Editorials
New Decade, New Rules: The Pandemic Gives Horror a Chance to Rewrite the Rules
Does anyone even remember we’re in a new decade? Feels weird to say since it seems like we’re living several years in the span of a few months and, being completely honest with ourselves, 2020 waved the white flag. We get it. A once in a lifetime pandemic tends to have that effect. With that in mind, what will horror look like for the next ten years? Historically, it takes a while for a decade of horror to truly define itself, something often determined by real-world events. Saw and Hostel didn’t drop until 2004 and 2005, respectively, but became the epitome of early 2000s horror. Before that, ‘90s horror didn’t find its voice until 1996 with Scream.
Scream, which turns 25 next year, famously outlined the rules for surviving a horror flick. What was true then is still true today: you pay for your transgressions no matter how big or small. Characters walk into rooms they shouldn’t, open doors that should stay closed, and play around with forces beyond their control just for a couple of laughs. And every time, without fail, something bad happens. Horror films reinforce our cause and effect belief system, giving us a bit of a false sense of comfort when the final body drops. But living through a pandemic changes every single rule. Many are suffering due to no fault of their own, and there’s no plan coming and no hero ready to burst through the door to save the day.
The 2020s should explore what it means to be helpless. How it feels to follow the rules and get nothing but an icy embrace in return.
Once again, horror needs to look inward, examine the rules, and rewrite them. How does that look in some of the most famous subgenres of the last decade? Glad you asked.
We’re in the age of small gatherings only consisting of friends and family; people we trust with our lives because we believe they value their own. Plus, those are the rules. Since pandemics have a way of making you think twice when that doorbell rings, the external threat of the bad guys in home invasion movies like You’re Next or The Strangers would have no appeal. Instead, the internal threat from anyone in those small gatherings becomes the new fear. There’s no need for forced entry because we willingly let them inside when they come rapping at our door, greeting us with a smile and the warmth of familiarity.
Or worse, the tormentor could be a family member who lives under the same roof as the main character(s) and wants nothing more than to see them suffer. The movie becomes a metaphor for what we’re going through and makes our safe spaces anything but. It speaks to the fact that a virus can live in our loved ones and we never really know how safe we are. But ultimately, it’s a lot scarier knowing the people we trust with our lives can just as easily decide we’re as disposable as a napkin.
Shudder’s ‘Host’
Perhaps no other subgenre is more of a slave to its rules than found footage flicks. Safe to say we now have a little more empathy for the annoying person who won’t drop the camera. We’re all trying to make sense of the world in any way we can, and for the most part, that means sharing our madness with others. To say nothing of it being the only way some of us can communicate with the outside world. Because of all of that, plus the fact TikTok and Instagram are now essentially appendages, a found footage movie in 2023 will have a completely different subtext than one from 2016.
The scariest thing about these movies, besides whatever is doing the haunting, should be that the refusal to film and share is what will get these characters killed. No matter what happens, no matter how bad it is, no matter how ridiculous and absurd the situation gets, they must keep rolling. The movie itself demands they keep going, the entity wants all that attention, and the characters can’t live without feeding the beast. We, the audience, demand the cameras stay on as well. Our societal pressures to share and create content gave birth to new rules. If it’s not on social media, then it didn’t happen at all. If you say you were terrorized by a demon and didn’t stream it for the world to see, then you’re probably lying.
We’re told if we follow the rules and do the things we’re supposed to do to be thought of as good, upstanding citizens, those charged with protecting us will do so. The Crazies and any of the 100 or so Purge movies refute that idea by portraying government as women and men who magically appear whenever trouble arises. Monster on their block? Here come the suits. When an experiment goes wrong and affects an entire town? Suits send in the military. Sky-high crime rate? Suits implement legal murder and thin the herd. Pandemic? Well, they at least try.
But our reality is the flip side of that dynamic. Corruption is worse when combined with incompetence. The people in charge have no clue how to fix anything and don’t even know where to start.
This decade should deal with the scariness of ineptitude. Instead of seeing suits and military fatigues when that monster comes, characters get nothing. When a bomb is misplaced or a chemical experiment goes south, not even containment is an option because there are no options.
‘The Beach House’
Being abandoned sucks. Being abandoned because the person or people in charge can’t handle the problem sucks even more. There is a specific trauma that event elicits; it’s one horror rarely explores but certainly should. That stress can result in people hurting themselves, hurting the ones around them, drowning in despair, or an entire society living out scenes from The Shining. These films can examine our relationship with institutions meant to protect us and what it’s like watching a group of people slowly descend into nihilism all because they followed the rules and were completely misled.
2020 is the year a particular brand of scary movie broke the fourth wall. How can we ever go back to the typical ghosts, goblins, and strangers at our door? We know what lurks around the corner, which doors not to open, how many seconds it takes for that jump scare, and where that apparition will pop up. To paraphrase the tagline of an underrated entry in the Scream series, it’s a new decade, and it’s time for new rules.
College kids, strippers and vampires—those were Donald P. Borchers’ only requirements when he approached Richard Wenk about writing and directing a movie for New World Pictures. As requested, Wenk cooked up Vamp (1986), a tailor-made blend of the decade’s teen movie craze as well as its horror boom.
Grim and earnest stories were still very much a part of the ’80s horror landscape, yet Vamp is something of a comedy. One difference between it and, say, Saturday the 14th, though, is the former avoids using schtick. Wenk’s movie proves that horror comedies also don’t have to subtract thrills from their recipes. Of course, it takes a minute before reaching that point; college antics and culture shocks preface this one macabre misadventure.
Vamp‘s initial setup is apt for a typical college-set, sex-driven comedy; to bribe their way into a fraternity house, two pledges (Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler) go looking for some adult entertainment. Without wasting time on any further exposition, the characters embark on an all-in-one-night trip that quickly detours into terror.
To procure their elusive MacGuffin—a stripper willing to gyrate for some frat boys—Keith (Makepeace) and AJ (Rusler), plus a third wheel named Duncan (Gedee Watanabe), trade the safety of their remote college campus for the seediness of some unnamed city. The setting is recognizably L.A. by day, but as soon as night falls, downtown, along with the characters, slips into a kind of surreal universe. Director of photography Elliot Davis gave this early entry on his prolific résumé an unusual yet distinctive look; that Mario Bava-esque, magenta-green lighting is omnipresent, so much so that it’s almost its own character.
Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler in Vamp
The faint comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours are merited, although not just because of Vamp’s distinguishing nighttime aesthetic. Save for the primary characters, the supporting roles in Wenk’s movie are also quite colorful and transactional in their behavior. The difference here, though, is the additional urge to ruin Keith and his friends at every turn. Some of that harm is humorous and tolerable enough, whereas the moment Vamp dishes out its first fatality, it’s abundantly clear how this movie qualifies as horror.
Vamp falls into that category of horror movie that reveals its genre with a scream rather than a series of whispers. The opening scene can function as a hint of what lies ahead—things are not at all what they appear to be—but otherwise, Wenk is more than happy to hold off on the horror. When that time does come, though, it catches the viewer off guard. In addition to the pure shock value is that sudden decision to upend the movie’s foremost feature. Or so it would seem.
If afraid of major spoilage, those new to Vamp would be wise to stop reading here. There’s just no skirting around the fact that the central fellowship in this buddy movie hits a serious snag when AJ is killed. That development causes the story to become more of a “long, bad night” journey for Keith and his romantic interest. So while Wenk scores points for subverting expectations, there is also a touch of sadness in his decision. Because if Vamp does anything well, it’s making the characters likable.
Something that comes easily to Vamp—and other teen horror movies from this same era—is its ability to invent young characters worth caring about, or at the very least, are interesting and not so immediately off-putting. More impressive is how Wenk did all this without actually fleshing out those characters. Still and all, Keith and his kind are a grade above cookie-cutter, and in some cases, aren’t completely devoid of growth.
Grace Jones in Vamp
Vamp appeals with an assorted cast of characters. No two are the same, nor are they operating on the same wavelength. The cinematically extroverted AJ, whose actor conveyed charm and vulnerability in near equal amounts, comes alive when he’s at his most undead. Makepeace then makes the chronically cautious Keith a sympathetic fellow, even as he’s more and more affected by the night’s bizarre events. Meanwhile, Duncan is indeed the designated loser of the whole bunch, but Watanabe still manages to humanize him. As a bonus, the role didn’t require him to pull a Long Duk Dong.
As for Dedee Pfeiffer, she is plain adorable as the mysterious After Dark server nicknamed “Amaretto”. She spends all night fixing her dress strap while at the same time trying to get Keith to remember how he knows her. As their offbeat romance grows, it becomes another highlight of this movie. Whether or not Pfeiffer’s character is really a vampire also creates some welcome tension in the story.
Like a lot of its contemporaries, Vamp went on to become a bit of a cult classic. That current status is determined by several factors, but without a doubt, the casting of Grace Jones is the most considerable. The image of her writhing on that unique-looking chair, a Keith Haring original, springs to mind whenever this movie is brought up.
Chris Makepeace, Billy Drago and Paunita Nichols in Vamp
Prior to that first display of unequivocal horror, local vampire queen Katrina (Jones) took to the stage and delivered a strip show like no other. One would expect nothing less from that renowned model and performance artist. By now reports of Jones’ tardiness on set are no secret, yet it’s also hard to deny her commitment to the part of Katrina. It was, in fact, Jones who took charge of her character’s appearance—on top of Haring painting her body and that now-iconic chair, she had Andy Warhol handle her costuming. And not too many actors could seize a room’s attention without saying a single line of dialogue.
In 2022, Vamp received a retrospective novelization from Encyclopocalypse. This literary union of preexisting source material—Wenk’s original screenplay—and new ideas from author Christian Francis amounts to a more comprehensive visit to the After Dark Club. The basic story there is no different than what’s shown on screen; however, Francis gets creative with the characters’ origins and designs, and he enhances a number of key scenes.
The novelization expands on the urban and social decay of the main setting, and supplies a background for the After Dark Club. Sandy Baron’s character, Katrina’s emcee and familiar, is given ample motivation for sticking around; up until the fiery end, he is loyal to his friend and former business partner “Squeak”, who looks like he was “fed through a combine harvester, and left as nothing more than a heap of mangled remains”. Then there is Billy Drago’s character Snow, the leader of a street gang called The Dragons. His reason for menacing Keith and AJ is more altruistic than in the movie; he and his peers act tough to scare off any potential food for the vampires.
Lisa Lyon in Vamp
If not for all the backstories, Francis’ Vamp would be a hell of a lot shorter. Instead, this tie-in read dives into how AJ met Keith—the orphaned Anthony Joseph hailed from a broken home back in Brooklyn—and how their friendship flourished over the years. Keith’s archership is no longer just an assumed part of his entire being; it’s a confidence-building extracurricular for a boy who got picked on before coming into the protection of the new kid in town. These supplemental, in-depth looks at the protagonists, plus their close connection, are maybe unnecessary. The movie already did a fair and concise job of addressing their platonic intimacy without the need for flashbacks and insights, specifically in that scene where AJ lays it all out as he sacrifices himself.
Where the novelization gets off course is its approach to the minor characters. Intermittently backstorying the likes of Katrina’s indentured servants, Seko (Leila Hee Olsen) and Vlad (Brad Logan), ends up disturbing the flow of the writing. Was it absolutely essential that readers know Vlad was the Grand Duke of the House of Romanov, or how Snow’s accomplice Maven (Paunita Nichols) became so dentally challenged? No, not really. However, one’s mileage with these random biographies may vary.
The novelization is a more substantial experience, but for a movie like Vamp, less is more. And as plentiful as they are, it never simply coasts on its campy charms, either. The character work sits comfortably in that realm between cursory and meticulous, the script is sharper than first realized, and Greg Cannom’s vampire makeup is straightforward yet effective. Most of all, the movie didn’t squander its out-of-the-box concept. Richard Wenk made his vision of a “comic nightmare in which just about anything that can go wrong does” come true, and it is very enjoyable.
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