Home Invasion Blues: The Terror Within

The troubled Iraq War vet, armed with a knife, who hopped a fence and made his way into the White House has given all of us pause. Where’s the Secret Service when you need them? Certainly they’re not acting the way Clint Eastwood does in a 1993 thriller, In the Line of Fire.

In that film Eastwood plays a dedicated Secret Service agent with a painful past. Back on November 22, 1963, while on special assignment in the President’s entourage, he’d failed to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Now another would-be presidential assassin is on the loose. He’s viciously taunting Eastwood, who’ll do anything it takes to protect the current President’s life, even if he has to sacrifice his own. Three guesses as to whether he succeeds.

Hollywood has always thrived on movies in which an unknown assailant intrudes on someone’s domestic happiness. This holds true whether the victim-to-be lives in the White House or in a little white house with a picket fence. Take one classic example wholly suitable for the month of October: John Carpenter’s Halloween. Laurie Strode (played, of course, by Jamie Lee Curtis) is the good-girl babysitter. Michael Myers is the knife-wielding psycho who seems to have a thing for nubile young women. Part of what makes the film scary is the thought that there’s a stranger out there, lurking in the shadows, just waiting to pounce.

But statistics tell us that most attacks inside the home are perpetrated not by strangers but by someone known to the victim. Even the Halloween series, having first established Michael Myers as a mysteriously unmotivated bogeyman running amok, eventually gets around to explaining that Laurie is – unbeknownst to her -- Michael’s younger sister.

In my Roger Corman days, I personally worked on two of the three Slumber Party Massacre movies, in which a pleasant suburban home is invaded by a fiendish Driller-Killer bent on pursuing young girls to their doom. Part of what makes these films memorable for their fans is a nightmarish bad guy who can be seen as a figment of a pubescent co-ed’s fevered imagination. But Slumber Party Massacre III goes the other route, exonerating the weird Peeping Tom and revealing that the true killer is a clean-cut classmate with some serious hidden hang-ups. Then there are Corman’s Sorority House Massacre films, in which slasher figures include the heroine’s psycho brother (Sorority House I) and a creepy next-door neighbor (Sorority House II).

So often in real life the killing is an inside job. I was reminded of this in reading about Daniel Crespo, mayor of the SoCal city of Bell Gardens. He was just shot to death by his wife, in what may or may not have been a response to years of spousal abuse. Then there’s an odd but true story from my very own Santa Monica neighborhood. In a nice corner house, very neat and tidy, lived a middle-aged couple. Good-hearted folks, they agreed to help out a young homeless man by giving him odd jobs around the property. Pretty soon he was occupying a spare bedroom on the premises. At this point the lady of the house, obviously taking seriously the Biblical injunction to love thy neighbor, began a hot and heavy affair with the newcomer. One day an ambulance pulled up in a great hurry: the stranger had suddenly gone berserk, attacking and badly wounding the husband.

I didn’t know those involved, and I don’t know what’s become of them. But the episode would make a great movie, maybe borrowing the title from another Roger Corman film: The Terror Within.

“Sorority House Massacre” Hits Home

The horrific events in Santa Barbara that left six young people dead and many others wounded have hit me hard. The killer began his rampage by slaughtering his college roommates. But his real target – spelled out in a series of chilling YouTube videos -- was clearly the pretty, popular co-eds who lived at the sorority houses of the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus. In my Roger Corman days, I worked on Sorority House Massacre II. But I never thought the events of that slasher flick would be played out in real life.

The classic “girls in jeopardy” films, which date back to Halloween in 1978, feature plucky young women menaced in nightmarish fashion by a male intruder. A “final girl” always survives to tell the tale, but not before many attractive females have been brutally slaughtered. Personally, I’ve contributed to the scripts of Concorde’s Slumber Party Massacre II and III, as well as to Jim Wynorski’s quickie take on Sorority House Massacre, not to mention his office-tower follow-up, Hard to Die. Wynorski’s involvement in the latter two films assured the viewer of buxom young lovelies being terrorized in their undies. But mostly Roger Corman mandated that his films in this genre be written, produced, and directed by women. His reasoning: if women called the shots, he’d be able to swear that the on-screen carnage was justified, because it simply reflected the fears felt by post-adolescent girls facing their budding sexuality.

Despite this clever self-justification, the fans of the Slumber Party and Sorority House series are largely male. I suspect what they like is the sight of nubile young women, scantily clad, screaming in horror as they flee from a relentless assassin. There are two Facebook groups I know of that celebrate these films. I’ve communicated with some of their members, and they’re hardly rooting for harm to befall the films’ female protagonists. In fact, they often strongly identify with the damsels in distress. Said one, “Women-in-jeopardy films as a whole appealed to me as a teenager because I was associating myself with the heroine of each film. I wasn't enjoying watching her get tormented. I was enjoying watching her survive. Overcoming the odds.”  These female characters, he said, were “going through the worst time of their life, but they were coming out on top. Battered, bloodied and bruised, they were still beating the bad guys.” 

And yet . . . a key component of all of these slasher films is that bad guy, someone who hates women and wants to make them suffer. He’s so attractive to viewers, in his dark and demonic way, that I’ve seen lively debates about which Driller-Killer (from Slumber Party Massacre I, II, or III) fans prefer. The killer’s backstory varies from film to film, but none seems much different from Elliot Rodger, who announced in a 141-page diatribe that “I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex. . . .  I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of them to the core of their wicked hearts.” Rodger’s relentless anger and self-pity are hideous to contemplate, but I have the sinking feeling that somewhere out there someone is incorporating him into the script for a new slasher extravaganza.   

According to the newspapers, Elliot Rodger’s life was one of Hollywood privilege. Thanks to family connections, he hobnobbed with celebrities, went to the swankiest schools, drove a BMW on his killing spree. So sad that he went Hollywood by leaving a trail of blood.  

Fans of Slumber Party Massacre: Their Hearts Are Young and Gay

It’s Outfest time in Los Angeles. L.A.’s oldest film festival, founded in 1982 to showcase movies that resonate with the gay community, should draw 40,000 fans over ten days. I suspect a fair number of Outfest’s sixty-four offerings will be outrageous sex comedies and sensitive coming-out-of-the-closet dramas. But there’ll also likely be a horror film or two. From working on the Slumber Party Massacre trilogy, I’ve learned that films of this ilk have a substantial gay following.

The question is—why would a young gay male want to watch a gaggle of pubescent girls in lingerie fend off a rapist/killer/creep armed with a phallic electric drill? For answers, I turned to two experts. Jason Paul Collum, a filmmaker whose work includes Something to Scream About, recently wrote, produced, and directed “Sleepless Nights: Revisiting the Slumber Party Massacres.” This documentary is a featured extra in the new Slumber Party Massacre box-set that’s part of Shout! Factory’s Roger Corman collection. Tony Brown, a serious fan of the genre and creator of the Old Hockstatter Place website, helped out as co-writer and associate producer of "Sleepless Nights.” As a gay man, Tony appreciates the Slumber Party movies for “their sense of sisterhood, basically. . . All the girls team up together to help defeat the killer.”

Jason Collum explains that “women-in-jeopardy films as a whole appealed to me as a teenager because I was associating myself with the heroine of each film. I wasn't enjoying watching her get tormented. I was enjoying watching her survive. Overcoming the odds. Here was someone going through the worst time of her life, but she was coming out on top. Battered, bloodied and bruised, she was still beating the bad guys. That's how—in some pseudo-psychological way—I was trying to just get through teen angst and my feeling of everyone being out to get me.”

Growing up, Jason “always hung out with the girls. . . . Most of my childhood was spent adoring my mother and aunts. Strong women, like Wonder Woman, or the women I later viewed in horror films, drew my attention in particular. Maybe it had to do with having something of a more feminine side than most of the straight men in my life.” From his perspective, “when you look at a horror film, and you see an initially defenseless girl who more often than not is being tormented by a brute of a man using some phallic symbol (which Slumber Party Massacre in particular does very pointedly, right down to the ‘castration’ of his ‘big drill’ at the end), I think psychologically there's something going on in a gay man's head.”

Like other gay males I’ve talked to, Jason and Tony value big studio pictures like Brokeback Mountain for teaching the general public to empathize with specifically gay problems. But for their own pleasure, they much prefer the low-budget and the lurid. The movie Tony remembers most fondly from 2005 is not Brokeback Mountain but rather Jason’s shot-on-video October Moon, a gay male version of Fatal Attraction that ends in a pool of blood. Blood, of course, also spurts in the Slumber Party film trio, but Jason too focuses on the camaraderie: “The girls in each film are pretty, enjoyable, and fun-loving. They're the girls you wanted to hang out with in high school. They were strong, independent. . . . Nobody was trying to steal anybody's boyfriend. And once the mayhem begins, they generally stick together.”

Slumber Party Massacre 3: My Son the Serial Killer

Yes, I worked on Slumber Party Massacre 2. And, though I’m somewhat abashed to admit it, my son made his screen debut in the film’s quickie follow-up, which naturally enough is called Slumber Party Massacre 3.

The three Slumber Party movies have been getting some attention lately because they’ve been reissued by Shout! Factory, as part of its series of Roger Corman Cult Classics. (Obviously, the definition of a classic is not the same for everyone.) To round out the collection, serious fans Jason Paul Collum and Tony Brown contributed a “Sleepless Nights” documentary, for which they interviewed everyone they could find who had a hand in the making of the films.

That meant I spent a blustery afternoon at Shout! Factory videotaping my recollections. I discussed why Roger Corman liked handing the reins of these highly sexualized films to female directors, and how the third film in the series was conceived to fill a hole in the schedule at Corman’s Venice, California studio. I also revealed the story of my son’s participation.

The maniacal driller-killer in the third Slumber Party film (known to its makers as SPAM3) is a boy-next-door type gone wrong. In the shorthand of so many horror films of the era, his underlying problem is that he was molested as a child by an evil uncle. The filmmakers needed a photograph of a very young Ken (yes, Ken!) with creepy Uncle Billy, to use as a climactic explanation of the bad guy’s warped psyche. My son Jeffrey was a cute eight-year-old, and so he was a natural choice. I took him down to the studio, where he obligingly climbed all over the production assistant (a nice guy with kids of his own) who would supply the slightly sinister face of Uncle Billy.

Then I found myself on the horns of a moral dilemma. Director Sally Mattison decided the backstory should be made clearer. So several flashback scenes were written for little Ken and his uncle. In them nothing visually disturbing happened, but the innuendo was unmistakable. Would Jeffrey participate? At first I was amused and pleased at this chance for my son to make his acting debut. But then I started to worry. What if somehow the implications of these scenes seeped into Jeffrey’s subconscious? What if, years later, he’d find himself traumatized? That’s how maternal guilt stood in the way of his fledgling acting career. (P.S. The scenes were never shot.)

I don’t regret my choice. But I do regret that Roger Corman, in his infinite wisdom, decided to strip this story—and my entire interview—out of the finished documentary. Jason Collum and Tony Brown complained loudly, but to no avail. For additional Slumber Party trivia, check out Tony’s ultimate fan site, which he calls The Old Hockstatter Place. There you’ll find several versions of the Uncle Billy picture, along with news of such tasteful giveaways as a Slumber Party Massacre blood-stained pillowcase (while supplies last) to commemorate the release of this cinematic landmark.