An appreciation by Matt Finley
In a recent discussion with friends
about where middle school-aged boys got their hairy palms on
pornography prior to the Internet’s omni-present maelstrom of
digital perversions, older members of the group almost unanimously
cited (along with brothers, friends’ dads, etc.) the woods. Imagine
it: a half century of pre-adolescent American snot-noses scrutinizing
thousands of dirt-sullied, water-damaged girlie mags willed to the
elements by some triumphant, porn-flinging folk hero (I call him
Seedy Applejohn).
It’s this method of discovery –
unexpected, clandestine, half-buried in red-orange October leaves –
that I recommend for every young, first-time viewer of THE GATE.
Kids will be forcibly sat in front of THE WIZARD OF OZ, and
enthusiastically handed E.T. and STAR WARS, but, like
the moldering centerfolds unevenly ripped below naked thighs, THE
GATE is something they should discover on their own.
The title refers to a trans-dimensional
doorway between our world and an ancient dimension of infinitely
powerful nightmare spawn... A sort of Lovecraftian void full of
incomprehensible and infinitely powerful elder beings. With his
parents away for the weekend and his older sister carousing with her
high school friends, dweeby Glen (fun-size Stephen Dorff!) and his
bespectacled buddy, Terry, play a heavy metal album backwards,
accidentally opening said gate and spilling a bevy of dark magic and
magnificent stop-motion grotesqueries into their otherwise quiet
suburban idyll.
If E.T. is an affirmation of
childhood innocence and wonderment, THE GATE is a celebration
of pre-pubescent mischief and, conversely, the single, solitary
moment in which any of our childhood selves first comprehended, with
heart-plummeting terror, the unreality of our perceived
invincibility – the bicycle-jack-knifing, monkey bar-plummeting
truth that we are fragile beings in a chaotic world .
To watch the film now, as an
adult, is to enjoy a delightful relic of the late ‘80s (1987 to be
precise) – it’s sort of THE GOONIES meets THE EVIL
DEAD. It offers ‘80s horror standards like cheesy
Satanic metal band Sacrafix and some slang-drenched dialogue, but
also boasts a captivating, dreamlike narrative. And, for a b-horror
flick, the creature effects are off the chain - hordes of stop-motion
imps (and one climactic mega-demon) delightfully inspired by the work
of late Ray Harryhausen.
To watch the film as a 12-year-old
suburban kid (as I did, complete with regular commercial
interruptions on Sunday afternoon TV) is to recognize a swiftly
tilting landscape comprising not only the most thrilling and
innocuous accessories of youth – captured bugs, geodes, model
rockets, slumber parties – but also the encroaching mysteries of
full teenage immaturity and the shadows of adulthood.
I could bluster on about the film’s
coming-of age ramifications and tag all the scrabbling night-beasts
as toothed and fanged metaphors, creeping interlopers in the
borderlands of innocence... But that crap doesn’t mean jack to a
kid. Those scrabbling night-beasts aren’t thematic devices…
they’re every half-glimpsed shadow in the yard, every scrape inside
the wall.
Watching the movie now, it’s fun to
think about how many bizarrely occult superstitions and horrific
urban legends came part and parcel with childhood. THE GATE
references a few: satanic verse bellowed from the vinyl grooves of a
backwards-played record; an unsettlingly successful game of
Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board; the threepeated suburban
shocker about the ill-fated construction worker killed and then
concealed behind McMansion drywall. And it’s fantastic at
depicting these urban legends from the perspective of children, who
embrace the rituals and lore knowing they aren’t true, but fearing
them just the same because, well, what if they are?
The realization of these cul de sac
penny dreadfuls – explained, plot-wise, as signs that the gate’s
top will pop – are paired with truer devastations of youth. Terry’s
retreat into the dark and mystical metal of Sacrafix has everything
to do with the recent death of his mom, while the opening of the gate
is preceded by a much more banal tragedy: the death of Glen’s
family dog. There’s an even more revelatory moment in which the
Christianianty imposed upon Terry by his parents proves useless
against the encircling darkness.
Certainly, themes of mortality and the
efficacy of faith are inherent to the horror genre, but to pair them
so directly with the fictions of youth, to suggest that childhood
epiphanies of biological mortality and spiritual curiosity come
naturally paired with the bloodcurdling fictions, urban and
otherwise, that are whispered across playgrounds, is gorgeously
perceptive. Because whether a result of a desperate belief in some
supernatural afterlife, a bid to create monsters larger than the
looming specters of death and despair, or an attempt to build linear
storybook narrative out of otherwise dizzyingly complex and untenable
concepts, the connection is hard to deny. We’ve all lived our own
graceful, harrowing version of it.
Maybe it’s just the sickly tendrils
of nostalgia working at my brain, or maybe it is because my
first viewing of the film was unhindered by expectation and
unsanctioned by any elder or authority figure, but I think THE
GATE really understands kids on their own terms, while never
shying away from scaring them (or, at the very least, me) senseless.
So, yeah. I'm gonna start buying up
copies of this thing and chucking them out into the porn-littered
shrubbery. Road trip, anyone?
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