Halloween 2024: September 16th

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

When I was a young teen, I picked up my sister's paperback copy of "Danse Macabre," Stephen King's collection of essays about the horror genre. I tore through the whole book in a single night. The next day, I used it to make a pencil-and-paper list of movies and books I needed to watch or read. On that list was "Looking for Mr. Goodbar." King gave it high notices, especially an ending he called chilling. However, the movie isn't often considered part of the horror genre, more commonly listed as a drama. Moreover, it's not widely discussed today, as music licensing issues have kept it off disc and streaming. These are the primary reasons I've not watched the film before now. However, HD recordings from recent television broadcasts do circulate online and a few other Letterboxd users classify it as horror. I guess what I'm saying is: This is the year I decided to stop looking for Mr. Goodbar and actually find him.

Theresa Dunn is a shy and reserved young woman, studying to become a teacher for deaf students. She lives with her browbeating Catholic parents, always in the shadow of a livelier older sister and a traumatic surgery she had as a child. She loses her virginity to her married English professor, the subsequent stormy affair leaving her shaken. Afterwards, she moves into an apartment in a sleazier part of town. While carrying on the respectful image of a schoolteacher by day, she begins to live a second life at night. She trolls the singles clubs for action, hooking up with different men and doing a lot of drugs. Some of the men she brings back home are dangerous. Some are deadly. It's not long before her salacious nightlife intrudes on her waking world. 

Having now seen "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," I think a case can be made for it being a horror movie. (Not to mention a predecessor to the erotic thriller genre that would emerge in the next decade.) Without knowing the film and book are based on a real life murder, an unsettling ambiance still floats over the entire story. Practically every interaction Theresa has with a man is haunted by the threat of violence. Her father is a bully. Her professor is prone to emotional outburst, striking Theresa at one point and saying horrible things to her after sex. A coked-up hustler she hooks up with named Tony – Richard Gere in one of his earliest screen roles – swings a switchblade around her room in an unpredictable fashion, which he seems to think is a cute way to flirt. An interaction with a drug dealer in a bar bathroom is tense with uncertainty. When things do turn terrifying for Theresa, when Tony becomes a violent stalker or she brings home a lunatic in the final act, it's the climax of a mood of uneasy, growing tension maintained throughout the whole movie. From the first moment, the feeling that all of this is going to end badly is unavoidable and colors every scene that follows.  

Both the book and the movie were wildly controversial in the seventies, sordidly depicting the club culture that went mainstream that decade. It's easy to see this sex and drugs lifestyle as another rejoinder to the traditionalist, all-American, family values that died in the late sixties. Women's lib is referenced all throughout, usually derisively by the various men in Theresa's life. Some saw the movie as a criticism of second wave feminism, showing a woman discarding family life and pursuing sexual liberation until it kills her. However, the movie strikes me as much more complicated than that. Every man in Theresa's life, from her dad on down, takes out their personal problems on the women around them. Her professor vents the stresses of his crumbling marriage at Theresa, always ending up disgusted with her and himself after they have sex. Tony thinks he can live a sexually free lifestyle but expects Theresa to be under his control. The nicest guy she meets, a landlord played by Will Atherton, eventually reveals himself to be an emotionally manipulative jerk that takes pleasure in talking down to her. The final man she meets is a self-hating homosexual who attacks Theresa after he can't maintain an erection. In fact, sexual inadequacy seems to drive a lot of the violence – usually from men, against women – in the film. 

And it's not like the movie depicts traditional married life as any better. Theresa's mom is always silenced by her bellowing father. Her sister – an Oscar-nominated Tuesday Weld – is trapped in a cycle of failing marriages and terminated pregnancies. To call "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" a social horror movie is not wrong. The liberated lifestyle – which Theresa's sister introduces her to via her swinging friends – doesn't seem to make anybody very happy. Such unhappiness is merely a symptom of a wider disease effecting American life, centered in misogyny and repression. William A. Fraker's bleak but depth-filled cinematography frames religious symbols over Theresa literally every time she's in her parents' house. We are often privy to her sexual fantasies and imaginings. She envisions herself as a streetwalker at one point, seeing all expressions of sexuality as a freedom that has long been denied her. She's naïve and shows poor judgement, in the drugs she takes and the men she sleeps with, but the film is thoroughly on Theresa's side. The criticism it directs is at a sexist culture and the controlling, unreasonable men that occupy it. 

The same year Diane Keaton would play the prototypal manic pixie dream girl in "Annie Hall," she gave a much more introspective performance here. Her expressive face and meaningful body language brings Theresa's rich inner life to the surface. Keaton is absorbed totally in the role, seeming to be a completely different person by the story's end. That end is when the film's slowly simmering tension boils over into full-blown terror. A sweating, terrifying Tom Berrenger grows more and more unhinged before the apartment is lit by a strobe light. The audience's stomach sinks as the flashing images drag us totally into a bloody, screeching nightmare of a conclusion. It's an audio-visual descent into Hell, the film closing more and more into Theresa's disturbing fate until her face is the only thing on-screen.

The result is a chilling, complicated film. The cast is accomplished, full of up-and-coming actors before they were stars. The cinematography captures the grittiness of the setting and the intimacy of the story it's telling. The musical score is mournful, a dirge foreshadowing the eventual nightmarish fate it ends with. (That is when the soundtrack isn't filled with a litany of recognizable disco hits, resulting in the complicated mess of song rights that keeps the film trapped on VHS.) It might be unconventional viewing for this time of year, the movie beginning around one Christmas and ending shortly after another, yet it still manages to chill and horrify me with its uneasy mood, complex themes, and unsettling climax. [9/10]

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996)

As I said last time, Dimension Films would sequelize the hell out of any recognizable property they got their hands on. Especially if it could be exploited with cheap, quick follow-ups pitched directly at the most indiscriminate video store customers of 1990s America. They made eight "Hellraisers," five "Halloweens," five "Scary Movies," five "Prophecies,'" four "Crows," three "Mimics," and two "Highlanders." Of all the titles the Weinsteins happily drove into the ground, "Children of the Corn" has to be the most baffling. How do you get eight movies out of that premise, Bob? But they did. The churn-em-out years of this starch heavy series started with 1996's "Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering." The directorial debut of Greg Spence, the post-production supervisor for several previous Dimension horror sequels, the film was released on October 8th of '96. Just in time for the harvest, I guess.  

Grace Rhodes returns to her home town of Grand Island, Nebraska to take care of her agoraphobic mother and two younger siblings, James and Margaret. (Margaret secretly being Grace's child.) She resumes her work at the local clinic as a strange virus sweeps through the children of Grand Island. After high fevers and a loss of teeth, the kids awaken with altered personalities and ask to go by different names. This is the work of Josiah, a deathless child preacher who cursed the town in the fifties and has now risen again. He has entranced the local children, swaying them to murder adults. Grace must unravel Josiah's weakness and save her siblings/daughter before the Children of the Corn overtake the town entirely. 

"The Gathering" drops any connection to the previous installments. Surely to the dismay of hardcore corn heads everywhere, there's not much maize in this movie at all. "The Gathering" is instead a weirdo blend of a science fiction reinvention of Stephen King's premise and general folk horror vibes. Josiah – this sequel's version of Isaac/Micah/Eli – doesn't sway the children to his ideology via magic or cult indoctrination. Instead, the murderous impulses spread through a virus, which seems linked to the bloodlines of the community somehow. Somehow, it also is magic in some unexplained way. Meanwhile, Josiah is the result of local legends and hidden shame, an illegitimate child who was raised by travelling showman preachers but eventually given over to darker forces. Anxieties about Christian fundamentalists being connected with otherworldly evil is what most makes this a "Children of the Corn" movie. Tying this premise into a small town's shameful past – a mythic local history discussed by old women sitting in dark, drafty farmhouses – is the most interesting idea "The Gathering" has. It brings the folk horror elements of the series, of ancient rituals and folktales arising again in the modern age, to the forefront.   

You can tell Spence was going for something with "The Gathering." Richard Clabaugh, one of four cinematographers credited on the film, creates a brooding atmosphere. The interiors are full of shadows. The nights are dark. The cornfields are foggy. That gloomy, green-tinted visual approach that was so hot in horror during the post-Fincher nineties is definitely present. Close-ups, askew angles, and frantic editing tries to create a disorienting feeling during the attack scenes. Bizarre touches like a hospital gurney outfitted with an enormous blade, blood samples overflowing and spreading across the floor, and telepathically flung syringes show up. The result is almost creepy, if the film didn't constantly spoil its own ambiance with loud jump scares. Any time "The Gathering" started to work for me, settling into a weird and spooky folk horror vibe, the face of a shrieking demon child is flung right at the camera. It's hard to build a disquieting experience without the "quiet" part. 

One gets the impression that, while the filmmakers behind "Children of the Corn IV" had some interesting ideas and an understanding of the fundamentals of horror, they didn't have enough time to properly develop them. Long before becoming a two time Academy Award nominee, Naomi Watts had her first top-billed role here. Watts tries to add some pathos to Grace's arc, of reconnecting with her mentally ill mother and the child she left behind. (Which is clearly meant to parallel, however awkwardly, with Josiah's origins.) However, the script spreads itself too thin, focusing on numerous side characters. A lot of time is devoted to Donald, the father of one of brainwashed kids, running from the cops. This subplot is introduced without feeling natural. Karen Black as Grace's mom, bringing the campy vamping we expect of her, is important to the story until she abruptly is not. By the end, any chance to develop the heroes is lost as the plot pivots to quasi-mystical gobbledygook about magic blood and Josiah's weakness to liquid mercury. An 85 minute runtime simply isn't enough to support the plethora of subplots, most of which exist to introduce more bodies that can then be hacked up with scythes. 

Considering "Children of the Corn IV" was rolled out merely a year after the last one was released, it's easy to guess that every aspect of this production was expedited. Maybe complaining that a direct-to-video slasher sequel doesn't develop its characters much is missing the point. Still, the filmmakers clearly had ambitions higher than making a simple gore-fest. Any invoking of deeper ideas or attempts at making real scares ultimately falls short. Compared to the campy humor of part two and the elaborate special effects of part three, "The Gathering" is an unsatisfying slog. By the way, a deleted scene was going to reveal that Josiah was, in fact, He Who Walks Behind the Rows all along. This was probably a way to connect a largely unrelated plot to the other movies. I'm glad this information was removed. The eldritch, pagan entity worshipped in the last three movies actually being a child preacher from the fifties who can't age is a big letdown. I'd rather He stay as a big freaky worm monster. [5/10]

Mystery and Imagination: Sweeney Todd

As displayed with “Lights Out” and “Suspense,” horror/thriller anthologies have aired on American television almost as long as the medium has existed. It took the rest of the Anglosphere a while to catch up. As far as I can tell, the earliest British horror anthology program was “Tales of Mystery” from 1961, which adapted the stories of Algernon Blackwood. Like a lot of early U.K. TV, no episodes survive. Other early candidates – “Out of This World” from 1962 and “Out of the Unknown” from 1965 – have suffered a similar fate, only a handful of episodes being preserved. “Mystery and Imagination” began airing on ITV in 1966. Each installment was a feature length “television play” based on a classic work of eerie fiction. As you've probably guessed, most of this show is gone too. However, the 1968 and 1970 seasons survive. Which brings us to “Sweeney Todd,” the penultimate episode of the program. 

"Mystery and Imagination" follows the general outline of "The String of Pearls," the penny dreadful that introduced this grisly tale into British pop culture, while shaving away (sorry) the many subplots. For those who don't know the story: In a barbershop on Fleet Street, across from St. Dunstan's Church, resides Sweeney Todd. When a rich fellow carrying a string of fine pearls comes into the shop, Todd murders him by activating a trap door under the barber's chair, dropping the man head first into the cellar below. It's a regular habit of Todd's, who slits the throats of any survivors with his trusty straight razor. The bodies are then taken to Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, who bakes the flesh into her meat pies and makes unwittingly cannibals of all her customers. Todd attempts to sell the priceless pearls, while snooping cops and a rather androgynous young man (actually the murder victim's bride-to-be in disguise) come into his shop. It's not long before the horrifying truth is uncovered. 

In the original serial – officially uncredited, though usually attributed to Thomas Peckett Priest and James Malcolm Rymer – Sweeney Todd is never anything more than a dastardly villain. He physically abuses his young assistant, hates dogs, and kills only for greed. He is so obviously a dangerous lunatic that it's hard to believe his barbershop could've operated for any amount of time. Like most adaptations, "Mystery and Imagination" makes Todd a lot more sympathetic. In fact, the film is devoted largely to showing us how someone could be molded into such a ruthless killer. After sending his assistant away to a horrible asylum, a flashback reveals that Sweeney was raised in a similarly atrocious environment. Mrs. Lovett rejects his romantic advances, only being interested in the pearls' monetary value. After hiding in a den of thieves and counterfeiters, he is dismissed by other criminals too. He's been abused and isolated his whole life, resulting in an unhinged man more than willing to slit the throats of anyone around him. 

Truthfully, the episode paints Sweeney Todd as a pathetic figure, suffering from some rather Freudian psychosis. The flashback shows Todd as a boy begging for his mother. The way the warden gets right up in his face and teases him brings an unseemly suggestion of sexual abuse into the story. This has led Todd, as an adult, to an obsession with "purity" and youth. When he gives Tobias away, it's because the boy is maturing and starting to grow facial hair. He falls in love with the disguised Johanna because she has no hair on her chin. (Todd seems to implicitly recognize her as a woman, unconvincingly acting as a boy. Or the British censors somehow looked right past the pedophilic, homoerotic undertones.) Todd takes revenge on Mrs. Lovett not because she rejected him but because she's not as "pure" as his new love interest. It all seems to suggest that Sweeney Todd's homicidal tendencies are born out of childhood abuse locking him in a regressed state, where maturity is associated only with cruelty. 

It's an interesting take on the material. Freddie Jones plays Todd as a soft-spoken introvert that switches between pathetically mumbling under his breath and violent rages. Jones' performance is rather stagey, as is all the acting in the film. Look at Heather Canning's gasping death scene as Mrs. Lovett for another good example of that. This stilted, stage bound qualities somehow only adds to the eeriness of the production. The sets are quite artificial looking. When Todd is down in the cellar, his own thoughts echo throughout the scene. Primitive photography effects bring his visions of skulls in a mirror to life. It all adds up to create a dreamy, bleak quality that suits a story as internal and nihilistic as this. The production doesn't run from the stage play style either, as it bookends each section with on-screen text announcing the act number. I guess the British took the idea of a "television play" rather literally in the early seventies. The more vintage British TV I watch, the more its stilted, uncanny style appeals to me. 

"Mystery and Imagination" adds a twist ending to the "Todd" story which, as far as I can tell, isn't present in any other version. Normally, I'd dislike a rug-pull ending like this. Somehow it suits a take on the story that focuses so much on what happens in the killer's mind, that shows him as more broken than threatening. It's quite a nuanced and interesting version of the oft-told narrative. Among the other surviving installments of "Mystery and Imagination" are adaptations of "Dracula" and "Frankenstein," which I'm intrigued to check out now. Though this episode also makes me wonder why Hammer never took a shot at "Sweeney Todd." Such a bloody, bawdy tale would have fit right in at that studio. Easy to imagine Peter Cushing in the title role, ya know? I guess this psychological but still macabre 70 minute interpretation is the closest we'll ever get to that pipe dream. [7/10]

The Addams Family: Halloween with the Addams Family

I regard both shows about equally but one way "The Addams Family" is unquestionably superior to "The Munsters" is that the latter never did a Halloween special! The Addams, meanwhile, were celebrating October 31st in their seventh episode. "Halloween with the Addams Family" has the kooky, spooky clan gearing up for the big day. Granmama takes Wednesday and Pugsley trick-or-treating – dressed as square Americans in suits and glasses – while everyone else prepared for a grand party. On the same night, two bank robbers named Claude and Marty are on the run from the cops. The Addams mistake them for trick-or-treaters and invite them inside. While the robbers mistake the family for simply really being into the holiday, they soon realize that their hosts are genuinely ghoulish. 

When pitching the idea of the Addams family on Halloween, there were a few routes to go. Perhaps they could've turned their noses up at the holiday, as the one night every one else embraces the lifestyle they live every day. Or maybe they could've continually horrified the neighbors by taking the macabre nature of the celebration beyond traditional taste. Instead, the original sitcom chooses a third, more charming option: The Addams love Halloween and they do most all the normal things we associate with the day, simply a little stranger. They bob for a live crab, instead of apples. Morticia's punch is mixed like a mad scientist's potion and smokes like a witch's cauldron. The main idea, it seems, is that Halloween is to the Addams as Christmas is to the average American family. This is evident in a reading of a "Halloween poem," which sounds a lot like a spooky version of "The Night Before Christmas. Honestly, as a big advocate for Halloween carols, I love that. Everyone should read spooky, goofy poetry on October 31st!

The episode also finds a fun spin on the show's biggest reoccurring gag, of normies being scared by the Addams' style. Once Claude and Marty get the spooks, they want to leave. The presence of the cops in the neighborhood forces them to stay, repeatedly exposing them to the Addams' eccentric celebration. Don Rickles and Skip Homeier play Claude and Marty. While casting Rickles as a straight man is a little disappointing, the set-up still presents plenty of laughs. Such as Gomez' reaction to their bag being full of money, the two thugs trying to explain hide-and-seek to a very confused Gomez and Morticia, and Thing swapping Marty's gun for a banana. In fact, Thing is quite mischievous in this one, locking the door before the robbers try to leave and preventing from grabbing a bat. 

Honestly, "Halloween with the Addams Family" works simply because this cast is so good at playing these characters. Jackie Coogan's weirdo body language turns Fester posing for a jack-o'-lantern into a great gag. Or Gomez and Morticia having a conversation about Richard Styx, an old boyfriend of her's. The expected gag of one of the outsiders mistaking Lurch's face for a mask is elevated totally by Ted Cassidy's dead pan reaction. I know we all adore the interpretation of Wednesday as an extremely sardonic, mildly homicidal, grim super-goth. Yet Lisa Loring's performance, as an otherwise precious little girl with extremely morbid hobbies, might honestly be more subversive at this point. I love her little line here about wanting to play "autopsy" with a new knife her dad ordered. Don't you love to see kids interested in science? The running joke about Kitty Kat being timid is reused but this episode does find a fresh spin on Fester's lightbulb trick. [7/10]