Welcome back to “Late to the Party”, iHorror’s weekly column where the writers pick a movie that’s on the “Everyone’s seen that” list and watches it for the first time.  I had the great privilege this week to watch Wes Craven’s Shocker, and it’s one I won’t soon forget!

To summarize briefly before we really get started, Shocker tells the story of Horace Pinker (masterfully played by Mitch PIleggi), a serial killer whose MO is killing entire families.  A young college football player named Jonathan (Peter Berg) begins have nightmares that soon prove to be a psychic connection to Pinker which leads to the killer’s arrest.  When he is taken to the electric chair, Pinker manages to free his own spirit with the ability to possess others and travel by electrical current.  What follows is one hell of a ride as Pinker possesses and kills some of Jonathan’s closest friends as the young man does his very best to stop him.

Written and directed by Craven, this movie is a shining gem in the horror auteur’s career.  Every twist and turn, ever shock if you’ll excuse the play on words, was an expansion of ideas he had only begun to toy with when he wrote and directed the first A Nightmare on Elm Street.  In Pinker, he created a madman on the same scale as Kreuger and gave his audiences a brand new source of paranoia.  If Nightmare made us afraid to dream, then Shocker convinced us that turning on the lights or the television could be just as dangerous.

PIleggi and Berg played off each other just as well as Englund and Langenkamp had just a few short years before.  Jonathan is a remarkably vulnerable and emotionally open character in a way we don’t see in many male characters in the genre, and it was his openness that made us care about him and his connection to Pinker.  It also made him the perfect foil for the rabid and inhuman Pinker.

Aside from Pileggi and Berg, the cast was rounded out by some terrific talent that could have easily stolen the show.  If you look closely, you’ll see Ted Raimi playing the football teams manager and trainer, and Sam Scarber brought militant heat as Jonathan’s teammate.  If you look really closely, Craven filled out the cast with an unexpected array of talent that plays like the ultimate Easter egg hunt.  Look closely and you’ll spot, Heather Langekamp, Craven’s children Jessica and Jonathan Craven, Wes Craven himself, and even Timothy Leary as a late night televangelist.

Special props also go to young Lindsay Parker who, at 9 years old, played Pinker’s youngest victim of possession.  Young Parker played it to the hilt as she maniacally drove construction equipment and cursed like a 3 foot tall sailor before Jonathan managed to force Pinker from her body.  It was a great moment in a movie filled with great moments.

Another point that really worked for the film is how Craven handled the script.  It would have been all too easy to start out with Pinker’s execution and an hour and a half of his rampage afterward, but in a masterstroke, the writer started in the midst of the Pinker’s killing spree while he was alive.  It was fully halfway into the film before the execution takes place.  This gave us time to get to know the characters and learn more about their motivations.  Pinker wasn’t just a supernatural menace. He was also a serial killer who killed whole families and we saw him do it.  It made his villainy all the more real when he is loosed from his body in the electric chair.

If I had one complaint for the film, it was that there were a few too many things that went completely unanswered.  There were suggestions that Jonathan might have actually been Pinker’s son and while they played on that throughout the film, I was ultimately left wondering if it was true or not.  Likewise, I wasn’t sure why Jonathan’s plan to banish Pinker actually worked or if it ultimately had at all.  PIleggi has said in interviews that he really thought Wes had intended to turn the film into a franchise, but was never able to get it done.  I have to wonder if some of those answers weren’t held for sequels that never happened.

Ultimately, this is a movie that I’m so glad I finally had the opportunity to watch.  Entertaining and chilling, the film was everything a fan could want in a Wes Craven movie.  It gave us questions and left some of them up to us to answer about the nature of evil and how we ourselves would confront the personification of it.  As I said before, it’s a hell of a movie and I highly recommend you watch it soon if, like me, you’re late to the party.

Join us next week as Jacob Davison takes on 1981’s The Burning!  And as always, take a few moments to leave a comment or share the article along if you like what you see!