What To Watch This Week

Creepy October Bonanza Edition

Oct 27, 2022

All October, I've been using this space to recommend Halloween-themed shows and movies, and now, lo and behold, the time is upon us: the upcoming weekend is the last one you'll have to gorge yourself on movies the celebrate this holiday. So enjoy it! Because as soon as it's over, of course, we'll all be forced to throw ourselves into that monumental season that now spans everything from the beginning of November to the beginning of the new year and revolves around trying to be cheerful and buying lots of things nobody needs: ThankChristmaNewYear, I believe the kids are calling it.

(If you're interested in the other entries from this month, by the way, they can be found here, here, and here.)

So this week, before the Halloween season is gone entirely, I thought I'd throw out a list of some of my offbeat favorite scary films, as well as some links to some other pieces I've written about horror.

Offbeat Favorites

The Black Cat (1934, Edward G. Ulmer)

One of the things you’ll notice if you watch a lot of older horror films is how deeply Freudian ideas had penetrated the consciousness (a Freudian phrase if there ever was one) back then, and how interestingly they combined with a certain gothic notion of evil left over from the 19th Century. If you want a great example of this, go check out Ulmer's The Black Cat from 1934. You'll get to see a couple of horror film titans – Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi – square off in a flick that features an epic revenge story, plenty of psychological innuendo and exploration, a tinge of real evil, that wonderful old trope of innocent people wandering into the middle of a conflagration they're really not prepared for, a weird fear of cats, and one of the finest macabre moments of '30s American cinema (it's shot using shadows, and you'll know it when you see it). If you want something old and creepy that's definitely a B-movie but still a lot of fun, this one's worth checking out.

The Masque of The Red Death (1964, Roger Corman)

Longtime readers are familiar with my love of Vincent Price, as well as my deep admiration of the works of Edgar Allan Poe – and this film combines the two. What's not to like? (If you want a still further off-beat recommendation, incidentally, check out Poe's short novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which is at once surreal and striking and important, and ends with a moment of perfect, almost indescribable, strangeness that you will never be able to forget.) For my money, the character in Masque might be Price's best bad guy of the '60s, a decade in which he made a lot of movies and played a lot of bad guys. Here, he plays Prince Prospero, a really evil fellow who barricades himself and his nasty followers up in his castle in an attempt to hide from a plague sweeping the land. Other than some narrative structure and color scheme, the film doesn't really have much to do with the Poe story from which it takes its name (it also borrows liberally from another Poe tale) but what it does as well as virtually any adaptation of a Poe work ever made is capture the feeling of his work. And that feeling, friends, is a deep dark side of Americana: a sense of fantastical exuberance turned to wrong ends, of the fears of a culture perched at the edge of what it imagines to be a wilderness and inventing itself whole cloth with no foundations beneath it, of the terrible erosive possibilities that come with power and freedom. So if you want a resplendent piece of eerieberry pie for desert some night before Halloween, check this one out. (Bonus: it was gorgeously photographed by Nicholas Roeg, who would go on to make the horror masterpiece Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth, staring David Bowie, and other cool stuff.)

The Devil Rides Out (1968, Terence Fisher)

In the late '60s and early '70s, there was a spate of movies about satanic cults. This included some terrible ones, some famous ones (Rosemary's Baby) some absurd ones (Race With The Devil, in which Peter Fonda and Warren Oates play dirt-bike enthusiasts do battle with a cult while driving around the Southwest in an RV) and some fun gems. Why did this film cycle take hold? Maybe because both the young revolutionaries growing their hair long and lighting things on fire and the old conservatives moaning warnings and drooling in their sherry thought that the other group resembled a bunch of Satanists, following mindlessly along behind their leaders, so these movies played on everyone's fears. Or maybe not. In any event, The Devil Rides Out is one of the fun gems the era produced. There's a lot of names tied to it: screenwriter Richard Matheson (a legend in the field, who wrote things like The Omega Man and Duel) director Terence Fisher (who made solid movie after solid movie for Hammer Films in England) and star Christopher Lee, who cut his teeth in B-movie fare (he made seven Dracula films for Hammer) before going on to play the villain in a Bond film, and Saruman in Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy (and the villian in The Wicker Man! don’t forget that one!). The plot here involves some rather upright British chaps who go on a mission to rescue the wayward son of a friend from a mysterious cult, and it's a little jewelry box of delights, ranging from the way Fisher conveys the cult leader's power (it's all in the eyes…) to the way the actual appearance of the devil is handled. If you're looking for a little British gothicness to spruce up your pumpkin season, look no further.

Black Christmas (1974 Bob Clark)

Is there a weirder director than Bob Clark? You might remember A Christmas Story, the beloved one where the kid wants the air rifle? Yep, he made that. And Porky's, the frat-tastic forerunner of so many '80s movies featuring nerds and breasts? Made that one too. And how about Black Christmas, which the horror diehards love to argue about: is it the first "slasher" film ever made, the one that gave birth to the horror genre that swamped the '80s? Or is it not a true slasher, for various reasons related to its flouting of the "rules" that horror fans like Matthew Lillard's character in Scream love to pretend exist? It's all beyond me. But it's a great scary flick. The setup might feel like parody now, but in 1974 it was treading mostly, er, virgin territory: there's this sorority house, see, and one by one the girls in it are being killed by a mysterious fellow. And he keeps calling on the phone, but the cops can't tell exactly where he's calling from… Like John Carpenter (see below), Clark has the advantage of being a really good filmmaker who knows how to tell a story and also how to set up a scare. It's the first film on this list that really feels like a modern horror film, and if you're a fan of the genre and somehow haven't seen this, you really should.

Deep Red (1975) / Suspiria (1977) / Tenebre (1982) – Dario Argento

I haven't gotten around to writing at any length about Argento on this site yet for some reason that I can't really bring to mind. And I'm not going to do something as silly as just pick just one of his films to suggest you should check out if you happen to have gotten through all the Halloween seasons thus far in your life without watching his stuff, you poor soul. In fact, I'm going to go in the opposite direction, and say that you should probably watch Opera, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Phenomena and maybe even The Stendhal Syndrome too, although this last one may be pushing it a little bit. Anyway, who's Argento? Short version: this crazy Italian guy who makes horror/thriller/Grand Guignol films that are fearsome and lush and pulpy and lots of other adjectives. They're not for everyone, and Argento likes his violence hot and heavy, but, wow, are they worth checking out if this kind of movie is for you. Like a lot of other folks, I think Deep Red is probably the finest giallo film ever made (this is an Italian genre that mashes together horror stories and person-solving-a-mystery stories) and its reveal of how you should have known the identity of the killer all along is just outlandishly good; Suspiria is a witch flick that doubles as a kind of sensory stimulation event (if you watch it, try like hell to do so with a really good surround-sound system or, better, wearing headphones: the sound design here is one for the ages); Tenebrae is another giallo – a little smoother, perhaps, without quite as much raw verve as the others – that I admire nonetheless because of the audacity of the twist that runs through the center of it. If you've never seen Argento's films and want to entirely rearrange the furniture of your horror-movie understanding, you should watch a couple or five of them this weekend. You won't regret it.

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982, Larry Cohen)

As far as I'm concerned, there are two main reasons to watch Larry Cohen's Q. The first is the radical pluck it takes to try to make a large-scale monster movie on a restricted budget. And that's exactly what this is: New York City is being terrorized by a gigantic dragon-like creature, and it's up to a loose-cannon cop (David Carradine) and a small-time criminal (Michael Moriarty) to defeat it. The budget, you ask? Just over a million bucks? Larry Cohen you madman, with the kind of budget that slasher directors are using to make limited location films with small casts, you're going to try for something closer in conception to Godzilla or King Kong? Indeed he is. And once you get past the fact that the shots of the monster aren't going to look all that great, there's not much else to do but marvel at the fact that Cohen pulls it off as well as he does. It's all here: the monster swooping down and picking people off of rooftops, construction workers getting decapitated, random people in the street getting showered in blood from hundreds of stories above, a final shootout with dozens of gun-toting cops – it's just about the best thing this side of Equinox. And then there's the second reason to watch it: the performance of Michael Moriarty as the small-time criminal and ex-junky at the center of the story, which is as good a piece of acting and character observation as there is in any American horror movie. It's like a guy from a Cassavetes film has walked into a monster movie – all those layers of internal conflict and small victories running up against a lifetime of bigger defeats – and Moriarty absolutely nails it. Overall, it's just a wonderful example of the possibilities of low-budget filmmaking when there's some real talent involved.

Prince of Darkness (1987) / In the Mouth of Madness (1994) – John Carpenter

Let's get this out of the way. Neither Prince of Darkness nor In The Mouth of Madness are at the top of the list of Carpenter's very best films. But what am I going to do, recommend Halloween or The Thing or They Live? If you haven't already seen those, then there's no hope for you. (I jest, I jest – but seriously…you should go watch them.) But here's the thing about Carpenter: he's so talented that virtually everything he ever made is fun as hell. And these two are great examples of that: both are stuffed full of delicious Carpenterian weirdness and pure entertainment value, although they push in two different directions. Prince of Darkness finds Mr. Carpenter in his '80s high adventure period. It's a horror flick through and through, but like so much of his work it's also a siege film, and not quite as dark-toned as the work from the beginning of his career. The plot is a corker, too: a priest finds a mysterious container in the bottom of his church and calls in a bunch of scientists to examine it, and let me tell you, you do not want to get stuck in that church when the poo poo hits the propeller. In The Mouth of Madness represents the Maestro making maybe the most Lovecraft-influenced movie of his career, dipping into both nightmare and surreality. The story is about a writer of horror novels who disappears, perhaps into one of the monstrous imaginings of his own books, and the insurance man who gets sent to find him. It's weird and dark and creepy, and if you screen it back-to-back with Prince of Darkness I'm personally guaranteeing a good time.

The ‘Burbs (1989, Joe Dante)

Joe Dante really loves movies, and this is perhaps his work that is the most directly a movie-lovers' movie. The screenplay by Dana Olsen gets this started off right: the characters are broad but lovingly observed, and the whole thing is undergirded by the kind of ironic subversion that's only available in decades ruled by a plastic sunny optimism (see something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the 1950s version of this). It tells the story of a poor suburban schlub (Tom Hanks) who decides to spend his vacation at home, lounging about; with all that time on his hands, he soon launches an investigation of his weird neighbors, whom he suspects of committing foul acts in their crumbling old home. It's goofy and funny and not really a horror flick so much as it is a loving ode to horror flicks and movies in general – there's riffs here on everything and everyone from Sergio Leone to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II – and if you want something that's not gory or scary but still captures the sensibility of the season, this might be the right one for you.

Hostel (2005, Eli Roth)

My suspicion is that more than a few readers will be surprised (and perhaps even borderline annoyed) to find this film on this list. Here's why: if your memory extends back this far, you'll probably remember this as one of the first that kicked off the so-called "torture-porn" moment of a few years ago, when it seemed like a sudden spiritual darkness had swept in over the horror movie landscape and all anyone was interested in was nasty little films that showed people being killed in unpleasant ways and for unpleasant reasons. And I'm not here to argue that there isn't something unpleasant in Roth's little shocker. But I do think this: Roth is an intelligent filmmaker, and with Hostel he may have somehow backed into making one of the most politically interesting horror films of the new century. The story, such as it is, goes like this: there are a couple of American college students traveling around Europe trying to have a good time and sleep with hot women. Then they fall into the clutches of a group that kidnaps people and makes them available to very wealthy clients, who are willing to pay big money to torture and kill other human beings. It's absolutely abrasive and played for shock value. But it also operates according to a remarkably acidic logic. In the opening, the college dudes are sex-obsessed, and clearly see the bodies of the women they come into contact with as having little value other than pleasure; in the second half of the film, the college dudes find that it is their own bodies that have no value to the rich torturers (and the audience), other than that they can provide them with titillation. This, folks, is what we call implicating the audience, and Roth takes a devilish delight in it (although whether he fully realized what he was doing is perhaps another question.) You want to condemn the guys for objectifying women's bodies? He's going to throw it right back in your face, making the point that viewers of all violent horror films objectify human bodies for the purposes of their own entertainment. If you're a serious fan of the genre, it's worth giving this one another look, particularly if you're into thinking about how the political sides of these kinds of movies work.