Goblins, Ghosts, and Gabaghouls 1.01: People Come Here to Die

A bloody hand slips from a butcher’s cleaver as a man collapses to the floor, leaving streaks of red across the polished steel. Boys with toy pistols run beside an empty swimming pool, mimicking the sounds of gunshots as the mouth of the forest yawns black and deep behind them. And in the entrance hall of a retirement home, aged matriarch Livia Soprano (Nancy Marchand) hisses “People come here to die,” her long nails, sunken face, and hunched posture transforming her into a figure more Count Orlok than Italian-American grandmother. Horror is everywhere in David Chase’s seminal mafia series The Sopranos, woven into the show’s themes and iconography from its pilot episode to its infamous final shot. Even in its first moments, long before the overt horror homages of its later seasons, up to and including long stretches of the slasher film-within-a-show Cleaver, the visual and narrative language of horror provide a unique lens for understanding what Chase’s opus is driving at.

The focus of the pilot’s horror imagery is Satriale’s, the New Jersey deli and butcher shop from which Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and his crew conduct their criminal enterprise. The aforementioned bloody cleaver moment is straight out of any number of sleazy, visually playful slashers (think Nightmare on Elm Street or Black Christmas) and supernatural revenge flicks like The Crow, the hogs’ heads hanging from meathooks behind Christopher (Michael Imperioli) a clear visual link to the carcasses and cannibalistic fetishm which permeate Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Later we follow Christopher and Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero as the pair dispose of Christopher’s victim, a comedically mistreated figure wrapped in a translucent tarp like a kind of gruesome echo of television’s other famous plastic-wrapped corpse: Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer. It’s a whirlwind tour of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s in horror, all in the space of a few minutes.

Beyond the purely visual, there is Livia, rendered both pathetic and horrific by her encroaching decrepitude and senility. Her bottomless discontent with and resentment of her son Tony, arguably the show’s single most important thread, is almost tangible from the first moment we meet her. In a show full of people cast not for their Ken and Barbie good looks but for their believability as members of a strange and insular but still perversely all-American subculture, actress Nancy Marchand plays Livia with a distinct physical wretchedness, stiff and teetering like a tower on the brink of collapse, her long, gnarled fingers always curled into claws and the loose skin of her face pulling taut only across flashes of disgust and rage, baring sharp teeth and reducing her huge, pale eyes to fearful slits. Her clear untreated and unrecognized mental illness is the series’ most profound existential threat, a dark pit down which her son, if his efforts in therapy fail, might follow her.

In this first episode, much of Tony’s time in therapy with Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) is spent analyzing his emotional connection to a family of wild ducks which nest in his backyard. His panic attacks, the show’s inciting incident and the reason for his presence in her office, are connected to these animals, to the ducklings they rear and teach to fly in the brush behind the Soprano family’s palatial McMansion. In their first appearance we see the brush at the edge of the backyard rustle and shake before we see the ducks themselves, a classic piece of visual horror setup. In this sequence the brush is vibrant green, seen up close in morning sunlight. In the final shot — discussed above — it is steeped in shadow, that verdure now an archway through which darkness lurks, as deep and concealing as the gloom in the Bada Bing that renders Tony a nearly featureless figure of menace as he coldly lays out his plan to defraud health insurance companies by creating phony clinics.

“I was watching The Birds last week on TV,” Tony says to Dr. Melfi near the episode’s end. “You think maybe that had something to do with it?” It’s a throwaway line, a little half-joke as the mafioso dodges and weaves before at last accepting that the flight of the wild ducks who nested in his backyard inspired in him feelings of dread at the idea of losing his own family, but pick it apart and the episode’s famous central metaphor takes on sinister undertones. If, in Tony’s subconscious, the bird originates with Hitchcock’s vision of a world turned suddenly and inexplicably hostile, then the family he fears losing isn’t only something small, wild, and delicate in need of nurturing and protection, but a danger in its own right. And in the absence of the ducks, what else might emerge from that dark wood in the heart of suburban New Jersey? What, now that the pool is empty, might slip from the forest verge to slither slow, unseen, and venomous beneath its placid surface?