Rat Catching: Crispin Glover in the role he was always meant for.

Cultural memory keeps shrinking—especially when it comes to movies. It’s commonly thought that today’s target movie audience—ages 15 to 35—recalls only a few films made before 1994’s Pulp Fiction. (The previous point of measure was 1977’s Star Wars.) That means the 1971 horror movie Willard is nearly antique, presumably due for a remake. Yet writer-director Glen Morgan, who sharpened his claws on the X-Files tv series, evokes just enough of the original Willard and its 1972 sequel Ben (for which Michael Jackson recorded an imperishable title song) to make contemporary paranoia seem almost classical, to give it roots.

This new Willard (starring the eccentric Crispin Glover) caters to our worst fears and sense of unfairness. The title role of the introverted young man who trains pet rats to act out his rage seems ideal for Glover, who takes on Willard almost by right of succession (being younger than Christopher Walken and too authentically bizarre and modern to play Ichabod Crane). To say it’s hard to imagine anyone else in this role attests to Glover’s now-familiar idiosyncrasy and isolated artiness. As the awkward father in Back to the Future and a fashion designer uncannily resembling Yves Saint Laurent in John Boorman’s Where the Heart Is, Glover has displayed a disarming, lyrical weirdness. Willard speaks to his rats intimately. Though never rivaling Ralph Fiennes’ sensual poignancy in Red Dragon, Willard seems Glover’s own fascinating amalgam. With his sharp jaw and cheekbones, protruding nose and tall brow, he naturally has the look of silent movie eccentrics Max Shreck and Conrad Veidt. Walking down the cellar staircase with both arms stretched out at his side, Glover’s movement is almost balletic. Teaching the rats how to bite and rip and destroy, he whispers, "Tear it!" like a lecher demanding service and getting private, dirty kicks.

Novelty made a hit of the first Willard. Its tale of high-strung, self-destructive revenge was the flip side of 1971’s hippie vengeance fable Billy Jack. To hear Bruce Davison as the original Willard shrieking, "Tear him apart!"—the command for his legion of vermin to attack his enemy—was to recognize the unfettered voice of youthful disdain echoing in the generation gap.

But in the sequel, Jackson’s "Ben" provided a contrasting delicate sound that went on to surpass both original movies’ renown. Jackson’s tender recording with its odd, coincidental rat-loving, homo-emotional sincerity still provokes "What the hell!" astonishment—and that’s the legacy that this Willard latches on to.

Seventies psychosis has become the new millennium’s routine. Glover’s Willard attends to his mad, senile mother (Jackie Burroughs) while working as a functionary at his family’s bought-out business where he’s harassed by his boss (R. Lee Ermey). Willard isn’t a stifled artist, yet his animal-training obsession suggests idiosyncratic privilege. The film’s most shocking detail locates Willard’s home in a Brooklyn brownstone (he’s just one ecstasy away from being a hipster). Morgan’s cultural memory randomly evokes Norman Bates’ loneliness in Hitchcock’s Psycho and the gathering of predators in The Birds as well as Kubrick’s The Shining (In Willard, elevator doors open to unleash a stampede of rats). Yet, his ace is that Michael Jackson recording, a near-legendary piece of pop that even out-weirds Glover; it’s an example of a filmmaker provoking cultural memory to enrich what might otherwise be just a common piece of film industry commercialism.

Jackson’s recording swells on the soundtrack inevitably, but in the context of the remake’s most disturbing scene: Morgan places a darling, fluffy kitty cat (a gift to Willard from a sympathetic female coworker) in a creepy mansion full of hungry, pissed-off rodents. Hyping the conventional cat-and-mouse chase, the scene’s relentless danger also recalls the great Babe: Pig in the City chase scene that wuss critics complained was too intense for fantasy-loving children. Outnumbered by rats, Willard’s frightened kitty leaps from sofa to etagere to certain death. It’s a grisly joke, a psychic emanation of Glover’s aggrieved Willard/ Norman/Oedipus as well as Jackson’s own perplexing strangeness. This otherworldly set piece, as campy as it is cynical, bridges cultural memory to modern uneasiness.

"Was that the first weird thing Michael Jackson did?" a colleague asked me about "Ben."

"No more weird than the public’s loving it," I answered.

And Willard bears out that new ambivalence. Not even the end credits’ reprise of "Ben" (sung by Crispin Hellion Glover) can match the potency of that unusually affecting recording. Even children have been moved to tears by "Ben" because it’s a song about loneliness sung miraculously—astoundingly—from a child’s hypersensitive consciousness. The lyrics, "I used to say ‘I’ and ‘Me’/Now it’s ‘Us’/Now it’s ‘We’," are a presentiment of adult maladjustment. (It’s a wonder Morrissey didn’t cover "Ben" instead of "Moon River.") Morgan perverts the song while playing off the recognition that the voice is Michael Jackson’s—a smart-alecky effect as self-righteous as most Jackson-bashing. Yet hearing "Ben" is unsettling because its cultural memory draws one to Jackson’s—and Willard’s— innocence.

Jackson missed his big-screen opportunity when he wasn’t cast as the alien in Powder, but this new Willard suggests what that showcase might have been through Morgan’s complicated treatment of Willard’s freak-out. Willard sees the mice in his basement when feeling pressured (they seem to appear out of his unconscious). First he befriends a small, white rodent and names it Socrates, then a black rat the size of a full-grown hare that he names Ben after a Big Ben clock representing the stress of Willard’s adulthood and impending responsibility (and Ben keeps growing). The white/black pets play out Willard’s ego/id struggle like the mogwai Gizmo and Scar in Gremlins, and like the gremlins, the rats multiply—nightmarishly—once Willard’s aggression is unleashed. Morgan doesn’t have Joe Dante’s sense of satire; instead, the "Ben" sequence has such studied malevolence that its deliberate derangement of Jackson’s crossover triumph seriously suggests racial anxiety is still suppressed in the movie’s basement. (Note the way Willard recoils when a black insurance adjuster inquires about selling his house.)

Something’s powerfully compelling about the film’s knowing evocation of Michael Jackson and all he represents; eventually balancing out the film’s white/black dichotomy of the good/bad alter egos. At this stage in culture, Jackson can be seen to epitomize where blacks’ and whites’ anxieties have merged; the ordeals of work, sex and social identity are so well-understood by all levels of society that Willard’s ordeal is not merely a singular freak. The film’s racial symbolism acutely uses the traditional return-of-the-repressed meanings of horror films to uncover a pervasive cultural condition. Morgan capitalizes on Willard and Jackson’s alienation and turns it into self-conscious esthetics—like The X-Files, like the Edward Ruscha painting, Prudent Aggression, that hangs in the office of Willard’s boss.

That kitty catastrophe sequence is a killer. Morgan goes against the unwritten rules—the niceties—of genre movies that protect children and pets and our own hypocritical sense of propriety about weirdos, freaks, our hidden selves. Vengeance is no longer a novelty; it’s a popular blood sport. Even with the irony of young Michael Jackson’s love song, the related fear of repression and psychic abuse is so clearly and widely understood that this scene is guaranteed to shock the child in most horror-loving adults. (Exposing children to it is unthinkable.) Willard becomes more than a cheap-thrill remake; it’s an art thing that hints at a new sinisterness in our culture.

Willard Directed by Glen Morgan