To Horror, with Love: Cinema’s Biggest Genre Fans – Eric Binford from FADE TO BLACK (1980)

[Hello, readers! To celebrate Valentine's Day, the Daily Dead team thought it would be fun to do things a little differently this year. We're putting the spotlight on our favorite horror-loving characters from genre cinema—people who have represented our own fandom on screen and, in many cases, helped bring our passion for horror into the mainstream. Be sure to check here for more of our tributes to some of the greatest horror fans to ever grace the big screen.]

Eric Binford, the protagonist (antagonist?) of Fade to Black (1980), loves movies so much, he is wholly subsumed by them. When not working in a Los Angeles film distribution center delivering prints to various locations, his life revolves around watching films on a projector in his room, or on TV, or reluctantly sharing a film at the theater with a crowd. Eric, played by Breaking Away’s Dennis Christopher, has no need for human interaction—the shadowy figures in the flickering lights are his only allies.

For those unfamiliar with Fade, it tells the simple tale of a lonely young man with an already tenuous grip on reality whose overwhelming passion for film leads him down a vengeful path of retribution against those who’ve wronged him. Dressing up as his favorite characters from filmdom (Dracula, The Mummy, Hopalong Cassidy, Cody Jarrett), Eric lays to waste those who come between him and his celluloid dreams.

Fade to Black is a revenge story set against the backdrop of LA; except the film is about the movies, so the city acts not so much as a setting, but rather as another character—one that is under no great illusion about the dreams won or lost by its denizens. Eric is so consumed by film, his only means of communication are through film speak and trivia; quoting dialogue from Kiss of Death (1947), Dracula (1931), and White Heat (1949) provides Eric with a protective shield from the outside world. Mind you, the people he does have to interact with are mostly intolerable: bullying co-workers (one played by a baby-faced Mickey Rourke), an apoplectic boss with a heart condition, and a Marilyn Monroe lookalike who (inadvertently) stands him up on a date. Not to mention a wheelchair-bound aunt who deeply resents having brought up and (continuing to) cohabitate with Eric.

Are all of these people bad? Hard to say, really. Eric is so cinematically cocooned that no one could get in if they tried. Our Monroe surrogate is at least friendly with him; she accepts a ride and agrees to see a movie together. When she forgets their date, he doesn’t hate her, but instead grows even more insistent in making her his own. A psychiatric officer in a useless subplot is the only one who throws sympathy Eric’s way in an attempt to sway the audience to his corner. But Eric is such a caustic, bitter man that only Christopher’s empathetic portrayal brings us over. On paper, Binford is just unlikeable. But did it have to be this way?

At every turn, Eric is sabotaged by his lack of connection to reality and certainly to people. His blind faith of film renders him utterly useless to societal norms, and by turn, harmful to them. His complete disconnect and full-on immersion into this alternate reality occurs with the death of his aunt. Tired of being harassed (and there are sexual insinuations as well), he pushes her wheelchair down the stairs in a re-enactment of Richard Widmark’s big moment in Kiss of Death. After her lethal tumble, a distraught Eric looks at himself in his movie set mirror. In front of that mirror is a smaller makeup mirror, and for a moment his reflection lights up both. It’s a brilliant scene, orchestrated by director Vernon Zimmerman, to show Eric’s complete fracture from this world.

At this point he wholly adopts the persona of Cody Jarrett, correcting people when they call him Eric, and bristling at anything that isn’t cinema-related. Anyone who gets in his way is confronted not by Eric but by manifestations of his matinee idols, all done in a hyper-reality two steps removed from the mundane. When he confronts Rourke’s character Richie in a back alley, done up as Hopalong Cassidy, Eric (sorry, “Cody”) is evocatively backlit to imply that this event alone matters. He confronts Marilyn in her shower, à la Psycho, while he’s dressed as Dracula; so far gone is he that his own cinematic influences start to blend together. Again, this is the only way that he knows how to communicate, through film. By the time he has his final showdown with police atop Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Eric has sealed his own fate much as his idol Cody Jarrett does in the aforementioned Cagney classic White Heat. Exclaiming, “Top of the world, ma!” before his demise is his manifest destiny.

But back to my original question: did it have to be this way? Remember, there were no outlets for having passionate discussions of film back in the day; perhaps Eric could have been a proud member of the Twitterverse or an IMDb message board (RIP) if he was around today? Even if he didn’t have any physical friendships, social media could have connected him with other film lovers, sparing LA the indignity of Binford-splatter on the steps of Grauman’s. But perhaps not. Maybe Eric Binford was always meant to be horror’s loneliest boy, howling at the wind, reaching out to his silver screen saviors in a bid at redemption and love. The problem, though, is that they never love back.

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