Eaten Alive (1976)

          The best horror filmmakers realize there’s a lot more to disturbing audiences than gore—fictional worlds populated by weird characters often make viewers more uncomfortable than onscreen bloodshed. Consider a pair of early Tobe Hooper movies. His breakout hit, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), imagines a remote pocket of the Lone Star State where insane cannibals prey upon innocent visitors. His follow-up, Eaten Alive, presents a rural hotel where the proprietor is a psychopath who kidnaps people, slaughters them with scythes and other instruments, and feeds their bodies to the gigantic alligator he keeps in a pond behind the hotel. Whereas many horror pictures frighten viewers by inserting a chaos agent into the normal world, these Hooper films drag normal people into chaos.
          That said, there’s a massive difference between these two pictures. Shot on location and featuring a no-name cast, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an immersive nightmare. Shot on soundstages and featuring several Hollywood actors, Eaten Alive is fake on every level, and therefore much less effective. Other problems include a slow-moving script, threadbare characters, and the vulgar intrusion of gratuitous nudity. Nonetheless, there’s a certain compelling derangement to Eaten Alive. After all, the first scene features a pre-Freddy Kreuger Robert Englund as a redneck who introduces himself to a prostitute by saying, “Name’s Buck—I’m rarin’ to fuck.” Later, the movie includes a woman stripped to her lingerie and bound and gagged for days; a young girl trapped in the crawlspace beneath the hotel, with the psychopath coming at her from one direction and the alligator coming at her from the other; and various persons impaled, stabbed, and swallowed in grisly death scenes.
          Nihilism hovers over this flick like a dark cloud.

          Yet it’s the bizarre throwaway scenes that make Eaten Alive unsettling, more so than the ho-hum creature-feature moments. In one bit, a weirdo played by William Finley, known for his work with Brian De Palma, engages in a masochistic conversation with his wife. (“Why don’t you just take that cigarette and grind it out in my eye?”) In another scene, the hotel proprietor tries on various pairs of glasses while reading porno mags and ignoring the pet monkey that’s dying in a nearby cage. The strangeness extends to the actual filmmaking. Hooper often bathes his sets in garish red light, so characters seem as if they’re in hell, and the editing lingers on lurid images—the dying monkey, a nubile young woman stripping—so the whole movie has the air of deranged voyeurism.

          Neville Brand’s leading performance is obvious and silly, but his character is so grotesque that Brand’s work gains a sort of unpleasant power, and onetime Addams Family star Carolyn Jones adds a peculiar quality with her small role as an alternately courtly and cross madam who wears men’s clothes. The performances are hardly the point, though. As a straight-through narrative, Eaten Alive—which was inspired by the crimes of a real-life killer—is a dud, too campy and episodic to maintain real suspense. As a journey into an otherworldly headspace, it’s fairly effective.

Eaten Alive: FREAKY

Salem’s Lot: The Movie (1979)

          Even though the 1976 movie adaptation of horror novelist Stephen King’s first book, Carrie, was a solid success, it took Hollywood a few years to dip back into the King well—and the follow-up project appeared on the small screen rather than in theaters. After attempts to turn King’s book Salem’s Lot into a feature ran aground, the piece was reconceived as a two-part miniseries that would allow for the narrative sprawl that gives King’s stories their folksy texture. The shift worked, because the Salem’s Lot miniseries was an Emmy-nominated hit. Then, after its November 1979 TV run, the movie was chopped down to feature length and issued to theaters outside the United States. But here’s the twist—King stated at the time he preferred the shorter version, even though it excised nearly half the plot. Go figure.

          Watched as a stand-alone feature, Salem’s Lot: The Movie is underwhelming, and not just because of the choppy edits that appear wherever a big chunk of material was removed—even the unbroken scenes feel ordinary, with a few noteworthy exceptions. The story, of course, is a typical King lark about good people confronting a bad place. Ben Mears (David Soul) is a novelist who returns to his hometown of Salem’s Lot, Maine, to write about the Marsten House, an imposing edifice just outside town where horrible things are rumored to have happened in the past. Mears wants to explore the notion of whether houses can truly be haunted. However, someone else got to the Marsten House first—elegant Englishman Richard Straker (James Mason), who plans to open an antique shop in town, recently bought the place. It turns out Straker is the accomplice to an ancient vampire who plans to feast on the people of Salem’s Lot, converting them to an army of bloodsuckers. Once a trail of bodies and a series of supernatural confrontations reveals what’s happening, Mears endeavors to defeat the monsters with help from unlikely sidekicks including a little boy and an old man.

          Viewed in the 112-minute version, the story feels contrived and overwrought, because useful elements including a prologue/epilogue device and various subplots aren’t there to buttress the outlandish narrative twists. Director Tobe Hooper stages several fun shock scenes—the best bits involve a ghostly vampire kid floating in fog outside a bedroom window while calling to a young friend on the other side of the glass—but Salem’s Lot merely seems like a classier version of the supernatural escapism that producer/director Dan Curtis made for TV throughout the ’70s, in projects such as the spooky 1972 telefilm The Night Stalker. Still, there’s a lot of nihilistic bloodshed here for a small-screen project, even though Salem’s Lot isn’t gory, and Mason is terrific as the charmingly evil Straker. (By contrast, leading man Soul, of Starsky & Hutch fame, is hopelessly bland.) Still, it’s a head-scratcher why King fancied this version over the three-hour mother lode.

Salem’s Lot: The Movie: FUNKY

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

          Calling The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a masterpiece seems wrong, because while it’s made with incredible skill—and while its potency as a fear machine is beyond reproach—the movie is so unrelentingly sadistic that praising it requires significant qualifiers. Yes, a strong argument can be made that the film represents an unflinching statement about the evils that prowl our modern world, and yes, there’s a glimmer of hope in the film’s climax. But, man, this movie is grim beyond measure, and that last shot—I won’t spoil it for you, but brace yourself for nightmares—is among the most frightening images ever committed to film. So while director Tobe Hooper deserves all sorts of credit not just for his cinematic craftsmanship but also for his merciless integrity, one must ask the inevitable question: Why was this film made?

          I have a hard time believing the picture was created to express the dark psychological and social themes that bubble beneath its bloody surface. I have a much easier time believing the picture was created as a thrill ride, and that it’s only because Hooper did his job so well that critics look for meaning in the movie. And that, in turn, raises another inevitable question: What does it say about society that something titled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre qualifies as a thrill ride?

          Setting aside these larger questions for the moment, the texture of the picture is deceptively simplistic. Several young people, led by Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), wander into the Texas wilderness and stumble upon the lair of Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his deranged clan. Living in a dilapidated old house far away from civilization, these inbred monsters are cannibals and murderers, so the horror begins the moment the young people end up in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time. Excepting sequences preceding the introduction of Leatherface, all of which are creepy, Hooper doesn’t really bother with the subtle art of building mood once the movie reaches cruising altitude—Leatherface kills someone in his first scene, and the bodies pile up as the movie progresses.

          Leatherface is so named because of the human-skin mask he wears over his features, and the pervasive gruesomeness found throughout the movie is just as nauseating as the reason for Leatherface’s moniker: A woman gets impaled on a meathook; a man gets it with a chainsaw; and so on. There’s actually not much gore in the movie, at least not nearly as much as one might expect, but Hooper makes clear exactly what’s happening so viewers can fill in the ugly pictures with their imaginations. Allegedly inspired by the crimes of real-life killer Ed Gein (who also inspired the novel that became Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho), Hooper’s movie is meticulously filmed, and despite a miniscule budget, the production design is sickeningly perfect. The central location will ring true for anyone who’s ever lived by a mysterious abandoned house, and the costuming of the film’s grotesque characters is so persuasive that simply looking at Leatherface’s family is enough to turn the stomach.

          The rare horror movie that’s truly horrific, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a unique piece of work that shouldn’t be tarnished by its association with myriad lesser sequels and remakes; Hooper’s original is unforgettable, in the worst possible way.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: GROOVY