Opinion: A final word on Bob Clark
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Before sending off Bob Clark, the middling-successful filmmaker who was killed the other night in a senseless traffic accident, it’s worth pointing out one small portion of his legacy. Though all the obits noted that he was the director of the beloved perennial A Christmas Story and a few may have pointed out that he was, by way of the Porky’s franchise, the most successful director in Canadian history (though the New Orleans-born Clark was that rare south-north cultural export), he also made two of the more politically interesting undead films. With the caveat that all undead films are political, the deliciously named zombie picture Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and the variously named Vietnam-era PTSD metaphor Dead of Night a.k.a. Deathdream (a.k.a. The Night Andy Came Home, The Veteran, and Whispers) take the genre in notable directions.
In Deathdream, a movie supported in large part by the lead performance of Cassavetes/Coppola featured player John Marley (you loved him as the horse’s-head movie producer in The Godfather), a family’s fervent wish to be reunited with a son reported killed in Vietnam results, Monkey’s Paw-style, in horror for all. Two-time Razzie nominee Clark doesn’t get as much out of this witty premise as he should, but it’s both a very early variation on the crazed-Vietnam-vet genre and an intergenerational riff that makes a good companion to George Romero’s more respected Martin, a better generation-gap horror picture from the same period. Children...Dead Things, on the other hand, deserves special mention for being possibly the first anti-hippie horror film. Although some have differed with my thesis that the protaganist/victims in this film are in fact hippies, I still think it kickstarted the very fruitful era of horror cinema which pitted the supernatural against the counterculture:
There was a good long period there where the horror genre was replete with longhairs getting devoured, slashed, and eviscerated—to a degree that both chimes with and illuminates non-horror movies of the period such as Easy Rider and Joe, which also end with freaks getting offed. Children, whose acting troupe is even more annoying than the talking mimes in Easy Rider, obviously savors its holocaust of flower children, particularly because they’ve brought it on the themselves by scoffing at the taboos of their elders. Factor in hippie horror classics like I Drink Your Blood, the Larry Hagman-directed Son of Blob, the Robert Quarry vehicle Deathmaster, and several episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and you’ve got the makings of a film festival. The pair of over-the-top gays who get dispatched by the late William Marshall in the beginning of Blacula would also have to count as counterculturites punished from beyond. There are prosaic explanations for this phenomenon: that horror films appeal mostly to teens and young adults, that hippie culture was ubiquitous at the time, and so on. But I like to think that in that brief period between Joe Friday and the punks, it was left to horror films to express America’s abiding hatred of hippies.
I make no great claims for either of these films, other than that they’re worth checking out. Clark’s filmography makes compelling reading. Replete with oddball efforts and inexcusable stinkers, it’s a specimen of the kind of interesting career a director of his age could have even though, or because, he never got near the A list.