In the late 1960s America's innocence had been lost. The television news was its own horror show: a real life one. From the bloody, burned bodies in Vietnam to political assassinations at home, everyone was going a little bit psychotic. Of course, everyone knows this now looking back. Hindsight is 20/20. But back then they couldn't see the cloud because they were in it. All this was new. There was no such thing as post-modern cynicism. They still were doing it although they did not know what they were doing, to paraphrase Marx.
As powerful as the 'mainstream' had become there was a counter-current that set out to be as subversively strange as they could. Enter Charles Manson. Charles Manson had spent a third of his life incarcerated by the time he got out in 1967. He made friends with Bobby Beausoleil, another musician and later an actor and score composer for the epic Kenneth Anger avant-horror film Lucifer Rising. According to Anger, Beausoleil was 'a little too close to the devil.' Manson and Beauseoleil were a match made in hell. Charlie would send Beausoleil and a veritable harem of women to the Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's house (the Beach Boys had covered a song written by Manson on their ironically named 20/20 album). There they met Terry Melcher, a record producer. Melcher was friends with Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, who were married at the time. Tate had just made The Fearless Vampire Killers, a vampire film with Polanski, and rumor has it that the pair were into the occult. As the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon tells us, everyone in Hollywood is connected one way or another. The point of this narrative is that life imitates art. The artists got knives and started feeding on other artists in a drug frenzy. Beausoliel was already in jail in 1969, but another group of Manson's friends, lead by Tex Watson, went to the Tate mansion in order to 'do something witchy' to Melcher in revenge for not getting the family a record contract. They wrote 'political piggy' on the wall in blood to make it look like it was Black Panthers that did it. Manson was afraid of black people, especially the Black Panther Party.
I can imagine the Manson family watching Dracula or the Wolfman on an old projector at Spahn Ranch, stoned out of their minds on LSD and MDA and fucking like rabbits in the straw [like the film Manson Family Home Movies]. When their minds were in this vulnerable state Manson would sing to them. He would sing, "People say I'm no good, Because I don't do like they think I should, Do they really expect you to act like them?" Counter-culture meant subverting the norm, whether it be religious norms, sexual norms or norms of dress and grooming.
Rabies physically changes the composition of the brain. LSD and other psychedelics are said to do something similar, even though there's no evidence for it. It was as though someone had poisoned America's water supply. When soldiers started coming home from the jungles of Vietnam they were all messed up. A spirit of evil had gotten into them. Fear is a dangerous thing. The peace and love generation was no longer peaceful and lovey. On Manson's heels were the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army and The People's Temple. They were proof that the hippy experiment had somehow become more violent that anyone had expected.
There were a whole lot of films based on the Manson myth at this time, but my favorite is I Drink Your Blood. Horace opens the film with the line, "Let it be known that Satan was an acidhead." If Charles Manson was Satan then this was true. The cult in I Drink Your Blood bears striking resemblance to the Manson cult. But not only that, it points to a greater phenomenon that was going on at that time in America. It was two worlds colliding... Helter Skelter. The Freedom Riders had seen what the deep South thought of integration of their two worlds. Their bus was burnt and their leaders were beaten and left for dead. Yes, small town America didn't want to change even though the times there were a-changing.
In I Drink Your Blood a cult of Satanic hippies from various racial backgrounds invade a small town that is about to be destroyed by a dam. They aren't very nice to the locals, they rape a young girl and beat up an old man, so the young boy poisons their food with rabies infected blood and zombie chaos ensues.
Who really is the monster here? Is it the young boy who infects the whole town with rabies? Is it the rabid zombies themselves? Or is the monster not even present here? Isn't the monster in I Drink Your Blood really evil itself? The followers of Satan (i.e.: Manson - or worse - Marx) are the perpetrators of the initial evil, but really aren't they in fact the victims of evil? The rabid dog that the boy takes the blood from is the patient zero here, but it is the act (in the Žižekian sense) of tainting the meat pies with the rabid dog's blood that breaks the master signifier and opens the door for the ensuing chaos. The boy thus is the actor, driving a wedge in reality and opening the door for the negation of all previous master signifiers. I would argue that it is the boy, the agent/actor, that fits the monster archetype. Juxtapose that with the good he thinks he is doing and his youthful innocence.
This is not the only film to make the child into a monster. The J-horror instant classic Ringu also does this. In Ringu it is the child's innocence that leads to her evil. Again, it is a Žižekian act, the watching of the enchanted video tape, that breaks the master signifier and results in death and chaos.
This clash of worlds, the dialectic between country and city, white and minority, conservative and progressive is also seen in another Zombie film made around the same time, the George A. Romero classic Night of the Living Dead. The protagonist of the film is a Mandingo-archetype African-American man. He is strong, well spoken, tall, handsome. He is helping a helpless white woman. The dialectic comes when a family is discovered in the basement. The patriarch of the family is a racist redneck. He tries to subvert the protagonist's power. He doubts an African-American's ability to lead by insisting that he himself determine the line of defense the group takes (staying in the basement versus boarding up the windows and defending themselves from upstairs where there is an escape route), and thus reveals himself a racist. Issues of affirmative action and meritocracy arise here. The African-American man is obviously the best man for the job. However, by virtue of the color of his skin his legitimacy as the leader is put into doubt.
Zombie films in general reflect this dialectic. The monster here reveals itself to be the ultimate master signifier, defined by its negation. The zombies are undead, neither dead nor alive. However, they are not quite human. They are humans stripped of their humanity. Their only drive is the thirst for blood, much like the rabies victim. Often zombie scenarios are the endgame of a post-apocalyptic world. The 99% from whatever other backgrounds tend to share and get along when faced with difficult situations. Thus, the remaining uninfected individuals in the apocalyptic zombie world tend to work together no matter their petty differences. The zombie apocalypse is the great equalizer. Kropotkin calls mutual aid a factor of fitness in a world where the fit survive. That is to say that those communities that tend to work together tend to survive whereas those that do not perish. I'm reminded here of the scene in Jurassic Park when one of the characters runs to the bathroom and is eaten by a T-Rex. Jeff Goldblum's character, the Chaos theorist, explains, "When you've gotta go, you've gotta go." The point is that in these crisis situations any sign of individualism is punished in the most extreme of way. In order to survive we must work together. No one is an island.
As powerful as the 'mainstream' had become there was a counter-current that set out to be as subversively strange as they could. Enter Charles Manson. Charles Manson had spent a third of his life incarcerated by the time he got out in 1967. He made friends with Bobby Beausoleil, another musician and later an actor and score composer for the epic Kenneth Anger avant-horror film Lucifer Rising. According to Anger, Beausoleil was 'a little too close to the devil.' Manson and Beauseoleil were a match made in hell. Charlie would send Beausoleil and a veritable harem of women to the Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's house (the Beach Boys had covered a song written by Manson on their ironically named 20/20 album). There they met Terry Melcher, a record producer. Melcher was friends with Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, who were married at the time. Tate had just made The Fearless Vampire Killers, a vampire film with Polanski, and rumor has it that the pair were into the occult. As the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon tells us, everyone in Hollywood is connected one way or another. The point of this narrative is that life imitates art. The artists got knives and started feeding on other artists in a drug frenzy. Beausoliel was already in jail in 1969, but another group of Manson's friends, lead by Tex Watson, went to the Tate mansion in order to 'do something witchy' to Melcher in revenge for not getting the family a record contract. They wrote 'political piggy' on the wall in blood to make it look like it was Black Panthers that did it. Manson was afraid of black people, especially the Black Panther Party.
I can imagine the Manson family watching Dracula or the Wolfman on an old projector at Spahn Ranch, stoned out of their minds on LSD and MDA and fucking like rabbits in the straw [like the film Manson Family Home Movies]. When their minds were in this vulnerable state Manson would sing to them. He would sing, "People say I'm no good, Because I don't do like they think I should, Do they really expect you to act like them?" Counter-culture meant subverting the norm, whether it be religious norms, sexual norms or norms of dress and grooming.
Rabies physically changes the composition of the brain. LSD and other psychedelics are said to do something similar, even though there's no evidence for it. It was as though someone had poisoned America's water supply. When soldiers started coming home from the jungles of Vietnam they were all messed up. A spirit of evil had gotten into them. Fear is a dangerous thing. The peace and love generation was no longer peaceful and lovey. On Manson's heels were the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army and The People's Temple. They were proof that the hippy experiment had somehow become more violent that anyone had expected.
There were a whole lot of films based on the Manson myth at this time, but my favorite is I Drink Your Blood. Horace opens the film with the line, "Let it be known that Satan was an acidhead." If Charles Manson was Satan then this was true. The cult in I Drink Your Blood bears striking resemblance to the Manson cult. But not only that, it points to a greater phenomenon that was going on at that time in America. It was two worlds colliding... Helter Skelter. The Freedom Riders had seen what the deep South thought of integration of their two worlds. Their bus was burnt and their leaders were beaten and left for dead. Yes, small town America didn't want to change even though the times there were a-changing.
In I Drink Your Blood a cult of Satanic hippies from various racial backgrounds invade a small town that is about to be destroyed by a dam. They aren't very nice to the locals, they rape a young girl and beat up an old man, so the young boy poisons their food with rabies infected blood and zombie chaos ensues.
Who really is the monster here? Is it the young boy who infects the whole town with rabies? Is it the rabid zombies themselves? Or is the monster not even present here? Isn't the monster in I Drink Your Blood really evil itself? The followers of Satan (i.e.: Manson - or worse - Marx) are the perpetrators of the initial evil, but really aren't they in fact the victims of evil? The rabid dog that the boy takes the blood from is the patient zero here, but it is the act (in the Žižekian sense) of tainting the meat pies with the rabid dog's blood that breaks the master signifier and opens the door for the ensuing chaos. The boy thus is the actor, driving a wedge in reality and opening the door for the negation of all previous master signifiers. I would argue that it is the boy, the agent/actor, that fits the monster archetype. Juxtapose that with the good he thinks he is doing and his youthful innocence.
This is not the only film to make the child into a monster. The J-horror instant classic Ringu also does this. In Ringu it is the child's innocence that leads to her evil. Again, it is a Žižekian act, the watching of the enchanted video tape, that breaks the master signifier and results in death and chaos.
This clash of worlds, the dialectic between country and city, white and minority, conservative and progressive is also seen in another Zombie film made around the same time, the George A. Romero classic Night of the Living Dead. The protagonist of the film is a Mandingo-archetype African-American man. He is strong, well spoken, tall, handsome. He is helping a helpless white woman. The dialectic comes when a family is discovered in the basement. The patriarch of the family is a racist redneck. He tries to subvert the protagonist's power. He doubts an African-American's ability to lead by insisting that he himself determine the line of defense the group takes (staying in the basement versus boarding up the windows and defending themselves from upstairs where there is an escape route), and thus reveals himself a racist. Issues of affirmative action and meritocracy arise here. The African-American man is obviously the best man for the job. However, by virtue of the color of his skin his legitimacy as the leader is put into doubt.
Zombie films in general reflect this dialectic. The monster here reveals itself to be the ultimate master signifier, defined by its negation. The zombies are undead, neither dead nor alive. However, they are not quite human. They are humans stripped of their humanity. Their only drive is the thirst for blood, much like the rabies victim. Often zombie scenarios are the endgame of a post-apocalyptic world. The 99% from whatever other backgrounds tend to share and get along when faced with difficult situations. Thus, the remaining uninfected individuals in the apocalyptic zombie world tend to work together no matter their petty differences. The zombie apocalypse is the great equalizer. Kropotkin calls mutual aid a factor of fitness in a world where the fit survive. That is to say that those communities that tend to work together tend to survive whereas those that do not perish. I'm reminded here of the scene in Jurassic Park when one of the characters runs to the bathroom and is eaten by a T-Rex. Jeff Goldblum's character, the Chaos theorist, explains, "When you've gotta go, you've gotta go." The point is that in these crisis situations any sign of individualism is punished in the most extreme of way. In order to survive we must work together. No one is an island.
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