John Landis (Part Two)
John Landis (Part Two)
The writer/director of An American Werewolf in London (and many other classic films) ponders dreams and nightmares, ghosts and zombies, disaster movies, and the rise of the A-budget B-picture.
by Kurt Sayenga
NO RESPECT
LANDIS: I’ve always loved fantasy and horror and science fiction and there really are a lot of very good horror films. Probably 50 to 100 really good ones. And then there are a couple thousand pieces of shit.
KURT: Isn’t that the ratio for motion pictures in general?
LANDIS: That’s the ratio for everything. For everything.
KURT: Horror movies get singled out as being an embarrassment to “the art of cinema,” like the lunatic cousin the aristocratic family keeps locked up in the attic.
LANDIS: The two genres that historically never really got respect from critics or academics, it’s changed now, but really if you look at the Oscars for instance, The Silence of the Lambs [1991] is the single horror picture that actually won the Academy Award. Every so often there’s an actor like Frederick March, but basically… And what’s interesting is that the movies that got respect were all based on books. Whether it’s Frankenstein, Dracula, Rosemary’s Baby [1968], The Omen [1976], Jaws - they’re all based on books. So it gives it kind of a literary patina. It’s like, it’s okay, it’s really literature! [Laughs] Which is something Roger Corman used to do, he’d throw Edgar Allan Poe’s name on anything. Class it up. But the reality is comedy and horror, which historically don’t get much respect, are very similar in the fact that they both invoke an involuntary physical response. So how do you judge comedy? “Did it make you laugh?” “Yeah.” “Was it good?” “No, no!” [Laughs]. “But it’s a comedy?” “Yeah.” “The purpose of which is to make you laugh?” “Yes.” “Did it make you laugh?” “Oh, I was crying I was laughing so hard.” “But the movie wasn’t good?” “No.” It’s very interesting. The other one is horror which is, “Did it scare you?” “I was scared shitless.” They both invoke an involuntary physical response. It’s a convulsion. You laugh, or you [gasps]. My favorite thing when in a horror cinema and people are watching a horror film, is this [covers his eyes]. Because you watch it but you don’t wanna see it. Children are very good about what they should and shouldn’t see. When something really creepy happens, they don’t wanna see it, they leave.
KURT: The prejudice against the word “horror” goes way back.
LANDIS: Famously, Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, all the so-called horror stars, they all objected to the term “horror film.” Chris Lee liked fantastic, or fantastique, which is what the French called it. I understand why they object to that label – because it’s easy to horrify someone. Very easy. Show me a picture of Donald Trump, no problem, I’m horrified. Show someone a terrible car accident, show someone disfigured, show someone dying – there’s so many things to horrify you, it’s not hard. What’s hard is to create suspense and tension and concern. If you care about or are involved with the characters, the people in the movie, if you can relate to the people in the movie, then that’s successful. And all of those actors didn’t like being called horror stars because horror is dismissive, it’s a genre that gets no respect, although that’s changing now. It’s not hard to go “Boo!” It’s easy to go “Boo!” Just go into a haunted house ride and you’ll be scared shitless by morons in rubber masks. You know a redneck’s last words? “Hey Bubba, watch this!” Anyway, the reason they objected to it is because it takes no skill to horrify. But it takes skill to make stories in which we worry and are concerned. This whole genre of slasher films, you really didn’t care about those people, you just wanted to see how cleverly they could be killed.
It’s kind of a strange, it became - I remember I worked on The Towering Inferno [1974], this picture John Hillerman directed, it was a huge hit for [producer] Irwin Allen. And I did stunts on that. And the ad for The Towering Inferno had the big the two buildings, and Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, or depending which side of the Mississippi you were on, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. But anyway, it had boxes along the bottom with each big star - Jennifer Jones, Robert Wagner, Faye Dunaway, William Holden, OJ Simpson, Fred Astaire, all the stars that were in the movie, and the line was “Who will survive?” It was a snuff movie! It was like, “They got Jennifer Jones!!!” It became a new genre. The Saw films, all the films with multiple casts where they knock ‘em off one by one…Agatha Christie’s famous Ten Little Indians, it’s basically “Who will die?” Or House on Haunted Hill [1959] – “Who will survive?” It’s the pleasure the audience gets in watching other people get killed. But to really care about those other people, that’s what makes it real.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out [2017] takes a Twilight Zone situation and makes it so scary because we’re concerned about that guy! The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974], the original one, you’re really worried about Marilyn. It was relentless and it was truly terrifying. It was also horrifying, but that was secondary. It was terrifying. The Exorcist, oh my god – Friedkin takes half the movie! The first half is all setup, and then the second half is “Whoopee!” Very much like Jaws. It’s a traditional monster movie. Or King Kong [1933], King Kong doesn’t enter till halfway through the movie, then it doesn’t stop. Same thing with Jaws [1975], the shark is hidden. And one of the most interesting things about Jaws – which is a wonderful movie – is the first half is a classic monster movie. Even the music: Dah-dun. Dah-dun. It’s the same score as King Kong, da-dun da-dun da-dun da-dun. Max Steiner, John Williams. The point is, it’s a monster movie. But the second half, once they get on the boat, even the music changes to action adventure on the high seas. Bum! Bum! Bum! – it’s like an Old Spice commercial. It’s wonderful, it becomes Moby Dick [1956]. First it was The Creature from the Black Lagoon[1954] and then Moby Dick and it’s wonderful. That’s an amazing movie.
KURT: The tables start to turn when the monster is a known quantity, whereas before it was an unseen force.
LANDIS: Well yes, absolutely. The monster when unseen is malevolent, it’s “Where is it, what’s gonna happen next?” And that fin, or better yet the shape underwater is like, Holy…! It’s much, much scarier when they shoot it and you see the barrels being dragged and then go underwater than when you finally see the little rinky dink shark robot. That’s the big sea change in movies, no pun intended. Up until the mid-‘70s, all science fiction, fantasy, and horror was almost always B product. It was either exploitation or the second half of the bill. Every studio every decade made A horror films. Paramount made [Rouben] Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1931], which is great, still the best Jekyll and Hyde, and you should check it out if you haven’t seen it. And it has that amazing effect on Frederick March, who won an Oscar as best actor. Paramount made Island of Lost Souls [1932], they all made A-budget pictures. Universal, Columbia. Mystery of the Wax Museum [1933] is Warner Bros. Doctor X [1933] is Warner Bros. But usually they were B pictures. In the ‘50s, MGM made Forbidden Planet [1956], which is one of the great brilliant movies, and that’s a big A picture of a B product. Jaws and Star Wars [1977] change things because they were so successful in creating the summer blockbuster. Jaws is a monster movie and Star Wars is Flash Gordon, or Buck Rogers. But they were not made with cheap money and B actors, they were made with good actors on big budgets. And now what’s happened, it’s all completely reversed now. Comic books are corporate and it’s these $200 million movies they come out with, that’s the A product.
KURT: It’s interesting that the superhero movies usually have monsters of some kind.
LANDIS: Oh always, always – it’s weird that people don’t refer to the superhero movies as monster movies because they’re always monster movies. They always have some great monster or three or millions of them. The Hulk is essentially a monster. But my other point is the two sea changes, one was in budgets to where it is now which is very bizarre. And the other is in special effects. Because they were B products, B pictures had lower budgets, you didn’t really have the resources. So through the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s and into the ‘70s you had movies from Roger Corman, from Joe Solomon, from Fanfare and AIP, William Castle, from the Italians, you’d have pretty good movies until the monsters showed up. And it was a guy in a rubber suit or the rocket ship had swivel chairs. And then suddenly, because of guys like Dennis Muren and Rick Baker and all these guys who grew up with [the magazine] Famous Monsters of Filmland, they got into special effects and they were revolutionary. Suddenly you had these really bad movies with stupid plots and horrific monsters and great special effects! You cut to the spaceship, you go, “Wow, that’s cool.” It’s always been funny to me.
DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
KURT: So, tell me about this notion that cinema is dreams being brought to life.
LANDIS: You read my forward!
KURT: I read the whole book! [Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares.]
LANDIS: There’s an interesting thing about cinema, or about motion pictures. There’s a language that all filmmakers use to tell a story. The motion picture is new. It’s not even 150 years old, it’s brand new as opposed to sculpture or painting or writing, or most of the other arts, music, dance. The film is – or now you should say the motion picture – the motion picture is relatively new and the way you tell a narrative story is through the juxtaposition of images. Editing is called montage, and basically Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, these five or six guys invented the language we still use. And what fascinates me the most about it is you can show a movie to an Ethiopian, to an Aborigine, to a guy in Chicago, to a guy in Toronto, to someone in Guatemala, you can show a movie to someone who’s never seen a movie image before, and they’ll understand what’s going on. That when you see a building, and then suddenly you’re inside the building, you’re inside that building. This basic film language. And I’ve always been fascinated, how do people know that? My theory, with my great research credentials, is that it’s the way we dream. When people dream, and they wake up and they remember their dreams, they always say “It was so real, it was like a movie,” which is totally schizophrenic and wonderful. I think that cinema is the way we dream, and cinema has become the world mythology now. It’s the one thing that ties all cultures.
KURT: And if that’s true, then genre films are expressions of our nightmares?
LANDIS: Nightmares. What’s fascinating about movies, or what’s called the American film business, is between like 1928 and 1976 you had these factories in LA. You had Columbia, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Disney, Universal, Columbia, RKO, Fox. And, not Disney, but the others, Paramount, Metro, Fox, they would make between 50 and 56 feature films a year, for 30 years. And what’s amazing is, they’re all pretty good. Even the bad ones are watchable. It’s quite remarkable. That’s changed completely. That’s gone, that factory system of making movies. But my point is that everybody loves movies. They really do. And there’s certain movies that are like Al Pacino in Godfather Part II [1974), “They pull ya back!” There’s certain movies, if you pass a television and Goodfellas [1990] is on, or The Godfather [1972], or Psycho [1960], there’s so many of them, you just, vrrroooom. [laughs] You just are there. And you’re stuck!
KURT: Also sticky, at least for some of us: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [1948]. I must ask you about that film’s historical importance.
LANDIS: Well okay. The thing that makes Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein important is that there are these two burlesque comics romping around and it’s a monster rally. It was Universal saying, “We’ve got the Wolf Man and Dracula, who else we got?” But what makes that film so special is, they treated the movies with respect. The monsters are not oafish, they’re not silly. Dracula’s Dracula, and the Frankenstein Monster is The Monster, Wolf Man’s the Wolf Man, he’s still tortured. “You don’t understand, when the moon is full, I turn into a wolf!” “Yeah, you and 20 million other guys.” They were silly, but the monsters were straight. And as a kid, that movie was scary to me, watching it on TV when I was six years old, you know? It was scary. I like that picture.
KURT: In King of the Zombies [1941], there’s one guy who’s telling jokes and everybody else is pretty much playing it straight.
LANDIS: Well, the wonderful thing in King of the Zombies, it’s an unfortunately dated and racist picture, but Mantan Moreland, he sees the zombies, and when he sees them, of course, no one else sees them. So he tells people, “I saw a zombie!” And it’s on a Caribbean Island. It’s actually an interesting movie plot-wise because this nefarious white man is manipulating the zombies. And zombies are fascinating. All the way back to White Zombie [1932] with Bela Lugosi.
THE MONSTER OF THE 21ST CENTURY
LANDIS: The thing that makes zombies so fascinating to me is, they are real. Most monsters are not real. There arezombies. The real zombies are in Haiti and they’re created by the venom of a thing called the Fugu Fish and witch doctors and voodoo. Voodoo is essentially Catholicism and African religions all mixed up together. And they would take people and poison them, the poison would put them into a catatonic state, and they’d bury them alive, basically making them insane, and totally break a person, until they became just a zombie. And then they used them as labor in the sugar cane fields. So there’s zombies that are real. There was a Wes Craven movie, based on a book, The Serpent and the Rainbow,which deals with the real idea of zombies. But then there are zombies – talk about metaphors again, as they have evolved since George Romero [writer/director of Night of the Living Dead, 1968].
There’s a great Richard Matheson book called I Am Legend that has been made into like four or five movies, of varying quality, but one of them was made in Rome with Vincent Price [The Last Man on Earth, 1964]. And George told me that he took his idea of – he called them blue collar zombies – from that film. In that film they’re not zombies, they’re vampires. But it’s the idea of the mailman and your neighbor, and that old lady and that teacher and that guy, it’s us. Pogo, the wonderful comic strip by Walt Kelly, had the famous line, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” And so zombies have become this constantly evolving metaphor.
They are the monster of the 21st Century. Just merely by the fact they keep making these zombie movies. So zombies can come now, not just from religion and poisons, zombies comes now from radiation, from government experiments, from some mysterious disease, I mean, there’s some from toxic waste, they just make it up. Zombies just come from whatever you wanna talk about. And Romero’s brilliant thing in Night of the Living Dead was he made the zombie totally real. It wasn’t I Walked with a Zombie [1943], the Jacques Tourneur movie. That was the more traditional voodoo zombie, and it’s usually a tall black guy whose eyes are white walking like this [slow stiff gait]. He evolved it into the flesh-eating – like, where did that come from? [laughs] I don’t know where that came from. But they eat people now. And how do you kill a zombie? You have to shoot it in the head. Why? Or where, you know, what? Huh? I mean, the brilliance of Night of the Living Dead on so many levels. The fact it had a black lead, which George always said was not deliberate. It was like, “Dwayne was the best actor.” I don’t believe him. I think it was deliberate. But nonetheless, that movie’s revolutionary in many, many ways and had a profound impact.
And zombies have now been used – you’ve got running zombies, you have shuffling zombies…And it’s like, why is the Mummy scary? Why is the Mummy scary? Richard Pryor had a routine about the Mummy where he said, “It’s the Mummy! Walk away!” Because the Mummy’s always dragging his foot. And what’s fascinating is that what makes the Mummy scary is that he just keeps coming. He’s the Eveready bunny. He won’t stop. And some zombies just keep coming. To the point of insanity. In World War Z [2013], the Brad Pitt movie, they have so many zombies they start piling on top of one another like ants and just become human piles of zombies. CG zombies. And zombies now, it’s just, it’s silly, it’s become crazy. And yet, they’re still very scary when done correctly.
KURT: They’re still popular, but trends come and go. You can look at the slasher films of the ‘80s and wonder, “Well, why was that a thing?” Why slashers then, why zombies now?
LANDIS: Yeah. Well first of all, when there are a lot of movies of the same kind, it’s because there were movies that were successful and people are jumping on the bandwagon. “Make me one of those movies!” Beach party movies or whatever. But zombies have become metaphors for not only old age and decrepitude…[David] Cronenberg told me once that you go to an old age home and watch the people shuffling in their robes and that’s what we all become. Dementia comes and you start losing your mind and you’re just wandering, and you need to be kept alive. It’s frightening. Zombies are representative of Alzheimer’s, a terrifying disease, and zombies are representatives of cancer. To me, what’s happened with the zombie is now they are representatives of anarchy, and the collapse of government, the collapse of order, you know, they’re everything [that’s] failed us. I mean, they elected Trump because essentially he’s a zombie.
KURT: The film version of World War Z, if it was about anything, seemed to be about overpopulation. You talk about all of those masses and masses of bodies…
LANDIS: That’s how you deal with zombies: birth control. It can be anything you want. Dawn of the Dead [1978], again, George [Romero], those zombies shuffling around the mall. How fabulous was that?
GHOSTS AND THE ENIGMA OF DEATH
KURT: We were going to talk about ghost movies. Let’s start with The Uninvited [1944].
LANDIS: Okay well, ghosts. There are very few international monsters. There’s generic types of monsters, but the one monster that’s everywhere, it’s in every culture no matter how sophisticated and primitive all around the world, and that’s ghosts. And that deals with not just the fear of death, but humans need answers. We need answers. And sometimes they’re not really knowable yet. So what happens, I mean science will bring us there eventually, but what happens is, we must create a rationale for what – the our whole justice system is based on answers. Responsibilities. Like if there’s an accident, the concept of an accident terrifies people because it must be somebody’s fault. And it’s not really always true. Sometimes an accident is, I heard a definition, it’s an unforeseen series of coincidences with a tragic result. Which I think is a very good definition of an accident. Sometimes they’re not coincidences. Sometimes you can say, “Well, if they had done that, and if they had done that, that wouldn’t have happened.” But the truth is, not always. So, when people die, what happened to them? Where did they go? Where are they? What, you know? If you have a relative die, it’s a very bizarre and surreal event because it’s like people who lose limbs, there’s the phantom limb, have you ever heard of that? Where people lose their arms but they can still feel their hands and open their fingers, even though they’re not there?
When a relative or a friend passes away, they’re not there. What is death? Where did they go? So one of the things people do, because they can’t handle it, is they invent religions. They’re either reincarnated or they go to heaven, or maybe they go to hell, or they are ghosts. They’re spirits. And they’re still here. And for a lot of people, that’s very comforting. It’s also very scary, because you’re dead. So you have vengeful ghosts, you have evil ghosts, you have ghosts who are broken-hearted, but usually ghosts are out to cause trouble. [laughs] Not always. You mentioned The Uninvited. I always found the strangest thing about The Uninvited, which is a movie I quite like, is Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey, they’re brother and sister, neither of them are married, and they’re buying this house together on the coast. It’s like, what? You know, very strange, but they have a dog. The way they deal with ghosts there, quite wonderful. They go in the house and they [sniffs] “Do you smell mimosa?” [laughs] And that great scene where she’s got flowers she picked and she goes to this room that their dog won’t go in, and she puts the flowers down and as they’re talking you cut to the flowers and you see they just brrr [the flowers die in the cold]. And that’s one of the few movies, now I haven’t seen it in many, many years, but I remember when the ghost materializes, it was scary.
KURT: They do a misdirect there by making you think there’s only one ghost, but actually there are two. But you rarely get a clear view of ghosts in classic horror.
LANDIS: Well, there’s so many. The ghost movie that I remember being wonderful is of course Robert Wise’s The Haunting [1963], based on The Haunting of Hill House. And that’s a really scary movie. And the ghosts are never really shown. You hear them. The Innocents [1961], great movie with Deborah Kerr. I lost a bet with Joe Dante ‘cause I said you never see the ghost in that, but actually you do. You see Quint’s reflection in the window. So, I had to pay Joe money. But that’s a wonderful, creepy movie and that’s got a fabulous moment with a little boy, she’s a governess, and they go to kiss “goodnight” and his kiss is very sexual. And it’s like, “Uuhhhhhh….” The Legend of Hell House [1973], Richard Matheson’s script? That has a wonderful surprise at the end. There are a bunch of good ghost movies actually, some Japanese films and some Korean films, wonderful.
KURT: Well, with the Japanese and ghosts, it’s a big part of their culture.
LANDIS: Every culture. Ghosts mean different things in different religions and different cultures. Some ghosts are benevolent, some ghosts are malicious. Usually in a movie, a ghost should be malicious, pretty scary, but there’s always that struggle. ‘Cause when someone dies, where do they go? Where are they? I have a friend who says that people she knows don’t die. They just are on vacation. “So, where’s Larry?” “Oh, he’s in Rio de Janeiro on the beach.” Because they just are here, and then they’re not here. And that’s why we create rituals, funerals, memorial services, to help us deal with the grief. And part of the grief is, where the hell did they go? They’re here and they’re not here. You can’t call them. And it’s that movies help you, they’re therapeutic. They deal with “Where did they go?”
THE AFTERLIFE (ON SCREEN)
KURT: We were trying to think of movies that had interesting depictions of the afterlife.
LANDIS: I was trying to think of a good one and the only one I could really think of was Beetlejuice [1988].
KURT: Afterlife movies are a rare breed.
LANDIS: Oh, there are a lot of movies that show various afterlives. Did you ever see Hellzapoppin [1941]? It starts in Hell. Or a wonderful Lubitsch movie called Heaven Can Wait [1943], where Laird Cregar plays Satan. A Matter of Life and Death [1946], with David Niven and Kim Hunter before she was a chimp [in the original Planet of the Apes series]. Have you ever seen The Horn Blows at Midnight [1945]?
KURT: Sure. Jack Benny as the trumpet-playing angel at the end of the world.
LANDIS: That’s got a wonderful heaven in it. That celestial orchestra with Jack Benny. Here Comes Mister Jordan [1941]. That shows, really, purgatory. But so does Heaven Can Wait.
KURT: Jack Benny mocked his own acting, but he was great in To Be or Not to Be [1942].
LANDIS: Playing a ham actor.
KURT: A modern movie that does show you the ghost is Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone [2001].
LANDIS: The Devil’s Backbone is a terrific ghost movie. It takes place during the Spanish Civil War. Guillermo has made two films set during the Spanish Civil War. The other is Pan’s Labyrinth [2006], another wonderful movie. But no ghosts in Pan’s Labyrinth.
KURT: Pan’s Labyrinth is a proper creature movie.
LANDIS: Pan’s Labyrinth is very much sort of another view of Alice in Wonderland. Little girl goes into the rabbit hole and encounters a new race of people. Guillermo has a real appreciation and passion and love of monsters. He always has terrific monsters in his movies. The Shape of Water [2017] is basically the romantic side of The Creature from the Black Lagoon [1954]. And [Jean] Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast [1946], you love the beast so much, wonderful make-up, that when Jean Marais becomes the handsome prince, it’s disappointing! [laughs]
GOOD MONSTERS
There’s so many good monster movies. King Kong [1933], I mean what a wonderful monster. Both King Kong and the Frankenstein Monster, they’re both crucified, you know, they’re not subtle when they’re telling you about these monsters. And Kong is just so delicious and so much a Depression movie.
KURT: How so?
LANDIS: Well, because it starts when Fay Wray steals an apple. That’s all Carl Denham sees, it’s the Great White Way, it’s about Hollywood, it’s about filmmaking, it’s a real movie about fantasy and a real New York movie. You’ve been to a premiere of a movie, there’s something called the red carpet or when you do a photo call, which I’ve done too many times, where you have a whole bunch of paparazzi, a whole bunch of people and these flashes are going off, the flashes, pew pew, and I always hear in my head, “Stop, he thinks you’re hurting the girl!” [laughs] Which is a reasonable conclusion for Kong to come to. In Kong: Skull Island (2017), I kinda liked it except he’s so big, they’ve made him sobig, mainly so he can fight Godzilla in the next one. But he’s just so tall that he can’t relate to the girl.
KURT: What did you think of Kong: Skull Island combining Apocalypse Now [1979] with a monster movie?
LANDIS: I don’t know, it was silly. I enjoyed it actually. I love Peter Jackson, but I didn’t like his Kong because he made him a gorilla. And King Kong’s not a gorilla; he’s a mythical beast. Just making him a gorilla was odd.
KURT: In your book Monsters in the Movies, you have headshots of all the Kongs, and you do see a progression. Is making Kong too realistic kind of…problematic?
LANDIS: Well, first of all, did you hear what you just said? [laughs] Is making a 60-foot gorilla too realistic? I just didn’t like it, I just felt that it was odd and I didn’t like the natives. A movie that I do like that’s terrible is King Kong Vs. Godzilla [1963], which is a Toho Picture. First of all, it’s in Toho-scope, it looks beautiful, but my favorite scene is the villain in this native village that worships King Kong are doing a big musical number and it’s all Japanese in blackface. And it’s insane. It’s really nuts.
THE NATURE OF FEAR
LANDIS: When I wrote my monster book, I interviewed a lot of distinguished filmmakers. I interviewed John Carpenter, and I always ask, “How do you define a monster?” And the question I ask second is, “What’s the monster you find most scary?” And he said, “I don’t think monsters are scary. People are scary.” And that’s quite true. My wife could see any monster movie, anything with a monster. Any zombie any werewolf, any vampire, any whatever. She won’t see a movie like The Silence of the Lambs [1991], or Psycho [1960], or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974], because that’s real. There are people out there who do these things. And it’s about madness. When Norman Bates says, “You know we all go a little mad sometimes.”
Psycho is just brilliant on every level. Not just the composition of the shots, but the script and especially the way Anthony Perkins plays Norman Bates. He’s just extraordinary. And there are things in the movie…Hitch always thought it was a comedy. He always claimed that, but there are things in the movie that are funny. “Muh-mother’s not herself today.” But that is truly horrible, that story. It’s very perverted and very sick. And the last shot, the superimposition of his mother and the skull, pretty scary. “I wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Well, we know that there’s a guy that climbs into a Vegas hotel with a machine gun, then murders 50 or 60 people. Why? We still don’t know. Well, I know why, he was crazy. He was psychopathic and disturbed.
When people are afraid, what are they afraid of? Well, where does any threat come from? It comes from outside or inside. So it’s like Peeping Tom [1960] or Norman Bates or Hannibal Lecter. It’s madness which ends up in murder. Or it comes from outside: the other team, the other tribe, the other country. And it’s very much the way Trump is doing this whole anti-immigration thing. The obvious racism of it is despicable, but also the whole Wizard of Oz aspect. “Never mind that man behind the curtain, it’s these immigrant people killing us.” Well, all the mass murders in our country are done by white Christian men, born here! He’s lying! But people are buyin’ it! So, talk about horror movies.
KURT: Well, the role of the Other in horror movies is reflective of our social relationships, whether we identify with the Other or vilify the Other. So much of it is based on appearances. We’re hard-wired to fear difference.
LANDIS: Well of course. The infamous Todd Browning film Freaks [1932], that’s a remarkable picture and it’s considered a horror film. It’s a drama, but it has a horrific ending. It reverses the tradition. The freaks are the people we care about, and the beautiful people, the beautiful trapeze artist and the strong man, the physical specimens, are the monsters. And one of the things about “Freaks” that’s so disappointing – I think it’s a great film. And Todd Browning grew up around the carnival, the circus, and freak shows, and knew a lot of freaks and was friends with people with physical anomalies. And the thing about that movie that’s so difficult is he generates such sympathy for the freaks that when they’re happy for the wedding of Hans the midget and this beautiful woman, and they’re singing “Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, we will make you one of us,” her revulsion and disgust at these malformed people, we’re pissed off. We’re like, “Hey!” [laughs] you know, “These are our friends!” And then the movie does this strange turn, which is when all the freaks come to mutilate her. There are images you don’t forget. There’s this guy in the movie who basically is a head, a normal size head, and his body is like this big, it’s like a sausage in a sweater with like a safety pin. And in fact, he’s real, and in the movie at one point he rolls a cigarette, does everything with his mouth. And you like him. And then, I remember, when I first saw that film, that image in the storm, in the rain, in the mud, where all the freaks are coming to mutilate her and turn her into a freak, there’s a shot of him with a knife in his mouth, a big knife in his mouth, sort of squirming through the mud, and I remember thinking, “What’s he gonna do with that knife?” [laughs] But still, that’s disappointing. It’s like, well, wait a minute!
KURT: It builds sympathy, then betrays them.
LANDIS: Well, it does, very successfully throughout the whole film, and then at the end, it goes against it. And makes her a monstrosity.
KURT: I guess that speaks to what Stephen King has written about conservatism being built into the genre.
LANDIS: It’s totally a reactionary genre. Especially all the mad scientists. Whether it’s Doctor Morbius on Altair IV, or Doctor Jekyll, or Doctor Moreau, they’re all doing things that man is not meant to know. And so, they all get punished. ■
Portions of this interview were featured in the AMC-TV series Eli Roth’s History of Horror; our conversation appears here in its entirety for the first time.
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