The Horror of It All Read online

  Horror fans, unsurprisingly, take a particularly dim view of this theory, since most of us are well-adjusted, contributing members of society. So instead of addressing it head-on, we choose to deny it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read defenses of violent entertainment in which the author states unequivocally that there has never been a reputable study that shows a positive correlation between the consumption of violent media and antisocial behavior. That’s bullshit. I could find you dozens if not hundreds of such studies that show a moderate or even significant correlation. Despite what cable news has led us to believe, you can’t legitimately win an argument by pretending the opposing view doesn’t even exist.

  That said, I’m generally skeptical about academic studies. My senior year in college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I took a course taught by a lovely older professor well-known for her groundbreaking scholarship on the effects of media. Her class focused on the relationship between fictional violence and aggression in children. For an ongoing class project—which commenced on day one and concluded on the final day of the semester—we had to interview dozens of parents about the viewing habits of their children. Then we would ask them about the children’s subsequent behavior. After analyzing all the responses, we would draw our conclusion. Well, it should come as no surprise to anyone who knew me in college that the day before the project was due I had not interviewed a single parent. I think I might have even forgotten about the entire thing were it not for the fact that Feldman, my housemate who was also in the class, inadvertently unearthed his syllabus at the last moment. So we did what any enterprising college student would do—got drunk off our asses, ordered in from the Pizza Pit, stayed up all night, and forged every single one of those questionnaires. I actually felt guilty the next day when, after we made our presentations to the class, the professor complimented us on our work. I was always afraid—though not enough to confess—that one day the professor would publish another one of her well-received books, relying at least in part on our data.

  Whenever people question the veracity of scientific studies they’re usually concerned about the possible bias of the conductor. What they should be far more worried about is the integrity of those compiling the data. If this usually falls to goofballs like me and Feldman, I can’t begin to imagine how many other studies have been corrupted. Maybe everything we know about the universe is suspect. Is regular exercise and a good night’s sleep secretly hardening my arteries? Could an all-bacon diet and midmorning cigar really be the key to longevity?

  However, let’s pretend that all studies are conducted flawlessly by meticulous professionals—not inebriated undergrads—under the most rigorously enforced controls. I could still find ways to dispute the methodology. Or minimize the findings. Or even come up with completely different ways to interpret the results.

  There are also correlations that simply can’t be easily explained, as they seem to fly in the face of common sense. For example, it’s indisputable that violent crimes—even violent crimes among youths—have plummeted over the past twenty years. And yet over this same period I don’t think anyone would deny that entertainment has become far more violent, even if we take first-person shooter games out of the equation.

  Although it might make us uncomfortable, let’s accept the fact that people who commit violent crimes watch a disproportionate amount of violent entertainment. Because let’s be honest, it’s probably true.

  What I believe has been lost in the entire debate, and what I’m convinced is the most important component of it, is the reason why we watch. After all, we know people have entirely different psychological, emotional, and even physiological reactions to the same stimuli. Whenever NFL Films shows the famous play from Monday Night Football where Lawrence Taylor snaps Joe Theismann’s tibia like a wishbone on Thanksgiving, I have to look away. Same thing goes for the injury of that Louisville basketball player in the 2013 Final Four, where his bone was sticking clear out of his shin. I assume most people have the same reaction (which makes me wonder, why the hell do they still keep showing it?). On the other hand, my business partner Alex Flaster once directed a documentary about Joe Clark, a seventeen-year-old who abducted a young boy and over the next forty-three hours proceeded to break most of the bones in both his legs. Clearly this psychopath didn’t have the same aversion.

  Wouldn’t it stand to reason then that people watch horror movies for a multitude of purposes? Some, like me, started watching them almost as a dare, then kept watching for the vicarious thrill. Others might get off on the startling special effects. Still others might find comfort in the formulaic archetypes. And some—hopefully very few, but still some—might use horror films to satisfy their actual sadistic tendencies. But if there were no horror movies, and it was all Mary Poppins and the Wiggles, I promise you, those lunatics would still be out there. Horror movies don’t create real-life monsters and aren’t in any way liable for their existence. To use an oft-quoted line from Scream, “Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative.”

  Still, horror movies have always been a convenient scapegoat. Natural Born Killers, Child’s Play 3, Scream, Rob Zombie’s Halloween, and countless others have been fingered as the inspiration for gruesome murders. And truthfully, maybe they were. Between the alarmist press, the knee-jerk reactionaries, and the less-than-precise diagnosis of mental illness, determining the actual cause of violence is nearly impossible.

  Sometimes, however, the connection is explicit.

  On January 18, 2003, the body of twenty-one-year-old Thomas McKendrick was found in a shallow grave. He had been bludgeoned with a hammerlike object and stabbed in the face over forty times. The killer was his best friend, twenty-two-year-old Allan Menzies. Menzies was obsessed with the forgettable (though apparently not for him) film Queen of the Damned, based on the bestselling Anne Rice novel. He had watched it at least one hundred times, sometimes multiple times a day. As reality slipped away, Menzies became convinced that the main character Akasha was his queen. He committed the murder at her behest.

  Now, clearly Menzies is crazy by any measure. And equally clear, he was definitely motivated by Queen of the Damned. But what does this prove? Chapman was inspired by The Catcher in the Rye. Hinckley by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. Berkowitz by his neighbor’s dog. All this shows is that mental illness finds a home in a myriad of places. At the risk of sounding like the narrator in those commercials for Time-Life Books, or a second-rate Rod Serling, when you’re dealing with the mysteries of the human mind, uncertainty is the only thing that’s certain.

  As a lifelong (mostly) Chicagoan, Ebert was intimately familiar with Bughouse Square, a nickname for Washington Square Park, which for much of its history was a place for activists, revolutionaries, dreamers, and garden-variety nut jobs to gather and debate the issues of the day. As if channeling the spirits of those long-lost orators, he gets up on his soapbox. “There is a difference between good and scary movies and movies that systematically demean half the human race. There is a difference between movies which are violent but entertaining and movies that are gruesome and despicable. There is a difference between a horror movie and a freak show.”

  Following this rant, we move on to a scene from Halloween, a film that, again, both he and Siskel greatly enjoyed and admired. Jamie Lee Curtis is trapped in a closet while Michael Myers menaces her with a kitchen knife. It would seem that this scene encapsulates everything the duo hates about the slasher film. After all, the dominant image is Curtis cowering in fear, her shirt ripped, as Michael tries to stick a knife in her. There’s certainly no discernible difference between this scene and others they’ve railed against. But as Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast, my friend!” According to Ebert, “Halloween is directed and acted with a great deal more artistry and craftsmanship than the sleaze-bucket movies we’ve been talking about.” It’s a justification that artists have been using since time immemorial: execution can elevate content.

  It’s the reas
on why Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is considered a masterpiece while Kink.com is obscene. Why Lolita is read in college classrooms but online schoolgirl fantasy stories are tawdry. Why Mapplethorpe is a genius and Anthony Weiner a pervert. (For the record, I find Salò complete and utter shit [no pun intended], Lolita thinly veiled child porn, and Mapplethorpe silly. But whatever, high culture was never my thing.)

  The episode is drawing to a close so Siskel needs to wrap things up. With typical hyperbole he says, “These women-in-danger films all really boil down to just one same image. One disturbing image. A woman screaming in abject terror.” Ebert ends with what amounts to a public service announcement about how to recognize these films by their posters (“Usually has a knife! Or a hatchet! Or an ax!”),IV as if they’re some communicable disease to be prevented by hand-washing or slapping on a condom.

  In retrospect, the effect of Siskel and Ebert’s crusade was negligible. At best, it may have galvanized a few housewives in Des MoinesV who were previously unaware of slasher films but now quite worried that their once-innocent teenagers could be exposed to such Hollywood garbage.

  It also may have reminded the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), under whose purview the film ratings fell, that they really dropped the ball in letting Friday the 13th get by with an R rating, considering how graphic the murders were. Who knows how embarrassed the organization really was—although I’ve heard reports that MPAA honcho Jack Valenti was furious—but there’s no question that the murders in subsequent slashers such as Friday the 13th Part 2, My Bloody Valentine, Terror Train, and Happy Birthday to Me were far less explicit—and not by design. Fortunately, most of these films have now been rereleased in uncut versions with all their gore effects restored (in the old days, the naughty bits were only available on bootlegs or foreign imports, which could be prohibitively expensive).

  Speaking of naughty, the attack on slasher films in the United States was nothing compared to that of our friends across the pond. Europeans love to paint Americans as puritanical and sexually repressed, but the British are a far more uptight bunch. Until recently, hard-core pornography was basically outlawed. In July 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that Internet service providers (ISPs) would be asked to automatically block access to pornographic sites, unless customers actively decided to “opt in” by contacting their ISP. Can anyone imagine a similar measure being seriously considered in America, other than by some fringe religious group? I was going to write that pornography has become as American as baseball and apple pie, but that’s doing a severe disservice to our patriotic smut peddlers. After all, a lot of people hate pie and the 2013 World Series had an average 8.9 rating, meaning about 14.9 million people watched. By comparison, that very day, about 40 million Americans visited an adult website.

  Commentators love to bemoan the polarization of American politics. You want an issue that crosses party lines and unites the masses? Try taking away our Internet porn. You’ll have New England liberals linking arms in solidarity with Deep South rednecks to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of cum-shot compilations.

  Apparently, the British had their knickers in a twist over home video technology even before questionable content began to dominate the offerings. According to David Kerekes and David Slater in their definitive book on the subject, See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy, there was a very real fear that British citizens were becoming addicted to home video. Because these “videoholics” were not constrained by any external safeguard—unlike television, which signed off at midnight—these addicts could theoretically watch forever. One only has to think back to the sparse offerings in the early days of home video to understand how ludicrous this concern was. It seems that VCR theft was also a major problem in Britain. A device called Videoalert, which emitted an ear-splitting siren whenever the unit was moved, was designed to ward off would-be thieves. I don’t know which is worse, losing a relatively expensive piece of technology, or enduring the equivalent of a foghorn blast every time I bumped into my entertainment center.

  An early opponent of Britain’s nascent video industry was the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA).VI Founded in 1965 by a schoolteacher named Mary Whitehouse, NVALA’s original target was television, but it soon turned its focus to other objectionable mediums, none more famously than videos. Whitehouse was straight out of central casting. With her prim haircut and severe features, she looked the part of a sanctimonious scold. She was both beloved and feared by the establishment, and before her work was done she would be appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Not surprisingly, she was equally detested by the artistic community. The Pink Floyd song “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” from their 1977 album, Animals, calls out Whitehouse by name. It’s obviously supposed to be a scathing indictment of her hypocrisy, but like most of Pink Floyd’s lyrics that I once found brilliant, now it just sounds silly.

  While Whitehouse was unquestionably the face of the movement, her ideas found a willing audience in a public already galvanized against horror movies. Newspapers stoked this fear with sensationalist stories about robberies and rapes committed by juveniles who blamed their antisocial behavior on home videos. It did not help that in the early days of the video panic the Yorkshire Ripper was still on the loose. This serial killer murdered thirteen women before he was apprehended in the winter of 1981. When the truth about his grisly crimes came to light, it read like something right out of a slasher script.

  Initially, video distributors were not required to obtain certification for their films, unlike theatrical releases, which had to be reviewed by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). The result was an explosion in horror and exploitation titles that previously had no chance of seeing the light of day (or light of a projector bulb on a theater screen). The authorities, however, were not completely hamstrung. The Obscene Publications Act (OPA) allowed police to seize videotapes that, in their opinion, had a “tendency to deprave and corrupt.” I never understood why obscene materials thought to have a detrimental effect on the general public wouldn’t also impact those whose job it was to determine their harmfulness. Apparently, society’s moral guardians are made of tougher stuff. Maybe Mary Whitehouse was really a nunsploitation aficionado?

  In 1982, The Driller Killer, Death Trap, and I Spit on Your Grave were all successfully prosecuted under the OPA. But this wasn’t good enough. Under pressure from the public, the press, and, of course, Mary Whitehouse, the director of public prosecutions drafted a list of thirty-nine film titles that were suitable for prosecution. The films on this list became known as the fabled video nasties.VII Over the years, the number of films on the list fluctuated, as some were added and others removed, evidently not depraved enough to still warrant inclusion.

  Then, in July 1984, authorities brought out the big guns with the passage of the Video Recordings Act. The thrust of the law, and its most chilling stipulation, was that prior to release all videos had to be certified by the BBFC. The fallout was catastrophic. Because the cost of certification was prohibitively high, many small independent distributors who specialized in videos of questionable content were forced out of business. The remaining few that tried to play the government’s game saw their films shredded so badly as to be almost unrecognizable. After all, if you try to eliminate all the offensive content from, say, I Spit on Your Grave, you’re basically left with a fifteen-minute promotional video for some lakeshore real estate.

  One unintended but completely predictable consequence was a robust video black market that sprang up virtually overnight. Nasties that once couldn’t be given away now commanded several hundred dollars. It’s a principle familiar to any student who ever took an introductory econ class: value is inversely proportional to supply. Then there’s the principle familiar to any parent, or to any person with a lick of common sense: the more forbidden something is, the more attractive it becomes. I can’t imagine someone actually wanting to watch Night of the Bloo
dy Apes. That is, until being told they’re not allowed to.

  Part of the fun of revisiting moral panics surrounding slasher films, the video nasties, and other forms of controversial entertainment is watching nostalgia slowly replace indignation. Even the most alarmist campaigns eventually lose steam. Manufactured outrage has a relatively brief shelf life. I mean, is there anybody out there who still believes that comic books portend the end of the Western civilization? Today, that mind-set is more quaint than threatening.

  Except when it isn’t.

  In October 2009, Montreal makeup artist Rémy Couture met with a prospective client. A man and his girlfriend wanted Couture to help them stage a series of provocative photos. But they weren’t really a freaky couple; they were undercover officers. Couture was handcuffed, thrown in the back of a squad car, and charged with “corrupting morals,” which sounds like something out of Orwell, not an actual crime in North America’s most liberal country.

  This whole sorry saga began back in 2006 when Interpol received complaints out of Germany and Austria about Couture’s website, www.InnerDepravity.com (don’t put the book down and run over to your computer; the site has since been disabled). The site was created from the perspective of a fictional psychopath and sexual sadist. It contained dozens of photos and two short films of women being raped, tortured, and mutilated (not necessarily in that order). The material is some of the most disgusting I have ever seen. And Mr. Couture is one of the most talented makeup artists around.