The Book of Lists: Horror

by Wallace, Amy

  2. Frank Langella in Diary of a Mad Housewife

  Although Langella was quite dreamy as Dracula in the 1979 vampire flick based on the hit Broadway play, his turn as George Prager, the narcissistic New Yorker who seductively toys with tormented housewife Carrie Snodgrass, was the sexier monster. Dracula couldn’t hold a candelabra to this psychic vampire, who drained more than blood from his victims.

  3. Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man (1973)

  Lee portrayed many sexy vampires in many Hammer films, but he was at his most devilishly debonair in the role of neo-pagan cult leader Lord Summerisle, with his middle-aged John DeLorean good looks. No man has made a turtleneck sexier.

  4. Oliver Reed in Curse of the Werewolf

  Oliver Reed, in or out of werewolf drag, is one sexy beast!

  5. Peter O’Toole in The Ruling Class

  Sure, he was cuddly as Christ, but when O’Toole’s lunatic aristocrat turns bad and appears in undertaker-chic riding breeches, he seduces one and all. Those steel-blue eyes, that commanding voice, the punishing way he slaps a riding crop against his black leather boots while singing “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones . . .”—all conspire to make this Jack one ribald ripper!

  6. Thomas Kretschmann in Downfall

  No one did evil like the Nazis. No one did leather like the SS. And no Nazi combined the two quite like Eva Braun’s philandering brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein. Known as Himmler’s “Golden Boy,” Fegelein was a seductive fiend who believed any woman who did not succumb to his charms was his “enemy.” Downfall is one of the only movies to commit the decadent Fegelein to celluloid, and the über-handsome Kretschmann (who portrayed the lead Nazi in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist) does an excellent job conveying Fegelein’s diabolically dissolute ways.

  7. Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

  Oldman is a sexy monster in almost all his roles: Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy, the corrupt psychopathic cop in The Professional, even Mason Verger in Hannibal. But when he shows up on the streets of Victorian England in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, elegantly dressed in an absinthe-green top hat and immaculately tailored waistcoat, I wanted to crawl into that dandy Dracula’s coffin for all of eternity!

  8. David Hemmings in Camelot

  A boyish Blow-Up–era Hemmings puts the Pan in Peter Pan when he appears in a captivating cameo as Mordred, the mischievous spawn of King Arthur and witch Morgan le Fey (or was his mother Arthur’s half-sister Morgause? Either way, young Mordred is of dubious origin, and mythological to boot!). Sporting a Satan-esque ginger goatee and looking like a spry satyr in a tight, modishly medieval leather ensemble, Hemmings gleefully taunts Richard Harris and, in the process, seduces those of us who like our imps mordant.

  9. The Creature from the Black Lagoon

  Green is my favorite color. Plus . . . those abs!

  10. Anton Walbrook in The Red Shoes

  No doubt about it, Powell and Pressburger’s dance film The Red Shoes is a horror classic. Distinguished Austrian actor Walbrook plays a seductive yet cruelly controlling ballet master who drives his dancers harder than Simon Legree. Think Balanchine gone very, very bad. Just as tyrannical as my Belgian-born ballet teacher but far sexier, Walbrook might have driven me to jump to my death on the railroad tracks had he been teaching ballet, baton, and tap in my hometown.

  11. Patrick O’Neal in Chamber of Horrors

  Little known and underutilized actor O’Neal made a startling impression on me in 1966, when us neighborhood kids were invited to a movie party to celebrate Marshall Jones’s birthday. We were supposed to go see the latest James Bond film, but my parents forbade my brother and I from seeing those racy movies. Instead, Mrs. Jones took all us kids to Chamber of Horrors. Was seeing madman O’Neal chop his own hand off while handcuffed to a railcar, then use the stump as repository for an array of weapons, such as a hook, scalpel, and meat cleaver, more child-friendly than Bond? Was tingling in anticipation of the gruesome gore to follow the Fear Flasher and Horror Horn more wholesome than watching 007 bed buxom babes? You bet!

  12. Jack Palance as Attila the Hun in Sign of the Pagan

  Combine Palance’s Ukranian bone structure (he was born Volodymyr Palanyuk) with swords, sandals, and an evil Fu Manchu mustache, and you got one yummy barbarian.

  13. Jeff Goldblum in The Fly (1986)

  Strangely enough, Goldblum is more appealing when he has been transformed into “Brundlefly”—a mutated heap of human/fly goo. How director David Cronenberg managed to make such a monstrosity so sympathetic is a mark of his genius. All I wanted to do was cradle that bloody morass of dripping marrow and tweaked fly-DNA in my arms, look into those sorrowful Brundlefly eyes, and kiss the pain away.

  14. Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments

  Pharaohs are hot. Brynner is hotter. Brynner as Pharaoh is as hot as it gets. Also: Brynner in Westworld: Evil, Wild West robotgunslinger Brynner is almost as hot as evil, bare-chested, chariot-driving, Hebrew-oppressing Pharoah Brynner.

  15. Frederic March in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1932)

  I first fell for this split personality in 1965, when gazing at photos from the film reproduced in my brand new issue of Famous MonstersofFilmland. March’s transformation from the genteel Dr. Jekyll to that bad boy to end all bad boys was nothing short of mesmerizing. Plus, I just love a man in an opera cape!

  16. The Phantom of the Opera

  Speaking of men in opera capes: Every Phantom in every version of Phantom of the Opera, with Lon Chaney Sr.’s 1925 silent classic at the top of the list and the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical at the bottom.

  17. All of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-action animated creatures

  Special mention goes to the hunky Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and the crazed Skeleton Warriors in Jason and the Argonauts. There is something mysteriously titillating about stop-action animation, especially when applied to mythological fantasy creatures!

  18. The centaurs in the pastoral sequence in Walt Disney’s Fantasia

  Granted, these centaurs are more mildly mythic than monstrous, but I can’t help myself—centaurs are hot, hot, HOT!

  19. Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster (1964)

  Godzilla was my first love, but when we saw the previews for the new movie that introduced the latest in Japanese mutants to the world, my brother and I went nuts for the high-flying, threeheaded, death-ray-shooting, gold-plated daikaiju. Ghidorah (or as we pronounced it in West Virginia, GHEE-dra) emits a highpitched, otherworldly, three-toned shriek that translated into an irresistible mating call to one particular young West Virginny girl besotted with monsters.

  20. Claude Raines in The Invisible Man

  I love a guy with a sick sense of humor, and the Invisible Man knew how to deliciously torment his oppressors.

  21. The gigantic green goons in William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (1953)

  Super-tall invaders from outer space are damned sexy, no matter what planet they hail from. Mutant giants can so easily overpower their victims and carry them off to those unimagined lands that lay beyond the sandpits behind their boring suburban homes. These particular big lugs from Mars are especially appealing due to the fact that their costumes resemble vintage onepiece pajamas with the feet in them . . . complete with zippers and sagging bottoms. They may not have had great seamstresses on Mars, but their foot soldiers really knew how to sweep a girl off her feet!

  22. David Bowie in The Hunger

  If you thought he was a sexy monster on screen, you should’ve seen him off!

  C. COURTNEY JOYNER’S TOP TEN HORROR MOVIE

  SURGICAL BLUNDERS

  C. Courtney Joyner is a screenwriter whose credits include The Offspring with Vincent Price, Prison with Viggo Mortensen, Class of 1999, Dr. Mordrid, The Devil’s Prey, Puppet Master III , Nautilus, and more than twenty-five other movies and television shows. He has also written comic books as well as articles on genre films for Fangoria, Famous Monsters, and Wil
dest Westerns. He is the author of the upcoming book The Westerners and his latest movie is the action film Cop War.

  1. Facial replacement in Eyes Without a Face

  Georges Franju’s 1960 masterpiece treads over now-familiar story ground: The daughter of a brilliant surgeon is disfigured in a car accident, and he becomes obsessed with finding her a new face, which he cuts from young women he’s captured. They all die in screaming pain, but it is worth it to him if the destroyed beauty of his daughter can be restored. Of course, the operations fail over and over, which only fuels the surgeon’s madness and horror.

  Franju’s film is not just a stunningly atmospheric horror story; it’s a fascinating look at the fragile mind of a genius that’s warped beyond redemption by an obsession that plays itself out in the operating theater. Beneath the carnage are the bonds of family that no amount of blood-letting will ever dissolve.

  Eyes Without a Face is true Grand Guignol committed to film, and we must be brave enough to watch it. Brilliantly (and graphically) shot by frequent Edgar Ulmer collaborator Eugen Shuftan, the film is the ultimate statement on the horror of medicine and the sometimes unstable minds of the men who practice it—we pray—only in the movies.

  2. Gynecological procedures in Dead Ringers

  One of David Cronenberg’s most polished masterworks, the tale of the twin gynecologists goes from stylish noir seduction to the darkest realms of sexual torture. Cronenberg has explored the closeness of pleasure and pain before, but never with the romantic directorial eye he uses here. Unlike the smashed (and sexual) fenders of Crash, the polished metal that’s pressed to skin in Dead Ringers is born from the mind of a doctor whose sexual indifference turns ultimately to rage, and the instruments he uses on his female patients become as twisted as he is. For Cronenberg, the blade of the scalpel is more than a tool for the surgeon; it becomes an organic extension of his body and the pain it causes is a sexual reward. The corruption of the body (“The New Flesh”) is a theme the director has investigated before (in The Brood and Videodrome, among many others), but never with the subtle touch shown here. Dead Ringers is a violent story of medical perversion told in a whisper by one of cinema’s true visionaries.

  3. Hand replacement in Mad Love

  It’s a tried and true rule that romantic obsession and surgery don’t mesh too well, and yet we see the tragic results over and over again. One of the finest examples is Peter Lorre’s mad surgeon Dr. Gogol replacing pianist Colin Clive’s destroyed hands with those of a knife-throwing killer, so that he can satisfy his love of music while Lorre tries to satisfy his love for Clive’s wife, Frances Drake. The hands, of course, become their own entity with the instinct to kill, and Clive cannot control them—and eventually his target is Gogol. Once again, we witness a bizarre surgery that is successful, only to have dire circumstances. The great cameraman Karl Freund directs with more energy and glamorous élan than he displayed in his classic The Mummy. The gloss of MGM serves Freund’s dark tale well, with every shot beautifully framed by the brilliant James Wong Howe.

  The most remarkable sequence is when Lorre appears in a hideous disguise as a man who has had his own head and hands replaced. It is one of the great images of horror cinema, and Lorre’s portrait of a medical genius pushed to the breaking point by unrequited love is one of the great performances.

  4. Twin Separation in Sisters

  The moment Dr. Breton (William Finley) savagely cleaves conjoined twins Danielle and Dominique apart, he kills one and splits the other’s mind and personality completely in half. It’s not the result he was hoping for, but it is a smashing moment in Brian De Palma’s first major thriller. This quirky, violent, funny, and beautifully directed low-budget horror is a model of tension and craft. Although the fleshly connection between the girls is gone, they are joined forever in Danielle’s mind, which is scarred (like her body) by the horrific surgery. Too influenced by Hitchcock? De Palma has never denied it, that’s for sure, and this exercise is the director’s indie masterwork. With a pounding score by Bernard Herrmann and a wonderful, troubling performance by Margot Kidder in the lead, Sisters remains a marvel of ingenious filmmaking from a director who has, sadly, had more than one misstep.

  5. 1940s Brain Transplantation in Black Friday

  Brain-switching has been a problem for mad doctors for decades, and no doctor dabbled in this procedure more than Boris Karloff. In this fast-paced Universal backlot gangster-horror combo, Karloff actually succeeds, but with (of course) tragic results. Black Friday is terrific fun. Doc Boris drops the brain of a gangster into a dying professor’s body, only to have Jekyll-andHyde results, as the gangster’s brain takes charge and the mildmannered Prof goes on a killing spree.

  Karloff’s doctors seemed to start their experiments with the best of intentions, only to have everything go haywire by Act II. In Black Friday, Karloff is driven by ambition to show the world the wonders of his new surgical technique. But greed rears its head, and the good doc ends up shooting his patient in the guts and getting sentenced to the electric chair. Certainly, no other dedicated mad doctor went to the death house more times than Boris, and this time he deserves it.

  Concocted by Curt Siodmak (several years before writing Donovan’s Brain), this one is more gangster than horror, and more thriller than fantasy, and still manages to combine all the elements into one slick programmer package. Ably assisted by Stanley Ridges as the professor/gangster, Anne Nagel as a moll, and Bela Lugosi as a dapper hood, this little B is one of Dr. Karloff’s mini-triumphs.

  Karloff spent decades in the lab, as both creator and creation, making film history. His medico status was assured with the Columbia Pictures “Mad Doctor” series, which includes the terrific The Man They Could Not Hang and the wondrous The Devil Commands. As the years marched on, iconic Boris found himself cast as every doctor from Henry Jekyll to Baron Frankenstein, finally wrapping things up in scientist roles in the four U.S.–Mexican productions directed by Jack Hill. For all of these movie-medical ups and downs, Black Friday remains a little gem of the pre-war years.

  6. Victorian Brain Transplantation in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

  There’s no argument that Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments are the greatest achievement in the history of horror-science in literature and film. When brought to the screen in its most famous incarnation, Universal emphasized Ken Strickfaden’s wonderful machinery over scalpels and sutures, although the biggest “personality” problem with the monster was the result of his botched brain transplant. In the sequels, Universal often focused on the undead monster’s indestructible nature as a human machine rather than a human being—a classic miscalculation for all of the Frankenstein fathers, sons, and disciples.

  When Hammer approached the story in 1957, they applied the realities of Victorian science to the scenario, adding a new sense of theatrical reality: The great Peter Cushing performed bloody surgery to put his monster together. And we saw it. After Curse of Frankenstein, Cushing’s experiments brought him from the mere creation of life (Revenge of Frankenstein and Evil of Frankenstein) to the transference of the soul (Frankenstein Created Woman), and then back to brain transplantation in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. In Destroyed, the doctor’s surgeries weren’t part of the monster-creating process, but rather were done to save the life of a colleague in order get his scientific secrets. This is a story with roots in Stevenson and Conan Doyle rather than the Hammer archives.

  A true, gaslit, Victorian melodrama without a trace of fantasy, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is Terence Fisher and Peter Cushing’s elegant summation of their work at Hammer. Beautifully shot and cut, the film boils away all traces of lightning bolts or resurrection of the dead. Instead, this is a tale of medical horror that is grounded in time, place, and character. Cushing played scores of medical men in his career, but he has never been more commanding in his signature role than here. As the doctor’s tragic patient, Freddie Jones is no lumbering monster, but rather “a victim of everything Frankenstei
n and I ever advocated.” This is the true yin and yang of the Frankenstein saga as creator and creation face off against one another, and both actors are superb.

  Although Cushing and Fisher opted for one last dance with the fragile Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, their Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is the energetic, full-throttle, bloody masterwork of the Hammer Frankenstein series.

  7. Head Transplantation (and Removal) in The Thing with Two Heads (1971)

  Dr. Cadavan Griffiths is credited as “medical advisor” on this American International Pictures backdoor classic. Griffiths obviously knew his stuff, since the procedure of putting bigot Ray Milland’s head on Rosey Grier’s body is a success. The problem is that Rosey refuses to have his own head removed so Ray can have his massive body all to himself. Sadly, the attitude of the patient can mean a lot in the recovery process, and Rosey just ain’t going to cooperate with the plans of Ray’s doctors. This culminates in a wonderful two-headed motorcycle chase with the cops, and all kinds of silly hell breaking loose around L.A. With the drive-in-gutsy direction of producer Wes (Race with the Devil) Bishop, a two-headed gorilla courtesy of Rick Baker, and wonderfully funny work by its two leads, The Thing with Two Heads is a great AIP time capsule from the seventies, and a demonstration of the stumbling progress of head transplant surgery.