Frankenhooker (1990)

directed by Frank Henenlotter

Emily Costa

On the first day of freshman Physics, Joey Nowakowski started calling me porno dad. He hissed it from the back of the class, goofball cronies giggling along. Porno dad, porno dad. At first I was confused. Like, me? Is that for me? I turned, saw other kids staring, stifling their own laughter, and then my brain stopped working except to make my face bright red. I was new; this was a huge public high school and I was coming from Saint Mary’s, where you might get expelled for saying something way more innocent than porno. When the bell rang, Joey walked past, said it again, followed by “Galactic Gigolo,” the words stretched out slow. Then I got it.

What Joey was trying to say was this: he knew me. He was a customer at my father’s video store, all the Nowakowskis were, which meant he was aware my dad starred in a string of independent sci-fi and horror comedies in the 1980s. He also wanted me to know he knew there was nudity in them. But what I knew was this: sure, if you flipped over a VHS copy of one of them, you’d see my dad in a hot tub with naked women, but he was acting. He was just playing a space alien that looked like a broccoli who won a game show and got to come to Earth and have sex with as many women as possible. He wasn’t a porn star, Joey. He wasn’t in porn. That movie was in the CULT section of his store, not the little back room with the curtain.

I walked to my locker and considered my options. Would I be called porno dad for all of high school, then? Would it catch on? It wasn’t even a nickname for me. If anything, I was porno daughter. I briefly imagined a life where I was confident and leaned into this, like, adjacent-sluttiness, compounded by the whole former-Catholic-school-girl thing. But I wasn’t confident. I was caught in the teenage purgatory of wanting absolutely no one to look at me, while simultaneously wanting desperately to be seen.

This was also the year we all noticed my dad was actually more similar to a sex-crazed alien broccoli than we’d previously thought. We kind of knew this—my sisters and I talked about our suspicions frequently—but it got more brazen, and suddenly seemed unbearable. There were other women, there had always been other women, and since I was a teenage girl and not a thirty six year old in regular therapy who’d forgiven him and come to view my parents as whole, complex people with inner lives, I was fucking pissed, dude.

The deterioration continued. At my wholly unsupervised fifteenth birthday party a year later, a friend sat on my boyfriend’s lap. It felt like a vice tightening around my heart, the resulting whine of yearning squeaking out of me as: you guys wanna watch some porn?

I pulled down the only tape I knew my dad kept upstairs, high on a shelf next to his own movies. Traci Lords in Traci, I Love You.

Her first legal release, I told my friends as I popped in the tape. I hoped they would look at me with a mix of awe and fear, hoped my boyfriend would recognize some edge in me not present in the other girl (now off his lap; hell yeah), hoped, in burgeoning pick-me-girl fashion, for validation, maybe. Attention? Some payoff for the embarrassment I felt constantly, for the joke-y comments they’d sometimes lob at me about my chaotic family. But they just looked at the screen. It was standard stuff. Extremely ‘80s. Too ‘80s.

What else is on that shelf, they asked.

*

My shelf now (abbreviated): Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, a big-box copy of Elvira presenting a 1970s version of Frankenstein put out by ThrillerVideo. Several VHS copies of his movies: Galactic Gigolo, Psychos in Love, Cemetery High. A bootleg DVD of Salo from the old video store. Traci, I Love You. The same copy. Digging through his apartment attic after he died, the rent clock ticking, I scavenged like crazy. I couldn’t imagine what I’d want or need or regret tossing. Now, in the storage unit, squished cardboard boxes filled with mouse shit and his entire Playboy collection. In my guest room, binders full of curated, extra-special ephemera: a Troma gift bag, a still from Frankenpenis signed by John Wayne Bobbitt, a home-printed beeper brochure. In my garage, bins separated roughly by subject: DAD MOVIES, DAD STORE, DAD LIFE.

*

My sister swears Frank Henenlotter hated my dad’s movies. We can’t verify anything, especially because even when he was alive my dad was often full of shit. But Molly says she thinks that during one of the last times we all went to Chiller Theatre, the long-running Jersey-based horror con, my dad was talking to Henenlotter, the iconic exploitation director of Frankenhooker, and he straight-up told my dad his movies sucked. I was getting ready for a photo, paying my fee to meet the film’s stars, Patty Mullen and James Lorinz. It was the 25th anniversary. James was wearing a Jets jersey under his lab coat. Patty had on a neon purple wig.

Frankenhooker wasn’t one we watched together, but it was the first neon, goofy, gory horror comedy I’d really claimed as my own, as my favorite. This is somehow more important. Like a teach-a-man-to-fish type thing. Because after watching it, I’d come to him to talk about that world, to purposely get him going, rambling about the things I used to roll my eyes at. He’d name-drop and quiz me, telling stories and jokes and rattling off who he’d met at what convention, a clearly overblown anecdote following. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of scream queens and old TV actors, shook his head in exasperation if I didn’t know who he was talking about. I should’ve; he was always teaching us. As kids, we were schooled in early comedy: The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Keaton and Lloyd and a little bit of Chaplin. We would do “Who’s on First?” with him. I went through a Shemp phase.

I scroll through the pictures Molly took of us posing at Chiller, me and my husband in between the stars, James Lorinz with his stethoscope to my chest. Molly took a million to guarantee the shot. It’s like a flipbook. I watch my husband walk out, and my arms open to someone off-camera, and my dad joins. I don’t remember how I felt about him that day, if he’d yelled at one of us, if he was embarrassing me. But I can see in this little scene, photo to photo, that I want him there.

I fuck around on Google Photos more just to torture myself, to see what our last photo is together, the last one I have of just us. It’s four years later, our last convention together. But in between? In “real time”? Zero. Instead, there's an odd chronology, because of pictures I took of physical pictures—those convention pictures from 2015, but then us in 1994, then 1989, then 1996. A random patchwork of time-hops, us young, us old, back and forth. It mimics my memory. These ones are so old they’ve warped, any residual badness almost evaporated.

*

At the beginning of Frankenhooker, Jeffrey Franken accidentally kills his fiancée when the electric lawnmower he gives her dad runs her down, chopping her to bits. The TV news reporter puts it best: “In a blaze of blood, bones, and body parts, the vivacious young girl was instantly reduced to a tossed human salad, a salad that police are still trying to gather up, a salad that was once named Elizabeth.”

Jeffrey’s grief manifests as a psychotic drive to recreate her, to take her head and put it on a new, perfect body; he’s a bio-electrician at a power plant, but he’s also an amateur doctor. He maps out the new and improved Elizabeth, devising ways to eliminate any unsightly attributes she may have once had.

He decides to turn to sex workers, “interviewing” them (sizing them up and measuring them in a montage) to find the best parts. He works hard to rationalize his plot to kill one, but as he mentions to his mom, he’s “antisocial,” and “becoming dangerously amoral. [He’s] lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Good from bad.” Even after he conceives the plan, he still wrestles with whether he should give the sex workers the “super crack” he makes, arguing with himself that they don’t have to take it. In the background, a debate rages on TV about legalizing prostitution, adding just the right amount of contextualization and humanity to the silliness happening in front of the TV. When the girls find the crack, they explode like fireworks, someone’s head pinging off the pimp’s, knocking him out with a cartoon boing.

*

Molly’s the same as me in so many ways, our interests echoing our upbringing even though we’re five years apart. We experienced it in slightly different ways. Still, she writes screenplays full of blood and camp. We’re always trying to examine why we are the way we are, but now I ask her more pointedly. These are the types of movies most people don’t want to watch, the rest of my family included. So why do we? Can we untangle why we love Frankenhooker, or something like, say, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama? What does it do for us? What does it say about us?

Loving this brand of sleaze and gore as a woman feels complicated, but coming from our house it feels even more so. The TV room, where we ate every meal in front of the screen, was covered in posters of half-naked big-breasted women, decapitated corpses, blood and sex, but also the word comedy. It was normal to me, until it was pointed out that it wasn’t. I’d look at these images daily in fascination, then I’d go to school and burn in secret shame, learn all the ways God was disappointed in me. I was afraid of sex. I was intrigued by it. It meant bad things. But people loved it. We had to collect diapers and onesies to help unwed mothers, for the defenseless beings created through their wicked deeds. I was going to hell.

And then as a teenager, I not only saw how sex had the power to destroy families, but I began to explore my own sexuality, how it could be used and manipulated. Becoming, myself, used and manipulated. How could it be good if everything pointed to how bad it was? The confusion continued. Then I stopped going to church and started going to horror conventions.

*

When my dad invited me to go with him to Chiller Theatre in October 2006, I felt so incredibly special, his favorite, even, like he was welcoming me into the fold. Like he knew I had potential. We’d been at odds for years, but maybe this was the way back in. We met Paul Reubens together. The whole world opened up.

I hung around his friends, these older guys he met through his video store. They still talked about the TV characters they had crushes on when they were kids. But it was the way they talked about them, a little crudely and like it was all still happening. On the long drive home, they discussed who still looked great. Hot, even. You could stay a kid forever at these places, which, I realize now, is one reason why I still go.

At Chiller, we gawked. We walked through the vendor rooms, the mazes of folding tables, the hotel hotdog smell mixing with sweat and plastic and mask-rubber. My dad made me meet Boris Karloff’s daughter. We saw retired porn stars and Mink Stole and a Warriors reunion and Scott Schwartz from A Christmas Story. We saw Zacherle, the Cool Ghoul. There weren’t a ton of teenage girls walking around. The women I remember seeing were beautiful, many of them near-naked. Most of them were on display behind the tables, with mainly men, black T-shirt men, crowding around them. No—display is the wrong word. Because these people were worshiping them.

I’d like to say seeing this was when I began attempts to sort it all out: like, how could I be a slasher/cult horror fan and a feminist? But I couldn’t have figured that out when I was 19. Man, we were obsessed with like, Hostel. My I’m-not-like-other-girls shtick was physically hurting me at this point, tangled up in repressed bisexuality and whatever the fuck was going on with the emo boys I had been hanging around with. I was going by vibes and gut feelings, not examining anything. I didn’t even really know what feminism was.

*

I recently rewatched Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (1984). I hadn’t seen it in so long, but it was one of my favorites as a kid. I think it soothed me in ways I didn’t understand, this idea that you could simply reanimate the dead. My grandparents had just died within two years of each other, and my dad was wrecked from it. I remember him watching it with me many times, and I wonder what it did for him, if it was doing the same thing for both of us.

Before he died, we visited his apartment, and he gave my three-year-old his collection of Universal Monsters memorabilia. I must’ve dissociated in the moment; he looked shockingly like my grandfather did before he died. I don’t think I could’ve absorbed everything happening, but I remember him explaining each monster in detail to Ezra, their myths and origins, the specific ways to kill them. He explained, too, that most of the monsters weren’t really bad, just misunderstood. It was a complicated thing, he said.

*

During one call, Molly and I come to a point where we butt heads. We’re long past the simple nature/nurture debate, onto the “isn’t it kind of bad that we like it?” part. It starts to feel like self-flagellation to me. I’m still wrestling with this stuff, but I don’t feel as torn anymore, which makes me feel bad in a way I can’t describe. Should I be more uncomfortable by the objectification of and violence toward women in these types of movies? Doesn’t that disregard agency—these actors, porn actors, people in general? There’s tension in the call, and so I’ve got to be wrong; if it’s not bothering me as much as it should, is that my internalized misogyny?

Am I still trying to get men to like me? Am I still trying to get my dad to like me?

*

The last convention he went to was the CT HorrorFest in 2019. He was sick and dying and delusional or hopeful, however those are different, and we went together, me as helper, him as guest, and except for a few reminders of his illness, the day was all joy. The conventions feel more open and welcoming now, more like a celebration.

In 2017, Vinegar Syndrome re-released Psychos in Love, his most “famous” (lol) film. I don’t know if it was this release, or streaming, or whatever else has replaced the dusty VHS shelf at the back of the video store, but so many more people seem to love it now. Or maybe he wasn’t as full of shit as I thought he was when he’d claim such a deep fandom.

I love that movie, too, like I genuinely do, not just because I miss him. I see it as a kind of tri-state horror-comedy cousin to Frankenhooker. They’re both love stories, but with murder. When talking about the movie in Mike Watt’s Fervid Filmmaking, my dad said, “We decided to do something that was totally off the wall, totally fun.” In an interview with Lee Sobel, Frank Henenlotter, who fought his own cancer battle while filming Bad Biology, and who credits that film as a kind of therapeutic savior, said, “Anything I do, it will find its own audience. Maybe it’s a small audience. Maybe it’s only four guys who are going to like it. I don’t know, but it’ll find its own audience.”

I talk to Molly again, and I talk to my husband, and I won’t stop talking at all, really, I’m sorry. I say to them, maybe it’s this insistence on fun, or Henenlotter’s “four guy” theory that draws us to these films, this independence and freedom. It seems like the best way to make art. You do it for yourself first. It’s tainted when the outside leaks in.

But the more I talk and talk and write, the more it’s clear to me how little it actually matters that I figure out how my fondness for these films squares up with some morality ghost haunting me since childhood. It’s okay to like them. I don’t have to exist in a binary; it’s a complicated thing.

Because these films, despite their “off-the-wall”-ness, operate in a gray area. There’s no easy answer. There’s offensive shit in them, but then stuff that’s so much more progressive than anything mainstream. They’re made on the fringe, so they get to grapple with the shocking and taboo. The things that make us uncomfortable.

Henenlotter doesn’t like to talk about what his films mean. I’ve read this in multiple places about Brain Damage, specifically—is it about drugs? “Sexual loathing”? He says: “Who cares? Believe me, I’m not sitting there thinking, ‘Oh what subtext am I going to play with this time?’ Oh God, no. I never confront it until I’m asked about it or read a review.” In the February 1988 issue of Fangoria, he says of Brain Damage, “I just wanted to deal with the story visually and…I tried not to provide all the answers. Not just about the monster, I didn’t even want to tell the audience about the characters’ ages or circumstances, I don’t tell anything about these people.” He explains that pinning it down to one subtext is a “narrow” reading of the film, and that some ideas are simply to enhance the story. Either way, there’s so much meat in the films to dissect, so much gray area to live in.

In Cemetery High, one of the movies my dad made with his director and friend Gorman Bechard, there’s the “hooter honk,” double warning horns that sound every time we’re about to see boobs. Gorman disowns this movie (worth looking up), but even so, the women in it have agency and purpose—they’re out to kill “scummy men”—and they frequently break the fourth wall to discuss the gratuitous nudity.

I’ll go against Henenlotter’s wishes and dissect the end of Frankenhooker a bit, too: the sex workers are killed, but Elizabeth, created from their corpses and her own judged and mangled parts, is imbued with their spirits. As she hobbles through New York, she exacts revenge through sex, electrocuting Johns. Then, after her head falls off and Jeffrey re-zaps her, Elizabeth has her regular personality back, but is horrified to find she’s made of random parts. She could be seen to represent all women, saying, “​​I feel so strange, as if there were so many women inside of me.” Then Zorro the pimp comes in and decapitates Jeffrey. Then the mutilated, mashed-up body parts of his marked girls attack him, dragging him back to the purple liquid of the freezer. Elizabeth turns doctor, fixing Jeffrey, but oh yeah—the serum is estrogen-based. It only works on women. Jeffrey is horrified to see his new form, his purple-nippled breasts, but Elizabeth doesn’t care. She’s in love.

It’s silly and funny and gross. And that’s enough! It definitely is. But the reason why it’s perfect is because there’s more there, if you want to look. Like, is having boobs and no “Johnson” the worst horror Jeffrey can imagine, worse than…anything that’s happened in the film? Is Elizabeth saving him or punishing him? Is it I’ll love you no matter what you look like, or is it take that, you misogynistic asshole? Now you know how I feel?

It could be any of that, or none of it, or all of it. Just like how I can watch one of these movies and have a total fucking blast, engaging with or completely ignoring the subtext I drag around with me. Just like how the things I was so deeply ashamed of are what I now hold closest. Just like how every electric-red splatter reminds me of him.

Emily Costa is the author of Until it Feels Right (Autofocus Books). Her work can be found in X-R-A-Y, HAD, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. You can follow her on Twitter @emilylauracosta or on Letterboxd @cannonxball.