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But What About Traditional Family Values? (Horror Through The Decades, 1907's Part 2)
9 Plays3 months ago
We are back to the 70’s for part two, and the decline of the “traditional American family.” Let’s explore the fears that parents have about children of all ages, and how any disruption to the standard and expected family dynamics create an opening for true horror. Expect a detour about how horror movies of the time start to more closely resemble urban legends, and how they are supposed to warn teenagers and young adults not to get into trouble.
Movies discussed: The Exorcist (1973) (briefly), It’s Alive (1974), The Omen (1976), Black Christmas (1974), The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976), and Last House On the Left (1972)
Intro Music: Body in the trunk by Victor_Natas -- https://freesound.org/s/717975/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Outro Music: drum loop x5 by theoctopus559 -- https://freesound.org/s/622897/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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Transcript
Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to What Haunts You, a podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams. Find us on Instagram at whathauntsyoupod and find all of our episodes on both YouTube and Spotify.
1970s Societal Anxieties
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host Carly and today we are going to dive right back into the nineteen seventy s
00:00:40
Speaker
This episode is actually a part
Concerns About the American Family
00:00:42
Speaker
two. And in the first part, we talked about the financial crisis of the 70s and how that, along with government scandal, was leading to a lot of anxiety for a lot of people.
00:00:52
Speaker
about their own security, and about the state of the world and of society. But that's not a prerequisite for this episode. There's nothing in here that you won't understand without listening to that one.
00:01:03
Speaker
You don't have to pause this and go find that one, unless you want to. Because today we are switching gears, and today we are talking about families. More specifically, we are talking about the growing concern over the state of the traditional American family in the nineteen seventy s And I assume that we all know what I mean when I say traditional American family, right? We're picturing probably a white family, a mom, a dad, 2.5 kids, maybe a dog, and a picket fence.
00:01:32
Speaker
In the 70s, divorce rates were rising, there was increasing awareness around gender roles, and Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973, which guaranteed the right to an abortion to anyone who needed one.
Cinema Reflecting Family Fears
00:01:44
Speaker
All of this led to societal fears about the state of the American family and its decline. This fear got translated into a lot of movies about how the dangers might actually lurk within the family and within the familiar as opposed to outside of the family and in the unknown.
00:02:01
Speaker
The danger could be a mother, a father, a husband, or as so often happens in horror movies, a child. There were movies about bad kids at all stages of development.
00:02:13
Speaker
We had evil babies, we had evil children, we had evil adolescents, and any kid could be evil. And if any kid could be evil, then your kid could be evil. 1973's The Exorcist explores a particular parenting fear that no one really likes to talk about explicitly,
00:02:30
Speaker
but sort of lurks behind the scenes for a lot of parents. It shows up in horror movies, it shows up in dramas, and it shows up in our moral panics. And that is the fear of what is going to happen when a child turns into a teenager.
00:02:45
Speaker
We recently did a full episode on The Exorcist, so if you really want a deep dive of that movie, go check the most recent episode out. But the short version is that a priest is having a crisis of faith and is confronted with an honest-to-goodness possessed adolescent girl.
00:02:59
Speaker
Reagan, the possessed girl, screams obscenities, makes overt sexual and violent gestures towards the adults who are trying to help her, and is essentially unrecognizable as the little girl she used to be.
00:03:11
Speaker
Reagan's mother, Chris, is horrified as twisted versions of menstruation and masturbation are on full display. Reagan's mother is not currently married to her father, which has further implications on the breakdown of the American family.
00:03:25
Speaker
The possession is considered by some to be a symbolic punishment for their non-traditional life without a father figure in the house. In Night Mother, a personal and cultural exploration of The Exorcist, Marlena Williams writes, by horror movie logic, the female-led household in The Exorcist, much like the one in Carrie, is inherently more penetrable, more open to invasion by an evil outside force, than a household with a strong male at the helm.
00:03:50
Speaker
Chris has tried everything. Reagan has been subjected to a battery of gruesome tests, and she's put on different medications to regulate her moods and behaviors. None of this helps, and that's where the priest comes in.
00:04:03
Speaker
It's only by restoring a male presence and the presence of a Christian god that Reagan and her mother could be freed from their torment. This movie was incredibly impactful to the audiences who saw it.
00:04:15
Speaker
In Night Mother, Williams writes, "...audience reactions to The Exorcist are the stuff of legend.
Parental Fears in 'It's Alive'
00:04:21
Speaker
Vomiting, seizures, panic attacks, miscarriages, heart failure." Go see The Exorcist and you might leave in a stretcher.
00:04:28
Speaker
Or at least that's what the media blitz surrounding the film led people to believe. But interestingly enough, she suggests something that'll probably sound familiar to some people. The movie wasn't really all people were freaking out about.
00:04:40
Speaker
She writes, Through the ritual and communal experience of viewing The Exorcist in the darkened theater, audience members were given a space to physically react not only to the horror unfolding on screen, but to the apparent chaos engulfing the world outside the cinema doors.
00:04:55
Speaker
If you're a horror fan, this probably sounds familiar to you. I think a lot of us use horror as an outlet for fear that we're already feeling. Whether or not the movie we're watching connects to our real fears, it gives us an opportunity to let the experience and emotion of fear breathe a little bit.
00:05:11
Speaker
Adolescence was one thing for parents to be concerned about, but The concern starts much earlier, right? The concern starts as early as conception and pregnancy. In the 50s and 60s, a medication called thalidomide was given to pregnant mothers to treat morning sickness. It was marketed as a kind of sedative, but it was eventually banned after a doctor testified in court about the link between thalidomide during pregnancy and babies dying in utero or having various birth defects, ranging from limb differences to urinary tract, eye, and heart defects.
00:05:43
Speaker
In the late 60s, a doctor testified before Congress about the dangers of thalidomide for expectant mothers, and it was finally banned. But people did not quickly forget this. The thalidomide scandal was such a big deal that it made it into Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire in the eighty s The thalidomide scandal showed people more widely that it would be so easy to give birth to something that just isn't quite what you expected, and it opened up people's fears to just how far that could really go. The 1974 film It's Alive explores the fears of parenthood, particularly of bringing a new infant into the world and uncertainty about what exactly that infant will actually be like.
00:06:20
Speaker
There's fear that the infant will not be what you're expecting and will not be something you're prepared for. the movie starts right in the middle of the action. our main character, Frank, is woken up by his wife, Lenore, and she tells him it's time and the baby is coming.
00:06:34
Speaker
They wake up their son, Chris, and tell him that they're going to take him to a friend's house because mom is having her baby tonight. Chris asks his dad if something bad could happen to his mom. He saw a movie on TV once where a woman died during childbirth.
00:06:48
Speaker
Frank reassures him that while that used to happen more often, nothing is going to happen to his mother. Lenore tells Chris that she'll call him as soon as they know if he has a little brother or a little sister.
00:06:59
Speaker
He looks at his mom and says, I don't care what it is as long as you're okay. In the labor room, Lenore is insisting that something is different this time. This isn't her first rodeo. She kind of knows what to expect and something feels wrong.
00:07:12
Speaker
She also says something interesting to Frank. She says she's really glad that they decided to have another baby, which would be sweet, but she follows it up asking him, you're not going to feel tied down.
00:07:23
Speaker
It's not going to make you feel trapped like last time. While waiting for the baby to come, the dads of the various women in labor on the ward are killing time together. They're complaining about how long everything is taking, which is kind of infuriating, like their wives are bringing their children into the world.
00:07:37
Speaker
In the labor room, Lenore is continuing to insist that this feels different than her first time giving birth. The doctors estimate that this baby probably weighs between 10 and 11 pounds, and its head is huge.
00:07:49
Speaker
They have to cut Lenore to get the baby out, which to me is the stuff of nightmares. I know that that's not that uncommon, but it really freaks me out. Frank, near the room where they put the babies after they're born, sees a nurse come out of the delivery room absolutely covered in blood.
00:08:04
Speaker
He walks out and literally collapses to the floor, which is obviously concerning for Frank. And so Frank runs to the delivery room, and he finds literally everyone except his wife dead.
00:08:15
Speaker
She's screaming at the top of her lungs, what does my baby look like? What's wrong with my baby? And she's bleeding out. The umbilical cord appears to have been chewed through, but not sutured and not properly cut.
00:08:27
Speaker
And every single nurse, every doctor, was lying dead on the floor with blood everywhere. Frank is understandably freaking out, and the hospital staff is trying to calm him down, but he's accusing them of stealing his baby.
00:08:40
Speaker
Lenore is devastated. She says she doesn't want her baby to be dead, but she's still sort of delirious from the whole experience. And all of a sudden, there are, like, several cops and a few detectives in the hospital to figure out what happened.
00:08:53
Speaker
Lenore is finally waking up fully, and Frank is there too, and the detectives need to ask them some questions. Frank is saying that he is planning to hold the hospital responsible because his baby was obviously kidnapped.
00:09:06
Speaker
They don't really think that's what happened, and wildly enough, the detectives pretty much immediately jumped to mutant baby, which you would kind of think they would need to cover some other bases first, but I guess not.
00:09:17
Speaker
They're asking about radiation, so they're asking if Lenore has been subject to radioactive materials of any kind or if she's had to get numerous x-rays done before. Frank is sort of speaking for her, speaking over her, which is a little annoying, but she's pretty obviously tired and exhausted from this experience.
00:09:34
Speaker
The detectives ask them if it's true that Lenore had inquired about an abortion eight months prior, and Frank says, well, doesn't everyone inquire about it nowadays? While they're talking about everything, the doctor calls the baby an animal.
00:09:47
Speaker
Frank says to him, but it's not an animal. You know that very well. Whatever it is, you can't classify it as an animal. It's human, doctor. That's what's disgusting to you, isn't it? The doctor responds, it kills like an animal.
00:10:00
Speaker
And the detective follows up with, and when we find it, we're going to have to destroy it like one. Frank says he doesn't care. The detective says he hopes that Frank's wife will feel the same way and understand what's to be done.
00:10:12
Speaker
What's to understand, Frank asks. He tells them it's better not to think about it. While Frank is on his way home, the news is reporting what happened, and the report includes Frank and Lenore's name, which kind of puts them in danger, but at the very least puts them in the public eye in a way that they're not really interested in being.
00:10:29
Speaker
And we don't really know very much about Frank and Lenore, so we're just kind of watching them handle this very intense situation. But we haven't spent any time with them, right? We're thrown into this movie the night that she's giving birth. We haven't had time to see what they're like.
00:10:43
Speaker
So we can't predict at all how they might handle this. But anyway, we get another shot somewhere else in the city of a woman dressed in honestly a fabulous outfit. And she's walking to her car and she hears a kind of distorted baby cry.
00:10:58
Speaker
She goes to find the baby, as I think many people would if they heard a baby cry and they were kind of in the middle of nowhere. and we get a quick and very blurry glimpse of this baby that is sort of humanoid but doesn't really look human.
00:11:11
Speaker
And all of the shots of the baby are like this. They're kind of blurry and distorted. We don't get a lot of clear shots of him, and I think that makes things much more effective. It would have been hard for them to make a convincing enough baby to show really clear shots of.
00:11:25
Speaker
But anyway, at this point, we find out that Frank works for a PR firm. And Frank currently has a murderous monster baby on the loose. So Frank is bad for PR.
00:11:36
Speaker
So they're taking away his clients just until things cool down in the news. The boss is talking to Frank and says that their other coworker has a disabled kid. ah He doesn't use the word disabled. He uses the R word, but I'm i'm not going to do that. um But, you know, 70s.
00:11:52
Speaker
And he says that the other coworker keeps his child in the house and no one blames him for it. Frank says, we aren't talking about a disabled kid. We're talking about a monstrosity of some kind.
00:12:03
Speaker
Lenore finally gets to come home from the hospital. She asks Frank, I don't have to take any more of those shots, do i She says, i don't like being made to sleep. Frank lies to Lenore about what's happening at work and says he's taking three weeks off to stay with her and to help take care of her.
00:12:20
Speaker
They're also lying to their son, Chris. And worse, they're isolating him. He's with a family friend, and he's not allowed to see any of his friends or go to school or even watch TV at the risk of finding out the news.
00:12:31
Speaker
They tell him that the baby is sick so it isn't home with them yet and that he'll have to stay with the friend for a little bit longer. The family friend offers to take Chris up to the lake to go fishing but also just to get him away from the whole situation.
00:12:44
Speaker
They have a nurse at the house taking care of Lenore and this nurse is nosy. She's pressing Lenore for information about what the baby looks like. And she tells Lenore that the baby has killed again.
00:12:55
Speaker
Not just the woman that we saw, but now also a musician nearby. It turns out that the nurse had hidden a tape recorder on the tray of food she brought Lenore and is trying to get information basically to sell.
00:13:07
Speaker
She says she is really a nurse, but that she does some writing on the side. Frank kicks her out. He is understandably furious, and he and Lenore agree that there won't be any more nurses.
00:13:19
Speaker
As he unravels the tape to destroy it, he says, i should have known better than to trust anybody. Soon we get another brief and blurry glimpse of this monster baby as it approaches a milk truck.
00:13:30
Speaker
He goes inside the truck and ambushes the driver at one of his later stops. Glass is smashing, milk is pouring out of the back of the truck, and we hear the baby making what sounds distinctly like baby sounds but are way too weird to be normal baby sounds.
00:13:47
Speaker
In the next scene, we see cops approaching a house. They hear a baby, and obviously they're on the lookout for a baby, and the cops pull their guns and surround what ends up being a normal baby. So the cops surround this baby. They're pointing the guns at the baby, but it's just a normal baby. It's not our monster baby.
00:14:05
Speaker
Frank is later approached by doctors from the university who want to study the monster baby. They assume that the cops will kill it and they want him to sign away the rights to the body to them. Frank says, it's not my child.
00:14:17
Speaker
They advise him that emotionally separating himself like this is a wise decision and that good things can still come out of bad situations and that's why they need to study it. He's worried about how this is all going to be remembered. Like, is this monster baby going to be the only legacy of his family name now?
00:14:34
Speaker
He's talking about Frankenstein and how he remembers when he first learned that Frankenstein was the name of the doctor and not the monster. And how identities get mixed up along the way.
00:14:45
Speaker
One of the doctors says, one must not allow himself to be impressed by escapist fiction, which is a hilarious line to put in a horror movie, but especially a horror movie like this. Another doctor shows up.
00:14:57
Speaker
He's worried about the fact that Lenore was on birth control before this baby was conceived. He's worried that it'll be discovered that the defects in the baby, if you can call them that, were caused by medication that they had created and they had exposed people to.
00:15:11
Speaker
He essentially tries to bribe, i don't know, like the medical examiner, whoever's going to be in charge of the body when it first gets found. And he's trying to bribe him to make sure that the body is fully destroyed and not able to be studied.
00:15:23
Speaker
He says we wouldn't want people to lose faith in us. Eventually, Frank gets a call that they have found the baby nearby and there's already been another death. The baby is at Chris's school and Frank is there with the cops. And again, we get short, like blurry, unfocused glimpses of the monster baby.
00:15:41
Speaker
Frank assures the cops that he wants the baby destroyed just as much as everyone else. And that's the word they keep using, destroy. They don't say kill. They say destroy the baby. He says, why is everyone looking at me? Like it's my own flesh and blood or something.
00:15:55
Speaker
Well, it's not, you understand? It's no relation to me. Frank is sort of paranoid that people don't believe him, that he isn't attached to this monster baby, and that he does want it destroyed.
00:16:06
Speaker
Lenore asks Frank if they can bring Chris home, but he says no. This is not really a decision he should be making unilaterally, but there isn't even a conversation he's not even willing to talk about. it They go to bed for the night and Frank wakes up and sees that Lenore is seemingly gone.
00:16:22
Speaker
We see a few shots that are stylized the way the shots of the monster baby scenes are. And so we don't see the monster baby, but because of the stylization, we're suspicious that it's somewhere, right?
00:16:33
Speaker
The movie has set us up to be cued by the stylization to assume that there's a monster baby moment happening. It's Lenore who shows back up instead of the monster baby.
00:16:43
Speaker
Frank finds several empty milk bottles, which prompts him to ask if Chris has been home. And he thinks that Lenore has brought Chris back to the house and lied about it. And Lenore is acting pretty weird and scattered. She's acting a little sketchy.
00:16:57
Speaker
So Frank goes to Chris's room, where the room is like totally torn apart. It's a total disaster. Frank calls the family friend to see if Chris is still there. And when they talk, Frank basically hangs up on Chris. Like he can't really be bothered with Chris in this moment.
00:17:11
Speaker
And Chris feels like he did something wrong. Frank goes and finds the fridge now totally empty. The whole thing is really suspicious. Earlier, we saw a shot of an almost like overstuffed fridge. Like they had so much food in there and now it's totally empty.
00:17:26
Speaker
At the family friend's house, Chris runs away in the night. He is literally running home as the sun is coming up. Frank is at home, looking around the house, and eventually he gets closed into the nursery, so the room they had originally set up for the baby.
00:17:40
Speaker
Downstairs in the basement, the monster baby is crying his monster cries, and Lenore approaches him as if to console him. Frank catches her come up from the basement, where she has apparently been keeping the baby, feeding it all their food and giving it all that milk, and just around that time, Chris arrives back at the house.
00:17:58
Speaker
Frank grabs a gun and Lenore screams at him, why are you so anxious to be the one to do it? She doesn't understand why he's so enthusiastic about the baby being killed, but also why he thinks that he should be the one to kill it.
00:18:10
Speaker
Chris gets home and he goes in through the basement door where he finds his cat dead on the floor. He sees the monster baby and the monster baby sees him and Chris says hello to the monster baby and says that he'll protect him.
00:18:23
Speaker
Lenore is screaming at Frank that it's a boy. She's trying to humanize this baby, and Chris downstairs already sees the baby as kind of his little sibling. Frank shoots at the baby in front of Chris, and Chris is absolutely horrified.
00:18:37
Speaker
The family friend has just gotten to their house to see if Chris was there, and the monster baby attacks him as he flees. Frank slaps Lenore again while Chris is watching, and he says the baby has no relation to them.
00:18:50
Speaker
Lenore brings Chris upstairs out of the basement, saying about his little brother, he just wants to live. Frank really does seem to want to be the one to kill this baby, or at least he wants people to think that he does.
00:19:03
Speaker
He goes to the detectives and he says he wants to go with them to find the baby. They ask him if he got a good look at the baby yet. He says no and that it wouldn't matter if he did. He could still do it.
00:19:14
Speaker
They find out that the baby is traveling through town through the sewers, and so tons of cops, just like tons of cops, surround the entrance to the sewer system, and the hunt continues.
00:19:26
Speaker
Frank is in the sewers and eventually he does find the monster baby. The baby is cowering and crying and Frank really sees him for the first time. Frank starts to cry too.
00:19:38
Speaker
He says, i know it hurts, but everything is going to be all right. See, I was scared like you are. He begs the baby not to cry because if he cries, the cops will hear him and they'll come.
00:19:49
Speaker
The situation is finally hitting Frank in full force as he really sees this baby for the first time as as his baby. He desperately looks around, realizing that everyone else looking through these sewers will immediately kill this baby on sight.
00:20:05
Speaker
His baby, which only seems to be clicking into place for him right now. He wraps the baby up in his coat, and the baby is shot. Remember, it's injured. But they're totally surrounded. The cops are yelling for him to come out, and they're looking for him all through the sewers.
00:20:20
Speaker
A cop car even drives into the sewer chasing him, and he's running through the sewer with this large monster baby wrapped in his coat, and we're still not getting very good looks at this monster baby. When Frank and the baby emerge from the sewer, he tells them the baby can't hurt anybody.
00:20:35
Speaker
He tells them not to kill the baby. It's wounded. It can't hurt anybody. He begs them to just take the baby in, hold the baby somewhere, study it, whatever they need to do, but just don't kill him.
00:20:48
Speaker
The detective orders police to fire at them. Frank, knowing the baby is probably not going to make it throws the baby at the detective and it attacks and kills him. They fire the baby, killing him too.
00:21:00
Speaker
Frank and Lenore cry and embrace. Their whole ordeal is over, but their son is gone. In the back of the cop car, they learn from a news report that another mutant baby just like theirs has been born in Seattle.
00:21:14
Speaker
And just like that, it's over, leaving the audience wondering, will they make all the same mistakes this time? Was it the medication? Will there be more after this one? We have no idea what's going to happen. We don't get any more information.
00:21:28
Speaker
And so we don't really know what the larger implications of the story are, but we can obviously guess.
Adoption Fears in 'The Omen'
00:21:34
Speaker
This movie hits the nail on the head of fear surrounding what kind of child you might bring into the world and like what that will mean.
00:21:41
Speaker
Similar to the fear of what kind of child you might bring into the world yourself, there's also fear of what kind of child you might bring into your home. So not only could your own baby be a horrifying monster, but a baby that you adopt could also turn out to be a horrifying monster without you knowing it.
00:21:59
Speaker
The Omen, released in 76, opens with the news of a dead baby. Robert Thorne is an American diplomat living in Rome, and his wife Catherine has just given birth, but they're told that their baby didn't make it.
00:22:12
Speaker
The hospital chaplain convinces Robert to adopt this other baby whose mother died during childbirth. They don't tell Catherine that this isn't her baby. They allow her to live in blissful ignorance, at least until she can't anymore.
00:22:27
Speaker
This opening sort of reminds me of Rosemary's Baby, where a man just makes a unilateral decision about bringing a baby into the world and leaves his wife totally in the dark about what is going on.
00:22:39
Speaker
Fast forward a few years and Robert is appointed ambassador to Great Britain. They move to London to start their next chapter of their lives as a happy family. We get a quick montage of their lives as their son Damien grows from a baby into a little boy.
00:22:53
Speaker
And the story kicks off for real at Damien's fifth birthday party. This is a truly infamous horror scene. If you haven't actually seen this scene, you've probably seen something riffing on it or parodying it or referencing it in some capacity.
00:23:08
Speaker
Damien's nanny, at this birthday party, hangs herself from the roof of the house, yelling, Damien, it's all for you And the press is at the party because Robert is a public figure, so this becomes a news story.
00:23:23
Speaker
Not long after, a priest shows up to talk to Robert at his office. The priest is trying to convince him to take communion. He tells Robert, he's killed once, he'll kill again.
00:23:33
Speaker
He'll kill until everything that's yours is his. Only through Christ can you fight him. The priest reveals that he was there at the birth. He was there when Damien was born. Robert stands firm, saying that Catherine is Damien's mother, but they both know it's a lie.
00:23:48
Speaker
He has security escort the priest away, but it's pretty clear that he's shaken up by this. A new nanny named Mrs. Balock shows up and she insists on meeting Damien alone.
00:24:00
Speaker
Catherine and Robert realize that neither of them actually hired this woman. They both thought that the other one had made the phone call. When they confront her about this, she tells them that the agency saw news of the other nanny's death and sent her in immediately.
00:24:15
Speaker
Later, Robert and Catherine have a wedding to attend, specifically a wedding in an Episcopalian church. Ms. Balock tries to keep Damien home from the wedding, but they insist that he attends with them.
00:24:27
Speaker
As they approach the church, Damien freaks out. He is wide-eyed and shaking, and the closer they get, the worse it gets. Damien throws a fit.
00:24:37
Speaker
He is screaming and pulling his mother's hair and hitting her. They have to leave before they even have a chance to get out of the car. Back at their house, Catherine and Robert are talking about Damien.
00:24:49
Speaker
Robert asks if they should get him examined by the doctor, but Catherine says he's totally fine and he just had a bad moment. They point out that not only does Damien seem fine now that he's home, but Damien has actually never been sick before, which is pretty uncommon for such a small child.
00:25:07
Speaker
Miss Balock bought a guard dog without the couple's permission, saying that they should have one, and kind of tries to corner Robert into having to keep the dog, saying that Damien already loves the dog.
00:25:18
Speaker
but Robert tells her to get rid of it. Later, the family takes a trip to a zoo and a safari park. So it's like a drive-through park. So you take your own car in and the animals are just kind of running around loose and you drive through. And the animals there just fucking hate this child. And it's freaking Catherine out.
00:25:38
Speaker
Their car is literally attacked by baboons and the scene is surprisingly scary. Or maybe not that surprisingly. Baboons are like pretty intense and scary animals. but they are just freaking out about the presence of this kid.
00:25:52
Speaker
Catherine is pretty shaken up, and later that night, she and Robert are laying in bed talking about Damien. Catherine says, what could be wrong with our child, Robert? We're two beautiful people, aren't we? She says she's scared and that she wants to go to a psychiatrist.
00:26:07
Speaker
Robert goes to talk to the priest. He's starting to finally believe that something is really, really wrong here. The priest quotes revelations at him and tells him that his son is the son of the devil, literally.
00:26:19
Speaker
The priest tells Robert that Catherine is now pregnant and that Damien will kill Catherine and her unborn child. He will secure himself as the heir to all of Robert's money and power and then take over the world for Satan.
00:26:33
Speaker
Robert is sick of what he is interpreting to be nonsense, and when the priest tells him that Damien has to die, he leaves. The priest is then caught in some kind of freak storm.
00:26:44
Speaker
He tries to get back inside the church, but lightning strikes a pole on the roof, which then falls and plunges straight through the priest's body, killing him. Catherine is becoming less and less patient with Damien and is clearly under a lot of stress.
00:26:59
Speaker
She tells Robert that she's pregnant, having found out just that morning. She doesn't ever want to have more children, she tells him, and she hopes that he'll agree to an abortion. The psychiatrist tells Robert that Catherine thinks Damien is evil and that she doesn't think he's her own child.
00:27:16
Speaker
But he doesn't know what's happening. He thinks it's all delusion and insists that Robert give her permission to get an abortion. Robert refuses and at the house, Damien is riding a little big wheel around and Miss Bacroft lets him out of his room and into the hallway where his mom is.
00:27:34
Speaker
She's standing on a chair. She's like watering some hanging plants and Damien rams his big wheel into the chair that his mom is standing on. She falls off the chair and over the railing of the second floor, hitting the ground below as Damien just silently watches her.
00:27:51
Speaker
She's taken to the ICU to be treated and Robert arrives shortly later. The doctors tell him that she's lost the baby. He goes to her bed and she wakes up and says to him, don't let him kill me.
00:28:02
Speaker
Later on, a reporter calls Robert, one who had been at the birthday party where the nanny had hanged herself. Robert goes to talk to him and a lot of stuff gets revealed in this scene.
00:28:13
Speaker
It turns out that some of his photos have been predicting people's deaths. the priest with the pole going through him, and the nanny. It turns out the priest also had had a birthmark that looked like three sixes, and when they went to his apartment, his walls were papered with Bible pages, like the entire walls and the entire windows just covered from top to bottom with pages ripped out of the Bible, and he had 47 crosses hanging on the walls.
00:28:41
Speaker
It's revealed that five years ago, on the 6th of June, a comet went by. This was the same day that Damien was born. And he was born at 6 a.m. So 6 a.m., June 6th is 6-6, so 6-6-6, right? The number of the devil.
00:28:57
Speaker
Robert finally admits, my son is dead. I don't know whose son I'm raising. The reporter shows Robert a photo he had taken of himself in the mirror, and it shows a large slash through the center of the photo just below his head.
00:29:11
Speaker
Obviously, if you're taking pictures that are already predicting other people's deaths, that is going to be terrifying. Robert and the reporter go to Rome in search of more answers, and they find out that the hospital where Damien was born burnt down five years ago, so just after he was born.
00:29:28
Speaker
While they're driving, we finally hear the word antichrist for the first time. They're reading revelations for signs of the birth of the antichrist. The reporter says the devil's child will rise in the world of politics.
00:29:43
Speaker
They track down a priest who has fallen from grace after being in the hospital when it burnt down. They're trying to find Damien's birth mother, but obviously she died during childbirth, so the priest sends them to a cemetery.
00:29:55
Speaker
The cemetery is not kept up. It's like very run down. It's kind of in ruins. And they find the graves of both Damien's birth mother and Robert and Catherine's biological child who passed away.
00:30:08
Speaker
The birth mother's grave has the corpse of a jackal in it. which is another reference to Revelations. When they find this, they also, like, break the fuck out of her gravestone.
00:30:19
Speaker
And then they open Robert's son's grave, and in it is the skeleton of a baby, but the skeleton of a baby with a massive cracked hole in the skull. The baby appears to have been murdered.
00:30:32
Speaker
Just about that time, they're attacked by dogs who are guarding the cemetery. Robert calls Catherine and tells her that he's going to have someone bring her to Rome. Now remember, Catherine has just fallen off the second story of their house.
00:30:44
Speaker
She's all fucked up. She's not really fit to be traveling. But he's scared and he kind of scares her with his urgency and his anxiety. So she gets up and she tries to get dressed, but obviously she's really struggling because she is pretty severely injured.
00:31:00
Speaker
Miss Bailock shows up and we hear ominous music. And the next thing we know, Catherine is violently flying out of her hospital room window. The next stop for Robert is Jerusalem.
00:31:12
Speaker
He and the reporter go to an archaeological site and find the man that the priest had mentioned to them. The guy insists on talking to Robert alone, probably because he is about to tell him he has to kill his child.
00:31:24
Speaker
He gives him a set of seven daggers and tells him specifically how he has to kill Damien. He also tells him that Damien will have 666 birthmark and to look for it on his body.
00:31:36
Speaker
Robert later tells the journalist that he won't kill a child, but the journalist is like, well, I will. So the film at this point in the story is basically asking us like the baby Hitler question.
00:31:47
Speaker
Like if you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it? right This child is just a child, but this child is almost certainly the Antichrist. He's almost certainly going to cause death and destruction on a really large scale. So do you kill the child? Do you try to raise the child better? like what do you What do you do here?
00:32:05
Speaker
Is basically what this movie is doing. Robert is leaning toward no at this point, but the reporter is like, hell yeah, let's kill this Antichrist kid. Unfortunately for him, a truck starts rolling backwards towards him and a sheet of glass slides off the truck.
00:32:20
Speaker
it decapitates him right in front of Robert. So now we know what that slash across his neck in the photo was all about. And now Robert is freaked out enough to be basically on board and he heads home.
00:32:33
Speaker
When Robert gets home, the dog that was supposed to be gotten rid of already goes to attack him, but he's able to lock the dog in the basement. He goes into Damien's room with a pair of scissors and starts going through Damien's hair, looking for the 666 birthmark because he hasn't seen it before, so it's got to be hidden.
00:32:50
Speaker
When he thinks he finds it, he starts cutting his hair off, and he's right. It's right there on his scalp, like the three sixes. Miss Bailock charges in and attacks him, waking Damien up in the process.
00:33:01
Speaker
They fight it out, and he eventually stabs her in the neck and kills her. He and Damien drive away, but because he's driving so recklessly, a cop is following him, trying to stop him. They get to a church, and he's holding one of the special daggers over Damien.
00:33:16
Speaker
Damien is like, please, daddy, no, and he's begging, but he also seems kind of weirdly calm for the situation. The cops bust into the church and shoot him because he is literally obviously about to stab a child, so of course they shoot him.
00:33:31
Speaker
The movie ends at Robert's funeral. It's revealed that Damien is now in the custody of Robert's brother, who just so happens to be the president of the United States. Damien turns to face the camera and smiles.
00:33:46
Speaker
His smile taunts us, the audience. It's a knowing smile. He knows that he is in exactly the right place to fulfill the prophecy. So we kind of see, right, that like parents are scared about their children, but they're also sort of scared of their children.
00:34:02
Speaker
They don't know what kind of baby they're going to bring into the world. They don't know what their kid will be like. And ultimately, in the long run, they don't know what their kid will become in adolescence and adulthood.
00:34:14
Speaker
That's a lot of uncertainty to deal with at a time where you don't feel like you can rely on the systems around you to support you through that process. This fear of what their kids will grow into and what their kids will do once they have a little more autonomy mixes together with the fear of what dangers are lurking and what might happen to their children.
00:34:34
Speaker
These fears all coalesce in the slasher genre. The 70s isn't where the very first seeds of slasher films show up, but it's sort of where the first really recognizable slasher films come into play.
00:34:48
Speaker
Slasher movies walk this strange line of engaging with a purity culture, but also laughing in the face of purity culture, with all of the overtly violent and often sexual overtones of these films.
00:35:00
Speaker
As Carol J. Clover puts it in Men, Women, and Chainsaws Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the slasher film, not despite, but exactly because of its crudity and compulsive repetitiveness, gives us a clearer picture of current sexual attitudes.
00:35:16
Speaker
I'm not saying that people in charge of making slashers were promoting purity culture, but we can see how purity culture and the fears around the different experimentation that teenagers have sort of always done permeated the subgenre through the quote unquote rules of the slasher film that start to emerge a little bit more later on.
00:35:37
Speaker
Slashers provide a lot of commentary on the fears people have about how fragile their lives really are. People do things that they think will be safe. They do things that they think will keep their children safe.
00:35:50
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that people really felt safe or even really were safe. Slashers show us that despite efforts to be safe, dangers could always be lurking.
00:36:01
Speaker
When we think of original slasher movies, the first one that comes to mind for a lot of people is Halloween. And I think Halloween is sort of the platonic ideal of a slasher
Teenage Rebellion in Slasher Films
00:36:11
Speaker
film, right?
00:36:11
Speaker
It hits every mark, it solidifies every trope, and it it's the one that got so big that it kick-started the trend that followed through into the eighty s And some people also consider Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be one of the early slashers from 1974.
00:36:27
Speaker
But that same year, a movie that is way more overlooked, but actually is more recognizable as a slasher movie, came out called Black Christmas. Black Christmas takes place at the start of winter break at a sorority house.
00:36:42
Speaker
In the opening scene, we get these like voyeuristic shots from the perspective of the killer, which is a style that has been carried through into the slasher genre basically since then.
00:36:53
Speaker
The girls are sitting around drinking. They're having a small goodbye party before they all leave to go home for the holidays. They get a phone call from someone they refer to as the moaner, so clearly this isn't a new thing for them.
00:37:07
Speaker
The caller moans and grunts into the phone and he makes pig noises into the phone. and He says obscene things to them and they all crowd around the phone to listen. One of the girls, named Barb, yells at him and he threatens to kill her and then hangs up the phone.
00:37:23
Speaker
This upsets another girl whose name is Claire and she tells Barb that she shouldn't provoke someone like that. They argue a little bit and then Claire goes upstairs alone to pack. After that, the house mother comes back. And if you don't know what a house mother is, it's basically like an older woman living in a sorority house as sort of a chaperone for the girls.
00:37:44
Speaker
They give her a gift. It's a nightgown. And they egg her on to try it on, despite her saying, I'll have about as much use for this as a chastity belt. The house mother adds like such a fun element of camp to this movie that I think wouldn't really be there otherwise. Like she's she's just like a hilarious character throughout the whole thing.
00:38:02
Speaker
um But anyway... Upstairs, someone is in Claire's closet. We never get a good look at him, but but he attacks and kills her, and she's our first victim. Then we have our main character, Jess.
00:38:14
Speaker
Jess's boyfriend calls her, and she says that there's something she needs to talk to him about face-to-face, and she plans to see him the next day in the afternoon. In the house, the house mother has booze hidden everywhere.
00:38:28
Speaker
Parents of these sorority girls are presumably trusting her with their children, but she is seemingly constantly drunk. She hides booze in like the tank at the back of a toilet.
00:38:39
Speaker
She hides it in a book on a bookshelf and the pages of the book are cut out so she can fit a bottle in there. And it's like a fancy looking book too. And she's looking around her bookshelf going,
00:38:50
Speaker
B for booze and then, you know, pulling the book out and opening it and it's just like a bottle of liquor. Jess looks for Claire but doesn't find her and everyone kind of just assumes that she left because they all knew that everyone is planning to leave for break.
00:39:05
Speaker
But we, the audience, do see her body confirming that she is in fact dead upstairs. The next day when Claire's father shows up on campus to pick her up, obviously she does not show.
00:39:17
Speaker
And when he goes by the sorority house, the house mother is predictably very unhelpful. He expresses disappointment that the girls there are not better looked after. He finds out that his daughter has a boyfriend and is pretty immediately suspicious about this.
00:39:33
Speaker
He says, "'I didn't send my daughter here to be drinking and picking up boys.'" And the house mother kind of just makes fun of him for that once he leaves. She's not really taking the situation seriously yet, and she's not that worried.
00:39:45
Speaker
Meanwhile, Claire's body is still just sitting upstairs wrapped in plastic. When Jess's boyfriend shows up, she tells him that she's pregnant, that she doesn't want to be pregnant, and that she will be getting an abortion.
00:39:58
Speaker
He's furious with her. He says, you can't make a decision like that. You haven't even asked me. So as a reminder, this movie came out in 1974. And as another reminder, it was only one year before that Roe vs. Wade was passed and protected abortion rights and took the wind out of the sails of various states' overly strict abortion laws.
00:40:20
Speaker
Roe vs. Wade has since been overturned as of 2022, but at this time it had just been passed. So this is a simultaneously surprising and unsurprising topic to be in a horror movie.
00:40:31
Speaker
And the strange thing about it is that it's sort of incidental. Like, it's an interesting thing to add. Like, it adds a layer of complexity to the character and to the story. But it's sort of unnecessary as a plot point. Like, it doesn't move the story forward really at all.
00:40:46
Speaker
Jess tells her boyfriend that she wasn't even originally going to tell him, and he tells her that he wants them to have a baby. She says she can't, and he says, don't you ever consider anyone but yourself?
00:40:57
Speaker
He's mad at her for wanting to get an abortion, and he's also mad at her for telling him on the day of a big performance that he has. So I kind of wonder if he ever thinks about anyone but his self, but I digress.
00:41:09
Speaker
Later that night, when Jess is waiting for another call from her boyfriend, she gets another call from the mystery caller. This time the caller says, where did you put the baby? Where did you put Agnes, Billy?
00:41:21
Speaker
There's a man's voice and a woman's voice alternating on the line, but they're basically saying the same thing. When the cops are there to talk about Claire being missing, Barb is sort of like fucking with the cop who is there to try to help them, and Claire is, again, still just dead upstairs.
00:41:37
Speaker
Another girl named Janice's mom shows up because Janice also hadn't arrived home when she was expected. Barb is drinking a lot. She's sort of embarrassing herself in front of everyone, including Claire's father, who is already suspicious of the girls being more partiers than he wants his daughter to be.
00:41:55
Speaker
She eventually says, "'You think it's my fault, don't you? Don't shit me. It's what you're all thinking. Why don't you just come right out and say it? You think I drove her away, and if she's dead, you're going to blame me.'" They tell her to go to bed and sleep it off, so she goes upstairs.
00:42:09
Speaker
Jess's boyfriend has basically a temper tantrum after his recital, and he smashes up the piano. So definitely another point in favor of aborting this baby and not raising a family with him. Back at the house, the rest of the girls and Claire's dad are getting ready to go out looking for their missing friends.
00:42:25
Speaker
They leave Barb asleep in her room, and the house mother is there, but she's getting ready to leave to visit her own family for the holiday. Plus, Claire's dead body's still upstairs. They join up with a search party looking for Janice.
00:42:38
Speaker
At the house, the house mother is drinking even more hidden booze, and she hears her cat meowing from the attic. While she's up there looking for him, she finds Claire's body up there wrapped in plastic.
00:42:49
Speaker
And our killer is up there too, waiting for someone to show up and ready to swing a big metal hook at the house mother, killing her too. So she's dead, but she has also literally just told the girls that she's probably going to be gone when they get back. So it's probably not going to raise that much suspicion for them if she's gone.
00:43:08
Speaker
The cab driver who had been outside waiting for the house mother while she was looking for the cat goes inside and he is attacked too. Back with the search party, one of the girls finds a body.
00:43:19
Speaker
Claire's dad and Janice's mom both approach it, like bracing for the impact of finding out that it could be one of their kids. But it turns out to be like a little girl that had been murdered. Jess is alone in the house, basically, and she gets another call from the moaner, and in this one, he is begging for help and also still yelling about Billy.
00:43:39
Speaker
Jess's boyfriend shows up, and he says he's been asleep upstairs, and he's still sort of being a jerk to her while she's trying to call the cops and report these obscene phone calls. They start talking about their situation, and he tells her that he's leaving the music conservatory, and he tells her that they're getting married.
00:43:58
Speaker
To be clear, he doesn't ask her to marry him. He tells her they are going to get married. She's understandably incredulous at the idea. She reminds him of their dreams, although we don't really get to learn that much about her dreams in this movie. I think like, you know, a little bit of a flatly written female character, but she does talk about the fact that they both have dreams.
00:44:19
Speaker
I still want to do those things, she said. You can't ask me to drop everything I've been working for and give up all my ambitions because your plans have changed. He says it could work, and she tells him that she just doesn't want to marry him.
00:44:32
Speaker
He asks her, what about the baby? and it's like, dude, she already told you what about the baby. She wants to get an abortion. He's furious with her, and he calls her a selfish bitch. And he says, you're talking about killing our baby as if you were having a wart removed.
00:44:45
Speaker
He starts sort of ambiguously threatening her, saying, if you try to get an abortion, you're going to be very sorry. Just as the detective arrives at the house to talk about the phone calls, he like angrily storms out, which makes the detective really suspicious of him.
00:45:00
Speaker
And at the same time, one of the other sisters is getting back to the house. The detective asks to see Claire's room and starts to ask them questions about what she's like. He's asking about her mental state. He's asking if she drinks much. You know, he's trying to get a picture of who this girl is.
00:45:16
Speaker
And they say that they're going to put a tap on the phone so that they can try to figure out who this caller is just in case he's related to the missing girls. The only other girl left there right now with Jess is Phil, who is sick and exhausted, and she goes up to bed so functionally, leaving Jess alone again.
00:45:33
Speaker
The killer is still up in the attic. He's rocking Claire's body in a chair, and he's like giving her this creepy old doll to hold. It's very unsettling and weird. From the killer's perspective, we then walk into Barb's room.
00:45:47
Speaker
We quickly flash back to Jess, who hears Barb having an asthma attack, presumably caused by fear. She says that she must have had a nightmare and that she dreamt that a stranger came into her room.
00:45:59
Speaker
Jess gives her inhaler and then goes downstairs where she hears children caroling outside. While she's listening to the carolers, we get more of the killer's perspective, returning again to Barb's room and focusing in on a glass unicorn figure.
00:46:14
Speaker
He calls himself Billy and he calls Barb Agnes. He says, don't tell them what we did, Agnes. And then he kills her with the horn of the glass unicorn figure. As this is happening upstairs, the group of kids caroling get rushed away because news of the murdered little girl in the park reaches them.
00:46:31
Speaker
And then Jess goes back inside just in time for the phone to ring. She picks it up, and the cops pick up their phone at the station that's connected to the one at the sorority house, ready to get the information from the phone company about who's calling.
00:46:44
Speaker
She hears more screaming, and this time, one of the voices says, just like having a wart removed, just like her boyfriend had said about her desire to get an abortion. and So we're like, is this her boyfriend?
00:46:56
Speaker
Could it be someone else in the house who might have overheard them? We don't really know. I mean, we know the killer is in the house and has been in the house, but it seems a little suspicious. The cops call her after the phone call ends and say that the call was too short for them to trace.
00:47:11
Speaker
He also asks Jess more about her boyfriend who had stormed out of the house earlier. Jess starts talking to Phil, and she's talking about how it is pretty suspicious that the caller said the same thing her boyfriend said.
00:47:24
Speaker
The phone rings again, and this time it really is Peter, her boyfriend. He's crying and asking Jess to help him. Because they're already suspicious of him, the cops trace this call too. He's crying and begging her not to kill their baby, and eventually he does hang up.
00:47:40
Speaker
The cop calls her and he's like, what the hell is this about killing the baby? What's what's that about? And the cop is like asking about Peter and like what his deal is. And he's just really suspicious.
00:47:51
Speaker
She tells him that she only told her boyfriend about the baby today. And we know that the calls started before she told him. She tells them that he was even at the house when the first call that day came since he had been upstairs to sleep.
00:48:03
Speaker
but we also know because he was upstairs asleep that he wasn't actually in the room with her. Not that there are cell phones at this point in time, but it's still a little suspicious. The cops are still looking into Peter, and eventually the phone rings again, and the voice calls Jess a pig.
00:48:21
Speaker
We hear a man's voice and a child's voice this time. So we know that there are at least three voices between those and the woman we have also already heard. That doesn't necessarily mean there are three people, but we've heard three voices.
00:48:33
Speaker
And this time they're yelling about a baby. And this time the cops are able to trace it And it's revealed in a lovely moment that the call is coming from inside the house, which obviously I love.
00:48:45
Speaker
Who doesn't love a call coming from inside the house moment? And one of the detectives heads over there and he tells the other cop to call the sorority house right away and not really tell the girls that the killer is in the house, but to just tell them to get out of the house.
00:48:59
Speaker
He calls and tells Jess to leave the house and absolutely not to go upstairs to wake the other girls, but Phil and Barb are both upstairs and she's calling to them, but they don't answer her. In true final girl fashion, she grabs a fire poker and heads back upstairs.
00:49:14
Speaker
She finds Barb and Phil both up there dead and sees the killer upstairs, and again he tells her, don't tell her what we did, Agnes. She slams the door into him and runs away. He chases her through the house and eventually she locks herself in the basement away from him.
00:49:30
Speaker
The basement is only semi-underground, so it has like several windows on the top and she sees a figure skulking around outside. Eventually, he calls her name and we realize that it is her boyfriend, Peter.
00:49:43
Speaker
Jess doesn't seem very sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, so she stays hidden. He approaches her and she's screaming. She's scared of him, which is understandable after his behavior and threats earlier alongside everything else that's been going on.
00:49:58
Speaker
She panics and stabs him with the fire poker, killing him. The detectives find Jess nearly unconscious from shock, and they're convinced that Peter was the killer and that she has just gotten rid of the killer.
00:50:10
Speaker
There are so many bodies that some of them are taken to the next town because their hospital doesn't have the capacity to process so many bodies at once. And reporters swarm the house while Jess is asleep upstairs in her room.
00:50:23
Speaker
Claire's dad faints, and they take him away to the hospital. And remember, they still haven't found Claire's body. So that's still a mystery for them, even though it's not a mystery for us. They leave Jess in the sorority house, alone and asleep.
00:50:36
Speaker
Maybe closer to unconscious than asleep, really. There's a cop posted outside the house, but nobody's in the house. From the attic, we hear the killer still talking, saying, "'Agnes, it's me, Billy.' The bodies of Claire and the house mother are still up there, still undiscovered.
00:50:54
Speaker
And the credits roll just as the phone starts to ring again. Between Black Christmas and Halloween, the two earliest straightforward slasher movies, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the subgenre was pretty well established during the 70s, even though we associate it more with the eighty s All three of these movies contain the Final Girl
Themes of Innocence and Societal Change
00:51:13
Speaker
trope.
00:51:13
Speaker
Final Girl is a term coined by Carol J. Clover in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, gender in the modern horror film, as abject terror personified. She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued,
00:51:29
Speaker
or to kill him herself. In either case, from 1974 on, the survivor figure has been female. Halloween expertly employs the final girl trope in Laurie Strode, who is a little stuffy but still very likable and might be the first final girl to actively fight back against her monster.
00:51:48
Speaker
But we aren't going to go all the way into Halloween today. I think that there's a deep dive in that series to be done later on. So I'm not going to do it today. So instead of Haddonfield, we are going to stop by Texarkana for The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
00:52:03
Speaker
The Town That Dreaded Sundown is similar to slasher movies, but is like a little unique because it's structured a bit differently and also because it is based on a real string of murders in Texarkana known as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, committed by someone known as the Phantom Killer in 1946.
00:52:20
Speaker
Rather than playing as a straightforward slasher, The Town That Dreaded Sundown blends elements of the slasher film with elements of mockumentary and police procedural sort of at the same time.
00:52:31
Speaker
Since it's based on real murders, but it takes a lot of liberties for the sake of entertainment. So definitely don't take this as the real story. That's not how it's intended. The movie was sort of snubbed when it came out, like it wasn't super well received initially, but it has really grown on people in the time since and has become sort of like a midnight movie, cult film type of thing.
00:52:54
Speaker
But while the movie wasn't a commercial success in the 70s, it still feels very of its time. Despite being based on real events, the movie amounts to little more than urban legends designed to keep teenagers from hooking up in their cars.
00:53:08
Speaker
That being said, it's a really fun watch. So the movie takes place in the 40s, and it's funny, like, we are, as humans, just always making things that are set, like, about 30 years earlier. It's very funny.
00:53:20
Speaker
It opens with discussing how the end of World War II affected the town of Texarkana. One thing it talks about was the rush of people to buy cars, which I think touches on something that parents have always been afraid of, the independence that comes with being a teenager, especially if that teenager has a car or even just has access to a car.
00:53:41
Speaker
The murders in the town that dreaded sundown take place primarily in lovers' lanes, where teens would park their cars in an isolated spot and hook up. Okay, so our first attacked couple is 19-year-old Linda May and her boyfriend Sammy.
00:53:56
Speaker
They're attacked within the first five minutes of the movie. Sammy and Linda May are parked on a lover's lane late one night. See, this already sounds like an urban legend. And the phantom shows up and bludgeons them both.
00:54:07
Speaker
He bites and, quotes, chews on Linda May's body while she is still alive. Both of them are found alive and taken to a hospital where they will stay to recover from their injuries.
00:54:19
Speaker
The sheriff's department and especially Deputy Ramsey are on the case. All they really know so far is that the attacker had, like, a big hood on. The hood that the Phantom Killer wears would eventually inspire the hood that Jason wears in Friday the 13th, too.
00:54:33
Speaker
They decide to caution high school and college students not to park on lovers' lanes and to instruct the local cops to move any kids along that they see parked in isolated areas. One of the things that I think kept this movie from being a big hit is probably that we don't really get to know any of these couples. It doesn't really feel very personal when any of them are attacked.
00:54:54
Speaker
So there's a level of detachment in this movie that can be kind of less effective. The police force is really what is functioning as the central character of the story, especially Deputy Ramsey.
00:55:05
Speaker
So Deputy Ramsey is driving around on a rainy night a while later after the town has kind of like settled down from these initial attacks. He hears gunshots and he goes looking and finds our second couple, Howard and Emma Liu.
00:55:19
Speaker
He finds them and they have both been shot multiple times. So right off the bat, this killer is inconsistent. And we don't really know yet if he just like upgraded from bludgeoning to shooting people because the last couple lived or if he's just going to be like trying out different stuff or what to expect going forward.
00:55:38
Speaker
Deputy Ramsay came really close to catching the Phantom Killer that night, but he basically just barely eluded him. He got out of range for the deputy to shoot him, and that was kind of it. The lack of motive for the killer caused a lot of fear for people in Texarkana because they felt like someone they loved could be next or like they could be next themselves.
00:55:57
Speaker
They call in Captain Morales, who they refer to as the lone wolf of the Texas Rangers, and they call him a living legend, the most famous ranger in all of Texas. He has them set up a curfew in town to keep teens and young adults off the street.
00:56:12
Speaker
And he holds a press conference to reassure the citizens that the investigation is serious and that he's confident that they'll find the killer. He tells the sheriff and deputy that he doesn't want any press people hanging around.
00:56:24
Speaker
He wants to be the only one in contact with the press so that he knows exactly what information is being released and how. We spend a lot of time with these cops. Ramsey seems reasonably competent.
00:56:36
Speaker
Morales seems to be kind of on a power trip, but also pretty dedicated to actually finding the killer. They start to realize that the strikes have happened about three weeks apart, so they can kind of try to predict when he might strike again.
00:56:48
Speaker
They set up a plan to put cops out as decoys to lure the killer out and hopefully catch him. And a line of cops holding big rifles come out dressed as women, including padding for effect.
00:57:00
Speaker
And they have them park in couples. Instead of falling for this, though, the phantom killer attacks a real couple, our third couple, Peggy and Roy. He bludgeons Roy and eventually shoots him when he tries to get away.
00:57:13
Speaker
And then he kills Peggy in like a truly infamous and unforgettable scene. It's very ridiculous, but it's also like something that will never leave your brain once you see it.
00:57:23
Speaker
And Peggy is a trombone player. And so what the Phantom does is he ties Peggy to a tree. He attaches a knife to like the part of a trombone that slides back and forth to hit the different notes. I don't know what it's called. I don't play trombone.
00:57:37
Speaker
And basically he like plays the trombone into her body, just like stabbing her repeatedly with the trombone slide. Morales is furious that none of the cops who were out that night caught the phantom.
00:57:49
Speaker
While he's talking to a local doctor about the killer, we actually see a man get up in the background and walk out who seems to be wearing the same boots that the killer had on. And those boots will show up again.
00:58:01
Speaker
Later, the cops get a report of someone claiming to have killed people and they chase the person's car down. When they stop the car, they find a man named Eddie. Eddie has been claiming to be the Phantom.
00:58:12
Speaker
He says, bring on the newspaper reporters. I'll give you a confession. So it looks like Eddie just wants to play the big man. He just like wants the ego trip of being able to say that he's this scary killer that's like been holding the town hostage this whole time.
00:58:27
Speaker
So we don't really think it's Eddie. And then we get confirmation of this because we get another look somewhere else of those same boots. The indicator that the person we're seeing is the phantom.
00:58:39
Speaker
He's watching a young woman like leave the supermarket. And when she drives off, he follows her to her house, which is also sort of a change up again, right? Like he's escalating from lover's lanes to following people home.
00:58:50
Speaker
And this is couple number four, Helen and Floyd. The phantom killer shoots both of them, killing Floyd and injuring Helen. Helen crawls away and he pursues her, but she gets to another house and a house that happens to have a gun owner in it.
00:59:05
Speaker
So seeing the man with the gun scares off the phantom and Helen lives. The cops search the area, but they don't find anything helpful. They're talking about how the killer seems to have just, like, disappeared altogether.
00:59:16
Speaker
They talk about how this could mean that the killer died or moved on to another town. Morales even says, like, maybe he got arrested for something else and he's in jail. While they're driving around talking about this, they get a report for a stolen car.
00:59:30
Speaker
The description of the car matches the one Ramsey saw the night that he almost caught the Phantom. So they spy the Phantom in the car. They shoot at the Phantom. And then there is like a full shootout between law enforcement and the Phantom across a train track. It's all like very Western feeling. Like the Phantom gets to the other side of the train track right as a train is coming. So they're like shooting through the gaps between the train cars.
00:59:53
Speaker
They do hit the Phantom killer, but by the time the train passes, he's still gone. The closing narration takes over while they're looking for him, talking about what might have happened to the Phantom.
01:00:04
Speaker
And it's probably become pretty clear through the story why I say this movie is functionally just an urban legend on film, but it's solidified by the ending narration saying, what happened to the Phantom killer? No one really knows.
01:00:17
Speaker
Some believe he was convicted of another crime, and and today he's still serving his time in a Kansas prison. Some people believe he died here in these swamps. Texarkana today still looks pretty much the same.
01:00:29
Speaker
And if you ask people here in the streets what they believe happened to the phantom killer, most would say that he is still living here, and he's still walking free. As this is being said, we see a movie theater with a line of people waiting to see this movie. So we have a real meta moment. They're going to see The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
01:00:49
Speaker
The line is full of viewers and the theater is full of viewers, one of whom has on the Phantom Killer's boots. This is a cautionary tale if I've ever heard one. And I don't compare it to an urban legend in a derogatory way.
01:01:03
Speaker
It works. And I honestly love when stories take a moment to be like, and this thing could still get you. Like, i I personally love that. I think that's so much fun. And urban legends are kind of just the modern day equivalent of fairy tales anyway, right?
01:01:16
Speaker
Like, stay out of the forest, stay out of the lover's lane, right? They try to keep the young ones under control. That could probably be a whole episode in and of itself, so maybe I'll circle back around to that at some point. But I say it more to say, have a lot of respect for urban legends and their cultural impact, and especially the impact they have on horror films.
Reflection on 1970s Family Fears
01:01:34
Speaker
A lot of them have the same message. Fool around at your own risk. And parents in real life were probably less scared that some masked murderer would attack their kids in their car than they were that their kids might be using their car to have sex outside of marriage.
01:01:48
Speaker
And stories like this make a great warning of why doing that is dangerous and not worth the risk. Another big fear that parents had that was similar and had similar cautionary tales built around it was kids experimenting with drugs and alcohol.
01:02:02
Speaker
Addressing this fear, we have another movie presenting itself as factual, so you can sort of see that trend emerging too. And it is the infamous Wes Craven film, The Last House on the Left. If you aren't sure that purity culture is going to play a role in this movie, one of the first conversations between main character Mary Collingwood and her parents is literally a debate over bras and how no one wears those anymore The movie starts on the day before Mary's 17th birthday.
01:02:29
Speaker
She's going to a concert in Manhattan with her friend Phyllis, who's a couple years older than her, but only 19, so they're both really young. Before the concert, they're drinking booze that Phyllis had hidden away in the woods, and they're talking about trying to find some weed before the show.
01:02:43
Speaker
Mary talks about how this summer, she finally feels like a real woman for the first time in her whole life. She's getting older. While they're driving to the concert, they hear a news broadcast discussing recent escaped convicts who were guilty of rape and murder.
01:02:57
Speaker
While this broadcast is playing, we flash over to a small group of people who, it quickly becomes clear, are these fugitives. The group consists of Fred, also called Weasel, who is a child molester and a murderer, Krug, a serial killer, Krug's son, Junior, who is a heroin addict, and Sadie, who ends up being just as violent as the men.
01:03:19
Speaker
The men are total misogynists, even going so far at one point as saying to Sadie, why don't you just lay back and enjoy being inferior? Phyllis and Mary see Junior standing outside and they approach him to ask if he knows where to find weed.
01:03:32
Speaker
He says he does, so they follow him inside where the door is immediately locked behind him and they're sort of ambushed by the rest of the group. Eventually, Fred pulls out a knife and like that's when they know shit has hit the fan. They know things are serious. They're in a seriously dangerous situation.
01:03:48
Speaker
We flash back to Mary's parents, Estelle and John, who are setting up the house and like preparing for Mary's birthday party the next day. They're waiting late into the night for Mary to get home, eventually even like calling the concert venue to find out when the show ended to see when they should expect her to be home.
01:04:04
Speaker
John tries to reassure Estelle, saying that staying out all night is, quote, classic. It's a kid's way of saying she's grown up. He says that they'll call the police in another hour if she doesn't show up.
01:04:16
Speaker
I'm not going to go into, like, too many details about what ensues for Mary and Phyllis. It's bad enough that the movie was banned in New Zealand and, like, really put through the ringer to get official ratings in other places.
01:04:28
Speaker
While the group of fugitives drives Mary and Phyllis into the woods from their apartment, an original song that was written for the movie plays with lyrics playing over like an upbeat kind of bluegrass-y vibe, which is just foreshadowing what's to come.
01:04:42
Speaker
And the lyrics are, "'Weasel and Junior and Sadie and Krug, out for the day with the Collingwood brood. Out for the day for some fresh air and sun. Let's have some fun with those two lovely children and off them as soon as we're done.'" Back at the house, Mary's parents have now called the cops.
01:04:59
Speaker
There's no sign of Mary in any jails or at the morgue. Unbeknownst to them, very nearby, mary and Phyllis are being taken into the woods just near her house, with Mary even seeing her house's mailbox as they go.
01:05:13
Speaker
The group humiliates the girls. They torture them physically, sexually, and psychologically. Junior is trying to get the rest of them to kind of tone things down, saying, you'll kill someone if you're not careful.
01:05:25
Speaker
Phyllis, stepping in as an older friend, is really protective of Mary. She's a little more able to keep her head in this situation than Mary is. Eventually, she makes a run for it and tells Mary to escape when they start to chase her.
01:05:39
Speaker
Mary is left with Junior, who she sort of tries to like butter up. She gives him the peace sign necklace that her parents had just given her for her birthday and tries to be nice to him and convince him that they should leave together.
01:05:51
Speaker
She picks up on the fact that he's an addict and she tells him how close they are to her house and that her dad works with addicts and that there's actually methadone at her house that she can get for him. Further in the woods, Sadie catches up to Phyllis, but Phyllis bashes Sadie's head with a rock and keeps running.
01:06:07
Speaker
Phyllis is totally exhausted, and eventually they do catch up with her and kill her. As they're killing Phyllis, Junior and Mary start to run away, but the rest of the group catches them.
01:06:18
Speaker
Mary asks Krug if Phyllis got away, and they reveal that she didn't. Mary sort of gets away for a little bit. She is praying while the group of fugitives stands around, realizing how much blood is all over them.
01:06:31
Speaker
There's an agonizingly slow chase scene in the lead up to Mary's death. She's just walking, like seemingly aimlessly to the group, but like we know really trying to walk to her house.
01:06:43
Speaker
And they just slowly follow behind her. When they get to the river, she wades into it to cross and they shoot her. It's really dragged out and really kind of uneventful for such a violent movie.
01:06:56
Speaker
The cops, who are incompetent as always, and whose car ran out of gas many miles from where they were trying to get to, are starting to walk the rest of the way toward the Collingwood house.
01:07:08
Speaker
The cops sort of serve as like weird comic relief in this movie. The movie is intense and the cops are like bumbling and ineffective, so it gives you something to laugh at for a little bit to break some of that tension.
01:07:19
Speaker
But almost too soon, really, we are back with this group of violent people. They've rinsed off in the river and they've changed their clothes to try to hide the evidence of what they've just done.
01:07:30
Speaker
The next thing we know, we're back with Mary's parents and who has arrived at their house but the gang of fugitives who have just killed her daughter. And they don't know whose house this is.
01:07:42
Speaker
This is just the closest house to where they were and they needed to go somewhere. They surreptitiously cut the phone line, and they lie about their identities, obviously, and they have a story about their car being broken down outside.
01:07:56
Speaker
Mary's parents tell the group that the nearest garage is already closed, but that they can spend the night there and go to the garage in the morning. So they go upstairs, and they still don't know whose house it is yet, but as they settle in they find pictures of Mary there, and they realize what situation they've just found themselves in.
01:08:13
Speaker
So they know now that they are in the home of the girl they killed, having dinner with her parents while she is missing. The parents know their daughter is missing, but they don't know what happened to her.
01:08:25
Speaker
But as they're eating, they start to notice little things that seem off about the group. Sadie has a cut on her head from where Phyllis hit her with the rock. When Estelle and John ask them if they're on vacation, Krug tells them that they're actually on a business trip.
01:08:39
Speaker
And when asked what kind of business they're in they each give different answers. And then they try to sort of like play it off with another answer. Junior is also going through withdrawal, which is noticeable to Mary's dad, who works with addicts.
01:08:52
Speaker
And he's also having flashbacks to what has just happened. It seems like this is the first time he's really been present for such extreme violence, and the guilt is hitting him in a way that I don't think it is for any of the rest of them.
01:09:04
Speaker
From the dinner table, they hear him crying and screaming, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And Krug, who, just as a reminder, is his dad, goes upstairs to shut him up while Fred and Sadie keep trying to make a decent and disarming enough impression. Estelle wakes up in the night because she hears Junior retching and vomiting.
01:09:22
Speaker
He is deep in withdrawal, and when she goes to check on him, she notices that he's wearing the necklace that they had given to Mary the last time they saw her. Estelle is obviously suspicious at this point and she goes and looks through their stuff.
01:09:35
Speaker
She discovers like the bloody clothes in their suitcase and she also starts to overhear Junior talking about how they murdered Mary. Estelle gets John and they run together into the woods ready to search for their missing daughter and they don't find her alive but they do find her body not far from their house and they take it back to the house with them.
01:09:54
Speaker
Fred, or Weasel, whatever, also has a dream about the couple torturing him, which again gives us a little bit of foreshadowing of what's in store for them. In the rest of the house, John and Estelle are plotting revenge.
01:10:08
Speaker
John is searching for things that will make good weapons, and he also gets his rifle, while Estelle is in the kitchen with a glass of wine when Fred comes downstairs. still shaken up from the dream he had. Estelle starts to seduce Fred.
01:10:20
Speaker
She talks to him about how her husband is like sort of afraid of her, like maybe she's a little too much for him. And in this moment, we see that Mary's body has been brought back to the house and is laid on their couch.
01:10:33
Speaker
She's trying to avoid having Fred see her, so she takes him outside. She eggs him on, reminding him of how he earlier said he could make love to her with his hands tied behind his back. While they're walking outside, John is setting up booby traps like all over the house.
01:10:48
Speaker
Fred, in moment of pure ego, insists that Estelle ties him up before they make love just to like prove that he can, like he said, just for the ego boost. Inside, John steals Krug's gun from the room they're sleeping in, almost waking Krug, but he kind of just like immediately falls back to sleep. He doesn't really have his guard up enough.
01:11:07
Speaker
Outside, Estelle continues her seduction and eventually starts, let's say, orally performing. Inside, John is positioning himself with his rifle in the room where the rest of them are asleep.
01:11:19
Speaker
While outside, Estelle, who is still ah orally performing, bites down and Weasel lets out a blood-curdling scream that wakes up everyone inside.
01:11:32
Speaker
Krug is able to disorient John by shutting the light off and he gets the upper hand. He starts talking to and about Mary after seeing her body on the couch. He's making fun of John for not being strong enough, and when he seems like he's about to kill him, Junior fires a warning shot towards them.
01:11:49
Speaker
Kruger is making fun of Junior while this happens and eventually tells Junior to shoot himself. And you sort of remember in this moment that, like, Kruger is Junior's dad, so we have one father trying to avenge his daughter's death and then one father egging his son on until he can't take it anymore and ends his own life.
01:12:09
Speaker
While this exchange is happening, John goes down into the basement to get a chainsaw, and the rifle only had one shell in it, so it's useless to Krug. And this moment is a serious flip on the chainsaw-wielding killer, right? Now the good guy has a chainsaw, so we like to see that.
01:12:24
Speaker
Krug tries to get away and electrocutes himself on the door handle that John rigged. I swear this movie is like I Spit on Your Grave meets Home Alone, which is not a sentence I would have expected to ever say.
01:12:36
Speaker
Sadie comes in and then tries to flee outside where Estelle is, and Estelle attacks her as the chainsaw battle continues inside the house. Krug is cowering and trying to hide himself behind furniture while while also saying, let's get it over with.
01:12:51
Speaker
He's posturing even as he like cowers and crawls away. The cops arrive just as each parent makes their final kill. After this all happens, they sort of just like fall into each other.
01:13:03
Speaker
The remains of a completely destroyed family. They were worried about their daughter. They were worried about this older friend that she was hanging out with. They were worried about her lack of modesty.
01:13:15
Speaker
They were worried about the show she was going to and what kind of trouble she might get into along the way. And ultimately in this movie, they were right to be worried because look at all the trouble she did get herself into.
01:13:26
Speaker
And I don't say that to victim blame, I just say that to point out that there's a similar kind of urban legend vibe here, and it almost has like an after-school special element to these movies that sends a clear message about the importance of staying pure and innocent.
01:13:42
Speaker
Because if you don't, bad things will happen to you. Within the context of movies like these, the only thing scarier than the fact that this kind of violence is finding these young people— is the idea that the young people may have brought it upon themselves through their impurity and through their lost innocence.
01:14:00
Speaker
And that's the whole thing, right? Like innocence and the role of innocence in what's viewed as a traditional family. In The Exorcist, Reagan is hitting puberty, where a loss of innocence really starts to happen.
01:14:11
Speaker
She curses and makes sexual gestures that signal that she is leaving the innocence and purity of childhood behind her. She's also living in a female-headed household and her parents are divorced.
01:14:22
Speaker
All this creates an opening for her to become possessed by a literal demon. In The Omen and in It's Alive, we sort of grapple with the question of, like, what happens when innocence is never really there to begin with, even in infancy and childhood?
01:14:37
Speaker
In Black Christmas, there's conflict between the girls who are more interested in boys and partying and their sorority sister, who's kind of seen as the goody-two-shoes of the house. In the town that dreaded sundown, the couples were all engaged in what would have been considered scandalous behavior at the time, parking on lovers' lanes to get frisky together even after they were warned not to.
01:14:59
Speaker
and in the last house on the left, the girls tried to score drugs from a stranger, and although their killers were eventually punished, the girls were punished first. Innocence and the loss of innocence is a big recurring theme for horror movies in general, but especially at a time where concerns about the American nuclear family were rising so much.
01:15:20
Speaker
Divorce rates going up, more children being born outside of marriages, abortion rights becoming guaranteed, the sexual revolution and the women's movement all sort of created this perfect storm for a backlash of fear about what all of this could mean for the children.
01:15:36
Speaker
and it's always like that, right? It's always the children. What about the children? Think about the children. it children of all ages, the fears sort of adjust as the children get older, but the fears amount to the same thing.
01:15:48
Speaker
What if my child isn't perfect? What if my family isn't perfect enough to raise a perfect child? What will the consequences be for any sort of life for a child that isn't a white picket fence, two-parent household, 2.5 kids situation?
01:16:02
Speaker
Parents never stop being afraid of for or of their children. They're afraid of who their children are and who they'll become. They're afraid of what they'll do. And they're afraid because they can't really keep them safe from the world like they would like to.
01:16:18
Speaker
The 1970s were a time of upheaval for the norms of the traditional American family, a time where those norms were being broken and redefined. And maybe that's ultimately a good thing because our idea of life can expand in so many ways as a result of that.
01:16:34
Speaker
But the societal fears that come with those kinds of big changes will always show up and they will always show up in horror movies.
Preview of Next Episode
01:17:01
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of What Haunts You. Our next episode is going to be about a movie that's very close to my heart with a person who is also very close to my heart. I'm going to be joined by my friend Jasmine to talk about I Saw the TV Glow.
01:17:14
Speaker
We both have and very big feelings about this movie, so hopefully you'll be ready for an emotional conversation, but this is one that I really recommend actually watching before you listen to the episode.
01:17:27
Speaker
I know some people don't care about spoilers and might listen to things about movies they haven't seen yet, but trust me, this time is different. Nothing I can tell you about the plot, nothing we can go over in conversation really even begins to touch what watching this movie is actually like. So I really hope that you'll check it out.
01:17:44
Speaker
And after you do, I'll see you for the episode.