“I’m a strange little person”: it’s our Henenlotter Special!

A few years ago, at the Dead by Dawn horror festival in Edinburgh, I was invited to take part in a ‘play dead’ competition with the rest of the auditorium. Quite unusual as a pastime, you might think, even for a horror fest.

Well, this was all off the back of a competition being held by a guest filmmaker, in which he’d invited festival attendees to send in their best ‘dead’ pics – the more outlandish the setting, the better – to be judged accordingly. Pretend to be dead, get a photo taken, and we’ll judge the best one. If I remember rightly, we had someone lying dead near what looked like Sellafield, someone dead in their front room (with their daughters happily playing with dolls on their father’s corpse) and we also had plenty of examples by the filmmaker himself, showing us how it was done. It was, he said, funniest of all when he did it because he’s “a fat guy”. I have rarely laughed so much. The filmmaker was Frank Henenlotter, over to introduce some of his films at the festival, and clearly making the best of his time in the UK. A modest, good natured guy, it was a privilege to hear him speak and also to check out some of his work on the big screen at last, alongside a crowd of people who already knew when each limb was going to go flying. Not many guys could set up a whole roomful of people to pretend to be dead bodies, and sure, it’s a weird sign of devotion, but a sign of devotion it nonetheless is – and all because of those crazy films we know and love.

Frank Henenlotter was born and raised in New York City, first developing a love for TV horror and later, spending a good share of his youth amongst the miscreants of the fleapit cinemas of 42nd Street, where he no doubt developed a taste for maximum bang for buck (if you’ll pardon the expression) which eventually translated into his own work. His time in the theatres of NYC also firmly cemented his love for exploitation cinema; Henenlotter in his own words says that he’s never really set out to make horror movies, but he isn’t trying to get out of his association with that genre by saying he made ‘elevated horror’ or ‘post horror’ or any such desperate re-branding. It’s a lot easier to take the horror denial in Henenlotter’s case when he says he’s an exploitation filmmaker first and foremost, because there’s always been such a lot of fun crossover between the two very broad genres, and neither one is seen as better than the other. Rather, any permutations of skin and gore are usually looked down on equally, something which Henenlotter has been able to use in his own films to create completely new permutations of skin and gore.

Henenlotter has not made a vast array of features during his career, though via his work with Something Weird he’s shown he’s as happy to save other people’s films from oblivion as he is to make his own. Altogether, he’s made eight original films, together with some documentary work, and at the time of writing his name is attached to a couple more shorts. Some directors crank out a film a year, but Henenlotter has never joined their ranks; there’s even been a sixteen-year hiatus between features. None of that means the impact of his work has been any less, and in a few very notable films in the 80s and 90s in particular, he’s made his name as a director of ‘body horror’, where the physical body can be invaded, mutated, updated and quite open blown apart by a whole host of bizarre phenomena. Some body horror is genuinely unsettling: close contemporary David Cronenberg, for instance, renders his compromised bodies the stuff of nightmares. It’s horrific, yes, but sublime. Henenlotter has a different approach – he opts to go straight from the sublime to the ridiculous. Sure, you can wince at some of the things he does on screen, but any deeper considerations are usually grabbed out of your hands by the next scene coming, which does something so hideously outlandish that all you can do is laugh. It is, as he suggests, pure exploitation, and it’s terrific entertainment, as well as immensely formative for many of us of a certain age, who grew up with these films on VHS and later, DVD.

As a little thanks for all the entertainment, we’re going to be running a few special features on Frank Henenlotter’s work over the next couple of weeks. Keep your eyes peeled, enjoy, and join in the discussion in the usual places…