_︎

    The first Prom Night came out in 1980, one of many slasher films released in the summer of that year and the next. All of these films had one goal—be the next Halloween, the out-of-nowhere smash hit from 1978, filmed on a shoestring budget. The goal and means were simple enough: hire young actors, pick a setting (or themed holiday), pick a mask, and pick a bludgeoning weapon. The very first Friday the 13th didn’t even need half of them. Nudie-film producer Sean S. Cunningham took out a page-length ad on Variety promoting only the title and promise of the most terrifying slasher film ever made. He didn’t have a particular plot in mind.

Producers were quick to jump on the trend. Within two years of John Carpenter’s Halloween, we saw Maniac, Terror Train, the first and not-so-great Friday the 13th, New Year’s Evil, Mother’s Day, Death Ship, Fade to Black, and a few others. All of this was 1980 alone. The next year we would have genre-defining entries like The Burning, My Bloody Valentine, Madman, the much-better Friday the 13th Part II, and the much-worse Halloween II.


A lot of these films were derivative by design. They wanted to replicate Halloween, and within two years they wanted to replicate Friday the 13th, favoring gore over mood and chiaroscuro-lighting. And in the middle, there were some oddities. The Jamie Lee Curtis– and Leslie Nielsen–starring Prom Night was one of them.


Prom Night’s producers took the script for a psychological drama—of guilt-ridden teens and a dearly departed classmate—and spun it into a high school-murderer-on-the-loose. What we get is an odd mixture. Heartfelt characterizations, half-chewed death scenes, and a dying-disco soundtrack all throughout. It doesn’t always work, but things come together, and it truly does, in the last 15 minutes. If you watch Prom Night you watch it for these 15 minutes: The sudden tempo-shift, the overpowering lights, the colors, the buckets of blood, the burst of violence, a claustrophobic high school gym, students trapped-in and shrieking. It needs reminding, though, that this heady sequence of events was an unabashed rip-off of yet another popular release of the time: Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976).


Slasher films stealing from Carrie wasn’t actually a rare sight. Both Friday the 13th and Maniac just as shamelessly lifted its famous “final scare,” 1979’s Tourist Trap copied the exact same set-piece as Prom Night, and in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), Jason battles effectively a Carrie White stand-in. There was also 1984’s The Initiation, one of my favorite movies of the era, that is so very Carrie in spirit.


There was this sense of give-and-take among the slasher filmmakers of the 1980s, an honor among thieves. Everyone freely plundered among themselves: there would be 5 movies in a year, all exactly the same, with the filmmakers’ own twists to the familiar story the only matter setting them apart.

︎

While the industry was aping De Palma’s work, the man himself was no saint. Probably my favorite director of all time, Brian De Palma has made his name and filmic career (some 55 years) copying one artist in particular: the “master of suspense” Alfred Hitchcock. The man will tell you this himself. “Hitchcock thought up practically every cinematic idea that has been used and probably ever will be used in this form,” the Body Double director said. “But I’ll take the grammar wherever I can get it.”


De Palma’s biggest critics go as far as to label him a thief, that the director has lifted entirely the styles and motifs of Hitchcock (who himself was heavily inspired by D.W. Griffith and F.W. Murnau; to say the least about the man’s competitive rivalry with Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose style very much reflected his own.)


In a 2015 documentary, De Palma asserts such criticism aren’t properly reflective of his work. He feels he doesn’t ape Hitchcock’s films so much as he pays it forward. He repurposes them, with his own tweaks and advancements reflective of his era—like an evolution of the classical Hitchcock film. His is a Hitchcock film but more. More style, more tension, more explicit, more depraved.

No stranger to rip-offs, Quentin Tarantino has professed similar love and preference. “I’ve always felt that Hitchcock’s acolytes took his cinematic and story ideas further,” the Kill Bill director said. “I love Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock movies. I prefer those to actual Hitchcock.” Tarantino more than certainly inherited this viewpoint from his literary idol, critic Pauline Kael, who similarly felt De Palma made more “heightened” versions of Hitchcock thrillers.

It’s a lot more than that, though. De Palma’s talk of grammar, and his subsequent additions to it, show us pertinently the roadmap for the good pastiche. He retraced the familiar signposts, sometimes right to the detail, and used it as base. Through his work—decadent and repetitive—he asked all the right questions.


What more can the familiar story say? And when can it stop being said?


Why, after all, is Hamlet still being performed on the stage, some 400 years later? Clearly Thomas Ostermeier isn’t Shakespeare, so why did he produce a Hamlet in 2022 (with camcorders and projectors no less)?


We can, in the case of Shakespeare and the familiar stories from times out of mind, find it is commonplace to see drastic reinterpretations of the old. A Jane Austen novel two centuries later can become high school-comedy Clueless (1995). Shakespeare’s King Lear (c. 1606) can become Akira Kurosawa’s Sengoku-period war epic Ran (1985). Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1593) can become the 1955 play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which in turn can become the nutball 1957 film Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (otherwise known as Oh! For a Man!) with much of the plot points re-imagined.


It becomes apparent that stories from a certain distance in time become fair grounds for reappropriation. It also becomes apparent that “distance in time” has all to do with first-world copyright laws, i.e. the public domain. Works published before 1928 today is public domain, meaning no producer has to pay a cent for rights to the next Great Gatsby (1925), in film or in literature. This explains why no one will bat an eye when a newer story traces over the famous structures of the old. Edward Scissorhands (1990) is Mary Shelley’s (or James Whale’s) Frankenstein, just with more style and a general more-ness—and it’s lauded for it. Because you can’t rip-off what is owner-less.


I really loved Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987). I watched it on Shudder and it was in shit-VHS quality. The movie is a rip-off of a rip-off of a rip-off, and it’s at least better than two of those rip-offs. And for all its cheapness, in cultural and fiscal values, Hello Mary Lou nevertheless boasts eye-popping special effects from future Academy Award-winner Jim Doyle. About 3 years before this, Doyle did mechanical effects work for A Nightmare on Elm Street. (Hell, he even designed Freddy’s gloves.) One of the makers of Nightmare, thus, had a hand in creating its own rip-off...

And what do you make of artists who routinely make the same thing? What do we make of arthouse great Hong Sang-soo, who has made as many films as there are years this century, all of them the same movie. “It is a critical truism—and only partially true—that the Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo makes the same movie over and over. His protagonists belong to a particular milieu, which happens to be his: they work in the arts, usually in film, sometimes as novelists or painters,” said Dennis Lim. “But to accuse Hong of repeating himself misses the point. Repetition in his films is both subject and structuring device, and, like any artist who works with this formal strategy, Hong finds meaning in the subtlest variations.” Sang-soo actively approaches a repetitive structure, perhaps to chisel away until finally reaching his most satisfying model. Or perhaps, more simply, the South Korean director is acutely aware of pure repition necessitating true innovation.


But it is not just that Sang-soo and directors like him (Hitchcock never made terribly different films either) repurpose and rip-off their own works, but they did and do this so frequently that at some point the themes and motifs became impersonal—and interpersonal—superstructures, no longer beholden to just its makers.


Take the “wronged man on the run” troupe driving most of Hitchcock’s works. In his grounded, early masterpiece The 39 Steps (1935), the falsely-accused protagonist sweats and tumbles and hides, routinely outsmarted by the police and assassins out to get him, relying purely on luck and whatever grace his charm can afford. By 1959, with the big-budget North by Northwest, the formula has evolved so that the falsely-accused is now played by Hollywood royalty Cary Grant, so cocksure and fast-on-his-feet that he hangs off the bolders on Mount Rushmore in a climactic scene, and we never once question his making out in one piece.

^{︎The 39 Step’s hero (above) hides furtively from the police, while North by Northwest’s (below) outruns a shot-firing aeroplane // PHOTOS: MGM, Warner Bros.}

By this point in time, Hitchcock’s usual stylistic fascinations and fetishisims had been repeated, added to, and crystalized so frequently by him that it had become a standard—no longer shocking. The style no longer an in-your-face bravura, the fetishes no longer alarming, but expected. Hitchcock’s late-career films, with all its maximalism and twists and dolly zooms, is now the socially-held ideal of a Hitchcock film. We picture Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), The Birds (1963). And it took decades of recycling to get there.


Kael and Tarantino have held their fair share of curious views, but they got one thing right. De Palma did better the Hitchcockian thriller. He added in more perversion, more emotion, more stylistic camera cuts. He bettered the mold. And this wasn’t even a new process. In the 1960s, we had the French school of Hitchcock admirers, from François Truffaut to Claude Chabrol (both of whom once unknowingly walked into a water fountain, awestruck, at the passing sight of the director on the set of his To Catch a Thief.) In the 1970s, we had the Italian masters Mario Bava and Dario Argento, who likewise furthered the maximalist thriller, making some the best the genre would ever see and influencing generations of Italian stylists to come, including Bava’s son.


De Palma is one among a public of thieves, Hitchcock included. They repeated a set of structures and took the grammar where they could get it. They repeated this process in varying circles within and beyond themselves until the artist reproduced a work that was now their own. Body Double is Brian De Palma’s Rear Window and Vertigo, in every sense of ownership. Sang-soo’s masterwork may be Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) but he then made the very samey Grass (2018) and Hotel by the River (2018), and they all equally captivate.


Sang-soo isn’t striving for reinvention. He’s looking to perfect the same film, or adding in different shades, every time. It was AC/DC’s Angus Young who famously said, “I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.”


Here’s, then, to the next era of rip-offs.

AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO