Sax and Violence: Stage Fright (Michele Soavi, 1987)

Here we are again! Issue #2 of Dead Teenagers is out today, April 15. You can pick it up at your local comic store or the usual digital retailers. If you're at the comic shop, you can also get a reprint of Dead Teenagers #1, which (unaccountably, but wonderfully) sold out its first print run. The deadline for pre-ordering Issue #3 is Monday, April 27, so get those orders in while you can.

In the meantime: In celebration of Dead Teenagers (though not dead teenagers) I'm covering some of my favorite slasher movies.

This is an embarrassing confession, but I have to make it: I do not find most slashers scary. Everyone has different things they respond to, in horror, and for me, it’s the destabilization of reality — I’m scared by the dreamlike, surreal atmosphere of (say) a David Lynch movie or a Junji Ito comic, by the sense that the rules of reality as I know them are breaking down. 

A guy with a knife is a very real threat, and a very physical one. Despite the cartoon physics and biologically impossible wound recovery you see in many slasher movies, “guy stabs you with a knife” is a scenario most of us can envision actually happening in our real lives, and we can also predict what would happen (we’d yell a lot and die). 

So, while I respect the craft of slashers, and while I can have a lot of fun watching slashers, I am not really ever that scared by slashers. Stage Fright is the exception. I watched it expecting your standard corny, sleazy mid-80s Italian knife crimes movie, and I got it, sort of. I was also primally shaken and disturbed: I felt the presence of evil, in this movie, in a very vivid and upsetting way. 

Now: Telling you this means I have to admit that the only slasher movie that really scares me contains a dance sequence where the serial killer jetes along the city streets wearing a giant foam owl head, and where his “victim” (who is obviously a dummy) is launched eight feet in the air before coming to earth as (somehow) an actual person, and that the movie both begins and ends with a woman in a Marilyn Monroe costume playing a frantic saxophone solo. 

So, like I say: Embarrassing. But surreal atmosphere comes in many forms, and this one works for me, so let’s dive in.