31 Days of Horror 2013: Days 20-24

31 Days of Horror 2013: Days 20 - 24

20. Nosferatu (1979)

21. House of 1,000 Corpses (2003)

22. Terror Train (1980)

23. Vampyr (1932)

24. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

After watching the silent "Nosferatu" last week, we wanted to see Werner Herzog's remake, which is a rare example of a remake that honors the spirit of the original while also taking the story in a slightly new direction and even improving upon some aspects of the original.  Herzog emphasizes the vampire as the embodiment of the plague, an idea touched upon in the original but not fully developed.  He also makes the story more haunting by giving it a pessimistic ending.

 

What I find so appealing about Rob Zombie's movies is that they are clearly made by a horror fan for other horror fans.  "House of 1,000 Corpses" reveals his love for the "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the Italian horror movie "House by the Cemetery, but rather than simply imitating these movies, he incorporates elements of each into his own vision of a family of psychopaths.  The result is a disturbing but highly entertaining movie about a group of friends on a road trip who end up spending Halloween Eve in the home of the murderous Firefly family, where they're terrorized by a cast of memorable characters, notably Captain Spalding, a clown who runs a horror-themed roadside attraction, and a mad-scientist named Dr. Satan, who attempts to create a master race by performing brain surgery on mental patients.

Set mostly on a train that a fraternity has reserved for a party, "Terror Train" is a dull slasher that fails to take advantage of its setting that seems designed for a high body count.  I had always been curious about this one, so I'm glad I finally saw it, but I won't be suffering through it again.

"Vampyr" is an interesting if somewhat disappointing early horror film that is something between a late silent film and an early talkie.  It features only about a dozen lines of dialogue, and it relies heavily on the kinds of intertitles used to clarify key plot points in silent movies.  It has moments of true horror that it achieves with eerie shadow effects.  It also features a haunting scene in which a man has a vision of his own death, and we see from his point out of as he peers out a window in his coffin.  But it drags with too much nonsense in the middle, so by the end I had lost interest.

"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" is one of the first horror movies ever made and remains one of the best.  It's a silent movie that even those who refuse to watch anything that's not in color can appreciate.  With its painted sets full of jagged lines and off-kilter buildings, its visuals are so engaging that you have the sense of watching a demented cartoon rather than a classic of the silent era.

31 Days of Horror 2013: Days 14-19

15. Nosferatu (1929)

16. The Reptile (1966)

17. The House that Dripped Blood (1971)

18. Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

19. Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

This week we've watched mostly European horror, starting with F.W. Murnau's silent "Nosferatu."  The

absence of audible dialogue in silent horror movies gives them a kind of other worldly eeriness.  It can also give them an element of authenticity that's often missing in sound movies, making them feel like reel-to-reel footage of actual events that happened in the distant past.  As a result, although I've lost all interest in vampire movies, I'm always up for a viewing of "Nosferatu."

I had no idea what to expect from "The Reptile," another Hammer Production, but it's been one of the most entertaining movies of the month.  It's essentially a re-working of the basic vampire myth that replaces the vampire and its vulnerability to sunlight with a humanoid cobra that must be kept warm throughout the British winters.  The Reptile is the daughter of an anthropologist who intruded in the lives of the secretive snake people of Borneo.  In response, they kidnapped his daughter and then returned her several months later after having transformed her into one of them.  The anthropologist returns to England along with his cobra-daughter and a snake charmer to help control her.  Soon, residents of a British village begin dying mysteriously with two punctures wounds in their necks.  "The Reptile" enthralled me with its sheer bizarreness, but it also does a good job of creating suspense by drawing suspicion on its many oddly behaving characters and keeping viewers guessing until the end about the identity of the the reptile and the involvement other villagers might have in the murders.

An Amicus anthology, "The House that Dripped Blood" contains four stories that supposedly illustrate the evilness of an old house.  The protagonists of all four stories are residents of the house, but the connection between the horrors they experience and the house they live in are mostly unrelated, a fact that doesn't make the movie any less entertaining.  The first segment features a horror writer who keeps having visions of the the killer from his latest novel appearing throughout the house.  This one is a bit dull, but it's saved by a strong ending. The second is an oddity about two aging men who become obsessed with a figure in a wax museum that resembles a woman they both loved when they were younger.  It's hard to go wrong with wax-museum horror, an underrepresented sub genre that I wish more filmmakers would explore.  The third segment is about a man played by Christopher Lee who is terrified by his young daughter who turns out to be a witch.  Seeing Christopher Lee terrified by anything, especially a little girl, is reason enough to watch this one.  The final segment is a deliberately campy tale about a horror actor whose vampire costume turns him into a real vampire.  Jon Pertwee, better known for his role as the Third Doctor in "Doctor Who," plays the vampire, and the scene in which he flies with the assistance of very visible strings adds a nice dose of laugh-out-loud comedy to an otherwise fairly straightforward horror anthology. 

The only American movie of the week so far, "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" felt like a lame attempt to bore Brad to death.  It has a strong ending, but after I had to watch hippies sitting around a farm house playing music for an hour, even Godzilla appearing from nowhere, stomping on the house, and killing everyone inside wouldn't have saved it for me. 

Hammer Production "Kiss of the Vampire" starts strong with a drunk, hard-boiled priest interrupting a funeral by spearing the coffin with a shovel, piercing the heart of the dearly departed, and sending blood spewing out of the coffin.  It then bores with a lot of bullshit about a newlywed couple running out of gas near a chateau and going to lots of parties with the residents who turn out to be vampires.

After a double-feature of snoozers, we're going to have to inject new life into 31 days of horror by watching something more intense.

31 Days of Horror 2013: Days 11-13

12. Frankenstein (1931)

13. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

14. House of the Damned (1963)

Over the weekend, we watched two classics and one stinker.

 

The best of the classic Universal monster movies are the three directed by James Whale: "Frankenstein," "Bride of Frankenstein," and "The Invisible Man."  "Dracula" is a bore, and Lon Chaney Jr. is too whiney for me to take "The Wolf Man" seriously.  I don't have any complaints about "Creature from the Black Lagoon," but it lacks the wit that makes Whale's monster movies so entertaining.  The other Universal monster movies also lack Colin Clive and Boris Karloff.  I always have trouble deciding who makes the better Dr. Frankenstein, Colin Clive or Peter Cushing (lately, I've been leaning toward Peter Cushing), but I'm always enthralled with Clive's performances, especially when his creatures awaken for the first time.  He delivers the most memorable line of any Frankenstein movie, "He's alive! He's alive! In the name of God, now I know what it feels like to be God!" Of course, when the film was first released the words "to be God" were cut, rendering the line almost incomprehensible.  Karloff's Frankenstein's monster is one of the most famous movie icons of all time, immediately recognizable even to people who have never seen the original movies.

I thought we couldn't go wrong with a movie titled "House of the Damned," especially when I learned it involved couples on vacation being terrorized by circus freaks.  But I was again reminded that it's not uncommon for the contents of a horror movie to have little or nothing to do with its title.  There's a house, but no one's damned.  Instead, it's inhabited by circus freaks who have no where else to go when the owner of the house and the proprietor of their show dies.  They attempt to frighten the couples away, so they won't be discovered.  About halfway in, there's an eerie scene in which a man with no legs walks on his hands into the dark bedroom where one couple is sleeping and steals their keys, but then nothing else interesting happens.  Thankfully, this one runs for only just over an hour because for about fifty-five minutes nothing of interest happens.

31 Days of Horror 2013: Days 7-10

8. The Hands of Orlac (1924)

9. The Fog (1980)

10. ParaNorman (2012)

11. Torture Garden (1968)

This week has featured a varied selection so far.

"The Hands of Orlac" is a silent film starring Conrad Veidt and directed by Robert Weine, both better

known for their work on "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."  I had high expectations for this one but was a bit disappointed.  Orlac is a concert pianist who loses his hands in a train wreck on the same night a man named Vassuer is executed for murder.  The doctor treating Orlac also happens to be in charge of processing Vassuer's body, so rather than waste a perfectly good pair of hands, he sews them on Orlac's stumps.  Of course, Orlac's new hands are unable to play, and when he learns where they came from, he falls into despair.

I was hoping he would then go on a killing spree illustrated through several murder scenes where his body was at war with itself: his new hands pulling him toward the kill, while the rest of him tried unsuccessfully to resist.  His new hands do attempt to kill the maid, but Orlac spends most of the movie brooding in the shadows and bemoaning the loss of his talent.  Fortunately, "The Hands of Orlac" does feature more weirdness about amputations and transplant surgery.  Near the end of the movie, Orlac meets a man claiming to be Vassuer. He shows Orlac a scar on his neck and tells Orlac that the assistant of the doctor who gave Orlac his new hands transplanted Vassuer's head onto a new body enabling him to escape death.  This new body is also missing hands and has artificial ones, details Vassuer fails to explain.

"The Hands of Orlac" is one of many movies from the 1920's to deal with mutilated bodies and attempts to repair them.  In his excellent book "The Monster Show:  A Cultural History of Horror," David Skal explains this interest in disfigured bodies by drawing attention to the context in which the movies were made:  the period directly after the First World War when advances in medical science had enabled more soldiers than ever before to survive their battlefield wounds, but with badly damaged bodies.

I'm embarrassed to admit that before this week I had never seen John Carpenter's "The Fog," which is a very effective ghost story about a shipwrecked crew seeking revenge on the townspeople responsible for their deaths.  Carpenter exploits the natural eeriness of fog by using it to cloak his water-logged ghosts as they terrorize the town.  "The Fog" made me wish more horror movies would leave the sharks alone and explore the many other horrifying aspects of the sea.

In "ParaNorman," the second animated movie of the month, Norman can see and talk to ghosts, and he uses this ability to save his hometown from a witch's curse.  For a movie directed toward a younger audience, a few scenes are pretty horrifying, particular the one in which zombies rise from their graves and chase Norman.  Watching this one always makes me wish I hadn't been afraid of horror movies as a kid because I could have had a room just like Norman's: it's filled with horror posters, models and toys, and he wakes every morning to the sound of a zombie groaning from his alarm clock, which is in the shape of a grave with a hand bursting out.  In addition to being a very entertaining horror movie, it also presents a positive message about tolerance and acceptance of differences.

"Torture Garden" is another Amicus anthology, but this one was a snoozer.  The torture garden is a carnival

attraction that's on screen for about five minutes before Dr. Diablo, the attraction's proprietor, shows his rubes true horror: a physic wax figure who tells them each a possible future.  Their different futures make up the movie's four segments. The first features a cat (or a witch in cat form, it's never clear) that convinces a man to kill for gold.  Aside from a hilarious moment when the cat motions toward a man it wants killed, this segment makes a quirky premise surprisingly dull.  The next segment, which put me to sleep, is about an aspiring actress who learns that all of Hollywood's big players are actually robots.  In the third segment, which woke me back up, a piano named Euterpe becomes jealous when her owner falls in love with a woman.  Imagine "Christine" with a piano instead of a car.  In a scene that almost makes "Torture Garden" worth sitting through, the piano pushes the woman out a window.  The last segment revolves around a Poe enthusiast who has found a way to resurrect the writer and now keeps him locked in a secret room and forces him to write new stories.  As with the first segment, this one shocks with its ability to make an interesting idea almost unbearably boring.

Vicki's in Florence tonight, so we're taking a brief break from the horror, but we'll be back with a triple-feature Saturday night.  On Sunday, I'll be experiencing a different kind of horror: Danzig performing classic songs from the first three albums, and Danzig and Doyle performing Misfits songs.  

31 Days of Horror 2013: Days 2 - 6

2. From Beyond the Grave (1974)

3. Repulsion (1965)

4. The Mummy (1959)

5.  An American Werewolf in London (1981)

6. Monster House (2006)

7. The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)

Six days into the month, and we've made it through seven movies and consumed one box of Frankenberry, one box of Frute Brute, and half a box of BooBerry.

The most enjoyable movie from the first week was "From Beyond the Grave," an anthology film from the British production company Amicus, which was active throughout the 60s and 70s and known for its horror anthologies.  "From Beyond the Grave" features four stories tied together through their connection with an antique shop.  Each segment begins with a man buying or stealing an item from the shop and then taking it home where it soon begins unleashing horrors.  In my favorite segment, a man pays 5 pounds for a 40 pound snuff box after switching its price tag, and quickly realizes that the box contains an invisible elemental that has latched onto to his shoulder.  After it tries to kill his wife, he has it exorcised in a ceremony that frees him from its control, but it continues to haunt him.  Other segments feature a haunted mirror that demands blood sacrifices from the man who bought it, a door that leads to a castle where an occultist is waiting to steal the souls of those who enter, and a stolen war medal that has a very tenuous connection to a story about a father-daughter killing team that answer the wishes of a child wanting to be free of his parents.

I often think horror movies work best in shorter segments because there's no time for bullshit and they get straight to the horror.  They can sometimes be formulaic because they tend to rely on twist endings, but in the best anthologies this doesn't make them any less enjoyable.  "From Beyond the Grave" was so much fun to watch because each segment is bizarre in its own way, and although I knew to expect twist endings, each one kept me guessing.

"Repulsion" is an early Roman Polanski film about a woman repulsed by men.  Men find her irresistible and pursue her obsessively.  I wasn’t very interested in this one at first because it moves slowly, but when its protagonist begins to crack and tries unsuccessfully to isolate herself from the outside world and the men who won't leave her alone, the psychological horror that unfolds made me glad I stuck with it.

Mummy movies usually bore me, and this is particularly true of the

Universal films featuring Boris Karloff, but Vicki wanted to watch the Hammer Studios version of "The Mummy" featuring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and I'm glad I gave it another chance.  All mummy movies have the same basic plot--archaeologist finds tomb, an Egyptian warns him not to to disturb it, he doesn't listen, and a mummy later terrorizes him back in the UK--but in this one the mummy's coffin falls in a bog while he's being transported to the UK, so when he rises to seek revenge on those who disturbed his rest, he appears part mummy and part swamp creature.  Moreover, he's also pretty fast for a mummy, and he has an entertaining habit of bursting through locked doors.

 

"An American Werewolf in London" is the best werewolf movie ever made.  Its characters are likable, and viewers even sympathize with the werewolf.  He's more like a person with a contagious terminal disease than a monster.  Its transformation scene has yet to be surpassed, contrary to what some misguided critics have written about "Hemlock Grove.”  It also manages to horrify while having a sense of humor. 

"Monster House" is a great animated horror movie about a haunted house that eats anything that ends up in its yard.  The boy who lives across the street decides to investigate and he and his friends discover the secret of the house.  "Monster House" always reminds me of what it was like to be a boy and find adventures in my own neighborhood.

We ended the week with another Hammer production, "The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll."  Like Amicus, Hammer was a British production company, but it was active for longer and much more prolific. (It was recently revived and has released several good movies in the past few years, the best of which have been "Let Me In" and "The Woman in Black.")  While Amicus is best known for anthologies, Hammer is famous for gothic horror, particularly its Frankenstein and Dracula films, but the studio produced a wide variety of horror movies from the 1950s through the 70s.  "The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll" is less a horror movie than a slightly comedic psychological drama.  It would be entertaining if it ended about 20 minutes sooner.  It has some unique aspects such as making Dr. Jekyll look more horrifying than Mr. Hyde and portraying his neglected wife as an adulteress who refuses to wait around while her husband works in the lab.  Racy for 1960, it features a dance scene in which a mostly naked woman rubs a snake on her crotch and then puts its head in her mouth.  It’s worth viewing once, as long as you stop it after an hour.

The next week of horror begins with the silent film "The Hands of Orlac" (1924).

31 Days of Horror 2013: Day 1: Halloween

Last year, I attempted to watch at least 31 horror movies in October (an average of one a day) and blog about each one.  I succeeded with the first goal, and although I failed with the second, I did manage to blog about 25 days of horror.  I plan to watch at least 31 horror movies this October as well, but I’m not even trying to blog about each movie this year.  I’ll be happy to work in a few posts a week.

Vicki and I kicked off the month of horror with John Carpenter’s Halloween, which might seem a bit like opening all our Christmas presents on December 1, but I disagree.  It helped get us in the spirit.  For us, the big event that the entire month is leading up to is the viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

I’ve seen Halloween at least a dozen times, and I always enjoy watching it again.  What makes it so effective is that there is no attempt to give Michael Myers a motive for returning to Haddonfield and killing teenagers on Halloween.  The only explanation is that he is pure evil.  This aspect of the story is lost in the sequels and in Rob Zombie’s terrible remake, all of which offer explanations that have something to do with family relationships, and in doing so they deprive the story of what makes it truly horrifying.  Rob Zombie of all people should know that a killing spree that can’t be explained is much more frightening than one that can.   Having said this, I should also acknowledge that Zombie’s Halloween 2 is one of the best horror movies of the past years (I’ll explain why after a I watch it again later this month).

I’m looking forward to a month of horror movies.  Vicki and I carefully planned our list of movies on Saturday night.  A selection of our favorites makes up half the list, and the other half are movies neither of us have seen.  Most of my choices are Hammer movies from the 60’s and 70’s, but I think Vicki’s are more varied.

We’ll also be celebrating all month by eating several boxes of Monster cereal.  This October, for the first time ever, all five flavors will be available: Count Chocula, Frankenberry, Boo Berry, Frute Brute, and Fruity Yummy Mummy.  We haven’t been able to find the latter two yet, but they’re supposed to be available at Target.