Chinatown, Young Frankenstein, The Godfather: Part 2, A Woman Under the Influence, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Conversation, Lenny—1974 was a hell of a year in movies! And horror was just as revolutionary.
We celebrate the 50th anniversary of those gems of 1974 with our pick of the five best. But we still love It’s Alive, Dark Star, Sugar Hill, Beyond the Door, Frightmare, CaptainKronos Vampire Hunter, and Abby. We just love these five more.
5. The Phantom of the Paradise
Brian De Palma’s first and only musical is a Phantom of the Opera/Faust/The Picture of Dorian Gray mash up (with some Frankenstein, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and more than a little Rocky Horror thrown in for good measure). That’s a heady mix.
A campy skewering of the soulless music industry, Phantom sees tiny Seventies staple Paul Williams as the Satan-esque Swan, a music executive with a contract for you to sign. Poor Winslow (William Finley) is just as wide-eyed about his music as all those would-be starlets are about their chances for fame and fortune in this evil world of pop super stardom.
Like many horror musicals, the film works best as a comedy, but Finley’s garish visage once he makes his transformation from idealistic musician to mutilated Phantom is pretty horrifically effective. The film as a whole is a hot Seventies mess, but that’s kind of the joy of it, really.
4. Blood for Dracula (Andy Warhol’s Dracula)
The film was also released as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, which is kind of rude since it was actually Paul Morrissey’s Dracula. The longtime Warhol collaborator had just made Flesh for Frankenstein with Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro and Arno Jürging. (Both films were made available in 3D. If you are ever able to screen them theatrically in that format, you are compelled and required to do so!)
Set during a Socialist upswelling just before Fascism took hold in Italy, the film sees a weak and anemic Count reeling from the lack of virgins to eat. He travels with his manservant to the Italian villa of Il Marchese Di Fiore. But he did not take into account that Joe Dallesandro is the handyman there.
Lurid, hot and sloppy in that gloriously garish Morrissey tradition, it’s a trashy treasure.
3. Young Frankenstein
Will you look at this cast? Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman are untouchable comedy gods in this movie (per usual). Gene Wilder is the master of pretending to the a comedy’s straight man but employing every physical instinct for comedy. Peter Boyle, Teri Garr and Marty Feldman round out one of the most spot-on comedic ensembles ever assembled.
But Mel Brooks’s horror comedy is unlike many of his other comedies in that it honors and loves that thing it sends up. He used cinematic techniques popular in the 1930s, shot in black and white and even borrowed actual sets from James Whale’s original Frankenstein laboratory.
The result is a perfectly executed horror comedy.
2. Black Christmas
Director Bob Clark made two Christmas-themed films in his erratic career. His 1940s era A Christmas Story has become a holiday tradition for many families and most cable channels, but we celebrate a darker yule tide tale: Black Christmas.
Sure, it’s another case of mysterious phone calls leading to grisly murders; sure it’s another one-by-one pick off of sorority girls; sure, there’s a damaged child backstory; naturally John Saxon co-stars. Wait, what was different? Oh yeah, it did it first.
Released in 1974, the film predates most slashers by at least a half dozen years. It created the architecture. More importantly, the phone calls are actually quite unsettling and the end of the film is a powerful, memorable nightmare.
1. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Tobe Hooper’s camera work, so home-movie like, worked with the “based on a true story” tag line like nothing before it, and the result seriously disturbed the folks of 1974.
Hooper sidestepped all the horror gimmicks audiences had grown accustomed to – a spooky score that let you know when to grow tense, shadowy interiors that predicted oncoming scares – and instead shot guerilla-style in broad daylight, outdoors, with no score at all. You just couldn’t predict what was coming.
He dashes your expectations, making you uncomfortable, as if you have no idea what you could be in for. As if, in watching this film, you yourself are in more danger than you’d predicted.
But not more danger than Franklin is in, because Franklin is not in for a good time.
