Enchantment: The Fantastic Films of Michael Krueger
Art & Trash, episode 22
Enchantment: The Fantastic Films of Michael Krueger
Stephen Broomer, November 24, 2022
Movie magic is a dream of transformation. It transforms day into night, paupers into princes, dreamers into actors on a fantastical stage. And it’s as if by magic that circumstances can come together, where a setting, a passion, an opportunity, can make for a strangely effective aberration of form. The fantasy-cliché of the film director is of a person possessed, making films that are just an exteriorization of the inner life of the dreamer. In this episode, Stephen Broomer discusses the brief filmmaking career of Michael Krueger, who directed two films back-to-back in the late 1980s for the international home video market.
SCRIPT:
First Films and Flash Features
Movie magic is a dream of transformation. It transforms day into night, paupers into princes, dreamers into actors on a fantastical stage. And it’s as if by magic that circumstances can come together, where a setting, a passion, an opportunity, can make for a strangely effective aberration of form. The fantasy-cliché of the film director is of a person possessed, making films that are just an exteriorization of the inner life of the dreamer.
Michael Krueger loved science fiction and horror movies. As editor and co-publisher of Fantastic Films, a magazine that focused on special-effects-driven genre cinema, he had been active in the community of commercial filmmaking beginning in the late 1970s. He entered film at the dawn of the theatrical blockbuster, a sea-change guided by a small and privileged brotherhood of populist cinephiles in California. Hollywood wasn’t so far from Krueger’s base of Denver, Colorado but at the same time, they were worlds apart. By the time he began to try his own hand at filmmaking, the broader marketplace had changed, grown, diversified; the sci-fi blockbusters he had written about in the pages of Fantastic Films had arrived almost simultaneously with the dawn of the home video market, a shift that would greatly empower consumers to become makers. In the mid-1980s, Krueger found himself collaborating on a pair of nested production companies, First Films and Flash Features, with two goals in mind: to make inexpensive, regionally-anchored genre movies for the international home video market, and to make theatrical features. Krueger had already made commercials and industrial films, but by becoming a partner in the First Films enterprise, he could pursue his dream, to be the Roger Corman of Denver.
That Denver focus is central to understanding what would follow. A passionate regional spirit marks the few films that Michael Krueger would produce before his death from cancer at age 39. He spoke to journalists about his desire to make films that showcased local Denver talent. Taking Roger Corman as his idol, Krueger embodied Corman’s core value, quick turnaround: his first two films as a director, which would prove to be his only films as director, were shot back-to-back and made inexpensively. Corman films, at their best, tap into unconscious creative processes, a consequence of the speed of their production and the unusual gathering of talents that the California trash king brought together, a mix of beat hipsters, Hollywood aspirants, and Borscht-belt wits; that unconsciousness produces simple, automatic narratives and surreal continuity. The Corman influence was felt in both Krueger’s business model and production style: the rapid production, resourceful construction, and idiosyncratic writing give his films an uncommon, ready sophistication, the work of a filmmaker conducting a subtle exploration of technology, morality, and the theme of possession.
Casanovas
“What do you know about beauty?” An elderly woman, suffering from dementia, asks this question of a young man who has visited her seeking answers about the death of her son. Her visitor is an aspiring pickup artist, but all of his training in the art of persuasion has made him no smoother at conning her into cooperating. “What do you know about beauty?” It’s less a question than an accusation. Michael Krueger’s first film, Mind Killer, takes this accusation as its central challenge. In the world of Mind Killer, in lieu of tenderness, there is only sexual opportunism. None of the men in Mind Killer understand beauty, but they are entranced by it, enchanted by a great mysterious Other. “What do you know about beauty?” Krueger will tell us something of beauty, and a great deal about ugliness.
In Mind Killer, comic undercurrents are at odds with the grim, even visionary portents of its story. It is a film about feeling unheard, unacknowledged, unloved and unloveable. Or so it would seem. That’s the cliché disposition of anti-hero Warren, a sad-sack doomed to insignificance in the shadow of his father, a professional wrestler, that calling that summons both foppish theatricality and rugged masculinity. Warren is a lonely, strange, isolated man, and he occupies what he can only perceive as a loveless world. He’s sensitive and, it seems, traumatized to bitterness, from too many nights coming back empty from the well of human kindness. His solitary job as a city archivist occupies him during the day; at night he unsuccessfully cruises a local bar, Swingles: is it a singles bar, is it a swingers bar, or something in between? There Warren tries and fails to put into action the tricks of a pick-up artist. Instead of finding the naive women that the pickup artist claims as ready prey, Warren finds instead women who immediately recognize his immaturity, his awkward, superficial attempts at connection, and rightfully dismiss him. He claims he’s looking for love, but his search is rooted in objectification: he doesn’t want connection, he wants possession. He fixates these desires on Sandy, a woman who enters the city archives to increase productivity. Warren has a juvenile understanding of the needs of others, an immature sense of the limits of his will, and this will lead him to condemn the world in generalizations: he sees only the predatory dominance of charming men, the inherent wickedness of unavailable women. Despite his intellectual gifts, Warren will never learn the difference between love that’s given and love that’s taken. What, after all, does he truly know about beauty? For this, he blames society. And the solution he finds comes from another outcast, a dead one, a scientist whose research mysteriously produces telepathic powers in those who study it. Even at this, Warren starts out as a failure: in his first session reading it, he seems to hypnotize himself. Now that he has the power of mind control, Warren will teach the world to love him by force.
No, Mind Killer is not merely a film about feeling unloved, because it doesn’t court Warren’s perspective; as Warren’s story enters into this pseudoscientific, fantastical stage, and his motives and tantrums make him increasingly suspect, its themes shift to the consequences of asserting one’s will over others. For Warren, Mind Killer is a rape fantasy and a revenge fantasy; it is the fantasy of an antisocial nothing. For the rest of us, it is a cautionary fable of the danger of getting what you wish for, how power can transform the meek into something evil. The moral judgment of Mind Killer begins not with Warren’s transformation, but long before that, with the pitiful and repulsive creature he has already become by the time the film begins, a man who watches laughable pick-up artist how-to videotapes, a man who will meet a kindly rebuff from a beautiful women with a gruff, “par for the course,” a man whose demands and expectations are unfair because of his own arrested development, his sense of entitlement, a man whose faults strain the limits of our sympathies. He is, in contemporary parlance, an Incel, collapsing the society around him into three categories: unavailable and uninterested women, whom he views as objects; men who out-charm him, for whom he has contempt; and his fellow sexless underdogs, with whom he has a complex and fraught solidarity. Warren will never mature, and yet, Warren grows in other ways under the influence of his new powers, his flesh expanding until his giant, evil, mutated brain leaves his rotting, twisted husk of a body in a supreme act of ejaculation.
From the outset, Mind Killer is a film about perversity. Scientific perversity and sexual perversity, taboo desires, castration anxiety. Krueger draws his themes from nineteenth century fantasies of the reckoning of science and spirit. The pseudoscience of telepathy and the pseudopsychology of the pickup artist are offered in parallel, both of them fantasies of dominance. Warren is an amalgam of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and H.G. Wells’s Griffin, the Invisible Man. Like Henry Jekyll, his curiosity transforms him into a harbinger of unrestrained desire, willpower, cruelty; like Griffin, his transformation assumes thematic resonances with his self-perception, his destiny. Before he becomes a telekinetic Svengali, Warren is already an invisible man, a ghost at the banquet of Swingles. With a little taste of power, it is a short ride from there to become Mr. Hyde, restyling himself as a Casanova. This Casanova is a librarian who loves objects—books and documents—and so naturally he sees other human beings as objects, and his desires are essentially necrophilic. This fantasy of mind control, like any assertion of willpower that turns another human being into a puppet, is a form of necrophilia. The doo wop singer Vernon Green, at 14, defined a nonce word from his song ‘The Letter'. The word was Puppetuse: “a secret paper-doll fantasy figure who would be my everything and bear my children.” It is, of course, a portmanteau of the word puppet and the French feminine suffix ‘euse’ — as in masseuse, danseuse, chanteuse, coiffeuse. Green considered this expression “a sweet word of pizmotality.” Warren wishes to make Sandy into a puppetuse, to force her to be his everything. But for Warren, in a great irony, physical maturity and mental telepathy are opposing forces: his hair falls out in clumps the more he asserts his will over others, as if he is reverting back to infancy, or at least, to some prepubescent state.
The comedy of Mind Killer is at its most ambiguous in a recurring technique, possibly accidental, of mixing background sound so high that the voices of characters are lost in the mix. This starts in a painfully realistic scene of the men talking in the club. We cannot hear them; can they hear each other? Later, when roommates Warren and Brad attempt a heart-to-heart, the volume of a football game, which Warren complains about, drowns out their voices. At face value this a technical error—a bizarre one—but one that seems to suit the theme of a man desperate to be acknowledged and heard, drowned out by the world around him. This sound mixing is given a greater intention later, revealing itself as a clever conceit. Other comic aspects further undercut any compassionate portrayal of Warren: the very idea that a pick-up artist would be anyone’s hero brands him as a loser. As the climax begins, Warren’s head undergoes a penis-like transformation, growing long like an erection before it bursts, a real dickhead. The film’s comic aspects are often steeped in irony, but there are also suggestions of a hip, idiosyncratic humour, akin to Charles B. Griffith’s contributions to Corman films, for example, in the characterization of Warren’s friend Larry, a seemingly harmless pervert who seems to pattern himself after Tex Avery’s horny wolf from Swing Shift Cinderella. This behaviour will reach its climax in the film’s final moments, when Larry goes from conquering hero to bonafide pickup artist. But long before that misanthropic punchline is a scene in which he brings a date to his apartment and they listen to recordings of wolves howling. Sweet and weird, in this the nerdy idiosyncrasies of the librarian become endearing. It is a marked contrast to other monsters that will appear, for example, when Warren is transformed, seemingly in Sandy’s imagination, into a bat-like monster that assaults her. Warren is feeding on Sandy, and she recognizes him for what he is: a kind of psychic vampire.
Mind Killer bears overt debts to an older order of pseudoscientific fantasies, but it also has more contemporary influences. When Warren’s body begins to transform as a result of his out-of-control psyche, Krueger and his effects team allude to the body horror of David Cronenberg’s films, especially Scanners and The Brood, films that draw from the psychoanalytic theories of Wilhelm Reich, of the relation between physical and psychological health, giving grotesque form to emotional turmoil. There is no greater body horror imaginable than what happens at the climax of Mind Killer, when Warren’s brain ejaculates from his body. It attaches itself to Sandy’s chest and possesses her, its appearance a bizarre exaggeration of a heart shaped broach. Warren’s brain is both brain and heart locked in conflict. For Sandy it becomes a blazing, exposed heart; that it is ultimately defeated by being stabbed off of her is itself another allegory, that the mind of the predatory, manipulative man, becomes the broken heart of a woman. The brain should know better than to play with the heart. Mind Killer’s debts are not only to horror movies: the transformations that Warren and Larry undergo mirror the transformation of The Nutty Professor. Julius Kelp becomes Buddy Love; the nerd becomes the cool mod guy; Warren becomes a monster; Larry becomes his own hero, one that doesn’t seem so far removed from Warren’s monster. The men learn nothing about beauty. Such is the manly art of the Casanova.
Signal Hypnosis
In Mind Killer, shy and lonely people search for relief in an unfair world; Warren internalizes the perceived cruelties of that world and inflicts them back a hundred fold. In Night Vision, the world is still as unfair as ever, but its occupants are not searching for any greater experience; these characters live in a city without starlight, huddled in the glow of a tube television. They have learned not to hope for something greater. Into this masquerade drops Andy Archer, milquetoast cornpone midwesterner with his heart on his sleeve. He is a writer, searching for inspiration. On arrival he cannot find real life—he doesn’t know its address—so he turns to home video, the sewer of stories, watching VHS tapes on a haunted VCR, an imitation of life. Imitation is the keyword here, for Andy Archer’s priorities shift from a romantic search for an adventurous Hemingwayesque literary life to automatic writing, writing, as if in a trance, scenes from the future, future love and future fear and future crime, every word, it seems, at the behest of a haunted VCR. Here technology brings out the worst in people—that same technology drives the world that Andy Archer so desperately longs to occupy, Denver, Colorado, a city of distracted, downcast eyes. He wants real connection, that stuff that writers talk about when they talk about writing what they know. Andy Archer knows nothing. The world will educate him. By the end of this story he will come to embody another ethos, one of life’s great truths, that, to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, an authentic man will have the same experience again and again and again. Like another, significantly more worldly example of the armchair author—The Coen Brothers’s Barton Fink—Andy Archer, despite his aw-shucks bright-eyed demeanour, lacks true respect for the world that he is trying to depict, in part because he is removed from it by a lofty self-regard—even in his naivety, he sees this city as foul and is drawn to it because of this perception. No matter. Again, the world will educate him.
Night Vision is anti-Capra; one could argue that this makes it misanthropic, torturing a wide-eyed Capra idealist for the joy of it, but it could also be said that Night Vision simply has a measured, moral sense of the distance between idealization and reality. Andy Archer has the ingenuous style of a classical Capra hero, repurposed into an absurd caricature of the Big City, where dreams are inevitably dashed, and everyone but him has already accepted that dreams are futile. Storytelling can’t save him or this city and the people in it. When he’s warned to leave town, he doesn’t listen, because that’s his character. He’s Jefferson Smith, he’s Longfellow Deeds. He’s searching for a happy ending. He will end up in a mental hospital.
Night Vision is also about dreams in a more general sense. What is the title but a romantic description of dreams? The dreams in this film kill. On one level that is literal: the Druid Punks who serve as the film’s antagonists are nightmares come to life, and their medium, the VHS tape, has an inherent nocturne about it, to be watched in the dim hours of a lonely night, the dawn of home video as the first twilight of the movie house. The dreams that kill are also those of cinema itself. Vinnie Scotto, like Andy, has problems of self-definition: he’s a short man who seems to have internalized his height as a moral allowance, and in a prolonged soliloquy he opines about his own lost hopes and dreams. He won’t change: that’s his character. He is following a cinematic model: he has become Ratso Rizzo, and his relationship with Andy, as the pimp and his mark, is the inner city fantasy of Midnight Cowboy. Jill Davies, Andy’s only friend and later girlfriend, is a street kid cum video store worker who has become misanthropic because of the world she sees from behind her desk, whether she’s renting Nazi porn to giggling perverts or stopping kids from stealing the empty boxes of porn tapes. As with Vinnie, cinema has taught Jill lessons about the world and what to expect of life. Cinema will teach Andy, too.
Is creative action a means of thawing the chill of this world? Night Vision is not kind to Andy Archer. Andy’s desire to be a creative person, to escape the empty horizons of his Midwest town, has led him to an even lonelier place. Possessed by videotape, he hammers out stories that come true in the worst possible of ways. His VCR will spit blood, but his typewriter may as well be doing the same. In Krueger’s demonization of modern convenience, all the extensions of man are corrupted, evil, demonic. The ending of Mind Killer was misanthropic, but it had a charm to it, suggesting perhaps that the power of suggestion was relatively harmless in Larry’s hands, or, conversely, that the dangerous knowledge of the mad scientist would go on wreaking havoc so long as it remained in the possession of immature minds. Night Vision is likewise misanthropic: there’s no happy ending for Andy Archer, and like Larry, his fate suggests cyclical violence, the continuing danger posed by his possession. Andy’s fate is an ironic twist on his quest for transformation. Both films deal with possession, and both films leave the threat unresolved.
Like Warren, Andy has little agency of his own. He has a dream, but no clear skills to achieve it. His ineptitude at dealing with the city is clear from the start, when he’s ejected from a hotel for talking too much and misunderstanding the cost; he is incapable of very basic tasks, and it’s here that his aspirations first begin to falter. He wants the city to change him and it will. Like Warren, his helplessness allows him to be easily led by forces greater than him. The great irony of Night Vision is its representation of home video technology: Krueger’s own creative work could only be realized through the apparatus of home video, which is depicted within the story as a dangerous force. Consider also the ways in which Krueger and company control tension through their films: they impose skips and static to disorient the viewer. When Sandy comes to Warren’s home, and sees him transform into a ghoul with bat-like features, his transformation is anticipated by this kind of editing, an unpredictable signal-shift that suggests subliminal imagery. In Night Vision, videotape and televisual signals are given a central role; the haze of static, tuning between signals, becomes a mystical and hypnotizing force. In the film’s climax, it is out of that static haze that Andy is revealed to be a murderer. But when Vinnie attempts to show this to the police, the video signal transforms into incriminating evidence about him. Video is evidentiary but fugitive, sentient with a fine sense of irony: like any storytelling medium, it is untrustworthy.
Where much of Mind Killer was set in living rooms, offices, and sound stages, Night Vision deals with street scenes and hour-rate hotel sets. Its Denver is often dirty and menacing and vacant, policed by the stupid and corrupt, and like the archetypal characters of Krueger’s story, it is merely an archetypal Big City setting. The city backdrop is important insofar as it is mythic, as the setting of Andy’s quest. Its mythic nature is made explicit by the presence of a fraternal order, who stumble comically through the film in their Viking costumes, farting and fighting like the crew of the Goksted ship. To match them, the Druid punks conduct their rituals, summoning something evil. Denver is an anachronistic new world where Vikings and Druids meet. So too is Andy’s search for creative vitality timeless. This is the Big City as a country mouse would dream it: threatening, impatient, marked by omens, petty criminality, desolation. It’s a place of broken dreams; why on earth would Andy Archer imagine his story could end any other way?
East of Hollywood
Michael Krueger shot his first two films back to back in 1987. He would not make another. Both rely on the ingenuity of staging to tell stories that are primarily about interior transformations. Both feature Denver as a distinctive regional setting. Both prominently feature actress Shirley Ross, a strangely powerful presence who appeared in no other films but these two, along with other faces shared between his films that reflect a kind of Krueger repertory of Denver actors. Like the films of Roger Corman, Mind Killer and Night Vision are fast and cheap, mixing conventions of storytelling with idiosyncratic gestures that personalize them. That was the trick of Roger Corman films, to pursue a cookie-cutter structure so quickly that the filmmakers wouldn’t be left to dwell and deliberate and overthink and, in doing so, undermine themselves by being clever. The wit of Corman films came from the speed of their improvisation, where even the most crass, commercial exploitation could assume properties of the unconscious that distinguished them from other films. Krueger’s films are a result of the same instinct, as if the filmmaker was possessed throughout 1987 by a force of sheer creative action, a form of creativity that doesn’t stop to question itself.
After the back-to-back production of Mind Killer and Night Vision, First Films was planning a theatrical science-fiction fantasy titled My Soul to Keep, described by Krueger’s wife, producer and screenwriter Nancy Gallanis, as a serious version of Ghostbusters; also planned was a frat comedy titled Party U, which Krueger intended to direct. Neither project would materialize. The first script that Krueger had written for the company was titled Lone Wolf. It was a murder mystery about a high school terrorized by a werewolf. He and his business partner, A.B. Goldberg, agreed that it was the most commercial script they had. While Krueger had written it with the intention of directing it himself, they agreed to hire an experienced commercial filmmaker from California to direct the film.
John Callas had considerable industry experience in a range of departments, working on major commercial films and music videos, but this was his first film as a director. His approach was more conventionally professional than those who had been involved in earlier First Films productions. When Callas came on board, by his own account, he rewrote large portions of the script. This in itself makes it difficult to determine what authorship the film shares with Krueger’s own films.
Like Mind Killer and Night Vision, Lone Wolf is a story of possession. Where those films had assumed the perspective of the characters being possessed, Lone Wolf is told from the neutral position of a community seeking answers. The werewolf is a ready metaphor for puberty—the host is dragged out of their humanity and into a beastly, sexual form, much as the teenager is torn away from their childhood self by hormonal transformation—thus Lone Wolf is, appropriately, a coming-of-age story, but this aspect is undermined by its casting: its players are amateur Denver actors, all of whom are mature adults who are strangely and obviously miscast as teenagers. Unable to suspend our disbelief, Lone Wolf becomes a record of adults at-play, like children in cardboard castles or dinner theatre actors with deerstalkers and monocles hunting the Hound of the Baskervilles.
Lone Wolf plays a familiar game with archetypes: you have Eddie, the ‘bad boy’ with a criminal history; Joel, the bullied nerd; Julie, the beautiful co-ed. Like Night Vision, an emphasis is placed on new technology, in this case, computers that are used by the amateur detectives to eliminate suspects; but where Night Vision tapped into the novelty and threat of home video, Lone Wolf’s inclusion of the computer is merely topical. Setting aside the theme of possession, the strongest link between Lone Wolf and Krueger’s earlier films is the special effects, which are elaborate, gruesome, and at times out of step with the whimsical Encyclopedia Brown tone of the mystery at hand. Krueger’s authorship cannot be clearly assigned because of the changes Callas brought to the material. But from interviews he gave at the time, Krueger suggests he had grown less interested in the burden of directing than he was in the business of producing. In the final moments of Lone Wolf, Krueger and Gallanis appear as record executives, roles that give some vague suggestion of how they saw their own place in this film, as dream makers.
Michael Krueger’s final credit is as a writer of The Amityville Curse, released in 1990. He wrote the script alongside Denver television news anchor Norvell Rose, and Doug Olsen, owner of a Denver stand-up comedy club, the three men adapting their script from a book by parapsychologist Hans Holzer. Like Lone Wolf, it was originally to be directed by Krueger. A financing arrangement based on Canadian tax shelter laws convinced the company to bring in a Canadian director and cast. This also allowed them to proceed with a massive 3.5 million dollar budget. The Amityville Curse was made in Montreal with a cast and crew of Canadians; Krueger’s role was diminished and, as with Lone Wolf, his ultimate contributions cannot be clearly defined. Once again his creative ambitions took a backseat to his commercial responsibilities. The film was released after Krueger’s death from cancer at age 39, but he was present on the set. We’re left to speculate about Krueger’s role here: one is tempted to imagine the editor of Fantastic Films finally living out a kind of dream, making a franchise film with a real budget, professional actors, special effects that didn’t need to rely solely on the economical creativity of his team. The script is built around the central theme that courses through Krueger’s films, that of demonic possession. One can also find traces of Krueger’s interest in technology: like the computer in Lone Wolf, a video camera is used to solve the mystery of The Amityville Curse. But those qualities that had made Mind Killer and Night Vision so distinctive are gone: the thrifty staging, the homemade effects, the earnest, amateur acting. The charms of Krueger’s films have been replaced with flash and professionalism, and in this Krueger and Goldberg have realized the ambition of their company, to make professional products to the standards of the marketplace. But it is also a sad compromise, that a regional booster like Michael Krueger, who spoke of Denver as a surrogate Hollywood, would end up so far from home in order to realize those ambitions.
Michael Krueger (R) with Kim Coates (L) on the set of The Amityville Curse.
Possessed by the Movies
The films of Michael Krueger’s that are most his-own, the first two, which he wrote and directed and produced, demonstrate a skill for inexpensive, fantastical filmmaking that transcends their humble station. He was guided by passion, first a fan and then a maker, working thriftily and without the pretence of professional standards. In these films, new knowledge is a threat, whether it’s the arcane knowledge of a mad scientist, or the new and perhaps suspicious technology of home video. His characters want to develop skills they lack, be it creative talent or charisma and persuasion, but their search ends in violence. Demonic possession, which lies at the root of every script he had a hand in, is metaphoric: Warren and Andy willfully surrender to something greater than them, and it changes them. Like his characters, Michael Krueger was in the process of changing as well, and his films are those of a dreamer enchanted, possessed by the movies.
CREATOR’S STATEMENT
As someone who grew up watching movies like Creature from the Haunted Sea and The Giant Gila Monster, I don’t suffer the same discipline others seem to when it comes to suspending my disbelief. If a filmmaker piles up books of carpet samples and puts some googly-eyes on their creation and calls it a monster, I’ll go along for the ride, grinning silently without the need to self-consciously declare, “that looks so fake,” and “how cheesy!” I figure if anything this is the great leveller when it comes to how we watch so-called trash: our willingness to accept that what happens in a movie doesn’t need to resemble an exacting reality.
Michael Krueger was a fan of science-fiction blockbusters. One would have to be to serve as an editor and publisher of a magazine like Fantastic Films, which sported interviews with the teams behind the space operas and effects spectaculars that defined the post-New Hollywood era of studio filmmaking. Like many genre-focused blockbuster-era cinephiles looking to Hollywood for a path forward, Krueger took inspiration from the classic monsters of Universal Studios, and in his films there are allusions, in both story and image, to the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and the Wolfman. He was also preoccupied with the idea of demonic possession, and both Mind Killer and Night Vision feature characters who have been overtaken by forces greater than themselves, and whose egoistic frailties have transformed them into instruments of violence.
Krueger and his business partner managed to land a deal with Prism, the international home video company, whereby Prism would finance their films so long as they could be made for less than $250,000. It’s by this arrangement that they made these first two films, which allowed them to move on to other projects, projects for which Krueger would take a backseat, serving only as a screenwriter and producer. He died from cancer at age 39, only two years after completing Mind Killer and Night Vision. What claims can be made about a filmmaker who only made two films, and further to that, in such a brief, condensed period of time? There are qualities that tie the films together, qualities that suggest what Krueger might have done had he continued to tell fantastical but modest, Denver-focused stories. But I’m not really interested in leaving room for speculation: he was already ascendant in his career, and when he died, Krueger’s company was producing a 3.5 million-dollar runaway production in Montreal (The Amityville Curse, issued on blu-ray disc in October 2022 from Canadian International Pictures).
We learn through imitation. In some ways, Krueger’s creative path suggests what happens to the protagonist of Night Vision, Andy Archer, when he is distracted, again and again, from the creative work of writing, by his haunted VCR, what I refer to in the piece as ‘the sewer of stories’. Andy tries to write what he knows, but the problem is that he knows nothing. Krueger wrote what he knew, and what he knew was movies. Like the best Roger Corman movies, Krueger’s were developed at a necessary speed that surrendered them to a subconscious force. Night Vision is about automatic writing; it seems at times to be the result of automatic filmmaking.