Forbidden Zone: The Elfman Brothers' Underground Musical

Richard Elfman had a problem that almost nobody in film history has had. He ran a Los Angeles performance troupe called the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo — a cabaret-cum-carnival act with masks, horns, ragtime, and a sensibility somewhere between a Cab Calloway revue and a fever — and he was handing it over to his younger brother Danny, who intended to turn it into a rock band. The act was going to stop existing. So he decided to film it.

Forbidden Zone (1980) is what happened when that impulse escaped. It is a black-and-white musical about a family whose basement contains a door to the Sixth Dimension, ruled by a king roughly three and a half feet tall and a queen who is losing her mind about it. Danny Elfman wrote the score — his first — and plays Satan. Every set is hand-painted. The film has been baffling people for forty years, and it has never once been imitated successfully, which is the surest possible sign that nobody has worked out how it functions.

The premise, such as it is

The Hercules family live in a house. In the basement there is a door. Through the door is the Sixth Dimension, which is a kingdom, and the kingdom is ruled by King Fausto — Hervé Villechaize, a year or so into Fantasy Island fame, doing something his television audience would not have recognised — and Queen Doris, played by Susan Tyrrell at a pitch of magnificent, bottomless derangement.

Frenchy Hercules (Marie-Pascale Elfman) goes through the door. The Queen becomes jealous of the King’s interest in her. Various members of the family and the neighbourhood follow. There is a princess, a topless one; there is a schoolboy in drag; there is a frog butler; there is Satan, who arrives to perform a musical number in a room made of paper.

The plot is a coat rack. What the film actually consists of is a sequence of turns — songs, sketches, chases, animated interludes by John Muto — delivered at a tempo that never once lets you sit down.

Approach it as a narrative and you will conclude within ten minutes that it is broken. Approach it as a filmed revue, which is what it is and what it was built to be, and the architecture snaps into focus: every scene is a number, every number has an entrance and an exit, and the through-line exists to get performers on and off. Richard Elfman was documenting an act that had already been road-tested in front of real audiences, which means the timing of these bits was refined in rooms where people either laughed or left. That is a discipline almost no cult film has access to, and it is audible in every cut.

The mechanics: why the cardboard is the achievement

Here is the craft argument, and it is the reason Forbidden Zone survives while a hundred cheaper-than-it midnight movies do not.

Marie-Pascale Elfman designed and painted the sets, and they are, physically, flats and cardboard and paper covered in Expressionist scrawl — perspective lines running the wrong way, doors painted onto walls, corridors that are drawings of corridors. Shot in black and white with hard light, they read as a German silent film built by someone with no budget and a full box of poster paint.

That is the trick, and it is a triple play.

Black and white flattens the image, which erases the distinction between a painted line and a real edge. The Expressionist distortion gives the eye a reason for the flatness, so the audience files it as style rather than poverty — the same permission that Caligari issued in 1920 and which has been available to broke filmmakers ever since. And the hand-painting makes the world continuous: because everything is drawn by one person in one hand, the Sixth Dimension has an aesthetic unity that no amount of money buys. The cheapest possible solution produced the most coherent world design in the entire midnight-movie canon.

The second mechanic is pace. Richard Elfman cuts this thing like a stage manager who has been told the venue closes in an hour. Nothing is held. No shot exists to establish anything. A gag lands and the film has already left. Watching it is exhausting in a way that most cult cinema, which tends to sprawl, never manages — and that exhaustion is deliberate, because a stage revue’s discipline is that dead air kills the room.

The third is the music, and it is where the film’s afterlife lives. Danny Elfman’s score is a raid on 1930s jazz, klezmer, ragtime and cartoon underscore, performed by a troupe rather than an orchestra. His Satan number is a full-throated assault on Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” done as a rubber-limbed devil’s turn in a paper room. That is a man discovering, on camera, what he is for. Everything Elfman did afterwards — the Burton scores, the carnival brass, the choral howl — is present here in a Los Angeles basement in 1980, with no orchestra and no budget, and hearing it arrive fully formed is genuinely thrilling.

The real ancestor

The obvious cross-reference is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the obvious cross-reference is wrong in an instructive way. Rocky Horror is a musical about transgression with a plot, characters, and an emotional arc; its cult is a participatory ritual that the film’s structure invites. Forbidden Zone has none of that machinery, which is exactly why it never developed a shadow cast.

The true ancestor is the Fleischer brothers. The rubber-hose animation of the early 1930s — Snow White with Cab Calloway rotoscoped as a ghost, the Betty Boop shorts where the furniture sings and the geometry gives up — is the aesthetic Forbidden Zone is reaching for, and reaching for with actual human bodies. Once you see that, everything clicks: the flat painted backgrounds, the bodies that bounce, the Calloway material, the refusal of physics, the sense that every character is a drawing that has been given a mouth. Richard Elfman made a live-action Fleischer cartoon, in 1980, when nobody was asking.

The second ancestor is Caligari by way of the poster paint, and the third is the Los Angeles underground itself — the same scene, the same decade, that produced Pink Flamingos on the opposite coast: a troupe of friends with a camera, no permission, and an act that already worked in a room.

For the film’s closest living relative, try The American Astronaut, which is likewise a band’s stage sensibility poured into black-and-white cinema by people who could not afford to be careful. And for the mechanics of the venue that kept such films alive, why the midnight movie needs a crowd covers the ecology this thing was born into.

The honest case against

The film contains blackface, in more than one form, and it is foregrounded — it is in a musical number and it is on screen. Richard Elfman’s defence has always been that the film is a Fleischer pastiche and the Fleischers did it too, which is an explanation of the source rather than a justification of the choice. Anyone recommending Forbidden Zone has to say this out loud and up front, and the film’s later colourised reissue did nothing to address it. The material is there, it is ugly, and the correct posture is to name it rather than to route around it.

Beyond that, the picture is genuinely and unrelentingly abrasive. It has no interest in whether you are enjoying it. The performances are pitched at a shriek and stay there for seventy-odd minutes; Susan Tyrrell is spectacular and also never modulates; and the film’s humour is 1930s vaudeville filtered through 1970s Los Angeles bad taste, which is a combination that has aged in patches.

And structurally, it goes nowhere. The Sixth Dimension is a set of rooms containing turns. The film has no accumulation, no stakes it takes seriously for more than a beat, and its ending arrives because the reel does.

The verdict lands on originality, which is the rarest thing on this desk. I can put almost any cult film in a lineage — that is largely what this column is for — and I can trace Forbidden Zone’s parts to the Fleischers and to Weimar, and still be entirely unable to name a second film that resembles the result. Forty-three years, and it remains sui generis. That is worth more than polish.

Where to find it: the original black-and-white version is the one to watch, and it has been given respectful disc releases; the 2008 colourised pass is a curiosity rather than an upgrade. It streams in the usual cult corners.

Spoilers below

The Queen’s rebellion is the film’s actual plot, and Susan Tyrrell plays it entirely straight. Doris is jealous, cruel and frightened, and Tyrrell — an Oscar-nominated actress, doing this for friends in a garage — invests a cardboard kingdom with real, unpleasant marital resentment. Every laugh in her half of the film comes from a woman meaning it.

Danny Elfman’s Satan appears late, does his number, and departs, and the structural joke is that the devil is a guest star. Hell in this film is a booking. He has nothing to do with the plot, no interest in anyone’s soul, and no consequences follow from his visit. He simply has an act, and the film stops to let him do it, which is the most honest statement of Forbidden Zone’s priorities available: this is a revue, and the revue outranks the story.

The ending is a chase, a resolution, and an escape back up the stairs, delivered so fast that first-time viewers routinely miss that it happened. Then the film is over, and the family is in the kitchen, and the basement door is still there.

That final flatness is the thing I keep coming back to. Nobody in the Hercules household is changed by having been to hell. They go, they sing, they come back, and the door remains in the basement for next time — a domestic arrangement, filed under household maintenance. Richard Elfman preserved his brother’s stage act, exactly as intended, and accidentally made the only American film that treats damnation as a place you can pop down to.