Dean Brandum is interviewed by Martyn Pedler over at Time Out Melbourne on the city’s remarkable cinema history. Check out “Melbourne’s Cinema Graveyard” here!

Mr Pedler also interview Alex H-N on VHS aesthetics for The Big Issue magazine. Read a “Is VHS the New Vinyl”  here. Alex’s first book – Rape-Revenge Film: A Critical Study – is also now on sale. More information is available at rape-revenge.com

With an adaptation of Atlas Shrugged finally hitting the screens (and slinking out quickly, its boxoffice would indicate), I got to thinking about the other, infamous Ayn Rand cinema excursion, King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949). As detested as it is by some critics, I actually find it most loopily enjoyable.

Anyway, the hero of the story is Howard Roarke, a brilliant architect who refuses to compromise his designs to placate the dimwitted, the close-minded, anyone who wants a neo-Roman touch or anyone who wants to include amenities that may be beneficial to poor people. Yeah, he’s a helluva guy.

So in the movie he is played by Gary Cooper and in one pivotal scene he unveils his masterpiece -

Unique and with no concession to architectural traditions, this skyscraper’s beauty lay in its pure functionality. Patricia Neal swooned, but sadly the scared, lunk-headed public would not buy such a proposition. Poor Howie becomes a martyr to all those free-thinkers unwilling to bend to the collective.

Were such a situation ever to occur many of us would be outraged at such talent and ideology being so encumbered. But the very first time I saw The Fountainhead (maybe 25 years ago) something struck be about the design presented in the film. What cinema’s Howard Roarke had essentially designed were Melbourne’s Gas and Fuel Buildings.

Completed in 1967 and despised by the public from the day they opened, there was close to a mass celebration when they were finally torn down in 1997 to make way for the generally well-liked Federation Square complex.

And you can make of that what you will.

Warner Bros. 2000 re-release of The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973), dubbed The Version You’ve Never Seen (1), adds an extra ten minutes to the original running time of 122 minutes, reinserting previously excised footage. The most significant sequences reinserted include the bittersweet denouement in which Lieutenant Kinderman strikes up a friendship with Father Dyer (a relationship explored extensively by director William Peter Blatty in his 1990 sequel The Exorcist III), early medical examinations that show Regan growing increasingly distant and hostile, and the infamous “spider walk” scene that Friedkin had earlier insisted served only to detract from the shock revelation of Burke Denning’s death. (2) The re-release also introduces composite shots of the demon Pazuzu flashing briefly onscreen just prior to the spider walk sequence – once over Chris’s right shoulder as she pauses in the kitchen while the lights flicker on and off, and moments later inside Regan’s bedroom against the door, just before Chris opens it to find her daughter uncovered and the windows wide open. But reinserted footage and computer composites are not the only additions to The Version You’ve Never Seen. A complaint levelled against the narrative coherence of the 1973 film concerns the opening Iraqi sequence and its relevance to Regan’s possession in Georgetown, USA. It is really only the brief appearance of Pazuzu in Regan’s bedroom during the exorcism ritual that has provided the narrative joiner. The re-release attempts to close the gap between Iraq and Washington D.C. through sound. Augmentations to the soundtrack draws us back time and again to the archeological dig, the marketplace, the foundry, and the statue of Pazuzu. In this brief discussion of The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen, I want to explore the ways that sound is used in the film to reinforce clearer links between the events that unfold in Iraq during the film’s prologue, and the subsequent possession and exorcism that takes place in Georgetown.

Sound design in The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) can be roughly divided into two sections: primitive and modern. Throughout the lengthy opening sequence of the film, the soundscape in Iraq is what I describe as primitive. By this I mean that almost all diegetic sounds are derived from either natural sources, such as human or animal voices, or from low-tech sources, such as pickaxes and hammers. Modernity, it can be argued, is almost altogether absent from this part of the soundtrack. From the solitary call to prayer through to the disturbing crescendo that accompanies Father Merrin’s (Sydow) discovery of the unearthed statue of Pazuzu, the soundtrack is primitive. The pendulum clock and Merrin’s briefly heard jeep are the only two sonic exceptions belonging to the modern world, and one of these, the clock, is quickly – and ominously – silenced. At the other end is the modern. The moment we cross-fade to Georgetown, the sounds of modernity dominate: trains, planes, automobiles, radios, megaphones, telephones, a fish tank water filter, a steam iron, doorbells, light switches, police sirens, medical machinery and rational, scientific language. That is, until Regan’s (Blair) possession eventually overwhelms, engulfs, destabilises and silences the rational, mechanical, medical, jargonistic, automated sounds of modernity. The sounds of the modern world are rendered mute and impotent by the primitive.

The Iraqi sequence begins with the busy sounds of multiple pickaxes, shovels, barrows, footsteps on dirt and the din of voices at the archeological dig in Nineveh. Later we hear the cacophany of the marketplace, the rise and fall of voices in the crowd, and from a foundry, the synchopated high-pitched clanging of metal on metal as three labourers stand at an anvil, skillfully hammering away in a fast rhythmic sequence of carefully timed repetitive triplets. Later still we hear a horse and buggy clopping and rattling on stone paving, distant at first, then arriving with a sonic boom as Merrin narrowly avoids being struck by the galloping animal. Returning to the dig, Merrin confronts the Pazuzu idol and layer upon layer of sounds are combined, creating an alarming and overwhelming crescendo intended to denote the lurking presence of a powerful supernatural force. The source of these sounds are in keeping with the primitivity insomuch as their origins are likewise in the natural world, rather than the world of machinery. Jay Beck describes how musician Ron Nagle developed his sound effects for the sequence “by agitating several bees trapped in a jar, getting his dogs into a fight, and recording his girlfriend’s stomach while she drank water”.(3)

Ron Nagle's soundtrack adds layer upon layer

As the unearthly crescendo diminishes with the cross-fade from Iraq to Georgetown, the first noise heard is the whirring scream of airplane engines. The frame shows an extreme long shot of the McNeil house across the other side of the Potomac river. As the shot slowly closes in on the house, the jets fade and the rumble of cars crossing the Potomac bridge is clearly heard. The soundscape has substituted the primitive for the modern. Eventually this will reverse so that the only thing that can be heard on the soundtrack is Regan’s horrific moaning and howling filling the Georgetown house. Technology is powerless against this demonic auditory force. Distressed by the incessant wailing, Sharon seeks comfort from her radio which she uses to try to drown out the omnipresent voice, but it proves to be utterly ineffective.

The moment the medical establishment bows its head in defeat takes place not when they suggest Chris (Burstyn) take her daughter to a priest, but much earlier when Dr Klein is examining Regan’s initial cranial x-rays. The critical moment occurs as the doctor is analysing the film against an automated x-ray screen. The screens are attached to an automated mechanism that whirs loudly as it raises and lowers them. At one point, an x-ray screen moves down and out of the frame, leaving the cinema screen absolutely empty. In this moment, the audience has nothing to look at but whiteness. The blank screen seems representative of the failure of sight – the most privileged of senses – and conflates sightlessness with the inability of rationalism and medical science to provide any explanation for Regan’s condition. Indeed, as the next x-ray rises in close up on screen, Klein declares, “I don’t see a thing.” But the bare white screen also implies that cinema itself – that most modern of Western mechanistic marvels – has also been rendered powerless, sightless, broken, inept. Struck as blind in both eyes as the one-eyed man slaving over the anvil in Iraq.

Throughout The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen, Friedkin regularly returns us to Iraq and its primitive soundscape. When Father Merrin, having returned to America, is walking up a forest path and is presented with a note by a younger priest, as he reads the note summoning him to Georgetown, the triplets of syncopated foundry hammering can be faintly heard on the soundtrack. During the exorcism, when we are locked in the room with the priests and Regan, the soundtrack completely reverts to a primitivity that echoes the earlier Iraqi soundscape: the muslim call to prayer becomes the Catholic ritual of exorcism; the multiple voices emanating from Regan recall the cacophany of arabic voices in the marketplace (and perhaps the rebellious rioting students drowning out the megaphone during the filming of “Crash Course”, the movie Chris is shooting in Washington); the thumping of the bed evokes the various rhythmic sounds of tools digging, tapping and hammering at the Nineveh excavation site. And as Pazuzu appears at Regan’s bedside, elements from Nagle’s sound design – most prominently the agitated bees trapped in a jar – can one again be heard.

The droning of bees can once again be heard as Pazuzu appears in Regan's bedroom

The modern is altogether displaced or removed, just as Regan’s bedroom is stripped of all bourgeois accoutrements. It is as though Father Karras’ assertion that in order to perform an exorcism, one would need a time machine to return to the 16th century, has been literalised.  The modern can only return once the demon has been expelled and the exorcism concluded. Thus in the film’s denouement the sound of modernity finally reasserts itself as Chris and Regan are noisily driven away in a black Mercedes. Father Dyer then walks to the top of the stairs where Karras met his death, and we can hear the faint sound of traffic as cars busily cross the Potomac bridge in the middle distance. Moments later, Lieutenant Kinderman invites Father Dyer to the movies and modernity, it seems, reasserts it dominance, albeit uneasily and unconvincingly.

Works cited

1. The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen, Dir. William Friedkin 2001, DVD, Warner Home Video.

2. In the documentary, The Fear of God: 25 Years of The Exorcist, Friedkin explains that he cut the spider walk sequence from the film because he felt that the shock of Burke Denning’s death was overshadowed by the alarming spectacle of Regan scampering downstairs backwards, upside down, back arched, on her hands and feet.

3. Beck, Jay “William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and the Proprietary Nature of Sound” Sound on Screen 6.1 (2010): 4-10.

The following is a supplementary component of a larger research project I am currently working on about The Child Molester  (1964) and the Highway Safety Foundation. The majority of this article is a summary of the events surrounding a series of shots at the end of the film, and this reconstruction would not have been possible without the gracious assistance of Bret Wood and Boyd Addlesperger (the Sherman Room Librarian at the Mansfield/Richland County Public Library).  Bret Wood’s documentary Hell’s Highway – The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003) is essential viewing for anyone interested in ephemeral or industrial films, exploitation cinema or screen histories more generally. A trailer can be viewed here, and it is available to purchase through Amazon.

The Child Molester is in the public domain, and as such can be seen in its entirety online (please note that there is extremely graphic imagery in this film that may be disturbing and upsetting for some viewers): Click here to view film

A Brief Introduction

As their name suggests, the bulk of the Highway Safety Foundation films concerned road safety. Famous highway safety films such as Signal 30 (1959) and Wheels of Tragedy (1963) combine zeitgeist-drenched re-enactments of small town Americana with grizzly footage of actual car accidents and their mangled (often dead) victims. The juxtaposition of these pantomime-like re-enactments with often extreme, real-life gore is shocking, even to viewers today. While there is debate regarding the educational effectiveness of films such as these – did they really reduce car accidents, or were they simply an exploitation wolf in didactic sheep’s clothing– there is no escaping the powerful impact of the Highway Safety Foundation films. But as artist William E. Jones’ Mansfield 1962 (2006) and Tearoom (1962/2007) (the latter which screened in 2008 at the Whitney in New York) has shown, the Highway Safety Foundation’s non-driver education films offer a just as fascinating (and conceptually problematic) point of interest. Sifting through public domain footage online, Jones discovered a Highway Safety Foundation film from 1964 titled Camera Surveillance: ostensibly a training film showing the virtues of using hidden cameras for law enforcement professionals, it consisted of footage Mansfield police filmed through a two-way mirror with the assistance of the Highway Safety Foundation of anonymous homosexual encounters in a public bathroom in Mansfield’s Central Park in 1962. This footage led to the arrest of a large number of men (numbers vary from 38 to 69), and formed the basis of Jones’ Mansfield works which are remarkable historical documents that eloquently and powerfully capture a particular moment of the unfolding story of human sexuality. Jones’ work is visual poetry that captures the very real invasions of privacy and abuses of human dignity that result from bigotry and discrimination. But the events that lead to the filming of the material later used in Camera Surveillance and Jones’ work lie in another Highway Safety Foundation film, which is the topic of this post. Ex-Mansfield Chief of Police John R. Butler wrote in his book about 19-year-old Jerrel Ray Howell who was charged and imprisoned for the murder of Connie Burtoch and Jean Hurrell, aged 7 and 9.  In his interview with police the night of the murders, Howell informed them about the activities taking place in Central Park leading to the filming of the now notorious ‘tearoom’ footage.

While much of this film plays out at as a simple educational film for school-aged children about the threat of the eponymous child “molester”, the shock of seeing those murdered corpses of two young girls in the final moments is arguably one of the most shocking and grotesque moments in any Highway Safety Foundation film. But who are these children? Although Jerrel Ray Howell, Jean Hurrell and Connie Burtoch’s names are not used in the movie, there is enough evidence that supports claims that this crime scene footage in The Child Molester is taken from their case.  This evidence supports the opinion of Bret Wood (director of the excellent documentary Hell’s Highway: The True Story of the Highway Safety Foundation)  that he voiced in our email correspondence that “it’s a safe assumption. The circumstances are identical”. William E. Jones also explicitly states that both The Child Molester and Camera Surveillance were “inspired by” and “based on the 1962 double-homicide”. Witnesses at the Hurrell-Burtoch scene recall the girls wearing “bathing suits or sun suits”, and in the film, the outfits the girls wear (‘Mary’ in a white top and ‘Jeannie’ in a pink sun suit) closely resemble the same outfits worn by the victims shown in crime scene footage in the film’s final moments.

The Burtoch-Hurrell Murders: Mansfield, Ohio, 1962

The Child Molester cannot be fully considered without a reconstruction of the events that surround its climactic real-life crime scene footage.  It was the middle of summer in Mansfield, Ohio on Saturday June 23, 1962. It had rained that day, and 9-year-old Jean Marie Burtoch and her 7-year-old friend Connie Lynn Hurrell, perhaps enjoying the break in the weather, were playing outside. Jean was in the fourth grade and was active within the community—she attended Sunday School, was a Brownie Scout and was a member of the Mansfield Children’s Theatre. Connie was a little younger, and had just finished second grade and was ready to move into the third. Connie’s mother was out that night and had left her daughter with a babysitter. Jean lived with her grandparents, and her grandfather Carl recalled seeing Jean and Connie playing outside at approximately 4pm that afternoon: “It had rained, they put on their swimming suits and went out to play in the puddles. I gave Jeanie some change and they went to the refreshment stand for ice cream. The two girls were friends although Connie had only lived near us a couple of weeks”. Michael Bowie, who was 13 at the time, remembered seeing the two girls at North Lake Park that afternoon, playing near a creek close by. They were alone, he recalled, and he warned them against playing in deep water.

Glendon Mount was in his early 20’s and worked at the mini-golf course at the park. He remembered seeing Howell playing with the girls near the golf course that afternoon at approximately 4pm to 4.30pm.  In The Best Suit in Town: A Great Generation of Cops (2001) ex-Mansfield Chief of Police John R. Butler includes a lengthy excerpt of Howell’s confession of the murder of the two girls. Howell claims he met the girls near the water while they were catching water lizards. He offered to take them to a better location, but they refused because of snakes. Howell insisted that there were no snakes in that area, but the girls refused to believe him, and insisting on showing him otherwise, they left with him. Once in a secluded area with the two girls, Howell stated, “he got his penis out and held it in his hand and both girls started to scream. He told them to shut up and they screamed even louder and began to cry. Then they began to run, the smaller one behind the older one. I gave the small one a shove and she fell onto the other one. They were both down, still hollering. I then chopped both girls across the neck with a judo chop and then put the feet to them’”.

The bodies were discovered by a group of boys walking across the bridge that ran across Touby’s Run. One of those boys, John Duzan, spoke at Howell’s trial: “At first we thought it was a joke somebody was playing, they looked like dolls. They were face down in the water. We went to a filling station and the man there called the police”. The call was made from a nearby gas station close to 8pm that evening. Officer Edwin Smith received a call that some children had drowned in the creek near West Fourth Street Bridge, and the police arrived soon after. At first, there was some confusion about the scenario presented before them: coroner Dr D.C. Lavender, Butler recalls, believed it was an accidental death until a police officer pointed out blood and that some fabric had been tied around one of the girls’ necks. But upon further investigation, Lavender reported, “both girls died as a result of violent blows to the head which produced skull fractures and brain injuries…there was no evidence of sexual attack”. He also reported, “a ‘T’ shirt worn by one of the girls had been wrapped and knotted about her neck and that there was some possibility of partial strangulation”. On this, he was right: during Howell’s trial in 1965, a pathologist confirmed that Jean Burtoch had been strangled to death, while Connie Hurrell had drowned.

Howell was hardly an elusive suspect, and he was taken into custody only five hours after the discovery of the children’s bodies. The police gained intelligence very quickly (probably from Glendon Mount) that the troubled 18-year-old had been seen nearby at the North Lake Park near the public toilets speaking to the two children. Howell was familiar to police: he had been cited twice previously for “sexual perversion” in 1957 and 1968, and had been out of institutionalized care for only four months prior to the murders of the two girls. Four days after the killings, Dr Robert A Hames, the Director of Mental Hygiene and Corrections for the state of Ohio, was reported in the Mansfield News-Journal stating that “Howell was released from the Juvenile Diagnostic Center in Columbus four months ago because examination failed to show he needed further psychiatric treatment”. Media coverage of this self-defined “lone wolf” often mentioned his weight and IQ: he was 200 pounds and six foot tall at the age of 16, which according to the current Body Mass Index would suggest he was overweight (but not obese). Howell was also very bright, with his IQ ranking of 127 suggesting he was a young man of superior intelligence. But Howell was also clearly troubled, and according to court records he talked regularly about suicide “because he felt people didn’t like him”.

Howell was arrested at the house where he lived with his mother and stepfather that night at 1.30am, and confessed to the murder of Hurrell and Bertoch at 2.30am the next morning. The news was the front-page headline in the Mansfield News-Journal, and Glendon Mount picked him out of a line-up behind a two-way mirror that same day. According to Captain Marion L. Hardesty, he and two other detectives offered to take Howell to the funeral home to view the bodies. While he had little response to seeing the corpses, Hardesty noted that “in the cruiser on the way back … he started to sing and whistle and did that all the way back to the station”. Howell pleaded an insanity defence, which rendered an appalled public effectively crippled in their outrage: they still demanded some kind of action, even though the culprit had been easily captured. Police Chief Clare W. Kyler announced the day after the murder that “he would strongly urge to the city administration that the city re-establish park police to prevent a recurrence of Saturday’s tragedy”. But this was deemed insufficient, and it was in this climate that Howell’s comment during his interrogation regarding the gay sex occurring in the Central Park’s public toilets led to the ‘tearoom’ busts and its notorious footage.

In February 1963, eight months after the murders, and long since the ‘tearoom’ busts, Howell was sent to the Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane for 25 months. Over three years after the murders, Howell’s trial began in the Richland County Commons Pleas Court in Mansfield on November 5, 1965 when he was deemed fit to stand. Public interest in the case when the trial started was low, and the local newspaper reported, “the courtroom has not been full. The spectators are mostly Howell’s family, the families of the two slain girls, courthouse employees and sherriff’s deputies”. Howell appeared calm throughout the trial, although he was still being medicated for his epilepsy.  A few days into the trial, however, and it began to look less like the open-and-shut case that locals may have assumed it to be. Interest grew as prosecutor and defence attorneys debated the legal and constitutional ramifications surrounding Howell’s arrest and the seizure of the clothes he wore during the crime. It was in this context that Howell’s sudden change to a guilty plea of murder on November 11 1965 came as a shock: “Howell’s guilty plea came with an almost numbing calmness and left spectators in the half-filled common pleas courtroom a little wilted and disbelieving”. This plea nullified Howell’s previous insanity defence, but by pleading to two counts of second-degree murder he avoided the possibility of being executed if the insanity plea was rejected. Howell’s was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment, and he died in prison at age 33.

After the trial’s sudden conclusion, the rhetoric about “sex deviants” that had so strongly marked the case at the time of the murders had vanished. Instead, the Richland County Prosecutor Rex Larson made it clear whom he considered responsible with no mention of the events surrounding the ‘tearoom’ busts: “I lay these two deaths, and this is for the record, at the doorstep of the juvenile authorities in the state of Ohio…He (Howell) was in custody of the state juvenile authorities and was released by them without their resolving his personality problem … The state not only made it possible, but probable that he would do these acts”. The vehemence with which Larson’s speech shifts the responsibility for the murders of Connie Hurrell and Jean Bertoch from “sex deviates” to a broader institutional failing on the part of the government is striking, and raises significant questions surrounding the effectiveness of the crusade against “sex deviates” in the ‘tearoom’ busts in 1962. It may seem obvious from a contemporary perspective that associations between homosexuality and child abuse are factually unsupportable. Says Dr Gregory Herek: “The empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children. This is not to argue that homosexual and bisexual men never molest children. But there is no scientific basis for asserting that they are more likely than heterosexual men to do so. And, as explained above, many child molesters cannot be characterized as having an adult sexual orientation at all; they are fixated on children”. But regardless of how ideologically regressive and factually unfounded the linking of homosexuality to so-called child sexual assault and other forms of what once was called “sex deviancy” may be now considered, there is little doubt that there was some degree of sincerity on the part of many in the Mansfield Police department and those involved in the ‘tearoom’ busts to take concrete action to avoid similar future instances. Whether this was justified higher up to distract the public from the slipshod manner that Howell – an earlier offender – was allowed to slip through the cracks to commit such a heinous crime is open to debate.

Tragically, it perhaps goes without saying therefore that these kinds of crimes did not magically vanish after the ‘tearoom’ busts. Only three days after Howell entered his guilty plea in court, a case with noteworthy similarities occurred again in Mansfield.  On Sunday November 14 1965, 22-year-old Lester Eubanks attempted to rape 14 year-old Mary Ellen Deener who was on her way to the local Laundromat. Like Howell, Eubanks had a history of criminal activity: he had assaulted a 12-year-old girl when he was 16, and had been released on bond for assault with intent to rape at the time of Deener’s death. She was shot in the right side of her chest, and then in the abdomen, but in a curious allusion to the Howell’s murder, Eubanks returned to the body after he had shot her and smashed Deener’s head in with a brick. It may only be coincidence and nothing more than a failed attempt to conceal her identity, but considering the Deener murder occurred during a period when local interest in the Howell case had been regenerated, there is enough evidence to at least raise some suspicions that Eubanks may have to some degree returned to attack Deener with a brick as some kind of subconscious (or even conscious) allusion to Howell. This is, of course, just speculation, and shall no doubt remain as such: while Eubanks was convicted on May 25 1966 for first-degree murder while perpetrating a rape, he escaped from prison on December 7, 1973. As of January 2010, the FBI is still offering a reward of up to $10,000 USD for information leading to his arrest.

References:

Butler, John P. The Best Suit in Town: A Generation of Cops. Royal Palm Press: Charlotte Harbor, 2001.

“Bodies of Two Girls Found In Creek; Suspect Murder.” Mansfield News-Journal 24 June 1962: 1.

Constable, George. “Parents of Slain Girls Recall Day of Brutal Murder.” Mansfield News-Journal 6 November 1965: 1, 13.

Gaynor, Donn. “Youth, 18, Admits Beating, Kicking 2 Girls to Death.” Mansfield News-Journal. 25 June 1962: 1-2.

Herek, Dr Gregory. “Facts About Homosexuality and Child Molestation.” 1997-2009. 11 January 2010. <http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/HTML/facts_molestation.html>.

“Howell Arrest Debated.” Mansfield News-Journal 10 November 1965: 1-2.

“Howell Could Get Parole in 30 Years.” Mansfield News-Journal 12 November
1965.

“Howell Enters Innocent Plea.” Mansfield News-Journal 26 June 1962: 1-2.

“Howell Remains Calm.” Mansfield News-Journal 6 November 1965: 1, 13.

“Howell in Special Jail Cell.” Mansfield News-Journal 27 June 1962: 1-2.

“Larson Blames Ohio Juvenile Authorities.” Mansfield News-Journal 12 November 1965: 1-2.

“Man Saw Howell, 2 Girls.” Mansfield News-Journal 8 November 1965: 1-2.

“Murderer of 2 Girls Dead in Columbus.” Mansfield News-Journal 10 July 1977.

“Sparring Continues in Trial.” Mansfield News-Journal 11 November 1965: 1-2.

“Wanted by the FBI – Lester Edward Eubanks.” Federal Bureau of Investigation. 31 January 2011.  <http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/murders/lester-edward-eubanks >.

“Youth Has Record of Sexual Offenses.” Mansfield News-Journal 25 June 1962: 1-2.

I’ve spent much of my time working this year on a manuscript for a book on rape-revenge film that will be published in 2011. Most academics pick up these admittedly often nasty and ugly films with tongs while they hold their noses, with Jacinda Read and Carol J. Clover proving to be brave exceptions to this rule. While the work of these two women is of great interest to me, my research led me to ask how rape was been represented pre-cinema. The art historian Diane Wolfthal has observed that while critical memory privileges the so-called “heroic” rape imagery of the Italian Renaissance period (paintings like Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’, where Zephyrs is shown heroically ‘conquering’ Chloris the nymph), our focus on these types of paintings from this region blind us to strikingly different (and often far more sympathetic and comparatively progressive) depictions of sexual violence from areas such as Germany and Scandanavia being produced at the same time. It sounds simple, but the force of Wolfthal’s observation that “diverse notions (of rape) coexisted contemporaneously” cannot be underappreciated today.

Film, television, and even news coverage sends out not only conflicting but often flagrantly contradictory attitudes to and representations of rape in a seemingly constant barrage. As German feminist academic Sabine Sielke has noted, rape exists in many ways to underscore the seriousness of issues other than rape itself: by its sheer proximity to other issues (class, race, etc.), what she calls the ‘rhetoric’ of rape has become a narrative tool with broad thematic clout. When stirred into the pot of contemporary screen narrative (be they fictional or otherwise), rape ‘makes’ things serious.

Enter Julian Assange. The first whispers of his rape charges appeared on Twitter on the night of the Australian election, an evening that spectacularly displayed the political ambivalence of the Australian public that ended with the return of the ALP government and Prime Minister Julia Gillard only after the comparatively dull backroom machinations by a group of otherwise negligible independents. For those of us—and there were many—who saw the Kevin07 campaign dethrone John Howard and place Kevin Rudd in the Prime Minster job, the rise-and-fall of both Rudd and the hopes of left-leaning Australia were less Scorsesian in their gritty melodrama than simply depressing. In bidding farewell to John Howard in 2007, I knew I was not alone in David Hicks’ story playing a large part in celebrating Howard’s loss: while few (including Hicks himself) view the initial actions that led him to be imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay as anything but really stupid, that the Howard’s government so easily sacrificed his rights as an Australian citizen so we could cozy up to the US was grotesque.  The longer Hicks’ circumstances were ignored by the government that we assumed would protect us, the more difficult it became to not question the value of Australian citizenship itself.

Last night Melbourne time, Julian Assange was arrested in London for rape and offenses of a similar nature in Sweden. I’ll raise my hand as one of the few self-identifying feminists online who doesn’t pretend to be an expert in Swedish criminal law: I’m not quite sure what of these charges is about a broken condom, and what is about forced sexual assault.  Like many, my first assumption was that this seems a lot more to me about old-fashioned psy-ops rather than violence against women. The USSR were pulling identical stunts like this by inventing bogus rape charges against dissidents,so I figured it was a neat little trick the US picked up during the Cold War. I’ve even heard today rumours online that one of the women accusing Assange was thrown out of Cuba while on holiday there for being a suspected CIA agent as well – if this is true, its a fact that adds weight to suggestions of political conspiracy.

The danger here is that I think we can by now safely say that we can’t rely on the courts – in any country, in any situation – to be able to distinguish a real rape claim (and protect the rights of violated women) and a ‘fake’ one (protecting the rights of falsely accused men). It scares me that I so easily assumed these women were lying, and that has made me question who I am and what I stand for, both personally and professionally. It scares me that ideologically the best case scenario here is that these women are telling the truth and the system works to find justice for them – if they are lying for political reasons, then a rape trial getting this much exposure where the public find themselves questioning even once the truth of the accusations does so much damage to the plight of actual survivors of sexual assault that it will put us back centuries.

If Assange really did assault any of these women but we are happy to dismiss these charges as political conspiracy reliant upon what appears to be Sweden’s unusual rape laws, we are in real trouble and it is far too close to regressing back to the figure of the ‘heroic’ rapist for my liking. But if our governments are prepared to mock the real trauma of actual rape survivors by promoting fraudulent charges to their own ends – which is not a definite, but certainly a possibility here – then for citizens, media consumers, and people who rally against the horrific reality of rape that faces legions of women on a daily basis, the outlook is equally as grim.

Assange has been charged not for anything relating to Wikileaks, but for rape. But whether guilty or innocent of these charges, the stain of sexual violence will contaminate the public image of his personal morality in relation to the leaks regardless. This is guilt by association: if he is a rapist, the logic goes, then surely everything else he does is morally questionable too. It’s all about the story: even today, I’ve seen people actively indifferent to what he’s been charged with, only focused on the fact that he’s been charged at all. Once again, the narrative function of rape seems to have trumped the reality of sexual violence itself.

In this situation, we are looking at a lose-lose scenario: either these women are lying, which does diabolical harm to the plight of actual rape survivors, or Assange is guilty and we’re championing him as the hard-done-by victim.   Naomi Wolf has written a smart, fun piece on this topic for the Huffington Post that’s worth a read, but in thinking about these matters—and remembering David Hicks—I can find nothing to smile about.

by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Shock Corridor fictionalises division, particulary that surrounded around the divided self and the divided society. It is about divided passions – director Sam Fuller stated in an interview about the film that “in our society, for some reason or another, we love to hate”. Narrative is not the only way Fuller seeks to disassemble: the form and texture of the film itself aggressively demands exploration, most notoriously with its jumps between black and white and colour footage.    Ostensibly a Film Noir – at least insomuch as the murder mystery framework, the use of light and shadow, the existential anguish of the protagonist suggest it to be – Shock Corridor also presents a generic divide in its references to the Hollywood musical.  While topically and dramatically distinct from the traditionally lightweight story matter of the musical, Shock Corridor still utilises song and dance routines—“numbers”– to create both meaning in their own terms, but also to provide a dual-focus narrative layer within the text as a whole.  Shock Corridor is not a musical as such, but this combination of musical numbers with a thematic fascination with contradictory worlds draws significant parallels. But where the musical tends to find joyous equilibrium, Fuller’s film instead seems consciously and confrontationally askew. The famous ‘nympho’ rape sequence, for example, contradicts traditional musical genre codes by the very nature of its dark subject matter and its low-budget Noir surface, but also contains enough formal and structural similarities with the musical to make it a legitimate point of comparison.  Unusual representations of insanity and violence within the film such as this can be approached via Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque and its relationship to spectacle, performance and performer and may provide a significant methodology for aligning the formal aspects of the film with a broader reading whereby a divided (dual-focused, critical/spectatorial) mind is required to understand the divided (insane) world of Shock Corridor.

The tragic conclusion to the film documents the collapse of protagonist Johnny (Peter Breck) into a state of catatonic schizophrenia, but this outcome holds little surprise for either Cathy (Constance Towers) or the spectator.  Johnny’s psychological collapse was, from Johnny’s introductory voiceover announcing his defeat, inevitable.  If not a self-fufilling prophecy as such, his final insanity was at least a self-motivated one.  The distinction between sanity and insanity is tenuous from the outset – that Johnny and his colleagues so haphazardly tempt fate seems, for Cathy at least, to be asking for trouble.  As the films primary metaphor for division, the sane/insane binary is predicated upon Johnny’s final (and seemingly irreversible) collapse into a catatonic schizophrenic state. Johnny’s “schizophrenia” (the process of division) takes different forms, where even his occupation as a journalist shifts him from an objective onlooker to a subjective centre of experience.  Johnny’s decay into schizophrenia is active, loaded with high-energy visuals (such as the famous colourised waterfall sequence), and functions in stark comparison to his passive (and somewhat arrogant) resignation to his role as Deceiver, the ambitious trickster who is trumped by his own game. With his collapse, Johnny is at last liberated from his own fictions and self-delusions. As hero – or at least protagonist – of Shock Corridor, Johnny’s journey marks a shift from one narrative stream (sane) to another (insane).

The contradictions the darker elements of Shock Corridor aim to reconcile appear to share common ground with that of the traditional Hollywood musical, despite the treatment of these paradoxes being glaringly different in tone and style.  Rick Altman has claimed that the Hollywood musical itself manifests a particular kind of social burden:

Society is defined by a fundamental paradox: both terms of the oppositions on which it is built (order/liberty, progress/stability, work/entertainment, and so forth) are seen as desirable, yet the terms are perceived as mutually exclusive.  Every society possesses texts which obscure this paradox, prevent it from appearing threatening, and thus assure the society’s stability. The musical is one of the most important types of text to serve this function in American life.  By reconciling terms previously seen as mutually exclusive, the musical succeeds in reducing an unsatisfactory paradox to a more workable configuration, a concordance of opposites.

Shock Corridor concludes with an contradictory unworkable/workable configuration – the only way to find a concordance of opposites at the films ending is to acknowledge that an acceptance of the paradoxes and contradictions of American life ultimately – and in Johnny’s case, literally – requires a schizophrenic perspective.  These skills to be able to “read” fundamental narrative duality – albeit in a much more pleasant way – are not dissimilar to those required for audiences of the musical.  For Altman, the musical is centred around a dual-focus narrative, “built around parallel stars of opposite sex and radically divergent values. This dual-focus structure requires the viewer to be sensitive not so much to chronology and progression…but to simultaneity and comparison”.  Progression is narratively weakened to some degree in Shock Corridor if only because we know where we are going – Johnny states from the outset that things do not end well.  Chronology is thus also less important, but, like the musical, an awareness of this dual-focus dominates.  It is a film about schizophrenia that requires a certain degree of schizophrenic (or at least split or divided) spectatorial understanding.  If Shock Corridor is a “crazy” film about “crazy” people, it is therefore perhaps reasonable to propose a certain amount of “craziness” (establishing a non-classical viewer position) is required to follow the dual strands of narrative action and broader meaning within the film.

Both the musical and the hospital of Shock Corridor function by their own laws, where art and life, spectator and performer are blurred.  Johnny infiltrates the hospital to observe, but is observed himself in a performative sense (he literally acts, be it in the riverboat mime sequence or his broader ‘performance’ as an incestuously motivated patient).  And, as Jane Feuer suggests, with its seemingly spontaneous explosion into song and dance routines regardless of the environment, the musical provides a world where “stages appear and disappear, proving again and again that the stage is a world we needn’t feel any distance from and that the world is full of the spirit of musical comedy.  The performers are part of our world and we’re right up there on the screen”.  She continues; “The doubled identification provided by the musical’s dual registers gives a tremendous rhetorical advantage. We feel a sense of participation in the creation of entertainment (from sharing the perspective of the performers) and at the same time, we feel part of the live audience in the theatre” .

Like the musical, Shock Corridor consists of a series of numbers or routines that break up (or are broken up by, depending on your perspective) non-musical plot sequences. Says Martin Sutton:

The musical is essentially a genre that concerns itself with the romantic/ rogue imagination and its daily battle with a restraining, ‘realistic’, social order.  This battle grows out of a tension between realistic plot and spectacle/ fantasy number… the number functions as a narrative interruption, a fantastical tangent that at once frustrates and releases the spectator. The plot itself, however, surrounds, regulates and keeps in check the voluptuous, non-realist excesses of the number.

The place of plot within the musical provides a useful approach to understanding the non-musical aspects of Shock Corridor (the murder mystery narrative of “Who killed Sloan in the kitchen?”). Despite the Noir-heavy style and murder investigation storyline, the story that Shock Corridor offers up through a series of musical numbers is not just one of Johnny’s collapse into schizophrenia, but of his shift from one narrative layer to another.

Before a closer look at these musical numbers, it may be fruitful to examine how the stage is literally set within Shock Corridor for these numbers to play out.  As a key element of the Hollywood musical in terms of creating a “stage” area, proscenium arches are a primary visual motif throughout Shock Corridor, literally turning the supposedly ordinary space of the hospital into performance arenas.  ‘The Street’ – what the inmates and staff call the corridor of the films title – is obviously not a ‘real’ street, but rather a pantomime street. Even its name denotes a space for theatrical activity.  The angular lines that connote perspective and depth within the corridor create a literal frame for the action on this pantomime stage.  Cathy’s “I Want Somebody to Love” sequence – the films most overt musical number – literally occurs on a stage in the nightclub in which she works.  The second musical number is the canteen sequence, where the rhythm begun by Pagliacci’s table-bashing as a fight over medication breaks out is framed again by an angular, high-contrast grid pattern on the wall and ceiling that literally frames the action, creating yet another stage. Johnny’s second nightmare in the hospital has a light, supposedly coming from outside the window, but that functions as a spotlight on his face and forms an arch above his head, and as Pagliacci performs his “opera”, the sequence is interspersed with “audience” (fellow inmate) reaction shots (albeit, that reaction is to be slumped over asleep).  Johnny and Trent’s (Hari Rhodes) steamboat mime sequence – another powerful musical number – begins not with a shot of them front on, but rather in profile, sitting to the edge of the shot while (again) the corridor itself creates a proscenium arch (complete with a stupefied ballet of fellow inmates in the background).  And as Trent and Johnny lie in beds side by side in straight jackets, the bed heads again make clear and distinct arches above their heads, denoting the frame as a performance space. The fight sequence between Johnny and Wilkes is laden with arches, be it shadows in the hydrotherapy room or the air-conditioning pipes in the kitchen – as they arrive in ‘The Street’ for the final confrontation, there is again literally a spotlight on them.  The waterfall sequence is the films final ballet, and before the music even begins, shadows form a square frame above Johnny and Pagliacci before Johnny finally choreographs himself to the ‘main stage’ again of ‘The Street’ which frames his aquatic dance routine.  The Noir aspects lend generously to the creation of these proscenium arches – shadows this overt and stark are generically not just permitted, but required, in Film Noir – but while the technical justification for these arches may stem from Noir, the primary function is to create a performance space for musical numbers to unfold.

Recognising how Shock Corridor creates its musical performance spaces allows new approaches to the sequences that could be defined as musical in form and structure.  A close-up of Cathy’s bewilderingly feathered head opens the “I Want Somebody to Love” sequence, with her literally singing and dancing upon a stage.  But the song does not match the image – it is slow and sad, her movements awkward. The gyrating is off-kilter (not to mention out of time) with the music itself.  The sequence is intercut with a montage of backstage action, including a stagehand carrying a large birdcage. She sings like a caged bird, her feathered head only adding to this image.  The backstage shot is important, highlighting through contrast Cathy’s status as ‘On Stage’.  But the spectator cannot engage with Cathy as one would a performer in a traditional Hollywood film musical number – aside from the uncomfortable anomalies between tone of song and her hideously provocative dance, the sequence is not filmed ‘right’ in terms of how sequences such as this are conventionally presented in a musical.  Beginning with a slow motion pan from her feet to feathered head and a close up of her face; the camera pulls back – but too far back, making Cathy seem far too small on the screen. We are not sure if she is the centre of action – there is nothing else to look at, but the camera seems to deny us any traditional engagement with her as a singing/dancing filmic feature.  As Cathy dances across the stage, the camera refuses her invitation to follow her from left to right, instead only moving at the beginning and end of the sequence from in to out.  That Shock Corridor provides a clear reference to the Hollywood musical so early on is no coincidence, but is offered as a point of comparison only to defy its conventions almost simultaneously.  These comparisons are built but then collapsed upon themselves precisely to support the dominant thematic concern of the film, where in a divided and insane world a divided and ‘insane’ approach may be required to understand it. It can be at the same time Film Noir or musical, but by virtue of the tense and contradictory application of these codes within this specific text, it is also neither.

As Johnny walks through the caged wire door to make his entrance onto ‘The Street’, the shadows create similar bar patterns that not only suggest a jail-like institutional tone, but are reminiscent of Cathy’s birdcage and the world of ‘backstage’ (again, through contrast, implying that The Street is a performance space).  Johnny rolls his neck as he enters the stage, an actor preparing for performance.  The structure of what plays out on ‘The Street’ is governed by three clear and distinct sections (Johnny’s interviews with each of the three witnesses to Sloan’s murder).  While ample attention has been given to ideological readings of these politically loaded segments in regards to racial and Cold War tensions, it is in this case perhaps more fruitful to approach them as a point of comparison with a seemingly irrelevant Hollywood musical, On The Town (1949).  Both Shock Corridor and On The Town are divided into three main narrative threads: the numbers that introduce the romantic storylines in On The Town are Ann Miller’s “Prehistoric Man” routine (she outright demands for a pre-theory primal man, with “no psychoanalysis”), Betty Garrett’s “Come Back to My Place” number (Frank Sinatra sings his desire to visit New York landmarks of a time past while she aggressively invites sexual contact instead, repeating “come back to my place” in reply to his various requests for cab destinations) and the “Miss Turnstyles” ballet (Vera-Ellen and Gene Kelley tells the story of Miss Turnstyles journey from small town USA to New York, laced with a nostalgia for a past America).  All three numbers are predicated about an attempt to reclaim a semblance of lost past.

In Shock Corridor, this structure is mimicked by the three interview sequences with patients who cannot cope mentally with their pasts.  Stuart (James Best) believes he is General Jeb Stuart and his insanity has a Civil War motif; he hides in an earlier past from a recent past to function in the present.  Music governs his appearances in the film.  He is introduced in the musical number in the canteen – the patients lining up to receive their food swirl awkwardly but in a distinctly choreographed pattern behind him.  He whistles “Dixie”, and the aforementioned fight that Pagliacci starts creates the rhythm for the sequence.  Later in the dance therapy sequence, diegetic and non-diegetic music not only mingle but become blurred – it becomes unclear what music is coming from inside his head and what music is coming from outside the world of the film.  The singing may be manic, but it is most definitely still singing.  Shadowed proscenium arches line the walls, the Noir lighting creating spotlights.  Trent’s number starts with musical fanfare and we see his racist anti-black placard before we see him: he literally makes a theatrical entrance.  The steamboat sequence is, as mentioned above, clearly a musical routine, governed by the dominating theatricality of proscenium space, diegetic and non-diegetic sound colliding and collaborating with Johnny and Trent’s hoots and honks providing vocal accompaniment.  Dr Boden (Gene Evans) has literally regressed to a childhood state, but his sequence plays out startlingly differently to the first two interviews – indeed, the drawings in his sketch book are reminiscent of the childish scrawls that line the walls of the dance therapy room, Johnny’s room and the ‘nympho’ ward.  Dr Boden’s number occurs less as a proscenium routine but rather as a backstage production number (as in such films as Singin’ In The Rain or Kiss Me Kate). Music begins when Dr Boden begins his game of hide and seek with Johnny and his aural flashbacks have musical accompaniment: he actually looks off screen to try to locate the source, demanding it to “leave me alone”.  There is no colour flashback in the Dr Boden sequence, again making it distinct from the Trent and Stuart sequences.

Arguably one of the most powerful sequences in Shock Corridor is the ‘nympho’ attack scene where Johnny is raped, one that interesting parallels can be drawn with the Hollywood film musical.  The “Come Up to My Place” sequence in On The Town, for example, shares its depiction of a sexual conquest by an aggressive female sexual predator.  What is light-hearted in On The Town and concludes in romantic conquest is outright sexual assault in Shock Corridor, but the core action is ultimately the same and both sequences are heavily invested in song.  The dance therapy sequence leads directly into the rape scene, and functions as perhaps the first half of the number.  As Johnny walks from dance therapy room into the ‘nympho’ ward, he smiles a content smile of control, he views himself as a director – he has worked Stuart into a song-and-dance frenzy.  As Johnny enters the female room, however, his mood changes rapidly to fear he appears confused as a main girl starts slowly dancing backwards, singing a Capella (to Johnny, the other girls, or both is not made clear) “He’s mine”. This song morphs into “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”.  The camera follows the women moving back and forward and circling the room.  They wear costumes, identical uniforms – institutionalised showgirls.  Johnny aims to walk from the door he entered to a door on the other side of the room. The room is decorated in the childlike drawings of pantomime, reminiscent of the sets in Cathy’s nightclub, the walls in Johnny’s room and the drawings in Dr Boden’s sketchbook.  The women’s movements are choreographed roughly but distinctly, and as Johnny reaches the centre of the room he is circled and the camera suddenly leaps upwards, alluding to but never quite aspiring to an awkward Busby Berkley-styled shot as the ‘nymphos’, succubus-like, leap upon Johnny and drag him down to the floor.  The camera follows the action, dropping also, and a blonde woman enters the frame singing “I Love Coffee / I Love Tea”. This tune duels with the up-until-now dominant “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”, the two a Capella songs resulting in aural chaos in their battle for supremacy.  Aside from its powerful representation of sexual assault, this sequence denotes a pivotal moment within Shock Corridor, and that it plays out as a musical number is of no small significance in terms of performance and spectacle. The rape sequence in Shock Corridor emphasises this link between the spectator and the performer by highlighting Johnny’s role as a performer for our benefit.

The Johnny/Pagliacci relationship uncovers perhaps the greatest significance to how generic musical codes function within Shock Corridor.  In the climactic fight scene between Wilkes and Johnny, Pagliacci is significantly positioned centre screen, singing and literally conducting with his hands. While superficially a sign of his continued display of operatic insanity, this moment captures precisely Pagliacci’s function within the film – he literally directs and conducts, and is in charge of, the musical elements of the film that represent a whole other generic narrative path outside of the Noir/murder mystery story.  Pagliacci laughs when Johnny firsts asks who killed Sloan in the kitchen – the world of the Noir mystery is irrelevant to Pagliacci and to the world of the hospital. As the ‘second world’ of the carnivalesque, the murder narrative is connected to what is in comparison a mythological ‘first world’, the world of the Pulitzer Prize. Like Sloan (of whom little to no information is provided aside from the fact he was murdered), the Pulitzer Prize is ultimately an empty signifier in Pagliacci’s world.  Pagliacci literally enters the film stage left to musical fanfare and approaches Johnny with flamboyant theatricality, grabbing the back of Johnny’s head, making his function as something quite distinct and different from a madman clear to both Johnny and the audience from the outset; “If you expect a demonstration of insanity, forget it”.  Pagliacci asks Johnny repeatedly “What are you doing here?”, clarifying that he recognises that Johnny is a transgressor, he can only be rejected or assimilated into the script.  By bashing the table in the canteen sequence, Pagliacci changes the entire rhythm of the scene – until that point it had been limited speech and silence, but Pagliacci converts it into a percussive explosion of cryptic and chaotic dance and violence, “Give me back my vitamins” providing verse and chorus of an anarchic, free-form musical number.  In Johnny’s second nightmare, the song he imagines Cathy singing in his head is drowned out by Pagliacci’s opera – he overpowers Johnny’s music with his own.  Pagliacci also plays a pivotal role in Johnny’s final ballet, the waterfall sequence.  The proscenium arches formed above Johnny and Pagliacci’s head on the blank wall of ‘The Street’ are joined by music starting to denote the sound of falling rain;

Johnny: It’s beginning to rain

Pagliacci: (shrugging) I like the rain.

Pagliacci accepts the ‘second world’ of the carnivalesque, the schizophrenic ‘reality’ as opposed to what in the film is the mythic ‘first world’. What is for Johnny a total, manically-colourised breakdown is for Pagliacci nothing but another musical routine, one upon which he casts an overt and literal directorial critique: “Such a sour note, Johnny! (laughs) You’re way off key!”.

It is obviously not a case of categorising Shock Corridor as ultimately a musical or as Film Noir per se, but it is noteworthy just how much the generic codes of each are used in direct opposition within the text to create broader meaning.  By acknowledging and exploring the generic depths and diversities of the film, the process of spectatorial acceptance of these contradictions becomes itself a conceptual challenge – they simply cannot be reconciled.  From this perspective, Shock Corridor becomes less what has traditionally been understood as Fuller’s attack on a world gone mad, but rather a recipe for functioning within that world – to accept its divisions and its lunacies is to find (no matter how uneasily) some method of surviving it.

Us: Settle down, sunshine! We’re still writing! Check out some of Dean and Alex’s latest efforts here:

Dean Brandum on Dennis Hopper and the ‘Easy Rider’ Legacy over at Senses of Cinema

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on history, death and ‘Snuff’ over at Cinephile

There. Everyone OK now? OK. Good.

Little critical or fan attention has been expended upon the Halloween franchise outside of the first and second titles of the series and the latter additions. The general consensus is that after the conceptual shark-jump of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1982), with its brazen rejection of not just the Michael Myers plot but the entire subgeneric slasher framework altogether, little of real interest happened until Jamie Lee Curtis returned once again as Laurie Strode in Halloween: H20 (Steven Miner, 1998). Rekindling audience fascination with The Shape, the franchise’s contemporary regeneration continued with Halloween: Resurrection (Rick Rosenthal, 2002) and Rob Zombies’ surprisingly intelligent “de-imagining” in 2007’s Halloween, and the recent follow-up, Halloween II.

By the 1980s the sheer proliferation of sequels had riddled the decade with remakes and rehashes of successful originals, anywhere up to 145 by one count. By virtue of this bulk, an unspoken ‘quality versus quantity’ divide became increasingly instilled in both fans and critics: not immune to the law of diminishing returns, the more sequels there were produced, it seemed, the less likely those films would be viewed to hold any critical value.  The original Halloween had earned a place in the critical canon by virtue of both its surprise success and its landmark historical placement as the film that launched the US slasher cinema wave of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Halloween II (1981) also garnered some critical interest – while not directed by Carpenter, he was still involved with the production and scriptwriting, thus providing a certain sense of authorial validity to the project (the inclusion of the stars of the original film, Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance also branded it a ‘genuine’ product).  But as the subgenre upped its output and increased its sequel numbers, the interest sparked by the first Halloween film rapidly fizzled outside of attacks of its assumed reactionary backlash to the supposed (but debatable) liberal glory days of the genre’s more celebrated heyday in the 1970s. David Bartholomew typified this position when he stated that  “the Eighties horror film was, in fact, dumb, even driving the decades-dependable formulas into outdated nonsense…The modern horror film has become instead simply a test of stamina: can one sit through this film without throwing up?”. These films, Bartholmew claims, destroyed any capacity for horror to contain ethical or political meaning, sacrificing themselves instead to what he holds is the comparatively worthless visual spectacle of gore and tits.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that the fourth film in the franchise contained very little of either. But by this time, it was too late: the small amount of critical attention that Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers did receive still sparked near instantaneous denunciation almost solely because of its status as a sequel.  In 1989, Steve Biodrowski at Cinefantastique dismissed the film as a feeble regurgitation of the franchises stronger earlier offerings. But there are significant deviations from the first two films of the cycle that render accusations that Halloween IV was merely churning out what Biodrowski called “the same old story” grossly unfounded. In fact, I argue that it is the precise manner in which Halloween IV strays from not only the rest of the films in the Halloween series, but from the popular 1980s subgenre as a whole, that render a re-evaluation both fruitful and long overdue. Halloween IV challenges the nature of and desire for basic narrative-propelling melodramatic structures of good/evil and categories such as the final girl, highlighting the precise reason that these ethical structures need to be clear for the rest of the subgenre to ‘work’.  The always-abundant psychoanalytic readings of the earlier Halloween films may be satisfactory, but Halloween IV clearly invites a different approach through its ambivalent representation of one of the franchises main thematic concerns: evil.

Rewatching Halloween IV

These absences and deviations manifest in the first few moments of Halloween IV.  As a point of comparison, it is useful to remember how earlier films begin: Halloween opens with a black screen with the words “Haddonfield, Illinois”, which then fades to the words “Halloween Night, 1963”.  Halloween II continues this pattern of clearly specifying spatial and temporal information in the first few moments: it opens with only the slightest alteration to update the spectator as to where the narrative intends to pick up. The first screen (again) specifies location (“Haddonfield, Illinois”), the second, time (“October 31. 1978”).  Even Halloween III provides this same information in its first seconds: “Northern California/ October, Saturday the 23rd”.  But in Halloween IV, while the letters on the black background specify the time – “October 30, 1988”, the location is surreptitiously absent.  For viewers familiar with the series, a significant disturbance to the spatial/temporal patterns established in previous films has already irrevocably occurred, even before the action starts – we do not know where we are, but we do know when we are there. The similarity of titles at the beginning of Halloween andPsycho has not been ignored. But while in Psycho they create a documentary tone, in Halloween they are easily dismissed one of many cute, intertextual homages to Hitchcock’s film.  This comparison of opening scenes between the earlierHalloween’s and Halloween IV may seem simplistic, but it’s meaning cannot be underappreciated. By omitting half of the information traditionally supplied in the films’ opening moments, Halloween IV subverts the traditions of the earlier films even.

Halloween IV cuts from a black screen announcing the date, and over a low- frequency, electronic hum, sounds of nature and music are introduced over a series of images that suggest a regional location (one riddled with ratty Halloween decorations).  This is a strong contrast to the images of suburban Haddonfield in the first two films; not only is it rural, it is unidentified and continues to be so even at the film’s conclusion.  We are “nowhere”. The following events suggest (perhaps) we are near the Ridgemount Federal Sanatorium, but this is an assumption based on “where else could it be?” rather than factual information (such as the direct transfer of text-based information in the earlier films).  The musical contrast provided in the opening moments of the first two films (the children singing the “Halloween night” rhyme inHalloween, “Mr Sandman” in Halloween II) are replaced by atmospheric mood music in Halloween IV. The sound design emphasises the natural environment as much as the non-diegetic musical accompaniment.

It is over this sequence that the opening credits roll.  While the first three films open with overtly non-diegetic opening sequences (Halloween II and Halloween III offer slight variations to the famous “pumpkin eye” sequence in the original film), the opening credit sequence of Halloween IV alludes (but never confirms) that what we see is part of the diegesis.  This sequence is drenched with a deliberate ambiguity: we never find out where this space is, whether it is part of the film’s world or an externalised addition to it. Thus the initial moments of Halloween IV destabilize the earlier films: time here may be definable, but this time around, space is undetermined from the outset.

The credit sequence ends as night falls, and an ambulance weaves through a deserted road to arrive at the Ridgemount Federal Sanatorium.  Clanging gates and uniforms indicate brutal institutionalism, and it is announced that the two white-coated guests the ambulance has brought (a man and a woman) wish to transport killer Michael Myers to Smith Grove (a name of instant significance to those familiar with the series as it is from here that Myers escapes in the beginning of the first Halloween film to begin the rampage that provided the story for the first and second films).  With a guard helpfully reminding us of who Myers is and what had happened in the first two films, via the Smith Grove attendants, we penetrate deeper into the Sanatorium until Myers is shown with his face wrapped in bandages (he was, of course, badly burnt in the climactic scene of Halloween II. Michael’s death-like pose suggests classic horror monsters: mummies and Frankenstein’s come to mind as much as from the outset invites comparison with Halloween IV.  Both films open with those at rest (the corpse in Frankenstein and the institutionalised Myers in Halloween IV) are being disturbed by medical science.  During the journey to Smith Grove, Myers springs to life (and to violent attack) after overhearing his nearest living relative is a young girl.  The killing of the male attendant is shown – Michael uses his hand to do so – but the action scene is cut short by a dramatic shift to seven-year-old Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris, who turns up as a friend of Rob Zombie’s final girl in his recent de-make) looking out of a window in a suburban house.  In a moment of ambiguity, she looks at an ambulance on the street that suddenly vanishes (it cannot be the ambulance Michael is in, surely, but then why show it?). Her foster sister, teenage Rachel Carruthers (Ellie Cornell) enters, scolding Jamie for being awake so late, thus establishing her position as caregiver. Jamie follows with a series of probing questions – does Rachel love her? Eleven months after her parents’ death, Jamie is clearly disoriented and lonely, and feels like an outsider. Her mother, we later discover via photos Michael discovers in a shoebox in Jamie’s room, is the Final Girl from Halloweenand Halloween II, Laurie Strode (Jamie Leigh Curtis). In this box, Jamie also keeps a photography of Michael himself as a small child, wearing his famous clown outfit – not only, therefore, does Jamie know what Michael wore when he murdered Judy Myers, she also identifies him as “family”.  In what is soon exposed to be a dream sequence, Jamie says her prayers and goes to bed (after walking past her dressing table, repeating her image in its three mirrors, but is attacked by Myers – the literal boogeyman underneath the bed.  The plot information communicated in this sequence is vital to the film’s concluding ‘twist’: Jamie is clearly a troubled child who feels excluded and an inconvenience to her foster family.

Jolting to a cheery, festive outdoor suburban street scene, we are returned to the familiar location of the earlier series openings and the titles that were so notably absent from the film’s opening moments are finally shown, restoring a sense of balance: “Haddonfield/ 31 October/ Halloween”.  Finally, we now know both where we are and when. But what we knew immediately in Halloween and Halloween II takes over ten minutes to confirm in Halloween IV: these aspects of delay become increasingly crucial to the film thematically. It is this point that Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasance, returning to his famous role) discovers that Myers has escaped from the ambulance, he provides what has by now become Loomis’ trademark view on Myers Calling him “it”, he reminds us that Michael is no “ordinary prisoner, we are talking about evil on two legs”. Evil” as pronounced by Loomis with a heavy emphasis on the ”e” – as opposed to “evil” – is vital in theHalloween series (and arguably all slasher films). This “Evil” is pantomime morality, an excessive and arguably hollow signifier of a more complex ethical framework.

In a parallel scene to when Laurie Strode’s male babysitting charge Tommy is teased at school in Halloween, Jamie is teased by other children who sing, “The Boogeyman is going to get you!”.  The superficial motive for this attack is her blood ties to Myers: while Tommy is teased about being threatened by the boogeyman, Jamie is teased because she was aligned with the bogeyman (“Jamie’s uncle’s the boogeyman!”).  This harassment soon sets its sights on her mother’s death. Evoking the image of bandage-clad Myers in earlier in the film (and, more broadly, with more classical horror iconography), one boy states “Jamie’s mommie is a mummy!”.  Where Tommy trips and falls, Jamie instead runs to a lamppost where she consoles herself out loud, repeating “You’re ok” – and notably, she IS ok. While delicate, Jamie can clearly take care of herself, an element pivotal in defining slasher’s Final Girl character.  While Rachel’s age and role as caregiver suggest her for the position, Halloween IV indicates early in the film that this occupation may feasibly be shared between the two girls.

Loomis travels from Ridgemount to Haddonfield and confronts Myers at Penney’s gas station. We see Myers murder a haggard mechanic and discover with Loomis the body of a woman at the counter of the store and the hanging body of another man in the garage.  Loomis sees Myers in the kitchen through a doorway and shoots at him repeatedly, front on. But, in a peculiar shot suggesting more a hall of mirrors than anything else, Myers suddenly vanishes. His shifting prowess has been observed in past films, but here we have an added reason to doubt Loomis’ perception of events; Dr Hoffman has already stated his belief that Loomis “is the one who needs psychiatric help”, and Loomis’ manic behaviour does little to negate this.

Meanwhile, in another ominous foreshadowing of the film’s conclusion, Jamie chooses a costume at the store identical to the one Myers wore in the famous opening sequence of Halloween.  Jamie holds the outfit up to herself in the mirror, but it is a young Myers whose reflection she sees.  She is then attacked from behind by the adult Myers and falls, shattering the mirror.  Rachel runs when she hears Jamie scream, but dismisses Jamie’s declaration that the “nightmare man…is coming to get me”, telling the child she “probably just saw a mask” that scared her. The sequence ends with a shot of Myers’ reflection in numerous shards of broken mirror on the floor.

Determined to get to Haddonfield, the hitchhiking Loomis is mocked by a car full of boisterous cheerleaders and accepts a ride with alcoholic, self-proclaimed preacher Mr Sawyer, with whom numerous parallels to Loomis are drawn. Calling Loomis a “fellow pilgrim”, he identifies that both men share their occupation of “hunting the apocalypse”.  Clearly eccentric, the two men are allies: Loomis’ pursuit of Myers is not only futile (he refers to this frequently throughoutHalloween IV), but by this stage it is an evangelical obsession founded on his belief of a Manichean moral universe, where Myers can only be understood on a near transcendental level as absolute evil.

As a medical doctor, science had failed and disillusioned Loomis: he cannot conquer (let alone ‘cure’) his boogeyman, deserting secular empiricism for a near medieval religious fervour.  Like Frankenstein and those in horror who follow this lineage, Loomis is a classic mad doctor.  In both Halloween and Halloween II, he literally saves the day (not to mention the girl). He is a dominant, strong figure in the first two films, and it his sense of the true threat of Myers and his drive to action enough to render him the closest the films have to an alpha male.  But this all but collapses in Halloween IV, rendering him as little more than a sad, obsessed old man chasing if not windmills, then a killer he himself admits is beyond redemption and unable to be contained. More importantly, Loomis’ identity has itself become just as inextricably linked with Myers as Victor Frankenstein’s was with his monster.  Loomis is defined through his opposition to Myers, and the simplicity of this relationship is near Cartesian: StompTokyo.com observes, Loomis “departs in pursuit of the killer, because that’s what he does”.

Halloween and Halloween II establish a simple binary opposition of good and evil are played out in a frequently violent and graphic battle.  But in Halloween IV, the increasing hysteria of Dr Loomis in the first two films is exaggerated to a point of insanity. Mr Sawyer’s spirituality is offered as a point of comparison – he may have “I believe the bible” and “I Heart Jesus” bumper stickers and sing hymns, but he is clearly an obsessive drunk rather than a spiritual crusader.  Loomis, as a “fellow pilgrim”, may speak of destroying evil, but like Mr Sawyer it is impotent posturing rather than actual moral or spiritual action that unites them.  Any potential of Loomis’ heroism exhibited in the final scenes of the first two films, as a figurative ‘white knight’, has vanished – rather, he is now a jester figure.

Halloween IV’s Haddonfield is also riddled with duplicity. The film is littered with mirrors and reflections, and – in the case of the ambulance and Myers in the gas station – of images that may or may not be real.  But there are further deceptions – Brady returns to the Meeker’s house to have sex with Kellie despite his pleas to Rachel that “it’s not what you think” (it is, in fact, precisely what she thinks).  Mr and Mrs Carruthers’ need Rachel to babysit so they can elicit promotion from Mr Carruthers boss.  And, seeing Jamie’s costume, the school children that had only hours before teased her now ask her to accompanying them on their trick-or-treating endeavours.

These themes of duplicity and disorientation are most dramatically represented when the separated Jamie and Rachel are reunited and placed in the police car by Meeker and Loomis. Michael Myers appears simultaneously three times, surrounding the car.  Loomis reflects the viewers’s confusion and panic, but as Meeker raises his gun it is discovered that these are merely teenagers skylarking in Myers outfits.  Laughingly they run away, but Loomis (and the spectator) remain shaken: in Halloween IV we cannot trust what we see.  As the three faux-Myers flee and Meeker’s car drives away, the ‘real’ Myers appears behind the car watching them as they leave.

Loomis and Meeker discover that there has been a massacre at the police station in their absence.  Peculiarly, in what could quite easily be the film’s visceral showpiece, the action of the (at least) three killings occurs solely off-screen.  We see the aftermath: there has obviously been mass destruction, but we only see one body.  Bereft of a police force, Loomis provokes a mob to find and kill Myers, with “Beer Belly” Earl in control. The mob sees Myers in a park and shoot, only to discover they have in fact killed Ted Hollister.  The crazed mob again draws parallels with Frankenstein – while on a rampage they adamantly believe morally sound (they as good versus monster as bad), their own criminal and immoral actions throw moral questions back onto society itself, inviting a reassessment of terms such as ‘monster’ and ‘evil’.

Sheriff Meeker’s house failure as a makeshift fortress is twofold, as not only is Myers already in the house, it is not just he who poses a threat inside the walls.  As Rachel confronts Kellie in the kitchen about Brady, an angered, Rachel throws hot coffee on Kellie’s crotch.  This sequence initiates the climactic sequence of killings. Kellie takes coffee to Logan but instead discovers his body (again, murdered off-camera – we see his head which appears to have been decapitated). The figure she talks to as Logan is Myers sitting in Logan’s chair: Kellie is attacked by Myers with a gun, but instead of shooting her she is impaled through the stomach by the barrel. This is shown on-camera.

As Myers makes his way upstairs to find Jamie, he encounters Brady. Brady attempts to shoot Myers, but cannot use a gun – he instead (like Myers) uses it as non-firing weapon, hitting Myers with the handle.  When the gun is taken from him he resorts to fisticuffs.  Myers kills Brady with his hands, breaking his neck on camera. Myers continues to follow Rachel and Jamie to the attic – it is here at this late stage that we see Myers first reach for his traditionally signature butcher’s knife, significantly over one hour into the film.

The girls climb onto the roof, where Rachel tries to save Jamie by tying electrical cord around her and delivering her to the ground below, but Myers pushes Rachel off the roof before Jamie is safe. Jamie makes her own way to the ground (notably she does not even need Rachel’s protection, undermining Rachel’s assumed position as solo Final Girl). Jamie cries “Come alive, Rachel”, but Rachel does not “come alive”, so Jamie runs decides in true Final Girl fashion to take action into her own hands.  She and Loomis flee to the schoolhouse, where Myers appears and attacks Loomis. But Rachel also appears (‘magically’, seemingly blessed with the same shifting skills as Myers himself) and attacks Myers.

Myers’ final scene in the film shows him appearing from under the truck that carries the mob gleaming knife first and escaping girls to attack the three men standing in the back of the truck. He then pushes Earl through the driver’s window. Notably, he uses not the knife but his other hand to kill Earl (again, he kills using his own hand, literally ripping at Earl’s throat, shown on camera – unusual considering he is actually holding a knife at the time). After Rachel has flung Myers across her bonnet, he rises to stand in front of the car (knife clearly visible in the headlights), and Rachel slams on the breaks. Continuing with the references to Frankenstein, unseen to the police and Rachel, Jamie has moved to Myers’ body, where she touches his hand in a moment evocative of the Monster in Frankenstein first meeting the little girl Maria. Various issues concerning virtue are raised by this moment of comparison – not only concerning the nature of monstrosity but also, by association, the nature of innocence.  A hysterical Rachel screams for Jamie to move as Myers reanimates, but he is again gunned down by the police and falls into an unused mine that lies just behind him.

The final sequence of the film cannot be undervalued in terms of this location of virtue and monstrosity. As Mrs Carruthers runs a bath for Jamie, the opening sequence from the first Halloween is repeated: first-person camera takes over walking through the house, the field of vision divided again into three sections – a predominantly black screen with two circles (eye holes) of vision, as if seen through the eyes of the mask. Scissors are picked up and Mrs Carruthers is attacked. Both narrative and technical aspects indicate that this is meant to be Myers.  Mrs Carruthers’s scream draws the gathered crowd from downstairs to the bottom of the stairwell where they meet not Michael, but Jamie in an identical pose (and identical, heavily blood-stained clown outfit) as young Michael in the first film.  In the most significant moment in the film (and arguably of the entire series), Loomis screams “No!” repeatedly, and aims to shoot Jamie only to be restrained by Meeker.  The film ends with Loomis’ repeated screams fading into the credit music, Jamie standing in tableaux just as Michael had in the original scene.

Rethinking Halloween IV:

In slasher, the scream functions most commonly in two ways; it operates in terms of a reaction (such as seeing a dead or maimed body), or it operates as a primal utterance of fear of bodily harm to the self.  Dr Loomis’ final scream in Halloween IV, however, is neither of these.  Rather, it punctuates the precise crisis of the film; it is an existential scream.  Increasingly questioned throughout Halloween IV is Loomis’ determination to protect innocence from monstrosity, and the instant that innocence becomes monstrous the collapse of the moral universe in the film is complete.  It has been frequently threatened, challenged and weakened throughout the film, but it is Loomis’ scream and the negation “No! No! No! No!” that capsulates the angst of realising the ethical framework has collapsed.  It is this moment in Halloween IVwhere the patriarchal dominance of defining the moral universe ceases to control the narrative; not only has Loomis failed to protect virtue, but that the symbol of virtue itself is monstrous.

In the little that has been written on Halloween IV, few have offered an insight into the significance of this ending, seeing it primarily as existing primarily as a curious but hollow twist on the famous sequence from the first film.  Fangoria’sMichael Rowe suggests that Myers has ‘possessed’ Jamie, and while in the context of a horror film this would not be inconceivable, there is enough evidence in the film to suggest that troubled, lonely Jamie has other reasons to mimic her uncle’s behaviour.  Kim Newman writes in the Monthly Film Bulletin in 1989, it is only “in the last few moments, replicating the first moments of Halloween, does the film even try to come up with new twists on the old themes, and even here it is crippled by essentially dull film-making”. Again, this reading views the sequence as twist-for-twist’s sake, and apparently what is deemed poor execution ultimately defeats any search for further meaning.  But fans see these technical aspects quite differently.  Providing a curious model for comparison, StompTokyo.com judges the film an ultimate success based on its placement as the fourth sequel in a series: For example, instead of being compared to earlier Halloween films,Halloween IV thus competes with titles such as A Nightmare On Elm Street IV: The Dream Master (1988), Friday the Thirteenth: The Final Chapter (1984), and Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil. PitOfHorror.com says “it’s beautifully shot and competently performed…Halloween IV’s conclusion, had they run with the concept, would have altered the course of the entire series.”

But obviously Halloween V did not “run with the concept”.  According to Adam Rockoff, the motives for this were based on broader fan agitation making Stomp Tokyo and Pit of Horror’s  responses unrepresentative of broader contemporary fan responses. But despite Rockoff’s suggestion that  Halloween V ‘fixes’ the errors of its predecessor, the box office statistics he offers suggest this may not be quite as simple as he claims.  According to Rockoff. Halloween IV was made for US$5.5 million and grossed US$17 million, topping the box office for the first fortnight weekends following its release. Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers, however, grossed only $11.5US million (Rockoff 172).  It is possible, as Rockoff alludes, that fans were so disappointed with Halloween IV that they simply did not have interest in seeing Halloween V. But perhaps the thought of sweet little girl Jamie as a killer, while “distasteful and ridiculous”, was simultaneously titillating, or at least intriguing.  That the series itself denied the possibility of Jamie as a killer in the following film – and that that film ultimately was less successful – suggests the possibility that the image of Killer Jamie as opposed to Virtuous Jamie may have contained more pleasure than Rockoff admits.

Past critical readings regarding the feminisation of the killer such as that by Carol J. Clover could be incorporated into a reverse Oedipal understanding of the relationship between Michael and Jamie.  But Jamie’s crisis is most immediately a moral one – the one thing she can find solace in (her family) is the one thing that literally threatens her. She is fascinated with Michael (she approaches his apparently dead body after he has been shot), but she cannot connect directly with him for fear that he will kill her. She can, however, connect symbolically – by wearing his clothing and by mimicking his actions.  Jamie is searching for a security she has not found it with the Carruthers’, despite their efforts, and as her immediate family, Michael is her only other available option.  As she cannot make a traditional connection with him, she finds another way: she shifts her moral allegiance from that of her unsatisfactorily “innocent” girl-victim protected by the insane Loomis, the genuine but still immature Rachel, and the murderous “beer belly” mob, to that of her powerful, undefeatable bogeyman uncle.

This simple equation may explain Jamie’s actions within the context of her character development, but when incorporated into the broader framework of the film it becomes far more complex.  Jamie’s moral classification is not a simple allegiance shift from one binary (good) to another (evil).  Halloween IV literally opens in No Man’s Land, and throughout the film nothing is ever as it appears to be.  Halloween, Halloween II and Halloween III all include direct footage of other horror films, a postmodern wink that indicates these films are knowingly aware of their status as horror films themselves. There are no such moments of postmodern smugness in Halloween IV; the comparisons to Frankenstein are thematic, not textual. There are killers, there are deceivers, and there are people beside Myers that can shift mysteriously.  There are doubles, triples, illusions.  Loomis is obsessive, mad, an impotent patriarch – little more than a drunk preacher ranting about evil.  In Halloween and Halloween II there is some potency to his urgency, the spectator has some investment in his desperation trying to convince the town how much of a threat Myers poses to them. But Haddonfield of Halloween IVneeds little convincing: Loomis is at best superfluous. In generic terms, this redundancy can be compared best to John Wayne in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), but as a lowly 4^th sequel in the franchise, little critical attention has been paid to this fact.

For Biodrowski, Halloween IV offers nothing new or significant because ultimately it shows no deviation from the traditional narrative core where “the virginal baby-sitter will survive; the promiscuous slut will die”. And since the originalHalloween this model is frequently listed a defining aspect of the subgenre. True, ‘virginal babysitter’ Rachel does not get murdered, but considering Rachel’s goal was not to defeat Myers per se, but to protect and defend Jamie, it is arguable whether she has achieved anything at all.  Kellie is killed, and while the ‘promiscuous slut’ of the film (the only nudity and sex in the film is a short sequence with Kellie and Brady), the demographic breakdown of the ‘body count’ of Halloween IVsuggests a far more complex situation than the puritanical crime-and-punishment model of earlier slasher  films.   Unarguably, Brady and Kellie engage in illicit sexual activity, and are murdered.  But their deaths are anomalous within the context of the film itself and the nature of the other killings.  It is established at the beginning of Halloween IV that Myers murdered sixteen people on Halloween night 1978 – the night that consists the bulk of Halloween and Halloween II.  Including Judy Myers the total is therefore seventeen across the first two films.  Virtually all of these murders are shown in frequently graphic detail, the rule of thumb being the younger (and more female) the victim, the more detail shown, the more intimate the camera work. Myers also stabs – most often with a knife, but often getting creative (such as the medical motifs in Halloween II).  Halloween IV, however, deviates drastically from these patterns on a number of levels.  The first murder shown is that of the male attendant in the ambulance – Myers kills him with his own hands, literally inserting his thumb through the man’s forehead (shown close up and in great detail).  But when Loomis and Dr Hoffman arrive at the scene of the ambulance crash, it is stated that there were four people aside from Myers in the ambulance – it is not clear how many bodies are found (“It’s hard to tell – they’re all chewed up”).  While it is the one body we have literally seen killed, in all probability it is meant to signify all four.  The next murder scene is at Penney’s gas station – the on-screen murder of the mechanic under the car is shown (impaled with a crow bar), but the bodies of another mechanic (Garth, hung by heavy chains from the roof of the garage) and an older female inside at the counter are shown – this is another three bodies.  There are, therefore, anywhere between four, and probably seven, corpses in Myers’ wake before he gets to Haddonfield. Loomis and Meeker discover the body of Jamie’s dog, Sunday, in a closet (the killing is not shown on camera but the body is shown).  Bucky, a worker at the power station, is picked up and physically thrown onto live electrical wires by Myers – his death is shown in graphic detail. The next murder is significantly not committed by Myers, but by Earl and the mob of “beer bellies” – they believe they are shooting Myers, but the figure is obscured (to them as well as to us), and the body is in fact that of Ted Hollister.  Not including Sunday, the body count currently stands at minimum six, probably nine – but only five, probably eight, committed by Myers.  The carnage at the police station is ambiguous and it is impossible to glean actual statistical information as the entire sequence happens off-camera.  There is a lot of blood and chaos, but only one corpse is shown.  There were previously three policemen (not including Meeker) in the station earlier in the film, but according to Loomis the bulk of the police was wiped out (“You haven’t got a police force!”).  Myers’ killing spree in Meeker’s house begins with Deputy Logan. His murder is not shown, but his body is.  ‘Promiscuous slut’ Kellie and transgressor Brady both have their deaths filmed completely on camera and in great detail.  After finally grabbing a knife, Myers attacks three “beer bellies” in the back of the truck and throws all of their bodies from the truck (these are shown as scuffles – it is unclear whether they have been stabbed or whether they have been just thrown from the truck).  Earl’s throat is literally ripped out by Myers.  This is Michael’s last murder in Halloween IV, but the final death (despite being “undone” in Halloween IV) is that of Mrs Carruthers, stabbed by Jamie.

Simply put, many assumptions about Halloween IV are unsupported by the text itself.  While Biodrowski’s narrative equation “the virginal baby-sitter will survive; the promiscuous slut will die” may be supported by Halloween, Halloween II and some other slashers, in Halloween IV to reduce the complex demographical information of the body count to this equation is glaringly ignorant of the film’s deeper structures.  Not including the massacre at the police station and Sunday the dog, there are seventeen murders in Halloween IV – the same body count as both of the first two films combined.  Including the police station victims, however, the body count is substantially increased.  Of those seventeen, only two victims can be considered to fall under the category of ‘punished’ teen, the same number that were murdered at the hands of people other than Myers himself.  There are also seven potential teen victims offered in the film; Rachel’s friend Lindsay, the two cheerleaders and their two male companions and Brady’s two friends in the store.  Traditionally, these would all be disposable victims, ripe for the proverbial slasher picking – teens of dubious morality that are given only the barest bones of character to indicate their status as little more than ‘slasher fodder’.  But all seven disappear from the film undeveloped and unscathed, blood red herrings.  What is of significance with the higher body count is that the number of on-screen killings is substantially less than the total number of corpses: even accepting the minimum deaths at the police station as three (the number of police shown in the building earlier in the film, minus Meeker who we see later), there are eleven killings shown on camera, four bodies shown on screen (while the murders were committed off camera) and at least two more policemen who we are only told have been murdered.  For a slasher film it is unusual that half of the killings have been committed off-screen, and the slasher himself does not commit two of those shown on-screen.  Nor, interestingly, are they committed by his traditionally signature knife – even in the sequence where he literally has a knife (the phallic darling of psychoanalytic readings) in his hand, he opts to use his other hand, committing what for all intents and purposes are ‘weaponless’ murders.

Halloween IV may prove unsatisfactory in this regard, as Myers’s frequently off-camera execution of evil is narratively and visually less dominant than we are traditionally used to it seeing in the slasher film.  But this confusion is part of what the film is about: we are meant to be confused, and our ability to identify familiar ethical structures is obscured by literal double vision. We see Myers everywhere – his reflection in a broken mirror, in the doorway of the gas station, we see three Myers surround Meeker’s car.  We see three Jamie’s in her bedroom mirror, we see Rachel die and spring back to life, we see Jamie morph into a young Myers not once but twice.  What we see in Halloween IV and what know in slasher to be good and evil collapse under the pressure of the films own ambiguities. Transcending the usual reversal of good and evil, in Halloween IV it is not a question of melodrama providing the twist, it is that it vanishes altogether as a viable moral framework for the Halloween universe.

In Halloween and Halloween II, pleasure (albeit titillating and/ or perverse) is gained through watching Myers kill.  By being denied these scenes, his position as evil is impacted more through what we believe about him rather than what we have actually witnessed.  The absence of these scenes does not lessen our indirect cognitive understanding of Myers as the killer, but it does remove our direct sensory experience of his crimes. While narrative indicates his body count inHalloween IV is numerically greater than his past spree, it simply does not feel like it; aside from being forbidden to actually see a large number of these murders, there are other, more ethically complex murders in the film such as those Myers himself is not responsible for (Ted Hollister and Mrs Carruthers).

Halloween IV highlights its own ambiguities. It is a film of gaps, of absences, of things unseen and familiar patterns suggested but ultimately unfulfilled.  Murders are committed but we are denied witnessing them. Halloween IVoffers a trail of breadcrumbs of pathos (poor Jamie!) and action (the violence!), but that path does not take us where we expect – to a morally legible conclusion where the killer is, if not killed, then at least suppressed until the next sequel arrives. The significance of Halloween IV lies in its ability to not only the lines between good and evil (and how we identify them within the context of a horror film), but to eradicate them completely. The symbol of virtue (Jamie) is ultimately exposed as aligned with the exact evil that her peers have struggled to protect her from.   And those peers – Rachel, Dr Loomis, Earl and the “beer bellies”, Mr and Mrs Carruthers – are far from clearly legible themselves, and at best redundant.

Halloween IV may reflect a broader crisis of moral uncertainty. Good and evil did not vanish from the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the traditional mode of its representation (one that had been maintained for decades) was changing.  “Who is the villain now?” asks Halloween IV, and the answer is not simply a case of “Michael”, “Jamie”, or even “Jamie and Michael” (Michael is still a killer after all, but – again – the moral legibility of everyone else in the film is also questionable). Rather, the answer is perhaps more rightly, “I don’t even know what a villain is anymore”. Morality and ideology are not interchangeable, but nor are they mutually exclusive.  In the specific instance of Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers – and, indeed, Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers – readings pertaining to the impact of the end of the Cold War to American popular fictions would be possible, the effect of this moral panic upon film certainly warranting further investigation.

Perhaps inadvertently, Halloween IV picks up on a broader cultural crisis active at the time of its production: in the face of a rapidly vanishing enemy with the close of the Cold War, it is unclear quite what concepts like innocence and virtue can mean without an Other to define itself against.  This crisis within the moral occult is of fundamental value not only to melodrama, but also to broader critical discourse that dares to venture outside of traditional investigative paths.  While later 1990s slashers (such as 1996’s Scream and 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer) seem to consciously invite postmodern readings of slasher film, late 1980s slasher almost disappointed critics for not providing the same insight as those examined by the predominantly psychoanalytical model that was so enthusiastically applied to films of the 1970s. While approaches like these are not to be rejected, that their wholesale dominance of horror studies appears to be slowly grinding to an end may allow a continuation of long-overdue analyses of films like Halloween IV.

Evoking a rich generic ancestry of crazed-beasts-gone-wild films from Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Razorback (Russell Mulcahy, 1984) to a slew of werewolf variants, Rogue is the story of a killer crocodile’s reign of terror over a group of tourists visiting a deserted Northern Territory river .The film is positioned amongst the long melo-horror tradition of innocence threatened by pointy-toothed villainy, and it utilises these generic assumptions to subvert broader notions of national identity. Through its sophisticated sound palette, it negotiates the unutterable complexity of Whiteness in contemporary Australia.

When Thomas Elsassear established melodrama as a feasible site for critical investigation in his 1972 essay ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations of the Family Melodrama’, interest in the area was sparked in the context of the films of Douglas Sirk and the so-called ‘woman’s film’ of the 1950s. Later work by critics such as Steve Neale, Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, however, resituates melodrama as a dominant narrative modality, what Gledhill defines as a ‘genre-producing machine’ rather than a genre itself. Melodrama provides the narrative foundations upon which a range of narratives may manifest, predicated upon a belief of a universe that is fundamentally moral in nature as outlined by Peter Brooks’ The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (1976).

The influence of this ‘genre-producing machine’ upon horror is demonstrated in a typical melodramatic scenario: a young girl (white dress, blonde ringlets) is tied to train tracks, screaming. A villain menacingly twirls his moustache as a steam train hurtles towards the girl. Urgency grows as the train draws closer, the spectator wondering, ‘Will the hero arrive in time?’. He does (it is almost always a He), saving the girl and ‘the day’. His act saves not just her life, but restores the moral universe—good has conquered evil. In horror, the key actions may not change, but the area of fascination for the spectator shifts: ‘What will she look like if the train hits? Do I dare look?’. Even if it is that very assumption that its aims to subvert, horror narratives are frequently predicated upon the moral universe constructed by the melodramatic imagination.

Like many horror films with a clearly defined monster, Rogue targets the melodramatic imagination. This is made no clearer than when a beer-fuelled Simon (Stephen Curry) refers to the villainous croc as ‘a steam train with teeth’, drawing an instant parallel with the above scenario. Rogue demonstrates the dominant narrative modality of melodrama within the generic horror text: when innocence is threatened by villainy, that villainy must be conquered (or potentially be conquered) to restore moral equilibrium. Rogue utilises this simple melodramatic structure, but defamiliarizes it and laden’s it with extreme ambivalence to create its final impact. That Rogue adopts a melodramatic framework does not mean it ‘is’ a melodrama as such, of course—rather, it questions the entire category of melodrama in terms of how it relates to the very notion of “Australian-ness”. Melodrama itself is racialised, and the carnivesque nature of the horror genre itself throws the whole category of ‘rogueness’—and Whiteness—into question.

Australian national cinema has historically sat uncomfortably with what it views as imported, ‘Hollywoodised’ aspects such as genre and melodrama. But horror finds itself in a unique situation: despite its clearly non-Indigenous status, Australian horror often caters specifically to popular notion of what Australian films ‘are’ because the open and ambiguous endings that mark the ‘arty’ Australian cinema are also a common generic feature of horror. While spawned from the ‘genre-producing machine’ of melodrama, horror uniquely does not demand happy endings: it doesn’t even necessarily require endings that make sense. Part of the pleasures afforded by the genre—in all its frenzied glory—is that it loves to keep questions open, either from a cynical desire to keep franchise options for the notoriously sequel-friendly genre open, or in ‘classier’ horror, an internal, narrative-driven goal of maintaining dread after the film watching experience is completed. It is a generic function for killers to not really be dead, for ghosts to not be completely exorcised and demons not totally put to rest: for Picnic at Hanging Rock’s Miranda never to return, for Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor to vanish into thin air, and for the Harlequin’s legacy to live on in a small boy with DIY mud-pie eyeliner. Australian horror films are capable of bridging the gap between being ‘real’ Australian films by leaving endings open and inconclusive, but by also satisfying audiences by uniting them with distant (American) audiences under the rubric of the moral universe and the collective moral imagination.

As many have noted, the Gothic feature of ‘forbidden space’ manifests in Australian horror film (and perhaps Australian cinema more generally) as the frequent utilisation of the outback as a setting for narrative action. The outback/bush is represented in Australian cinema (as with other arts) as aged and wise, unfamiliar and alien to white settlers, a paradox of unpredictable beauty with chaotic and extreme violence (or, at least, the threat of violence). The dark and beautiful world of the Gothic is paralleled by this mythology of the Australian landscape in horror, the shadow, mystery and enigma lending themselves frequently to powerful images of danger and isolation. Wolf Creek, Razorback, Night of Fear (Terry Bourke, 1972) and Lost Things (Martin Murphy, 2003) all to varying degrees emphasise how the locally produced horror film engages through this popular image in Australian cinema with a wider mythology about the land as an overwhelming, uncontrollable physical, spiritual and moral force.

Horror has proven to be a highly appropriate forum for specifically Australian concerns, the iconic Little Aussie Battler taking the shape of the downtrodden hero or heroine battling the odds (and landscape) to survive in a display of visual, visceral excess. Horror creates a forum for specific local issues to be examined: what in horror is a standard generic element—the hero-villain, final girl or protagonist who is commonly an out-of-towner—in Australian horror is frequently used to explore aspects of national identity in crisis. Many Australian horror films adhere to the broader convention of the Outsider: all the films previously listed involve travel to a new location where the drama unfolds. Wolf Creek, Razorback and Rogue follow foreign travellers, engaging with this Outsider figure in a way that signifies an Anglo-Australian sense of ‘not belonging’, but simultaneously representing this in a figure that does not identify as Australian. Horror’s fascination with this notion of the Outsider offers a significant vehicle for exploring non-Indigenous tensions and insecurities in their relationship to the land. ‘Natural’ knowledge in Australian horror is often dangerous, not only in the sense that it opens a Pandora’s box of natural experience (such as experienced by Miranda and her cohorts in Picnic at Hanging Rock), but more literally for the Villainous Ocker, represented by Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek and Razorback‘s Baker Brothers.

These murderously resourceful characters replicate familiar Bush Tucker Man mythology, but unlike other representations of this archetype, in horror these skills are rendered immediately violent and threatening. These white men are killers, potential rapists: they may be Masters of their individual domains who have conquered a natural environment their victims cannot, but their moral legibility is perfectly clear. Dominance of the land is pitched at odds against City Slicker social knowledge, driven by a fascination with the moral universe that is frequently stretched to a life-and-death degree of bodily threat. It is within the nuances of this moral spectrum that horror often finds its ability to address and even subvert dominant melodramatic norms.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the battle waged against the giant killer crocodile in Greg McLean’s Rogue. The assumption that the ‘rogue’ of the title is the croc itself is undermined by the final shot: the camera zooms in on the increasingly pixilated newspaper photo of the central protagonist, American travel writer Pete McKell (Michael Vartan). The image of ‘hero Pete’ (he saved the girl and thus the day) blurs in these final moments, drawing striking parallels to the fade-to-nothing departure of Mick Taylor in Mclean’s earlier Wolf Creek. Rogue is as complex as it is daringly simple: while dependant upon a simple melodramatic framework where good versus evil (good people, evil croc), it strives to question that definition, rendering many of its key characters frequently arrogant, often loud, selfish and completely unaware of the hubris entailed with being strangers in a strange land.

Horror’s visceral hypertheatricality allows McLean to work within a framework most suited to imparting the scope and impact of the threat of this ambiguous figure of the ‘rogue’. This need not only be visual: arguably one of the most powerful elements of both Wolf Creek and Rogue is the use of non-verbal sound. This again allows parallels with melodrama, this time in relation to Brooks’ delineation of it as a ‘text of muteness’. The retro-horror sound of the onamatapia-heavy title Wolf Creek (Woof! Creak!) denotes a key fascination with non-verbal sound that permeates Rogue. In horror, melodrama’s traditional focus on action and pathos is predominantly exhibited through physical movement, performative aspects of gender and a well-documented postmodern familiarity with the intertextual referencing—things other than verbal communication. In Slasher film in particular, dialogue is often impotent—it may fill narrative gaps, but it is spectacle that predominantly propels horror. The most remarkable Australian instance of muteness in the horror film is of course Terry Bourke’s Night of Fear, taking it to its logical extreme: a graphically violent horror film that, although filled with sound (screams, groans, music, grunts), has no dialogue as such (think of an Australian gore Rhubarb, Rhubarb. Picnic at Hanging Rock gleans its defining air of ethereal supernature through pan-flutes and an absence of chatter. Aside from some stiffly delivered but necessary basic exposition, conversation in Rogue is word-shaped ambiance: it is the texture and sound of language rather than its literal meaning that signifies its value.

Accents communicate as much as words in Rogue , and they highlight the brazen, pantomime-like simplicity that construct the 2-dimensional racial stereotypes that structure the film’s deliberately crude characterisations. This further emphasies their foreignness: the bumbling and aggressively protective Allen (Geoff Morrell), a Kenneth Williams-esque picture of British stuffiness; the slow-drawling American Everett (Robert Taylor) and his shrill, hysterical wife, Mary Ellen (Caroline Brazier); the too-easygoing Guinness-and-potato-plumped Irish backpacker, Gwen (Celia Ireland). It is the sound of words that carries greater effect than their meaning—the frequent slurred holler of ‘fyuk-in heyl’ by ockers Neil (Sam Worthington) and Collin (Damien Richardson) contrasts in tone, volume and intent with soft-spoken American journalist Pete: it is the quality of their voices as much as what they say that contains the melodramatic punch. While different nations are represented, the sound of chatter from the occupants of the boat reduced to an indistinguishable hum of Whiteness.

The significance of Brooks’ notion of muteness can be seen most effectively in the film’s final thirty minutes in the showdown between Pete and the croc. Aside from brief cries, Pete is relatively wordless. The croc-killing climax is executed with a distinct absence of verbal utterance: Pete and the croc don’t have much to discuss outside of the odd exclamation from the American journalist: their battle takes place in a realm outside of language. While dependent upon visual action, Mclean opts for a clear gestural palette during this climax: pietistic imagery is utilized on no less than three occasions, rendering an awareness of the heroine Kate’s (Radha Mitchell) Christ-like sacrifice inescapable. The oversized tree stump Pete uses to finally slaughter the croc attains a Carry On! level of outrageousness with its crotch placement reaching a virile 45-degree angle. The melodramatic aspects in both story and image are excessive to a point of comical silliness: notably, this contrasts starkly with the use of sound.

Whole subplots wordlessly open and close in Rogue. Taken on dialogue alone, the only indication of that Russell (John Jarrett) is a widow is cruise-leader Kate’s observation that he has two tickets. In a moment of pure melodramatic excess, the pathos-dripping image as he empties ashes into the river garners an even stronger heartstring tug when Cherry (Mia Wasikowska), whose pale and thin mother Elizabeth (Heather Mitchell) was previously shown mechanically downing pills, catches his eye. Instantly, she understands his loss. He knows that she knows. And we know that they both know. After Alan dies (almost immediate punishment for his fit of excessive and hysterical selfishness to save himself and his daughter at the expense of the rest of the groups safety) a brief shot shows Russell huddled with Elizabeth and Cherry. In this fleeting image, the restoration of the moral universe is suddenly, silently but vividly possible. It need not be maintained throughout the rest of the film, but that one moment consists of the melodramatic promise that order—just maybe—might be restored.

The croc himself is wordless, but not silent. The attention paid to the minutest detail of sound in Rogue takes pains to highlight similarities between its monstrous, bass-like groan. While the swag of differing English-speaking accents suggest an Anglo centre, the rest of the soundtrack emphasizes their difference but refuses to privilege that sound—White Voices become another surface atmosphere. Registered deeper down the scale are the groans of the croc itself, the bass-like roar of motors, and a diverse musical score utilizing everything from musical saws to knitting needles, laden with Indian Classical violin, sound sculptures by Rod Cooper, and most strikingly, Jida Gulpilil’s renditions of the songs of Bobby Bunanggurr. These sounds combine to effectively expel the conglomerate of internally fractured Whiteness (in terms of the cast themselves and the moral hyperactivity that dominates the melodramatic structure) from within the depths of the film itself. There are two worlds in Rogue —the surface buzz of high-pitched, ineffectual chatter of the tourists, and the non-verbal depths of the world they invade. That world is not specifically Indigenous—notably, it is simply un-white. They are outcasts in sound. Pete straddles the two spheres, Rogue -like: but rather than endowing him with the status of the melodramatic hero, he joins Mick Taylor as he fades into a mythic Never Never of mute ambivalence.

Rogue engages melodrama’s penchant for muteness to expose and undermine the very structures upon which the narrative is constructed. It racialises melodrama itself—melodrama is white, and its stories of strong heroes, virtuous heroines and evil villains are rendered as out of place in the Australian outback as much as the awkward tourists themselves. The pretence of a melodramatic framework is offered with the sole intent of collapsing it, rendering the defeat of the killer crocodile both strangely hollow and infinitely satisfying. The hero saved the day, the girl and conquered the villain, but instead of victory, we are left with a faded stare, a glimpse of a victory that should be tangible but, in this environment, is reduced to something far less substantial. It is through its melodramatic excess that Rogue at its core explores the complexities that govern Australia’s unique relationship with the moral universe that governs the melodramatic imagination. It is the place of horror within this imagination that makes it the ideal forum to explore notions surrounding the deeply subjective nature of ‘the Other’ in Australian film.