Volume 4 - Night of the Living Dead and the Legacy of George A. Romero

It's been just under two weeks since horror fans around the world lost one of our heroes, George A. Romero. Like many I know, I was hit incredibly hard by this news. The creator of the modern zombie, Romero seemed truly larger than life, and that creature's pop culture stamina made it seem like George would just always be there for us.

The other reason losing George Romero hit me so hard is that, despite his place as one of the pioneers of the genre, he seemed like he was one of us. A true independent filmmaker, Romero made raw, unique, and personal films that felt like they were specifically formed for horror fans. It's like that line Dan Aykroyd repeats in Tommy Boy - "I make car parts for the American working man, because that's what I am, and that's who I care about." - only Romero made horror films and I truly believed that he'd mean it if he said that about his films.

It took me a while to get over the news that Romero had passed. I cried that afternoon, but I also couldn't help but feeling grateful that I had the chance to learn about the horror genre from this man, grateful to be a little blip in the horror loving world at the same time he was out there representing all of us and making us proud. And, for me, everything I loved and will always love about George Romero begins with his debut feature, which changed the genre forever.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Night of the Living Dead

1968, Directed by George A. Romero

Night of the Living Dead and I have a history that makes me laugh when I think about it today. I was into "scary" stories and movies from the time I was a toddler, and my parents were very receptive to me seeing films from the horror genre at a young age. But there was one movie on our VHS shelf that I was told was absolutely off limits: Night of the Living Dead. 

I was a surprisingly compliant child, so I settled for The Blob and The Phantom of the Opera and The Creature from the Black Lagoon and enjoyed myself. As I got in to my early teens I was allowed to watch things like Fright Night or A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. But I still didn't watch Night of the Living Dead until I was probably 15 or 16 years old. You might think it ridiculous, but on the bright afternoon when I plugged the tape into our basement's VCR I understood why my parents didn't let me see this movie. 

I grew up in a farmhouse in a secluded area outside a blue-collar town, not unlike the one where most of the events of Night of the Living Dead take place. When I saw Night of the Living Dead it did something that most of those other horror films I had already seen couldn't do: it felt like something that could happen in my world. The people were real, the setting was real, even the graveyard was real. I didn't know to think about it at the time, but later I realized that this was the first true independent horror film I'd ever seen. Even though it wasn't trying to make me jump and it wasn't as violent or in-your-face as many of the newer horror films I'd seen, it got under my skin and made me feel a true sense of dread. 

I left my first viewing of the film knowing two things: 

1) I wasn't safe anywhere.
2) I needed to see more movies by this director. 

Fast forward 20 or so years, and I'm watching it again. It's been one week since I found out George Romero died, and I've got a DVD commentary featuring Romero - along with actors/crewmates Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, and Russell Streiner - playing over the movie. And even though I've seen the film dozens of times and read countless tales of the production and even listened to this same commentary before, I'm floored. 

Listening to Romero and his friends talk about the work they did on this film 30 plus years ago is a reminder of everything I love about the film, but also a wake up call about just how much went right and wrong during production. This team had to be amazing to put it all together. Romero tells stories about accidents on set and talks about the mistakes they made and the apologies they had to give. He shares so many stories about the people who helped make the film happen and the process of writing the film, down to talking about how the personalities of the people on set influenced the film's message. I'm hearing all this, and I'm wishing I was as committed to anything as this man was to getting this film made. The conversation pulls back the curtain on just how difficult it is to make even the smallest movie, and yet Romero just has this quiet confidence as he relays stories of how he and his crew - Romero never takes sole credit for anything in the discussion, which is adorable - never backed down and put it all together. He never mentions the fact that he ended up making a no-budget horror film that basically defines the genre, and he doesn't need to because his hard work and the hard work of his crew bleeds off the screen. 

As I listened to that conversation, I felt the same kind of awe that I felt the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead. Then I started to think about how Romero came back and did the same thing over and over again, for more than 40 years, and along that road managed to create so many other films that horror fans like me can look at with the same sense of wonder. It makes me want to live my life with the same drive and passion that George Romero had, because I know if I do that I will die a happy man.

This hasn't been much of a commentary on the film itself, partially because ever since that afternoon in the '90s it has been impossible for me to imagine the world without Night of the Living Dead. If you haven't seen it, my best advice is to open your mind, let it wash over you, and think about how much love the people who were making it had to have for their little film. If you can do that and it doesn't end up infecting your heart and mind, you might be a zombie already.

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Normally this is the point where I talk about what I'm looking for in a double feature, but another great thing about Romero and Night of the Living Dead is that they mean something special and unique to so many people in the horror community. So when I decided I was going to pay tribute to the man by featuring it in a double feature, I wanted to know what other people were thinking. I asked my Twitter followers what kind of double feature they would pick, and the responses did not let me down.

In a late tribute, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD will headline this week's double feature at the blog. What would you pair with it?

— The Mike (@TheMike31) July 23, 2017

The Blob!!!

— Danielle Sinay (@daniellesinay) July 23, 2017

Return of the Living Dead?

— Ted Flint (@TedFlintKansas) July 23, 2017

Either RETURN or THE DEAD NEXT DOOR.

— Derek Smith (@Darathus) July 23, 2017

THE CRAMPS LIVE AT NAPA STATE for the b&w cinematography, claustrophobic setting, and the way the audience slowly takes over the stage.

— Mitch Lovell (@TheVideoVacuum) July 23, 2017

CREEPSHOW.

— Brad Henderson (@BradFHenderson) July 23, 2017

MARTIN. It's another great Romero movie but looks & feels nothing like NOTLD.

— Barnabas Collins (@CousinBarnabas) July 23, 2017

Assault on Precinct 13 seems an obvious 1. Secluded, aligned with people you don't like much and battling a force trying to get in.

— H.E.A.D. C.H.U.D. (@Unrealized_Tomb) July 23, 2017

Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead.

— Nathan Smith (@madmanmarz85) July 24, 2017

Body Snatchers '56, The Innocents, Children of the Damned

— Elbee (@ghoulieschool) July 24, 2017

I'd also go with AOP13.
JC really took the lessons Romero laid down & employed them almost surgically to create a terribly effective flick.

— Albert Muller (@aj_macready) July 24, 2017

GET OUT would be a pretty good companion piece, considering the ending.

— Brett Gallman (@brettgallman) July 24, 2017

Panic Room

— David Hart (@pccasestudy) July 24, 2017

🎡 of Souls

— St. Ephanie Crawford (@scrawfish) July 25, 2017

The Battery. or Shaun of the Dead.

or Caddyshack 2 if I'm feeling randy.

— Mike Snoonian (@mike_snoonian) July 25, 2017

First off, you all are wonderful. I love everything about that list, from The Blob to Caddyshack 2. We've got independent horror films from the same era, modern studio hits, concert films, more of Romero's classics, and more. You could teach a course on film based around people's double feature picks to go with Night of the Living Dead if you wanted to, and these are the people you need to have help with the lesson plans if you do.

This leaves me with a lot to live up to. I'm not gonna promise you'll love my choice - it's one of the more divisive horror films in recent memory - but if you don't the good news is that these fine folks have your back too.

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Here are the things I was looking for when I made my pick.

• The thing that struck me first about Night of the Living Dead was how the secluded setting. It's a movie that takes place in a very small area, but you can feel that this is not a secluded incident, and that this event is a lot bigger than what we see. It takes a lot of work to make one set seem like the center of the end of humanity, but Romero did it so well that he laid the foundation for other filmmakers to bring the same tone to their films.
• Night of the Living Dead is a movie with few real characters, and it does a lot of its best work by building tension between them. But it also has a couple of characters - namely the melodramatic young couple, Tom and Judy - who just seem to be trapped in the middle of everything and who are trying to go on with their life. There's something about their relationship, as cheesy as it is, that has always been a neat romantic centerpiece to the zombie apocalypse for me. I wanted to find a movie that amplifies that feeling
• I keep saying that Night of the Living Dead influenced other films, but also it provided a structure that other filmmakers can use as a jumping off point. I wanted to pair Night with another film in the same vein, but I wanted to pick something with a different mindset. There are plenty of films that imitated Night of the Living Dead, I'm looking for something that brings its own mystery to the framework Romero provided. 
• I wanted a zombie film. It's an easy condition, but Romero is responsible for all the zombies we've seen since. It only seems right to bring a version of them back for this one.

After considering all of that, I settled down with one of my favorite horror films of the past decade...

Pontypool

2008, Directed by Bruce McDonald

Among the many thrills of Night of the Living Dead are the scenes where we see news reporters on TV trying to explain what the heck is going on and why the dead seem to be coming back to life. We never get a real answer from them, and perhaps the most relevant piece of information that comes from the TV set in the besieged house is when Sherrif Kosana utters an exasperated and now famous response to a reporter's question. 

"Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up."

Romero knew this was one of the great mysteries of his film, and that's probably why he chose to start Dawn of the Dead, his first sequel to Night, inside a news room that had been trying to make sense out of the living dead. We never get an answer from those reporters either, but I always wonder what it would have looked like if the people sharing the news had a direct line to the outbreak. What would the zombie apocalypse have sounded like if it was broadcast live?

That's the question that Pontypool aims to answer.

Pontypool follows a morning in the life of Grant Mazzy, a displaced shock radio DJ doing the morning radio show in a small Canadian town that shares its name with the movie. He's played by veteran character actor Stephen McHattie, who gives one of the best lead performances in horror here. Mazzy gets a report of mob brutality from a correspondent and he's forced to try to decipher what's going on while staying on-air as the reports of brutality become more and more bizarre. McHattie, working with a chip on his shoulder and a wild-eyed energy, seems to be having the time of his life bringing this character to the screen, and the enthusiasm he shows reminds me a little bit of the confident tone Romero had while making his film. There are a lot of questions about the film as a whole, but the man at the center of it is certainly doing everything he can to outwork all of them.

Pontypool does not leave the explanation of the outbreak to our imagination, and that is either one of its strengths or weaknesses depending on your interpretation of the film. I'm not sure I'm smart enough to get it - and I've seen the film 3 or 4 times - but I really appreciate how these filmmakers created their own take on how a zombie outbreak could occur. It's unique as hell, and I've been told by wiser people that it makes sense. I'm comfortable taking their word for it, because even without understanding everything about it I find myself grinning and bracing for surprises every time I see it.

This film has its mind in a much different place than that of Night of the Living Dead did, but the bones of the film are the same. It's a flipped perspective - one film has people at the center of the outbreak looking outward for answers, the other has the person who's supposed to have the answers getting information directly from the outbreak - but the sense of dread is still there, and it still feels like the world is ending everywhere around this small town.

And that's what's so amazing about George Romero and Night of the Living Dead. This is a film with an entirely different idea than Night of the Living Dead, but there's no way it exists if Romero hadn't pushed through all the challenges to get that little film into theaters back in 1968. There's no way many of the films the fine people of Twitter picked happen without it, either. Night of the Living Dead changed our perception of what horror could be, and opened up the door for films like Pontypool to come into existence. The work he did on Night of the Living Dead made the work director Bruce McDonald, McHattie, and everyone else who made Pontypool easier, because the kind of film they wanted to make didn't exist before Night of the Living Dead.

George Romero just wanted to make one movie when he made Night of the Living Dead happen. But people like Romero, who do what they love and fight through any of the challenges that try to stop them, are the kind of people that end up changing the world. That's one more reason it hurts so much to write these words and think about what the horror universe lost last week. Romero's passion was so great that it became larger than any film he made. He had an impact on every horror fan out there. 

There's no right or wrong way to pay tribute to someone, but this is the way I wanted to look back this week. Try it out if you're a fan of Night of the Living Dead, or find your own way to pay tribute if you miss him too. I never met George, but I know the two words he wrote next to most of the autographs he gave are what he would want us to do to honor him.

"Stay scared."

Volume 3 - Blue Steel and the Rise and Fall of the Steamy Flick

This week I think I found two movies that form one of the creepiest couples I could ever create. I don't mean creepy in the cool "Hey, Vincent Price is creepy!" way, I mean creepy in the "Dude, these filmmakers really threw a lot of craziness on screen just to see what would stick." way. The '90s were a weird time, man. One of the reasons the '90s were such a weird time is the rise in what most critics would call "erotic thrillers." I like to call 'em "Steamy Flicks."

You know how some film historians - Paul Schrader, for example, wrote an essay on it - claim that Film Noir was a movement, not a genre, and it only lasted during a certain time frame? (From Double Indemnity in '44 to Touch of Evil in '56, if you're asking.) Steamy Flicks might have been the same kind of thing, because they blew up from the arrival of Fatal Attraction in 1987, and I think they might have ended around the time the second half of tonight's double feature, or possibly when David Caruso decided to be like David Caruso in Jade. It was a time and place when people spoke with their wallets at the box office, and their wallets apparently said "We want to see women (preferably blondes) have crazy sex (preferably with Michael Douglas)."

Now, I haven't researched this entire movement and its place in Hollywood history. I was only 14 or 15 when it all but died out in the mid-'90s; I've been learning and playing catch-up ever since. But I'm pretty sure the two movies I'm gonna talk about tonight are two of the craziest Steamy Flicks from that time and place. 

That place is New York City.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Blue Steel

1990, Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Steamy Flicks hadn't hit their prime popularity yet in 1990 - that would come two years later when Basic Instinct became a pop culture thing - which means that Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel didn't have to follow some of the rules that Verhoeven's film made for this cinematic movement. That's a really good thing, because Bigelow and co-writer Eric Red (who had teamed together previously on Near Dark) had a little more freedom than they might have had if Sharon Stone was already a household name. They made their movie crazy, but it was at least their own kind of crazy. That's what makes it one of the best of all Steamy Flicks.

Blue Steel is the story of Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis!), a rookie cop who admits flat out that she wanted to become a cop because she craves action. Apparently they didn't have psychiatric tests for police officer women (Thanks, Hot Fuzz) in 1990 NYC, and that's fine, because Megan is kinda mostly sane. It's just that she has pretty bad luck.

Megan gets her first taste of action early in the film, and it doesn't go extremely well. She rushes into a NYC grocery store because she sees a gunman (a youngish Tom Sizemore) attempting to rob it, and she ends up gunning him down before he can do the same to her. In the chaos that follows, one of the onlookers, Eugene (Ron Silver), manages to grab the robber's gun and leave the scene before Megan can clean things up. Why would Eugene do that?

Because Eugene is CRAZY.

I don't like to call people crazy. It's not a nice word, nor is it the technical term. But if you lined up all the people in all the movies of the 1990s, and ranked them by mental illness, I'm willing to bet that Eugene would be in the top five or ten craziest.

What makes Eugene crazy, you ask? Well, here's a quick timeline of what happens before Blue Steel gets REALLY crazy:

• Eugene steals a gun from the crime scene, leaving poor Megan's shooting under investigation because apparently no one else saw the robber's gun.
• Eugene uses the gun to kill people, starting with an old man who seems too innocent to even try to not get killed while expressing his disbelief that he's about to be killed.
• Eugene carves "MEGAN TURNER" into the side of the bullet he uses to kill the old man, leaving Megan facing even more questions from Internal Affairs and a nice, but tough, cop (with beautiful curly hair) played by the marvelous Clancy Brown.
• Eugene lifts weights, which wouldn't be entirely creepy if he didn't start hearing voices while doing it, then start arguing with himself, then lift weights more violently.
• Eugene not only continues to kill people, but he does things like going to a rooftop, stripping nude, and wiping the hooker-he-just-murdered's blood-drenched sweater all over his face and body.
• Eugene uses the word "misanthropic" to describe his job as a commodities trader. Maybe that's not crazy, but it's a warning sign.

Oh yeah, and Eugene also manages to bump in to Megan on the street, put on the charm, and start dating her.

I KNOW. If you told me these were things that happened in a movie about a rookie cop who is just trying to get a little action, I wouldn't believe it either. But that's Blue Steel. And there's a lot more twists from there, I'm not giving too much away.

Now that I've gotten that craziness out of the way, let's get back to Megan Turner, as played by the still virginal in my mind Jamie Lee. She falls madly in love with Eugene. Maybe it's because her father doesn't like her being a cop, maybe it's because all the other men around seem to be shouting at her, but it's probably because Eugene seems to have a caring personality when he wants to.  He's sweet to her, and she's not used to that. One one of their earliest dates she kind of breaks down, possibly because the rest of her life just isn't working out right now.

Megan:

"I'm actually happy, very happy to be here. I feel like I'm on top of the world."

Eugene:

"Wanna get higher?"

At this point you might expect me to tell you that Eugene then gets Megan addicted to crack and starts riding her around the room like a pony. But NO. That's not what happens. He takes her for a ride in a helicopter. Over New York City, at night, with the wind in their hair and smiles on their faces. It's actually really lovely. At the end of the night, they share one of the most beautifully framed kisses I've ever seen on screen.

But, he's crazy. So things don't stay so lovely. And that's when the game of cat and mouse gets really fun. Blue Steel isn't one of Bigelow's most respected films, and you could possibly argue that she did the relationship between cop and criminal better a year later in Point Break (which would make a fine double feature with this too). But the thing I love the most about Blue Steel is just how willing it is to sell this crazy relationship between a kinda messed up cop and a totally messed up beyond belief killer. Bigelow and Red are in perfect control of a film that is perfectly out of control, and that makes it so much fun.

Now, what do we need for a double feature?

• Blue Steel is blessed with the unique couple, Curtis and Silver, that leads its cast. It's a pairing that you wouldn't really expect, and yet they play off each other incredibly well. This is mostly because they're two great actors, but also because they have an awkward, yet palpable, chemistry with each other. We need leads like that.
• Blue Steel also brings a stacked supporting cast to the table. I mentioned Brown and Sizemore, but you can also keep your eyes open for such all-stars as Elizabeth Pena, Matt Craven, Kevin Dunn and Richard Freakin' Jenkins. That's a great cast. We need a movie that has some heavyweights around the leads.
• I talked about the Steamy Flicks movement in the opening, but Blue Steel is actually pretty tame compared to some of them in the Steam department. If this double feature's gonna make any sense, I gotta take the Steam up a notch with movie number two.
• One of the things I think about every time I see Blue Steel is whether or not Megan is a problematic character. She's a strong, independent woman who can hold her own most of the time, but she also lets herself get caught up in the moment and falls in love with a crazy guy while occasionally getting in trouble because of her action fueled desire to be a hero. The movie solves this debate by the time the credits roll - and does so emphatically - but it's still interesting to think about the female lead and her choices when Hollywood so often struggles with characters like this. So, I'm looking for a female lead who's got some issues that the film has to work out.
• Also, I need to find a movie crazier than Blue Steel. I know that sounds difficult when you read all that stuff I said about Eugene, but I'm looking for a movie that does some insane things. Maybe a movie that has a montage where they cut together a series of trust falls, a snowball fight, and a sex scene. 

That movie, thankfully, exists.

Never Talk To Strangers

1995, Directed by Peter Hall

It's 1995 and we're in New York City. It's been five years since the events of Blue Steel (You can't prove that this isn't a shared universe, so back off!), and criminal psychologist Dr. Sarah Taylor (Rebecca DeMornay) is at the top of her game. She's working on the case of an accused serial rapist, Max Cheski (Harry Dean Stanton!), who might have Multiple Personalities Disorder or might be schizophrenic or might be a mastermind of crazy like Eugene was in Blue Steel. As we watch their sessions together it takes maybe seven words for us to realize Stanton, as you would expect if you know his work, is killing it in this role. Cheski is kind of a laid back version of Hannibal Lecter to Sarah's Clarice Starling, so when she asks "How often when you say you suffer from bouts of dementia?" and he responds with "I don't remember." before breaking into laughter, you start to realize Never Talk To Strangers is going to be the kind of movie where the lead character says the title of the movie, ten minutes into the movie, while doing the exact thing the title of the movie is saying not to do.

Cheski might be the shadiest dude in Sarah's life, but the movie quickly reveals there's going to be a lot of competition in the race for that title. First she's out to a kinky art gallery with her horny neighbor (Dennis Miller), and later her alcoholic father (Len Cariou) shows up and tries to make amends by jumping out of a dark alleyway at her. Between these moments, she meets a stranger in a supermarket (if these two movies taught me anything, it's that people shouldn't meet in NYC supermarkets) named Tony Ramirez, played by the undeniably suave Antonio Banderas.

To her credit, Sarah tries really hard to avoid Tony's advances...for about 2 minutes. He starts up a conversation about how she's choosing the wrong wine, compliments her on her looks, and tries to convince her he's got the right wine for her waiting at his nearby loft apartment. Much like the banter between Eugene and Megan in Blue Steel, he's got the right answers to most of her rebuttals.

Sarah:

"Do I look like someone who can be bought with a great vintage?"

Tony:

"You look like someone...who has to be won."

You might have guessed by now that Sarah and Tony get Steamy soon after this. And, since the bar for Steaminess had been raised by Basic Instinct and its immediate predecessors, this one goes for bizarrely Steamy with aplomb. It's not long before we start to question everything in Never Talk To Strangers, because when we see what Sarah is willing to do inside Tony's sex cage we see that Sarah is all about that Steam. Cheski sees it, Tony sees it, and whoever starts doing things like leaving dead flowers at her door or placing her obituary in the newspaper prematurely starts to see it.

The kissing in Never Talk To Strangers is just a tad Steamier than that of Blue Steel. Lovely doesn't live here anymore.

The biggest difference between Blue Steel and Never Talk to Strangers is their tones. Bigelow kept her film gritty with a focus on the police drama and a restrained musical score, while famed theater director Peter Hall (the father of actress Rebecca Hall) brings an operatic drama and a Pino Donaggio score to Never Talk To Strangers. The movie hits its first peak when Sarah, deep in doubt about Tony due to everything going on around her, realizes he might be a nice guy by participating in trust falls in a snowy park at night.

I hope you've never experienced a trust fall - that weird activity some doofus in the counseling community started where you fall backwards into a loved one's arms, hoping they catch you - because if you have you will be instantly jealous that you didn't experience it the same way Tony and Sarah did. What starts as an over-the-top attempt to convince her she can trust him escalates into a slow motion series of these falls, a snowball fight that devolves into a wrestling match, and (since this is a Steamy Flick) a sex scene. And it's all cut together. One shot of the fall, one of the snowballs, one of the sex back in her apartment, and repeat. It's the best montage since Rocky IV. 

I'm not convinced that Never Talk to Strangers isn't a terrible movie - especially considering the finale that I won't even hint at here - but it's a perfect example of why the Steamy Flick had to die eventually. There's only so much you can do with the concept. Blue Steel used it to create a gritty police drama, and Never Talk To Strangers uses it to create a melodrama that would almost be Hitchcockian if Hitchcock lost his damn mind and threw every piece of crazy he could think of into an 89 minute movie. (Then again, a Marnie/Never Talk To Strangers double feature might work. I must think on this further.)

The Steamy Flick movement is certainly defined by a mutated venn diagram that focuses on Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone and Demi Moore, but these two flicks that exist outside that framework just seem like they should be crazy best friends. If you're ever in the mood for a bunch of psychological mumbo jumbo, sexual tension that bubbles up in the most awkward ways, and all kinds of surprises - you need to take a trip to Steamy New York City with a Blue Steel/Never Talk To Strangers double feature.

P.S. - Could I possibly say Steamy more times?

P.P.S. - Steamy.

Volume 2 - Get Out and the Conversations We Need To Have

Last week we had some fun with some horror movies, this week we're starting with horror again. (If you haven't met me, you'll learn to expect that they'll come up a few times.) Gotta admit though - I'm really nervous about writing this piece. Based on who I am and what I've experienced in life, I can't possibly know what I'm talking about here. I thought about that a lot when I was considering this double feature, and I almost didn't do it. But sometimes the conversations we need to have are not the most comfortable ones, and sometimes the things we mean to say are more important than the mistakes we might make trying to say them.

That said, I'll leave one last warning up front. The things I am about to say will be said in the best way I can based on my experiences and the knowledge I have from my life. If the terms I use are insensitive or poorly chosen, please let me know. I am trying to do the right thing, I'm just not sure I'm the person to do it.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

I don't need to spend a lot of time talking about the movie we're starting with this week; everyone else in the film world and lots of audiences have already done that for me. It's one of the most well-reviewed movies of the year, and it's a flick I think will stick around for a long, long time.

Get Out

2017, Directed by Jordan Peele

I've already put my cards on the table, so I'll say this in a real simple way: I love Get Out a lot. I think it's one of the best horror movies ever made, and I'm not the kind of person who says something new is one of the best somethings ever made often. I buy new jeans more often than I find new favorites, and y'all should see some of the ratty jeans I wear. This is not what I do. And yet, here I am, doing it.

If you're one of the people out there that hasn't seen it or doesn't know about it yet, here's the quick summary of what you need to know about the film. A young African-American man, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), goes to the home of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to meet her family. Things there...are not what they seem.

That's it. That's all I want to say. You may be picturing something like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner - a film Peele lists as an influence on his film (more on that in a bit) - but there's a whole lot more "not what they seem" in this film than a difficult Spencer Tracy and a racist maid. The biggest joy in watching Get Out is seeing how it tackles this racial divide and finding out what the twist Peele has waiting for us is. 

The central theme of Get Out is best summed up by Peele's own words. In an interview to promote the film for Crave Online, Peele was asked what scares him the most. His answer, posted below, has a lot to do with the movie I picked for this double feature.

People. I think, and it goes to this whole horror thesis I hope I get to explore, but there's nothing that's scarier than what people are capable of when we get together. The way we can use fear, the way we can scapegoat, the way we can value those closer to ourselves more than we value people further from ourselves, or the other. I think human beings together are capable of the greatest things on Earth but also capable of the biggest atrocities.

Get Out hammers home that point. It manages to do so in an entertaining manner, balancing the injustices people are capable of with impressive comic and dramatic moments and a neat little horror/sci-fi twist. So, where can we go from there? Here's what I was thinking when I started looking for a double feature partner for this one.

• Peele has coined Get Out, and the next several films he plans to make, as "social thrillers." One of the coolest things I've seen in a long time is that, ahead of the release of Get Out, the Brooklyn Academy of Music allowed him to program a series of films entitled The Art of the Social Thriller. Through this 12 film series, he paired his film up with greats like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Rear Window (my personal favorite movie ever!), The 'Burbs, and more. Go ahead and click on that link and look at that list of films. It's beautiful, man. So...I couldn't use any of those films here. Dude stole my thunder. Thanks a lot, Jordan.
• As the quote above states, the scariest thing about Get Out is the human element of it all. At the center of the film are people. People who don't think Chris' life is valuable. People who get together and have their own way. Unfortunately, we need another movie that features people like that - even if it makes the double feature a little less pleasant.
• Before Get Out, Peele was most known for his time in comedy. As the co-star of Comedy Central's groundbreaking Key & Peele, Peele spent five years making people laugh and pushing the limits of comedy, while also dealing with plenty of issues like racism and homophobia. He wasn't the person you'd expect to make a movie that challenges what we think and what we believe about each other - and yet his willingness to challenge viewers helped him become the perfect person for that film. We need another director like that.
• Above all else, the thing that excites me about Get Out is how much it got people who had seen it talking. I can't sum that all up in one bullet point, so let's have a quick personal talk before we get to our other movie.

Hi. My name's Mike, and I am a white man. More than that, I'm a white man who grew up in a place where there were only white people. It was the '80s and the '90s, and that was just how things were there. For the most part, it still is.

The only black - that's the word we used then, because that's the word we were taught - people I knew were on TV or in sports. I never really thought about them as different than me, and I was never really told they were different than me, but the older I got I just started to notice that people around me - and thus, me - talked about them a little differently. And yeah, people used the n-word. It was thrown around in jokes sometimes, just because it could be. 

Perhaps the weirdest encounter of my life happened when I was a young adult. I had gone to college and stayed in my college town after graduation; I was now a "city boy." One day, I was home for a gathering with my extended family. I had a pair of black tennis shoes - cheap ones, I'm not the kind of guy who's rocking any Jordans - and for no reason, other than the fact I thought it didn't matter, I had replaced the worn out black shoelaces with some white ones. If this sounds like one of the smallest decisions I've ever made in my life, that's because that's what it was to me. Yet, as I wandered through a totally normal setting with people I've known my entire life, someone I was walking by said, our of nowhere, "Did you get those white shoelaces from one of the blacks over there?"

I still have no idea why the color of my shoelaces mattered, or how it represented the African-American community, and - I'll be honest - I was far too dumbfounded by the question to even reply to it.  I realize that this is one of the smallest incidents of racism in the history of racism - I've seen much worse, believe me - but it just struck me as the most bizarre comment I'd ever heard in my life. And it made me fully realize...that's how some people think when they've only learned from their own community. Sometimes they are taught things and they teach their children things and the cycle just goes on. And most of the time they don't even talk about it.

Nowadays, I work directly with people of many races and colors, but I still live a mere 25 miles from my hometown in a "city" of about 60,000 people on a school day. It's not a huge shift - this is still a 90%+ white community - but it's something. And when I talked to some of those people about Get Out, I got the biggest smile on my face. I was never in a place where we had actual conversations about race issues with someone, outside of the basic lessons about slavery and The Civil War we had in school. I don't blame my parents or close friends and family for that - I know all of them to be people who would stand up with the same opinions I have if they were confronted this issue - but it's so weird to look back and think about the unspoken beliefs people had back then. I wish we had more movies like this, movies that made us think about our belief systems and made us ask questions and start conversations about life.

Like I said, I know this is a totally white story about racism. But it's mine, and it makes me want to help people who might want to have these conversations get to that point. So let's get to that double feature....

The Intruder

1962, Directed by Roger Corman

I'm really excited that today's audiences have a film like Get Out that can get them talking about race issues. The film I wish I had seen when I was younger, that would have helped me to be more understanding of the dangers of groupthink and stereotypes, is Roger Corman's The Intruder.

Like Peele, Corman - a master of pulpy schlock that covered everything from Edgar Allan Poe to Crab Monsters - doesn't seem like the guy you'd expect to make a statement about how we live with each other and how minorities face challenges being accepted as who they are. Yet here he was in 1962, teaming up with author Charles Beaumont and a pre-Star Trek William Shatner, to create a film that tackled the white reaction to the integration of schools in the South without compromising one bit.

The Intruder is the story of Adam Cramer (Shatner), a young white man who rolls into a fictional town telling those he meets that he's a "social worker" and that he's "come to do what I can for the town." In fact, what he's come to do is stop the town from accepting a small group of African-American teenagers into its all white high school. And it really doesn't take him much work for him to get most of the white people in town on his side.

Bragging about his membership in the Patrick Henry Society (I googled it, it's real) and repeating "Whose law?" whenever someone reminds him that United States law has already decided that the schools will accept these students is enough to get Cramer in the door with most of the townspeople. We quickly see that they are generally opposed to integration, especially when it takes less than four minutes of the film before a little old lady drops a casual "nigger" in conversation. Much like my personal experience, she uses the term toward a white man who just happens to not be meeting her standards. This town is living that same belief that there's something different about white and black people - but unlike my childhood, this was a time when these comments were rarely held back.

While Cramer is busy giving speeches on the courthouse steps and reminding the town's richest man that "democracy is the collective will of the people," there seems to be only a couple of men in town who are willing to stand up against him. The guy I really like is Tom, the head of the town newspaper, who at one point admits to his wife that he is, in fact, in favor of the integration of schools. She responds with shock, because that's just not the way people in that town think, and when she asks him why he's never told her this he gives the perfect response to sum up his realization.

"Because I didn't know. I don't think I really knew til now. One thing Adam Cramer's done for us...he's made us face ourselves."

If this sounds a little like The Twilight Zone, that's because Beaumont - who adapted his own novel for Corman after the studios that bought the rights chickened out on making the film - wrote 22 episodes of that show and knew exactly how to point out the dark side of human nature. But there's no disclaimer from Rod Serling here; this is our world and our reality. As the film builds to a finale that's full of lies, threats, and all kinds of mob mentality, The Intruder becomes a gut-wrenching film to watch. 

Random note, because this post hasn't been long enough, I freakin' love this kid that co-starred in The Intruder. His name is Charles Barnes, and Corman picked him for a central role because he was a student and football player at a school that was integrated the previous year. He didn't bother finding an actor in Hollywood for the role, he just told Barnes to go with what he experienced and work from that. And the kid nails it. So good.

I don't think this would be an easy double feature to watch - you're definitely going to want to watch The Intruder first and end with Get Out, both for tone and timeline reasons - but I think it's an incredibly important one. Both Beaumont and Peele knew how dangerous people can be when they start thinking the wrong way, and both films can be necessary conversation starters.

I've never told that story about my shoelaces before. Partially because it's such a small incident, but also because it's just not comfortable to talk about these issues. Yet, the only way we can get stronger and smarter and braver in our world is to challenge ourselves to do it. Maybe watching The Intruder will help people see how things used to be, and maybe watching Get Out can help them see how things still are today. Maybe if we look at these things, and talk about these things, we can help change the lives of people who don't understand the racism that lives in their community. 

Maybe there are better ways to do it, but for me it's the movies that speak loudest. And if these movies can make me think more, it's my duty to recommend them to others too. That's a chance worth taking.

Volume 1 - I, Madman and the Dangerous Horror Story

Welcome to The Mike's Double Feature Picture Show, where I promise to be more interesting than the title of the site. I'm The Mike, and I've got this theory that movies are better in pairs. I'm not saying one movie isn't a good idea - I'm firmly in the All Movies Matter mindset - but when you realize a movie connects to another, whether it be through some cast/crew overlap or just a tonal similarity, you've got the makings of a great evening.  It's like people, but without the threat of divorce. I'm pretty sure science did a study on it.

No, I don't have a link to it.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

For our first adventure, let's start with a mostly forgotten horror movie from the late 1980s that might make you think twice before you take a trip to your favorite used bookstore - especially if you're afraid of clay monsters.

I, Madman

1989, Directed by Tibor Takacs

I, Madman is one of my favorite late '80s horror films that nobody seems to talk about anymore. It's a high concept plot wrapped up in a low budget package, and it's got so many great things going for it.

Jenny Wright (Near Dark) star as Virginia Clayton, an aspiring actress/used book store employee who becomes caught up in a pulp horror novel that comes across her desk. That book is Much of Madness, More of Sin, by Malcolm Brand, and I've got to admit it sounds like something I would want to read. Early in the film Virginia's boyfriend (Clayton Rohner, April Fool's Day) reads the blurb from the back of the dust jacket out loud, and....well, I'll just let you see it with your own eyes....

"Tortured and ridiculed by the scientific establishment for his investigations into the creation of superior life forms, noted zoologist Dr. Alan Kessler continues his experiments in the cloaked secrecy of his basement laboratory. Finally, after years of failure and frustration, he manages to successfully mate his own seed with an egg excised from the ovaries of a jackal and plants it in the womb of an unwitting human surrogate."

You'd read that book, right? Me too. It's got a dash of The Island of Dr. Moreau, a hint of Rosemary's Baby and - as we soon learn from Virginia's explanation of the book's plot - a handful of Frankenstein. Apparently that jackal man comes to life and doesn't like the doctor too much. If that sounds like something you want to read about - or see in a movie - then I, Madman is definitely for you.

Of course, it doesn't really matter if we like Much of Madness, More of Sin - it matters whether or not Virginia likes it. And she likes it a lot. Why is her boyfriend in her apartment reading that dust jacket anyway? Because she got so scared that she made what the kids these days would label....a booty call. And we can tell from the following scene that the book awoke some of Virginia's more animal impulses. Looks like you landed in the right place at the right time, boyfriend who also conveniently happens to be a police detective.

Virginia likes the book so much that she seeks out the only other book published by the author, which you might have guessed by now has the title I, Madman. And that's when things really get interesting for Virginia, because this book also gets her attention - but not in the same way as Brand's previous work. She's still addicted to the book and frightened in that wonderful great horror story kind of way, yet this time she also gets a bit more paranoid and a bit morbid. After another late night encounter with Detective Boyfriend he asks if she's OK and she responds by asking a couple of questions inspired by the book.....

"How much do you love me, Richard?"

"On a scale of 1-10? 20."

"Enough to cut off your ear?"

(You got game, Richard, aka Detective Boyfriend. Smooth.)

If it sounds like Virginia's starting to spend too much time in a nasty book, that's because a nasty book seems to be spending its time torturing Virginia. Turns out Dr. Kessler is back for the sequel, and he's also showing up in Virginia's life and reenacting the twists and turns (and murders) of the book on people around her. At first it seems like it's just in her head, but soon Virginia starts to see the things happen around her and - after a visit to the seedy publisher behind these novels - begins to realize that Malcolm Brand might have created something that isn't fiction.

I won't spoil any more of the plot than that, just know that you should strap yourselves in for a bit of blood, a dose of Rear Window-esque police drama, and the kind of finale you would expect from director Tibor Takacs, who made this shortly after completing the kids vs. a portal to Hell classic, The Gate.

So what are we working with here? What are the factors that make I, Madman as much fun as it is and what are the things that we're looking for in a double feature?

• I, Madman's concept is the first thing that draws me to it. Horror movies about horror stories seem to be worth a viewing more often than not, and Takacs and screenwriter David Chaskin (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) capitalize on that. It makes a lot of sense that this is written by someone who previously did a Nightmare film, because I, Madman's best moments live in that area where we're not quite sure if what Virginia is experiencing is set in reality or a kind of dream. 
• Even better, the horror story at the center of I, Madman seems to be such an outlier in society that there's a fantastic mystique around it. This isn't a banned book, it just seems to be something that no one except Virginia has heard of. Again there's a blurring of the line between reality and fiction here, which sets up the classic "nobody believes it's real even though things are seriously real, just look at those bodies over there" element that you need in this kind of movie.
• One of the problems with matching this up with a double feature is that it's obviously an '80s movie and it's not quite on the same wavelength as a lot of its contemporaries. There are parallels to be drawn with the Nightmare on Elm Street series and some other woman-who's-connected-to-a-killer flicks (like Bad Dreams or Popcorn, the latter of which also has a dangerous forbidden horror tale), but the heroine here is a little stronger and isn't dealing with any kind of past trauma. She's just an intellectual who slipped into the wrong book and didn't know what would come from it. We need to find another movie with someone like that.
• This is a movie with a cat scare. I don't know if that's relevant, but I just really love movies where a cat jumps in front of someone at the right moment. Jenny Wright sells it well too. I kinda love her. That last sentence wasn't relevant, but I do. This whole bullet point is irrelevant, I guess. But I love cats and Jenny Wright. Let's move on.

Now, let's get to our double feature pick.....

In The Mouth of Madness

1994, Directed by John Carpenter

This almost seemed like too easy of a pick. One movie's about a book that drives someone nearly insane, the other's about a book that drives a lot of people insane. I almost called off this recommendation about halfway through watching both movies again, but then a revelation hit me. We'll get to that in a minute.

More people are probably acquainted with In The Mouth of Madness, arguably John Carpenter's last great horror picture, than they are with I, Madman. It's easy to see why from watching this film - it's a bigger budget horror film with a bigger name cast. (Charlton Heston is in it!) The films have a lot of similarities in their plots - a dangerous book, skeptical male leads who question the artistic value of horror fiction, an author who has dark powers to taunt his victims, a lot of blood and deformities - but it's their differences that really made me think this had become a fun double feature.

While I, Madman focuses on an obscure book that seems to target only the woman who found it, In the Mouth of Madness is about a man named John Trent, played by Sam Neill (Jurassic Park), who is the target of a famous author who outsells Stephen King. (Carpenter makes sure we hear that multiple times, just to hammer it home.) Trent, an insurance investigator hired to locate author Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow, Das Boot), becomes the target of the author - but there's also a much more grand design behind Cane's game. And while I, Madman brings its villain into Virginia's world, In the Mouth of Madness invites Trent into Cane's world. The lines of reality and fiction are blurred, but here it's even more obvious that things are wrong. We know at certain points in I, Madman that Virginia is still in her world, but at a certain point in In the Mouth of Madness that Trent has gone too far into Cane's world and there will be no letting up on him from that point forward.

Watching these films as a double feature made me think about the Mad Max franchise, and not just because all these movies have the word "Mad" somewhere in the title. Particularly, I was thinking about the original Mad Max - a small film where one man has his limits pushed and has to survive - and Mad Max: Fury Road - a big budget reboot where things are so much bigger in scale and it feels like the whole world is hanging on the conflict at the center of the film. That's the same kind of relationship that you get from an I, Madman/In the Mouth of Madness double feature. One film is small and focused on one thing, the other has a whole lot going on and a lot more at stake than just the lives of a small group of people. 

So, I recommend you hit up I, Madman first, for a taste of what can happen when a horror book comes after a few people, then take it to the next level with In the Mouth of Madness, where you can joy some full-blown, cats-and-dogs-living-together mass hysteria. Once you're done you can pick up your favorite horror novel and be happy that the author hasn't set their sights on you.

Yet.