The Book of Lists: Horror

by Wallace, Amy

  5. Jeepers Creepers: During the closing credits, “Officer with Hole in Chest” is spelled “Office.” (01:26)

  6. Jurassic Park: Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) enters his trailer by opening a door with hinges on the left—but from the inside, they are on the right. (00:10)

  Dr. Grant stands in front of a velociraptor egg, which is delicately held by a computer-controlled arm—which proceeds to vanish before the next shot. (00:28)

  7. Manhunter: On the telephone, Doctor Lecktor (Brian Cox) is able to get Graham’s (William Petersen) address as “3680 DeSoto Highway.” Later on, at the hospital, Graham is told they broke Lecktor’s coded message to the tooth fairy killer: it reads, “Graham home, 3860 DeSoto Highway.” Did he send the Tooth Fairy to another house just for fun? (00:31, 01:04)

  8. Maximum Overdrive: The military vehicle with a machine gun arrives at the Dixie Boy, and as it drives by, it shows that the steering wheel has a small button as a horn. But when the vehicle starts honking the Morse code, in the middle of the steering wheel there is a horn the size of a pothole. (01:10, 01:13)

  9. The Terminator: The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) looks for Sarah Connor’s (Linda Hamilton) address in a phone book. There are three Sarah Connors, and their street numbers are 1823, 2816, 309. The first Sarah the Terminator visits lives at 14239. (00:15)

  10. Tremors: Earl’s (Fred Ward) horse gets grabbed from underground by one of the monsters, and fights to stand up again, but the tentacles hold it down—well, the tentacles and a cable that runs from its saddle and can be seen on screen left, that is. (00:32)

  Earl’s last name is Bassett, as mentioned by Valentine (Kevin Bacon) when he wakes him up (00:01), and as it appears written on the plate Earl himself removes (00:11) when they first attempt to leave Perfection, yet in the closing credits he’s listed as “Earl Bass.” (01:31)

  BOB MURAWSKI’S TWELVE GREATEST

  GRINDHOUSE HORROR ONE-SHEETS

  Bob Murawski is a film editor who has worked with Sam Raimi for two decades, cutting Army of Darkness, The Gift, and the three Spider Man pictures. He has also edited films for directors John Woo, Scott Spiegel, and Kathryn Bigelow, and music videos for the Ramones and Motörhead. In 1996 he partnered with Sage Stallone to form Grindhouse Releasing, a Hollywood-based distribution company dedicated to the restoration and preservation of motion pictures historically held in very low regard (.e.g., low-budget horror and exploitation films). Grindhouse is committed not only to video distribution, but also theatrical release of the movies it acquires. Past releases include Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, and Ruggero Deodato’s notorious Cannibal Holocaust, which have played to sold-out crowds throughout the U.S. For more information visit www.GrindhouseReleasing.com.

  1. Blood Feast (1963): The one that started it all. Crudely rendered artwork of a meat cleaver–wielding Einstein-haired killer standing over the mutilated torso of his bikini-clad victim in this two-color poster printed in stark black and blood-red. Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman’s immortal tag line— “Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror!”—fully delivered on its bold claim. “You’ll Recoil and Shudder as You Witness the Slaughter and Mutilation of Nubile Young Girls.” Indeed!

  2. Beast of Blood (1970): A beautifully executed full-color painting of a rotting ghoul tearing off his own head, with viscera and gore galore! Hemisphere Films brought the classic Reynolds Brown–style monster art into the sleazy seventies with this striking one-sheet.

  3. Torture Dungeon (1970): Lew Mishkin’s lurid posters for Andy Milligan’s threadbare Staten Island horror epics have their own demented charm, and this is one of the sleaziest. A brightly hued combination of crudely colorized and overpainted scenes from the movie creates a nightmarish feeling of seediness, which perfectly conveys the movie’s dingy aesthetic.

  4. I Drink Your Blood (1971): Jerry Gross’s spectacular one-sheet for David Durston’s sordid tale of LSD-infested, rabies-infected hippies on a blood-crazed killing spree is appropriately printed in Day-Glo green and yellow fluorescent ink and actually glows under a black light! It was double-billed with Del Tenney’s blackand-white zombie movie I Eat Your Skin to earn its well-deserved tag line: “Two great blood-horrors to rip out your guts!”

  The one-sheet for the legendary exploitation double-bill of I Drink Your Blood and I Eat Your Skin.

  5. Orgy of the Living Dead (1972): I was obsessed with this artwork from the time I saw the ad in the Detroit News drive-in listings, especially since the theaters playing this show were over 100 miles away and I was 8 years old. Touted as “A Triple Avalanche of Grisly Horror,” the ad featured a vicious living corpse-head with sharp fangs, one eye, and one rotted socket. A large chunk of the skull was missing in the forehead to reveal the brain beneath. A disembodied, rotted hand reached forward, beckoningly. Behind this horror-head was a savage, busty vampire-woman, fangs and clawlike fingernails bared, chained like an animal. As if this weren’t enough, a black–and-white photo of a screaming man in a straight jacket was also included, with the story of poor John Austin Frasier, who was driven insane by this explosion of terror. And the most shocking element of the entire program? Its PG rating! I later saw the one-sheet in full color and was even more impressed by this lurid gem, which was created by genre icon Alan Ormsby, writer of Deathdream and Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things.

  6. Invasion of the Blood Farmers (1972): A legendary exploitation title, a great tag-line—“they planted the LIVING and harvested the DEAD!”—and an incredible black-and-white photo-collage of pitchfork-stabbing, grave-digging action, all depicted in front of a blood-red moon. Another PG-rated treat from a kinder, gentler MPAA.

  7. Caged Virgins (1973): Harry Novak’s U.S. release of Jean Rollin’s 1971 vampire art-film featured a poster with a hellish, full-color painting of scantily clad females (with a few in the background who were actually topless!) chained in a bloody pit of horror. No less than seven victims, “IN AN ENDLESS NIGHTMARE OF TERROR,” are depicted, in ultra-lurid artwork that recalls the sixties men’s magazine torture-chamber illustrations of such artists as John Duillo and Norm Eastman.

  8. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974): The classic! A simple, gruesome image of Leatherface, his chainsaw, and his helpless victim, dominated by the chillingly evocative tagline, “WHO WILL SURVIVE AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM?”

  9. Zombie (1980): Jerry Gross scored a major comeback with this minimalist masterpiece for Lucio Fulci’s living dead classic. I’m not usually a fan of the “big head photo” style of movie poster, but the maggot-encrusted Gianetto De Rossi creation, with the blunt, cut-to-the-chase tagline, “WE ARE GOING TO EAT YOU!” made Zombie the must-see movie of 1980.

  The one-sheet for Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.

  10. Maniac (1980): The best of all the slasher movies also had the best poster, a vivid painting depicting a waist-down shot of the killer holding a huge knife in one hand and a bloody scalp in the other. He is standing in a puddle of blood. In jagged white psycho-script, it reads “I WARNEDYOU NOT TO GO OUT TONIGHT,” and the title appears in big, bold, ugly letters. A hard-hitting piece of exploitation dynamite.

  11. Make Them Die Slowly (1981): Exploitation master Terry Levine supercharged his U.S. release of Umberto Lenzi’s Italian gore-fest Cannibal Ferox with a new 42nd Street–style, right-to-the-point title, and a one-sheet that takes the incredible Italian art and roughs it up for the grindhouse crowd, adding some grainy, violent stills from the movie and proudly labeling it, “The Most Violent Film Ever!” As if this weren’t enough, Levine sealed the deal with the proclamation: “BANNED IN 31 COUNTRIES.” Sublime.

  12. Pieces (1983): A movie with two great tag-lines—“You don’t have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre” and “It’s EXACTLY what you think it is.” A bright red poster depicting the surreal image of a chainsaw lovingly displayed on a satin platform, with a grotesque but sexy sewn-together blonde victim beneath. This one-sheet promised a lot and the movie delivered even more. I drove sev
enty miles to see Pieces and was not disappointed.

  TIM LUCAS’S TEN HORROR FILMS

  THAT AREN’T HORROR FILMS

  Tim Lucas is an internationally recognized critic specializing in fantastic cinema. His work has appeared in Sight & Sound, Fangoria, Film Comment , Cahiers du Cinéma, Cinefantastique, and his own award-winning monthly, Video Watchdog (www.videowatchdog .com). He is the author of The Video Watchdog Book (1992), the monumental biography Mario Bava—All the Colors of the Dark (2007) and Studies in the Horror Film: Videodrome (2008). He is also the author of two acclaimed horror novels, Throat Sprockets (1994) and The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula (2005). He lives with his wife, Donna, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  Throughout my life as a horror film devotee, I’ve taken silent note of a number of occasions when I have ventured outside the genre only to find myself unmistakably still in horror’s presence. It’s possible for a western, a drama, a love story, even a comedy to channel something of the atmosphere or undertow of the horror genre, be it through excessive violence, morbidity, a pronounced awareness or concern with matters of death, romance that takes a dark or unhealthy turn, or the surrealistic depiction of aberrant psychology and mental illness. It would also seem that elements of horror are virtually unavoidable in the realms of experimental cinema and European art cinema. What is most wonderful about these occasions, when they happen, is that they usually present us with ideas, approaches to the genre, that have not as yet been properly explored within it. The following (in chronological sequence) is a list of my favorite examples of non-horror pictures that nevertheless gave me some of the biggest cinematic scares of my life . . . or got deeply under my skin.

  1. J’Accuse! (1938): Abel Gance’s sound remake of his own 1919 antiwar classic stands out in my memory as the film that most made me believe in figments of terror that weren’t there. This miracle is primarily achieved through the force of the lead performance by Victor Francen (The Beast with Five Fingers) as Jean Diaz, a World War I veteran so traumatized by his wartime memories that he withdraws from people and immerses himself in the abstraction of work geared toward pacific solutions. However, as his work is subverted by a government determined to engage in another war, Diaz breaks down and pleads with the world not to live by the sword—out of respect for all those sons who gave their lives, their limbs, their faces for peace—and, as the world refuses to listen, the dead return to amass in defiance, summoned back by the vividness of Diaz’s outrage. Francen’s harrowing performance makes one believe that such a thing could actually happen. In a manner recalling Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), real disfigured war veterans were used in the climactic procession, which allows the most sincere horror to emerge from the most earnest and urgent of dramas.

  2. Pinocchio (1940): The name of Walt Disney evokes all manner of family fun, but let us not forget that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938)—the very foundation of his empire—has some scary moments involving a huntsman ordered to cut the heart out of our virginal heroine, her flight into a forest made monstrous by the frenzied projection of her fears, and the wicked queen’s transformation into a witchy crone dedicated to her rival’s destruction. But this, Disney’s next feature, based on the book by Carlo Collodi and widely touted as his masterpiece, is a harrowing parable about innocent life at the mercy of a corrupt, manipulative, exploitative world. I’ve seen screaming children carried out of screenings of this film. Lampwick’s transformation into a donkey in the Pleasure Island sequence predates all but one werewolf transformation in the cinema (Werewolf of London, 1935) and, almost seventy years further on, it somehow remains more terrifying, more agonizing, than any other attempted to date.

  3. Sunset Boulevard (1950): Billy Wilder’s noirish dramas had incorporated elements of horror before—notably The Lost Weekend (1945), with its unforgettable drunkard’s hallucination of a bat picking its way through a broken wall—but here, the prevailing moods are narcissism, paranoia, and necrophilia. The narrator (William Holden) tells us up front that he is dead, and his story sucks us into the living death that is silent screen star Norma Desmond’s (Gloria Swanson) waxworks monument to her own past glory. Her final descent down the stairwell (“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille!”) is, importantly, the cinema’s first fadeto-white and one of the rare instances of a scare that never loses its incendiary power, no matter how many times you see it.

  4. The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (1952): In compiling a list like this, we mustn’t overlook religious drama. This film is a predictably inflated Hollywood retelling of a true and rather more humble event that took place in 1917, when three children in the Portuguese village of Fatima claimed to have borne witness to a recurring vision of the Virgin Mary. Perhaps because the project was entrusted to director John Brahm—responsible for the horror classics The Undying Monster (1942), The Lodger (1944), and Hangover Square (1945)—the vision carries a charge as ghostly as it is “holy,” and the titular miracle the Virgin enacts before an assembled crowd (causing the sun to momentarily plummet toward the Earth) terrified audiences in its day.

  5. The Night of the Hunter (1955): Charles Laughton’s only directorial venture has everything one might expect from a classic horror film, such as starkly expressionistic photography (by Stanley Cortez) and Robert Mitchum’s ogreish performance as the Reverend Harry Powell, a money-grubbing con-man of the cloth who dramatizes the war between good and evil with letters tattooed on his own knuckles; he’s as intimidating a Big Bad Wolf as you’ll find in any fairy tale. Too stylized to fit comfortably into any genre, it nevertheless contains many frightening scenes, sometimes goosing its scares with flashes of comedy, and there is one unforgettably, perversely lovely moment when a man in a rowboat finds the corpse of a woman at the bottom of a lake, her hair floating upwards, seated behind the wheel of her submerged Model T Ford.

  6. Susan Slade (1961): Romantic melodrama of the 1950s and early sixties was actually a common source for some of the most shrill and sensational yet unexpected moments of horror. Who could forget the out-of-left-field cannibalistic climax of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)? Or the moment in Imitation of Life (1959) when clean-cut Troy Donahue suddenly shows his own true colors as a sadistic racist by demanding of girlfriend Susan Kohner, “Is it true you’re a nigger?” and slapping her to the ground in a back alley? There are dozens of like examples, but this Delmer Daves melodrama stands out in my memory—though I haven’t seen it in decades—as especially horrific. Why? Well, there’s a scene in which Connie Stevens, playing an unenthusiastic new mother, ignores the cries of her toddler until she can’t stand it anymore and storms into the nursery . . . only to discover that the cigarette she accidentally dropped into her baby’s crib had engulfed the wailing child in flames! (I wouldn’t see anything quite so upsetting in a drama again until Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, made in 1976.) Visiting harm, especially such extreme harm, upon infants remains a place where horror films still generally refuse to go, and this hair-raiser shows why—which may have something to do with why it has become almost impossible to find in recent years.

  7. Last Year at Marienbad (1961): From its introductory burst of funereal music, there is something vaguely but inescapably deathly about Alain Resnais’s classic based on an original screenplay by novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. The story is warm-blooded enough—a woman (Delphine Seyrig), vacationing with her husband, is approached by a debonair stranger (Giorgio Albertazzi) intent upon seducing her with stories of their past affair at Marienbad, which may or may not have happened—but the cast are almost indistinguishable from a waxworks. Might the characters be inhabitants of a palatial afterlife in the wake of a tryst that culminated in homicide? Perhaps. Another explanation is that these characters are robots continuing to inhabit these geometric gardens long after their human creators have died, and that their tapes are finally beginning to corrode and break down. Whether it’s horror, science fiction, or merely strange, it’s as creepy as it’s alluring. Notable for including the scariest
fade-to-white since Sunset Boulevard.

  8. Persona (1966): Because Ingmar Bergman was generally regarded as one of the most important filmmakers of his time, perhaps the greatest ever, the horror elements in his work were generally overlooked by the doting mainstream. The Magician (1958) contains some frightening, surreal moments; The Virgin Spring (1960) inspired Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972); Through a Glass Darkly (1961) is as harrowing a depiction of psychological disintegration as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965); and The Hour of the Wolf (1968) is most assuredly a horror film, an acknowledged influence on Oliver Stone’s Seizure (1974) and David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979). This film is about loss of identity and the psycho-vampiric relationship that develops between a recuperating actress (Liv Ullmann) and her nurse (Bibi Andersson), who must fill the void left by her patient’s refusal to speak. Throughout the film, Bergman shocks the viewer by playing with the mechanics of cinema—faking torn frames, projector burns, even inserting subliminal images of sex and violence. There is also a frightening flash of a satanic face, seven years before Captain Howdy popped up in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973).

  9. Gimme Shelter (1970): David and Albert Maysles’s film of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 US tour culminates in chilling documentation of the free December concert held at the Altamont Speedway, the ugly antithesis of the paradisiacal Woodstock Music and Arts Fair four months earlier. Bad drugs and worse vibes infecting the audience, the Hell’s Angels in charge of security (which they maintained by beating people with pool sticks), Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane being pulled offstage mid-performance and knocked unconscious, and, when the Stones finally take the stage to play songs like “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Under My Thumb,” they quickly realize their repertoire can only offer kerosene to douse the flames of discontent. A man aiming a handgun at the stage is stabbed to death on camera, and there were reportedly other deaths too, but the scariest moment (for me, anyway) is when a girl in the front row suddenly notices Mick Jagger looking in her direction and drops her look of concern to flip her hair and look flirtatious.