Okay, now we're talking antiquity : a
quickie radio interview I did with Randy Palmer for KALX-FM
in San Francisco during the press junket for Leatherface:
Texas Chainsaw Massacre III . For completists,
please note that I did a pile of fast-forward interviews
for radio, TV, and the local papers, while billeted at the
four-star Mark Hopkins hotel ... and you'll never find
them all. At four o'clock in the morning, I awoke from
my zombiatic stupor to discover we were at war yet again
in the Persian Gulf (and stop me when this starts to sound
familiar). Randy Palmer did frequent pieces for Fangoria amid
other monster mags, but to my mind his greatest achievement
was writing an entire book about Paul Blaisdell ( Paul
Blaisdell: Monster Maker [McFarland, 1997]). He
also fronted his own metal band, Pentagram ,
as well as its doom-metal spinoff, Bedemon . After
spending eight days in an ICU after being broadsided by a
17-year-old asshole who ran a red light, Randy died in August
of 2002.
David J. Schow - Horror Writer Interview by Randy Parker
In December 1989, LA-based horror writer David Schow traveled to the Bay Area
on a press tour to promote Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, his
screenwriting debut. I had the opportunity to speak with Schow in the KALX-FM
(U.C. Berkeley) studios. Below are excerpts from the interview:
______________________
You are often described as a member of the “splat pack,” and you coined
the term “splatterpunk” to describe your particular brand of horror
writing. Could you explain those labels: splat pack and splatterpunk?
Well, the splat pack came up, I think, in the first issue of a magazine called Midnight
Graffiti. The erstwhile editor decided that a number of us
who were writing horror of a certain tone could be grouped together under
what she called the splat pack, and what we had already named splatterpunk,
which was just a term to describe graphic, visceral, in-the-streets horror. The
thing that we used to differentiate it from everything that had gone
previously was the idea that Stephen King became popular by taking horror
into the family room, as it were. And we took it back out to the
streets and the alleys, where it belongs.
What, specifically, are your credits as a horror writer?
I’ve had a novel published called The Kill Riff, which
is my rock ‘n’ roll horror novel, or suspense novel. I
edited what is arguably the first splatterpunk anthology, a book called Silver
Scream, which featured the work of a lot of writers like Clive
Barker ... and the best of the proto-splatterpunks, like Bob Bloch, the
guy who wrote Psycho. I came to the novel on the basis
of having written a lot of short fiction, which got a fair amount of attention
and won a couple of trophies — that sort of thing. In fact,
most of that short stuff is coming out in two books, a collection called Seeing
Red, in paperback, and another called Lost Angels,
which is a four-novella book. And those two books together cover
about the last ten years of my short fiction writing, from which everything
else derives. The first book that I had published with my name on
it, because I did pseudonymous things before that, was a rather lengthy
and extensive retrospective on The Outer Limits TV series. The
be-all and end-all of The Outer Limits. More than you ever
wanted to know on The Outer Limits.
Past the outer limits of what you wanted to know about The
Outer Limits …
Yeah, it pushed the envelope.
What qualities do you think make a horror film effective? What distinguishes
the good ones from the bad ones, in your mind?
I think the purpose of horror movies has kind of changed in the past couple
of years, because one thing that you hear a lot of people coming out of
horror movies saying is: “Gee, that didn’t scare me.” I
don’t think the purpose of horror films is to scare you anymore,
because one of the ways they try to do it is that they just ram the camera
into something in tight close-up and provide a musical shriek on the soundtrack. Being
scared and being startled are two different things. I’ve
gotten to the point where I go to screenings of these things, and you know
how the formula works and you know where the bumps are going to come. And
it’s just … nothing. It’s like watching a toy perform. It’s
like going through the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland too many times: you
know where all the stuff is. I think the purpose of "the stuff" is
to unsettle you and make you think: what if there were
really people like that out there? Or what if the people I ride BART
with, or the bus with; what if I’m sitting next to somebody who
is blatantly like this? Or who knows what these people do when they
go home at night? You know, that kind of thing. It’s to unsettle
you and make you ask that question that makes you uneasy.
Can you name two or three of your own personal favorite horror movies?
Gee, Alien is a big one, still. Alien was
the last movie I stood in line to see.
How would you compare Alien to its sequel, Aliens?
I think there’s a peculiar difference in those two movies. I
think the first one is like a "British" version of the idea,
and the second one’s an "American version" of the idea
... [Aliens] is certainly not scary. It’s
more of a “let’s squash the alien cockroaches” kind
of movie. And this brings us back to: what is the purpose of
these things if it’s not to scare you? Alien is imbued
with that sense of just imminent dread, of what is going to happen? And
that’s a really delicious feeling to have occasionally. In Aliens, there
are no plot surprises. You know what’s going to happen and
you see it coming toward you like a freight train ... [In Alien], you
know something awful is going to happen. Clive Barker
talked about this. It’s the dread that he plays so heavily
on. And it’s an interesting emotion to evoke.
I went through the ceiling when
I first saw The Exorcist, and I’m not a particularly
religious person. That I think is a triumph of the material because
you can get behind the story of this priest having this crisis of faith
in terms of what’s happening to this little girl. You don’t
have to be religious at all to be affected by that movie. But it’s
still up there; it’s very chic now to say, “Oh, I saw The
Exorcist on videotape the other night, and it didn’t
scare me.”
I polled the contributors to Silver Scream as to what their
favorite horror movies were, and I got some really interesting examples. Alien was
cited quite a few times. Clive [Barker] cited movies like Salo:
The 120 Days of Sodom and Viva La Muerta — really strong
stuff! I mean stuff that’s designed to send you running out of the
theater. The 120 Days of Sodom is really a “how much
can you take?” movie. But for a more elegantly expressed
sense of it, a movie like Les Yeux Sans Visage [Eyes Without
a Face], which was released in this country as The Horror Chamber
of Dr. Faustus, has a scene that is so clinically chilling because
you understand why the character of the doctor is cutting off a person’s
face to replace his daughter’s face. A movie like Polanski’s Repulsion is
so creepy to me even today that I don’t want to look at it. It
unsettles me that much.
Do you have any plans to adapt your own stories or novels as films?
A lot of people have been asking about The Kill Riff, the first
novel. And I know what it would take to make that
book into a movie, and we’d have to chop off all the nasty bits
to make it into a film. I just finished a novel called The
Shaft, which I wouldn’t be averse to adapting into a movie. So,
yeah, that factor’s there, but it’s not the primary reason. I
don’t write books for them to be made into movies, although it’s
nice when people come to you with an offer for movie rights. It’s
kind of a secondary thing. It’s like gravy.
Which of your books would you recommend to people as a good introduction
to splatterpunk?
Silver Scream, first of all, the anthology,
which is available in paperback now. I edited it so that’s
a good book to read to get the sense of this stuff not just being graphic,
gross, in-your-face horror but having actual literary values and strengths
as well. Since the collections are coming out, I’ll plug
those. What the hell — I’m shameless: Seeing Red,
which is a collection of my short stories, and Lost Angels.
And we don’t want to confuse people; it wasn’t the basis of the movie
with Adam Horovitz of The Beastie Boys.
No, I’m doing really bad on titles. When I first wrote The Kill
Riff, my agent hated the title, and we circulated it under
the title Dead Bang for a while, which was a John Frankenheimer
movie not long ago. And we changed it back to The Kill
Riff, and it sold. But the last three books I worked
on — there was another book called Seeing Red; there
was a movie called Lost Angels; and now that I’ve finished
a novel called The Shaft, there’s a dumb
movie about politicians in a mine shaft somewhere called — surprise — The Shaft, coming out sometime in 1990. So we try to
get past these things as best we can. I just sort of studiously
ignore them and say, “Well, mine’s better.”
______________________
©1989, by Randy Palmer
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