Childhood memories of Movie magazine, which would cover upcoming cinema releases and seeing a still of Shocker (1989), Peter Berg in a room splattered with blood, anguished and crying. I was pretty scared of horror movies back then, so that image and the poster of Horace Pinker on the electric chair creeped me out. Years later, being an X-Files fan, I was more intrigued finding out that the orange jumpsuited maniac on the poster was Assistant Director Skinner himself, Mitch Pileggi. While New Line Cinema was making money with Freddy Krueger, director Wes Craven had departed from the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise that he created. Shocker is a flagrant attempt by Craven to create a new Nightmare On Elm Street, returning to dreams as a link between hero and villain, and giving his monster a distinctive look and opportunities for one-liners. That, and courting the teenage audience further using a soundtrack filled with banging hair metal cuts (Megadeth, Bonfire, The Dudes of Wrath).
Shocker takes its time setting up Horace Pinker as a killer and the bond between college football jock Peter Berg, his foster family murdered except his adopted father, a cop on the case played by Michael Murphy. A centrepiece sequence is when Pinker is to be executed in the electric chair, which begins with Alice Cooper’s ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’ at full volume, gives space for Pileggi’s entertainingly scenery-chewing performance and ends in a pyrotechnic explosion of sparks and violence, as Pinker has made a deal with the devil within the electricity (“You got it, buddy!”). The horror film mode in Shocker shifts and twists, from serial killer thriller to body swap ghoulishness to a tele-visual showdown across channels and through TV sets (with appearances from Dr. Timothy Leary and John Tesh). There’s a vein of humour that fits within this era’s point in horror, like Chucky in Child’s Play, where a few jokes here and there makes the ghoulishness even more of a Halloween circus ride. When a possessed child jumps into an Excavator to run over Peter Berg, that’s a fun time!
There are great special effects in Shocker that flit between practical prosthetics and puppetry, into pre-CGi use of spectral effects and composites. There’s even lovely moments of neo-gothic atmosphere, and a sincerity that feels very Wes Craven as Peter Berg, his girlfriend and his football team work together to fight Pinker’s non-stop rampage. Shocker achieves the biggest compliment I can give an American horror movie: it transcendentally feels like an Italian one.
