Book Review: Shock Value by Jason Zinoman

The Peter Biskind approach to film history (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) at its best captures – in its life and times methodology – a sense of the defining cultural moment,  of how events and personalities conspire to create a new epoch.  At its worst it falls into tittle-tattle and gossip (like Biskind’s latest book on Warren Beatty). Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value falls somewhere in between.


The book’s full title is Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror. This makes it pretty plain that Zinoman intends to follow the Biskind approach, only instead of charting the revolution of Hollywood by the Movie Brats of the 1970s, Shock Value focuses on the revolution of the horror film by directors like Romero, Carpenter, Hooper and Craven. Zinoman’s main conceit is that up until Rosemary’s Baby, horror was stuck in the doldrums of gothic schlock and rapidly losing its audience. Then along came films like Targets and Night of the Living Dead that revived the genre by creating a ‘New Horror’ set in the modern everyday world. Zinoman describes the exact moment that this happened: during a television programme called The Mike Douglas Show in June 1967. Vincent Price, the guest, is taken to task by Dr Frederick Wertham about the ‘harm’ that horror films do to children. Price defends his films as harmless fun, full of silly capes and goofy costumes. Protesting that real horror is not the violence of the movies but the real-world violence of Vietnam, Price inadvertently admits his own - and along with it, ‘Old Horror’s - irrelevance. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Roman Polanski prepares to film Rosemary’s Baby and the rest is history. It’s a great story - Zinoman never lets the facts get in the way of a great story – and so it is with the rest of the book.

The Biskind approach relies on conflict to create an entertaining narrative. In Easy Riders this arises mainly from the clash of egos between free-wheeling eccentrics like Hal Ashby and the Hollywood suits.  In Shock Value there is tension between ‘Old Horror’ and ‘New Horror’, dramatized in the case of Rosemary’s Baby, in the conflicting approaches of Roman Polanski and his producer, old-school schlockmeister, William Castle. There is bitterness between Dan O’Bannon and John Carpenter, who fell out after making Dark Star together. There are creative differences between Sean Cunningham (the moneyman) and Wes Craven (the artist) on Last House on The Left. This makes for an engaging read on the whole but sometimes it feels a little forced. In “The Problem with Psycho” Zinoman argues that the notion that Hitchcock invented the modern horror film with Psycho and The Birds is overstated. Although the younger directors were influenced by Hitchcock, he claims, they also rebelled against him. It’s an interesting point but one Zinoman never really manages to back up adequately, relying too much on reports of personal slights and a bit of old gossip (such as the occasion when Hitchcock instructed the young William Friedkin to wear a tie on set.) As a piece of film criticism, it simply does not stand up to the likes of Robin Wood and Christopher Sharrett, both of whom have argued for the primacy of Psycho and The Birds much more persuasively…

Zinoman had access to most of the directors in the book, and is clearly a skilled interviewer. One of the best things about Shock Value is the way Zinoman prises intimate details about their personal histories from the film-makers; vividly told, these offer new insight into their lives and work. We learn about the parental feuds that made Tobe Hooper come to dread mealtimes and family get-togethers; we learn how a troubled home life lies behind the voyeurism theme in Brian DePalma’s films. Perhaps most touching is the account of how Wes Craven’s life fell apart prior to his making Last House on the Left as he struggled against the conformism of his Baptist background. These sections alone make the book worth spending money on.

Déjà vu does set in at times. Sometimes Zinoman’s narrative momentum falters and he lapses into a ‘making of’ commentary – this is especially so in the chapter on Alien. Zinoman retells the story of how Dan O’Bannon conceived the original story, how Ridley Scott came on board etc. Really there isn’t much new here and I found my attention wandering.

There are also, as many reviewers have noted, a lot of factual inaccuracies: far too many for me to want to go into them all here. (There is an excellent review by Jon Putnam that lists all of the book’s mistakes, which you can read here.) I will say, however, that these mistakes sometimes make you question how well Zinoman knows the actual films. Describing Last House on The Left, for example, he writes ‘a character is slashed to death with an electric boat fan.’ Perhaps he was thinking about I Spit on Your Grave. Unfortunately when you read such a mistake as early as page two (‘Krug carves the word ‘love’ onto his victim’s chest’) it immediately makes you doubt the writer, which is a shame, because inaccuracies not-withstanding, Shock Value is a worthwhile read.

Buy it, then, if you are looking for an entertaining overview of 1970s American horror cinema.

Jason Zinoman is appearing at the Roxy Cinema in London on 29 January 2012 where he will introduce a double bill of Texas Chainsaw Massacre + Shivers. Info here

Save The British Film Industry!

This week’s report on the British film industry by a panel of experts, including Lord Julian Fellowes, and chaired by Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury, former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (AKA Chris Smith) recommends that the industry should concentrate on producing low budget horror films. Not really, of course. I’m making it up. Wouldn’t it be great, though, if it did?

Instead the panel recommends that the industry continues to support a range of films, from mainstream to ‘arty’ (good!) but also urges film-makers to move away from a reliance on government subsidy (bad!)

In my last post I extolled the virtues of Mum and Dad (2008), not just as a good horror film but also as a great piece of regional film-making (it was co-produced by East Midlands Media) and exemplary micro-budget film-making. With 50% of its financing provided by Film London’s Microwave Scheme (a scheme to produce feature films with a budget ceiling of £100k), it is a film that may well not have been made if it hadn’t have been for government subsidy in the form of lottery money.

Monday's report also recommends that producers forge closer relationships with distributors to ensure a healthier profit return to the British Film industry. This, of course, is easier said than done. In terms of the horror film, there was Hammer Studios whose output was handled by American distributors (Warner – Seven Arts) ensuring a healthy return to the company which enabled them (during the height of their popularity) to run a British franchise second only to that of Cubby Broccoli. Things have changed since then, sadly. Production companies of a similar size to Hammer, such as Working Title Films, are now owned by American conglomerates. There lies the reason why subsidies for the British Film industry are necessary. The American domination of the industry extends to not only to UK production, but also to UK distribution and exhibition, making it so much more difficult for British producers and distributors to take a share of the UK market.  It is difficult for a UK feature film to find English-language distribution without an American-distributor, and even an independently produced hit like The King’s Speech – well, good luck getting your net profits out of the Weinstein Company accounts, boys.

Ironically, the epitome of Tory film policy was probably Pete Walker. He funded his films himself (from the profits of his previous films), kept his production budgets low and production values high (through sheer competence and a good crew) and didn’t need to rely on funding bodies or financiers. He sold his films to the American drive-ins, and when the drive-ins closed down in the late 1970s/ early 1980s, his market dried up.

The domination of the multiplex has now made such independence almost impossible.

Pete Walker: show 'em how it's done

It used to be that in Britain a levy was place on American imported films (the Eady Fund) creating a pot of money that went towards financing British films. The Eady Fund enabled film-makers like Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg and John Boorman to secure international co-funding for their work. However, Thatcher’s government put an end to the Eady Fund in 1985 in a bid to minimise trade-barriers to the USA. Since then, ‘how can we revitalise the British Film industry?’ has become the perennial question.

The answer is  – we can’t.  Not in the face of American domination. The British Film industry is likely to remain a cottage industry - a niche industry. This is why government subsidy is a necessity.

This perhaps suits horror film production well enough, as horror is a niche product; as long as budgets remain low, the  horror film, by virtue of its appeal is likely to remain profitable – the key issue is to make sure those profits are returned to the film-makers so that they can keep producing.

To read the Chris Smith’s report on the British Film industry – if you can get through the buzzwords and the blah – follow this LINK

Mum and Dad (2008)

Continuing the short series of posts on degenerate families that I started with We Are What We Are, is this 2008 Brit-shocker, the feature debut of Nottingham-based film-maker (and co-founder of Nottingham’s annual Mayhem Horror Fest), Steven Sheil. Mum and Dad was produced under Film London’s low-budget microwave scheme for £100K and provides a great example of edgy low-budget horror. Nottingham has produced some outstanding film-makers, including of course, Shane Meadows and Chris Cooke (another co-founder of Mayhem), director of the excellent DV feature, One For The Road (2002).

As a Nottingham-born lad myself, I am bound to be a fan, especially as Sheil has, in Mum and Dad, consciously drawn on British ‘domestic horror’ of the 1970s like Frightmare (1974) and Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970) to create a ‘fucked-up family’ horror par excellence.

Sheil’s film closely mirrors the theme and plot of Mumsy: airport workers Birdie and her silent brother, LB, bring home unsuspecting waifs and strays to ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’, who force them into perverse role-playing games in which they are the perfect family; those who refuse to obey the rules or try to escape are ritualistically murdered. One day they bring home a polish migrant, Lena, who turns out to be more than a match for the family in her sense of fight and determination to survive.

Both Mumsy and Mum and Dad are concerned with the threat posed to the traditional family by social change. But whereas in Francis’s film it was the alternative lifestyle of the hippie and the drifter that ‘threatened’ the family structure, Sheil’s film draws on contemporary fears of mass immigration and its challenge to British identity for its subtext.

The film quickly gets down to brass tacks. As soon as Lena enters the home of Mum and Dad, she is knocked unconscious, drugged and imprisoned. Mum takes sexual gratification by scarifying her with a scalpel; Dad’s proclivities are even more degenerate: he likes to dismember his victims and masturbate with their body parts. Indeed Sheil plunges us so suddenly into depravity that for a moment it becomes unclear where he could possibly take us next. It is a risky ploy (the ‘torture porn’ scenario immediately threatens to turn the viewer off) but Sheil makes it work, taking us from there into a parody of family domesticity, made all the more perverse by the knowledge of Mum and Dad’s true nature.

‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ attempt to play the role of ‘parent’ to Lena. She is given a pet name, ‘Angel’, and the rules of the house are explained. In effect she must submit completely to the will of ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ if she wishes to survive. It becomes clear that everyone in this ‘family’ is merely playing a ‘role’: ‘Mum’ is emotionally needy and overbearing; ‘Dad’ makes the rules and punishes those who disobey; ‘Birdy’ is the favoured sibling who feels in danger of being usurped by ‘Angel’, and ‘LB’ is ‘Little Brother’, the dogs-body. Both ‘Mum' and ‘Dad’ spout cliches of parent-ism (“If you live under my roof, you'll abide by my rules”) and Shiel plays up the parody with soap/sit-com-like scenes set around the breakfast table. Think the Oxo family played by Fred and Rosemary West.

The falsity of the situation is not lost on Lena or the viewer: none of these relationships are ‘real’ (except, perhaps, ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’s) and there is no real emotion except the desire to control. At first, Lena attempts to play along in an effort to win the favour of ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’, but it soon becomes clear that they see through this. “You have to make them love you” Birdie tells ‘LB’, but here, as in We Are What We Are, love is a masquerade for hatred. Birdie understands that perhaps the only way to gain ‘Mum and ‘Dad’s approval is by becoming like them; LB understands this too, but his sensitive nature precludes him becoming like ‘Dad’, and Lena’s sense of fight secretly reawakens hope in LB that he too might escape ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’s clutches.

As they so often do, family tensions come to a head at Christmas (and the parody of the typical British family Christmas in Mum and Dad has to be seen to be believed). Lena has it spelt out to her that she is merely the family pet. (Her outsider status as a Polish immigrant precludes her assimilation into the family – she remains an object of loathing, a perceived threat to the family structure). Realising that her time is almost up she makes a desperate bid to escape, in the process forcing all allegiances in the family to be revealed.

Interestingly, Steven Shiel has remarked that much of Mum and Dad arose from thinking about the implications of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individuals, and there are families.’ (In Mum and Dad it is therefore left up to ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ to make the rules, and there is no wider community to tell them that those rules are unacceptable.) Which, of course, is all very well unless your Dad happens to be Josef Fritzl, in which case having a society to which such people can be held accountable might just be desirable – eh, Maggie?

Shiel has just finished his second horror film, Dead Mine, shot in Indonesia, hopefully scheduled for release later this year. Meanwhile check out the Mayhem website here

Gone Hollywood

On a recent trip to Los Angeles (Hollywood no less), I took the opportunity to do some film-related stuff and visit places connected to Shocks To The System.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery entrance on Santa Monica Boulevard

Hall of David: resting place of Edgar G. Ulmer

Fay Wray's grave

First on the list was a trip to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to see the final resting places of some horror movie luminaries. Hollywood Forever is a pleasant green sanctuary off Santa Monica Boulevard and situated behind Paramount Studios. Amongst those laid to rest in the cemetery are Maila Nurmi (AKA ‘Vampira’), Darren ‘Kolchak’ McGavin, Peter Lorre, composer of ‘Bride of Frankenstein’, Franz Waxman, ‘Ruby’ director Curtis Harrington, director of the 1941 ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, Victor Fleming, ‘Black Cat’ director Edgar G. Ulmer and star of ‘Mystery of the Wax Museum’ and ‘King Kong’, the original scream-queen, Fay Wray.

4565 Dundee Drive: James Whale's home in the 1930s

On my way to visit Pasadena, I stopped off in the Los Feliz district to visit the home of James Whale. Situated at 4565 Dundee Drive, the ‘Villa Sophia’ is a magnificent Mediterranean house that was Whale’s residence in the 1930s while making ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’. This photograph taken from Dundee Drive does not do justice to the size and scale of the place, but you can see more photographs that show the sheer scope of it by following this link.

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard

When James Whale first arrived in Hollywood, he stayed here at the Roosevelt Hotel. The Roosevelt also housed the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. The hotel is famously said to be haunted by the ghosts of Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift, and was the inspiration for the film '1408'.

Cecil DeMille's Barn : the first Hollywood Studio

Door to DeMille's Office

Cecil B. DeMille's office in the Barn

Although not horror-related, I just had to visit this old barn situated on North Highland Avenue. It was the first film studio in Hollywood, built by Jesse Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille for the filming of the first-ever feature length film, The Squaw Man (1913). Now the Hollywood Heritage Museum, the barn still houses a recreation of DeMille’s Production Office, as well as other film memorabilia including a shrine to Rudolph Valentino.

Musso and Frank's: legendary Hollywood restaurant

Inside Musso and Frank's

Back on Hollywood Boulevard, for lunch in The Musso and Frank Grill, the oldest restaurant in Hollywood. It is also famous as being the drinking den of choice for veteran scriptwriters such as Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner. It is the place where Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma first dreamed up the idea for Obsession (1976). Well worth a visit, it retains the genteel charm of Old Hollywood and the waiting staff all seem to be well into geriatric-age with plenty of tales to tell of days gone by.

Exterior of Larry Edmunds Bookstore

Inside Larry Edmunds.

Practically opposite Musso and Frank’s is another Hollywood institution, Larry Edmunds’ Bookshop, an absolute treasure trove of rare and second hand movie books and Hollywood memorabilia, lobby cards, movie posters and scripts. This is the place to go if you need something out of print and Larry has now got a website going which you can visit here.

Samuel French on Sunset Boulevard

The film section inside French's Bookshop

Another famous movie bookshop is Samuel French located on Sunset Boulevard. The shop is divided into two main rooms: Theatre and Film. The film section has pretty much everything you could ask for including an extensive horror and cult film section. I bought a copy of Jason Zinoman’s account of 1970s horror, Shock Value (review to follow).

The American Cinematheque on Hollywood Boulevard

The Cinematheque is house inside Grauman's Egyptian Theatre

Showing a Ken Russell tribute

On Hollywood Boulevard again, I was very impressed by the American Cinematheque. Housed at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the Cinematheque is a non-profit cultural organisation devoted to the presentation of film in all its forms, from the classics to fringe cinema. I was disappointed to miss a screening of Vertigo in 70mm but delighted to see a Ken Russell retrospective this month that includes a screening of The Devils – although I’m not sure which version. Check out their website here.

1537 Orange Grove Avenue

Across the street: 1530 Orange Grove Avenue

Of course Los Angeles is itself a museum in terms of movie locations, many of which are instantly recognisable. But I was surprised and delighted to discover that John Carpenter filmed some of the most famous scenes in Halloween only two roads away from my sister-in-law’s house, here on Orange Grove Avenue, just off Sunset Boulevard.



Anyone interested in finding out more about movie locations in Los Angeles should check out Robby Cress’s excellent blog Dear Old Hollywood.

 

Communizine's 50 Best Blogs for Movie Fans

Will Roby at Communizine has included Shocks to The System in his 50 Best Blogs For Movie Fans at #3 in the Horror Movie Blogs category.

Thanks, Will - it's an honour!

Communizine is a 'Website Community For Blogging' - check it out here!

Save the Night of The Living Dead Chapel

The chapel in Evan's City Cemetary that features in the famous opening scene of Night Of The Living Dead (1968) is under threat of demolition, sparking a campaign headed by Gary Streiner (one of Romero's associates in the film) to raise funds to fix it up. 


NOLTD fans with a few pennies to spare at Christmas can check out the campaign here Fix the Chapel.


The campaign has gone global, helped partly by a email from George Romero pledging his support.  Here's the message from George:

In 1967, the citizens of Evans City, Pennsylvania permitted us to use their community cemetery for a very unusual purpose... to make a movie.       At the time, nobody in the Pittsburgh area was making movies, certainly not feature-length movies, but that's what we had set out to do.  We hoped to someday complete a film which might actually be worthy of distribution.  We were young and reaching for the stars.  We had no reason to believe that anyone would support us in our aspirations.  But the people of Evans City did.  They welcomed us, in some cases fed us, and occasionally even agreed to play small roles in the film.  They gave us all their support and then some.  In this way, they became the first people to not only approve but endorse what we were attempting to do.
The people of Evans City in effect 'teamed-up' with us, subscribed to our hopes and dreams as if they were their own.  It was as if, in accepting us, they were willing to accept the far-fetched idea that a film made by what could only be called 'amateurs' might just possibly have a chance at success.  The film,Night of the Living Dead, was as its title suggests, a horror film, which further prejudiced its chance at any sort of lasting attention.  But the people of Evans City knew nothing about box-office shares or audience-response polls.  We believed, so they believed.  And, in a hundred ways, they enabled us to complete the film.       In the end, our litte movie was distributed worldwide, was invited into the permanent collection at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and was selected by the American Film Institute as one of the top 100 films of all time.  We have all gotten careers out of its success.  The film has somehow remained a favorite of audiences ever since its release in 1968, and a cult has formed around it.  Hard as it is to believe, people travel from all over the world just to visit the place where the film was photographed. Only the people of Evans City have the ability to say, "Oh, yes, Night of the Living Dead was filmed right here in town."  I'm sure this hasn't created an economic 'boom' for the town, but to some minor extent, it has given Evans City a permanent place in some people's hearts.  Not the more important, though mournful place occupied by men and women who perished in service to community and country, but a happier place born out of success, a sense of accomplishment against very long odds.       Our first day of filming in Evans City was spent in tne cemetery.  There seems to be a 'Zombie' craze sweeping the nation right now, and indeed the world.  I was in Strasbourg, France last week where more than 3000 people turned out in make-up and costume for a 'Zombie Walk' through town.  Next week, I'm going to Mexico City, where upwards of 5000 are expected to attend.  Well, the very first Zombie (not your grandfather's vintage Caribbean-style Zombie, but one of the 'New Order') made his premiere appearance on a cloudy afternoon in 1967 in the graveyard at Evans City.  I'll never forget the day.  I was fulfilling a lifelong dream: directing a motion picture.  My long-time friends and partners were there with me (Russ, Jack, Gary, Vince, Bill...) and the people of Evans City played a big part in making it all possible.       I'm writing this as a way of thanking Evans City and voicing my strong vote for the preservation of the chapel at the cemetery there.

We Are What We Are (2010)

They say Christmas is a time for families, so in the next few posts I will be looking at some recent horror films with particularly degenerate families, starting with this 2010 Mexican cannibal shocker from director Jorge Michel Grau (whom I understand is no relation to the director of the classic zombie flick The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, 1974).

Mexican cinema has come into its own in the last decade or so with films like Amores Perros (2000) that depict the brutal reality of life in modern Mexico City, a place where life is cheap and survival often calls for desperate measures. At first glance, We Are What We Are seems to follow in this school of ‘poverty cinema’ and it shares the same languid pace and formal asceticism as other celebrated Mexican offerings as Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), but as we get further into the film it becomes apparent that We Are What We Are is closer in theme to schlockers like Frightmare (1974) and Death Line (aka Raw Meat) (1974) in its use of the cannibalism motif to explore degenerate families.

Tony Williams in his book, Hearths of Darkness, wrote of the family as an instrument of repression, a way of turning out docile members of society willing to conform to social norms. We Are What We Are manages to explore this idea pretty neatly within its brief (80 mins) running time. We are firmly in Freudian territory here; what is described as the ‘Oedipal Trajectory’ forms the thesis of the film: the process by which male family members are socialised to take on patriarchal roles within the family, and by extension, wider society, thus ensuring the continuance of male power structures.

In We Are What We Are, when the father of a poor Mexican family dies unexpectedly, it falls to his sensitive son, Alfredo, as the eldest, to take on the role of patriarch. This family, however, survive by eating human meat and Alfredo seems ill-equipped temperamentally to take on the responsibility of hunting down victims.  While his mother, Patricia, sits in judgement waiting for Alfredo to prove his metal; his younger, more vicious brother, Julian eyes the father role for himself, while his sister Sabine manipulates them both behind-the-scenes like Lady MacBeth, finally goading them into action.

Logically in the film cannibalism as the family ‘ritual’ is presented as the social norm – not a deviation from the social norm: and although poverty may be a contributory factor, cannibalism is seen as a monstrous extension of patriarchal family values and a way of holding the family unit together in the face of social change. An image in Bunuel’s Los Olvidados comes to mind: in a nightmare, the child sees his mother coming towards him holding a dripping hunk of dead flesh. This image – with its evocation of the child’s fear of the mother – resonates throughout We Are What We Are.

In We Are What We Are the women in the family work towards perpetuating the patriarchal power structure. The Oedipal Trajectory, according to Freud, works by dissuading the male child from identifying with the mother through the fear of castration – both literal and symbolically through the denial of power within the family structure, a demotion, if you will, within the pecking order – so that the male child becomes like his father. The ‘successful’ completion of the trajectory results in the male child taking on the characteristics of heterosexual masculinity to become the virile, aggressive patriarch.  Unfortunately, Alfredo falls short somewhat, harbouring homosexual feelings and suffering ‘Oedipal guilt’ because he is unable to live up to his mother’s expectations. During one of his hunts he brings home a victim from a gay nightclub that he has ‘picked up’. We have seen him wrestling with his sexual desires and for a brief moment, think that he might liberate himself from the repression of his family life by breaking with 'social norms’, but his repression is too great for him to take that step.

Although the women in the film maintain their gender roles within the family structure– the men bring home the meat; the women prepare it – both mother and daughter act out their ‘power envy’ (or penis envy) in their treatment of Alfredo.  Although they devote their frustrated energies to the perpetuation of patriarchy within the family, they are excluded from the wider world of money, power and politics. Their resentment at this exclusion shows itself in their secret despising of Alfredo and his ‘privileged’ position within the family. Patricia forbids him to bring home a prostitute for them to eat because her husband enjoyed the privilege – as befits the patriarch - of consorting with prostitutes. Later, Patricia brings home a man for herself, on the pretext of providing a ‘meal’ for her family, whom she is then forced to kill. The film shows that in the patriarchal family ‘hate’ masquerades as ‘love’: the only priority, as Patricia points out, is that in time of crisis at least one family member survives, so that the ‘ritual’ can be preserved and continued. This plays itself out in the final scenes as the police close in on the cannibal house and a shoot-out ensues. As Patricia flees, leaving her children to their fate, the family finally implodes: Alfredo attacks Sabine and is shot by Julian, who is himself shot and killed by the police.

Interestingly, Grau posits the prostitutes – in their deviation from the social ‘norm’ – as another potentially positive alternative to the patriarchal family. This is of course another reason for Patricia’s antagonism towards them: they pose an ideological threat to ‘family values’.  Grau depicts them as a social collective, ‘a sisterhood’ with their own moral code (which is more honourable than Patricia’s). Similar to Tod Browning’s Freaks, the prostitutes hold the policy of ‘offend one and you offend them all’. As Patricia rests after fleeing the police shoot out, the whores converge on her, en-masse, and beat her to death.

Now with the cannibal family wiped out – and only Sabine left alive – is the ‘ritual’ over? I will not reveal the film’s conclusion but suffice it to say that in the patriarchal society of We Are What We Are indoctrination runs deep and old ways are hard to change.

We Are What We Are is pretty strong meat. It will provide you with food for thought on Christmas Day when, as head of the family, you prepare to carve the turkey.

Ambiguities in Suspiria

I'm not an expert on Argento like James at Behind The Couch who has published a book on the director LINK but I love Suspiria and when I watched it again recently I was struck by its ambiguities: that the events in the film might not be supernatural at all but (para)psychological. Of course,  Argento pretty much signals this in the scene where Udo Keir gives the famous ‘broken mirrors, broken minds’ speech but it’s intriguing to watch the film with these ambiguities in mind. 

To start with, Argento’s positioning of the main character is interesting: Suzy is neutral – she neither believes nor disbelieves in witchcraft. Instead, like so many Argento characters, she is unwittingly drawn into a mystery that she feels compelled to resolve through rational means. She is a contrast to the neurotic Sara and the hysterical Pat – whose histories of mental breakdown make them ripe for suggestion. She is un-sentimental and, as Tanner remarks, ‘strong-willed’ (Jessica Harper played similar no-nonsense women in ‘Phantom of the Paradise’ and the little-seen ‘Inserts’); she provides a strong backbone for the film in terms of exploring its rational/supernatural ambiguities.

Suzy enters a world of the uncanny...

Her arrival in to a world of the uncanny - symbolised by the opening storm as she leaves the airport at Friburg – can be read as her entering a ‘collective mental state’ of hysteria and superstition.  Argento shows this hysteria to be contagious – all the ballet dancers in the school seem to be affected by it – even the hard-headed Olga, who first offers Suzy lodgings ‘at a price’, seems to be on the edge of sanity (Freud would doubtless say that all this hysteria was down to the sexual frustrations of all these women cooped up together). Suzy, despite her rational mindedness, succumbs to it briefly when she becomes suggestible to psychic attack in the corridor (it is interesting that Argento keeps her incapacitated for some sections of the film) but it is because of her rational nature that Suzy recovers from this and it is really her friendship with Sara that draws her deeper into the mystery - into uncovering the ‘secret of the iris’ - than any firm belief in ‘witches’.

...and succumbs to mass hysteria

Indeed there is maybe very little in Suspiria that might not have a rational or (para)psychological explanation.  Understanding Argento’s idea of ‘broken minds’ even helps to explain some of the ‘arbitrary’ episodes in the film that seem to have no purpose within the plot: such as the maggot invasion and the bat attack. Once you believe in the supernatural, then all natural phenomenon might be the work of occult forces: bad weather (the storm at the beginning), strange animal behaviour (Daniel's dog attack), inexplicable accidents. These incidents in the film explore this mind-set.

....that gives strange natural events - like the bat attack - a 'supernatural' meaning

Argento is also careful to maintain ambiguity in the murder sequences: we see only the killer’s arms. They are strange, hairy and freakish – they may be the arms of a demon, but then again maybe not. The eyes that Pat sees through the window glinting in the darkness might be those of a cat, not related to the killer at all. Argento never presents us with something that is indisputably supernatural, unlike, say Polanski  in ‘The Ninth Gate’, who shows us Emmanuelle Seigner doing the physically impossible by floating down steps. In Suspiria, the killers might be demons or 'familiars' conjured up by the witches; or they might be human acolytes, 'brainwashed' into doing the witches' bidding. There is a moment when we briefly see the back of Sara's killer, dressed in a cape, walking away from us:  it might even be Richard, the young penniless dancer who has a crush on Suzy and who also works for Miss Tanner and Miss Blanc.

Sara's killer is glimpsed briefly from behind

Once it is accepted that witchcraft has a (para)psychological explanation even ‘necromancy’ – the raising of the dead – can be explained rationally: the result of hypnosis/suggestion/hallucination. When Sara seemingly rises from her slab to confront Suzy, it may only be that Suzy ‘hallucinates’ this under the suggestion of Elena Markos (as is implied by Sara’s apparition ‘fading away’ when Suzy stabs the old witch to death). And the final destruction of the Tanz academy with its exploding lightbulbs and self-destructing walls might also be Suzy’s hallucination or telekinesis. Certainly her enigmatic smile at the end suggests that, having escaped the academy, she is already mentally shrugging off the ‘hysteria’ to which she and Sara and the others might have succumbed.

Sara's apparation fades ...Suzy emerges from her madness.

Either way, the ambiguities in Suspiria only add to the enjoyment of a great film that is already rich in allusions to everything from Freud to early German Expressionist horror films, to the writings of Poe and DeQuincey.