MANSON CINEMA DOUBLE FEATURE

Special to PollyStaffle.com

The Manson killings are but a drop in the ocean of human murder. The reason they got as much press as they did was in large part because, then as today, there was a large press dedicated to gossip about the lives of people in the film industry. Serial killer and cult leader Charles Manson is said to be a millionaire in prison to this day, because he and his followers committed a couple of murders that portions of our society refuse to let go of.

Someone recently sent me a YouTube link to the video for This Mortal Coil’s version of “Kangaroo” (originally by Big Star). That reminded me that This Mortal Coil’s version of “Song of the Siren” by Tim Buckley was used in the Lynch film Lost Highway, but was originally intended to be in Blue Velvet and that lead me to the thought that people need to let large portions of eighties art student culture die, or at least sleep for a while.

People need to let David Lynch films die. People really need to let This Mortal Coil die. Pixies did a cover of the song “In Heaven” from the Lynch film Eraserhead. People need to let Pixies die at this point. The whole Manson fixation overlaps audience wise with that, and similarly is generally in need of sleep. However, there are two pieces of Manson cinema that have come up lately that might stand as worth examining – I Drink Your Blood and The Manson Family Movies.

But before getting into those films, I want to look at music a bit more. Joy Division and Psychic TV are bands grouped into the eighties art student culture that I’m inclined to give a go-free card to. Very few bands of any kind really interest me by now. Black metal is generally good, early oi is good, Joy Division is good, Psychic TV, Celtic Frost, Voivod, Circle, Earth, and maybe a few other bands are notable.

Early oi is good just because of how brutal and thuggish it is. Psychic TV still gets my respect for the reason that when I was a freshman at Eugene Lang college back in the 90’s in NYC, I had a Psychic TV pin. An older student warned me that no good would come of that pin and he was pretty much dead on because crazy people and heroin addicts would come up to me at coffee shops wanting to be my best friend. I would say Genesis P. Orridge of Psychic TV should have retired years ago, the breast implants Orridge has now look stupid to me, and there was that unbearable “acid house” period.

Psychic TV had a Manson preoccupation hard. They were also tied to filmmaker John Aes-Nihil, (short for “aesthetic nihilism”) who made The Manson Family Movies. Aes-Nihil has maintained his erection for all things Manson for decades. His fixation with Manson might be intense enough that it works as art, because his shit might be wrong enough for me to take notice of.

I actually corresponded a little bit with John Aes-Nihil online recently. I tried to tell him about how I’m a certified firearms instructor and I’ve been networking with PIs to get work, and the kind of information that pops up because of that. But he kept changing the subject back to the Manson killings, to that one particular case from a little over forty years ago. He seemed to have little interest in a more general discussion of forensics, firearms and investigation which is more my style these days. Aes-Nihil would just spit back minutia and conspiracy theories related to the Manson family. He has an unreal archive of Manson related materials, going into cults that would appear as footnotes or little more on the subject such as the Lyman Family and the Process Church of the Final Judgment.

THE MANSON FAMILY MOVIES

The Manson Family Movies was made back in 1984. Here we are more then twenty five years later, top of the conversation, Aes-Nihil is still working on obscure details of the Manson killing. People like Ed Sanders and Maury Terry that have written on Manson have claimed that there existed a huge satanic underground of drug dealing, child pornography, snuff flicks, etc. I think Aes-Nihil may have a lot of the answers to those things, having really done his homework on The Process Church of the Final Judgment and the Lyman family, Victor Baranco, etc.; relatively obscure data about all this, and was very much of the same scene as the Manson family. The historical answer to that would seem to be “yes and no” if you do some background reading online and follow people like Aes-Nihil and Orridge closely. I’m not sure how much I truly care, and it might be dangerous stuff to get too fascinated by.

Manson Family Movie is highly psychedelic and would be impossible to fully follow unless you either know intimate details of Manson family history by heart or if you listen to Aes-Nihil’s commentary on the DVD from Cult Epics. It goes along the general hypothesis that the Tate killings were about a drug deal gone wrong involving the house guests and the drug MDA, which makes a fair bit of sense. Aes-Nihil used many actors to play the same characters, super 8 film and music that is mostly either by various Manson family members or Aes-Nihil’s own band Beyond Joy and Evil. The soundtrack is so gorgeous you almost have to watch the film once without the commentary. The locations used were the real ones. He used high actors. It took years to make. The Manson killings have always been full of
conflicting reports and it’s never real been clear exactly what happened anyway.

Aes-Nihil knows likely as much as anyone about the case and brings it to life in his own deranged fashion. His version of it seems like what it most likely was, which is a gang of garbage eating users pulling off botched home invasions, having something to do with drug deals gone wrong. Some of the techniques he used, such as employing actors in drag and pieces of paper with dialogue on them are more abstracted, but it also has an unmistakable feel of absolute sleaze and filth.

I DRINK YOUR BLOOD

I’m actually even more impressed by I Drink Your Blood. My college band Chariots
of the Gods with electronica musician Evan Morris sampled this film. I stopped talking to Evan because he was taking low blows at the Tea Party movement online without realizing that I had become a rank-and-file libertarian in recent years, but if you want to hear Chariots of the Gods, both of us are easy enough to contact and we’ll send you a CD or something.

I Drink Your Blood was only very loosely inspired by the Manson family in so far as it
involves a satanic hippie cult that have orgies and drop acid, etc. This one has no interest in anything other then pure camp grindhouse insanity on screen.

The hippy cults bus breaks down in a nearly abandoned town. A young boy gets revenge on the hippie cult after they rape his sister and beat up and give acid to his grandfather. The boy shoots a rabid dog, and uses the blood from the dog to infect a bunch of meat pies that he sells to the hippies. It makes far less sense on screen. The combination of LSD and rabies turns them into killer zombies that foam at the mouth. The violence in this film is hilariously fake, with many a head and limb hacked off by rabid humans. Realistic it is not. Since people used to call rabies hydrophobia, the rabid hippies’ weakness is that they are scared of water.

I am fixated on this film because of its amazing soundtrack (utilizing early moog keyboards), the sexiness of seventies grindhouse-looking women, the hilarious stupidity of the plotline, and general disregard for anything remotely approaching good taste. But when was Manson ever about good taste or coherence?

What you really need in a Manson film to have it work is a smoking psychedelic soundtrack from outer fucking space, retro super-sexy satanic hippie chicks, and low budget carnage. These films deliver on that end to the nth degree. Therefore, they can get away with being about a subject that probably otherwise needs some sleep.

- William Wheaton, March 2010

For more from Wheaton, visit his Myspace