On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: A Full-Bodied Slasher for a Special Occasion
There’s nothing wrong with saving a movie for the right moment. Maybe you’re avoiding “The Drama” until after your alimony payment clears. Perhaps you’d simply enjoy the new “Minions” sequel better from the privacy of your own home. Whatever the occasion, some films are better left unwatched until the universe makes it clear you’re finally ready to enjoy them.
For me this week, that was 1981’s “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker”: a slasher recommendation that came up almost in passing while I was wrapping an interview with James A. Janisse and Chelsea Rebecca, founders of the popular YouTube channel Dead Meat, earlier this month. I’d originally planned to watch it as soon as I finished their interview. Then a trip to Montreal — and one particularly surreal afternoon that somehow involved me interviewing a Dead Meat staffer on the phone while also talking to a lovely French-Canadian man about the history of a local porn theater (more on all that next week) — kept me kicking this singular little cult oddity further and further down the road.
Reissued under the theatrical title “Night Warning” in 1983, I thought about throwing on director William Asher’s bizarre psychosexual thriller between screenings in my hotel room during Fantasia. I even downloaded the film for potential programming on my flight home. But the setup wasn’t right (read: I was seated next to several small children), and it ultimately wasn’t until today that I got the chance to let this very special selection breathe.
Of course, it was worth the wait. Like so many of the best deep-cut horror recommendations, “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” initially tastes like pure exploitation. An aunt’s increasingly inappropriate obsession with the nephew she’s raised since childhood blossoms into a feverish (read: visibly sweaty) melodrama that’s punctuated with enough psychosexual dysfunction and hysterical screaming to make a pregnant nun blush. But let that terror develop for just a second and something more unsettling will emerge.
Delivering the type of wonderfully contradictory performance that gets richer the longer it goes (shout out Gretchen Corbett in “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death”), star Susan Tyrrell offers the sort of full-throated, unhinged villain role that could easily overwhelm a more straightforward thriller. Instead, the Oscar-nominated actress (“Fat City”) turns the tables to become her director’s unlikely emotional center — transforming the rapidly unraveling Aunt Cheryl into a danger that’s monstrous, yes, but also heartbreaking.
That peculiar balancing act creates a unique tone that every seasoned slasher fan should experience at least once in their life, if only because Asher produced a prime example of a movie becoming imbued with the chaotic energy of how it was made. “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” started out under director Michael Miller before financiers replaced him with Asher, who was a major television creative then known for shows like “I Love Lucy” and “Bewitched.”
And yet, establishing himself as remarkably fearless in unfamiliar creative territory, Asher didn’t sand down the film’s script — instead pressing on to helm the project with an almost Old Hollywood sensibility that allowed Tyrrell’s channelling of domestic malcontent to curdle into the kind of nasty homegrown horror that’s made Joan Crawford-types unnervingly sexy for decades.
That specific blend of overheated desperation and empathetic nut-jobbery is precisely what drew me into Aunt Cheryl as a character, and watching a seemingly well-meaning woman erupt into a furious vehicle for both lust and rage (not to mention one of the angriest haircuts ever put on film!), I texted my friend Bret Berg at the American Genre Film Archive to ask him what he thought of “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” and its resurgence in recent years.
A longtime friend of IndieWire After Dark, Bret has one of my favorite artistic palates and his response summed it up well: “Ha. Deranged and hot. Unpredictable and entertaining.” Reader, he wasn’t wrong.
Somewhere between “Donkey Skin,” “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” “The Dressmaker,” “Parents,” “In a Glass Cage,” and even “Pieces” (still an all-timer for me after I watched it five times during the very first weekend I saw it), I’ve slowly realized that I have a weakness for films that live in the same, uh, let’s say twisted neighborhood. That said, many of the movies we’ve chosen for After Dark are shaggy, excessive, and unapologetically provocative. They’re unafraid to use blood and spectacle as a way of expressing powerful ideas many more “traditional” projects would happily waste their entire runtimes circling, and that’s a curatorial practice worth championing… even with an incest warning.
“Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” has actually attracted a growing audience since its pandemic-era rediscovery, and there’s no doubt in my mind it’ll get an even bigger fanbase when it’s featured in a Dead Meat video eventually. Some bottles just need extra time to reach their most potent peak, and the batshit ballad of Aunt Cheryl? That’s officially aged to perfection. Thanks, Dead Meat! —Alison Foreman
The Bite: Butcher, Baker, Homophobe Slayer
The gays love horror, but horror doesn’t always love them back. The strong queer fandom for the genre that thrives today in online spaces and conventions was formed on the back of the canon’s exploration into themes of otherness and social isolation, on its frequent intersections with camp, and on the parade of ‘80s slashers that featured attractive guys getting knifed through their (shirtless) chests. But homophobia and transphobia also run rampant through horror, and for every explicitly LGBT work in the space like “Leviticus” and “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” there are a hundred achingly hetero films it exists in conversation with.
To be a queer fan of the genre is often to reclaim something that wasn’t for you: was “Sleepaway Camp” and its notorious twist ending ever meant to be empowering or a positive statement? Probably not, but if that’s the best we can get, well, sometimes you’ve got to make the most of it. And then there’s something like “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker,” a wildly campy and lurid slice of exploitation trash that’s also a (somewhat) sincere story about the dangers of institutional homophobia. Nowadays, the film feels a bit quaint. But remember it came out in the early 1980s, and suddenly, an ending where the homophobic douchebag police officer gets shot to death while the gay guy survives the carnage feels downright GLAAD-award worthy.
A “Mommie Dearest” tale that’s as wildly disturbing as it is nastily enthralling, “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” doesn’t exactly center queer lives as much as it portrays a society where gay people are scapegoats and boogeymen that actual abusers can hide their crimes behind. The story starts with Tyrell’s Aunt Cheryl stabbing a man to death after he denies her sex, and only after the fact do we learn he was gay and in a relationship with Billy’s coach Tom (Steve Eastin).
From there, police detective Carlson (Bo Svenson, in a diabolically hateable performance) jumps to conclusions — clearly, Billy is also gay, and murdered Tom’s boyfriend in a lover’s quarrel, right? Forget all the evidence his partner is digging up about Aunt Cheryl having a history of unhinged behavior, or her connection to numerous missing persons’ cases and mysterious deaths, or the fact that Billy and Tom vigorously deny his theories. If a gay person is tangentially involved with this case, well, then they must be responsible.
Homophobia in “Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker” isn’t so much casual as it is an ingrained, violent fact of life. Aunt Cheryl refers to gay men as “very sick,” the douchebag bully Billy deals with (played by a young Bill Paxton) taunts him when rumors he and Tom had an affair circulate, and even Carlson’s more observant partner (Britt Leach) still casually refers to the murder victim as a “fag.” For all the film focuses on Carlson’s irrational attempts to peg the murder on gay people, the actual gay man Tom disappears from the narrative for long periods of time. But when he pops up, we’re reminded that he’s an upstanding guy wrongly harassed by the law for his sexuality, and one of the few adults actually looking out for Billy.
In fact, Homophobia is so rampant that it blinds the straight people of “Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker” to the real, very heterosexual perversion going on under their noses. A modern Oedipal story that merges the Greek Tragedy with trashy ‘80s mom-stepson porn, William Asher’s slasher opens its main plot — after the second-best log truck death scene in horror history — with Cheryl scratching her naked nephew’s back and purring into his ear. The subtext behind her actions only becomes more and more explicit as the film goes on, and it’s revealed nephew and aunt are actually son and deeply emotionally disturbed mother.
Does the film handle this subject matter tastefully? Not tastefully enough to refrain from gratuitous shots of McNichol’s bare ass in a scene where Billy argues in the bathroom with Cheryl. But as deliciously over-the-top as Tyrell’s delirious performance can get, there’s real terror in Cheryl’s toxic enmeshment with her own son, and her use of him as a substitution for the one man she ever loved. Modern viral TikTokkers complaining about overbearing boy moms will have a field day with “Butcher Baker,” which takes emotional incest to its grossest, most uncomfortable conclusion.
Part of what makes the film — as hilarious as it can (seemingly intentionally) sometimes be — genuinely terrifying is McNichol’s relative youth during production. At 21, he can still pass in the film as a teenager, and the film doesn’t shy away from showing Billy as an innocent kid who’s harmed and broken by his parent’s abuse. The ending rests on the emotional breakdown he experiences as a result of Cheryl’s betrayal of his trust, and how, even after going through a horrific tragedy, his experience is denied as reality due to homophobia. That Billy is ultimately heterosexual, with a loving girlfriend nonetheless, doesn’t defeat the point being made. In the world of “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker,” gay people might be made out to be the villains, but it’s really the straights that are not OK. —Wilson Chapman
“Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” (1981) is now streaming on Tubi.
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club:
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