By MARK MATICH
With the initial rise of now very popular boutique DVD labels like Vinegar Syndrome, who released two of her most recognizable titles, Prime Evil and Lurkers, a few years ago, the films of Roberta Findlay have undergone something of a mini-renaissance in terms of appreciation of her work. Fans and film scholars have shown intense interest in her work, usually going to great lengths to praise her transgressive depictions of female sexuality in her now-classic erotic films. This was not always the case, and for a long time, her ’80s excursions into horror have simultaneously been derided by genre critics and considered hidden gems to ardent fans.
For example, in “The Unwatchables,” a tongue-in-cheek essay-overview featured in Chas Balun’s Deep Red Horror Handbook, writer Greg Goodsell reserves some of his most unforgiving jabs for the New York City auteur. To quote Goodsell, who lumps Findlay in with decidedly less technically (or at least visually) gifted filmmakers Larry Buchanan and Don Dohler in the section of his essay titled “Repeat Offenders and Attitude Problems,” as of 1989 Findlay was “The single worst genre director active today.” Goodsell describes her work as being “devoid of any and all originality” and “betray either a contractual obligation to which Findlay will be paid $186 after lab fees or a severe attitude problem.” According to Goodsell, Findlay’s “New York-lensed ditties, The Oracle, Blood Sisters, Lurkers, and Prime Evil were a “new nadir” in her career, which began in the burgeoning adult sexploitation market of the 1960s.
In this piece, I want to take a look at some of the more interesting narrative and visual elements of the horror films she made in the ‘80s and challenge the notion that they only represent the sheer opportunism of the video boom and are not as notable from an aesthetic and historical point of view as her adult films. Instead, they are both technically more resourceful than many of their contemporary counterparts and, by the same token, show a marked continuation of Findlay’s interest in exploring overlooked aspects of women’s psychological and social predicaments within genres one could (and many have) argue are fundamentally filtered through a male point of view. I will also explore how Roberta Findlay was working on what could be considered the fringes of independent horror filmmaking and how her low budgets often benefit the droning, uncanny effects of her approach to horror. There is no doubt that her horror films can’t be held up as great examples of genre filmmaking, but her reputation as a sort of inner-city Ed Wood doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny either, and recent approbation on platforms like Letterboxd shows people are becoming hipper to her style, replete as it is with jittery hand-held inserts, ghostly lo-fi lighting effects, and a penchant for bulging, unpleasant fish-eye close-ups of various goons and ghouls confronting the viewer.
But first, some context for this hard-to-categorize female auteur. For ’80s horror fans who have worked their way through Mill Creek Crown International sets or lists of every video store-bound, low-rent title from the ’80s, it’s easy to watch a film like Lurkers and just be blown away by a sense of an overriding lack of conformity to any of the trends of horror at the time. Unlike many one-shot filmmakers who got together enough funds and friends to complete an honest-to-goodness movie during these halcyon days, Findlay did not emerge from a vacuum, and a more generous effort at providing context than Goodsell and other contemporary commentators offer is in order. Born in 1948, she began her cinematic career after meeting her husband, Michael, at City College in New York. Michael Findlay was an avid cinephile who was also attending City College in the mid-‘60s when he met Roberta, enlisting her as a pianist for a silent film festival he was running; Her first assignment was accompanying the D.W. Griffith’s epic, “Intolerance.” The purportedly convivial, cinema-obsessed Findlay was Roberta’s anchor into the world of exploitation filmmaking in which the duo would number among the pioneers of the original onslaught of “roughie” pictures that mixed strong doses of seedy violence and crime with sadomasochistic sex.
Roberta quickly acquired the essential filmmaking skillset while working on these ultra-low-budget films (e.g. Take Me Naked, 1966), acting as director of photography (or as she unfailingly puts it in interviews, “cameraman”) and also doing “everything from voiceovers to playing floozies and masochistic victims.” Her sardonic, yet oddly authoritative “voiceovers” are more like a wizened, disembodied Greek chorus in her early shoestring-budget sexploiters, culminating in Angel No. 9, an X-rated hit that has interesting resonances with her later, more mainstream genre efforts. Sadly, Findlay’s narration is absent in the horror films she made. After separating from Michael Findlay, who died in a tragic accident in 1977, Roberta Findlay had a successful career in porn during its golden age, though she accepted her assignments on these films, according to her testimony, mostly to stay at work. As such, she’s a unique example of a filmmaker who had sustained success in horror (at least from the point of view of turning out profitable movies) after being very visibly known as a force in the adult film industry. Usually, as in the case of filmmakers like Maniac director William Lustig, a few X-rated pictures provided a training ground for entry into the more mainstream (but still, as anyone who has followed the history of horror in the ‘80s knows, very disreputable) horror genre. Accordingly, the reverse is true of Findlay, who has reluctantly assumed a kind of legendary status as a female porn auteur, resulting in her later-career tenure in making cheap horror movies often consigned to an inauspicious asterisk in analyses of her filmography. And while 1985’s The Oracle and the films that followed are certainly low-rent examples of their ilk and not, strictly speaking, “good movies,” they do offer an interesting continuation of some of her thematic obsessions. Despite their varying quality, Findlay’s horror movies represent a set of texts that fit into the canonical structure of ‘80s horror in their own right.
First in Goodsell’s list of offensively bad Findlay films is The Oracle, the first of the five she made with her producing partner Walter E. Sear under the banner of the Reeltime Distributing Corporation. As Findlay explains in the audio commentary included on the Vinegar Syndrome edition of 1988’s Prime Evil (the last Reeltime horror opus), after a successful run of feature-length pornographic works during the heyday of “mainstream” porn in the ‘80s, horror seemed like a “logical next step,” although she was not particularly drawn to the genre. The film bears this out, as the plot of The Oracle is a mishmash of horror clichés complete with incessant poltergeist activity that doesn’t seem credibly connected to the oracle of the title as well as similarly random gooey special effects that might seem more at home in a movie like Charles Band’s Parasite or The Return of the Alien’s Deadly Spawn. The charges brought forth by Goodsell (“devoid of any and all originality, apathetic attention to technical detail,” etc.) seem more like they were inspired simply by sitting through this particular movie and not Findlay’s subsequent horror efforts, each of which is better than the last from a technical and storytelling standpoint.
The Oracle stars one-and-done leading lady Caroline Capers Powers as Jennifer, a young woman who has recently moved into a New York City apartment with her TV executive husband. In a prologue sequence, we see a wizened old gypsy woman muttering over an Ouija-like device comprised of a stone hand that produces a kind of ghostly automatic writing. This hand seems to have a mind of its own, acting as a conduit for a sleazy murdered business bigwig named William Graham to turn the tables on the people who conspired to kill him, leading to Jennifer’s complete mental breakdown in the process. The pat and annoying way in which her mental deterioration is presented is more the fault of R. Allen Leider’s script than Findlay’s treatment of it, as the film goes through familiar motions of visits to occult bookstores (where the owner corrects the protagonist that spirits aren’t “like” dead people, they are dead people!) and a no-one-will-believe-her regiment of psychiatric counseling. This conventionality, where it seems like the film goes out of its way to be generic (which makes sense for a first effort at a money-making horror film) detracts from the core concerns that Findlay had developed in some of her erotic films and would emerge more clearly in the next few horror movies she made – namely an interest in the point of view of a mentally unstable woman and meshing that idea with a sinister and supernaturally-tinged conspiracy.
Links to Findlay’s earlier films like 1973’s Angel No. 9 are present throughout the horror films Findlay made under the Reeltime banner. For instance, the focus on a woman’s relationship with a callous and disinterested partner in The Oracle recalls the caustic relationships and cutting (and surprisingly, for the time, vicious) remarks on display in Angel No. 9, which has the interesting premise of a man given the comeuppance of being sent back to Earth in a woman’s body to feel both its pleasures and the degradation of mistreatment by men.
There are some striking thematic resonances with the film. In a seemingly innocuous love scene from The Oracle in which husband Ray (Roger Neil), who has previously chastised Jennifer for not being “more positive, more assertive,” uses the notion of “starting a family” to initiate sex with her, which she eventually rebuffs when he again questions her sanity. This is an interesting variation on the memorable bookended scenes in Angel No. 9 in which slimeball protagonist Steven (Alan Marlow) tells his girlfriend, who has just revealed she’s pregnant, to “raise the bastard yourself!.” Later, he is on the receiving end of the same treatment when reincarnated as Stephanie. It turns out a similar sexual discord is presented in a different and possibly more depressingly subtle way; In Angel No. 9, Steven is shown in a long shot, haranguing his girlfriend, who is left completely vulnerable, naked, and sobbing, on their bed. Whereas in The Oracle, a more formally organized set of tight framings and longer shots of the two on their bed shows what seems like the intimacy and trust between Ray and Jennifer, shattered by Ray’s dismissal of her experience with the supernatural as a childlike fantasy. In a close two-shot, Jennifer disgustedly says, “Is that what you think of me? Not tonight, Ray.” As such, while the dialogue is clichéd and toned-down in the horror example, it’s clear that the supernatural forces that besiege Findlay’s horror heroines can be seen as symbolizing sexual repression that pervades every aspect of their life – a far cry from the typical sex scenes in horror that simply presage violent death (although there are certainly many of those in Findlay’s films horror films as well).
The low budget, mediocre acting, and stale script of The Oracle place the film closest to the descriptions of some of Findlay’s detractors. However, unlike some of the other stalwarts Goodsell mentions, Findlay tended toward a steady forward momentum of stylistic improvement in each of the different phases of her career. For the horror movies, the budget constraints were the only constant, and with each film, Findlay and her producing partner, Walter E. Sear, got better at working around the same limitations. In her next film, Findlay hit her stride, partially because the quotidian aspects of the production (i.e., its cheapness) become strengths. It is also the least connected, stylistically and thematically, to her erotic works, demonstrating a versatility that transcends genre.
In Tenement, also from 1985, mounting suspense is sublimated into a sustained, all-encompassing horror as we see the gradual inevitability of Chaco (Enrique Sandino) and his group making their way up each floor of the tenement. Closer in spirit to the slow and agonizing buildup of the avian marauders in The Birds, a film Findlay namechecks in her commentary on Tenement, the comparison is apt as we don’t know all the details of the motivation of the leather-clad miscreants. We only know that they will stop at nothing to take over a building they (mostly Chaco) lay a ridiculous and almost surreal claim to. The programmatic use of text on the screen to signify each inch of territory gained by the gang is ingenious in aiding this sensation of inevitability. The gang members rely simply on brute force and continued intimidation tactics (not to mention indiscriminately and brutally killing the tenants) as opposed to the skulking use of the element of surprise that defines other entries in the genre. In this sense, it’s a very disciplined film in terms of how the narrative progresses.
Much more than in The Oracle, in Tenement, there is a dynamic, freewheeling, handmade sensibility to the camerawork that recalls Findlay’s formally unrestricted beginnings in ’60s and ’70s sexploitation (such as the kinetic opening car-mounted tracking shots in Angel on Fire) but done on a larger and more elaborate scale. A great example of this is an unbelievably lucid use of what otherwise might have been a badly distracting, narrative-busting 360-degree pan around Chaco as he contemplates the bloodshed he plans on unleashing upon the unsuspecting tenants. The interior monologue voiceover accompanying the shot works amazingly well, lending a surreal quality to it that recalls Findlay’s fixation on the interior states of her female protagonists. Likely due to budgetary constraints, a lot of the film transpires in fairly simple shot-reverse-shot progressions, often between the beleaguered residents and onrushing attackers. Findlay seizes on a great opportunity for some camera dynamism here that informs the larger-than-life aspirations of the wacked-out Chaco without being showy. Findlay’s commentary also mentions the old-school good vs. evil aspect of the narrative that betrays a lack of cynicism and a certain level of sincerity that will surprise those familiar only with the kneejerk reputation for making “neurotic” or overly downbeat movies.
By the same token, for someone who unequivocally stated (in audio commentaries) that they’re not a fan of horror movies, Findlay’s two final theatrical releases contain some knowing allusions to classic horror filmmaking. It can be argued that Findlay’s lack of interest in horror refers more to her tastes in the movies (as attested again by audio commentaries in which she calls low-budget horror dull). This lack of interest has been too often mischaracterized by critics as contempt. In truth, Findlay’s horror movies are peppered with a few knowing references to classic horror that may subconsciously recall the type of film shown by the Theodore Huff Society, a film community she and Michael Findlay belonged to that showed 1930s and ‘40s B movies. This comes in the form of sequences that are patterned in a way similar to Val Lewton’s classic suspense tactic of a “Lewton bus” in which the unknown forces lurking in the dark are alluded to but not shown, leading to a sense of anticipation that reaches a crescendo at the exact point when an innocuous surprise closes out the sequence.
For example, in Lurkers heroine Cathy’s (Christine Moore) misadventures while Bob (Gary Warner) is waiting for her to return to the party at her childhood apartment complex (note the apartment complex as the locus of childhood trauma and violence, an idea that would be repeated in Tenement) are structured in the same way as the sequence in 1942’s Cat People that culminates in Simone Simon’s character being startled by what she at first thinks is the hiss of a malevolent cat but is just the screeching brakes of a bus. The key difference is that instead of building to a comical lack of threat, Findlay represents the mentally perturbed state of awareness of her heroine by an almost absurd accumulation of real danger lurking in every corner. Here, everything Cathy “runs into” just makes things worse for her, as each run-in represents some extraordinary instance of real danger and grue popping out of nowhere and mercilessly piling onto her pre-existing psychological malaise. Finally, since Cathy returns to Bob and he appears to only have been waiting for her for a few minutes, the sense of a unified world of synchronized time has also been thrown out the window. Turning many genre expectations on their head, Lurkers may be confusing at times, but it does take an original approach in creating dread and is unequaled in low-budget cinema for developing that hard-to-define, lingering sense of unease that makes more well-known examples of movies about alienation (like Carnival of Souls) memorable.
Findlay’s horror films belong to the second wave of ’80s horror titles made when the slasher craze was on the wane. While they have slasher elements, they are more often tales of the supernatural in contemporary New York settings, a conceit that goes back to her assisting on the legendarily bad 1974 low-budgeter Shriek of the Mutilated by photographing the film to help out an in-over-his-head Michael Findlay. Shriek screenwriter, Ed Kelleher, would write the screenplay for Prime Evil, incorporating many of the same ideas and nixing the rampaging cannibalistic sasquatch. Walter E. Sear, whose offbeat, minimalistic electronic scores on the Kurzweil 250 grace all the Findlay horror films except Prime Evil, had a career (among numerous other pursuits) in composing unusual orchestral-sounding electronic music for drive-in style movies going back to such films as 1973’s The Bride (aka. Last House on Massacre Street). Personages such as these make up one swatch of the interconnected world of NYC grindhouse filmmaking and contributed in some way to Findlay’s ’80s horror output. While this may not change the fact that Blood Sisters and Lurkers were churned out to meet particular audience demands, the fact they were made on the fringes in this way gives them a hard-to-match sensibility. And you have to respect that Reeltime was able to make so many horror movies during a period dominated by countless single-entry hopefuls.
Ultimately, contemporary genre writing about ultra-low-budget horror like Goodsell’s “The Unwatchables” could have imagined how some of these films now are the originals that hordes of nostalgia-crazed filmmakers and fans have latched on to in the era of streaming, in which sheer strangeness and fringe lunacy often comes as a breath of fresh air amidst a sea of calculatedly bland content. I’ve tried to draw some attention to the expanded awareness of Roberta Findlay’s horror films by contextualizing them within her earlier erotic cinema career and putting some pressure on the director’s disavowal of the horror genre. I think that, despite their limitations, Findlay’s horror films are interesting because they align her work, for their own inherent set of reasons, with that of a group of filmmakers that could be called the “genre pessimists.” That group includes George A. Romero, whose Day of the Dead was unleashed by Laurel Films along with The Oracle and Tenement in 1985. Although more well-known and of substantially higher quality, movies like Day of the Dead and John Carpenter’s excursion into low-budget territory, They Live, provide a solid pessimistic backdrop of suspicion of Reagan-era values that Findlay’s films, with their critiques of the inability of the patriarchal order to answer to submerged female desire, complement in an interesting way. Featuring and focussing on a memorable set of female protagonists besieged by an eternally returning, supernatural terror, these four horror films are a thematically cohesive unit. And luckily for fans of Findlay, they’re all preserved on Blu-ray with Findlay herself providing some enjoyably candid commentaries.
