The Book of Lists: Horror
Page 30
19. “Yee-Hah, the South’s Gonna Rise Again,” written by H. G. Lewis, performed by the Pleasant Valley Boys for Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964). Well, it is the best thing about the film. Johnny Legend has cut a fun cover version.
20. “You’ve Got to Have Ee-ooo,” written by Skip Redwine and Paul Dunlap, performed by John Ashley for How to Make a Monster (1958). Marginally more memorable than the songs from I Was a Teenage Werewolf (“Eenie Meenie Miney Moe”), Eeegah! (“Nobody Lives on the Brownsville Road”), and Horror of Party Beach (“The Zombie Stomp”)—and let’s not get into Hillbillies in a Haunted House and The Incredibly Strange Creatures (“the first monster musical!”), etc.
KARIM HUSSAIN’S TOP TEN HORROR MOVIE
SOUNDTRACKS
Karim Hussain is the cowriter of Nacho Cerdá’s The Abandoned (2006), and the director of Subconscious Cruelty (2000). He wrote, directed, and photographed the art-house genre film Ascension (2003), which won the New Visions Award at the 2003 Sitges Film Festival in Spain. He also codirected, cowrote, and photographed the short film La Deniére Voix in 2002, which was nominated for a Jutra (Quebec Academy Award) for Best Short. La Belle bête (2006), his third feature as director/producer/cinematographer, premiered at Sitges and played numerous other film festivals, including Mar Del Plata, Fantasporto, and Austin Fantastic Fest. From 1997 to 2001, he was a programmer for the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal.
1. Suspiria (Goblin with Dario Argento)
2. Angst (Klaus Schulze)
3. Prince of Darkness (John Carpenter)
4. Near Dark (Tangerine Dream)
5. Day of the Dead (John Harrison)
6. In a Glass Cage (Tras El Cristal) (Javier Navarrete) 7. The Beyond (Fabio Frizzi)
8. Dust Devil (Simon Boswell)
9. Full Circle (Colin Towns)
10. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Chu Ishikawa)
BRYAN SMITH’S TOP TEN HORROR-THEMED
ROCK ’N’ ROLL SONGS
Bryan Smith is the author of the horror novels House of Blood, Deathbringer, The Freakshow, and Queen of Blood (all published by Leisure). He lives in Nashville with his wife, and likes loud rock ’n’ roll and dark beer. More information can be found at his official Web site www.bryansmith.info.
1. “TV Set” by the Cramps
2. “I Walked With a Zombie” by Wednesday 13
3. “Now I’m Feeling Zombified” by Alien Sex Fiend
4. “Braineaters” by the Misfits
5. “Release the Bats” by the Birthday Party
6. “I Love the Dead” by Alice Cooper
7. “I Eat the Living” by the Creeping Cruds
8. “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer” by Roky Erickson and the Aliens
9. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus
10. “The Ripper” by Judas Priest
CORALINA CATALDI-TASSONI’S TEN FAVORITE
TRAGICALLY ROMANTIC HEROINE DEATHS IN OPERA
Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni made her first opera appearance at the age of 3 in Puccini’s La Bohème. She was born in Manhattan and sailed to Italy at age of 5 with her opera-stagedirector father and mezzo-soprano mother. From there, she went on to work in opera houses around the world. Thanks to a bizarre set of circumstances, she encountered Dario Argento, becoming his murder muse in various films, and presented with Argento a popular Italian television series called Giallo. In her films with Argento, she was cut open with scissors as Giulia in Opera, strangled by her own intestines in Mother of Tears, and spared, just by chance, in Phantom of the Opera. Lamberto Bava blinded and impaled her as Sally in Demons 2, and she also appeared in movies directed by Pupi Avati, Luciano Odorisio, and many more. Coralina’s love for the arts spreads to her mystical paintings and music. She recently released her debut CD, Limbo Balloon, and has had solo and group art exhibits in New York City, Chicago, and Rome.
1. Crushed to Death— Salome (Richard Strauss): Salome lap-dances for the head of John the Baptist, then tongue-kisses the saint’s decapitated head. Revolted, her stepfather Herod orders his soldiers to crush her under their shields.
2. Dismembered by Mad Scientist— Tales of Hoffman (Jacques Offenbach): At the height of her simulated passion, robot lover Olympia is destroyed by her vengeful creator Coppellius.
3. Buried Alive—Aïda (Guiseppe Verdi): Aïda sneaks into an Egyptian tomb to be buried alive with her lover Radamès.
4. Guillotine Decapitation— Dialogues of the Carmelites (Les Dialogues des Carmélites) (Francis Poulenc): Kill-crazed revolutionaries execute an entire convent full of nuns.
5. Human Sacrifice— Norma (Vincenzo Bellini): Druid priestess Norma and her Roman lover Pollione are burned alive when she violates her sacred vows of virginity.
6. Suicide from High Balcony— Tosca (Giacomo Puccini): Opera singer Tosca leaps to her death after killing the secret policeman who tortured and executed her lover.
7. Strangulation— Otello (Guiseppe Verdi): Tricked by scheming Iago, jealous Otello strangles his innocent wife Desdemona with her own hair.
8. Death by Clown— I Pagliacci (Ruggiero Leoncavallo): Snuff, operastyle. Tormented clown Pagliacci kills his unfaithful wife Nedda on stage, while the audience thinks it is part of the play.
9. Accidental Assassination— Rigoletto (Guiseppe Verdi): Hunchback court jester Rigoletto hires an assassin to kill the Duke who seduced his daughter Gilda, but the assassin accidentally kills Gilda instead.
And finally, in true operatic style, anything worth doing is worth over-doing. . .
10. You Only Die Twice— L’Orfeo (Claudio Monteverdi): Eurydice gets to die twice in this opera! Once, when she is bitten by a poisonous snake on her wedding day, and again when her groom Orpheus fails to rescue her from Hades.
S. P. SOMTOW’S TOP TEN GRUESOME OPERATIC DEATHS
S. P. Somtow is the only director of a national opera company to have a novel on the Horror Writers Association’s 40 All-Time Greatest Horror Books list. Born in Bangkok, he grew up in Europe. He has published over fifty books, winning major awards such as the John W. Campbell Award and the World Fantasy Award. He also directed the splatter flick The Laughing Dead. In the twenty-first century, he returned to music and his native country, where he founded the Bangkok Opera. He has composed several operas; his most recent, Ayodhya,caused worldwide scandal when the Thai military junta attempted to censor it on the grounds that showing the death of the demon king Ravan on stage might bring bad luck to the country. His horrorwriting credentials include the seminal Vampire Junction trilogy, the novels Moon Dance and Darker Angels, and many awardwinning short stories, including “Brimstone and Salt” and “The Bird Catcher.”
1. In Dialogues of the Carmelites (Les Dialogues des Carmélites), by Francis Poulenc, an entire convent of nuns is decapitated. They line up meekly for the guillotine and all go out soulfully singing. It’s quite charming . . . a sort of macabre campfire girls outing.
2. In Aïda, by Giuseppe Verdi, the hero, Radamès, is walled up alive underneath the Temple of Ptah. His girlfriend, the beautiful slave-girl Aïda, somehow manages to have sneaked inside this living tomb as well—blame the poor security—and they sing a touching duet as the oxygen runs out.
3. In Lulu, by Alban Berg, the heroine is hacked up by celebrity serial killer Jack the Ripper while moonlighting as a prostitute in London. It’s her comeuppance for having somehow caused all her previous husbands to die horribly. Her corpse is discovered by her lesbian sidekick, the Countess Geschwitz.
4. Well, you can’t blame me for including this, but in my own opera Mae Naak, the heroine, Naak, who happens to be dead, takes revenge on the midwife whose negligence caused her death by reaching into her belly and pulling out her intestines (while singing an aria). Malpractice insurance could have solved this. (In another scene, she also rips off someone’s head.)
5. In Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, our heroine, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, sets herself and her horse on fire while singing an eighteen-minute aria. The fire gets out of hand an
d accidentally consumes the entire earth, as well as spreading up to the sky and burning up Valhalla and all the Gods. Luckily, the River Rhine overflows its banks and puts out the flames, but meanwhile, everyone on earth has perished. Only the three Rhinemaidens remain, presumably because they know how to breathe underwater.
6. In Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, the entire cast, after five acts of emotionally wrenching love triangles, betrayals, religious conversions, and heroic displays of honor, are savagely butchered by a bunch of marauding soldiers.
7. In Hans Werner Henze’s Bassarids, King Pentheus is talked into cross-dressing by the God Dionysus. He is then dismembered by a gang of crazed women, including his own mother. This Oedipal-cross-dressing-slasher theme puts our hero in the noble company of Norman Bates.
8. In Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a statue doesn’t just come to life—it comes to dinner. It doesn’t eat much, but sings up a storm as it drags the unrepentant rake off to hell.
9. In Puccini’s Tosc a, the heroine leaps off the parapet of the Castel Sant’Angelo and is supposed to drown in the Tiber. This would not be so gruesome except that it has been scientifically computed, from the angle, distance of the walls from the river, terminal velocity, trajectory, and so on, that the correct sound effect should be splat rather than splash.
10. In Bluebeard’s Castle, by Béla Bartók, the heroine’s punishment for being too inquisitive about her new husband’s past is to be locked into a room with all his former wives. The kicker is that they haven’t been brutally murdered. They’re all alive inside that room—for all eternity. I shouldn’t include this as a gruesome operatic death, strictly speaking, but this fate actually is worse than death. Presumably, eventually, the ladies do die . . . of boredom.
CHAPTER 4:
“And He Answered, ‘Legion . . .’”
A MISCELLANY OF TERRORS
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN’S TEN FAVORITE
SUPERNATURAL TV SERIES
Christopher Golden is the author of such novels as The Myth Hunters, Wildwood Road, The Boys Are Back in Town, The Ferryman, and Of Saints and Shadows. Golden cowrote the lavishly illustrated novel Baltimore or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire with Mike Mignola, which they are currently scripting as a feature film for New Regency. He has also written books for teens and young adults, including the thriller series Body of Evidence, honored by the New York Public Library and chosen as one of Young Adult Library Services Association’s Best Books for Young Readers. With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the coauthor of the young readers’ fantasy series OutCast and the comic-book miniseries Talent, both of which were recently acquired by Universal Pictures. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.
1. The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s classic anthology series combined the supernatural, science fiction, and social commentary in five seasons of one of the greatest television shows of all time. Many of its episodes are among the finest programs to ever grace the small screen. The 1980s update gets an honorable mention for a handful of stunning hours, some of which held up to the best of the originals.
2. Kolchak—The Night Stalker: Darren McGavin was utterly convincing as the curmudgeonly reporter who stumbled upon chilling supernatural mysteries week after week. Though it lasted only one season, the series was an inspiration to writers of novels, films, and television, including The X-Files creator Chris Carter.
3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Joss Whedon’s landmark series brought a new wave of female empowerment to television, added a whole new cadence to American language, and became a worldwide phenomenon, despite being seen by only five or six million people per week in the U.S. It offered monsters that mirrored the troubles of teenage experience and characters whose relationships were the source of boundless passion on the part of the series’ faithful.
4. Twin Peaks: David Lynch’s ingenious series had one of the most wonderfully creepy first episodes in the history of television, and was layered with murder and magic. Its weirdness gave rise to one of the earliest Internet fan communities. Unfortunately, it fell apart in season two, spinning away into oblique surrealism.
5. The X-Files: Chris Carter promised us that the truth was out there, and that one day everything would be explained. Sadly, it turned out that the producers of the show had no more idea how it all fit together than the viewers did. When Mulder and Scully were on, however, and particularly in the supernatural-based episodes, The X-Files was riveting.
6. Bewitched: This charming comedy about a hapless advertising executive married to a witch may be here simply because the nine-year-old in me will always be in love with Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha. Or perhaps it really was as wonderful as I remember it.
7. Angel: Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off was a gem all its own, beginning as a hard-boiled detective series about a vampire attempting to redeem his soul, morphing into a show about a law firm whose clients are all monsters—human and otherwise, and finally becoming a show about a motley group of troubled people who are the only chance the world has against cosmic evil. Its final episode may have been its very best. There’s nothing like going out on top.
8. Miracles: This short-lived series starred Skeet Ulrich as a Vatican expert on the supernatural, and lasted only half a dozen episodes (seven additional episodes are available on the DVD edition), but each one is a breathtaking masterpiece. Wonderful television series are canceled all the time, but few leave the kind of impression that Miracles did.
9. Carnivale: HBO’s tale of a dustbowl-era conflict between good and evil—with a righteous minister becoming the tool of evil and a troubled carnival worker given a divine touch—was unsettling, terrifying, and beautifully crafted. It was also unique in the history of television.
10. The Outer Limits, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, Night Gallery, and Tales from the Darkside: While none can compare to The Twilight Zone, each of these wonderful anthology series produced some extraordinary supernatural television, episodes that were harrowing originals, as well as some adapted from the works of classic horror, fantasy, and science fiction writers.
— Originally appeared in The New Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace (2005)
SCOTT HEIM’S TEN CREEPIEST MADE-FOR-TV MOVIES
(OR TV SERIES EPISODES)
Scott Heim is the author of the novels We Disappear, In Awe, and Mysterious Skin (which was made into an acclaimed 2005 film by Gregg Araki). Originally from Hutchinson, Kansas, he now lives in Boston. His Web site and blog can be found at www.scottheim.com.
1. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (directed by John Newland, 1973): Sally, played by Kim Darby, inherits a Victorian mansion. When she and her husband decide to open a sealed basement fireplace, a freaky tribe of tiny murmuring creatures with furrowed blue faces begins stalking her. The scene where they invade Sally’s dinner party is truly terrifying.
2. Bad Ronald (directed by Buzz Kulik, 1974): A couple of years before he starred in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, the excellent Scott Jacoby played the title role in this film based on a now rare book by Jack Nance. When teenage Ronald accidentally kills a neighborhood girl, his ailing mother hides him behind the walls of the house. But soon, Mom dies, and a new family moves in. Increasingly kooky Ronald begins to spy on the new family through the tiny peepholes he’s drilled in the walls.
3. The “Screamer” episode of Thriller (directed by Shaun O’Riordan, 1974): “Screamer” was the most chilling episode from this British series that ran from 1973 to 1976 and was occasionally shown on latenight American TV. It starred scream queen Pamela Franklin (who also starred in The Innocents and The Legend of Hell House). An American girl, vacationing in the British countryside, is raped and nearly murdered. Later, she exacts revenge on her attacker—only to see his face in nearly every man she encounters.
4. Trilogy of Terror (directed by Dan Curti
s, 1975): This is perhaps the obvious choice for this list; anyone who sees it won’t forget it. Karen Black played the lead role in three connected stories, but it was only the final third, written by Richard Matheson, that packed the punch. In that segment, titled “Amelia,” a crazed Zuni fetish doll with razor-sharp teeth comes to life and terrorizes poor Karen in her apartment.
5. Vegetable Soup (various episodes, various directors, 1975–1978): This wasn’t a horror film; it was merely a PBS kids’ series. But certain things about it were (unintentionally?) nightmarish. At the beginning of most episodes was a strange puppet fantasy sketch called “Outerscope One,” wherein a group of children crash-land on various planets, including a frightening germ-free world called Sani-Land (which is ruled by the twitching, brush-bodied King Scrub and Queen Polish). Everything about this show—the misshapen, expressionless puppets with large, swiftly moving hands . . . the warped-sounding voices . . . the acid-trippy quality of the sets—produced much more childhood horror than entertainment.