Masters of Horror: Jenifer

Cody Hamman looks at the fourth entry in the Masters of Horror anthology series, Dario Argento's Jenifer.

For many, including myself, Steven Weber will always be best remembered for playing the comedic role of Brian Hackett in the sitcom Wings, which ran for eight seasons, from 1990 to 1997. But even when he was bringing the laughs on a weekly basis on Wings, Weber was also earning some genre cred, working on episodes of Tales from the Crypt and The Outer Limits, appearing in the thrillers Single White Female and The Temp, staking vampires in the Mel Brooks comedy Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and even starring in the mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. That version of The Shining was directed by Mick Garris – and several years after Wings came to an end, Garris and Weber reunited on Masters of Horror, an anthology series that Garris created for Showtime. And this is where Weber earned some major genre cred, as he not only starred in one of the episodes of Masters of Horror, he also wrote the script for the episode – which was directed by the legendary Dario Argento, whose credits include Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebrae, Opera, Two Evil Eyes, and much more.

Argento and Weber’s Jenifer was the fourth episode of Masters of Horror to reach the airwaves, and, like the previous three episodes, it was an adaptation of existing material. Don Coscarelli’s Incident On and Off a Mountain Road was based on a Joe R. Lansdale short story, Stuart Gordon’s Dreams in the Witch-House was based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, and Tobe Hooper’s Dance of the Dead was based on a Richard Matheson story. When he was hired to write an episode, Weber drew inspiration from a 1974 issue of the horror anthology comic book series Creepy. For issue #63 of that comic, writer Bruce Jones and artist Bernie Wrightson crafted a twisted, disturbing story about a man named Jim who rescues a young girl (the title character) from an axe-wielding attacker while in hunting in a forest. Jenifer is hideously deformed, with bulbous, black eyes. She seems to have mental disabilities and she’s non-verbal, but she also seems to be some kind of supernatural force. She quickly gains some kind of “hold” over Jim, who takes her into his home – and even after her presence drives away his wife and children and Jenifer drowns the family cat, and even though he doesn’t like it when Jenifer joins him in bed at night, he can’t seem to get rid of her.

For his adaptation, Weber changed the name of the lead character from Jim to Frank Spivey, and Frank also happens to be the character he wrote for himself to play. Not only does he have a different name, but also a different occupation: instead of a businessman on a hunting trip, Frank is a police detective who’s taking a lunch break in a secluded area with his dimwitted partner Spacey (Laurie Brunetti) when he has to save a young woman from a cleaver-wielding maniac. This maniac is later revealed to have been a formerly well-to-do businessman who lost everything, so this adaptation could be seen as a follow-up of sorts to the comic book story in that way – but it can’t be entirely considered a follow-up, because Frank goes through some of the exact same stuff Jim did.

Played by Carrie Anne Fleming under some gross-out makeup (though she gets to show her own face in some fantasy visions), Jenifer is depicted in this live-action version of the story in basically the same way she was depicted in the Creepy comic story... and yet, when his wife Ruby (Brenda James) tries to initiate sex with him that night, he doesn’t get really excited until he starts thinking about Jenifer. He gets so excited and rough that it upsets his wife. The following day, when he finds out that Jenifer has been placed in an institution with a bad reputation, he decides to bring her home to live with him, Ruby, his “prince of darkness” son Pete (Harris Allan), and their ill-fated cat.

Just as Jones wrote back in ‘74, the presence of Jenifer in the lead character’s life quickly causes his home life to fall apart. The cat is killed and devoured, Ruby and Pete move out, and Frank sinks into alcoholism while engaging in a highly sexually-charged relationship with Jenifer, who may look like a morlock from the neck up, but does – as multiple characters point out – have a banging body. Then, when Jenifer starts consuming random humans, Frank has to find a way to get rid of her or at least take her to a place where she’ll never cross paths with another person she might eat.

As you can tell from the title of the show and the list of directors that worked on it just over the first four episodes, Masters of Horror was designed to be a showcase for some of the horror genre’s greatest contributors. So when Dario Argento signed on to take the helm of an episode, many horror fans probably expected him to do something along the lines of the giallo killer thrillers he’s best known for – but Jenifer is absolutely nothing like any of the other Argento credits listed above. Aside from boasting a score composed by his frequent collaborator Claudio Simonetti, Jenifer doesn’t have much of a noticeable Argento stamp on it. This may have been disappointing to some of his fans... but it doesn’t mean that Jenifer is bad at all. This is very much the sort of story you would expect to see pop up in an anthology series (and, after all, it originated in an anthology comic book), and Argento did a fine job bringing this twisted tale to the screen in the most effectively troubling and nauseating way possible. Weber, who also wrote an episode of The Outer Limits back in the day, did a good job writing the script as well.

Jenifer isn’t one of my favorite Masters of Horror episodes and it doesn’t scream Argento, but it’s a worthy addition to the series.

In the twenty years since Jenifer aired, Weber has worked on some other horror projects: a couple more Stephen King adaptations, a few episodes of Channel Zero, a movie called Crawlspace, an episode of Sleepy Hollow... but his visits to the genre have been sporadic. Which is okay, because he already earned an incredible achievement within the horror genre when he had the chance to write a 58-minute Dario Argento movie.