by Joyless Creatures Staff
"What's your favorite scary movie?" a creepy voice asks Drew Barrymore to open Wes Craven's 1996 film, Scream. We at Joyless Creatures decided to ask ourselves the same question. Here follow our Halloween picks – from chilling characters and half-human monsters to legitimate encounters with hell itself, these movies are guaranteed to keep your Halloween spooky and your dreams troubled.
|
The Fly (1986)
Directed by David Cronenberg |
In David Cronenberg's rich 1980's canon, The Fly is perhaps the most mainstream–a remake of a hallowed sci-fi short story with future superstars Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. It remains Cronenberg's most financially successful film, and has an almost unbelievably enduring cultural influence. (The phrase "Be afraid. Be very afraid." only entered the popular vernacular after serving as The Fly's tagline.) But for a film with such broad success, The Fly is also one of Cronenberg's most intense exercises—a terrifying fusion of traditional horror and body horror that furthers Cronenberg's career-long investigations into the fleshy despair of mortality and the existential dread that is the logical consequence of the existence of disease. At its most philosophical moments it is as psychoanalytically deft as Videodrome and at its goriest it competes with The Thing for pure stomach-turning gross out factor.
The film follows Seth Brundle (Goldblum), a brilliant, reclusive scientist working on a teleportation machine, and Ronnie Quaife (Davis), a journalist getting the inside scoop on this world-changing device. After accidentally entering a telepod along with a fly during a test teleportation, Brundle begins a grotesque transition as his body fuses with the fly's DNA. Cronenberg's adaptation focuses the gaze tightly on Brundle as he becomes aware of this transition, and feels his mind begin to adopt a cruel, insect mentality. The result probably owes more to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
than it does to the original short story, lending a tragic pathos to Goldblum's Gregor Samsa as he sees his world-changing discovery turn quickly into his own groundbreaking demise. But despite deep philosophical tones in the script, this is still an upsettingly visceral cinematic experience, a movie that will send you screaming into the other room, unable to look at the unsettling transformation unfolding on screen.
The film follows Seth Brundle (Goldblum), a brilliant, reclusive scientist working on a teleportation machine, and Ronnie Quaife (Davis), a journalist getting the inside scoop on this world-changing device. After accidentally entering a telepod along with a fly during a test teleportation, Brundle begins a grotesque transition as his body fuses with the fly's DNA. Cronenberg's adaptation focuses the gaze tightly on Brundle as he becomes aware of this transition, and feels his mind begin to adopt a cruel, insect mentality. The result probably owes more to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
than it does to the original short story, lending a tragic pathos to Goldblum's Gregor Samsa as he sees his world-changing discovery turn quickly into his own groundbreaking demise. But despite deep philosophical tones in the script, this is still an upsettingly visceral cinematic experience, a movie that will send you screaming into the other room, unable to look at the unsettling transformation unfolding on screen.
|
Hour of the Wolf (1968)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman |
With his penchant for emotional close-ups, intense imagery, and expressionistic black and white cinematography, Ingmar Bergman is surprisingly a natural choice for a horror film. Yet he forayed into the genre only occasionally: in 1960, with The Virgin Spring (later the inspiration for Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left), and in 1968, with Hour of the Wolf. In a year of transgressive horror classics like Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead, Bergman's film fits right in with that company. It is the story of a couple, played by Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow, who live on an island populated by mysterious, inverted horror movie archetypes. Slowly, the Von Sydow character goes mad and reveals dark terrible truths about his past.
Part of what makes the film scary is that, like Caligari, it is unclear what imagery is "true" and what is part of Von Sydow's mentally unbalanced imagination. Bergman's film plays with horror movie archetypes (the vampire, the zombie, a character called the "birdman") in ways that are visually delightful, but are also totally unsettling and unique.
Part of what makes the film scary is that, like Caligari, it is unclear what imagery is "true" and what is part of Von Sydow's mentally unbalanced imagination. Bergman's film plays with horror movie archetypes (the vampire, the zombie, a character called the "birdman") in ways that are visually delightful, but are also totally unsettling and unique.
|
Jigoku (1960)
Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa |
In 1960, England gave us Peeping Tom, America gave us Psycho, France gave us Eyes without a Face, and Japan gave us Jigoku—all wildly different horror movies, though they all clawed aggressively at the boundaries of the genre. Arriving in the early years of the Japanese New Wave, Jigoku was financed by the disreputable Shintoho Studios, known primarily for low-budget exploitation flicks; the massively ambitious Jigoku (its final release) proved to be disastrous, as the company filed for bankruptcy in 1961. It’s hard to believe that such a comparatively large budget went towards articulating this nasty view of humanity: the first two-thirds of the movie stare headlong at human evil, offering an ensemble of characters guilty of murder, adultery, larceny, slander, a litany of torrid misdeeds. Through it all wanders a ghostly character named Tamura, who may or may not be the devil, nudging all of these people towards imminent destruction.
Translated loosely as The Sinners of Hell, that title manifests itself late in the film, when dozens of characters die almost simultaneously—the movie’s most wickedly funny joke. Damned to hell, these sinners relive their own horrors on a garishly artificial studio backlot—they’re boiled, dismembered, or flayed alive, the bright-red gore taking full advantage of early-‘60s laxness. Initially hired to write a film called Heaven and Hell, screenwriter Ichiro Miyagawa later joked that he would write about Heaven in the sequel; Jigoku is absolutely hopeless, its dismal view of human nature masked by schlocky gore FX and a mordantly funny tone. It was (and remains) a picture of human depravity so vitriolic that it effectively destroyed a studio.
Translated loosely as The Sinners of Hell, that title manifests itself late in the film, when dozens of characters die almost simultaneously—the movie’s most wickedly funny joke. Damned to hell, these sinners relive their own horrors on a garishly artificial studio backlot—they’re boiled, dismembered, or flayed alive, the bright-red gore taking full advantage of early-‘60s laxness. Initially hired to write a film called Heaven and Hell, screenwriter Ichiro Miyagawa later joked that he would write about Heaven in the sequel; Jigoku is absolutely hopeless, its dismal view of human nature masked by schlocky gore FX and a mordantly funny tone. It was (and remains) a picture of human depravity so vitriolic that it effectively destroyed a studio.
|
River’s Edge (1986)
Directed by Tim Hunter |
River's Edge seems to have completely disappeared from film history. Part teen thriller, part social problem play, Tim Hunter’s film explores the ‘horrors’ of teenage apathy and degeneracy. Released just weeks before Blue Velvet, the picture plays out like a dismal inversion of Lynch’s film. The chilling realities and perversions that lurked behind Blue Velvet’s dreamy façade are brought to the forefront here. The suburbia and teens of River’s Edge don’t have inherent innocence to lose, and the film’s script is divested of the spurious naiveté so prominent in Blue Velvet. At the outset of Hunter’s picture, a girl is found dead, naked and brutalized on a riverbank, and nobody seems to care, least of all the killer. Based on a horrifying true story, River’s Edge is a testament to the fact that truth is not just stranger than fiction but also much scarier.
While moral decay is the horror that propels the plot, it’s the bizarre, one-of-a-kind performances that truly carry this film and provide its dark wallop. Dennis Hopper shows up in a role that has to be reckoned as his definitive lowlife. As the one legged paranoiac Feck (who’s fanatically committed to his girlfriend—a sex doll named Ellie), he’s something of a surrogate father to the film’s misled youth and can always be counted on for free weed and beer. He's even more pathetic and unsettling than his turn as Frank in Blue Velvet. Then there’s the inimitable Crispin Glover, whose nervous histrionics are on full display as Layne. With a hip mullet (somehow he pulls it off), biker jacket, and Volkswagen bug with outsize tires, he's a commanding screen presence. In the end, the film is alarmingly prescient in its depiction of teen violence and will leave you mesmerized in a deep malaise.
While moral decay is the horror that propels the plot, it’s the bizarre, one-of-a-kind performances that truly carry this film and provide its dark wallop. Dennis Hopper shows up in a role that has to be reckoned as his definitive lowlife. As the one legged paranoiac Feck (who’s fanatically committed to his girlfriend—a sex doll named Ellie), he’s something of a surrogate father to the film’s misled youth and can always be counted on for free weed and beer. He's even more pathetic and unsettling than his turn as Frank in Blue Velvet. Then there’s the inimitable Crispin Glover, whose nervous histrionics are on full display as Layne. With a hip mullet (somehow he pulls it off), biker jacket, and Volkswagen bug with outsize tires, he's a commanding screen presence. In the end, the film is alarmingly prescient in its depiction of teen violence and will leave you mesmerized in a deep malaise.
|
The Thing (1982)
Directed by John Carpenter |
John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing follows a small group of scientists and technicians stationed in a remote Antarctic research outpost who find themselves infiltrated by a shapeshifting predator, recently unleashed from the depths of the ice shelf after being preserved for thousands of years. Kurt Russell gives an awesomely grim and gruff performance as helicopter pilot MacReady, who becomes the group’s de facto leader as their paranoia rises alongside the body count. Yet an equally magnetic presence is the monster itself, brought to life thanks to an array of lifelike, supremely imaginative animatronics that must be seen to be believed. Expertly framed by cinematographer Dean Cundey in gorgeous CinemaScope, the film skillfully evinces the base’s claustrophobic environment and vividly captures the gory, surreal terror unfolding therein.
The Thing is a consummate fusion of sci-fi and horror cinema, arriving right in the midst of both genres’ 1970s-through-80s artistic peak, and it might even be Carpenter’s masterpiece — no small feat in a catalogue that includes Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, and They Live, to mention just a few. And while it feels thematically congruent with predecessors like 1979’s Alien and 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, pushing into the same aesthetic frontiers as the contemporaneous work of David Cronenberg, the film is ultimately its own tense, fraught, and spectacularly gruesome creation — a monster movie built around a chimera whose sole will is to both perpetuate and disguise itself, and which remains fearsomely unknowable through the credits’ final frames.
The Thing is a consummate fusion of sci-fi and horror cinema, arriving right in the midst of both genres’ 1970s-through-80s artistic peak, and it might even be Carpenter’s masterpiece — no small feat in a catalogue that includes Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, and They Live, to mention just a few. And while it feels thematically congruent with predecessors like 1979’s Alien and 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, pushing into the same aesthetic frontiers as the contemporaneous work of David Cronenberg, the film is ultimately its own tense, fraught, and spectacularly gruesome creation — a monster movie built around a chimera whose sole will is to both perpetuate and disguise itself, and which remains fearsomely unknowable through the credits’ final frames.
|
The Tribe (2014)
Directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy |
The Tribe literally haunted me. In fact, I’m not sure I could ever see it again. It’s the first full-length feature film by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy and is portrayed entirely in Ukranian sign language with no subtitles. Oh, and there’s no music soundtrack either. The narrative follows a teenage boy who moves to a new school for the deaf. After a rough initiation, he becomes part of a group of boys who pimp out a pair of their female classmates to earn some money. The protagonist runs into trouble when he begins his own relationship with one of the prostitutes.
The Tribe is an interesting experiment in scriptwriting and audience interpretation. As viewers trying to decipher intention and emotion with no verbal language to ground our assumptions, it is possible to read the film in countless different ways. If you watch it with a friend (please watch it with a friend), you will find discrepancies between what each of you believe to have happened. The Tribe truly challenges the cinematic experience and creates an entirely new relationship with the senses. You will watch this movie in ways you have never watched a movie before.
But be forewarned, there is a great deal of violence throughout The Tribe. Because there is next to no sound, viewers gain an acute awareness of the noise that does exist. Each rustle will assault you. The footsteps in a hallway become ominous. Imagine how you will feel when there is actual violence. This film is very, very disturbing.
The Tribe is an interesting experiment in scriptwriting and audience interpretation. As viewers trying to decipher intention and emotion with no verbal language to ground our assumptions, it is possible to read the film in countless different ways. If you watch it with a friend (please watch it with a friend), you will find discrepancies between what each of you believe to have happened. The Tribe truly challenges the cinematic experience and creates an entirely new relationship with the senses. You will watch this movie in ways you have never watched a movie before.
But be forewarned, there is a great deal of violence throughout The Tribe. Because there is next to no sound, viewers gain an acute awareness of the noise that does exist. Each rustle will assault you. The footsteps in a hallway become ominous. Imagine how you will feel when there is actual violence. This film is very, very disturbing.
RSS Feed