Auds have hankering for horror
Rampant remakes inspire vet Cohen to new fright heights
Larry Cohen wants back into the mainstream. To accomplish that, the 64-year old genre movie auteur has acquired the remake rights to "It's Alive" from Warner Bros. and is shopping a new monster-baby script, hoping to capitalize on a studio climate that's transformed an increasing number of yesterday's B-movies into today's box office hits.
The commercial track records of Ronny Yu's long-gestating slasher sequel "Freddie vs. Jason," Marcus Nispel's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake and Quentin Tarantino's homage to grindhouse gore, "Kill Bill, Vol. 1," have given new life to the once-disreputable explotation genre.
But few writer-directors who emerged from the 1970s netherworld of exploitation horror have managed to turn this trend to their advantage.
Drive-in movie impresario Roger Corman is a prolific producer, but he continues to operate as he always has, releasing films like "Slaughter Studios" and "The Suicide Club" mostly straight to video through his Concorde Pictures-New Horizon label, now known as New Concorde.
"Texas Chainsaw" creator Tobe Hooper and zombie maven George Romero continue to write, direct and produce, but neither has had a studio hit in years.
"Bloodfeast" screenwriter David Friedman, who coined the phrase "Mall-seleum" to describe multiplex theaters, has dropped out of sight. Several remakes were made of exploitation pioneer William Castle's pics, but Castle died in 1977 before remake fever hit.
Cohen, by contrast, has adapted deftly to the multiplex universe. He wrote both the Colin Farrell thriller "Phone Booth," which grossed $47 million in its domestic run last winter, and the original script for "Cellular," a thriller which David R. Ellis just finished shooting for New Line.
He's developing another script called "Captivity," which Cohen describes as a kidnapping thriller about a supermodel and "a schlub who works at Starbucks" who are abducted together.
Each of these films turns on a simple, eerily plausible premise -- a template that's served Cohen well since the 1970s.
"I set up a paranoid situation," Cohen says, "and they have to get out of it. I've been experimenting with this form for years -- small cast, limited frame of time and constant suspense."
Cohen was a standup comedian before moving to L.A. in the 1960s, and his mischievous, somewhat offbeat sense of humor is evident to anyone who sets foot in the living room of his Coldwater Canyon residence. It's ornamented in plastic Christmas decorations, including an almost life-size Santa that wriggles its hips suggestively. Nearby is a closet that's teeming with ghoulish props and prothetics and more monster babies.
The house, which was built by the Hearst family in 1929 and was once inhabited by director Samuel Fuller, has been Cohen's home for 36 years.
In that time, Cohen has forged a career as an indefatigable Hollywood journeyman. He started writing TV scripts as an undergraduate at City College of New York and created TV series like "Branded" and "Coronet Blue" before writing, directing and producing low-budget features like "Bone," "Black Caesar," "Hell Up in Harlem" and "The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover," the latter three of which were released through Samuel Arkoff's AIP.
He also began to build up a fan base among film critics. Robin Wood wrote in Film Comment that "Hoover" is "perhaps the most intelligent film about American politics ever to come out of Hollywood."
"It's Alive" was released through Warner Bros. As Cohen tells it, Terry Semel, who had just become the studio's distribution chief, plucked the film off the shelf and released it rapidly in nearly 1,000 theaters, an unusually aggressive gambit at the time.
The film -- which Cohen says cost $425,000 to produce, including makeup work by Rick Baker and a score by Bernard Herrmann and the London Philharmonic, proved to be a remarkably efficient financial enterprise. It grossed approximately $14 million in its first theatrical run and has had a long ancillary afterlife."Larry is an idea factory," says Dean Devlin, who's producing "Cellular."
That's undoubtedly one of the qualities that has kept Cohen in the good graces of the studios over the years, even as some of the creative energy that Cohen and his B-movie contemporaries brought to the biz in the 1970s has faded in the face of today's staunchly corporate, marketing-driven franchise film business.
Remakes now in development -- like "The Amityville Horror," "The House of Wax" and "Suspiria" may strike the studios as low-cost, high-return enterprises that can be easily marketed and blasted onto thousands of screens.
But the same quality that makes such films marketable commodities -- the familiarity of the brand name -- also makes them less startling than the original films on which they were based.
As writer and director Robert Parigi puts it: "The great horror films are themselves monsters and freaks. They come from out of nowhere, overturn the natural order, and shock and amaze everyone."
B-horror movies, Cohen says, often served as Trojan horses for serious cultural ideas that studios were too conservative to confront directly.
"Nobody likes a message picture," Cohen says. "But horror movies used to be about something -- Vietnam, the sexual revolution, morality, relationships. Now they're just scare-the-pants-off-you movies."
Cohen says a top-heavy development system at the studios is sometimes to blame for squeezing the idea out of movies.
"There are so many meetings, and so many people coming to meetings with yellow pads and taking notes," he says.
It's a system that's at odds with a one-man-band like Cohen, who in the past has preferred to write, direct, produce and even art-direct his own films.
It's also a system that depends on idea men like Cohen who aren't afraid to fling open their closet and give his monsters free rein.
