The eyes have it! (Viewer discretion advised)
Kinky fashion victims from Mars, picky mothers make gift-giving a chore, tropical all-inclusives where you're the one on the menu, it's all fun and games till, well, you know. It's time for the Sunday Scaries!
To die——to really be dead——that must be glorious.
~ Dracula (1931)
Hello, welcome, Happy Fall! Here I am once again with another case of the Sunday Scaries.
It seems like a poor evolutionary model to put a half-dozen or so holes in the human body, mostly for certain things to go into or other certain things to come out, and to place an unusually large number of these holes in the head, in close proximity to the brain.
Which leads to our topic du jour: eye horror, one of the more potent brands of body horror, guaranteed to make us flinch, recoil, turn away or throw one’s hands up in front of one’s face to shield our own eyes in fright. Eye injury and blindness have distressed and alarmed moviegoers ever since Luis Bunuel’s surrealist collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou in 1929. The eyes are the windows to the soul, we often hear, and are crucial for many of us in perceiving, navigating and interpreting the surrounding world. As a child I already had eye anxiety as my vision began to decline and required glasses from age seven onward. My glasses were ugly, fragile and expensive and signalled to everyone, bullies in particular, that I was uniquely vulnerable compared to the other children.
Two films I saw on television at a too-early age contributed to my eye terrors: Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), a British shocker which aired late one Saturday on our local Chiller Thriller program, and opened with a woman receiving a pair of binoculars with retractable spikes that stab her eyes out; and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), which inexplicably was broadcast uncut one Sunday afternoon, and featured a near-silent scene where Jessica Tandy searches through an empty house and finds a room full of broken windows and dead birds, and a man on the floor in his pyjamas with his eyes pecked out.
From the 1970s onward, and particularly through the slasher era, it was nearly impossible to escape the sight of eyes being gouged, pierced, burned, burst or otherwise disrespected as part of one’s horror adventures. Realistically executed eye trauma is still considered to be one of the peak achievements among practical effects technicians. I couldn’t begin to list every film that goes for the eyes, but a few personal favourites spring to mind.
“The eyes of the city are mine,” states Zelda Rubinstein as she sends her hypnotized ophthalmologist son to go out and kill kill kill and then harvest his victims’ eyes for her collection in the perfectly sane and sensible and not at all bonkers Euro-slasher Anguish (1987) by genre-hopping cineaste Bigas Luna. This is a film where it’s best to read nothing, even the Letterboxd summary, as it has one of the biggest rug-pulls in cinematic history. Trust me: you will not see it coming! (har har)
The titular Eyes of Laura Mars belong to Newtonesque fashion photographer Faye Dunaway in this stylish nonsensical American giallo, and are somehow telepathically linked to a killer who is inspired by her images, or perhaps is inspiring them, and is killing his way towards a confrontation with her. But who could it be? Well, no points for guessing as there aren’t that many options, especially as the bodies start hitting the studio floor—but if we set aside the compromised script, we find some surprising queer and gendery elements as the film explores dual identities, shadow selves and the fetishization (commercial and aesthetic) of sexually violent imagery. If this had been made by Argento, we’d be all over it.
We can’t talk about eye horror without mentioning the comprehensively revolting Lucio Fulci 1979 classic Zombie / Zombi 2 / Zombie Flesh Eaters. Fulci jets to the tropics with an attractive buffet of performers and leavens the gut-munching with a see-it-to-believe-it zombie vs. shark battle and an unforgettable eye-splintering that sets the standard for, um, for this kind of thing. The Arrow 4k features an essay by good friend Willow Catelyn Maclay in the collector’s booklet, FYI. Om nom nom!
Ruby (1977) is a terrible film. When I was too young to go to certain movies by myself (many horror movies but also many arthouse films), I would ask my father to take me, and there were only three or four which prompted him to announce that he was never taking me to the movies again: Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Tenant (1976), both of which upset him for personal reasons I think; Carrie (1976), where the final scare made him jump so hard he threw his back out; and Ruby, which was just terrible. Which is a shame because I love it so! It is a camp-tastic supernatural neo-noir set at a drive-in run by Piper Laurie, former moll of a dead gangster whose daughter (Janit Baldwin, one of Swan’s groupies in Phantom of the Paradise, gator bait in ‘Gator Bait) is eventually possessed by him. You know, these things happen. It was made for about ten cents but everyone gives their all to varying degrees of success. However, there is a climactic moment where Ruby reveals that she has kept the eyes of her husband’s killer in a jar, and she pulls that cloth-covered jar down from a shelf in her closet, and she reveals them to the ghost of the killer and, well, cinéma!
And then we have Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), with Ray Milland evoking Claude Rains in The Invisible Man (1933) as a Doctor Who Goes Too Far by inventing eye drops that give him x-ray vision and then proceeding to use them to see through paper, clothing, flesh and ultimately the fabric of the universe. “I’ve come to tell you what I see!” he says before he finally takes matters in his own hands. Caustic comedian Don Rickles has a terrific role as a sideshow barker who capitalizes on Milland’s uncanny talent.
Currently watching: Ethan Mundt, known to many RuPaul’s Drag Race fans as Utica, has made it much farther on this season of Project Runway than I expected, and given some surprise circumstances may now be heading into the final [redacted]. It’s a great time to catch up if you haven’t already.
Cool Story, Bro: A poignant and unsettling piece of micro-fiction on HAD, with a title nearly as long as the story is short: Our Second Date Was Meant To Be Unconventional And Unromantic by Anna Vangala Jones. (Search the site for more of her stories. Each and every one’s a banger.)
This Week in Horror: Oh god, where do you even start. Let’s go with this: Robert Redford died this week, after one of the greatest careers one could have on screen and in the film industry overall. He never made a horror film per se, though he was the first choice for Guy Woodhouse in the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby (he turned it down because of a contractual dispute, and apparently later regretted it). However, he came quite close in two pieces that bookended his amazing life: an episode of Twilight Zone (which he refused to watch) where he plays an injured police officer who is bleeding out as he tries to convince a reclusive old woman to help him; and the terrifying 2013 existential sea thriller All Is Lost which was not a wise viewing choice for someone who has moved within half a mile of the ocean.
In other news, the Winnipeg Public Library hosts their Queer Book Fair next Saturday. I will be participating virtually, reading a previously unheard short story and taking questions. This is Manitoba's largest bookish event that celebrates 2SLGBTQIA+ stories and spaces including author readings, creative workshops and crafting, and a vendor with 25 local authors, publishers and bookish makers. Follow @wpgqueerbookfair and Raven's End Books for program updates.
That’s it for this week. Until next time, remember: “There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness…a light that glows, changes…and in the centre of the universe…the eye that sees us all.”
Help me. Help me be human.
~ The Fly (1986)