Monster Serial: MARTIN, 1977

By PHIL NOBILE JR

The mid 1970s. In an urban, blue collar neighborhood, a young man finds himself at odds with his Catholic family’s attempts to impose its rigid, oppressive lifestyle onto his own. Seeking escape, the youth goes out at night where he can act on his desires and truly be himself. Women are a complete mystery to him, and he goes through them as disposable pleasures. Eventually, he’s forced to re-evaluate his place in life when he falls for an older woman.

It’s an amusing set of similarities that exist between SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and George A Romero’s MARTIN, but the films also share a cynical, deeper probing of the constrictive nature of family and the poisonous core of empty faith.

But where SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER invites us to find the humanity in a racist, misogynist cheeseball, MARTIN asks us to empathize with a protagonist who, the film tells us, might be an 84 year-old vampire, but in all likelihood is a 19 year-old serial rapist and murderer. Troublesome waters, but well worth navigating.

We meet Martin (John Amplas) on a train bound for Pittsburgh. He eyes an attractive woman boarding the train during a stop in New York. Later, he picks the lock to her cabin and flings the door open. The film immediately transitions to black & white as we enter Martin’s fantasy world. The woman is waiting for him on the bed arms extended, as haunting, romantic music swells.



Of course, none of this is actually happening. Back in the real world the cabin seems empty, and the unceremonious flush of a toilet tells us Martin’s quarry is in the shitter. She opens the door as Martin crouches behind it. Her hair is in a towel and her face is covered in cold cream - hardly the idealized, willing victim of Martin’s fantasy. She sees him just before he pounces, hypodermic needle in hand. After injecting her, what ensues is still not Martin’s romantic fantasy, but rather a clumsy, messy struggle, punctuated by profanity and a discordant, jazzy score. Through the images, action and music, Romero telegraphs the collision course on which he’s set fantasy and reality in his film.

Once she’s subdued (but, interestingly and distressingly, still somewhat conscious), Martin quietly rapes the woman before opening her vein with a razor blade and drinking her blood. Her eyes, fluttering, watch the entire thing with a hazy confusion. He kisses her passionately, his bloody face smearing her own. He turns his attention back to the vein and in the next shot, she’s dead. There’s a casual, horrible banality to it. In its opening moments, Martin boldly announces itself as a very different kind of vampire film.

But Martin is less interested in digging into or deconstructing the vampire myth than it is in exploring the stagnant well of religion, and of Catholicism in particular. It stands next to the aforementioned SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, and to varying degrees films like THE EXORCIST and MEAN STREETS as part of an incidental movement in 70s cinema to question the hoary, empty and sometimes dangerous phenomenon of blind faith.

That loyalty to ritual and tradition is embodied in Tateh Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), Martin’s cousin who meets him at the train station. Dressed immaculately in white and speaking in a thick accent (Greek? Lithuanian? Cuda references “the old country” but is never specific), Cuda presents himself as a “good Catholic” who believes Martin to be his 84 year-old cousin cursed with vampirism, “the family shame.” Cuda escorts Martin to his home in the blighted city of Braddock, a former steel town seemingly sucked dry. Echoing the plague-ridden village of Nosferatu, our titular vampire arrives to find the shadow of death over the entire town and everyone in it. The shops, the streets, the church are all sparsely littered with sleepwalking bodies- truly the living dead. Even the zealot Cuda seems pretty resigned in his initial interactions with Martin. “First I will save your soul. Then I will destroy you. I will show you your room.” Cuda subscribes to a belief system that has preordained our lives from beginning to end, his words seem to be suggest. No sense getting worked up about it.

Again and again, the film ties vampirism to antiquated religion. And much like any other religion, even the believers can’t seem to agree on what exactly it is. Shortly after unpacking, Martin reacts angrily to Cuda’s addressing him as “nosferatu.” Martin chases him through the house, ripping a string of garlic from Cuda’s door. As Cuda retreats to his bedroom, he’s backed into a corner, and as a last resort reaches into a drawer and pulls out...a glow-in-the-dark plastic crucifix. Martin bites into the garlic and presses the cheap cross against his cheek. “You see? It isn’t magic.” Yet a few scenes later Martin tells his cousin he’s 84 years old. So Martin really believes he’s a vampire; he just doesn’t have the same beliefs about vampirism that Cuda does. We learn that like any other religious fanatic, Martin cherry picks his belief system to justify his own actions, but gets upset and emotional when other people’s interpretations intrude on his version.

Cuda puts on a normal face for the outside world, telling his customers that his young cousin (and new employee) is nineteen years old, and dismissing their clucked tongues when they suggest it’s inappropriate that a young man live in the same house as Cuda’s young daughter Christine (Christine Forrest). “My family knows how to behave.” Cuda only lets his crazy side out to a trusted few. Martin shows his true self to even fewer, and it tends to result in their death. So he reaches out to a late night radio call-in show and begins having long phone conversations with the DJ. The calls become a de facto voice over for the film, allowing us to hear Martin’s inner dialogue mixed with a fair amount of mythbusting. Martin’s life as a vampire, he tells the radio audience, involves no coffins, no fear of crosses or sunlight, and he doesn’t turn into a bat.  “Those movies are crazy!” His refutation of vampire lore takes on an odd tone- incredulousness mixed with betrayal. The movies don’t just lie to us about vampires; they lied to him. And the myth Martin is most distressed about is that you can’t make women do what you want in real life.

Martin’s workaround for this inconvenience involves a fair amount of leg work: reconnaissance, staking out a target’s home over a period of days, figuring out how to get inside the home, and waiting for the right moment to strike. Martin patiently waits for one victim’s husband to go away on business, but again messy reality gets in the way of his fantasy: when he flings open the woman’s bedroom door, syringe in hand, the sexually naive Martin is confused by the presence of the woman’s side piece. He improvises masterfully, though, his mind remembering (or fantasizing) a cat and mouse chase from his younger days.

As these brushes with capture - the woman’s home, wandering into a drug deal/police shootout after murdering a wino - fool us into thinking they’re the only real danger posed to Martin, Cuda and his religious fervor take on an air of buffoonery. Martin accompanies his cousin to church and the only thing that threatens to destroy him there is boredom. An attempted exorcism proves to be a rather limp exercise. When Cuda invites a young priest (Romero) over for dinner, the priest has to stifle a giggle when asked about demonic possession. When pressed on the issue, the priest nervously says “I don’t know what to believe about that.” It’s a damning moment in a throwaway line.

Martin’s antagonistic relationship with Cuda comes to be portrayed not so much as an epic battle of good vs evil, but as Martin straight trolling Cuda. He becomes an insolent punk, smirking at Cuda’s convictions and delighting in pissing him off. AfIn one scene Martin menaces Cuda in a mist-shrouded playground, dressed up in a dime-store vampire getup. When Cuda clutches his rosary for protection, Martin cackles at him. “It’s just a costume,” Martin says, spitting out a set of plastic fangs that might have come from the same factory as Cuda’s glow-in-the-dark crucifix. Cuda is reduced to a frightened old man, a misconception which primes us for the film’s bleak finale.

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

Martin’s relationship with a lonely housewife (Elyane Nadeau) is his first sexual interaction with a willing participant. Although it’s not exactly an ideal romance - she likes that he seldom speaks, he’s happy she’s not unconscious - it suggests that perhaps Martin can make progress toward a more human, normal life. Martin’s fate does end up intimately tied to this woman’s, but not in a way he (or we) could have seen coming. Martin’s undoing comes from trying to be like everyone else; O. Henry style irony, or maybe Romero is indicting conformity all the way to his last frame.

Is Martin a vampire? People like to say the film doesn’t tell us; Romero likes to say “it doesn’t matter,” but the clues are there and any other answer than the obvious one serves no end other than cheap storytelling gimmickry. Martin is a delusional maniac, from a family of delusional maniacs, and they’re all far too human. The smoking gun that Martin’s “memories” are all in his mind is given right up front: when he busts into that first victim’s cabin, the black-and-white fantasy sequence transports him (and us) not into a distant memory, but into a fantasy of what’s about to happen. It’s just wishful thinking. Martin imagines the woman wants him, just as he imagines he’s an 84 year-old vampire. But as Martin says early on, there is no real magic, ever. It’s just a sickness.

PHIL NOBILE JR is a writer/director of non-fiction television projects, including the feature-length A&E documentary HALLOWEEN: THE INSIDE STORY (2010.) He is a contributing writer for Birth.Movies.Death and its sister print publication.

Monster Serial: GANJA AND HESS, 1973

By PHIL NOBILE JR.

On June 22, 2014, Spike Lee’s Kickstarter-funded feature, DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS, screened for the first time. Moments before the screening, it revealed that the film is actually a remake of the 1973 horror-art film Ganja & Hess. There’s an easy joke in here about Lee learning from his experience remaking OLDBOY that if you’re going to remake a cult film, stay away from beloved titles and go for the deep cut.

It’s not all that surprising that Lee was able to keep a lid on his new film’s lineage - relatively speaking, not many people have seen the original Ganja & Hess. And it’s maybe equally unsurprising that the nearly-forgotten film has returned from the dead in a new form, as it seems to have been doing just that over and over for decades.

GANJA & HESS played theaters in its original form for less than a week in 1973 before it was pulled from distribution, re-cut, retitled and forgotten. While the film was pitched (and financed) as a horror flick, it’s closer in tone to Nicolas Roeg’s inscrutable, non-linear THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, which GANJA & HESS predates by three years. Director Bill Gunn’s shooting script allegedly contained more traditional, mainstream horror elements. Gunn later claimed he intended all along to remove most of them, very intentionally leaving a frustrating but weirdly resonant meditation on addiction, cultural extinction and the struggle of the “Blackman” (Gunn’s term) to retain his identity.

We get early hints of Gunn’s preoccupation with the slippery nature of identity: the film begins with a minister (Sam Waymon) discussing his faith in voiceover, accompanied by handheld, documentary-style shots of him commanding a church service. But we soon find out that the minister’s main job is quite different - he’s a driver for Dr. Hess Green (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD’s Duane Jones), and we learn from some oblique exposition that this well-to-do “doctor of anthropology and geology” is studying artifacts from an extinct civilization of African blood-worshippers called the Myrthians. As the surviving crew members note on the blu-ray commentary, seeing a respected, affluent black man onscreen, being chauffeured around New York in a Rolls Royce, was quite a bit of culture shock, and was likely a hell of a way to start your film in 1973.

Hess studies dead civilizations; Gunn’s camera slyly suggests the doctor is also part of one. That’s about as overtly political as the film gets: there are no rallying cries for equality or quaint-but-clumsy speeches about race, just frame after lonely frame of Gunn’s Blackmen occupying near-deserted bars, sparsely populated streets and big empty rooms. Even dialogue scenes are framed in ways that isolate the individual. As Hess quietly ponders a relic and dreams of ancient Myrthia, there’s a genuine feeling of mournfulness, of mortality, of memory bleeding out into history.

The plot, such as it is, is set in motion when Hess hires George Meda (played by the film’s director) as his assistant. We find out as abruptly as Hess does that Meda is quite out of his mind. After dinner, Hess finds Meda sitting in a tree, threatening to hang himself in Hess’ yard (easily the film’s funniest exchange, in which Hess asks Meda to consider the amount of trouble his suicide would bring to “the only colored on the block”). Meda then gives a long speech about his suicidal impulses with a stalactite of snot dangling precariously from his mustache. In the very next scene, for reasons the viewer is never given, he attacks Hess in bed, stabbing him with the Myrthian dagger, an act which transforms Hess into a blood drinker (the word “vampire” is never used in the film).

Thinking he’s killed Hess, Meda takes a bath, brushes his teeth (using his cloudy bathwater), and kills himself. Next, Hess is seen sitting up in bed, no worse for wear, and upon discovering Meda’s body begins to drink his blood. Much of this film can’t rightly qualify as horror, but the sight of Jones slurping congealed blood off the bathroom floor is a moment of genuine revulsion (reportedly for the actor as much as the audience), and says everything the film aims to about addiction.

Meda ends up in Hess’ walk-in freezer, and Hess begins the life of an addict - petty theft from a blood bank, cruising bad neighborhoods for his fix. The commentary isn’t terribly subtle, but it’s delivered with a measured hand. Soon Meda’s estranged wife Ganja (Marlene Clark) shows up looking for her husband. She finds him in Hess’ walk-in freezer. From here the film becomes a kind of love story, before sending the title characters down a road of increasing debasement and self-loathing to feed their craving. As their addiction brings them together, it slowly drains their humanity. METAPHOR!

I’m not quite in the “masterpiece” camp on this film, but I’ve been fascinated by it for over 20 years (I watched a sort of incomprehensible 16mm print back in 1992). On a first viewing, the film often feels a bit patchwork and unwieldy in trying to get even the basic narrative setup across, as if Gunn has so much to say, but is battling his own framework in the process. And his subtext feels at times as confusing as his talky, wandering narrative. The Christian church scenes are messy, sweaty bits of handheld vérité, while the flashbacks/dreams of the Myrthian Queen are shot in loving, elegant slow motion. Is he criticizing the Western European eclipsing of African culture? It often seems so, but the film’s finale suggests otherwise.

Similarly, posing Ganja and Hess as a well-off black couple in 1973 seems a deliberate, progressive stance. But why are they then portrayed as such assholes about their status? Hess’ black butler is a constant object of the couple’s ridicule and derision (and of Gunn’s as well; the director literally robs him of all identity in almost every shot, his head cut off by the top of the frame in nearly all of his scenes). Is he criticizing Ganja and Hess for their bourgeois social status, or the butler for his willing subjugation? Or both? And the film’s final shots are guaranteed to frustrate as much as they resonate.

 
But what seem like problems with the film begin, on repeated viewings, to feel like stubborn badges of honor. And you begin to realize it’s not that Gunn CAN’T make a more traditional story; he simply refuses to. (There are 17 minutes of deleted scenes on YouTube which connect the details of the evasive plot; Gunn shot them and threw them away.) There are just enough moments in the film to show you that Gunn could have easily gone a more mainstream route: the film is beautiful when it’s meant to be beautiful; the use of ambient sound is innovative, almost masterful. Gunn is not an amateur. But not every movie is willing to meet you halfway. There are films that are fun to watch; Ganja & Hess compels you to watch. There are films that ask more questions than they answer; Ganja & Hess answers zero questions, nor does it aim to. Maybe that’s why it lingers in the brain.

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

It’s such a cheap bit of irony that a film rife with subtext about a dying culture devouring itself was carved up and shortened by over 30 minutes to make it more palatable to the blaxploitation crowd. As the legend goes, Gunn took a single print with him to Cannes, where it received a standing ovation and was named one of the ten best American films of the decade (in 1973, but still). New York critics were less impressed, and Gunn’s film was pulled from release after playing less than a week in one theater, after which its distributors hired another filmmaker to re-cut the film into the 76 minute Blood Couple (also released in various formats and markets as Black Evil, Black Vampire, Blackout: The Moment of Terror, Vampires of Harlem, and Double Possession for good measure). Stories vary, but at some point Gunn stashed the uncut print from Cannes at the Museum of Modern Art, and once the original negative was reworked, this became the only surviving print of Gunn’s original cut, and remained so for nearly two decades. (For the whole, amazing history of the film’s rescue from oblivion, check out the great Video Watchdog article by Tim Lucas and David Walker, reprinted on the DVD. Reading it, one realizes it’s nothing less than a miracle that the film exists at all.)

Gunn never directed another film (he started work on the Muhammad Ali biopic THE GREATEST, but was replaced by Monte Hellman). He returned to the stage and television, and ended up on the set of “The Cosby Show” as one of Bill Cosby’s poker buddies. Gunn died in 1989. In the end, the burial of GANJA & HESS perfectly illustrated the kind of cultural extinction which preoccupied the filmmaker.

Fittingly, the film refused to remain buried. A grass-roots movement to restore the film culminated in a DVD release in 1998. Today an even more fully restored blu-ray is available. Amazon will even stream the movie to you for $3.99. And early reviews of DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS suggest that Spike Lee might have given the tale yet another cinematic resurrection. Though reactions from the film’s premiere describe a fun tone that’s light-years from Gunn’s film, the plot descriptions coming out of the initial screening sound eerily accurate to the original. It’s astonishing that we live in a world where GANJA & HESS has been remade, and way more astonishing that said remake might actually be good. But sight unseen, it sounds as if perhaps Lee has engaged the material correctly. And much to my surprise, I’m finding the story of GANJA & HESS calling to me once again.

PHIL NOBILE JR is a writer/director of non-fiction television projects, including the feature-length A&E documentary HALLOWEEN: THE INSIDE STORY (2010.) He is a contributing writer for badassdigest.com and its sister print publication, BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH.

Monster Serial: HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, 1982

By Phil Nobile Jr

John Carpenter wanted Michael Myers dead.

That amazing final moment from 1978’s HALLOWEEN — the one where The Shape has vanished from the spot where he’d surely been shot dead seconds earlier — helped cement the film as a genre staple, the new slasher gold standard for which countless wannabe franchises (and a handful of actual franchises) strived. HALLOWEEN made a bundle, and was for 20 years the most profitable independent film of all time.

As a result, by 1981, the low-budget film industry was lousy with filmmakers planting flags (and pitchforks and machetes) on every holiday on the calendar, lining up for some of that easy slasher money.

Somewhat to his dismay, John Carpenter discovered he was one of them. That famous last shot had come around to bite him in the ass; if Michael Myers wasn’t dead, surely there was a sequel to be hammered out to keep that gravy train rolling? That was the thinking of the money men, at any rate, and Carpenter, much like his crazed Dr. Loomis, must have felt a measure of responsibility for unleashing Michael Myers on the world. So Carpenter, while a firm “no” on directing, returned to finish off his monster with his typewriter. (And if he made a few bucks off the franchise in the process, well, no one was more entitled to such than him.) As Carpenter himself tells it, each night he, fueled by a six-pack of beer, would hammer out the draft for HALLOWEEN II.

It’s not hard to look at HALLOWEEN II and realize the film’s one mission seems to be to destroy the original’s mysterious killer. It’s certainly true in a thematic sense: the unknowable, unstoppable killer (who, remember, was simply called “The Shape” in the first film’s script), is given a sibling, a bit of pagan backstory/motivation, and is referred to by his first name over and over again. Rob Zombie takes a lot of heat for fleshing out Michael Myers too much in his 2007 remake, but let’s assign blame where it’s due; the rot of demystification takes root the second HALLOWEEN II starts. “Kill The Shape” is also a more literal mandate here, as Carpenter sees to it that his creation is shot in both eyes before being set on fire. THE END, the filmmaker seemed to be saying. You can practically envision Carpenter gleefully patting down the dirt on Michael’s grave with a shovel. Slashers had recovered from lesser injuries, and would of course go on to recover from worse, but watching Michael Myers’ head melt through his mask while The Chordettes chirp “Mr. Sandman” on the soundtrack, things felt pretty final.

Which, of course, created a unique opportunity for Carpenter and producing partner Debra Hill when Universal came calling in 1982, asking for a third Halloween. With Myers a charred puddle of goo and filmmakers still somewhat beholden to the laws of physics, a third killing spree for the Shape was apparently out of the question. So what happened next was one of the ballsier, more admirable, and most ill-fated moves of the genre. HALLOWEEN isn’t about a single killer, the team suggested to the studio. It’s a BRAND NAME. We’ll do a new HALLOWEEN every year. Each story will be a standalone tale, and you can keep the franchise going indefinitely. The first new story of the anthology will delve into the origins of Halloween itself, and will meld ancient pagan sacrifice with the modern consumer age! People will forget all about Michael Myers!

 
What optimism in this pitch! Think about the leap of faith, the boundless credit given to the public here - the adorably naive belief that horror audiences would rather see a new story under the brand name than sequel after boring sequel of teenagers being stabbed to death.

Sadly, they were 100% wrong.

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH feels like a significant moment in horror history, and for a couple of reasons. For starters, it’s pure fork-in-the-road, “what if” territory; had the filmmakers’ anthology approach worked, there’s every reason to think the ensuing 30 years of horror would look very, very different. The other angle is more personal, and it involves the tough lesson learned by three young mavericks (Carpenter, Hill, and director Tommy Lee Wallace), emboldened by a bit of mainstream success, who thought they were going to use the system to do something original and different. It feels like such an ambitious, naive gesture that fans are inclined to be on board with it, no matter the actual film’s shortcomings.

To be fair, the film gets a lot right. Dean Cundey’s cinematography and Carpenter’s score (co-written by Alan Howarth) effectively maintain the ongoing HALLOWEEN “brand,” as does the cast, containing a handful of faces from Carpenter’s repertory company. (You can even hear Jamie Lee Curtis as the voice of the telephone operator.) The film uses Halloween as a backdrop much more effectively than Carpenter’s film, where the holiday was more of an excuse to have a masked killer wandering town unnoticed. Here, kids pester their parents for cool masks in the days leading up to Halloween; incessant TV commercials count down the hours to the holiday; and in one nicely shot montage, children all over the country canvas their respective neighborhoods as the sun goes down.  We wouldn’t see Halloween so lovingly rendered on film again until 2007’s TRICK ‘R TREAT.




The plot, derived from an early script conceived by British science-fiction writer Nigel Kneale, concerns nothing less than the fate of the world — we’ve traded in a lone maniac for one who heads a corporation, and his plan involves sacrificing all the children of the world using old-fashioned magic combined with the latest in 1983 telecommunications. Throughout is that same love of film history so palpable in all of Carpenter’s films. With a half-crocked protagonist (Tom Atkins) at the wheel, HALLOWEEN III sort of drunk-drives back through time, scraping against the paranoid thrillers of the 70s, bumping into 1973’s THE WICKER MAN, and eventually ditching straight into Don Siegel’s 1956 masterpiece, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (the film is set in Santa Mira, the same fictional locale as Siegel’s film.) Atkins is a constant joy as a protagonist over his head and out of patience, and Dan O’Herlihy as Conal Cochran, channeling equal parts Boris Karloff from THE BLACK CAT and Edmund Gwenn from MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, makes for a memorable villain.

This column is among those featured in
 BRIDE OF MONSTER SERIAL, a collection of 
horror essays written by contributors to 
THE COLLINSPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 
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All of this to say HALLOWEEN III has some legitimate pleasures. Script tinkering and producer meddling (courtesy Dino De Laurentiis) is revealed through some hard tonal shifts, but the film maintains a plucky enthusiasm, and for an ‘80s studio effort, it’s got a mean streak that’s to be admired. (You don’t often find corporate product in which a little boys head is turned into a swarm of bugs and snakes.) Combined with its weird pedigree, this all makes the movie something of a singular experience. But one also can’t help but experience HALLOWEEN III through that “what if” context, and when we watch it we’re imagining that alternate world where HALLOWEEN III worked, and 1983 saw the release of HALLOWEEN IV, a film that had all the earmarks of the series — that Cundey lighting, that Carpenter/Howarth score, that repertory company — but was yet another standalone tale. We watch HALLOWEEN III and imagine a decade in which “John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN” meant an all-new, annual experience. When we watch and love HALLOWEEN III, we’re loving a franchise that never really existed, and that’s part of the appeal.

Timing is everything. In 1982, the idea of a horror anthology was certainly in the air, as evidenced by the release (and success) of George A. Romero’s CREEPSHOW. The following year would see four of Carpenter’s peers collaborating on TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (one of those peers, Joe Dante, was originally slated to helm HALLOWEEN III.) Before the decade was over, both TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE and TALES FROM THE CRYPT would be on the small screen, proving that there was in fact a market for horror anthologies. Many folks have pointed to these examples as proof that HALLOWEEN III was ahead of its time. But in reality the film was, in fact, a year too late. It’s not that people weren’t ready for an anthology; it’s that HALLOWEEN II gummed up the works, fixing in audiences’ minds the idea that the franchise was about Michael Myers, no matter what kind of shape he was left in at the end. Had Wallace’s SEASON OF THE WITCH  been the second Halloween film, audiences would have no doubt been more open to the idea of an anthology series, and we could very well be celebrating a very different franchise today.

PHIL NOBILE JR is a writer/director of non-fiction television projects, including the feature-length A&E documentary HALLOWEEN: THE INSIDE STORY (2010.) He is a contributing writer for badassdigest.com and its sister print publication, BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH.

We Need to Talk About Dark Shadows

Cousin Barnabas here.

It’s not exactly a secret I didn’t much care for Tim Burton’s take on DARK SHADOWS. I’m not sure many people did, but my evidence for such a claim is anecdotal. If you take a look at Tumblr, you’ll see the movie certainly has its fans, even if the demographics have little in common with the older fanbase. There's a very clear schism between these two groups, a valley dug, in part, by older fans as an effort to keep younger audiences from usurping their beloved property and transforming the brand into a Hot Topic fashion accessory.

I’ve tried to rein in the bile on this site since the movie's release. My feelings about it have softened during the last few months, probably because I haven’t seen the film since May and tend to remember the parts of it that I liked. It had a tremendous sense of visual style (a Tim Burton hallmark) and a great cast, but the script was a trainwreck of Irwin Allen proportions (another Tim Burton trademark.)

But, it was still DARK SHADOWS. Johnny Depp clearly loved Jonathan Frid’s performance and has spoken often of the show over the years, so I refuse to interpret the movie’s shortcomings as a vendetta against the original program. It was misguided, sure, but Burton has proven repeatedly that he can’t tell a good script (Ed Wood) from a bad one (Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland, Batman, The Corpse Bride, etc.) If he were interested in intentionally damaging DARK SHADOWS he wouldn’t know where to begin.

So, with that in mind, I thought the DVD release of DARK SHADOWS was the perfect opportunity to revisit the film. Did we sell it short on its theatrical release? Were fans too angry about the final product, and would the fanbase have spewed bile over all things Depp/Burton no matter WHAT the final movie looked like? These things are worth talking about. And, because the cops usually get involved whenever I talk to myself in public, I decided to invite some friends to the discussion. Joining me in this group column are writers/raconteurs Phil Nobile Jr., Will McKinley and Plucky McFeatherton.

Now that you’ve had a chance to revisit DARK SHADOWS, what did you think?

WILL McKINLEY

I tried to give this movie the benefit of the doubt. I've seen it three times now, and each time I like it less. This last time, on Blu-ray, I found it infuriating. It's just a complete and utter failure.

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

Same here. I was positively beside myself when I realized that Tim Burton and Seth Grahame-Smith had turned Dr. Julia into a doughy alcoholic. I know for a fact that Helena Bohnam Carter has a bangin' figure, so why they elected to have her don mu-mu's and down play her very Grayson Hall-esqu check bones is beyond me.

Also, did anyone else laugh out loud at "GO... WATCH... THE COOPER... WOMAN"? Easily the funniest line in the movie.

PHIL NOBILE JR.

I did like that line.

Here's the problem with adapting DARK SHADOWS: The story is the least original thing about it. Barnabas chasing a reincarnated Josette? Right out of Karloff's THE MUMMY. Yet each time they re-adapt the show, they just copy that same story, over and over. You get the sense that Smith was sent a highlights reel by Jim Pierson, or maybe watched two weeks of show, and was off to the races. What I'd hoped for, and which threatened to happen for about ten seconds in the film, was a love letter to the crazy tone of the show. Instead the movie was essentially tone-deaf, jumping from scene to scene, skimming the surface, with bits of interesting things always threatening to happen, but never taking shape. The film keeps flirting with themes of "family" but Barnabas never connects (in the 18th century or the 20th) with anyone in the family. Or his love interest. Or us.

COUSIN BARNABAS

I missed the "Cooper Woman" line during my first screening (it was probably drowned out by the sound of my breaking heart) but it was easily the best laugh of the film. It's worth pointing out that I passed up a chance to see LAWRENCE OF ARABIA on the big screen last night so that I could watch DARK SHADOWS again in preparation for this piece. Shouldn't that kind of decision cost me my right to vote or something?

The last time I saw the movie was at the midnight showing during the film's theatrical release. I've been bombarded with photos and memes via Tumblr during the last few months and was starting to think the film's flaws were my imagination. But the movie was actually worse than I remembered it. The script lacks anything resembling a narrative focus, plot, etc. Ideas are constantly thrown at the screen and immediately forgotten, but the entire project is crippled by Tim Burton's lack of interest in the movie's romance. Victoria Winters disappears during the last 45 minutes of the film, and then brought back in an "Oh shit, we totally forgot about her!" moment. It's like the entire movie was a protracted last-minute reshoot.

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

You passed up digitally remastered Lawrence of Arabia for "boldly re-imagined in the hackneyed Tim Burton style that is neither bold nor re-imagined" Dark Shadows? I DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU RIGHT NOW.

Tim Burton put more effort into the totally gross monster-sex between Barnabas and fork-tongued uber-bitch Angelique than he did the budding (and also kind of gross in its own way) romance between Barnabas and Vicky (who is actually Maggie, which is a problem that will never actually be addressed in the film so why even bother?)

Also, Julia fellating Barnabas: WHO YOU FINNA TRY MR. BURTON?

WILL McKINLEY

Honestly, I don't care what the funniest line in the movie is. I don't watch DARK SHADOWS for funny lines.

And that storyline with Julia felt like it was conceived on a 10-minute conference call. "Instead of her trying to cure him, why not make it that she's trying to cure herself of aging. Because, you know, women hate aging."

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

"Women hate aging". Nah Mr. Burton and company. Women hate being told what they hate.

COUSIN BARNABAS

I watched this with my fiancee last night, who's had to suffer through the movie twice without any prior devotion to the original television show. She highlighted a dozen different ideas in the film that were worth exploring as films, and said she'd love to see a sequel about a love triangle between Barnabas, Victoria and Julia because they all came upon their curse in different ways. Barnabas was cursed (though you'd never know it was a curse by watching this movie,) Victoria was made a vampire to save her life, while Julia actively SOUGHT IT OUT. There's a story there, but I don't trust these idiots to find it.

PHIL NOBILE JR.
"Women hate aging", and this movie HATES women! Russ Fischer at Slashfilm has an interesting take: this is Tim Burton's movie about his breakup with Lisa Marie. I hate to think that Burton spent $200 million slamming a woman who now charges $20 an autograph at horror conventions, but there's definitely a big, uncomfortable, half-baked "bitches be crazy" subtext running through this whole movie.

I have a friend who's never seen the show, and in twenty seconds he came up with a more interesting take for the film:

"It COULD have been a pretty good Burton-movie if it had been about Barnabas slowly discovering (with his comedy sidekick Willie) his family members' secrets, gaining their trust, slowly becoming their friend, leading up to the big fight at the end where everyone uses their powers in sync and OMG THEY'RE A REAL FAMILY NOW.

"The boy and his ghost mother? Barnabas should have IMMEDIATELY bought into that and gone to investigate. Chloe-wolf? Have Pfeiffer say she's going through changes and Barnabas IMMEDIATELY assumes it's lycanthropy because his mind is in 1780s mode.

"There'd be MOMENTUM! How unheard of!

"Instead nope everybody just walks around being miserable and then CGI fight scene the end."

WILL McKINLEY

For you guys who saw it in the movie theater (all of us?), did you have any walk-outs? When I saw it on opening night at midnight, there were too few people to walk out. If anyone had walked out it would have left me alone in a 200-seat theater. But when I went the next night, there were at least three couples who left. Now, I understand people do that in multiplexes, because they can just walk into another film. But I can't remember the last movie I thought was bad enough to walk out on.

PHIL NOBILE JR.
I was at a press screening; a walkout would have been hilarious. For this conversation I watched it again and nodded off after 20 minutes, if that counts.

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

No walk-outs, just a very nearly empty movie theater. Me and a bunch of teenage girls. I think the tragedy of Dark Shadows as a Tim Burton fustercluck was lost on them.

COUSIN BARNABAS

I didn't see any walkouts, either. I was at a midnight screening, and the kind of people who show up to a movie at midnight on Thursday are pretty much committed to the experience, good or bad.

Then again, I didn't see any walkouts during BATMAN AND ROBIN, either, and that movie is still my personal gold standard for bad movie experiences.

WILL McKINLEY

DARK SHADOWS makes BATMAN AND ROBIN look like CITIZEN KANE.

COUSIN BARNABAS
I don't know about that ... I still suffer from PTSD from BATMAN AND ROBIN. Ice-related puns send me into convulsions and I often wake up screaming from nightmares about that fucking Batman credit card.

But I digress.

The Barnabas/Angelique sex scene is pretty much the apex of the movie's problem: Neither character has defined powers. Barnabas is 21st Century vampire, which pretty much makes him Superman, while Angelique can do anything she wants, whenever she wants. She needs a forked tongue for the sake of a joke? Done. She's survived 200 years without explanation? Fine. She can bring furniture to life with the flick of her wrist? Whatever.

She's a walking "deus ex machina" character, which goes a long way toward explaining the movie's deus ex machina ending ... it was the only thing that could stop an unstoppable character.

Also, was there some kind of relationship between Angelique and Collinwood? She seemed to get injured whenever the property took damage, but it was never addressed.

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

There was definitely something about the way the film was edited that gave it an unfinished feel, as if the original script (and I guess the movie as it was originally filmed) was much more complex, more dynamic, and maybe didn't move at a breakneck pace.

I've always gotten the sense that Tim Burton likes to coat Johnny Depp in layers and layers of makeup to somehow compensate for the fact that he essentially plays the same character in every film in the Tim Burton universe. The facial expressions and mannerisms will always be the same, and only the look of the character changes. I didn't get a sense go Jonathan Frid at all from Johnny Depp's Barnabas. It made me miss the REAL Barnabas Collins.

PHIL NOBILE JR

Over and over I keep coming back to the script as the culprit. I love the series but I didn't expect reverence.  I would have LOVED a comedic take that was actually funny. But the humor was just lazy, and kept relying on obvious montages of Rip Van Winkle jokes. Three montages? Four? That got old fast. The approach didn't bother me, the changes didn't bother me, but goddamn it, Smith's ability to mix horror and humor apparently ends at title mash-ups.

COUSIN BARNABAS

That's the downside to playing an homage: You're constantly reminding the audience of the OTHER guy. I didn't much like the new STAR TREK movie (though I didn't hate it) and one of the smart decisions they made was to avoid having Chris Pine do a William Shatner impersonation. The most flattering thing I could say about ST is that it was a deft piece of commercial cinema, which is a meager accomplishment that DARK SHADOWS didn't manage.

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

I can go with you on this one. It would have been unsettling to see Johnny Depp channeling Jonathan Frid. Unfortunately his only other option was to combine Edward Scissorhands and Jack Sparrow.

WILL McKINLEY

Johnny Depp IS channeling Jonathan Frid. Everything about his performance is based upon Frid, including inflection and the way he moves his head when he speaks. His Barnabas is a DIRECT homage, which is why it's so disconcerting to see him in the middle of this dreck.

COUSIN BARNABAS

I think Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer are the two saving graces of this film, even though they aren’t given much to do. My favorite bit of acting in the entire movie is by Depp, just as Dr. Hoffman is preparing to hypnotize him. In that moment he feels like a real character and not just a collection of quirks. Depp certainly meant well, but his trust in Burton was misguided.

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

Johnny Depp SAYS he's channeling Frid, but I don't see it. Granted, it could be that I'm looking for something else familiar from Frid's Barnabas, something that I noticed personally that I'm not seeing in Depp's performance that's throwing me off, but I just can't go with you on this one.

Maybe I can't see it because on the whole, the movie is so far divorced from Dark Shadows as we know it that it's hard to place a familiar Barnabas in an unfamiliar Burton-tacular landscape.

PHIL NOBILE JR

That was the biggest misstep in tone. The series lives in this hermetically sealed bubble; I'm pretty sure I never even saw a TV on the show. But for easy jokes Burton has immersed Collinsport in pop culture - books, music, television. It takes away from what made the show unique and adds virtually nothing.

COUSIN BARNABAS

The reason Barnabas was able to survive on the original show was because he had a profound lack of curiosity about the outside world. He lived like a ghost, haunting the "old house" and rarely ventured out beyond Collinwood. He didn't care about telephones, pop culture, television, etc. He had about as much use for that stuff as my grandfather has for Twitter, which is none at all. On the original show, it was still a BAD THING to be a vampire.

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

Yeah guys, I'm coming with you on this one. Just watched Johnny Depp's Barnabas back to back with Jonathan Frid's on Ye Olde YouTube. He just looks like Johnny Depp playing Johnny Depp to me.

COUSIN BARNABAS

I know people are getting tired of Johnny Depp, but I still like the guy. I think there's more going on with his characters than "just" playing chalk-faced weirdos, and I'm not holding a grudge for SHADOWS. It's just one more well-intended misfire from Burton, who is an amazing production designer that's paid tons of cash to be a storyteller. If I paid the David Bowie to fix my plumbing, I'd only have myself to blame when he fucked it up.

Has anyone seen any new fans sign up because of this film? I think the anticipation of the film generated a lot of new SHADOWS fans, but the actual film hasn't done much for the brand. I don't know if you noticed, but the back of the DVD/Blu makes no reference to the TV show.

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

I tried enticing my little sisters (12 & 14) but it's hard to get anyone under 25 to sit still not just for Dark Shadows, but for anything that doesn't offer constant action. Granted, the series gets less creeping in its pace as it moves forward (and, y'know, backwards) but initially winced every time my siblings deferred to their smartphones for entertainment during their introduction to Dark Shadows.  

WILL McKINLEY

One more thing. What pushed me over the edge, I think, were the "special features" on the Blu-ray. There are NINE little behind-the-scenes packages that were shot and edited specifically for this release. NOT ONE of them is about the original series. NOT ONE of them is a tribute to Jonathan Frid, without whom none of this would be happening. 

When Frid died so close to the movie's release, my first thought was, "Well, it's too late to dedicate the film to him. But I'm sure they'll do something on the DVD." Nothing. His face appears for ONE SECOND in one of the special features, along with a shot of the logo and Lara Parker. They don't even reference him by name. And here are the soundbites from the special feature that the images are meant to support:

Derek Frey, Associate Producer: "The television show was trying to pull off things that maybe it didn't have the budget or the means to."

Johnny Depp: "'Dark Shadows' the series did it well within whatever restrictions they had. But it was time to take it to another level."

Derek Frey, Associate Producer: "Were able to tell the DS story with a much grander scope, on a bigger scale."

So, they only reference the source material to point out how flawed it is, to damn it with faint praise?

These people did not come up with "Dark Shadows." Art Wallace, Gordon Russell, Ron Sproat, Sam Hall and Dan Curtis did. Burton and Seth Grahame-Smith just remixed it. And they did a shitty job. And there are no acknowledgements to the people that created this, other than Dan Curtis. This is unforgivable.

COUSIN BARNABAS

Uh, yeah ... I don't think it's a good idea for me to watch those features. It might prompt some kind of Hulk-related incident here in South Carolina.

WILL McKINLEY

FUCK ALL THOSE BITCHES.

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

As a Dark Shadows fan, I really only had one humble wish in the months leading up to the premier of Tim Burton's Dark Shadows movie: Just don't fuck it up. Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the donkey, just don't fuck it up. Unfortunately Tim Burton and Seth Grahame-Won't-Be-Working-Year-From-Now remained loyal to the source material only in the sense that they didn't change the name to Technicolor 1970's Vampire Romance (But Not Really, You Guys) Extravaganza!

Dark Shadows was terrible. It was terrible in a laughable, MST3K-worthy way and it was terrible in a way that elicited a collective groan from a deeply emotionally invested fan base who was genuinely hoping for a DS movie that wouldn't fall squarely with in the realm of Things That Are Craptacular That We Wish We Could Forget.

It was clear before Dark Shadows was released that with the notable exceptions of Michelle Pfeiffer and Johnny Depp, no ones heart was in the right place going in to this film and that's super unfortunate, because what ended up in theaters was a movie where the director, producer, and writer were clearly in on the joke and the two principle players, the ones old enough to remember getting REALLY TEEN-ANGSTY EXCITED about Dark Shadows back when vampires were still Bela Legosi in a cape, weren't in on it at all.

And that just sucks.

Sometimes being a DS fan is like watching your teddy bear (or applicable favorite childhood plush) get repeatedly run over by a pick up truck in slow motion while Tim Burton films it with a steady cam.

PHIL NOBILE JR.

Making Barnabas just a visibly obvious vampire really killed the other great subtext of the series - of the lonely "bachelor" living with a secret, and honestly just about every decision they made confirmed to me that I was right way back when: http://badassdigest.com/2010/12/14/terror-tuesday-how-burtons-dark-shadows-could-be-great-but-wont-be/

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: I'm not going to try to summarize the credits of the contributing writers for this piece because I'll leave out something important. But, if you want to read more from these folks, here are some good places to start:

 PHIL NOBILE JR.
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WILL McKINLEY

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Cinematically Insane

PLUCKY MCFEATHERTON

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