Shocker is an unfairly maligned masterpiece from a master of horror, combining the best elements of Craven’s previous films while predicting the thematic concerns that’d define his late career
The history of horror cinema is a history of effort going unrewarded, achievement going unremarked upon, and all too many excellent films finding themselves in the annals of the unloved. Even the genre’s quartet of masters — John Carpenter, George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, and Wes Craven — faced indifference and outright disdain more often than critical acclaim. Part-way through their careers, each of the first three slid out of studio favor and mostly stayed out. Craven’s trajectory was more unusual; his high and low points were much more scattered than those of his genre contemporaries and his little-loved, late career efforts had the backing of a major studio.
It’s a well known bit of trivia that Craven worked in porn before crossing over into the comparative mainstream. What’s less well known (it certainly surprised me) is that he continued in porn even after the shocking theatrical run of The Last House on the Left (1972). The Fireworks Woman, the only porn film that officially lists Craven as its director today, hit screens three years after its director’s just-barely-more-respectable feature debut. For Craven, in 1975, the film that’d go down as his first of several classics was exactly what its marketing insisted: only a movie. The sudden shift from relative prominence to conspicuous obscurity would prove a theme of his career. He followed A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), for example, with Chiller (1985), a rightfully forgotten made-for-television film, Casebusters (1986), an installment of the Wonderful World of Disney, and The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985), a cobbled-together sequel that critics disparaged and Craven disowned.
Craven didn’t suffer Hollywood mistreatment without at least attempting to fight back. Speaking to Film Comment in 1989, Craven confirms that resentment played a role in bringing Shocker (1989) and its killer TV repairman, Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi), to life. Author Marc Mancini suggests Craven’s masterpiece was conceived in an effort to get revenge on the studio suits who turned Elm Street into a franchise and Freddy into a wisecracking mascot. “I want to make a competitor for Freddy,” said Craven during the mid-production interview, a competitor “who is so strong that Freddy will be forced into retirement.” In a cruelly ironic twist, the film forced its director into a kind of retirement, a return to directing for television.
Critics and audiences didn’t embrace Shocker. It never spawned sequels and no kid ever dressed up as Horace Pinker for Halloween. Shocker outshines its director’s recognized classics, however, thanks in part to a blend of their best elements. By the late 1980s, themes of generational trauma and the curse of inheritance were a fixture of Craven’s work. Elm Street and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) introduced a new layer of psychological intrigue (and took Craven’s work to a new level) by both straddling and blurring the line between the waking and dreaming worlds. Shocker goes further; Craven seemed to believe it had to. “Other movies forced us to do some rethinking. And as much as I love to exploit the irrationality of dreams, to poke holes in our psychic armor, I knew I needed a twist.” “That twist,” he confirms, “turned out to be television.”
Shocker’s opening credits make the film look less like a rebuttal to Elm Street than a loose remake with the promised “twist” present in the form of ubiquitous televisions. Elm Street begins with “Fred” Krueger (Robert Englund) at work in his dreamworld lair, a dripping, labyrinthine boiler room. Insert shots show how he assembles his iconic knife-fingered glove. We’re here because Tina (Amanda Wyss) is here, walking through a nightmare that soon turns violent. When she wakes with a start, it’s only after suffering an injury at Krueger’s gloved hand. The violence of Shocker’s titles is more consistent and mostly unrelated to the characters we’ll soon meet. As Pinker works on some vague mechanical apparatus, grim television footage accompanies the process. Barking dogs, police brutality, bombs, and gunfire all suggest what Craven may have meant when he lamented our embrace of television and almost willful blindness to “the threats it holds.” TV owners can recreate such grisly, deadening montages themselves, any day of the week, with nothing more than idle channel surfing.
As the credits draw to a close, we see and hear a news broadcast related to Horace Pinker’s crime spree. An anchor fills us in:
“Police are sure only of the following: he is male and savagely powerful. In almost all cases, he has battered his way to victims through locked doors and he is so intelligent that he has managed not only to elude police for these nine months, but escape identification of any kind.”
That almost laudatory description of Pinker and his crimes serves Craven’s critique of television while betraying the writer-director’s desire to outdo Freddy Krueger. It predicts the fetishization of killing that true crime programming and all-day reporting has amplified in the years since, as well as some of the ideas Craven would explore in his final franchise. Those anchors also set a tone for the copious newsroom narration to come. The camera zooms out from a television in Pinker’s workshop and tilts away from another, on the counter in an on-campus concession stand. Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg) asks the attendant to change the channel. This news footage ties Pinker to all the televised violence we’ve seen and the camera’s movement places the viewer and every character in a world defined by, perhaps even circumscribed within, television.
Throughout the first two Scream films, Craven mostly literalizes his exploration of violent media and its cultural impact through dialogue. Sometimes this works in his favor. It’s thrilling, for example, when Stu (Matthew Lillard) and Billy (Skeet Ulrich) allude to the cinematic inspirations for their crimes during Scream’s frenzied final act. On the other hand, it’s excruciating when Randy (Jamie Kennedy) and his college classmates debate the merits of sequels and the corrosive effects of on-screen bloodshed in Scream 2. No one would call Shocker a subtle film. It’s often as blunt and aggressive as its antagonist and the heavy metal on its soundtrack, but it beats the Scream films for subtlety by using the cinematic language established during its credits to comment on the impact of violent media more often than its script. Even when Horace Pinker is praying to a television and summoning an all-powerful, electrical demon, Shocker never puts its intentions in the mouths of any characters other than its pervasive news anchors. Most of Craven’s commentary comes instead from the ever-present screens which add violent undertones to even some tender sequences and often seem to transport the viewer from place to place.
Shocker makes so-called shortcomings that are all too common to low and mid-budget horror films — common to even some of Craven’s more expensive, studio-backed efforts — into virtues. Nondescript settings and cardboard characterizations give this remarkably singular film a strangely universal quality. Despite his athletic prowess and tragic past, Jonathan is an every-teenager (Berg is an even worse actor than a director) who may as well live on Main Street (or Elm Street) and attend State U. That lack of specificity and surface detail makes the events of Shocker something like a horror story that’s already survived a generation or two of retelling. Or, more accurately, Shocker plays like a half-remembered mix of a nightmare and whatever was airing on TV during a few brief waking interludes. Even the wild diversions of the film’s script, which split the proceedings into something more like three programs than three acts, work in its favor.
Though it doesn’t open mid-dream, Shocker is nearly as quick as Elm Street to shock a character awake. Jonathan, a college wide receiver, suffers an injury on the football field, knocking himself out cold. He comes to, converses with his girlfriend, Alison (Camille Cooper), and walks back to his house to recuperate. In the hands of a more conventional director, the cut from the field to an empty street wouldn’t give us pause. This is Craven. Within a few moments, it becomes clear that he’s still poking holes in his viewers’ and characters’ psychic armor. The sudden change of location was not mere cinematic shorthand, nor is the eerie stillness merely in our heads. Jonathan realizes that there’s no accounting for he and Alison’s location: the street he grew up on, where his foster family still lives. There’s no explanation for the TV repairman’s van outside their home either. “Who’s working on a TV at this hour?,” he asks before heading inside alone to investigate. His brother Bobby lies dead in the foyer; upstairs Pinker has his mother and sister cornered, wielding a knife. Jonathan’s attempt to intervene results in the first of Shocker’s many surprising optical effects. He lunges at Pinker and passes straight through his body and back into his own bed. A phone call confirms that this wasn’t an ordinary dream and that dreams will play a different role for Pinker than they did for Freddy. Freddy’s psychic connection with victims was the most powerful weapon at his disposal. Pinker has killed victims in their sleep and keeps a town full of would-be victims awake for fear, but it’s a surprise when Jonathan suddenly appears via dream and threatens to thwart his plans.
The film’s narrative briefly centers on an investigation, and, after an unsuccessful raid on Pinker’s headquarters, newscasters and journalists become like secondary antagonists thanks to their outrageously detailed reports. They inspire Pinker’s ire while exposing Jonathan to retaliation. After Allison is brutally murdered, Jonathan collaborates with his football teammates to reenter the dream world and interrupt Pinker mid-murder yet again. What follows is an extended chase and fistfight that establishes the pace of the film’s surprising second act. Save for Pinker’s prolonged execution, the film effectively works (when it works, at least) like one long chase from here on out. It suffers for every second it spends with idle or overly introspective characters. With Elm Street and Serpent, Craven distinguished himself as a master of controlled chaos. Both films are at their best when characters are thrown into worlds that erode and evolve around them, capitalizing on their anxieties and showcasing Craven’s uncommon gift for practical effects and inventive set design. Shocker’s most involving sequences bring the logic of dreams as well as the aesthetics of television into the real world.
When Alison returns as a flesh-and-blood apparition to arm Jonathan with a magical necklace, it might amount to nothing more than a new narrative contrivance in a film that hardly needed one. If not for the nature of the necklace’s (totally unexplained) magic power, that is. In his electrified and semi-undead form, Pinker can jump from body to body. Starting with a police officer who was injured in the aftermath of his execution, he pursues Jonathan in various forms before our protagonist reveals what the necklace is good for. It causes Pinker’s spirit to leave whatever body he’s currently occupying (a jogger, a construction worker, a young girl, her mother) and reappear as a TV-static phantom, vulnerable to attack. Eventually, Alison returns to confront Pinker in a new flickering form. She has the beautiful, ghostly glow of a projected image, a stark contrast to the rough pixelation of his glitchy, video-like shape, further supporting Craven’s argument that televised images are somehow corrupted. Pinker and Jonathan’s fight takes them to the top of a television tower and eventually inside the world of television itself. They brawl across multiple channels and interact with unwitting co-stars, like a heavy metal frontman and a pair of boxers. Craven didn’t see a film until college and, in interviews, he cited philosophers far more often than filmmakers. That makes this, the best sequence of Craven’s career, all the more surprising. Just this once, a filmmaker who very rarely made explicit reference to filmmakers other than himself staged an explicit and extensive homage — to Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924). Fittingly, the analogous sequence from Keaton’s film starts when his character, a projectionist and wannabe sleuth, falls asleep at the reels and walks into a dream.
The similarities between Shocker and Sherlock Jr. end there. Keaton’s sequence is joyous. It speaks not only to the incomparable talent of its auteur-star, but to the improbably large and diverse body of work its nascent medium had already allowed for. It’s a more despairing sequence coming from Craven. In addition to providing a showcase for the violent content and glib commentary of television, it anticipates what Martin Scorsese would go on to say (to much controversy) about the content industrial complex being empowered by business interests and a culture of ubiquitous screens. The advent of home viewing and streaming platforms, Scorsese wrote, has “devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced [cinema] to its lowest common denominator.” Craven didn’t experience the proliferation of streaming services (or the true proliferation of franchise filmmaking, for that matter), but television was seemingly enough to make him agree. “On one level,” he promised Film Comment readers, “Shocker is a horror film. But on another, it’s something much more disturbing.”
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