Brain Damage (1988) – What Happened to This Horror Movie?

These days the horror genre is one of the only ways to get a thoughtful, original story made in Hollywood. But believe it or not, there were those who used to be ashamed to take part in the genre. Basket Case and Frankenhooker director Frank Henenlotter was never one of those people. He basked in it. And though it may not be his most famous film, the film we’re going to cover today might be his grossest, funnest, and most thought provoking of all them. Featuring heavy drug references, a phallic parasite, and a scene so twisted it made some of the crew walk off the set. This is what happened to Brain Damage.

Seasoned 80s horror fans and monster movie aficionados may look back at Basket Case as a decently known cult commodity. Not enough so at the time that its director, Frank Henenlotter was given a huge budget for his next production. It wasn’t like today when a great horror movie sets the world on fire and the next Jordan Peele or Oz Perkins sign a fat contract with a major movie studio.

Though Brain Damage would have more than double the budget of its predecessor, that still only amounted to around $1.5 million dollars. And even that was a slog to achieve. According to Henenlotter, Embassy Pictures agreed to finance Brain Damage but then sold to Coca-Cola (of all places). So Henenlotter and the former head of Embassy Andre Blake became partners with a company called the Cinema Group. Who absolutely hated Frank’s movie. He said they had to make two versions of the film, one of them strongly edited, and even then Cinema Group “took the footage I did as if I was some kind of pornographer”.

Originally titled Elmer the Parasite up until the final stages of writing, Henenlotter’s follow up would be another low budget affair with a punk rock, f*ck you attitude. A movie that literally had to be edited at night in the Film Center Building in New York, so long as they promised to clean up after themselves before real business showed up in the morning.

In the film, our lead character Brian, your every day average dudes dude, becomes ill. He decides to stay home instead of taking his girlfriend to concert they planned. Seeing as though he had Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees posters in his bedroom, it was probably a pretty cool concert. None the less, his girlfriend is forced to go with his dutiful but secretly in love with her brother instead as he sleeps it off. Once alone, things gets weird and hallucinatory as Brian’s apartment fills up with various lights and liquids. When he wakes up, he discovers a disgusting puppet-like parasite with the gentlemanly voice of a manly news anchor has attached itself to him. The parasite convinces Brian to let him explain what’s happening to him by allowing it to “juice him up”. Aylmer then crawls on to his neck and injects a fluid that makes Brian euphoric and care free; literally tripping balls in a junk yard. Meanwhile, Aylmer is in control and looking for human brains to graphically eat. And I mean graphic.

You can’t tell while watching it, but Brain Damage bravely employs three first time actors in its leading roles. Brian would be played by Rick Hearst (who can be seen to this day as the character of Ric Lansing in General Hospital) in a performance that felt quite natural for him. Not too natural however, as Henenlotter had the makeup team give him a split lip throughout filming because he “looked too f*cking pretty”. Gordon MacDonald was cast as his brother Mike and Jennifer Lowry as his abandoned girlfriend, Barbara. They were each equally natural and likeable in their roles and because of this, it’s rather easy to care for all three characters as they are thrust into a wacky and cruel situation.

The voice of our smooth sounding, drug packing sock puppet from Hell, belongs to John Zacherle; An American TV horror host and friend of Dick Clark who Henenlotter had watched when he was younger. It’s such an ironic voice for such a disgusting little creature, that it never would have worked as well with anyone else. Zacherle would have to go uncredited for the film unfortunately, as the production wasn’t Screen Actors Guild approved.

Creating the official Henenlotter movie universe with a cameo appearance is Basket Case actor Kevin Van Hentenryck. And this awful wig (He had short hair at the time). Hentenryck appears on a bus across from Brian and Barbara carrying none other than the basket from Basket Case with his own little monster inside. On this moment Hentenryck would say, “The original idea for that film was that both paths would cross. In other words, I would be in Brain Damage, and the main character from Brain Damage would appear in Basket Case 2, because we filmed it back to back. Now there’s some union rule that once you start someone that you have to pay them continuously until they wrapped. That prevented the other side of the cross over, but I thought was a very cool idea of Frank’s.”

With Aylmer’s physical prowess being just as important as his voice, Henenlotter recruited Gabriel Bartalos and Al Magliochetti to create him. Together they created two separate Aylmer puppets for the production. One in its natural state of size and another for close up shots. More on why they chose this specific (phallic) design for Elmer, later.

The creature is transfixing, resembling everything the film itself is: Silly, cool, and gross as hell. Whether Aylmer is opening his mouth and shooting his drug needle into Brian’s neck Neo-from-the-Matrix style or making conversation with his haunting human eyes…this disgusting little bastard is mesmerizing. As are many of the effects in the film.

Brain Damage features tons of gross out, over the top special effects gags and trippy brain-melting moments. Which meant the production had to become very crafty producing them with their modest budget. And they would…..working with everything from stop motion to calf brains purchased from a local deli to achieve their gross out gags.

Speaking of calf brains…..one of the film’s most memorable moments featured them in a way you’ll never envy. In a scene that resembles exactly what its meant to resemble, Elmer goes inside of the mouth of a woman and pulls out her brains. That woman was played by actress Vicki Darnell, who had to endure a model of Aylmer being inserted in her mouth, with sewn calf brains on the end of it. All of this for the scene to be dramatically edited down by the MPAA for both the films theatrical, and home video VHS release. It wasn’t until the DVD in 2007 that the moment was included in the film on screen. There weren’t “intimacy coordinators” on the set back in those days, of course. But hey, they did give her Binaca breath spray before the scene. So, there’s….that.

Another jaw dropping moment where Brian has a hallucination that his brain is leaking copious amounts of blood and brain matter was cleverly done by placing him on a metal brace at an angle, removing him from the shot, and pouring said blood and brain matter down a heat duct before transposing him back into the scene. It’s truly disgusting and unbelievable. And awesome.

All of this blood, guts, and depravity was shot in New York City, New York. Most of it on the fourth floor of a building in Manhattan that used to be home to a belt manufacturing and a sign business. Of the location, Henenlotter said, “On that street there was a row of industrial buildings on one side and on the other the train tracks. Because of the layout that block was hooker central. Every morning I’d walk there and the sound effects under my feet were either a gushy sound from stepping on a used condom or a crunching from crack vials.” I wonder if they do weddings?

Along with the films ultimate release, Fangoria’s original editor, the late Robert “Bob” Martin penned a novelization of the film titled Brain Damage: A Trip Through Hell that goes into further detail on its lore. Including some of Elmer’s deep history hinted at in the film by the obnoxious Morris character. Though limited to 1,000 copies, the book can still be purchased to this day in a digital version via Amazon Kindle. Brain Damage released in a limited fashion in April 15th of 1988 and eventually screened at the TIFF Film Festival as a “Midnight Madness” entry.

There’s not a lot of financial information about the film’s release but it’s pretty obvious it wasn’t the next Avatar, financially. Henenlotter in part blamed this on Cinema Group saying, “They got it out there, made sure it failed and then buried it. It was only when it came out on home video (that it found an audience)”. Henenlotter would later tell Fangoria that Basket Case fans weren’t originally accepting of the film either, saying, “they just wanted another Basket Case! People loved Basket Case and they just want you to make the same film over and over again”.

As films like this so often do, however, the film found its own life on Betamax, VHS, and eventually DVD where it could shine in all its degenerate glory. It’s currently available both on Blu-Ray and is streaming for free on Tubi as of the time of this writing.

As time has passed, some folks have looked far deeper into elevated ideals of Brain Damage. There are of course, the obvious allegories to drug addiction. I mean, c’mon, we’re talking about a creature that injects you with a needle that makes you see bright colors and forget the world around you. A fluid that once you’ve come down from causes debilitating withdrawals. It gets so bad it causes Brian to become an accomplice to murder and lie awake in bed listening to his brother sleep with his girlfriend. With almost no reaction.

Of this, Henenlotter says, “To me, the drug is a function of the plot and that’s that”, adding that Brian’s situation was about escapism in general. It just so happened that drug imagery was the easiest way to express that. He told Dazed Magazine that the films message wasn’t quite anti-drug either, saying, “A lot of people thought Brain Damage was anti-heroin because we see this strange drug being injected into the guy but that reading is not quite true. In fact, my drug of choice was always cocaine. So, I had the guy speeding more than I had him downing.”….Oh.

Others put the sexual nature of the film under a microscope. Fair. I mean, look at him (Aylmer). It’s a gross, veiny, phallic monster. The films most shocking scene is of course, the demise of the club goer about to go down on Brian that we referenced earlier. The kind of scene that makes you pray no-one is going to walk in the room unannounced and see you watching out of context. A moment so gnarly it allegedly caused some of the crew to walk off the set at the time of filming.

All this caused journalists to run wild overanalyzing what the film was trying to say about masculinity and sex. One writer even surmising the film was about the transmasculine experience….because of a scene where Brian wakes up covered in blood. Which is supposed to say something about menstruation. I think we’ve lost the plot. Henenlotter agrees, saying, “I didn’t set out to put (the phallic images) there; that’s simply what the imagery turned out to be, and I’m not about to change the imagery just to eliminate that.” Henenlotter would continuously disregard a lot of others claims about what he made his movie about, saying instead that it’s just “a monster movie”.

Although stop motion animator and optical effects artist Al Magliochetti did remember Henenlotter discussing that he wanted Aylmer to look phallic and like a, and I quote, “black dildo”. Moving on.

Though Brain Damage clearly didn’t cause a stir upon its release or knock over the box office ATM, it certainly left folks with very strong, thoughtful opinions. Personally, I found it a disgusting, depraved, and most importantly entertaining and shocking little horror movie. It’s certainly impressive. And that my friends, is what happened to Brain Damage.

A couple of the previous episodes of What Happened to This Horror Movie? can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!