Two years before The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a British film weighed into the 1970s gloomfest
with a more socially conscious narrative about an army of dispossessed wreaking
their vengeance on the corrupt and the pampered who inhabit the streets of
London. No, this isn’t a documentary on the miners’ strikes but Gary Sherman’s
1973 film Deathline (aka Raw Meat in the United States), and as
far as British horror goes, many horror aficionados,
from Kim Newman to Edgar Wright postulate this film as one of the best British
horror movies of the seventies.
The remark about miners’ strike is not a flippant one: one
Rotten Tomatoes reviewer calls this film “the first (or only) ethnographic
urban legend horror film”* and as a social commentary it is quite powerful: as
striking as the spade through the head delivered to a hapless victim in one of
the film’s most memorable scenes. As the film tells us, in 1892 a small group
of workers (conveniently for the narrative eight men and four women) are
trapped during the excavation works for a tube station; left to fend for
themselves by unscrupulous employers who have gone bankrupt and thus cannot
afford to rescue them, the workers survive first through cannibalism and then
by snatching waifs and strays from lonely tube stations. Paul Weller take note.
Although the ‘monster's’ actions are brutal, we cannot help but feel sympathy
for his situation. Indeed, the film is effectively the American Sherman holding
a mirror up to British society at the time. Through the salacious antics of
James Manfred OBE who combs the flesh pits of Soho for his sexual kicks prior
to becoming the film’s first victim to Christopher Lee’s darkly forbidding
Government official, Stratton-Villiers, warning the working class coppers away from Manfred’s case,
there is a sense of darker forces at work above and below the tube-line. As he investigates Manfred’s disappearance,
Calhoun discovers that he is not the first to go missing at Russell Square tube
station. Previous missing persons – a man named Cohen and a grocer from Kilburn
named Panowski suggest that minorities in Britain do not merit a second glance.
However, as Calhoun puts it, Manfred’s disappearance cannot be shut away in a
file somewhere. Privilege and justice, in this picture of Britain, go hand in
hand.
Death Line is indeed
a film about consumption, corruption and exploitation. The monster’s cannibal
antics are mirrored in the Manfred’s own consumption of female flesh; his money
buys sexual release and provides him with enough arrogance to objectify any
lone woman who happens to pass him by as a receptacle for his lust. Thus, when
he himself becomes food for the monster and his dying mate, we can’t help
feeling some sense of karma.
There is a pervasive sense of grime and disease present in
the monster’s lair which sits at the heart of the labyrinth of tunnels nesting
beneath the streets of London. The famous tracking shot which pans across a
butcher’s shop of human remains, places the spectator knee deep in the filth of
maggots and rats taking their rightful place in the food chain. As one of my
students put it, the sense of dirt is inescapable and the accompanying sounds,
the steady metronomic dripping of water and the monster’s groans of despair,
lend a sense of realism to the scene which is missing from its recent remake,
2004’s Creep.
But consumption isn’t the domain of just the cannibals below
the surface. Inspector Calhoun is supplied with a constant stream of tea; he
stuffs sausages into his sidekick’s mouth and gets pissed in an afterhours bout
during which he jokingly threatens the bemused landlord with a summons if he
doesn’t continue serving drinks. Pat and Alex, the two young protagonists who
become enmeshed in the monster’s need to replace his dead mate, serve up a
fried breakfast in scenes of domesticity which ironically mirror those ‘down
below’. And of course there is the symbolic consumption: the machinery of
capitalism which Moloch-like chews up and spits out the unfortunate souls who
happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – the disenfranchised who
could stand for pretty much any of the impoverished who had so much truck with
the successive failures of British government in the early seventies.
As a study in man-made monsters it offers a Frankenstein for the 1970s, the flotsam
and jetsam of society whose instinct to survive is defeated by a world that is
equally brutal and unforgiving. As Alex says when he and Pat encounter the
dying Manfred, “in New York we just step over [the bodies].” Pat’s response, as
the archetypal nurturing female, is to default to pity although if she had been
alone in the tube station only a few moments before, she too might have dealt
Manfred a meaty blow with her patent yellow thigh-highs. There is genuine pity
for the film’s monster, as much pity as revulsion: does he deserve to die? The scene
in which we see the bodies of his ancestors lying in state on storage racks and
buried with a token or trinket taken from other victims suggests that there is
innate dignity in even the most atavistic of human creatures. The need to build
a past amidst the chaos of the present offers a glimpse into what makes us
civilised. Surrounded by the bones of his ancestors, what does the monster make
of the world above? What does he see there? Furtive encounters between un-consenting
adults, lonely women left to fend for themselves on desolate platforms: no
wonder he is unable to make sense of a world which engenders alienation and discontent.
Could his mantra of ‘mind the doors’, the only words he hears and which he
repeats parrot fashion throughout the film, instead be a comment on borders and
boundaries? The monster’s transgression
is not in murder and cannibalism: his mistake is in his attempt to breed anew
with a race of people who rejected him in the first place.
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