25 Years Later: Bette Davis and The 6th of October

Miss Davis with one of her many beloved dogs, Tibby.

As I look back on my life, the profound significance of October 6th is truly awesome. It all began when I was just over a a year old: although unbeknownst to me at the time, October 6th, 1982 was the commercial release date of Madonna’s first single, “Everybody”. I don’t think I need to detail the impact that the first rung on Madonna’s ladder would ultimately lead to in my own life. 

Exactly one year later was the more profound October 6th for me. That was the literally awesome day when I met my newborn sister Jennifer for the first time, just before she came home from the hospital. I've been blessed to share most of my life journey with her, for she truly became my first and most defining friend. 

On October 6th, 1991, our dog Frisky came into the lives of Jen and I, soon to be joined by her equally beloved sister Chloe. And they changed us both forever. 

In the interim between the October 6th milestones that saw Jennifer and Frisky become defining parts of my time here on Earth, there was the October 6th when the whole world lost an artist and a heroine and gained an angel and a Goddess. It is no exaggeration to say that my life would never be the same. 

I refer to the October 6th of 1989, and to the death of Bette Davis.

Looking back as an adult, and verifying my theories via a calendar for 1989, I can surmise that my family was spending Columbus Day weekend on Cape Cod. We took two cars to get there from where we lived at the time, and my Mom and my sister and I left after my Dad, who arrived at the house while we were still en route. I still remember my mother getting the call on the vintage car phone in our station wagon. It was my Dad, telling my Mom to tell me that Bette Davis had died. The news must have just broken, and I can imagine that that night it would have been all over CNN, which I remember him always watching. The next morning, there was a gorgeous photograph of her face on the front page of The Boston Herald when I came downstairs for breakfast. I vividly remember that moment of seeing that newspaper and, internally, making peace with the finality of her passing. And for nearly ten years, the photo that they selected was immaculately recreated in my memories, too. But I can no longer definitively recall which photograph it was, for I went on to become such an enamored fan that that part of my memory was eventually lost among hundreds of beautiful still photos of Miss Davis that I have since laid eyes on. I strongly believe it was either the most iconic photograph used in the promotion of William Wyler's The Letter or a publicity shot of Bette as Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve. I have trace memories of slightly longer hair, like Margo’s, yet with her face sparkling in that indescribable way it always did during the best years at Warner Bros. Either way, she looked utterly beautiful splashed across the whole cover of one of her hometown's two biggest newspapers.

I loved Bette Davis at the time that she died, which was why my father wanted my mother to be the one to break the news to me. But I had a narrowly focused way of showing idol worship at that age, for I was apt to be intensely fixated on only one era in a person’s career. In the case of Diana Ross, my favorite singer at the time, my obsession was all-consuming and yet relegated exclusively to her years with The Supremes. I worshipped Diana, but only as I would have in the 1960s, as if her incredible solo career had not even happened. (Thankfully, I got to enjoy the rest of her magnificent career many years later!) In the case of Bette Davis, I was fascinated and in awe of who she was in the 1980s, as opposed to any decades prior. This was based largely on the impact of being introduced to her via John Hough's infamous/brilliant Disney horror film The Watcher In The Woods. I had not only not been afraid of Bette Davis, as many traumatized members of my generation apparently were, but came away adoring her and apt to rewatch the film, and her performance, repeatedly. 

My adoration of Bette Davis was also based on her priceless talk show appearances. I gather that her ventures into late-night television were always legendary, but they seemed to take on a new air of importance in the 1980s, when she did not let her unbelievably debilitating stroke stop her from electrifying TV audiences with vivid recollections and a razor sharp wit. There was a relevance to the fact that the indomitable Bette Davis should come back from suffering a double mastectomy, a stroke, and a broken hip all within a year to still be the greatest star on the planet. The stroke dramatically affected her ever-copied persona, inhibiting her oft-imitated speech and limiting her defining use of body language. But she soldiered on, proving to the public that nothing could stop Bette Davis. She unconsciously formed a whole new set of mannerisms and speech patterns after the stroke, and it was this grande dame persona that I fell in love with as a child.

The place where I fell in love with Bette was, beautifully enough, Cape Cod, where her theater career blossomed at The Cape Playhouse. It was in Cape Cod where I have the most vivid memories of endlessly rewatching The Watcher In The Woods as well as seeing Bette on TV one afternoon thanks to a late-night TV appearance that my father taped for me the night before. (Like that fateful newspaper cover whose image has dimmed in my memories over the years, I cannot say with any certainty which Bette Davis interview(s) I watched as a child, because I have seen so many since.) And indeed it was en route to Cape Cod that I learned that the incredible life of Bette Davis had come to an end.

The Cape Playhouse, as photographed in 2010 for Cape Cod Today.

About nine months after Bette died, my family and I lost our beloved Grandma Mary, an “adopted grandmother” who had been as integral a part of my and my sister's childhood as both of our biological grandmothers. Grandma Mary’s death was the first loss to hit so close to home. Seven years later, my father lost his mother, and less than two months ago, my mother lost her mother. My sister and I have since found ourselves living in a world without the physical presence of the three matriarchs of our childhood and adulthood. These three losses in many ways are the defining signposts of my personal timeline up to this point. And the loss of Bette Davis preceded all three of them. 

I had already been fascinated with the concepts of life and death and differing perceptions of reality at an extremely young age. But the passing of Bette Davis was the first time my life was consciously affected by death. I was saddened and yet neither afraid of nor confused by the death of Bette Davis. Whether because of upbringing, intuition, or some profound spiritual influence, I put emotions aside and accepted the idea of life ending with death despite, or perhaps because of, a belief in the immortal spirit. My perspective on the sharp distinction between physical and spiritual death has never wavered. I do not feel guided in this by doctrine or delusion or fear, but rather by an internal understanding that has remained with me for as long as I remember being alive. I cannot say that Bette's death fully prepared me for any of the subsequent losses yet to be endured, but I believe that my actively accepting the notion of Bette Davis in spirit has absolutely guided me in the ensuing quarter century.

The back cover of the 1962 first edition of The Lonely Life.

I suppose you could say that I have always considered Bette Davis to be the standard-bearer for all of humanity. But it was not until a decade after her passing that I actually dove into her filmography. In 1999, I read her last book, This ‘n That, saw many of her classic films, and even wrote about Bette Davis (along with Madonna and Dario Argento) for an essay that apparently helped get me accepted into Emerson College. In the mid-2000s, a number of DVD releases reignited my interest in her career and prompted my finally reading her earlier autobiographies, The Lonely Life and Mother Goddam. I ADORED both books, but it was The Lonely Life that offered an unprecedented insight into the mind and heart of an individual who was far more like me than I could ever have realized simply by watching her films or even her dazzling interviews. I feel that I reaffirmed a deep spiritual bond with Bette Davis when I read The Lonely Life at the age of twenty-four. It has since become my favorite book, and based on what I have learned in the ensuing years, I believe it offers a very strong suggestion that Bette Davis was, like myself, an individual with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Bette's unrelentingly honest insights into her all-consuming drive, obsessive perfectionism, constant desire to work, and lifelong struggles with personal relationships were as relatable to me at twenty-four as they still are at thirty-two. These shared traits are also part of what  lead to my being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome/High Functioning Autism. There is much discussion online, thanks to communities like Wrong Planet and one of my personal heroes, Rudy Simone, about the nuances of ASD in individuals like myself and many female Aspies who "hide it" underneath a protective veil of feigned charisma. We may never know if Bette Davis was on the autistic spectrum, but based on evidence left behind, I believe she was. And I believe that that makes her an even greater role model to millions of people just like me.

Aside from being the greatest of artists and finest of human beings, Bette Davis epitomized Joseph L. Mankiewicz's notion of "a great star". I must admit that Bette has even eclipsed Madonna as my favorite star--but Madonna is, of course, a very close second! It really is something that Bette's best films, from any given era of her career, still entertain new generations of viewers in the exact same way that they did upon their initial release. And thanks to Bette's impeccable taste and domineering influence, her best films still hold up on artistic merits, too. In her work and in her life, Bette underlined the role that a brilliant mind plays in being "a great star" versus merely "a celebrity". I take stardom very seriously because of Bette Davis. And I would argue that every culture benefits from stars who break barriers and inspire masses, which Bette Davis did in spades both during, and indeed long after, her incredible lifetime.

Thank you for everything, Miss Davis. XO

Me '93 On The Future Of American Horror Movies

Today marks twenty-five years since the U.S. release of Gary Sherman’s Poltergeist III, a film that has been derided far too much over the last quarter century. It bombed at the box office before terrifying a generation of small-screen viewers (specifically, my generation), and is most infamous for being released four months after the death of its lead actress, Heather O’Rourke. An unbelievably talented child star who would have evolved into a truly great adult star, Heather O’Rourke was so synonymous with the role of "Carole Anne Freeling" that her tragic death before filming was complete seems almost like a ghastly extension of this uniquely nightmarish film. Although savaged by critics upon its initial release, I assume that it has since earned itself a place high in the ranks of 80s cult horror films. It’s as frightening a picture as Gary Sherman’s earlier 80s gems, the darkly comic voodoo masterpiece Dead and Buried and the gritty prostitution thriller Vice Squad. The cast is uniformly exceptional, especially the pitch-perfect performances by its two late stars. Heather O’Rourke was at her most controlled and impressive by the third film, and once again Zelda Rubinstein expertly walks the fine line between genius and camp as filmdom’s most famous medium: the legendary “Tangina”. Despite its stellar performances and effectiveness as a relentlessly claustrophobic and surreal horror film, it does have its fair share of unintentionally hilarious shortcomings. This is best illustrated in this priceless (negative) review of the film by the late, great Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert, arguably one of the funniest segments ever broadcast on their classic TV series. 

Poltergeist III was a film that I did not see until my life-changing Summer of 1991. For years I’d only been allowed to either gaze at the 80s horror movie covers at the video store or “settle” for classic movies of the 30s and 40s like Bride of Frankenstein and I Walked With A Zombie. But then one day near the end of the third grade my Dad told me he would let me see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho if I put more effort into Little League. (I was never one for sports, so movie privileges were often an incentive during my thankfully brief baseball chapter.) I can’t remember if he showed it to me or I watched it by myself, as I most remember subsequently watching it over and over that summer. I was not frightened, but I LOVED everything about it, and consider it a great blessing that the film which birthed modern horror should be my own starting point. Viewing Poltergeist and its sequels followed shortly thereafter. Like Psycho, I watched the Poltergeist movies so many times that summer that memories of the repeat viewings all absorb into one another. But unlike Psycho, the Poltergeist movies freaked me out.

Two years later, my wonderful 5^th grade teacher, Mrs. Quinn, had everyone in class create our own magazines. My magazine was called Boston Entertainment, and was a mish-mash of Entertainment Weekly and Premiere Magazine—literally. I spliced ads from both into my magazine, along with a few reviews by my favorite local film critic, James Verniere of The Boston Herald, with full credit of course. In addition to the collage of cut-outs and capsule reviews, the magazine contained a number of articles which I wrote myself, including this one about the future of the American horror film. I rediscovered this “magazine” in my parents’ attic and thought I would share my favorite article in honor of Poltergeist III's 25th Anniversary and Boston Entertainment's 20th (!) anniversary. I still remember the urgency with which I wrote it: as someone who aspired to make horror films, I felt that my own future was at stake. I wanted to insure that a market would still exist when I was old enough to make my dreams come true, and my fears in those dismal days of early 90s horror were all too valid. The genre has come a long way since. But now corporate influence, economic turmoil, changing technology, and unprecedented piracy are all drowning out the voices of independent filmmakers. Indeed, there is once again reason for those of us pursuing a career in horror films to proceed with caution. And so, without further adieu, here is another blast from my past, peppered with a bit of present-day commentary . 

My lone foray into magazine publishing. 

                                                                   The Horror of Horrors:

                                                                     Will Scary Movies Be

                                                                     Here For Us To Look

                                                                                Back On?

                                                                                                  By Robert Jeffrey

                Have you ever heard of “Jaws”? You probably have, because it IS a classic. Still, have you ever heard of the movie “Leprechaun”? In my opinion, it is a true horror, blending comedy and scary special effects to make it perfect, but just the title probably sounds strange to you, although some people are familiar with it. “Jaws” was a box office smash, but “Leprechaun” was out for less than a week in Peabody.

Alas, I would never again rave on about Leprechaun 

as much as I did at the age of eleven.

                These are just two examples of what people may realize is happening in theaters, or may not care to notice. What is it that makes a horror movie popular? Is it special effects, suspense, black humor, or a hip, cool style? The reason I don’t mention a “foundation” such as a bestselling novel is because many Stephen King movies, such as “The Dark Half”, are movies that are not only bombs at the movies, but I don’t even consider most of them to be real horrors.

Sorry, I don't know why I was so mean to Stephen King adaptations! Worse yet, I hadn't even seen The Dark Half when I wrote this--and it's a GREAT movie.

                Maybe special-effects is the way to go. In the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, part three made forty-seven million (1987), and part four made forty-nine million (1988). Both of these movies were the most popular of the “Nightmare” movies, and these were both crammed with mind-boggling special effects. Still, other movies like “Dr. Giggles” also had fairy gory special effects, but it didn’t quite pack ‘em in the aisles.

I haven't seen Dr. Giggles since childhood, and it MIGHT be a terrible movie... 

but, to this day, I still LOVE the ad campaign! 

                Maybe it is a campy style. In the movie “Fright Night” which starred Fox 25 regulars William Ragsdale of “Herman’s Head” and Amanda Bearse of “Married…With Children”. I found this 1985 movie which was supposedly a hit at the ticket booths to have real wit, suspense, comedy, some great FX, and camp. Yes, I found this movie to have really cool style that most Stephen King horrors miss by a mile, which made this one of my favorite, if not my very favorite, horror movies. Still, some hated this movie, so don’t rely on modern gimmicks.

My #1 favorite scene in my #1 favorite vampire movie of all time. 

(I think it's safe to say I still love Fright Night as much as I did at eleven.)

                Maybe it is suspense. Lots of suspense movies get better reviews by critics and make more money at the box office than some horrors. Still, that doesn’t mean horrors don’t have suspense. The classic “Jaws” was not only one of the biggest (meaning made the most money) movies of all time, but it keeps audiences on the edge of their seats. Another horror noted for its superb suspense was the terrifying “Halloween”. Not only was the music in this just as bad as “Jaws”, but its great acting by Jamie Lee Curtis (“My Girl”) and Donald Pleasance (The 1979 version of “Dracula”) and its plot that WAS creative at this time, the movie is excellent.

The night I saw Halloween deserves its own blog post, 

because it's been one of my biggest cinematic/life influences ever since. 

                As we see, there are lots of good reasons to see a horror, but if you see a bad one, the rest you’ll see will be bad too. With that in mind, here are the horrors that I consider to be the best (although some have the gore that I don’t usually like):

                                                                Fright Night

                                                                Halloween

                                                                A Nightmare On Elm Street 1, 3, and 4

                                                                Jaws 1 and 2

                                                                Leprechaun

                                                                Dr. Giggles

It would not be until the 6th grade that I saw most of the great American horror films--hence that pitiful list. But with the exception of Dr. Giggles and Leprechaun, I still LOVE those movies, and Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street remains my favorite horror movie of all. 

Fun With Lycanthropy: I Heart "The Howling"

I can’t recall the last time we had two Full Moons in one month, but I remember the ending of the John Landis classic An American Werewolf in London every time I hear the term “Blue Moon”. I never wrote about that film, one of my two favorite werewolf movies of all time. But I did write about the other one: Joe Dante’s The Howling. It still stuns me that they were both released the same year, both played to the same audience, and both reinvigorated the concept of “the horror-comedy” like no American movie since Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. In honor of this lunar event, here is another piece from my days reviewing DVDs for the dearly departed Laser Exchange.

The Howling

April 19^th, 2001

Review by Robert Jeffrey

When I first saw Joe Dante’s The Howling, it was via the film’s original videotape incarnation (unfortunately I missed out on the theatrical run). At the time, I thought the film was bizarre and rather overrated. Of course, I was only seeing part of the film; the video was so dark and murky that I could not see what was going on most of the time. It was not until years later that I watched a “cleaned up” cable presentation and realized what a good movie The Howling really is. Perhaps the better the image, the more enjoyable my experience, because seeing The Howling on DVD I was finally able to fully appreciate its greatness.

Karen White (Dee Wallace) is a Los Angeles reporter suffering from nightmares, panic attacks, and frigidity as a result of a botched undercover mission that results in the shooting death of a serial killer called ‘Eddie the Mangler’. Karen’s psychologist, Dr. Waggner (Patrick MacNee), advises her to stay at “The Colony”, a self-help village that he operates. She and her husband Bill (Christopher Stone) travel to this secluded sector in Northern California for a week long “therapeutic vacation”. Before long, though, Karen starts to sense something is very wrong in The Colony. Her nightmares are becoming more vivid, and are now incorporating images of her husband and of people staying in The Colony. She hears howling in the night, and finds a mutilated cow in the woods.

Meanwhile, back in L.A., Terry (Belinda Balaski) and Chris (John Dugan), a young couple working at Karen’s TV station, investigate the death of Eddie the Mangler for a news special the station has planned. Eddie’s body disappears from the morgue, and they investigate further, only to discover that he was obsessed with werewolf mythology. When a panicky Karen calls Terry to tell her that Bill was bitten by a wolf in the woods, Terry rushes to The Colony to offer comfort and further her investigation. At this point, you can probably figure out where all this is headed. But The Howling is a film full of twists and turns, and to spoil even one would be an injustice to first-time viewers.

I have not seen enough werewolf movies to recognize every homage paid by this film, but apparently most of the characters are named after werewolf movie directors. An expository scene from The Wolf Man plays as Terry learns that Bill has been bitten by a wolf, and a cartoon adaptation of The Three Little Pigs is cut into one of the most classic, terrifying sequences. Additionally, there is a stellar roster of genre cameos: Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), B-movie king Roger Corman, and Joe Dante regular Dick Miller, to name a few.  Sound familiar? Sixteen years before Scream was even a reality, The Howling invented the “self-referential scary movie” sub-genre. In fact, the humor laced throughout the film is generally the most celebrated element of The Howling. It was certainly among the most influential, for such contemporary classics as Evil Dead, Fright Night, Return of the Living Dead, Re-Animator, and of course Scream owe a debt to the road paved by this film.

The humor may be the most widely regarded facet of this film. However, in the end, this is a horror movie, and a damn scary one. Even coming on the heels of such classic shockers as Friday the 13^th, The Shining, and Dressed to Kill, The Howling still manages to hold its own-and then some. Joe Dante, who at this point was best known for the cult classic Piranha, updated werewolf folklore by applying it to two of the more popular horror trends of the time: female paranoia (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Suspiria) and fear of non-urban environments (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes). Dante makes the most of these two thematic elements, while also cultivating a classic, spooky atmosphere all too rarely seen in post-Psycho horror movies. Dante also manages to tap into primal childhood fears of the dark, the woods, the fog, and The Big Bad Wolf. In fact, some of the film’s most terrifying scenes make their mark because they so aptly recreate images from Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs.

Looking back, it really is amazing how ahead-of-its-time this movie was. Not only did it turn the mirror on horror films of the past and present, but it also offered a shockingly accurate, post-Network glimpse into the media. From what I have read, the novel The Howling, by Greg Brandner, is vastly different, particularly in this regard. Instead of being an author, as she was in the book, Karen is a reporter, and this allows Dante to explore the notion that the American public in the early 80s was so desensitized that television had to resort to extreme shock tactics to maintain viewership. It also suggests that the same public was nonetheless too sophisticated to believe what was happening right in front of them. In this time of unprecedented cynicism and complacency (not to mention being the era of “reality shows”), Dante’s message is more relevant than ever.

When The Howling was released, it was extremely well received by critics and became a box office hit. Joe Dante went on to direct the blockbuster Gremlins. Dee Wallace went on to play the mother in E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, which years later prompted one of the funniest lines in Scream. And special make-up effects man Rob Bottin went on to do equally classic work in such films as The Thing, Total Recall, and Se7en. As the cast and crew were busy moving on with their own successes, The Howling did not get its inevitable sequel until 1985’s loosely related (or so I have heard) The Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf. Over the next ten years The Howling would amass a total of six sequels, many of them barely released in theaters or sent straight to video. I have never seen these films (has anyone seen them?), but from what I understand they give Amityville a run for its money as the worst horror franchise of them all. In fact, The Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, is actually a remake of the first film! Normally a string of ill received follow-ups harms a film’s reputation, but in this case, it may have actually strengthened it. More than two decades after its initial release, The Howling remains one of the most enduring horror films of the 80s. 

NOTE: This review was pared down to omit references to the Dutch DVD I was reviewing, as it is no longer in print and I was frankly more qualified to talk about horror movies than DVD technology. If my comments sound familiar, that’s because a similarly amended version of this and most of my other Laser Exchange reviews were ported over to The Internet Movie Database ten years before I began this blog.

Birth Of An Angelo: The de Vries Side Of Me

I write films that are violent, romantic, and rooted in my fascination with sex and cinema. I think it’s ridiculous to ascribe artistic traits with an ethnicity, yet I cannot deny that I link being Italian with the passions that shape my work.

"Ik ben Angelo".

“Angelo de Vries” is the the name I use as a screenwriter. It is the purest side of myself, the constant essence of who I am, and it is only visible to people through my writing. I don’t want to suggest that I “created” Angelo to take some share of the load in a semi-schizophrenic, Stephen King’s The Dark Half kind of a way. It has more to do with presenting the sides of myself that won’t immediately come off to people unless they meet me through my work.

I first conceived of the idea for a new name after a humiliating experience that I had brought upon myself while living in Miami. After allowing myself to become romantically attached to someone whom I barely knew at all, someone who disappeared from my life with lots of my money and all of my self-respect, I felt like a different person. So different, in fact, that I wanted to separate myself from my lifelong identity by giving birth to a new one.

I created "Angelo de Vries" in Miami in August 2008. My birth name never felt like my own to begin with, but rather a gift which I inherited as the grandson of Robert Emerson Jeffrey. My father’s father was a fine man whose passing in 1976 left a gaping hole in my father’s family, one that I certainly could never fill. I’ve always felt a very literal closeness with my grandfather, whom I consider to be a guiding light in my life, but I’ve always felt a great insecurity about the fact that my name is really his name. I think that that must be part of why I have always felt such a need to be perfect—by “perfect”, I mean always able to make people feel happy, regardless of who they are or where they come from or how I feel around them. Robert Emerson Jeffrey is who I am, but it’s also a sort of post-modern riff on what I assume my expectations are. Coming up with a new name felt natural because I felt that there was a name out there which could describe "the real me"—I just had to find it.

When I was a child in the 80s, we spent summers on Cape Cod and frequented a grocery store that many will fondly recall: “Angelo’s”. Best known for their baked goods, I knew Angelo’s for their video section. That was the wonderful era when video stores thrived so much that supermarkets got in on the action. I still recall the now-classic films I could once only fantasize about as a child wandering down the 'Horror' aisle: The Company of Wolves, Demons, A Nightmare on Elm Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2, Creepshow, Piranha, Eaten Alive. But above all other videos, I most vividly remember the Media VHS for Creepers, an infamous New Line Cinema re-edit of Dario Argento’s Phenomena. The cover art, of a beautiful girl with half of her face taken off by flying insects, stuck out to me at every video store I frequented in my youth. But those images stood out most within the wholesome, brightly-lit, air-conditioned little universe of Angelo's Supermarket.

My childhood introduction to my future favorite filmmaker in the horror aisle of Angelo’s Grocery Store was half the reason I decided upon "my other first name". The other half was based on a lifelong insecurity about my ethnic identity.  My ancestry is predominantly Irish-Scotch and Italian. My inherited face speaks to the former. But nothing about me physically speaks to the latter. So I chose the name “Angelo,  because it is a distinctly Italian word for “angel”. I believe in angels, I’m a huge Buffy/Angel fan, and writing “Angelo” flows more naturally than my own name does. What I did not realize at the time was that the full name of my father's maternal grandfather, an Italian immigrant, was Angelo Callandrella. I had unconsciously gone from being named after my grandfather to naming myself after his father-in-law.

My paternal grandfather, after whom I was named, and my paternal grandmother, 

whose father was also an 'Angelo'.

Sadly, there is no Dutch blood running through my veins, but the affinity I feel with The Netherlands and Dutch people goes much deeper than the flesh anyway. What I most connect with in the Dutch is the love of freedom, of tolerance, of embracing humanity and learning to flow with it, not against it.  As such, I adopted “de Vries”, an extremely common Dutch surname, which translates to “the free”. I also chose this name after Xaviera de Vries (aka Xaviera Hollander), one of my heroes and author of one of my favorite books of all time, The Happy Hooker.

Madame Xaviera: AGELESS! 

On April 12th, 2010, my favorite Dutchman of all almost literally Christened my creation at my favorite movie theater in the world. I attended a Q&A/screening at The Brattle Theater when my second favorite filmmaker, Paul Verhoeven, brilliantly paired a discussion of his book Jesus of Nazareth with one of the many Christian parables that define his film career: Robocop. I bought a copy of his book after a fascinating discussion and I asked him to sign it to “Angelo”.  It was the first time I publicly identified as Angelo and the first time that name had been written in relation to me—and in a book about Jesus, no less! This photo, taken by my friend Danielle, captures how truly delighted I was that Paul Verhoeven got to meet "Angelo de Vries".

4/12/10: When I met Mr. Verhoeven, I wore my "Marilyn Chambers For President" 

button in memory of a most beloved icon, one year after her passing.

Paul Verhoeven is a magnificent artist and a beautiful human being who has been a huge influence on my creative development since I was ten years old. But he is “my second favorite filmmaker" because I can only have one favorite. That person, my idol and my “artistic father”, is Dario Argento.

I should note that my pride in being Italian and my connection to Italian cinema is very Dario-centric. All of my favorite Italian filmmakers worked in either Argento’s giallo oeuvre or some other subgenre of Italian horror. And I can’t say I loved any of their works until high school, when I gained a truly life-changing appreciation of Argento. My desire to appeal to an Italian audience is largely a tribute to the auteur from whom I have learned the most. Thus, when I read that Dario Argento would be at the 2010 Weekend of Horrors in Los Angeles, I flew across the country to meet him. I stayed in LA for months, trying to launch a writing career, before going home disillusioned and broke in the grand tradition of failed East Coast transplants. But all the time and money were worth it to meet the man of my cinematic dreams.

5/23/10: From left to right, it's my sister, my idol, 

my muse, and me! :)

My sister Jennifer joined me in meeting Dario. She generously had him sign my copy of Opera, the film that most influenced my writing, “To Robert”. I am forever grateful to Jen for that, for it gave me the opportunity to have my copy of Phenomena, aka Creepers, signed from Argento “To Angelo”. That signature insures that I--as in Robert AND Angelo--will die with a smile on my face.

Nancy vs. Freddy: 25 Years of "Dream Warriors"

Freddy vs. Vogue Boy: 

05/22/10, The Day Robert Jeffrey Met Robert Englund!

This weekend marks an astonishing 25 years since the release of one of the most popular and truly beloved horror films of all time: Chuck Russell’s A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors. Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street is the most acclaimed film in the series, and my favorite horror film of all time. Renny Harlin’s Hollywood breakthrough, A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 4: The Dream Master, was the highest-grossing installment in the Freddy franchise. But “Dream Warriors”, with its troubled teens, surreal setpieces, and the dramatic character arc of returning heroine Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), makes it the most enduringly popular—if not the very best.

In honor of the Silver Anniversary of a film that will NEVER age to me, here’s a Summer 2006 chestnut from my Emerson College days. Written for one of my favorite professors, Rachel Thibault, it underlines why the feminist “Elm Street” series has more meaning to me than any other group of horror films this side of Dario Argento. 

Robert E. Jeffrey

MA405: 1980s Film and History

                        

Facing Freddy: The Story of Nancy Thompson

            Throughout the 1980s, among the most popular and quickly multiplied of film franchises were the teen-oriented horror sequels spun off from John Carpenter’s Halloween, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13^th, and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. All three of these films concerned the plight of a group of teenagers who fall victim to a blade-wielding killer who prematurely ends their often sexually confused lives, and all three of them build up in action to a “Final Girl” standoff in the last act.

“[The] Final Girl is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued or to kill him herself.”

                                    Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws  35)

            One of these horror sagas, the “Nightmare” films, was not launched until 1984, by which time a collective total of seven Halloween and “Friday” films had already hit American screens, along with dozens of thinly-veiled rip-offs. By most accounts, this cottage industry splatter genre had passed its commercial peak. “All the major studios [sent me] rejection letters. ‘Nobody will be afraid of anything that happens in a dream. The horror film is dead.’ This was during a period [of] backlash against the Friday the 13^th [series].” (Schoell, Spencer 179-80) When Robert Shaye, head of fledgling New Line Cinema, bought Craven’s script and put the film into production, he unknowingly launched not only a lasting cultural phenomenon in Robert Englund’s portrayal of “Freddy Krueger” but also a watershed heroine in “Nancy Thompson”, as immortalized by actress Heather Langenkamp.

            Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is the ultimate metaphor for teenage disenchantment, rebellion, and perceived suppression as realized through one of the most original concepts in post-Psycho psychological horror. “Several teenagers discover they’re all having nightmares about the same character, scar-faced Fred Krueger—a kind of ghost who can enter their dreams at will, and kill them in macabre ways. It’s up to surviving teen Nancy to try to stop him.” (Maltin 920) Through the course of the film, Nancy uncovers that Krueger had been “a filthy child murderer who killed at least twenty kids” with his razor-fingered glove. She concludes that he is haunting Nancy and her friends because their parents were part of a vigilante mob that burned Freddy alive after a judge set him free. In a sequence cut from the first edit of the film, Nancy learns from her mother that “you weren’t always an only child”. In a sequence cut from the shooting script, it is revealed that it was only Nancy’s mother who was brave enough in a crowd full of men to set Freddy ablaze, and this is why Nancy is the most psychologically tormented of the teenagers. (The Nightmare Series Encyclopedia DVD)

            Had Wes Craven maintained the subplot about Nancy’s mother’s vengeful audacity, he would have highlighted the seed of strength in mother and daughter that lead to Nancy being dubbed “the grittiest of the Final Girls” by Carol J. Clover. Craven wrote the role of Nancy to symbolize “good/beauty” versus Freddy’s “evil/beast”. “I wanted somebody for Nancy that was very non-Hollywood, somebody I felt could live next door:  not the blonde bimbette, but your babysitter. Heather [Langenkamp] had that, [and a vital] sense of personal courage about her. Once she came in I recognized her.” (Craven, The Nightmare Series Encyclopedia).

Unlike the sexually repressed “virgin-heroine” prototyped in horror iconography by Jamie Lee Curtis’s “Laurie Strode” in Halloween and subsequently carbon-copied for the anti-sex “slasher movie” knockoffs that followed in its wake, Nancy Thompson is better defined as a (possible) “virgin” and a “heroine”. Whereas Halloween’s Laurie was burying her teen sexuality beneath layers of academia and maternal obligation (“You must have a small fortune stashed from babysitting so much!” remarked another character in that film), Nancy is very much in touch with her womanhood, and very much in control of it. She frequently asserts power over her boyfriend, Glenn (Johnny Depp), and though we never see Nancy engage in sex in the film, it is never revealed or denied that she is in fact “a virgin”. Instead, we see her telling her boyfriend to withhold from intimacy on two occasions, in both cases due not to a negative conception of sex, but rather because of more important obligations (showing support to a troubled friend and working on a plan to fight Freddy, respectively). She employs his license to drive  to make a late-night trip to the police station following a vivid nightmare, but upon entering the station she takes charge, demanding to be taken seriously by a night guard while Glenn is silent behind her. She seeks the aid of his assumed physical strength (“You’re the jock, you have a baseball bat or something!”) in pummeling Freddy, but only after she has first defeated him on his dream turf and pulled him into “her world”.

Glenn’s inability to stay awake—or to heed insomniac Nancy’s grave warning that “whatever you do, don’t fall asleep!”—costs him his life, but Nancy goes forth with a plan to pull Freddy into the waking world all the same. Rather than relying on “male” physical strength to overpower Freddy, she constructs a virtually fool-proof annihilation before she even goes to sleep. “When [Freddy] enters the house, she dares him to come at her, then charges him in direct attack. As they struggle, he springs the contraptions she has set so that he is stunned by a swinging sledge hammer, jolted and half-incinerated by an electrical charge” (Clover 38). Nancy finally defeats Freddy, though, not with violence, but by “taking away his power”. Freddy has killed all of her friends and committed the final sin of murdering her mother, and he is about to finally tear apart Nancy after the house-of-horrors pains just inflicted upon him. Instead of running, Nancy faces him, and tells him that she wants them all back. She turns her back on Freddy, and with cool, authoritative control, tells him that “I take back every bit of energy I gave you. You’re nothing.” Not unlike Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) in the Academy Award winner The Silence of the Lambs the following decade, Nancy uses her mind, her intuition, and her fearlessness to “compensate” for her seeming physical vulnerability up against a powerful (male) killer (“Silence” Criterion Commentary). The “draining of energy through certainty” motif is also vaguely Pagan in thinking, suggesting a defense of “White Magic” against “Black Magic”; this is likely no mistake either, as Craven would later note the importance of Heather’s long brown hair as a repository of Nancy’s (magic) power, and Robert Englund has frequently noted that the Krueger make-up was partly modeled on the concept of “a male witch”. (A Nightmare on Elm Street Audio Commentary; Elm Street: The Making of a Nightmare)

Despite initial resistance from Hollywood studio brass, A Nightmare on Elm Street would prove to be a mammoth commercial success, as the $1.8 million film went on to gross nearly $26 million in the United States alone (“IMDB.com”). However, Craven was forced to alter his ending to please New Line president Robert Shaye; as a result, Nancy’s “victory” in the shooting script is slightly compromised by a “final scare” in the last frame that left open a sequel window. Indeed, one year later, New Line released A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Despite the loss of Craven and Langenkamp’s participation, the $3 million film outgrossed its predecessor with a whopping $30 million haul. (“IMDB.com”)

We were discovered by the heavy metallers and the punkers. They picked up on the dark nihilistic side of these films. It wasn’t sold to them by MTV, or a lot of advertising on television. There was no media hype at all for the first two movies. It was completely a grass-roots phenomenon.

                        Robert Englund          (Schoell, Spencer 188)

           

The “Nightmare” films were so financially successful, and progressively became so much more mainstream, that “New Line Cinema has come to be called ‘The House That Freddy Built’” (Schoell, Spencer 199). In 1987, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was the first “Nightmare” film to open with a national theatrical release and with a major advertising campaign, including a heavy metal music video and further MTV coverage. The film grossed an astounding $45 million, followed by 1988’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, the most successful film in the franchise with U.S. grosses of just under $50 million. (The Nightmare Series Encyclopedia; “IMDB.com”) 

Throughout these peak years, the “Nightmare” films consistently relied on the importance of strong female protagonists. More importantly, during this period New Line player Rachel Talalay, who was behind the scenes of each “Nightmare” film from the beginning, saw her role at the studio and in the franchise progressively rise in prominence. By “Nightmare 4”, she was co-producer. “We basically developed the characters and their dreams and started prepping the movie,” says Talalay of the origins of “Nightmare 4”. “We were developing and prepping the special effects before we had any script at all.” (Schoell, Spencer 83) It was Talalay who discovered budding Finnish director Renny Harlin; after seeing his debut film, Prison, she felt that he could give the film, and particularly the dream sequences, a truly distinct visual style that she felt had been neglected in earlier installments. (Elm Street: The Making of a Nightmare) Together, Talalay and Harlin reworked the story, ultimately serving up a platter that, for all its dizzyingly surreal setpieces, was arguably so successful because it, like the first film, placed such importance on the arc of its heroine. Says Harlin, “It was really about a mousy girl who finds herself and gains strength, physically and mentally, to cope with all the problems in life. It was done through supernatural events, but it was a very simple story that touched, I believe, the hearts of our core audience” (Schoell, Spencer 83). Appropriately enough, a significant portion of that core audience defied long-held genre expectations that horror films make money off of strictly male audiences. “My impression is that the A Nightmare on Elm Street series in particular attracted girls in groups.” (Clover 23)

More than twenty years have passed since the release of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, and while the series remains a prominent staple of the horror genre and perennial bestseller on home video, it is arguably best represented by the subsequent proliferation of forceful female roles in genre films (The Silence of the Lambs, Scream, The Descent) and most especially television shows, namely the feminist sci-fi/fantasy universe of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Nonetheless, this potent tale of female good versus male evil remains forever intertwined with the decade that bore it. “It never really occurred to me that it was a horror movie,” says Heather “Nancy” Langenkamp. “I always looked at it as a teenage parable, [Nancy’s] struggle with all of these forces, not only her parents, but also this external boogeyman.” (A Nightmare on Elm Street Audio Commentary) During the commercial peak of the series, the boogeyman himself, Robert Englund, offered a similar theory on what Freddy symbolized for 80s audiences, and why the heroines of Elm Street offered viewers salvation.

Kids [today] will probably not live as well as their parents. You can imagine what it is like to be seventeen or eighteen and enter a world with a drug culture and hardly any jobs on the horizon, and AIDS and racial unrest. Freddy represents all of these things that are out of kilter in the world, all the sins of the parents that are being passed on. I think [teenagers] enjoy the consistency of this evil character and the unapologetic relish that he has for his reign of terror. [The heroines in turn] keep this horrible future they are about to inherit—this future with race riots, an AIDS epidemic, with unemployment, with no sex because it’s ‘dirty’—at bay”.

                                                            (Schoell, Spencer 187)

Works Cited: 

Books

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

            New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992

Maltin, Leonard. 2006 Video Movie Guide. New York: Signet, 2005.

Schoell, William, and Spencer, James. The ‘Nightmare’ Never Ends.

            New York: Citadel Press, 1992.

VHS/DVD

Elm Street: The Nightmare Never Ends

1988 HMS Communications

Writer/Director/Executive Producer: Drew Cummings

Out of Print

Halloween

Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill

Directed by John Carpenter

Available on DVD from Anchor Bay Entertainment

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Audio Commentary)

Written and directed by Wes Craven

Available on DVD from New Line Cinema

The Silence of the Lambs (Audio Commentary)

Out of Print Criterion Collection DVD, 1998

The Nightmare Series Encyclopedia

Available in The Nightmare on Elm Street DVD Collection

From New Line Cinema, 1999

Internet

WWW.IMDB.COM