#norman thadeus vane

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Movie Review | The Black Room (Kenner & Vane, 1982)

This review contains spoilers.

Normally a muddy VHS rip is not the ideal way to watch a movie, but in the case of The Black Room, it does bear some advantages. While I'm certain that a nice restoration would bring out the richness of the colours, the crappy transfer I watched made the colour of the titular room almost impenetrable, so that the darkness envelopes the screen. The candles decorating the room register as abstract points of light, like a frame from one of those Marie Menken shorts I watched recently, and the glowing table seems impossibly bright, the inverse of the Monolith scenes from 2001. How much black could this room be? The answer is none. None more black.

I first learned about this movie from reading Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA, an endless source of great recommendations. Thrower likens it to a vampire movie, which is a fair comparison, as the villains "feed" on the adulterous hero and drain the blood of his partners. (The movie is not especially graphic by the standards of early '80s horror movies, but the blood transfusion scenes do get something of a jolt, perhaps because of how deliberately they conduct the operation.) But to me it played like a dark mirror image of those family-centric haunted house movies, like Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror. The room itself carries an aura both inviting and threatening, mixing an erotic charge with a sense of imminent danger. The danger posed by the villains is not just in the literal sense, but in the way they threaten the protagonists' marriage. The room provided by the villains proves conducive to the husband's infidelity, and then when the wife finds out, her desire for kinkier, more exciting sex makes it easier for the villains to convince her to bring lovers (read: prospective victims) to them. These movies tend to have a certain conservative streak, and here is manifests in skepticism of the sexual revolution and the benefits of free love, with one pretty pointed scene showing the husband lashing out in jealousy after he learns of his wife's infidelity, despite him having cheated first and more frequently. (If you ask me, the guy's a putz.) And the climax, where the heroes scramble to get away from the villains' house, only for the husband to go back in to save the babysitter, overly deploys a trope from those haunted house movies.

There is a certain elegance in how these character relationships are depicted. The sex life of the husband and wife is paralleled by an incestuous charge in the relationship between the villainous brother and sister. And the movie offers a few particularly juicy ironic moments. One early on where the husband and wife walk along the beach in a parody of a romantic scene, bonding over their improving sex life, the wife unaware that she's being cheated on, the husband unaware he's being manipulated into bringing victims to the villains. And one late in the movie, where the brother shows off his carpentry chops to assemble coffins for his victims while the sister plays with the protagonists' kids, a parody of a happy family. I do think the central performances go a long way in selling this material as well, particularly the sexual menace of the villains. Astute viewers (or people who read the credits) will recognize the actress playing the sister as Cassandra Gava, who played the sexy evil witch in Conan the Barbarian and brings some of that same mix of sexy and evil to her role here as well. Astute viewers (or people who read the credits) will also recognize Linnea Quigley as the babysitter and Christopher McDonald as the boyfriend of one of the husband's lovers, although the mix of sexy (some) and evil (none) they bring to their roles here is nowhere near as potent.

They movie is directed with admirably lowkey style, from the way it lingers in the darkness of the titular room, the sense of the void amplified by the thudding synth soundtrack, and the bursts of steadicam as we encircle the villains' house during tenser moments. The closing scenes ramp up the excitement, but for the most part it lingers in this perverse atmosphere, emanating a sense of an evil that corrupts. There is a certain goofiness in how the movie wraps up (Thrower's comparison feels more apt here), but a certain form shattering quality as well. If something this evil has been unleashed into the world, it can't be rid of this easily. A shot of blood splashing on the wife's face as she stabs the sister lingers in the subconscious. The heroes have been irreversibly corrupted.