Just about two years ago, I attended American Cinematheque’s all-night Horrorthon in Los Angeles for the first time. For those unfamiliar, it consists of seven horror/cult films that are played back to back amongst a slew of other crazy trailers and videos, typically lasting from 7:30 at night to 8 the next morning. Part of the event’s intrigue for me is that while there are usually one or two titles I’ve seen before and are fun to revisit with a passionate and appreciative crowd, the remaining titles are ones I haven’t seen, or let alone heard of – ones whose reputations or very names altogether have been forgotten (or completely neglected) with time, and as a result ones I probably wouldn’t have chosen to waste my time with had it been up to me sifting through the typical old deluge of media accessible from home.
But these unpopular films were plucked out of the ether, resurrected by B-movie archaeologists who had crafted a mystery package all too tempting for us uninformed to ignore. The fun thing about seeing these types of movies at an event like this – typically the ones with Rotten Tomatoes scores of 59 or less and only a handful of acknowledgement on IMDb by the common reviewer – is that you and the people around you are kept largely in the dark as to what to expect out of these mysterious flicks, so that as it unravels, both yours’ and the audience’s reactions are entirely pure and collectively shared at that very moment.
Fast-forward six movies through – so far we’ve covered the relatively popular and beloved An American Werewolf in London (1981); the modest gem-of-a-find Popcorn (1991), whose horrorthon-involved plot proved gratifyingly “meta” and resulted in rapturous enthusiasm from the audience; the charmingly old-fashioned black and white William Castle/Vincent Price flick The Tingler (1959); the virtually no-budget Hack-o-Lantern (1987); the scattered, bafflingly-paced Shocker (1989); and the ’90s-era virtual reality thriller Brainscan (1994). All so far very interesting in their own right. And by the time these are through, half the theater is empty, with some half of those remaining slouched in their chairs, heads resting crookedly on the backs of their seats – littered popcorn bags, shreds of candy wrappers, and scattered snores galore. It’s about 6:30 a.m. – according to our bombarded senses still nighttime. Those still awake are somewhere between half-asleep and fever-dream hysteria. The last and final movie, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), is about to start.
Initially, I expected Death Bed: The Bed That Eats – by virtue of its title and almost non-existent status – to be a fun but ultimately trivial adornment to an otherwise pretty solid line-up. William Castle, John Landis, Wes Craven, and even John Flynn – but George Barry? His film must be some rediscovered, hastily slapped-together ’70s Z-grade trash reserved as the last show simply due to the strong likelihood that most attendees will be gone by then. In other words, I’d probably get a few good chuckles out of shoddy production values and cheesy storyline straight out the minds of a team of film school rejects, but if I did end up missing it, no big deal. It wasn’t like I’d be missing the greatest film in the world, right?
Well, closer to wrong than right. Turns out that by the time Death Bed ends and the screen goes blank – as people are waking up, readjusting their clothes and ascending sluggishly from their seats all in funeral-like silence (save for the reverberating ‘clunk’ of the seats as all the cushions bounce back up) – I realize that this film had a lot more to it than I’d expected. What I thought would be typical, clumsily-made grindhouse fare actually turned out to be quite beautiful, evocative, and unique. Indeed, everything about that exact moment seemed inverted: the once-uproarious crowd silent, the formerly bustling nighttime surroundings of the place turned into Sunday morning stillness, supposed Z-movie schlock turned transcendent film-watching experience. While I didn’t exactly revere the film at that moment as much as I would say I do now, for some weird reason the overall impression of the film stuck with me for months. I started to entertain the thought that perhaps the best was saved for last. It wasn’t until a little while later that I truly found my utmost appreciation for it, and by now would rank it as one of my favorite cult films.
I won’t spoil anything too fun, but the movie is about a killer bed situated in the abandoned room of an old mansion. Unsuspecting victims visiting the locale eventually find their way into the room and onto the bed, which soon proceeds to gobble them in a most imaginative low-budget fashion: foam starts to froth around their bodies – as if the bed were drooling with primal delight at the doom of its prey – which then slowly begin to sink into its sheets like quicksand, until they are immersed and dissolved in a vat of acidic, amber-colored digestive fluid located somewhere within the hellish bowels of its mattresses. We are also introduced to the spirit of a deceased young man, our narrator, who is existentially trapped behind a see-through painting of The Bed in that same room, able to do nothing but observe and ruminate vacantly over whatever events take place before his eyes. Soon it is revealed to us that there is an entire backstory and wild dream-logic to the given circumstances from which, intriguingly, the rest of story will develop.
My fascination with this film is mainly due to how a film with such a silly premise somehow manages to be simultaneously serious about itself. It is achieved by maintaining a particular, offbeat tone: a dream-like fusion of fantasy, horror, and comedy, in which each of those elements do not break each other’s merits but work together harmoniously to achieve the film’s signature, contradictory ambiance. It’s a fairy tale in the fullest sense, albeit renewed in more contemporary terms in that it uses the absurdity of its “B-movie” premise – a bed that eats people, for crying out loud – as a counterpoint to its more traditional fairytale motifs. The juxtaposition/unification of campy, B-movie ridiculousness and morose, somber Romanticism expressed in the film is what gives it its unique aura – and treating its story and subject matter in the serious manner that it does only serves to amplify its underlying absurdity – analogous to how some jokes are funnier when told in a serious manner. In these days, where we are no longer mystified by enchanted lands or magical realms and entities at face value, part of the brilliance of Death Bed is that it replaces this naive raptness with a more self-aware and ambiguous tone that, while cognizant of its own absurdity, plays fair to its storybook plot and more fantasy-oriented elements. Refreshingly, the humor in Death Bed isn’t used to subvert the fairy tale genre inasmuch as it’s used to reinvent it and expand it to new territories.
A pet peeve of mine is the overuse of words like “surreal,” “hypnotic,” or “dream-like” when used to describe films, which especially seems to come up in the horror genre. It might be because a lot of “horror” films aim for these qualities so desperately to the point that when these “states” are attempted it seems manufactured, caricatured, and resultantly clichéd rather than organically developed from a meaningful point of view. (Or, it might be just be due to reviewers’ lazy writing practices, in which those same three words are used to describe seemingly everything.) But to hell with it; I’ll describe Death Bed as hypnotic, surreal, and dream-like anyway. The majority of words spoken is told in narration, thereby removing the need for the camera to accompany lots of exposition from different characters, or follow the action of the story in a linear fashion, etc. The images then have the latitude to speak solely for themselves, free to show anything integral to the film’s spirit rather than be constrained by mundane action confined by time and space. As a result, in true Romanic fashion the richness of the setting is given far more prominence and depth than the few characters we’re introduced to. Romantic motifs like the blooming roses, skulls, abandoned castles, and ornate, regal beds, to name a few, comprise much of the film’s beautifully composed and haunting images, that when combined with the detached tone of the narrator and some very interesting, “pulsar” choices for sound design, make for a film that in the end rings closer to the nature and pacing of a dream rather than any sort of traditional narrative structure.
I acknowledge that about half of this so-called “review” consists of my describing my experience at the horrorthon, and so for that – I guess I’m sorry. But a large part of why Death Bed resonated with me so much was precisely because of the context with which I saw the film. As I watch more and more stuff, I become increasingly aware that the motives for why and the conditions in which I see the films factor a great deal into how I end up engaging with them. As I continue to tire of the tropes I see over and over again in movies – visual, story, or otherwise – the qualifications by which I deem a film “good” tends be increasingly for subjective reasons rather than objective ones (if there were ever such ones in the first place). Thus, being that I was nearly in somewhat of a trance-like state to begin with after having been up all night seeing six other horror films, Death Bed‘s dreamy atmosphere and languid, drifting pace proved especially transfixing to me, especially given that it was such a drastic departure from the faster-paced, “harder-edged” horror movies it followed. When the movie was over the dream seemed to continue; I left my seat and went outside where the formerly lit marquee was now backdropped by a blank white sky; and I proceeded to drive the two-hour drive home on the eerily empty Sunday morning Los Angeles roads.
Time for bed.
