For this Halloween season, I have lined up a selection of some of the odder monster movies I could find. First up, this Dutch production directed by equally Dutch filmmaker Dick Maas (director of the perfectly-named Amsterdamned), who like Razorback‘s Russell Mulcahy came from the world of music videos, gaining notoriety for his videos for the Golden Earring songs “Twilight Zone” and “When the Lady Smiles” (which was banned in the US.) Maas does not make The Lift (De Lift) nearly as stylistically wild as Mulcahy did with his creature feature, although there is certainly a style to this—more importantly, this has a much more unusual premise, because as the name implies, this is a horror movie about a killer elevator. The purpose in watching a movie about a killer elevator is to discover just how strange the execution of such a premise could be, and what I discovered is that, as unusual as the central conceit is, many of the things surrounding it are equally unusual in some unexpected ways.
What I appreciate here is that, like Theodore Sturgeon’s “Killdozer” novella, the plot of The Lift does not necessarily take the easy route when making an elevator go rogue. In the opening scene, we see the central high-rise building (the Kronenstede building in Amsterdam) struck by lightning, causing a power outage right before the first “attack”—a duo of doltish rich couples being boiled and nearly suffocated while trapped in the elevator—but as we learn more about the building and the elevator system, the lightning seems to be more a coincidence than a catalyst. After this near-fatal incident, the owners of the building call in lift mechanic Felix Adelaar (Huub Stapel, a regular in Maas’ movies), who finds nothing wrong with the mechanisms. Increasingly violent accidents keep occurring with the elevator, which we see moving up and down and opening its doors on its own, and Felix gets suspicious that something is afoot here—the fact that his coworker who worked on that particular elevator before has been institutionalized after experiencing an unexplained mental break seems to be another clue. All this ultimately leads Felix, alongside a reporter who really latches onto stories of elevator accidents, to begin investigating the company responsible for the central computer system, who of course know a lot more than they let on.
Partway through the movie, we get a lecture from a university professor explaining the history of microchips, and through stories of computer systems going berserk (and being buried in the desert) and how shrinking chips makes them more susceptible to environmental damage (I guess?), they are portrayed as possibly the greatest threat to mankind yet known. But even this clinically-delivered hysterical rant is not enough of an explanation for The Lift, so we are then informed of the existence of self-replicating protein computers, and guess what the computer company installed in that building’s elevator? In short, we are not simply dealing with a machine with a screw loose or faulty wiring, but something given an actual artificial brain (represented in this case by a circuit board covered in goo), which of course means it will eventually start murdering people for no particular reason.
(Protein computers are a real thing, although obviously not capable of the things they are here, but, oddly enough, the only other monster movie I can recall using them as a plot device is Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, so it is still pretty novel.)
There’s an interesting strain of technophobia to this plot twist, coming early enough in the advancement and proliferation of computers and the growing paranoia over what was then the current trend of automation and self-guiding machines. Automation has been a concern and an inspiration for horror since the early twentieth-century at least, and this was a mostly up-to-date spin on it, taking an ubiquitous machine like an elevator and ramping up its scariness by bringing in even more advanced tech. To us, the idea of hanging your anti-technology angle on just microchips is funny, but it’s also kind of fascinating from a historical viewpoint. Coupled with that here is another eighties brand of paranoia: the multinational corporation, especially when it’s being run by the dreaded Japanese. They never outright say that the company that installs and maintains the elevator’s secret bio-computer brain is specifically Japanese, just that Japan is where most of their manufacturing takes place, but the fact that the company is called Rising Sun and has photos of middle-aged Japanese businessmen hanging in their lobby makes it quite clear what the subtext is. This is simply one of many movies that used Japan’s economic miracle corporate dominance as a slightly xenophobic plot point, and having it together with the evil computer brain makes this movie feel entirely of its era, alongside yet another synthtastic score.
You may be asking: how exactly does one make a living elevator scary? Wouldn’t people just start taking the stairs? The English poster certainly implores people to do it. That’s certainly not an invalid question. Not surprisingly, this is not a particularly terrifying movie, though Maas does use framing and lighting quite effectively when we’re in or around the elevator, with the bright artificial lights of the building contrasting the hot pink glow inside the elevator itself and the darkness of the shaft. Surprisingly, the amount of actual onscreen violent death is rather limited: after the scenes where the elevator uses the old “trick a blind man into walking into an open shaft” routine and plays around with and attempts to crush a young girl, the most gruesome kill scene involves one of two dopey security guards getting his head trapped in the elevator’s doors and then being decapitated by the car going down. For all its intentional B-movie feel, that scene actually comes close to being discomforting because at least the idea of having a limb stuck in a moving machine is plausible to a normal person (the second most gruesome death, which happens only at the very end, is significantly less plausible, but probably more visually interesting.) I think there is still plenty of potency in the horror of mechanical failure, so even if the idea of a killer elevator seems ludicrous, which it is, it does comes from a genuinely relatable sort of fear, especially when it also involves the owners of the companies responsible for the machine trying to cover up the glitches.
The more standard horror movie moments are generally executed competently, but what caught my attention was all the ostensible human interest that surrounds them. We are introduced to many, many characters throughout the movie: Felix’s wife and two kids (one of whom is more blatantly voiced by an adult in the dub than the other), their drinking buddies, his co-workers and bosses at the lift company, the suit-clad executives in the building, janitors, security guards, the CEO of Rising Sun’s Amsterdam operations (which is located in the middle of an empty field), and the rather incompetent detectives investigating the case. Some of these characters seem to be here for comedy—for example, the lead detective, who has a particularly over-the-top Dragnet cop voice in the dub and loves to tell stories of finding women cut in half by power drills—and maybe that slightly lighter touch is also the reason you see several characters talking about vacations so often. Other characters seem to be there to further the theme of strained marriages that is also unexpectedly omnipresent, as the movie is full of couples and scenes revolving around infidelity. We see an executive try to screw a married woman during work hours (her daughter is the one seen having a sinister play date with the elevator), Felix’s work buddies talking about their love lives, and we hear how Felix and his wife’s friends negotiated their way out of potential cheating, which in turn makes Felix’s wife paranoid about their own marriage. In fact, Felix seems to be the only upstanding man in the cast, but he’s also work-focused and a little morose, and when those nosy friends see him talking to the lady reporter about the whole killer lift situation they report it back to his wife and she immediately interprets it as an affair (this isn’t the most sympathetic depiction of wives) and ends up leaving him. Maybe this is angling for a bit of working/upper class atmosphere, appropriate enough for a film about a blue collar labourer dealing with fatally negligent businesses.
Felix’s motivations start as a straightforward devotion to doing his job right, but as he finds more and more mysterious facets of the elevator he becomes increasingly obsessed with dealing with it, which in turn leads to this elevator accidentally (in the case of his failing marriage) or not so accidentally (his boss puts him on work leave as part of the inter-company cover-up) ruining his life. By the climax, he’s gone rogue mechanic, breaking into the building in order to take the evil elevator apart himself—it makes more sense for him to do this senselessly dangerous mission because at that point he has nothing to lose. This whole section is languidly paced in places, putting off the inevitable revelation of the gooey mechanical brain, (although there is a decent fake out where the first box he opens, the one that had been ominously portrayed earlier in the movie, turns out to be empty), but it does eventually lead to what is essentially a fight between a man and an elevator shaft, which is inventive to say the least. He manages to make it out alive with the help of the reporter, and to make sure we end on the most ridiculous note possible, the regretful CEO of Rising Sun appears, shoots the computer brain multiple times, says “it was extremely sick”, and then gets his comeuppance. Felix’s life is still in shambles, but I guess the lift is dead probably, so…uh…happy ending?
I don’t think there are many other movies about killer elevators out there, let alone ones about killer elevators with techno-organic brains, so The Lift certainly fills its niche well enough. As far as I can tell, the only other movie similar to it is the 2001 movie Down (also called The Shaft), which is in fact an English language remake that Dick Maas directed himself, starring the likes of Naomi Watts, Michael Ironside, and Ron Perlman, among others. I don’t know if I’m that interested in seeing another version of this story anytime soon, but The Lift was worth watching because it has just enough off-kilter elements beyond its initial…elevator pitch. Good night!
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