Retro Review: Shock Treatment (and The Rocky Horror Picture Show)

 Alas, I couldn't find Double Take between last week and this week, so instead of trying to piece together a movie I think involves a train and Orlando Jones and Eddie Griffin, I thought I'd try to focus on something I could actually remember. It turns out that when it takes three times to get through a movie that you actually can recall it. Well, sort of. This is the true story of the Cap'n and Shock Treatment.

 I include The Rocky Horror Picture Show in parenthesis (instead of, you know, doing it the other way around) because it's necessary to contextualize Shock Treatment. For as long as I could peruse the weekend section of the newspaper, I was aware of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was the only movie that was playing - every Friday night at The Rialto. The midnight show. I didn't know what the film was, or the phenomenon surrounding it, but I knew it existed. When I was in middle school, The Rocky Horror Picture Show aired on television for the first time - on VH1. I don't know if anyone remembers this, but it was a big deal in 1993(?). It was the first time most "normal" people ever had a chance to see the legitimate cult sensation - the long(est?) running "midnight movie" of the original gang*. I only saw parts of it - the content was too salacious, even watered down, for middle school Cap'n to be allowed near VH1 that night.

 Actually watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show came later, just before I saw the midnight show for the first of many, many Fridays. I bought a copy of the recently released VHS edition while working at Suncoast and watched the film to "prepare." I'll tell you right now that watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show at home, alone, is an underwhelming experience. All of the film's deficiencies are immediate and glaring, and without the communal atmosphere of callbacks and performances, TRHPS lacks that "oomph" associated with it rowdy reputation. The live show, on the other hand, more than makes up for the let down of watching the film in isolation.

 Like I said, we went nearly every weekend for two years straight, and then on and off during college, where I played the Criminologist and one of the callback "assholes" in student run spin-off's of the Rialto production. To this day, I can sit down at any part of the film and immediately spout off callbacks, and it's been years since I last attended a live show.

 But anyway, this isn't about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's about Shock Treatment, the only movie more of an enigma than Rocky - the infamous sequel, an ill conceived and despised continuation of characters from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Shock Treatment allegedly has a hard core contingent of fans (some recorded a commentary track for the eventual DVD release), but I've never met one. Shock Treatment wasn't something I ever heard about from Rocky Horror fans. In fact, I read about it in Martin and Porter's Video Movie Guide (probably the 1986 edition), where they generously awarded the film a "Turkey." The phrase that stuck out was "sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show," an inconceivable notion to me when I finally understood what Rocky Horror was.

 How could there BE a sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show? How does that happen? Why would that happen? But sure enough, Richard O'Brien and company got together in 1981 and continued the story of Brad Majors and Janet Weiss, back in Denton and contestants on some elaborate game show that's the secret plot of Drs. Cosmo and Nation McKinley. Only Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon were nowhere to be found. Brad and Janet were now played by Cliff DeYoung and Jessica Harper (yes, of Suspiria). Richard O'Brien was Dr. Cosmo McKinley and Patricia Quinn was Dr. Nation McKinley. Little Nell was Nurse Ansalong, Charles Gray was Judge Oliver Wright, and I'm sure there were some other Rocky alums I'm forgetting. Tim Curry was also MIA, and the songs...

 Oh goodness, the songs. That brings us to the "three times to watch it once" part of the story - I finally found Shock Treatment on VHS at Video Bar (or North American Video or whatever they called it after it moved into the fabric store) and tried to watch it. The first two times, I made it as far as the "Denton" song that opens the film before I turned it off. I couldn't watch it - it was unbearable.

 The third time was the charm, and I soldiered through "Denton" only to discover the incomprehensible narrative that was Shock Treatment. Maybe it was just that I was so bored I tuned out halfway through, but I can't tell you what it is that happens to Brad and Janet after they become "trapped" by the game show, or why it is that the mad Doctors want to separate Brad and Janet, or even how the whole thing ends. No clue. I can't conceive of a reason I'd watch Shock Treatment one more time, so I may never know for sure, and I'm okay with that.

 Most Rocky Horror fans never try to watch Shock Treatment - it's reputation is such that there's no good reason for them to subject themselves to it. I would say I did it So They Won't Have To, but I can't even satisfy your curiosity. I don't recall much about the movie other than I hated it from beginning to end and that it was more endurance than experience. If there's really a cult following for Shock Treatment, it's surely more devoted than even the most die hard Rocky Horror fans. That's saying something, and while I can't say I admire their dedication, I will say to each their own. A guy like me who preaches The Happening to anybody listening can appreciate when something that isn't my cup of tea is yours, but that's serious devotion. Shock Treatment sucks.



* According to Midnight Movies, that would also include El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead, and Reefer Madness.

Friday Tidbits

Following up on last night's re-review, I'd like to add one more thread to the conversation about cult cinema. The "midnight movie" isn't exactly dead; while it is true that the advent of VCRs functionally killed Drive-Ins and seriously crippled the need for midnight cinema, in the years since Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, a concerted effort exists in cities across the U.S. to bring back the experience - as the oft-mentioned Best Worst Movie covers in reference to Troll 2. One could argue that The Rocky Horror Picture Show itself disproves the myth that "midnight movies" ever died in the first place. For as long as I've been alive, The Rialto screened (and screens) Rocky Horror every Friday at midnight, and it sells out every week. Its presence on Glee edged the film further into "mainstream," but its unabated presence as a "midnight movie" throughout the country.

Speaking of the Glee episode, one would be tempted to say that the "everything old is new again" maxim is reaching a breaking point when the ultimate "midnight movie" gets a glee club treatment, I would like to point out that this is not dissimilar to the Elgin and the Orson Welles Theatre trotting out Reefer Madness and Freaks to exploit their "camp" value for a new generation in the 1970s.

---

Despite the fact that nobody is going to pay the Cap'n for mentioning this (which is, in its own way, my disclaimer for what follows), fans of the Criterion Collection with limited budgets may be happy to learn that over a hundred titles are available on Netflix's "Watch It Now" streaming service. While you won't get the supplements, it is a much cheaper way to see Children of Paradise, Man Bites Dog, Tokyo Drifter, Cronos, The Battle of Algiers, Onibaba, Night and the City, Jules and Jim, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Ikiru, Pandora's Box, The Spirit of the Beehive, La Strada, Solaris, Elevator to the Gallows, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait, The Hit, Shadows, and The Passion of Joan of Arc.

I mention this because the aggregate prices for just the films listed above is around $700 without tax, whereas you can watch unlimited streaming for $7.99 a month. Again, I'm not getting kick backs from anybody, but it's worth putting out there to frugal cinephiles or Criterion fans. Think of it as a way to buffer your knowledge of the collection without killing your wallet - something that weighs heavily on my mind right now.

---

Finally, I just want to say "How cool is this?"


A friend of the Blogorium picked this up for me at a thrift store, and because I thrive on discovering things I didn't know, learning that the Criterion Collection also existed on VHS, in addition to Laserdisc, DVD, and now Blu-Ray.



What I find very intriguing as a Criterion fanatic is that according to the information on the back and the number on the Spine, The Third Man is number 5. A cursory search online is coming up with virtually no information on Criterion's VHS output (their site no longer lists the Laserdiscs, which included Taxi Driver and The Magnificent Ambersons), so if any readers out there finds something, I would greatly appreciate more insight into this heretofore unknown facet of the collection.

Blogorium ( re-)Review: Midnight Movies

I'm opting to call this a re-review in that the Cap'n "sort of" reviewed Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream almost two years ago. At the time I wrote the following blurb:

I've also been watching Midnight Movies, which is so far a fun documentary about the birth of the "midnight" cult film phenomenon. It begins with Jodorowsky's El Topo (the first "midnight movie"), and also covers Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Eraserhead, with shout outs to Reefer Madness and Bambi Meets Godzilla, among other movies that played at the Elgin in New York and the Orson Welles theatre in L.A*.

The directors are all involved and it's half about how the films came to be and half interviews with theatre owners, distributors, critics, and fans. Interesting tidbit: Roger Ebert gave Night of the Living Dead a harsh review because he watched it with parents who brought their children to the show. Just let that simmer a little bit, and imagine the review you might write after seeing the reactions he did.

I'm not done yet but they've just transitioned from Rocky Horror to Eraserhead, and it's particularly interesting to hear the overlap with people involved. Richard O'Brien talking about watching Eraserhead is almost as interesting as John Waters talking about seeing NotLD first run at a drive-in in Baltimore. For that, this is a definite "must see".

For the most part, this covers my impressions of watching the doc again - as I did last night - but as my motto is increasingly becoming "do your homework before you write a review," it seemed apropos to fill in the considerable gaps in that initial write-up.

The documentary is a condensation of J. Hoberman and Johnathan Rosenbaum's book Midnight Movies, which understandably has more room to work with in order to properly cultivate the inception, release, and second life as a late night attraction (Rosenbaum and Hoberman appear in interviews). While the film adaptation attempts to distill the book, sacrifices are made in order to make the transition: much of the opening history of cult and exploitation films are dropped in order to focus specifically on the period between El Topo (1970) and Eraserhead (1976), centering around Ben Barenholtz's Elgin and Larry Jackson's programming at the Orson Welles Cinema. The depth of coverage for the films vary, but the six central "midnight movies" are El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Eraserhead.

Midnight Movies is a Starz production, which is not to disparage the work of writer / director Stuart Samuel or co-writer Victor Kushmaniuk, but I've noticed a trend with Starz related documentaries: they attempt to cover a considerable amount of information in a minute amount of time (Midnight Movies is 88 minutes long). In this instance, the film covers six films, plus an intro and outro in less than 90 minutes, leaving roughly 15 minutes per film, which needs to cover the making of the film, its entrance into the "midnight movie" circuit, and its lasting cultural impact.

Not all of the films get that, either; Night of the Living Dead's "making of" portion is considerably less in-depth compared to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and is more focused on the social forces at work surrounding Romero's seminal "zombie" picture than the film itself. Romero's segment is topped off by a cynical comment that the film had no copyright and could therefore make money for any distributor who had a print (with text overlays of grosses for Night of the Living Dead in various territories), while the fact that Night's creators saw none of the revenue is left out.

Larry Jackson (who programmed the Orson Welles Cinema) suggests that his choices in "midnight movies" were based on "ironic" movie going casts a dubious shadow over Reefer Madness, Bambi Meets Godzilla, and makes his advocating of The Harder They Come slightly confounding. Jackson appears to be a genuine fan of the film, but the rationale behind midnight programming at the Welles seems counter-intuitive to the Jamaican made, reggae infused crime drama. The Harder They Come actually feels the least explored of the six subjects, with more time devoted to its distribution than the film itself.

Because I had not finished the film when writing about it, I also neglected to mention the more interesting connection between Eraserhead and John Waters: while promoting Desperate Living, Waters was so enthusiastic about Lynch's debut that he devoted most of the interviews to talking up Eraserhead rather than his third feature. The fact that many of these directors intersected thanks to the "midnight movie" phenomenon is in and of itself a component of the documentary worth watching.

While I understand the point that Midnight Movies: from the Margin to the Mainstream makes, the title can be taken two ways, neither of which I completely agree with: the documentary asserts that the subversive elements of "midnight movies" has become the mainstream, and accordingly their impact is dulled by a tendency towards hyper-irony in modern cinema (this is the central reason Roger Ebert appears in the film, albeit in an extremely limited capacity). The other argument one could make is that the "midnight movies" covered in the film have become mainstream in their own way, particularly as their respective directors elevated in stature.

The arguments bleed together in some ways: I strongly suspect that mainstream audiences have never seen The Harder They Come, Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, or El Topo. They may have some inkling that Eraserhead and Pink Flamingos exist, but it is incredibly unlikely that simply because David Lynch moved on to make The Elephant Man - the film's primary evidence of the "mainstreaming" of the margin - that the cult films have extended as far as Samuel would like us to believe. Waters makes the point that the subject matter of his films hasn't changed, but culture changed to accept the "freaks" he showcases. This is fair, but the argument is not universal across the doc's subjects: Jodorowsky, Henzell, and Romero (to a degree) are still relatively outside of the "mainstream," and while Lynch occasionally taps into the cultural zeitgeist (Twin Peaks), his idiosyncratic filmmaking often scares off the audiences Samuel assumes have come to accept "midnight" culture. I also find the argument that Jaws and Star Wars are "midnight movies" that went mainstream a bit specious - it suggests that there was no precedent for these kinds of film before the "midnight movie" era.

Waters also makes a salient point about the death of "midnight movies": the advent of VHS functionally rendered the midnight experience moot by giving audiences greater access to "cult" films, coupled with the ability to do everything they would do at a late-night theatre in the comfort (and safety) of their own home. In a sense laziness, rather than a shift of values, killed the "midnight movie" (as well as the Drive-In, although that's something I prefer to save for another time).

Accordingly, Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream is a cinematic Hors d'oeuvre, a taste of "cult" cinema that covers six major films in the history of the midnight movement to a relatively satisfying degree. It functions as a primer, designed to interest you in the individual histories of the films covered, and while I may not concur with the assertion it reaches, with the limited running time, it packs in enough valuable morsels of trivia** that film fans will leave the film hungry for more information.



* The Orson Welles Cinema is not in Los Angeles, but Cambridge, Massachusetts.
** George Romero openly refutes a misleading rumor featured in Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue, which is also suggested in Midnight Movies before he corrects it: that Duane Jones was a deliberate casting choice to comment on race relations in the 1960s. Nightmares edits Romero interview footage to suggest that WAS the case, where he directly corrects the misconception in Midnight Movies.

Blogorium Review: Best Worst Movie

For those readers who haven't been reading the Blogorium for a while, Michael Stephenson's Best Worst Movie, a documentary about the cult status of 1990's Troll 2, has been something of an obsession for the Cap'n. I first heard about the documentary a year ago or so, and it awakened foggy memories of Troll 2 from my younger days. I didn't remember the film being bad enough to attain a Rocky Horror Picture Show-like "Midnight Movie" status, but apparently that was the case, and Stephenson (who played Joshua Waits, the boy who saves the day with a bologna sandwich) had put together a film about the phenomenon and how that impacted the cast and crew of the film. I've been trying to see the film all year long, just missing it when it played in Durham, NC, but it finally opened in Santa Fe on Friday. (Original Blogorium reactions are collected here).

Best Worst Movie is primarily about George Hardy, a dentist in Alabama that, once upon a time, played Michael Waits, the father in Troll 2. He, like many cast members, went up to Utah in 1989 to make a horror movie for three weeks and then waited for the film to come out. But it didn't. Troll 2 (which is really a sequel in name only to Troll) made its debut a year later on VHS, much to the dismay of everybody who appeared in the film. Troll 2 is a terrible, terrible movie, filled with awkward line readings, strange plot machinations, bad special effects, and one of the most incomprehensible scripts in film history. The film is almost impossible to watch seriously and has, over the past twenty years, gained a cult reputation around the country.

When Stephenson reconnects with Hardy and introduces him to the sensation that is Troll 2, the actor-turned-dentist is fascinated with audience responses and quickly becomes enamored with his celebrity-like status. Hardy is eager to quote his most memorable line from the film "You don't piss on hospitality!" to anyone in earshot, and travels around the country, alternately championing the film he forgot about and basking in his new-found "star" status, happily re-enacting scenes from the film whenever asked to.

Meanwhile, Stephenson introduces viewers to the rest of the cast, most of whom seem alternately horrified and fascinated with Troll 2, as well as some of the film's die-hard fans from around the world. Whether it be home made costume makers, a guy who designed a Troll 2 videogame, or just folks who put together parties to watch the films (and Trollympics), the fans seem to really love this horrible film, mostly in a non-ironic way (more on this later).

It's not all chuckles and triumphs though; while much of Best Worst Movie is lighthearted and uplifting, it's clear that two of the major cast members of Troll 2 - Margo Prey, who played the mother Diana Waits, and Don Packard, who played the Nilbog store owner - are suffering from serious mental illness. Their interviews are more disturbing than amusing, in part because they genuinely don't seem to be on the same page that other cast members are during Q&A's or when discussing the film.

On the other hand, Troll 2 director Claudio Fragasso and co-writer Rosella Drudi are blissfully unaware that their film is considered one of the "worst" movies in history (it has the only 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and insist that the movie is a deep exploration of a family in crisis. Drudi admits that she made the goblins vegetarian because it "pissed me off" that so many of her friends were going veggie, and that she "took the standard vampire mythos - and turned it into vegetarians" for the film. Fragasso seems pleased that audiences have "embraced" the film and "taken it back" from the critics.

Fragasso and Drudi return to the U.S. to attend two screenings in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, and the director is continually frustrated that audiences are laughing at his film. He yells at viewers during Q&A's, insults his cast (who he continually refers to as "dogs"), and seems frustrated that no one takes his film seriously, which generates a number of laugh-out-loud moments in Best Worst Movie. Fragasso's insistence that his cast members not laugh while re-enacting scenes in the house where Troll 2 is set is indicative of his Italian filmmaking mindset around American actors.

Hardy, on the other hand, is having a grand old time with his unorthodox fame, until he agrees to attend conventions in England and Dallas, Texas. When almost no one turns up for a Troll 2 roundtable discussion or stops by to visit the booth, Hardy begins to walk up to British convention attendees, desperately trying to explain who he is, what Troll 2 is, why they might know him, and recite his signature line, all falling on deaf ears. Things get worse at a horror convention in Dallas, when Hardy learns just how small the audience for Troll 2 really is amidst horror fans, and finds a moment of clarity while comparing the relative obscurity of cast members from the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels to his own.

There's a touching climax to Best Worst Movie when The Alamo Drafthouse has a Troll 2 screening outdoors in Utah and fans and cast members introduced during the film interact for the first time. Fragasso also shows up, and continues to insult his cast members, accusing them of making up stories about the script and suggesting that one character's arc was deleted because "we saw you were not a very good actor," but the ultimate tone of Best Worst Movie is a hopeful one. While Hardy eventually grows tired of "pissing on hospitality" over and over, when Stephenson asks if he'd be in hypothetical Troll 3, he enthusiastically says yes. It's nice to see some good come out of something so bad.

At the screening we went to, about half of the twelve people in the audience hadn't seen Troll 2, which must make for a strange experience. It's not as though you can't find Best Worst Movie compelling or worthwhile, because there's a healthy smattering of footage from the film - all of which helps cement its reputation as one of the "worst films of all time" - but I do wonder how they reacted to Hardy, Stephenson, Fragasso, and Prey. Based on a question from the Q&A after the film, it seems like most audiences for Best Worst Movie fall one of two categories: 1) the type of fans who appear early in the film, or 2) people who heard about the film based on the growing reputation Troll 2 has been experiencing.

The former category is further split in the film and, as it turned out, in our audience. Early on, George Hardy is traveling from screening to screening with fans that seem genuinely enthused to be seeing Troll 2 in a theatre, people who actually love the movie for all its (many) faults. Later in the film, particularly during a screening in Salt Lake City that Fragasso attends, more of the "smart-aleck," derisive fans appear, including one that decides to ask the director "why the film is called Troll 2 when there are no trolls?" something the director takes umbrage at.

We had one such viewer in the audience of Best Worst Movie, a guy that howled with laughter during cringe-worthy moments involving cast members that had serious mental problems, as though their conditions were nothing more than fodder for his amusement. While I agree that the bulk of laughs in the documentary come from the clueless nature of Troll 2 participants as to why people fill up theatres to see their film, there is a point where the laughs are mixed with seat-squirming. It's not as though the unfortunately hysterical outcome of Troll 2 gives viewers license to mock people who moved on with life and are being reintroduced to their film in a way no one would have expected. There's a fine line between finding humor and assuming that everybody is open for mockery because they were in the Best Worst Movie.

Soapbox aside, I had a great time with Best Worst Movie, which is a consistently amusing, insightful, heartfelt, and occasionally disturbing documentary. George Hardy's arc from small town dentist to quasi-celebrity to something in-between anchors the film, but it's clear that Michael Stephenson has an affinity for his cast mates and wants to impart some of Troll 2's cult status on them, even if that's not always the best thing that could happen. It's refreshing to know that so many fans of the film - which again, is awful, but never unwatchable - are genuine in their enthusiasm, even if the dark underbelly of sarcastic fandom pokes its head up during the film. The film comes highly recommended from the Cap'n.

Check out the site here, and since Best Worst Movie is traveling from city to city without a theatrical distributor, it might help to mention that it arrives on DVD on November 16th.

From the Vaults: Memoirs of a Geeky Cap'n

Greetings. The Cap'n is going to be a little busy today working on applications for money paying jobs (no disrespect to the Blogorium, but as it pays nothing, I cannot survive on blogging alone), so enjoy a flashback from the vaults.

My parents can’t quite seem to remember what the first movie they ever took me to was, but they narrowed it down to two possibilities: The Muppet Movie or The Empire Strikes Back.

Either one of them goes a long way in explaining why I’m the type of geek I am. The Empire Strikes Back, if that’s the case, is coupled with the first movie I remember going to see, a midnight showing of Return of the Jedi (mom won tickets through some radio promotion), which was the first time I ever saw a true fanboy (in this case, a woman dressed like Princess Leia).

The potential subliminal impact of seeing The Muppet Movie, however, takes us in an entirely different direction. I would’ve only been a few months old when they went to see it (as opposed to a little over a year for Empire), so most of it would’ve been noise and "Frog!", but I can’t help but think that some of Jim Henson’s bizarre and sometimes subversive humor embedded itself into my infant brain. It would certainly explain why I’ve always gravitated towards Muppets, either watching reruns of The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, or later a longstanding fascination with Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal.

Dad was a sci-fi geek, so in the mix with all the Disney movies mom would take us to see (I still remember seeing The Black Cauldron in theatres and wondering why it didn’t come out on video until I was in high school), dad liked to use the growing VHS market to introduce us to things like Tron, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and at a certain point, Blade Runner.

I’m pretty sure we were too young to understand Blade Runner when we saw it for the first time, but the fact that he’d mix it in with more "all ages" fare like Forbidden Planet made a real impression on me. Sure, we wore out our Star Wars tapes and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but Blade Runner was so dense, so sophisticated for a young kid that I never really shook it, and it continues to interest me with every successive viewing.

We would also see really random things, like Downtown and Disorganized Crime. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of either of them, but they’re sort of typical eighties comedies: Downtown is a sort of reverse Beverly Hills Cop starring (conveniently) Judge Reinhold, and Disorganized Crime, if I remember it well enough, is a little bit like The Ref or Trapped in Paradise but with the sensibility of Bad Santa and set in the midwest. I haven’t watched either in years but I remember thinking they were funny when I was 12.

Because of the local video stores (and this was back before Blockbuster and Hollywood Video ran everyone out of town), Carbonated Video and The Video Bar, there was always an opportunity to check something different out, like Murder by Death and Real Genius, both of which became fixtures in the house. There were also kids movies, but my brother and I had surprisingly leniency until the age of 14 or 15 to watch pretty much anything that looked interesting (which is how I saw Time Bandits), and because of the invention of Mick Martin and Marsha Porter’s Video Movie Guide, I had no shortage of possibilities.

They still make those guides, but I can’t help but think with the sheer increase in number of movies to review that they can’t possibily be as entertaining as the old guides were. Reading about Shock Treatment long before I ever knew what The Rocky Horror Picture Show was or understanding that Evil Dead 2 was "more of a remake than a sequel" armed me with information that wouldn’t pay off for years, but within all that was the making of someone seriously curious about movies.

And that hasn’t changed much since.

Still on a Horror Kick

Somehow, I've forgotten to mention this every time the Academy Awards come up, but because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reaaaaaallllly loves montages, this year they're finally giving the horror genre its own montage. If you're wondering why, then you probably haven't been by the Blogorium before. Welcome!

The reason why is because despite the fact that horror movies have always made money for the studios when damn near nothing else would, the genre has always been treated like the red-headed stepchild of Hollywood, in part because it's easy to blame horror movies for just about everything. Since virtually every degraded, depraved, disgusting thing can and does happen at one point or another in "those" types of movies, people taking the moral high ground can argue that "horror is the downfall of our culture blah blah blah" while ignoring the potentially cathartic effect the film has on audiences.

Wait... didn't I write something to that effect in an anthropology paper? I did!!! Enjoy. And again, welcome to the Blogorium. The guy in the top photo is Dr. Re-Animator, but not to be mistaken with Herbert West: Re-Animator, who is the actual Re-Animator. Dr. Re-Animator is some European guy who sings a techno-dance song called "Move Your Dead Bones", the video of which appears on Beyond Re-Animator, the third film in the series, which I doubt ever played in theatres.

Where was I? Oh yes, horror, of which the Re-Animator films certainly count. They would also count as what I'd call "second tier" horror series, though I neglected to mention them in last night's "Four Reasons." At any rate, getting the Academy to acknowledge horror movies is something of a coup, because they generally think that, like Science Fiction and Fantasy, only nerds, geeks, dweebs, spaz's, and dorks watch those movies while blogging from the basement of their parents house. And that's only mostly true. I'm not in the basement and this isn't my parent's house...

I'm curious to see what the montage consists of; will it be strictly "first tier" horror films, or will they delve into the bizarre and creep-tacular? Because if they're still operating under the assumption that The Silence of the Lambs is a "horror" film, then we're going to have more than mere philosophical differences about what horror films really are. An FBI procedural / psychological drama about a cannibal and an Ed Gein-clone is not the same thing as, let's say, The Haunting, which you could argue is a psychological drama about a haunted house that drives a woman crazy enough to kill herself (spoiler). Or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is about a family of cannibals and Ed Gein-clones that kill some kids dumb enough to wander into their house full of body parts and chicken bones (also spoiler).

Not to say that The Silence of the Lambs isn't creepy at times, but The Haunting scared the shit out of me the first time I saw it, and has the ability to make you fundamentally mistrust the place you're sleeping in. When a house is the enemy, it's really hard to find solace before bed. Of course, that's why you should NEVER watch The Haunting in the middle of the night alone. You should probably avoid watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre while eating barbecue, but maybe you're into ironic shit like that.

I'd also be disappointed to see things like The Rocky Horror Picture Show in a "horror" montage. Just because it's culturally associated with people you assume watch horror movies (okay, we do), and it has the word in the title does not mean Rocky Horror is part of the genre. If you haven't noticed, video stores usually put it in the "cult" category, or in recent years, "musicals." Young Frankenstein, also not a "horror" movie.

But I digress. The truth is that the Oscar Montage will probably have most (if not all) of the Universal Classic Monster Films, a shot of Christopher Lee as Dracula, Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface, Jigsaw, Hannibal Lecter (again, see above why that doesn't make sense), and other semi-iconic images from Poltergeist, An American Werewolf in London, The Evil Dead, The Phantom of the Opera, Nosferatu, Audition, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

In short, anything well enough known in the cultural zeitgeist that audiences can immediately recognize the reference. And sometimes, that's good enough. It beats ignoring horror, especially when it's as prevalent in theatres as anything else.

Maybe I didn't...

I've been revising the paper on Movie-going as Ritual, and I could have sworn I put up the second part of the research that you'd find interesting, but for the life of me I'm not seeing it in the archives. If somebody was patiently waiting for the section on The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a subculture collective experience, I apologize for not getting that up sooner. Since no one is biting on the SYWHT (I'm not giving up on you good readers yet!), let me share that with you tonight:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Collective Experience through Open Participation.

For over thirty years, The Rocky Horror Picture Show invites audience member to become one in the most overtly ritual movie-going experience. After a dismal first-run in 1976, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, based on a wildly successful London stage production, by all rights should have vanished into obscurity. Instead, the film and its midnight movie audience took on a life of their on, starting in the Waverly Theater in New York.

Regular audience members, noticing pauses in the dialogue, began shouting one-liners back at the screen. J. Hoberman describes the “back talk” in his book Midnight Movies:

The counterpoint backtalk… had varying rationales. Some was a direct response to the erotic tease of Tim Curry’s Frank… Others were the equivalent of Bronx cheers, mocking the camp sobriety and unruffled authority of Charles Gray’s very English and vaguely parental Narrator… or ridiculing the meatball straightness and uptightness of the juvenile Brad. Whatever the source, the movie seemed to be asking for it; and whenever the repartee went over well, it would be repeated the following Friday or Saturday, become absorbed within the general text. The more one listened to the movie’s dialogue, the more it seemed to offer an invitation, or even a dare to throw in your own two cents and see if it glittered. (176)

Rather than engaging with the stage, ala a theatrical production of a play, the “cult” of Rocky Horror was engaging in something quite different:

the Rocky Horror reaction was the reverse of [audience engagement within story, as in Peter Pan], because it wasn’t being directly solicited, was spoken to a screen instead of a stage, and came closer to being a dialectical response – a real dialogue between screen and spectator, and not a mere consensus. (176)

If the line was popular, you could expect to hear it the following week, and so on. Before long, the Rocky Horror ritual brought about a new level of audience solidarity:

Still, it was more like cheerleading at school than reciting a prayer in church… but also a bit of teaching, too, such as when he began making announcements about matters of general interest to the cult before he even started the cheers – laying out a few ground rules for newcomers (or “virgins,” as they were identified), calling attention to new parts of the twice-weekly ritual, and helping, like any good theater director, to keep the kids in line and groom their performances. (179)

Meanwhile, another ritual began at the Waverly, “[q]uite independently of [counterpoint backtalk], members of the audience had begun turning up dressed like some of the screen characters.” (177). The “cult” of Rocky Horror also brought props to share, based on lines from the film, while a separate set of actors onstage re-created the film as it played.

As the ritual continued, it became clearer this was more than simply a film-based event; “More importantly, some people would turn up periodically at the Waverly because they made friends there… standing in front of the Waverly, they’d swap information, sing and dance on the sidewalk, compare their costumes, discuss potential line and prop ideas” (181). Rocky Horror fans became a fully fledged sub-culture movement, and “the demarcation line between insiders and outsiders was clearly drawn” (184).

Group identity within this sub-culture is based on defining oneself against “conventional” audiences, particularly the “rules” of movie-going, even if the end result is identical. The behavior grew in popularity, and so did the size of crowds, although the Rocky Horror ritual was not always welcome:

People outside the cult were beginning to take notice. Some were sympathetic, but some of the older visitors to the Waverly found the whole spectacle too nihilistic and noisy – too boisterous about opposing everything that they held sacred about sex, art, and life – to take much pleasure in the madness, which they often found dumb or foolish or just plain sick. (182)

The ritual spread across the nation, and I must admit to have been a regular attendee of the Rocky Horror Picture Show for several years. The collective experience is akin to an evangelical church – with fouler language – and the bonds between long time ritual attendees are strong. The film continues playing every Friday night in the Rialto in Raleigh and as a once a year tradition in the Mary Foust Residence Hall on the UNCG campus. As a ritual, Rocky has become “a kind of cultural hand-me-down that has passed through all these identity changes en route to another style and generation” (188).

---

So there's that. Sorry about setting up the second piece and forgetting about it, but the Cap'n gets a little scatterbrained from time to time.