Anthology films are a tough nut to crack. While having a collection of shorter-form stories as opposed to a single full-length narrative can make for a refreshing change of pace (for one thing, if you don't like the story you're seeing, then you can rest easy in the knowledge that there'll be another one starting shortly enough), a lot of anthology films don't succeed in overcoming the problem of culmination. The segments need to work individually, but at the same time it has to function as a cohesive piece. There needs to be a certain rhyme and rhythm in weaving the stories together; each individual segment should ideally be building on and enhancing our appreciation of the ones that came before it, and the ending should bring all of those reactions together and give clarity/thematic closure to the full catalogue in a satisfying way. Otherwise, you end up with the theatrical equivalent of showing a bunch of TV episodes back to back, and if that's what you want to be watching, you would presumably opt for that instead. Generally speaking, anthology films don't end up being the sum of their parts, and you're forced to take the rough along with the smooth. Twilight Zone: The Movie, released in 1983, is the textbook definition of an anthology film that's a total mixed bag. This big screen tribute to Rod Serling's seminal TV favourite from the movie brat generation practically begs the rollercoaster analogy, offering both dizzying highs and gut-churning lows. On the one hand, Joe Dante's take on "It's a Good Life" is a wickedly inspired slice of grotesquery, in that it plays like a live action Looney Tunes short set in the deepest bowels of Hell (you gotta love that it involves a young Nancy Cartwright being banished to the cartoon world, where she's stayed ever since*) so of course, being a self-respecting horror fan, you'll want to have it in your collection. On the other hand, I think there are far fewer horror fans out there who relish the idea of being saddled with John Landis's witlessly sadistic "Time Out" (the knowledge that three cast members were killed during the making of this segment only makes it all the more of a woeful experience). I'm such a huge fan of the Dante segment and so repelled by the Landis one that I find it hard to determine how I stand on the movie as a whole. But then, it doesn't work as a whole movie. Three of the four segments are direct remakes of episodes from the original Serling series, and as such the film is effectively a TV marathon in theatrical dress. The film attempts (somewhat) to redress this by bookending the segments with a couple of sequences involving Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd. I...don't know what those are all about. Having Aykroyd's character show up at the very end to give John Lithgow one final shock is basically just an unconvincing means of attempting to pass off the entire affair as a circular narrative - which fails, because of course it isn't. Really, I could curse the Dante segment for being so good, otherwise I would have a much easier time writing the whole thing off as a failure (with apologies to Lithgow, who is extremely fun to watch in the George Miller segment).
Within the same year that Twilight Zone: The Movie hit the screens, a far lower-key horror anthology, also comprised of a tetrad of grisly tales, saw the light of day and has nestled away in dark obscurity ever since. Joseph Sargent's Nightmares is yet another anthology film that plays more like a TV marathon than a cohesive feature, which, in this case, is precisely what we're looking at, given that the segments started life as a pilot for a proposed NBC anthology series that was ultimately shelved. Unlike Twilight Zone: The Movie, Nightmares makes zero attempt whatsoever to disguise its origins as a collection of self-contained television episodes, forgoing the popular tactic of having either a framing narrative, bookends, intersecting characters (like the cat from the 1985 film Cat's Eye) or even a common narrator to imply that the segments are somehow connected. It is simply a string of stories told back-to-back, with the vague interconnecting theme that they all involve characters having to confront something nightmarish. Is it any more even as a viewing experience than Twilight Zone: The Movie? Oh, who cares? It has a giant rat, so it's already passed the first test.
Note that the segment with the rat ("Night of The Rat") is the only one that I care to talk about here. The three remaining segments are perfectly watchable, but they do not have a giant rat. I went out and bought this film entirely on account of the rat. I've probably mentioned this elsewhere within these pages, but I am very fond of rats, and as such would consider myself something of an aficionado of rat cinema - an esoteric category which, barring a few scant exceptions like Don Bluth's The Secret of NIMH (1982) and Pixar's Ratatouille (2007), tends to fall overwhelmingly into the horror genre (rats being an animal that are apt to evoke feelings of discomfort in numerous people). I stumbled across Nightmares last year, thanks to a recent Region B Blu-ray release by 101 Films, and when I learned that it contained a story about a giant rat I was immediately intrigued, but also very cautious. All I could glean about the plot was that it involved an oversized rat menacing a human family, culminating in a dramatic showdown within a child's bedroom. Sounds enthralling, only I saw this exact same scenario in a certain Disney movie and it didn't end well for the rat. I should stipulate that, given my affection for the animal in question, I can be quite picky about which rat movies I choose to watch. My preference is definitely for films that are willing to regard the rat with a degree of sympathy, even where they're also treated as objects of horror (eg: Daniel Mann's Willard (1971), which is one of my all-time favourite films). I wasn't totally convinced that I was going to get that from Nightmares, and yet when I did a Google Image search on the film and was treated to an array of imagery showing the final confrontation between family and rat (see below), I was immediately won over and had to give it my time. And I was happy that I did. I will say upfront that "Night of The Rat" is actually very favourable to the titular rodent.
"Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?!" Heroic mutt Tramp faces off against a rat with an appetite for ripping up the family unit in Disney's Lady and The Tramp (1955).
Actually, the above Disney allusion is entirely appropriate, as "Night of The Rat" is a film that plays as if it were conceived from a strange mix of nostalgia and psychological scarring induced by a half-remembered childhood viewing of Lady and The Tramp from the film's initial release in the mid-1950s. In the Disney animated classic, the creeping black rat that only Lady is aware of signifies a contaminant in the characters' apparently pristine neighbourhood (much like the bugs lurking beneath the grasses in David Lynch's 1986 film Blue Velvet). It is a disturbance that the human residents go about their daily lives happily oblivious to, and as such it falls upon the dogs, appointed defenders of the clean-cut American family unit, to keep this malign intruder at bay. Lady encounters the rat twice in the story; obviously, we have the aforementioned dramatic climax involving a brutal face-off between Tramp and the rat, but Lady's first meeting with the unsavoury rodent occurs long before then, prior to the arrival of the human baby who forces her to re-evaluate her role within the family household. When it first appears, the bedraggled, shadowy creature comes as a startling contrast to the bright and colourful images that have defined Lady's idyllic existence up until now; it is an early hint as to the trouble that lies ahead. The rat represents a threat to the conservative middle class values that the film is concerned with upholding; elsewhere in the story, the Siamese cats and the uncollared dogs pose their own kind of threats to the established order, but it is the rat that launches its attack directly where it hurts, by going for the soft centre of everything this order holds precious and sacred, and gravitating almost uncannily toward the crib of Jim Dear and Darling's baby. Unlike the other animals in the film (dogs, cats and beavers included), the rat does not possess the gift of the gab, for is more a symbol than it is a character, an embodiment of suburban America's darkest nightmares as it stealthily infiltrates the family home and threatens to rip all sense of safety and security to shreds. The rat is the ultimate outsider, the distasteful nonconformist whose very existence these white-bread bourgies would sooner shut out and ignore but who has found its way in anyway. That such horror could be conveyed through an animal of such tiny stature no doubt made it all the more potent to audiences back in 1955.
The rat in "Night of The Rat" serves a similar purpose, the major difference being that this particular rodent is not in the business of going where she is not invited. Here, the white-bread banality of suburban America, far from being emblematic of a pristine, perfectly-maintained social order, is depicted as symptomatic of its complacency and vapidness. Crucially, the couple of this particular cautionary tale are not the loving, idyllic Jim Dear and Darling; the family patriarch, Steven Houston (Richard Masur), is an avaricious businessman eager to get in on the yuppie reign that was sweeping 1980s America, to the point that he has distanced himself, both physically and emotionally, from wife Clair (Veronica Cartwright) and daughter Brooke (Bridgette Andersen). Steven prioritises the acquisition of material wealth over the welfare of his family, as is made clear when Clair shares her suspicions that the house may have a rodent problem, and he forbids her to hire an exterminator on the grounds that having a swimming pool installed would be a better use of their money. Recalling Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982) in its condemnation of the materialistic values of 1980s America, "Night of The Rat" offers an almost immediate inversion on one of the key ideas presented in Lady and The Tramp - namely, that the family home is a place of purity, to be preserved and protected from foreign encroachment in the form of rats and Siamese cats. Here there is the sense that the family home, decked to the brim with fashionable luxuries, has become a danger in itself, a hotbed of contaminants that are slowly poisoning the very unit it purports to uphold. Banality has given way to apathy, and to a culture of unquestioning consumption in which no one cares to ponder what they are letting into their houses, or even their own bodies. This is best encapsulated in an early breakfast table exchange between Clair and Brooke, in which the latter, reading from a cereal box, asks her mother what pyridoxine hydrochloride is, and receives the response, "God knows." "Am I eating it?" asks an unsettled Brooke. There is actually nothing amazingly sinister about pyridoxine hydrochloride, which is a form of the vitamin B6, but the resigned indifference of Clair's response to her daughter's inquisitive concerns about the unknown substances that make it daily onto the family dining table is telling of the general nonchalance that defines the family's consumerist lives. It is hinted that this culture based on the accumulation of domestic debris is precisely what has attracted the rat into their house - to that end, the rat is right at home among the garbage of modern life. And yet the rat functions as the antithesis of of the family's materialism; when she brings her reign of destruction upon their abode, biting through cables and tearing down furniture, she exposes their fortress of material comforts for the facade that it is. The rat is effectively Mother Nature, come to feed these complacent suburbanites a bitter reality sandwich and remind them that they are still a part of the wider world.
The (rat) race is on! Bart Hughes (Peter Weller) may have bitten off more than he can chew in Of Unknown Origin (1983).
You've no doubt heard that old adage about how the average human is never more than 6ft away from a rat. It is typically spoken with the intention of unsettling people (although I keep pet rats and am at my happiest when there is no distance between myself and my rats, so I am totally unfazed by the suggestion), but it also functions as a sobering rebuttal to our assumption that we have successfully divorced and removed ourselves from the rest of the natural world. No matter how far have we attempted to distance ourselves from nature, the rat has always insisted on following us and making itself right at home in our shadow. Rats, much like humans, are enormously adaptable animals, and the rat's ability to thrive in just about every environ that we are capable of erecting is a reminder that we do not have complete control of our urbanised kingdoms (the threat of infestation, be it from rats, snakes or insects, is one of the most common motifs of the human nightmare, as it signifies the loss of control of one's personal space). There are few other creatures with whom humankind shares such a close and uneasy relationship (the cockroach being one of those few), and the success of the rat in the human-modified world only accentuates the high number of species that haven't been nearly so fortunate, instilling us with a sense of guilt as to the wider impact that our resource-guzzling habits have had upon the planet. More troubling still is the rat's ability to profit from some of the more distasteful aspects of our culture (eg: our extreme wastefulness), which comes as an unwelcome reminder of the wealth of filth and disposal that underlies our ostensibly spotless existences. This notion of the rat and the human being kindred, if oppositional spirits was used as the basis for another film from from the class of '83 - George P. Cosmotos's Of Unknown Origin, in which Peter Weller plays a businessman who is effectively driven to madness by his personal vendetta with the rat that has taken up residence within his walls. The rat remains the enemy, but unlike Lady and The Tramp, where the rat is nothing more than a foreign interloper, Of Unknown Origin regards Weller and his rodent nemesis as worthy adversaries competing in the very same rat race, with the suggestion that a part of humankind's animosity toward our sewer-dwelling neighbours stems from the unease of seeing just a little too much of our own natures reflected back at us for comfort.
The Houston family live in an environment where the closest they would ordinarily get to nature is through their pet cat, Rosie. Veronica Cartwright is best known for playing Lambert in Ridley Scott's game-changing space horror Alien (1979), so it seems only fitting that Rosie should bear a (non-coincidental?) resemblance to Jones, the skulking ginger tabby who survives his encounters with the invasive Xenomorph in Scott's film. Cat lovers are cautioned that, here, Rosie doesn't fare nearly so well. Rosie's meets a (mostly) off-screen but clearly very brutal end when she walks into the basement where the giant rat has taken up residence; prior to her untimely demise, Rosie's role is evocative of that assumed by Lady in acting as a guardian to the youngest member of the household. (Actually, I would have preferred it if Rosie was a dog, ideally a cocker spaniel, as that would make the Lady and The Tramp allusions all the more salient, but I suppose a cat is fitting as the more traditional enemy of all things murine. Besides, I suspect there is an assumption among movie executives that audiences respond more negatively to dog deaths than to cat deaths - look up Danny DeVito's The War of The Roses (1989) for an example of this double standard.) Early on in the segment, we see the cat in Brooke's bedroom, lying beside the sleeping child in a state of alertness which suggests that she is keeping watch (in that sense, the film anticipates the aforementioned anthology Cat's Eye, which concludes with a story about a plucky feline defending a small girl from the gremlin lurking within her bedroom walls). Like Lady, the cat possesses an attunement to the rodent encroachment that the humans initially do not, but her compulsion to confront those dangers head-on, like Tramp, does not here go in her favour. The death of the family pet serves as a terrible disturbance, not least because of the great source of comfort and security that the cat has evidently brought to Brooke in her otherwise indifferent world; in fact, in the absence of a strong sense of family unity the most tender displays of affection within the household are those expressed by Brooke toward Rosie. The relationship between Brooke and Rosie, and the parents' inability to settle their daughter's malaise or to confront her with the reality of what has become of her beloved cat, recalls the similar scenario with Ellie and Church of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, which was published in the same year. The pervasiveness of death within the fabric of everyday life, one of the central themes of King's book, is perhaps the harshest reminder that we remain fundamentally connected to nature, for death is nature's way and there is no hiding from it, even behind the floral patterned walls of our suburban homes. Clair discovers Rosie's mangled body, but chooses to conceal the truth from Brooke, which only fuels her daughter's malaise further. Steven's off-hand suggestion that they get Brooke a new cat seems less like a means of renewal than it does a facet of his detached, consumerist mentality; the idea that everything can fixed with further acquisition, while the underlying concerns of both his wife and daughter go unaddressed.
Steven's response to the rodent invasion, in lieu of calling in a professional exterminator, is to set up his own trap. When this successfully kills a (regular-sized) rat, he considers the problem solved and disappears yet again, leaving his family to fend for themselves. Eventually, the havoc becomes so overwhelming that Clair is prompted to go against her husband's orders and consults an eccentric exterminator (Albert Hague), who advises that Steven may have unwittingly brought the curse of Das Teufel Nagetier (The Devil Rodent) upon his family. This legendary rodent is reputed to bring pestilence to wicked individuals, although the exterminator is vague as to what crimes Steven might have committed to warrant the wrath of a giant rat. Steven may be the one who has inadvertently willed the rat into their property and yet, much like the rat from Lady and The Tramp, this rodent of unusual size attacks the family in its most vulnerable spot, by directing its fury at Brooke. There is a scene in which Brooke goes to her bedroom to find that nearly all of her toys have been violently slashed and ripped apart (in a mordant bit of humour, we see that Brooke's toy rat has been spared in this plush massacre - significantly, the toy rat wears a bonnet and a dress and is clasping a stirring spoon, which gives us a clue as to the rat's maternal intentions). The destruction dealt to Brooke's property and to her beloved cat are attacks on the sense of security the already uneasy child feels within her home, but more importantly they serve to expose the failures of both of her parents to provide adequate protection, both physically and emotionally.
And yet, the final confrontation between the family and the rat reveals a twist that puts Steven to shame in a most unexpected way - that is, the rat transpires to be a more dedicated parent than he. It turns out that the rat's motivations have been rooted in maternal instinct, for the rat killed by Steven earlier the film, which now lies bagged and buried in the family's trash can, was the child of Das Teufel Nagetier and she has come to retrieve it. By contrast, Steven's initial response during the confrontation - to come at the rat with a shotgun - serves only to put his daughter in even graver danger, for the rat has positioned herself between Brooke and her parents, and Steven's erratic firing, as Clair is at pains to point out, comes at the risk of blasting Brooke to smithereens. Where traditional macho heroics threaten to make the situation all the more virulent, it is, surprisingly, a display of empathy that diffuses this hair-raising stand-off, for Brooke becomes attuned to the rat's intentions, and implores her father to return the dead one. Steven complies, although his impulsive inclination toward foolhardy self-destructiveness again rears its head as the rat moves away from Brooke and toward her dead offspring; Steven raises his gun at the preoccupied rat, thus coming dangerously close to destroying the possibility of a truce between the two warring families, but Brooke convinces him to let her be. As Das Teufel Nagetier slinks out of the bedroom window and away into the night, it leaves the Houston family, Steven included, huddled together in an emotional heap. Far from destroying the family unit, as its Disney counterpart seeks to do, Das Teufel Nagetier has (her brutal slaying of Rosie notwithstanding) succeeded in reinforcing it by the end of the film. "Night of The Rat" goes a step further than Of Unknown Origin, which suggests that man and rat are basically the same beast in different skins, by bestowing the monstrous rodent with a kind of purity that underscores the materialistic Steven's negligent attitude toward his own offspring. The film ends on a hopeful note, with the possibility of a co-existence between the suburbanite and the lifeforms eking out an existence within his shadow - although Brooke's final line, "Where do you think she's going next?", coupled with one final shot of the street outside stretching off into a nocturnal abyss, implies that there are plenty of identical scenarios all across Reagan's America, and that Das Teufel Nagetier could be restless for a while yet.
The Mother Load: Brooke (Bridgette Andersen) comes face-to-face with a rodent of unusual size in the climax of "Night of The Rat".
Finally, I couldn't close off this commentary on "Night of The Rat" without tipping my hat to the film's special effects. They are...well, they're something else entirely. In some shots, the rat is clearly a close-up of a wonky taxidermy job, in other shots we see a real rat that has been green screened, unconvincingly, into the family's bedroom. It goes without saying that if you have trouble suspending your disbelief, or if you require your visual effects to have the vaguest semblance of realism, then "Night of The Rat" may not be the horror for you. If, on the other hand, you like your effects to be as strange and delightfully hokey-looking as possible, then I think you will eat this up. In the Blu-ray commentary by Nathaniel Thompson of Mondo Digital, he comments, with some validity, that "Night of The Rat" is a good story that is ultimately let down somewhat by its creaky, TV-budget visuals of the final sequence, and proposes that a more effective approach would have been to have used a Jim Henson-type puppet during the final confrontation. Overall, I would have to disagree. The fact that Das Teufel Nagetier is played by a real rat (however blatant it is that the rodent in question was never actually on the set), gives it a living, breathing presence that contributes enormously to the surprising emotional resonance of that final sequence. Besides, there's a tremendous charm in its silliness. That climax may look ropy as sin, but I'm not convinced I would have "Night of The Rat" any other way.
Next up in rat horror - how about we look to television, and to the Night Gallery episode, "The Nature of The Enemy"? It was penned by the master of shadow and substance himself, Rod Serling!
* Nancy later had her revenge in The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror II", where Bart had acquired Anthony's powers.
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