“I felt there was a dead end to the kind of films I was making. . . . I was losing sight of reason in favor of result and so I decided to make Vermillion Eyes.” – Nathan Schiff
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Nathan Schiff, Long Island-based super 8 amateur auteur, could well be the definitive fan filmmaker working in the horror genre. Between 1979 and 1991, Schiff completed and released four feature-length films shot around the locales of his home base, all on budgets that make even fellow underground films and shot-on-video releases of the day appear extravagant by comparison. His first three films – Weasels Ripped My Flesh, The Long Island Cannibal Massacre, and They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore – have been covered at great length, both by myself and others, since their arrival in the underground consciousness in the mid-1980s. This surge of interest was initially inspired by Gore Gazette editor Rick Sullivan regularly screening those titles at his film series in Manhattan. Initially, none of the films received a legitimate or widespread release beyond the range of VHS bootlegs sold and traded via zine back pages, which were believed to have been sourced from Sullivan himself. This is why it’s all the more remarkable that Image Entertainment released them in lavish DVD editions in 2004. Schiff’s fourth, Vermillion Eyes, was electively excluded despite being remastered and restored, having been deemed too troubling and disturbing for release. To this day it remains unavailable in any legitimate form, the only circulating copy a ninety-seven-minute VHS rip that is shorn of almost forty minutes of footage. As an essentially lost film by a cult filmmaker, Vermilion Eyes is now the stuff of underground legend.
A darling of the 1980s zine scene, Schiff’s reputation is largely based on his first two films, Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979) and The Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980), which remain inspiring for the sheer fact that they were brainstormed and completed while the director was a teenager. Their contents, however, reveal something far more impressive: soundly constructed visions of man-made apocalypses on the shores and suburban streets of Long Island; gore-strewn nightmares that never insult the audience or creator’s intelligence with cheap humor or self-indulgence. Made after a five-year break from filmmaking, Schiff’s next feature, They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore (1985), stood out as something very different, an admittedly rushed affair blending class-conscious satire of 1980s excess with prolonged gore sequences. As challenging as the film can be, particularly after the adrenaline-rush exploitation updates of his first projects, there’s a unique thrill in how Schiff captures the intensity of his vision onto the small-grade film stock. These first three films are defined by their audacity, the youthful exuberance of having massive ambition and seeing it fully realized against all odds. At the time, amateur horror cinema was a guarded secret, rarely emerging beyond the backyards in which it was filmed. By 1985, super 8 features did not yet command devoted cult reception, and even the more prominent outgrowth of amateur cinema, shot-on-video horror, was just beginning to invade the video shelves of the nation.
The period of 1988–1991 saw Schiff totally immerse himself in the production of Vermilion Eyes, an investigation into obsession and psychological disturbance that had haunted its creator since his earliest days behind the camera. Vermilion Eyes is a journey unlike any other in the underground horror field, even in its current bastardized state that bears little resemblance to the director’s preferred cut. There is an interesting investigation, no doubt ultimately futile, to be made into the provenance of the circulating bootleg, and Schiff himself has little idea where either this edit or the source copy could have originated. Vermilion Eyes was essentially never released beyond screenings held by Schiff and a handful of screener copies sent out, and the only coverage contemporaneous to its completion is an exclusive review in British zine In the Flesh. After an agonizing editing process, one that made the director question his own sanity and the nature of his entire production, Vermilion Eyes largely disappeared from underground consciousness. Particularly damaging were two disastrous cast and crew screenings, where the film’s collaborators reacted with enraged horror, voicing disapproval of the film they had participated in making. It should be mentioned that his closest collaborators on the project, leading man John Smihula and Arlene Burns (who plays Smihula’s sister), had no doubt as to the power of Schiff’s ultimate vision. Rather, Vermilion Eyes presented a glimpse into its creator’s mind that was so painfully close to the source, so revealing and unflinching, that he himself was forced to question just where the film could exist. Of course, Image’s refusal to release it only reignited these old debates, denying the film its chance to be unleashed onto the world. Thus, its reputation as something darker and more uncompromising than even underground audiences could stomach was put firmly into place and maintained well into the new millennium.
The film’s plot can be reduced to a simple outline, though the on-screen complexity carries far greater weight than any summary could contain. An unnamed man wanders a landscape both apocalyptic and lush, encountering only a series of women as well as various corpses at the scenes of tragic accidents. He dons a hazmat suit and films these sites with his own super 8 camera before retreating to his home to view his collected footage and peruse detective magazines and pornography. His interactions with various women – his fiancée, a prostitute, a blind woman, his sister – stand as interjections of philosophical debates, unraveling both his damaged psychological state and his longing for connection in a world so barren and distressing. His fixation on the inescapability of death ultimately escalates, and nightmarish visions of violence both real and imagined pollute his mind and world. The film concludes with an investigation into the nature of life itself, of salvation and the circularity of the natural life cycle.
If the film’s content is volatile, its form offers no easy or comfortable engagement. Seventeen minutes pass before the first line of dialogue. The world is vacant, and never do more than two people appear on-screen or in any given location at one time (until its finale); and The Man does not encounter any other living person save women or children. What truly sets Vermilion Eyes apart from the amateur horror heap is its honest, if unintentional, engagement with established practices of avant-garde filmmaking techniques. There are no sideways glances at bumbling surrealism to be found; instead, the film offers itself as a deep, abrasive psychological probe of both its creator and audience. In fact, Vermilion Eyes emerges as a nearly pure example of the trance film style outlined by experimental film historian P. Adams Sitney. Defining this mode using Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon as an example, Sitney classifies these as works dealing with “visionary experience. . . . The protagonist wanders through a potent environment toward a climactic scene of self-realization” (18). As such, trance films often make use of dream narratives, ritualistic practices, and other devices to establish separate planes of reality and awareness.
Vermilion Eyes is constructed as a psychic landscape, the conflicting desolation and warmth of the cinematic space seeming to filter outward from The Man’s perception as much as from any identifiable reality. Scenes cut from a suicide at a railway station to a dreamy date on an empty beach; from an auto accident to The Man watching his super 8 footage at home. This technique actualizes his trance state, his lack of social connection putting the focus on himself rather than on an engagement with the world around him. Such elusiveness allows the film to be read as an extended trance narrative through The Man’s eyes; though he inhabits the recognizable world, one of vibrant greenery and beachside beauty, all is presented as a reflection of his perception rather than a realm recognizable to the viewer. The hallucinatory quality puts the spectator entirely in the protagonist’s situation, forcing them along for the ride through his psyche. In this way, Vermilion Eyes fits Sitney’s claim that the “pure trance film has a single protagonist – all other human figures being distinctly background elements – and a linear development” (25). Indeed, the women The Man encounters play crucial roles in his journey, and the film does follow a linear progression that builds in severity; but until the deadly revelations of its conclusion, his actions and responses alone define the course of the narrative.
Further connecting Schiff’s film to this theory is Sitney’s discussion of how Deren’s work “offers us an extended view of a mind in which there is a terrible ambivalence between stable actuality and subconscious violence” (12). The Man of Vermilion Eyes indeed demonstrates this ambivalence, alternately transfixed by the violence of the world and repulsed by its limitless and random capacity for cruelty. Ultimately emerging as an aggressor and perpetrator himself, he is forced to contend with the cataclysmic consequences of such actions when they progress from passive to active engagements. Like his character, Schiff too was galvanized to react to the violence he created for entertainment, choosing to engage the real-world consequences of those visuals. In his own view, “there was a dead end to the kind of films I was making. . . . I felt I was losing sight of reason in favor of result” (In the Flesh, 21). The director employed the trance film style to craft a stark, clinical view of extreme violence, delivering not catharsis but rather an experience of pure horror and devastation. The Man’s use of a super 8 camera acts as a commentary on the pervasive staging of violence on-screen. He watches the carnage just as the viewer does and has a hand in its creation even when he spills no blood himself; this is Schiff indicting his own role as the orchestrator of these acts, taking them to their final extremes.
This brings us to the heart of the matter, the fact that Vermilion Eyes is, in every conceivable way, an extreme film. While designed as a conscious deviation from the splatter-heavy narratives of his previous films, Schiff’s vision for Vermilion Eyes is one that manages to outpace them all in terms of bloodshed. However, the violence is withheld for more than half of its runtime. In its stead is the overwhelming presence of death itself, the inescapable reality of the end that awaits us all. The effect is as much psychological as purely physical, and the horrific tolls of each side are explored but never resolved. Some scenes prove so unbearable that it seems Schiff sought to challenge the very notion of violence on film, the fact that people willingly seek out and consume depraved content via his own works in particular. His Man is obsessed with death, with the sensation of seeing it, feeling it in his hands whether through the still-warm bodies of the unfortunates he encounters or in manipulating the celluloid captures he records at every death scene. So too can we say the standard underground audience, and certainly Schiff’s own fans at the time of Vermilion Eyes’ completion, is obsessed with cinematic death. There’s a sense that every unpalatable act witnessed is the hook, the allure of the finished film. In taking these dangerous encounters to their breaking point, this work renders the gore film obsolete.
Vermilion Eyes isn’t an endurance challenge, and often its emotional cruelty is more savage than any moment of spilled blood. It may confront the very notions of what is sacred in life, but never as a direct assault on the viewer. This is a film one can emerge from enlightened rather than simply disgusted. In fact, the film’s strongest case is as a work of acinema, a piece of art that, despite its roughshod construction (which is quite seamless when one dispenses with notions of “proper” acting or budgetary sanctity), challenges the very system that defines it. Schiff’s insistence that the work is “anti-film” and “anti-entertainment” bears heavily on his on-screen vision. His previous productions were unabashedly pro-film and pro-entertainment, containing the raw and rough joy of an enthusiast finally feeling the power of sculpting his medium to his needs. There’s passion in Vermilion Eyes, to be sure, but not of the amateur in Stan Brakhage’s conception of one who does something for the pure love of it. The passion of this film is more substantial, torrid even, recalling the symphonic inspirations that drove its conception, not to mention the mythological significance Schiff imbues into every frame.
We can recognize in ourselves The Man’s impulse to watch his accident footage and read his lurid magazines. These are the traits that allow us to identify with extreme and unconventional cinema, which come to define personalities as fans of the bizarre and excessive. But the insights and revelations of his dialogue, that of the women he encounters, are where the film’s true identification rests. The Man is not an antisocial pervert or reject. The scenes of dialogue don’t so much reveal as make immediately clear that he is capable, sociable, likable. Whatever the nature of these interactions may be, it’s incorrect to presume his nihilism on the basis of his communications. Just as The Man is stripped of any identifying characteristics and his very name, so too do the women lose these essential traits, becoming archetypal figures of experience along his journey. Sometimes even the less spectacular scenes carry just as great a weight of verbal violence. The blind woman at the beach presents the perfect foil to The Man’s voyeurism, his constant search for stimuli in a world that seems to have slowed to glacial frigidity and tragedy. She can be seen by his camera but cannot see it, his gaze reduced to a one-way mirror as she confidently and bravely navigates the world that still holds so much mystery and danger for him. Likewise, to walk into Vermilion Eyes without expectation is the only approach that will work.
Everything in the on-screen world is wrong on its surface: the desolation of the familiar locations, the sheer absence of other men or populated spaces, the intimacy of each interaction and grave significance contained therein. The film stretches the very concept of genre to its breaking point, exhausting the tropes of psychological and splatter films in a single go. The only thing it can purely claim to be is an experimental film, which was the entire idea informing its conception. Narrative, feature-length experimental films are an incredibly inconsistent medium, even from long-term practitioners of the form. Whether inspired by outright surrealism, formal and structural innovation, or the sublime challenge of translating dream state to film, the varied approaches yield mixed results. That Vermilion Eyes was Schiff’s first attempt at a purely avant-garde feature and succeeds in its various formal deviations and narrative digressions is a remarkable feat. Its status as a trance film inverts the interior psychic landscape onto the objective screen. Sometimes it feels as if the work’s subjectivity can seep into the viewer’s own mind, leaving scars and traces of its existence on their psyche just as it probes those of its protagonist.
There’s a cunning simplicity, an elemental quality at work that is just as likely to steer careful viewers astray as to mislead the uninvested. Look no further than the archetypal Good and Evil battle enacted in the film’s show-stopping Nightmare sequence. Here the mysterious figure perpetrating violence wears a long black cloak and hideous rhinoceros mask, standing in direct contrast to the bleached white hazmat suit donned by The Man in his own transformations at the scenes of death. The protagonist seems to occupy several selves throughout the film: the muscular, ominous presence of his daily life, the white-suited scavenger of death that records accident scenes, and the tortured boy who once filmed his sister in horror and became the broken maniac unable to control his own violence. His fascination with death and destruction is not as all-consuming as it appears, but reticent, passive rather than participatory for much of the film. The Man’s filmed footage of the deaths he encounters, his magazines and memorabilia, don’t assert that he is perverse because he is immersed in these subjects, but that his immersion is a natural response to their omnipresence in his life. Despite every excessive moment, every appalling act or revelation, the key to the film’s humanism rests in its circularity, the undeniable truths it visits and restates throughout. Innocence and loss are two predominant themes, as in the dead infant revealed (but never explicitly shown) at one early accident, or The Man’s own corruption at the hands of those who should have nurtured him in his youth. Sacred as life may be, it is never safe or guaranteed, and that is the truest tragedy of the film. Around every corner is an ever-present danger, forces beyond control that can strip away the only thing we can truly claim as our own. There are no explanations, the very fact of our being is as perplexing and unfair as the ease with which it can cease. More than rage or violence, the beating heart of Vermilion Eyes is loss and the coming to terms with how this can be so. The film offers a circularity that matches the very cycle of life itself, beginning and ending with death and tragedy. And just as The Man dies painfully on the beach, life begins anew with the child that refuses his outreached hand. All is consumed and all is reborn, though what form and shape it takes cannot be defined or declared by any of us.
As this might suggest, Vermilion Eyes is a film completely bereft of humor by design. One that for every so-called failing of budget or performance cannot be penetrated by any sort of leering or knowing irony. Mark E. Smith of The Fall once sang, “It’s like I drunk myself sober,” and there are few better descriptions for Schiff’s final work. Whatever preparations or expectations one can bring, they will be unseated and made obsolete. Seemingly everything has been done and can be seen in some form, but Vermilion Eyes remains, after many viewings, something entirely unclassifiable. That’s the trick of intensely personal art: just as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon has inspired decades of debate and interpretation, so too does one get the sense that Schiff’s film cannot be reduced to any simple schematic. Vermillion Eyes is the final word, the apex of all amateur horror. That means it comes with all the baggage associated with that form and the work required to address it. But it also represents an unsettling triumph that forces a viewer’s entire investment in the culture itself, and for that probing alone it remains a crucial, if lost, piece of the underground horror continuum.
Even to knowingly watch an incomplete version of the film, uncertain whether the full elements will ever be restored, it impresses on the viewer a terrible importance. No version of personal apocalypse has ever been rendered so terrifically, the all-consuming passion of obsession eliminating the need for all subsequent art. The circulating version is of a truly horrendous quality, the visual information poor enough that less devoted fans of strange cinema would be likely to flee after the first few minutes. My own initial encounter with the film produced a distinct sense of disorientation, wondering if the hallucinogenic visual qualities of this transfer – smeared neon exteriors, impenetrably dark interiors, static and grain and tape decay so dense as to be illegible – were responsible for the allure of the film itself. Or were they merely obscuring the true depths of its invention? As it currently exists, the film seems to have been divined as an illicit object, and this relationship is nearly inseparable from any discussion of its contents. The illicit image – in many senses, Hito Steyerl’s Poor Image reconfigured for the genre film audience – seems to radiate from The Man’s brain, the wave of magnetic tape presented on-screen (and compressed through the digital file conversions that allowed me to view it) as the uncensored expressions of his mind as it collapses.
Each of Schiff’s films offers various lessons in underground filmmaking, but Vermilion Eyes is perhaps the most revealing, even beyond the scope of its creator’s psyche. Established as someone capable of delivering gruesome carnage on minuscule budgets, the response to his final feature reveals the limitations of a reputation built solely on notoriety. Never properly accorded the respect his craft and innovations deserved, when Schiff delivered Vermilion Eyes to a select few, he surpassed their limited expectations of underground genre cinema. While this piece celebrates that risk-taking approach, in its time the film proved to be too challenging, too confrontational and probing. Fans have come to embrace and celebrate the work for its innovations and obscurity, but as an incomplete work of art, Vermilion Eyes has not yet been accorded its rightful place as a genuine masterpiece of avant-garde cinema.
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Restored images from the film included with the permission of Nathan Schiff.
References
Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000. 3rd ed. Oxford, 2002.
“Weasels, Cannibals, and Killer Bumpkins Going Cheap: An Interview with Low-Budget Gore Master Nathan Schiff.” In the Flesh, vol. 1, no. 8, 1991.
“World Exclusive! Vermilion Eyes.” In the Flesh, vol. 1, no. 10, 1992.
