Editorials
[Butcher Block] The Supermarket Massacre of ‘Intruder’
Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
Intruder is what happens when you take the tongue in cheek humor of director/writer Scott Spiegel, fresh off writing Evil Dead II, and the unrestrained special makeup effects of young gurus in the making Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger. A gory bloodbath of a slasher set in grocery store during the overnight shift with cheesy puns and humor befitting of The Three Stooges. In other words, it’s a whole hell of a lot of fun. It took a long while for the film to catch on, though, due to it getting caught up in the collapse of Empire Pictures and the MPAA on the warpath of restricting the slasher craze. When Intruder finally was released, it was highly edited to the point where the glorious kills were cut out, making it seem as if the victims simply disappeared. Luckily, those scenes were restored and Intruder finally caught on among fans like it deserved from the start.
The plot is somewhat generic and straightforward, and most of the marketing material gives away the killer. Yet the supermarket setting makes for some surprising and fun kills. Who knew there were so many ways to die in a grocery store? Though Intruder follows a basic slasher formula, it doesn’t bother much with conventional character archetypes so there are some characters that seems like they’d survive a lot farther into the run time than they do. Spiegel’s screenplay also addresses what would play out if the cops showed up right after the final girl won her final battle with the killer in a more reality based setting.
The true star here, though, is the special effects. Kurtzman, Nicotero, and Berger has just launched their own studio, K.N.B. EFX Group, and were looking getting their name out there and transition into a more supervisorial role. When most film productions wanted effects studios with more experience under their belt, it made things difficult for the trio in establishing their newly launched company, perhaps further complicated by being only in their early 20s. So, giving them the reigns for special effects here gave them the needed experience to further establish their studio and gave the production a trio of extremely talented special effects and make-up artists for a steal; Kurtzman, Nicotero, and Berger were each paid $700 each for labor and materials to do Intruder. To be fair, the budget was miniscule and the principal photography lasted only a couple weeks, but considering what the trio delivered it is jaw-dropping. Even more impressive is that they pulled out this caliber of work during nights, as they were working on effects for DeepStar Six during the day.
In their hands, and in Spiegel’s script, Walnut Lake Market became the most hazardous of working conditions. The killer used the grocery store to his fullest advantage, delivering kills by way of skewers through the eye, meat cleavers, meat hooks to skulls, trash compactors, and even the carbonation of a large stock of beer to unleash maximum blood spray.
All are violent and messy, but the crowning glory (even in the eyes of the make-up effects team) is the gnarly death by bandsaw. The camera gets extremely close and personal with the excruciating, slow slicing of the victim’s head. It looks so real that even one of the members of the make-up team fled in tears after watching.
Between Spiegel’s sense of humor, his gleeful joy on display at his first feature directing gig, and the stunning work by Kurtzman, Nictotero, and Berger, Intruder is far more fun than it had any right to be. Cameos by Spiegel’s friends and neighbors Sam Raimi, Ted Raimi, and Bruce Campbell played a role in drawing in fans of the Evil Dead series, but it’s the special effects team that stole the show.
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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