The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[Mr Sausage]

If anyone else feels like taking last minute suggestions on a couple I fear will be orphans: the fantastic anthology film, Tales that Witness Madness, and the second best Jekyll and Hyde film ever done (after the Mamoulian), The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. You can find the latter on youtube (hint, hint).

[Dr Amicus]

Tales is particularly good, although it does bear slight signs of producer interference. Jekyll is fine, but I have a soft spot for Hammer's later Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde and its kitchen sink approach to Victorian crime legends.

My own late recommendation, and I did really mean to write in depth about it ages ago, is Scream and Scream Again which is probably going to claim my top spot. A gloriously excessive mixture of horror, sci fi, police procedural and paranoid conspiracy thriller it remains a genuine one off, the best of both AIP and Amicus. And you get Lee, Price and Cushing as well, albeit not as much as the publicity makes out. Oh, and there's a guest appearance by Amicus's favourite severed hand prop as well...

[Mr Sausage]

I, too, have a soft spot for Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. I really like its gallows humour. Plus seeing Ralph Bates in drag may well be the most disturbing thing in Hammer's ouvre!

[zedz]

My own late recommendation, and I did really mean to write in depth about it ages ago, is Scream and Scream Again which is probably going to claim my top spot. A gloriously excessive mixture of horror, sci fi, police procedural and paranoid conspiracy thriller it remains a genuine one off, the best of both AIP and Amicus. And you get Lee, Price and Cushing as well, albeit not as much as the publicity makes out. Oh, and there's a guest appearance by Amicus's favourite severed hand prop as well...

This is one of the key films in my cinephilic development. When I was seven or eight, my Mum got it into her head that I was really into horror movies (me having seen half of Carry On Screaming on television and absolutely nothing else), and bought me two coffee table books (Horror Movies and Monsters and Vampires) for Christmas. I lapped their intriguing plot descriptions and scary pictures right up, and immediately decided that, yes indeed, I was really into horror movies, and therefore better start watching them. First up in TV's weekly horror movie slot was Scream and Scream Again. I think a lot of it went over my head at the time, but there was one GREAT scare that made everything worthwhile and set me off down the rabbit hole. I didn't get around to revisiting it for this project, and I'm sort of reluctant to dilute my weird half-memories of it with the real thing, anyway.

[Cold Bishop]

Only one Jekyll/Hyde will be making my list, and it'll be ranking very high indeed: Walerian Borowczyk's Docteur Jekyll et les femmes. I considered making it my spotlight, but I never found the time to host the uncut version. But highly recommended.

[Yojimbo]

LISTS ARE DUE BY JANUARY 01 2013
Please submit your list of fifty (50) films-- no more, no less-- ranked in order of preference, to me, domino harvey, via PM.

Eligibility
Short films are eligible. Music videos, should the spirit move you, are eligible. TV Miniseries (using the American definition) and Made For TV Movies are eligible. TV series are not.

Just need clarification, Dom

1). What is precise final deadline?
Is it midnight, January 1st?
and Pacific or Eastern USA time?

2). a). Should titles be in English or native language?
b). And do you require titles only, or also director and year?

I think I'll give 'The Exorcist' another spin.
I think I've only seen the complete film once and wasn't as bowled over as many seem to be, but I need to be definitive about its ranking

[Yojimbo]

One title I did remember and want to remind people of is Marina de Van's In My Skin (Dans ma peau), a worthy entry in the Cronenbergian body horror subgenre. Maybe at least one other person will vote for it so it's not an orphan.

Thanks for reminding me; I reckon I'll be able to find a spot for it.
I was squirming in my seat through much of it; I might have even averted my eyes for part of it.
If they aren't criteria for inclusion, I don't know what is
(not sure I'd buy the DVD, though!)

Tales is particularly good, although it does bear slight signs of producer interference. Jekyll is fine, but I have a soft spot for Hammer's later Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde and its kitchen sink approach to Victorian crime legends...

Martine Beswick was delightful in this; and I remember spotting her as a waitress in 'Miami Blues'
(how the mighty have fallen, indeed)
As has the cinema where I first saw Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde , a mere stones throw from here; even the rubble has been removed

[domino harvey]

LISTS ARE DUE BY JANUARY 01 2013
Please submit your list of fifty (50) films-- no more, no less-- ranked in order of preference, to me, domino harvey, via PM.

Eligibility
Short films are eligible. Music videos, should the spirit move you, are eligible. TV Miniseries (using the American definition) and Made For TV Movies are eligible. TV series are not.

Just need clarification, Dom

1). What is precise final deadline?
Is it midnight, January 1st?
and Pacific or Eastern USA time?

2). a). Should titles be in English or native language?
b). And do you require titles only, or also director and year?

These are good questions, actually.

I'm thinking midnight EST January 1st, which is to say at the end of the day on January 1st, so technically 12:00AM on January 2nd. I will probably start the tallying process during the day of January 1st, though, so if you already submitted a list but plan to submit a revised list at the last minute, for God's sake give me a heads up that it's coming so I don't have to go back and change everything

Either years or directors is good, but I wouldn't worry about it unless you're picking a film that shares a title with other films (Dr Jekyll, Dracula, &c) or goes by different titles: there is a high probability, especially in this genre that so frequently finds films rereleased under new titles, that people will vote for the same film under different names and split the vote accidentally-- I'd like to avoid it, though, of course.

As far as foreign films go, for the sake of making my life easier, you should try to give me a film's most popularly-known title alongside the original if there's some reasonable expectation that I may not recognize the foreign title. Someone already submitted the Host, for instance, as Gwoemul. I assure you I didn't know what the fuck that was without Googling

[Yojimbo]

Perfect, thanks

So I'll ditch those planned Irish translations, then!

[swo17]

Everyone should bear in mind: You know all the films on your list by heart and are only dealing with your own list of 50. domino is dealing with perhaps dozens of lists of 50 (probably hundreds of distinct films in total), and may not be familiar with many of them (though not for lack of effort). If everyone takes an extra 5-10 minutes to make their individual lists as domino-friendly as possible (i.e. making it abundantly clear what particular films you are voting for, as well as identifying any alternate titles) it will probably save him several hours of tabulation. Not to mention, it can cut down on missed votes owing to alternate/foreign title confusion.

[zedz]

Further to swo's comment, I'm picking, based on the discussions in this thread, that there will be much less consensus with this list than with the previous genre and decade ones, so this could end up being the most thankless tabulation task yet, in terms of the sheer amount of information to process. So, uh, Happy New Year, domino!

[Finch]

Will PM my list before Jan 1 but by the looks of it, Jacques Tourneur may be the most represented director on that list. Also, anyone else having Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me in their list? To me, other than Eraserhead, the one film in Lynch's work that most closely resembles a horror film although Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Lost Highway of course have terrifying moments in them.

[Yojimbo]

Will PM my list before Jan 1 but by the looks of it, Jacques Tourneur may be the most represented director on that list. Also, anyone else having Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me in their list? To me, other than Eraserhead, the one film in Lynch's work that most closely resembles a horror film although Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Lost Highway of course have terrifying moments in them.

Ta, Finchy: maybe now's the time to finally get around to watching it. God knows I've had the DVD long enough

[colinr0380]

Here's another one of my also rans:

Cat's Eye (1985, Lewis Teague)

This is an excellent little anthology film, featuring adaptations of a number of Stephen King short stories from his Night Shift collection. There is a wonderful and quite moving wraparound sequence that involves a kind of fairy tale about a life/soul sucking troll who preys on children while they sleep, with a young Drew Barrymore (still in the child star era of E.T., and a year post her other Stephen King role in Firestarter) as the latest potential victim, with only her cat trying to save her (and of course being misunderstood and thought to be a threat by the parents!). The wraparound is a kind of paen to cat lovers - that your cat really does love you enough to try and save your life rather than being vaguely indifferent to your presence until it wants to be fed!

Anyway, whilst the cat is being treated as a pariah and has to do an Incredible Journey-style trek back home to save Drew, it cameos in through the other two stories. These are both excellent with a really dark vein of black humour running through them - a particularly underrated one is a kind of adulterors comeuppance tale that feels as if it has crept in from the Creepshow film also made around that time. In this one Robert Hays (most famous as the lead in Airplane! - imagine if he and the Leslie Neilsen from his Creepshow segment had done a horror segment together!) gets tempted out onto the narrow window ledge of his apartment building as part of a bet proposed by the husband to either walk around the whole building and get the girl or instead freeze up and fall to his death. Most of this segment involves his attempts to navigate his way around the edge of the building without fallling (including meeting the cat), and it is almost unbearably tense. It is kind of a horror film version of a Harold Lloyd stunt sequence.

Of course this segment is utterly overshadowed by the fantastic Quitters, Inc., which features James Woods as a smoker who decides to sign up for an extreme aversion therapy course without reading the fine print first. Incredibly dark and hilarious both in the lengths to which organisations feel it is appropriate to go to in order to stop people smoking and the way that even when faced with quite literal life and death torture sessions enacted on their loved ones (the cat cameos here as the innocent creature that gets to show how the room with the electrified floor works as a warning that if you stray from the path that your loved ones will be in there next!) that the need for a cigarette might win out! Of course that leads to a common bond developing between the 'quitters' who have similarly maimed family members to show off as a (status) symbol of their struggle against lighting up!

I remember my mother really loving this sequence and being very amused by it. Unfortunately for me it did not really have any effect on her even considering quitting smoking!

Woods is perfect in this piece, using his jittery and anxious style to ramp up the paranoia factor as the need for a crafty cigarette overrides his caution at realising that his whole life is being monitored to ensure that he doesn't! The most amusing section here has to be the crazy party scene set to the amusingly literal performance of the Police song "Every Step You Take" as an over the top warning, which then seques into the excellent lower-key paranoia traffic jam sequence, the wise words of Sting ringing in our ears! There's also the neat sense in that traffic jam sequence of being guilty and wary of committing a transgression set against the wrongness of the action creating an extra dark, dirty secretive pleasure! A feeling that doesn't last for long when you get caught in flagrante delicto!

(In a possibly nerdy note, I think that the filmmakers might also have used the same bridge for that sequence that gets used for the car carnage opening of Maximum Overdrive!)

[domino harvey]

Cat's Eye is one of the best of the post-Creepshow anthology revivals of the eighties, though it won't be making my list either. The final segment with little Drew Barrymore and littler breath-stealing troll is so fantastically tonally mismatched from the first two segments that it results in the equivalent of cinematic whiplash! But all three segments are great fun in their fashion, my favorite being the middle passage with the cheating lover on the ledge, particularly for its mordant cruelty. I think Patrick Wilson was in a full-length variation of this idea a few years ago but I don't think I could stand the tension beyond the thirty minutes or so its allotted here!

And speaking of the devil, how the devil did I forget to include Creepshow on my list? Fixing that now!

[terabin]

Will PM my list before Jan 1 but by the looks of it, Jacques Tourneur may be the most represented director on that list. Also, anyone else having Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me in their list? To me, other than Eraserhead, the one film in Lynch's work that most closely resembles a horror film although Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Lost Highway of course have terrifying moments in them.

Inland Empire is going to rank high on my list as the film consistently dishes out the dread and terror. It showcases "phantoms" or "monsters" in Nikki's dreams like the Rabbit sitcom scenes, like the distorted images of herself. This film reminded me of another borderline horror film I've seen recently and which will figure on my list, Ruiz's excellent City of Pirates (thanks for the rec, Zedz). Ruiz and Lynch share a passion for the theme of shifting roles and cracked storylines and relationships blending together as they so often do in dreams. In these two films, Lynch and Ruiz successfully had me dreading the next image, the next cut, fearing that even in quieter moments, anything horrible and/or violent could happen.

The horror in horror films is all about twisted role-taking and making. What appears to be a good father turns incestuous rapist. The innocent child turns serial killer. The cute, blonde actress turns jealous, psychopathic monster. This is nothing new. Lynch and Ruiz do what many do in horror: take that which is closest to home - family relationships, love interests - and twist them into something devilish, monstrous.

But what stands out to me about these two filmmakers is that they can shift on a dime. For example: You maybe see innocence from afar (the blonde) but what is really there is monstrous (Laura Dern's clown face) once Nikki gets close enough to the camera. AND: Ruiz and Lynch use the logic of dreams to show how both sides - the innocent and monstrous - can be present in the same instant, but depending on your perspective you see one or the other.

For example: with the ending sequence of City of Pirates,

SpoilerShow

you see the two women (a mother and daughter? That's the role they're in) looking out the window at dusk, looking out at an isle over the water. This image is beautiful. An evening ritual evoking a good family relationship. Looking at their silhouettes, everything appears normal visually. But the things they are saying to each other are an odd mix, talk of boredom and paradise and love lost and corpses. A silhouette of a man is introduced, he holds a gun to his head, then an image of him with bloody worms crawling on his face. Something is definitely wrong. What of the two women? Ruiz then allows us to see the face of one of the women. The silhouettes we once saw hide corpses. Horrifying imagery reminiscent of Munch's The Scream. But then, in the final moments, Ruiz shifts back. We only see silhouettes again of the women, one woman waving out the window to a shadow of a boy on the water. She sings/whispers "Nous sommes ici (we are here)." Enchanting last image, if you had missed the reveal of the corpses. And yet, even with that horrific reveal, a mixture of feelings evoked here. Creepy AND enchanting? A mother and daughter looking out across the water at sunset. Yet dead, monstrous. An apocalyptic image holding the innocent and the monstrous together, depending on your perspective.

Happy viewing these last few days everyone!

[Finch]

City of Pirates is in my Top Ten (as well as zedz's I believe?) and I had to make do with watching the film on youtube! If I wasn't so utterly broke right now, I'd buy the Ruiz set in an instant.

[Yojimbo]

Cat's Eye is one of the best of the post-Creepshow anthology revivals of the eighties, though it won't be making my list either. The final segment with little Drew Barrymore and littler breath-stealing troll is so fantastically tonally mismatched from the first two segments that it results in the equivalent of cinematic whiplash! But all three segments are great fun in their fashion, my favorite being the middle passage with the cheating lover on the ledge, particularly for its mordant cruelty. I think Patrick Wilson was in a full-length variation of this idea a few years ago but I don't think I could stand the tension beyond the thirty minutes or so its allotted here!

And speaking of the devil, how the devil did I forget to include Creepshow on my list? Fixing that now!

I don't think I'll have time to watch Creepshow again before the deadline, but it should make my 50
I devoured those old comics

And I hope everybody will be including The Ninth Configuration in their list

[Mr Sausage]

In My Skin (Marina de Van, 2002): I watched this on Matt's suggestion above. One of the things I most like about the horror movie, in terms of its potential anyway, is how it can let itself explore extreme and unusual psychological states without having to let the usual restraints (or even strictly realistic psychology) get in the way. So I liked how this one took its odd idea and really ran with it. But it was a very unpleasant film to watch. Paradoxically so, since the level of violence here, at least in terms of physical damage, is so much more superficial and inconsequential than a good many horror films that I have no trouble watching. But then superficial damage like a paper cut or someone stepping on a nail is always more wince-inducing than a gunshot wound. Plus I think my real concern for the mental well-being of the protagonist was mixed in as well. I was genuinely worried for her. I liked how the movie made a lot of evocative associations--to addiction, to narcissism, to issues of body-image, to fetishism--without fully giving itself to any one of them. Giving in to a convenient explanation like that would've made the story less singular and less inexplicable. The film avoids becoming vulgar, not because it pulls back from the nasty logic of its story and themes, but because it resists becoming a banal allegory for, say, female body-image in society, or something equally facile. The movie is very specific to its character; that's its strength. It's fascinating and expertly made and, I think, admirable. But it's not an enjoyable movie to watch. I'm glad I saw it, tho'. It's not often you find such a placid movie that's so horrific at the same time. I don't know if I want to put it on my list, but I know this'll be a movie that haunts me for a while--in a good way, I think. Thanks for the last minute rec., Matt.

[Matt]

Thanks for making time for it. It's a real shame that her follow-up, Don't Look Back / Ne te retorune pas, does not fulfill her promise. It's a very dull piece of work. de Van has apparently shot a third feature, an English-language film (something about a sentient house, maybe), but that's about all the info that seems to be available online.

[colinr0380]

Next also ran (I told you these were going to be more interesting than my relatively staid list!):

Pulse (Paul Golding, 1988)

Not to be confused with Kiyoshi Kuosawa's 2001 film or the 2006 American remake of the same, this is the only feature film directed by a guy who was an 'editorial consultant' on Medium Cool, worked for Disney, and directed the 1967 experimental short Herbie with George Lucas.

This is probably what most people think of when they see the title Pulse associated with a horror film: killer electricity terrorising a suburban neighbourhood! As with Tremors, this was one of those films that ten years ago I could have quoted you scenes and sequences from as I had rewatched it so much!

It starts off with a neat montage sequence showing the 'pulse' hitting the electrical grid and then being disseminated into the local power supply (something with parallels with the sequence under the end titles of the lights of the city at night being intercut with macro shots of circuit boards) and then shows our main couple being woken up in the middle of the night by the sounds of a man screaming and shouting across the street. The police arrive and find the man and his family dead.

The rest of the film is perhaps less about killer electricity than the more satirical theme of how the facade of quiet homely neighbourhoods conceals real broken families and antagonisms - how someone can turn from a dissociated onlooker to terrible events at the beginning of the film to a raving madman at the end, chopping down the electricity pole in the street in front of the rest of the appalled neighbourhood while your son giggles and raves in delight at your actions!

(There is a kind of parallel between destroying the home electronic comforts and not being a part of suburbia any more! In that sense it is kind of the more entertainment orientated version of Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent! Either that or an early run at Todd Hayne's more low key [Safe], in the sense that all your gadgets and home furnishings really are trying to kill you! Although Pulse has a relatively happier ending than either of those films!)

Things are immediately revealed not to be perfect at the beginning of the film with the arrival from across the country of a young boy to come and live with his father and step-mother (the couple from the beginning of the film), with a lot of play in the early sections of the film of how many new gadgets and toys this family has, especially microwaves! We see the film through the eyes of this boy, learning about the terrible events across the street through the kid social network, and of not being believed when he witnesses strange electrical goings on. This is classic horror stuff, with the father and step-mother concerned about whether the boy is playing up, especially after he has made a scene out on the front lawn (and in front of watching neighbours) about not wanting to go back into the house. The kid is turned into a kind of pariah and there is a lot of 'evil house across the way' stuff of being dared to search the empty building with the dead lawn in the front of it (the dead grass being the unhideable symbol of encroaching corruption).

There is even the classic horror appearance of the creepy old man (familiar from films like The Blob or Friday The 13th) who gets to provide an early jump scare as the boy is exploring the house and then explain the secret of the "voice in the wires" to the step-mother! (“Pull the plugs…pull…all…the plugs. Me…I’m back to wood fires and kerosene lamps. My wife would like to kill me! She thought I was mad when I built the fallout shelter, but I was right about that one too”) He amusingly, in the way he talks about having seen twenty houses burnt out just like this one, seems to also anticipate the arson investigator that Robert De Niro played in Backdraft!

However the step-mother is surprisingly played as rather sympathetic and likable by Roxanne Hart, which is a neat twist on the usual stereotype of that kind of character. Which gets interestingly contrasted with the way that the heroic kid gets pushed into almost complete insanity by the end! Although the insanity is suggested to be really the only appropriate response!

One of the best examples of the way the film focuses on the accumulation of little details is in the journey of the video tape that gets rented out at the beginning of the film - a chance to give a treat to the newly arrived boy (as well as flaunt their VHS recorder!), the tape of which then gets ruined by little electrical fizzes and pops during the first electrical manifestation causing the father to have to pay a couple of hundred dollars to buy the tape from the rental shop (part of the section where the parents are getting steadily disenchanted with their kid), and which then reveals itself to have captured something as various characters then edge it closer to being revealed at the climax as they in discreet scenes open the box, put it in the VHS player and turn the tape on again.

Interestingly the scene that gets shown from the film on the videotape comes from one of John Carpenter's few non-horror films, Starman! The sequence of pushing in onto the lock of hair in the photo album, cutting to a close up of an eye opening and a baby gurgling is made to play as incredibly creepy when totally removed out of its original context.

There are lots of wonderfully paranoid shots of the insides of electronics or mechanical whirrings of compressors or central heating systems, little buzzing noises from poorly connecting wires and so on, along with some really neat macro shots of TV innards of melting and reforming connections, with great sound design (And the editing is really impactful too, especially in the slow motion 'slipping onto the electrified kitchen floor' sequence!) making the blobs of solder seem alive, conscious and amost insectidal in their movements. Following that logic I suppose that in a way the final collapse of the house is slightly reminiscent of the collapse of the ant colony in Phase IV.

I suppose another thing that Pulse tackles is the depressingly mundane way that keeping a home together involves an almost constant, aggravating daily battle at keeping everything in working order as pieces of pipes snap or the TV breaks, and twisting it into something horrific! Probably best expressed in the step-mother's wonderfully hysterical reaction to a friendly repair man that: "Something happens and it almost kills someone, and you people come here and you talk about 'pulses' and metal fatigue and you pull out some pipe or switch and you say "Here you are, just slap it into one of these", and you don't know what is happening. I mean you don't know what's really happening. Do you? DO YOU!?!"

Anyway everything eventually climaxes with a phantasmagoria of killer showers, quite literally overscanning televisions, dangerous disposals, gouts of water spraying towards electrical appliances and the father’s unfortunate decision to put military-grade bars on all of the windows causing all the expected problems.

[domino harvey]

The number two film (as of now) is from the same decade as the Number One slot, though it arguably belongs to another genre than Horror, at least primarily

[zedz]

Well, I'm glad City of Pirates has sucked a few more people into its vortex of dread!

[Yojimbo]

Well, I watched 'The Exorcist' last night and its certainly secured itself a higher slot than it might otherwise have.
But its certainly not the best horror film of the 70s, never mind No.1 on my list.

I'm planning to watch 'The Tenant', 'Vampyr' and 'Creepshow', before the deadline: more to see how high they rank, than anything else.
I think Roman Polanski may well have more entries in my Top 50 than any other director

[swo17]

The number two film (as of now) is from the same decade as the Number One slot, though it arguably belongs to another genre than Horror, at least primarily

Alien?