# Things That Go Bump **URL:** **By** David Brudnoy **Published:** August 1, 1979 --- “If not nearly so poetic as falling in love, jumping in terror is probably just about as much fun, in the short run, at least, and certainly good box office.” Birds do it (Hitchcock’s do); bees do it (Swarm); even educated fleas do it (actually, ants, Them); let’s do it, let’s—scare the bejabbers out of the audience. If not nearly so poetic as falling in love, jumping in terror is probably just about as much fun, in the short run, at least, and certainly good box office. We’ve fallen on lean times in the horror flick category of late, reduced to the tongue-in-cheek (_Invasion of the Body Snatchers_), to the assaults by toothy beasties from the deep (_Jaws_; _Jaws II_; _The Deep_; _Orca, the Killer Whale_; _Tentacles_), to the campy (_Love At First Bite_, with another, richer Dracula about to pierce our jugulars in a month or so): we haven’t much of the good old shrieky stuff on screen and it’s much missed. The occult is always dicey, given that for every outstanding shlock masterpiece like _The Exorcist_ or _Carrie_ we are punished for our sins of enjoyment with a deluge of abominations like _The Omen_ and _Damien: Omen II and The Heretic_; _Exorcist II_ and _The Fury_ and endless spin-offs of spin-offs. And the mad psycho lurking in the blind lady’s closet (_Wait Until Dark_) becomes in our time some nameless loutish killer eliminating everybody in sight in the current _Winter Kills_ (which loosely, very loosely, plays on the JFK assassination and subjects us to one of the Bridges boys as something of a Teddy and John Huston as something of an Old Joe), or a Christopher Plummer peering through a keyhole in _The Silent Partner_ and telling an oafish Elliott Gould that one day he, Gould, will come home and find him, Plummer, on the other side of the door and then he, Gould, will wish that he, Gould, had never been born. Some inspired moments and then—and then, fizzle. They just aren’t making them like they used to. But you’ve heard that before. We are told by the true believers that science fiction (never, please, “sci fi”) is a far rarer commodity on screen than we goyim know, that most of the space suit stuff is mere technological masturbation and doesn’t partake in the least of the essential quality of the genuine article. I don’t know about that but I do know that there’s a paucity of terror in cinema space adventure. Nothing was frightening or meant to be frightening in _Star Wars_, nothing really eerie survived all the contrived religiosity and ponderous philosophizing of _Close Encounters_, and in the major space adventures this year (_Battlestar Galactica_, recycled from the TV pilot episode, shorn of its commercials, and snipped here and there to fit the average three-year-old’s attention span; and _Buck Rogers in the 25th Century_, intended originally for television but dumped into theaters for a quick zillion bucks before returning to the small screen) the fright level is approximately that experienced when reading the Yellow Pages: Cylons, indeed, and assorted tin woodmen of the would-be robot variety. It is very depressing. What makes a good horror film? We ought to recognize on screen some plausible villain whose evil could touch us tomorrow; or we ought to see something, or some things, so hideous that we ask our companion to sleep over (and not for kicks); or we ought to be yanked into the unknown where our worst suspicions about tomorrow are confirmed. This trio of possibilities just about exhausts the options. Which leaves us _Halloween_, _Dawn of the Dead_, and _Alien_. Each is a remarkable example of the horror genre, each is gross, each is gapingly flawed, and each is uneasily forgotten, if forgotten at all. Come let us be terrified together. _Halloween_ is a little 1978 item that developed a cult following late last year but awaited the early Spring to find distribution outside New York. It will be trotted out henceforth every Halloween for years, and if you missed it a few months ago you’ll be able to catch it shortly. Do. _Halloween_ is vivid proof that super horror flicks are still being made in the grand tradition, without occult junk plunked on for atmosphere, and with a horrible killer whom you will quite eagerly consign to the ranks of the utterly-without-socially-redeeming-value. The movie begins Halloween night, 1963. A six-year-old boy named Michael watches his teenage sister smooching with her boy friend. When nibble turns to the real thing upstairs, the child turns to the kitchen where he pulls out a butcher knife. After the boyfriend has satisfied his lusts—we must try to understand the attitude of the little puritan in our midst—and leaves, the tyke puts on his holiday mask and carves up his sister. “The film version of _Battlestar Galactica_ is recycled from the TV pilot episode, shorn of its commercials, and snipped here and there to fit the average three year old’s attention span.” Shift now to 1978, to an insane asylum where Michael has been living, in the opinion of his shrink (Donald Pleasance) hopelessly insane. Michael escapes, however, and returns to the nice middle-American town where he first played chop chop with Sis, and we’re off. We are introduced at this point to Michael’s sister’s latter-day incarnations, mindless little ladies in their mid-teens who do what nature intended and who also babysit. Babysitting is as American as apple pie and so, Michael must believe —we never see all of Michael and he says nothing, though he breathes heavily, very, very heavily—is sleeping around. One by one, on _Halloween_ night, Michael eliminates teenagers until only one (Jamie Lee Curtis, Tony Curtis’s proudest achievement) remains. There is a diverting trivia aspect to the choice of Jamie Lee Curtis as the heroine of this piece: she is Janet Leigh’s daughter, too, and _Psycho’s_ shower scene, which took care of Janet Leigh fairly early on, is certified Classic. I wouldn’t give out more details at this point because the film is absolutely lost without its surprises. Director and co-screenwriter John Carpenter has a gimlet eye for the macabre and a delicious sense of timing. This film is damn near choreographed in its dramatic turns: Michael pops up almost but not quite where you would expect him and he, for all that he is “crazy,” has a sense of humor, too. One example will have to do: when Michael moves in for the slaughter on one of the babysitting brigade, he must first snuff out her boyfriend, which he does in the kitchen, hanging him neatly on a hook, and then, heavily breathing, ascends the stairs in a sheet, carrying a beer. Our next to die thinks her honey has quite caught the spirit of the holiday and she welcomes him eagerly into the bedroom, cold beer in hand. It is a cold but not a brewed thing that next enters her. You see the point. No doubt she does, too, just before it enters her for the first of several plunges. Now, oddly enough, the anti-sex attitude of Michael infuses the whole picture. The lay-abouts are murdered and the virgin, Jamie Lee, survives, at least she survives to the inconclusive end of _Halloween_; we are not quite so certain that Michael is gone forever, and were I John Carpenter and in need of bones to throw the IRS, I’d be scratching out a sequel this very minute. This 1978 gem is a movie that is painful to _hear_, the dialogue having obviously been the least of Mr. Carpenter’s concerns, but it is transfixing. To see. To sit in the dark, heart thumping madly, eyes glued to the screen wondering from which corner Michael will next spring, imagining, and it’s no idle thought, how many such nuts there are in your town, ready without benefit of seeing _Halloween_ to do a Michael. When those beach pictures were the craze we learned a lot about sharks, especially that they are the perfect eating machines, compelled forever to move or die, drawn to blood from miles away, prone to bite anything, anything: we were instructed by publicity flacks and scientists alike that the purpose of a shark is to use its jaws. The purpose of _Halloween_ is exactly the same: to bite us, to gnaw away at us until we (figuratively) die of fright. The shark is no more a summa of the animal kingdom than is _Halloween_ of the fright genre. Take a friend. _Dawn of the Dead_ is horror not of the plausible sort, not the kind that could touch us tomorrow (unless our tomorrows are conditioned by strong belief in Haitian voodoo). This is George A. Romero’s colorful sequel to his 1968 black and white _Night of the Living Dead_. In the first installment the zombies terrorize a few people in an isolated village; in the coming third installment, at least tentatively titled _Day of the Dead_, they inherit the earth. Here, in their _Dawn_, they’re winning but still resisted by what remains of the living living. We are to know of course that when there’s no more room in Hell the dead will walk the earth. That is told to us fairly early in the film and golly whiz it sure seems like it. Just why the living dead are blueish we aren’t told, but they are recognizable not only by their facial color but also by their lumbering walk, and by their appetite: they have a really annoying preference for leg or arm or shoulder or neck or head of the living living, preferable bitten off en passant. The living living can get rid of a living dead only by plugging them in the head; any bullet will do. Dawn wastes no time with exposition. We start in the middle of the stream, as it were, at a Pittsburgh TV station where the rational ones are trying to do a symposium of sorts about zombie disposal. Quickly we are yanked off to a lower-income housing project where throngs of the living dead gobble cops and other assorted passersby, and then, with three men and a woman (David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, and Gaylen Ross: Romero has neither budget nor need for stars) who flee in a helicopter and land at a shopping center. To which, alas, a veritable army of the living dead have come, because it is a place that had great meaning in their lives. That is the film’s one joke, intoned by one of the living living, and it is the encompassing conceit of the whole film. You see, these zombies are our very own friends and relatives, unsnug as bugs in their earthy rugs, come to eat us, and where better to lurch around than at America’s greatest contribution to the art of finding happiness through materialism, the gargantuan shopping center. From then on we groan through acts II and III of this neo-Wagnerian opera of impending doom. Act I is the feast of the zombies, and Act II is the revenge of the living, Act III the intrusion of the bikers and the stand-off to propel us on to the third, as yet unmade, movie. In Act II the four living living barricade themselves inside the shopping center, rummage through the unlimited store of goodies and play house, eliminating a few hundred (thousand?) living dead in a carnage of catsup-blood. The viewer must prepare himself for some pain as he listens to the living living speak, a perhaps minimal price to pay for the two hours of unending carnage that we have come to experience. In Act III some inventive Hell’s Angelic slobs come roaring up on their bikes, make war on the zombies, and then precipitate a territorial imperative sort of battle from our four good guys. This quickly un-does the neatly barricaded partitioning of the shopping empire and we lose two of our friends and fly off in the ‘copter with the two remaining. _Dawn of the Dead_ is preposterous horror. We know the dead don’t come back to sup upon us. But its loony idiocy is its charm, if charm can be used in this situation. _Dawn_ plays its one trump card again and again, grinding our noses in our own credit card ethic, and requiring that we put up with nauseating slaughter or get up and leave. I wanted to get up and leave from about the fifth minute of the film, and I couldn’t. Some dark, foul corner of my mind compelled me to stick with it to the last splattered brain oozed onto the shiny shopping center floor, till the last gobbled up viscera went down a zombie’s maw, till the bitter, godawful end. It is the horror of horrors that this crazy, monstrous thing demands such attention. Isn’t this what Sam Peckin-pah has always known (and once so cunningly turned into movies) about us? That we are a people who with one large chunk of ourselves literally thirst for blood? _Dawn of the Dead_ is sleaze and it is unimaginably successful at making sleaze work. At last, _Alien_, the current rage on the screen, and the best exemplar in years of the third type of successful horror film, that which impels us into the unknown, there to confirm our most abiding apprehensions about the shape of things to come. _Alien_ is the most expensive of the three films and the most “respectable,” by which I mean it is the one that requires that we take it seriously and subject it to the usual vocabulary of critical analysis. It is not shlock horror like _Halloween_, or trash horror like _Dawn of the Dead_. _Alien_ is a little science and a lot of fiction and it is at base nothing more than a very contemporary, very hip version of the old monster-behind-the-closet-door thriller of blessed memory. The seven-person crew of the commercial starship “Nostromo” (John Hurt, Tom Skeritt, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, Harry Dean Stanton, and Sigourney Weaver) are alerted to a signal from some object in space. They are required by a clause in their contract (did George Meany approve?) to respond to any distress sign, and so they land on something of a wasteland planet and find a deserted craft. One of the crewmen (Hurt) discovers what would appear to be a bed of artichokes. Not quite. One of them attaches itself to him, first as a gooey, creepy mass, then as a thing resembling a crab. His pals take-him back to the ship where, despite crewwoman Weaver’s warning that a proper quarantine must be imposed, he is brought on board. We learn soon enough that this thing has planted its spoor in the poor fellow’s breast, and in a scene that must rank with the dozen most terrifying on film, that which has been hatched leaves its temporary human home, squeals a horrible squeal, and darts across the floor. One little Indian—one dead crew-man, that is—and one thing somewhere on board ship. This is the same fundamental story as _It_, a 1950s horror flick, which was itself a version of Agatha Christie’s _And Then There Were None_. The monster, which has the disconcerting tendency to grow very fast and to change shape for no apparent reason other than sheer perversity, does in six of the crew members (actually it does in five, since one turns out to be a robot, but that’s a digression and you’ll find it a pleasing interlude). One of the crew members survives. The story is simple, even simplistic, and everything really is weighted on the side of the thing, who, one of the characters tells us, is a perfect thing indeed, “unclouded by conscience or delusions of morality.” You get a hint, in that, of why such movies do best by severely limiting the chatter and obsessively dwelling on the terror. Whatever the thing’s conscience, clouded or unclouded, it, like the living dead in Romero’s film, has a taste for people. The excitement comes from one implicit and two explicit sources. We wonder a) who will be next, and b) how will the next be zapped. And, under the surface, we ponder-der the implications of all that fooling around out in space, all that messing around in the sky, all that folderol (as in ‘if we can put a man on the moon why can’t we develop an engine that doesn’t guzzle gas?’) of the civilian still unsure about, even hostile to, the NASAish adventures. I write this just shortly before Skylab is expected to fall to earth, and though you’ll read it after it has fallen, you will perhaps recall that otherwise serious people back in June were getting up psychic parties to will Skylab not to fall. Now do you understand why something like _Alien_ so closely touches our soft spots? What the hell are we doing up there? What on earth—actually, what off earth—are we going to bring back down here to contaminate us? If we can’t rescue the _Mayaguez_ how’ll we do against them? These are not the questions only of primitives in the red clay country; they are apparently sober, certainly earnest, questions of our generation, and a neo-gothic horror tale like _Alien_ plays so ideally into our paranoias; hell, it plays into our legitimate fears as well. Technically _Alien_ holds up beautifully. The “_Nostromo_” is a gadgeteer’s dream ship, all blinking lights, omniscient computer (“Mother”), zippy corridors, sleep pods for long space travel snoozes, icky processed food for nourishment, plush seats and hundreds of sleek buttons and knobs and whooshy things. It is, as a cinema space ship, ever so much more believable than the flying city of _Battlestar Galactica_, and if not as awe-inspiring as the flying world revealed at the end of _Close Encounters_, at least we spend two hours on board it, whereas in the original version of _Close Encounters_ (a revised version is coming soon) we barely got in the front door. We are in the presence of a handful of fine actors and a couple of yeomen, we don’t quite care about any of them since they are so sketchily drawn as individuals but we certainly groan when one of them expires of terminal Thing, and if we are overdrowned in Dolby and stretched to the limit with the sameness of the expectation between slaughters we are unquestionably rewarded for our patience by a half dozen of the most hideous deaths any voyeur could want. _Alien_ is unforgiveably sloppy in many ways. It plays by no rules; it makes its characters do absurd things like take solo expeditions through dangerous territory on board the ship when it is manifest that the buddy system is essential to survival; it ladles out a glorious world of ultra-sophisticated machinery but persons the “_Nostromo_” with a crew too dumb to make the best of the circuitry; it even requires of the gorgeous Miss Weaver that she strip down to her panties for no immediately intelligible reason; in fact _Alien_ doesn’t show much concern for anything but shock. But of that there is an abundance to last for days. _Alien_ is future shock, and when you sit down and think about this item for a few minutes you’ll understand why the Luddites are returned to earth as the anti-nukies and why Ralph Nader and his clones are riding the range again. The nuclear age is the space age and man it is spooky. LR’s film critic also reviews for WNAC-TV (CBS) and _Boston Magazine_, and hosts “The _David Brudnoy Show_” on WHDH-AM. © Copyright David Brudnoy 1979.