In an effort to illuminate a broad selection of films, from the abyssmal to the erudite, I’ve decided to dedicate Sunday to the cinema experience. Each week I’ll call attention to movies, trends, actors, directors, and cinematographers. To recitify for our lax treatment of Halloween (surely the most important of the secular holidays), my coverage starts out with what claims to be a horror film.
Scared to Death - 1981 - dir. William Malone
There is an unintentional visual joke in the very first shot of Scared to Death. The camera slowly pans right, showing a suburban house, eventually showing a street sign that says “End”. If only this was the signifier of the termination of the movie, a curious audience could be spared their 93 minutes. The camera then pans down and begins to zoom on to the iron grating covering the sewer. This shot is pretty spot-on as well, since the film, literally, is a sewer, containing an ill-conceived cesspool of uninteresting, unoriginal material.
The sewer does end up playing some sort of role in the plot, which can be summarized easily enough. An unknown force, actually some sort of scientific predator/killer gone loose, has been causing a string of seemingly inexplicable murders in Los Angeles. Detective-turned-writer Ted (John Stinson) becomes involved with Jennifer (Diana Davidson) after hitting her car, and after their poorly filmed sexual encounter, she does his beck and call. Meanwhile, active detective Lou (Jonathan David Moses) tries to convince Ted to come back and work on the case - the bodies continue to fall and Jennifer is attacked and put into a coma to boot!
Scared to Death suffers from many of the tropes of other 1980s horror films. Unlike the more distinguished films of the era (Altered States, The Funhouse, A Nightmare on Elm Street), Scared to Death follows the logic of binary oppositions (absolutely evil monster vs. invariably “good” protagonists), contains a totally moralistic sense of right and wrong, and serves its characters only insofar as they further the plot. Despite its supposedly blind moral sense, the monster kills people who have committed perceived transgressions against “proper” culture: a once naked woman, a drunk woman trying to drive, and a bawdy public works employee are all set up to seem as if they “deserve it.” There is little left to the imagination the entire film, as all elements of mystery and suspense fall flat. One murder even pilfers the famous violin music from Psycho but doesn’t even have the sense to do an apt visual quotation.
To be stayed away from at all costs.
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