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 Not Scared Of You Anymore. You’re Scared Of Me.




Shit, man, I dunno. Young. Probably just teen or cusping it.


It’s Devon. The village. Population 450. And my memory has it that it’s a late night showing my mum’s let me stay up for. Like for The Sting (and, for no reason I can fathom at this stage, the Eastwood flick FireFox). It feels like one of those, but maybe I’m cross-referencing from seeing a later TV listing for a late-night showing; shit, maybe it was a lazy Sunday afternoon.


No reason why not, after all. This may have been banned for 13 years in the UK upon release, only scoring an X certificate thereafter, but there’s nothing in here you couldn’t show at teatime on TV in 1990/1/2/3, in all honesty. The past isn’t just another country, it’s another fucking planet.


And yet.


Years later, I’ll see Rebel Without A Cause, as part of a Moviedrone season. And, you know, it’s fine. Good, even. James Dean is everything you’ve read, for sure; angst and pain and strength and vulnerability and fundamentally a lost puppy in a world that makes no sense to him. At the same time… Well, let me put it like this; I watched these movies on consecutive weekends with a friend of mine, the essay subject first and Rebel second, and her observation after Rebel was ‘It’s good, but you could tell it was made by normies’.


And she was - is - right. That’s not to damn Rebel, nor to yuck anybody's yum, but Rebel is, at heart, ‘A Very Special Episode Of…’ sure, done about as well as anyone has ever managed such a format, but that’s what it is.


And then, there’s… this.


We open with black and white on that most American of images; an open highway, stretching back as far as the eye can see. Some text appears on screen, strongly implying what we’re about to see is both a true story and carries with it the whiff of scandal. The final line of text reads ‘It is a public challenge not to let this happen again’. Which, you know, points for being possibly misleading and definitely ominous.


And then we get the voice-over.


‘Mostly, I remember the girl’.


And, I mean, come on.


By this age, I’m sure of very little. Two facts I am pretty confident about are that I am a massive Springsteen fan, and that I’m basically heterosexual; or at least, that women hold an at this stage not well explored but absolutely soul-deep fascination to me; a fact that, in my case, I can date with some confidence to seeing Belinda Carlisle perform Heaven Is A Place On Earth on Top Of The Pops in 1987. I was 9, but I’ll never forget how that moment made me feel. If you know, you know.


Anyway, the point is this; we’re combining two of my essential cultural obsessions in one single line/image combo here - the open road of the US fucking A, legendary backdrop to so much of Springsteen's epic triumph and heartache (often both in the same song), and ‘the girl’; also a Springsteen staple (Mary, Wendy, Bobby Jean et al), but also a pop culture and pulp fiction staple that has captivated me since long before puberty (if, indeed, I’m meaningfully through that process by the time this movie surfaces, which I frankly doubt). This is not just totemic, in other words; it’s close to elemental. And, sure, with adult eyes, there’s a ton of deconstruction work I could do on literally every single element we’re talking about, here; but I’m not an adult, I’m a kid, and, for whatever the word even means, these concepts are still pure; by which I may mean nothing grander than ‘uncomplicated’, but okay, whatever, this is feelings we’re into, and I am feeling it.


And then there’s this voice. It’s beautiful. He’s beautiful. I mean, in about 60 seconds or so, we’re going to be hit full bore with that fact, as the muttering becomes a rumble becomes a roar and the dark cloud on the horizon line becomes a swarm of bikes that hurtle towards us before passing with seemingly inches to spare, and then a smash cut to Brando in the jacket and hat and shades and the score crashes in and the title ‘The Wild One’ appears over that impossible figure in words that feel 100 foot tall and written in fire…


But even before then, there’s this disembodied voice, talking about The Girl, wondering at her and how she affected him, before going on to muse about fate and happenstance and odds. And the tone, the delivery, they are velvet. Soft. Almost musical. It’s the voice of a man so utterly secure in who he is that he doesn't have to worry about sounding high or even effeminate; the voice is confident because it’s sexy and sexy because it’s confident, and, among many other things, I’m suddenly even more secure in my sexuality than I was five minutes before.


Because I don’t think it would be possible to have even a minimal attraction to men and not find Brando in this movie anything less than devastatingly sexy.


And I don’t.


I understand, intellectually, that he is, to be clear. And I do periodically catch myself wishing I had an ounce of his swagger, his appeal, his apparently effortless cool - especially as a teenager, but, let’s be real, even now, once in a while, sure. And my heart fucking soars pretty much every time he’s in the frame, throughout the running time of the movie. But, without wishing to be crude, my heart is the only part that does soar. I wouldn’t be ashamed if it were other. But it isn’t.


(Sidebar to gay men reading this; I’m doing a bit. Of course you’re still gay if you don’t want to fuck Brando in The Wild One. Though if you also don’t want to fuck Slash, I do Have Questions)


(Second sidebar: That was also a bit. Sorry. I’ll shut up now)


Anyway.


Following the frankly stupendous opening, we follow Johnny and his club - B.R.M.C. on the back of the leather jackets, and not a fucking clue, but I wanted one so, so bad - to a speedway racing meet. They watch the racers, for a while, Brando theatrically blinking dust from his eyes as the racers scream past…. And then, seemingly on a whim, he walks across the racetrack, hands nonchalantly in his jacket pockets, elbows sticking out. Of course, the rest of the club immediately follows him, causing at least one contestant to almost crash, disrupting his run, and causing an announcement across the tannoy; ‘Please, don’t cross the track!’


At this point, one of the club climbs a few steps up a nearby ladder on the side of one of the PA towers and, leaning forward with a mocking voice says ‘Please, don’t cross the track! We wouldn’t want you to get hurt! Blood makes everything slippery!”, which earns a round of laughter from the club. Following this moment, they have a confrontation with one of the officials, then one of the racers, then finally a cop, who moves them on.


I want to zoom in on this moment because it happens early in the film and it serves as a microcosm of so much of what is to follow.


The first is the positioning of the film's sympathies and the way that positioning is passed to the audience.  So let’s get into what I first heard Joe Hill talk about as ‘duckling theory’ - the idea that an audience will imprint, like the eponymous duckling, on whatever character they first encounter. It’s not a cast iron law of storytelling, or anything (pulp horror writers like James Hurbert delighted in playing with it, for example; not to spoil any Hurbert books for you, but I’d advise against getting emotionally attached to anyone you meet in chapter one of most of his novels, and God help anyone in a prologue); but it is a tendency, and one that I feel like even in ‘53, movie makers had to understand. Given this, having Brando’s voiceover be the first thing we hear, and the man/icon on his bike the first we see is pretty suggestive. I don’t want to keep banging on about how he looks in this movie, because we’ll be here all day, but if that overused word iconic has any meaning left, it must surely apply to Brando in biking leathers astride a road hog. I mean, come on.


So. Of course I’ve imprinted on Brando at this point, as a budding metalhead in a tiny rural village all but surrounded by Squares who Just Don’t Understand - but I’m pretty sure that not only am I meant to, but so are you, whoever you are. And let’s just take a moment to admire the enormous balls of making a film in 1953 that invites the audience to primarily identify/sympathise (both weasel words, but still driving at something real, I think) with an antisocial biker club.


And then, look at how this scene plays out. Firstly, the official who confronts them is effectively mocked out of the conversation. Next, the racer, initially dismissive, is forced to walk away when faced with a straight-up challenge to try his skills against Johnny one on one. Finally, the cop does exert authority, moving the club on.


The cop figure echos very neatly the movie’s conclusion, of course, but it’s the first two confrontations I want to focus on, because I rewatched this recently, and it was the damndest thing, in that I found myself seeing the scene via two conflicting perspectives at once, whereas as a kid, I’d only had one.


Because, dig it; as a kid, the duckling principle was in maximum effect. Hell, I had a leather jacket; the BMRC were my tribe, spiritually. I felt this to my core. So when they walked across the track and fucked up the race, my heart sang, and when they mocked the safety announcement and the racer, I laughed along with them. Because, yeah, man, fuck these squares and their cornball races-by-the-rules. Johnny can beat them all. He just don’t wanna, because he’s too damn cool. And as a kid with undiagnosed ADHD in a rural secondary school who had enough raw intelligence to be able to coast on the class and homework, and who’d just started to develop a sense that maybe all of it was bullshit hoop-jumping for hoop jumping’s sake, let me count the ways I related. I loved it. I loved Johnny and the boys Sticking It To The Man, and  fuck that cop moving them on, they weren’t doing nothing.


And I still agree with that last part, for the record.


But.


I think that old saw about how you drift right politically as you get older is mostly bullshit. Personally speaking, I’ve never held more radical politics than I do in the year of our lord 2022, at age 44. But I think the kernel of truth around which that particular puffball popcorn of bullshit has grown is that as you get older, you do get more tired of all forms of bullshit, including cynicism, and maybe especially youthful cynicism. It’s not that I can’t, still, relate to the nihilistic impulse to just walk the fuck across the track because you feel like it; it’s just that tempered against that is an understanding of the futility of it, the pointlessness, a feeling that there are more important, meaningful conventions to fuck with that might have more impact and power, and that, given the current state of play, this kind of adolescent nonsense feels like… well, adolescent nonsense.


And I can feel him howling in my breast as I type that; the scared kid with a stomach full of lies that he’s desperate to puke up and a heart full of fuck you for everybody and everything that conforms to a system that’s trying to kill him. I feel him. And his heart is absolutely in the right place.


But there is such a thing as wisdom. And that’s not an old man cop-out. That’s life experience, an understanding of The Finite that’s almost impossible for the young, immortal mind to grasp. It’s a calm, kind, rational voice, but not one devoid of the rage that fuels the entirely justified youthful piss and vinegar, and it simply says ‘pick your battles’.


God, I’m so fucking tired.


Anyhow. Point is, watching it now, sure, fuck the cop moving them on. And sure, fuck the racer, too; there’s a gatekeeper quality to his arrogance, and at this point in my life, I’m so very far over wankers who have expertise in one area acting like it makes them lords of all creation. He chickens out because he knows Johhny will hand his arse to him, and also because he has everything to lose and Johnny has nothing, and fuck him for that, too.


But then there’s the official.


And what’s changed between then and now is I’ve been given shit jobs to do, and I can’t help but feel for the guy. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve been required as part of a paying role to tell people things they don’t want to hear and even gotten a bit of verbal and physical abuse as a result; nothing serious, nothing life-changing, but enough that my instinctive sympathies rest, these days, with anyone in a customer facing role. Because I know from first-hand that a person in that spot is never responsible for the rules they’re being asked to enforce. ‘You can always pay one half of the poor to kill the other half, as the old saying goes, and this ain’t that, of course, but it's somewhere on the spectrum that has that as the endpoint. And it fucking sucks. So, as much as my gut instinct pulls me towards the BMRC, yeah, I’m going to allow that being dicks to the official is, well, a dick move.


As I think about it more, there’s this riff in Easy Rider where Jack Nicholson's lawyer talks about how the reason people hate Fonda and Hopper’s bikers is because they represent freedom, and how everyone likes to talk about it, but nobody likes to see people actually living it, embodying it, and here’s the BMRC in ‘53, personifying what Easy Rider doesn’t have the confidence to keep as subtext, and that’s… interesting.


The bike meet is important for two main reasons; firstly, because it’s the source of the stolen racing trophy that’ll instigate so many of the fateful (and fatal, I guess) turning points of the narrative, right down to the final scene denouement, and the smile that broke a million hearts. The fact that it’s stolen is enormously important, and delivers layers throughout; for now, let’s just observe that it serves a duel symbolism from the get-go. On the one hand, it’s literally Stolen Valour, that most dishonourable of deceits, giving Johnny an entirely bogus and unearned aura of achievement - sure, his crew is in on the gag, but wild horses wouldn’t drag it from them to an outsider, they stole it for him, and his valour is theirs. But there’s a flip side to that, right? We’re back to ‘fuck your rules’. Why shouldn’t Johnny steal it, wear it, wield it over the squares? It’s all meaningless, all stolen valour. It only means something because we say (pretend) it does. By stealing it (well, it’s stolen for him, which in some ways is more poetic), Johnny underlies the trophy is what it ways was; a lump of dipped-gold metal, just like a sheriffs badge is a lump of shaped tin, just like a uniform or flag is… ah, you get the idea.


And you know what I’m realising, kids? We’re nearly three thousand words in and we’re barely past the first scene. Meaning if I’m gonna say everything I want to about this movie, it’s gonna end up as a damn book. Okay, so let’s not do that (at least not here - if you’re an editor and you like the idea of Kit Power on The Wild One, drop me a line and we’ll talk).


Let’s just zoom in on The Girl.


Because I think part of why this story hit me so hard was that I was on both sides of the love story. Johnny spoke to my soul; angry, lost, bright enough to see the size and depth of the hole, but not clue one how to get out, angry at the world for simply existing, configured as it was, and utterly convinced of the impossibility of anything resembling happiness, let alone contentment. A man for whom there is only the temporary relief brought when rage is allowed to drive action, burning out, temporarily, the baseline feelings of futility.


But then there’s Mary Murphy’s Kathie.


And I was her, too.


I didn’t have the same deep roots in the village I was mostly raised in, and looking back, that was my saving grace; I knew I didn’t belong, and it was the most basic article of my faith, so solid as to go utterly unexamined, that I would, one day, leave. Still, though, at age twelve or thirteen, the gap between here and now and leaving is essentially infinite. So, sure, it’ll happen, of course… but if Now is Forever, what, exactly, is going to be left of me, by the time my life finally has a chance to begin?


So, sure, I’m Johnny. But I’m Kathie, too. And I’m sure an analyst would have a field day with that, but it is what it is. Her doe-eyed romanticism is mine, her naivety is mine, but so is the war between those desires, hopes, dreams… and the crushing mundanity of day-to-day life, closing off thought and possibility, feeding the romanticism whilst also underlining the essential fantasy nature of the dream. It’s just now striking me that I can’t think of any narrative convention that gender swaps this situation very often; and I can’t help but wonder what a romantic female biker club leader might have done to my young heart and libido, (except exploding it beyond any possible repair, obviously). So, maybe it’s just as well. Regardless, what the BMRC represent to Kathie is exactly what they represent to me; a kind of impossible freedom that is both desperately attractive and clearly utterly unachievable; they may as well have come from the moon, for all the good their visit will do me when they inevitably roll out of town.


And that’s kind of my relationship with music, with movies, with art, at this age, in this time and place. I’m perpetually drawn, moth to a flame, to the art that lights up a whole different way of being, a mode of existence I can romanticise with a fiery passion and ache, because I know it’s forever unattainable. There’s pain there, of course, but there’s a safety in that pain; it reinforces the inevitability of the status quo, which, sure, is shit, but at least, underneath that knowledge/pain, the sneaky voice that says there’s nothing you can do.


And, of course, if you believe that, it’s true.


And it’s a pretty potent horror story, I think.


The Wild One is, I have discovered on a recent rewatch, about enough things that I’d need a book to do it all justice (and, seriously; commission me, my rates are very reasonable). I’ve only touched on how the entire piece is suffused with a sense of alienation; sure, between tribes, but also within them; The BMRC may have started off as Beetles, but it’s clear Johnny feels almost as distant from the rest of his current crew as he does from his old club; Kathie is alienated from her father, and her town, but also Johnny, to object of her desire, the fantasy-made-flesh-rendered-nightmare-but-still-yearned-for (a journey that you can track based on her peeling back the layers of meaning in the racing trophy, as I think about it). The townsfolk and the BMRC are mutually alienated, of course; but the town is equally clearly as fractured as the bikers, if not more so, with ancient animosities and cycles of behaviour playing out against the psychodrama of The Night The BMRC Came To Town. That Easy Rider riff about the nature of freedom is here, as is everything Rebel Without A Cause didn’t have the bottle to keep subtext, and there’s also a nihilism that leaks out from Johnny himself, infecting everything and everyone he comes into contact with.


But for young teenage me, I think it was mainly about the impossibility of romantic love, both on its own terms, and as a stand-in for all the things I might desire for myself and could never, ever have. The freedom I knew I’d never have the courage to even try and live. The inevitability of a life of indentured servitude to the almighty Machine we pretend is called society, but whose true purpose is to grind us to dust and extract and syphon our life force as Value, to be drunk by an elite to whom we, in the words of Henry Rollins, ‘look like ants, and our flesh takes just like chicken’.


And do you know, in one way, I was kinda sorta right?


But in many other far more important ways, I was as wrong as it’s only possible to be when you’re young, and you’re burning with a fear that All That Is is not just Awful, but Inevitable.


There are things this project has reminded me about being young that I’ve been glad to rediscover, to savour, and to try and nurture anew in my adult life. But that particular feeling?


Sorry, kid. You can keep it.


It does get better.


KP
31/7/22

​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.


Fairness Would Be To Rip Your Insides Out And Hang You From A Tree

So. It’s Haloween, 1997. The town in which I am living in benefit poverty while slowly but surely failing college has a cinema, praise Milenko; one screen, old school seating; the place vibed theatre, though I have no idea if it ever was. It was a genuinely beautiful building and space. There was even an old-school Ice Cream lady who appeared at the front of the stage in between the trailers and the main event, just in case you had a sudden craving for a comically overpriced choice or Calippo to go with your movie of choice.


Being poor, I didn’t go very often; I did catch the Star Wars special editions there (and loved them, especially the first two, which I’d only ever seen on TV in pan and scan before; I know the CG in the new scenes has not aged well, but it blew my tiny mind at the time). And I discovered later that Spawn was maybe the worst first date movie ever (we bailed after 30 minutes and went for burgers).


But it was Halloween. And it was Wes Craven. And, do you know, despite being a childhood fan of the Elm Streets, Hellraisers, and related concerns, I’d never actually seen an 18-certificate horror movie at the cinema?


Plus, I mean, just look at that poster (the version, to be clear, preserved in my head, though I can't find an exact version of it on a Google image search, so, you know, whatever) The white space, the blood red writing at the bottom, spelling out the single word title below the face of the transcendently beautiful Drew Barrymore, eyes wide with fright, hand mostly covering her mouth (and also blood red lipstick), features fading into the white background.


I-fucking-conic.


And so I settled into my seat, probably not with popcorn, given the tight budget, and as the lights dimmed and the movie certificate and title appeared on screen, I felt an honest-to-God gut thrill; after endless years of VCR, here was, finally, horror as intended twenty feet high and ninety wide.


It was time for Scream.


And, you know, I am aware that The Blair Witch Project was about to set new levels in terms of marketing hype and misdirection - hell, by 97, they may have already started with the websites that would cause such a sensation in the run-up to release. But I gotta say, whichever genius asshole put Drew on the posters did an absolute number on me.


She was a star, is the thing. Probably about as big as she ever got, in 97. So of course it made perfect sense that she’d be the star of Wes Craven’s massive slasher movie. And when the film opens with her and her creepy phone call, I am absolutely delighted and thrilled, but not remotely scared. I appreciate it, of course - no fucking about, we’re in, archetypical, young woman, home alone, creepy man on the phone, a sense of building dread… better yet, both the creep and the woman seem to know it; the conversation revolves around scary movies, and my memory is that I guffawed when Drew’s character talks about how much she liked the first Elm Street, but not so much the sequels. I know I was hip to the joke, and, at age 19, almost insufferable in my smug pride at getting it. I mean, what a delight, they’re banging on about Friday the 13th, there’s a superb gut-drop as Drew realises she’s being watched, and then the reveal of the bloody boyfriend on the patio, bravo, good people, bravo. Most excellent entertainment.


And I think I picked up on the role reversal - the boyfriend in peril rather than the girlfriend, and if so, no doubt nodded in similarly smug approval. And when the chap does get eviscerated, it felt suitably bloody and shocking (though interestingly far less so on a rewatch). And when Ghostface finally made his entrance, I was suitably thrilled, envisaging a frantic tussle, then escape for our heroine. I even remember wondering if the whole movie was going to be some real-time stasher/stalker a la Halloween, with Drew legging it across town, pursued by a relentless knife-wielding maniac (who would, naturally, dispatch several innocent bystanders along the way).


And do you know what? That would probably have been a fun movie.


But Wes Craven, the magnificent bastard, had quite other plans.


I can still remember the visceral shock when Drew Barrymore was stabbed. I remember, just like a living cliche, sitting bolt upright in my seat, eyes wide. No fucking way. No fucking way is this happening.


And her crawl! The movie teases us one final time, oh, sure, look, there’s rescue, just out of reach, but she’ll get there, okay, this is like the Halloween opening, we’ve got a 5 years later caption coming any second, Drew looking all haunted and hardened by her near brush with death. And she can’t scream. That’s the final brilliant touch. Her lung appears to have collapsed, she can only whisper, and it’s not enough, and then, just like that, she’s murdered, and we are off to the fucking races.


And I know I’ve just spent a thousand words on the opening five minutes, but in my defence, it’s pretty clear I’ve never gotten over it. And it’s a good microcosm for the film as a whole - a horror movie that’s about horror movies; or, to be more specific, a slasher movie that’s also about slasher movies. Like my beloved RoboCop, Scream manages to be both of genre and commenting on genre; and, sure, these days pretty much every single show and movie has some moment of wry self-reflection. But in ‘97 it was a lot less common, and I would argue it’s very rare indeed that a horror movie does it this blatantly and this well.


The kids know they’re in a slasher movie. They talk about it constantly, the way kids would; sure, in the famous ‘rules of a horror movie’ scene, with a teenage Jamie Lee Curtis having a spectacularly bad pumpkin day in the background, but elsewhere, too. In the video store, they’re picking each other apart, looking for suspects, and there’s a level of casual cruelty that felt painfully real to me, watching it as the last of my own teenage months bled away.


The adults, interestingly, don’t, for the most part. Courtney Cox’s reporter is obsessed with the murders, but she thinks she’s the star of a movie about a plucky reporter who lands The Big Scoop (hilariously, she doesn't seem to much care what the scoop is, as long as she lands it). As for the cops, they fall into a proud tradition of Wes Craven police going all the way back to Last House On The Left; they’re hilariously inept, totally fucking useless. Which, given recent events in the US, I’d say is hard to argue with as the best-case scenario, honestly.


And as for Henry Winkler…


It’s a Goddamn genius piece of casting. I recently found out it happened at the last minute; that the part was written after filming started when the film-makers realised that after the opening, they didn’t have another murder happen until they hit hour two of the script, and they, I think correctly, assumed this might raise some eyebrows with the audience. So Winkler's part was written, cast and shot pretty damn fast. And it’s a great example to me of the magical power of cinema as a storytelling medium, because I genuinely can’t conceive of Scream without his presence. Taking the ultimate icon of teen cool and turning him into a stick-up-his-ass high school principal - the ultimate teen cop, if you can dig it - should have earned everyone involved in the decision-making process awards and bonuses. It works brilliantly. Winkler chews the scenery, a take-no-prisoners hard ass for the ages, coming over so ludicrously angry at one point he becomes a semi-plausible red herring himself… right up to the point where he’s murdered in one of the finest it’s-behind-you jump scares in slasher history, complete with an Elm Street reference that almost certainly made me punch the air in the cinema (it sure did on the rewatch).


There are few, if any weak links in the cast, to be fair; sure, David Arquette’s character is a goofoff, but again, this is Wes Craven and cops; he’s supposed to be. Neve Campbell grabs the lead with both hands, managing to make naturalistic-yet-self-aware look easy. Rose McGowan is superb as her best friend (and scores my favourite death of the film, a spectacularly over-the-top encounter with the dog flap on the garage door).


And then there are the killers.


Skeet Ulrich is great as Billy Loomis. He has a tricky part to play, as the red-herring-that-isn’t boyfriend, and he does a good job throughout the movie hitting the pivot points. In particular, his seduction of Campbell’s Sidney towards the end is perfectly pitched, making his ‘murder’ and final reveal a superb twist moment, at a point where such twists are landing thick and fast.


But, hoo, boy, Matthew Lillard.


Lillard’s Stew is brilliant because he’s demented from the off, gurning and cracking gross in every single scene, right out there hiding in plain sight… and yet he does hide, and I remember the visceral shock I got when he’s revealed as one of the killers. And from the moment he is revealed, he just opens up the crazy can and spills it all over everywhere; a scenery-chewing for the ages that manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely unnerving all at once.


It’s another microcosm of what the film does so well, actually - he and Billy trade psedojustifications (Billy blames Sidney’s mother sleeping with his father for causing their marriage to fail and is therefore enacting revenge; Stew, hilariously, claims to just be easily led) and it’s both a commentary on the arbitrary nature of slasher villain motivation and an expression of it, at the same time. And, again, it absolutely is funny, but Stew in particular is also absolutely creepy as fuck, especially when the scheme takes a turn for the seriously deranged and he allows Billy to stab him as part of the plan to ultimately frame Sid.- The blood helps; we’ve been treated to ‘corn syrup’ effect blood when Billy was fake-stabbed, and the filmmakers ensure the rest of the blood spilt in the scene is of a different shade and consistency, and it’s absolute genius because, even in a scene that is highlighting and pointing out artificiality, it manages to play that against the viewer, subconsciously selling you on the ‘real’ blood by showing it differently, and I’m sorry, but that’s genuinely clever filmmaking.


It’s interesting to look back at Craven’s grimy, deeply disturbing debut, Last House On The Left. The hype text for the poster there reminded you, if you were feeling faint, to repeat to yourself ‘It’s only a movie’.  Scream spends its entire runtime yelling at you that it’s a movie too; using the conventions, naming them, playing with them, having characters call out the cliches, and then finding ways to subvert them, play with them, spin-off them. And yet - at least for 19-year-old me - in doing so it didn’t in any way sell the horror short; rather, it uses that awareness to play with the audience, confound expectations, and deliver something brilliant and funny and scary all at once.


Wes Craven was a massive part of my childhood horror experience. And as much as my revisit to Elm Street for this project wasn’t the unqualified delight I’d hoped for, I was forcibly reminded of how strong the core concept of those movies was, and how mind-melting some of the effects work was.


When Wes Craven passed away, there was a lot of commentary among horror fans on social media about the man and his legacy. It’s absolutely true that many of his movies didn’t live up to the high tide marks of his best work, but I have to say I felt some people overcompensated for that a bit, in some of the critiques they offered. Like, Last House On The Lest may not be to your taste - it sure wasn’t to mine - but it’s kind of hard to deny the baseline awful power parts of that movie have to shock you in ways cinema rarely does (and you could make a case that The Hills Have Eyes delivers similar levels of shock with less issues relating to storytelling, and I’d certainly entertain such an argument). And caveats duly noted for A Nightmare On Elm Street, it defined an entire decade of horror cinema, and remains one of the best ideas for a horror movie anybody has ever had.


So it seems fitting that I’m wrapping up my coverage of Craven’s work, as this project as a whole nears conclusion, with Scream. Because, like LHotL and Elm Street before it, Scream set the standard and conversation in horror cinema for the next decade, for better and worse.


And with all due respect to the critics, that means Wes Craven was responsible for making one of the most important horror movies of the decade for three decades in a row.


We should all fail so well.


KP
22/07/22