Past Misdeeds: Contagion (1987)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Real estate agent Mark (John Doyle) is driving through the Australian bush when he sees a woman being kidnapped by your typical rape-hungry backwoods person. The following rather timid rescue attempt doesn't work out too well for Mark, for the backwoods guy isn't alone. A few minutes later, Mark finds himself stretched over his own car's hood and raped by a guy who dresses up in a mouse mask for the occasion.

Afterwards (we don't get to see the rape in detail), the backwoodsies (that's the technical term, I think) take Mark and the girl to their camp. In a surprising twist of fate, Mark manages to escape after a time and even stumbles into killing one of his tormentors. Next thing he knows, Mark finds himself - still in the bush - breaking down in front of an aggressively blasé woman named Cleo (Nathalie Gaffney). Unimpressed by the backwoods rapist threat he mumbles about, Cleo takes Mark to a mansion where she lives with another girl called Helen (Pamela Hawkesford) and an older guy with an upperclass accent and Hugh Hefner's dress sense (that is, none) called Rupert (Ray Barrett).

Rupert likes to expostulate about the classical 80s yuppie talking points - power and money - and something called the threefold path. Mark seems instantly smitten by the blather and the two girls, so he's quite happy when they invite him to return whenever he likes. Which he will do, once he's fled from the hospital he'll soon enough find himself in after his ordeal.

On his second visit, Rupert invites Mark to become one of them ("ONE OF US! ONE OF US!") - filthy rich, spouting nonsense, and so on. He just has to prove to Rupert he really has "the right stuff" for that role.

It's pretty clear to Mark that you demonstrate your talent for being a rich bastard by killing people, so he first gets rid of one of his real estate colleagues, and then strangles his girlfriend Cheryl (Nicola Bartlett) a bit. Surely, that would impress even Gordon Gecko, and Rupert does in fact accept Mark as one of his own, while Cleo and Helen reward him with sex.

Cheryl's not the sort of person who is dissuaded from a man by a bit of strangulation, however. She decides to find out what the hell happened to Mark. That probably won't end well for her. But honestly, what is happening to Mark? Is he hallucinating? Or has he stumbled onto haunted ground that has infected him with some kind of evil?

There are quite a few things the films of the ozploitation wave of the 70s and 80s have in common with the US local indie productions of the same era - generally (yes, this is a shoe that does not fit every film) both styles of film were done on low, sometimes very low, budgets; they were distinguished by not hiding their specific regionalities but using them (consciously or unconsciously) to give themselves a grounding in the local that could reach nearly documentarian levels; they were often not afraid to be terribly weird - sometimes because their makers didn't actually know how to do "normal", sometimes because their makers were willing to take risks the mainstream would never take, sometimes both; and they were often made by directors who only had a single movie in them, or were the single strange outings by the kind of work-for-hire director you'd never expect to have something weird, or even just interesting in him.

Contagion's Karl Zwicky is one of those latter directors. Before and after this particular films, Zwicky was working on about every Australian TV show ever made (warning: I may be exaggerating here). While Zwicky would also go on to direct an episode of Farscape (as you know one of the notoriously weirdest SF shows ever made), most of his TV work was on the sort of show that does not thrive on creative direction or a talent for the bizarre. Contagion pretty much makes up for that lack of strangeness in its director’s filmography by being as weird an experience as a film made outside of Taiwan can possibly be.

Now, parts of the Internet call the film a supernatural slasher, and it's hard to disagree with that interpretation completely - there are, after all, various murders, and the film's ending suggests that the supernatural agency that was kept ambiguous until then is in fact real. However, calling Contagion a supernatural slasher leaves out a few other genres it's part of, like 80s yuppie satire (rich people are evil, and proud of it, use computers, and love to talk gloating nonsense, don't you know?), classic backwoods horror (even going into the male rape direction most films of that genre - beyond Deliverance - don't dare touch), films about pacts with evil entities, and so on. Most importantly, calling this a supernatural slasher just doesn't at all prepare somebody willing to watch it for the air of utter strangeness it breathes.

Mainly responsible for this air of the bizarre is Zwicky's direction. I don't think the director applies a single camera angle here you'd call straight. When a scene is not dominated by improbable blue light like in a Tsui Hark movie gone mad, it's filmed from below, or with a camera tilted sideways, or Zwicky just applies a judicious amount of peculiar camera movement. It's a style quite unlike anything I'd have expected from a TV guy of this era. It's also a style that could easily step into the trap of being weird for weirdness' sake (not that I'd necessarily have a problem with that), but it fits the tone of the film's script - raving lunacy - perfectly.

In a different movie, the acting - especially John Doyle's wide-eyed mugging - could be seen as unpleasantly broad, in Contagion's case this broadness is needed to not let the actors' work be drowned out by all the things Zwicky's visuals are throwing at the audience, and to strengthen the mood of the unreal. That mood's pretty necessary too, seeing as some of what's going on in the film is in fact not real at all (just don't ask me which parts).

Although the film's general execution has an remarkably artificial feel (that's a compliment, mind you), it stands in marked contrast to the localities it takes place in - there's a fantastic friction between the very real and naturally moody locations it takes place in and the strangeness and absurdity of what happens in these locations.


Contagion shows not a weird slowly seeping into reality as is normal in the horror genre, but the weird having a shouting match with reality until one of them falls down dead.