God is Watching You

The montage ends abruptly with our two young ladies together alone for the first time and Liz enthused about her apparent fixing up of Amy and Buzz. This tent bathroom is the first of several interior set design triumphs for Hooper and Production Designer Mort Rabinowitz in terms of immortalizing carnival seediness. This bathroom is so dirty you feel unclean merely beholding it.

Liz and Amy's costumes are here at their most extreme contrast to their surroundings, while simultaneously the shale colored walls are at their most coldly mechanistic contrast to the rainbow of the carnival (at least until later on inside the Funhouse.) Their conversation is what makes them co-exist yet transcend the squalor of utilitarianism around them: They are discussing how Amy's chances with Buzz are going, youth and vigor giving them willful blindness to ignore the cracked mirrors and unclean sinks which underscore their natural bodily urges.

"You know, if you play your cards right..."

"You may not have to spend the rest of your life a virgin."

Particularly youthful in our culture is the idea that losing your virginity is a game that ends with a ride. Beginning with Halloween came the idea that teenagers in horror films playing with the screen taboo of intercourse were tempting death, and from the blossoming exploitation genre of youth animal comedies (Animal House and its imitators) the genre borrowed the sense of play now framing the quest for sex. 

The point of this scene is that Amy is a virgin, which puts her fun seeking dishonesty in a new light. She is beautiful and socially active, yet contrasted here to the vivacious and sexually active Liz. This is not just another night out for her, this is the make-or-break night for one of the biggest hunks in school and presumably the high school social grace that follows. The Funhouse gently asks us to take a lot of teen movie cliches seriously by making their involved behavior directly implicated in the danger to come.

"Liz...?"

"...Fuck up!"

Neither JR nor I have ever heard the words "Fuck up!" used in conversation as you might say "Oh, shut up!" Not in real life or even any other films. Have you?

Sonia Zomina as the Bag Lady. John Beal's score reappears for the first time since The Shower Scene with synthesized strings, a marked shift from the rest of the score's full orchestra and also the incessant generic background melody of carnival music. Quite a lot of slashers had taken the synthesized sound as their own after John Carpenter's bluntly selective use of it in Halloween.

"God is watching you!"

"Beg your pardon?"

Teenagers and their elders have had communication problems since at least the 1950s, when a sheriff wouldn't believe that the Eye Creatures were abducting neckers from makeout point or whatever. Although the Donald Pleasance character in Halloween is a masterful reversal of the truth-seer role into a lone adult underdog, the real influence on the genre belongs to Friday the 13th and "Crazy Ralph," a bicycle riding drunkard whose unheeded warnings of "doom" became the model for a lot of disheveled adults warning youth that there was a murder in the area however many years ago and they should party somewhere else.

Tobe Hooper tapped into the feeling young people get from bad adult omens back in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with that film's own drunken old fool, so it's important to notice eight years afterwards he allows himself to revisit and behold that genre cliche he unwittingly helped create. "God is watching you" is a way different warning from "you're going to die tonight." The fact that this is a bag lady in the ladies room/tent addressing two girls who've yet to be sullied by life is vital to the virginity conversation. When she says God is watching Liz and Amy, she really means we the audience and Tobe Hooper himself are watching, waiting and silently judging.

Zomina does a humorously hurried shuffle towards the girls you have to see in motion to appreciate; an actor's moment that makes the scene come alive. The adults of The Funhouse are all either deformed or alien.

" He - "

" - hears - "

" - everything!"

This is as close as any slasher film has ever gotten to saying outright that the girls better stay chaste or else. The uneasy laugh of the scene is recognizing the Bag Lady's scold within the context of a horror movie.

A short dramatic violin string emphasizes the Bag Lady's wink beneath the synth strings and her relaxed face puts the period on Hooper's ominous and humorous declaration.

"I hate people who preach..."

The Bag Lady's water closet exit urges once more the queasy coexistence of budding womanhood and the ramshackle public chamber of bodily functions.

"...Especially in bathrooms!"

Classic Girl, by American Apparel.

"Anyway - "

" - I don't know what you're saving it for."

"Who says I'm saving it?"

"God..."

"...is watching you..."

Watching Amy, that is.

"All good horror movies have at least one Old Crone. This one has a couple of 'em. The Old Crone is there to remind you what your girlfriend is eventually going to look like. That's why she's so scary."

- Joe Bob Briggs, Monstervision (airdate: April 3rd, 1999)

Games and Rides

Joey's first in a series of escalating table-turning adult scares for the night is a cheap chair jumper, probably as it should be. The Funhouse gets a lot of quiet scenes from his inclusion in the story, which is a purely symbolic and emotional one.

Our first view inside the carnival is the mingling of society's fringe and the bourgeoisie suburbanites who visit their theater for thrills. Further away from Amy and friends in age, the mother and her children don't even see this guy and he shambles pitifully across Hooper's first time widescreen composition. Then in the same shot we see the group enter.

Amy bumps into the guy, the first of her escalating confrontations with the dark side of adulthood, and moves on. It's probably a coincidence, but there's a father and daughter passing by as this happens. Credited sensitively as "Geek," David Carson will be seen several more times in the background of the film, as will some of the speaking roles for the other carnival denizens. This is one of Hooper's movies which can be called Altmanesque in its simulation of an interacting community of characters.

The costumes of the carnival extras are perfectly drab, and the bold colors of the lead actresses really pop out even amongst the color of the carnival itself. Hooper pays a lot of attention to costuming for characterization and his dead teenager movie is no exception - Elizabeth Berridge's dress is perfect because it makes her look like Snow White. Largo Woodruff's star-covered purple shirt and red pants are stylishly loud without being dated, and the guys are preppies in blue jeans. There's a timeless quality to these clothes.

There's also timeless quality in the film's lengthy visitation of the carnival, that familiar seedy antique and institution of show business. Here's the first of many familiar distractions and another example of Hooper trusting his actors enough to tell the story through their reactions. 

Here's a lobby card of Amy inspecting a different selection of game prizes and reaching for what looks like a shrunken head. This scene didn't make it, although finding a disturbing anomaly amongst cheap artifice is what the film's all about.

"I admired a quality about the Tyrone Power movie, Nightmare Alley, and my memory of it was it was set at a working carnival. It wasn't, but I always wanted to do a carnival movie."

"It was a full-on carnival. And I wanted to make sure we used all of it. You always saw segments in carnival movies - the Ferris wheel and what not - but the carnival here was a character."

Shock Till You Drop Hooper interview

This may be the only montage in Hooper's filmography. He had a lot more location terrain to cover on The Funhouse and more reason to cover it than any of his other work.

The Brass Ring, which I've yet to see anywhere outside this film as they're extremely rare these days.