{"id":103196,"date":"2016-09-28T19:09:36","date_gmt":"2016-09-28T23:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=103196"},"modified":"2016-09-29T10:51:26","modified_gmt":"2016-09-29T14:51:26","slug":"the-scary-peeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/09\/28\/the-scary-peeper\/","title":{"rendered":"The Scary Peeper"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nothing so appalling \u2026<\/p><\/div>\n

In Canada today, Home Depot announced that it was pulling a Halloween decoration called \u201cScary Peeper Creeper\u201d from its shelves<\/a>. Shoppers were deeply perturbed by the Peeper\u2019s pockmarked, rubbery visage, and for good reason\u2014he\u2019s designed to scare the living shit out of people. \u201cRealistic face looks just like a real man is peering through the window at you,\u201d boasted the description on Home Depot\u2019s website; all that\u2019s missing is the labored mouth-breathing. The manufacturer advises sticking him \u201con the passenger side of a car window, in a bedroom window, basement window, kitchen window, bathroom window, or garage window \u2026 We\u2019d love to hear where you\u2019ve gotten good results with your Scary Peeper!\u201d<\/p>\n

The debacle brought to mind\u00a0Herschell Gordon Lewis, cinema\u2019s very own Scary Peeper, who got very <\/em>good results with his pictures. He died yesterday at ninety. (It\u2019s\u00a0been a bad week for voyeurs.) In his forty-one turns as a director, he did more to popularize gore, splatter, and willful puerility than a Peeper in every window could do. His films range from the out-and-out depraved (Blood Feast<\/em>, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat<\/em>, Miss Nymphet\u2019s Zap-In<\/em>) to the merely lascivious (Boin-n-g!<\/em>, Living Venus<\/em>, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre<\/em>), but\u2014per the Peeper Code of Conduct\u2014they were always, always in poor taste.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And they always made money, too\u2014the\u00a0New York Times <\/em>obit noted, seemingly with surprise, that every one of Lewis\u2019s films was in the black. The Times\u00a0<\/em>also quotes\u00a0John Waters, whom Lewis counted among his most ardent fans<\/a>: \u201cHe invented a genre of movies, and made fun of himself from the very beginning, which I thought was endearing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Endearing<\/em>\u00a0wasn\u2019t often the first word that came to mind for Lewis\u2019s critics.\u00a0<\/em>As James Kendrick writes in Hollywood Bloodshed<\/em>, the filmmaker \u201ctreated the dismemberment of the human body with the same exploitative, voyeuristic glee that he treated the naked female form\u201d:<\/p>\n

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Much like traditional pornography, Lewis\u2019s movies were constructed around flimsy narrative structures that existed primarily to create situations in which people could be dismembered, gutted, beheaded, crushed, or otherwise killed in some imaginatively grisly manner; in effect, graphic gore replaced nudity as the movie\u2019s illicit promise to see something you couldn\u2019t see elsewhere.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cImaginatively grisly\u201d is, if anything, an understatement\u2014it\u2019s hard to describe the churlish panache that animates Lewis\u2019s \u201cblood-soaked cheapies.\u201d In 1970\u2019s The Wizard of Gore<\/em>, for example, a couple goes to see a magician named Montag the Magnificent, prone to long disquisitions about the nature of reality. The couple goes home and has a nice drink, until, as Wikipedia describes it,<\/p>\n

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Suddenly, Jack laughs and begins peeling his own skin from his face to reveal that he is actually Montag. \u201cWhat makes you think you know what reality is?\u201d he asks Sherry before disemboweling her with his bare hands.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That takes moxie, if you ask me. And then there\u2019s\u00a0Blood Feast<\/em>, which, for its part, is remembered largely for a scene involving a brutal\u00a0tongue removal, which Simon Abrams and Matt Zoller Seitz remember fondly at RogerEbert.com<\/a>, pulling back the curtain a little bit:<\/p>\n

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The feast of blood that is Blood Feast<\/em> may not seem sophisticated by twenty-first-century torture-porn standards. But it got a rise out of early audiences, particularly the scene where Arnold’s character pulls the tongue out of Olsen\u2019s head\u2014actually a sheep\u2019s tongue.<\/p>\n

In the film, Olsen\u00a0gags, and crosses her eyes as her character\u2019s tongue is yanked out. The sheep\u2019s tongue\u00a0that Arnold laboriously pulled from his costar\u2019s\u00a0mouth was\u00a0rotting and\u00a0had\u00a0to be sprayed with\u00a0Pine-Sol to\u00a0prevent Olsen from throwing up. So when Olsen\u00a0greets Arnold\u2019s advances with horror and disgust, she\u2019s not\u00a0acting, she\u2019s reacting \u2026\u00a0When Olsen\u2019s tongue disappeared during the Peoria premiere, the crowd\u00a0swallowed theirs.\u00a0\u201cHere are all these fellows sitting on their fenders, yelling and laughing and screaming,\u201d Lewis remembered. \u201c\u2018Hey, wotta lousy movie!\u2019 Then comes the tongue scene, and suddenly everything goes dead quiet. And all you can see are these white eyeballs staring up at the screen. That one brought \u2019em up short!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You can see part of that Magic Cinema Moment\u2122 in the trailer for\u00a0Blood Feast<\/em>, below, which is prefaced with a lively series of disclaimers of the sort usually found at the entrance to amusement parks. Times being what they are, I advise against watching\u00a0it within a hundred\u00a0yards of the nearest Home Depot. You never know, after all, who\u2019s spying on you.<\/p>\n