Horror Movie Watch: Pin

This October, I’m attempting an ill-advised viewing of (at least) thirty-one horror movies. I’ll watch (on average) one movie a day, after which I’ll write some things about said movies on this website. Be forewarned that all such write-ups will contain spoilers! Today’s movie is cult Canadian classic (and all-around strange movie) Pin (1988), directed by Sandor Stern, and recommended by friend Jo-Anne Wilson, a friend who works at the University of Toronto’s English Department and enthusiast of fine literature (at least, she was a big fan of Coach House Books).

In this particular case, I have to thank Bay Street Video, as one of the Queen Video clerks actually had Pin rented (it’s that good). While quite a bit further from my apartment, Bay Street Video is a really excellent video store. This is a film I watched with a few friends: horror movie stalwarts Emma Woolley, Annie Gibson, and Phil Bardach, and I tried to remember to credit them for their insights.

What happens:

Are you ready to be creeped out? Because I’m certain just describing the plot of Pin will give you the willies. And if you have a weird thing about dolls or automatons, you should probably just stop reading. Pin opens with a bunch of kids hiding behind a berm as they spy on a large house in which a man is seated in the upstairs window. One young turk decides he’s going to find out if the figure at the window is real or a dummy. He climbs to the window and what appears like an impassive, plastic face suddenly blinks. He and his compatriots run screaming and the film fades to black.

We start again, fifteen years earlier, as two really proper, blond kids – Leon and Ursula – prepare for bed. They interrupt their paediatrician father, Dr. Frank Linden (Terry O’Quinn!), who is pretending to conduct a symphony on TV. (That’s cool, I guess) Before he’ll allow them to go to bed, he quizzes them on basic math. (Their mother also vacuumed the floor moments after they finished their pre-sleep snack, so it’s a less than free-wheeling household.) The next day, the good doctor brings his young children into one of his appointments. We learn that one of Dr. Linden’s weird quirks is he uses the life-sized medical dummy (think, one of those ‘visible man‘ models) named ‘Pin’ to explain various medical issues and bodily functions, via ventriloquism, to his young patients and children. The children begin to think that Pin is real.

A few years later, the Linden household is as stuffy as ever. Leon and Ursula’s mother discourages the children from having friends because they’re filthy and carry disease. (Mom is really into cleanliness.) Pin becomes Leon’s only friend, despite the fact that he won’t talk to him when his father isn’t around. One day, when he’s alone with Pin, telling him about his day, a nurse sneaks in, and Leon hides. Leon learns about the facts of life the hard way … or a way that literally no one else ever has … when he secretly watches the nurse remove Pin’s modesty towel and has sex with the anatomically correct dummy. (Confusingly, Pin is on top in this scenario.) One can assume this triggers all sorts of psychosexual dysfunction in Leon. Though his parents are unaware of what he’s seen, they continue to encourage Leon’s belief that Pin is real, presenting Ursula with birthday presents both from them and from Pin. (Pin is a really thoughtful gift-giver.)

That night, Ursula and Leon are hanging out in bed together, while Ursula casually peruses a pornographic magazine. Leon, ever the charmer, fat-shames one of Ursula’s friends, then blows a gasket when Ursula dares to criticize Pin. When Mom drops in and sees what Ursula is reading, the parents realize it’s time to tell the kids about the birds and the bees. Or rather, it’s time to have Pin lecture them on human sexuality, inviting the kids to take off his modesty towel. Pin informs them that ‘just as people get thirsty for water, people get thirsty for sex.’ Later, in the yard, the siblings discuss what they leaned from Pin. Leon doesn’t feel the need to have sex. He’s not old enough yet, he affirms. But Ursula can’t wait until she has the need. ‘I think it will be fun!’ she beams. So when we zoom forward a few years to when Leon and Ursula are teenagers, local goons have graffitied If you want an easy screw, Ursula will do on her locker and UrsulaLeon (David Hewlett) has a real problem with sex – especially when it involves his sister – so he drags Ursula’s sexual partner out of the car and viciously beats him. He forces Ursula to promise never to have sex again (it seems?). Leon’s misogynist slut-shaming is all the more troubling because he’s grown up to be distressingly hot.

Despite Leon’s best and creepiest efforts to control his sister, she winds up pregnant, and Leon insists she tell the Doctor (which is what they call their father, like most kids do). Leon thinks they should go to Pin for advice, but Ursula reminds him that Pin won’t speak to them without the Doctor around. (Duh.) Still, Leon insists, and when they ask advice from Pin, Pin eventually responds in his creepy dummy voice. Ursula is astonished that her brother learned ventriloquism. Or is something else afoot? Either way, Pin agrees with Leon, and Ursula tells her dad about the pregnancy, which leads to the creepiest scene I’ve seen in a horror movie so far: Ursula has an abortion at the hands of her own father. (I’ll give you some time to throw up now.) He even invites Leon to watch, as he could ‘learn something.’ (You probably need to throw up again.) Mercifully, he refuses.

One night, Dr. Linden and his wife head off to a big social event, leaving Leon home to work on his college admissions. But en route to the party, Linden realizes he forgot to bring along the medical case histories; he has to drive back to his office. When he gets there, he finds Leon talking to Pin and Pin talking back. Horrified, Dr. Linden tells Leon never to go into his office alone again, and – in true repressed WASP fashion – asks him to leave through the back entrance so his mother doesn’t know he was there. Not trusting his son, Linden covers Pin in a blanket, hauls him into the backseat of the car, and zooms off toward the party. But Linden starts sweating, driving erratically, and glancing nervously at the shrouded figure in the back of the car. A rough patch of potholes knocks the shroud free, revealing Pin’s skinless face and unnerving Dr. Linden to such a degree that he crashes the car and kills both himself and his wife. (Pin, you’ll be relieved, survives the crash.)

At the funeral, Ursula and Leon’s Aunt Dorothy shows up to say she’ll be moving in soon. After all, Ursula is a minor and Leon and she can’t just live on their own. This upsets Leon to an unreasonable degree. But before Dorothy moves in, Leon and Ursula run wild, peeling the plastic covers off the furniture, eating pizza straight from the box, not even cleaning up until morning. But it’s not all teenaged rebellion. For instance, against Ursula’s express wishes, Leon has brought Pin into the house. (But at least he’s given him some clothes: his father’s old suit. Not Freudian at all.) Ursula argues that Aunt Dorothy won’t want Pin around, and Leon suggests she won’t be sticking around for long. That’s about the time Ursula starts spending a lot of hours at the library and reading up on schizophrenia.

Aunt Dorothy does move back in, reinstating the ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ aesthetic. Ursula mentions that she found a job at the library, and Leon, like the abusive partner that he longs to be, goes ballistic. Why does Ursula need a job?! That night, Leon drugs Ursula, freeing him to scare Dorothy into leaving. He wakes his aunt by putting Pin in her bed and whispering to her in Pin’s voice. The resulting scare causes Dorothy to collapse from a heart attack. But with Dorothy in the hospital, Leon is free to let his freak flag fly: he makes skin and hair for Pin, who starts to resemble the John Malkovich statue at the world’s worst wax museum; he pursues his writing career (of course he’s a writer); he becomes violently angry whenever Ursula criticizes Pin. But Leon’s perfect home is ruined when sensitive guy Stan Fraker starts dating his sister. They even get so close that Ursula buys Stan a really neat digital watch. Leon calls up high school friend Marcia to take her on a hate-date and get back at Ursula, but when Marcia undresses, Leon freezes, claiming that he’s worried his roommate Pin will barge in. He’s unable to perform and Marcia begins to leave. Shamed by his inability to perform sexually, he terrorizes poor Marcia by placing Pin in an electric wheelchair and tormenting her with the creepy dummy.

Leon invites Stan over for a nice family dinner, and Stan arrives with a box of chocolates, which Leon passes right along to Pin. He then introduces Stan to Pin while Ursula checks on the coq a vin, and Stan, like the socially adept, feather-haired hunk he is, plays along, chatting Pin up. They sit down for perhaps the most awkward dinner in history, and Stan mistakenly asks to hear some of Leon’s poetry. (Of course he’s a poet.) They move to the drawing room, where Leon regales them with a poem about about an epic hero who decides to rape his sister. Once Leon is out of the room, Stan advises Ursula that Leon needs help, what with the thinking a dummy is real and writing poems about raping his sister. Ursula knows that Leon is a paranoid schizophrenic (though I’m not sure that’s the correct diagnosis), but she doesn’t want her brother institutionalized. Once Stan leaves, Pin warns Leon that Ursula is slipping from the family.

Leon calls Stan and asks him to come over: he’s planning a surprise birthday party for Ursula. Stan, being the golden retriever that he is, falls right into Leon’s trap. Realizing too late that he’s been drugged, he staggers to his feet and attacks Leon, but Leon bludgeons him with a tabletop sculpture, inadvertently knocking Stan’s wristwatch off in the process. Meanwhile, Ursula’s boss gives her the afternoon off because she’s in love (I gotta’ fall in love more often!), and she calls Leon to let him know the news. Leon needs to clean up the mess on the drawing room floor – and fast! Pin advises him to hide Stan’s body in a clear garment bag and bury it under the wood pile at the side of the house (because, I guess, he’s a master criminal). When Ursula returns home, Leon makes up a story about Stan calling to say he had to take care of a sick friend, but with each moment, Leon’s anxiety increases. Ursula calls Stan a few times and Leon chastises her for acting like a jealous girlfriend. (Gaslighting!)

That’s when Ursula hears Stan’s digital watch: it fell under a chair during the struggle in the drawing room. Leon, caught in his lie, admits that Stan was killed, but says, ‘Pin did it!’ Ursula leaves in a rage while Leon grovels at Pin’s feet. Ursula returns with an axe and raises it toward Leon. The film cuts outside, where the police find Stan in the wood pile: he’s still breathing! The film again moves forward a few weeks (or months), with Stan and Ursula pulling up to the Linden family home in their convertible. Ursula goes upstairs where Pin is facing away from her, sitting in his wheelchair, peering out the window. Pin asks Ursula if she’s heard from Leon. She says she hasn’t. The final shot of the film is Pin’s face – or rather, Leon’s face. Leon has become Pin, emulating his voice and made up to look like his only (laytex) friend. When Ursula destroyed Pin, Leon must have had a psychotic break and had his personality taken over completely by the medical dummy.

Takeaway points:

• The horror of Pin is a supremely creepy brand of psychosexual horror. Pin is Flowers in the Attic with a unsettling dummy thrown into the mix. Brother Leon acts like an abusive boyfriend in nearly every scene – controlling his sister, her sexual actions, her work – and is all the more disturbing because an incestual desire underlies his actions. As difficult as an abusive romantic partner is to escape, imagine how much harder it would be if that person were family. And it’s quite explicit in the film that Leon acts the way he does because he fears female sexuality: his mind is frayed by watching the nurse pleasure herself; he can’t handle the thought of his sister having sex; when about to have sex with Marcia, he is overcome with fear and reacts by terrorizing the poor woman. When Ursula mentions Stan while Leon chops wood, he’s suddenly unable to split the logs. Part of what makes Pin so scary is that while Pin may not be real, Leon definitely is. He’s out there every day, calling women a slut on the street corner, trolling (and devising) the GamerGate hashtag on Twitter, telling women if they didn’t want their nude photos stolen, they should have never taken them in the first place.
• The real question is, who is creepiest? Leon, Pin, or Dr. Linden? Pin looks scary, but Leon is a raving, violent misogynist, and his dad thinks it’s, like, totally kosher to perform his own daughter’s abortion. (Not to mention the whole lesson of human sexuality he teaches his kids through an icky medical dummy.) Before Stan showed up (the #notallmen of this particular horror movie), Pin, despite being a terrifying medical dummy, was the most sympathetic male character of the film.
• The subtitle of Pin is ‘A Plastic Nightmare,’ but more accurately, this movie is ‘A WASP Nightmare.’ There is so much Protestant repression and propriety in Pin it’s claustrophobic. It’s the Lindens’ obsessive propriety that prevents Leon from being friends with any of the ‘dirty’ neighbourhood children and prevents Dr. Linden from tackling the problem of his son’s severe mental issues head-on. (I imagine this is a not uncommon problem – though perhaps less extreme – in many repressive WASP households. Mental illness is something just not spoken about.) Only Ursula is able – nay, eager – to leave this obsession with appearances and properness behind. In this regard, it’s also telling to compare Stan Fraker’s locks – feathered and free – with that of the gelled, precise haircut of Leon. (A Hitler Youth homage, I assume.)
• I also wanted to give a quick shout-out to David Hewlett, who did a really convincing job playing the worst brother ever. I felt genuinely uncomfortable watching him sweat and nervously pick his nails as his deception falls apart near the finale.

Truly terrifying or truly terrible?: Truly terrifying. I have to hand it to us Canadians. I can’t imagine an American horror film this weird. Gorier, scarier: sure. But this extremely creepy blend of psychosexual and familial horror is right out of the Canadian thematic handbook. (You’ve seen Guy Maddin‘s films, right?) While nothing will make you jump out of your seat, you’ll feel unsettled and kind of unclean, and you won’t stop ruminating about Pin for at least a few days.

Best outfit: Pin is great because it is, for all intents and purposes, a WASP fashion show. It’s difficult to choose a favourite from the selection of crisp white shirts, boat shoes, white Keds, school blazers, and cardigans that Leon and Ursula wear. I think Ursula peaked early, fashion-wise, as her game when she was seven was extra-fierce. (Note the above dresses featuring some bold plaid patterns.) But can it top that blue-and-gold sweater Leon wears while discussing Stan Fraker with Ursula in the garden? I had to rub my eyes to make sure I was really seeing the amazing sweater I thought I was seeing.

Best line: ‘I bet you before they do it, Mother washes his penis with Spic ‘n’ Span.’ – Ursula, thinking about her parents having sex way more than I ever have.

Best kill: Astonishingly, no one is killed in Pin. Not really. Leon and Ursula’s parents die in a car accident, Aunt Dorothy lives through her heart attack, Stan survives his bludgeoning, so it’s really only Pin who dies, axed to death by Ursula. That wins by default.

Unexpected cameo: At first, I was just glad to see Terry O’Quinn (a.k.a. John Locke from Lost, a.k.a. the dad from The Cutting Edge), journeyman character actor, in Pin. I thought I recognized Leon, and a quick IMDB search revealed he’s a key actor the Stargate television series. But the coup de grace is the voice of Pin himself. My fellow viewers and I could not believe the voice of Pin was provided by none other than Jonathan Banks: Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad!

Unexpected lesson learned: When you hide a body, three easy tips: (1) make sure the person is dead, (2) try to use an opaque bag or sack, and (3) maybe don’t hide the body directly outside your house.

Most suitable band name derived from the movie: Plastic Nightmare

Next up: Deathdream / Dead of Night (1972).