An underappreciated gem of regional horror filmmaking, Terror at Tenkiller is a hazy tour through a summer from hell in Oklahoma
We know that not all horror films have to be scary. But it is a rare breed that treats the horror with an almost complete lack of alarm. Terror at Tenkiller is of that rare breed. This isn’t to say it is poorly made, or that it’s insensitive to the plights of its characters — in fact, it’s far from it. But there is a strange disconnect at play between the interests of its creators and their chosen genre within this film. They appear more attentive to listening to their characters talk and go about their summer vacation than fulfill any studio-mandated slasher film kill quotas, even as a disquiet pervades over the film. What we have in Terror at Tenkiller is an underappreciated gem of regional genre filmmaking. But even the title of this Oklahoma-shot oddity threatens to tie it too close to something more general. For as with most great regional horror films, it is the one-of-a-kind specifics that make Tenkiller worthy of attention.
Leslie (Stacy Logan) is a college student stuck in a troubled relationship with Josh (Kevin Meyer), her long-term boyfriend. Josh’s erratic behavior has recently become more threatening. Leslie admits to her friend Janna (Michele Merchant) that he has been physically abusive, but she feels unable to end the relationship or seek help due to how close their families are. When Josh instigates a public argument on campus right before summer break, Janna steps in to defend her friend. She convinces Leslie to change her vacation plans and run off with her to her family’s lakeside cabin without leaving a trace for Josh to follow. Janna promises that Leslie will be safe and that she can set her up with a job at the local diner. So the two women embark on their trip to Janna’s cabin, which is located near the aptly named Tenkiller Lake.1
When they arrive, everything feels too good to be entirely true. Even without Leslie’s voice-over, the lush scenery appears bound to wilt from the strange atmosphere that the film develops — like serenity caught just past its prime. Janna follows through and sets Leslie up with a waitress position. They go swimming and cruise the river in the family motorboat. They engage in their summertime fun without knowing that the area has been plagued by a series of disappearances. Tor (Michael Shamus Wiles, credited as Mike Wiles), the seemingly nice boat dock worker who Leslie and Janna both take a shine to, has been busy murdering young women. From what we can gather, the townspeople suspect it’s just several cases of foolhardy kids running off for the summer. And all the while, Josh is dialing in on his girlfriend’s location. A series of threatening phone calls make the women think he is becoming more violent and unstable, but the danger is in fact far closer.
But this description of what happens in the film threatens to mislead what the film actually is. Sure, all of the above action occurs, but when it’s all typed out in synoptic fashion it suggests that it unfolds with typical slasher thrills and intensity. The film was produced by United Entertainment International, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, home video company and special effects house. United is perhaps most famous for releasing Blood Cult, the 1985 straight-to-video classic that is widely considered the first film made for the home video market. Oddly enough, Tenkiller was a family affair. Documentary filmmaker Ken Meyer was hired to direct a horror film for United, and his wife, Claudia, was given the opportunity to write the screenplay. Ken’s son, Kevin, was asked to bring several of his friends from USC’s film school, where he had recently graduated after co-directing (with Jeff Burr) the short film Divided We Fall (1982), a Civil-War-set drama featuring his father as the narrator and a very young Mike Wiles acting alongside an aging John Agar. The Meyers were given two weeks to make Tenkiller. It was to be shot on 16 mm before being released straight to video.
There was one kink in all of this: Ken Meyer had little to no interest in horror movies. But he wanted his shot at making a feature-length movie. When United offered him the chance to do just that, he took it. Rather than play into a genre he knew little about, the film he and Claudia set about making appears to follow their own unique path through the well-established territory of horror filmmaking.
A hazy detachment pervades over the film as Leslie is pulled from her own personal nightmare into her friend’s nostalgic dreamworld. We hear Janna rhapsodize about her childhood summers and how innocent and easygoing the townspeople are. According to Janna, the only danger in Tenkiller is that the old fishermen might come into the diner and “try to pinch [Leslie’s] ass.” Janna’s rose-tinted memories of the town are never exactly shattered, but a lightly dread-filled aura is cast over the women’s vacation as they smile and shield their eyes from the sun. Janna’s telling of how Tenkiller Lake earned its name brings this odd romanticism to the fore. She recounts that her father would put her to bed with the tale of a young Native American woman who killed 10 men involved with murdering her sister. She killed them off one by one and eventually drowned herself in the lake alongside her last victim. Janna says that she was scared of the lake because of this story, but also comforted, as she felt the spirit of the woman was below the water protecting her.
Terror at Tenkiller’s narrative plays out like a sleepy float down a river, a dreamscape of a summer from hell that just can’t help being recalled almost pleasantly. The film drifts along dazed and sunburnt — breezy one minute, mildly heat-stroked the next, occupying a space between the spirits said to haunt the waters and the living horrors that lurk along the shoreline. The characters comment on the strangeness of their environment as they sunbathe and swim. “It doesn’t seem real here,” Leslie says to Janna. “Dreamlike, I guess I’d call it… it kind of makes me feel strange… like [how] you feel when you wake up and realize someone’s been watching you sleep.” They all but shrug off the menacing phone calls and disappearing neighbors. With Josh as the most likely source for potential danger, somewhere off in the distance searching for them, their eyes glaze over all the warning signs directly in front of them.
The film uses the idyllic setting to odd effect. The women pass through and look upon scenes that you might see hung on the walls of a restaurant or dentist’s office — a lone fisherman with a line cast at sunset, a classic American diner at the base of a dam. But there is something fragile about these familiar images and the quiet lakeside scenery. We know from the opening scene that the calming environment is the location of grisly murders. We also know exactly who is committing them. The film makes no effort to conceal Tor’s identity as the killer. He shows his face in the opening scene as he kills a diner waitress under the moonlight; she lets out an almost relaxed sigh as her throat is cut, more or less setting the film’s tone. Tor has no history within the town. The lack of information about his past is only suggested by his temporary boss, Preacher (Dale Buckmaster), in the form of a lazy introduction — “Tor, short for Tor.” — and insinuations about a “white trash” upbringing. His proximity to the community and his casual demeanor among his neighbors, pulling boats up onto their docks and receiving free pie at the diner, ease us into the extended scenes of casual, even caring, conversation that he often takes part in. Throughout most of Terror at Tenkiller it’s rather easy to forget you are watching a horror film.
It often feels like the film itself is trying to take its own vacation. Unlike its Oklahoma-shot contemporary Blood Cult, Terror at Tenkiller just doesn’t feel quite at home when it comes time to settle into the horror elements. Due largely to Ken Meyer’s lack of interest in horror, the producers had to call for reshoots when early cuts came back nearly goreless. The filmmakers seem more interested in listening to Leslie and Janna talk about life than in putting their lives at risk. At times it feels like the Meyers need to remind themselves that Tor is a murderer! Even in its final released version there is a noticeable resistance within the film against the narrative’s nastier aspects — like it doesn’t want to go there despite its genre-based predestination. This creates its own tension that is almost harmonious with the very conflicts of the film. We know from Leslie’s opening voice-over narration that her tale ends with tragedy. What begins as an escape from one type of horror with Josh leads to something more severe as she and Janna encounter Tor. Tenkiller features several gnarly gore scenes, but they stick out for how they contrast with the easygoing social dynamics and vacation atmosphere at the lake. For one, the murder scenes are often presented without scoring, which, rather than add to the naturalism or “reality” of it, draws attention to the stagedness of the effects and setpieces. An arm is sawed off in close-up and a woman is brutally drowned in a living-room-stationed hot tub. And rather than feeling as visceral as the gore effects look — the arm especially is quite well done — they feel at odds with the rest of the film. Several of the other setpieces, including an impressive Hammer-esque dream sequence shrouded in fog, while the finale catches us up in the familiar tensions of a well-made slasher film. But there is something refreshingly disjointed about how it all comes together. Where most regional horror films feature dramatic scenes to pad out the time between the gore, this one seems to flip the formula.
Further aiding Tenkiller’s hazed-over tone were several production problems brought on by the Oklahoma shooting locations. The extreme heat during the shoot led to Ken Meyer being hospitalized for a severe bout of heatstroke. His son, Kevin, had to take over behind the camera at the inopportune point in the shoot during which his own scenes as Josh were scheduled. He recounts in a recent interview that he struggled to take the directorial reins of the project while acting.
On the technical side, the audio recorded on location was overwhelmed by cicadas, which forced an entire rerecording of the dialogue in post-production. The cicadas are audible in the film as a looping drone throughout the soundtrack. Strangely, Stacy Logan and Michele Merchant, the two lead actresses, weren’t asked to come back to record their lines in the studio. The final film doesn’t necessarily come across as if it were dubbed, but there is an uncanny drawl in the sound design that feels right at home alongside Tor’s unsettling harmonica rendition of “Beautiful Dreamer” that seems to emanate from the lake itself.
To some, Terror at Tenkiller may come across like the result of incompetence. But all of the above factors, more than anything, make for a unique film with a sort of catatonic horror. I won’t make claims that this is a great film. But it’s the sincere concern it shows for its characters and the lack of urgency that pervades over most of the film that is most compelling. It captures the anxiety that comes from being told to relax when you know something just isn’t right; it gently places us in that helpless position of being dragged along for a ride that feels doomed to go wrong. And that is no small feat of horror filmmaking.
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- While there is a real place in Eastern Oklahoma called Tenkiller Ferry Lake, the film was actually shot nearby at Lake Fort Gibson.
