Most people don't list The Wolf Man at the top of the list when it comes to Universal's "classic" monster movies. I disagree with most people. I think I get too caught up in the tragic drama aspect of this film, because I really buy in to the whole father/son/tortured family thing that we get from Claude Rains and Lon Chaney, Jr. here. And Rick Pierce's magical makeup effects, transforming the lovable Chaney into a wonderfully creepy monster, are a thing of nightmares.
The Moment That Changes Everything:
I don't know much about Maria Ouspenskaya, but I want to give her great grandchildren a hug some day. The actress who plays the gypsy fortune teller that explains the curse of the werewolf has pretty much the best delivery of an ominous warning in the history of cinema. It feels so darn real, and sends chills down my spine.
It Makes a Great Double Feature With:
Speaking of Claude Rains and things that aren't at the forefront of the Universal Monsters discussion, let's talk about The Invisible Man. It has the annoying comic relief of Una O'Conner, which is a problem, but it also has Rains eating up the scenery while occupying none of it. These two movies are often lost in the shuffle when it comes to Universal Monsters, but both have a lot of drama and some fantastic special effects.
What It Means To Me:
There's not a scare to be found in The Wolf Man today, but it's the story behind this man-turned-wolf tale that represents everything I love about horror movies. Some belittle the film and think I have it rated about a billion spots higher than it should be, but it's like comfort food to me. I love the actors and the script and the effects, and that ending is just one of the all-time best "hammer your point home" moments ever. I'll never tire of The Wolf Man.
In The Mike's Lair, it's just not October without a little Christopher Lee. I have plenty of heroes in horror - in fact, I detailed my 10 favorites last October in some of my favorite posts I've ever written - but Lee just seems to be my go-to horror star as I age. There's something about his presence that can be truly chilling in almost any setting, And when the mood is right (and I don't mean that in a Barry White kind of way) he can help make a horror film truly memorable. And that brings us to Horror Hotel, aka The City of the Dead in its native England, a film that brings in Lee as just one small part of its creepy goodness.
A black-and-white chiller from 1960, Horror Hotel might be the most atmospheric horror film to be released between the works of Val Lewton and John Carpenter's The Fog. Half the film seems to take place in parts of a small New England town where patches of dense fog just seem to happen, and there's a terrific unease to the setting of a small town with a history of witchcraft that dates back to 1692.
Enter Nan Barlow (you don't hear the name "Nan" any more...but it's kind of awesome, I say), a blonde college student who takes up the challenge of her professor (Lee) and heads off - alone, naturally - to investigate the historic (and fictional) New England village of Whitewood, where a young woman was burned as a witch more than 250 years earlier. She goes through the investigation-of-an-odd-small-town procedures that have become commonplace in horror cinema, with the most interesting person she meets happening to be an innkeeper (Patricia Jessel, who gives a juicy performance) who looks a lot like the which we all saw burned in the opening scene. Gee....you gotta wonder if that's gonna come in to play later on.
Venetia Stevenson stars as Nan, and her perky performance draws some incredibly eerie (but likely coincidental) parallels to the one given by Janet Leigh in another horror film released in 1960. The film is most interesting when she moves around this ghastly town and interacts with Jessel and the other inhabitants, most of whom seem to be keeping a dark secret and few of whom - basically just one incredibly helpful young woman in a book store - seem to be living in the current century. The culture shock of this young college girl entering a town from the past is a big part of the film's early tension, but it's not the meat and potatoes of the film.
No, the film hits it's stride near the middle when that dark secret catches up to poor Nan. There's a sequence that also parallels that other 1960 horror film where everything seems kind of normal and a whole lot more than was the norm is revealed to the audience - and then things take off in a surprising manner. The shock might not have been as groundbreaking this time around - there's no chocolate swirling around a drain ala Psycho - but the sequence that reveals what's going on in this hotel seems to move incredibly quickly and has a haunting quality to it, thanks in large part to Miss Stevenson's screams.
The second half of the film isn't as interesting as the first, but Horror Hotel still works as a moody tale of witchcraft and the occult that features excellent performances, spooky settings, and a crap-ton of fog machines. Fans of Lee and old-fashioned horror should have fun with this 75 minute chiller, which can be found on plenty of public domain DVDs/websites. It's worth seeking out, and not just because of its similarities to Psycho. During the Halloween season, a chiller like Horror Hotel is just what the doctor ordered.
When it's an old-fashioned spooky story that I want, it's The Innocents that I turn to. A deep and macabre adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, it's a movie I've seen many times and a movie that I feel I can barely understand. Led by a frantic performance by the great Deborah Kerr and supported by perfect and unique turns by children Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens and established actors Michael Redgrave and Peter Wyngarde, The Innocents becomes a psychological nightmare that offers some of the most haunting visuals in horror cinema. In fact, the moment that gives me more chills than any other I've seen is the centerpiece of The Innocents' ghastly tale. And that alone makes it an undeniable favorite of mine.
The Moment That Changes Everything:
I alluded to this moment, but there's literally no way I can explain in words just what this moment means to me. It's so incredibly simple - a woman in black appears in a lake - and it's been done 1000 times before and after. But man, there is just something incredible about how Deborah Kerr reacts to this vision. It is the most chilling thing I've ever encountered in a movie. It's perfect.
It Makes a Great Double Feature With:
This seems like a great time to pitch a Peter Wyngarde double feature, and I don't even have to mention Flash Gordon. (But I will anyway, because that's how I roll.) Check out Burn, Witch, Burn, a solid occult thriller written by Richard Matheson & Charles Beaumont, both of whom had their hands all over some of the best Twilight Zone tales ever. It has some of the same melodrama that The Innocents offers, and nearly as impressive black-and-white cinematography. Should make a heck of a double bill.
What It Means To Me:
Cutting out the strange sexual tension in the film - because that's a whole 'nother discussion for a much less scatterbrained writer - The Innocents is a classic ghost story that bucks plenty of trends. And then you add back in that strange sexual tension that I won't touch here and the movie becomes that much more mysterious. The Innocents has the power to keep me completely mystified, and it always leaves me a bit shaken and deep in thought. I might love it more than I should just because it effects me so much, but that sounds to me like the mark of a great horror film.
For a relatively straight-forward film that doesn't disguise its punches very well, In Their Skin is particularly effective at what it does. A home invasion thriller akin to The Strangers and its like, the film works thanks to a strong cast and an astute attention to detail. In fact, it might be the film's consideration of every angle might be a big part of what makes the plot seem straight-forward.
Josh Close and Selma Blair star as Mark and Mary, a married couple whose relationship has seen better days. They abscond to a country home for some quiet time with their son, but things quickly turn bizarre when another couple with another son show up and invite themselves into that home. As we learn more about the newcomers, we realize two things. Firstly, we realize that they have a lot of questions about the lives of Mary and Mark. And secondly, we start to notice that these invaders seem to look a lot like this family.
From those two hints - and the Freudian usage of the word "invaders" by a ham-fisted reviewer - you can probably guess where In Their Skin goes as the film moves past happy interactions and into full fledged carnage. Things quickly evolve from an awkward dinner conversation to plenty of violence and depravity, as Mark and Mary begin to lose control of their lives to their guests. And their lives are exactly what these invaders are after.
Blair and Close are asked to be victims in some pretty awful events, and each actor does well with their role. Blair is recognizable from several Hollywood films earlier in her career, but this is the most interesting I've ever seen her be in a film. She's traumatized before things get out of hand due to the family issues that have driven Mark and Mary apart, and I couldn't help but feel really badly for the character as Blair bared herself for the performance. Close seems to be the more put together of the two, as is normally the case in these films, but his performance evolves as the film goes on and his work in the final act is quite impressive.
The star of the show, however, is British actor James D'Arcy as the aggressor that leads the charge against this family. His performance doesn't go to the insane heights that we are used to from actors who are asked to commit unspeakable acts in a realistic setting, and it's the calmness with which he attacks his role that really won me over. The actor shows off some range throughout the film, but always seems to pull his character back to a cold and distant place that is wonderfully unsettling. A film like this works when the threat works, and most films achieve that through gimmicks. Some make the killer a total David Hess style madman, some take away the killer's face - but In Their Skin is perfectly comfortable letting their intruders reside somewhere in the middle. Some might say this hurts the film's shock value, but I think it makes D'Arcy and his "family" that much more interesting.
In Their Skin loses some steam in the final reels - which sadly leaves D'Arcy trying to do too much to keep us interested once the torture of Mark and Mary has kind of peaked - but the film has enough human drama to keep it afloat. It succeeds mainly because it's so well-acted, and I feel like the same script with lesser actors might have fallen flat. Blair, Close, Rachel Miner, and D'Arcy do more than enough with their performances to keep us watching the film. It doesn't have the scare factor of some home invasion thrillers - though there are some good chills - but it does make the viewer feel incredibly uncomfortable with the things that occur on screen. In that regard, In Their Skin is worth seeing for fans of dramatic human horror.
In Their Skin is currently available through most VOD/Instant Video services (including ITunes, Amazon, and game consoles) and will be hitting select theaters on November 9th. In the meantime, you can check out the trailer below.
While the first two parts of this series may have been familiar to most horror folks of my generation, the movies that sent me to where I am as a horror fan will be more familiar to the kind folks that read this here blog. Most of the movies I'm about to talk about have been covered here numerous times, so coming up with something relevant and useful to say in what follows has been a strong challenge for me. But as I look at this list of horror movies that inspired me in my path toward horror, I am taken aback by how totally random these movies seem to be.
I've covered some of the movies that inspired me in my currently running Top 50 Horror Movies Countdown - and I've chosen not to repeat my position on many of the films on that list. I'd be completely wrong to negate the impact films like The Shining, Fright Night, Happy Birthday to Me, and others had on me, but there's something about each of the movies I'm about to mention that just feels incredibly special to me. I know I'm not the only person that likes them, but it's kind of like these movies just happened to be in the right place at the right time for me. And that time and place was, for lack of a more intellectual word, awesome.
In January of 2009, From Midnight, With Love was born. And when I started putting this little blog together, dreaming that someday someone might read the ramblings I had to offer and maybe even consider an opinion of mine as a reason to check out a genre film, I put together a simple bio for the sidebar of the site that explained what I stood for as a genre fan. That same bio still sits in the right hand column of this site - and you can still see these three films listed there as the movies that awakened the monster that I now am.
I can't remember all the details, but I'm pretty sure Phantom of the Opera came to me first. I remember being told about silent movies and realizing that this was kind of like reading a book with pictures, and I don't know if I had the attention span to finish the whole movie, but I do remember getting to the part where the unmasking happens and I remember being really freakin' excited. Whenever people ask me about my first horror movie, I mention this one.
Creature from the Black Lagoon came next, I think. I remember being in awe of the green dude on the cover when I first had the VHS tape brought to me, and I remember taking it to a friend's house when I was in second grade to watch during a sleepover. It didn't go as well as I wanted it to - I'm pretty sure I watched the whole thing alone - but at least I was in love with it. Was this the first time I tried to push someone I know to watch a horror movie against their will? It may very well have been.
Considering that it's the one of these three that I mention the most, it's slightly funny to me that I don't have any vivid memories of my childhood encounter with The Blob outside of the question mark that pops on screen at the ending. I didn't fall as in love with The Blob as I am now until a little later in my life - but I do remember thinking it was a ton of fun and talking about The Blob all the time whenever I had a reason to make a reference to it. (And sometimes when I didn't.)
As I look at these three VHS tapes now - and that's them, in their original glory, as they look tonight - I am completely in awe of how much what these three movies meant to me before I was even 10 years old. Maybe it was a brilliant design by my parents, or maybe it was just dumb luck - but whatever the reason, I can't help feeling that they gave me the three perfect films to push me to the love of horror I have today.
The Monster Squad
Remember that time in part one of this series when I talked about "those orange back monster books from the library? (If not, you should go read it and stuff.) Well, The Monster Squad was the film adaptation of those books - and the library had it too. Again, this was one of those things that kind of got lost in my memory except for parts - "Wolfman's got gnards!" is part of my philosophy on life, obviously - but it was my gateway to the monsters that I hadn't really seen outside of those books. Fred Dekker got me in the door with his monsters-for-kids film, which is probably exactly what he wanted to do - and I applaud him for that.
Pumpkinhead
There's a very simple and not very exciting reason that Pumpkinhead is on this list. When I was 8 or 9, I was ready for all the "scary" movies I could get. I'd seen the trinity, I'd seen the Monster Squad, I'd seen Dracula, and I wanted more. And I thought a monster with a pumpkin for a head sounded like a creepy idea, for reasons that I will elaborate on next week. Well.....
It was NOT a good idea for little me. I have a vivid memory of about 12 seconds of Pumpkinhead carnage when I was a kid. And I remember being instantly shocked and terrified and completely uninterested in seeing any more of that. Did I act cool? Yeah, I was a cool little pimp. But I was terrified. I went away from the screen and I did not come back. I wasn't completely ready to go where I wanted to go, but I learned from the experience.
Clownhouse
There it sits, alongside the plastic protector from Freedom Video Superstore in Marshalltown, Iowa that protected it (poorly, as you can see) for over 10 years in store and over 10 years in my hands. On sentimental value alone, this would be the absolute first thing that I would grab and run to safety if my lair was on fire.
I've long ago written a detailed rant about how much Clownhouse meant to my sister and I as we became old enough to watch horror movies. But I couldn't talk about movies that contributed to my horror love without Clownhouse. I must have watched it 50 times between the ages of 10 and 15, and I always knew it wasn't a good movie. But I loved it. And it led to every bad horror movie I've loved, and every horror movie I've watched and shouted at with friends, and every stupid grin I've ever given during a stupid movie. All of that can be traced back to how much fun I my family had with Clownhouse.
When that Freedom Video store went out of business, my mother rushed to town and ran through the store to grab it before anyone else even had a chance. You know how that watch was Bruce Willis' birthright in Pulp Fiction? Clownhouse is like that to my sister and I.
Dr. Giggles
Speaking of stupid and bad, there's Dr. Giggles. I have to list Dr. Giggles here, for similar reasons to Clownhouse. We didn't watch this movie religiously, nor did we necessarily like the movie, but Dr. Giggles became a cult figure in our house very quickly when we first encountered him.
And so it came to pass that my father would torture my sister by cackling like Dr. Giggles. And it's still funny. Heck, I'm pretty sure he somehow mentioned Dr. Giggles while she was in the hospital after giving birth a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Giggles was our home's Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees or Cropsey, and that still makes me smile.
Night of the Living Dead
The VHS Tape shown above demands your attention. First of all, anyone who's worth their weight in horror immediately realizes that the image that has been chosen - completely spoils the final moments of the movie. Then they might notice that they even spelled Duane Jones' name wrong on the cover. I'm laughing about that little yellow spot that denotes the guarantee on the 1986 VHS release of Romero's film, and the back of the box promises a "lifetime commitment" that you can call 1-800-VHS-Tape for details of. Oh, and the blurb on the back of the box reads EXACTLY as follows:
"Possibly the greatest low-budget film of all time filled with non-stop action. From the opening sequence, in which Judith O'Dea is terrorized by the first living corpse in the twilight cemetery, to the last slow dissolves and pans of still pictures, depicting the hero's death, the film is filled with ghoulish undertow that pauses only now and then on the thread-line to reality."
I'm sorry you guys, but I just got really distracted by that blurb. It's....so bad. Does that make sense to anyone else?
OK, back on topic. This VHS tape. This VHS tape may have been in my parents' VHS cabinet as long as the rest of the trinity. Yet I was strictly told that I COULD NOT watch it. So I didn't. I told you guys I was a good kid. Now do you believe me? I'd like to say that I didn't watch it because I was that respectful of my parents - never mind the fact that I snuck several viewings of my dad's copy of Brian De Palma's Body Double as soon as I realized what boobs were - but honestly I was kind of terrified of this movie. If they were that adamant that I couldn't watch it - it must be the scariest thing ever, right?
I'm pretty sure I saw the remake on Monstervision before I finally got the guts to put this VHS tape in the player. The spoiler on the video cover wasn't a big deal, because my dad had already explained the differences in the endings when we watched the remake with Joe Bob Briggs. Heck, when I finally did put in the VHS, I'm pretty sure I was like 16 and my parents came home with groceries with like 6 minutes left in the movie and started yelling for help and I had to pause right when it was about to blow up. Night of the Living Dead and I were just not meant to have a perfect meeting.
Did I love the movie anyway? Of course I did! It's bloody brilliant, and the hype and the distractions and the stupid VHS package only make me love it more. The anticipation was worth everything that followed, and watching Night of the Living Dead for the first time was a key moment in my life as a horror fan no matter how it happened.
Did I got long winded there? Man, I got long winded there. Apologies to those who don't like rambling incoherence, but these are the memories of horror that give me goosebumps. It wasn't the introduction to horror films that most had, and it wasn't always the best way to meet horror. In fact, those last three experiences would almost push most people to avoid horror movies. But these movies got to me at the right moment and it all just came together perfectly for me.
And now it's your turn - what movies got you in to horror? How did you learn to love cheesy goodness or overwhelming zombies or big green gill-men? Hit up the comments below, and then comeback next week for a the How The Mike Met Horror finale, in which i will present a "grab bag" selection of the other stuff that helped me fall in love with horror films.
Until then, keep watching horror movies and having an awesome October!
George Romero, for all intents and purposes, invented zombies in 1968. Yeah, I know zombies were already a thing, but the common perception of zombies can be tied directly to the release of this film. Some may say that it's dated at this point - I'd agree in regard to its perception of trauma, but not in regard to its plot and pacing - but it still strikes me as one of the most visceral and harrowing horror films out there. George A. Romero didn't have his characters completely down yet - that would improve in Dawn of the Dead, which already made this here list - but the chaos that he unleashes fits perfectly with the simple characters here.
The Moment That Changes Everything:
"They're coming to get you, Barbara."
Like, seriously. Can you get a better moment in horror than "They're coming to get you, Barbara"? This is exactly what horror is. You introduce a threat, you build the threat, and then you bring in the threat. But Romero and company pull the introduction and the build off in like 5 minutes with a simple exchange between a brother and sister and the random introduction of a zombie. And that's it. Romero looked at the film and said "Alright - here's five minutes to make people think something might happen - and now it happened. Just run with it." Freaking brilliant.
It Makes a Great Double Feature With:
I've used up almost all of the zombie movies I like on this list. Dawn of the Dead, Zombie, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Last Man on Earth (technically vampires, but you could argue they fit Romero's mold) - all mentioned already. There's a decent enough remake that came out in 1990 that you could pair with this one, or you could just do the cool kids thing and pair it with Shaun of the Dead. Whatever you do, the zombies you see will fit with this one's. Because they're all the children of Night of the Living Dead.
What It Means To Me:
I'm actually going to talk a little more about my personal experiences with Night of the Living Dead later this week, so I'm gonna go with a simple/vague answer here. Night of the Living Dead represents the unpredictable nature of horror. Sure, people look at it now and know exactly what's going on because of Shaun and remakes and The Walking Dead and the fact that zombies are suddenly hip. But I think they're all wrong if they dismiss the relevance and power that the original Night of the Living Dead has, because I truly think this is one of the most game-changing films ever made.
I have to admit, there was a moment near the end of Paranormal Activity 4 that had me rolling my eyes and considering a quick exit to beat the crowd. As a character with a handheld camera frantically chases impending doom, I get the feeling that I've seen this a few times before.
I didn't walk out, of course, partially because I'm old now and have to pay for movies, but mostly because you just never know exactly what's around the corner with the Paranormal Activity franchise. The formula repeats itself - and in this case, loses some touch with logic in the process - but the result of the formula still seems to be a surprise more often than not.
Moving forward following the events of Paranormal Activity 2 - and leaving numerous questions from the prequel Part 3 hanging in the balance - Paranormal Activity 4 is the first film in the series that is set in the 2010s. Moving forward five years after the events of the first two films, this one follows a family of four in which the fifteen year old daughter seems to be obsessed with filming whatever is going on around her. She also enjoys video chatting (Skype didn't offer to pay the producers, I guess) with her boyfriend, who sets up all the computers (and the XBox 360 with Kinect sensor, who must have paid the producers) to record what is going on in their house. These recordings are deemed necessary after a strange boy from next door moves in for a few days while his mother (Katie Featherston, returning as the tie that binds these four films together) is (conveniently) in the hospital. Oh, and Toby, the unseen force that talked to young Katie and her sister in part 3, is back too. Which is bad news for this seemingly random family.
What follows is the same thing you expected from the first two sequels. We're shown the camera of an empty room, and we wait until something surprising happens. The people who watch this kind of movie and complain about things like "Why were they even filming this?" will surely shake their fists over the lack of logic shown by these characters, and rightfully so at times. I probably spent too much time asking myself questions like "Why would she walk around with her laptop all the time?" or "Why did they start recording all of this to investigate events and then stop checking the footage for events?" myself. This time around, it seems that the filmmakers - including directors Joost & Schulman, who return from Paranormal 3 - put less of an emphasis on involving the characters in the investigation and more of a focus on showing the audience what is going on in the house. This takes us out of Paranormal Activity 4 slightly, but not enough to take me out of the film.
Despite the reliance on computers following characters, the film pulls off several scares because - like the other films in this subgenre - control over the timing of the film is taken from the viewer. Most traditional films move with the camera and cut to the action, but these films leave their mark on us by making us sit there with the camera and wait for the action to come to us. The tension that's created is just as real this time as it was in the other films, even if our interest in the characters and our involvement in the found footage gimmick is a little less evolved. We get a little bit of a laugh when the camera conveniently makes its way to places it usually shouldn't be, but at the same time the scenes that follow are worth the trickery. My favorite example of this was probably a moment where the camera ends up next to a bathtub, because what we witness through this camera is one of the most intense moments in the series.
Which brings us all the way back to where I started these ramblings - the ending. The ending of Paranormal Activity 4 is exactly why I can't get enough of these movies. I'm sitting there and I'm thinking that I know the film and know that the camera is herding me toward a scare - and yet I'm still completely in awe of the scare that was presented to me. It's a wonderfully abrupt ending that builds on events from the previous films while leaving more questions about where the film will go next.
A lot of people write off this franchise as just a gimmick and the lowest form of horror, but I really like what creator Oren Peli and the writers/directors that have been brought in have done so far to keep this series moving in an interesting direction. They've taken a simple haunting tale and turned it into a mythology that has shown us action from three decades and implied that the tale really could go anywhere in time. This time out they seem to slam the door on one storyline, but at the same time have opened up a lot of possibilities - including one that is teased in a post-credits sequence at the end of the film. There's no sign of this storyline slowing down, it's only the gimmick that may go stale.
Though this one shows some obvious flaws and seems destined to be far less memorable than its predecessors, Paranormal Activity 4 still has enough tricks that work up its sleeve. If you've enjoyed the series thus far, then you might as well head out to the theater and see this one with a raucous crowd while you can. The Paranormal Activity series has become a horror tradition that's as old as time (or at least as old as this blog), and I've got little doubt that we'll be checking out another piece of this demonic puzzle next October.
I really hope the people of the 1970s knew how awesome of a world they lived in, particularly if they liked horror films. It's about the one time in the history of horror when nearly every single movie put all of its weight behind the ideas of evil and the devil, a trend that started around the release of Rosemary's Baby in 1968 and ended around the time that viewers mistook evil for a man in 1978's Halloween. (Someday I'm gonna write my masterpiece on evil and Halloween, and it's gonna be glorious. But today is not that day.)
In that time span, with films like The Exorcist and The Omen standing tall above many horror films and actually earning respect from critical circles and Oscar voters, film studios of all sizes and shapes began to put their faith in people's willingness to fear devilish forces. But while most took evil forces and embodiments of evil very seriously and focused on gritty realism, one film chose to lead with a quote from the leader of The Church of Satan and then follows with an unmanned and self-aware demon car.
That movie, of course, is The Car, in which the great and powerful James Brolin faces off with a customized 1971 Lincoln Continental. As a Police Captain in fictional Santa Ynez, Utah, Brolin's Wade Parent is basically the everyman of the decade - which means he's a single dad who hooks up with a young music teacher and has a mustache and really cool sunglasses. He's living the dream, until that black demon vehicle rolls into town and starts rolling over anyone and everyone it can.
The trick behind The Car is that this is literally all the film is about. A car. The cover of the DVD release suggests that the viewer consider "What evil drives...The Car", but do not expect much of a reveal during the film. A lot of people would suggest that The Car needs a face to its terror, at least in the form of a deranged cult leader that controls it from afar or a scared priest who connects the terror to some prophecy. Alas, director Elliot Silverstein - who previously helmed successful westerns Cat Ballou and A Man Called Horse and wrote episodes of The Twlight Zone and Tales from the Crypt - lets the car stand alone as the villain for the film. (Which can be kind of confusing when I'm typing this. So for the rest of this post, I will refer to the vehicle as a character as "Boris". And will still refer to the film as The Car.)
Anyway, Boris The Car, as I like to call him, is basically the biggest paradox in horror history. On one hand, Boris is something that could kill us, on the other, Boris is a big freakin' car in the middle of a Utah desert. One one hand, we know Boris has some kind of evil force driving him, but on the other hand we have no idea why that makes any kind of sense. I've seen The Car a few times now, and I keep going back to it willingly, yet there are so many moments throughout the film when I just don't get Boris. I do know that I love that he doesn't have door handles, but the rest of Boris is confusing.
Am I overthinking Boris? Should I just sit back and be afraid of Boris and stop trying to rationalize Boris? Probably. Most horror fans will notice obvious similarities between The Car and Stephen King's Christine (which was published six years after The Car was released), and maybe that's why I struggle so much with accepting the fact that Boris simply is who Boris is. King gives his killer car a name and a personality, while this film leaves me making up the name Boris and knowing no motive for a killer car rampage.
But, we get James Brolin reacting with fear, we get his girlfriend - Kathleen Lloyd, creating something out of nothing with a side character - fighting to protect children, and we get Ronny Cox as the unsure deputy who brings up the possibility that Boris is a force of biblical evil. Like plenty of my favorite ridiculously plotted horrors - and like almost all horrors of the 1970s - The Car never winks at the audience and gives us a reason not to feel that Boris The Car is a credible threat to legitimate people in a legitimate movie.
The film still probably works best as something to watch with friends and laugh at, thanks to its premise and how dated it is, but I still find it fascinating in its own way. The final reveal isn't a Soylent Green-style punch to the gut, but it is grand and provokes more thought than anything else in the movie does. The Car plays like a made for TV drama with a killer car, but if you're looking for a movie where James Brolin takes on an evil car then you're not going to find anything more fun than this one.
I don't know man. I'm really second guessing myself at this point in the list. Maybe this is too high on the list for The Evil Dead. But it might be too low too.
If the competition is dealing with inventiveness and ingenuity, then The Evil Dead would probably be in a class of its own. Aside from its sequels, there just aren't a lot of films out there like it. Some might say it's just a splatter flick, but I dare them to name a movie that splatters like The Evil Dead does. We've got glop of all colors and consistencies spraying from all over the place, we've got pencil stabbing, and - yes - we've got tree rape. The whole thing is just so ridiculous, yet at the same time it manages to be incredibly tense and quite unsettling. And that's pretty awesome.
The Moment That Changes Everything:
I simply can not talk about The Evil Dead without mentioning tree rape. And I'm a dude. A fat one. I'm 99% less likely to be raped than anyone else (outside of a prison). And it still creeps me out to the max. If there was ever a moment when a horror movie literally stuck it to the audience, this might be it.
It Makes a Great Double Feature With:
There aren't a lot of movies like Evil Dead out there, but fans of do-it-yourself horror and practical special effects should jump backwards in horror history and find Equinox, a low budget monster film from 1970 that has since been restored by the Criterion Collection. It lacks the shock value and tension of Evil Dead, but the theme and the method behind the film are surprisingly similar and there's fun to be had there. (Bonus pick from the low-budget and fun genre - Thou Shalt Not Kill...Except. Raimi co-stars in friend Josh Becker's backwoods cult picture, which is ridiculous and fun in all the wrong ways.)
What It Means To Me:
When I dug up The Evil Dead as a teenager, I was promptly told I was doing it wrong. It was the '90s, after all, and Army of Darkness was how the cool kids knew Ashley J. Williams. Now I love Army of Darkness as much as the next guy - the poster's on the wall in front of me and the movie's already been talked about on this list - but I kind of feel bad for anyone who worked their way to The Evil Dead in reverse. I wasn't ready for what I saw when this movie came to me, which left it as one of the most new and thought provoking movies I've ever seen. If you're like me, your first time with The Evil Dead is one of the most memorable movie events of your life.
Once I got through the books that my parents gave me to test my awesomeness, I was ready for the real gift to children of the '80s and '90s - the television. And though most of my youth was spent with a combination of Transformers/G.I. Joe/Masters of the Universe/Thundercats/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (OMG, there were so many awesome things!) on the tele, there were a few things scattered into the mix that helped push me toward my budding affection for the dark and dreary side of entertainment.
Like the books I listed in Volume One, these are some pretty common picks for folks my age - but that doesn't mean they didn't pack a lot of punch for little The Mike. So let's take a look.
Most kids love Scooby Doo (I do too) and loathe the many knock-offs of the show that occurred later in Scooby's run. I agree with most of them - because, let's face it, NO ONE EVER liked Scrappy or that weird white version of Scooby with the goatee - but yet there was something about A Pup Named Scooby Doo that just enamored The Mike from day one. I guess it's kind of the Army of Darkness to the original Scooby's Evil Dead. And I'm OK with that.
Perhaps the thing that made me laugh most about A Pup Named Scooby Doo - and I did laugh at it often, still do on occasion - is the ridiculous monsters put forth on screen. I'm not saying they were great, but I still love to draw my version of the "Totem Pole Monster" (which is LITERALLY the only thing I know how to draw) and can still sing the "Cheese Monster" song. (Because any song with the lyrics "Mozzarella...nasty fella....here comes the Chhhhhheeeeeeeesssssseeee monster!" is worth singing.) Was it a cheesy show? Absolutely, and literally at times. Did they introduce a character named Red Herring who was always accused but was only once the monster? Yes they did. Did it make little me smile and make me want to watch more monster mysteries? You betcha.
Disney's DTV Monster Hits
This thing was something special.
A one-time-only presentation that aired sometime in October of 1987, this one hour (with commercials) special featured Jeffrey "Mr. Rooney" Jones as the magic mirror on the wall that hosted a collection of animated music videos featuring some awesome music and plenty of Disney's favorite characters. There was Michael Jackson's Thriller, Monster Mash, Ghostbusters, and plenty of other great tunes. Even today, I still picture images from this special whenever I hear Stevie Wonder's Superstition or the Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams - which was definitely the most bizarre and engrossing segment of the show.
Luckily for little me, my grandmother happened to tape this special when it aired, which means I watched it as many times as I could when I was at her house. Sure, I could have watched any of the other videos she had - and there was one that I'll cover when we get to movies later this month - but this was the "scary" movie of the bunch. So I sat, and I stared at the old Disney images, which had been matched up perfectly with pop music - and I loved every second of it.
And, like all good things, you can now watch it on You Tube. Ain't life grand?
Count Floyd
Horror hosts were a big deal a lot of places in the '80s, but little The Mike didn't get to see a lot of them. I certainly knew who Elvira was, mostly because her breasts face were all over the place, but I never was up late enough to see her show. No, the first horror host I really knew was the undeniable Count Floyd - and I'm still pretty excited to have viewed him.
Though the character originated on the sketch comedy bonanza SCTV, my experience with Count Floyd was due to Joe Flaherty's appearances on the animated spin-off The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley. On most episodes, Count Floyd would promise a "real scary story", though his show-within-a-show never seemed to turn out the way he wanted it too. Count Floyd didn't necessarily teach me anything about horror - but it's another one of those things that kept horror in my mind and made me smile.
OK, now we're getting to the real stuff.
What, you're telling me a Nickelodeon show isn't the "real stuff" when it comes to horror? Boy, you're missing out.
It was a much simpler time in my life when SNICK was destination television for The Mike and family. There was Ren and Stimpy that got me in the door, but then there was Are You Afraid of the Dark. And this show, to those of us where were 9-11 years old, was basically The Twilight Zone with awesome early '90s kids telling the stories.
Unfortunately, Are You Afraid of the Dark has been a hard show to find on home video, so my memory of the show is pretty bare at this point. But I remember the excitement, mostly that joyous feeling that seemed to run through the house every Saturday night as we sat down to watch the horror show that was completely OK for us to watch. I'm not sure that I've been that excited about a TV show since then.
I don't think I'm overstating myself when I say that Unsolved Mysteries might have had the biggest impact on my sense of wonder than anything else I watched as a child. If you don't believe me, talk to the counselor that I had to talk to after I emphatically claimed I saw a UFO at a high school football game. In retrospect, I may have been a spaz. But I was not afraid to believe.
And so it came to pass that I hid out in my childhood bedroom with a 13 inch black-and-white TV, listening to Robert Stack tell me about terrible true stories and fantastic tales from people that belonged in looney bins. I was in awe of this show, and I - because I was about 8 or 9 years old when I started devouring every episode - kind of let myself believe everything I saw. Seriously, I think this show is about 90% responsible for how insane I am now. And I kind of love that about it. Robert Stack, you complete me.
Tales From The Crypt
Like Stephen King was in my post on books, this was kind of my graduation from being a kid with horror. My parents might not know it, but I was up way later than they thought on most Saturday nights during my teenage years. But unlike others in the family - *cough*my sister*cough* - I wasn't out partying and missing curfew. I was laying in bed and watching syndicated episodes of Tales from its first few seasons on network television.
By the time I got around to Tales From the Crypt I had already seen a lot of horror cinema - more on that next week - but there was something about the Cryptkeeper that made me feel like an official horror freak every time I watched Tales. Did I still change the channel every time he unleashed his blood-curdling laugh in the opening? Well....I'm going to plead the fifth on that one. I'm not going to tell you that I was a giant scaredy cat who was tucked safely under the covers with his feet nowhere near the edge of the bed. That would be too much incriminating information. I'm not saying it.
But it might have happened. ---------------------------------------------------------
Television played a big part in leading me to horror, even if there was a heavy dose of comedy and plenty of cheese involved. It wasn't the biggest piece of my horror fandom, but these shows definitely filled some of the gaps and reminded me how much I loved the spooky and macabre in my entertainment. But movies were always where I felt horror lived....which means we can talk about them next week.
As always, join in the comments and let me know what kind of TV shows inspired your love of horror. Next week I'll talk more about my horror birth via movies. I promise you'll be a little surprised by what you learn. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm watching some Are You Afraid of the Dark.
If you have questions or suggestions not regarding a specific review, or would like to recommend a movie to The Mike, feel free to email him at frommidnightwithlove(at)gmail(dot)com!
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