Scarlet Cinema
Friday the Thirteenth: The Series: Season 2, Episode 16
“There’s no underestimating the power of someone’s dreams, is there?”
— Jack Marshak
One of the great buried shows of the 1980s, "Friday the 13th: The Series," remains one of the most creative, darkest, bloodiest, and all-around satisfying genre television experiences of that entire era. Micki (Louise Robey, or simply “Robey”) and Ryan (John D. Le May) joined Jack Marshak — portrayed excellently by the late Chris Wiggins — as the proprietors of their late Uncle Louis Vendredi’s (E.G. Marshall) antique shop, Curious Goods. There, in what I presume is Manitoba, they hunted down the cursed items that led to Uncle Louis’s death and damnation, along with the unlucky souls — usually downbeat ne’er-do-wells — who possessed them and unleashed their startling supernatural properties. All of which, inevitably, backfired on the unlucky wielder.
In the episode “Scarlet Cinema,” a young film student named Darius Pogue (Jonathan Wise) wields an old Super 8 camera that brings to life the original and indelible incarnation of that unredeemed and tragic lycanthrope: the Wolf Man, as portrayed by the equally tragic Lon Chaney Jr. Chaney was as much a sad sack and lummox playing Larry Talbot the lycanthrope as he was playing Lennie Small in the famous 1939 adaptation of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
Darius is a film school student whose nemesis is Blair (John Graham), a wisecracking, somewhat bullying teaser with an arrogant and snide manner who is competing for Darius’s girl, Carissa (Julie Stewart). Blair catches, through the eye of his own camera, Darius enacting a strange, bloody, self-mutilating “werewolf ritual” — scratching himself with a wolf’s foot and leaving raw trail marks across his chest. This footage is later screened for the class as part of Blair’s student movie project, with Professor Shwartz (Peter Messaline) looking on unsympathetically.
Darius makes a heartfelt plea for the “Scarlet Cinema” of the thirties and forties — the noir thrillers and supernatural horror films like The Wolf Man — arguing they are an unheralded, underappreciated genre. The plea leaves Professor Shwartz unconvinced. As if to underscore his obsession, Darius’s room is a shrine decorated with memorabilia posters of the film, dominated by a huge, spookily underlit Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man.
Ryan, investigating the cursed camera’s location from the manifest, visits Darius’s room. Initially rebuffed, he slips inside and comments on how cool the decor is. Yet the posters are only part of the shrine built to Chaney’s deathless portrayal. The camera itself summons the bestial lurking within those fantasies of fog-shrouded forests and gypsy wise women, of slavering, upright beasts brought violently to life. Juxtaposed against the murders is a monster that is not the traditional werewolf as portrayed in the contemporary series Werewolf (with John J. York and Chuck Connors, sadly cancelled the following year — one of the all-time great horror TV shows ever broadcast).
This lycanthrope looks exactly like Chaney in his yak-hair makeup, complete with cheap, phony fangs: hairier human gone mad than a metamorphosed hybrid of man and wolf. It is an interesting and actually effective pastiche. The extensive use of original The Wolf Man footage featuring Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and Maria Ouspenskaya (“Maleva,” the old gypsy woman) makes this episode not only a chilling thriller but a loving homage to one of the true masterpieces of cinema, scarlet or otherwise.
Getting back to the story: Ryan and Micki hunt Darius, who has traded identities and is now the Wolf Man himself. Having shot the monster with his own silver bullet, he takes on, exactly as promised by the strange message on the old camera’s strip of film, the identity of the bestial “wolf within.”
The naive and put-upon ne’er-do-well has, through the cinematic magic of illusion made manifest, transformed himself alchemically into the slavering Thing Most Feared — a hideous, hairy protector, a fantasy ego defense mechanism born from the box-like sprocket vulva of the motion picture fantasy lens.
What ensues is killing: of Professor Shwartz, of Blair, and of the proprietor of the shop where the camera was originally stolen — Jack’s friend. We could give away the spoiler and the twist ending, but we won’t. Suffice to say, “Scarlet Cinema” is a beautiful episode in an excellent series, a startling black-and-white homage to a classic Universal monster flick. And it offers an interesting, symbolic examination of that glass-and-metal womb of wonders from which fear and terror are born, merge, and become inextricably bound in the same terrifying dream.
(SUB INDO) Friday the 13th The Series S02E16 "Scarlet Cinema"
Links
My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1
About the Creator
Tom Baker
Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
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