(click thumbnails for larger view)

Some Great Movie Classics for a Chill October Night

I’m always up for a good horror movie, but Halloween gives me a particularly good excuse to indulge. The opposite of the films that’ll shortly be airing on television for the Christmas season, horror films make us look at possibilities (and other stuff) we’d rather not consider consciously, like fate and our own inevitable demise, the stench of decay inherent in mortality and, my personal favorite, human duality. The darkness we all carry around inside, the beast called humankind, the monster, that good old Jungian Shadow.

Of course, many great movies deal with these themes, but they’re not all certified horror movies. A real horror movie creeps up on you and stays for awhile, it upsets the fabric of nature, makes it hard to continue accepting the reality you’ve been living. The psychic disturbance may last for only an hour, it may last for a couple of days, but you know you’ve been given something to think about.

Make that, worry about.

Horror is the most elemental of genres, which could be the reason why it is never taken seriously by academics and critics. Even audiences view horror cinema as the most disposable art form (and thus, not really an art form at all). But horror films that are really doing their job inspire the purest emotions, leapfrogging suspense and moving straight to terror, activating life saving responses from our days as prey on the veldt, such as that ever popular feeling, total revulsion. You know, something to really fire up the flight response and make sitting in a theatre seem less than comfortable, even counterproductive.

Only gut-busting laughter and sexual arousal are as primeval as horror, and everyone knows that art makes us rise above our baser instincts. Anything that makes us feel our deepest nature growling from slumber, a nature that we spend a lifetime learning to repress, can’t possibly be healthy, nevermind art.

So, most horror films are disdained by the culture that produces them, waiting for respectability until their primeval, psychosexual charge has lost its current, or at the very least, until our social taboos and standards have evolved (and by “evolved” I don’t necessarily mean “improved” — merely altered into something different by time). Author Stephen King has theorized (in the delightful Danse Macabre, 1981) that the best storytellers in the genre are always dissecting the status quo, working out their own little autopsy of a culture’s dreams, desires and self-deceptions and leaving them in a mess for someone else to clean up. That seems as good an explanation as any for why Horror remains eternal, the insane relative that Comedy and Romance keep locked in the cellar.

Ah, but there is no basement door strong enough, and there never will be. Horror slips out through the cracks, infecting other genres, continually making itself known and heard again, especially at times of economic and social upheaval, like now, when the status quo has created a vast Shadow of taboos, unspoken dos and don’ts, shoulds and shouldn’ts, with-mes and against-mes. The tale of horror is as ancient as storytelling itself, perhaps the third story ever told (“Did ya see that boar gut Ralph yesterday? Who knew the old man had so much blood in him?”)

Likewise, horror cinema was born as soon as there were moving pictures and some horror films never quite lose their charge. A few tap into something truthful about the human condition and have finally gained credence as great films; others continue to inspire dread because they remain intimate with what really scares us. The following list of 11 classics (because I just couldn‘t shave it to 10) is not intended as definitive, but merely as a brief sampling of rental suggestions for aficionados, or in case you don’t have a costume or a date on Friday, the 31st of October. Or maybe you want to hide from the trick-or-treaters, pop some corn, turn out the lights and snuggle with someone warm.

Only, (heh-heh-heh), don’t say I didn’t warn you. A couple of these movies still have their teeth. Enjoy, now…

Nosferatu (1922, 81 m.): Yeah, it’s creaky as a castle door hinge, and a silent film besides (speaking of horrors), but here is where it all truly began. F. W. Murnau’s masterpiece of early cinematic terror, very loosely adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, showed the world how it was done and as a consequence may be one of the most imitated films of all time. Terminally weird Max Schreck as the horrible Count Orlov is still as chilling and creepy and monstrous as any film villain in history. Slow going in its opening act, but a fabulous visual feast when it reaches the vampire’s lair. The film’s subtitle, translated into English, is a Symphony of Horrors (eine Symphonie des Grauens).

Frankenstein (1931, 71 m.): Not the greatest of Universal Studios’ monster films from the Depression era, nor the first (that was Lugosi’s Dracula, earlier the same year) but certainly the most important. Frankenstein was the prototypical box-office sleeper, a film the studio was trying out with low expectations, which then became a smash hit beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Its brilliance lies in two human factors: director James Whale, who transformed Mary Shelley’s cumbersome, not always believable tale into a story of the Sympathetic Monster, an archetype for the times; and the world-shaking performance by a lisping British character actor named Boris Karloff. The Whale/Karloff monster is an ungodly beast brought to life through no fault of his own, then made to suffer interminable humiliations before his brutal death at the hands of a mob (sort of like being a teenager). In this film, the horror comes from identifying with the Outsider, and recoiling from your own kind.

The acting by all is way over the top except for Karloff’s performance, which is a giddy privelege to watch, one of the few acts of pure originality ever caught on film. Contains that immortal snippet of rousing blasphemy “Oh, it’s alive, it’s alive! IT’S ALIVE! In the name of God, now I know what it feels…(the rest drowned by thunder)…”

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! It’s short, so you can double it with…

Dead of Night (1945, 102 m.): No matter what kind of buzz you seek from your Halloween cinema, this brilliant anthology of shivery tales should provide. Four directors and a flawless British cast unfurl a series of archetypal ghost stories, some disturbing, others comical, all framed by a man’s visit to an English country house, where he experiences a powerful sense of déjà vu among strangers. Every viewer is different, of course, I won’t promise anything, but the grand finale of this film made the hair on my head start violently from its normal place of rest. Michael Redgrave is unforgettable as a ventriloquist in need of some serious therapy.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 80 m.): It was only natural that horror, ancient and pulsating, would tickle and tease that newcomer science fiction when it finally found its cinematic voice. Horror can’t leave any of the other genres alone, and those touching on the fantastic are especially fair game. Die-hard sci-fi geeks think their domain should only be about the “Sense of Wonder,” but any way you slice this pungent allegory of American life in the conformist 1950s it’s a great movie. A thoroughly plausible investigation of what makes us human, with a perfectly constructed rising line of tension, the original Body Snatchers still has the power to disturb. See only the widescreen version, if you can.

A modest drive-in hit in its day, I first saw it myself when I was a child, but it scares me more now than it ever did then. If you don’t see Pod People around you every day, then you must be one of them.

Horror of Dracula (1958, 82 m.): a sentimental favorite. Forget Lugosi, whom I dearly love, irrepressible ham that he was, and forget Oldman, too, with his overdetermined Count romantically falling for Winona Ryder. The towering Christopher Lee (6’5”) was the epitome of Bram Stoker’s indestructible bloodsucker for the many years in between Lugosi and Oldman, because he played him just the way he should be played — as an evil, evil, undead, merciless, inescapable demon from hell, okay? Once in his sights, it’s all over, you are doomed to torment (in part, no doubt, because the music score is too loud). This was Lee’s first appearance in the role, with the incomparable Peter Cushing as his nemesis, Van Helsing. Though it was made on a low budget, distilling Stoker’s original story to the very bone, it’s still a rollicking, trashy good time with a smashing climax. Interview this.

Try a Hitchcock Double Feature:

Psycho (1960, 109 m.): the clear point at which horror cinema divided into two sub genres — the supernatural and the realistic. It was the only way Hitchcock was going to make a horror film, since he had strenuously avoided ghosts and monsters throughout the previous three and a half decades of his career.

The first slasher movie and still the best, Psycho acknowledged there were human monsters abroad, something we had always known but which filmmakers had been reluctant to address before, because it would have lowered the paying customer’s ability to recover quickly from the experience. If you can blame it on a mythic demon like a vampire, the audience remains safe, even in the theatre seats. But if you blame it on Mother, you’ve got something that cuts straight to the heart of things, if you’ll forgive the unfortunate imagery.

Famous as a piece of relentless manipulation, what Psycho really does is seduce us, a much more pleasant way to have your expectations totally violated, drawn and quartered. When first released, this movie shocked the audience like a hair-dryer falling into the bathtub. Some of that edge has been dulled by constant imitation (as it has with Nosferatu), but even if you’ve seen it and know all the “surprise” plot twists, Psycho is still eminently frightful and enjoyable as the blackest of black comedies, a trip through the coldest and dankest of graveyards, inviting us to settle in with the notion that the universe doesn’t care and (heh-heh) never has.

Starring Jamie Leigh Curtis’ utterly foxy mom, Janet Leigh, it also marks the first close-up of a flushing toilet in a Hollywood movie.

The Birds (1963, 119 m.): Still in a horrific mood, Hitch followed Psycho with one of the most original movies ever made. Though it is based on a brief short story by Daphne DuMaurier about an isolated farm house attacked by birds, this film is all Hitchcock, a Technicolor nightmare of cosmic proportions, as all of nature turns against humankind. It’s actually a fairly common occurrence, both in Nature and the movies, but there’s almost always a reasonable explanation. In The Birds, there is some evidence that the plague is unleashed by the all-consuming jealousy of Mother (again), or simply the fierce psychic energies of a run-of-the-mill love triangle, but really, it happens because we deserve it don‘t we? Deep down? Several magnificent Hitchcockian set pieces, with the attacks steadily increasing in size and intensity until an unprophesied apocalypse looms over the California coast. There is no music in the film, only Bernard Herrmann’s orchestrations of chirping, fluttering, cawing, screeching birds.

Or a Polanski Double Feature:

Repulsion (1965, 104 m.): Nearly every film Roman Polanski has made could be classified as horror; the guy has lived an entire life, from childhood on, pursued by real-life demons and his films are all about the terrors that suffuse the sunlit world. In the 1960s, when he was ascending to international prominence as a great artist, he made two nerve-jangling films exploring feminine anxiety about sex, birth and death.

Repulsion is about a young woman, played by a twitching, ominously withdrawn Catherine Deneuve, who has intimacy issues as serious as those of Norman Bates. Except in this film, we are implacably pulled into sharing the madness, no exceptions. This is not a movie to watch if you are at all unstable: as Catherine becomes enveloped in her own isolation and insanity, taking us with her, it becomes ever more difficult to separate reality and hallucination, whether onscreen or off, though it is clear who the real monsters are — those mindless, groping, lust-crazed ogres popularly known as the male of the species. Made while there was supposed to be a “sexual revolution” going on, Repulsion taps into a terrible darkness that is still with us.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968, 136 m.): Uncertain how you really feel about pregnancy and childbirth? Polanski’s first film in America is one of the great movies in any genre from the sixties, an electrifying Gothic shot in New York’s monstrous Dakota building and a masterpiece of mood-making. In fact, Rosemary’s Baby is all atmosphere and suggestion, a bloodless journey into the depths of paranoia and the downsides of reproduction that could only have been made by a European. If you are at all concerned about Satan and his minions, you should definitely rent Father of the Bride instead (either version).

I never cared much for Mia Farrow as an actress, but she is fantastic here, as a pregnant woman who suspects the next-door neighbors are, well, as creepy as they seem to be. Polanski wrote a scrupulously faithful screenplay from the novel by Ira-The Stepford Wives-Levin, filled the supporting cast with great faces from Hollywood’s studio era, and shot the movie in long takes, with an uncanny knack for investing doorways and walls with a vise-like sense of foreboding.

Slowly but surely, through a succession of impeccably staged and acted scenes of familiar domestic life, the chills start working their way up and down your spinal cord in larger and larger waves, beginning with that immortal line, “This is no dream! This is really happening!”

The Exorcist (1973, 122 m.): I’m not as cynical about this one as I used to be, primarily because director William Friedkin has said that he and the film’s author William Peter Blatty believed this story really happened (to a young American boy in the late forties). I knew about Blatty, but I always felt Friedkin was hedging, possibly because the techniques he used to get this film’s great performances stepped over the line of acceptable behavior too often. A former maker of documentaries, coming off the surprise success of The French Connection (1971), Friedkin was out of control while shooting The Exorcist, at least one of his stunts injuring Ellen Burstyn for life. Still, there is no doubt he made a film here that out-Polankis Polanski in melding realism with the supernatural. The Exorcist is a brutally terrifying movie that set a new standard for smashing taboos, one from which we’ve never fully recovered.At the time of its release, the media was all agog with reports about how The Exorcist tapped into some imagined new interest in the occult and demonic possession, but that misses a big chunk of the film’s universality. In the wake of a decade (the sixties again) in which all sense of order, tradition and respect for one’s elders had been put to the torch, adults in the Western hemisphere already thought the children had gone absolutely mad, unleashing evil between the walls of quiet, bourgeois respectability. In a society that often romanticizes the innocence of childhood to a nauseating degree, The Exorcist confirmed the Shadow cast by the myth and showed the unshowable: children can be monsters, too.

Oh, it had been said before — in The Bad Seed (1956), for instance, and Village of the Damned (1960) — but it had never been shown, that’s the secret. When the demon invades, it will not be wearing horns and a tail but by stealth, and he’ll destroy your innocence first.

Alien (1979, 117 m.): Even before I knew this classic was about to be released in a “Director’s Cut” (on October 29, 2003, at a theatre near you), it still made the short list of movies I would recommend to anyone seeking a good old fashioned horrific time on Halloween night. Steeped in weirdly organic, Lovecraftian imagery and a general, post-feminist, psychosexual unease, Alien follows The Excorcist’s lead in revealing visually all that cannot, or should not, be shown: the universe is a terrifying freakin’ place, and Nature, its primary engine, is a complex and cruel task master. Who says science isn’t horrifying? Though it has only one scene of nearly unspeakable violence, Alien is crammed with disturbing visions, especially in its first thirty minutes or so. The “face hugger” alone should put you off of sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong for life. After that, director Ridley Scott doesn’t really have to do anything else to scare us; we’ll do it for him.

Sure, on one level it’s just another haunted house movie, only it’s set in a medieval-looking spaceship, blah-blah-blah. Alien’s detractors wave this observation around as if the recasting of old forms hasn’t been the ongoing project of art since cave painting. This film takes us back to the veldt, rejoins us with what Camille Paglia called the “Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten.” If you’ve never seen it in a theatre, trust me, Panavision-with-Dolby is the only way to go, and now is your chance. The Jerry Goldsmith score is both shivery and oddly beautiful.