This Ultimate Forgotten Slasher Film is Now Streaming Free
Did you catch the trailer for the upcoming Black Phone 2? There’s some pretty gnarly stuff happening there. Derrickson’s film appears to be a total departure from the tone of the original, opting instead for a blend of Sinister and A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s bloody. It’s bonkers. It’s pretty damned scary looking, and brimming with subtle horror homages.
Among them is a deep cut sequence that diehard slasher fans will surely lose their minds over. Whether it’s intentional or not, the scene where Ethan Hawke’s Grabber is skating across the ice with an axe toward the camera calls to mind one of the best, yet often forgotten, slasher movies around. Luckily, the film is now streaming free online, so you can travel back to 1983 and relive one of the earliest and best slasher entries. Read on as we explore more about Richard Ciupka and Peter R. Simpson’s Curtains below.
Per Tubi: Six actresses have been called to an isolated mansion to audition for a movie, but there’s a killer who is determined to kill them all off first.
Curtains is a lean, mean slasher machine. It’s “back to basics” without necessarily being so, since in 1983, the “basics” were hardly gospel of the genre. Sure, the tropes we’d all soon come to know, love, and possibly lament are all there, but Ciupka and Simpson, alongside writer Robert Guza Jr., imbue Curtains with enough delicate weirdness to render it one of the best of its era. Case in point? That terrifying, masked ice-skating kill.
Curtains also has the distinct honor of featuring some pretty stellar Hollywood royalty. While most Golden Age actresses would eventually appear in made-for-television horror movies (think Olivia de Havilland in The Screaming Woman), Curtains features a prominent Samantha Eggar, and she’s nothing short of excellent. Her casting grounds the very adults-only tone, an intentional choice in pre-production to center a slasher movie around older women, not teenagers.
The pre-production cycle also resulted in disputes over tone. Some, like Ciupka, envisioned an arthouse film inspired by giallo films, while Simpson wanted a more straightforward slasher movie instead. Anyone who’s seen Curtains will most likely notice the result of this conflict of vision, since so much of the weirdness originates in what’s ostensibly a slasher movie that’s trying really hard to be something else. I love it, mainly because Curtains doesn’t feel like anything we’d seen before.
Now that Curtains is streaming free, be certain to check out this lost, golden slasher movie. When you do, let me know what you think over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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