Editorials
6 Slasher Films That Don’t Get Enough Love!!
Slasher movies were what introduced me to horror. The idea of some huge (yet oddly quiet) man, skulking around in some cryptic mask, looking to viciously murder anyone who crosses his path. Sometimes, the slasher would have motive for doing what he did, so that added another layer of fun to the sub genre. The idea that the bad guy may have been a victim at one point. In that sense, slasher movies are more like revenge movies. They begin with the tragedy befalling a character. Said tragedy changes his appearance and demeanor. Often then, we flash forward as some masked maniac has begun killing everyone. The formula is easy enough to follow, but I have noticed over the years slasher fans always seem to talk about the same movies. The movies that set the tone. The Friday the 13ths and the Halloweens. But what about the hundreds of other slasher movies through the ages? How come they get no love? Well, my sick friends. They are about to.
Man, I love me some Cropsey! Yes, The Burning may have been very similar to Friday the 13th, but why is that a bad thing? The Burning was about Cropsey, the caretaker at a summer camp (for apparently really cruel children). One night some of the campers decided they want to scare the guy, but in the process of trying to scare him, they kind of burn him alive. You know, we have all been there? You try to prank someone and mistakenly maim them. Man, I hate when that happens.
Anyway, Cropsey does not actually die. He just spends five years at a hospital getting skin grafts and shit. They release him and he pretty much makes his way to a camp and starts murdering kids. I know murdering kids at a camp is nothing new, but man, that canoe scene is one of my faves of the 80’s. Fisher Stevens seems genuinely shocked he gets his fingers cut off. That never fails to make me laugh. Makeup master Tom Savini at his early best.
Oh, and let it be known. A young Jason Alexander (with hair) is in this movie. It is worth seeing just for that. Well, that, and when Cropsey busts out a blow torch in the final stretch of the film. Yeah, that’s pretty badass, too.
Long before “Dexter” was showing us how to kill people on Showtime, Leslie Vernon was showing us how to kill people in this brilliant mockumentary. A movie that follows the exploits of a man named Leslie Vernon (sort of a real life Jason Vorhees with charisma) as he goes about, doing his thing. The Vernon character is so charming, you tend to forget the fact that he is a murdering monster pretty quick. Then he reminds you again.
The film is satire of the slasher genre, while also being a love letter to the genre. We follow Leslie as he addresses such things as picking victims, ways to kill, and how to get away with it. The movie bounces back and forth from satire, and it hits you during the last half hour that it was all an elaborate set up for the finale of the film.
I will not tell you more than that, as I do not want to spoil this gem of a film for you.
Peeping Tom is on the list for one simple reason. It was WAY ahead of its time. We are talking about a film from 1960. On top of that, the way the kills go down in this movie are still incredibly chilling. Why? Well, that is the whole point of the film. The Peeping Tom in mention is a man who has a camera mounted and running at all times. He essentially films all his murders, and we see them from the perspective of the camera. Think the modern remake of Maniac and you have a good idea.
Mark, the main character in this movie, has an Anthony Perkins in Psycho levels of creepy to him. He is an odd and quiet man, and the more we find out about his past, the more what he does seems to make sense. Granted, it dos not justify his actions, but at least validates why he does them.
Again, I am being cryptic and vague on purpose. See this movie. Also, someone needs to remake it, stat. The voyeurism themes would lend themselves well to our technological age.
Okay, I am gonna be honest with you about this one. StageFright is on the list because of that fucking owl head. I know Lord of Tears is coming soon, so this feels really topical to bring up. Something about a human that looks like an owl is very disturbing. StageFright is about a group of actors who start getting offed, one by one. They hear of a legend of a murder known as The Night Owl, and once they bring him up, it is like they summoned him.
But this is a slasher, so you know the owl is just one of the people in the cast. But who? Well, that is not important. What is important is that the owl head is creepy a fuck (even though you know field of vision would be all but non existent with it on) and the final half hour has some cool twists and turns.
But mainly, that owl head.
So wait, you have a killer cop roaming the streets of New York city, and Bruce Campbell is in this movie? Two stronger selling points, I have never heard. While every other aspect of it may just seem generic, sometimes all you needed for a good slasher was to change the setting, and change the antagonist.
I will be honest with you. Another reason this is on the list is because the idea of a cop being a murderous fiend is pretty scary. Why? Because your mind set it to do whatever a cop tells you. We have all been conditioned to respect them as authority. So the very idea that a cop would be the murderous monster sends a chill down your spine.
Granted, other than that, this is typical slasher fare, but the cop thing sets it above most other slasher clones and gets some points for originality.
I will admit, this one (much like StageFright) is on the list for the killer’s ensemble. In this case, the killer wears an old hag mask that, for some reason, fucking freaks me out. The actual movie is sort of by-the-numbers, but man, that hag mask? That thing is terrifying. Oh, and extra points for the ice skate scene.
Rarely do we get to see ice ballet and slasher films meet up so gloriously. Okay, so what slasher films do you think are underrated? Take to the comments and let us know. Then go toss a like over here, and then go read about< a href="http://remycarreiro.com/soul-stealing-cinema-seasoning-house/" target="blank">the one film from this year that really fucked with my head.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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