Monster Serial: THE TWILIGHT SAGA

By DANNY REID

“We don’t think of ourselves as monsters.” - Edward Cullen

The first time I ever heard of TWILIGHT was, of course, from a girl. “Oh, it’s cool,” she explained. “It’s a book series about vampires who live in Washington because it’s cloudy all the time. And they fight, like, werewolves.” Which, indeed, did sound cool, in a ‘some dude felt that HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN wasn’t enough’ fanfiction-y sort of way.

 The second time I heard of TWILIGHT was on the internet. Perhaps you’ve heard of the place? It’s an echo chamber, mostly, where every man is a boy and every woman a princess — or a cunt, depending on whether she opens her mouth in disagreement or not. The pushback against the TWILIGHT books is legendary, a massive confluence of armchair feminists and white knights who were utterly terrified of the idea of prepubescent girls reading the sexy story of a sexy vampire and finding its tale of preferable virginity to violate sacrosanct laws of newly won cultural female freedom.

A few years after the series’ final entry and it’s been tossed into the collective trash bin of cultural history, an embarrassing blip. The ship of the cinema state has eagerly given the audience the correctly maternal Katniss Everdeen of THE HUNGER GAMES and second banana Black Widow in the immense AVENGERS dirge — a badass assassin who has never been put at the front of her own entry, less fanboys piss their camouflage shorts at the thought of empathizing with a protagonist who isn’t white and male.

Bella Swann, the heroine of TWILIGHT, is an aberration then and now, a twitchy woman protagonist from the Daria-school of snarky outcasts whose sheer passivity seems to attract friends and admirers in spite of herself. That’s because she’s easy prey, a bundle of insecurities that allows everyone around her to project their wants and desires — including, of course, the audience themselves.

This evolves as the series grows, though. Those who see Bella as an easy mark soon find the situations reversed. Her angst-ridden high school classmates who try to fuck her or out-maneuver her soon rely on her for advice, which is flawless. The vampire boy who finds the scent of her blood irresistible must resist because she tells him to—not unless he’s willing to put a ring on her finger. And the werewolf boy with the puppy-love crush finds in her his Lady MacBeth who urges him to grow up, take responsibility, and be the leader he must be ... and it doesn’t hurt that it will further her own means.

Bella’s journey through the films is from a lost girl wrapped in a blanket of melancholy to becoming the one of the most powerful creatures the world has ever seen—with a perfect little family to boot. She manipulates her way to this, using both her sex and savvy to dominate the weakening structures of the patriarchy, evidenced by her sheriff father’s ineffectual grasp on the small community of Forks, Washington, and the centuries-old structure of the vampire clans, weakened by incest, bloodlust, and general rigid tyranny.

Much of the criticism for the series, besides the fact that 75 percent of the film’s content is that dreaded “people talking about their feelings” thing, comes from Edward Cullen, a big hunk of pale Muenster cheese whose skin sparkles in the sunlight rather than explode. He’s brooding and pouty, but wears trendy clothing and lacks any sense of menace. While he can punch another vampire’s head off, he doesn’t project much beyond a calm sensitivity. Because of Bella’s craven desires, he spends most of the five movies terrified of himself.

It reverses the usual vampire’s seduction. Even Edward, the impossibly gorgeous killing machine, has completely lost his masculine independence as the weakest link in the vampire food chain. Bella can help him and his brood rediscover it, but at a price.

The first TWILIGHT sets up this dynamic swiftly and quietly. Bella is the new girl whose curiosity lands her in a den of bloodsuckers. But they’re the good guys. The bad guys are the roaming vampire gang who smell Bella’s delicious (nigh irresistible) blood and make her a target.

The film is about being watched and desired. Infatuation and the vaguest hints of lust lurk around every corner. Bella is mostly a blank slate in the first movie, wandering around wide eyed and impossibly moored to her own past as an innocent little girl, almost unwilling to leave the safety of the world she once knew until being violently thrown from it. Step one of the hero’s journey over, now it’s time for her to explore and conquer the new reality.

NEW MOON is about the dangers of obsession, on both ends of the equation. Bella and Edward separate after a disastrous party, and we are shown romantic love without its usual gilded Hollywood angle. Rather than longing looks at the stars or delicate evocations of poetry, romantic love in the series is grotesque and unbearable. It’s an ode to deep teenage fatalism with as little window dressing as possible.

Bella also spends far more time with Jacob, a brooding werewolf who feels that the fact that he’s not among the murderous undead would perhaps put him higher in the ‘sleep with Bella’ line than the cold, meek Edward. But while Jacob has absolutely ludicrous pectorals (shown off both early and often), he lacks Edward’s strength and icy charm. And, of course, immortality.

Through their adventures in this go-around, Bella meets the ultimate tools in the patriarchy’s closet, the wizened council of vampires who are, naturally, effeminate (and campy) to a fault. Their henchman is a butch Dakota Fanning who gets to glower at people like a champ and zap them with pain rays or something. Bella has found the enemy, and, despite their powers and reach, they are weak.

The third film, ECLIPSE, is a negotiation. The ending marriage proposal in NEW MOON is clarified and reconsidered, with a bargaining between Bella, who wants to be an immortal undead vampire with all of its benefits, and Edward, who views the act of doing so with paternal condescension.
The confrontation between Edward and Jacob is one of the more electric moments in any of the films, an ideological crossroads for two very different kinds of monsters. The rivals debate their roles and powers, and how that would work best for Bella’s future. Some may see it as a bartering for Bella as property, but the crux of the scene is how both men admit they’re weak where Bella is concerned. Whatever she demands, they shall obey.

The unspoken gnarly racial disharmony that runs through the series comes to a head here, too. The films, one of the few to use Native American characters in any significant way in the last twenty years let alone as sex symbols, frame the rivalry between the encroaching Old World vampires and their sensitive warm blooded werewolves as an unresolved colonial resentment. Jacob and Edward are part of a new, younger generation whose affection for Bella allow them to find common cause for a truce. Love conquers all, it seems.

The first BREAKING DAWN is the best movie in the franchise. The opening  half of it, featuring a cheeky montage of Bella eagerly trying to lose her virginity to her new husband, Edward, is possibly the series at its most playful. Indeed, much of the movie (and much of the series) can best be summed up in this clear HOW EDWARD GOT HIS GROOVE BACK scenario where an eager woman rips the bodice off the unwilling vampire and teaches him anew the pleasures of the flesh.

The second half of the movie, which involves an unplanned pregnancy and the threat of all out vampire war climaxes in the birth of Bella and Edward’s unholy vampire baby. The scene is both intensely physical and utterly unique. Few people would have guessed that a vampire performing a caesarian section on a woman with his fangs after their super powered baby broke her spine while still in the womb would somehow be the pivotal scene in a mega budget franchise picture only a few years earlier. Hell, it’s hard to believe just a few years later.

The film also contains one of the series’ creepiest moments (aside from the one mentioned in the last paragraph) where Jacob ‘imprints’ on Edward and Bella’s daughter, thus setting up, yes, one of the film’s major characters to lust after a baby. The movie desperately tries to soft peddle this situation inherited from the books, but combined with Jacob’s brash egotism and forceful crush, the creep factor can’t be ignored.

But that’s also a part of the movies’ charms. Many people view them as merely romances with vampire window dressing, but they clearly set out to horrify the audience as well. Bella’s birth is terrifying. Jacob’s sudden veering into pedophilia is equally unnerving. We see tour groups maimed, a child vampire murdered, and plenty more for the sick thrill of understanding how fucked up all of this stuff is. But, while these characters exist in a world filled to the fringes with the occult and horrific, sex may be the most deeply confusing thing to everyone, with only Bella truly understanding what she wants or needs throughout.

The second BREAKING DAWN is more conventional and far less interesting, though it does contain one of the series more inspired moments. It mostly revolves a lot more action and special effects—something the filmmakers seemed desperate to inject into the series, hoping that a reliance on CGI will give the movie the proper appearance for what turned out to be a summer blockbuster franchise.
The finale involves groups of X-MEN-esque vampires defending Bella’s baby from the legion of the vampire council, with a massive battle in which several series regulars are brutally murdered. Because that didn’t happen in the book, however, the movie backs down and reveals it as a dream sequence. The vampire council, seeing that they don’t have much of a chance to win, decide to let Bella and her many, many defenders live on peacefully.

The moral would seem to be that ancient evil cannot be defeated, only shown to be impotent. Even after acquiring all of her power, Bella remains but one cog in a machine, but she has everything she’s wanted, and like King Conan sitting on his throne, one is left to imagine that the end of the vampire council is merely the story for another day.

This essay is one of dozens featured in our new
book, "Taste the Blood of Monster Serial."

So ends the TWILIGHT saga. I come not to praise the clunky acting, poor pacing, or the fact that every single villain in the series spends half the running time walking around with a stick up their ass while licking their lips, but to bury it until its near-eventual resurrection. The movies still get their play on cable, and the books’ admirers have churned out thinly-veiled fan fiction to the tune of millions of dollars. Whatever your feelings on the series, it was a major speed bump on the road away from the tough female sidekick school of action and towards a world where a woman character can triumph through gumption and desire.

The TWILIGHT backlash wasn’t completely without merit, either. Dozens of television shows and movies moved to cash in on its monster mash mythos, with many taking potshots at the series while showcasing a new generation to their hipper, cooler vampires. The stench of the garbage post-INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE films of the late 90s and early 00s, which included detritus like DRACULA 2000, VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN, QUEEN OF THE DAMNED, the inconceivably awful UNDERWORLD series—oh god, I could spend another 1,000 words just listing all these pieces of shit—and much more were eradicated, and fantasy had its heart pumping anew.

The TWILIGHT saga remains an outlier in the middle of two decades of explosion-laden, inert male teenage fantasies. It’s an utterly bizarre reinvention of the vampire mythos that managed to jar pop culture into remembering what’s so sexy about vampires—the sex!—while flirting with a distinctly un-Hollywood means—the pleasure and power of virginity. The complete aberration of the TWILIGHT series’ success, an odd movie series full of high drama and an utterly unique take on female empowerment in a world steadily arguing for the same blockbuster movie being remade every year, should be celebrated.

DANNY REID lives outside Tokyo, Japan, with his lovely wife and two yappy dogs. He blogs bi-weekly at pre-code.com, a website dedicated to Hollywood films from 1930 to 1934.

Monster Serial: FRIGHT NIGHT (2011)

By DANNY REID

So, I’m not sure if you remember this, but in 2008, the American economy ground to a halt. Things were crap, pretty much, with the bursting of the housing bubble sending shockwaves throughout the country, leading to foreclosures galore and the observation that, in its relentless drive to build more and more houses, the housing industry got down on all fours behind the average homeowner while the banking industry pushed them over. Then they walked away laughing like mad, because they’re both dicks.

That very brief social studies lesson in the middle of your vampire movie book helps set up FRIGHT NIGHT, a remake of a 1980’s movie that you can also read about in TASTE THE BLOOD OF MONSTER SERIAL, perhaps even before this one if the law of alphabetical order dares to exude its many charms.

The original FRIGHT NIGHT is about the encroaching horror of suburbia, that feeling of disconnect between neighbors who are strangers only a few feet away. From 1985 to 2011, however, suburbia had changed. Because of the housing crisis, acres of generic looking McMansions sprung up in around major cities, assembled quickly and cheaply in hopes of luring foolish homeowners into their maws.

But suburbia is a lie, an attempt to apply order to chaos. FRIGHT NIGHT, set on the outskirts of Las Vegas, one of the largest losers in the housing bubble, shows the houses for what they are. Layers of sod covering sand and gnarly rocks. Construction is poor. And with the economy rotting and the transient nature of work in Vegas, the only people there don’t seem to stick around very long.

Which, naturally, makes it a perfect place for a vampire to take root. That’d be Jerry, a muscular dude who wears a tanktop and claims to work construction at night. He lives next door to single mom Jane and teenager Charley. Charley’s life is full of its share of problems — after maturing into that ‘nerd chic’ we’ve all heard so much about, he lands beautiful girlfriend Amy and ends up estranging his old friends Adam and Ed.

Adam is killed by Jerry before the credits even get a chance to roll and Ed is next, but not before Ed tells Charley about what’s going on. Jerry is a vampire. Their empty neighborhood is only getting emptier.

In some ways, Jerry represents the inescapable history of mankind, the appealing bid to nihilism. But he’s another kind of threat to Charley —  Jerry’s nothing but pure masculinity, an angry force of violent, smug aggression that clearly threatens the women in Charley’s life. Colin Farrell’s twitchy, unhinged performance as a leering, arrogant bastard is phenomenal, and the actor’s ability to sneer like a champ has never been better utilized.

Charley’s own shaky grasp on sexuality is threatened by Jerry, with the homosexual vibes that Ed sends his way only making things more confusing. This is driven home when Jerry comes over to borrow a few beers and offers him some words of advice on women which can only be properly denoted as being ‘creepy as fuck’:

“Women who look a certain way, they... they need to be managed. It’s true. Your dad ducked out on you, huh? Your mom, she didn’t exactly say, but there’s a kind of ... neglect. Gives off a scent. You don’t mind my saying, you got a lot on your shoulders for a kid. The two of you, alone. And your girl ... Amy. She’s ripe. I bet there’s a line of guys dying to pluck that. Your mom, too. You don’t see it. Maybe you do, but she’s putting it out. It’s on you to look after them. You up for that, guy?”

My favorite part of that is his deliberate use of the word ‘pluck’ — the movie is rated R with blood spurts and swearing galore. But Jerry dropping the G-rated ‘pluck’ is playful, an insult directly acknowledging Charley’s youth and inexperience.

The movie has a lot of other nice touches like that, too. FRIGHT NIGHT can be quite fun, and, as is appropriate in a post-Scream world, it references a bevy of horror institutions, from Twilight to DARK SHADOWS. Jerry is even described, rightfully so, as, “the shark from Jaws.”

There’s also a lot more action than you’ll get in the older version of FRIGHT NIGHT, with a long sequence of Jerry chasing Charlie, Amy and Jane in a van contained in long tracking shots within the van to increase the tension. Director Craig Gillespie, otherwise best known for his offbeat indie comedy Lars and the Real Girl, frames much of the film in darkness. He also wisely frames the murders in front of video; in a world where stuff on television seems more real than reality, filming it this way is an excellent way to manipulate the audience’s connection to what’s happening on screen.

This essay is one of dozens featured in our new
book, "Taste the Blood of Monster Serial."

He also knows the right beats to get some laughs out of the movie, too. Many of the film’s funnier moments come from Peter Vincent, a performer on the Vegas strip who promises to be the world’s foremost expert on vampires while also often wearing leather pants and no shirt (let’s see Roddy McDowell do that). Beneath his bravado and excessive British vulgarity, he’s a coward, hiding in his panic room when vampirized Ed and Jerry come to call.

It’s not an easy journey to Charlie’s triumph, but the film’s ending has him finally plucking Amy. He’s gone from dweeb kid who’d lucked into a beautiful girl to a boy fully confident in his own manhood, slaying his own past and centuries of unyielding masculine domination to be able to finally be comfortable with who he is.

FRIGHT NIGHT takes the unapologetic bleakness of post-9/11 cinema and pokes it in the guts. In an era where grimness seemed to stretch from abroad to home, it takes an old story and updates it. It’s no longer just that the enemy is next door; he’s now the only other person left in the neighborhood.

DANNY REID lives outside Tokyo, Japan, with his lovely wife and two yappy dogs. He blogs bi-weekly at pre-code.com, a website dedicated to Hollywood films from 1930 to 1934.

Monster Serial: DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1932)

 
By DANNY REID

You are Dr. Henry Jekyll. Cocksure, a hero in your field, and a man whose lectures are attended by hordes of eager students. With the rapture of a revival preacher, you’re completely convinced of your ideals: “It’s unscientific not to admit the possibility of anything!”

Your hypothesis? There are two beings within every human: the good part, and the dark, creeping half. With science, this dark part can be exorcised, and man can become pure and good. The darkness will wither and die on its own.

That also figures into your fatal character flaw: you, sir, are really, really horny.

Okay, let’s dial back from the second person narrative before we get into your sadomasochistic impulses and rampant egomania (don’t pretend, I know you too well for that.) 1932’s DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE cashes in on two popular impulses of the time: Freudian psychology and Dracula-inspired horror trappings. The film’s director, Rouben Mamoulian, does these concepts one better by adding an inspired layer of first-person trappings. He implicates the viewer in each of Mr. Hyde’s increasingly depraved acts, a dark ride where no one leaves with clean hands.

As mentioned above, Henry Jekyll is a rock star scientist, consumed with his own ego. He works long hours in the clinic not out of charity, but as a way to further confirm his own godly delusions. This is to the frustration of Muriel Carew, his fiancée, and even more to the frustration of her father, Brigadier-General Carew. The general isn’t so concerned with Jekyll’s late hours and overt power fantasies but that Jekyll doesn’t have the decency to behave enough like a stuffy upper class gentleman. What no one seems to pick up on is that Jekyll is far more obsessed with being right and better than everyone than being in love; consummating his passion with Muriel is the only thing between him and standing atop Olympus.
 

The dismissal by Muriel’s father really gets to Jekyll since being old and stuffy just isn’t in his wheelhouse, man. The night after his request to bump up the wedding date is refuted once again, Jekyll’s horny thermometer is reaching dangerous temperatures. That’s when he comes upon Ivy, a cockney singing girl whose blonde locks and exhibitionist attitude show once again that it isn’t Jekyll’s upper lip that’s stiff.

She’s been injured in a fight with a customer—er, boyfriend—and Jekyll agrees to take her back up to her room and examine her bruises. Rather delighted that a man of stature has taken an interest in her, she flirts mercilessly and undresses for further examination. She teasingly tells Jekyll to turn eyes because he’s a gentleman— but he clearly doesn’t. The audience doesn’t get to journey along with Jekyll as he gets an eyeful of Ivy’s delicate curves, but, like so many things in life, the implication is much more alluring.

If not for the intervention of his friend and confidant, Dr. Lanyon, Jekyll’s Victorian impulses may have been lost in the chaos. Learning that Muriel still won’t be his for months, and is going on a long sea voyage to boot, Jekyll finally snaps. If he can’t make it with a woman, he’ll just have to make it with science.

The brew that he’s been discussing that frees the beast that lurks in the hearts of men does so admirably. The transformation from Jekyll into Hyde contains some of the most impressive “How’d they do that?” special effects of their time, with some work that still looks seamless and impressive today. Crooked, hairy prosthetics turn handsome Fredric March into a half man, half ape with sharp protruding fangs and a brow sourced from times long passed.

This is Mr. Hyde. You may have heard of him. Besides the simian appearance, his attitudes follow the same path. In a bar full of ruffians, his scares them all into submission; he immediately makes it known that he is the alpha bully, and their job is to fall in line or get hurt. His body language is that of pure primordial aggression, slinking his arms and hissing at those who oppose him.

March really nails both halves of the equation, from Jekyll, who believes himself a holy man who can do no wrong, to Hyde, who cackles in glee listening to the woman he beats sob and beg him for more. He cackles to Ivy who he now keeps locked up in an apartment, “I hurt you because I love you. I want you. What I want, I get.” Freud writ large indeed.

Jekyll feels mild guilt when he returns to normal by way of his potion, but he still feels justified in this escapism until Muriel returns. He’s such a great man, didn’t he deserve to indulge in a bit of naughtiness in the mask of a savage for a fortnight? Unfortunately for him it turns out that the darkness doesn’t go away so easily; Jekyll’s transformations into Hyde start to become involuntary.

Jekyll and Hyde gets away with showing as much as a filmmaker could get away with showing back then, both in terms of violence and sexual content. A product of the “pre-Code” era, a time where film censorship was present but not as heavily enforced as it would later become between 1934 and 1966. The film revels in Paramount’s European-flavored production design, with Mamoulian crafting one of the most atmospherically engaging visions of Victorian-era London put onto film. Taking plenty of cues from THE CABINET OF CALIGARI and other surrealist tinted masterpieces, he makes use of wipes, extreme close-ups and shot composition to symbolize the inner torment these characters are stuck in.

This column is among those featured in
 BRIDE OF MONSTER SERIAL, a collection of 
horror essays written by contributors to 
THE COLLINSPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 
Buy it today on Amazon!

The performances are uniformly excellent. Miriam Hopkins, most often recalled as Lubitsch’s preferred provocateur of the 30s, plays Ivy as a brazen bargirl who goes from fiercely independent to unenviable victim overnight. Her aching desperation endears the audience to a character who normally wouldn’t portrayed with an ounce of sympathy. Rose Hobart as Muriel is excellent as well, giving her longing and desire a palpable sense of eroticism, something needed to drive Jekyll just completely up the wall.

And the film wouldn’t work without Fredric March’s titular performance as the two men. March, who
was usually seen as a Paramount, used his charm to both endear and repulse us from Jekyll. And, as Hyde, he’s nearly invisible as an actor. He brings a fascinating charisma to both, creating monsters out of men while still being endearing enough to straddle the line between repulsion and attraction. March won an Academy Award for his performance, a rarity for the horror genre but certainly a well-deserved one.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE has held up well over the years since the original novel was published, and this screen adaptation remains the most visceral and sumptuous of the adaptations. The story can be interpreted in several different ways, from the deleterious effects of sexual frustration to how society condones depraved lunatics until they cross the line.

What’s important to remember isn’t how much of an unhinged psychopath Hyde is, but how much of that rampant entitlement comes directly from Jekyll’s character. Hyde isn’t so much a dark mirror as a slight skew—Jekyll is the genius of science, Hyde is the mastermind of depravity. In today’s world, where there’s the person you are online and off, it’s hardly a wonder that the story continues to resonate.


DANNY REID lives outside Tokyo, Japan, with his lovely wife and two yappy dogs. He blogs bi-weekly at pre-code.com, a website dedicated to Hollywood films from 1930 to 1934.

Monster Serial: MURDER PARTY, 2007

By Danny Reid

The horror genre has been the entryway for directors over the last few decades. Horror films have the ability to succeed even with no budget, cheap special effects, and a lack of star power as long as they have the ability to at least seem spooky. With just a short tap dance on an underexploited nerve of the public conscious and one good ad campaign, and you’ve got a phenomena —I mean, how else do you explain the likes of SAW?

This has resulted in an entire subgenre: the calling card movie, crafted by up and comers looking to break into the industry while demonstrating their own creativity. Hollywood’s been kind to the true craftsmen who’ve exploited that path, even if those directors go on to make overripe screeds like OZ: THE GREAT AND POWERFUL or three 10-hour-long HOBBIT movies.

But many people decide to hop into horror to make their mark, eager to hit the HALLOWEEN, BLAIR WITCH, or PARANORMAL ACTIVITY pay dirt. The problem always seems to come from the novice writers and directors getting to step one—make a horror movie—and then completely skimping on step two: make it unique. For every person who sits down and tries to create a horror movie that’s scary or, god help them, funny, another five would-be directors go, “Has there been one with a psychotic lumberjack set on Arbor Day yet?”

(The answer? No there hasn’t, and I have dibs on that idea, so back off.)

MURDER PARTY’s hook takes that idea and runs with it: “What can we do that hasn’t been done?” It’s a movie deeply obsessed with artists trying to find their own voices and the deep insecurities they have in regarding one another. As the body count increases, the film reveals how deep artists’ pathological hatred for one another can grow. It’s a movie about the creative itch, and the people who must scratch it with an axe.
The main character and all-around-loser of MURDER PARTY is Christopher, a male meter maid in New York. He is alone on Halloween. His cat, Sir Lancelot, won’t even heed his command to get off his recliner. His entire life is an empty pointless charade, and he’s an utterly safe person. When he decides to throw caution to the wind and attend a party whose random invitation he finds, he dresses up: a knight costume made from cardboard and a pair of khakis.

MURDER PARTY understands how Halloween has become a safe holiday — its opening is filled with children laughing and cookie-cutter Wal Mart decorations blowing in the breeze. Christopher rents a stack of horror movies (on VHS, naturally), but when he finally decides to do something daring with his night, he hits the subway and heads deeper into the jungles of New York City. Away from the brownstones and families, there is the murky miles of warehouses, slums, and debris.

Arriving, Christopher learns that he’s the guest of honor! It turns out that an artist’s collective has decided to celebrate Halloween by murdering a random person and using that as inspiration. A painter paints it, a photographer photographs it, a sculptor—okay, he mostly drinks. The artists themselves are a broad range of neurosis, from insecurity to obsession. For all the members of the collective, they’re suffering from a unifying lack of imagination, as their sexual and religious identities are worthless and success is their only goal.
They’re all slaving under the ringleader Alexander, a smug promoter who promises a big wad of grant money to whoever produces the most daring piece of art. While the others begin to get nervous at the idea of murdering a random person, Alexander reassures them: “Don’t think of this dildo as a victim. Think of him as a collaborator. It’s his privilege to be here.”

This column is among those featured in
 BRIDE OF MONSTER SERIAL, a collection of 
horror essays written by contributors to 
THE COLLINSPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 
Buy it today on Amazon!

The collective becomes a den of liars and backstabbers as blind desperation mixes with ambition. The film seems to push the idea that artistic success requires a complete detachment from empathy—something the cast and crew of thousands of films can relate to. During the unhinged debauchery, one line explains the film’s own feelings on creativity in a succinct way:

“Now when I go to a good movie or a great exhibit, I hate it. I just want everything to be bad, because when something’s good, there’s no room for me. I used to love art but now I just hate it, I want it to suck.”
Things go south pretty quickly for the group, as poor life decisions lead to a number of them dying accidentally. As the corpses pile up, the film’s only competent artist finally snaps and begins to complete the objective of the murder party, with only Christopher and his meager set of wits left to survive.

He ends up in a room with a series of naked women painted in gold and a sign on the wall that simply reads “Art?”. Shortly thereafter it gets splattered in blood (a lot of people die at this murder party; in that way it is quite successful), giving the audience the film’s message on a platter. Are goofy horror movies filled with blood, guts, and bad jokes art?

Fuck yeah they are. Nice try, movie, you didn’t stump me there! 

With CGI effects so cheap and YouTube such an easy way to demonstrate success, the calling card film is fading. The horror market has become so flooded with low-budget, low-quality entries that a director’s chance of breaking out have become negligible.  It hasn’t helped that over the years the streaming video marketplace has come to resemble less a videostore with a vast selection and more a Walgreens $2 bin of unwatchable shit. Murder Party still stands out as a funny and weird outlier.
Is it pretentious? Yeah, probably, but it’s also fucking funny and starkly different. It’s proof that a person with an idea may not change the world, but can make a movie with ideas and a sense of humor.

DANNY REID lives outside Tokyo, Japan, with his lovely wife and two yappy dogs. He blogs bi-weekly at pre-code.com, a website dedicated to Hollywood films from 1930 to 1934.