Five Horror Films That Will Leave You Feeling Unclean

There exist within the horror genre certain films that are concerned less with scaring you than with making you question the essential goodness of mankind.  I don’t really want to write about most of these movies, because it means that I have to think about them.   Nevertheless, if you want to kick your Halloween off with a bang – or you just enjoy counting gross-out coup with friends – you’ll want something from this list.  Of their uniquely loathsome kind, these are the most perfect examples that exist.

5) Dead Alive

This gonzo kiwi zombie movie is actually pretty tame for this list, and that’s despite the zombie sex scene, the zombie baby, the disembodied zombie gastrointestinal tract, and the infamous “lawnmower” and “ear in the soup” scenes.  Peter Jackson invests the proceedings with a dose of levity and humanism, and the central love story is just too sweet for words.  Plus, where else are you going to find a kung-fu fighting priest who dives into the thick of a zombie uprising while shouting “I kick ass for the lord!”  And yet… the various puppet effects ARE decidedly unpleasant, especially the aforementioned zombie gastrointestinal tract and the slow disintegration of the protagonist’s mother.  And just when you think there’s nothing Jackson can do to gross you out physically any more (the lawnmower sequence required fake blood to be pumped onto the set through a fire hose), the climax of the film takes a startling left turn into psychologically disgusting territory.  I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so suffice it to say that it is very surprising.  And gross.  Definitely gross.

On the whole, Dead Alive is a remarkably enjoyable film, so much so that I do sometimes sit down and watch it again.  I always think I’m ready for that ending – that it will have lost it’s power over me.  So far, it hasn’t.

4) Last House on the Left

For all that it’s a loose remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Wes Craven’s directorial debut is a really nasty piece of work. And you know what?  The Virgin Spring is pretty nasty too. Let’s look at the tale of the nihilistic tape:  In Craven’s version, two young girls buy drugs from the wrong people, and wind up getting robbed, raped and murdered.  Bergman’s version is pretty much the same, except the girl’s fatal mistake is leaving her house. Advantage Bergman.  Next, through a string of wacky coincidences, the killers have to stay overnight at their victim’s parents’ house, and when the parents notice that the killers are carrying a piece of their daughters’ jewelry, they decide to exact a terrible revenge.  But first they need to prepare.  In The Virgin Spring, this means watching Max Van Sydow singlehandedly tear down a birch tree so that he can penitently whip himself with the twigs.

In Last House on the Left, this means watching Richard Tower set up a series of singularly uneffective deathtraps.  (I mean seriously, he soaps up the floor, later causing head killer David Hess to slip, curse, and then stand up and walk out of the room.  Totally weak.)  Advantage Bergman.  Then it comes time for the revenge itself.  This is a complex process, but in each case there’s a single act defining act that lets us know that the parents have gone beyond the limits of acceptible retribution.  In The Virgin Spring, it’s when Sydow kills a young boy whose only real crime was having an unpleasant group of friends by throwing him into a wall.  In Last House on the Left, it’s when the mother, Cynthia Carr, fellates one of the killers almost to climax before biting off his equipment.  Advantage (rather definitively), Craven.  The making-of featurette has a charming anecdote about this scene.  “We were trying to shoot the blowjob scene, and it just didn’t look realistic.  So we had him feed the end of his belt through the fly of his pants, so that she’d have something to grab onto with her teeth.” You’ve got to admire their dedication to the craft.  Sure enough, the scene is distressingly believable.  At the end, Carr jerks her head around like a terrier killing a rat.  But this scene is so over the top that it’s pretty easy to shrug off. So what makes Last House on the Left such a punishing film to watch?

At the heart of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 lies something he calls Snowden’s Secret (named after the most singularly unfortunate of all Heller’s unfortunate airmen).  Heller talks around this grim idea for about four hundred-odd pages before he finally puts his cards on the table.

“Yossarian was cold too, and shivering uncontrollably.  He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor.  It was easy to read the message in his entrails.  Man was matter, that was Snowdens secret.  Drop him out a window and he’ll fall.  Set fire to him and he’ll burn.  Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage.  The spirit gone, man is garbage.  That was Snowden’s secret.  Ripeness was all.”

This is also the secret of Last House on the Left. There are way gorier killings in horror cinema… but few are so callously biological.  Before Hess murders his young victims, he forces one of the girls to urinate in her pants (“That wasn’t a special effect!  That was… the real article!” she brags in the making-of video).  It’s every bit as unpleasant as the killings themselves, and shares their soul-deadening quality, their reduction of the human organism to its basest animal element, and eventually to mere flesh.   Incidentally, this is only really true for the deaths of the innocent young girls.  The revenge killings at the end of the film are brutal, sure, but they’re also, for want of a better word poetic.  They mean something:  they are movie deaths.  So in a sense, Last House on the Left backs away from the whole victims-of-monstrous-acts-become-the-monsters-themselves schtick that it tries so hard to sell.

3) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is probably the only movie that can match Last House on the Left for its presentation of violent death as a fundamentally organic process.  We’re used to horror films where the killers play with their victims, stalking them in a sadistic game of cat and mouse. So in one early scene where a teenager wanders into Leatherface’s house, we’re expecting to spend five minutes watching him get chased around before some kind of elaborate death.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre refuses to play these games.  Some ten seconds after the teen enters the house, Leatherface charges into the room and poleaxes him with a hammer.  This is shocking enough, but what comes next is worse:  first the camera lingers on the victim as his limbs twitch frantically, then without waiting for his corpse to go still, Leatherface drags him into the next room for butchering.  Now, I’ve got no idea what it actually looks like when someone kills a person with a hammer.  Still, this somehow feels more like what would really happen, and that’s not a particularly good feeling.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for all that its unpleasantness, is mercifully rape-free (a real hazzard when you subject yourself to this school of horror film). So why do I rank this film higher on the disturbing list than Last House On The Left?  Well, by and large, bad movies are less upsetting than good ones.  And while there’s not much to the plot, and the acting is amateurish, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an absolute triumph of production design.  Every set and prop is carefully calculated to increase the atmosphere of scuzzy dread.

See what I mean?  I’ve never actually seen any of the Saw movies, and I hear they’re pretty awful.  But the posters for that franchise are probably the most effective commercial art to be released in the past five years.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre feels like the Saw posters look:

Again, it’s not a good feeling… but there’s something compelling there that demands to be recognized.

2) Henry:  Portrait of a Serial Killer

There’s a doctoral thesis waiting to be written comparing this movie to the popular Showtime series Dexter.  Both are about serial killers who are charming and handsome.  Both have their killers make tentative overtures towards humanity through their relationships with emotionally fragile women.  The difference is that Dexter‘s Dexter is heroic, a killer who only murders other murderers.  He’s kind to children and polite to his sister.  Henry‘s Henry is just a fiend.  He kills anyone who gets in his way, he kills people who he picks at random, he kills his enemies, he kills his friends.  Dexter is kind of like Jack Bauer.  He doesn’t play by the rules, but he’s on the right team.  And I think that the show’s popularity comes from the same place as 24’s popularity, or for that matter Batman’s.  We don’t ultimately want our authority figures to be subject to the same laws as everyone else… at least in our fictions.

Think back to that image of the slasher villain as a father figure (alluded to in yesterday’s post on The Stepfather).  The serial-killer hero is the perfect example of this:   Dexter is the ultimate in “my dad can beat up your dad.”

Anyway, if Dexter is like Jack Bauer, Henry is Dick Cheney.  We desperately want him to reveal a common humanity, to use his killing skills for good, to punish the wicked and reward the righteous.  The filmmakers tease us with this, throwing one loathsome SOB after another into Henry’s path, so that we can cheer as he calmly rubs them out.  But at the end of the day, he’s still a monster, and the specifics of how this plays out are both hideous and heartbreaking.  A film like Henry is probably a necessary tonic to shows like 24.  But like any medicine, it is bitter, and profoundly hard to swallow.

1) Cannibal Holocaust

If you really, I mean really buy into the idea that all art is protected speech, and nothing should be obscene, Cannibal Holocaust is what you should be prepared to live with. It isn’t quite the most repulsive movie I’ve ever seen – that dubious honor goes to Cannibal Ferox, a shallow ripoff intended to capitalize on CH’s “success” – but it’s by far the most disturbing.  The reason, again, is that bad movies don’t have the capacity to be nearly as unpleasant as good ones… but now I’ve gone and implied that Cannibal Holocaust is good, a thought at which the mind somehow rebels. Let’s call it skillful instead.  For although there are good horror movies, and bad horror movies, and movies that are so bad that they are good, Cannibal Holocaust is none of these.  “Good” and “bad” don’t apply:  the distinction we need to make here is between “good” and “evil.”  If a movie can be evil Cannibal Holocaust is.  And if it’s not evil, it is at the LEAST very, very wicked.

The story concerns a group of documentary filmmakers who go into the Amazon rainforest hoping to bring back footage of the elusive and dangerous Yanomamo tribe.  They are never seen again.  Months later, an NYU anthropology professor (played by former porn star Robert Kerman) enters the jungle in a vain attempt to rescue them.  All he finds is the footage that they shot, and this footage becomes the second half of the film.  The structure is rather ingenious, actually.  As Kerman voyages through the jungle, he finds a trail of human wreckage that the ill-fated documentarians left in their wake.  A series of mysteries are set up for us:  how did their guide die?  Where did this turtle shell come from?  Why are the natives so hostile to Kerman’s group?  And then, as we watch the pseudo-documentary footage, the mysteries are unraveled one by one.  It turns out that the “documentarians” were not above staging their footage.  When they wanted to show a group of relatively peaceful Yacumo fleeing from a Yanomamo raid, they simply burned the Yacumo village down.  When they had trouble finding evidence of Yanomamo sexual travesties, they commited one of their own.   And this in turn reflects on the other camera crew, the makers of Cannibal Holocaust itself (who after all are staging all of these “real” and “staged” atrocities), and on the enterprise of cinema in general.  Like I said, it’s skillful.

But it’s also astonishingly vile.  The most atrocious element (but hardly the only one) is the slaughter of actual animals for cinematic effect.  There are six, according to Wikipedia (I didn’t count), and while most of these are clinical and efficient (a snake and a turtle are decapitated, a spider is stepped on), one small rodent is dies messily and in obvious pain.  Revolting as it is to watch, it does kind of make you think.  Let’s say I eat a hotdog once a week.  That means I’m personally responsible for killing something like two pigs a year.  And unless you’re a vegetarian, you have no problem with that.  Now imagine instead that the pig was killed on film for a horror movie.  That one death will serve to “entertain” a thousand people for a thousand years.  Which of these should you really be concerned about, if you’re an animal rights activist?  Nevertheless, there are laws against this sort of thing for a reason.  If I could go back and unwatch these scenes, I would do it.

In order to qualify as illegally obscene under current US law, a film must be devoid of all redeeming social or artistic value.  That’s not a charge that can be leveled at CH.  The film is smart enough that it cannot simply be sneered at, and well crafted enough that every transgressive gesture registers for maximum effect.  There is a social message, and every shot in the film conspires to drive this message home.  It’s there in the camerawork, it’s there in the score, it’s in the acting, the editing, and the fractured narrative itself.  This kind of organic unity is the sort of thing we’re taught to look for in the highest forms of art…  but in the end, CH’s very skill becomes just another calculated affront.  It taunts us with the knowledge that capable professionals were willing to pervert their craft to such ends.

And of course, even this reinforces the film’s message which is:  that barbarism is not a characteristic of the savage, but rather of the “civilized” man.

Dear reader: do not watch Cannibal Holocaust.  The film is repulsive, beyond repulsive. It is loathsome in its themes, in its tone, in its subtext, in the specifics of the plot, and certainly in the images it displays. The film is clearly some kind of a triumph, but that does not mean it should be seen.  I do not believe that that watching it is a moral act.  Oh, it’s nothing so bad… perhaps the equivalent of finding a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk and quietly pocketing it.  Nevertheless, it tarnishes the soul.

Coming up next: Horror movies that you don’t have to feel guilty about watching.