TCM Underground, Saturday November 8th, 2014: BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1981), 11:30pm PST/2:30am EST. Directed by Ed Hunt. Cast: Lori Lethin, Julie Brown, Jose Ferrer, Susan Strasberg, Elizabeth Hoy, Billy Jacoby, Andy Freeman, KC Martel, Joe Penny.
In suburban Meadowvale, three children born during an eclipse are celebrating their tenth birthday by raining terror down upon their parents, teachers, and friends.
One of the eeriest frames in the freakshow of Sixties horror is the penultimate image of Jack Hill’s SPIDER BABY (1964). In the climax of this weird family satire, the level-headed protagonists escape the climactic conflagration that takes out the demented Merrye clan (Lon Chaney, Jr., Sig Haig, et al) and their Merrye Syndrome of galloping devolution and unalloyed anthrophagy, and live happily ever after in foursquare suburbia. Or do they? Before we fade to black, we hold on an angle on the couple’s first-born, a preteen girl, whose ever-so-slightly mad stare into the camera suggests that lunacy never dies, it just skips a generation. Shelved upon completion in 1964 and not screened for another four years, SPIDER BABY feels, in retrospect, oddly predictive of the wave of kiddie horror that would come of age in the next generation.
Following SPIDER BABY into theaters at the distance of six months was George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, whose take on white collar cannibalism wasn’t quite so, um, nouvelle cuisine. Among that landmark film’s apocalyptic outrages was the image of another preteen girl, killed by the bite of an undead ghoul and resurrected as same, carving up her screaming mother with a garden trowel in a truly horrific setpiece that raised the bar for horror movie violence as it mocked the birth ritual in a way that would not be topped until the chestburster sequence in Ridley Scott’s ALIEN (1979) a decade later. American horror was only picking up on societal anxieties that had been prevalent in British cinema for years. Wolf Rilla’s VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960), Jack Clayton’s THE INNOCENTS (1961), Joseph Losey’s THE DAMNED (1963), and Peter Brook’s adaptation of William Golding’s THE LORD OF THE FLIES (1963) all cast grave doubts about Britain’s legacy and issue at the midpoint of the 20th Century.
These films all followed the example, of course, set by THE BAD SEED (1956), Mervyn LeRoy’s adaptation of the 1954 novel of the same name by William March (source also for a successful Broadway adaptation by Maxwell Anderson). Written at a time of great focus in the media on the rise of juvenile delinquency after the Second World War, THE BAD SEED is the mother of all killer kid movies, though it took some time for its effect to be felt. We might surmise that it was the success of William Friedkin’s THE EXORCIST (1973) — a problem child movie of an entirely different stripe — that opened the door for the antisocial likes of BAD RONALD (1974), THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE (1976), and THE DEVIL TIMES FIVE (aka PEOPLETOYS, 1974), which shucked the supernatural to offer young’uns whose genocidal bent is more organic. Often pigeon-holed as a killer kid movie is Richard Donner’s THE OMEN (1976), though it’s worth remembering that the chum-chum-cheeked Antichrist leaves the dirty work in that film to interested adult parties. Still, the image of a demonic child was key to THE OMEN‘s publicity campaign…
… and the film’s final image of evil triumphant in the Sears-worthy smile of a little kid tasked filmmakers around the world to take the triple dog dare of bettering the example. One filmmaker who was already rising to the challenge was the Narciso Ibanez Serrador, whose ¿QUIEN PUEDA A MATAR A UN NINO? (WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?, 1976) imagined not one or five killer kids but an entire island of them, armed with knives and sticks and rakes and, in the film’s muy inquietante coda, machine guns and a means of reaching the Spanish main.
Whereas THE EXORCIST and THE OMEN pinned chaos and heartache on the machinations of demons and devils, WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? focused not on the extended finger of blame but on the three pointed backwards. Though its beleaguered protagonists (a vacationing British couple drinking in Iberian authenticity) were effectively blameless, society was clearly the bad guy here, its reliance on warfare as a political bargaining chip having beget a new breed of either psychopaths or saviors, depending on how you looked at it.
All of which brings us to BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1981), a low rent but highly entertaining pretender to the throne of killer kid movies. Though it suggests that its trio of prepubescent population-thinners was sired by an unfortunate celestial conjunction, BLOODY BIRTHDAY shrugs off cause-and-effect in the second act to focus more squarely on the caprices and predations of its unholy three: Debby (Elizabeth Hoy, the little girl that Jake and Elwood offer to buy from her horrified father in THE BLUES BROTHERS), Curtis (Billy Jayne, billed as Billy Jacoby, then coming off of a season on the short-lived BAD NEWS BEARS spinoff series), and Steve (Andrew Freeman, who inherited the Ike Eisenmann role in BEYOND WITCH MOUNTAIN, the second sequel to Disney’s 1975 hit ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN).
Though raised in relative comfort and given all of the perks of their middle class upbringing (the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale subs for sunny Meadowvale), these kids mark their first decade of life by going on the offensive, taking out Debby’s sheriff father (Bert Kramer), a character coded as a major player (the name Sheriff Brody draws an obvious parallel to JAWS) but disposed of with a suddenness that is truly shocking. The children have already killed a pair of cemetery lovebirds, a double murder that leads us to suspect that they will operate below the radar of polite society, targeting strangers whose seemingly random deaths cannot be traced back home; this murder, committed within ear shot of Debby’s mother, changes the equation. Next to go is school teacher Viola Davis (prominently-billed Susan Strasberg), whose death is equally unbalancing to any viewer expecting more of the Hollywood veteran.
I won’t go so far as to say that BLOODY BIRTHDAY is brilliant but for one girding one’s loins for the expected body count slog of the typical killer kid movie, it does toss an undeniable curveball. Sussed out for their psychopathy by the brother-and-sister act of Lori Lethin (who went on to good roles in Nicholas Meyer’s made-for-TV THE DAY AFTER and the low rent horrors of THE PREY and RETURN TO HORROR HIGH before retiring from the business) and K.C. Martel (the kid with the headphones in E.T. – THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL and Eddie in the dire 1981 MUNSTERS reboot REVENGE OF THE MUNSTERS), the kids go after the goody-goodies with a mind for murder… and fail repeatedly to hit their mark. Nearly the whole of the film’s second act is a PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN (1976) style series of botched attempts, from which the intended victims walk away unharmed as their would-be killers gnash their teeth in frustration. Derivative as writer-director Ed Hunt may be in the broad strokes of this undertaking, BLOODY BIRTHDAY eventually becomes its own animal via a latticework of quietly gonzo setpieces that no other movie would attempt… and perhaps none more bizarre than the scene in which Lethin is pursued through an auto wrecking yard by a hotwired junker driven by a kid in a Halloween bedsheet. Shot in broad, unevocative daylight, the bit can hardly be said to ape John Carpenter’s pitch black HALLOWEEN (1978), yet it retains a kind of sickening strangeness in light of its utter banality, even as Arlon Ober’s aggressive score goes balls-out Penderecki.
Unremittingly sleazy (the copious female frontal nudity will seem an ill-fit on Turner Classic Movies), BLOODY BIRTHDAY is a catchbasin of a movie, offering pop culture seconds in a way that feels like home cooking. While never scary, the film hits an unpleasant vein of tenable menace that, if it fails to make you forget THE BAD SEED or WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?, just may make you jump up to check the children.
Second feature: POLTERGEIST (1982), 1:00am PST/4:00am EST. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Cast: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke, Richard Lawson, Zelda Rubinstein.
Paired with BLOODY BIRTHDAY in TCM’s “overnight” slot is Tobe Hooper’s POLTERGEIST (1982), which takes the threat to children in a different direction. Produced by Steven Spielberg (who may or may not have taken a more authorial/auteurist hand in the production, depending on which story you hear), POLTERGEIST changed the shape of the American supernatural tale, supersizing shocks and being one of the first Hollywood films to put across the extended “it ain’t over yet” denouement where a lull in the action only means the worst is yet to come. Yet despite its kettle drum subtlety, POLTERGEIST has a core of genuine heart, catching as it does yet another distracted middle class family unawares when their youngest falls victim to influences from beyond. Kudos to adult stars JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson for etching parents who are far from perfect but who become fully sympathetic in the full flowering of their anguish.