Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [67]
The actor was Kim Henkel, and while the movie opened and closed right away, receiving very little notice, their friendship blossomed, leading to discussions on how to make a movie that would really sell tickets. Taking a look at his resources and his expertise, Hooper knew it had to be horror.
Hooper and Henkel, who worked days as an illustrator for an educational company, met every night at Hooper’s house and talked over ideas. They watched the original Frankenstein together as well as Night of the Living Dead. Hooper, building on the loves of his childhood, immediately thought of a dreamlike tale about the supernatural. “We referred to the way we put the story together as ‘nightmare syntax,’” Henkel said. Hooper liked this idea, but also wanted the movie to be funny, in a dark, satiric way, a twisted spin on ordinary life. He had recently seen A Clockwork Orange and was drawn to the comic incongruity of the moral ugliness on-screen being played to the music of Beethoven and Singin’ in the Rain. The beautiful, thought Hooper, can often be found in the horrible. He wanted the movie to be about how easy it is to shut off your conscience when stuck in extreme circumstances.
Henkel suggested they build upon the story of Hansel and Gretel, an inspired choice of source material for a horror film. After all, the Brothers Grimm fairy tale begins with abandonment and moves on to kidnapping, imprisonment, suggestions of cannibalism, and finally a happy ending: the burning of an old woman. Hooper picked up the thought and brought it closer to Night of the Living Dead, borrowing the idea of being trapped in a remote house away from the rest of the world. Growing up in various small towns in Texas, he understood how eerie that kind of separation could be, and how it could serve as a useful metaphor. What remained was the inevitable Monster Problem. Hooper originally imagined a troll under a bridge. Henkel hated that idea.
“I had a visceral response to that kind of thing as being a little, I don’t know . . . The underlying social motivations get stripped out, if it moves in that direction, if you go with the supernatural,” he says. “I had never seen horror films and wasn’t particularly interested, not because I had any negative attitude toward them. It’s the tools they employ—the tension, the suspense—I didn’t care for that, still don’t.”
Henkel proposed that they should try something closer to home. He raised certain questions again and again: What would make someone turn into a killer? Why would a human being commit violence? Drawing on their own experience in Texas, they came up with the idea of a family of redneck Luddites who saw their way of life under threat. Like many people they knew, these uneducated locals had been laid off, made expendable because of changes in industry. Their quiet southern town was falling apart, and they blamed it on the modern world and took it out on the poor teenagers visiting from out of town. To be sure, Henkel was talking about crazy people, but not so crazy that they weren’t recognizable. Unlike many of the makers of New Horror, he began with the question of how to psychologically motivate the killers.
For a Texas redneck feeling under threat, Henkel, who spoke with a thick drawl, thought the idea that they would kill innocent outsiders didn’t seem that outrageous. You needed something more grotesque. So he added the fact that these killers eat people. Hooper thought it was a hilarious idea and took it a step further. It was not only about the terror of finding yourself in the middle of nowhere confronted by a savage monster. It was about feeling so different, so alienated that it seems you are a savage monster. Drawing on his love for the sentimental aspects of classic Universal horror movies, in particular how the monster in Frankenstein earned your sympathy, Hooper set out to make a monster who was unloved and bullied himself.
BY THE SEVENTIES, the werewolf had gone out of fashion in the movies, and the Frankenstein monster grumbled