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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.

By Kit Rathenar

It’s amazing what ten years can do. Everyone knows Rob Zombie the movie director by now. While his cinematic career hasn’t been hugely prolific by some standards, he’s got several notable titles under his belt – including the remake of Halloween – and whatever critical opinion may say of his movies, nobody would dream, today, of questioning his place in horror cinema history. He’s there, and everyone’s cool with that. Any horror buff can tell you who Rob Zombie is. Yeah, House of 1000 Corpses was his first movie…

Stop right there. Back the truck up. House of 1000 Corpses was… Rob Zombie’s first movie. Let me take you back with me to 2003; where to me and my friends at the time, that simple statement meant the world. We were a bunch of metalheads in our early twenties who’d come through our student days to the strains of songs like “Dragula”, “Superbeast”, and “Living Dead Girl” – huge, thundering industrial-metal anthems, all gravel and gasoline and blood on chrome. The rest of the world didn’t give a damn about Rob Zombie back then, but we knew who he was. A peerless showman and performer, the carnival barker of the devil’s own sideshow with a voice that could peel your skin back and a gift for tapping into the currents of classic American horror on a level so deep that even us Brits felt like we got it. Rob Zombie KNEW America’s twisted, mythic heart, and he knew his vintage horror and video nasties like few others. He took the fear of a kid who knew the boogeyman was real, braided it with the excitement of a teenager watching their first classic slasher or Universal Studios original, spiced them with a touch of grindhouse grime and strip-joint sparkle, and gave us the results as songs that went in through our ears and down our spines without ever seeming to touch our brains. He was the metal scene’s version of that one uncle you were kinda scared of but always went to his house on Hallowe’en anyway, because he had the best decorations and the most candy of anyone in the neighbourhood. Rob Zombie was THAT guy.

So when the word got round that our Uncle Rob had been allowed to make a full-length movie? You can imagine how excited we were. We knew what this man was capable of. We’d seen his stage shows, his videos, the pop-culture nightmares in his liner notes; we’d heard his songs, we knew how his mind worked. The idea of this diabolic genius being let loose in a movie studio was enough to make us damn near cream ourselves. And most of all, this was something of OURS; something from our own rejected, despised, outsider subculture that seemed to spend most of its time being blamed for murders and suicides, getting loose in the (comparative, anyway) mainstream. It’s worth remembering at this point that House of 1000 Corpses had already been put on the shelf once in 2000 by Universal Pictures, who were afraid it would receive an NC-17 rating; Rob Zombie had to buy the rights himself and reshoot bits of it to give us the film that, in 2003, we finally got. I was and am very grateful that this film didn’t get watered down for Universal’s sensibilities, and the critical panning that it got at the time didn’t trouble or deter me or anyone else I knew. We weren’t expecting anything that came from our corner of the world to be embraced with open arms by the mainstream. We were metal fans. We already knew how it felt to be sideshow freaks.

And that, right there, is what gives House of 1000 Corpses its unique magic. It’s B-movie horror made BY a B-movie monster. Rob Zombie starts from the classic narrative of a redneck-killers, backwoods-horror, Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre style staple but his sympathies are with his villains from the start, and he turns the deranged killers of the Firefly clan into three-dimensional individuals with concerns, emotions and quirks all their own. Sid Haig’s Captain Spaulding is a grumpy but magnificent old badass with lot more smarts than anyone would expect of a man who runs a gas station while dressed as a clown. Bill Moseley’s Otis is a genius, an artist, and a psychopath – someone you really wouldn’t want to meet on a deserted highway, but he’s got a fearsome charm and a smile that’s given plenty of otherwise sensible women some very strange ideas. Sheri Moon’s Baby is aggravating yet adorable; two-thirds space cadet, one-third damaged doll, selfish, sadistic and vicious and yet also just an overgrown little girl who loves her mom. I really don’t understand why people find fault with Moon’s acting so often, because her performance here is pitch-perfect in my eyes. Meanwhile Karen Black’s Ma Firefly is every inch the perfect mother and lady of the house, kind to her children, welcoming to guests, loving and protective – the fact that her devoted family are murdering maniacs and the guests are destined for oblivion is beside the point. Their logic may be warped, their ideas of fun perverse, and their appetites murderous, but they are never cardboard cutout psychos. Indeed, the role of cardboard cutouts is instead – quite deliberately, I think – left to the four victims whose only job is to give the real (anti)heroes something to chew. Bill, Jerry, Denise and Mary are little more than cliched ciphers, with no futures and little past worth bringing up. The villains are the real characters with the real ongoing lives, even if they are cartoonishly over the top; more human than human, you might say, to borrow a phrase.

But then again, the whole of this film is larger than life, scripted in strict accordance with the Rule of Cool and shot through a lens of greasy psychedelia to capture that kid-in-a-carnival-funhouse sense that this is a world where anything can happen and probably will. Indeed, one thing that I hoped for from House of 1000 Corpses when I first saw it was a film where everything really would happen; one that would make good on the nameless, titillating promises on which so much horror of previous eras didn’t deliver. I was raised on HP Lovecraft, I know how easy it is to create horror by simply declaring the true heart of the abomination to be “unspeakable” and shunting it off-camera, and I’m fond of that technique even if it has been abused beyond all reason by a great many no-budget movies. I’m quite happy to accept that it’s my job as reader or viewer to make up the truly eye-popping details that an author or director is forced to skip over for the sake of good taste, moral responsibility, or FX limitations – indeed, many films that do try to speak of the unspeakable find that they simply can’t live up to the shapeless evocations that are already in the audience’s heads. But if one man could make a movie that would whip back the curtain and show us a horror that would actually justify all the anticipatory chills and excitement? I had faith, back then in 2003, that Rob Zombie was that man.

And indeed if he failed, from my point of view it’s only because he created something both so mind-warpingly gorgeous and so comfortingly familiar to me that it almost wasn’t horrible at all. From that first moment when the camera pulled back to show the signboards for “Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen; Fried Chicken and Gasoline”, I felt at home in House of 1000 Corpses’ mad little world and that feeling has never left me. Shot like a music video, exaggerated to comic-book scale, this was a film that spoke my visual and emotional language perfectly and this is why I loved it then and love it now.

I love it too because for all that it is, yes, brutally and grotesquely gory in places, the gore is a servant to the story, not its master. It feels like we see more footage of the Firefly clan messing around, goofing off and playing mindgames with their prey than we do of anyone actually dying or being hurt. I’m not upset or shocked by the violence in House of 1000 Corpses because I don’t think Rob Zombie is either; he directs the bloodshed as though it’s a simple function of the narrative and characters, an intrinsic element of the universe he’s portraying rather than a deliberate eyepoke of “watch this, isn’t it horrible, aren’t we edgy, are you feeling sick yet?” The camera spends longer and lingers more appreciatively on Baby doing a song and dance number than it does on anyone getting tortured; although speaking of lingering cameras, you can’t talk about House of 1000 Corpses without tipping the hat to that legendary world’s-longest-pause before Otis puts a bullet through Deputy Naish’s head. As an ultimate moment of stillness and silence in a film that’s otherwise a constant barrage of colour and noise, it’s the perfect device to make a single, simple bullet feel like the end of the world. It’s a solitary little touch of manifest creative discipline that says “I could’ve made a whole film like this. I CHOSE not to.” And I love that.

I don’t care that House of 1000 Corpses is cartoonish, unrealistic and utterly implausible. I’ve seen enough “realistic”, “gritty” horror to last me a lifetime. I love it because it’s a carnival madhouse of a film whose director wasn’t afraid to fill it to the brim willy-nilly with everything that he loved and knew his pre-existing fans shared his love for, instead of sacrificing his roots to try and crack a new market. When it came out, House of 1000 Corpses was called too violent, too disgusting, too sick. Ten years after the fact, we’re buried in movies that offer us far more unpleasantness for far less character, fun, or charisma. By contrast to currently prevailing trends this movie feels less like a visit to the slaughterhouse and more like walking into the noise and light and warmth of a party filled with familiar, friendly faces. Okay, so some of those faces are wearing man-skin masks and you don’t even want to know what’s in the punch, but even knowing the hazards, it still feels like home. This is the House, come on in…

By Oliver Longden

The Crazies is 40, but should anyone care? It is usually considered one of George A. Romero’s lesser works, partly because it has had less of a solid legacy than his iconic zombie films, and partly because everyone always forgets about the real rubbish like Survival of the Dead, alongside which The Crazies looks pretty damn good. Although The Crazies lacks the genre-creating cache of Night of the Living Dead and doesn’t have the hipster credentials of films of like Martin, it was still considered iconic enough to be fed into the remake meat-grinder in 2010. While it is definitely a flawed film, it is a flawed film with something to say about madness, sanity, and the thin line that divides them. The remake, by comparison, has something to say about avoiding crazy people who want to eat your face. I think the 1973 original still has an important message, even if it doesn’t always say it was well as you might wish.

In some ways the plot of The Crazies is the prototypical zombie movie plot. A government experiment, a deadly bioweapon, is released into an area and the army moves in to try and contain the disaster. (The 80s classic Return of the Living Dead makes use of precisely this set up and owes a great deal of its structure to The Crazies.) The bioweapon is a virus that causes a brain mutation which drives people mad and ultimately kills them. Some people become crazed killers and others become empty shells staring blankly into space. We see the action unfolding from two perspectives: that of the army (and their attendant scientists), and that of a small group of people trapped in the middle of the action. As the small group of survivors tries to escape from the army cordon we witness their mental deterioration.

We see a lot of madness in The Crazies, and it isn’t clear just how much is the result of the virus, and how much is the result of the situation. Right from the start we are shown that the army is woefully under-prepared for the disaster and hobbled by layers of bureaucracy that seem to make decisions almost for themselves. A key scientist is flown inside the quarantine zone despite his insistence that he will be more use in his lab, only to find out that the commander agrees but can’t allow him to leave because that would violate quarantine. As the attempts to control the townspeople turn into a bloodbath, the small group of people attempting to escape the corral start to fall apart, but are they infected or are they just reacting to appalling stress? The horror is wound tighter by the fact that there is no clear definition for when someone has succumbed. Unlike a zombie film (with which The Crazies is doomed to be endlessly compared) there is no digital line beyond which you are lost, nor is there a clear set of behaviours that define those afflicted. While zombies are single minded cannibals, these are horribly damaged people who may attempt murder, regress to childhood, rant and rave, or lapse in mutism. Worse still, they may return to lucidity for a time, armed with the terrible knowledge of their own degradation.

Another theme that occurs in The Crazies is the idea that the military will always end up oppressing anyone they come into contact with, and that this is as much a product of incompetence as it is ideology. The soldiers are very much the bad guys despite the fact that their aim of controlling the spread of the infection is entirely laudable. By virtue of their faceless uniforms, their monolithic bureaucracy and their endemic paranoia, they automatically become an adversarial presence in the town almost as soon as they have arrived. Rather than the well-oiled machine we are often presented with in American depictions of the military, we get to see a confused and divided agency riven with its own internal power struggles, and reacting aggressively because it doesn’t know how to do anything else. As we have witnessed the appalling failures of the military in Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of those conflicts, this depiction of soldiers and their role in mediating conflict seems extremely relevant even 40 years later, which is colossally depressing.

It’s not all good news, however. The film has some quite serious problems, which may explain why it was never seen as an important Romero film and why it never had the impact it deserves. The soldiers, dressed in white hazard suits and gasmasks, all look exactly the same. While an army of faceless troopers ought to be extremely sinister, the fact that they look like they’re wearing bin bags does a great deal to mute their menace. There are also some real pacing issues caused by the cast being just the wrong size. It’s too big to tell a taut, psychologically harrowing narrative focused on a few individuals, and too small to do the full ensemble cast disaster movie. In addition, the middle third of the movie drags; the civilians are busy running here and there without much direction, and the army characters are repeatedly getting irritated with each other and indulging in testy exchanges with their superiors. It’s crying out for another group to focus on who can act as a bridge between the two main plot lines. This pacing issue isn’t helped by the very small budget. This causes a lot of the action to be quite repetitive because all the action sequences are shot with six people wearing bin bags as the antagonists. There are a number of night sequences where it is painfully obvious that there isn’t enough lighting to make more than a small area visible, which hugely reduces the scope for innovation. A bigger budget would have allowed for more variety in the action. The addition of a car chase and a few explosions would have helped enormously.

While far from a perfect movie The Crazies has some excellent moments, and the question of how you judge madness and sanity is an ongoing concern. The new edition of the DSM, the handbook which clinicians use to diagnose mental illness, is due out in May, and there are strong concerns that it may increase the risks of medicalizing normal human experiences. This difficulty is well explored in The Crazies with the effects of stress, trauma and pre-existing personality traits all combining to make it difficult to say for certain which characters are definitely infected. There is no shortage of good ideas in The Crazies and it seems a shame that it hasn’t been plagarised as heavily as some of Romero’s other works. I would love to see a really large scale disaster movie/horror crossover and I’ve got my fingers crossed that the troubled production of World War Z will finally scratch that itch and demonstrate the viability of the unique approach to horror proposed by The Crazies.

By Stephanie Scaife

I’d just like to start by saying that I fucking hate Valentine’s Day. This isn’t because I’m bitter but because I hate the marketing, the blatant fleecing all in the name of romance, the pink love hearts and special displays in stores hawking their finest selection of Nicholas Sparks books, Jennifer Aniston DVD box sets and other such things that just make me want to barf. I hate the assumption that we want nothing more than fluffy wish fulfilment, the sort of saccharine Hollywood nonsense that assumes its viewer will shed a tear into their cheap glass of chardonnay whilst secretly wishing their significant other was actually Channing Tatum. Not to mention the pressure of the socialised norm that being in a monogamous romantic relationship is such a good thing to begin with.

All of this is fucking bullshit of course and it’s not aided by the idea, oft lamented on these here pages at BAH, that chicks don’t dig horror flicks and that men must be forced to watch them alone. Well, consider this crazy concept… what if gender and sexuality have nothing to do with whether or not someone likes something? What if it’s all to do with individual taste, and having the world dictate to us what we should and shouldn’t like based on whether or not we have a vagina is complete and utter nonsense? With that in mind what I’m all about this Valentine’s Day are the unconventional romances, the ones that seem grounded in an actual, tangible sense of reality that we can all relate to no matter how fantastical or out of this world the premise, because believe it or not horror films can be just as cockle warming, and less nauseating, than your standard romantic fare. So here are my top ten suggestions (in no particular order) if you want some genuine warm and fuzzies this Valentine’s Day…

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Let’s face it, if you don’t have a crush on Jenny Agutter after watching this movie then there’s probably something wrong with you. An American Werewolf in London is my all time favourite horror film, but it’s also pretty damned romantic too, making it the perfect choice for Valentine’s Day. David (David Naughton) and Alex’s (Agutter) liaison is passionate but ultimately doomed, you know because he’s a werewolf who kills people, so it keeps things nicely in perspective. The lesson here – don’t bring strange American men home from work unless you’re prepared to cause mass havoc in Piccadilly Circus and get your heart broken into tiny little pieces.

Jack & Diane (2012)

Bradley Rust Gray’s coming-of-age lesbian werewolf film is both odd and endearing. Hot young upstarts Riley Keough and Juno Temple star as Jack and Diane respectively, two teenage girls who meet during a long hot New York summer and instantly fall madly and dangerously in love. Jack is a street wise baby dyke and Diane is the naive innocent, whose sexual awakening breeds bizarre and destructive visions of werewolf transformations, conveyed using beautiful stop-motion sequences rendered by the Quay brothers. Jack & Diane wonderfully captures the visceral and honest nature of first love, its fickleness and all of the ups and downs that come with those pent up hormones finally having a sexual outlet. There’s also a great cameo from Kylie Minogue as a butch tattoo artist.

Midnight Son (2011)

Okay so I know that we harp on about this one a lot at BAH, but it really is that good. Jacob (Zak Kilberg) works the nightshift as a security guard and spends his days avoiding daylight; he has a rare skin condition and finds being out in the sun almost unbearable. As his condition gradually worsens he finds his only sustenance in consuming human blood, but is he a vampire or just a troubled young man? Redemption of sorts presents itself in the form of Mary (Maya Parish), a young bartender, with whom Jacob falls madly in love. A bloody and miserablist romance that is ultimately sweet and tender, not to mention a vampire film that succeeds in that rarely attained feat, originality.

Kaboom (2010)

In the loosest possible terms Kaboom is a science fiction film, I guess, although really it’s kind of difficult to label, a bit like the central character’s sexual preferences. It has elements of comedy, noir, conspiracy thriller and apocalyptic cinema all rolled into one. The sexuality of the characters is fluid and changeable; main protagonist Smith (Thomas Dekker) refers to himself as “undecided” and is seen openly engaging in and enjoying sex with both men and women, to the detriment of nobody. It’s seen as normal and is matter of fact, not chaotic or subversive. Kaboom could be described as post-New Queer Cinema – the anger has been replaced with an utterly bonkers sense of irreverence. There’s almost no consideration for narrative structure or characterisation. To enjoy this film is to not think about it too much and to just go along for the ride. It’s genuinely refreshing to see a film where gender and sexuality are at the forefront for all the right reasons, not just to create drama or play into misconceptions and genre stereotypes.

Let the Right One In (2008)

Although considered to be a vampire film, Let the Right One In is more accurately about the friendship and quasi-romantic relationship that develops between Eli (Lina Leandersson) and Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), two twelve year olds on the cusp of adolescence. Although in the case of Eli, our young vampire who will forever be on the cusp, it serves to heighten the loneliness and confusion felt at such a difficult age. A far more innocent film than the others on my list, this is none the less affecting in the urgency and desperation of their relationship. Where their individual lives are almost unbearably painful they seek refuge together, their blind willingness to do anything for each other regardless of the consequences results in what can only be described as being equally as horrifying as it is touching. A truly beautiful film that is both haunting and profound.

Near Dark (1987)

Yep, another vampire flick, and despite the bleak sun bleached deserts and rough terrains of Kathryn Bigelow’s classic horror film, it’s also got a lot to do with love and the loss of innocence. Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) falls madly and instantaneously in love with Mae (Jenny Wright) – isn’t that always the way with movies? – only to find out that she’s a vampire and her little love bite means he will become one too after he makes his first kill. Thus forcing Caleb to choose between the woman he loves and his family, a tough decision when all he really wanted was to get his leg over.

May (2002)

So you’re single and you’ve got nobody to spend your Valentine’s Day with? How about you take a leaf out of May’s (Angela Bettis) book and start crafting the ideal lover from your favourite parts of the otherwise unsatisfactory people who come into your life? Sounds a little extreme, but when that lazy eye of May’s is finally straightened out and she feels beautiful enough to embark on a romantic relationship, all those dreams fall flat when she quickly comes to realise that the world is full of assholes. As creepy as her patchwork monster is, at least it’ll never let her down. Aw, and some say that romance is dead…

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Nic Roeg’s classic horror Don’t Look Now has perhaps one of the most honest portrayals of sex and marriage ever committed to film. Laura (Julie Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) are grieving the tragic death of their young daughter when they travel to Venice; once there they slowly start to rebuild their fragile relationship. In one now infamous scene the couple have sex; this is intercut with them getting ready to go out. It’s such a simple scene but it captures the intimacy of a couple who have been together and have loved each other for years rediscovering their relationship and their sexuality once the veil of grief has lifted ever so slightly and they are able to start to function again as a couple. In so many films sex is put on a pedestal where what we’re given very rarely actually resembles any sort of reality, so it’s refreshing here to see a couple who so obviously know each other and love each other and sex is shown for what it so often is in real life; it’s passionate and founded in familiarity, the earth doesn’t have to move and the planets don’t have to realign, it’s just about a simple connection between two people. Not to mention that despite being an accurate portrayal of grief and love, Don’t Look Now is a genuinely terrifying film.

Switchblade Romance AKA Haute Tension(2003)

Unrequited love, sigh, a difficult topic to tackle at the best of times so why not just soak it in extreme amounts of blood and gore? That’s exactly what Alexandre Aja did with Switchblade Romance (Haute Tension) and it works pretty darn well, so long as you ignore the plot holes. That aside, it’s unlikely any Valentine’s Day won’t be improved by this slice of Gallic ultra violence. Not that the film isn’t also sort of romantic, being that when Alex (Maïwenn) is abducted by a crazed murderer, Marie (Cécile de France) goes to pretty extreme lengths to save the object of her affections.

Thirst (2009)

Yes… I know, more vampires. But as we all know, vampires = sex and there’s a lot of this going on in Park Chan-wook’s frankly bizarre film about Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a Catholic priest who becomes a vampire and begins an illicit love affair with his friend’s wife, Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim). The priest is a good man who takes his vow of chastity very seriously, so when his new found taste for blood opens his mind to the world of carnal desires things get a little crazy. Sang and Tae develop and obsessive relationship and become so deeply entwined with one another that their present becomes all that exists rendering the outside world irrelevant to our pair of star crossed lovers. Of course, everything ends rather badly for all concerned but isn’t that what romance is all about?

By Oliver Longden

Horror franchises fade and die just like other organisms. What starts off as a vibrant exciting premise winds up puking and shitting itself to death in abject confusion while the rest of society does their best to ignore it like an embarrassing relative in a nursing home. Rarely has this been more true than with the Hellraiser franchise which starts with a film of unique and uncompromising vision and ends a senile dog desperately in need of being put down with a hammer.

Hellraiser is one of the best horror movies of all time. It has been hugely influential and despite featuring some of the most horrifying eighties hairdos ever committed to tape it still has the power to both shock and arouse even in these jaded times. A young woman becomes trapped in a deadly game with the otherworldly Cenobites, sadomasochistic voyagers to the limits of sensation. Three sequels were made, none of which could hold a candle to the original movie. The last, Hellraiser: Bloodlines, was a such an artistic failure that the director refused to put his name to it, insisting on being credited with a pseudonym. That was in 1996 and it felt like Hellraiser had creatively run its course and been put to bed. One great film, three indifferent sequels. Enough good stuff to make the fancy boxed set worth buying if you saw it cheap.

This article is about what happened next, and about how greed and cynicism contrived to produce a sequence of direct to video sequels that took whatever residual good feeling the Hellraiser franchise evoked and proceeded to metaphorically shoot it in the face five times while its metaphorical family watched in horror. Five more movies all released direct to video, and all more or less travesties that serve only to illustrate what a wretched creative business the movie industry can be.

Hellraiser: Inferno came out in 2000. It set the template for future installments by completely ignoring the established Hellraiser canon and by not bothering to feature the main series antagonists for more than a few minutes. This is because, like most of the direct-to-video sequels, Hellraiser: Inferno was made by taking an existing script and crudely stitching in a few Cenobite references in the hope of making a few extra bucks from the horror franchise completists. What results is a desperately mediocre film about a corrupt police officer investigating a series of brutal crimes. As his investigation grows deeper more and more bizarre things happen, reality itself seems to fall apart and he must ultimately confront his own complicity in the events that have led up to the beginning of the movie. At the end of the film Pinhead pops up briefly (in a fashion reminiscent of a Scooby Doo villain being unmasked) to deliver a convoluted explanation as to why nothing you have seen makes any sense. The explanation turns out to be one those Twilight Zone twist endings that only seem clever if you’ve been repeated punched in the face with a fistful of tranquilisers. It turns out the main character was in hell all along! It’s a deeply un-inspiring film that comes across as a pallid tribute to John Carpenter’s vastly superior In the Mouth of Madness. The saddest thing about it is, shoddy though it is, this is still probably the best of the direct-to-video sequels.

Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002) marks the first time Rick Bota directed for the franchise. He would go on to direct two further installments in 2005. His approach is best described as workmanlike. It’s hard to be too down on him given the excremental quality of the three scripts he has to work with, but he comes from a TV background and it shows in the blandness with which all of his Hellraiser films are shot. Hellraiser: Hellseeker has one big draw which is the return of Kirsty from the original movie. Don’t get too excited however, she barely appears in the film, much like the Cenobites who are once again reduced to a minor cameo. This is another below average script trapped in development hell that was given a zombie-like semblance of life by the injection of some half-hearted Hellraiser references. Thematically it’s very similar to its immediate predecessor with the plot involving a man trying to find out what happened to his wife as he battles amnesia, and a screenwriter who hates the audience. The film is filled with idiotic plot twists and people behaving in exactly the way that no one in the real world actually behaves. Once again Pinhead appears at the end to inform you that all the moronic guff that irritated the hell out of you as you watched the film was put in deliberately. They were there because of a massive twist – the character was actually in hell all along! This is known as the M. Night Shyamalan manoeuvre and it never works. Explaining that you’ve been deliberately trying to get the audience to think that a movie was an incoherent shitfest filled with continuity errors and things that make no sense doesn’t make you clever. It makes you a cunt.

Hellraiser: Deader and Hellraiser: Hellworld were both shot back to back in 2005, largely in Eastern Europe. Hellraiser: Deader is the story of a journalist sent to investigate a weird cult that appears to be killing people and bringing them back from the dead. It features a small role from British TV staple Marc Warren who acts as though he’s been kidnapped and forced to be in the movie against his will. The journalist (Kari Wuhrer, an old hand at this sort of nonsense) gets sucked into the cult leader’s plan to control the Cenobites. This apparently involves reality itself breaking down because that is what happens in Hellraiser films now. At the end Pinhead makes his mandatory five minute cameo to once again explain what was happening (most of the film was a drug fuelled hallucination which does at least make a change from everyone being in hell but still sucks). It doesn’t make much sense because, as you may already have guessed, the script wasn’t originally a Hellraiser script. There’s the bones of an interesting film in struggling and failing to get out of Hellraiser: Deader. Ironically, it would have been a lot more interesting shorn of its tenuous Hellraiser connection. Also if you don’t see the twist coming by this point you may need to check that you haven’t had a massive stroke during the course of the film.

Hellraiser: Hellworld is the worst film I’ve seen in a good long time and represents an astonishing nadir in franchise. A group of friends go to a party hosted for fans of Hellworld, a MMORPG based on Hellraiser because in this film the Hellraiser films only exist as films. One of their friends died from playing the MMORPG because that’s totally a thing that can happen. This is one of those tiresome films that thinks breaking the fourth wall is clever. It was quite clever when Wes Craven did it in New Nightmare, but it’s old hat in 2005. Once the four friends arrive at the party they are quickly separated by the host (Lance Henriksen, who seems almost as bored as the audience) and then weirdness abounds. The teens, all about as likeable as a bout of Norovirus, are killed off by Pinhead and his chums in depressingly humdrum fashion, eschewing the gruesome S&M hooks and chains in favour of using whatever seems to be handy. The Cenobites have finally been reduced to sub-Vorhees slasher villains in the kind of middle of the road teen horror fare that would have been considered a below par Friday the 13th sequel. It’s that bad. Eventually it’s revealed that the whole thing was a set up by the host and that most of the film was a drug fuelled hallucination. The Cenobites weren’t real! They were drugs all the time! This is clearly the worst twist since the twist in the last three Hellraiser films. This crappy haunted house movie is the Hellraiser sequel where it’s most obvious that the script had nothing to do with Hellraiser at all. The fact that it’s a bottom of the barrel direct-to-video horror film that still feels it can somehow afford to look down on people who play online games is just the crowning turd perched neatly atop a whole heap of other, much more massive turds. Hellraiser: Hellworld more or less killed off the franchise. Everything went very quiet until 2011 when another film quietly squirmed out into the world with all the fanfare you might expect from a nasty fart.

Hellraiser: Revelations was made for even more shockingly mercenary and creatively bankrupt reasons than the four films that preceded it. This is no small accomplishment. It pensions off Doug Bradley who had appeared in all eight previous films, largely from a twisted sense of obligation to the character, and replaces him with a rather fatter Pinhead who looks like he should be much jollier than he actually is. Hellraiser: Revelations is an incredibly cheap film that comes across more like a bunch of fans getting together to play dress up than an actual film. It’s an ignominious end to the franchise that was apparently made solely to hang onto the rights to the Hellraiser property. The weird thing is that Revelations is the only direct-to-video sequel that actually feels thematically like a proper Hellraiser story, since it’s the only one that was written specifically as a Hellraiser film. It’s about two friends who go on a bender to Tijuana and come across the box that acts as a portal to the realm of the Cenobites. They disappear but some months later one of the boys reappears at the family home. He has escaped from the Cenobites and returned to the world wearing his friend’s skin and determined to do whatever it takes to avoid being returned to the realm of pain and torment the Cenobites call home. All the classic images from Hellraiser are there and, despite the appalling quality of the film-making, I actually like Hellraiser: Revelations much more than all four of the films that had come before. It has the crazy gay S&M vibe that was so powerful in the original movie and, like the original, it is a story about obsession and the selfish pursuit of ever more extreme pleasures. Even better, at no point during the narrative does it turn out that everything was a hallucination. Anyone who cares about production values or acting is going to hate this film, but I have to confess that there were moments when I almost enjoyed it.

There are still rumours that a remake of Hellraiser may actually make its way to the big screen some time in the next couple of years, but with the project currently completely stalled there is at least the possibility that Hellraiser: Revelations may be the last cowpat to be flung at the screen in the hope of wringing ever smaller amounts of pocket change from the diehard fans. Clive Barker is still producing comics set in the Hellraiser universe, and these are significantly more interesting than anything the series has committed to celluloid in the last twelve years. Franchises rarely end on a high note, but few have subjected to the kind of unrelenting tsunami of shit that Clive Barker’s visionary 1987 horror masterpiece has had to endure. Is Hellraiser: Revelations the end of the line? We can only hope.

By Stephanie Scaife

In a year brimming with Dark Knights, Avengers and Hobbits, not to mention the impending (if ultimately anticlimactic) apocalypse that was supposed to befall us last month I feel that 2012 has been a pretty weak year for us horror fans, where there have been far too many films eliciting nothing more than a slight “meh” upon viewing. In fact I gave up trying to write a top ten as I couldn’t actually think of ten genre films I’d seen this year that I liked enough, although I feel that I should say that I haven’t seen Berberian Sound Studio, Sightseers or Antiviral yet, all of which I have pretty high expectations of. So without further ado, I bring you my likes, dislikes, those in-between and what I’m looking forward to in the year ahead…

My Top Films of 2012

Killer Joe

My review – Ben’s review.

Killer Joe was an easy choice as my favourite film of the year, and I absolutely loved how unashamedly sleazy and violent this southern fried neo-noir from veteran filmmaker William Friedkin is. I can see why it was divisive – any film where Gina Gershon is introduced naked from the waist down won’t be to everyone’s tastes – but for me Killer Joe was unrivalled in 2012 for its humour, style and excesses.

The Raid

Ben’s review – Keri’s review.

Turns out my favourites of the year were all about being as excessive as possible; where Killer Joe had sleaze, The Raid brought us unrelenting, no holds barred violence for a solid 90 minutes. This Indonesian film directed by Welshman Gareth Evans seemed to come out of nowhere and became a true word of mouth success. By showcasing the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat The Raid proves that no amount of CGI and clever camera work can be a patch on the real deal; you seriously wouldn’t want to mess with any of these guys!

Looper

My review.

Rian Johnson’s Looper wins the award for being perhaps the most original mainstream genre film released in 2012. It also only works if you can completely suspend your disbelief for 2 hours, as it falls into many of the plot pitfalls associated with tackling time travel on film. That said, in a world where we’re treated to endless remakes, reboots and prequels, it’s genuinely refreshing to have something completely different, and with its fantastic cast, irreverent plot, and an ending that shifts the whole thing into straight up horror territory, it well and truly deserves a mention.

The Hunter

My review.

I saw this strange and haunting film on a flight and in my valium-induced state I thought I’d perhaps imagined some of it as the plot is pretty much bonkers, but after revisiting it on blu-ray I realised that no, this really is a film about Willem Dafoe hunting Tasmanian tigers. Although it’s perhaps a stretch to class this as a genre film, as it is pretty much a straight-up thriller, The Hunter does however have an uncanniness about it that ensures it’s not out of place on the pages of BAH. Criminally underseen, I’d urge you to seek out a copy of The Hunter.

Midnight Son

Annie’s review – Keri’s review.

Just when you think nothing new can be done with the vampire genre something pops up and surprises you. Very much in the vein of Romero’s Martin, Midnight Son takes a more human approach to the genre and works all the better for it. This ultra low budget indie film uses its small cast and limited locations to great effect and it turn creates something claustrophobic, frightening and ultimately very moving. A romance at heart, but Twilight this ain’t.

What I’m Undecided On

American Mary

My review – Nia’s review.

This film was a bit like marmite at BAH, but for me I’m still undecided. I have great admiration for the Soskas and their work but for me American Mary was, just slightly, too much style over substance. Katharine Isabelle and Tristan Risk are absolutely fab in their roles and I love the fact that this is a truly original piece of work but upon reflection I think I desperately wanted to like this film a whole lot more than I did in reality. Still, I’m eager to see what the twins do next as they are undeniably a force to be reckoned with.

Detention

Dustin’s review.

Detention is a weird one, and although many will have seen this in 2011, it didn’t get its official release until 2012 so I’m counting it here. The thing about this movie is that I genuinely have no idea whether it’s the most irritating film ever made or a work of pure genius. The good is that it’s completely and utterly bonkers and clearly doesn’t give anything close to a shit regarding coherency and plot; it’s anarchic, fast-paced and unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The bad is that it may as well have been named Hipster: The Movie as it’s so painfully self aware and nostalgic for the 90s that frankly, it just made me feel old.

The Worst of 2012

Excision

Tristan’s review.

I just didn’t get this film at all and despite the great cast (usually John Waters is reason enough to watch anything) I found almost nothing to like here. The otherwise generally very positive reception it received confused me greatly, did we all really see the same film?! I found it vapid, the characters unlikeable and the fantasy sequences seemed like the work of a green behind the ears film school graduate working on their first music video.

Cabin in the Woods

My review.

This was another one that was heaped with praise that invoked little more than indifference followed by mild annoyance from me. It was just trying so hard to be clever that I found it bordering on smug and the ending was a complete and utter let down.

Prometheus

My review.

I mean, really? What a colossal and incoherent disappointment that was. Even without the likes of Alien to live up to if taken at face value as a stand-alone sci-fi film this was dire. The characters’ motives were all over the place, not to mention their actions borderline stupid, and the whole religious allegory, meaning of life nonsense was eye wateringly dull. Even Michael Fassbender couldn’t save it.

What I’m Looking Forward to in 2013

The Nymphomaniac – Lars Von Trier’s new laugh-a-minute comedy caper (or at least that’s what I’m assuming) starring the always fabulous Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Only Lovers Left Alive – Jim Jarmusch’s foray into the Vampire genre starring the exquisite Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as her lover and vamp muso who spans the centuries primarily within the New York underground music scene. Sounds pretty fucking amazing.

Only God Forgives – Nicholas Winding Refn’s crime thriller starring his muse Ryan Gosling and Kristin Scott Thomas as a brutal mafia ringleader. Colour me intrigued…

Byzantium – Neil Jordan’s return to the vampire genre staring Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as a mother daughter bloodsucking team.

Under the Skin – Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Michel Faber’s bizarre novel about an alien, transformed by surgery to make her look like a beautiful human, who trawls the streets of Scotland looking for hitchhikers.