Check the Gate!
A good friend stopped by my job a few days ago and let me know his father – at whom I'd nodded once in passing, and nothing more – had died. There's a lot more story here that's not mine to tell, but one of the little details is that the man, not a film industry careerist by any stretch of the imagination, had worked in some capacity on The Gate when my friend was a tyke, and assisted in at least the waterbed setup from Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, possibly among a few other film tasks. I don't say 'credits,' since he won't show up in the credits roll for either flick, but I like to think of this as worth taking a moment's pause to consider the low-end effects techs, not to mention the carpenters, guys in charge of electrical tape, and on down the line.
(Neither do I want to be overly romantic. My very limited experiences when I thought I wanted to work on movie sets led me to be at least a little at odds with the "team effort" idea that it's so easy to praise in any well-intentioned rebuttal of auteur theory. When you show up on a set and nobody can find you script pages or be bothered about script pages, because they're only unionized to adjust lighting stands, it takes some of the charm out of it.)
I caught The Gate repeatedly – both in its entirety and piecemeal – from time to time back when it was an HBO staple, and I was young enough that I might later have ascribed my love of it to being roughly in the right demographic. Capturing a kid's imagination is a different matter from impressing a jaded connoisseur, and going back a couple of decades later to a childhood favorite can be a risky business if you want to preserve your memories. (The Neverending Story is awful, as it turns out.) I wasn't sure if I wanted to risk my very fond recollections of The Gate, but the evening I got the news, I settled in for a Gate revival in tribute.
The Gate is still a wonderful movie. I don't mean "still" as in "despite my grousing," I mean "still" as in: twenty years later already? There's a tricky line between "horror movie for kids" and "horror movie with kids," and The Gate incorporates good stuff from both types. It's not watered-down – there are some creepy bits that are pretty scary for children (my younger self can attest to that), but it's not too extreme. The Gate manages to span the interest of children and adults not just by recasting teen victims as children instead, but buy addressing issues of youth and adolescence. Al begs their parents to leave them for three whole days without a babysitter (Glen equivocates, jokingly but tellingly), but their reasons don't pan out. Al ("Quit calling me Al, my name is Alexandra") can't work things out with her would-be boyfriend ("She's just not ready for me," he boasts), and Glen soon wishes aloud that the babysitter were there after all. It's one of the movie's more revealing moments: obviously Mrs. Van De Grift is unlikely to be of much use against encroaching demonic forces, but Glen's wish is merely to be relieved of the independence he wasn't sure he wanted in the first place. Terry, through the loss of one parent and the unavailability of the other, has more independence than he knows what to do with.
Timelessness in kid-horror comes from universal themes and familiar moments, not from watering down standard horror for the youth set, but by making flicks about childhood and growing up, by knowing that the differences between literal and metaphorical horrors are still being sussed out during those formative years. The films that blur these boundaries are the ones at the apex of the tradition, and they don't air on the Disney channel: The Reflecting Skin, Afraid of the Dark, Wendigo, Paperhouse.
I can't give the more objective, useful assessment of whether The Gate works if your first viewing is as an adult. Kid-horror often has a limited window of impact. If you don't get to it by the early teens, it won't work for you, but if it gets to you as an impressionable 9-year-old, you'll swear by it indefinitely (as long as you don't get curious and pop it in at 29). I can only assume this is why people still tell me to watch Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and why I can't imagine any impetus to do so.
Gate director Tibor Takács directed the mostly-forgotten I, Madman before bringing Louis Tripp back as Terry (now 'Terrence,' please, an echo of the older 'Alexandra') for The Gate II: Trespassers (sometimes The Gate II: Return to the Nightmare). It's not in the same league as the first, but it's pretty watchable, and seeing the kid from the first flick (not Stephen Dorff, the other one) as a gangly teen has a definite resonance, given the first film's look at adolescence.
There's been a remake in the works, or a semi-remake possibly – one working title was The Gate: 20 Years Later, indicating a semi-sequel. Since The Gate was released in 1987, that boat has long since sailed, but script content was never public enough to determine whether it was sequel or remake. The project had been in the directorial hands of Randy Cook (now 'Randall William Cook,' please), the main effects man on the original, and in the meantime Academy-awarded for work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Cook recently told an interviewer at a Fright Night appearance that the script was terrible and that producers weren't willing to let him fix it up. He's no longer involved, and the smart money is on the idea fading out.
(Cook had one of his very few acting roles as the titular madman of I, Madman, a comfy little rainy-night pulp thriller released in 1989 to very little notice – though the trailer stuck with me until I finally got around to renting it years later. What a thrill to act opposite your own special-effect creations, and how Frankensteinian to do it in a horror flick involving a stitched-together face!)
Tibor Takács is now on Sci-Fi Channel monster duty, where's he directed probably the three best-titled flicks of the last three years:
Takács: "It has a lot of good will, so to speak. People look on it favorably. I’m not a big fan of remakes but they happen all the time."
(Neither do I want to be overly romantic. My very limited experiences when I thought I wanted to work on movie sets led me to be at least a little at odds with the "team effort" idea that it's so easy to praise in any well-intentioned rebuttal of auteur theory. When you show up on a set and nobody can find you script pages or be bothered about script pages, because they're only unionized to adjust lighting stands, it takes some of the charm out of it.)
I caught The Gate repeatedly – both in its entirety and piecemeal – from time to time back when it was an HBO staple, and I was young enough that I might later have ascribed my love of it to being roughly in the right demographic. Capturing a kid's imagination is a different matter from impressing a jaded connoisseur, and going back a couple of decades later to a childhood favorite can be a risky business if you want to preserve your memories. (The Neverending Story is awful, as it turns out.) I wasn't sure if I wanted to risk my very fond recollections of The Gate, but the evening I got the news, I settled in for a Gate revival in tribute.The Gate is still a wonderful movie. I don't mean "still" as in "despite my grousing," I mean "still" as in: twenty years later already? There's a tricky line between "horror movie for kids" and "horror movie with kids," and The Gate incorporates good stuff from both types. It's not watered-down – there are some creepy bits that are pretty scary for children (my younger self can attest to that), but it's not too extreme. The Gate manages to span the interest of children and adults not just by recasting teen victims as children instead, but buy addressing issues of youth and adolescence. Al begs their parents to leave them for three whole days without a babysitter (Glen equivocates, jokingly but tellingly), but their reasons don't pan out. Al ("Quit calling me Al, my name is Alexandra") can't work things out with her would-be boyfriend ("She's just not ready for me," he boasts), and Glen soon wishes aloud that the babysitter were there after all. It's one of the movie's more revealing moments: obviously Mrs. Van De Grift is unlikely to be of much use against encroaching demonic forces, but Glen's wish is merely to be relieved of the independence he wasn't sure he wanted in the first place. Terry, through the loss of one parent and the unavailability of the other, has more independence than he knows what to do with.
Timelessness in kid-horror comes from universal themes and familiar moments, not from watering down standard horror for the youth set, but by making flicks about childhood and growing up, by knowing that the differences between literal and metaphorical horrors are still being sussed out during those formative years. The films that blur these boundaries are the ones at the apex of the tradition, and they don't air on the Disney channel: The Reflecting Skin, Afraid of the Dark, Wendigo, Paperhouse.
I can't give the more objective, useful assessment of whether The Gate works if your first viewing is as an adult. Kid-horror often has a limited window of impact. If you don't get to it by the early teens, it won't work for you, but if it gets to you as an impressionable 9-year-old, you'll swear by it indefinitely (as long as you don't get curious and pop it in at 29). I can only assume this is why people still tell me to watch Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and why I can't imagine any impetus to do so.
Gate director Tibor Takács directed the mostly-forgotten I, Madman before bringing Louis Tripp back as Terry (now 'Terrence,' please, an echo of the older 'Alexandra') for The Gate II: Trespassers (sometimes The Gate II: Return to the Nightmare). It's not in the same league as the first, but it's pretty watchable, and seeing the kid from the first flick (not Stephen Dorff, the other one) as a gangly teen has a definite resonance, given the first film's look at adolescence.There's been a remake in the works, or a semi-remake possibly – one working title was The Gate: 20 Years Later, indicating a semi-sequel. Since The Gate was released in 1987, that boat has long since sailed, but script content was never public enough to determine whether it was sequel or remake. The project had been in the directorial hands of Randy Cook (now 'Randall William Cook,' please), the main effects man on the original, and in the meantime Academy-awarded for work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Cook recently told an interviewer at a Fright Night appearance that the script was terrible and that producers weren't willing to let him fix it up. He's no longer involved, and the smart money is on the idea fading out.
(Cook had one of his very few acting roles as the titular madman of I, Madman, a comfy little rainy-night pulp thriller released in 1989 to very little notice – though the trailer stuck with me until I finally got around to renting it years later. What a thrill to act opposite your own special-effect creations, and how Frankensteinian to do it in a horror flick involving a stitched-together face!)Tibor Takács is now on Sci-Fi Channel monster duty, where's he directed probably the three best-titled flicks of the last three years:
Takács: "It has a lot of good will, so to speak. People look on it favorably. I’m not a big fan of remakes but they happen all the time."
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Labels: i madman, the gate, tibor takács
