chapter 13

If a horror movie is a big hit, and it doesn’t look totally stupid, and especially if it ends up getting theatrically released sequels, I usually watch it at some point, just to give it a shot, or to understand it. For example after a while I sat down and watched all the SAW movies they had made up to that point, even though it was not something I had followed before. As a subscriber to Fangoria Magazine it is my duty. They got those “Chainsaw Awards” you can vote on every year, you want to take that shit seriously. But I always avoided JEEPERS CREEPERS.

Maybe you can guess why. The director is Victor Salva. I remember his movie CLOWNHOUSE being pretty creepy in the ’80s, but years later I read that he was convicted of molesting the kid who starred in it. Salva served his time, I’m not trying to say he doesn’t have the right to make movies. And I don’t want to be that weirdo in the Ain’t It Cool talkbacks who seems to sit around waiting for opportunities to accuse Harry of being a sicko for the rare crime of acknowledging that Roman Polanski is a great filmmaker even though he did something terrible also. Sometimes people can be bad (or have bad things in their past) but make good art, and it’s okay to watch it. Duh.

But I don’t know, man. I read something about Salva’s movie POWDER that said it had pedophilic subtext in it, that it idealizes and camera-ogles hairless male bodies in uncomfortable ways. I haven’t seen the movie, so I’m not saying that’s a fair criticism, I have no idea. But it kept me away. I see even commercial movies as an expression of the personalities and the world views of the people who made them. I guess I just wasn’t up for a peek into the mind of this guy who was lucky enough to have Francis Ford Coppola bankrolling his first movie, still found time for his child porn side project.

But here I am doing this summer of 2001 study, and Salva’s JEEPERS CREEPERS was the last big movie of the summer, released on the last day of August. Genre-wise it’s a little different from the “big summer popcorn movie” I’m trying to focus on, but I consider late August horror movies to be an under-recognized part of the summer tradition. Almost all of the intervening summers have had horror releases in the last half of August, giving us movies like FEARDOTCOM, JEEPERS CREEPERS II, EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING, HALLOWEEN REMAKE, HALLOWEEN REMAKE II, THE FINAL DESTINATION, PIRANHA 3D and THE LAST EXORCISM just in time for people to ask “Why didn’t they wait for Halloween?” This year FINAL DESTINATION 5, FRIGHT NIGHT REMAKE and DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK REMAKE all came out in August.

So I decided to finally break my boycott and watch JEEPERS CREEPERS. Stayed away from the director commentary, though, because those don’t represent the views and opinions of United Artists, who knows what that perv is gonna start talking about?

Okay, all that out of the way I’m happy to report that JEEPERS CREEPERS is a solid, clever, original horror movie. I can see why it caught on. It might’ve influenced that movie I like HIGHWAYMEN in its great pacing, its scary use of roads out in the middle of nowhere, and most importantly its escalating weirdness.

The story begins with a bickering brother and sister (Justin Long and Gina Philips) driving the scenic route back from college to their mom’s house in a beat up Impala. After taking some time to show the dynamic between the two, to set up some things about their lives and to get a feel for the open road, the two have a DUEL or ROAD GAMES or beginning of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 type road incident where a crazy looking old van almost drives them off the road. Okay, that was scary, but everybody’s okay, let’s get on with our lives. Then they drive by an old church and notice the same van parked there. And the driver is out of the van. Dumping something into a big pipe. And the something is a bloody sheet tied around a body-shaped object. Possibly a body. Oh, and he sees them seeing him.

I love how this movie just keeps moving along and revealing more and more oddness. It keeps setting up things in the dialogue that you expect to turn into standard horror movie plotting, but it’s mostly just tricks to fuck with your head. Every time it seems ready to settle into a standard horror movie type some other unexpected thing is ready to come along and change everything. At first it seems like it could be a road-stalker movie like DUEL, ROAD GAMES, THE HITCHER or JOYRIDE. But they go back to look into the pipe, and it becomes a finding-the-evidence-before-the-killer-gets-back, Hansel and Gretel type deal. And they go to the diner and try to get help, so you think it’s gonna be a they’re-telling-the-truth-but-nobody-believes-them. But not long after the cops have heard their crazy story everybody witnesses some guy breaking into their car and sniffing Justin Long’s dirty laundry. “And liking it, from the looks of it.” That’s not something I have seen a Freddy or a Jason or even a Leatherface do before.

Convinced that something weird really is going on here the cops head back to the old church where young Mr. Long has promised a stash of hundreds of corpses, and we’re ready for the ol’ I-swear-they-were-right-here, what-the-hell-is-going-on, you’ve-got-to-believe-me. But again, it’s not going where it seems like it’s going. I’m being free with the spoilers now because this is ten years old, so if you’ve been saving it you might want to stop reading.

I wish I woulda seen this back then because I knew from the magazines that the killer was some kinda monster. That must’ve been a hell of a reveal. It’s still a great moment when the kids are driving toward the church with the cops right behind them and through the back window we can see that motherfucker drop down and land on top of the police car. He punches through the roof, grabs one cop by the top of the head and yanks it off like he’s picking fruit. And then they watch him, you know, kinda… make out with the severed head, and then eat its tongue. You know. One of those type of movies.

Man, sometimes you just run into a person you really would’ve been better off not running into. And these college kids would’ve been better off not running into this crazy-driving, corpse-collecting, dirty-laundry-sniffing, demonically-flying, police-officer-decapitating, severed-head-making-out-with, human-tongue-and-heart-eating sonofabitch. Should’ve just taken the interstate.

There are other weirdos they run into like the psychic who calls them on a payphone, the cat lady with the shotgun. There’s a little bit that reminded me of MAD MAX, a little bit that reminded me of ALIENS. It’s a great tone – proudly absurd, but not tongue in cheek.

I sort of had mixed feelings about the Philips character. She reacts more with anger than with fear, and yells at people too much, making her hard to like. But I sort of appreciate that it makes her different from a standard modern horror gal. She’s got the required cut-off jeans and sleeveless blouse, but not the screaming. When her brother wants to look into the pipe and she says “See, this is why boys are stupid” it seems like a legitimate expression of her bitter personality and not a self-conscious attempt at post-SCREAM horror screenwriting. They both get grating at times, though. Maybe people would be quicker to help them if they wouldn’t yell at everybody.

The IMDb bulletin boards actually led me to some interesting information about this movie. That’s extremely rare, so it’s worth acknowledging. The beginning of the movie has a very urban legend type of feel, but it turns out it comes from a real incident where a brother and sister (older than in the movie) saw a guy driving crazy in a van and later saw the same guy dumping some bloody sheets. The clear connection between the real incident and the movie is that the brother and sister play a game where they make words based on the letters in license plates, and therefore remembered the maniac’s plates.

Specifically the movie must’ve been inspired by an Unsolved Mysteries episode about the case. Instead of starting with the main story of an agitated dude who killed his ex-wife the episode brings us into the story from the perspective of the brother and sister in the van incident. In fact the JEEPERS scene where they see him dumping the body is staged pretty much the same as the sheet-dumping in the episode. Check it out:

As far as they say there is no human-eating demon-man involved, but of course it was an unsolved mystery at the time so maybe more information came out later. So they really shoulda called this “based on a true story.”

So, being partly an adaptation of a real murder, and being written and directed by a convicted child molester, and now that I think about it having a guy enjoy smelling Justin Long’s dirty laundry, it is hard for me to recommend this as a really fun horror movie. But that’s exactly what it is if you look at the movie on its own. Definitely one of the best movies of summer of 2001.

* * *

legacy: there is a JEEPERS CREEPERS 2 and they’re supposedly working on a part 3. Salva directed the sequel and a weird inspirational 2006 movie called PEACEFUL WARRIOR. Justin Long has gone on to become a much bigger star, mostly in comedy, but was in another good horror movie, DRAG ME TO HELL.

datedness: I don’t think it’s as stuck in a specific time period as many teen horror movies are. The cars are already retro, the kids look and dress similar to the kids in the later Michael Bay produced shitty horror remakes, they don’t have a bunch of pop culture references in the dialogue or anything like that.

would they make this now? Yeah, they would do a remake because the name sounds familiar.

Have you ever had a friend, a relative or a pet that disappeared for so long you thought they were dead, and after you gave up hope they showed up again? Or maybe your car got stolen, you figured it was gone for good but then one day the cops called you and they found it on the side of a road somewhere without that much damage? Well, that’s Sam Raimi. He was lost so deep in Spider-land we went through a period of denial, then acceptance, then moved on with our lives in a Raimi-free world and forgot all about him. But all the sudden the intercom buzzes in the middle of the night, we rub the sleep from our eyes and look out the window and holy shit if that isn’t Sam Raimi standing at the gate holding DRAG ME TO HELL in a little cage.

Let’s be fair though. I’m not gonna disavow the Sam Raimi of the 21st century. I don’t blame him for getting bored with what he was doing and making THE GIFT, even if I was kind of bored with what he did in THE GIFT. And I liked his SPIDER-MAN movies, it’s just that seven years of them is a heavy trade for the old Sam Raimi we loved. EVIL DEAD seems like so long ago now that when you hear his name associated with a horror movie (he produces a bunch of them through his company Ghost House) you assume it won’t be very good.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT had some good parts, but there’s not a particularly good track record there. There is no noticeable connection to the O.G. Sam Raimi, the guy with the energetic visuals and goofy dark humor, the purveyor of ultimate experiences in grueling horror and Three Stooges homages. The guy who strapped that camera to that car and drove it through the woods, who made a character swallow a flying eyeball, who had Liam Neeson demand the fucking elephant and blew a hole bigger than a grapefruit through Keith David’s head in THE QUICK AND THE DEAD. What happened to the guy who worshipful fans rallied around and cheered on when he got to do SPIDER–MAN and then kind of… forgot about? You see glimpses of that guy in the SPIDER-MANs, but they’re hidden behind the big budgets, the top-of-the-line effects, the demands of the corporation and the iconography and the movie stars and the franchise. Not as much room to fuck around and invent shit when you’ve got all those boxes to check off. So we don’t really get to see all his talents there.

But god damn if O.G. Sam Raimi isn’t back with DRAG ME TO HELL. Written with his brother Ivan just after ARMY OF DARKNESS, this is an old fashioned fun-time horror movie with a tone very close to EVIL DEAD II. It treats its story of a fatal 3-day gypsy curse seriously just like EVIL DEAD did the Necronomicon Ex-mortis. It’s not another fuckin horror comedy. But you will find yourself laughing at all the inventively horrible things that befall the young loan officer Christine Brown, played by Alison Lohman.

There’s a great score and arsenal of creepy sounds courtesy of Christopher Young (HELLRAISER), and the old school Universal logo and the way the title slams onto the screen get you ready for business. But the point where I made a positive I.D. on our man Sam Raimi was in the first real setpiece where Christine fights a decrepit, angry gypsy woman in an enclosed space and the two use every dirty-fighting technique known to woman. (My SPOILER favorite: the old lady loses her false teeth but bites Christine in the face anyway.) Just this scene milks more laughter and squirming out of you than most recent horror movies do in their entire running times. And this one never lets up.

Somebody told me DRAG ME TO HELL had “jump-scares” that work, somebody else said it wasn’t very good because it was just a bunch of jump-scares. Both might be valid but I didn’t think about it that way. I don’t think it made me jump, it just seemed to be a movie where everyday reality can at any moment be ferociously invaded by feverish otherworldly visions, demonic apparitions and disgusting substances. It doesn’t build to a crescendo of insanity like EVIL DEAD. It’s more like this young professional is trying to keep a lid on the horror but it keeps pushing its way out and whacking her in the jaw with the lid. The poor girl is trying to get a promotion at the bank, but she bleeds all over her boss. She’s trying to make a good impression on her boyfriend’s parents but she starts yelling at a demon during dessert. She’s not stuck in a cabin in the woods, she’s trying to live her normal life and go to work and everything while this devil keeps circling around her licking its lips.

As horror fans we know that when somebody comes back from the dead there’s gonna be something missing, such as a soul. Maybe it looks like little Gage, but he’s gonna slash your achilles heel with a scalpel, so I was worried there would be some catch here with Raimi. Horror fans tend to be purists, and most of the ones I know are totally racist against any use of CGI. I do think there is one quick grossout gag in the movie that was a mistake to do with computers. We know it’s fake when it’s made out of rubber, but at least you know she really had to have slime on her face. When it’s digital it might as well just be a drawing. The rest of the computery shit I thought was really good though. There’s a scene involving a fly that could not have been done any other way, but looked good enough it had me questioning whether they somehow really did it.

Okay, so the computers aren’t the monkey paw’s curse, so what about the rating? If you’ve avoided this movie it might be because you read it was PG-13, the cursed watered-down rating that has been forced on so many once proud R-rated series. THE EVIL DEAD was pretty damn R (nobody gets raped by a tree in PG-13, that’s the rule), Raimi was once known for his extravagant gore, and there have been almost no good horror movies ever released with that rating. (I like the remake of THE RING, that’s about it.)

But my friends, I don’t know how to explain this, but somehow this one works. It doesn’t feel like “good for a PG-13″, it just feels like “good.” If I did not know about that rating I would’ve never believed it. This doesn’t necessarily need to have a bunch of blood (actually it does have a bunch) and it turns out that inventing new ways to be disgusting doesn’t affect the rating. I would still think it would be a problem though because with a PG-13 rating you can feel safe knowing that certain things won’t happen, certain lines will not be crossed, and that takes the horror out of it.

But take my word for it, lines are crossed in this movie. There are things that happen here that you don’t expect to happen in any movie, let alone a PG-13. There are tricks in the movie I completely fell for. I think it’s one of those decoy PG-13s they put on there to give you a false sense of security just so they can fuck with you. One act in particular – okay, it’s off screen. But it is something reprehensible that you do not ever expect the hero of a movie to do. Especially when the hero is a pretty young blonde.

That brings me to my next point, which is the unexpected cleverness of the characterization in this script. The basic feel of the movie is like a spookhouse ride. It’s about fun. This ain’t MARTYRS. So the characters can just be types if they want to. There are a couple really hatable types in here, and Raimi could leave it at that, but then these characters show another side you don’t expect, and just at the right time to make everything more uncomfortable.

More importantly Christine is subtly different from your standard horror heroine. Most women in horror movies are either idiots or saints. If you look at Laurie in HALLOWEEN, Nancy in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, Helen in CANDYMAN, Sydney in SCREAM, Kirsty in HELLRAISER… most of these ladies are goodie two shoes by design, they are supposed to have a purity that gets challenged or corrupted when they encounter true evil or whatever. They find the toughness to survive and maybe kill their attacker, but they’re still good through and through.

Christine might seem the same at first – she was raised on a farm, she’s nicer than everybody else at the bank, she even says she’s a vegetarian and volunteers at a puppy shelter. But the nice twist is that throughout the movie she has moral lapses and temptations that are a little over the edge of what can be reasonably expected. She’s still sympathetic but every once in a while she has a plan that makes you think, “Wait– really?” For example she comes very close to allowing a random old man at a diner to get his soul ripped out in place of hers. And worse.

There’s alot of humor in this going too far, and I think it’s really cool they would give that to a female character. I can see Bruce Campbell doing this stuff but I can’t think of another woman that would.

The other thing about the script that makes it a little better than it might appear on the surface is the classic horror movie morality that (by accident, I think, since it’s an old script) is very timely. The whole story kicks off with her denying an old lady a loan extension, causing her to lose her house. For Christine’s own personal code it’s the wrong thing to do, but she’s under pressure from her asshole peers and wanting to get this promotion, so she tries to be unfeeling about it. Raimi sets it up in an interesting way because the old lady is not very nice (to say the least) and is physically repulsive, coughing snot onto Christine’s desk and taking out her false teeth (which are completely rotted, by the way, even though they’re false). Christine has many excuses not to feel sorry for her, but deep down she does anyway, showing her humanity. And then throughout the movie she can have a combination of fear and guilt.

This goes back to Christine’s moral lapses, too, because she keeps lying and saying it was her boss that denied the extension, even though we saw that it was her own decision. Even while communicating with angry spirits in a seance she tries to pin it on her boss. Some funny shit. But of course she learns her lesson.

DRAG ME TO HELL doesn’t waste its time trying to reinvent horror, and it’s not nostalgic either. Okay, I counted four references to the EVIL DEADs, but it’s not trying to be retro or meta or anything. It’s just reviving an enjoyable type of horror that we don’t get enough of in our diets, and executing that style with flair and supreme skill.

Welcome back and long live new-old Sam Raimi.

[ratings]