Jim VanBebber makes films about blood. Not the bright red blood of Hollywood blockbusters. In a VanBebber movie the blood is at best the dirty sticky brown of rotting organic matter, more often it is dark black dried and crusty. It is the blood that soaked into the furnishings and left ugly human stains. So often in movies blood is meant to be bright crimson. It is intended to be titillating, exciting, even heroic. Jim VanBebber ignores the niceties of such cinematic conventions. In his films blood represents the physical evidence associated with decay, crime, torture, and death. VanBebber’s subject matter is grim, unpleasant and swirling darkness.

VanBebber has directed two films rooted in true crime. Not cases
told via the agency of those august individuals who protect and serve, not crimes that are solved by rigourous detective work, but cases that under VanBebber’s direction explode the veneer of the American suburban middle classes, families whose children are exposed through their actions as the dark underbelly. In VanBebber’s drama-documentaries the focus is on the process of willfull exclusion that these teens engage in via drugs, sex, violence, and Satanism (the kind of cultish-Satanism that the tabloid media salaciously indulge in).

The first of these films – My Sweet Satan (1993) – loosely follows the Long Island Satan Teens who gravitated around loser and stoner Ricky Kasso. Near-mindless drug-fucked metal heads who have nothing to do but get more drug-fucked and do whatever comes to mind, including murder.

And then there’s VanBebber’s epic, his Charles Manson / Family movie. Fifteen years in development, Manson (2004) is a film that follows the drugged-up kill-crazy teen-femme runaways who gathered at a decrepit movie ranch, a few stunted miles from the dog-shit stained stars - the footprints of celebrity - on Hollywood Boulevard. Amongst the dirt and shrubs and the aged wooden buildings, and in the streams and caves that punctuate the hills around the Spahn Ranch these teens spent the late sixties planning the apocalypse. Driven by conspiracy politics, millennialism and English pop music to form the end time philosophy that helped transform the ‘groovy’ sixties into the gory seventies. VanBebber doesn’t just recreate the sixties - including meticulously observed mise-en-scene – but follows the media myth of Manson through to modern devotees. Satan teens.

In Roadkill: The Last Days of John Martin (1988) VanBebber turns his attention to the classic couples-lost-in-the-middle-of-nowhere scenario, but avoids the camp humour of so many horror movies, spinning his tale into a genuinely unpleasant bloodthirsty celebration of cannibalism. In fifteen-minutes VanBebber single-handedly takes the grim vibe of the truly great seventies horror movies – Texas Chainsaw et al – and takes them on a detour that owes more to crime scene forensic photography than the oh-so-funny postmodern humour of Scream and its ilk.

Finally, VanBebber’s first movie, Deadbeat At Dawn (1987) an homage to youthsploitation, gang movies, action movies, and martial arts movies. Started during his third-year at college, the film lacks some of the stylistic invention of Manson but makes up for it in shear velocity.

Contrary to the belief fostered by most mainstream cinema, films do not have to operate on one level. They don’t have to be cast with the daughters of hotel magnets, former (manufactured) pop stars, or ex-models. Films don’t have to make hip references to the detritus of pop culture, they don’t have to inspire sequels, they don’t have to be weighed down in a quagmire of special effects. VanBebber uses the low-budget confrontational aesthetic of the eighties underground movie as articulated via Richard Kern and mixes it with the sensibilities of independent horror movies and exploitation movies.

Jack Sargeant 2005

Session 1
KINO DENDY | Sat 9th 9pm

The Manson Family
Chunkblower
With intro and Q&A with director moderated by Jack Sargeant

Session 2
KINO DENDY | Sun 10th 7pm

Roadkill: The Last Days
Of John Martin
My Sweet Satan
The VanBebber Family
documentary uncut!
Intro by VanBebber
and Jack Sargeant

Session 3
KINO DENDY | Fri 15th 9pm

Deadbeat at Dawn
With intro and Q&A with director moderated by Jack Sargeant