Charles Band’s production Cellar Dweller (1988) is the unlikely link between The Evil Dead (1981) and Castle Freak (1995). Cellar Dweller features a monster brought forth by a book who then haunts and terrorizes the residents of an artist colony. The film is heavy on gore and light on gratuitous nudity in true Empire Pictures fashion. It also sells the appearance of Jeffrey Combs who in actuality only appears in Cellar Dweller for roughly five minutes.
What is interesting about Cellar Dweller is that it can be seen as a defiant statement against the belief, so popular in the eighties, that media inspires violence. In the film Whitney’s (Debrah Farentino) interest and work in horror comics is a healthy catharsis for her negative emotions that is only harnessed and acted upon by a supernatural evil. To have negative feelings and to embrace horror culture is deemed healthy and even fun in Cellar Dweller. The real violence of the titular monster is at first motivated by the emotional violence of Whitney’s rival after all.
Cellar Dweller also takes it upon itself to champion comic book illustration as a valid genre of fine art. For a very long time comic book art was considered low brow and unimportant. When Cellar Dweller first came out that position was only just beginning to change in popular culture. The efforts of Warhol and Lichtenstein reframed the conversation around comic books in the sixties but the effects of their work didn’t permeate all of pop culture until the comics boom of the late eighties. Cellar Dweller embraces this cultural current and celebrates the lurid fantasy of EC Comics and delivers a rather hip heroin in the form of Whitney.
It’s also worth noting that veteran actors Yvonne De Carlo and Vince Edwards appear in Cellar Dweller. De Carlo had been a major star in the forties and fifties while Edwards had been a heartthrob on television’s Ben Casey in the fifties. These two stars lend dramatic gravitas and a playful camp to their roles in Cellar Dweller that link the film to the monster movies of the fifties and sixties. De Carlo in particular elevates Cellar Dweller with her scenery chewing turn as Mrs. Briggs.
But Cellar Dweller never does anything more than it promises. It’s a fun, scary little romp that will make the audience gasp one minute and chuckle the next. At seventy-seven minutes long, Cellar Dweller is a brusque sojourn into the horror genre. Of Band’s many forays into horror, few of his hundreds of productions have been as economical or as effective as this one.
