The blood doesn’t get bloodier and the implications don’t get grimmer than in the next two films in Horror Madness.
First we have one of horror’s darkest and most disturbing tales, Wes Craven’s 1972 breakthrough Last House on the Left:
And in the other corner we’ve got giallo master Mario Bava’s characteristically stylish Five Dolls for an August Moon:
See the introduction and full slate here http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.
I paired these films together, but without a real plan for how to talk about them together. There are obvious similarities, as far as plot and then go: but these are similarities that a whole host of slasher films share. They’re about people getting tortured, and murdered, and seeking revenge. They’re about how you’re never really safe anywhere, or with anyone. That’s par for the horror course.
It does go deeper than that. Both films are very much products of the early 70s, when the good vibes of the hippy era had fully curdled what with assassinations, wars, political scandals, and serial killers. Young people don’t save the world in either film; they’re either naive victims, too headstrong to understand how much protection they need, or they’re dangerous killers themselves, people without roots or conscience or any social guardrails keeping them in place. The Manson murders are all over these films, especially Craven’s. There’s a sense that the conflict between generations can’t help but boil over into horrific violence: that neither side of the gap feels it owes anything to the other side. Kids are killing parents and parents are killing kids (the Vietnam war is all over these films too).
The thematic similarities make the differences all the more stark. Five Dolls for an August Moon, is, like all Bava films, beautiful. It’s almost too beautiful: it’s slick and stylish. The dead women are, appropriately, treated like dolls. Their dead bodies are inert, naked, often covered or wrapped in plastic. They’re like Barbies. I don’t usually find Bava’s films to be especially misogynistic, at least no more so than the films of any other horror director. But the beautiful dead women in this one are so lifeless, so lovingly photographed in their dead beauty, that the film makes me a little sick to my stomach. I used the word “slick” above and it’s the most appropriate one, I think. There’s little of the chaotic, hothouse flower-like beauty of my favorite Bava films. This one is cold and commercial. For all its violence, it’s awfully clean.
Which is something you can’t accuse Last House on the Left of being. Craven’s film is the opposite of slick; it’s grimy and sordid. Its lack of budget shows in every shot. Instead of a glamorous ad, the aesthetic here is that of a seedy porn film, and I doubt that comparison would offend Craven, who worked in porn before he made the switch to horror. I’ve written in this space before about horror and comedy being sister genres; less comfortable is the fact that pornography is their other, neglected and shameful sister. Horror and pornography both deal in raising tension and then resolving it, in indulging voyeuristic cravings, in creating a visceral need for satisfaction or catharsis and then fulfilling that need. Craven knew what he was doing when he shot Last House on the Left this way; I think he wanted you to be a little disgusted with yourself for watching it. He wanted you to be as invested in the desire for violence as (at least some of) the characters are, and then he wants you to be ashamed of it.
Which is as it should be. On the face of it, LHotL is the more cynical film; the villains largely succeed in that the victims themselves become monsters. There’s nobody to root for or enjoy. It pushes your face in the violence, while FDfaAM keeps you at a bit of a remove. But the darkness and harshness of LHotL is in fact reflective of an almost heartbreaking sincerity and purity of mind: it reflects a worldview that still considers violence ugly and shocking. According to Craven, violence should never be made pretty and wrapped in plastic and put in a box to be sold. It’s ugly; it should stay ugly. It should make you feel sick and ashamed. Making an ugly, sordid film is treating violence and social decay with the seriousness they deserve.
Bava’s more removed, stylish approach works for me a lot of the time, but less well here. They’re both horror masters, who will both return to this project, but this fight is won by Wes Craven.