The Twenty-Fifth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Three on a Meathook (1972), a no-budget exploitation slasher written and directed by William Girdler. 

Four young ladies in go-go shorts drive out to a lake for a day of skinny dipping. A young man named Billy watches them from his fishing boat. On their way home that night, the ladies’ car breaks down. Luckily, Billy happens to drive by and offers them a place to stay until they can call a garage in the morning. They hesitantly accept. Billy takes them back to the creepy old farm house where he lives with his pa. He serves the ladies dinner and sets them up in the guest rooms. All seems well. When pa learns of the guests, however, he starts berating Billy by ominously alluding to “what happens” whenever Billy is around women. Billy assures pa that this time, things will be different. Everyone goes to bed. Fifteen minutes later … cut to a killer POV shot. One by one, each of the guests is stabbed, chopped, or shot to death. In the morning, pa shows Billy the grisly scene in the guest rooms. He ruefully explains that Billy murdered the women while in a sleepwalking trance—just like he did before. Billy refuses to believe it and drives off. In town, he meets a young woman and invites her out to the farm house. This time, he’s sure things will be different.

This movie is awful. But it’s also pretty great. That’s not to say that it’s another obnoxious “good-bad” movie. Girdler was an accomplished and talented filmmaker with a really interesting career. He made all nine of his movies in six years, including a couple well-regarded works of supernatural horror, and he died in a car accident shortly after his 30th birthday. Three on a Meathook, his second picture, was self-financed and shot in his home town. 

What’s awful about it is that the entire middle 45 minutes (out of 85) consists of slow and pointless filler. There’s an extended sequence where we just watch Billy in a bar watching Gridler’s own funkadelic band perform (their music is actually pretty good, but it adds nothing to the story). 

What’s great about it is that the first thirty minutes and last ten deliver on the promise of a squirm-inducing, greasy slasher. It’s incredible that Three on a Meathook was made two years before that cinematic masterpiece often cited as the first slasher, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. All the hallmarks of late 70’s and even 80’s slashers are somehow already in place here. There is an extremely silly axe-decapitation moment that would fit seamlessly in any Friday the 13th knock-off.

What’s also great about it is that watching it feels like being at a sketchy 70’s drive-in. I can think of no better example of what the term “grindhouse” means to me than this movie. First, “Three on a Meathook” is a title whose sole purpose is to snag eyeballs. Second, its narrative is abrasively sensationalist in that it’s very loosely based on the legendary exploits of a real American serial killer, Ed Gein (thus forming a bridge between two of the best horror movies ever made, Psycho and (again) Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Third, its opening scenes offer plentiful cheesecake nudity. Fourth, it actually played in those multi-billed runs at cheap theaters and drive-ins from which the term “grindhouse” derives—a “grind” was a back-to-back continuous presentation of movies that started at a cut-rate price in the morning and increased in cost toward nightfall. Fifth, the only version of it that I was able to find anywhere (on Youtube and Internet Archive) is a worn-out and yellowing video transfer. So, it’s still not in any sense a premier work. Can you name another horror movie that nails all five of these grindhouse characteristics so well?

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

The easily-predicted twist of Three on a Meathook is that Billy is not actually murdering the women, in a sleepwalking trance or otherwise—pa is. Pa has suffered from a dissociative break as a result of his wife becoming a cannibal for health reasons (this insane revelation drops in the last five minutes with no further explanation), which necessitated him locking her up, telling Billy she died, killing whoever showed up at the farm, and secretly feeding her the bodies. Pa could not cope with being a mass murderer, so he projected this role onto his son. Then, in a folie à deux, his son came to accept the projection. 

So, here we have an identity caused by a stress-induced mental break, as in Black Swan. Then, that identity is imposed on another to manipulate that person’s behavior and self-image, as in Blacula. This is done so as to deflect responsibility for murders, as in giallos like Opera. And finally, Billy internalizes pa’s delusion to the extent of reproducing it, as in Hour of the Wolf. Furthermore, this narrative was inspired by Norman Bates’ dissociative roleplay as his mother’s doppelgänger in Psycho. The appearance of this amalgamated psychological version of a doppelgänger in even such a typical piece of grindhouse fare as Three on a Meathook should stand as strong evidence that the doppelgänger is a specter haunting all of horror cinema.