It’s
hard to say what Gary Graver is most remembered for now: the fact he directed a
staggering amount of hardcore porn movies (something he kept denying until the
day he died apparently) or his association as cinematographer with Orson
Welles. There’s a story floating around which claims at one point Welles was
editing some of Graver’s porn, so he in turn would be free to shoot some
material for Welles – a story that could very well be an urban legend but which
you desperately want to be true because it would make this world a little bit better.
True or not, the mere existence of such a story already points to one of the
more interesting facets of the enigma that was Graver: the idea he seemed to be
completely at home in very different worlds, worlds that normally are kept far
apart. This in itself would be good to keep in the back of your head when
watching a bonkers movie like ‘Trick or Treats’, a movie that seems to be
consciously designed to frustrate the viewer by refusing to give what he wants.
It looks and feels like a slasher movie in every way, except the little fact it
doesn’t deliver the goods on the stalk and slash front. Like the costumed kids
who go trick and treating on Halloween, its disguise seems to hide something
rather different: it’s more like a meta-examination of the horror genre instead
of a straightforward genre flick. There’s a line in the Robert Wyatt song ‘Sea
Song’ where he sings: “But I can't understand the different you in the morning
/ When it's time to play at being human for a while”. To play at being human for a while is a wonderfully evocative line,
and very much applicable to ‘Trick or Treats’, a movie that plays at being a
slasher for a while.
With
this, we immediately find ourselves in treacherous waters, because there seems
to be a general dislike for this kind of genre bending. I fell in love with the
movie when I first saw it, and was delighted when I heard Code Red would give
it its first ever DVD release, but when I read some other comments on the movie
I was very much surprised to find out most people really just regarded ‘Trick
or Treats’ as a very bad movie. Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised, as
I should’ve known by now most people would react that way to a movie like this,
but I still didn’t see it coming. It’s hard for me to understand actually why
people seem to dislike this movie, because I can’t see anything bad about it.
If taken as a horror movie, it may be pretty bad, yes. But these objections
simply vanish when you zoom out a bit to take everything into account. Thinking
outside the box seems to be hard however.
I always
wonder why most people seem to be genuinely frightened by the blurring of
boundaries, but a recent personal experience may shed some light on this. In
the last couple of months I’ve gone through a rather significant personal
transformation which ultimately led to an adoption of a completely biological
diet. I realize that biological or organic food still is far from the norm
unfortunately, but I didn’t really expect to encounter so much resistance to
it. Of course, there are explanations for this: for one, most people seem to
dislike change of any sort which would make them naturally suspicious of changing
their eating habits and there’s the oft heard objection that biological food is
too expensive. These are valid points I suppose, but it still doesn’t really
explain why mere resistance often leads to downright hostility on the part of
many people. It’s perfectly fine by me if people don’t want to change their own
ways, but why they should feel the need to actually attack mine remains
somewhat of a mystery and certainly implies there’s much more at stake here
than just the question of eating biological food or not.
The more
I think about it, the more I start to feel it has in fact everything the do
with people clutching not just at what’s familiar, but also at what’s easily
understandable and the idea people just don’t like to deal with all the fuss
that comes with increased complexity. People seem to like their categories nice
and simple, because it makes life nice and simple and the moment you start
messing with those boundaries, you start messing with their very foundation. Life
is extremely simple if you don’t have to think what you stuff into your mouth,
even if deep down you know it’s basically just pure trash you’re eating. Life
gets very complicated if you take away that security, if suddenly you have to
think about everything you eat. It would force people to actually start
thinking on their feet instead of easily following an already downtrodden trail.
And because people always like everything neat and simple (“All wrapped up in
tissue paper with pink ribbons around it” as they would say in ‘Double
Indemnity’), this sudden increase in complexity is often met with hostility –
god forbids if we were to start messing with our boundaries!
This sentiment is brilliantly commented upon by Elizabeth Taylor in ‘Identikit’ (a marvelous movie I hope to write something about for this series somewhat later this year) when she says with that shrill voice of hers: “When I diet, I diet and when I orgasm, I orgasm. I don’t believe in mixing the two cultures”. It’s a pretty memorable line that’s especially revealing in a movie obsessed with the virtual impossibility of achieving true contact with another human being (Taylor’s only bit of real contact is with Andy Warhol of all people, who actually made a career out of the evasion of human touch). When taken even deeper, this fear of mixing and contamination is of course the root of many problems: the fear of miscegenation, xenophobia and even the Holocaust all point to the same mistaken ideal of purity, with purity being just another description of the fear of blurring boundaries. Now before I get accused of equating people who don’t like ‘Trick or Treats’ with mass-murderous fascists, I would only like to point out these are obviously not the same but the difference is basically only a matter of degree – the psychological principle behind it is the same.
As it
happened, I saw ‘Trick or Treats’ directly after seeing Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s ‘Gods of the Plague’, which could’ve easily been just a
coincidence were it not for the fact it’s very hard not to be struck by the
similarities between the two movies as both can easily be read as
deconstruction of their genres, the horror and gangster film respectively. Now,
this particular Fassbinder movie has been widely read that way and it’s kind of
hard to do otherwise, because Fassbinder wears his pastiche very much up his
sleeve. Besides this, it is something people more or less expect of a Fassbinder
movie, because he obviously makes art movies and we all know art movies are
serious movies with deeper layers and significance. Gary Graver on the other
hand is nothing more than a purveyor of silly trash movies where what you see
is what you get – we all know that, don’t we? Perhaps things would already look
a little bit brighter if more people would see ‘Gods of the Plague’ and ‘Trick
or Treats’ consecutively.
The opening
of ‘Trick or Treats’ should already give people a clue to expect the
unexpected: two people are seen by the poolside, having a somewhat strained
conversation when the doorbell rings and the woman opens the door. Two large
guys dressed in white, who look like they have escaped from a nearby gay porn
movie set, enter the house and walk to the man by the pool carrying a
straightjacket. After this we get treated to a rather hilarious chase scene
with the two orderlies trying to catch the man who is actually seen climbing a
tree in his backyard before everybody ends up in the pool and the man is
captured and taken away eventually. It’s quite the unusual beginning of a movie
which you suspect to be a horror movie, with already porn and slapstick comedy
banging on the door. Most of the rest of the movie is dedicated to some
irritating kid (the director’s son) who delights in playing magic tricks
(apparently with off-screen assistance by Orson Welles) and pranks on his
increasingly annoyed babysitter.
When taken straightforward, all this may sound boring as hell (but then again, reading the synopsis of ‘Gods of the Plague’ is also boring as hell, while the film is really a minor masterpiece), but if you look a little bit deeper, you’ll find that Graver in fact wears his pastiche as much up his sleeve as Fassbinder does, their outwardly differences notwithstanding. Things already start opening up quite a bit the moment you realize all the tricks the kid performs are a virtual catalogue of all the horror clichés: think of all the ways you’ve ever seen somebody murdered in a horror movie and chances are they are here. If you don’t find this evidence very convincing, stick around because there’s more. Steve Railsback (there’s quite a few well-known actors in this low-budget movie) plays an actor in the movie who doesn’t get to do anything except being an actor. In fact, the only reason he seems to be in the movie is to remind people of the very existence of actors, thereby emphasizing the illusionistic aspect of movies. This idea itself is further toyed with by the whole subplot of the man from the opening sequence who was taken away: as it turns out, he’s been put in a mental hospital by his cheating wife so she could get rid of him and live in luxury with her lover. Now apart from the very convenient fact the hospital gives every occasion to relish in some low humor, it also provides the movie with our escaped lunatic (who as we know, is only the illusion of a lunatic) so common to slasher movies. The way he escapes warrants mention too: when trying to overpower the night nurse, he accidentally pulls off her wig in the struggle, much to his own surprise (and our delight). But this wig does come in handy later on when he decides to simply walk out of the asylum dressed up as the female nurse, which he does under the strains of some string music which suspiciously sounds like Bernard Herrmann’s music for ‘Psycho’. If this wouldn’t already be unbelievable enough, he actually gets to walk in drag for quite a long time, all the while making one of the most ugly and unconvincing drag queens ever put to celluloid and encountering several people who all fail to notice his rather odd way of dressing.
This
could easily be criticized as being not realistic or ‘bad’ writing, which I
think is very much its point: the movie clearly pushes the very idea of
suspension of disbelief, which is so necessary for most (genre) movies, beyond the
limit, thereby exposing the mechanics behind it. In Fassbinder people would
scarcely be surprised by this, but in Graver it seems a well-nigh impossibility
to most. But to really hammer his point of self-reflexivity home, Graver even
includes a sequence (totally unrelated to the main plot line) completely
dedicated to two editors working on some fictitious horror movie, all the while
saying things like “people in the theater don’t realize it’s us editors who
make a movie work”. Well, Graver couldn’t have been more explicit in his aims,
now could he?
By
focusing so much on a seemingly endless parade of lame tricks being played on
the babysitter, what the movie very cleverly does is creating an atmosphere
where the unbelievable becomes believable, something that’s actually explained
to the kid by the babysitter. This is something not peculiar to ‘Trick or
Treats’ but is indeed the very basis for virtually every horror movie: when
seen through the sober eyes of rationality the sudden emergence of some hideous
monster is never very convincing (I’ve actually talked to someone once, who
proudly proclaimed he couldn’t do anything but laugh at ‘Alien’ because he could
look at it rationalistically) and every horror film has to create a certain
mood where such gross stupidities become logical within the framework of the
movie. But then of course, the blurring of such clear-cut boundaries is also the
very essence of the Halloween tradition, with its filmic representation going
all the way back to Tootie in ‘Meet Me In St. Louis’: children play at being
adults and vice versa and this temporary disappearance of normal boundaries is what
paves the way for the seeping in of strange influences which turns everything
topsy-turvy. So that, when at the end ‘Trick or Treats’ does at last provide us
with some fleeting stalk scenes, you realize the movie has been able to have
its cake and eat it too, because it both lays bare the mechanics of the horror
movie, as it is able to create a genuine horror picture through these very mechanics.
By putting so much stress on the conventions of the horror movie, it opens the body of the genre right open. But it doesn’t tear its heart out, because this isn’t a condemnation of the horror genre, Roger Ebert style. On the contrary. Instead of pitting the babysitter against the outside boogeyman, as is usual in these kinds of pictures, she has to fight all her battles within the house. With this, Graver subtly but forcefully suggests the real evil in this world isn’t created by violent movies but lurks within the home: it lies with parental neglect and the monsters that creates, a point the movie drives home at its very ending and which aligns ‘Trick or Treats’ with yet another genre, that of fifties melodrama. But the idea that evil already lurks within the homes of America is of course most frightening for people to contemplate, because then they have to really look at themselves instead of superficially and simply blaming an easy scapegoat like the movies. Which of course brings us round circle to the much hated blurring of boundaries and the fear of looking at life without the comfort of parochialism. The very existence of something like ‘Trick or Treats’ is a very nice reminder that categories like horror and art movie or life and entertainment aren’t as strictly separated as most people would like them to be. If only people could embrace this fact, it would also mean they would learn to deal with nuance and complexity. It reminds one of the beginning of the surreal musical ‘Red Garters’ (1954):
"Many people have said: `The movies should be more like life!’ and a wise man answered, ‘No! Life should be more like the movies"!
Available
on DVD from Code Red
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