The Book of Lists: Horror

by Wallace, Amy

  10. The Green Room (1978): This little-known film by acclaimed director François Truffaut is based on “The Altar of the Dead,” a short story by Henry James (also responsible for “The Turn of the Screw,” the inspiration for the 1961 horror classic The Innocents). It is a morbid love story, if you will, involving a young woman (Nathalie Baye) and an older widower (Truffaut) who writes the obituary column for a magazine. The more she probes into the life of this reticent man, she discovers that his private life is wholly dedicated to the maintenance of a private, candle-lit shrine originally built for his late wife, which he has expanded to accommodate all of those people beloved or admired by him who have died. In order for their relationship to exist, the woman must accept her lover’s dead as her own and promise to look after them when his own photograph is added to the shrine. It’s a morbid concept, but also a deeply human one—and, for lovers of French cinema, one also deeply allied to the shrine to dead pets in René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952). Truffaut may have been forced to accept the lead part due to lack of funding, but I prefer to think that this project—made in the wake of the deaths of Truffaut’s personal mentors Henri Langlois and Roberto Rossellini—was too intensely personal for him to entrust the role to anyone else. Acquired for U.S. release by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, this haunting parlor piece was slapped with a remarkably misleading ad campaign: “In the Green Room, everyone can hear you scream . . . but no one will help.” No one came, either. Within a year of completing this commercial disaster, Truffaut began suffering from the migraines heralding the brain tumor that was to claim his life in 1984 at the age of fifty-two.

  ANDRE DUZA’S TOP TEN HORRIFIC

  MOMENTS IN NON-HORROR FILMS

  Andre Duza is a leading member of the bizarro movement in contemporary horror fiction, writing under the sub-style Brutality Chronic. His books include Dead Bitch Army, Jesus Freaks ,and Necro Sex Machine. His novelette“Don’t F(Beep)k with the Coloureds!” is featured in The Bizarro Starter Kit, and he has contributed short stories to Permuted Press’s zombie anthologies Undead and Undead: Flesh Feast.In addition to writing, Andre is an avid bodybuilder and a certified instructor of Spirit Fist Kung Fu.

  1. Scarface: Chainsaw scene

  2. American History X: Curbing scene

  3. Looking for Mr. Goodbar: Diane Keaton’s death

  4. Requiem for a Dream: “Ass to ass”

  5. Casino: Joe Pesci’s death

  6. To Live and Die in L.A.: William Petersen’s death

  7. Lady in a Cage: James Caan’s death

  8. Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom: Entire film

  9. Se7en: “What’s in the box?!”

  10. Pulp Fiction: Ving Rhames doggy style

  MITCH BRIAN’S TEN FAVORITE

  DISGUISED HORROR FILMS

  Mitch Brian was born in Dodge City, Kansas, and raised on a steady diet of horror films, comic books, carnival freak shows, and family stories of frontier violence. He proudly cocreated and wrote episodes for Batman: The Animated Series,and not-so-proudly wrote screenplays which became the grade-z horror flicks Night Screams and Transformations. His unproduced horror scripts include an adaptation of David Morrell’s The Totem, rewrite work on The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and biopics dramatizing the true-life horrors of John Brown and George Armstrong Custer. He is a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where he teaches courses on the horror film and screenwriting. Please visit him at MitchBrianFilms.com.

  1. Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

  Directed by John M. Stahl

  Screenplay by Jo Swerling, based on the novel by Ben Ames Williams

  Sold as a mainstream romance based on a bestselling potboiler, Leave Her to Heaven is filmed in a gloriously bright Technicolor palette that suggests psychological safety as hero Cornel Wilde happily falls in love with Gene Tierney. But under the gloss lurks a dark tale of an emasculating female bent on destruction. The perversity roars into high gear as Tierney’s character is revealed to be a psychotic whose jealousy spells death for anyone too close to Wilde. Bedecked in virginal white, she drowns the hero’s crippled brother, emerges snakelike from the lake in green skintight swimwear, and hits a masochistic high as she throws herself down the stairs to kill the baby inside her.

  2. The Virgin Spring (1960)

  Directed by Ingmar Bergman

  Screenplay by Ulla Issakson

  Bergman directs this medieval drama of predation, destruction of innocence, and revenge with rich, brooding intensity. In a deepfocus, black-and-white world where no good deed goes unpunished, we watch helplessly as a stern father’s doting favoritism leads to a daughter’s rape at the hands of outlaws. Wicked reversals abound. The virginal daughter’s kindness is rewarded with savagery, the profound wisdom of the black-sheep daughter is callously ignored, and a loving father becomes a murderer, losing his soul in the process; though by this time we are sharing his sin and urging him on. Horror director Wes Craven would remake this film in 1972 as Last House on the Left . . . with far less sublime results.

  3. Performance (1970)

  Directed by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell

  Screenplay by Donald Cammell

  This psychedelic, wantonly transgressive crime story soon morphs into a tale of psychic transference as ultraviolent gangster James Fox hides out at reclusive rock star Mick Jagger’s pleasure dome. The once-powerful criminal’s gradual loss of control is both funny and terrifying. And as one personality is subsumed into the other, polymorphous eroticism supercharges the growing sense of dread, making for dark, delicious pleasures (aided by the presence of Anita Pallenberg). Paint it black, indeed.

  4. Straw Dogs (1971)

  Directed by Sam Peckinpah

  Screenplay by David Zelag Goodman and Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, by Gordon M. Williams

  Few films have so successfully transposed elements of the Gothic horror story into modern drama. Instead of an innocent young woman, it’s a petulant Dustin Hoffman who finds himself in a remote location on the moors where mental illness, familial abuse, angry villagers, and the unrestrained id are transmuted by Peckinpah’s outlaw cynicism. Despite its dismissal by critics as sexist and exploitive (it both is and isn’t), the film also explores marital sadism, psychological isolation, male inadequacy, and the human propensity toward senseless violence. As with all great horror films, we can both fear and revel in the cruelty and violence.

  5. Day of the Locust (1975)

  Directed by John Schlesinger

  Screenplay by Waldo Salt—based on the novel by Nathaniel West

  Novelist Nathaniel West’s portrait of the denizens of Hollywood who have “come to Los Angeles to die” provides a rich landscape for a parade of grotesques, including sexually unidentifiable children, bitterly libidinous midgets, repressed homosexuals, emasculated suitors, and a queen bitch with a vagina dentata. Underscored by John Barry’s underwater basso score and gauzy cinematography by Conrad Hall, this film is truly horrific in its apocalyptic portrayal of Hollywood at the height of the studio system, which it somehow manages to link (successfully?!) with rising fascism. Most distressing of all is how wonderful we feel when a child is trampled to death and how quickly that glee fades.

  6. Midnight Express (1978)

  Directed by Alan Parker

  Screenplay by Oliver Stone, based on the book by William Hayes and William Hoffer

  From the opening soundscape of gunshots, human wails, sinister electronic music, and a pulsing heartbeat, this “based-ona-true-story” prison drama’s horrific intentions quickly become apparent. Parker’s documentary cityscapes (indebted to William Friedkin, himself indebted to Michelangelo Antonioni) give way to claustrophobic long-lens shots, violent slashes of night-time lighting, and sublimely baroque, smoke-filled interiors. Like 1975’s Salò, this film manages to generate a palpable sexual undercurrent despite its horrifying situations . . . perhaps because “reality” has nothing to d
o with the hothouse ambiance of this Turkish prison, seething with homoeroticism and fetishized violence. By the time Brad Davis descends through Dante-like rings of hell to join zombified prisoners in a shuffling circle, we halfexpect Bela Lugosi to be presiding over the proceedings.

  7. Cruising (1980)

  Directed by William Friedkin

  Screenplay by Friedkin, based on the novel by Gerald Walker

  Disguised as a police procedural, Cruising, through Friedkin’s clinically distanced eye, creates a cold, growing sense of dread, as Al Pacino’s supposed straight-arrow cop submits himself to the late-seventies gay leather bar scene to search for a serial murderer. Critics decried the film for being inaccurate; though I have no doubt that everything represented in the movie happened somewhere somehow, it sure didn’t happen this way. The film see-saws from frames packed with Bosch-like decadence, all overheated and oversexed, to suddenly icy, disturbingly formalized compositions and enigmatic plot-turns. The result is dizzying and unnerving.

  8. Come and See (Idi i Smotri) (1985)

  Directed by E. Klimov

  Screenplay by A. Adamovich and E. Klimov

  We all know “war is hell,” but the infernal crucible of war has never been so hypnotic as in this Russian odyssey of a twelveyear-old boy who is swept along through the Nazi invasion of Belarus. As in another great war odyssey, Apocalypse Now, humor and horror co-exist, shifting back and forth in the blink of an eye, but Klimov’s vision has no room for heroics and is far more harrowing. There is never any hope that our young hero will control or dominate the proceedings and it is this helplessness that gives the film its exhausting, electrifying pull. Aleksei Kravchenko’s face is an out-of-time mask of fear and pain, occasionally colored by wonder and fleeting joy. It is as rich and troubled as the war-torn landscape, a landscape both apocalyptic and eternal. Even when it’s finished, it goes on. As Bertolt Brecht observed upon Hitler’s end: “Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men, for though the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

  9. After Hours (1985)

  Directed by Martin Scorsese

  Screenplay by Joe Minion

  This nightmarish comedy of errors, directed with frantic glee, presents a human gauntlet of damaged city-dwellers who impede poor schlub Griffin Dunne’s efforts to get back uptown to the safety of his apartment. Predatory camera moves and paranoid compositions ratchet up the tension so that even the tinkling music of an ice cream truck becomes sinister, as our hero’s only hope of escape from an angry mob is to submit to premature entombment. The horrific has never been so funny . . . or the funny so horrific.

  10. Damage (1992)

  Directed by Louis Malle

  Screenplay by David Hare, based on the novel by Josephine Hart

  A bone-dry tale of a prominent man’s sexual obsession with his son’s fiancée becomes a morally slippery-wet meditation on trust, blame, and self-control. Juliette Binoche is a nearly silent, blackclad vampire, passively alluring, as Jeremy Irons falls under her spell. Or is it his own sense of inadequacy and self-loathing? Is he predator or prey? Nothing is explained, which intensifies the creeping dread as we watch and wait for the coming car-crash. As in so many vampire films, eroticism and violence result in the walking dead, and the desiccated remains revealed in this film’s conclusion are both surprising and haunting.

  ERIC SHAPIRO’S FIVE FAVORITE SCARY

  GENERATION X/Y–ERA MOVIES

  THAT AREN’T HORROR MOVIES

  Eric Shapiro is an author from Tarzana, California. It’s Only Temporary, his short, apocalyptic novel, was on the Preliminary Nominee ballot for the 2006 Bram Stoker Award in Long Fiction. Shapiro also wrote the novellas Days of Allison (2006) and Strawberry Man (2007).His short fiction can be found in the anthologies The Elastic Book of Numbers (British Fantasy Award Winner for Best Anthology, 2006), Daikaiju! (Ditmar Award Winner for Collected Work,2006),and Corpse Blossoms (Bram Stoker Award Nominee for Anthology, 2006), among other speculative fiction anthologies. In 2007, he directed the film Rule of Three, which depicts an assortment of sexual compulsives and predators.

  1. Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975): Promise me you won’t watch this movie. Just advance to Number 2 on the list. This isn’t even a movie; it’s a beige-lit nuclear power plant of heinous emotion. You want to feel sick for three days? You want to drop some pounds through fasting? Then watch the movie. I’d give details, but I’m a being of class. Okay, okay, just one: The wedding cake is made of feces. I’d share more, but I’d rather die.

  2. United 93 (2006): You know that enemy of yours, the one who’s afraid of both flying and terrorism? When it comes time to take revenge on that bastard, pry his eyes open Anthony Burgess– style and press play on this motherfucker. Like Salò, in addition to showing humanity at its most extreme, United 93 has some seriously upsetting lighting. Everything you see is washed-out and flat, just like the terrorists’ consciences.

  3. Requiem for a Dream (2000): The most topical movie ever made (minus the smirking self-back-patting that tends to accompany topicality). As somebody who’s been sent around the bend and across the river by mis-prescribed medication, watching Ellen Bursytn’s meltdown gets me crackling with panic. Add to this the fact that, my being a Jewish New Jerseyian, Bursytn resembles every single mother and grandmother that I met growing up, and my only recourse is to weep inconsolably.

  4. Bully (2001): I don’t know what’s scarier: This realistic/lowbudget/true-story depiction of a sociopathic Florida teenager being murdered by his peers, or director Larry Clark’s shameless insistence on photographing his young cast minus clothing. Either way you slice it, the atmosphere in Bully is in-your-head harrowing, and the story is even more harrowing than that.

  5. Full Metal Jacket (1987): As far as I’m concerned, one of the deepest reasons that this movie is so unsettling—beyond director Stanley Kubrick’s maniac-perfect compositions and the shining-showerknobs lighting—is its infinitely inscrutable and experimental two-act structure: We get a half hour of Marine boot camp, followed by ninety minutes of field action, and in the process, we’re constantly adrift. This examination of warfare psychosis never allows you to settle into it, a technique that makes its leering faces and penetrating gunshots all the more disquieting.

  RICHARD HARLAND SMITH’S TEN HORROR MOVIES

  THAT SUGGEST LIFE IS UNLIVABLE

  Richard Harland Smith is an award-winning New York playwright turned rogue Hollywood screenwriter, a critic for Video Watchdog magazine, a founding moderator of The Mobius Home Video Forum, a blogger for Turner Classic Movies’ Movie Morlocks film blog, and a busy writer of DVD liner notes. He has been a contributor to the Wallflower Press critical guides Contemporary North American Film Directors and Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors as well as Vampiros and Monstruos: The Mexican Horror Film of the 20th Century.

  1. Night of the Living Dead (1968): The best of the bunch bears the worst possible news: when the chips are down and we need one another the most . . . we fail. Live with that.

  2. The Innocents (1961): Forget the “past is prologue” nonsense— the past is epilogue in this neck of the dark woods, and there’s naught to do but turn around and go back the way we came. Except we’re already there.

  3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920): This German expressionist classic is so visually striking that we forget how unrelentingly grim a picture it paints of life in the modern age.

  4. Carnival of Souls (1962): The moral of this story is, no one gets out alive. And even if you do . . . you don’t.

  5. Haunts (1977): Though we sense that the filmmakers didn’t quite have a bead on the Big Picture, this obscure scissors-killer-onthe-loose psychothriller betters the instruction of Repulsion with an overwhelming aura of repression, dreariness, and ennui that makes you wish you were dead.

  6. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971): That we can’t decide whether Jessica is cracked in the head or the victim of genuine supernat
ural events seems to be the point of this gently disturbing gem, in which there is no happy ending either way you slice the mole.

  7. Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (1963): This has got to be the most candied poison apple ever lobbed at horror film fans. Nobody dies, but everybody loses.

  8. Session 9 (2001): A masculine answer to the overstuffed “problem heroine” subgenre brings a refreshing blue-collar approach to the subject of psychic contamination.

  9. 28 Weeks Later (2007): This film takes Night of the Living Dead’s message even further . . . that those trying their best and even sacrificing their lives for the common good of humanity can’t reverse the impossibility of living in a world gone mad.