More Homage to New Orleans in Three Films Featuring the Big Easy

By June Pulliam

11/01/2005

The Skeleton Key. Iain Softley, Director. 2005.

Cat People. Paul Schrader, Director. 1982.

J. D.’s Revenge. Arthur Marks, Director. 1976.

More than likely, you’ve only heard of one of these three films, The Skeleton Key, and only because a) it came out this year and b) we reviewed it in this issue of Necropsy.  But all three of these films have a certain charm to them, not only as horror films, but in how they represent New Orleans as something more than an endless strip of Bourbon Street where tourists go to gawk at strippers and puke after drinking too much during Mardi Gras. I recommend watching them if you would like to see the Crescent City and its surrounding areas, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s.

The most recent of the three, The Skeleton Key, is a multilayered possession narrative involving Voodoo and race in New Orleans and the surrounding bayou areas. The Devereaux plantation home, the main scene of the film’s action, is located about 60 miles away from New Orleans in Terrebonne Parish, and is a bit geographically prophetic. The modest edifice (not of the epic proportions that Hollywood would have everyone believe represented plantation homes in the south) is surrounded by a bayou which is perpetually threatening to overtake the dwelling, and nearly does near the film’s climax. And indeed, this parish was flooded badly by Katrina and Rita, and many of its coastal areas found themselves seven feet under water.

The film also does an excellent job of representing New Orleans, though this city is not the story’s main setting. Of course, there is the de rigueur scene in a French Quarter bar, but it doesn’t last long. What is particularly intriguing is the film’s representation of the rest of New Orleans. Caroline is a home health aid who has relocated from the Crescent City to Terrebonne Parish to help Violet Devereaux care for her dying husband Ben, and soon suspects that her employer might be using Voodoo to steal the remaining years of her husband’s life in order to prolong her own mortal existence. Caroline’s suspicions and her desire to help Ben cause her to venture into the city, into the 9^th Ward (the part of the city that received the most damage from Katrina), to a shop that sells Voodoo supplies. There she consults with the proprietress about how to counteract Violet’s magic. The modest shop itself, located in the back of a Laundromat in this black working class neighborhood, is fairly typical of the stores that actually sell such supplies. And the filmmaker is to be commended for showing one of these actual stores, a dimly lit place with strange candles, oils, and herbs placed on functional metal workshop shelves rather than the stereotypical and generic magic shop that is usually seen. Shops such as the one in this film really exist, both in New Orleans and even here in Baton Rouge, and look precisely like this store, down to its location in a relatively inexpensive urban piece of real estate.

However, The Skeleton Key is not without problematic representations of the city and its culture. The film’s biggest faux paux regarding local color concerns accents and use of music. As I mentioned in the review proper of The Skeleton Key, an opening scene has the main character boogeying in a New Orleans bar to second line music, and no one but tourists would dance in a bar to second line music. The film’s South Louisiana accents are also wrong, but not so bad as to be hideously offensive stereotypes. They’re just wrong; trust me--I know.

Paul Schrader’s 1982 Cat People is another film that accurately represents the city. Schrader’s film, a remake of Jacques Tourner’s 1942 classic of the same name, relocates the story to New Orleans. Here is the plot briefly: A young and attractive woman is terrified of losing her virginity because doing so will release her true and bestial feline nature, with dangerous consequences for those around her. Schrader’s film itself is forgettable. The original is much campier, in part because the Hayes Office prevented it from openly discussing the female sexuality it nevertheless attempts to so frankly deal with. But the parts of New Orleans and surrounding areas that Schrader chose to incorporate into the film truly capture the city. Very little attention is paid to the French Quarter. Instead, a good deal of the film is set in downtown proper and the old Audubon Zoo. Today, the Audubon Zoo is a world class facility that displays the animals in settings that are very close to their natural habitats, and gives them some space and a bit of privacy away from the prying eyes of patrons. But Cat People shows the zoo just before these renovations, where animals were displayed in small, dark cages. So when one of the panthers becomes aroused by the presence of one of the cat people and rips off its handler’s (Ed Begley's) arm, I couldn’t help but think its behavior was only the natural result of being contained in an inhumane environment that I am glad has been since replaced.

Another spot not often seen by tourists lies in Lake Ponchatrain just to the west of the city. Anyone driving to New Orleans via East I-10 over the Causeway will see a blue house in the lake near the railroad tracks, that like the interstate, runs over this body of water. The house is a fishing camp, one of the few that I’ve seen visible from the interstate, as most of these buildings are assessable by water only, not roads. This particular house was the scene of a tryst between Irena (Natassja Kinski), one of the cat people who is trying to contain her nature, and Oliver (John Heard), the zookeeper who is sexually drawn to her, who earlier that day fished for crabs in the lake. Sad note: after many, many hurricanes, this house has finally succumbed and was knocked on its side into the lake.

The last horror film to give a particularly accurate representation of New Orleans is the little known J. D.’s Revenge, which was Lou Gossett’s first film, by the way. The plot of J. D.’s Revenge follows Ike, a mild mannered law student and cab driver, who is possessed by the spirit of J. D., a gangster from the 1940s who was killed by someone’s betrayal. For some unknown reason, he chooses to inhabit the body of Ike and settle scores with his killers some thirty years after his own death. While the film itself could be seen as offering an interesting commentary on race and horror (Ike, aspiring to become a member of the middle class, is nevertheless compelled through possession to behave in the way many white people would see all African-Americans), here I’ll confine myself to discussing how it represents New Orleans. I first saw J. D.’s Revenge in the mid 90’s after stumbling across it at my local video store, and though most of the film is set in the French Quarter, it is not the Quarter of today, which still retains some of its unique charm, but has been increasingly homogenized by corporate influences (witness, for example the Decatur Street Hooters, or the Gold Club, an Atlanta based up-scale strip club chain, now a presence on Bourbon Street, competing with all of the local titty bars). Instead, this is the old French Quarter with local color, before the Jax Brewery building was converted into a mall, and previous to the insidious creep of other national chains.  Seeing this older more original version of the Quarter is like traveling back in time. Also featured in the film is one of the above ground cemeteries, something not often seen in cinema. The only other cinematic representation of these cemeteries that come to mind is a scene from Easy Rider.

As of this writing, we don’t aren’t sure what New New Orleans will look like, but know that a good many old historic buildings will have to be razed. Worse still, though, we’ve heard rumors that the new and improved city, particularly the Quarter, will be “revitalized” by more corporate chains, causing it to resemble Orlando, or even what has been done to the Riverwalk in San Antonio over the past fifteen years. With more and more of the local color of New Orleans being washed away by the flood of corporate interests, films like these are destined to become time capsules, offering us a rare glimpse into the real city that time forgot.