Author Lars Nilsen, a longtime Alamo Drafthouse film programmer, and now Austin Film Society lead film programmer, has written a definitive guide to exploitation cinema. Mondo’s Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive, edited by Kier-La Janisse (Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror) featuring numerous genre contributors, hits shelves on November 16, 2021.
Warped & Faded is over 400 colorful pages dedicated to cinema’s weirdest, from personal accounts, essays, newspaper clippings, and photos. Part oral history of the Alamo Drafthouse’s best known programming series and part compendium of films that have screened throughout the program’s history, Warped & Faded offers everything from cult faves to deep, deep cuts for the cinephile. It’s an expansive and passionate dive into film history made accessible for all but will appeal most of all to exploitation enthusiasts and fans of offbeat cinema. It’ll also deepen your appreciation for what it takes to program repertory screenings.
For the book’s release, Nilsen curated an exclusive list of horror exploitation for Bloody Disgusting, in tune with Warped & Faded‘s informative and stunning genre guide, including when it screened for Weird Wednesday.
Nilsen explains, “In the years before we spun the horror movie titles from Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series into their own iconic night (Terror Thursday – later Terror Tuesday), we played a lot of horror films. The ones I have selected here aren’t necessarily the most frightening around, but I don’t think we’ll hear any complaints about how dull or conventional they are. These are movies that each seems to open the door into a unique phantasmagorical world with its own set of rules, from the Max Ernst-like surrealism of THRILL OF THE VAMPIRES to the cough-syrup-drunk continuity nightmares of BOARDINGHOUSE.”
BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS
Andy Milligan, USA/UK, 1970
Playdate(s): July 6, 2005
Andy Milligan made films more cheaply than anybody else before or since. He delivered 35mm feature films (blown up from 16mm) on budgets of under $10,000 a piece. At those prices, a distributor didn’t have to wait very long to start turning a profit. So Milligan got a chance to make some of the strangest, most personal exploitation films of all time. He produced, wrote, shot, edited, directed, and even made the costumes for all his movies. His casts consisted largely of prostitutes, drug addicts, and other street people. Whatever bad things might be said about Andy Milligan’s films, they all come straight from the heart. And Andy Milligan’s heart was a tiny, black, malformed thing that pumped hate instead of blood. His movies are venomous parcels of filth, made by a miserable person and depicting the continuing adventures of hateful people whose entire reason for living is to make others suffer. Milligan’s characters can barely get through a simple expository scene without bickering and ranting. This relentlessly misanthropic outlook makes Milligan’s films sublimely entertaining to people with a very dark and depraved sense of humor. Bloodthirsty Butchers is Milligan’s version of the Sweeney Todd story—about a murderous barber who plies his trade with a straight razor. The blood and gore are plentiful but insignificant compared with the spiritual violence the characters inflict on one another. As Michael Weldon has famously written: “If you’re an Andy Milligan fan, there’s no hope for you.”
BOARDINGHOUSE
John Wintergate, USA, 1982
Playdate(s): October 9, 2002
This totally berserk micro-budget horror movie has baffled and mostly delighted everyone who has come into contact with it. As a cost-saving measure, it was shot and edited on videotape and transferred to film. Don’t just gloss over that part. It affects every aspect of the viewing experience. In the same way that a magnificent location or score can transfigure a movie and smooth over the rough parts, here the shitty image quality is driven home with every blurry, oversaturated frame. Fortunately, there are other compensations, particularly writer-director-star John Wintergate’s performance as a telekinetic entrepreneur who converts a haunted house into a bed and breakfast for attractive women. A really unforgettable experience.
DEVIL TIMES FIVE
Sean MacGregor, USA, 1974
Playdate(s): August 4, 2004
Let’s face it. Kids are creepy. Not all kids, of course, and not all the time. But in movies like The Exorcist and David Cronenberg’s The Brood, the kids are a whole lot scarier than any hulking maniac or black-gloved mystery killer. But imagine, if you dare, an all-star dream team of killer kids led by future teen idol Leif Garrett, and you’ll have your nightmares all mapped out for the next—oh, 40 or 50 years. And even though this is a schlocky, laughably bad movie, we can pretty much guarantee dead silence in the theater when this band of spunky youths brings the evil. We’ll leave it up to you to decide which kind is the scariest: the precocious cross-dresser, the pyromaniac, the “nun,” the kid in military fatigues who barks orders like a marine drill sergeant, or Leif Garrett, who, for some reason, acts like a cynical, world-weary 40-year-old backgammon champion. For our money, it’s Leif all the way. He makes Hannibal Lecter look like a Muppet baby. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
THE THRILL OF THE VAMPIRES
Jean Rollin, France, 1971
Playdate(s): January 11, 2006
The druggy surrealist sex vampire movies of Jean Rollin are considered a bit excessive by more traditional horror movie fans. Screw those mama’s boys. Jean Rollin’s movies are so great that I would personally go to war for them if I had to. For years, I’ve gotten weird looks every time I rave about Rollin’s Man Ray-inflected pulp art masterpieces like The Nude Vampire, Caged Virgins, Schoolgirl Hitchhikers, and this. Rollin’s films are virtual encyclopedias of fetishistic sex and horror movie imagery, lashed together under the flimsiest dime-novel pretexts of a plot. But they garnered an enthusiastic following among students in Paris, who watched these bizarre films alongside the skid-row popeyes in Pigalle nudie theaters. In this regard, they form a continuity across generations with the silent serials of Louis Feuillade, which also had tiny budgets and played in flea-bitten theaters for enthusiastic audiences of pickpockets and Bolsheviks in the ’20s. Featuring the gorgeous French sex star Sandra Julian (I Am a Nymphomaniac) and a beautiful vampire who sleeps in a grandfather clock. Music by high school prog rock band Acanthus. An essential movie experience.
THE VELVET VAMPIRE
Stephanie Rothman, USA, 1971
Playdate(s): October 26, 2005 / October 28, 2009
Stephanie Rothman has provided some of the most memorable Weird Wednesday movies: The Student Nurses and Terminal Island. This is possibly her weirdest—a one-of-a-kind Aquarian sex-vampire epic. Though made in America, the film incorporates a lot of the techniques we associate with artsy European horror movies—an emphasis on storytelling through color, slow psychedelic dissolves, and that old standby: abundant nudity. There’s a school of thought that horror movies need a strong sexual component, whether explicit or sublimated, or they just don’t have the desired impact. Clearly, Rothman has attended a few classes at that school herself, as this movie is all about vampirism as a sexual dynamic. And Celeste Yarnall, as the bloodsucker of the title, provides a clear sexual focus for this movie about a vapid bleached blonde California couple who find themselves ensnared in a vampire’s desert lair. Better than you’d expect and possibly the only vampire movie to successfully incorporate dune buggies. Featuring a completely unexpected cameo appearance by legendary Delta bluesman Johnny Shines, who performs “Evil Hearted Woman.”
Discover the history of Weird Wednesday and an impressive catalog of cinema with Warped & Faded, available now here.
