Midnight Classics: Horror Marathon

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Like Night of the Living Dead (1968), another key work of modern horror, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre starts with a car ride to a cemetery: Sally Hardesty and her wheelchair-bound brother, along with Sally’s boyfriend and two other friends, pay a visit to their grandfather’s grave in rural Texas. They get an inkling of the horrors to come by picking up an unpleasant hitchhiker on the way back, but it isn’t until they stop by the family’s deserted house that things take a turn for the worse; the rest of the film can be summed up by its legendary tagline: “Who will survive – and what will be left of them?” The tongue-in-cheek humor of the tagline and the sensationalist title are misleading, however: far from being a campy bloodbath in the Herschell Gordon Lewis vein, Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece is one of the most intelligently conceived and artistically ambitious horror films ever made, creating a uniquely terrifying experience by combining elements of documentary and avant garde filmmaking.

Veikko Suvanto

Scanners

Scanners. Individuals with abnormal synapses, capable of penetrating other people’s minds. Child prodigies and monstrous outsiders posing danger to themselves as well as others. One of them, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a crazed vagrant, is recruited by the ConSec corporation to stop a powerful and malevolent telepath, Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside). David Cronenberg’s sci-fi thriller demonstrates what the X-Men film series might have looked like had it been created by filmmakers of a different calibre. The Canadian auteur delivers the comic-book-inspired storyline in his trademark style – with scientific rigour and bloody candour. The scene with a head exploding under telepathic pressure, a masterpiece of gore effects, is already iconic. It also serves to illustrate Cronenberg’s artistic stance, who, like one of his scanners, would like to blow up his audience’s brains.

Piotr Mirski

The Toxic Avenger

The Toxic Avenger stands with Pink Flamingos and The Evil Dead as one of the most gleefully offensive “midnight movies” of the twentieth century. Among the residents of Tromaville is Melvin, a nerdy janitor at the local health club. A gang of thugs devise a cruel hoax that goes horribly wrong and Melvin is cast through a third story window into a vat of toxic waste. However, an unexpected metamorphosis takes place. As the chemicals take hold of his body, Melvin turns into the Toxic Avenger, doer of good, and brutal mauler of evil! The excitement is non-stop as Toxie sets out to single handedly wipe out the forces of evil that torment the people of Tromaville.

Uncut and restored, The Toxic Avenger is one of the most notorious 1980s horror comedies ever made. 40^th anniversary screenings.

source: American Genre Film Archive