Every Saturday night The Tomb of Terror opens, unleashing reviews of the obscure and the classic in horror cinema.
The early 90s were possibly the worst time ever to be a horror fan. The genre’s success throughout the 80s was carried by the popularity of the slasher film, most notably the Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street series. By the time 1990 rolled around, those series were all near the bottom of the barrel and the entire genre seemed to die with them. There were still good horror films to be had in the first six years of the decade, but they weren’t very successful commercially. This all changed in 1996 with the release of Scream. The film reinvented the horror genre, and the slasher subgenre, specifically. It did so with a great admiration for films of the past and a great sense of fun throughout.
Abracadabra,
Husband and wife writer/producer/director team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz have had a storied career in Hollywood. Film school friends of George Lucas (Star Wars), they have worked with the famed director on many projects. They co-wrote American Graffiti with Lucas and wrote the screenplay for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from a story by Lucas. This all led to the film that pretty much ended Huyck and Katz’s career, the much maligned Lucas production of Howard the Duck. On that notorious box office bomb, Huyck acted as director while Katz produced, and both wrote the screenplay. Many years before that tragic film befell their careers, the duo played identical roles on a low budget horror film entitled Messiah of Evil.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow is an interesting film in that it embraces some major things which we don’t see in horror entertainment anymore. One is the complete lack of blood and gore. This is a film that uses the Hitchcockian technique of suspense, drawing out scenes until you’re ready to jump out of your skin, instead of going for the easy (though still fun) gross out. In fact, except for a couple of notable instances, all of the film’s violence takes place off-screen or without much of a visual aftermath. This might have something to do with the second thing we don’t see in horror anymore. Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a made-for-TV horror film, something very prevalent in the 1970s that is all but dead today. Some might look down on a made-for-TV film, but this piece of 80s goodness shows that small screen terrors can sometimes be more effective than those released into cinemas.
Vampires have been a mainstay of horror ever since Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula popularized them in 1897. Every few years we see an influx of films centering on bloodsuckers. Certain things may change from film to film, such as the ridiculous lovesick sparkling vampire craze which we are currently in the midst of, but the basic rules always stay the same. Vampires have to drink blood. They can only be killed by sunlight or a stake to the heart. They hate garlic, crosses and holy water. Watch a vampire film and you’ll usually find at least three of these rules honored. And that’s how it should be. There’s nothing more annoying than a monster movie that changes all the rules of its monster. One exception to this rule is Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 film Near Dark, which reinvents the vampire mythos by stripping it to its core.
Prophecy (1979) is a monster movie. You know this because the poster reads: “Prophecy: The Monster Movie.” This might be one of the most ridiculous taglines ever. I don’t know anyone who was going to look at that drawing of a deformed embryo and think they were going to get “Prophecy: The Romantic Comedy.” But that’s not enough for Prophecy’s poster. It also has to throw in one of the longest taglines ever: “She Lives. Don’t Move. Don’t Breathe. There’s Nowhere To Run. She Will Find You.” The film itself has a lot in common with that poster. There’s a lot of talking, as you could probably tell from the paragraph-long first tagline. There’s a crazy looking monster that is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, as referenced by the monster embryo. And it’s a little cheesy, just like the second tagline that tells you this is in fact a monster movie.
Being an older sibling can be difficult. Your parents fuss and muss over your younger brother or sister. Everything you do is wrong, everything they do is right. This is the situation that Alice Spages (Paula Sheppard, Liquid Sky) finds herself in. She lives with her single mother (Linda Miller, The Green Slime) and younger sister Karen (Brooke Shields, The Blue Lagoon) in working class New York. Alice is a strange girl who takes to hiding out in her apartment building’s basement, where she dons a creepy mask and collects cockroaches. This is the exact opposite of Karen, a young beauty who is the apple of her mother’s eyes. To say that there is a sibling rivalry between the two sisters would be an understatement.
Sometimes a film comes along that wouldn’t have been able to exist without the success of another. After watching The Sentinel (1977), I’m convinced that the movie would not exist had The Exorcist not been a hit three years before. There are certain aspects of the film that seem carbon copied from that classic tale of demonic possession. The film is based on a novel by Jeffrey Konvitz that was released in 1974, the same year as The Exorcist hit theaters. Was the inspiration for writing it the box office figures of William Friedkin’s film? No one but Konvitz can know for sure. I am fairly certain, however, that the movie exists because of that film’s success, as well as the success of another hellspawn, The Omen (1976).
Have you ever seen a film and felt like it spoke to you? What did you do afterward? Did you watch it as many times as you possibly could? Did you show it to all of your friends? Did you research every aspect of the production until you became a walking encyclopedia on that particular film? Maybe you were so inspired that you decided to become a filmmaker yourself. It’s a feeling that many are familiar with, myself included. But I’ve never met anyone who was so inspired by a film that they then decided to do a shot-for-shot remake with whatever cash they could scrounge together. That’s what three friends by the names of Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos, and Jayson Lamb did after they saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981. They were only twelve years old.
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