Book Review – Crimson Orgy

Author: Austin Williams
Publisher: Borderlands Press
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: January 2008

South Florida, 1965. The birthplace of underground cinema.

Grindhouse director Sheldon Meyer is cultivating an obsession. He has just one hellish week to shoot Crimson Orgy., seventy-six minutes of mayhem destined to become the world’s most notorious cult movie…and just maybe the first true “snuff film” ever made.

Struggling to cope with a reluctant starlet, a booze-ravaged leading man, a backwoods cop bent on revenge, a mutinous crew, a devastating hurricane, and his own inner demons, Meyer relentlessly pursues a vision of unrivaled box office horror.

He gets what he’s after, but at a price no one could imagine.

The prologue of Crimson Orgy feeds us some of the scraps and bits of history and speculation that surround the production of the infamous cult movie of the same name. We then learn more about the infamy that surrounds it. The provocative premise is that a crew member died violently on the final day of shooting and in the years that followed the rumors that the death was not only intentionally staged for the camera, but also that it made it to the final edit grew the film to legend status. It’s a deceptively simple premise that keeps us off balance and asking questions from the start. Since they are unanswered as we start the book there is a sense of questioning everything that keeps our guard up.

Crimson Orgy nails the dusty back roads of low/no budget filmmaking and the sense of urgency and immediacy that comes through in its best examples. This is an alternative to Hollywood and often times exiting art is created under the intense pressure of these situations. Regardless of the outcome of the final product, low/no budget filmmaking can, at its best, be its own art form. We see the techniques, the budgeting, the pay-offs and the general rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul attitude that’s necessary to film an entire movie in one week. For example, the budgetary needs of the shoot are spelled out so specifically that a predetermined amount of film sock is purchased. That’s it. So there isn’t really any room for mistakes and re-shoots. These internal (to the shoot) pressures coupled with other external pressures that arise over the week foster an environment that is rife with tension and pressure.

1965 is a nicely chosen window in film history because the winds of change had begun to blow. After the explosive, and unprecedented, popularity of Blood Feast exploitative filmmaking was shifting away from the nudie cuties (movies that guys like David Friedman, who produced Blood Feast, had been filming for decades) and branching into what the modern horror and modern pornography (another highly successful industry that flies under the Hollywood radar screen) industries would become. Crimson Orgy is framed with non-existant primary source material (reference works, interviews and personal correspondence) that ground the story firmly, not only in its time frame but in the events portrayed. This era is perfectly presented and Williams weaves historical fact and location with fiction and puts us right there on the front lines.

Except for the climax there is an element of detachment to some of the violence in the book because it is simulated. In these moments he pulling back and yelling of ‘cut’ after reading about an act of violence serves to lull the reader into a sense of security that creates a false sense of security. The explosion of “real” violence that comes at the end has a bigger impact because of our exposure to the “fake” violence that led up to it.

The characters start out as two dimensional but then through rich interactions they begin to further flesh out and become much more fully realized. As more and more of their personalities are peeled back, and the other facets revealed, everyone becomes a suspect to the reader.

Perhaps the books greatest strength is that it succeeds in making the reader feel like a frog in a pot. Williams gradually ramps up the pace, tension and suspense as the inevitable conclusion draws ever closer until it becomes almost unbearable. There is an atmosphere of unavoidable ruin that permeates everything as we start to wonder who we can trust, who is responsible, and what, specifically, will happen.

Crimson Orgy is an entertaining novel that deftly straddles the line between horror and crime and becomes not so much a who-dun-it but instead a whose-gonna-do-it.

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