Crooked Numbers

Our theme this week
Horror film franchises from the 1970s to today

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (6 films, 1974–2006)
Tuesday         —   Friday the 13th (12 films, 1980–2009)
Wednesday    —   A Nightmare on Elm Street (9 films, 1984–2009)
Thursday        —   Saw (7 films, 2004–2010)

Halloween

The franchise films
1.  Halloween (1978), John Carpenter, director
2.  Halloween II (1981), Rick Rosenthal, director
3.  Halloween III:  Season of the Witch (1982), Tommy Lee Wallace, director
4.  Halloween 4:  The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Dwight H. Little, director
5.  Halloween 5:  The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), Dominique Othenin-Girard, director
6.  Halloween:  The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), Joe Chappelle, director
7.  Halloween H20:  20 Years Later (1998), Steve Miner, director
8.  Halloween:  Resurrection (2002), Rick Rosenthal, director
9.  Halloween (2007), Rob Zombie, director
10.  Halloween II (2009), Rob Zombie, director

The villain
Michael Myers, portrayed by Tony Moran / Will Sandin (age 6) / Nick Castle (The Shape) (1), Dick Warlock (The Shape) / Adam Gunn (Young Michael) (2), George P. Wilbur / Erik Preston (Young Michael) (4), Don Shanks (5), George P. Wilbur (6), Chris Durand (7), Brad Loree (8), Tyler Mane / Daeg Faerch (9), Tyler Mane / Chase Wright Vanek (Young Michael) (10) (Michael Myers did not appear in Halloween III)

Overview
If you’re a horror fan with discriminating taste—we know you’re out there somewhere—this may be the one for you.  The first of the series is the gold standard of low-budget mask-wearing psycho-killer slasher films.  John Carpenter’s Halloween features some fine performers, including veteran English actor Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis in her “scream queen” debut, a memorable score composed by Carpenter himself, and a story that relies more on suspense than depictions of gore.

Michael Myers begins his killing early, as a 6-year-old, when he takes a kitchen knife to his older sister while their parents are out for the night.  Fifteen years later Myers escapes from the sanitarium and returns to his Indiana hometown.  The body count of teenage babysitters begins to mount.  Here we see a masked murderer, and it makes perfect movie sense.  It is Halloween, after all.  That face on the mask, if it looks at all familiar, is none other than William Shatner.  Frightening, huh.  Why Shatner?  The story is, the budget was tight and the Captain Kirk mask was the cheapest at store, just a buck-ninety-eight.

In the first of the films, Myers stalks the sitter played by Curtis, while being hunted by the doctor played by Pleasence.  The good doctor turns out to be a good shot, yet after he plugs Myers with six gunshots, Myers’s body disappears.  The sequel, three years later, picks up where the original left off.  The main cast returned, but in the end, to lesser effect.  III was a one-off, unrelated to the other films, and when Myers returned for 4 and more, it was often a retelling of genre clichés.  The 2007 and 2009 films rebooted the franchise, with heavy-metal frontman-turned-film director Rob Zombie handling the script and directing.

In 2006 the Library of Congress selected Halloween, the 1978 film, for the National Film Registry, a rare distinction for a horror movie.  It’s been a highly influential slasher film, and it kicked off one of the most popular franchises of the genre.  Production for the next in the series, a 3D version, was shut down last year because of money problems, but ultimately it will take more than that to kill off Michael Myers.

1.  Béla or Boris?  Which icon of classic Hollywood horror starred in the movies below, Béla Lugosi or Boris Karloff?

Dracula (1931)
Frankenstein (1931)
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
White Zombie (1932)
The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
The Mummy (1932)
Island of Lost Souls (1932)
The Black Room (1935)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Murder By Television (1935)

2.  Match these movies based on works of Stephen King with the director of the film.

Carrie (1976)
The Shining (1980)
The Dead Zone (1983)
Misery (1990)
Dolores Claiborne (1995)
Apt Pupil (1998)
Dreamcatcher (2003)
The Mist (2007)

David Cronenberg
Frank Darabont
Brian De Palma
Taylor Hackford
Lawrence Kasdan
Stanley Kubrick
Rob Reiner
Bryan Singer

3.  Let’s play “I Am Not a Witch.”  Name the movie witches who speak the lines below.

a.  “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”  (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)
b.  “Just try and stay out of my way.  Just try!  I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!”  (The Wizard of Oz)
c.  “Rock-a-bye rabbit, in the hot oven, into my mouth for dinner I’ll shoven…” (Bewitched Bunny, animated short, sung to Bugs Bunny)
d.  “Devil’s Snare, Devil’s Snare.  ‘It’s deadly fun, but will sulk in the sun!’  That’s it!  Devil’s Snare hates sunlight!  Lumos Solem!” (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)
e.  “Now I am the ruler of all the ocean!  The waves obey my every whim!” (The Little Mermaid)

4.  The following ghost stories appear in alphabetical order.  Place the films in order of their release.

Blithe Spirit
Field of Dreams
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
Ghostbusters
The Haunting
Poltergeist
The Ring
The Sixth Sense
Topper

5.  Saving the scariest for last, a quiz on elections!  Name the office for which the candidate ran in the following films.

Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) in Citizen Kane
Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) in Election
Bill McKay (Robert Redford) in The Candidate
Jack Stanton (John Travolta) in Primary Colors
Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) in Bulworth
John Iselin (James Gregory) in The Manchurian Candidate

Answers here.

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Crooked Numbers

Our theme this week
Horror film franchises from the 1970s to today

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (6 films, 1974–2006)
Tuesday         —   Friday the 13th (12 films, 1980–2009)
Wednesday    —   A Nightmare on Elm Street (9 films, 1984–2009)

Saw

The franchise films
(short) Saw (2003), James Wan, director (sometimes referred to as “Saw 0.5″)
1.  Saw (2004), James Wan, director
2.  Saw II (2005), Darren Lynn Bousman, director
3.  Saw III (2006), Darren Lynn Bousman, director
4.  Saw IV (2007), Darren Lynn Bousman, director
5.  Saw V (2008), David Hackl, director
6.  Saw VI (2009), Kevin Greutert, director
7.  Saw 3D:  The Final Chapter (2010), Kevin Greutert, director (opens in the U.S. tomorrow)

The villain
Jigsaw/John Kramer, portrayed by Tobin Bell (1–7)

Overview
I suppose every decade gets the horror it deserves.   The 1970s had its slasher films, the past decade torture porn.  There’s an argument to be made that the Saw films are not, strictly speaking, torture porn.  It’s about as convincing as the argument that waterboarding isn’t torture.  Remember that one?

That’s not to say that the Saw franchise is quite the same thing as Hostel and its sequel.  Distinctions can be made—there’s an ongoing debate, actually—but however you want to slice it, the horror films of today go a lot further, and darker, than those slasher films of the ’70s that were then the cutting edge, so to speak.

The conceit of Saw is a diabolical killer named John Kramer, a.k.a. Jigsaw, who does not kill his victims directly.  He captures people, then tests them in a series of games—death traps, really—in which the victims have to maim, or kill, themselves or each other to achieve some macabre objective.  The so-called games are elaborately constructed, with each device intented to teach a lesson to its victims.  There’s a cold calculation to the Saw franchise that puts it far beyond horror films of the past.  It almost makes the vengeance of a Jason Voorhees seem understandable, if not sympathetic.  Like Jason, and most of the killers this week, the Jigsaw character is often seen wearing a mask, a pig mask, in fact.  Every killer needs a prop.

The good news, if you’re a Saw fan, the newest installment, in 3D, opens in theaters this weekend.  The good news, if you’re not a fan, it’s called The Final Chapter.  You can hope, but by now you should know nothing’s ever ”final” in the world of horror.

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Crooked Numbers

Our theme this week
Horror film franchises from the 1970s to today

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (6 films, 1974–2006)
Tuesday         —   Friday the 13th (12 films, 1980–2009)

A Nightmare on Elm Street

The franchise films
1.  A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Wes Craven, director
2.  A Nightmare on Elm Street 2:  Freddy’s Revenge (1985), Jack Sholder, director
3.  A Nightmare on Elm Street 3:  Dream Warriors (1987), Chuck Russell , director
4.  A Nightmare on Elm Street 4:  The Dream Master (1988), Renny Harlin, director
5.  A Nightmare on Elm Street 5:  The Dream Child (1989), Stephen Hopkins, director
6.  Freddy’s Dead:  The Final Nightmare (1991), Rachel Talalay , director
7.  Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), Wes Craven , director
8.  Freddy vs. Jason (2003), Ronny Yu , director
9.  A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Samuel Bayer , director

The villain
Freddy Krueger, portrayed by Robert Englund (1–8), Jackie Earle Haley (9) (Englund played the character for the 1988-1990 TV anthology series, Freddy’s Nightmares)

Overview
One of Wes Craven’s inspirations for Freddy Krueger was the song “Dream Weaver,” a top ten hit of 1976 for Gary Wright.  Now that’s a scary thought.  I must have heard that song a thousand times—and I can’t say I didn’t want to scream sometimes—but I somehow managed not to go off the deep end.  Craven, it appears, was not so lucky—though whatever trip he took to the dark side turned out to be a lucrative one.

A Nightmare on Elm Street played with the idea of mixing dreams and reality (long before Christopher Nolan was on the scene).  Freddy Krueger appears as a stalker who inhabits the dreams of teenagers in Springwood, Ohio.  Years before Krueger had been a child murderer.  Released on a technicality, he was killed by the town’s angry parents, and as the series kicks off, he returns to wreak his vengeance.  Teens on Elm Street mysteriously die, apparent murders and suicides, but it’s actually nightmares of Freddy that do them in.  A deformed figure with a razor-studded glove and fedora, Freddy kills his victims in their dreams, thus causing their death in real life as well.

In the first of the films, Nancy Thompson loses friends and has terrifying nightmares of Freddy herself.  She struggles to overcome her fear, and when she does, she destroys whatever power he had to do her harm.  Freddy returns in other films to continue to terrorize the town’s teens and families, wiping out the children of poor Springwood.  In The Final Nightmare, a resourceful doctor pulls Freddy from the dream world and she finally dispatches him with a pipe bomb.   But in the world of horror films, there is nothing that is “final” (not if audiences continue to buy tickets).  Freddy has made a few more appearances on the screen, including this spring’s remake of the original.  The film made more than a hundred million at the box office, and the nightmares on Elm Street are a sure bet to continue.

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Crooked Numbers

Our theme this week
Horror film franchises from the 1970s to today

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (6 films, 1974–2006)

Friday the 13th

The franchise films
1.  Friday the 13th (1980), Sean S. Cunningham, director
2.  Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), Steve Miner, director
3.  Friday the 13th Part III (1982), Steve Miner, director
4.  Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Joseph Zito, director
5.  Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985), Danny Steinmann, director
6.  Jason Lives:  Friday the 13th Part VI (1986), Tom McLoughlin, director
7.  Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), John Carl Buechler, director
8.  Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), Rob Hedden, director
9.  Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), Adam Marcus, director
10.  Jason X (2001), James Isaac, director
11.  Freddy vs. Jason (2003), Ronny Yu, director
12.  Friday the 13th (2009), Marcus Nispel, director

The villain
Jason Voorhees, portrayed by Ari Lehman (1), Warrington Gillette (2), Richard Brooker (3), Ted White (4), C.J. Graham (6), Kane Hodder (7, 8, 9), Ken Kirzinger / Spencer Stump (Young Jason) (11), Derek Mears / Caleb Guss (Young Jason) (12); in Part V, Dick Wieand portrayed Roy Burns, a copycat killer fashioned on Jason

Overview
Jason Voorhees died at summer camp long before the series begins.  A promising start, you might say, but Jason is the boy who does not stay dead.  That’s a recurring element through the series of films, many of them set at Camp Crystal Lake, where Jason drowned in 1957.  If only the counselors had saved him, but the counselors were doing what counselors do best, having sex.  That leads to another recurring element:  he and she who have sex must die.  A double murder and other unfortunate events close the camp for decades to come.  The first film takes place when the abandoned camp is ready to re-open.  That’s when the body count for camp counselors begins to escalate.  Knives, arrows, axes—there’s a lot of slashing going on.  A visit from Mrs. Voorhees (the original “mama grisly“?) gets violent, and when she loses her head to one of the surviving staff, it’s the corpse of Jason himself who appears for the final attack.

The franchise got a lot of mileage from the same basic story.  Counselors come to camp, get horny, and die.  Someone kills Jason, but not really.  Jason’s trademark hockey mask makes its debut in the third film (in 3D).  Even after a Final Chapter (part 4) and a Final Friday (part 9), the series—like Jason—refuses to die.  In 2003, Freddy vs. Jason brought together Jason with the villain from the series A Nightmare on Elm Street.  The 2009 film, same title as the original, was a reboot of the franchise.  The latest two films earned more than a combined $200 million worldwide.  As you should know by now, don’t think you’ve seen the last of Jason.

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Crooked Numbers

They’ve been making horror movies since the early days of cinema.  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu are silent classics.  Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy rank among the popular hits of the 1930s.  Otherworldly creatures hit the screen during the ’50s, in movies such as The Thing and The Blob.

The horror genre covers many kinds of films and villains—mad geniuses, monsters, zombies, vampires, the supernatural—but in the 1970s a new kind of horror movie was born.  The danger we had to fear was no longer out there, but more likely right next door.  The villains may have been our neighbors or the new kids in school.  Maybe we knew them, or maybe not, but the deranged behavior they exhibited onscreen was unlike anything anyone had seen before. The production code was no longer in effect to constrain what was permitted, and new tools allowed depiction of gore in a more realistic manner, even on a low budget.  With Vietnam, Watergate, and the sexual revolution all tearing at society, the culture had a lot to process.  Filmmakers found new ways to scare the bejesus out of audiences.

The early slasher films owed a debt to Alfred Hitchcock, whose Psycho in 1960 must have been an inspiration for many of them.  Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, also from 1960, broke similar ground; the film about a London serial killer had thrust moviegoers into a new world of sensation, and helped create an appetite for what was to come.

Slasher films didn’t win raves or awards, but they did win—and continue to win—a loyal audience.  The appeal of the films is not like that of most movies.  We don’t go just to find out what happens or to see who’s in it.  We go for the visceral experience.  We go to feed our nightmares.  We go to test ourselves—to see if we can survive.

The horror films featured this week are among the most successful at getting under the skin of the people who watch them.  These are not just films with sequels, but bona fide franchises, with series of numbers appended to their titles so we can keep them straight.  (Crooked numbers, in the sports world, refers to numbers greater than one, especially the numbers generated when a team is running up the score.)  Each of the franchises has at least six films to date, and a couple of them number in double digits.

Our theme this week
Horror film franchises from the 1970s to today

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The franchise films
1.  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Tobe Hooper, director
2.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), Tobe Hooper, director
3.  Leatherface:  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), Jeff Burr, director
4.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre:  The Next Generation (1994), Kim Henkel, director
5.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Marcus Nispel, director
6.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre:  The Beginning (2006), Jonathan Liebesman, director

The villain
Leatherface, portrayed by Gunnar Hansen (1), Bill Johnson (2), R.A. Mihailoff (3), Robert Jacks (4), Andrew Bryniarski (5, 6)

Overview
Leatherface and his inbred family of cannibals run a gas station somewhere on the backroads of Texas.  Pity the poor travelers who stop to refuel and find the deranged, chainsaw-loving clan who make a practice of abducting and murdering their customers.  (And if a chainsaw isn’t handy, a meat hook will do.)  Leatherface gets his name from the variety of masks that he wears, made from the skin of his victims.  Shocking?  Well, yes it is.  Good to know this is a fictional story, yet the “inspiration” for Leatherface was a real-life figure named Ed Gein, a Wisconsin murderer who had a certain taste for the skin and bones of his victims.  Gein was also the model for a couple of other famous movie villains, Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter.

Tobe Hooper, as director, co-writer, and producer of the first in the series, deserves much of the credit (or blame) for the franchise, as well as other slasher films to come.  (Wes Craven, with The Last House on the Left, in 1972, was another key instigator.)  The original in the Chain Saw series was a very low-budget affair, made for $140,000, but a big moneymaker at the box office, taking in more than $30 million.  The sequels had bigger budgets and varying returns.  The 2003 movie, a remake of the original but with a somewhat different storyline, was the top grosser of the franchise, earning more than $100 million worldwide.

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Six Packs

Our theme this week
Rat Packs, and other “Packs” that made movies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Holmby Hills Rat Pack
Tuesday         —   Rat Pack
Wednesday    —   New Rat Pack
Thursday        —   Brat Pack

Four “Packs” down, two to go, according to our theme title, so let’s double up today as we close out the week of Six Packs.

Frat Pack

We’ve come a long way since the days of Bogart and Sinatra.  Just about anybody can be in the Pack these days.

The Frat Pack should have been the collective name for John Belushi, Tim Matheson, Peter Riegert, and the guys from Animal House in 1978.  They must not have been thinking at the time.  After the Brat Pack hit it big in the ’80s, the Frat Pack seemed too good a label not to use for someone.  At the time of the 2003 comedy Old School, featuring a group of thirty-somethings, played by Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, and Will Ferrell, who start a fraternity, the entertainment media had found their guys.

The actors usually identified as the Frat Pack may be a shade on the old side, but they do have the virtue of never having grown up.  Other members of the Pack include Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and the second Wilson brother, Owen.  Steve Carell may have gotten a late start, but he’s now one of the brothers too.

The Frat Pack filmography includes some of the more popular comedies of the decade or so.  Not many (or any) have to do with college life, but on the other hand, no one can deny that they are often sophomoric.

They can be pretty funny too.  Here are a few of the films:

Meet the Parents (2000):  Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson.

Zoolander (2001):  Ben Stiller (director too), Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn.

Starsky & Hutch (2004):  Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell.

Anchorman:  The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004):  Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson.

Tropic Thunder (2008):  Ben Stiller (director too), Jack Black.

Splat Pack

It’s no mystery how these guys earned their name.  Horror.  This gang is into the gory and the gruesome, and in the past decade they have taken a not-so-respectable genre and pushed it to new levels of outrage.  This Pack is not a group of actors, but directors.  They don’t get big budgets to make movies—usually $10 million or less—but they spend it to maximum effect.  They know how to push the audience’s buttons, and they have earned a loyal following of fans, mostly young ones, for their films.

The Splat Pack includes directors who are among the big names in horror working today:  Alexandre Aja, Darren Lynn Bousman, Neil Marshall, Eli Roth, James Wan, and the aptly dubbed Rob Zombie (not his birth name).  This group aims to push limits, and it’s no surprise they’ve been criticized for going too far.  When Darren Lynn Bousman, twenty-something director of Saw III, was in a dispute with the Motion Picture Association of America, which claimed his 2006 film was too dark, here’s what Bousman had to say:  ”That’s what I set out to do!  It’s a horror movie.”

A short list from the Splat Pack filmography, among them some of the sickest, scariest, most over-the-line, and most violent movies ever made:  Cabin Fever (2003, Eli Roth), Saw (2004, James Wan), Hostel (2005, Eli Roth), Saw II (2005, Darren Lynn Bousman), The Hills Have Eyes (2006, Alexander Aja), Halloween (2007, Rob Zombie), and Scanners (2009, Darren Lynn Bousman).

In the past decade we have witnessed unspeakable violence, in this country and around the world.  We have been engaged in bloodier wars than we’ve seen in many years.  We have seen debates about the use of torture as a matter of national policy.  It’s no surprise to me that we’ve seen a rise in ultraviolence at the cineplex.  There’s something going on, and like it or not, these filmmakers, and their audience, seem to be in touch with it.

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What’s the Score?

Have you heard any good movies lately? 

Film is much more than a visual medium.  Many movies we cannot think of without hearing their unforgettable scores.  Some of the greatest musicians of our time compose for film, and this week, let’s hear from them.  With a vast selection to choose from, we’ll focus on scores spanning just a few short years, a time when the film music, it seems to me, was in its golden age.

I’ll be keeping my comments to a minimum this week.  Let’s listen to music.

Our theme this week
Unforgettable film scores of the 1960s

Bernard Herrmann:  “Psycho” (1960)

About Bernard Herrmann

• American, 1911-1975; active in film 1941-1975
• Educated at New York University and the Juilliard School
• Best known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock during the 1950s and ’60s (he famously changed Hitchcock’s mind about the shower scene in Psycho, for which the director originally intended to have no music)
• One of the most original and innovative of film composers (his experimentations included the Theremin in the score for The Day the Earth Stood Still)

Honors

• Academy Awards:  1 Oscar, 5 nominations
• Two scores among the top 25 American film scores chosen by the AFI in 2005 (Psycho, #4; Vertigo, #12)

Select list of film credits

• Citizen Kane (1941)
• The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
• The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
• Anna and the King of Siam (1946)
• Portrait of Jennie (1948)
• On Dangerous Ground (1951)
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• The Trouble with Harry (1955)
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
• The Wrong Man (1956)
• Vertigo (1958)
• North by Northwest (1959)
• Psycho (1960)
• Cape Fear (1962)
• Marnie (1964)
• Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
• Taxi Driver (1976)

Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock, director
John L. Russell, director of photography

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