Thirty Days of Fright (plus 1) – Halloween Recommendations: part 5…

For the first part of this series click here

For the second part of this series click here

For the third part of this series click here

For the fourth part in this series click here

Maniac Cop 2 (1990) William Lustig

For those looking for a little action grit with their horror thrills, then there’s always the Maniac Cop franchise. I default to the part 2 because, well, it’s the best, but the original film is certainly no slouch and is also well worth a look. It’s not required viewing to enjoy the sequel though, which conveniently re-caps the first film’s finale by replaying it in its entirety. With William Lustig directing a script from Larry Cohen, this is entertainment first, with any high-falutin’ ideals about changing the world or challenging the status quo buried deep enough that no one need accidentally trip, although with its recurring theme of institutional corruption, you could get digging if you felt the urge.

Picking up right on the heels of the first film, the resurrected and thoroughly pissed off Maniac Cop (Robert Z’Dar) has been buried in the docks of New York (in one of the best stunts in American 80s cinema) and the police are left with a lot of questions to answer. They’ll be picked up by a hand-nosed detective (Robert Davi) and a cynical police psychiatrist (Claudia Christian) who unwittingly inherit the case when police officers start dying again. It’ll take more than the pollution in New York Harbour to kill this guy.

There are a few specific factors to recommend Maniac Cop 2, most notably its continuation of the superb stuntwork that distinguished the first film. Lustig credits himself with discovering Spiro Razatos and giving him free reign with the stuntwork and second unit direction and while Razatos had a number of credits to his name prior to this, this certainly was the ideal vehicle to showcase his talents. It’s immediately evident that Lustig and Razatos were watching a lot of Hong Kong action cinema of the time because they shoot for a similar low-fi, high impact aesthetic, with the stuntwork placing human bodies centrally in action sequences. This serves as a welcome alternative to the more usual, and more boring, Hollywood tactic of strategically dotting stuntmen around massive explosions that serve instead as the central spectacle. Everything that made Maniac Cop so impressive from an action standpoint is back in part 2 and inched up an extra notch, marking the film out as one of the best American action films during a time when Hollywood still actually made notable action films.

Elsewhere the film offers everything the viewer might expect with a steady pacing that never allows the meagre narrative to sag. As artfully composed as the action sequences are, Lustig injects intelligent ornamentation throughout, most notably the searching camera movement around a stripper’s apartment that wordlessly imparts all the details we need to recognise how far her reality strayed from her dreams. Sure, it’s not quite the revelation a similar shot was in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, but it’s a thoughtful touch and distinguishes this film from so much mass-produced junk that litters the low to mid-budget film circuit. Our Maniac Cop even makes a friend, a frothing, puritanical pervert (Leo Rossi) whose warped vision of the world makes him a fitting sidekick to a man so heavily fuelled by vengeance that he refuses to shuffle off his mortal coil.

If your action movie’s gunshots don’t look like this then you’re doing it wrong

There’s nothing genuinely new here, and no one could reasonably expect there to be, but Lustig and Cohen repackage the standard with plenty of individual touches, offering a quality product that can satisfy even hardened genre movie fans. Although the custom-written Maniac Cop rap song that closes out the film might be a bit of an overstep.

Re-Animator (1985) Stuart Gordon

As adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft go, we’d have to admit that Stuart Gordon’s 1985 film isn’t exactly the most faithful adaptation. That’s okay though, because the spirit is there and the final product remains one of the most grotesque and oddly humorous horror films around. Gordon’s done plenty of good work elsewhere and I admit, given Re-Animator’s fairly popular stature, I was tempted to talk up his excellent re-telling of Poe’s The Black Cat for cable horror series, Masters of Horror, or another of his Lovecraft adaptations, the underseen, and surprisingly effective Dagon. But there’s no denying that Re-Animator stands alone, his greatest work in a career that certainly hit plenty of bumps but has stayed an interesting course.

Much of the film’s success rests with Jeffrey Combs and his portrayal of the slightly mad student doctor, Herbert West, whose medical studies have pushed into areas the Hippocratic Oath could scarcely accommodate. West has developed a serum that can re-enervate dead tissue, effectively bringing the dead back to life. The only problem being that he can’t quite figure out the perfect dosage to restore not simply basic motor functions, but also higher intellectual functions. Pinning down this little detail requires a lot of experimentation and what West lacks in patience, he more than makes up for with access to a fully-stocked morgue. Cue the shambling dead.

Gordon’s film is high energy and fast-paced, pushing through its exposition and faux-science to ensure that some kind of bizarre spectacle is never too far from sight and all the right pieces are comfortably in place for the final meltdown. Despite this snappy pace, the film sensibly keeps its human actors front and centre, establishing a high-stakes showdown that revels in its excess. Although gladly gory, there’s little here that does not further the plot, even while Gordon and co. orchestrate what must go down as one of the most comically creepy sexual trysts in horror cinemadom. I mentioned in part one of this series that Frank Henenlotter was something of a master of grotesque sex but he has some competition here, with a disembodied head making bedroom eyes at Barbara Crampton’s bedroom body.

Herbert West makes for a fabulous anti-hero, simultaneously despicable and sympathetic, utterly propelled by his obsessive nature. Had he not designed a serum that can rekindle the dead, we might just as easily envision him obsessively plotting his designs in some other specialist field, be it restoring cars, acquiring obscure vinyl, or attending a Linux Convetion. Combs finds a nervous energy and intensity for West and the film readily feeds off of it. Re-Animator offers gory spectacle, sensationalist thrills, and genuine laughs in sequences we might never have expected. It also settles on a certain tragic tone, knowing full well that such power in the hands of man will only exacerbate suffering- dragging the tortured dead into extended purgatories and too many of the living into early graves.

Thirst (2009) Chan-wook Park

I’m a big fan of South Korea’s Chan-wook Park, indeed I think he’s one of the best directors currently working anywhere in the world. His career is marked by tales that count the cost of blood, but with Thirst he takes things a little further by establishing the shedding of blood as the necessary stuff of life itself, at least for one man. A loose retelling of Émile Zola’s, Thérèse Raquin, Park’s film is also a loose adaptation of vampire lore, combining the two into a blackly-comic, and appropriately fanged, morality play.

You’re gonna carry that weight

A Catholic priest (Kang-ho Song) survives a deadly and mysterious disease but finds the consumption of human blood necessary to continue staving off its effects. A bizarre side-effect of living with the disease is that it bestows certain super-human powers. As he struggles to deal with this most unusual development in his otherwise frugal life, he gains a posse of religious followers that seem to have him pegged not as an emissary of Catholic faith but as a new God entirely. Meanwhile he reconnects with a young woman (Ok-bin Kim) who has been trapped in a loveless marriage by unfortunate circumstances. As the priest struggles to acquire blood without succumbing to murder, he finds other corporeal passions rising up too and begins an affair with the young woman which eventually escalates into the murder of her husband.

Although freely indulging in vampire tropes, Park’s film is more concerned with Zola’s text, the supernatural elements merely heightening the irresistible tug of selfish pleasure and the treacherous moral slope that holds our characters in sway once the first small infraction has been committed. For all its doom and gloom, Park’s film is often riotously funny- finding gags in guilt-ridden, adulterous sex and projectile-vomiting gore, among other things. The real find here, Song’s quality as a lead actor already well established, is the gleeful performance of Ok-bin Kim as the henpecked wife turned unchained explorer of long-subdued passions. She blends a vulnerable, childlike sensibility with a fearless sexual bent that allows her character a transformation somehow even more remarkable than her lover’s journey into vampirism.

The film’s finale, and the culmination of the work as morality play, invokes the final shot of Ran but, where Akira Kurosawa suggests that each man stands alone in the face of existence, Park suggests there may be nothing lonelier than a couple. It’s Stoker, Zola, Strindberg, and Kurosawa but above all else, Thirst is pure Chan-wook Park.

Inland Empire (2006) David Lynch

David Lynch has moved around a lot between mediums within a lengthy career that has continually surprised. Although first and foremost recognised as a filmmaker, he has, in the last two decades, gone the best part of a decade between features before then unleashing a couple of beasts to keep his fans thrilled. In between he’s not disappearing into the ether, but producing short films, documentary art projects, and music. In this fashion, he has cemented himself as one of America’s foremost multi-media artists, following his own whims and continually reinventing his work while maintaining a familiar thread through it all.

2001’s Mulholland Drive was going to be a difficult act to follow. It had a popular crossover appeal while also embodying absolutely, indeed even refining further, the dream-logic tapestry that underpins Lynch’s film theory. Sensibly, he took his time although with five years elapsing, warning signs flashed: Lynch declared that film was dead and digital cinematography would be his new muse. Inland Empire approached: all three hours of it. It would reunite Lynch with his Blue Velvet star, Laura Dern, but the production’s other details sounded so ambitious, so demanding, that it was hard to imagine what the final project might actually be like. Would this be the film that we’d nod sagely through, cite our admiration, and then acknowledge that there were failings fundamentally born of the project’s design that it just couldn’t overcome? Okay, maybe it was just me gearing up for that potentiality. But then the film came out, bitch-slapped me, and strutted away leaving me clinging to the arm-rests.

To be fair, I don’t think any amount of preparation could really have set me up for Inland Empire even as its subtitle, ‘A Woman in Trouble’ proves an accurate summation. It is certainly Lynch’s thorniest feature, even more demanding than the willful obtuseness that pervades Fire Walk with Me (some might argue that Dune is still harder to watch. Sting’s golden underpants are indeed a potent hurdle). At times this feels like a film that escaped Lynch’s grasp, pushing itself out from him, first through a series of shorter vignettes (Rabbits and Darkened Room) before finally coalescing, into one monstrous feature. Your instructions are simple, put aside the three hours, because they are well-spent, crank the volume up as loud as your system and neighbours will allow (actually, ignore your neighbours), and step aboard a magic-carpet ride to some strange threat yet to be determined.

Inland Empire is again, a film about film, but where Mulholland Drive traced tragedy amidst Hollywood’s dream factory, this later film feels like it begins with tragedy and traces a nightmarish path into deepest, purest despair. A Polish film production is shut down, due to some horrible happenstance of an ill-defined nature. A new production, in America, later starts and an actress (Laura Dern) scores the lead. She begins an affair with her co-star (Justin Theroux) and soon finds her sanity fraying, as the details of the production and her own life begin overlapping, reversing, interchanging, and conjoining. Laura Dern is a woman. She’s in trouble.

For anyone familiar with Lynch, a narrative re-cap is basically irrelevant, the meaning is layered through a thousand little details, textures, and edits- a logic that specifically evades words and rationality. What is not as familiar for Lynch fans, is the immediacy that digital cinema imbues in his images, how it allows him to structure his film in an ever more radical fashion, capturing accidents, the camera uncovering as he explores. And so Lynch’s longest feature is, in many ways, his most intimate. It catapults the viewer through an identity in its death throes. It is here that Lynch exposes most fully the quiet, terrifying loneliness of a human in distress, evoking and sustaining what many of his previous films could only find quiet glimpses of (I think particularly of Fire Walk with Me here). It is probably Lynch’s single greatest film, although I think many people, myself included, are slow to make that judgment because we’re wary to tread back into it too often. As far as scary movies go, this occupies some special tier, a small plateau ahead where almost nothing can bear to tread.

Wake in Fright (1971) Ted Kotcheff

“All the little devils are proud of hell.”

So what film could possibly follow Inland Empire’s cavalcade of the unwell? How about a Christmas movie? Well, a movie set in Australia at Christmas- sun-bleached and suffocating. It would be tempting to dub Wake in Fright as, ‘The Hangover: Australian Edition’, if only to tempt in unsuspecting victims, but I couldn’t in good conscience unleash this beast on someone who was unprepared. It is the tale of man succumbing to his animal self in the Outback and easily one of the more upsetting films I’ve ever seen. And that’s not a bad thing. The film was nearly lost, unseen for decades, with only a few sub-par prints rotting in storage around the world until a single, quality negative was found, marked for imminent destruction. One wonders if perhaps the Australian nation conspired to erase the film to protect their good name, but as is the fashion with serious interrogation, this film tells us about more than simply Australia.

Losing all his money in an ill-advised gamble, a school-teacher on his Christmas break finds himself adrift in an isolated town. He is taken in by a few of the locals, his planned one night there turning into a five-day, beer-soused nightmare of self-discovery- of both himself and the base impulses that link all men. The Australia shown here seems so remote and so wild that its feral nature seemingly seeps into its inhabitants. Living in dusty, small communities, a male-centric culture emerges, defined by drinking and dull thrills. The “hospitality” that finds our protagonist being fed free beers is really a need for everyone to conform, to exist on the same level so that no one need be reminded of every failure that underpins them.

Opening with an almost jovial tone, aided by a bouncy musical theme (which also accents the film’s close as a kind of wicked joke), Wake in Fright soon descends into uninhibited nausea, throngs of sweating bodies seeking to forget, sexual dysfunction, and social loathing. Without a Toecutter in sight, this portrait of rural despair suggests something vastly more distressing than the dystopian hyperbole of Mad Max. It’s curious then, that a Canadian, Ted Kotcheff (best known for directing the first Rambo film) is at the helm of it all. It begs the question, “just how accurate is all this?” But where Wake in Fright succeeds is that although it resides in the geographic specifics of Australia, one can imagine the small, insidious boredoms that breed its terrors thriving anywhere where isolation and lack of amenities are the norm.

As a final warning, those distressed by animal cruelty may wish to pass. The film closes with a note from the producer clarifying that the sequences of kangaroo hunting captured here were to take place anyway, and were not staged for the film. In fact, so appalled were the crew with the hunt they found themselves filming, that they reportedly staged a power-failure just to call a halt to the thing, while the drunken hunters continued taking potshots at already grievously maimed kangaroos trying to crawl for cover. Under advice from animal cruelty advocates, Kotcheff and co. were asked to leave as much footage as they could in the final film, simply to show the barbarity that formed the norm of professional kangaroo hunters’ sport. To that end, the sequences in the film are highly protracted, crossing into the seemingly gratuitousness. They gel well with the rest.

Island of Lost Souls (1932) Erle C. Kenton

Although I say this with absolutely no research (which always makes for the best grand pronouncements) I can’t imagine there have been many films rejected by the British Board of Film Censors for being, ‘against nature.’ As backwards as film censorship is as a moral practice, that’s a pretty cool feather for any film’s hat and Erle C. Kenton’s 1932 horror film, Island of Lost Souls can make that boast. Made by Paramount, looking to cash in on Universal’s recent successful forays into horror cinema, the film takes H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau as its genesis before gleefully stripping out much of that work’s finer points to instead ratchet up the horror and the sex. A release year of 1932 allowed it to slip by Hollywood’s own censorship code, which would not come into official effect for another year or two.

As with many of Hollywood’s early talkie horror films, this isn’t a particularly high-minded or lavish production. It’s pure exploitation and it’s very happy with that. What makes it fascinating, and compulsively watchable, is the way exploitation was honed in those days, when you still had to sublimate it into a variety of other channels rather than just flinging nudity and cascades of gore at every scene. The film’s jungle-sets are claustrophobic and simple. The story-line whips by like a child on their first unassisted bicycle ride, petrified by the thought of slowing down even for a second because that might bring the whole thing to a crashing end. And then there’s Dr. Moreau, played with reserved menace by Charles Laughton, then only at the start of his film career and still enough of an unknown to be attainable by the producers of a film such as this.

 

What really sets Island of Lost Souls apart though, are the make-up effects and the sadistic veneer the whole thing carries. The beast-men, Moreau’s animal/human hybrid experiments, are a pathetic, cloistered mass of deformed flesh and stupefied minds. They huddle and quake in Moreau’s presence, dumbly reciting platitudes as scripture until they realise Moreau holds no law in regard when his own interests are threatened. The rebellion comes swiftly and horrifically amidst horrific screams. Without showing a single explicitly grisly scene, the clambering throngs of beast-men sweep up Moreau so that he may experience his own, self-proclaimed ‘House of Pain’ from a whole new perspective.

There is a sense of outrage to the whole project, a sense of real intensity to its otherwise threadbare recounting of Wells’ tale that passes through to the transgressive. Laughton’s Moreau is so brilliant a mind and so appalling a human being that he courts no sympathy, and yet the final descent still conjures up images that suggest an end too awful for anyone or anything. Island of Lost Souls feels like a companion-piece to another shocking 1932 odyssey, Tod Browning’s freak-show drama, Freaks. Browning’s film is undoubtedly more formally extreme, a combination of exploitation and genuinely curious exploration that feels impossible to replicate now, but Kenton’s film achieves nearly the same level of outrage using special effects and judicious production, pointing the way forward for many of the best of horror cinema that would come in its wake.

The film also features a small role for Bela Lugosi, as the shop-steward, as it were, of the beast-men, The Sayer of the Law. It’s not really a major part of the film as a whole, but I find Lugosi’s participation in nearly anything, aside from the unreserved success of Browning’s Dracula, to be a point of some bittersweetness. His talents wavered from role to role, the product of a tumultuous life, but his presence remained unscathed, even in the most garish and ridiculous of projects until the very end, when drug addiction and Ed Wood, Jr. were all he had. He has, in my mind, outstripped his characters and become a figure of genuine tragedy which then bleeds back into his fictitious personas. His small role here is just another in a series of hammer-blows to my senses.

Witchfinder General (1968) Michael Reeves

Although subject to mismanagement, critical attack, and misguided expectation, Witchfinder General has eventually been recognised as one of Britain’s finest horror films. Hedged slightly in truth but heavily in fiction, it dramatizes the reign of terror of Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witchfinder General who took it upon himself, during the English Civil War, to travel from town to town detecting and punishing witches: which is to say, he briefly made a living preying on religious paranoia and social upheaval, to horrifically torture, maim, and murder a lot of woman. About 300 or so in a two-year span, according to Wikipedia. This makes the film an unusual ‘based on a true story’ affair since its brutish violence and sadism are reasonably accurate but the notion that Hopkins actually paid for his crimes was not. Reality sometimes just isn’t a good script-writer.

One of the major sticking points for the film is Vincent Price’s role in the lead, as the villainous Hopkins. His inclusion was directly in opposition to hotshot young director, Michael Reeves’ wishes and was imposed at the behest of American investors, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, of American International Pictures (AIP), who ironically, originally only invested in the film as a tax write-off. Price was their biggest contract star and they wanted him in the lead to bolster the American marketing effort. It turned out to be one of cinema’s more pleasant accidents. Though Price and Reeves were apparently at each other’s throats for the entire production, both knowing the other didn’t want them there, what emerged is arguably Price’s finest acting role in a jam-packed career. It took a while for that realization to emerge though, as Price ended up, under Reeves’ direction, playing entirely against his usual ‘type.’ Gone were his campy flourishes and thespian brooding. Here Price is deathly calm and utterly intense, his every word and action laced with venom. His Hopkins is a cowardly opportunist and a despicable tyrant. A man genuinely disinterested enough in basic human mores to push ever harder to carve out a legacy of bold forgery.

Shot on sparse sets, and utilising England’s unassuming countryside for fullest effect, Witchfinder General depicts in glimpses, a nation in freefall, tearing at the seams under weight of war and uncertainty. With men dying by the score on battlefields to forge the nation’s political identity, anxiety and paranoia took root in small towns and villages, where fear that the Devil and his assistants might sense new opportunity seemed an all too plausible possibility. Of course we’re left in no doubt that if the Devil has any role here, Hopkins is his emissary. Reeves’ film depicts the affairs of witch-hunting with an unsparing eye, lingering on torture and hopeless death. This facet of the film didn’t exactly make it many friends in the late-sixties. Still there’s no denying the intelligence of Reeves’ film, and its broader theme of the darkness mankind can breed when it lets fear take the upper hand. He would never see the film’s success, dying of an accidental drug overdose mere months after the production closed.

In its native England, the film was censored for its violence. In the United States, it avoided such treatment but was instead affixed with ill-judged addenda to try and loosely tie it in with a larger cycle of films AIP had produced, centring on Poe adaptations with Price in lead roles. As part of this treatment it was re-titled Conqueror Worm which, while inarguably evocative, doesn’t really make much sense. It took many years but the film eventually found itself restored and re-assembled, shirking off the opportunistic additions of its American incarnation and re-instating the elements forcefully shorn from its UK release. In time it would be recognised as a classic of horror cinema, but its more earthy elements quickly struck a chord, producing many knock-offs that focused more on sadistic sexual violence and less on character study. The most famous is probably Mark of the Devil, made in 1970 and luridly marketed at the time with promotional sick-bags etc. It’s the kind of film that is every negative thing people claimed of Witchfinder yet with curious redeeming features of its own, namely stately location photography and a couple of impressive directorial flourishes to counterpoint the pulled tongues and popped eyeballs. So if you’re looking for something a little less classy once Witchfinder’s end credits roll, consider that another suggestion.

And that makes 31 films!

Thirty Days of Fright (plus 1) – Halloween Recommendations: part 4…

For the first part of this series click here

For the second part of this series click here

For the third part of this series click here

Repulsion (1965) Roman Polanski

It was in 1968 that Roman Polanski really took hold of popular cinema, with the resources of Hollywood helping him to craft a horror film shot in broad daylight, intertwining the supernatural with mundane domesticity. That film was Rosemary’s Baby and although it was an introduction for many to Polanski’s work, it was not his first polished piece. Indeed that film formed the middle section of the so called ‘Apartment Trilogy’, each focusing on dreadful elements bubbling below the surface of the domestic. The first film in that series was Repulsion, made in the UK, which provided Polanski his first foray into English language cinema.

Providing the focal point for the film we have Carole (Catherine Deneuve), a young French girl currently living in London with her sister. She’s pretty but delicate, almost a wisp blown through the streets of the city. She works in a beauty salon and, despite her shy nature, all seems well. To a certain degree it’s difficult to provide a full account of the storyline beyond that. The details are apparent but the specific causality is far more difficult to grasp. Seemingly because of her sister’s lover, a married man, spending an increasing amount of time at the apartment, and perhaps also fuelled by another man’s attempts to court her, Carole begins to slowly lose grip of her sanity as deep-rooted sexual dread begins to surface. When her sister and lover vacation in Italy for a week they leave Carole to mind the apartment, and it grants her sanity just the seclusion it needs to crumble away entirely.

 

What marks Repulsion out as a truly superior psychological thriller is the refinement of Polanski’s direction. Not a shot or sequence seems out of place and the film maintains a steady, measured pace as we follow Carole’s nightmare- taking its time to grant us our bearings so that their loss will resound all the more. Behind the camera was Gilbert Taylor, a man who has worked with everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Stanley Kubrick to George Lucas, and no other film better represents his mastery of black-and-white photography (no, not even Dr. Strangelove). His work lends a tactile dimension to the images that enhances both their inherently mundane quality and also the inexplicable air of threat they present to Carole. Minimal levels of special effects are used and, where they are employed, they are kept simple, usurping this sense of surface. The smooth walls turn to malleable clay in one scene, the walls crack violently, and a simple cutthroat razor never seemed more loaded with dreadful potential.

The violence here is perfectly measured, made potent by the investment we have in the characters. Coupled with the often explosive percussion score, mundane sound effects, such as a ticking clock, form the aural backdrop. Nothing here seems outlandish. It is Carole’s own dysfunction that colours the apartment with so much venom until we reach that closing shot; a textbook example of the cinema’s unique potential. It reminds me of the economy and power of the final shot of Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu– a world of suggestion and potential in a single move of the camera. Where so many psychological thrillers offer glib explanations for their antics, deflating the intensity of what preceded, Polanski opens the question to the audience. Should they dare, they may explore at their leisure.

The Night of the Hunted (1980) Jean Rollin

Do you enjoy episodes of The Twilight Zone but find yourself wishing there were more nude French women? Yes? Really? Well then I may have a movie recommendation for you. For those unfamiliar, Jean Rollin was a French director who made his name with surreal, erotic vampire films that were generally bereft of both funding and coherence. Still, he was a unique force, crafting films that, whether you enjoy them or not, you must concede could only be his. Although he seldom shifted away from vampires – albeit, like Jess Franco and other euro-trash stalwarts, he also dabbled in hardcore pornography to pay the bills – when he did it often resulted in his best work. The late-70s and early-80s stand out as a Belle Époque for Rollin and, coincidentally or not, overlaps with his casting of Brigitte Lahaie, one of the breakout stars in a freshly legalised French pornography industry.

The Night of the Hunted hosts a threadbare narrative but gives full voice to the Rollin’s romantic inclinations. Indeed, this is an unapologetically romantic film, with a man seeking to reconnect with a young woman held captive in a specialised facility. She is held here with others, all of whom deteriorate from the same, unnamed affliction. With an urban setting, a narrative hinging on degenerating humans, and a carnal undercurrent that occasionally bubbles to the surface, a surprising analog emerges in David Cronenberg’s formative cinema, primarily Shivers and Rabid. These works share a strong affiliation in both theme and atmosphere. It seems evident that Rollin took cues from the young Canadian. Another curious overlap is that Rabid also featured an actress who made her name in pornography, the late Marilyn Chambers (horror fans might also note that Chambers can be glimpsed in The Exorcist, on a box of Ivory Snow laundry detergent). Lahaie is undoubtedly the more charismatic performer and although the film opens with an extended sex-scene, her central role builds into a fully realised performance.

And they lived happily ever after?

What’s so unusual here is the melancholy Rollin finds within what might otherwise seem the typical horror milieu. As minds deteriorate, reducing human function to the bare necessities, Rollin finds his core romantic thesis, a kinship that pushes through the conscious and outlasts it. He offsets this against the doctors of the film, trying to cure this horrible malady, which intones that most terrifying of afflictions, Alzheimer’s, who, due to their inability to legitimately help, find themselves rationalising ever more heavy-handed intervention, up to and including euthanasia. It’s revealed that their motives stem from more than just medicine but from politics and subterfuge too. The world is all too brutal but Rollin, without a vampire in sight, still finds beauty to fill the film’s final moments.

Hellraiser (1987) Clive Barker

So I’ll admit Hellraiser might seem a bit obvious for a list like this. It’s haunted plenty of people in my age demographic since before we even saw it, on those days when you’d head to the videostore with your parents and inevitably wander over to the horror section to soak up the lurid VHS cover-art. You’d always find Doug Bradley’s Pinhead staring back at you, his bald head sectioned off with countless nails driven through: the perfect fuel to set alight young nightmares. You hardly even had to watch the film but I, of course, eventually did. I’ve always liked it but it’s only been in recent years that I have come to herald it as one of the finest of all horror films, a claim I don’t exactly make lightly. I guess that over the years it has bled under my skin and sunk its steel hooks into my brain.

This is not to say that Barker’s film is not without its flaws, it certainly has a few and some of them are significant. Exhibit one is the daughter, Kirsty Cotton (played by Ashley Laurence), who Barker uses as a stand-in for the audience, a vessel through which to give us viewers a peek inside an intensely private affair. It’s an understandable move, but misjudged, and it distracts in the later passages, where Kirsty’s actions become narrative fulcrums when we’d all rather wish she’d just not be there instead. It’s a problem specifically because Hellraiser is a tale of interiors, not least because almost its entire narrative is pinned not simply to a single house in bustling London, but to a single room within that house. There resides the final traces of a man whose deadly impulses destroyed him and, through an omission by forces he can scarcely understand, he sees the possibility to regenerate and rejoin the truly alive. For that he needs living flesh to consume, and to get that, he needs the help of his former lover, now married to his brother. Luckily for him, old passions die hard, and she reciprocates, driven by her own unfulfilled passion. But of course, it was the tenacity of passion that led him to his downfall to begin with, and so the cycle now begins anew, with unwary new players taking to the field.

Why are you in this damn movie?

It is the intensity of the core love-story, a tale of truest l’amour fou, which drives the film. Although surface details now look undesirably dated with the heady mistakes of 80s fashion excess, in a sense these are almost a boon, preserving the film in time as the period details of Poe serve to preserve his. When so steadfastly trapped in time, the stories assume a timelessness. It’s just that since many of us remember the 1980s and not the 1880s, the details may distract. Digging beneath, the intensity of the performances, the slow, levelled delivery of lines and the deadly deliberation of the central players all speak to a grand, fatalist romance- something entirely in line with the aforementioned Poe and classic tales of human folly. The Cenobites, of which Pinhead is merely the most outspoken, but certainly not the leader, remain a most brilliant visual invocation of carnal human desires- the titillating lust for experience and to sate deep-rooted desires. They are not villains, but contractual actors, opening the door for what humans already accommodate. Their suffering, in S&M-infused horror, is that their brief dalliances with some sweetly sexual agony have become their eternities. They now serve to wreak that hell on others, though only if they’re asked…an offer laced with irresistible potential that some will always indulge.

Barker’s original is a tragic tale of sullied romance first and a gory shock-fest second. It is a superb rendering of the dark linings of human sexuality, packaged as monster movie. It isn’t Barker’s fault that his schema was so alluring that it produced, indeed demanded, sequels. Making a sequel to Hellraiser is as absurd as penning a follow-up to The Raven (Hellraiser 2? Nevermore!) but of course it had to be done. The franchise is mostly daft, trying to fill in backstory and follow narrative inquiries that were of no relevance to begin with. While a few sequels managed, almost accidentally, to find small plateaus of success, the vast majority sink under the heavy stone of redundancy. I guess their failure only mirrors the deadly mechanics of the Puzzle Box that links our world with that of the Cenobites. A delicately constructed Trojan Horse, it’s alluring enough that you just have to keep going, even though your mind screams that you’re only going to make it worse.

And if you’d like to indulge in a Hellraiser sequel then I’ll still help you out.

The Wicker Man (1973) Robin Hardy

Another obvious choice, I suppose, for those to whom such a film is already a favourite. I have found though, since moving to the United States, that this film’s cult there is greatly reduced, and that for many casual film fans, even those with a penchant for horror cinema, the risible Neil LaBute remake is often what springs to mind. We’ll speak no more of that remake, other than to remark that it is entertaining, though not quite on purpose, and is otherwise so directionless that it hardly overlaps with the original’s immense shadow. The original remains one of the oddest, most effective, and impressive horror films of British cinema.

We open with a mystery: a policeman (Edward Woodward) arrives at a small, privately-owned island off the coast of Scotland. He is responding to an anonymous tip that a young girl has gone missing. The tightly-knit populace of the island offers him little assistance. At first they don’t recognise the girl in the photo and later they say she died a few months back. No one seems to remember just how she died. As the policeman continues his inquiries, growing increasingly frustrated with what appears to be an indifference to his case laced with conspiracy, he also becomes aware that this picturesque isle harbours some unusual traditions which chafe his staunch Christian faith. A meeting with the owner of the island, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) confirms that the agrarian community is founded on the tenets of ‘The Old Gods’ and maintain a pagan way of life.

Shot mostly in daylight, and entirely devoid of spooky goings-on or shock cuts, The Wicker Man seems a world apart from what most of horror cinema claims as its own. Indeed, the film could almost claim status as a musical, stringing together a series of beautiful, bawdy folk tunes as the villagers enmesh the policeman in their rituals. This soundtrack, with the songs all embedded in the film’s events, not simply overlaid a-top the images, is not simply a pleasant adornment to the film but rather a central pillar of the whole project. With their heavily sexualized lyrics they recall age-old concerns of courting, procreation, and just plain fun, that served humankind as an early compass through life. It was only with later incarnations, Christianity and so forth, that sex became a matter of some impropriety, begrudgingly acknowledged but best not spoken of. This unease between Christian and pagan mores, writ larger as a showdown between the civilized and otherwise, sets the tone for the whole film and no matter how pretty the little town may be, as an outsider it is quickly veiled in uncertainty and threat.

The Wicker Man cleverly condenses various antagonisms of western history into a strange tale of a missing girl. It trades not on shocks or on violence but on the slow realisation of being truly at odds with your environment you bereft of control. Woven between are threads of music and humour which reward repeat visitors. There really is nothing else quite like it and the later American remake somehow managed to even more boldly highlight the original’s iconic status.

Death by Hanging (1968) Nagisa Oshima

Yes, Oshima actually has made a ghost story, the eerie Empire of Passion from 1978, but in a brilliant career, this is probably his scariest and indeed his most brilliant film. Granted, it’s not ghosts or ghouls or monsters or unsuccessfully aborted conjoined twins hell-bent on revenge. No, it’s much worse than that. It’s politics.

A showcase of Brechtian technique, Oshima’s film is highly experimental in tone and slips free of any constraints one might normally expect of narrative cinema. A man, a Korean, has been sentenced to death by hanging for the crime of murder. He is hanged but, somehow, he does not die. Instead he loses all memory of himself and his crimes. The presiding officials from the Japanese prison and government are left in a precarious position. They could try and hang him again but questions are raised about the ethics of hanging a man with no recollection of his crimes, and thus no guilt. Of course within this framework Oshima has his eyes on grander questions: the legitimacy of state violence; the nature of crime and guilt, both personally and nationally; and quite specifically, as was a long-time concern of his, the perceived mistreatment of Korea by Japan.

With the criminal unable to recall his crimes, the next step is to recreate them, with the various officials crudely acting out his crimes in front of him, so that he might rekindle at least enough memory that they could execute him. It’s absurd and deeply uncomfortable stuff, humour dyed in the deepest vein of black. As the law-abiding officials re-enact the prisoner’s crimes, emphasizing repeatedly his status as a Korean living in Japan, their own violent histories, again both personal and historical, bubble through to the surface.

Oshima’s film is a searing political document and a loaded gun that begs answers from anyone interested in political institutions and their mechanics. Although immersed in a very specific national identity, that of Japan, the questions of crime, guilt, punishment, and state action invariably concern us all. That I include it on a list of horror films is simply because the stakes could never be higher than here and Oshima’s film, with its overtures to Kafka (this would make an ideal double-bill with Orson Welles’ superb incarnation of The Trial) paints a troubling portrait of institutionalised violence and society’s very real tendency to ignore deep-rooted problems to instead focus on superficial punitive measures.

The Last House on the Left (1972) Wes Craven

There are a lot of revenge movies in the world. Thousands. Tens of thousands, even. I’ve seen my fair share. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are really bad. Most are slack-jawed entertainment, doused in authoritarian mores. Some are smart and look inward. Some are allegorical tales of inter-generational conflict and national identity. Okay, maybe that’s just Ermek Shinarbaev’s remarkable, Revenge. Anyway, out of all those films, only one is The Last House on the Left. And if you’re wondering if that film is good or bad, the truth is, it’s more complicated than that.

Introducing the world to writer/director Wes Craven, The Last House on the Left is a low-budget, grim re-envisioning of no less lofty a source material than Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Now sure, I like A Nightmare on Elm Street as much as the next man, but what business has Craven got tackling Bergman? Actually, he has quite a bit of business, making a film that is, if not an unreserved triumph like Bergman’s, nonetheless a troubling little beast of the burgeoning American grindhouse movement. In the early-70s, independent American cinema was still struggling to define its boundaries, answering to market forces by pushing violence and sex freely in the wake of the recent dismissal of the censorious Hays Production Code. American filmmakers were free to go places they previously couldn’t and plenty of the films of that time feel quite a bit more unrestrained than contemporary cinema’s slicker, more market-oriented product. Above all of those, stands Craven’s film, with levels of transgression that feel dangerous even today.

The story is unremarkable, a young woman and her friend are heading to ‘the city’ for a concert when they are confronted by a trio of escaped convicts. The girls are kidnapped, sexually humiliated, raped, and ultimately murdered. The criminals move on only to later cross paths with the parents of one of the girls. Vengeance is meted out and all seems normal per the genre’s understood code. What is unusual is the severity of Craven’s representation of events and the film’s own uneven tone. These factors highlight difficult concerns in exploitation and violent cinema generally, leaving the audience with a whole heaping of discomfort and difficult questions. It’s neither here nor there that Craven probably didn’t intend it that way.

The final, horrific moments of the two girls are paraded in front of the audience with no distinction drawn between the base titillation of naked flesh and the supposed scenario which is unfolding; that of rape and butchery. There is nothing subversive at work here. The murderers’ wishes to sexually humiliate the girls are passed straight on to the audience. It’s a near unthinkable reality but it’s pretty riveting up there on the silver screen and Craven’s camera peers steadfastly onward as the horror slowly unfolds. What’s really odd is that Craven then intercuts those scenes of sexual sadism with slapstick details of bumbling cops and a genteel folk soundtrack. It’s likely these elements were designed to inject some levity into proceedings, with Craven conscious that the MPAA were going to bitch-slap this film for its gruesome content (and also for it not being a major studio production- a sin the MPAA never forgive, while cruelly dangling a rating in front of industry outsiders) but the balance is decidedly wrong.

Relentlessly vicious cinema can be taken simply as a bitter pill but Craven’s attempts to defuse the nastiness actually make the film harder to process. I seriously doubt that was his aim but it certainly makes his film stand out. And so this film seems genuinely dangerous. As if Craven knew he shouldn’t but couldn’t help himself. As if the camera in his hand made him do it. So all that is wrong is what is so right here. The breezy soundtrack, the idiot cops, the absurdity of its “justice”, and the genuine exploitation at the core of it all. I can’t say I like The Last House on the Left but it remains emblazoned in my memory when so many similar projects from the time have faded.

Thirty Days of Fright (plus 1) – Halloween Recommendations: part 3…

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) Jaromil Jireš

In the 1960s there was an explosion in the cinema of Czechoslovakia that was heard around the world. Although the nation had a rich cinema prior to this period, and one I’d very much like to explore in the future, this period ushered in what became known as ‘The Czech New Wave’ and formed a Golden era whose influence still resounds. Though under the auspices of a repressive Soviet government, the artists of Czechoslovakia found themselves with an increased artistic freedoms compared with many of their neighbours, and pushed the boat out even further when they recognised that Communist censors had some difficulties spotting aberrant messages if they were veiled in the blackly comic or dressed as the absurd.

Many great talents grew out of this period, including a few who made it to Hollywood and helped shape their New Wave in the 70s (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest director, Milos Forman, for example) but for the season that’s in it, I’ll focus on Jaromil Jireš’ eerie vampire tale, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Stating the obvious early on, Valerie has little to do with the legacy of Bram Stoker’s novel, or with vampire lore generally. It is, as we might expect, a number of different stories and sources intertwined and overlapped, creating an odd web of image, sound, and intimation.

Young Valerie finds herself the subject of much strange attention, her earrings stolen by a young man, a vampire potentially living in her yard, priests calling all the virgins of the town for a sermon, and her grandmother apparently in a pact for eternal youth sealed with blood. Gliding along on ethereal narrative strands, the film’s lush musical compositions meld with unusual visuals, hedged in the natural, flowers, water etc. that belie the rigorous composition behind them. The film creates multiple planes of interest, with Valerie’s own quest set against many unknowns- the weight of her family history, of the town’s own unnatural rhythms and so on. Reminiscent in part of the great Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, the film’s compositional sense creates tensions and allusions within the same frame, offering the eye many points to pursue.

Or to put it another way, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is probably the best film ever made about menstruation.

Suspiria (1977) Dario Argento

I know, I know, if there’s one name that keeps popping up again and again here, it’s that of Monsieur Argento. It can’t be helped really, he’s kind of a big deal in horror cinema and this will be my first, and only, pick which places him front and centre as the director. It’s an obvious choice I guess, Suspiria has carved out a pretty sizeable niche in the annals of cult cinema, but it’s a film that I have grown more and more fond of with each viewing. There’s plenty to enjoy here, but sometimes it’s easy to get hung up on the film’s great sense of surface and forget just how strange and provocative a heart lies underneath.

Argento got his start as a director popularizing the ‘giallo’ sub-genre of film. He pretty much made the genre what it is today, moving it into the semi-mainstream and providing what are widely regarded as the very best films of the entire scene (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Tenebre and so on). Those films are not hinged on the supernatural though, so Suspiria represented something of a shift in his career. The film moved away from the recipe for most of Argento’s previous films: a belaboured protagonist seeking to unveil a murderer, the key to the mystery usually couched somewhere in his own memory, while all around him people die in horrific ways as the killer closes in. Instead Suspiria follows a young woman as she attends a ballet academy in Freiburg, Germany. That’s all very well, ballerinas must learn to ballet somewhere, I suppose, but it turns out this place is also the coven of a powerful and ancient witch and no amount of pliéing makes that okay.

Lovely (crystal) plumage. Must be a Norwegian Blue.

Sometimes, there’s even ballet

The film’s pitch is nothing less than delirious, from start to finish. The sets hang in abstract space, boasting décor, colours, and shapes that defy their nominal role as functional objects and the music, provided by prog-rock group Goblin, is cacophonous and unrelenting, often being given primacy over dialogue or other diagetic sounds. It’s easy to get caught up in this surface madness, the sheer titanic pull of Argento’s aesthetic, but there’s still a tendency to prescribe that the film works despite its narrative failing, rather than because of it. Argento’s earlier films, for all their outlandish content, maintained tight narrative controls, offering very explicit explanations for their every motion and gesture, with red herrings composed as carefully, or perhaps even more carefully, than the final denouement. Suspiria is the film where he let go of narrative, instead pursuing something more intangible and fractured.

Suspiria is a nightmare, unfolding in broad strokes of cinematic excess. It draws you in with its brazen swagger but its finale closes tight on the viewer, a fantastic success in wayward logic and casually outlandish special effects. While not everything works perfectly here, the odd childish whisperings of the ballet school’s student body, for example, would make sense were they all 12, but they’re all adults…Argento just never changed the script when he altered the girls’ age upward for casting, Suspiria remains a triumph of experimental form, demonstrating avenues of madness not yet explored by heavyweights of psychological horror and surrealism. If giallo largely depends on stunting audience perspective by only allowing us to see the hands of the killer, or their blade, until the final reveal, then Suspiria alternately denies us all of our various senses, reveling in switching on and off various functions of cinema to leave us swirling in its wake. The finale then clamps tight around us, a genuinely fearful spectacle that parlays the film’s fractured narrative into a deadly stand-off against illogic itself, a witch in our presence.

Suffice it to say, Suspiria remains one of the most visually and aurally insistent films ever made, but it is also one of the truest works of filmed horror we have.

Fiend Without a Face (1958) Arthur Crabtree

The 1950s was a glorious time for science-fiction and horror cinema. Sure, a lot of it is cheap hokum, but let’s be honest, a pig in a dress is still a pig, and once you’re on board with that fact, everyone can have a lot more fun. Which I guess, is my way of saying, most critically-acclaimed science-fiction and horror cinema is just a more expensive, shinier pig in a fancier, frillier frock. In any case, there’s a reason why people keep returning to these movies and that they are constantly being re-issued, moving from Laserdisc to DVD to Blu-Ray: because they’re just fun.

Originally paired as the B-side of the more lofty Boris Karloff picture, The Haunted Strangler, Fiend Without a Face is a monster-flick of almost unrivalled goofiness. Its plot is a thing of absurd beauty, involving leaked atomic energy that produces mental monsters that prey upon the spinal cords of their hapless human victims. At first they remain invisible – a hilarious cost-cutting exercise as much as anything – but later they become manifest as disembodied, flying brains with spinal-cord tails and insect antennae.

The special effects, involving impressive bouts of stop-motion animation, have a delightfully primitive feel and take flight in the film’s final third as the evil brains are dispatched left and right with bullets, axes, and whatever other instruments come to hand. The effects for this are so gleefully gory that questions were raised in the British Government about how such a film ever saw the light of day. There was some public outcry too, and the film had already been trimmed by the censors before if had been released anyway. Granted, by modern film standards Fiend Without a Face might seem tame, but it looks like little else of its time with its violent abandon, as if the director (Crabtree felt the project was beneath him from the get-go) was trying to mercilessly slay the stupidity of the whole thing right there on the screen.

Fiend Without a Face mischievously repels intellectual inquiry, despite the fact that half the cast are murdered by manifestations of the human mind. I mean, that’s gotta be at least kinda Freudian? Right? What’s more important is that it easily surpasses the limits of its financing and production to reign supreme as a work of absolute, unapologetic entertainment.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943) Jacques Tourneur

It’s amazing what you can do with a strong vision, some canny financing, and some talented cohorts. It certainly can be the recipe for great cinema and we need look no further than producer, Val Lewton as proof. Through the 40s he released a string of low-budget genre flicks that remain influential to this day. No one undoes the crass hierarchy of A and B movies better than Lewton, who helped shape a supremely cinematic group of films on topics and budgets that most others would only use to produce cynical filler. Of course it helps when you have the likes of director Jacques Tourneur and script-writer Curt Siodmak on your side, both established as talents in their field but not yet pegged as notable names in cinema history. Lewton would help them cement their case as they helped him do the same.

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead brought the zombie movie into the modern, marrying a tense narrative with gory spectacle and critically, although perhaps accidentally, a racially charged subtext. Prior to that film, Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie stands as perhaps the greatest ‘classical’ zombie flick, although it is, in fact, something much more complex than that. Utilizing an exotic locale, weaved with voodoo folklore and Tourneur’s penchant for ambiguity, the film unfolds a very strange tale about a Canadian nurse, Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) who is brought to a small Caribbean island to care for a plantation owner’s wife. The wife is apparently the victim of a spinal injury that has left her bereft of identity and free will. A zombie? Perhaps? Investigating the inhabitants of the island, Betsy uncovers an illicit love triangle and a rich vein of voodoo practice, which may or may not be harnessed by elements on the island to shape the larger society.

The beauty of Tourneur’s film, as was his wont, was that he offers the viewer two parallel folds within the same narrative. I Walked With a Zombie may simply be a sweltering, fantastical soap-opera about an unusual medical event or it may be a portrait of Black Magic run amok. Either version suits, and the film supports both comfortably. The most interesting elements reside in between the rational and the supernatural, the question of identity and free will and of religion and folklore’s role in a rational society. Shot in high-contrast black-and-white, with the darks of the frame often clambering to suffocate all light, Tourneur’s film is a brilliant example of high-concept filmmaking, tackling seemingly outlandish subject matter to expose instead very real concerns and ideas.

As an interesting side-point, Portuguese director Pedro Costa states that his second feature, Casa de Lava, is a re-envisioning of Tourneur’s. It may be lighter on the portentous omens that inform this ongoing list’s sensibilities, but it remains an intriguing and rewarding film too. So feel free to track it down.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) Shinya Tsukamoto

No list of scary movies would be complete without something from David Lynch and, I admit, he’s on the way. In the meantime I’ll dwell on this particular oddity from Japan, Shinya Tsukamoto’s critical breakthrough, Tetsuo: The Iron Man. I mention Lynch because, when I first saw his feature debut, Eraserhead, I didn’t really think anything else out there could be much like it- its inky-black photography, its freeform narrative, its unyielding sense of anxiety etc. Although quite different when you get down into the (in this case, literal) nuts and bolts of it, Tsukamoto’s film is perhaps the closest relative we have to Lynch’s resolutely strange film.

Tsukamoto got his start in experimental theatre, which led him to experimental cinema in due course. That experimentation was hedged heavily in the burgeoning ‘cyberpunk’ aesthetic that was gaining popularity in the fringes of Japanese media culture throughout the 1980s. It’s little surprise that one of his cohorts was Sogo Ishii (now Gakuryū Ishii) who, in 1985, directed Halber Mensch, an hour-long film documenting a recent trip to Japan by Germany’s Einstürzende Neubauten. If you’re familiar with that musical group’s aesthetic, especially their work at this time, where clanging metal and the incessant whine of angle-grinders were integral parts of their soundscape, then you’ll have a good idea of what Tsukamoto’s film offers.

Ostensibly a portrait of urban alienation and man’s growing dependence on technology, Tetsuo follows a nondescript salary-man who finds that his body is slowly and agonizingly turning into metal. With little interest in a coherent narrative, the film resolves into a series of dizzying chases, paranoid asides, and gory transformations coupled with a booming soundtrack of chattering metal and pounding percussion. The editing is frantic, often used to create stop-motion effects or simply to create grander fractured motion and disconnect. Rather than elegantly and logically unifying disparate shots as classical editing theory dictates, Tsukamoto instead uses it as a whole other language separate of image and story, flinging the viewer about within the world. Given how insistent and ultimately how abstract, not to mention how unpleasant much of its content is, the film is unsurprisingly divisive. Suffice it to say, those who have seen Tetsuo will always remember it.

Fright Night (1985) Tom Holland

One night while Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) is making out with his girlfriend, Amy (Amanda Bearse), he gets distracted by events next door. Two men seem to be moving into the old, abandoned house there. That might not be so strange except that it’s night time and the first piece of furniture they bring with them is a coffin. A fan of old-school horror films, Charley knows what that must mean: there’s a vampire next door! Still, at least vampires need to be invited in to invade your home, so imagine Charley’s chagrin when his mom asks him in for a nice cup of tea. With all his friends thinking he’s nuts, and the neighbourhood vampire well aware that he’s been found out, Charley’s in quite a pickle.

Blending genuine thrills with effective comedy, Fright Night remains one of the most lovable of 80s Hollywood’s teenage horror outings. Tom Holland’s film is informed by a love of old-school horror cinema but brings it hurtling into the 1980s with grand aplomb. The special effects are excellent, admittedly picking clean the bones of Rick Baker’s trend-setting work in John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, and the film gleefully ups the ante with not simply a vampire, but a bevy of other monsters too. Although crystalized in that way that 80s fashion and music can’t help to do, Holland’s film remains fresher and more fun than most of its peers. It relies little on star power or passing trends and instead harnesses the best timeless qualities of its material, marrying horror and comedy with young-adult rites of passage and friends-forever shenanigans.

For the first part of this series click here

For the second part of this series click here

Thirty Days of Fright (plus 1) – Halloween Recommendations: part 2…

The Church (1989) Michele Soavi

The Italian horror circuit through the 70s and 80s was a pretty small troupe, but who could complain with such talent? The movement was on the decline through the 80s but it’s fair to say that Michele Soavi had been picked out as the front-runner to cut the path into the 90s. Alas, that never really came to pass, for reasons I’m unsure of. Soavi still works to this day but he’s not made a horror film in two decades now. Perhaps the industry’s downturn quashed too many avenues, perhaps he just grew disinterested in it, I don’t know. What I do know is that Soavi’s early career as a horror director is marked by a couple of fabulously entertaining features.

He started as an assistant to Dario Argento, sometimes even appearing in front of the camera too. You can find him in Bava’s A Blade in the Dark, for example. Eventually he graduated to helming feature films of his own and opened with the hyper-stylized StageFright. Despite a close overlap with a Hitchcock title, StageFright vs. Stage Fright, rest assured it would be impossible to mistake the two, what with the synth-pop soundtrack and an axe/drill-wielding killer who wears a giant owl-head for the whole thing. Yeah, it’s pretty great. Still, it’s Soavi’s second film that I’ve chosen, because it’s arguably his best.

Considering the people he trained with, the slow-burn aesthetic of The Church might feel surprising. In fact it was originally intended as a second sequel in the growing Demons franchise until Soavi wisely nixed the idea. He wanted to break free and craft something more reserved and atmospheric. The Demons films, the first two at least, are massively entertaining but they are not what we might call subtle. Indeed, if they were faced with subtlety, they would smash its head to a bloody mush against a wall while bopping along to a blaring heavy metal soundtrack.

The Church follows more in the footsteps of Argento’s free-form supernatural thriller, Inferno, although it does so with a much quieter, haunting aesthetic. And where Argento unhinges from narrative, assaulting viewers with a sensory barrage, Soavi remains engrossed in story, slowly ratcheting up the tension. The spectacle, ancient demons made manifest, is impressive and employed sparingly, heightening their effect. Meanwhile the soundtrack, a Keith Emerson score dotted with Goblin and Philip Glass compositions feels perfectly appropriate. Soavi’s sensibilities are, in many respects, more careful and mature than we could have any right to expect, and expand on the work of his formative influences, staking out his own place in the pantheon of Italian horror.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

Everyone seems to love zombie movies. They’re everywhere and everyone is touting their fandom. Discussions on the internet revolve around people imagining how they might survive a zombie outbreak and how excited they are that The Walking Dead is coming back on the air. While I’ve nothing against zombie movies, indeed I could count myself as a fan too, it always surprises me that, amidst this popular love of the genre, so few people seem to have seen anything outside of Romero’s original trilogy, a couple of other modern knock-offs, and the aforementioned The Walking Dead– each episode of which, based on my own cursory viewing, seems to be a 50/50 split between boring shots of people shooting zombies and those zombies then falling over, and irritating, whiny morons whining moronically about their irritations.

Without a shadow of a doubt, Romero looms large over the genre and his original trilogy of films, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead are the definitive texts of the modern genre, but his work also gave rise to a number of talented impersonators. The European zombie movement took off with a vengeance, in part fueled by Romero’s close work with Dario Argento. The Italian horror/exploitation scene was running wild in the 70s too, producing so many films it’s difficult to keep count. A few stand taller than the rest though, with Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters aka. Zombie aka. Zombi 2 (in Italy a ‘2’ was appended and it was marketed as an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead) commanding a pretty good audiences. Less well known is an Italian/Spanish co-production, shot in the UK, that boasts so many varying titles I believe it actually may have set a record. We’ll call it The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue as that’s the one I’m most familiar with, although you may also find it listed as: The Living Dead; Let Sleeping Corpses Lie; Don’t Open the Window; Do Not Speak Ill of the Dead; and various variations on all of those.

There’s nothing particularly glaring about the film’s production to make it stand out amongst the throngs of other cheap, quickly produced movies of the era but, take my word for it, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is easily one of the finest zombie movies ever made. It’s a fairly traditional affair, relying on the excitement of escaping from the zombies more than on dubious allegory to fluff up its ingredients. It finds our heroes desperately trying to stay alive as the living dead come to haunt rural England. What distinguishes the film is the quality of its set-pieces, which combine satisfying levels of gore with a strong sense of narrative tension and excitement. Unlike countless other zombies, there’s a real feeling of urgency to this one, coupled with strong design.

Also, it features the line, “You’re all the same the lot of you, with your long hair and faggot clothes,” which maybe my favourite line in all of movie-dom (you have to hear it in context). Doom Metal group Electric Wizard also liked it, sampling the line to open their song, Wizard In Black. Granted, this nugget of information will almost certainly never help anyone ever. But just in case, I thought I’d better include it anyway.

Bay of Blood (1971) Mario Bava

In the last article I did in this series I talked about the grand shadow cast by Mario Bava. He was a giant in Italian cinema and one of the most influential genre filmmakers around. First establishing himself as a cinematographer, he later became a director in his own right, presiding over a series of popular Gothic horror films including the brilliant Black Sunday (aka. Mask of Satan). As his career progressed, he helped to shape the tenets of what would be known as giallo, a sub-genre of films, distinctly Italian, that gelled mystery with gory, highly stylized murders- invariably involving blades and scantily-clad women. Growing weary of these films, and using his own money, Bava decided in the early 70s to try something a little new. So one day he kinda invented slasher films, as you do.

Bava’s film kinda set the tone for how skinny dippers get treated in all slasher flicks hence

Although it’s exact origins are tricky to pin down exactly, since bloody death had been a mainstay of cinema for a while already, there’s little doubt that without Bava, what would become known in the US as ‘slasher films’ simply would not exist. To that end, Bay of Blood was a formative start to the movement, defined by narrative so pared down that it frankly bordered on the abstract. Although the template is well set now, there was a time when a group of people showing up in an isolated place and all being summarily slaughtered in various different ways wasn’t justification enough for a film to unfold. Weird, right? It was Bava’s tale of a contentious inheritance in a small lakeside community that cheekily demonstrated that sometimes, killing’s all you need (The Beatles claimed it was ‘love’ but they hardly seem trustworthy).

Given its extreme violence and rudimentary narrative Bay of Blood was a shock to the system at the time, prompting many horror fans to discard it as a completely inane gore-fest. Sure, that’s what 99% of slashers are, but Bava’s film, brimming with paranoia, does build a legitimately interesting result, suggesting a pernicious fate which, in the film’s conclusion, transcends familial and generational lines. The slasher film as a kind of filmic ‘standard’ would be cemented in due course, but Bay of Blood is perhaps the earliest clear adherent to the format, supplanting narrative justification (a mainstay of giallo) with ever more brute force. The result remains one of the finest slasher films ever made. Indeed, maybe even the very best of them all. And in the US it got the rather fabulous title of Twitch of the Death Nerve.

Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Grey (1932) Carl Theodor Dreyer

Dreyer is generally regarded as one of the finest directors in the history of cinema. That’s fairly understandable since that’s exactly what he is. However while much attention is lavished on the likes of The Passion of Joan of Arc (which is, to be fair, an easy contender for the title of greatest film ever) and Ordet, his bizarre 1932 horror film Vampyr is often forgotten. I say it’s a horror film but it’s altogether stranger than that: a kind of lucid dreamscape involving a man possibly encountering a vampire, being ensnared by it, or simply passing on to the other side himself. Pick your interpretation, the film remains intensely watchable regardless.

Although time is often unkind to films beyond a certain age, Vampyr’s washed-out look is partly by design. Discovering a light-leak in the lens early into the production, Dreyer asked the cameraman not to fix it because he liked the diffuse, hazy look it gave the film. Elsewhere he shot through gauze to texture the image, all of which only heightens the oneiric bent of the exercise. Disinterested in narrative logic, the film assembles a fabulous array of odd and intriguing visuals, conjuring up spectres of death in the oddest of places. As mentioned above, the film can be interpreted allegorically or can be followed in more literal, and decidedly supernatural, terms.

Thought-provoking and atmospheric, there really aren’t many equivalents to Dreyer’s film, which remains a crystallised dream from so many years ago. In many respects, the film is timeless, harnessing the eccentricities of the production, some intended, some not so much, to create a project that stands apart from both Dreyer’s other work and cinema in general. Its influence can be traced through to David Lynch and others but it remains a singularly important work all of its own and a necessary trip for all of cinema’s dreamers.

The Pendulum, The Pit, and Hope (1983) Jan Švankmajer

If you’re stuck for time but would like a quick shot in the arm, then this one’s for you. Created by Jan Švankmajer, one of the world’s finest animators, here he adapts Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, conjuring up an abstract, nightmare vignette set in labyrinthine tunnels with a deadly, bizarre apparatus threatening the unnamed protagonist. Using primarily live action, the film blends in his trademark stop-motion techniques to filter the otherworldly into the frame.

Staying close to the original text’s style, Švankmajer seeks to heighten the experiential by presenting the entire film in a first-person perspective, the lens of the camera literally the eye of the tortured protagonist. This blends with the claustrophobic set design and the details of hideous minutiae to create a particularly jarring and atmospheric rendition of the tale, perhaps the best ever filmed.

The Face of Another (1966) Hiroshi Teshigahara

The sixties was a great decade in general for paranoid identity studies. Though spoiled for choice, it would be easy to nominate Japan’s Hiroshi Teshigahara as their king. The Woman in the Dunes is probably his best known film though my preferences tend more towards his later film, The Face of Another. Alongside Pitfall, they form a loose thematic trilogy on the subject of fractured minds, societies, and identities.

The story concerns an engineer whose face is badly disfigured in an industrial accident. He becomes reclusive and angry, unable to deal with this injury. Things look up when a doctor offers him an experimental treatment, essentially a lifelike mask that can replace his entire face. The only issue is, since his face is destroyed, it will have to be another man’s that forms the model. This doctor’s office is a completely abstract space, free-floating and amorphous, and the discussions there wax more philosophical than medical. Concerns are raised that, with a new face may come new behaviours and indeed, perhaps an entirely new identity. These concerns are well met as our protagonist, recognizing the potential to start entirely anew rather than rekindle his old life, begins to adopt increasingly aberrant behaviours.

Teshigahara’s film is visually gorgeous, appropriately utilising black-and-white despite it being somewhat out of vogue by the mid-sixties. His father being a master of Ikebana, the traditional art of floral arrangement that branched, often literally, into huge and remarkable organic sculpture, Hiroshi was entirely at home in the avant-garde and unusual. To that end he surrounded himself with a bevy of experimental artists, adapting novels from the acclaimed Kōbō Abe, with cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa, set and prop designs by noted architects and sculptors, and a musical score by Toru Takemitsu. It is a formally bold film, with its intellectual concerns writ neatly into its every nook and fold and stands as one of the high-points of 60s cinema, in Japan and elsewhere.

For the first part in this series click here

Thirty Days of Fright (plus one) – Halloween Recommendations: Part 1…

 

 

So October is upon us and with it, Halloween and pumpkin-spice lattes and the inevitable uproar on Twitter when someone decides it’s hilarious to dress up in such a manner as to make light of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri or the Ebola epidemic or whatever. Separate of all that, at this time of the year people often like to indulge in a spooky movie or thirty-one. So, for the season that’s in it, here’s a few recommendations based on my having watched them at one point and then typing all of this…

Dust Devil (1992) Richard Stanley

Suffice it to say that Richard Stanley’s career probably hasn’t panned out the way he’d have liked. And unfortunately it’s not because he’s bad at what he does. He’s kept busy of course, with documentaries, short films, and music media, but from promising origins in the late 80s, today he only has two completed features to his name: Hardware and Dust Devil. Luckily, they’ve both taken on cult status although both remain invariably under-seen. Since Hardware has at least managed a reference in the US incarnation of The Office (gangling nerd, Gabe suggests it as a date movie) I’m going to pick Dust Devil for this list.

 

It was cut by the Brothers Weinstein upon its US release and its UK publisher went bust during production which left Stanley in a bit of a bind. Luckily, with some politicking, he was able to assemble a ‘Final Cut’ which has since made it to DVD. That’s the version to get, although my introduction was the shorter Weinstein edition and I could recognise the quality on display. The film, set in Namibia, concerns an evil spirit made flesh, who wanders the desert in human form, seeking victims. Each person the spirit can ritualistically murder propels him closer to escape back to the spirit realm yet as it has been made flesh, so it can succumb to the weaknesses of flesh. What’s impressive here is Stanley’s sense of scale and drama. What could easily be a hackneyed gory monster flick instead strives to unite African legend, western genre flick, tragic romance, and the tumultuous politics of the region into one unified whole. It’s a tall order but Dust Devil invariably succeeds.

The film’s unusual structure is at times a little jarring, combining extensive voiceover with sweeping African vistas etc., but once you lock step with it, it feels like some kind of old soul, imploring you to heed its warnings. Comparisons to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser are apt. Both films offer a sense of grand romance that is battered by the petty hostilities of our banal world. The Dust Devil preys on its victims because they are bereft of hope and set for suicide anyway. It toys with them, offering them caresses before justifying its final actions as merciful release. A cull practically invited by these souls too delicate for the harsh African sands. A genuine and unusual sense of location, a developed narrative, and a particularly nuanced sense of desperation mark Dust Devil out as a superior horror flick.

Brain Damage (1988) Frank Henenlotter

Although I’m a fan of his, it’s almost a shame that David Cronenberg sits so unassailably atop the throne as the, ‘king of body horror.’ I’ll agree, his place is deserved, but his reputation sometimes seems to crowd out other similar, and excellent work. Exhibit A: Frank Henenlotter. He brings a rip-roaring sense of comedy to the often overtly icky trappings of the movement and remains a criminally underrated talent within the usually quite forgiving annals of schlocky genre cinema. Perhaps part of the issue is that Henenlotter’s films revel in schlock but also come with an alarming amount of intellect. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Brain Damage.

Strangely enough, you’d think ‘responsible’ authorities would love this film, given its fairly strident anti-drug message, but apparently when your film also contains a curiously carnivorous blowjob, they can’t see the forest for the trees. By Henenlotter’s own account, that fellatio scene resulted in his crew walking off set in protest. Which might seem like a big deal but he had practice when a different crew did the same thing during the shooting of his debut, Basket Case. I guess if Cronenberg has ‘king of body horror’ sewn up then Henenlotter can always grab, ‘sultan of really uncomfortable sex scenes.’

Setting aside the shock though, Henenlotter’s tale of a young man held in sway by a charismatic, chemical-spewing parasite is full of imagination and wild visuals- all fabulously realised on a meager budget. While unashamedly lewd, Henenlotter keeps an eye on grander dramatic designs. So if the aforementioned Basket Case managed a romantic tragedy in league with King Kong on a $35K budget, then Brain Damage pushes even further, offering us an enticing and entertaining depiction of drug addiction, under the guise of creature-feature, that soon descends into grubby, defiled awfulness. What could be more telling of the film’s success than that aside from cuts requested on the basis of grotesque violence, upon its initial release the film was also trimmed by its own financiers because some bits were just deemed, ‘too depressing.’ Brain Damage is an unusually socially constructive message, dressed up in a package that might actually appeal to demographics everyone worries about losing to drugs. So it makes sense that the film was mutilated and abandoned by its original distributors. Luckily, thanks to VHS, it later built up a fanbase. If you’ve not seen it, you’re in for a treat.

Martin (1976) George A. Romero

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you, George Romero is the king of zombie flicks- which is true, really. Unfortunately that title has tended to cloud some of his other achievements. Granted, it’s also helped diminish hard feelings for some of his grander missteps too. While I’ll make no qualms about citing Romero’s Day of the Dead as my go-to ‘best zombie movie evar!’ I reckon Romero’s two most interesting films are entirely bereft of the walking dead. Those films being: his ode to low-budget filmmaking dressed up in a tale of motorcycle-riding, jousting knights, Knightriders; and his sole vampire film, Martin, which Romero also claims as his favourite of his own films. We’ll focus on the latter here, since Knightriders isn’t a horror film at all, although a young Tom Savini’s sexual swagger may be unsuitable for the faint of heart.

At the heart of the film is a young man (John Amplas) who is quite convinced that he’s a vampire. The audience though may be excused their uncertainty since he roams the streets and suburbs of Pittsburgh quite freely during the day. He also lacks fangs, instead opting for sedatives and razor blades to free his victims of their blood, while he dresses up their deaths as suicides to keep the law off his tail. It would seem more obvious that this young man is in fact a victim of mental illness, perpetuated by his granduncle Cuda, who talks daily of a family curse that brought Nosferatu into the family line. Muddying affairs are Martin’s visions, which blend details from the present and past to suggest either nightmare or genuine recollection.

Above all else, Romero’s film is a rather sad account of distrust between generations and the weight of familial strife. Whether Martin is indeed a vampire or not is up for discussion, but the film remains one of the most intelligent, inventive, and interesting texts ever assembled on the subject. Which makes it all the more depressing that I’ve encountered many avowed Romero fans that have never seen or even heard of Martin.

A Blade in the Dark (1983) Lamberto Bava

Make no mistake, Lamberto Bava’s best film is Demons, a cacophonous, delirious, veritable meta-textual zombie soup caught on film. It’s hilarious and brilliant and fabulously entertaining. Still, a lot of people get to that film and look no further, so I’m going to push past that one for now. Lamberto is in the unfortunate position of having an awful lot of shadows looming around his career. His father, Mario Bava, is one of Italian cinema’s giants- a man who practically invented both the Italian sub-genre of super-stylised, gory mystery now known as ‘giallo’ and the modern slasher film proper. Meanwhile Bava worked in league with Dario Argento, the man who legitimized and mastered the ‘giallo’ and who remains, to this day, one of the biggest names in cult cinema. So while Lamberto was perfectly poised to learn from the very best, he was also set a near impossible task in trying to really delineate himself from them- and he never really did.

That doesn’t mean there are no rewards in his cinema though. In fact, anything but. Certainly Bava the younger was getting started when the Italian film scene was unfortunately falling apart, which unsurprisingly dented a promising career, but he still managed a few corkers. The aforementioned Demons remains the highpoint, produced and co-scripted by Argento, but there’s also A Blade in the Dark. Sure, Argento brought giallo screeching into the 80s one year earlier, with his riotous, synth-infused bloodbath, Tenebre but with that transition realised, Bava’s film is arguably even more fun. It’s a veritable magician’s trick-bag of giallo gimmicks and trademarks, all expertly manipulated and unfolded. We have Freudian analyses, gory deaths, exposed female flesh, red herrings by dozen, light glinting off blades, and, of course, a protagonist in a creative profession (musician) whose preferred medium is roped into the mayhem.

To that end A Blade in the Dark might not be anything new for the seasoned giallo fan, but it’s a pretty wonderful recapitulation of the movement’s mechanisms and highpoints. Granted, seasoned giallo fans have likely already watched it but luckily, if you’re entirely new to the genre, by the same token it works rather well as an introduction too. Just be sure to check your disbelief at the door.

Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926) F.W. Murnau

F.W. Murnau is, without question, one of the most important film directors within the medium’s history. Aside from the dream-like web of Nosferatu, which remains a quintessential vampire film, which I’m not going to talk about because it’s far more widely seen, his work in Der Letzte Mann (aka. The Last Laugh) fully evoked his concept of the ‘unchained’ camera and the notion, now quite humdrum, that camera movement and perspective could generate meaning in tandem with the events actually being filmed. Certainly, he didn’t quite ‘invent’ this notion, as it manifested almost unconsciously through cinema from an early stage, but he championed and elaborated on it, providing stunning examples throughout his all too short career (he died in a car accident). If you have any doubt, watch some silent films made prior to Der Letzte Mann and then enjoy Murnau’s film. It’s like being punched in the gut by awesome.

But Murnau was no one-trick pony and for all the amazing choreography of Der Letzte Mann he still found room for more magic. It was thanks to that film that he’d soon move from his native Germany to Hollywood, securing an unheard of contract from William Fox to produce a film with no limits on budget or topic. Yes, Fox was so wowed by the film that he pretty much wrote Murnau a blank cheque. So he made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which is generally regarded as one of the greatest works of cinema, silent or otherwise. But between those two films he had another project, an adaptation of the ancient tale made famous by his countryman, Goethe- that of Faust. To give you an idea of how splendiferous his film is, just bear in mind that it was basically the most elaborate film ever made in Germany to that point, and German silent cinema is not exactly remembered for a lack of elaborateness. Only Lang’s Metropolis, released the next year could really match it and that was a project of such gargantuan scope it nearly bankrupted what was, at the time, one of the biggest and most powerful film studios in the world.

Granted, for all its grandeur, Faust may not be quite the cinematic landmark that Der Letzte Mann or Sunrise is, but it’s still incredible stuff. With some of the most talented artisans in the world, and with no less an actor than Emil Jannings playing the tricky Mephisto, Murnau went to town crafting a blockbuster extravaganza using every trick in the Cinema Book. The end result reminds us that even in 1926, the Cinema Book apparently boasted a shitload of tricks. Puppets, multiple film exposures, trick photography, and good old-fashioned elaborate set design combine to create a swirling tale of a man’s struggle to choose between good and evil. It’s only testament to the remarkable peaks of Murnau’s career that Faust got relegated to ‘lesser’ status by many film fans. There are few films out there that so fully and fabulously evoke the monstrous and malevolent. If you’ve not seen it before, you owe it to yourself.

Ugetsu monogatari (1953) Kenji Mizoguchi

For the casual cinema-goer, it’s easy to imagine that Japanese horror cinema began in earnest in the late 1990s with Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. That certainly opened the world up to a refreshing vein of supernatural cinema but it’s little surprise that Nakata’s shocker was perched upon the shoulders of giants. Although a gentle antecedent, the great director Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece, Ugetsu monogatari remains one of the most remarkable ghost stories in the annals of cinema. Granted, this isn’t really a film that sets out to scare anyone, it’s resolutely more drama than horror, yet the universality of its story, and the film’s pitch-perfect direction, build an eerie power.

The story concerns a potter who, in times of war, sees the promise of great profit by selling his wares to competing militaries. The possibility of so much money, enough to lift him and his family out of subsistence-living, inevitably makes him lose sight of that which he truly holds dear, his wife and son, and he is visited by tragedy. Led by a stellar cast of classic Japanese actors, including Masayuki Mori and the ever amazing Machiko Kyô, what impresses even more is Mizoguchi’s exceptional direction, particularly his use of sequence shots- long, complex takes playing out without a single edit. Within an uninterrupted frame the corporeal and spirit worlds intermingle seamlessly, vying for the protagonist’s senses. It is often so delicate one might feel an intruder into someone else’s dream.

The film’s closing shot, a technically simple lift of the camera that, in the context of the vista it opens, communicates vast realms of information and more vitally, of hope, remains one of the greatest moments in all of cinema. Couple that with the film’s unusually feminine edge (albeit a mainstay of Mizoguchi who, while not exactly a feminist, found his greatest success in tales of tragic heroines) and Ugetsu is surely one of the loveliest ghost stories ever told.