Slash Americana: Strange Behavior’s Eerie Charm

Features—

Oct 26, 2022

Every elliptical pleasure of Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (a.k.a. Dead Kids, 1981)—the flattened post–Twilight Zone affect, the tableaux evoking Technicolor footage faded like old Polaroids, a host of cross-pollinated genre kinks—suggests outmoded code that’s been surreptitiously updated. Embracing dissociation as style and psychology, it plays with slasher devices and De Palma–esque thriller elements, while folding in science fiction, horror, and American pastoral archetypes. Laughlin and cowriter Bill Condon display a sangfroid sense of humor that’s doubly, deliciously anachronistic. Strange Behavior tweaks the past, but from the cryptic vantage of Twin Peaks and Donnie Darko: works that were still a decade or two in the future, as if it had cracked their passwords in advance. It nods (winks?) at the 1980s’ gory, R-rated slasher-knocking-off-teens paradigm, and its pervasive air of unease suggests a subconscious parallel to David Cronenberg’s emerging type of celluloid dysmorphia. Laughlin toys with elements that defined the zeitgeist and others that hadn’t surfaced yet.

The movie’s inscrutable aesthetic feels stumbled upon as much as developed, a matter of trial, error, luck, and environment. For instance, by setting it in Illinois, but deciding to film it in Auckland, New Zealand, and flying in a mainly American cast, Laughlin and Condon made the scenery double beautifully for vintage Middle America (they even found the right cars from a local collectors’ club), but with something always a touch askew. Minor characters sometimes have their voices dubbed, but Down Under accents keep slipping through at the margins. With a one-million-dollar budget and a one-month shooting schedule, there’s no disguising its B-movie status. Laughlin and Condon embrace the possibilities of less-is-more with the relish of a satiric Jacques Tourneur.

Right out of the gate, a crafty preamble walks us into the first murder, depicted as shadowplay. A teenager is left alone in a house and the power goes out. (He’s played by a boyish Condon, taking his first inadvertent baby steps toward the James Whale biopic Gods and Monsters.) The about-to-be-dead kid finds a candle and starts amusing himself by making hand-shadow puppets on the wall. He doesn’t realize a figure is following him. The intruder’s shadow brings a knife down on the boy. The killer is revealed to be another innocent-looking teen, who blows out the candle, whoosh. Cut to black.

Nice touch, but the kicker is that we still hear the dying teenager’s death gurgles softly in the background as bucolic landscapes appear. This is the two-tiered strategy throughout the movie: There is this surface narrative going on, with all the regular elements of dread, violence, romance, mystery, and even a jump-in-the-night Tangerine Dream score—possibly their most creepily atmospheric film work. It delivers the predictable jolts, but in unpredictable, oblique ways, executed with a stealth eccentricity you can never quite pin down. Then there’s another level that feels adjacent to mundane, everyday interactions, an outward “normalcy” that’s off by a few subterranean degrees. Like a set of standardized conventions that has been replicated in a laboratory, only with something inconspicuous in their DNA mutated.

So we get a standard rugged sheriff, played by the Robert Altman favorite Michael Murphy, and his handsome smart-aleck son (Dan Shor, who wears his cockiness like a bull’s-eye), as protagonists. But unexplained, uninflected details keep cropping up. Father and son are introduced when dad wakes the kid, goes back to shaving, and the boy walks bare-assed past dad into the shower. Moments like these are subliminal double takes, hovering between blankness and stone-faced insanity.

The sheriff’s old deputy opens a minifridge at the office that’s packed with what looks like a hundred cans of beer. His girlfriend/caregiver (Louise Fletcher) and his son later have an affectionate chat, while in the background he lies passed out in an overstuffed armchair. At the end of the exchange, the son kisses her in a casual, highly overfamiliar way. It doesn’t imply anything titillating, only that strange is the norm here and boundaries are porous. If aliens made a training film on learning to pass for human, these mistranslated moments would be their examples of “natural.” (In 1983, Laughlin and Condon’s next film in a planned but ultimately unfinished “Strange” trilogy, Strange Invaders, took up the Body Snatchers premise and ran with it.)

No surprise, then, that the local coroner not only looks more like a farmer (his smock might as well be overalls), but is played by the Los Angeles pop artist Billy Al Bengston. Speaking of pop, Condon loved the old Lou Christie song “Lightnin’ Strikes,” so he convinced Laughlin to stage a full choreographed dance routine to it at a teenage party. A costume party no less, featuring sixties American TV characters: a Flying Nun, Flintstones Fred and Wilma (also Betty Rubble), Robin and Batman, Hoss from Bonanza, etc. Meanwhile, a stalker in a Rondo Hatton mask is closing in on a couple parked nearby . . .

Strange Behavior isn’t content with a Halloween-style killer; it features killers, plural, who have volunteered at the local college for medical experiments conducted by the splendidly magnetic Fiona Lewis, as a doctor who’s more fatale than femme, sporting a coiled hairdo that apparently inspired Sean Young’s retro coif in Blade Runner. To further convolute things, she is working at the behest of a mad behaviorist professor, ostensibly deceased, who lectures his students via black-and-white film. When the sheriff realizes that his son has fallen under their influence—a procedure that involves inserting a giant hypodermic needle into the boy’s eye—he does the sensible law-enforcement thing: he breaks into the professor’s crypt, whose contents are missing everything but legs.

Take a moment to process. Remember that Louise Fletcher’s character comes along on this escapade, and prior to the break-in, she snaps a heel in the cemetery—a whole sequence is devoted to this, as though it were a PSA reminding you to always wear flats if you go graverobbing. How has a movie like this escaped the loving, incredulous scrutiny of the podcast How Did This Get Made? In fact, its provenance can be traced to Michael Laughlin’s friendships and business connections in Hollywood. In the sixties, he’d gone to London, then come back and produced Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971); he wasn’t a major player, but he traveled in influential circles and knew the right people, or knew their confidants.

He scouted Condon as an industry prospect after the kid graduated from Columbia and hired him as his assistant. They saw that horror films were a cheap but profitable foot in the door: they’d pool their sensibilities, write something that undermined its own derivativeness, and recoup their investors’ money. Halloween (1978) opened the bloodgates, and Friday the 13th (1980) further codified the gold-rush template—the former returning 47 million domestically on a cost of roughly $300,000. By the time Dead Kids, as it was pitched then, began production, there were dozens of other films in the pipeline trying to cash in on the maniac craze. With cost-consciousness in mind, Laughlin recruited pals like Fletcher and Murphy and Fiona Lewis (he discovered her in London). He was living with Susanna Moore, who did a terrific job with the production design, and whose CV testifies to a fascinating career: she was friends with Ridley Scott’s girlfriend Joanna Cassidy, which is how he saw that hairdo; she became an acclaimed novelist, and her book In the Cut was made into the Jane Campion film; and she had been Warren Beatty’s assistant, a Hollywood education no amount of money could buy.

Throw in some sharp supporting faces like the Australian actor Arthur Dignam (mordantly riveting as the mad professor) and Charles Lane (the dyspeptic deputy, one of those craggy, ultrafamiliar visages traceable back to Frank Capra times). Meet Dey Young, who had just debuted in Rock ’n’ Roll High School, in a bank line and hire her to play the chain-smoking ingenue. The production was an exercise in applied serendipity and catch-as-catch-can invention; the behind-the-scenes process was closer to the plot of an unproduced Altman comedy than some meticulously storyboarded conception.

In that trance state of unpretentious experimentation, Strange Behavior finds its own private mode of hushed peculiarity. Bits and pieces of it stay with you as vividly as any masterpiece: the Blue Velvet drive through an idyllic neighborhood; the sequence when Young turns out the lights in a spooky hallway by flipping the electrical breakers one by one; the shot of officials approaching a corpse made up as a scarecrow in an open field. It’s impossible for me to think of the actors and not smile. The movie didn’t initially find an audience, but it was well reviewed in New York. What it lacked was solid distribution and marketing that might have tapped into its weird crossover potential. Condon describes seeing it opening week in a packed theater with a mostly Black crowd, who roared their approval as if it were Jaws. But Pauline Kael and Woody Allen were also reputed to have loved it. Perhaps genre mash-ups present an especially tricky sell because they undermine the fear and suspense factors: there’s no adrenaline release, unless bemusement sets your glands into overdrive.

It’s said that Buck Henry was such a fan of the movie that he taped a piece of Lewis’s Bond-villain dialogue—“I can’t stop you; I don’t have a gun”—and made it his outgoing answering-machine message. Who’d know what to make of that? Even in context, it’s a statement wrapped in a non sequitur inside an enigma. Sheer preposterousness. Would we have it any other way?

Slash Americana: Strange Behavior’s Eerie Charm

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