Lagniappe Podcast: Destroy All Monsters (1968)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the kaiju battle royal Destroy All Monsters (1968), featuring Godzilla and all his best frenemies.

00:00 Welcome

01:09 The Craft (1996)
04:20 The Shining (1980)
07:26 Fight Club (1999)
14:47 Malignant (2021)
18:17 Civil War (2024)
19:36 It’s What’s Inside (2024)
28:52 Megalopolis (2024)
40:41 Look What Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976)
49:00 Christine (1983)
52:07 They (2002)
56:45 The Grudge (2019)
1:00:25 Mr. Crocket (2024)
1:05:17 Sex Demon (1975)
1:12:47 Flesh and Fantasy (1943)

1:19:13 Destroy All Monsters (1968)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Get Excited! Swampflix is Tabling at This Year’s ACAB Zine Fest

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Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this Sunday (October 20) at the third annual ACAB Zine Fest along with a bunch of other super cool Arts, Crafts, And Books exhibitors, hosted by Burn Barrel Press. We will be selling the print versions of six Swampflix zines, including a new collection of low-budget horror & sci-fi reviews to commemorate the Halloween season.

ACAB Zine Fest will take place Sunday, October 20, from 11am-7pm at The Fred Hampton Free Store (5523 St Claude Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117) in the 9th Ward.

We hope to see y’all there!

-The Swampflix Crew

Flesh and Fantasy (1943)

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Most scholars cite the 1945 British “portmanteau” film Dead of Night as popularizing the horror anthology genre.  No one would claim it was the first horror anthology film, since the storytelling format is almost as old as the cinematic medium itself, but it is credited for establishing the rules & tones of the genre that would eventually be codified in anthologies from Amicus, EC Comics adaptations, and the like.  That horror-history milestone puts the 1943 anthology film Flesh and Fantasy in a unique position.  Since the Universal Horror production precedes Dead of Night by a couple years, it avoids a lot of the typical trappings of a by-the-numbers portmanteau, delivering something so far outside the expectations of the horror anthology format that it almost doesn’t qualify as horror at all.  It’s a lot more handsomely staged and a lot less macabre than what most anthologies would become in its wake, often transforming its characters through supernatural phenomena instead of punishing them for their moral transgressions.  More genre-faithful titles like Asylum, Creepshow, and Tales from the Crypt introduce selfish, amoral assholes who get their cosmic comeuppance at the hands of otherworldly ghouls, while Flesh and Fantasy plays its horror with a softer touch.  We have immense sympathy for each of its hopeless protagonists, rooting for them to make it out of their darkly fantastic crises alive & improved.  The movie is not vicious enough to be chilling, but it is beautifully eerie throughout, and its three tales of “dreams and fortune tellers” each land with genuine dramatic impact (which is then somewhat undercut by a racist punchline in the final seconds because, again, it was the 1940s).

The first tale (read from a spooky short story collection over a nightcap between businessmen in the hotel-lobby wraparound) immediately sidesteps genre expectations in its chosen setting.  While there are countless horror stories set on the thin-veil-between-worlds holidays of Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, Flesh and Fantasy finds its own thin-veil fantasy realm in the final few hours of Mardi Gras night, just before the Christian calendar transitions from hedonism to Lent.  The story starts with the discovery of a dead body pulled from the banks of the Mississippi River, a victim of suicide by drowning.  Drunken, costumed revelers briefly sober up while gathering around the unidentified corpse, but then quickly return to partying the last few hours of Carnival away before midnight ends the fun.  Only one woman stays behind, sympathizing with the suicide victim a little too intimately and considering joining him in death.  She sees herself as too ugly to be loved or to even party with the rest of her community, as represented by harsh low-angle lighting that accentuates strange, scowling curves on actor Betty Field’s otherwise pretty face.  Just before she drowns herself, a mysterious mask shop owner offers her an It’s a Wonderful Life-style perspective shift on her miserable life, allowing her to be beautiful for the last few hours of Mardi Gras thanks to a yassified plaster mask.  She, of course, subsequently learns a Twilight Zone-style lesson about how beauty comes from within, but the enchantment of the mask and the magical costume shop that provides it still hangs over her all-in-one-night journey like a heavy, eerie fog.  The only death in the segment happens before the story even starts, and all of its supernatural imagery is derived from the Mardi Gras floats & costumes parading in the background.

Legendary noir actor Edward G. Robinson has a much rougher time in his segment, in which he plays a wealthy lawyer who’s told by a palm reader that he’s going to become a murderer in the near future, to his shock.  This, of course becomes a story about self-fulfilling prophecies, as Robinson’s obsession over his fate to become a murderer against his will is the exact catalyst that drives him to becoming a murderer.  It’s like a noir variation on The Hands of Orlac in that way, with Robinson having heated debates with his own reflection & shadow about who in his life would be most ethical to kill, just to get the weight of the prophecy off his shoulders.  The argument is rendered in creepy, hushed whispers, which are echoed in the clouds of urban steam that pour in from every corner of the frame.  Likewise, the third & final segment of the film involves a self-fulfilling prophecy about a tightrope walker (Charles Boyer, of Gaslight fame) who envisions his own death in a nightmare featuring a cameo from (Robinson’s Double Indemnity co-star) Barbara Stanwyck.  Only, he doesn’t actually meet Stanwyck’s noir-archetype femme fatale until after he sees her in his dream, and he ignores the déjà vu feeling in pursuit of romance, ensuring that the dream will eventually come true.  It’s the most surreal segment of the trio, featuring psychedelic double-exposure compositions in its multiple dream sequences that provide the only true effects shots in the film, give or take the rear projection of Tarnished Angels-style Mardi Gras parade float footage in the opening vignette or Robinson’s onscreen doubling in the second.  It’s also the gentlest in its horror elements, though, offering a much kinder fate to Boyer’s helplessly smitten tightrope walker than what Robinson suffers after his own doom & gloom vision of the future.

In one of the stranger deviations from typical horror anthology formatting, there’s no wraparound buffer between the second and third segments, which bleed right into each other.  Edward G. Robinson reaches the end of his rope outside the very circus where Charles Boyer is walking his rope, so that the two stories are daisy-chained together.  That narrative conjunction feels excitingly ahead of its time, but it also leaves the opening Mardi Gras segment feeling isolated & insular in comparison.  The thematic & narrative connections between the tightrope & palm reading segments are crystal clear, which leaves a haze over how they relate to the opener.  What’s really important, though, is that all three segments are solidly satisfying and entertaining on their own terms, so that even if the audience might walk away with a personal favorite, it’s unlikely that one would stand out as the stinker of the bunch.  That might be the biggest deviation from horror anthology tradition, since even the best examples of the genre usually include a throwaway story that provides convenient bathroom-break time between the bangers.  The only throwaway segments of Flesh and Fantasy are its wraparound story which, again, concludes on a casually racist quip about superstitious “gypsies”.  If a horror anthology is going to whiff on any of its individual segments, the wraparound is the ideal place to do so, since it doesn’t tend to linger in the memory as much as the stories it scaffolds.  As a result, Flesh and Fantasy does register as one of the all-time greats of its genre, often by virtue of not falling victim to that genre’s worst, yet-to-be-established tropes.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Justice Society – World War II (2021)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Here we go, boys and ghouls, the “Tomorrowverse” is officially on, as we now have our second film in this subfranchise. That title is a little on the silly side, but it is a fair sight better than “DCAMU,” and I’m hoping the number of times I have to type that particular acronym will now be fewer and further between. Justice Society: World War II is a narrative about the current-day Flash, Barry Allen (Matt Bomer), apparently traveling into the past as a result of moving so fast that he breaks the Speed Force barrier. Finding himself in the middle of World War II, the fastest man alive finds himself face-to-face with the Flash of the past, Jay Garrick (Armen Taylor), as well as a team of commandos who are operating on behalf of the Allies. There’s Hourman (Mathew Mercer), who can take a serum of his own invention that provides him with super strength and durability for an hour, but which he cannot take more than once per twenty-four hour cycle; Hawkman (Omid Abtahi), an infinitely reincarnated ancient Egyptian who possesses wings; Black Canary (Elysia Rotaru), a street-level vigilante and occasional scofflaw who harnesses sound as a weapon via her sonic scream; and the group’s leader, the Amazonian Wonder Woman (Stana Katic), as well as her longtime boyfriend and U.S. Army liaison Steve Trevor (Chris Diamantopoulos). Together, they are on a special mission to stop Hitler’s ongoing search for supernatural artifacts that he hopes will give him an edge in the war. 

I’m still not won over by this art style, but it does fit a bit better here, with the thick line animation being more akin to the cartoonery of decades past. It still feels a bit Venture Bros. for something that’s supposed to be taken a bit more seriously, but within the context of this being a story set in a different time it manages to work, more or less. If this were the aesthetic solely of this time period (which, spoiler alert, is actually a different timeline, meaning that they’re going multiversal in only the second film of this new subfranchise—yikes), I’d be more accepting, but I guess for as many of these as I’m going to have to watch (four to eight, depending on how you count things), I’m just going to have to stomach it. For what it’s worth, before starting this project, I had already watched the upcoming-within-this-project Legion of Superheroes of my own volition—I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love Supergirl—and found it less distracting there, although it’s entirely possible that I assumed it was a one-off and not the defining visual style of a film series. 

There’s not much to say about this one. It falls right in the middle ranking of these movies: solid, but unremarkable. I guess it’s fun that Matt Bomer and Stana Katic are together again after they previously played Superman and Lois Lane, respectively, all the way back in Superman: Unbound, if you’re into that kind of thing. As far as character work, the Flash/Iris relationship is really thin, but the stuff between Trevor and Wonder Woman, who has promised to marry him “one day” but who rejects each individual proposal, is probably the most interesting thing about this flick. Their ongoing incomplete engagement serves as a kind of good luck charm to get them through the war, and we start to believe in its efficacy just as much as they do, until that luck finally runs out. It’s the emotional crux on which this narrative hangs, and it reads and even elicits a twinge in the heartstrings, even if it never manages to pluck them. It’s also a welcome reprieve to see what may well be the only team-up movie in forty-odd movies that doesn’t feature Batman, especially given that the next few are set to be very Bat-heavy. The perfect place for this movie is on a Saturday afternoon on Cartoon Network ten years ago. Where it belongs now is where it is: near the end of an assembly line that’s starting to wind down (like Cartoon Network now). Not bad, but not special.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #223: Communion (1989) & Alien Abductions

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Welcome to Episode #223 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, and Brandon discuss a grab bag of movies about uncanny alien encounters, starting with the Christopher Walken alien abduction horror Communion (1989).

00:00 Welcome

01:43 Pulse (2001)
07:56 Alan Resnick
18:41 The Exorcist Steps
24:41 Carrie (1976)

29:36 Communion (1989)
51:19 Fire in the Sky (1993)
1:05:27 Xtro (1982)
1:21:47 The Arrival (1980)
1:38:02 Love & Saucers (2017)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

It’s What’s Inside (2024)

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This is a movie that it’s really best to go into as blind as possible. I was supposed to see this one back in March at SXSW, and it (along with I Saw the TV Glow) was one of the ones I was most excited about, even though I ended up getting bumped from both of them by passholders (such is the nature of being a townie). I avoided reading anything more about it until it premiered on Netflix this week, and it was all that I could have dreamed of and more. I’ll put up a spoiler warning before I get into anything that gives too much away, but I’d recommend you skip this review if you haven’t seen it yet, and avoid any other reviews that might reveal too much about the film’s plot. 

Shelby (Brittany O’Grady from White Lotus) and her boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini) have been together for nine years, and it’s less than blissful. Shortly before they travel to attend a wedding of one of their old college friends, Shelby attempts to seduce Cyrus while wearing a blonde wig, a fantasy of his that she was less than enthused about. When she enters the room, however, she catches him masturbating to a gangbang video, having (unbeknownst to her) just navigated two tabs over from the Instagram account of Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Cyrus’s longtime crush who was part of the same circle of close knit friends and who is now an influencer of some notoriety. The groom to be is Reuben (Devon Terrell), who is soon to marry a woman named Sophia, but, the night before the wedding, he’s hosting a final party at the home of his late mother, an artist who purchased a stately manse and turned it into a living exhibit, meaning that one might go down a corridor and end up in a room that looks like an inside out disco ball, with a light pulsating at the center. Also in attendance are stoner Brooke (Reina Hardesty), modern day flower child Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), and trust fund kid and Post Malone wannabe Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood, of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina). An eighth friend, Forbes (David W. Thompson), is mentioned, and the falling out that he had with Dennis is revealed in flashback. Forbes was invited but never responded, although he does surprise the others by showing up at the party, carrying a suitcase that holds something mysterious inside. 

There’s a similar “trapped a party that you can’t leave” vibe here that’s reminiscent of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, although the twists and turns that each film takes are starkly divergent. As a setting, Reuben’s mother’s house and all of its installations make for a film that, despite being set almost entirely in one house, manages to remain visually interesting throughout. Odd sculptures and light fixtures litter rooms that feel as if they were designed to make it feel like you’re inside of a beating heart. There’s even a literal glowing sign that says “TRAUMA,” even though this is not that kind of movie. The tension between Cyrus and Shelby is palpable and real, and his lack of interest in getting married or even engaged is something that other characters take note of and comment upon, and Cyrus’s defensiveness only draws attention to what a terrible boyfriend he is. Not only does he not respond when Shelby tries to give him one of his fantasies, but he’s also clearly lying about how often he’s jerking it on PornHub despite having promised to save his sexual energy for his partner. When she’s not around, he complains to his old buddies that she’s always trying to get him to go out and “have new experiences,” his voice dripping with disdain when he mentions that she tried to get him to go dancing. He’s not evil; he’s just selfish, withholding, and dishonest. Once they get to the estate, it becomes more and more clear that there’s a lot of that going around. Despite it being the night before his wedding, Reuben is clearly still in love with Maya, whom he dated years earlier, and there’s also romantic history between Dennis and Nikki, which further complicates things. And boy, are we going to get to explore every angle of these sexual and romantic dodecahedron. 

Ok, this is your last chance to get out before spoilers. You have been warned. 

As we find out in a story that is told to Shelby about a party in college that she didn’t attend, Forbes and Dennis got into a fight years earlier when Forbes brought his high school aged sister, Beatrice, to a party, where she got too drunk and the cops were called, resulting in Forbes being expelled. After that he moved out west, got involved with tech, and hasn’t really been in contact with the others since. In the present, Forbes opens his suitcase to reveal a device that he convinces the others to try by putting electrodes on their temples, promising a “twenty second experience.” What then happens is a full on Freaky Friday, in which all of the members of the group swap consciousnesses for a brief period of time. Although Shelby is understandably freaked out about the fact that Forbes shuffled everyone’s minds around without really explaining what he was about to do, Cyrus pressures her into playing a game that Forbes proposes. Similar to Mafia or Werewolf, the eight party-goers swap consciousnesses with one another, with Forbes acting as DM. If you guess who someone is, they have to admit the truth and wear a Polaroid of who’s “inside,” but if you guess incorrectly, you must reveal yourself and get no further guesses.

The first round ends up being a success for everyone but Cyrus. When a guess is made that Cyrus is in Dennis’s body, the true occupant, Forbes, pretends that this is correct, leaving Cyrus, who is in Reuben’s body, to be forced to play along that he’s actually Forbes in Reuben’s body (confused yet)? Although Cyrus-in-Reuben first tries to use this to his advantage when he realizes that Reuben’s old flame Maya is in Nikki’s body—Maya-in-Nikki is hot for Reuben while Cyrus-in-Reuben is hot for Nikki—he quickly weirds her out, then is forced to watch as Shelby-in-Brooke has a good time with Dennis-in-Cyrus. For Shelby, she’s having the subjective experience of being with her boyfriend(‘s body), but one who’s fun-loving and willing to dance with her, and when she starts to loosen up and joke about Cyrus’s porn habits, he’s forced to continue to pretend to be Forbes-in-Reuben. After everyone switches back, it’s now Cyrus’s turn to be the one who doesn’t want to play, while Shelby tells him that she’s actually having a good time. When he insists that they work out a sign between them that will let the other know who they really are, she reluctantly agrees, but once the second round begins, none of the other participants returns the sign, so Cyrus-in-Forbes wanders the party, sullen and miserable. Things really take a turn for the worse when two of the group sneak off and hook up, again per the same mutual inner-attracted-to-outer situation as Cyrus and Maya in the first round, and they end up falling to their deaths. Now, two people find themselves unable to return to their own bodies, leading to friction between them and the others who have bodies to return to, while Forbes realizes that he’s made a huge mistake and attempts to simply take the device and flee. From here it’s a twisting, turning game of manipulation as each person tries to figure out where they’ll end up once they all sit down from the game of mindswap musical chairs. 

The visual language of the film is a lot of fun. Early on, one of the partygoers mentions that she has been working on a new art form, wherein she draws images of people inside of images of other people, which are revealed by placing colored plastic over the drawings that filter out the top image and show what’s underneath. This neatly sets up later scenes in which we the audience, looking through different panes of glass in the mansion, see who’s inside of whom at certain points. The flashback to the night that Forbes and Dennis had their falling out is told through a series of monochromatic still images that look like Instagram-ready party pics, with a mini-Rashomon playing out as Brooke and Maya recall certain details slightly differently as the images change in real time to reflect the corrections from each storyteller. It’s also an interesting choice that we spend most of the film with Cyrus, regardless of which body he’s in, as he moves through the party, given that he is, for all intents and purposes, one of the antagonists of the film, at least when it comes to the way that he treats Shelby. His narcissism drives the narrative, and it’s satisfying to see him get his comeuppance, even if his punishment far outweighs his actual sins. I don’t want to give any more away; just go watch!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Carrie (1976)

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Running this movie blog for the past decade has rotted my brain to the point where I can’t even vacation without planning my day around cinematic artifacts.  Thankfully, I recently found plenty cinema history to visit in Washington D.C.: a superb selection of used film-criticism texts for sale at Second Story Books, a few gorgeous art objects on display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History (including a foam face-hugger egg from Aliens) and, of course, the infamous Exorcist Steps at Georgetown.  That part was easy.  What was a little more difficult to pin down was a local screening of a D.C.-specific film to commemorate the trip, like when I caught the Bay Area Blaxploitation relic Solomon King at The Roxie in San Francisco.  Visiting D.C. during an election year, I expected there to be some local rep series of 70s-political-paranoia classics screening somewhere, but what I mostly found was the usual suspects that clog up most corporate cinema calendars: Harry Potter, Hitchcock, the rest.  Weirdly, though, I did discover a D.C.-specific tidbit when The Angelika Pop-up at Union Market listed a couple screenings of the classic 1976 adaptation of the Stephen King novel Carrie.  Although King’s work is generally associated with Maine, the movie version of Carrie neither premiered there nor in more traditional first-run cities like Los Angeles or New York.  For its first couple weeks in theaters, Carrie played exclusively in the D.C. and Baltimore distribution markets before expanding nationwide, for no other reason that I could identify besides giving this humble movie blogger something regionally specific to do on a Monday afternoon while vacationing there a half-decade later, where I comprised exactly 50% of the attending audience.

Even without knowing its bizarre distribution history, Carrie has always been a kind of orphaned anomaly to me.  The problem is that it’s almost too perfect as a literary adaptation, vividly capturing everything I remember about King’s most powerful, most succinct work.  It’s so vivid, in fact, that I had remembered looking up the definition of the word “telekinesis” in my high school library while reading it for the first time, only to rediscover on this viewing that my supposed research was actually just a scene from the novel & film.  Given that narrative loyalty to its source text and given its looming stature in the larger canon of All-Timer Horror, it’s easy to forget that Carrie is also a great Brian De Palma film, maybe even one of the director’s personal best.  While not as wildly chaotic as a Sisters or a Body Double, Carrie does not find De Palma tempering his stylistic flourishes for wide-audience appeal.  The man never met a lens he didn’t want to split or a Hitchcock trope he didn’t want to reinterpret, and those personality ticks are present all over Carrie if you’re looking for them.  Every time he doubles the frame or imports notes from Psycho score the film’s placement in his personal canon becomes just as clear as its placement in the larger Horror canon.  Carrie is just so self-evidently great on its own terms that I never think of it as a De Palma film first and foremost.  Maybe it’s just not sleazy or ludicrous enough to register among his more idiosyncratic titles like Dressed to Kill or Femme Fatale.  Either way, I can’t name another time when a De Palma film has made me cry in public, whether those tears were earned by the director or by his lead actor, Sissy Spacek.

Spacek stars as the titular Carrie White, a cowering teenage recluse whose abusive homelife (at the hands of her religious zealot mother, played by Piper Laurie) makes her an easy target for high school bullies (including improbable castings of Nancy Allen, John Travolta, and P.J. Soles as cackling teenage demons).  What Carrie’s wicked parents & peers don’t know is that she has a powerful mind that can violently lash out if provoked, like a goth Matilda.  Because this is a high school movie, this all comes to a head at prom, when Carrie is taken on a pity date by one of her former bullies and then grotesquely pranked by the rest of the knuckleheads, who pour days-old pig’s blood on her homemade gown so that everyone can point and laugh at the freak.  In an act of moody teen-outsider wish-fulfillment, she snaps and effectively burns the entire town to the ground with her immense, supernatural intellect, taking revenge on world that was cruel to her for no other reason than the fact that she was born Different.  Carrie is bookended by bloodshed, but not in the way you’d expect a classic horror movie to be.  It ends with the pig-blood prank and begins with Carrie getting her first period in a high school locker room, having had no previous sex-ed training to prepare her for the shocking experience, much to her peers’ cruel delight.  That inciting menstruation is exactly what makes it one of the core texts of the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, with especially thunderous echoes in later horror titles like Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and Raw.  It’s a perfect, self-contained text in that way, when the other heights of De Palma’s filmography tend to be defined by ecstatic messiness and directorial indulgence.

This theatrical revisit of Carrie is the first viewing that both made me cry (when Carrie finally enjoys herself for ten minutes of her otherwise miserable life at prom) and made me jump out of my seat (when Carrie’s undead hand reaches out from the rubble of her home, post-revenge).  Those strong emotional reactions directly resulted from De Palma’s deliberately Hitchcockian use of tension.  His filmmaking hero famously demonstrated how to build cinematic suspense through the “Bomb Under the Table” analogy, explaining that the best way to keep the audience on edge is to show us the bomb minutes before it goes off rather than to surprise us with it at the moment of detonation.  Ever dutifully faithful to the Master of Suspense, De Palma literally translates the Bomb Under the Table tension of that analogy to the Bucket in the Rafters totem of King’s novel.  He allows us to be swept up in the momentary fantasy of Carrie White’s prom night romance, but not without repeatedly cutting to the bucket of pig’s blood that hovers over her, waiting to tip over at the most painful moment possible.  The way he draws out that tension can be knowingly absurd at times, especially when the camera trails up & down the string that controls it in long, unbroken tracking shots that tease its precarious position above our poor, murderous heroine’s head.  It’s incredibly effective, though, and its obvious adherence to Hitchcock tradition is just as much a De Palma calling card as the countless shots framed with a dual-focus split-diopter lens (as well as the leering girls’ locker room opening that crams in as many naked actresses as the script would possibly allow, the pervert).

I don’t know that I discovered anything new about Carrie by watching it in the unlikely city where it premiered in its initial theatrical run, but I did rediscover a lot of what made it feel so powerful when I first saw it in my own moody, poorly socialized high school years.  Back then, I would’ve watched the movie alone in my bedroom on a rented VHS tape.  Now, I watched it alone with an afternoon beer in a city where I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have anything especially urgent to do.  Its story of religious resentments and teenage revenge felt empowering when I was still a Catholic school grump, but this time I didn’t feel invigorated by it the same way I did revisiting The Craft at The Prytania last year.  I mostly just felt sad, unnerved, and coldly alienated from the rest of humanity by the time the end credits rolled – all reassuring signs that it’s an all-timer of a horror movie.

-Brandon Ledet

The Exorcist Steps at Georgetown

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When you search for cinematic tourist attractions in Washington D.C., all signs point you towards Georgetown University – the setting and filming location for William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of the William Peter Blatty novel The Exorcist.  Specifically, they route you to the bottom of “The Exorcist Steps”: the death site of the fictional composite character Father Karras, who launches himself down those horrifically steep steps as a heroic act of suicide at the film’s climax.  Given Friedkin’s determination to make the supernatural terror of Blatty’s novel feel as believably authentic as possible, it’s not surprising to learn that the steps are a real location.  Referred to as “The Hitchcock Steps” at the time of filming (either in reference to their 19th Century designer, according to Friedkin’s memoir or, more credibly, in reference to the famous 20th Century director, according to locals), they’re a vertigo-inducing connection point between two busy streets at the edge of Georgetown’s campus. The extreme concrete flight burned a hole in Blatty’s mind while he was a student there, as did a local news report about a legitimate, certified exorcism performed in the Washington, D.C. area.  The only facts Friedkin had to fudge were minor geographical quibbles that allowed Karras to reach the steps from a nearby window, something that bothered the detail-obsessed filmmaker who wanted to keep his visualization of the novel as accurate as possible.  It seems that time has since corrected that adaptational inaccuracy, since there are now several windows facing the concrete staircase that could easily accommodate Karras’s leap.  I know this, of course, because I recently visited The Exorcist Steps on a trip to Washington, D.C., despite not being an especially big fan of The Exorcist.

I just find Friedkin’s grounded, real-world approach to supernatural horror to be a little too dry to deliver the genre goods.  A lot of people highly regard The Exorcist as one of the all-time greats precisely because it’s “accurate” to the real-world events that inspired it, finding terror in the idea that what it depicts could really happen.  I appreciate the tortured domestic drama that results from that approach, especially as a story about two lost adults (Ellen Burstyn as a semi-fictionalized stand-in for Shirley MacLaine and Jason Miller as the doomed Father Karras) desperately looking for a lifeline in a world that no longer makes sense.  It’s only after they’ve thoroughly exhausted the scientific, atheistic explanations that could debunk the possibility of demonic possession that Friedkin fully gives in to the supernatural mania of the premise, allowing Linda Blair to literally spew pure evil into the world.  Personally, I much prefer the ecstatic mania of The Exorcist‘s two direct sequels, The Exorcist II: The Heretic and The Exorcist III: Legion.  That’s where the dark magic of the demonic-possession premise really comes to life, unconcerned with duty to real-world reporting or to Blatty’s writing (despite his continued creative participation in the series).  The kinds of audiences who value tasteful restraint over uninhibited entertainment are likely to dismiss the Exorcist sequels outright as silly dilutions of an important, respectable piece of art.  Those sequels are exactly what attracted me to visiting The Exorcist Steps in Georgetown, though, since they speak more loudly to my tastes as a horror fanatic who prefers his horror to be fantastic rather than realistic.

So, what most D.C. travel guides tend to gloss over is that The Exorcist Steps are not only significant to the events of the original Exorcist film.  They are a constant, chilling presence throughout the initial trilogy, even more iconic to the series than Linda Blair’s spinning head.  In The Exorcist, the steps are largely used as an ominous mood-setter, repeatedly presaging Karras’s fall in establishing shots that beckon the in-over-his-head, faith-questioning priest to meet an early end.  The Exorcist II also uses them as an establishing exterior to signal that the story has returned to Georgetown.  While most of The Heretic is spent detailing young Regan’s life in New York City therapists’ offices—attempting to heal from her demonic episode through radical dream-state hypnosis sessions—it can’t help but drag the audience back to Georgetown at regular intervals, afraid to stray too far away from the familiar details of the original.  Each return to Georgetown is established by a shot of the infamous concrete steps . . . except, not really.  The Exorcist II was shot on a studio lot in Los Angeles as a cost-saving measure, so all onscreen appearances of The Exorcist Steps are an artificial substitute for the real thing.  The genuine, real-life steps reappear in the series’ crown jewel The Exorcist III, though, and without the continued participation of Linda Blair as a now-adult Reagan, the series has no choice but to treat them with total reverence.  They’re lovingly framed with music-video smoke machines at exaggerated angles, including several action shots of the camera rolling down each step in a dizzying spectacle from Karras’s tumbling POV.  The inciting beheadings at the start of The Exorcist III occur on the 15th anniversary of Karras’s fall down those steps, which get their own reverent shout-out during Brad Dourif’s show-stopping speech as the Devil incarnate.  It isn’t until The Exorcist III that The Exorcist Steps truly got their full due as a horror nerd fetish object; it was a slow upward climb to get there.

The Exorcist Steps were officially designated as a Washington, D.C. landmark in 2015 with the installation of an informative plaque marking Karras’s death site.  Shamefully, there are no mentions of The Exorcist II or The Exorcist III on that plaque, despite their significant contributions to those steps’ legacy.  When I visited them on an clammy Monday morning, I was greeted by the exact two kinds of frequent visitors you’d expect to see: a fellow gothy tourist who, like me, was there to take pictures and an annoyed local jogger who was impatient for us to get out of the way of his workout routine zipping up & down the steps.  I will share my pictures of the steps and their accompanying plaque below as documentation of the state they’re in as of this posting, in hopes that more joggers will be annoyed by horror movie nerds who happen to read this and will be visiting D.C. in the near future.  More importantly, though, I’d like to highlight that The Exorcist Steps’ significance to The Exorcist are thunderously amplified by that film’s own sequels, which are just as much worth rewatching before your visit as the original.  There’s even an added bonus to rewatching The Exorcist II before visiting D.C. in that the film also features a lengthy visit to the Natural History Museum, which is one of the city’s other must-visit tourist destinations.  Of course, Linda Blair’s tour of the Natural History Museum appears to be the one in New York City, not the one in D.C., but the effect is largely the same, much like how that film’s version of The Exorcist Steps aren’t actually The Exorcist Steps.  Let’s take a lesson from Friedkin’s folly and not get too wrapped up in the pursuit of accuracy at the expense of pleasure.

-Brandon Ledet

Sex Demon (1975)

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These days, rip-offs & retreads of The Exorcist are all the same grim-grey trudges through tired Catholic iconography.  They’re so dutifully routine that I can close my eyes and picture the entirety of titles like The Exorcism, The Last Exorcism, The Pope’s Exorcist, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose without having seen so much as a trailer; the only novelty left in the genre is Russell Crowe occasionally doing an outrageous Italian accent.  That wasn’t always the case.  While William Friedkin’s original Exorcist was a relatively reserved, grounded horror film that tried to make a supernatural phenomenon feel like a genuine real-world threat, a lot of its immediate echoes were bonkers, wildly unpredictable novelties (not least of all its own sequel The Exorcist III).  We used to live in a world where an Exorcist riff could be a Blacksploitation sex romp like Abby, a Turkish copyright violator like Şeytan or, apparently, a hardcore gay porno like 1975’s Sex Demon.  To be clear, Sex Demon is not a porno parody of The Exorcist.  It’s a strangely serious, sinister knockoff of the original – a psychedelic story about a cursed medallion, nightmare-realm Satanic orgies, and a couple who’s normal, milquetoast life together is violently disrupted by demonic possession . . . and ejaculating erections.  It would take a lot of footage of Russell Crowe riding a Vespa to match that kind of novelty.

To celebrate their anniversary, a gay male couple have morning sex and then venture out of the apartment to buy each other gifts.  Some misguiding antiquing leads to the purchase of a cursed medallion (helpfully accompanied by a note that explains “This medallion is cursed”), which the older man buys for his younger lover as an affectionate gesture.  Since there’s less than an hour’s worth of celluloid to fill, the medallion makes quick work of transforming the younger boyfriend from gentle lover to demonic rapist, sending him on a manic quest to fist, piss on, and cum inside as many men as he can before either the spell wears off or his body expires.  The movie skips all of the science vs. religion diagnoses of its source text and gets right to the bed-rattling goods, but it somehow doesn’t lose an ounce of the feel-bad domestic horror in the process.  By mirroring specific objects & moments from the original Exorcist, it invites a parent-child reading on the main couple’s age gap relationship, which is a kind of 40-something/20-something affair.  Having given his younger boyfriend a cursed anniversary present, the older man is worried that he’s psychologically fucked the kid up for life, and a lot of the same helpless exasperation Reagan’s mother feels in the original carries over here.  It’s a feel-bad porno where even the sex scenes are set to a somber, menacing orchestral score, leaving you to wonder exactly what audience this was intended to please. 

Sex Demon‘s specific allusions to moments & totems from The Exorcist are relatively sparse beyond a brief recreation of the Catholic, climactic bedside ritual meant to cast the demon out of its host body.  It might not have clearly been presented as an Exorcist knockoff at all if it weren’t for the final scene’s violent tumble down a flight of apartment stairs or the marketing tagline declaring “Not even an exorcist could help!”  It’s only in retrospect that some moments stand out as allusions to The Exorcist, like Reagan’s masturbation with a crucifix being reworked as the possessed man stabbing a hookup in the anus with a screwdriver.  A lot of Sex Demon‘s horror is of its own making, including a ritualistic Satanic orgy that signals halfway through the runtime that the demonic possession has begun (a move that feels more inspired by Rosemary’s Baby than anything Friedkin directed).  The real creative centerpiece is a concluding montage that chaotically remixes all of the preceding film’s imagery into a violent, dizzying meltdown.  Sex scenes, antiques, dive bar strippers, candles, skulls, kitchen cabinets, and wobbly lamps rapidly flash over a menacing orchestral soundtrack, as if every frame snipped onto the editing room floor was randomly stitched together in lieu of filming something new for the climax.  That nauseating montage feels legitimately evil by the time it reaches its fever pitch, and for the first time you almost forget you’re watching something otherwise dutifully derivative.

Sex Demon was a lost film for nearly four decades, recently rediscovered and restored through the archival diligence of Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell.  This was a much more substantial preservation of a lost porno parody than the infamous Bat Pussy reels uncovered by Something Weird in the 1990s.  It’s a battered, seemingly incomplete print, but it gets across the film’s artistic significance as an independent queer cinema mutation of a now-canonized horror classic.  Bat Pussy is much too silly of a comparison point, since Sex Demon takes its dramatic, romantic tension seriously enough to match other vintage porno outliers like Both Ways, Equation to an Unknown, and Pandora’s Mirror.  If you’re looking for a goofy parody of The Exorcist, you’re looking for the 1990 Leslie Nielsen comedy Repossessed.  Sex Demon is much more concerned with echoing the evil, supernatural horrors of the original, which is a pretty lofty goal for low-budget pornography.

-Brandon Ledet

Burial Ground (1981)

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One of the great joys of Italo zombie schlock is the genre’s chaotic, anything-goes unpredictability.   In Zombi, a zombie has an underwater fist fight with a shark.  In Cemetery Man, a zombie’s severed head becomes a gravedigger’s loving bride.  In Demons, the zombies emerge through the silver screen to infect a horror-movie audience in their theater seats. In the most preposterous scenario of all, The Beyond imagines a New Orleans home with a basement (which, of course, opens a portal to Hell for the zombies to crawl through).  1981’s Burial Ground features none of that chaotic energy.  Narratively, it’s a by-the-numbers zombie invasion story that’s only extraordinary in its efficiency.  The film opens with an archeologist disturbing the ancient burial ground of the title and awakening the flesh-hungry zombies within.  This inciting incident is immediately followed by the arrival of several romantic couples at the estate who don’t seem terribly concerned about their missing archeologist friend.  They waste a little time exploring the musty mansion grounds (mostly looking for places to have sex, naturally), but it’s not long before the disturbed zombies arrive on the scene to eat them alive.  There isn’t much story to speak of from there – just an army of the undead slowly hunting down their soon-to-be-disemboweled victims one at a time.  It’s more commendable for its excess and its expediency than it is for its delivery of weirdo Italo-horror anomalies.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  There is one anomaly worth singling out in Burial Ground: a little boy named Michael.  Since most of the houseguests at the zombie-infested estate are adult couples, Michael stands out as the only child on the premises, which the movie frequently exploits by putting the vulnerable little chap in grave danger.  What really makes him stand out, though, is the casting of the 25-year-old actor Peter Bark in the role, playing a small child with an adult’s face.  The idea was to get around child labor laws that would have limited daily shooting schedules by casting an adult who could work more grueling production hours, but it’s a decision that adds an intensely absurd layer of menace on top of everything Michael does & says.  When he complains that the estate “smells of death” or suggests that his mother light an encroaching zombie on fire, his adult facial features undercut his childlike vocal dub with pure, ancient sadism.  Burial Ground intentionally leans into that discomfort too, spending a lot of time detailing Michael’s childlike curiosity about the adults’ sexual habits – at first as a Peeping Tom, then as an incestuous suitor for his freaked-out mother.  He is undoubtedly the star of the show, and once he inevitably joins the ranks of the zombie hoard you can’t help but leap out of your seat to cheer on his uncanny reign of terror like your favorite football team just scored a 100-yard touchdown.

I’m convinced that Burial Ground would still be recommendable as a late-night zombie horror even without the Michael weirdness.  It’s an all-killer-no-filler affair, not wasting any time explaining why zombies are attacking these horny couples or even why those couples gathered in the first place.  Instead, it invests that energy into making its zombies as grotesque as possible on a tight budget.  Tons of care went into costuming the ambling ghouls with a wide range of gnarly latex masks so that they all have distinct personalities.  Their faces drip with hanging worms and maggots.  Their victims bleed lipstick red as zombie hands tear out their guts in retro Romero fashion.  Not as much care went into making those zombie hands look gross enough to match the latex masks, though, leaving most of them fleshy and intact so it appears as if they’ve never worked a day in their undead zombie lives.  And yet, they clearly have a strong work ethic.  They tirelessly invade the palatial vacation home in search of gross-out gore gags to entertain the audience watching at home, each set piece scored in droning, arrhythmic 80s synths.  Peter Bark’s jarring performance as little Michael is an anomalous element of the film that makes it a must-see entry in the Italo zombie canon, but it’s not entirely reliant on his eerie novelty for its entertainment value.  I don’t know that I could say the same about a scenario where Zombi didn’t depict a zombie fighting a shark.

-Brandon Ledet