The Dark Halves: How Stephen King and George Romero Reflect Themselves in The Dark Half

In 1991, an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Half (1993), written and directed by George Romero, began filming. Though both men are well-regarded artists within the horror genre, the pairing of Romero and King is not the most obvious. Romero has always had a very critical eye for the world around him, whereas King revels in the American world as much as Lovecraft revelled in New England. King’s Christine is not just about a car; it's about growing up in the American way of life, and the vision is pretty optimistic, murderous car or not. Romero’s zombie-besieged farmhouses and shopping malls are his vision of American life's true nature--violent and rotten. The concerns each artist has in the same subject matter of The Dark Half are therefore quite distinct. I think it would illuminate the thematic interests of both to see how they each exploit the narrative.

The narrative of The Dark Half concerns a professor of creative literature, Thad Beaumont. He writes literary novels under his own name and violent crime novels under the pseudonym ‘George Stark’. When a snoop learns Stark’s true identity and tries to blackmail Beaumont, Beaumont goes public and gets some media attention. With Stark effectively dead, Beaumont begins work on his literary masterpiece in comfort. But this is interrupted when Stark enters existence and begins killing everyone involved in his ‘death’, leaving the police at Beaumont’s door. All Stark wants is for Beaumont to write a new violent crime novel so he can exist again. The problem is that it's now either/or: if Stark exists, Beaumont's has to go.

The most obvious and most important difference between King’s and Romero’s representation of the narrative is Stark’s appearance. For King, Stark is a huge, muscular, blond man, looking nothing like Beaumont, but rather like the hero of Stark’s novels, Alexis Machine. For Romero, Beaumont and Stark are twins, the only difference being that Stark slicks his hair back, wears all black, and is physically stronger. 

I think the reason King portrays Stark as being very different in appearance is because King is using the duality of Beaumont and Stark more allegorically than Romero is. The narrative, for King, allegorically expresses his own often conflicting attitudes toward the creative act and toward producing literature for an audience.

King’s position in literary hierarchy is, to put it simply, in the lower rungs. He’s a successful popular writer to most critics, a crowd-pleaser with no real literary talent. He is, as far as they’re concerned, George Stark. I don’t think King would agree that he is, or at least has always been, George Stark. There is ample evidence in his writing that he aspired to be an artist. Christine is certainly a literary novel to a degree, and it is in fact quite a good novel. In his early career King wrote his unapologetically populist novels under the name ‘Richard Bachman.’ The Dark Half was written after he let Bachman go and began to write as King only. That King had literary ambitions and had a pseudonym for populist novels does, of course, mirror Beaumont in an obvious way, though King was never as pretentious as Beaumont. Beaumont fancies himself the next Updike. What all this suggests is a certain attitude toward the production of literature. King has two conflicting desires that it seems impossible to simultaneously fulfill. The first is the desire to write 'great books,' masterpieces like David Copperfield. The other is the desire to just write, to just let loose and write with the heart, the guts, and the balls. No concern for perfect word choice or the harmony of the phrase or the quadruple meaning of a line, just visceral storytelling dripping with blood, shit, and semen as needed.

I suspect many writers suffer from these conflicting desires. Some writers like Dickens and Georges Simenon could write from the guts and still write great books. Others, like Flaubert, could take years to write a short novel. Producing literature is hard work and producing visceral storytelling is easy, exciting, freeing, and, best of all, lucrative, because gutsy, ballsy writing sells. In The Dark Half, King explicitly states that writing does not come easy for Beaumont (whose name, incidentally, resembles Flaubert’s). When he writes as Stark, on the other hand, Beaumont falls into a trance and writes frantically. What I think interests King in this duality, then, is how it allegorically represents the duality he feels in himself between the two distinct approaches to the act of writing.

There is further evidence throughout The Dark Half that suggests this duality. King references several literary writers, like Oliver Goldsmith, Saul Bellows, Hunter Thompson, Hemingway, Burroughs, and occasionally writers of non-fiction, like Chomsky, that it appears King himself really does read, or at least has read. He also references pulp crime writers like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Horace McCoy quite approvingly. In his Afterward, King states that the crime novels of Shane Stevens are ‘as striking’ as McTeague and Sister Carrie, and are some “of the finest novels ever written about the dark side of the American dream.” (King 1989: 433) King seems at pains to decide between writing pure, critically valueless pulp novels and writing critically praiseworthy literary novels, and at last settles for the hope that we will mature enough to elevate what is fun and for ‘pure entertainment’ to the level of art. Unfortunately, many in the critical establishment remain dubious. For King, the answer is embodied in the text: do away with the cowardly pseudonym and write whatever you want, which, for better or worse, is just what he did.

I suspect, further, that the novel’s main theme is also somewhat allegorical. The passage that most embodies this theme is, “The overflow of make-believe into one’s own life seemed to be an almost unavoidable side-effect of story-telling—like getting calluses on the pads of your fingers from playing the guitar…” (King 249) The act of writing, in The Dark Half, is a ritual, “There had been no mystic decision to write the Stark novels longhand, although time had turned it into a kind of ritual” (King 249) Later, more explicitly, “Writing is not what we’re doing here, not really. Writing is just the ritual” (King 403). Writing is also a quasi-spiritualist ritual Beaumont uses for accessing Stark’s mind long-distance. Writing is a ritual that summons things into being. This is an allegorical way of speaking which I find to be rather flakey, but which many writers believe to varying degrees of literality. They speak of their characters as real people who, once created, pretty much take over the story with their reality. For some writers, it just feels that way; others sorta, kinda believe their own bullshit. In The Dark Half, the metaphor is very literalized, as Stark, and with him Alexis Machine, become real enough to embody the soul of Beaumont’s excised potential twin, medically known as ‘fetiform teratoma’.

The belief that characters are who they are and will do what they will do presents an escape from concerns over art versus entertainment. Like Dickens or Shakespeare, the characters are central. Writing is merely the ritual that grants us access to them, just as Thad uses the ritual of writing to read Stark’s thoughts. One is no longer responsible for writing either penny dreadfuls or literary masterpieces, but only for revealing the characters as they are and honestly reporting what they do.

Thus, everywhere throughout The Dark Half, King affirms Beaumont’s relationship to Stark as creator and creature. Stark’s difference in appearance is important also because he is not another side of Beaumont, but something created by Beaumont. His appearance conforms to how Beaumont imagines he looks. Beaumont’s ‘dark half’ is referred to in the text not just as Stark, but as his own imagination, “[t]hat eye, glowing in the dark half of him, the side which was in constant shade… that was like a God, and he was glad they could not see it” (King 157). As when Beaumont subconsciously makes Stark write ‘THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN’ in a murder scene, there are hints in the text that Beaumont is, in a sense, writing Stark’s reality with his mind. So what King is doing with The Dark Half, most of all, is investigating the relationship between the artist and his character through a magic realist lens.

Where King makes Beaumont and Stark distinct in appearance to emphasize the different sorts of literature they allegorically represent, Romero has no such allegorical interests. There are doubtless very pragmatic reasons for adapting a Stephen King work, such as mainstream success, but I think Romero had personal reasons for adapting this particular King novel. These reasons, his thematic interests, are difficult to see in this particular film as a standalone project. However, in light of Romero’s previous films, we can see The Dark Half continues his explorations of a particular family of themes, and, even more, gives Romero an opportunity to reflect upon his own career and films.

Throughout Romero’s career, he has had two types of film, each type dealing with a different family of thematic concerns to which Romero repeatedly returns. One of these is obviously the zombie films, which allows Romero to study the nature of human cooperation in modern society. The focus of these films is always on how the humans treat each other rather than how the zombies treat, or eat, the humans. The other films are his dark dramas like Jack’s Wife (1972), Martin (1976), Monkey Shines (1988), most recently Bruiser (2000), and, between Monkey Shines and Bruiser, The Dark Half. Below I will briefly discuss the thematic concerns of this set of films in order to show how The Dark Half fits into this group of films and, thus, how Romero adapts King’s material to his long-time thematic concerns.

All of these films follow a similar pattern. They begin with a character who holds some set of oppressive ideas and who is, in one way or another, actually oppressed. The nature and source of the oppression varies according to the theme Romero is investigating, but the theme is always about some sort of social oppression. In response to the oppression, the character has violent fantasies. Through some instrument in the real world, these violent fantasies are involuntarily transformed into violent action. This process leaves the character liberated from both the oppression and the oppressive ideas. In order to illustrate this pattern, I will describe the structure of both Jack’s Wife and Monkey Shines to show that, despite being radically different films, they share a structure and family of thematic concerns.

In Jack’s Wife, Joan Mitchell (Jan White), a housewife, is stifled by her husband and the traditional, patriarchal values he embodies. After her husband strikes her, she begins having dreams about a threatening intruder breaking into her house. Around the same time, a friend turns her on to studying witchcraft. The more she studies witchcraft, a traditionally matriarchal religion, the freer she becomes from traditional attitudes. Meanwhile, the dreams become increasingly threatening and she becomes increasingly active in her own dreams. Ultimately, a real intruder appears to be trying to break into the house and, confusing dream and reality, Joan shoots the intruder, only to discover it is her husband. The form of oppression Romero is interested in with Jack’s Wife is clearly patriarchal oppression. Joan isn’t free to think or do as she wishes. In her frustration, she fantasizes, in this case through dreams, of violence. As she studies witchcraft, she is empowered to do things she normally would not have done. Finally, witchcraft gives her the confidence she needs to translate the violence that would have remained pure fantasy into the real world, killing the dream-intruder and her oppressor simultaneously. Thanks to the violence witchcraft has enabled her to perform, she is left free from her husband and free from oppressive values.

As Romero’s first film of the self-actualizing model, Jack’s Wife is somewhat primitive. Monkey Shines is a much more sophisticated instance. In this film, a successful lawyer, somewhat allegorically named ‘Allan Mann,’ (Jason Beghhe) with a nice house, sexy fiancée, and impressive physique, is hit by a truck and rendered paralyzed. Once paralyzed, his fiancée leaves him, his mother begins to take care of him like a child, and a live-in nurse takes over his house for herself. Frustrated with his powerlessness, Mann has fantasies of killing these women who take advantage of his impotence. The (female) helper monkey a cousin gives Mann psychically receives these fantasies and enacts them in reality. The more the monkey enacts Mann’s violence, the more she begins to dominate him. When the monkey tries to kill the one woman who treats Mann like a man, Mann summons the strength to kill the monkey. He then recovers and enters a relationship with the surviving woman.

In Monkey Shines, then, the same structure we find in Jack’s Wife is present. The difference is that Romero is interested in a different form of oppression. Instead of patriarchal values oppressing women, Romero is now interested in how traditional notions of masculinity, shared by men and women, can oppress a man. So, Mann’s physical weakness and inability to make money leaves him in self-loathing and permits him to be abused by the women in his life. Like Joan, Mann has violent fantasies, though his are more consciously directed against his abusers. And like Joan, Mann’s violent fantasy becomes violent action through a proxy, in this case a female monkey. Where Romero hones his structure is in making the proxy for violence something that then begins to dominate the protagonist. Mann has to face and destroy the monkey in order to regain his masculine strength. The ordeal leaves Mann self-actualized, represented in his ability to walk again, but shown really in his new girlfriend, an intelligent equal rather than a trophy fiancée.

There are obviously many subtleties to be examined in the development of Romero’s thematic concerns from film to film, and much vagueness that needs to be clarified. However, for the purposes of this essay, this brief overview is sufficient. The continuity and development of a structure for addressing a family of thematic concerns, namely themes that pertain to oppressive ideals, is all I needed to elucidate for our needs. Now it remains to show how Romero tries to mould the narrative of The Dark Half to this structure and these themes.

With The Dark Half, Romero begins with a man, Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton), who has already mastered his violent fantasies and has already given them a proxy. He has created a pseudonym in order to channel his violent fantasies into violent fictional action. When he is forced to publicly reveal that he is George Stark (Timothy Hutton), he effectively kills Stark and decides not to write violent literature any longer. With his outlet for violent action removed, his violent fantasies channel themselves into the real world, in real action, through the now-real proxy that is George Stark. Beaumont must face and destroy this proxy for violent action in real life, using violence himself, just as Allan Mann had to do with the monkey.

In this description, there are a few points from the structure I defined above that appear to be absent. First of all, it is not evident what the source of Beaumont’s oppression is. There are certainly issues in his life, but the violent fantasies predate these issues. That being the case, it is also not evident that Beaumont has liberated himself from any oppressive ideas by the film’s conclusion. There is clearly tension between King’s material and Romero’s thematic concerns, and this obscures Romero’s structure, but I don’t think it erases it.

One important issue that Romero would not be able to excise from the material even if he tried is the opposition between literary fiction and popular or pulp fiction that is so central to King’s text. Far from trying to remove this central theme, Romero exploits it for his own use. Beaumont’s oppression is due to this opposition between writing literary novels and pulp novels. Only, for Romero, the opposition is tweaked slightly. The various literary references are dropped and the issue becomes one not of literary classification but of violence. Beaumont is frustrated by the inability to write novels that are both violent and still deemed serious. Beaumont remarks that he had writer’s block and found writing violent fiction helped him get around it. What necessitates writing under the name George Stark, however, is the need for Beaumont to compartmentalize his aptitude for writing violent literature and preserve his literary reputation.

Looking at a few of the changes Romero makes to King’s material will lend some support to my contention that Romero shifts the focus to violence. For one, Romero introduces multiple instances in which Beaumont reveals a violent side, none of which occur in King’s text. The first is in the scene, totally absent from the novel, in which Beaumont meets his blackmailer face-to-face. Beaumont quickly and threateningly grabs the blackmailer’s wrist as the man reaches for a book; then he offers his autograph politely. The violence is present, just quickly diffused. Later, when speaking of the blackmailer, he suggests cutting off the man’s penis and stuffing it in his mouth, an action Stark later performs. Where King’s Beaumont is a clumsy man who has no real capacity for violence, Romero’s Beaumont is not. Given the importance Romero bestows upon having the potential for violence in his other dark dramas, this is not surprising.

This clarifies to some degree reasons Romero may have had for transforming Stark into a doppelganger. Romero makes Stark literally a twin of Beaumont. King’s approach to Stark’s ‘resurrection’ is always nebulous and spiritual, so to speak. The fetiform material having been hidden from Beaumont’s parents by the arrogant surgeon is presumably discarded with any other medical waste. Romero’s approach is quite the opposite. Romero makes a point of telling us that Beaumont’s parents were given the fetiform tissue, told what it was, and then proceeded to give the tissue a burial. The burial, naturally, is in the very same plot the photographer stages George Stark’s mock grave. This suggests a certain material component to Stark and with that a biological component, such that Stark is literally twinned with Beaumont. Where King’s notion of a ‘dark half’ is also rather spiritual, sometimes referring to Stark and sometimes referring to Beaumont’s inner creative forces, there is no ambiguity in Romero’s film. For Romero, the ‘dark half’ of Beaumont is his evil twin, Stark. But by referring to Stark as a ‘dark half’, Romero also tells us that this is a physical manifestation of Beaumont’s violent nature.

So, what is achieved by Romero’s modifications is an emphasis on Beaumont’s relationship to his own potential for violence. His oppression, therefore, arises from two related ideas, shared by society generally, that violence is contemptible in behaviour and that graphic violence has no place in serious art. When Beaumont’s means of coping with his frustration is removed, his violent fantasies are channelled into reality. What Beaumont liberates himself from at the end of the film is his compartmentalization of his violent nature into an Other, which, separated, directs itself at him and his family. He destroys that Other with his own violent action. Where King adds an ambiguous ending in which the sheriff wonders whether Beaumont’s wife can ever trust Beaumont again, Romero simply ends the film upon the destruction of Stark and the vanishing of the sparrows. Romero’s ending is unambiguously a happy one.

By transferring the emphasis of the narrative from literary style to violence, Romero also makes the narrative reflect upon his own career much as King makes the narrative reflect upon his. Romero’s niche has always been in the horror genre, a genre that is essentially violent, arguably the most violent of all fiction genres. His films have had critical acclaim, but there is a reluctance to view these films as serious works of art rather than as, to use Kael’s phrase, ‘great trash’. They are viewed as shallow and usually treated superficially. Just as Beaumont does in the film, many strive to deny the potential for violence as a part of themselves and to distance themselves from violent fantasy. This idea is as oppressive in Romero’s worldview as patriarchal values. In Romero’s films, violent fantasy is an important part of dealing with our own oppressive ideas and offers a potential path of relief. I am not suggested Romero advocates violence at the least provocation, but that violent fantasy appropriately channelled is a means of understanding and surmounting what oppresses us individually and socially. And his films, just as George Stark’s novels, are violent fantasies that we all can share. We deny them at our own peril.

All this is not to say Romero’s The Dark Half is a great film. The Dark Half is a decent film, but one of Romero’s worst. His clever modifications transform King’s narrative enough to put The Dark Half in Romero’s family of self-liberation films, but this structure is obscure and all but invisible without comparison to Romero’s previous films. Nor is The Dark Half a great novel. It is without a doubt a fascinating novel, but neither as sophisticated nor as rich as some of King’s earlier work. Though Romero and King are very distinct artists, however, The Dark Half is curiously a career midpoint they share. For King, The Dark Half is an optimistic novel looking forward to a new era of creativity in which Richard Bachman is retired and King can write from his brain and his balls simultaneously. For Romero, The Dark Half is a film in which he tries to reach the mainstream but sceptically doubts society is ready to accept his worldview that violence and violent fantasy are a valuable part of human nature not to be denied. For both artists, The Dark Half is an opportunity to move their career into new territory. But that territory has never been deemed generally, or by me, as being as good as what they had done prior. I do not think King has ever yet written another novel as good as Christine, nor has Romero ever yet made a film as good as Monkey Shines or Dawn of the Dead (1978). Still, from comparing The Dark Half the Stephen King novel and The Dark Half the George Romero film I hope we have learned more about the thematic concerns of two very different artists who both happen to labour in the horror genre, and their anticipated paths forward in their respective arts.

Works Cited

King, Stephen. (1989) The Dark Half. New York: Viking Penguin.

Walled In (2009) - 2.5/4

Walled In, based on the psychological thriller Les emmurés by French author Serge Brussolo, concerns a pretty, young engineer (Mischa Barton) assigned to find a building's weak points for her dad's demolition company. The building is an odd structure built in the middle of some marshland by an eccentric Italian architect, Malestrazza. During construction, a madman cemented several inhabitants into the walls. The only inhabitants left are Deborah Kara Unger, her intense son, and two other weirdos. Assisted by the boy, the engineer finds discrepencies in the building's blueprints and gradually uncovers more of its secrets.

Walled In is the sort of European thriller that would have been very much at home in the '70s, alongside films like The House of Laughing Windows. Like such films, Walled In has a serious, artistic sensibility that seems at odds with the conventional macabre the content seems to keep steering toward and yet never revealing. At times psychological thriller and at times suggesive ghost story, Walled In never quite settles until the disappointing climax. The building itself and its provocative nature is really what sustains the whole film.

The source of just about all the trouble with Walled In is how much the narrative fixates on the teen boy. After a fascinating first twenty minutes that sets up the film's major conflict between a talented engineer and an almost living building she respects too much to want to destroy, nearly all the plot twists and turns center on whether she can trust the boy or not. The questions of what Malestrazza was up to, what the real purpose of his mysterious building is, whether it is haunted, what was the real reason for the immuring of the victims--all the truly interesting questions, in other words--are largely left in abeyance and only answered peripherally to the questions regarding the boy.

The boy is just not that interesting. As a side-order grotesque, he would be fine. But as the entree, he is not. This is not the actor's fault at all. On the contrary, Cameron Bright performs the character with the awkward stiffness the character seems to really need. The screenplay is at fault for presenting the character as just a bland, melodramatic device. It is unfortunate that the tale's climax and conclusion ultimately hinges on just this melodrama.

While I have not had a chance to read the novel, I suspect it is filled with philosophical discourses and historical speculations that director Gilles Paquet-Brenner was at pains to work into engaging cinema. There are a lot of great ideas throughout that just don't quite work. Walled In certainly has much to recommend, particularly Karim Hussain's beautiful and potent photography of the spooky, dystopian set and the Saskatchewan grasslands. Much as similarly confused films, like Mariano Baino's Dark Waters, Walled In will probably be re-discovered a decade or two later as a forgotten gem of 2009. Do yourself a favor and just discover it now for what it is

Bad Kids Go to Hell (2012) - 2.5/4

Probably every reviewer that took on Bad Kids Go to Hell has described it as "The horror version of The Breakfast Club." Yes, there is even a Judd Nelson cameo. I suppose to some extent that's true. To a greater extent, I think Bad Kids Go to Hell is really one big joke--and not a bad one, actually.

The plot of Bad Kids Go to Hell is that a bunch of private school rich kids--and one not-quite-as-rich kid--with behavioral issues and seething resentment for each other get stuck in an 8-hour detention in the school's new library. By coincidence, all the students present had something to do with the library's construction on land once owned by a stubborn old Injun. When the students are a-dyin', either they're killing each other or it's a good ol' fashioned Injun ghost curse.

I'm not sure if it comes through in that plot description, but the whole scenario is over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek. You have the Poltergeist Indian curse deal, The Breakfast Club, the privileged teens, and the preposterous reason for locking them in one spot. I don't think director Matthew Spradlin had the least intention of treating this seriously. This is not a sneering attack on privileged children, an ironic treatment of horror themes, or a realistic take on The Breakfast Club. It's a joke.

The spitfire venomous dialogue in which every character expresses Tennessee Williams-level hatred for one another only makes the situation even sillier. These people are so hateful and acerbic. You certainly want them to die. But that's not the point either. The point is that it's all intentionally overblown. You can't take it seriously.

The best part of Bad Kids Go to Hell by far, however, is the series of flashbacks to what these kids are like in everyday highschool. With peppy techno music and slow motion, their wacky antics are presented with such deadpan realism and conviction. I know Spradlin doesn't take it seriously, but his trick is to make you feel he does. Interspersed amongst the venom, these absurd and hilarious flashbacks are moments of bizarre brilliance amidst the bizarre mediocrity.

The tone of Bad Kids is entirely inconsistent. The editing is often clumsy, with the flashbacks appearing without introduction. The acting is all over the place. The resolution as illogical and melodramatic as the rest of the movie. That really all adds to its charm. Bad Kids is far from a great movie, but it's good comedy. It cracks me up. I'm looking forward to Spradlin's next opus.

Deadheads (2011) - 3/4

Deadheads is another heartwarming zombie horror comedy in the vein of Shaun of the Dead and the legions of other heartwarming/hearteating zombie comedies. If you're sick of zombie comedies, as I am, Deadheads will still please you, because it is a genuinely charming and funny movie.

Mark wakes up to find himself a zombie in the middle of an outbreak. He's one of the few zombies that can actually think and talk. A smart zombie. Or smombie, if you will. (But why would you?) He teams up with another smart-zombie, Brent, a slacker doofus who just wants someone to hang with. They acquire a pet stupid-zombie, Cheese, and an old war vet with a TMI problem. Together they try to find Mark's girlfriend and help Mark perform his last planned action before death, propose marriage to her. Unfortunately, the usual anti-zombie elements are in place, like a black guy with a shotgun and dudes in hazmat suits.

The characters' personalities are established quickly and they're immediately likeable misfits. These are zombies you'd want to hang with so long as you had some Fabreeze nearby. Their misadventures consequently prove amusing. Goofy jokes that might ordinarily be groan-worthy work quite well. I particularly enjoyed Brent's constant movie references. I enjoyed spending time with these idiots and I wanted them to win.

I also found it amusing how much of Deadheads's structure is based on Star Wars. Cheese is clearly intended to be Chewbacca, down to some outright shot-references. While Brent ought to be Han Solo, the incestuous vibe had to go. So the Han Solo/Luke Skywalker roles flip between Brent and Mark. The girlfriend, Ellie, is Leia. Her dad is Darth Vader. Watch the movie and see how much the roles fit. I believe it was conscious on the part of the writer-directors, the Brothers Pierce.

Like Star Wars, Deadheads is a crowd-pleaser. It is self-consciously a crowd-pleaser. The douchebags are all really douchebags, the good guys are really good guys, and goodguyery will triumph over douchebaggery. Sometimes that's tedious and saccharine. Deadheads does it right. Cliches and spotty acting will quickly become negligible. This movie is a lot of fun and you will indeed be pleased by it. Watch it when you're depressed. It'll do you better than that whiskey in your sock drawer.

The Cinema of Repulsions from Suspiria to Satan's Playground

The following essay I originally wrote a few years ago as a sort of defense of Dante Tomaselli's films. When I wrote it, Tomaselli, an independent horror filmmaker, had made only three films, all competent, strange, and unique. Eventually, I had written so much preface and so little about Tomaselli, I realized the essay was in trouble. I also realized that while Tomaselli's films are inventive, I didn't want to exaggerate their value. Since I see no real future for this essay elsewhere, nor do I have any desire to re-read, let alone re-write it, I'm posting it now with some slipshod repairs to hide the seams. The writing is turgid, the references pretentious, my case pompously overstated, but I hope the ideas and facts prove interesting.

A new and peculiar approach to making horror films arose in 1970s Italy, an approach that placed its faith in the pure effect of horrific, terrifying, and otherworldly imagery. With this faith in imagery came increasingly illogical narratives, so thin they were but clotheslines for a series of horrifying images, movements, and sounds. Why one event happens when it happens, or why it happens at all, the source of a light and its colour, the source of sound: none of this is adequately explained within the narrative; one just accepts the incoherent order of things on the strength of the spectacle. It is a "cinema of attractions," as Tom Gunning calls it; a "cinema pur" in its abstraction from narrative, a purity devoted to the creation of horror, terror, revulsion. It's a cinema of repulsions.

One might suppose this category is unnecessary. Horror films, after all, generally are light on narrative. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) isn't so much plotted as it is experienced: it's a single event. Some youths arrive at a house and what follows is one instance of cruelty after another until Marilyn Burns finally escapes. What distinguishes Texas Chainsaw Massacre from a film like The Beyond (1981) is just the explainability of what you see. The remarkable set designs in TCM are certainly effective at creating horror and a horrible awe. But they're explained: the lunatics inhabiting the house keep lots of bones and fashion things out of them, and they do this just because they're lunatics. However, when spiders attack an archivist in The House by the Cemetery (1981), there is no explanation other than some abstract, malign influence that is itself in need of explanation. That explanation, of course, never comes, because the malign influence is in essence hand-waving. By its very nature it is an excuse to have whatever horrifying event one imagines on the screen. The events, then, happen for extra-narrative reasons: for the creation of the horrifying image, ultimately the creation of pure effect. There's no reason, in The Beyond, for the decaying body of the plumber to be in a bathtub, but the 'malign influence' allows us to excuse our normal requests for explanations, coherence, continuity, and accept he is indeed there; he's there so he can smash Veronica Lazar's eyeball out of her skull and make us recoil in so doing.

Perhaps someone will claim I'm cheating. The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery are both films involving the supernatural, whereas The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does not involve the supernatural. However, I could have just as readily chosen The Exorcist or The Omen in place of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Every horrific event in The Omen, also the product of a vague, malign influence, is explicable: we know why it's happening. The glass severs David Warner's head because he was poking his nose in Satan's business and because the glass's presence made a convenient tool of execution. Why the bookstore owner in Inferno must be assaulted by rats and finally sliced by a random hotdog vendor is considerably more mysterious--in fact, it defies explanation other than the vague, malign influence.

The need for the term 'Cinema of Repulsions' on the other hand is a little less defensible. Tom Gunning coined the term 'Cinema of Attractions' to define the pre-narrative film shorts that presented only a shocking image to the audience, then ended: a train enters a station as the camera points at it; Melies's head grows enormous then returns to normal; a train robber shoots directly at the audience (the camera). Gunning acknowledges that the Cinema of Attractions continues to appear amidst narrative, however, in avant-garde films and musicals. When these moments occur, "The spectator," he claims, "does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfilment." It also appears in horror movies as murder set pieces. These set pieces, like musical numbers, exist for pure effect. They usually have some relevance or explanation within the narrative, however, and are at the service of the characters and the world they inhabit. But for the films in what I'm terming the Cinema of Repulsions, as I've noted, these set pieces don't have much to do with immersion in a fictional world or character psychology, but rather with "the film image engaging the viewer's curiosity" and the fictional world and characters are subordinated to that engagement. The emphasis is on thrill, as Gunning notes, "the immediate reaction of the viewer." So this term doesn't so much refer to a style of cinema in opposition to the cinema of attractions, but rather a subset that concerns a very specific sort of effect or viewer reaction, one might even say a particular type of curiosity: the fascination with death, abnormality, and other objects of revulsion safely viewed. If Gunning considers the traditional Cinema of Attractions akin to a rollercoaster ride, the Cinema of Repulsions is the Haunted House ride.

We've gone as far as we can with abstractions. Let's move on to the films themselves.

The inaugural film of this movement is, of course, Suspiria (1977). While obviously influenced by the films of the maestro Mario Bava, particularly Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) and his masterpiece Lisa and the Devil (1974), it was Suspiria's singleminded devotion to a sound-and-light show of horror at the expense of all reason that made this cinema of repulsions a movement. All the pieces were already in place with Kill, Baby, Kill, however. Kill, Baby, Kill concerns a town trapped in perpetual nightmare by the malign influence of a haunted villa and its resident ghost, the androgynous Melissa. Though the film ultimately explains most of its mysteries, the astounding Villa Grapps sequence, with its Maya Deren-esque twisting of reality through film language, contains all the seeds for Suspiria and its followers. Suspiria, like Kill, Baby, Kill functions on the premise of a vague, malign influence that perverts the world around it. In this case, the malign influence is an ancient witch inhabiting a prestigious, Isadora Duncan-style dance school. Her influence extends from violent, black-gloved murders to maggot rain and random dog attacks. The famously expressionistic lighting and atmosphere depicts not reality but that malign influence oozing everywhere in and around the school. (Ultimately these tropes can be traced back to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). As usual, Dreyer is decades ahead of his time. Already in Vampyr we have the same tropes: in a small village, an evil vampiress exerts a vague, malign influence over the locals causing a whole host of inexplicable, supernatural events.)

With the success of Suspiria, Argento and his muse/co-writer Daria Nicolodi took the idea even further with Inferno (1980). The 'malign influence' of the two remaining witches creates a movie-length string of set-pieces, as Kim Newman argued(1). Rats and cats launch fatal attacks without reason, a hot dog vendor suddenly becomes murderous, a book binder chases a woman from a library--it all looks strange and horrifying, though it doesn't make a lick of sense other than, "Well, there's that malign influence..." On the strength of these two films alone, Daria Nicolodi can justly be regarded as one of the architects of this movement. Her screenplay for the third film in the series, while never actually adapted by Argento, became the source for two other films in the cinema of repulsions tradition: the interesting if very flawed Paganini Horror (1989) and Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat (1989).

Picking up this trend and taking it in new directions is the other major architect of the movement, Dardano Sacchetti. Sacchetti, working with Lucio Fulci, created narratives that don't really go anywhere--in fact, they tend to loop in on themselves--but allow for maximum carnage. In this, Sacchetti follows Lisa and the Devil more than Kill, Baby, Kill. Lisa and the Devil provides a circular narrative about a woman unwittingly trapped in the land of the dead. She arrives in Rome, sees a painting of Satan carrying away a body, and through a series of bizarre events ends up carried away by Satan--piloting a Boeing 747! The point is not the narrative, but the disturbing and bizarre events, and their corresponding imagery, that occur along the way. Fulci's infamous gore trilogy, The City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), and The House by the Cemetery (1981), all penned by Sacchetti, follows much the same trajectory. In fact, The Beyond, like Lisa and the Devil, begins with a painting, in this case of hell, and ends with the protagonists trapped within it. The major difference from Bava is the notorious gore. Patricia MacCormack has argued these films are best understood as being "about intrinsic quality, texture, consistency...they affect sense rather than intellect – confusion, disgust, suffering, delight at the pangs of horror are the qualities these films evoke." Because "[t]he narratives are there but they don't matter, what matters is the very matter of the images, their materiality." I think she's exactly right. The carnage in Fulci's gore films is cognate to the expressionistic lighting in Suspiria: it exists to shock, revolt, horrify. And the narratives, which replace the 'malign influence' of a supernatural being with the sudden opening of a 'gate to hell' and which does very little work as narrative, does great work at making room for increasingly revolting, disturbing, and disorienting images.

Sacchetti's work didn't stop with Fulci's gore trilogy. Together they made Manhattan Baby (1982), an interesting failure for being less logical but also less substantiated by horrifying imagery. Still, the film oozes the mystique of Egypt, not so much the real Egypt but the movie Egypt that has yielded us such horrors as Karl Freund's The Mummy. The film readily fits within the cinema of repulsions. Sacchetti then moved on to write The Church for Michele Soavi, of which I'll say more later, and for Lamberto Bava the minor masterpiece that is Demons and The Ogre. The Ogre very much resembles Fulci's gore films minus the gore; the gore is replaced, instead, by otherworldly fluids, the visceral horror by psychosexual terror, making the film more about semen than blood. Yet the film is no less a string of repulsions held together by the thinnest and most ethereal of narratives.

Fulci himself continued his cinema of repulsions without Sacchetti in Ghosts of Sodom, a haunted house film that only makes sense on a visual level where vaginas and pool balls can equal real bombings. And in Demonia, an awkward nunsploitation film that fuses the 'malign influence' tradition with Fulci's gore aesthetic. Neither of these films are anywhere near as good as Fulci's work with Sacchetti, although Ghosts of Sodom offers some fascinating images. The same energy and invention just isn't invested in creating repulsion, revulsion, terror.

Argento's disciple, Michele Soavi, took over the cinema of repulsions throne once Argento had returned to the familiar territory of his gialli. If this movement has always been a self-indulgent one, Soavi's films are entirely decadent. The Church, written by Dardano Sacchetti, concerns itself with nothing but stylishly strange events and images on the grounds that a massacre once occurred upon the grounds where the church was built. The Sect, Soavi's next film, is one of the most incoherent horror films ever made and yet its seemingly-endless flow of disturbing, terrifying, and confusing images--such as a thief finding a human heart in his mark's pocket, a rabbit watching television, and a face-removal sequence--more than makes up for its chaotic narrative.

Outside of Italy this movement had few proponents. At the time the only filmmaker out of Italy to seriously and consciously attempt to work in the cinema of repulsions was the British director, Norman J. Warren. He had already made a film in the style of Hammer and Amicus, albeit considerably gorier, called Satan's Slave when he saw Suspiria and had a revelation: for pure shock and terror, narrative could be foregone. He then made Terror (1978), a deliberate attempt to emulate what Argento did in Suspiria. The film concerns a burnt witch whose curse haunts her archnemesis's bloodline to the present with no apparent limits. The best and most abstract moment of this film is when a producer is attacked and killed by celuloid amidst green-gelled lights. The film is something of a failure if only due to Warren's inability to really commit to leaving logic aside. He wants his witch to adequately explain everything, even if she thankfully doesn't.

Warren tried to develop this approach with his, as of now, final film, Bloody New Year (1987), and, despite producer interference, did quite well. A group of youths are trapped on an island where, due to an experimental time-distorting device having accidentally been dropped, the dead, the buildings, the very order of reality assaults them. Why? How? Who cares? There is no narrative. There's only the desire to escape the island and the island's incessant and morbid toying with its victims. We're treated to such images as a burnt man crumbling into ash, a woman being consumed by an elevator wall, and an attack by a staircase post, amongst other things. A strange film that, by 1987, had become difficult to appreciate as the cinema of repulsions style had already lost its public appeal.


The cinema of repulsion's loss of public appeal has been most unfortunate for a young, dedicated American filmmaker named Dante Tomaselli, the latest and perhaps only active practitioner of the cinema of repulsions. He has made three films to date and every one of them is firmly and deliberately in the cinema of repulsions style. All of them have had a poor reception, despite being some of the most fascinating independent horror films of the past fifteen years. Desecration (1999), his first feature, about the malign influence of a dead mother/nun reaching from the grave to capture her son, is at present his highest rating film on Internet Movie Database with a whopping 3.1. His second film is Horror (2002), a title that recalls Warren's Terror. It concerns a group of juvenile detention escapees who take refuge in a house perverted by Satanic rituals. Horror is rated 2.8. His latest film, Satan's Playground (2006), mixes the ideas of Desecration and Horror with the legend of the Jersey Devil, creating a phantasmagoria of inexplicable horror set-pieces around a shack in the woods. Satan's Playground is rated 2.6. If those who rate Tomaselli's films are to be believed, his films have only been getting worse. In fact, they've been getting better; but each film reaches a wider audience that, unfortunately, does not appreciate what Tomaselli's films have to offer.

(1) - "Previously, the murders in Argento's films (particularly the first death in Suspiria) have been set pieces; Inferno is all set pieces, and thus all of a piece." - Nightmare Movies

Hellgate (2011) - 2/4

Hellgate is a film about a man (Cary Elwes) who survives a car accident that kills his wife and son. From then on he can see ghosts. They can see him, too, and seem to want something from him. Fortunately, he lives in Thailand, where they have mystics coming out the wazoo, so he learns that he's fading from life and has to reclaim his soul from the world of the dead.

Hellgate's primary attraction to me was certainly the part about reclaiming his soul from the dead. What really sealed the deal, though--I can't lie--was the presence of both Cary Elwes and William Hurt. A lot of actors I used to count on, like Michael Madsen and Christian Slater, take any five minute role for top billing and sucker me into mediocre film experiences. Screw them, man! But Elwes and Hurt are still cool cats--or are they?

Structurally, Hellgate is an odd experience, almost like a few different films merged. The first half is a tasteless gruel of Asian ghost movie cliches, probably because this is a Thai co-production. Plaintive Asian ghosts shamble and beckon, trying to touch Elwes. They don't seem particularly scary or threatening. That's the major problem with this segment. It's just not scary, tense, or suspenseful; nor does 'seeing dead people' strike me as particularly interesting. Blame Shyamalan and Japan.

The second half of Hellgate is much more interesting. This is the section where Elwes ventures on a mystical journey courtesy a Thai mystic and an ex-patriate American (William Hurt). Leading up to the journey to the world of the dead, Hellgate has the mystical feel, if not the depth, of a film like Dragonfly. Once taken to the world of the dead, however, the film excels. The portrayals of this world and the ritual required to enter it are as creepy, strange, and inventive as they should be. I wished writer-director John Penney had gotten the film to the world of the dead much sooner, in fact, or at least showed the same level of invention in earlier parts of the film.

The overall experience of Hellgate is disjointed, held together only by the gradual unfurling of the characters. It has its charming moments, mostly involving William Hurt. But there's an awkwardness to the writing and direction that just never goes away. If you know what to expect, it's an adequate mystical adventure/horror film, only really worth watching for the final twenty minutes.