PSYCHO-Babble: Phantasm (1979)

I miss the Drive-Ins of my misspent youth. The rows of gargly metal speaker boxes. The seven story screens. The rusted playground filled with broken glass at it's foot.

If I was to cast a cynical eye, I could attach a metaphor to that sad little playground. Something about my lost innocence. Fractured psyche. Blah, blah, blah. I guess that could be true, but would also be kind of boring. I prefer to look at it a different way.

The Drive-Ins were where the most lurid and dark aspects of my own self found a home. Boobs the size of buicks. Buckets of entrails gushing out of body cavities. Cars honking their approval of every depraved moment. Sex. Violence. Giant garish communial projections of the animal nature within us that we labor to repress.

And thanks to this venue for double and triple featured grindhouse cheapies, many filmmakers used the horror genre to create classic visions of horror. Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre. John Carpenter's Halloween. George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. Without studio heads and test audiences, these filmmakers were able to get as close as possible to transmitting their nightmares directly to their audiences, with only their limited budgets as barriers.

What was even more interesting than these highly regarded grindhouse classics were the ones that were less successful. These films also reflected a personal and twisted vision, but didn't work quite as well and have failed to register in the cannon of classic horror. But because of their sheer wierdness, they definitely stood out from the pack. I'm thinking of Charles Kaufman's Mother's Day and, most definitely, Don Coscarelli's Phantasm.

We open on Tommy, sporting some Quinn Martin Production sideburns. He's at Morningside Cemetery getting busy with a trashy blonde who is looking all Andrea True Connection with her blue eyeshadow and white pumps.

Clearly queludes are involved, because the boning movement is so slight I'm thinking actual penetration is not possible. Which may be all for the good, because after she stabs Tommy to death she turns into (lightning, thunder) The Tall Man.

So now we meet Tommy's brother. AKA Jody. AKA Seventies sex on legs.

Yeah, his hair is parted down the middle. Yeah, his bellbottoms are tight and his wavy brown locks hang down over his ears. (Later we learn he drives a Black 'stang. He's just that hot. You just know he read for Greg Evigan's part in BJ and the Bear and came this close.).

He's at Tommy's funeral with his best friend and jam session parter: Baldy McPonytail. BM also happens to drive an ice cream truck for reasons that will not become clear later.

We also meet Michael, his high strung younger brother who rides a dirt bike and is watching the funeral from afar via field glasses. He wasn't invited to the funeral because he still hasn't gotten over the death of his parents and is expressing his submerged rage with a super annoying haircut.

Suffice it to say, things get wierd. Set pieces include, but are not limited to:

An Old Witch who looks like Ozzy Osbourne:

The iconic Flying Metal Ball of Death:

Zombie jawa dwarves:

A parallel universe slave planet accessed by giant tuning forks:

Yes, Giant Fracking Tuning Forks:

As a 10-year-old rake of a horror nerd, I was mesmerized by Phantasm. Sitting in a lawn chair next to my Dad's Chevy Nova at Neponset Circle drive-in, shoveling handfuls of greasy stove-popped popcorn, riding out the sugar rush of five Stop and Shop Orange sodas, I related to Michael's sense of alienation, his fear of abandonment, his call to the dark side, his questionable grooming choices.

His nemesis The Tall Man represented everything that a 10-year-old fears: old mean people, death, even sex (when he was donning his disco diva drag). And the creepy theme music, with its hints of Rosemary's Baby, Halloween, and Suspiria. Synthesizery and oh-so-seventies really gets under your skin.

And it's not a stretch to see a little of teh gay in Phantasm land. Phantasm is a world of men. Women were either villainous or witchy, but not a main part of the core world. This is quite unusual for horror, which generally favors a "girl-in-trouble" plot structure.

And, whether intentional of not, Phantasm provided images that would play like a series of coming attractions for the archetypes that would take up permanent residence in my gay psyche for years to come:

EXHIBIT A: Before Frosty McEyeshadow pulls out her tits like a couple of raw chicken cutlets, we are treated to a shot of Jody's ass. It's brief, but I remember that it got my attention. It still has some type of magical talisman-like quality over me. I believe if I held it in my hand I might be able to fly, talk to the dead, or predict the future.

EXHIBIT B: There is that whole ending scene where Michael sees The Tall Man as a reflection in his closet and is then pulled into his closet by demon hands. 

Again, intentional or not it was certainly an image that would hold increasing resonance as the onslaught of gay puberty headed my way.

EXHIBIT C: It's tempting to make a crude joke about the balls flying at one's head in this movie, but seriously ... look at this thing. I mean. C'mon.

And then after it gets, er, inserted into homeboy's skull, um ... this happens.

I'm just saying.

Psycho-Babble: Halloween (1978)

Anyone who reads this blog knows the story of Halloween. Michael Myers is the boogeyman. He is a soulless child who kills his teenage sister, then goes to the nuthouse, then comes back years later to kill more teen girls. Add some nonsense psychology spewed in Shakespearian intonations by Donald Pleasance about Michael being pure “e-e-e-e-vil” and you’re done.

Simple, effective horror.



Halloween was arguably the first in a long line of “violent-sexual-repression-symbolized-as-psycho-with-knife” horror that emerged in the 70s/80s.

Our shy and sensible final girl Laurie Strode is a virgin with a crush on never-seen Ben Tramer, but lacks the extroverted, brazen lustiness of her pals Annie and Linda.

Whore. Slut. Survivor.

So Michael Myers comes back to town – the embodiment of Laurie Strode’s inner animus. Michael is, to put it crudely, the cockmeat Laurie wants and fears made manifest. He keeps coming after her again and again, breaking down doors, trying to break through her skin with his big, thrusting knife. In Michael’s nightlong attack on Laurie, we see her hormone-driven inner conflict played out in a suburban cat-and-mouse horror show.

"Is it supposed to hurt?"

What works about the original Halloween is that (without the Rob-Zombie-esque explanation of Michael’s inner world) we are free to project anything we want onto Michael. An effective boogeyman, like an effective prostitute, should be able to become whatever we need him to be.

But what is a boogeyman?

The boogeyman exists, first and foremost, in everyone’s personal subconscious. He is an archetype within our monkey brains, inherited from our knuckle-dragging forefathers and foremothers who had the good sense to fear, and therefore avoid, bad people bent on doing them grave bodily harm.

"You're welcome!"

In our modern world, we still need our boogeyman archetype, because there are still plenty of assholes and crazies who want to fuck with us and those we love. Our modern manifestation of the boogeyman includes, but is not limited to, the serial killer, the rapist, and the terrorist.

Even today, 1978’s Michael Myers remains a great target for our projections of the boogeyman because he is so vague – faceless, shadowy, nightmarish. Whatever is freaking us out at the moment -- whether it be a touchy substitute teacher, a person-shaped shadow in our closet, Osama Bin Laden, or one of the Olsen twins -- can be projected onto the Shatner-masked creepo with the big butcher knife.

I'm your boogeyman. That's what I am.

At 9-years-old, my boogeyman lived in my bedroom closet that (thanks to the rotted wood around the latch) would never quite close. Every night, I would stare at the dark sinister crack, shrink into my Scooby Doo blanket, and wait for the shadowy humanoid-shaped hanging coats and shirts to start talking, moving, and plotting my lengthy and painful demise.

So as I watched Michael’s violent rampage at the Drive-Ins from the front seat of my Dad’s Chevy Nova, I found a masked representation for the evil, scary boogeyman in my closet.

But Myers was more to me than just some vague imagined thing that hated me and lurked among the toughskin jeans and Braggin’ Dragon shirts in my closet. He was more than an echo of my half-monkey great-great-(to infinity)-grandmother’s “avoid-the-scary-man-with-the-sharp-thing” survival code.

Michael Myers was the projection of a demon I was battling inside of myself -- a malicious and ugly motherfucker called internalized homophobia.

I will haunt your dreams...

By nine, the first strains of homo-lust had already begun to permeate my psyche vis-à-vis Patrick Duffy, Tom Wopat, Grant Goodeve, and other dark-haired, light-eyed stud-muffins of the era. Unfortunately, I had also already begun to internalize the violent homophobia of the culture around me.

What is a nine-year-old gay growing up in a blue-collar section of Boston in 1978 to do with thoughts of getting lost in the tangles of Tom Wopat’s magnificent chest hair? These were strong, powerful thoughts that – according to God and television – were very, very bad and needed to be violently crushed.

The face of evil.

So I developed an inner mechanism -- a violent interloper that would come in to exterminate any intrusive thoughts of Patrick Duffy’s nipples or the bulge in zipper area of the Marlboro Man’s jeans. By developing an inner gay basher, perhaps I could crush these evil thoughts and avoid an actual gay bashing in real life.

So, as I watched the last scene of Halloween, with Laurie hidden in a closet as marauding Michael smashed his way through the thin membrane of the slatted closet door, it was at precisely the same time that my closet (as a personal symbol) was transforming. The dark closet that housed my childhood bedtime boogeyman was quickly becoming a secret place where I could hide my emerging homosexuality from the hostile world around me.

And Michael Myers, whether symbolizing my repressed homosexuality itself, or the violent homophobic reaction to said homosexuality, could tear right through that psychic slatted door of denial.

Who you think you're kidding, girl?

(Carol Clover in her brilliant essay “Her Body, Himself” posits that the final girl is actually a boy made female to allow the audience to accept his/her vulnerability. This explains why final girls are often tomboys, sometimes with unisex names. Accepting that thesis means that it isn’t a big leap to view the final girl as a gay boy, no?)

So do I think John Carpenter and Debra Hill intentionally sought to create Michael Myers as a symbol of violent internalized homophobia and Laurie as a closeted gay boy? Not at all. But they did create a film that was universal enough in its dread and symbolism that anyone could project their personal shadow drama onto it. Clearly many, many others who had different struggles, passions and fears were able to project those up onto the screen as well, which is why it made so much damn money and fostered so many sequels and remakes.

But, what did I learn from Halloween? I learned that the safety of the closet is an illusion. The door can be stripped away at any time, and you better be ready to stick a wire hanger into homophobia’s cursed eyehole or you just might find that prison to be your final resting place.

Come to the light!

Just for fun...

Psycho-Babble: It's Alive - When Angry Mutant Babies Attack!

After the closing credits of “Psychic Killer” (and a pedophile-dodging dash at Intermission to the urine-flooded Men's room) was "It's Alive!" Attempting to draft behind the awesomeness that was "Rosemary's Baby" (which includes the sub-awesomeness of Ruth Gordon as a Satanic witch), this trashy gem about a steroid-enhanced monster-baby had the best horror movie tagline ever:

"There's only ONE thing wrong with the Davis baby ... IT'S ALIVE!".



The film starts with the bloody birth of a shadowy monstrous baby that kills all of the staff in the delivery room and then escapes out into the suburbs to wreak murderous mayhem. Its father tries to hunt It down, but in the end he can't help but love the little monster and tries to protect It from the police in the touching/disturbing finale.

Where Psychic Killer operates on pure psychological wish fulfillment ("I will so think you to death, bitch!"), “It's Alive” strikes a deeper chord, methinks, simply because it used a monster baby as its highly sympathetic antagonist. With It’s vascular arms, four fangs and three-fingered talonesque hands, It wasn't exactly cuddly (and It had that troublesome homicidal tendency), but It was a baby … perhaps a very demanding baby with hard to meet needs, but a baby nonetheless. And who doesn’t love babies?

My understanding of psychology (aka - my years on the couch) tells me that when it isn't about mother it's usually all about baby. More specifically, it is about the baby inside each of us that we try to pretend doesn't exist -- the one that surprises us when it takes over our limbs and does baby-like things like making unreasonable demands on our familiars, throwing a tantrum, grabbing anything it wants in it's line of sight … or acting out in a murderous rage.

It may seem like any other homicidal monster baby. But It is more than that. This little snaggletoothed, veiny-headed bundle-of-talons is a poignant metaphor. It is that needy, angry baby inside all of us personified, the one we deny and try to snuff out with drugs, booze, reality television, compulsive Hummel collecting, whatever. It is the inner baby that we need to learn to love and protect at all costs (like the Daddy in the movie learns to do) to become whole psychological creatures.

In other words, the journey of It from a hated, angry, biting, slashing, monstrous demon baby to a loved, cooing, cared for, happy monstrous demon baby is just about the purest metaphor for the process of psycho-therapy that a schlocky 70s horror drive-in movie can achieve.

But I wasn’t thinking that on “Drive-In Night” in 1975 when I was 6. As I watched the father and mutant reunion on screen, I was briefly (it doesn’t end well) comforted. I looked up at my Dad, sleeping with an empty carton of stale milk duds propped up on his gut, and was so certain that if he discovered me to be somewhat ... er ... different from the other kids ... a pimply faced, girly, parachute-panted mutant of sorts … that he would not shoot me, either. He would run into the sewer, gather me up in a blanket, grab my talon affectionately and tell me that he loved me and would protect me.

OK, OK. I know. It's just a cheesy movie and I’m overanalyzing it all. “It’s Alive” just copied the themes of Frankenstein and fused it with Rosemary's Baby to make a quick buck. And, yeah, the Daddy gets shot to death at the end and It escapes to the sewers to await calls from his agent to appear in sequels (which kind of kills my nice “inner child” metaphor).

But still ... I stand by my overanalysis:

Important lesson learned from age-inappropriate film #2, “It’s Alive”: We all have a little monster baby inside of us and rather than try to kill it, we gotta learn to love it … or it will rip us to ribbons.

All of 6 years old and already the grindhouse schlock of the Drive-Ins had taught me so much. But there was so much more to learn ...

Psycho-Babble: Psychic Killer - When Brains Attack!!

'Drive-In Night" started out innocently enough. My Dad would shake up some greasy popcorn on the stove, dump it into a brown paper shopping bag, pick up a few neighborhood kids and charge them a dollar each, load up a cooler full of Stop-and-Shop-brand tonic (they call soda tonic in Boston), plunk down the $5 per carload at the Neponset Circle Drive-In, and enjoy PG-rated double features like "Cannonball Run" with "Smokey and the Bandit" or "Gumball Rally" with "Vanishing Point."

But after weeks and months of innocent fare, one "Drive-In Night" in 1975 showed a double-feature that would change everything for me: "It's Alive" with "Psychic Killer" (sounds like an ad for a new energy drink: "It's 'Alive!' ... now with extra 'Psychic Killer'!" ... okay maybe not...).

Yes, at the ripe old age of 6 (?!), my Dad was initiating me into the world of disturbing horror. Sure, go ahead and call it bad parenting or lousy boundaries (my therapist, my Dad and I have already conceded this point). However, it was also the start of my lifelong fascination with horror movies. More importantly, it was the start of some very intense life lessons on how to handle the dark (or shadow) side of life.

"Psychic Killer" starred Jim Hutton (Timothy Hutton's Dad!) as a guy who can kill people by astral projecting (C'mon ... no judging ... it was the 70s!), which was quite a useful skill. Is there an evil lawyer you hate who happens to be in a construction site? Just psychically move that conveniently dangling pile of concrete over his head and bomb's away! Is the butcher not cutting your Black Peppercorn turkey breast quite as thin as you like it? Just make him force his own hand into his meat grinder and hit the switch.

To be sure it was all a lot for a 6-year-old to take. The meat-grinder scene seared my 6-year-old brain like albacore tuna. I had been plunged right into a dark underworld without any warning or welcome and without a road map on how to get out.

As I sat nervously rubbing the grease-bruised popcorn bag as if it were a magic lamp that would bring back my innocence, my brother quipped "Hamburger Helper ... when you need a helping hand!" His gallows humor was just what I needed. From this point forward, gallows humor would be my trusted tool, my psychological ally, my breadcrumb trail from the darkness back to the light.

And once back in the light, I could enjoy all the wonders of imagining that I, too, had a "Psychic Killer" brain with all its perks: (a) Revenge wish fulfillment without consequences! (b) No fingerprints, DNA, or any way to trace you to the crime! (c) Miminal physical effort expended, not even so much as lifting one’s hand to the bitch-slap position!

Sure I was only 6, but killing people you hate without suffering any of the consequences is truly an idea that can be enjoyed at any age (What do you mean we don’t get recess today? Don’t make me make you shove the business end of that protactor into your eye Miss Toomey!). We all share in common the desire every so often to just wish some arrogant, ignorant, bullying, lying, pathological motherfucker into violent oblivion (no … you don’t? … maybe it's just me... this blog might have not been such a good idea…).

Unfortunately, despite valiant efforts, life kept reminding me that you can't really just think people dead. (the high-school quarterback who mocked my Elvira pin-up pictures should be very thankful for this). Life later taught me that "psychic killing" was a subset of what is called "magical thinking" - thoughts that give you a little psychological boost, an illusion of power over your outside world, but that have no actual effect. I was tilting at windmills (if said windmills then launched a projectile sail that decapitated said high-school quarterback who mocked said Elvira pin-up … for instance).

Psychic killing turned out to be just some made up Hollywood BS. Hollywood had set me up for withering disappointment for the first time, but not the last...

So what life lesson about the dark side did "Psychic Killer" impart to me? Quite simply that it's better to try to kill people with your brain than with your actual hands. And when I grew into a skinny, pimply, introverted, girlish, awkward teen in a Cure t-shirt stumblefucking his way through the psychic meat grinder of public high school, this non-lethal power was actually quite useful. Sure it was completely ineffective, but it did help me avert mid-to-long term negative consequences like blood-stains on my Chess King parachute pants (shutup, you had them too!), incarceration, and starting a cycle of karmic violence that could haunt generations of my hypothetical children.

Important lesson learned from age-inappropriate film #1, “Psychic Killer”: Kill people only in your thoughts, because when you use your hands, you get your stinking DNA all over the place.

Next posting: It's Alive! ...