

And, obviously, the title itself; promising thrills and chills in equal measure.

I wasn’t eighteen. But somehow I bought it anyway; and in this particular instance, I can confirm Mia’s proposition - sometimes, it is more exciting when you don’t have permission.

There’s a phenomenon I’ve observed with the truly great crime cinema and TV, which is that, particularly on a first viewing, they are incredibly, almost unbearably tense. I think back to my first viewing of Goodfellas, Casino, Sopranos, Deadwood (yes, Deadwood is a crime show, don’t @ me), and the common thread of the experience is a screaming, desperate fear that imbues pretty much every scene. Because these are violent men, with volcanic tempers, and the spectre of that anger, and that capacity for violence, haunts every fucking scene they’re in; I can never relax on a first viewing, because, bluntly, I’m always having to mentally bolster myself for things kicking off in a major, mortal way in pretty much every scene. It makes for a viewing experience both thrilling and exhausting, a kind of low key adrenaline high that lasts for the couple of hours the movie runs. I find crime novels the same, and as I think on it more, that’s probably the reason I absorb crime fiction so voraciously but reread so rarely; once I know how it pans out, and where the explosions are going to happen, that particular part of the experience is gone.

And with this movie, given the reputation of both this title and the director, and my otherwise total absence of information (we’re pre-internet here; I’m almost certain I’ve seen only the poster, no clips, no trailer, probably not a cast list - what, exactly am I doing here? Flying on instinct, I guess), when I first put the tape in and hit play, I imagine even the piracy warning notice made me jump.

All of which is a borderline unforgivably long-winded way of saying I was psyched.

And within approximately two minutes of the movie starting, I was plain blown away.

I’m second-guessing the setup now, because my memory is that actually, I did know Tim Roth, and there’s a limited number of places that could have been, with Reservoir Dogs being the most likely contender. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, maybe? Regardless, I knew/thought of him as cool, and this guy… wasn’t. He clearly hadn’t shaven for a day or two, his skin and teeth were both bad. And his girlfriend… something was off about his girlfriend. I mean, now, with my almost 43 years of watching movies, I could point you two half a dozen things QT is doing in this sequence, from camera positioning to script to sound design and on and on, to create and build that sense of tension. But in the moment, at 15 or 16 years old, all I know is that, despite the kookiness of the two characters, I am freaking the fuck out long before the gun hits the table with a startlingly percussive noise, and HunnyBunny yells “ANY OF YOU FUCKING PRICKS MOVE, AND I’LL EXECUTE EVERY MOTHERFUCKING LAST ONE OF YOU!!!”

The freeze-frame on her rage-filled yelling face before she’s finished speaking, coupled with the title card, and that guitar line kicking in… I get echoes of that first time thrill every time I watch it (hell, I’m getting a ghost of an echo of the thrill just recalling it now), but that first time… it felt like things in my mind being permanently rearranged; just plain picked up and put down again somewhere else.

And then, of course, we cut away, and now it’s two immaculately suited, unbearably cool looking gangsters sitting in a car talking about the ‘little differences’ in McDonald’s restaurants across Europe; every single line of which now feels like a weird kind of movie nerd scripture; like Python, lines that you can quote endlessly, and that your fellow tribe members will immediately fall into with you. Part of that’s the rhythm of the writing, of course (“You know what they call a Quarterpounder with Cheese in Paris?” “They don’t call it a QuarterPounder with Cheese?” “Nah, man, they got the metric system, they don’t know what the fuck a QuarterPounder is.” it’s exquisite, no?), part of it is how funny it is (the punchline of “I dunno, I didn’t go to Burger King” tells us so much about Vince and the hilarious limits of his ‘American abroad’ bit) but, again, what I think it’s easy to miss with the passage of time and the curse of the familiar is just how jarring and tense it was, alongside what had just happened and what was about to happen - this inane-yet-somehow-brilliant conversation is casually interrupted by a POV car boot shot where, in the same casual tones as they discuss international cuisine, they bemoan not having ‘shotguns for this deal’.

The film does this time and time again, at the micro and macro level, the fractured time structure setting up tensions, laying down strands - think about the casual confrontation between Travolta and Willis in the bar, Travolta’s dripping contempt for the aging boxer; we never find out why Vince is so contemptuous of Butch, but his petty unpleasantness is paid off in spectacular fashion in The Gold Watch portion of proceedings. Similarly, the movie rather ruthlessly exploited my 15-year-old racist face blindness such that I was convinced I’d found an actual flaw in the storytelling first time out, with Jules appearing in a scene with Vincent after he’d decided to leave The Life; of course, it’s not; it’s the barman from the earlier scene who has apparently been promoted to enforcer in Jules' absence, and given a cool new suit into the bargain.

I’m forcibly reminded - don’t laugh, or at least not yet - of the piece I wrote about Gremlins. There, as here, the subsequent viewings render the whole as a brilliantly crafted, rollicking black crime comedy, really; with, sure, thrills and spills aplenty, as the name implies, but ultimately a slice of entertainment. And, you know, sure, of course it is.

Now.

But… then? That first time?

The Gold Watch sequence is the obvious one; if you hadn’t been spoiled, the unbearably slow-motion release of The Gimp was, well, pretty much unbearable, and I think even knowing what Butch is going to find when curiosity drives him, Katana in hand, back to that basement, there’s still a kind of sick shock value to proceedings, the impact of which, for me, hasn’t really faded with rewatching.

But it’s Mia’s overdose scene, for me, that serves as an exemplar - maybe the exemplar, of the ‘first as horror, second as comedy ‘effect.

Because it is hysterical. Pulp Fiction is back in rotation of the Sky Movie channels right now, and consequently, I’ll often find myself watching 20 or 30 minutes of it before going to bed of an evening, and if I happen to tune in anywhere around Jackrabbit Slims (another scene which on a first viewing felt almost terrifying, the social bear traps Vince is surrounded by and the potential lethality of falling into one of them, my God), I know I’m strapped in until I see pale, sweaty, dishevelled Travolta blowing a kiss. And I know I’ll be laughing like a drain pretty much the whole time. Travolta’s dead-eyed, remorseless fixation, and the way it explodes into raw panic during the confrontation on the lawn, Eric Stoltz just losing his shit as every heroin dealers worst nightmare crashes into his garage and threatens to die in his living room, the escalating fury and utter pettiness of his interactions with his wife (exacerbated by her, through no fault of her own, being about a minute behind the conversation for most of it), the fixation on pointless detail (‘a little black medical book!’ ‘A fucking felt pen! A fucking fat magic marker!’), all while crime boss Marcellus Wallace’s wife twitches her way to heroin-induced oblivion… look, it’s not high art, exactly… but it’s not exactly not high art, either. I’ve seen it I don’t know how many times at this point, and like all truly great comedy, I find it at least as funny now, if not more so, knowing every single beat and every single piece of dialogue, as I did the first time.

Or rather, and this is the point, as I did the second time.

Because the first time, honestly? This was one of the most shit-your-pants scary bits of cinema I had encountered to date.

I was invested, that’s the thing. Like I suspect 80% of the male audience, I was half in love with Mia Wallace by this point, and I desperately wanted her to be ok. And, you know, Vincent is clearly a gangster and somewhat of a bad dude… but he’s also goofy and charming and clearly also half in love with Mia, and it’s already clear that the likely consequences for him if this goes all the way south are going to be Old Testament Biblical. And all the actors in the scene sell it magnificently; a lot of the second time viewing comedy comes from how everyone in the scene is just about out of their minds with fear about what's going on, and about what may or may not happen in the next ninety seconds. But first time? Nah, mate. First time, I was a bundle of raw anxiety, proper fear sweat on, absolutely no fucking idea what was about to happen.

It was brilliant.

And look, I know I keep saying it, by My Life In Horror really is nearly done, now; I’m hurtling towards the concluding essay, we’ve maybe five or six more of these to hang out in and shoot the shit. And one of the themes that comes up is the similarities between horror and comedy (applies to erotica as well, I guess, though that’s not really my area); tension and release, set up and punchline, stress and catharsis (even if, in horror, the catharsis is a gut punch rather than a smile). But I think Pulp Fiction exemplifies something else, something more complex; sometimes, it’s horror the first time and comedy the second, because the second time through, you know the punchline is a punchline, not a gutpunch.

I don’t know exactly what to do with this information, and it almost can't be an original observation, at this point. That said, I remain incredibly grateful to Pulp Fiction for delivering such a hand grenade of a movie, at a time and place where I’d simply never seen anything remotely like it. It changed the way I think about story, and like all great traumatising art, it has since become a comfort space - a go-to film where the dialogue and performances wrap around me like a warm blanket, and, for a couple of hours, take me away completely to another time and place; a place where horrible things happen, sure… but also a place where I know how it’s all going to shake out; freeing me to enjoy the horror of the absurdity of, well, people and circumstance.

It’s 2021, people. Take your joy wherever you can find it.
​
KP
5/6/21

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