The Town & The Eclectic Group

As I mention in the Solo Hero section, at its base lever all a horror story really needs is a Hero and a Villain. What kind of crap horror movie would that be though? Horror movies need some poor saps around to periodically get slaughtered until our Hero gets around to killing the Monster. We need a victim pool!

The Town
Horror movie settings can be cleaved into two fairly obvious lots: Public (our Hero is in civilization) and Secluded (our Hero is cut off from civilization.) The Town is the victim pool for horror movies with a Public setting. It can really be anything from a little hamlet somewhere in the country to New York City. It doesn't even have to be a city at all. It can be any kind of populated community; an army base, a prison - the key definer being that there are people at this location we never get to meet and that our Hero never interacts with but that we know are there.

Bubba Ho-tep (2002) takes place in an old-folks home, but only a handful of those old-folks are characters - it's a Town. Leviathan (1989) takes place in a deep-sea mining rig and every person working there is a character - it's an Eclectic Group. I chose 'The Town' because it sums up the overall idea of the victim pool better than 'The Community.' Sounds better too.

Back in the day a lot of horror movies were about literal towns. In 50's sci-fi/monster pics seemingly the entire population of a desert city would rally behind our Hero to defeat The Blob (1958) or the behemoth spider. In the 70's our Hero might be a cop stalking the crowded NYC streets of a Larry Cohen film, or a suburb in Halloween (1978), or both - When a Stranger Calls (1979).

Over the course of the 70's, something started to change. What Night of the Living Dead (1968) proposed, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) confirmed, and Friday the 13th (1980) signed, sealed and delivered, was that you didn't really need a budget at all if your film wouldn't require city permits and a large cast. Stick a handful of kids in a van, get'em trapped somewhere in the country and - BAM! - you can make a movie for next to nothing. Not to imply that Towns are dead and gone. They just aren't part of the indie-cheapo horror movie world that fills our video shelves.

horror movie world that fills our video shelves. The most useful purpose for the Town is a nice endless supply of random people to kill. If we only have five kids trapped in a cabin, that doesn't leave much leeway. Anytime someone dies it has to be one of those jerks (though we'll see that there are some clever ways around this.) In a Town we can randomly cut away to someone we've never seen before getting offed. Arachnophobia (1990), for some reason, always pops into my mind when I think of a horror Town (stupid youth, frying crappy movies into my brain).

Though Town movies offer more character and location possibilities, one could argue that the danger factor is watered down. A psycho killer might be stalking you? Well, go to the police. Problem solved. For this reason the Monster of a Town movie is usually threatening the entire population, like Slither (2006).

Another way around this problem is to just make one of our good guys a cop. Make it about his hunt for the Monster, or his attempt to keep our unsuspecting Hero Girl alive (He Knows Your Alone, 1980). A whole other way around all of this is to just trap our Hero in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of other idiots.

The Eclectic Group
There are two kinds of Eclectic Groups: the Random Cluster and the Mismatched Friends.

The Random Cluster
The Random Cluster differs from the Mismatched Friends in two simple ways: a) the group is made up of strangers, and b) the ages of these strangers usually vary. Some kind of disaster always immediately precedes the isolation and union of the Random Cluster. A terrible storm and a washed out road might send several cars full of people up to The Old Dark House (1932). A spaceliner might crash on an alien world (Pitch Black, 2000). Maybe the isolation in caused by all other humans being dead (28 Days Later, 2002), or maybe everyone just wakes up in a Cube (1997). How they get there rarely matters. Usually it's just a MacGuffin for our movie to ensue.

Now, obviously there's no way to define every type of character in a Random Cluster, but there are definitely common types. So many to choose from, let's see - who will be in our RC...

First off we need a Hero. Our Hero is usually a late 20's/early 30's no one. Just some chick or dude, a schoolteacher or co-pilot, a Reluctant Hero who will slowly rise to the occasion over the course of the film as everyone else dies or proves untrustworthy. Why a no one? Well, it may work on "Lost," but if our movie Hero is Dr. Amazing and good at everything, it kind of cuts back on the conflict.

Helping our Hero will be a Love Interest, who usually agrees with our Hero on some key point early in the film, thus forming their bond, and a Doomed Badass, often our Hero's strongest supporter and usually the best fighter in the group. The Doomed Badass always seems to be a black dude, paired with our white chick Hero, and man'o'man, does he love to pointlessly sacrifice himself for this chick he just met yesterday. He also seems to be played by Charles S. Dutton a lot (Alien 3, Mimic, 1992, 1997).

My personal favorite RC staple is the Unreasonable Jackass. He's the guy who always wants to do the exact opposite of what our Hero does, and often says things like, "Who put you in charge?" Not always, but often I find myself sympathizing with the UJ, especially in instances when our Hero wants to dangerously go back for a straggler and the UJ will say, "Fuck that guy! He's probably dead!" Sometimes the UJ will heroically redeem himself for being such a j-hole, like CJ (Michael Kelly) in the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), but best is when he doesn't, when he goes down swinging – and by swinging I mean being an asshole – such as Leslie Nielsen in Day of the Animals (1977). *

The UJ can be a woman, but her unreasonableness usually comes off as panicked idiocy or mania rather than selfishness; I'd call her the Stupid Bitch (Marcia Gay Harden in The Mist, 2007). To clarify, the UJ isn't just a grumpy guy and he's not evil, he's just a coward and a huge, huge asshole, and sometimes that leads him to do evil things.

Another key to the Random Cluster is the feeling that it's not that random, that each of these people serves a function. Sometimes that's part of the story (Cube) and sometimes it is just cruddy writing (80% of RC movies.) All horror movies have a Guy Who Knows Things step out of the crowd at some point; the guy who worked at the research facility the zombies came from or the novelist who is an expert on caves. That's to be expected. What is totally silly is when everyone will turn out to have a marketable skill of some sort like this is a cheesy sports comedy... I know how to build a bomb! I'm an ordained minister! I took karate when I was 12 but I guess I still remember all the moves! Sure, it makes the side characters less useless, but come on.

Rounding out our hypothetical group, let's say we have the Scared Quiet Girl (she'll go crazy or die running away), the Old Man (always dies, you know, cause he's old), the Parent and Child (the Parent will be our UJ; the child, she's just a prop), the Extra Person (dies immediately to clearly establish the parameters of the danger to the rest of the Cluster), and we can't forget the Injured Guy, holding up our group. The UJ will want to leave him behind but our Hero won't hear of it. In a zombie or vampires-as-hoard movie this is the dude who gets bit and lives, slowly turning evil (and I feel proving the UJ's jackassery correct).

A set-up variation on all this is the Assembled Cluster, which is still a random assortment of character types but they're aware from the get-go that there's a reason they're all together. Maybe they all received a mysterious invitation to a spooky house for the weekend (House on Haunted Hill, 1959/1999), or maybe a their professor selected a group of them for a weekend experiment in the woods (The Fear, 1995). It could be as simple as they work together (Leviathan again). In a sense these movies bare more similarities with Mismatched Friends…

The Mismatched Friends
The MF aren't that different from a RC, except that these people all know each other. A disaster doesn't need to precede the MF being stuck together. They do it to themselves. The MF are inevitably reopening a summer camp (Friday the 13th, 1980), going up to an empty cabin (The Evil Dead, 1981), or exploring an abandoned structure for a night of partying (Night of the Demons, 1988), cause who doesn't love abandoned structure parties?

Coinciding with the rise of Trapped-In-The-Middle-Of-Nowhere movies, the Mismatched Friends have become a horror standard since the 80's. What makes the MF so delectably rad is simply this: they're terrible friends. The fact that the Random Cluster doesn't get along makes sense. Oh, shit! Sea snakes just ate all my friends, and now I'm stuck on this out-of-gas boat with these assholes! The MF already don't get along, making the fact that they're all hanging out together kind of a logic flaw.

Begin tangent:
Starting during the Politically Correct movement, another important part of the MF has become the sore-thumb minority factor. We'll have six white kids and then a black dude or black couple or Asian kid. Nothing wrong with that on paper, but the sheer number of movies with this ratio would lead one to believe that African Americans only hang out with groups of white people. And more often than not, if you're a white dude hangin' with your Asian buddy, it is you, White Guy, and seven Koreans (hey, where's that horror movie?) Even worse is when the MF look like the rank for some line of culturally diverse Barbies. Did these kids meet at the Festival of Nations?

I really love that in Hollywood's lame and entirely marketing fueled attempt to make horror movies more 'inclusive,' all they actually achieved was making them even more racially bias by creating the now notorious cliché that black characters always die. Well done, Hollywood. Golf clap for you.

Okay, tangent done. Back on track:

Let's choose our Mismatched Friends, shall we? First we need a location for them to be going to, since all MF movies begin with our stupid teens either picking up the Hero or already in the van (inevitably drinking, smoking pot, singing a song, or all of the above.) Their destination will be...ummm...an abandoned ferryboat one of our kids has the keys to. Now we need our stupid teens (usually they're college kids, I just like calling them that.)

Again, let's start with our Hero. We can't have our Hero be too prominent in the group structure, so nix to the football captain or most popular girl in school. We also don't want the Hero to be a nerd (no one likes them.) An easy way to make the Hero stand out is to make him/her the new kid in the group. She's studying to be a doctor and her friend, the Slut, invited her along for the trip. Immediately Love Interest will notice how noticeably hot she is and come to her rescue when the Party Jock says something gross to her. "Let me help you with your bag. And don't mind Dave, he's just a jerk." Ah, hackily written young love.

Our Love Interest is always boringly charming. We'll say he's on the football team, the modest star player. He doesn't like to talk about it, but we know he set a school record because his buddy, Party Jock, loves talking about everything. The Party Jock is important to the setup of the film. The New Girl and the audience need the 411 on where these kids are going and why, and he's always the most excited about telling. "The Queen Anne! It's a ferryboat! Been abandoned for years! We're gonna do a scavenger hunt there! Party!" The Party Jock's catchphrase would probably be “WOOOOO!" Yelled whenever he feels the mood requires, which is often.

The Slut will be Party Jock's lady friend. She acts like she hates him, but once they arrive at the ferryboat they'll be the first to run off to hump. One of them will likely die while the other waits in bed, "I'm getting another beer," their romantic last exchange. The Slut's main function in the group is to be New Girl's oddly mismatched best friend in the early stages of the film before Love Interest takes her place. One of her first pieces of dialogue will showcase her sexual liberation: “God, I need to get laid." Something classy like that.

Now, one might think that our two football players would be hangin' out with their jock buddies. Wrong. That's in the real world. These are mismatched friends. The MF movies often feel like an early John Hughes film crammed into a van.

So next we add to the mix, the Sex Crazed Perv. The SCP can be in place of Party Jock, especially if our Hero is a dude. Then he becomes the Sex Crazed Sidekick. All he talks about is getting some, and never ever does. He's always coming on to the girls harassingly, eliciting comments like, "Ick. Why'd we invite him along?" Making you wonder, why did they invite him along?

The SCP is often forced to partner with the Annoying Guy. This character can go in any of many directions, as his key function is just pissing everyone else off (again, why'd they invited him?) The two basic kinds of Annoying Guy are the Wacky Dude and the Jokester. The Wacky Dude is very similar to the Party Jock, except he's not buff or cool. He's very energetic though. The video camera is a favored prop of the Wacky Dude, sometimes never leaving his hands (House of Wax, 2005). The Jokester is a singularly remarkable character, and discussed at length in his own chapter. We'll say our group has a Jokester.

Rounding out our little group will be Other Girl. Other Girl often looks annoyingly similar to one of the other female characters; Friday the 13th Part III (1982) had a particularly bad problem with this, having three girls who looked exactly the same. Other Girl's function is just to be cute, be lusted over by the SCP or the Annoying Guy, and then eventually die before she develops much of a personality.

If we want a really high body count we can add a Twosome. They could be two stoner dudes, or and a generic boyfriend and girlfriend. Doesn't matter. And what if we want even more? Our van is pretty jam packed as it is. This is where the Auxiliary Deaths come in.

An AD character is just some poor bastard that the Monster happens upon while not stalking our Mismatched Friends. Their first scene is usually their last. Sometimes the filmmakers will attempt to not make them seem so random. Maybe our AD characters are driving up in a separate vehicle and they're running a little late. We'll join them - probably looking at a map - right before they die, then our other characters will spend the rest of the movie wondering where they are. Often, as bad luck would have it, the AD's had something our Heroes need in their car: a first aid kit, gun, etc.

We got our team. Sure there's a few others we could have chosen, like the Virgin or the Unbalanced Kid. But, hey, who's to say New Girl isn't a virgin, or that Annoying Guy doesn't turn out to be unbalanced? I think we made some good selections. I wonder who will make it out of the ferryboat alive? My prediction? Love Interest will turn out to be a False Partner (see The Couple chapter) and die right before the climax. Only our sweet New Girl will survive. Of course, she'll die in the opening scene of Scary Ferry 2.

* Day of the Animals is one of the most ridiculous entries in the already ridiculous 70's Crazed Animals subgenre (see The Horde chapter), and in it Nielsen, as a j-hole ad executive (classic Unreasonable Jackass job), has quite possibly the greatest UJ character arc in film history. After being a racist prick for half the movie, Nielsen successfully leads an insurrection against our Hero, breaking our RC into two and taking his own group off in a different direction. Then within a matter of hours (hours!) he goes completely Lord of the Flies: he inexplicably stops wearing a shirt, tries to rape a member of his group, murders the girl's boyfriend when the boy attempts to prevent said rape, claims the girl is now his property and attempts to rape her again, then goes out in true gonzo-macho style by attacking a bear. That's right, HE attacks the bear. Of course, he loses.