A writer will use anything as inspiration when coming up
with a story. We’re told from a young age that it’s better to write about what
we know. That’s somewhat true. But I think that’s just convenience. It’s easier
to write about what you know, not necessarily better. You can be inspired by
other things, too. Things you haven’t experienced yourself.
Me? I’ve started tales about the Canadian Baseball League
which existed for a single year in the early 2000s, a pet rock that slowly
convinced a man to kill his partner, a person who lived in a storage unit, and
a slasher set in a logging town. Have I experienced any of that? Not at all.
I’ve watched baseball and I had a rock collection, but that’s as close as I got
to any of that. It’s tougher to write a story about things you don’t
necessarily know. That doesn’t make the stories any less fulfilling or good.
When you get into horror, a genre that I’ve dabbled in
because I’m a huge fan of it, writers will find inspiration in almost anything.
Horror can be almost anything. There can be fear and terror anywhere you look.
Spooky old houses are obvious. There could be ghosts or monsters or murderous
squatters hiding in the shadows, causing the boards to creak and the hinges to
squeak. An isolated cabin in the woods can prey upon the anxiety people have of
feeling isolated. If something happens in that cabin, there won’t be people
around to help. People, in general, can be horrific. Serial killers, torturers,
doctors who want to sew people together ass to mouth. If you can think
something up, chances are that another person can think up something equally
horrible or even worse.
What fascinates me more than those rather basic ideas, at
least at this moment, is another rather basic idea that horror writers always
come back to. What if an everyday object could somehow take on a mind of its
own and use that sentience to maim, murder, and torment? There have been plenty
of movies where dolls have been able to kill or influence people to kill. Child’s
Play had the mind of a murderer transfer into a doll that then continued to
murder. Annabelle was a conduit for a demon to do its evil bidding. The Boy
was about a woman taking care of a doll like a babysitter with a child, but
strange things involving the doll kept happening. It was sort of a haunted
house doll movie. Dolls are like an extension of humans, though. They just
happen to be inanimate objects. They look relatively close to humans, in most
cases. Maybe not full anatomy, depending on the doll, but they have the limbs
and head and stuff.
Some writers have gone even further into the inanimate
object world. Look at the writing of Stephen King. He has been called one of
the masters of horror. He wrote Christine, a novel where a teenager
became obsessed with his possessed car. The same car that became obsessed with
him and tried to murder anyone who got between them. Stephen King also wrote The
Mangler, a short story about a possessed ironing and folding machine at an
industrial laundry facility. Trucks was a Stephen King short story where
a group of people were trapped in a truck stop that was being circled by
possessed transport trucks. Then there was The Monkey, a short story
about a wind-up monkey that caused the death of someone whenever its cymbals
clanged together. He really likes his possessed objects. They creep him out in
the right way that he keeps going back.
This is closer to the type of horror that’s really picking
at my brain lately. There have been so many horror movies that made random
objects the source of horror. It’s like they’re never ending. I’ve covered a
bunch of them for Sunday “Bad” Movies. Ever since the beginning, really.
They’ve covered a wide breadth of objects. Discussing them would probably get
this out of my system, and that’s just what I’ll do. We’re going to go one by
one through the possessed object horror movies I’ve covered, from Evil Bong,
one year into the blog series, until this post’s movie, Killer Sofa.
Evil Bong
I didn’t intentionally choose Evil Bong to be the
first movie I watched for Sunday “Bad” Movies where an inanimate object
caused the horror. There were a bunch of movies within this subgenre of horror
that were on my radar. I happened to own this one as part of one of those
Walmart multi-packs. Only, I think I got it at Zellers when they were going out
of business the first time. Not this more recent, everything is Anko, time
where they were only in The Bay. I’m talking about when Target came into Canada
and completely floundered for a year or so before abandoning ship. Those
original standalone Zellers stores. That’s where I got the multipack. It was
probably 2012 or 2013.
The name Evil Bong stuck out to me in the set. I
threw it into my schedule, gave it a watch, and wrote about it. I have more
appreciation for what it did now than when I first saw it. I didn’t have the
knowledge of Charles Band movies to fully grasp the crossovers that were
happening. I thought it was a simple, weird movie where a bunch of stoners were
taken by an evil bong into a stripclub dimension where they would be killed.
That was the inanimate object horror. It was basically a
slasher movie where the stoner friends succumbed to taking a toke from Eebee,
the evil bong, and were subsequently killed in her bong world. This would be
the case for pretty much every Evil Bong movie going forward, though
other bongs were introduced along the way. Things always ended up with people
being sucked into a bong world and fighting their way out, lest they be killed.
Evil Bong was an interesting enough way to be
introduced to inanimate object horror in Sunday “Bad” Movies. It took
something that you wouldn’t inherently find horrifying, unless you were super
conservative and anti-marijuana, and turned it into a killer. Not a killer in
the way that Reefer Madness might have you believe. The bong killed
people through that bong world. That was the horror. Not very good horror, but
horror all the same.
Jack Frost
Very soon after Evil Bong, I went into Jack Frost.
This was a movie that I had known about since around the time it first came
out, when I would frequent movie stores like Blockbuster and Rogers Video. I
knew there was the Jack Frost I had seen, with Michael Keaton being
brought back to life as a snowman and teaching his son to throw snowballs and
shoot a hockey puck. Then there was this one, the horror movie.
Well, Jack Frost took the Child’s Play
approach. A serial killer was killed. His spirit was transferred into a nearby
snow man. Now he would be able to kill and, in one scene rape with his carrot
nose, all the people he wanted without being suspected. Until he was,
obviously. He had to be stopped at some point. He wasn’t completely stopped,
though. A year later, a sequel came out that relocated him to Hawaii for a
Christmas vacation.
This may have been the point when I truly became fascinated
with the inanimate object horror movies. It was two weeks after Evil Bong
and it not only built on that, but it played into that serial killer thing
which would resurface a few months later. It wasn’t only part of the subgenre
of inanimate object horror. It was part of the subgenre that came from that
subgenre. In my mind, which likes to categorize stuff like that, it was a great
time.
Jack Frost didn’t do this kind of the story the best.
It at least had fun with it. The thing with diving into inanimate object
horror, I’ve learned, is that you need to do it with a little bit of
tongue-in-cheek. You are very rarely going to find a snowman to actually be
scary. You may, however, find the stuff the snowman does to be horrifying, if
done right. Dark humour at its finest. Okay, not finest. Jack Frost was
some dark humour, though.
The Gingerdead Man
A few months later, I was back into the Charles Band movies
with the first film in The Gingerdead Man franchise. This series of
movies would last three instalments and a crossover with Evil Bong
before being completely folded into the Evil Bong franchise. It’s a
shame because I thought there was a lot more going on in these movies than the Evil
Bong movies.
The Gingerdead Man took the same approach as Jack
Frost. A serial killer was captured and executed, only for his spirit to
find new life in a gingerbread man at a bakery. This new body helped him
continue his murderous ways, eventually going after the victim who got away.
Yes, another serial killer in an inanimate object that sort of looks human
enough story.
I didn’t particularly like the first movie in The
Gingerdead Man franchise. It played things a little too straight, even with
Gary Busey as the killer. The second and third movies brought more of a comedic
edge, particularly in how they satirized independent horror studios in The
Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust and how they spoofed Carrie and
roller discos in The Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver.
Again, you’re not likely to find too many inanimate objects
to be innately scary. Would you really believe people were going to get killed
by a cookie they could simply take a bite out of with no problem? That’s not
likely. But when the comedy gets brought into it so that the killer can go
over-the-top with their rampage, audiences will more likely overlook the
fallacies of the concept.
Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
It took about a year to get to another movie in this horror
subgenre. A complete 180 from what I had seen previously with Sunday “Bad”
Movies, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was like if an inanimate object
horror movie were made by an arthouse director. It was one of the few inanimate
object horror movies to not default to a slasher style. It felt like it
presented the murders committed by the bed in a different way. A more artistic
way. A more surreal way.
The bed didn’t stalk its victims the way some of these other
objects did, particularly the ones that had more of a human or animal shape.
The bed was stationary. It did its killing when people approached it. Many
approached for sex, while a few just wanted to catch some zs. It would wait for
the people to be on it, then swallow them into the mattress. It would grip them
with the sheets. In one case, it would dissolve a man’s arms right down to the
bone. It was a different kind of inanimate object predator, more in line with
The Mangler than Chucky.
To further accentuate the arthouse feel of it, Death Bed:
The Bed That Eats was based on a nightmare the writer/director had. That
made sense with the dreamlike feel of the movie. The story was broken into four
parts, titled based on meals of the day. The parts would flow together in
almost nonsensical ways that made some sense in a dream state. Why is someone
sleeping on a random bed in an abandoned, decrepit house? Couldn’t tell you,
but it made sense in the dreamlike world of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.
I’ve ended up watching some odd inanimate object horror
movies in the decade plus that I’ve been writing these posts. Death Bed: The
Bed That Eats was one of the movies that stood out the most. Not because it
was good. I didn’t really like it. But it was different. It was unique. I had
never seen another movie like it. I don’t think I have since. That’s something
special.
I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle
My memory of I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle is a
little foggy. By a little, I mean I remember nothing about the movie. I know I
watched it. That’s all the only thing I remember. That happens sometimes with a
blog that has been going for over a decade. Some movies have faded from my
memory. I’m going to have to go off what I wrote about the movie when I watched
it nine and a half years ago.
I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle was fell into a second
category of inanimate object horror movies. It was a blood possession movie. An
occultist was killed with a crossbow, which happened to also puncture a
motorcycle. This allowed a vampiric spirit into the motorcycle, which began
killing people almost as soon as it was purchased by a new owner.
Based on the synopsis I’m currently looking at, the bike did
some crazy things, bringing I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle into the dark
comedy/horror realm. It tried to have sex with a woman. It stabbed people with
spikes. It got scared by garlic and crucifixes. There didn’t seem to be much
blood sucking, but there sure were some other vampire traits.
This would probably be an easier movie to write about right
now if I had rewatched it more recently than a decade ago. Maybe before I edit
this, I’ll rewatch it and add a new final piece to this movie. All I can say is
that I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle fit into the inanimate object horror
because that vampire spirit was in the motorcycle.
Killer Condom
Two weeks after seeing I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle,
I checked out an inanimate object horror movie that has quickly become a
favourite. I didn’t have high expectations about Killer Condom, but I
almost immediately fell in love with it. Don’t let the name fool you. There was
a whole lot going on with this one that made it a fun little flick.
Killer Condom was a German neo-noir set in New York
City where a gay detective tried to solve the mystery of a bunch of murders and
maiming in a seedy sex hotel. He would quickly realize that the condoms in the
building were coming to life and biting off more than they could chew. I mean
penises. The condoms were biting off penises.
The condoms in Killer Condom weren’t an inanimate
object possessed by a spirit or a demon. They were little monsters. They were
lab created little monsters, but they were little monsters. More like animals
than anything else. They weren’t intelligent beings. They were simply out there
to eat the men who were in their way, as a way to stop sex. They weren’t
protection. They were permanent prevention. When it comes to inanimate object
horror, the point is to make horror out of an inanimate object, such as a condom.
In the world of the movie, that object doesn’t need to be inanimate. Only in
our reality.
The neo-noir detective story of Killer Condom almost
required the inanimate object coming to life to not be a serial killer. In
almost all the serial killers or bad spirits possessing inanimate object
movies, the audience was shown the item getting possessed near the beginning of
the story. That couldn’t happen in Killer Condom if the filmmakers
wanted to tell a detective story about solving a mystery. The way the condoms
came to life had to be kept under wraps until the climax, which meant they
couldn’t be as much a character as other objects had been in other movies. The
animalistic nature of them was the way to go. And it worked. It allowed the
rest of the characters to be stronger. It allowed the story to be something
other than a basic horror movie where an item killed and people tried to escape
it. Killer Condom did something different and was successful at doing
that different something.
Dead Sushi
In 2018, my birthday fell on a Sunday. I wanted to feature
one of my favourite bad movies for my birthday post. Dead Sushi took the
opposite approach of Killer Condom. It still had the inanimate objects
as monsters sort of thing going on, but it showed the audience almost
immediately what was happening. That was because there was no mystery involved
with the story. It was a zombie story and that was it.
The sushi wasn’t the spirit of evil in an inanimate object.
There wasn’t some serial killer continuing their spree through a piece of
sushi. No no. A disgruntled former employee used a serum on sushi to bring it
back from the dead. They were zombies that attacked the current pharmaceutical
employees staying at an inn. Revenge really was a dish best served cold, in
this case.
Dead Sushi, much like the best in the inanimate
object horror subgenre, didn’t take things too seriously. It went off the rails
in the things the sushi would do to people. I mean, the finale involved a bunch
of the sushi coming together to form a warship that could fly around and shoot
the survivors. There were nipples being sucked by the sushi. A fish man chased
people down. A naked woman sushi table went very, very wrong. All kinds of
wacky, Japanese hijinks.
That doesn’t mean Dead Sushi was all wacky hijinks.
There was an emotional core to the movie. The main character needed her
confidence so she could make the perfect sushi. One of the pieces of sushi was
outcast from the rest for being a different kind of sushi. There was an old,
disgraced mentor who overcame the event that cast him out of the sushi world.
All these came together because someone decided to bring sushi to life. What an
odd little movie that I love oh so much.
Puppet Master
This is where we dive back into the slasher side of
inanimate object horror movies. It’s now the height of lockdowns during the
pandemic and I decided to give my box set of Puppet Master movies a
watch. The franchise has been around since 1989. The film that kicked off the
franchise involved a group of psychics going to a hotel owned by their late
acquaintance, only to be picked off one-by-one when a bunch of puppets snuck
into their rooms and attacked them. It was fairly basic stuff, but the
franchise became a much bigger thing.
There have been fifteen movies in the franchise. The
original, five sequels, five prequels. That’s eleven in the main series. Two
spin-offs about different puppets. That’s thirteen. One crossover, and one
reboot. There’s your fifteen. Almost forty years, and fifteen movies. After the
first two movies, the franchise went in every which way and direction, becoming
more than a simple slasher. For Sunday “Bad” Movies, I covered the first
movie, a clear slasher. Then I went and covered a few of the later movies,
dubbed The Axis Trilogy, which weren’t slashers at all, really.
The Axis Trilogy were a trio of prequels to the first
film that involved the puppets teaming up with some rebels in 1930s/1940s
California to fight off a Nazi underworld that formed. Yeah, the movies turned
into low budget war movies. This wasn’t the first time, either. The third movie
in the franchise, which I haven’t covered yet, showed the story of the main
human character and the puppets leaving Nazi Germany and coming to the USA.
What began as a simple movie about people’s spirits being
placed in puppets so they could be controlled killing machines ended up
becoming an anti-Nazi war epic on a small scale budget. It wasn’t a trajectory
I could have expected, but it was a pleasant one. The movies might not
necessarily be good, but at least they tried something different than most of
the inanimate object horror movies. They went a different direction and that
was commendable.
Blades
As I approached week 500 of Sunday “Bad” Movies, I
tossed on a movie I had heard about on a podcast. It was an inanimate object
horror movie where the inanimate object was essentially an animal attacking
people. It was a spoof of Jaws where the shark was replaced by a
lawnmower and the beach setting was changed to a country club. There were other
slight changes, but this was essentially Jaws on land.
Blades was a pure animal attack movie, following the
same story beats as Jaws. There was a big golf tournament coming to the
country club. The new golf pro noticed that a lawnmower was attacking people
and wanted the tournament postponed while they found and stopped the mower. The
owner wouldn’t listen and people were mowed down. The golf pro teamed up with
the groundskeeper to hunt the lawnmower. There were other, more specific story
beats that lined up, too, but you get it.
This was another case of comedy creeping into horror to make
things land a little better. No audience was going to take a killer lawnmower
seriously. When the story was wrapped up in a Jaws parody, however, it
became much more palatable. The believability of the world was strengthened by
things being a little on the comedic side. The comedy was the rug that brought
the room together.
Blades quickly became not only one of my favourite
inanimate object horror movies, but one of my favourite Sunday “Bad” Movies
features. Even though the story was unoriginal, it worked with the mantra of
“originality doesn’t come from the story, it comes from how the story is told.”
There was magic in that lawnmower just as much as there was magic in this
comedic spin on Jaws. This might be the pinnacle of inanimate object
horror.
Amityville
Week 500, I dove into a bunch of Amityville movies. I
covered a few more after I stopped doing these posts weekly, for official post
560. I’m not going to go movie by movie through the Amityville franchise
and talk about how each one featured inanimate object horror. Not all of them
featured it. But there was a point, once the franchise stopped being
theatrical, that the inanimate objects really began creeping into the stories.
Let’s do a quick summary of all that.
After three theatrical Amityville movies, producers
kept the series going without the house. They needed to justify how the newer
movies were connected to Amityville, though, so they used haunted objects to
create the horror. Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes featured a haunted
lamp. Amityville: It’s About Time had a haunted clock that could
manipulate time and do Final Destination style Rube-Goldberg deaths. Amityville:
A New Generation had a haunted mirror, while Amityville Dollhouse
had a dollhouse.
When all the random Amityville movies started popping
up after the Platinum Dunes remake in 2005, a bunch of those writers/directors
continued the trend of haunted objects. There was haunted lumber, a haunted
musical monkey toy, and, in a movie I haven’t yet watched, a haunted vibrator. If
there’s an object that could harbour an evil spirit of some sort, you can be
sure that some independent director has made a movie about it.
I’ll say as much as Amityville: It’s About Time did
the inanimate object horror the best, followed by Amityville: A New
Generation and Amityville Dollhouse. The way they used those objects
added some interesting layers. The time dilation of the clock. The way the
mirror was able to project loved ones to kill the victims. The little bit that
characters ended up miniaturized in the dollhouse. They used the objects well.
The rest of them, not so much. They were mostly just conduits to the evil
spirits from the original Amityville house.
The Mangler
Here we find ourselves upon a movie based on a Stephen King
short story. One of the ones I mentioned at the start of this post. This one
tapped into his past. When he was a struggling writer who hadn’t yet published
his first novel, Stephen King was a teacher in the school year and worked at an
industrial laundry in the summer. The story, having been written in 1972, may
have been written during his time as a laundry worker.
The idea was fairly simple. After some blood fell into an
industrial laundry machine, it became possessed and started killing people from
its newfound bloodlust. A detective who was called in after the first death in
the machine later began investigating why the machine acted the way it did. A
detective story with a known supernatural villain in a laundry machine. They
just needed the evidence to shut the laundromat down.
The Mangler was a simple story. Possessed laundry
machine killed people. That was probably why there was the whole detective
story thrown in around it. The story had a hook to pull readers in. The movie
went even further, giving occult backstory showing that these weren’t the first
killings with the machine. It also turned the machine into a monster by the
end, with it chasing the main characters around. The Mangler got wild.
It’s been a while since I checked this one out. It was that
mid-to-late 90s wild imagery that makes me think Jon Peters was involved, even
though he wasn’t. It was like he wanted this movie to have the giant spider
that he would finally get into Wild Wild West. Those were some
interesting times for movies. At its core, though, it was the same idea that
had been explored in I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle. There was a machine.
It was possessed after blood fell onto it. Inanimate object became animate and
began killing.
Yoga Hosers
I had been meaning to get to a Kevin Smith movie for Sunday
“Bad” Movies for a long time, and finally got around to Yoga Hosers in
2022. It was one of the more interesting inanimate object horror movies I’ve
seen. This was made during Kevin Smith’s non-stop weed smoking era of his
career where he started a film trilogy of nutty horror movies that only ever
made it to two entries. The first was Tusk, where a man was turned into
a walrus. Then there was Yoga Hosers.
Taking place in Winnipeg, the movie put two teenage girls up
against a bunch of Bratzis (Nazi bratwursts) created by the Nazis that lived in
the area. That means I’m stretching the idea of inanimate objects again, in the
same way that I stretched it with Killer Condom. The Bratzis were
definitely a living creature that just happened to be made in the form of an
inanimate object. For the sake of this post, though, I’m counting it.
The visuals of seeing Kevin Smith as a Nazi sausage were
maybe the most horrific thing in the movie. That image is one that will never
leave your brain after you see it. Frightening stuff. The whole movie was like
a fever dream of stuff Kevin Smith thought was funny while high, much like Tusk
came from his rambling on a podcast. The Bratzis stuck, though. That’s the one
thing from Yoga Hosers that really stuck.
However, I’ve seen movies do much better with inanimate
object horror. They either made the inanimate object into a formidable horror,
or they found a way to be satirical. Yoga Hosers didn’t really do either
of those, instead becoming a goofball Nazi movie that never really worked and
wasn’t truly scary. The image was scarier than the movie, and that’s really the
most I can say about it.
Bearry
About a year and a half into Sunday “Bad” Movies no longer
being a weekly blog, we returned to an inanimate object movie that didn’t
involve a monster made to look like an inanimate object. It was a human-sized
teddy bear that came to life and grew jealous of its owner’s new relationship.
Thus, the bear went on a killing spree. Things got very violent bearry fast.
See what I did there?
Bearry was one of the inanimate object horror movies
that didn’t take itself so seriously. I mean, who would be able to take a
jealous teddy bear killer seriously? A jealous teddy bear that was jealous of
all the guys making moves on the woman who used to cuddle with it after a bad
divorce. The almost obsessive stalker teddy bear. Yeah, the visual is hard to
be frightened of. They knew that some comedy had to be infused into the story.
It didn’t do too bad of a job, either. Sure, the low budget
might have kept it from reaching the heights it could have gotten to. But the
people involved had fun with it. That made up for most of the quality issues.
Especially when they got to do things like reference both Psycho and Scarface
in a scene where the teddy bear mowed down a guy with a chainsaw while he was
showering. What a movie.
This is another one of those inanimate object horror movies
that I want to rewatch. It was a fun enough movie that I think back on it
fondly. The number of times when I was shocked by what they did has kept it in
my mind since seeing it nearly two years ago. That’s the case with a lot of
these movies. Dumb fun sticks with me, as it did when I saw Bearry.
Trucks/Maximum Overdrive
I’m going to lump these two movies together because they
told the same story. No, I mean the same story. I mean they were both based on
a Stephen King short story about a group of people trapped in a truck stop
while a bunch of possessed trucks circled around to kill anyone who tried to
leave. One was Stephen King’s only directed movie, made while he was clearly
coked out of his mind. The other was a television movie that was a little more
subdued.
The case of these two movies was a case where one was better
made, while the other was a more memorable, entertaining movie. Trucks
tried to be scary. It tried to be grounded. It tried to take things more
seriously. It didn’t necessarily work the way the filmmakers wanted it to. Instead
of being a solid horror flick, we got goofy scenes played straight. Scenes like
a lady running on the top of a hill only to be knocked off a cliff by a truck
while everyone looked on. Scenes like a Tonka truck that came to life, broke
out of a building, and tripped a postman before repeatedly driving into his
face. Scenes that were a little too silly to be taken in the serious way the
movie wanted.
Maximum Overdrive, on the other hand, was as coked up
rock and roll as could be. There was the AC/DC soundtrack backing everything.
There was an ATM that called the user, played by Stephen King, an asshole. One
character got electrocuted by an arcade cabinet. Someone was hit in the dick
with a can of soda, fired at MLB pitcher speed from a vending machine. Almost
every single choice in this movie was insane. And when I say it felt coked up,
there was evidence to back that up. This was made during the period of Stephen
King’s heaviest cocaine use, and he has said as much about making the movie.
Aside from the tones of the two different adaptations of
Stephen King’s short story, the thing that most made Maximum Overdrive
the more successful and entertaining movie had to do with the trucks,
themselves. They were inanimate objects brought to life in both movies.
However, the biggest and baddest of the trucks in Maximum Overdrive was
given a face. It had a big Green Goblin (yes, the Spider-Man villain) face
slapped across the front grill. That gave the truck a little more personality.
It made the truck stand out. It gave a definite villain for the characters. A
one truck above the rest to root against. And that was important to a situation
that wasn’t all that believable to begin with.
Maximum Overdrive ended up being the better
adaptation of the short story, if only because of the tone. The cocaine of it
all made things memorable. The face on the lead truck made it stand out. It
gave a more direct focus for the distaste of the villain. But at their cores,
these two movies were about the same thing as any of the other movies I’ve
written about here. An inanimate object, in this case a bunch of trucks and/or
machines, was wreaking havoc on people. That same idea we keep coming back to
where something we control becomes uncontrollable.
Killer Sofa
That brings us to the movie that inspired this post. Killer
Sofa wasn’t about a sofa killing people. Oh no. Big difference. It was
about a recliner killing people. See? It’s a completely different piece of
furniture. Only one person can comfortably sit on this one. If it’s
comfortable. You’re probably getting killed while sitting on it, so maybe not
so much.
Killer Sofa went like this. Francesca (Piimio Mei)
was given a used recliner after the death of her ex-boyfriend. She began having
dreams about the chair, which turned sexual at times. At the same time, all her
ex-boyfriends or the men who wronged her were coming to untimely deaths. The
police investigated a serial killer, while Francesca’s friend Jack (Jim
Baltaxe) thought there might have been a dybbuk to blame.
That synopsis might sound more complicated than it really
was. The movie was, at its core, about a chair killing people and nobody
willing to accept that. Everyone tried to find other sources of the disturbing
deaths. It was always the chair, though. We, the audience, knew that. We knew
it from the beginning. The movie never tried to hide it. The characters didn’t
realize until it was too late, however. The death and destruction were already
happening when they figured things out.
Killer Sofa was another one of those low budget
horror movies that didn’t take things seriously. How could they? There was a
recliner killing people. People fantasized about having sex with the recliner.
The filmmakers made sure that the back cushion had a face in it, as well. Not a
real face. Obviously. But the way the buttons and stitching were positioned on
the chair, it looked like there was a face peering at people. So much so that
the chair moved to the apartment window at one point to watch people out on the
street below. Can you really take a killer chair seriously when it has a face
and watches people? Probably not.
There was a twist near the end of Killer Sofa that
added a new layer to inanimate object horror. I’m not going to get into it. I
don’t want to spoil things. But it did something that none of the other
inanimate object horror I’ve written about here did. It was something new.
Something refreshing. Not necessarily good. It made the movie stand out,
though. That’s all you can ask from a sub-subgenre like this.
Inanimate object horror is an interesting subgenre within
horror. There can be so many different ways an inanimate object can be used as
the vessel of horrifying events. It could be a monster that simply looked like
an inanimate object. It could be an inanimate object come to life for slasher
purposes. It could simply be possessed with an evil spirit and doing the same
things as would happen in a ghost or demon story. In one case, the inanimate
object was essentially a shark in the water, only it was out of water and not a
shark.
I think the reason horror storytellers keep returning to the
inanimate object horror is because there can be some fear in the most seemingly
innocuous places. Sure, most of these movies veered into the comedy realm. So
did movies like Rubber and Slaxx, which I haven’t watched for Sunday
“Bad” Movies. But there’s some fear in there. Deep down, beneath the
chuckles and the guffaws, they’re hoping to get the audience to look around
their room and maybe fear something they had never thought to fear. That cup? It
could somehow make you drown. The box of tissue? That could shoot a tissue
straight down your throat, causing you to suffocate. The Pop Vinyl figure of
George Clooney in Tomorrowland that you got for $3 at the dollar store
because nobody wanted it? Imagine that thing started speaking in demonic
tongues. There’s horror to be had in everything in one way or another.
There won’t be a time when I’m not fascinated by stories
about inanimate objects causing horrific situations. The ideas that
storytellers come up with always pick at some small section of my brain. It’s
an itch that needs to be scratched. Lawnmowers, bongs, lamps, condoms… What
other wacky objects could be the source of scares? Every new one interests me,
even if the end result is a bad movie.
One of the biggest sayings in writing is that you should
write about what you know. Inanimate object horror is people writing about what
they know. Maybe not so much the horror side of things. But when it comes to
the object, they surely know about the object. Stephen King wrote about an
industrial laundry machine because he worked at an industrial laundry. I write
about movies because I watch movies. Inspiration can come from anywhere. What’s
more magical than that?
Now, after that really long post, let’s get to the notes:
- I wrote about a bunch of movies in this post. It’s time to
list them. Evil Bong, Evil Bong 2: King Bong, Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong, The Gingerdead Man, Gingerdead Man 2: Passion ofthe Crust, Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver, Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong, Evil Bong 420, Evil Bong: High Five, Evil Bong 666, Jack Frost, Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle, Killer Condom, Dead Sushi, Puppet Master, Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, Puppet Master X: Axis Rising, Puppet Master: Axis Termination, Blades, Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes,
Amityville: It’s About Time, Amityville: A New Generation, Amityville
Dollhouse, Amityville Toybox, Amityville Exorcism, Amityville:
Evil Never Dies, The Mangler, Yoga Hosers, Bearry, Trucks,
and Maximum Overdrive.
-
Nobody from Killer Sofa was featured in Sunday
“Bad” Movies before. That’s the thing with New Zealand movies. I haven’t
seen a whole lot of them.
-
I mentioned Reefer Madness and Wild Wild West in
this post.
-
Have you seen Killer Sofa? What did you think? What
inanimate object horror movies do you like? Let me know in the comments or get
a hold of me on Bluesky.
-
Bluesky and the comments are also places where you can send
me recommendations about what to watch. I’m sure I’ll get around to them sooner
or later.
-
Now for a look at the next post. It’s already written, aside
from the notes. I hammered it out pretty quickly. It’s much shorter than this
one. I wrote about Breaker! Breaker!, one of those late 70s trucker
movies. If you want to see my thoughts, come back when that post goes up.
Probably next week. See you then.
