The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[puxzkkx]

Would Albert Nobbs count?

[colinr0380]

I liked that strange turn from goofy gore movie to a kind of post-apocalyptic Road Warrior action film in the first Demons, with the helicopter crashing through the roof (one of the most flagrant uses of deus ex machina I've ever seen!) and that amusingly callous sequence which plays out during the end credits. And I remember thinking that the most interesting thing about Demons 2 was the TV broadcast knitting together the various storylines in the apartment block during the first section of the film, supposedly set in the cordoned off area of the city from the first film, yet intriguingly following the same basic beats as the cheesy horror film playing in the theatre in the first Demons! But unfortunately nothing much is made of this idea, beyond the amusing Videodrome rip-off that Sausage notes (I particularly like the vague suggestion both in the free ticket giveaway beginning of Demons and the TV broadcast in the sequel that some kind of invocation ritual was going on, by undefined groups for unspecified purposes), and instead we get another group of relatively unlikeable characters involved in various set piece gore scenes during a siege situation. However I love that the one black guy that Bava must have had available, who played the pimp in the first film, turns up again in a different-but-similar role in the sequel leading the cabal of overly-buff body builders against the demons with gusto, and who again almost immediately gets overpowered!

The strange off kilter feel to the first two Demons film due to strange leaps of logic or bizarre swerves off into totally unrelated tangents leads, like many Italian horror films, to playing fun games with the film and asking myself: "is this intentionally strange for a reason or just not that well thought through, or so eager to get to the juicy parts that it does not care about coherence?". I enjoy those films for being rather unique experiences (perhaps for the best!) in mixing and matching elements together, but can also see why many people may not feel the same way! I especially like the way that Demons 2 is just a reiteration of the structure of the first film, since that adds a strange kind of deja vu to events playing out slightly differently (and with a childhood vs motherhood twist) to the same, almost pre-ordained schedule of the original film.

Plus, like The Face of Fear, Demons 2 features yet another couple trapped in a tower block who turn out to have mountaineering gear close to hand!

Mr Sausage, did you also notice a very young Asia Argento in Demons 2? (I think she is also in The Church too, but I have not yet seen the Soavi film)

This discussion reminds me of a rather guilty pleasure of mine, Poltergeist III. I think this is the nearest Hollywood came to the insane logical leaps of Italian horror films - it starts off quite tame but then escalates into dopplegangers, various chases through sideways-flooding meatlockers and frozen parking garages, and includes probably every possible kind of gag involving mirrors and reflection imagery that could possibly be conceived of! It is not quite as good as the director Gary Sherman's 70s London tube train cannibal epic Death Line, and it is possible that I'm just starry eyed over having crushes on both Nancy Allen and Lara Flynn Boyle (though Allen's 'wicked stepmother' character does have to treat Carol Ann quite horribly during this course of this film, by telling her husband to abandon her, and so on!), but it certainly makes for a nice addition to the 'possessed tower block' subgenre along with films like Shivers, Demons 2 and The Lift.


By the way I am definitely putting Death Line (aka Raw Meat) on my list and would highly recommend anyone to watch it - it is one of the high points of 70s British horror and you get to see Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasance playing off of each other in a couple of scenes! (If you are really curious compare and contrast it to the 2004 Franke Potente-starring Creep, which involves almost exactly the same plotline! While the director of that film in his commentary denies having known about Death Line before making it, I'm not entirely sure that I believe him!)

[Mr Sausage]

Mr Sausage, did you also notice a very young Asia Argento in Demons 2? (I think she is also in The Church too, but I have not yet seen the Soavi film)

I did! Even at ten and in her first role, she's quite a good little actress.

I also noticed one of Argento's other daughters, Fiore (who was notably the first victim in Phenomena) showed up in the original Demons.

[colinr0380]

Wow, I'd missed Fiore Argento in Demons - I'll have to watch it again tonight now! (But I agree that she has one of the best sequences in Phenomena, a little reminiscent of Tenebrae at the end with the 'head smashing through a sheet of glass' murder)

[ArchCarrier]

(...)the 'possessed tower block' subgenre along with films like Demons 2 and The Lift.

Is that the Dutch The Lift from '83? I was almost tempted to submit that as my Spotlight at the beginning of the project, as it's such a popular film in the Netherlands (at least when I was growing up). Director Dick Maas remade the film (very badly) in 2001 as Down, starring Naomi Watts.
Also don't forget Maas' take on Jaws in Amsterdamned.

[colinr0380]

Yes, that's the one, though my memories of the film mostly come from my parents taking me to a video store when I was six or seven and being terrified and traumatised/mesmerised and horribly fascinated by the lurid video covers for that film, Scanners and The Stuff!

(But then I was probably a much too sensitive kid, as I also seem to remember skirting warily around the Ghostbusters logo poster that was on the stairs to the shop!)

[ArchCarrier]

Most of those mid-80s VHS covers were far better than the movies inside anyway... I remember being disappointed so many times, after having carefully selected the movie with the most gory pictures on the back cover and then finding out they were the only gore scenes in the movie.

[Murdoch]

Anyone thinking of voting for L'Argent (Bresson)?

[Murdoch]

Well, I'll be voting for it anyway!

[Mr Sausage]

What does everyone think of Zvyagintsev's The Return as a horror film? It has the right atmosphere, seems like a kind of concrete nightmare, and there are some shots of the father that make him look positively demonic (the boat ride to the island).

I'm not entirely sure myself yet, and wouldn't mind knowing other people's thoughts.

[puxzkkx]

I was a bit scared by the first ten minutes of Possession, expecting a genre transplant of one of those stereotypically European 'relationship movies', where the central subject is talked around but never about, and always in the most purple kind of dialogue. However, it soon reveals itself to be an absurdist parody of this kind of movie, setting a tenor of hysteria that almost pummels you into laughing and testing the limits of what flies within even 'arthouse weirdness' with its ever-more-outlandish threats to Sam Neill's masculinity. On the other hand I found it sort of moving in the way it explores - via tentacle sex, ultraviolence and replicants - our inability to deal with imperfection in our relationships and partners. Still I can't say I really liked it or bought it as an example of quality cinema - I think that kind of hyperemotional romantic doubletalk is irritating regardless of whether it is offered up sincerely or as parody.

[tojoed]

By the way I am definitely putting Death Line (aka Raw Meat) on my list and would highly recommend anyone to watch it )

I remember seeing this in the cinema a long time ago, and I've only seen it that once.
"Mind the doors" never had so much meaning to it.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Possession is one of the most ridiculous films I've ever seen. It's also one of my favourites.

[colinr0380]

On the other hand I found it sort of moving in the way it explores - via tentacle sex, ultraviolence and replicants - our inability to deal with imperfection in our relationships and partners. Still I can't say I really liked it or bought it as an example of quality cinema - I think that kind of hyperemotional romantic doubletalk is irritating regardless of whether it is offered up sincerely or as parody.

There is also that East/West Germany split which also seems to factor into the dopplegangers and male/female, spouse/lover (and alien/human lover!) splits in the film as well.

While we are on the subject of Possession, long before I saw the Zulawski film I remember watching the rather upsetting (in the sense that people screaming incessantly in an attempt to 'chart the outer limits of insanity' for an hour and a quarter can become aggravating!) Japanese film √964 Pinocchio, which has a section in which the main female character is driven insane featuring a ten to fifteen minute sequence of her running through a train station (and crowds of people who are obviously not extras - it must be hellish to be a commuter in Japan, since if it is not the Beastie Boys vogueing their way through the station, instead shrieking women are barrelling through the corridors, getting in the way and causing you to miss your train!), amping herself up into an hysterical state before falling to her knees in a dead-end, empty tunnel and vomiting up about three times her body weight, which she inevitably proceeds to collapse and writhe about in! Certainly a striking(!) sequence and in retrospect it obviously feels like an attempt to top Adjani's subway freak-out in Possession!

Note: I would definitely not casually recommend √964 Pinocchio (or the other Shozin Fukui film released on DVD by Unearthed Films, Rubbers Lover, which acts as a kind of companion piece or semi-prequel to the other film) without major caveats - I found it very interesting to get a chance to see some of the other films made in the rather shortlived Japanese 'cyberpunk' genre, but of course would be much quicker to recommend Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo films to anyone curious about this area (which are extreme enough in themselves!)

[colinr0380]

By the way I am definitely putting Death Line (aka Raw Meat) on my list and would highly recommend anyone to watch it )

I remember seeing this in the cinema a long time ago, and I've only seen it that once.
"Mind the doors" never had so much meaning to it.

I remember my dad (not a horror film fan, to say the least!) being accidentally lulled into a false sense of security on two separate occasions when the film was shown on television by coming into the film during those cosy, gently comic scenes in Donald Pleasance's Inspector's police station (scenes which include lots of schtick about making cups of tea, if I remember correctly!) which then abruptly cuts to that long, almost pitch black, mostly silent but for the sound of dripping water 360° pan around the cannibal's lair as the film shifts perspectives at the mid-way point! (You don't get quite as much of a jarring sense from that YouTube clip presenting the sequence in isolation from the scene which came just before)

I wonder if there is any Hitchcock influence there since there is a much more comic aspect to the Inspector's scenes that kind of throws the rest of the film off-kilter, much as there was in Frenzy made only a year or so before.

[tojoed]

Good points, Colin. It's strange to relate, but I know a few people who are, like myself, not particularly horror fans, but who remember scenes from this film many years later.
I'd love to see it again actually. Is there a DVD available?

[colinr0380]

I'm working from an old video, but it looks as if there is a DVD of it available from Network.

By the way if any UK members haven't seen them and have access to the Horror Channel on Freeview, they are doing a mini-Pete Walker season over the next couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to seeing The Flesh and Blood Show for the first time, especially based on this amusingly hyperbolic trailer, but can highly recommend the incredibly bleak House of Whipcord (it has a kind of sleazy premise, along with many seedy, decrepit locations, but makes them work perfectly in service of a portrait of a nation polarised between the extremes of casual nudity and general licentiousness on the one hand and moral crusading of taking matters into your own hands for the sake of the Big Society on the other) and the 'family cannibal' film Frightmare.

Sheila Keith is really the star of the show in these two, and appears to relish her bad guy roles in these films! (Incidentally when all of the stuff about Andrew Sachs was going on a couple of years ago, with Sachs being portrayed as that saintly gentleman who made the nation laugh as Manuel in Fawlty Towers, I kept wondering how the tabloids would have reacted if they had known that he also got drilled in the head with a power drill in the pre-credits sequence of Frightmare!)

[domino harvey]

Tales From the Crypt (Freddie Francis 1972) / the Vault of Horror (Roy Ward Baker 1973) Here we have night and day adaptations of the infamous EC comics, and why one is certainly better than the other may not be as easily apparent for those unfamiliar with the source material. I imagine most reading have at least passing knowledge of the gruesome and heavy-handed morality of the comics, but the ghoulish dark humor and "just desserts" attitude is wholly absent from the joyless Tales From the Crypt. I've actually read all of the source comics for the titles in this film before, and one of the biggest problems with the film is that they've chosen some of the lousiest EC entries to adapt, with only the last segment being worthy of inclusion (but unworthy of the laborious treatment it gets. I'll never forget the manic panels of the blind men sawing their labyrinth, but none of that nightmarish dread is conjured here-- I was not surprised to find that the film was based on novelized written adaptations of the original comics, because that goes a long way towards explaining why everything is so drawn-out and serious). No such problems with the raucous the Vault of Horror, which smartly adapts some lesser known comics and keeps the fun tone of the source material. Even with the censor-cuts (which are uneven-- surely someone's hands getting chopped off is worse than a hammer to the noggin?), the flick plays dirty and keeps everything moving in a race to the punchline. To make it plain and personal, Tales From the Crypt felt like nothing more than another middling anthology horror flick, but the Vault of Horror made me feel ten again, giddily reading the collected EC reprints in the car on the way back home from the flea market. The later Tales From the Crypt TV series (which, like these films, drew liberally from the entire EC stable, not just TFtC/tVoH) does a better job of matching the gruesome sick jokes of the source to their adaptation, but the Vault of Horror'll do in a pinch.

[Mr Sausage]

Macabre (Lamberto Bava, 1980): An unpleasant and off-putting movie about a woman's bizarre descent into madness...I think. It's tough to say what the movie is trying to accomplish. I suppose it's trying to be a psycho-sexual thriller--only nothing thrilling happens, and the movie has little that could be considered actual psychology. It doesn't even really have a plot. It just circles around, going nowhere, until deciding that it may as well end. Not just content, either, to offer the usual flat, affectless dubbing, it also has the voice actors attempt southern accents, with predictably horrendous results. Boring, poorly made, and often plain revolting, especially in the way it tries to pretend its grimy story is somehow elegant. Best part of the movie was its final moment, the mind-boggling stupidity of which actually made me laugh.

[colinr0380]

Tales From The Crypt does have the fantastic segment involving a homicidal Joan Collins murdering her husband on Christmas Eve and trying to clear up the mess and make it look like an accident, while at the same time trying to get her precocious moppet of a child, eager for Santa's arrival, to stay in bed. Which then becomes more complicated when the radio reports of an escapee from the local mental hospital wearing a Santa costume, who then starts prowling around the house! That is one of the best anthology horror segments I've ever seen, especially the way that it plays out almost in total silence apart from the background of the carol service on the radio.

I just love the practicality of that segment (set against the comic schtick of the treatment of the same material in the Tales From The Crypt series) and the little touches like the wine glass full of blood, the changes in carol signifying a new twist in the action, or the use of the same poker that Collins bludgeoned her husband with to knock the bolt shut on the window!

Watching Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse again this week, I noticed a very neat stylistic trick that he does to create an excellent sense of things taking place beyond the frame - he has one character well framed and then someone else placed just outside of the frame, which then pans across to them. It works very nicely to create a sense of disconnect (but also a kind of violence of connection as suddenly characters interact together in conversation) and gets used throughout the film, for example in early dialogue scenes through to the more celebrated set pieces (set pieces which are so strong that even the framing gets repeated beat for beat in the remake without any consideration as to why they had been framed that way, just because it looks cool). I really think Kurosawa's Pulse has to stand as one of the greatest horror films of the 2000s - it is so beautiful and sad; frightening yet without an 'evildoer' to blame (or really a hero to celebrate).

(I also love the brief 'back projection' bus rides, which gives a strange Europa feel to a couple of transitional sequences)

There's a nice version up on Youtube with selectable English subtitles

[domino harvey]

Three more anthology films down

Tales From the Darkside: the Movie (John Harrison 1990) Well, it's only fitting that the movie expansion of the low-rent syndicated anthology horror show be equally pleased with low-hanging fruit even when given a semblance of a budget. When my most charitable response to the film's three tales is that they're dumb, that says a lot. Lots of inept stylistic choices abound, particularly in the absurd William Hickey segment, which reveal's most of the film's technicians spent their time turning dials on post-process filtering. Deborah Harry and Matthew Lawrence participate in the most ludicrous framing device of all time.

Trilogy of Terror (Dan Curtis 1975) Not a minute of time is wasted in this tight and impressive TV film. No framing device or even real opening credits slow it down. What's left are three interesting tales, only one of which could be charitably called "horror" in the jump-scare tradition, but all three rife with fascinating feminist rhetoric that when viewed against the era illuminates the underlying societal fears indeed. Special kudos of course to Karen Black, who is onscreen almost continuously for the film's scant 71 minute running time and has a blast embodying variations on an idea, but also Curtis, who allows the stories to unfold with much technical prowess and craft. This looks and plays better than most theatrical films of the period. Trilogy of Terror moves beyond the punctuated trickery of even the best anthology horror films into more intelligent and disturbing forms of provocation, and it will place high on my list.

From Beyond the Grave (Kevin Connor 1974) I swear I'm not intentionally trying to ostracize myself further in this thread, but you'd never know it. I don't get what y'all see in this one at all, as it strikes me as the least of the anthology films I've seen yet. The stories are patchworks of nonsense and weak narrative, with borderline non-sequitur set-ups that make the whole ordeal an exercise in watching the clock.

[knives]

You didn't even like the wonderful Cushing short in Tales From the Crypt? Different strokes I suppose. As for Dan Curtis his two Dark Shadows films are very good and while not list material are worth checking out. Jonathan Frid especially is wonderful in that first film. Burnt Offering is also one to check out as possibly the best of those various haunted house movies running around at the time.

[domino harvey]

Neat, I already have Burnt Offerings in the ol unwatched horror stack (the unwatched piles have their own list project subpiles now-- God grant me strength), will have to move it up. As for "Poetic Justice" (the Cushing tale), the comics (and subsequent show) dance a delicate ballet between "they had it coming" and maudlin ploys for emotion, but this one stumbles. The impetus behind Cushing's grossly inappropriate punishment were ill-defined and the resultant story was a pale imitation of better EC stories ("Fitting Punishment," for one) even before it got before cameras.

[knives]

Hmm, I'll admit that the story depends a lot on a familiarity with Cushing's stage persona, but it always works for me on an emotional level because of that. The twist really doesn't matter to me since it's a given anyway, so the emotional torment he goes through is where my interests lie. Also while I said that Burnt Offerings is the best of those late '70s early '80s haunted house flicks that doesn't necessarily mean it's a great one (though our tastes seem so wildly divergent on this topic anyway that my opinion probably doesn't factor to your).

[Mr Sausage]

I swear I'm not intentionally trying to ostracize myself further in this thread, but you'd never know it.

No worries. After you indicated that you preferred Dr. Giggles to something like Stagefright (which takes all of the notable elements of the genre and perfects them, a real feat for such a late entry), I figured our tastes weren't going meet all that often. Although it does bring to mind the time your slightly off-centre taste in Westerns sent that one member into a public meltdown.

(I also love the brief 'back projection' bus rides, which gives a strange Europa feel to a couple of transitional sequences)

Reminds me of those similar sequences in Cure (in competition for my top ten), where the reflection of the clouds and sky in the windows of the bus make those journeys seems like the passengers are floating peacefully into another world, an image that seems to prefigure the protagonist's own journey into a totally other psychic plane that he calmly controls rather than being at the mercy of.

Kiyoshii Kurosawa is by far the best modern director of horror of the past decade or so. More than anyone else, he seems to have realized the potential for horror films to examine unsettling modern anxieties and preoccupations, concerns which tend to appear as accidental byproducts in most modern horror films, when they appear at all. His films have the unsettling sense of being at once totally enigmatic and filled with palpable significance. He never explains the frameworks that underlie the actions in his films, but he is often explicit in how he uses those frameworks reveal or reflect the social and psychological predicaments of his characters. He's also one of the few horror directors to rely overtly on symbols, indeed symbols whose literal function in the story is less important than their significance (what happens to people after they see a ghost in Pulse, for instance, is inexplicable narratively, but is filled with symbolic meaning to the point that its inexplicable position in the literal narrative hardly matters at all, it carries so much weight just as a symbol).