Horror Recollected in Tranquility 2: C.H.U.D. (1984)

What does C.H.U.D stand for?  One of the big twists in Douglas Cheek's film is that it doesn't stand for 'Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller'. That phrase, blurted out by Wilson, the dodgy suit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after some papers bearing that acronym are inadvertently revealed during a meeting with the protagonists, is actually a hastily improvised cover for the real translation, discovered in the final act on canisters of toxic waste dumped under New York City - Contamination Hazard: Urban Disposal. 

The files never referred to the Dwellers, but to this secret programme of dumping waste beneath the inner city. It's an effective twist, and it really transforms the movie, turning it from a battle between humans and typical - if very well-executed - horror movie monsters to a struggle to reveal the truth and expose Wilson's schemes. It's Wilson, the NRC company man, who gets shot by one of the protagonists in the film's denouement, after all. The revelation that the bigwigs have decided the only thing New York City is useful for is dumping waste also situates the film in the kind of conversations about New York that were going on at the time, with the city still emerging from the 1975 financial crisis, and not yet transformed into the sanitised, tourism and finance-focused behemoth we know today. Reagan to City: Go Toxic. 

Not just New York, in fact. During the 1980s, the Thatcher government, an ideological ally of Reagan's neoliberal US regime, discussed whether or not it might be better to allow the 'managed decline' of the poverty-stricken city of Liverpool, rather than investing to save it. Liverpool being, among many other things, the setting for Clive Barker's short story 'The Forbidden', better known to most through its US adaptation into yet another film whose supernatural hijinks reflect anxieties around urban spaces, the 1992 version of Candyman (which would be rewritten in 2021 by Us director Jordan Peele). 

Candyman itself is somewhat outside the purview of this series, in that I didn't get around to rewatching it while doing the October Horror Movie Challenge this year, and this series is meant to strictly follow the films I did watch. But it's worth mentioning here both because it shares concerns with C.H.U.D., and was Peele's next writing choice after Us, which strongly suggests Peele didn't show us a copy of Cheek's movie on the TV shelf in the opening of the film we looked at yesterday just because they share subterranean settings. 

Both films are about abandoned populations: the Tethered in Us, the street people (and indeed by extension the entire population of NYC who will have to deal with toxic waste and the cannibalistic mutants it creates) deemed expendable in C.H.U.D. And while there are specific groups culpable in these abandonments - the scientists who discontinue their experiments with the Tethered, Wilson and his pals at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - both those groups ultimately answer to the US government. Whether it's the Tethered or the people of New York, both of them have been abandoned by America. 

This is what's so important about Red's statement in Us that 'We're Americans'. Why her final, attention-grabbing gesture is the Tethered creating a Hands Across America style chain across the country. She's staking a claim, resisting being discarded. The protagonists of C.H.U.D. -  George the photographer, and A.J. the Reverend (played by future Home Alone housebreaker Daniel Stearn) - also stake their claim with an attention-grabbing move, stealing an NRC camera to expose that organisation's misdeeds, but you could argue that they're less successful. Certainly they are in a non-diegetical sense. 

Why? Because - well, what does C.H.U.D. stand for? You have to have seen the movie to know the initial explanation is a bait-and-switch. In posters and video covers for the movie, in its numerous sequelae, and throughout pop culture since, it's become axiomatic that the acronym really does mean Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller. And so a meditation on urban abandonment and necropolitics avant la lettre is more readily remembered as simply a creature feature. 

Of course, that's a fairly common trope in the history of horror cinema: often the first film in a franchise has depths and resonances which vanish from later entries (indeed, we'll be looking at one notable example of this later in this series). Maybe the reference to C.H.U.D. in Us will lead more people to look again at a film which might too easily be dismissed as 80s schlock, and think about the themes both films share.