The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[colinr0380]

Opera also has that great 'survived but maybe at the cost of my sanity' ending which goes full bore into delirious hillside rolling reverie. In a way it unlocks a lot of what he did later on in the Asia Argento films - the 'shocking past familial connection to my present day torment' element to Trauma and the 'character subjected to horrible repeated assaults who eventually loses their mind' aspect of The Stendhal Syndrome.

I do find it interesting that the best Argento films (Tenebrae, Opera, Bird With The Crystal Plumage) are the ones where he apparently had the most difficult relationships with his leading actors too (Deep Red is the exception that proves the rule). Maybe those apparently fractious relationships provided the necessary distance to carry out some of the rougher scenes with impunity (though again that gets complicated in the Asia Argento films. But see the way that Daria Nicolodi gets ever more elaborate death scenes in later Argento!). But that itself might tie in interestingly with what seems to be another big Argento theme of people getting 'victimised' by art. People get stabbed in galleries; characters literally get trapped underneath and/or stabbed to death by dangerously pointy abstract art sculptures (even in Two Evil Eyes someone unwisely keeps a pointy statuette on a shelf right above where they sleep!); they fight and kill over the juiciest operatic roles (and there's the literal Phantom of the Opera of course!); they get Stendhal syndrome over viewing artworks; drawings, architect's diagrams and pictures often provide the clues to unlocking past traumas; books full of arcane occult knowledge are fought and killed over, etc. Cristina Marsillach in Opera literally gets turned into an art gallery exhibit by her tormentor at a number of points! (Which itself anticipates Asia Argento in The Stendhal Syndrome turned into an passive witnessing audience member for the intial assaults before turning into (reasserting herself as?) the 'creative artist' herself in the second half of the film. And then embodying the artwork itself in that beautiful pieta-inspired final shot. Which now I'm thinking about it is kind of the same structure as Tenebrae!)

Popular music, ballet, publishing, literature, libraries, opera, painting, sculpture, architecture and even the 'theatrical stage' of a lecture theatre or a seance! Its all 'dangerous art' in some senses! The characters are often so interested in partaking in artistic practices, perhaps more than occult ones (or perhaps like the occult they just want to exist in a world where fantastical things are possible. I guess its all about different ways of tapping into 'forbidden, cultish knowledge'!) that they end up losing their minds over it, if not their lives.

[Mr Sausage]

American Horror Project

The Witch Who Came From the Sea (Matt Cinder, 1976)
The movie’s set up is so blunt and its psychology so telegraphed that it leaves nowhere for the movie to go. We learn everything we need in the first ten minutes; there’s nothing left to explore. The rest of the film is spent making what was already explicit doubly so. The video introduction by Stephen Thrower would have you believe this is of the calibre of Repulsion or May, an intense psychological portrait made with sensitivity and sympathy that’s only nominally a horror. In reality it’s amateurish and hamfisted, with poor writing and performances and plenty of cheap psychologizing of a Freudian sort. I don’t know what horror fans would get out of this, especially with better and more famous examples of the same thing already available.

The Premonition (Robert Allen Schnitzer, 1976)
Again, Thrower’s introduction sells this as a mature and emotionally sensitive movie, not so much a horror as an adult psychodrama, it would seem, despite the project that includes it. Does he moonlight selling snake oil? He’d make a killing at it. This is a dull, trashy movie. It’s called adult and sympathetic because it’s one of those movies where nothing happens for long stretches except disconnected scenes of people chit chatting or just staring at each other or things. See, drama! No one says much of consequence, but oh well. The film is competently lensed and acted, if only in comparison to the other films in the set. Not that this makes it less boring and empty, nor the plot less sloppy and ill-stitched.

Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (Christopher Speeth, 1973)
A horror of the ‘stuff just happens’ variety. I’m sure the carnival seemed creepy when standing in it. Too bad no one told the filmmakers that doesn’t mean you can just point a camera at it and get the same effect. Fun fact: I’ve seen this movie but nothing by Jacques Rivette.

[domino harvey]

Your response to Thrower’s bill of goods selling mirrors mine. I don’t know how anyone can take him seriously after this set. But then again, we live in a world where Jess Franco enjoys lavish special editions, so taste has nothing to do with it

[Mr Sausage]

Your response to Thrower’s bill of goods selling mirrors mine. I don’t know how anyone can take him seriously after this set. But then again, we live in a world where Jess Franco enjoys lavish special editions, so taste has nothing to do with it

Appropriate that Thrower wrote a two(!) volume critical work on Franco, published by MIT no less.

[domino harvey]

I remember someone on this forum tried to defend Franco against my assertion that he was the worst director of all time by pointing out that Thrower had written a book about him and I remember thinking, “That means something different than you think it does”

[Mr Sausage]

I remember someone on this forum tried to defend Franco against my assertion that he was the worst director of all time by pointing out that Thrower had written a book about him and I remember thinking, “That means something different than you think it does”

Funny, someone on this forum did the same to me when I called Lucio Fulci's films dreck.

[therewillbeblus]

Fun fact: I’ve seen this movie but nothing by Jacques Rivette.

Rivette's films are horrific in their own Pynchon-esque reveal of mysteries as meaningless, with anti-paranoia (to quote Rosenbaum) where nothing is actually connected like we need it to be by creating fake tangible concoctions from invisible forces that provoke us with fear. But even I would say that's a stretch for horror. Still, Paris Belongs to Us is one of the best films ever made, and he's got at least another handful of masterpieces, so worth a look.

[Robin Davies]

I remember someone on this forum tried to defend Franco against my assertion that he was the worst director of all time by pointing out that Thrower had written a book about him and I remember thinking, “That means something different than you think it does”

That was me.
I mentioned Tim Lucas as well. For me, both of them are among the finest writers on film. We all find a lot to enjoy in some of Franco's films but you have to be able to tune into his dreamlike wavelength.Of course I can understand people hating his films (just as I know some of my friends are bored rigid by Tarkovsky films) and (like Thrower) I find a lot of his later work dreadful. But his best films don't function in conventional horror terms. He made Franco films, not horror films.
Regarding Mr Sausage's post -Thrower's two Franco books are published by Strange Attractor Press and they are superb. It seems the second one is "distributed by The MIT Press" - so what?

But then again, we live in a world where Jess Franco enjoys lavish special editions, so taste has nothing to do with it.

I'm not sure someone who doesn't like Curse of the Cat People is qualified to pontificate about taste!

[domino harvey]

If you’re defending Franco, you’re already watching movies on another plane of existence from me, so surely a disagreement over Curse of the Cat People isn’t the only indicator of our differing tastes... though it seems a rather random film to weigh so heavily in your assessment of another’s worth

[therewillbeblus]

I love Curse of the Cat People but it took a while to grow on me, and for a film that appears accessible I think it actually requires a lot of rope to mold oneself to what it's offering, and that isn't an indicator of if someone "gets" it or not but rather wishes to meet the film on the specific plane its on. I didn't think it was very special the first few times and wouldn't judge anyone else for thinking that either, and I put it in my top ten of the 40s! I guess I think it's an easy narrative but not an easy film to fall in love with, if that makes sense.

[therewillbeblus]

Hausu: This one doesn't really get old for me upon rewatches, and it's maybe the wildest horror comedy because of just how creatively insane it all is, from a style that threatens death on epileptics to hilariously exaggerated expressions of female sexual development to people turning into fruit, this is just bananas (yes, and a guy actually transforms into a bunch of bananas). I love the stories behind this (to think it was a response to Jaws is funnier than anything in the movie), even if in the end it only works as an embrace on camp. Definitely not a list contender, but highly recommended anyways for its audacity in outperforming the idea of the horror comedy with no restraint in confident stimuli flooding. This is my girlfriend’s favorite movie, which is ridiculous, but so is the movie and if you can appreciate the weird this is worth seeing.

Cemetery Man: The opening minute sets the eclectic tone of this existentially-absurdist comic horror. The gags can be deadpan or exaggerated-situational but ultimately there is so much occurring within this bizarre conception that spilling out my thoughts won’t do much good. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and can second Sausage that there’s nothing quite like this. I think this is the kind of mood and style that Evil Dead wanted to be but instead chose a safer path, while this makes jokes about enjoying rape and even somehow lands those... I don't know. It's all over the place, but carries with it a calm core of levelheaded internal logic that allows for the surrounding chaos to be more easily accepted.

Rosemary’s Baby: What a sick, sick movie; it was the first time and it still is the - I don’t know, tenth? One of my favorites, a masterful exercise in pacing and narrative unfolding, gradual dread, and strong directorial choices in surrealism and sobering clarity in tackling an honest portrayal of jarring material, differentiating drastically between the scenes of banal relatable everyday life and insane disruption of paranoia and powerlessness. The gaslighting is hard to watch but it’s the ending that actually supports what some may be skeptical about, considering the psychological horror elements (we’re just waiting for this to be all a misperception!) though not only is it shown to be true but the screeching cheers that reveal the true colors of all involved never fails to send chills down my spine. One of the greatest endings in all of cinema, that decides to go even further by recounting a nihilist reading and provides impermanent hope in the meaning of the mother role, caretaking for the agent of the apocalypse.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (‘78): This childhood favorite still holds up, now for the detailed idiosyncratic scientific mayhem beyond the shocking finale (talk about perfect endings). The sound design mixed with eerie score and focus on the peculiarities in the coexistence of vegetation and humanity is all well-executed, and the narrative itself is engaging with strong character rapport to evoke their respective humane strengths. The horror manifests from a space within the wheelhouse of science yet out of our own reach, emasculating the human race while remaining a tangible threat. This is an excellent film, drawing a world of three dimensional authentic composites of people, a significant careful act that provides a wallop every time they become a pod person, because we immediately sense with the surrogates that something is 'off' never doubting their perspective, due to the attention to honest character development. Nemoy’s psychosocial theories are a wonderful touch at taking the idea of morphing behaviors into complacency and wish fulfillment for emotional blunting as a result of social-emotional discomfort a bit too far, but entertaining nonetheless!

[DarkImbecile]

I have yet to see anything that would dislodge Rosemary's Baby from the top of my list; nothing else is as sickeningly paranoid, as psychologically rich, or as precisely constructed, and the horror is so genuinely upsetting. Supposedly Polanski kept his adaptation extremely close to the book because he'd never adapted anything pre-existing into a script before, so I wonder if he would have stretched further into Repulsion-style surrealism if he'd felt he had the latitude to do so. On the other hand, the balance between the three modes of grounded and recognizable reality, off-kilter but not totally inexplicable interactions with the cult, and the nightmarishness of the dream sequences and the final scenes is so effective that I wouldn't want anything to throw it off. The pinnacle of my beloved satanic cult genre, with Hereditary, House of the Devil, and The Omen likely also making my list

[domino harvey]

Have you seen Brotherhood of Satan?

[DarkImbecile]

Not yet, though I see you've been advocating for it for a while. Does anyone know if the version that's streaming on Amazon is acceptable from a picture quality perspective, or should I blind buy a physical copy?

[domino harvey]

It looks like the streaming version is licensed from Sony/Columbia, so should be the same as what’s on Mill Creek’s Blu-rays, I’d imagine?

[DarkImbecile]

I'll check it out ASAP and report back, and of course welcome any other recommendations best viewed while sitting in a pentagram ringed by black candles.

[domino harvey]

Spellbinder, actually, might be up your alley— more of a witch cult than satanic, as I recall, but pretty much the same thing in practice and it has a great finale. It’s an excellent horror film directed by a woman that addresses head-on certain tendencies in men in a rather merciless fashion

[swo17]

I'll check it out ASAP and report back, and of course welcome any other recommendations best viewed while sitting in a pentagram ringed by black candles.

Viy

[therewillbeblus]

Rosemary’s Baby was at the top of my list when I created a tentative list a while back. Along with Halloween it’s the first film I think about when somehow asks about the best of the genre, though both will likely be at the tail end of my top ten and into the top 20. Glad to see another vote for House of the Devil, and would be curious to see if you join the rest of the party on hating its ending, or join my one man island of thinking it’s great in a messy way.

My supervisor at work loves horror but her only Achilles heel is satanic stuff, which I love, so I’ll be checking out both of those recs to report back to her next week.

[domino harvey]

Glad to see another vote for House of the Devil, and would be curious to see if you join the rest of the party on hating its ending, or join my one man island of thinking it’s great in a messy way.

I mean, the ridic ending is the only reason it fits his categorization!

[therewillbeblus]

But sometimes the absence of something is just as effective as its presence, creating a different kind of invisible presence (i.e. the strengths of that entire movie for most people!)

[DarkImbecile]

I mean, the ridic ending is the only reason it fits his categorization!

Exactly! The build-up is enjoyable in its own right, but that the payoff so nicely fits in with the tropes of the genre is the icing and cherry on top of the blood-red cake

[domino harvey]

On the subject of Rosemary’s Baby, this is one of the coolest prints I have:



It’s hard to reflect in a picture, so I turned the flash on to help a bit, but it’s three metallic ink images overlayed in a way that foregrounds Mia Farrow while showing death or the Devil depending on what angle you view it

[therewillbeblus]

I mean, the ridic ending is the only reason it fits his categorization!

Exactly! The build-up is enjoyable in its own right, but that the payoff so nicely fits in with the tropes of the genre is the icing and cherry on top of the blood-red cake

Well, finally I don’t feel crazy on that one. Now I just need people to tell me the 20% of my list that don’t hit predictable horror tropes have some merit in that field so I can motivate myself to write a book redefining the genre.

[DarkImbecile]

Spellbinder, actually, might be up your alley— more of a witch cult than satanic, as I recall, but pretty much the same thing in practice and it has a great finale. It’s an excellent horror film directed by a woman that addresses head-on certain tendencies in men in a rather merciless fashion

Viy

Thanks for these! Have no idea how I haven't seen Viy before, and your description of Spellbinder is all I need for that one. The best of these movies are rooted in fears of family, sex, and birth, and nearly all of the best of them touch in some way on exploiting or exploring misogyny.