Текст книги "Monsters in the Movies "

Автор книги: Джон Лэндис

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Zombies[ Book Contents]

Night of the Living Dead  [George A. Romero, 1968]

Original poster for the little black and white movie from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that has had enormous impact on popular culture.

Zombies[ Book Contents]

On a scene still from his film, George gives me some good advice: “John—don’t ever let the bastards in!”

Zombies[ Book Contents]

Live and Let Die  [Guy Hamilton, 1973]

Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi in this James Bond blaxploitation movie. The first time Roger Moore played Bond, James Bond.

Zombies[ Book Contents]

The Return of the Living Dead  [Dan O’Bannon, 1985]

A very funny sequel to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead[1968] that puts the blame for a zombie outbreak directly on the military.

Zombies[ Book Contents]

I Walked With a Zombie  [Jacques Tourneur, 1943]

Producer Val Lewton was given this title by RKO and told to make a movie out of it. What they got was a Voodoo version of Jane Eyre!

Zombies[ Book Contents]

The Omega Man  [Boris Sagal, 1971]

The second film version of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Charlton Heston battles albino zombie vampires.

Zombies[ Book Contents]

Shaun of the Dead  [Edgar Wright, 2004]

Simon Pegg shines as he and a group of friends and loved ones deal with a zombie attack in contemporary London by seeking sanctuary at his favorite pub.

Zombies[ Book Contents]

I Walked With a Zombie  [Jacques Tourneur, 1943]

Nurse Frances Dee with her patient and a zombie in the sugar cane field. I really don’t want to tell you more, go see the movie!

Zombies[ Book Contents]

Sugar Hill  [Paul Maslansky, 1974]

Those white gangsters should never have fooled around with a Voodoo priestess in the first place! Another AIP blaxploitation picture.

Zombies[ Book Contents]

The Plague of the Zombies  [John Gilling, 1966]

Gilling’s period Hammer film, with zombie slave labor being used by the upper class, is a zombie movie, of course, but like many British horror films, it is really about class.

Zombies[ Book Contents]

An American Werewolf in London  [John Landis, 1981]

Griffin Dunne as Jack Goodman does not look his best, and it will get worse. Jack is not happy being one of “the undead.”

“Have you ever talked to a corpse? It’s boring.”

Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), An American Werewolf in London

Zombies[ Book Contents]

Dead Alive  [aka Braindead, Peter Jackson, 1992]

Jackson’s uproarious movie about zombies in Auckland is so gory it becomes Dada. With a cameo from Forrest J Ackerman.

“They’re not dead exactly, they’re just … sort of rotting!”

Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme), Dead Alive

Zombies[ Book Contents]

Cemetery Man  [aka Dellamorte Dellamore, Michele Soavi, 1994]

Anna Falchi as Rupert Everett’s great love, only now she’s dead and returned from the grave. An interesting story about the caretaker of a small cemetery in a small Italian town and his mentally handicapped friend who try to deal with the dead who refuse to stay in the ground.

Zombies[ Book Contents]

Dawn of the Dead  [Zack Snyder, 2004]

A remake of the Romero classic [1978]. The living dead overwhelms an escape vehicle.

Zombies[ Book Contents]

Resident Evil: Extinction  [Russell Mulcahy, 2007]

An ugly lady zombie from the third movie in the Resident Evilfranchise. Every Resident Evilmovie is basically Milla Jovovich kicking zombie ass. You could take random scenes from each of these films and cut them together and I don’t think anyone would notice.

IN CONVERSATION

Sam Raimi

“I made Evil Dead just to break into the business…”

Sam Raimi on the set of Drag Me to Hell[2009].

Zombies[ Book Contents]

JL: Sam, how would you define a monster?

SR: Something that represents our deepest, darkest fears in a physical form—for the movies.

JL: Do you believe in ghosts or anything supernatural?

SR: No, but I believe there are many things that are even more fantastic, as proven by science, out in the cosmos with the Hubble telescope: How gravity and time works backwards and the sub-atomic worlds. There are so many fantastic things.

JL: But that’s a sense of wonder, not fear. Those aren’t physical things that can hit you on the head.

SR: No, I wish there were some good old-fashioned monsters walking around.

JL: What about human monsters, like in Psycho[Alfred Hitchcock, 1960] or The Silence of the Lambs[Jonathan Demme, 1991]?

SR: I definitely believe that they’re out there. And they make the subjects of terrifying movies. It’s too real for me to be involved in as a filmmaker. I get too freaked out. I think all horror moviemakers are cowards at heart, but that area really terrifies me and I don’t find it entertaining to work in, even though I do love Psycho.

JL: What about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre[Tobe Hooper, 1974]?

SR: That’s so brilliant.

JL: That’s about crazy people.

SR: I found it very upsetting. As a filmmaker, I couldn’t get involved in a project like that—but it was masterfully directed. In many ways it was like Psychobecause it dealt with the most disturbing and monstrous aspects of human behavior, yet it was handled by a superb storyteller. That’s a very unsettling combination.

JL: Deborah [my wife, Deborah Landis] can watch and enjoy your Evil Deadmovies [ Evil Dead, 1981, Evil Dead II, 1987, and Army of Darkness, 1992, all directed by Sam], she can see any movie with monsters. But she refuses to watch a movie like The Boston Strangler[Richard Fleischer, 1968], The Silence of the Lambs, or Psychobecause those people exist.

SR: I get very disturbed watching those films. They have a very deep effect on me.

JL: What about Mike Myers in Halloween[John Carpenter, 1978], or Freddie Krueger [in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven, 1984], these unstoppable killing machines who are clearly not human?

SR: Mike Myers was sort of a combination of the two. He was a great movie monster—with the artificiality of that blank Captain Kirk mask that he had—but there was also something very real about him. He could be any one of us tipped over the edge, putting on a mask, and doing terrible things. Mike Myers was both a movie monster and real person for me.

JL: I see Mike Myers as a supernatural figure, because he’s unkillable. Even when he’s shot point-blank, he gets up and walks away.

SR: You’re right. That is how Carpenter presents him: as a ghost. In the beginning of the movie he’s just this unbalanced guy…

JL: He’s escaped from a lunatic asylum.

SR: And by the end he has supernatural powers. He’s everywhere.

JL: What are some of your favorite monster movies?

SR: I really like King Kong[Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933]; I think that’s a great monster movie. I love the fact that the monster has a soul, because it really makes it rich and emotional—very deep. I’m a big fan of your movie, An American Werewolf in London[1981]. It’s funny, it’s scary, and it has a great love story. I like it when movies have a few different elements and they all work. It’s hard to orchestrate that, but I like it when movies are rich and they have a lot of dimensions to them.

JL: In King Kongand American Werewolfboth the leads are victims. They’re sympathetic, even though they’re the monsters.

SR: They are, and both films have tragic endings. The monster had a soul and it dies. It scared you, but you felt for him.

JL: What about Frankenstein’s Monster?

SR: It’s the same exact thing. I love Karloff’s Frankenstein—James Whale’s Frankenstein[1931]– and I loved The Bride of Frankenstein[James Whale, 1935] even more.

JL: Yeah, Doctor Pretorius is my favorite mad scientist of all mad scientists. What about The Wolf Man[George Waggner, 1941]?

SR: I liked The Wolf Manvery much, and Lon Chaney, Jr. gave a great performance.

JL: Larry Talbot was another victim. What about Ray Harryhausen’s creatures?

SR: Those are some of my favorite monsters of all time! I was very influenced by Jason and the Argonauts[Don Chaffey, 1963]. Every Harryhausen set piece in that film was absolutely brilliant. I love the skeletons that attack Jason. To this day, my mind boggles that Harryhausen could control and plot the movements of seven skeletons.

JL: And without video playback.

SR: Yes! How did he keep track, three seconds into a shot, on frame number 85, where skeleton number six was swinging his blade, and how fast he should be moving?

JL: It took him months to animate those three minutes. And you paid homage to that sequence in Army of Darkness. What’s your favorite Harryhausen monster?

SR: Wow. I think Talos, (the bronze giant in Jason and the Argonauts). He might be the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen in the movies. I love (composer) Bernard Herrmann’s music and those horrible groans of metal when the monster turns his head.

JL: The sound effects are incredible.

SR: And the way that Harryhausen limited Talos’ ability to move. When he comes to life so slowly, it’s awful!

JL: It’s interesting that Talos has no expression. He’s a bronze statue. He never changes, but the emotion conveyed when Jason and his men pull that hatch out of his heel and his lifeblood pours out…

SR: Yeah, you feel almost sorry for the guy. Almost. One of my favorite monsters, in the vein of Talos, is Gort [the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still, Robert Wise, 1951]. Another faceless creature.

JL: Did you see that movie on television, or in the theater?

SR: I saw it at Camp Tamakwa, in Algonquin Park, Canada. They would show old 16mm prints, and they got that for a Saturday night.

JL: How old were you?

SR: I was probably 15 years old. It was great because you’d see the reel changes. The projector would run out and you’d have to wait for the second reel to be put up. It really gave you an appreciation of this being a film. I don’t mind reel breaks because they give you time to think about what you just saw. It’s like: “Oh, that was just an illusion but it was so powerful! I wonder what they’re going to do next?”

JL: In your picture Evil Dead, isn’t there a witch, possessed by demons?

SR: That’s right. Evil spirits get inside the kids and possess them.

JL: Do you believe in God or the Devil?

SR: I don’t believe in the Devil, but I do believe in a form of God.

JL: Some kind of higher intelligence?

SR: Some cosmic intelligence, yeah.

JL: You do this great thing in Evil Dead II—which is one of my favorite movies—where you make the action completely insane, just ridiculous, and it totally works! Like that sequence with Ash and his hand; it’s a cartoon! It’s totally insane, but it also makes you believe that Bruce’s hand (Bruce Campbell, who plays Ash) has a complete will of its own.

SR: Thanks!

JL: You also did something in Drag Me to Hell[2009] that made me laugh so hard because it was so damn silly and out of left field.

SR: What?

JL: The anvil gag in the garage.

SR: Oh, that Roadrunner bit, yeah.

JL: It was like, “Who keeps an anvil suspended on ropes in their garage?” I thought, “Sam knows that’s nuts. He did it deliberately.”

SR: I did it for you!

JL: That was so funny. It really made me laugh.

SR: Thanks, man. That’s very kind of you. Making you laugh is a big, big deal to me. (Laughs.)

JL: There was also one jump scare really got me in that film.

SR: When the witch (played by Lorna Raver) is in the back seat of the car?

JL: No, when the scary old lady appeared on Alison Lohman’s cell phone. That really worked! I’m a good audience because I’m a sucker, but also, that gag was so very unexpected but completely plausible.

SR: I think one of the best scares I’ve ever seen was in American Werewolf. It was the dream within a dream; it was so powerful. I just shrieked and jumped out of my seat!

JL: I was inspired by Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie[1972]. That movie goes along for quite some time with this one character, and then he wakes up! So everything we just watched was a dream, but then someone else wakes up! And so on. Buñuel keeps surprising and confusing you. You think: “Wait a minute! His dream was in her dream. But who’s dream are we in now? And is this reality or still a dream?” The dream within a dream within a dream is such a great concept. I just borrowed that and created a jump scare out of it.

SR: I remember the collective shriek in the theater when I saw American Werewolf, and I remember great roars of laughter, back and forth, back and forth.

JL: Well you do exactly that, Sam. You’ve had great success with that, too! Okay, now I have another question: Why are zombies so popular right now?

SR: I love George A. Romero! Night of the Living Dead[1968] was a big influence on me. At the time, that was the scariest movie that I had ever seen and it freaked me out. Romero shows us how to take the walking dead and one little house, and make a whole movie for no money. He’s the one that gave me the formula for the Evil Deadmovie.

JL: Night of the Living Deadhad almost a documentary quality. Most fantasy films are set in a fantasy place. The Wolf Manwas made in 1941, at the height of World War II. It takes place in England during the war and there are horses and carriages and no mention of the Nazis or German bombings! It was filmed on the back lot of Universal—it’s like, where the fuck is this place?

SR: Night of the Living Deadhad a docu-horror feel. It took place in our real world.

JL: Exactly. George A. Romero’s zombies weren’t big black guys with staring white eyes. They were ordinary folks. George calls them “Blue Collar Zombies.” He had real people eating human flesh!

SR: Oh that bit is awful—the cannibalism.

JL: Politically, the movie was so smart.

SR: And the protagonist was expendable. When that first zombie attacks the girl, it was like, “No, wait! I’m following that girl! Anything can happen here! What’s with this filmmaker?” You’re in unstable hands once that’s happened.

JL: Hitchcock did exactly that in Psycho. The movie is about Marion Crane, who is played by a movie star, Janet Leigh. We’re in her story for 30 minutes and then she’s brutally murdered and suddenly it’s about Norman Bates! At the time it was very shocking for the audience.

SR: Plus in Night of the Living Dead, I had never seen a movie with a black male lead alone in a cabin with a white woman before. That probably created a bit of extra tension in the audience, whether they knew it or not. Social tension.

JL: I think the gore had a bigger impact on the audience than the subtleties of the politics. Although the irony of the ending is hard to miss. Anyway, Sam, you’re associated with monsters and fantasy, but I get the feeling you’re not that big a fan of the genre!

SR: Well, I made Evil Deadjust to break into the business, not because I was a horror movie fan. I had not liked horror movies up until that point because they scared me so badly! My friend Rob Tapert [producer of Evil Dead] told me: “We can probably only raise about $100,000, and the only kind of movies that are made for that little are these cheap Italian horror movies for the drive-in. Can you make a horror movie?’

JL: We all started in exploitation—me, you, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante—there is a long list. You knew that it didn’t matter how bad the movie was, if there’s a monster in it you could get it distributed.

The Devil’s Backbone[Guillermo Del Toro, 2001] An orphanage during the time of the Spanish Civil War is haunted in Del Toro’s wonderful ghost story.

GHOSTS

The easiest Halloween costume to make is that of a ghost—all you need is a white bed sheet over your head. I suppose this comes from the custom of wrapping a corpse in a winding sheet. Certainly, pulling a sheet over a patient’s face is a clear signal that the doctors have given up!

People who have lost loved ones are easy prey for “mediums” that claim they can communicate with those who, as Hamlet said, “shuffle off this mortal coil.” The great magician Harry Houdini, devastated by the death of his mother, attended enough séances to be appalled by the blatant tricks and scams mediums used to convince people of their special skills in contacting the “dear departed.”

The outrageous medium, Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford) in David Lean’s movie of Noel Coward’s comedy Blithe Spirit[1945] is not so far away from the medium depicted in Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell[2009]. Both summon up the spirits of the deceased and both are unable to control the spirits they summon.

Ghosts are literally the spirits of the dead. They can manifest themselves in many ways. And every way you can imagine a ghost to manifest itself has been exploited in the movies. The Uninvited[Lewis Allen, 1944] begins with Ray Milland’s narration, “They call them the haunted shores, these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here, and sea fog, and eerie stories. That’s not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you. It’s just that people who live hereabouts are strangely aware of them.” Disregarding his own voice-over, Ray and his sister, played by Ruth Hussey, buy an empty house on a cliff overlooking the sea. While they wander around looking into the rooms, their terrier Bobby refuses to go up the stairs to the second floor. One room smells “like mimosa” and Ruth casually puts down the bunch of flowers she has just picked. Ray and Ruth do not notice, but we are shown the flowers quickly wilt and die. Suffice to say, the house is haunted. The Uninvitedis romantic and frightening. It’s also one of the few pictures to clearly show the ghost that still manages to keep us in suspense. I recommend that you see it.

Poltergeists are spirits that cause a physical disturbance, either by making loud noises, tossing objects around, or actually attacking people. In Poltergeist[Tobe Hooper, 1982], the spirits of long-dead Native Americans, whose burial ground has been built over by a housing development, make it very clear that they are unhappy with the situation. In The Entity[Sidney J. Furie, 1982] Barbara Hershey is repeatedly raped by an unseen force.

In The Shining[Stanley Kubrick, 1980], an isolated hotel with a murderous past slowly drives its winter caretaker, a writer named Jack Torrance, mad. Jack Nicholson’s intense performance as Torrance is scarier than the ghosts Kubrick shows us. The most frightening moment in the film is when Jack’s wife Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, looks at the pages he has been working on in the typewriter. All she sees are the words “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” neatly typed, over and over and over again.

Many films center around a team of researchers investigating a supposed haunted house, with unpredictable, but always spooky, results. The Haunting[1963], Robert Wise’s movie version of Shirley Jackson’s classic ghost story “The Haunting of Hill House” creates unbelievable tension by showing us nothing. Jan de Bont’s terrible remake [ The Haunting, 1999] does not scare us because it shows us way too much. Another team of paranormal investigators attempt to unravel The Legend of Hell House[John Hough, 1973], which Richard Matheson adapted from his own novel. Matheson and Hough craft a rip-roaring shocker with an unexpected ending.

Perhaps the best known haunted house franchise in movie history began with The Amityville Horror[Stuart Rosenberg, 1979], a supposedly true story about a house on Long Island. The poster declared, “FOR GOD’S SAKE, GET OUT!” So far the movie has spawned eight sequels and a remake, so clearly no one has taken this warning seriously.

Movie ghosts aren’t always out to terrify or destroy. Phantoms of a far gentler disposition feature in Casper[Brad Silberling, 1995], a live-action movie (albeit with computer-animated ghosts) based on the Casper the Friendly Ghostcomic books and cartoons. In the comedy Topper[Norman Z. McLeod, 1937] the ghosts are not only friendly but, as played by Constance Bennett and Cary Grant, handsome, glamorous, and fun.

The Innocents[1961], Jack Clayton’s elegant adaptation of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, features a very fine performance from Deborah Kerr as the governess who fears for her sanity, and superb use of deep focus in gleaming black and white CinemaScope by director of photography Freddie Francis. When Deborah Kerr is kissed on the lips by Miles (Martin Stephens), the little boy she is supposed to be looking after, I defy you not to get the creeps.

Set during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, The Devil’s Backbone[Guillermo Del Toro, 2001] is the tale of a haunted orphanage. This is the first in Del Toro’s trilogy of fantastic tales set during that period (the second is Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006; the third is yet to come). The Devil’s Backboneis a straightforward ghost story. The surprise discovery at the end of the film is who is telling the tale!

We have had sad ghosts, vengeful ghosts, mischievous ghosts, evil ghosts, and loving ghosts, but my favorite ghosts appear in the beautiful Japanese film Kwaidan[Masaki Kobayashi, 1964]. The title translates literally as “Ghost Story.” Based on Japanese folk tales collected by Lafcadio Hearn, the film comprises four, unrelated stories. With magnificent production and costume design, the film is a visual delight with moments of real terror. My two favorite stories are “Hoichi, the Earless” and “In a Cup of Tea.” A magnificent and (I’ve got to say it), hauntingfilm.