Video Scripts: Frailty, Dead Calm, Shocker

Cody has been writing video scripts for the JoBlo Horror Videos YouTube channel.


Every weekday I can be found writing news articles for the horror site ArrowintheHead.com, where I also review movies and the occasional TV show. ArrowintheHead recently launched a YouTube channel called JoBlo Horror Videos, and I've been contributing there as well. I'm not editing video or providing narration, but I have written the scripts for some of the videos on the channel over the last few months. In case you missed the videos on the channel - which you should really check out and subscribe to if you're a genre fan - I have embedded some of the videos I wrote the scripts for below.

First up was an episode of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series that was dedicated to Bill Paxton's 2001 film Frailty:



Frailty script: 

This week we're taking a look back at the 2001 psychological-slash-religious horror-thriller Frailty, starring and directed by Bill Paxton.

THE STORY: Frailty is primarily set in 1979 and centers on the Meiks family, a father and his two young sons. The mother died while giving birth to the younger son, but nine years down the line the Meiks guys are living a happy life together. Until one night when the father – who is played by Paxton and credited only as Dad - tells his sons he has seen a vision from God. An angel has visited him and informed him that the devil has set loose demons into the world, and he has been tasked with destroying these demons. Problem is, these "demons" look just like normal, horrified people when Dad gets ahold of them, and the so-called magical weapons he's meant to destroy them with are just items found lying around: a piece of pipe, a pair of gloves, an axe with the name Otis carved into the handle. Dad says he can see the evil deeds these demons have committed when he puts his bare hands on them, and younger son Adam says he can see these things, too. Older son Fenton doesn't see any of this stuff. He believes his father has gone insane and brainwashed his brother into being complicit in these murders.

THE PLAYERS: Paxton surrounded himself with a great supporting cast, headed up by Matthew McConaughey, who plays an older Fenton in scenes set in the present day. McConaughey also serves as the film’s narrator as he tells the story to an FBI agent played by Powers Boothe. 12-year-old Fenton is played by Matthew O’Leary, with Jeremy Sumpter as the 9-year-old Adam. Also in the cast are Missy Crider; Luke Askew, who is best known for his early roles in Cool Hand Luke and Easy Rider; and acting coach Vincent Chase, who helped Paxton work with the child actors. If the name sounds familiar to you, that’s because Vincent Chase is the person the lead character in the show Entourage may or may not have been named after. Either way, he wasn’t happy about the show using his name.

THE HISTORY: Screenwriter Brent Hanley has jokingly said that Frailty is 100% autobiographical, as the story is set in a small town in his home state of Texas, where he grew up attending church and reading Stephen King novels. The script was sent out on a Tuesday and quickly rejected by all the major studios, but by Thursday it was in the hands of Child's Play producer David Kirschner, who optioned it and began working with Hanley on further drafts.

The script was eventually sent to Hanley’s fellow Texas native Paxton, but getting him to direct the film wasn’t the original intention. While Kirschner was only hoping he would sign on to star in it, Paxton got so wrapped up in the material that he pitched the idea of him getting behind the camera as well. This became Paxton’s feature directorial debut, and his second directing credit after that wacky “Fish Heads” video he made in 1980.

Taking inspiration from classic child-in-peril films like The Night of the Hunter and Invaders from Mars, Paxton wanted his movie to have an old school look and feel, and he recruited Jaws cinematographer Bill Butler to help him with that. The fact that the story was set in Texas was something else that had appealed to Paxton from the start, and even though the movie would end up being shot in California for budgetary reasons, he strived to make it seem as Texas as possible. Part of that endeavor was the casting of Boothe and McConaughey, both Texans, and Paxton said the film got funded and distributed because of McConaughey. “Once we decided to appear in the picture together, that’s really when Lions Gate waded in. Then I got carte blanche after that – great creative freedom. Matthew I owe a great debt to, because without his participation the film wouldn’t have been made.”

Produced on a budget of 11 million dollars, the film ended up pulling in just 17 million at the global box office when it was released on April 12th, 2002, getting lost in the shuffle among other releases like Resident Evil, Blade II, Panic Room, and The Scorpion King. Even Changing Lanes, The Sweetest Thing, and Murder by Numbers bested it at the box office - and when you take into account that box office juggernaut Jason X came out just two weeks later, it's plain to see that this movie never stood a chance. Just kidding about that one, Jason X made even less money than Frailty did.

There were too many other, flashier options in theatres at the time, and the abstract title surely didn’t do it any favors. The suggested alternative title “God’s Hands” probably wouldn’t have fared any better. But really, this isn't a movie that was likely to be raking in the dough no matter when it was released. This sort of heavy subject matter, with no fantastical elements other than a quick shot of one of Dad's angelic visions, isn't something that was going to have average moviegoers flocking to it. After viewers at early screenings were offended by the perceived child abuse, called the film morally disreputable, and even walked out in droves when the first killing happened, Paxton was feeling like he and his movie might be in trouble, so he turned to some familiar names for help. He showed the movie to his collaborators James Cameron and Sam Raimi, as well as Stephen King, hoping they would give him positive quotes to feature in the marketing. And they did. Frailty was promoted with quotes from each one of them. Those quotes weren’t much help to the movie financially, but at least they helped save the film and Paxton from getting a bad reputation.

Then again, maybe it would have made more money with some controversy. Maybe they should have featured quotes in the marketing like "Is Bill Paxton really an insane religious fanatic?" and "Does this movie promote murder and child abuse? Come see and decide for yourself!" Of course, Paxton wasn't advocating that parents force their children to kill people with them for religious reasons, he was telling a horror story, and the fact that those people in early screenings were so outraged and disturbed really goes to show how engaging and effective his storytelling was.

Frailty was reasonably well received by those who did see it when it was first released, with Roger Ebert, who was known to have something of a shaky relationship with the horror genre, even giving it a 4 star review. It just wasn’t seen by many people.

WHY IT’S GREAT / BEST SCENES: It was a lucky break for everyone involved that Paxton decided to bring his vision of the story to the screen, as the film holds up to this day because of the classic approach he took to the material. He said he decided to direct the film because “I was worried that a wild-eyed director would get hold of this material and sensationalize it just to shock people. And that, to me, wouldn’t do the script justice. My vision of this story has always been the idea that it is a very edgy script that pushes a lot of buttons, especially because children are involved. But I thought that’s exactly the reason to give it a real, old Hollywood approach, where all of the darkness is implied instead of being explicit. We hear a chop or a scream, but we never see a drop of blood.”

In the hands of a different director, this easily could have been something gore-soaked and appalling, shocking in the moment but forgettable. Paxton turned Hanley’s script into one of the most engrossing and well-crafted horror films of the last twenty years.

The story needed to be handled delicately, because the concept is deeply disturbing right away. The Dad character is attentive, obviously cares for his sons, jokes around with them, and makes sure they know he loves them. Then he’s telling these young kids that he needs their help killing these demons that appear to be human beings, and it’s terrifying no matter what the reality is. If Dad is right, there are demons just walking around out there. If Fenton is right, if Dad is crazy and the kids are stuck with him while he murders people in front of them and says he's doing something righteous... well, that's even scarier than the idea of demons. For most of the film we're seeing things play out through Fenton's eyes, so we're skeptical of Dad's claims from the start. It's like we're watching an act of child abuse being carried out by a beloved parent who has gone crazy and turned homicidal.

The cast made all of this thoroughly believable; Paxton is reliably great in the role of Dad, and O’Leary proved to be capable of carrying a large amount of the film on his shoulders. The cutaways to McConaughey and Boothe add an extra sinister edge to the proceedings, and Sumpter did well as the younger and more naïve of the Meiks brothers.

One of the best things about Paxton’s performance is that, even as the Meiks family home life turns into a living nightmare, Dad never loses his loving, caring demeanor. A great example of this comes when Dad is trying to convince Fenton to help him capture the latest demon-person. Fenton says he can't, and Dad replies, "Can't never could do anything." It's such a goofy dad thing to say when their kid tells them they can't do something, but here it's said in the middle of a very dark and twisted situation.

The film benefits from not being overly stylized; the more down-to-earth and natural it looks, the more realistic it feels, and that makes the horrific events all the more unsettling. Paxton and Butler were quite successful at capturing that old school look they were going for, complete with driving scenes shot on a sound stage and a floating head gag that was accomplished by having the actor wear black clothing in a dark room and looks like something straight out of the 1950s.

That floating head shot is part of one of the film’s standout sequences, in which Dad locks the defiant Fenton in a cellar, telling him he’s to stay in there and pray until God shows him a vision of the truth. Fenton is down there for days, and McConaughey’s voiceover tells us that he goes “beyond fear into total insanity”. It’s really great, troubling stuff.

All this time after its initial release, Frailty is still just as gripping as it was when it first came out. Hanley's script has so many layers to it, and Paxton and his supporting cast brought the story and characters to the screen in such a pitch perfect way, this a movie that not only holds up to multiple viewings, it begs to be seen multiple times. Paxton was quoted as saying, "If you've only seen the film once, you've only kind of seen half the film." Unfortunately, it still seems that not nearly enough people have seen the movie at all, because it doesn’t get referenced very often.

SEE IT: For anyone who would like to watch the movie now, it’s readily available on Blu-ray and DVD, even in some multi-film packs with other Lions Gate releases. It can also be rented or purchased through Amazon Prime Video.

PARTING SHOT: Bill Paxton wasn't just one of our great character actors, he also proved to be a fantastic filmmaker. It's a shame he didn't get the chance to demonstrate his skills in that department more often, but at least he was able to give us Frailty. If you haven't seen this movie yet, seek it out… and watch it a couple of times.

The next Best Horror Movie You Never Saw episode I wrote covered the 1989 thriller Dead Calm, directed by Phillip Noyce:



Dead Calm script: 

Welcome to another edition of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw video series. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the 1989 high seas thriller Dead Calm.

CREATORS / CAST: Directed by Phillip Noyce, produced by Mad Max franchise mastermind George Miller, and scripted by Miller’s The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome co-writer Terry Hayes, Dead Calm is based on a 1963 novel by Charles Williams and stars Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman as John and Rae Ingram, a couple who have gone out to sea on their yacht while dealing with the grief of losing their young son in a car accident. After a month at sea, they cross paths with a young man named Hughie Warriner, played by Billy Zane, as he flees from a sinking schooner. Hughie tells them that everyone else on the schooner died of botulism ten days earlier after eating some bad canned salmon, but John – who served in the Navy and has twenty-five years of experience at sea – has trouble buying his story. Once Hughie falls asleep, John heads over to the schooner and finds that he was right to doubt the stranger, because the other people on board have been murdered and cut to pieces. Unfortunately, this means he has just left his wife on their yacht with a killer. Before John can get back to the yacht, Hughie has taken control of it and taken Rae captive. Stuck on the water-filled schooner, John tries to keep it from sinking so he can use it to catch up with the yacht, while Rae does whatever it takes to make sure she and her husband will both make it through this alive.

Along for the ride is a smart little dog named Ben, but animal lovers should be warned – every fun or clever thing you see Ben do early on is only going to lead to trouble later.

BACKGROUND: Williams’ novel was actually a sequel to his 1960 book Aground, which served as the basis for the 1965 French film The Dictator’s Guns. In that one, John and Rae meet when she hires him to locate a schooner that was stolen by gun runners. The follow-up revisits the characters to tell a story in which John and Rae run into trouble while celebrating their honeymoon at sea – in fact, an early version of the story that was published in an issue of Cosmopolitan was titled Pacific Honeymoon. Thankfully the story had the much better title Dead Calm when it was released as a novel.

This was the second adaptation of Dead Calm to go into production, following a disastrous attempt made by Orson Welles soon after the novel was published. Welles had hoped to turn the story into a thrilling crowd-pleaser, but even after a couple years of off-and-on filming he didn’t manage to get all the footage he needed, and the death of star Laurence Harvey ensured that the project would never be completed. Miller’s production company acquired the film rights from Welles’ estate just months after he passed away in 1985.

Noyce, Miller, and Hayes managed to successfully complete their adaptation, but it wasn’t an easy process. Principal photography took place on the water between the Great Barrier Reef and mainland Australia, with interior scenes being shot on sets that were on top of floatation devices in a large water tank, and filming at sea proved to be so complicated that production stretched on for fourteen weeks.

An indie made on a budget of around six million dollars, Dead Calm secured distribution from Warner Bros. – but the studio did require a new ending to be filmed, almost a year after filming had wrapped, before they would release it. Even with this more exciting climax, the movie only did modest business at the global box office, earning just under eight million in the states. It wasn’t a failure, but it didn’t have much of an impact aside from the fact that Tom Cruise watched it and got Kidman cast in Days of Thunder, starting her career in the Hollywood mainstream. Noyce moved on to Hollywood himself, but was hired to direct films like Blind Fury and Patriot Games based on the merits of things he had done before Dead Calm.

It wasn’t seen by a large audience, but the film was well received by critics. The New York Times has even counted it among the top one thousand movies ever made. It quickly gathered a cult following and remains a cult favorite to this day, even while the creative team seems to have let it fade into the past. It’s rare to see anyone involved talk about the film in depth, and the DVD and Blu-ray releases have been barebones. This really deserves to get a special edition that’s packed with bonus features, but it doesn’t look like one is forthcoming.

WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Dead Calm is an incredibly well-crafted thriller that establishes a deeply unnerving tone right away, thanks to Hayes’ decision to ditch the honeymoon aspect of the source material and replace it with a tragic back story for John and Rae. The film begins with a sequence that shows exactly how the couple’s son died, and Noyce doesn’t pull any punches while doing so, even including a shot in which the toddler’s body is launched through the windshield of Rae’s car. This sequence plays out with very little dialogue, and the dialogue that is there just makes it even more troubling, as John is told that his little boy took twenty minutes to die.

After opening with that gut-punch, we move on to the location where the entire rest of the story will play out; the open sea, with no hint of land in any direction. This setting allowed cinematographer Dean Semler to capture some stunning imagery, but while the vast ocean is nice to look at, when things go wrong this sight also brings a feeling of terrifying hopelessness to the film, driving home the fact that John and Rae will have to make it through this ordeal on their own. They are alone in this. Land is hundreds of miles away, there are no other boats out here, help is not coming.

Noyce and Hayes don’t make us wait long for the thrills; John and Rae have taken Hughie onto their yacht within the first fifteen minutes, and the conflict between them carries on for the rest of the ninety-six minute running time. They did an impressive job of keeping the situation tense that entire time, repeatedly giving John and Rae hope that they’ll be able to get out of this quickly, then throwing more obstacles in their way. It’s a very emotionally and intellectually engaging scenario, making the viewer ponder how they would handle things if they were in Rae or John’s position.

Neill, Kidman, and Zane are the only cast members for the majority of the film, and each of them did a great job bringing their character to life. Neill’s John comes off as being a very capable person; we root for him to figure out a way to catch up with Rae and Hughie, and even when the odds are stacked against him – and they usually are – it seems like he’s going to be able to pull through this with skill and determination. And yet by the end there has been a reversal; John is the one in serious distress, and Rae has to step up to rescue him.

At first, it may seem like Kidman was miscast. She was only nineteen when filming began and turned twenty during the lengthy production, so she’s truly a bit too young for the character. Rae had originally been envisioned as being thirty-six years old, but Noyce, Hayes, and Miller had been so impressed by Kidman while working with her on a mini-series about the Vietnam War that the character was rewritten specifically for her and changed into a twenty-four year old. For the filmmakers, Rae’s personal journey was the primary focus of the story, and Noyce said, “We felt the audience could identify more with a young woman, because, in a kind of rite-of-passage, she goes from weakness to power, from girlhood to womanhood, from loss to re-growth.”

Rae goes through so much, the audience probably could have sided with a thirty-six-year-old version of the character just as well, but the casting of Kidman worked out for the film and especially for the actress herself.

Rae’s youth also brings an interesting edge to her interactions with Hughie, who is closer to her age than her husband is – Billy Zane is only one year older than Kidman. Hughie is clearly attracted to Rae, and she uses that to her advantage, leading to an uncomfortable sex scene. Zane had appeared in Back to the Future and Critters before this, but Hughie was his most prominent role yet, and what’s really great about his performance is that he didn’t choose to play the character as a completely unhinged lunatic. Hughie tries to be friends with Rae, tries to show her his side of things. The filmmakers dropped Zane off on an island to spend a few days with the actors who appear as the other schooner passengers in home video footage, and during that time he was able to craft his own story for Hughie in which he feels like he was the wronged one. The other passengers turned against him, he had to kill them, and now he’s trying to sail away to freedom. Hughie is the hero in his own story… but he does some very bad things that we can’t condone. So when we reach the re-shot ending in which Hughie is definitively taken out in a very flashy way, we don’t feel too bad for him.

Much like the ending of Fatal Attraction, this ending was added when test screening audiences reacted poorly to the more low-key, ambiguous ending the filmmakers originally wanted the film to have. It’s a little obvious that it was tacked on, but it works.

BEST SCENE: One of the greatest scenes in the film comes when John realizes what Hughie has done on the schooner, and that leaving Rae on the yacht with him was a bad idea. He jumps in a dinghy and tries to cover the distance between the two ships before Hughie can take the yacht away. Watching a guy try to row a dinghy quickly may not sound like something that would be exciting, but the performances of the actors, the editing by Richard Francis-Bruce, and the music by Graeme Revell all work together to make this a standout sequence that effectively gets the pulse pounding.

It ends with John trying to jump from the dinghy to the yacht, but he doesn’t quite make it and falls into the water. In an interview conducted in 1989, Noyce pointed to that shot of Neill in the water as an example of how tough filming this movie could be. “There’s two divers underneath the water, one’s holding on to his left foot and one’s holding on to his right foot. There’s a dinghy behind him, and that’s anchored in two spots. And the big 150 foot boat is behind the two of them, and that’s being held there by two tugboats, which you can’t see on the film. And, of course, our camera’s on another boat. Just imagine that, trying to get all of those elements to line up.” After hearing that, it’s easy to understand why this thing took fourteen weeks to film.

PARTING SHOT: Just the fact that the filmmakers were able to complete Dead Calm and thus succeeded where the legendary Orson Welles had failed makes this movie a notable curiosity that’s worth seeking out. Once you do, you’re rewarded with a harrowing thriller that features some great acting and has a thick atmosphere of tension and dread hanging over every minute of it. The idea of watching a film that mainly follows just three characters as they sail the ocean may seem daunting to some viewers, but the filmmakers kept things moving at a good pace and never let too many minutes go by without something exciting or awful happening. Because of this, more than thirty years after it came and went at the box office, Dead Calm still holds up.

My third contribution to the channel was for a series called WTF Happened to This Horror Movie, for which I tried to figure out why Wes Craven's 1989 film Shocker, which was supposed to kick off a franchise and introduce a new horror icon, never received any sort of follow-up:



Shocker script: 

Wes Craven gave the horror genre one of its greatest icons when he introduced Freddy Krueger in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, but he had very little to do with what happened to Freddy after that. As his character’s story continued, Craven had zero creative control over the Nightmares – aside from when he co-wrote the third film and wrote and directed the seventh film – and didn’t see much money from them. As he told Fangoria, creating Freddy gave him great credibility, but not a great payday. So when Alive Films asked him to create a new horror franchise that he would have control over and a financial stake in, he jumped at the chance. Alive gave him complete creative freedom, and he gave them Shocker, mixing ideas from some of his previous films, like A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Last House on the Left, with elements inspired by the likes of The Hidden and The Thing, and a desire to examine television’s place at the heart of modern culture – by creating a character who can travel through TV land. Shocker was supposed to give us a new genre icon, jump-start a franchise, and earn Craven stacks of cash. Instead, it had a mediocre run at the box office and never received a follow-up of any kind. So WTF Happened to This Horror Movie?

Looking back at the production and 1989 release of Shocker, it’s obvious that the legacy of Craven’s earlier creation Freddy Krueger was hanging over this project like a cloud. It’s almost like the movie was made as a challenge to Freddy. Set reports and interviews conducted at the time were packed with references to the character; for example, one article said that Craven was aiming to “build a better Freddy” here, and in a “making of” featurette Craven straight-out said that the villain in this film was “designed to retire Freddy” and was “more exciting” than Freddy. The concept originated as a TV series idea that Craven had pitched to Fox, and the title of the series he wanted to make was The Dream Stalker, which is how Freddy is often described.

The Dream Stalker would have been a fitting title for the film up to a point. The story is set in the city of Maryville, which Craven intended to be in his home state of Ohio, but it was filmed in the Los Angeles area and never feels like anywhere other than L.A. Even though the production went through the trouble of putting Ohio license plates on all of the vehicles, they didn’t bother hiding the palm trees in the background of some of the locations.

When the film begins, Maryville residents are living in terror because their city has been the site of a nine month killing spree being carried out by the Family Slasher, a maniac who has battered his way through locked doors to slaughter entire families, claiming nearly thirty victims. Police are baffled, and the crime might never have been solved if local college football player Jonathan Parker didn’t develop a psychic connection to the Family Slasher. Through his nightmares, Jonathan is able to witness these crimes before they even happen. The images he sees eventually allow him to deduce that the Family Slasher is TV repairman Horace Pinker. Using his dreams as a guide, Jonathan helps the police apprehend the killer.

Musician Mick Fleetwood, who had recently taken an acting role in the Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man, auditioned to play Pinker, this character who was supposed to replace Freddy in our hearts and minds, but the role ended up being played by Mitch Pileggi. Pileggi would go on to play Walter Skinner on nearly one hundred episodes of The X-Files, but at the time he was an unknown and he turned out to be the perfect choice. He really shines in the scenes he has in the first 45 minutes. There is no explanation given for Pinker’s madness, no mythology built up around him, this guy is just a violent, sleazy, scumbag. It’s not hard to imagine him plotting to commit the sex crime of the century with Krug and the gang from The Last House on the Left. We never find out why he chose to wipe out entire families, but we do learn that he had a family of his own once, one that he beat relentlessly. Until the day his seven-year-old son shot him in the knee, giving him a permanent limp. Pileggi turns in an incredible, intimidating, unnerving performance as Pinker. In those first 45 minutes.

Then Shocker earns its title by executing Pinker in the electric chair and turning him into a supernatural-slash-electrical force that can travel through bodies and appliances. From then on he’s kind of a joke. The character turns into a quip machine for the second half of the film; his offer to take Jonathan on a ride in his “Volts-wagen” is one of the all-time worst groan-inducing one-liners. He was scary when he was flesh and blood, but when he gains supernatural abilities he does things like transform into a Vibe-O-Matic recliner and chant “I think I can, I think I can” while elongating his fingers and fingernails so he can plug himself into an outlet. It’s unfortunate. It took Freddy a few sequels to become overly comedic, but Pinker gets there within his first movie.

Between Pinker’s execution and the point in the film when he starts jumping between TV channels, he possesses the bodies of several people, giving some other actors a chance to play the character. Vincent Guastaferro of Jason Lives, Michael Murphy, Alice Cooper’s guitarist Kane Roberts, Janne Peters, Dendrie Taylor, Sam Scarber, and even Craven’s son Jonathan all get a turn, but the standout of the bunch is Lindsay Parker – who was nine years old when the film was released – as a little girl who develops a nasty disposition and a foul mouth when Pinker briefly takes control of her. One thing that becomes quite obvious when Pinker is possessing people who have guns is that this guy is a lousy shot. It’s no wonder he chose to use a knife when he was committing his Family Slasher murders.

Once again, it’s up to Jonathan Parker to stop Pinker, and along the way he finds out that he has the psychic connection to the killer because he is Pinker’s long-lost son, the kid who shot him in the knee. Jonathan is played by Peter Berg, who doesn’t look anything like Mitch Pileggi. These days he’s primarily known as a director, his credits including Friday Night Lights, Hancock, Battleship, Lone Survivor, and Spenser Confidential, but he’s a solid actor as well. He made his character a likeable person and is capable of bringing some impressive intensity to some of his scenes. Jonathan is easy to root for as he dedicates himself to taking Pinker down, whether he’s a slasher or an electric ghost, and lucky for him, his girlfriend Alison is so special that she’s even able to give him assistance from beyond the grave after Pinker kills her.

It could be that one reason why Shocker didn’t catch on with a larger audience is that it’s a slasher that doesn’t follow the standard formula and doesn’t feature much in the way of the usual slasher movie clichés. The biggest cliché in here is the presence of a wisecracking killer. Beyond that, there are no instances of sex equaling death, there isn’t any gratuitous nudity – not even when Alison is seen taking a bath – and it kills off the character you might expect to be the Final Girl. Alison is the lead female, and even though she also claims to have a chaste relationship with her boyfriend – which doesn’t seem likely, given that he’s a college athlete who rents his own place and they’ve been dating on and off for a year – she still gets killed by Pinker just 25 minutes in. Alison was played by Cami Cooper, and Craven and Cooper were clearly endeavoring to give the character an ethereal quality during her early scenes. Mainly they tried to do this by having her whisper nearly every line she says. Even when she talks on the phone, she whispers. It’s kind of irritating.

Alison is one of several people killed by Pinker over the course of the film, but this also happens to be a slasher movie that doesn’t revel in the kills. The Shocker doesn’t even use his ability to manipulate electricity to kill many people. Most of the deaths are bloody slashings, and we’re usually just seeing the aftermath. That’s partially due to the way the death scenes were shot in the first place, but Craven also had trouble securing an R rating from the MPAA on this one and some gore effects had to be removed. In all, the MPAA demanded that thirteen changes be made throughout the movie before they would give Craven the R.

Craven seemed to have a great time during the production of this movie, especially since he was working with his largest budget to date, but there were some bumps in the road during post-production. The trouble with the MPAA was one bump, and another came when the cheaper method they were planning to use for the film’s special effects fell through and they had to spend three times as much as they intended to on special effects that had to be thrown together in just two weeks. Craven was never happy with how those effects turned out, and in the days when he was producing remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left he was also talking about remaking Shocker, mainly just to have a chance to tell the story with better effects. But even though the effects in the film look silly at times, they’re still fitting for the mind-boggling scenes they’re featured in.

Craven was also uncertain about the rock soundtrack, which was a sign of the involvement of executive producer Shep Gordon of Alive Films, who was manager of several musical acts, including Alice Cooper. While Craven might have felt that an orchestral score would have worked better for some scenes, the film’s fans love that soundtrack and have a lot of fun rocking out to the likes of Megadeth, Dangerous Toys, Bonfire, Iggy Pop, Dead On, and The Dudes of Wrath while watching Horace Pinker do his thing.

The most likely reason why Shocker only developed a cult following instead of becoming a big hit is the fact that the story jumps around all over the place and the film is extremely inconsistent in tone. What starts off as a promisingly chilling slasher goes off the rails and becomes an insane live-action cartoon; those first 45 minutes are very dark, and yet a goofy-looking strangled corpse seen early on serves as a warning sign for the silliness that lies ahead. A villain who starts off frightening and repulsive ends up chasing the hero through an episode of Leave It to Beaver. On the audio commentary, Craven admits that he was seeing the world in a different way while he was making this movie because he was going through a rough divorce and it had given him a dark sense of humor. At one point he wonders aloud if he made it too whimsical.

Shocker reached theatre screens on October 27, 1989, just in time for Halloween and just two months after the release of the latest Nightmare on Elm Street movie Craven had nothing to do with, The Dream Child. In the end, the icon the film had challenged, the one whose success Craven was chasing, beat Horace Pinker at the box office. Shocker’s domestic total was $16.5 million, and the fifth Freddy movie made just over $22 million. That’s less than half what the previous Elm Street movie had made a year earlier, but it was still enough to overcome Horace Pinker.

While Shocker wasn’t successful enough at the box office to kick off the franchise it was supposed to lead to, and Alive Films didn’t last much longer as a company, it’s tough to feel cheated by the lack of sequels. Are they really necessary when Pinker already goes through multiple movies worth of changes within this one’s 109 minutes?

Shocker quickly developed a solid cult following, but someone checking it out for the first time more than thirty years down the line will have to be accepting of the issues its fans see as part of its charm. The film is a mish-mash of ideas that doesn’t really hold together. The fluctuating tone and the ridiculousness of it all is what earns the film a place in the heart of some viewers, while repelling others.

For audience members who find Shocker’s scattered ideas and tonal shifts to be off-putting, the movie is a mess and has been ever since it was released. But if a viewer can appreciate the craziness it has to offer and overlook the dodgy effects, it’s just as entertaining now as it was in 1989.

Those aren't the only videos I've written for the channel and there are more on the way, so I will be sharing another batch of videos here on Life Between Frames down the line. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Videos, because several cool videos are being added there every week.