Lynn Lowry: Return of a Scream Queen
By Marc Shapiro
           

By the mid 90s, veteran actress Lynn Lowry’s career was in decline. An attempt to go mainstream after many years in the genre trenches had gone nowhere. She was doing a lot of theater and would occasionally front a jazz combo. But Lowry, who made her horror bones in the 70s in the films The Crazies, Shivers (aka They Came From Within) and I Drink Your Blood, was feeling kind of forgotten.

            Until she reluctantly hit the horror convention circuit in 2005.

            “I started going to the conventions,” recalls Lowry, “and I was amazed. People were coming up to me. They knew me and they knew my work. Then all of a sudden I started getting phone calls from horror filmmakers who wanted me to be in their films.”

            Lowry’s return to fright started with a small role in the Brinke Stevens topper Dead Things. Most recently she has done roles in the slasher movie Basement Jack, the low budget horrors Psychosomatica, Splatter Disco, and The Ocean as well as the remake of The Dunwich Horror.

            “It’s wonderful to be having this kind of resurgence,” says Lowry. “I always dreamed of being a star. I always wanted to win an academy award. But being in demand for horror films at this point in my career is very cool. It’s great to see that so many people know who I am and remember my work.”

            Lowry’s very first scare fare was also her very first feature film, the notorious I Drink Your Blood in which rabid hippies run amuck. The irony was that Lowry, who played, in her own words, “the mute, rabid hippie on LSD named Carrie”, did not receive on-screen credit in the film. “That was the first feature film I did after arriving in New York from Atlanta. I met with the director [David E. Durston] after the movie had already been cast. But he just fell in love with me and decided to put me in the movie. Then he decided that I would be mute. When the people who put the end credits in received the cast information, they did not see my name so they didn’t put it in. It didn’t bother me. Playing a character with no dialogue was not as easy as it appeared, especially with all the craziness going on around my character. My memories were that it was a fun film to do and, for its time, it was pretty violent and gory. Because I didn’t think much of the film at that point, I didn’t care if anybody saw it, let alone found out I was in it. Now I think the film was quite remarkable for its time.”

            Lowry’s next stop along the 70’s horror trail was in the role of Kathy Bolman in George Romero’s The Crazies in which a small town in Pennsylvania falls victim to an insanity-producing virus and the military has to come in and clean up the mess. “That movie was so much about the military and the townspeople. I would have loved to have had more to do in it as I’m in it so sporadically. What people remember most about me in that film was the death scene. I actually remember having this big argument with George about it. I thought that just saying the word ‘oh’ and dropping dead was so lame. I wanted to die big. But George said no that it needed to be simple and of course, in the end, he was right.”

            The third element of Lowry’s 70’s horror hat trick was Shivers (aka They Came From Within) in which a scientist unleashes a very disturbing parasite on the occupants of an apartment complex that turns them into sex obsessed monsters. Lowry, who played Nurse Forsythe in the film, remembers landing that role right on the heels of The Crazies when no less a light then fledgling producer Ivan Riteman cast her in what would be one of David Cronenberg’s early films. “It was disgusting,” laughs the actress of that film. “It was probably the first film that showed a horror getting inside the human body. My favorite scene was when I’m swimming across the pool and come up out of the water at the other end. It was shot in slow motion and it really showed the sensual, evil quality of the story.”

            In looking back on those three films, Lowry acknowledges “In certain ways all three films were a head of their time in terms of violence,  gore and sexuality. At the time I believed everybody was doing their best work despite budget and other limitations. To be honest, I didn’t think any of them would go on to have any kind of reputation today but I’m happy that they have.”

            For completists, Lynn Lowry’s filmography contains a lot of cinematic delights. An early film entitled Sugar Cookies showcases Lowry in the all-together. There was a soft-core quasi-documentary called Score. She appeared in a non-genre film called The Battle Of Love’s Return which was directed and starred Lloyd Kaufmann in his pre-Troma days. There’s also the role in the 1982 remake of Cat People and a one season wonder of a television sitcom, How To Survive A Marriage to consider.

            But these days, Lowry’s mind is definitely on her future in horror and looks to the past only in terms of how much things have changed… for better and, perhaps, for worse. “One thing I know is that I’m a much better actress at this point. I can handle things now that I could not have handled 30 years ago. What I’m finding is that so much of horror today is done digitally, which allows for a lot more takes. There just isn’t a lot left up to the imagination anymore. But then the movies I was doing back then left very little up to the imagination.

            “Gosh, the stuff I did in the 70’s… there was just so much blood and horror.”