Desert Horror
Tremors
Dust Devil
Hi hello and HAPPY OCTOBER my divine, devoted readers. As an October baby, I may be biased, but I think this is the best month of the year. The leaves begin to change color, the sunsets burn more brightly, and I am at my most confident and witchy. The veil is thinner and the air is crisper, and though every store is already pushing Christmas down our throats, I cling on to Halloween with all my might. This October has FIVE Thursdays, and as someone who was born on an October Thursday, who watches double features and writes about them every Thursday, this is a momentous occurrence. And to distract my aging body and brain from the oncoming doom of turning 🪦30🪦, let’s fill the month with all the horror movies we can! There are a multitude of mythic, mysterious, frightening things in this world—some tangible, some purely existential, many of which are naturally-occurring. There is the ever-expansive and dangerously deep ocean and the consistently-confounding landscape of outer space, but tonight I want to focus on another organically terrifying natural phenomenon, the desolate, daunting, deadly desert. A desert is any large area of dry land that typically experiences less than 10 inches of rain annually, and about 33% of planet Earth is comprised of them. There are also coastal deserts and polar deserts—the Gobi desert in Asia and the deserts of Antarctica fit this bill—but I am, personally, most terrified of the classic, arid, sun-scorched deserts that are completely deprived of moisture and humanity. Growing up in the most metropolitan areas of the South, I’ve never really been exposed to the deserts that are geographically closest to me, but on searing, 100+ degree days where the ground singes your shoes and the sky melts into a thick, choking smog, even a lonely, empty parking lot can feel like a desert. I’ve explored some desert horror films on this blog before, like Punishment Park, Revenge, Near Dark, Detour, Badlands, Duel, A Boy and His Dog, even Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but I’m also a big fan of desert horrors like The Bad Batch, Nocturnal Animals, Wolf Creek, It Stains the Sands Red, and No Country for Old Men. I am frightened of the mere thought of being lost in a desert, which is why my Australian horror double feature particularly disturbed me, and why the increasingly unignorable reality of global warming gives me nightmares. I can’t even romanticize the heat the way summer romances try to, because I’m simply too high maintenance to endure the heat without any air-conditioned respite. Beasts and boogeymen are unsettling, but to be planted in the isolated nothingness of the desert, that’s enough of a horror premise for me. So, as the stubbornly hot temperatures persist, let’s explore two horror films that set their terrifying scenes in the desert—where the potential for death and decay and doom is endless.
Let’s begin with a film I technically saw as a small child, but have zero recollection of beyond scream king Kevin Bacon’s memorable presence, this is Ron Underwood’s directorial debut from 1990: Tremors. Tremors transports us to the isolated fictional town of Perfection, Nevada (population: 14), where two handymen, Valentine “Val” McKee (Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) have had just about enough of their dirty job(s). Even the new addition of a young college gal named Rhonda (Finn Carter), who is there studying seismology, doesn’t excite Val, and after one-too-many bullshit gigs cleaning septic tanks, the two business partners decide to pack up all of their belongings and move to Bixby. On their way out of town, though, they spot something troubling: a resident named Edgar Deems is sitting high up on an electrical tower, silent and completely exposed to the sun. Edgar is dead, and has likely been dead for days, but what made Edgar climb up that tower and stay there? Just a little further down the road, the two spot another disturbing sight: a herd of dead sheep. And the only thing left of the shepherd is his severed head. Worried there’s a serial killer on the loose, Val and Earl head back to Perfection to warn their neighbors and alert the authorities, but the phone lines are dead. And to make matters even stranger, Val and Earl find a dead, worm-like creature wrapped around their truck’s rear axle. Rhonda the college student told the handymen there had been some odd seismic recordings as of late, and what the entire town of Perfection soon finds out is that there isn’t a serial killer stalking this small town, but several gigantic, subterranean, bloodthirsty worm creatures that attack from beneath the earth. “We decided to leave this place just one damn day too late” Val laments, as the handful of humans occupying this land band together and try their best to survive and defeat these monsters. The origin of these “Graboids”, as they are dubbed by one of the townsfolk, are unknown, but as we swiftly learn, they are fast, intelligent, and have an insatiable appetite that even the local gun-loving doomsday preppers, played by Michael Gross and Reba McEntire, aren’t unprepared for. What is so frightening about the Grabroids, apart from their large, grotesque, smelly, ooze-filled appearance, is the fact that they are such fast learners, and easily adapt to the wiles and guiles of the citizens of Perfection. The only thing scarier than a vast, relentlessly hot desert, is the possibility that there might be deadly creatures lurking just beneath your feet, and I have Tremors to thank for this imaginative addition to my eremophobia. Tremors was conceived as a modern variation on 1950s monster films, but writer S.S. Wilson dreamed up this specific idea while working as a film editor at a naval base in the Mojave Desert, and imagining being stranded on a rock while a creature moved beneath the ground. Every bit of this film was hand-constructed and filmed practically, from the Graboids to the town of Perfection as a whole, which gives the film a more realistic feel. The small town protagonists added to this realism as well, as there were no brave, renegade, movie-ready heroes to be found, just regular people trying to survive in an already impossible terrain. Tremors was even more fun than I’d remembered. It’s a hilarious, genuinely thrilling creature feature full of impressive stunts and memorably freaky moments. All of the love and physical labor put into this movie is palpable, and it’s no surprise that this film eventually became a cult classic that spawned six sequels and a TV show. Tremors is the kind of movie I could watch over and over again, and now that I’ve properly revisited it, I think the Graboids and Kevin Bacon’s tight little butt will be mainstays in my Halloween comfort watches.
Less comforting and far more freaky was tonight’s next film, a film I’ve been wanting to see since I learned about its potentially cursed director, this is Richard Stanley’s 1992 film Dust Devil. You may know Richard Stanley as the original director of the ill-fated and highly-maligned The Island of Doctor Moreau film from 1996, but since that film was taken from him by John Frankenheimer, it is more likely that you’ve never heard of him. Before his career was halted by the cursed production of Doctor Moreau, Richard Stanley directed music videos, a sci-fi horror called Hardware, and the puzzlingly petrifying hidden gem known as Dust Devil. Inspired by a series of unsolved murders in Namibia, Stanley wrote Dust Devil when he was just 16, and later made it into a short film. It then became a feature length project when the Weinsteins (unfortunately) became interested, and though several elements of this film were cut, spliced, and changed, Dust Devil is a miraculously good and decently disturbing movie. The film opens on an boundless, orange desert, where the narration of a Sangoma (a traditional African healer) reverberates, explaining the legend of the fearsome, folkloric being known as a dust devil. “Like a hawk, he flies to seek his prey, having once been a man, he still suffers the same passions of a man. Me and my ancestors before me have a name for those violent winds that blow from nowhere: dust devils.” We are then shown a black mirage of a figure, slowly materializing into the recognizable form of a man—a hitch hiker clad in all black (Robert John Burke). On this desert dirt road to nowhere, a car appears—as if conjured by this devil—and behind the wheel a woman is transfixed by the dust devil’s glowing eyes. As the narrator explains, “hypnotized by his razor glare they come, the faithless, the grieving, the lost.” He enters the vehicle, she takes him to her home, and the two have sex—this entity behaving almost as a normal human does until we are cruelly reminded of his darkness, and he takes out a knife and kills her. Only, he doesn’t just kill her: he mutilates her, uses her blood to draw all over the walls of her home, and sets the house ablaze before he abandons the scene of the crime, in search of his next victim. There are zero fingerprints left behind, zero evidence of another human being’s presence, and the police have no idea how this could’ve occurred, even though this has seemingly happened before. Though he is a rational skeptic, Sergeant Ben Mukurob (Zakes Mokae) spots the spiritual drawings still visible on the burnt walls of the victim’s home and seeks out the guidance of Sangoma Joe, who explains that this was the work of a dust devil. It is the end of the war of Namibia’s independence, and the country is experiencing a devastating, record 7-year drought. That, combined with the divestment of South African funds, places Namibia on the brink of doom, and several citizens are seeking refuge elsewhere. For the remaining residents of a town called Bethanie, there is little civilization or hope left, which makes it prime hunting ground for active dust devils. Cue our final girl, Wendy Robinson (Chelsea Field), a lost woman in her own right, who has left her overbearing husband behind in Johannesburg after he unfoundedly accuses her of cheating. She packs a bag, rides off in her car, and unfortunately finds her way to Bethanie, where she ends up right in the tantalizing clutches of this dust devil. Rather surprisingly, this dust devil is quite charming, beyond his supernatural powers. He is handsome, friendly, and makes compelling conversation with Wendy before he begins behaving suspiciously, and it almost seems as if he has taken a special liking to her. Wendy is hardened by turmoil, flirting with her own destruction, and the dust devil is charmed by that little spark of life she still has left in her. It’s a complicated and fascinating dynamic these two share, and their chemistry is beyond electric… it is, dare I say, romantic? I’m not sure what I expected from Dust Devil, but I certainly didn’t expect there to be a complex and sexy magnetism between the protagonist and the antagonist here, which made the experience all the more thrilling and perplexing. The desert is very much its own character here, as the suffocating heat, simmering sand, and intolerable, formidable nothingness looms so large, it is impossible to ignore. I love that this film’s monster isn’t some kind of sand beast, but the personification of wind: something so ephemeral yet ever-present, something that can linger forever and literally get under your skin. Dust Devil is equal parts horror movie and historical drama, as we bear witness to the ways in which a place is decimated by war, and how generations of people can be haunted by the same ghosts. I love when a film takes a true, unexplained story and fills in the unknown gaps with the supernatural—and when it’s done right, it can feel like sacred, mythological text. I’d been craving more African horror, and Dust Devil satisfied this craving and accomplished something truly special with its unsettling, fascinating world building. The writing was excellent, the cinematography was trippy as hell, and the entire result was entirely unique and thoroughly exciting. Dust Devil, more than Tremors, captured that isolated, oppressively hot ambiance that can make one feel suffocated and trapped, but they both provided highly-cinematic, hopelessly hellish experiences that I loved! Thanks for braving this scorcher of a double feature with me, my dear sweet readers! It’s best we learn to stand the heat; we may all be desert-dwellers some day.
