THE CHOOPER [1971 / SHRIEK SHOW]

There is a brand of slasher that offers something specifically relaxing, like watching golf on tv with the sound off. It isn’t anything subtle, or tricky to get one’s mind around. Simply, there is a type of slasher that loves to indulge in gorgeous landscape shots. Regional slashers tend to have a lot of these. Sans budget, but living out near some incredible manifestation of nature’s elegance, any director can sense how to fill the screen and hourglass with visual gold for free. Zero resource wonders like ‘Scalps’ and ‘Don’t Go In The Woods’ give us pure new age album cover art more so than vicious kills. The category isn’t venn 1:1 locked with DIY though. ‘Just Before Dawn’ and ‘The Burning’ are examples of how any slasher with nature in a pivotal roll needs to lean on atmosphere enough to give landscape shots more than just a setting establishing roll.

In terms of constructing the edit of these films, something unique emerges. While much of killing driven horror can follow a sort of porn like structure; short narrative excuses to go from kill to kill; the landscape first style is the setting as erotic drive. Short bursts of kills to get from landscape to landscape. Hey kid, want to see some hot, horny majestic sunsets? The price of admission is watching someone die. Fair? ‘The Chooper’ is the lonesome cowboy version of this. The wide openness that plays the part of protagonist sucks in characters seemingly from nowhere, and definitely without explanation. Their paths while living are just food for this sentient setting which chews them up and eventually swallows. Their deaths are inevitable, but it is the characters’ existence in the living world around them that justifies the true essence of the film ~ a sort of National Geographic presents without the burden of learning anything. Classic narrative requires the viewer to see charaters doing things, so these films do just that, but their actions are the background to the back drop being in the front, narratively speaking. In the ‘The Chooper’, to keep up appearances, a mythical killer is constantly invoked, but when the killer is finally caught at the end, we’re told “That is not the Chooper, it is an impersonator” and credits roll. We’re not played for fools, rather, this was a decorative piece and shouldn’t offer us more. The gravitas of actual narrative backbone would destroy the ecosystem. There can be no actual Chooper. For a an example many will know, consider the heavy use of landscape shots in ‘Twin Peaks’ that provide more mystery and suspense than anything else on camera, at least in terms of pure screen time. Ultimately to pull that off, the curtain of nature can never be fully pulled back, and thus we’re always left with a “How’s Annie?” or “What year is it?” for this genre of landscape horror to work. Nature can’t reveal its secrets. It wants us to see death and chill.

‘The Chooper’ aka ‘Blood Shack’ is available on DVD and youtube.