THIRTEEN HORROR CLASSICS (in no particular order):
Toby Dammit (1968)
Long before the dark-bellied whimsy of Lynch, before the Japanese brought to our awareness the ultra-creep potential lurking in images of little girls, there was Federico Fellini’s “Toby Dammit.” It is the final chapter of the swingin’ European triptych Spirits of the Dead, three short films loosely inspired by Poe stories. The Roger Vadim is inconsequential, the Louis Malle is interesting in a lurid way (Delon strip-n-whip with Bardot!), and the Fellini is a bounding little romp through a surrealist hell. Terence Stamp is the beautiful and disintegrating movie star decked out in Carnaby Street satin and lace, his smile a death’s-head, walking -- mostly doubled over in agony -- through the loving insanity that is Fellini’s Rome toward his inexorable death. Aside from delivering an image so uncanny that it’s burned forever into my mind, the film seems to me perhaps the truest psychological portrait of the absurdity of superstardom ever entrusted to celluloid.
Pulse (2001)
Pulse is not my favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa film; that’s Bright Future. Despite its revenant, though, its ominous use of ambient noise and a strange plot involving toxic fish loosed into the waterways of Tokyo, Future’s optimistic, sometimes jaunty mood sets it uncomfortably apart from the horror genre. Pulse, though, is a worthy example of this director’s stunning oeuvre and contains some of his most compelling images. In Kurosawa’s world, murders and suicides occur not by individual design but in waves, in plagues and infestations (in Pulse, such an epidemic reaches its logical culmination in worldwide apocalypse). The dead are active among us, and no action of theirs is benevolent (with one wonderful exception in Bright Future) outside of a rare forgiveness (Retribution).
A man stands still in a dimly-lit room. Gradually, without obvious change of lighting or perspective, we become aware of a spectral presence behind him, its stance somehow off, crooked; the presence dawns on us, as it does on him, with the same slow horror. The ghost of a woman walks with long strides across a tiny room, grotesquely slowly, and she’s moving her arms wrong. A man meets his doppelganger and sets it on fire. There are unearthly stains on cement walls, and baleful pools of dark water on the ground. Kurosawa leans toward the police procedural, but it is the antithesis of CSI: there is no single murderer and no simple motive. Crime is both viral and supernaturally motivated, not in the possessed-by-the-ghost-of-a-serial-killer sense so beloved of Hollywood, but in the Jungian sense that we are all of us capable of all things, and even a reasonably good person living in the isolation dictated by our modern society is vulnerable to dark suggestion. Don’t stop with Pulse: watch also Cure, Seance, and Retribution.
Ravenous (1999)
A masterpiece, and the most exhilarating cannibal movie you’ll ever see. Anthropophagy in Old California is the metaphor for the greed and rapacity of the white man with his empire-building and his Manifest Destiny. The music is perfect, the casting is perfect, the script is an unpretentious gem. Director Antonia Bird steers the helm with a strong hand, and the thing can be grimly funny. Once you’ve seen it, TRY and forget Robert Carlyle’s manic fit in the snow outside the cave or Jeremy Davies’ anguished cry, “He was licking my wound!” Or the marvelous endgame, in which two men caught in a bear-trap are playing Whoever-Dies-First-Gets-Eaten.
Night of the Demon / Curse of the Demon (1957)
Wonderful old telling of the M.R. James story “The Casting of the Runes.” Niall MacGinnes is a Crowleyesque mage, equal parts aristocrat, buffoon and coldly effective demon-raiser; Dana Andrews is the skeptic who has to re-examine his Weltanschauung. Classily shot in deep, velvet b&w, its demon is controversial: while its emergence from the clouds is eerily magnificent, the close-up looks like what might have happened had Ed Wood designed a muppet. A great story, though, and an undeniably great film from director Jacques Tourneur.
The Leopard Man (1943)
A Spanish dancer walks down a threatening street playing castanets. A fortune-teller keeps drawing the Ace of Spades. A girl trapped in a cemetery watches, fascinated, as a tree-branch lowers menacingly to block out the moon. This is my choice to represent the truly unique body of work by producer Val Lewton, which deserves to be watched in its entirety: Cat People is the most famous, Isle of the Dead perhaps the best, but this one (directed by Jacques Tourneur) I love for its strong female characters, appealing dialogue, and really dazzling images. As in most Lewton films, there is nothing supernatural here (a cat has escaped, a murderer may be impersonating it), but the presence of Death is unnervingly tangible, throwing its dense shadow across everything.
The Legend of Hell House (1973)
Four people -- a physicist, his wife, a mental medium, and a physical medium -- walk into a notoriously haunted house, a house which has killed and driven men insane. Richard Matheson has written an economical script from his own book, and director John Hough has conjured the house into life, made it a breathing and genuinely frightening character by means of ambient roars and indiscernible whispers, crooked long-shots, and creeping dollies. The four actors (Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowell, Clive Revill, and Gayle Hunnicutt) seethe and ham a bit, but you do when you’re fighting possession by an evil house. In fact, the film’s genius lies in its Britishness; that’s the dignified foundation from which it can run wild with impunity.
The Stepford Wives (1975)
While the sixties were turning into the seventies and women were sloughing off old roles to step tentatively into new, Ira Levin wrote two extraordinary potboilers, Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. Their heroines walk into a nightmare of complete isolation in which there is literally nobody they can trust, and anyone who believes them is powerless to help. This was no rehash of the old mothers’ nightmares or don’t-walk-alone cautionary tales that Hollywood was used to dishing up for women. This was a new brand of total nightmare for a new breed of total woman. Having grown up with the network television version of Bryan Forbes’s film, I was shocked to see the huge breasts on the Katherine Ross-bot at the end of the DVD. The anguish of her husband makes it scarier than if he were cold and conscienceless. These men aren’t inhuman. They do love their wives. Making the decision to replace them with obedient, boobalicious clones is not an easy one, but THEY ALL MAKE IT ANYWAY. I don’t know how it plays for men, but one of the most chilling moments in film history for me is when the heroine asks the replica-maker why they subrogate their wives and he says, “Because we can.” Nearly as chilling is the feminist consciousness-raising session which is highjacked by replicas who froth with manic joy about household cleansers.
Duel (1971)
Yes, it’s a monster movie. That truck is a monster, and if director Steven Spielberg were sitting here with us, he’d second the notion. My favorite bit, the bit that always gets the hair standing up on the nape, is when Dennis Weaver is at the side of the road thinking the danger is past, then he looks back and sees the truck lurking in the tunnel, rumbling, watching him. He thinks he must be imagining it, and then, as he looks, it TURNS ITS LIGHTS ON.
Angel Heart (1987)
Some of us remember a time when Mickey Rourke was heralded as the De Niro of his generation, and this is some of his best work. It’s after World War II and Rourke’s unkempt, charming PI who has “a thing about chickens” follows a missing persons case steeped in voodoo from New York to New Orleans. Under director Alan Parker’s unfailing guidance the sense of dread grows to unbearable levels. A haunting soundtrack and a hypnotic, repeating series of fragmentary flashbacks weave a mesmerizing spell, and if it weren’t for two badly miscalculated elements (the glowing eyes and the ham-fisted De Niro character), this might have been a perfect horror film.
The Dead Zone (1983)
Saying The Dead Zone is one of your favorite Cronenbergs is like saying Hanky Panky is your favorite The The record: the disciples cry apostasy and reach for the tar-bucket. Great directors have strong, sweeping vision and suffer obsessive returnings to specific themes and visual tropes, but the best prove their mastery by stepping easily outside their own shoes to make “normal” movies with ease. As my sixth-grade teacher said, Picasso had to conquer the rules before he could cast them off. Who might have predicted the Lynchiana to follow from the exquisitely melancholy The Elephant Man? Similarly, Cronenberg takes a peripatetic Stephen King work, pares it down into clean lines, then tells the story austerely, with simple elegance. It could not have been better shot, better edited, or better cast. Christopher Walken gives a great and subtle turn as a man who emerges from a coma with unnatural powers, and I defy you to watch The West Wing easily again after seeing Martin Sheen’s powermad senator Greg Stillson.
Prophecy (1995)
Who wouldn’t love to live in a Miltonian universe in which angels vie with men for the love of God, in which the heavens are perpetually rent by war between seraphim, where Christopher Walken is the ruthless archangel Gabriel and Viggo Mortensen is Lucifer himself? For two hours and two sequels, you can revel in the gnostic angst. This is the other side of Walken, dry-witted and unstoppably brutal, and there’s nothing fey about these angels, who are fierce and homicidal. Gabriel’s speech about the nature of the beast (“I’m an angel. I turn cities into salt. I kill first-borns while their mamas watch…”) is a piece of cinematic perfection. There are other adeptly macabre moments in Gregory Widen’s film: one in particular in which a little girl who carries the soul of a genocidal general inside her assesses the battle-worthiness of a stronghold. Elias Koteas, always the virtuoso, gives his doubting-thomas hero a complexity rare in the genre.
The Fool-Killer (1965)
Not a horror film, exactly, but what is it? Lovely in b&w, it’s a good one to watch while feverish or sleep-deprived for the full, dreamlike effect. Reminiscent of The Night of the Hunter, Servando Gonzalez's film follows a boy (Edward Albert) on his travels through post-Civil War America. He’s on the run and he hardly knows from what, but it’s embodied in his mind by the mythical demon of the title who may or may not be his mysterious traveling companion. There’s a pleasing Manly Wade Wellman quality to the world, and the camp-meeting scene, with its Dutch angles and fearsome Calvinist sermon, is something to behold.
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
The world of The Passion is dark and Manichean. Satan and her archons are everywhere in evidence and God is impossibly remote, embodied in the moon at the moment it is obscured by clouds or in a single drop of rain. Meanwhile, demons race out of nowhere and disappear just as fast. In Gethsemane, a gorgeous scene, the night in the garden is electric with dread and panic. The crowd jeering at the flagellation is nothing short of Boschian. Lucifer walks constantly among the masses, gloating and taunting. Judas harassed to death by demons in front of the maggot-ridden grin of a rotting cadaver is some kind of horror-film epiphany. You’d think director Mel Gibson had been working in the genre all his life. This is not a movie about love, God’s or otherwise; it’s about suffering, horror, the easy supremacy of evil, and mankind’s unending and continuous failure to rise to any level of goodness. The upbeat ending, if you can call it that, in which God takes matters into His own hands and the Christ rises up to the ominous sound of a martial drumbeat to go forth and make His war, is obligatory and unconvincing.
