Dis­cov­er this shock­ing pre­cur­sor to A Night­mare on Elm Street

Although the her­met­ic, cir­cu­lar events of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marien­bad took place in and around a baroque château lost in time, Adol­fo Bioy Casares’ 1940 SF nov­el ​‘The Inven­tion of Morel’, which inspired Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screen­play for Marien­bad, was set instead on an island. The same is true of JS Cardone’s The Slay­er (aka Night­mare Island), released two years after anoth­er Marien­bad-influ­enced hor­ror film, Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shining.

As its char­ac­ters are picked off one by one and the view­er is kept guess­ing as to who is respon­si­ble for the mur­ders, The Slay­er for­mal­ly presents itself as that low­est of hor­ror forms, the by-num­bers slash­er, and its inclu­sion, until 1985, on the Direc­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions’ list of ​‘video nas­ties’ hard­ly helps bol­ster any claim that the film might have to being con­sid­ered high art. Yet with its deliri­ous con­fu­sion of real­i­ty with dreams, paint­ings and cin­e­ma, and its out­right refusal to unpick for the view­er the ambi­gu­i­ties that it has so care­ful­ly craft­ed, this film’s insu­lar world of entrap­ment is far clos­er to the envi­rons of Marien­bad than to any Crys­tal Lake, Camp Black­foot or Soror­i­ty Row.

Loca­tion is cru­cial in The Slay­er. ​“It’s this place,” says Kay Church (Sarah Kendall), ​“it makes my skin crawl.” Kay is talk­ing about the off-sea­son, wind-swept and (most­ly) aban­doned Atlantic island to which she, her hus­band David (Alan McRae), her broth­er Eric (Fred­er­ick Fly­nn) and Eric’s wife Brooke (Car­ol Kot­ten­brook) have come for a week’s vaca­tion, hope­ful­ly so that Kay, a sen­si­tive, stressed-out artist, can relax a lit­tle before a com­ing exhi­bi­tion. Recent­ly her land­scape paint­ings, inspired by her dreams, have tak­en a dark, sur­re­al­ist turn – and now that she is on the island, she insists anx­ious­ly that she has not only seen its bar­ren loca­tions (a derelict cin­e­ma, the house where they are stay­ing, the adja­cent boathouse) before in a dream, but also depict­ed their exact like­ness in her recent art, despite nev­er hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly set foot on the island.

David is hav­ing none of this: ​“It’s not this place, Kay, for Christ’s sake! It’s those damn dreams of yours! I some­times, hon­est to God, think you’re slip­ping right over the edge.” There is the rub: we too find our­selves split between these two per­spec­tives – one intu­itive, one ratio­nal­ist – and uncer­tain where the truth lies, since what is hap­pen­ing on the island does not eas­i­ly reduce itself to any straight­for­ward, lit­er­al reading.

What we do know is that when­ev­er Kay is asleep and dream­ing that one of her com­pan­ions is being bru­tal­ly mur­dered by a mon­strous pres­ence, the same hap­pens – simul­ta­ne­ous­ly – in real life. Whether this is a case of pure coin­ci­dence, a night­mare in a dam­aged brain, or some­thing gen­uine­ly super­nat­ur­al, is left for us to unrav­el in our own the­atre of the mind. A coda, return­ing us to a pri­mal scene from Kay’s child­hood, serves if any­thing only to mud­dy fur­ther all those grey waters.

Much as Kay’s recur­rent dream is also a pre­mo­ni­tion, The Slay­er itself is often cit­ed as a pre­cur­sor to Wes Craven’s A Night­mare on Elm Street, where too a female pro­tag­o­nist strug­gles to stay awake so as to repress the vin­dic­tive bogey­man of her dreams. It is still, though, with its recur­rent sce­nar­ios, uncan­ny déjà vus and unre­solved mys­ter­ies, much near­er Marien­bad than America’s suburbia.

Since the film ends at its begin­ning, it is per­haps not entire­ly unsuit­able for this piece to end some­where in the film’s mid­dle, with a scene that lays out sev­er­al dif­fer­ent lay­ers of mean­ing. As Eric, Brooke and Kay search the island for the miss­ing David, whose decap­i­ta­tion – or at least Kay’s dream there­of – we saw the pre­vi­ous night, Kay wan­ders into the island’s dis­used the­atre. Hear­ing a sound above, she climbs the stair­case, the hooked shad­ow of her hand momen­tar­i­ly vis­i­ble on the wall in imi­ta­tion of the most famous expres­sion­ist sequence from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu.

There is a strange echo effect here, as Kay is sud­den­ly assim­i­lat­ed to one of cinema’s old­est mon­sters – dwelling in the dark, dis­solved by the light – inside an actu­al ancient cin­e­ma (that province of shad­ows on the wall). Yet Kay is not ascend­ing, in this hall of mir­rors, to her next vic­tim, but rather to the projectionist’s booth. She finds noth­ing in the the­atre – apart from David’s head­less corpse – but then, in The Slay­er, per­haps the mon­ster nev­er is any­thing more than a projection.

The Slay­er is released by Arrow in Dual For­mat Blu-ray/D­VD on 21 August, 2017.