Perpetual Night: Musing on Eaten Alive (1976)
It's an endless winter where I live. The howling wind creeps beneath my parka as I drag the body between walls of naked pines. Their branches reach up like nerve cells, desperate for sensation but cursed to only experience this cutting cold. It's perpetual dusk where I live. The sun hangs just above the horizon like a damned man waiting for the trap door to drop below him. It's impossibly red, blood turned from liquid into photon and shaped into a perfect circle. The body I drag drove a primer grey pickup. On the back bumper was a sticker that said "Come and take it!" I smile. I didn't need to take it. I took you and now all those things are masterless. The gun rack, the half drank bottle of Evan Williams. They won't miss you, this isn't a Disney movie.
You don't leave a body to sit. A doctor at a party told me the gas builds up inside them. Putrefaction he called it. Strange guy. The stomach bloats out, tight like a drum. Around it you'll see the mottled blue cracks that are the blood vessels. "His heart lost its rhythm and the rest of the band broke up..." I chortle to myself, still dragging the corpse. Putrefaction is bullshit if you ask me. That's their bad intentions bubbling up inside them. Nowhere to go now that they're dead. No wife to hit, no dog to kick, no open mouth to sputter falsehoods. Mine have always bloated and that's how I know I did right. I reach the shed and look up at the weather vane, the metal rooster spinning in the wind that is becoming a gale. By the time I'm inside hail is dancing on the rusted metal roof. I use trauma shears to strip the clothes off. I got them from the doctor, actually. It's incredible how much blood he had inside, gouts and gouts that fountained out of him and then coagulated on white linoleum into what looked like blueberry marmalade. Strange guy.
The bowels get thrown out the shed door and into the hail, steaming like a coiled python that just burrowed out of hell. There's an eclipse every night here, and the body has to be ready before it happens. The hail will end before then but the sun will continue to sit there, crimson like a gouged out socket. He'll come as the last light is shut out by the eclipse, and the body has to be ready by then. If I feed Him enough, maybe the winter will end and the sun will set. I pray to Him that it will, my forearms stained burgundy as the red sun starts to blacken.
Eaten Alive is Tobe Hooper's masterpiece. I stand by that notion. Hooper looked at the dinner scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and thought to himself, "Can I stretch the demoniac horror and hopeless energy of this moment into a feature film?" Turns out he could. The first line of the movie is uttered by none other than Robert Englund playing a real smooth-talker: "Name's Buck and I'm rarin' to fuck." He then attempts to sodomize prostitute Clara with her refusal leading to her eviction from the brothel. Does this sound ugly to you? Strap in, we haven't even met Judd. A deeply-lined face topped with taped spectacles, he runs the Starlight Hotel, a ramshackle affair in the swamplands. It's perpetual night here, expressed as blackness shrouded in fog or bathed in crimson lighting gels. Next to the hotel lingers Judd's pride and joy, his pet crocodile, a perfect receptacle for those who earn his distaste. It turns out, everyone ultimately earns his distaste.
We spend a lot of time with Judd. Neville Brand polishes this character to a shine reserved for a revolver used in Russian roulette. Judd rants and rambles, the inside of his skull a never ending squall just waiting to crack the bone. When those cracks do form and what's inside leaks out, Judd grabs his trusty scythe and turns people into croc chow. The cast of characters either overflow with viciousness or live in a state of relentless anguish. If they don't fit into these categories when they enter the Starlight Hotel, they do when they leave it.
Hooper shot the entire film on sound stages creating a disturbing unreality to the entire affair and generating the feeling of being trapped, even when a character is outdoors. Further enhancing this feeling is the soundtrack by Hooper an Wayne Bell, a mix of brain-scrambling synths and non-traditional instrumentation that may as well have been composed by a psych rock band out of a Bosch painting. When the credits roll, this flick will sit inside you, and it won't go anywhere for a long time. You'll have no exhale of relief. Sally Hardesty doesn't get to ride off on the back of the pickup truck with the sun high above her. That's because here, it's perpetual night.
-Dr. Benny Graves
