1980s, Auteurs, Crime/Detective, Horror/Eerie, Thriller

Dressed To Kill (1980)

Director/Screenwriter: Brian De Palma

By Roderick Heath

Brian De Palma was the first of the so-called “movie brats” to emerge, a young technical wizard who won a prize at a science fair whilst still in high school for a project titled “An Analog Computer to Solve Differential Equations.” Whilst studying physics at college he fell under the spell of cinema and soon changed his major. Collaborating with drama teacher Wilfred Leach and producer Cynthia Monroe, De Palma pieced together his first feature, The Wedding Party, at 23 years of age. Amongst the cast were two then-unknown actors also heading places, De Palma’s friend Robert De Niro and Jill Clayburgh. The Wedding Party wouldn’t see release for six years, so in the meantime De Palma developed his craft with documentaries, particularly The Responsive Eye (1965), about an art exhibition, and Dionysus in 69 (1969), an account of a radical theatre group staging Euripides. His return to feature cinema, Greetings (1968), became a cult object in recording the weird and woolly environs of Greenwich Village bohemia, whilst Murder a la Mod (1968) exhibited the first glimmerings of De Palma’s love for making horror films and violent thrillers, if still within the official brackets of an arthouse-experimental sensibility.

De Palma soon began climbing the slippery pole towards mainstream stature with Sisters (1973), a darkly funny remix of Hitchcockian motifs that signalled De Palma’s unique and sly way of balancing his ironically parsed theorems of cinema with a capacity to serve the genre film market. His gaudy, would-be breakout film Phantom of the Paradise (1974) failed at the box office only to once again gain cult status, and it wasn’t until his film of Stephen King’s novel Carrie (1976) that De Palma arrived as a commercial force. Dressed To Kill, one of De Palma’s biggest hits from the height of his career and possibly his greatest film purely from a formal viewpoint, is also one of his most layered and illusive works in an oeuvre littered with densely composed exercises in cinema aesthetics. Part film fetishist tribute-cum-assimilation of Hitchcock and the Italian giallo subgenre and its notables like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Sergio Martino, and Giuliano Carnimeo, it’s also a darkly humorous piece of sociological and sexual satire, and a particularly twisted piece of autobiographical meditation on De Palma’s part, a hall-of-mirrors gag that dares the viewer to separate fantasy from reality, art from artist.

The opening scene, like much of De Palma’s cinema, works like a musician’s variation on a theme, referencing both the legendary shower murder of Psycho (1960) and De Palma’s opening for Carrie, which trod with faux-sentimental/exploitative sensuality through the burgeoning dreamworld of a high school girls’ changing room only to violate the image with a handful of red menstrual blood, the shock of sexuality registering in its most primal fashion disturbing both the evoked prurience of ‘70s cinema culture and the strictures of the title character’s religious background. Dressed To Kill kicks off with busting other taboos, presenting frustrated upper-middle-class housewife Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) showering with languorous sensuality, fixing on her husband whilst he shaves, and begins masturbating in a swirl of soap and steam and erogenous delight. De Palma mocks the grammar of soft-core porn and erotic showmanship, Dickinson gazing at her husband who doesn’t notice/audience who can’t help but watch, with Pino Donaggio’s score pouring romantic syrup on the images filmed in estranging slow-motion, busting the basic niceties of mainstream cinema in going for unavoidable shots of Miller’s hand caressing her crotch. The fantasy is cruelly severed as a dark, masculine figure surges out of the steam and grips her in a violent, seemingly murderous embrace.

This shock gives way to Kate emerging from sleep to find her husband Mike (Fred Weber) on top of her in the marital bed, giving her what Kate later describes to her therapist as one of his “wham-bang specials,” a bout of uninspired humping concluded with a patronising pat on the cheek. Fantasy sexuality collides with its reality, the onerousness of brute masculinity clasping Kate in her dream and dragging her back into banal fact, whilst also presaging her imminent intersection with a murderer. Kate contends with another disappointment as her teenage son Peter (Keith Gordon) is preoccupied with a computer he’s building on his school vacation, and wriggles out of coming with her on a trip they’d planned to the Metropolitan Art Museum. Kate leaves him to it after extracting a promise to not work all night, and heads off to an appointment with her therapist, Dr Robert Elliott (Michael Caine). Kate confesses her frustrations and resentments to the smooth, solicitous Elliott, who readily admits to finding Kate attractive when she prods him on the issue.

Obsessive tunnel-vision is of course one of the constant threads of De Palma’s cinema, usually manifesting in terms of desire – characters, usually male, too preoccupied with women, although here reversed both in Kate and her hunt to get off, and Peter, whose laser-focused geekiness distracts him from the business that preoccupies everyone else to a greater or lesser degree. “I moaned with pleasure at his touch, isn’t that what every man wants?” Kate says to Elliott, speaking of Mike, to Elliott’s advice that she stop dissembling and properly own her sexuality and her anger. Kate’s visit to the Met Gallery presents an opportunity to do just that she realises a good-looking stranger wearing sunglasses, whose name is cursorily given later as Warren Lockman (Ken Baker), is trying to pick her up. This sparks a lengthy game of flirtatious hide and seek as she oscillates between responding and shying away from this potential adventure, he initially driven off when she accidentally exposes her wedding ring, she momentarily freaked out when he plays a joke on her with a glove she dropped and he retrieved. The tryst finds fruition when, after thinking he’s left, Kate spots him in a taxi cab outside the museum waggling the glove at her. Moving to retrieve it, Kate is instead pulled into a sexual encounter on the taxi’s back seat.

The starting point for this epic sequence, which unfolds almost entirely without dialogue and achieves a pure play of visual exposition and associative storytelling, is Madeleine’s visits to the art museum in Vertigo (1958), much as her arc in the film mimics Marion’s in Psycho, and also sideswipes Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970) in making a knowing connection between the rectilinear framings of artworks and the space and form perturbing content of modern art and the director’s manipulation of the cinematic frame. The focus is however inverted in one vital aspect, the lonely lost woman no longer a remote love object but a being seeking out satisfaction, groping her way through to actualisation in that regard, whilst the motif of following and finding is given its own, ironic, post-sexual liberation-era remix. In an interview later De Palma would irritably deny this sequence was based on Hitchcock, stating it was rather rooted in his own adolescent days trying to pick up girls in art galleries. De Palma, I think, was being half-truthful here. What the sequence instead depicts is something I’m sure every young creative person has done: moving through their private reality whilst reconfiguring it mentally in the mould of favourite art, whilst also giving it newly ironic context.

Kate’s movements are necessarily the camera’s hunt, supplanting the usual tactic of the giallo and slasher movie styles where the camera viewpoint becomes rather that of the killer. The audience is presumed to be aware that we’re watching a thriller but the hunt here has no obvious sense of suspense beyond the depiction of Kate’s blend of anxiety and excitement in seeking out a lover. The act of picking up/being picked up is transformed into a thriller experience in itself, the surging tides of contradictory emotion becoming the essence of the sequence rather than the appeal to displaced eroticism attached to the killer’s desire to tear the beautiful illusion to pieces that drives the more standard slasher movie. De Palma weaves in visual gags, some overt – Kate’s immediate position before a painting of a woman staring back sceptically at the beholder as if challenging to action, neighbouring a painting of a reclining gorilla aping her current opinion of her husband and which reminds her to write in her shopping list “nuts.” Others slyer, like positioning Kate in a frame with the bottom half of a female nude, keeping in mind both her sexual need and De Palma’s smirking satire on the disparity of painting’s sanctioned comfort for nudity and the penalisation of filmmakers who offer the same.

Kate’s dropped glove both grazes standard romantic fiction lore, the lost personal item that presents the opportunity for a gallant gesture, and giallo movie protocol, where gloves are totems of a killer’s presence. The pick-up artist touches Kate’s shoulder whilst wearing the glove, trying to make the first association work but instead provoking the second. Meanwhile photographer Ralf D. Bode’s camera tracks and moves with sinuous care around the museum corridors, illustrating Kate’s roving through a system of gates and passages, stops and permissions, at once sexual and algorithmic, echoing Peter’s computer with its capacity to both hold and carry binary numbers, whilst also recalling the jokes about computer dating in Greetings. The gestures that finally resolve the tension of the sequence as well as signalling something else in the works again involves Kate’s gloves: Lockman waves one to her from the waiting taxi window whilst the other one, the camera panning from Kate’s fce over to the captured object: only to the repeat and attentive viewer does a vital detail emerge, the sight of a long-haired woman wearing sunglasses and a black raincoat in the midst of this shot, on the pavement between steps and car. Kate has already thrown down her other glove in vexation. As Kate is drawn into the taxi by Lockman, her expression of affected gratitude smothered in a violent kiss, the dropped glove is retrieved by an unseen person.

This whole sequence might well be counted as De Palma’s single greatest achievement, a multivalent piece of filmmaking that piles up meanings as plot-enabling suspense sequence, character study, extended sex joke, essay on cinemagoing and art appreciation, and lecture on film grammar and history. In the taxi, the movement resolves with a transgressive act as Kate’s world is rocked by Lockman’s deftly seductive touch which nonetheless has a resemblance to a crime – the sudden silencing, being dragged into the cab and molested, Kate’s moans of excitement. Meanwhile De Palma weaves in the first of several nods to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), a film De Palma was initially slated to direct, as the cab driver ogles the spectacle unfolding on his backseat, part of the texture of a film that gleefully perpetuates the mythology of New York in its bad old days as a place where all kinds of human perversity spilt into the streets. “There’s plenty of ways to get killed in this city if you’re lookin’ for it,” Dennis Franz’s quintessential Noo Yawk cop Detective Marino states a couple of reels later, and Kate’s search for Eros is also naturally stalked by Thanatos.

Kate is ushered into Lockman’s apartment building – a near-subliminal, enigmatic vignette sees Kate momentarily distracted by the doorman overseeing a furniture delivery, containing no apparent meaning except as a flash of the ordinary highlighted with special meaning for Kate as well as possibly suggesting how her stalker gets into the building after. Post-coital languor is Kate’s reward but this movement of the film isn’t yet over, as she rouses herself from Lockman’s bed, dresses, and leaves. Further items of clothing now supplant the gloves as totems that provoke fretting and backtracking: Kate remembers her panties being stripped off in the cab, now lost to fate, but it’s her wedding ring, left on the bedside stand, that foils her clean getaway. Kate dies not for a moral transgression, but because she does not commit to her liberation. Kate has already had all romantic illusions coarsely dashed as she has paused to write a note offering a farewell missive to Lockman, only to catch a glimpse of a letter from the NY Department of Health warning him he has a venereal disease. To a great extent Kate’s brutal murder a few minutes later simply dramatizes the world-ending fear the sight of the letter provokes, of her transgression, her few minutes of adventurous bliss, potentially having consequences that will shatter the structure and stability of her life.

Kate flees Lockman’s apartment and gets into the elevator, whereupon De Palma finally urges the audience’s direct attention on a detail hiding in plain sight, tracking down the corridor towards the fire escape door where the stalker hides. Kate seems to be keeping ahead of her pursuer, but stopping the elevator to return for her ring delivers her directly to the stalker, waving a colossal straight razor in her face and cornering her in the lift. Kate’s murder is a Grand Guignol spectacle of the highest order, her attacker slicing her with precisely punitive blows. Again, of course, De Palma is offering his own twist on certain models – Psycho’s shower scene, a similar elevator assault in Carnimeo’s What Are these Strange Drops of Blood Doing On Jennifer’s Body? (1972) – whilst doing so in quotation marks. De Palma’s murder is exactingly aestheticized, blood spattering on the lit numbers of the elevator controls, clean gashes not releasing torrents of arterial spray by elegantly daubed crimson despoiling her chic white outfit, her attacker, vaguely feminine yet held out of focal range beyond the all-too-immediate razor blade, carefully and teasingly withheld from the camera’s knowing.

Kate’s death demands the narrative focal point change, and a new heroine is immediately nominated in the form of Liz Blake (Nancy Allen), a professional escort accompanying her latest john to an apartment only for the elevator doors to open upon the sight of Kate sprawled and lifting a hand in a pleading gesture. The john dashes off whilst Liz reaches out to grasp Kate’s hand, only for the flash of light on metal to lead her eye to a mirror that reveals the killer is still in the elevator, hiding behind the door and ready to slash Liz’s hand. This shot is the pivot of the entire movie in linking the two major narrative movements and heroines in a moment where latent threat has become actual, and yet the appearance of revelation is also another sleight of hand that conceals. The killer drops the weapon and Liz retrieves it before the elevator continues its journey, only for a maid to see the bloody razor in her hand and scream in terror, hiding from Liz as she frantically tries to explain. Liz flees in serach of a cop whilst Kate’s arm is glimpsed jutting from the elevator in the lobby, the doors foiled in trying to close, lending a ghoulish simulacra of life to the very dead woman’s body.

Liz contrasts Kate in obvious ways whilst supplanting her as official damsel in distress and seeking heroine, younger and accustomed to using her sexuality for profit, tapping her clients for stock tips and cheerfully bullshitting her escort service in pretending to need cash for her mother’s operation when really planning to invest it in a hot tip. Just about every gesture regarding sex and gender in the film is, in its way, conscious of its performance. The game of role-playing and false appearances is given its wryest variation as Liz plys prim and coy with Marino, the detective assigned to investigate Kate’s killing, only for the purposefully coarse and aggressive detective to abandon the game and brand her: “Let’s face it, you’re a whore. Oh, a Park Avenue whore, but you’re still a whore.” Marino’s office and the police station around it becomes a narrative plaza where the players in the whodunnit meet, Elliott encountering Peter and Liz, although Marino ain’t no Poirot, the detective’s brash cynicism used to provoke displays of resistance and forms of cooperation the subjects might not recognise as such. Elliott’s smooth, apparently perfect professional rectitude and concern for his patients seems to be confirmed as he expertly rebuffs Marino’s attempts to extract information on his patients, as Marino seems to think Kate might have attracted the attention of one of Elliott’s other, crazier clients.

Meanwhile Peter, officially stranded as a grief-stricken relative and hapless collateral damage, reveals his own streak of perverse invention as he uses a homemade listening device to eavesdrop on Marino and Elliott talking. This display of ingenuity and determination has its own masochistic dimension as the seemingly callow and unworldly Peter forces himself to listen to the detective’s crude and reductive but relevant attempts to understand his dead mother’s behaviour. The transfer of narrative focus onto Liz and Peter sees the film become in part a satirical update on old-school young adult detective tales, Liz as a very grown up Nancy Drew and Peter a nerdy Hardy Boy, mixed with a wistful edge of mutual longing for what the other has, Peter trying to become a man in seeking out his mother’s killer whilst Liz snatches at an opportunity to play the innocent again as she’s repeatedly confronted by visions of bloodshed and terror. De Palma stages a jovial nod to old-school mystery tales as Liz draws another cab driver (Bill Randolph) into her attempt to lose a mysterious pursuer in a chase through Manhattan’s streets. Liz doesn’t learn until the end of the film that Marino has assigned a policewoman, Betty Luce (Susannah Clemm), to keep tabs on her, and Luce in overcoat and sunglasses is almost indistinguishable from the killer. Meanwhile Elliott visits a fellow psychiatrist, Dr Levy (David Margulies), and warns him about his potentially murderous client, only for Levy to strike unusually guarded and uncertain postures in dealing with him.

Dressed To Kill’s almost algorithmic structuring with its four, distinct, extended movements involving mini-reboots and variations that finally circle back to the beginning, presents also a series of structural traps that the character are varyingly aware of, some of them environmental, others social, biological, mental. The film’s driving plot conceit is of course another nod to Psycho, but it also glances off the rest of the film’s simultaneously sarcastic and earnest explorations of contemporary mores a la 1980, a moment locked between the insouciance and gamy adventurousness of the ‘70s zeitgeist and ‘80s with its reactionaries and reality TV inquiry/homogenisation: not for nothing does a significant portion of the film revolve around an episode of Phil Donahue’s trendsetting confessional talk show. A vignette from Donahue’s show in which the interviewer talks with a trans woman, who merrily explains her life of compensating macho endeavour and confesses to being “a devout heterosexual,” offers both a clue to the unfolding mystery whilst also disowning its darker inferences. Elliott and Liz are offered in split screen as the clip unfolds, itself a joke about divided identity and gender. Meanwhile Elliott keeps getting phone call from a disturbed patient who calls herself Bobbi, who claims to be “a woman trapped in this man’s body,” and confesses to killing Kate with Elliott’s stolen razor. Soon after, Liz thinks she is being tailed by “Bobbi,” and tries to elude her first by getting a taxi driver to outrun a pursuer, and then descending into the subway.

Dressed To Kill relishes the tabloid flavour of its concerns even as it converts them into deliriously artistic cinematic effects. Indeed, it created a stir in its day from several quarters, who were nonetheless tone-deaf to the way it mines it all for extreme metaphors and crazy comedy based in games with cultural coding. De Palma’s native celebration of Manhattan at a time when it had a reputation for being an open sore of the city sees both its grit and its glamour, alternating the leafy brownstone climes of Elliott’s office with the steam-wreathed, neon-gilded sleaze of the downtown where Liz is tracked by the killer. It is, in its own oddball way, just as amusingly romantic a vision of the city as Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), just as the film as a whole is as much of a riff on sex and dating in the modern, urban world as Greetings. De Palma evokes a common kind of white anxiety of the day only to use it for puckish comedy, as a gang of fly-dressed black dudes think Liz is teasing them when she crowds close to a subway platform when she’s being pursued by “Bobbi,”; they get annoyed and start harassing her in turn. Liz runs to a policeman on a stopping train, instantly inverting the cliché as the cop is also black, bemused and annoyed when the assailants elude his line of side. Once the cop gets off the train the dudes start tracking Liz again, only to then be scared off by the sight of “Bobbi” attacking Liz, performed manhood found wanting in the face of genuine violent demonstration.

“Bobbi”’s attack on Liz is another ingeniously visualised scene but in a manner completely different to the more operatic effects elsewhere in the film – Liz’s flight through the train takes her through linking vestibules only to find herself caught in one with “Bobbi”, razor the only thing catching the light in the dark. The attack is foiled by the sudden intervention of Peter, appearing from the next carriage: teenage nerd fends off the ferocious murderer with a spurt of homemade mace. The action here is coherent but also successfully achieves a spasm of frantic movement, playing a foregrounded game with witnessing and its limitations, and also doubling again as a sort of sly sex joke, as young Peter blows his wad for the first time to good effect. De Palma offers Peter as a version of himself at that age, using him as a springboard to weave in autobiographical details and recurring obsessions. The film as a whole can be described as a fantastical enlarging up on a vignette from his youth where his mother supposedly had him use his homemade surveillance equipment to see if his father was having an affair. This is conflated with metafictional meanings: Gordon tells Elliott, as the good doctor tries to counsel him in the police station waiting room, that Ted is not actually his father, his real one having been killed in the Vietnam War, and so positing Peter as a generational inheritor to the angst of De Palma’s early protagonists in Greetings and Hi, Mom! (1971).

Gordon, who would eventually become a director with more than few De Palma-esque traits, deftly plays Peter as both grief-stricken kid and newly determined young man, the tight tilt of his jaw after he chases off “Bobbi” confirming his quick growth in a fearless fighter of evil even as he’s still the kind of guy who will entirely innocently ask a hooker to come to his home if she’s feeling nervous. Liz, by contrast, inhabits entirely adult realms, a young but very worldly woman who knows with scientific precision how to get a rise out of men in several senses of the phrase. De Palma’s shooting throughout utilises the expanse of the widescreen frame with sense of instability and dialectic even when not using overt tricks like split frame, often using dioptre shots to keep multiple plains of action in equal relevance. This is most obvious in serving an expository purpose when Peter times patients entering and leaving Elliott’s office so he can set up camera surveillance, or when Liz takes care to part the curtains of Elliott’s office so the watching Peter can see in whilst keeping Elliott mesmerised with her erotically-charged anecdotes, but continues throughout with a charge of ambiguity, as in shots of Peter listening in to Marino and Elliott’s conversation about his mother, different portions and layers of the frame containing their own distinct dramatic registers.

This unstable sense of space shifts when “Bobbi” attacks Kate, whereupon a game of focal planes begins, the looming razor in focus and the wielder beyond and behind out of focus. Dressed To Kill certainly takes up the challenge of Hitchcock’s great triptych of films about voyeurism and unstable appearance, Rear Window (1954), Vertigo, and Psycho, as well as the formal games of perception and details seen but not observed Argento played in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and Deep Red (1975). But De Palma also works to transmute them. De Palma’s use of slow motion and split screen effect, for instance, entirely contradict those celluloid heroes’ fastidious method and faith in the edit of the heart of cinematic viewing. De Palma uses such devices to prolong and expand, to linger, to fetishistically celebrate rather than merely deploy the crucial image. Most particularly, the incapacity of De Palma’s heroes to quite understand what they’re seeing, and through them the audience, is part of the film’s deeper texture, just as it had been in some of De Palma’s early work.

This is particularly obvious in the finale where Peter contends with the visage of the lurking killer that seems to appear in two different places at once, manifesting out of thin air in the distant blur of Elliott’s office and also right next to him as a looming, immediate presence: for a few brief, dizzying moment reality loses all structure and life takes on dream logic, logic which then becomes the entire texture of the film’s very last movement. As such Dressed To Kill contrasts something like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), which sublimates the same strong giallo influence into a Hollywood cinematic tradition but to very different ends, creating a zone where the audience is obliged at the outset to share the killer’s viewpoint and buy into his mystique. Both represent formal games with what the director wants the audience to know, of course; the presumed end-game of the classical horror-thriller is to unmask the killer for maximum shock effect, but for some time that end had become increasingly supernal. That signature trope of giallo, the black-gloved hands of an enigmatic presence, presents the undeniable fact of the killer but conceals gender and stature. Halloween presents the horror movie killer as achieving mythic blankness, at one with the audience in conspiring to erase the object of its gaze, where De Palma heads in the opposite direction, fragmenting his sources of evil, confronting his heroes with the limitations of seeing and knowing.

Of course, the upshot of all this is that Elliott himself is “Bobbi”, his trans identity rendered paranoid and murderous by schizoid traits, the ineffably decent and helpful psychiatrist supplanted by his maniacal alter ego who desperately wants to suppress his masculine side. De Palma apparently originally sought Sean Connery to play Elliott: undoubtedly having James Bond himself play “Bobbi” would have taken the gender satire to an even more extreme place, although then the nominal formal game would have been even harder to play. Caine was ultimately a smart piece of casting, bringing a light touch to the role of the seemingly solicitous and conscientious doctor constantly teased and upbraided by his own mirror, whilst also playing off an ironic aspect of his star persona. Caine the 1960s heartthrob who had risen to fame as the womanizing Alfie (1966) had nonetheless often in his early stage acting days found his career limited by a perception he looked camp, and so playing Elliott allowed Caine to play games with this schismatic performative life. “Bobbi” herself is a constructed being: the voice heard on the telephone provided by De Palma’s constant early collaborator William Finley, whilst the physical being alternates between Caine and Clemm.

The climax sees Liz, pushed by Marino’s threats to arrest her for Kate’s murder, conspiring with Peter to enter Elliott’s office by pretending to seek his help, so she can pilfer his appointment book and locate the supposed killer client. Liz’s spiel to Elliott starts as an acting exercise as she recounts disturbing and dirty dreams (“And I know dirty – believe me, this was dirty.”) shading into seduction as Liz strips off her overcoat to reveal all too undeniable feminine charms swathed in black lingerie, like a burlesque on a porn film’s take on the ritual Hollywood audition. Meanwhile Peter watches from outside in the rain with binoculars, incidentally turned into a voyeur, forced to strip off his glasses and wipe them down in frustration mid-gawk. What seems to be a smirking acceptance of basic desire as Elliott smiles at himself in the mirror before starting to remove his clothes at Liz’s challenge instead proves the cue for “Bobbi” to emerge and try to kill again. The mysteriously bilocating killer confuses Peter’s gaze in the strobing lightning and rain before he’s grabbed by a lurking figure; inside the office the real killer lurks in wait for Liz, who beholds Peter thumping on the window in warning whilst the figure, actually Luce, tries to restrain him. Luce saves the day by shooting Elliott through his office window.

The rush of action here gives way to another of De Palma’s multivalent directorial gestures, offering a lampoon of the tabloid god’s eye view camera movement in surveying post-battle carnage Scorsese used at the end of Taxi Driver, by way of a glance at Liz standing glaring in shock at the red blood on her hands whilst still of course swathed in black lingerie, a fetishist image that also calls to mind the title of Bava’s foundational giallo film Blood And Black Lace (1963). The shot resolves on Elliott lying sprawled on the carpet and weeping, solving the mystery at last and converting cinematic pizzazz finally into a space of unexpected pathos. The shot’s dreamy slowness and the surge of Donaggio’s music, the spectacle of Liz’s shock at the blood on her hands and Elliott’s weeping pain more in being exposed and forced to confront his sundered identity more than in being shot, all refuse to offer a sense of relief or winding down, but instead present an arrested spectacle of damage and pathos, the wreckage left even as the plot seems to be resolved in one binding and clarifying gesture.

But De Palma still isn’t finished, passing through two wry scenes where the story is “explained,” Levy giving specious diagnoses and Marino explaining sheepishly if not apologetically as to the confusion Luce’s presence caused and his miscalculation in trying to manipulate Liz into doing his job for him. Liz then expostulates to Peter as they meet in a restaurant the details of a sex change operation with the mounting glee of provocateur as some old biddy listens in with expressions of mortification. The film resolves in what proves to be an extended dream sequence in which Liz conjures up the threat of Elliott, imprisoned in the bowels of Bellevue, strangling a nurse and dressing in her clothes to escape, tracking Liz to Peter’s house and hovering beyond at the threshold of the bathroom in wait as Liz, in the shower, realises she’s trapped and tries to retrieve Ted’s razor for defence. De Palma expands here on the famous dream sequence at the end of Carrie but in a far more elaborate and spectacular manner. De Palma clearly signals we’re watching a fantasy even before he gives the game away as Elliott, after strangling the nurse, strips off her uniform to reveal white lingerie, the mirror-image of what Liz wore in his office, unwrapped with delight whilst fellow inmates, a collective of thronging geeks and gibbering weirdoes, watch in delight from high vantages as if we’ve stumbled into some Ken Russell version of Poe’s The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Feather.

Cut to a signature De Palma point-of-view shot, the unseen killer lurking in the bushes outside Peter’s house, before finding Liz in the shower. Liz catches sight of the nurse shoes sticking out into view beyond the bathroom door, and begins a quiet, wary attempt to leave the shower and grab Ted’s razor from the medicine cabinet. Only for the killer to suddenly, somehow vacate the shoes, and appear behind Liz to cut her throat. Liz awakens, screaming, reacting in fear as Peter charges in to check on her. Dressed To Kill’s circuit closes just where it started, Liz in Kate’s bed, dreaming of sex and murder in the shower. This sequence at once allows De Palma to fully engage his most baroque impulses, particularly the long, soaring overhead crane shot of Elliott stripping the nurse whilst his audience – the film viewers – watch in delight from above, and the spasm of random, oneiric action at the very end. Here Dressed To Kill surrenders to perfectly enter into a state of dream logic, particularly in the killer’s final defiance of space, the sense of threat invading Liz’s mind and firing her fight-flight reflexes even whilst now seemingly safely cocooned within suburban normality, a place De Palma plainly has no trust in to deliver us from evil. Dressed To Kill saw De Palma branded and pilloried for his perceived sins and also hailed as a great cinematic voice, but most usefully it also propelled him on to other career heights through the 1980s, whilst its success helped inspire a particular Hollywood variety of giallo film distinct from the slasher movie craze, including movies like Richard Marquand’s Jagged Edge (1985), Kenneth Branagh’s Dead Again (1991), and Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992).

1930s, Horror/Eerie

White Zombie (1932)

Director: Victor Halperin
Screenwriter: Garnett Weston

By Roderick Heath

Victor Halperin’s White Zombie holds status as one of the true oddities of classic Hollywood Horror cinema. The Chicago-born Halperin and his brother Edward, who often served as his producer, were entrepreneurial Hollywood players: Victor broke into moviemaking penning the screenplay of 1922’s The Danger Point, debuted as a director on Greater Than Marriage (1924), and served as writer, producer, and director on the Agnes Ayres vehicle When A Girl Loves (1924). Like many other Hollywood talents the Halperins had difficulty negotiating the transition to sound, but when the enormous popularity of Béla Lugosi’s star-making vehicle Dracula (1931) unleashed a craze for Horror films, the brothers mounted what was then a relative rarity, an independently produced film, filmed on a budget of $50,000, making canny used of Universal Studios’ infrastructure and staff and managing to land Lugosi for one week’s work a few hundred dollars. Today Halperin is best remembered by far for White Zombie. The film’s profitability and popularity gained Halperin a fresh studio contract with Paramount, although his two horror follow-ups, Supernatural (1933) and Revolt of the Zombies (1936), were interesting but sketchy disappointments, and the director himself reportedly disliked working in the genre despite his affinity with it. Later Halperin worked at the Poverty Row studio PRC, managing the occasional oddity like the Jack London adaptation Torture Ship (1938), before retiring from directing at 47: he would live for another 41 years.

White Zombie also owes some of its stature to being the first zombie movie, albeit one with few links to the subgenre as we recognise it today. The infamously hard-living journalist and travel writer William Seabrook had grabbed international attention with his report on Haitian voodoo practises in his 1929 book The Magic Island, popularising the word “zombie.” A play by Kenneth Webb took the word as its title and gave inspiration to Halperin, but legal tussles obliged Halperin to amend his own title. The film’s early vignettes, including Haitians burying bodies in the middle of the road to prevent them being resurrected, are drawn directly from Seabrook’s book. One famous episode recounted in the book was the story of a young bride who realises she’s attending a wedding party where all the guests are dead: Halperin references this with his own benighted wedding but inverts the situation so it’s the bride who joins the undead ranks. But White Zombie is really more a classical fairy tale, with its central villain, the notorious dark sorcerer “Murder” Legendre (Lugosi) offered as a figure akin to Koschei the Dread from Slavic myth or Atlantes from Orlando Furioso, a figure of vast and evil power ensconced in a fortress, snatching away the decorous maiden and suborning all to his will.

Like Karl Freund’s The Mummy from the same year, White Zombie’s minatory charge stems from the way it hovers stylistically in a grey zone between silent and sound cinema, between generic Horror cinema and something more primal and poetic. The film’s opening credits unfold over the burial in the road, the ritual singing of the funeral party offering a stark and throbbing rhythm on sound. Upon this scene intrudes a horse-drawn coach carrying the young about-to-be-marrieds Madeleine Short and Neil Parker (Madge Bellamy and John Harron). Neil and Madeleine have come to Haiti to be married after accepting the hospitality and patronage of Charles Beaumont (Robert W. Frazer), a local plantation owner they met on a cruise, with the promise of a job for Neil as Beaumont’s agent in New York. “A cheerful introduction for you to our West Indies,” Neil comments to Madeleine after rolling over the fresh grave. Halperin follows this immediate with the first and most notable example of his peculiar imagistic imagination, cutting to a shot of the carriage rolling along the lonely, shadowy country road with a pair of huge, glowing eyes appearing as a spectral presence tracking the vehicle’s passage, before revealing a tall figure standing by the road waiting for the carriage.

The huge eyes become smaller and zero in on the figure’s head, telling the viewer this figure is an uncanny, threatening, very interested presence with supernatural power. The driver (Clarence Muse) halts to ask the figure for directions, and we gain our first proper glimpse of Lugosi as Legendre, a Satanic figure with blazing, mesmeric eyes, widow’s peak sharp as a scalpel, flaring eyebrows and inward-crooking beard forks. Legendre approaches the carriage and clasps Madeleine’s trailing white silk scarf even as he holds her and Neil rapt with his powerful gaze. Against the night horizon, upon a slope above the road, a procession of slowly moving, disquieting figures, men the coach driver recognises instinctively: “Zombies!” The driver whips up the horses and charges away, leaving Legendre with the scarf in hand, much to his satisfaction. When the carriage finally arrives at the Beaumont house, a place of lush splendour and genteel pretence, Madeleine and Neil listen to the driver’s credulous explanation that the people they saw were the living dead, and the driver points to the line of figures moving down a slope silhouetted against the sky in fear, declaring these to be the zombies.

A mysterious man approaching through the shadowy garden of the Beaumont estate proves to be Dr Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn), a missionary and theologian who’s been invited by Beaumont to officiate at the couple’s wedding and a hearty, reassuring figure. He dispels the eerie atmosphere, but only to a degree, as even he admits that Haiti is a place filled with such mysteries that would “turn your hair grey.” Bruner becomes uncomfortable as he listens to Neil and Madeleine’s explanation of why they’re here and what Beaumont has promised them, noting that Beaumont never struck him as such an altruistic romantic. Halperin illustrates how right Bruner is, as Beaumont (Robert Frazer) is seen instructing his manservant Silver (Brandon Hurst), asking if he’s heard anything from “that gentleman” and quickly enough revealing that his actual motivation for inviting the young couple is because he’s in love with Madeleine and wants to find some way to cleave them apart. Even as he greets the couple warmly and declares himself ready to help them along, Beaumont is planning to head out and visit Legendre, a dark sorcerer and voodoo master, who promises he can render Madeleine Beaumont’s passive and obedient slave.

Beaumont’s visit to the sugar mill Legendre owns is one of the more delicately strange and important sequences in Horror cinema. Legendre’s zombie slaves toil in shuffling, dead-eyed ranks to feed cane into a huge grinding machine, itself driven by zombies turning the gears, machinery still working obliviously as one of the zombies trips and falls into the feed chute to be chewed up along with the cane. Halperin betrays unique awareness of how sound cinema could operate in the genre here, allowing the unnerving creak and grind of the machinery and the unnatural silence of the zombies to forge the uncanny atmosphere as well as draw out the fascinating thematic undercurrents of what we’re seeing. Later, he uses the ambient croaks of frogs and insects, and the bloodcurdling shriek of a vulture to equally odd and unnerving effect. Seeds for the ominous sound design of David Lynch in this, conjuring oneiric and psychological dimensions beyond what visuals can gain on their own. Indeed, White Zombie, described by Phil Hardy as “one of the underground classics of horror,” feels like a root leading as much to Lynch, Kenneth Anger, and other icons of underground and experimental cinema and surrealist music videos, as it does to George Romero’s Dead movies and his manifold imitators.

White Zombie certainly birthed a subgenre followed by zombie movies with highly varying levels of ethnographic validity and dramatic tension, like Roy William Neill’s Black Moon (1934), Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With A Zombie (1943), Edward L. Cahn’s Zombies of Mora Tau (1957), and on to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979) and Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987). But the film’s more vital influence feels more rarefied, writing cheques more exalted filmmakers like Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, Ingmar Bergman, and Lynch would cash. Something about White Zombie seems to sit outside the normal boundaries of the liminal. Some of this air of the alien is due to the archaic, shoestring production, like the wheezing, tinny classical music on the soundtrack: the glaze of oldness as an aesthetic unto itself has a taunting appeal, the awareness of the limitations of past technology operating in its own way as a force of black magic itself, sustaining the ghostly presence of people long dead. But it also connects to the otherworldly charge of Halperin’s carefully composed visuals, which by contrast to the primitive sound still retain vibrant lustre. The early shot of the huge, spectral eyes that shrink and find their place in Legendre’s head is a marvellous jolt of visual invention, whilst the column of gnarled and mindless zombies tracking Legendre around the dark Universal backlot standing in for Haiti are a memorable, eerie sight, bolstering the idea of the land beyond the wrought iron boundaries of the plantation as ruled over by primal and unnatural forces which know no easy quieting, where the dead walk and the irrational still rules.

Legendre’s sugar mill offers a wealth of hallucinatory space around the dark grinding machines and hobbling black bodies. The stout but carefully crafted gates that separate Legendre’s managerial space evoke the pretences of Old World civility erected as a barrier to separate from the ruler from the ruled, whilst also allowing Halperin to work through his recurring fascination with images captured spying through barriers and loopholes. Beaumont’s visit to Legendre sees the self-deluding and desperate planter begging Legendre to facilitate his desire to make Madeleine fall in love with him – “If she were to disappear for a month!” – but Legendre tells him with detached thoughtfulness that she is too deeply in love with Neil and implies his only option for obtaining her is to make her into a zombie. Legendre hands him a vial of the powder he uses for the zombie-making ritual and tells him a pinprick will suffice on some object, but Beaumont initially announces his refusal to take this option. Legendre hovers outside Beaumont’s house whilst the wedding proceeds within, Beaumont making desperate entreaty to Madeleine to her love-struck disinterest.

This finally provokes Beaumont to a desperate, fateful gesture that directly engages a folkloric feel as he hands Madeleine a rose impregnated with the zombifying powder. This causes her to pitch over and collapse, apparently dead, at the wedding banquet. The visuals in this sequence are particularly memorable in the sharp alternations of romantic and sepulchral imagery. The impending wedding amidst the splendour of Beaumont’s mansion with its gilt fixtures and candelabra and flowers has some of the teeming lushness of Josef von Sternberg. Legendre without exists in a hoary netherworld as he presents the equally folkloric figure of death intruding upon a wedding, standing before an ornate gateway as the master of life and death, the dark antithesis to the settled, ordered pretence and ritual sustained within the house. Legendre, watched over the harshly shrieking vulture that seems to be his familiar, clutches Madeleine’s white scarf as he takes a candle from a carriage lamp and carves it into a voodoo doll so he can work his influence over the hapless bride.

Another seminal 1932 Horror film White Zombie bears a striking similarity to is Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, a resemblance particularly keen when comparing Dreyer’s tour of a mysterious abode where the shadows of dancers play on walls with Halperin’s take on the same idea, finding a way of acknowledging the world beyond the primal drama consuming the protagonist without dispelling the mood of oneiric isolation. Neil is glimpsed in a tavern drinking away his sorrow after Madeleine’s burial, the revelry around him casting shadows on the wall, amidst which he sees Madeleine’s spectral, pleading visage. Neil, close to madness with grief and drink, stumbles up the path to the cemetery to visit Madeleine’s mausoleum, only for Halperin to fade out as his scream echoes from within in finding Madeleine’s body gone. The fairy tale qualities of the film, focusing on objects like the cursed rose given at the wedding and the climactic images of the possessed princess in the dark tower under the sorcerer’s spell, connect with a nascent surrealist sensibility. Neil’s desperate liebestod comes touched with a morbidly hysterical, almost necrophiliac edge as he goes to join Madeleine in the grave, intercut with the sight of Legendre and Beaumont supervising as the zombies remove Maadeleine’s coffin from its place and open, revealing her doll-like form, nominally dead now the perfect, passive feminine love object. Years later Buñuel would approximate aspects of Halperin’s vision in Abismos de Pasion (1953), whilst Halperin’s insidious feel for animal life infesting his conjured world is also Buñuel-like.

Halperin and his screenwriter Garnett Weston deliberately tried to lessen the reliance on dialogue, to make the production easier and expecting beforehand that on a stringent budget they weren’t likely to land particularly good actors. It’s commonly noted that the two romantic leads, Bellamy and Harron, are insipid, and Frazer, with his shock of dark hair and sensual lips, has a Byronic quality that’s good for his part even as he often walks the edges of the overripe. All the more space for Lugosi to dominate. Lugosi’s star wattage was at its zenith when he made White Zombie, which makes it all the more interesting that he was willing to appear in a low-budget independent film, particularly after he had so recently turned down the role of the monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), in doing so handing over an opportunity to the man about to be his great, even eclipsing rival as a horror star, Boris Karloff. The attraction of the role is obvious, however, offering Lugosi, Dracula notwithstanding, his greatest genre role. Legendre is a perfectly iconic villain with his unmistakeable appearance and costume, a figure of dread and sepulchral stature supllying an intelligent brand of evil, relishing the power he wields with an edge of vengeful purpose.

Weston’s dialogue registers on a more subtly sinister key than Lugosi’s better-known Dracula lines, allowing Lugosi to turn his much-mimicked but still unique intonations to drawing out an undercurrent of sardonic and self-satisfied menace, most pointedly in his comment to Beaumont as the planter slips ever deeply under his power after once snubbing him, gripping the sorcerer’s hand in a bleakly useless appeal to his humanity: “You refused to shake hands with me once, I remember…Well, well. We understand each-other better – now.” Legendre watches Beaumont succumbing with a quiet, almost indulgent sense of entertainment whilst he whittles another candle down to a voodoo doll of the planter. White Zombie exploits the image that had been built around Lugosi even well before he started playing Dracula on stage, as a man imbued with preternatural stature and mesmeric eyes often highlighted with pencil spotlights. In Dracula this was part of his role as the ultimate dark seducer-destroyer, a bringer of sexual evil, whereas Legendre is in that regard a more ambiguous creature.

It’s signalled that Legendre is driven on by resentment and a cruel sense of poetic justice, as he points out the members of his favoured zombie cabal, consisting of people who tried to control or sit in judgment on him, including his former mentor in sorcery, a minister of the government, and the state executioner “who might have executed me!” Beaumont immediately and unthinkingly gets on Legendre’s wrong side when he neglects to accept the sorcerer’s proffered hand at their first meeting. Legendre’s delight in controlling people has the inevitable dimension of claiming the virginal young beauty as he zombifies Madeleine but also gains a homoerotic edge as he does the same to Beaumont, taunting him in his bleakly transforming state with the dread knowledge, “You are the first man to know what is happening,” and regretting that Beaumont can no longer speak to describe the experience. The sight of Beaumont, twisting up, slowly losing control of his limbs and faculties as a malignant force takes him over, speaks eloquently nonetheless of a state that actually seems to live up to the old cliché of a fate worse than death.

Where the vampire becomes in death a wielder of mysterious power and therefore has long served as a metaphor for potency ranging from the political to the erotic, the zombie is the opposite, driven on purely by either the will of a master or the remnant of a life instinct. Zombie movies have long since become detached from the zombie figure’s roots in the black magic esoterica attached to voodoo religious tradition. That’s largely for understandable reasons: dealing with voodoo obliges storytellers to anchor their stories in a specific cultural and historical dimension, often with an edge of racist assumption even despite the best intentions of the filmmakers. But the figure of the mindlessly shuffling walking dead nonetheless retains a potency that can be applied to a variety of paradigms. Despite its pointed metaphors and mindful aspects White Zombie doesn’t entirely avoid such discomfort, sporting one actor in blackface playing ancient witch doctor Pierre (Dan Crimmins), who Bruner visits to learn more about Legendre, whilst Muse’s performances manages to imbue his part with an edge of baleful awareness and solicitous purpose even as it also treads the edges of bug-eyed, timorous stereotype.

The very title of White Zombie invokes games of racial coding – a white zombie is something else again from a black zombie, apparently. But Halperin’s film also predicts the later detachment of concept from root in the scene at Legendre’s mill, the zombie immediately and plainly rendered a vessel of potent metaphorical malleability. Legendre is also a classical figure of devolved European culture, with his great gothic castle grafted onto a new world shore like some cancerous offshoot. The vision of Legendre’s sugar mill zeroes in on the ghostly echo of slavery sustained in zombie folklore with Legendre as a Baron Samedi figure, whilst also linking it to a more general, mordant portrayal of exploitative labour that must have echoed with excruciating clarity for a Depression-era audience: “They work faithfully,” Legendre tells Beaumont as he encourages the planter to take them up for his own workforce, “They are not worried about long hours.” The perfect state of capitalist endeavour.

It’s also tempting to view Legendre as an analogue for the rising tide of totalitarianism in Europe, a prototypical fascist dictator suborning people to his will, as well as embodying the dark side of western colonialism and exploitation. The zombie cadre that follows Legendre consists of defeated and enslaved enemies from the ranks of the local law and politics, as well as rivals and his former mentor in magic “whose secrets I tortured out of him,” rivals in power suborned in a fashion comparable to fascist takeover of the mechanisms of civic democracy, although at the same time he also exhibits a mischievously subversive attitude towards state power. In this regard he also rather strongly resembles the type of gangster-outlaw hero so popular in films around the same time, subverting the machinery of justice and morality to service his own will. His enthralled servants wear the symbols of defeated creeds – one has an iron cross slung around his neck, whilst his former mentor still wears a robe inscribed with cabalistic signs. Halperin would reiterate this shade of political commentary, however clumsily, in Revolt of the Zombies, where the story revolves around trying to bury the potential zombie threat stemming out of a misbegotten attempt to use them as soldiers during World War I.

The theme of domination also resonates on a more interpersonal level. White Zombie offers a dark lampoon the concept of the trophy wife, the beauty suborned to plutocratic ego as both Legendre and Beaumont in their way attempt to impose their will on Madeleine. Beaumont’s desperate passion shades into a sense of entitled prerogative that drives him, despite his scruples, to impose on his beloved a most terrible fate, only to then cringe in remorse as he beholds her, a dead-eyed, blank-minded automaton playing piano in Legendre’s castle, a prettified object. Beaumont is remorseful as he perceives the ultimate logic of his choices, only to quickly pay the price. For Legendre, such perfect annihilation of personality and agency seems on the other hand the most relished edge of his power, steadily consuming every being that comes into range, happy to force the mindless Madeleine to slay Neil when he comes to rescue her, and having his zombie cadre carry the screaming Silver out to the castle battlements and drop him into the whirlpool churning below.

After finding Madeleine’s body missing, Neil visits Bruner, who speaks sceptically about the supernatural even as he readies for a contest of magic, showing Neil statutes in Haitian law against poisoning in a form that reproduces the appearance of zombiehood. Bruner has no pretences to being a sorcerer but explains in his position as a preacher he’s picked up lore from all sorts of sources. Bruner and Neil set out across country and approach the territory where Legendre dominates, a veritable fiefdom of death where he rules unchallenged, and camp on the wave-tossed beach beneath Legendre’s citadel, Neil stricken with fever. Legendre’s keep, based around a central set redressed from Dracula, is a marvellously incongruous outpost of gothic architecture and outsized aristocratic pretence, a space entrapping Legendre’s dark fantasies and egotisms as well as his human pets, with an interior replete with odd and inchoate dimensions, including a flooded dungeon and a whirlpool below for easy disposal of unwanted guests. Halperin returns to liebestod imagery as he splits his frame between the mindless Madeleine hovering on a high balcony in the keep whilst Neil, visionary in his feverish state, senses her presence and the bond of their love achieves its own, delirious spiritual force, and the young husband begins a stumbling journey towards the castle.

White Zombie occasionally signals the relative freedom of the pre-code independent filmmakers as Halperin offers glimpses of Madeleine before her nuptials in her underwear, and gore, as when Neil shoots a zombie only behold the bloodless hole it leaves in its chest, tame of course by later standards but provocative enough for the time, particularly the latter touch, at a time when Lugosi’s Dracula wasn’t even shown biting anyone or being staked. Moreover such touches simply feed rather than disrupt the weird atmosphere, marking out the corporeal stakes of the magical drama. Halperin’s unusual, oblique, reality-destabilising grammar approach is maintained even as the film nears its ending. Legendre mesmerically directs Madeleine to stab the collapsed Neil after he manages to penetrate the house, stirring the white-clad captive from her bed and drawing her through the cavernous twists of the castle for the deed, filming her through a loophole in a balustrade in a frame charged with a sense of onerous constriction. As she moves to stab Neil, a hand reaches into the frame and grips her wrist, staying the killing blow, the unseen figure’s black cape also visible.

This helps identify that it’s actually Bruner who stops her blow, having followed Neil into the house and dressed in the cape in literally assuming the mantle of opposing white magician, but Halperin transforms the gesture into something rather more abstract, almost like the hand of fate, or the author, intervening to break the chains of Legendre’s control. As the zombies shuffle in to aid their master in the final battle, Halperin shows their ragged, stalky shadows cast on a wall, incarnations of the darkness scuttling out of its burrow to meet the white of Madeleine’s nightgown and Neil’s suit. As Madeleine takes up Legendre’s dagger the sorcerer’s command from the table where he was talking at Beaumont, the latter attempts in his last throes of transformation to prevent her, with no success. The climax comes as sudden, hysterical blur of action as Neil finds himself surrounded by the zombies, Bruner offering an amusingly curt answer to Legendre’s vast necromantic power by sneaking up behind him and knocking him out with a blow to the head, before ordering the zombies to leap over the battlements into the surging surf.

The recovering Legendre smashes a vial of his zombifying powder on the masonry when Bruner and Neil try to charge him, and holds them at bay with his will, only for Beaumont, advancing with the last of his human strength and purpose, to ambush and grab the sorcerer, and drive them both over the precipice to their deaths, whereupon Madeleine returns to life. The film’s simple yet rich narrative closes a tragic circle as Beaumont undoes the evil he set in motion and even provides a proof that his passion was as authentic for Madeleine as Neil’s, as he uses his last breath to save her and the man she loves as well as avenging himself. Halperin signs off with a leave-‘em-laughing touch of Bruner interrupting the couple’s reuniting kiss to ask for a light for his pipe, but it actually comes as a welcome release from the atmosphere Halperin has sustained despite all limitations for the previous seventy minutes, that suffocating netherworld where the dead walk and romance has poisoned thorns under the pretty petals.

1960s, Auteurs, Horror/Eerie, Swedish cinema

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

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Vargtimmen

Director/Screenwriter: Ingmar Bergman

In memoriam: Max von Sydow 1929-2020

By Roderick Heath

The hour between night and dawn…when most people die, sleep is deepest, nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their worst anguish, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most babies are born. – note in the screenplay of Hour of the Wolf

As a filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman synthesised two vital artistic modes, the psychological realism of Scandinavian theatre, and the essential faith of Modernism, that understanding of the world depended on perception and therefore art had to find ways to replicate modes of perception, groping towards a rational understanding of the irrational impulse. And yet Bergman’s fascination, even obsession with pathological behaviour and with the dark and tangled roots of the modern psyche and civilisation repeatedly drew him towards the fantastical, the hallucinatory, and the oneiric, conveyed through cinema that often reached back to the supple blend of naturalism and expressionistic stylisation achieved in early masters of Scandinavian cinema like Carl Dreyer, Benjamin Christensen, and Victor Sjöström. So, much as it might once have infuriated some of his high-minded worshippers in his heyday to say so, Bergman’s films very often grazed the outskirts of Horror cinema, and sometimes went the full distance. The anxious, unstable, beleaguered tenor of Bergman’s mature work often employed imagery sourced from the same wellsprings as Horror’s lexicon of preoccupations and metaphors.

The Seventh Seal (1957), the film that made Bergman an international star of the art form, revisited the traditions of medieval folk tales and images of Death personified and triumphant, inhabiting a world of wind-thrashed coastlines and cavernous castles. The Magician (1958) was a queasy lampoon of gothic horror imagery and the mystique of the carnival sorcerer. Through A Glass Darkly (1961) featured a young psychotic who envisions God as a giant spider resting in the centre of a web. Persona (1966) annexed imagery redolent of both Horror and Sci-Fi in its exploration of mental collapse and psychic merging, mental landscapes, climaxing with its two heroines’ faces blended into a monstrous visage fit for a B-monster movie. Bergman in turn had a deep influence on the genre. The Seventh Seal heavily informed the revival of Gothic Horror in the late 1950s, including Mario Bava and Roger Corman’s Poe films, particularly The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Most famously, The Virgin Spring (1960), with its folklore-inspired tale of a medieval patriarch who avenges his saintly daughter’s despoiling and murder by some brigands, provided the springboard for Wes Craven’s notorious Last House On The Left (1972), and through it a vast number of films revolving around rape and vigilante violence.

1968’s Hour of the Wolf and 1978’s The Serpent’s Egg represent perhaps the closest Bergman came to making proper Horror movies. The latter, the result of Bergman’s brief exile from his native Sweden over a tax dispute, is a bleak and miasmic portrait of the waning Weimar era in Germany where proto-Nazidom is engaged in voyeurism and grotesque experimentation. Hour of the Wolf belongs amidst a string of films Bergman produced in the 1960s preoccupied with the flailing of the artist before the interminable pressures of the modern world and the impossibility of entirely escaping it, and the accompanying morbid psychology resulting from the tension between inner and outer worlds. The film in context mediates the portrayal of an artist retreating from reality in Persona and the depiction of being plunged back into its brute immediacy in Shame (1968). Hour of the Wolf also reflects Bergman’s adoption of the island of Fårö as a base for working, a place of untrammelled creative freedom where he built a film studio and retreated to make movies each year after expounding his other great artistic pursuit, directing theatre. Hour of the Wolf has been described as the first film of a distinct Fårö trilogy, followed by Shame and The Passion of Anna (1969), in offering the island not just as a shooting location and artistic retreat but a muse in itself.

The movies Bergman made around this time might be said by a sceptical soul to explore the ground between exploiting the freedom to meditate and know one’s inner world and licence to navel gaze mercilessly. But Hour of the Wolf drags something rare and transfixing out of such depths, at once a patently autobiographical movie for Bergman, who was experiencing insomnia and anxiety during its making, and a fantasy that inverts the usual struggle to rationalise in his work. Bergman might have essentially invented the title concept though it has some echoes in folklore, to explain the long and harrowing nocturnal vigils he was experiencing, and later claimed to have successfully exorcised once the film was made, filled in with remembered childhood nightmares and conjurations. Bergman’s notoriously unstable private life, already with a string of marriages and mistresses behind him, was experiencing one of its periodic moments of calm, as he was in the middle of a five-year affair with Ullmann, who was pregnant during the film’s shoot. Not surprisingly, then, the film is also a portrayal of sexual guilt and self-recrimination. Earlier Horror cinema is also stitched into its texture, the imprint of Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921) in style and theme, dealing as it did with a self-destructive husband claimed by dark forces, and Bergman’s love in his teenage years for Hollywood Horror movies, particularly Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), affection and inspiration paid heed to in the casting of Georg Rydeberg, who bears distinct resemblance to Lugosi.

Hour of the Wolf stands as probably Bergman’s most surreal and visually imaginative work, a highpoint in his collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, carefully removing the usual props for certainty in cinematic narrative without entirely dissolving into incoherence. Hour of the Wolf commences with an opening title sequence sporting credits unspooling in stark white letters upon black, with the sounds of a film crew working to prepare the set and beginning the shoot on the soundtrack. Bergman originally intended for this metafictional touch to be more overt in a manner close to what he had offered in Persona, where the texture of film itself stands in for the psychic reality of his protagonists, but eventually abandoned it, leaving this supernal aspect perhaps to underline the draft-like nature of the drama here, his refusal to elucidate in the manner of his more realistic dramas driven by a need to engage with a portrayal of the irrational as its own consuming zone. An expository scrawl, offered as a direct statement from Bergman or rather from an authorial stand-in, tells of how he interviewed Alma Borg (Ullmann), the wife of famed painter Johan Borg, who had mysteriously vanished on the Frisian island of Baltrum where the couple were living. Very pregnant Alma is then presented as speaking directly to the camera, not exactly as if appearing in a documentary but rather speaking to the audience as an immediate and personal presence. Alma, calm and melancholy, declares as her first line, “I have nothing more to say.”

Alma tells her interviewer that she’s handed over Johan’s diary and that she’s expecting to give birth in a month: she was found to be with child by a doctor shortly before she and Johan came back to the island. She comments that they came there for quiet, and that Johan liked her because she was quiet, and reiterates her intention to remain in the house they shared for seven years. Cut to the arrival of the couple back on Baltrum, with Johan played by Bergman’s favoured acting alter ego Max Von Sydow. The arrival, as if being carried across the Styx on a motor boat, gives way to a deadpan long shot of them tramping their way up a rocky shore, Johan pushing a wheelbarrow that squeaks interminably during their ascent. Already we’ve made a free-fall out of any kind of modern world or any sense of safely cocooning society, back into a zone not really that different from the medieval world Bergman explored in The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring. Alma’s comments at the opening suggest she and Johan were a very mutually supportive couple early on, back when he was struggling, occasionally taking work to help keep them going. Now Johan has become successful and lauded, but the couple still maintain the same Spartan, retreating lifestyle: when Alma asks Johan for money to take care of a budgeting shortfall he hands over a wad of cash, only for her to complain because she takes pride in her bookkeeping and wants to explain how rigorous she’s been.

Alma and Johan’s sanctuary is evidently supposed to contain an idyllic bohemian lifestyle, spurning distractions and living sufficiently together in splendid isolation. But the dark side of such a life quickly begins to manifest when Johan returns from a painting jaunt looking distracted and coldly rebuffing Alma’s show of affection. A note of unspoken strain persists between them as Johan begins staying awake all night to the dawn, and eventually he suddenly presents Alma with his sketchbook and begins showing her characters he claims to have recently met out on the island. His record of perverse, demonic presences includes a woman who always threatens to take off her hat (“Her face comes off with it, you see.”), various spider-like and insectoid hominids, and “the worst of all,” a bird-man Johan claims is related to Papageno from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but seems far more threatening than that character. These strange visions and weird people Alma at first takes for artistic fancies welling from Johan’s ambiguously troubled mind, until she is visited whilst doing laundry by an elderly woman (Naima Wifstrand), dressed all in white including a broad hat in a rather antique style, mentioning she’s 216 years old (“What am I saying? I mean 76.”). She seems to know not only about Johan’s sketches but tells Alma she should prevent Johan destroying them as he intends, and also that he keeps his diary with them in a satchel. After the woman leaves, Alma digs out the satchel and begins reading the diary.

Johan’s entries recount a string with encounters with some of the people he’s sketched, who all seem in flashback to be ordinary if sometimes odd folk from the island’s smattering of social elite. Baron von Merkens (Erland Josephson) drives up to Johan whilst he paints and invites him and Alma to his house for a dinner party. A frantic fellow in a beret in glasses calling himself Heerbrand (Ulf Johansson) pursues Johan as he trudges home and explains he’s a school counsellor, his job to “probe souls and turn them inside out.” Johan, aggravated beyond all reason by the man possibly because he’s the one Johan has previously mentioned to Alma as possibly homosexual, suddenly struck him and demanded he shut up. He also records an encounter with a beautiful blonde woman (Ingrid Thulin), who stalks up to him on the beach and immediately falls into an intimate rapport with the distressed artist: later it’s revealed this woman is Johan’s former lover Veronica Vogel, with whom he carried on a long affair that overlapped with his marriage to Alma before it was exposed to the world.

Veronica reads to Johan a disturbing letter she received full of veiled threats: “Dreams can be exposed. The wells will run dry, and other liquids will moisten your white loins.” When the Borgs attend the dinner party, they meet Von Merkens’ wife Corinne (Gertrud Fridh), brother Ernst (Bertil Anderberg), mother (Gudrun Brost), friend and archivist Lindhost (Rydeberg), as well as Heerbrand, who calmly remarks that “we’ve met before” as he shakes Johan’s hand. During dinner and after, the couple are regaled with their hosts’ discomforting knowledge of their private lives as well as public fame. Corinne keeps Johan’s portrait of Veronica in her bedroom as a combination idol and fetish, and shows off bruises left by her lover. Heerbrand needles Johan by recounting their meeting and his assault to the party, not mentioning his name but still with the apparent intent of provoking him.

Bergman’s theatrical side and his cinematic imagination grew in tandem and indeed drew from each-other: whilst his creative palette remained almost strictly interpersonal, often indeed interiorised, he had by this stage in his career grown into a genuine cinema master. Hour of the Wolf exemplifies Bergman’s ability to, with a few quick, deft cuts and camera set-ups, create effects with an almost physical impact on his audience in describing the emotional and psychological world of his characters. The hazy blend of fantasy and veracity that permeates Hour of the Wolf is bolstered by perturbing film grammar. Johan’s encounter with Heerbrand is a prime example, starting with a close shot of Johan marching up a slope, in motion with the sounds his feet crunching grass in forced long strides as he glances behind him, before cutting next to the pursuing Heerbrand also in a close shot, the sense of motion, exertion, and tension made manifest before the retreat to a long tracking shot as Heerbrand catches up with his quarry, now imbued with an edge of cruel comedy. Elsewhere his static framing constantly seeks a sense of trapped energy. Johan embracing Alma tenderly before turning from her coldly is framed with flapping laundry entering the frame, somehow describing both their forlorn domestic space and the frantic movement of their mutually locked minds. Both Alma and Veronica are filmed from over Johan’s shoulder as they make desperate appeals, electric in emotional intensity and yet not quite able to take whole and proper form beyond the range of the man they share.

Alma holding her hands around a guttering candle during on the night vigils becomes a veritable emblem for Bergmanesque drama, replete with religious connotations and a feeling for the mental and physical strain of lasting out long, assailed nights in a cold country. The beginning of the dinner party at the Von Merkens’ house begins with a point-of-view shot that may be for Johan or Alma or both as they’re introduced to the family and other guests, looming faces caught in Nykvist’s lens, before a hard cut to the diners taking their chairs at the dinner table, the camera circling at speed and the arc broken up by edits, creating a sense of both sociable excitement and an unpleasant edge of the frenetic amidst the tony splendour and fake conviviality of the aristocratic entertainment. The overheard talk is discontinuous and confused, littered with totemic phrases. The Borgs become increasingly uneasy as strangely barbed pieces of conversation flit by, like Von Merkens noting that he once bought a painting and invited the artist and other around to get a good laugh because the picture was hung upside down deliberately: “What do you say, Mister Artist? Wasn’t that a good joke?” whilst Corinne boasts of travelling the world to lose weight. “It’s supposed to be pleasurable to be humiliated,” another guest notes, which seems to be the name of the game.

Lindhost entertains the crowd by putting on a performance with the Von Merkens’ puppet theatre, a record playing a passage of The Magic Flute as he manipulates the figure on the tiny stage: in one of Bergman’s weirdest, almost subliminal flourishes, the figure on stage proves to be not merely a puppet but an actual human figure, going through the motions of singing. After the performance Lindhost talks through the splendours of Mozart’s music, particularly the passage where the chorus sings the name of the heroine Pamina in fractured syllables, turning it into a ritual chant to bring the dead back to life. Seeds here, obviously, Bergman’s filming of The Magic Flute in 1975, but his use of the opera here brims with a emblematical sense of its music and staging, conjuring a state between the liminal and subliminal, sane and insane, even life and death, which does not otherwise exist; the artistic creation itself forges a dream-life that henceforth retains its own peculiar reality sustained in the minds of those who encounter and truly enter into it. Johan’s celebration of his carnal lust for Veronica was transmuted into artistic achievement, but the legend of its making is now inseparable from the creation, and so both the Borgs are forced to cringe their way through the exposition of the deeply private and personal furrowed into art and then reflected back through the audience. “I have in any case,” Corinne tells Alma, “Bought a considerable piece of your husband.”

Hour of the Wolf knits a daisy-chain of images strip-mined directly from Bergman’s subconscious, as he admitted to incorporating many dreams into it, some dating back to his childhood, linking them together less with story and character than the pervasive mood of disturbed meditation that eventually dissolves into an approximation of madness. Hour of the Wolf nonetheless has a certain narrative similarity to Jean Ray’s novel Malpertuis, later filmed by Harry Kuemel in 1972, in the theme of a grand house crammed with beings with seemingly banal, harried exteriors resembling housebound gentry, and true natures of frightening import, as well as many a haunted house tale where a crumbling manse provides the shell for haggard old leftovers and proper phantoms, like Corman’s House of Usher (1960) and Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Mario Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio (1960) and Operazione Paura (1966), or Antonio Margheriti’s Danza Macabra (1964). As a project from Bergman, it also resembles a particularly toxic and self-exposing riposte to Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), taking up the same basic idea of an artist lost amongst his memories and contending with his inability to rest comfortably in a marriage but turning the intense and hermetic atmosphere created in Fellini’s dream and fantasy sequences into a sustained mood.

Whilst presenting ambiguous and threatening emblems of Johan’s ills, the Von Merkens and their circle are also sardonic caricatures of devolved nobles and hangers-on from a frustrated intelligentsia who certainly feel like accurately observed types: Hour of the Wolf suggests Bergman had spent many such an uncomfortable evening amidst such crowds, sensitive to the adulation of celebrity rather than true artistic rapport and to backhanded compliments of people resolved to steal some fire from the gods by proving a level of intellectual superiority to art and artist. This fear is underlined in the film when the guests applaud Johan for making a speech spurning any sense of personal greatness and claiming to have finally proved immune to megalomania. They also resemble the kinds of large, genteel clans that often flock around Bergman’s characters in his contemporary dramas with their urbane uncles and ancient grandmothers, and particularly twisted, diseased mirrors of the pleasure seekers of Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), by-products of repression and perversion turned cannibalistic.

Bergman often wove personal experiences and autobiographical touches into his films, eventually dedicating the last handful of films he would direct and write to entirely anecdotal portrayals of his family. Hour of the Wolf depicts one tale that would recur in other films, of being imprisoned in a cupboard with the promise that a small troll will emerge in the dark and eat his fingers and toes. Johan explains this memory to Alma during one of their night vigils and its consequences, as he calmly accepted punishment by beating from his parents rather the face the terror conjured by his own mind. The title card for the film is repeated half-way through, just before Johan tells Alma what it is. Earlier in the film, in a suffocatingly intense vignette, he sits with a watch and, proving his thesis that “a minute really is an immense amount of time,” counting the seconds as Alma is held transfixed and apprehensive. The rule of cinematic time, which usually has no relation to physical time, is thrown out here and the audience is forced to experience the mortifying tick away of the minute with Bergman’s characters, the sensation of claustrophobia enforced by the unfolding of the scene in one, long, rigorously framed shot. Alma, answering Johan’s request for her to speak about anything, mentions an observation that old couples eventually seem to resemble each-other in face and mind, moulded to each-other’s shape by time and familiarity: Alma even confesses that she hopes one day they’ll be two old, shrivelled, virtually indistinguishable beings.

Such an end seems rather to feel Johan with revulsion, having praised Alma for seeming complete in herself, liking that “God made me in one piece, that I had whole thoughts and feelings,” a complete and self-sufficient being who would be a companion and not a mystical addendum who might invade and disrupt his creative world. The Von Merkens’ circle embody much that Johan loathes and fears, a bleak survey of beings trapped together beyond natural limits, husband and wife with appetite but not love, authority and learning without purpose, dilettante appreciation without real creation. Another, vital aspect of Hour of the Wolf’s sickly texture is anxiety over the child Alma is carrying. A pivotal scene late in the film sees Johan confessing to her a dreadful deed: fishing on the rocks one day during a break from painting, he realised he was being watched by a boy of about 10, dressed in swimming trunks. As the boy came closer and crowded him before then lying on the rocks nearby in a vaguely suggestive manner, he and Johan finished up in a tussle, the boy biting him and Johan ramming him against the outcrops. Finally Johan clubbed him in a fury to death with a rock and dumped his body in the sea. Bergman and Nykvist shoot this scene as a silent movie-like sequence like they did the dream sequence in Wild Strawberries (1957), but with a new edge of the alien, lightly overexposed film making everything overbright and scorched and grainy, only atonal music heard on sound, amplifying the savagery apparent in the struggle and killing.

The vision of the dead boy suspended in the dark water bobbing to the surface briefly before sinking into the murk, reminiscent of the images of the submerged murder victim in Night of the Hunter (1955), presents a languorous blend of horror and beauty, filmed from directly overhead, white skin, dark water, black blood all afloat like an abstract painting trying to regain form before losing it altogether. Johan’s confession to this crime nonetheless remains uncertain in terms of veracity. He seems more likely to be trying to communicate to Alma some dread dream or vision regarding his fear of their child interfering with his work, as well as calling to mind the homophobic panic inherent in his reactions to Heerbrand in the boy’s provocative, sylph-like recline, everything around him charged with intimations of cloying sexuality. Meanwhile Alma’s body is growing bigger with the seed he planted in it. The allure of Veronica as a temptress contrasts the way Bergman often shoots Ullmann in close-up without make-up, snub nose and freckles the image of a raw, peasant-like form of beauty out of a Dürer or Holbein painting. Alma and Johan initially seem to be happy in the regulation form of genius male artist and adoring muse, as Johan interrupts a moment of sublime leisure where they sit embracing on their doorstep and makes Alma pose for him.

The rest of the time Alma pursues her domestic role without complaint, even satisfaction; she succeeds perfectly in her part as wife up to and beyond the point of losing Johan to his demons, and carries on as if now embodying them both, which might indeed be the ultimate meaning of Johan’s comment about her wholeness. Alma stands at a telling remove from Bergman’s celebrated run of complex and reactive female characters, although she is simple rather than crude, dedicated to her own ideal of life: she is the all too sane counterbalance to her neurotic husband, wedded to earthy things, a fort to guard against the sea swell. Nonetheless the exploration of people whose identities become inextricably joined, merged into ungainly chimera, begun in Persona recurs here, as Alma eventually confesses that she has no idea whether the Von Merkens and their circle and the demons of Johan’s visions were actually real or hallucinations she felt bound to share, compelled to enter into his reality rather than keeping him compassed in hers. At the end she even questions if the intense sensitivity of her love for Johan ultimately helped destroy him precisely because she could not provide that alternate, rock-fast beacon.

Alma’s perfection in such regard is indeed what Johan seems to find so hard to take, even as he clearly cares for her deeply, witnessed in one moment of sidelong affection as he wraps a scarf about her neck with a comforting gesture amidst the dinner party, or kisses her in trying to maintain something like mutually protective intimacy between them as the ordeal goes on. Such gestures highlight the brilliance of Von Sydow and Ullmann, caught at their height as Bergman’s ideal screen actors, with their easy chemistry and intuitive mutual awareness. Where Von Sydow was so often cast as villains and menaces and plummy oddballs in his international acting career, here Bergman depends on him absolutely to play a character threatening and pitiable all at once, a bundle of nerves who seems to set the entire, passive island landscape to vibrating. Few actors in cinema have ever managed to depict incipient instability as skilfully as Von Sydow does here, eyes lit as much by sadness as erotic compulsion and mania when he finally invades the Von Merkens castle in search of his tempting succubus, and the final wounds to his mind and heart registering as bottomless pain and absurdity upon which been pecked and gnawed to death by hovering demons is mere injury piled upon insult.

Ullmann manages to inhabit the opposite role, limpid and preternaturally sensitive to warning signs and gestures, often held as the transfixing focus of shots, particularly in her final monologue delivered in close up direct to the camera, as if Bergman wants to turn her into the human equivalent of that candle flame, a pool of brilliance in a dark universe. The tumult of Johan’s relationship with Veronica entirely contrasts his one with Alma, full of mess and fury, an addictive form of love, and Johan is driven deeper into a recessive and obsessive place as the carefully placed harpoons in his thoughts draw him back to Veronica. Von Merken eventually reveals she is now his lover, but feels obliged to surrender her to a night with Johan. Heerbrand visits the couple and invites them to another party, this one with Veronica in attendance, and also gifts Johan a small pistol to protect himself for “small game,” but which Johan quickly turns on Alma, shooting at her three times and thinking her killed. Bergman punctuates the gunshots not with familiar sound effects but with blasts of discordant music.

Johan advances towards his date with Veronica and enters the Von Merkens’ house, now a labyrinthine space, stark and largely barren, corridors stripped of all furnishing and décor and flooded with madly flapping pigeons. Amongst Bergman’s touchstones here Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) might stand up with its similar sense of unmoored geography and irrational space, strange manifestations and ghostly parties. Johan glimpses increasingly bizarre and impossible sights as he wanders the castle, like the jealous Von Merkens driven literally up the wall by his imminent cuckolding, dancing on the ceiling whilst begging Johan not to look at him. Lindhorst sprouts wings and seems to transform into a bird just after telling the hapless artist, “You see what you want to see.” The wizened old lady really does takes off her hat and her face with it, Johan struck by utter horror as he glimpses the void revealed, fake eyeball dropped into glasses of wine with the mask-face resting beside it. This image right out of nightmare succeeds in illustrating the deep-set anxiety running through most of Bergman’s films, the stripped façade of civilisation as symbolised by an icon of bygone courtliness, leaving a grotesque shell, not even a skull, but a plasticine simulacrum pocked by black holes.

The ritual of humiliation gains momentum and sting as Johan has to abase himself and perform erotic delights for the old Countess, and Lindhorst insists on preparing Johan for his lover’s role, pressing him into an antique and fanciful dressing gown and painting his face in rouge and lipstick, his macho disquiet given a mocking makeover into a drag parody that plainly identifies him as the whore in the scenario. When he finally gains the chamber where Veronica lies waiting for him, laid out stark naked upon a shroud-draped bier like a corpse delivered up for autopsy: Johan caresses her bare form worshipfully and moves to kiss her, only for Veronica to begin laughing with boisterous and sadistic delight. The sound of other laughing turning Johan’s attention aside to see the rest of the household watching on with leering, mocking pleasure at the spectacle of his utter reduction. Johan can do nothing more than thank them for “finally crossing the line – the mirror has been shattered, but what do the shards reflect?”

The fracturing of Johan’s ego and sensuous side is also, it seems, the breaking of the whole man. If the circle are vampires they’re a kind who gain sustenance from a different kind of drawn blood; if they’re Furies avenging Johan’s sins real or imagined, trolls from out of the cupboard come to punish his wild passions, they’re avengers he’s carved out of his own flesh. The last vision of Johan comes through Alma’s eyes, as the film returns to her as narrator to explain how, only lightly wounded and playing possum after John’s shooting, she ventured out after him, tracking him into a swamp where she seemed to find him slumped over a log, battered but alive. But this Johan transformed suddenly into a grimly victorious-looking Von Merkens. Johan himself is glimpsed deeper in the swamp, surrounded by the cabal, who strike at him, drawing blood: Lindhorst transforms into a black raven who delivers a savage peck whilst Johan suffers their blows without cries or attempts to flee, as if resigned to accepting whatever fate they have for him, before he finally seems to vanish into the black swamp water, the demons disappearing too, leaving Alma alone in the dark and tangled mire.

The coda returns to Alma speaking direct to camera, still unsure if what she witnessed was real or the product of a mutual psychosis, beginning her own watch in the hour of the wolf with new life waiting within her. Hour of the Wolf ultimately makes a virtue out of a central premise that might seem to limit it, that the kinds of anxieties that keep artists awake at night, kept in a constant churn by creative process, have a value in themselves, speaking to the part of us that is most human and the part most monstrous. Hour of the Wolf was long underrated amidst Bergman’s films, but today it seems like of his greatest achievements, a by-product of artistic angst that finds a brilliant and disturbing form for it. Where many of Bergman’s films spoke with uncanny precision to like minds of his moment, Hour of the Wolf retains a special edge precisely because it is at once more vague and more allusive in tracing the edges of the psyche’s recesses. It’s also one that’s had its own, peculiar influence on films at the nexus of metafiction and genre film: it’s difficult to imagine works as disparate as The Shining (1980) or Mulholland Drive (2001) without it.

1970s, 1980s, Action-Adventure, Horror/Eerie

Grizzly (1976) / Alligator (1980)

Directors: William Girdler / Lewis Teague
Screenwriters: Harvey Flaxman, David Sheldon / John Sayles

By Roderick Heath

The colossal success of Jaws (1975) immediately provoked exploitation filmmakers the world over to imitate Steven Spielberg’s foundational blockbuster just before a great sea-change in the way B-moves were sold took hold in the changeover from grindhouses and drive-ins to home video. Italy’s exploitation industry took up the challenge with particular gusto, churning out movies like Tentacles (1977), Orca (1977), and The Last Shark (1980), with other entries coming from locales as diverse as Mexico, with Tintorea (1978), and Australia, in the form of Russell Mulcahy’s Razorback (1984). But the best Jaws riffs generally came from closer to the source. Up-and-comer Joe Dante whipped together Piranha (1976) for Roger Corman, with a script by earnest young novelist turned film player John Sayles, who would return to the theme four years later with Alligator. William Girdler, another enterprising young director staking a space for himself in the exploitation movie zone through the early 1970s, offered his take with Grizzly. All three films wielded their own particular spin on the Jaws template, pleasing crowds by happily indulging levels of gore beyond what Spielberg’s relatively clean-cut film offered, but also in weaving their own creative enquiries and elaborations on the big hit’s subtexts.

The two hemispheres of Jaws’ storyline managed without underlining to describe the situation of the United States in 1975, still smarting over Watergate and Vietnam. The basic narrative tension in Jaws revolved in its first half around the spectacle of conscientious and practical response to a blank, near-existential threat being stymied by competing interests that demand the illusion of stability and control, in the form of the Amity Island town grandees who foil the police chief’s reaction to a string of shark attacks for fear of scaring off tourists. This was balanced in the second half by another kind of transfixed compulsion, in the shark fisherman Quint’s obsession with expiating his terror of the animal and proving his dominance, pathological, war-damaged machismo duelling with a cunning enemy and hijacking the hunt to his own, increasingly deranged ends, before finally all narrative and social complications are stripped away, leaving a raw tale of Jungian terror. The film had mostly tossed out the subplots involving local government ties to racketeering in Peter Benchley’s source novel and kept the potential Vietnam allegory on a low simmer.

To a great extent those choices helped Jaws – the portrait of political ostrich-playing, for instance, has retained a relevance all too apparent at the moment through its very lack of too much melodramatic inflation and concentrating instead on the banality of corruption. But it certainly left other filmmakers with plenty of room to move within the strictures of a fool-proof blueprint. The post-Vietnam blues, still waiting for an official, high-class catharsis that would arrive, at least in cinema, with The Deer Hunter, Coming Home (both 1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979), nonetheless first found full expression in Piranha and Grizzly, with Piranha offering up its titular critters as weapons of war accidentally unleashed upon the petty tyrants and tin-pot entrepreneurs of America-on-the-make, whilst Grizzly offers one of its central triptych of heroes as a former chopper pilot who readily compares his latest adventure with his wartime experience. Rather than repeat the motif for a film released on the cusp of the Reagan era, Sayles’ script for Alligator instead offers up panoramic social satire and wish-fulfilment poetic justice in amplifying the theme of venality and blowback for the body politic. Grizzly commences with a deadly hairy beast attacking and slaying two young female campers amidst the lush and dappled forest of a popular state forest.

Contending with an unusually large post-season influx of visitors raiding the souvenir stands, enriching the restaurant and lodge owners, and tramping the trails, the chief park ranger, Kelly (Christopher George), has been deploying his thin-stretched team of rangers to try and keep an eye on all the campers. Soon they find the two mutilated bodies, one of them buried in a shallow pit, consistent with a bear stashing away food for later. Soon the huge and voracious bear kills two of Kelly’s rangers, Gail (Vicki Johnson) and her boyfriend Tom (Tom Arcuragi), several more campers, and a mother (Susan Orpin) who lives adjacent the park, also mutilating her young son. The park’s resident naturalist Arthur Scott (Richard Jaeckel) quickly discerns from the evidence on hand that the bear is not only a male grizzly, long thought to have been wiped out in the area, but a species thought to be extinct, a huge prehistoric holdover that’s been hiding in some primal forest abode until now. Grizzly repeats the motif of the dedicated public servant struggling with malfeasant and obfuscating authority, in this case the park manager Charley Kittridge (Joe Dorsey), who insists on keeping the park open and invites in a horde of hunters to deal with the bear, an action that only provokes more carnage.

Grizzly was produced independently and despite its hazily north-western setting filmed in rural Georgia, during an early golden era for such movies in the Horror genre. The budget was about $750,000, and yet Grizzly tries its utmost to look and sound like a blockbuster, sporting opening credits offered over shots of Don flying his helicopter patterned after the opening of The Towering Inferno (1974), and with composer Robert O. Ragland alternating a lush pastiche of John Williams with a more folky, wistfully evocative sound. Co-producer Harvey Flaxman got the idea for the movie after encountering a bear on a family camping trip and immediately seeing how a killer bear movie could cash in on Jaws. Flaxman wrote the script with fellow producer David Sheldon, and they interested Girdler, who was on the rise in Hollywood thanks to his success in the Blaxploitation field, with The Exorcist knock-off Abby (1973) and the action-thrillers The Zebra Killer (1973) and Sheba, Baby (1974). The film paid off big time, making nearly $40 million at the box office and setting a record for an independent film success until Halloween two years later. Girdler would quickly follow Grizzly’s success with another killer animal movie, Day of the Animals (1977), and then a relatively classy bestseller adaptation, the dizzyingly ridiculous and entertaining The Manitou (1977), before dying tragically in a helicopter accident whilst scouting locations aged just 30.

Girdler’s small body of films is nonetheless marked out by their cheery energy, a remarkable capacity to convey genre canards and long storytelling bows with a straight face, and firm sense of narrative thrust. Grizzly comes at the viewer much like the title beast, wild, shaggy, and surprisingly fast on its feet. Part of the film’s charm from today’s perspective lies in its very mid-1970s look and sound and incidental sociology, complete with scoring that manages to be melancholy and jaunty all at once, lots of good-looking young extras in denim and flannel on the trails, and many slow zoom shots in and out from burning sunsets over dark woods with that feel for the outdoors only movies from that period seem to wield. Grizzly obeys basic slasher movie principles in having most of the bear’s victims be attractive young women. The various bear attacks are staged with a deft blend of suggestion and gore, like the opening that sees one of the female campers raising a hand in fear as the bear looms over her, only for its great swiping paw to send her severed arm flying off into the bushes. The second girl hides from the monster in a ranger’s hut only for the bear to break in and rip half her face off with a great blow. Girdler can’t entirely paper over the disparity between the huge, mighty, but rather well-groomed Kodiak bear used in some shots and the man in a bear costume used in others.

In the film’s most snort-inducingly gratuitous scene, Gail decides to strip down to her underwear and bathe under a waterfall when it seems that the bear is not in the vicinity, only to be nastily surprised when the animal turns out to be hiding behind the torrent. Another victim is snatched out of her tent as she prepares to bunk down with her husband. Kelly assigns Tom against his objections and desire to be in on the ground hunt to man a watchtower in knowing Tom lacks sufficient bushcraft, and risking offending his girlfriend when refusing to let her accompany him. Tom, heartbroken, resents Kelly for leaving him out of the hunt, but the bear comes to him and topples the tower to get at him. Finally Kelly, Scott, and a helicopter pilot often employed by the park, Don Stober (Andrew Prine), set out to track the monster down. George, Prine, and Jaeckel were all well-weathered actors with much experience in Westerns; George’s best-known role was as the rival gunslinger who provides John Wayne’s slyly smiling, surprisingly honourable foe in Howard Hawks’ El Dorado (1966), a role that suggested star potential that largely remained unfulfilled. But here he’s a very enjoyable lead as Kelly is offered as a bit of an eccentric, teasing his girlfriend with his shifting accounts of what led him to be a forest ranger, as well as a sensible and much-liked authority figure who can build up a righteous head of steam when provoked, as Kittridge repeatedly insists on doing. Kelly is also defined by his efforts to be direct and honest with people about their viability in dangerous situations as a marker of his skill as a leader, as when he assigns Tom to the watchtower because he knows the younger man still lacks sufficient bushcraft, and risking offending his girlfriend when refusing to let her accompany him.

Said girlfriend, Allison Corwin (Joan McCall), is a photographer and the daughter of the park’s restaurant owner, who finds herself getting rather more deeply immersed in the action than she’d like when she trips over the buried corpse of one of the early victims and finds herself covered in dark, dank blood. The film’s snapshot of the mid-1970s milieu grazes not just the post-‘Nam zeitgeist but also feminism as a new wrinkle in the eternal landscape of both the forest and male-female relations. On The Manitou Girdler would embrace a feminist twist enthusiastically as the seemingly victimised heroine suddenly becomes an all-powerful conduit of the cosmic feminine, but Grizzly is cruder and more confusedly macho, if with some nuance. Kelly digs Allison’s strength of character and independence, and there’s a good scene where Allison helps council Kelly talk through a bout of self-recrimination after Gail’s death: “There’s something I’m not doing,” Kelly declares in his frustration to Allison’s reply: “Sure, you’re not killing the bear.” But when she announces her intention of joining him on the hunt he eventually feels obliged to lay down the law in refusing to take her, contending with her increasingly irate protests at first with honesty (“You couldn’t handle it…okay, maybe I couldn’t handle it.”) and then a final, breezy facetiousness that makes it clear he’s not going to be emotionally blackmailed into cowing (“Dammit, Kelly!” “I’m glad you see it my way.”).

The central trio of Kelly, Scott, and Stober have their own issues and spiky ways of relating. The drawling, limpid-eyed, wryly cynical Stober constantly teases Scott for his excessive confidence in his ability to track the bear without becoming lunch, whilst Scott sees the bear as just another example of the wildlife he seems rather more fond of than people. Scott is introduced barking in frustration when his beeping radio scares off a deer he’s trying to photograph; later, as Stober flies Kelly over the forests in search of the bear they think they spot it only for this to prove to be Kelly using a bearskin for camouflage as he tracks it. The film pauses for a creepy monologue delivered by Stober, recounting a local Native American legend about a tribe that suffered from a feverish illness and fell prey to a pack of grizzlies who gained a taste for human flesh. This scene, patterned after Quint’s Indianapolis monologue in Jaws, hints Stober himself might have Indian heritage and so feels a special paranoid connection to the bear not simply drawn from his ‘Nam days but as the incarnation of a primeval, even mystical threat lying in wait in the forest.

Later, Stober offers a meditation on his service experience as he and Kelly load up to go to war again, including packing a surplus hand-held bazooka: “Y’know, in ‘Nam I zapped about a hundred – maybe two hundred gooks. People. Called ‘em gooks so it wouldn’t get personal. But it did get personal, anyway, so I stopped countin’ and tried to stop caring. Y’know, now I don’t kill nothin’ no more, not even flies.” Not so much The Deer Hunter as The Bear Hunter. Meanwhile Kelly keeps butting heads with Kittridge until the attack on the mother and son makes it plain the professionals need to take over and the fight must be taken to the beast on its own ground. Despite the blatant, almost beat-for-beat appropriation of Jaws’ structure, the relaxed sense of the characters and their interaction that permeates the film and elevates it along with Girdler’s handling. Even the yahoo hunters, who might easily have been caricatured, are given a certain amount of humanisation as one group capture a bear cub and try to use it as bait for the bigger monster, and then acquiesce agreeably to Kelly’s leadership after they ask to join the hunt.

Girdler generates the right phobic feel for the forest once the heroes venture into it, often keeping his camera close on his actors so the sense of threat seems to close in tight from every direction, building to a sublimely odd moment as Kelly, seated by the campfire on watch whilst Stober sleeps, stares into the shadows beyond the campfire, nerves tingling from the sense of being watched right back from the blackness. Girdler has rather too much fun with his horror scenes in toying with audience expectations, and one quality it shares with Alligator is a certain delight in the freedom of a B-movie to leap in where a classy movie like Jaws only skirts. Tom seems safer than his colleagues in his tower only for the grizzly to topple it with a few determined shoves. One strong suspense sequence depicts one of the weekend warrior hunters (David Holt), tramping alone through the woods only to encounter the bear and realise he has no chance of bringing it down. He flees the pursuing monster with increasing desperation and frantic gymnastics. Luckily, he manages to plunge into a river and be washed away to safety.

The bear’s assault on the young boy resolves with a startling glimpse of the lad left legless while the bear consumes his mother. Late in the film, trying to track the bear on horseback, Scott is ambushed by the monster which decapitates the horse he’s riding, and mauls Scott before burying him. Scott, tattered but still alive, awakens and crawls his way out of his own grave, only for him to be immediately confronted again by the returning monster, which kills him properly this time. Scott’s death jolts Kelly and Stober, and the film, into a rather more sombre mood in time for the finale, where the duo chase the bear down in Stober’s helicopter, only for the beast to attack and damage the machine as it lands, forcing them to battle it out on the ground. Stober makes a heroic stand, shooting at the bear to distract it from the trapped Kelly, only for the bear to wheel about and crush Stober in a terrible, very literal bear-hug. Kelly, unable to turn the bear even as he fires bullet after bullet into it, takes up the bazooka and blows the animal to fiery fragments.

The last shot, a slow zoom out that surveys the battleground, offers no sense of triumph but rather a note of melancholy as Kelly ignores the burning carcass of the bear and walks over to Stober’s body, Ragland’s harmonica score playing plaintively as the end credits role. The film keeps in mind that Kelly has lost many of his friends and colleagues by this point, claimed by the bad bush somehow in the seemingly tranquil embrace of the American landscape itself. How very ‘70s of even a likeably absurd movie about a killer bear to finally prove a downbeat and nuanced meditation on the cost of war. Grizzly kicked off its own subgenre of killer bear movies, followed by the weirder, near-hallucinatory Claws (1977), which amplified the invocation of Native American folklore by making its monster bear also possibly a manifestation of a demon god, John Frankenheimer’s blend of social issue drama and straight-up monster movie Prophecy (1979), where the beast is a mutated travesty caused by mercury pollution, and later entries like Into the Grizzly Maze (2015) and Backcountry (2014).

Alligator follows the same basic template as Grizzly, whilst being a more sophisticated movie. Hero David Madison (Robert Forster) is like Stober dogged by survivor guilt, although his trauma is linked instead to being a policeman, with the memory of a partner’s murder thanks in part to his own rookie fearfulness, compounded when he loses a young colleague, Jim Kelly (Perry Lang), consumed by a freakishly large alligator that attacks them as the two policemen search the sewers of Chicago. Alligator is built around director Lewis Teague and screenwriter John Sayles’ appropriation and relocation of an old but beloved urban myth, one that held blind albino alligators, former pets flushed down to grow in the sewers of New York when they became too large. Sayles’ script immediately and cheekily rhymes the origin story of the title critter with the eruption of political violence in the Chicago streets. A news radio report on the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots can be overheard whilst an irate suburban father (Robert Doyle), furious with the pet baby alligator his reptile-crazy daughter Marisa (Leslie Brown) has brought back from a trip to see gator wrestling for leaving tiny turds all about their home, unceremoniously flushes the tiny animal down the toilet. Thus the alligator is immediately implied to be a misbegotten creation that literally becomes an underground agent, a toothsome beast chewing at the underside of the city until it bursts into view.

To underline the connection between the metaphorical monster and the lingering socio-political fallout, Alligator casts Forster, star of Medium Cool (1969), which portrayed the riots in such fervent and alarming immediacy, as the world-weary detective who becomes the beast’s singular foe. Madison and Kelly descend into the sewers whilst investigating a string of apparent mutilation murders that see body parts collecting at the sewer treatment works, connected in some unexpected way to the discovery of the carcass of a dog that seemed to have grown to a bizarrely large size between disappearance and death. Madison has encountered a pet store owner, Luke Gutchel (Sidney Lassick), who has a lucrative if vexing sideline snatching stray dogs and selling them to a rich and powerful pharmaceutical company headed by Slade (Dean Jagger), whose prospective son-in-law and chief researcher Arthur Helm (James Ingersoll) is developing a growth drug. Consuming the remains of these test animals, which Gutchel dumped regularly in the sewer, has helped the alligator not only survive but grow to a fantastic size and develop an insatiable appetite to boot.

Alligator takes a snap at many an annoying social phenomenon in American life circa 1980, mocking the tabloid press in the form of prototypical trash journalist Thomas Kemp (Bart Braverman), portraying the Chicago Mayor Ledoux (Jack Carter) as a boob hopelessly enslaved to his own political interests and dedicated to brownnosing Slade, targeting the unethical practices of the big business types, and indicting the police as enthralled to power despite their best intentions. The structure of Sayles’ script, which connects the sewer and the street to corporate and political offices in a chain of corruption, malfeasance, incompetence, and potential lunch meat, incidentally presents a rough sketch for the screenwriter-turned director’s later panoramic societal studies like City of Hope (1993), Lone Star (1996), and Silver City (2004), whilst more immediately laying out the aspects of urban satire, sociological sting, and genre riffing that would inform Sayles’ early cult hit Brother From Another Planet (1984). Teague, for his part, had started his directing career on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in the mid-1960s, but followed a meandering career route until he started working for Corman, making his name on the gangster film The Lady In Red (1979).

Alligator, despite only doing mildly good business compared to Grizzly, proved a calling card that would thrust Teague towards a spell as a major director if mostly on rather stolid films, handling the Stephen King adaptations Firestarter (1984) and Cat’s Eye (1985) as well as The Jewel of the Nile (1986), a sequel to Robert Zemeckis’ Romancing the Stone (1984), and his career would just as quickly lose momentum after the Reaganite action thriller Navy SEALS (1987) bombed. On Alligator, at least, Teague’s direction rockets along, nimbly countering the often very funny and textured character business with the necessary genre thrills, offering a flavourful sense of the urban landscape (amusingly, despite the Chicago setting the film was shot largely in Los Angeles and Missouri). Alligator gleefully describes a fetid zone in the sewers where rats and mouldering carcasses are littered, dank alleys are piled up with garbage, where dirty corporate secrets are forged by golden boys, tossed away by schlubby underlings, and the shrubbery around mansions hide very rude surprises. The film looks a lot like Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and other low-budget but well-made genre films of the period and shares with them a specifically gritty lustre, with Joseph Mangine’s cinematography short on colour texture but high on vivid contrast, bright sunlight and deeply pooled blacks.

One of Teague’s best directorial gestures confirms the presence of the alligator stalking Madison and Kelly in a chilling yet easy-to-miss manner, as the gator’s jaws are momentarily caught in flashlight glare in the dark of the back of the frame behind the oblivious cops. A later sequence in a dark and menacing ghetto alley is shot like a scene from a ‘50s noir film. Alligator constantly nudges film buff awareness of the material’s roots: whilst it certainly exists as another Jaws cash-in, Alligator makes a point of emulating 1950s sci-fi creature features as a more piquant reference point, in particular borrowing the plot of Jack Arnold’s Tarantula (1955) with the same concept of a dangerous animal made huge by experimental drugs, and visually referencing the sewer battle with the giAnts in Gordon Douglas’s Them! (1954) and the great saurian monster stomping down the city streets in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Alligator at least has Madison as the eye for its particular storm. Madison is one of the great movie heroes, quickly but lovingly characterised by Teague, Sayles, and Forster as a sort of intellectual émigré turned institutional hangover, depressed and touchy about his thinning hair, ensconced in an apartment littered with old magazines and records and books on New Age esoterica, festooned with poster for the trippy fantasy artist Ramón Santiago. After confessing to Marisa that he took her at first for a “real tight-ass,” she replies unfazed: “You were wrong weren’t you. When I first met you I thought you were a man whose apartment would look just like this.”

Just as Alligator plays as a kind of absurdist spiritual sequel to Medium Cool, Quentin Tarantino would make his Jackie Brown (1997) such to Alligator in directly basing Forster’s character Max Cherry on Madison, down to a line about him taking action in regards to his hair problem. Early in the film Madison and Kelly expertly take down a livewire nut who turns up at their precinct station claiming responsibility for the murder and with what looks like a bomb strapped to his body, with Madison launching into a delightfully jaded rant to distract him: “I used to be a left-hander, they made me into a right-hander. I wanted to be a priest, they made me into a cop. You wanna blow the joint up? I don’t care what you do, I stopped wanting to be a cop about last week.” Kelly springs on the man and holds him prone whilst Madison checks out the bomb and finds it’s just a clock radio. This proves not just a great character vignette but also, naturally, introduces a story device, as Madison will later adapt the fake bomb into a real one to take on his toothy foe.

Madison finds himself disbelieved when he reports the monster in the sewers after Kelly’s death, even by Marisa, who’s grown up into a respected herpetologist (played as an adult by Robin Riker) when Madison’s boss, Police Chief Clark (Michael V. Gazzo), takes Madison to consult with her. Madison finds himself the object of suspicion particularly after Kemp publishes a lurid article on the incident, but Kemp himself falls victim to the alligator when he gets wind of Madison’s story and goes into the sewer. Kemp’s death is another cleverly shot vignette, as the reporter’s camera keeps taking photos as he’s consumed by the monster, strobing flashes illuminating the terrible struggle in friezes of desperation. The camera is recovered and the photos seem to prove Madison’s story, so he and Clark get down to directing a joint effort by cops and National Guards to flush the alligator into a trap. The operation fails as the alligator breaks out through the pavement in an inner city area and begins marauding, ripping the legs off sundry cops. The Mayor brings in a professional hunter to track and kill the beast, Colonel Brock (Henry Silva), but the alligator proves adept at eluding its trackers, hiding in various bodies of water like a park lake and backyard swimming pools. Madison forges an alliance with Marisa to locate the alligator their own way, tracking down its nest in the sewer.

Whereas most of the other Jaws rip-offs settled for reproducing its social theme as a kind of rhythmic necessity, Alligator has its own brand of fun with the conceit, offering the beast as both the diseased offspring of a diseased society and its deus-ex-machina punishment, whilst Madison tries ever so shaggily to do his job as a keeper of cop lore. One is eager to see Helm get chewed up right away thanks to his habit of experimenting on puppies and his habit of cutting their larynxes to keep down the noise in the lab, even before it becomes clear he’s responsible for the whole affair. Madison is sacked by Clark when he digs too deep and establishes the connection between the Slade experiments and the alligator. The theme of blowback for cronyism and corruption climaxes in a mirthfully gruesome set-piece where the alligator invades a spectacle of ruling class arrogance, entering the Slade mansion grounds during the wedding of the tycoon’s daughter to Helm. The animal quickly turns the wedding into a scene of bloody chaos, snacking on maids and slamming its tail into sundry guests, launching them and dining tables around like confetti. The gator makes snacks of Helm and the Mayor, who Slade locks out of his limousine in his panic, only for the great lizard to furiously crush the car and the mogul within.

Teague has a funny poke at the kinds of make-work business often thrust upon movie extras when Clark is seen talking over his car’s CB radio whilst some uniformed cops literally beat the bushes in the back of shot, only for Clark to turn around and bawl out, “Dammit, he’s not hiding in the bushes!” The film reaches some sort of sick apogee in a scene where some kids costumed as pirates at a dress-up party drag one of their number out to make him walk the plank into the backyard pool, only to obliviously hurl him right into the maw of the gator, red red blood boiling in the pool, whereupon his accidental executioners go running back to mom. Cops chasing after the beast in speed boats finish up crashing into him, boat spilling men into the water, one particularly luckless chap dragged into another boat minus his legs. Alligator is boosted not just by the excellent writing and strong direction but a surprisingly great cast crammed with underutilised character actors, beginning most evidently with Forster but also including Lassick as the affable but seedy Gutchel and Gazzo as the hard-pressed Clark. Even Jagger, who looks like he was about a million years old by this time, gets in a few good lines as the elder Slade, and Mike Mazurski appears in a cameo as the Slade Mansion’s gatekeeper.

Thanks to both Sayles’ writing and Silva’s acting, Brock provides a truly hilarious lampoon of he-man posturing and the great white hunter mystique. His hunt for the monster is punctuated with plenty of canny media performance, flirting shamelessly with a TV reporter (Sue Lyon, in her last screen role before quitting acting) by mimicking an alligator mating call, patronising Marisa (“Well now you can get back to your books.”), and reporting the beast must be “a big mutha” when he finds a huge pile of dung in an alley. His deathless credo: “If I couldn’t get myself killed chasing it, what fun would it be?” Brock pays some local black teens to be his native bearers and guides and teases them for not wanting to follow him down a dark lane (“No backbone? Must be the environment.”), only for the alligator to ambush him and consume him whole whilst one of his aides snatches up his rifle and speeds off. Alligator continues to balance such mischiefs whilst maintaining its unusually rich and nuanced take on basic heroic characterisation, with Madison’s kindled romance with Marisa well-played by Forster and Riker, their relationship evolving in a series of spasmodic gestures. Madison is initially irked by Marisa’s coolly professional disbelief of his accounts, and Marisa later disconcerted when Madison, who’s used to subsisting within a space of private grief, spurns her attempts to counsel him after Brock’s death (“Don’t understand me so quick.”). To make up with her, Madison visits her at home the next day and encounters her garrulous mother Madeline (Patti Jerome), a woman so talkative Marisa suggests letting her loose on the alligator.

Great little vignettes are stitched in throughout the film, like Madison awakening from a looping, red-soaked nightmare reliving of Kelly’s death to see his dog with its head in a carton of Chinese food and of the plastic-bedecked lizards used as dinosaurs in Irwin Allen’s The Lost World (1960) on his TV. “Freud said the police are to punish society for their own illicit desires,” Marisa notes, to Madison’s riposte, “This guy never worked the kamikaze shift in east St. Louis.” When the gator breaks out of the sewer, he interrupts a game of street baseball played by some neighbourhood kids, one of whom dashes back to his flat and steals away one of his mother’s bread knives to go do battle with the creature whilst his mother protests in vain whilst refusing to hang up the telephone. Where Grizzly stuck the possibility in the too-hard basket, Alligator has no compunction in offering Marisa as a smart and canny woman aiding Madison in his mission who blooms herself from uptight-looking lab rat to adventurer with Farrah Fawcett hair, although ultimately Madison must venture into the sewer alone with his improvised bomb, anointed as a shabby urban Beowulf.

The climax sees Teague whipping up suspense with some hoary but entirely effective devices as Madison races to set the bomb and elude the gator in the midst of a cloud of methane and climbs up to a manhole cover only to find it won’t move, because a little old lady waiting for a garbage truck to move is parked above, Marisa desperately tries to convince her to back up, the countdown of the bomb’s LED display intercut with Madison’s efforts to scramble free of the manhole, before the explosion rips apart the alligator and sends plumes of flame up into the street. “We got him,” Madison and Marisa concur as the gaze down into the smoky pit, only for Teague’s camera to descend into the sewer and sound a note of karmic reboot as another baby alligator is flushed into the sewer, under a scrawled piece of graffiti that declares, “Harry Lime Lives!,” both a great film buff gag and also one that pays heed to The Third Man’s (1949) high-and-low panorama of moral rot, but played in reverse, the spawn of the age’s iniquity born in the dark of the sewer and ready break out. Of the two films, Alligator is ultimately highly superior to Grizzly and indeed one of my favourite films of its kind. But both movies ultimately retain the charm of a bygone era when it came to disreputable entertainment flecked with flashes of intelligence and humour, and remain great fun.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Tag Archives: Halloween Horror Film Freedonia

Dressed To Kill (1980)

White Zombie (1932)

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Grizzly (1976) / Alligator (1980)