Retrospective

‘Shocker’ at 35: Wes Craven’s Beautifully Bonkers Thriller About an Electric Serial Killer Lives On As an Underrated Gem [Retrospective]

Trace Sauveur October 24, 2024

On November 9, 1984, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street was released to critical and commercial acclaim, praised for how it leveraged the slasher formula to create a horror film that reached newly surreal and terrifying heights, while also introducing a new horror icon in Freddy Krueger and laying the foundation for a long-running franchise. Craven would subvert his genius depiction of suburban terror (and introduce yet another ubiquitous villain) 12 years later with Scream, another generation-defining piece of pop horror media that famously took the recognizable tropes of the genre to task. This franchise, too, is still seeing new entries more than 25 years later.

However, Craven had long seen the potential for bold, playful conceptual swings in horror before introducing audiences to Ghostface. His run of films between Elm Street and Scream never found the same widespread success as those two bombshells, but they offer a telling insight into Craven’s enthusiasm for the madcap flavors of the genre. Whether it’s Chiller, a TV movie about a cryogenically frozen bigwig who returns as a psychotic killer, or Deadly Friend, a sci-fi horror about a teen who creates a killing machine by implanting a robotic processor into his neighbor’s brain, Craven’s unrestrained zeal for exploring wild ideas defines this period of his career—perhaps never more madly or successfully than with 1989’s Shocker.

Anchored in a batshit premise and paced like a bullet train, Shocker is a lot like Elm Street on steroids, amplifying both its concept of stretching the limits of our temporal reality and the biting humor of the script into a horror film that’s never particularly scary, because it seems like it’s having too much fun to try terrifying you. Rather than outright dread or fear, Craven is more interested in remixing the element of a killer that moves between worlds and maps it onto another film that operates in modes of dream space and logic, morphing into something much more unorthodox: a movie about an electric serial killer who can only be stopped by the power of love.

In practical terms, Shocker takes about a half-dozen different horror and thriller concepts and merges them to make a film that feels entirely its own. It’s by turns a slasher, a detective procedural, a possession movie, a ghost movie, a supernatural romance, a chase movie, and a techno-thriller—all while fitting in some incisive commentary about American television culture and violence. It’s a testament to Craven’s finesse behind the camera and his intelligence on the page that it comes together coherently whatsoever, let alone being just as much of a blast as it is.

Things begin in familiar territory: an opening credits montage set to the film’s chosen soundtrack genre of 80s hard rock (specifically, a title track written specifically for the film by metal supergroup The Dudes of Wrath) gives way to a newscast that lets us know there’s a brutal serial killer on the loose, time and time again evading police capture following the murder of his victims—typically innocuous suburban families. We’re then introduced to Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg), a star high school football player whose adoptive father, Lt. Don Parker (Michael Murphy) is the investigating detective in the murders. After a scene that plays as outright slapstick in which Jonathan runs into a goalpost and then cartoonishly falls over a table, his girlfriend Alison (Camille Cooper) takes him home to rest. That’s where Jonathan has a vivid dream of visiting the house that would make headlines the next day as the site of the murderer’s latest victims. Jonathan has developed an unexplained psychic connection to the killer and, after encountering him in his dream, he knows his name: Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi of The X-Files).

Jonathan convinces his skeptical father to investigate Pinker’s phony TV repair shop, and Pinker, realizing they’re getting too close, kills Alison to send a message. Angry and devastated, Jonathan devises a far-fetched scheme to dream about Pinker’s location during his next murder, and it works. After a struggle, Pinker is caught in the act, arrested, and sentenced to death by electric chair.

Of course, any film where the main adversary is captured and killed in the first half hour is only just getting started. Our characters didn’t account for the fact that Pinker is a devout practitioner of black magic, which he uses to commune with the dark television gods in his jail cell to make his spirit one with electricity—an apt application of occultism when you’re about to be electrocuted to death. Pinker’s execution is carried out, with just a slight hiccup from a mysterious power surge and the casual insinuation that he’s Jonathan’s real father, and his body is set ablaze and disappears.

This is where things get really wacky. Building on Jonathan’s dream connection to Pinker, the killer becomes a direct Elm Street analog, an entity from another dimension bent on tormenting the living. As a byproduct of his electric magic ritual, Pinker is now granted the ability to possess people at will (presumably through electric currents of the body but don’t think about this too hard). In practice, this means having the narrative morph from tracking a serial killer to Jonathan outrunning him as he takes over the bodies of friends and strangers. One of the most notable scenes of the film for its blend of supernatural concepts realized through ironic humor sees Jonathan trying to escape Pinker in a park, his spirit passing like a baton from person to person, including a little girl who he uses to try and run Jonathan over with a bulldozer while calling him a son of a bitch before kicking him in the groin.

As evidenced, Pinker exudes a sort of Krueger-esque sense of crude humor about himself and a similar affinity for jokey one-liners. Later on, Pinker turns himself into a lounge chair (yes, through electricity, don’t ask) and attempts to strangle Jonathan as he lets out: “This BarcaLounger’s gonna kick your ass!” In the ensuing scuffle, he says what only naturally comes to mind as a serial killer spiritually linked with electricity: “Let’s take a ride in my Volts-Wagon!” Pileggi is intimidating as Pinker, with his animalistic expressions, large frame, and brute-force style of physical violence, but Craven’s priority for him as an antagonist is rooted in entertainment first and foremost—a villain who can carry the unrestrained tone of the overall film with a larger-than-life presence.

The multi-sub-genre-hopping of Shocker elsewhere expresses itself in the capacity of a ghost movie. Following Alison’s death, Jonathan is suddenly able to commune with her bloodied corpse, as well as those of Pinker’s other victims, in his dreams. She returns to him a necklace that he had gifted her that can be used to extract Pinker’s spirit from the body of those he possesses. This is surreally visualized as Pinker’s staticky form, made to look like a real-world manifestation of the artificially electric look of human beings broadcasted through satellite television, forcibly being removed from those he inhabits. The effects work give Shocker an additional edge of uncanny, dreamlike fervor, as Pinker continually finds more and more creative ways to leverage his non-corporeal form.

Much of this was done with unique camera techniques dreamed up exclusively to make Craven’s scripted madness work for the screen. Cinematographer Jacques Haitkin says in the film’s production notes: “By taking the motion-control camera out of the special-effects studio and using it on location, we were able to pan across sets once and then superimpose various things on those sets—a body for instance. The second and third passes with the motion-control camera duplicate the first exactly, so we can add or change things in each pass, then superimpose the sets of frames on each other and create very unusual effects.”

Bar none the most novel piece of effects work in Shocker comes during the climax, after Jonathan and his friends craft a harebrained scheme to bring Pinker back into the real world, and Jonathan enters the world of his television to do so. After literally diving headfirst into his television set, a montage ensues of Pinker chasing Jonathan across horror movies, boxing matches, game shows, war footage, and newscasts, occasionally interrupting the action of the footage in real time. It’s an audacious sequence, both for the unorthodox visual effects and the balancing of something categorically absurd within the rest of the film’s tone—though this is part of the final showdown between our characters, Craven isn’t hesitant to take it in preposterous directions (lest you forget that Pinker and Jonathan dive back out of the TV to scuffle and destroy a random family’s living room where the mom proceeds to say, “I’ve heard of audience participation shows but this is ridiculous!”)

But this climax also speaks to Craven’s fascination with the relationship between violence-induced trauma and a world inundated with media; the interactions between us as viewers and what we engage with on our screens. He would carry this meta framework on to an even more focused degree with New Nightmare and Scream, but the ending of Shocker feels like the wildest, distilled version of Craven’s fascination with our savage relationship to pop culture. When Jonathan lures Pinker back into the real world, he realizes he can control him with the television remote; or, as he eloquently puts it: “You bought into TV, now you’re bound by its rules.” Shocker seems to argue that devotion to the artifice of a television screen is a Faustian bargain.

There’s a beautiful tension in that, as Craven lives on as one of our most gifted image makers, particularly of blood-curdling horror and distressing violence. But, given his proclivity for imbuing his genre motifs with cheeky humor and trenchant satire, he seems to revel in that strange friction—in undercutting our relationship with the media we consume with a self-aware wink. Shocker is wildly bonkers and borderline nonsensical, but then that just feels like a writer and director pushing the preconceived boundaries of the medium he devoted his life to. I can’t think of anything that feels more Wes Craven.

Shocker was released on October 27, 1989 by Universal Pictures. It is available to stream on AMC+ and Peacock with a subscription and Prime Video to rent or buy.