On Friday nights — and special occasions! — IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.
Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.
The Pitch: God Gives His Toughest Battles to His Strongest Pickle Salesmen
The episodic anthology is, by definition, the biggest mixed bag of a genre you’ll ever find on television. For every early season of “Black Mirror” and “The Twilight Zone” there’s a “Romanoffs” and… well, the recent seasons of “Black Mirror.” By eschewing serialization and giving creators freedom to tell self-contained stories in each episode, you create opportunities for fascinating one-offs that wouldn’t fit into any other medium. But you’re also inevitably left with a lot of weird filler episodes.
Such was the case with “Tales from the Darkside,” George Romero’s syndicated horror anthology that ran from 1983-1987. The zombie filmmaking legend conceived the series as a campier, more colorful take on the “Twilight Zone” format that leaned more towards pulpy horror and sci-fi thrills than philosophy. But the series is perhaps most notable for giving a coterie of legendary horror writers early opportunities to hone their craft in a low pressure format. While I certainly won’t vouch for the entirety of the show, a quick scroll through the writing credits is a film and literature trivia lover’s dream.
For as long as I’ve been familiar with the series, one episode has towered above all the others: “The Yattering and Jack.” The 1987 episode, adapted by future “Hellraiser” creator Clive Barker from his own short story of the same name, is one of the most profoundly confusing things ever to air on broadcast television. Ever since my cool uncle discovered it on a late-night cable rerun when I was in middle school, basking in its 22 minutes of utter weirdness has become one of my favorite Thanksgiving traditions.
The episode begins, as so many great works of literature do, with a happy-go-lucky pickle salesman who refuses to acknowledge the strange supernatural happenings in his bachelor pad. Despite the fact his furniture is constantly moving and paintings are falling off the walls, recent divorcee Jack Polo (Anthony Carbone) refuses to allow anything to harsh the vibe for his holiday dinner with his adult daughter. (It sometimes seems as if the only possible explanation for Carbone’s bafflingly lackadaisical performance is that he — or at least his character — was high on an elaborate cocktail of painkillers for the entirety of the shoot, as his limp body language and constantly-shifting accent make it impossible to take him seriously.)
It soon turns out that his apartment is being haunted by a miniature demon named The Yattering (Phil Fondacaro). The Yattering has been tasked with stealing Jack’s soul, but a treaty between God and Satan has prohibited him from touching Jack in the process. We learn that this drugged-up pickle peddler apparently has the purest soul in the world, which renders The Yattering’s typical tricks ineffective. With his status in the soul-stealing community on the line, The Yattering is forced to bring out his strongest weapons. I can’t say much more without spoiling anything, but his plan gets my vote for the greatest use of a raw turkey in cinematic history.
While “The Yattering and the Jack” technically takes place during Christmas, the turkey-centric horrors make it perfect Thanksgiving midnight viewing material. Pairing an endlessly quotable script with surprisingly decent practical effects and acting that must be seen to be believed, “The Yattering and the Jack” is the kind of underseen holiday classic that should be cherished by anyone with an internet connection and a flair for the bizarre. —CZ
The Aftermath: When Life Hands You a Microwaved Cat, Make Hot Chocolate
Not since I defrosted last year’s Thanksgiving leftovers have I enjoyed such a timely reminder to chill the fuck out as Clive Barker’s seasonal “Tales from the Darkside” episode.
Trite but true, the holidays can be stressful. My kingdom for “an orgy of forgiveness and compassion” but for most friends and families, getting everyone and everything together for a big meal in late November is as mammoth a task as battling it out with the devil himself. “The Yattering and Jack” takes approaching that problem with blissed-out mindfulness to unthinkably delusional heights — yoinking a bare-assed, demonically possessed turkey carcass atop a Christmas tree while its willfully naïve purchaser looks on in baffling bemusement as a symbol of, dare I say, consumerist transcendence?
Horrified daughters of chronically in-denial suburbanites are something of a specialty for the “Hellraiser” director, but Amanda Polo (Danielle Brisebois) has it particularly bad with Jack for a dad. If the Yattering is to be believed — and I’ll admit that’s a big “if” — then this pickle salesman is a man who had his cat microwaved to the point of explosion and still resolved to address his daughter’s anxieties about an apparent home invasion with a cup of hot chocolate.
Understanding the complex intricacies of the father/daughter dynamic on display here seems herculean; such bewildering bravery and too-intimate chemistry belies a complicated psychology that would torture even Pinhead and Freud. But you have to wonder what dark magic is going on for this son of a witch and his straight-man daughter to be so casually flipping between the outside scene’s picturesque Christmas caroler tableaux and the inside scene’s color-corrected Leprechaun spinoff.
The mythology of the Yattering and Beelzebub is just as baffling, although I’ll admit criticizing the fairytale logic of characters predictably breaking the One Rule laid out in a plot is pointless. (At least it’s a decent allegory for consensual touching?) And I’ve got a million questions about the mechanics of the turkey possession, but fear too seriously questioning what’s so obviously a good thing.
“He’s not a saint — he’s a pickle salesman!” has to go down in some book as one of the great lines of ‘80s television, and “You look pale, let me pour you some brandy…” isn’t far behind. I’ll forgive the mismatch of what’s explicitly a Christmas TV special with a Thanksgiving IndieWire After Dark edition, if only because I could so immediately tell why it was tempting to recommend. They just don’t do turkeys in media like this enough, and raising awareness about the weaknesses of the Yattering seems akin to a public service. —AF
IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations at 11:59 p.m. ET every Friday. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
- ‘Boardinghouse’ Is the Baffling, VHS-Shot, Pie-Filled Piece of Midnight Movie History You’ve Been Sleeping on
- Isabella Rossellini Is a Double-Amputee with Beers for Legs in ‘The Saddest Music in the World’
- ‘A Town Called Panic’: The Best Stop-Motion Movie About Bulk Brick Sales to Ever Emerge from Belgium
