Tag Archives: horror movies

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown: Day 19: Exorcist

Leave a comment

The Exorcist (1973)

For evocative, nerve jangling, demonic horror, you will not find better than The Exorcist.

Slow-moving, richly textured, gorgeously and thoughtfully framed, The Exorcist follows a very black and white, good versus evil conflict: Father Merrin V Satan for the soul of an innocent child.

But thanks to an intricate and nuanced screenplay adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, the film boasts any number of flawed characters struggling to find faith and to do what’s right in this situation. And thanks to director William Friedkin’s immaculate filming, we are entranced by early wide shots of a golden Middle East, then brought closer to watch people running here and there on the Georgetown campus or on the streets of NYC.

Then we pull in a bit more: interiors of Chris MacNeil’s (Ellen Burstyn) place on location, the hospital where Fr. Karras’s mother is surrounded by forgotten souls, the labs and conference rooms where an impotent medical community fails to cure poor Regan (Linda Blair).

Then even closer, in the bedroom, where you can see Regan’s breath in the chilly air, and examine the flesh rotting off her young face. Here, in the intimacy, there’s no escaping that voice, toying with everyone with such vulgarity.

The voice belongs to Mercedes McCambridge, and she may have been the casting director’s greatest triumph. Of course, Jason Miller as poor, wounded Fr. Damien Karras could not have been better. Indeed, he, Burstyn, and young Linda Blair were all nominated for Oscars.

So was Friedkin, the director who balanced every scene to expose its divinity and warts, and to quietly build tension. When he was good and ready, he let that tension burst into explosions of terrifying mayhem that became a blueprint for dozens of films throughout the Seventies and marked a lasting icon for the genre.

Remember the stories of moviegoers fleeing the theatre, or fainting in the aisles midway through this film? It seemed like hype then, but watch it today, experience the power the film still has, and you can only imagine how little the poor folks of the early 1970s were prepared.

Even after all this time, The Exorcist is a flat-out masterpiece.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown, Day 18: Martyrs

Leave a comment

Martyrs (2008)

This is one you may need to prepare yourself for. Equal parts orphanage ghost story, suburban revenge fantasy, and medical experimentation horror flick, the whole of Martyrs is a brutal tale that is hard to watch, hard to turn away from, and worth the effort.

On the surface we follow Lucie’s (Mylene Jampanoi) descent into madness after escaping, as a child, from an abandoned warehouse where she’d been tortured by unknown hands.

Mining the heartbreaking loneliness of abandoned, damaged children, the film follows the profound relationship between Lucie and the only friend she will ever have, an undeterrably loving Anna (Morjana Alaoui).

Constantly subverting expectations, including those immediately felt for Anna’s love, writer/director Pascal Laugier makes a series of sharp turns, but he throws unforgettable images at you periodically, and your affection for the leads keeps you breathlessly engaged.

The third act offers the most abrupt change of course as well as tone, and the proceedings are tough to stomach, but well conceived and equally skillfully executed. It holds some gruesome imagery, and though the climax may not be pleasing, it certainly doesn’t disappoint.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbct9qWBSME

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown, Day 17: They Look Like People

Leave a comment

They Look Like People (2015)

A lot of horror films introduce characters with a kind of cinematic shorthand: disheveled, bearded, worn white tee shirt = sketchy but sympathetic. Skinny jeans, self-empowerment in the headphones, checks his flex in the gym mirror = douchebag.

Generally it happens so the film can devote less time to character development and jump right into the carnage, but They Look Like People writer/director Perry Blackshear has other aims in mind.

Christian (Evan Dumouchel) is killing it. He’s benching 250 now, looks mussed but handsome as he excels at work, and he’s even gotten up the nerve to ask out his smokin’ hot boss. On his way home from work to change for that date he runs into his best friend from childhood, Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews), who’s looking a little worse for wear. Christian doesn’t care. With just a second’s reluctance, Christian invites him in – to his apartment, his date, and his life.

But there is something seriously wrong with Wyatt.

Blackshear’s film nimbly treads the same ground as the wonderful Frailty and the damn near perfect Take Shelter in that he uses sympathetic characters and realistic situations to blur the line between mental illness and the supernatural.

Wyatt believes there is a coming demonic war and he’s gone to rescue his one true friend. Andrews is sweetly convincing as the shell shocked young man unsure as to whether his head is full of bad wiring, or whether his ex-fiance has demon fever.

The real star here, though, is Dumouchel, whose character arc shames you for your immediate assessment. Blackshear examines love – true, lifelong friendship – in a way that has maybe never been explored as authentically in a horror film before. It’s this genuineness, this abiding tenderness Christian and Wyatt have for each other, that makes the film so moving and, simultaneously, so deeply scary.

They Look Like People can only barely be considered a horror film. It lacks the mean-spiritedness generally associated with the genre and replaces it with something both beautiful and terrifying. Whatever the genre, though, Blackshear’s film is a resounding success.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown, Day 16: The Thing

Leave a comment

The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter’s remake of the 1951 SciFi flick The Thing from Another World is both reverent and barrier-breaking, losing a bit of the original’s Cold War dread, but concocting a thoroughly spectacular tale of icy isolation, contamination and mutation.

A beard-tastic cast portrays the team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic who take in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in a cut-off wasteland with barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.

This is an amped up body snatcher movie benefitting from some of Carpenter’s most cinema-fluent and crafty direction: wide shots when we need to see the vastness of the unruly wilds; tight shots to remind us of the close quarters with parasitic death inside.

Rob Bottin’s FX, especially for the time, blew minds. That spider head move – woo-hoo!

The story remains taut beginning to end, and there’s rarely any telling just who is and who is not infected by the last reel. You’re as baffled and confined as the scientists.

The film was an inexplicable bomb with audiences and critics alike when it opened, but it’s gone on to become a must see.

Seriously, you must see it.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7t-919Ec9U

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown, Day 15: Oldboy

Leave a comment

Oldboy (2003)

So a guy passes out after a hard night of drinking. It’s his daughter’s birthday, and that helps us see that the guy is a dick. He wakes up a prisoner in a weird, apartment-like cell. Here he stays for years and years.

The guy is Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi). The film is Oldboy, director Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece of subversive brutality and serious wrongdoing.

This is not a horror film in any traditional sense – not even in South Korean cinema’s extreme sense. Though it was embraced – and rightly so – by horror circles, this is a refreshing and compelling take on the revenge fantasy that drags you places you do not expect to go. But that’s the magnificence of Chan-wook Park, and if you have the stomach, you should follow where he leads.

Released in 2003 and remade (BADLY) ten years later, the film’s secrets have likely been spilled by this point. One of the miraculous things about Oldboy is that, even if you know the twists that lie ahead, you cannot imagine how Park will reveal and execute them.

And if you don’t know, all the better

Choi is unforgettable as the film’s anti-hero, and his disheveled explosion of emotion is perfectly balanced by the elegantly evil Ji-tae Yu.

Choi takes you with him through a brutal, original, startling and difficult to watch mystery. You will want to look away, but don’t do it! What you witness will no doubt shake and disturb you, but missing it would be the bigger mistake.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown, Day 14: Freaks

Leave a comment

Freaks (1932)

Short and sweet, like most of its performers, Tod Browning’s controversial film Freaks is one of those movies you will never forget. Populated almost entirely by unusual actors – midgets, amputees, the physically deformed, and an honest to god set of conjoined twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton) – Freaks makes you wonder whether you should be watching it at all. This, of course, is an underlying tension in most horror films, but with Freaks, it’s right up front. Is what Browning does with the film empathetic or exploitative, or both? And, of course, am I a bad person for watching this film?

Well, that’s not for me to say. I suspect you may be a bad person, perhaps even a serial killer. Or maybe that’s me. What I can tell you for sure is that this film is unsettling, and the final, rainy act of vengeance is truly creepy to watch.

Beautiful ‘normal’ Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) performs in the circus, flirting with sideshow manager Hans (Harry Earles) for the perks – the gifts, and the chance to mock him with the other ‘normals’ in the group. When she realizes that Hans is loaded, she decides to marry and then kill him, with the help of dunderheaded Hercules (Henry Victor).

Among the film’s drawbacks are the ridiculously thick accents of most of the principal actors. Earles, in particular, is almost impossible to understand, but he is – god help me – absolutely adorable. That’s Hans’s problem, of course. His baby face and tiny stature make him tough to take seriously, and his tendency to fall for opportunistic bitches that tower over him isn’t helping.

To make things even more unseemly, Hans is loved truly by fellow little person Frieda, played by the actor’s own sister Daisy. The two characters are not, as far as I can tell, meant to be related, but they look exactly alike, which just makes the whole effect all the weirder. I have no idea if this was intentional or not, but I’m for it.

Well sir, the close knit “family” of freaks gets wind of Cleopatra’s plan, and they exact revenge. The revenge itself – the final act – makes no logical sense, but the perpetration is awesome.

Browning’s camera stays near the ground, filming everything as lowly, dark, hiding, creeping. He’s taking the inconcrete fear we have of what is abnormal and making it literal: that which we hide from view will creep forth and kill us.

Or, turn us into a chicken lady.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown, Day 13: Wolf Creek

Leave a comment

Wolf Creek (2005)

There have long been filmmakers whose ultimate goal is not entertainment; the idea being that art is meant to affect, not entertain. These filmmakers, from Sam Peckinpah to Lars von Trier, generally develop impenetrable indie credibility and a line of devoted, bawling fans. No one in recent memory has applied this ideology to horror cinema as effectively as writer/director Greg McLean with his Outback opus Wolf Creek.

Some of the best scares in film have come as the reaction to urbanites’ fear of losing the tentative grasp on our own link in the food chain once we find ourselves in the middle of nowhere. With Wolf Creek, it’s as if McLean looked at American filmmakers’ preoccupation with backwoods thrillers and scoffed, in his best Mick Dundee, “That’s not the middle of nowhere. This is the middle of nowhere.”

A quick glimpse of a map of Australia points out that nearly every city with a population higher than that of an Ohio State University dorm is along the coastline. McLean explores the isolated beauty of this vast, empty middle with spectacularly creepy results.

Using only digital cameras to enhance an ultra-naturalistic style, McLean’s happy backpackers find themselves immobile outside Wolf Creek National Park when their car stops running. As luck would have it, friendly bushman Mick Taylor (John Jarratt) drives up offering a tow back to his camp, where he promises to fix the vehicle.

If this sounds predictable and obvious to you, rest assured that McLean has plans to burst every cliché in the genre, and he succeeds on almost every level.

His first triumph is in the acting. Jarratt’s killer is an amiable sadist who is so real it’s jarring. You find yourself hoping he’s an actor. His performance singlehandedly shames the great Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven, whose backwoods horror films relied so completely on caricatures for villains.

A horror film this realistic is not only hard to watch, but a bit hard to justify. What makes an audience interested in observing human suffering so meticulously recreated? This is where, like a true artist, McLean finally succeeds. What is as unsettling as the film itself is that its content is somehow satisfying.

 
Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown, Day 12: Juan of the Dead

Leave a comment

Juan of the Dead (Juan de los muertos) (2011)

By 2011, finding a zombie film with something new to say was pretty difficult, but writer/director/Cuban Alejandro Brugues managed to do just that with his bloody political satire Juan of the Dead.

First, what a kick ass title. Honestly, that’s a lot to live up to, aligning yourself to three of the great zombie flicks, both Dawns and Shaun of the Dead. That’s heady company, begging the comparison of Dawn’s scathing social commentary and Shaun’s ingenious wit. Juan actually survives this comparison.

Breathtakingly and unapologetically Cuban, the film shadows slacker Juan and his layabout pals as they reconfigure their longtime survival instincts to make the most of Cuba’s zombie infestation.

I’m sorry – dissidents. Thankfully the Cuban media is on top of this situation, letting the faithful patriots know that the violent, flesh-hungry villains outside are all dissidents. You old, fat auntie? Dissident. Paperboy, missing a foot and dragging himself toward that priest? Dissident.

One of a thousand hilarious touches is that the word zombie is never used – even Juan and his friends thoughtlessly refer to the mayhem happy characters as dissidents. It’s a whole new approach to the zombiepocalypse – not to mention social satire – and it’s entirely entertaining.

Alexis Diaz de las Villegas is outstanding as longtime, intentional loser Juan. Brugues surrounds him with a charmingly disreputable posse ready to take on the dissidents and find freedom – if that’s what they want.

It’s such a clever, eye-opening film with some added oomph via soundtrack and closing credits animation. Juan of the Dead promises one killer dia de los muertos!

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown, Day 11: Night of the Living Dead

Leave a comment

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

From the brightly lit opening cemetery sequence to the paranoid power struggle in the house to the devastating closing montage, Night of the Living Dead teems with the racial, sexual and political tensions of its time. An unsettlingly relevant George A. Romero knew how to push societal panic buttons.

Two hundred miles outside Pittsburgh, squabbling siblings Barbara and Johnny visit a cemetery to put a wreath on their father’s grave. Then comes the first of the film’s many iconic quotes: They’re coming to get you, Barbara.

My favorite, though, has always been, “Yeah, they’re dead. They’re all messed up.”

A befuddled, borderline useless Barbara (Judith O’Dea) stumbles to an old farmhouse, where the very useful and not easily befuddled Ben (Duane Jones) takes her under his wing and boards up the place. Meanwhile, TV newsmen declare that the, “scene can best be described as mayhem” and note that Barbara, Ben and all those folks down the basement should avoid the mayhem’s “murder-happy characters.”

Romero’s responsible for more than just outstanding dialogue. (OK, at times, like the heavy handed score, the dialogue isn’t entirely outstanding. But often enough, it is.) As the first film of its kind, the lasting impact of this picture on horror cinema is hard to overstate. His inventive imagination created the genre and the monster from the ground up.

They’re dead.

They’re back.

They’re hungry for human flesh.

Their bite infects the bitten.

The bitten will eventually bite.

Aim for the head.

The tensions inside the house are almost as serious as the danger outside the house, once bossypants Mr. Cooper pokes his head out of the basement. And wouldn’t everybody be better off if Romero could write a worthwhile part for a female?

Still, the shrill sense of confinement, the danger of one inmate turning on another, and the unthinkable transformation going on in the cellar build to a startling climax – one that utterly upends expectations – followed by the kind of absolutely genius ending that guarantees the film’s eternal position in the annals of horror cinema.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

Halloween Countdown

Halloween Countdown, Day 10: Jacob’s Ladder

Leave a comment

Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

Jacob’s Ladder isn’t exactly a horror film, but it is as unsettling and creepy as any movie you’ll watch. The entire 113 minutes transpires in that momentary flash between life and death, with both light and dark trying to make a claim on Jacob Singer’s soul.

Tim Robbins plays Singer with a weary sweetness that’s almost too tender and vulnerable to bear. In a blistering supporting turn, Elizabeth Pena impresses as the carnal angel Jezebel. The real star here, weirdly enough, is director Adrian Lyne.

Known more for erotic thrillers, here he beautifully articulates a dreamscape that keeps you guessing. The New York of the film crawls with unseemly creatures hiding among us. Filmed as a grimy, colorless nightmare, Jacob’s Ladder creates an atmosphere of paranoia and dread.

By 1990, the Vietnam film has run its course, but with some distance from the post-Platoon glut, the “flashback” crisis that underlines Singer’s confused nightmare feels less stale. It allows the movie to work on a number of levels: as a metaphysical mystery, a supernatural thriller, and a horror film.

The horror is peppered throughout, and there are several scenes that will make your skin crawl.

The storyline is challenging and may seem like a sleight of hand more than anything, but Robins’s deeply human performance and some memorable scares make it a standout for the season.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!