A relaxed chat about tech in horror featuring Ghosthouse and Edge of the Axe, both released in 1988. It’s ham radio versus the “central terminal.” Click below to hear my theories on why people were wary of communicating with random strangers in 1988, or scroll down to read the transcript. I’ve gone on camera for the first time in my last couple of videos, but you can still just listen as well.

Another double feature for you featuring tech in horror, and it’s Ghost House and Edge of the Axe. Both of them are from the late 80s, they both feature someone who’s communicating with strangers using technology, and they both have homages to Lucio Fulci films in them, which makes me very happy.

Ghost House—it’s an Italian Evil Dead rip-off. This guy named Paul is going to college in Boston with his girlfriend Martha, and Paul is a ham radio enthusiast. So he goes on—I was going to say online, but he goes on the radio in the evening, and he talks to people all over the place that he doesn’t know. Remember that in the late 80s, early 90s, that was considered dangerous, to be communicating with people that you don’t know. Although we’d all had pen pals for years, and they had your address, so somehow that wasn’t dangerous. But anyway, this would be risky.

One night he hears this noise over the ham radio and tapes it, and it’s this guy going “Who are you?” and then the screaming and this terrible song playing backwards. You can’t quite understand these childlike voices, and Paul gets obsessed. He figures out, by using like maps and math, where the sound is coming from. He and his girlfriend Martha travel all night, and they get to this house, which is the exterior where they filmed Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery.

There’s some campers sort of squatting there and a hitchhiker who’s an unfortunate comedy character, but nothing’s happened. They confirm that it’s one of the guys—the guy who also has a ham radio who’s hanging out there in the abandoned house—that’s doing the talking, and then his sister is screaming. But it hasn’t happened yet. Later on that night, while they’re trying to investigate, it does happen, and somebody ends up dead, and somebody ends up hurt. There’s a strange handyman around the house, but it’s not a case of the handyman; it’s the case of something that the former owners did when they lived in the house and got it to be a curse. Pretty much everybody either dies off or, if they survive, they’ve witnessed something terrible.

Finally at the end, Paul gets hit with fate. You think: would he have ever met this fate, or would the other people have, if he hadn’t heard that tape coming from the future over the radio? It goes back to what I was saying about Prince of Darkness, how the transmission from 1999 was from the future, but it was really the past because no matter what, it has already happened. That’s the way I feel about the tape in Ghost House and what ends up happening to Paul. It’s his fate; it has already happened. It’s just that it was beamed in from the future, or however dimensional travel with supernatural horror works. If he hadn’t gone looking for the source of the sound, then he wouldn’t have been hit with fate.

Edge of the Axe is a little different. It’s not a supernatural horror; it’s kind of about being a slacker, not working up to your ability. This guy Gerald, he’s a computer genius, but he’s working with his gold-digging, sort of womanizing friend who has an exterminator business instead. They find a body in the ceiling of a bar that the bar owner had thought was just a dead rat. This puts Gerald into contact with the police of the town, who are not investigating a series of murders—they’re somehow trying to rule them all as suicides or accidents, despite the fact that the killer is using an axe. So everybody’s just accidentally falling onto axes accidentally.

The police don’t want to investigate because it’s all about control of information. In Edge of the Axe, the computer represents too much information flowing. The police are afraid that reporters will come to town and start asking questions if it becomes known that there are murders happening there, and that will expose whatever kind of small-town bullshit that they’ve got going on. But Gerald is now under their radar because he’s the one that found the body. In a police procedural, whoever found the body is the killer.

Not only that, but later that same day he comes across a girl who seems really cute, and she’s also into tech. She’s really good at video games—they’re console games mostly, and like text-based PC games. So he gives her his old computer and he hooks them into what’s called the central terminal, which I guess they were calling the internet at that time. Because she can get on his computer, then because they’re hooked together, she can see that he’s been investigating the axe murders. All of that information being on his computer makes him a suspect to the lazy cops.

The cops don’t want reporters getting information about them; the killer doesn’t want everyone to know that they’re crazy and that they’ve been institutionalized and have hurt or killed someone before. The best way of hiding that is not by controlling information, but by just, you know, not going around killing everyone in town with an axe. But, I mean, this person doesn’t think like me, I suppose, and they wouldn’t think that I was very good at arcade games either.

Gerald also meets a fate that he wouldn’t have met if he had not been, well, basically chatting with babes online. The Lucio Fulci connection in this movie, in Edge of the Axe: there’s that effect that you’ll remember from City of the Living Dead when someone’s killed upstairs and the blood flows through the ceiling and into a glass of milk. Something similar happens in Edge of the Axe. It’s a nice homage, and Mr. Fulci may have gotten it from somewhere—I don’t know the source of every trope. But that’s the flow of information being controlled. Fear of information getting into the wrong hands is the reason that computers are so central to Edge of the Axe, and also a little bit of “don’t talk to strangers,” which is a big part of Ghost House. So you can see why I wanted to put those two together.

They’re not actually about possessed technology, probably. In the case of Edge of the Axe, I guess the ham radio could have been possessed; it certainly caused Paul to be cursed. Paul and Gerald are together in eternity and they’re playing Doom on a couple of computers that they’ve hooked together—that’s my fanfiction about these two.

Do you like either of these movies? I know Ghost House has been mocked and had a RiffTrax, but it actually is a pretty good movie, especially in terms of Italian rip-off movies. It’s pretty great. There’s something for everyone in it, except for maybe an explanation, but you don’t need that—it’s Italian horror, it’s a series of images. Ghost House was made by Umberto Lenzi and produced by Joe D’Amato.

Edge of the Axe was by my favorite Spanish filmmaker, José Ramón Larraz, who you would know from Symptoms, which I’ve recommended, starring Angela Pleasence and Peter Vaughan, I believe it was. He made Vampyres, he made The House That Vanished. I should have picked up the videotape, but I’ll get a picture of it—probably the rarest video in my collection is a Larraz film called Deviation that was from Canada. It has a picture from a movie called Alien Dead on the cover, doesn’t even have a picture of Deviation.

But Edge of the Axe is a pretty straight-ahead American slasher movie made by a Spanish guy and starring some of his stable of actors. Patty Shepard and Jack Taylor both have supporting roles, and you will have seen them in other things if you follow Spanish horror of the 70s.

I’m still afraid of going through a car wash because of Edge of the Axe. The movie begins with somebody who’s trapped in a car wash getting killed by an axe murderer. That’s about it. I would have liked to think that there was something supernatural at work in Edge of the Axe, just because that’s always more fun—it’s always more fun to mine for symbolism—but it’s just not the case. It’s a slasher; it’s not my favorite genre, but it is one of my favorite slashers, really, especially of the 80s. If you think that you have seen them all, maybe you haven’t seen Edge of the Axe. Arrow put out a good Blu-ray of it—don’t try to play the Blu-ray on your PS4 like I did, you won’t be able to hear it, but if you get a good Blu-ray, it’s a good Blu-ray.

I don’t have a set of skills that make it easy to go on camera. I don’t know where to put the camera, I don’t know where to put the lights. I will tell you that probably 50 to 70% of the audio-only videos that you’ve seen from me have been from me relaxing on the couch or in bed. So I decided to just go ahead and do that tonight so that maybe my thoughts would come out.

Just a chat! Tell me if you think that these movies go together, or if you think that I’m nuts. Have a good night, and think about keeping your car clean in your yard with a hose and a bucket if you want to avoid axe murderers. Bye-bye!