The Screengrab

Marilyn Chambers, who was found dead in her home yesterday at the age of 56, was best known as the star of Jim and Artie Mitchell's Behind the Green Door (1972), one of the three biggest hits of the brief era of "porno chic" in the early 1970s. Where Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, had a winning, giggly anything-goes quality, and Georgina Spelvin, of The Devil in Miss Jones, stood out for her voracious level of on-screen enthusiasm, the youthful Chambers (nee' Marilyn Ann Briggs), who was twenty when Green Door was made, had what porn directors invariably claim to value above all else and seem to find once in a blue moon: a fresh-scrubbed, girl-next-door, all-American cheerleader look and manner that, to the Mitchells and their audience, must have seemed to be screaming out to be defiled. In the movie, Chambers played an innocent miss who is abducted and spirited away to a sinister underground club where she spends the bulk of the film's 72-minute running time being ravished for the delectation of a masked audience; she loves it, of course.

Green Door, which would go on to make millions, was made for $60,000, with the leading lady receiving $25,000 and one percent of the gross--a very good deal for her, because the Mitchells were tough businessmen and Green Door would be one of the few hardcore porn "classics" to make money that actually wound up in the hands of the people who'd made it. The Mitchells were lucky to find Chambers, but their cup really ranneth over when they discovered that their leading lady was the recently anointed face of Ivory Snow; she could be seen, with her hair pulled back and cuddling a baby, on boxes of the detergent from coast to coast. Procter & Gamble wound up giving the movie a shot of free publicity (and taking a bath itself) by recalling all its products and advertising that featured her face, thus demonstrating that it's that 56/100% that's not pure that'll kill ya.

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A black and white, animated anthology film that draws on the talents of an unusual mix of well-known comics artists and graphic designers, Fear(s) of the Dark is the trippiest cross between a European art-house curio and a thrill-crazed midnight movie since the heady days of Fantastic Planet. As usual with omnibus features, the stories vary in quality, but the shifts from one striking visual style to the next will keep your eyes glued to the screen--unless you turn your head away from the grislier moments, notably the recurring episodes, captured in compellingly scratchy-looking artwork from Christian Hincker (the artist known as "Blutch"), in which a wild-eyed, cadaverous-looking nobleman terrorizes the streets with a pack of vicious dogs. There are also full segments from a pair of giants in the comic book world, Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattiotti, both making their first forays into film animation (though Burns once adapted his "Dogboy" character for a bizarre, stylized live action serial that ran on MTV's old animation showcase Liquid Television.) Mattotti's brief segment is a beauty, a sophisticated rendition of a folk tale that seems to carve out its own quiet, eerie space at the heart of the feature. Burns's segment is lively enough and supplies the movie's only traces of humor, but it might seem most impressive to people who haven't seen a lot of Burns's work and so haven't already been well-exposed to his retroland style and obsessions with virginal sexual terror. (It'll be easy to tell which reviewers of Fear(s) of the Dark are new to Burns; they'll be the one whose first thought is to compare his segment to David Cronenberg.)

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