All the Colors of the Night

“No, I don’t know why.”

That’s the response that would probably come first if someone asked me what motivated me to make this new video project. But if I thought about it a little, I might come up with something along the lines of this: “Not that I need a reason, you sniveling jerk, but I feel like a nearly lifelong love of horror movies and weird ’80s music is reason enough.”

That gets pretty much to the point of my second video project, which I’m calling “All the Colors of the Night” and which you can watch in full below.

Heads up: This project contains boobs and butts and some blood, and it’s therefore NSFW, unless your work is cool about typical horror movie fare. If you’re squeamish about violence, know that there’s nothing excessively graphic, but these are horror movies I’m working with, for the most part, so there’s a certain base level of bodily violence that should be expected.

My previous video project came out of nowhere, really, because I’d been pretty much only words up until that point, and while I’m happy I did it, I now feel like it’s mostly a messy and unstructured thing. I felt like I wanted to give it another shot and make something a bit more orderly. You can judge for yourself whether I achieved this. Regardless, I liked wrapping up a bunch of horror movies (and thereabouts) in colorful dressing and setting them to ’80s Euro pop (and thereabouts), and I hope you do too.

A few notes:

• I tried to make it so it looks good either on a computer monitor or a TV screen. 
• Please watch the credits.
• Please watch for patterns.
• I do acknowledge that the vast majority of characters appearing in this project are white people. I will blame that on the genre as it existed back in the day. I did my best to offer Geretta Geretta prominent placement.
• I also acknowledge that a disproportionate number of victims of violence in this are female. I will again blame this on the genre as it existed back in the day.
• I honestly love all of the movies and songs I included in this project, and in case anyone wants to point out that I am essentially using them all without permission, I’d like to clarify that I don’t intend to make a dime off this project and I consider it a remix—just one that blends video and music in a way that doesn’t exist online elsewhere and that does not intend to take the place of the original film or songs.
• I started this project the day before Halloween and finished it on Valentine’s Day, meaning that the world seems a lot different now than it did beforehand. I will hold back on making any grand metaphors, but I did this because I wanted to try take movies that people might think of as scary or weird or dark and focus on the parts that make them beautiful. You can find nice moments even when things are scary, I guess. 
• The title comes from a 1972 Edwige Fenech film All the Colors of the Dark, which was released in the U.S. as They’re Coming To Get You and Day of the Maniac. I like my version of the title better.
• The three through-lines between the first project and the second are, apparently, Dario Argento’s Inferno and Dorine Hollier’s “Tonight! (Crazy Night!)” and the Bollywood version of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Regarding that last one, I made a handy ten-minute supercut of it that you can watch here.
• No, that really is Mia Farrow’s little sister.
• No, that isn’t actually Shelley Winters.
• I did actually make a little trailer for this project, and none of it appears in the final project. Watch, if your want, below.

And here is the list of source materials, in the order they appear, in case you’re trying to place a given song or movie.

• Intro: Suspiria + “Seconds” by Human League
• Part one (“Green Goblin”): Demons + “Tonight! (Crazy Night)” by Dorine Hollier
• Part two (“Blue Boy”): A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge + “Right on Target” by Paul Parker
• Part three (“Red River”): House/Hausu + “Crazy” by Daydream
• Part four (“Italian Purple”): Blood and Black Lace + “Jamie” by Mistral — and for the love of God please watch the original video for “Jamie,” as it will make your life immeasurably better and worse for having seen it
• Part five (“Golden Dream”): Mahakaal (plus a little of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Nightmare on Elm Street 4) + “Don’t Stop” by Gigamesh featuring Jana Nyberg
• Part six (“Aquatic Ambiance”): Zombi 2 + “Aquatic Ambiance” by David Wise
• Part seven (“Strawberry Skies”): Night of the Comet + “Strawberry Skies” by Games featuring Laurel Halo
• Part nine (“Bloody Silver”): Profondo Rosso, Suspiria, Tenebre and Inferno + “Slice Me Nice” by Fancy
• End credits: “Seconds” by Human League + “Kraken of the Sea” by Keiichi Suzuki

And here are all the segments individually, in case you want to see the bits in their pristine form.

The Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street (Abbreviated)

When Wes Craven died, my first thoughts were of Scream and how much that movie had shaped my understanding of pop culture. However, the only piece I wrote about Craven this week focused on the outlier in his filmography: Music of the Heart, Craven’s single non-horror feature and the movie he made in the break between Scream 2 and Scream 3.

And now, along similar lines, another one of Craven’s most unusual legacies: 1993’s Mahakaal, also known as the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street.

I actually watched this a few nights ago. It’s something I’d only recommend for hardcore Bollywood fanatics and diehard Freddy Krueger fans. (These groups must share some overlap, and I’d guess that Mahakaal is a godsend for these people.) For me, the film was interesting when it chose to cleave especially close to the source material and when it chose to diverge drastically from it.

Mahakaal runs nearly two and a half hours long, and a lot of this time has the characters singing and dancing for no reason, even after they realized they’re being stalked by the monster. Bollywood movie rules trump slasher movie rules, I guess. As a result of the lengthy run time and the long, long spans when nothing particularly interesting happens, I did a quick and dirty recut of the film, in case you also are mildly curious what a Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street might be like but don’t have two and a half hours to spend watching Indian youth sing about how great it is to be in love.

Here, then, is a eleven-minute version of the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street.

In making this, I tried to highlight the scenes that were most directly inspired by the original as well as the weirder additions — like the unsettling Michael Jackson impersonator, who may or may not be speaking English.

Some notes:

• The weird mix of horror and whimsy make me think this movie’s DNA has about as much in common with Hausu as it does with A Nightmare on Elm Street.
• It should be noted that the main character, Anita (but pronounced ah-nee-TAH rather than uh-NEE-tah) frequently dresses like Rosie Perez probably did around the time this movie was made.

• The villain doesn’t speak — and that’s odd, considering that even in the first film Freddy Krueger gets a few great lines and this remake seems interested in stuffing in comedy as often as possible.
• The only character whose name bears any similarity to its counterpart in the original is Seema, the main character’s best friend. In the original, Amanda Wyss plays the role and the character’s name is Tina. Seema lasts longer than Tina does, and instead of dying at a sleepover she dies at a hotel, where the group of young people is staying only because they get stranded. I wonder if there’s some cultural reason that the group was forced to spend the night together rather than just choosing to shack up.
• For what it’s worth, the death of the Rod character — the main character’s best friend’s boyfriend — may actually be creepier in this version than it is in the original. I always thought that bedsheet snaking around the actor’s neck seemed hokey. Mahakaal literalizes the scene.
• Notably, the main character’s parents aren’t divorced in this version, and both Anita’s cop dad and housewife mother help vanquish the bad guy in the end. Sure, Mom doesn’t do a whole lot, but she’s there in a way Ronee Blakley’s checked-out, alcoholic character isn’t in Nightmare.
• Though there’s a scene with a waterbed in Mahakaal, the Johnny Depp analogue doesn’t die in it. He survives to the end of the film, in fact.
• I wonder if the appearance of Anita’s dead sister is supposed to mimic the white-clothed “ghost girls” who sing the creepy jump rope rhyme in the original.
• There is, tragically, no Mahakaal 2 that’s rife with homoeroticism. Are you listening, Bollywood? Because I would watch that movie.

I’ve done this public service before, in case you’re interested in the Cliff’s Notes versions of movies you’d otherwise not bother to watch. My first one was actually an early Wes Craven movie: 1984’s Invitation to Hell, which features Susan Lucci as the devil and Robert Urich as a dad who has to kick the shit out of Punk Brewster and Bastian from The NeverEnding Story. The second was The Visitor, which I kind of hated but which still has some moments of primo WTF-ness that are worth watching. And finally I made a nine-minute version of the most David Lynchy moments from the one bizarrely Twin Peaks-themed episode of Darkwing Duck.

And in case you have two and a half hours to spare, the whole of Mahakaal is currently posted on YouTube here — with subtitles.

In closing, please enjoy the full discotheque sequence, just one of the many musical scenes that had me asking “Why are you singing and dancing still? Did you forget that your friends just got butchered?"

In Which Jada Pinkett Gets an Obscene Phone Call

Sometimes your celebration of America begins with poking around online and finding a German-language poster for Scream 2. For a piece of promotional art that came out in the late ’90s, this poster pings all your old movie nostalgia censors. It reminds you of something that would have come out two decades earlier.

You don’t even mind that during the scant few minutes that Jada Pinkett actually appears in Scream 2, she never uses a phone, to say nothing from using an old-fashioned pay phone receiver. And you wonder what aesthetic debate went into the decision to feature Pinkett’s skin as being brown. Of course, her skin actually is brown, and that’s actually an important aspect to the role she plays in Scream 2, what with the discussion with Omar Epps about African-American representation in the horror genre and the general tendency to kill off the black guy first. 

In the poster for the first movie, Drew Barrymore’s face shows up ghostly white.

The American poster for Scream 2 features Pinkett too, but in the same ghostly white as Neve Campbell. (And yeah, in the first version of this post, I assumed that it was Courteney Cox appearing on the left side of the poster before a commenter pointed out that Cox does not have brown eyes. On second look, that is totally Jada Pinkett. I guess the white skin threw me.)

It’s interesting that this German poster, and only this German poster, puts Pinkett front and center in the way Barrymore appeared on the first poster and doesn’t change her skin tone.

A Scary Horror Movie Scene in Which Nothing Explicitly Scary Happens

If pressed to name the scariest movie scene I’ve ever seen, I’d probably go with one in Lost Highway that introduces Robert Blake’s menacingly grinning character. Lost Highway isn’t technically a horror film, but David Lynch delves into the mystical, otherworldly, soul-shattering stuff often enough that it doesn’t need to be. It’s scary just as a neo-noir art film.

Dario Argento’s 1980 film Inferno features a completely G-rated scene that has always unnerved me and that I would like to offer for your consideration.

Give it a spin. It’s fairly brief.

Some context: Inferno is Argento’s sequel to Suspiria, which pits an American ballerina against a coven of German witches hiding in a dance academy. Much of Inferno concerns American music student Mark Elliot leaving Rome for New York to help his sister, who believes her apartment building may home to a second cluster of witches. The above scene takes place early in the film, before he arrives in New York.

Inferno is not as visually spectacular as Suspiria — and if you don’t know how beautiful the latter movie is, please have a look at this post, which offers a few dozen stills of the movie in all its color-saturated glory — but it has some good scary moments. The classroom scene, however, is the one that has stuck with me most, and for just one reason: It is the movie scene that best re-creates what it’s like to have a dream, at least for the kinds of dreams I have.

I have nightmares every now and then, but more often than not, I have these less outwardly scary dreams in which I’m trapped in a familiar setting where events are unfolding in an unrealistic manner that causes me gradual, increasing concern. The Inferno scene has Mark in an innocuous enough environment, a college lecture hall, but as he listens to the music, it becomes increasingly apparent that something is wrong.

Around the one-minute mark, he starts acting like he may be ill. A few seconds later, it gets explicitly weird: He sees that beautiful woman stroking her cat. His reaction? “Oh, Now’s a good time to read that letter my sister sent me about witches or some junk.” Within a few moments, the beautiful woman has noticed Mark, and she’s mouthing something to him. Importantly, he doesn’t offer any big reaction to this. It’s more of an “Okay, that’s weird. Let’s just roll with this.”

This is how I dream. Most dreams I have involve me being somewhere, tasked by my subconscious to follow a script that initially seems like it’s on the up-and-up. I don’t realize I’m dreaming. Then, something weird happens. Something appears in a place where it shouldn’t be. Someone acts in a way that even my subconscious knows it’s right. But I’m always too scared to react — to break character, I guess — and I continue with the scene, trying to follow its logic no matter how weird it may seem.

Then there’s the silent mouthing of words. This happens a lot in my dreams, and usually by someone I don’t know in real life. That’s a strange thing to wrap your head around, isn’t it? That the mental headshot gallery of everyone you’ve ever met doesn’t have anyone quite right for the part, so your brain just invents a whole fictional character — without your permission — to play a role in your dream. And then these strangers, whom I kinda-sorta invented and maybe-possibly have to take some responsibility, attempt to tell me something, but I can’t hear them. There’s background noise or they simply are moving their mouth but not producing words, and while it seems like the most important thing in the world to figure out what they’re trying to say, I can’t hear them.

And then I wake up.

Fittingly, for this discussion, the mysterious, beautiful woman in the lecture hall does not appear in the film again.

I don’t know if these moments happen to everyone else quite so often. Actually, I also don’t know if most people are likely to decide that the show must go on and follow along with dumb dream nonsense, either. Do you?

Inferno, for what it’s worth, has many more surreal scenes and many more explicitly scary ones. Just because tomorrow is Halloween, I’ll leave you with a more traditional horror movie scene. In this one, Mark’s sister Rose finds a hole in the floor of her apartment building’s basement. It’s full of water and, inside, there’s a whole room that’s eloquently decorated but also submerged in water. Again, following screwy dream logic, she’s just all “Okay, this is weird,” and jumps right in to explore.” You know, like anyone would.

Maybe dreams and horror movies both require the removal of logical reactions to strange situations?

Ana Pieroni, who played the mysterious woman, later appeared in Argento’s Tenebre, as a sexy shoplifter, because that’s a character type in Argento movies. I had to gif her magnificence in Inferno.

Revenge of the Creature from the San Andreas Fault

So here’s a weird thing that happened. Yesterday’s post concerned my friend Kristen, who back in college starred in a photo shoot I did for a class project in which I tried to re-create a film press packet. I chose to make a bad slasher movie, which I titled Creature from the San Andreas Fault. In yesterday’s post, I used one of those photos.

star vivian lynn pfefferman, unaware of approaching doom

Weirdly, hours before, someone on Twitter used a different one of those photos. I just found out late tonight.

For the project, we purposefully tried to imitate Scream. Here’s the original image we used as inspiration.

It’s little more than a weird coincidence, but it is a surprising one considering how I and everyone else in the online world forgot about these photos until now. However, it did remind me of this project that I did more than a decade ago...

For the sake of posterity (and because October is the month we revel in all things spooky-scary), here are the rest of those photos.

vivian lynn pfefferman, more aware of approaching doom

vivian lynn pfefferman, wondering when the mail will come

vivan lynn pfefferman, pretending she can read

vivian lynn pfefferman, doing her best fay wray

best friend patsy pickett, suffering the fate of all slasher movie besties

the creature

the creature (again)

some asshole

vivian doing her best IKWYDLS-era j-lo-hew

vivian, doing janet leigh

vivian, learning how to scream in a shower

Note: Yes, that is me, fourth from the bottom. No, I don't know why I look like that. Yes, the photos are, in general, very yellowish, but only in mind does it make me look like I have jaundice. No, I don't know why my lips look so pink. I let someone I thought was good with digital photo editing do the color correction — in fact, because college, I paid him in liquor for his services — and I did not question it at the time. Yes, I had hair. Yes, that is a puka shell necklace. No, I do not have any excuses.

Also: No, I don't know why we had that mask or the hatchet.

Regardless, as one intrepid reporter once exclaimed, “Deja voodoo!”

Revisiting The Visitor: A Cliffs Notes of Suck

Back in November, I watched the 1979 movie The Vistor, which is a work of science fiction that is maybe also horror and it has birds in it and Shelley Winters plays a character who may or may not be intoxicated the whole time. That’s maybe the most accurate thing I can say about The Visitor. It’s a tough movie that goes from “Oh, wow, this is so bad!” to “Oh, wow, this is so bad,” and the scattered moments of what-the-fuckness don’t quite make up for a plot that so vehemently resists sensible direction. That said, the movie isn’t a complete waste of time, because those what-the-fuck moments really linger with you.

Thus, following the success of my Cliffs Notes version of the also terrible Invitation to Hell (a.k.a. “the worst line readings, the shittiest special effects and all of Susan Lucci’s outfits”), I decided to condense The Visitor down to the best-worst parts, so you can see them, appreciate them and then move on with your life. I’m happy to report that I cut down the original film’s running time of 101 minutes down to just 7:37.

Enjoy!

And no, you’re honestly not missing out of that much. Any of the seemingly unexplained plot points go more or less equally unexplained in the real version. Only now you didn’t have to sit through a stuffy Cinefamily screening to see Lance Henriksen get murdered by a bird.

You may rightly be wondering how a film like this ever gets made. Per the Cinefamily screening (and per my original post), the director was fired and then threatened the producer at gunpoint not only to hire him back but allow him to continue seeing through this collection of weirdness and baffling line readings. And that, my friends, is how a movie like this gets made.

For those who dare, you can rent the full film on iTunes.

Invitation to a Terrible Movie

Tonight, Hollywood salutes the year’s best movies, but I say that’s garbage. Anyone can make an award-winning movie. Just walk into the cinema section of your library, and there are literally dozens of books advising you how to properly make a film. Much harder, I’d wager, is making a terrible movie that people will forget about, and in tribute to shitty cinema, I present to you Invitation to Hell.

A TV movie that aired on NBC in 1984, Invitation to Hell is notable today because it was directed by Wes Craven. “Oh, the Wes Craven of landmark horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream?” No! This is the Wes Craven from Vampire in Brookyln or Shocker or that movie where the old lady gets killed by a basketball. But while Invitation to Hell is pretty bad overall, it has enough good moments — wonderfully made-for-TV special effects, utterly baffling line readings and references to 1984 computer technology that sound hilarious today — that it merited a Cliffs Notes version. So here you go, movie nerds, horror fans, Craven completionists and people who just have nine minutes to spare: everything you need to see from Invitation to Hell, including all of Susan Lucci’s shitballs wackadoo outfits.

Things to note:

• Yes, you are correct: The plot does play out like a supernatural blend of two Simpsons episodes: the one where the family moves to Cypress Creek so Homer can work for the villainous Globex Corporation and the one where Marge joins a ritzy country club and figuratively loses her soul. 
• And yes, Joanna Cassidy in the role of Patricia looks a bit like Maureen Prescott.
• The cast is a who’s-who of people who did better elsewhere. In addition to Susan Lucci, there’s Brenda’s mom from Six Feet Under, Punky Brewster as the daughter, Bastian from The Neverending Story as the son, Frank Fontana from Murphy Brown as the dad’s friend, Patty “The Bad Seed” McCormack as the friend’s snitty wife and even Anne Marie McEvoy (the one and only Kathy Santoni) as the neighbor girl.
• Blame the dialogue on Richard Rothstein (Universal Soldier, the original Bates Motel), but you can’t say the movie doesn’t have a few nice shots, at least for a TV movie.
• It wasn’t Craven’s only TV movie. He also directed Stranger in Our House in 1978. It starred Linda Blair, which makes her cameo in Scream make a little more sense.
• Is the whole movie a parable about the dangers of moving your family to the San Fernando Valley? Sure, why not?

If my condensed version isn’t enough for you, the full version is currently posted on YouTube. I also found an on-air promo that triggered all kinds of TV nostalgia.

And in case you just don’t have nine minutes to spare — ahem, FANCY — here’s the opening scene and then nearly a minute of Robert Urich’s family kicking the shit out of him.

Pop culture that time forgot, previously:

• A weird little story about Wes Craven and Sharon Stone
• A genuinely odd passage from Robert Bloch’s Psycho II
• The amazing opening credits to Land of the Giants
• That episode of The Brady Bunch where everyone gets shot to death
• The weirdness that is the two halves of the ’80s action series Cover Up

Deep Red (But Mostly Chartreuse, Taupe and Umber)

Back in October, in apparent preparation for Halloween, I posted a collection of stills from Suspiria, Dario Argento’s gorgeously colorful 1977 slasher movie. I wanted to prove that it’s beautiful, I suppose, but that’s no difficult task: Nearly every scene is a nicely composed, color-saturated work of art.

Today, in apparent preparation for… St. Patrick’s Day, I guess, I offer you a collection from Argento’s film immediately before Suspiria: Deep Red, also known as Profondo rosso. It’s more restrained, more noir, and its color palette skews more ’70s. You see less of the pure red, blue and green of Suspiria and more colors filtered with yellow — which is appropriate, considering it’s a giallo. Lack of Technicolor surrealism notwithstanding, Profondo rosso is still a beautiful film.

And here are a bunch of stills that prove this claim.

Also, I enjoy how the film ends by reminding you what film you were watching, just in case you’d gotten confused.