Tourist Trap (Schmoeller, 1979)

“Every year young people disappear.”

As is so often the case with horror cinema, a good horror film doesn’t necessarily equate with a good film. In a phenomenon particular to the horror genre – a phenomenon ensconced in the genre’s extreme valuation of a “bottom line” – good acting, narrative coherence, and refined direction are rather dispensable qualities. In the end, a horror film’s reputation, its standing, if you will, depends on its ability to scare, its capacity to disturb the mind and set the heart racing. For this reason, it isn’t hard to comprehend why David Schmoeller’s Tourist Trap remains a fairly well regarded work (within the horror community) in spite of its numerous ineptitudes.

Tourist Trap seems a familiar film when discussed in broad terms. It depicts a group of college-age kids trapped in a strange place, terrorized by a masked man, and killed one by one. Released in 1979, sandwiched between John Carpenter’s archetypal Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham’s influential Friday the 13th (1980), it is rather enticing to lump Schmoeller’s film in with these exemplars as part of the 80’s slasher cycle. However, such comparisons remain apt only at a surface level, for although Tourist Trap’s narrative template suggests a strong relation to slasher cinema, Schmoeller has created a film that operates far outside the precise and restrictive boundaries of that much loved sub-genre.

In place of the brazen sexuality, gruesome violence, and formulaic predictability that have come to define the slasher film, an unmistakable surfeit of bizarreness marks every inch of Tourist Trap. Everything from Pino Donaggio’s eclectic, effectively creepy score (a strange amalgamation of instruments and dissonant vocal fragments), to Chuck Connors’s unhinged performance (an audacious attempt at late-stage career redefinition), to the disturbingly rigid (and later on not so rigid) mannequins, to Schmoeller’s willful, baffling commingling of incongruous horror references (Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, House of Wax), suggests Schmoeller’s attempt to root audience fear in the film’s connective tissue, its eerie atmosphere, rather than in increasingly extravagant murder set pieces.

Unsurprisingly, it is in these peculiarities that the film’s true value is located. Schmoeller generates fear with his environment, through an unsettling collage of disembodied sounds and grotesque facades that stay with you long after the film ends. Importance is placed upon the process by which we arrive at the film’s relatively few deaths, rather than upon the deaths themselves, forcing us to pay attention to the pervasive, distressing details of the environment. Collectively they generate an eerie, macabre ambiance so thick and unyielding that Tourist Trap remains frightening and at times even threatening despite the absence of any real gore and the low body count. Partially obscured by the heavy fog of terror are the elements that conspire to sink the film, namely the amateurish acting (save, of course, for Connors) and the many ridiculous logical inconsistencies. And though the film is a crude, flawed, easily ridiculed mechanism with all the subtlety of a jackhammer, it is certainly unique and strangely effective. Not to mention it’s got a killer final shot.

Film Rating: C+/B-
Scare Factor: B

View Date: 10/7
Shocktober Horror Film Count: #7

Lemora: A Child's Tale Of The Supernatural (Blackburn, 1973)

“We are one and the same, and until you realize that, you can never be happy.”

The Vampire mythos has served as one of the foundations of cinematic horror from its very beginnings. Since his debut in F.W. Murnau’s seminal horror masterpiece Nosferatu, the most famous screen vampire, Count Dracula, has appeared in countless film and television productions. Despite the incredible proliferation of vampirism in cinema, I am certain that there has never been a Vampire film quite like Richard Blackburn’s Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural.

An undeniable cult item – the film received only a limited theatrical release in 1975, two years after its completion, was banned by the Catholic League of Decency, and languished in obscurity for nearly two decades until it was released on video in the mid-90’s – Lemora thrills in the way that only a cult item can. An initial viewing of Blackburn’s film, bathed in ethereal midnight blues and inky blacks (punctuated occasionally by blasts of blood red), is invariably accompanied by a sense of discovery, the feeling of unearthing cinematic “buried treasure.”

A vampire film with a stark lesbian undercurrent, steeped in Catholicism, and filtered through the prisms of Freudian & Lacanian psychology, Lemora is a startlingly original creation. Set in the prohibition era, the film follows the virginal 13-year-old “singing angel” Lila Lee (Cheryl Smith) on a macabre odyssey to see her dying gangster father in the mysterious town of Asteroth (one of the film’s highlights is the sinister bus ride to the aforementioned town). A strange, Southern Gothic fever dream (the film has been aptly described as an adult fairytale) and a sly, potent allegory of sexual repression and awakening (not to mention gender politics), Blackburn’s film (his only directorial effort) is a truly singular, visionary work of horror cinema.

Now, before I go too far, or indulge myself in hyperbole, a bit of honesty is in order. Those of you lacking a fair bit of experience with horror cinema, and probably more pertinently low-budget filmmaking, may not appreciate Lemora to the same degree as I do. It is, without a doubt, a cheaply made film, as evidenced by the shoddy (though strangely creepy) make-up effects. And excepting Smith, who, as the protagonist Lila, glides through the film with a hypnotizing somnambulant grace, concessions must be made for the crude performances.

It is a testament then to the strength and persistence of Blackburn’s vision, that in the face of these noticeable shortcomings, Lemora still emerges as an exceptional film, one that only engenders greater esteem in retrospect. Budgetary constraints never seem to get in the way of the film’s lofty aspirations, and though Blackburn only rarely taps directly into our fear nerve, the bizarre and pervasive ambiance he orchestrates floats like a spectre in the mind. The world he creates generates a brilliant sense of unease and uncertainty, and this is the film’s true accomplishment. In the final analysis, Lemora remains as ambitious and unusual an entry into the horror pantheon as you are ever likely to find.

Film: A-/B+
Scare Factor: C-

View Date: 10/2
Shocktober Horror Film Count: #3