Black Sunday: (1960. dir: Mario Bava) In that oppressively steamy hothouse that is Italian Horror, Black Sunday stands out as a somewhat restrained classic. Yes, it's got the unforgettable opening set-piece in which the Mask of Satan is nailed onto the squirming Barbara Steele's face with a single blow from a sort of sledgehammer. It's got the grossness of maggots and puddles of eye-jelly in a decomposing corpse. It takes Sam Raimi-esque glee in giving us a protracted look at an animated corpse-face melting in a fire. And, naturally, it's got Steele's heaving bosoms. I'm not saying it's exactly dignified. But Bava holds back, using all manner of polished technique to build a very fine atmosphere: wonderfully noir-lit black and white, tension-building slow pans followed by sparsely-used quick-cuts, Dutch and other strangely-angled shots. There's a lovely, dreamlike shot of a peasant girl watching a formidable carriage, which, in fact, is carrying Satan's emissary on an iniquitous deed, drive in ominous slow-motion through the night, and I especially enjoyed the effect of the erupting tombs.
Children of the Corn: (1984. dir: Fritz Kiersch) Where did I get it stuck in my craw that this was a classic of some kind and my horror-education was incomplete until I watched it? This movie is a piece of crap. Scarecrows have a certain amount of built-in eeriness. "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" is a very creepy concept. Children wielding scythes also enjoy a certain amount of fundamental creep-cred. But this is a piece of crap. Except for the kid playing the Big Bad (see above), you will never, not at your local grade school pageant, nowhere, find worse child-actors than in this film. The cutesy voiceover is godawful. The dialogue is terrible, and the people are all Stephen-King people, which means they're unbelievable and unlikable simultaneously.
Messengers 2: the Scarecrow is much scarier, with better images, better acting, great tension building. AND it's got Norman Reedus, whom I suspect is an unsung treasure. Go for that one; give this one a miss.
the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: (1974. dir: Tobe Hooper) I can't imagine, on the other hand, how I waited so long before watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. From the very beginning, from that long, static shot of the atrocity in the graveyard with the radio voiceover, then the guy rolling on the ground saying, "The things I've seen! I've seen things...", even then you can feel it's going to be an extraordinary ride, like some grotesque approaching.
It occurred to me that maybe the reason that this first Chainsaw was so great (as opposed to the many execrable sequels and remakes, one directed by Hooper himself) was partly the editing. Because some of those effects, like the slamming of the metal door after Leatherface first appears and kills the guy, that hair-raising noise with the eerie quiet afterward, or the exploration of the chicken/bone/feather room... And of course, its brilliant ending, with the gruesome chainsaw dance of frustration then cut to black... Those things might all have been magic from the editing room. I mean, once it had all been dredged up out of Tobe's id and perfectly filmed; give the guy his credit.
What a movie. How does one prepare for it? I was slack-jawed with awe as the end credits rolled. I can't even imagine watching that on the big screen when it came out. It must have been a mindfuck, a cinematic apocalypse straight out of left field. And notice, please, that I'm not even mentioning the dinner scene, which is so utterly brilliant and yet so very, very wrong in every conceivable way that I think one should not attempt to speak of it except in the vaguest, most Lovecraftian adjectives ("Noisome! Blasphemous! Necrophagous, charnel and miasmal. Nighted.")
Daughters of Darkness: (1971. dir: Harry Kumel) Not so much a horror film as an erotic mood-piece for those intimate, blood-sipping evenings in your dungeon. John Karlen, fresh off the set of Dark Shadows, is very good as the secretly twisted young honeymooner, and there's an entirely unforeseeable plot-turn which sets it at least a rung above other eurobabe horror erotica of the time. Delphine Seyrig is flawlessly stylish as the Countess Bathory, embodying a sort of hypno-opiate sensuousness of manner which may have been precursor to that wonderful, somnolent acting style in Cronenberg's Crash.
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