The Big Picture - ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and the Most Extreme, Disreputable Movies Ever

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

We’re looking at the latest chapter in the ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ story, now available on Netflix, and the history of extreme, depraved, disgusting, and shocking movies with writer, director, and returning champion Alex Ross Perry. Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Alex Ross Perry Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about going to extremes. On today's show, we're looking at the latest chapter in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre story that's now available on Netflix, and the history of extreme, depraved, disgusting, and shocking movies. Joining me to do so was my first and only call for this conversation. It's writer, director, cinephile, bard of discomfort, and returning champion Alex Ross Perry. Alex, how do you feel about that delineation I just gave you? It's very lofty. I hope that anybody listening feels like it's remotely earned and not just like, I'm here because I could be, because you knew that I would be available. That's not true. I like to target very specific

moments to have conversations with you, big sweeping conversations about the contemporary movie landscape or movie history. I feel like Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a really good entree. I got to admit, I was listening to Blank Check a few months ago, and I heard your opus on the Halloween episode. You delivered an incredible history, a little pocket history of, I guess, what, slasher horror, like sort of late 60s into late 70s horror films. And my breath was taken away. It was one of the best podcast performances I'd heard in a while. So I thought, hey, how do we follow that up, but only by going a little bit more extreme with Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Yeah. I mean, I appreciate that. I spent four months forming my outline for that show off and on and not to just throw people to another program, but it's worth a listen if you have extra time.

I basically, what I did for it was talked about how Halloween, which is a 1978 movie, is sort of, I tried to contextualize it as the end result of a decade from 1968 onward with two forms of horror. One of which was the idea of studio horror filmmaking that I posit is beginning for that decade with Rosemary's Baby, which is 1968. And the other one is the world of independent horror, which 1968, I posit, is Night of the Living Dead. And kind of through Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which obviously is right in the middle of that decade, we can kind of talk about both here in a way. But I sort of traced two parallel trajectories of 10 years of what the studios were

making in terms of horror and 10 years of how independent filmmakers came to shape the genre. And in doing so, was able to go on about one of my favorite points to make and has been for years since I worked in a video store, which is the history of independent film is the history of lowbrow exploitation, genre, cinema, pornography, horror, these these things this is independent filmmaking before independent filmmaking was viewed as like a narrative thing to do for intimate stories that can't be told otherwise so that's a perfect entree into texas chainsaw massacre because what started out as the lowest of low budget independent exploitation horror has now become Netflix IP in the span of less than 50 years. And so this is the 10th Texas

Chainsaw Massacre movie that was released this weekend. And it seems like a lot of people are watching it. It doesn't seem like a lot of people are loving it. I would say I was very mixed on this movie. It's a straight sequel to the original and i would say if you try to look at the chronology of the 10 movies it's a little bit head-spinning one does not often seem to be very related to the other they shift pretty radically in tone over time um i guess does this franchise make sense to you as a franchise well in a way i mean yes and no like it makes sense because i put this kind of i found this on bloody disgusting this kind of infographic of the uh the four different timelines that this franchise now has um which we can talk about it makes sense to me because growing up, the four originals existed as a compact four-movie franchise.

So smaller than your Halloweens, which at the time I was getting into these things had six. But bigger than your Exorcists or things like that that had three, poltergeists as well so it made sense to me as a franchise then um the original the toby hooper canon sequel the the new line one and then the sort of remake reboot sequel next generation one um and certainly then it makes sense that a few years later they just remake it um i mean it's hard i can't it's like saying like does something make sense to you that's always existed that you know exists and that you know is real it's like oh it makes sense to me because it is a thing um but it is interesting because if you look at the other things you would call a horror franchise 70s 80s i mean that's really kind of where you have to draw the line for something

like this not a lot of them come from uh something this independent this uh you know lowbrow call it video nasty experimental um in in its aesthetic most of them as franchises are like the Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, things like that. Yeah, it's an unusual thing. I guess part of it is it has incredible iconography in Leatherface. And for whatever reason, obviously it was a hit when it was released, and that also is a factor. But it having one of the kind of Mount Rushmore horror movie villain baddie figures, I guess plays a pretty significant factor into it. But I find that the like MCU-ification

of these kinds of movies is so confusing where there's like this desperate attempt to create continuity. And this kind of predates, I guess, the MCU because the Platinum Dunes films seem to be trying to create these whole universes. And then there's Texas Chainsaw 3D, which was released in 2013, which also seems to be a direct sequel to the original film. So they continuously keep making sequels to the original story, but they don't stretch the story out beyond the first four that you're talking about.

So the whole thing is a little bit head spinning to me. That being said, I do really like Texas Chainsaw movies. You know, I don't I don't know where it sits in like the hierarchy of those the Halloweens and the nightmares and the exorcists. But I will watch every single Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie once it is released. Do you do you feel similarly about it? I mean, it's the original is in my top 10 of all time. There are not 10 movies I love more that I've seen more times that I cherish more deeply as a experience, as something I spent my teenage years relishing, showing to other people um just everything about it is is extremely

important to me so i am i am here for all of it um it's it is just like this curious this curious object because like in this this bloody disgusting infographic i've mentioned like what just you know people not looking at it you have the original four that's the original timeline original two leather face colon part three and then the beginning the next generation whatever you want to call that one and then there's the remake of which there's the remake followed by a prequel um both platinum so it's like so they didn't just make a movie and they make a sequel they made a remake and then made a prequel so we don't we don't know what happens after that one and then um there's this kind of other timeline that we have here which is that the prequel 2016 2017 i think

leather face it's called not to be confused with like the 1991 new line Leatherface, which is a prequel to the original, followed by the 3D one you mentioned, which came out really close to the Platinum Dunes ones, but has nothing to do with them, and is a direct sequel. And then what we have here is another direct sequel, meaning that there are three direct sequels to the first movie, of which this is the third.

So it's Texas chainsaw two, three. And then there are two prequels, but only one of which is a true prequel to the original. This is, this is a lot. There's a lot to what just, just setting aside the original film,

which I agree is one of the best movies ever. What, what's your favorite of, of the remaining nine? It's the 2017. It's Leatherface. Okay, so why? I'm curious about that.

Hands down, the second best Texas Chainsaw movie. And I'm always amazed to find that people don't love this movie. To me, here at home, and my wife agrees, this is such an incredible, surprising film. It's visceral. It's compelling. Unlike all of these other ones, it adds something nice to the lore. It embellishes on the characters in a way that's like actually kind of worthwhile um and it you know it's made

by the filmmakers uh who made inside the the french horror film that i guess we'll be referencing again at some point when we're talking about other extreme films um so it has like this kind of nasty you know new, new French extreme aesthetic to it, but, but it is, and which is something else we can talk about that in my opinion tends to be missing from other versions of this. Isn't that version also just a little bit more sympathetic to Leatherface in a way, sort of like a open hearted tale of a traumatized boy.

It is. And you know, I, it is like the movie that's sort of you know a lot of these like the original ones expand on the family the sawyer family uh renamed the hewitt family and the remakes for unclear reasons and then this this this this french this french reboot obviously it's not a french film but it's you know it's made by french filmmakers like it is a movie that sort of asks unlike any of the other ones like i guess maybe the other prequel but not really like it asks hey do you do you ever think like what made leatherface this way and would you like to feel bad for him uh and see him as a as a

wounded youth who kind of makes a conscious choice to become Leatherface, the monster we all know and love. And I think that that is kind of one of the movie's greatest strengths. But also, like, in contrast with all the others in the franchise, and especially, unfortunately, this new one, like, it opens up this interesting conversation where it's like what is the thing about the texas chainsaw massacre that you like the most not you you or you me but like this new one sort of posits that the thing that it thinks people like the most is just is the idea that people are killed with a chainsaw in Texas and what I think invariably most people would say what I like the most is the idea of this this family and this this odd dynamic of this father and his son's leather face and the hitchhiker

uh at Chop Top and then you know the sort of idea of Grandpa's Upstairs. And it's sort of something that, you know, with the exception of maybe the Platinum Dunes remake, none of the movies really seem to find as interesting as I think every fan of the franchise finds to be interesting. So, and this 2017 one kind of approaches that with a little bit more integrity than it has any right to and to me is number two easily i would probably put toby hooper's sequel right behind that um and then i'd have to really think about it that is um the texas chainsaw massacre part two is is my favorite um but specifically because of what you said which which is that it's again, the family story. It's like,

and it obviously it's a, it's a comedy where the original is pure exploitation, grindhouse horror. Um, but it's really funny. Also written by LM kick Carson, which I don't think I realized, which is kind of amazing.

Yeah. That just makes it even more of like a, a what's it object. Yeah. It's, it's strange, but like it is, I mean,

we're like already lost in the weeds of parsing this 10 film saga and something i just wanted to mention that is is of interest is like it's also kind of amazing to me that you could still make this movie um today not because like you couldn't make a leatherface movie now but but this just seems like something that the rights to would be so convoluted. And almost every one of these 10 films has been released by a different company with very few exceptions. Like in my counting here,

it was one, two, three, four, five, six, kind of seven if you count Legendary and Netflix, different companies releasing 10 movies, which is outrageous that this hasn't just somehow become something that's locked behind a legal vault where no one can touch it anymore because the rights have been bought and sold half a dozen times. Yeah, we talked about that recently on the show where Friday the 13th, I think, is trapped in one of those legal disputes. And so there are no Friday the 13th modern reboots

at the moment. Maybe that will be resolved shortly. But we do have a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie. It's on Netflix. It's directed by David Blue Garcia. It's produced by Fede Alvarez. People may know from the Evil Dead films, the Evil Dead remake films, I should say. Like I said, this movie is not terribly warmly received. It's got a 31% tomato score. It's got a 35% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. I found it to be a very mixed bag. It's like half social commentary, I guess, as many horror films are. Half pure kill fest, as most Fede Alvarez films are.

It's an odd duck odd duck i would say ultimately does not work at all some people seem very very frustrated with it what was your take on this one um well what are what are the i mean other than the obvious like the frustrations as far as i can tell just from a quick glance at your your meta critics and so forth i mean it you know i don't really have any takes on it that are like radically, radically more sophisticated. Like I'm frustrated again, like this is a worthwhile endeavor to spend a corporate money making the 10th Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie. If I have, you know, if, if I'm frustrated by it, it's that I kind of do feel like the 2017 one raised the bar a little bit and it's but in

every sense of the word like in the way that this movie kind of tries to be the texas chainsaw massacre part two it actually just kind of feels like part 10 like it kind of does feel like and again i say i prefer this movie a lot but like the movie I'm about to mention, but you know, it feels more like Jason Takes Manhattan or something where it's like, and for our next chapter, this character is going to go to this place and kill these people. And those Friday movies really function well because it is kind of exciting to see Jason continue to expand and become somewhat more of a demonic spectral character and go on other adventures whereas this is just the idea that we're kind of stuck in one place really like on one drag one main street

um it like it just sort of lacks the thing that to me if someone were like we'll write down the top five things you love about this world the most, I would be like, well, the aesthetics first and foremost, the 16 millimeter poetry of that first movie is unmatched and a big part of why I love it so much. The sort of like the visceral quality of how like palpably gross and unpleasant everything in that house looks is very important. And then like the dynamic of this family and the insanity of dropping characters into this world that is so far beyond the pale of human comprehension. And those are like all things that are not present in this version at all, which isn't to say it doesn't have other things going for it. But those things to me that make the original very special are weirdly sidelined now.

But, you know, there are pretty exciting things in it. I mean, the violence is exciting to me and to be expected, and it does deliver what I feel like the level of gore one would hope for in something like this. But it's just kind of like a curious object, because it feels kind of like caught between two worlds. And again, the 2017 film, looking at this list of the other eight or nine movies, like the reason I think that movie is kind of remarkable is because I think, you know, it is the only one that feels like it's kind of made in like a nasty style, a French, a new French extremist style.

But all these other ones are just a little too clean to actually put you in the world of of the sawyer family yeah i feel like this one almost feels like it read the more elevated high-minded criticism of the original and tried to project a modern version of that criticism and didn't necessarily project the aesthetics of the original. Like the criticism is this is a post-Vietnam story that exploits the kind of like hippie fear colliding with a post-war society. And we see that, you know, in the backwoods of this country, there still exists a kind

of extreme violence. And so this movie takes the hippie ideal and transposes it onto a kind of like gentrifying hipster, wealthy, but subconsciously oblivious to the world at large kind of point of view. And that those people should become the victims and that Leatherface will seek his vengeance on anyone trying to adopt and destroy his land. And the movie seems to take like kind of a sneering attitude towards virtue signaling and the kind of like, like a modern progressive identity, I feel like, but it doesn't ultimately seem like super interested in that idea. It just wants to like put us in the context of that idea and then have fun. I do feel like, I mean, I agree with you. I feel like this level of horror violence on Netflix, distributed by Netflix, is kind of amazing to me. I guess I'm happy about that.

It may just be that Netflix identified that this was just really strong IP and maybe did not totally evaluate what they were getting themselves into. But at the end of the movie, you're just sort of like, I don't know. That was kind of an exercise in IP management and not an exercise in joyous movie making, whereas the original is one of the most joyful.

When you get to the end of the original Hooper film, you want to jump out of your chair and swing your arms around like Leatherface with the chainsaw. And this movie doesn't really

necessarily give you that. Certainly not. I mean, to be fair, I feel like the final 90 seconds of the movie are as close to the best part of the movie. It's a great kill.

The final kill is amazing. Also worth mentioning, this movie is 74 minutes long. That is a credit to it. I mean, it's actually kind of remarkable to somehow have either been forced into that or gotten away with it. with complete, you know, the third movie on a grindhouse double feature than something this huge of a legacy behind it, which is certainly perplexing. But, you know, like, as you say, if there's two sides of the coin, the original, and like, you can't compare this to it because it's inimitable, but it's the only thing you can compare it to unless you just want to say like, why did they make 2018 Halloween but do it with Leatherface?

But like, the original is about people who accidentally get lost and then find themselves trapped in this world. And what Leatherface is doing when Pa Sawyer finds out about it, he's so angry and he, you know, like, this is, I can't believe you've done it again. Whereas this does not, people in this do not get lost. They deliberately go to this place. And like, that is the difference. One is like, there are these places that are so far off the map that if you go there, you might never come back. And then this is like, there are places that have been, time has forgotten them and if you go to them you will

find all sorts of odd things there and it's like well i already know that i know that like places are full of odd people that have lived there the bank is foreclosed but they haven't moved versus like you're driving somewhere and you're just praying you don't get a flat tire because you might die which is something that could happen to anybody. Not just anybody would pull into a town and say, I am going to buy this town and kick out all of the current residents of it in favor of my nebulously defined rehabilitation, art project, Marfa, Texas type dreams. Do you think that movies like this need good guys and bad guys for lack of a better phrase because this movie obviously is completely disinterested in its its heroes i mean i guess you want you're meant to have some sympathy for the lc fisher character and i think the desire to put a school shootings

trauma backstory behind her character i felt a little bit needlessly overwrought to me. But aside from her, I found almost everybody else in the movie deplorable or boring, except for Leatherface, obviously. And so I guess, do you need a rooting interest when you're watching a movie like this? Or has, because you've seen everything and you know this space so well, is it more of an intellectual exercise for you? Well, I mean, i've seen the original probably 20 or more times at least six or seven of those in the theater other than sally and franklin i couldn't tell you the names of the characters in that movie and i don't think most people could either uh so so yes and no i mean it the movie does have fun with sort of the the two characters at its at

its core but in terms of like recent legacy sequels like the new scream does have a lot more to say about how to like define and distinguish these characters both from each other and within the franchise um but again this has that like part 10 feeling in a way of like these are the characters who we are serving up on a platter to be killed. And you may not know what order they will be killed in, but like, it doesn't even matter. So, don't even think about it. Let's just go with the flow here. Like early in the movie when this one girl, this blonde girl, they sort of find this old lady in an orphanage taking care of a hulking figure who later turns out is leatherface himself

who i guess in this movie has just been living in this orphanage since the events of the original um and then they like kick her out and they take her away in some sort of a paddy wagon and then this one girl's like i'll go with her you guys stay here and i was just like where is this girl going makes no sense i mean obviously it's okay for her to be the first one to die but like it is very odd that they're like i don't understand this measure of human empathy this character is supposed to have for this woman who's just being like sent away who immediately you know hyperventilates or something it does set up a beautiful cornfield sequence and i do love a good cornfield sequence but it is uh the first of many

deeply illogical moments in the film. Now, I don't really care necessarily if these movies make sense, quote unquote, but that was one that kind of pulls you right out of the situation. Well, there's a difference between characters in a horror movie saying, let's go sneak out into the woods and fool around, which is a bad decision, and characters in a movie saying,

I'm going to make an active decision for not selfishly, but also not selflessly either. It's just an odd plot beat in a movie that in 74 minutes really only has like six or seven plot beats. It's a good point. How old is Leatherface, Alex? Is the movie supposed to be, you know, is the original supposed, there's that little documentary segment that they're watching on the gas station TV at the beginning. Did they say it's supposed to have taken place in 74? I mean, I presume so. Right.

Or is it somehow that the, the original is supposed to have taken place in like 1998 and now we're in 2022. Simpsons, Simpsons and comic book trick of like, these things can't all have happened in the sixties or the nineties. Um, I don't know.

I mean, well, by the logic of the movie their face would be like 75 years old so that's just yeah well that's kind of how old michael myers is but also to be fair you don't necessarily know how old he is in the original i do feel like there's an argument to be made especially via the 2017 movie you know he could be like 17 or 18 years old like this big you know fat mongoloid child of a family whose other child uh chop top has gone to vietnam and has done these other things and that's kind of

like you know because chop chop he can't be that old if he's kind of a veteran type so his younger brother probably would be not not that old but nevertheless if we're saying that that's almost 50 years ago, he's at the youngest, 67, which is wrong, which is odd, but the new Halloween movies do this. It's fine. I guess that's true. I hadn't even really thought about the fact that Michael Myers is also in his late 60s. Anyhow, I guess this is just the problem with revitalizing this IP. You mentioned Chop Top and the family. This movie seems just widely disinterested in all of that history. I found that kind of a strange choice. It's curious, especially because kind of the one thing I knew about this, other than that the director had been fired a week into production and replaced with the

current filmmaker, was that it was billing itself as the sort of the proper Sally Hardesty is back legacy sequel, which is nothing if not exciting. And when I said to my wife, we're going to be watching this the night before I record, I was like, oh, so the premise of this one is like, it's, you know, 50 years later and now Sally's in it. And like, you could almost, you know, not literally blink and miss it, but that element, it takes up a very scant portion of the scant runtime which is odd because again like not that i think the new scream is like some masterpiece i found it

supremely enjoyable but like i feel like it strikes the right balance of the new characters and then the way the old characters come in mostly because they know who the old characters are so even when sally shows up here there isn't this sense of like oh it's that lady from the um documentary i saw at the gas station it's more just like here's this uh mission you know a shotgun toting texas ranger or something it's just like it's very odd especially because again not that anybody asked me but it feels like there's a legacy sequel to be made here with chop top mosley um who is like around he does like conventions and stuff and he owns his legacy as the hitchhiker. And it just feels like he's right there to come in and have 10, 15 minutes of insanity and just be the thing that fans would really be like, at least I feel seen in that regard. It does seem

like from my browsing, you can look at Rotten Tomatoes scores for this. For something like this, all I need to look at is the comments on Bloody Disgusting. I don't need to see what the top... I have no doubt what the top critics at all the newspapers would say in their reviews that get excerpted. But to look at the Bloody Disgusting review, which is like two out of five or something, and then read all the comments is is like this is the temperature of how this response is going down and people are uniformly disappointed with the handling of the sally legacy sequel element yeah you make a really good point which is that um i don't really trust national film critics on horror kind of period there are obviously some who are more open-minded or have seen everything or more excited about certain things but and i include myself in this because sometimes i i feel like i don't necessarily bring the right brain to certain

films and then i'll revisit it i had a recent example of this with malignant where the first time i watched it i was like whoa what is this and the second time i watched it i loved it and so like the it's a little bit tricky with this kind of material but this one in particular it does feel like there is some consensus around the fact that it just doesn't work, which is too bad. This gets into, you know, this point that I jotted down here for us. And by the way, I mean, you always mention putting together these outlines or dockets. People should know this is pretty comprehensive stuff you put together. Thank you.

I do my best. You know, episode by episode. It's actually quite a bit of work. It's not just hitting record and riffing. You actually really put a lot in here. But the sort of like the critical appraisal of something is like, in 1974, I'm sure very few serious high-minded critics at such a boom time for American cinema would have been like, there's actually like beautiful filmmaking poetry in the 16 millimeter photography in this film, which also has a lot to say about Vietnam, much like things like The

Deer Hunter that we're giving Oscars to. And then over time, people, of course, come around on these things. So, the contemporary response to this sort of thing is often irrelevant aside from the cultural response to it. And that makes it these kinds of things that are very valuable to fan communities because fans will decide what they will elevate and what they will not. And it's worth mentioning that I feel like the recent release of Jackass has given culture another example of this, which is something that the Monday after the first one opened, my freshman year film professor said, it's time for us to all figure out what else we can do for a living because movies are dead and the number one movie in the country is not a movie. And then 20 years later,

people are like, well, it goes without saying this is an established masterpiece of fiction, nonfiction, and lowbrow, highbrow film. And so, it's like the way that time sort of catches up with these things, either enveloping them into a corporate machine or anointing them culturally correct is nothing if not peculiar. Well, let me ask you a question about that point in particular, because you have now pointed out something about Scream and Jackass. They are sort of quasi-contemporaneous, and those are two things that at the time of their release i absolutely adored but i probably didn't intellectualize particularly did you unlike your professor did you like the jackass movie when you first saw it or did you come around to the idea of it being important did not come around to the idea i was i've been watching the show since the day it

premiered it was amazing it was always amazing but I wouldn't at the time, there was no, you know, there was no language October 2002 to talk about this in terms of criticism or art that really didn't come until later. So that's why I'm very skeptical about how many people are heaping praise upon the new one. I really want to know like what they thought of this TV show in the first movie, because I know what I thought of it. It changed my life and showed me new ways of getting into trouble. And, you know, it's not to say you can't change your mind on something, but there was no critical language for a movie like this in 1974 or for Jackass, the TV show in 2001, to talk about it in the terms that it's now talked

about, which is just like an interesting way that, you know, time swallows itself. And it's just like, it's not like people were walking out of this movie from the grindhouse. You know, again, this movie opened in 74, but it would have played for like four or five years, just like perpetually, which is one of the reasons that prints of it were always very scarce in like the 90s and early 2000s is because the prints were just run to shreds. It's not like it was distributed by a clean company or a studio, you know, the Bryanston distribution. I don't even know what else they would have released. So, like, it just would have existed forever, but people wouldn't have said, like, want to pause it in the greatest decade of the art form that we've ever seen.

This is one of the most substantial films, but now it's the kind of thing that gets into the, the national film registry when they announced their annual 25 or whatever in the way that like heavy metal bands, there's always one that get into the rock and roll hall of fame or are at least publicly shortlisted for it. All the way of saying, time is very strange. Yeah, that's kind of a perfect entree, I think,

into the bigger discussion here about extremity in movies and what is depraved and what should be celebrated because it does feel like culturally we've just arrived at the conclusion that Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original film, is deeply important to the history of our culture and has been analyzed and picked over and remade and reimagined.

And there are a lot of other films that feature some of the same tropes or methodology or point of view or financial background that have not been celebrated. But this big scope of extremism and extreme filmmaking i think basically has two tracks and tell me if you agree with this there is the sexual tract and there's the violent tract and those are really the two core things that define whether a movie is either too extreme for audiences or too disturbing or need to be managed by the MPAA or international distribution. Do you agree with the Tulane approach to this thing?

Yeah, I think that makes sense, you know, in sort of shelf categorization terms. But again, like that's because these were the original independent productions. And the two things you couldn't show on screen when these started getting made in the 50s or 60s was extreme sexuality or extreme violence. We're in a perfect world both. So these sort of became the two ways of getting people out of the house to see things that were unavailable any other way and completely forbidden. So I've created, I guess, close to 10 categories here. When you looked at this, when you looked at this outline, did you feel like like i see you've added one or two additions but for the most part do you feel like do you feel like

i've grabbed on to like do i have it here am i missing anything i mean we could talk about this i mean every one of these you could talk about for an hour yes i agree to to to say to use uh exhibit a in your list nudist films and nudie cuties, like, no, we don't need to belabor that, but you really could have a lot of fun talking about the way that, like, these European sex education films became, public hygiene films became the only way of going to see moving pictures of naked people, and then, like, became this kind of pocket genre of things that would have been made, you know, in the South and then played not in big cities or, you know, on the fourth part of a Times Square bill. And we really could just talk about that

for, and I hope you do someday. I hope you, I hope some movie comes out that gives you the occasion to have the nudie cutie episode, much like another episode that's coming that I'll tease that you've promised will happen someday if COVID keeps happening. But yeah, just as one final thing, as we transition into this to mention, and I don't, you know, I'm sure this is something that's on your radar very soon, but you know, in about two or three weeks, I think we have a new Ty West movie coming out. Yes, we do. It's what you want from this. It's incredible. It's, I mean, I can't, I don't want to say about it. I don't want to oversell it, but like oversell it but like i'm seeing it on wednesday alex you're you're getting out in front

of a great week and stuff i mean it will just this movie will have unfortunately for the you know years of people spent making it probably have faded from your memory by then largely um except for the party bus sequence which is quite delightful um but when you see x you will be like you see it's not so hard to just do this. Like you just need to give it to someone who 100% is on the wavelength of this. And I'm sure you'll be talking about that in some capacity at some point.

But I will hopefully talking to Ty on the show. Yeah. You watch this and you're like, why can't they just nail it? And you watch that and you're like, if someone had just said, Ty, just we're going to give you like a little bit more money to shoot another 20 minutes and make Leatherface in this, it would be

the second best takes the Chainsaw Massacre movie that's ever been made. Just even if he just pops up, you know, magically. So, so just as a way of saying, I just want to help and, you know, put the word out for something that I think people are really going to enjoy. But, but back, back to your, your, your precious nudie cutie subcategory. Well, I didn't know where to start. You know, like I think you described ably what the nudie cuties were. And, you know, it's a little bit

of an important bridge category of movie because like people like Francis Ford Coppola were involved in making those films. And obviously Herschel Gordon-Lewis, who went on to become one of the masters of gore, did some work in that space. And they were these kind of like proto, not quite pornography, but these kind of illicit films that people would pay to see. And it was like kind of a kitschy night out, with what Russ Meyer would do in the following 10 years. And then those movies were, if not outright banned, harder to see and not something you would necessarily discuss in mixed company, but something that people still wanted. And they still want to this day, honestly.

Yeah, the reason I sort of zoned out for a second and started trying to look something up is you're saying like, when does it start? And there's this movie from 1945 called Mom and Dad, which is, you know, which is exploitation film. It's a hygiene film. It's a sex hygiene movie. And, you know, just sort of is a thinly veiled excuse to have discussions and images of sexual education and sexual knowledge, but it's really sexual presentation. So, if we're looking for a beginning, in my mind, and maybe the reason that jumped in my mind is because that's historically considered, if not the dawn of it, certainly the most successful that created something of a subgenre. But again, like, it's not an original point, and therefore it's not really worth going too deep into, but, like, you know, you go from these into your Russ Meyer movies, a lot of, like, the Herschel Gordon Lewis ones, especially those nudie films, like, you know, they're just people standing around, like, they really are, which means they could be exhibited as documentaries, which means they don't have to have the same scrutiny, but they're, you know, by modern

standards, very curious and interesting filmmaking, but overwhelmingly dull and untitillating uh even by like i'm a teenager at the video store kind of standards and you know they did all these things you know goldilocks and the three bears b-a-r-e of course and like fun little movies where people are just kind of frolicking around in fields um and then again like you have your russ meyer here and things like that but not an original point but you just have to remind people like there's no other way to see anything even remotely like this the appeal of going to a theater and watching nudists like play volleyball or whatever is just like this is the only way or place you can see that unless you know somebody who has a projector and hosts stag parties so was were all of these things

available at kim's when you were working there at kim's video in the 2000s so you could rent and like a lot of these nudie cuties yeah well they're all on the you know essential label something weird video which you know at the time must have had thousands uh of, all two or three movies to a package. And most of those are 65 minutes long, much like the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre nearly is. So you could throw those on and watch all three of those movies on a disc within a shift. And it would only take up about four hours of an eight-hour shift. You just have them on and they just have looping music basically and non-sync sound and just, yeah, they're very, very abstract in an odd way

and kind of perfect background entertainment. So I feel like those movies are in this lineage of the Russ Meyer and the sexploitation movies. And that does kind of dovetail into the rise of Deep Throat, which is true pornography, but a mainstream version of pornography, which became very popular. So you have this run between, like you said,

the post-war American filmmaking period all the way through the early 70s. And then you get deeper stuff like Ilse She-Wolf of the SS and things like that that start to fall into those categories. But that is primarily the brief sexual history. I think you also have a lot of European cinema, like Summer with Monica, which is a Bergman film, but that a lot of European cinema like Summer with Monica which is a Bergman film but that a lot of people went to go see just because there was a nude woman in the movie and then later like I Am Curious Yellow things like that that

were sort of pornographic if not pornography and that there was this sense that there was something illicit going on in those movies too but for the most part I feel like the sexual films are fairly contained and the extreme kind of horror and violence is this much bigger wider space to analyze does that seem reasonable to you or am i missing something in the sex lane no i think that makes perfect sense

i mean you're you're i think you're in the correct sex lane if you want to be. I mean, it does just become, and again, like, you know, criticism has now caught up with this. And a lot of these films have been made available on labels, you know, like Vinegar Syndrome and things like that. But the sort of like the industry, the New York 70s adult film industry is, you know, sort of shown on the TV show, The Deuce, like people now know that that really was an industry with its own ecosystem beyond the sort of heyday of Boogie Nights type stuff. Like the New York, you know, the three-day wonders or whatever they were called. I think that's it. If not that, something like that. There's movies that were shot in three days, 80-minute movie, 50 minutes of sex, 30 minutes of dodgy acting. And it became like, you know, if there was a moment where it was almost above ground, it then kind of became back underground for quite a while. And, you know, I mean, that's just the thing that the depths of those titles is still something

people have no idea about. But to watch those movies, and again, the deuce showed this quite well like the locations in them the the ingenuity and the filmmaking the the cleverness the like use of repetitive location like it's all incredibly clever independent thinking um you know most of them made for fifty thousand dollars hundred thousand dollars or something i feel like a lot of those films are now considered through an aesthetic lens in a way that they were not when they were originally released. When they were originally released, they were pure product meant for consumption in dark rooms. And now there is in part because of the rise of some of these distributors, there's a desire to better understand what the intention was of some of these films. Who were the great performers? Were there visionary filmmakers in this space? And in many cases, there were not, but in some cases there were you know some of those people are celebrated now today in a way that they were not at the time of the release um yeah i mean it's a bottomless well of of of names and and titles but uh in the interest of of not you know again these are all future episodes for you to consider um i don't think we're going to get around to the You know when X This might be what you're talking about

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At participating restaurants in Canada It's time for Tim's. Okay, let's talk about violent stuff. I feel like you know this space very, very well. I think that there are the same polarity that you point out in horror, I think is true just more broadly in violent movies. I think there are violent Hollywood films to this day that are funded by studios. You know, The Wild Bunch and A Clockwork Orange,

I think, are two that jump out to people. And this primarily starts, I would say, in the 60s. There are not a ton of examples that I could find from the 1950s of gory or deeply violent films. Am I missing anything there? Well, again, you've already set this up with the, with the 74 chainsaw. Like this is all just, I mean, this doesn't, you know, the prior to the broadcasting of images of the Vietnam war, the idea of violence was different to people. Um, so there's really no place for it. Obviously these kinds of sixties outliers are a little bit ahead of the curve, but, um, coming from a pretty pure place at the time. But nevertheless, the idea of things being that visceral had not really struck anybody as something that they should or could be creating.

So there's this explosion in the 1970s, like you say, post-war. There's huge hits, The Exorcist, people like Wes craven hit the scene and they make really transgressive movies last house on the left and the hills have eyes obviously toby hooper is here movies that are even kind of dirtier under the fingernails like i spit on your grave then we have this whole wave of italian and european horror masters argento comes along lucio Fulci is is is working at that time Giallo becomes a very active subgenre of film and do you do you consider that the golden period the greatest period of horror movie making you know Last House on the Left is a great example of something that would at the time be seen as as ridiculous to be talking about 40 years later as having there be nine of them and one of them being released by like a major corporation but i you know i'm sure for most people that in texas chainsaw we're seen as like these are the same exact kind of thing and the other thing that i sort of uh elaborated on when i did the blank check halloween is that this decade also

is like the rise of the american serial killer and manson 69 and all the others uh ted bundy john wayne gacy all of these were largely happening between 68 and 78 so this decade is also in the press and in the son of sam like if it's not vietnam it's the idea that someone's going to break into your house and slaughter you and your family, which is not something that existed in the 50s in the same way or at all necessarily. Zodiac killers around this same time. That's the other thing that's both desensitizing people to violence, but also making them have an insatiable appetite for it, which these movies step in to satisfy. Again, you mentioned some of these ones coming from Europe, which you can't even ascribe this culture. What do the Italians care about Vietnam or

American serial killers? So, I've never even really begun to understand where they were coming from in the way that it's very clear where American violence was coming from. Obviously, they were coming out of a fascist period, and some of the more extreme films are Italian and German, which I'm sure is not a coincidence considering what somebody making films in the 60s or 70s would have grown up considering their culture as. Maybe there's more to it than that. I would like to learn that someday.

But I mean, this is just a golden period of just sleaze and totally just nastiness because that was what people wanted and that's what people were ready for. I feel like, you know, like you're saying, is this the, this is a great question. Is the 70s the golden age for this type of movie? And, you know, you have here at the top of your list, The Exorcist, which is maybe the only thing that crosses over from the official version of 70s American cinema to this other version. But it is now, I think, kind of inarguable that

the 70s is the greatest decade for both kinds of movies. No one in film school or in Easy Rider's Raging Bulls would be like, all these important films, The Godfather, you know, would carry this and that. Also, Last House, I mean, they would get a mention of Last House on the left and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but that's not really the official story that we tell ourselves about American cinema in the 70s. But it is obviously the correct story if you're taking it all into account, that's what's so fascinating about how much stock people put in top 10 lists. You know, it's like no one in 19,

January 75. I mean, not nobody, I'm sure somebody, but very few people would be like Texas chainsaw massacre is one of the top 10 films of 1974 because they would be looking at what's that means that conversation. Like I forget, you know, big movies of that yearfather too i think yeah where yeah so like now i i feel like

it's inarguable that texas handsaw massacre is one of the top 10 movies so like when you look at a top 10 list from the last five years like we don't know what those things are yet we don't really know how those things are going to snowball over time from something that exists in this one very specific way of consumption into to and say, this is a hugely meaningful movie that will resonate for the next 50 years in the way that maybe not Texas Chainsaw, but something like it does? I mean, I would almost have to have a sidebar conversation about how I don't, I don't know how possible that is considering how different viewing habits are. Because there is nothing more exciting from 74 up to 2000 than somebody like me saying to my friends you've got to see this movie i'm not even gonna tell you anything

about it we're just gonna put it on and press play i'm not even gonna tell you what it's called we're just gonna watch this movie and certainly that doesn't exist in the same way but i mean i could say i could say one of my own movies is a joke which i'm sure would be uh indifferently received but uh i mean i don't know not identified that it was your own and just see who how many could say one of my own movies is a joke which i'm sure would be uh and and differently received but uh i mean i don't know not identified that it was your own and just see who how many people can draw it together unfortunately i'm sure not many um that's not true but like i can tell you i can tell you this whatever the answer to that is is not a movie that's going straight to streaming that is going to be like swallowed up in the algorithm within a week whatever that is is, is going to be something that has a much more organic path ahead of it. But you know, we'll

talk about French extremism again in a minute, which we've already done with the 2017 Leatherface, but like, it's not like people knew when Martyrs came out that that was like the purest shit in the world. I didn't hear about it until several years later. Somebody has to mention it. Somebody hears it mentioned on a podcast. Now you talk to horror people, everyone's like, yeah, martyrs, of course, martyrs. That's the movie. That's the one. That's the one that goes further than anything else. But it's not like that was known immediately. It's not like it was appearing on top 10 lists of the year, even perhaps of the decade. But now in 10 years, it might be regarded as the most important horror movie of the 2010s. So, I agree with you. It's not actually a 2010s movie. It's a 2008 movie. I don't think I was even made aware of it until 2013 or something like that. But that's a movie

that I did not... It's probably not when I saw it. Yes, I did not even put it down here. Well, we're jumping ahead a little bit. Let me just quickly say, at the risk of zooming past 20 years of movies, there are some things in the 80s that I think are relevant to this conversation, but so much of it is so known and understood because so much of it went so deeply mainstream. Obviously, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street and the reams and reams of horror movies

that came in the subsequent decade, some of which are great, many of which are being reclaimed right now by a nostalgic generation that is looking back on it. There are now like, there's like seven hours worth of documentary

looking into 80s horror films on Shudder right now called In Search of Darkness, part one and part two. And it's effectively an encyclopedic look back at almost every single horror movie released

in that decade. There's a lot I like and a lot I have an emotional attachment to. But for whatever reason, it was like the culture was just ready and less angsty, I think, about some of these movies. And so they don't feel as, I didn't feel the need to necessarily like identify all of the extremes of the 1980s. Am I overlooking any key movies from that time that really pushed the boundaries? I mean, probably in my sort

of like thinking you know again i was just looking at your video nasties lists and stuff to prepare for this like there are plenty of things there that i love but the crucial difference if there is one is that by then a decade removed from a lot of these things like something like the texas chainsaw massacre seems like it comes from nowhere it that you don't it's something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems like it comes from nowhere. It that you don't it's much like the Blair Witch. It's like I don't understand who made this. I don't know how this got made. I don't know how these images were put in front of a camera. I don't recognize any of these people. This has like this mysterious power over me because of all of that and within a a decade, the industry has

seen that there is money to be made in this. So the pipeline for these things is now very clean. And the ability to kind of confuse people in the way that this film or something like Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave, the sort of found object, mysterious, horrifying nature of some of these grindhouse sensations is gone when it's just, now it's just the horror industry. And I mean, I'm sure I could just come up with 10 80s things, but that would just be slashers and wonderful films like that that I enjoy. I feel like the only, not the only place, but one of the key places you can look for for 80s films is that really push the boundaries is Europe. I feel like The Beyond is an example of a movie

that was reclaimed in the late 90s, Fulci's movie. And that is a movie that is at times a genuinely difficult to watch and really, really intense and beautiful and kind of so phantasmagoric and fascinating. There are a couple of other examples of that. Obviously, like the sort of middle period Argento movies are very, very intense. But the American movies are a lot of fun. And there's a little bit of like tongue in cheek, I think, to a lot of the execution. And so it doesn't feel like as extreme and as is this really happening as a lot of the 70s american films do simultaneous to that though we do get like a little bit of the rise obviously vhs is a big part of this story

and the rise of like tape trading and these curios these found objects of that era you know i when i first um reached out to you about this i i think i threw Faces of Death and Bumfights in a conversation together and they're not necessarily contemporaneous, but that is an era of, it's sort of like, it's two ends of an era

that I assume you were very intimate with having spent some time at Kim's video. Well, I mean, this is where you can finally reveal that you've offered a Bumfights episode

at some point in the future. You have now skipped past many things in your carefully constructed outline, which I don't want to shortchange because you're absolutely right. The sort of the way to maintain that kind of mysterious otherness was these European films as nudie films and things like I Am Curious and Summer monica began as nudity and you know sexploitation films this sort of these imports maintained this mysterious allure um you know like this movie that just was on criterion and uh shutter angst that you know many people were not familiar with like um the only movie made by this filmmaker. So, it is just like, even to see it today, you have to ask, like, where did this come from? How did this get made? What is

happening here? Why does this exist? And that power is still very, very valuable in the way that saying, here's Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 10, you'll never ask those questions again. And you know, you've asked for a sort of five list and i'm looking at it here and it does seem that four of the films i put on it are european films from roughly this era in terms of the the exciting disreputable films uh but obviously there's many great american films of just video store recommendations and things like you know the slayer is like a great movie that arrow put out on blu-ray a few years ago that i'd never seen and dead and buried and movies like that that are slightly more violent and and kind of gross than whatever horror sequels right the 13th

part three were coming out in those same years but um kind of still have the power to shock because they are still quite quite handmade and unpleasant looking um but yeah i mean if you want we can we can talk about bum fights but i i don't i don't yet but i i want to just like point out you have the incomplete bum fights over your shoulder on your on your shelf there it's quite a lot taking up quite a lot of space that's not true alex that's uh i look forward to the the instagram post one day that's just a stack of bum fights that you say you know let's do this uh in um i can't tell if it was middle school or high school when did bum fights really rise was it like 97 99 when was this happening yeah i think like late 90s i mean that's the other thing like yes that sounds right and again if we're talking about the rise of these

things in the 70s is this sort of yeah post serial killer post post Vietnam, post Charles Whitman era of American violence. Like the rise of these things that you've earmarked here in the nineties and you, you know, you note things like portrait of a serial killer and natural born killers, like Henry, very low budget, independent, natural born killers, studio Oscar caliber thing. But like, again, just like the cycles of violence become much more appealing to people when the culture is ready for violence again. So then you can take Faces of Death, previously a very verboten and hushed of object, and then somehow over time that becomes ordering a tape of bumfights off of the cable advertisement.

Yeah. I think though the other thing that comes into this period and what the nineties does is the internet and the internet creates this, this conversation around things that were otherwise, if you didn't have a friend who was into this stuff, you could be alone. I had a couple of friends who introduced me to this entire world who introduced me to Argento and who introduced me to, um, I spit on your grave and a lot of stuff that at 16 and 17 was really mind expanding and fascinating. It got me excited about the genres, but if you didn't have people like that in your life,

you kind of found them on the internet. And that has kind of continued to be true. Now there are like huge communities of horror and extreme violence fans online. You know, there's always a lot of attention paid to the torture porn era of horror and that as a post-9-11, post-Abu Ghraib, post-Middle East conflict born out of that period of time. But what do you account for in the 90s? Why was there this rash of deeply violent films in the

independent cinema and in the mainstream cinema at that time, both in, and 80s. And by the 90s, just whatever sense of decorum or decency had remained throughout our parents' generation was finally gone. And we were finally living, beyond violence, we were finally living in a fully vulgar and debased world. And this is things that, this is none of these things I say with any judgment, but this is post-Satanic panic, heavy metal. This is post-gangster rap. This is like in a cultural moment where not just violence, but everything that was previously not mainstream or spoken of is somehow getting a foothold in the mainstream and that's a long 20-year journey from things that were strictly to be seen in theaters with a trench coat on to now you know the internet is making things available but also like as i'm

sure you remember like the sort of accessibility of things like the soft core, like the Playboy VHS is like, they sold those at the mall. Yeah. Like that's, that, that's, that's not like going somewhere that you're going to maybe get rated when you buy it, like, and not going to see it in theater. Like they had these things at Suncoast and you could just purchase them like it's just it's that certainly was not happening before then and then it happened for like 10 years and then the internet happened but it does seem to have desensitized people to things that were previously only to be whispered and then somehow via this you get the something you can't even get them all bumfights and and you And you can't get it at Blockbuster, but it exists on the same consumer format

as everything else you already own, but you have to buy it on TV because it's too hot for stores. I feel like there was also this kind of culture of managed anarchy that people got excited about. You mentioned Jackass earlier. I feel like Beavis and Butthead was a part of this. Skate videos were a part of this. And bumfights felt like a

natural extension of that too, where it was sort of like verite madness that was happening in the world at a time. And maybe it was because it felt like the whole country just had its restrictor played off. I think if you were making the CNN decade documentary about bumfights, you might point to say what was happening in the White House and the way that the president was being impeached and the way that our discourse had grown more vulgar, as you say. And it just felt like everything had gone haywire. This was also in the time of Kimbo Slice becoming a phenomenon in the world. And figures like this, almost like real-life vigilante heroes in a very kind of strange and perverse way

all of those things rising to the fore and it made the world seem safer for these things i don't know if that was actually true and a lot of the stuff we're talking about right now if you're 25 you might be listening to this episode and thinking yourself like what the hell are these guys talking about because it does feel fairly far away it doesn't feel like we're in a more puritanical moment and a more like culture-controlled moment than the late 90s. Yeah, I mean, we haven't even, you know, we can't and shouldn't go into this. But like, you can't even get to any of this without mentioning at the beginning of the 90s is a phenomenon of a movie where a guy gets his ear cut off. Yeah. a movie where a guy gets his ear cut off. And you started to have culturally prominent, acclaimed, mainstream, not mainstream adjacent, but like actually mainstream figures

selling violence to people that they had ingested via all these things that, you know, you wrote down and we kind of moved past. Extreme arthouse films, hyper-violent Hong Kong films, Giallo films that would have not been available culturally at all. They would not have been on the shelves at Blockbuster to most people. Maybe they would have been on cable, but basically you had to know where to find those. And now you have those things being siphoned through these wonderful kind of polyglot remix artists like Tarantino that present things, the global scope of violence and sexuality now being filtered into

Hollywood movie star entertainment was certainly a new thing at that time, as has been noted over and over again, and will not be elaborated on further here. But it's just kind of undeniable that that was a significant factor in what you're talking about. Yeah, I just want to make a quick point about that, actually, before we get stuck on a Tarantino jag. There was a recent conversation on the Press Box podcast, which is on our podcast network, that Brian Curtis had with Ty Burr and Owen Gleiberman about the heyday of Entertainment Weekly. And the editor-in-chief of Entertainment Weekly at the time of the release of Pulp Fiction, James Seymour, did not like that movie.

And he pointed out that it was not necessarily the filmmaking, but that that film was the mainstreaming of a sadism that he felt like was dangerous in the culture. And that seems like such a prissy and fussy reading of that time. But I think it's also fair to say that Tarantino, not just the movies he made, but his taste and the things that he valorized, some of the Hong Kong films that you're talking about, like John Woo rising in the culture, created a space where you could re-release the beyond in theaters, created a space where you could say, old boy is one of the most exciting movies in the world. And in some respects, I think he widened the cultural taste of American moviegoers.

But in many ways, he did do that thing that James Seymour was nervous about. And that's kind of fascinating to look at, maybe not explicitly Reservoir Dogs, but the work that he was doing in that time. And obviously, there are a bunch of other filmmakers working at the same time who are doing similar things, who are pushing the extremes of violence in the movies. But it's all pretty radical and it seems like it kicked the doors down in a serious way. I mean, it's just so undeniable and it's worth pointing out that people like that always lose. They're always proven wrong. Whatever the thing is that they're the most horrified or afraid of ends up somehow becoming

culturally accepted or ubiquitous to the extent that you can clutch your pearls about Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and you can clutch your pearls about Showgirls and then to show that person in 95 upset about Showgirls and Pulp Fiction what television would look like 10 years later, which is more violent and more sexual than these films, they would be like, oh, so I just lose. So, much like my professor who hated Jackass, if I could just show him the contemporary response to the fourth one, it'd be like, oh, so I don't win this battle, do I? And those people always lose those battles. It's never, like, there's never, you know, Tipper Gore never keeps the genie in the bottle in terms of

profanity. It's always like this huge fight that just the only thing the losers can do is try to get ahead of how they're going to live with themselves once the culture goes exactly where they don't want it to, which is kind of great. I mean, that's the way that satanic panic can say that heavy metal is influencing our children negatively, but now nobody thinks that. And these things are as popular as ever or more popular, and in some cases, even institutionally approved. So, history tends to slant towards what's cool, at least in terms of what people are deathly trying to warn people away from as some omen of the culture going into the toilet.

So I feel like in the last 20 years or so, we've had extensions of a lot of the things that were born in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but not necessarily any new evolutions. So we have the torture porn era, which I mentioned, and you get films like Saw and the hostile films, and you get the French extremism, you know, high tension and some of those filmmakers who then end up coming to the United States. We get the Platinum Dunes horror remakes, including two Texas Chainsaw films. We get these, you know, brutal Miike movies, you know, Audition and Ichi the Killer

and a handful of other films. But I don't feel like we were necessarily like pushing towards anything that is unseen before am i am i wrong about that well there's i mean i think by the end of the 20th century there's really nothing left yeah until now i feel like you know but then occasionally yes like and these are not examples of things that are hyper extreme uh disreputable that you've not seen before but you think that you've seen it all and then Blair Witch is something you've never seen before and then found footage becomes viable and then you think you've seen it all and then Unfriended shows you this kind of screen life

horror and then suddenly that is a viable way to tell a story then you have Unfriended Dark Web and Host and things like that and it's's not that these are dealing with visual things or stories that are unseen or untold, but they're just become new ways of telling them in the way that Last House on the Left is a new way of telling a Bergman film about getting revenge for a sexual crime that happens against somebody you care about. It's the same movie. It's the same story. It's a remake in its own way, but it's not like it's inventing something new. It's just like dragging it through the American gutter and then representing it in a way. So, I feel like that's all you can hope for in the way that critics at the time would have said, well, Tarantino's not showing us anything new. I've seen John Woo films. I've seen Melville films. So there's nothing new here.

But then to the other 99% of people who watch it, they're like, well, this is brand new. This is all brand new to me. What do you think when you see a Gaspar No film or Lars von Trier film or maybe even like a Hanukkah film, like Funny Games? Do you feel like those are a part of this conversation? I feel like, I mean, I don't know. You'd have to be present at the time. Some of these things seem quite scandalous. Irreversible, I remember, was hyped when I was at an age to appreciate something that seemed too dangerous to be publicly acceptable. And I like baiser moi was the other kind of french extreme sex violence film that came out right around that same time uh for which a poster still hangs on the 12th street cinema village poster wow uh right off of university place in greenwich

village but you know those things were like i'm sure I stand alone if I had a, if I was five years older, I would have remembered the way that what would have then not been called discourse around that film and then the sort of Gaspar Noy film. But now he's like, you know, like an institution now. He's like the grand old man of like French provocations and provocative cinema. And it's like, nobody goes to see in one of his new films being like, man, this I'm very nervous about how extreme this will be. And saying like, I wonder what he's done this time, because now I know the language and Vontre.

I mean, he operates in like, you know, sometimes he'll make just like the most heartbreaking tender movies, like breaking the waves or dancer in the dark that are beautiful and tragic. And then other times he just clearly wants to, you know, be a stinker and get violent but it's just you know again like the europeans can always impress people this is the other thing that i always think about when you see things like yeah parasite being sweeping everything in the world, I'm just like, oh, most people only see one foreign film a year.

Like, to people like ourselves, like, you cover the New York Film Festival or Cannes or whatever, and you see 15 films of fairly astonishing quality. And then you see the way most people react to the one foreign film they see a year, and they're like, I've never seen, this is the most incredible storytelling. It's like, oh, this is the only foreign film you've seen this year. Most foreign films are this good or better. At least the ones we see, you know, minted by a few festivals. So, it's the same kind of thing where it's like, if you don't see very much, you can be blown away by anything. And if you're constantly prowling for all horror and all things that are going to be upsetting and violent, then it's very hard to

make you say, well, this I've never seen before. So when somebody like me or you or Chris Ryan is like, yeah, this horror movie goes somewhere that I've never seen, then it's like, well, I should probably listen up because this one seems like it's being spoken of in the correct way. That's a good entree into where we're at right now, because I was trying to think of what defines the 2010s and the 20s. And there's not a lot under the sun in a in a horror mode that is surprising to me these days and maybe I've just seen too much I know you've seen even more than I have there were a few films that I think have gotten headlines I think the human centipede is probably foremost among them as the franchise of anxiety around how far is too far, even though those films always seemed like one

big joke to me. Never saw it. Never seen a minute of them. Yeah. I, you know, no interest. I mean, obviously I'll watch literally almost anything that contains even shreds of what I like. And I hear about that. And by the time the person's finished describing it to me, I'm like, okay, I've seen it. I, I, this is just, this is just not exciting to me. It is the ultimate no there there movie. It is all in the title and you're done once you get past it. There have been a few others. I think some of them have been tonal.

You know, Kill List is one that I think is very tonal for people that feels like there's a kind of electricity in that movie that it feels very dangerous, if not as always shocking as something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 74. A Serbian film I found on a couple of lists. I think people have pointed to that as something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 74. A Serbian film I found on a couple of lists. I think people have pointed to that as something that is pushing the level of

extreme. What else defines this time for you? I mean, the difference is that in the sort of the Don DeLillo cycle of American desensitization to violence, like by the 2010s, there's like a one out of three chance that you'll look on the front page of the New York Times and see a video of some journalist being decapitated or somebody being shot by the police and dying. And this is couched by a disclaimer, but nevertheless, you can stream the video and it's the news. And if people thought like battlefield images of Vietnam, like in hearts and minds and that kind of like elegant photography of that era was shocking. The fact that like you can just bring up actual demise and loss of life and it's no longer, I mean, you're talking like the long

50-year crawl out of the grindhouse of how hard it was to see images like this. And then, you know, on the sexual side, like, impropriety of celebrity leaks. And, like, the internet has just taken the things that were so forbidden and made them so quotidian to the point that they've lost their power to shock and all they can do now is just upset people, which is, you know, shocking, exciting filmmaking or storytelling or visceral images, that's very fun. Things that are just upsetting, there's no excitement about that. So if it's like De Palma's movie Redacted, it's like, well, what's the movie about watching soldiers torture and

kill people? I've seen, unfortunately, I've actually seen footage of this and it people like i've seen unfortunately i've actually seen footage of this and it's like watching this movie will not make me feel like i'm enjoying myself because this is like a real thing i feel like the one thing that kind of walks this line pretty well lately is the card counter which takes the you know the the torture the real the american torture industry but doesn't make a torture porn spectacle of it it just kind of uses it as the character's backstory much like the somewhat tasteless school shooting backstory in this movie i do feel like the the new version of extreme for lack of a better word and these films don't necessarily fit neatly into the conversation we're having here but is really

more in the the daily wires venture into film production and the run-hide fights of the world, which are attempting to grapple with some of the more extreme aspects of our culture, but are doing so from a quote-unquote conservative lens, whether they're actually conservative films or not, I think is probably debatable. I guess there's another one that's out recently called Shut In, which I've not had a chance to see, but those feel more about the discourse beyond the movie. They're not actually about what's in the movie. They're about who gets to make movies and why. And that becomes a different kind of fight about propriety that

I'm a lot less interested in kind of wading through in the culture. Yeah. I mean, Shut In, is that the Vincent Gallo movie that just came out? It is, yeah. Yeah. So you'll do an episode on out? It is, yeah. Yeah. So you'll do an episode on the Daily Wire's film studio. Yeah. And Buffalo 66 and Brown Bunny also as well. We'll kind of win them all together.

Well, you've kind of taken my joke now and ruined it with two indisputable masterpieces. But I mean, I feel like that's, you know, violence wouldn't upset people as much now as fundamental opposition. That's true. So I don't really, I just don't know. I mean, people seem more upset by folks having viewpoints they don't agree with than they do with the idea of fake death and carnage on screen. And certainly, this was so exciting when there can still be genre films that go somewhere that are appealing and why we would always want to watch a good one because, yeah, it's hard to say what that is. But again, I'm sure you'll look back and there'll be something clear in 10 years. And I don't know, the torture porn thing kind of ran aground. And then what did that give us? That gave gave us found footage that went from like hyper violent to like very, very

quiet and calm and eerie. And then we all kind of started living in more of a surveillance state by our own design with our devices and so forth. So maybe now there's still not that many screen life horror films, but the ones that there are always quite good. Almost, they're almost uniformly good. It's really funny. But only because, you know, you could have said the same that there are are always quite good. They're almost uniformly good. It's really funny. But only because, you know,

you could have said the same thing about found footage after three years. That's true. I guess once we get into the mid-2020s, we may feel differently. Before we go, can you give me some of your favorites of this category? Yeah, I mean,

and I didn't write them in the list so that you could be surprised. I can't wait. And, you know, like I said, four of these are European. Do you have five? I mean, obviously, we don't need...

Mine are... You filled yours in. I've just started to fill mine in. I mean, mine are... When I do this with you, I like to do something that is very... I like my five

to be straightforward. I'll do my five very, very quickly because all of these movies are movies I've talked about before. Number five is The Beyond. I've mentioned it a couple of times here.

The Fulci movie, which is this, like, mind-expanding movie about hell operating underneath a hotel Argento's Deep Red which I've written about talked about many many times the movie that kind of opened my mind to this whole world high tension we didn't really talk too much about the French extremism but that is an absolute masterpiece Possession which is now like a hit movie to like, it's like, that's no longer, that's not a card that you can play to people and say, I've seen Possession three times in theaters

because it had such a big, I guess that was a 40th anniversary reissue last year, but is one of the coolest and craziest movies ever made. And TCM, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, how can you not, you said that that's one of your 10 favorite films of all time in the world of extremity, that the masterpiece um is that is that your number one as well no i mean i i didn't put that on this list because i thought this you know i wanted to go a little bit a little bit

deeper and you know i like to try to stump you i know like even the last time we talked when we were talking about great movies you might not have seen or inaccessible i was like you know possession like you still can't get that movie. And then I didn't know that, like, two months later, it was going to be widely re-released and fully remastered. But that's, and Out of the Blue, I mentioned as well, is like, that movie's not out there. It's hard to see.

And now that, too, has been restored and released. So there's hope for everything. Maybe you can will a couple of things into the mainstream by uttering their names right here. That was something that you did. You pulled that off. These that I have here, these are not super inaccessible. Okay. So yeah, so here's five movies off of the sort of, you know, great disreputable films. But what I wanted to target these two was movies that are, you know, in every case, something that somebody would say,

oh yeah, I've always been afraid to see that movie. Like something that its reputation precedes it in an unseemly way that makes somebody say like, yeah, everything I've heard about that movie makes me feel like I can't handle it. If you've heard of it at all. So, so you did yours five to one. So number five, I put pieces, which is a film I'm very fond of. Love it. Which, you know, to tie it into our episode, the tagline is, you don't have to go to Texas to have a chainsaw massacre. It's a Spanish film. It's incredibly visceral. It's very nasty.

It's about somebody who's cutting up bodies and sewing them into other body parts. There's like nothing subtle about it it's very very grotesque but has this wonderful kind of euro sleaze uh aesthetic filtered through an american story as a lot of these european films do uh should basically be available i believe i don't think it's that hard to find uh the number four is a film called who can kill a child have never seen it you never seen who can kill a child nope great film um a film that really grapples with the uh the central question of the title and a film that you know at the time of my sort of deepest appreciation of it there's i think it's hostile to that just like ends with like the exact same button as this movie. Not at all surprising, but an incredibly, uh, an incredibly unpleasant film, uh, about murderous children, which is

something that is still very taboo that people don't like to be confronted by. Um, number three, and it's the only one that I feel like is, this is a very basic pick, but Cannibal Holocaust to me, it's just like, it's just a transcendently great film i really do love it it is an italian film that engaged you know again set in america partially filmed in new york uh but again has this crossover because uh the guy in it kern his last name is he's like a porn actor but he's in the movie and it's it's just it's just that you can't it's it's a grand daddy of this kind of thing you can't get away from how upsetting it is it's just it's just that you can't it's it's a granddaddy of this kind of thing you can't get away from how upsetting it is it got a couple chances to see prince of it years ago

at midnight screenings in new york and then at some point you know there's like the big nice two disc dvd of it that i'm sure has been replaced by a better edition but at some point i got my wife to watch it and yeah she had like a physical emotional reaction to it and had to stop which just says to me like it still works like the power of this movie it doesn't have like a physical emotional reaction to it and had to stop, which just says to me, like, it still works. Like the power of this movie, it doesn't have like a carbon half-life. The power does not go down every year. It's extraordinary in that it is still as deeply, deeply upsetting as it was when it was first released. It is one of the few things that does not expire.

No. And obviously, you know, these Italian movies, they end up having a handful of wonky titles sometimes. It is something I'm surprised there is no cottage industry of sequels or pseudo sequels to in the way that to, again, tie it all back. I am fairly certain I remember hearing that Legendary, who's behind this new Texas Chainsaw movie, is making a Faces of Death movie. So Faces of Death has hardly come up at all, but that was also a sort of like quasi-crypto documentary compilation series of actual deaths that may or may not have ultimately been staged. I guess they were ultimately proved to be fake. Yeah, almost all of them are. There's seven or eight of these official Faces of Death. But I guess that title those three words are considered valuable enough ip and i remember being kind of interested in whatever was announced i wasn't like that's stupid i was like okay whatever it was there

was something about it that was interesting that made me think like i guess this is the world we live in now where faces of death is ip uh yes a Faces of Death shirt. I'm a big fan of it. I feel like there was this other movie around this time that I want to say is called Killing of America. Which is, looks like I'm right, which is a Japanese documentary, 1982, partially credited to Leonard Schrader schrader paul's brother yeah didn't remember that part yeah this is the same the tagline is before bowling for columbine and it is just about violence in america and it is full of um actual you know it's not faces of death it's full of actual actual violence and it's a very disturbing very interesting movie that's where i didn't realize it was from the 80s i guess i thought it was like

from the from the 90s um but yeah that is this kind of odd cottage industry of like do you like basically like that do you want to see a dead body kind of kind of cinema you should put yourself up for the faces of death ip extension with talent it was announced with talent that was maybe what was interesting i want to see your version of that i mean it would have to be real that would be my take on it my take on it is that's the you know how the tagline for jurassic world was the park is open and then it made a billion dollars yes my tagline would be it's literally real and it would similarly people would be like i'm trying to look yeah i have i have like some i have some i have a table over there called bizarre rituals

of the sacred and profane which is like the same kind of thing mondo kane is another thing we didn't get into that's right you know that's an entire sub-genre of i mean again you could you could do 10 part podcast on this sort of disreputable history of films that most people have overlooked but the kind of um you know the the shockumentary these these these realistic depictions of these foreign cultures and the and the ways that they sacrifice things which then become narrativized in something like cannibal holocaust um but mondo kane is great um it's one of those things where like it's a movie that mysteriously has an oscar nomination i believe for the score so it pops up in a kind of trivia context like that kind of thing fairly often but again this is something i feel like these things have maybe

fallen a little bit out of style but tomorrow i could read like netflix is rebooting the mondo kane universe with an eye towards film and television shows uh you never know you never know nothing would surprise me um moving moving on from our tangents here my number two is a film called der fan okay i've never seen it which is which is a german film again like why why do these cultures that endured such horrors produce such horrible and upsetting films? This movie is like, if you like Christian F, but find it to be too pleasant in its depiction of German youths who are warped in the head and are addicted to drugs and living a life of crime and terror, then this movie is for you. But it has really good news about it. Girls obsessed with a pop star.

Nothing else about it can or should be said, but it's a great film and really dark and perverse and interesting and truly, I think, transgressive and still possessing the ability to shock. I'm aware of the title, but I've never seen it. I'm a little bit reluctant to go hunting for it tonight for fear that my wife would be deeply concerned about me. But if you've recommended it, I'm intrigued. We're down to number one. What's your most depraved, disturbing, disreputable movie?

My number one and this really i'm just going to bring it right back home is deranged oh yeah which is i believe a 1974 film i love this film have you seen this i have this is like the real ed gein film right isn't this this is the real ed gein film now in order to bring this all back to where it started you know you talk about how silly it is and bizarre to consider that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre has become what you would call viable IP. But the original IP is Ed Gein himself. He is the sort of, and someday someone will do like the Spider-Man No Way Home of the Ed Gein universe, and they will bring together Ezra Cobb from Deranged and Leatherface and Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill from Science of the Lambs

and all of the cinematic children of Ed Gein will be brought into one film. It's not that I'm saying it really does sound great and really like that movie would be made for me. But, you know, just a brief refresher in closing, I'm talking about the dawn of the American serial killer in the 60s and 70s. Well, prior to that is Ed Gein, who all of these movies are based on. And every one of these movies takes parts of his story and fictionalizes them. He dug up his mother and kept her corpse in the house and wore some of her clothes. You have that in Psycho. He dug up other bodies and stored their body parts, the body parts of people he dug up in jars and turned them into clothing and wore their skin. That ends up in Signs of the Lambs and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But Deranged is kind of the

one that goes slightly further and slightly more just, it's more low-key and therefore it's more insane um it features some depending on if you get the uncut version or not him like eating out of a skull like it really leans into the the cannibalism of him that is alluded to in texas chainsaw massacre but it's sort of taken from subtext into text into this wonderful film. And I love it. I've always loved it. And it does not trump Texas Chainsaw Massacre for me as a horror film, but it's because it's less beautiful and less fun as just an experience. But it's a film love and a film i i'm always trying to recommend to people and i've gotten to see a print of it it's really fun to watch with a crowd and and

when i saw it as a child as a teenager you know i'd gotten like a bootleg tape of it on ebay or something and the movie's horrifying and it's upsetting and it stars roberts blossom who plays the old man in home alone by the way so you're coming into this with this sense of like, I grew up with this as the kindly old man who helps Kevin McAllister work through his issues with his family. And he's in Christine as well, I believe. Turns out he's in all these horror movies. But in this one, he's like killing people, skinning them, and eating them. And that brings its own psychological angle. And the movie is just deeply upsetting. I was watching it in my basement alone. Bootleg tape ends. It was on More Video, which was a great big bootleg company. And then immediately there's like a 20-minute documentary, which is basically what they're watching at the beginning of this Texas Chainsaw

movie. And the documentary is called like Ed Gein, The Butcher of Plainsville or something. And this documentary is the most upsetting. Like it's almost like I can't separate deranged from how great this little 20 minute piece is. Bone dry narration and all the images of his victims and just the story told in very, very straightforward fashion. And when that ended, the documentary at the end of the tape ended, you know, I was like 13 or 14 like i had to take the tape and hide the tape because to wake up in the middle of the night and see that tape looking at me was more than i could handle and i've since re-watched the documentary it doesn't have the same effect on me but i love it um and it's a it's a very it's a very very

nasty movie but a very great film incredible pics i can always count on you to to bring the real real deep cuts derfan in particular that's not that's off my radar i gotta get into that you will i i would be very surprised if you didn't enjoy it alex what do you do you want to plug do you anything you want to sell anything what do you you're you're just here gratis just being great being a historian i mean we i i there's the i mentioned vinegar syndrome earlier in terms of their work preserving american independent underground pornography and cinema their sister label ocn just released this very nice her smell uh special edition i believe you commented on and

you've sent me some excitement about it yeah i paid some money for it yeah yes it's it's worth a little bit of money if you like physical media it's a beautiful addition uh and it's not like we just this thing existed like i spent all of last summer working on this doing new features and commentaries and i'm really proud of it it's a nice object if you want to have it it's limited i think the run is like half sold out so don't don't delay but i'm very happy with it and it's a fun little thing to have and to to put on the shelf and other than that, I don't know. No, I mean, just making a bunch of music videos. Those are all coming out every couple of weeks, but I don't know when.

So I can't really plug any of them. But then, you know, they come out every so often. Okay. Buy the physical copy of Her Smell. Listen to the commentaries. If you liked listening to Alex on this podcast, you'll enjoy it. You'll enjoy all of his films. Alex, thank you, man.

I really appreciate it. Always happy to swing in. If you liked listening to Alex on this podcast, you'll enjoy it. You'll enjoy all of his films. Alex, thank you, man. I really appreciate it. Always happy to swing in. Thank you to Alex Ross Perry. And thank you to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for his work on this episode. Stay tuned later this week on The Big Picture. The movie draft finally returns me amanda dobbins chris ryan and the year 2018 we'll see you then