Last Saturday night, a dozen folks from the Great Lake Association of Horror Writers gathered for our annual holiday party of eggnog, finger food (which Elsa took a bit TOO seriously) and holiday themed horror movies. There are many to choose from and this year’s selection was Rare Exports (2010), The GingerDead Man (2005) and Silent Night, Deadly Night Part Two. An awesome assemblage.
My thoughts on the delightful Rare Exports are already known and it was fun to watch the film again. Notable highlights for this crowd were our horrifying ignorance of world geography, the revelation that folks above the Arctic Circle subsist entirely on reindeer meat and gingerbread and of course, the anatomically correct monsters. Ah yes, the Europeans. Rare Exports is hardly a “bad” movie so it was somewhat difficult to ridicule — but this crowd certainly rose to the challenge.
The GingerDead Man was far easier to supplement with witty commentary. From what I was able to figure out, it is a heart warming tale of a family-owned bakery threatened by a chain store… and then more directly threatened by an animated gingerbread man. SPOILER: it sucks — but in that charming bad movie kind of suckage. Our refrain became: And exactly why aren’t you leaving the bakery right now? This tale of baked goods gone bad, er, evil was a perfect stinker.
But the highlight of the evening, for me at least, was Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. By this point in the evening, the crowd was warmed up and raucous so the actual dialogue was difficult to piece out. Assessed as a purely visual document, the work is superb experimental cinema if for no other reasons that the bold acting choices of the spree killer protagonist and the work’s extremely avant-garde story structure. Actor Eric Freeman brilliantly interprets the rigorously non-psychological lead character in an act of pure performance. In particular, Freeman punctuates his lines with a highly mannered, post-semiotic semaphore of eyebrow gestures, often animating every syllable with a separate flick of his brow. The effect is unnerving and erects a portrayal of the unhinged murderer in a way that never resorts to simplistic realism. I checked wikipedia for Freeman’s later work but his whereabouts is listed as unknown. A pity.
Even surpassing Eric Freeman’s tour de force performance is the daring narrative structure of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. The work forsakes a pedestrian linear narrative, going beyond traditional non-linear tropes to what I would dub an “anti-linear” story structure. This brief post can hardly do adequate justice to its innovation. For the first 50 minutes of the film, the younger brother of the original spree killer recounts the events of the first movie to a psychologist. These incidents are illustrated through scenes purporting to be flashbacks to the first film. If this was a work of psychological realism, we might be tempted to ask why Billy is able to have such detailed memories of events he didn’t witness. This apparent conundrum can only be resolved when these “flashbacks” are read as purely dissociated psychotic fantasies; that is, read Part 2 as is Part 1 didn’t exist. The key to this interpretation involves a sequence where two policemen are called in to apprehend a man dressed like Santa, presumably the Santa killer but who turns out to be a father dressing up for his kids. The only possible explanation for this scene given the wrap-around situation of Billy narrating to a psychologist, is that this whole event is a deranged fantasy, specifically a psychotic power projection. Step aside, Hitchcock; Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is truly psycho.
Elsa and I left warmed as much by the fond friendship and clever repartee as by the glow of the plasma TV — but I’ve come to expect such merriment from the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers. Given the staggering number of scary films with holiday themes, I can only wonder what horrors will await us at next year’s party.