Welcome to the Funhouse...
THE FUNHOUSE (Tobe Hooper, 1981): When I was young, I wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies. My parents were rather strict about this. I did, however, really come to like monsters, and the concept of the horror movie. To make up for this (and I undertand this wasn’t uncommon with folks of my age and circumstances), I used to roam the horror aisle of the video store, imagining what the films advertised by the graphic (in sensibility, if not gore) packaging might be like. I had some clear ideas, but these mostly, when I began actually watching horror movies, weren’t anywhere close to the reality of the genre. That’s where The Funhouse comes in. Though I don’t recall it from my youthful perusal of video jackets (in part becuase of its consistently poor advertising graphics: from its release poster to its video and DVD boxes, the movie has been burdended by some terrible and/or misleading art), it more than any other film I’ve seen captures just what I’d expected/hoped that horror movies would be like.
As a result, The Funhouse is not the best horror movie I’ve ever seen, but might be my favorite. It, for instance, is not especially frightening. It has its moments of suspense, sure, but it isn’t terrifying. But, then, I’m not usually frightened by movies. It is marred by some evident production problems. By what accounts of this movie’s production I’ve found, there were some substantial disagreements between the movie’s producers and director Tobe (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) Hooper. According to Cinefantastique (10.3), this forced the production into daily script re-writes, caused budget and shooting over-runs, and made subplots in scenes shot earlier dangle as the scenes that they anticipate were never filmed. Sounds rough, right? Dean Koontz, before his career took off, thought so too. He was given the responsibility of writing the novelization of the screenplay (under the pseudonym of Owen West), and so took the liberty of completely changing the story. Unfortunately for the film, the (unrecognizable, and much more sleazy-feeling) novelization was released months before the movie, disappointing audiences futher with the disconnect between the (popular and well received) book and the movie it was “based” on.
But the movie is better than that. For one thing, this picture captures the best essences of both the slasher/stalker pictures that were gaining popularity in the moment this film was made (Halloween and Friday the 13th being the most immediate points of comparison) and the monster movies of a previous generation. That is, there’s much more at play here than teenagers being hunted down, and also means we end up with sympathy for both the protagonists and the “monster” stalking them. The production design and cinematography are lush and mix a certain overt silliness with a shadowy atmospheric that manages to make the titular funhouse itself a character as alive as the protagonists, and as menacing as the villains.
Much of what works in this movie gets scooped up by Hooper when he revisits hisTCM five years later for Cannon, the ’80s schlock house that also made The Apple and Death Wish 3. The sexualized terror of The Funhouse’s Liz (Largo Woodruff) when she’s cornered in the labyrinthine ductwork is awfully similar to the more famous scene in TCM 2 when Stretch (Caroline Williams) is menaced at the radio station by Leatherface. Both films are likewise infused visually by what my old officemate Stefan Cieply dubbed “gothic kitsch”: an accumulation of objects of bad taste seemingly collected without irony that give the audience a palpabale sense of just how wrong the environment created by the collectors is to have stumbled upon — an element borrowed from both films by Rob Zombie in his House of 1,000 Corpses.
So that’s a lot about the movie, but not much in the way of setting up what you actually are being set up for. So: a group of four teenagers out on a double date and looking for kicks decide to spend the night in the funhouse of the travelling carnival set up on the outskirts of their sleepy town. But as they witness more than they expected, their night turns from prankish lark to terrifying fight for survival…
Here’s a trailer:
as well as:
THE BLACK CAT (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934): Though a feature in its own right, this one clocks in at a few minutes over an hour. Not quite short enough to be a short, so it’s a double bill. This is the strongest second tier horror film to come out of Universal in its golden age, and may be my favorite of the bunch (though I’ll admit to not having seen Whale’s Old Dark House yet). Though the poster claims allegiance with Poe’s (public domain) story of the same title, that simply isn’t the case. Like the last few of AIP’s later Vincent Price/Roger Corman Poe pictures, the title was meant for audience draw rather than legitimate adaptation.
That said, this movie has just about every element one would want from one of its pedigree, and is more or less swiped whole by Rocky Horror to boot. A young honeymooning couple (shall we call them Brad and Janet, though they’re really named Peter and Joan?) find themselves in the strange mansion of an even stranger host (Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Karloff) who is locked in a polite but nonetheless bitter rivalry with an equally curious figure (Dr. Vitus Werdegast, played by Bela Lugosi). Poelzig’s plans seem to include our innocent young couple, and seem to be far from kosher…
As this is an evening of atmospheric “horror”, there’s little that’s too terrifying here, though there’s plenty to conceptually unsettle, and visually haunt. This is usually a film that sticks with its viewers fro quite some time. The set designs in this movie are startling creations in an expressionist/Deco mode, and go a long way towards equating that style of aesthetic severity/economy with the Satanic. Karloff’s Poelzig is dapper, gentlemanly and sinister in a way that few screen villains are, were, or have been since (and is, by some accounts, the visual genesis of Dr. Strange!). The score includes themes from Beethoven’s 7th symphony and Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos. And, as a topper, there are some rather prominant (evan central) elements of this film that are as queer as can be. How can it go wrong? For my dime, it doesn’t!
