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Still Creepy After All These Years:
Some
Great Movie Classics for a Chill October Night
By Eric Barker
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Mother
has her costume; how 'bout you?
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I’m
always up for a good horror movie, but Halloween gives me
a particularly good excuse to indulge. The opposite of the
films that’ll shortly be airing on television for the
Christmas season, horror films make us look at possibilities
(and other stuff) we’d rather not consider consciously,
like fate and our own inevitable demise, the stench of decay
inherent in mortality and, my personal favorite, human duality.
The darkness we all carry around inside, the beast called
humankind, the monster, that good old Jungian Shadow.
Of course,
many great movies deal with these themes, but they’re
not all certified horror movies. A real horror movie creeps
up on you and stays for awhile, it upsets the fabric of nature,
makes it hard to continue accepting the reality you’ve
been living. The psychic disturbance may last for only an
hour, it may last for a couple of days, but you know you’ve
been given something to think about.
Make that,
worry about.
Horror
is the most primal of genres, which could be the reason why
it is never taken seriously by academics and critics. Even
audiences view horror cinema as the most disposable art form
(and thus, not really an art form at all). But horror films
that are really doing their job inspire the purest emotions,
leapfrogging suspense and moving straight to terror, activating
life saving responses from our days as prey on the veldt,
such as that ever popular feeling, utter revulsion. You know,
something to really fire up the flight response and make sitting
in a theatre seem less than comfortable, even counterproductive.
Only gut-busting
laughter and sexual arousal are as primeval as horror, and
everyone knows that art makes us rise above our baser instincts.
Anything that makes us feel our deepest nature growling from
slumber, a nature that we spend a lifetime learning to repress,
can’t possibly be healthy, nevermind art.
So, most
horror films are disdained by the culture that produces them,
waiting for respectability until their primeval, psychosexual
charge has lost its current, or at the very least, until our
social taboos and standards have evolved (and by “evolved”
I don’t necessarily mean “improved” -- merely
altered into something different by time). Author Stephen
King has theorized (in the delightful Danse Macabre,
1981) that the best storytellers in the genre are always dissecting
the status quo, working out their own little autopsy of a
culture’s dreams, desires and self-deceptions and leaving
them in a mess for someone else to clean up. That seems as
good an explanation as any for why Horror remains eternal,
the insane relative that Comedy and Romance keep locked in
the cellar.
Ah, but
there is no basement door strong enough, and there never will
be. Horror slips out through the cracks, infecting other genres,
continually making itself known and heard again, especially
at times of economic and social upheaval, like now, when the
status quo has created a vast Shadow of taboos, unspoken dos
and don’ts, shoulds and shouldn’ts, with-mes and
against-mes. The tale of horror is as ancient as storytelling
itself, perhaps the third story ever told (“Did ya see
that boar gut Ralph yesterday? Who knew the old man had so
much blood in him?”)
Likewise,
horror cinema was born as soon as there were moving pictures,
and some horror films never quite lose their charge. A few
tap into something truthful about the human condition and
have finally gained credence as great films; others continue
to inspire dread because they remain intimate with what really
scares us. The following list of 11 classics (because I just
couldn‘t shave it to 10) is not intended as definitive,
but merely as a brief sampling of rental suggestions for aficionados,
or in case you don’t have a costume or a date on Friday,
the 31st of October. Or maybe you want to hide from the trick-or-treaters,
pop some corn, turn out the lights and snuggle with someone
warm.
Only,
(heh-heh-heh), don’t say I didn’t warn you. A
couple of these movies still have their teeth. Enjoy, now...
Nosferatu
(1922, 81 m.): Yeah, it’s creaky as a
castle door hinge, and a silent film besides (speaking of
horrors), but here is where it all truly began. F. W. Murnau’s
masterpiece of early cinematic terror, very loosely adapted
from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, showed the world how it
was done and as a consequence may be one of the most imitated
films of all time. Terminally weird Max Schreck, as the horrible
Count Orlov, is still as chilling and creepy and monstrous
as any film villain in history. Slow going in its opening
act, but a fabulous visual feast when it reaches the vampire’s
lair. The film’s subtitle, translated into English,
is a Symphony of Horrors (eine Symphonie des Grauens).
Frankenstein
(1931, 71 m.): Not the greatest of Universal
Studios’ monster films from the Depression era, nor
the first (that was Lugosi’s Dracula, earlier the same
year) but certainly the most important. Frankenstein was the
prototypical box-office sleeper, a film the studio was trying
out with low expectations, which then became a smash hit beyond
anyone‘s wildest dreams.
Its brilliance
lies in two human factors: director James Whale, who transformed
Mary Shelley’s cumbersome, not always believable tale
into a story of the Sympathetic Monster, an archetype for
the times; and the world-shaking performance by a lisping
British character actor named Boris Karloff. The Whale/Karloff
monster is an ungodly beast brought to life through no fault
of his own, then made to suffer interminable humiliations
before his brutal death at the hands of a mob (sort of like
being a teenager). In this film, the horror comes from identifying
with the Outsider, and recoiling from your own kind.
The acting
by all is way over the top except for Karloff’s performance,
which is a giddy privelege to watch, one of the few acts of
pure originality ever caught on film. Contains that immortal
snippet of rousing blasphemy “Oh, it’s alive,
it’s alive! IT’S ALIVE! In the name of God, now
I know what it feels…(drowned by thunder)…”
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
It’s short, so you can double it with...
Dead
of Night (1945, 102 m.): No matter what kind
of buzz you seek from your Halloween cinema, this brilliant
anthology of shivery tales should provide. Four directors
and a flawless British cast unfurl a series of archetypal
ghost stories, some disturbing, others comical, all framed
by a man’s visit to an English country house, where
he experiences a powerful sense of déjà vu among
strangers. Every viewer is different, of course, I won’t
promise anything, but the grand finale of this film made the
hair on my head start violently from its normal place of rest.
Michael Redgrave is unforgettable as a ventriloquist in need
of some serious therapy.
Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1956, 80 m.): It was
only natural that horror, ancient and pulsating, would tickle
and tease that newcomer, science fiction, when it finally
found its cinematic voice. Horror can’t leave any of
the other genres alone, and those touching on the fantastic
are especially fair game. Die-hard sci-fi geeks think their
domain should only be about the “Sense of Wonder,”
but any way you slice this pungent allegory of American life
in the conformist 1950s, it’s a great movie. A thoroughly
plausible investigation of what makes us human, with a perfectly
constructed rising line of tension, the original Body Snatchers
still has the power to disturb. See only the widescreen version,
if you can.
A modest
drive-in hit in its day, I first saw it myself when I was
a child, but it scares me more now than it ever did then.
If you don’t see Pod People around you every day, then
you must be one of them.
Horror
of Dracula (1958, 82 m.): a sentimental favorite.
Forget Lugosi, whom I dearly love, irrepressible ham that
he was, and forget Oldman, too, with his overdetermined Count
romantically falling for Winona Ryder. The towering Christopher
Lee (6’5”) was the epitome of Bram Stoker’s
indestructible bloodsucker for the many years in between Lugosi
and Oldman, because he played him just the way he should be
played -- as an evil, evil, undead, merciless, inescapable
demon from hell, okay? Once in his sights, it’s all
over, you are doomed to torment (in part, no doubt, because
the music score is too loud). This was Lee’s first appearance
in the role, with the incomparable Peter Cushing as his nemesis,
Van Helsing. Though it was made on a low budget, distilling
Stoker’s original story to the very bone, it’s
still a rollicking, trashy good time with a smashing climax.
Interview this.
Try a
Hitchcock Double Feature:
Psycho (1960, 109 m.): the clear
point at which horror cinema divided into two sub genres --
the supernatural and the realistic. It was the only way Hitchcock
was going to make a horror film, since he had strenuously
avoided ghosts and monsters throughout the previous three
and a half decades of his career.
The first
slasher movie and still the best, Psycho acknowledged
there were human monsters abroad, something we had always
known but which filmmakers had been reluctant to address before,
because it would have lowered the paying customer’s
ability to recover quickly from the experience. If you can
blame it on a mythic demon like a vampire, the audience remains
safe, even in the theatre seats. But if you blame it on Mother,
you’ve got something that cuts straight to the heart
of things, if you’ll forgive the unfortunate imagery.
Famous
as a piece of relentless manipulation, what Psycho
really does is seduce us, a much more pleasant way to have
your expectations totally violated, drawn and quartered. When
first released, this movie shocked the audience like a hair-dryer
falling into the bathtub. Some of that edge has been dulled
by constant imitation (as it has with Nosferatu), but even
if you’ve seen it and know all the “surprise”
plot twists, Psycho is still eminently frightful
and enjoyable as the blackest of black comedies, a trip through
the coldest and dankest of graveyards, inviting us to settle
in with the notion that the universe doesn’t care and
(heh-heh) never has.
Starring
Jamie Leigh Curtis’ utterly foxy Mom, it also marks
the first close-up of a flushing toilet in a Hollywood movie.
The
Birds (1963, 119 m.): Still in a horrific mood,
Hitch followed Psycho with one of the most original movies
ever made. Though it is based on a brief short story by Daphne
DuMaurier about an isolated farm house attacked by birds,
this film is all Hitchcock, a Technicolor nightmare of cosmic
proportions, as all of nature turns against humankind. It’s
actually a fairly common occurrence, both in Nature and the
movies, but there’s almost always a reasonable explanation.
In The Birds, there is some evidence that the plague
is unleashed by the all-consuming jealousy of Mother (again),
or simply the fierce psychic energies of a run-of-the-mill
love triangle, but really, it happens because we deserve it
don‘t we? Deep down? Several magnificent Hitchcockian
set pieces, with the attacks steadily increasing in size and
intensity until an unprophesied apocalypse looms over the
California coast. There is no music in the film, only Bernard
Herrmann’s orchestrations of chirping, fluttering, cawing,
screeching birds.
Or a Polanski
Double Feature:
Repulsion
(1965, 104 m.): Nearly every film Roman Polanski has made
could be classified as horror; the guy has lived an entire
life, from childhood on, pursued by real-life demons, and
his films are all about the terrors that suffuse the sunlit
world. In the 1960s, when he was ascending to international
prominence as a great artist, he made two nerve-jangling films
exploring feminine anxiety about sex, birth and death.
Repulsion
is about an ethereally beautiful young woman, played by a
twitching, ominously withdrawn Catherine Deneuve, who has
intimacy issues as serious as those of Norman Bates. Except
in this film, we are implacably pulled into sharing the madness,
no exceptions. This is not a movie to watch if you are at
all unstable: as Catherine becomes enveloped in her own isolation
and insanity, taking us with her, it becomes ever more difficult
to separate reality and hallucination, whether onscreen or
off, though it is clear who the real monsters are -- those
mindless, groping, lust-crazed ogres popularly known as the
male of the species. Made while there was supposed to be a
“sexual revolution” going on, Repulsion
taps into a terrible darkness that is still with us.
Rosemary’s
Baby (1968, 136 m.): Uncertain how you really
feel about pregnancy and childbirth? Polanski’s first
film in America is one of the great movies in any genre from
the sixties, an electrifying Gothic shot in New York’s
monstrous Dakota building, and a masterpiece of mood-making.
In fact, Rosemary’s Baby is all atmosphere
and suggestion, a bloodless journey into the depths of paranoia
and the downsides of reproduction that could only have been
made by a European. If you are at all concerned about Satan
and his minions, you should definitely rent Father of
the Bride instead (either version).
I never
cared much for Mia Farrow as an actress, but she is fantastic
here, as a pregnant woman who suspects the next-door neighbors
are, well, as creepy as they seem to be. Polanski wrote a
scrupulously faithful screenplay from the novel by Ira (Stepford
Wives) Levin, filled the supporting cast with great faces
from Hollywood’s studio era, and shot the movie in long
takes, with an uncanny knack for investing doorways and walls
with a vise-like sense of foreboding.
Slowly
but surely, through a succession of impeccably staged and
acted scenes of familiar domestic life, the chills start working
their way up and down your spinal cord in larger and larger
waves, beginning with that immortal line, “This is no
dream! This is really happening!”
The
Exorcist (1973, 122 m.): I’m not as cynical
about this one as I used to be, primarily because director
William Friedkin has said that he and the film’s author
William Peter Blatty believed this story really happened (to
a young American boy in the late forties). I knew about Blatty,
but I always felt Friedkin was hedging, possibly because the
techniques he used to get this film’s great performances
stepped over the line of acceptable behavior too often. A
former maker of documentaries, coming off the surprise success
of The French Connection (1971), Friedkin was out
of control while shooting The Exorcist, at least
one of his stunts injuring Ellen Burstyn for life.
Still,
there is no doubt he made a film here that out-Polankis Polanski
in melding realism with the supernatural. The Exorcist
is a brutally terrifying movie that set a new standard for
smashing taboos, and one from which we’ve never fully
recovered.
At the
time of its release, the media was all agog with reports about
how The Exorcist tapped into some imagined new interest
in the occult and demonic possession, but that misses a big
chunk of the film’s universality. In the wake of a decade
(the sixties again) in which all sense of order, tradition
and respect for one’s elders had been put to the torch,
adults in the Western hemisphere already thought the children
had gone absolutely mad, unleashing evil between the walls
of quiet, bourgeois respectability. In a society that often
romanticizes the innocence of childhood to a nauseating degree,
The Exorcist confirmed the Shadow cast by the myth
and showed the unshowable: children can be monsters, too.
Oh, it
had been said before -- in The Bad Seed (1956), for
instance, and Village of the Damned (1960) -- but
it had never been shown, that’s the secret. When the
demon invades, it will not be wearing horns and a tail but
by stealth, and he’ll destroy your innocence first.
Alien
(1979, 117 m.): Even before I knew this classic was about
to be released in a “Director’s Cut” (on
October 29, 2003, at a theatre near you), it still made the
short list of movies I would recommend to anyone seeking a
good old fashioned horrific time on Halloween night. Steeped
in weirdly organic, Lovecraftian imagery and a general, post-feminist,
psychosexual unease, Alien follows The Excorcist’s
lead in revealing visually all that cannot, or should not,
be shown: the universe is a terrifying freakin’ place,
and Nature, its primary engine, is a complex and cruel task
master. Who says science isn’t horrifying?
Though
it has only one scene of nearly unspeakable violence, Alien
is crammed with disturbing visions, especially in its first
thirty minutes or so. The “face hugger” alone
should put you off of sticking your nose in where it doesn’t
belong for life. After that, director Ridley Scott doesn’t
really have to do anything else to scare us; we’ll do
it for him. Sure, on one level it’s just another haunted
house movie, only it’s set in a medieval-looking spaceship,
blah-blah-blah. Alien’s detractors wave this observation
around as if the recasting of old forms hasn’t been
the ongoing project of art since cave painting.
This film
takes us back to the veldt, rejoins us with the “Darwinian
spectacle of the eaters and the eaten” (thanks Camille
Paglia). If you’ve never seen it in a theatre, trust
me, Panavision-with- Dolby is the only way to go, and now
is your chance. The Jerry Goldsmith score is both shivery
and oddly beautiful.
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