by Wallace, Amy
In Manhunter, when FBI-man Jack Crawford accuses detective Will Graham of going soft—“feeling sorry” for the “Red Dragon” serial killer they’re pursuing—he replies: “As a child, my heart bleeds for him. Someone took a kid and manufactured a monster. But as an adult, he’s irredeemable. He murders whole families in pursuit of trivial fantasies. As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks.”
This clear-cut, remarkably sane statement sums up the moral core inseparable from any film in which children must act in relation to horror. Heroism is a response, not a fact of nature: We may not be responsible for the horrors perpetrated upon us, but we are always accountable for how we respond.
DOUGLAS BUCK’S TEN FAVORITE
FAMILIAL HORROR MOVIES
With his disturbing short films, including the notorious Cutting Moments, Douglas Buck has been a continuing presence at international genre festivals for over ten years.
With the theatrical release in France and NewYork of his first indie feature, Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America, to outstanding critical reception (including raves in both the cinephile bible Cahiers du Cinéma and the mainstream Premiere), and the completion of his second feature Sisters, starring Academy Award nominees Chloë Sevigny and Stephen Rea, it appears Buck’s time under the radar has passed. He’s arrived.
1. The Corpse (1970): English stockbroker daddy Michael Gough sadistically desires his teenage daughter and humiliates his pained wife and son to the point they decide to kill him. But is that corpse really dead? Slow moving, maybe, but wonderfully perverse and terribly underrated.
2. “Home” (1996), an episode of The X-Files, Season 4: So disturbing the Fox Network vowed to never air it again (even though, of course, they did). Scully and Mulder wish they were dealing with the supernatural rather than with this limbless mother inbreeding with her three sons in an attempt to continue their “pure” family lineage. It also happens to share the name of one of my short films.
3. The Brood (1979): David Cronenberg’s idea of a family drama. A mentally unstable mother gives birth to “id” dwarfs that kill her guilty parents and take back her daughter from the father who has custody . . . leaving him no choice but to strangle her to death. The birth sequence is a seminal Cronenberg moment— psychoanalytically and intellectually fascinating, while also totally disgusting.
4. Deathdream (1974): Junior has come back from Vietnam as a zombie, and Mom is so determined to deny it she’s willing to kill Dad if necessary. Talk about the elephant in the room no one’s willing to talk about. Plays like a John Cassavettes drama (including two stars from his 1968 Faces) with a monster.
5. Eraserhead (1977): Wild-haired Henry Spencer may not be married, but—with a newborn mutant child, a disturbing Thanksgiving dinner with his girlfriend’s family that has to be seen, the constant presence of a mysterious massive maw resembling a birth canal, and a terrifying sexy female neighbor sinking into a literal black pool of desire—he lives in a landscape of male anxiety regarding family life. Surreal, amazing. My favorite David Lynch film.
6. Parents (1989): It’s 1950s America and young Michael is starting to suspect his ever-merry suburban parents of a terrible secret— they may be cannibals. And, yes, they are. If you haven’t seen it, I’m not giving away much about this blackest of comedies, as the success of it lies in its disturbing and subversive presentation rather than in its admittedly one-trick-pony idea.
7. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974): The seminal crazy hillbilly family so many horror films continue to exploit, in all its original, epic, disturbing glory and pitch-black humor. Those dimwitted American backwoods families sure can be funny—when they’re not robbing graves and hanging hot teenage girls from meat hooks. “Look what your brother did to the door!”
8. Eyes Without a Face (1960): How far will a doctor go to restore the beautiful face of a daughter destroyed in an accident he was responsible for? Enough to surgically remove the faces of kidnapped young women in an attempt to graft a new visage on to her head, that’s how far. The fact the surgeries aren’t working doesn’t dissuade this loving father. Proving it’s not just the Americans who are obsessed with beauty is this creepy, yet strangely tender, French classic.
9. The Cement Garden (1993): You can argue the film’s inclusion on a horror list, but it certainly has its share of sexually perverse and baroque images. Soon after the death of her husband (in a scene linking a father’s death with his son’s random masturbation), a mother dies of an unknown illness, leading her three children to hide her body in the basement so they can get on with their adolescent games—including the youngest boy dressing as a girl while the barely teenage son and daughter flirtatiously cultivate an incestuous desire for each other. I felt less guilty after I learned Charlotte Gainsbourg was over twenty when she made the movie. Somber, slow moving, yet deeply rewarding.
10. Shock (1977): Dora, recovering from a mental breakdown brought on by having viciously stabbed her abusive drug-addict husband to death and hidden the body, moves in with her young boy and new husband . . . but has her first husband returned, possessing both her and her son? Or is she is going insane from guilt? Or is the boy seeking revenge for his dead father? Lots of perverse family intrigue—and lots of gore—in this Italian shocker. Mario Bava’s final film.
MICK FARREN’S TEN BEST OF HAMMER HORROR
During his long, checkered, occasionally hallucinatory and sometimes hell-raising career, Mick Farren has published over twenty novels, which range from the psychedelic fantasy of the DNA Cowboys trilogy to the neo-goth vampirism of The Renquist Quartet, and the far future militarism of Their Master’s War. An unreconstructed rock ’n’ roller, he also continues to function as a recording artist and songwriter. He resides in Los Angeles where he writes a media column for Los Angeles CityBeat.Find Mick at http://doc40.blogspot.com.
Hammer Film Productions is arguably the best-known British studio. Founded in 1934, it staggered for more than twenty years making truly dreadful, low-budget second-features like Death in High Heels, Crime Reporter, and Dick Barton Special Agent. It wasn’t until the mid–1950s, with innovative remakes of the Frankenstein and Dracula classics, that it hit a formula that would make it a legend in Gothic horror cinema. The strength of Hammer films lay in a repertory company of classically trained actors lead by Christoper Lee and Peter Cushing, and production techniques that turned cheap thrills into classy kitsch. One other factor played incredibly well for Hammer. They were the first English-language studio to make low-cost horror flicks in color, with the spilled blood a vivid red.
1. Dracula (1958): An enormous success for Hammer, with huge trash-movie box-office returns in both the UK and the U.S. (where it was released as The Horror of Dracula), reviving the suavely immortal vampire count, saddling Christopher Lee with the part for the rest of his career (until he graduated to Star Wars and Lord of The Rings), and generating a slew of sequels. Directed by Terrence Fisher, and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
2. The Vampire Lovers (1970): Based on the J. Sheridan Le Fanu story Carmilla, this film initiated a whole new subgenre of lesbian vampire movies in which low-cut nightgowns and fangs in the neck proved an irresistible combination, and turned Polish starlet Ingrid Pitt—who, as a child, actually survived a Nazi concentration camp—into the Queen of Kink and Fang. Directed by Roy Ward Baker, and starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing.
3. Countess Dracula (1971): Very loosely based on the historical murderess Elizabeth Bathory, Countess Dracula consolidated both the cult following for blood-sucking lesbians and Ingrid Pitt’s supremacy as an icon at Hammer. Directed by Peter Sasdy, and starring Ingrid Pitt, Nigel Green, and Lesley-Anne Down.
4. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955): Known as TheCreepingUnknown in the U.S., this early Hammer drive-in hit was the movie version of a successful British TV sci-fi series, and one of the very first films in which a nasty alien with bad intentions is brought back to Earth aboard an experimental space probe to wre
ak havoc on humanity. Directed by Val Guest, and starring Brian Donleavy and Thora Hird.
5. Quatermass and the Pit (1967): This third outing for the intrepid, alien-battling Professor Quatermass (U.S. title: Five Million Years to Earth) was again based on a Brit TV series. This time a prehistoric Martian spacecraft is discovered in an excavation under the London subway system, and, when revived, its ancient alien astronauts attempt to enslave humanity (which turns out to be the result of millennia-old Martian genetic experiments in the first place). Directed by Roy Ward Baker, starring Andrew Keir and Barbara Shelley.
6. Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966): This film gave Christopher Lee time off from playing Dracula to cause occult chaos with a particularly sexy and alcoholic—but historically fanciful version— of the mystic madman running amok at the court of the last tsar, immediately prior to the Soviet revolution. Directed by Don Sharp, and starring Christopher Lee and Barbara Shelley.
7. The Devil Rides Out (1968): The occult adventure novels of Dennis Wheatley had a large following in the UK, but never gained a foothold in the U.S., despite their recurrent theme of Satanist conspiracy. Hammer attempted to turn one into a movie, but failed to attract a U.S. audience to the written works of Wheatley, despite supernatural and occasionally absurdist melodrama, and a U.S. title change to The Devil’s Bride. Directed by Terence Fisher, and starring Christoper Lee and Gwen Ffrangcon Davies.
8. The Camp on Blood Island (1958): Hammer moved away from its usual fare of historical costume gore when it attempted to combine the horror genre and the war movie. With World War II stereotypes prevailing, the inmates of a particularly bloody and brutal Japanese prison camp rebel against the torture and brutality of a sadistic commandant and guards. The formula was different, but the gore remained the same. Directed by Val Guest, starring André Morell and Barbara Shelley.
9. She (1965): Throughout the sixties, Hammer discovered that sex sold quite as well as shock and gore, and the combination of all three was irresistible. They cast around for suitable vehicles. One of the stranger ones was She—the H. Rider Haggard schoolboy adventure of the kind that inspired Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films—in which Ursula Andress (post–Dr. No hot) played Ayesha, “she who must be obeyed,” the ruler of a lost city, who uses supernatural powers and human sacrifice to achieve immortality. Directed by Robert Day, starring Ursula Andress and Peter Cushing.
10. One Million Years B.C. (1966): This film ultimately became a trashcult classic, with excellent Ray Harryhausen dinosaurs, battling cavemen, not a single word of English in dialogue—and, of course, Raquel Welch in an alarmingly twentieth-century fur bikini that was a hit all on its own as a dormitory poster for college boys the world over, which catapulted her to stardom. Directed by Don Chaffey, starring Raquel Welch and John Richardson.
LISA MORTON’S TOP TEN ASIAN HORROR MOVIES
Lisa Morton’s fiction has appeared in many books and magazines, including the award-winning anthologies The Museum of Horrors and Dark Delicacies. She won the 2006 Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction for her story “Tested.” She has also written several films, including Meet the Hollowheads, and two nonfiction books, The Cinema of Tsui Hark and The Halloween Encyclopedia.
1. Song at Midnight (Ye BanGeSheng) (1937): This early mainland China talkie by the influential Ma-Xu Weibang riffs on Phantom of the Opera and still manages a few chills, despite its dated production values.
2. Ugetsu (Ugetsu Monogatari) (1953): Kenji Mizoguchi’s Japanese masterpiece still contains some of the most quietly frightening images ever put on film.
3. Kwaidan (Kaidan) (1964): This classic from Japan’s Masaki Kobayashi (based on stories collected by Lafcadio Hearn) may still be the best horror anthology movie ever made.
4. A Chinese Ghost Story (Sien Nui Yau Wan) (1987): Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung’s breathtakingly beautiful and frantically paced classic is one of the quintessential Hong Kong films.
5. The Untold Story (Baat Sin Faan DimJiYan YukCha SiuBaau) (1993): Half of Herman Yau’s lunatic Hong Kong serial-killer movie is admittedly not good—but the half that works, starring the brilliant Anthony Wong, earns it a place on this list.
6. The Ring (Ringu) (1998): This Japanese chiller not only firmly placed Hideo Nakata in the ranks of horror’s great directors, it also launched a flood of sequels, remakes, and rip-offs . . . and none of them come even close to the original.
7. Battle Royale (Batoru Rowaiaru) (2000): Kinji Fukasaku’s Japanese science fiction/thriller/social commentary/action mash-up is intense, fast, deeply disturbing, and not for the squeamish.
8. A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon) (2003): Kim Ji-woon’s South Korean masterwork is quite simply the best horror film of the last twenty years, with an astonishing performance from Yeum Jeung-ah as the psychotic stepmother.
9. The Host (Gwoemul) (2006): South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho scored a smash hit with this funny, action-packed, and exquisitely made monster movie.
10 .Dog Bite Dog (GauNgaoGau) (2006): This Hong Kong thriller from Cheang Pou-soi forces the traditional killer-on-the-run motif through a horror filter and creates one of the most nihilistic and uncomfortable films ever made.
JÖRG BUTTGEREIT’S TOP TEN
JAPANESE MONSTER MOVIES
Jörg Buttgereit is the director/cowriter of the legendary art house horror films Nekromantik, Nekromantik 2, Der Todesking, and Schramm. He has also directed music videos, TV shows, and stage productions, and written the books Monster Island and Nightmares in Plastic. Find out more at www.myspace.com/joergbuttgereitofficial.
1. Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965): The heart of Frankenstein mutates in the atomic fires of Hiroshima into a giant Japanstein creature.
2. Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971): Godzilla saves the day by defeating the giant vomit-monster Hedorah! Director Yoshimitsu Banno was thrown out by the producer after he created this hilarious Greenpeace-monster-feast.
3. King Kong Escapes (1967): Poor old Kong has to fight his robot clone and falls in love with a cute American scientist. The beautiful Mie Hama, from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, is also in this movie.
4. Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (1963): On a deserted island, members of a shipwrecked party eat strange mushrooms and turn into walking mushrooms. Strangest drug movie ever.
5. Gamera vs. Guiron (1969): Two boys get kidnapped by two sexy females from planet Tera. The girls (named Barbella and Flobella) want to eat the little boys’ brains to get their knowledge. But the giant superturtle Gamera appears and has to fight with the knife-shaped monster Guiron to save the boys. Must be seen to be believed.
6. Mothra (1961): Two 6-inch fairies (the pop duo the Peanuts) get exploited by a capitalist in Newkirk City. The beautiful giant moth Mothra flies to the rescue. Very sweet family entertainment.
7. Goke, Bodysntacher From Hell (1968): Aboard an Air Japan commercial jet, a terrorist is infected by spores from outer space and turns into a bloodthirsty vampire.
8. Godzilla (1954): The grim black and white classic that started the Kaiju eiga genre. Gotta have this in the list. Otherwise they don’t take you seriously.
9. Gamera 3—Revenge of Irys (1999): The atomic turtle’s most convincing adventure, featuring stunning FX. Even people who normally laugh at Japanese monsters like this film.
10. Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah—Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001): Stupid title, but the most convincing Godzilla movie ever, made by Shusuke Kaneko, who also did Gamera 3.
RICHARD STANLEY’S TEN FAVORITE ITALIAN HORROR
MOVIES (PLUS THREE BORDERLINE CASES)
Richard Stanley’s films include the visionary science fiction thriller Hardware (1990) and the mystical Africa-based horror film Dust Devil (1992). He was the original writer/director of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996),starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, before departing the production after a few days. He cowrote the screenplay for The Abandoned (2006), directed music videos for Public Image Ltd. And Fields of
the Nephilim, penned articles for Projections 3 and The Fortean Times, and made documentaries on such diverse topics as Afghan freedom fighters, Haitian voodoo, and Nazi occultism. He is also a trained anthropologist and a voodoo houngon. More is available at www.myspace.com/richardstanley13.
1. Kill Baby . . . Kill! (1966)
Director: Mario Bava
Stars: Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Erika Blanc
Mario Bava can be considered to be the godfather of the Italian Gothic, having innovated many of the conventions later “borrowed” by American franchises like Friday the 13th and Scream. Despite its extraordinary title, this is one of the director’s most restrained entries, relying on a skillfully maintained otherworldly atmosphere rather than the physical frissons of his earlier work. The plot concerns a cursed aristocratic family at the center of a series of supernaturally motivated murders. The ghost story, reminiscent of the work of Bava’s mentor Riccardo Freda, serves as an excuse to crank up the dry ice, stirring the usual clichés into a vortex of Kafkaesque dreamscapes, exemplified by the sequence in which the protagonist literally pursues himself through a series of identical chambers, slowly but surely gaining ground, only to find he has gained nothing at all. Being a ghost story there is—of course—a ghost, and while I hate to give the game away, this does feature one of the scariest specters ever committed to celluloid. You’ve been warned!