'Going to Pieces' Cuts to the Chase

Starz Horror Doc Goes Straight for the Bloody Good Parts

In television's tradition of wretched Halloween excess, virtually the entire month of October is now saturated with scary movies and creepy shows.

But Starz, the pay-cable network, has come up with a dubious innovation: a way to see a couple of dozen horror movies in one sitting -- and has reduced each of them to just the gory parts, so you don't even have to sit through their pale excuses for plots or any of that inane acne acting.

The Starz wallow is being passed off as a documentary premiering at 9 tonight: "Going to Pieces," a 90-minute look at "The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film," although basically every fall is followed by yet another rise.

The film begins and ends with montages that show in predictable graphic detail the slashing of throats, the lopping off of heads, girls hung on meat hooks and such old reliables as the hatchet-in-the-face trick, to cite just a few popular murders and maimings. The documentary includes a quick clip of the late Gene Siskel, original partner of fellow Chicago critic Roger Ebert on what used to be called "Sneak Previews," summarizing his reaction to the slasher trend in one word: "disgusting."

But most of the experts and aficionados interviewed for the documentary work in the horror business themselves and find that work to be artful and honorable. "There's a bloodlust in all of us," says director John Carpenter, whose movies have included "Halloween," one of the landmarks of the genre. Cheaply produced -- Carpenter says he could only afford to pay big-time actor Donald Pleasence for three days' work -- the 1978 film was relatively low on explicit gore, but it had a point of reference with which the audience could identify: the imperiled babysitter threatened by an unseen menace that traps her in the house.

It was a gigantic hit -- sequels dribbled on for years.

More influential, really, was the next big movie in the horror mode, Sean S. Cunningham's "Friday the 13th" in 1980. According to the documentary, Cunningham saw George A. Romero's ultra-gory epic "Dawn of the Dead" (part of a trilogy-of-trauma that began with "Night of the Living Dead") and so admired the hideous makeup effects engineered by Tom Savini that he tracked down Savini and hired him to create grisly illusions for "Friday," the film that really upped the ante on the amount and detail of explicit gore that could be splattered across the screen.

Savini speaks lovingly of his favorite "trick": the scene in which a then unknown Kevin Bacon is lying on a cot when a hand reaches up from below and clamps him to the pillow. Then we see the head of an arrow pop through the flesh of his throat from under the bed; it twists and turns as the puddle of blood grows larger.

"Going to Pieces" is filled to the brim -- in fact, beyond the brim -- with hideous examples. It is, as the saying goes, not for the squeamish and certainly not for children, although if you've seen any of these films with teenage audiences, you know that they tend to laugh at the gore effects as often as they scream in terror. The target teen audience tends to see the films as comedies, calling out mock warnings to the characters in the film: "You're next, baby," and so on. The audience in effect supplies the punch lines for the films' equivalent of jokes.

Although the documentary does precious little dabbling in The Meaning of It All and the continuing appeal of Grand Guignol films, it notes with a straight face that the form flourished in the '80s partly because of the policies of the Reagan administration -- a contention which is absurd to the point of idiocy.

To its credit, though, the documentary can boast one cute coup: Betsy Palmer, cast wildly against type as the killer in "Friday the 13th," not only speaks fondly of the film but also gives her rendition of the whispery "tch-tch-tch" vocal refrain on the soundtrack, a signal of mayhem ahead. (According to the documentary, the effect in the film actually comes from distorted voices saying "mommy mommy" and "kill kill.") Palmer got her head lopped off in the film's climax (or the pre-climax before the pre-credit climax made mandatory by "Carrie"), and we get to see precisely how that was accomplished. Lucky old us.

Perhaps the horror in horror movies is so grotesque that it still serves as escapism from the true horrors in the news -- murder and torture by terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, or the unspeakable obscenity of children killed in schoolrooms by real-life monsters.

No matter how horrifying horror films get, the real world keeps supplying the stuff that nightmares are made of.

Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film (90 minutes) premieres tonight at 9 on Starz.