the TV set

"They look just like you and I, but inside - inside they're...different."

In the early 90s, nothing was better than hunkering down for Friday nights with Rhonda Shear (and sometimes Saturdays with Gilbert Gottfried).  Heaven is a double feature comprised of Can't Buy Me Love and The Howling: Part 4.  I remember the palpable thrill that can only be derived from being twelve years old and desperately trying to stay awake throughout both USA Up All Night movies.  Coming out of the MTV years, I think we all took for granted that TV wouldn't always be rock'n roll.

As long as there's been television, there's been cheap and easy late-night horror programming - the two go together like Kristin Chenoweth and twitter.  Whether staying Up All Night with Rhonda or hiking across town to the local video store and being lured by the siren song of a VHS box cover, one of the best elements of Pre-Blockbuster video culture was the element of discovery.

I miss being able to put my faith in late-night horror hosts and video store hipsters - the intimacy and trust implicit in that experience. Ticking through Netflix isn't the same.  Times have changed.  Even when Elvira came back to syndication a couple years ago, something was off.  Elvira still looks exactly the same as she did in 1987, but the revival of her late night shtick (using the same exact formula as it did in its original run) only demonstrated that we can't go back, we can only move forward.  

Here in LA, we're fortunate enough to have repertory theatres like Cinefamily and the New Beverly that drag out the classics week after week to expose a whole new generation to the joy of cinephilia. Nostalgia and kitsch are back in the hipster zeitgeist where they belong.  The good folks over at Shout Factory (the good people who brought us the Jem and Thirtysomething DVDs) were paying attention to this rash of sold-out horror screenings (each more obscure than the last) and Scream Factory was born.   A lot has been made of Scream Factory's recent slew of blu-ray restorations and the hype is well earned.   They're rapidly becoming the Criterion Collection of horror.  Now we can all can host our very own curated late-night movie marathons!

It’s thanks to Scream Factory that I discovered my favorite film of the summer, The Video Dead.

I know I can be a hard bitch, but once in a while a movie comes along that sweeps me off my feet and makes me feel like a giddy eleven year old sneaking downstairs late at night to watch scrambled pay-per-view in the living room with the volume turned all the way down. The Video Dead is such a film. 

With an electric synth score and prominently featuring many "actors" who wear high-waisted denim and appear to struggle with the English language, this movie has it all.  The Video Dead is about a brother and sister named Jeff and Susy who inherit an indestructible television that zombies come out of unless it’s covered in mirrors - aka: it's the stuff that pre-adolescent dreams are made of.

Last month, I was heading out to a party in Laguna and I couldn't decide which shoes to wear.  I've developed a weird habit of leaving yesterday’s shoes outside the front door – so I was trying on a couple pairs of dress shoes on my front porch when a platinum blonde barefoot girl charges at me.  Apparently I have a new neighbor.  Within three minutes, I was informed that she loves gay people and that I shouldn't get upset if I hear her yelling “Faggot” because she’s family and that her Facebook wall is full of rainbow flags.  Then she asked if I was a bottom and invited me to a party hosted by one of the Real Housewives of Miami.

Miami?  Really?  Anyone with a lick of common sense would know that I like The Real Housewives of New York.  Pay attention, please!  Stone-faced, I told her I liked her pedicure and pad-locked my door.  

This is basically what happens to my namesake protagonist in The Video Dead. 

Jeff doesn't like to wash or change his clothes.  He lives with his sister, Susy, who is a college freshman majoring in aerobics with a sensible minor in "Music Videos".  She just bought her first house.  An obnoxious blonde girl ingratiates herself to her new neighbors and the next thing you know, zombies are pouring out of the television.

This is why we must avoid talking to strangers (especially manic girls who think they're sexy)!

When the zombies start doing what zombies are wont to do, Jeff takes to the woods with a creepy old man and a chainsaw.

You know I love a movie where the boy takes on a Final Girl role and this is a good one - Jeff runs and falls and yelps and even gets tied up.  Watch out, Amy Steele, somebody's coming for your spot!

Shot on 16mm, The Video Dead was a movie made for the booming '80s home entertainment market – produced fast, cheap and locally and then gussied up with fantastic box art to spark a thousand adolescent imaginations for thirty years to come.  This is the pulp nonsense movie that those V/H/S movies wish they could be.

We're older than we ever intended to be, but thanks to Scream Factory, we can relive the majesty of Up All Night horror movie marathons in the comfort of our own living rooms without having to stay up all night or having the face the indignity of waiting in a line outside a sold-out screening with 100 fanboys in black t-shirts loudly talking at each other.  The future has its perks.

Everybody be quiet, I have something to say.

While we should be toasting the first Birthday of Now Kindly Undo These Straps, I am interrupting our regularly scheduled gay shit for an important message.

It has come to my attention that a lot of little gay pumpins have been killing themselves lately. This is not okay.  This is not amusing or fabulous.  Kids, DO NOT kill yourselves. It's not worth it.

Sure, our government hates us. Yes, we aren’t supposed to shop at Target because they hate us too. Of course, women in politics speak a lot of nonsense - they don’t know how to apply their own eyemakeup!  You have to take heart, dolls, that it really does get better. These people are not you.  This time in your life hurts like hell, I know. We all have been there. I had to hitch-hike in the pouring rain on Christmas Eve after being thrown out of the the house at fourteen.  I couldn't even be gay with another boy until I was 18 because there was no one remotely cute enough to be gay with and Joe Seely still won't return my calls...Who cares?!  We ALL have our stories and it does get SO much better, I promise.

Believe it or not, being gay is not about Liza Minnelli or even Faye Dunaway.  For better or worse, being gay is about being an outcast.  Being gay means that you sometimes get called "Faggot" for buying Haagen Daz at the drugstore.  Being gay means it's socially acceptable for your neighbors to put up signs saying that your family isn't legitimate during political campaigns and it's okay for them to throw rocks at your car when no one's looking.  Being gay means the president can go on network television and say that you're what's wrong with this country.  But it also means that you're prettier, smarter, and faster than the rest of them! I, for one, wouldn't trade that for a lifetime of acceptance.

It is a scientifically proven fact that anyone hateful in high school (including teachers) will be morbidly obese in ten years.  They are going to always live in the same town their parents grew up in.  They will embark in loveless marriages and treat each other terribly because that is all that anyone has expected of them.  This is not your story. You won't even remember the names of these monsters in five years, I promise.

Now pick yourself off that dirty bathroom floor, put on the Exorcist 2 soundtrack and dance.

Remember what Bette Midler used to say:

“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke!”

I love you very much.
xoxo

my ex-boyfriend lies

"Lately we’re just sort of edited for television."

By the early ’90s, after a decade-long onslaught of mass-horror-consumption, America seemed to have had its fill. Audiences were far more interested in psycho-sexual thrillers than they were in hacking and slashing maniacs. From serial killing trans tweens to telekinetic camp counselors, we’d seen it all. Nothing could shock us. We were a generation raised on horror movie clichés.  Franchise horror was going the way of Faye Dunaway’s career. We were ready for something new. 

Wes Craven, hardly content to sit by the sidelines or to rest on his long list of credentials, saw potential in this fear famine. Thus, the meta-horror film was born.

I remember the night I had my mom drop me off at the Liberty Tree Mall after school to see Wes Craven’s New Nightmare(1994) like it was yesterday. 

It was autumn and it was dark and there was lots of mist in the air.  It was a perfect night made more perfect by the film. This was no sequel! This was a horror movie about the people who made the horror movies - Wes Craven, Heather Langenkamp, New Line CEO Bob Shaye – each integral to making Nightmare on Elm Street and each falling prey to the monster they helped create.  There had been nothing like New Nightmare before and there’s been nothing quite like it since.  

New Nightmare was about adult nightmares; it was about show business.  Horrible things weren’t just happen to small town teenagers.  Wes was examining and poking fun at a political climate that blamed horror movies for real life killings and violence. In hindsight,  this movie was merely the testing ground for something much larger in scale: a horror movie about what horror movies have made us into.  

He made a scary movie about people obsessed with scary movies.  He made a movie about us! Walking a finest of lines between genuine horror and parody, this was all proof of concept for Scream (1996).

“I’m sorry my traumatized life is an inconvenience to you and your perfect existence.”

Does growing up with a crazy mother mean that I'm gonna wind up crazy too?  Does the fact that my father was abusive mean that I'm gonna lose it one day and wind up punching holes into walls?  These are the things that used to keep me up all night worrying. I'm not alone. Sydney Prescott's mother was deemed a slutbag by her bougie NorCal town and it’s got her all kinds of torn up.  Needless to say, Sydney’s in no rush to start having sex herself.  

Can you have a whore for a mother and not wind up a whore yourself?  Who knows? Would that be such a bad thing? I don't know. Maybe she’s a lesbian (there is an Indigo Girls poster in her room). Either way, she’s fabulous.  Sydney. She wears lots of oversized sweaters and always seems on the verge of tears. Her best friend, Rose McGowan, drives the red Volkswagen bug from The Shining.  They all live in mansions in Scream.

"Movies don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative!"

If you’re going to have a psychotic gay boyfriend, it’s always better to get that over with early.  Accordingly, Sydney is dating a sociopathic homosexual named Skeet Ulrich. Skeet also has mommy issues.  The tricky thing about sociopaths is that they’re not gay or straight – they’re just users. Like kitchen sponges, these guys will absorb all your empathy and strength; they make you believe that they love you and that you matter to them more than anything. The next thing you know, you’re regrouting their bathrooms and buying them designer vacations. 

I’ve fallen for enough Skeet Ulriches in my time to know. They show up at your house with tears in their eyes, needing something (whether sex or brownies or your car)  and you give in because there’s something broken inside you that wants desperately to believe that you’re the only one they can turn to - that you matter to someone, no matter how fucked up.  

Suddenly, he and his new boyfriend are in your kitchen playing erotic love games with your dad’s best hunting knives and the house is a mess.

I love Scream because it affirms the fact that, just because my mom was a crazy whore, I don't have to be a crazy whore. We write our own destiny.  

Harkening back to Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sydney Prescott is a perfect final girl. Scream is about Sydney finding strength, finding her voice. Through adversity, Sydney blossoms and ultimately lives to see another day. She takes all the pain and the anger and she keeps going. It doesn’t matter that she’s not a virgin anymore. It doesn’t even matter if she is a lesbian. Subsequent to her finding inner-peace amidst chaos, Sydney thrives.  She never looked better, in fact. It’s funny how that works! 

Scream is brilliant because it spends so much time establishing the rules of successfully navigating a horror franchise only to determine that there are no rules.  Scream is part Psycho (with its fearlessness in killing off protagonists, rife with red herrings), part Nightmare on Elm Street (Johnny Depp-like boyfriends sulk and sneak into bedroom windows), and has a dash of Rebel without a Cause thrown in for good measure (teenagers are misunderstood, they get arrested, parents are absentee at best).

Stylish, funny (there are three separate Sharon Stone references), and genuinely scary, Scream was the it-shit when it came out - the condensed horror soup of all that came before! It’s easy to forget how iconic this one movie was. The shooting style (clearly influenced by the queer cinema aesthetic of Gregg Araki and Todd Haynes), the mall clothes, Patrick Lussier’s editing, the brooding actors, everything about Scream bled into popular culture for almost the entire decade that followed. The WB network was built around Kevin Williamson and the afterglow of Scream.  Every horror movie proceeding followed the same structure.  Even Twilight managed to gank Rose McGowan’s awkward coloring!   

If you add domestic gross of the Scream franchise (now going on four films) and the franchise of its spoofs (Scary Movie: four films), they have made a billion dollars domestically.  That’s a testament to Wes Craven and the power of becoming your own hero.

Horror movies have taught me a lot over the years.  I learned from The Fly (1987) that you can't replicate anything without losing something essential in the transfer (like a soul).  I'm not the fanboy who cried wolf - I don't live in my mom's basement and I don't particularly care for Doritos. However, some things never need to be "re-imagined".  Freddy Kreuger and Jason are our contemporary Dracula and Frankenstein. The greatest thing about the invention of the wheel is that we don't need to re-invent said wheel.  You can be so much more creative with a wheel that's already been invented! Wes Craven got this. Wes Craven understood story and structure and filmmaking and character arcs.  Maybe Wes Craven should go work for Platinum Dunes.

* P.S.  Wes Craven actually followed New Nightmare with Vampire in Brooklyn, but I never saw that because of institutional racism and I apologize.

This is no dream. This is really happening.