Reviews
[Review] “Deadwax” Has An Eerie Atmosphere And Killer Sound
On paper, Shudder’s new original series Deadwax (premiering Nov. 15) sounds like The Ring but just with a different object that kills its user. While that isn’t untrue, the series expands that initial premise with intriguing world-building and lore. And of course, the music is great, otherwise what is the point?
The opening scene shows a man meticulously taking out a plain red vinyl record, treating it like a mythical thing of sinister beauty, like the music version of the Lament Configuration. He places the record on a turntable, as the needle slowly goes down, looking more like a guillotine about to chop off a head. He sits down and smiles as the record begins to play, the camera closing in on his face. Then a quick and horrible sound interrupts the man as the screen goes black and then reveals the same man, dead, with his skin gray and mummified, his eye sockets empty and black as the void of space.
It’s an eye-opening start to what accounts for about two hours of TV. If you are the type to complain about shows and films being too long, then Deadwax’s 15-minute-long episodes should be right up your alley. Graham Reznick uses his extensive background as a sound designer, which includes The House of the Devil, and In a Valley of Violence, to craft a show where sound is essential. While good sound design is important in horror (look at this year’s A Quiet Place), there’s usually not a lot of experimenting with it. Reznic bases his entire premise on the idea of sound as a beautiful yet menacing thing, capable of horrible damage. The electric 70s giallo-inspired music, the eerie burst of static noise in the background and the audio cues before the jump scares elevate this beyond its comparisons to The Ring.
In the span of eight episodes, Deadwax follows Etta (Hannah Gross) a vinyl collector and hunter hired by rich people to track down rare records. She will do anything to get her hands on the rarest of the rare, even breaking into people’s houses at night. Her latest score includes a unique record from legendary sound engineer Lyle M. Lytton, part of a series and one of only three pressings in existence. This leads her to hearing about one of the other two records, one with weird markings on its deadwax (the space between the grooves and the label), said to be haunted. Meanwhile, a police officer while investigating the death of our mummy guy from the beginning will get more than he gambled for when he comes across the record.
Inspired by the concept of backmasking – hidden messages in vinyl records that can be discovered when playing backwards – and the Satanic Panic of the 70s, Deadwax treats its acetate subjects as mythical, almost magical objects. Reznick constantly uses close-ups and lingers on the turntable, the needle, and the turning of the vinyl as if it was otherworldly. Those who collect vinyl are portrayed not as hipsters or tinfoil-hat-wearing nutjobs, but as protectors of a sort of ancient art that the rest of the world doesn’t know about. Most of episode 4 is devoted to a college DJ alone in his booth talking about how special the format is. The show manages to also expand the lore of its universe without the need to show everything, as little pieces get added to the mystery and the mythology of Lytton’s killer record, specially around the idea of frequency resonance manipulation, and the notion that sound waves can make the human body react in invisible and sometimes deadly ways.
In the four episodes of Deadwax I saw, the series managed to create an eerie atmosphere that doesn’t shy away from gory and practical deaths like the mummified body or exploding heads. The mythology of the show is intriguing, and the characters have enough development to make you care, but the real winner is the short episode runtimes, which are laser-focused and will leave you wanting to binge the whole thing in one sitting.
Night School, director Ken Hughes and writer Ruth Avergon‘s tale of a headhunting slasher on the streets of Boston, arrived in the early Golden Age of the slasher film and never quite broke through the endurance test that other films in the subgenre, like Friday the 13th, managed to pass with flying colors. Blame it on a more cerebral tone, a crowded market, whatever you like, but saying it’s a shame that the film didn’t break through doesn’t begin to cover it.
Night School isn’t just an underrated slasher, or an underseen one. For my money, it’s one of the best films the subgenre has ever produced, full stop, and Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K UHD restoration, arriving just in time for the film’s 45th anniversary, is must-have proof. Stacked with special features highlighting the craft of the film and its place in slasher history, and headlined by a gorgeous restoration showcasing the wonderfully textured production, this is Night School as it’s meant to be seen for slasher devotees everywhere.
So, what makes the film so effective? It starts very simply, with the revelation that a killer with a very cool knife and a motorcycle helmet as a mask is murdering young women in Boston, taking off their heads, and dropping those heads in the nearest body of water (no matter how small).
Solving the case falls on Judd Austin (Leonard Mann), a detective with an academic background who traces all of the victims in one way or another back to a local night school. There, suspicion falls on a womanizing professor (Drew Snyder) who sleeps around on his research assistant and romantic partner, Eleanor (Rachel Ward), whose own death could be right around the corner.
I’m doing my best to stay as spoiler-free as possible here, not just because I think plenty of slasher fans still need to see Night School, but because the film is quite determined to be a whodunit in the classic Italian giallo sense. The kills are brutal and elaborate, the killer deliberately covered head-to-toe in leather and a gleaming black helmet, the knife and the headhunting a disturbing signature. Avergon’s script is well-versed in the trappings of exactly this kind of story, complete with red herrings galore. And yet, by the time it’s all wrapping up, there’s also the sense that the answer was right there in front of you the entire time, something the very best films by legends like Mario Bava and Dario Argento could also achieve.
But on to the restoration: Like the best of the gialli, Night School is also a beautifully engineered film full of colors and delicate camera compositions and sound design. The opening kill, which takes place on a playground carousel outside of a daycare, is rich in exactly this kind of thing, from the cityscapes that lead into the scene to the sound of a motorcycle slowly rolling forward, its engine already dead. Cinematographer Mark Irwin, best known for his many collaborations with David Cronenberg, paints the film in rich reds, absinthe greens, and haunting, chilled blue-white light on wet Boston streets, all of which are preserved beautifully by the restoration team at work on this one.
It’s a movie that very deliberately evokes a specific place – the aging streets of Boston in the 1980s, and the halls of relatively low-level academia – and then takes that place into haunted territory, saturating every frame with color and shadow that suggests a killer lurking just out of view.
Night School is not a massively gore-heavy film, but it does deliver the slasher goods with a series of tense, often unpredictable kills and body discoveries that range from the darkly comic to the flat-out jaw-dropping. That’s thanks to the sound design, the score, the editing from Robert Reitano, and more, all of which add to the film’s giallo soul.
In every case, the scene’s geography is outstanding, and it’s easy to see where the simplest possible kill shot might land, but the film never goes for the obvious. Throw in a surprisingly (for 1981, anyway) feminist bent to the storytelling and some very progressive moments for an early slasher film, and this one fits right in with Black Christmas and The Slumber Party Massacre as a film with depth you can just keep unpacking.
That depth, helped along by a load of featurettes and two new commentary tracks featuring members of the crew, is what stands out the most in this new 4K set. Night School may be a niche film recognized mostly by horror addicts and the slasher faithful, but it deserves to be something more, a landmark on the roadmap of slasher cinema history. It’s one of the best in the genre, and this restoration highlights, underlines, and shouts that from the rooftops.
Night School is now available in 4K UHD from Vinegar Syndrome.
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