|
|
Home
Reviews
Articles
Reel History
Attack of the Bs
Archives
Links
Submissions
Ad Rates
The Tidbits
|
|
Attack
of the Bs
A
celebration of cult and B-movies by Tim McLean
Theatre of
Horrors?
In
1897, Oscar Metenier purchased a small theatre at the end of a cul de sac in
Paris. Ironically, the little building used to be a chapel, and still had
twin stone angels looking down over the entrance. He named his theatre the
Grand Guignol, after a famous French puppet character known for controversial
political satire.
Through the opening year of the Guignol, the theatre furthered the nascent
Naturalist movement in French drama—putting on plays that were gritty,
ugly representations of the real world. The Guignol’s plays concerned
real Paris street types never before seen on a stage: beggars, pimps,
prostitutes, murderers, thieves, what the Parisian referred to as “apaches.”
But the theatre really came into its own, indeed became (for a time) the
best-known tourist attraction in the city, when it turned into a nightly
bloodbath and sex extravaganza.
That’s right you freaks, I said a nightly bloodbath and sex
extravaganza. Bet you thought this would be another dry, boring column.
Under the helm of Max Maurey, who took over in 1898, the Guignol began its
life as a macabre institution. The collapsing dagger, the blood packet, the
sheep’s eyeball plucked from a real woman’s socket, the garish
music and lighting; the various parts of the theatre would mangle together in
a cacophony of terror every night. Several short plays, usually one act each,
depicted robbery, assault, kidnapping, rape, murder, revenge, torture, the
undead, necrophilia, and most importantly, madness. An inordinate number of
them were written by Mr. Andre de Lorde, the chief playwright of the Guignol.
These plays were lifted directly from the crime blotter pages of Paris’s
more sensational newspapers.
Parisians would gossip, condemn, perhaps lower their voices and ask excitedly:
Have you seen what’s at the Guignol now? Have you seen what they’ve
done?
But the public was fascinated, and stayed fascinated for more than sixty
years. In France, the guillotine had gone away, but the horrors of WWI and
WWII had yet to turn the collective stomach, it was a perfect time for the
theatre to come into existence. Notable patrons over the years included
kings, queens, dukes, princes and sultans; as well as the ordinary local
street person looking for a night of blood and scares. A young Ho Chi Min,
then an expatriate noodle cook, was known to attend.
The Guignol boasted having a physician on duty at all times to give attention
to those audience members overcome by terror. Indeed, many people did faint
during almost every performance night. The more fainting, the better the
theatre was doing. To break up the onslaught of the violence and the horror,
the theatre also peppered sex farces into the repertoire. These were short,
bawdy pieces that may or may not have included full on nudity and perhaps
even actual sex, depending on who you ask.
But it wasn’t just onstage where sex was happening.
Many high-society women over the years would attend, either openly or in
varying degrees of secrecy. The Grand Guignol had “luxury boxes”
that were quite enclosed and private, and it was a common Parisian perversion
for women of good birth to take various men in with them and conduct their
extramarital affairs while being fascinated and titillated by the bloody acts
happening onstage. Somebody’s GOT to make a movie about this place.
The grand Guignol rode an enormous wave of popularity due to several reasons;
and the subject is well documented. One of the factors, briefly, was that of
the rise of psychoanalysis in general at exactly this time, and in particular
the diagnosis of “mania.” The notion of a “crazed killer”
or worse, a psychopath, was a new, terrible, and fascinating idea (indeed, de
Lorde’s best friend was a psychologist, and he supplied many of the ideas
for the Guignol’s villains). If you sit through philosophy courses, someone
sometime is bound to start rambling about “The Other.” Yeah, yeah.
We all fear this Other, no matter how brave we are in various walks of life.
It could be death, or simply bad health (deformation, leprosy, etc.),
foreigners, sexual deviance, the opposite sex, violence, insanity, whatever. The
Guignol served up a healthy dish of “Other” every night, and you
could—with the exception of maybe fainting or getting some stage blood
on you—watch unharmed. That, my friends, is catharsis. Let’s go
look right into the Beast’s eyes, then leave and live to giggle
nervously about it.
So. Why am I bringing all this up?
Because it’s Halloween, and the Grand Guignol serves as an effective
reminder of why we love horror movies in the first place. You know what
killed the Guignol, finally and pathetically, in 1967? Movies. Horror movies,
in particular.
I mean, when you think about it logically, horror movies should hardly exist
at all, let alone constitute perhaps the oldest continuously popular genre in
cinema. Who would (logically) think people would leave their houses and pay
money to be terrified? To see things they literally don’t ever want to
see in the real world? Well, logic’s got nothing to do with it. Many
(most?) of us need to see the baddies, to see and hear someone get tortured,
mauled, eaten alive. Whether we care to admit it or not is another matter.
Whether you’re slowing down past a car accident, or watching When Animals
Attack or the UFC or any police procedural forensics show (or even 90% of
nature shows, for that matter), or, worse yet, watching the damn news; you
are that sick French audience. We all are. We need to see it, we need to get
it, at least for a while, out of our systems.
And one of the strongest of these outlets is the cult horror movie. You know
the type. It moves by word of mouth (and lately bolstered by the Internet).
It’s the kind boys, as a test of manliness, ask each other if they
have seen. But it’s anything but childish. It’s at least one step beyond
the “normal” horror films cruising through the mainstream. It has a
nastier reputation. It’s generally frowned upon in polite circles. But
most people still want to see it.
“Cult horror movie” is a big genre, it would encompass such
particular subgenres as early American exploitation (Blood Feast, Two
Thousand Maniacs, Freaks), the 70s grindhouse films (Last House on the
Left, The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), both Italian
Giallo and slasher films (Suspiria, Deep Red, Tenebre, Zombi) and
Italian cannibal films (especially Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal
Ferox, the twin heavy-hitters of unadulterated exploitation), the Faces
of Death films, 80s schlocky stuff (Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator
and From Beyond, Ken Russell’s Lair of the White Worm and Gothic),
and some other, harder to pin down forms, like the Evil Dead films.
These roughly-made gore spectacles are not far removed from the depravity of
the Grand Guignol. Sex is still very much part of the essential mixture; the
brutality is graphic and extreme, a spectacle in itself; and the plot lines
can be darker or simply riskier…the hero maybe not always get away alive,
and sometimes the monster/killer isn’t even punished!
Let’s focus, for a moment, on the crazy Italian cannibal films of the
late 70s and early 80s. As mentioned, Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal
Ferox are the two strongest (or most blatant) examples of the Grand
Guignol fascination. I remember seeing the box to Ferox (sometimes
with its English title, Make Them Die Slowly) almost every time I went
to the small, pre-Blockbuster, family-owned video rental store. My parents
wouldn’t let me rent it when with them, and the video clerk certainly
wouldn’t let me rent it on my own. Another night of Commando or Big
Trouble in Little China for me.
But they were always there, those Italian cannibal films. I didn’t get
to see Holocaust or Ferox until college, when fortunately
I met a few other curious sickos. They are bad movies. I mean really bad. The
violence is shocking and wholly gratuitous; both Ruggero Deodato of Holocaust
and Umberto Lenzi of Ferox used real pig’s blood and organs to
achieve not only convincing visuals, but also to cause actual distress and
shock in the faces of the actors portraying the victims. Both films concern
groups of white people entering, for slightly different inconsequential
reasons, the darkest parts of the Amazon and being horribly victimized by the
primitive peoples there. That’s about it. Rape, sexual mutilation,
torture, murder AND bona fide cruelty to animals…and of course
cannibalism, are all portrayed in grainy 70s glory.
Now, I’m not recommending these films, mind you. I’m merely
pointing out the widespread urge in human beings to go and see things like
this. Even privately, in the dark, half drunk, whatever. In fact, anyone that
recommends these films should be avoided, or at least watched closely. But
anyone who claims there is “no reason” for such films, or says she “does
not understand why anyone would want to see them,” well, they’re
sick too. Or maybe just kidding themselves, because these Mondo-ish
exploitation films are simply a harder booze than the lighter, mainstream
horror films that garner respectability. Both are made from differing proofs
of the same stuff. People who lined up to see Halloween, The Howling,
the Friday the 13th films, The Ring, An American Werewolf in
London, whatever, they are looking for a little of the Guignol whether
they care to admit it or not. They just like their drink a little watered
down. We want a look. Even a quick one, a look right into the Worst, the
Other, the castle freak that is waiting for each one of us to come down those
dark back stairs one night. Of course, we hope “it” does not stare
back at us too intently. If it does, we can always stop the tape, turn off
the DVD player, walk out of the theatre. Can’t we?
My Halloween recommendations are thus: Rent Suspiria (1977), Dario
Argento’s first major film, and I believe his best. But, if you haven’t
seen it before, keep in mind it is primarily an audio-visual nightmare, not a
cohesive, logical story. The imagery is unique to this day, consisting of a
garish and oddly beautiful palette of colors, most notably red. The music,
provided by the band Goblin, is assaulting at first, and utterly perfect by
film’s end. Watch this all the way through, it is a short film, and by
the end the dread builds to surprising levels. I was genuinely unsettled
(though I admit, for the first 20 minutes I was chuckling into my whiskey).
The story concerns a mysterious European dance academy secretly (perhaps)
controlled by a coven of witches. Originally written as a school for
12-year-olds, producers deemed it far too violent to concern children. So
what does Argento do? He refuses to rewrite the script, which keeps the
dialogue childish and the teacher-student relations didactic, but makes all
the students sexy 19- and 20-year-old girls. Brilliant!
Second recommendation: Rent Hostel (2005), and not just because Eli
Roth is a good Newton boy. The film is actually a very impressive throwback
to the grindhouse movement of the 70s. The entire film sells itself on the
idea of torture, it looks like an exploitation film; and to an extent it is.
But it is also chock-full of explicit sex between incredibly attractive young
people; it serves as one VERY dark guess at what the truly uber-rich and
bored might do for twisted recreation; and it keeps a strange, comical tone
throughout its non-torture scenes, allowing for a respite from the grim
goings-on (which makes it similar to The Wicker Man, and there is even
a funny reference to that odd-ball film). The violence becomes, while not
quite tongue-in-cheek, definitely surreal and operates with a glorious,
roughhousing energy all its own. And, it must be noted, Slovakia is actually
a wonderful, safe, non-torturing-for-sport country full of friendly people;
but the movie was in good fun.
Since both films treat Europe as a strange place where Americans go to get
murdered violently in the nude, you should drink a fine wine, or, if you can
get it, absinthe. Or perhaps frosty Czech beers. Sit in the dark and watch
the mayhem, and remember the long tradition in which you are taking part.
And, actually, if you can get real absinthe, email me. I ran out back when I
was reviewing Krull.
Back to Top
Interested in one of the films mentioned above? Try Movies Unlimited:
or have some fun with:
|
|
