In this case the assumptions are: A) you like horror movies, B). you can pick a .....
horror movie genre and has been from the time I read the Amityville Horror as a ...
October Horror: Musings on Horror Movies by C. Patrick Neagle
October Horror: Musings on Horror Movies by C. Patrick Neagle Published by Goblinbrook Press at Smashwords Copyright (c) 2012 C. Patrick Neagle Cover design (c) 2012 Pinned Eye Media All Rights Reserved Find out more about this author at Smashwords.com This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents Chapter One: The Ides of Horror Chapter Two: Finding Horror Chapter Three: Attack of the Creepers Chapter Four: When Animals Attack, Then Eat You, Then Attack Some More Chapter Five: Houses of Horror Chapter Six: Rewound The Appendix (or possibly liver) of Halloween About the Author
Chapter One: The Ides of Horror Every once in a while, I find myself teaching a college-level English class, and every semester that contains an October (and a few that don't), I ask my students at some point, "What's your favorite horror movie?" The answers vary, and that's what the lesson is about: the assumptions we make when we ask certain questions. In this case the assumptions are: A) you like horror movies, B). you can pick a favorite, and, among others, but perhaps most importantly, C) we all agree on what a 'horror' movie is. Some people will immediately head for the classics, the Canon of Horror: "Halloween," "Friday the 13th," "Nightmare on Elm Street," or even "Saw"--the movies that everyone who knows anything about horror movies know about. Other choices are trickier. Is Alien a horror movie, or is it science fiction? Does it matter if the ghost in the haunted house story is a reptilian alien that has multiple, many-toothed maws or that the haunted house itself is a spaceship? Probably not. After all, the haunted house theme in horror movies isn't about the house; it's about isolation. The family moves into a new (and ridiculously affordable) home only to encounter horrors there while finding themselves separated from the rest of the world by being new to the area and not knowing anyone to go to for help, or by storm ("It was a dark and stormy night." Boo!), or by concern that people will think they're crazy, or by any number of other factors. What is Alien, then, but the ultimate in isolation and thus the ultimate haunted house--the one you can't leave because outside the windows is only the vacuum of space, and therefore a whole lot of yard between you and the next closest neighbor? Other choices are even more problematic. Is Silence of the Lambs a horror movie? There are some disturbing scenes in it, but is "disturbing" enough to classify something as horror? Does appearing on the "Horror" shelf at your local (and probably out-of-business) video rental store or on Netflix make it so? Often, one of my students will offer that his favorite horror movie is anything with Will Ferrell. I might be tempted to agree, but I doubt I'll include "Land of the Lost" on my October Horrorfest roster. What will be going on my roster are movies that include a supernatural element. For me, it isn't good enough that there is an unstoppable killer wearing some sort of hockey/catcher's/Canadian curling mask (or, in the case of Michael Myers from the original Halloween, a mask of William Shatner's face). Slasher movies are fine for the startle scare and for having your significant other jump in your lap while you're watching one at the theater. Heck, I have a lot of them in my DVD collection (including the best of the batch and movie that almost singlehandedly brought horror back into the theater mainstream after nearly a decade of horror-less-ness: Scream). But being un-killable isn't supernatural enough (and, yes, I know the killer in Scream wasn't un-killable. Endlessly replaceable works just as well). Maybe, for me, this is because there are quite enough human monsters out there in the world already. I prefer my movie monsters to be ghosts, werewolves, vampires (the ones that don't sparkle, thank you very much), aliens, mutants, and possibly to have tentacles, or at least to exude some sort of ichor and to have far too many teeth. One of my favorite horror movies of this type is They. It's about small, hungry creatures who live in the dark. These critters target children who have night terrors, and then hunt them when those children are all grown up. A childhood favorite of mine, Don't be Afraid of the Dark was remade recently, and it has small, frightening creatures that live in dark places, too. Another good one in the same vein is Boogeyman. The monster in the closet scares us on a near primal level, perhaps hearkening back to a genetic memory of one of our ancestors gazing into a black cave mouth and wondering if he'll be gulped down by a grizzly or a sabertooth if he goes back in there to grab his coat and hat.
American Werewolf in London is excellent, too, exploring the psychological damage one does to oneself when we hurt the ones we love (or at least like a little bit). But then, werewolf movies explore the dark places in ourselves anyway--the fear that we might let the wolf out by accident or on purpose one day. The Howling pursues this theme with teeth. And therein is what horror is all about. By taking as its subject the impossible, or at least improbable (aliens, ghosts, giant worms, killer frogs, spooky children with glowing eyes), horror allows us to face our deeper fears--of death, of being alone, of the unknown, of ourselves, of children with spooky glowing eyes--and say, "Oh, whew, it's okay. That could never happen." Unless it could.
Chapter Two: Finding Horror One of the "new" genres of horror movies is that of the "Found Footage" horror movie. In this subgenre, someone--usually a group of amateur moviemakers who get in over their heads, or a news team that finds more than they counted on, or homeowners documenting the weird experiences they've been having, or some similar conceit--grab a camera or ten and start filming. Strangeness and horror, and often death, ensue. Later, this movie footage is "discovered" by the producers (or someone) and published as a sort of public service, marketed as a documentary. The best ones make you wonder if what you're seeing, or even if part of what you're seeing, might be real. From what the Internet tells me (motto: "Horrifying you with links to groddy medical studies since 1991″), the first Found Footage movie was probably Cannibal Holocaust (Italian, 1980). I haven't seen that one, mostly because it looks absolutely horrible--and not in the absolutely-horrible-but-in-a-fungood-like-"Flash-Gordon"-kind-of-way. Also, it isn't available for streaming on Netflix. The premise of this movie is that a documentary crew headed off into the jungle and got eaten. Later, a team sent in to look for them finds their footage, thus allowing us to see what happened to the poor documentarians. The movie was banned in several countries because the animal cruelty depicted in it is actual animal cruelty, even if the cannibalism wasn't (the director had to defend himself against this latter charge in court and apparently managed to do so successfully). But you probably haven't heard of that one. The most famous Found Footage movie is The Blair Witch Project (1999). This one took over the Internettubewebscloud. It probably wasn't the first movie meme to spread virally across the World Wide Web, but it was perhaps the first to be so darned effective. The marketing materials surrounding the movie were extensive. There were Internet clips, a Sci-Fi Channel special, and fake web sites detailing the fake people and fake places in the movie. At the time though, although there might have been some suspicions, no one in the general public knew for sure whether or not the Blair Witch Project was for real. Reception to the movie itself was mixed. Some moviegoers complained that the shaky hand-held camera style made them motion sick. Others were thrown off by the fact that the film didn't make use of many of the staples of horror movies, most notably, a soundtrack. Still others thought that the first 90% of the movie was too slow. They wanted more scares. I often hear this last argument from people who saw Blair Witch at home rather than in the theater. But if you don't do it right, watching this movie at home loses its impact. You can't hit pause and go to the bathroom, or pop some popcorn, or answer the phone. You have to sit there and watch the movie from the opening scenes of happy-happy faux documentarians doing faux documentarian things all the way to the nerve-sizzling final moments of faux documentarians not being quite so happy-happy. The slow burn buildup is what makes the ending work and what makes Blair Witch Project one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, and the only one that I've seen as an adult that gave me nightmares. Following the Blair Witch Project's success came a number of other Found Footage horror movies. There's REC (Spanish, 2007) and George Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007) (the same Romero of Night of the Living Dead fame--he who gave us the zombiepocalypse without ever calling his shambling dead folk "zombies"). Both of these were zombie-centric; REC is the more "Found Footage" of the two, since everyone knew that Romero's movie wasn't "real." Cloverfield is like the Diary of the Dead in that regard, too. Pretty sure we would have noticed if a giant alien tentacle-thing had fallen on New York. So for some movies, the Found Footage motif is used for stylistic reasons rather than in an attempt to convince us that what we're seeing is real. Thusly, I won't cover any more of those here. But a quiet little movie that did want to convince us that what we were seeing had actually happened was The Last Exorcism. In it, a sham exorcist has changed his exorcising-demonically-
possessed-folk-for-money ways and wants to expose the "profession" of sham exorcism by going out on one last gig, with a film crew, and showing how he'd fooled people all those years. What he finds is more real than he, or we the audience, were expecting. This is another case of the slow-build, which is a staple of the Found Footage sub-genre. But the payoff is a surprise: if not a pleasant one, then at least a satisfying one. Much less quiet, in theaters, at least, was Paranormal Activity (2007). Telling the story of a couple of young upwardly mobiles who are trying to figure out what all that spooky stuff going on in their house is all about, it spawned a couple of sequels (so far) and several knock-offs. As with Blair Witch Project, opinion on Paranormal Activity is mixed. Most of the slow burn for this movie is composed of sounds heard off-camera and genuinely spooky scenes of the girl part of the couple standing beside their shared bed, staring blankly at the guy-part for hours on end (time-lapse speeded up in the film, 'cause otherwise those scenes would be boring rather than spooky). Even so, some moviegoers complained that the movie was too slow. As much as I complain about trailers giving away the major points of movies--I think it was in Quarantine, an English-version of REC where the trailer shows us the very, very, very final scene--for Paranormal Activity this actually works in the movie's favor, as I was on edge every time the view in the boyfriend's camera switched over to nightvision. I was waiting for what I knew was coming, but not sure when it would be coming. However, for horror, shock, and disturbing spookiness, I have to declare the winner of the Found Footage subgenre to be a Paranormal Activity clone called Paranormal Entity (2009). It was produced by The Asylum, who make it their business to rush-film similarly-named "mockbusters" of popular films. Their Sherlock Holmes (2009) for instance, capitalized on the popularity of the Robert Downey Jr blockbuster of the same name, but the Asylum's Holmes had to fight a giant octopus, killer robots, and, erm, a t-rex. Yes, a t-rex. However, where Paranormal Entity succeeds is that it doesn't rely on as slow a burn as Paranormal Activity. The viewer is rewarded with a movie that is, well, all of those things I said a few sentences ago. Also, there's nudity. Bonus. To finish off our discussion of Found Footage movies, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the one that I just watched a couple of days ago: Trollhunter (Norwegian, 2010). In this, a group of young Norwegian documentarians go looking for a bear poacher, but instead find Hans, Norwegian Trollhunter! Hans leads the kids into the dangerous world of troll hunting, and the amateur film work is set off beautifully by the trolls we get to see--much like Cloverfield's shaky handheld camera gives more umph to the monsters the survivors encounter. Trollhunter has a sly sense of humor underlying it, as well. Trolls, apparently, can "smell the blood of a Christian man." So at one point, one of the filmmakers is asking the new team member if she's Christian. Finding out she's Muslim, he says to Hans, "Muslim, that's okay, right?" to which Hans responds, perfectly deadpan, "I don't know. We'll see what happens." I so want to be Hans, Norwegian Trollhunter, for Halloween, but my friends won't let me. It might be the part about where Hans insists on going around covered with "troll stench." Apparently, troll stench doesn't smell great. Oh well, I'll just have to grab a camera and go to Halloween costume parties as a fervent-but-naive filmmaker, looking for something extraordinary to put on film. Maybe later, after the horror, someone will find that footage and show it to you.
Chapter Three: Attack of the Creepers Creepy crawlies have a certain, well, creepiness about them that horror filmmakers like to exploit to disturb, scare, or just plain gross out the audience. The creepy-crawlie subgenre of horror preys upon our fear of spiders, worms, and insects, many of which are made giant size in order to up the creep factor. Spiders are a perennial favorite. One of the scariest spider-oriented movies that I can remember from a youth spent hanging out in front of the TV is Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), wherein a town is overrun by deadly not-giant-but-really-big web-spinning tarantulas. Never mind that tarantulas aren't web-builders, the movie freaked this arachnophobe out. Speaking of arachnophobia (which is, if you were wondering, an unreasonable--or, I'd argue, quite reasonable--fear of spiders), there was the John-Goodman-playing-an-exterminator movie Arachnophobia (1990), about a small community threatened by a plague of spiders made into killers by the introduction of a violent South American species of, erm, web-spinning tarantula. If that isn't enough to get your arachnid fix, then there's 2002′s Eight-Legged Freaks: giant, jumping spiders with very big fangs. I'm shuddering just typing such a thing. And although it isn't spiders-threatening-civilization-as-we-know-it, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) is frightening enough, pitting the height-challenged protagonist of the title against a common house spider (I shudder at the idea that there are such things as "common" house spiders) armed only with a sewing needle. If you want your spiders with a bit more fun than fang, I recommend the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of The Giant Spider Invasion (1997/1975) where the giant spider of the title is actually an animatronic beastie duct-taped (as far as I can tell) over a 1970s VW Bug, like the world's ickiest parade float. And while you're enjoying the movie-riffing of the MST3K gang, pull out Horrors of Spider Island (1999/1962) which, possibly playing on the mispronunciations possible with that title, puts a boatload of prostitutes (exotic dancers? hopeful starlets-to-be? baristas?) on an island with a spider-man. And we're not talking Tobey Maguire or that guy who played Spider-man in the reboot of the superhero franchise, either, but an oozy, fanged, floppy-armed mutant. Separate from spiders, insects have had their share of screen time, too. Again, don't confuse insects with spiders, or spiders with insects, or any other permutation thereof. Spiders aren't insects. Your entomological fun fact of the day: insects have six-legs, spiders get two extra, the better to hold you down with when you've been shrunken to the size of a salt shaker by cosmic rays. Anyway, in the insects-that-want-to-kill-you-subgenre, cockroaches keep coming back even after you step on them. There's Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, wherein a layabout kid turns into a giant cockroach overnight. Much hilarity (or depressing Kafkaesque social commentary) ensues. There's also Mimic, an excellent horror movie about cockroaches that have evolved to the size of humans and can mimic the human form (if you see them in bad lighting after a few beers). Much hilarity (or cockroaches chomping on humans with virtually no social commentary) ensues. There's also the Samuel Z. Arkoff (he of the cheap, late-night made-for-tv fright fest movies of the 70s) environment-gone-wrong flick, Frogs (1972). Frogs, although titled Frogs, doesn't skimp on nasties, even if they don't happen to be amphibians. There are snakes, worms, and, if I remember right, cockroaches. Okay, maybe there aren't cockroaches, but there is hilarity (if you count the fact that it's Sam Elliott's first starring role) and social commentary, too, since the critters decide (perhaps by committee) to attack humans because said critters are upset about a chemical plant upstream dumping toxic waste into their river. The movie starts off with a touching-in-that-they're-trying-to-recreate-theemotional-impact-of-that-Native-American-chief-crying-a-single-tear-because-of-pollution-publicservice-commercial-of-the-1970s scene where Sam Elliott's character is paddling down the river in a canoe, taking pictures of trash and dead fish. He's Sam Elliott, so he doesn't cry, but he does get angry. He also wears very tight jeans.
Not to be outdone by the beasties with legs, the Squirmy-Thing Union went into collective bargaining with Hollywood to give us such stomach-clenchers as Slugs, (1987), Tremors (1990) and Slither (2006). Oh, and, of course, most of the non-frogs in Frogs (still 1972) also fall into this category. I showed that first one, Slugs, at a Halloween Party back in the 90s, where it was a crowd favorite. I came in from re-filling the aquarium with Bug Juice (1 liter of vodka to 1 gallon of fruit punch, no actual bugs or fish harmed during preparation) and found two-thirds of my partygoers sprawled out on the living room floor watching this atrocious movie wherein slugs inundate a home (or possibly a whole town--I have no idea) and are menacing a family, forcing them to take refuge on top of beds, tables, and other assorted furniture. I haven't watched this awful-sounding piece of dreck, but, hey, can fifteen drunken people at a Halloween party be wrong? Tremors, although having far more humor than horror, also has just enough tension (and devoured protagonists) to make it into this list. Kevin Bacon leads (poorly) a group of small town oddballs who must try to survive in the face of an attack on their tiny community by burrowing worms of the Dune (1984; not a horror movie) variety--giant, vibration-seeking, and hungry. Which reminds me of another science fiction movie with a lot of horror in it: Screamers. Screamers has burrowing killbot worms that make a lot of noise right before they kill you. Soooo, there's that. Meanwhile, back with the squishy critters and Slither, wherein we have alien worms that infect people and make them into alien-worm-breeding hosts. It stars Nathan Fillion (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Doctor Horrible's Sing-along-Blog, and Castle fame) and is a horror parody sometimes, although at other times it takes itself too seriously. Anyway, it's in the Lake Placid school of horrorhumor with critters. Ah, Lake Placid (1999): giant, killer alligators (or possibly crocodiles; I can never tell them apart) and a slightly psychotic Betty White. What more do you really need in a giant, killer alligator (or possibly crocodile) movie? 1980′s Alligator, while scary, doesn't have Betty White, so that's a no go; and 2007′s Primeval has too many genocidal warlords to give us much in the way of fun-ness. Nope, go with Lake Placid. But I digress. Back to finishing off our list. Frogs: snakes, worms, and killer tadpoles. Okay, maybe the tadpoles are just angry, but when they grow up, they'll be angry AND human-killers. Anyway, you may not have noticed, but we covered this movie already. The creepy-crawly trend even spills over into supposedly non-horror fare as the reality psuedogame show Fear Factor and the reality prank show Scare Tactics, where contestants (or innocent passersby) are often confronted with tanks filled with squirming worms, crawling spiders, antennaewaving insects, and writhing maggots. Sometimes they're even required to lay down among all these ickies, or even eat them. Yummy. What you don't normally see on those shows are people being creeped out by bunnies. But never fear, there are movies out there that can sate your desire for deadly furballs. We'll take a look at those in the next chapter. Until then, keep in mind that slugs shrivel up when you pour salt on them, so keep those condiments handy; they're not just for popcorn anymore.
Chapter Four: When Animals Attack, Then Eat You, Then Attack Some More One of the backbone thematic questions horror movies ask is this: what would happen if nature had had enough of humans screwing things up and decided to sic its critters on us? There was a trend in the 1970s and 1980s of making horror movies that were also ecological morality tales. On the surface, this doesn't sound like it'd be a whole lot of fun. "Morality tale" gives out much the same vibe as having the preacher over to talk to the kids about why they shouldn't be looking at pornography on the Internet. However, when you combine the morality ("We're screwing up the environment and should really do something to fix that") with giant, mutated beavers, such as the much-bigger-and-angrier-than-anormal-beaver one found in 1979's Prophecy, then things get a lot more entertaining. Nothing like giant, mutant beavers menacing some campers to convince you that logging companies should be more careful about how much toxic waste they dump into the river. Heck, before I saw this movie, I didn't even know that logging companies produced toxic waste. Deforestation, sure, but giant-mutant-killerangry-really-nasty beavers?* Nope. Exploring a similar toxic waste theme is the Samuel Z. Arkoff Frogs (still 1972--we went over this last chapter, quit bugging me about it). Our protagonist, Sam Elliott (in his first starring movie role, since "Card Player #2" in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid doesn't count), is on a canoe-about, taking evocative pictures of trash and other pollutants fouling up the river. He soon finds himself on an island owned by Mr. Let's-Dump-Toxic-Waste-From-the-Plant-Straight-Into-the-River Man himself. While Sam tries to convince Mr. LDTWFtPSItR Man into changing his evil ways, members of the birthday (because there's a birthday party, of course) start getting knocked off one-by-one by mutant, killer frogs. Well, actually, the frogs in the movie don't do much more than hop around and croak ominously, but they are very ominous, and it's obvious that they're the masterminds goading the snakes and bugs and, erm, more snakes, into doing the killing for them. Anyway, lesson learned: don't dump your toxic waste straight into the river, at least not without investing in a few frog spears first. And if you thought you were safe just because you were surrounded by cute, hopefully-not-killer bunnies and not a bunch of obviously untrustworthy reptiles and amphibians, well, watch out, buddy, because 1972's Night of the Lepus (ie: rabbits) shows us that everything in nature is out to get us. At least in Night of the Lepus there isn't toxic waste dumping going on. In fact, the characters are trying to be ecologically friendly by dealing with a rabbit infestation not by spraying the fluffy little fellas with cyanide, but by messing up their breeding cycle with hormones. Ahh, hormones. Hilarity--and rabbits the size of dump trucks eating people (er, dump truck-sized rabbits eating people, not dump trucks eating people. That'd be the 1970s movie Killdozer you're thinking of)--ensues. Also, rabbit-wise, we don't know for sure that Monty Python and the Holy Grail's (1974) vicious Rabbit of Caerbannog wasn't created by some logger pouring poisonous log slurry into pristine natural springs. And I have no idea what created the shark-toothed rabbit of 2010's Primal, but there it was, all toothy and bitey and mean as a bunny scorned by his hormonally-neutered significant other. What we see in these ecologically-minded horror narratives is a reflection of the fears of the time. Or at least a reflection of the fears we as a society and a species have that we may be, pardon my Midwestern, crapping in the same place we eat. After the creation of the atom bomb in the 40s, we got a slew of mutant animal movies created by radiation. Even excluding the Godzilla (and other Giant Monster movies) of the Japanese, there was still plenty of radiation mayhem to go around. In Them (1954), it was giant ants. In the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms it was a stop-action dinosaur. It was a praying mantis in The Deadly Mantis (1954),
and, well, the list goes on. In the 70s, it was all about industry poisoning the environment, as we've already seen. Later, genetic manipulation takes the stage as the Meddling With Things That Should Not Be Meddled With trope. Deep Blue Sea (1999) is one of my favorites of this subgenre, what with its nearly-amphibious super-smart sharks and Samuel L. Jackson's rousing Let's-Work-Together-Here-People morale-boosting speech. We also can't forget the genetically-tampered-with flying piranhas of 1981's Piranha II. Mmm, flying piranhas. And, of course, there's Jurassic Park: dinosaurs re-created by taking DNA found in ancient mosquitos locked in amber and infusing it into frog eggs. The frogs finally get to have teeth and don't have to depend on the snakes to do the wet work. In the Oughts, nature started to do away with the intermediaries. In M. Night Shyamalan's mess of a movie, The Happening, it's the very embodiment of nature--the plant life--that's out to remove the plague of humanity from the surface of the planet, via a self-preservation-removing pheromone attack. Fortunately, Zooey Deschanel lives. Mmmm, Zooey Deschanel. However, there was still plenty of humans doing genetic tampering left to go around. Black Sheep (2006--not the 1996 Chris Farley movie of the same name) takes us to scenic New Zealand and to a sheep ranch where the sheep have acquired a taste for blood thanks to hormonal manipulation. Also, if they bite you and you don't die, you turn into a, erm, sheepotaur. Or weresheep, or something. 2005's Isolation does much the same thing, but with cows. It's also considerably scarier than Black Sheep, although you might be more scared of the ickiness of farm life than of the small, Alien-like killer cow fetuses crawling about. I can't advise eating anything, even popcorn, while watching the scene where the vet has her arm up to the elbow in this pregnant cow's...well, best leave that to the late-night viewing. Moving on. Now, in the Post-Oughts, barring zombies created by bath salts and other human-based tampering, and possibly sparkly vampires, the trend of mutant monsters in horror seems to be moving away from radiation, genetic mutation, and DNA tampering to Things-Found-in-Places-We-Shouldn'tHave-Gone. Mostly, the things found there are mutant or hyper-evolved humans, rather than groddy Stan Winston special-effects animals. This is the case in the excellent spelunking-gone-bad movie The Descent (2005) and in the aforementioned Primal, as well. This may be because humans are easier to get along with as actors than animals are (Russell Crowe excepted, of course), or it may be because our fears are turning away from what nature is going to do to us when she gets peeved enough, since there's not much we can do about that anymore, and more toward the depths to which humans can sink. Since many of these movies deal with going into caves or ancient ruins (The Cave (2005), The Ruins (2008)), they evoke a metaphor of us "descending" into the darkest places of our psyches. Still, there is that shark-toothed rabbit in Primal. Maybe the beasties will be making a comeback soon, after all. *As it turns out, the beastie in Prophecy wasn't a beaver after all, but rather a mutant bear. But, really, who could tell? It certainly looked like a giant, mutant beaver.
Chapter Five: Houses of Horror At last we've gotten around to talking about haunted house movies. This is, perhaps, my favorite horror movie genre and has been from the time I read the Amityville Horror as a kid and then saw the movie in 1979. The buzzing flies that congregated on the window, the blood dripping down the walls, the glowing eyes of the demonic pig as it peered into the child's bedroom from the darkness outside the house--these are the things of nightmares, and nightmares are why we watch horror movies, right? At least, they're why I watch horror movies: I like to be scared. For me, there's very little scarier than finding that your home--your refuge, the place where you are supposed to feel the most safe--has been overtaken by the "other", whatever that "other" happens to be. In The Amityville Horror the "other" is supernatural, which is my personal favorite. A human evil has to find some physical way into the house, as with Them (2007) or Panic Room (2002) or any number of other psychos-have-just-gotten-into-the-house movies. Often this is scary and creepy and I'm not trying to downplay the horror of Them or of what may be the ultimate intruder-in-the-house movie, When a Stranger Calls (1979), based on the urban legend of the Babysitter and the Man Upstairs (www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/babysit.asp), but the denizens of the supernatural dark don't need a door; they just need the dark. Although there are many horror movie tropes--there must be strange noises; things must move or open or appear or disappear at random; things must be seen out of the corner of the eye before they are seen straight on; there must be some false positives (the cat jumping out of the closet) and some false negatives ("Oh, that must have been the cat jumping out of the closet"--there are only two primary kinds of haunted house stories. The first is where a family moves into a new place--often purchased (or rented) at a ridiculously low rate--and then discovers, to their dismay, that the place is already occupied by something...else. The something else could be the creeping creatures with their grasping hands of 2011's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (and it's me-scaring-silly 1970s progenitor of the same name) or Wes Craven's People Under the Stairs (1991), or the thing-that-goes-bump-in-the-night of a Boogeyman (2005). Alternatively, the something else could be the shifting shapes and psychological tricks of ghosts and demons as in the above-mentioned Amityville Horror, 1985's Poltergeist ("Get out of the house!"), Burnt Offerings (1976), 2001's 13 Ghosts (2001) (where the ghosts can only be seen through special goggles (creeeepy)), or the endlessly entertaining Paranormal Activity movies (2007, 2010, 2011, as discussed in a previous chapter). There's also Stephen King's The Shining (the 1980 Stanley Kubrick version, not the 1997 miniseries). In all of moviedom, there may not be any more frightening scene in horror than that of young Danny Torrence cycling his Power Wheels around a corner in the hotel only to see those dead, twin girls standing there. To offset that image, I have to go to the William Katt starrer House (1986) which allowed me to laugh, jump, and be concerned about whether or not I had a transdimensional portal hiding behind the wallpaper, all at once. Aside from The Shining, perhaps two of the best--certainly the most haunting, heh heh heh--of this kind of haunted house movie are the movies-with-a-twist like The Others (2001), which plays with the haunted house tropes in clever ways, and M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999). In the latter, I know what the twist is (heck, I knew it ten minutes into the movie) and it still give me shivers. I get even more shivers during the scene where Haley Joel Osment is hiding under his sheet fort with his flashlight and when the fort collapses, we see that there are now two forms outlined beneath it. Okay, okay, if you know your horror movies, then you may be saying to yourself, "Hey, that's not right. Haley Joel Osment could see dead people, which we know 'cause it says so on all those funnymocky t-shirts. Didn't matter where he was or what house he was in. Oh, and while we're on it, the
same goes for "Paranormal Activity." Those daughters were being stalked; didn't matter where they lived." Yup, you're right. Absolutely. But there were houses involved. And those houses were spooky. So there. Anyway, the second kind of haunted house movie (we'll call it Type II) is the staple of teen-scream horror flicks: some group of people, be they investigators, good-looking twenty-something teens looking for a dare or a scare, or unfortunates who just happen to be in the wrong place (a house) at the wrong time (usually night), find themselves doing their best to keep their blood inside their bodies, where it belongs, as well as keep their sanity. Paranormal investigations (of the not Paranormal Activity found-footage kind) have been popular in the history of haunted house movies. Investigations provide the filmmakers with reasons the characters would be in the obviously scary places they're in, rather than running away, which would be the far wiser choice. The granddaddy of these is 1963's The Haunting, based on The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. The original is better than the 1999 Catherine Zeta Jones starrer of the same name. Interestingly, in the original v. remake ring, I like the 1999 House on Haunted Hill better than the 1959 Vincent Price original. Well, unless you count the 2009 Rifftrax version of the latter. Mind you, the protagonists in House on Haunted Hill aren't investigators. They're there because they want to win money for staying overnight in a ridiculously haunted house, but the general idea holds. To get back to our daring investigators, we have to look to 1973's The Legend of Hell House, or perhaps to Stephen King's 1408 (2007), wherein a cynical paranormal investigator, played by John Cusack, must last the night (heck, an hour--a very long hour) in a haunted hotel room. For our purposes, we'll say that a haunted hotel room counts as a haunted house, just like the Nostromo does in Alien, with the alien of the title playing the role of "haunt" as we discussed up in the first chapter. Another Stephen King haunted house movie involving paranormal investigators is the mini-series Rose Red, which pays homage (a lot of homage) to The Haunting of Hill House, but is still worth watching, as it takes the time to develop the themes. As does 2011's non-investigator Type I horror TV series American Horror Story. Dares are another good way to get characters to go places they wouldn't otherwise go--then the doors and windows can lock and they're trapped in there with the creaking floors, the mysterious things seen out of the corner of eyes, and the very angry spirits. Strangely, although I know that there are a bunch of movies that use this trope (the first episode of American Horror Story used this, too), all I can think of for an example is Monster House, so if you've got a few stuck in your head, let me know via my Twitter @Parablehead. I mentioned the wrong-place/wrong-time set, which pretty much covers all of the above, but sometimes you're really just not where it's good to be, like in the best horror movie ever!, 2005's House of Wax, where the good-looking twenty-something teens stumble on a town made of waxworks. Unfortunately, that's a slasher flick and doesn't really fit the Haunted House motif. Oh, why is it the best movie ever even though it has a horrible plot and the acting sucks? Paris Hilton is impaled on rebar. You just don't get better than that in a movie. Any movie. Until next chapter, when we examine all the leftovers, remakes, and shiny, bloody things, plug a movie into the brain-sucker box, pop some popcorn, and dim the lights. And don't worry about that noise coming from the attic. I'm sure it was just the cat. Even though you don't have a cat.
Chapter Six: Rewound A few days ago I saw Fright Night (2011), which is a remake of the 1985 classic. This one didn't have Roddy McDowell in it and it wasn't a spoof of vampire and horror movies like the first one was, but it did still have a share of humor and, let's admit it, much better production values and acting. It also had David Tennant in the Roddy McDowell role. As a Doctor Who junkie, I'm obligated to like anything with David Tennant in it. Fright Night is one of the rare horror remakes that actually turned out as good or better than the original. There are a few like that. Dawn of the Dead (2004) doesn't do the social commentary quite as well as the 1978 original, but it's still a good zombie yarn and it looks pretty. Well, except for the zombies, of course. Piranha (2010) is another one. It goes for over-the-top nudity and gore and plays up the spoofiness, giving it a distinct advantage over the 1978 "Jaws" rip-off. And I'm also very hopeful about the new Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2011). The 1970s original scared me as a kid; I'm hoping that the remake manages to do the same to me as an adult. [Update: it did]. There's also The Fly (1986), which was a remake of a 1958 horror ("horror" in the bad way, not the, y'know, good way), and the 1982 Kurt Russell-starring The Thing that bested the good-but-dated 1951 Thing from Another World version. There are a number of foreign-language-to-English-horror-movie remakes that should be included in any list of successful re-dos, too. The Ring (2002), Let Me In (2010), and even The Grudge (2004) all take the difficult-to-approach foreign versions and make them accessible to a broader American audience, although I'll argue that Let the Right One In, the 2008 Swedish progenitor of the Englishlanguage Let Me In is the better movie. It's worth reading the subtitles so that you can appreciate the Scandinavian imagery. But there are so many bad remakes that the good ones are eclipsed. Although the 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street lost something over the years as we moviegoers came to expect slicker and slicker production values, the new version failed to capture the menace and the sheer creepiness of the original. When, in the Robert Englund version, Nancy looks up from her desk to see her dead friend at the door of the classroom, encased in that opaque body bag, it's just...freaky scary. The remake, even with its shot-by-shot scene swipe, doesn't manage to replicate that nightmare-inducing imagery half as well. Tom Welling in the remake of the beautiful, menacing, atmospherically-drenched 1978 John Carpenter-directed The Fog? Puhleeese. Sorry about any breakout hopes you might have had, Mr. Welling, but stay in Smallville. There's also a new The Thing out. I've heard it's terrible. Don't know. Refuse to watch it. There's also maybe possibly going to be an Evil Dead (1981) re-do. No thanks. Give me Bruce Campbell overacting in the original any day over a non-campy version. Then there's the 2007 Rob Zombie Halloween remake and its sequels. Not bad in and of themselves, they would make fine splatter/slasher movies if only they weren't Halloween flicks. The 1978 original (I'm sensing a trend here: 1978 appears to have been a fine year for horror) had its share of bloodiness. As one of the original slasher movies (along with Friday the 13th (1980), itself remade in 2007 for the new age of teeny-boppers, but at least offering an explanation for how Jason can be everywhere at once. Spoiler: tunnels under Camp Crystal Lake), Halloween was derided at the time for its violence, but Rob Zombie eschews menacing atmosphere for slash after slash after slash. Feel free to like that sort of thing. Speaking of movies that Jared Padalecki (of TV's excellent "Supernatural" series) stars in, other than the Friday the 13th remake, he was also in the House of Wax (1953/2005) do-over along with Paris Hilton. So that tells you all you need to know about how good that was (except for the rebar--See Chapter Five--that was great). His Supernatural co-star, Jensen Ackles, was in his own remake: 2009's
cover of the 1981 My Bloody Valentine. Oh, and let's not forget Stephen King's 1997 mini-series remake of the absolutely terrifying The Shining. King has said that he always hated the 1980 Stanley Kubrick version. Sometimes Stephen King can be wrong. Really, really wrong. I'm not opposed to remakes. A friend of mine once argued that film actors shouldn't be denied the opportunity to play beloved characters from previously filmed movies any more than stage actors are, or any more than musicians are when they cover a previously recorded song. I don't disagree. Still, there is a permanence about films that isn't replicated in stage productions, or even musical compositions. Stage plays are expected to change (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot) from night to night, show to show. Plus, stage plays are ephemeral: they exist and remain only in the memory, and the only way to for anyone to see them again or for the first time is to go see a new production of them (unless they're filmed, of course, but at that point they become something else). We expect the original actors to be replaced by new ones; we expect new directors to come up with new interpretations of the materials. Songs are this way too, to an extent, thus explaining the popularity of the concert, of the stage performance. Films, on the other hand, come with a sense of immutability. If there's a very good version already, then one is forced to wonder why we should try for another one. Sure, there's a chance that the remake will be just as good (or better) and will add to the collective creative excellence of the cinematic world. There's an even better chance that it will fall short, and in doing so, possibly lower the value of the original, associating a taint to the original that wasn't there before (sequels can cause this result even more often than remakes. Can you say Highlander II?). All in all, unless you're calling a do-over on a previously horrible movie (The Hills Have Eyes, most Hammer films), then maybe they should be left well enough alone. But if David Tennant wants to do any more remakes? Hey, I'm all for it.
The Appendix (or possibly liver) of Halloween At long last it's Halloween. You're at the video store, or scrolling through your Netflix Instant Play list, or browsing Hulu looking for something thematic and atmospheric. You've been reading my thoughts on the subject, but, to be honest, because you were reading this a chapter at a time while sitting in the bathroom, you've forgotten most of the movies I mentioned as being good ones, or you couldn't really decide if the author (that'd be me) liked them or hated them because he's a really bad reviewer. And you think to yourself: "So what horror movies should I watch?" Here are my recommendations. If you're wanting to dip into the movies that will keep scaring, year after year, viewing after viewing, then pop these into the Blu-Ray player. Call 'em the Canon of C, in no particular order, with twitter-worthy commentary and plenty of spoilerage: ~ Classics: Halloween (1978): When you never know if it'll be a yowling cat or Michael Myers behind that door. Friday the 13th (1980): When you never know if it'll be a yowling Kevin Bacon or Jason Voorhees behind that door. Oh, plus axes to the head. Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): A murder that takes place on the ceiling. Committed by an invisible force. With lots of blood. Then, later, a very creepy body bag. Ohhh yeaaah. The Fog (1980): When your ghostly leper pirates can cause a tape recorder to catch on fire just because a piece of their wrecked ship happens to be nearby, you know you've got some serious ghostly baddies. The Shining (1980): Twin girl ghosts and a Big Wheel. Shudder. Carrie (1976): Last scene. Nightmares for years afterward. Enough said. The Omen (1976): Priest skewered by a lightning rod. Classic. The Exorcist (1973): Priest drenched with pea soup vomit. Classic. Candyman (1992): This one was filmed in the very real projects with very real danger. Dunno whether the actors knew that before they signed their liability waivers. Amityville Horror (1979): Creepiest flies in any movie, any time. Blair Witch Project (1999): Despite the snotty nose shot shown on the DVD cover and in every promo made, this slow burn Found Footage pic gave me an honest-to-goodness nightmare as an adult. Gotta love that. The Ring (2002): The beginning of the English-language versions of Japanese movies starring ghost women who crawl around in a very disturbing fashion and who have nearly sentient hair. Alien (1979): Space. Difficult to hear screaming. Also, beware whom you have lunch with. ~
Teen Scream: Scream (1996): The movie that revitalized the horror movie in the 1990s. Gotta give it credit for that. It was also a clever, self-referential masterpiece of writing. Now, of course, it's been imitated so much that you'd never know it was once fresh. Jeepers Creepers (2001): Pretty sure the Creeper drives the same truck as can be seen in Halloween: H2O. Also, he's creepy. Saw (2004): The sequels got old very fast, but the original was, well, original. Smarter than I expected and not as bloody as one might think it'd be for something called Saw. I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997): Fun slayings of silly yutes. Who can complain? The Faculty (1998): Pretty teens fighting an alien tentacle menace. Scarier than you might think. Also, a pretty good soundtrack.
Final Destination (2000): It's never quite the final destination after all, but the first one has a nice angle. ~
Comi-scares: And finally, for when you want a break from the mind-numbing horror of it all, or at least want a few laughs interspersed with your screams: Ghostbusters (1984): Source of more movie quotes ("Don't cross the streams!") than anything other than Aliens ("Game over, man! Game over!") Shaun of the Dead (2004): Grab a bag of popcorn and a box of vinyl records and watch this movie for the first time or the hundredth. It's worth every record thrown at a zombie head. Zombieland (2009): Join the quest for the world's last Twinkie(tm). You want some rollick with your zombie hunting? Here ya go. American Werewolf in London (1981): The humor here is woven expertly with the horror so that you're never quite sure which is coming next. Idle Hands (1999) Seth Green in the moralistic tale of what happens when you're a slacker and live in your parents' basement for too long. Scary Movie 2 (2001): The Ring parody is actually scarier than the same scenes in The Ring, but also funny. Very, very funny. Dead Snow (2009): Not much overt comedy, but, um, it's zombie Nazis in the snow. That's frackin' funny. And... Tremors (1990): Kevin Bacon. Giant worms. Not that scary, but loads of fun. ~ So there you go. If you can't find half a dozen movies to watch on All Hallow's Eve out of that bunch, then, well, I've done all I can for you and you need to move on to the Rom Coms. Happy Halloween, everyone!
About the Author C. Patrick Neagle is an author, photographer, game designer, and teacher who lives in the Missouri Ozarks when he isn't trekking around the world. Follow him on Twitter @Parablehead or @tweepreviews (Twitter-sized movie and tv reviews) and at C. Patrick Neagle on Facebook. Read his blog at http://goblinbrook.wordpress.com. Find out more about him on Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/CPatrickNeagle
Look for Essays in Travel and Humor Vol. 1-3: Wanderer, Nomad, and Sojourner and other works by this author at e-booksellers near your computer. Check out his FREE horror short story, "Opposites," on Smashwords. Back to Top
Published by
cover by
This manuscript made use of the Gypsy Curse font, designed by Chad Savage www.savagefonts.com
