1970s horror movie round-up

You may remember that an early October repeat viewing of Let's Scare Jessica to Death inspired me to see what other unseen 70s horror movies were out there that would give me a similar vibe. 

Well, unfortunately, I came up short on this -- not for lack of follow through or effort, but for lack of results. 

But on the second-to-last day I was watching these movies -- having known I planned to watch new horror on both the 30th and 31st -- I did finally hit.

My methodology in determining candidates was to google a variety of relevant search terms and see what came up that I hadn't seen. This produced a list of the following 21 titles on Letterboxd.

Blacula (1972)
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
The Cat and the Canary (1978)
Scream and Scream Again (1970)
Phase IV (1974)
Prophecy (1979)
Shivers (1975)
Empire of the Ants (1977)
Day of the Animals (1979)
The Swarm (1978)
A Knife for the Ladies (1974)
Piranha (1978)
Coma (1978)
See No Evil (1971)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
The Legend of Hell House (1973)
Trog (1970)
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Jaws 2 (1978)
Theatre of Blood (1973)

Each 70s release year appears at least once on this list, and you would have thought this should have been more than enough to go on. 

I picked from this list in some cases out of pure interest, which meant a rental from iTunes, and in other cases because of availability, meaning it was streaming for free on one of my services. The latter opportunistic approach left me watching some candidates that were decidedly imperfect fits for what I was looking for ... but as it happens, I was mostly striking out with the hand-picked rentals as well. 

As I was considering my final few options, I began really scrutinizing the remaining movies on the list to try to pre-empt my disappointment. I'm sure some of the remaining candidates would have been fine, but when diving deeper into them on Wikipedia, they struck me either as too hokey, too associated with a genre other than horror, or too similar to something I had already watched. I also wanted to get variety from my movies, not just all slasher films or all monster movies. 

So as I was gearing up for the final two viewings on Thursday and Friday, I called an audible and went off the Letterboxd list. One of my final two choices was uncovered in a more traditional countdown of the best 1970s horror movies, and one was found by sheer happenstance among the list of rentals currently priced at 99 cents on iTunes. And one of these two proved to be my saving grace.

Alas, the sum total of my new 1970s horror viewings for the month was only eight. That's even with watching probably the most horror movies overall that I've ever watched in October. This can be attributed in part to getting a late start (October 8th was my first viewing), in part to saving most of my viewings for weekend nights (Thursday to Sunday), and in part because I was also trying to keep up with 2021 horror, five of which I reviewed on ReelGood. At least because the cinemas have been closed here due to lockdown, I didn't have any normal new theatrical releases providing additional competition for my finite number of available viewing hours. (Cinemas just reopened Friday night. Probably a topic to expound on at greater length in a different post.)

That's plenty of preamble. Why don't I take you through what I watched?

Shivers (1975, David Cronenberg)
Watched: October 8, iTunes rental

I have a bit of a hit-and-miss history with David Cronenberg, but I generally consider his early period to be his best work, including the likes of Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone and The Fly. I thought investigating the beginnings of his obsession with body horror (which he has abandoned in his later career, to his detriment) would be a fruitful launching point for my 70s horror. Perhaps I should have gone with 1979's The Brood instead, because Shivers was a mild thumbs down for me. The setup seems to have everything I might want, as a parasite infests a state-of-the-art Montreal apartment complex and enters and exits its victims through various orifices, some of which did not previously exist. I'm not sure if I can put my finger exactly on what held me back about this one, as it does have individual moments of good body horror and even some weird deviant behavior, which I can get behind. (The parasite makes you a sex-craved lunatic. There is probably some social commentary here that doesn't translate as well 45 years later.) In the end though I felt a bit disappointed.

Blacula (1972, William Crain)
Watched: October 15, iTunes rental

Perhaps sensing that I was falling behind, it already being the middle of the month and only my second viewing, I snuck this one in on a Friday afternoon after I finished work. There was a bit of a necessary sacrifice in that, as I decided I didn't want something that would really give me the creeps, it being the afternoon at all. Blacula was perfect in that sense: It was a cool bit of period history that I probably should have made time to watch before now, and it was better than just a blaxploitation movie whose cheeky title has given it more of a humorous than frightening reputation. But as I anticipated, it wasn't scary. That's not a problem unique to Blacula -- I realize that I don't find most vampire movies very scary. Because the vampire has a sexy and urbane alternate persona, which was no less the case with William Marshall's Prince Mamuwalde, he is fundamentally more knowable than most other ghouls and goblins we might meet, leaving a deficit in his ability to terrify us. I'm really glad I saw Blacula and it might make an interesting discussion in a post unto itself, but as an attempt to give me the kind of willies I get in Let's Scare Jessica to Death, it did not scratch that itch.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976, Nicolas Gessner) 
Watched: October 15, streaming on Amazon Prime

This was a course corrective in a number of ways: 1) Time to get a 1970s horror for free, and 2) Time to see something that seemed to exist in the same world as Let's Scare Jessica, in that it represents a realistic depiction of the 1970s and contains horror elements that are more subtle than a parasite or a vampire. Unfortunately, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was subtle enough in its horror elements that I'm not even sure it qualifies as a horror movie. As I wrote about in this post, probably the creepiest thing about it is the sexual advances an adult Martin Sheen makes toward a 13-year-old Jodie Foster, and in a way, that was the kind of insidious thing I was looking for as a more psychological form of horror -- which we get in Jessica. But while Jessica does turn to the supernatural, this film remains in the purely realistic realm of a girl living by herself around whom people turn up dead, in some cases by accident and in some cases intentionally. Since this character is also our protagonist, the film is an odd duck that defies easy categorization. That said, as a movie itself, it earned one of the highest ratings for a movie in this series, 3.5 stars on Letterboxd. (And I should mention there's also something creepy about the thing that's in the cellar that you never see.)

The Cat and the Canary (1978, Radley Metzger)
Watched: October 17, streaming on Amazon Prime

And again watching a movie that was available to me for free steered me wrong. Although there are some loosely defined horror elements in this latest cinematic adaptation of a story that goes all the way back to the 1920s, this is a lot more of a comedy or a murder mystery in the same vein as something like Clue: The Movie than it is something that even has the stated ambition of scaring its audience. (I also wrote about this film here, in the context of an anachronism that appears in it.) As with The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, I liked the movie a fair bit for what it was -- 3.5 stars on Letterbox -- but what it was was not a horror movie. (I was fooled by a very convincing poster that wanted to have it both ways.) That said, there is obviously a desired connection to horror here, as the film features an actress who has been introduced to me as an iconic "scream queen" over the course of this series: Barbara Steele. They wouldn't have used her if they weren't trying to leverage her horror bonafides. (She also appears in not the next movie on this list, but the one after that.)

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977, John Boorman)
Watched: October 22, iTunes rental

After a couple missteps the previous weekend -- a whole weekend of missteps, in a way -- I decided to course correct again. What better jumping off point than my favorite horror movie of the entire decade? The Exorcist is a stone-cold classic that makes my blood run cold every time I watch it. Its sequel is ... not. But I didn't realize until afterward how great disliked it actually is. When I went on Wikipedia, I found that audiences howled with laughter when they watched it and it had come in as high as #2 on certain prominent lists of worst movies of all time. That's right -- not worst horror movies, but worst movies period. I certainly didn't like Exorcist II but I didn't find it anywhere near that bad. It's more misguided than anything, though it's true that Richard Burton's performance as the central priest is laughable in certain spots, including one bizarre moment where he turns to speak directly to the camera. It's just kind of a dumb story in which Linda Blair does appear again, but she doesn't get twisted into a pretzel like she did in the first film, and in fact, the film doesn't seem to benefit at all from four years of progress in visual effects. Instead it focuses on the purported horror value of a swarm of locusts. Yawn.

Piranha (1978, Joe Dante) 
Watched: October 23, streaming on Stan

I'm forever course-correcting it seems. I'm back to movies I can watch for free, and since I didn't get the blood and guts I was hoping for in Exorcist II, I was hoping there would be some good gore in the original Piranha -- which also seemed promising given how much I liked the 2010 remake. Wrong again! There are only very few shots of maimed and mutilated bodies in this movie, as the mayhem wreaked by these swarms of fish is mostly viewed by blurry closeups accompanied by frenzied teeth-gnashing noises, and the reactions of the people above the surface of the water as their lower halves are devoured. At worst I was hoping for some good camp in this movie, but I found it lacking in that respect as well. I was glad to watch it given the careers its collaborators would go on to have, not only Dante the director but, get this, screenwriter John Sayles as well. It fits in pretty well with Dante's later work, but given the respect accorded to Sayles for a very different sort of movie down the road, I expected to find something quite literate or clever about the script. Really, I couldn't tell the difference between this and any other creature feature. Another drawback I realized only after watching: Just because a movie features (or at least promises) blood and guts, doesn't necessarily make it a good Halloween viewing. A lot of this takes place during the day and there's no "spooky" vibe at all. (Incidentally, this is the other movie that features Barbara Steele.)

Phantasm (1979, Don Coscarelli)
Watched: October 28, iTunes rental

At last! The movie that saved the whole project. (You might have already guessed from my use of its poster as the artwork.) I was reminded of Phantasm from a list of 1970s greatest horror movies that I found on the very day that I watched it. This was a movie that was on my radar from when I was younger, but I haven't thought about it in years -- I think I lumped it in with Hellraiser back in the day, which I also didn't see until about ten years ago. It's not that type of movie really although I suppose the vibe is not dissimilar. In mining the recesses of my brain, the thing I would have remembered from this was the flying silver disk that impales people's heads and drills into their brains. That would have been the thing kids talked about on the playground. Phantasm is a lot more than that, combining a variety of bizarre horror iconography that could only come from the mind of Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-Tep). There's Angus Scrimm's The Tall Man, always striding and staring in discomfiting ways as he stalks our heroes. There's the dwarves who seem a bit like demented Jawas, and are particularly chilling when we see only flashes of them, as when they scamper behind gravestones in the opening, and we get little more than the signs of their movement. Then of course there's the animated severed finger with its milky yellow blood, which transforms into a nasty little insect. I can't believe it's taken me this long to see Phantasm, and am pleased there are a handful of sequels of surely lesser quality. 

Deep Red (1975, Dario Argento)
Watched: October 29, iTunes rental

Given how I worship Argento's Suspiria, I have no idea how I've never seen another of his movies (he has quite a few). It took randomly seeing Deep Red priced down to 99 cents for an iTunes rental to finally break that drought. Since Suspiria itself has some pretty blah passages, I wonder if part of my delay was a suspicion that the rest of Argento's filmography would be of uneven quality. Deep Red is only one other example of his work, but it does confirm that notion. There are origins here of the visual ideas I love in Suspiria, which came two years later, but they have far lesser impact. As just one example, both films contain imagery of female attack victims with their heads thrust through glass, and the bloodletting that results as their necks are pierced. As both films are obviously shot in Italy (though Suspiria is set in Germany), there's a similar reliance on piazzas to try to create an air of mystery. Plus I got a definite chill from a few signature moments, such as Argento's use of disembodied eyes hanging against a black background, and a reflection of a woman's face in a mirror that scared the shit out of me. Plot-wise, though, I found it pretty banal by comparison, maybe even a bit boring. Suspiria's highs are enough to sustain it through its own more ordinary passages; not so much for Deep Red.

Okay, this took longer to write up than I expected, as I actually intended to have this up yesterday.

While I'm here I might as well mention a few near misses that were available on streaming but I just didn't have time to see, or opted specifically not to see when I wasn't sure how well they'd fit the theme or how much bang for my buck they'd provide. Only two, actually: A Knife for the Ladies on Amazon and The Island of Dr. Moreau on Stan. Even though the former involves something plenty salacious sounding, the murder of prostitutes in a small town, it seems like more of a western than a horror, which is not the genre you would expect from the first part of that sentence. The latter seems like ... well I'm not really sure, but the image of Michael York beaming on the still they chose on Stan just put me off. I'd like to see both this and its disastrous 1996 remake (which the Val Kilmer documentary reminded me of), but maybe not in conjunction with Halloween.

I've taken up way too much of your time already (congratulations if you've gotten this far!), but I thought I'd close by giving you a small bit of context for the previously expressed opinions. This might also double as a list of recommendations, if you are looking for 1970s horror options for your Halloween night viewing.

The following are my top ten 1970s horror movies as determined by Flickchart:

10. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, Philip Kaufman)
9. Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, John D. Hancock)
8. Don't Look Now (1973, Nicolas Roeg)
7. Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)
6. Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)
5. Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)
4. Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento)
3. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Jim Sharman) - ha!
2. Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)
1. The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)

Honorable mention: The Wicker Man (1973, Robin Hardy)

If you have any must-see 1970s horror movies not mentioned in this post, leave 'em in the comments. I've still got 15 more titles in my Lettrboxd list and I could definitely see myself giving this another whirl in a future October.

Happy Halloween everyone!

The casual teenage nudity of the 1970s

One of the first actresses I ever had a crush on was Brooke Shields. All I needed was a glimpse of her in The Blue Lagoon and I was smitten. I would have been no more than ten, which is maybe early for starting to notice the opposite sex -- maybe I was ahead of my time.

It might be that all I got was that glimpse, as my official records don't show me as having seen the whole movie. I'm pretty sure I caught Blue Lagoon, parts of it anyway, on cable at a friend's house, so it may be time to add it to my lists. But Brooke in skimpy clothing -- it's one of those movies where their nudity is covered by coconuts and well-placed hair, if I remember correctly -- was enough to send me down a Brooke Shields rabbit hole, resulting in a viewing of the considerably more adult-oriented Endless Love around the same time. (Didn't think you could go down rabbit holes in the early 1980s? Apparently you could.)

I still wanted to see more, and I sure did see more of Brooke Shields in the earliest of those three films, 1978's Pretty Baby. I don't remember much about Franco Zefferelli's film, but I remember one scene with absolute clarity: Brooke Shields, who would have been about 12 at the time of filming, jumping up and down on a bed, fully naked. 

You might think this is what I wanted, what had been teased in the comparatively chaste Blue Lagoon two years later. But even as a ten-year-old I remember feeling skeeved out by it. Here is this girl, who would have been only two years older than I was at the time she filmed it, jumping up and down in her birthday suit, without any breasts or pubic hair to speak of it. It wasn't right.

I was reminded of my Pretty Baby experience last night while watching my latest 1970s horror this October, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1977). 

Before we get into genre quibbling, I'll say that Nicolas Gessner's film might be more comfortable in the thriller or mystery genres than horror, but I went by the poster art above to decide it made a good viewing for the month leading up to Halloween. The movie's opening scene also takes place on Halloween, which doubles as the birthday for the main character, played by Jodie Foster.

Whether it's a horror or a thriller or a costume drama has no relevance for what I want to talk about today, which is another instance of teenage nudity, and a very matter-of-fact inclusion of themes related to child sexuality on the whole.

In that opening scene, when the movie is barely five minutes old, we see Martin Sheen's character perving on the 13-year-old Foster. He's come to visit her house under the guise of trick-or-treating, but his children aren't with him -- he's run on ahead of them, perhaps for the very opportunity to perv on Foster's Rynn Jacobs. 

After he invites himself in, first we can't tell if he's calling her pretty and touching her hair just as some kind of overly forward attempt to be charming, something that would have been more common back then and would have fallen away in the decades since. Pretty quickly, though, his advances become unmistakeably sexual, and are confirmed when he gets called out on it and quickly scampers out of the house before his own children have a chance to arrive. (They're stepchildren, we later find out, which makes more sense.)

The fact that Martin Sheen is casually a pedophile in this movie is interesting for a couple reasons. For one it reminded me that before he began playing almost exclusively good guys later in his career, Sheen could be a real weirdo on screen. He played sort of a psycho in Terrence Malick's Badlands in 1973, a few years before this, and a few years after this, he's the sinister presidential candidate in David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone. Playing a pedophile would not have made anybody blink at that time.

But the thing that's really strange about it is how it forefronts the sexuality of a 13-year-old girl. Foster was born in 1962, so when filming took place, presumably in 1975, she would have actually been 13 -- maybe only 12, as her birthday is late in the year. Wikipedia doesn't say exactly when filming occurred, but the movie was ready for Cannes in 1976, its general release delayed until 1977 due to the sorts of controversies I'm writing about here.

Not only does Sheen treat her as a sexual object in his every interaction with her, but the film itself does as well. She's also got a relationship that becomes actually sexual with a teenager a few years older than her, played by Scott Jacoby, who reminded me so much of Matthew Modine that I had to check to make sure it was not actually him. The existence of that relationship alone would not be enough to posit a perviness on the part of the filmmakers, but the following is.

There's randomly a scene that shows Foster stripping down naked to get in bed with Jacoby's character. We see her from behind and from the side, but her rear is fully visible and there's a very clear side view of her 13-year-old breasts, which have enough hang to them to qualify as adult breasts. There's absolutely no reason this needed to be in there, except that, according to Wikipedia, a producer wanted there to be "sex and violence" in the film. Yikes. 

At the time I was watching the film I did not know this, but it's not actually Foster we see in that shot. Her older sister Connie did a nude double for her, and Connie seems to have been 21 at the time. I'd like to go back and watch that shot to see what trickery they did to create the illusion that it was Jodie rather than Connie, because I certainly didn't suspect I was looking at anything other than Jodie Foster in that shot. However, whether the actress was of legal age or not is besides the point. The film wants us to believe we are seeing a naked 13-year-old girl. Apparently, this was not something we minded at the time -- and perhaps even something we were supposed to like?

It must have been weird to be Jodie Foster at that time, as she also made Taxi Driver, where she plays a child prostitute. That film, released in February of 1976, would have been released concurrently with the production on The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, but you'd think principal photography would have already been finished if the film were set to appear at Cannes in May. So it appears that multiple filmmakers imagined something sexual about her even when she was just a 12-year-old. And that apparently, this was not universally scorned. (Thank goodness Freaky Friday was released between these two films to give her public image some additional dimension.)

We are so nervous about these issues today that not only would you never come close to child nudity in a film today, but you'd barely even suggest anything related to child sexuality. We don't want to make films in which pedophiles appear even if it is absolutely 100% clear that that character is the scum of the earth. 

In reading up a little more, it seems that these choices were controversial even at the time, not just in hindsight. Regarding Pretty Baby, Wikipedia states:

Pretty Baby received an R rating in the United States, an X rating in the United Kingdom, and an R18+ rating in Australia, for nudity and sexual content. Continuing controversy over Shields' nude scenes resulted in the film being banned in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan until it was repealed in 1995. Gossip columnist Rona Barrett called the film "child pornography", and director Louis Malle allegedly was portrayed as a "combination of Lolita's Humbert Humbert and (by that point) controversial director Roman Polanski".^[1]

Okay that seems pretty clear. Although the delay in the release of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was due to a court case over distribution rights, the controversy over the nude scene is listed in Wikipedia's opening two paragraphs about it, as word got out that Foster had a conflict with producers about it and actually walked off the set. I guess her older sister eventually had no such qualms. (The nude scene was removed for the VHS release but restored for the DVD release.)

So in the subject of this post I made it sound like this sort of thing happened all the time, but maybe I've just stumbled across two of the more egregious examples. The fact that I cannot immediately recall any other examples, despite seeing my fair share of films from that era, seems to support the relative scarcity. 

The funny thing is, apparently even The Blue Lagoon, which I thought was comparatively chaste, has a number of scenes that might qualify as nude scenes, some involving body doubles for Shields, who was still underage at that time. Reading up on the parental guide on IMDB, I found that you can clearly see Christopher Atkins' penis at a couple points, and there's even a masturbation scene, which must have been really confusing to me at that time. Atkins would have been 18 or 19 at the time of filming, at least. The other scenes where they appear without clothes are obscured underwater, so maybe not as graphic -- which is also maybe why the more in-your-face scenes in Pretty Baby shocked me so much.

Nowadays we won't even do infant nudity on screen. Back then, on the other hand, I don't believe that a young naked Clark Kent in the original Superman (1978) even raised any eyebrows, because everybody knows that a naked child under the age of three is not sexual -- we would hope. (Apparently there is also a naked baby in the later portions of The Blue Lagoon.) 

Today? The naked underwater baby who is portrayed as reaching for a dollar bill on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind has filed a lawsuit alleging "child sexual exploitation." I suppose neither extreme is particularly useful for society.