FEATURING: Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Katarina Zutic, Slobodan Bestic

PLOT: An ethical and well-intentioned ex porn star collaborates with an Eastern syndicate to
produce a series of art-house pornographic films. In the process he is unwittingly ensnared in the dark, serpentine morass of his film executives’ depraved madness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite the colorful controversy surrounding A Serbian Film, including claims that it is torture porn and even child porn, the movie is a straightforward—if transgressive—cross-genre thriller, a skillfully blended mix of mystery, horror and suspense elements.  Adventurous viewers who choose to watch A Serbian Film should seek the uncut version.  The controversial scenes are a crucial part of the plot.

NOTE: Director Srdjan Spasojevic was confronted by the international press and informed that his movie A Serbian Film is nothing more than thinly veiled torture porn, perhaps even child pornography.  He responded by asserting that the movie is in fact “a political allegory,” intentionally resplendent with metaphors for the historical, systematic repression of the Serbian people. For example, Spasojevic tells explains that the shocking baby scene “represents us and everyone else whose innocence and youth have been stolen by those governing our lives for purposes unknown.”

Is he being serious?  Or does he believe the most effective way to point out the absurdity of detractors’ allegations and deliberate misinterpretations is to posit an equally absurd response?  A thorough consideration of this controversy is beyond the scope of this review.  The viewer should watch the movie and judge for himself.  I present my own ideas regarding what I think the film discursively accomplishes in the addendum which follows the review.  Whether Spasojevic intends the film to deliver any of these meanings is a matter of speculation.  Despite what I think are some very good points made in the film, it’s my personal belief that he primarily set out to make an offbeat, tense thriller that was shocking enough to be sure to attract attention.  He succeeded.

COMMENTS: Lurid and grim, suspenseful and exciting, A Serbian Film is a well crafted, taut thriller that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence.  Sporting a chic visual signature and structured with a non-linear, temporally shifting plot, this sensational shocker fires off images that range from bizarre and salacious to astounding and stupefying.  By applying the element of satire, A Serbian Film impels its audience to appraise the controversial predicament of contemporary mass-produced culture.  The result is provocative, visceral and shocking.

Milos (Todorovic) is an easy-going family man who used to be a successful pornographic movie actor. Needing additional income, he grudgingly accepts a mysterious offer from an enigmatic production company to star in their flagship project, a series of “high art” experimental adult films. What Milos doesn’t know, however, is that the producer, a government agent named Vukmir (Trifunovic) with obvious Russian Mafia affiliations, is quite completely insane.  Without Milos’s consent, he doses the unsuspecting actor with a futuristic cattle stimulant.

Poor Milos has no idea what is in store. The real details of the scripts are kept secret from him. Production is arranged like a sort of reality show. Multiple cinematographers with digital cameras lead and follow him in real time as directions are fed to him through a small earpiece.

The films turn out to be an avant-garde exercise in taboo extremism. Appalled by requests to violently degrade women and seduce minors, Milos finally grasps the full extent of the producer’s intentions. Deeply disturbed by the crew’s pernicious agenda, Milos possesses a progressive, but genuine moral compass. His conscience compels him to resist. Yet even the actors he works with possess a malignant bent. Behaving like miscreants some of them seem to actually enjoy being degraded.

A classic good and evil struggle ensues between Milos and Vukmir. Vukmir praises Milo’s “talent,” but wants to ferociously exploit him, to use him up, drain him dry, steal his soul and discard him like a paper cup. He schemes to eventually dispatch Milos with an end fitting for an exhausted stag goat. Milos flees, only to be recaptured, sedated, and forced to participate.

Now at the mercy of the sinister syndicate, a sexy, diabolical biochemist keeps Milos subdued with cocktails of powerful, mind-altering narcotics. When the armed crew of jack-booted production technicians is ready to film, she injects her brainchild livestock aphrodisiac into Milos with reckless abandon. In large amounts the potion turns a subject into a bellicose, crazed rapist, easily incited to violence. The producers don’t just want a sexual performance from Milos. They want brute-force physical aggression, and the formula renders even the most abject perversion irresistible to him.

The bovine sex stimulant compels Milos to confront the most grim, primal dimensions of biological programming run amok. He finds himself helplessly driven to desperately gratify himself by committing horrifying, depraved atrocities of sexual barbarism. Plunged into a bedlam of psychotic excess, Milos is trapped on the other side of the looking glass. There is no salvation for him. The filmmakers have powerful government and organized crime associations. They’ve thought of everything and covered every angle. Milos must find a way to deliver himself, but how? Subjected to violence and sexual assaults alongside the films’ other subjects, will Milos manage to achieve deliverance before he is ravaged of his last vestiges of humanity?

As Milos plunges into a nightmare of lust and death, some of the sex acts that A Serbian Film depicts are appalling. They are supposed to be sickly pornographic in the fictitious concept of a film within a film. The images are not, however, prurient from the audience’s perspective. Presented through Milos’s point of view as an unwilling participant, copulation is filmed in such a way as to reveal little explicit nudity other than some quick shots of heaving breasts. Rather, the frames are composed in a manner that tricks the audience’s sense of perception. This is a cornerstone of theater and magic; people see what they think they are being shown, or what they want to see.

A Serbian Film contains violence that is controversial because it is sexually related, but the piece brandishes less mayhem than many action movies, and remember, it is a work of horror. Moreover, unlike many action and splatter films, the violence is not a gratuitous exhibition. It furthers the plot and the terror.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 ”In its histrionic dream logic, the movie says as much about Eastern Europe as Twilight does about the Pacific Northwest. Frankly, you’d be better off self-abusing.”–Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York (contemporaneous)

A Serbian Film – sanitized trailer

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ADDENDUM:

A Serbian Film Is Socially Apposite and Cinematically Significant

It is tempting to deliberately misconstrue A Serbian Film, but it would be a miscalculation to dismiss this effort for being symptomatic of the controversy that it addresses. Granted, the filmmakers’ primary objective was to create a provocative thriller, an effort at which they impressively succeeded. The film is unique however, not only in its portrayal of a porn star as a sympathetically conscionable character, but in it’s exposition of audience malleability.

Notably, the picture conveys a grim social observation about the runaway train effect of ever-increasingly deviant pornography. This idea doesn’t break new ground. It’s not one that hasn’t been considered independently of A Serbian Film. What makes A Serbian Film so cogent is that it adds a chilling dimension to the contention. When an increasingly fiendish and jaded audience demands snuff movies, who will answer the casting call?

A Serbian Film builds credibility to set the stage for its postulation not just by being shocking, but by employing exaggeration. The movie operates on a dual plain of horror and subtle, dark satire. Some of the imagery illuminates realities so abhorrent that the element of mockery may not be immediately evident. Satire is detectable however, when sensational elements in the film are very slightly over-the-top, without being contrived.

Three concepts are played on: the misguided idea of justifying porn as art, pornographic contrivances in general, and outright perversion. In accordance with the first, Vukmir aggrandizes himself as being a break-through auteur and pornography prophet. For him, this new brand of pioneering smut is nothing short of visionary. Like Theatre of Cruelty French playwright Antonin Artaud, Vukmir conceptualizes the organic essence of theater as consisting of the coarse elements of naked emotion. Plot, storyline, and method are secondary to a surreal atmosphere conveyed with minimalist, but dreamlike sets, and a nearly psychedelic parade of alarming visual sensationalism.

To Vukmir, the highest form of drama, the best-selling subject matter, and thus the best pornography is based on the most striking reality: the reality of horror and victimization. “The victim feels the most and suffers the best,” he proclaims to Milos. Vukmir takes Cinema of Transgression to a philosophical plain. What appears on the screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, taboo and violent pornography is reality, and reality is less than taboo and violent pornography.

Perhaps not as dramatically, real-life pornographers have clung to similar, albeit watered-down versions of these grand sorts of delusions, believing that they employ genuine craftsmanship to produce solid works of art. This has been depicted in the popular media. Examples are found in parodies of the adult film industry, such as the biographical Rated X about the notorious Mitchell brothers, and in the reality-inspired black comedy, Boogie Nights.

In addressing the notion that pornography (as opposed to explicit erotica) can be a valid medium of expression, A Serbian Film‘s aphotic send up of smut strikes some common ground with David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome. In the latter, producer Max Renn discovers a secret, pornographic BDSM torture program. It consists of a nude woman being strapped to a wrought iron grate in front of a clay wall, and savagely whipped, presumably, eventually to death by leather-hooded executioners.

Harlen, Renn’s media technician, observes that the torture show is “for perverts only.” Unable to discern any significant difference between the poetically substantial and the superficially sensational, Max fires back, “Absolutely brilliant. I mean look, there’s almost no production costs. You can’t take your eyes off it. It’s incredibly realistic. Where do they get actors who can do this?”

It’s a revealing and sardonically humorous reply, in that Max completely misses the point. The dreadful truth is that those are not actors at all, but genuine victims. Similarly, in A Serbian Film, Vukmir tries to enlighten Milos by demonstrating the cutting edge of profound drama and ready marketability, concepts which are interchangeable to him. During the screening of a film in which a brutish, incognito man delivers a baby and then rapes it, a shocked Milos runs out of the room in disgust. Vukmir roars after him that he has just seen high art, but can’t accept it. “Can it be that you don’t get it? This is a new genre, Milos! The new porn is newborn porn!” He triumphantly shouts.

A Serbian Film wryly, sublimely lampoons pornographic clichés. It not only demonstrates the artificiality of commercial pornography, but also stresses it’s superficiality. For instance, in the above scene to which Milo was just subjected, the mother revels in the rape, ecstatically savoring the penetration of her offspring as if she herself were the sexual vessel. This is an exaggeration of the phenomenon of transferred gratification, a form of male ego-stroking for the sake of audience patronization. A staple of adult films, the most common example occurs when an actress expresses as much pleasure and enjoyment in her partner’s exhibitionistic ejaculation as she would derive from her own climax. A Serbian Film satirizes the absurdity of this canon by taking it to the extreme with the new mother’s ecstasy.

Other grist for A Serbian Film‘s burlesque of triple-x entertainment include the male fantasy of the completely and enthusiastically submissive female. A throbbing Venus-like icon of instant sexual gratification, she worships at the altar of the turgid male sexual organ, and revels in abundant facefuls and mouthfuls of scalding, sanctimoniously-sprayed semen. It is an additional tenet of the pornographic representation of reality that women are merely licentious tureens. They are not to be gently made love to, but rather vigorously assaulted, and it is this axiom that the film enlarges upon so effectively. In Vukmir’s production, the assault evolves from the exaggerated, rough, comically frantic sex of garden variety porn, and explodes into a fury of genuine violence.

This leads to the central tent of A Serbian Film, which is its statement about pornography’s deleterious effect upon contemporary culture by way of the slippery slope. In the story, victim porn is the ultimate, “priciest sell.” In the movie’s setting, this is what the social climate has degenerated to.

Traditionally, many forms of perverse and deviant behavior are condemned or restricted. Society pressures its citizens to deny or suppress facets of the human condition, e.g. inappropriate primal instincts. Due to social controls, relatively few people will ever have to confront the disconcerting fact that under the right set of circumstances, they are capable of just about anything.

Pulling out the stops can produce a cumulative, or domino effect. Like domesticated pets becoming feral without human supervision, a dramatic example can be found in the curious case of the 16th Century Scottish Sawney Beane clan. Having isolated themselves from society, the Beanes became inbred and mad, turning into genetic mutants, living off highway robbery and pickling and eating their victims.

The idea of a cumulative effect applies as well to viewers becoming jaded by progressively far-fetched prurience. As the Randy Marsh character laments about his addiction to Internet porn in the irreverent animated comedy South Park, “I need the Internet to jack off. I got used to being able to see anything at the click of a button, you know? Once you jack off to Japanese girls puking in each other’s mouths you can’t exactly go back to Playboy!”

Given that so much commercial porn seems to cater to the gross-out factor at the very bottom of the medulla oblongata’s intellectual barrel, it’s understandable that Randy has become hardened, so to speak. Indeed, if the bizarre, runaway nature of society’s perversions as reflected in everything from crush erotica and felching, to plushophilia and the sexual aspects of furry fandom is any indicator of what can happen when people are allowed to freely indulge unfettered in their kinky twists, then A Serbian Film posits a provocative proposition. If there is no mechanism in place to limit widespread, commercial indulgence in perversion, will sexual deviance compound on itself until the demand for crush videos and Japanese girls puking gives way to cravings for snuff movies and baby rape?

Can we take a cue from history? There is nothing new about barbarous savagery and violent sexual perversion. They have been around for a long time. For instance, during looting and pillaging of those they conquered, Attila’s Huns would engage in a form of monstrous gang-bang in which numerous soldiers would dismount from their horses and fall upon a single woman. The first three men occupied her primary orifices, the additional rapists would cut their own in her body cavity.^[1]

In ancient Rome, bestiarii trained all nature of wild beasts, from horses to lions to giraffes, to rape immobilized girls for a leering public. Author Daniel P. Mannix describes a scene in which a prostitute and her pimp were tricked into performing an exhibition of lovemaking positions in the arena, and just when the crowd was growing bored of watching, a wild bear was released to rip the couple apart and devour them mid-coitus. This delighted the audience who considered the stunt to be a very good joke.^[2]

Historians attribute the origins of the eventual Roman Colosseum spectacle to a boxing style, gladiatorial match staged between three pairs of slaves in 246 BC. Arranged by Marcus and Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva to honor the memory of their deceased father, the event drew a large crowd to the Forum Boarium in Rome. One thing led to another and centuries later, the Roman mob was showing up regularly at the Colosseum to behold an astounding width and breadth of atrocities.

This is an oversimplification of course. The factors giving rise to the nature of the games in the Colosseum are varied and complex. It is nevertheless illustrative of the notion of the runaway train phenomenon that occurs when an audience is cultivated around, and continually bolstered with aberrant debauchery and violence.

Obviously perversion unraveling to its extremes is nothing new, but its mass production and global distribution are relatively recent developments. Avenues of modern exposition now include Internet sites that deliver video satiation at the touch of a button. One can “jack off,” as Randy Marsh so elegantly phrased it, to anything from coprophelia and foot fetishes to bestiality and child pornography.

This form of electronic dispensation makes paper and ink publishing of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom seem as antiquated as waiting for a town crier to shout breaking news. It is this high tech and widespread commercial marketing of outrageous deviance that A Serbian Film addresses. The movie impels a consideration of the domino effect of an increasing demand for perversion in concert with unprecedented, broad dissemination. It does so with a striking and engaging bearing that abstains from being preachy.

This makes A Serbian Film as thought-provoking as it is horrifying. That’s important because perhaps we should consider the consequences of a commercial brutality industry. Going back to the Max Renn Videodrome quote above, if the runaway train of cultural degradation should in fact, give way to another era of Colosseum-style cruelty, “where will we find the actors who can do this?”

1. G.L. Simons, Simon’s Book Of World Sexual Records (Random House:1982)
2. Daniel P. Mannix, Those About To Die (Ballantine: 1974)

Karloff was not the studio’s first pretender to Chaney’s throne. Bela Lugosi starred as the screen’s greatest vampire in Tod Browning‘s Dracula, released at the beginning of 1931, nearly a year before Karloff’s star-making performance in James Whale‘s Frankenstein (also 1931).  With the premiere of Karloff’s monster, Lugosi and his vampire alter-ego were usurped.  Lugosi liked to tell the tale of how he turned down the role of Frankenstein’s monster, thus “giving” Karloff his career-making role.  It is merely a story.  Lugosi was not wanted by either the new director (James Whale, replacing Robert Florey) or producer (Carl Laemmle, Jr.).  Lugosi’s career and life quickly deteriorated, catapulting the Hungarian actor into parody, abject poverty, drug addiction, and pathos.  In 1956 Lugosi was buried in his vampire’s cloak, forever merging actor and role.

In sharp contrast, Karloff celebrated unabated success until his death in 1969.  Since Karloff’s passing, Lugosi has exacted revenge (from beyond the grave) on the thespian who stole his crown.  Lugosi’s cult status has risen considerably, far surpassing that of Karloff.  This turnabout is, in part, due to the increasing faddish (and increasingly dull) obsession with vampires, and with Lugosi’s more colorful biography compared to the workaholic Karloff.  Justice, it would seem, has been served, except that the revisionist take is dead wrong.  Karloff’s genteel nature and cultured leaning made him a vastly superior actor.  The studio heads were right in preferring Karloff to Lugosi: Bela was not in Boris’ league.  Karloff triumphed because he approached his craft with an intelligence and insight that Lugosi simply did not possess.  It was not for no reason that Karloff worked with directors and producers as celebrated as Whale, Edgar G.Ulmer, Howard Hawks, Karl Freund, Michael Curitz, John Ford, Val Lewton, Roger Corman, Robert Wise, Mario Bava, Michael Reeves, Peter Bogdanovich, Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin, Jr, and Chuck Jones.  Vincent Price, Karloff’s only real successor, took a similar career approach (albeit, more tongue-in-cheek ) and, consequently, also achieved success.

Even before Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) catapulted the 45-year-old Karloff into super-stardom, the actor had been noticed for his character work in Howard Hawk’s The Criminal Code (1931) and Mervyn Leroy’s Five Star Finale (1931).  Karloff ‘s beautiful pantomime performance as Frankenstein’s monster aptly stemmed from the best of silent cinema (Karloff had been acting in film since 1919).  Like Chaney, Karloff was a consummate professional, enduring the physical demands and challenges of the role without complaint.  Despite the inaccurate portrayal of Karloff’s relationship with Whale depicted in the elegiac Gods and Monsters (1998), the actor and director worked off each other well, delivering the quintessential film and performance of Mary Shelly’s creation.

Karloff died a classic cinematic death as Gaffney in Howard Hawks original Scarface (1932- the phenomenally inferior remake is a dour indication of contemporary banality). The actor was back with Whale in the The Old Dark House (1932) playing the malevolent, mute butler among a cast of delightful eccentrics including Ernest Thesiger (“have a potato”), Eva Moore (“no beds”), Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey, and the late Gloria Stuart.  It is the quintessential film of its type.  Karloff’s enjoyment in chewing scenery is contagious in Charles Brabin’s pulpy Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), but the actor also recognized and enjoyed real artistic experiences, such as Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932) (essentially, a rethinking of Dracula). The Mummy sequels and remakes go a considerable distance to prove the superiority of this original. The star worked closely with legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, Freund, and co-star Zita Johann.  Later, Karloff later cited this film as an exciting experience of ensemble collaboration.

Following The Mummy, Karloff dared to rebel against Universal’s efforts to put him in lesser, assembly line films. In protest, the actor departed for London to star in  T. Hayes Hunter’s uneven cult film The Ghoul (1933).  He gave a hammy performance as a religious zealot for John Ford in the Lost Patrol (1934) and played the evil anti-Semite in Sidney Lanfield’s House of Rothschild (1934).

Karloff received critical accolades for these non-horror roles, resulting in a considerable increase in his stock.  He was soon back at Universal for his first (and best) co-starring vehicle with Lugosi in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934).  Poelzig is one of Karloff’s greatest roles; the actor utilizes his entire body to manipulate the sense of dread.  Here, Karloff again delved into the challenges of artistic collaboration.  Ulmer and Karloff engaged one another, while the jealous Lugosi, feeling left out of conversations clearly above his head, fumed on the sidelines.  Lugosi’s only recourse was to vehemently complain about Karloff’s routine tea breaks.

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) possibly remains the quintessential Universal Horror film.  It is a sophisticated, witty, and black sequel that surpasses the original.  Although Karloff objected to his beloved monster speaking, he wisely deferred to the director’s wishes.  The film was an enormous success with audiences and critics at the time, and its reputation has endured. Lew Landers’ mildly enjoyable, crass hokum, The Raven (1935), caused a furor in Great Britain, resulting in a brief ban on films containing ”horrific elements.”  The ban did not appear to faze Karloff near as much as it did his co-star Lugosi, who gave an insanely over-the-top performance in the film.

The Black Room (1935) was the first of several films for Karloff did for Columbia.  This Roy William Neill Gothic melodrama cast Karloff in a dual role, which the actor relished.  The Invisible Ray (1936) brought  Boris back to Universal and co-star Lugosi in a subdued science fiction curiosity directed by Lambert Hillyer.  Lugosi had a secondary role and did it well (apparently, he was actually directed for once); but, oddly, it was Karloff whose ham meter went into overdrive here.  He fared much better in Michael Curtiz’ The Walking Dead (1936), injecting genuine menace in this nearly forgotten film, directed with atmospheric flair.

The Man Who Changed His Mind AKA The Man Who Lived Again (1936) was the first of Karloff’s “mad doctor” series for Columbia, but the star’s next film of decent quality was Roland V. Lee’s The Son of Frankenstein (1939) which returned the actor to his beloved, pantomime monster.  However, co-stars Lugosi and Lionel Atwill walked off with the acting honors; Karloff was given little to do, and Basil Rathbone delivered an embarrassing performance.  Whale’s sardonic touch is badly missed, but Karloff did manage to give his monster a departing dignity.

The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) was the second of Columbia’s agreeable-enough entries, but Karloff’s meatier role was that of the bald, clubfooted executioner Mord The Merciless in Roland V. Lee’s Tower of London (1939).  The film was hardly Shakespeare, but it looked gorgeous and is enjoyable for a number of colorful performances (including an amazingly straight-laced Vincent Price).

Karloff’s role as Valder in the non-horror British Intelligence (1940) is a gem in an underrated film directed by Terry Morse.  The actor followed that with two more 1940 entries in the Columbia series: The Man With Nine Lives and Before I Hang.  He also gave a serviceable performance with a secondary role in Universal’s Black Friday (1940), filling out an alarmingly busy year.

Dissatisfied with what he was being offered, Karloff jumped at the opportunity to play Jonathan Brewster in the stage version of Arsenic and Old Lace.  The part was slyly written for the actor and the character’s murderous tendencies come to the surface when he is told, “you look like Boris Karloff.”  Touring with the play, Karloff essentially disappeared from the screen for three years, the sole exceptions being the final Columbia picture, The Devil Commands (1941) and the best forgotten You’ll Find Out (1942).

Due to contractual problems, Karloff was, regrettably, unable to play the part of Brewster in the film version of Arsenic, although he starred again in a 1962 teleplay with Tony Randall.  It was thought lost, but has been made available through pirated copies in recent years.  Karloff’s first color film was 1944′s The Climax, Universal’s bastardized semi-sequel to its 1943 remake of Phantom of the Opera.  The Climax was as good as its predecessor, which is saying little.

Feeling Frankenstein’s monster had become a parody, Karloff admirably refused to play the part again, but this did not stop him from appearing as a mad doctor in Universal’s all-star monster mash-up, The House of Frankenstein (1944).

Beginning in 1945, the actor’s work with Val Lewton reinvigorated him.  The first of these, The Body Snatcher (1945), was also the best of Karloff’s trilogy at RKO.  Directed by Robert Wise, Karloff gave a remarkably nuanced performance as body-snatching cabman John Gray.  Karloff’s interaction with co-stars Henry Daniell (incisive) and Lugosi (poignant) challenged all three actors, and they each responded with some of the best work they ever did.  This was followed by Mark Robson’s Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946).  Lewton was initially reluctant to utilize Karloff and resisted RKO’s efforts to hoist “the Horror Star” onto the producer.  After meeting with Karloff, who expressed artistic enthusiasm, Lewton was won over.  The harmonious working atmosphere on the Lewton set was artistically rewarding for the actor, so much so that a comedown was inevitable.

The years immediately following Karloff’s work at RKO were unsatisfactory for the actor.  He mainly appeared in character roles and television.  Although Karloff flat out refused to spoof his monster, he had no problem spoofing himself, so after turning down Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) he ill-advisedly appeared in Abbott and Costello meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949).  Far more rewarding was the remarkable success the actor enjoyed in the 1950 play Peter Pan.  Karloff wowed critics and audiences alike with his dual roles of George Darling and Captain Hook (the play co-starred Jean Arthur with music composed by Leonard Bernstein).

The Strange Door (1951) re-teamed Karloff with Old Dark House co-star Charles Laughton, but this Gothic Robert Louis Stevenson tale was flatly directed, and Karloff’s hamminess was too subtle compared to the antics Laughton delivered.  Another bit of mediocre Gothic meoldrama was at hand in The Black Castle (1952), co-starring Lon Chaney, Jr.  If Karloff’s working relationship with Lugosi could be tense, his relationship with Chaney Jr. bordered on hostility.  Karloff actively disliked his younger peer, and probably for valid reasons.  Karloff was back with the second rate Laurel and Hardy act in Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953), which is more bearable (not by much) than the 1949 entry.

Again, television primarily occupied the actor until 1958′s The Haunted Strangler and Corridors of Blood, both directed by Robert Day.  In the second film, Karloff co-starred with new generation horror star Christopher Lee.  While neither film was up to the standards of the classics directed by Whale, Freund, Ulmer, or Wise, both were semi-literate and refreshingly old school.  The same could not be said for Frankenstein 1970 (1958), which had a promising enough start but floundered badly.

His duties as host of the Thriller TV series occupied Karloff from 1960 to 1962.  High points of the series included “The Incredible Dr. Markesan,” which Karloff memorably acted in, and a trio of episodes directed by Ida Lupino.  In 1963, Karloff narrated and starred in Mario Bava’s Gothic anthology, Black Sabbath. The final and best episode featured the actor in an excellent performance as a Wurdalak preying upon his own family.  The film quickly became a cult favorite.  Karloff had another success the same year, starring with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in Roger Corman’s horror comedy The Raven.  This marked a new, playful phase in Karloff’s career, even if the follow-up film, The Terror (1963), is too aptly named.  The Comedy of Terrors (1963) was slightly better.  The trio of Corman films led Karloff to fun TV guest appearances in “The Wild, Wild West,” “The Girl from U.N.C.L.E,” “I Spy,” and voice work as the rat in Rankin and Bass’ The Daydreamer (1966).  This effort was soon surpassed by Karloff’s classic voicing of the Grinch in Chuck Jones’ perennial favorite “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (1966). In this period Karloff had even starred in one of the first H.P.Lovercraft screen adaptions—the unimaginatively titled Die Monster Die (1965)—but this adaptation of the classic chiller “The Colour Out of Space”, co-starring teen heartthrob Nick Adams, was a considerable disappointment.

Rankin and Bass’ Mad Monster Party (1967) was what the Universal monster mashes should have been.  The Sorcerers (1967) is an unjustly forgotten surreal film made by the tragically short-lived Michael Reeves.  Karloff topped that acheivement with what should have been his final film, Targets (1968), directed by Peter Bogdanovich.  The aging actor plays horror icon Byron Orlock whose last personal appearance, at a drive-in-cinema, is interrupted by the true horror of a crazed sniper.  Targets is a compelling and intelligently penned film.  Unfortunately, Karloff himself did not have as memorable a send-off as Orlock did. Karloff had been in poor health for several years, suffering from a deadly combination of crippling arthritis and emphysema (which eventually killed him).  Wanting to die with his grease paint on, Karloff bravely signed a four-picture deal with producer Jack Hill.  These films were shot in Mexico (although Karloff’s parts were filmed in Hollywood) and were released after the actor’s passing.  In between these four films, Karloff also appeared in Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968) co-starring Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele.  The amazing horror cast was completely wasted.

The Jack Hill films have a well-deserved execrable reputation, but they really cannot stain Karloff’s title as King of Horror. He worked hard for the crown, and it remains intact to this day.

Typically subtle symbolism from Pink Floyd: The Wall

Now, my sixteen-year old self recognized that with The Wall I had stumbled across a masterpiece on the order of the collected works of Shakespeare, or even the Beatles. Its emotional impact on me blew away the stuffy literature crammed down our throats in English class: the narrative was more relevant than Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” the poetry more stirring than John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the insights pithier than “Pride and Prejudice.”

I was pleasantly disillusioned to discover that most of my Top Gun-quoting, Pac Man-playing peers weren’t enlightened enough to grasp the profundity of The Wall.  Their beer-chugging, party-hearty shallowness threw my depth of feeling into sharp relief.  Unlike them, I had insight about the bleak nature of reality, as demonstrated by my appreciation of true art, which is depressing.

The Wall-hating yahoos were easy to dismiss.  But another school chum of mine had a more maddening tack on the film.  A natty dresser (I’ve forgotten his name, but I can still see his skinny frame in his white sports coat and narrow piano-keyboard tie), he dismissed the whole of Pink Floyd (and The Wall in particular) as “pretentious.”  At the time,  I dismissed his dismissal by assuming, based on his musical tastes—Depeche Mode and other contemporary New Wave bands of the day—that he considered anything not danceable to be “pretentious.”  But something in his assessment nagged at me.  Could The Wall really be pretentious?  And if it were, what would that say about me for adopting it as my lodestar?

Pretentious?  Moi?

The older I got, the more I came to realize that my sartorially stylish compatriot was dead on—The Wall is pretentious.  The more adult problems I faced—paying bills, romantic heartbreak, the death of loved ones—the less sympathetic I became to The Wall’s whiny rock star narrator.  As a teenager, it was easy to identify with protagonist Pink’s free-floating depression, tendency to blame others for his failings, and inchoate rage.  The album became a mega-hit precisely because it appeals to the melancholy romantic inside the adolescents who make up the record-buying public.  But in the cold light of adulthood, Pink’s complaints in the film can be summed up as: “I didn’t know my dad, my mom was overprotective, I had mean teachers, and my wife and I cheat on each other.  Oh, and war and totalitarianism bum me out, too.  And trust me, all the adulation, groupies, drugs, money, cars and luxury suites only underscore how empty my life really is.”  To which most adults say: boo-hoo, quit your complaining.  I’ve got my own problems.

So, I went through a period where my earlier adoration of the film became an embarrassment to me.  But, if my mistake as a teenager was to uncritically accept The Wall as a masterpiece of melancholia merely because it flattered my bleak adolescent worldview, my error as a young adult was the same one my dapper teen friend made so many years ago: to dismiss it as “pretentious.”  It took me many years away from the film for nostalgia for The Wall to replace my embarrassment over my mawkish fawning for the film (I still can’t listen to the album, however).   Watching the movie again after a twenty year hiatus, I confirmed something I’d been slowly growing to suspect:  The Wall’s pretentiousness—its schoolchildren falling into a meat grinder, its women who turn into praying mantises, its demagogues born from maggot-ridden cadavers—these things are strengths, not weaknesses.

The world needs pretentious movies.  They are a joy all their own, providing unique pleasures that no other types of movies can. (I call this the “Ken Russell Principle”).  To say a movie is “pretentious” is simultaneously to say it’s “ambitious.”  Unpretentious movies are self-limiting.  If, as a director, you set out to make the best formulaic romantic comedy or sci-fi action movie you can, and succeed, you’ve been unpretentious.  But the only thing you’ve succeeded at is creating a ninety-minute diversion for the masses; a valuable contribution, but not a lasting one.  On the other hand, if you fail to hit your low mark, you’ll be responsible for inflicting another Maid in Manhattan or Transformers on the world.  Does anyone want that on their conscience?  If, on the other hand, you start out intending to make something artistically or intellectually important, and succeed, you create a masterpiece.  But even if you fail, like The Wall, there’s often enough interesting residue left over to salvage an unforgettable, invigorating, pretentious film.

There’s something especially lovable about a great pretentious movie; we admire the passion that led the filmmaker to take those artistic gambles, and treasure the film for its flaws. We become devoted to a pretentious film the way we love a sweet-natured but ugly, dog, or an obnoxious but loyal friend.

Not every weird film is pretentious, but a remarkable number of them are.  Besides The Wall, just take a look at a few of our favorite outrageously pretentious films from the Certified Weird list:

• Altered States (1980) – Ken Russell makes a trip movie, so obviously William Hurt has to hallucinate the Book of Revelations, meet God in a maelstrom, and overcome the whole existential 0rdeal through the power of love.
• Antichrist (2009) – Chaos reigns when Lars von Trier abandons any lingering notions of hope and good taste to explore the depths own despair, bringing us the world’s first metaphysical torture porn movie.
• Donnie Darko (2001) – Richard Kelly writes the world’s most convoluted plot involving time-traveling demonic bunnies, and has enough energy left over to channel J.D. Salinger, add Tarintino-esque pop-savvy dialogue, and parody 1980s teen films.
• Gummo (1997) – Harmony Korine gives us bunny boys, cat-killing glue-sniffers, and spaghetti in the bathtub in a grotesque white trash freakshow that appears to be saying something important about something or other.
• El Topo (1970) – Alejandro Jodorowsky, perhaps the most pretentious man alive, remakes the Bible as a Zen Western.  He casts himself as both God and Jesus.

You may notice the descriptions above all have one thing in common: they all begin with the name of the director (who, 80% of the time, is also the writer).  That’s because every pretentious movie starts with an individual with a pretentious idea.  Pretentious movies are never corporate.  They’re always intensely subjective and individualistic: the author has a passionate sentiment, something that surpasses his own ability to communicate, something that he struggles to translate into narrative and image.  In a great pretentious movie, the author’s fervor intoxicates us.  We root for him to make it, even as we watch the noble ideas he’s reaching for slip out of his grasp.  A great pretentious movie is human, all too human.  A great pretentious movie is so pretentious it’s profound.

90% of the time, when someone tells you a movie (or book, or painting) is “pretentious,” it means they either a) didn’t understand it, or b) didn’t like it, but are too lazy to lay out the reasons why.  10% of the time, they’re right: it’s pretentious.  But they err in blithely accepting the premise, “pretentious = bad.”  A cinematic universe without pretentious movies would be a universe without The Wall‘s amorous flowers devouring each other, one without a giant demonic bunny rabbit named Frank asking Donnie “Why are you wearing that man suit?,” one where the fox in Antichrist stares silently at Willem Dafoe and keeps its vulpine mouth shut.  I, for one, wouldn’t want to live in a world where the most grandiose mistakes inspired by the maddest muses were left on the cutting room floor.

So the next time someone dismissed one of your beloved weird movies as “pretentious,” don’t doubt yourself like I did, lo those many years ago, when a skinny boy with a ridiculous tie dared question my choice in favorite movies.  You look the accuser straight in the eye and tell them, “Damn straight it’s pretentious, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”  Because out here in the darkened audience, we’re starving for big, wiggy ideas, fearlessly grandiose visions, and filmmakers who aren’t afraid to put their balls to the wall with no fear of looking foolish.  The world needs more pretentious movies, not less.

But, the world does not need more pretentious film critics.  We’re flush on those right now, thanks anyway.  I have job security to consider.

“God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods by whom they are severally possessed. Was not this the lesson which the God intended to teach when by the mouth of the worst of poets he sang the best of songs?”-Ion

On September 13, 2010, I received an email that would have changed the course of cinematic history, had misfortune not intervened. The message contained the startling claim that the worst movie ever made—the inimitable Graverobbers from Outer Space (later retitled Plan 9 from Outer Space)—was not the work of incompetent transvestite director Ed Wood, Jr., but in fact an imitation of Wood’s style by the writer’s dead husband, the unrecognized genius of avant-garde filmmaking, Ted Hood, Jr. (1932-1958). Though I was skeptical of her claim, Mrs. Norma Jean Shady-Hood—whose attempts over the years to interest the late Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and TMZ.com in her story had all fallen on deaf ears—invited me to visit her on her deathbed so she could set the record straight about her dead husband’s greatest achievement.

Original unaltered credit screen for "Graverobbers from Outer Space"

You will search in vain for a complete (or partial) filmography of Ted Hood, Jr. In fact, you will have difficulty finding mention of the underground auteur anywhere; so ahead of his time that his work was rejected by his contemporaries, his obscurity is ample proof of his importance. Hood had a letter to the editor published in Cahiers du Cinéma arguing that “Dwain Esper‘s orangutan rapists and tea-smoking pianists are fully as dialectical and twice as proletariat as Cocteau’s grasping candelabras and mirror tricks, and the King of the Celluloid Gypsies deserves the status of auteur every bit as much as that dyspeptic Italian pretender.” His seven minute short “Defecation” anticipated the quotidian films of Andy Warhol, but although the footage was not explicit, the controversy caused by the protagonist’s folding of the toilet paper under the roll was judged to violate the Hays Code’s prohibition against presenting material that goes against the “correct standards of life,” and thus the film could not be exhibited legally in this country. Besides his uncredited script for Plan 9, Hood completed nine unpublished screenplays: “Revenge of the Atomic Darwinists”; “Tales from the Harlot’s Crematorium”; “Oh! How Dry My Wick Is!”; “Lunchwagon of the Worms”; “Night of the Crazy Lunatic” (his only attempt at film noir); “King Leer” (a stage production of Shakespeare’s play to be performed entirely by burlesque dancers reading off cue cards with no rehearsal); “Gauchomania!” (believed by Flixter’s moaninmovievixen to be the inspiration for George Lucas’ Star Wars); the rejected sequel “Citizen Kane Has Risen from the Grave”; and the screwball comedy “Is America Ready for Morris Windsor to Propose to a Jewess?” These pieces all demonstrated an advanced knowledge of camp aesthetics far beyond that of his peers. An obviously jealous Edward Albee makes mention of Hood Jr. in an unpublished diary entry, calling him an “annoying little brat” who “smelled of his beloved muskrats” and “always had his hand out for some crazy scheme or another.” Jean-Luc Goddard was well aware of Hood and once called him a “crackpot” and a “bleeding heart liberal.” The polymathic Hood Jr. also developed a photographic process for filming ghosts, although to this day his patent application languishes in some Washington bureaucrat’s desk drawer (Shady-Hood claims that this neglect was due to the intervention of big money interests at Kodak-Eastman, who filed a competing patent for a similar process two months after Hood’s application, and by United Artists, who were afraid that the invention’s widespread use would mean they would be forced to renegotiate Rudolph Valentino’s contract).

Eager for a possible scoop that would rock the movie world, on September 19 I followed Norma Jean Shady-Hood’s directions to her double-wide trailer, at that time illegally parked on land in a southern Indian county owned by the State Septic Council. I was greeted at the door by her chain-smoking Filipina caretaker, Jhenelynia. Shady-Hood herself was in the final stages of her battle with nose cancer and was barely mobile; while holding her oxygen tank in one hand, I used the other to maneuver her wheelchair between the corridors formed by stacks of yellowing, tinder-dry issues of Variety, Hollywood Reporter and (oddly enough) Player, none of which contained any mention of her deceased husband. She directed me to a chamber with walls formed from the August 1950 – November 1962 issues of TV Guide, where she had created a small shrine devoted to her ex-husband’s work. There, in between wheezes, she showed me the documentary evidence of her husband’s authorship of the notorious film that came to be known as Plan 9 from Outer Space: reels and reels of Hood’s unpublished short films, which demonstrated an ahead-of-his-time sense of pop culture irony worthy of a Taranatino; the original handwritten script dated Febraury 3, 1959; photographs of her husband on the set with a megaphone in one hand and Tor Johnson’s beefy shoulder in the other, cardboard gravestones in the background; an actual Cadillac hubcap used as a special effect on the set; outtakes from Graverobbers featuring Dudley Manlove delivering the scrapped line, “You dumb humans!  You’ll ruin everything, the whole magnificent planet!,” a useless scene of Duke Moore accidentally forgetting to point his revolver at his own head, and Vampira’s lost nude scene; and, most tellingly, a signed photograph of Bela Lugosi bearing the legend, “Dear Ted, Ed’s a cool guy but also a backstabbing faggot.  Don’t let him take credit for your work!  All my best, Drac.”

Persuaded by Shady-Hood’s ample documentation of her husband’s authorship of Graverobbers, I listened to her story.  Ted Hood Jr. was born the poor son of Ted Hood, Sr., a fertilizer salesman from El Paso; in 1950, after becoming the youngest person to graduate Texas Western University with an associate’s degree in applied agriculture (at that time there was no film studies program), he married his high school sweetheart Norma Jean Shady and began filming short experimental works in his backyard and mailing his screenplays to Hollywood studios.  His efforts met with indifference.   Clearly, Hood, whose work anticipated the prankish anti-audience provocations of Paul Morrisey, the Kuchar brothers, John Waters, and George Lucas, was too ahead of his time to find approval in conservative 1950s Hollywood; he was even too out there for his fellow experimental filmmakers.  The hostility of the timid film industry to Hood’s innovative ideas left him despondent, forced to work part time as a soda jerk to support his wife.

His life changed forever, however, when in 1953 Hood witnessed an uncut screening of Ed Wood’s pro-transvestite documentary Glen or Glenda at the Starlite Drive-In.  The labyrinthine, wandering, inconsistent narration, Lugosi’s inexplicably omniscient character, and the dream sequence featuring Satan attending a wedding mixed with catfighting strippers ignited Hood’s imagination.  “We usually made out at the Starlite,” Norma Jean confessed, “but that night Ted was glued to the screen.  He kept saying, ‘This is it, honey muffin.  This is what I’ve been searching for.  Buñuel and his Marxist claptrap be damned; this is the unconscious on screen, this is the absurd parade of human comedy at its subtlest. I must harness this power.’”

Ted became obsessed with the movie and soon cashed in his soda jerk pension for a one way ticket to L.A. to meet the man who had brought this masterpiece to the screen.  “But when he finally met Ed,” Shady-Hood relates, “he was crushed.  Eddie wasn’t even drunk that day, but he could hardly put two sentences together.  Ted knew twice as much about filmmaking as Ed did.  Ted always assumed that other people were as smart as he was; he went into that first meeting thinking Ed was this great Surrealist filmmaker.  He came out of it with a hangdog expression, telling me, ‘the master is an oaf.’”  But Hood remained impressed by the power of Glen or Glenda, and thought of a plan to create a film in the style of Ed Wood, but with one important difference: everything that Wood produced by accidental bumbling, Hood would create deliberately.  Ignoring the advice of Pierre Menard, Hood sought to recreate the experience of being Ed Wood.  For a year, he studied the director as he worked: he hung out with Lugosi, grew a pencil mustache, drank the same rotgut, wore the same chemises and cashmere sweaters.  Finally, he conceived his grand idea to make a science fiction epic about grave robbers from outer space reanimating the dead to prevent Earthlings from harnessing the apocalyptic power of the sun.

Deliberately putting himself into the mindset of his inspiration, Hood realized Wood would want to feature Lugosi as his star, and doubted that Wood would have let the actor’s death a few months earlier stop him.  Hood asked Wood for the few minutes of footage the latter had shot for the unfinished project Tomb of the Vampire; the guileless director saw no harm in providing Hood with the film.  Hood used the bland footage of Lugosi attending a funeral and sniffing flowers outside his suburban home and, realizing that Wood would want Lugosi to play an even larger role, came up with a brilliantly absurd idea to circumvent the star’s demise.  “Ted told Ed I was suffering from back pain,” Shady-Hood explains, “and asked for the name of his chiropractor.  For some reason, Ted had the idea in his head that Ed would want to cast his chiropractor as Bela’s stunt double.  He giggled every time he thought about it.”  Hood cast Wood’s chiropractor in the role of Lugosi’s reanimated corpse, instructing the actor to pull his cape in front of his face so that the audience could not help but get the joke: it was a parody of a blatantly incompetent attempt to hide the identity of a stand-in.  Cleverly mocking the proclivity of exploitation movies for including pseudo-celebrities in their products as a selling point, Hood surrounded “Lugosi” with the cheapest, craziest cast of misfits and the near-famous he could think of: former Swedish wrestler and Wood regular Tor Johnson, TV psychic Criswell as the omniscient, unexplained, stream-of-conscious narrator (a nod to Lugosi’s role in Glen or Glenda),  TV horror hostess Vampira, radio announcer Dudley Manlove.

Hood painstakingly prepared a script for the project, taking care to make it as ridiculous as possible.  “I swear, Ted must have rewritten each line twenty times,” Shady-Hood recalls.  “He would accidentally write something grammatically correct, or that he felt made too much sense, then he would shake his head angrily and scratch it out.”  Hood was just as meticulous in every aspect of the production.  “He must have worked eighteen hours a day for six months to get everything perfect,” relates the great man’s wife.  “I remember we must have discussed for hours where to put the shadow of the boom mike.  He finally decided the airplane scene was the best place.”  Although the acting seems ramshackle to the untrained eye, in fact, every stumble was carefully planned.  Hood would often have his actors do twenty or more takes.  “I recall there was a scene where Tom [Mason, Wood's chiropractor] was supposed to be threatening a cop, advancing towards him menacingly with his face away from the camera.  The scene was just too chilling, there was nothing humorous about it.  After about nine or ten attempts, Ted came up with the idea to have Tom’s cape slip off his shoulders to defuse the ‘tension’ [Shady-Hood uses 'air-quotes' here to illustrate her point, a quite painful gesture for her given her advanced rheumatoid arthritis--Ed.]  It worked like a dream. It’s the kind of thing that just sucks all the suspense out of the scene, seeing the ‘monster’ stop to adjust his wardrobe.  After he came up with the idea, Tom had to do the scene another four or five times until he got it just right.”

Knowing the actual facts of the production completely reverses the common understanding of Plan 9 from Outer Space as a “bad movie.”  Film critic Michael Medved originally rescued the film from obscurity by anointing it the “worst movie ever made” in his “The Golden Turkey Awards”; given the fact that a large part of his argument was premised around the numerous “continuity errors” found in the film, that judgment can no longer stand.  There are no continuity errors in the film; every supposed mistake was painstakingly placed there by the film’s auteur to contribute to the farcical continuity of cinema’s first, funniest and greatest self-referential meta-comedy.

Had Graverobbers from Outer Space been made by incompetent, drunken, flatulent Ed Wood Jr., it would have been a risible disaster.  Since it was created by the brilliant Ted Hood, Jr., it is, in fact, a cinematic masterpiece. Consider Criswell’s introductory narration (pretending, as a thought experiment, that these lines were penned by Ed Wood):

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls, who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of grave robbers from outer space?

These lines are clearly the laughable ramblings of a complete idiot. Why does Criswell begin his spiel spouting off about the future (mentioning it three times in two sentences) when he’s talking about events that happened in the past? The exposition sounds as if it was dashed off five minutes before shooting commenced. But now consider the opening as written by Ted Hood:

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls, who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of grave robbers from outer space?

Here, the author masterfully inverts our expectations as to what is future and what is past, reminding us that time is naught but a construct, and that in the malleable world of cinema the auteur is free to manipulate it as he sees fit. The idea is astounding. “Unknown, mysterious, unexplainable” indeed! Hood labored for over a week crafting these twelve unforgettable opening lines. A version of the sixth draft of this speech, which your author alone has had the privilege of reviewing, reveal half a dozen interlineations, and perhaps a dozen words angrily struck out in red marker. Clearly, the carefully studied absurdity of this passage is a work of genius, something far beyond the feeble capacity of a literary hack like Ed Wood, Jr.

Graverobbers from Outer Space has never garnered the praise it deserves as a work of sly wit and satire on par with the best of Wilde and Twain because of the misattribution of authorship to the bestial Ed Wood. This misfortune, in turn, results from Hood’s lack of business sense and skill at self-promotion: “Teddy was an artist,” Shady-Hood complains. “He had no business sense. When Ted screened the final product for Eddie, poor Eddie didn’t get the joke. He thought the movie was a legitimate thrill ride. Ed was really keen on distributing the picture, and Ted sold him the rights for a song. Ed might have been blinded by his love for Lugosi; he still thought the public would flock to see anything with Dracula in it. I remember he asked Ted, ‘When did you get Bela to do those scenes? I thought he had passed away already.’ It was sad, really.”

Snapshot of the hubcap that felled Ted Hood, Jr., caught in flight by an amateur photographer at the fatal scene

Even sadder was the fact that Ted Hood died in a tragic accident the day after he sold the rights to Graverobbers from Outer Space to Wood. His passing was the height of irony: while witnessing a violent automobile collision on La Brea Parkway, Hood was struck in the head by a flying hubcap that could have been a prop from his own masterpiece. He suffered a brain hemorrhage and died within hours at a Los Angeles public hospital.

Graverobbers from Outer Space was not an immediate hit; remarkably, its debut was largely overlooked by the press, who expected another Wood yawner. What few notices the movie received entirely missed the point, considering it as if it were a badly made, schlocky piece of disposable sci-fi. Even Shady-Hood forgot about the film, and she had no idea until the end of her life that Wood had removed Hood’s name from the title screen and substituted his own, taking credit for her husband’s work. In fact, the change of name from Graverobbers from Outer Space to Plan 9 from Outer Space was conceived by Wood precisely to deceive the widow Hood.

When Plan 9 emerged as a cult movie in the 1980s, the film’s entire cachet was tied up with the connection to Wood, now a legendary figure.   Ever since Medved had been fooled into believing Graverobbers was the work of Ed Wood, and used that ‘fact’ as evidence to anoint Wood “the worst director ever,” audiences had been enamored by the myth that the the film was the work of the incompetent Wood; they gained a smug satisfaction from viewing themselves as obviously intellectually superior to the author of the film.  The surviving cast of the film was making a fortune selling autographs at sci-fi conventions, and no one was willing to break ranks and rock the boat by confessing that Plan 9 was a lie, that it was not the worst movie ever made, but possibly the cleverest. If the audience knew the truth, the joke would suddenly be on them for believing for all these years that this masterpiece was a turkey; their self-satisfaction would be annihilated and their contempt would be turned against themselves instead of Wood. That would be bad for business.

The conspiracy of silence continues to this day from everyone involved in the production. As proof, I note that all of the surviving cast and crew whom I have attempted to contact have refused to speak to me. They will not deny the fact of Hood’s authorship either publicly or privately. A denial would start a debate, and in any debate the facts would inevitably emerge. They prefer to remain tight-lipped, pretending your author is a crazy person and hoping that the issue will magically go away.

They did not count on this reporter’s tenacity. Or, perhaps, they did. I have, or had, ample documentary proof of the legacy of Ted Hood, Jr.: not only the testimony of Norma Jean Shady-Hood, but the reels of film and the stacks of photographs and writings housed in that TV Guide-walled shrine deep inside the labyrinth of her doublewide. I intend, or intended, to blow the lid off this case. One week ago, I drove out to Mrs. Shady-Hood’s trailer, meaning to gather the necessary information and take the case to Harry Knowles. About two minutes from her home, I heard a great “boom” in the distance and saw a flash of light on the cornfield horizon. My heart thumping in my chest, I arrived on the scene to find a scorched but unharmed Jhenelynia gaping in disbelief at a smoking crater where Norma Jean Shady-Hood’s doublewide trailer used to sit. She claimed, and the authorities seem to credit her testimony, that the explosion was an accident caused by her failing to completely snuff out one of her Marlboro lights in the ashtray. Apparently, the combination of an oxygen tank with a faulty valve and the omnipresent methane fumes from the nearby sewage treatment facility created a situation where the slightest ember could have sparked a conflagration at any time. Deportation proceedings have now begun against Jhenelynia, whose grasp of English was too poor at any rate to corroborate the deceased Mrs. Shady-Hood’s story. There are a few living cast members of Graverobbers who will be quite happy at this news; I do not accuse them of committing murder, arson, vandalism and evidence tampering to keep their shameful secret. I only point out that they are the beneficiaries of the final link in a literally incredible series of coincidences that make up the tragedy of Ted Hood, Jr., auteur of Graverobbers from Outer Space.

The 1941 film has several strikes against it, the first and foremost of which is writer Curt Siodmak, who, frankly, was a hack.  The second is director George Waggner, who wasn’t really a hack but merely a competent, unimaginative commission director with no personal vision.  Finally, there is “star” Lon  Chaney, Jr.  The younger Chaney gets picked on a lot these days and always has.  He deserves it.  He was an idiotic, drunken bully who had an obsessive hang-up about outdoing his father.  Since Lon Sr. probably ranks with Chaplin in the silent acting department, Lon Jr., the pale, watered-down copy, did not have chance.  It’s amazing that Jr. even thought he would be able to compete.  That said, Lon Jr. did have a few good character roles in his career.  Damn few out of literally hundreds of films.  He was quite good as the arthritic sheriff in Fred Zinnemann’s  High Noon, as Big Sam in Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, as Spurge in Raoul Walsh’s Lion is in the Streets and Bruno in Jack Hill’s cult classic Spider Baby.  Like Bela Lugosi, he was only good when he was actually being “directed.”  Unlike Lugosi, however, Jr.’s signature horror role is not one of his best.  That honor goes to his immortal Lenny in Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men.

Even considering his success with Lenny, Larry Talbot is out of Lon’s range.  Never once does Talbot’s amorous nature register.  Evelyn Anker’s repeated flirtations with the hulking, rubbery Chaney only evoke numbing disbelief.  If Jr. the romantic lead is ludicrous (that side seen at its mustached worst in the execrable Inner Sanctum series), then seeing Lon’s Talbot crying on the bed inspires cringe-inducing embarrassment.  Chaney’s performance as Talbot was marginally better in the mediocre assembly line follow-up Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, but the character became increasingly tiresome and repetitive.  Jack Pierce’s make-up for the beast cannot compare to the work he had done in Frankenstein(1931) and The Mummy (1932), either.

Despite all the negatives, there is enjoyment to be had in the 1941 Wolf Man, mainly in overall atmosphere and some of the character performances.  The inimitable Maria Ouspenskia steals every scene she is in and makes the film memorable.  Claude Rains, Warren William and Ralph Bellamy give the film far more class than it deserves.  Finally, there is Bela Lugosi, very good as the doomed, aptly named gypsy, Bela.  Lugosi often excelled in character parts such as this, his performance as Roxor in the otherwise awful Chandu The Magician, as Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (his best role) and Joseph in The Body Snatcher.  These roles are far more memorable than the bulk of his “starring” roles.  Patrick Knowles, however, is stiff as a board, and Ankers’ only descent asset is her lungs.

Even by 1941 standards, The Wolf Man is chock full of logic gaps, narrative loop holes,  and stock cliches. The Wolf Man may not have much in the way of individual personality in the way the best 30′s films had when the witty James Whale, the poetically obsessive Tod Browning, or the delightfully black Edgar G. Ulmer were at the helm, but it is the last time a Universal Horror Film does not seem a “too rushed” assembly line production.  It was all downhill from here; hence the necessity for Val Lewton in the 40′s.  However, that “rushed” quality to come is certainly seen creeping in here.  The forest sets seem artificially planted, the fog machine was in overdrive, and there is a cheesy hallucinatory sequence, complete with the scream queen doing a still-photographed, horror stricken pose.

The 2010 remake does have atmosphere aplenty and, overall, it is an improvement over the original, but not by much.  The biggest surprise is the lackluster performances from the two leads.  Most people count Anthony Hopkins as one of the leading actors from the past twenty years, but he’s clearly just collecting a check here, and it’s certainly not the first time.  It is unfortunate that Hopkins’ attitude of slumming shows, because he could have given as wonderfully nuanced performance as Claude Rains.  More surprising is Benicio Del Toro’s performance.  He  invests little into the role.  He sulks, he broods, he carries angst, but it is pure surface, echoing Chaney’s performance while adding little to it.  He creates no real sympathy, which, at least, Chaney did manage to inspire.

Director Joe Johnston wisely sets the 2010 Wolfman remake as a period piece near the end of the nineteenth century.  This allows for some marvelous Gothic atmosphere and production sets, seeming more Hammer than Universal, which is not a bad thing.  Composer Danny Elfman actually seems to be composing again here, which is an effective, pleasant surprise.  Certainly much time, care, and money went into the remake, so it escapes the “B” quality of the original in production values.  The CGI effects, however, are a mixed bag.  The Wolfman himself seems too sprightly and, despite some terrifying,  gory mayhem, never seems real enough to evoke a threat that we can readily identify with.  For the most part the transformation scenes are well done without being innovative (An American Werewolf in London and The Howling already went there).  The one exception is the  superb transformation in the asylum.

Emily Blunt is a vast improvement over Ankers as the love interest, but the underrated Geraldine Chaplin is given nothing to do with her thankless role, which is a pity.  Despite a few narrative deviations from the original, this remake winds up being more homage than a truly imaginative re-thinking, which adds up to an “A” funded “Back to Gothic” horror with “B” results.  It’s a good”B,” but it could have been the quintessential film for the genre character.  It’s better than the bulk of the rot that has been churned out over the last 20 years in horror film, but it falls short of being the classic it could have been, a bit like its 1941 namesake.

Although the word “surreal” is common today, it’s a very new word, less than a century old.  “Surréalisme” was coined by the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), but it was André Breton who redefined the term and gave it its current meaning when he wrote the First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 to describe a new artistic and political movement.  The word derives from the French prefix “sur-” (above, beyond) and “realism,” and suggested that this new movement would produce works that transcended realism.  Throughout most of human history, the artist’s dominant concern was realism, the quest to accurately depict or reproduce external reality (e.g., to paint a flower that is instantly recognizable as a flower to any viewer; to tell a story that “really could happen”).  Deeply affected by Freud’s “discovery” of the unconscious, Breton was concerned that art was unfairly limiting itself to only a part of the human experience, the rational, waking world, and ignoring the separate language of dreams and myth.  He also believed that with the rise of science and the attempt to apply scientific principles to all realms of life, things were only getting worse: “The absolute rationalism which remains in fashion allows for the consideration of only those facts narrowly relevant to our experience…  In the guise of civilization, under the pretext of progress, we have succeeded in dismissing from our minds anything that, rightly or wrongly, could be regarded as superstition or myth; and we have proscribed every way of seeking the truth which does not conform to convention.”  He defined Surrealism, his counterpoint to this limiting, overly rational view of the world as “[t]hought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations” and as “based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought.”

Originally, the adjective “surreal” properly referred to works from the Surrealist school.  To achieve their aim of giving the dream its due, Surrealists tried to build a direct conduit to the unconscious mind, allowing the images and associations to flow freely without the rational mind censoring and reorganizing them.  They practiced techniques such as automatic writing (improvised scribbling done quickly without time for reflection or conscious revision of the spontaneously flowing words) or used games of chance like the “exquisite corpse” (where each member of a group writes a part of a sentence without knowing exactly what the other participants have added) to produce works that consisted of a string of strange, irrational, but often mysteriously suggestive images (the “exquisite corpse” game got its name from one of the first sentences the Surrealists composed using this technique: “the exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine”).  It was hoped that the results of such experiments would either be mysteriously poetic, or incongruously humorous, but in any case that they would produce something which no artist would or could have consciously created, thus inspiring the imagination of the reader.

The Surrealists valued, and relied upon, incongruity and juxtaposition to create or reveal new relationships between ideas.  They also hoped, naively, that the strange linkages between disparate images in Surrealist art would shock the mind of the viewer out of its preconceived notions and habits, ultimately leading to political and social change (presumably in a Leftist vector).

Although not the first, the most famous early example of pure, doctrinaire Surrealism in film is Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou.  It is an excellent illustration of the Surrealist technique and philosophy, containing within it all one really needs to know about the artistic movement in film.  The 17 minute short features scenes (some taken from Buñuel and Dalí’s dreams) of an eyeball being slit be a straight razor, a hand with a hole in the palm from which ants crawl, and a man lugging a piano with a dead donkey on top and two priests clinging to the bottom.  Buñuel insisted that “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted” in making the film.

Nonetheless, after viewing it, many critics tried to construct elaborate symbolic explanations of the movie: for example, one analyst believed that the man slowly pulling the piano towards a woman represented the artist who was held back from achieving his goals by his own art. Buñuel and Dalí laughed at such interpretations, not because they were “illegitimate”—in fact, part of the aim of Surrealism was to involve the viewer by forcing him to make his own connections between incongruous images—but because the critics did not understand the Surrealist project, and could not accept that anyone would put something into a work of art that had no intentional meaning.  The critics did not “get” the Surrealist mindset, the idea that it possible simply to delight in the novelty of displays of the irrational.  It takes practice to get out of the habit of assuming that everything mysterious and unexplainable in a work of art has some hidden symbolic meaning put into it by the artist.

To this day, people cannot accept the idea that the hallucinatory imagery of David Lynch‘s Eraserhead can’t be reduced to a simple formula, that every image isn’t a deliberately constructed piece in a web of symbols that resolve themselves into a conventional message.  The human mind’s refusal to accept mystery, its desire to organize the world into something comprehensible even if it must lie to itself do so, is almost overpowering, and is the primary obstacle to simply enjoying the surreal for what it is.  One must learn to relax the rational mind and lie back and enjoy the dream without fighting it, a skill that few can master.  The Surrealists are still laughing at their audience, who after more than eight decades don’t grasp the concept that the irrational has its own unique power and appeal.

What I would call “pure” or “doctrinaire” Surrealism in film—which insists on complete irrationality without any semblance of an organizing plot— died out relatively quickly.  Perhaps Un Chien Andalou so completely expressed the ideals of the movement that no further demonstration was necessary.  A more likely explanation is that pure Surrealism quickly grows tedious.  Un Chien Andalou was probably the perfect length at 17 minutes long; later experiments in producing feature length Surrealist movies proved that irrationality grew boring when the series of unconnected images was extended for too long.  Possibly those disposed towards Surrealism came to realize that humans aren’t completely irrational creatures, but mixtures of the irrational and the rational, and that effective movies too should be a blend of the irrational and the rational.  They also may have considered that dreams, their ideal model for film, do not arise mystically and randomly from nothing at all, but are rather built by the dreaming mind using our real life experiences and emotional concerns as raw materials.

At any rate, within ten to twenty years pure Surrealist films were rarely being made, and when they were they were usually shorts by film students trying to recapture Un Chien Andalou’s magic.  Buñuel himself started adding, if not actual plots, at least plotlike organizing elements elements to his films that gave them an internal consistency that rubbed up against the Surrealist dogma of “the absence of all control exerted by reason” (The Milky Way, for example, is built around an intellectual theme of heresy and the plot device of a pilgrimage).  Most of what is called Surrealism today is rather Neosurrealism: well defined by Wikipedia as “an artistic genre that illustrates the complex imagery of dream or subconscious visions…  [but] does not imply the original surrealist idea of a freedom from rational control or psychic automatism…”

The dramatic lesson of the Surrealists—the power of a strange juxtaposition of images to shock, amaze and interest us—was adopted by others and came into popular culture through advertising (the juxtaposition of incongruous images, e.g., cavemen being used to sell insurance) and music videos (which are seldom anything but surreal).  The Beatles even had number one hits with songs with surreal, nonsense lyrics (“He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football/He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola…”)  Filmmakers, too, would adopt Surrealist techniques for short stretches and dream sequences in movies that otherwise told realistic or straightforward stories: for example, Carole’s hallucinations at the end of Roman Polanski‘s Repulsion, used to illustrate her terrified subjective view of the world, are set inside a film that is otherwise a highly realistic character study of a schizophrenic woman.

Surrealism was already declining as an artistic movement by the 1930s, but with the persistence of the old Surrealist notions of the importance of dreams and the unconscious in the work of later artists, the word “surreal” stopped referring primarily to the works of a particular movement and came to have its current meaning: “characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions” or “dreamlike, resembling a dream.”  This definition sounds a lot like a synonym for “weird.”  But, as is illustrated by the list of “surrealist” movies on IMDB, the common use of “surreal” is watered down.  To many people, Vertigo is surreal—despite the fact that nothing really impossible or incongruous happens—because it’s obvious that the events of the story are exaggerated symbols for the psychology of the protagonist.  Pulp Fiction seems surreal to some because it’s hyperstylized and because the viewer is surprised by seeing the events of a story told out of chronological order.  We might even describe a conversation with a boss as “surreal” just because he didn’t appreciate our concerns or had unrealistic expectations, or describe a politician’s speech as “surreal” just because we think he’s lying.

On this site, a movie will be tagged and described as “surrealism” only when it is an actual Surrealist or Neosurrealist work that is thoroughly dreamlike and irrational, not merely when the director used some surrealist techniques to tell another kind of weird story.  At the time of this writing, we have not covered any classical Surrealist works.  Some of the most important Neosurrealist entries we have covered are The Milky Way (previously discussed), El Topo (a movie in which every scene is supposed to have a private symbolic meaning for the writer/director, but there’s almost no way for the audience to figure it out), Naked Lunch (a fairly surreal movie about a writer who was deeply influenced by surrealist techniques and theories),  Eraserhead (an excellent example of how a Neosurrealist will utilize surreal, incongruous imagery inside a narrative about a man and his deformed baby that seems comprehensible on its surface), and Funky Forest (a worthy experiment in mixing short surreal segments together, creating a work in which each story is surreal by itself while its juxtaposition with the tale next creates an additional layer of surrealism).  You can see all the movies tagged with “surrealism” by clicking here.

Still, we can see trends of movies that tend to be recurrently weird. Of these, the one species that comes to mind is the horror film.  Of all the popular film genres, horror films are the ones that most consistently give us that “weird” feeling.  If we’re looking for a word to describe the subclass of the weird that horror films exploit, I suggest the term “uncanny.”

The Wikipedia dictionary defines uncanny as “strange, and mysteriously unsettling (as if supernatural); weird,” which perfectly describes the feeling that the best horror movies seek to evoke.  I believe “uncanny” has more of a strict supernatural connotation than “weird,” which is often used simply to describe anything that deviates from the norm. You might speak of a boy as being a “weird kid” if he insisted on wearing a tie to school and was obsessed with Bigfoot, but you probably wouldn’t call him an “uncanny kid” unless his eyes glowed like one of the tykes from Village of the Damned (1960).

For a long time, “weird” and “supernatural horror” were almost synonyms.  The pulp magazine “Weird Tales” was founded in 1923, focusing mostly on horror but also including fantasy fiction (such as Robert E. Howard’s “Conan” stories).  In 1938 H.P. Lovecraft wrote Supernatural Horror in Literature and used “weird” essentially as a synonym for “supernatural horror,” devoting chapters to “The Weird Tradition in America” and “The Weird Tradition in the British Isles.”  In his Introduction, Lovecraft wrote, “[t]he one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”  There’s something religious in that description of the weird, with its focus on the “unknown” and “awe” and the suggestion of something that exists past the limits of our everyday reality, simultaneously intriguing and terrifying us from the Beyond.

Increasingly, however, our idea of the weird has come to encompass the surreal, the absurd, and other forms of psychological strangeness that don’t depend on the supernatural for their weird effect.  For this reason, I think it’s better to use the term “uncanny” to describe the species of weird that results from an encounter with eldritch forces.

There’s also another, possibly more important reason, for introducing different term to describe horrific weirdness: the word “horror” has become terribly debased and diluted in modern times, and when someone today thinks of a “horror movie” they’re at least as likely to picture something bloody and gruesome as something weird and uncanny.  Lovecraft wrote that “[t]he true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones…” but considering the endless teen-oriented slasher “reboots” that pass for modern day horror films, “horror” today often consists of little more than open murders and bloody viscera.

It wasn’t always this way.  When they first began, horror films were very often art films.  Some of the greatest early works of German expressionism were “weird” horror films (in Lovecraft’s sense) and are now regarded as movie classics: The Golem (1915),  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and Nosferatu (1922).  The Universal horror cycle of the 1930s and 1940s—Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932) and The Wolf Man (1941)—being Hollywood products, were aimed more at the popular audience.  There was still an unusual degree of artistic merit and a hint of real weirdness to these films, however, partially because many of the crew that worked on them were Germans schooled in expressionist techniques who had fled Germany with the rise of the Nazis.  Most notable among these was Karl Freund, who worked as a cinematographer on Dracula and directed The Mummy.  The classic Universal films were not often what we would today term “weird,” especially since they always focused on the victory of the rational order over the irrational monster, but they always included scenes, sets and costumes that at least toyed with weirdness.

The popularity of the Universal cycle was the shovel with which the horror movie dug its own grave.  Hollywood began to copy itself and the once uncanny horror film, which dealt with dread and awe, turned into the “monster” film, often a hastily written formula adventure story aimed at the young with a vampire or werewolf serving as the villain.  With the characters of the monsters and their lore well established—Dracula is killed by a stake through the heart, the Wolf Man by a silver bullet—the aura of mystery was drained from these characters.  So, we had numerous sequels to Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy which gradually grew worse and worse, more and more comical and cartoonish, until the studio, running out of ideas, began to match their monsters up against each other as if in cage matches: Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944).  When the suits at the studio finally dredged up the idea of Frankenstein Meets Abbot and Costello (1948), it was clear that the Universal horror cycle had run its course.

This is not to say that horror movies stopped exploring darker, psychological realms of the uncanny altogether.  Off to the side of the main Hollywood system, producers like Val Lewton were making weirder movies like Cat People (1942), with its story of sexual repression drenched in ambiguity.  In all eras, some artists have used the idea of the uncanny to explore the subconscious and bring the audience an encounter with something genuinely, soul-shakingly strange.  The point of this genealogy is to show how, in a mere 25 years, something weird and arty like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari could degrade into something silly like The House of Frankenstein.

The more important degradation suffered by the horror movie is the one we see today: the shift from the uncanny to the merely terrifying, from monsters to maniacs.  None less a giant than Hitchcock was responsible for this unfortunate move, since his suspense movie Psycho (1960) was improperly classified as a horror movie simply because it’s psycho killer was so damn scary.  By the 1970s, barely supernatural killers like Micheal Myers (from Halloween, 1978) and Jason (from Friday the 13th, 1980) were stalking horny teens in the cinemas.  Soon, the uncanny elements of the horror movie were done away with altogether in the stalker craze of the 1980s, and “horror” movies increasingly became about body counts, carnage and the visceral thrill of violence rather than an encounter with the mysterious Unknown.  Things got worse and worse until we reach today’s torture porn, which achieves its effect by exploiting nothing deeper or more meaningful than our literal fear of physical pain.

Nothing could be less like Lovecraft’s prescription for the weird.  At the time the shift was occurring, some argued that these non-supernatural “horror” movies should be reclassified as “terror” movies, since they were really about something altogether different than the uncanny.  Terror played off people’s realistic (if exaggerated) fear of the known—a sadistic or unbalanced person killing another, innocent person—rather than their fear of (and secret attraction towards) the unknown, the mysterious, the unreal and the irrational.  Unfortunately, the distinction never gained any traction.  In the public mind, whatever scared you was “horror,”  and that was that.

This essay isn’t meant to imply that supernatural horror, even good supernatural horror, is always weird, but it’s  certainly more closely related to the weird than any other genre.  There’s a reason the word “horror” is so large on the tag cloud in the right column.  When you start your movie by making a ghostly undead power the antagonist, your already predisposed towards going weird.  Some uncanny stories follow the standard horror formula of a protagonist meeting and defeating (or rarely, losing to) a supernatural power and do not really ever get much weirder than this.  These movies always end with rationality triumphing, either by literally defeating the evil invader, or at least by completely explaining the threat so that our concept of what’s real temporarily stretches to encompass the monster.     Such movies can be very good indeed: see Viy, which I consider an unacknowledged horror classic but not an extremely weird movie; it’s a standard folkloric ghost story that completely explains and resolves the menace by the end.  Other horror movies can be less polished but far weirder, such as the recently reviewed Phantasm, which focuses on a supernatural power that is never explained, that retains its mystery until the final shot.  These are the kinds of movies that honor the weird and can be blessed with the term “uncanny.”

Horror movies which evoke the uncanny and have made the List already include Don’t Look Now, Eyes Without a Face, Carnival of Souls, and Phantasm.  Readers can explore horror movies further by looking at entries tagged horror.

When a film tries to appeal to an audiences higher nature, to their intellect and aesthetic sense, but at the same time promises plenty of sex, nudity, violence, and moral degeneracy, then you have an “artsploitation” film.

Not all art films which deal with sex or include nudity or violence qualify as artsploitation films.  There needs to be some gratuitous or sensationalist element to merit the “-ploitation” suffix.  There’s little truly exploitative about the way sex is treated in Sex and Lucia, for example; sex is a natural part of the character’s relationship and there are good plot and thematic justifications for each coupling.

Although the “artsploitation” genre can’t be reduced to a simple recipe, and does not necessarily involve remaking some sort of recognized formula film in an arty way, as a first step at identifying the category, here’s a short list of some art films that also fit neatly into a recognized  exploitation film sub-genre:

• EL TOPO (1970) = arthouse + Spaghetti Western
• THE DEVILS (1971) = arthouse + nunsploitation
• LIQUID SKY (1982) = arthouse + science fiction
• GOTHIC (1986) = arthouse + horror
• LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988) = arthouse + horror
• SANTA SANGRE (1989) = arthouse + serial killers
• THE THIEF, THE COOK, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989)= arthouse + gross-out cannibal film
• DELLAMORTE, DELLAMORE [CEMETARY MAN] (1994) = arthouse + zombie film
• KIDS (1995) = arthouse + juvenile delinquency
• NOWHERE (1997) = arthouse + juvenile delinquency + drugsploitation + sci-fi B-movie

Another simple way to identify an artsploitation film: look for the name “Ken Russell” under director.

Exploitation films, which used to play at drive-ins, fleapits and grindhouses, and are now often released directly to video, are considered “trash cinema,” and distinguishable both from mainstream films and from art-house films.  They began as early as the 1930s, when Hollywood’s Hays Code created a lucrative gray market for films dealing with forbidden subject matter like prostitution, drug abuse, and revenge killings.  Cheaply made films such as Reefer Madness [Tell Your Children] (1936) (the famously campy anti-marijuana flick), Child Bride (1938) (which dealt with the “serious” problem of child marriage among hillbillies by having a 12 year old girl perform nude scenes), and Mom and Dad (1945) (which advertised itself as a “hygiene” film and showed the birth of an illegitimate baby in graphic, gaping detail) quickly stepped in to take advantage of Hollywood’s shyness about sex.  An alternative, parallel cinema of forbidden delights sprung up in the shadow of Hollywood and flourished through the 1960s and 1970s, with producers discovering ever new subjects to exploit (bikers, rape-revenge flicks, the LSD scare).  These films were typically completely commercial and had little to no artistic aspirations, seeking only to shock the audience with lurid images and ideas they couldn’t get anywhere else.

Much of the air was taken out of the parallel exploitation industry in the late 1960s with the decline and eventual abandonment of the Hays Code; critically praised films like Midnight Cowboy (1969) now featured nudity and frankly discussed forbidden topics such as homosexuality and prostitution.  This is the era when the true artsploitation film begins to appear.

Sex films were major precursors to the genre.  Roger Vadim’s  …And God Created Woman [Et Dieu... créa la femme] (1956) was released in America to art-houses that specialized in foreign fare, but shots of a nude Brigitte Bardot brought in the punters as well as the aesthetes.  Foreign films, which of course were not subject to the Hays Code, could get away with depicting nudity and promiscuity wrapped in the guise of Art.  Such films could simultaneously garner critical praise and shatter box office records, and give horny men a legitimate excuse to gaze upon a naked woman.  Michelangelo Antonini’s Blowup (1966), an otherwise dry and despairing satire of mod London, gave American audiences their first glimpse of pubic hair (at least on the big screen).  The sex/art trend hit its zenith with I am Curious Yellow (1967), a surreal Swedish socialist satire that featured a few seconds of what might have been fellatio and created a censorship sensation (which, of course, soon resulted in major box office receipts).   Savvy art theater owners noticed the not-so-subtle uptick in sales when foreign films featuring nudity would play, and some began to specialize in such naughty fare, gradually morphing into full time sexploitation palaces, then into full fledged porn theaters (for this reason, as late as the 1980s you could still find adult theaters proudly spouting marquees identifying themselves as “Pussycat Art Theater” or “Dragon Art Theater”).  Art movies and gratuitous sex had been linked in the public mind.  Whether the director intended to explore issues of sexuality with any sort of seriousness or not, from a marketing standpoint it couldn’t hurt to throw a couple of bare bosoms into your art film.

A critical pioneer in the artsploitation movement was pop artist Andy Warhol.  Warhol, ever the provocateur, made several plotless and unwatchable conceptual films in the 1960s (for example, Sleep [1963], a work consisting of five hours of a static camera filming a sleeping man).  Starting in 1968, Warhol commissioned director Paul Morrisey to make a string of sexy and shocking experimental movies starting with Flesh (1968), the story of a heroin addict (Joe Dallesandro) who works as a male prostitute.  The Warhol/Morrisey collaboration reached its zenith in 1973-1974 with the dual release of Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein [AKA Flesh for Frankenstein] (a perverted and gory 3-D spectacle of offensiveness) and Andy Warhol’s Dracula [AKA Blood for Dracula] (sickly vampire Udo Kier can only drink the blood of virgins, giving the characters an excuse to have sex to prevent vampiric infection).  Morrisey pictures featured not only every shocking sexual, violent or degraded image he could think of, but also deliberately corny dialogue and often crazy experimental camerawork and editing.  In addition, he solicited fish-out-of-water non-actors like Dallesandro and Kier to play major roles in order to stoke the absurdity factor to a fevered pitch.  By slapping his name on these feature length narrative pictures, Warhol gave an avant-garde imprimatur to sleaze, at least when it was done self-consciously in the name of art.

A third, and subtler, influence on the genre were the LSD exploitation films of the late 1960s, with titles like The Trip (1967), The Weird World of LSD (1967), and The Acid Eaters (1968).  Here, it was art films that influenced the exploitation film, rather than the other way around.  Exploitation directors eager to capitalize on psychedelic hysteria adopted fisheye lenses, kaleidoscopic lenses, and other tricks of experimental filmmakers to try to recreate  hallucinogenic experiences.  These being exploitation films, after all, LSD was frequently portrayed as an aphrodisiac that caused nubile hippie girls to immediately shed their clothes after dosing.  Hallucination sequences could by viewed as “arty” in and of themselves, evoking comparison with classic Surrealist works such as Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’Or (1930).

With all these formative influences in place, the stage was ripe in the early 1970s for an explosion in the artsploitation genre.  I think that the art form truly took off with Alejandro Jodoworsky’s surreal spaghetti western  El Topo (1970), the first “midnight” movie.  I wrote in the comments to El Topo that Jodorowsky used “shameless exploitation movie elements– abundant nudity and gore, lesbian kissing, sexual depravity, freaks and animal abuse… to sneak classic surrealism past the guardians of ivory tower intellectualism, reaching the people directly, and thereby created a marketable genre for future pop-surrealist directors like David Lynch.”  Soon, Ken Russell (whose constant emphasis on sex, horror, and hallucination combined with Big Ideas make him the ultimate artsploitation director) and others would take up the torch.

On the one hand, artsploitation movies are too arty and weird for general audiences, and even for exploitation movie fans who don’t want their boob and bloodfests to be diluted with pretentious musings.  On the other hand, artsploitation movies can (and frequently have been) critically dismissed as artistically immature.  Any auteur who is seriously interested in intellectual ideas can probably find a way to tell his story with a minimum of breast shots; artsploitation directors sometimes appear to be doing little more than self-indulgently putting their own sexual fantasies and preoccupations on screen.  (As Roger Ebert sarcastically mused in his zero-star review of Ken Russell’s The Devils, “We are filled with righteous indignation as we bear witness to the violation of the helpless nuns, which is all the more horrendous because, as Russell fearlessly reveals, all the nuns, without exception were young and stacked.”)  Without much popular support, and qualified critical support at best, these films exist in a cinematic no-man’s land: their own little fiefdom in the kingdom of the weird.

I tend to like these films.  Often, a lot.  Although the nude human body, or its dismemberment, is no longer taboo, tapping into these sorts of primal images, which are repressed in everyday life, is an authentically Surrealist mission.  Ebert notwithstanding, what could be more enjoyably weird than Ken Russell’s libidinal excesses in The Devils?  Who can fail to be impressed with his convent orgy of squealing, religiously fevered nuns, a sequence that’s so over-the-top that it piles weird upon weird, so shamelessly excessive that it makes the director’s purpose in filming it totally obscure: is he really trying to make a serious point about religious fervor, or is he staging his own sexual fetishes for his own pervy enjoyment, or is he playing an elaborate joke and expecting us to laugh along?

In the end, with so many possible layers in play, the effect is that we can’t divine the “message” behind the scene; we can only accept what is depicted as it’s own kind of fantastic reality.  At their best, this is the feeling all artsploitation films evoke: they simultaneously satisfy both our base longings and our aesthetic aspirations, remaining true to both the arthouse and the grindhouse.