Welcome to Nightmares and Schlockscapes, where movies that go bump in the night are dragged from beneath your bed and into the spotlight. The Gothic classics of yesteryear, the bodacious B-grades, and those celluloid chillers best watched through your fingers.
Horror. It's versatility and the importance of it's tropes to other genre spectrum's make it transcend tone, becoming a language all it's own. Beside the great Greek masks of Sock and Buskin that represent the pillars of storytelling - Comedy and Tragedy, respectively - there should be a third with barred fangs and splattered blood. Horror can be thrilling or unnerving, inducing cheers or screams. It may expand your mind with philosophical waxings on life, society, and the psyche. Or, you know, maybe just have a hockey mask wearing super-fiend beat someone to death against a tree. All shapes, all sizes. It's the oldest form of storytelling, and be it grandiose rumination or splatter-punk, it tingles that primitive part of our brains. There's one variety of fright flick I have a particular soft spot for, and it shares a namesake with the title of this feature: Schlock. A term that carries with it... mixed connotations. Many negative, for sure. But, when used in the context of a certain breed of horror film, it can be quite endearing.
So, it's only fitting to start this series with the film that birthed this love of schlock.
Wes Craven's SHOCKER is a frenzied, nutso, tonally whiplashed delight. It is also, sadly, a near ignored entry in the late horror maestro's filmography. Craven placed the unmitigated definition of over-the-top into a stew pot, poured a sizable helping of earnest melodrama so thick it could choke you on top, stirred in a pinch of spit in your face pop culture, and what brewed was a film born to be rented on V/H/S over and over again.
