It’s always nice to be surprised.
Matinee is a movie I recently watched while trying to catch up on the filmography of Joe Dante, and what I found with this one is a movie that couldn’t be further up my alley. The movie stars John Goodman as Lawrence Woolsey, a “filmmaker” who is a clear take on William Castle…
Let’s derail for context. If you don’t know, William Castle was B-filmmaker who came to prominence in the 50’s and 60’s making cheap yet undeniably well-done horror movies that were notable for their audience participation gimmicks. For instance, during the creature feature The Tingler, the movie would stop midway through and star Vincent Price would warn the viewers that the titular monster was loose in the audience, an effect that was achieved by hiding buzzers in random seats, giving members of the audience the “tingling” feeling of the monster crawling against their spines while Price called out for the audience to “scream for your lives” in order to pacify the sound-sensitive creature. Such audience participation gimmicks were a way to get young people into the theater at a time where TV was increasingly taking attention away from theaters (surly not a familiar situation in the modern day)
Let it never be said, though, that Castle was just P.T. Barnum but for the big screen (and not, you know, pure unmitigated evil). There could be a fascinating amount of social observation in his tricks. Another movie of his, Mr. Sardonicus, was a lurid little thing built around a sinister man stuck with a permanent wide grin who cruelly torments the other characters of the movie in his search for a cure. At the end of the movie, the film once again stops so that Castle himself could address the audience in his typical carnival barker fashion and encourage them to decide the fate of Mr. Sardonicus; all members of the audience were provided with large flash cards to show the projectionist, voting on whether Sardonicus should be shown mercy and cured of his affliction despite his evil deeds, or suffer a torturous death as punishment for his wickedness. Supposedly this would be achieved by providing the projectionist with different film reels with the two endings, which he would put on depending on the vote.
Here’s the twist, though; the happy “merciful” ending footage has never been found and may very well not exist. What appears to have happened here is that Castle never shot the happy ending because he knew that it would never be voted for; with the benefit of anonymity, the majority of people in any crowd would vote for blood, the barrier of cinema making for a fun, consequence free outlet for one’s inner sadism. Few people are truly good enough to resist such temptation. A genuinely fascinating social experiment disguised as a silly b-movie gimmick.
I could go on, but I think I’ve painted the picture; William Castle was a truly unique presence in the history of cinema, a consummate showman who uniquely understood how to speak to his audience of young people. Even without the gimmicks, his works that indulged in boundary-pushing violence and taboo subject matter while retaining a fun innocence that make his work eminently watchable. And while there’s sadly no way to participate in the gimmicks at home, the carnival barker presentation remains and is infectious to this day.
Castle is fairly obscure by modern standards, but his legacy remains, from being the main visual and tonal inspiration for the ongoing Scooby Doo franchise to his audience participation tricks sometimes being referenced in more modern movies like Gremlins 2. And speaking of Gremlins 2, that movie was directed by Joe Dante, who also directed Matinee.
That was a perfect segue, not contrived in the slightest. I will not hear otherwise.
As I was saying before, Matinee stars John Goodman as Lawrence Woolsey, a clear take on William Castle, from his use of theater gimmicks to his personality that rides the line between a joyful eternal child at heart and gleefully exploitative huckster. Probably one of Goodman’s best roles.
The movie is about Woolsey going to a small coastal town in Florida to set up the premier of his newest film, Mant! (a spoof of 50’s b-creature features about a man infected with radiation from a dental x-ray gone wrong that causes him to become a giant ant. Hence, Mant!).
The hiccup being that this is happening during the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event that’s hitting the people of the town especially hard due to their proximity to a military base. Woolsey, however, insists on moving forward with the premiere, believing that his gimmicky horror movie will make an effective distraction from the real-life fear of nuclear war.
That’s the real central theme of the movie. It’s an ensemble piece about a handful of different kids coming of age in the midst of this crisis and their families in this town and how they react both to the existential fear of possible nuclear war, Woolsey’s horror movie premier, and some intersections of the two. I honestly don’t want to go too much further into it because this is more a recommendation than anything. Watch Matinee. It’s an overlooked cozy nostalgic gem of a film.
More relevant to this article is the central theme of the movie, which revolves around the value of horror films as relief from real horror. And while the film-within-the-film Mant! is intentionally a b-movie pastiche where the joke is that only in the 50’s could anyone think it’s scary, this light little movie still got me thinking about actual horror movies and why people love them.
The argument that Matinee puts forth is that the benefit of horror movies is that they provide controlled fear. We go to the movie, it scares us, then it’s over and we feel relief. Unlike the existential fears that real life provides, a movie ends. We shudder and sweat at our leisure. In a way this goes back to the Mr. Sardonicus social experiment; A movie can give relief to the parts of ourselves we bury. Usually not in as extreme a way as essentially taking part in anonymously voting for a public execution, but the principal remains.
Here’s a personal example of this phenomena; one of my own favorite horror movies, The Descent.
I don’t often get truly scared by movies, but The Descent is a massive exception. The movie is about a group of spelunkers who get trapped in an underground cavern, and I have terrible claustrophobia so you can probably see where this is going. But it’s not even just that, it’s that the movie’s set design, cinematography and performances are all perfectly executed to bring to life exactly what I find terrifying about the situation. On top of that, the characters are given harrowing personal conflicts that add even more to the terror of the situation, making watching them try to survive this awful predicament even more unendingly stressful. The movie really does get under my skin. And that’s before…well, I don’t want to spoil what else happens in the movie because I also want to recommend it. The Descent is a fantastic horror flick that you should definitely check out as blind as possible if you haven’t seen it. All I’ll say is that eventually new elements get introduced that add even more personal fears of mine to the table and makes the whole thing even more of a nightmare.
So the obvious question is “why do I watch this movie when I know it’s going to get my fingernails stuck in the upholstery of my chair’s armrests? When it will inevitably result in my pants getting filled up with enough browns to make the playoffs?”
Counterpoint: it’s funny because poop. Anyway, my personal relationship with The Descent is exactly what I described earlier; an outlet that lets me feel uncontrollable emotions in a controlled environment. I can feel those intense emotions without actually being in peril myself.
Also, without going into it, The Descent also demonstrates how horror of that kind can allow for a really unique kind of character drama. The character dynamics in that movie are based in things so dark, displayed so unflinchingly and with no hope of emotional reprieve at any point…it’s a different kind of audience engagement is my point. I don’t always love movies just because they are “dark”, but when something like The Descent hits and turns your empathy into another opening with which to get under your skin. A lot of good horror does that; provides and emotionally intense way to make you feel not just for, but with the characters on screen.
It is honestly, as much as anything else, an example of cinema as a true art form, That even “lower” genres can really tap into the human psyche. Mr. Sardonicus can tap into our inner monster. The Descent can trigger genuine panic that is relieved by the end of the runtime. Halloween can temporarily take away the safety of our home. The Beyond can shatter our sense of what’s real and make us imagine living nightmares. The Silence of the Lambs can put into perspective how real horror is existing as a woman. Audition can really make you think twice about doing a shitty thing to another person, even if for a good personal cause, lest that person get retribution by CUTTING YOUR FOOT OFF WITH A PIANO WIRE…ahem, Lake Mungo can make us think of the potential selfishness of grief and the horrors we can passively inflict on the ones we love the most. Eden Lake can make you truly understand the British upper class are a truly wretched breed of creature ruled by hate and fear of literally everyone else to a truly untenable degree that makes you wonder if an island of such unashamed scum creatures should even be allowed to…sorry, I saw that movie recently and it pissed me off. Can you believe it won the Empire award for best horror movie that year? Oh yeah, do you know what’s truly scary? POOR PEOPLE! I swear to god that’s all Eden Lake is actually…sorry, I’m done.
Honestly I could go on. I probably will go one day. Horror is my favorite genre and I have a lot to say about what makes it so great. I actually, truly believe that it is the genre that creates filmmaking in it’s absolute purest form so I’ll probably have to write about that once I find an angle to tackle it from. But for now I just wanted to pontificate on things that a wonderful little movie called Matinee got me thinking about. Check it out, maybe it’ll get your mind going too. Or just seek out something small and overlooked in general. Look up a director who you’ve liked movies from and look up their body of work, watch something they made that you’ve never heard of. You never know, it might speak to you like few other movies do.
Right Side of the Brain Film Thoughts 