Dead Snow - Tommy Wirkola - 2009

It may just be the self-righteous Guardian reader that exists within me, but is it not right that we call time on the hackneyed usage of Nazis as an irredeemable evil, free to be killed off as violently as possible and without remorse “cause the tenets of national socialism ‘n’ Hitler ‘n’ the final solution ‘n’ all that” makes it ok. This argument may hold little water but whilst many Nazis were of course rather unsavoury types to say the least, many were simply ordinary German soldiers conscripted to essentially defend their country, just like the Brits, just like the Russians etc. In years past with the horrors of the Second World War as still a fresh and haunting memory, the use of the Nazi’s as a voiceless evil unit of übermenschen to be wiped out was somewhat more understandable, a catharsis if you will. Therefore the sub-sub-sub genre that is the ‘Nazi-Zombie movie’ found its genesis in films such as Ken Wiederhorn’s Shock Waves (1977), a film worthwhile purely by merit of it including both Hammer hero Peter Cushing and the king of Poverty Row John Carradine slumming it for quick bucks, and Zombie Lake (1981) a film by Jean Rollin at his ‘poor man’s Jess Franco’ worst. Well I say poor man’s Franco but then the Spanish soft focus merchant made the equally poor Nazi brain muncher Oasis of the Zombies in the same year.

In this age of supposed enlightenment though, several generations removed from those who fought in the battlefields of Europe, Africa and Asia. Do contemporary German viewers of cinema really deserve the indignity of being told that their grandfathers made up a nation of purely malevolent beings just ripe for beyond the grave butchery?

Bah, whatever you fucking hippy Lee etc. Anyway, whilst such shenanigans have continued to mine a rich vein in computer games such as the Castle Wolfenstein series and the recent Call of Duty 5. It has taken Norwegian horror buff Tommy Wirkola to resurrect this dubious tradition for the cinema screen with Dead Snow.

After opening with a typical pre-credits first victim gets felled with a cheap scare scenario, the film has us following a group of young medical students on a doomed skiing vacation in the mountainous landscapes of northern Norway. As the film presents the opening half hour of exposition we are made aware that this is a post-Scream generation of disposable teens, very much hip to the tenets of slasher cinema. In the case of one of the gang, the filmmaker’s inspiration is quite literally worn on his sleeve as he parades around in a t-shirt bearing a poster for Peter Jackson’s comic grue tour de force Braindead (1992).

The film proceeds to lay on the self-aware slasher film clichés as thick as possible. With tongue wedged firmly in cheek, we witness a creepy wizened stranger arrive at their cabin to spout local histories not generally provided by lonely planet guides, as we find that the area was during WWII a shipping channel for the allies which the Nazi’s attempted to unsuccessfully blockade. We then witness members of the group foolishly split up to search for missing friends, false scares chalked up and a promiscuous pair sign up as the first victims by choosing to copulate in a freezing outhouse. After half an hour of this post-modernist pastiche though, tedium does begin to set in as the whole enterprise threatens to slip into banality.

Thankfully we soon see the proper arrival of the zombies, as the film’s uneasy balance of seriousness and comic homage gives way to pure ‘splatstick’ and thus proceeds to go batshit insane for the final 40 minutes. All previous attempts at developing character arcs and creeping dread are thrown off the mountainside in favour of Raimi/Jacksonesqe farcical carnage as creative dismemberment becomes the order of the day, and cliff side zombie fistfights, snowmobile massacres and wilderness survival techniques that would turn Ray Mears a whiter shade of pale take precedence. All set in the sort of scenery that would usually be reserved for the grandeur of a Bond ski-chase set piece rather than zombie intestine wrestling.

It also becomes evident that the usage of Nazis as the enemy here does admittedly work rather well. The eternally sharp uniforms of the Wehrmacht make for a wonderful contrast against the snowy backdrops, and for once the concept of athletic and savvy zombies works in the films favour, as they really do proceed to work with military precision, frequently outflanking and outthinking our young protagonists.

Whilst never destined to join the ranks of classic zombie cinema. Dead Snow overcomes it’s stiffly directed slavish adherence to cliché in the opening half and does enough to make you enthusiastically recall the copious claret and freeform butchery of the latter half in recommendations to friends. Worthy popcorn fodder for the gorehound, and returning to my original point, I just saw Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009) since I wrote the opening paragraph, and excitedly revelled in 2 ½ hours of the wildest Nazi bloodlust. Colour me hypocritical scumbag!

Deathdream - Bob Clark - 1974

It’s a well established notion that the horror film is a primary visual means by which to incorporate a subtextual representation of, and commentary on, the times in which it was made. Reaction to real world traumas channelled through the cinematic medium can be seen from the post World War I doppelgangers and distortions of German Expressionism to the Cold War “the reds walk among us” paranoia that found itself a staple of the 50’s drive-in B-Movie. If the relative sanity and prosperity of the early Sixties therefore saw somewhat of a lull in horror cinema, then the unbridled chaos and loathing of the fallout from the countercultural implosion saw horror return to the forefront of cult cinema at the tail end of the decade.

From George Romero’s watershed Night of the Living Dead (1968) onwards, we can easily play ‘spot the allegory’ as references to the counterculture, civil rights movements, Nixon’s politics and the Vietnam War abound. A good overview of how this era would go on to influence the 1970s careers of Carpenter, Craven, Cronenberg et al, can be seen in Adam Simon’s documentary An American Nightmare (2000). One film from this fruitful period that isn’t provided with an overview in the documentary though is Bob Clark’s Deathdream (also known by the even more generically 42nd street grindhouse title of Dead of Night).

Clark (who mined a rich vein in cult horror during the mid Seventies with this, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) and Black Christmas (1974) before finding infamy in 1982 with the teen sex ‘n’ slapstick romp Porky’s) boldly takes on the issue of veterans returning from the Vietnam War, tapping directly into the uneasiness of the period.

The film at an intrinsic level is essentially a contemporary retelling of W.W. Jacob’s famous short horror fable The Monkey’s Paw. Here a fresh faced infantryman Andy Brooks (Richard Backus) is seemingly killed in a striking low budget fever dream recreation of Vietnam in the film’s opening scene. We then cut to his family who are informed that he is M.I.A. and presumed dead. His mother’s refusal to accept this leads her to pray for his safe return, which duly takes place the following night. Except now rather than the vivacious all American apple pie eatin’ young gun that left them, he instead returns as an anaemic and disturbingly somnambulistic young chap with a sideline in casual canine slaughter and family friend butchery.

It is finally and unsurprisingly revealed that Andy is now a slowly decaying member of the undead (make-up for which is provided by a debuting young war Veteran named Tom Savini) who needs human blood to keep himself relatively ‘fresh’. The film never attempts to play this for laughs, thankfully averting any images of Weekend at Bernie’s esq. scenarios. Nor though does the film particularly attempt to force cheap scares upon us. Clark instead envelops the viewer with a creeping dread, a fatalist approach that makes it clear we are not in for a happy ending. Everything in the film hints towards misery, from the mise-en-scene of the middle American mundane, in which our protagonist’s hometown is everywhere and nowhere, a world of identikit prefabs and greasy spoon cafes, through the wonderful lighting of the family home’s hallway, the staircase lit like a shadowy representation of their collective mental disintegration, to a minimalistic soundtrack so intensely coarse it sounds like it’s being scratched across the celluloid.

So to return to the subject of horror as allegory, Clark here paints a picture of the difficulties faced by veterans returning from war, attempting to return to normalcy after witnessing months of shocking atrocities. Throughout the first half of the picture Andy is like a pent up ball of post-traumatic stress, finding himself unable to communicate the horror of his putrefying form with those he loves. The scenes of his self-preserving attaining of blood from people by using syringes (in a clear precursor of Romero’s Martin (1977)), and watching his eyes roll back in a hit of junkie lust clearly reminds us that for some the only way to escape the war still raging on in their minds was to turn towards narcotics. While Deathdream is hardly Born on the Fourth of July, it is still a film that resonates far beyond its current undervalued position as a cheapo early seventies fright flick.