Death Screams (1982) and the essential innocence of early slashers (Review)

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is one of those American TV shows which, like Little House on the Prairie and Leave it to Beaver, is remembered as a euphemism for cloying wholesomeness more than an actual show. If you were told that its main child star David Nelson later became a director, you might imagine him directing films like America, You’re Too Young to Die, his 1986 polemic about the perceived decline of America’s Christian values featuring Ronald Reagan. You might not imagine him directing Death Screams, a grisly, nudity-packed slasher featuring Playboy playmate and former hardcore star Susan Kiger. And yet, four years before he was working with the President, he did just that, and Arrow Films have plucked the result from obscurity.

Before the credits, you get a well-realised attack on a courting couple that made me wonder if the whole 1980s slasher boom was a delayed response to the Zodiac murders. After the credits, the film does indeed start to resemble a slasher movie by the child star of Ozzie and Harriet. We hear Dee Barton’s jazzy score, which would be inappropriately jaunty for a Smokey and the Bandit sequel, let alone this. We see a paperboy throwing a newspaper onto a neatly-trimmed lawn, and even though you know this classic Americana is going to be subverted, it’s just too corny: Blue Velvet this is not.

If I had to pick something from Arrow’s back catalogue to compare Death Screams to, it wouldn’t be a horror movie, it would be the Blaxploitation film Sheba Baby. The films share a conviction that the most entertaining way of getting the money up on screen is to spend a very long time at a state fair, although Sheba Baby’s director William Girdler does a much better job keeping the plot moving through the carnival. On a very entertaining commentary track, the crew of slasher movie podcast The Hysteria Continues praise the fairground scenes, saying they both build tension and allow us to feel more empathy with the victims by showing them at leisure. Fun as this commentary is, I was unconvinced on both counts. The state fair material just goes on, intersecting most convincingly with the horror material in a bizarre scene where a woman is shot through the chest with an arrow, then she runs away and gets on a carousel in order to facilitate a shot of her corpse being carried away as it activates.

The Hysteria Continues are all very amused by the implausibility of this on their commentary, as are several cast and crew members in the brand new behind-the-scenes documentary All the Fun of the Scare. (Kiger is absent, as is Nelson, who died in 2011) But nobody watches slasher movies for the quotidian realism, and the image of a dead body bobbing up and down on a fairground ride is odd and memorable enough to justify the contortions the script takes to get there. Death Screams captures the slasher movie at an early stage of its evolution, before it became focused on iconic masked killers. At this point there is still a lot of the whodunnit in the genre’s DNA, so there’s a mentally handicapped peeping tom character who mainly exists to provide the reddest of red herrings. But Nelson definitely knows what the murder scenes need to look like, culminating in an unconvincing but satisfyingly rubbery head explosion.

There are some horror movies that are badly written, acted or directed, but have a kind of energy or scariness that a more tasteful, professional film would struggle to reach. I’m not even sure Death Screams is that kind of bad, it’s just weirdly hard to dislike. It has an essential innocence that has to be attributed to Nelson, although he didn’t always fit the stereotype you might have of him – his other acting credits include John Waters’s Cry-Baby and Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke. A measure of its sweetness is the decision to cast Kiger, whose first screen credit was the deeply alarming horror-hardcore hybrid Hot Nasties in 1976, as the virginal good girl. Kiger retired from public life shortly afterwards, having apparently achieved her dream of settling down and starting a family. It’s nice to think that, before she left the screen, she was cast in at least one film which allowed her to keep her shirt on.

Another reason why it’s easy to enjoy Death Screams despite its myriad flaws is Arrow’s package. Previously the film was only available on an infamous Vipco DVD that got the reels in the wrong order; sadly the Arrow release doesn’t offer you the chance to watch this accidental alternative cut but it has everything else you might need. There’s a crew commentary, an alternate opening credits sequence from when it was released under the title House of Death, the above-mentioned podcaster commentary and making-of documentary, and more. In recent years Arrow have been doing sterling work on the arthouse end of the spectrum, acquiring Second Run and Third Window as well as running their own, increasingly impressive, Arrow Academy collection. It’s nice to see they can still roll out the red carpet for a bargain-basement slasher, including a restoration job clear and cared-for enough to let you appreciate the craft in Nelson’s night scenes.

THANKS FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF DEATH SCREAMS

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