The Horror Film Hall of Fame, Part One (1915-1970)
Submitted by JohnnyW on Wed, 04/13/2005 - 04:26
Tags:
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
- Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages (1922) Sometimes cited as the very first documentary, Haxan seems more akin to unabashedly mass-appeal shows like Unsolved Mysteries, gleefully showcasing the titillating history of the black arts through hysterically entertaining reenactments. Can’t miss moments include a naughty monk clearly enjoying his flagellation a little too much and devotees lining up to literally kiss a flamboyantly grotesque demon’s ass.
- Nosferatu (1922): One of the pinnacles of an era when the German film industry produced a masterpiece every other week, or so it seemed. Max Schrek, as the vampire Count Orlok, delivers one of the most frightening performances horror has still ever seen; unlike Bela Lugosi’s charming Count Dracula, Schrek doesn’t bother with charm, as his vampiric nobleman is clearly a grotesque menace from our first glimpse of him.
- The Phantom of the Opera (1925): I first saw this film years ago on a Halloween night; a student in Baylor University’s music department accompanied it with the school’s pipe organ—as you can imagine, it was quite a first impression. Lon Chaney is genuinely horrific as the title character, a deformed monster with a wounded heart, and the nightmarish labyrinth beneath the opera house mirrors his unfathomable psyche, warped by years without hope or love.
- Dracula (1931)
- Frankenstein (1931): James Whale’s film bears less resemblance to Mary Shelley’s source novel than might be expected, but no matter—the movie is a vivid and iconic piece of art in its own right. Boris Karloff, as the monster, plays no small part in the film’s achievement, although the plot implies he is evil because of his criminal’s brain while simultaneously stressing that his violence is due to mistreatment, an unsatisfying (and perhaps unintentional) take on the nature vs. nurture debate. Reading Frankenstein’s monster as his creator’s repressed homosexuality, erupting at the last second to derail his wedding (as some critics have done), provides a fascinating and compelling subtext.
- The Most Dangerous Game (1932): Count Zaroff has his own version of the Minotaur’s maze—a remote island strangulated by thick jungle and drowned by oozing swamps. Once he releases humans—the “most dangerous game” of the title—into his primeval trap, he hunts them down. His brutality frighteningly extends from murder to rape; as he leers at Fay Wray’s Eve, he confides to Rainsford that man “must first kill, then love!”
- The Mummy (1932): Western science opens up an Egyptian Pandora’s box. A series of British archaeological digs uncovers ancient tombs—and a incantatory scroll—while the impetuous and skeptical nature of the scientists unleashes a malignant power millennia old. Helen, simultaneously the love interest for the young Englishman and the descendent of a Pharaoh’s daughter, is biracial and yet adored by all, a daring and rare depiction for the era.
- King Kong (1933): So many of the early horror films featured creatures who simply wanted love and acceptance, a motivation that sounds trite when stated so baldly, but one that is often powerful on the screen. Should we be surprised that as people, among the most social of animals, we associate rejection with horror? Perhaps the great ape was simply tired of being feared and hated, and he risked everything for a chance to love. Beauty may have killed the beast, but he’d probably been dying for years.
- Bride of Frankenstein (1935): In a few ways inferior to Frankenstein (comic relief in the form of the screeching Minnie), but in others superior. Whale returns as director and Karloff as the monster, and both are essential in presenting the monster as more sympathetic, more sinned against than sinning, than in the original film. Karloff masterfully uses his eyes, hands, and stiff, sweeping movements to communicate depths of hurt, fear, and need in the character—just witness the scenes where an old blind man befriends the monster and gives him his first (and only) experience of love, and try not to be moved.
- The Wolf Man (1941): Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance as a gentle, afflicted man gives this film its resonance. He seeks nothing more than to find his place—in his family, his community, with a woman he can love—yet his sadness as his inability to fit in turns to a recognition that something is terribly wrong is almost unbearable. A tale of a good man who deserves peace but receives only the opposite, it is fitting that the gypsy woman—member of an outcast group herself—understands him better than anyone else.
- Cat People (1942): Val Lewton’s atmospheric nightmare of sexual jealousy and rage shares much with the previous year’s The Wolf Man. As with that film’s Larry Talbot, Cat People’s Irena is tormented by the fact that she cannot forge any meaningful connection because of the predatory animal seething within her. In this case, the “mad legends” of Irena’s native Serbia’s “cat people” are all too true, condemning her unconsummated marriage to an All-American draftsman and culminating in her ferocious stalking of her romantic rival. Fears of both women and foreigners underlie this masterpiece.
- The Thing from Another World (1951) Widely suspected of being directed by Howard Hawks despite Christian Nyby‘s name on the credits, this film exploits the limitations placed on us in the most unforgiving conditions on earth. As in other Hawks films, good, competent people band together to face down whatever obstacle is at hand with ingenuity and bonhomie—with one exception. While the practical members of the Arctic station, the military men, the secretaries, the journalist, know what needs to be done, those foolish scientists place knowledge above common sense and pay the price for their hubris. Inspired everything from a remake to an episode of The X-Files.
- The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) An evolutionary dead end menaces the present when an American scientific expedition stumbles upon a backwater Amazonian lagoon in a quest for fossils. Like Kong, the creature finds himself entranced by a lovely white woman—the pinnacle of human evolution, don’t you see?—and wants to take her for himself. The scene of the creature swimming beneath the woman, facing her and matching her stroke for stroke, is subtle yet suggestive. Easily transcends the monster-movie ghetto.
- Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon (1957): Another case in which rationality gets its head handed to it. The handsome-by-numbers American professor steadfastly believes anything supernatural to be humbuggery and anyone who practices magic to be a charlatan, but in his latest visit to England, a vindictive warlock decides murder at the hands of a demon will prove his case nicely. Niall MacGinnis, playing the sinister Karswell, carries the film, as his malevolent charisma, even as entertainment at a children’s party, carries a strong echo of Aleister Crowley.
- Eyes Without a Face/Les Yeux San Visage (1960): One of the great mad scientist films, with misguided love, egotism, and amorality swirling around in the head of a grieving father. Coming barely a decade and a half after the end of WWII, the scientist without ethics calls to mind the horrific doctors of the death camps, running roughshod over basic human compassion in the name of sadistic “progress.” The daughter, tormented both by her scarred face and the blank mask that strips away her individuality, finds more comfort in the dogs used as test subjects than in her father.
- Peeping Tom (1960) The most explicit acknowledgment of the invasive, destructive nature of the camera ever filmed, it would take Freud or Jung books upon books to unravel all the latent suggestions of a maniac strapping a knife onto his camera so he can film his murders while also maintaining a type of distance behind the lens, participating in an act while playing the role of the voyeur at the same time. Released the same year as Psycho, it was clearly a great year for extreme psychosis.
- Psycho (1960): A film as much of an American institution as baseball, apple pie, and mom. Well, except that “mom” is dead and yet still orders her cringing son to carry out horrific murders of young, sexually attractive women. Somewhere, Freud is smoking a cigar, nodding his head, and taking copious notes.
- The Village of the Damned (1960): Like a town I once visited in northwestern Iowa, Midwich is full of perfectly blond-haired children, to magnificently creepy effect. Even before the colony of alien-human hybrids begins to separate itself from the rest of the village, tensions skyrocket as the men see their wives and daughters pregnant at the same time, from some outside influence that dominates the eventual look and substance of the offspring. A fable on the power of the unharnessed mind, yes, but also one that strikes at the heart of men’s genetically-encoded fear of raising another’s progeny; the supposedly civilized Englishmen in the end are no more understanding than the group of savage Mongolians we are told also had a rash of hybrid births—and massacred both children and mothers.
- The Innocents (1961)
- The Haunting (1963): The greatest of all haunted-house films. Director Robert Wise understood that the house itself must be a vivid character, and he succeeds brilliantly; Hill House, built ninety years previous by a wealthy New England merchant, disconcertingly combines lavish eccentricity with a Puritan austerity—witness the rich dark-wood beams in the nursery emblazoned with “Suffer Little Children” in gothic script. The real heart of the house, however, is not the nursery but the library, with its tightly spiraling metal staircase that vaults thirty feet to a tiny indoor balcony: not a stairway to the heavens but a terrifying dead end.
- Night of the Living Dead (1968): A shot across the bow of traditional horror, this film injected a new grittiness into a genre too often fixated on the stylish, understated, and implied. The zombies here were unapologetically dumb, ugly, and determined, with no underlying motives to elicit sympathy. A nation in the throes of the Vietnam War sees law enforcement roll into the Pennsylvania countryside with a let-God-sort-them-out policy—kill everything that moves. When the last survivor takes a bullet, surely we understand: they had to destroy the village to save it.
- Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
- Targets (1968) Peter Bogdanovich’s first film cleverly bridges the gap between the more stylish horror of old Hollywood, and the tougher, nastier brand of terror that would really blossom in the seventies. Boris Karloff, as aging film star Orloff, reluctantly agrees to one more public appearance at a popular drive-in theater; meanwhile, an outwardly successful young man snaps, brutally murdering his family and embarking on a spree killing—you just know these two are going to collide, but how? The scene of Karloff recounting the anecdote of “An Incident in Samarra” is worth the price of admission alone.
- Witchfinder General (1968): I’ve always enjoyed Vincent Price’s screen persona well enough, but Witchfinder General convinced me he was also a true actor. Price plays a witchfinder, an opportunistic man who roams the English countryside torturing suspected witches and eliciting confessions. His callous persecution of a blameless vicar—and sexual exploitation of his terrified niece—unsettled and appalled me. He may get what he deserves by the end, but the evil he has sown in the hearts of the innocent has only just begun to flower into insanity and vengeance.
Cloned From:
I'll try to get the rest of these done as soon as I can. I've only included films I've actually seen, so more may be added later...