It took a pair of experiences when I was 15, one book and one movie, for me to see what joy there is to be distilled from the horror genre … one was the novella “The Mist” by Stephen King, the other James Cameron’s original The Terminator. It might be because in both cases the endings were unapologetically downbeat and unresolved, but they gave me that queasy feeling that only the best horror can, sending me stumbling back into my sane, rational world with dread still lingering in my mind. That feeling stuck with me for days, and I came out the other side with a rabid taste for anything creepy.
Don’t get me wrong… I’m not fascinated by real morbidity. I shy away from actual violence, and find it absolutely repellent. I can’t watch real fistfights, avoided the “Faces of Death” video series like the plague, and I consider the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen to be television news footage a real pool of blood on an Israeli street, separating and congealing in the sun. But I think there’s truth that unreal horror can be a great catalyst, the mental equivalent of a roller coaster, that twists you and drops you and flings you around, making you feel adventurous and daring, but still never quite making you think that you’re really in danger. These 10 films do exactly that for me.
1. The Exorcist (1973)
William Friedkin claims, in adapting William Peter Blatty’s novel for the big screen, that he never intended to make a horror movie, but instead one about faith. For various reasons, I’m not sure if that’s true, but in doing so he made quite possibly the best horror film ever made.
It tells the story of the devil himself possessing a young girl (played by Linda Blair) in suburban Washington, DC, and the Catholic priests that come to her house to purge the demon from her. I’ll admit, the film takes a while to get going. There’s a lot of exposition at the beginning, dealing with the little girl’s mother (Ellen Burstyn playing a movie actress) and the tortured of existence of the priest she initially goes to with a plea to help her daughter. When the girl’s situation really starts deteriorating, with much pea-soup spitting and head-spinning, they call in the big guns in the form of an
official exorcist, who is played by Max Von Sydow). It takes death and sacrifice, but the
little girl is finally freed from Satan’s clutches.
I’ve thought about this film a lot, why it works so well. I know I’ve already mentioned Stephen King several times on these lists, but here’s yet another way I can work him in, this time in the most obvious genre. I’ve heard it said that the secret to Stephen’s success is that he brought horror into the everyday world. Instead of spooky, atmospheric places, his stories take place in the A&P down the block, where people buy Skippy peanut butter and Hostess Ding Dongs. These are all stories happening now, and you see so much of your own everyday existence in them that you can almost feel the monsters breathing down your neck, whether they’re shape-shifting spider demons from beyond time, or your own parents. Now, others might say (and I think Steve would agree) that it was Robert Bloch and his novel Psycho that really performed this sleight-of-fiction first, but the idea is the important thing. The Exorcist works because most of it is so commonplace, so matter-of-fact. Even when Linda Blair’s head is spinning around, it’s shot so simply, a static shot, the trickery obvious on the second viewing. It’s that first viewing, though, the very idea of it, that sets your heart racing.
The film actually has a pedestrian, almost documentary feel to it. Dialogue seems improvised, scenes kind of amble aimlessly from one setting to another. All this set-up makes it even more horrifying when the demonic possession really sets in, and Linda is sent flailing around, a deep, guttural voice speaking foul things from the pit of her stomach. The film is so assured, so perfectly clear on what it wants to show us, that there’s never room for us to question its truthfulness. It’s an epic battle staged mostly in a child’s bedroom, good and evil deciding the fate of the world just down the hall.
Even the poster for the film is brilliant, in my opinion. I remember seeing it as a child and assuming that the dark figure on the street was the menacing one. That figure, who is looking up at a second-story window, from which a wide swath of white light is emanating, is actually Max von Sydow’s character. The poster gains its true impact when you realize that is in fact a negative of what’s really going on: the exorcist is really the embodiment of light, standing bravely in the face of the blast of pure evil coming from the little girl’s bedroom.
Although in 2001 Friedkin sent out a reworked version of this (which premiered, strangely enough, in limited release in New York, Chicago, L.A., and Ann Arbor), I can’t say that “The Version You’ve Never Seen” is much of an improvement. The extra doctor scenes are unnecessary, the infamous “spider-walk” scene is best left as a DVD extra, and the subtle addition of demonic faces in the background of other scenes is just cheesy. Watch the original, along with the documentary “The Fear of God”, and you’ll understand what the fuss was all about back in 1973.
2. Barton Fink (1991)
There are certain filmmakers whose movies I don't expect to make sense, at least not right away. David Lynch, as I mentioned earlier, is the foremost. The Coen Brothers run a close second. With artists like these, I've found it best to just sit and let the film wash over me like waves, enjoying the plunge into the rabbit hole, not trying too hard to fit it all together into a cohesive whole until after the experience is done, and there's time to meditate and replay them in my head. The real joy comes later, when some odd bit of throwaway dialogue or unexplained action suddenly makes the whole thing snap into focus. That's the case with the Coen brother's fourth film, Barton Fink, and one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is recalling the moment it all came together, when the entire film flipped over into a whole new frame of reference, moving from black comedy to horror, from just plain weird to perfectly logical.
The film is the story of a New York playwright (the titular character, played with just the right touch of Italian/Jewish otherness by John Turturro) who, in the rush of good reviews for his new play, signs a contract to write for motion pictures in Hollywood. When he arrives in L.A. he finds a strangely lonely, sunlit wasteland, peopled by oddball characters that don't seem particularly helpful in helping him get over his sudden case of writer's block. One of these is played with aw-shucks Everyguy honesty by John Goodman, but he, like everything else, is not what he seems. All these factors, coupled with what seems to be a steadily increasing heat wave, eventually drives Barton to the brink of madness, until his hotel literally erupts into flames.
You're right. On paper, it doesn't make much sense, and I'll warn you now that I'm going to reveal the key to this unusual puzzle of a movie, so if you'd like to try to figure it out yourself, don't go any further... There. I've done my part...
The solution lies first in the fact that Barton is eventually revealed, in little bits and pieces, to not be a very sympathetic character at all. He claims to be writing for and about the "common man" in his plays, but when faced with a real-life one (John Goodman's character), he doesn't listen, interrupting his new friend's tales of the road to expound on how important his own work is. Secondly, it occurred to me on repeat viewings of the film that what happens to Barton is a laundry list of the worst things that could possibly happen to a writer... he suffers from crippling writer's block, is forced to produce material by deadlines issued by the movie studio, has a chance meeting with his favorite writer, who is a helpless drunkard -- and who, we later discover, didn't write most of his own work! -- is forced to watch movies to try to jumpstart his creativity, and finally has to resort to cannibalizing his own work and convince himself that it's the best he's ever done (notice how the dialogue from his play at the beginning and the screenplay at the end are nearly identical?)
So here's the thing... Barton is in hell. One specially reserved for writers who are pompous, vain, and elitist, those who write snooty art pieces and convince themselves that they're writing for "the masses", who they not-so-secretly look down upon. The fact the hotel bursts into flames at the end a literalization of this. I find this film inspiring not only because it does a better job of portraying the alternately lonely and thrilling act of sitting at the keyboard than any other film I know, but it's a constant reminder and a warning: never underestimate who it is you're writing for, and the real purpose behind it. It's a lie to think that you ever write for others; in the end, you're always writing for yourself, and betraying that fact is the worst sin you can commit.
3. Seven (1995)
I've known Morgan Freeman my entire life. I can't recall ever not being able to hear his smooth, mellow voice in my head, to know the casual grace that he brings to everything he does, even if that's dressing up like a hippie and singing about how great reading is. When I was kid, I didn't need him to tell me that, I already knew. But knowing that he loved reading too, well, that just made it all that much cooler.
I think a lot of people feel this way about Morgan. I heard somewhere about a poll that was conducted. In it, people were asked to give their opinions about what a new form of organized religion should be like, given no restrictions. When people were asked who they thought of when they pictured God, the majority of them said... you guessed it. He seems to embody all that is calm, dignified, and self-assured in the world. That's why he's the perfect person to play a detective who has to face down the ultimate killer, one whose ruthlesness and cruelty rivals the Devil himself.
The premise of Seven (or, more precisely titled, Se7en) is a brilliant collision of five supremely talented individuals (the director - David Fincher, the writer - Andrew Kevin Walker, and the actors - Morgan, Brad Pitt, and Kevin Spacey) who conspire to create the most thoroughly disquieting film of that genre spawned by 20th-century media fascination, that of the serial killer...
Bodies begin turning up in an unnamed, perpetually rainy city, each one horrifically (and ironically) based on one of the seven deadly sins (which, for the record, are Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Pride, Envy, and Wrath), and Morgan and Brad -- the veteran-nearing-retirement and the gung-ho rookie -- are charged to find who's responsible. The body-littered trail they follow gets darker and more perverse with each new murder, and the clues that the killer leaves behind lead them right along to the inevitable conclusion...
There are so many things to admire about this film -- all the performances I've mentioned above, but also the film's odd sense of restraint. No murders occur onscreen, and the way they're left to the imagination makes them even worse. Most of the horror is conveyed through the dialogue, of all things. It out-Hitchocks Hitchock in that respect.
Actually, The most genre-defying part of the film is how the detectives fail utterly at their job, even though Morgan's extensive library research helps them to understand what they're up against. The only reason the case gets solved is that the killer -- a cypher played by Kevin Spacey -- suddenly turns himself in at the end of the second act, with little fanfare. He just walks in off the street and admits to the crimes. And the brilliance of that move on the part of the filmmakers, the sheer poetry of it, is this... after that, things get worse. So much worse.
Morgan and Brad are personally drawn into the bloody masterwork this man is creating, until finally they have no choice but to help him add the final brushstroke. In the end, the madman is dead. The ends are wrapped up (although messily), the psychology of the killer is understood, all questions are answered. But you know what?
It doesn't help in the slightest.
In every other serial-killer film, once the perpetrator is put away, that's the end of it. The case is closed. But Andrew Kevin Walker's genius is that he knows the paranoia that lies in the heart of modern America. We need a rationale, we need a reason not to think that our neighbor might be just as diabolically insane as what we've seen on the screen. That's the allure of the serial killer, that there's a method to the madness. Find it and you can stop the killing. Morgan's rational wisdom and Brad's sheer tenacity should give them the edge. And there was a time when these types of films gave us that comfort, knowing that justice and right could eventually prevail. But what Mr. Walker tells us is that even when they do... they don't. There is violence in the world, random cruelty that staggers the mind, and the books will never be entirely put in balance. Behind this elegant mystery is an inescapable truth about the nature of the world, and that's something most horror films don't dare to reveal.
4. Hellraiser (1987)
I've met Clive Barker a total of three times, and if there's one artist whose career I'd most like to emulate, it's his. He's worked in almost every conceivable medium, letting his insanely fertile imagination take him wherever it wants, and the beauty of his life is that someone's always been there to support his flights of dark fancy. When he wrote plays, he had a close-knit band of friends to act them out. When he started writing short stories (and later, novels), a publisher was waiting on the other end of the fax line, rabid for every word. His art, from pen-and-ink drawings to sculpture to gigantic oil paintings are all well-received and sought after... he even managed to get Disney to support his ridiculous-in-theory quartet of young-adult books, each of which incorporates over 100 original paintings! He's a man who once inked a multi-million dollar publishing deal by giving only the titles of his next four books. Regardless of his unorthodox procedure, though, Clive always pays off. His works transport you to worlds completely familiar and totally alien. So I guess it's no surprise that when Liverpool's fifth-favorite son decided to make a movie, we ended up with Hellraiser.
The film is based on a novella called "The Hellbound Heart", and it is typically atypical Clive... it centers around a Chinese puzzle box that, when you solve it, opens the door to a new dimension of "ultimate pleasure". Of course, one man's pleasure being another's pain, this means that otherworldly creatures appear and rip you to shreds with rusty hooks. This is the fate of one unfortunate man, but he is given a chance at rebirth when his unscrupulous sister-in-law (who in life he was having an affair with) discovers she can resurrect her former lover by dripping blood on the floorboards of the room he died in. As she lures men to their death and continues to feed her increasingly-fleshed out boyfriend, they both find that the engineers of the puzzle box are very interested in not letting their captive get away...
I knew about this film long before I saw it. I wasn't quite up to reading Clive's work at the time, and had heard that the film pushed a lot of boundaries that I just didn't have an interest in having pushed at the time. Just the poster art was enough to warn me off... a man dressed in torn, bloody leather, his shaved head corpse-white and criscrossed with deep cuts, cuts that at each junction were marked by a large pin driven down into his skull... I specifically remember the first time I saw the movie, early in my voriacious horror-watching days. Watching Pinhead (as that terrible figure later came to be called) put the pieces of human face back together like a jigsaw on the floor of dark, chain-draped room, I remember thinking, Now, here's something no one's seen before. And judging how the film was received, that's what a lot of other people thought too.
The film is clearly made by a first-time director, just getting his sea legs in terms of pacing and dialogue. But the ideas are so out-there, so attention-grabbing and visceral, that you can't help but be drawn in. Clive has never been one to shy away in his books and paintings from showing the monsters that others leave to your imagination, and he has no intention of letting us off the hook in film either. From a half-built man dragging himself across the floor to the quartet of creatures Pinhead leads into our world, the world Clive creates is squishily squirm-inducing in many different ways.
Hellraiser isn't without its flaws. It's clear to see Clive's theatrical background at work in the film; every time the action moves outside the small house on Ludevico Street, it feels like a calculated move. And there are several concessions to the supernatural-horror stereotype: dream sequences, menacing street people, etc. Fortunately, by this point in his career, several execrable low-budget films had been made from his works, and it's to his credit that he decided to take the reigns himself. As can been seen from the endless parade of Hellraiser sequels (of which there are currently seven, and only the first of which is any good -- the one made before the creator disowned the series), no one can handle his own material quite like Clive.
5. The Wicker Man (1973)
Every once in a great while, a movie comes along that entirely makes you forget that you’re even watching a movie, one that never hits a wrong note that breaks the spell, thoughts of other things you could be doing don’t even come up, somehow the phone doesn’t ring. It’s as if the entire world conspires to help you experience nothing but that two hours of cinema. That’s what happened with me and The Wicker Man.
I remember seeing the box on the shelf of the video store I worked at for two solid years, but it never grabbed me. I recognized the man on the cover from the TV show “The Equalizer”, which never held any interest for me, and the straw face that dominated the cover art didn’t seem menacing at all, so I wondered why it was in the mystery/thriller section, with a blurb on the cover about how it was “perhaps the most frightening film ever”. Maybe I had burned myself out on horror film by that time. In any case, I could have taken it home any day during those two years for free. But for some reason, I didn’t.
Then, in 2003, for reasons I don’t really remember, I put it on my Netflix list and, on a cool fall afternoon when Amy was out of town visiting her family in Alabama, I watched it by myself. I really can’t remember the last time a film was so haunting, and how every element in it was perfectly placed, leading me along toward its inevitable, disturbing conclusion. It was lyrical, filled with dread, puzzles, and foreshadowing.
It really has a strong pedigree, and I’m surprised more people don’t know about it… it was written by Anthony Shaffer – the brother of Peter Shaffer, scribe of the movie that would have fallen at number 11 on my drama list if I had gone that far, Amadeus -- and stars Christopher Lee, attempting to break away from his shlockier Dracula/Fu Manchu roles, as the devious Lord Summerisle.
The story is that of a detective (Edward Woodward) who travels to a strange island off the coast of northern England to investigate the disappearance of young girl. What he finds there is an isolated community, still living in a nineteeth-century pagan cycle of music, rituals, and farm living. That the detective himself is a devout, celibate Christian only makes the clash of cultures even stronger, and the amoral tone of life on the island make him more and more uncomfortable, until he finally unravels the mystery and learns what the giant wooden sculpture built up on a high cliff is really for.
The strangest thing about The Wicker Man, and perhaps the reason that it’s so effective as a horror film, is its use of music. There’s a siren song that the innkeeper’s daughter sings to the detective the first night he arrives, trying to entice him to come to her room. It’s a repetitive, slow, sweet song, folky and innocent, even though the lascivious message that lies underneath is no secret. When I first heard it I was completely convinced that I had heard it somewhere before, the nostalgia it created so strong that it had to be from way back in my early childhood. I still haven’t managed to pin down how I know the song, although I may have heard it when my mother worked in a combination bookstore/music store in the late 70’s. There are many other memorable songs in the film as well, each one in the same lite-FM folk vein, lending a shimmer of normalcy to the top of the island’s inner life, which is never less than ominous.
I’ve resisted watching the film again in the three-years-plus since I saw it that first time, but know I will again soon, and if its strange spell is even half as potent as it was that first time, it will have justified its place on this list.
6. The Seventh Sign (1988)
Hard to believe there’s a sentimental favorite on a list of horror films, but this is one. I could tell you that it’s a thoughtful film about the nature of faith -- the basic, primal question of religion itself -- or an atmospheric thriller that sees the Book of Revelations coming true and trying to understand how the modern world would deal with it. I could even say that it’s an excuse to put Demi Moore in physical and mental anguish as the soon-to-be-mother of the Antichrist. All those things would be true. But in reality, the main reason it’s here is that it was the first time I went out with a girl named Amy Abernathy, someone you might recognize from the dedication page of this site.
My junior year of high school was a great time. In stark contrast to all my school years up until that point, I suddenly had a ton of great friends. I suddenly found myself spending all my time with the choir and drama groups at school, which had a sizeable overlapping population, and there were always things to do on the weekends. One was going out to the movies… they were still relatively cheap (under $5, mostly) and you could always find people ready to go, especially on Friday night, which was the case with The Seventh Sign. Amy, being able to take her parents’ full-sized van, drove about ten of us to what was then the Fox Village theater on Maple, and we sat together through the drama. Little did we know that we would still be each other’s favorite person to go to the movies with, even whole decades later.
As I hinted at before, the movie is one of those that tries to dig a little deeper into the idea of the Apocalypse. Rivers turn to blood, oceans boil, and Demi comes to realize that not only will her unborn child come into the world without a soul (because heaven’s inventory has run out, heralding the End of Times), but she is the only person who can restore the balance and renew the supply. The reason why this is so escapes me, although I remember it has something to do with reincarnation, which I wasn’t aware was really part of Christian doctrine. Anyway, it’s one of the few films that dares to ask the question pointblank… how does anyone know that their religion is the true religion?
7. 8MM (1999)
This is the second appearance in this list of Andrew Kevin Walker, who has written Se7en, this film, Tim burton's Sleepy Hollow, and strangely little else. I find it hard to believe that someone with claws that long -- long enough to dig deep into the psyche and find fresh, original horrors there -- won't come back at some point, wielding the next great script that will twist and churn in our heads for many long nights to come. Until then, I have his second brilliant piece of work to talk about.
8MM feels like one of those films that slipped through the cracks somehow, as if it were greenlit before the producers even realized what it was about. It paints such a grimly unflattering portrait of L.A. and the Hollywood machine, as a modern Moloch that demands the sacrifice of innocent children, that I still marvel that it even got made. Here's the story... Nicolas Cage plays a private detective, called to the estate of a wealthy industrialist who has just died. While going through his papers, his widow has found a single reel of film that starts out looking like a grainy, homemade porn film, but then shows the brutal killing of a teenage girl by a bondage-masked hulk of a man. Gravely disturbed, the widow charges Nicolas with finding out about the origin of the film, hoping to clear her husband's name, if nowhere else than in her own mind.
Nicolas' investigation goes from bad to worse, from questioning the girl's mother for information to the seediest-of-the-seedy underbellies of America, where human dignity and human lives can be bought and sold like butcher's meat, where porn and death are treated the same -- as a commodity. If you don't leave this film with your faith in human deceny shaken, then you haven't been paying attention. The thing about AKW's scripts, and the reason he gets so far under our skin, is not only that he can tap into that primal fear of chaos and random death that we all live with in the back of our minds. He also has the uncanny ability to show us how violence and cruelty is infectious, a plague in itself. When Nicolas finally finds the men responsible for the death of the girl, he must then decide what to do. In the hardest-to-watch scene in the film, he subdues one of them, and then, unable to bring himself to kill him, goes outside and calls the girl's mother. No less cruelly than the way her daughter was treated, he tells the woman that her daughter is dead... and why? Because he wants her to tell him it's okay to kill this man. He wants permission. It's one of the most despairing scenes I've ever watched. In discovering the truth, Nicolas finds, we ourselves turn out to be no better, no higher above those who hurt others just because they can.
Joel Schumacher (he of the Batman blasphemy) redeems himself as a director here, giving the whole production the feel of the "snuff" films that, he proposes, are bought and sold in secret underground meetings... it all feels like something you're not supposed to see. Obviously, he never shows the actual obscene footage being discussed, although at one point he does show a disturbing montage of them -- only to let us off the hook when one of the viewers points out that the girl supposedly being killed is the same in two different films. It's a cinematic one-two punch, first relief, followed closely by the thought that there's enough of an audience out there for someone to want to fake one of those movies... I have to credit him with keeping the atmosphere as claustrophobic and bleak as it is, when in other work he devolves into candy colors and broad, sweeping comedy. Also, he uses one of the creepiest pieces of music in recent years (Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy") to amazing effect.
The questions we're left with when it's all over are ones that have been with mankind since the beginning: In a world where it's hardly ever necessary, why do we kill? What does killing do to the one who carries it out? Does it matter whether you kill for a "good" reason or not? And above all, what comes after, for those who are left?
8. Psycho (1960)
They always say it’s the quiet ones… I’ve never known how to feel about that statement. It’s sounds to me like a way of pardoning ourselves for not noticing that there’s a potential killer living next door, a time-bomb so innocuous that no one could possibly notice it until it’s too late. Even so, there are millions of “quiet ones” (a group that probably includes me) that don’t do horrible things. I think that we’re all secretly darker and stranger than we lead everyone to believe; it’s just that outgoing people have more of an outlet for it, a way to disperse that dark energy. There’s a thesis in there somewhere, but in the meantime, here comes my favorite film by a peculiar little English gentleman who somehow had his finger squarely on the pulse of American cinematic thrill-seekers for over forty years.
Hitchcock was, above all, a brazen risk-taker in an impeccable suit. Who else would stage an entire film in a fifteen-foot dinghy adrift at sea? Or stage an entire murder mystery in one continuous shot? Or allow Salvador Dali to create a dream sequence for him? Or base an entire film on animal attacks and then never explain why they were happening? Or use American icons like the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore for backdrops of ridiculously tense foot chases? And, most importantly, who would have the audacity to messily kill off their main character halfway into a movie with no warning whatsoever?
My man Sir Alfred, that’s who. He loved espionage, he loved blondes, he loved seeing ordinary people dropped into extraordinary circumstances, but most of all he loved keeping audiences in suspense. From its screeching score to its ominous imagery of taxidermy and mirrors, there’s no better example, or film that has had a more lasting effect, than Psycho.
The story is the cinematic equivalent of the rope-a-dope… at first, it appears to be about a secretary that embezzles money from her employer so she and her boyfriend can run off together, but halfway through it goes off the tracks and never comes back… namely, when the girl in question (played by Janet Leigh) is brutally stabbed to death in her motel shower by what appears to be an old woman wielding a very large knife. That knife artistically marks the barrier between the oppressed, button-down, insular, victorious America of the 50’s and the wild, free, nothing-is-impossible America of the 60’s. (It also marked the boundary between how safe and secure the 50’s were and how anarchic and scary the 60’s were, but then all coins have two sides, don’t they?)
The rest of the film is taken up with other characters (some live, some don’t) trying to figure out exactly what happened, and why. And by the time the truth is finally found, Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins) has wormed his way into the American psyche like few characters have. There’s a great story about when Clive Barker first saw Psycho… he says he saw it in a theater, and liked it so much he stayed for a second showing. Some girls came and sat in front of him, and he spent the first forty minutes knowing how those girls were going to react when that shower curtain drew back… the feeling was so intoxicating that he decided right then that he wanted to create horror for a living.
9. Evil Dead 2 (1987)
In the eighties, there was no better role model for a wannabe filmmaker like myself than Sam Raimi. Here’s a guy who treated his first film, a self-proclaimed “ultimate experiment in horror” called The Evil Dead, as a business venture. He sold shares in the film on the merits of a few minutes of footage, and actually found people canny enough to realize that a cheapie horror flick was a sound investment. He made the film with his friends as cast and crew, and it made back his investors’ money with room to spare. When the independent studios came knocking, he remade it with a bigger budget (and the deceptive sequel numeral “2” after the title). Even if the film were pure crap, it would still be a great testament to self-made success. But the fact is that Evil Dead 2 is a great piece of camp and horror at the same time makes a very rare gem.
Horror maestros like Mario Bava and Dario Argento had been making wildly fantastic gross-out Italian films for years, but the first person to successfully translate it to American screens was Sam. And make no mistake about it… this film exists solely for Sam to trot out every visual trick he can think of. What little plot there is (college students try to spend the weekend in a haunted cabin) serves only to provide situations where gallons of fake blood (red, black and green) and acres of rubber prosthetics can be utilized.
But the real revolution is how Sam expanded on a theme that was barely there in the first incarnation of the film. All the demons, ooze, and muck come with a side of comedy, both of the queasy-laughter and slapstick varieties. For every scene of a coed being molested by tree, or a character’s deceased mother crawling up out of the earthen floor of the root cellar, there’s also a scene of a girl accidentally swallowing a flying eyeball, or Bruce Campbell’s possessed hand smashing plate after plate over his own head.
Bruce eventually chops off the offending hand and attaches a chainsaw to the stump (all the better to chop up zombies with), and this brings up another reason why the lighter elements of the film work so well. Bruce is capable of playing any situation absolutely straight and lending it an air of camp seriousness. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a caricature of 50’s action-hero handsomeness made flesh, either, and to see him willing to make himself look absolutely ridiculous on screen has won him a legion of dedicated fans (and cameos in nearly every Sam Raimi film since).
The climax of the film, where Bruce battles a giant demon head on the edge of a swirling time-vortex, is truly something to behold, and the cliffhanger ending provides the springboard for the next film, Army of Darkness, which amps up the comedy and special effects even farther. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun film, but it also highlights how masterfully Evil Dead 2 treads the line between scares and laughs.
10. Scream (1996)
The early nineties were a bad time for horror movies. The slasher franchises that had all but driven box office traffic in the eighties (Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.) were limping along from sequel to sequel, barely making enough money to justify their own existences. They had become exercises in either hokey comedy or sheer ludicrousness, with seemingly nothing new to contribute. Then Wes Craven, the mind behind the original Elm Street, read a script by Kevin Williamson that hinged upon a deceptively simple idea … since horror is most effective when it reflects the fears of everyday American life, what would happen if one were to turn that mirror on the horror movie industry itself? The result is a crazed funhouse meta-maze that single-handedly injected new life into the genre.
Every known horror cliché is present in Scream, but the brilliant thing about it is that all the kids whose lives are threatened have grown up on a steady diet of horror films, just like all teenagers have. They know all the rules and conventions; one character even clearly spells them out in one of the most memorable scenes. What results is a win-win situation for Craven… when he plays into the cliché it’s with a clever, knowing wink, and when he twists it around and does something unexpected, its impact doubles because it’s flaunting the rules (which he first does by killing off the biggest star in the film within the first ten minutes!)
Add into that a cast that was just gaining traction in their careers (including Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Rose McGowan, Matthew Lillard, and Liev Schreiber) and you’ve got something that made horror cool again. They got more mileage out of their subsequent films as well, with Scream 2 pointing out the facts and fallacies of movie sequels while playing directly into them, and Scream 3, which combined the “all bets are off” suspense of series-enders with a Hollywood adaptation of the events of the first movie (?!).
Note: One of the down sides of the success of Scream was its use by studios to justify dumping more money into the already tired franchises that it poked fun at. I can almost hear the studio executives exclaiming “See? Horror is back!” as they churned out snoozefests like Jason X (aka Friday the 13th part 10), Halloween H20 and Resurrection (the seventh and eighth in the series), not to mention the crossover Freddy Vs. Jason. Sigh…
Honorable Mention – Pet Sematary (1989)
Everyone has their personal point at which horror stops being fun and thought-provoking and just gets to be too much. For some, it's any kind of horror at all. Some people are physically unable to watch The Exorcist. I'm sure there are others who have been actively looking for that boundary but haven't found it yet. For me, it's the latest round of horror movies, where crafty young filmmakers have finally figured out that the worst thing that can happen to a person isn't to be killed, but instead to be horribly tortured and then killed, or maybe even to live on, horribly disfigured.
There have been two moments in my life when something I was watching (as entertainment, I should clarify) turned horribly wrong and went way past what I was comfortable with. I think it's fitting to leave this section with a few words about those times, since they point to the keystone of the horror experience, finding that boundary and testing the waters beyond...
The first was at a community theater production of Tennesee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer, which my father directed when I was about 10. I went to an evening performance with absolutely no idea what the story was about. It takes place in an insane asylum, and is basically a long argument between a woman and a neurosurgeon as to whether the woman's niece should be lobotomized. The girl has suffered some sort of psychological trauma concerning the death of her cousin (the woman's son) and can't leave the asylum. When it was finally revealed, near the end of the show, exactly how he died (and I'll leave that up to you to find out, if you don't know already), in a long, almost abstract monologue by the niece, I began to feel weird. My ears and face got strangely hot, and I began to start feeling dizzy and lightheaded. It wasn't until much later that I realized that I must have been on the verge of fainting. I had no idea that simply hearing someone talk could do that to a person, and it might be the very reason I waited as long as I did to start watching horror in any of its forms.
The second was Pet Sematary, which I, Amy, and a group of friends went to see a midnight showing of the weekend it opened in the spring of 1989. I understand, the reason people go to horror movies in flocks is for comfort, but in this case it really didn't do any good. The place was packed, but it in no way diminished the pure queasy nastiness that the film conveyed.
It's no surprise that this was a film based on a Stephen King novel, but not quite as well-known that King almost didn't publish the book, because he thought it too bleak and disturbing. And that's exactly what it is. It centers around a man who relocates his family to rural Maine, and in the course of learning about his new surroundings hears rumors about an old Micmac Indian burying ground back in the forest, past the pet cemetery that local children have constructed. Sure enough, when the family's beloved cat dies, they go the extra distance and bury it in the wilderness beyond the cemetery. It comes back, although changed somehow, meaner and, well, just different. When tragedy strikes and the family's little boy is killed by a speeding semi, the father crosses to the dark side and resurrects the little boy as well, and anyone who knows the story of the Monkey's Paw can tell you how bad an idea that is...
It really is a gruesome, campfire-ghost-story-gone-too-far on the page, and if can be said that it's a sign of quality when a film can capture the spirit and atmosphere of a novel, then this is one of the best films ever made. The production is slathered in dread and the inescapability of death from beginning to end. There are dozens of cringe-inducing moments, but none of the good kind. A subplot in which the wife talks about her long-dead sister, who turned into her family's dirty secret when she became physically and mentally twisted by spinal meningitis, as well as a flashback scene when a local boy's body is shipped back from World War II, only to be seen wandering around town several days later, are only two of them.
The truly horrible thing about this film is how it doesn't turn away, doesn't spare you any of the misery that these characters go through, and never gives you a sense that things are going to work out, just that they're going to keep getting worse, and worse...
I've never seen the movie since that night almost twenty years ago, and frankly, it's not just because I'm afraid to, but equally because I think it might seem to be so much less than I remember, cheesy where I remember it to be gut-twistingly dreadful. For me, it's better as a memory of that night where at least one of our friends actually ended up hiding behind her movie seat. Because isn't that what horror movies really are? A roller-coaster ride that you can point to and say "I survived that... how far can you go"?
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