The Godfather As a Horror Movie Template

We've come a long way in Mafia movies. Taken today against the animalistic types in Good Fellas and Casino (and the gruesome killings they commit, and the body chop ups they carry out), The Godfather is almost a stately film...likeable.

The movie carefully kept matters between rival gangs -- and made the Corleones a more charming family than the Barzini family or the Tattaglia family. Brando's Don Vito was courtly and..in that key early scene where he rejects a family interest in narcotics(because its "a dirty business" )...rather a nice guy.

But this is around the same time that Jack Woltz wakes up with the severed head of a half million dollar horse in bed with him, his silk pajamas slathered in slick red blood.

And THIS was a key to what sold all those Godfather novels and drove all those Godfather lines around the block.

All those killings.

I recall a review put up front on the paperback (bestselling edition) of The Godfather: "These people use guns, knives, axes, garrotes to KILL!" screamed the cover. The implication was pretty clear: gangsters could now be portrayed as: psycho.

Now Alfred Hitchcock had made big bucks putting a mere two gory murders on the big screen in 1960, with Psycho, a movie sold as a horror movie(in Hitchcock's own words) and as a shocker...as well as as a "thriller." Psycho set the stage for movies in which murder would be bloodier than usual, more brutal than usual, SCARIER than usual...and a whole group of knock-off slasher films followed in the 60s.

By the 70's, The Godfather was ready to show off as a "prestige movie." Big budget. Literate script. Carefully crafted characters. A mix of business education on the one hand("Don't tell anybody but family what you are thinking") and family ties on the other(the sibling rivalries, the hothead son, the weak son, the smart son...the daughter.)

But for all that prestige, all those levels of historical interest..The Godfather made money by being Psycho. Psycho had two murders. The Godather had...well, let's count them:

The horse. A severed head, a bedfull of blood.
Luca Brasi. Slowly strangled with the additive(not in the book) of a knife puncturing his hand and pinning it to the bar counter.
Paulie Gatto. In a car by Lady Liberty and amber waves of grain("Leave the gun, take the cannoli.")
Solozzo the Turk and Crooked Captain McClusky -- you can feel Michael's creeping anguish on the one hand and his bloodlust on the other, and then it explodes: Sollozzo with a bullet through the forehead; McClusky going down harder with a first shot to his throat that interferes with his eating his pasta.
Sonny at the toll booth: a surging wave of machine gun bullets riddle him, even as he fights like a bull to stand up and move away; his corpse is kicked in the face for good measure("Look what they have done to my boy.")
And then the final wave of slaughter(intercut with a baptism) -- men shot in various ways, one with a hapless naked hooker next to him, Moe Greene -- famously -- through his eyeglasses and into his eye(that's the Psycho moment.)
With one final and very satisfying garroting...of treasonous Carlo,, by fat mumbling Clemenza.

That's a lot of murders -- and I left out the near miss on Don Corleone and I probably forget some others.

They left this from the book out of the movie: Luca Brasi ties up two men, chops one up ALIVE with an axe; the other man swallows his mouth gag in terror and dies.

They left this from the book out of the movie: we actually see the sentence carried out on the two young punks who beat up the undertaker's daughter while trying to rape her. Some Corleone hires(Paulie Gatto included, I think), lure the two punks into an alley and give them a brass knuckles beating that puts them both in the hospital for a long time.

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Even with Coppola taking out a few of the book's more sadistic, horrific killings, the array of other killings that made it to the 1972 movie of The Godfather rather "hid its box office draw in plain sight": it was a slasher movie done on an epic scale. Granted, bladed devices are used sparingly (the axe on the horse's neck; the knife through Luca's hand) but even the gun murders are "intimate"(through Moe Greene's eye; through McClusky's food-digesting throat).

And in the end, it is likely the two garrottings(stranglings) that are most disturbing, intimate and lingering. Its just the way strangling is (the same year, 1972, Hitchcock drew his first R rating for the lingering strangulation of a female victim in his film Frenzy, it was worse to watch than the two tough guys garroted in The Godfather.)