RETRO REVIEW: FADE TO BLACK (1980)
Dennis Christopher as Eric in Vernon Zimmerman’s Fade to Black (1980).
It’s unusual for a movie to make me feel both seen and attacked. My life-long movie obsession has generally been a boon in my life - it has led me to different, positive, career paths as well as decades-long friendships and relationships with some amazing people. But that love of cinema has not been without its downsides as well, especially when the object of my film devotion centers around the horror genre.
As horror movie fans, many of us are used to drawing criticism and more than a few eyebrow raises by our devotion and love for the genre. We collect collectibles and buy so many blu-rays, we could give the Library of Congress a run for its money. We incur judgement by people who question our love for a genre they see as nothing but glorified violence, and are often categorized as strange, creepy, and even possibly disturbed because we can’t get enough blood, guts, and gore. For many horror movie fans, fandom takes up a decent chunk of our everyday lives, which means that being a horror fan you have to be at least somewhat obsessed. But what happens when your love for the films that bring you joy turns into something twisted and dark? When you are so immersed in a fantasy world that you lose touch with reality? When people stop being polite and start being real? Okay, that’s from MTV’s The Real World, but just work with me here. The point is that something that begins innocuously and with the best of intentions can very easily veer into the realm of destructive obsession. In Vernon Zimmerman’s 1980 film, Fade to Black (Compass International Pictures), that very idea is put into sharp relief when a young man takes his revenge on a society that has done nothing but ridicule the one thing he loves most in the world: the movies.
The many faces of Eric Binford in Fade to Black.
PLOT:
Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher) is an obsessive movie fan who works as a delivery boy at a film distribution warehouse by day and watches old movies in his bedroom at night. He is bullied by both his aunt (whom he lives with after the death of his mother and the abandonment of his father), his boss, and society in general for his fanatical devotion to these films. When he runs into an aspiring model and actress, Marilyn O’Connor (played by Linda Kerridge), who is a dead-ringer for Marilyn Monroe, the lines of his movie fantasies and reality get even more blurred as he becomes obsessed with her. When he is stood up for a date by the beautiful blonde, Eric’s rage finally breaks, and he begins to disguise himself as his favorite movie characters and kill off those who have wronged him, one by one.
Eric dons the guises of classic horror characters like The Mummy to carry out his kills.
VISUALS:
The visuals aren’t terribly remarkable and overall, the film looks like your typical 80’s low-budget movie. However, in one scene Eric goes to Marilyn's house and in a little ode to the film Psycho, barges in on her as she showers. But instead of a butcher knife, he brandishes a fountain pen, saying he only wanted her autograph, and when she screams, he drops the pen in the shower and we see the black ink from it run down the drain, echoing that same shot of the blood in Psycho. It’s a great moment, made even more ironic by the fact that since Psycho was shot in black and white, the blood going down in that film looked black as well. The film is also interspersed with cuts from the films that Eric takes his inspiration from: White Heat, Creature From the Black Lagoon, and The Public Enemy, creating another level to how we experience the kills through Eric’s own distorted lens.
Dennis Christopher, Marcie Barkin, and Linda Kerridge in Fade to Black.
KILLS:
The first death in the film is perhaps the most significant one. Eric’s Aunt Stella has been an albatross around his neck for most of his life. She’s an abusive bully, who may have also been forcing Eric to perform unwanted and intimate acts with her for money (this is only somewhat implied in the film). She’s the mother to his Norman Bates. After his perceived rejection by Marilyn, he returns home to cope with it the only way he knows how: by watching movies. Specifically, the 1947 film, Kiss of Death. When Aunt Stella comes into his room on another tirade, we see him look at the screen, where we see a man attack a woman in a wheelchair, and then see him look at Aunt Stella, who is also in a wheelchair. A switch in Eric clicks on and, finally at his breaking point of her abuse, pushes her down the stairs to her death.
This kill spurs on his subsequent revenge murder spree, as, now flush with a feeling of power, Eric dons the costumes of his favorite movie characters to take out those who have wronged him. A coworker who reneged on a bet gets gunned down with Eric dressed as a cowboy. A shady film producer gets ambushed by him dressed in full gangster regalia, complete with a working tommy gun. Perhaps the most disturbing kill of the film sees Eric dressed as the classic Bela Legosi Dracula. He tracks down a prostitute who turned him down earlier in the film, and proceeds to chase her until she trips on a toy left on the sidewalk and gets her neck impaled. Reaching out, he touches some of the blood and brings it up to his lips, and then proceeds to suck the blood greedily out of her neck wound. It’s deeply unsettling, because up until now, Eric has been a fairly innocuous guy. Sure, he killed his aunt by pushing her wheelchair down the stairs, but we can kind of justify it due to the years of verbal abuse suffered at her hands. But the aunt’s death was also impulsive, making him nearly vomit afterwards. However, when he kills the prostitute and drinks her blood, we see a different Eric: cold, psychotic, and absolutely reveling in the power killing her gives him. He’s been able to make the celluloid characters he loves made flesh, directing his own movie, his own narrative, through his kills.
Dennis Christopher in Fade to Black.
PERFORMANCES:
As Eric, Dennis Christopher obviously has to shoulder the weight of this film, and for the most part, does an admirable job. His body language pre-killing spree is hunched and small, naturally in a constant defensive state against the cruel world around him. His attitude and personality also reflect that learned defensive mechanism, deflecting insults with sarcasm and superiority in his knowledge of movie trivia (have I mentioned I feel attacked?). But as the bodies start piling up and Eric’s grasp of reality slips even more, he turns vitriolic and confrontational, his anger taking on an unsettling color. In one scene, when a co-worker bails on a trivia bet, it sets Eric off, and in his anger he starts spouting off what Hitler’s favorite film was, and the two movies that were playing in the theater Oswald was spotted in after President Kennedy’s assassination. Eric is not well, and maybe he never was, but it’s here that the hairline fractures in his psyche turn into full-blown, 40 foot-deep crevasses. At times, it can feel like Christopher’s performance as Eric shoots to the rafters, his imitations perhaps cartoonish and grandiose, but they should be. Eric lives in a fantasy, in a bubble of charismatic monsters and garishly overblown gangsters, and with each kill he gets to be them, to inhabit their skin. For once he has power and it’s not something he is willing to give up now that he has experienced it.
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:
Watching this film again, I couldn’t help but look at it through a post-Todd Phillips Joker lens. While a main thread of Jokers narrative is a slow burning class war between the have and have-nots that threatens to erupt, Fade to Black is less about socio-economic commentary (though Eric and his aunt struggle to make ends meet), and more about societal norms and those that live on the fringes of society and the lack of empathy had for them by our culture writ large. However, Eric is not indefensible in his actions just because he is constantly bullied. Like Arthur Fleck, he also has culpability in how society relates to him - he is consistently late to work, when he is at work he regularly makes mistakes and errors. He also is arrogant, and has an insistent need to leverage his superior knowledge of film trivia to others around him in order to make himself feel validated. While society does nothing to accept him, he also doesn’t do anything to endear himself to it either. But such is the chicken or the egg existential argument - why does he have to change who he is to be accepted and seen as a person of worth? Why can’t society change what is seen as acceptable behavior? If he’s happy watching movies all day, what’s wrong with that?
Ultimately, Fade to Black is not a love letter to movie lovers and more like a break up note where they tell you, “it's not you, it’s me.” The only romanticizing of Hollywood in the film is through Eric’s eyes and ultimately, through his psychosis. To us, Fade to Black’s Hollywood is only rejection and disappointment. It is toxic and terrifying. Eric sees it as magical and comforting, but it’s actually the twisted comfort that is felt by the alcoholic opening that new bottle of whiskey or the junkie with a full syringe. It’s an addiction, a mechanism for coping with the traumas of his childhood and the years of subsequent bullying he faced at the hands of his aunt. Healthy obsessions positively fuel our lives and relationships, they can help to build friendships, relationships, our sense of self-worth, and even benefit our careers. Eric’s love of the movies is a parasitic relationship - it feeds off of his body, soul, and mind. He constantly smokes, has a diet that basically consists of junk food, and spends most of his free time in his room watching movies. The more life around him gets worse, the more he retreats into his film fantasies. Though he catches a possible break career-wise when he meets a film producer who loves his pitch for a movie idea, that ultimately turns out to be another Hollywood disappointment when he discovers the guy steals his idea for his own.
At every turn, Eric is emasculated and belittled, and it is that very reason he inhabits gangsters, cowboys, vampires, and monsters when he kills. These are not just any Joe-Schmos, they are cinema archetypes that embody everything Eric isn’t and what he wants most desperately to be: strong, powerful, fierce, and charismatic.
While the film’s structure and plot remains strong through most of the film, it starts breaking up into gossamer by the end, with no real weight or structure to really pack the punch it was going for. The final showdown with the LAPD at the Grauman’s Chinese Theater should feel epic, like the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Bonnie and Clyde going out in a hail of bullets, but Eric isn’t a criminal we are rooting for to get away. He’s lonely, sad, and very mentally ill. Eric feels like he’s accomplished something with these kills, even yelling the famous line from White Heat: “I finally made it ma - top of the world!” as he’s facing down the police, but the fame and recognition he has finally received is hollow and cloaked only in his own delusion. He ultimately doesn’t get our sympathy because he doesn’t earn it. Yes, he was bullied and abused, but he also murdered people simply because he felt slighted by them.
Much of the post-Joker narrative centered around making the disaffected white man sympathetic despite the violence he perpetrated, but I feel like that is painting these kinds of white-guy revenge films in broad strokes. As a woman, I have to ask myself, would I still feel as unsympathetic towards Eric’s actions if he were a woman, and I say yes. The reason being, is that I don’t believe this film set out to paint Eric as a martyr, as someone standing up to some higher injustice. This is ultimately a portrait of a disturbed young man, trapped in an oubliette of his Hollywood fantasies that he uses to justify the violence he perpetrates. To Eric, his journey is triumphant and the stuff of Hollywood endings, but to us, it’s ultimately a somber depiction of a lonely man cocooning himself in empty fantasy. Eric wants our sympathy, but at the end, he only gets our pity.
EASTER EGG:
When Eric is in his boss’s office at the film warehouse, there are two large posters behind the desk for the films Halloween (1978) and Tourist Trap (1979). Compass International Pictures, who produced Fade to Black, also produced those films.
