Punk Rock Horror Show: Five Films from the 80's that Comment on Punk Culture

As punk rock blossomed from a garage movement and into a veritable way of life in the US, UK, and beyond, the production of films by young independents was becoming more accessible than ever. The late 70's and early 80's were a time of unparalleled DIY attitude. Anyone with a guitar and a garage could have a following, and, more and more, anyone with a crazy idea, a typewriter, and access to a camera could create a cult film. For someone like myself who is very interested in 80's counterculture, especially in music and film, it's a great pleasure when these two things run together.

I've always felt that horror flicks and punk rock share a lot of common ground. It's something about the intensity of approach and the expectation of visceral outcome. It's more often than not a high energy affair with the end result hopefully being whipping the crowd into some kind of frenzy. I remember hearing a story when I was a kid about a screening of Craven's The Last House on the Left where an angry and terrified mob broke into the projection booth, confiscated the reel, and burned the damn thing. "What a fucking movie!" I thought. And I'm sure Wes Craven had similar thoughts when these stories/rumors came drifting in. Like punk rock, horror is something raw. It's best experienced in a public venue. It draws energy from the reactions of the audience. It wants to make us do something.

Here is my list of five films that not only recognize the shared blood between punk and horror, but seem to comment on it in some way as well.


1. Return of the Living Dead (1985)


With its ironic selection of punk rock anthems as a soundtrack (The Damned's "Dead Beat Dance" and The Cramps' "The Surfing Dead," among others) and its delightful cast of leather and patches clad punks, Return of the Living Dead is nothing short of the shining example of when punk and horror collides on the screen. It's brilliant because it plays on the themes and tropes that, by the mid-80's, had already becomes stereotypes of both punk culture and the zombie attack subgenre. It's a movie that is so self-aware that it refers to Night of the Living Dead, the grandfather film which arguably made pictures like Return possible almost two decades later, as "just a movie," with Romero having "changed all the facts around" in order to take attention off the real government coverup involving re-animated corpses.

"You think this is a fucking costume? It's a way of life!"

The band of survivors are made up of two distinct groups, the punks and the non-punks. The stark divide of character types, though largely unacknowledged by the film (what the hell was Tina with the bouncy hair and pearls doing hanging around Suicide and Spider?), leads us to question not only the differences between the living and the living dead, but the differences between two distinctly different aesthetic cultures. And ultimately, it offers up a grim assessment of how much our cultivation of identity really matters in light of "national security" and keeping secrets. 


2. Repo Man (1984)


Though not a horror movie, per se, no retrospective of punks in film would be complete without mentioning Repo Man. It's a smorgasbord of cultural throwbacks, jabs at consumerism, and high energy story telling. In other words, it's very punk rock. For anyone who hasn't seen this masterpiece of cult cinema, it's the story of Otto, a gutterpunk turned repo man, and his quest for the white whale: a 1964 Chevy Malibu with the radioactive remains of crash-landed aliens in the trunk.

Otto's too cool to stock cans.

  
Repo Man stands out to me because of its level of awareness. Even though it's considered a low-budget film of cult status, it has a sophisticated level of introspection and investigation not found in many movies. Sure, it's suspect of main stream America and all complacency it tries to sell us (the title and brand of all products sold in Repo Man are one in the same: cans of beer labeled BEER, and so on), but it's also very weary of the other side of things as well. The punk rock movement is held to no lower standard of suspect of its faults and shortcomings. After listening to his dying former friend blame his criminal actions as a punk on society, Otto tells him bluntly that's all bullshit, and that "You're a white suburban punk, just like me."


3. The Lost Boys (1987)


Kieffer Sutherland! Coreys both Feldman and Haim! Vampire punks! Joel Shumacher's The Lost Boys is set in Santa Clara, California, which, despite an ominous sign claiming it to be "the murder capitol of the world," seems peaceful enough. Sleepy residents and boardwalk games. Calm beaches and mild days. That is until we're introduced to Sutherland's gang of vampiric punk youths. There are two things that interest me about The Lost Boys when discussing its connection to punk.

One is the way in which vampirism and punk aesthetic are conflated. Any fan of the genre knows that even in its earliest iterations, the vampiric condition has been represented as an invasive outside element. It's like a disease. Think of Nosferatu bringing the plague rats when he descends on Wisborg. It makes one begin to think about how the eccentricities of punk rock fashion and behavior must've been perceived by the rest of society as more and more young people began to embrace it.

You can't have your pudding until you eat your meat.

The other is the selection of music. While there's no doubt that the vampires are punks, the soundtrack is largely made up of new wave and post punk selections. This leads me to begin thinking about time: both the hyper time-sensitive nature of a "movement" like punk rock, and the timelessness of existence when talking about vampires. It seems a very subtle nuance that Sutherland's gang of vampires would hold onto the last vestiges of punk, a counterculture which in my mind seems perfectly suited to the needs of a vampire, even when their surroundings, and indeed the film itself, suggests the world has moved on. What is time to a vampire? How can something as short as a cultural movement even be comprehensible to a creature who is conceivably harboring eons of memories? 


4. Demons (1985)


Interesting connections concerning time and culture can be made from Lamerbto Bava's Demons as well. At its height, punk rock culture was largely perceived as a threat to our precious youths, our infrastructure, and the status quo. In an endless cycle of future telling, the adults of any given generation see the unusual behaviors of youth cultures as worse than anything that ever happened "back in their day." Lamberto Bava, son of landmark horror director Mario Bava, shows us in Demons that the real threats are those that emanate not from the future but  from the past. True evil is ancient born, and the things about modern culture that we see as threats are little more than passing storms. The film opens as the decidedly clean cut protagonist rides the subway with several of the blue haired and nose pieced loonies we stereotypically associate with punk rock. She is noticeably put off, and, at first, seems to associate the menacing "man in the mask" with the other punks--although he is, as we find out later, an agent of much older and more extreme terror.

Demons are so punk rock.

As if to drive this point home, once all the demonic shit gets going full blast in the theater, a gang of criminal punks enter the scene. Although we get several shots them riding around and acting like hard asses--snorting coke, playing with knives, and acting generally "edgy"--it takes no time at all for them to be put in place by the glowing eyed monsters which stalk the Metropol. So much for the dangers of youth. 


5. Brain Damage (1988)


To round out this essay, I'd like to bring our attention to Frank Henenlotter's contribution to punk in horror: Brain Damage. I'm still hoping for a Blu-ray release of this sometime in the future, as it's one of the craziest films I've ever seen. Almyr is a phallic shaped, smooth talking, brain munching slug. If you want, he can supply you with a blue liquid which gets you higher than you ever imagined, sending you on a technicolor trip of epic proportions. The only cost? Human brains. And lots of 'em.

 

Hi there, Brian!

Brian, a good kid with a nice girlfriend and an interesting haircut, gets caught up in Almyr's brains for good-times cycle, and decides that one of the best places to seek live brains is New York's then thriving underground punk scene. I think this film draws a lot of energy from punk rock's "party all night and sleep all day" attitude, and then parallels it with Brain's disconcerting situation. Couple this with Henenlotter's penchant for on location filming in the grimiest corners of New York City, and we end up with lovely portrait of punk in the late 80's. The ending, to this day, remains one of the most perfectly inexplicable things I've seen in film. Check it out.