#34: The Gate (1987) (dir. Tibor Takács)

Sidenote: Manny MassGrave Serrano wrote this wonderful piece that I'm also including to link to here for a lot of great tidbits surrounding the film including a surprise revelation about the actor that played Terry: 10 Things About "The Gate" You Probably Didn't Know

Can’t help but think the writer/director of this film had an epiphany - what if someone made The Evil Dead but instead of it being in a cabin with a bunch of young adults, what if it happened in the suburbs with a bunch of young teenagers? Ever since I had that thought, I was hoping for a true hard-R Evil Dead 2 in the suburbs (not a high rise like the recent remake/sequel). Perhaps that desire stems from the fact that The Gate was the first horror movie I was obsessed with as a ten-year-old kid. Watched it multiple times thanks to a cheater box that allowed us to access Pay-Per-View. You might say it was the “torrent” of its time. This film was a true gateway into all-things horror and essentially led me to becoming a fan of the genre for life. From this point on, it was all about sleepovers, cheap pizza, Mountain Dew and renting horror movies.

The Gate is a little Canadian-born, video store generation classic starring an unknown 13-year-old Stephen Dorff and directed by Tibor Takacs (the great I, Madman and the Rutger Hauer straight-to-video Redline). It resonated with me at the tender age of 10 (being about the same as protagonist Glen in the film) and quickly became the sort of movie you’d rent over and over, record off Pay-Per-View or watch every time it rotated back to USA Up All Night and Monster-Vision. Very much in the same vein as the Tobe Hooper version of Invaders from Mars, it sets a young child up to be the lone savior of the world and gives its viewers (mostly kids) a protagonist they can relate to. And boy did I ever!

This time instead of the Necronomicon, the book of the dead comes courtesy of a heavy metal record that best friend Terry (Louis Tripp) listens to and realizes that him and his best friend Glen (baby-face Stephen Dorff) have opened up a portal to hell in their backyard. Simple as that. What officially sold me on this movie was the Pay-Per-View trailer. Along with the sheer fear of Freddy Krueger and staying up late to watch Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer way too young, the image that turned me into a horror fan was the workman falling onto the floor and collapsing into a bunch of little demons. It’s somehow a perfect encapsulation of the movie - creepy, funny, cool (the original title for the TLC record).

Michael Nankin originally wrote the film as an R-rated movie with abundant blood, gore, and deaths. The studio made him tone it down because they didn’t think they could market a movie predominantly starring children to adults. The first half of the movie sees small frights occurring in the house - it takes a good 40 minutes to where all hell breaks loose to where you can see why it’s Rated PG-13. A party game of levitation turns real early on (that party is perfectly captured), windows are attacked by moths & the flycatcher outside keeps shorting out. Nothing too heavy but enough to put the characters on edge…oh and don’t forget the rolling smoke that comes out of the hole and a rather comical scene involving an elderly dog and a dead mom. No-one questions the weirdness at any point, but it is a little weird that the etch-a-sketch shows Necronomicon-like drawings. 

Once the dog is buried in the backyard (by a friend of the older sister) the tiny demons show up and the movie kicks into high gear with a frantic last act that sees a dead man trashing the house after breaking through the walls and a super-demon being summoned. Having recently been on a podcast discussing my appreciation for Poltergeist III, there seems to be a correlation around the time both films came out. Kids my age in peril - think of the horror version of The Goonies.

Only in these films, randomness ends up being a strength - arms just emerge from under the bed, phones start melting, zombies emerge from inside the wall. No rhyme or reason, really. Perhaps it’s all just a special effects showcase surrounded by characters that I could relate to due to their childish, impulsive behavior. (Oh that party sequence!). Not to mention that I sometimes wished my half-sister lived with me and not with her dad in California. The brother/sister dynamic here is also very three-dimensional and naturalistic. I actually love all the teenagers in this since they remind me of the kind I grew up around in the ‘burbs.

The film has an appropriate title because, despite the suburban California setting and protagonist's age, it really does feel like an unofficial entry into one of Lucio Fulci's "Gates of Hell" movies only not as extreme. When The Gate gets down to business it has no problem going for the same kind of surreal, doesn't-give-a-damn-if-it-makes-sense-or-not nightmare logic that marked that trilogy of films. You might even be reminded of The Beyond's cranky undead sorcerer when the reality warping powers of this particular hell-mouth makes Terry's ghost-story about a dead worker walled up in Glen's house come unpleasantly true. Jesus Christ, in fine Fulci fashion, The Gate even contains multiple examples of horrific eye trauma! The Gate ends up being such a perfect little primer for the kind of batshit insanity and repulsion that you can find in Italian horror films. I’d say the original source of my earliest nightmares comes courtesy of this and the Elm Street dream sequences only because the surreal imagery is hard to forget no matter what age you are. This may not scare you per say but things like the dad’s head turning into liquid mush before collapsing onto the ground is very Fulci.

Regarding that father moment, my dad sure enjoyed delivering that line back to me as a joke sometimes - “you’ve been baaaaad!” Which oddly enough, the trailer audio of that being said is vastly different than the one being used in the movie to where I was a bit confused as a kid. Since I had watched the trailer multiple times I was expecting a different voice to utter than line, hence my first experience of trailers lying to me or at least realizing the post-production process can trick me into thinking I was going to get one thing, when I actually got another. But as stated, nothing compared to seeing the “money shot” of this film in the trailer over and over again to where I highly anticipated seeing the workman fall onto the ground and turn into a bunch of little demons. How did they do that is something I rarely thought of watching a movie up until my first viewing of this. I was excited about this image and practical effect to where I started to crave more. If you were to pinpoint the exact moment in time where I decided, “okay horror is for me,” then when I first watched this movie and that scene happens, it was all uphill from there. Not to mention a couple of years later, the astonishing camera work and cleverness of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2. Sorry mom, I love horror!

Huge thanks to the work of a team of artists including Randall Cook – who would go on to be a part of Wētā Workshop and work on LOTR – a bunch of guys in rubber suits being filmed and layered over and over in forced perspective would give the effects a level of strange realism that is captivating. It draws you right into the world they’re creating and it never lets up. Once the horror starts, it’s a roller coaster and even when Glen is left to prevent the apocalypse from happening, you can’t help but be invested in the outcome at that point. However, there’s no denying the simple fact that a grown adult watching this for the first time today might feel let down and deem it as “fine, nothing special.” Nostalgia, once again, much like my love of Poltergeist III, plays a huge role in my response.

Which brings me to a couple of other Takacs films - the follow-up to The Gate as well as the underrated I, Madman. Let’s just say that Gate II: Trespassers is pretty much nothing like the original. I saw it opening night not even realizing it was Rated R. It had been pushed back a couple of years, released in one theater near Gary, Indiana that my dad took my friend Mike and I to see. We walked out disappointed and dismayed by what we had seen. Yes, Terry did return but this time he was a teenager trying to summon the demons to grant wishes. Only any time a wish was granted, it would turn into shit. Literal shit. Don’t get me started on how truly awful the ending of the film is to where we erupted into laughter. My hope that perhaps The Gate would turn into an Elm Street-like franchise full of crazy set pieces was completely tarnished, destroyed at the end of the sequel.

I, Madman on the other hand was kind of a miracle. It had a Darkman quality to its central villain and how could someone who was slowly becoming interested in girls not immediately be drawn towards Jenny Wright (Near Dark) as a book store owner (!) that loves horror. What she reads eventually starts happening for real and the lines between reality and fiction are blurred as murders start to take place around her and the police become suspicious of her involvement and sanity. You could see how my eventual love of Candyman stems from a storyline like this because even the monster in I, Madman, essentially just wants to romantically be entangled with our protagonist. I can’t say enough good things about I, Madman including the choice to have some more high-quality stop-motion animation at the beginning and very end. I often think of this as another film that made me appreciate horror as something more than just another showcase for effects. As an avid reader and Stephen King fan, it makes sense that things like this, Candyman and In The Mouth of Madness were early favorites of mine during my teenage years. Something that went a little deeper with more on its mind than creepy crawly monsters under the bed.

Takács’ Raimisms are the main things setting The Gate apart, with an odd camera angle here and there and the delightful in-camera practical effects that we just don’t see much of these days. There’s very little gore though again, Terry getting stabbed in the eye by a Barbie doll is certainly a shock to the system. I still watch this with fondness even though there are elements now that I don’t care for, including some of the dialogue between friends that rings as silly. Before Stephen Dorff became a bit of Hollywood pretty boy, he was a chubby-faced kid like Sean Astin and I wish he stayed within the genre outside of Blade. It’s funny to think that this is still my favorite performance of his probably because it comes across as very natural. (Though once again, it was the 80s so a throwaway use of the word ‘fag’ is uncalled for, but hey, cruel teens will be cruel teens).

I knew going back to this would bring up a lot of memories mainly due to the fact that I just wanted my small circle of friends to join me on this journey towards the horror genre, courtesy of the local mom-and-pop video (Citizens Video) in Griffith, Indiana, which allowed me to rent just about anything and everything. Though it would take me a long while before I would see the director’s cut of Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead / Dead-Alive since they only had the R-rated cut. I can remember that video store as a memory palace in my mind - which genres were where. And the bittersweet moment during my senior year of high school when they said they were closing down, but my friend Denny and I got first dibs on any VHS we wanted for a reasonable price. Talk about kids in a candy store.

We kept coming back for more even if the sad reality remains: I parted ways with that collection a long time ago. Still, my gratitude is immeasurable to the team behind The Gate along with a film critic like Nick Digilio of WGN Radio who actively championed great horror films, still vividly remembering when he recommended A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. But it all goes back to the year 1988 when I saw the trailer and then I watched The Gate. Honestly, if there were a remake, I’d be thrilled to see what they would do. I’d keep an eye out for that. You should pick up this Vestron Blu-Ray release too!

Finally, I must admit, the delivery of the line from Glen to Terry: “Hey, you want to come over later and mess around” plays very differently to me now. The way Glen looks at Terry as he walks away left me with a sneaking suspicion that maybe the director was hinting at some subtext going on. But the scene where the sister checks herself out in the mirror seems unnecessary to say the least. Let’s just focus on those cool, creepy little demons that just want to use us humans as pets once hell on earth is unleashed. These days, I sometimes think hell on earth is slowly being unleashed. Better keep my rocket launcher handy just in case!