by Wallace, Amy
And who would ever have thought that the face of God would be conveyed, so thoroughly and convincingly, by Danny Aiello and Macaulay Culkin?
But there it is.
When they smile—or dispense their wisdom—they do everything that the horror genre could ever hope to do, in terms of radiant gnosis.
Dispensing truth that the soul cannot ignore.
Transcending genre.
And achieving true greatness, in the process.
Honorable Mentions
28 Days Later (2002): The scene with the horses, flat out. Brendan Gleeson blowing the kiss is the icing on God’s cake.
The Exorcist (1973): As much Christian iconography as there is throughout the film, it’s the scene at the end—when the post-possession Linda Blair hugs the priest—that says it all for me. Rosemary’s Baby (1968): It’s all about the look on Mia Farrow’s face when she comforts her little monster. Talk about transcendence. . . .
May (2002): The very last shot of the film—the comforting gesture from the patchwork-corpse pal of the amazing Angela Bettis—is a gorgeous God-surprise, and seals the deal on this little indie gem.
Blade Runner (1982): Roy Batty’s dying speech. No more needs to be said.
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954): Similar monster-loveswoman moments can be clocked, from the original King Kong on. But there’s such poetic grace in the swimming sequence— the creature mirroring Julia Adams from below—that it takes things beyond the obvious lust to a grander sense of God’s weird design.
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935): One word: “Friend . . .”
Dawn of the Dead (1979): The beautiful, pure Romero moment, down in the mall, between Gaylen Ross and the zombie in the Arco-Pitcairn softball uniform. Just looking at each other, through the barrier of glass. Always makes me wanna cry.
Day of the Dead (1985): My vote would be for Terry Alexander’s smile, every bit as beautiful as Scatman’s. But Scott Bradley would never forgive me if I didn’t also include the final climb up the missile silo, a literalized ascension of pure redemptive truth.
Cannibal Ferox (1981): Who would have thought this callous shitburger of a movie would feature the face of God? But when the two doomed white women sing “Red River Valley,” even the cannibals are moved.
(And though Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust [1980]— the movie this one shamelessly rips off—is the far superior film, it’s interesting to note that God never shows up for Deodato. Maybe God was off with Terrence Malick at the time, spending twenty years prepping The Thin Red Line?)
VICTOR SALVA’S TEN THINGS WE HAVE LEARNED
FROM HORROR MOVIES
A California native, Victor Salva is the writer/director of Jeepers Creepers, Jeepers Creepers 2, Clownhouse, and Powder. He also directed the 2006 film Peaceful Warrior, starring Nick Nolte.
1. If your car breaks down in the rain outside a spooky old house, sleep in the car.
2. Short cuts, back roads, and any lakes or resorts you’re warned of by crusty, indigenous strangers should be avoided.
3. Skinny dipping or any other kind of nudism or sexual activity is punishable by death.
4. Never, ever, throw down and step away from the gun, knife, or any other weapon you have just used to kill the monster. You will need it again, trust me.
5. When bodies start to pile up or people go missing, the smartest thing to do is to split up the remaining group into easier targets and hope nothing bad happens to them.
6. Most monsters are warded off by fire, a bright light, or a smaller budget, which makes it ill-advised to glimpse the creature in any great detail.
7. Always assume the calls are coming from inside the house—wherever you are.
8. Radiation causes gigantism in everything but human intelligence.
9. Aliens are creatures whose main interest is the human heart. Other organs are considered side dishes.
10. No creature will ever really be destroyed until its box office potential is pronounced dead as well.
THE ORIGINAL TITLES OF FIFTEEN HORROR FILMS
1. Original Title: The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell
Final Title: Last House on Dead End Street (1977)
Director: Roger Watkins
2. Original Title: Orgy of the Blood Parasites
Final Title: Shivers (1975)
Director: David Cronenberg
3. Original Title: Network of Blood
Final Title: Videodrome (1982)
Director: David Cronenberg
4. Original Title: The Babysitter Murders
Final Title: Halloween (1978)
Director: John Carpenter
5. Original Title: Headcheese
Final Title: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Director: Tobe Hooper
6. Original Title: Charlie’s Family
Final Title: The Manson Family (2003)
Director: Jim Van Bebber
7. Original Title: Burned to Light
Final Title: Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Director: E. Elias Merhige
8. Original Title: Phobia
Final Title: I Drink Your Blood (1971)
Director: David Durston
9. Original Titles: Zombie; Voodoo Bloodbath
Final Title: I Eat Your Skin (made 1964, released 1971)
Director: Del Tenney
10. Original Title: Star Beast
Final Title: Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott
11. Original Titles: The Anderson Alamo; The Siege
Final Title: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
Director: John Carpenter
12. Original Title: Code Name: Trixie
Final Title: The Crazies (1973)
Director: George A. Romero
13. Original Title: Scary Movie
Final Title: Scream (1996)
Director: Wes Craven
14. Original Title: Sex Crime of the Century; Krug and Company
Final Title: Last House on the Left (1972)
Director: Wes Craven
15. Original Title: Grave Robbers from Outer Space
Final Title: Plan9fromOuter Space (1959)
Director: Edward D. Wood, Jr.
— Compiled by S.B.
NACHO CERDÁ’S TEN MOST PROFOUND
CINEMATIC HORROR EXPERIENCES
Nacho Cerdá was born in1969. He became interested in filmmaking at an early age, shooting Super8and video home movies. After graduating from journalism school in Barcelona, he studied film at USC. There, he shot his first 16mm short, titled The Awakening. In 1994, he and his partners founded Waken Productions, a production company for which Cerdá directed his second short film, the controversial Aftermath. He has also produced two other shorts, Doctor Curry and Dias sin Luz. These were followed by his world acclaimed short Genesis which earned a Goya (Spanish Academy Awards) Nomination for Best ShortFilmin1998. The Abandoned (2006) was his feature film debut and was voted “Audience Favorite” at the first After Dark Horror Fest.
1. Jaws (Directed by Steven Spielberg; 1975): The film that marked me for life, period—not only as an aspiring filmmaker, but as a fan of horror films. I was only six when my uncle snuck me into an afternoon show. An amazing sense of anticipation started to build as I was just looking at the lobby cards, where a great white shark’s mouth was on full display. I felt like we were stepping into forbidden territory, a place where the most unimaginable horrors were to unfold . . . and they did. Halfway through the picture, I was totally glued to the screen watching Richard Dreyfuss dive through a wreck in the middle of the night. As he rummaged through the sunken remains, a severed head popped out, sending a chill through my spine. I jumped in my seat, so scared that I instinctively grabbed another spectator’s hand, making him jump even more. I freaked that guy out so much that he was about to slap me before realizing that I was only a child. “Keep your nephew on a leash!” he snarled to my uncle. After that memorable experience, unconnected scenes and images kept coming bac
k to me, to the point of reconstructing in my mind a version of the movie created from visual memories. Of course, back then we did not have home video to watch films over and over again, so I was stuck with that memory for years to come— seven, to be precise. When I turned 13, I picked up a bootleg at my local video store, and I couldn’t wait to relive the excitement. It was then that I realized film was able to keep the emotions intact, and also, the possibility of reprising them over and over. Besides all this, I could share the horror with my friends. I believe that’s when I was born to be a filmmaker and create those fantasies for other people.
2. The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (Directed by Jorge Grau, 1974): When Chicho Ibañez Serrador (director of Who Can Kill aChild?) hosted a Spanish TV show consisting of a fine selection of horror films, none of us knew what we were in for. It had been only a few years since my Spielberg experience, and although I got scared to death, my fears circled around creatures, monsters, or vampires. After watching these resurrected human beings eating flesh and stalking the living, I realized how much that fear was indeed not only coming from the outside but from the inside. I became familiar with my own mortality at the sweet age of ten. Death has been an obsession for me ever since. I basically could not understand why a living form with an intellect (us) could hold such an enormous amount of viscera inside. I believe much of this conflict confronting soul and body erupted in my own school, which was of a hardcore Catholic sort. After the film was over that Monday night, I could not sleep at all, tucked under my bed sheets, looking into the darkness of my bedroom in search for an answer to those questions that we all keep asking to this day.
3. El Espanto Surge De La Tumba (Directed by Carlos Aured, 1973): This one might sound a bit funny, but I swear to God that it happened this way. Before home video was introduced in the Spanish market, my family used to rent Super 8 movies to basically make me shut up. I was the very insistent type, always asking my parents to take me to a movie or get specific titles for my home enjoyment. Little did they know what sort of flick they had just picked up for their 7-year-old child! My uncle had taught me how to operate the projector, so I could be in total isolation in the darkness of the screening room. I remember inviting Pablo, a friend from school, who later became my long time companion in watching horror flicks. He and I started projecting El Espanto, starring Paul Naschy, and by reel 2, we literally had to stop the movie because we were shitting our pants. It was so ridiculous . . . neither of us would dare to thread the next reel . . . what sort of nightmares were still to unfold through that lens? I looked at the projector like it was some sort of machine from hell. I believe that also developed my fascination for the damn thing.
4. The Evil Dead (Directed by Sam Raimi, 1982): It’s one of those classics that I have yet to watch on the big screen. Again, it was back in the eighties, when home video was bursting in Spain; because of my young age, this option became a way to watch R-rated films. It was like being a child again and sneaking in to see Jaws. I remember pressing play with a sense of dread running through my spine, and sure enough, twenty minutes in, I had to stop the thing again! Just like with the Naschy flick a few years back. This time the horrors were bigger and meaner. It was the ultimate mix of reanimated corpses, now possessed and shooting out all sorts of internal fluids. My Catholic school had already pushed the envelope teaching us the concept of Hell. And this damn movie gave me the whole enchilada. I used both this film and Jaws as a way to torture my classmates, inviting them over to my place and playing both movies to witness their reactions. When the U.S. DVD came out, the menus proclaimed “Begin Horror” for the play function, and that’s exactly how I felt the very first time I pushed that button.
5. The Thing (Directed by John Carpenter, 1982): Yes, we all know . . . the same year as ET. But this one was way more pissed off and nasty. Maybe it was this film that first combined both my obsessions for human metamorphosis and identity. My old pal Pablo, who had previously watched it, came along with me. “You’re in for a ride,” he said. I remember an early scene where Kurt Russell finds the Norwegian corpse with all those weird tentacles coming out of his arms. He told me: “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” That set me up for good. The film’s isolation, loneliness, and the fear of death were all elements that I believe somehow influenced so much of my future work. After Jaws, it’s probably the film that I’ve seen more than any other and still to this day remains a classic for me.
6. The Legend of Hell House (Directed by John Hough, 1973): My first haunted house movie ever! Once more, it involved my sneaking into a summertime afternoon screening. There are a couple of scenes that kept creeping up on me years after. First, it was a ghostly silhouette showering, but underneath the cabinet, blood was leaking out. Once the main character opens the door, we see there wasn’t a person, but a slaughtered cat in the basin. The second were those little trips the characters take down to that hellish chapel with cobwebs and nightmarish paintings. It was scary as shit. Of course, that’s when I realized that all our Catholic iconography was as twisted and dark as the Middle Ages. When I returned to a church on my own, nothing was the same anymore. The outstanding production design, sound, and electronic music were especially haunting, and they also helped to set up my future standards as a genre filmmaker. I rushed to my local video store when it came out and quite honestly, the atmosphere was so well accomplished that it still holds up.
7. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Directed by Sergio Leone, 1964): I also spent half my childhood watching American westerns in the repertory cinema across the street from home. John Wayne was usually the king of the show, and for some reason, in those films there was always a fine distinction between the good and bad guys, mostly Indians, bank robbers, or ruthless criminals. It was later that I found out about these other kinds of westerns that didn’t look quite the same. The landscape, the cast, the way they were shot . . . somehow when I was a child they started making an impression on me with how radical and different they were compared to the American ones. Good and evil were no longer separate entities, and I really liked that. It was very interesting for me how they mixed and confused those sacred terms. Now we had three ruthless people going after a sum of money buried in some distant cemetery. It was particularly striking the way Leone turned violence into beauty, blending both with a haunting score that would remain in my soul to this day. I never thought that you could find beauty in Hell, but I believe Leone found it. I particularly remember a very touching scene where Clint Eastwood grants a last wish to a dying soldier. He gives him a cigarette and sees it consume in his lips until the soldier dies. For a moment, amongst all that violence and crazy battle that preceded this scene, time seemed to stop for a second to watch that man die. It was only one life out of hundreds being killed in a battle. Absolutely beautiful.
8. Se7en (Directed by David Fincher, 1995): When Alien3 was released, I happened to be in Los Angeles. Being a huge fan of the series, I immediately bought my ticket to an evening show at a Westwood cinema to check out how in the world they would top what Ridley Scott and James Cameron had so expertly crafted before. To tell you the truth, I was not disappointed at all. Although the film was a bit uneven, it definitely possessed a unique and moody style that had me totally glued to the screen. Everyone I knew trashed that movie back then, but the name David Fincher started to pull certain strings in some of us. Not much later came this absolute masterpiece called Se7en. Being a filmmaker myself, it’s often difficult to get involved just like a regular member of the audience. You just know too much about the craft, too much about the technical aspects, making it hard to approach a film from a fresh perspective. But sometimes, and I mean really rarely, you find a film that throws all that out the window. Fincher’s masterwork did it. For the first time in a long time, the roles were inverted, and the film took control of me. The third act in film took on a whole new meaning, with the scene of John Doe leading the main characters to the desert.
9. United 93 (Directed by Paul Greengra
ss, 2006): An absolute masterpiece and one of those once-in-a-lifetime cinematic experiences that shouldn’t be missed. It constitutes for me what the essence of cinema should be: an emotional journey. When people talk about films, they usually overestimate the story elements—I’ve heard people saying, “Oh, you already know what’s going to happen, the bad guy is such and such, the girl will die . . .” and I think: “So what, stupid? Do I care about that? No!” Movies are not so much about where you’re going as about the emotional journey of how you get there. We each know our own life is going to end, don’t we? Yes, of course, we will definitely die. But does it take way the excitement or surprises to come? No. Why shouldn’t it be the same in a movie? United 93 is not trying to make a political statement or surprise the audience by any means, it’s just trying to involve you emotionally in that craziness that happened back then. Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Americans, Europeans, Asians . . . that didn’t really matter. They were all a bunch of human beings trying to survive, and that’s what made it special to me. As I said, as a filmmaker, it’s hard for me to detach from the technical aspects of a movie, but, once again, I was totally blown away. In fact, I had to pinch myself halfway through to realize I was in a movie theatre. A magic experience.
10. Lonesome Gun aka My Name is Nobody (Directed by Tonino Valerii, 1973): Actually, this was my first doppelganger movie, and one of those westerns that I could not quite understand as a child. Its haunting geography and, again, Morricone’s score to portray the poetry of solitude and despair in the old West, left a mark on me. After a few viewings, I began to realize how much of an existential ride this really was. It was about an old gunslinger who accepts his own death and the coming of a new generation. Basically, it talked about the passing of time and how we grow old. Despite the fact that this Sergio Leone–produced film was supposed to play as a comedy, it made me cry several times. Leone’s hand crept in at certain times, inflicting a sense of nostalgia and sadness. There is one memorable scene when Henry Fonda confronts a wild bunch of 150 horsemen, putting on his old pair of glasses to focus. It was a man alone against his destiny. A long shot booms up over him to frame the vast desert while the bunch throttle ahead. If you ever watch this one, you’ll understand why I could not hold my tears.
