Hexcrafting and Cursing: Musing on The Burning Moon (1992)

There's no greater poverty than loneliness. It can drive people to pitch black places. Alan Volk is the blackest place you'll ever go. Moving in your senior year was hard enough, the threads of your life slashed to fraying ends by your father's work opportunity. That this opportunity cost you your friendships doesn't seem to register to him, hidden behind the finance section of the newspaper like Reagan's idea of the great and powerful fucking Oz. You're now in the Midwest, where the walking lobotomies that made up the football team call you a "burnout faggot" and the gym teacher responds by smirking beneath his baseball cap. You corner a dog long enough and you're liable to get bit. So one day you crack the quarterback in the mouth, snarling as his teeth clack on the linoleum floor like dice. Snake eyes.

You meet Alan Volk in detention. Eyes that gleam like napalm igniting and a grin promising heresy. Wrapped up with care in an Rotten Cotton shirt like a gift from Kaczynski. His introduction is a balled up piece of notebook paper thrown at the back of your head. Inside is a detailed illustration of a fist throwing up the middle finger but the finger is a veiny cock. Your laugh buys you another week of detention and a new friend. Your time together feels like someone took American Movie and put it in a blender with Cecil B. Demented and an early Cannibal Corpse demo. You are not beloved but Alan never worries about mainstream appeal. "Better to reign in hell..." you hear him mutter to himself just before throwing a big gulp full of his own piss out of your moving car and onto the hood of the church van behind you.

Alan's room would have interested Aleister Crowley. It may also have interested GG Allin. He collects everything from moldering books on necromancy to German SOV horror that has since been wiped from history. You'd come to his house with a trash bag because he has no concept of food going bad or where an empty bottle could be deposited after its high proof contents were drained. When you'd leave, usually high or drunk, he'd scream out his window "This individual is robbing me of my treasured property!" One Friday he told you he'd ordered something really special. He explains it's a copy of a video someone had taken. A ritual done near the Chernobyl reactor. No one involved had survived but their undoing had been more than the radiation. He eagerly describes how that the original tape had to be copied quickly because it had started to melt and grow things. You tell him plastic couldn't grow anything and he raises his eyebrows while wearing the biggest grin.

The following week Alan is not at school. You give it a few days before skipping class yourself to see what's going on. He isn't exactly dedicated to public education. There are no cars in the driveway but there are boards on the windows and doors. Someone had spraypainted crosses on them. You have a moment of dissociation wondering if Alan had even existed or if you are in some kind of Lynchian fugue state brought on by having to go to a school with a cowboy woodchuck as a football mascot. Then you pry some nails out of the board in the back door and enter the house. Things have been taken in a hurry, but much has been left behind. Except for in Alan's room. Everything has been left there, and more. There's a battered cardboard box with an address written in Cyrillic discarded in a corner, its insides looking like a petri dish. There's a scorched black mark on the rug in the same place right where Alan usually sat when he watched television. Black trails lead from that spot to the closet. Inside is where you find some of him. Someone had to have put the skin into the closet, folded like a piece of linen. You wonder what that must've felt like for his mother or father, cradling the silken costume that held the meat and bone and electrical impulses that had powered their deviant son. Or had he crawled there before deflating like a blow-up doll forgotten after a stag party?

You get little time to weigh these options . The skin is inflating, filling with matter. It's a sound like pouring tomato sauce out of a jar. Alan's skin is too small a vessel for whatever is occupying him and you see the scales of the thing beneath creating countless small punctures under the flesh, a pointillism of hematomas. Short obsidian Horns puncture the skin of the forehead just slightly, rivulets of old blood flowing out of their hiding places between the layers of tissue. Its eyes look like cracked eggshells straining against the borrowed sockets. The thing's voice sounds like its been run through a litany of vocoders and behind the speech is a constant sibilant giggling. "Alan was such a brave boy", it croons. "Still brave...As above so below." You are rooted to the spot and can hear the scorched place on the carpet sizzling through some unholy chemistry. "Shall I show you what he saw?" The thing in the skin queries. Its laugh is water running down a drain clogged with cords of dead hair. The television turns on and the plastic housing begins to sprout obscene things. On the buzzing screen is a landscape made by no man. You see something that's partially Allan above the writhing masses. Does he reign there? Then your flesh begins to bubble and sprout and bloom, until the things you see on the screen become the things you'll know eternally. As above so below.

The Burning Moon is many things to me. It's a death metal demo with lyrics so filthy and riffs so ruthless that they threaten to warp the tape reel. It's a tincture of paint-red SOV gore sucked into a dropper and dripped into your eyeballs, an reverse Ludovico Technique that'll turn you into a celluloid sadist. It was also one of my earliest exposures to SOV and set far too high of a standard. Analog media dorks who've blown their life savings on every W.A.V.E. productions release would have you believe that SOV flicks are a rich tapestry of artistic creativity. Shut your pie holes. Maybe 20% of all the SOV movies released during their heyday are worth watching. Everything else is either barely-disguised fetish porn or mundane to the point of sedation. However Olaf ittenbach's diabolical anthology is far from whatever flavor of the week is fetching obscene prices on eBay. The only obscenity here is what's happening on screen...and thank German Satan for that.

Ittenbach plays Peter, a street-fighting, heroin-loving degenerate whose parents have wisely decided he's the best choice to babysit his younger sister. After dancing with Mr. Brownstone, my boy sees some shit that'd be at home in the liner notes of a Beherit album. Taking it in stride, Peter heads off to his sister's room to tell two very unique bedtime stories. Curious George they ain't, unless there was a part in one of those where that dude in yellow got his teeth drilled through by the low budget answer to a Cenobite. The first tale is one of a date night gone wrong where Mr. Right turns out to be Mr. Family Annihilator. The second tells of a Priest corrupted by his Satanic allegiance and insatiable appetites, with a climax that takes us on a scenic tour of hell.

I could go into greater detail but in my opinion, it's the style and not the substance of these segments that makes The Burning Moon one of the best SOV horror movies ever released. The victims in these tales have an almost gullible disposition, lambs walking up the conveyor belt to the entrance of an abattoir that's visibly spitting out gallons of blood. You can practically hear Ittenbach's gleeful giggling as the horrors crest over their heads, the shadow of a wave that promises a tide of viscera. Said horrors are executed by way of some ludicrously creative practical FX work with zero notion of cutting away, lest some Tipper Gore analog clutch her pearls. Ittenbach wants that heart attack to be the one that puts her in the dirt. The trip to hell at the climax of the second segment is when we really get to the fireworks factory. A drawn out parade of atrocities, our boy Olaf channels Hieronymus Bosch by way of early Cannibal Corpse. This is the the art for Hammer Smashed Face come to life. This is the movie your older brother would have had to hide among his pornos. Now get off my stoop, you've got some legendary trash to watch.

-Dr. Benny Graves