1970s cinema has many noteworthy qualities, but amongst these, the decade is certainly remarkable for its brief, but intriguing phase of imagining animals ‘going rogue’ and attacking humans; some of the resulting films were breakthrough hits, such as Jaws (1975), whereas some, such as Day of the Animals (1977) would be long-lost to obscurity if the DVD age hadn’t decided seeing Leslie Nielsen wrestling a grizzly bear was too good to pass up. Before sharks, bears and other beasts were redressing the natural balance, however, there was Willard (1971) – a film where it’s the humble rat who’s up to no good, though all at the behest of a rather lonely young man. I suppose the initial premise makes some sense: compare the number of people killed by sharks to the number killed by rats over the centuries, and the rat is definitely king – though to be fair to rats, they’ve simply been clearing up after Man for millennia, fighting over the same resources, often dying of the same things, whilst not being particularly deferential along the way.
Willard himself is a rather feckless young man: he has a white-collar job as a cashier at the ultimate blue-collar business, a steel mill: he clearly doesn’t fit in there, and when he returns to the sprawling but tumble-down home which he shares with his mother (Elsa Lanchester), he’s frequently surrounded by elderly family members and family friends who can’t understand why he doesn’t use his initiative at work to get further on in life. The plant once belonged to his father, after all. After a particularly abortive 27th birthday party, Willard – miserable and brow-beaten – disappears outside. He sees a rat out there, but rather than call Rentokill, he throws the creature a few crumbs, which – being a rat – it happily eats. As escapism goes, it’s not orthodox, but Willard continues to feed the rats he sees, lying to his mother that he’s got rid of them. He even tries to obey her command to kill them off on one occasion, but he can’t face it: soon, Willard is spending more time with his growing cabal of rats, training them to perform simple commands.
To state the bleeding obvious, anyone with a rat phobia is going to have problems with Willard: the rat cast is actually quite large, though these are of course fancy rats (the tame variety) rather than wild rats. They’re quite well-trained, too, which makes the film’s initial premise seem more plausible than it might otherwise; I used to keep fancy rats myself, and I can verify that they’re surprisingly bright little critters who can learn basic commands, even if they then choose to do the opposite of what they’re meant to be doing at twice the speed. Course, I’ve never (yet) tried to train a rat to take vengeance on a malingering boss, as Willard eventually does: as his life begins to unravel, the command he exerts on his rat posse becomes more and more unlikely. The film is chiefly about a man losing control over his life, however: the rats are an engaging sideshow, but the spotlight is very much on Willard.
With these rather gentler kinds of exploitation films – y’know, where the goings-on are incredibly unlikely but there’s a story behind it – it’s completely possible to take them on face value. You can do that with Willard: sad loser wreaks havoc on an unfair world. It’s interesting, though, if you can be persuaded to look a little further, to see a young man up against a system which seems completely stacked against the young. The only people who own anything are resolutely much, much older: the Willard family business has gone to an opportunistic post-World War II businessman; Willard’s remaining family are ageing; he has no siblings; even the people meant to care for him or about him are ludicrously out of touch. The 1970s inhabited by our main character is a very lonely place – lonely enough for him to make friends with creatures usually considered vermin. He has no control over who comes and goes at his own home, either: let me potentially be the first person to compare Willard to mother! (2017) in that he continually finds people letting themselves in, talking about helping themselves to his house, and there’s even an impromptu funeral bash which he hasn’t organised.
Still, for all the extremes of unlikelihood which ensue, with rats eventually rebelling against their master, Willard is by and large a fairly quiet film, with only one or two scenes which go beyond this. Really speaking, Willard is an interesting oddity in the ‘careful what you wish for’ category, an engagingly dismal look at 70s America.
Clearly, it was modestly successful enough to give rise to a sequel: Ben (1972) appeared just the next year, this time named for the particularly intelligent rat rather than for yet another lonely human whom he would ‘work alongside’. Ben therefore shifts focus, escalating the horror which only constituted a fragment of the earlier film and adding extra rat attacks on humans. And yes, it’s a bloody weird quirk of history that the late Michael Jackson sang on the film’s soundtrack: perhaps people don’t realise that the King of Pop was in fact serenading a hyper-intelligent killer rat, but there we go.
In the sequel, Willard’s rat posse have escaped and decided to go it alone, moving into the sewers beneath the city. Forging a link to Willard before it, people establish that Ben is the leader of the rats via some pages from Willard’s diary (which we never saw him keep, but hey.) This eventually throws them into the path of a young lad, Danny, who is being bullied and suffers from a heart condition: Danny befriends Ben in particular, and Ben – who is already rather comfortable with people – becomes his best mate/avenging angel, protecting him from the bullies. Thing is, Ben the rat isn’t always a force for good. Ben and his crew aren’t too keen on human intervention in their now-habitat, and anyone making the mistake gets attacked by a whirlwind of flying rodents; again, probably not safe terrain for a phobic.
Ben (1972) feels as rushed as it no doubt was, but it’s interesting in how it manages to generate some sympathy for a pack of occasionally hostile rats led by an oddly prescient rat. It retains the same half-eye on the underbelly of America, too, with lots of clambering about in the tunnels beneath the streets. The performance given by Danny (Lee Harcourt Montgomery) swings the focus, though, now that we have a victimised child in the frame, rather than an isolated adult. By the end, you even find yourself gunning for the child/rat combo rather than the people meant to be sorting things out, which happens despite all of the film’s flaws and overdependence on simply chucking more rats into the mix. Their friendship is even a little Disney, considering all that’s gone before – which includes the addition of flamethrowers.
Truth be told, neither Willard nor Ben are superb films and Ben is the weaker, but they’re certainly quite unlike anything else, and they have had some influence elsewhere. Willard even got a fairly glossy remake/’reimagining’ in the Noughties featuring cult actor Crispin Hellion Glover, so its reach was definitely there. Willard, in particular, is also notable for a surprising cast featuring ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ Elsa Lanchester in one of her last roles, alongside Ernest Borgnine as the execrable boss. There’s enough here to entertain and some material which can surprise. Well, you can now own this ratsploitation double bill in an attractive limited edition Blu-Ray box set: the good folk at Second Sight are about to release this, and you can find out more about it here.
Rather than a straightforward stand-alone short film, Empire of Dirt is intended to introduce characters and themes which will be explored fully in a feature-length offering. As such, no time is wasted: we’re shown, briefly, that these events are taking place in Manilla, 1997, and then we’re straight in to a frantic shootout, followed by a skirmish in a dilapidated building. It seems as though our protagonist is coming to the aid of a desperate, terrified woman, at least on first impressions: whatever his loyalty to her is, he pitches himself into some gritty, bloody and physical action, killing those he finds, with the violence happening both on and off screen. It’s a testament to Mason’s directorial abilities here that, even in a few short minutes, you feel as disturbed by the violence taking place off-screen as you do the violence in front of you.
Few writers have had their work adapted for the screen half so much as Stephen King, nor with such variable results, but then this is exactly to be expected when the man himself’s work has varied so wildly over the years. When it comes to the huge tomes from his early days, such as The Stand and IT, the TV miniseries has often seemed to be the way to go, rather than making a feature film. Particularly bearing in mind that epic-length films are really more a contemporary domain, it no doubt made sense, even if for manageability alone, to serialise the events of the books over a period of weeks. The resulting TV version of IT, made in 1990, for all its (now apparent) flaws cemented itself as a formative experience for many viewers, particularly those of us in our thirties. Look at it now, and what you mainly see are the awkward birth pangs of CGI; back then, though, everyone – very few of whom had read the book, and many of whom were children themselves – were frightened of Pennywise the Clown.
IT also uses its now thirty-years-old setting, a world before health and safety, safeguarding and more concerted efforts to tackle bullying, to present childhood itself as horrific. Sure, these kids didn’t have to prefix ‘bullying’ with ‘cyber’, but no one was tranquilised by mobile phones and social media, either: it plain didn’t exist. Your plight was your own, and your world ended at the edge of town, or went as far as your friendship group – if you had one. It seems to me that knowing all of this – seeing these changes – has also been used to add to the impact of the supernatural horror. (This would have been as much the case had they left the setting in the mid-twentieth century, mind, but fewer of us would now recognise that in the same degree of detail.) As for the adults in IT, and bearing in mind that many viewers are now approximately the same age as them and not the kids, they’re represented as negligent at best, incestuous at worst: they cajole, they medicate, they exploit but most of all, they ignore their offspring completely. Their children are ripe pickings for any sinister force which might come along.
Festival season is upon us once more, and one by one, the best horror and genre film festivals of the UK are revealing what they have lined up. Myself and co-editor Ben often take ourselves down to Sheffield’s Showroom Cinema for Celluloid Screams: now in its ninth year, it has introduced us to a range of excellent films during the years we’ve been attending, and films we see there have often wound up on our ‘Best Of’ lists at the end of the year – proving that festivals are where it’s at for film fans. This year looks to be no different, with an absolutely stellar line-up coming our way. Whilst there’s often a bit of overlap between festivals of this nature (no bad thing, in my opinion, meaning that most people will be able to get to at least one of the screenings they’re after) Celluloid Screams has also got the steal on some intriguing and exciting new films.
Though a few notable films have bucked the trend, it’s still comparatively rare, at least in Western cinema, that we see so much of a mention of Stalin or the Soviets whilst Nazi bad guys are ten a penny in all manner of horror, sci-fi and exploitation cinema. So, when I saw the promo material for Guardians – a modest budget Russian sci-fi – it seemed that here we’d have a film to buck the trend, what with all the mentions of Stalin taking action in response to the Nazis developing ‘super soldiers’ and what-have-you. It turns out that this context is mainly for the press information and doesn’t really feature in the film at all, however, so aside from some black and white images relative to the Cold War in the opening credits, the film is set squarely in modern-day Russia.
The Guardians themselves, once back together, need to use their slightly odd array of skills to defeat their erstwhile engineer. So we have: Ksenia, a woman who becomes transparent in water, and is impervious to extremes of temperature; Khan, a guy who can move very fast and has some equally speedy swords; Ler, who can make stones move, and (my obvious personal favourite) Arsus, who can turn into a half man, half bear (the top half) or if he’s really up against it, an ENTIRE BEAR, replete with Incredible Hulk style magic reappearing trousers when he becomes a man again. The rest of the film prioritises a number of what look like reasonably budgeted fight/action scenes, with a fair few head-scratching moments regarding the plot: it feels rather as if things are being raced through here, simply in order to introduce some action heroes who are clearly being set up for a sequel by the end credits – which is okay, but if you’re expecting a detailed story, best forget it. In fact, you’re probably already thinking of a certain other franchise at this point, and yes, the similarities to X-Men are manifest, albeit the latter takes more time (or more time makes it to screen) to establish character and motivation. It’s as if director Sarik Andreasyan has looked at all the X-Men movies and got a little ahead of himself, wondering how he could propel his own characters to those heights. This is clearly a film made by a team cognisant of the rage for superheroes ongoing in cinema. Guardians goes at a run throughout, where perhaps it would have established itself better by taking a breath.
The way that I first found out about its existence no doubt did a great disservice to A Ghost Story. Remember that Guardian newspaper article from July, which argued for something called ‘post-horror’? Post-horror is, of course, simply the latest in a long line of terms invented by people who can’t quite accept that they may have liked or made some horror: we’ve had dark fantasy, social thrillers, and now we have post-horror; 
At this point, C sits bolt upright. The sheet which covers him stays in place, referencing the old idea of ghosts wearing shrouds (see the alleged ghost photograph taken at Newby Church in the UK as an example) and also the prevalent idea in Western culture that ghosts remain because of some sort of unfinished business. Instead of walking through what looks like an exit, which is incidentally the only slightest nod to conventional ideas about the afterlife in the film, he walks home. From now, the character is mute and invisible. Whereas in a book like The Lovely Bones, where the deceased narrator is again drawn back towards their loved ones, in the novel we have just that – a narrator. Here. we have to read the ghost’s actions, even gestures, and we can do no more. We do know, however, that C’s ghost is fascinated by M, and desperate to reach out to her. Here. it could easily have segued into something which feels familiar – a Ghost (1990) for the Tumblr generation, where things seem bleaker but more picturesque as a rule. However, the key moment comes when M moves out; the ghost remains, trapped, waiting for her. Weeks – or years, decades? – go by. He observes life unfolding, but it is intermittent; a moment gives way to a different season, different residents. Still the ghost is there, (usually) invisible and unable to voice his thoughts. In this, A Ghost Story is indeed a horror story, because there can be few things more horrifying than the prospect of an eternity in this state.
In a small US theatre, the cast of avant-garde performance The Night Owl are readying themselves for their big opening night. In true Stanislavsky style, the director wants everyone locked in, so that they can really get into their roles. This is a health and safety disaster waiting to happen in its own right, so it’s even more of a shocker when a psychopathic luvvie breaks out of a nearby psychiatric hospital that very night, dons the suitably eerie owl mask being used in the performance and then runs amok, picking off the actors one by one. Yep, this is the film most commonly now known as Stage Fright (or StageFright, but I’ll stick with the distinct words if I may), the first film made by director Michele Soavi as a foray away from his mentor Dario Argento: it carries a lot of the hallmarks of Argento’s work, as you’d suppose it might, but it also shows a director already more than capable of committing his own style to celluloid.
For all that, this is a horror film, and by this point in the 80s, horror was established enough and popular enough to be self-referential on a scale not seen before: horror cinema had often become about the knowing nod, relying on audiences to know some of the conventions, or at least to have seen enough of the wealth of films already floating around and far more readily available, thanks to good ol’ analogue technology. Freddy Krueger was doing the rounds by now, wisecracking and gurning for the camera as he terrorized teenagers; Henenlotter was grossing audiences out with his body gore gags; even Romero could afford to reference his own work in the otherwise relentlessly grim Day of the Dead (remember the little jingle from Dawn which plays over the zombie being left in the dark to ‘think about what he’d done’?) Stage Fright, too, is often cleverly self-referential, and deserves more dues for it. The whole film-about-a-play which is itself based on an exploitation script, where in one scene director Peter matter-of-factly announces that it’s time to give the rape scene a go, seems to me to be a spin on the behind-the-scenes elements of many of the films being made under the masked killer banner around this time. It’s an actor who initiates the horror here, after losing his mind in his acting career.
Considering their importance to the subculture consciousness – y’know, having probably dismantled hippie culture ready for the start of the 70s – cinematic versions of (or interpretations of) the Manson Family murders have always been…problematic, shall we say. Some of the very vaguest of nods to the case have been played for great, exploitative fun (such as I Drink Your Blood) whilst some have gone for the full art-house treatment (such as Jim Van Bebber’s The Manson Family) and – for me – not quite worked. It’s a different prospect altogether when you actually namedrop the case, as Wolves at the Door chooses to do: the Manson Family inspiration is right there, writ large on the cover art. Openly using such a well-known case has its issues; these are also writ large all over this film.
See, this is the thing when you oh-so loudly and proudly declare that your film is based on the Manson murders. These murders are amongst the nastiest and most well-known from the era, and to this day, horror films shy away from torturing and killing heavily-pregnant women (as an example) so this leaves the film at an impasse: do you recreate all of the grisly details from the case, dare any disapproval, and also land yourself the task of creating tension around events which many viewers will already know well? Or do you deviate from the case, despite name-checking it – and, if you do something rather different, won’t you be held to account for that? These are issues which dog Wolves at the Door throughout, but, I’m sad to say, they’re only some of the flaws causing issues with the film.
With some films it’s clear, even from the opening seconds, that they are not going to provide an easy viewing experience, and this is definitely the case with Malady (2015), a first feature-length from director Jack James which I’ll confess has left a rather unpleasant aftertaste with me. This emotional effect has been carefully constructed, of course, and it’s there every step of the way. As the opening scenes blend emotional exchanges between a dying mother and her adult daughter, Holly (Roxy Bugler) with the end result – her funeral – there’s an immediate weight and sense of dread here. Holly’s mother spends her dying breath imploring her soon-to-be bereaved daughter to “find love”: left with little else, Holly tries to move on and fulfill her mother’s last wish, pushing herself to go out into the world – though it’s a struggle, and this frail young woman doesn’t seem particularly willing or able to feel at ease.
There is a great deal to admire in how this film has been shot and soundtracked, each of which show a lot of care and skill. The discordant sound design is superb: it gets going as soon as the film begins and rarely lets up throughout. As for the shooting, the film is underpinned with anxiety, and it keeps the pressure on the nerves by its relentless focus on people’s hands, as well as their facial expressions. The close, often unsteady camera work lends a suitably claustrophobic feel to the film – even the intimate scenes feel unseemly via this technique – but then to balance this, there’s thoughtful shot composition and lighting, often rich with lots of contrasts. Appearances can be deceptive, perhaps: scenes can be warm and inviting, but the human drama unfolding is anything but warm. Human relationships in this film are not straightforward, to say the least, and the film’s style mirrors that.
After a dreary Friday night playing bridge with a selection of oblivious males and watchful females, Tansy begins to act strangely. After their guests leave, Tansy becomes frantic, looking for something which she claims is a shopping list. Eventually, she finds what she’s looking for: an effigy, like a voodoo doll, woven into the fringes of a standard lamp. Taylor, a little baffled by her panic, continues to get ready for bed, but at around the same time he finds something very strange in one of the bedroom drawers – a dead spider in a ceramic pot. She demurs, saying it’s just a souvenir from their time living in Jamaica, but within a short space of time the Taylors’ quaint, domestic cottage is suddenly turning up a whole host of curios, charms and spells; it’s like looking again at a photograph and suddenly noticing a host of new details that you missed on the first glance. Taylor, the thinker, is decidedly unimpressed. The final straw comes with his discovery of a range of phials of graveyard dirt: he insists that the whole lot gets consigned to the fire, despite Tansy’s by now desperate pleadings that dark forces are poised to destroy him without her protections. True enough, almost the moment that the flames consume the charms (including, accidentally, a locket portrait of himself) Taylor’s extraordinary luck begins to fail. Blind chance, or something more?
Although Night of the Eagle’s approach to gender (and to race) can feel out of step with modern thinking, it’s an important factor in the film’s plot, and gender is very important in the film. Tansy is a housewife: Taylor implies that boredom has therefore driven her to her magical practices, but she insists – quite vociferously – otherwise. What Tansy is doing is operating within the domestic sphere where she ‘belongs’ to control the external environment, as witches have long done historically. Think about the stereotype of a witch: the cauldron, the broom. Objects which were part of the average home hundreds of years ago were imaginatively ritually re-purposed for witchcraft. Tansy isn’t so different, and even Taylor acknowledges that we – women – still use ritual in our daily lives, whatever form it takes; it’s just that Tansy is performing ritual magic. As much it pains me to hear Tansy castigated as ‘hysterical’ by her husband (oh, that word…) and to also see her on the reverse of that – utterly catatonic and self-sacrificial, that does not ultimately take away from the great power held by women in the film, or the wildly malevolent joy with which Flora Carr (Margaret Johnston) intones the words ‘burn, witch, burn’ as she attempts to kill Tansy – a phrase which gave the film its alternative title. It seems that Flora may have been defending her ward, a student who alleged that Taylor had sexually attacked her – or, she simply believed what she chose to believe. Incidentally, Flora does have a role outside the home, so she can add black magic to her professional credentials – although, by the end of the film, we’re shown in no uncertain terms that women really couldn’t have it all at the time.
If women are harmful sleeper agents, then consider also the impact of the Taylors’ tenure in Jamaica, where – we are told – Tansy first picked up her magical habit from fraternising with the locals. You don’t have too look too far for anxiety about the effects of a more ‘primitive’ belief system on a more developed one, and that could easily form the basis of a completely different article, but I will say this: the impact of this Jamaican magic is of note within Night of the Eagle because, as Tansy says, “it seemed to work”. It’s not simply harmful because it’s Other – it’s simply harmful. As we have seen in Svetlana’s feature on American folk horror, Haitian supernatural practices have become interwoven with American folk beliefs: this is another example of the terrific impact of racial and cultural Others on a Western cultural landscape. In the 1960s, ideas of horror seemed to have to adjust to this ever-changing landscape, poised to degrade at any time and sweep modernity away. Even wives were weaponising; even beliefs were vulnerable and permeable.
Where it differs, perhaps, is in the way Taylor has to come to accept that strange things are happening; once he has done this, he can escape, although things cannot be the same again. A man of few words, we are never told how he feels, but we’re in the same position as him, by the end. We don’t know if the eagle falls by chance or intent. We don’t know if Tansy survives by chance or through magical protections. The world is a more uncertain place by the end of Night of the Eagle. In this respect, Norman Taylor is more of a Rosemary Woodhouse than a Sergeant Howie – he encounters a cult, and his rationalism gets modified by the encounter. The Taylors survive. But at what cost?
There’s engaging content here throughout, which I feel would intrigue fans as much as academics – though that’s a bit of a false dichotomy these days, I know. For instance, I really enjoyed the section on M R James and his screen legacy which so often comes to us via Lawrence Gordon Clark, a talented figure who has done a great deal to shape our appreciation of ‘folk horror’ (see also: Nigel Kneale, whose work is happily given due consideration.) The 70s themselves are shown as uniquely placed to have given us so much folk horror,and we also see, interestingly, the way that the decade now comes down to us as a kind of folk horror realm itself – other, distant, uncanny, tinged with nostalgia. There is also a section on more modern forays into folk horror (The Witch, A Field in England, Kill List) as well as a whole host of films and TV I’ve never seen, but would now seek out: The Shout sounds fascinating. All in all, the level of research and knowledge showcased in Hours Dreadful is second to none.