Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #206 Lurkers (1988)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

I could not be more grateful for this column and the income that it provides but I do sometimes find myself wondering why a particular film was chosen. 

Of course there are many different reasons for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 selections. Making a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledge is an act of generosity above all else, a way of supporting me, the site, my career and my vision in the most concrete possible sense. 

Y’all make Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledges to keep this website in business and my family housed and fed but also because you believe, you really believe, in independent media. 

I would much rather be doing your bidding than toiling for a faceless multi-national corporation because y’all are a bunch of weirdoes, god bless you. Not a single one of you has ordered me to watch The Rise of Skywalker or Zack Snyder’s Justice League but you continually choose movies that are so obscure that they barely exist. 

Sometimes patrons choose a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 movie because they’re huge fans and want me to evangelize passionately for it on their behalf and sometimes they despise a movie with a white-hot burning passion and want me to eviscerate it for them. 

You have to feel pretty strongly about a film to pay some lunatic one hundred dollars to watch it and write about it for his modestly read cult website. A movie has to be important to a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 patron even if it’s deeply unimportant to the culture at large. 

I’m talking about movies like the hypnotically horrible 1988 horror psychodrama Lurkers, a movie I would never even have heard about, let a lone watched and written about, if I did not have a professional obligation to do so. 

Lurkers is a Z-grade pastiche of Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion and The Shining from grind house veteran and prolific exploitation filmmaker Roberta Findlay, who directed X rated films under the pseudonym Robert Norman and shot such titles as Dr. Love and his Strange House of Perversion (which she inexplicably chose not to take credit for), Love in Strange Places and All in the Sex Family as a cinematographer. 

The sordid exercise in sleaze begins with a prologue with protagonist Cathy as a spooky little girl traumatized by her abusive mother’s sinister words about demonic “lurkers” with sinister intentions haunting their small, sad lives and then the brutal murders of both of her parents. 

Fifteen years later Cathy, now played by Christine Moore, has seemingly turned it all around. She’s got a thriving career as a professional classical musician and a handsome photographer fiancé in Bob (Gary Warner).

All is well not well in Cathy’s world, however. Everywhere she goes Cathy sees ominous visions, most notably a spectral little blonde girl who reconnects her with the still-lingering trauma of her horrific childhood. 

Also, people are total assholes to her for no goddamn reason at all. For example, when Cathy asks her priest brother, her only surviving relative, if he will come to her wedding, he coldly turns her down even after she complains of seeing horrific visions possibly related to their parents’ deaths. 

The priest dispassionately explains that it is not a priest’s job to help people or to fight evil, particularly of the supernatural variety. “I have my own life now, with God. You can’t be a part of that!” he declares with wildly misplaced self-righteousness.

Apparently God is a jealous God and doesn’t want his servants on earth to go around assisting humanity when they should be focussing all of their time and energy on Him. 

Cathy keeps seeing sinister spirits until she sees a murder in the spooky building where her parents were viciously killed. Cathy understandably wants to report the murder to the police but her boyfriend insists that they shouldn’t ruin a pleasant night out just because someone was brutally slain. 

What kind of buzzkill wants to call it a night just because they’ve seen something that will haunt them until their dying day? Bob suggests that they duck into the party, have a few drinks, enjoy a few laughs, maybe forget their cares for a few hours and then if she’s still so damn adamant about being an old fuddy duddy and alerting law enforcement to the crime she just witnessed, then maybe they can call the cops from the party. 

A loving and supportive partner would not make you go to a party in the building where your parents were butchered fifteen years earlier and then act like you’re being silly when you say you’ve seen someone die in front of you. 

Then again, good boyfriends also don’t cheat on you with their foxy business partner and also every attractive woman they encounter, the way Bob does. Bob is one seriously shitty boyfriend who is constantly gas-lighting his terrified girlfriend.

Bob is not a nice man! He’s a demon in the sack but also a garden variety demon.

In a deliciously literal non-twist, it turns out that our poor, frazzled, haunted heroine has the fiancé from hell because (SPOILERS) he’s actually FROM HELL. The building where the party is being held and where our heroine witnessed multiple murders occupies a place deep in the underworld and the sinister “lurkers” that Cathy has been seeing are the undead. 

It’s the dark destiny of Bob and his fellow lurkers to bring the damned back home so they can be dragged down to hell. That’s the true purpose of the party and Bob’s relationship with Cathy.

There’s something oddly mesmerizing about Lurkers rooted in its lurid cheapness. Findlay was a veteran filmmaker at the end of a long career when she made Lurkers but the movies she specialized in making had entirely different rules and requirements than the ones that dictate horror movies. 

There’s consequently something ingratiatingly homemade about Lurkers, a dreamy quality that also feels oddly personal. Even by Happy Place and Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 standards it’s weird and obscure but I’m glad I got around to watching it. I’m not sure I’ll remember much about it going forward. Instead I suspect it’ll flicker across my psyche unexpectedly in the decades to come and then disappear almost instantly like half-forgotten dreams, literal, cinematic or otherwise, are prone to do.

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