Cinema Suicide

Tonight’s entry into the Based On A True Story is a total cop out and I am very, very sorry. I did The Entity during last year’s 31 Ghost Stories blog-a-thon and I said that I wasn’t going to do it again this year but it’s late and I need to get something up here. I’ve also had numerous requests for this movie to be in the rotation, so apparently nobody reads this blog because if they did, they’d know.

So we all know at this point that haunted house flicks really get under my skin. I’ve said it a thousand times. With rare exception, the only kinds of movies that make me look over my shoulder while walking around my house in the dark are movies about families tormented by ghosts. I’ve had my own personal encounter with the unexplained and even though I remain skeptical, the whole experience planted a seed of irrational paranoia in me that I can’t seem to shake. I also seem to be surrounded by people who keep me informed of spooky goings on in the Fortean/paranormal world so I can’t help it. The recent flick, Insidious, literally gave me nightmares, The Amityville Horror actually makes my skin crawl in parts and even mild made for TV shit like The Haunting and Unsolved Mysteries’ ghost episodes shake me up a bit. Last year at this time I re-endured the Tall Man’s Ghost episode (haunted bunk bed) and while it didn’t frighten me quite the same way that it did back when the show first aired and upon reruns, it still made me uneasy. Ghost stories, well executed ones, that is, get right into that primitive fear-driven module of my brain that puts me in fight or flight mode at the worst times. So bearing all that in mind, here’s the true story that inspired one of horror’s most underrated achievements. In spite of its absolutely mind-bendingly terrible ending, The Entity scared me half to death when I was a kid, seeing it for the first time.

It’s 1974 in Culver City, California. A pair of investigators, Kerry Gaynor and Barry Taff were giving a talk at a local book store about paranormal investigation and were approached by Carla Moran, real name Doris Bither. Moran made an appointment with the two at her home, claiming that the place was haunted and in a subsequent interview with the two, she apprehensively admitted that the spirits in her home, at first described as your usual knocking on walls, disembodied voice types were actually extremely violent entities and that she had been beaten severely and savagely raped by these unseen monsters. Taff and Gaynor initially scoffed at this allegation. Physical contact with spirits is a rare thing and often a fleeting sensation. A force powerful enough to do what Moran was saying was unheard of even in the world of paranormal investigation. However, in a follow up call, Moran told them that the beings had shown themselves to her and there were other witnesses. This was enough to spring into action and look a little closer. Taff and Gaynor arrived with photography equipment and described the beings’ attempts to manifest but the best they could do at the time was cause pops of light here and there. No photographic evidence could be collected since these lights were so quick. This was just the start, however. Taff and Gaynor claimed that as they interviewed Moran’s teenage son in the kitchen, cabinets flew open and spit out pots and pans and Moran began freaking out, alerting everyone to the presence in the bedroom. Photos were taken but the Polaroid shots were useless and bleached. Photos from the same camera, taken with the same cartridge of film developed normally after Moran told everyone that it had gone and upon its return, the same effect was applied to further Polaroids taken, this time only obscuring Moran’s face.

The investigation lasted ten weeks with a lot of nickel and dime evidence captured by Taff and Gaynor. Moran described horrible encounters with the being, a huge man accompanied by two smaller beings who held her down. Taff and Gaynor could capture no such evidence of the being. The only documented evidence they could keep was some photos of lights, though they admit to having seen the shape of a person take form from these lights. This being only ever seemed to attack in the presence of her family, sometimes in front of the children and she often bore bruises and bite marks on her neck left by the being. During one particularly vicious attack, Moran’s son tried to intervene when he heard her screaming and was thrown across the room, breaking his arm from the sheer force of the attack.

In the end, the advice from Taff and Gaynor was simple and unsatisfying. Move out. Moran was a single mother of four living in a twice condemned dump in Culver City. Moving out wasn’t exactly an option but the severity of the situation made it an easy decision in spite of lacking the resources to do so. The Moran family picked up stakes and moved to Texas, keeping in touch with the investigators. What’s really too bad is that the attacks didn’t stop, immediately. For another couple of years, Moran was brutally assaulted by this being before it got bored and moved on to another victim.

Years passed. A movie was made but the real Carla Moran, Doris Bither, disappeared with her family, went underground. In recent times, some of the children have come forward and talk to people on the paranormal web about went on there to defeat some of the claims from the book that Barry Taff wrote following the attacks. The details are mostly factual according to the kids. Often times during the pop culture paranormal investigations of Ghost Hunters, the investigators pick a location based on its reputation as a haunted house but what they fail to connect with is that it’s not the house that’s haunted. It’s the people living there. This is why they don’t get any worthwhile evidence. The story of Doris Bither is a sad one. She was an alcoholic, he children were each born to different fathers and she went through countless relationships and marriages before her death by heart attack in 1995. The Entity, the movie highlighting these attacks, is a pretty spooky affair that goes completely off the rails by Hollywood standards in the final act. I recommend it.

What you probably don’t know about me: I love UFOlogy. I don’t necessarily believe in any of it but I desperately want to. I have all sorts of weird theories on the phenomenon that have been ironically laughed off by people who firmly believe that beings from parts unknown have been visiting this planet by way of infinitely sophisticated space travel technology. Better yet, the same people who’ve laughed off my own theories of alien beings coming not from our own universe, but from an entirely different one that exists outside of our own are the same people who firmly believe that a planet named Nibiru orbits our sun on a 3,600 year orbit and our planets come into contact once during that cycle. In that time, every 3,600 years, these beings come here and give us some kind of technology to push our species forward in terms of development but not because they have our best interests in mind, but because we were genetically engineered from apes by these aliens at the dawn of man in order to mine gold. Because they need it. For some reason. Like they’re fucking pirates or something.

No shit. I’m working out one day while wearing my sweet Exeter UFO Festival shirt and this guy comes up to me wearing the same shirt and strikes up a conversation. He laters goes to his car and gets a copy of “his paper” on the topic of aliens, UFOs and reality and hands it off to me in a very deliberately inconspicuous manner and tells me that he’d like my thoughts on it. He wastes my entire workout blabbing about aliens which have been visiting us since the stone age, nuclear wars in the middle east and attempts to wipe us out or force us to worship them as gods and then he gives me this essay that is 10 pages of impenetrable nonsense about the same topic and why it’s important for governments around the world, who know all about it and in some cases have been working with these beings to keep us down, to keep it all a secret. My mind was blown. I feel as though I’d stepped into an episode of the X-Files but instead of receiving damning state secrets from Deep Throat I was given a rambling diatribe of bullshit by The Lone Gunmen.

But I digress. I’ve granted space here for dubious bullshit like The Amityville Horror and The Enfield Poltergeist and there’s been an awful lot of serial killer talk in the last few articles so it’s high time I turned my sights on the stars and brought the spotlight on some spooky alien shit. In this case we go back to 1993′s, Fire In The Sky which is based on the alleged abduction of Travis Walton by aliens.

Travis Walton was at the time a logger with a contractor who had been hired by the United States Forestry Service to clear brush from land in Arizona that was intended to be a state park. On the evening of November 5th, 1975, near the job site, Walton and his friends – on their way home from the job – saw a bright light coming behind a nearby hill. They drove to investigate and found what they described to investigators as a silver disc hovering in the air. Walton jumped out of the truck, excited, and ran toward it but upon his approach, the UFO was said to have made a sound like a turbine and suddenly captured Walton in a single beam of light. He was lifted off the ground and then seemingly smashed into the dirt by an unseen force. Fearing he was dead and that they were next, the truck full of his co-workers took off and then later returned to the spot to look for Walton’s body. Unfortunately it and the craft had disappeared.

The other men, Mike Rogers, Ken Peterson, John Goulette, Steve Pierce, Allen Dallis and Dwayne Smith, then raced back to Snowflake, Arizona, their home town, and reported the encounter to the police. All of them were said to be in serious emotional distress at the time but police reaction was predictably luke warm and skeptical. A half hearted search of the area Walton had disappeared from turned up nothing and enraged Walton’s family and friends but the police were far more convinced that foul play was afoot despite a complete lack of evidence and motive from any of the persons involved. A polygraph test was administered to all five of the men present on that night and each one conclusively proved that they were telling the truth when asked if they had killed Travis Walton, if they knew where his body was and if they had seen a UFO. Following this, the police in Snowflake finally broke down and accepted the original story that the men had seen their friend thrashed around by a UFO and that with his body gone, that they believed that he had been taken by extraterrestrials.

Six days later, Travis Walton turned back up in Heber, Arizona, not far from where he’d been taken. Walton called his brother in law from a pay phone at a gas station and was retrieved. Believing that he had been gone only a few hours, he was shocked to find that he had been missing for nearly a week. During that time, according to Walton’s brother in law, Grant Neff, he was visibly thinner and appeared to be in shock. The entire ride home, he showed signs of trauma and was in a highly agitated state. When he began to tell his story, Walton’s tale became one of the most vivid tales of alien abduction of all time. He awoke on a bed, surrounded by figures consistent with descriptions of ‘Greys’ and after managing to leap up and ward them off with a nearby glass beaker, Walton left the room and wandered around the ship, finding a control room of sorts containing only a chair that when sat in, displayed what looked like star charts on the ceiling of the room. He was able to manipulate the stars with  control on the chair but eventually left it and encounter what looked like a man in a jump suit who took him to a room with other people like him. Once encountered, they placed a mask over his face and he passed out, waking up at the gas station that he called his brother in law from. Over time, Walton would reveal more about his encounter through hypnosis and would take a polygraph but as national attention came to his story, Walton began to withdraw. The story, as noticed by skeptics and investigators, began to bear inconsistencies and Walton would shut down when he felt his back was to the wall.

The interesting part of the story was that unlike cases like The Smurl Haunting or The Amityville Horror, where a great deal of publicity and creating a hoax to make some money was an obvious motive, the Travis Walton abduction case lacks any of these details. Walton was in no apparent financial trouble, the guys in the trucks had no reason to cause him any harm nor did they have any reason to take part in a hoax and what’s more, their involvement in the case drew unwanted attention on all of them. Critics argue that the Walton case is loaded inconsistencies and Walton’s own account of his time on the UFO is a little too Hollywood to be comfortable with but an apparent lack of reason in the story makes finding a foundation for criticism hard. Sure, these guys may be full of shit but you have to ask yourself why.

It’s not the nature of nostalgia to acknowledge the warts of the era that you’re being nostalgic about. When I was a kid, everybody a little older than me couldn’t help themselves but look back on the 70′s with a sort of ironic madness. It was fun to laugh about fond memories involving involving ridiculous clothes, hair styles and disco but amid all the madcap reminiscence, nobody ever thought to point out how the end of Vietnam more or less destroyed the social quotient of morale and how this led to a lot of people burying their heads in the sand about unemployment, a sagging economy, an imagined fuel crisis and all that. Only in this case you have to replace the sand with cocaine. Flash forward to my own generation getting old and how we look back on the 80′s like it was nothing but Back To The Future, synth pop and Transformers toys. Like our predecessors, not one of us ever thinks to point out the rise of the AIDS epidemic, the Savings and Loans scandals, titanic inconsistencies in the distribution of wealth and so on so forth. In the case of both examples, honestly, who wants to be Debbie Downer at the nostalgia party? Sorry to be that guy but for the first time since the 60′s, the Cold War, in its death throes, reached fever pitch and relations between the United States and the USSR seemed to be on the door mat of critical mass. Over here we had Ronald Reagan, the great orator, to assure us all that we’re number one and over there, they had Mikhail Gorbachev to assure them that in spite of appearances, Soviet communism was the shit and that capitalism  was driving America to moral bankruptcy. Each side’s leadership was full of shit but only one of their national philosophies allowed one of the world’s most vicious and prolific serial killers to run free.

Citizen X, produed by and aired on HBO in 1995 tells the story of Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo, The Butcher of Rostov. It’s a pretty dreary but excellent flick from the height of HBO’s period of made-for-cable movies. It features a solid cast and tells an absolutely rancid story about Chikatilo from inside the bureaucratic system of blindness that allowed Chikatilo to run free for so long. When the bodies began to pile up, Victor Burakov, a forensic specialist and Moscow police investigator Mikhail Fetisov headed up a team of cops out to find The Butcher and stop him but in order to make that happen, they had to get The Party to accept the fact that serial murder in Soviet Russia was happening at all. The KGB and influencial members of the communist party refused to believe that this could happen in the USSR because serial murder was an American problem. It was a symptom of a capitalist society and therefore could not happen there. How wrong they were. By the time they got wise to the problem and granted an investigation, Chikatilo had worked out a solid system of murder and had stacked up six dead bodies.

Chikatilo was a typical serial killer in the sense that he came from a seriously fucking awful childhood. In Russia during the time of Stalin, it was hard not to. Stalin ran the country like a maniac and more or less took a shit all over Lenin’s vision of a communist Utopia. Even though this Utopia wasn’t really working for Lenin, it was functional. Stalin came in and instituted many of the nasty hard line communist practices that we have come to recognize as Soviet Communism in the days since. The USSR was a god-awful place to be and it’s a wonder at all that this environment of suspicion and fear didn’t breed more Andrei Chikatilos.

Chikatilo had a fairly simple MO. An accused pedophile before he was even killing people, he found his hunting grounds in the train stations around Rostov and would single out troubled young children. Specifically girls. Unlike most pedophiles, though, Chikatilo didn’t have an age preference. He would hit the train station and lure girls away to a house he had bought on the sly so his family wouldn’t know and this became the staging site for many of his murders. Chikatilo’s initial motive for abduction was rape, however, his impotence would send him into a rage and the act of murder was the thing that would trigger an orgasm. No shit. Strangulation was often his method of killing but post-mortem mutilation was the act that would send him over the edge. His first kill was in 1978. Hid final kill was in 1990. Between those 12 years, Chikatilo managed to rack up 53 murders of boys and girls, men and women between the ages of 7 and 45. He ran wild until the police got wise to his game and decided to lead him into a trap.

Soviet cops blanketed the train stations in the areas surrounding the usual murder scenes with an obvious police presence but left a couple of stations under the careful surveillance of undercover cops. Seems like a good plan, no? The place with all the cops hanging around are going to discourage Chikatilo from doing his thing there and he’d go out to one of these other stations where the cops weren’t hanging around. You’d think it would work, right? It didn’t. From one of the undercover surveillance spots, Chikatilo managed to lure a 16 year old boy away where he was murdered in the usual way. Eventually, the cops would implement this plan and following his final murder, an undercover cop witnessed Chikatilo washing off the blood of his last victim in a train station bathroom. Chikatilo was placed under arrest and subjected to Soviet police interrogation, which is an awful lot like you’d expect it to be.

Chikatilo was found sane by a state psychologist and was sent up to trial for his crimes. He was sentenced individually for 52 of the 53 murders. Each count carried the death penalty. In 1994, Chikatilo was led into a sound proofed room in a prison in Novocherkassk and was shot once behind the ear. It’s a pity they didn’t shoot him 52 times.

Fuckin’ Australia, man. It’s hard to believe in this day and age that there exists a place where you can’t get cell phone service. It’s also hard to believe that settlements such as these exist in this weird space where if trouble goes down, you’re pretty much on your own until the police can get there and the time takes is measured in hours. The Australian outback is just such a place. We don’t really have a place like that here in America. There are parts of the Appalachian mountains that are pretty remote and hard to reach and there are parts of the deserts in the South West that are pretty remote but Australia has the market cornered on this matter. The Australian outback is still this vaguely wild west style area where settlements are these mostly self-sustaining communities that have everything they pretty much need within an area of a couple of miles and between it and the next town, there’s a hundred miles or more of barren nothingness. Bearing this in mind, it makes perfect sense that a movie like Mad Max could take place within some semblance of reason. It’s not an entirely implausible scenario.

The outback is also the perfect setting for a ruthlessly unpleasant horror movie since a key ingredient to any horror movie is isolation. Typical screenwriters rely on lazy cliches like summer camps and power outages to put their victims-to-be in peril but can you imagine if you found yourself in a place where you were being stalked by a maniac with a toolbox full of killing implements and the distance between you and salvation could be measured in three digit miles? Man. Fuck that. The Australian exploitation film industry had been seizing on this idea for decades, evident in the outstanding documentary, Not Quite Hollywood (Review). It turns out that lawless and remote is a pretty popular idea there but for one reason or another they never reached our shores with greater impact. That is, until Wolf Creek came down amid a wave of nasty, purely misanthropic horror that kept asses in seats at the theaters. For a spell, the American horror movie going audience couldn’t bear to endure a horror movie unless it was tempered with numerous scenes of sadistic violence. More sadistic than usual, that is to say. Man, Wolf Creek delivered.

In July of 2001, British tourist, Peter Falconio, was traveling through Australia’s barren Northern Territory with his girlfriend Joanne Lees. Lees describes their encounter with an Australian motorist at night, John Bradley Murdoch, who flagged them down on the highway and then shot Falconio when he got out of his car. Murdoch allegedly then forced Lees into his pickup truck but she managed to escape and hide in the brush until Murdoch gave up looking for her. Once the coast was clear, Lees flagged down another car for help but in the time that she was hidden, Murdoch removed the body of Falconio and to this day, the body has yet to be found.

There are some inconsistencies in Lees’ story about what happened that night and some of the evidence collected from the scene tells a strange story but the courts in Australia were able to make a murder charge stick to Murdoch who is now in prison on a life sentence. Even though Lees’ testimony wasn’t terribly compelling, Murdoch wasn’t some unlucky dude caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. A drifter and a drug smuggler, Murdoch had a violent past with the law and was once up on rape charges involving a 12 year old girl. He managed to shake the rape charge with an acquittal, but facts are facts and Murdoch was a bad guy with a history of violence.

This isn’t the end of the story, though. Wolf Creek, though marketed as though it was based on one true story similar to what happened in the movie, was not. It was based on the above murder trial but there was also the matter of Australian serial killer, Ivan Milat, who was responsible for the deaths of seven backpackers around Belanglo State Forest in the 90′s. The convicted murderer, Milat, was stalking hikers in the park before he would shoot, stab, strangle and/or beat his victims to death. Nearly all the bodies suffered upwards of 35 stab wounds a piece before or after death before Milat haphazardly buried their bodies face down in the dirt to be found. Other than a body to be murdered, Milat offered no motive for his crimes.

I had no idea. In the research I’ve done for this series, already starting to hit bottom as I scrape to find a new based on a true story horror movie idea, I’ve discovered one that was a complete surprise. I thought I was up on serial killers but I found one that I’ve never even heard of that was the source material for a movie I would have never considered. Serials are obviously ripe for horror movie exploitation. I’ve passed on a lot of chances to do an article about Charles Manson or Ted Bundy or something but until Zodiac, I felt that was just plain lazy. I keep my eyes open, though. Tonight’s entry is another serial killer entry but I’m fairly certain that if you’ve seen the movie, you probably didn’t know that it was based on a true story. Tobe Hooper broke out with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a story based on a pastiche of American true crime horror. His follow up, Texas Chainsaw being a tough act to follow, was a tremendous dud even by sophomore standards (even though Texas Chainsaw wasn’t his first movie). Eaten Alive follows the same idea. A nasty, grotesque horror movie based on a series of grisly, nasty murders. True to form, Hooper picked a piece of Texas horror lore to base his story on. It’s a pretty nasty one.

Telling the story of Joe Ball is hard to pull off. The legend says that in the 30′s, Ball had built a pen for five alligators and the murdered up to 20 local women, dumping their remains in the pen for the alligators to dispose of. The problem is that this was the 30′s in Texas and crime reportage wasn’t what it was that is today. People went missing but the law wasn’t hip to the idea of the serial killer. It didn’t make sense. A killer with no motive, who simply gets off on murder, no bodies to speak of, only a few reports of missing persons. Stories of Ball’s killings became boogeyman stories of old Texas that persisted throughout the years.

Joe Ball was a bootlegger during prohibition but with the close of that chapter of American history, Ball found himself in need of something to do. With that in mind, he built a saloon and in order to beat his competition, he built a pen for gators. When his relationship with his girlfriend went south and he found another woman to occupy him, the girlfriend mysteriously disappeared. After an accident with Joe’s backup girl left her with an amputated arm, she also mysteriously disappeared.

Ball wasn’t a terribly smart guy, either. He lived under the assumption that without a body, a murder conviction couldn’t stick, so as women came into his life and then exited his life through assholes of his alligators, he though he had it made since their bodies would never turn up. Ball was an extraordinarily violent guy, too, according to people who knew him. As people in his life pissed him off, they would suddenly disappear.

It would later turn out that for numerous reasons, Ball would shoot the people that pissed him off and then dump their bodies in the gator pen. His victims were mostly women. He’d date them, they’d do something to land on his bad side and the next thing you know they’d wind up with a .22 in the head and their dead bodies landing in the shallow water of the alligator pen. By popular accounts, Ball had fed 20 people, mostly women, to his gators.

Lackluster police performance and a killing spree eventually caught up with Ball, though. Joe had a handyman that he wasn’t particularly nice to. His final victims trail eventually led police to Ball’s place where the trail ended but with no bodies to nail to Ball, the police couldn’t do much. Instead, the cops leaned on Clifton Wheeler, the handyman, who eventually cracked and told the cops about the gators and how Ball disposed of his corpses. The police immediately took to bringing in Ball but when confronted in his bar, he took out his gun and turned it on himself, actually shooting himself in the chest rather than die in the electric chair.

When I was a kid I had what many would consider an unhealthy fascination with serial killers that bordered on the obsessive. What’s funny is that I totally didn’t fit the stereotype. By all accounts, I was your average teenager. I stayed up late. I partied on the weekends. I played a lot of video games. I hated homework. There was nothing overt about me that drew me to the dark side of horror movies and heavy metal. My family was kind of fucked up but whose wasn’t? The only thing remarkable about us was that my parents were still married and by all accounts still loved each other. I had a good support system, too. Must be a symptom of growing up in a small town where nothing ever happens. The only things to do are smoke weed and and watch movies.

I was probably 16 years old when I found a box of True Crime trading cards at the store that I bought my comics at. Chris’ Cards and Comics down in Seabrook, New Hampshire for the longest time was the only place within a reasonable distance to buy books. Chris’ place was sort of dingy, located in a rotting strip mall next to a fireworks store, a shitty tattoo shop and a porno store. Between my friends and I, he moved a lot of comics but I think his bread and butter was buying and selling baseball card collections and other assortments of trading cards. This was the early 90′s, though, and speculation trading was ramping up in comic book circles, so publishers sprang to life cranking out anything that looked like a collectible. I never fell for it. That was my brother’s scene. He’d buy anything with a foil embossed variant cover as long as it was on clearance and because of that he wound up with a lot of comics nobody has ever heard of and a shit ton of collectibles nobody wanted. The only strain of this disease that I ever fell for were True Crime Trading Cards.  The first one I ever pulled from the first package I bought was Charles Whitman. I remember this. The last one I pulled from the pack was The Zodiac. I was hooked, immediately. I bought the book. I had other favorites, too, but none of them taunted the cops with homebrew encrypted messages. It turned out that The Zodiac’s cypher wasn’t that hard to break but come on! How many serial killers do that? His entire routine had an air of evil murderous mastermind behind it.

Fincher’s flick is based on the same book that I read, Zodiac, and it pretty much sticks to the facts. You probably already realize this but The Zodiac killer was real. He falls into a hotspot in American history when serial killers were publicized in the media and given cute names by the people investigating the crimes. Zodiac made his hunting grounds in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1968 and 1972 where he killed a confirmed five people out an attempted seven. His first victims were Betty Jensen and David Faraday who were killed near their parked car one night when Zodiac pulled up next to them in his car and ordered them out. They were both shot to death. His second pair of victims, Michael Mageau and Darlene Ferrin, were killed in a similar fashion. Zodiac pulled his car up behind them to block them in, walked up to the window with a flashlight and a pistol and shot them both through the window. As he left the scene, Zodiac heard Mageau moaning from the car and returned to shoot them both twice more. Following this killing, Zodiac called the police from a pay phone to report the killing and at the same time, took credit for the shooting of Faraday and Jensen. Despite being shot all over the place, Michael Mageau managed to survive the encounter. Darlene Ferrin wasn’t so lucky.

Following the second attack, Zodiac begins sending letters to Bay Area newspapers, introducing himself and taking credit for the murders. As well, Zodiac threatened that he would drive around, killing whoever he found by themselves if the four parts of his cryptogram weren’t published in the newspapers who received the letters. The cypher was eventually broken by a married couple who were crypto-enthusiasts. The decoded message read:

I like killing because it so much fun it is more fun than killing wild game in the forrest because man is the most dangerous animal of all to kill something gives me the most thrilling experience it is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl the best part of it is thae when I die I will be reborn in paradice and thei have killed will become my slaves I will not give you my name because you will try to sloi down and atop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife ebeoreitemethhpiti

Following this in 1969, Zodiac struck again. This time he presented himself to Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard while they picnicked at Lake Berryessa. He approached them holding a pistol and wearing an executioner’s style hood with a bib displaying the cross/circle symbol that would eventually come to represent the Zodiac. He would start using it in his letters to the police and the media. He held Hartnell and Shepard at gunpoint and ordered Shepard to tie up Hartnell, telling them that he wanted their money and their car but wound up stabbing them both repeatedly where they lay. Both Hartnell and Shepard would survive the attack for a time. Shepard eventually slipped into a coma and died a couple of days later but Hartnell was survived and provided the first detailed description of the killer that the police had.

Finally, cab driver Paul Stine was shot to death in his cab and a piece of his shirt was sent with a letter from Zodiac to The San Francisco Chronicle. The death of Stine would be the last confirmed murder by Zodiac but this letter contained a claim of a detailed plan to attack and kill a school bus full of children but it never happened.

A second cypher was sent to the papers but remains as unsolved as this mystery. There were also more attacks and deaths but conclusively linking them to Zodiac is not possible at this time since the MO changes and the only thing to go on are letters from the killer, including details only the killer would know, claiming to be the Zodiac. The chronicle received these letters right up to 1990. There have also been numerous suspects in the killing but no evidence could conclusively link any of them to the killings. The Zodiac murders remain unsolved to this day and most likely will never be solved.

Before Night of the Living Dead, zombies weren’t a terribly common horror movie trope. It’s weird to think about this since they’re so common these days. To an obnoxious degree, even! Got a few bucks and want to make a horror movie on the weekends? Zombie flick. Do it. There’s a legion of fans out there so stupid and ga-ga for zombies that you could make a movie about people shooting zombies in for an hour and a half and the fanboy legion of doom would hardly notice that nothing else happens. Before George Romero came along and revolutionized horror, though, zombies were an obscure bit of island folklore and nothing more. Unlike the zombie apocalypse, the old notion of the voodoo zombie has not been done to death and some of my favorite spookfests walk in the footsteps of White Zombie, the classic Lugosi horror that is as heavy on Bela’s intense presence and overacting as it is on atmosphere.

The idea of the voodoo zombie, a body stuck somewhere between life and death, able to think and speak but unable to do much more than you are told by the person who made you. It’s a pretty fucked up concept in horror and is ripe for a comeback. Somebody make this happen. It’s about on par with the idea of being buried alive which, coincidentally, is a part of making an actual zombie. With A Nightmare On Elm Street, Wes Craven managed to revive the dying slasher movie and breathed new life into horror, which was already beginning to sputter out after a flood of cut-rate slasher flicks drowned any momentum the genre may have gained in the wake of Halloween. Unfortunately, he dropped the ball with just about everything he directed in the aftermath of that hit. The Hills Have Eyes sequel is dud of epic proportions and Deadly Friend is incomprehensible. To break out of this trail spin, he took on a book by Wade Davis, an ethnobotanist who spent time in Haiti while researching voodoo zombies. The result was The Serpent and the Rainbow.

The Serpent and the Rainbow turned out to be pretty loosely based on Davis’ text, as his book is said to be a harrowing account of time spent in Haiti in the middle of a revolution. If spending time in a seriously poor third world nation wasn’t already a dangerous situation, add the element of political upheaval and a seriously corrupt police force desperate to maintain order among its own people, let alone a bunch of foreigners out to uncover Haiti’s dirty folk medical secret. I’m sure Davis spent most of his time trying not to contract malaria and not be killed by nasty Haitian cops but the search for the zombie drug in this case wasn’t terribly scary. When the director of A Nightmare On Elm Street comes to town, the studio isn’t going to give up the money unless there’s some horror involved and this is where Davis’ book and Craven’s movie part ways.

In 1962, a man named Clairvius Narcisse died. He was given a funeral and was buried in front of his family as they saw him off. In 1980, Calirvius Narcisse wandered back into his own village a little worse for wear but mostly alive. He told a wild story about a voodoo sorcerer who used the famous zombie powder on him to put him into a coma that looked a lot like death. In this state, Narcisse was conscious and aware of what was happening to him. A little while after his burial, the sorcerer snuck into the cemetery where he was buried, dug him up and took him to a sugar plantation where he “stole his soul” and was put to work with other zombies for the plantation owner. When the sorcerer died and the plantation owner died, Narcisse eventually regained enough of his counsciousness where it eventually occurred to him that he should probably get the fuck off the plantation and find somewhere to go because he was getting hungry. Enter Wade Davis.

This remarkable story made its way to Davis,  who had spent a lot of time in the third world researching indigenous folk drugs like Ayahuasca and through decades of rumors of this zombie drug, this opportunity presented Davis with the opportunity to find out if it existed and if it did, how it worked. He made his way to Haiti and during his time there, learned about the zombie powder, a combination of Tetrodotoxin and Bufotenin, chemicals derived from the venoms of puffer fish and certain species of toads, respectively. When administered to a human, they go through a process that looks an awful lot like death but isn’t. Once recovered, the zombie is given a paste made from datura seeds, which is a sort of hallucinogen that induces the classic zombie state of a mindless drone. Davis discovered a rumored underground trade of zombies that Narcisse was a part of. What makes this system so air tight in Haiti is that most of the zombies suffer severe brain damage after prolonged exposure to these drugs and they wind up dying. Narcisse did not and eventually pulled his shit together enough to go home where a superstitious lot of people assumed that the guy’s dead body was up and wandering around.

I honestly don’t know what’s spookier. The original story or Craven’s movie. The overblown Hollywood version weaves a ton of creepy mysticism in to the mix and this fantasy version is an effective tool for scares but the original tale, where all you have to do is piss off the wrong people in Haiti and the next thing you know, you’re slaving away on a sugar plantation in a near-complete state of vegetation when the rest of the world thinks you’re dead because they saw your dead body buried beneath six feet of dirt in a pine box. One is completely implausible and ridiculous. The other has actually happened. A lot.

Don’t go to Haiti.

You know who’s cool? King Diamond is cool. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that he isn’t more popular among horror fans since the guy has made a long, prolific career out of heavy metal concept albums about spooky hauntings. There’s Abigail, Them, The Conspiracy, Abigail 2: The Revenge, a portion of The Spider’s Lullaby, etc. King Diamond, with his ridiculous face paint and his trademark falsetto wail, The King takes metal to a place it doesn’t usually go. Dismemberment, true crime inspired horror, sure, but eerie tales of a family terrorized by their grandmother who seems to serve a trio of unseen presences in the house? Holy crap! By the way, I’m talking about the album ‘Them’.

But seriously. That album is dope.

King Diamond was originally in a band called Mercyful Fate who also did a lot of the same sort of stuff as King Diamond’s solo projects. As a matter of fact, they also sounded a lot alike. I don’t know, it’s weird. I didn’t really intend for this to turn into a celebration of all things King Diamond, but here we are. The point, I guess, is that while in Mercyful Fate, King Diamond wrote a song called The Bell Witch and like a good God of Metal should, he based it on the American urban legend of the actual Bell Witch. What’s a Danish satanist doing singing about ghosts from Tennessee? Beats the hell out of me. I think at this point The King was living in Texas, spending all his free time hanging out with Pantera. I guess it only makes sense.

The Bell Witch has been floating around American folklore since the late 1800′s and has been the inspiration for a lot of quality horror. The Bell Witch was responsible in part for The Blair Witch Project. The story of The Bell Witch is pure weirdo Americana and the movie, An American Haunting, which starred Donald Sutherland – who clearly doesn’t care anymore – chose to twist the story and the event surrounding the haunting in favor of a story about a girl’s delusion to deal with her own sexual abuse. I don’t get it, either. You couldn’t just make a horror movie about the curse of The Bell family and the fucked up shit they endured in those early settlement times of Tennessee? Here’s the scoop:

It’s 1817 and John Bell uproots his family from North Carolina to Tennesssee where he establishes a farm on a huge plot of land in Red River. Not long after they get set up, Bell encounters a strange creature in his corn field said to have the head of a rabbit and the body of a dog. He takes a couple of shots at it but misses. Following this, the Bell family home is assaulted by unseen forces. At first, there is the sound of the house being pounded on from the outisde. Investigations by John Bell turns up no sign. Later, the daughters report hearing the faint voice of a woman singing hymns. Everyone is said to experience this but the source of the sound can never be identified. It’s just there. All the time. Attacks around the house increase in frequency and intensity. Something no one can see pulls the covers off the of the children at night as they sleep. The youngest daughter, Betsy, is physically attacked, having her hair pulled and being beaten by an unseen force. At first Bell keeps these happenings a secret until it becomes such a problem that he confides in his neighbors who spend enough time in the Bell home to experience the disturbances first-hand. As this is happening, the once faint voices around the home have grown in intensity and volume until it can be described as a single voice, a mocking awful woman’s voice that torments the Bell family in their home.

The girls grow older and men began to take an interest in them. Betsy, once again the target of the spirit’s attacks, attracts the attention of a local man ten years her senior and eventually they plan to marry. The spirit, now known as The Bell Witch, named by then-General Andrew Jackson who had heard of the disturbance and even showed up at the Bell place to check it out – but was frightened away by it – now taunts Betsy constantly. The voice follows her everywhere she goes, making it a point to voice its disapproval of the man she plans to marry. She can’t escape it and eventually breaks it off with this guy. The voices cease and return their attention the John, the head of the household, whose mental and physical well-being has been on the decline since the Bell Witch first revealed itself to the family. John begins suffering from seizures until his dead body is found, a bottle of some unidentified substance next to the bed. To test the unidentified substance, some of it was given to the family cat, who died immediately. The rest was thrown into the fireplace where it erupted into a plume of blue flame. To this day no one has any idea what that stuff was or where it came from.

Things take a turn for the better with the death of John Bell. The attacks by the Bell Witch fade over time, eventually ceasing altogether. Among the final promises, the Bell Witch vows to return to the Bell family in seven years, which it is said that it did, this time visiting an older John Bell, Junior. This second visit wasn’t menacing, though, according to legend. The return of the Bell Witch was a more philosophical approach bearing disembodied conversations about life, the universe and everything, it seems. Before it left for a second time, it vowed to return in 1935 to a living relation of the Bell’s. Whether it did or not is up in the air.

The Bell Witch was the blueprint for the modern impression of poltergeist activity. There’s plenty of ghostly folklore going around but this story, originally published in The Goodspeed History of Tennessee, didn’t turn up until around 1887 and most likely influenced a lot of ghost stories to come. Gone were the spooky allusions to tormented family spirits and here to stay were stories of an angry, violent force that tormented the Bell family for no apparent reason. Scary stuff!

Reporting The Amityville Horror to you as if it were a true story was a bit of a stretch for me. This is probably why I’m so downright harsh on it in my capsule review. The entire thing was a hoax perpetrated by an author who should have known better and a desperate couple who needed money but The Mothman Prophecies is a different story. What if you write a book under the pretense that it’s nonfiction and you believe every word of it? What if your source material is so fucking far out there, father out than evil pig spirit haunts Long Island home? It takes a special kind of passion and a particularly potent brand of crazy to tread those waters, my friends. I’m a huge conspiracy enthusiast and my all-time favorite theory is one called The Montauk Project, which is a sort of kitchen sink conspiracy theory that ties in absolutely everything you could and has some many brilliant and strange ways of explaining away the inconsistencies that no matter how crazy it actually is – and believe you me, that shit is fucking nuts! – the people who subscribe to it as the truth have an escape hatch to keep their delusion going. Montauk is an awful lot like Mothman. John Keel’s book lays out some seriously nuts philosophy and there’s just no way you can dispute it with pure logic. Sure, absolutely everything about it is a question mark and not one lick of it makes any sense, but this seamless lunacy is what keeps it in the paranormal/conspiracy cultural consciousness.

I don’t really remember The Mothman Prophecies as a movie. I remember seeing it when it came out with my wife and I remember actually walking out of the theater feeling like it was money well spent but I honestly have no impression of it and that’s kind of a bad thing for a movie. I write glowing reviews and I write scathing bad reviews of movies but there is nothing worse than a movie that leaves me with nothing to think about it. I’d heard of Mothman, of course. I was a huge fan of the X-Files and that show would be nothing without the stunning madness of pioneering conquistador of weird, John Keel. In the movie, Richard Gere plays the stand in for Keel, a journalist whose wife veers off the road one night to avoid something that came at them that she was at a loss to explain. After she dies from an inoperable brain tumor, Klein heads back to the scene to investigate the circumstances surrounding the crash and its relation to a series of strange drawings she did before her death. He winds up in a Twin Peaks sort of town full of weird motherfuckers, taunted over the phone by a menacing dude named Indrid Cold and everything involving the Mothman seems to be leading up to some kind of tragedy.

I did Mothman last year during the 31 Ghost Stories blogathon and that entry was actually related to the actual Mothman encounters in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the 60′s where a number of people were said to have been terrorized by a humanoid man with wings and incadescent red bug-eyes. A lot of terrified people reported seeing this thing and then his last appearance coincided with the collapse a bridge that killed an awful lot of people. Paranormal author, John Keel, who is responsible for a lot of modern UFOlogy’s craziest shit, hit the town in the days leading up to the bridge collapse to investigate sightings of this Mothman and that’s when his already strange existence became even stranger.

Keel originally showed up in Point Pleasant on contract to write a book about UFOs, a subject he’d already had a healthy helping of in the past. The original Mothman sightings prior to the bridge collapse were met with ridicule in the press when these things were reported but Point Pleasant not being a very big community started seeing the Mothman in greater numbers. The media may have laughed it off but an awful lot of people along the Ohio River took it pretty seriously.  You could chalk it up to mass hysteria, I guess, but Keel’s account of his time spent there paints a chilling picture of a nutty community that starts to talk about other, unrelated phenomena. There was a wave of animal mutilations, primarily dogs, strange craft were seen flying in the area and many people around Point Pleasant reported receiving visits from the strange and menacing Men In Black – who have nothing in common with the Tommy Lee Jones/Will Smith movie.

Men In Black are a favorite topic of mine. Do you keep up with Fringe? The Observers are based on these mythological characters who tend to show up around UFO sightings and depending on who you talk to, they either play an intimidation game to discourage you from talking about your encounter or they simply show up, act completely fucking weird and then disappear leaving only an extreme feeling of tension and terror since there’s no explanation for any of it. In the case of Mothman, the Men In Black were spotted all over Point Pleasant in the days leading up to the bridge collapse.

We’re not done yet, though! Enter Indrid Cold. Cold’s actual identity is a complete mystery. Depending on who is telling the story, Cold is some manifestation of The Mothman, a time traveler, an alien or a Man In Black. Where other Men In Black involved in Mothman was absolutely petrifying in their presentation and often times described as crazy or robotic, Cold was nothing of the sort. Everyone who encountered him often describe him as ‘The Grinning Man’ and his presentation was friendly. In Keel’s case, Cold delivered numerous prophecies to Keel which were alleged to come true. With the exception of his final prophecy, that when President Johnson lit the christmas tree lights at The White House, an enormous blackout would hit the East Coast. Keel, completely fooled by these creepy phone calls, prepared for the worst and then the blackout never came, but the bridge in Point Pleasant fell, killing 46 people, several of whom were Mothman witnesses. To boot, Indrid Cold’s name gets dropped an awful lot in Forteana taking place in West Virginia and elsewhere and like most good Fortean stories, it’s a tale of circlar madness and not much of it makes any sense but it’ll drive you nuts when you begin to obsessively research it. Fans of Philip K. Dick take note. Srsly.

Serial killers are utterly fascinating to me. It’s an incomprehensible kind of horror that is deeply unsettling seeing that the motive for the murders is known only to the killer. There’s some kind of obsessive, primal drive to kill that transcends typical motives like anger or money. Murder is always awful but when we see them, there’s always some kind of motive that we can understand. It’s shitty, yes, but we can grasp the reasons for murder, no matter how petty. When serial killers go to work, it’s usually to fulfill some kind of baseless desire that comes from the reptilian brain. To twist the knife, so to speak, they develop a very specific ritual that becomes their calling card when the inevitable homicide investigation begins. The ritual becomes an integral part of their process. It’s as important to the murders as the murders themselves. If they stray from their script at all – which almost always happens and leads to their capture – the murder becomes moot. It loses its power. It’s fucking crazy! Totally fascinating, I tell you. The pathology of these maniacs is something I can’t resist researching. I really want to know what drives them.

What really spooks me, though, are the guys who manage to get away. Few killers ever totally stop. Murder becomes a drug to them and they are addicted. They will never stop killing. So when a trail goes cold and the body count ceases, it’s often reasonable to assume that these guys either died or wound up in jail on some unrelated charge. Sometimes they slip below the radar and stay free, but like BTK or The Green River Killer, the law eventually catches up with them. There are a few notable unsolved serials, though. The Zodiac still remains at large even though there are some pretty strong suspicions on who he actually is or was. Jack The Ripper was never caught, either. These guys, the unstoppable serial killers, provide ample source material for the masked mass murderers that are so popular in horror today and the early proto-slashers such as this, The Town That Dreaded Sundown and Black Christmas would serve as the forerunners to a category of horror that would shape the entire genre in the 80′s and beyond. The Town That Dreaded Sundown was loosely adapted from the true crime reports of a series of murders that took place in Texarkana, Texas in 1946, a time when a serial killer with a serious eye for details could get away with their crimes for a good long time.

Popularly known as The Texarkana Moonlight Murders, the killings took place in Texas beginning in 1946 with an assault on a couple parked in their car on lover’s lane. This scenario would later infiltrate popular culture through word of mouth and inspire some of the more popular crazed killer urban legends. Unfortunately, this one was true. Jimmy Hollis was bludgeoned several times with an unidentified blunt object and his girlfriend, Mary Jeanne Larey was chased down after the attacker ordered her to run. When he caught up to her, she was sexually assaulted with the barrel of his gun. On the bright side (I guess), both victims survived their attacks and were the only ones to ever give a description of the attacker since his victims to follow this attack would never be so lucky.

The killer was described as 6 feet tall and wore a bag over his head with holes cut out for eyes and a mouth. What skin the couple could see was either a dark skinned white guy or a light skinned black guy. In the case of serial killers, it was far, far more likely that he was a white guy. There have been black serial killers but statistically speaking, it is much more common that serial killers are white men.

The second couple to be murdered was Richard Griffin – obviously not Cinema Suicide’s favorite indie horror director – and Polly Ann Moore, both shot in the head and left for dead in their car even though blood near the car suggested an execution style murder whereupon their bodies were then  moved back into the car. Less than a month later, teenagers, Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker were found in similar fashion. Paul was found, shot to death in his car even though forensic evidence at the scene suggested that he was killed elsewhere and moved to the car later. Betty Jo’s body was recovered hours later, also shot several times and showing signs of sexual assault. Finally, married couple Virgil and Kate Starks were attacked in their home when Virgil was shot through the parlor window of their home. He died from his wounds. His wife, Kate, ran to his aid and was shot twice in the face but  managed to not only survive the attack but also escape and get help in a neighbor’s home.

The Texarkana Moonlight Murderer came to be known to the press as The Phantom Killer and the panic that came as a result of these murders was substantial. Texarkana was not a large community and a killer running wild in their town was the sort of thing that made the townspeople feel like rats in a maze. There was nowhere to hide. Nobody knew who this guy was. It looked like he could get you on the road but this final attack proved that you weren’t even safe in your home. However, the MO of this final attack casts some doubt on whether the attack was carried out by The Phantom Killer. Ballistic evidence gathered at the scene of the Starks’ home was a .22 caliber bullet fired from a semiautomatic pistol where the other attacks features a .32 caliber revolver. Remember what I said about the ritual? The weapon was probably an important component to these killings and the attacks were almost definitely serial killer related since they had a sadistic sexual component to them often found only in serial murder cases.

Like I said before, The Phantom Killer was never caught and what’s even creepier is the parallels between this case and the unsolved Zodiac case. Both killers attacked couples parked in cars. Both killers used guns. Both killers wore masks. The Zodiac added the strange component of symbolic significance to his costuming, though, and had the cyphers that he used to bait the cops and the media. The Zodiac killer struck twenty years after The Phantom Killer, which could have possibly been a dry run for his much more evolved murders in California. A twenty year cooling off period, after all, isn’t unheard of. Also, distances between murders aren’t unheard of, either. Some believe that the killer in the Black Dahlia murder and The Lipstick Killer are the same person.