The Book of Lists: Horror

by Wallace, Amy

  10. The Incredible Melting Man (1977): Though it borrows heavily from The Quatermass Xperiment, this poor cousin distinguishes itself by the dead weight of its pessimism. And at the end, God gets out his hose.

  TOMMY O’HAVER’S TOP TEN

  WOMEN-IN-PERIL HORROR FILMS

  Director Tommy O’Haver’s movies include the comedy Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss and the romantic fantasy Ella Enchanted. His most recent film is An American Crime, starring Catherine Keener and Ellen Page—a dramatization of a horrific true-life murder case (which was also the inspiration for Jack Ketchum’s novel The Girl Next Door) from the mid-sixties.

  1. Shadow of a Doubt (1943): Although Alfred Hitchcock has long been accused of hating women, he’s actually given us some of the most dynamic heroines of the silver screen. In fact, he is arguably the grand master of the women-in-peril film—from Rebecca to Suspicion to Psycho, it’s almost always his women we root for. This movie, Hitchcock’s personal favorite and written by Thornton Wilder, is a particularly twisted treat, as teenager Charlotte Newton (Teresa Wright) discovers her beloved Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton) is a serial widow-killer—and in doing so, finds herself the next would-be victim on his list.

  2. Gaslight (1944): Is Ingrid Bergman’s timid young Paula Alquist going mad? That’s certainly what her new husband, the mysterious and dashing Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), wants her to think. As objects around the creepy old house disappear inexplicably, and gaslights flicker on and off without reason, poor Paula’s pushed to the brink. But when the gig is up, she finds her strength and the tables are turned. Bergman got an Oscar for this one, and she deserved it, playing the quintessential heroine of the genre.

  3. Julie (1956): This Doris Day–Louis Jourdan thriller was, surprisingly, also nominated for some Oscars—Best Screenplay and Best Song. In the tradition of Gaslight—and Doris’s other, more famous woman-in-peril film Midnight Lace—our leading lady, a stewardess, marries bad, as she learns her new man actually killed her first husband! The climax—Julie manages to singlehandedly land a passenger jet after her ex offs the pilot—is not to be missed.

  4. Eyes Without a Face (1960): Georges Franju’s obsessively gorgeous creep-fest scandalized the French establishment, reportedly making people faint when it was first released. At heart, it’s the simple, sad story of Christiane (Edith Scob), a young woman left disfigured by a car crash, and her doomed relationship with her mad scientist father (Pierre Brasseur). Overwhelmed with guilt, he murders girls and attempts to graft their faces onto his own daughter’s. This classic exposed the psychological horrors of plastic surgery long before we had Nip/Tuck.

  5. Strait-Jacket (1963): Joan Crawford starred in what is perhaps the mother of all women-in-peril films, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But it’s this William Castle film that really cemented her as a staple of the genre in her later years. Joan gives a terrific performance as Lucy Harbin, fresh out of the asylum after being locked up twenty years for a double murder. When she moves in with her daughter (Diane Baker), we begin to wonder whether she was ready to be released in the first place.

  6. Die! Die! My Darling! (1965): In this brilliant Baby Jane rip-off, Tallulah Bankhead plays Mrs. Trefoile, the religious-fanatic mother-in-law of recently widowed Patricia Carroll (a very spunky Stephanie Powers). But when Patricia stops by to pay her regards to Mrs. Trefoile, and happens to mention she’s planning to remarry, the overbearing woman locks the hapless “harlot” in the attic, determined to teach her a lesson. Seeing these two go at it is more fun than a Showgirls strip-off.

  7. The Big Cube (1969): Gaslight meets Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in this outrageous acid-induced shocker. When well-to-do heiress Lisa (Karin Mossberg) meets ne’er-do-well gigolo Johnny (George Chakiris) it’s bad news for her stepmom, aging actress Adriana (Lana Turner, of course). The couple begins “cubing” her—replacing her Valium with LSD—to make her go insane so they can make off with the family fortune. The plot gets more absurd and convoluted—suffice it to say, this film satisfies, with its drug-trip visuals, ridiculous acid-claptrap dialogue, and a hilarious hippie wedding.

  8. Dressed To Kill (1980): Brian De Palma’s ode to Psycho is full of fun twists, as we find ourselves led from the milieu of a repressed Manhattan housewife (Angie Dickinson) into a not-so-distant underworld full of prostitutes, transsexuals, and anonymous sex. It’s over the top and, as in most all De Palma films, almost every female character is in peril in one way or another.

  9. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992): This year brought two great returns to the genre, Single White Female being the other example. Curtis Hanson’s Cradle narrowly beats SWF to make this list, if only because Rebecca De Mornay’s evil nanny corners Ernie Hudson’s simple-minded but suspicious handyman—and she threatens him with one of the most wicked and politicallyincorrect lines in cinema history: “Don’t fuck with me, retard.”

  10. Safe (1995): Paranoia is an essential element to all of these stories, and in Todd Haynes’s strange and brilliant film, Julianne Moore’s Carol White finds herself allergic to virtually everything—that’s right, everything’s trying to kill her. Her fear ultimately leads her to Wrenwood, a new-age retreat where she may find some peace—but for the audience, it’s extremely unsettling.

  EDWARD LEE’S TEN BEST HORROR MOVIES

  WITH GRATUITOUS NUDITY

  Edward Leehas had over thirty books published in the horror and suspense field, including City Infernal, Flesh Gothic, and House Infernal. He is a Bram Stoker Award nominee, and his short stories have appeared in over a dozen anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of 2000, the Hot Blood series, and the award-winning 999. His movie, Header, was filmed inlate2003 and will soon be released. Meanwhile, several others have been optioned for film. His Web site is at www.edwardleeonline.com

  1. Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980): Not even Joe (Beyond the Darkness) D’Amato’s directorial expertise can save this dollarstore-budgeted effort (they couldn’t afford lights, so they shot the night scenes during the day!) but what does save it are uncommonly original-looking zombies and a bunch of brazenly naked women, including Laura (Emmanuelleand theCannibals) Gemser and Dirce (Porno Holocaust) Funari. The only thing more horrific than the zombies are the plainly visible genital warts on actor Mark Shannon, and it must also be mentioned that one actress in this flick sports so much pubic hair, you’ll think she’s got Don King in a leg-lock.

  2. A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1971): The title blows the story as effectively as renaming The Sixth Sense something like BruceWillisisReallyDead; however, this movie is, in my option, Spanish eroto-horror maestro Jess Franco’s very best work, combining atmosphere, uncanny direction, lesbianism, vampirism, real dead bats on a bedspread, a talking hanged man, and howlingly attractive naked women into a brew of pulp horror perfection. It stars Franco supernumeraries Britt Nichols and Ann Libert, plus horror’s answer to Marlon Brando, Howard Vernon. And we can only hope that protagonist Christina von Blanc was not a minor when this was filmed.

  3. Horror Rises from the Tomb (1972): Naked women rise as well in this creepy doozy—perhaps, Paul (Jacinto Molina) Naschy’s most notorious Gothic gem. A satanic baron, none-too-happy about being beheaded in the 1400s, personifies the phrase “payback’s a bitch.” Never mind the fake Styrofoam head in the decapitation scene, nor the barbeque-sauce-covered chicken thigh that stands in for a human heart. Good clean gory creepy naked entertainment doesn’t get better than this.

  4. Graveyard Tramps (1973): No graveyard but plenty of tramps in this campy sci-fi horror thriller formerly titled Invasion of the Bee Girls and oddly endorsed by Siskel and Ebert. Directed by Denis (yeah, I’ve heard of him) Sanders in California, this movie is actually brilliant in the way it takes its ludicrousness so seriously, and more brilliant still in its casting some of the best-looking women you’ve ever seen in a movie. Endowed female researchers who wear white lab coats and apparently nothing else “hump” government scientists to death,
summoning incredulous, hip-talking federal agent Neal Agar, who does some humping of his own. This flick boasts one of the most scintillating lines of monologue in the history of cinema, when the proverbial overweight police captain says, “You’re uptight, we’re uptight, I’m uptight, we’re all uptight.” Kind of beats the heck out of “To be or not to be,” huh? The gist: An evil plot to change earth’s women into “bee girls” by cocooning their nude bodies in goo infused with bee enzymes. I’m not making this up. One actress here proves that breast implantation surgery had yet to be perfected in 1973.

  5. The Living Dead Girl (1982): Impressionistic French director Jean Rollin’s magnum opus of low-budget occult gold. Hell, I’ll go you one better and say it is to horror what Ben-Hur is to classic film. . . . All right, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but what’s not an exaggeration is the movie’s incontestable success in terms of viewer engagement, transitive atmosphere, and sheer cinematic beauty. You’ll forget all about the opening scene’s mock earthquake (jiggle the camera and have some off-screen stage hands lob rocks down the stairs—that’s the earthquake) once the stunning Françoise Blanchard climbs out of her subterranean coffin and gets the blood-party started. She utters nary a word, and she doesn’t need to because her body could make a 120-mph Amtrak slam on its brakes and back up for a second gander. If anything, her nude scenes are so captivating that you might find yourself distracted from the actual storyline. Miss Blanchard needs to be in some Naked Scream Queen Hall of Fame. Horror movies are rarely more effective and genuine than this.

  6. Satan’s Slave (1975): This movie asks the question: “Did women in colonial times have bikini lines?” while the branding scene provides the answer: “Evidently, yes.” This very obscure Brit flick brings snappy hottie Candace Glendenning to a wonderfully creepy English manor house that turns out to be Party Central for old-school devil worshipers. The only element more abundant than things that go bump in the night are the naked women in nearly every scene. Horror virtuoso Michael Gough delivers a laudable performance, while every female cast member delivers a laudable pair of . . . forget it, and just take my word that this movie sits high on the list of must-sees for fans of sleazy seventies occult horror.

  7. Nude for Satan (1974): One of the worst horror movies ever made but clearly one of the best titles. Italian pixie Rita Calderoni can hardly “bare” the horrors of a ramshackle castle that seems to be a revolving door between the past and the present. Terrible storyline, great shower scene. Appreciators of feminine beauty will easily forgive the project’s jaw-dropping flaws, due to Miss Calderoni’s curvatures and professional mettle. Several women in this howler have doormat-sized pubic plots, and you can actually see the black chewing gum used to denote the missing teeth of the “Igor” character. Unabashed nudity and a spider made out of a football with pipe cleaners for legs (no lie!) earn this movie a top slot in the So Bad, It’s Good category.

  8. The Devil’s Nightmare (1974): A creepy castle, a 600-year-old curse, and several women hotter than a rock in a campfire are the recipe for trouble in this Italian/Belgian Eurocult favorite. Pulp schlock or provocative thematic allegory? Probably the former, but, see, each character here represents one of the Seven Deadly Sins. When a tour bus misses the ferry, a field hand who happens to really be Lucifer directs our symbolic cast to the castle of one Baron von Rhoneberg, and little do they know a succubus is afoot, along with a lot of bad organ music. This movie is a ton of fun, pure and simple, and the bathtub scene steals the show. Veteran horror bombshell Erika Blanc treats viewers to not one but two trips to Nipple City.

  9. Blood Spattered Bride (1974): This Spanish sleeper waxes Freudian in its rape-fantasy innuendo that tries at times to be a sleazier version of Polanski’s Repulsion but throws in lesbian/vampiric undertones for kicks. High marks here for a preeminent Gothic atmosphere so important to successful movies from this era; this serves as the glue for a plot that’s confusing and simultaneously captivating. There are only two nude scenes in this flick, but one of them—featuring bent-out-of-shape protagonist Maribel Martin—may well be the Mother of All Nude Scenes. This woman’s, uh, mammary carriage could make a monsignor kick out a stained-glass window, which is a more polite and less sexist way of saying that she’s got the best tits to ever be bared in a horror movie. The other scene is an award-winner as well, as it begs the question: What do you do when you’re walking on the beach and you see a snorkel and a pair of breasts sticking out of the sand? Answer: You dig!

  10. Toybox (1971): What’s more fun than a barrel full of monkeys? A Gothic mansion full of low-brow Hollywood strippers who think they’re horror actresses. This Harry Novak clunker actually stands tall in the annals of sleaze horror, and afficionados of such fare will stare in awe at the bevy of female cast members who all possess rebel-yell-inducing physiques. The story kind of reminds me of that old Outer Limits episode about the handful of insipid dolts kept captive in a gloomy manse by an alien brain in the attic. There’s no brain in this attic, however—there’s “Uncle.” See, Uncle’s a perv with a penchant for voyeurism, and every week he pays his attractive relatives and their friends to participate in a role-playing orgy. Problem is, this week Uncle is dead but he’s still directing the show. Nudity and the macabre have never proved more symbiotic. A zombie in a hot tub, a portentous giantess, dead naked chicks on meat hooks coming back to life, and a “handsy” bed—folks, this movie’s got everything . . . everything, that is, except respectability.

  ADAM GREEN’S TOP TEN HORROR MOVIE ACTRESSES

  WHO SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN NAKED . . . BUT DIDN’T

  Writer/Director Adam Green made the films Hatchet and Spiral. Awards he has won include second place in his sixth-grade poetry reciting contest, an honorable mention in his third-grade diorama contest, and being just twenty-seven days shy of perfect attendance in the seventh grade.

  Before I get castrated by the feminist right, let me lead this list off with a statement that this is all in good fun and in keeping with the themes of this book—it is just meant for a laugh. I have nothing but the utmost respect for each of these actresses and I do not think of women as objects—in fact, I even have one of my own that I keep around the house for stuff like laundry and sex.

  For the guy who’s gonna track me down and write to me, saying, “But dude! You forgot __________” . . . you need to get a grip, stop playing Halo, and kiss a girl. I don’t really walk around keeping lists of actresses who I think should have gotten naked in a horror movie. This was a spur-of-the-moment notion, and what I came up with on the spot. So for those of you who do go through life keeping real lists of this sort of shit . . . um, wow.

  And for the rest of you . . . thanks for having a sense of humor.

  1. Jessica Biel in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake

  Okay, I know I am not alone when I say that Jessica Biel and her body deserved two separate credits in this film. In fact, I would almost dare say that she was miscast, only because during the moments when I was supposed to be scared of the chainsaw wielding maniac . . . I was falling in love. Not to mention that this remake furthered the rumor that the character of Leatherface is gay, because no straight man would ever hurt a woman this beautiful. He should have been chasing after her with ice cream . . . not a chainsaw.

  2. Kathy Bates in Misery

  Just hear me out. Is it possible that perhaps Rob Reiner could have added a scene where Annie Wilkes shows up and stands over Paul’s bed naked taunting him with her “dirty bird” talk and we see everything? Not because I needed to see Annie Wilkes’ chesticles, but because perhaps it would have helped Kathy Bates get the “I should do full frontal nudity” thing out of her system before waiting it out another twelve years and doing it in About Schmidt. I love Kathy Bates and I think that she is arguably one of the most talented and beautiful women working in Hollywood . . . but if we were going to see her naked, I would rather it had been Kathy Bates circa 1990 over Kathy Bates circa 2002.

  3. Heather Donahue i
n The Blair Witch Project

  Did I really need to see Heather naked? No. But she makes this list because for a movie that went to such great lengths to seem realistic . . . there were some major logic issues. Someone explain to me how they had two stoners and an artsy film-school girl sleeping in the same tent night after night surrounded by video equipment . . . and not even some basic oral action got shot? Especially once they realized they were lost and that they might in fact die. Josh or Mike should have at least been able to talk Heather into some “just the tip,” right? And once Josh was gone and Mike had her all to himself, a simple “look, we may not live through this” speech would have had her clothes off in an instant. I don’t know about you, but any time I’ve ever had a neardeath experience I didn’t start thinking about Gilligan’s Island or my mom’s mashed potatoes. I thought about sex.

  4. Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed Me

  I am very much a fan of Lindsay Lohan and I have often found myself in her corner and defending her when people have been bashing her. (So look out, because some actual thought went into this addition to my list.) After the recent wave of unflattering paparazzi shots that have surfaced online . . . it’s not like there’s much of Lindsay left that we haven’t seen, save for perhaps the space in between her toes. Those asshole photographers have essentially Kodak-raped this poor girl at her every move just hoping to get some skin. So here, she’s doing a movie where she plays a stripper . . . and could have taken the moment to really do nudity tastefully, perfectly lit, well made-up, and in a very sensual way in order to counteract those nasty paparazzi shots . . . but instead, she stayed covered up for the whole film. Not only did this prove to be frustrating for the audience . . . but it also condemned me to another year’s subscription of Playboy just to check that goddamned “Potpourri” section for nipple slips.