Karen Black's voluptuous horror
August 31, 2006

The featurette on Dark Sky Films’ just-released Special Edition of the memorable Seventies TV horror flick Trilogy of Terror finds actress Karen Black warmly recalling her Broadway days and major film projects with Coppola, Nicholson, Schlesinger, and Hopper, but when it comes to the movie she’s been tapped to promote, she’s a little less enthusiastic. In a free-wheeling interview that finds the Oscar-nominated actress talking about everything from her thighs to the differences between sci-fi and horror to her theory as to why women are frightened by rats, snakes and mice (“Women are afraid of vaginal entry,” she explains), Black admits that she doesn’t quite get the appeal of Trilogy.

“I’m proud of Day of the Locust, I’m proud of The Great Gatsby, I’m proud of Five Easy Pieces and many people mention these movies to me,” she says. “But if I were to make a statistical survey, it would be Trilogy in Terror that people have mentioned to me more in the past thirty years than any other film and I just don’t understand it. It’s a real cult phenomenon and I guess I’m proud to be part of it.”

Even loonier is Black’s insistence that Trilogy is not a horror or “terror” film but, rather, science fiction:

“Trilogy in Terror is science fiction—every part of it is utterly science fiction and many of the movies I’ve done have been science fiction and have been miscategorized [as horror] and I don’t appreciate its. I don’t think it’s very literate of people.”

Now, call us crazy, but a movie that features a foot-high, Zuni fetish doll coming to life, wielding a kitchen knife and stalking a woman in a bath robe ain’t no science fiction! And it still scares the hell out of us!

Posted by on August 31, 2006 | Comments (5)