Jump Scares Don’t Cause Nightmares: 10 Horror Films that Use Atmosphere Over Jolts

Living in Birmingham, I tend to see wide releases only after they hit theaters, so I keep an ear out for any unlikely multiplex film to earn positive buzz. Chief among recent, surprising critical darlings is a horror film released in the middle of summer. James Wan’s “The Conjuring,” out today, arrives on a wave of critical praise rare for a horror film. Michael Phillips calls it “an ‘Amityville Horror’ for a new century” before comparing Wan’s direction to Robert Altman’s, while our own William Goss says that though “we’ve seen swarms of birds, levitating furniture and chaotic third-act exorcisms before, even down to its very last shot, “The Conjuring” demonstrates a scary — and welcome — amount of care.” It all sounded too good to be true, until I noticed a recurring tidbit in the reactions. Whether negative or positive, the buzz for “The Conjuring” has made special note of its volume of jump scares.

Most eye-catching was Calum Marsh’s article for this site, in which, as the title claims, he argues that the film is simply too scary. Admitting he found the film terrifying, Marsh goes on to say that the film “makes every gesture a fatal blow, paying off each moment of suspense almost the second it is established. Its most radical quality isn’t the extremity of any of its single scares…but rather its overall guiding principle, which is that no moment should go to waste.” But that same overwhelming asset ultimately becomes “exhausting,” a horror film comprising only a string of jump-scares that gives the audience no reprieve.

For a horror film to be described, whether by Marsh of the MPAA itself, as “too scary” is certainly a dream problem for a filmmaker, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sound appealing. But even the praise for “The Conjuring” has started to make the feature sound like its own YouTube compilation of “Best Scenes from ‘The Conjuring,’” like a horror version of “The Raid.” Where at least “The Raid’s” counterproductive distillation of the action genre to a constant movement between setpieces at least had the advantage of well-choreographed fighting, “The Conjuring’s” vaunted series of expert jump scares are hobbled in one respect: jump scares suck.

Well, that’s not fair. Some jump scares are so ingeniously executed they take on a life of their own. The hand in “Carrie.” The blood test in “The Thing.” The homeless “monster” appearing behind the diner in “Mulholland Dr.” Even James Wan’s earlier “Insidious” shows a flair for setting up such payoffs and ably knocking them down, and by all accounts “The Conjuring” improves on that film’s strengths. But to excel at crafting films of nothing but scares is like being a master of cotton candy, putting great care into something that instantly dissipates. Deafening noises, bursts of music, faces materializing from nowhere can make the heart skip, send popcorn flying from tubs and reduce one to watching a screen through woven fingers, but after going home and surviving the night, all the just-a-cat moments and demon faces and gore slip from the mind.

Perhaps I should clarify that I’ve often delineated scariness, which describes an emotional reaction and is most susceptible to sudden frights, to horror, a method and focus of storytelling that, at its best, brings out one’s fears less for a quick scare than for a more sinister confirmation of the justifiability of those phobias and anxieties. To scare is not necessarily easy, but often it lacks the haunting power of great horror. In the moment, “The Conjuring” may be the most unbearably tense experience I have all year, but if it’s anything like “Insidious,” I’ll be going to Wikipedia the next time Wan makes a film to look up details just to remind myself what happened. Even Sam Raimi’s parody of this approach, “Drag Me to Hell,” worked a little too well at aping its targets’ mannerisms: nowadays, I remember only white noise and its meaningless twist ending.

For various reasons, horror is often compared to comedy: both deal in cathartic releases and are judged by the intensity of vocal responses to those releases. The volume of laughs and screams, then, becomes the yardstick for measuring a film’s success. But to equate the two is to miss how differently the genres work: comedy lives on surprise, where the outcome of an unexpected punchline is the reward. Horror, though, works through anticipation, through the unnerving setup of a person, place, even world that subtly turns against a character until hope is lost. In other words, comedy, no matter how long-winded and carefully ordered the setup, is about the end, while horror is about the means.

Atmosphere, then, gives horror its power, from Edgar Allen Poe’s stories through the Brontë sisters’ demented romances through H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic doom. The best horror films, likewise, do not treat the act of unsettling an audience as a mere primer for the eventual spooks as an ongoing process of warping not just the world within the film, but the one outside the theater. Images, and, more importantly, moods, stay in the mind for days, weeks and occasionally even a lifetime after experiencing them. These movies may not be “scary” in the sense of eliciting screams, but they live on like Poe’s beating heart, or the impenetrable moors of “Wuthering Heights.” Below are 10 such films, a sampling of features spanning from the studio system to the present day, that may not send you running from the theater in terror like “The Conjuring” but may just come back to unnerve you later. By no means the last word on great horror, these films mark a good starting point to finding horror movies that work in mysterious ways.

“Diabolique” by Henri-Jacques Clouzot (1955)

“Diabolique” is a colossal horror fake-out, an entire plot structured on the “just a cat” principle as a trio of closely linked but secretly combative teachers plot to off each other and disguise their own duplicity as death. This is a film where the absence of a corpse scares more than the sudden appearance of one, and when one “reanimates,” Clouzot’s filming of the scene in silence and slow-motion flies in the face of generic expectation and is all the more frightening for it. The reversals continue all the way until the end, in which the monsters themselves are shocked with a normal person walks out from the shadows to defeat them.

“Night of the Demon” by Jacques Tourneur (1958)

Tourneur’s three films for Val Lewton (“Cat People,” “The Leopard Man” and “I Walked with a Zombie”) pretty much throw down the gauntlet for atmospheric horror, but not to be forgotten is this lesser remarked-upon feature, in which Tourneur goes against his ambiguous early horror to clearly show the existence of a monster at the top of the film. That makes the film more outwardly jolting than the eerily absent terrors of Tourneur’s other genre work, but Dana Andrews still plays things as if the looming demon might be a feverish hallucination that he can will out of existence. And even when the demon fills the frame, Tourneur’s vast gulfs of space remain unparalleled for the sheer discomfort and foreboding: in showing huge frames with nowhere to hide, Tourneur somehow only enhances the feeling that something will pop out from nowhere.

“The Haunting” by Robert Wise (1963)

The haunted house film naturally lends itself to atmosphere, what with the “monster” being the mise-en-scène, but Robert Wise’s 1963 masterpiece sets a standard few can meet. Before unseen forces pound at doors and lost visitors pop out of trap doors, the film sets its mood with brilliantly curved frames, warping perspective and confounding one’s sense of space at all times. No monster ever materializes from the shadows, but Wise’s meticulous tension building makes what most horror films would consider spooky setups (disembodied laughter, the turn of a doorknob of its own volition) act as effective payoffs. Wise cut his teeth on Val Lewton movies, and no film made since Lewton’s death so thoroughly demonstrates the knowledge of what made the producer’s work great.

“Repulsion” by Roman Polanski (1965)

This writer’s favorite horror film of all time is something of a haunted house movie, but only in the sense that the house (well, apartment) is both the vehicle for supernaturally grim manifestations and the victim of same. Cathereine Deneuve’s shut-in anthrophobic projects cracks and decay upon the walls as she stews in paranoid energy in her sister’s absence, and the apartment retaliates by materializing the sources of her deep fears. Polanski plays out the socio-sexual undercurrents of the film’s horrors through his camera, using his mastery with unorthodox, teasing compositions and undulating focal lengths to visualize not merely paranoia but a female perspective as it navigates a world aligned against it. The shot of arms reaching out from the walls to grope Carol, violating her in what should be her private sanctuary, is one of the great horrific images for its surreal shock, and its deeper implications.

“Don’t Look Now” by Nicolas Roeg (1973)

Nicolas Roeg’s elliptically ordered chamber horror tilts off its axis so rapidly that the spill of red ink on a photograph at the top of the movie proves a scarier use of red goop than the goriest pictures. As soon becomes clear, the monster of the film is grief, the destabilizing effect of losing a child on parents whose broken spirits lend the movie its erratic structure. The most accomplished horror features provide a keen sense of place, but “Don’t Look Now” is the rare film that benefits from obliterating any foothold for the audience to orient themselves, its looping movement only clarifying place and time in retrospect, and after several viewings.

“Possession” by Andrzej Zulawski (1981)

If “Don’t Look Now” consumes itself in agony over a lost child, “Possession” puts forward a strong case for never having kids in the first place. Zulawski mines Lovecraft for an extreme take on miscarriage, postpartum depression and more, with Isabelle Adjani’s powerful performance rooted in melodrama as much as terror. Images from the film linger for years: Adjani collapsing in a puddle of spilled milk and uterine blood, a double take of her rebelling on the street against Sam Neill’s abusive husband, and the final image of a monster’s hands slowly beating on a frosted glass door as bombers circle overhead. All monsters are grotesque expressions of inner human fears, but few feel as palpably connected to internal madness as the creature Adjani births.

“Prince of Darkness” by John Carpenter (1987)

Just about any Carpenter film deserves a mention when it comes to finely constructed, precision-timed horror, but in atmospheric terms, he tops himself with “Prince of Darkness.” From the moment that Donald Pleasence (in his most fear-stricken but least panicky role for Carpenter) confesses to a long-standing Church conspiracy to conceal pure evil with a mixture of disgust, resignation, and the quiver of deep fear, a pall of gloom is cast over the proceedings that mutes even the handful of jolts into something more cosmic. Interdimensional mirrors, a mass of zombified homeless, the slow dissolve of a possessed colleague into a mound of ants never overstep the film’s limited scale, but they all suggest a much larger presence that can only be directly seen in such minor visions because the full thing would be incomprehensible to us.

“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” by David Lynch (1992)

David Lynch is the greatest horror director of non-horror films, though if he ever did make an outright entry into the genre, it was with his maligned masterpiece “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.” With the actual mystery of Laura Palmer’s death solved, for better or worse, on the show, this quasi-prequel narratively covers trod ground. Emotionally, however, this is as harrowing and devastating and unrelenting as anything to ever be foisted on an unprepared public, in which a town so friendly to an affable male outsider turns toxic and unpitying for a girl who grew up there. The longer format and ongoing weirdness of the show put the focus on its supernatural elements, but “Fire Walk with Me” makes the likes of BOB seem more like coping mechanisms for blotting out the more sadly common horrors of rape, incest and murder. “Fire Walk with Me” forces the viewer to see the world through the eyes of someone who can find no solace in it, where even the spinning of a ceiling fan or a creepy painting contain a sense of danger.

“Pulse” by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (2001)

“Pulse” could have gone so wrong (just look at the American remake). A film directly tied to an emerging technology will instantly date itself, but “Pulse,” released before the widespread adoption of high-speed internet, the rise of social media and various other developments of Internet life, only seems to get more relevant. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s chiller finds ghosts in the machines, which crawl out slowly, not suddenly, and bring with them less a sense of terror than abject melancholy. The subtext of the Internet uniting people through a false sense of presence as it isolates mankind is hardly original, but Kurosawa suffuses the film with such rich despair that the viewer’s own life force threatens to turn to ash. Even the insistent score only spikes after a ghost has appeared, or a person has reacted extremely to loneliness, turning even the one truly clichéd element on its head.

“Halloween II” by Rob Zombie (2009)

For someone who so gleefully trades in throwback schlock, Rob Zombie admirably avoids the easy reward of jump scares. (Even his most jump-ridden feature, his recent “Lords of Salem,” puts its surprises in deep background rather than the fore.) His finest outing, “Halloween II,” finds its true monster less in Michael Myers than in the PTSD triggered in survivors from his first spree of terror. In both the theatrical and especially the director’s cuts, Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) rips apart bonds with friends and surrogate family as the agony of her survivor’s guilt proves too much to bear. So frightening is Laurie’s self-immolation that when her brother returns, one is tempted to see him only as a manifestation of Laurie’s fear, as well as a now-necessary agent for her release. The film asks what happens to the Final Girl after she becomes the Final Girl, finding no victory, only a mere prolonging of torture that ends only when recurring monsters, or new forces, finish the job only just started with a franchise’s first entry.

Categories: Features, Lists

Tags: Diabolique, Halloween, Horror Movies, Jake Cole, James Wan, Jump Scares, Night of the Demon, Repulsion, Rob zombie, The Conjuring

Don’t Fear the Reaper: Why Horror Films Love Pop Music

In Rob Zombie’s newest film, “The Lords Of Salem,” vinyl brings evil into the world.

The title refers to a witches’ coven that was burned alive during the town’s famed witch trials by a preacher incensed by all aspects of their dark magick, including their “blasphemous music.” Appropriately, the witches choose to announce their return by mailing an LP to a radio station. The song itself (co-composed by Zombie’s bandmate John 5 and Griffin Boice) isn’t too captivating — grindingly repetitive rock with just three grudging bass notes instead of the usual minimum three cords. The equally abrasive vocals signal the return of Satanic witches and bad news all round.

Zombie’s soundtrack lavishes the most attention on the Velvet Underground. Early on, heroine Heidi Hawthorne (Sheri Moon Zombie) dances in her apartment after work with radio co-host Whitey (Jeff Daniel Phillips) to “Venus In Furs,” turning a song about “shiny whips and leather” into an excuse to prance around waving scarves. That’s just a teaser for the climax, a full-on mass Satanic ritual with the main female sacrifice offered up to the VU’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Avoiding spoilers for a film not yet opened, the lyrics take on a grimly ironic, black comic aspect in this final context. Said Zombie during an interview at SXSW: “I always like to find songs that can represent the film, so there’s at least one song in every movie that when you hear it, it brings back the imagery of the film.” (The most memorable example is the climax of “The Devil’s Rejects,” set to “Freebird”; the first time I saw it, the crowd went nuts watching anti-heroes gunned down in slow-motion to the song.) “Sometimes you just hear a song and you go, ‘This song sounds like how I want the movie to feel.’”

Zombie was a musician before he eased into directing, and his attention to soundtrack choices can be accordingly meticulous beyond the norm (he co-produced an entire fake country greatest-hits collection by “Banjo & Sullivan” for “The Devil’s Rejects”). His songs are used for ironic purposes or to heighten lurid emotions, one of many ways a horror film can use a pre-existing tune. All movies have editorial rhythm, of course, but this genre’s especially reliant on precise attention to cutting: the longer a shot during a tense sequence, the greater possibility it’ll end with a) something horrible coming at us from the left, right or back of the frame with no warning b) a sudden cut to something horrible happening.

Songs serve as a sonic safety buffer that could be punctuated by sudden noise at any moment. Indeed, the tension between the ostensible security of pop music and the underlying terror implicit to scary movies is so rich and immediate that it’s even come to influence the trailers for horror films (i.e. this great preview for ”You’re Next”).

Here’s a look at how five different horror films used pop music to deepen their dread.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Don’t Fear The Reaper” from “Halloween,” 1978

“Halloween” didn’t invent the unseen-/masked-man-kills-people slasher formula, but it codified the genre’s structure and look, including one possible use for pre-established pop songs. 40 minutes in, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is in the passenger seat when friend Annie (Nancy Kyes) pulls out a joint. Behind them, a car emerges — driven by the unseen Michael Myers — but Laurie and Annie don’t notice the vehicle ominously tracking them. The radio’s trying to warn them via Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” that they should very much be afraid of imminent death, but they don’t pick up on the threat. The scene ends without incident, though Annie will later meet her gruesome end in the same vehicle (on the way to pick up a boy, naturally).

Stevie Wonder, “Superstition” from “The Thing,” 1982

Director John Carpenter composed the score for “Halloween,” and the theme’s ubiquitously recognized still. His 1982 “The Thing” features another deathless sound of the ’70s-and-onwards, the 100-million-plus-units selling Stevie Wonder. The tune is 1972's “Superstition,” listened to by the cook in the kitchen. “Will you turn that crap down?” a cranky Arctic base resident yells over the intercom. “I’m trying to get some sleep. I was shot today.” “Will do,” says the cook and cranks it up. (Wonder was a racial radio uniter, but the fact that a white man’s yelling at a black guy who’s asserting his independence through volume doesn’t seem incidental.) The camera moves from the kitchen to an empty room, the song’s heavy irony inviting us to realize that the crew’s fears aren’t based in irrational superstition but on a real threat, ending with a dog being lured into a room where The Thing lurks in shadow. Picture fades to black, sound to nothingness, the scene’s potential scare realized only in the static shadow’s head abruptly turning; the audience, suitably keyed up, will have to squirm longer before the first Big Jolt.

Nick Cave, “Red Right Hand” from “Scream,” 1996

Remixed for “Scream 2? and re-recorded by Cave himself for “Scream 3,” “Red Right Hand” is the series’ unofficial theme song. Its first appearance in the initial installment leaves a strong impression, even though it plays for barely a minute. Woodsboro’s under curfew to foil the Ghostface killer as Cave rumbles “You’ll see him in your nightmares/You’ll see him in your dreams,” linking Ghostface with director Wes Craven’s earlier “A Nightmare On Elm Street.” parents bustle their children along sideways, people grab their last brews from closing coffee shops, and the streets are deserted. The ominous music deflates the series’ constant wit and cleverness, a brief injection of unmediated menace.

Joanna Newsom, “The Sprout And The Bean” from “The Strangers” (2008)
One of the odder and certainly less populist horror music cues, Joanna Newsom’s “The Sprout And The Bean” nonetheless serves a textbook literal-minded function in this relentless slasher film. “Should we go outside?” Newsom asks as Liv Tyler sulks alone in her isolated house, her decidedly acquired taste vocals hovering over harp and strings. The obvious answer to even inexperienced horror viewers is “NO,” but Tyler answers the door anyway when someone asks “Is Tamara here?” The record player (vinyl again!) will recur throughout, its sudden bursts into sound not cued by Tyler or luckless boyfriend Scott Speedman signaling another imminent burst of homicidal mayhem.

The Fixx, “One Thing Leads To Another” from “The House Of The Devil” (2009)

Unlike the other songs on this list, the lyrics of The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads To Another” have no bearing on the scene it’s heard in. Two things matter here: Samantha Hughes (Jocelin Donahue) is listening to the song on her Walkman (an outdated, nostalgically regarded object from the movie’s vague early ’80s setting, just like the tune itself), and she’s got her headphones on while bouncing around a big, creepy house. The audio goes from just-song-with-no-ambient-context to a tinnier version heard from Samantha’s headphones in different rooms. Every time The Fixx become just part of the overall soundscape, we’re aware that something loud and homicidal could (and inevitably must) burst onto the screen, but it never does, not this early. Samantha dances on, oblivious to all menace.

Categories: Lists

Tags: Halloween, Horror films, Joanna newsom, Lords of Salem, Music, Rob zombie, Scream, The Strangers

10 Movies that Honestly Depict the Horror of Gun Violence

Francois Truffaut said it was impossible to make an antiwar film, because every representation is an act of romanticization and therefore an act of recruitment. In the gun debate, one often hears a similar argument: the movies make guns look unduly romantic and cool, transforming them into fetish objects to celebrated with mindless glee, contributing to a culture of acceptability and the naturalization of violence. Whether representation, even if flattering or romanticized, actively influences the behaviour of an impressionable audience is hard to say, but in any case it seems obvious that the cinema—and the American cinema in particular—has a fascination with gun violence so extreme and unrelenting that it borders on irresponsible. The problem isn’t so much that movies explicitly valorize guns as it is that they do nothing to suppress their appeal. It’s a tacit sort of endorsement, all the more insidious because, as with war movies, the advocacy remains only implied.

In the immediate wake of the Senate’s most recent failure to pass more comprehensive gun legislation, we’ve compiled ten films that make a point of doing the opposite: these are films for which guns are made to look deliberately unappealing, the violence that comes in their wake represented honestly as brutal, horrifying and something that we as a people can no longer abide.

1. “Elephant”

Gus Van Sant’s misunderstood Palme D’or winner has high aspirations and an unenviable task: this is film that attempts to make sense of a school shooting in order to suggest that one ultimately can’t. In “Elephant”, gun violence plays out as unqualified atrocity, its consequences as incomprehensible as the reason it occurred at all. The crowning touch is a moment of unbearable defeat: we follow a student as heads cautiously toward the sounds of gunshots, hopeful that he might save the day, only to watch helplessly as he is shot down the second he makes a move.

2. “A Bittersweet Life”

Handguns, of course, are considerably less hard to come by in Korea than they are the United States, which is why in this Korean crime film a mobster in exile just can’t seem to get his hands on one. A backroom deal for a single weapon becomes an arduous exercise in politics and negotiation, culminating in a quick-draw shootout that leaves the dealers shot dead. The irony is that, once his gun is acquired, the hero is closer than ever to meeting his fate, brought about rather than avoided by making the purchase.

3. “The Tin Star”

One of Anthony Mann’s superlative black and white Westerns, “The Tin Star” stars Anthony Perkins as a small-town Sheriff forced to learn to shoot in order to survive the mistrust and dissent of his constituents. Here Mann depicts the gun as a crude instrument, a terrifying source of power that must be wielded with caution and fear. Far from confirming its importance, “The Tin Star” suggests we’d better off—or in the very least much safer—without the weapons on which we rely.

4. “Full Metal Jacket”

If ever there could be a successfully anti-war war movie, Stanley Kubrick’s hostile, seethingly angry “Full Metal Jacket” must be it. What distinguishes this particular representation of war—and, by extension, the attendant gun violence—is that Kubrick never feels the need to pay his respects to those bravely fighting, opting against the romance and valor of duty and instead lambasting the soldiers as much as the institution to which they belong. Where a film like “Saving Private Ryan” self-consciously makes heroes of its protagonists, “Full Metal Jacket” depicts them as idiots and buffoons, contributing to the repulsiveness of warfare rather than trying to avoid it. When even Private Joker eventually succumbs to the brutality around him, the point seems clear: in war, everybody gets dragged into the muck eventually.

5. “Bowling for Columbine”

Michael Moore’s admittedly simplistic and reductive documentary might seem an obvious choice when discussing anti-gun movies, but it nevertheless remains an important one, broadening the conversation about American gun culture to the national stage and illuminating dimensions of a subject traditionally kept shrouded in mistruth. Where Moore fails as a rigorous documentarian, he succeeds as a populist voice, and it’s worth recognizing the value of his influence on an underdiscussed issue.

6. “Blood Simple”

The Coen brothers probably aren’t the first names that come to mind when one thinks of filmmakers averse to glamorizing violence—“Miller’s Crossing” is nothing if not in love with the look and feel of its tommy guns, and “No Country For Old Men” practically invented a new weapon—but their startling debut, the darkly comic noir “Blood Simple”, treats its guns as instigators of a sick cosmic joke, one which sees murders committed strictly in the name of misunderstanding. Guns go off, lives change, and nobody can walk away clean from the consequences.

7. “Taxi Driver”

“Taxi Driver” is the rare case of a movie that, like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Scarface”, is so commonly misperceived as endorsing the violent acts of its protagonist that one wonders how effective its true message could possibly be. De Niro’s iconic bedroom posturing made drawing a gun—or, y’know, mounting one to a custom arm rig—an act of movie-star cool, but the point is precisely that it’s all an act. It’s telling that the point at which he finally buys a gun from a black market dealer’s suitcase is also the point at which Travis Bickle makes the leap from on-edge to off the deep end, and one would be hard-pressed to describe the fallout from this purchase as anything but grotesque.

8. “Point Blank”

John Boorman’s postmodern crime film tells a decidedly oblique sort of revenge story. Lee Marvin plays Walker, a man on a mission for vengeance after a betrayal during a robbery-gone-wrong leaves him shot and left for dead. Boorman makes Walker out to be a veritable precursor to the Terminator, crashing through downtown Los Angeles on a hunt for the $93,000 he feels he’s owed by his former partners. Guns become a fixture of the skyline: snipers hide from sight, men fall without warning, and shots rip through the sky like claps of thunder. “Point Blank” reinstills guns with a sense of actual power, making them a force to be reckoned with and an object to fear.

9. “Starship Troopers”

Paul Verhoeven’s strategy for making the case against gun violence has always been to rub our faces in it, forcing us to recognize the repulsiveness of the spectacle we desire. “Starship Troopers” takes this approach into the realm of satirical science fiction, taking the American military-industrial complex to task for its continued exploitation of its own populace and the wars it draws them into arbitrarily. It’s a searing critique, one as much about the abhorrent excessive of on-screen violence as it is about the real world stuff that inspires it, though it so successfully adopts the look and feel of the pulp material it’s satirizing that many mistook it, rather ironically, for an earnest piece of schlock cinema.

10. “A History of Violence”

David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” tackles the representation of violence in two very different ways: on the one hand, this is a movie about inherited traditions of violent behavior, drawing explicit connections between violent acts and their long-term repercussions for both the people who commit them and those they commit them upon. But on the other hand, “A History of Violence” engages with the issue through its very form, growing increasingly violent—and increasingly absurd—as its running time continues and the body count rises. By the end of the picture, the film has evolved (or devolved) from naturalistic drama into what is essentially a live-action comic book or cartoon, in the process critiquing our tendency to conflate violence and heroics.

Do any other films make a compelling case against guns and gun violence? Let us know in the comments.

Categories: Lists

Tags: A Bittersweet Life, A history of violence, Blood Simple, Elephant, Guns, List, Point Blank, Politics

Awesomethology: The Best Segments From Omnibus Horror Films

This week’s “The ABCs of Death” presents 26 tales of bloody terror in one nifty little package, all held together by the very broad theme of “death.” Anthology films are nothing new, though, and often provide both young and seasoned filmmakers the chance to flex their muscles in a short form that allows them to explore subjects or techniques outside their wheelhouse. Sometimes the results are masturbatory or phoned-in, but in every omnibus picture there is usually one segment that everyone agrees was the topper.

Since horror stories are often most effective in short bursts an anthology is a choice way to present them, so here’s a list of all the juiciest morsels from the omnibus pantheon. Perhaps some intrepid reader out there can compile them all into one big (highly illegal) MEGA ANTHOLOGY?

Yes, it’s Disney, but what list would be complete without the most thrilling denouement in any music-oriented movie? Being Walt Disney’s (final) attempt to elevate his work to the level of high art, “Fantasia” has some legit scary scenes in it, especially if you’re not sexually attracted to hippos, but none more indelible than his interpretation of Modest Mussorgsky’s eerie tone poem. It features a massive demon named Chernabog (partly modeled after Bela Lugosi) orchestrating a slew of ghosts and demonic forms above a gloomy castle, inspiring heavy metal albums for generations to come. What stops this fiendishness? Schubert’s Ave Maria, duh!

Before Ozzie Osborne took the moniker for his occult band of miscreants, “Black Sabbath” was a wicked cool Italian anthology (from the amazing Mario Bava) containing three tales of dread that spawned a boom of this type of film in the ’60s. That’s why there’s four of them from that era on this list. The other two segments have threatening phone calls and Russian vampires, but the kicker is the final one about a sleazy nurse who steals a ring off the finger of a dead psychic woman’s corpse. Inspired by Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the woman keeps hearing a monotonous drop of water (really pangs of conscience) that drives her up the wall. What really makes this creeper so memorable is the apparition of the dead woman, whose frozen facial features are F**KING TERRIFYING!

Masaki Kobayashi took home a Special Jury Prize at the ’65 Cannes Film Festival for this four-part exploration of ancient Kaidan (“ghost story”) folklore. All of them have a deliberately studio-bound look to them, with theatrical backdrops representing outdoor locations, and this artificiality makes it all the more dreamlike… or nightmarelike. “Woman of the Snow” has a hapless woodcutter stranded in a blizzard, who meets a strange Yuki-onna, an icy female snow spirit, who agrees to save his butt on the condition that he never tell another soul about it. Year’s later he forgets his promise… WHOOPS!

Amicus was the rival to England’s Hammer Studios in pumping out old fashioned B-level horror, usually starring Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee. This one has both, with Cushing as the eponymous Dr. Terror as he reads tarot cards to five men during a long-ass train trip. Their fates are revealed in the form of lurid tales, the best involving Christopher Lee as an uptight art critic who angrily runs down an artist. Later, the artist’s severed hand begins a non-stop rampage of revenge against Lee, surviving pokings, fires and burial to ultimately strangle the bastard. Hells yeah.

Euro auteurs Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini joined forces for this trilogy of (loose) Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, originally titled “Histoires Extraordinaires.” While the first two fall flat, good ol’ Fellini really went all the way with a wild, hallucinatory jaunt about a boozy, publicity shy Shakespearian actor who agrees to do a film in Rome in exchange for a new Ferrari. Thing is, he keeps having visions of a little girl with a ball, and it’s driving him nuts and, eventually, across a really rickety bridge. This is Fellini at his surreal, “8½”-like best, with a truly bugged-out performance by pasty-faced Terrence Stamp, who looks like he’s been partying for a century.

The French magazine Metal Hurlant (and it’s American counterpart Heavy Metal) was one of the first outlets that catered to adult sensibilities in mainstream comics, i.e. blood and tits. Produced by Ivan Reitman, the animated film had 8 sequences inspired by the comics, held together by a wraparound about a mysterious orb that seems to cause evil wherever it goes. This glow-in-the-dark maguffin manages to cross paths with a World War II bomber where everyone except the two pilots has been killed. Soon the pilots discover that their crew are not as deceased as they seem… “Alien” creator Dan O’Bannon crafted this quick little horror piece in the spirit of EC Comics (like “Creepshow”), and there’s something compelling about the lonely nighttime setting in the skies above the Pacific.

There have been many, many, MANY films adapted from the works of Stephen King, but how many of them actually STAR the Master of Horror? George Romero of “Night of the Living Dead”-fame was at the height of his powers when he drafted King to bang out five tales of medium-well horror (just a little bloody in the center), and the result was a hit. Future stars like Ed Harris and Ted Danson both appeared in other segments, but none of them hold a candle to King’s hambone bow as slackjawed hick Jordy, who touches a strange space meteorite only to wind up covered in green plant-like gunk. Romero uses tons of Dutch angles and optical effects to recreate the graphic look of old EC Comics like “Tales from the Crypt.”

This big budget tribute to Rod Serling’s perennial series was soured by the on-set death of Vic Morrow and two children during the shooting of John Landis’ portion, which caused a falling out with producer Steven Spielberg and ultimately, the studio turned a blind eye to the other two segments. This resulted in young Joe Dante and George Miller given free reign, with Miller’s being the undisputed champ. “Nightmare” remakes the famous William Shatner episode about a destructive gremlin on the wing of a plane, with John Lithgow taking over Shatner part splendidly. Lithgow is out of his head from minute-one, but manages to work himself to fever pitch by the time the monster is tearing out the plane’s engine, and Miller (hot off “The Road Warrior”) was clearly on top of his game in the suspense department.

Though he’s most famous for his many slice ‘em dice ‘em samurai chanbara flicks, Kurosawa has a wide range of ability, as you might expect from one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time. This collection of brief filmic sketches unfold with steady dream logic, and include a radioactive cloud shrouding Mount Fuji in red or Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh (you read that correctly). The most haunting of the bunch is “The Tunnel,” a slow burn horror tale of a Japanese officer walking home after World War II who comes across a dark, foreboding tunnel. He’s met by a demonic red dog strapped with explosives, then encounters the ghosts of all the soldiers he sent to their deaths during battle. That’s gotta be every commander’s worst nightmare.

Okay, not exactly a horror flick, but elements of horror mos def permeate throughout. Made in the wake of the indie movie boom of the mid-nineties, this noble experiment plays like a sitcom version of “Mystery Train,” but with four jarringly un-unified visions guiding the mess. Although all of them are tied together through Tim Roth’s manic bellhop, the first two pieces by Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell are unwatchable, and then we get to the Robert Rodriguez segment “The Misbehavers.” It finds Roth having to babysit Antonio Banderas’ two precocious kids, with them stirring up a whole heap of trouble starting with a dead prostitute in the bed. Rodriguez would again emerge the victor over Tarantino in the two-header “Grindhouse,” but it should be said that QT’s segment in “Four Rooms” may in fact be his worst film, if for no other reason than he stole it wholesale from Roald Dahl’s short story “Man from the South.”

Categories: Features

Tags: Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, Black Sabbath, Creepshow, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, Fantasia, Four Rooms, Heavy Metal, Kwaidan, Max Evry, Spirits of the Dead, The ABCs of death, Twilight Zone: The Movie