Well, this is a very special “Willies Wednesday” because the topic that I am talking about today is something that doesn’t actually give me the willies, but rather gives one of my brothers the willies, and I definitely used this knowledge to my advantage growing up.  You see, my brother Jeremy is claustrophobic.  He hates small places including RVs, and tents.  We went camping A LOT when we were young as it’s one of my dad’s favorite activities, and whereas I didn’t much care for it because of all the bugs, and dirt, and boring food, one of Jeremy’s main qualms with this activity was having to sleep in a small tent at night.  This led to many nights where I was jarringly awoken by Jeremy’s frantic screams, as he clawed at the tent looking for a way out.

I chuckle about this every now and then when I think about it.  Yes, I am a bad, bad person.  This is not what I want to talk about today though, but rather another cruel thing that I did to play on Jeremy’s fear.  I’m talking about the dreaded blanket over the head.  Now it seems innocent enough, but apparently when you have claustrophobia, this is not so fun, and I found this out pretty early on.  As I thought it was hilarious to scare my brother, I would sneak up on him with a blanket, throw it over his head, and then hold it there while he screamed and pleaded with me to take it off.

I would leave it on for a little while to get the maximum effect, and then finally I would release him, and promptly scamper off, as he would chase me once recovered, which was remarkably quickly.  Here’s how it would go:  I put the blanket on his head, he screamed, I let him go, he ran after me, I would hide somewhere.  If he caught up with me he would usually punch me, and if he was able to do this, he would then run and lock himself up somewhere.  This could go on for quite a while.  We were cruel, cruel children.  Don’t go thinking that I was the only bad guy here though- he also knew my fears and would take advantage of them, such as the time he threw a spider at me (yes, I do have arachnophobia).

Stop-motion animation  and claymation give me the willies.  You know the Rudolph the Reindeer special that everyone loves to watch around Christmas time?  Well, instead of giving me a feeling of joy and happiness, it instead makes me want to cover my eyes with my hands, and run out of the room screaming in terror.  I of course hold this in, as I do not want the others around me to know how much this animation petrifies me.  I have endured this for far too long, and it is time to come clean- so here it is- stop-motion animation is freakin’ scary!!!!  I don’t find it cute, or endearing, instead it scares me more than most horror movies.  Why you ask?  Did I have some kind of traumatic experience in childhood that led to this irrational fear?  Not that I know of.  But maybe it stems from my early childhood viewings of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, especially the animated Santa Clause who I found to be more cruel than jolly.

I seem to have a weird emotional connection to cartoon animals (so in this case stop-motion animals), and in this case I even had an emotional connection to the poor elf, who just wants to be a dentist.  Santa Clause seems like such a miserly old curmudgeon, and is also quite prejudiced against red-nosed reindeers.  He is just extremely unpleasant, and he only accepts Rudolph when he sees that he can get something out of Rudolph’s deformity.  So I’m thinking my fear may stem from this cruel stop-motion Santa Clause, and it just branched out from there, growing into a full out stop-motion-phobia.  Now this fear seems to be confined to claymation and stop-motion animation such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Clause is Coming to Town, James and the Giant Peach and the like, and has not branched into  traditional animation.  It seems to be a more specialized fear.  So there you have it- stop-motion animation gives me the willies!!

I have a feeling this is going to come back to haunt me next Christmas where my brothers will decide to lock me in a room with a non-stop stop-motion-athon that they have set up to play on the television from which I will be unable to escape….

Heights give me the willies.  I have a long-standing battle that has been raging between me and high places for quite some time.  It seems that when I am in a high place, looking down to the ground far below me, I begin to feel dizzy, and have an irrational fear that I will climb up on whatever barrier is keeping me from falling, and somehow not be able to stop myself from leaping towards the far away ground.  I have no idea what would possess me to do this, but I can’t help thinking about this when the fear hits.  I have tried to remedy this, but my last attempt, about 13 years ago now, when I was in eighth grade, led to a humiliation, which was probably only something that I concocted in my head, but it seemed entirely real.  Here’s what happened.  In eighth grade our social studies curriculum focused on immigration to the United States, and the immigrants experiences at Ellis Island.  Being close to New York City, we took a class trip to visit Ellis Island, and Liberty Island.  The event occurred on Liberty Island.

I decided that part of facing my fear meant climbing up as far as possible in the Statue of Liberty as was humanly possibly.  I was in a small group that included a couple of friends, and my mom who came along as a chaperone on the trip.  Well, we began climbing up the winding stairs that lead up inside the statue, and I pretty immediately felt my fears begin to surface.  I started feeling woozy and wobbly on my feet.  Well, we made it to the first landing, and then I had to call it quits.  I just couldn’t go on.  I couldn’t even look over the barrier of the first landing without feeling that I would suddenly jump up on to it, and fall over the side.  Thus the humiliation- I was the reason my group of friends could not claim victory over the Statue of Liberty.  Since then, I’ve pretty much avoided heights at all costs.  I feel like James Stewart in Vertigo, where even if I wanted to climb up some stairs to save a damsel (or dame) in distress, my fear would not allow me to go above a certain height, and I would not become a heroine, but would instead descend into a state of shock that would lead to my admittance into a mental hospital…..

Whoa, I’m getting off track there…but you get the picture- I am afraid of heights- a full out acrophobia.  I do not have any hope of conquering this fear for good, so for now I confine myself to the ground, and places of low to moderate height.  I can, luckily, access the second floor of my apartment without getting stuck halfway up and having to cry out for help, which would be quite a problem if I was the only one home at the time- I doubt that my animals would be able to provide much assistance.

Tonight’s double feature is a double dose of 90′s horror featuring actor, Sean Whalen (Twister, Never Been Kissed, Laid to Rest).  Our two features tonight will be The People Under the Stairs (1991) and Idle Hands (1999).

The People Under the Stairs (1991)

Directed by Wes Craven

“In every neighborhood there is one house that adults whisper about and children cross the street to avoid.”

In a run-down ghetto, a boy named Poindexter aka “Fool”  (Brandon Adams) is roped into helping rob the house of his family’s landlords, the Robesons, by a thug named Leroy (Ving Rhames) who is dating his sister Ruby (Kelly Jo Minter).  Fool and his family are in the process of being evicted because they are three days late with their rent, and they are unable to come up with the money to pay.  The rule of their landlords is because they are three days late, they have to pay three times the amount of their normal rent.  Fool decides to go along with the plan to rob the Robeson’s in order to save his family from getting kicked out into the street.  It is rumored that the Robeson’s have a hidden stash of gold hidden somewhere in their house.  The next day, Fool, Leroy, and another burglar, Spenser (Jeremy Roberts), go case the house.  Fool pretends to be a Bear Scout in order to approach the house, but the woman who answers the door is very cold to him, and tells him to go away.  She also does not allow him into the house when he asks to use the bathroom.  Spenser then takes his shot at getting into the house, pretending to be an electrician in order to gain access to the house.  The woman lets him in after some cajoling on his part, and after she notices a ring on his finger in the shape of a skull.  The look she gives as she closes the door tells up that things do not look good for Spenser.  A little while later the woman leaves the house. After a while, Spenser has still not returned, and Leroy is getting antsy.  He thinks that Spenser may have betrayed him, so he and Fool enter the house.  They are quickly attacked by a large dog, and after they escape that attack with minimal damage, they split up to explore the house.  Fool heads to the basement where he comes upon the dead body of Spenser, who happens to be holding a gold coin, and he also hears strange noises.  He rushes upstairs, sees that the Robeson’s are returning, finds Leroy, and tells him that Spenser is dead.  Soon Fool and Leroy are pursued by the Robeson’s- who consist of “Mommy” (Wendy Robie) and “Daddy” (Everett McGill).

Leroy ends up dead, but the Robeson’s do not yet know Fool is in the house, and he escapes when he follows a rag doll into the walls.  He meets a girl who lives in the house, Alice, who says the Robeson’s are her parents.  They have spent their lives trying to find the perfect son and daughter.  Alice is perfect because she does not hear/speak/or see any evil, but all the boys that the Robesons have brought home have not been deemed good enough as they have tried to rebel, and so they have been mutilated and stuck in the basement.  She has one friend, named Roach, who escaped from the basement, and now lives in the walls.  Mommy and daddy soon discover that Fool is still in the house, and they go on a rampage, especially when they find both Fool and Roach in Alice’s room.  Fool and Roach try to escape into the walls of the house, and Alice is punished- she has to clean up Leroy’s blood in the foyer.  Will Mommy and Daddy catch Fool and Roach, or will Mommy and Daddy get what’s coming to them?

The People Under the Stairs is a like darkly comedic modern fairytale of evil “parents” who have stolen children and mutilated them when they don’t turn out to be perfect.  Alice is the princess being held captive that the hero, Fool, comes to rescue.  The story also involves the riches that the Robeson’s have hoarded that Fool is trying to locate so that he can save his family, and the other people of the ghetto, from the clutches of the evil Robesons. The portrayals of Mommy and Daddy are over-the-top and endlessly disturbing.  They are incestuous (they are not actually husband and wife, but rather brother and sister), sadomasochistic, cannibalistic, and obsessively religious, with their focus on perfection, seeing/hearing/speaking no evil, and their insistence on everyone going to Hell.  The house that they live in is incredibly bizarre with its seemingly endless rooms and maze-like corridors, its passages within the walls, and its booby-traps.  It’s like some find of absurd funhouse that I for one would not want to be trapped in, although I wouldn’t mind owning a house like this- I’ve always wanted to live in a house with secret passageways and the like- I just wouldn’t want to have a bunch of mutilated people living in the walls.

Idle Hands (1999)

Directed by Rodman Flender

“The Devil will find work for idle hands to do…but what happens when he chooses the laziest teen slacker in the world to do his dirty work?”

This stoner comedy/horror film centers on a lazy slacker, Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa), who finds out that his hand is possessed by some kind of demonic force the day after his hand kills his parents without his knowledge.  One night, as Anton’s parents (Fred Willard and Connie Ray) are preparing for bed after a vigorous day of Halloween decorating, they turn off the light, only to see a message written on the ceiling, stating that something is under the bed.  Pretty soon they both are killed by something unseen.  The next morning, Anton wakes up, does his slacker thing, puts on some headphones, heads downstairs, switches on the TV, and looks for some pot, which unfortunately he is out of.  He heads over to his slacker/pot head friend’s house, where his best friends, Pnub (Eldon Henson) and Mick (Seth Green) say they are out of pot.  We get a glimpse of his love interest, Molly (Jessica Alba) as she rides down the street on her bike, and she drops her journal which is full of her poetry and song lyrics, which Anton thinks are brilliant.  He heads to her house to give her back the journal after some cajoling from is friends, and after borrowing a pair of pants, but when he gets there he ends up losing his nerve.  He returns the notebook, and then leaves abruptly.  He heads home, and is accosted by a couple of cops (one of which is Sean Whalen) who went to school with Anton.  He makes fun of them, they search his pockets, and find an empty baggy that smells like marijuana, and decide to charge him with drug possession.  He points out that the bag is empty, so they drop the bag on the group and write him a ticket for littering.  After arriving at home, and having an unsuccessful attempt at smoking an oregano and nutmeg combination, he prepares to make a sandwich, failing to see the blood on the knife.  After he takes a bite, he sees the blood, and hastily spits out the bite of food.  He then freaks out, using his lazy dog to explore the house looking for his parents, and he eventually finds them dead, disguised as Halloween decorations.

His friends come over at this point, and after some delayed reactions, they see the dead parents.  After finding some clues that point to Anton as the killer, he realizes his hand is possessed.  The possessed hand ends up killing his friends, who soon come back as zombies (although they don’t seem to be the flesh-eating kind, but more the comic-relief kind), and Anton’s hand ends up forcing him to go over to his love interest’s house.  While he attempts to control his possessed hand, Molly ends up showing Anton that she shares his affection, and they make plans to go to the school dance together.  Anton is finally able to leave.  After a few more murders at the hands of his hand, he decides to cut it off with a cleaver….but the hand still has a mind of its own.  Meanwhile, we are also following a druidic high priestess (Vivica A. Fox)  who is trying to locate the hand so that she can destroy it.  Will she find it in time?

Idle Hands seems to be a movie very typical of the time in which it came out, with the predominance of marijuana smoking slackers, but just put into a frame of a horror film.  The premise of the movie is that, “Idle hands are the devil’s playground”, and this particular demon has chosen to possess Devin Sawa because he is the laziest of slackers, and has “idle hands”.  He lives a life where he apparently never attends school, stays in his room for days at a time, and lives for getting high basically.  The demon that possesses his hand not only forces him to kill, but also gets him out of his house and into the world again, so I guess not everything was a negative effect of the possession.  The murders in this movie are never played seriously- the death of Anton’s parents was never really addressed other than when he finds the bodies, but he never was sad, and we never dwell on their deaths.  The deaths of his friends weren’t anything to feel bad about either because they just come back to life as zombies- they are the same though personality-wise, they just look a little decayed, although this saves the problem of having to find actual costumes for the school dance.  After Anton chops off his own hand (which seems to cause him minimal pain) the murders escalate when the hand escapes, and heads for the school dance.  We are treated to some death and mayhem at the hands of the hand, we get some more incompetence at the hands off our leads as they try to track down the hand, and we even get a cameo of The Offspring as they perform at the school dance, kind of reminiscent of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones performing at the party in Clueless!!  This movie was much better than I expected it to be, and there were many hilarious moments, but also some awesomely gruesome and interesting death sequences that definitely made for enjoyable viewing.

Thoughts on the double feature

Some SPOILERS may follow

-        Both movies obviously share the acting talents of Sean Whalen, who always reminds me of a young Steve Bushemi.  In The People Under the Stairs he has a larger role as the mutilated but heroic Roach who saves Fool on numerous occasions, and is a great friend to Alice.  In Idle Hands he is more of a losery loser for lack of a better word who wants to be a hero and has become a police officer due to this desire, but seems to be more into getting revenge on those who make fun of him.

-        Both movies are comedic horror films.

-        Both movies include a severed hand.  In The People Under the Stairs, the hand of one of Mommy and Daddy’s victims is fed to their vicious dog.  In Idle Hands, the possessed hand is cut off voluntarily and goes off on a vicious rampage of its own.

-        Both movie involve scenes where our heros/victims crawl around in walls and vents.  In The People Under the Stairs, the house of the Robeson’s is filled with secret passageways in the walls, and Fool, Alice, and Roach crawl around in these passages for safety.  In Idle Hands, Molly and her friend escape into the vents in the school to try to get away from the possessed hand.

-        In each movie Sean Whalen’s character dies L In The People Under the Stairs he dies by shotgun, in Idle Hands, by possessed demon hand.

-  The father in The People Under the Stairs looks eerily similar to the father in Idle Hands. That may just be me though.

The Brits hit the nail on the head with this one.  28 Days Later (2002) is one of the best “zombie” movies ever created.  I use quotes because these poor souls are not actually half-deteriorated ghouls raised from the dead, they’re infected.  Infected with “ rage”.  In the movie’s opening scene, animal rights activists have just invaded an animal testing facility to free captivated chimps from their cages—unbeknownst to them, the chimps are infected with a deadly virus that make them flesh-happy.  Chimp bites human, and the rest is history.  28 days later…

Jim, a hospital patient, awakens from a prolonged coma only to find that the streets of London are deserted.  There’s not a trace of life anywhere—only scattered, empty cars, debris, and missing persons flyers galore.  It’s not until he enters a dimly lit church in search of signs of life that he encounters his first “zombie”, a cannibalistic priest who makes a beeline for Jim the second he says “Hello”.  Jim narrowly escapes the church with his life, and is lucky enough to befriend a few other survivors, one of whom is a machete-wielding woman by the name of Serena.   Serena is a fierce chick, who isn’t about to risk her own safety for anyone.  When a friend of hers is suddenly attacked and bitten, she uses her machete to make human mincemeat of him before he can so much as open his mouth in protest.

The rest of the movie follows Serena, Jim, and a father and daughter as they attempt to find other uninfected  survivors.  There are others out there—some military men gone bad who’ve bunked up in an abandoned mansion and play target practice with the infected.  They’ve even got one chained like a dog in their backyard, whom they plan to observe in order to see how long it takes the infected to starve.  That plan goes horribly awry…but I won’t give away the ending.  Watch the movie—you won’t be disappointed.

Favorite heart pounding scene:

“They’re running from the infected”:  Changing a flat tire is scary enough, right?  How about if you’ve got to change that flat tire in a dark tunnel that’s suddenly overrun with hundreds of rats?   Oooh, and by the way, the rats are running from the infected.  This suspenseful scene left me white-knuckled and short of breath…and thinking that I should:

 1) learn how to change a tire

2) learn how to do so in under 30 seconds (you never know when you might be under a time crunch!)

~Rebecca

Helium balloons give me the willies.  Yes, I know, they are just inanimate objects that would not hurt a living soul….and regular balloons do not scare me, but with the addition of the helium, which allows them to float, and move freely unless otherwise secured…this is what gives me the willies.  I believe this fear began after I had watched Steven King’s It for the first time.  That mini-series had a bunch of creepy balloons in it, that “It” used to put fear into the hearts of children, and the grownups who had gone back to Derry to try and get rid of “It” for good.  The image of the floating balloons, combined with his creepy uttering of “we all float down here”, combined to put a fear of these innocent floating objects in my young mind.

Compounding the scariness of the mini-series (especially to a 7 or 8 year old me), was the fact that the night after I had seen It, I woke up in the middle of the night, and there was a balloon floating next to my bed.  I know my parents would not have put the balloon there, and I’m pretty sure my brothers did not do it….at the time one of them would have been 5 or 6 and I don’t even know if he had watched It with me, and my other brother would only have been 1 or 2.  No, I think these were cosmic forces working against me to put a life-long fear of floating balloons in me.  Not that I run in terror when I see a floating balloon, but I can never quite get the image of Tim Curry as “It” out of my head whenever I see one of these creepy balloons…..and the ones that have legs and arms…..don’t even get me started on those!

Billy and Stu look like your average high-schoolers, well, maybe ones that have stayed back a few years.  They don’t seem like dangerous guys.  They have lots of friends, are well-liked, both have devoted girlfriends, and they live in a nice, wealthy town, based on the houses we see in the movie!!  Underneath the surface though lurk malice, unstableness, and murderous desires.  Now Billy’s motive is revenge, as he blames Sidney’s mother has for led to the downfall of his family.  He and Stu have already murdered her mother, and now they want to massacre a few others, with the finale being Sidney and her father.  Stu doesn’t have a motive.  He tells Sidney that it’s peer pressure, he’s far too sensitive, and he was dragged into this by Billy.  They both seem to have had a lot of fun planning these murders, coming up with a creative costume, and well thought-out plot.  Adding to the fun is the fact that they have watched a lot of horror movies, and are basing their plan of attack on what happens in the movies.

What makes Billy and Stu so scary is that they are just nice seemingly normal kids.  They could be your next door neighbors.  They are not loners, they don’t dress all in black, they don’t display the average signs of depression, or hostility toward others.  Basically, they don’t fit the mold that the media has laid out for us about what to look for in a psychotic person.  What also makes them scary are the lengths they go to in their plan of massacre.  This is not a crime of passion, but rather a well thought out plot to kill a lot of people, pin the murders on someone else, and then plan a sequel where they can kill more people.  They seem to enjoy being the source of destruction and fear.  They still behave naturally after murders are committed.  Stu is still a constant joker, and they never show any remorse.  The closest either one of them gets to remorse, is when Stu is handed the phone, after they have told Sidney of their plot, and she has escaped, and turned the tables on them.  He then says that his mother and father are going to be so mad at them.  He still doesn’t seem to be sorry about any of the murders though.  And Billy never shows remorse once.  They are psychopaths who seem like well-adjusted youths, and this is terrifying.

Here’s a short film from 1967 starring none other than the Goblin King himself, David Bowie, in his first acting role, playing “the boy”.

Directed by Michael Armstrong

Also starring Michael Byrne as “the man”.