The History of Horror: 1970s and 1980s: The Auteur Movement and When Horror Gets Graphic

The late 1960s saw a rise in horror films that became stylized and realistic, taking on the auteur movement of such filmmakers as Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffault. Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski had made a name for himself as a director in his native country with such psychological suspense thrillers as Knife in the Water (1962) and Repulsion (1965), starring French actress Catherine Deneuve, revealing a style suitable for horror films. In 1967, Polanski directed Fearless Vampire Killers, a humorous take on the old legend. When producer Robert Evans bought the rights to the Ira Levin novel Rosemary's Baby, he turned to Polanski to helm the big budget production. Rosemary's Baby isn't a horror film in the traditional sense with monsters and other horror creatures stalking the cinematic landscape, but, like Lewton's previous work, used the psychological fears of the recent Thalydimide scares of the 1960s to create a story of demon birth. The fear of authority, in this case medical authority, was prime material for younger audiences who were rejecting and rebelling against the values and conventional wisdom of older generations. Other films, such as George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, represented the changes occurring in American society during this period. Starring Duane Jones, one of the first African American actors to lead in a horror movie, Night of the Living Dead turned over old ideas of what constituted a

good horror picture by using cinema verité filmmaking and making its Black lead the hero. Romero has often stated in interviews that his film was a social commentary on the changing of the old guard (the humans in the film) being devoured by a new revolutionary spirit (the ghouls). His 1970's sequel, Dawn of the Dead, likewise commented on the growing mall culture in America and the incessant materialism and consumerism that replaced spirituality and communality.

The horror films of the 1970s, like many of Hitchcock's films, found terror in reality. In Willard (1971) and its sequel Ben (1972), rats terrorized the victims of their owner Willard, a wimpy and abused young man who uses them to get revenge. Films such as Steven Spielberg's TV-produced Duel (1972) provide its terror thrills from a demonic eighteen-wheeler which chases star Dennis Weaver through the Arizona desert. In 1973, veteran television director William Friedkin directed what would become to that date one of the scariest films to make it to the theaters, The Exorcist. Based on a novel by William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist brought a new level of horror storytelling by taking the story of demon possession with the same level of seriousness as drug dealing in Friedkin's previous film The French Connection (1971). The Exorcist also brought a level of gore and sexual content into the horror movie not seen before, with young demon-possessed Regan assaulting herself with a crucifix. Such depictions took the genre to another level, shocking and horrifying audiences.

Twenty-five years after the second World War and the holocaust and the ongoing conflicts in Vietnam and in the United States had primed audiences for more graphic depictions of horror on the silver screen. The presence of gore and graphic violence upped the ante for later films such as Brian de Palma's psychological thriller Sisters (1973), The Omen (1976) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1976). Based on the story of Ed Gein, a serial killer from the Pacific Northwest (Hitchcock also used Gein as the basis for Norman Bates in the 1960 film Psycho) who often wore the skins of his victims, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre featured a family of serial murderers to strike horror in the hearts of film goers. The later successful Halloween (1978) capitalized on the growing fear of crime in America to create horror, though the monster in this film, Michael Myers, was a more supernatural version of the super predator, creating a new genre of horror called slasher films. During the eighties, films such as Friday the 13th (1980) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) followed in this vein. These films often scored the growing societal problems of teen sexuality and pregnancies with the super predators of Jason Voorhies and Freddy Kreuger often attacking their victims in postcoital bliss. Other films during the 1970s that featured a high quotient of blood and gore were Black Christmas (1974), directed by Bob Clark (Porky and A Christmas Story), and Suspiria (1977) by Italian horror director Dario Argento.

The rise of Blaxploitation during the early seventies also saw horror films targeted toward Black audiences with grindhouse fare like Blacula (1972), which told the story of a cursed African prince who comes to L.A. in search of blood and his reincarnated lost love. A sequel Scream Blacula Scream was released a year later. The Thing With Two Heads (1972), starring veteran screen star Ray Milland and football champion Rosey Grier, was a campy horror take of race relations. Most of the Blaxploitation horror films were simply Black versions of well-known horror films, such as Blackenstein (1973) and Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde (1976). One film, though, released in 1973, Bill

Gunn's Ganja and Hess, took a detour away from the schlock of most Blacksploitation and told the story of a doctor who becomes infected with a disease in Africa that turns him into a vampire.

During the 1970s, horror novelist Stephen King became the literal king of new horror films when the Brian de Palma-directed 1976 film Carrie, based on King's first novel, became a smash hit. Starring the young Sissy Spacek and John Travolta, Carrie used telekinesis as an analogy for a young woman's growing sexual maturation. The film's ending, when Carrie's prom is ruined after she is splattered with pig's blood, is one of the most frightening sequences to ever be filmed and also one of the most familiar to film audiences. In 1979, King's The Shining found film treatment under the helm of director Stanley Kubrick and starred Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. While King himself wasn't fond of this eerie and spooky version of his bestselling novel, audiences were easily spooked by Nicholson's performance of a writer who is driven to insanity while caretaker of a closed resort hotel in the mountain range with his small family. Other film adaptations of King's films during the 1980s include Cujo (1983), Christine (1983), Firestarter (1985), Silver Bullet (1986), and Maximum Overdrive (1986), shot often with mixed results.

During the early eighties, film audiences saw a return to the werewolf mythology, only this time with updated special effects to create a more believable transformation from man to beast. Such films as the John Landis-helmed An American Werewolf In London (1981) and Joe Dante's The Howling (1981) elevated the genre using special effects as a key ingredient to storytelling. The work of famed special effects artist Rick Baker helped bring a new appreciation to makeup and effects used in horror films and have since become a standard bearer. Other werewolf films during this period include Wolfen (1981), In the Company of Wolves (1984) and the aforementioned Silver Bullet.

The 1980s also saw an output of humorous horror films that recalled earlier movies such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Movies such as Gremlins (1984) and The Ghostbusters (1984) were extremely popular with audiences who preferred to laugh along to the frightening hijinks. Other films of this ilk include The Witches of Eastwick (1987), starring Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon and Jack Nicholson; and The Lost Boys (1987), starring Coreys Heim and Feldman, Jason Patric, Keifer Sutherland, and Dianne Wiest. The Lost Boys was heavy on atmosphere and humor, creating an interesting mix for this tale of teenage vampires who take over a seaside California community. Other films, such as the independent and underrated Lady in White (1988) returned to an earlier era of gentle horror films that played less on gore and violence and more on atmospheric chills.

Still, the 1980s became an output for a lot of horror films that used graphic violence for its source of fright. Along with King-based and slasher movies, Canadian director David Cronenberg, who began his career in horror films during the 1970s with films like Shivers (1975) and The Brood (1979), released the 1981 film Scanners, a movie that took graphic film violence to new levels when psychics with awesome telepathic abilities caused heads to literally explode on screen. Other films directed by Cronenberg during this period include Videodrome (1983), the popular remake of The Fly (1986) starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, and Dead Ringers (1988) with British actor Jeremy Irons playing dual roles as a pair of spooky twins. Wes Craven became a well-known name in horror circles starting with his 1972 film Last House on the Left, one of the first films to include graphic violence in this genre, and the infamous The Hills Have Eyes (1977), a horror flick about desert-dwelling killer mutants who terrorize a vacationing family. During the eighties, Craven's films, such as the Freddy Kreuger Nightmare series, defined much of horror films during this period. Graphic violence and gore became the norm during the 1980s as horror fans demanded more and more horrific depictions of violence to up the terror factor. Other horror producers and writers, such as Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead (1981) fame

Bruce Campbell, Evil Dead

and Army of Darkness (1992) and British horror novelist Clive Barker who wrote Hellraiser (1987) and Candyman (1992) brought an interesting mix of horror and humor to their films. Director Sam Raimi, due to his stylish camera work, enlivened many of these films, such as the scene in Evil Dead II, in which he shoots a shooting eyeball plopping into a young actress's mouth. These stylized and humorous takes on the genre would set up the 1990s, which became the decade of irony for horror fans.

Source: IMDB.com and www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms.html

The History of Horror: 1940s WWII and the Cold War; 1950s and 1960s: Repression and Revolution

1940s: World War II and the Cold War

During World War II, real life horror was playing across the silver screen in newsreels delivering word back to Americans from the home front. The holocaust, whose extent of true horror was not revealed until after the war ended, made cinematic versions pale in comparison. Yet during this period, Hollywood continued to churn out horror films to audiences' delight. Two such filmmakers who created some of the classic horror films of this period were Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton. Russian born RKO producer Lewton teamed up with French director Tourneur to create such suspenseful films as The Cat People (1943), I Walked with A Zombie (1943), and The Leopard Man (1943). Though Lewton and Tourneur's films tended to be more suspenseful psychological dramas rather than straight horror, the chills they created had far more impact on the cinematic imagination. In the classic The Cat People, for instance, horror is conveyed through what is implied and not what is shown. The film is about a young woman who is transformed into a black panther whenever she is overwhelmed by sexual desires and jealousy, leading her to stalk the young heroine who has fallen in love with her husband. One of the film's most frightening sequences occurs when the heroine is stalked by a panther while swimming in a local pool. We don't see the panther crawling in the darkened pool room, but only its shadow and its growling. Other films such as The Uninvited (1944) starring Ray Milland and the gentle ghost love story Portrait of Jennie (1948), starring Joseph Cotton, were films that were also depended on atmospherics to deliver their chills.

The 1950s and 1960s: Repression and Revolution

The changes occurring in 1950s and 1960s America found its way to the movie screen, particularly in many of the horror films created during this golden age of cinematic filmmaking. Capitalizing on the advent of the atomic age, 1950s horror revealed the frightening reality of the Cold War Era. Films such as The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), Godzilla (1954), and Them (1954), about mutant ants, revealed what could happen to the natural order of things when atomic energy unleashed its massive fury. Other films such as The Thing (From Another Planet) (1951), War of the Worlds (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) played on Cold War fears of Soviet invasion as well as the previous decades' fears of the Nazi blitzkreig. During this period, rock and roll became the dominant soundtrack for a younger generation, prompting Hollywood to take advantage of the teen buying dollars by creating horror films marketed directly to this new demographic. I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957) and The Blob (1958), starring the young Michael Landon and Steve McQueen respectively, were two such representatives of this new subset of horror films. The decade also saw a rise in B-movie horror films produced by such sclockmeisters as William B. Castle (1959's The Tingler and The House on Haunted Hill). When theater ownership monopolies were struck down by the courts during the late 1940s, independently owned theaters and drive-in theaters opened up a field of independent filmmakers who could now get their films into theaters without dealing with the studios. Filmmakers, such as the director and producer Edward D. Wood (1959's Plan 9 From Outer Space), despite their lack of filmmaking skills, could raise budgets and shoot films that found their way into movie theaters. While these films lacked cinematic style, they more than made it up in cheesy frights that delighted teenage audiences looking for cheap thrills. During the 1950s, television had dealt a serious blow to the competitive edge films had over the attention of American audiences by delivering entertainment right into their living rooms. The studios competed with this new medium by shooting films in wide-screen (Cinemascope and Vistavision, for instance), while producers like Castle used gimmicks, such as films shot in 3-D, to offer audiences something extra for their cinematic viewing pleasures. Ironically, many nascent local broadcast affiliates broadcasted old horror movies to fill out viewing hours, often in the guise of horror hosted programs such as L.A.'s KABC-TV's Vampira (Maila Nurmi), which delivered classic 1930s horror pictures to a new generation of fans. It was during this period that a rise in classic horror memorabilia depicting such characters as Karloff's Frankenstein and Lugosi's Dracula became a moneymaking enterprise for both collectors and buyers.

While the days of horror films creating household names had ended by the 1940s, the 1950s saw one such actor whose name would forever be attached to horror: Vincent Price. During his early screen career, Price was a supporting actor often appearing in dramatic films such as 1940s noir thrillers Laura and Leave Her To Heaven (both starring screen actress Gene Tierney). Price's first horror film was in the 1948 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, where he was uncredited as the voice of the Invisible Man. But his first starring role in a horror film was in the 1953 Andre de Toth classic House of Wax, where he plays Prof. Harold Jerrod, a sculptor who uses real life victims for his wax models. Price would later star in other 1950s classic horror films such as The Fly (1958), as well as four films released in 1959 alone––House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, Return of the Fly, and The Bat.

Price continued his career in horror movies throughout the sixties, starring in a series of Edgar Allan Poe-based films such as House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), the horror anthology Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), all directed by Roger Corman, a film producer and director whose output during the 1950s and 1960s created an arena for low-budget horror and exploitation films. Corman's films during the 1950s, such as It Conquered the World (1956) and Attack of the Crab Monster (1957) were hardly film classics in the traditional sense, and were often ridiculed on the 1990s Comedy Central show Mystery Science Theater 3000. But Corman set the stage for offering work to some of the most inventive directors, such as Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13) and Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha) of the 1970s auteur movement. In Britain, the Hammer Studios released an outlet of horror films during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that have become classics within the genre, including such films as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and the Brides of Dracula (1960), starring such Hammer horror mainstays as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Other horror films released during the early 1960s include Herk Hervey's Carnival of Souls (1962), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1965).

Though not necessarily a horror film director, British born Alfred Hitchcock directed two films during the early sixties that changed how horror films would be interpreted by modern audiences. In his 1960 thriller Psycho, Hitchcock proved that the most horrific models of evil were not vampires or werewolves but other human beings, in this case, Norman Bates, an outwardly normal if troubled young man who turns out to be a serial killer masking as his late mother. In 1963, Hitchcock released The Birds, using another normal and everyday creature as the villain in this piece. In The Birds, Hitchcock dispenses with exposition which explains the random and frightening bird attacks in the small California seaside community of Bodega Bay, making the horror seem arbitrary in the way true horror often visits upon everyday reality.

The films of this period––particularly Hitchcock's The Birds; Hervey's Carnival of Souls; the 1961 Deborah Kerr film The Innocents, based on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw; and Robert Wise's 1963 classic The Haunting (starring Julie Harris) based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House––revealed the repressive nature of 1950s Cold War on the American mindset, often focusing on sexual hysteria and repression among its female leads. As the baby boom generation began to dictate popular culture during this period, the youthful rejection of the moral codes of previous generations was met with virulent opposition until the early 1960s, when even rock and roll was tamed for older audiences. But as the underground ideas and movements of the Beat generation slowly influenced artists as broad as Bob Dylan and The Beatles, younger audiences were slowly rejecting older values, giving way to a popular culture that represented this growing freedom of ideas about politics, spirituality, and sexuality.

During this decade, the Production Code, which controlled many of the films previously released, were relaxing, allowing filmmakers to push the envelope in what they could show in horror films. Challenging old Hollywood standards were a new wave of filmmakers, graduates of the nascent film school movement and the stepchildren of the European-based French Nouvelle and Italian neo-realism movements of the 1940s, '50s, and early '60s, emerged with a new style of storytelling for the horror genre.

Source: IMDB.com and www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms.html

15 Horror Movies without the Gore

I’ve never been much into gory horror movies. They never scared me. I’ll take a nice horror story that delves deeply into the psyche of its characters and pulls out the darkness within any day. Therefore I’ve compiled a list of 15 horror movies I think are the best in piling on the creeps and chills while sparing the gory details. So in no discernible order, here is my list of some really great, creepy, chilling horror flicks.


1. The Innocents (1961)

Based on the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents is one of those horror films that succeeds in delivering the right gothic atmosphere for chills and thrills. Filmed in b&w and starring Deborah Kerr, The Innocents tells the story of a young governess whose two charges, Flora and Miles, may or may not be the victims of spectral manipulation. Like the novella, the movie is ambiguous about whether the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, the children’s previous and long deceased caretakers, are real or whether it is all in Miss Giddens’ sexually repressed head. But that only makes film viewing all the more fun. Regardless, the film has a few shockingly frightful scenes, such as when Miss Giddens, in a game of hide-and-seek with the children, comes across the ghostly image of Peter Quint himself peering ominously at her through a window; or the film’s climax, when Miss Giddens forces a psychological exorcism on poor Miles that goes horribly wrong. A great film for horror fans who want a heavy dose of psychology with their chills.

2. The Haunting (1963)

 

Another b&w classic, The Haunting is, like The Innocents, an adaptation from a literary source, in this case Shirley Jackson’s classic novel The Haunting of Hill House. Unlike most horror movies, The Haunting succeeds in delivering its frights by not revealing what is at the rotted core haunting the decrepit mansion. Sounds effects are put to great use as a small team of parapsychologists encounter a terrifyingly noisy haunting. At the heart of the story is the neurotic and unloved Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), a woman whose desire to belong takes a shocking and fatal turn. Also starring Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn, and directed by the legendary Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Sound of Music), The Haunting delves deeply into the psychology of horror and how the things we don’t see are often the things we ought to fear the most. Forget the 1999 remake and check this one out instead.

3. Carnival of Souls (1962)

 

Carnival of Souls is one of those low-rent movies that were produced in the 1960s and then quickly forgotten. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when the film was revived for modern audiences, that its quiet and simple pleasures were appreciated. Carnival of Souls, the brainchild of industrial filmmaker, Herk Hervey, is a truly spooky entry on this list, with its b&w cinematography, its naturalism, and yes even its cheap production. With an even spookier soundtrack, composed of music performed on a pipe organ, Carnival of Souls makes for the perfect midnight viewing. I won’t give too much of the plot away since much of it depends on the twist ending, but needless to say the movie, which stars Candace Hilligoss as Mary Henry, a woman who is being stalked by an apparition, builds its creepy chills to a shocking conclusion.

4. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Rosemary’s Baby is by far one of the most paranoid films ever made. In fact, one can argue that it is as much a conspiracy movie as it is a horror movie. But then again, what can be more frightening than a conspiracy against you? As the old saying goes, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. That is the horror Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) encounters while she and her actor husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), await the birth of their first child. Unbeknownst to poor Rosemary, she is the victim of a worldwide conspiracy involving her neighbors (Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer) and her husband to steal her baby. Once Rosemary discovers the shocking truth, she tries to protect her unborn child, only to learn that the truth is far more shocking than she realized. With an ending that is enhanced by what it doesn’t show, Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski, proves that real fear comes when no one, not even your own husband, can be trusted.

5. The Entity (1981)

Starring Barbara Hershey, The Entity is one of those movies that plays for keeps. While not gory, the film is graphic in its depiction of a woman who is sexually assaulted by things she cannot see. Hershey plays Carla Moran, a single mom struggling to hold her family together. One night, Carla is raped by an entity, which then continues to assault her in the most brutally horrifying way. Fearing for her sanity, she seeks psychiatric help, but loses hope in psychiatry when her therapist insists that she is creating a delusion to deal with childhood abuse and sexual repression. Carla knows her encounters are too real to be a figment of her imagination. After she meets a group of parapsychologists in a bookstore, she convinces them to investigate and capture the entity. Supposedly based on true events, the film’s ending, no doubt added for dramatic license, nonetheless begs credibility. No matter. The film is still powerful and frightening enough whether you believe it actually happened or not.

6. The Others (2001)

The Others doesn’t start off as a terribly scary movie. In fact, most of the film deals with a young mother trying to keep her family together while her husband is away at war. Yet the film is deeply atmospheric and slowly builds its creep factor as the family begins to realize that they are not alone. The shocking twist ending adds a satisfyingly unexpected touch. Starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Alejandro Amenabar, The Others takes the haunted house concept and completely turns it on its head as audiences are forced to question who is truly haunted. A remarkable film that is gothic, moody, atmospheric, and unsettling all at once.

7. The Devil’s Backbone (2001)

Directed by Guillermo del Toro, The Devil’s Backbone is the story of a young boy who is sent to an orphanage in the countryside during the Spanish Civil War and is drawn into a murder mystery involving a now deceased orphan and a shady character working at the orphanage. While there is a ghost story at the heart of the mystery, the true horror of this quiet gem is the one involving the uglier aspects of human nature, whether that be the horrors of war, of greed and corruption, or of the inexplicable behavior of adults as seen through the eyes of a vulnerable child.

8. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

 

 Night of the Living Dead, the granddaddy of all gory movies, not to mention zombie pictures, shouldn’t really belong on this list. So why is it? Well, I like it. But more than that, this 1968 feature does an excellent job of balancing chills, thrills, and gore. Shot in b&w, George Romero’s first movie has an eerie, claustrophobic feel to it as a group of people are trapped in a farmhouse while hordes of zombies who want to make them their midnight snack try to break in. You get the feeling while watching that the entire world has been confined to these people and this farmhouse, adding to the movie’s sense of dread and paranoia. What gore there is in the movie (shots of zombies gorging on the entrails of their victims) is kept to a minimum, and what is shown instead are the power dynamics between the film’s lead, Ben (Duane Jones), and fellow stowaway Harry (Karl Hardman), a typical suburban dad, who, along with his wife and daughter and a young couple, has been holed up in the basement. Like all great horror movies, Night of the Living Dead is as much concerned with the ways humans attack and destroy one another as it is about marauding zombies. There lies its effectiveness. How different really are humans from monsters? the film asks. This is the real terror and one of the reasons why Night of the Living Dead is a classic.

9. The Exorcist (1973)

Upon release, The Exorcist set box office records and also had audiences vomiting in the aisles. Modern audiences might find it implausible that a movie could cause such violent reactions, but The Exorcist, regarded as one of the scariest movies ever produced, earned its pedigree simply because nothing like it before had ever been committed to the screen. Director William Friedkin wasn't kidding around with this story, based on the novel by William Peter Blatty, about a young, innocent girl who is possessed by the devil. Starring Ellen Burstyn and the young Linda Blair as Regan, The Exorcist builds upon its horror slowly as we watch Burstyn’s Chris and Regan live out their otherwise normal lives only to be violated by the intrusion of unspeakable evil. The film creates sheer terror through the convincing use of special effects, makeup, and especially sound effects (when I was a kid seeing this movie for the first time on television, my mom told me not to look at the TV screen if I was too scared to watch it. But the sound effects were a lot scarier than what was actually on screen). Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller round out the cast as two priests enlisted to perform an exorcism to save Regan’s soul.

10. The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)

This recent take on demon possession is supposedly based on true events. Whether you believe in the devil or not, however, oughtn’t get in the way of enjoying this very effective horror flick. Laura Linney plays an attorney who is placed on retainer by the Catholic Church to defend a priest (Tom Wilkinson) who has been charged with the negligible death of a college student, Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter), during an exorcism. The Exorcism of Emily Rose, like Rosemary’s Baby, is a movie that reveals how flexible the horror genre can be. Taking demon possession and mixing it up in a courtroom drama, this movie is more concerned with the questions of belief, both in God and in the devil. Despite its philosophical and theological concerns, the film also works as a great horror movie without relying on cheap gore. Little moments, the ones that often occur in the corner of our eyes or in the back of our minds---a door supposedly closed now open; the smell of something burning; the little bumps in the night---add to this film’s creep factor. The flashback scenes of Emily Rose’s possession and exorcism are also scary as hell. This is one of those films that continue to play on your imagination long after the final credits have rolled across the screen.

11. Psycho (1960)

No list of horror movies can ever be complete without Psycho. Directed by the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho is precisely one of those movies which proves that you can still deliver on the shock and thrills without an excess of gore. All the more important to remember considering that Psycho is the granddaddy of all slasher films. Starring Vivien Leigh and Anthony Perkins, Psycho tells the story of a frustrated and unhappy woman, Marion Crane (Leigh), who steals money from the real estate office where she works so that she can be with her lover, who is at present too broke to marry her. Marion takes off with the money to meet up with her lover, but is detoured when she stops at the Bates Motel, an out-of-the-way motel run by the skittishly neurotic and loney Norman Bates. The rest of the story revolves around what happens next at the Bates Motel. For those who have yet to see this classic, I won’t spoil it. Needless to say, Psycho, known famously for its shower sequence, set the standard for horror movies and also showed that real horror sometimes comes with a welcome sign and a smile.

12. The Shining (1980)

Based on the popular Stephen King novel, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, The Shining has a creepy, cold feeling to it. And I’m not just talking about the winter atmosphere. Rather, everything seems off in this flick. Nicholson’s line reading and facial expressions have a kind of dream-like effect to it, like he’s operating at a completely different speed than everyone else. And the relationship between his Jack Torrance and Duvall’s Wendy, as well as with his son, seem cold, distant, aloof. You sense that this family has seen horrors far more frightening than what they’ll experience at the Overlook Hotel. Kubrick’s directing style adds to the film’s dread. The lighting and camera angles, the use of silence interrupted by abrupt sounds (such as the scene of young Danny [Danny Lloyd] riding his Big Wheels through the hallways) all create an atmosphere that is slightly abnormal and off-balance. The real horror, of course, lies not with the ghosts that haunt the Overlook, though when they appear they’re as shocking and disturbing as in any ghost story. Rather the real horror lurks in the soul of a man who is slowly disintegrating into madness.

13. The Sixth Sense (1999)

While M. Night Shyamalan’s first film The Sixth Sense deals with ghosts, it isn’t really a horror movie in the traditional sense. Rather, the lead character, Cole (Haley Joel Osment), a troubled young boy who is a conduit to the spiritual world, struggles to cope with his otherworldly capabilities while dealing with the even scarier problems of bullies, divorce, and alienation. Yet there are genuinely frightening scenes in this movie, especially when Cole is visited by ghosts who seek him out for help or companionship. The Sixth Sense, though, earned its way to the top of the box office with a twist ending involving Bruce Willis’s child psychologist who tries to help Cole wrestle with his emotional problems, unaware that he might have more to do with Cole’s psychological problems than he realizes. The film works still even without the twist as it delves effectively into the emotional lives of its characters.

14. Ringu (1998)

You can't find a scarier image than the one above. It's from Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (aka The Ring) and it's the spookiest thing you'll ever see in film. Ringu involves a videotape that causes the gruesome death of anyone who watches it. A young reporter Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) researches the tape following her niece’s death and is drawn into the mystery regarding the young girl who appears in it. After viewing the tape, she has exactly one week to find a way to avoid an equally gruesome fate. The movie is a race against time as Reiko not only tries to solve the mystery of the little girl’s death, but save her life and the lives of her loved ones as well. Creepy, atmospheric, and thoroughly original, Ringu is a marriage of traditional horror with modern technology.

15. Carrie (1976)

This second Stephen King-based adaptation is notable for the fact that the real horror starts in the last third of the film. Starring Sissy Spacek, Carrie is the story of an abused, loveless, and otherwise unremarkable girl who has the remarkable power of telekinesis. Much of the film deals with Carrie struggling to understand her powers while coping with being the punching bag for both her classmates and an overbearing mother. The film shows how group conformity and religious zealotry can be pretty scary too. Poor Carrie is so abused that when she finally gets her revenge, you can’t help but root for her. The movie ends with a twist that’s a real shocker and proves that director Brian de Palma knows how to bring the terror and suspense. Spacek’s performance is likewise notable for bringing to life a character who goes from a sad sack to a blossoming flower with enough potential that her final degradation is as heartbreaking as it is horrific.

Honorable Mentions

16. The Universal Horror Movies: these 1930's Universal horror movies, such as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), the Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and others, are light on scares, but big on atmospherics. Still it’s a little hard to go through Halloween without settling down with one of these classic horror films.

17. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1991): Sure, Keanu Reeves’ performance nearly sinks this movie, but there’s always Francis Ford Coppola’s baroque excesses and, of course, Gary Oldman as the titular vampire.

18. The Lost Boys (1988): Joel Schumacher’s creepy and atmospheric movie is pretty funny too. It is also one of the great ‘80s vehicles starring Corey Feldman and the late Corey Haim.

19. The Lady in White (1988): not particularly scary, but it does have the nice, curl-up-in-a-blanket-and-pop-the-popcorn feel to it. A horror movie that’s gentle enough for the kids.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick: A Review

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, A Novel in Words and Pictures, Brian Selznick. New York: Scholastic Press. 2007

Later this year, Martin Scorsese will release a new film called Hugo, based on the 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. This would seem like an odd choice for a director like Scorsese, known for his gritty urban dramas, to direct a film based on a children’s story. But this particular story is actually more up the alley for a well beloved cineaste.

The novel, which takes place in Paris during the early 1930s, is about a young boy named Hugo Cabret, left orphaned after his father is killed in a fire at the museum where he works and is taken under the wing of a drunken uncle who is in charge of making sure that all the clocks in the train station are on time. When the uncle disappears, Hugo is left to fend for himself, caring for the clocks and stealing food from the local vendors. One day he decides to steal a toy mouse from a toy booth across the way from the apartment where he is holed up. He is caught by the toy vendor and forced to work at the booth, mending toys, as punishment. He soon becomes embroiled in the lives of Papa Georges, the man who runs the booth, and his goddaughter, Isabel, who later helps Hugo undercover a mystery concerning an automaton his father tried to fix. After discovering the automation among the ruins of the museum fire, Hugo lugs it home and tries to fix it, hoping to discover the message his father left him through a mechanization which allows it to write. When he realizes that a key dangling from Isabelle’s neck might actually be the key that will turn on the automaton, he steals it. What he and Isabelle discover after they turn on the automaton uncovers another mystery about Papa Georges. It turns out that he is actually Georges Méliès, the film director responsible for the film A Trip to the Moon, one of cinema’s earliest sci-fi/adventure movies.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a novel about the wonder and beauty of film, so it’s hard to see why Scorsese wouldn’t have been attracted to such a project. Interspersed throughout the novel are the author’s own pencil hand drawings, which lend it a sense of cinematic splendor. Too bad the writing itself couldn’t have matched the illustrations. Selznick has a rather flat and unengaging writing style that could have used more of the same magical renderings of his illustrations. I never got a sense of the magic and mystery in Hugo’s story from the writing itself, which is disappointing since the story is interesting. 

No doubt, when Hugo will be released later this year, Scorsese will bring some of his own cinematic magic to a children’s tale about the magic of film. The film stars Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ben Kingsley as Méliès, and Sacha Cohen Baron.

What You See in the Dark by Manuel Muñoz: A Review

What You See in the Dark, the debut novel by Manuel Muñoz (Faith Healer of Olive Street), takes an unlikely subject, the making of an iconic Hollywood film classic, and wraps it around a story of murder, love, and obsession.

It's 1959, Bakersfield, California. A murder has taken place. A young woman, Teresa, is brutally beaten in the stairway outside her apartment. The perpetrator is her boyfriend, Dan. These particulars set the story in motion. While What You See in the Dark takes its cues from film noir, it is much more than that. It is a mediation on death. It is also about film, and the hold it has on our collective imagination to portray on the silver screen our deepest desires and fears.

What You See in the Dark is told through four voices: Teresa, a shoe sales clerk with ambitions of becoming a singer; Arlene Watson, Dan's mother, who is also a waitress and motel-owner biding her time in Bakersfield following her husband's abandonment; the Actress who comes to Bakersfield to shoot principal photography on the movie that will become Psycho, a movie that will not only launch itself into the nightmares of countless film goers, but also change everything we know about film; and one of Theresa's co-workers at the shoe store, who tries to bring some perspective into her senseless death.

The women have few interactions, if at all, but they are nonetheless affected by one another and the paths each take. Teresa Garza is a young, restless Mexican woman who begins a relationship with a migrant worker who teaches her to play guitar. Yet it is Dan Watson, one of Bakersfield's most desirable young men, who captures her heart. They begin a doomed relationship, both on the stage where he asks her to perform with him and in bed. After the murder, Dan runs away and the migrant worker is deported, but the affect that all three will have on Bakersfield stains the town, even long after the people who live there move on.

Arlene bears the burden of what her son has done. But she has carried a lot of bad memories through her life. She isn't thrilled about her son's relationship with Teresa or his crime, but she is as resigned to it as she is resigned to the fact that she is a waitress and the owner of a motel doomed by the construction of a new highway that will lead away what little customers she has left. She is mystified by the younger waitresses at the diner who are fascinated by the movie stars in Look and Life magazines, whose lives of glamor and excitement are only a stone's throw away in Los Angeles. But Arlene is as swept up by such excitement when the Actress arrives with her driver. Arlene recognizes her, but the Actress denies who she is, a fact which later upsets Arlene when the Actress and the Director show up at her motel. The exterior of that motel will become famously enshrined in their film.

While Teresa dreams of a better life and Arlene is resigned to the one she has, the Actress has the life that is the stuff of fantasy, and yet she is unsettled with insecurity and ambivalence. The Hollywood she has grown used to will soon fall by the wayside, a victim to the European style of auteur filmmaking that will push envelopes and liberate film from its rigid, censorious past. She is a part of that past, and knows that if her career is to survive she will have to change with the times. The Actress is like a lot of Americans during the 1960s, seeing the tides of change sweeping at its shores and aware that if she does not ride along its waves she will drown in the undertow.

Muñoz's story is both quiet and unsettling in the way it reveals how change comes to certain areas of the country---not like a flood but more like a trickle. It is the building of a new highway, creating opportunities even as it destroys others. It is how a movie whose graphic depiction of nudity and violence for its time becomes an unlikely trendsetter. It is the murder of a girl whose death signals the ending of one era and the start of another. Teresa's murder is never depicted. As the story moves forward, this absence intensifies the expectation. This is not a failing, but rather an indication of Muñoz's mastery of manipulation (not unlike the master of manipulation himself, Alfred Hitchcock). He allows the reader's imagination to take over, just as Hitchcock allows his audience's imagination to run wild when the second murder occurs in his lesser known film, Frenzy (Muñoz mentions this scene as a reference point in his novel). Muñoz makes the point, as Hitchcock might, that now that the curtains have been thrown back, and we are able to see death graphically on screen or on the pages, it is time to pull them back firmly in place. There is a time and place, but the imagination will ultimately hold sway, the way the eye will actually perceive the knife cutting flesh, even when we know it is all an illusion.

Muñoz ably juggles his numerous themes in an understated way. He creates a mood and tone that beautifully captures small town life in southern California. He also does a superb job of capturing the unique experience of watching a film, whether it is being shot or shown on a screen. This is his take on Alfred Hitchcock's infamous shower scene in Psycho:

A silhouette in women's clothes, and a big butcher knife. Any knife will do in real life---a pocket blade in a street corner mugging, a sharpened screwdriver in a jail cell. But this was the movies and it had to be a butcher knife.

The knife came at her like a tiger's paw reaching through a cage, not able to strike, but the illusion was the same.

The silhouette was (or wasn't) a Las Vegas breast.

From overhead, it was heartbreakingly easy to see how she had nowhere to go, trapped as she was on all sides.

More screaming. Keep your face in the water. It will force you to shut your eyes.

We go to the movies because movies are meant to be safe. They allow us to experience our deepest fantasies without ridicule; to explore our fears without harm; to express our thoughts without censor. Psycho opened a way for filmmakers to push the envelope and make cinema more daring. Yet, as Muñoz's novel reveals, the way toward those changes often involves a bit of violence. Tightly written and sharply observed, What You See in the Dark is an auspicious debut of a very talented writer.

Wendy and Lucy: DVD Review

There are few films today that explore the parameters of poverty and capitalism that have the same power as older films such as Umberto D, Nothing But A Man, and The Killer of Sheep. When film and television do explore such issues, it is often trapped within the confines of sociological case studies, designed more to explain to a mostly middle-class audience about the social pathologies and criminal behavior of the poor. The films mentioned above avoid such trappings, and instead present its characters as fully rendered human beings, capable of kindness as well as cruelty, whose perceptions and actions are nonetheless shaped by the socioeconomic realities of their lives.

Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 feature Wendy and Lucy follows more in the tradition of these earlier films, a rare breed that chooses to treat those who live within the margins of society with the respect they rarely get in popular culture. The plot of Wendy and Lucy is fairly simple. Wendy and her dog Lucy arrive in Portland, Oregon on their way to Alaska, where Wendy hopes to find lucrative work in the fishing canneries. While there, she faces a series of mishaps that force her to delay her trip and tax her meager financial resources. First her car breaks down. Realizing she will have to spend what little money she has to get it fixed, she shoplifts dog food at a nearby store, gets caught, and arrested. She spends more money to pay the fee to avoid a trial two weeks later. After she’s released from jail, she returns to the store where she had Lucy tied up  outside only to find that the dog is gone. Wendy spends the rest of the film searching for her dog and trying to get her car fixed. But along the way, she finds herself in more precarious situations that grate on her both emotionally and financially.

The quiet power and strength in this film, which is only 80 minutes long, lies in its social commentary about our society and the way it treats the poor and indigent. Reichardt doesn’t betray her story with didacticism, but rather carefully and masterfully reveals her vision through story and character. Every step of the way, the film reveals how society and relationships are shaped by the exchange of money. After Wendy sleeps in her car for the night in a Walgreen's parking lot, she is told by the security guard that is she in violation of parking rules. Already we see that rules, codes of conduct, and laws benefit those who are only willing to shop and spend. The young clerk at the store who catches Wendy shoplifting reports her zealously and with a rigid allegiance to rules and authority. He is the glue that holds a society together that keeps people like Wendy out. When Wendy finally finds Lucy at a foster home, she comes to the heartbreaking realization that her dog will be better off with a new family. Even her relationships with her sister is fraught with monetary exchange. During a phone call to her sister and brother-in-law, Wendy is promptly disregarded by her sibling with the stated fact that she is unable to loan her any money.

There are moments however when this rate of exchange is subverted, in which characters act not out of monetary gain but through the simple goodness of human exchange. Ironically, the security guard who tells Wendy to move her car out of the parking lot turns out to be the most humane of all the people she meets in Portland. He helps her move her stalled car out onto the side street, advises her on where to go shopping, and even loans her his cell phone so she can keep in touch with the local pound. The relationship that quietly develops between these two offer a bright ray of hope in so much building despair.

Reichardt is able to explore so many complex issues precisely because she allows the story to unfold slowly through characters and actions. The movie is rather slow-paced but is thoroughly engaging. When it was released, Wendy and Lucy was compared to such Italian neorealist films as Umberto D, which likewise tells the story of an old man, stricken in poverty, and his relationship to his dog Flag. Yet unlike neorealism, Wendy and Lucy is steeped far more in experimental filmmaking. The cinematography is slow and deliberate, capturing the minute details of Wendy’s world, lingering on wide and medium shots of nearly empty streets and roads, the inside of a grocery store, a jail cell, then closing in on tighter shots of fruits in stalls, of fingerprints being taken, to reveal how claustrophobic and alienating this environment is. There is no musical score. Rather the ambient noises of traffic, wind blowing through trees, footsteps on gravel express Wendy’s loneliness. Michelle Williams gives an understated performance that quietly builds in frustration as the story moves forward. She portrays Wendy as a young woman numbed by society, on the cusp of cynicism and jadedness. Her only trusting friendship is with Lucy. The emotional bond she forms with the dog snaps when she realizes she must give her up. Williams portrays this scene with the kind of quiet restraint that gives the film its emotional strength.

Recently, Reichardt’s latest film, Meek's Cutoff along with Terence Malick's Tree of Life, has stirred a debate among film critics about whether watching such movies is the equivalent of eating your vegetables: movies that are good for you but are boring as hell! I won’t delve into that debate since I haven’t seen any of the movies mentioned, but I do think it’s important to point out the difference between boredom and slow-moving. Boredom is a total disengagement of the things around you. A film or novel can be slow-paced and not be boring. Rather only the subject for what ever reason can fail to engage its viewers or readers. Wendy and Lucy is not such a film. I failed to not care about Wendy’s plight. We’ve all been in the situation where our dreams or goals are thwarted time again by bad luck. And we’ve all experienced times when we’ve had to sacrifice the things and people we love. Wendy and Lucy is one such exploration into the human condition, beautiful, quiet, and evocative in its vision of love and sacrifice.

Memorial Day War Stories

War stories are the most enduring stories of all. That’s a rather depressing thought, but no less truthful. War stories go as far back as the Illiad, and continue to be written about, produced for film and television or for the theater.

What is it about war stories that continue to sway audiences? What do we gain from them? When Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan was released more than a decade ago, it opened our eyes about the true costs of war and the bravery of the men who fought in WWII. But if it was designed to caution us, we did not heed its warning. Within two years of its release, we were in Afghanistan. And two years later, we were fighting in Iraq. Both wars were painfully unnecessary (as the recent killing of Osama bin Ladin has pointed out), and the fear and jingoism which brought us into both conflicts now seem of a different time and place.

During that time we were presented with more war stories. Hollywood played its part by releasing films such as In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Lions for Lambs, and The Hurt Locker, which won its director Kathryn Bigelow an Oscar in 2010. Documentaries such as Restropo (whose co-director Tim Hetherington was recently killed while documenting the war in Libya), No End in Sight, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 demonstrated the power of documentaries to tell war stories in all their raw authenticity. The number of fictional tales about Iraq or Afghanistan have been scant, but war stories are still being written. Both Denis Johnston’s Tree of Smoke and Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn are about the Vietnam war. Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner takes place during the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and follows through to the rise of the Taliban. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun hauntingly details the civil strife that occurred in Nigeria during the 1960s. And then there was James McBride’s Miracle at St. Anna, a WWII story about black soldiers which was made into a film directed by Spike Lee. In non-fiction, which has taken up the slack of war reporting, there is Sebastian Junger’s War, Brandon Friedman’s memoir The War I Always Wanted, Dexter Filkin’s The Forever War, David Finkel’s The Good Soldier, and a wealth of others. Television presented us with the miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific, both about WWII; Generation Kill, about Iraq; Army Wives, and Saving Jessica Lynch, an NBC movie that was rightly criticized for its inaccuracies.

Then of course there are the classic war novels and films: War and Peace, The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, Catch 22, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Send Me Home; Apocalypse Now, The Bridge on River Kwai, Patton, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Back to Bataan, M*A*S*H, Platoon, Glory, and so many others, many of which starred John Wayne.    

But the question still remains. What draws us to these stories? I suppose it all depends. There seems to be three different types of war stories out there. There are those stories which validate the actions of war as an heroic endeavor: men testing out their mettle on the battlefields, true leaders rising to the challenge of defeat and victory. These are the tales of the Illiad, of Shakespeare’s Henry V, of Patton, of The Green Berets. Then there are the stories that are meant to simply document the war experience: Saving Private Ryan, Hamburger Hill, All Quiet on the Waterfront, The Hurt Locker, HBO’s documentary Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam and Generation Kill. Then there are the anti-war stories, the stories that are meant to caution, to horrify, to provoke. Films like Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon, Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, Redacted, and The Tillman Story, a documentary about fallen U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, whose death from friendly fire was misused by the Bush Administration as propaganda, fall easily into this category.

Depending on what audiences are searching for at any given moment, war stories offer insightful glimpses into what it is like to be on the battlefield, to witness the horrors of carnage and destruction, and to suffer from its aftermath. They, like horror stories, push us to the mouth of hell and bring us back to safety. Unfortunately, what they cannot do is teach us somehow to avoid them in the first place.

This Memorial Day I dedicate my post to my late grandfather, Paul Buford Shipman, a WWII veteran.