The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[puxzkkx]

Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast (1969) was rather disappointing, a sordid sexual psychodrama that early on appears to be gearing up an interesting commentary on the parallels between objectification and physical mortification but eventually starts making it up as it goes along.

[colinr0380]

I really like Blind Beast, especially the way that our hero(?) is trying to create tactile rather than visual art pieces eventually causing the heroine (?) and the film to go the same way, tightening in closer and closer while the characters are simultaneously losing all sense of physical and spatial awareness among the scupltures in the massive, darkened warehouse space.

Spoiler

However I do think that the wonderful figure of the enabling mother is removed from the picture too early, though this is necessary to remove the last trace of the outside world, isolate the couple and change gears for the ecstatic death pact and dismemberment final section

[zedz]

Blind Beast would be worth seeing for the art direction alone, but I think it sort of collapses under its own thematic weight. I find Red Angel much more horrifying, though I hadn't considered it as a horror film (until now, that is . . .)

From the same era, I'm undecided on whether to include Hani's Inferno of First Love. It's a jaw-dropping masterpiece, but it's not obviously a horror film even though so much of the movie seriously creeps me out.

[YnEoS]

The Ghost Train (1927) - Germany-British co-production of the horror-crime-mystery branding with light comedy sprinkled throughout. Lots of fun to watch, and quite visually inventive utilizing stylized inter-titles, miniatures, wire-work, stop-motion animation, and a bunch of other fun visual gags. Not a great film, but definitely worth checking out if you're into these silent horror films.

[Mr Sausage]

La Donna del Lago. Finally dug this one out of my large pile of giallos to watch. I was going to wait and do a capsule summary in the giallo guide I'm planning for later, but I can't wait that long to gush about it, so here I am.

I can see why tarpilot would call it a giallo Last Year at Marienbad. The movie refuses to resolve itself. The mystery is obviously of secondary importance: when the killer is revealed, it hardly seems to matter. At that point it's next to impossible to unweave the strands of memory, fantasy, and hallucination that make up the hero's understanding of the world (as indeed his world slowly contracts until it becomes simply the lake, the hotel, and the grave-yard, and the sad mystery that floats over all of it). Even the police officer at the end, typically an agent of narrative authority in a giallo, refuses to offer the expected resolution. He simply says that the hero's guesses and suppositions are acceptable enough; they will give those who crave closure the kind of closure they seek, with the implication that such answers will also serve a less engaged viewer of the movie who wants his mysteries nicely wrapped up with no dangling ends. But this is a movie about dangling ends.

The thing about the hero's answers is that they are probably right: they are plausible and acceptable accounts of what happened. And yet the refusal to provide certainty leads you to the conclusion that there are any number of similar solutions that are no less plausible

Spoiler

(maybe Irma was the only murderer, or maybe Mario did the other two, or Mario and Enrico each did one, or Enrico both, or the two girls really were suicides).

So much hinges on confessions that could be fantasies, or if real, could be composed of lies (eg. Mario's confession). And the movie ends with a summation of all the failures in resolution that occur throughout the movie:

Spoiler

the killer is probably dead, but since the body might never be found, there's room for an unpleasant niggle in the back of the brain that the movie actively encourages.

The movie is ultimately about a state of mind, and in this case I think it resembles Antonioni in the way its characters wander around lost, detached from their emotions. It also resembles Antonioni in the way that the framework of a thriller is used to explore deeper and more unsettling themes. Much like The Passenger, this movie is partly about the way a displaced person--displaced in terms of emotion, memory, and desire--attempts to inhabit a generic narrative whose conventional structure he hopes will order his own life into a meaningful progression of events. Yet as the movie goes along, the narrative increasingly fails to resolve in the way that such a structure normally would, and we are left with something far more unsettling than the usual psychopathic murderers and outrageous violence: an existential crisis, where our attempts to impose narratives on life ironically reveal the emptiness and arbitrariness of all such structures. That this is done within an actual genre film is impressive (along with a million other things).

This is a shoo-in for my list.

[knives]

Somebody brought up the Inner Sanctum Mysteries a few weeks ago and I figured I'd bite the bullet. The delicious raspberry bullet. The films are by no means great plagued by bad performances (to the point of killing the drama in Dead Man's Eyes completely) and their radio origin is very clear. Yet they manage to be entertaining and broadly good to the point I'd recommend. Easily the best of these are the three directed by Reginald LeBorg though Harold Young's entry is the only one where the spectre of radio isn't omnipresent. They all follow a simple whodunnit structure with the horror coming more from the premise than anything in the story. The way things work out if Chaney (who is always great) has something radically change in his life, someone dies, and he has to fight the temptation of insanity and the police as he solves the mystery despite some handicap. While the acting is basically entirely up to Chaney occasionally someone like J. Carrol Naish will pop up to give him some levity and those make the best talking scenes (much of the films are talking on account of the radio nature of the screenplays). It always ends up well, but the roads to that are fun.

[colinr0380]

La classe de niege (Class Trip) (Claude Miller, 1998)

This film is skating the boundaries between horror and drama, but I think is worth discussing here (Perhaps a good comparison would be with Chabrol, particularly Le Boucher). A very nervous young boy, Nicolas, is driven by his father to his class skiing trip to the French Alps, who refuses to let him go on the coach with the other children in case there is an accident - the father is very overprotective, yet distant to the extent of driving off with the boy's suitcase, forcing him to have to borrow pyjamas from another boy, Hodkann.

Nicolas is constantly having nightmares of abandonment taking the form of masked strangers coming into the lunchroom of the chalet and gunning everyone down, fears of organ traffickers (following a comment his father made to him at a themepark), of freezing to death in the snow after being unable to get back inside the chalet in the middle of the night (with associated coffin burial involving the teachers and students), and even at one point of himself and his parents taking the main roles in a version of The Monkey's Paw. There's a bleeding together of fantasy and reality, especially near the end, although I hear that the original novel does this to a more ambiguous effect. One of the most interesting aspects of the film is that the more the horrors move out of fantasy and into real life, the more understandable the film becomes (sort of the opposite to the way A Nightmare On Elm Street works, turning mundane reality into something fantastical).

It is very much about the withdrawn main character co-opting everyday interactions with people and events (even briefly glimpsed television programme and scars that his classmates have!) into his fantasies, which only works if everyone else is in mortal danger (in that sense it is a more effective version of Switchblade Romance/Haute Tension, though without the particular twist that film has, I hasten to add!). Whether they are fantasies of becoming an action hero and saving his friend from a machine gun massacre, or of becoming an intrepid investigator into the disappearances of children, as well as the use of fairy tales to deal with suppressed issues (Here it is The Little Mermaid: if you make the choice to become a real human being, do you lose the part of yourself which makes you unique, special and prized by others?)

I like the way that our relationship with the character is constantly evolving from at first thinking he is a withdrawn, nervous kid. Then things steadily become more troubling as the boy wonders whether what he imagines actually happens (as his father goes missing). Then the investigation section begins as a child from the local area goes missing and Nicolas confides in Hodkann that it is all to do with organ traffiking and that he and his father are undercover agents. Suddenly the boy is making up things that obviously ring untrue to the audience - is he just trying to make his humdrum life seem more exciting? However the problems of making things up often occur not when people do not believe what you say, but when they actually buy in to your worldview themselves and start acting on their beliefs, which Hodkann does leading to Nicholas's world totally imploding.

Spoiler

It is a fascinating film about Nicolas coming to terms with abuse (although that never explicitly gets stated, that seems the only answer). I especially like the way that the second of Nicolas's three fantasies seems to be more of a memory of his younger brother being passed over to the organ traffickers by his father while he is on the theme park ride, just incorporating Hodkann into it. Then the third fantasy goes in totally the other direction of complete metaphor with the Monkey's Paw tale, as if Nicolas is retreating from the previous very clear memory and instead diving back into fantasy, albeit a fantasy about parents wishing for money which then comes about by way of compensation for the death of their child.

I also like the way that the film sort of reverses the opening, with instead of the father and Nicolas stopping at the service station instead the teacher and Nicolas doing the same on the return journey after his father has been arrested. Along with The Vanishing and Fat Girl, this is another film that doesn't really make French service stations seem like the safest places! It is using those rather bland transitional spaces of service stations as rather menacing areas where you can be confronted at any times by realisations of your darkest fears/desires - as with Nicolas seeing the footage of his father being led away by the police on the televisions showing the news in the cafeteria.

Although Class Trip also uses that scene in the service station near the end for one of the most heartbreaking moments, as Nicolas sees a mother and baby together - a family unit that is now lost forever to him, if it were ever there in that idealised form in the first place.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Rybczinski was the DoP on an Austrian movie, 'Angst', that I saw once, ages ago. Haven't found it since but remember it to be quite striking. He also made the Close to the Edge video for The Art of Noise, amongst others. Would love to see this again.

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 did my usual search to see if my favourite horror related shorts had turned up on Youtube. While the great morality tale about an amoral yuppie getting his comeuppance by being trapped inside a parking garage, Left Hand Drive (written by the novelist Christopher Fowler), is still nowhere to be seen, I did find that the darkly amusing short To Have And To Hold is up.

I remember thinking at the time it was a little like a compact version of a similar kind of premise from Stephen King's novel Gerald's Game, but it does have an interesting Haneke connection too given that it stars Susanne Lothar, still perhaps best known as the mother from the original version of Funny Games, getting into yet another distressing situation!

[zedz]

Whoever recommended Pontypool: good choice. A very effective micro-budget film with way more atmosphere than most of its flashier rivals.

It won't find space on my overstuffed list, but I'm glad I caught up with it.

[colinr0380]

I thought that the premise of Pontypool was fascinating (and it makes a great use of that isolated radio station location, with lots of split levels, lockable sound booths and stock rooms) but it seemed to end up collapsing into total incoherence near the end. Then again, I suppose that was the point!

It also has a great opening!

[zedz]

There's a definitely a sense that the premise is somewhat incoherent, and this may well be a writer's fudge, but I liked the sense it gave that the heroes never really understood what was going on (and nor did we), but were rather testing hypotheses and finding things that seemed to work, provisionally. That seems to me a far more plausible (and suspenseful) narrative model than the typical one where the characters discover the exact nature of the threat and the exact means by which it can be counteracted, either through unlikely trial and error or through the exposition of a flown-in expert.

What might have put the film over the top for me was an eleventh hour revelation that the nature of the threat was actually something quite different, and all the wrong conclusions had been drawn. That could actually be a good starting point for a horror film: upturning the deductive model to reveal, when it's far too late, that our heroes have been barking up the wrong tree and all their neat hypotheses and inferred solutions are dead wrong.

[colinr0380]

That reminds me, have you seen The Signal zedz? That's a film that uses an epidemic of insanity as well. While I'm not sure that it is as good as Pontypool, the idea of splitting the film up into three thirty minute sections tackled by different directors is an interesting one even if it does lead to some jarring shifts in tone and bizarre non sequitur scenes (such as the opening). A conventionally made film certainly wouldn't have included the middle section in which a group of people who have been driven insane by The Signal (plus one of the supporting players from the previous section to keep things nominally tied into an ongoing plot) get involved in what feels like a blackly comic situation comedy sketch show where everything is played off key and the paranoia of one character keeps mounting to deadly effect!

Spoiler

I'm still unsure about whether the film had a (relatively) happy ending or not, which I suppose must be an achievement of some kind!

[zedz]

Yeah, but I didn't think much of it. That was a case where the fudging of the premise seemed really quite lazy: the shortest distance between two zombies.

[Dylan]

I would like to submit two "member spotlight" titles:

"Le Orme" (1975), directed by Luigi Bazzoni with gorgeous cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. In it, Florinda Bolkan plays a woman haunted by nightmares centering around a creepy black and white science fiction film she saw as a little girl. After one of these nightmares, she awakens with no recollection of the past three days. She finds a torn postcard from a remote town on the kitchen counter, and the strange, imaginative odyssey unfolds when she decides to travel there. A unique, creepy, beautiful film.

"Blood and Roses" (1960), directed by Roger Vadim (note: I've only seen the uncut 87 minute French version that was ripped from a broadcast and made available to collectors with fan-made English subtitles; from what little I've seen of it on YouTube I would avoid the print on the Paramount VHS like the plague, being the 75 minute US version dreadfully cropped from 2.35:1 to 1.33:1 with the lush Technicolor 100% washed out, making an extremely visual movie completely unwatchable). This one is a lot of fun: a visual, gothic vampire story infused with sensuality and surrealism - the French and the British went on to do this sort of thing for decades after. Think of it as Vadim's one and only Hammer-esque film, and one of his best. Blood and Roses has never received a DVD release in any country and it would be great if some label got around to it eventually - I'd work on it myself if I could!

[ArchCarrier]

From Press Play: Top Five From the New Wave of French Horror (spoiler: he likes Martyrs).

[colinr0380]

I'm surprised at how many 'contemporary reimaginings' of the Red Riding Hood story there have been in recent years, from Matthew Bright's Freeway to the Belgian short Black XXX-mas.

Perhaps the most interesting of these is the French film from 2000, Promenons-nous dans le bois (aka Deep In The Woods). It concerns a group of young travelling players visiting the country estate of a strange old man in order to put on a performance of the Red Riding Hood story for his disturbed young son's birthday. I have mixed feelings about this film - after an extremely strong start the film fails to capitalise on a number of its fascinating plot strands and turns into the usual plot of a group of attractive young people getting killed off (including a lesbian couple, who of course have a long sex scene, contrasted with the old man of the house hitting on one of the rather reticent beefcake hunks in the group - I'm not entirely sure whether there is a point being made here, or not! It is one of those films where people find out there is an escaped killer running around loose then immediately decide to split up so one person checks out the shed, the other goes for a nap upstairs while a third runs around the woods and the fourth has a long, lingering shower! The tropes are so obvious, and so straightly played out, that it feels as if there should be some sort of larger statement or twist there that unfortunately just never arrives). The film throws any sense of logic out of the window at about the halfway point too, which is disappointing, though it is obvious that the filmmakers are focusing much more on visually stunning Argento-styled individual scenes rather than trying to keep the audience's interest through any sort of intriguing plot.

So a mixed bag, but the film is definitely worth watching for its first half hour or so as everything is being neatly set up; to see Denis Lavant in an Igor/Renfield-esque servant role and François Berléand (best known perhaps as the Inspector in the Transporter films but who has also been in a couple of later Louis Malle and Claude Chabrol films and played the tender bondage fetishist in a major scene in Catherine Breillat's Romance) in a great, grumpy (possibly homicidal?) patriarch role; and also for a few individual scenes - the 'spying on a fairy tale' opening that neatly transitions into the great title sequence, the scene in the foggy bathroom, the encounter that one unfortunate actor has with a bear trap, and the utterly bizarre scene where the local police show up to investigate but end up just planting more red herrings and suggesting that the film has gone utterly insane (the only thing I can think of to compare that sequence with are the totally pointless scenes involving Stephen Fry's police inspector that crop up in Gosford Park!)

[zedz]

Not that 'recent' for the youngsters among us, but don't forget The Company of Wolves, certainly one of the most interesting horror movies of the 80s, even if it probably won't make my list.

[puxzkkx]

I can't really explain why I didn't get into Eyes Without a Face - maybe it settled for grimness over true horror? The episodic structure kept it from being really engaging for me, and once it stepped into procedural territory it became even more inert. The ending seemed like a half-hearted realisation of the story's fitfully made fairy-tale allusions, and Alida Valli's combination of exotic looks with absolutely bland presence has always bored me. Still the surgery scenes are as shocking and squirmy as they must have been in 1960, and Édith Scob's waïfish swanlike physicality is very striking. Less than the sum of its parts imo.

[Dylan]

I like Eyes Without a Face but even ranking the top 20 of 1960, I'm not sure if it'd quite make that list and I actually prefer the more recent spin on the basic themes/elements of Franju's film, which is of course Almodovar's The Skin I Live In. But it's beautiful black & white and I adore Maurice Jarre's crazy score. 1960 was a tremendous year for horror films, actually: Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Little Shop of Horrors, Village of the Damned, Black Sunday, Blood and Roses, Peeping Tom, 13 Ghosts, House of Usher, and that's just off the top of my head.

Zedz, I liked Company of Wolves when I was in elementary school - I nearly wore out of the Vestron VHS that the old neighborhood video store had - but I haven't seen it in over fifteen years. I wish more films had been made out of Angela Carter novels. I watched the only other film adaptation of her work, The Magic Toyshop, last year and it's no great shakes, which is a shame because the novel itself moved me a great deal when I was a kid.

[colinr0380]

While we are on the subject of Eyes Without A Face don't forget that Jess Franco 'homaged' the film a couple of times at different stages of his career: The Awful Dr Orloff from 1962 and the utterly bonkers (but with a great cast!) Faceless from 1988.

[Matt]

I'd just like to make a plug for a couple of films by Rafael Baledón, a fine poetic soul laboring in the low-budget Abel Salazar salt mines of '50s-'60s Mexican horror: The Man and the Monster (El hombre y el monstruo) and The Curse of the Crying Woman (La Maldición de la Llorona). Both were available on DVD in the US from CasaNegra but are now, tragically, out of print. They're still available used for fairly reasonable prices.

[Mr Sausage]

I finally got around to watching the first two films in the Demons series, a flagship series from producer Dario Argento that had a good deal of success in the mid-eighties.

Demons (Lamberto Bava, 1985): A bunch of patrons at a free film screening become trapped inside the theatre with some pus dripping monsters. The movie is really just an excuse to gather together some stereotypes (jive-talking black pimp, check; bickering married couple, check; leather-clad punks, check; prophetic blind man, check) to be ripped apart by monsters. A cheerfully awful gore spectacle. Lamberto did not inherit the artistry or talent of his father, and he turns in hackwork as usual. But the movie does have a break-neck pace and plenty of unintended laughs. Mildly entertaining.

Demons 2 (Lamberto Bava, 1986): The exact same thing, only in a high-rise apartment. In that, it's a exploitative imitation of David Cronenberg's effective and cerebral Shivers. It also blatantly rips off some of Videodrome's imagery in its incoherent attempt to continue the conceit set-up in the first one, where visual mediums act as a conduit for evil. Here, evil seems able to leap into and out of television screens. Don't expect any kind of explanation for this, tho'. This is a movie that wouldn't exist without plot devices. People turn into Demons solely at the whim of the filmmakers. This movie is simultaneously more serious and more goofy than its predecessor, something that, admittedly, is kind of impressive. It gives up the frenzied pace of the original for more serious attempts at mood building, and the tone is more despairing and bleak; but at the same time it gives us slapstick scenes like a pregnant woman being chased all over her apartment by a squeaking gremlin that seems to've been designed to capitalize on the popularity of Dante's movie. Not good, but not dull either.

The Church (Michele Soavi, 1989): Originally intended to be the third Demons film, disagreements between Bava and producer Argento lead to Bava leaving the series and the assignment being turned over to another of Argento's proteges, Michele Soavi. Unlike Bava, Soavi was an ambitious and visually creative filmmaker, and he tried to make something more interesting and artistic out of the series. It still has the basic Demons plot of people being trapped inside a building (here a Church) with monsters, but it's more ambitious and less schlocky. The Demons are no longer mindless and deformed, they are possessed people who act erratically at first, only to become more coordinated as the plot builds. There's still no real rhyme or reason for why this or that person becomes a Demon, but the monsters are less over-the-top. This is a film to be watched for its mood and imagery. It has a rich visual style, helped in no small measure by the beautiful architecture of the church; and there are some incredible visuals, such as a possessed man tearing out his own heart and holding it up in silhouette against the blood red sky, or a giant pyramid of writhing bodies ascending through the floor of the church. Unfortunately, for all of Soavi's efforts, the film is undermined by its awful script. Argento's over-bearing presence plus a script cobbled together from multiple rewrites leaves you with an incoherent jumble that switches main characters every act and kind of leads nowhere. It's the least interesting, I think, of Soavi's four films, not having the thematic weight of The Sect (even if it's better assembled than that fascinating mess) or Cemetary Man, nor the tight construction of Stage Fright. It stops short of being totally satisfying, but is still a far better movie than its two juvenile predecessors. If you're going to watch any of these movies, make it this one.

[Cold Bishop]

Doesn't Demons have a glorious after-the-credits sequence... or am I misremembering?

I was lucky enough to see this in 35mm with a near-full auditorium on a double bill with Zombi a few years back (actually, a triple-bill, as Black Belt Jones was on immediately after, as a different screening). Frankly, I don't know that I care to revisit either film in a different environment; you really need that crowd to appreciate their particular brand of schlock.

[Mr Sausage]

Doesn't Demons have a glorious after-the-credits sequence... or am I misremembering?

I was lucky enough to see this on 35mm in a near-full auditorium on a double bill with Zombi a few years back (actually, a triple-bill, as Black Belt Jones was on immediately after as a different screening). Frankly, I don't know that I care to revisit either film in a different environment; you really need that crowd to appreciate their particular brand of schlock.

It definitely has an after-the-credits sequence. I don't know if it's glorious, but it had me grinning (and not totally out of derision!).

It's a film that would absolutely benefit from being seen with a vocal crowd of gore-hounds. It's as mindless as entertainment gets, but it does what it does fairly well (no movie that has hoodlums using a straw to sniff coke out of an actual can of coke can be totally worthless, can it?).