The Horror Film Hall of Fame, Part Two (1971-2008)
Submitted by JohnnyW on Mon, 03/03/2008 - 03:45
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- Duel (1971): The battered truck maniacally pursuing city-slicker Dennis Weaver as he crosses the desert is as surely a character as much as an inanimate object can be—we never even see the face of a driver. We never know exactly what Weaver has done to earn the truck’s—er, the driver’s—wrath, but reconciliation sure doesn’t seem to be an option. I think of this film every time I see a tractor-trailer’s grill looming up in my rear-view mirror.
- Images (1972) In this early Altman film, a woman’s mind dissolves in the beautiful surroundings of rugged English countryside. On a retreat at their country home, Susannah York and her husband try to recuperate from her recent breakdown, only York has difficulty unwinding because of one teeny-weeny problem—because of her schizophrenia, she can’t distinguish reality from the tormenting images that exist only in her mind. The film is disorienting because we see so much of it from her perspective—in her quest to rid herself of a man she once had an affair with, should she simply wake up, or kill?
- The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972): Platonic ideal of the low-budget, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it plot, B-movie drive-in flicks of the seventies. The cheap look actually helps here though, as the movie, filmed on location in the Boggy Creek area of Arkansas/Louisiana, achieves a type of trailer-trash cinema verité. Just try not to panic when Bigfoot (or whatever it is)launches an enraged attack on an isolated farmhouse.
- Don’t Look Now (1973): Nicolas Roeg’s film masterfully takes advantage of the winding corridors, lapping canals, and tarnished architecture of Venice to create a work long on atmosphere, if sometimes short of plot. Mysticism abounds with blind seers and doppelgangers, but at the heart of it all lies two top actors, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, dealing separately with their grief over their young daughter’s death. A head-scratcher of an ending.
- The Exorcist (1973): In some ways an extension of the imperialist horror tales of the late-nineteenth century, when some evil (mummy, vampire, or entity) would invade our civilized, rationalist West because we cannot stop meddling in the rest of a world still grappling with primeval forces. During an archaeological dig in the Middle East, the discovery of an ancient statue of the deity Pazuzu either releases tthe demon or heralds his reappearance. Subliminal shots of a grotesque visage reinforce the terror as priests battle evil from antiquity that all of our technology, scientific knowledge, and progress can’t help us escape.
- Jaws (1975): If previous monster movies either gave the creature a sympathetic personality (The Creature from the Black Lagoon) or made it outsized and mutated (Godzilla), Spielberg with Jaws creates one of the first naturalistic horror films, one in which humanity means less than nothing in the face of a universe that produces killing machines like the Great White Shark. The shark doesn’t want to be us, nor does it nurse a grudge—we’re simply on the food chain.
- Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Peter Weir’s film helped jumpstart Australian cinema as a world force and no wonder: it is an eerie, beautiful, perplexing creation, full of pagan dread and psychological horror. Four girls on a day trip from their early-twentieth century girls school go missing after hiking monolithic Hanging Rock, a place venerated by the Aborigines as home to the kind of mysterious, animist forces discounted by the British who have colonized the Antipodes. Last seen in an ecstatic state, shedding clothes and sprinting to the top of Hanging Rock, the girls discover there is more than is dreamed of in the colonizers’ philosophy.
- Carrie (1976): There’s no denying the campiness, especially Piper Laurie‘s over-the-top fundamentalist mother, but Sissy Spacek never lets Carrie become a caricature. We hurt for her when she’s mocked, thrill with her as she finally finds acceptance, root her on when she stands up to her mother, and then watch in impotent disbelief as she destroys everything that has ever touched her world.
- The Hills Have Eyes (1977): Western civilization has always held a return to savagery with a particular kind of horror. After all, our “superiority” to the rest of the world depends on our ideals, our reason, our discipline, our relentless striving toward the spiritual, leaving behind the animal. And boy, nothing repudiates progress like good old fashioned incest and cannibalism. The modern middle-class family on a vacation through the desert runs into a buzzsaw of homicidal primitivism and must reconnect with their own long-dormant savagery if they want to survive.
- Halloween (1978): That piano line alone can induce panicked glances behind you, but Laurie’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) nightmare in suburbia never lets up. So many of the slasher film’s conventions begin here, from the shot from the killer’s view to the murder of horny teens to the killer who isn’t quite dead, but no matter how many times they’ve been copied, here they are still fresh.
- Alien (1979): As in Jaws, nothing personal, just biology. The alien, unencumbered by the pesky emotions and thought processes of humans, goes about its business reproducing and feeding as it has for millennia in the depths of space. Natural selection never hurt so good.
- The Fog (1979): John Carpenter’s low-key follow-up to Halloween relies mainly on atmosphere (no pun intended), and can perhaps be criticized for inducing mild anxiety rather than all-out scares, but this revenge tale full of long ago leprosy and religious hypocrisy finally coming full circle never bores despite its languid pace.
- The Changeling (1980) A well-acted gem of a movie, George C. Scott delivers as a grieving widower and father who moves to the Pacific Northwest to escape his memories. Poking around in the grand old house he has rented after hearing strange knocks, he discovers a hidden room, evidence of an abused child, and, most frightening of all, an antique, child-sized wheelchair. Nothing new here, but I still shiver every time I think about it.
- The Shining (1980) Jack Nicholson on the verge of self-parody, yet still interested enough to convey true menace in this tale of a writer’s block morphing into homicidal rage. The Overlook Hotel is as much a star as Jack, with its cold, endless hallways turning corners into more cold, endless hallways, and the great, soaring lobby as empty and remote as Jack Torrance’s soul.
- An American Werewolf in London (1981): The transformation scene is justly famous—all werewolf movies must concern themselves with the morph into the lycanthrope, so the scenes are often impressive (see The Wolf Man), but the emphasis here on the literal physical pain accompanying such a stretching and mutating of the body truly matches the psychological trauma of the human-become-wolf. Black humor, romance, and horror are blended seamlessly in this movie, for my money the high point of John Landis’ uneven career.
- The Howling (1981): 1981 was a very good year for werewolves, and part of that is due to the efforts here by Joe Dante. An uneven movie overall, the effects tend to be solid, if not as spectacular as those in An American Werewolf, and the satire on psychobabble and new-age touchy-feeliness is funny despite having such an easy target. The opening scenes, where a newscaster goes undercover to catch a killer, eventually necessitating her recuperation at the wilderness retreat/werewolf den, are so effective the rest of the film suffers in comparison.
- Poltergeist (1982): A whole generation can trace its fear of clowns to a single scene in this movie. As is often the situation with horror, past sins—in this case, a desecrated Indian burial ground—resurface with a vengeance. The past may be the adversary, but it manifests itself through modern conveniences like television. In response, a desperate family turns to the cutting-edge as support: determined academics utilizing technology that measures and records. Guess what? Modernity loses, and the family flees as their bland housing development erupts into primal chaos.
- The Thing (1982): Not superior to the original, but it holds its own. The isolating and unforgiving Arctic setting makes for shivering claustrophobia, and brilliant special effects work creates scenes with the sled dogs, among others, that are chilling. Wilford Brimley stands out as a possibly deranged team member, and Kurt Russell justifies himself as John Carpenter’s go-to guy. This version ends on a bleaker note than the original, with comraderie and martyrdom among the snowdrifts.
- Tremors (1990): Horror-comedy is a subgenre rarely done well, but once in a while a movie nails it just right. Tremors surfs smoothly along on a bizarro concept (giant carnivorous worms—what is this, Dune?) and an unlikely but perfect cast (Kevin Bacon and Gerald McRaney, okay, but Reba McEntire?). Like movies from The Thing to Duel to The Hills Have Eyes, the vast outdoors ironically becomes a trap, boundless playground for something wicked.
- Scream (1996): Standard-bearer for the post-modern horror film, Scream achieved nirvana by not forgetting the actual scares. Not content to archly point out how conventions had become cliché, the film actually uses its knowing attitude to give us new frights when we least expect them, while putting the more expected ones in new contexts. Or we can forget the theory and just enjoy the damn entertaining ride.
- Lost Highway (1997): The adjective “Kafka-esque” actually underplays the surreal absurdity and disquiet of David Lynch’s rebound from the eventual implosion of Twin Peaks. The set-up, which involves a couple receiving anonymous videotapes taken inside their house while they sleep, is creepy enough. Add in a character morphing into someone else entirely, a homicidal mobster, and Robert Blake’s nightmare of a character, plastered in white grease-paint and wielding a camcorder, and you won’t be able to look away. An overlooked dry run for Mulholland Drive.
- The Blair Witch Project (1999): Easily lampooned and poorly copied, this movie can still dog you with creepiness for days after a viewing, The mockumentary style may never have been used so effectively before, and the Maryland woods—trees denuded by winter, expectant silence during the night—are the pitch-perfect setting for this tale. Years removed from the phenomenon (OMG is it real?!), it’s still essential viewing.
- The Others (2001): I’m not always a fan of Nicole Kidman, but her coldness works beautifully in this WWII-era period piece. Likeable children, an isolated estate, and a slow unfolding of clues complete the equation. Haunted house movies have always been one of my favorite subgenres of horror, and this one takes its place next to The Haunting and The Innocents as among the best.
- 28 Days Later (2002): From the break-in of a high-security lab by misguided animal-rights crusaders to the desperate escape from a marauding military unit, every plot point in this film had me riveted. Yet what lingers more are the lighter, sweeter moments: the tenderness between Brendan Gleeson’s survivor and his teenage daughter, the gleeful run through a deserted grocery store, and much of the ride in an old taxi through the lush countryside. The message seems to be that people can salvage moments of normality even in the most extreme situations.
- Dawn of the Dead (2004): In my opinion, a remake superior to the original (heresy though that may be). A powerhouse ensemble, led by Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, gives it all they’ve got as they barricade themselves inside a shopping mall as hordes of bloodthirsty zombies riot outside—how’s that for the ultimate post-modern take on the Western?
- The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005): Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, and newcomer Jennifer Carpenter lead a strong cast in this horror/courtroom drama hybrid. The central question revolves around the disintegration and eventual death of college student Emily; must the priest who performed an exorcism on the dying girl to be held responsible, as the prosecution contends? Or does humanity still grapple with forces that law simply cannot hope to comprehend, much less address?
- Wolf Creek (2005): One of the few horror films I’m not sure I could ever watch again. The terror in this film set in the Australian Outback grows partly out of the time we are allowed to get to know the three young people on a road trip who have the bad luck to need help in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. When truly unspeakable things happen to even the woman who fights back and doesn’t make dumb decisions, the one I just knew would make it, I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
- The Descent (2006) Director Neil Marshall improves significantly from his promising debut Dog Soldiers. A group of women go spelunking in the Carolinas, and the horror packs two mighty wallops. The first half revels in claustrophobia, as tight fits and unexplored passageways finally give way to a cave-in that blocks the entryway; from here…well, you know how everything from catfish to grasshoppers to frogs evolve strange and at times abhorrent new traits in caves, branching into blindness and albinism? What if humans had done the same?
- Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
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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...