By William Blick.
Aren’t all genre films structuralist in nature? Isn’t everyone either obeying or disobeying genre conventions?”
–Andrew Repasky McElhinney
At the turn of the millennium, the filmmaking industry was in flux. A wave of visionary film directors emerged to embrace new forms of cinematic expression. The horror film genre in particular changed with indie films like The Blair Witch Project (1999) redefining how horror films are created and distributed. At this time, Andrew Repasky McElhinney produced, wrote, and directed a low budget horror film that has become something of a cult-classic titled A Chronicle of Corpses, which turns 25 this year.
A Chronicle of Corpses still endures to this day. It is a macabre nod to Expressionism, and creates atmospheric renderings and compositions that are once horrific and aesthetically pleasing. The film allows one to delight in the innovation and ingenuity that transcends limitation recalling the classic indie-horror films. One can feel the spirit of many great films made on a shoestring budget including Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead, and others from earlier decades such as the films of Val Lewton, Edward Ulmer, and numerous European directors. One can also spot influences of the New American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. McElhinney’s film exudes ambitious confidence in his second feature film. He burst onto the independent film scene with this outrageous homage, while simultaneously creating a new horror genre aesthetic with a breadth and depth of influences. CoC features a distinct sense of style and a creepy visual dynamic.
It was my pleasure to correspond with McElhinney about the recent anniversary of this unique entry into the world of independent film. The following is a result of this correspondence.
A Chronicle of Corpses (2000) is considered by many to be a cult classic and a key work of the new-indie horror film. How would you define the film in terms of genre?
I am an Expressionist. I knew it around age eight or nine. I saw The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and M (1931) on VHS via the Chestnut Hill Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia – this was when they first got videotapes, and it was a (free) godsend! I would watch anything, everything. A lot of key movies. Vertigo. Rear Window. We didn’t have cable. Around the same time, at the Hahn Gallery, also in Chestnut Hill, I was exposed to the 1930s works of Benton Murdoch Spruance…amongst mostly all this shitty watercolor, was a Philadelphia genius. And I saw how he represented our home town. And it gave me something to aspire to as a visual thinker.
I am attracted to work in every genre as a movie director. The influence of Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Edgar G. Ulmer, here. I am also attracted to the collisions of genres. A Chronicle of Corpses is an intersection of low and high art – the slasher film, and the period piece.
Isn’t every movie a horror movie? Aren’t all genre films structuralist in nature? Isn’t everyone either obeying or disobeying genre conventions? What is not genre?
To paraphrase Sontag’s Against Interpretation; art is the balance of form and content. So, genre can be form. And form is structure. All genres have cycles. Genres end, and are reborn via self-parody. The slasher film cycle that was codified by the exquisite template of Halloween (1978), reached main-stream self-parody by Scream (1996). Yet, the end of a cycle is renewal. In the case of A Chronicle of Corpses, there was a post-Scream opportunity to reduce the genre to structure and emblem, and then activate these in a sincere, almost primordial, certainly informed, way. The tropes of the slasher genre build a frame around otherwise marginalized characters in an under-visualized period of American History, while making faint impression of allegories. Writing A Chronicle of Corpses, I gleaned a lot from Debussy and Maeterlinck’s purposely abstruse opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. I’d also read Carol J. Clover’s genre changing study, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), which pretty much tells you everything you need to know to write a slasher movie.
Looking back over 25 years, how would say A Chronicle of Corpses has aged? What is your reaction when you look on your second feature in hindsight? Is there anything you would’ve done different? What do you love about it?
That people are still watching A Chronicle of Corpses is very, very flattering.
With an initial reaction of any work of art, there is always uncertainty. But the movie’s been around 25 years, and I think people expect A Chronicle of Corpses to be what it is, now, rather than what it might be. It also has the context of the works I’ve directed since.
I am completely proud we made the movie – it was a labor of love and faith by so many. 1999 was a hot summer, people schlepping back and forth between Philly, New Jersey, and Manhattan. So many of the right things fell into place…. The cinematographer Abe Holtz introduced me to the lighting designer John F. Draus. The costumes of Rhonda Blessing. The locations. My editor Ron Kalish. And the virtuosic stedicam work by Mike O’Shea.
The ensemble cast is remarkable: Margot White, Oliver Wyman, Ryan Foley, Kevin Mitchell Martin, Sally Mercer, Jerry Perna, Harry Carnahan Green, Melissa Rex, Lindzie Calabrese Rivera, Amanda Scheiner, David Scott Taylor, as well as the late, great David Semonin, George Spence, and, of course, the legendary character actor Marj Dusay. Along with Breezy (1973), A Chronicle of Corpses is some of Marj’s best movie work. She took a chance doing the movie, and I am very glad she did.
Every once in a while, I am asked about writing a sequel to A Chronicle of Corpses, and the only reason I would do it would be the gift and pleasure of working with all these people again after all these years.
How has the “indie film horror scene” or (the industry in general) changed since 2000?
How has it not changed?
The digital revolution…
Without a doubt, regardless of if you capture image on film, or on digital, or on video; digital post-production is far, far less cumbersome, and often more precise.
I published a book in 2013, Second Takes: Remaking Film, Remaking America. It touches on how the concept of 20th century cinema was superseded by the current media era, and that this was cemented into being with the New York–set events of September 11, 2001. As not only did international policies and concepts of freedom change on 9/11, but viewing habits were irrevocably altered. The glue-ing to the 24-hour news cycle. Advance sales at theaters plummeted, while home entertainment blossomed with Xbox and Netflix, aided by digital technology being physically lighter than analog technology. The move from cinema to media is an indicator of societal post-literacy.
Post-modernity is a blurring, as Theodor Adorno elucidates in Transparencies on Film. “One will have observed that it is difficult, initially, to distinguish the preview of a ‘coming attraction’ from the main film for which one is waiting. This may tell us something about the main attractions. Like the previews and like the pop hits, they are advertisements for themselves, bearing the commodity character like a mark of Cain on their foreheads. Every commercial film is actually only the preview of that which it promises and will never deliver.”
What role has Covid-19 pandemic played in current indie horror?
Before Get Out (2017), it seemed only certain rarified groups of horror films were allegories. Now, after Get Out almost every horror movie is an allegory.
If you think of it, COVID-19 (via zoom, skype, etc) made everyone an independent filmmaker.
Undoubtedly, the social trauma of COVID-19 is still being unpacked, as are the fears of another pandemic happening again… among everything else.
When I watched A Chronicle of Corpses for the first time I was reminded of a British Hammer horror film, or maybe even Coppola’s Dementia 13, or even George Romero’s Martin. Who are your cinematic heroes or influences in general?
I’ve never been a Hammer fan. I find the movies obvious, square. I much prefer the Universal horror movies of 30s and 40s. With A Chronicle of Corpses, the inspiration wasn’t Hammer or Universal, but Val Lewton, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the Anthony Mann/John Alton collaborations, especially Reign of Terror (1949), and Bergman and Bresson’s cinema. Other key influences were Edgar G. Ulmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol’s silent films, Stanley Kubrick, Marguerite Duras, Budd Boetticher, Douglas Sirk, Peter Greenaway, Fritz Lang, Halloween, and Friday the 13th movies. I’d love to direct a Friday the 13th or Children of the Corn movie!
Apocalypse Now (1979) is the Coppola movie I like most because of how the movie weirdly prisms radical adaptation, the operatic in cinema, ambiguity, and social observation. It also has a sense of humor and is a spectacle to watch. I admire that Coppola spent his own money to make Megalopolis (2024) on grand scale. I also like Coppola’s wines. And Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) is marvelous!
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979) are important movies in my life. They’re movies that make an impression. I didn’t see Martin (1977) or The Crazies (1973) until later, but I also admire them. It was a delight when Romero’s “lost” The Amusement Park (1975) was unearthed in 2017!
Can you describe the critical reception to the film and do you value critical opinion?
All critical opinion is flattering, ultimately.
Your mise-en-scene and overall compositions in the film are fantastic, macabre visual feasts to watch. Would you say your film is an exercise in “style over substance”? What is more important to you in cinema: visuals or story?
Stephen Sondheim writes that “content dictates form.” Cinema is a time based visual art form. Plot and plot twists are how most people fill that time. However, I think the more freedom from plot, the more opportunities for other, unusual things. Plot can be boring and tedious to follow. Character, spaces, catalogues, rituals are unlimited (to name a few).
What are you working on now?
Currently, I am working on the sound mix of Casual Encounters: Philadelphia True Crime Confessions. It radically pivots an axis of true crime tabloid TV, site-specific theatre, surveillance footage, direct address, and home movies. It examines the active role of passive TV watching and the societal escalation of news as infotainment.
Based on newspaper reports, interviews and trial transcripts, it reframes Philadelphia true crime narratives to make viewers complicit in, and forced to examine the urban issues of poverty, illegal drugs, gentrification, as well as crime as entertainment, and the voice of violence in domestic American society. Something like the offspring of Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966), Casual Encounters: Philadelphia True Crime Confessions is an epic tour though five radically different, yet adjacent, neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
How did you get into the film industry and filmmaking?
I knew of Orson Welles from the Mercury Theatre on the Air repeats on WCAU’s week-nightly program, Radio Classics in the 1980s. Same time, I was into silent movies, especially Caligari. I also watched a lot of classic Dr. Who on PBS, and for almost a decade I watched the late, great CBS soap Guiding Light every day.
At first, I thought I wanted to be a writer, a novelist. Somewhere in a style between Marguerite Duras, Camus, Kafka and James M. Cain. But everything I wrote always read more as a script than fiction.
Via PBS in the late 1980s, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and was a little bored and somewhat confounded, but engaged. PBS played it every so often, so I had the opportunity to watch it multiple times, and it grew on me.
Then, I saw a PBS show about Bob Fosse just after he died. It explained his query of where to put the camera during the “Big Spender” number in Sweet Charity (1969), pointing out that on-stage, the audience can choose where they want to look, but in cinema, the director must decide for the audience. I connected this to Kubrick’s and Fredrick Wiseman’s uses of wide shots. I find I like the sprawl, if not the ambiguity of wide shots as a director. I don’t want to necessarily always decide things for the audience. However, Dreyer makes the greatest of cases for close-ups in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and Casual Encounters: Philadelphia True Crime Confessions is full of them.
A little later than Fosse’s death, 1992, I saw Dr Strangelove (1964) for the first time, and was again confounded, but the ending literally blew me away! What an ending! ….I thought, yes, this is cinema; this is what cinema can do, and what cinema should do.
Linking 2001 and Dr Strangelove, and I said, “Who is this Stanley Kubrick? he’s never made a normal film!” I had to see all the Kubrick movies. The Shining (1980) was next, then A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Barry Lyndon (1975), Killer’s Kiss (1955). And so I began down the rabbit hole of auteur directors in world cinema: Ingmar Bergman, Andy Warhol, Peter Greenaway, Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Waters, David Lynch – my parents pushed me toward Robert Altman – Jace Gaffney towards Robert Bresson. These movies are a cinema school.
You also work in academia. What do you think of the academic study of film? Why is it important to study film from an academic’s point-of-view?
Screen studies are as key now as “reading, writing and ‘rithmetic” was in the 20th century. Maybe more so because of the way digital technology has speed up our consumption cycle. Screen studies is ultimately about visual literacy, and everyone needs that toolbox today because we’re constantly bombarded by moving images. So to make informed decisions, one must understand basic cinematic technique and cinematic grammar. It is also crucial to understand how montage (editing) is the creative phenomena unique to moving images, and how intercut images create an effect larger than their individual parts. Ask yourself, if a picture is worth a thousand words – what is moving picture worth?
Museum of Modern Art artist Andrew Repasky McElhinney is an independent filmmaker and experimental theater director known for his audacious, genre-bending movies including A Maggot Tango, Magdalen, A Chronicle of Corpses, Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, Animal Husbandry, Christmas Dreams, and Casual Encounters: Philadelphia True Crime Confessions. McElhinney is also the author of the screen studies work, Second Takes: Remaking Film, Remaking America. ARMcinema25.com
William Blick is a film and literary/crime fiction critic; a librarian; and an academic scholar. His work has been featured in Senses of Cinema, Film Threat, Cineaction, and CinemaRetro, and he is a frequent contributor to Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of Noircon. His crime fiction has been featured in Close to the Bone, Pulp Metal Magazine, Out of the Gutter, and others. He is an Assistant Professor/Librarian for the City University of New York.