White Fright

White!' he sneered. 'It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.' ~ Saruman the White

Why are albinos so scary? Is it the idea that the absence of pigmentation is somehow directly equivalent to the void where their soul(s) should be? White is a scary color, man. Fuck black - black has substance, a texture you can feel. Even the bloodiest shade of crimson has life in it - pulsing, vivid, sparkling life. But white is the absence of color. It is cold and empty. It's sterility incarnate, lifeless, severely antiseptic, incapable of sustaining life and hard as glass. White is a void where colors go to die.

I've never known an albino, but I doubt they're evil by nature. They're just people, lacking in tyrosinase, a copper-containing enzyme. Big whoop. I have a lopsided amount of red blood cells swimming around in my veins, but no one ever casts me as the Evil Anemic. However, albinos always seem to end up being thrown into horror movies as villains: silent, stiff and imposing, utterly lacking in emotion.

The first one I can recall is a character named Whispering Death, from a 1976 German horror film called The Night of the Askari, Death in the Sun and, most obviously, Albino. I've never actually seen it, but I remember reading about it in some film review book or another many years ago and being intrigued. It's been uploaded to YouTube but I didn't feel like watching it before I wrote this article because goddammit I'm tired and I just wanted to write this one little article about albinos before I go to bed, okay? Is that so wrong?

Anyway, Christopher Lee is in this, as is Sybil Danning, so it can't be all bad. Actually, its rating on IMDb is rather good.

The first movie I recall actually seeing with my own eyes that contained a Big Bad Albino was 1978's Foul Play. Man I loved that movie as a kid. I used to go around shouting "Kojak! Bang bang!" in a pseudo-Asian accent and it was okay because I was a kid and it was the 70s. Anyway, if you're a completely brain dead twit and have never seen this comedic homage to The Man Who Knew Too Much, you suck. Non-albino actor William Frankfather played Whitey Jackson who, as it turns out, is not that football player who wears pantyhose on TV. Nope, Whitey is a hired hit man working for big bad crime lord The Dwarf, and his job is to run around San Francisco in a spotless white suit, scaring the shit out of Goldie Hawn and never saying a single fucking word because he's so badass. His silver-white eyes are freakier than Linda Blair's contact lenses in The Exorcist.

On the other end of the spectrum (literally) is 1970s Barf Bag B-Flick Mark of the Devil. I bring this film up not because it features an albino, but because it doesn't. Reggie Nalder plays a guy named Albino, a sadistic, lecherous, not-very-nice-at-all witch finder. Albino is not an albino, so why he's called Albino is an utter mystery. However, Reggie played the hit man in Hitchcock's film The Man Who Knew Too Much which was the inspiration for Foul Play so maybe making the hit man in Foul Play an albino was a nod to Albino the not-albino as played by the guy who played the hit man in The Man Who Knew Too Much playing a guy named Albino in Mark of the Devil! Right? You guys see the connection there, right? Guys?

Fine. Let's skip ahead a decade and check in with 1986's Vamp, a seriously fucking balls-out weirdo vampire film which I still can't decide if I liked or not. It was certainly original if nothing else. And it features Super Sleaze King Billy Drago as an albino gang leader/pimp named Snow. Billy is the farthest thing from an albino someone can get without actually being black. He's swarthy and oily with a reptilian smile and cold shark eyes. But he went all out for this flick, bleaching his eyebrows and apparently storing himself inside of a flour bin at the back of a deep freeze for a month before filming began. Co-star Dedee Pfeiffer (Michelle's kid sister) admitted in the audio commentary that she found albino Billy quite sexy. Which is not at all weird.

And now for The Da Vinci Code, that incredibly pompous movie based upon the incredibly shitty book of the same name. Paul Bettany plays Silas, a gigantic albino monk who has been recruited as a hit man by...um...some guy for some reason I don't remember right now. Anyway, who cares? The Silas of Dan Brown's badly written book was utterly evil, an absolute - or rather a caricature of an absolute as written by a nap-deprived 2 year old. Hey Danny, ever hear of character development? Anyway, Silas fares somewhat better in the film version, portraying Silas as a misunderstood, misled man-child, who doesn't really understand what he's doing or why, but blindly follows his faith just like a good Christian should. Also, Paul Bettany just plain old rules. I don't care how many crappy films he's done, he's hot, he's cool and he writes a mean Twitter rip:

I would also at this juncture like to point out that Paul Bettany has been married to smoking hot sexy star kitten galore Jennifer Connolly since 2003. They have two kids together, which proves they've had sex, a mental image which will blow the mind of anyone who ponders it too long. Galaxies will collide and explode at the very idea of two such gorgeous creatures having orgasms together! So yeah, I very much doubt he's a "faggot." And even if he was, I'd dress up like a choir boy and bend over for him.

And last but not least is 1987's The Princess Bride, in which actor Mel Smith played The Albino, a straightforward kinda guy who works in the torture chamber below Prince Humperdinck's castle, sponging blood off of Westley and aimlessly pushing wheelbarrows around the forest. Mel Smith also showed up in an episode of The Young Ones as a security guard who has a serious problem with a ferret being named "Bacon Sandwich." But he was not an albino in that show, so whatever.

And no, I am not including Powder in this write-up, partly because Victor Salva is a pederast, but mostly because Powder looks more like a Thriller era Michael Jackson than a Boondock Saint.