That Sexploitation Horror Article!

As everyone knows, I have an intense fondness for sexploitation gore horror from the 60’s and 70’s. I was born in 71, so I spent my formative years ‘76-81, glued to television watching late-night re-runs of films on local channel affiliates called ‘creater-double-feature’ and ‘midnight-macabre’. Where were my parents? My parents were old, and so they had their own lives…as I got older, cable was born, offering 1 or 2 all movie channels that devoted late night programming to more sinister, uncut material. I was quite happy with films like Suspiria and The Last House on the Left running on late nights on Cablevision when the programmers assumed most people were sleeping. NOT MEH! What better way to kill 80-90 minutes of insomnia.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Dan Savage, but I’m pretty darn close. Once upon a time, I loved sex and horror, together. I loved ritual, zombies, blood, and man’s inhumanity to man, all rolled up and wrapped in sexploitation schlock. I loved the terror of sexuality. Perhaps that’s why, when I discovered David Cronenburg and Wes Craven as a pre-teen, I became a sexual horror fan so easily. Last House on the Left [Craven] used rape and violence as its murder weapon; there were no monsters except those born to brutal criminality, and others driven to obscene violence by emotional pain. Movies like Last House, certainly garnished my interests, but I longed for something a bit more ‘horror’, and less ‘horrific’. The first film I ever watched by David Cronenburg was The Brood. OMG. My mother [an elderly woman now] was going through the change of life during ‘79-80. When I saw this film [I was about 11] I recall fearing that if my mother saw a psychiatrist for her ‘issues’ that she’d end up spawning these mutated children out of her crotch, and then use her mind-bond with them to kick my ass whenever I was bad. My sister dismissed this as retarded, and told me to get real. Hey, I was a kid! Either way, I was hooked on Cronenburg.

Scanners is the bomb, and I am so in love with Michael Ironside’s character because, he randomly uses his mind to make people’s heads go ’splodey. There are times when I sit at this keyboard wishing I could possess such power.

As I got older, so did Cronenburg. Around the time Videodrome came out, I became a sexual teen. After the first few sessions of intercourse, I developed a genuine fondness of sex, BUT due to my age and reliance on my parents for survival, my encounters were few and far between. Since I couldn’t have sex when I wanted [I could only score it away from home-on a weekend night-like once in a great while-when Jupiter Aligned With Mars in the house of Terminally Jew] I projected my newfound desires toward my favorite type of film; the horror. It was okay, for about a year. You see, I was also becoming a woman, with clear goals for my place in the world, and so my burgeoning feminist notions began to get in the way of enjoying the sexploitation schlock of the indie scene. Unwilling to compromise [or admit to] my own place in the gender imbalanced world, I turned to male on male sexual horror, [OMG, is this why women love YAOI!!]. I buried myself in gay themed horror books, because, there just wasn’t a cinematic scene for gay horror in the late 80’s. I began appreciating horror for the sake of horror, and stopped looking for the sex.

Years later I went back and tried to get into all again; my gynocratic nature still kept me from enjoying the exploitive titty-terror films, and I even had some issues with the powerful women in films like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and others because only when a women is thinly disguised as a man, can she truly save the day and herself. The only sexual horror out there seemed to come via serial killer flicks, again, Last House on the Left anyone? I tried out the gay slasher [no pun intended] films like Lionel Delplanque’s Deep In the Woods, or Alex Dove’s Dead Guys series. They failed to interest me, but were hella fun to watch. I fell in love with zombie films like At Twilight Come The Flesh Eaters [personal fav] and Night of the Living Bi-Dolls. Porn and Horror, perfect together, without any guilt or complexities…

I want to make sexual horror. I want to tap into that realm of WTF, and come up with something interesting; but at the same time, I want it to be so sexual, it doesn’t take itself seriously.