STILL, IT’S SO MUCH CLEARER [550]

When a film about a horror film confronts you with the position that intellectual explanation and discussion get in the way of expressing emotion, presenting it both as a cinematic theme and as a real-life truth, that film is going to stay with you for a while. For that reason, expect spoilers as I recover from watching Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”.

There is a scene past the half-way point of this film where Kris Williams, played by Hannah Einbinder, a queer filmmaker hired to reboot a problematic slasher film franchise, “Camp Miasma”, becomes very emotional during a call with executives at describing her new vision of the story. This does not go over well with people that just wanted a revival of a dormant intellectual property with “woke” credentials and a queer voice to paper over the cracks, and you feel her idea has been dismissed as much for her as its merit.

By this point, reboots of slasher films have been shown to be an intellectual exercise, finding ways to repackage what has been as mindless violence or tired tropes: “Camp Miasma” had one in the 2000s, alongside “Halloween”, “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, the latter having already been given the postmodern, metatextual treatment in 1993 with “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”, starring the franchise’s original “final girl” Heather Langenkamp as her real-life self. I don’t remember the “Scream” and “Scary Movie” franchises being mentioned, but they hardly needed to be. The opening titles of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” place its fictional franchise as much a part of cultural landscape as the others, through VHS tapes, posters and merchandise to reviews and news articles depicting its decline and reboots, while positioning it as a mirror to “Friday the 13th”, down to using the same font for its title.

The call with executives followed Kris having travelled to meet Billy Presley — played by Gillian Anderson, who can do no wrong —who was the “final girl” in the original 1980 “Camp Miasma” film, never acted again, and has since bought the real-life camp used by the production as their home. Already compared to Norma Desmond from “Sunset Boulevard” before Kris meets her, Billy is a much happier and well-adjusted person than given reason to expect, especially as she contends with Kris’s intellectual positioning of both “Camp Miasma” and of her own life: Kris describes ­herself as both polyamorous and in a consensual throuple, to which Billy immediately assesses that Kris does not sound happy about that arrangement.

Breaking through layers of emotional repression is at the heart of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”. Billy is an artist, but her works are of concentric squares, mirroring the box on the head of the franchise’s slasher villain. As Billy and Kris watch the film together, Billy forcefully draws the same arrangement.  A sign already seen among the other artworks reads along the lines of, “if it becomes too much, you can switch it off”, and the film is switched off, albeit by a power cut. Billy says that the sex scene in the film in which she participated turned into a sexual assault, something she overcame by imagining the killer watching them, then killing them after climax. Kris later admits she imagines being pursued and killed as what enables them to do the same, put down to having seen the film at too young an age. 

The slasher villain of “Camp Miasma” is named “Little Death” – la petite mort. Once a child at the camp marked out by their changing of gender expression each day, rendered into a boogeyman through successive campfire stories, they were killed and thrown in the lake, coming back to take revenge – the “Sleepaway Camp” series is also referenced, as are Felissa Rose and Pamela Springsteen, both actresses that portrayed the transgender killer Angela Baker in that film, a character similarly singled out as “other” through the emotional reaction of the other characters, and perhaps the intellectual explanation of the filmmakers. The feeling I got was that “Little Death” was more complete as a person, but in a way too unconventional to be allowed to live.

Upon Billy first meeting Kris, Billy tells her that “there is a hole at the bottom of the lake, where the movies come from...”, which is then laughed off as a joke. By the end, this is true: “Little Death” really does live at the bottom of the lake, in a room decorated like a video rental shop, ready to come to the surface and take revenge, the climax of the “final girl” delivering a VHS tape of the latest instalment in the franchise to their shop-room. “Little Death” is the filmmaker, the arbiter, and we are the surreal fodder, to be killed off at a rate of one every 7-8 minutes, if “Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning”, is anything to go by – I did feel the gore shown was more than would have been allowed in 1980. After breaking through layers of repression with Billy, Kris delivers that latest instalment through the killing of what frustrates them, the victims being the executives, agents and lovers that have inexplicably arrived to find them. The title of the new film is the one we have been watching.

And yet, the following morning, Kris and Billy wake up – covered in blood, the literal spear of “Little Death” having been removed from them both, but it’s a new day, and they are full of life. They go to the local store to stock up on more sweets and candies, a recurring motif through the film that I took to be as much of an enjoyment of “empty calories” as the real-life slasher films being parodied here, but they talk about them with such joy and knowledge, just like an audience of slasher films would.

There is a question in Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Against Interpretation”: “What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?” I feel like I have watched one answer to that question. This film completes Jane Schoenbrun’s “screen trilogy”, begum with “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (2021), about a video game, and “I Saw the TV Glow” (2024), based around a TV show. I have yet to see the first of these films, but we are drawn “through the looking glass” in this latest film just as with “I Saw the TV Glow”, the film grain and dust of film entering “real life”.

Schoenbrun and their team do as good a job of making “Camp Miasma” a “real” franchise as is done with the teen drama “The Pink Opaque” in “I Saw the TV Glow”, playing with our idea of nostalgia – we recognise its footprint, and we acknowledge that the constant reinvention of that nostalgia is not new either, shifting our memory and interpretation of it. Indeed, Schoenbrun was apparently asked about rebooting the “Leprechaun” horror franchise, although I perceived the problems with executives coming from A24, the production company that funded “I Saw the TV Glow”, turning down this film, leading to its eventual funding by the British producer (and streaming service) Mubi. When their novel “Public Access Afterworld” is published in October 2026, continuing the same themes of identity and self-discovery, I will most likely be reading that too.

I don’t know if this will make me want to watch a 1980s slasher film, as I rarely have before now, but they will allow me to understand why they persisted, and still endure.

ARE WE NOT MEN? WELL, ARE WE? [544]

The full story of my vertiginous journey into the music of Devo will be told in full detail one day, but until then, an infamously mythologised moment in the group’s history was finally unleashed in full on Friday 19th June 2026, and I was of course ready – I had it on pre-order since the end of March.

“Nitrous Nightmare” is a double-vinyl album (or double-CD, in my case) of one of Devo’s first few live performances, on 31st October 1975 at a private Halloween party in support of the jazz and avant-garde artist Sun Ra, recorded by them to a four-track reel-to-reel tape. Accounts of this event are of Devo’s setlist running so long, having refused to stop playing, that the audience became openly hostile, threatening the group, with their instruments finally being unplugged for them. Another account was Devo overran so much that Sun Ra would never get to perform, and that a rendition of their signature song “Jocko Homo” approached half an hour in length.

Some of this performance appeared in 1990 on “The Mongoloid Years”, a compilation of early live recordings, but “Nitrous Nightmare” is, as far as I know, the entire extant recording of the set, all one hour and twenty-two minutes of it. The British label Futurismo have given this release the full treatment of photographs, artwork and Halloween imagery, collaged together in a sickly green and yellow, with secondary oranges and pinks.

The title “Nitrous Nightmare” was chosen for this release by Devo co-founders Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, as nitrous oxide turned out to be a major ingredient of the evening for the audience, along with alcohol and other drugs, and store-bought Halloween costumes. For their part, dressed in grey overalls, blue hard hats and face masks, Devo appeared as normal. Mark Mothersbaugh as “Booji Boy” on keyboards is the enduring character from a line-up where all then-four members adopted personas: Gerald Casale as “Chinaman” on bass, Bob Mothersbaugh as “Clown” on guitar, and Jim Mothersbaugh as “Jungle Jim” on self-made electronic drums. 

With fifty years of mythologising now over, it is time to listen. The recording wobbles into life with the one “cover” Devo would perform that evening, as Bob Mothersbaugh sings Mark’s reworking of “Secret Agent Man”, followed by two more songs before Casale calls for a DJ to come to the stage, seemingly as a way to seal approval for the group to continue playing: “I know everyone’s looking at their programme right now... there’s a change in the programme... after that introduction, Murray reminded us that we’d better do it now”. That song, “Buttered Beauties”, is one of the initial “Hardcore” Devo songs that would not make it to later albums, although “Secret Agent Man”, “Smart Patrol” and “Auto Modown” soon will.

The Devo sound here is bluesier, rockier and noticeably slower, led by Casale’s bass and Bob Mothersbaugh’s guitar, while Mark Mothersbaugh’s punctuating keyboard sounds feel like a starting point with no tradition before it, although I still think the effect played in “Jocko Homo” sounds like a tiger. Jim Mothersbaugh’s electronic drums are interesting: while they do not match the force and drive that Alan Myers would later produce for Devo with a regular drum kit, you remind yourself that you normally hear electronic beats like these when they are regimentally programmed, not played manually like they are here. It is a tribute to Jim Mothersbaugh that his skill as a drummer is not overshadowed by his having built the kit.

The audience is not heard all that much on the recording up to now, with distant clapping, whistles and the odd comment. It sounds like the evening is running well enough until Casale, commenting on whether they have cleared the auditorium, says that “you just can’t take it... OK, here’s a man song, no Booji Boys”. To that end, the first public performance of “Jocko Homo” turns into eleven minutes of goading the audience. I remember the first time I heard the album version, thinking “oh, come on” upon hearing “we must repeat” after enduring “are we not men / we are Devo” sixteen times in a row. This time, I know what is going on: keep asking “are we not men?” until you pierce the surface of those who think they can say “no”. The moment one of the audience yells, “you’re not men, you’re fucking assholes”, the song then becomes, “is he not a man?” and “they are not men”. The sheer length of this version of “Jocko Homo”, which doesn’t yet include the middle section of “God made man, but he used the monkey to do it”, will begin to grate, until you laugh at how irritated you became. This is now my favourite version of the song, fully appreciating why “we must repeat”.

From then, you can hear the audience deteriorating, scandalised at their tastes being confronted, the sounds of beer cans hitting the stage. Devo’s answer? “We came here to observe your hatred.” After three more songs, proving they could rock as well as anyone – notably, the synth melody intro to “Chango” would be reused in 1988 for the song “Plain Truth”, on the “Total Devo” album – the question “want anymore?” ends the recording – nothing sudden action, and no popping sounds of plugs being pulled. Devo apparently decamped to a fish restaurant across the road for dinner, returning in their regular clothes to watch Sun Ra, no-one realising who they were.

For what I have heard about how badly this performance apparently went, “Nitrous Nightmare” was a rather good listen. If you have listened to Devo’s older pre-1978 material, recorded mostly in the seclusion of a basement, hearing them being performed in such a confrontational manner, with the audience reacting entirely as expected, is fascinating. You imagine the disparaging voices belonged to people who left before the end, satisfied they had maintained order, provided they were still able to think clearly. Other groups have been called worse, and had larger things thrown at them, but Devo made people look, then look again.

Gerald Casale’s liner notes for this release are much more extensive than those he gave to re-releases of the albums “Total Devo” and “Smooth Noodle Maps”, and read like it could be turned into a theatre or film script at a moment’s notice. I guess you had to be there, but if you did, the adrenaline worked better than the laughing gas could.

To clear up some inaccuracies I found in the notes, it was the album-oriented rock radio station WMMS-FM that held the private party at WHK Auditorium (now known as the Agora Theater & Ballroom) in Cleveland, Ohio, from which the radio station operated alongside the medium-wave WHK, then operating a hybrid country-talk format. Seemingly lining up with the “de-evolution” mindset, WMMS introduced “The Buzzard” as its mascot the previous year, a “scavenger” whose existence commented on the economic decline of its own city. 

The DJ who comes to the stage after the opening songs, yelling “it’s Friday” and “you gotta go low with Devo!” is not “Murray the K” Kaufman, as implied in the liner notes. It is really the WMMS-FM DJ Murray Saul, who yelled “it’s Friday” in the same guttural way on his radio show – I guess “Murray the K” was a much less annoying Murray to remember. Murray Saul does not have a Wikipedia page, but “Murray the K”, who during the 1960s insited upon calling himself “the fifth Beatle”, does.

This Devo line-up was preserved in their later short film “The Truth About De-Evolution”, before Alan Myers joined as drummer, and Gerald Casale’s brother Bob joined on rhythm guitar, the “Bob 2” to the lead guitar of “Bob 1” Mothersbaugh. Jim Mothersbaugh left Devo to continue in electronic engineering, joining the Roland Corporation during the 1980s to help develop the MIDI technology standard that allowed musical instruments to speak to each other, something Devo had been able to benefit from for some time.

I only discovered Bad Company was a British band while writing this article, and I still cannot name any of their songs. Their first album was recorded in a former workhouse in Hampshire. 

DANCING IN THE NIGHT [368]

Coming up, I take advantage of the eternal popularity of Halloween to stitch together slow-motion footage of the bats circling the back garden.

Thank you for watching, if you would like to see more videos like this, please like, comment and subscribe, and as ever the nostalgia culture crisis continues at www.leighspence.net, the home of dancing with the gatekeepers.

HURRY UP IT’S HALLOWEEN [243]

“Halloween III: Season of the Witch” has been around long enough to be reappraised as an enjoyable cult horror film, successfully separated from the eternally rebooted Michael Myers roadshow - indeed, the first “Halloween” film is treated as a fictional work, with a trailer appearing on TV before one of the incessant Silver Shamrock ads. 

However, because people were apparently expecting to see The Shape again, it was the least successful “Halloween” film at the time, dooming the idea of an anthology series – it may have been released in the US in time for Halloween 1982, but when it ran out of steam, it took until 9th June 1983 for it to reach UK cinemas. “Halloween III” remains my favourite film in the series, only because it is the one I actually wanted to watch.

The plot is essentially an anti-consumerist retelling of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” even based in a carefully controlled named Santa Mira, this time overrun by the Silver Shamrock Novelties mask factory, instead of alien plant spores. A man, later established as a toy shop owner, is admitted to hospital, saying “they’ll kill us all” – when he is himself killed, his doctor, and the patient’s daughter, travel to Santa Mira. What unfurls is a tale of watching men in suits, androids, microchips that activate swarms of insects, witchcraft and Stonehenge, all brought together to wipe out large numbers of people, upon activation of a signal embedded in that bloody advertising jingle – corniness is both catchy and deadly.

“Halloween III” has the feel of an episode of “The Twilight Zone” or “The Outer Limits,” the latter especially evoked by the TV interference and lines creating a pumpkin in the opening credits. Producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill would only make a third “Halloween” film if they could tell a different story, and future films in the intended anthology would evoke the same mood. The music, with an electronic score by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth that sounds as if they had a chat with both Philip Glass and Brian Eno first.

The connection with the older TV series is reinforced by the script having been written by one of John Carpenter’s heroes, Nigel Kneale, best known for creating the 1954 live BBC adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” starring Vincent Price and Donald Pleasence, and the “Quatermass” series, last seen in 1979 and starring John Mills. “Halloween III” is not horror for horror’s sake, and is reminiscent of the tone and feel found in Kneale’s other work, especially the “Quatermass” series and “The Stone Tape,” which is more along the lines of psychological horror.  

Kneale had his name removed from the credits when some gore and nudity was added to the script by the director, Tommy Lee Wallace, at the behest of a producer, ending Kneale’s only time working in Hollywood. When the producers wanted to change direction back to Michael Myers, John Carpenter and Debra Hill sold their rights to the “Halloween” films to them. Meanwhile Wallace, also heard in “Halloween II” as the cheesy voiceover for the Silver Shamrock mask ads, would next direct episodes of the “Twilight Zone” TV revival series, and write “Big Trouble in Little China” for Carpenter. None of them had anything to do with “Halloween” again until Carpenter co-wrote the music for the 2018 “Halloween” revival, of a revival, of a sequel.

TOMMY CAN YOU HEAR ME [227]

“This is a mess. No way. I refuse to do this! You're the one who keeps fucking around with it so get off your ass and fix it! You understand?”

I rarely make a conscious decision to watch a horror film, but when I do, I am more likely to choose one from before the mid-1980s, before the cliché, excess and self-referencing set in. You can say the same about any genre, but horror films have more long-running series of films that eventually turn in on themselves. 

I thought the intention of the “Friday the 13th” series of films, alongside “Halloween” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” was to kill the killer so definitively, it provided the perfect starting point for next time – how do you bring them back? I know better now: “Friday the 13th” was originally planned to end as a trilogy, but a fourth was then ordered, deliberately titled “The Final Chapter”. However, because part 4 did so well at the box office, another new trilogy was planned, with part 5, “A New Beginning,” released within a year.

Tommy Jarvis, the child who killed Jason Vorhees at the end of part 4, is now older, released into a halfway house from a mental institution, still having flashbacks to Jason – you know he will become him, so the plot becomes a case of guessing who isn’t Jason, once the killings start. John Shepherd, taking over from Corey Feldman as the older Tommy, worked in a mental hospital in preparation for his role, before being told that “Repetition” was a fake title for a “Friday the 13th” film - his performance hides his disappointment very well.

This film feels like it was made to a very strict plan. Killings happen at a steady rate of about one every seven to eight minutes of screen time, as mandated by Paramount Pictures, with a shock or scare if there is no kill, and a liberal sprinkling of sex, gore and gratuitous shots of women’s breasts. For this reason, you have little reason to care when a character dies, as you are only given enough of them to begin caring, before it doesn’t matter anymore. (If anyone can tell me the reason for the redneck mother and son in this film... that's fine, but please still keep it to yourself - it was probably so they could also be killed off.)

This film has a more psychological plot than previous “Friday the 13th” films have, the guessing game around the killer’s identity requiring more of the audience, but switching attention to an ambulance driver, and later revealing his son was staying at the halfway house, was rather jarring. By the end, Tommy has had so many hallucinations you are practically waiting for the final reveal. 

In the end, it all counted for nothing, as Jason Vorhees was simply brought back for part 6, “Jason Lives,” replaying the classic “Friday the 13th” formula, except with more jokes. The actors signed up for a sequel to “A New Beginning,” their characters having survived, had their contracts terminated, with a third actor playing Tommy Jarvis. John Shepherd next appeared in “Thunder Run,” a Cannon Group film that was essentially “Smokey and the Bandit,” but with plutonium instead of Coors.

I WANT YOUR PSYCHO, YOUR VERTIGO SHTICK [160]

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” is regarded as the ur-text of the American horror genre, but its three sequels have proved harder to find, because of their being perceived as both inferior to the original, and, and as an obvious and poor answer to the rise of slasher film franchises like “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th”. However, Arrow Video have released “Psycho II” on DVD and Blu-ray, under licence from Universal Pictures, so I braced myself, and handed over some money.

As much as Hitchcock did not like the idea of sequels to his own films - although he had remade his British film “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in Hollywood, with James Stewart and Doris Day - “Psycho II” was always going to be out of his hands, especially by his dying three years before its 1983 release. Hitchcock had sold the rights to “Psycho” and his “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” TV series to Universal in 1968, with the film having already made $18 million at the box office – not bad for having spent $800,000 of your own money in the first place. Hitchcock became the third largest shareholder in Universal, which had been bought by his agent, Lew Wasserman, and his company MCA in 1953. As inevitable as a “Psycho II” was going to be by 1983, it was the perfect opportunity to both commemorate and capitalise on Hitchcock’s work.

I am happy to say that this is a sequel worth watching. I was worried that “Psycho II” was either going to be some hackneyed, by-the-numbers horror flick, even though its director, Richard Franklin, had studied Hitchcock’s work, and had met with him during the making of “Topaz” (1969). Fortunately, it is also not the academic exercise of remaking the original that Gus Van Sant’s 1998 “Psycho” is known for being – just because you can now do the opening aerial shot of Phoenix, Arizona, that Hitchcock could not in 1960, due to technical constraints, doesn’t mean you should, whether you can do it in colour or not. Instead, what we have is a story that makes good use of the twenty-year gap in both the film’s events and of the public’s knowledge, while learning Hitchcock’s lessons in filmmaking without just copying them (although starting the film by replaying the original’s shower scene is a bit on the nose for me).

After twenty-two years in a mental facility, Norman Bates is deemed to be fit and well, and is released, against the wishes of Marion Crane’s sister Lila, who cannot believe that a murderer is not imprisoned for life – it is pointed out from the start that he was found to be insane, not a murderer. Initially working at a diner, he befriends and helps out Mary, who was thrown out of her boyfriend’s place. Norman and Mary take up residence back at his mother’s house and Bates Motel – the sleazy manager, played to greasy perfection by Dennis Franz, is first to die, at the same point as in the first film (after about forty minutes).

As the murders occur, Norman begins to see his mother again, which Mary sees as being part of his mental illness, something that could not make him a murderer. What is worse, Mary knows who is framing Norman: Lila, her mother, who wants him put into jail, using a “mother” costume secreted in the house. The climax of the film is that those who are implicated in the murders are those that have been shown to have been cool and calculating all along, and not the one shown to be almost incapable – fortunately, Norman is shown at the very end to have regained his equilibrium, and his mother, with the use of a spade, though not in the way you might think. As much as you think that “Psycho II” might be playing with notions of mental illness, the definition of what is “sane” is also shown to be different for everyone - as Norman Bates says in the original film, “we all go a little mad sometimes.”

The older Anthony Perkins seen in this film looks perpetually haunted, and this is to his advantage here, which is also the case for the returning Vera Miles as Lila Loomis, née Crane – his father is said to have died, presumably in an explosion with Michael Myers at the end of “Halloween II.” As Mary, Meg Tilly is the audience’s point of identification, but she is, and we are, ultimately proved wrong in the end, setting up 1986’s “Psycho III,” directed by Perkins himself.

The black and white of the original “Psycho,” and the stark string soundtrack, are traded for full colour and a lush orchestra, which could be seen as a way of muddying the waters. At the end of the first “Psycho” we got a nice summary of how Norman Bates took over his role as his own mother, but we don’t get anything so easy to understand here... but it sets up a sequel rather well.