The Initiation (film)

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The Initiation
Theatrical release poster
Directed byLarry Stewart[i]
Written byCharles Pratt Jr.
Produced byScott Winant
Starring
CinematographyGeorge Tirl
Edited byRonald LaVine
Music by
  • Gabriel Black
  • Lance Ong
Production
companies
Georgian Bay Productions[2]
Initiation Associates
Distributed byNew World Pictures
Release date
  • April 6, 1984 (1984-04-06)
Running time
97 minutes[3]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

The Initiation is a 1984 American

sorority pledges
stalked by a killer during their initiation ritual in a department store after-hours.

Filmed in Dallas, Texas in 1983, The Initiation initially had English director Peter Crane attached, though he was fired from the project early into the shoot, after which television director Stewart took over. The Dallas Market Center and Southern Methodist University served as the primary shooting locations.

The Initiation was given a regional staggered release by New World Pictures beginning in the spring of 1984, and continued to screen theatrically through December of that year. It was met by largely unfavorable reviews by film critics. In the years since its release, the film has been noted for marking star Zuniga's first leading role after her minor part in The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982),[4] as well as establishing a contemporary cult following as a midnight movie.

Plot

Since childhood, college student Kelly Fairchild has suffered from a recurring nightmare in which a strange man is burned alive in her childhood home. The nightmare began when Kelly suffered amnesia after sustaining a head injury at age nine. Hoping to unravel the nightmare's meaning, Kelly pitches a term project idea to Peter, the graduate assistant in her psychology seminar, about it. Peter agrees to perform a sleep study on Kelly, but her mother, Frances, subsequently forbids it. Meanwhile, at a psychiatric hospital miles away, several patients escape, and a nurse is murdered. Frances is notified of this incident by phone, and informs Kelly's father, Dwight.

Kelly prepares to partake in her sorority's

initiation ritual which entails her and a group of other pledges breaking into her father's multilevel department store after hours and stealing the night porter
's uniform. Kelly, her friend Marcia, and roommates Alison and Beth are the four main pledges. On the night of the initiation, Dwight departs for a business trip, but is brutally stabbed outside his car with a hand rake before being decapitated. The murderer leaves in Dwight's car with his corpse in the trunk.

Just before Kelly and the other pledges arrive at the department store, the night porter is murdered while doing rounds. Beth decides to quit, leaving Kelly, Marcia, and Alison alone. The three split up, and Kelly heads to the lounge upstairs to retrieve one of the spare uniforms. Meanwhile, head sorority sister Megan lets coeds Chad, Ralph, and Andy break into the store to scare the pledges. Shortly after, Andy is killed with a hatchet and Megan is shot to death with a bow and arrow. Ralph and Chad successfully scare Kelly and Marcia by hiding in a dressing room. After uniting with Alison, all five attempt to leave the store, but are locked inside.

At the university, Peter and his colleague, Heidi, comes across newspaper clippings detailing the fire Kelly described in her dream; the articles reveal the burning man's identity as Jason Randall, a floor manager at the Fairchild department store who was at one time married to Frances. Peter suspects that Jason is in fact Kelly's biological father, and that her nightmare is a memory of him being burned in an altercation with Frances' lover Dwight, who subsequently raised Kelly as his own daughter. A recent article on the inmates' revolt at the hospital reveals Jason is a groundskeeper there, and that he was among the prisoners who escaped. Peter drives to the Fairchild residence to notify Frances of his discoveries.

Alison and Chad wander around the store together. While Chad is in the bathroom, Alison discovers the night porter's body, followed by Chad's corpse in a bathroom stall. A traumatized Alison locates Kelly, who instructs her to hide at a security desk on the ground floor. Kelly enters the bathroom and sees Chad's body, as well as her name written in blood on a mirror. Meanwhile, Alison is attacked at the security desk and viciously stabbed to death.

Ralph and Marcia have sex in a retail display bed before Ralph is shot dead with a

harpoon gun
. Marcia flees through the store and is met by Kelly. They seek safety inside a freight elevator, but it is soon infiltrated by the killer who drags Marcia into the elevator shaft. Kelly escapes and flees into the store's boiler room, where she encounters Jason, whom she assumes to be the killer. He pursues her to the roof where she bludgeons him with a pipe, causing him to fall to the ground below.

Peter and Frances arrive at the store and find Jason lying on the ground, clinging to life. Inside, Peter sees whom he believes to be Kelly standing in the store foyer and embraces her before she stabs him in the stomach. Kelly stumbles upon the scene and is faced with a reflection of herself: Her disturbed twin sister Terry, who has been institutionalized since childhood when Frances left their father and married Dwight, and of whom Kelly has no memory. Just as Terry is about to murder Kelly, she is shot to death by Frances. The film ends as a wounded Peter is taken away in an ambulance while Kelly stares at her mother in disbelief.

Cast

Production

Development

Screenwriter Charles Pratt Jr. wrote the script for the film after being asked to produce a low-budget horror film for executive producers Jock Gaynor and Bruce Lansbury, and producer Scott Winant for New World Pictures.[1] While writing the screenplay, Pratt deliberately incorporated "soap opera" elements in the subplots involving the Fairchild family's history, as he was inspired by the genre at the time.[1]

According to Pratt, he initially cobbled together the concept of the sorority initiation pledge taking place within a department store, but the concept had to be reworked when the film scouts were unable to find a suitable location in Dallas available for shooting.[1] British director Peter Crane signed on to direct the project.[1]

Casting

The film marked the first leading part for Daphne Zuniga, pictured here in 2019

Lead actress Daphne Zuniga was cast in the film following her minor role in the horror film

Brookhaven College.[5]

Vera Miles, best known for her portrayal of Lila Crane in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), was cast as the mother of Zuniga's character.[1] Miles, though not impressed by the film's screenplay, agreed to appear in the film after having met the director, Peter Crane, with whom she had a quick rapport.[1]

Filming

The campus scenes were filmed at Southern Methodist University

The Initiation was filmed on location in Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas, over an approximately 30-day period[1] in the summer of 1983.[6] Filming commenced with director Crane at the helm.[1] After several days of filming, however, the shooting schedule had already fallen behind, leading to Crane being fired and replaced with Larry Stewart, who completed the rest of the film.[6] The difference in technique and style between the two directors accounts for slight aesthetic differences in some of the film's sequences.[6] According to writer Charles Pratt Jr., Crane was employing more experimental camera techniques, close-ups, and point-of-view shots, whereas Stewart, primarily a television director, used a more conventional style akin to that medium.[1] Many of the early point-of-view shots featured in the film, as well as the sequences set at the psychiatric hospital, were all shot by Crane.[6]

The multilevel World Trade Center building of the Dallas Market Center served as the location for the Fairchild department store,[7][8] and the crew shot the film during evenings while the building was closed. The campus scenes were filmed at Southern Methodist University, while the dream-lab sequences were shot in an abandoned Holiday Inn hotel, where the production design had refitted a maid's closet to appear as the laboratory.[5]

Release

The Initiation first screened in the United States in the spring of 1984, with showings beginning in Lexington, Kentucky during the weekend of April 6,[9] and in Philadelphia beginning April 28, 1984.[ii] It subsequently opened in Silver Spring, Maryland, beginning on May 12, 1984.[12] In some midwestern cities, such as Bloomington, Illinois, it was paired as a drive-in double-feature with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).[13] It was released several months later in Baltimore on September 7, 1984.[14] The Los Angeles Times reported a tentative autumn release of the film in Los Angeles.[15] In several southern U.S. cities, such as Shreveport,[16] Pensacola,[17] and Jackson,[18] the film opened on December 7, 1984.

The film was largely overshadowed at the U.S. box office by

MPAA's restrictions without being cut, the British Board of Film Classification cut nearly a minute of gore from the film, specifically from Hunter Tylo's gratiutous murder scene.[19]

Critical response and legacy

Joe Baltake of the

Sisters (1973).[22]

Following the film's first DVD release in 2002,

Film.com in 2012, gave the film a negative review, calling it "a bad movie with bad ideas that are badly executed,"[25] while TV Guide summarized the film as "boring slasher stuff," noting that "Top-billed [Vera] Miles and [Clu] Gulager barely appear in the film, which would make a terrifically dreadful double bill with the similar The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1983), also featuring Zuniga."[26]

Brian Collins, writing for the

Birth.Movies.Death., noted that the film "might be worth a look for slasher aficionados—it's far from a perfect film, but there are some unusual elements to it that give it enough personality to overcome its somewhat sluggish pace and TV movie-esque production."[27] Dread Central's Anthony Arrigo observed in a 2016 review "a surprising amount of character depth on display here, more so than similar pictures of the era."[28]

In Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movie, writer Jim Harper called the film a "lackluster effort that never quite lives up to the abilities of its cast," further noting: "Even with the soap opera ending, the film isn't entirely successful, mostly because of the terrible script. There's a wealth of unnecessary jargon and cheap dialogue, not to mention some notable inconsistencies. Zuniga does her best to rise above the bad material and turns in a great performance, but Gulager and Miles sleepwalk through their parts."[29] Horror film scholar Adam Rockoff alternately notes in his book Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, that, "despite its proclivity for laughable dialogue and silly plot twists, [The Initiation] manages to be a fairly entertaining and occasionally frightening film."[30]

Irrespective of the film's critical reception, it has garnered a contemporary cult following.[19]

Home media

The film was released on VHS by

Image Entertainment's "Midnight Madness" Series.[31]

In August 2016, it was revealed that Arrow Films would be releasing the film for the first time on Blu-ray in both the United States and the United Kingdom.[32] It was released in the United States on November 8, 2016.[33]

Notes

  1. ^ Though Stewart is the only credited director on the film, Peter Crane was the original director who was fired from the project several days into shooting. Some of Crane's work still appears in the final cut of the film, though he is uncredited.[1]
  2. ^ Contemporaneous newspaper sources from Philadelphia date the film as a new release for the weekend of April 28, 1984, and reviews were also published that day.[10][11]

References

  1. ^
    OCLC 971035865
    .
  2. ^ Muir 2012, p. 395–97.
  3. ^ Stine 2003, p. 169.
  4. ^
    Sun-Sentinel. Archived from the original
    on August 26, 2016. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
  5. ^
    OCLC 971035865
    .
  6. ^
    OCLC 971035865
    .
  7. ^ Swindall, Damon (April 27, 2012). "The Chronicles of Horror Movie Night: 'The Initiation' (1984)". Horror's Not Dead. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
  8. ^ "The Initiation (1984): Revisiting the psycho-sexual thrills of the slasher that time forgot". What's On TV. Movie Talk. United Kingdom. August 9, 2013. Archived from the original on April 22, 2016.
  9. Herald-Leader
    . April 8, 1984. p. D4 – via Newspapers.com.
  10. ^ a b Baltake, Joe (April 30, 1984). "Comedy, Thriller;: Two for the Rude". Philadelphia Daily News. p. 39 – via Newspapers.com.
  11. ^ a b Lyman, Rick (April 28, 1984). "Film: A few murders with a gardener's tool". The Philadelphia Inquirer. p. 5-D – via Newspapers.com.
  12. ^ "Silver Spring Drive-In Theater: Now Showing". The Sentinel. May 12, 1984. p. 21 – via Newspapers.com.
  13. ^ "Bloomington Drive-In: The Initiation and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre". The Pantagraph. June 17, 1984. p. B-4 – via Newspapers.com.
  14. ^ "The Initiation trade advertisement". The Baltimore Sun. September 7, 1984. p. 37 – via Newspapers.com.
  15. ^ "Future Shock Schlock". Los Angeles Times. September 2, 1984. p. 20 – via Newspapers.com.
  16. ^ "The Initiation trade advertisement". The Pensacola News. December 7, 1984. p. 4 – via Newspapers.com.
  17. The Times
    . December 7, 1984. p. 5-D – via Newspapers.com.
  18. ^ "The Initiation trade advertisement". The Clarion-Ledger. December 7, 1984. p. 7D.
  19. ^ a b c d "The Initiation". Mondo Digital. August 13, 2013. Retrieved July 9, 2016.
  20. ^ Cedrone, Lou (September 11, 1984). "2 multiple-murder films; both worthless". The Baltimore Evening Sun. p. B5 – via Newspapers.com.
  21. ^ Cedrone, Lou (September 15, 1984). "Film Reviews: The Initiation". The Baltimore Evening Sun. p. 5B – via Newspapers.com.
  22. South Florida Sentinel
    . p. 6D – via Newspapers.com.
  23. ^ Vonder Haar, Pete (November 27, 2002). "Film Threat - The Initiation (dvd)". Film Threat. Archived from the original on August 7, 2022. Retrieved August 7, 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  24. ^ Beggs, Scott (October 18, 2012). "The Initiation: 31 Days of Horror". Film School Rejects. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved July 9, 2016.
  25. ^ Snider, Eric (May 8, 2012). "The Initiation (1984)". Film.com. Eric's Bad Movies. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
  26. ^ TV Guide Staff. "The Initiation: Review". TV Guide. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
  27. Birth.Movies.Death. Archived
    from the original on October 18, 2020. Retrieved October 18, 2020.
  28. ^ Arrigo, Anthony (November 2016). "Initiation, The (Blu-ray)". Dread Central. Archived from the original on October 18, 2020. Retrieved October 18, 2020.
  29. ^ Harper 2004, p. 116.
  30. ^ Rockoff 2002, pp. 148–149.
  31. ^ "The Initiation (Midnight Madness Series)". Amazon. 20 September 2011. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
  32. ^ Anderson, Derek (August 12, 2016). "Arrow Video's November Blu-ray Releases to Include C.H.U.D., THE INITIATION, THE DRILLER KILLER". The Daily Dead. Retrieved September 4, 2016.
  33. ^ "Initiation, The (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]". Amazon. Retrieved September 1, 2016.

Sources

External links
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