Editorials
Meet Weegee, the Original ‘Nightcrawler’
In Dan Gilroy’s debut film Nightcrawler (our review), Jake Gyllenhaal plays a freelance crime journalist named Lou Bloom who lurks L.A.’s underbelly at night armed with a camcorder, capturing gruesome footage to sell to the news. Car crashes, murder, all around mayhem (and a healthy dose of misanthropy) are Bloom’s mealticket.
Over 80 years ago, over on the east coast, a portly cigar-chomping immigrant beat Gyllenhaal to the punch. In his time, Weegee (a take on Ouija) was the reigning champ of candid crime journalism, which he’s also credited as originating. As he helped conduct and shape the culture of tabloids as we know them, he also spotlighted the seedy, gritty side of the human experience, elevating murder and calamity to a high art.
Weegee was born in the the Ukraine in 1899, under the name Ascher Fellig. When he was a baby, Fellig’s father moved to America to become a rabbi, later sending for the rest of his family once he’d earned enough bread. At age 10, Fellig emigrated to the U.S. with his mother and three brothers. When the family came through Ellis Island, his Ascher name was anglicized to Arthur.
The family had trouble making ends meet, so despite being a good student, Arthur was forced to leave school shortly after the eighth grade. He worked a bunch of odd jobs around the Lower East Side but it wasn’t until he had his picture taken by a street photographer that Arthur felt he’d found his calling. He purchased his own tintype camera and hit the streets.
His first racket was taking photos of kids in their Sunday best, sitting atop a pony he’d rented from a local stable. Afterwards he’d try to hock the photos to the kids’ parents. Within a few years, he got his big break working in the darkroom of Acme Newspictures. There he’d develop other folks’ pictures for use as stock photos in the papers. But at night, while all the other employees were asleep, Arthur would creep out into the shadows and shoot emergencies, murders, and death. The office girls at Acme gave him the nickname “Weegee” after the infamous spirit board, because he seemed to possess a supernatural intuition for breaking news.
From 1935 to 1945, Weegee was the preeminent freelance crime photographer of NYC. At first he’d find stories by going into Manhattan police headquarters and sniffing out whatever he could find on the teletype machine. He quickly grew tired of this, so he bought himself a souped-up ’38 Chevy Coupe, complete with portable dark room in the trunk and police radio (he was the only press photographer ever given permission to have one in his car). Equipped with spare cameras, flash bulbs, and even a typewriter, Weegee stalked the streets at night, chasing down “Page One” stories, oftentimes beating cops to the scene. His four-wheeled studio allowed him to expedite the process from negative to printed photo, giving him one hell of an advantage over other press hounds.
For the times he wasn’t out on the beat, Weegee rented an apartment directly across from police headquarters. He naturally kept a police scanner next to his beat and would sleep with one ear open. Somehow, he’d manage to snooze through humdrum police calls, then spring outta bed for the juicy ones. He’d sell his photographs to the tabloids and various news photo agencies, eking out a living in a profession most starved their way through while in the process becoming a minor celebrity around town.
When asked how Weegee picked what stories he’d chase after, he said he looked for ones with a name. Barroom brawls between nobodies in Hell’s Kitchen might fetch him $10, but a scrap between society types would draw the big bucks (maybe $25). In Naked City, Weegee’s first collection, he explains that murders and fires were “my two best sellers, my bread and butter.”
Murders were the easiest for him to shoot. Stiffs made the best models, because they “couldn’t get temperamental” and stayed there on the concrete for a good two hours before being carted away in the meat wagon. Weegee observes in Naked City that at murder scenes, the bodies always seemed to be well-dressed, face-up on the sidewalk with their hats sitting beside them. They always had hats, “pearl gray” ones. He jokingly said one day he wanted to just go follow a guy in a pearl gray hat and set up his camera so he can catch an actual murder as it happens.
“I had so many unsold murder pictures lying around my room…I felt as if I were renting out a wing of the City Morgue.” – Weegee
He even took so many shots of the era’s most notorious criminals – Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz, Mad Dog Coll – while they were behind bars that he became known as the official photographer of “Murder, Inc.”
With fires, Weegee had to work much more quickly. He shot a lot of photos of people being rescued and he was fascinated by the items they risked their lives to retrieve from the flames (snakes, art, violins, religious artifacts). He also always made sure to take shots of the crowds watching the fires, in case the cops were looking for a known pyro. There are a lot of Weegee shots of fire survivors, which he preferred over the burnt up corpses. When firemen would come out with victims, they’d retrieve a priest to deliver last rites. This ritual always made Weegee cry.
He wept because through all the murder and mayhem, Weegee was a shy and sensitive guy. It wasn’t all about the paycheck for him. He sincerely liked humanity in all its beauty and ugliness. Aside from the crime beat, he snapped photos of lovers at Coney Island, opera singers, Sinatra, the black community in Harlem, and simply anyone and everyone from all walks of life. His street cred swelled so big, he even managed to break into the film world. Stanley Kubrick brought him in as technical consultant on Dr. Strangelove because he wanted the film to have the sharp flash effect of Weegee’s photos.
But man, his crime photos are something else. The excitement and urgency still bleeds off of them to this day. Their gritty candidness displays how murder and violence are commonplace, but that all this bullshit happens to real humans – not just people on the movie screen.
His work now rests in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. There are loads of places online to check out his work as well.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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