It would not surprise us if we saw a new wave of ecological horror in which our own mistreatment of the environment and our irresponsible handling of pharmaceutical progress creates flesh hungry critters, pissed off two-headed bears, opioid addicted tapeworms, whatever. Let’s prepare by looking over history’s forewarnings, shall we?
Here are our favorite mutant animal films—cautionary tales about big pharma, careless planet keeping and sex.
5. Shivers (They Came from Within) (1975)
In an upscale Montreal high rise, an epidemic is breaking out. A scientist has created an aphrodisiac in the form of a big, nasty slug. That slug, though, spreads wantonness throughout the high rise and threatens to overrun the city with its lusty ways.
Not Cronenberg’s best film, but this is his first feature length horror and it announces not only his arrival on the genre scene, but it predicts so many of the films to come. The film obsesses over human sexuality, social mores, the physical form, physical violation and infestation, medical science, conspiracy, and free will. He’d revisit all of these preoccupations throughout his career, most obviously in his very next feature film, 1978’s Rabid, which is weirdly similar in every way.
Shivers takes a zombie concept and uses it to pervert expectations. (See what we did there?) They’re not here to eat your brains, after all. It’s the first film where Cronenberg marries ideas of the repugnant with the pleasurable, medical monstrosity with human body. It would be several years before his skill with performances (or maybe casting) matched his other directorial talents, but Shivers is still a worthwhile, utterly bizarre pleasure.
4. Isolation (2005)
In 2016, writer/director/Irishman Billy O’Brien made an effective and lovely – yes, lovely – creature feature called I Am Not a Serial Killer. But about a decade earlier, he started down that path along a muddy, ruddy Irish roadside that wound ‘round to an out-of-the-way farm.
It’s the kind of a depressing, run-down spot that would catch nobody’s eye – which is exactly why it drew the attention of runaway lovers Jamie (Sean Harris) and Mary (a young Ruth Negga – wonderful as always). The solitude and remoteness also got noticed by a bio-genetics firm.
Down-on-his-luck Farmer Dan (John Lynch, melancholy perfection) has little choice but to allow some experimentation on his cows. He doesn’t really mind the required visits by veterinarian Orla (Essie Davis – hooray!).
But when one cow needs help delivering – genetic mutations, fetuses inside fetuses and teeth where no teeth belong. Nasty.
O’Brien and his truly outstanding cast create an oppressive, creepy, squeamish nightmare worth seeking out.
3. Black Sheep (2006)
Graphic and gory horror comedy seems to be the Kiwi trademark, no doubt a product of the popularity of native Lord of the Gastro-Intestinal-Splatter-Fest-Laugh-Riot, Peter Jackson.
First-time writer/director Jonathan King uses the isolation of a New Zealand sheep farm and the greedy evil of pharmaceutical research to create horror. He does it with a lot of humor and buckets full of blood. It works pretty well.
Evil brother Angus (Peter Feeney) has bred some genetically superior sheep while smart but sheep-phobic brother Harry (Nathan Meister) has been away. But the new sheep bite (a recurring problem with bio-genetically altered farm animals). Victims turn into, well, were-sheep. Of course they do.
The result is an endearing, often genuinely funny film. Cleverly written with performances strong enough to elevate it further, Black Sheep offers an enjoyable way to watch a would-be lamb chop get its revenge.
2. The Host (2006)
Visionary director Joon-ho Bong’s film opens in a military lab hospital in 2000. A clearly insane American doctor, repulsed by the dust coating formaldehyde bottles, orders a Korean subordinate to empty it all into the sink. Soon the contents of hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde find its way through the Korean sewer system and into the Han River. This event – allegedly based on fact – eventually leads, not surprisingly, to some pretty gamey drinking water. And also a 25 foot cross between Alien and a giant squid.
Said monster – let’s call him Steve Buscemi (the beast’s actual on-set nickname) – exits the river one bright afternoon in 2006 to run amuck in a very impressive outdoor-chaos-and-bloodshed scene. A dimwitted foodstand clerk witnesses his daughter’s abduction by the beast, and the stage is set.
What follows, rather than a military attack on a marauding Steve Buscemi, is actually one small, unhappy, bickering family’s quest to find and save the little girl. Their journey takes them to poorly organized quarantines, botched security check points, misguided military/Red Cross posts, and through Seoul’s sewer system, all leading to a climactic battle even more impressive than the earlier scene of afternoon chaos.
1. The Fly (1986)
After a couple of interesting, if un-medical films, the great David Cronenberg made a triumphant return to the laboratory of the mad scientist in his most popular film to date.
But it’s not just Cronenberg’s disturbed genius for images and ideas that makes The Fly fly; it’s the performance he draws from Jeff Goldblum.
Goldblum is an absolute gift to this film, so endearing in his pre-Brundlefly nerdiness. He’s the picture’s heartbeat, and it’s more than the fact that we like his character so much. The actor also performs heroically under all those prosthetics.
He and Geena Davis make the perfect pair, with their matching height and mullets, and their onscreen chemistry does give the film a level of human drama traditionally lacking from the Cronenberg canon. Atop that, there’s the transformation scene in the bathroom – the fingernails, the pustules – all classic Cronenberg grotesquerie, and still difficult to watch.
Join us in the screening room as we rate The Grinch, Girl in the Spider’s Web, Overlord, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and everything new in home entertainment.
Remakes! Legendary returns! Song! Dance! Exclamation points! It’s all in the new Screening Room Podcast, where we talk through the pros and cons of Bohemian Rhapsody, Suspiria, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, The Happy Prince, The Other Side of the Wind and Beautiful Boy, plus a slew of new home releases.
We are thrilled to be a part of a circle of movie podcasts spending the month of October talking about Universal monster movie sequels. And how lucky are we to have drawn the Bride of Frankenstein?
For our money, not just the best Universal monster sequel but the best Universal monster movie, Bride is a special. So special, she gets her own podcast. No lists, no competition, but to do it justice, we thought a special guest was in order. We are thrilled to have Dino Tripodis join us for the conversation.
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
James Whale and Boris Karloff – with tag along make-up man Jack Pierce – returned to Castle Frankenstein for an altogether superior tale of horror. What makes this one a stronger picture is the dark humor and subversive attitude, mostly animated by Frankenstein’s colleague Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger).
Thesiger’s mad doctor makes for a suitable counterpart to the earnest and contrite Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, again), and a sly vehicle for Whale. This fey and peculiar monster-maker handles the most brilliant dialogue the film has to offer, including the iconic toast, “To gods and monsters.”
The sequel casts off the earnestness of the original, presenting a darker film that’s far funnier, often outrageous for its time, with a fuller story. Karloff again combines tenderness and menace, and Elsa Lanchester becomes the greatest goth goddess of all film history as his Bride.
We talk through Gerard Butler’s place in cinematic history, Jonah Hill’s place as a filmmaker, and Alex Honnold’s place as a crazy person as we break down Hunter Killer, Mid90s and Free Solo. We also run through the best and worst in new home entertainment.
The Screening Room breaks down the new Halloween, talks through The Oath and the new YA The Hate U Give. Plus, we’ll run through what’s worth watching in new home entertainment releases.
We run down so many movies this week, most of them great and well worth your time. Check out our thoughts on First Man, Bad Times at the El Royale, Goosebumps 2, Old Man & the Gun, All About Nina, The Sisters Brothers and everything new in home entertainment.
Horror movies mirror the anxieties of a population. If you look at the best horror in any decade, what made it relevant, what gave it punch, was that it spoke to the anxieties of the society at that point in time.
Case in point: Godzilla. Not long after the end of WWII, a Japanese filmmaker spun a yarn about the end of civilization as a giant kaiju brought about by atomic bombs. You can see how that spoke to folks at the time.
You can also point to one particular film that changed the trajectory of the genre. To use Godzilla as the example again, after that film, you were hard pressed to find a horror film that was not a creature feature.
Here’s our quick primer, decade by decade, on the films that marked the genre, predicted the coming decade’s cinematic output, and articulated the social anxieties of the day.
1914 to 1918 saw the first global war. Germany, France and the US also happened to be the three countries investing the most in film. And while many in the US protested the idea of paying our money to see German films at the time, the most interesting horror was coming from German writers and directors who could feel the ideological changes that would inform not only WWI, but the more horrifying underpinnings of the next generation’s war.
Required viewing:
• Nosferatu (1922)
• Phantom of the Opera (1925)
Era defining film: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Non-practicing Jewish/German director Robert Weine would eventually escape from Germany and make films in Hungary after the Nazis came to power. His expressionistic presentation in this film, much of it owing to an ingenious way to deal with a limited budget, had a lasting impact on cinema worldwide.
But it was the writers of Caligari – Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz – who bring the social anxieties into focus. Both were in the military in WWI and both had a profound distrust of power, which influenced this amazing film.
1930s
This was the calm between world wars. Advances in medicine meant that more soldiers came home from WWI than what would have happened in any earlier war. Many of those people were physically disfigured to a degree that we would never have seen before these medical advances.
The films of the 1930s—Universal’s sweet spot—focused almost exclusively on shady Eastern European evil that unleashes disfigured monsters, often sympathetic monsters whose pain and ugliness are no fault of their own, on an unsuspecting population.
It played on audiences fear of the sinister European other, that mysterious presence of evil that they could never hope to fathom. It also picked those scabs of seeing the monstrous in their own home towns.
Era defining film: Frankenstein (1931)
James Whale’s brilliant take on Mary Shelley’s novel looked at Frankenstein’s monster and saw the cruelty humanity was capable of committing. For him, the monster was the central and most interesting figure. Unlike Shelley’s antihero, Whale’s creature was utterly sympathetic, an oversized child unable to control himself, making him simultaneously innocent and dangerous.
Barons and aristocracy, the European setting – the film distrusts scientists and public officials as fools unable to reign in their own ambitions no matter the dire consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McUce_xwxeA
1940s
WWII was in full swing and Americans were looking for escapism. In a way, though, the 40s were more of the same. Still monster movies, mostly based on Universal’s success. RKO began its run with Jacques Tournier/Val Lewton films that- because of smaller budgets – relied on audience audience imagination over pricey make up effects. The success resulted in a change, however temporary, toward smarter, suspenseful films.
But the real enemy was German. While most of the monster movies of the decade saw some kind of shadowy European figure of power or evil, one really exemplifies the era and where it is.
Required viewing:
• Cat People (1942)
• I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
• The Uninvited (1944)
Era defining film: The Wolf Man (1941)
For George Waggner’s 1941 classic, Lon Chaney Jr. plays the big, lovable lummox of an American back in his old stomping grounds—some weird amalgamation of European nations.
In a real sense, this film was the answer to a formula, an alchemy that printed money. The Chaney name, Bela Lugosi co-stars, and we pit a sympathetic beast against some ancient European evil. But it’s much more pointed than it seems. The evil is purely German, gypsies sense it and yet can do nothing but fall victim to it, and it is an evil with the power to turn an otherwise good man—say, your average German man—into a soulless killing machine.
Few eras have earmarked their horror output with social anxiety as thoroughly as the 1950s. The war was cold and it was everywhere.
You were hard pressed to find any horror film in that decade that were not specifically about fear of the Communist and/or atomic threat unless you looked overseas. Those who needed a minute away from the mutant monsters that followed Godzilla to box office gold found it in England’s fledgling horror company, Hammer.
Required viewing:
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
• Dracula (1958)
• The Bad Seed (1956)
• Diabolique (1955)
Era defining film: Godzilla (1954)
More than any other film in the genre, Godzilla spoke directly to global anxieties, became a phenomenal success, and changed the face of horror.
As Japan struggled to re-emerge from the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, director Ishiro Honda unleashed that dreaded kaiju—followed quickly by a tidal wave of creature features focused on scientists whose ungodly work creates global cataclysm.
Far more pointed and insightful than its American bastardization or any of the sequels or reboots to follow, the 1954 Japanese original mirrored the desperate, helpless impotence of a global population in the face of very real, apocalyptic danger. Sure, that danger breathed fire and came in a rubber suit, but history shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
Civil Rights, Vietnam, women’s rights, the pill—the Sixties was a decade that changed an awful lot. And with change comes social anxiety.
A woman’s right to control her own body became front page news with the release of the birth control pill, and worries generated there spilled into horror, the best of these being France’s Eyes Without a Face and Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.
The decade saw a slew of other true classics, from The Innocents to Psycho and more, but the effects of the social change – which would become even more pronounced in the cinematic output of the next decade – was articulated best by the bargain basement budget zombie film that changed every single thing.
Required viewing:
• Psycho (1960)
• Eyes Without a Face (1960)
• The Innocents (1961)
• Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Era defining film: Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Romero’s first zombie film – the first proper zombie film – hit upon cultural anxieties aplenty. The war in Vietnam – televised almost constantly, and for the first time – was reflected in Romero’s onscreen broadcasts of unimaginable horror. He depicts the changing paradigm of the generations in the power struggle going on inside the besieged house.
More than anything, though, Romero hit a nerve with his casting. The filmmaker has long said that African American actor Duane Jones got the part as the lead because he was simply the best actor in the cast. True enough. But his performance as the level headed, proactive, calm-under-pressure alpha male – followed by Romero’s gut-punch of a finale – spoke volumes and is one of the main reasons the film remains as relevant today as it was when it was released.
The rise of independent film in the US in the Seventies led to maybe our greatest era in film. Taxi Driver, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, A Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Now, Chinatown, Mean Streets, Rocky—it’s dizzying to think of the filmmakers who established themselves in that decade with fresh, gritty, realistic, genius films.
Horror benefitted from the same boon in independent filmmaking. Some of what would become the strongest voices of the genre were making their first sounds: David Cronenberg, Stephen King, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, among others.
It’s a time when the TV coverage of Vietnam has begun to dull the population’s senses to violence. We saw horror movies that did two things. First, filmmakers came up with a way to wake people up to violence, either with extreme violence or with larger-than-life violence.
The second thing was a sense of pitting evil against the status quo. People were wearying, as the decade waned, of the constant state of flux. They longed for simple, wholesome answers. Sue Snell challenged the status quo by showing kindness to Carrie White, and look what happened. Teenagers rebelled in suburbia by partying and having sex when they were supposed to be babysitting, and Michael Myers appeared to punish their unholy behavior.
The most iconic film of the Seventies—horror or otherwise—saw just one way to contend with modern evils.
Era defining film: The Exorcist 1973
A single mother, a daughter on the verge of puberty and sexual awakening, an opening for evil—much of the grounding concepts of William Friedkin’s masterpiece is simply that the status quo in the Seventies was being challenged and we needed God to come straighten things out again.
The concept that the Catholic Church will save us now seems almost so quaint as to be offensively naïve. But at the time, Friedkin combined this sensibility with an impeccable script, uncompromising direction and breathtaking performances (the film raked in two Oscars and another 8 nominations) to scare the hell out of viewers.
Conservatism, consumption, capitalism—the Eighties had it all. Everything was bigger, splashier, louder. Music videos and their phenomenal influence on teenage buying habits meant movies catered more to a younger audience, partly by ensuring that a short attention span could be kept engaged.
Thanks to the rise of VHS, everybody learned that you could turn a profit more easily with horror – the go-to rental property – than with any other genre of film. They could be made cheaply and they were the most likely to be rented, immediately and repeatedly.
The slasher was king – there were 8 Friday the 13th films in the decade, 4 Halloween films, 5 Nightmares on Elm Street alone. There were also some good movies, but the one that looks the most like the Eighties is one that comes from the era’s most iconic icon, Spielberg
Required viewing:
• The Shining (1980)
• American Werewolf in London (1981)
• The Thing (1981)
• Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
Era defining film: Poltergeist 1982
Tobe Hooper’s love child with Steven Spielberg may not be the best or most important horror film of the Eighties, but it is the most Eighties horror film of the Eighties. In both of Spielberg’s ’82 films, the charade of suburban peace is disrupted by a supernatural presence. In E.T., though, there’s less face tearing.
Part of Poltergeist’s success emerged from pairing universal childhood fears – clowns, thunderstorms, that creepy tree – with the adult terror of helplessness in the face of your own child’s peril.
Splashy effects, excellent casting, Spielberg’s heart and Hooper’s gut combine to create a flick that holds up. Solid performances and the pacing of a blockbuster provide the film a respectable thrill, but Hooper’s disturbing imagination guarantees some lingering jitters.
The Nineties was a fairly calm time, although the angst in the music suggests otherwise. More than anything, the social anxiety of the Nineties was more about rebelling against the conservative, self-centered, larger-than-life Eighties. And without a single, overarching, global worry to inform horror, the output of the decade was a mixed bag.
The decade started off with the best film horror may ever see. The Silence of the Lambs won all 5 major Oscars that year – actor, actress, film, screenplay, director – absolutely unheard of for a horror film. It is a perfect movie, and its success led to more heavyweight directors working with a big budget.
The decade would end with a phenomenon that created its own subgenre: The Blair Witch Project. Takashi Miike’s Audition was one of the burgeoning J-horror genre that would have a huge influence on American horror in the next decade.
But the film that reestablished horror among fans and changed the entire trajectory of the genre was Wes Craven’s Scream.
Required viewing:
Cape Fear 1991
Silence of the Lambs 1991
The Sixth Sense 1999
The Blair Witch Project 1999
Audition 1999
Era defining film: Scream 1996
In its time, Scream resurrected a basically dying genre, using clever meta-analysis and black humor. What you have is a traditional high school, but director Wes Craven’s on the inside looking out and he wants you to know it.
What makes Scream stand apart is the way it critiques horror clichés as it employs them, subverting expectation just when we most rely on it. We spent the next five years or more watching talented TV teens and sitcom stars make the big screen leap to slashers, mostly with weak results, but Scream stands the test of time. It could be the wryly clever writing or the solid performances, but I think it’s the joyous fondness for a genre and its fans that keeps this one fresh.
Here’s where things get nutty. New technologies made filmmaking more affordable and made it easier for US audiences to access foreign films.
What we learned with the insane financial success of the bargain basement Blair Witch Project is that horror turns a profit. Netflix, on-demand viewing, online viewing – all of which was in its infancy in the last decade – meant that these outlets needed content.
In terms of high quality horror, we saw an incredible influx from abroad, mainly visceral foreign horror.Required viewing:
28 Days Later (2002)
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Wolf Creek (2005)
The Descent (2005)
The Loved Ones (2009)
Let the Right One In (2008)
Era defining film: The Ring (2002)
Gore Verbinski’s film achieves one of those rare feats, ranking among the scarce Hollywood remakes that surpasses the foreign-born original, Japan’s unique paranormal nightmare Ringu. Verbinski’s film is visually arresting, quietly atmospheric and creepy as hell.
The film announced Verbinski as a filmmaker worthy of note, brought Naomi Watts into our consciousness, and unleashed countless (sometimes fun) copycats. We saw more PG-13 horror, more remakes, and so many J-horror remakes.
2010
We’ve settled into a world where you can find dozens of brand new horror films from anywhere on earth at any moment of the day or night via countless channels. This means we benefit from a bounty of possibilities never before seen. In this decade, horror has spawned some of our biggest blockbusters.
Horror is suddenly not only a realistic go-to for studios looking for a blockbuster, it’s also become one of the more highly regarded genres for quality, though-provoking, challenging and brilliant content.
The Babadook deals unapologetically with something we’d honestly never seen in film before. It Follows deals with the changing paradigms of adolescence in a way that was fresh and devastating. Hereditary looks at family dysfunction, The Witch contends with the roots of radicalization.
But the movie we’re proudest to call horror is Get Out. Blockbuster, Oscar winner and a brilliant slice of social commentary made by a filmmaker who clearly loves the genre, it will change the face of the genre.
Required viewing:
The Babadook (2014)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
It Follows (2014)
The Witch (2015)
Hereditary (2018)
Era defining film: Get Out (2017)
What took so long for a film to manifest the fears of racial inequality as smartly as does Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
Peele writes and directs a mash up of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Rosemary’s Baby and a few other staples that should go unnamed to preserve the fun. Opening with a brilliant prologue that wraps a nice vibe of homage around the cold realities of “walking while black,” Peele uses tension, humor and a few solid frights to call out blatant prejudice, casual racism and cultural appropriation.
Peele is clearly a horror fan, and he gives knowing winks to many genre cliches (the jump scare, the dream) while anchoring his entire film in the upending of the “final girl.” This isn’t a young white coed trying to solve a mystery and save herself, it’s a young man of color, challenging the audience to enjoy the ride but understand why switching these roles in a horror film is a social critique in itself.
Before you worry: no, we have not run out of real topics. It’s just that, every so often we need to indulge a weird little voice that says things like, “Ever noticed how many people die on toilets in horror movies? Wonder what kind of deep-seated fears that explores.”
And there are a LOT of people who die on toilets in horror movies. Michael Myers really likes to freak people out in public restrooms. We know Norman Bates likes to dispatch folks while they’re in the shower, but he is not above preying on someone while they’re just trying to pee. Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger have also done it. (The poor guy falls asleep on the toilet. Don’t judge—we’ve all been there.)
Here, however, are the best instances of nature calling you to your death.
5. Scream 2 (1997)
Phil (Omar Epps) just wants to take his girl to a scary movie. Still, he does get up in the middle of it to pee. I’m not saying that’s cause for murder. I’m not saying it’s not, either.
The whole Scream franchise does an excellent job of taking the mundane moments in life and drawing your attention to all the ways in which you are actually vulnerable. This scene plays not only on the vulnerability involved in our social contract to allow others to urinate in peace, but also touches on the ways in which anonymity (by way of the costumes everyone is wearing at the theater) emboldens people. Usually the wrong people. The kind that whisper weirdly from the next stall.
4. Zombieland (2009)
Mike White makes such a great doofus victim, doesn’t he? Here he is, minding his own beeswax, taking a leisurely in a filthy public toilet during the zombiepocalypse…No part of this really sounds wise, does it?
It’s all in keeping with one of Zombieland‘s great gimmicks: the rules. The reason the rules work so well for the film is that each one is actually an excellent piece of advice. Get some cardio, people, because zombies don’t tire out.
And for the love of God, beware of bathrooms.
3. Ghoulies II 1988
Everybody hated Philip Hardin (J. Downing) anyway, didn’t we? He knew. Sure, he claimed that his little monster gravy train, the only reason his dying carnival attracted any customers at all, had nothing to do with all those dead bodies. But, come on.
The nasty little muppety creatures from Luca Bercovici’s surprise 1984 hit (and Gremlins ripoff) have left town. They’ve found a hunting ground better suited to them alongside the carnies at the Satan’s Den attraction.
The film is not good—sequels to sloppy derivatives rarely are. It’s a mixed bag of kills and puppet hijinx. But there is something about a monster in the toilet, man, and it ain’t good.
2. Street Trash (1987)
This iconic Troma film sees the homeless population of a town turn from cheap liquor to cheaper god-knows-what, Tenafly Viper. It’s old, but this is not the kind of wine that ages well. Those who drink it, well, it’s like looking directly at the Ark of the Covenant.
The hobo-melting is honestly the least interesting and least offensive thing happening in this envelope pusher. But there is this one poor bastard who just takes a seat, just wants to rest a bit and enjoy a lovely beverage. The FX are laughable, and yet sort of genius.
1. ABCs of Death: T is for Toilet (2012)
Yes! Every single thing the previous films were trying to capture, all handled here with inspired (and brilliantly hideous) claymation. It’s perfect. It’s sadistic, funny, tender, mean, goofy and pretty clearly Australian.
We are back and digging through the wild array of movies out this week: The House with a Clock In Its Walls, Fahrenheit 11/9, Assassination Nation, Lizzie, Pick of the Litter plus all that’s fit to watch in home entertainment.
