Here’s my Halloween horror selection essentialist filmathon, all of which I intend to watch over this despicable season…
Evil Dead 2
For me, the king of all horror-comedy and my personal favourite horror film. It does look a little rough around the edges these days, and the claymation bit especially looks as dated as Ray Harryhausen’s classics (which I also love), but the affect of the film is not. Bruce Campbell plays our hero, Ash, attempting to survive the night against an evil entity that not only animates physically to attack him but also assaults him mentally at every opportunity. It’s a a tour de force of horror film-making. The evil viscerally and audibly permeates every beam and wall of the cabin as it tries to force its way into our reality and Ash is forced to loosen his grip on his own sanity in order to stay ahead of the malevolent force. But who needs sanity when you have a chainsaw attached to your stump? “Who’s laughing now!” We are. very, very much.
I should probably have left it for later in the film season but I’m impatient. It’s just too good.
Rubber
Post-modern, experimental, amusing and unique, Rubber is a horror oddity. An inanimate tire comes to life and ‘realises’ (literally, the tire’s learning curve and reaction is masterfully directed) that it has the power to kill. Rubber is an artful exploration of the anthropomorphised monster and of surrealist horror storytelling. It possibly drags on a little in the middle third but the film is too distinctive and weird to suffer greatly from it.
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978)
The 1970s version of this film is the best of them and probably of the body-snatching sub-genre itself (with The Thing possibly running a close second). It is dialoguically adult and its dramatic approach, especially the conceptual discussions of the main characters, bed the film in the zeitgeist and social construct of the period. The slow, cultural replacement of Donald Sutherland’s group of friends and confidantes sets up the terror of this inescapable foe, one which will replace you if you fall asleep. The end is shocking, bleak and wonderfully depressing.
Cronos
Guillermo del Toro’s first venture into big-screen horror and it is, as you would expect, both dark and elegant. A bejewelled, metallic, scarab-beetle looking device is created that imbues its wearer, once its claws are sunk in to them, with immortality. Ron Perlman seeks to find the device, his search set against the touching, yet still sad, story of a young girl and her now-immortal grandfather.
Dawn of the Dead (1974)
George Romero’s masterpiece, and the best of the true zombie films. By true, I mean that they are the shambolic, decayed, mindless flesh-eaters they should be, and none of this nonsensical free-running parkour undead that seems to be expected nowadays. In this film, with the outbreak slowly taking over the entire US, a group find and secure a mall to live in. The inevitable, inescapable fall comes, but throughout the film is replete with social commentary and bleak human analysis. THE prototypical zombie film.
Let the Right One in
I only ever saw the first twenty minutes of this one (I’d downloaded a copy that only had the audio description subtitles ‘Snow patters, a wind rustles through the leaves…) however I’m fairly confident I’m going to love the rest of it.
Braindead
Before Lord of the Rings and King Kong, Peter Jackson was a gore-fest director. Bad Taste won special effects plaudits but my favourite is Braindead, a wonderful comedic horror, following a doting son who finds he is required to kill his mother, and much of the local populous due to a Sumatran Rat Monkey bite zombifying them. Weapon of choice; lawnmower…
The Shining
Still not as good as the book but, although fiercer Stephen King fans than I may decry how far it strayed from the book’s premise and theme, Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel is cavernous, sumptuous and, with Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall’s phenomenal performances, quite terrifying. Redrum! Redrum!
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
I remember borrowing a bootleg video of this when I was fifteen, closing the curtains and settling down to watch it before my parents came home from work. I managed to get through the first half hour before having to stop it, after deciding it was too nasty to watch alone. And it was. Bloody brilliant. Slightly dated now and the series crawled downwards in quality as they went on, but this first chapter was horrible. I owned, and loved, a Freddy Krueger knife-glove for many years…
Shadow of the Vampire
Sublime, in both concept and execution. Shadow of the Vampire follows the film director, FW Murnau, played by John Malkovich, as he struggles to complete the filming of possibly the most famous vampire film, Nosferatu. The film, being shot entirely in Romania, has an eccentric star in Max Shreck who never departs from his character, supposedly due to being a student of Stanislavski’s method style of acting. However, Shreck, masterfully played by Willem Dafoe, is in truth an ancient Vampyr, and Murnau has hired him to play the lead, on the proviso that he may feed on the leading lady when the production is finished. Rich, stylish and funny (Eddie Izzard and Cary Elwes ably support), Shadow of the Vampire is a wonderful piece of metafiction horror.
Event Horizon
A horror film that actually scared me as an adult, this science-fiction horror is to some extent a Hellraiser in space, as the lost ship Event Horizon is rediscovered nine years after its experimental engine had taken it out of the known Universe. When it returns, only glimpses of the inhabitant’s video-log can hint at the horrors that the crew experienced, and what it brought back with it.
The Thing (1982)
Kurt Russell is brilliant, and somehow not the typical, comedy caricature of himself he generally plays in other films. His whisky-drinking helicopter pilot, Mac ready, serves as our focus within the Arctic scientific outpost that the alien attacks. This monster is no hulking evil but an organism that corrupts and perfectly replaces it’s victims. It skulks and picks off, bides its time and multiplies. The atmosphere of tension and paranoia that is created is palpable and the explosive body-horror of the creature(s) when exposed is brilliantly realised, graphically gory and even, despite the mood of the film, humorous.
Pan’s Labyrinth
Guillermo del Toro’s second entry in the horror-thon and it is dark and beautiful. A true fairytale, I was in love with it from the moment, sat in the cinema, that Captain Vidal brutally smashed in an old man’s teeth with a bottle. Blimey! The film’s dark, magical realism offsets the visceral brutality of Ofelia’s actual reality. Sorrowful, disturbing and powerful, Pan’s Labyrinth is phenomenal. And the peek-a-boo ‘playing’ Pale Man is horrifyingly brilliant.
A few extra titles that didn’t quite make it into this season:
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare Before Christmas/Corpse Bride, An American Werewolf in London, The Frighteners, Eraserhead, Wolf Creek, The Devil’s Backbone, Rec, Fido and Tucker and Dale vs Evil.
