TerrorVision: The Alien in the TV Suburban Satire

There is a moment about ten minutes into TerrorVision when you understand that the film’s production design is doing the talking. The Putterman family home is a hallucination: chrome, mirrored surfaces, animal prints, a colour palette that appears to have been chosen by throwing a brick through a fruit machine, statuary in the hallway, a hot tub in the living space. Nothing in it is comfortable. Nothing in it is even usable. The house is a display of taste by people who have money and no interior life whatsoever, and the film has not made a single joke yet. It does not need to. The set is the joke, and it is a cruel one.

Ted Nicolaou wrote and directed it in 1986 for Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, and it was shot in Rome, at Empire’s Italian facility, which is why a film about American suburbia has the faintly wrong dimensions of a place assembled by someone working from photographs. That accidental quality is the best thing about it.

The setup

On the planet Pluton, a mutant is created by a garbage-recycling experiment gone wrong, and the authorities decide to beam it off-world as an energy signal — the interplanetary equivalent of fly-tipping. On Earth, Stanley Putterman installs an enormous new satellite dish on his roof. The signal arrives. What comes down the cable and out of the television set is hungry.

Everything that follows takes place in and around the house. Nicolaou never leaves it for long, which is a budget decision that turns into a formal one: the film is a chamber piece about a family being eaten by their own home entertainment system.

The family is the horror

The Puttermans are a genuinely hateful creation and the film’s willingness to commit to that is what separates it from the run of eighties creature comedies. Gerrit Graham’s Stanley is a man who has read one magazine. Mary Woronov plays Raquel with the eyes of someone who left a much more interesting life behind and is furious about it. They are swingers, and the film sends them out to a club to pick up a couple, which means the alien’s first uninterrupted hours with the children happen because the parents are out looking for strangers. Diane Franklin’s Suzy is a teenager who communicates exclusively in the vocabulary of a music channel. Bert Remsen’s Grampa is a survivalist with a bunker and an arsenal, waiting for a war he has been promised his whole life. Chad Allen’s Sherman, the small boy, is the only person in the house who notices anything, and nobody listens to him, because the family have no mechanism for listening.

This is where the film earns its keep. The creature functions as a bailiff, arriving to repossess a household that everyone inside it had already abandoned. The Puttermans are eaten one at a time in the middle of a house full of screens, and none of them notice the others going, because they never noticed each other in the first place.

Woronov is, again, the professional in the room. She plays Raquel absolutely straight, exactly as she plays Principal Togar in Rock ’n’ Roll High School and the Blands in Chopping Mall: find the character’s real dignity, play it without irony, let the film be ridiculous around you. It is the reason her scenes have weight and the reason she was in everything.

Why the design works

The creature, built by John Carl Buechler’s shop, is a magnificent piece of rubber: a lumpy, single-eyed thing with tentacles and a mouth that expands past any reasonable jaw hinge, and it looks exactly like what it is, which is a man operating a puppet in a lurid living room. It moves with real physical weight because it has real physical weight, and it interacts with the set — it displaces things, it knocks things over, it leaves the furniture wrong. The man-in-the-suit essay makes the general case for why this reads better decades later than a rendered equivalent; TerrorVision is a useful test because the film asks you to believe in the room rather than the creature, and the room is convincing because it was built.

The colour is the other technical achievement. Nicolaou lights the house like a nightclub and holds that scheme for the entire picture, so the television — the actual source of the disaster — is only ever slightly brighter than the wallpaper. When the monster comes out of the screen it does not clash with anything, because the Puttermans already live inside a broadcast. The design has been arguing this since the first frame.

The Fibonaccis’ title song is the final piece: a berserk, hyperactive new-wave number that establishes the register before a scene has played, and it tells you the film knows exactly how stupid it is willing to be.

Rome standing in for the San Fernando Valley

The Italian production is the film’s secret ingredient. Charles Band had moved Empire’s operation to a studio outside Rome, on the sound commercial reasoning that Italian crews were superb, experienced in exactly this kind of genre work, and considerably cheaper than their American equivalents. It is the same calculation that had produced the spaghetti Western twenty years earlier and the Italian horror boom more recently.

What it does to TerrorVision is subtle and enormous. The Putterman house was built on a soundstage in Italy by designers working from an idea of American suburbia rather than from the thing itself, and the result has the uncanny over-correctness of a translation. Every element is right and the assembly is wrong. The proportions are slightly off, the objects are slightly too emphatic, and the whole set reads as a foreigner’s diagram of American aspiration. For a film whose subject is Americans living inside a broadcast image of themselves, that is a piece of luck worth more than any amount of budget. The house looks like television, because the people who built it had mostly seen America on television.

The real ancestor of this is a Larry Cohen film

The lazy comparison is Poltergeist, on the grounds that both films have a television and a suburb. The actual ancestor is The Stuff, Larry Cohen’s 1985 picture in which a delicious product eats its consumers from the inside and the advertising keeps running. Cohen’s method is the one Nicolaou borrows: put a cheap monster in the middle of an American appetite, let the appetite be the subject, and refuse to make the humans sympathetic. Both films are about people who cannot stop consuming even while the thing they are consuming is consuming them, and both are far angrier than their rubber suggests.

The cousins are worth the shelf. Street Trash does the same decade’s rot from the bottom of the income scale. Society does it from the top and is nastier than both. Parents does the suburban family as a cannibal cell with far more control. And for the wider argument about screens as a delivery mechanism for the unwanted, the haunted-technology essay starts with Cronenberg and works forward.

Empire Pictures is worth knowing as a unit. In roughly the same window Charles Band’s company put out Re-Animator and From Beyond, which are genuinely major films, alongside a great deal of product. The house style — shot in Italy, practical creatures, saturated colour, contempt for good taste — is visible across all of it. TerrorVision is the purest expression of the aesthetic and one of the least successful commercially, which is the usual arrangement.

The case against

It is exhausting. The film pitches its performances at maximum from the opening scene and has nowhere to escalate, so the second half is loud in the same way the first half was loud. Jon Gries and Diane Franklin are both good and both stranded in a subplot that goes nowhere. The Medusa material — a late-night horror hostess who gets pulled into the plot — is a promising idea the film cannot afford to develop. And there is a real limit to a satire whose entire technique is showing you awful people being awful; the picture has no one to care about, which means the deaths land as slapstick rather than as anything sharper.

I would defend it on the grounds that its shapelessness is the point of a film about broadcast — it is channel-surfing as a structure — while conceding that this is exactly the sort of argument one makes for a film one has decided to love. Society is the better-made film by any ordinary measure. This one is the richer artefact, made by people with a real position on the decade they were living in, and its badness is load-bearing.

Spoilers below

The film’s best gag is the one that arrives on the television. A Pluthonian scientist appears on screen, broadcasting a public-safety message across the void, and the message amounts to instructions for handling the creature — the alien equivalent of a warning label. It is exactly the information the Puttermans need. They cannot receive it, because the family’s relationship with the television is entirely one-directional. They have spent the film absorbing broadcast, and when the broadcast finally speaks to them, they have no idea that it is talking.

The household is consumed almost in full, and the survivors are the boy and the grandfather’s guns, which is Nicolaou’s flat-eyed verdict on the American middle class of 1986: what is left after the family goes is a child and an arsenal.

The last shot returns the creature to the airwaves, on the reasonable logic that Pluton’s disposal method works and everyone else’s television is still switched on. The ending is a shrug that puts the monster back into general circulation, which is the only honest way to close a film that thinks the problem is the medium.

Where to watch

It has had a very good boutique restoration, which is worth having specifically because the colour needs the bandwidth — a compressed stream turns the whole house to mud. Pair it with The Stuff for the double bill about being eaten by what you bought.