The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[puxzkkx]

Has anyone mentioned Let's Scare Jessica to Death? I just saw it last night and was incredibly impressed. The lurid (but clever) title is a bit misleading because this is anything but exploitation, I saw it as a meditation on the nature of fear. The final 10 minutes are a bit awkward but the entire thing is just steeped in this magnificent aura of eerie sadness, the soundscape is incredibly creative, the images are gorgeous and at the centre of it all is a tour-de-force acting job by Zohra Lampert. If anyone liked Martha Marcy May Marlene I detect in it a heavy influence.

[YnEoS]

Also worth your time: Ti West's House of the Devil (especially if you like your horror building up slowly, with a greater emphasis on establishing mood and feeling instead of "action").

While I enjoyed the slow build up of House of the Devil, I thought the climax was a bit disappointing.

[knives]

Has anyone mentioned Let's Scare Jessica to Death? I just saw it last night and was incredibly impressed. The lurid (but clever) title is a bit misleading because this is anything but exploitation, I saw it as a meditation on the nature of fear. The final 10 minutes are a bit awkward but the entire thing is just steeped in this magnificent aura of eerie sadness, the soundscape is incredibly creative, the images are gorgeous and at the centre of it all is a tour-de-force acting job by Zohra Lampert. If anyone liked Martha Marcy May Marlene I detect in it a heavy influence.

I could have sworn there was some discussion on the board recently for it, but if not I want to second the recommendation now. It really avoids the traps that many similar movies have fallen into (particularly in the climax which I think strengthens the whole of the film even if it's a bit wonkily executed). It also has some really great performances that you don't usually get for such a film.

[domino harvey]

It's one of the eighty movies I wrote about in my second post in this thread. I won't be voting for it as I think it's problematic, but it's also not without its charms and I don't begrudge anyone for liking it.

[tarpilot]

I love Lampert's performance and the photography, but the attempts at giving the audible terrors emotional and psychological weight come off as kind of hokey ("He doesn’t love you Jessica, he’s all mine!"; "It's blooood, Jessica, it's bloooood!") and it ends up, to me, a watered-down version of what Don't Look Now and Images would later execute to much greater effect. Also, I'm not quite sure if it's horror so much as insane hicksploitation, but I'd strongly recommend the strangely beautiful Poor Pretty Eddie to fans of Jessica, if only for the casting novelties alone -- Shelley Winters, Slim Pickens, and Ted "Lurch" Cassidy.

[ArchCarrier]

Kill List (2011)
A very effective thriller that turns to real horror in the last half. The film starts slow with some domestic scenes that show the low budget, but once the plot gets going the tension builds up and never lets go until the end. The atmosphere is particularly grim, the gore is nicely done and the film leaves you with some questions that made me want to see it again - which horror films don't do very often. The film was one of Mark Kermode's top ten of 2011, otherwise I probably would have missed it.

[YnEoS]

Kill List, I believe, was co-produced by the people who run the Mondo Macabro DVD Label (Which I highly recommend checking out some of their titles for this list if you haven't).

[YnEoS]

Watched some more silent horror for this project, I'll edit my previous horror list in addition to posting them here.

The Haunted Spooks - Harold Lloyd horror-comedy. Lots of set-up before it gets to the scares, and then you know that all the scares are fake so it's not really attempting to scare the audience. Funny well made comedy, but not a particularly scary film.

The Haunted House - Buster Keaton horror-comedy. More of a horror film than the Lloyd one, but this too lets you know that the house isn't really haunted so it ends up being primarily comic. Very funny, and it even has a few scares that might've worked better if it was trying to be scary.


The Monster - Roland West directed horror film with Lon Chaney as the villain. Lightly comedic horror mystery about the investigation into some mysterious killings that eventually leads the main characters to an "abandoned" insane asylum. Not an overall masterpiece but it has a few pretty chilling moments, and some awesome physical stunts. Chaney is playing a more straight-forward villain here, but is effective in the part. Maybe not a masterpiece but worth looking into if you're going to check silent horror out in detail.

The Bat - Another Roland West horror film. This is a murder mystery and the film invites you to try and guess the identity of The Bat, a masked super-villain. The story is pretty mediocre, but enjoyable for what it is, and this film showcases some really wonderful lighting effects. Also worth noting is that this got a sound remake in 1930 titled The Bat Whispers also directed by West, which was shot on 65mm film and is an early example of a widescreen process.

The Bells - Starring Lionel Barrymore with an early performance by Boris Karloff as a hypnotist. Psychological horror film about a guilty conscience of having committed a murder. Pretty effective film, and Karloff gives a great performance for the short minutes he's on screen.

Noidan kirot (Witches Curse) - Finnish horror film that might be considered an early example of the Rape Revenge genre. A really fascinating but perhaps flawed film. For starters as with a lot of these Nordic silents, we get tons of beautiful landscape shots, and a cool climactic ski chase at the end. The storyline hits on a lot of fascinating topics intelligently, and it feels like each of these could've been a brilliant film if it focused on them and explored them in detail. But instead it skips around and feels unfocused, often leaving ideas behind just when they were getting interesting. Also a tricky case of how deserving this is for a horror list, since a lot of the supernatural more traditional horror elements are often cheesy, but the real-life horror aspects are much better handled. Worth a watch, if anything just to break up the stream of German and American silent horror films.

[zedz]

I've decided that I'll be voting for Zbigniew Rybczinski's Oh! I Can't Stop! on the grounds that any film about an enormous monster on a rampage is automatically a horror movie, even if it's hysterically funny.

Also hitherto overlooked, until Saturday night's standard "well, what sort of thing do you want to watch tonight?" question was met with the request "a really unusual vampire film": Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.

Both of those will be jostling for a top twenty placing on my list.

[colinr0380]

I've decided that I'll be voting for Zbigniew Rybczinski's Oh! I Can't Stop! on the grounds that any film about an enormous monster on a rampage is automatically a horror movie, even if it's hysterically funny.

Do TV shows count as well?

[Feego]

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976, Charles B. Pierce): I finally got around to watching this low-budget cult film, and I have to say it was a disappointment. Inspired by a real-life Texarkana murder spree from the 1940s that to this day has never been solved, the film takes a quasi-documentary approach (no doubt inspired by the superior Texas Chain Saw Massacre two years earlier) and presents the killings in a rather straightforward manner, without music or stylization. As a result, it lacks emotional engagement and creates the kind of distancing effect of the dramatizations you might see on old episodes of "Unsolved Mysteries." The cast is made up mostly of local non-professionals from the Texarkana area, with the lead roles going to old pros Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, and, of all people, Dawn Wells (Mary Ann from "Gilligan's Island"). When he isn't following the admittedly scary-looking killer, who wears a canvas sack over his head and never speaks, director Charles B. Pierce serves up some rather unwelcome country fried humor that would seem more at home on "The Dukes of Hazzard." Pierce even goes so far as to cast himself as Sparkplug, the main comic relief character, who at one point shows up in drag.

It's really a shame that this film doesn't deliver on its promise, because I think a really interesting movie could have been made here with the same actors and in the same locations. In spite of the film's title, Pierce never builds up a satisfactory sense of community to convey the kind of city-wide dread that, say, David Fincher created in the non-horror Zodiac. The film's best scene involves the killer's attack on Dawn Wells, which comes closest to resembling a typical slasher film, but Pierce doesn't have a good sense of pace to keep the suspense up. There's also a rather interesting and unexpected moment of meta-cinema at the very end that, in the hands of a better director, could have been chilling, but here it comes off more as a gimmick. Of course, any horror movie that includes a murder by trombone(!) can't be all bad.

Granted, it probably didn't help that I was watching an old pan-and-scan VHS transfer (the film was shot in 2.35:1). The movie has no official DVD release. It will be airing on Turner Classic Movies on January 20 as part of their TCM Underground series, hopefully in its OAR, so I may catch it again to see how it holds up. In spite of my lack of enthusiasm for it, I would recommend that others catch it, if only because it has become an obscure favorite in some corners.

[knives]

Dr. Giggles and Eyes of a Stranger
A pair of slashers from the beginning and end of the genres timeline that really are as generic for their period as you can get. Everything right and everything wrong of their respective eras is front and center. The former really has the disposable and not interesting at all side characters down to a science. This is actually so bad that I'm going to advise everyone just skip to the last act where the final girl chase sequence occurs as that's just perfect with the villain finally being able to make use of his token gimmick. There's certainly nothing bad about the film and that last act is very inspired, but otherwise there's nothing here to separate it from any other dime a dozen early '90s comedy slashers. The Jennifer Jason Leigh vehicle is worse, but more entertaining. There are still huge elements of giallo here particularly in the mystery set up and the fantastic ending. The thing that keeps the not killing scenes lively is that the movie opening scene aside doesn't really bother with victims and tries to (not very well) develop it's characters. The misogyny is also a bit excessive which puts a damper on the proceedings, but there's been worse.

The Monster That Challenged the World and It! The Terror Beyond Space
It didn't put up much of a challenge. Now that I'm done with that hope about the meaty film. Everyone talk's about Alien's debt to It!, but there are many more films that have stolen from it wholesale. Evil Dead 2 basically uses it's climax as a plot point for instance. It also has more a feel of Carpenter's The Thing than anything else. The carry over from that that I feel lifted the film the best is how these professionals were such. Usually the characters in these movies are two steps away from retardation, but here these guys are smart and really do a good job of dealing with the situation. All the suspense doesn't really come from the horror scenario, but instead trying to see what the heroes could have possibly missed that will lead to them getting into trouble. Using that mystery element is something I really want to see more of.

Someone's Watching Me!
I found the original Lifetime Original Movie. No, the film doesn't deserve anything more than that.

Obsession
As a general rule if a film gives me a nightmare it's going on my list (now just to figure out if I can seriously call Night of the Hunter a horror film) so even without being as great a film as it is it would still wind up on my list. It didn't really need that boost though as this film succeeds in everything it needs to do. Without question it's Dmytryk's best work with an amazing pair of performances by a greasy Robert Newton and Bruce McGill. It's readily apparent this is his first black listed film as there's an anger and element of risk a more in control man probably wouldn't let slip out. While given the time period it's obvious what will happen to Newton (though even that has some shocks), but the sense of danger is so keenly kept that McGill's fate is always uncertain and to succeed at that is a miracle in itself. I won't say more beyond this being truly worth the Hulu price alone

The Hand
Shockingly good Stone that despite extreme goofiness when the eponymous hand does rear .itself works really well as a tale of a man's world crumbling. Every element really is two faced. For instance despite his clear disinterest in the film Caine does a real good job and even makes the last scene work, but it's hard to treat him seriously with that haircut which is even more absurd than the killer hand.

Dragonwyck
I was skeptical to say the least throughout if this really counted as horror since the plot seemed almost closer to a malignant fairy tale or melodrama than what I'm used to defining as horror. Price's final speech in the closing minute of the film changed all of that though. In a career of great monologues this may be his best. Honestly it's such a great closing that it makes the rest of the film, which I felt was merely very good despite a few great ideas, appear truly and honestly great. I really love how Tierney and Price play off of each other and their ideas. Actually (and I want to mention that everyone does a great job before making it sound like the Vincent Price show) I was highly reminded of my avatar in their battles. Price's line about the loss of his child and what god means in the face of that especially had me on the floor and looking to Marins (at the very least see the trilogy and The Strange World of Coffin Joe everybody).

[Cold Bishop]

Robin Wood actually singled out Eyes of a Stranger as one of the best slasher films... and precisely because he felt it upturned the misogyny inherent in much of the genre. Still haven't seen it, but it's been on my list for a while.

It also has more a feel of Carpenter's The Thing than anything else.

Well, to be fair, It! borrows vigorously from the Hawks film. I like the film, and Ed Cahn in general, but there's no really getting around it.

[knives]

True, there's a whole little family there, though I think I liked Cahn's film better than Hawks'. I'm curious as to what did Wood say specifically on the misogyny since I sort of see where he may have gone with it, though it's also easy to see a defense lending to 'he's showing terrible stuff to show that it's terrible' type of defense.

[Cold Bishop]

No. I think he even admits a distaste for the violence of the film, but he accepts it as a generic and economic necessity of a slasher film, by which under other means it could never be produced. His main point was that he argues it disrupts and reverses the male gaze. I never saw the film, so I only half read the article.

EDIT: Google Books has you covered. Although I believe there's a smaller version of this essay in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan as well.

[knives]

I can get along with that and it does sound like a good reading of the film, though I think that Lustig's Maniac (which will be on my list) is far more successful on all points without getting problematic.

[ArchCarrier]

A Top Ten would include The Leopard Man (not just my favourite horror picture but also quite possibly my favourite American film)...

Can you elaborate on this? I watched The Leopard Man last night, and found it very predictable and not at all remarkable.
I'm starting to think Val Lewton is not really my cup of tea, since I've been underwhelmed by all of the titles from the box set I've watched so far.

[Mr Sausage]

Dragonwyck
I was skeptical to say the least throughout if this really counted as horror since the plot seemed almost closer to a malignant fairy tale or melodrama than what I'm used to defining as horror.

It was clear to me fairly quickly that it was a gothic melodrama. It has all the tropes right at the start: darkly mysterious stranger marries naive young girl and whisks her away to his forbidding castle where she must contend with submerged morbidness, half-hidden perversions, family secrets, and a host of creaks, moans, and bumps that may or may not have a supernatural origin, but are at any rate meant to symbolize the ghost of a very real past that is about the engulf everyone. Tho' I did like the way it effortlessly side-stepped all the cliches by having unexpectedly non-supernatural events help carry out the final plot mechanics

Spoiler

(Price being a drug addict; the final collapse coming from social-political abuses rather than an old family curse, say).

[zedz]

(now just to figure out if I can seriously call Night of the Hunter a horror film)

Night of the Hunter mixes up half a dozen genres to synthesize something entirely its own, but I think there's more horror in there than anything else. I'll be voting for it.

[Murdoch]

Mitchum's scream is easily the most terrifying thing I've heard in a movie, so I'd say it counts as well.

[zedz]

Normally with these projects I tend to write about the films I'm watching for the first time, for better or worse, but since I've already got more than fifty on my "must include" list, and more than forty on my "really want to include" list, I'll probably spend more time this go-round highlighting those films. I suspect that the final shape of my list will be shaped as much by determinations of whether or not a given film actually counts as a horror movie as it will be by better-than / not-as-good-as rankings.

So today's random selection is:

The Boston Strangler - There's an interesting divide when it comes to based-on-real-crime serial killer films, and whether they count as horror films or as 'mere' thrillers, and I have to confess that I'm just going to have to go on gut instinct. Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer all seem to me pretty clearly in the horror camp, but Zodiac, for example, doesn't. Though when I think harder about it, Zodiac has more than its fair share of very effective 'scare' scenes, even if most of them, by the very nature of the subject, are red herrings (or are they?). But in the end, the focus for that film seems much more squarely on the 'police procedural / investigative' side of the equation.

Fleischer's The Boston Strangler is probably closer to Zodiac than those other, more straightforward horror films. In fact, it might be the most direct precursor to Fincher's film, since it too stretches cinema's technical means to try and encompass the vast complexity of a murder spree as cultural phenomenon. I nudge it a little more towards horror because so much of its focus is on civilian dread, and, in Tony Curtis' extraordinary performance, it has a rather formidable monster at its centre.

What's most impressive about the film is how Fleischer turns a potential potboiler into a pointillistic study of an entire city under threat, and a psychological portrait, and a police procedural, all quite literally simultaneously, through the deployment of some avant-garde cinematic techniques that are particularly surprising coming from a reliable studio warhorse like Fleischer. If you've ever been impressed by the mileage Brian De Palma gets from split screens, this film exceeds his work in just about every way. De Palma generally uses the technique (very effectively) for suspense, as a substitute for Griffithian cross-cutting, or as way to offer two PoVs on a single event. But Fleischer not only does this, but employs multiple split-screens to orchestrate action in multiple public / private spheres and timeframes all within a single screen. Plus, he plays around with the size and aspect ratios of his frames within frames, altering size, shape and position mid-shot. It's incredibly flashy, but the miracle is that it actually works for the story he's telling, which is one that is divided between multiple, contradictory points of view and which confronts the problem (as does Zodiac) of an investigation hampered by an overload of information, a far rarer cinematic subject than the rather contrived convention of the investigators awaiting the inevitable arrival of a single golden clue that will unlock the mystery.

Also essential to the success of the film are the performances. Curtis was a great, versatile actor who seldom got the chance to explore his range to the full, and in this film he gets to go even darker than he did in The Sweet Smell of Success, but in a completely different way. Up against him is Henry Fonda in prickly mode, playing against type in a less obvious but no less accomplished manner.

[colinr0380]

I really like The Boston Strangler for the same reasons - that sequence of all the various women locking their doors, reporting stalkers, and getting suspicious of men in general is really well done to show all of the fears boiling over. I think along with showing the public/private spaces (as well as murder scenes and 'normal' life co-existing at the same moment until the separate frames collide together as a body is discovered) the 'overlapping scene-multiple frame' style conveying the mounting panic contrasts well with the more stripped down filming in the final section as Curtis gets interrogated,

Spoiler

eventually ending with that all-white room which finally strips everything back to totally bare walls, as well as perhaps alluding to the end of Psycho.

There seemed to be vogue for that multiple screen technique during that period - The Andromeda Strain used it for a couple of scenes as well a couple of years later, and I'm sure that there are another couple of films that also did the same thing for a few sequences.

There's an interesting divide when it comes to based-on-real-crime serial killer films, and whether they count as horror films or as 'mere' thrillers, and I have to confess that I'm just going to have to go on gut instinct. Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer all seem to me pretty clearly in the horror camp, but Zodiac, for example, doesn't. Though when I think harder about it, Zodiac has more than its fair share of very effective 'scare' scenes, even if most of them, by the very nature of the subject, are red herrings (or are they?). But in the end, the focus for that film seems much more squarely on the 'police procedural / investigative' side of the equation.

Where would you stand on Summer of Sam zedz? Instead of being a crime investigation film that one backgrounds the serial killer element way underneath a 'portrait of the times' ensemble drama. Though the film occasionally does take brief turns into vivid horror in the very short scenes where the focus switches to the Son of Sam screaming at his neighbour's dog, and so on (apparently Berkowtiz had actually believed that the dog was telling him to commit the crimes).

I guess the best way to describe it is that while The Boston Strangler is a mix of public reaction and the investigation, and Zodiac is more about the investigation aspect in such a case, then Summer of Sam is more about the public reaction and the way that those events get folded into the language of the wider society.

[knives]

On a similar note Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place is a great film and neat brother to The Shout as far as '70s horror where John Hurt is tortured by madmen in a way that doesn't help his marriage to be polite.

[puxzkkx]

On a similar note Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place is a great film and neat brother to The Shout as far as '70s horror where John Hurt is tortured by madmen in a way that doesn't help his marriage to be polite.

10 Rillington Place is amazing. Fleischer and his photographers and art dept set up such an intense atmosphere of decay and stagnancy, you feel dirty just watching this. I didn't like Hurt in it but Richard Attenborough is insanely good. I wouldn't exactly call it 'horror', though... more of a very, very dark kitchen sink drama with a serial murderer as the focus.

[zedz]

While we're talking about Fleischer's horror work in this period, I'll put a good word in for a not-that-guilty pleasure that won't make my list, See No Evil, in which a blind, isolated Mia Farrow is terrorized relentlessly for much of the film. There's not much more to the film than that, but it's taut as hell, and a lot more effective, in my opinion, than the rather more gimmicky Wait Until Dark, all in all a worthy successor to The Spiral Staircase (which will be making my list).

Colin, I haven't seen Summer of Sam, but it's in my kevyip. (What isn't?)