The four horror movies of the Apocalypse
“I know I’m human”
I don’t really like horror films.
Actually, let me give a bit of context to that statement.
I saw my first horror film at the age of 8 or 9 after I sneaked down the stairs one night, when I should have been in bed, to peak around the living room door to see what my folks were watching. It was The Amityville Horror, which I know is not very good, but it was the scene with Rod Steiger, as the priest, who had been called in to bless the house only to be confronted with a swarm of (devil) flies and an evil voice bellowing at him to “Get Out!”. How was this possible? The good guys always won and the monster was vanquished. To my young mind seeing this turn around was so absolutely terrifying that I spent that night sleeping in the hall on top of our dog rather go back to my dark and shadowy bedroom.
The type of movies that I have no time for, are the ones who sole modus operandi seems to be the “quiet, quiet, bang, quiet, quiet, bang” jump scares. These are not horror movies to me. They are like a ghost train with the plastic, mechanical monster creaking out in lurid lighting with a wheezy scream to give you a cheap thrill before the carriage continues squealing down the tracks. It’s not interesting, it’s unsatisfying and most of all, it’s not frightening.
Something that only gives you a series of brief scares when all you’re doing, in between, is waiting for the next one could easily be a description for the modern day slasher genre, which again I find to be thunderously boring. There has to be more for it to become a classic of the genre.
This was covered in “The Horror Café”, which was a dinner hosted by BBC2 back in 1990 with such legends as John Carpenter, Clive Barker, Roger Corman and Ramsey Campbell, where they discussed the nature of horror. You can still find it on YouTube and it’s fascinating to listen to their rational.
Carpenter says that “the jump scare is easier but the suspense needs to last longer and make you uncomfortable and it’s how long the suspense lasts before the release of the scare.” Spoken by a man who should know.
I think what he means is that there has to be a gathering sense of dread running through the story and that, unlike most of the time with movies, you’re not sure that there’s going to be a happy ending. Which makes it a lot more lifelike.
Between 1979 and 1983, four movies were released that not only exemplified that unescapable feeling of terror, but which would go on to be classics of the genre that continue to be admired and imitated over forty years later.
Ask anyone to list their favourite horror movies of all time and guaranteed The Thing, American Werewolf in London, Alien and The Evil Dead will be on there. These are seminal examples of, not only great genre films, but masterpieces in the craft of film making. Each created it’s own moment in cinema through their story, sound design and special effects, that means their legacy is secure for current and future fans to keep coming back to.
The main through line in all four movies is the invasion by “the other” and losing control of our humanity. Be it aliens in The Thing and Alien, demons in The Evil Dead or lycanthropy in American Werewolf in London, our characters are unable to escape their almost predetermined fate through just sheer bad luck. The crew of the Nostromo and Outpost 31, the friends at that cabin in the woods and even David Kessler tromping across the moors all just make the wrong choice that in horror movies always have grim consequences.
Alien was the first out the blocks when Fox tried to jump on the bandwagon after Star Wars. However, with a script from Dan O’Bannon, direction from Ridley Scott and, particularly, H.R Giger on visual effects they got something entirely different to the blockbusting space opera.
The story of blue collar space truckers just trying to do their job, get paid and get home was already a different set up to the heroes and villains we were used to seeing in science fiction, but it made it more comforting that these were people that could be related to, as everyone has the same issues. Even the spacecraft they’re floating through space on looks like a piece of junk held together with wire and sticky tape. However, when they receive a distress signal from an unknown planet and they are forced to investigate, you know that something bad is going to happen. However, what they find is so different and shocking in its unknown nature, that both crew and audience are thrown completely off guard.
The visual effects within the alien spaceship are truly other worldly. Even by today’s standards they shouldn’t be taken for granted so visually stunning is the palate. Giger’s work is astonishing particularly when considering the budget they were having to work with. Combine that with Scott’s production design and lighting and everything about it is “alien” in every sense. Finding all the eggs in the smoke and dankness is particularly eerie.
When Kane is attacked and an alien attaches to his face, the crew decide to bring him back on board to treat him, not realizing that he is being impregnated to become a new host, and after that all hell breaks loose. This type of alien doesn’t control your mind but it makes the body into a vessel for storing and growing more of their race.
The chest buster scene, when little cute baby alien makes it first appearance, is rightly famous particularly as the actors didn’t realise how visceral it was going to be, so their reactions are actually genuine, but the movie also introduces another common thread of being isolated in a single claustrophobic location, trapped with a monster from which there is no escape as the crew turn on each other as paranoia and fear begins to take hold.
The building tension in Alien is, at times, almost unbearable as the crew hunt or are hunted by the creature. There are jump scares but they are almost like a small oasis of relief in the desert of unflinching suspense as they fight for their lives.
It’s ironic that the tagline for The Thing, “Man is the warmest place to hide” could almost be used for this movie as well.
“If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation, how would you know if it was really me?”
There are some similarities to Alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing, although I think the latter is the superior movie, but this time the paranoia is turned up to 11 and questioning ones own humanity is really brought to the fore.
Based on the novella, Who Goes There by John W. Campbell, it finds a group of American scientists at a research station in Antarctica come up against a shape shifting alien that infiltrates their camp and can perfectly replicate the appearance of its victims. Driven by a thrumming, heartbeat of a score by Ennio Morricone, this leads to the perfect example of toxic masculinity as the 12 men face off against each other in mutual suspicion not knowing who is human and who might be The Thing.
It is all that and so much more with amazing gore filled set pieces that carry emotional weight as you’re invested in the wonderful character actors inhabiting the roles, whilst also having some hilarious gallows humour and snarky one liners.
The philosophical question at the heart of the story is what it means to be human. If The Thing is a “perfect imitation” does that not actually make it a human. In one of the most infamous scenes, Palmer, who is already a Thing mutters the immortal line “You got to be fucking kidding me”, when he sees the spider head part of The Thing scuttling away. However, if he’s a creature why is he giving away the presence of another one trying to escape? Could it be that he doesn’t even realise what he is?
As much as The Thing is compared to Alien, it also has very strong ties to Ridley Scott’s second feature, the science fiction classic, Blade Runner, which also flopped on release in 1982 before swiftly being re-evaluated. Tyrell, who makes the life like replicants, has the motto “more human than human.” Both movies ask the question about what makes us who we are and, if we weren’t human, would we actually know? However, unlike in Scott’s classic, the protagonists in The Thing don’t want to understand the non-human, they just want to kill it.
Anne Billson’s BFI Film Classics interpretation of the movie covers this in a lot more detail and is a fascinating read.
“Beware the moon.”
Of course, the earliest records of people being controlled by the “other” date back thousands of years, from the bible and mythological tales, and mostly concern demonic or animal possession.
In Greek mythology a man named Lycaon served Zeus a meal of human flesh and as punishment was turned into a wolf and since then these fables of shape shifting creatures who appear at the full moon have continued into European folklore.
Lycanthropes have appeared in cinema since its inception, with the 1913 silent movie “The Werewolf” being the first to explore the mythos on screen. Many have since followed and all try and deal with the curse to various degrees of success. One of the most famous is John Landis’, An American Werewolf in London.
Released in 1981, the same year as Joe Dante’s The Howling, this movie about two young American’s attacked by a werewolf on the English moors is often sneeringly dismissed as a comedy rather than a real horror, but this misses the point that, yes, some of the dialogue is laugh out loud funny, but it is also genuinely terrifying from the disturbing dream sequences of Nazi zombies to the ghostly visitations by his dead friend Jack, warning his friend that he is carrying the last remaining werewolf bloodline which must be destroyed.
Again, we see David, the victim of this infection initially going from scepticism to fear and then to acceptance when the transformation begins. His ecstasy after the first night as a wolf shows that he has never felt better and is willing to accept this gift without question, until he begins to hear what he has done. Unlike the other three stories, he is not trapped in one location but rather he cannot escape his “carnivorous lunar activities” every time the full moon rises.
With An American Werewolf in London in 1981 and The Thing in 1982, we also bore witness to the two greatest special effects gurus the world had ever seen. In Rick Baker and Rob Bottin, the limits of the imagination were no longer impossible to put up on screen.
Previously, horror movies would have and occasionally still do, cut away from creature transformation scenes or shroud them in darkness so it’s unclear what’s actually happening. Some will continue their entire film in that vein so everything is impossible to see until the monster pops out unexpectantly.
In Werewolf and The Thing, everything is done in the bright lights of a living room or laboratory as Carpenter says “I thought, well, why don’t we bring it out in the light and really show there’s a creature here, make you believe it.” And, boy, do we believe it.
There was no CGI involved, which was still in its infancy anyway, so everything was done with practical effects. Both men had teams of people working for months at a time to perfect how their monsters would look but more importantly how they would move.
On the Thing, Bottin used foam latex, KY jelly, bubble gum and even strawberry jam to create this monster that could morph into anything from throughout the galaxy and turn it into a mass of eyeballs and tentacles. Animatronics, reverse shots and puppetry were also used to give the impression of appendages sprouting out in all directions from a living, breathing creation. It was a 7 day a week, 56 week labour of love that caused Bottin to check himself into hospital suffering from exhaustion as soon as the shoot was over.
Baker won the inaugural Oscar for his work on Werewolf. Again his team worked tirelessly to create what Landis had described as a “hound from hell”. You’re a full hour into the film before it actually happens but it’s worth the wait. No slightly hunched man walking about in fake foggy forests with massive mutton chops. This was a full transformation in all its face stretching, hair sprouting, bone cracking glory that has to be seen to be believed.
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that the special effect sequences on these two movies will never be topped no matter how much CGI is thrown at the screen.
Both films were generally poorly received at the time but Werewolf went on to do decent business whereas The Thing sank without a trace, mostly in part to another much more cuter alien movie released in the same year, but also because of the withering criticism it received in the UK and US. Both films really found their place on VHS so the incredible effect scenes could be paused and scanned again and again to try and figure out how they were done.
However, the flak that these movies took was a drop in the ocean compared to what our final film had to put up with.
“We’re going to get you.”
The story of The Evil Dead is your standard, five friends go up to a cabin in the woods for some fun but actually end up being attacked and possessed by all the demons (or deadites to be more accurate) from hell when they find The Book the Dead in the basement. It’s a straight forward set up for 85 minutes of some of the most grotesque and disturbing scenes ever put to film but, again, has a wicked streak of black humour running through it. There are jump scares aplenty but the atmosphere is really unsettling with the guttural voices of the demons, the ticking clock and the swooping cameras creating a real feeling of dread. Again, we have the claustrophobic location as the isolated group try to survive until morning whilst gradually being whittled down. I remember the first time I watched it, my mouth was dry and I sat very, very still waiting for the next horror to unfold. However, that was in 1990, seven years after the film had first been released.
The Evil Dead was initially shown in the US in 1981 but didn’t receive a wider cinema release until 1983. It was certified as an X in the UK in January 1983 with 49 seconds of cuts and the video release soon followed and ended up being the best selling VHS of the year. And that was when the real trouble started.
The National Viewers and Listeners Association, which was a conservative group led by Mary Whitehouse, took exception to the movie, labelling it a “video nasty” and asked the government to ban it. The Video Recordings Act was introduced with politicians declaring that they had research that showed the film “would not just affect young people but dogs as well.” Clearly politicians were worried about their pets watching The Evil Dead and it was banned until 1990. Even then it was released in a cut version and did not get a fully uncut release until 2001.
We had seen this all before, of course, with The Exorcist 10 years earlier.
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is the granddaddy of modern horror film making. Again a story of supposed possession, but this time of a twelve year old girl and the attempts of two priests to rid of her of the affliction. As soon as the film was released in 1973 reports began to surface of people fainting, vomiting and even having heart attacks whilst watching it. Priests would picket cinemas and hand out leaflets warning of the dangers of the devil.
Strange as it may sound, with the reputation it has, The Exorcist was not banned when it was initially released and was fully available on video until it also fell foul of the Video Recording Act and was eventually banned between 1988 and 1999. As with The Evil Dead, its reputation and mythology only grew in that time making the ban all the more ridiculous.
It is without doubt that both movies have questionable moments with the possessed tree sexual assault scene from Evil Dead, about which Raimi has expressed regret, and the crucifix scene in The Exorcist which is too gratuitous, but neither are reasons to remove the films from public viewing altogether.
So, we are left with these four films, all infamous in their own way, made over forty years ago that cover issues which resonate and frighten us to this day. About our loss of consciousness and control, through things like artificial intelligence or, even more personal, human conditions like Alzheimer's. The fear of succumbing to this invading, encroaching Thing that will take away everything we once were or ever will be.
And, as these are horror films, they do not shy away from that terror and bleakness. Particularly when it comes to the denouement.
All of them end on an ambiguous or downbeat note. David lying shot dead in the street, the demon POV racing towards a screaming Ash or MacReady and Childs sitting freezing to death in the snow, not knowing which one of them is a monster. Only Alien finishes on a vaguely upbeat note as Ripley floats off into space. However, even then, with the sequels, we know that doesn’t turn out great!
For these movies to truly deal in the horrific then they should continue that to the end. It doesn’t make sense for it to go any other way.
Stories like these cannot be wrapped up in a big bow. That’s just the way things are when you come up against the unknown when, try as you might, you just can’t beat it, and sometimes it takes the most fantastical stories, with monsters and demons, to show us that the fight for our humanity may ultimately be hopeless but we still have to try. And that, as in life, is how it should be.
As I read the captions to the pictures I was *HOWLING*. 😆 The “Amityville Horror” terrified me when I saw it on cable for the first time. Very chilling story, and the real story is also rather unnerving. There’s a guy who does a YouTube channel called (I think) “The Tape Library” and his episode on this case was top notch.
I also really enjoyed “The Thing” because of the innovation with the special effects and all that body horror. It somehow made my adolescent acme feel a little less traumatic. And I like that they didn’t go too deep into the aliens’ past. Which brings me to Aliens. I thought the first two were brilliant. They were very different stylistically, but both of them worked for me. I think the problem with a lot of the stories is that they jump the shark after the first sequel: witness Hellraiser. It’s when the script tries to explain the mystery that it looses what made the original so creepy. You get this phenomenon in Victorian horror novels and short stories as well. It reveals the limitations of the authors, because they’re trying to adopt scientific ideas that they have a muddled interpretation of and so you get attempts to explain the chemical properties of ectoplasm. So, going back to the Alien saga, you get things like “Prometheus”, which is just a hot mess with too much going on. The characters no longer have credible motivations behind why they’re doing things. This happened from time to time in the old Star Trek episodes as well.
I also liked the original “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” as well as the remake with Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum and other 1970s cinematic regulars. I’ve already discussed with you in another thread how much I loved “American Werewolf in London”. It was the gallows humor peppered throughout that one that still tickles me.
I never took to the Evil Dead series. I don’t know what it was about it. I just always associated it “Toxic Avenger” and “CHUD” and it seemed a bit campy to me.
I've never been a fan of horror movies, but nothing traumatised me like watching the original Japanese version of "The Ring" when it was out in the movies. I recall having to sleep with the lights on for a while after that, and I was already a high-school student at the time. Thanks, but no thanks!