Year: 1982
Director: J.S. Cardone
Stars: Sarah Kendall, Carol Kottenbrook, Alan McRae
Around a decade ago, spurred on by an enjoyable podcast (The Hysteria Continues) I found myself looking to increase on the number of ’80s slasher movies I had under my belt. I turned, promptly, to the output of boutique Blu-ray label Arrow Video and The Slayer (aka Nightmare Island); one of a number of lesser-known titles nestled in their booming catalogue.
On first flush I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. It didn’t have the insatiable body count of the genre’s gaudier classics, yet it had made the notorious Video Nasties list way-back-when. It was an evidently low budget production and yet there was an undeniable sense of craft. Some genuinely beautiful cinematography from DP Karen Grossman and one of the genre’s most rousing, emotive scores courtesy of MVP Robert Folk. The remote island locations were evocative all by themselves. Desolate, windy, eerie vistas suggestive of some mezzanine place between life and death. The movie butted up against some noticeable limitations (particularly in its grand, make-or-break final reveal), and yet seemed to succeed nonetheless. Where a lot of ’80s slashers leaned into the gnarly or the camp, The Slayer felt more in keeping with the regional offerings of a decade earlier, enigmatic and watery. I didn’t outright love it the first time, but in the intervening years it’s kept drawing me back…
The set-up sounds familiar, but is pretty a-typical. A group of four adults – not sex-crazed teens, but adults in their 30s in established relationships – head by chartered plane to a secluded island for a fishing weekend. Kay (Sarah Kendall) and her partner David (Alan McRae), and another couple whom they know; actress Brooke (Carol Kottenbrook) and Eric (Frederick Flynn). Kay, a painter, finds herself preoccupied by the island’s unique topography, recognising buildings from her own art, as though she had summoned this place from a dream, or instinctively known of it precognitively. With strong inferences from the off of psychological frailty or vulnerability, we’re urged to think of Kay as slightly ‘other’ from the group. Special, cursed or blessed with some supernatural perception.
Their pilot (Michael Holmes) seems to fit the mould of the classic ‘Crazy Ralph’ type (see Friday the 13th, as lambasted knowingly in Drew Godard’s The Cabin in the Woods), issuing storm warnings and a general sense of foreboding. While our foursome are frolicking on the beach, a local fisherman – equally as crazy-seeming – is bludgeoned with an oar, his dislocation from the rest of the action marking this event out as a warning to us rather than any of the characters. We know more than they do now. Someone – or something – murderous lurks in their proximity.
Sure enough, as night falls the foretold storm rolls in, adding significantly to the threatening atmosphere. Lured by strange sounds into an elaborately scaled basement beneath their lodge (presumably a derelict fishing business), David is the first of the ‘core four’ to die and in a fashion as grisly as it is improbable. Snared by an unseen assailant, his head is caught between the closing doors of an elevator shaft above him, allowing special effects make-up creator Robert Short an opportunity to really show what he can do with a bit of fake blood and latex. While it may seem as though a steady body count is accumulating, it is here that The Slayer hunkers down some, playing out a methodical search for David the next morning that can only end one way.
And yet, in the relative narrative torpor, the film continues to build it’s sense of isolationist pessimism and despair. Kay’s sense of precognitive dissonance only intensifies following a dream of David’s severed head bleeding from the eyes – a dream she has long before they find his headless corpse. Indeed, while The Slayer can be pigeonholed as a slasher – victims are picked off one by one by an unseen assailant – it’s a mite slipperier than that, recalling both the monstrous feminine paranoias of the likes of Polanski’s Repulsion or the supernaturally inclined influence of 1971’s phenomenal rural horror Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. Both are investigations of fragile women being pushed back to the brink of a psychological break. The latter is closer to The Slayer in that it seems to throw a genuine paranormal element into the mix. Sure, Kay is unhinged – like Jessica – but there’s also really something out there. Even if it is, as intimated here, a manifestation of Kay’s own supressed murderous rage.
There’s also a moebius strip narrative to contend with. Slices of the film’s crescendo play at the top of the picture, framed as another of Kay’s dreams, completely out of context. Once numbers have dwindled and both Eric and Brooke have met ‘the slayer’ (Brooke’s end is another terrific and terrifying effect), Kay is left alone in a superbly tense final reel. Confronted, at last, with her enemy, we find ourselves flummoxed by her waking as a child, coming full circle on an anecdote told much earlier on in the picture. Is Kay stuck in a perpetual time loop? The constant in a cycle of torment? Not answering this question gives The Slayer a quality both frustrating and mercurial. It’s just hard to pin this thing down.
Which only adds to it’s willowy, haunting power. The slow-burn is absolutely part of what makes it so great. Those with a thirst for action may feel restless and aggrieved, but savouring the journey plays dividends here. J.S. Cardone conjures something really quite singular. I don’t know for certain if it was a touchstone for Ti West when considering his own career high The House of the Devil, but the era feels right.
Like that film, the only real let down is when the picture is moved to reveal it’s other-worldly menace, defining what’s been so effective outside of the frame. The creative team have a fair stab (pun intended) at sculpting something nightmarish, but it’s unfortunately pretty comical; a rather typical ‘monster’ and a rather rickety-looking one at that. Proof, if any were needed, that what’s left to the imagination is often way scarier.
With repeat watches, however, everything else is golden to me now. The balmy island setting (Tybee Island off the coast of Georgia), the oppressive, inclosing feeling of the encroaching storm, Robert Folk’s music (worth mentioning twice), and particularly Sarah Kendall’s overlooked performance as Kay, which remains humanistic throughout, skirting shrill pitfalls that lesser highly-strung heroines have tumbled into.
I dream, one day, of being able to program a season of evocatively creepy and overlooked horror gems. The likes of Messiah of Evil, The Night of the Hunted, the aforementioned Let’s Scare Jessica to Death among others. The Slayer is as deserving of a place on that schedule. If you’re looking for a horror movie to hunker down with on a stormy night with the lights out (spooky season will be upon us in no time), one off the beaten path from the franchise mainstays, well, this is it.
The Lost Highway Hotel 