Program Note
Debuted with the ultra-low-budget horror Basket Case (1982), Frank Henenlotter released Brain Damage in 1988, as a spiritual successor carrying the DNA of his earlier work. In this film, a grotesque creature named Aylmer slithers down from the upstairs apartment through the plumbing and invades the body of Brian, initiating a deadly symbiotic relationship. Brian becomes addicted to a mysterious blue fluid that Aylmer injects directly into his brain—and to keep supplying Brian with this euphoric substance, Aylmer demands a constant stream of human victims. Brain Damage weaves together elements of so-called 'abject horror'—seen in 1980s American low-budget classics like Street Trash (1987), Slime City (1988), and the works of Troma—with traces of New York's underground scene of the time. The blue fluid that brings Brian to states of ecstasy overlaps visually and thematically with the imagery of 1970s psychedelic cinema. Along with Aylmer, overtly phallic in appearance and prone to penetrating the bodies of others, the film strikingly fuses body horror and the sociocultural anxieties that defined the 1980s with innuendo of drug addiction, AIDS, street sex, and homoerotic cruising manifest. (Jin PARK)