As a kid—even a teenager—I was too viscerally affected by horror to get into it. When I was 10, even a trailer for the latest scary-schlock could keep me up at night. For whatever reason, that has largely dulled, and I’m able to participate in the rollercoaster-like effects more in tune with the general population. This led to substantial gaps in my survey of the genre. Whereas I was becoming privy to various major film movements and eras of Hollywood in my high school days, I didn’t have much of a basis with the major horror franchises besides being able to pick out their signature monsters at a glance. October has been largely a remedy month for me over the last five or six years, delving into all the series that most are familiar with: Friday the 13th, Halloween, Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. To an extent, I’ve covered the basics, at least insofar as that I know that I’m only scratching the surface.
One thing that has been kicking around in my head for some time is, why on earth did Monte Hellman make a direct-to-video Silent Night, Deadly Night sequel? Well, once I found out that a similarly underappreciated auteur working in-and-out of Hollywood also had a maligned horror sequel of his own, I had a double feature on my hands; one that’s going to have to stand in for my lack of engagement in the genre for the rest of the month.
Everything was stacked against John Boorman when he was tasked with directing a sequel to the highest grossing film of 1973. Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) is a beautiful, troubling, and tragic work of filmmaking, blending the transcendentally spiritual and the humanly imminent with a kind of filmmaking that looks like it’s from the future (or at least the future as filtered through the 1970s). That is to say, it’s a Boorman movie through-and-through. That’s probably not what audiences or critics wanted for a sequel to The Exorcist. Exorcist II is vulgar and operatic, exploring the relationship between man and his desired God, and how religion and science are used as explorations towards divinity. But that search is often foolish, blind to the demonic trickery with which it leads, positing a certain Lovecraftian danger in the odyssey to find God as well as a plain fascination with man’s hubris. Boorman’s liminality within this relationship, and how he uses the camera to dance around it, has me wanting (as I often do with his films) to call him a cinematic modernist, although I find that term nebulous and indefinable. But it feels right, and I’m guided by that feeling. As am I the feeling that Exorcist II is an incredible sequel, one which both refuses the first film and takes its possibilities to heights never thought imagined.
If Boorman exists in the realm of modernism, to me, Monte Hellman is distinctly of the postmodern. He’s something of an American Antonioni trapped in the dregs of journeyman work, running the gamut through Corman’s corner of independent cinema all the way to making seemingly discardable films meant to fill the shelves at a Blockbuster. Hellman’s films break the cycles of modernity by existing just beyond the limits of it—his visions of the West, his detailed and specific but somehow placeless road in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), or, in the case of Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989), in the family home at the holidays but lacking all the stuffing, family, friends, merriment—that make the American ideal of “Christmas,” Christmas. Instead there’s an empty house, and a killer psychically coming for the main trio.
It takes only a few seconds in watching Silent Night, Deadly Night 3 to realize you’re watching the work of an unequivocal master: a woman runs through empty white hallways of some undefinable, unmappable hospital, stalked by a killer missing the top part of his skull, whose exposed brain is grimly kept alive inside a clear plastic dome. She runs down the same always, opening the same doors—sometimes locked, sometimes not. Hellman’s camera is sprinting in wide lenses, pulling the walls of the hallway and turning the surreal space into a collection of geometric forms; the empty space is a playground for creativity, like that of genre forms themselves. This sequence, the next 10-or-so minutes of the film, and it’s odd David Lynch connections (which I explicated a little in my Letterboxd review) are where most people’s interest in the work start and end. But it’s after the heroine, Laura (Samantha Scully)—a blind woman taking part in an experiment that links her mind with that of a coma patient, which just so happens to be the killer from the first two Silent Night, Deadly Night films—leaves the hospital and the movie starts to get interesting in a uniquely Hellman kind of way, where it emotionally leans into disaffection and follows a wandering sense of destiny, with Laura’s premonitions overtaking her literal blindness act as a sort of direct metaphor for Hellman’s hand strangely guiding his figures through landscapes they seem lost in yet for whatever reason don’t feel lost in.
Both Exorcist II and Silent Night, Deadly Night 3 and their broad receptions as “bad movies” has less to say about the films and is more to do with the way in which films like these are received. That is, with expectation. For the vast majority, this is the expectation of a sequel to what was immediately deemed as one of the greatest horror movies ever made or it’s the expectation of a cheap piece of entertainment that’s meant to provide very specific kinds of thrills. These films appear as failures when put under their conventional lenses. But coming from an expectation of auteur insight, they soar, standing as keyholes into both filmmaker’s minds by way of a filmmaking practice that has to exist under specific economic conditions (studio sequel, direct-to-video). This highlights their personal affinities by way of necessary comparison the other films that number their series’, and shows what their directorial prowesses are. They’re shocking films for just how good, how personal they are.