The Screengrab : the exorcist

The Believer's 2009 Film Issue

Phil Nugent — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

The highlights of The Believer's 1999 Film Issue are conveniently located at the front and back of the magazine, and are perhaps even more conveniently available online. In an essay titled "Contemplating the New Physicality of Cinema", C. S. Leigh discusses "the physical act of seeking out and consuming great or hallowed or mythical films"--"the rumors traded among cinephiles, the stories and the clues"--and the degree to which this process "was as obsessive as our need to experience these films, when and if we found them", and the role it played in shaping the sensibility of many a movie geek (or, if you prefer, "cinephile"--you say tomato, I say tomahto). "We wrote letters to long-forgotten crew members of neglected masterpieces and arranged meetings in difficult-to-pronounce European cities still shrouded behind the Iron Curtain. We sent money orders or contraband to shady PO boxes in hopes of hitting the mother lode. (That’s how I got my hands on Bergman’s Merry Widow script, crafted as a showcase for Barbra Streisand and set aside when it could not be financed.) Did Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-and-forty-minute version of Out 1, noli me tangere, supposedly screened at Le Havre in 1971, really exist? Could sequences from the abandoned version of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the one starring Jason Robards and Mick Jagger (before Robards had a massive heart attack and Klaus Kinski replaced him), be bought on black-market videotape? Where could we find films of the Marxist couple Straub-Huillet with English subtitles when the filmmakers themselves had sought to keep their work free of the textual residue of the despised Anglo-American market?"

This kind of obsession-fueling trivia, and the will to journey to "dark and damp basement cinemas in New York, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Berlin, and London, places like the Carnegie Hall Cinema, the Cinema Village, and the Notting Hill, where double features were the order of the day," were often an essential part of the experience of devoting a large part of your life to feeding on movies before the budding addict had fully formed his or her aesthetic code or film sense. Before one has learned to talk the talk, one walks the walk by demonstrating one's willingness to go wherever it takes, pay whatever price, subsist on concession-counter Milk Duds with whatever outmoded expiration date printed on the side, to track down that precious film experience the that has been dangling just out of reach. For the true, well, believer, one's autobiography becomes a string of screenings, some of them at least as memorable for their surroundings as for the movie that occasioned them. As Leigh recalls, "You could also have a very different relationship with a film depending on where and with whom you watched it. An audience at a university cinema in L.A. had a solemn, nearly funereal reaction to Pasolini’s Salò, based on Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (they seemed uncertain whether they had just witnessed a film or a crime); later, I watched the same film at the Accattone in Paris with an audience that couldn’t stop laughing. I watched my first Philippe Garrel film, Les Hautes solitudes, starring Jean Seberg and largely based on her turbulent life story, at the old Cinémathèque Française near Trocadéro. It’s a silent film with an amazing lexicon of bohemian costars, including Nico, Tina Aumont, and Laurent Terzieff, in its cast. What I remember most clearly is the look of sheer terror washing over Seberg’s face in one of those endless black-and-white close-ups on which Garrel built his reputation, and, equally, the mildewy smell of the underground cinema. It had yet to decay to the point where it would become uninhabitable, even for the faithful. When I watched the film there again in 2004 it was pretty much raining inside."

The Believer web site also includes the full text of Chloe Veltman's interview with Mike Leigh Other worthwhile reasons for picking up the magazine itself include the enclosed DVD devoted to Jean-Luc Godard's visits to the United States, including his visits to college campuses in 1968 and 1979 and his 1980 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show to promote Every Man for Himself, an interview with Julie Delpy, in which she confesses her desire to be on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and a too-small and too-brief but tantalizing selection (by Michael Atkinson) of Polish film posters. In the not-so-much category, we have one more interview with the pretty much all-talked-out John Sayles, which will be a revelation to anyone who has never imagined that the indie auteur is too devoted to a talky cinema of quality to be content being caged as a Hollywood screenwriter; William Giraldi's disappointing piece on The Exorcist; and an article about Incubus, Leslie Stevens's 1966 horror curio Incubus (starring William Shatner, and written in Esperanto) which adds little to the classic Salon report that was accompanied on the occasion of the movie's 2000 reappearance on home video.

Then there's Believer co-editor Heidi Julavits's interview with Revolutionary Road director Sam Mendes. Mendes seems a little "New York Times Arts & Leisure section" for an enterprise like The Believer, but Julavits treats him very respectfully, honoring his high seriousness as a man of culture and fellow reader by mostly asking him about the role that the Richard Yates novel that served as the basis for his latest overpraised movie has played in the life of his mind. Oddly enough, she never got around to asking him about his forthcoming film, Away We Go, which Mendes directed and produced from a script by a brand new screenwriting team: Dave Eggers, whose company, McSweeney's, publishes The Believer, and his wife, the co-founder and co-editor of The Believer, Vendela Vidi. I can only imagine that when Julavits and Vidi were comparing notes on the new issue as it was about to go to press and they discovered that it contained a beyond-friendly interview with someone who had just ushered Eggers and Vidi into the movie business, there was much discussion about what a small world it is and a good chuckle was enjoyed by one and all.

"The Haunting in Connecticut" and the Evolution of the Bullshit "True" Horror Movie

Phil Nugent — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

The Haunting in Connecticut, a horror movie that opens this weekend, is being promoted with a poster and TV ads built around an image of a boy who appears to have tobacco leaves three times the size of his lead sprouting from his mouth. My first impression of this image was that the movie must have been made as part of a tax write-off scheme and that the publicity department, knowing that the film was meant to fail and understanding that they weren't expected to attract people to the theater, were having a little fun, but it turns out that a lot of people think that it's one selling ad. The intended reaction is, what the hell is supposed to be going on there!? Or, more precisely, because Haunting is touted as being "based on true events", what the hell is supposed to have been really going on there!?

It seems clear that a significant percentage of the audience for scary entertainment gets a charge out of hearing that whatever's freezing their marrow is "true"--or, at least, "based on a true story", or in the case of the just shamelessly fraudulent, "inspired by actual events." Last year, Brian Bertino's The Strangers was promoted with the "inspired" line; in interviews, Bertino revealed that the inspiration in question came from his having read Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Manson murders, when he was a kid, and also that someone who may have been a burgler once knocked on his door. So The Strangers was inspired by true events in the sense that it's true that, in a very different era, in circumstances very different from those in Bertino's movie, people very different from the people in his film were knifed in their home by people with very different motivations than those assigned to Bertino's masked creeps. And that if you've been reading Helter Skelter and know that there are some crazy sumbitches with knives running around out there somewhere, hearing a knock on the door can really freak you out. But the existence of psychos with knives is a well-established fact. Movies about supernatural events that claim to be somehow rooted in actual events are another kettle of fish, right?

As with so much else, your standards of veracity here may depend on how much you want to believe--or, if you're a filmmaker, how much you stand to gain in box-office revenue and media attention if you have a weird story that you can peddle as true. The Haunting in Connecticut purports to tell the story of the Snedeker family (called the Campbells in the movie), who in 1986 moved into a house in Southington, Connecticut to be close to a hospital at Yale University, where one of the two sons was receiving treatment for cancer. The boys moved into the basement, which had previously been used as a mortuary, and became witness to all manner of ghostly visitors--presumably, ghosts who either had complaints about their embalming or had enjoyed the process so much that they were reluctant to leave. The story was turned into a book, In a Dark Place, by horror novelist Ray Garton, who worked in concert with the Snedekers and Ed and Lorraine Warren, a married team of paranormal investigators who had looked into the case and vouched for its authenticity--which is reason enough to set off the screaming red light on the bullshit detector.

The Warrens, you see, had a hand in the granddaddy of bullshit "true" paranormal stories, that of "the Amityville Horror." That particular load began in November 1974, when 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered his parents and four siblings in the Long Island home where they had lived since 1965. DeFeo, who was known to use heroin and LSD, first tried to convince the police that his family had been wiped out by a Mafia contract killer before confessing to the murders himself; he was sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life, despite his lawyer's plea of insanity. A year later, George and Kathy Lutz and their family moved into the DeFeos' house. They lived there about a year, which turned out to be just enough time to gather the "experiences" that, embellished and augmented by the author's imagination, were plowed by Jay Anson into the 1977 bestseller The Amityville Horror. Reviewing the 1979 movie, which shocked the shit out of everyone involved in it by becoming one of the biggest hits of the year, Veronica Geng wrote that the filmmakers "had to add the horror" and that the book, which tries to make your skin crawl by recalling how the Lutzes were tormented by flies in the house in winter and the haunting sounds of a "German marching band tuning up", "should have been called The Amityville Nuisance.

For the Lutzes, the real Amityville nuisance turned out to be Ronald DeFeo's lawyer, William Weber, who published an article claiming that he and the Lutzes had jointly come up with the idea of concocting a haunting hoax and worked out the outline of what became Anson's book "over many bottles of wine." The idea was to provide a pretext for Weber to appeal DeFeo's case while giving the Lutzes a chance to break away from a house they now realized they couldn't afford, a make a bundle in the process. When the Lutzes sued Weber, the judge threw out the case, saying, "Based on what I have heard, it appears to me that to a large extent the book is a work of fiction, relying in a large part upon the suggestions of Mr. Weber." Kathy Lutz died in 2004, and George died in 2006. He continued to maintain that the book was "mostly true", although he remained vague about the not-mostly part that wasn't and declined to give details about just what happened the night the family claimed to have fled the house for good, saying that it was all "too frightening". (It would have to be better than the 1979 movie, which climaxes with everybody piling into the car and starting to drive away in a heavy rainstorm, only to have George go back on foot to collect the dog and falling through a hole in the floor into a pool of evil-looking black goop.) In 2003, George's stepson Christopher told somebody that the story was "mostly" fiction, and damned if George didn't sue him, too. Meanwhile, the house on Long Island is still there, and in the thirty-three years since the Lutzes got the hell out of Dodge, many occupants have come and gone. None of them has reported having "experienced" shit. That hasn't put a dent in the Amityville Horror industry, which now totals nine films, including direct-to-video specials, the 2005 remake of the 1979 original, and Amityville 3-D.

Compared to the story behind the more recent The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), the sheepish hucksterism of George Lutz and company seem downright adorable. Scott Derrickson's "based on a true story" film is framed as a courtroom drama starring Laura Linney as a lawyer who defends a priest (Tom Wilkinson) who performed an exorcism on a young girl who, the movie shows Linney slowing realizing, really was possessed by demons. The "true story" that this thing is based on is that of Anneliese Michel, a German woman who suffered from clinical depression and epilepsy, the symptoms of which her parents and local church authorities diagnosed as demonic possession. After almost a year at the hands of self-styled exorcists, Michel died of malnutrition and dehydration; both her parents and a pair of dipshit priests were tried and convicted of manslaughter. (This was in 1976; one thing this case and that of The Amityville Horror have in common is that neither might have happened if it hadn't been for The Exorcist.) The 2006 German film Requiem, directed by Hans-Christian Schmid and starring the talented Sandra Hüller, gives a truthful (as opposed to "based on a true story") account of the case. The on-line edition of National Review recently named Emily Rose as one of the 25 best "conservative" movies. Since I didn't vote for it, I trust that I won't take any flak for interpreting this as NR's way of saying that it's intrinsically conservative to starve your daughter to death and tell the judge that you thought it was what God would have wanted.

As for The Haunting in Connecticut, I haven't seen it yet, but Ray Garton has gotten the jump on the inevitable debunking claims, distancing himself from his own book and saying that it took considerable professional skill on his part to just craft a semi-coherent narrative from his discussions with the Snedekers because none of them could “keep their stories straight.” He also implied that drug and alcohol abuse might have been responsible for some of the "unusual" behavior, and has even implied that he's not sure the Snedekers' son was really being treated for cancer. (Meanwhile, used copies of the paperback edition of the out of print book are going for upwards of $160 on Amazon.) For her part, Lorraine Warren has complained that the movie distorts what happened to the Snedekers and that what "really" happened is actually "much scarier" that the movie. (Ed Warren died in 2006). How much you care about all this may depend on how bored you are by the real world, or maybe by whether or not you live in the house that the Snedekers vacated. No one but them has detected any paranormal activity going on, but the current inhabitants are now having to put up with what might be called the Southington Nuisance--rubberneckers who, turned on by the publicity campaign for the movie, have started invading the vicinity in hopes of seeing Bloody Mary waving at them from the attic window. The current homeowner, Susan Trotta-Smith, told a reporter that "Most people are respectful. They stay on the road. They might take a picture. But we have had a few problems with people kind of rudely coming up to the door and scaring our kids, telling them the house is haunted." Now all she has to do is slip her kids copies of Helter Skelter, and they'll be on their way to their own Hollywood careers.

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We’d Most Like To See (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

NATASHA LYONNE

As a jailbait Jewish American Princess with the voice and delivery of a wised-up, middle-aged dame, Natasha Lyonne was the tough-tender soul of the priceless coming-of-age dramedy Slums of Beverly Hills and the best thing about the first two American Pie movies (well, aside from Alyson Hannigan, I mean). She even managed to bring a surprising amount of relatable dignity to her role as a bulimic escaped convict on the lam (and in love) with a psychopathic gal pal in what otherwise might have been the even campier and trashier Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby. Actresses frequently complain about the dearth of good roles for women in film, but in her too-brief above-the-radar career, Lyonne’s bright, bemused persona made even underwritten roles compelling, the clear mark of a comeback-worthy talent. Bland contemporaries like Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson are considered A-list, but I’d rather hear Lyonne read the back of an Oxycontin bottle out loud for two hours than watch Good Luck Chuck or Bride Wars. Unfortunately, booze, heroin and other substances have derailed Lyonne’s life and career in recent years, leading to hospitalizations and legal troubles (one involving threats of dog molestation...even Lyonne’s criminal record is fascinating)! But if Robert Downey, Jr. and Mickey Rourke can make it back from self-inflicted career immolation, here’s hoping Lyonne’s recent stint on Broadway (in the play Two Thousand Years) and busy upcoming film slate (including, according to the Internet Movie Database, projects called Goyband, Heterosexuals, Jelly, Outrage and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle) are good signs that Lyonne has cleaned up her act, quit the dog molestation and will soon return to us in some decent roles (though, to be honest, the fact she’s co-starring with Michael Madsen in Outrage is less than comforting).

KATHLEEN TURNER

Following a scorching debut in the neo-noir Body Heat in 1981, Kathleen Turner – who was already in her late 20s when she made her big-screen debut – did as much as she could to establish herself as more than just a great body, a pretty face, and one of the screen’s sexiest voices. She soon established herself as a versatile and engaging actress, and had a strong career in the 1980s, but Hollywood is notoriously unforgiving of the reality of aging, and she began a slow decline in the 1990s. A combination of personal tragedy, ill health and the general lack of good roles offered to women over forty in Hollywood have caused her to be nearly invisible in the last decade or so, but she’s remained busy on the Broadway stage, and some reports of her savagely controlled performance as Martha in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? suggest that she may have plenty of surprises left in her. If given the chance – and if she has the inclination – Turner could still have a late-period career like that of one of her idols, Katherine Hepburn. Time will tell.

WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

Okay, this one’s probably a bit much to hope for, considering that the man is eighty years old and not in the best condition in the world. But we’ve always believed that William Peter Blatty – best known as the author of the jillion-selling religious thriller The Exorcist – was a great filmmaker trapped inside a good novelist’s body. When he couldn’t find anyone interested in making a big-screen adaptation of his novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, he decided to do it himself, with no formal training as a filmmaker – and the result was the astounding The Ninth Configuration, a genuine cult classic and one of the most surprising directorial debuts of all time. Likewise, when he became understandably unsatisfied with the direction the Exorcist franchise was taking after the rotten Exorcist 2: The Heretic, he took matters into his own hands again with The Exorcist III. And while that’s a deeply flawed film, it’s at least an imaginative one, with terrific glimpses of mood and tone that suggest the kind of thing its director might be capable of with more money and a better cast and crew. Blatty probably has neither the time nor the desire to make another movie, but as both a writer and a director, he’s shown more than once that he’s got greatness in him, and if he never has a Sidney Lumet moment and directs a great movie at the age of 83, we’ll at least always wonder what might have been.

GENE HACKMAN, SEAN CONNERY & WARREN BEATTY

When considering the later careers of many of cinema's most beloved actors, it's difficult to say which is worse -- taking role after role in a string of unworthy projects just to keep busy, or turning your back on acting altogether. In the case of the three actors listed above, we suppose it's understandable that after decades in the business, they would want to put acting aside and enjoy a nice retirement, and given the work they've done, we certainly don't begrudge them that choice. However, it's their most recent films that make us question their decisions. Hackman, always the busiest of the three, usually appeared in several movies a year prior to his decision to retire from acting after starring in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport -- Lord knows that playing second banana to Ray Romano might sour us on acting too. Connery, on the other hand, was still capable of carrying a movie well into his seventies, a gift which, alas, was usually squandered on subpar projects like Finding Forrester and his most recent film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And Beatty, never the most prolific actor to begin with, has been absent from screens since 2001's noxious Town & Country. While Hackman has busied himself writing books and doing voiceover work for Lowe's and Oppenheimer Funds, Connery and Beatty have been content to rest on their laurels and turn down project after project -- Connery declined to reprise his role in the latest Indiana Jones (yet another disappointing aspect of the film), whereas Beatty memorably bowed out of Kill Bill in favor of David Carradine. Still, hope springs eternal. As long as they're still alive and healthy, there will be the possibility that one can't-miss role will come along to lure these guys out of retirement for one final hurrah. After all, they deserve some time for themselves, but they also deserve to take one last triumphant lap before retiring for good.

Click Here For Part One, Two & Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark

The Screengrab: Your One-Stop Site for All Things William Friedkin

Phil Nugent — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

William Friedkin is going to explain himself to us if it takes him all night. His latest telegram from his subconscious is an article in the Guardian to which he has signed his name, ostensibly on the subject of the release of The French Connection on Blu-ray. "The myth of the incorruptible lawman persisted until policing scandals started multiplying [in the late 1960s]. The age of innocence was over with the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Vietnam War, so that after Watergate in 1972, people would believe anything about corruption in all walks of life." According to Friedkin, "Those of us who made films in the 70s were not following the zeitgeist: we shaped it. We no longer believed in a man on a white horse. We knew he was flawed because we were flawed." This all has such a nice ring to it that you kind of hate to point out that everything Friedkin writes seems to be canceled out by his next sentence. Either he "shaped" the zeitgeist instead of "following it", which would seem to indicate that he was out ahead of the curve, or The French Connection, with its racist, trigger-happy supercop antihero Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), was a reflection of attitudes that people had already formed from reading the newspaper. When discussing what set Connection apart back in the day, one factor that Friedkin doesn't bring up is Costa-Gavras's Z, the 1969 political thriller that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and whose slam-bang style, with its percussive editing, was heavily influential on Friedkin's picture. Friedkin was very open about his debt to Costa-Gavras back when he must have thought that it was real artistic for a commercial Hollywood director to know enough about European movies to copy his moves from one. To judge from his deep thoughts here about how all the best cops have a lot of the dark side in them--"Actually, the best cops are the ones who can think like criminals; and there is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal that street cops cross every day. In spite of a series of laws designed to protect the accused, cops can go off the rails in a crisis, and it has to do with adrenaline and the authority the police officer has to exercise power."--Friedkin may have concluded that it would give his reputation a boost if people got the impression that David Milch filched his world view from him.

Nobody asked me, but...while my esteemed colleague Vadim Rizov recently made an intriguing case for the argument that Friedkin has no sense of social obligation, I can't shake the feeling that it's something else that really sets him apart and that helps to explain why, for two years or so, he was the hottest director in Hollywood as well as why, for the 25 years since then, he's been, well, not so much. Looking down his nose at the young hotshots whose movies make more money than his stuff, Friedkin complains that "cop films have become more visceral, less realistic. The levels of violence that were allowed in the 1970s opened the doors to young film-makers who want to push the envelope beyond all limits." Pushing the envelope beyond all limits is, of course, what Friedkin did in both The French Connection and his other blockbuster, The Exorcist. It was shocking at the time, and can still get your pulse rate rising today, but it was silly at the time when some people, trying to find a justification for how exciting the movies seemed, to claim that Friedkin was introducing a new level of "realism" by having his cop so much meaner and the violence more in-your-face than audiences were used to. The Friedkin of The French Connection wasn't the Strindberg of cop operas, he was a hungry, ambitious young hotshot trying desperately to get the attention of an audience that demanded bigger and better shocks at a time when everyday life provided plenty of them. Over the course of two big hits, Friedkin really mastered the exploding-funhouse style that, thanks in no small part to him, set the standard in big commercial thrillers. Then he got a little complacent, and new directors arrived who contrived shinier, louder explostions.

It's not quite true to say that Friedkin is indifferent to how his movies are seen to reflect, or to effect, society. He did make at least one genuine message movie: Rampage, one of the biggest duds of his career, a courtroom drama about a beyond-evil serial killer which he first filmed in 1987 and which only won limited release in 1992, and which Friedkin tinkered with to turn it into a brief for the death penalty. And he did care enough about the charges that Cruising was a homophobic movie that linked homosexuality with psychotic murderousness by holding that unfortunate press conference where he said that he himself had no idea who had committed the murders in the movie or what the killer's motives or sexual orientaton might have been or what the hell the ending was supposed to mean. It's easy to believe him, because The French Connection and The Exorcist are themselves full of plot holes and loose ends and logical stretches out of the Bizarro World, but when Friedkin was truly on his game, the movies just plowed over viewers in a way that kept them good and distracted from that sort of thing. By the time he had finished The Exorcist, Friedkin was a master at the special craft of keeping viewers transfixed by how ugly and repellent everything onscreen was. He got in trouble with Cruising not because he had anything to say for or against gay lifestyles but because he was still working in the same way that had made him a hot ticket, but this time, because of the setting, the movie boiled down, not as "Ewwwwww!! Heroin dealers shot down in cold blood!" or Ewwwwww!! A little girl vomiting on a priest!" but Ewwwww!! Guys dancing together!" It could be that his subsequent films, such as Jade and To Live and Die in L.A., haven't been as successful just because his moment passed: other directors have stolen his thunder, and no matter how brutally he stages his chases and fights, they no longer pass for daringly ugly commentaries on What We've All Come To. And as his attempts to do something different, such as the "comedies" The Brinks Job and Deal of the Century show, it's not as if he knows how to do anything else.

Related Stories: "The French Connection" Influenced Everything

William Friedkins Has No Sense of Social Obligation

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 25-31, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hello, kiddies! It’s me, Pennywise the evil clown, and I’ve got a bone to pick with the Screengrabbers this week. In fact I just may PICK THEIR BONES CLEAN. It’s bad enough they showed me no respect in The Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). But to ignore me completely in the Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon (Parts One, Two, Three and Four)? Unthinkable!

Just look at these other so-called horror classics they saw fit to highlight this week. The Exorcist? I find chunks of guys like him in my stool! Tenebrae? What does that even mean? Seizure? Seize this! Halloween and Friday the 13th? Those are just days of the week to me.

Look, if you want to write about Star Wars auditions or Batman sequels or Zack and Miri making pornos, I’m not going to complain about being left out. Hell, write about farting dog movies for all I care. But when it comes to horror, let’s not forget who’s boss.

Happy Halloween!

Yesterday's Hits: The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)

Paul Clark — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The weeks leading up to Halloween are the most popular time of the year for horror movies, so it was only natural that I would choose one for this week’s Yesterday’s Hits column. But which one? Horror is a popular and relatively profitable genre, in large part because horror movies are generally not too expensive to produce, making it easy for them to turn a profit. Yet there are surprisingly few flat-out blockbusters in the genre. Since 1939, only four movies that might be labeled “horror” have placed among the top five box office hits of their respective years. Two of these were Psycho and Jaws, both of which remain classics not merely of the genre, but of cinema in general. And I wrote about the most recent of the bunch, The Sixth Sense, back in June.

This leaves only The Exorcist. But while William Friedkin’s film has been endlessly parodied over the years, it remains one of the most-watched horror movies of all time, a perennial Halloween favorite. In other words, it’s not what I normally look for in my Yesterday’s Hits selections. So, for the obvious reasons, I’ll be skipping over my usual question of what happened to The Exorcist’s popularity because, well, it never really went away.

What made The Exorcist a hit?: Prior to writing The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty had published several novels without achieving much commercial success, and eventually began writing for movies and television. But The Exorcist changed his fortunes immeasurably. Based partly on an actual exorcism that took place in 1949, Blatty’s novel became a publishing sensation with its no-holds-barred portrait of a young girl’s possession by the devil, and the efforts of her mother and a pair of priests to make her better. Given its critical and popular acclaim, it quickly became clear that The Exorcist would become a major motion picture.

With the newfound power afforded him by his bestselling-author status, Blatty was able to sign on as producer of the Exorcist adaptation. Despite a number of alternative choices on Warner Brothers’ part, Blatty insisted on William Friedkin, a recent Oscar winner for The French Connection, in the hope that he would turn the novel into a serious prestige picture rather than a run-of-the-mill horror movie. In turn, Friedkin jumped in with both feet, bringing the book’s most chilling set pieces to life using state-of-the-art makeup and special effects, which sometimes even endangered the safety of his actors. In addition, the relaxed rating standards of the day allowed Friedkin to make the film more visceral than any big-budget Hollywood production to date. Once word got around that the filmed version of The Exorcist was every bit as horrifying as the novel, audiences turned out in droves, making it the biggest hit of 1973 and one of the top-grossing horror movies of all time.

Does The Exorcist still work?: Yes, although not always in the obvious ways. For one thing, despite its reputation as a classic horror movie, The Exorcist really isn’t all that frightening. There are a handful of eerie moments and memorably macabre images, such as the desecration of a church altar. But by and large, the scares to be found in The Exorcist are of a crude and obvious kind, like Regan (Linda Blair) being tossed around by an unseen presence while lying in bed. Scenes like this are shocking to see once, to be certain, and the level of pre-CGI cinematic trickery is certainly impressive, but they don’t really burrow under your skin in the way the best horror movies do.

However, the movie is successful in a number of other ways, like the way it becomes a story about the limits of science. In the early 1970s, science was making progress to exploring every nook and cranny of the human body, both physically in the case of medicine, and psychologically as well. But in The Exorcist, all of the medical and psychological experiments that are performed on Regan prove futile, and in the end, the only recourse for Regan’s mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn), is religion. In our enlightened age, there’s something undeniably unsettling about the idea that there are still things that lay outside the realm of science, and while Friedkin and Blatty don’t come out explicitly in favor of religion, there’s no denying that it works in the film in ways the medicine does not.

But most compelling of all is Chris’ character arc, which the movie actually takes seriously rather than simply using it to mark time until the next big shock. Chris is a successful actress and a divorcee, and the only thing that’s really permanent in her life is her little girl. So when Regan begins to exhibit her alarming symptoms, Chris finds herself grasping at any possible solution to make her better, usually to no avail. Despite the fact that she’s not religious, she ends up turning to Father Karras (Jason Miller) for help. In perhaps the most affecting moment in the film, Chris pleads to him, “I want you to tell me that you know for a fact that there's nothing wrong with my daughter, except in her mind. You tell me for a fact you know an exorcism wouldn’t do any good.” Due in no small part to Burstyn’s performance, Chris’ storyline and her relationship with Regan make for such a fascinating chamber drama that it’s almost disappointing that the movie ends up resolving itself with visual trickery and mystical gobbledygook.

At the end of the day, The Exorcist isn’t remotely the scariest movie ever made. However, it still works as the prestige picture that Blatty and Friedkin wanted it to be. Sure, Friedkin might have been a pain in the ass while making the film (literally, in Burstyn’s case), but the story and performances work well enough that the end result was worth the effort. If only the film’s sequels had kept this same balance of drama and supernatural horror, The Exorcist might have been the first installment in a classic series, instead of a hugely popular original that spawned three inferior knockoffs. But no matter- it stands on its own just fine.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

10. THE FLY (1986)

Horror movies, contrary to the claims of highfalutin critics like us, don’t necessarily have to be about anything. If they’re scary and well-made and don’t insult your intelligence, just being a good horror movie is enough. But when they are about something, especially in the hands of a storyteller of the depth and intelligence of David Cronenberg, they transcend genre and become something truly special. Cronenberg took a popular pulp story by George Langelaan, which had been filmed once before as a pretty straightforward monster movie in the 1950s, and remade it as a terrific modern-day horror flick, complete with terrifically suspenseful moments and plenty of nauseating fluids for the grindhouse crowd – but he also infused it with a powerful undercurrent of extremely personal terror. The Fly, carried on the hair-sprouting, wing-bearing back of Jeff Goldblum’s greatest performance, is one of the finest movies ever made about the betrayal of the body: in the story of a scientist who is transformed into an insect-like creature, Cronenberg manages to isolate not only the horror, but also the loneliness, the helplessness, and the frustration of the sick and the dying. When Brundlefly is finally dispatched at the movie’s end, the pervasive feeling isn’t one of revenge, or relief – it’s one of terrible sadness.

9. CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

Half a dozen years before George A. Romero went to work re-creating the movie zombie for all time, this film, directed on a shoestring budget by Herk Harvey (with members of a filmmaking team that the Lawrence, Kansas-based Harvey used in his principal business making educational and industrial films) just about invented the modern concept of the independent horror movie, as well as doing its bit to fuzz the line between art film and amateur hour. The first and just about the last film to feature its star, Candace Hilligoss, with Harvey as the most notable of the ghouls who begin to haunt her, it has a dreamy, disconnected quality that may not have been entirely planned but that is especially well-suited to a story that may or may not be happening, about a heroine who may or may not have survived the car accident that opens the film. In fact, parts of Carnival of Souls come as close as any pre-'70s film to anticipating the world of David Lynch -- which makes you wonder if it's a coincidence that Hilligoss' character's name, Mary Henry, contains the names of the central male and female characters of Eraserhead.

8. BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

The 1931 Frankenstein wasn't the first film inspired by Mary Shelley's novel, and it sure wasn't the last, but its imagery was so perfect and powerful -- the shambling monster with the squared-off head, the boxy flat-top and the jacket with the sleeves too short -- that it imprinted itself on the imaginations of generations of viewers, so much so that no later version of the monster ever really looks quite right. This sequel was put together by the same key personnel who worked on the first film -- the director, James Whale, Boris Karloff as the monster and the high-strung Colin Clive as the mad scientist -- but Whale, a campy, stylish wit who would later be played by Ian McKellan in the 1998 Gods and Monsters, really let his dark sense of humor off the leash in this one, resulting in a film that sympathizes with the monster to such a degree that the creature's rallying cry, "I love dead! Hate living!" and his final kiss-off line, after his rejection at the hands of the title figure (Elsa Lanchester), "We belong dead," take on the quality of anthems. Underneath the film's knowing silliness is a genuine, tender regard for those who cannot find love or acceptance in this world, and what greater horror could there be?

7. THE EXORCIST (1973)

William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel isn’t the best movie on this list. The Shining is a greater artistic accomplishment; Psycho is a more important film; The Fly is more meaningful. But for my money, there’s no movie on this list that’s scarier, and isn’t that the whole point of a horror movie? The movie that utterly terrified me as an adolescent still has the potential to give me nightmares as an adult; Friedkin makes judicious use of timing and tone to keep you just interested enough to be alert when the real horror starts, and once it does, he keeps up a mood of sustained menace, ranging from the suggestive to the utterly brutal, that never lets up. In less competent hands, The Exorcist could have degenerated into a boring morass of overblown theatrics and incomprehensible theology – which is exactly what happened in the sequels – but here, with everything firing on all cylinders, the movie instills an almost religious sense of dread even in those who have never sat through a Catholic sermon on the horrors of hell. An extremely formidable cast, anchored by an intense Ellen Burstyn, an ironclad Max Von Sydow, a neurotically brilliant Jason Miller, and a killer one-two punch from Linda Blair and Mercedes McCambridge, helps fix your attention throughout the film, but it’s the handful of truly terrifying moments that keep this a classic. (The restored “Version You’ve Never Seen” only amplifies the constant sense of stress and unease, and if anything, is even more frightening than the original.) Small wonder that Billy Graham claimed that the movie was literally possessed by the Devil.

6. ALIEN (1979)

My parents took my brother and me to see Alien when we were 12 and 10, respectively. To the best of my recollection, my brother bailed for the safety of the lobby sometime around the time the baby “chest-burster” burst from John Hurt’s chest in the film’s iconic and notorious horror film moment, leading to Veronica Cartwright’s stunned and horrified, “Oh, God...” (because, really, what else does one say in such a situation)? I remember feeling very big brother smug about staying bravely in my seat as the ever smaller crew of the freighter Nostromo hunted H.R. Giger’s phallic dentata extraterrestrial through the claustrophobic cabins and corridors of their vessel...until, that is, the moment when sole survivor Ripley (and her cat) abandoned ship...AND THE ALIEN WAS IN THE ESCAPE POD WITH HER! Fuck this, I thought...I wasn’t gonna risk a pre-pubescent heart attack just because my folks thought it would be funny to scare the piss out of their children. Rushing out to join my brother in the lobby, I watched the rest of the movie through a window in the door of the theater, then probably went home and had a few hundred nightmares. In my adult life, I’m more a fan of James Cameron’s 1986 thrill-ride sequel than Ridley Scott’s relatively artsy, slow-moving original...but respect must be paid to any film with the power to induce actual childhood trauma.

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

Contributors: Pierced Leonard, Philled With Evil Nugent, Android Osborne

When Good Directors Go Bad: Cruising (1980, William Friedkin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Usually, when I watch a potential When Good Directors Go Bad title, I’m pretty sure of how I feel about it. Generally, it’ll be a movie I already know that I dislike, or one that I’ve heard enough negative things about that I’m almost positive I’ll join the chorus of naysayers. Occasionally, I’ve tried to defend movies which are much better than their reputations would suggest. But I don’t think I’ve ever been so conflicted about my feelings about a selection than I was with William Friedkin’s Cruising.

Let’s get this out of the way- as straight-up narrative, Cruising is pretty terrible. Plotlines are introduced and abandoned, the central mystery doesn’t really work, and there’s a final “twist” that’s borderline incoherent. Yet for all it faults, Cruising is too haunting and strange a piece of work to be dismissed lightly. It made me scratch my head and occasionally pissed me off, but I was never bored.

Much of the narrative muddiness can be doubt be attributed to the film’s provocative nature. Released in 1980, Cruising tells the story of a murderer who’s prowling New York City’s gay S&M underworld. It was the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, when homosexuality had become more visible in society yet was still misunderstood and frowned upon by most Americans. Naturally, Cruising aroused quite a bit of controversy from both sides. The increasingly-vocal gay rights groups protested the film for its portrayal of homosexuals as being scary, violent psychopaths. Meanwhile, United Artists was looking to make a commercial thriller, so many of the more risqué elements of the film were left on the cutting room floor.

Friedkin has stated that his original cut of Cruising was 140 minutes long, which means that nearly one-fourth of the movie had been shorn away by the time the 102-minute final cut hit theatres. And boy, do the seams show. There’s at least one major subplot- involving a pair of crooked cops who strong-arm a drag queen into performing sexual favors- that the film does absolutely nothing with. Likewise, the film presents a sympathetic homosexual friend for undercover officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), only to forget about him for a long stretch of time until he turns up dead.

Faring even worse is the character trajectory of Burns himself. After being sent undercover to investigate the killings due to his resemblance to a number of the victims, Pacino is purported to be changed greatly by his experience in the gay underworld. Unfortunately, the film has to come right out and tell us this, having Pacino tell his girlfriend (Karen Allen) that “what I’m doing is affecting me.” Really? It seems to me like he isn’t really touched by most of what he sees. It doesn’t help that the film shies away from the more graphic details of Burns’ experiences inside a club called The Ramrod. Does he ever actually have sex with any of the other men, or does he simply walk into the clubs, look around, and leave? The film doesn’t seem to know.

Some of the blame can no doubt be placed on United Artists and the MPAA for demanding such liberal re-cutting of the film. Yet Friedkin is not altogether blameless. Looking back at Friedkin’s Oscar-winning The French Connection, one can find another cop character- Popeye Doyle- who gets far too caught up in his work. But while Friedkin had Popeye define himself almost entirely through his work, Cruising gives Burns a personal life to make him more three-dimensional. However, the scenes we see both of Burns’ personal life and his undercover work are unrevealing, and so he remains largely an enigma. Popeye Doyle was similarly enigmatic, but while we liked him we weren’t meant to care about him. By contrast, we’re meant to get caught up in Burns’ psychological journey, so the fact that we don’t should be construed as a failure on the film’s part. What’s unfortunate is that Pacino gives a fine, surprisingly low-key performance in the role that might distinguished a better film.

In addition, the gay rights protestors did have a point when they spoke out against Cruising. While Friedkin’s portrayal of the S&M underworld is certainly not meant to be a definitive statement about all homosexuals, the character of the killer is nonetheless pretty troubling. The killer is eventually revealed to be a musical theatre student whose father made him feel guilty about his homosexuality, and who takes his guilt out on the denizens on the men he picks up in clubs. After he seduces them, he stabs them repeatedly with a knife while telling them, “you made me do that.” Unfortunately, the killer-queen stereotype was one that wouldn’t go away, as evidenced by the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. To say nothing of the film’s ending, which seems to be saying that Burns’ experiences have turned him into a killer himself. If this is the case, then it’s both laughable and highly troubling.

Yet while Cruising has a multitude of problems, I found myself fascinated by it, and not in a train-wreck sort of way. For one thing, the film’s portrayal of its seamy underworld is still bold by Hollywood standards. In a time before the PC police patrolled every big-studio release and homosexuals became dependable romantic-comedy sidekicks and prestige-picture martyrs, it’s bracing to see a major motion picture that actually allows its homosexual characters to be sexual beings. Although Burns is ostensibly all about the ladies, Friedkin doesn’t shy away from the details of the sex lives of the other denizens of The Ramrod (how’s THAT for un-PC?). There’s a tangible allure to the danger this world presents to those who inhabit it, yet when you consider that the very real danger of AIDS still hadn’t announced itself, these scenes feel almost poignant. Also, it’s hard to believe Friedkin got away with a shot in which a character lubes up his entire forearm, but there you go.

On top of it all, the movie’s just too damn weird to dismiss, and it’s easy to see why Cruising has amassed a sizable cult since its original release. What can one say about a movie that pauses for Powers Boothe to describe the meanings of the various bandanas that are worn by the cruising men, to say nothing of a police interrogation that’s abruptly interrupted by a hulking black man wearing only a cowboy hat and a jockstrap? On balance, I suppose Cruising does indeed qualify as a case of Friedkin “going bad,” another step in the downward spiral that torpedoed the career of the once-hot director of The French Connection and The Exorcist. But damn if it’s not fascinating.

List-o-Mania: “Ten Bad Dates with De Niro”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

You know we love our lists here at the Screengrab (tune in later this week for the 10 Greatest Colostomy Bags in Movie History), but even we bow before Richard T. Kelly, creator of Ten Bad Dates with De Niro. First Kelly edited the book of that name, subtitled A Book of Alternative Movie Lists. It’s chock full of great ideas for us to steal, from “The Mighty Apoplexies Of Pacino – Ten Scenes Where ‘Shouty Al’ Shows Up” to “Capital Offences – Ten Places You Wouldn't Expect To Find A Severed Head.” It’s also got some guest stars we haven’t been able to nab so far. Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) weighs in with “A Surprising Intimacy – Ten Films That Have Interesting Sensuality,” while the Coen Brothers offer up “Ripe For Remake - Five Films We’d Like To See Remade.” (Among their choices is Koyaanisqatsi: “We have not seen the original but suspect it could be interestingly remade with Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher.”)

The book was only the beginning, however – Ten Bad Dates with De Niro is also a blog, complete with daily lists! Well, that’s the claim anyway; in reality, the last list was posted on February 15th (10 Favorite Roy Scheider Roles). Still, there are some items of interest to be found. For instance, “Lights! Camera! Vomit! 10 Great Up-Chucks.” We can go along with Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life edging out The Exorcist, but I’m not sure we would have thought of Husbands: “John Cassavetes somehow ennobles on screen vomiting, thus making a mockery of the genre. Still he also manages to make it kind of funny.” Truly, this is the essence of cinema.

"The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema" in The Believer

Phil Nugent — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Slavoj Zizek may not exactly be overexposed in movies, but he's come closer to it than any other Slovenian film theorist, Lacanian philosopher, and sometime presidential candidate I can think of. (The Guardian once called him "the Elvis of philosophy", ignoring Elvis's famous statement that he thought that Lacan was "about as funny as a turd in a punchbowl.") A couple of fall festival seasons back, the bearded, bearish Zizek could be seen pontificating about such subjects as Hitchcock and David Lynch, The Exorcist and The Matrix, in Sophie Fiennes's two-and-a-half-hour The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, which was at least the third film documentary built around his gruff-accented rumblings, and which was widely acclaimed as his definitive star turn. The movie has yet to be distributed here in theaters or on DVD, but you can watch a fifty-minute chunk of it on a DVD that comes with "The 2008 Film Issue" of The Believer. In a brief accompanying tribute, Jason McBride describes Zizek's approach in this film essay as "dialectical materialism for the multiplex." I don't know what that means, but it sure is catchy.

Earlier film directors (including Alfonso Cuaron, who included Zizek among the list of all-star bigbrains who appeared in The Possibility of Hope, the documentary short that was included as a bonus on the Children of Men DVD, which also included a Zizek commentary track) have been content to stick a camera in front of Zizek and watch him spout. Finnes, trying to supply some cinematic fireworks to match the stream of words pouring out of her star, provides him with settings drawn from the film clips that are intercut with his monologue; we see him sitting in a chair in Norman Bates's basement, sitting across from Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus and demanding, "I vant a third pill!", steering the boat taking Tippi Hedren to Rod Taylor's island home in The Birds (the title of which Zizek pronounces as "The Burks"), and in Dorothy Vallens's apartment in Blue Velvet, passively observing her mating ritual with Frank Booth. (Disappointingly, he and Frank don't pass the inhaler back and forth.) At first it seems like a cute gimmick, but it begins to feel like the logical next step in Zizek's approach. He loves movies, but he also has mixed feelings about their hold on them, the way they invade and impose themselves on his dream life. Spinning theories about where these images come from and how they work is his way of fighting back and reclaiming some territory within his own inner space; Fiennes makes it possible for him to escape the lecture room and take the fight to his subject's home turf. In addition to the DVD (and the already-notorious Werner Herzog-Errol Morris conversation), there are a few other things in the magazine that aim to get at the movies' assaults on our dreams, and our conscious minds' efforts to stand their ground, that might do Zizek proud. Notable among them are the tribute to the late Leonard Schrader's vast collection of lobby cards,, and Devin McKinney's persuasive argument, which bows to neither purists nor James Stewart partisans, that Henry Fonda should have played Scottie in Vertigo.

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Cinema, a form that makes it possible for the artist to actually devise and stage his own dreams and record them for posterity, has always had a fascination with psychiatrists, explorers of the mind who endeavor to delve into their patients' subconscious for clues as to how to better understand and regulate their conscious behavior. The new HBO series In Treatment is remarkable for how accurately it captures the droning frustration of a session with a typical modern shrink, whose concern that he not appear judgemental or nonobjective leaves him with little to do but sit there grunting noncommittally while the person who's paying for his time sits there tearing his hair out. But it wasn't always that way. As depicted in movies, psychiatry was once a dashing profession, inhabited by risk takers who jumped into their patients' lives with both feet and made a real effort to make a difference. More often than not, the differences they made were scary, destructive, and hair-raising. Still, it must have been nice for their patients to know that they were sharing their problems with someone who cared. Such as these worthies:

1. DR. CALIGARI (WERNER KRAUSE) in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919)

Dr. Caligari (Werner Krause) runs the laughing academy in the picturesque German mountain village of Holstenwall. As the film's narrator tells it, Caligari has been using hypnotism to control his charge Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and has also been trying to help the patient to find a place for himself in society by exhibiting him at the local geek show. When Caligari invites members of the crowd to test Cesare's omniscient powers by asking him an unanswerable question, the narrator's friend, being German, asks him not when Chinese Democracy is going to be finished but when he, the friend, will die. Cesare tells him that he will die the next dawn, and because the doctor has taught him that words must be backed up by action, makes sure that the prophecy comes true by tracking the fellow down and throttling him to meet the deadline. At the end of the movie, all this is revealed to a delusional fantasy of the narrator's, who is in fact an inmate in the asylum where Caligari really is chief of staff. The film ends with Caligari's happy announcement that, now that the narrator has gone to the trouble of envisioning a landmark work in the history of silent German Expressionist cinema, Caligari now has the key to his treatment. Maybe if a few more of the people in analysis had cared a little more about breaking new ground cinematically, the success rate among those in therapy would skyrocket.

2. DR. YEN LO (KHIGH DHIEGH) in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

At first glance, Dr. Yen Lo seems to be the ideal psychiatrist. He has a wife he dotes on, an easy bedside manner, an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest medical and behavioral techniques, and a quick wit. “Always with humor!”, he tells a colleague, with a beaming smile on his Chinese face. It’s only when you realize that the joke he’s just told his nervous compatriot involves using him as the test dummy on which to unleash his newly reprogrammed assassin, and that his gregarious, friendly bedside manner only comes after he has completely rewired your brain and turned you into a remorseless killer that the bloom starts to come off the rose. And sooner or later, you’re going to realize that he may have gotten you to lose weight and play a mean game of solitaire, but he’s also gotten you hooked on yak dung cigarettes. To sum up, Dr. Yen Lo isn’t the kind of doctor who is going to get a lot of referrals through the HMO. But he is, as played by omnipresent character actor Khigh Dhiegh in the immortal 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, the man who made an unstoppable, relentless killer out of war hero Raymond Shaw, and one of the most sinister psychiatrists in cinematic history. (Dhiegh specialized in portraying menacing Chinese – he was also Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-0 – but he was actually not east Asian at all, but of North African Arab origin.) It’s his jolly, disarming manner that makes his aptitude at destroying innocent men’s minds so particularly monstrous; and worst of all, he gets off scot-free in a movie soaked with bloody murder: the last time we see him, he’s tottering off to Macy’s to tick some items off of Madame Lo’s shopping list.

3. DR. LOUIS JUDD (TOM CONWAY) in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

When you think about how many overpaid chin-scratchers are using their psychiatry degrees as a license to tap into the bank accounts of people who have abandonment issues or wished that daddy had hugged them more, you have to feel a certain admiration for Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who bravely agreed to take on the more difficult case of a deeply troubled young woman (Simone Simon) who was reluctant to consummate her marriage because she was convinced that if she did, she would turn into a sharp-clawed, fang-toothed jungle cat, with dire effects for any naked man who happened to be embracing her at the time. Dr. Judd's breakthrough method of treatment for her condition--i.e., putting the moves on her--remains controversial; some feel that he violated the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship, while others, pointing out that it was the patient's husband who retained him, argue that anyone who puts his confused, hot young wife in the hands of a guy with a pencil line mustache and a family resemblance to George Sanders is begging for whatever happens. In the end, Dr. Judd surprised himself, if no one else, by establishing that if anyone hit on his patient hard enough she really would turn into a murderous jungle cat, and in his last moments on Earth he wrapped up the case by shooting his client, thus making himself a hero figure to therapists everywhere.

4. COL. VINCENT KANE (STACY KEACH) in THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

“I’m telling you, Billy, Kane is Gregory Peck in Spellbound,” says Lt. Frank Reno (who is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs) to the depressed astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw. “It’s just like that movie. He comes to take over the nuthouse and he’s nuts himself.” Cutshaw responds to this news by requesting that Reno drop out of a tree like an overripe mango, but the lieutenant is right: Col. Vincent Kane, the Marine Corps psychiatrist sent to take charge of an insane asylum staffed by disturbed Vietnam veterans, is in fact the craziest man in the joint. The actual extent of his insanity is slowly teased out over the course of this gripping, underrated movie written and directed by The Exorcist’s William Peter Blatty; it begins as a surreal, endlessly quotable comedy, and, as Kane’s madness is revealed, becomes a dark, deep philosophical drama. Colonel Kane is played by Stacy Keach in what can only be described as the role of a lifetime, and he meets it with gusto. At first, he’s full of quiet compassion and boundless sympathy, but with the right provocations and the slightest circumstance, he’s fully transformed into the raging, lethal “Killer” Kane. One of his most memorable scenes comes when his subordinate, Major Groper, cavils at having to play dress-up as part of the inmates’ role-playing therapy; demanding love and compassion from Groper, Kane morphs, werewolf-like, from an impossibly kindly shrink to a seething, hissing, screaming maniac of a Marine drill instructor who’d just as soon see someone dead as insubordinate. Groper, by the way, gets one of the movie’s funniest lines earlier in the movie: warning the men – who he considers to be goldbricking fakers – that the asylum will soon be taken over by the formidable Kane, he hollers: “Too bad, boys! Tough shit! Because guess who’s coming? A PSYCHIATRIST! The best! The best in uniform! The greatest fucking psychiatrist since Jung!” Naturally, he pronounces it with a hard J.

5. DR. HANNIBAL LECTER (BRIAN COX) in MANHUNTER (1986) and ANTHONY HOPKINS in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), HANNIBAL (2001), and RED DRAGON (2002)

In many ways, this is an atypical entry for this list, as in the four films set during Dr. Hannibal Lecter's adult life, we almost never actually see him working with patients. Yet I doubt anyone would contest his inclusion here. Formidably intelligent, impossibly cultured, and certifiably wacko, Lecter's appetites take him all over the world and into many realms of human experience. Yet even more than his taste for human flesh, what makes him truly scary is the way he uses that great big brain of his to toy with those he perceives as being beneath him. As a character explains in Hannibal, Lecter preys on what he calls "the rude," and his most severe mind games are reserved for those who offend his cultivated sensibilities. Think of the way he talks Multiple Miggs into swallowing his own tongue after Miggs insults Clarice. Or the way he drugs Mason Verger and convinces him to carve up his own face. But even when he's dealing with people he respects more, he can't help himself — consider his conversations with Clarice, in which he drops hints about the case she's working on, but in the form of riddles rather than as straightforward clues. One almost feels sorry for him after a while — after all, what else does he have left to enjoy in life but his mind?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

S-Horror?

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As we gear up for another spring full of rampaging monsters and psychopathic serial killers, Desson Thompson in the Washington Post wonders if something elemental to the whole concept of the horror movie isn't missing: the victim.

After the usual handwringing over the 'torture porn' generation, the artist formerly known as Howe goes on to make some pretty compelling points: the horror films of today — even the stylized, artsy ones influenced by or coming from the J-horror movement — tend to focus entirely on the means by which the victims are dispatched: intricate traps, complex schemes, gruesome tortures, gigantic monsters. Very little attention, on the other hand, is given to providing the audience with an identification figure: while in previous horror films we were at least able to identify with the person going through such terrifying treatment (as in Rosemary's Baby) or with the person doing the terrorizing (as in Psycho), the modern-day horror film has lost its focus, one way or another, on humanity and gives us precious little to care about beyond the novelty of learning how the next victim will snuff it. "When we think of the horror classics", says Thomson, "we don't recall the gruesome acts so much as the people who weathered them. Think of Rosemary Woodhouse, the determined mother in Rosemary's Baby, who faces the prospect her baby has been fathered by the Devil. Remember Regan MacNeil, the sweet pre-teen of The Exorcist, whose satanic transformation forces heroics from two soft-spoken priests. Even Jack Torrance, the demented murderer at the heart of The Shining, affects us because he's a husband and father gone horribly awry, not some abstract ax wielder."

Providing a much-needed antidote for this alienating inhumanity in the horror genre, he claims, are a new wave of Spanish horror directors, presaged by Guillermo del Toro in the disturbing Pan's Labyrinth and followed up by two of his proteges, director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez, whose dark, moody The Orphanage is enjoying limited release in the U.S. They both cite the Spanish cultural heritage of the Day of the Dead (which is "not something that you look upon as horrifying or sad or terrible but as a way to conciliate with death; you bring death home instead of trying not to think about it", according to Sanchez) and the country's all-too-recent emergence from the shadows of fascism as reasons why this brand of non-gory, emotionally powerful, human-centered horror is hitting home with their audiences.

Whether or not The Orphanage will trigger a string of "S-horror" hits in the U.S., they're doing quite well at home; the movie was last year's highest-grossing film in Spain, outstripping even the blockbuster foreign imports like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

The Ten Best Deleted Scenes of All Time, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN," ALMOST FAMOUS

Depending on your feelings about Cameron Crowe, this is either the ballsiest or the most pretentious deleted scene ever released on DVD. Either way, Almost Famous would have been ten minutes and eleven seconds longer if Crowe had secured the rights to "Stairway to Heaven," which plays over this scene in its entirety. Here's the set-up: it's the early '70s, and high-school music critic William Miller (Patrick Fugit) has been offered the opportunity to accompany his favorite rock band on tour, but his mother (Frances McDormand) believes that rock n' roll is the devil's music. In order to convince her otherwise, William sits his family down and makes them listen to "Stairway." And they listen. And we listen. And we watch them listen. For eight minutes. The most amazing thing about this scene is that it works : it's a battle between William's youthful enthusiasm and his mother's skepticism, played out in facial expressions and body language. When McDormand's character reaches her decision, it's perfectly clear how she got there.

THE SPIDERWALK, THE EXORCIST

For all its grotesque make-up, bodily fluids and levitation effects, The Exorcist gets the most scare mileage from scenes in which possessed adolescent Regan (Linda Blair) does something that almost seems human — but is, in fact, frightening and impossible. The scene in which her head turns completely around is a bone-chilling example. This infamous deleted scene, achieved with the aid of a contortionist body double and suspension wires, is another. Director William Friedkin cut the spider walk from the theatrical release of The Exorcist, believing that it showed "too much" too soon. It later became the most talked-about inclusion in the director's cut, and it ranks among the film's most notable scenes for sheer creepiness.

THE RECORD-SELLING SCENE, HIGH FIDELITY

For record store clerk/owner Rob Gordon (John Cusack), romantic passion and musical passion are completely intertwined. If he were to lose faith in either one, life would not be worth living. That sentiment is perfectly encapsulated in this deleted scene from High Fidelity, in which a jilted wife (Beverly D'Angelo) attempts to sell Rob her husband's priceless record collection at an obscene discount. Most collectors would pounce on the deal, but Rob is thrown into a moral quandary — almost as if he's afraid of hurting the records' feelings. In addition to its endearing portrait of Rob's unique personal ethics, this scene forshadows his pivotal realization later in the film: that he actually kind of loves the job he spends his life bitching about.

THE PHONE CALL HOME, BIG

The '80s were a decade of body-switching comedies, but Penny Marshall's Big was a cut above the rest. Twenty years later, it's still fresh, believable and funny, mostly because Marshall eschews bloated gags and focuses on the small, day-to-day difficulties of being a child in a middle-aged world. There's a dark edge to the film's best moments, which inevitably emerge from Josh's fear, bewilderment and naiveté. This deleted scene takes place after Josh (Hanks) has received his first adult paycheck ("One hundred and twenty dollars!" he exclaims, having never seen that much money before) and spent it gorging on junk food. Up all night with a stomachache, the only thing Josh can think to do is call his mother — who, of course, doesn't recognize his post-puberty voice. The newly released extended version of Big includes this scene, and it's a moving counterpoint to the giddy junk-food-and-silly-string orgy that precedes it.

"MERCY" (THE LAIR SCENE), ALIEN

This gut-wrenching scene, cut from the theatrical release of Alien, contains a startling revelation: with the exception of John Hurt's character (whose chest was memorably split open), none of the alien's victims are dead. Instead, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) discovers the half-alive bodies of her friends being devoured, slowly and painfully, by the alien's offspring. In addition to being a great scene for Weaver — you can see her humanity leaking away as she aims that flamethrower — it's one of the more horrifying visuals that the filmmakers created, and it contains a stunning H. R. Giger set piece that didn't make it into the theatrical version.

— Gwynne Watkins

Check back tomorrow for Part 2!