hellevator - De Lift (1983)

"no little Dutch girl, don't go in the murder lift!"

Dick Maas presents: a 95 minute argument for just giving up and taking the stairs.

Spoilers, babes.

De Lift (aka The Lift -1983)

Written and directed by: Dick Maas

Starring: Huub Stapel, Willeke van Ammelooy, Josine van Dalsum, Ab Abspoel, Serge-Henri Valcke, Paul Gieske, et al

Running time: 95 minutes

Original release date: 11 May 1983 (the Netherlands), 4 July 1985 (American release)

but first

A very hearty welcome back to The Horror! The Horror! , now broadcasting from Goblin Towers 2.0 (aka our new flat). Thank you for sticking with me these past few weeks as me and Mr. THTH got the place up and running (aka unfucking our WiFi as well as unpacking), I truly cannot think of a better way to thank you for it than by gifting you this beautiful nonsense of a film.

This Stack likes to talk about horror media from a storytelling perspective, and I’d like you for this particular movie to imagine you are watching an extended episode of an 80s police procedural (sans police) you accidentally come across while channel surfing at 2 AM because you cannot sleep, nor can you remember that you have the channel you find this on. It is just there, and this is just there.

restaurant Icarus, dine under the stars, spectacular view

(*not seen: pissing rain)

After we get an opening credits sequence (as in, the opening credits over some admittedly quite cool footage of an elevator’s mechanics), the film starts quite literally on a dark and stormy night. In a twofer of shots that genuinely made me cackle, we first get the above billboard, advertising a restaurant based at the top of the Kronenstede building, the grimmest, most non-descript office block you can imagine. Then, we get teeth.

The zoom out from this woman’s mouth as she’s cackling with laughter should clue you in that this movie is here to be extremely unserious. The woman in question (not named, and I can’t for the life of me find a cast list that accurately tells me who the heck we’re looking at apart from the main three cast members so bear with me) is part of a dinner party of four (one of the waiters mentions he’ll be rather pleased once the agriculture conference is over, so let’s assume that this is a subsection of the agricultural world that likes to party).

The rest of the restaurant is empty, and the jolly foursome, all in varying states of drunk, are in extremely good spirits as they leave. In the hallway, they all pack into the elevator (the middle one of three, which believe it or not will become very relevant very shortly) where they continue to be in extremely good spirits (two of them are soon actively in the process of fucking, and it is exactly as awkward as that sounds) until a very Gothic bolt of lightning strikes the building.

The elevators stop working. The kitchen staff are alarmed to see the middle elevator stuck between two floors; as they investigate, the party of four in the elevator suddenly begin experiencing very unusual and abrupt symptoms of suffocation. All four of them have fainted by the time the kitchen staff get to the elevator.

The next morning, we are re-introduced to an old friend of the Stack - yes, it’s the glorious return of Dutch film and TV mainstay and That Guy with the Great Hair from Amsterdamned, Huub Stapel. Rather than playing a leather jacket wearing police detective, here he’s playing a leather jacket wearing elevator mechanic named Felix Adelaar. We get a couple of scenes establishing his life in broad strokes: he is married to a woman named Saskia (Josien van Dalsum), with whom he has two children (played by Emma Onrust and Sydney Kuyer - neither of them get names) and life seems pretty chill for them until Felix gets a call from his boss.

elevators do it up and down

Felix works for a company called Deta Liften (Deta Lifts - the company was almost called Delta Lifts but this was changed before filming to avoid confusion with an existing company), the company responsible for the construction of the elevators in the Kronenstede building. He attends the site and inspects whether there were perhaps any issues with the air-conditioning, but nothing appears to be amiss.

Nevertheless, things start getting very amiss very quickly: an elderly blind man (there to purchase a vacation home from a realtor with an office in the building and what looks like a deeply sus moral compass) falls to his gruesome death when the middle elevator (told you) opens to an empty shaft, a janitor is brutally burned and discovered after his body drops into the elevator and in what is arguably one of the film’s two most horrifying scenes, a nightwatchman’s head gets stuck between the elevator doors (this is when the elderly gentleman’s body is discovered) and his junior colleague is traumatized for life as he watches him get very slowly decapitated (YES, YOU SEE IT HAPPEN).

Meanwhile, Felix cannot shake the feeling that something is going very wrong - a fact that is not helped by the appearance of local journalist Mieke de Beer (Willeke van Ammelrooy), who is covering the discovery of the elderly man. Felix’s growing obsession with what is actually going on with these elevators is making Saskia suspect that he is actually having an affair (which is a suspicion kind of stoked by her friend when they go on a double date to the bowling alley). When he meets with Mieke in a café to discuss the fact that he spotted a van from Rising Sun, a manufacturer of microprocessors for automation, outside on the Kronenstede parking lot, he is spotted by Saskia’s friend, who immediately thinks he is having an affair and tells Saskia as much.

“daddy, what is adultery?”

Felix and Mieke investigate Rising Sun, and decide to try to meet with the company’s CEO. The Rising Sun offices and their surrounding environs look like someone having a bit of an experimental faff around with The Sims and I know this issue is very image heavy already but I feel like this screenshot explains it better than words could.

This is after you see Felix and Mieke drive through the actual middle of nowhere, presumably with a tumbleweed or two just out of shot.

Interior design-wise, she’s giving James Bond villain lab, she’s giving angles, she’s giving inexplicable red light while a number of faceless scientists work on whatever the fuck they’re working on, she’s giving Something is what I’m saying. The CEO is very cagey and nervy and generally exudes the air of a man who has to go home at night and live with what he did (whatever it is), so Felix’s worries are absolutely not waylaid by this visit.

Meanwhile, back at Felix’s house, the world’s most awkward evening meal happens. It includes shouting, burnt food, Felix’s daughter asking him what adultery is and a very ill-timed phone call from Mieke inviting him to visit with her former university professor (who specializes in electronics). By way of slide presentation, Felix and Mieke are told about how sensitive microprocessors are to external factors such as electric fields, magnetic fields and radioactivity, and the professor tells a charming story about a computer which suddenly began to self-program and went completely out of control.

The next day, Felix is incensed to find out his boss has suspended him from work for his visit to Rising Sun. It transpires that (who could have fucking guessed) Deta and Rising Sun are working together, with Rising Sun having provided the elevator’s computer processor, made of organic - and highly unstable - materials. The owners of the respective companies meet by way of midnight secret car meeting, and Mr. Deta nopes out of the arrangements, fearing the repercussions of being found out to be part responsible for the seemingly sentient murder elevator.

goo

Felix arrives home to discover Saskia and the kids have packed up and left him, and after a phone call from Saskia which infuriates him, Felix decides he has nothing to lose and goes to the Kronenstede building on his own (accidentally cutting off a phone call from Mieke, thinking it’s Saskia) to figure out what the hell is going on once and for all.

This is where it truly goes off the rails. Shots of the building with MORE Gothic lightning, Felix discovering that the elevator indeed has a sentient mind as it prevents him from accessing the microprocessor before attacking him, Felix climbing into the elevator shaft and finding a pulsating box with a sticky goo-covered chip inside (aka THE HEART), Felix having a life or death showdown WITH A FUCKING SENTIENT ELEVATOR and nearly being crushed before Mieke (who has deduced where he is) manages to pull him out of the elevator and save him… it’s all a lot.

AND THEN THE ENDING HAPPENS.

Rising Sun’s CEO steps out from the shadows and, seeing his experiment has failed, pulls a gun on the elevator’s heart and shoots it multiple times. He turns to a stunned Felix and Mieke, manages to say what he probably thinks is a James Bond-like finishing quip before THE ELEVATOR COMPUTER SHOOTS OUT ONE OF THE CABLES, DRAGS HIM INSIDE THE OPEN SHAFT AND HANGS HIM.

It’s such a spectacularly unhinged moment I nearly stood up and clapped, for an otherwise light-on-the-scares movie it’s one of the most fucking terrifyingly batshit moments I have ever witnessed, so salute to Dick Maas for that one.

The film ends with Felix and Mieke, traumatized, bleeding and shuffling, leaving the building by way of the staircase.

De Lift is not really a movie that begs to be delved into on a deeper level when it comes to its storytelling. It’s straightforward A-B plot, no real subtext. But that’s what makes it charming - as I mentioned, it plays like a TV police procedural (with no police) interjected by a few proper gruesome moments. It’s like an episode of Baantjer (it even has a brief appearance by Serge-Henri Valcke) crossed with The Twilight Zone. It’s both not that deep and very unserious.

But, and it’s a big but: it does make a fucking great point about not letting computer tech take over everything. Because this is what you get. Murder elevators.

I think.