First Houses of Joy

I lived in Detroit for several years and loved it; I've never been able to understand the negativity about the town. For a horror fan, it was a paradise.

It snows like hell in Detroit, especially in January. It was the first time I heard the expression "windchill factor". When you pump gas, you experience it firsthand.

As a new arrival, I was warned to steer clear of the drive-ins in Winter because of the snow and sleet. "It's best to wait until March or April," they'd say.

Did these people know who they were talking to?

I hadn't seen either film at the time. I was eighteen. When this ad mat appeared in the "Detroit News", I was shaking with excitement.

Last House on the Left had been banned in Australia for years. It was still banned three or four years ago. It had a rep. A great rep. That was all I needed.

I knew nothing about The House By The Lake because it didn't occur to me -- at the time -- that the film was called Death Weekend in the UK and Australia. I had read a review of Death Weekend in an issue of "Films and Filming", an excellent British periodical from the publishers of "Books and Bookmen". There had been a dynamite still of a cop being dragged behind a moving car. It was an image that never left me. Six years later, I'd take it for inspiration, and expand it into a modest feature of my own... Enough said.

The snow didn't stop falling all Friday. It had dug itself in for the weekend. My partner at the time warned me that driving on the slippery roads, in falling snow, was a recipe for disaster, especially for an Australian who'd only had his license for under a year and whose experience with snow was limited to writing on Xmas cards. So I nodded, acknowledging her concern, kissed her goodbye, and made a bee-line for the front door.

I was living in Mount Clemens, a suburb of Detroit that was approximately ten miles from the Gratiot Drive-In (it took its name from its street address).

I took my time, drove slowly, and ran the car heater at full bore. I was one of a chosen few who'd taken to the roads that snowy Friday night. The wipers were deflecting the falling flakes reasaonbly efficiently, but the hot air was drying out my eyes something fierce. I squinted to peer through the smudged windscreen. Every now and then, sets of bright, yellow eyes would sweep past me.

The Gratiot Drive-In emerged from a flurry. Its neon sign beckoned me in the right direction. I lowered the heat and lurched towards the ticket box. The driveway was a shagpile of mud. It was 730, but there were no other cars. I definitely had the right drive-in, though. Next to the ticket seller was a small, enticing poster for Last House. No amount of snow could dampen my enthusiasm.

When I paid my five bucks, I was handed a little square box that turned out to be a portable, in-car heater; they certainly didn't need those back in Australia. A portable air conditioner might have been nice now and then, though. I took this odd, unnecessary contraption off the ticket seller and drove on through the floating muck.

I parked dead center between the screen and the projection booth. I had my pick of spots. I wound down the window and reached out into the freezer to grab the speaker. Jesus, it was Arctic out there! I hung the metal speaker from the window and wound it up tight -- as tight as I could, anyway. That's when I noticed the gap. That gap had always been there, of course, but now it much more obvious and much more troubling. There was an insistent, chilly breeze blowing through that gap onto the side of my face. Suddenly I was very grateful for my unnecessary, in-car heater.

I watched Last House for the first time through falling snow, blunt wipers that left snail trails, and frequent blooms of condensation. Despite all that, and despite the buzz of the in-car, complimentary people warmer, I loved it. Experiencing Wes Craven's rough-edged cult classic for the first time left an indelible impression on my young mind. David Hess's "Krug" was just the sort of villain I warmed to and I couldn't take my eyes off him. When he commanded one of the kidnapped girls to "Piss your pants!", I felt like a very free man in America. I couldn't watch stuff like this back in Australia. Nobody could at the time. I felt lucky to be able to see this mighty movie at a drive-in. One of Detroit's finest drive-ins.

When I began work for Orion Pictures several months later, I would learn that the Gratiot and the Bel Air, an impressive multi-screen "ozoner", were the local industry's biggest outdoor earners.

The House By The Lake, which is a far more lyrical title than Death Weekend, became one of my all-time favorite movies that night, and it still is.

William Fruet's beautifully made revenge shocker, cut from the same cloth as Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Boorman's Deliverance (remade almost literally by Fruet later on as Trapped aka Baker County USA), and sewn together with fabric borrowed from Wes, was a revelation. In addition to the brutal action and great location photography of rural Canada, the film had a literate, take-no-prisoners screenplay that had the magnificent Don Stroud spouting vicious obscenities (to Brenda Vaccaro) like: "You goddamned fucking cunt. You'll get yours, baby!"

Chuck Shamata, who plays an unbelievably sleazy dentist, almost steals the show as "Harry"; his attempts to get into Vaccaro's pants make up a major portion of the movie. Naturally, the deviant tooth puller gets his comeuppance at the hands of Stroud and his gang of psychopaths.

Unfortunately, the film has never been released on DVD anywhere in the world. Could it be that Ivan Reitman, one of the film's producers (yes, the Ghostbusters guy) is holding up the release because he's embarrassed by it? I sure hope not. This is the best goddamned film that prick has ever been involved with. The last I heard, MGM were holding the film's rights because of a deal that enabled them to acquire AIP product. If you're reading this, MGM (which I'm sure you're not), get off your fat,corporate be-hinds and start gathering the elements. Come on, get cracking!

During the House... screening, a second car joined the show. When the film finished, Last House started all over again; this was a common practise at US drive-ins.

The snow had gotten much heavier and thicker by that time and it was piling up on the bonnet so high that I needed to get out on several occasions and sweep it off.

So, knowing I'd be doing a lot more sweeping before the night was out, did I stay for a second viewing of Last House...?

What do you fuckin think?

A Real Vampire Family

My 10 year old brain was working overtime trying to figure out how Village's "Blacula Protection Kit" worked. I hadn't seen the movie, of course, but as I sat in my 4th grade classroom on that cold Thursday morning in 1972, my mind was fixated on this vampire I'd never heard of -- although his name did have a familiar ring -- and the special kit that protected you from the scariest aspects of his movie.

You have to remember that this was twenty years before the internet (at least) and I hadn't even heard of "Famous Monsters" magazine (yet). I was getting no advance intel on anything. The newspaper WAS my horror film grapevine, my bible, although I wouldn't have told my Catholic mother that. That's why the Thursday edition of "The Sun" (new movies always start on Thursday in Australia) was such a source of excitement and anxiety for me. Usually, I'd rise an hour before my parents and run outside to rip the paper out of the letterbox ("mailbox" to some). I'd race back inside, jump back into bed, switch on the bedside light (waking my snoozing brother), and devour the Thursday listings. Those mornings were fifteen minutes of absolute heaven. Entire worlds of possibilities were presented to me. Images that fired my imagination, fed my sense of wonder, and stirred cravings of a more biological nature, came at me with the fury of vampire bats. It was almost too much for my young, Catholic mind to take.

I admit that I didn't fully understand the reasoning behind the "Blacula Protection Kit". Who was it protecting? The audience? That didn't make sense. If you had paid to see 'Blacula', why would you want to be protected from him? It seemed self-defeating. Perhaps the kit was meant for people who fought vampires in the movie. Now that made sense. It also gave me some idea of what the "kit" probably contained -- a stake, some garlic, a crucifix, perhaps a bible. I didn't want to be "protected" from a black Dracula, but I could have done with some official vampire-fighting items.

It took me some time to notice the last item on the screen above -- an announcement that you could "meet the vampires" at the Albany cinema. No doubt about it, the Albany was where it was at in those days. A year earlier, 'Frogs' had been showing with 'Chrome and Hot Leather'. Now, you could meet live vampires there. Correction: not just live vampires, but a "family" of live vampires for Pete's sake. That meant mum, dad, and their kids? Jesus! There was no way I was going to miss this. Meeting real life vampires was not something a kid did every day. It was one of those once in a lifetime things.

"Can we go and meet some vampires?" I asked my mother the minute I got home from school that afternoon.

"What are you talking about?" was her reply. She said that a lot.

I enthusiastically showed her the 'Blacula' ad mat and stabbed my forefinger on the part about meeting a family of vampires. "They're real vampires," I said with 100% conviction. "They have kids, too."

My mother donned her glasses and leaned in close to the ad mat.

"Where's it on?"

"In the city."

She looked at me slowly, her brain in decision mode.

I looked back, full of hope, and smiled a puppy smile that I hoped would tip the scales in my direction.

"What a load of absolute rubbish!" she said, and returned to making dinner.

I never did get to meet the vampire family, but I did encourage other kids at school to pester their parents into taking them (and me) to see them. Unfortunately, none of those bozos shared my passion for white or black Draculas. One kid, David Hagen, did talk constantly about 'The Blob', a film I hadn't seen. It had screened on "Awful Movies With Deadly Ernest", a late night horror show hosted by a deformed undertaker with a clawed hand named "Claw". A year later I'd throw myself into his arms at a school fete, but that's another story. Hagen talked about 'The Blob' like a converted Christian rhapsodizing about finding Jesus. There was always such reverence in his tone, and his passionate description of the movie got me salivating and checking TV listings. Eventually, the film did return, and I was more than impressed. The creature wasn't as destructive as I had imagined, but it did possess the "gelatinous immensity" that the disappointing "Frogs" (see my "RWC" blog) sorely lacked.

Even today, I think about the contents of the "Blacula Protection Kit" and how, in order to if be effective, it needed to be used "in accordance with directions". What had happened to those poor souls who had not followed the directions to a tee. Were they still amongst the living?

Whenever I was denied a movie, which was often, opening the newspaper a week later was a traumatic experience. Usually (and especially with horror flicks), what I had failed to convince the pares to let me see was gone from screen already, quickly replaced by something far inferior like the seventeeth return season of 'The Sound of Music' .

I finally saw 'Blacula' on TV and enjoyed it immensely. William Marshall made a great black Dracula and there were plenty of scary scenes and beautiful women of various exotic shades.

But what of the vampire family? Where are they now? The kids would be grown up and mum and dad would be quite old, I suspect. But I'm comforted by the knowledge that they'll never die. Unless, of course, they meet someone still holding a "Blacula Protection Kit".