Is there anything out there that taps quite so profoundly, and so inexplicably, into the dark recesses of childhood fear and uneasy nostalgia than an oddly-designed corporate logo? Far more terrifying than the monsters dwelling in your closet were the faceless monsters in your TV set that appeared at the end of certain shows and communicated their desire to tear your soul from your body through a tinny, screechy little burst of cheaply-produced audio. At the forefront of this phenomenon are the Unholy Trinity - Viacom's "V of Doom", Paramount's "Closet Killer" and, last but not least, Screen Gems' "S From Hell", but it's a terror that's spanned across multiple generations, and I suspect that most of us can recall a media logo that left us royally unsettled in our childhoods. In my case, I recall feeling, if not fear, then immense confusion at that DIC "Kid in Bed" logo that popped up at the end of my Sylvanian Families VHS tape. At age six I was apparently savvy enough to know that "dick" was one of those words that adults really didn't like you saying, so I was greatly perplexed that this innocuous cartoon about fuzzy woodland animals seemed to want to imprint it upon me by flashing up a spelling variation in large bright letters and having a disembodied young voice cry out "DICK!" (and yes, I know that technically it's pronounced "deek", but "dick" is what I invariably heard).
This irrational fear of corporate images is now popularly known as "logophobia" (if you can excuse the hijacking of the established term for an altogether separate phobia, the fear of words), and holds an odd captivation among hordes of online logo buffs, perhaps due to the simultaneous buttons it pushes both for simple childhood nostalgia and for the deeper, more inexplicable Pavlovian urges which have us welling up in terror when confronted by the demons of our TV-watching past. Rodney Ascher's short documentary The S From Hell is a lovingly-crafted tribute to the strange and alluring world of the logophobe, examining the phenomenon by focusing exclusively on one of those aforementioned demons; the Screen Gems logo that first appeared in 1964, combining primitive animation with the cheapest, nastiest and now most deliciously iconic synthesized melody one could imagine. Ascher's film was screened at multiple film festivals, including Sundance Film Festival in 2010, keeping the spirit of The Personification of All Things Evil well alive into the 21st century.
The synopsis on the film's official website sets out its mission statement thus:
"Not an exhaustive historical documentary, THE S FROM HELL is a subjective film whose aim is make the audience feel the same fear and confusion as the children who were first confronted by the vexing, unfolding sights and mournful, dissonant sounds that hid in the cracks between their favorite TV shows."
Indeed, the purpose of The S From Hell is not to provide any kind of in-depth look at the history of Screen Gems, or of the logo itself (beyond the very brief context presented at the beginning of the film), or to form any kind of convincing argument as to how something so mundane (if rather crudely-designed) could inspire such intense feelings of dread in such a high proportion of young viewers, but rather to recreate something of that irrational fear by incorporating it into the lexicon and iconography of horror cinema. What we essentially have are a tiny collection of anecdotes from people who can recall that, as young children, they were absolutely terrified of that television logo that used to pop up at the end of Bewitched, for reasons that they've never quite been able to rationalise (although some do here take a crack at it - one interviewee speculates that her childhood fear of The S was rooted in an unconscious recognition of the logo's resemblance to a radiation warning sign, while another observes that the dot in the middle looks as if it's being devoured by the two parallelograms). Ascher takes their experiences to altogether more disturbing heights by filtering them through a dislocating mishmash of archive footage, old cartoons and, in one particularly tongue-in-cheek case, a modified extract from Halloween III: Season of the Witch. The film then looks at how The S became interwoven into the wider landscape of childhood terror - you could flee and take cover behind your couch whenever the end-credits of The Flinstones were rolling, but were there other, more invasive ways in which The S could seek you out and threaten to have its wicked way with you? These range from one interviewee recollecting how his sister used to torment him by pinning him down and chanting "Screen Gems" over and over to another who recalls a nightmare in which she was chased by The S (albeit incorrectly-coloured, which the interviewee attributes to her subconscious trying to shield her from the full extent of the evil). This is all accompanied by an electronic soundtrack which, while nowhere near as memorably nasty as something Eric Siday might have composed, keeps the tone of the film consistently eerie throughout.
Ascher's approach in combining the documentary format with more playful and subjective representations of the matter in question (for which he has cited the late 70s conspiracy theory/paranormal phenomenon TV series In Search Of... as a key inspiration) tends to be quite divisive, if the mixed reaction to this film, and to his feature documentary Room 237 (2012), a collection of assorted ramblings on the "hidden meanings" that various individuals claim to have unlocked in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, is any indication. His tone, tongue-in-cheek while being genuinely spooky, convoluted without being particularly in-depth and, above all, appearing to deliberately shy away from offering up any more obvious meaningful observation than, "Well, this sure is strange, is it not?", seems to thrill the pants off some viewers while getting messily stuck in the craws of others. Figuring out what, if anything, Ascher intends to say beneath the winding trail of muffled monologues and archive footage can be a struggle in itself - I've seen numerous viewers dismiss Room 237 on the grounds that, "the director can't possibly expect us to take any of these oddballs seriously, can he?" while others defend it as a satire on the kind of obsessive tunnel vision that enables people to construct such bizarre and unlikely theories - the joke is on the theorists and those who might be inclined to take them seriously, in other words. I'd say they're only half-right. Myself, I doubt that Room 237 intends for us to walk away wholly convinced that any of the readings therein accurately reflect Kubrick's intentions, no matter how enthusiastic or insistent the proponent might be, or necessarily even suspecting that any of them contain any essence of genuine merit, although it undoubtedly intends for us to be a little weirded out by the oddities and coincidences identified throughout. For Ascher, one suspects, being weirded out is half the joy of being alive. And, certainly, I think that Room 237 wants us to marvel at the observational skills of these seeming fanatics, and to genuinely enjoy getting caught up in their idiosyncratic ways of thinking, even when our skepticism alarm bells are ringing at full volume. If nothing else, it's an invitation to view The Shining a little differently for a hundred minutes or so, much as The S From Hell invites us to view an ostensibly harmless logo from the perspective of someone who lived in utter terror of it (or, alternatively, to relive those childhood phobias) for just short of nine minutes. In both cases, the allure lies in seeing the familiar through a pair of oddly-coloured novelty spectacles.
The S From Hell is only too eager to highlight the ridiculousness, from an entirely rational standpoint, that a simple television logo could have instilled such strong emotions in its viewers, and to have some fun at its expense - the clip from Halloween III and the closing imagery, illustrating how The S literally became the stuff of nightmares for at least one viewer, are dead giveaways in that regard. And yet it also recognises and respects that fear is a powerful emotion that works in mysterious ways, particularly for small children still in the process of figuring out their place in the world, and all-too-often rationality never enters into it. Above all, The S From Hell revels in highlighting this cultural curiosity, functioning best as an unabashed celebration of the fact that such paralysing horror could lurk in the most unexpected of places, and of the dark, overlooked crevices of popular culture that ultimately had a wider-reaching impact than anyone could possibly have envisioned.
As for The Personification of All Things Evil, it's actually re-emerged from the netherworld since Ascher's film debuted. Check out what it's been up to more recently:
Finally, here's the S From Hell fansite that inspired Ascher to make the film: http://jsf3.homestead.com/
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