murder drone (film pamphlet)
Author: Claire Cox; Peter Galvin; Nathaxnne Walker
Date: 2017-04-02 04:06:28+00:00

Esotika Film Pamphlet 01
claire cox,

Peter Galvin &

Nathaxnne Walker
m u r d e r
d r o n e

Introduction

3

MURDERDRONE Peter Galvin

CANON

4

NOTES ON Nathaxnne

MURDERDRONE Walker

16

WITCH

THOUGHTS ON Claire Cox

MURDERDRONE

28
an Esotika Film Pamphlet

Solar ▲ Luxuriance

EF001

June, 2016

<drone>

The term MURDERDRONE is evocative of

INTRODUCTION
repetition, which is something that I find comforting just before bed. The perpetual rhythm in these films is nightmarish in
its own way, but each time a murder or
attack occurs, the inevitability of it

My hunger has a routine. Two movies,
happening again is both more enticing
every night after my wife goes to bed.

and more exasperating. Each murder

One at 10, another at 11:30 and I get to builds upon the last, not just in terms of bed at a reasonable 1 A.M. To those of you quantity, but also by eliciting a sense of thinking “1 A.M. is really late!” let me hopelessness and ultimately, acceptance.

assure you, I’m not sitting there with my And so strong is our desire to demystify professor’s cap on.

death, that even when we know exactly

There’s something that happens to
what’s coming we choose to stick around
your brain when you’re tired. I tried to and watch anyway.

look it up, but the first page of Google In removing all the junk that can
results was all sleep disorder stuff and drag down more established films,

I’ll be damned if I’m gonna click over
these 10 cliché-riddled, often boring,
to page two. You probably know what I’m
occasionally annoying films are perhaps
talking about anyway. You become very
the ultimate in slasher catharsis – a
receptive. Should something not make
concentrated shot of murder straight to
a great deal of narrative sense, “Who
the brain.

cares,” I say. Feed me the good stuff.

It is in this nether-realm of

—Peter Galvin
wakefulness that I fell in love with the concept of MURDERDRONE.

<murder>

Most of the films in this book are
slasher films, and as any fan of the

EDITORial PREFACE
slasher genre will tell you, there are
rules. They’re so well known that the
rules themselves have borne a bastard
sub-genre of meta-slashers like Scream

It felt important in how I encountered

(1996) and Behind the Mask (2006), which it, felt like something that I was
gleefully play with the widely accepted
missing from horror films. Having never
conventions in an attempt to make them
been a true fan of straight-forward
new, or at the very least, I don’t know…

Slasher flicks, it seemed like something ironic? Some of the more established
important. The ambient slasher. The
signifiers include: a specific focus on
slasher as background noise, as trance
the act of stalking victims, witnessing
state. Murder set piece hypnosis, crappy murders from the killer’s point-of-view, droning synths. I was ready to love it...

the presence of a “final girl” and, most MURDERDRONE, as it’s presented
importantly, a punk rock ethos that here, is something unusual, something suggests anyone can die at any time. That most genre film fans aren’t ready for.

one’s a biggie.

The slasher film as aid to meditation.

MURDERDRONE distills these slasher

A preference for the abandonment of
film rules down to their most basic psychology. There’s more akin, herein, components.

with the formal qualities of 20th century Whether it is the simplicity of the
experimental film than with Friday the

“man in the mask” that drives Day of the 13th. For me this proves infinitely more Reaper and The Mad Mutilator, the ADD
interesting, something worth exploring.

free-form ambition of Devil Story and

Something worth throwing yourself into

Twisted Issues or the palpable human
not just as a viewer, but as a participant.

anxiety that drives Lunch Meat and Scary Drone & trance forever.

Movie, these are amateur films that have

—M Kitchell
latched on to one real, true fear and have made it corporeal. And then they exploit that fear again and again until it is all but meaningless.

5

canon

Peter
galvin
murderdrone

6

DAY OF THE REAPER

TIM RITTER, 1984

Ritter is something of a big fish in the very small pond that is the direct-to-video horror scene. His second feature, Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness (about a cuckold who copes by forcing people to play truth or dare to death) was released in 1986 at the height of the VHS
boom and became a video rental smash. Ritter released the similarly plotted Killing Spree less than a year later.

The posters for these films were memorably plastered all over the backpages of Fangoria and on the walls of your local mom-and-pop. Any respectful horror geek likely has some fond memories for Ritter’s ubiquitousness in the late 80s and early 90s, if only for the fact that it seemed like one of “us” had made it.

Before the VHS chart-busters—in fact, well before he graduated high school—Ritter made a silent Super 8
flick about a hooded killer terrorizing Tequesta, Florida.

A black sheet wrapped around his head and fastened by a coil of rope around the neck, the killer’s slapdash look owed quite a bit to the oft-forgotten “baghead” look of Jason Vorhees in Friday the 13th Part 2, but for the excess fabric that dangles down the killer’s back like the cape of a cheap supervillain. Pre-dating the supernatural backstories that would drag down later entries in both the Friday and Halloween franchises, Ritter’s “Reaper” was a preposterously-unstoppable killer and sometimes-cannibal with a hankerin’ for teen flesh—and said flesh is never in short supply. Every part in Day of the Reaper is played by a teen, even the motormouth Dirty Harry detective hot on the Reaper’s trail, humbly played by Ritter himself.

As for plot, enter final girl Jennifer. The Reaper murdered all of her friends last year and she lives in constant fear that the hooded maniac might someday return to finish the job. In an early scene, she retrieves a knife from the kitchen and reluctantly checks her dark house for Reapers. She’s wearing something I want to call a “pink shorts onesie” - is that the proper term? The camera lingers on her face and body perhaps more than necessary (Ritter claims he was so smitten with his lead actress that the project nearly fell through completely) but the scene is astonishingly underlit.

Instead of frustrating the viewer, the darkness casts a swath of hazy red and blue tones across Jennifer that are, frankly, gorgeous, and it’s suddenly hard to blame the camera for its gluttony. While it may not have been Ritter’s intention, Day of the Reaper is frequently a beauty to behold.

By contrast, the post-dubbing job is horrific. It obviously follows a different script from the one spoken by the actors in the scene, and you frequently hear Ritter clicking buttons on his cassette recorder to bring some semblance of natural sound effects. We aren’t fooled—at one point Jennifer is seen dialing a touchtone phone to the sound of a rotary telephone! Having grown up watching horror movies on a combination of scrambled HBO feed and a boombox tuned to a local radio station that played TV audio, Ritter famously blames his disinterest in clarity on the environment to which he was accustomed at home.

As a film with a discernable plot, Day of the Reaper is rough as hell. But from within the theme music a MURDERDRONE vibe crystallizes: 15 warbly notes repeated ad nauseum. The notes overpower the dialogue (no great loss there)—they clip and distort in a way that makes you wonder if your speakers have blown—speed up to indicate action and slow to a comical crawl in a misguided attempt to draw out tension. The theme music reflects the structure of the film itself, in that even when it seems like we might be headed in an exciting new direction, the notes remain ever the same.

7

MAD MUTILATOR

N.G. MOUNT, 1983

Opening your film with a grisly child murder is pretty ballsy, right? I think so. Right away you feel like you’re in the hands of an unpredictable filmmaker. In fact, Norbert Georges Moutier seems like an all-around unpredictable guy. A French video clerk and horror fan who went on to make six more films in the years following Mad Mutilator, Moutier has taken on ninjas (Operation Las Vegas), aliens (Alien Platoon), and even dinosaurs (Dinosaur from the Deep). His only other horror film was a mad scientist gorefest called Trepanator and featured legendary French director Jean Rollin in a bit part.

There’s a hint of this creative restlessness in Moutier’s debut film as well. Before we even see the title card (the first of many shots that involve dripping blood directly onto the screen), Mad Mutilator has shocked with child murder, showcased some rather innovative point-of-view camerawork, and introduced a villain who veers perilously close to cartoonish in his appetite for violence. If it doesn’t quite keep up that incredible ratio of weirdness through its 88 minutes, it’s not for lack of effort.

A Super 8 homage to American backwoods slashers, infused with the sort of

“anything goes” zaniness that had recently made Evil Dead such a unique joy, Mad Mutilator’s singular playfulness often harkens back even further to the silent era.

The film stock is intermittently sped up—not enough to be overly comical, just enough to unnerve—and the picture tends to skip and drop out in concert with the dubbed soundtrack, which pops in the antique manner of a needle on a vinyl record.

The murdered child was named Leticia. Her family pulled off the road so Papa could take a pit stop, and little Leticia scampered off into the woods after a plastic ball, carelessly stumbling into a fateful meeting with the local boogeyman. A man named Ogroff.

Ogroff himself is a curious creation. A half-leather mask exposes his frequently twisted grin and a knit cap holds the mask in place. You’ve got the usual rubber galoshes (no gloves) but this madman is also fond of what appears to be a fleece sweater vest. It helps to sell the impression that Ogroff is less a man of homicidal tendencies than a man suffering from lost marbles.

After dispatching our French family, Ogroff similarly takes care of a group of partying teens smoking and playing chess (Europeans really are sophisticated!), a logger with a chainsaw, and, finally, a horde of zombies, which feel the swing of the madman’s axe from the seat of his fashionable motorcycle.

Through it all, Ogroff grunts and giggles with glee, he prances and dances...but is Mad Mutilator a joke? For all its winking and nudging, Moutier makes sure never to outright laugh at the genre. Similar to the sped-up sequences of film, Ogroff’s actions are exaggerated but never unreasonable. I believe that Ogroff would lie in bed and lovingly jerk-off his axe, I do. Just as I believe he would saw off a man’s leg and show it to him. That could happen. That did happen.

If there is a MURDERDRONE entry that approaches art, I’d say Mad Mutilator has a good argument. The film wallows in blood and guts but remains firmly self-conscious about what kind of conversation it intends to have with the genre, and I could see it going over gangbusters at the MOMA. If I have a bone to pick with the film, it’s a tad long, even at 88 minutes. No matter, like all good MURDERDRONE flicks I tend to tune out around the hour mark anyway, and accede to an experience of pure mood.

Also, that ever-present Jess Franco muse, Howard Vernon is in it for almost four whole minutes. Très chic.

8

Folies
meurtriEres

ANTOINE PELLISSIER, 1984

It’s unclear exactly to which the “folies” of the title refers. Meurtrières means “deadly,” but folies could go one of two ways. (1) There’s the classic Folies Bergere, a theater space in Paris that drew crowds in the late 19th century for its lavish performances and inspired a number of imitators through the years.

But (2) folie is also a term in psychiatry, basically meaning “psychosis” or “insanity.” Let’s just say the title is open to interpretation.

Mr Pellissier is not very well known in the West and I stumbled upon Folies meurtrières mostly by accident, crate-digging Super-8 horror films.

Apparently Pellissier started making amateur horror films in France in the 1980s and continues to this day. The wacky part is that he’s also a bonafide IRL
medical doctor. The only officially available version of Folies meurtrières is as an extra on the DVD for the 2009 documentary Dr. Gore—a look at Pellissier’s dual life as practicing MD and filmmaking MF.

The woozy, warped tape of Folies meurtrières has no subtitles. That’s okay, as there are maybe five lines in the film that aren’t a narrator reading off the date of the murder you are about to see. The 47 minute film is just that: a series of murders without context or plot, and within each murder sequence lies a different variation on the classic slasher scenario.

The first shot of the film is a woman dressing down to a bikini, laying a towel on a rock before going for a swim. But someone is watching—a someone in dark overalls, black gloves and a workman’s mask complete with plastic goggles. He also has a leg holster for his tiny axe. Cute!

If I had to make a guess of how much of Folies meurtrières’ runtime was made up of POV shots, I would say maybe half? In fact, sometimes the killer seems to be watching his victims from two directions at once. Pellissier seems to have gone for a “more footage!” approach to this short film, assuming he would pick and choose his shots in the editing booth. In the end he must have found it difficult to choose. Our bikini girl ultimately gets a pickaxe to the head and we see no less than 17 different cuts and angles of the bloody aftermath before moving on. Definitely at least 17, I counted.

More women are stalked and killed, and I’m reluctant to give concrete numbers on how many because I found that a good deal of the fun of Folies meurtrières was in thinking “this one, yeah, she’s gonna be the final girl, she’s gonna get away!” And then SQUISH: blood on the camera. Beautiful red paint blood that went out of style in the late 80s. There’s a standout chase through a rock quarry set only to the sound of the howling wind, and a lengthy game of peek-a-boo in one of those only-in-the-movies houses that are impossible to navigate because every hallway looks the same as the last hallway. In this case it just might be.

Folies meurtrières is perhaps the most concise distillation of the slasher movie in a book full of them. There’s very little plot until the last few minutes, leaving at least 40 minutes to watch helplessly as a killer gruesomely dispatches his victims. Rinse and repeat. The lighting is blindingly harsh, amplifying the inherent staginess; never has the term “set-piece” been more apt. On the other hand, the camera is the opposite of stagy: always moving, always probing for the best angle to view each death. A bloodthirsty fiend in which I imagine anyone who takes the challenge of seeking out this rarity might recognize a bit of themselves.

9

LUNCH MEAT

KIRK ALEX, 1987

We return to backwoods country once again, but this ain’t no Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These inbred rednecks belong to the Deliverance clan; stereotypically slow-minded, hygiene-deficient, eternally angry mountain men.

Curiously, the misanthropy extends to our victims as well, and Lunch Meat must have been one of the first films to employ the contemporary slasher style of “everyone is a different shade of asshole.” It makes for an especially ugly film, both visually and morally, but in his single-minded pursuit of ugliness director Kirk Alex creates and sustains a mean-spirited sense of unease that more heterogeneous slashers only achieve in fits and spurts.

Three backwoods brothers and their paw run a delivery service selling meat to a local burger shack. There’s the angry one (Harley), the pervy one (Elwood) and the stupid one (Benny). Harley and Elwood form some sort of Hee Haw-style vaudeville act as they yell at each other to shut up in increasingly shrill country twang, but Benny is that terrifying beast you see on Lunch Meat’s VHS cover which does not lie: Benny totally spends most of the film licking different cuts of meat. Inspired as much by Frankenstein’s monster as Lennie Small from Of Mice and Men, Benny is short on marbles and repeatedly whipped and tied to the house by Paw lest he should bring unwanted attention to the family’s nefarious activities. It’s never explicitly stated, but it seems that the brothers have a routine of running travelers off the road and murdering them for their tasty human meat.

Visually, Lunch Meat looks like smeared shit and the handheld camerawork is especially disorienting through the nth generation VHS I managed to track down.

So we won’t be praising or criticizing any talent that might be lurking behind the camera…there’s actually a chance I would like the film less if I could consistently make out what the hell is going on. From what I can tell, five college kids are headed up to Mount Edgar for a weekend of beer and making out. Halfway there and it becomes clear that sweater-preppy Cary has forgotten to fill up the gang’s red Jeep with gas—
or bring lunch. As luck would have it, they pull up to a gas station just in time for Harley and Elwood’s meat delivery at the next door burger shack. Cue montage of ominous close-ups of our teens eating hamburgers and making icky faces. Because they’re eating people!

Like the red Jeep, the plot portion of Lunch Meat runs out of gas after the teens’

initial bloody encounter with the backwoods brothers. From that point forward the film is a hazy collage of pained grunts and screams, mash-keyboard bedroom synths and numerous chase scenes through the woods that never seem to end with anybody actually caught or killed. What’s more, a good chunk of the violence occurs off-screen, which is both frustrating and laudably surreal when dealing with a movie of this nature.

Still, such crudely-cut corners do have their upsides. The filmmakers’ disinterest in taking sides in the conflict makes it difficult to predict the outcome of the film’s violent encounters. The teens are given a fair shot in each of the physical confrontations, often overtaking their dimwitted attackers soundly. Conversely, a great escape from death might be followed by a sudden reversal of fortune. No matter whose side you’re on, we’re all going to the same place—and rarely do you see it coming.

It’s tempting to afford Lunch Meat more consideration than it deserves purely for its nihilism—“something something commentary on the self-serving nature of man.”

In reality, the unrelenting ugliness is probably more due to a lack of vision on the filmmakers’ part. But if the take-away for your horror film is that all happiness is temporary and no matter how hard you fight the world is just gonna try harder to break you down, well, you’re doing something right.

10

SATAN WAR

BART LA RUE, 1979

Tribal drums thrum over a slideshow of abstract paintings that look like cross-sections of brain left in the blistering Los Angeles sun. The patterns appear melted—red and yellow slime. The music picks up a synth and becomes a strange amalgam of tribal and sci-fi monster mash. A narrator seemingly inspired by Leonard Nimoy in his In Search Of…

TV series speaks circuitously regarding angels and demons.

Finally the camera settles on a couple moving boxes into a house.

“This is Bill and Louise Foster. [Louise] is a public schoolteacher in a large western city in the United States.

In the summer of 1976, she and her husband moved into this small three-bedroom home. This was their first house since their recent marriage. Until then they had lived in a tiny apartment near her school. The purchase price was extremely reasonable...too reasonable. ”

Satan War is not a slasher. You’ve caught me—by my own definition of MURDERDRONE
there’s little reason the film should appear in this book. But allow me a chance to explain: shot and acted like a TV crime re-enactment, or a 70s safety video on ‘How Not to Act in a Haunted House,’ director Bart LaRue’s 1979 film is a truly mystifying piece of work that belongs squarely in our tribe of late night brain-melters.

Bill and Louise haven’t been in their house an hour and strange things are already happening. Louise hangs a golden cross on the wall and it twitches, wiggles and shakes, finally turning itself upside down. The coffee boils over and it drips down the stove thick and chunky like chocolate pudding. Someone keeps knocking on the front door but there’s no one there. Over the next two days, the freak phenomena builds towards a violent assault on Louise by an unseen force and this leaves the Fosters desperate to find some means of banishing the presence from their home.

Pre-dating the Barbara Hershey-starrer The Entity by several years, Louise’s violation at the hands of a ghost seems much too similar not to have been inspired by the same real life case of “spectral rape” that made national news when Doris Bither invited a group of paranormal researchers to her Culver City home in in 1974. But the film is much too cinematic and drawn-out to be an educational document, and not nearly exploitative enough to work as a straight horror film. So what the hell is it? A religious scare film? Who is Bart LaRue and what did he think he was making when he released Satan War into the world? Hard to say.

The “entity” of Satan War may not be a traditional slasher/boogeyman but is certainly a predator. It hunts the Fosters from within the music, repetitive stabs of synth and ookie-spookie female wah-wah vocals that bleed from the very edges of the screen. It peers at them from the rolls in the tape. It lives in the perpetual darkness that envelops the couple and threatens to swallow them whole—visible only in the moonlight on Bill’s twisted face as he tiptoes through his dream home with a pistol. The ending to Satan War sees the hungry darkness manifest in the most mind-bogglingly literal way, as a figure emerges from the inky black brandishing a kitchen knife.

It’s impossible to recommend Satan War without warning you what occurs at the hour mark. A sudden return to the abstract paintings and tribal drums that began the film, our Nimoy narrator reappears to espouse information regarding the traditional ceremonies of voodoo while a group of dancers perform on screen. That’s right, the film ends with 16 minutes of traditional voodoo dancing. The textbook-style narration over the dancing feels as superfluous as the information about angels and demons that opened the film; it’s possible that these were post-production inserts made in effort to distance the film from the stigma of “horror” by suggesting its purpose is educational.

And if you buy that I’ve got a house in Los Angeles you might be interested in...

11

BLOODSTREAM

MICHAEL J MURPHY, 1985

The first time I tried to watch Bloodstream I fell asleep halfway through. Six months later, I tried again and, with the helpful application of toothpicks to my eyelids, I was able to stick it out. I’m glad I did. The first half is pretty bollocks (to use the British parlance) but the film culminates in what might be the most metatextual MURDERDRONE moment ever made.

It’s impossible to understand why Bloodstream exists without knowing a thing or two about its creator, film-obsessed Brit, Michael J. Murphy. Making movies began early for Murphy, whose first feature at 15 years-old garnered a profile on the local TV news as “the world’s youngest film director.” Following numerous 8mm experiments, Murphy took on a job as a trainee at Hammer Studios and soaked up as much knowledge as would fit in a 16 year-old’s mind—but it’s hard to be on a film set every day and not want to be making your own films.

Murphy made a number of shorts, usually on 16mm, and sometimes pulled together enough money to shoot a feature but frequently found his work ripped apart and sometimes outright stolen by distributors. In a fit of frustration and rage, he decided to deliberately make a Video Nasty, a bitter pill of violence in which he murdered every person who had ever wronged him.

Of course, all the names were changed – this couldn’t be an outright threat. Standing in for Murphy in Bloodstream is Alistair, a passionate director of horror films who is first seen having his newest film, the titular “Bloodstream,” torn to shreds by bigshot producer William King: “You do know what kind of audience this is aimed at? A take-away curry, after the pub. Blood and tits. A few scares, a few thrills. Nothing too demanding.” King appears to destroy the VHS tape of “Bloodstream” and send Alistair packing, but little does he know that King intends to remove Alistair’s name from the project and sell it worldwide for cheap.

From here the story splinters. Alistair goes back to his flat and binges on horror tapes, watching five-cent homages to zombie flicks, slashers, mummies, Milligan-esque monster men and Rollin-inspired fake vampire fangs. Every few minutes he gets up and puts in another tape, smoking and stewing in darkness. Witches, cannibals, even a post-nuke flick. These homages take up most of the film.

A more interesting story is happening at the same time. King’s secretary, Nikki, has fallen in love with Alistair and hatches a rather convoluted scheme to find and murder all of King’s associates in one night and frame King for their deaths. High from his horror binge, Alistair agrees, but he wants them to see him in the reaper costume from his film, and he wants to film the murders with his personal camera, a one-two punch of irony.

As a product borne of wish-fulfillment, you can practically feel the snap of Murphy’s catharsis during the murders. They’re brutal, unsentimental and there is never a moment of hesitation from Alistair. In experiencing a non-stop deluge of terrible, pointless horror films, Alistair has become the character that best reflects the average MURDERDRONE viewer, and the film ends with our protagonist falling deeper and deeper into an actual “murdertrance.”

Even if all those horror homages have a purpose, they do tend to drag Bloodstream down. One can’t help wondering whether Murphy has slotted some old short films together in order to bring his real story to feature length. I certainly wouldn’t blame anyone who finds themselves checking out from time to time, while Murphy indulges himself once again. But the truth is, Bloodstream never was about you or me. This is Murphy’s version of “flipping the bird,” and you better believe he’s gonna have the last word.

12

DEVIL STORY

Bernard Launois, 1985

For the first few minutes you would be forgiven for thinking Devil Story was a complete knock off of Mad Mutilator. A horrible-looking man with a horseshoe crown of red hair stands in the middle of the forest, decked out in an SS
uniform and surrounded by corpses. He grunts wordlessly and shifts a knife from hand to hand while trying not to look at the camera. The corpses are so fresh the blood continues to pump from their bodies in fits and squirts. Thus begins a montage of death while the score pulses in earnest: the man punches a woman to death with a metal-studded glove, stabs a man who has pulled his car off the road, and shoots an old woman in the face with a shotgun. Only when the credits roll do they lend the man a name—one he never achieves within the film itself—“Pascal Simon as Monster.”

Filmed in France but possibly set in Florida, Devil Story is not about Monster. Not really. It’s hard to say what exactly it is about, something to do with an ancient curse, a mummy and possibly a ghost horse. Actually it’s possible everyone is a ghost.

A man and woman driving through the countryside stop to fix a flat and, before you know it, The Woman has scuttled off into a nearby field, hypnotized by the yowling of a black cat. The cat leaps at her and scratches her hands to high heaven. Her partner insists they go and take a load off in a nearby town. Dark now, the couple pulls up to an old castle signposted as “creepy” by that old organ standard, Bach’s Toccata in D

Minor. Devil Story features a number of these nods to classic Universal horror films, not least of which is the presence of the mummy. I’m getting to that, hold on.

The castle/B&B is run by an old man who regales our couple with a tale of pirates sinking ships off the coast in order to steal their precious cargo from the wrecks. The story goes that one of the ships was carrying crates from Cairo, and the pirates who sunk it were never seen again. They are survived by a mother and son (Monster) who keep the cemetery on the edge of town. Meanwhile a horse outside the castle begins to whinny and The Old Man vows to shoot that goddamn beast if it’s the last thing he does.

To go on describing the plot would be useless. No one hates reviews that amount to synopses more than I, but in the case of Devil Story the plot is something that seems to keep slipping through your fingers, leaving you desperate to connect the dots. There are long sequences of The Woman screaming, the horse neighing, Monster groaning and spitting blood, and The Woman running away (from the cat, the horse, and eventually a mummy that has emerged from a sarcophagus that was in the graveyard). Every few minutes we check in on The Old Man shooting his gun in the air at that damn horse. If the MURDERDRONE mantra is “90% people wandering around getting murdered,” then Devil Story shifts that ratio towards “90% man shooting at a damn horse.”

An actor who starred in a handful of Eurocine productions in the 70s, director Bernard Launois certainly had the connections to get his film distribution and even a semi-decent English dub. His resume suggests he was best known in comedy circles, and at times Devil Story seems like it might have been intended as a spoof of 80s horror, taking on slashers, monsters and dream-like confusion with equal abandon.

With no choice but to judge the film straight, I’ll go with “fascinating mess.”

13

LONG ISLAND

CANNIBAL

MASSACRE

NATHAN SCHIFF, 1980

Nathan Schiff‘s first two films, Weasels Rip My Flesh and Long Island Cannibal Massacre, occupy the purest niche of DIY filmmaking. No budget, no experience, and a whole lot of guts—literally, real animal guts. Filmed in and around Long Island, NY, Schiff’s worldview extended no further than the empty fields, cold-looking beaches and slurry-thick accents that populate his hometown. Neither film was made with the intention of getting into video shops; Schiff and his friends John Smihula and Fred Borges were just local boys having a bit of fun, screening the films to their families and friends. Few people knew these films even existed before their DVD release in 2004.

As Long Island Cannibal Massacre begins, we’re in comfortable territory: a woman undresses among the tall grass and lights a cigarette. A man wearing a pillowcase with goggles over his head smashes her in the head with a pickaxe, mows her face off with a lawnmower and carefully assorts all the bloody bits into black garbage bags.

The next scene finds Inspector Cameron (Smihula), and his girlfriend Susan standing on an outcropping of rocks and staring out at the ocean. Soon Cameron will discover a bloody head buried in the sand and become caught up in the disgusting world of cannibal meat delivery. But right now, he’s just a dude having some deep thoughts.

Perhaps seeing something in his far-away eyes that worries her, Susan asks “Hey, what are you thinkin’ about?”

“Nothing much,” he replies, “I was just imagining how twisted this world really is.”

You can argue this is a silly thing to say—in fact I’ll acquiesce before you even get the chance. But it’s also a really weird thing to say—when you’ve seen enough of backyard splatter flicks that you can predict all the beats, it’s moments like this one that cause you to sit up and take notice. The weird moments where you get to see a bit of what the people behind the camera might have been like. Just what kind of a person spends their weekends making a film called Long Island Cannibal Massacre, anyway?

In Smihula’s case, this is a quirk of personality so strangely specific that it shifts the Cameron character from potential audience surrogate/victim-in waiting into an honest-to-God human individual.

There are a number of quietly humanizing sequences like this one. In a later scene, we spend some time with Jack (Borges) as he speaks to a garbage bag full of body parts, growing ever more defensive as he imagines the silent corpse blaming him for its current lifeless state. A breathtaking meeting between Jack and his cannibal father is filmed completely one-sided: his father’s otherworldly voice booms from the trees while his face remains hidden. The father is less a villain than an imagined demon upon his son’s shoulder, encouraging Jack to continue murdering even though he feels deeply guilty about doing so (daddy issues were big in the 80s).

Long Island Cannibal Massacre cost $900 to make and you can hear the sound of the Super 8 camera whirring in every scene, but compared to a screw-about goof like Day of the Reaper, Schiff’s film feels incredibly adult, even world-weary. That both Schiff and Tim Ritter made their respective films at 17 is all the more confounding.

The final scene of Schiff’s film involves a green-skinned leper severing all of Borges’

limbs from his body one-by-one with a (real! moving!) chainsaw. The gore-soaked explicitness of it all is near overwhelming, but I can’t deny that Schiff’s characters have earned themselves the right to release some tension.

14

SCARY MOVIE

DANIEL ERICKSON,

1989/1991

The original Scary Movie was an amateur
production filmed just outside Austin, Texas.

We can assume the title in this case was also a goof—the production company listed in the credits is ‘Generic Movies, Ltd.” and the title is joined by an on-screen UPC code, so there’s a theme brewing there. Your guess is as good as mine though, as there’s not a lot of information available about the film.

Scary Movie is set in a haunted house. There are fog machines, strobe lights (blue then pink), sweaty night terrors, and everywhere you look lurks the Texas boogeyman, which I’m told is a reaper in a cowboy hat. We get the backstory out of the way ASAP—a mistrial has resulted in the release of a vicious serial killer, briefly seen drooling in the backseat of a police vehicle. Across town, an unbelievably anxious Warren (played by Oscar-nominated John Hawkes) has been dragged to a Halloween haunted house by his obnoxious friend, Brad, and he is hating every minute of it.

As a specific snapshot of a 1989 Texas haunt, Scary Movie delivers. Lovers of Halloween time-capsule grunge, this is your jam. With Warren and his obnoxious buddies stuck in line for half the movie, the camera has plenty of time to gawk at the crowd’s charmingly homemade costumes, and it seems like all the extras are getting drunk, grillin’ meat, and foolin’ around.

Once Warren and his friends gain entrance to the house, things get substantially more interesting. See, the serial killer’s police transport has crashed and he’s nowhere to be found. And some kid has left the back door to the haunted house wide open. Halloween revelers are shuffled from room to room to scream and laugh at the various bloody murder scenes, but are they watching real murders? Has the killer turned this shack of spooky fun into a real-life charnel house of death?

Scary Movie screened just once, at Houston WorldFest 1991, and was passed around on VHS for a while afterward in local rental shops. Director Daniel Erickson has said he doesn’t believe Scary Movie is a horror film and I think he was right to distance his film from the genre. Despite the obvious title, anyone looking for a Halloween-set slasher is definitely going to come away disappointed. Scary Movie is disturbing, just not in the way you expect.

I don’t want to give anything away, but the short version is I was ultimately a lot more tickled in the brain than the gut.

Genre semantics aside, the best reason to watch Scary Movie is future-Mr. Hollywood John Hawkes. Scene after scene of sweaty, shaky, screaming Warren completely losing his shit—it’s not the sort of bizarre performance that gets you awards but it is a thrill to behold. There’s a scene where Warren falls into a snake pit and the way he repeatedly leaps in the air in an attempt to escape their fangs puts Crispin Glover’s spastic dancing in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter to shame. Yeah, it’s that good.

15

TWISTED ISSUES

CHARLES PINION, 1988

Twisted Issues belongs to the profane halls of the shot-on-video horror genre. We’ve covered a lot of amateur productions in this book, but when the entry-fee to making a movie is a drugstore VHS tape, things typically get unprofessional real quick. Thankfully, an atypically frenzied style elevates director Charles Pinion’s punk doc/skate-video/slasher/performance-art piece to a realm beyond most of its ilk—a world where death and violence are truly meaningless.

Shot on VHS in Gainesville, Florida, Twisted Issues begins with backwards vocals over a black screen. The indistinguishable words are a both a prayer before we sin, and an invitation to the trance that Pinion sets out to create in the audience over the next four minutes.

Fuzzy footage of Ronald Reagan, fighter jets, nukes, Hitler, space shuttles and soldiers assault the screen, but these combative images are cross-cut with serene moments of suburban kids smoking and skating.

“America is going to hell,” he seems to say. “Fuck it, who even cares anymore?” Very punk.

These skaters ultimately end-up on director Charles Pinion’s own doorstep. Charles is a kind of narrator for the film—we are not seeing reality, we are seeing a reality of his design. In addition to the montage that introduced the film we’re watching, the TV
broadcasts images from around town and Charles watches that too. Today, the channel is set on a young skatekid named Paul.

When we first meet Paul, he’s dressed in a karate gi, eating a greasy cheeseburger on his porch. Paul is a pretty straight-forward guy: he loves his skateboard and he loves karate. Across town, four rowdy punks recklessly cruise the streets of Gainesville, catcalling pedestrians, smoking and drinking cans of cheap beer. There’s no professional lighting in this movie, instead a flashlight strobes over their faces and we get their features one a time. The gang is a rather coarse group, cursing, flicking each other off and barking orders for more beer. When you are a punk, this is known as friendship.

Worlds collide when Paul skates home from a punk show and the gang sees an easy mark. Despite some badass karate moves, Paul is no match for the moving vehicle and is mowed down in a parking lot. In its most absurd sequence, Paul’s corpse is reclaimed by a mad scientist who decides to bring him back to life. It’s a mystery how he accomplishes this miraculous act—the film cuts to gruesome real-life slaughterhouse footage, and when we cut back the scientist is chillin’, smoking a joint and Paul is alive. Let the real slaughter begin.

Music is the key to unlocking Twisted Issues. The film cuts back-and-forth from Paul’s revenge upon the punks that murdered him to teenagers dancing and moshing during live performances from local Gainesville bands.

Twisted Issues was originally conceived as a Decline of Western Civilization-esque profile of the Gainesville punk scene, but it switched gears during production.

Nothing of any sense happens for long stretches, but if you vibe with the grind of the music it can start to feel transcendent—like everything is actually happening all at once. One-by-one Paul makes the gang members bleed, and the mushy VHS colors leak in parallel, spread through neon bedrooms and back alleys like a fog.

As

Twisted Issues draws to a close, the violence Paul has inflicted on the city spills over into Charles’ own life, but there are no real consequences for our characters in a world where death is impermanent and apathy is all-consuming. Fuck it, as long as someone is watching, the show will go on.

16

Production still from Day of the Reaper

17

NOTES ON MURDERDRONE 1
notes on

In murderdrone there is a drone, or
a series of drones, or overlapping
drones and, crucially, there is a
murder-
minimum of plot set-up for a maximum
of chase=stalking sequences. This
makes murderdrone a specific subset
drone
of the slasher wherein the slasher
has individual set-pieces, ‘kills’ that
are modular and rated on technical
achievement. In murderdrone it is like a hillside collapse, a lava flow, a slurry nathaxnNE
spill. What murderdrone is about is
escaped containment: everything repeats
too much, goes on for too long, is
walker
indistinct. Narrative becomes ambient.

In murderdrone the kill forgets what it
is doing or forgets the economy of what
is going on: it is about the chase, not
the kill, which is usually perfunctory.

This is a wending, hiding, stumbling,
breathing-in hard. This is not ‘cat-and-
mouse’ but rather all the tension of
that relationship drained and replaced
by a weird slackness. Murderdrone is
awesome because it is fulfilling in the
moment, not in the payoff. It repudiates the much-theorized transactional model
of horror: we pay, they bleed. This is
a being-along-with, a learning-to-
live-within, even as we are all dying
together, some at faster rates than
others.

- - - - - - - - - -

LUNCH MEAT (1987)

Lunch Meat’s opening theme is
percussive and repetitive, like a
sequencer perseverating, like a drum
machine inscribing bad things in its
consciousness so it doesn’t forget.

Listen: it is not going to forget. You are not going to forget. You are going to
want to forget and you are not going to
forget. You are going to want to forget
and you are not going to forget. You are going to want to forget and you are not
going to forget. There are bells that
don’t toll but cut off sharply, like limbs might be cut off sharply. There is no
fake resonance. These are objects among
other objects. Everything is carried off by an ill wind or into a chasm, a really shallow chasm, full up of dark.

Pursued or pursuer, stumbling
through floodwaters, through
swamplands, grunting and huffing, out

18
of breath. Running with the corpse of There is a jazzy pseudo-piano flourish.

a bird that isn’t a corpse of a bird

This is their territory, the orange
yet, still flapping and squawking, and
men in the plaid and the caps and the
shaking underarm. Pursued, then, for
grease. ALL DELIVERIES IN REAR /
sure, by guys with plaid shirts, red

ELECTRIC SERVICE
and blue, and caps, and weapons. It’s a

Leaking Garbage Bags full of
chicken, a guy carrying a chicken, with

Potential Revenue
someone’s blood, his or the chicken’s or God I Can’t Eat This
someone else’s, all over his right arm.

STOCK UP ON PARTY SUPPLIES

This is how Lunch Meat begins.

You got piss all over the seat you

scum-sucking pig

Purple drink straight from the

Grease stains the skyline.

container. Restrained and caged.

A whole landscape composed of

A patriarchal gang with an actual
rendered fat; an oscillation from the
patriarch, run on violence and money.

depths unsettles. It is not a real piano.

HI-FI
it is not an electric piano.

HI-FI

A detour that is a real detour.

HI-FI

A detour that is not a real detour.

‘a mad dog with shit for brains’

a desperate situation indeed.

Bad handclaps, faint echo

hunger, excretion, scarcity of resources I just don’t want to get stuck
down on the farm, or what is left of it.

in these woods

HOLLYWOOD

MY GOD HIS FACE IS COVERED IN BLOOD
tilts into view. a scarcity of resources piled into illusory wealth manufactured

A Corpse That Is Not Yet A Corpse Spills through illusion.

From The Shadows, From A Copse In The

Leaking Woods

A car full of people on the freeway

with post-feathered hair and aviator

Eddie Gets Stabbed In The Throat
sunglasses. This is another family, one

Eddie Who Had Been Driving
oblivious to its wealth and privilege.

Eddie Who Was Going To Turn The Car

‘Nightmare Is More Like It’

Around

Mountaineering. A negative ascent.

Eddie Who Had Had It Has Got It Now

Backlit, frames freeze until snapping

out of it, an absence seizure fractured
it is as this point that the screams are like ice floes, a spattered duration.

looped. first one scream, then the next, then still another one on top, and that

A soft drink, a hard time.

one is looped. it is a dense pattern of
the hills like
screams looped one on top of the other,
drugged lions like cheap loops like
but not so dense they do not form a thin, pliable material, to bend and flutter

Where’s the Lunch Meat? How the Hell am
in the wind, like ragged plastic barely

I going to make a sandwich without the
covering furniture in the back of a truck Lunch Meat? Did somebody forget to pack
on the highway.

the Lunch Meat?

A Burger Joint with Disused Outdoor
a pickaxe or shovel whirled about

Cafeteria Seating next to AUTO PARTS
decapitates someone. it lands in the dirt SERVICE which claims to have ‘Wilbur’s
with a thud, blood obscuring the eyes,

World Famous Juicy Burgers’ is where
blood feathered into the post-feathered
this is going, where this car which has
hair. like a dog worrying a bone, like
run out of gas is going. This is in an
a marrow spilling from bone into the
urban sprawl. There is a busy highway.

street. restrained and loaded into the

This is not isolated. This is commerce.

truck, still snarling. a throat torn from There is a taped-on OPEN sign.

its mounting.

This Whole Trip Looks Like A Mistake

I HATE THIS FUCKING FAMILY

To Me

I HATE THIS FUCKING VALLEY

The Synth Holds and Slides Like A
to gnaw and pacify,

Toilet Flushing. This can’t be good.

LUNCH MEAT LUNCH MEAT LUNCH MEAT

19

A chicken pecking at a severed hand fake strings shudder or sustain

LUNCH MEAT
only a flesh wound its only a flesh

LUNCH MEAT
wound its only a flesh wound its only

LUNCH MEAT
a flesh wound its only a flesh wound

its only a flesh wound its only a flesh
a bowl upturned, bowed metal detourned
wound its only what will a killdeer do when it actually is wounded?

turned into a hamburger patty

the tree is crying blood. an error

HAMBURGER MAN
occurred. please try again later.

HAMBURGER MAN

hiding under the car to avoid the gaze

A chicken pecking at a severed hand
of the severed head to avoid the gaze of the unsevered head to avoid the gaze of
chicken of the earth/chicken of the
the head which talks.

dearth/chicken of the dirt

what’s that guy doing in the middle of

HI-FI
the street what’s that guy doing in the

HI-FI
middle of the street what’s that guy

HI-FI
doing whats that guy whats that guy

doing in the middle of the street whats

Get Off That Meat Boy!

that guy

I SAID Get Off That Meat!

in opposing directions, not

looking back
flayed alive, chicken onlookers

- - - - - - - - - -
stigmata unanchored, loose in the drift

BLOODSTREAM (1985)

war drums sound for the hunt

garbage compactors crumple gunk
whipsaw & flailing wild

muffled as like from behind a door or
a growl clearing/a clearing growl
under the ground or the apartment
below.

&&&

the sound of college kids being turned
the foreground is picked out by bright
into money. it can be slow going, it can light or it is not-not.

be

two black eyes,
lightning forks and then tears open his

greying at the temples
abdomen and lightning forks and
or
tears off his face the skull is

egg whites, spray paint
externalized and masklike. the eyes

fall out of the skull. the sockets are
a thrown-axe into a thorax.

empty, to face and echo and magnify the

screaming. this is on a monitor. this is A SHITLOAD FULL OF CANDY BARS
growl off-screen. the whole goes up in a A SHITLOAD FULL OF CANDY BARS
blaze: death or its representative

assumed to be on fire, evaluated on a

Now he’s dead, now he’s dead now
monitor.

go on, go on, go on without me

a shoe full of blood, a truck horn in a

This has been a movie-within a movie.

wind tunnel.

Bloodstream is a movie that is always
grasp the knife like a baby elephant
waking up from a movie into another
grasps a feather: to be able to fly
movie and falling back asleep into yet

another movie.

drop-in//axe-handle to face

Bloodstream is a movie that knows that
a baited trap, a flight into a ravine
movies are externalized dreams that can

be collectively shared, on film, as film.

20

Bloodstream is an homage to sitting a targeted chase through a known or
at home, mentally ill and smoking
foreign or enclosed space at whatever
uncontrollably, watching hundreds of
speed, all of those events compress and
video cassettes of movies you’ve never
recede to relative unimportance and the
heard of before but just got from the
minutes, hours or days spent running
video store because they had enticing
and hiding and screaming to attempt
covers.

assurance of continued survival stand

out in sharp relief, every moment an

Bloodstream chooses cheap horror
eternity of immediate focus. Markers
movies not out of material necessity,
of time which generally determine
but out of love and reverence for what
experience are by necessity ignored
they can achieve with the force of their or become superfluous. There is only
elemental powers.

an elongated present, impinged upon
by hysteria and exhaustion. This can

Bloodstream also owes as much
result in a hyperreal clarity, a sense of to Elizabethan/Jacobean revenge
never having been more alive. There is
dramatics as it does to traditional
no logical denouement to this situation.

slasher operations: the wronged hero,

There is only the eventual shutting down the outsized response, the gothickally
of the fight-or-flight response. This can disguised identity, the encouraging
take minutes, hours, days, months, years.

partner, the lure of wealth, and most of It can never happen. It can happen in
all the loss/reformation of identity in
all all-at-once which seems to consume
revenge. Something also is owed to ‘The
the whole of experience forever and

Video Nasty Controversy’ of late-70’s/
evermore. This is MURDERDRONE.

early 80’s Britain where specific films
were put on an index of suspect works

- - - - - - - - - -
under official approbation. The idea

that the overuse of horror movies (or

FOLIES MEURTRIERES (1984)

comic books, or heavy metal, D&D, etc) would lead to psychosis and violence

This film has a score that literally
is sort of tacked onto the end of
sounds like if you were to drown the

Bloodstream but dovetails neatly with
master tapes of John Carpenter’s
its overall concerns.

Halloween synth tracks in a sink until

they warped beyond recognition. This

There is Deformed Jester Dungeon
statement is only true if John Carpenter Torture Theatre!

had performed his score on a Casio

Keyboard he purchased at S-Mart that

There is a Witch-Burning extravaganza,
had its rhythm presets button broken
complete with shrieking at the stake as
off into the ‘always on, high tempo’

the fires mount!

position. But this is only before it

shifts into twinkly French Lounge Disco

- - - - - - - - - -
as something like actual 1984 Home

Movies filmed on 1964’s state-of-the-

NOTES ON MURDERDRONE 2
art home camera technology, as long as

your home movies contained shots of

The dilation of time surrounding
your stalker along with the walks on the trauma, fight-or-flight, the moments
beach at sunset. Your stalker is dressed leading up to death. As spacetime warps
in the most stalkerish outfit ever, with in and around the mouth of a black
a carpenter’s belt, mechanic’s jumpsuit, hole, the presence of death warps the
giallo gloves, and motorcycle boots. The lived experience of time, adrenaline
ostensible non-stalker subject of the
amping up reaction time & the speed of home movies is naked and oblivious to
thought, thus slowing down perceived
the stalking. Really this might be the
duration. This is a functional attribute most glorious sunset ever recorded on
of MURDERDRONE: normative events
film, which is saying something. The
like driving in a car with friends,
lens flares here are exceptionally great, going to the store, filing paperwork,
like so great Michael Bay would be
drinking coffee, etc are the bulk of what reduced to tears great. The sunset ends
happens, but if someone appears with
and switches to:

an axe or a knife or a gun and begins

21

INT -

One of the things about the slasher and

Mega-zoom! From inside to outside -

MURDERDRONE is that they both invite
nighttime noises! Indirect but super-
and frustrate a ‘modular’ structural
glareful lighting! Like in a bad dream,
reading. They are a weird admixture of
stalkee keeps doing the dishes despite
ambient drift and episodic structure.

there being stalker getting a knife out

Folies Meurtrieres makes this explicit
of the kitchen drawer (why are they
through its chapter-based format. FM is
not prepared? they have a carpenter’s
composed of a narrative drive so pure
belt and a hammer or something?) The
it almost cancels itself out. By relying wordless vocalization over the drone
on the barest outlines of what makes
adds to the rising tension.

a slasher a slasher, it opens itself up

EXT. -
to environmental cues and obsessive

Stalkee outside and looking at the moon!

repetition. This is similar to the

How is she still alive? How did she not
structural concerns of all slashers, but notice the stalker mere feet away from
pushed to the nth power, FM gains its
her brandishing a knife out of her own
power & tension from the repetition of kitchen? She comes back inside to light
the stalk/murder scenario, cutting out
a cigarette. Now we get to see that the
literally everything else. If you boiled stalker is wearing a pillowcase over
down a slasher to extended, contextless
the head a la Jason. They put such
set-pieces and then let them drift in a
work into the rest of the outfit, and a
vacuum, you would find this film.

pillowcase? That is not going to sell

Folies Muertrieres has one of the
a lot of retro action figures! Or is it?

best slasher movie endings ever. And

Well, I guess like if Jason had cut out
what is great is that a) it Totally
all of the eye-area and wore safety

Follows from what came before while b)

glasses—that is smart. I mean, stalking
being Totally Unexpected, as what came
and killing beautiful women in their
before was so disconnected/episodic
homes is probably the kind of thing that and c) completely alters not the facts,
you would want to wear eye protection
but also the affective orientation to
for. A stabbing at her hand through the
what was just watched. As far as I am
door in a scene weirdly evocative of
concerned, it is in the very highest tier Inside over 20 years later. Blood comes
of slashers and all films.

out of nowhere to run down the walls of

the room she is in. She opens a closet

- - - - - - - - - -
door and some guy is there with paint

or ash on his face, bloody and chained

DAY OF THE REAPER (1984)

up to the closet wall! He grabs her and

chokes her out, pulling her toward him!

sun-baked concrete, crumbling,

What is going on here??? She just is
abandoned asphalt turning gray
like, NO! and climbs out the window.

and cracking in the sun. shadows cast

Thank God someone just left that pickaxe inside the breezeway, patches of sand
outside the house! This is the most
between the edges of grass. faux-deco
opportunistic stalker/killer I’ve ever
concrete work mingles with actual-
seen in a movie! First the knife and now deco concrete work on slabs and within
this! Now she is banging on someone’s
screens. tail lights in pools of
shuttered window? door? By this point,
rainwater after it rains on asphalt.

the music has left the scene entirely and everything smears together.

nighttime noises are going full force.

not an actual castle, but a castle in

So, the KILLER opens the door and kicks
a videogame, with a pixelated vampire
her in the face! Pickaxe right through
that you know is a vampire because you
the skull! Full Stop! We get to see this read the description on the box before
from many different angles to maximize
throwing the box away to play the game.

the gush. She bleeds out from her third
it is a vampire due to context. because
eye and her mouth into the sand. The full the castle is a vampire’s castle.

moon glares.

wavy glass insets, whole fields of

Thus the first 10 minutes of Folies
squelchy blues, intermittently avoid

Meurtrieres play out.

themselves and again.

a slab of light between curtain-

MURDERDRONE degree zero!!!!

drapes, itself a kind of severing.

22
the sky is pink
civilization is taken out of the
the sky is yellow
picture. A movie like Lunch Meat views
the sky is orange
civilization as a problem concerning
the sky is violet
both the kids and the family of killers—
how to get money, how to survive, how to there is a place past which
attain and maintain scarce resources.

there is a place past which

Here capitalism is the omnipresent
there is a place past which
threat to all life, and MURDERDRONE
the screen blotches out in saffron.

is a solution to nothing, it is the abyss it is the end of legibility.

for everything at the end, the void
what can’t be seen is past there, not
yawning underneath. The Void cannot be
buried, but flooded, maybe dreaming.

identified with, cannot be reasoned with.

It is Absolute Negation. MURDERDRONE
the wind says it has arrived. it says
is the irruption of the Void into the
this. the wind is seen by its effects. the Real. Discontinuity, dilation and
wind is its voice. the wind is its own
drift, the edges of the frames, the
projection.

spaces between actions, this is where

MURDERDRONE is.

abandoned mattresses with a floral
print in places those flowers could

- - - - - - - - - -
never grow.

LONG ISLAND CANNIBAL MASSACRE
pine needles make for. sap runs in

(1980)

tangles down. to pretend for a kind of

amber. it isn’t.

The opening shots of the sound, the

marsh, the reeds, the wind, the leaves
saw palmetto //// saw palmetto
and branches in gentle, increasing
a manner of recogntion not dependent
motion, combined with the beautifully
upon sight.

orchestrated music make me think not
grasses matted, dog-circled. sea-
of slasher films, but of the opening to
grapes make arches over. that is how

Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust.

to walk to the beach and then into

Long Island Cannibal Massacre is
the waves, if any.

roughly contemporaneous with Cannibal
tile plaza, slatted wooden benches.

Holocaust and I have to wonder if
grassen-regions cut into polygons.

Schiff had intended to re-situate the
dried seaweed in clumps like ink
structures and functions of the Italian
dragged across the surfaces by a

Cannibal Cycle (at its zenith, no less) in clogged pen which cannot write any more
his immediate community.

but leaks from its body.

It is fascinating to think of what
a screen of Australian Pines. These
would have happened to slasher films
will already look blurry, as if seen
if Long Island Cannibal Massacre had
without glasses. the shadow cast-iron,
become the template for future advances
like a lava field cooled.

in the field over Friday the 13th, with
shells are crushed and used in the
which it also shares a lush score and
material of the roadway. the color of the wooded, pastoral setting. It would have
screen door.

been a lonelier, stranger, world for
the pines so far apart that only an
certain.

artificial wind may be coursed through

Films like Cannibal Holocaust,
them. to make a hollow, to allow for an

Friday the 13th and Long Island
escaping, an escarpment.

Cannibal Massacre are about the loss
tangled like hair unearthed, still
of wilderness, of the unknown beyond
attached.

civilization, and what is left of that

fear, of that wonder. Wilderness is a

- - - - - - - - - -
projection of ignorance. It is a fiction made up to push against, to conquer.

NOTES ON MURDERDRONE 3

Slasher films work by re-wilding
what we think we know, by making them

The slasher is civilization’s limit
unexplored territory, where monsters
problem, what defines it at the borders.

lurk at every turn. Slasher movies are

MURDERDRONE is what is left when
about the uncertainty of conquered

23
wilderness: what if there really is no Light having faded already, gone
civilization? What if human life is
under the horizon, shot through a stand
always at the mercy of chaos and the
of pines surmounting the water.

constant threat of lethality? What form

This is a film-making concerned with
would that take? Would it be someone
where the sun is at all times, light
with a broken pickaxe on the side of the rushing parallel to the earth, an after-road? It certainly could be. Cannibal
image or a breaking-upon.

films reawaken the sense of ourselves

The point where the roads literally
as prey. It is the nightmare of the apex end, Long Island Cannibal Massacre
predator, that one’s species is not
begins: the borderlands, the liminal
really as successful as it seems, or that places. Where field meets woods, where
we have run out of predators, and must
land meets water, where night meets day, ourselves assume that function.

where winter meets spring.

It is notable to me that the first kill in There are a lot of monologues in the film the film, of the unfortunate sunbathing
about the limits of human knowledge,
student, is conducted via a lawnmower—
human communication, human behavior,
symbol of the controlled repression of
what society can and cannot achieve to
uncontained life, the suppression of
alter or mitigate the scope of human
wilderness, forcing sterilized, lifeless activity.

geometries. When we turn these tools

This is a movie less about the society
against ourselves, what we get is
of feral cannibals that lives hidden
genocide, mass murder, imprisonment,
within the world we know and more about
slavery. What we get is Long Island
the people who are gatekeepers and

Cannibal Massacre.

caretakers for that hidden society. What Nathan Schiff really has an eye
are their lives like? What must they
for landscape cinematography and
do? In this way, Long Island Cannibal
selecting the proper locations. The next Massacre eerily prefigures We Are What
scene in the film takes place on a rocky We Are, also about the burdens of caring outcropping projected into the ocean
for a cannibal society living amongst
on a beach. It is windy, sunlight filters the larger, more dominant one. In a
through clouds to play upon the waves.

sense, MURDERDRONE itself is like the

A couple hold each other and talk about
mutant cannibal society hiding out in
how the world is a rough place. Both of
the inbetween places, the lonely areas
these opening scenes establish human
of the larger landscape of Slasher
presence as an intrusion. This is a film Movies.

that understands human occupation of

the land as an ongoing violence, a slow

What lies beyond the radius of light?

apocalypse.

What lies beyond the radius of light?

A decomposing head is found buried
in the sand of the beach, already in

- - - - - - - - - -
reclamation by the earth.

The sun sets, all action is impelled

MAD MUTILATOR (1983)

toward the night.

Piles of trash, animal skulls as

Vari-speed shot composition makes
makeshift geographical markers,
for a fractured, cubist sense of the
detritus from the road.

progression of time and event.

This is a barely populated Long

One person after another leaves a

Island, deserted or never came to be.

car in the most awkward way possible,

heading off into the forest to be axe-

The second act of Long Island Cannibal
murdered.

Massacre establishes a question: Texas

Ogroff, the axe-murderer of the
is large, with low-population density
forest, wears a knit-cap atop his
in many places. What would it be like if medieval torture mask which seems
a Cannibal Massacre happened in Long
incomplete. Maybe it is old. Maybe his

Island, in the waste places, the places
axe is old. Maybe the forest is old.

where civilization never took? What

People run at unnatural speeds,
about thinking of this as a criminal
either slower or faster (or both) than
syndicate founded upon murder and the
would seem possible for being chased by
sale of human remains?

someone with an axe along a dirt path or 24
for chasing someone along a dirt path be used for a variety of butchering
with an axe.

purposes.

An abundance of pulsing and

It is day. It is night. It is day.

twitching and oscillating, like if sound Insects are awake. Insects sleep.

were successive cold or warm fronts

Insects awake again.

moving over and around a central

mass which was sometimes there and

A picnic gotten to by car in pine scrub
sometimes not—this inconstancy, this
should clearly be soundtracked by
built-in instability, is key to Mad
synthetic reggae. There should be chairs Mutilator.

and a table there for your game of chess.

Sounds that sound like the wind

Someone should do a dub remix of
imagines itself to sound like at higher

Mad Mutilator except that it is, already, elevations, rising into the upper
its own dub remix.

atmosphere, at incredible speeds.

The basslines should be proto-

The trees are a vice that is closing
hoovering, sweeping and crackling,
in and only Ogroff has an axe, which is
there should be electro pings and echoes to say, a key to solve the forest.

until everything is replaced all at once A swarming, a twangling, a pounding
by all the keys depressed upon and
like on sheet metal but so far away.

organ and the wind howling again. Then,

Mad Mutilator is composed entirely
without warning, this dub remix should
of insert shots, shot at different times cut back to a synthetic reggae song
and sewn together later on. Because of
because we were in the synthetic reggae
this, Mad Mutilator feels like a silent
song the whole time.

comedy.

Ogroff will cheerfully ask for a

Ogroff is sad his quarry has left,
cigarette, and then once he gets one,
so he walks back along the road,
will go off, put on his mask and knit-
melancholy, with his axe on his shoulder.

cap, and then come back to put an axe

The woman’s frantic cries for help are
through your chessboard, table, and
rejected by someone who steps out of the face.

car that she has flagged to jump up and

Ogroff likes to have kindling fires
down with a crazy hat on before driving
around, to help cauterize wounds for no
off. Ogroff is happy now that he can
reason or to lightly cook human flesh to continue pursuing his quarry. It is day.

eat.

it is evening. It is sunny. It is raining.

Ogroff understands the world

A tone between a cry and a wind-
through his axes. They are his primary
chime. The woman tries to decide
sensory and epistemic organs.

something. Ogroff has cleverly

The primal, endlessly cycled event
disguised himself with a bicycle and
in Mad Mutilator is: someone stops a
an overshirt. The woman is wrestled to
car along a dirt road in a wooded area.

her doom—no, she is pushed along a

They get out of the car for some reason.

dirt path with a bicycle by Ogroff. She

They are chased and probably worse by
runs away, but Ogroff gives chase, first Ogroff, who has an axe.

having to disentangle his axe from the

bicycle. Now it is day. Now it is night.

It is day. It is night. It is day.

Now it is day. It is a forest. It is a

grassland.

A man is hanging by a rope from a tree.

A person who has left the car cuts him

[The pickaxe is the official weapon of
down. He attacks her. She stabs him and

MURDERDRONE. It looks good through an
runs away. She has a gun in he car. She
eyesocket, functional or not]

shoots the man. He pulls the bullet from himself. She ties a rope to his neck and Ogroff’s shack has a neatly made bed, a
her car and drives away. She gets out
neatly displayed axe collection, and a
of the car and smashes his decapitated
bunch of severed hands. Some hang from
head with a sizeable rock. This is the
the ceiling. Some are in a sink.

cycle of life in Mad Mutilator. Life is

Ogroff has some kind of plaid office-
tragic and futile, whether pursued or
shirt/sweater-vest/khakis thing
pursuer.

happening.

There is an oak tree. Maybe it has

Ogroff has a variety of stumps which
acorns.

are not only decorative, but which can

25

It is day. It is night.

It is day. It is night.

It is night. It is day.

There are frog-noises.

Ogroff has a girlfriend. They snuggle

There are zombie-respiration-noises.

and she helps out around the shack,

burying severed limbs, doing laundry,

It is day.

etc.

It is here that Mad Mutilator reveals

It is day. It is night.

its true nature: that of the pastoral

idyll, of the woodsman and his bride.

- - - - - - - - - -

This overlaps with the pastoral idyll of the passionate shepherd and his love.

NOTES ON MURDERDRONE 4

The sky is pink with blood.

It is a beautiful day.

In murderdrone, time becomes space

The days pass by, with
and space becomes time.

dismemberment, waylaid tourists and

There is no ‘outside’ in murderdrone.

passersby.

The entire world is a slasher movie, is

composed of what composes slasher

It is day. It is night.

movies. What happens when slasher

movies become worlds, become whole

Instead of a flock of sheep, Ogroff has a environments. In the classical slasher, a pit of zombies. He is a pastoralist, too.

group of people from the everyday world

The zombies and Ogroff’s girlfriend
enter into a situation or location which get to re-enact the zombie-arms-is heightened or unique, a fight-or-
through-the-wall scene from Dawn of The
flight, live-or-die situation. There is a Dead. Everyone is having a good time
beginning, middle and an end. There is a until the zombie flock gets too excited
mystery or puzzle to solve, to escape, to and tries to eat Ogroff’s girlfriend and survive. There is a ‘final girl’ because he has to dismember them with an axe.

there is the illusion of finality. In

MURDERDRONE this is not possible

It is day. It is night. It is day.

because there is no beginning and no

end.

Ogroff’s girlfriend is panicked and

Murderdrone is an enveloping. The
wants to leave despite the fact that the synthesizer is the perfect instrument
zombie flock has been defeated. Ogroff
for murderdrone because it blurs
is sad again, and kicks over his bike in the distinction between music and
melancholia.

environmental, ambient sound, between

Ogroff taking to the fields on a
music and space. Murderdrone becomes
motorcycle, lopping off heads with his
part of space, part of lived duration.

axe like a medieval knight on horseback

In the classical slasher, there is the
is something I never knew I wanted until experience of undergoing an ordeal, of

I saw it—and then I really wanted it.

passing through a ritual gauntlet. In

Ogroff is the knight, the soldier, who
murderdrone, this becomes mundane,
is battle-scarred and who has gone to
becomes ordinary. The things that are
live in solitude in the woods and wants
extra-ordinary in murderdrone would be
nothing more than to be left alone and
the quotidian details of living, of the
tend to his zombie flock but keeps being getting-along of life. When they appear
bothered, having to hack people to death in murderdrone, and they do ccasionally, until he finds and loses love. It is an
they stand out because they are NOT
old story.

what composes the world of murderdrone.

The second half of Mad Mutilator has

Murderdrone takes what is seen
a different engine. Once people stop
as the failing points of the classical
getting out of cars to get mutilated, and slasher: its cyclical repetition,
once the zombie flock appears on the
its abandonment of narrative, its
scene, the zombie army rises toward the
disinterest in characterization, its
sun to walk the earth again. The hand
perceived lack of overall structure and
reaching from below the grass to grasp
makes those the building blocks of a
at the sky is now the predominant image, positive aesthetic.

as is the zombie horde staggering in

collective.

- - - - - - - - - -

26

DEVIL STORY (1985)

arise! arise! corpse from the tomb!

arise! arise!

spiked glove murder // maw of the earth

crawl, crawl upon the belly of the earth!

black horse neighs is as to negate

is as to
collapse in slow motion and get up to
the horizon is tracking gone bad
run in slow motion — your hair like
the horizon is a bloodtrail gone cold
streamers trailing behind you
there is only propulsion or

there is only a leaking-out
the black cat paws and licks at the earth cry your tears into the warm body of
the black cat meows behind white fleurs.

the earth.

the blonde girl in the black and
face-flaps; internal bleeding; a long
white clothes summons fake lightning.

decay
she walks through the field, the field
goodbye we are leaving here to live
parts. she summons fake lightning onto
among
the field.

the dead
the black cat cries against the white

cliffs.

goodbye we are leaving here to live
the man in the white clothes carries
among
the blonde woman in the black and white
the dead
clothes away from the white cliffs and

the black cat and the fake lightning

- - - - - - - - - -
field.

TWISTED ISSUES (1989)

the black horse neighs and patrols the

cemetery gates or the gates that look

I went to college in the early 1990’s
like cemetery gates.

in Sarasota, FL and therefore spent a
the black horse neighs and whinnys
lot of time in Gainesville, FL getting
because something is coming from the
high, hanging out, going to used
bowels of the earth, from the cracks in
record stores, blasting the hardcore
the earth.

and noise music and going to shows so
a cursed ship erupts from the earth,

Twisted Issues being a slice of FLA-
teeters upon the cliff spilling itself
core so immediate to me I feel I have
over
been in some of these houses. Making
the black horse patrols the cemetery
what looks like a skate-clip video
gates and whinnys and neighs and paces.

only to morph into psychedelic low-

budget horror is perfect. I mean, this
black horse guardian!

is kinda like Slacker (with which it is
black horse excavator!

entirely contemporaneous) if Austin were Gainesville and Richard Linklater were
a mummy erupts from in full
a paranoid hardcore skate-rat making
sarcophagus, and opens.

Z-Grade Horror and getting too high to
the mummy has come from the beyond.

go outside due to paranoia, which, like, the mummy has come from
didn’t that happen?

the underworld. it has come to life by
lantern-light and blue-filter. blue filter Cruising around in cars, drinking
says fake thunder and midnight.

beer, hanging out in the parking lots

of convenience stores, walking home at
the mummy is hewn from the cliff.

night on badly paved sidewalks.

the mummy will collapse into powder.

HIGH ON VIOLENCE-
black horse rears and canters and

INDUCED PSYCHOSIS
wheels

hooves tearing at earth wildly

Watching yourself die on TV with your

totally boss Hellwitch shirt completely
black horse rears and canters and
ruined forever sucks pretty hardcore.

wheels

As Twisted Issues picks up steam, it
hooves tearing at earth wildly
becomes less a slice of life movie and

more and more a slasher/killer flick

27
what with facial grafts, personality of how we create intermediary places
breakdown, mad science, edged weapons
to negotiate anxiety, either temporal
and mask-distortion?

(Halloween) or spatial (the community

Haunted House).

Watching this I couldn’t shake the

feeling that I had met these people,

This is a movie about bad omens and
walked with them, lived and died and
nameless dread. This is a movie about
drank beer/smoked weed with them.

how those things are weird shadows of

As a tribute and a record to Charles
what is really coming to get you.

Pinion’s sense of Gainesville-as-

This is as good a snapshot of the

Home and his friends there, this is a
local community Haunted House in the
tremendous labor of love, a full-length
late 1980’s U.S.A. as we are going to get movie on video when that was super-in a fictional movie.

difficult.

Scary Movie is brilliant because it

More than any other MURDERDRONE
turns the ‘hangout’ aspect of the slasher film, Twisted Issues has thematic,
inside-out, inverting the threat matrix
formal, and aesthetic relations with the and the tempo and architecture of the

NYC-based Cinema of Transgression,
genre like no film I have ever seen.

and indeed, Charles Pinion’s follow up

to Twisted Issues, Red Spirit Lake would

- - - - - - - - - -
feature major parties associated with

that movement. Even without this sense

SATANWAR (1979)

of historicity, we have this awesome
record of late-eighties skatepunk DIY

SATANWAR // “Full Version Featuring
slasher horror!

Black Mass Intro” // SATANWAR

“The House That Dripped The Stuff

- - - - - - - - - -

Before It Tasted Good” / SATANWAR ///

SATANWAR

SCARY MOVIE (1989)

I’m not going to be molested just so you don’t have to take out the garbage!

Abandon Hope, All Y’all Who Enter Here

SATANWAR

Like listening to a barely functional

Having a regional lets-put-on-a-

“Dark Side of the Moon” cassette that
community-haunted-house thing going
gets stuck in your mono recorder and
on is what makes Scary Movie work like
is being eaten slowly as the batteries
it does. Halloween night, a bunch of
wind down home alone by yourself after
college kids, an escaped psycho killer,
school as night falls and yet still no
what’s not to like? Any movie that can
one comes home.

make the impaled aquarium skeleton

SATANWAR
creepy is good by me.

This movie gives me demonic PTSD

Scary Movie is a pretty great
flashbacks of early 80’s residences.

movie about the collapsing of inside

Satan War is a war fought fitfully while and outside, making the whole of the
ominously unpacking salt and pepper
world into a haunted house, which is
shakers and tea kettles; while the male
exactly what Halloween does. This is
lead’s contribution involves lighting
a movie fundamentally about anxiety,
one cigarette after another and sitting
about the anticipation of something
down grumpily in shorts. As problems
frightening. This is extended to almost
in the house continue, a woman who is
absurd lengths (the wait to go into the
probably the best New Age Medium ever
haunted house, the wait for the psycho
seen on film explains ‘it’s not ghosts,
killer to show up on the scene) until
it’s demons’ in partial trance while
the anticipation, the build-up, becomes
sitting on a hideous couch.

the thing itself. This is really how

SATANWAR!!!!!

Scary Movie fits into the MURDERDRONE

If The Amityville Horror and The Entity
schema, but frontloaded, unusual for a
exist as roomates in some awful tract

MURDERDRONE film.

house from a parallel dimension, Satan

There is a kid in this movie who has

War is how we get to experience this.

a comfort Universal Monsters Wolfman

SATANWAR!

Doll called ‘Wolf-Wolf’. This gets to the The people in this movie act as though
heart of Scary Movie, in its displays
they have just been released from

28

occult bondage and are still feeling
the burn. There is a truly awesome
abstract and psychedelic intro with the
indelible SATANWAR theme burrowing
and tunneling into it, which leads into
a freeform interpretive dance rendition
of a black mass which then leads into
the best mock-Dragnet/Health Films
voiceover explaination that SATANWAR
is neither a documentary nor a
mockumentary nor an exact re-enactment
but is all true anyway. The best trick
that Satan pulled off is to make you
think your TV is working adequately
when in fact all it is broadcasting is
roll and pitch and presumably backward-
masked demon voices hidden in static.

SATANWAR!!!

We can only hope that Realtor.com
prevents the next Satan War before it
ever begins, but did it ever end???

Answer: No! Satan War does not ever,
in fact, end, but transmogrifies
into a Beyond Questionable Voodoo

Disinformation PSA because, you know,
why not?

Whether or not they have supernatural
powers from Satan is beside the point.

SATANWAR!!!

29
witch

In their initial stage at least – in that golden age in the late 70s thru the mid

80s – I see slashers as fantasies of
thoughts
resistance. Sometimes these fantasies
were deeply embedded, fractional,
obscure, or merely suggested. Often
on murder- they were in an incipient, nonverbal, embryonic state. But they were there.

Amazingly, there were this visions of
drone
resistance, beamed out to me like electric light. At very least, to me, the films could be reclaimed as those fantasies.

The fantasy is US, the Final Girls
f ilms as reagents destroying the psychic avatars of oppression, simultaneously exorcising
for ritual magick the psychic control flow of MENTAL

COLONIZATION from the brainspace. An
excoriation. We could slash the controls from our brains. They were dreams of
feminine rebellion.

claire cox

And even more key, for me, these films
are spaces where the meaning of “Girl” is fluid. And they opened a psychic rift for me, where I began to spill and bleed raw gender, until I Knew I was that Girl, too.

I like to conjure it with names: Cinema
of Disruption, Fantasies of Revolution,

Cinema of Altering. They are feminine
fantasies because they dramatize
feminine fears. And revolutionary
because men empathize, identify. They
may emerge from the binary this way, but they begin to posit spaces where gender
is Not Stable, where it shifts and flows, where the categories are fundamentally
broken: the Final Girl arming herself
with a Phallic blade (or Chain Saw).

The key is the briefest moments of
breaking, where the Final Girl transcends gender coding and enters a non-gender
space of utter disruption and sorcerous
banishment, ripping apart the phantom
that has imposed the duplication and
system in the first place. For he is its Agent and Avatar. He is its Body.

We wake from the nightmare back
into the coded reality, but there is this fantasy of disruption. The Fantasy of
removing yourself from the culture, total rejection, abandonment.

Now, when I call Trauma a kind of
home and my hull sits damaged and
immobile, or a crawling mecha-torso,

I can call upon these Visions. They are
comfort and balm, and I begin to Unlearn the old Commands. They are restorative
fantasies. They animate my brain, trapped in psychic paralysis, to dream of better states, to dream of WAYS OUT. Healing

Magic. This is the White Magick of the

30

Slasher, hidden in the Veil of Evil.

But all this is in the Substance, the DRAMA, of the Slasher, the “What” that happens.

But the enthusiast will likely come to Love the films for qualities harder to qualify: moments of character (Strip Monopoly), pauses and punctuations, a kind of slackness, and perhaps most of all: Atmosphere and Mood. There is a quieter magic in these pieces. There are fragments of kind dreams.

Friends talking, the hush of the woods, the chill of the night. Pauses in the transmission. Channels of ambient Disruption.

Something lies in the gaps and hesitations, humming and vibrating subliminally in the Atmosphere and the Mood. Slashers are our nightmares of living under patriarchy.

But the Slasher has its own nightmares.

And they are called MURDERDRONE.

MURDERDRONE is the Slasher as Magick. It is the congealed distillate of the Slasher.

MURDERDRONE is a dream of the Void. MURDERDRONE is The End. It is the Anti-Transmission and the Anti-Miasma.

Part of the Magick lies in what I think of as the cinema verite quality of low budget films. This has, for me, two major facets. One: an accidental documentary quality. The lower the budget, the more you’re seeing “real” places, real people, sometimes non-actors. You’re seeing completely in-camera effects. Two: the low budget frequently results in distortions of this reality. This might be seen in bad audio, poor lighting, awkward dialogue (or, as you will seen in many MURDERDRONE films, no live audio: essentially resulting in the movies being filmed as silent). These factors fundamentally alter the material experience of viewing the film. And these two qualities compete with one another.

I am fascinated that “mistakes” can contribute to making a film wonderfully dreamlike. How they warp the experience of the film on a technical level. In black metal, when guitar and drums can’t be distinguished, a bizarre new wall of sound emerges. Deviations from the established norm have a raw distorting effect, like a clean guitar run through cheap FX pedals into a 4-track, drowned in hiss, and the tape submerged in water and then damaged by the sun.

MURDERDRONE has many magickal properties, but perhaps its most potent is its Lo-Fi Primitivism, found in: primarily natural lighting, shooting outdoors, “cheap”

synthesizer music. There are elements of “bad” process: discontinuous editing, utter 31
slackness in pacing, minimal or improvised scripts. These are the filmic equivalents of tape hiss or recording in the red. Almost fundamentally, these ‘techniques’ alter our sense of the movie’s reality. Unlike the Slasher proper, murderdrone – whether by happenstance or intention – disrupts not only our narratives but our expectations of what a film should be.

What characterizes murderdrone is the unique manner of its disruption. It channels the Violence of the Slasher, but it does so with slowness, slackness, the crawling pace of mystic syrup. It creeps like Doom. It is Glacial. It is “boring” cinema. But this is Key to its effect. It does not seek to create mythologies or narratives or ideologies or theories to resist Capitalism. Instead, it slows like Heat Death, and it converts the language of the Slasher into Voidic Cryptograms. All Signs & Portents of the Void.

Entropic Vibration Punk. And it documents the Irruptions of the Void into the dreams that nightmares have. It is VISION.

I write in a storm of damage/anxiety/depression/loops. Forgive the insubstantial Words and follow this pointing & I will be Gladde. What the Spelle is: The spells which follow extract the principles of the Miasma’s Mind Control and produce reagents for the casting of Mind Control spells for the lay practitioner or the hedge witch/wizard.

It is primary poisons, but they are reeking of haunted death. To cast these spells is to enter the Borderland, with its many small gods. Here is the Frog God and his highway cult. Here is Dissolution, Mysticism. Here is Submergence. Here is the diffusion of the Feminine. Here is taking the Miasma’s power to cast your own Irrational Spells: Aquatic, Solar, Cloud. How the Spell Works: I call it: Cinema of Reclamation, the cinema that transcends itself.

DRONE:

*****Narcotic / Hypnotic/Psychedelic (Trance): Looping is the primary Hypnotic factor. The Slasher experimented with this, distilling its narrative into repetitions of Stalk/Kill/

Pause/Repeat. Genre repeats this process in variations film to film. Murderdrone’s primary Component is the Loop. But the tape has gone slack, the camera will pause on the sun (see Folies Meurtrieres for the beauty of pauses). It causes Drone and opens the Channels by inducing a hypnotic-narcotic effect, through slack Loop of narrative’s charred remnant and the drone of electronic sound (the Holy synthesizer).

MURDER:

*****Void/End/Ritual Confrontation of Deathe: The Deterioration & Murder of the Movie Itself The unique interplay of form and content, melting into charred black tar. Light Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes on fire & imbibe the tar. They are not of interest primarily for their variation, so much as their formal Effect & Affect.

They register in Primal, Primordial, Pre-Emotional ways.

They resonate their Effect in the Body-Mind, in Intestinal Brain.

The Slackness, Slow Time Dilation is key to modified Effect of the Kill. No longer is the film’s subject the Intrusion into the mundane space of Normal Reality (capitalist suburban illusion).

Murderdrone constitutes a full-on oneiric space in which the shattering, irruptive quality of violence is highly diluted from brief high-spike potency into omnipresent miasma that coats and accumulates, like tar or resin. MD is emitted from the wounds the slasher put into “normal” reality. Or, MD is what is on the other side of the psychic wound: the new Portal. Savini Hatchet to the Head is an opening of a psychic rift, peerings into the void.

32

Murderdrone is the land of that void and all of its horrible, ineffable Substance.

It speaks in cryptograms or alien languages—intellectually unintelligible in the traditional sense—it must speak in psionic emissions / transmissions. It posits new epistemic categories of whole body & soul affective states. It is fundamentally a cinema of Altering, that works harder than most revelatory vision cinema to conjure

/ cast & ensorcell the viewer into new states of somatic being. To the point, it is best for being accidental; the raw, experimental state of what peering through the slasher wound has shown us. Like hedge wizards or cultic neophytes happening upon evil forumulae and replicating/casting them without fully understanding them.

Murderdrone becomes a vehicle for transmission of psychedelic affective body states.

It maps the negative space around cinema, intimating the boundaries & borderlands of cinema’s traditional epistemic regions. That it lies in “trash” is more to its profound virtue, for it pulses with the Vital Force of Life. It is profoundly haunted by the vilest immaterial ghosts of Void & Death, but it sees the rot of the contemporary structure in the light and denigrates it violently with mocking parody. It longs for more. It is the deepest and truest irony of paradox: the Drone oscillates in endless movement and undulation. It magnetizes and possesses the body, casting it into trance. But it does so to transmit its undulations, the sheer fact of which contradict and slough the layers of epistemic complacency that produced the nightmares in the first place. This is why Ogroff (whom I hope you will meet!) begins to seem a hero by the end of his film.

Violence in film can be base/banal/materialist/plainly misogynistic — but it can also be a rich formal catalyst for affective states — a symbol language that is neither symbol nor language — but inducements to the Primal Movement that constitutes the Quickening of the Human against the stillness of the void. Epistemic violence against staid and oppressive orders irrupt in Cinema as material Damages. (We know better.) Murderdrone is revolutionary cinema because it knows the contemporary state—not just the socio-political continuum, but the deep mental colonization and reification of its values and consciousness state—dominates vision.

The original Slasher is a haunted intimation of the force that sinews this kind of Mind Control or Possession. Murderdrone goes further and trances us into revolutionary blankesses that slough off stillness and grant clarities where new, unsullied visions can bloom. Murderdrone is the nightmare that loves you. Murderdrone is a clearing state, conjured from the necessary genealogy of its slasher antecedents. In some ways, the ultimate distillate of the original revolutionary impulse. However fragmentary this impulse becomes or however imperfectly it functions as “cinema” are wholly beside the point. The value is extra-cinematic and magickal. It becomes a reclaimable thing and potent reagent for your own Psychic Rituals Against the Terror of Psychic Colonization by Kyriarchy. It fights mind control with new mind control. Like a benediction, it privileges the act of transmission and the mode of transmission and the process of transmission over its message.

But when heard, the message tends one way: intimations of fragmentation, collapse, disruption, shattering extended as a new state. What is left in the mind is a kind of clarity and shattering of kyriarchical structures. It is fundamentally against

“internalized oppressions”—the ways in which thoughts are controlled subliminally by reifying the dominant ideology into the substance of your thought. It takes the tools of cult possessions and possesses with the emptiness of the trance, conjures dream states and sleep to disrupt the trajectories of Kyriarchal orders. It is sub-linguistic and speaks in images or to the body Directly by manipulating the senses. It causes the Effect of Possession & Mind Control without the corresponding transmission. It merely opens a Channel and sends No Data. It is a Great Opening. (See Satan War for more details—the earliest of the murderdrone films, it is the template for extracting the Process of Ritual from its context for use by the lay practitioner.) Now we can rest in the drone and capture the resonances of “total assault on the culture.” But know: it is necessarily a fragmentary cinema. It cannot hope to be totalizing. It’s low-budget, a cinema of enthusiasts (disciples) & pilgrims, it carries an obsessed nature that precludes any totalizing system. It speaks to us in familiar languages but it says something that cannot be understood. It is the bleak remnant of some utopian dream that said revolution was possible in the here and now. It has questions about freedom. Cede to the Void and mutate. Alter. Undulate. Be a living body. Cede control to 33

the body, which still is free. It is subliminal irruptions of light. Intimations, hints, whispers, breakings. It can’t save us, but it can point the way.

Genres constitute more-than-auteur bodies of work. They congeal fragments into wholes; variation (film-to-film-to film) is peering between the gaps, into the warmth of bizarre frictions.

MURDERDRONE says NOTHING. It is Emptiness. And in opening Us to this Void, the Miasma dissolves in the sheer Totality of Nothingness. In this way, it is the fundamental rejection of masculine, Apollonian orders. Of its hard, clear lines. They are utterly disintegrated. And raw girlstuff is left: the substance of No Gender, the dissolved bonds recongealing into wholes our Brains are not yet shaped to see. It is a New Life, the ways of which we do not Know.

Here is one trajectory of the Spell:

The caster is embedded with trauma: cultural damage = voicelessness = silence =
exclusion = nonexistence via atomization and destruction of community. Then there is Ogroff destroying everything and summoning cosmic Chaos and the Apocalypse. It is Satanic Revolt and Black Magick.

And all Sorcery and Satanism is Profound Love for Life Against Those who would Eat it From You. For girls hand in hand and the Cosmic Sisterhood of New Mountains and new Pyschic Landscapes. For the undreamed of places waiting to be born. Drone Light the Way. What Follows is a partial Liste of Reagents and Spells. But the Chiefest Spelle is SATANWAR.

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recovered hieroglyphs in the Name of SATANWAR

I have been possessed by its vibrating synthscape. It is dream seeding my subconscious with cryptic DRONE commands. I’m trance-damaged in the lingering VHS
haze. This is not really about a haunted house. It is about the haunting of SPACE by TIME. About slow motion. The music is key, it dictates and orders the temporality.

Causing the slow drifts of motion (Flowing Liquids in Space). The title music making the paintings seem to shift. The slow oscillations of the synthesizers. The stilted acting illustrating the complexity of the human brain misunderstanding physical reality, distanced from it, separated from raw temporality. Ritual of return. It LIVES in bad & damaged transfers. Seek the VHS haze, the VHS Murk. Scenes of imperceptible motion.

The scene is so dark, we cannot tell if a figure is there. We are Dreading movement.

After a conversation at the beach, ostensibly an establishing shot of the house, but haunted with the ghost of movement (the trees barely swaying). Everything vibrates/
flickers with subtle half-seen motion. We read subtle figures in darkness. The Dub distances us from Space, but the music completely drowns out the dialogue. Repetition and congealed ambiguous movement, even the beginning and end are repetitions of one another, making a kind of reflexive whole. It impregnates your subconscious with dreams you never had, wake up and think them yours, no referrent outside of itself.

Self-replicating images. Lull, trance you, and imbed, seed themselves. Artifacts of psychic colonization, like dream spores. Lo-fi form produces bizarre abstraction/
impressionistic or embellished impressions of or amplified versions: at 58 minutes, the caocophony of the s/t swells. The Phantom is in the house. Deep in murk, half-lit in tight framing: a face, a gun, darkness, a light playing off the gun, the flashing of the Giallo knife, all a sea of abstract motion. Renders the experience viscerally ambiguous and difficult to read and thus suspenseful in a dreamy way. The image distilled into its primary pieces, then abstracted further, until a figure with a knife becomes a blur, a glow—one, piercing condensed image, cradled in sound. Hypnotic, narcotic psychic implantation. Haze and Sleep Magick. Some demons from the invisible world. A rift opened: movie as suggestion, mind control. I was possessed by the movie.

------THE THAUMATURGICAL KEYS-------

The film begins and ends with “documentary” footage of a Satanic black mass and a voodoo ritual. At first, the you wonder why this is here when it seems to bear no relation to the house story. But it surfaced for me: the rituals described in the bookend are replicated BY the film. The voodoo segment outlines the filmic project: the music puts them into a trance, then the invisible comes and possesses them. The film is a ritual in the guise of a haunting story. A genre film that is itself haunted. What sounds like a soundtrack is actually a PRESENCE. It wants to get inside you. Or is it is a spell.

Danvala, the serpent, the only voodoo god who does not speak, but transmits his wishes telepathically. (Note some diabolical interlocking when the Satan War soundtrack overlaps WELL with the voodoo drumming.) Satan War may appear to be a simple, lowbudget genre film, but do not be fooled. The voodoo discussion doesn’t emphasize the MESSAGE so much as it does the TRANSMISSION: the passing of data, the motion, the process, the state of trance. The film is about abstracting the trance from the context of possession, a magickal dabbling. SATANWAR is a spell to be cast on oneself, taught to magicians by evil. And the film is a haunted artifact or reagent. It is alchemical black magic, the viewer attempts to transmute from what may variably appear to be some inert matter (dull, earthy, useless), or else something forbidden (the guise of DANGER). But it is a tool for magicians and witches. The synth is the key to it all. It is the voodoo drum. The chief reagent in the spell, the activator of the other components, the divine or Satanic hallucinogen. The invoker. Likewise, the Black mass is about communications and commandments by an entity or force, a possession, but it does not emphasize what is requested, what is to be done, merely the fact of the possession.

This movie is a magickal intervention that attempts to subvert the hypnotic, magickal quality of ritual for individual use, outside the context of possession. Trucking in dangerous territory, in a mythical sense, it creates a filmic artifact for individual psychonautics. The tools of mind control and possession adapted for ritual practice.

Possessions are hierarchical. This movie wants to possess you, but it is not itself an entity and thus cannot transmit any commands, it merely delivers the process of that 35

temporary possession without attendant commandments. It is a magickal pull for the sake of the magickal, ritual act. A reflexive experience. A possession by nothing. It is homemade reproduction of ritual, with the genre film is the vessel. The movie does not produce EVIL and it has no Goal. It merely reproduces its own state, it produces the state of trance. A viral consciousness. Can it be bled into the world?

LONG ISLAND CANNIBAL MASSACRE

Hedge wizardry in service to one of the baleful gods on capitalism’s edge. Renders the ostensible “mystery” of genre trope fundamentally meaningless in the face of an evil god & full-on Lovecraftian nightmare, announcing the void on the edge: a family still needs the raw substance of food. Capitalism twisted to its terrible parodic edge. This is the Slasher’s End Point. The decay or corpse of the Slasher. Along with LUNCH MEAT
this fulfills the genre’s obsession with cannibalism as an extension of the capitalist greed motive, the inherent self-destructive tendency of Capitalism, and finalizes the subversion of the Nuclear Family by completing its inversion. It is the Cannibal Family on Society’s fringe, persisting in unholy mockery after Death. I had an Experience watching this. I am still Reeling from it. This is the clashing at the edges, the eruptions along the leylines, wild assertions of cosmic volatility, the rift and the void. Conjured with the unmistakable enthusiasm of the truest hedge wizard. Sea waves, flowing grasses, the froggish mutant god hidden in the Dark Places of the Earth. Raw outlaw primitivism. The primordial Caveman scripture: it sinewed me with ruptures.

it was radioactive Weird Renewal. it lit my intestinal kerosene fluid and activated some howling gut sapience to channel extradimensional rock and roll vibrations from the Morlock dimension: it is a slow damage sentience warp, neural witchcraft in the thrum and hum of its Life Force, makes the Screen permeable, and masticates the time-space divide into a churning thresh of Divine Possibility and Kick Out the Jams sun worshipping netherpunk. I’m channeled by the sunshine possessionwave into arcologies stretched across the ethereal demiplanes.

LUNCH MEAT

& I think I am in another dimension. There’s inevitably a certain point where the dronespell starts drifting me to half-sleep and I enter the Haze Realm where the drone starts sending subliminal transmissions directly into my subconscious, causing this cascade of looping, non-linear Weird-void-vision. Spewing unintelligible cryptograms accessible only for reptilian brain decoding but still with profound psychedelic-hypnotic effect: the slasher of Cosmic Blight, of what pulses in the liminal spaces: corrupted distortions of normality (the Cannibal) masticate at the edges of Order.

Some borderland anti-cinema. & in the First Kill scene, with the drone throbbing way up and the chaos of it all, the ragged howlings of Everyone—it feels like the wailing of the damned had started bubbling up from the earth. Strange ritual and even stranger obeisance: cinema of Altering. Cinema for mutants. Waves/beams/clouds of radiation.

Ego-eroding Punk cascades of Undoing. Like they took what are superficially slasher movies and boiled them down into some evil caustic bubbling witch-goop, and when it burns the smoke causes subliminal vision damage. The drone is the Heat and the Flame

& me, hopeless slime thrall—accepting the Altering (!) 36

MAD MUTILATOR

The “apotheosis” of the drone as the key to the apocalyptic end. A progression to The End.

The Living Drone—Drone as Holy Intoxicant for Ritual Void Worship. Consciousness-less submission to possession.

The Celestial & final transmutation of the slasher “villain” into hero who hacks apart “Movie” through raw epistemic violence. Challenging the possession of psychic violence, mental illness and psychic damage as remnants of capitalist-sexist-patriarchal violence and mind control, Ogroff the hero who slashes and smashes consciousness and incites apocalypses, which biblically speaking, are revelations.

I’m afraid there really aren’t going to be words to capture or explain what happened to me. This is the ultradrone. This is the megatrance. This is beyond slasher mythology, theory. This is the left hand path. This is the DRONE from the crypt. “Movie” mutilated into a thousand fragmentary images. A sea of dislocations. A profusion of broken images. The sudden moon. Vampire in a sea of candles. Redolent of endless decay.

This is the true mindwarp cinema. It turns consciousness to some holy syrup. Turns thoughtwave to mystic sludge. Plunges the viewer into liminal hyperspace: some golden temple of frozen time: genre as collapse and collage. The slasherdrone opens the portal to the zombie endworld: Ogroff is the key! Ogroff is the gate! It all rests in the holy sound: the cosmic blood: the slow oscillations like waves over the soul: endless permutations: restless searching for holy frequencies. THEN: impressions of aquatic sunshine, overcast night, an exponential array, compulsive suggestions of inexplicable secrets all pointing One Way. It IS discontinuity, temporal shift, dilation, collapse, warp, confused montage. A labyrinth of broken cinema. It is movie as one of the Living Dead. Those glowing eyes in the phone booth—in the night sky. ALL is undead. ALL.

The drunken/narcotic sun/sea damaged Trance effect of Oasis of the Zombies Amplified.

But how deeply, sweetly, madly soaked in sound: howling, roaring, moaning, the forever mutation of oscillator, every sound creating a cascade of echo and repeat and repeat. Rain, night, the infernal eyes of the entire universe reanimated in the Final Cosmic eruption. Cinema of disruption: MELT MY MIND MELT MY MIND MELT MY MIND

Selah

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FOLIES MEURTRIERES

The ultimate slasher distillate, the reagent, The Terrestrial Madness, the deterioration of the soul through the vector of the body. I am for sure prone to ecstatic hyperbole, but I think there may be a real chance that this is the DRONE pinnacle. This must be one of the (un)holy relics of the whole slasher multiverse. Like if a tape recorder caught the slasher movie’s nightmares of itself in a haze of echoing, overlapping feedback waves. The purest slasher veneer, like a flapping curtain emitting black smoke wind from the VOID: the slasher movie dreaming it has died, that it has been reanimated by foul gods. Its corporeal body is the same, though rotting, but it is possessed by streams of souls and speaks with the twisted harangue of liches. Planar spanning alien Voice emitting from beyond the bounds of the body. DRONE is the symbol-word: intimations of vibrations of premonitions of the end;;; the camera comes zooming out of the skeletal maw in the green flame netherworld of THE END. Sleep spell/sleep magic of the highest apocalyptic order. Meant for the most daring practitioner. Filmic narcotics to fly to all the Yuggoths of the black galaxies beyond the timid earth, wearing the parodic mask of known things. It opens its eye and envelopes you in the sun. Children of the sun/of the dark/of the grave given the Thought Command: undulate for somatic hypnosis, reduced to component matter.

DEVIL STORY

A last vision of absurd cosmic futility—the abdication of violence—the endless horse; announcement of the ritual’s futility. It is the Endless Dilation of Time. It is Ritual for Ritual’s Sake. It is the cultist laughing at the Black Mass. The Ritual can never capture the horse.

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39

MURDERDRONE distills
slasher film rules down to
their most basic components.

Whether it is the
simplicity of the “man in
the mask” that drives Day
of the Reaper and The Mad

Mutilator, the ADD free-
form ambition of Devil

Story and Twisted Issues
or the palpable human
anxiety that drives Lunch

Meat and Scary Movie, these
are amateur films that have
latched on to one real,
true fear and have made it
corporeal. And then they
exploit that fear again and
again until it is all but
meaningless...

The term MURDERDRONE
is evocative of repetition...

The perpetual rhythm in
these films is nightmarish
in its own way, but each
time a murder or attack
occurs, the inevitability of
it happening again is both
more enticing and more
exasperating. Each murder
builds upon the last, not
just in terms of quantity,
but also by eliciting a
sense of hopelessness and
ultimately, acceptance.

And so strong is our
desire to demystify death,
that even when we know
exactly what’s coming we
choose to stick around and
watch anyway.

—from the Introduction