A Phenomenological Viewing of Scalps (1983)

The first shot of Scalps is of a hideous, aged Indian's face gazing angrily at us from the darkness. He leaps, showing a young man's body wearing blue jeans. Suddenly we see a man beheaded with gory detail of his hands catching at the gushing blood. We don't know the victim, at least not yet. The action and characters are totally abstract. It is a montage beginning in pure malice and ending in heinous violence.

Cut to a desert road over which rides a dusty old pick-up. We're now given a location for the abstract prologue: the desert. The next shot answers our suspicions: It shows a man in black robes with the head of a lion. We have no idea where he is in the desert, only that he is there and his rising is a response to the arrival of the truck. The score, consisting of long, droning synth chords is ominous and menacing. The shots of the truck suggest the driver, an old man, is being watched from all angles of the desert, and by the lion-headed man; but the oblivious driver drives on. The man parks, pulls out a shovel, and heads toward some chosen spot. The lion-headed man snarls. The man approaches a cave. We see him at the entrance from within, seeing him as an intruder. After puttering around at the cave mouth, he is overwhelmed with the urge to slit his own throat and does so, despite resistance. Only after this do we get the opening credits.

Some films have no prologues, some have one, but not many have a whole two prologues. Scalps is, needless to say, a very peculiar film. Unsurprisingly, it has never found much of an audience. Upon release, it was Siskel & Ebert's 'Dog of the Week' and maligned for its viciousness. The main audience for the film today, namely Fred Olen Ray fans, will be surprised to find none of the playfulness that characterizes his camp b-movies like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), Beverly Hills Vamp (1989), or Evil Toons (1992), with their abundant, contrived tits-'n'-ass and silly violence, or even less facetious efforts like Deep Space (1988). In contrast to the playfulness of his later films, Scalps is mean-spirited and nihilistic, its gore, unlike the rubber arms and transparent blood of Chainsaw Hookers, is intended to horrify. Perhaps standing out most, however, is the violence to women, which is fairly extreme in Scalps and which only features in Chainsaw Hookers in catfights; most of the violence in that and Ray's other films of the time is done to men, by women. Ray himself has said he didn't find Scalps fun and wouldn't want to make another film like it. Whatever audience the film might have left, such as those looking for a bodycount slasher will be frustrated by its atmospherics and such oddities as the unexplained, lion-headed man.

Part of the reason for Ray's distaste for his own film and its general oddness is the egregious distributor interference Ray alleges--and it's easy to believe him looking at the resultant film. The first prologue I noted contains footage from what is the penultimate death of the film and is therefore quite a spoiler. It also happens to be a spectacular beheading sequence, at least for 1983. If the distributor wished to catch the audience from the first few seconds and promise lots of horrifying stuff, that's a good way to start. The second prologue, probably Ray's own, contains the much tamer death of a nearly bloodless throat-slitting. The distributor clearly wanted to make what is a strangely atmospheric slasher less plodding, so they wouldn't have to give out any refunds to bored patrons. Even adding the gory first prologue didn't satisfy them, however. The shots of the lion-headed man are, Ray claims, mostly added by the distributor and were taken from test footage never intended for the final cut. Even the superimposition of the old Indian sorceror's head was added. In short, the bulk of the film's peculiarities are the results of extreme (unheard of to such a degree) interference from the distributors.

Ultimately, however, it really doesn't matter whether Fred Olen Ray or the distributor put the lion-headed man on screen; what matters is how the phenomena of the film affects me, or you, and understanding the film's effects. Scalps doesn't have any 'meaning', at least not in the traditional sense. But it does have a phenomenological process and both how that process functions and how affects us reveals something. So let's get back to the film.

After the two prologues, the first establishing an abstract malice and violent force, the second establishing the otherwordly inhospitableness of the desert, the narrative movement begins. After the oddness of the prologues, we now are placed in normality: normality of location, action, and narrative. A disorganized archaeology professor, we learn, is preparing a less-than-legal 'field trip' into the desert, where he and his graduate students will actually be digging in Indian territory. Unable to go himself yet, he sends the students--three males and three females--ahead. So we meet the characters, see them in their ordinary university environment, and begin what is a standard "dead teenager" plot in which we fully expect a maniac to slaughter most of the group.

The shot beginning the second act is of the students' car exiting a tunnel, with the camera mounted on the car. We, along with the students, are exiting the normality of the university and the modern, civilized world in which it's located and entering the mysterious vistas of the desert. The sole outpost of civilization, as in any horror film, is the gas station. This is the point where they will be warned not to go on and must decide whether or not to pay heed; of course, these are city folk and they pay cash, not heed. The more mystically-inclined of the group, lone-wolf D.J. looks down at an old, Indian man on the shop steps and is assaulted with a vision of the glowing-eyed old Indian sorceror from the second prologue. The old Indian later warns the group that the desert is a dangerous place and they must stay away from the place of the blackened wood. As he explains that it is the burial ground of many Indians who met violent ends, we see shots of nearly all the students' deaths from later in the film. The Warning Scene, in a horror movie, is supposed to suggest a choice to the protagonists. But by accompanying the Warning with flashforwards to the characters' deaths, we're being shown they have no choice; there is a certain inevitability to their deaths. They were dead the moment they exited that tunnel. So, apart from D.J., the group assumes the blackened woods is the place to go and off they head into the Other World of the desert.

Entry into the desert is greeted with the ominous music from the second prologue, the droning synth chords suggesting untold menace in spite of D.J.'s claims that the desert is beautiful. We see a shot of an Indian spirit wielding a bow. (In fact, it appears that this is a shot of the Indian sorceror-possessed body of one of the students from later in the film, taken out of the timeline. That he could be watching the students enter the desert is, therefore, particularly ominous and menacing, their deaths particularly inevitable.) The students drive past the abandoned truck of the man who died in the second prologue, left behind like the husk of a dead insect. As the camera pans left, we see what the students don't: the dessicated remains of the man, the skull's jaw wide open in an eternally silent scream. The students are going beyond this point, into a realm of death where the living have no business.

After this slow, atmospheric drive through the desert, they arrive at a spot where they decide to park. One of the girls notices a buzzard in the sky and believes it's a buzzard they saw earlier that followed them the whole way. D.J. agrees that it is the same buzzard. Again, the suggestion is that they are already dead. Nature knows what they don't. The tensions suggested are between culture and nature, the land of the living and the land of the dead. As D.J. bangs some metal sticks together, making primitive, percussive music under the blaring sun (shot from a very low angle), shots of the hideous Indian from the first prologue and of more gory violence to the students are cut in. They are in a realm of relentless, powerful nature, reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); and a land where death, not life, holds sway.

From here, the tensions in the film's structure--between the malice and violence found in the first prologue and the ethereal, ominous sense of doom found in the second prologue--begin to conflict and the film is admittedly somewhat messy. On the one hand, the trappings of any Friday the 13th knock-off are present: a group camping in the wilderness, tents, attractive co-eds, sex (or at least the potential for it), and soon graphic violence. On the other hand, elements of the mysteriousness found in the second prologue still come through. In the dark, around the camp fire, the students notice a drumming. As they put their ears to the ground, they hear the traditional Indian music more clearly. This is unsettling as it is. They are in the middle of the desert where they saw and heard no-one, and yet there is this sudden music, as though a whole group are present nearby. One of the couples decide to look for the source of the music. They find a camp set up with a camp fire, but no-one is present in the camp. As the male student looks into the fire, the ghostly head of the Indian sorceror appears for a while, chanting with the drums; then the fire explodes in the student's face.

After the couple returns, the male of the couple is changed. He refuses to acknowledge the existence of the camp and is verbally abusive to his girlfriend. He has, with the explosion of the camp fire, been possessed by the sorceror. From this point onward the spirit of the first prologue begins to take dominance over that of the second. The man takes his girlfriend out for a walk, where hits her, rapes her, and ultimately slits her throat and scalps her. Her friends eventually grow concerned and find her in a search. While the others frantically plan out what to do, D.J. grows peculiarly resigned to their fates. More ominous music plays as D.J. tells the group the possessed friend gave her a talisman and said he'd return. (This is actually foreshadowing: when the first possessed student is killed, the Indian sorceror 'returns' by possessing D.J..)

Now the classic bodycount slasher is set up. There is a violent monster loose and it is going to inflict violent deaths on all the young adults. One of the remaining males heads to the abandoned truck seen earlier and is clubbed by the possessed student, now physically resembling the Indian face from the first prologue. There is an insert One of the remaining girls is shot full of arrows. Finally, the remaining male kills the possessed student, but is beheaded with a trowel by the newly-possessed D.J.. This beheading is the one seen in the first six shots of the film. So the destinies of the students have been completed. By journeying into the land of the dead, they have joined the dead.

The main action of the film over, we get an epilogue. The professor who sent them out into the desert comes to check in on them. He enters a tent and falls out with an arrow in his eye socket. We're taken into the tent where we find the possessed D.J. clanking her metal sticks together, shots of the gory, dead bodies accompanying each clank.

The living are no longer intruding into the land of the dead. Nature has swallowed up civilization and science, with its limited ways of seeing, of understanding what constitutes truth. Only D.J., who looked beyond the restricted worldview of the modern world, is preserved. And if we look beyond the approved ways of seeing a film, as I've tried to do in this analysis, we can see that Scalps is a unique and powerful film. If we bring a standard approach to viewing Scalps, as with many other unconventional films, we, as the excavators in the film, are destined to fail.

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* - Please note that in Canada the term 'Indian' is used to refer to 'Native Americans', even on a legal level. The term 'native' carries connotations of primitivity that are more offensive than an ancient error of geography.