by Wallace, Amy
8. Evil Dead (seen on VHS): That damned white box was what sealed the deal. If you remember, the old EMI videos would sometimes come in white VHS hardcover plastic shells, and for some reason, I convinced my mother to heed Stephen King’s claim that the film was “the most ferociously original film of the year” and just rent it . . . how bad could it be, right? Most of the horror videos at the time were in black hard cases or those huge porno boxes with the glossy cardboard finish displaying H. G. Lewis movies instead of Little Oral Annie. In our video store (which at the time was a kiosk in the King Kullen) the Evil Dead box was white, which to me meant “pussy” or “Rainbow Brite.” So my mom relented, thinking “Well, Stephen King did see it . . .” and next thing I knew, I was having nightmares of trees going up my ass and spending years trying to figure out “How did they do that?” while my mother kept buying me Gorezone magazine and taking me to the magic store to buy latex and spirit gum. Thanks, Raimi. Then again, it was the film that taught me the word “disembowelment,” so all was not lost!
9. Last of the Mohicans (seen in theaters): What??? Lynch, you’re going soft on us! I know, I know. The reason this film is on this list is because it was one of the few flicks that Mom took us to that wasn’t a horror movie, yet for some reason we were all in agreement that we would sneak into it after the action onslaught that was Under Siege. (God bless that birthday cake, huh?) But Michael Mann’s sweeping and exciting adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel also had multiple scalpings, numerous bloody battles, a graphic ambush with stabbings galore, one of the greatest third acts in cinema history, and the best kiss/makeout scene this side of Rear Window. So why is it on the list? To balance things out, guys . . . not all of these films have to be horror. My mother shouldn’t have illegally snuck us into this movie, but the dramatic power the film had over her and her three psychotic boys was astounding. Mann not only shoots the hell out of this movie, but the emotional impact of characters’ dying was to me what horror movies were missing at the time I saw it. Wait, we’re supposed to feel bad when this character is burned at the stake, or when another sacrifices himself for his true love? All this violence, and my heartstrings are being tugged? I was confused, but also excited that a film like this had affected us so much in the theater. It has now become a family staple and I believe is my mother’s favorite film. (I don’t think her peer group would accept The Exorcist.) Plus, throw Last of the Mohicans in on a “movie night” date, and after the famed necking scene between Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe, I guarantee you’ll be sliding into second base in no time.
10. Psycho (seen on TV): I remember this classic Hitchcock slasher from the many TV airings it had on New York’s WPIX, Channel 11, but even more so from the poster my mom bought me for my bedroom before I even saw it. I admired the beauty of the framed pop-art-esque one-sheet daily when I stepped out of the room. It reminded me that Hitch was a Cinema King and that Janet Leigh’s undergarments defined “perk.” One night my mother made an extended effort to make sure my homework was done early, then made a big buttery bowl of popcorn, and we sat down to watch Psycho together, even though its razor-sharp tension was dulled by commercial breaks for peanut butter Twix and Tab. No matter; even with the commercials and all the lights on in the house, we were both chilly with fright, from the rainy, fateful drive to the Bates Motel, to the final moments of the dark smile over Norman’s face. The silent tension that precedes the most famous shower scene in film history is what sticks with me—that, and how a film that could play on public television without too many edits could still feel brutal and unflinching.
F. X. FEENEY’S TEN ESSENTIAL
“CHILDREN OF HORROR” FILMS
F. X. Feeney is best known for his writings on film for L.A. Weekly and the Z Channel. Feeney’s credits as a screenwriter include Frankenstein Unbound (1990), which he wrote for director Roger Corman, based on the novel by Brian Aldiss; and The Big Brass Ring (1999), based on a story by Orson Welles, for director George Hickenlooper. His books include Roman Polanski and Michael Mann,both published by Taschen.
I was tempted to call this list “Children, Grandchildren, and Stepchildren of the Damned.” One scary kid on film breeds legions of others, it seems, in hit after hit—though it’s fascinating to note that monstrous children never appeared onscreen until after 1945. Strictly speaking, they arrive in the late 1950s: but that’s in keeping with the rebuilding of the world which followed Spain’s civil war, the Nazi genocide against the Jews, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the whole of World War II. Humanity had never been obliged to consider so many displaced, lost children at one time before. The notion of “mutation” (for which we can thank our friend the atom) was also new. How better to dramatize these terrors and potential horrors than by focusing on children, whose potentials are by definition limitless?
1. El Espirituenlas Colmena (The Spirit in the Beehive) (1973): Ana Torrent (born in 1966) was barely five years old when Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice (born in 1941) cast her in the lead of this mysterious film-poem. Torrent’s vulnerable presence and wondering, oceanic gaze are the epicenter around which the world of the film orbits—the bleak plateaus of remotest Spain circa 1940, in the silent aftermath of that country’s civil war.
She encounters a monster: James Whale’s classic horror film Frankenstein, noisily projected on a bare wall—the very first movie she ever sees. The experience disturbs and obsesses her. The creature haunts her dreams—especially the scene where, in his own childlike enthusiasm at being accepted, the monster accidently (indeed, “innocently”) drowns a child (the great Marilyn Harris). Ana begins sneaking out of the house at night, in efforts to contact the “spirit” of the monster—a quest that (with terrifying and poetic results that can make your hair stand) becomes her initiation to adult understanding.
Although this is not, strictly speaking, a horror film, by invoking the experience of Whale’s masterpiece—that most primal of the breed—the story, through the lens of Torrent’s precocious capacities for terror, pity, and awe—for projecting grief to grown-up size—integrates the very meaning of “the horror tale” into our world, where the monsters preying upon us are the forces of history itself. This is a great gift to both lovers of horror, and poetry.
2. The Bad Seed (1956): One of the most charismatically horrid children in dramatic literature is Rhoda, the demon-next-door in Maxwell Anderson’s play, The Bad Seed. She is an eight-year-old, blind of conscience, who murders without remorse and lies about it without batting an eye. Patty McCormack played this role—at age eight—on Broadway, and though she was arguably getting a mite long in the tooth (at age eleven!) by the time Mervyn LeRoy translated the play onto the screen, she remains the Iconic Evil Child of cinema. To these eyes, the secret of McCormack’s precocious power is that she’s so smart and funny, but never seems “knowing,” and never ever plays for laughs. When she sets to work manipulating the adults around her, she is purely terrifying. Yet her energy is such that (innate, killer-comedic timing applied to horror will do this), over time, a ticklish anticipation at how far she will go may have you chuckling—in horror.
3. Village of the Damned (1960): “They’re children,” says the humane man of science, played by George Sanders. “Don’t be sentimental,” replies the military commander. “They must be destroyed!”
Sanders is, of course, father to one of this terrifying brood— “Or perhaps not,” he drily adds. Imagine a whole gang of Bad Seed Patty McCormacks: A circle of children—conceived in a weird multiple instance of Immaculate Conception—are born in the English village of Midwich on the same day, after a fourmonth gestation, and proceed to mature ten years in a matter of two or three. Similar incidents are taking place in remote villages around the world, though in those cases the locals (including the Soviets) have killed the children in their cradles. Here in more humane England, scientific curiosity prevails—until it is clear that these little telepaths are not just “otherworldly” but literally extraterrestrial, and bent
on world conquest.
At a mere seventy-seven minutes, the film has a fairytale power in its brevity. Any longer, and it might have become “psychological”—obliged us to identify too strongly with either Sanders or the alien kids, and wrecked the clean flame of the outcome—which can fill your memory with puzzling and disturbing shadows for years after.
4. “Toby Dammit” from Histoires Extraordinaire (Spirits of the Dead) (1968): Terence Stamp plays actor Toby Dammit in the throes of a wildly decadent meltdown. “I’m not an actor!” he insists, as he clutches the trophy at an awards ceremony and kneels, hoarding it close to his chest amid a standing ovation. His even greater prize is the sleek, devilishly speedy sports car his admirers give him—and here master director Federico Fellini perhaps tips his hat to the late James Dean, for isn’t it true that the shadow of all obsessive mass-admiration is subtly but forcefully a wish for our beloveds to die, youthfully and beautifully, so we might love them forever? One hates to think so, but the historic record is rather comically on the Devil’s side of the ledger, as Fellini conceives it. Freely adapted from Edgar Alan Poe’s story “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” we follow Toby as he roars through the streets of the night city, tempted toward Destiny (be it an orgasm, be it death) by a devil who repeatedly appears to him in the form of an angelic child (Marina Yaru, perfect), whose sinister, half-dead, half-sexualized gaze hints at infinities of possibility.
5. Don’t Look Now (1973): Although a young actress named Sharon Williams inhabits the red coat during this film’s terrifying beginning, and Adelina Poerio (details withheld!) wears it at the horrifying finale, the child in the red coat is less the result of a performance than of a masterfully evoked idea. Her little red coat is the only way we know her, because (just as for the grieving father played by Donald Sutherland, who is catastrophically undone by his ache to have her back in his life) she embodies both a heart-rending memory and a hope, always just one step ahead of us, always out of reach.
6. The Exorcist (1973): What child in jeopardy could be more iconic than one in the grip of Satan?
Nearly everybody sees this film sooner or later, so it needs little celebration from yours truly, but several strokes of genius must be acknowledged. First, there is the Jesuit-educated novelist, William Peter Blatty, whose bestselling novel tapped into a deep need for religious faith in an American public tested by a decade of political assassinations and civic turmoil, and a comparable need in the world at large, tested constantly by wars and social collapse. If there’s a Devil, there must be a God, right? This is exactly the primal, unspoken logic Blatty tapped into. Second, there is filmmaker William Friedkin, whose own storytelling genius was so engaged by Blatty’s screenplay that he applied every sensitivity, every ounce of craft and ingenuity, into creating a film which provokes the imagination as richly, if not more so, than the novel. Together, they made us see the devil in actress Linda Blair. Despite that she must work at the center of a brilliant maelstrom of diabolic effects, from the sounds of pigs being slaughtered to the husky voice of Mercedes McCambridge, her possession would not be scary or moving if Blair were not so sweet, so spontaneous and authentic.
7. The Shining (1980): I have this image in my head of Stephen King reading Blatty’s The Exorcist in 1971 and thinking, “I can top this.” After all, why stop at a kid being possessed by Satan when you can explore the ecstatic equivalent, a boy who is psychic and can handle it, menaced by a father who is just as psychic, but can’t? Top this with the fact that Stanley Kubrick was offered The Exorcist and turned it down, only to regret this decision when he saw what a mega-hit Friedkin made of it. When King’s bestselling novel later crossed his desk, Kubrick brought all of his passion and precision to bear on realizing it as a film.
The result is yet another iconic “child in jeopardy,” whose signature moment comes when Danny Torrance (played by young Danny Lloyd, of the thousand-yard stare) pilots his winged tricycle through the empty corridors of the Overlook Hotel, only to come upon the ghosts of twins his own age (Lisa and Louise Burns). They used to live in this place, until their father axemurdered them. They invite him to “come and play with us,” and that is their final warning. Never underestimate the capacity of kids to stick up for one another, whatever their states of being.
8. City of Lost Children (1995): A young boy dreams that Santa Claus has come. But then, dream grading into nightmare, another, then another, and still other identical Santas come down the chimney. The room fills with them before the boy awakens with a cartoon howl.
So begins this comical, poetic nightmare of a film by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (the latter of whom has gone on to direct such excellent films as Amélie [2000] and A Very Long Engagement [2005]). In City of Lost Children, the gaunt, decrepit villain is a stealer of children’s dreams. He kidnaps kids, wires them up to a strange helmet matching the one on his head, and eavesdrops on whatever unfolds while they sleep. He’s no longer capable of having dreams himself, or even of shedding his own tears—a textbook definition of adulthood, in the context of this movie. His only opponents are a circus strongman who has the mind of a child, and an orphaned nymphet who has the street-smarts of a miniature adult—a platonic pair of storybook lovers in a dinghy, like the owl and the pussycat. They row across the toxic-looking sea, under its perpetual full moon, to rescue the little boy from the first scene—but they also mean to liberate the villain, and this is the beauty of this film’s ethical core. Adults, it is implied, are the children of this world most in need of rescuing.
9. The Sixth Sense (1999): We’ve seen kid psychics—The Shining (1980)—and movie children have long been magically anointed into lives of special destiny—from the legends of King Arthur to the libraries of Harry Potter—but if there’s a more original rite-of-passage in fantasy or horror than The Sixth Sense, which so movingly elevates a mortal child to the role of ghostly ambassador between this world and the next, I’m not aware of it.
Many celebrate the ingenious twist with which this film delivers our hero’s protector (Bruce Willis), and us, to a new understanding in the film’s final moments. In the realm of fantasy, only Planet of the Apes (1968) has so effectively hidden such a jaw-dropping shocker in plain sight. But the greatness of The Sixth Sense derives instead from the depths at which it charts both the terrors of childhood, while dramatizing the astonishing practical strength with which children everywhere master their fears. Haley Joel Osment is essential to this—he has, precociously, the gravitas of James Stewart in Vertigo as he probes the maze of shocks with which his great gift confronts him. (“I see dead people!”) More wonderful than any wild final twist is the simplicity he summons in himself at the film’s most horrifying moment—hiding under a tent of blankets, he finds he has company, the outraged soul of a young murdered girl (Mischa Barton). This moment hits every nerve in a viewer, because each of us has, when small, feared what might lurk under our beds, and when grownup, felt a stab of animal panic at that floorboard which creaks for no reason at four in the morning. Haley gets a grip, and simply asks the ghost: “Can I help you?”
Can’t beat that for a role model. Ever since, roused, braindead and primally afraid, from safe sleep, above the age of 50, I’ve asked the squeaky floors in my place the same thing—and it never fails to relax both me, and the Unseen.
10. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Manhunter (1986): What are these two movies doing here? one might ask. Although we often fear for Will Graham’s son in Manhunter, and whole families are attacked (children included), the action centers around the doings of adults, and the same goes for Silenceofthe Lambs, where no child is in immediate evidence.
And yet—jeopardized childhood, and monstrous transformations, are at the very heart of the horror in both films. Think of how Hannibal Lecter probes Clarice, the young detective in The Silenceofthe Lambs, fishing for clues to the child she used to be, and in many ways still is. He’s not merely being a murderous, cannibal psychiatrist hunting his next mental meal, though that
’s the surface tension. At his core, he is seeking evidence that somewhere in this hideous world, one rare child has managed to achieve adulthood, with what’s best in her, unspoiled. He is riveted by Clarice’s tale of attempting to rescue lambs from slaughter. He even makes a pencil sketch, in the manner of a religious icon; for that’s the feeling she’s aroused in him—a restored belief. Every clue we detect of Lecter’s early life (like that jumble of strange maternal stuff in his storage unit) hints at a world of child abuse so deep we’d do better not to fathom it, only trust that it’s there. This is why Hannibal and Hannibal Rising inevitably failed. No one—not even Hannibal’s creator, Thomas Harris—can mine the darkness behind such evil without trivializing the causes into sentimentality. It is what is unknown about evil acts, and what is unknown about the world we each confront as children, that is most terrifying, and therefore most cathartic, about stories involving children and horror.