Night of the Demons was released near the end of the 1980s, after the Hollywood horror boon had already worked itself out and then reworked itself to death. In the back-half of the decade, the slasher films became both more banal and more outré. Sometimes this simply meant films flailing around, trying whatever they could think of, to get attention. Sometimes it meant that the films were genuinely chasing unclarifiable interests and stray sensations toward unexpectedly exploratory truths. Sometimes the difference could be impossible to discern.

Case in point: 1988’s Night of the Demons, a ghoulishly opaque slasher that is, on one hand, exceedingly debased, necessarily brutal, and grossly misogynist, investing fully in the baser elements of the genre. On the other, Night of the Demons joins films like Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II and Slumber Party Massacre II in being not only a supernatural slasher but a surpassingly strange one, a film whose limitations double as an exploration of the genre’s own failure. Night of the Demons depicts a genre so routinized and ossified that it was both flatlining and collapsing in on itself. The film figures the Reagan decade as a literal haunted house locked in a perpetual cycle of recurrence, tormented by unseen, tenuously acknowledged forces from the past. This is a film whose failures are not a matter of the film exploding out, but imploding inward on itself.

While Paul Verhoeven would strike Hollywood pay-dirt with 1987’s famously acid-spewing actioneer Robocop, his first English language production is in every sense an even more bilious distillation of the director’s blackhearted cinematic glee. This 1985 medieval anti-adventure is a film in which two of the would-be swooners in a nominal love triangle have their romantic “meet-cute” while two painstakingly-detailed, putrescent rotting corpses hang like Christmas tree ornaments on either side of them. The two living participants in the impromptu foursome are presently debating the merits of the mystical “mandrake root” the woman has found beneath the corpses, supposedly gifted with the power to ensure love at first sight for the two who eat from the flesh of the root. The man, who doesn’t even believe her, responds that the root’s powers are the result of the corpses dripping semen on the ground as they hang, a vicious circle where unceasing, unnecessary murder literally seeps into a would-be love that can only be taunted. I can think of no purer distillation of Verhoeven’s worldview.

One can hardly be surprised, then, that 1985’s Flesh + Blood failed at the box office. This is a downright dastardly production, a necrotic fable with Nietzschean disdain for notions of Medieval honor and an ironist’s smug, knowing detachment from the conventions of chivalry and triumph underpinning the mid-‘80s sword-and-sorcery film revival. Those films, so thick on the ground during the Reagan years, launder their noxious visions of self-centered masculinity and brutal, Aryan individualism in chimerical but hidebound frameworks of honor and duty. Flesh + Blood cuts those ideas straight to the bone. It assumes, both as a matter of course and philosophical first principle, that people are fickle, that love is transactional, that the bonds of brotherhood are suffused with brutal layers of power and potential for perversion, and that the only way to survive the world of the Middle Ages – and perhaps every moment that’s come after – is with a cruel conniver’s wit. In its cheekily mocking mood, this is a wickedly self-debasing anticipation of Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride from two years later. Verhoeven’s film looks on the backward-looking romanticism of the 1980s with impish, curdled disdain.

Videodrome wasn’t David Cronenberg’s first nocturnal cinematic emission, but even by the standards of the chilliest of Toronto-born filmmakers, this one orbits at a subzero frequency. The film is a dismal emissary from the nastier crevices of everyday life, presenting a psychosexual marsh as a cerebral mire. Cronenberg’s style here is an ice bath, one that chills a  heated and tempestuous world of boiling, subcutaneous human desires and fleshy sensations into a frigid, monstrous exploration of modern uncertainty. If its story ultimately exposes the liminal space between humanity and technology, the film’s texture itself seems to literally turn flesh into a strangely vibrating machine, mutating neurotic, restless passions into fuzzed-out, spacey confusion. A dark dispatch from an otherworld lodged in between the channels, Videodrome feels like it is not so much presented to you as stumbled upon accidentally, a film whose truths are felt like slow chill of your own body while watching, whose reality is barely exposed between lines of static.

Barely. Much of Videodrome is about how little the film can really tell us, how subordinate to wider flows and forces it is, and we all may be. If David Cronenberg’s ostensibly more commercial film from the same year, the spectral and hallucinatory The Dead Zone, depicts a man whose sudden trauma morphs into a genuinely revelatory second sight, the capacity to see the future in however unstable a form, Videodrome is about a man whose perceptual awareness is cunning and calculated but finally insufficient to the vicious, slippery contours modernity he is a child of. Unlike Christopher Walken’s newly-awake Johnny Smith, the protagonist of The Dead Zone and an Emersonian romantic with a capacity to peer beyond the dim propsects of the present, James Woods’s Max Renn is a shadow able to hide in modernity’s cracks. Renn is deeply comfortable skulking through the dingy halls of a ghostly world with sinister intent. In an increasingly disembodied space, only a wraith is at home. But the film reminds us that the contours of a rapidly expanding world, separating and connecting people whose bodies seem increasingly tenuous, is always one step ahead of him.

A bonus review of his final directorial effort in honor of the master’s life. RIP.

I for one cannot say what precisely motivated Roger Corman to take up the holy calling of the director’s chair after a 15-year sabbatical, following the phenomenally lurid Death Race 2000, nor to do it in the name of an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s 1973 novel Frankenstein Unbound. But having seen it, I’m fairly comfortable being happy that he did. It’s as though Corman himself saw into a crystal ball that Universal Horror adaptations were about to become a momentary trend in Hollywood again and, unable to pass up an opportunity to steal the zeitgeist for his own purposes, he got in on the ground floor before the films even started being produced. That didn’t help him at the box-office, but thirty-five years later, we still have to reckon with this one-time cinematic mad scientist’s final rodeo.

And a mad scientist experiment it certainly is. While the obvious comparison would be Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from 1994, this is a much closer cousin of Francis Ford Coppola’s quasi-comeback Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992, to name a director whose career Corman helped vitalize decades beforehand. Like Coppola’s film, Corman’s has a certain diabolical lunacy in its mind, and you can detect the glimmer of the playfully egotistical in Corman’s eye in the thoroughly injudicious way he unleashes a ludicrously protoplasmic pink (that gestures to the Lovecraftian texture of Corman’s 1963 classic X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes)  or when he closes with a distinctly putrescent green. They look thoroughly absurd on-screen, but can you blame the loopily boastful director for wanting to go a bit overboard, just because he could?

There are obvious differences: Coppola needed Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and he directed it like his life depends on it. Frankenstein Unbound feel more like a victory lap, a charming lark that Corman worked on because he wanted to, or because he was bored and needed something to do, or just to see if he could. If the fire of hell isn’t in it, that doesn’t mean it is just coasting, even if it obviously isn’t the work of a director who felt like he had something to prove. Cheerily idle, you might call it. Perhaps the somewhat lazy, “first thought, best thought” mentality of it all is what allows it to be so offhandedly pleasurable, so uncontaminated by any need to please or to perform to any expectations. So, well, unbound.  

A bit delayed here, but while I happened to post a review of a Roger Corman-produced film two days before his death, I couldn’t not honor the man by reviewing at least one of his self-directed works, and one of the sharpest and most prescient early ’60s films to diagnose America’s ills to boot.

In the final analysis, Roger Corman was really only interested in making a buck cheaply and quickly. He was a particularly vulgar variation of the termite artist, to use Manny Farber’s term, scratching immediately and injudiciously at any and all crevices that had opened up in society’s façade. He could make a womb, and a few dollars, in any space where the world no longer seemed comfortable. Usually, that meant selling audiences on astrological terror or cosmic instability, on the pleasures of momentarily acknowledging the diabolical awfulness lurking beneath the most domestic of exteriors. With 1962’s The Intruder, Corman did something most Hollywood directors then balked at. He looked directly at the fault lines in modern America, casting America’s favorite future explorer of the final frontier as a demonic embodiment of what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in American politics and what others would go on to call “demonology”: that inimitable ability to assume and mark others, particularly racialized others, as outsiders in need of an exorcism.

On principle, Corman was willing to do almost anything to make money, but many of his films capture the same strange outsider energy of filmmakers like Herk Harvey, fugitives from cinematic corporations working right at the moment where the Classical Hollywood studio system was collapsing. In these directors, we arguably sense the democratic potential of the medium. It is perhaps deeply ironic, then, that Roger Corman’s desire to sell anything for a profit, even the evils of racism, brought us 1962’s The Intruder, a film that viciously skewers the democracy of the masses and that casts as its central character a truly vile, desperate, pathetic man whose crime is that he wants to make a buck by stoking the masses and manipulating the rifts in the world around him.