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| Michael Powell's Peeping Tom -- obsession and damage. |
Last year, when I wrote a list of old-school horror filmfaves for Westword, I made a note to myself to continue that list, starting at the
pivot from the ‘50s into the ‘60s when Peeping
Tom and Psycho changed the horror
film forever.
If the list looks odd (why In the Mouth of Madness and not Halloween?
Where is Psycho and Last House on the Left, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, The Exorcist,
Re-Animator, Dead Alive, Aliens, Scream, Evil Dead, etc.?), it’s because
I restricted it to my personal favorites instead of hitting the points of
general consensus and historical significance.
In this I am guided largely by my aversion to gore and
hyperviolence onscreen. It is what it is, and I have soldiered manfully through
many films even though they turned my stomach because they were brilliant – Dead Ringers and Society come to mind – but it’s not stuff I would run through again
if I had the chance. I have little use for giallo,
and much of Miike, Argento, Fulci, Roth and the like is lost on me.
A pretty odd dilemma for a horror-film fan, so perhaps these
suggestions will help if, like me, you are a confirmed between-finger-peeker. Whether
you might term some of these thrillers, or fantasies, or sci-fi, it’s all the
same in result. These films scare the beejeesus out of me.
The Incredible
Shrinking Man
Dir: Jack Arnold
1957
It all begins here for me – the first first-person monster
movie, and in that a major step forward. Typical guy Scott Carey (the
underrated Grant Williams) is exposed to some kind of radioactive cloud while
out on his boat – and he starts shrinking. He’s our narrator as well, and the
story ties the viewer’s empathy squarely to Carey, who becomes a heroic figure even
as his ability to register in “our” world vanishes. His final statement of
self-affirmation, too, is remarkable.
Horror of Dracula
(Dracula)
Dir: Terence Fisher
1958
The first and to date only successful reboot of the
Universal monster cycles begins here, in the beautiful Bray Studios of Hammer
Films, in London. (The Curse of Frankenstein
precedes it, but this film has a lot more resonance to it, doesn’t seem like a
forced remake, as Curse sometimes
does.) Three of Hammer’s horror stars, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and
Michael Gough are here in a Technicolor reimaging of the Count as a rather more
suave and commanding figure, with plenty of toothsome young actresses to bite.
Soon the studio would churn out dozens of outlandish, scary titles we loved to
watch.
Peeping Tom
Dir: Michael Powell
1960
A mind-bending experience, very similar to Hitchcock’s Psycho, and released just before it.
Something was in the air. For my money, Peeping
Tom is vastly more frightening. Photographer Mark Lewis likes to take
pictures of attractive women – as they watch while he kills them. The
multilayered tale was so disturbing that it derailed Powell’s (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes) career. The key is that the villain is portrayed as
a victim, and the examination between desire and aggression, control and
submission, the confused complicities of the audience, and the very nature of
“making a picture” as an art form are all put into play here. Still an extremely
uncomfortable movie to sit through.
The Innocents
Dir: Jack Clayton
1961
The best adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a point-of-view tour de force. Is the
governess (Deborah Kerr) nuts, or are perverse ghosts infecting her charges’
minds? After watching a dozen times, I still can’t decide. “It was only the
wind, my dear.” WAAAH!
The Haunting
Dir: Robert Wise
1963
Another great am-I-losing-it-or-did-I-just-see-something
movie. (Robert Wise could make a great film in any genre, and almost did them
all.) A psychic investigation goes wrong – a simple premise, but it’s played
out with a patient sense of menace, with a rhythm that imperceptibly pulls you
into the feelings and mental distortions of the protagonists.
The Masque of the Red
Death
Dir: Roger Corman
1964
Corman’s Poe adaptation cycle is wonderful, even given the
lack of budget and time spent on them. He and screenwriter Richard Matheson
(who also gave us I Am Legend, The
Shrinking Man, and other seminal sci-fi and horror texts) created an
exciting, odd, claustrophobic world usually presided over by the inimitable
Vincent Price, that transmits the spirit if not the precise sense of Poe’s
works. Here, as an out-and-out Satan worshipper, Price is at his most
unrepentantly sadistic.
Kwaidan
Dir: Masaki Kobayashi
1965
A stylistically vibrant quartet of ghost stories. The horror
anthology film originated with Dead of
Night in 1945, and studios such as Britain’s Amicus made a ton of money
from them – but this is the best. As beautiful as it is terrifying.
Planet of the
Vampires
1965
Ridiculous, campy fun from the inventive Italian director.
The title says it all, and an all-star cast (who reportedly couldn’t understand
each other) fight the bloodsuckers in extremely stylized costumes and
surroundings that proved influential for films such as Alien.
Seconds
Dir: John
Frankenheimer
1966
Don’t Look Now
Dir: Nicolas Roeg
1973
It’s a harrowing film about loss, memory, identity, fate,
and communication. Set in a wildly edited world of flashback and flashforwards,
a couple grieving the death of their child try to put their lives back together.
It’s a heart-rending view, and Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland are great
in it.
The Wicker Man
Dir: Robin Hardy
1973
The idea that there is an older, more powerful religion
underneath the trappings and niceties of current theologies is a constant in
fantastic fiction. It’s the vision of it out in the open, relaxed and unashamed
of its realities – and necessities – that’s so disturbing here. Everybody on
Summerisle is in on what’s happening save for the crusading Sergeant Howie and
the audience. That calm progression towards the unthinkable at the film’s end
is a soul-crushing experience.
The Little Girl Who
Lives Down the Lane
Dir: Nicolas Gessner
1976
Rynn Jacobs is 13, and lives with her father. But nobody
seems to have met him. Is everything all right? In the hands of Jodie Foster,
Rynn is just fine – until a snooping neighbor and her pedophile son (an
impossibly creepy Martin Sheen) start poking around. This horror classic is
also an introvert’s fantasy – everything’s fine, just leave me alone!
The Howling
Dir: Joe Dante
1981
The Lair of the White
Worm
Dir: Ken Russell
1988
There is a tinge of horror underlying every movie the
flamboyant and provocative Russell made, a disconnect with reality that defines
all his main characters. In truth his The
Devils, a film still largely unfindable in the United States in its
original cut, is more disturbing. Still, this Bram Stoker adaptation is
blasphemous, ridiculous, gratuitously gory, and very enjoyable.
Lady in White
Dir: Frank LaLoggia
1988
Death and disaster invade Norman Rockwell country, as an old
murder comes to light and sympathetic characters are found to have disturbing
pasts. This beautifully filmed ghost story is balanced between poles of light
and darkness.In the Mouth of Madness
Dir: John Carpenter
1996
Carpenter’s contributions to horror are limitless, having
created the template of the slasher film with Halloween, and gems such as They
Live and Escape from New York.
His ‘apocalypse trilogy’ of The Thing,
Prince of Darkness, and this film
created an imaginary universe in which doom was unavoidable, nothing was
trustworthy, and meaning drained away into a sinkhole of despair and
annihilation. Sounds like a hoot, no? Madness
goes furthest in asserting the transience of the veneer of consensual reality,
and the fragility of the human mind.
Sleepy Hollow
Dir: Tim Burton
1999
Though Tim Burton is seen as the natural inheritor of the
Gothic sensibilities of American cinema, he’s made surprisingly few straight
horror films. This comes closest. Though it’s an adaptation of the classic
Washington Irving tale, it’s full of Burton’s steampunk sensibilities, and references
to other horror greats such as Bava and Fisher. The control of the in-studio shooting
makes this one of the best art-directed modern horror films.
eXistenZ
Dir: David Cronenberg
2000
Cronenberg has done more for modern horror than anyone on
this list. The Brood, Scanners,
Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly . . . and on and on. Centered firmly on
body horror, Cronenberg manifests all the cultural dislocations of our time in
the bodies of his protagonists, literally pulling them into strange new shapes,
obliterating their consciousnesses, submitting them to the will of a brutal new
order. Here, he mixes the unreal and real so thoroughly that the film is a
nightmare in itself, a deadly locked room from which no one can escape.
Tideland
Dir: Terry Gilliam
2005
Death and madness are the high points of this jarring
exploration of abandonment. A young girl loses her father and mother and,
trapped in the middle of nowhere, falls into relationships with more damaged
souls. A terrifying, dark poem set in bleached Texas sunlight.
Pan’s Labyrinth
Dir: Guillermo del Toro
2006
The present master of horror has many great movies to his
credit, but this is his most magical. It’s a fatalistic fairy tale, and
connects to the horrors of everyday life – Spain in 1944 – strongly enough to
make its meanings clear. Del Toro’s vision gives palpable heft and believability
to his most extreme imaginings – as though he were showing us real species
heretofore undescribed.
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