#8 A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)  Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp,  John Saxon.   Written and directed by Wes Craven.

One must be careful in revisiting the treasures of one’s youth.   Particularly if  one’s youth was, even if only a little, misspent.

I was there when this sucker opened in November 1984, and I stumbled out of the theater scared witless and convinced I’d just seen one of the great horror films of all time.

It’s okay, younger me.  You were wet behind the ears.

It’s not that A Nightmare on Elm Street is awful.   It isn’t.  (And  this is somewhat surprising that the brainchild of the whole shootin’ match is Wes Craven, a guy whose work normally does little for me.)

There are several nice touches in the film, and a couple of genuinely unsettling moments.  The scene where Tina is slashed to ribbons as she’s flung about the room is still highly effective.  Much more so, I think, than Johnny Depp’s blood fountain, partly because the former feels wholly realistic, even though it’s not, while the latter is Grand Guignol silliness.   Repulsive, disgusting, but silly.   (Which, come to think of it, describes most of the sequels in this series.)

The basic premise (in some ways similar to Lynn Biederstadt’s criminally overlooked novel Sleep) that sleep harbors the most mortal of threats is one that hits where we live.   There are certain things we all must do: we must eat, we must breathe, we must eliminate, and we must sleep.   No ‘Gee, I just won’t go into the ocean/haunted house/insane asylum.” here.   You can’t escape sleep.   It’s a premise loaded with promise.

I think the fulfillment of that promise is a hit and miss affair in this film.    The hits are solid: the aforementioned attack on Tina, the scene where Nancy nods off in school and only survives by scalding herself in her dream, the genuinely frightening attack on Nancy in the bathtub, the early appearances of Freddy Kreuger, these all hit  the mark.   Some of the other things . . . not so much.   The tongue coming out of the phone, while a great visual, feels too jokey, a sad precursor of what was to come with this series.  The death of  Glen via voracious bed doesn’t feel quite right (although the blood soaking through the ceiling when the cops discuss his murder downstairs, that is a marvelous, perfectly ghoulish touch, one that haunted me as a kid and haunts me now).   The bit where Freddy’s arms stretch out like some death-dealing Mr. Fantastic is simply unintentionally hilarious.   At times, the film seems to devolve toward a standard stalk-and-slash affair, which is the least frightening aspect of the story.    And the ending . . .

Look, in a horror movie about the blurring of reality and the dream state, some suspension of logic is not only to be expected, but is necessary.   But not the suspension of plot logic, and the means by which Nancy defeats Freddy is just . . . dumb.    It’s arbitrary and ill-supported by the film itself which sets up and then abandons the nice duality of Freddy’s vulnerability in our world.   It’s sudden, jarring, silly.   And the fact that it seems slightly undone by the typical horror movie coda doesn’t rescue it.

So, more flawed than I recalled.   Still a good scare, but not the masterpiece I once thought.

#7 CAT PEOPLE

Cat People (1942)  Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph.   Directed by Jacques Tourneur.  Produced by Val Lewton.   Screenplay bey DeWitt Bodeen.

Let’s call this horror noir, shall we?   Because it combines the look and feel of the best noir films with a supernatural edge and laces them together with true fear.

On the surface, the film doesn’t seem like much.   A low budget movie thrown together by a studio on the ropes, with a cast of unknowns, and a premise that sounds a little ridiculous.   A woman who turns into  a panther when she’s aroused?  Sounds less like a horror movie than . . . well, it sound like something, anyway.

Combine this with 40’s restrictions on the frank discussion of sexuality onscreen, with the fairly tame levels of shock that were deemed effective on audiences at the time, and you shouldn’t have a masterpiece on your hands.

But that is precisely what we have, and not just because Roger Ebert says so.

In the first place, the restrictions on the sex chatter work to the advantage of the film.    It is, after all, a movie about repression, and fear of the sexual, and nothing reinforces those themes like the hint of eroticism being everywhere and nowhere at once.   This is helped by Simone Simon’s portrayal of Irena, who looks both wholesome as a cloistered nun and as full of wanton lust as a rip-roaring nymphomaniac.   This is not commonly pulled off, and her performance is the dark star whose gravity holds everything else in Cat People together.   There are other good jobs as well:  Jane Randolph as Alice hits just the right notes, bringing levelheaded earthiness in to play as the yin to Irena’s exotic (and erotic) yang, and Tom Conway as Dr. Judd injects just the right amount of doomed skepticism.   He is the rational man of science standing before primal forces he only thinks he’s got a handle on.   (Typical man, in other words.)

There isn’t much in the way of overt horror in this movie, due to the unexpectedly providential lack of a budget,  but the steadily building atmospheric dread is remarkable, and the scene where the panther stalks Alice in the pool is a marvel of suspense.    You know how it all has to play out, of course, and it does.   But story is not all about plot, and we come to like and care for most of the characters in Cat People a great deal.

Like a couple of other movies on this demented movie crawl, Night of  the Hunter and Les Diaboliques, Cat People achieves a distinct dreamlike quality that is lacking in more recent horror films.  (It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen it, but I seem to recall it wholly absent from what I remember as a dismal remake.)  I keep coming up against the idea that less is more, and this is most certainly an aesthetic that has been lost to the horror film, by and large.  Cat People reminds us, I think, how powerful this ideal is, particularly when creating a sense of terror is the goal.

I don’t know how people weaned on splatter will view this movie.   Certainly, growing  up in the 1980’s, I watched more than my share of bloodletting, but  I just can’t see a group of moviegoers who’ve suckled at the bloody teat of crap like Saw and Hostel and their deformed ilk, films in which subhuman brutality is exalted,  I can’t see people who truly think gross is scary finding much to like in Cat People.

Their loss.   For those who can appreciate the quiet subtlety of fear in the shadows, Cat People verges on perfection.

#6 The Thing / #6a The Thing From Another World

The Thing From Another World (1951) Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan, Douglas Spencer.   Directed by Christian Nyby (who are we kidding, it was Howard Hawks).  Screenplay by Charles Lederer (credited) and Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht (uncredited) very loosely based on John W. Campbell’s story “Who Goes There?”

The Thing (1982) Kurt Russell, Keith David, Wilford Brimley, Donald Moffett.  Directed by John Carpenter.  Screenplay by Bill Lancaster, not so loosely based on John W. Campbell’s story “Who Goest There?”

There are strong opinions about both of these films, and it strikes me that most of those who love the 1951 adaptation John W. Campbell’s story (and, honestly, it’s not a terribly good story; it’s a great idea, but the writing, oh friends, it’s not good at all) absolutely loathe the 1982 take on the same story.   On the other hand, fans of Carpenter’s film praise it to the skies, and give short shrift to Hawks’ film.

I think both camps are stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins.

In the first place, I hate hearing Carpenter’s film referred to as a remake.  It is not.   These two movies have little in common, and The Thing From Another World departs from Campbell’s story early, and seldom returns back to it.   Carpenter’s version, on the other hand, is in many ways a faithful adaptation; updated for the times, and with some real plot stupidity thrown in, but reasonably faithful nonetheless.

I must confess that despite the flaws inherent in both films (and I think there are fewer in Hawks’ picture) I love both of these movies.   I love the staunch, can-do optimism and faith in common sense that forms the backbone of the Hawks film, and I equally love the claustrophobic nightmare that Carpenter’s vision gives us.    I think that fundamentally, one of these films is science fiction, and the other is horror.

I mean, yes, we get a killing vegetable in TFAW.  Yes, the brave men and woman of the arctic outpost are in grave peril.   But the most horrifying thing happens offscreen, is mentioned more or less in passing, and hardly comes up again.   I refer here to the two men killed, hung from the ceiling, and bled out to feed the seedlings the homicidal thing has created.   It’s completely plausible that the men in this situation wouldn’t dwell on this, as the film takes place in 1950 or 1951, and therefore these men were likely war veterans, most of them.   And, again, fear is not really the subject of this film.  Even the creature (James Arness in a monster suit) is not particularly frightening.   Threatening, yes.   Most definitely.   And there is a fair amount of suspense involved, but much of it is of the puzzle solving variety.   How will these clever, brave people defeat what seemingly cannot be defeated?  (They lop off the thing’s hand, for crying out loud, and it grows a new one back just like that.)  The tension in the story derives from that puzzle, which is why I throw this in the camp of science fiction, and damned good science fiction at that.  I love this movie.   In fact, until watching it again for this quixotic little project, I’d forgotten just how much I loved it, and why.

The characters are crisp and well drawn, the dialogue is snappy and sings (we are, after all, talking about the director responsible for Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, and Lederer and Hecht also worked on the latter), and we have no trouble whatsoever pulling for these people.   Even the ostensible bad guy, Dr. Carrington, is really just misguided, and at the end of the film, despite the fact that Carrington has almost gotten them all killed, the others cover for him.   There is a sense of goodwill and camaraderie that is omnipresent in this film, and it remains fresh over half a century later.   There’s a reason this is a classic.

Carpenter’s The Thing is an entirely different beast.  It is by no means science fiction, as it focuses entirely on themes of paranoia and doubt, and it does not stint on the fear and gore.    The creature in this movie bears no resemblance to the humanoid carrot of the Hawks film, and it is a truly terrifying apparition, shifting and blending the shapes of those it has consumed, at times a perfect mimic and at others a mind-bendingly horrific amalgam of creatures.   There is no Dr. Carrington here, no stand-in for the misguided liberal trying to impute goodwill to an implacable foe (in Hawks’ film, the Dr. Carrington figure is meant to represent those of the American left who tried to put a good face on Communism, despite Red China’s military involvement that had begin in late 1950; it is a measure of the decency of Hawks that his film seems to be saying that however wrong the American left were, they were still Americans) nor is there a Captain Hendry who has earned the trust, respect, and affection of his men; in Carpenter’s film, there is only mutual dislike and mistrust, almost from the word go.   Our hero, MacReady, is borderline psychotic.   It seems as though the arrival of the Thing does not create the miasma of ill-will, it exacerbates it.   And things go from bad to worse in a hurry.   The feeling one gets from the film is that these men are doomed from the get-go, that no matter what they do, the thing is a step ahead of them.   And why not?   It’s not new at this; the men of the research station are.

That’s okay.   Again, this is a horror movie.    But plot stupidity abounds, and how forgiving of it one chooses to be will, like mileage, vary.

For instance, and this was pointed out by novelist Dan Simmons, are we to believe that all these misfits and malcontents somehow passed the psychological screening required to be stationed in Antarctica?   For that matter, what about the drug and alcohol screens?  What about the ubiquity of flamethrowers and dynamite?  And the startling non-ubiquity of actual scientists?   What the hell kind of research station is this?   And as for the rampant ‘cabin fever’-ish ill will that we find at the outset of the picture, is this an accurate picture of life in an Antarctic research station?   No.   In fact, according to those who’ve actually been there and worked there, and those whove studied those who’ve lived there and worked there, the Hawks version of life at a research station bears a much closer resemblance to reality than Carpenter’s.

But we could do this all day.   Clearly, a strict adherence to reality was not a high priority for Carpenter.  But when is it ever, really?   Does this make The Thing a bad movie?

Almost, which is where my beef with those who lionize this flick begins.   They overlook the departures from reality.  Okay.  But what about the major plot holes?   We have a monster that works at a cellular level, and yet they try to take care of it by blowing it up?   Won’t all those little bits and pieces just freeze and wait for the next warm thing to come along?  And haven’t we established pretty clearly that the Thing is really goddamned good at waiting?  I believe we have.   And the ending.   Oh, Christ, the stupid ending.   Let’s see, you’ve just gone through enormous trouble to burn your whole base down because letting the Thing just hunker down and freeze is, as we’ve determined, A Very Bad Idea.   Then we are left with Childs and MacReady staring at each other as the Big Freeze starts to set in.  ”You’re the Thing.”  ”No, you’re the Thing.” “I’m made of rubber, you’re made of glue . . .”  ”Well, then, I guess we’ll just sit out here and freeze our asses to death, except that if you’re the Thing like I think you are, then you won’t die, and so all of this shit was for nothing.” “I’m okay with that.” “Me too.”

Didn’t somebody somewhere take Carpenter aside and say, “Uh, listen, John, about that ending . . .”?

Another thing: the gore.   Look, I get that there’s going to be viscera in this picture, and I’m not a fuddy duddy about that.  I have no beef with any of the transformation sequences (and sort of respect how Carpenter out-Cronenbergs Cronenberg) but I have to say that some things were just pointless.   Do we really need to see these guys slicing themselves open to get the blood for the blood tests?   No.   Do we really need to see the blood-jetting stumps after the Thing has chomped the guy’s hands off?   No.   Was the gloppy autopsy really necessary?  No.   All of these things are just FX guys engaging in a sort of masturbation, and it’s pointless.   And really, some of the creepiest scenes in the film are the bloodless ones: the shot of Clark looking back at the kennel after putting the infected dog in with the others is damned effective.

Anyway, despite this lengthy rant, I really do like Carpenter’s The Thing.  It isn’t the horror masterpiece too many have claimed it to be, but the energy of the proceedings, and some of the performances from the cast, carry things along once they get rolling, and there’s something to be said for that (I feel the same way about some of Clive Barker’s work, in that the energy and ferocity on display make up for other shortcomings that might be fatal in other hands.)  It ain’t great, but it ain’t too bad, for all of that.

One is tempted to view this films as markers of America thought on the Cold War; at the one end, we have Hawks with his optimistic view of American pluck prevailing, and at the other end we have Carpenter’s weary, cynical view that it’s all moot anyway.   One is tempted.   But that’s probably a reach.   Particularly for this humble one.

#5 From Within

From Within (2008) Elizabeth Rice, Thomas Dekker, Kelly Blatz, Laura Allen, Adam Goldberg.  Directed by Phedon Papamicheal Jr.   Screenplay by Brad Keene.

Maybe there should be points for effort.   On second thought, no.

From Within cannot be accused of failing to try.   It does.   It tries damned hard.   Too hard, I think.

The basic plot is this: a dude offs himself in front of his girlfriend, and then, like some sort of psycho-swine flu, suicide starts catching around the small town of . . . of . . . well, let’s call it Typical Horrorburg.   But wait, All Is Not As It Seems.  See, dude’s brother saunters broodingly, achingly, Christ-am-I-emo-enoughingly back into town, and it turns out the whole town (or something) killed his mommy the witch (or something).   And the only girl who can understand him, who can see through the angstiness to the real, sensitive, Rob Lowe wannabe at his core is our heroine, Lindsay.  (It’s worth noting that no character in this film seems to have a last name, not that I can recall.  Wait.  There’s Pastor Joe.  But I don’t suppose Joe is his last name, do you?)  And, anyway,  there’s this curse, right, and  . . . and . . . yeah.

I think From Within is supposed to be set somewhere in the American south, but the only time the film feels particularly southern is when it’s dishing out the usual stereotypes.   You know, the redneck no-good doofus in the biscuit cap, the small town hellfire and brimstone preacher, the small minded busybodies.    Away from those, this story could be set anywhere, in Generictown, U.S.A. perhaps.

Setting isn’t the main problem.  Character is.   We don’t care about any of these stumbling stereotypes.   There’s no depth to any of these people, not the ones we’re suppose to love, not the ones we’re supposed to hate.  In fact, much of the time I wished I’d had a scorecard so I could keep track of who was what and why, because the victims all blurred together and the baddies all blurred together, and after a while I was left wishing for just one goddamned substantial character. A film should have more than that, of course, but I was desperate.  I was begging.

And it’s a shame.   Because the basic premise of From Within is, while shopworn, one that can still carry some freight.   And the film looked really nice.  (This is because Papamichael, I have read, was a director of photography on films like Sideways, Walk the Line, and 3:10 to Yuma.)   The acting performances weren’t much to write home about, particularly Adam Goldberg as the biscuit hat-wearing, southern perv Roy (no last name) who dates our heroine’s mother but tries to put moves on daughter, yet is still somehow a fundamentalist Christian.   It’s a gratuitous performance, but one supposes Goldberg had little to work with in the script.   Nor is there much to say about Laura Allen’s performance as Trish (no last name), Linday’s (no last name) boozy, blowsy, yet somehow still a fundamentalist Christian, mother.  Allen comes off as a thrift-store version of Piper Laurie’s character from Carrie.   Cliches riddle the dialogue in this film like an infestation of Formosa termites, and that doesn’t help us buy into these people either.

Did I mention the Angsty Hunk’s Bitch Sister?   Did I mention the Pastor With A Problem?  Or the Preacher Kid From Hell?  No?   No need.  They’re not real anyway.  Not in this movie they’re not.   All is cardboard, all is ersatz, and that extends to the scares, which are borrowed from better films.   The plot makes little sense, which is not always a detriment to a tale of terror, but the characters that populate this tale are thinner than the most misty phantom, and that, my friends, will  put a stake through any horror story.

From Within veered dangerously close to having some meaningful things to say about the dangers of belief, but in the end it backed off, resorting to the usual boilerplate claptrap about intolerant Christians and persecuted outsiders (I must say, by the end of the movie, I had moved a little bit to the persecution camp; this is no doubt not what the filmmakers had in mind, but goddamnit, how much emo angst are we supposed to stomach?)  It’s as though the screenwriter lacked the courage of his own convictions, if you will.

There is a good horror movie buried somewhere in the bland, muddled, half-baked mush that is From Within.  It’s a shame it wasn’t found before it was served up.

#4: Dark Ride

Dark Ride (2006) Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Patrick Renna, David Clayton Rogers.   Directed by Craig Singer.  Screenplay by Robert Dean Klein and Craig Singer.

We are entitled to hate certain movies, and hate is the appropriate word for Dark Ride.

The plot, such as it can be called, is as follows:  group of college kids going on a weekend trip out of town decide to make an unplanned detour to break into a dark ride in Asbury Park.   (We did this shit all the time when I was in college.   For a while, I thought I would make a career of it.)  They bump into a creepy but entirely superfluous gas station attendant, then pick up a hitchhiker, then go get killed off one by one.   By a deranged lunatic.   Who escaped from an asylum (using, to judge by it, superhuman powers.)  And who lives in the dark ride.

Right.

We have several means of dispatch in this film, all shown in loving, blood dripping detail: an asylum orderly is killed by having  a flashlight rammed though him, a hot young thang has her head tenderly sawed off while giving a blow job (you read that right),  a hapless security guard has his head lopped in half  with a convenient machete.   On that last, we are dealing with a machete so thin and sharp, apparently, that the halves of the guard’s head stay together for several seconds, then flop to each side so that we may watch with lustful joy the quivering bloody brains.

Let us forget the terrible dialogue.   Let us forget the hapless performances.  Let us pay no attention to the clumsy pacing, the rotten score, the terrible lighting,  all technical goofs.   Hell, let’s forgive the swiss-cheese plot (which bears more than a passing resemblance to The Funhouse) and the absurd, intelligence-insulting ‘twist’ ending.    Let’s even overlook the boneheaded basic premise of this turd.

Because these things, as bad as they may be, are not grounds to hate a movie.   To consider it a waste of time and money,  sure.    To take them as reasons to avoid all future work involving these individuals, you bet.   But not justification for hatred.

That falls to the bloodlust evinced by the makers of this film.   And bloodlust is not too  harsh a term.   Most of this picture exists for nothing more than the most ghastly,  grisly, blood-drenched means of dispatch available.   It is a vile, reprehensible effort.    And it’s not even the gore that’s the worst of it, though that is pretty awful.   No, what makes Dark Ride truly worthy of every ounce of opprobrium that can be heaped upon it is the wretched mean-spiritedness of the whole affair.   This paucity of spirit is not even the result of a coherent worldview, in which case it might still have some merit.  It is simply the off-handed, slope-browed meanness of pinheads who have been brought up on the notion that slopping viscera is the height of cool.   It is the vacuous aesthetic of the gorehound.   It is the heartless love of torture, the soulless worshipping of pain, and it trumps any other human concerns.   There are no other areas of human experience to be explored in films such as this, no values to examine, no conflicts of the human heart.   There is only the tearing of meat and the spilling of fluids.  One expects the maker of fare such as this to spend any spare time hanging out at the local slaughterhouse, gazing wistfully upon the offal.

Well, offal Dark Ride is.  It is a film beneath contempt.  And it brings me to the brink of despair to know that, apparently, Dark Ride 2 is in the works.

Jesus wept.

#3: Zombieland

Zombieland (2009)  Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, incredibly funny mystery celeb.  Directed by Ruben Fleischer.  Screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.

Yeah, yeah, it’s a comedy.   Or horror-comedy.    Or hormedy.    Whatever.   It ain’t high art, and for that we should be glad.

A word about zombies.   I hate ‘em, for the most part.    Generally speaking, you’ve seen one zombie flick, you’ve seen ‘em all.  With a few exceptions (28 Days Later, um, ah, . . . this sort of makes my point, doesn’t it?) you’ve got reanimated dead wanting to munch the living.   Okay.   Not a lot of room for variation on this, is there?   Unless you speed the dead fuckers up, every zombie flick boils down to the faster living stupidly holing up somewhere to allow themselves to be turned into Kibbles N Bits for the shambling dead.    Oh, sure, Night of the Living Dead was groundbreaking and truly frightening (and unlike a lot of folks I know, I have a massive soft spot for Tom Savini’s remake, with the feminist undertones), and Dawn of the Dead had some things to say about consumerism, but beyond that, you’re left with gimmicks:  zombie versus shark (surely the only reason anyone watches Zombi 2), Nazi zombies, zombies on an airliner (I do not make this up), redneck zombies, gangbanger zombies, cheerleader zombies. stripper zombies . . . it do go on.   (Zombies in print sometimes fare a little better, as evidence by Brian Keene’s The Rising or the marvelous Dan Simmons story “This Year’s Class Picture”, which is my favorite zombie story ever because of the surprising, stubborn, fierce optimism the story projects.   Hunt down a copy of the Skipp and Spector anthology Book of the Dead 2 for this one.   It’s worth the price of admission.)

The thing is that zombies, while really gross, are not frightening.   What they are is funny.   You just can’t take them seriously.   They simply shamble around, aimless and brainless, eating whatever falls into reach (rather like a teenager forced to rise before noon, now I think about it) and usually fall all over themselves.    They’re not  threatening; they’re hilarious.

Enter the zom-com: Shaun of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, Fido, and now, Zombieland.

A fair number of people I’ve talked to have compared Zombieland to Shaun of the Dead. Aside from the obvious point of similarity (ambulatory stiffs with a hankering for human tartare) I think these are very different films.   There’s a great deal of satire at work in Shaun, and it’s a far more sophisticated film than Zombieland. That’s not a criticism at all; I don’t think Zombieland was aiming for sophistication.   It was aiming for a sort of knowing middlebrow funny, and it hits that target dead on.

The plot is simple: mad cow became mad human became zombie virus.   Civilization is toast.   It’s the zombie apocalypse.   Deal.

That’s what our quartet of survivors do.   They deal.   In different ways, but they deal.   That’s essentially the plot, which is simple and unadorned.    I loved the use of hometowns as monikers.   That feels exactly right.   I loved Columbus’ 47 rules for  surviving the zombie armageddon.   I loved the con-artist sisters.  I loved the cameo by the star who shall not be named here.    There aren’t many missteps in this film (although certain very smart characters become unaccountably stupid in the last act).   It’s breezy when it needs to be, has just the right touch of the macabre, and the grue never overwhelms the gutbusting laughter.   It’s truly poignant when it means to be, and archly flip when it needs to be.   The acting is spot on.   I haven’t enjoyed seeing Woody Harrelson this much in years, his fine turn in No Country For Old Men notwithstanding.   The only thing it truly lacked was a Jonathan Coulton song (although I suppose “Re: Your Brains” would have been too obvious.)  Unlike many horror comedies, there’s no ironic distance from the characters.  Even though the motley crew in Zombieland each have their flaws, they are not viewed without some sympathetic understanding.   I can’t express enough how refreshing this is, particularly given how empty of this a couple of films coming up on this list are.   Too often, it seems, modern horror, even modern horror-comedy, seems to think that sympathy for us human beings is beneath them.   That way lies empty nihilism.   Zombieland, despite the flesh-eating holocaust that forms its setting, is about precisely the opposite.   Thus my unabashed love for the flick.

So maybe it ain’t pure horror, but it’s just right for Halloween.

# 2: LES DIABOLIQUES

Les Diaboliques (1955)  Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzet, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanal.   Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot,  adapted from the novel by ierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac,

So here we are again in 1955, this time with the very-nearly-brought-to-us-by-Alfred-Hitchock LES DIABOLIQUES.  (Or, if you prefer, DIABOLIQUE.  I don’t prefer.)  Another black and white suspense film that appropriates the tropes of the horror story.   Another film that invokes death and water and joins them at the hip.  Another old school classic.

And yet here we have a film that couldn’t be further away from the previous film discussed on this here blog, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.    Where TNOTH was  a film that directed us to view the proceedings through the admittedly cracked lens of the fairy tale, LES DIABOLIQUES approaches things from an entirely different angle, one of jaded sophistication.  (I almost felt compelled to add jaded French sophistication, but that’s redundant, no?)   We have two women, both involved with Michel, the headmaster at a boarding school: Christina the wife and Nicole the mistress.   Right off the bat it’s clear that the women would probably find the arrangement .  . . tolerable, were it not for the fact that Michel is an utterly abusive shit.   As the film opens, Nicole sports dark glasses to hide the shiner Michel has given her, and we are left with no doubt that he has doled out the same, or worse, to Christina.   The story being what it is, the two women conspire to off the loathsome Michel . . . and then things get damned interesting.

In  the most technical sense, LES DIABOLIQUES is a clever thriller, and indeed certain mystery and thriller tropes are utilized (particularly in the character of Fichet, who is by many accounts a major inspiration for Peter Falk’s Columbo) but like NOTH, the vocabulary is that of the tale of terror; whereas NOTH used the motif of the bogeyman, LES DIABOLIQUES is steeped in the classic ghost story.   Even after the penultimate twist (which I will not divulge) the film stubbornly retains this sensibility.

There are no buckets of blood in this one.   No decapitations, no raving madmen brandishing gore-slicked weapons.   Yet half a century later, LES DIABOLIQUES retains its power to terrify.   So many modern scaremeisters are really only capable of disgusting us.   The films of these cretins are diminished grotesqueries by comparison.   (And let’s not even discuss the terrible remake, the Sharon Stone vehicle DIABOLIQUE, which was, as Ebert puts it, less a remake and more a repudiation.)

You want to know how effective LES DIABOLIQUES remains?   My daughter, who has a jaded teenager has viewed all manner of modern horror flickage, including some of the darkest flicks coming out of Asia, said that LES DIABOLIQUES was one of the creepiest things she’s ever seen.

Me, too.

31 movies, Craig? Really?

Well, yeah, really.   I’m far more behind in blogging than viewing.   Coming up soon, my thoughts on LES DIABOLIQUES, FROM WITHIN, ZOMBIELAND,  THE VIRGIN SPRING, and a couple others.   Hang tight, crickets, the ride’s just firing up.

#1: NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

Night of the Hunter (1955)  Robert Mitchum,  Billy Chapin, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish.  Directed by Charles Laughton, from the novel by Davis Grubb.

“Hey,” the missus says to me, “This isn’t really a horror movie.  How can you include this in your little spree?”

“Well,” I says, “It’s horror-y.   You have these creepy nods to the German expressionism all over the place, and the surreal way in which the thing plays out like a Southern-fried Grimm’s fairy tale, and–”

“You stole that from Wikipedia,” she says.   Which is only half true.   I hadn’t quite thought about the film as a sort of even more twisted Hansel and Gretel, which it is.

“Well,” I say, by way of throwing her off track, “Tell me the vision of Willa in the river won’t haunt your nightmares.”

“True.”

“And that moment when Mitchum’s shadow looms in the kids room, that’s creepy shit.”

“Right.”

“And that night journey down the river, that’s the stuff of warped fantasy.”

It’s an odd duck, this movie.   If we define the boundaries between suspense and horror in the manner in which Stephen King once did, which is to say that thrillers and suspense stories are those in which the plot is technically possible, and horror stories are those in which we have crossed over into impossible land of the phantasm, then you could make the case that NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is a suspense film.   But Laughton presents this film couched in such a strange, stylized manner that it feels like a waking nightmare, and so I do think this is a horror film of sorts.  Not that such labels matter, but the borderland  territory this movie occupies doomed it financially and critically at the time, and I think probably still lends it a cult status.

I’m hard pressed to  think of another film quite like this odd, dreamy chiller.    Not a bad one to start this exercise with, I think.   From Mitchum’s reptilian performance to Shelly Winters’ blasted resignation when she realizes that sometimes optimism can be lethally misplaced to the strange night journey the children make down the river, there are any number of truly unforgettable sequences.   Great stuff.   (I know, such powerful insights, Craig.   Well, hell’s bells, better minds than mine have chewed this one over.)

Nearing a year

Well, counting down the days to the one year anniversary of the corneal transplant.  I went in for a followup today, and everything still looks dandy.    On November 18, the stitches come out, and that, aside from adjusting my vision prescription for glasses or contacts, should be that.

It’s still a bit strange to me to think of myself as an organ donor recipient, but of course that’s the case.   I’m more grateful than I am able to express that I am able to see, and see without pain, as a result of someone else’s decision to be a donor.

I’ve always felt strongly about organ donation.   I knew from a young age that once I shuffled off this mortal coil, I wanted whatever organs could be used to be used.   My conviction in this regard was solidified by my cousin Brett’s situation.

Brett was one of the best.   He was the cool older brother I didn’t have, the one that turned me onto rock and roll and horror stories and shared with me the off=beat sense of humor that left most folks just puzzled.    We live in different states, my family in Oklahoma, his in Houston, but whenever we got together, we were instantly on the same wavelength.   When we were kids, we could dive into Lego and Star Wars figures and lose ourselves for hours.   Later it was rock albums (he was the biggest Rush fan I ever met, whereas I did my best to twig him on Yes and various proggy stuff; we both had a weakness for hair metal bands like Zebra and Dokken and the like.)   We both dug horror movies.  I remember he rented Carpenter’s THE FOG, and we watched it while our parents were out to dinner.   We grinned goggle eyed at that one.   We saw CHRISTINE together (as I recall, we had to pretend we were going to see some other piece of crap because CHRISTINE was rated R, and that wasn’t going to fly with his folks.)  Brett, man, Brett was cool.

Brett was born with a congenitally deformed heart, and concomitant damage to his lungs.  I don’t know the exact details.  I do know that from the word go, he dealt with open heart surgeries and breathing treatments and non-stop medical skirmishes.   He died in 1990, far too goddamn soon, while undergoing a heart/lung transplant.   I still miss him, but I’m grateful still that someone donated and gave him a shot.

When I was in fourth grade, I was reading off the charts.   I’m not bragging here, as I hit a plateau in college and consider myself marginally above average in my reading skills, but in fourth grade, they had me pegged literally off the scales.   So I was a reading group of when, having read every book in the classroom, and was more or less left to my own devices at reading time (at that point, I read a great deal of World War II history; as a phase, it could have been worse.)   Then we had this girl transfer in who read every bit as well as I did.   Her name was Jocelyn Foster, and we became friends after a fashion.   She was the pretty little girl who loved to read, and I was the dork with the coke bottle glasses who loved to read, and so we had that against the Philistines.

We were friendly and cordial all throughout middle school and high school, although she began to move in different social circles than I, which was inevitable.   I say she was pretty, but as time passed she left pretty in the dust and became truly beautiful.   She had a smile that could light up everything for miles.   I was still a dork, even after getting contacts.  (Hell, I’m a dork to this day.  Some ugly ducklings do not become swans, folks.)  She was still nice, and we often checked each others’ books out to see what the other was reading.  I remember bumping into her in the hallway one time and saw that she was reading T.E.D. Klein’s THE CEREMONIES, which she found to be slow going, as I recall.   I promise you, we were the only two people in that building who’d read that novel.   She was a reader, which made her member of the tribe, you know?  I tried to ask her out once, but made such a fumbling butchery of it that I wouldn’t have gone out with me, but she was sweet about it, and mature about it, and even though it wasn’t going to happen, she was kind enough to not let me feel like a total boob about it.  After that, I just watched her from afar, a star that was beautiful, radiant, but too far to ever reach.

Well, high school ended, and aside from one chance meeting in the public library one night (I recall that she mentioned she was thinking of going to California, and my sense at the time was that she’d be fine there; I don’t know if she ever made it, but if there was a girl made for sunny climes, it was her) we drifted apart.  I never saw her again after 1988.  I thought of her quite often, though.  Joz made an impression on you that didn’t fade easily.   It never has faded from me.

I read her obituary in the paper in 2002, over breakfast and a cup of coffee that grew cold, untouched.   It was a blow to my gut.  A world without her brilliant smile out there somewhere seemed, and seems, diminished.   Jocelyn died while waiting for a kidney, because disease had taken hers.   She left behind a husband who must have loved her very much and a daughter that must have loved her more, and she died because there aren’t enough donors.   It’s really that simple.    She died because not enough people got a box checked on their driver’s licenses.   And the world was lessened.   It just was.

Here you’ll find a picture of her, top row, third one in, the black and white photo.   That was Jocelyn, who died because of a stupid shortage.   That was beautiful Jocelyn.

Okay, you’ve seen the picture.  Now take a second to look around the website.  GOOD does, if you don’t mind the groaner, good work.  They’re on the side of the angels.  If you can toss a little coin their way, please do.   If you can’t, I get that.   Times are tough.   Please trust me, I get that.  But what you can do, you can make damned sure you’ve committed to being a donor.   It’s sane and civilized and there’s no goddamned reason in the world not to do it.

You will save lives.   You will ease suffering.  It’s your last gift to the world, and it’s a good and true one.

Please do it if you haven’t.

You’ll have the absolute gratitude of strangers.  I promise that.