In Other Blogs: Trick or Treat

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Night of the Living Dead made the top five in our list of the 25 Greatest Horror Movies, but our enthusiasm for George Romero’s seminal zombie film pales compared to that of PopMatters, which has put together an exhaustive tribute in honor of Night’s 40th anniversary. “Love it or hate it, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is a recognized cornerstone of American culture and world cinema. After 40 years, Romero’s film remains an influential film that generates a variety of readings and discourses. Furthermore, this horror classic continues to spawn a variety of sequels, remakes, and copycats…Indeed, the magnitude of the cultural significance of Night of the Living Dead is made evident in this massive collection of 30 articles that uniquely analyze, dissect, discuss, and re-appreciate the cultural, political, social, ideological, philosophical, and psychological meanings of this groundbreaking horror film. Here you will find fresh perspectives, appreciations, and theoretical frameworks that bring a new light to the critical examination of Night of the Living Dead.”

Spoutblog checks out the sexiest vampire movie of all time: Daughters of Darkness. “The tone is set right from the start: an appropriately blue-hued sex scene, jump cuts from Valerie’s ecstatically grasping hand back to naked entwined torsos, Stefan virtually devouring his young bride, burrowing his head into the heaving flesh of her chest, going for the jugular without drawing blood. The entire atmosphere of the film is steamy, as visceral as the Florida summer of Body Heat. From the rising and falling suspense string score to the lush, sensuous colors and velvet fabrics of the European resort, as cavernous and creepy as the Overlook Hotel; from the fluid camerawork, the grand high angle and long shots, the noir shadows, the close ups on Seyrig’s flawless face, a playful pixie vixen, nails and lips forever painted blood red.”

Filmcatcher looks at (near) great horror movies you’ve probably never seen, including 1974’s Bad Ronald. “Scott Jacoby, a popular TV actor back in the day, plays weirdo Ronald, a high-schooler who lives with his mother. When Ronald accidentally kills a tormenter schoolmate, his Mom fears the police and hides him away in a secret room in the house. Well, Mom dies and eventually a whole new family moves in; trouble is, Ronald is still trapped in the house. Confined to his hiding place, old Ronny starts to become deranged and invents an alternative reality, a fantasy world called ‘Atrantra,’ drawing and writing about it all over the walls of his room in a scrawled graffiti that is truly freaky. Then Ronald begins to venture out of his improvised prison and things get really nasty…”

The 31 Screams photo-essays at Arbogast on Film continue with Arlene Francis. “Francis spends a lot of time screaming in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932). In fact, it's all she does. Cast in her film debut as a ‘Woman of the Streets,’ she is screaming when we meet her, watching in horror as two men kill one another (presumably for her favor). It's a startlingly savage scene for the time, grainy, shadow-ringed and doom-laden, and when both combatants are finally dead, Bela Lugosi swoops in whisk away this damsel in distress.”

Unfortunately, we end this installment with some real-life horror. Andrew Johnston, longtime contributor to The House Next Door, died on Sunday. House founder Matt Zoller Seitz pays tribute. “So many truths only become clear with hindsight. Here’s one of them: Unbeknownst to nearly everybody, even those closest to him, Andrew Johnston was a superhero. His influence was as profound as it was largely unseen. Like the hero of Miller's Crossing, Tom Regan, Andrew managed to re-order large parts of his universe without anyone being the wiser.”

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This may be the scariest Halloween in recent memory.

Whatever happens in the election, it's going to be a nightmare for tens of millions of Americans. But until then, we’ve got a few days to dress like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, drink pumpkin-flavored beer and relax with ghosts, vampires and zombies instead of all those scary talking heads on TV.

There was some debate here in the Screengrab Crypt regarding whether this was a list of the BEST horror films of all time or the SCARIEST (or if there’s a difference)...which naturally got us thinking about just what makes a film scary in the first place.

When my mother-in-law was a wee little French-Canadian, she went to a screening of Murders in the Rue Morgue where a theater employee in a gorilla suit popped out when the lights came up, sending the audience screaming into the streets of Nashua, New Hampshire...now THAT’S scary.

On the other hand, there are some horror movies that skip the gotcha! moments in favor of sheer dread, a creeping mood of hopeless, helpless paranoia that haunts your nights long after the adrenalin rush from the guy in the gorilla suit has faded. I remember squirming my way through all the maggots and vomited intestines of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell as a teenager, but what scared me the most was the Italian film’s pervasive sense of inescapable doom...

...not that I have especially fond memories of the film. Just because it scared me didn’t mean I liked it, in the same way I’d rather read a 700-page grad school dissertation on the cultural significance of the torture porn craze than sit through Saw V.

Like comedy, it’s hard to nail down the secret of great horror, but we know it when it lurches up...RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!!!

Just kidding. Enjoy the list, and Happy Halloween from your pals here at The Screengrab!

25. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

What is it with zombies? Why do we love them so? We’ve got at least a half dozen killer corpse movies on this list...but personally, I’ve always had a special place in my braaaaiiiiiinnnssss for Dan O’Bannon’s punk-rock tribute to the genre, starring the venerable, indispensable B-movie staple Clu Gulager as the boss of two medical warehouse employees who accidentally unleash a zombie apocalypse. According to the film’s clever, way-better-than-it-has-to-be script (also by O’Bannon), Night of the Living Dead was a true story, but the government covered the whole thing up...and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for a mishap involving a missing barrel of deadly zombie toxin and the aforementioned bumbling warehouse employees: Freddy (whose friends are rockin’ out to the Damned and the Flesh Eaters -- and, for some reason, getting naked -- in a nearby graveyard) and Frank, whose eventual fate is actually kinda touching thanks to a horror movie hall-of-fame performance by character actor James Karen. One of my all-time favorites in the “disappearing characters” genre, Return is frightening, funny and exciting by turns, and pioneered “fast zombie” technology long before Danny Boyle hogged all the credit in 28 Days Later. Plus, the soundtrack totally kicks ass...and, of course, BRAAAAIIIINNNSSSS!!!!!

24. THE INNOCENTS (1961)

One of the most effective ghost story movies ever made is also perhaps the finest of all the attempts to adapt Henry James to the screen. (John Mortimer and a pre-In Cold Blood Truman Capote worked on the screenplay, which is based on a theatrical adaptation of James' The Turn of the Screw.) Deborah Kerr is a fascinating jangle of authoritative command and nervous anxiety as the new governess who thinks she's seen the apparitions of her predecessor and that woman's lover, the valet Quint, who both came to mysterious ends. Ten years later, Michael Winner's The Nightcomers would offer a speculative version of what happened before, with Marlon Brando as Quint. That movie is best remembered as a cautionary tale involving how it came to be distributed in this country: Universal agreed to pick it up as part of a deal to cancel its contract with Brando, who they assumed would never have another hit in his life. Of course, his next picture was The Godfather. Hollywood: it's a scary place.

23. THE STEPFATHER (1987)

A wholly unexpected high point for the slash/fill-in-the-blank-from-Hell genre, with an original script by the matchless crime novelist Donald Newlove which achieves just the right balance of wit and nastiness. Terry O'Quinn makes anonymity terrifying as the title character, a serial murderer of the type known as a "family annihilator" -- unable to deal with cracks in his fantasy ideal of a perfect family, he keeps wiping out one domestic unit and moving on to another. The movie was inspired by Newlove's meditating on the case of the infamously colorless John List, who butchered his family in 1971, and who was still unapprehended when the movie came out; he was arrested in 1989, after being the subject of an episode of America's Most Wanted, and died in prison last March. A TV movie about List was made in 1993. He was played by Robert Blake.

22. NEAR DARK (1987)

Kathryn Biglow's artspolitation movie about a "family" of white trash vampires traveling the back roads in a van with the windows blacked out has an unusually potent mix of striking visual beauty and cutthroat action. Bill Paxton and Lance Henrikson have never looked closer to shitkicker heaven than in the movie's bloody set piece in a roadhouse; the wonderful, and much-missed Jenny Wright is hard to resist as the teen-sister figure, who winsomely infects the country-boy hero (Adrian Pasdar) with vampirism so that she'll have someone nice to talk to between massacres. And where have you gone, Jenette Goldstein? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

21. THE MUMMY (1932)

The legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, whose credits ranged from Metropolis and The Last Laugh to 149 episodes of I Love Lucy, worked as a director of English-language films for only three years in the early-to-mid '30s. This was his Hollywood directorial debut; the last film he directed was the 1935 horror movie Mad Love, and that title would have been a neat fit for this one, too. It stars Boris Karloff as a 3,000-year-old Egyptian who was entombed alive for trying to restore his dead beloved to life; resurrected, he gets right back on the case, having identified the heroine, Zita Johann, as the woman's reincarnation. Slow and dreamily poetic, this is very different from later mummy movies -- Karloff is unbandaged for most of the picture -- and also very different from most of the other classic Universal monster movies. It's the rare film about eternal love than makes you appreciate the fact that most loves have a natural shelf life.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: The Zombie Andrew Osborne, Kill Nugent

The Screengrab : murders in the rue morgue

In Other Blogs: Trick or Treat

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)