Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #169 Seizure (1974)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
I am pleased to announce that I will also be exploring the complete filmography of Oliver Stone for a very kind, very appreciated patron.
You know the phrase “not a fan?” I like to toss it around after someone dies just in case people mistakenly assume that I have positive feelings about a dead celebrity that I do not care for. Oliver Stone is not dead yet but mark my words: at some point he will die and then we will all start referring to him in the past tense.
For example, I will tell everyone I can that I was “not a fan” of the late Oliver Stone so that people don’t get the wrong idea vis a vis Oliver Stone and me being a fan.
I am so not a fan of Oliver Stone that I vaguely assumed that the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s directorial career began on an auspiciously inauspicious note with the 1981 Michael Caine evil appendage fright flick The Hand.
Stone’s career as a director actually began seven years earlier with 1974’s Seizure, an even less auspicious horror movie about a creative man on the edge losing his grip on reality as he slips deeper and deeper into madness.
Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas Collins on Dark Shadows and later toured with a one-man show entitled Fridiculousness, a portmanteau of his last name and “ridiculousness”, plays Edmund Blackstone, a successful horror author tormented by violent nightmares and haunted by visions of gothic, sinister figures of death.
The best-selling author hopes to find a brief respite from his misery in a fun-filled holiday at his home in the country with his bourgeoisie friends but things take an ominous turn when the writer’s nightmares show up unexpectedly to terrorize and murder Edmund and his guests.
Seizure was released two years after the zeitgeist-capturing success of Wes Craven’s 1972 directorial debut Last House on the Left and shares with the seminal shocker an unmistakable grind house sleaziness as well as a set of surprisingly substantive thematic concerns.
Stone’s talky Last House on the Left knockoff is similarly concerned with the breakdown of order, societally and individually, when staid figures of upper-middle class conformity are suddenly confronted by violent nihilists with no respect for human life or anything else.
The Tate-LoBianca murders cast a long shadow over Last House on the Left and by extension Seizure. Manson’s massacre launched a million nightmares and a thousand slasher movies with the idea that a rebellious, countercultural “other” with no sense of propriety or morality will storm the walls of polite society and unleash hippie armageddon.
In Seizure the evil others take the exaggerated form of a sexy temptress billed as “Queen of Evil” (two time James Bond veteran Martine Beswick), a sexpot whose shtick is essentially “Malevolent Elvira”, Jackal, or “The Executioner” (Henry Judd Baker), a disfigured mute black muscleman and finally “The Spider” who Hervé Villechaize plays as a little person with a great big capacity for murder and mischief.
Ah, but who are these menacing monsters, exactly? What is their true identity? Are they the three escapees from a nearby mental hospitals mentioned on the nightly news? Are they creatures from Edmund’s feverish imagination brought into existence through some manner of black magic?
OR are they in fact modern-day manifestations of timeless evil, whether in the form of an evil king whose madness and cruelty are the stuff of legend (The Spider), the Destroyer-Goddess Kali (Queen of Evil) or a notorious Russian executioner (Jackal)?
Even though Stone made his debut with a lurid, vulgar low-budget horror movie he nevertheless managed to invest the proceedings with a deeply personal level of pretension. On one level Seizure is a laughable b-movie about a glowering, bearded Hervé Villechaize terrorizing respectable types but it is also, on a very real level, about everything.
Seizure is about guilt and death, about the nature of evil and the nature of society. It’s about creation and madness and demons internal and external.
The villains don’t just want to kill the guilt-ridden wordsmith, his family and his friends, although obviously they want to do that as well. No, their aims are both more ambitious and more twisted.
The bad guys want to destroy Eugene and his guests psychologically and spiritually as well as physically, to force them to do things they would never be able to forgive themselves for even if they somehow manage to survive.
To that end The Spider, The Executioner and the Queen of Evil force their captives to compete in a series of ghoulish games to determine what lucky soul will be the only person to live to see the morning.
It’s a juicy premise with unlimited potential for both unintentional laughter and intense, moody psychodrama, particularly in the hands of a very young Oliver Stone. Seizure is dream-like and atmospheric but never particularly scary.
Stone doesn’t seem to understand how to shoot horror. He’s either swinging the camera around in a seemingly random fury or filming scenes in such darkness that it’s damn near impossible to make out what’s going on.
The future cinematic maverick feels much more comfortable with scenes where actors rattle off huge reams of dialogue about weighty matters of life and death, guilt and innocence.
That Seizure isn’t a flat-out laugh riot is largely a testament to a wildly over-qualified cast that includes a very young, very sexy Mary Woronov right before she was typecast as wily, wicked women.
Frid lends an ultimately very silly role a real sense of pathos and regret. For it is in Eugene’s guilt-stained mind that all of these horrors are ultimately taking place. The literary fright-master’s mind is predictably a very haunted and troubled place.
Villechaize is infinitely more terrifying than he has any right to be, with his ponytail and shark tooth-heavy sartorial style. The Spider embodies a troublesome cliche—the little person as an otherworldly, damaged and rage-filled figure of pure menace rather than a flesh and blood human being with agency and hopes and dreams of his own—but Villechaize invests the character with surprising dignity all the same.
Seizure methodically kills off its supporting cast before (SPOILER) the big, astonishingly silly reveal that it was all a dream so scary that it literally scared Eugene to death.
Stone’s debut is neither a crazed camp classic or an overlooked gem of Watergate-era horror but rather a weirdly undistinguished little b-movie that takes itself very seriously, as a horror film of ideas as well as bloody spectacle.
Stone’s decidedly minor first film seemingly left nowhere to go but up and while Stone’s career would be full of downs as well as ups he’d never make a narrative film this slight again.
Stone’s future lie not in lurid horror movies but rather in Serious Movies about Serious Subjects for Serious People that were frequently so full of it that it paradoxically became impossible to take them or their creator seriously.
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