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By Ben Bussey

How many billions of conversations in playgrounds/pubs/online forums and so forth have been spawned by the timeless question, “if x and y got in a fight, who would win?” How many scenarios have been played out in the imaginations of fans all over the world, picturing their favourite characters co-existing in the same story world, whether beating the living crap out of one another, doing battle side by side, or getting down to business…? Well, okay, slash fiction may not have quite made the transition to the big screen just yet, but the utterly ridiculous box office takings of The Avengers would seem to indicate that the public taste for spectacular crossover movies is at an all-time high, hence we can look forward to more Avengers, Batman vs. Superman, and almost certainly more besides in the near future.

Is it fair to say it all began a decade ago, when two of the biggest names in 80s horror crossed blades in the same movie for the first, and to date last time…?

I have to tell you, I’m really feeling the years with this one. Writing some of these retrospectives, it’s not hard to accept how long it’s been since the film in question was released. But Freddy vs. Jason… it really does seem like only yesterday. How clearly I recall that weekend in August 2003; visiting a dear old friend (my future best man) in Sheffield, and dragging him (somewhat unwillingly, I suspect) to every nearby cinema in order to see it, only to find it was sold out everywhere; thereafter, getting back to my then-home of Liverpool that Sunday evening, and proceeding to drag my (even less willing) bride-to-be to a late show at what was then the UGC on Edge Lane.

The screen was packed, the crowd was rowdy, and there was barely a moment’s quiet during the movie; under normal circumstances this would almost certainly have pissed me off royally, but in this instance it all felt perfectly in tune with proceedings. From the beginning, it was clear this was not a horror movie inviting the audience to sit back, stroke their chins and get all contemplative. This was a scream, shout, cheer, throw your popcorn in the air kind of movie, and that was very much how the crowd at the UGC reacted that night; everyone seemed to be on the same page, enjoying it in just the same way. I look back on it as being truly one of the best cinema experiences of my life.

This being the case, it wasn’t until I saw the movie again a few days later, in a mid-afternoon show with a much smaller audience, that I came to fully realise just what a deeply flawed movie Freddy vs. Jason really is. And yet these are all flaws I’m still able to overlook a decade on, such is my affection for this movie.

Spoilers ahead, naturally…

A Friday the 13th/Nightmare on Elm Street crossover movie is one of those ideas that seems to have been floating around forever, one which any number of people want to take credit for. There’s no real mystery as to why it took so long to materialise: Paramount Pictures owned Jason Voorhees, New Line Cinema owned Freddy Krueger, and neither kid was willing to let the other borrow their best toy. The ball didn’t really get rolling until New Line acquired the rights to Jason, and made Jason Goes To Hell: the Final Friday in 1993. Yeah, never quite understood why the first thing New Line did after acquiring the character was ostensibly kill him off. Of course, that movie did end with a fan-pleasing shot of Jason’s vacant hockey mask being dragged underground by Freddy’s gauntlet, leaving audiences in no doubt as to what was to come – even if it didn’t come until a full decade later. (There was also Jason X in 2001, but given the future setting, it’s in no way referenced in FvJ; nor, unsurprisingly, is the meta-tastic Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.)

Once the legal red tape was out of the way, there was the not insignificant issue of coming up with a narrative that would bring the characters together in a way that didn’t seem too utterly ridiculous. There were a shitload of different treatments and scripts floating around, some of which can be found if you’re inclined to do so, but I think the premise they settled on was probably as good a hook as they could have found: our old frenemy Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund, playing his signature role for what promises to be the last time) is trapped in movie villain limbo, having been long since forgotten by the children of his old slashing ground, Springwood. In a somewhat Jungian twist, it turns out the source of Freddy’s power is his legend; as a scary story the local kids would tell one another around campfires or at sleepovers, Freddy reigned supreme in the collective unconscious. Their fear gave him his strength, and that kept him alive. Nifty, eh? Wait until they get to all that primal symbolism jazz about Freddy dying by fire and Jason by water. But don’t worry, if Jung’s not your bag there’s plenty of considerably less intellectual stuff around the corner.

In another smart move which acknowledges the sizeable gap between movies, it transpires that the elders of Springwood have long since gotten wise to the nature of Krueger’s power; they’ve supressed his legend through strong-armed censorship, plus the strategic ferreting out of undesirables who are then reprogrammed via illegal pharmaceutical means. (Yep, authority figures infringing on civil liberties, for the people’s own good… and this was only 2003.) The illegal drug in question is Hypnocil; yes, Freddy fans, that’s the dream suppressant prescribed to the kids in Part 3. The ‘crazy’ kids of FvJ are even in the same institution – Westin Hills. (References to widely acknowledged best sequel = instant fan credibility.) So, trapped on the other side, how can Freddy get back in the game? By spreading the fear once again – and who better to do that than the mindless, machete-swinging meathead of the apparently-nearby rural community Crystal Lake. Working his dream mojo on the slumbering indestructible hulk, Freddy sends Jason off to Springwood to wreak havoc.

Of course, there may have been trouble in paradise for some fans already, for – as that synopsis alone indicates – there would seem to be a definite narrative bias in favour of Freddy. Is this because it’s a New Line production, and Freddy was their baby, whilst Jason was merely their disadvantaged foster child? Perhaps. Or it might just be because, comparatively speaking, there isn’t really all that much you can do with Jason. As iconic as the two characters are, and as much as they do compliment one another, they’re pretty far removed in their overall approach, what with Jason being a silent, plodding, mindless killer, and Freddy being the scheming, wisecracking supervillain. Having Freddy manipulate Jason via his dreams was an entirely sensible move; more curious is how this approach tends to promote Jason as a figure of sympathy. Sure, it makes sense that we might feel sorry for him, given the hand he was dealt; disfigurement, social rejection, drowning, domineering mother who wound up getting decapitated. The fact that he died a child whilst Freddy is a child killer provides yet another parallel between the characters; in fact, if I’ve read correctly an earlier script had Freddy actually being one of the camp counsellors who let him drown, and may also have molested him. Still, Jason’s victim card can’t be played too heavily, given this movie sees him rack up one of his highest body counts: at least twenty-two, including Freddy at the climax (though, of course, neither of them can really be said to have died), and Odessa Munroe’s skinny dipper, who turns out to be a part of Jason’s own dream.

Ah yes, the opening scene skinny dip… okay, technically it’s not the first scene in the movie, given the Freddy-centric prologue, but for the moment that kick-starts the narrative to give us nudity almost automatically; if ever there was a clear declaration of intent made in a horror movie, it’s that. Tawdry and obvious? Absolutely, and that’s exactly the point. One thing we have to bear in mind is, when Freddy vs. Jason arrived in 2003, horror was in a rather strange place. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say it was facing a potentially greater threat than the Hays Code, the Video Recordings Act and the PMRC put together. Yes, horror was in grave danger of becoming… whisper it… respectable. The huge success of The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense, along with awards nods aplenty for the latter, resulted in both a mainstream popularity and a highbrow acceptance that the genre arguably hadn’t known for some time, with the ‘less is more’ sensibility catching on like wildfire; the rise of J-horror also played no small part in that.

The real joy of Freddy vs Jason, then, is how it cast all that aside and went back to the time-honoured 80s approach of showing everything, and often. I daresay it was almost certainly the goriest mainstream studio movie ever released at the time (though Final Destination 2 made a good stab at it earlier that year, and Kill Bill Vol. 1 probably outdid it two months later). Bodies folded in half, heads splattered, chest cavities gushing like hosepipes, chunks of flesh flying left and right – is it any wonder audiences whooped and cheered? Furthermore, is it any wonder how receptive the studios were toward graphic gore in the years that followed (coughtorturepornahem)?

The movie’s really alive when the arterial spray hits the screen. And in the two scenes when Freddy and Jason finally do battle – the last twenty minutes in particular… my face still aches just remembering how hard I smiled on first viewing. The Hong Kong style that director Ronny Yu brings fits the action like a knife-laden glove; the way it all builds from a high energy wrestling-esque spectacle, into almost a live-action Tom and Jerry as they swing on chains and pelt one another with lethal implements from on high. Then how it finally devolves into a relentlessly bloody blade-augmented no holds barred brawl, the two slasher icons gradually taking each other apart piece by piece, literally… all that’s missing is Freddy saying “you didn’t get me down, Jason.” Truly, it’s the stuff of every 80s horror child’s dreams.

But that’s when the movie is on form. Now for the rest of it, starting with… the teen ensemble. Oh, sweet lord, the teen ensemble.

Now, allow me to say in opening on this – I do not by any means hate any of these actors. Some of them, indeed, I actively admire: Katharine Isabelle, obviously (more on whom later); Monica Keena I quite enjoyed in the Night of the Demons remake (yes, I do mean for her acting, not just her torso); I dug Christopher Marquette in Fanboys; and Brendan Fletcher actually gives a really pretty good performance here, being blessed with one of the better roles as the sardonic Westin Hills inmate Mark. However, put them all together, give them that script, and throw in a few very, very weak links, and you wind up with – no word of exaggeration – the single most annoying bunch of teens in the history of both the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises. Yes, I’m well aware that’s saying a hell of a lot. This gang really is that bad. And the lion’s share of the blame has to fall on writers Damien Shannon and Mark Swift (with a side order of shame for uncredited script doctor David Goyer). The script emphasises this unengaging, largely unsympathetic pack of fucktards, fleshing out tedious subplot after tedious subplot, filling their mouths with horrendously overwritten dialogue – and all at the expense of the title characters, who wind up supporting players in their own damn film.

Like I say, I don’t hold all the actors entirely at fault; the ones I mentioned beforehand are doing what they can to make it work. But seriously, what were they thinking with Kyle Labine (incidentally, brother of Tyler Labine from Tucker and Dale versus Evil)? If they wanted Jason Mewes, why not just get Jason Mewes? And Jason Ritter… just no. He’s just too feeble, he doesn’t remotely convince as would-be romantic hero Will. But those guys are Sir Laurence Fucking Olivier by comparison with the worst, most annoying performer in the ensemble, giving almost certainly the single least likeable performance in the history of the Freddy and Jason movies… Kelly Fucking Rowland. Jesus Tittyfucking Christ, it’s like nails on a chalkboard every time she opens her mouth. Maybe they thought making her alternately utter “fuck” and “y’all” every other word would make her seem – I dunno – real. All it succeeds in doing is making her really, really, unbelievably annoying and impossible to care about. And yes, that is a problem. Sure, some characters in slashers are deliberately annoying so we’ll get some joy out of seeing them killed, but that isn’t how they play it here. We’re supposed to care who makes it out of there alive in the final reel, when in fact all we want to do is see them get the fuck out of the way so we can concentrate on messrs. Voorhees and Krueger battering the bejesus out of one another. Subsequently, when Rowland meets her inevitable demise, it just feels like an afterthought.

All this being the case, Katharine Isabelle kind of lucked out by getting killed off early…

And this is where it gets a bit ugly, as while I may look back on Freddy vs. Jason with much fondness, it’s hard to imagine Katharine Isabelle does, and it’s hard not to remark that the film probably didn’t do her career any big favours. When I got to meet Ms Isabelle in Sheffield on the American Mary UK tour early this year, I opted not to broach the subject of Freddy vs. Jason as much for expediency as anything else, but one remark she made in the post-screening Q&A did stand out to me. Asked whether she feared typecasting in bad girl roles, she replied (and I’m going from memory here, so I apologise if I’m paraphrasing) “good girls are boring twats.” If we’re in an unforgiving mood, that would seem a fairly apt description of Lori, Freddy vs. Jason’s final girl played by Monica Keena – and, up until quite late in the day, the role Katharine Isabelle was supposed to be playing.

In the wake of Ginger Snaps, Isabelle was shit-hot, hence New Line wanted her heading up their horror flagship. However, somewhere down the line it was decided she would be a better fit for the bad girl Gibb, and so that was the part she wound up playing, without any real choice in the matter. This also meant she was suddenly expected to do a nude scene; something she remains unwilling to do to this day, and why the hell not. Naturally she refused, hence a body double appears from a weird bird’s-eye view angle in the obligatory gratuitous (not a contradiction in terms here) shower scene. But her refusal to bend to the will of her superiors surely didn’t go unnoticed, not to mention how openly she spoke about her treatment and her overall disappointment with the film not long thereafter. Keeping in mind it was so soon after Ginger Snaps, in which Isabelle did such fantastic work with such a meaty role, it’s hard not to feel a bit pained watching her go through the motions in a fairly thankless slasher victim part. Even so, her comedic gifts do shine through here and there; take her wonderfully OTT reaction to the first bed-folding murder.

Nor was that the only casting controversy, given long-running Jason actor Kane Hodder was dumped for Ken Kirzinger, and the original Mrs. Voorhees Betsy Palmer declined to return after New Line refused to pay her above basic SAG minimum; not the best deal for someone who played a major role in launching the Friday the 13th franchise. If I’m not mistaken, Jason Ritter was also a late substitution for Brad Renfro, owing surely to the drug problems which would sadly end the young actor’s life not long thereafter.

Put all these problems to one side, though, and Freddy vs. Jason remains a very enjoyable film; I’d rank it in my personal top five of both the Friday and Nightmare franchises. I’d also argue that it’s a pivotal movie in modern horror – for better or worse. First off, along with Alien vs. Predator the next year, it brought back crossover movies – and you just know someone at Marvel was sitting up and taking notice. On top of which, it brought back tits and gore in a big way, demonstrating that explicit was the way to go, and thereby paving the way for the torture movies. Also, it closed the book on the two behemoth 80s horror franchises (both of which were rebooted in the years ahead). Yet in doing so – and making big money in the process, more than recouping its $30 million budget almost overnight – it also demonstrated, hand in hand with that fucking Platinum Dunes Texas Chainsaw remake, how easily new takes on the horror movies of yesteryear could be sold to a modern audience. Freddy vs. Jason might have been, in its own way, bold, risky, and even experimental for a mainstream movie, but it played a part in ushering in the nauseatingly risk-averse, lowest common denominator-friendly horror remake boom, from which we’re still struggling to escape the fallout a decade on. And that’s just from one movie; imagine what might have happened had Sam Raimi let them make Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash next, and/or if Dimension had managed to get their hastily-planned Pinhead vs. Michael Myers movie off the ground…

But once again, while there’s plenty we can criticise Freddy vs. Jason for, there can’t be many horror fans who lived through the 1980s that don’t still get just a little bit of a buzz from the mere idea of the two greatest killers of the era having a fight. It may be childish, it may be dumb, and maybe we should know better than to enjoy it; but we can say that about of a hell of a lot of horror, can’t we? And would we really want it any other way…?

By Tristan Bishop

Picture the scene – a cinema in a seaside town. The year is 1998, and you are in the audience for a midnight showing of a film which has been virtually unavailable for the best part of 20 years. You’ve heard about this film, of course – the entire audience has. Most of what you have heard is hearsay, rumour, but that doesn’t matter – this is the stuff of legend. You’ve perhaps heard that the film was banned in the UK, forbidden by the Catholic Church. Perhaps you’ve heard reports of the hysteria that accompanied the original screenings – fainting, vomiting, people being rushed to hospital. Of course you want to see this – the film’s reputation as forbidden fruit precedes it. This is a midnight showing, and it’s sold-out, the audience visibly and audibly excited, ready to be scared within an inch of their lives.

But something unexpected happens. The audience quickly realise they are watching a film that is 25 years old. A film from the 70s – this audience is young, mostly in their early twenties, this isn’t for them – they laugh at the fashions, the hairstyles, the dialogue, and the effects. They came expecting shrieking terror, instead they got history.

It’s understandable, of course. Your average cinema-goer isn’t all that interested in film history, or placing a work in context, and there’s no reason that they should – they go for entertainment. But in the case of The Exorcist (as with most films from 20 or more years ago) a bit of background can really help.

We can really start in 1967, the Summer of Love. Hippie counter-culture was making waves across the globe, a whole generation was turning on, tuning in and dropping out, celebrating peace and love and togetherness. Of course, it didn’t last long – by the early days of 1970 the dream was over, killed off by Altamont, Vietnam and hard drugs, but the seeds of destruction had always been there – at the height of the hippie bloom an increased interest in occult and hermetic knowledge had resulted in a public which was more terrified than ever by the perceived threat of evil. The devil was waiting outside the door, and perhaps people were interested in inviting him in.

It was then that, alongside the incredibly prolific Dennis Wheatley, that a book by Ira Levine, entitled Rosemary’s Baby, became a massive success (selling over 4 million copies that year alone). As usual with a successful work of fiction, it was brought to the screen – the ever-canny William Castle purchasing the rights even before publication, and with his courting of Roman Polanski (at that time the darling of the arthouse crowd) as director, the film had a massive impact, a thrilling injection of real darkness at a time when horror films, still perceived as kiddie material, were still trying to claw themselves out of the 1950s. It’s no accident that Night Of The Living Dead was also released in 1968, a year zero for the ‘modern’ horror film.

Flash forward to 1971 now, and writer William Peter Blatty, already with 12 years of published writing under his belt, penned The Exorcist – based on a ‘real life’ case from 1949. Blatty changed the sex of the possessed child as the real case was a young boy, and amongst the expected artistic embellishments he added a prologue with Father Merrin, one of the main characters, uncovering a statue of the demon Pazuzu himself in Iraq. Interestingly enough, Merrin was based on General Lankaster Harding (Merrin’s first name is Lankaster), an archaeologist involved in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, who was an acquaintance of Blatty’s.

The book was a huge hit, and of course was immediately optioned for a major film, with Blatty adapting it from his own novel. Unfortunately the production was not an easy one – and the producers approached Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, Mike Nichols, Mark Rydell, John Boorman, and even Stanley Kubrick to direct – all of whom turned it down because of the material or the challenge of working on a film hinging on the performance of a child. Boorman even went so far as to accuse the script of ‘cruelty to children’, although one wonders if he may have regretted this decision, as he went on to direct Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Eventually the job went to William Friedkin. Blatty had been a big fan of The French Connection (1971), citing the energy of that film as the reason he pushed for Friedkin to be onboard. Casting was equally difficult, with both Jack Nicholson and Stacy Keach considered for the role of Father Karras before the role eventually went to Jason Miller, after Friedkin spotted him in a play. The director also vetoed Marlon Brando for the role of Merrin, fearing his star power too great, and instead cast Max Von Sydow, best known then for his roles in Bergman dramas. The casting of the young girl Regan was equally fraught, but eventually went to the relatively unknown Linda Blair. With the cast and crew finally assembled, work began in earnest. The production was originally scheduled to last for 85 days, but, due mostly to Friedkin’s perfectionism and ‘unusual’ methods, ended up as 224.

The stories around the making of the film are legendary, from on-set fires causing the main sets to be rebuilt, to Linda Blair and Ellen Burstyn both being injured after being pulled too hard in harnesses. Burstyn’s real screams of pain are left in the film (the scene where she is slapped by Regan), but Friedkin went even further to maximise his cast’s discomfort – he slapped Reverend Williiam O’Malley across the face before an emotional scene, let off a gun on set to unnerve Jason Miller, and even built the bedroom set inside a giant freezer so that the actor’s breath could be seen onscreen (an effect much easier to produce in these days of CGI!). The uneasy atmosphere caused by these occurrences lead many of the crew to believe the film itself was cursed, and indeed Jack MacGowran, who played Burke Dennings, died before the film was completed. Legend has it that the set was blessed by priests several times during production.

These were not the only techniques that Friedkin used. He hired veteran radio actor Mercedes McCambridge (previously seen in Jess Franco’s women-in-prison ‘classic’ 99 Women) to voice Pazuzu, his original technique of manipulating Linda Blair’s voice deemed not dramatic enough; this was a masterstroke, as the voice sounds genderless but powerful and threatening. He also pioneered the use of mixing layers of sound (apparently including slaughterhouse footage) to create unease, and, most controversially, the use of ‘subliminal’ images, such as the now-famous ‘face of Pazuzu’ scattered throughout the film.

Fittingly for a film so steeped in Christian lore, the film was released on Boxing Day 1973, and drew some extremely mixed criticism from the mainstream press. Stanley Kauffmann, Gene Siskel and Variety magazine all heaped praise upon it, whilst The New York Times called it ‘practically impossible to sit through’. My favourite piece of negative criticism comes from Jon Landau in Rolling Stone however – “nothing more than a religious porn film – The gaudiest piece of schlock this side of Cecil B DeMille”.

The mixed notices did little to harm the film however, with $66 million dollars in revenue for the original domestic release making it the second biggest grossing box office that year, next to The Sting (which, ironically, has become increasingly forgotten over the years). This was helped of course by reports of people fainting during the film, and ambulances being on standby outside theatres, although how much of this is truth and how much clever publicity has been difficult to gauge over the years.

With that success came, of course, came the imitators. The devil was out in force, and, as always, the Italians were first to jump on the bandwagon, releasing Beyond The Door in 1974, followed by a figurative projectile-vomit of Exorcist clones, such as The Antichrist, Eerie Midnight Horror Show and The House Of Exorcism (actually a hatchet-job on Mario Bava’s surreal and creepy Lisa And The Devil, re-edited and with added ‘Exorcism’ scenes). Blaxploitation take-off Abby also turned up in 1974, and was quickly buried under litigation from Warner Bros, although it’s worth watching for the only ‘disco exorcism’ on film. Even the Turkish got on board with Seytan (also 1974), an oddly Islamic slant on a very Christian idea. The Exorcist even paved the way for the equally successful devil movie the Omen (1976) and attendant sequels.

There were official sequels too, although each appeared only after long gaps of time. First came Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1979, directed by the aforementioned John Boorman, which is an unholy, occasionally hilarious mess of a film, and not recommended unless you want to watch Richard Burton hitting rock bottom. The Exorcist 3 (1990) was much better – Blatty took the directorial reigns on this one and proved himself the right man for the job, using brave cinematic techniques such as uninterrupted long shots to heighten the sense of unease. Unfortunately in 2004 the usually excellent Paul Schrader made a prequel entitled Dominion, which studio execs hated. Though completed, his project was shelved, and Renny Harlin (of all people!) was brought in to make a more commercial prospect entitled Exorcist: the Beginning, which, predictably, was universally panned. The studio eventually gave in to public pressure and released Schrader’s version of the film. Unfortunately this also went down like a lead balloon, despite having the slight artistic edge.

Contrary to popular misconception The Exorcist was never banned in the UK. There were protests by the Christian group The Festival Of Light, who also objected to such enduring works as The Devils and Straw Dogs, but it was released – surprisingly uncut – with an X certificate by the BBFC. Stephen Murphy of the BBFC was quoted at the time as saying “It is a powerful horror movie. Some people may dislike it, but that is not a sufficient reason for refusing certification” (a rare example of the pre-2000 BBFC making an informed, balanced decision there!)

Much of the film’s ‘banned’ legend status instead came with the advent of home video and the subsequent ‘video nasties’ debacle. The film was briefly available in the lawless early days of home video, but after moral panic set in Warner Bros decided not to resubmit it for video classification. It’s probably testament to the power and reception of the film on release that the general public assumed a ban had occurred. However, the UK cinema re-release at the end of the 20th century proved that there was money to be made, and then finally we could see the film in the comfort of our own homes.

So, there are few horror films with such convoluted history and production as the Exorcist. In many ways it can be seen as the victim of its own hype, success, and, for some time, unavailability, with scenes like those at the start of this article played out on its re-release across the UK. However, Friedkin’s film stands on its own merits, as a well-made, visceral shocker, and remains the benchmark against which the devil’s works are judged.

By Oliver Longden

Clowns; the number one entertainment career of choice for serial killers, potential serial killers and people who just hate children. Whether you’re afraid of clowns like many normal people or sexually attracted to them as I am, there’s no mistaking the fact that a clown in its natural environment is about as funny as a long weekend with Michael Gove whispering right wing nothings in your ear while he gently spoons you in an uncomfortably small bunk bed. When professional clown John Wayne Gacy turned out to have a nasty habit of raping and murdering children it didn’t come as a surprise so much as a confirmation of everything people always suspected about the greasepaint and confetti brigade. Clowns are and always have been fucking horrifying.

The clowns in Killer Klowns from Outer Space aren’t all that scary when compared to the Joker, the clown from IT, Patch Adams and every single real life clown you’ve ever seen. Unlike real world clowns (and Patch Adams) they are actually quite funny. The Killer Klowns of the title are aliens who have come down to Earth in a space ship shaped like a big top and go on a circus themed rampage across small town America. Along the way there are horrific parodies of all manner of traditional clown acts, from the tiny clown car to the old custard pie to the kisser. A small group of misfits struggles to fight against the clowns whilst waving their arms about and delivering performances I might charitably describe as extremely enthusiastic.

Killer Klowns is a good time movie that only occasionally tries to be a horror film. It has become a cult classic in the 25 years since it was released simply because it feels a lot like a movie about murderous space clowns ought to feel. If you spent five minutes sketching out the sort of things you might expect to find in a film about psychotic clowns from space the chances are you’d come up with at least half the things that are in Killer Klowns from Outer Space. This is a film that’s on the same wavelength as its audience. It’s a movie that wants you to relax, have a few beers, have a few more beers and finish that bottle of Pernod some weirdo abandoned at your last party. You’re here to have fun and fun will be provided. It might make you cringe on occasion but that’s all part of the raucous cacophony of hoopla that is Killer Klowns from Outer Space. It helps that the film starts out on a strong footing with a bouncy title track written by goofy LA punks The Dickies. It’s enormously infectious and really sets the tone of the film nicely.

The directors and writers of Killer Klowns, the Chiodo brothers are more famously known as special effects people being responsible for the creature design of Critters (surely about twenty minutes work with a tribble and some false teeth) as well as working on Team America: World Police with Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Their background shows; the special effects are a masterclass in doing a little with even less, pure joy to a relentless CGI hating luddite like myself. The performances range from hammy to downright ludicrous which fits the material like a glove. There’s a particularly nice turn from perennial film arsehole John Vernon (Dirty Harry, Animal House) playing the town’s ridiculously angry sheriff. It’s a character who would be wildly unbelievable were he not being played by John Vernon, a man who could have played Lassie in a way that made people want to punch her right in her stupid dog face. There aren’t too many other names you’re likely to recognise although there are some faces that might be hauntingly familiar from minor roles in the background of television shows like CSI Miami.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space is not a film that deserves to be remembered because it is particularly influential. It’s not well acted or well directed, and the special effects aren’t even particularly good. The design of the Klowns themselves aren’t all that impressive and the sets towards the end of the film are little more than cardboard shapes on a black sound stage that evoke the weird impressionist non-sets in the third series of the 1960s Batman. The film comes from a long line of light-hearted B-movie shockers like The Ape Man and Bucket of Blood that trade more on chutzpah than technical sophistication. It’s just one of those low budget films that simply works because it isn’t trying too hard. In a world where Michael Bay feels it necessary to bore the shit out an audience for more than two and half hours to tell the story of some robots who really want to punch some other robots, films like Killer Klowns from Outer Space are starting to feel like lost classics. Killer Klowns from Outer Space land on Earth, fuck shit up, the end. What’s not to like?

By Ben Bussey

Warning: spoilers, sideboob and man-ass ahead…

‘Sex sells.’ The old maxim has always rung true, and no doubt always will. However, back in the 1990s that time-honoured notion was taken to an altogether different level. The major movie studios had not yet developed that obsession with making everything PG-13/12A rated, so a great many of the decade’s biggest hits carried restrictive ratings, and in many cases these ratings were to do with sexual content. Quite why this was, who can say; no doubt there’s an argument in there that a certain President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky might have had something to do with it. Either way, this was the decade that saw Sharon Stone become one of the biggest stars in the world on the back of her leg-crossing, Michael Douglas-straddling turn in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, the massive box office success of which sparked a slew of similarly sweaty mainstream movies like Sliver, Body of Evidence, Disclosure and so on.

But, by the mid-90s, the age of the ‘erotic’ blockbuster seemed to be already drawing to a close. It was all too easy to mock the absurdity of the movies, and the narcissism of the stars; this was around the time when Dennis Pennis prompted TV viewers to piss themselves with laughter by asking Demi Moore whether, if it was not gratuitous and tastefully done, she would consider keeping her clothes on in a movie. Following the one-two punch of the much-derided Showgirls (1995) and Striptease (1996), Hollywood began to shy away from softcore, leaving it to crawl back to the direct-to-video market with the likes of the Poison Ivy series. Sure, Kubrick’s swansong Eyes Wide Shut came in 1999, which had at least a hint of mass appeal thanks to the presence of the not-yet-divorced Cruise and Kidman, but its art house alienation tactics never stood a chance of winning over a wider audience (and I’d wager we’ll be able to say much the same of Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac later this year). By my estimation, the real last gasp for 90s multiplex erotica came with the John McNaughton-directed film which hit UK cinemas on 15th May 1998. Not necessarily the kind of film we might have expected from the guy who made Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, it was a glossy, big budget thriller with a name cast, boasting a complex plot driven by multiple protagonists. It was also positively oozing with thick, hot sleaze from every pore on its leathery-suntanned skin.

The movie was Wild Things, and for a generation of hormonally charged adolescents (and many older viewers too no doubt), it made our hearts sing. Bad pun, I know. But this is the movie in which a short-shorts clad Denise Richards goes to Matt Dillon’s house to wash his car and asks him where his hose is, so forgive me for not being too concerned with subtlety or good taste here. Indeed, subtlety and taste were not all that high on Hollywood’s list of priorities in the 90s – if they never have been, really…

It all starts out like any story one might have seen recounted on Jerry Springer at the time. In the affluent Florida town of Blue Bay, scandal breaks out when respected school counsellor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is accused of rape by high school cheerleader Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards), daughter of the town’s richest and subsequently most powerful woman, Sandra Van Ryan (Theresa Russell). Whether or not he’s guilty, we don’t know; but it’s immediately apparent that, guilty or not, he’s screwed, given the filthy rich always have the best lawyers, and all he can afford is strip mall shyster Ken Bowden (Bill fuckin’ Murray). Things look even bleaker when a second schoolgirl, trailer trash tearaway Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell), comes forward and claims Lombardo raped her too. But of course, things are not quite as simple as they might initially seem, and it soon transpires there’s a twist in the tale. And then there’s a twist in that tale. And then a twist in that tale. And so it goes; but not content with getting very twisty-turny, Wild Things is also keen to get naughty… real freaky-naughty…

It is interesting to note how mainstream representations of sex have changed since the 90s. After almost a decade of non-stop horror remakes and torture films, violence in mainstream cinema has almost certainly grown more extreme, whereas sex has been brushed to the side somewhat. If we look at the sauciest mainstream films of recent years, more often than not they tend to be comedies – the ‘Frat Pack’/Apatow films, the Hangovers and so forth – wherein the desires, fetishes and hang-ups of the characters are typically the source of the humour. Failing that, it might be the in-your-face aggressive sexuality showcased in Spring Breakers and Piranha 3D, which ultimately leads the characters into a world of hurt. In short, nowadays we seem happy to point and laugh at the sex drive, or see people punished for acting on it. So few mainstream movies nowadays are comfortable wading deep into sex and simply revelling in it, unrepentantly, with no ironic detachment or underlying morality. Wild Things does this with the best of them. It’s out-and-out sleazy and doesn’t care who knows it, and that’s the principle reason it’s so much fun.

From the very beginning this film makes no bones whatsoever about being an in-your-face raunch-fest, with its persistent droning saxophones on the soundtrack, scantily clad cast forever glistening with sweat, and constant sexual references in almost every dialogue exchange. The subject is on everyone’s minds from start to finish, young and old alike; the high school girls lust openly after their hunky guidance counsellor, while he quietly lusts after them back; the detectives investigating the case are often little more than legally protected Peeping Toms. Every conversation invariably comes around, sooner or later, to the subject of who the people in question are fucking, and/or who they were fucking, and/or who they’d like to be fucking, and in the few instances in which the subject is not broached directly there’s either an innuendo or a blunt vulgarity to fill the void. To use an suitable innuendo of my own, there’s very little beating around the proverbial bush here. Hell, the very first words we hear out of Denise Richards’ perpetually pouty lips are “fuck off.”

Watching the opening titles and looking at the poster art above, it seems strange now that Denise Richards doesn’t get her name above the title. Wild Things was sold most heavily on her presence at the time, and it’s remembered best for it since. And yes, when I say ‘her presence’ I do of course mean her breasts. There’s barely a moment she appears onscreen without the camera slowly, almost imperceptibly dipping and drawing in to perv on her shapely form. All this in spite of the fact that, really, her actual nude scenes are quite brief. Factor in the absence of any nudity from Neve Campbell, and despite the overall tone of pure sleaze, Wild Things is in fact not a very explicit film at all. Few seem to remember that the film’s most full-on sex scene occurs quite early on, and involves Theresa Russell’s iron-fisted matriarch. The notorious, pivotal ménage à trois scene is in truth pretty tame, fading to black before they really get to business without that much skin on show beforehand; likewise Richards and Campbell’s Dillon-less love scene later. Contrast these with the lengthy, comparatively unflinching mattress mambo sequences in Basic Instinct and Body of Evidence, and Wild Things isn’t really much to write home about. But this was 1998. The internet hadn’t really taken off yet, and as such hardcore pornography had not yet achieved the omnipresence it now knows. Subsequently, for a mainstream movie to showcase a threesome – even a brief, inexplicit and, it must be said, rather awkward and unnatural one – was a considerably bigger deal than it might necessarily be today.

True story: one of my housemates at university had a VHS copy of Wild Things which, whenever I borrowed it, was perpetually stopped at this point in the tape. Not that I had borrowed the tape to, ahem, review that specific scene myself or anything…

One of the most important things to note about Wild Things, however, is its sincerity. It is this quality above all else that makes it a considerably more genuine piece of exploitation than the vast majority of the oh-so-knowing pseudo-exploitation/grindhouse we see so much of these days (not that I want to start rabbiting on about that again). The plot gets tangled up in twist after twist, and everything gets increasingly ridiculous as the running time drags on – at almost two hours, Wild Things is undeniably a little overlong – yet for the duration it is played almost entirely straight. Sure, they’re having some fun with it, but crucially they’re never making fun of it; not even Bill Murray, who, though cast primarily as the comic relief, plays his big courtroom drama scene straight enough to do Matlock proud.

However, no one comes off as taking it quite so seriously as Neve Campbell. As we’ve seen since the Scream series ended (I don’t count that fourth instalment – hell, I’d rather not count the third either), over the years she has retreated increasingly to smaller, more dramatic indie fare than the sort of mainstream stuff in which she made her name. Taking the comparatively edgy role of bisexual bad girl Suzie would seem to be intended as a step in that direction. But here’s the thing… Neve Campbell is awful in Wild Things. She really is. I hadn’t realised quite how bad she is in this film until revisiting it for this article. Every gesture, every movement, every attempt at a little quirk, the way she lifts her fist whenever threatened as though it’s her instinctive reaction – all of it comes off so painfully forced, it’s laughable. All that considered, it’s no surprise she looks even more uncomfortable in the pervy bits. However, the other thing is – for exploitation, that’s perfect. Historically, those appearing in exploitation films weren’t playing it for laughs the way most do today; there was no irony involved at all. They weren’t even conscious that what they were making was exploitation. They wanted to be taken seriously, and subsequently gave serious performances, and the fact that they failed miserably – hey presto, instant paracinema. So it is with Wild Things. But we can at least say that nothing Campbell does here is anywhere near as unconvincing as her English accent in The Glass Man. (Not that many people are likely to have seen that, as it still hasn’t had a wide release. To be honest, you’re not missing that much.)

Still, disregarding any concerns about how natural any of it is or how much celebrity skin is shown, Wild Things ensures that fans of hot lesbo action get their money’s worth. One area where the film does undeniably wimp out, however, is the relationship between Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon’s characters. The big final revelation (wait, I’m wrong, I think there are at least two more revelations afterwards, it’s hard to keep up) that Lombardo and Detective Duquette are in fact in cahoots is easily the least credible of all the twists; unless, heaven forbid, the two of them might be into one another as well. Let’s face it, as soon as Dillon opens the shower door to be confronted with Bacon’s bacon (I know, I’m not the first and won’t be the last to make that joke), surely the first thing that crosses every viewer’s mind is that they must be lovers, particularly given that bisexuality and polyamory are central themes in the movie. That Wild Things stops short of showing this clearly indicates prejudices that still endure in popular culture: everyone likes a bit of girl-on-girl, but it’s no-way-José when it comes to guy-on-guy. Sad to say, I’m not sure things would be any different if they made the film today, even with the unflinching portrayal of gay sex on TV in the likes of True Blood and Game of Thrones. Let’s not forget, Brokeback Mountain might have got Ang Lee his first Oscar, but they wouldn’t let it have Best Picture. Not that Wild Things ever stood too great a chance of that particular accolade either, sad to say…

(Yes, I told you there’d be man-ass. If this bothers you, be aware that I could just as easily have posted a screenshot of Kevin Bacon’s cock from a few seconds later.)

So, was Wild Things the end of an era for the Hollywood sex film? Perhaps; perhaps not. Its overriding tone of unrepentant horniness may not be so prevalent in recent years, but its comparative under-emphasis on actual sex scenes and nudity might be seen as a precursor to the contemporary climate in which overtly sexual roles are frequently taken by actresses who refuse to appear naked on film (e.g. Jessica Alba in Sin City, Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed Me). We should probably also note that Wild Things inspired a couple of direct-to-DVD sequels; while I haven’t seen these and have no plans to, their very existence underlines how much more comfortable the studios are with relegating smuttier material to the less discerning, less prestigious home market. Given this climate, I can’t deny a begrudging curiosity in how things progress with the Fifty Shades of Grey movie: if, as the rumour mill suggests, Universal succeed in luring a hitherto respectable cast and director for the inevitably dirty movie, and they do indeed make it as unflinchingly kinky as planned, the ramifications are interesting for mainstream sex films in the years ahead. But regardless of whether we see the return of shameless voyeurism and unapologetic sexploitation in big budget films, let us be thankful for films like Wild Things, and remind ourselves that we needn’t always be so shy about admitting what turns us on that we have to gloss over it with excessive irony. After all, as someone far more learned than myself once said, you can’t have an ironic wank.

By Oliver Longden

It is fair to say that time has not been kind to The Leopard Man. 70 years after its release it looks hokey, unevenly acted and has a twist ending that looms like a Titanic-sinking iceberg over the second half of the movie. Yet despite its flaws, or perhaps because the distance of history now lets us see them as historical curiosities, The Leopard Man retains a certain primitive power.

The Leopard Man is one of three films directed by Jacques Tourneur for creative producer Val Lewton at RKO pictures which are considered minor masterpieces of the B-movie form. The other two, Cat People and I Walked with Zombie (which also recently reached its 70th anniversary) are generally held to be superior to The Leopard Man, and it’s certainly fair to say that they have aged better than this movie. The Leopard Man concerns a leopard which escapes from captivity during a botched publicity stunt and a rash of murders which follow. They are thought to be the work of the escaped beast but Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe), the promoter torn with guilt over his role in the failed publicity stunt, begins to suspect that other forces may be at work. He and his girlfriend, Kiki (Jean Brooks), the struggling cabaret entertainer who was with the leopard when it escaped, are sucked into the hunt for the animal. They are assisted in their attempt by Dr Galbraith, the man who runs the local museum in their New Mexico town. He takes on the role of all purpose man of science, a vital stock character in B-movie cinema.

The biggest weakness of The Leopard Man to modern eyes is that this a film ultimately about a serial killer, an antagonist supremely common in 21st century drama. Serial killers were little known in the 1940s and still less understood. Those of us raised on the real life crimes of John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein and Fred West or their fictional counterparts have much more experience with fictional depictions of deranged murderers than anyone in 1943. Serial killers have become one of our quintessential bogeymen and have been extensively studied by criminologists and forensic psychologists. We take it for granted that there are those who, through a combination of disposition and childhood trauma, kill for pleasure or to fill some void inside themselves. When we see these individuals on screen we have a narrative all mapped out for them (wildly inaccurate though that narrative might be). In the Leopard Man the killer is ultimately revealed to have been driven mad by the first killing, the only one actually committed by the leopard. It got into his head somehow and drove him to act out homicidal urges. It feels a strange, unsatisfying conclusion for the film to reach because we have our own internalised folk myth of how serial killers are made and we know, or think we know, that people do not just go mad and start killing people apropos of nothing. This sense of crudeness, of a narrative structure still in development drains the film of some of its impact.

Despite these weaknesses I enjoyed watching The Leopard Man. Tourneur’s direction is skilled and the film looks a lot better than it has any right to, considering how cheaply it was made. The film climaxes with a mysterious religious procession through the town which manages to be eerie and evocative despite mainly being heard rather than seen. The mournful song of the procession is a funeral dirge which concentrates the mind on death. It’s a very effective technique. The lighting during the climax is splendid with the heroine encouraging the murderer to turn out the lights, claiming he will be better able to see the parade through the window, but knowing all the time that the darkness will trigger his murderous impulses. The acting is fair to good and the dialogue has that marvellous B-movie charm where people bark exposition at each other in well-mannered staccato bursts. The scene where Jerry explains to Kiki that his poor upbringing has left him believing he needs to show a hard exterior to the world takes only fractionally longer to unfold on screen than the reading of this sentence.

The killings themselves are not particularly graphic, even by the standards of 1940s cinema. The camera is concerned with the set up to the murders, the darkness and the terror which precedes the final act of homicide. The first victim we hear rather than see, killed on the wrong side of her own front door while her domineering mother and her younger brother struggle to open it. The second is killed in a graveyard; we know her fate is sealed as soon as she goes in to meet secretly with a boyfriend, a fatal error in any murder narrative. The final victim is killed in the street in a short sequence with heavy overtones of Jack the Ripper. All three scenes are shot through with a fatalistic quality but enlivened through judicious use of the infamous Lewton Bus technique, an incredibly common horror trope whereby a sudden scare that interrupts a tense scene is revealed to be from an innocuous source (such as a passing bus). Now it seems hackneyed, although still very much in use. Back in 1943 when it was brand new, it must have ramped the tension up to unbearable levels.

Perhaps the best scenes in The Leopard Man are early on when we are still feeling our way through the plot and being tossed the odd red herring. It opens with Kiki in her dressing room preparing to go out, talking with one of the matchbox girls. There is tension early on between Kiki and Clo-Clo, a vibrant and passionate flamenco dancer who is the star attraction of the club whom Kiki is scheming to upstage. When the leopard escapes it initially feels like just another complicating factor in the lives of the characters rather than the key event which will shape the film. Clo-Clo, superbly played by enigmatically monikered Mexican actress Margo, is the most interesting character in the film. She instinctively plays with a set of castanets as she walks and has an almost constant sense of motion even when standing still. She has some of the best moments in the first half of the film, particularly in her interactions with a fortune teller friend. These interactions are pregnant with doom: the fortune teller keeps seeing the same card – the death card – in her readings, and this repeating motif inculcates a potent sense of unease into the early stages of the film before the bodies have started to pile up. They also cleverly raise the possibility of a supernatural element to the film; another red herring, but one which adds to the complexity of the narrative. The female cast and characters are noticeably stronger than the male in The Leopard Man and are unusually prominent in the action, especially early in the film. It’s depressing that this still stands out as unusual, even seventy years after the film was made. Male characters still get about 70% of the screen time in Hollywood.

It’s harder to recommend The Leopard Man as essential viewing than either Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie, both of which have more psychological depth, but it is a neat example of what a B-movie can be when it chafes at the edges of its remit and understands that horrible events have greater power when they cut through an existing narrative. It’s also an interesting attempt to deal realistically with serial killers before they became the unstoppable pop culture phenomenon currently infesting every screen in sight.

By Oliver Longden

April 2013 marks 70 years of Jack Tourneur’s psychological horror film I Walked With a Zombie. Underneath the layers of 1940s reserve and casual racism, there’s quite a charming little movie that probably deserves to be better remembered. Back in 1943, zombies weren’t the horde of shambling undead cannibals we know today: they were the product of voodoo magic, and rather than representing a distorted mirror to our own consumer culture as our current crop of zombies do, they sprang from a deep rooted fear of Afro-Caribbean culture. This earlier voodoo zombie has the primal fear of death about it but also has a concept of otherness; something not just dead, but foreign as well. It hints at powers that white men and women cannot access, and raises the possibility of the social order being reversed, of the voodoo priest becoming the master of white people instead of the other way around, something which would have a peculiar horror for white audiences in 1943. If these colonial anxieties seem quaint and distasteful today that’s because the world has moved on to a more explicitly post-colonial set of collective neuroses. I’m hopeful that one day zombies as a metaphor for mindless consumption will seem equally quaint to future critics.

In I Walked With a Zombie, a nurse named Betsy (played by Frances Dee) travels to the Caribbean to help look after Jessica, the wife of a plantation owner called Paul Holland (Tom Conway) who has been left profoundly mentally disabled after a serious injury. She finds her patient strange and unsettling, and at the same time finds herself drawn to the aloof master of the house. She meets his brother Wesley (James Ellison), a man on the verge of becoming an alcoholic, and Mrs Rand (Edith Barrett), the level-headed mother of family doctor. The family life is fractious and mystery surrounds the circumstances leading up to Jessica’s illness and her current state. As Betsy finds herself falling in love with Paul Holland, she decides to try and help cure his wife to make him happy. She hears that a local voodoo priest may be able to help Jessica and takes her to see him. She witnesses a voodoo ceremony but is shocked to find that Mrs Rand is involved in the voodoo rites. Gradually she begins to suspect Jessica may actually have died of her illness and been brought back as a zombie. In the final scenes Mrs Rand becomes hysterical and takes responsibility saying that she brought Jessica back. It is also revealed that Jessica was having an affair with her husband’s brother. The film ends in an orgy of melodrama with Wesley and Jessica dead and Betsy and Paul able to be together thanks to his wife’s final death.

The film never explicitly comes down on one side or the other on whether Jessica truly is a zombie, and this is one of the film’s great strengths, another being the performances of the supporting cast. While Tom Conway as the male lead is doing the classic distant unavailable thing that women in romance stories seem incapable of resisting, James Ellison is chewing the scenery as his unstable brother. Ellison’s performance reeks of danger and regret and it is clear to the audience that he is nursing some dark secret. Edith Barrett too is excellent; first appearing as the prim and proper woman of medicine it becomes steadily more obvious that she has been seduced by voodoo. Initially she takes a classic colonial line on voodoo, that she takes part in the ceremonies and uses the form of the religion to convince the local people to take their medicine, seeing it as a tool to help the ignorant savages. Over time it becomes clear that her relationship with voodoo is much more complex, that she has been sucked into using it as the local people use it.

There are some lovely set pieces in I Walked With A Zombie. The plot is foreshadowed when Betsy encounters a calypso singer outside a cafe who sings a song that hints of the dark secrets in the Holland family’s past. Calypso music had been introduced into the United States in the 1940s and here the singer (played by the brilliantly named Sir Lancelot) strikes a fine balance between the swinging rhythms of the music and the dark content of his song that makes the whole sequence surreal and unsettling. When Betsy decides to take Jessica to the voodoo priest there is a long sequence covering her approach to the houmfort where the voodoo worshippers gather. The journey is framed as a sequence of claustrophobic vignettes detailing the macabre experiences they have as they approach their destination. They walk through cane fields as dark and close as a forest and emerge to see a dead dog hanging from a tree. They pass strange voodoo accoutrements and have to pass the guard, a tall black man with staring eyes who may (or may not) be zombie himself. These sequences are shot on a sound stage rather than using externals which really adds to the sense of being trapped in an unfamiliar world. The voodoo sequences themselves are energetic and exciting all conducted to the wild beat of ritual drumming. Seeing the ladies throw themselves about and dance with the celebrant must have been shocking to 1940s eyes used to stultifying images of more decorous women.

If you strip away the voodoo and the colonial trappings, I Walked With a Zombie is a film about people going mad far away from home. It’s a film about how secrets and regrets can destroy a family and how superstition breeds in isolation. It’s a well made film, although not without its flaws. The lack of externals may add to the claustrophobia but it makes it very hard to believe in the island as a living, breathing place. It is a product of a more racist time and never regards the social iniquities displayed on screen as any kind of real problem. Betsy, the main protagonist is defined solely in terms of her relationship with men, cast as a lover to Paul and a kind of surrogate mother figure to his troubled brother. Despite these problems, this is a film with real psychological depth that artfully walks the tightrope between showing voodoo as real and showing it as base superstition. That we, the audience cannot say for certain whether voodoo is real or not allows us to better empathise with the characters grappling with that same issue. Finally, there is something refreshing about seeing a zombie movie that dates back to the old days before Romero redefined what it meant to be the walking dead.

By Kit Rathenar

John Carpenters Vampires (hereafter just “Vampires”, for simplicity’s sake) is a film I feel a little odd writing about. It’s a film that I absolutely love, but I’ve got the strangest feeling that if it could speak to me it would ask me “What the fuck are you doing here?” I don’t think it’s a film that I’m supposed to be the target market for. It’s definitely not, as it might itself point out if challenged, a chick movie. It’s also a movie that a lot of people have considered to be disposable, trashy, and deeply flawed. But regardless of the validity or not of such criticisms, I disagree wholeheartedly with anyone who thinks that this film isn’t worth seeing – or worth defending.

And at it’s simplest, that is because in Vampires, I honestly believe that John Carpenter – quite possibly, entirely unwittingly – made one of the last great vampire movies before the entire genre collapsed around our ears. For the last decade or two, we’ve been seeing the seemingly unstoppable rise of a new breed of vampire. They’re well-groomed, handsome, charismatic, and sometimes they even sparkle in sunlight. They’re portrayed as romantic heroes, tragic tortured souls, and profound and meaningful creatures. They also lose fights to high school students, can be led around by the dick by any woman with a couple of superpowers and/or an insecurity complex, and are generally a bunch of all-round pussywhipped losers. These monstrous alpha predators, these terrors of the night, have been watered down and objectified so far that I remember Waterstones at one point having an entire section titled simply “Lady and the Vamp”. While any given instantiation may have redeeming features, taken en masse I am very sick of the modern, romanticised vampire archetype.

In 1998, though, just as the common domesticated vampire was starting to become a mainstream phenomenon (cough Buffy the Vampire Slayer cough), John Carpenter decided to toss out a nice straightforward little action-horror movie based on a pulp novel called “Vampire$” by one John Steakley. I’ve read the novel, and in honesty, thought it was pretty lacklustre – fortunately, Carpenter played a bit fast and loose with it when he filmed it. And the result is something that, flawed or not, is still uniquely special: a movie with the aesthetics and soul of a Western, the heart of a hard-boiled action movie, and the blood of Dracula pounding molten in its veins.

The background narrative of Vampires is simple. In a world where vampires are incontrovertibly real, the Catholic church runs secret teams of vampire slayers – hard-case fighters who operate in units that have more in common with a military black ops or mercenary team than any gang of high-school cuties – to try and keep the bloodsuckers under control. When Vampires opens, the first thing we see is one of these teams, led by Jack Crow (expertly played by James Woods in classic badass mode) taking on a nest of vampire “goons”, the lowest-ranking and least powerful type of vampire in this setting. These men go in armed and armoured to the teeth, with a priest at their back and years of experience on their side, and they still look nervous. They take down nine goons and it takes them an entire, gruelling day. This is a universe where, for a trained professional with all the right equipment, killing even a basic, entry-level vampire requires cursing, sweating, scrapping, risking your life and losing your dignity every single time. And this, for my money, is as it should be. These vampires aren’t pinups or glamour models; they’re ugly, grimy, vicious and above all, dangerous. They present a threat that even the experts here take seriously.

And that’s before we even meet a so-called “master” vampire. To be precise, the first and most powerful of all master vampires: Jan Valek, a six-hundred-year-old fallen priest who was accidentally transformed into a vampire when the Church tried to exorcise him and screwed it up. Played magnificently by Thomas Ian Griffith (whose training as a martial artist clearly stood him in brilliant stead when trying to capture the inhuman blend of grace and savagery he brings to the role; and all of it without any CGI trickery to make him look superhuman either, he just DOES it), Valek for me is one of the final few of a dying fictional breed, the last of the great vampire lords. He’s as bestial as the least of his followers, snarling more often than he speaks, fighting and killing with an animalistic grace and wantonness that alienate him from any possible claim to true humanity; yet he’s also ferociously intelligent and self-aware, with ambitions and motivations of his own and a mockingly (and justifiably) superior demeanour when he does deign to interact with humans in any other context than an instantly fatal one. He is everything that a true vampire, at least to my mind, should be – something that repels and attracts in equal measure, at once higher and lower than human. A truly loathsome predator with no redeeming empathic qualities whatsoever, and yet simultaneously a thrilling glimpse of something so exotic in its limitless power that it can’t help but be seductive to any mere mortal who’s ever discontentedly asked themselves “Is this really all there is to life?” To add to his classical vampiric credentials, he’s got the traditional Eastern European origins (Czech, in his case, not Transylvanian, but that’s fine with me) and wanders around in elegant head-to-toe black including a huge velvet coat that somehow miraculously sheds all known forms of dust despite the fact that he goes around burying himself in sand with it still on. He speaks with a husky, rasping accent distorted by massive razor-sharp fangs, and has nails like claws that frequently hover breath-catchingly close to other people’s eyeballs, lips, and throats. Yes, I’ll admit it – I wouldn’t touch Edward Cullen with someone else’s bargepole, but Jan Valek could give me one glance and I’d do anything he asked me to. And I do mean anything.

Y’see, when writers try to deliberately romanticise vampires for a postulated female audience, they all too often do it by taking out most of the traits I like about the archetype in the first place. Thus, for me, the joy of Vampires – a movie made with the female gaze clearly the furthest thing from its mind – is that in overlooking me as a potential demographic, it’s actually given me exactly what I wanted from the start. I want my vampires as they’re portrayed in the old films and novels: terrifying, bloodthirsty, unpredictable, inhuman, and dominatingly powerful to the verge of being flat-out unstoppable. That’s the archetype I’ve been in love with since I was way too young to be watching movies like this, and I will forever be grateful to John Carpenter for taking that archetype and turning it up until the knob fell off, right before everyone else started getting it quite so terribly wrong.

But what makes me so convinced that Vampires wasn’t made with a female audience in mind? Mostly the fact that it’s one of the most unrelentingly testosterone-driven movies I’ve ever seen. There’s a universal surfeit of gravelly voices, weapon porn, marginalisation of female character roles (to the extent that LITERALLY every woman in the movie apart from the vampires is a hooker because that’s the capacity in which they were manoeuvred into the plot in the first place), and heartfelt male bonding exchanges with the appropriate leavening of violent scuffling. Like a good vintage Western or war movie, Vampires is permeated throughout with this combat-oriented, hypermasculine aura that allows it to get away with levels of intimacy between the male cast members that simply wouldn’t fly in a less stringently macho environment. One only has to look at Jack Crow’s relationship with his friend and only surviving teammate, Montoya (Daniel Baldwin, playing the role with a low-key yet sympathetic world-weariness). These two ultra-hardass characters, when interacting with each other, do everything but brush stray hair out of each other’s faces. Softened voices, affectionate asides, gentle touches, a near-telepathic ability to follow each other’s thoughts; and when they do quarrel, they’ll instantly join forces to get rid of anyone who dares to try and stop them before going straight back to their argument. They’re more married than most married couples I’ve ever seen while still both being portrayed as heterosexual, and while friendships like this are a revered tradition in “guys'” movies, it’s much harder to play them straight (if you’ll pardon the pun) in any movie that’s aimed outside of a very heteronormative and predominantly male audience. And while there is a male/female romance subplot in Vampires, that clearly isn’t consciously aimed at any passing women either because it’s neither sentimental, overt, nor superfluous to the main plot. The slow, painfully inevitable process by which Montoya falls for Katrina is all played out in a muted minor key, a plangent chord on a steel guitar rather than the sudden obnoxious blast of violins and accompanying bluebirds that it would’ve been if it was meant to placate a hypothetical viewer’s girlfriend. And once again, I love it all the more for that.

But even leaving aside this level of analysis, there’s so much more about this movie that I could praise. I love that it dips into the sinister, darkly glamorous mythology of movie-style Catholicism, and thereby underpins its storyline with just enough sense of history to give it some three-dimensionality. The idea that Valek has been hunting for six hundred years for the Black Cross of Berziers, with the goal of completing his own exorcism and transforming himself into a monster that can walk in sunlight, adds a sudden lurch of scale and perspective to the movie that makes it feel bigger and older and darker than it has any right to. Indeed, Carpenter handles the religious/supernatural element of Vampires with a smooth, unsqueamish assurance throughout, simply putting it in matter-of-factly whenever it needs to be there. The narrative never pauses for one of those aggravating “but surely this can’t really happen!” moments, and so the viewer’s disbelief remains comfortably suspended alongside that of the characters. And I love, too, that this straightforward portrayal of the supernatural sits alongside an equally straight-up handling of the more mundane elements. Everything here is simply what it is, take it or leave it: from the violence and gore and the scrambling desperation of combat, to the drunken sexual energy of a roadhouse party filled with fighters and whores, to the no-excuses-no-apologies way that the heroes will simply get the fuck on with what needs doing and never give up, never go down, never bottle out. This movie runs on blood, testosterone, desert light and pure human grit, and that makes it more beautiful and believable to me than any supposedly “relatable”, watered-down vampire flick could ever be.

It wouldn’t be fair to end this little writeup without mentioning that this movie scores hugely with me in two final areas: cinematography and soundtrack. The camerawork in Vampires is just to my tastes, being relaxed, smooth, and not obsessed with closeups in the middle of fight scenes. The recurring use of red filters to give the daylight scenes a dusty, bloodstained look is a beautifully evocative touch (and also, arguably, a trial run for the massive overkill of the same technique that Carpenter would employ a couple of years later in the much-maligned Ghosts of Mars). The soundtrack, meanwhile, is of Carpenter’s own scoring – I’ve always admired him as a composer as much as a director – and is loaded with Western and blues motifs, deep, languid bass grooves and mournful guitars, capturing the perfect blend of badassery and moody sentiment to fit the look and feel of the film. I can watch Vampires when I’m blind drunk with my brain completely switched off, and enjoy it as pure aesthetic and spectacle; I can watch it with my whole mind and heart engaged, and be as caught up in the excitement, action, and my affection for the characters as I was the first time I saw it. And I can go back to it every damn time I’ve been pissed off by yet another – to directly quote Jack Crow – pole-smoking fashion victim who’s just been offered up as the next big thing in vampire folklore, and remember why I loved vampires in general in the first damn place. If you ask me to list my top ten movies of all time, Vampires will always be in there. Heck, most of the time it’s in the top five.

So cheers, John Carpenter, from the girl at the back of the theatre who you probably didn’t even know you were making this film for. Thank you very, very much.