This may be a straight-up horror movie, but I also see it as a well-heeled tragedy, in the vein of Roman Polanski's more overtly horrific
Repulsion. I watched this for the first time late at night on IFC sometime in the early 2000s while housesitting for a friend. And, with the house empty and suspiciously quiet, it scared the shit-kicking bejeesus out of me. In it, Susannah York--who won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her frenzied performance--plays a children's book author who's suffering a mental breakdown while vacationing at her rural getaway with her clueless husband (Rene Aberjonois) and the ghosts of her haunted past. It's hard to believe Altman directed this movie, since it feels much unlike anything he did fore or aft; it's rigidly constructed, with none of the camera tricks that dotted his other movies. It feels completely like a nightmare (which, for Altman it was; it couples well with
3 Women, which was similarly inspired by his own dreams, and is also scary on its own). York's piercing screams as she begins to recognize her mind's own dissolution are unforgettable, as is John Williams' Oscar-nominated score, which is
UTTERLY unlike anything he's ever done, as he worked in collaboration with Japanese sound sculptor Stomu Yamashta to create a soundscape that resulted in some of the most unnerving musical stings in movie history. Couple that with Vilmos Zsigmond's curiously exquisite photography, and of course, Susannah York (who actually wrote the spectral children's book she's reading from in the movie), and you have a disorienting psychological maze that will leave you uncomfortably wide awake the very night you see it.
who believes himself to be an operatic genius (the superb Larry Tucker, later a writer/producer of many Paul Mazursky movies). Seriously, by the literally lightening-bolted finale of this shocking tale, you very well might be questioning your
own sanity.
Elephant (US, Gus Van Sant, 2003)
Years earlier, in 1968, Peter Bogdanovich's
Targets--another great choice for this list
--delineated the boundary between old-time horror
Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Suess) is rarely spoke of as someone who trades in scares. Yet his only real foray into filmmaking (he co-wrote the screenplay with Allan Scott and wrote the lyrics to the film's eight songs) is a '50s-flavored, still undeniably comedic hallucination experienced by Bartholomew Collins (Tommy Rettig), a single-parent child who bitterly resents having to learn how to play the piano. His teacher is the sneering Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried), who commands him to play the same grating tune over and over again:
Ten little dancing maidens, dancing all so fine! / Ten happy little fingers and they're mine all mine / They're mine, they're mine / Now isn't that just fine? / Not three, not five, not seven and not nine /
But ten all dancing straight in line! / And all of them are mine, all mine / Oh yes, they're mine, all mine! This lunacy leads Bart, who's simultaneously dealing with the loss of his father, the encroachment of an amiable substitute (plumber Peter Lind Hayes), and the pressure from his exasperated mother (Mary Healy), into Suess's tormented dreamworld in which Bart is pursued by the evil Dr. T and his band of demons whose goals are to amass 499 more kids to play in tandem on the doctor's crazily massive, curvy piano. It's a difficult movie to describe, and one that was much too much for 1953 audiences to handle (it would make for a perfect Tim Burton remake, if he could refrain from screwing it up). Rowland's film has more than a few horrific images to place it on this list, including perhaps the scariest thing to hit all of '50s cinema--the stultifying dip down into Hades, narrated by a hooded elevator operator whose emotions have long been strangled.
The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T is comedy, fantasy, musical, children's movie and horror spectacle all at once, and each classification as strong as the other.
Michael Tolkin's brave, eerie 1991 drama
The Rapture is, despite its obviously low budget,
probably about as close as any filmmaker is ever going to come in
treating the Bible's fabled endgame with some fashion of realism. Its central character,
Sharon (the extraordinarily generous Mimi Rogers), begins the film as a 411 operator who fights the
soul-choking dullness of her day job by enjoying hedonistic nights with
her oily, Eurotrash partner Vic (Patrick Bauchau). They troll the bars
and airports, searching for willing participants in sexual games that, for Sharon,
end in nothing but lonely, post-coital regret. This woman leads a
miserable exis
tence at the beginning of
The Rapture, and it's not long before her mind buckles under the burden, leading her to slowly start questioning her life choices. It takes an epic tattoo to truly shake her, though, and she's transformed into a jumpy, too-frantic Christian acolyte (especi
ally
after she receives a warming vision of the Pearl). And so she prepares
herself. She wins a doubting sexual conquest, Randy (David Duchovny) over to her side, and they have a child
(played with a bizarrely grating quality by Kimberly Cullum). Still, she
can't stop her insistent questioning (when she ch
allenges
a young prophet, simply called The Boy, with her doubt, he alarmingly answers her with a warning: "Don't ask God to meet you
halfway"). But it's in Sharon's fundamental nature to debate, to dig, to ch
allenge. And it gets her into a fix she's forced to live with, up to and beyond the film's
stupendous, intimidating final image.
The Rapture is not a horror movie; it's an inquisition into belief and what the lack thereof might lead non-believers into. But it leaves us all, faithful and unfaithful, with jaws dropped in stunned silence. There is not another movie like
The Rapture.
This whole notion of life imitating art--it really doesn't happen too
often. But it certainly occurred in 1979, and in a timely
manner. On March 16th of that year, writer/director James Bridges unleashed
The China Syndrome
upon American audiences. This taut, expertly-produced thriller
imparted the fictional account of Jack Godell, played passionately by Jack Lemmon.
Godell is an engineer at California's Ventana Nuclear Power Plant who suspects that faults in the plant's construction might set the
stage for a core meltdown that could send radiation spewing into the
atmosphere and groundwater. We follow Godell as he bucks stonewalling
plant management and subsequently leaks Ventana's shaky status to the news
media--specifically, KXLA puff-piece news anchor Kimberly Wells (a shaken Jane Fonda) and her cameraman Richard Adams (producer Michael
Douglas, in an understated role originally slated for Richard Dreyfuss).
This intriguing scenario was considered pure, albeit sobering, fantasy
on the part of Hollywood and nuclear power experts--until a scant 12
days after the film's release, when
Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear reactor had a similar mishap
that caused it and
The China Syndrome
to remain the subjects of newspaper headlines for the ensuing months
(making the connection between the event and the film even more palpable
is an onscreen physicist's assertion that an extreme core
meltdown--deemed "the China Syndrome"--would render "an area the size of
Pennsylvania" permanently
uninhabitable). Stark and alarming,
The China Syndrome
flickered on screens at a time when people needed it the most. The movie takes cues from other 1970s paranoia classics like
The Parallax View and
All The President's Men
in its deft balance of character, suspense, and political intrigue. When the final moments of
The China Syndrome appear on the screen, sans music, you'll understand why I included it here.
German director Michael Haneke has rarely made a movie that couldn't go on this list.
Benny's Video, The Seventh Continent, Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher and especially
Funny Games (my introduction to his work and both the most infuriating and beguiling movie I can name) could easily make the grade here. However,
Cache is the film that I pick for the list because it masquerades so effectively as a most fucked-up family drama. In it, Daniel Auteuil portrays a erudite French TV personality who discovers, with the film's first seemingly still frames, that someone is secretly videotaping the outside of his luxurious townhouse, which he shares with his wife (a prickly Juliette Binoche) and their distant son Pierrot (Lester Makendonsky). More tapes appear at the family's doorstep, along with some red-spattered artwork, and Haneke's film forces us to take sides with either the out-of-the-loop, inquisitive mother or the jangled, obfuscating father. As the film progresses, we learn more and more, until the screen explodes with one jetting cascade of plasma.
Cache (or
Hidden) is a movie about what we think we know, and then what we know we don't know, and ultimately--in its mystifying final shot--it reveals what we can't possibly imagine. That makes it one of cinema's most caustic ordeals.
Safe (US/Canada, Todd Haynes, 95)
In wh
at I still think is his best movie, Haynes slyly builds enormous tension while unfolding this story of C
arol,
a v
apid homem
aker (pl
ayed by
a dev
ast
ating Juli
anne Moore) whose sterile, not-
a-thing-outt
a-pl
ace environment is rendered a no-fly-zone
after she contr
acts
an unexpl
ain
able illness she's sure is c
aused by fuming chemic
als. There's a crushing, foreboding
atmosphere in C
arol’s immaculate home--it seems h
aunted--
and men
acing drones ring out
as C
arol h
as
a violent
att
ack
at
a b
aby shower, or coll
apses in
a dry cle
aning store being spr
ayed for bugs. The movie makes us FEEL she’s being st
alked by toxins, as if she was being chased by Frankenstein's monster. Every time
a c
ar p
asses or
another ch
ar
acter uses
any sort of concoction, H
aynes m
akes p
alp
able for us the fe
ar th
at cruelly overt
akes C
arol’s life, while inevit
ably m
aking us wonder if C
arol
herself isn’t the c
ause of
all her suffering. Check out the Cronenbergi
an touches in the clim
actic scenes
at the cultish desert retre
at C
arol tr
avels to for recovery; kink reeks from the gloomy, glorified refriger
ator she inh
abits,
and from her ne
arest neighbor,
a herky-jerky recluse w
andering the countryside like some neurotic Bigfoot. There’s no blood, no gore, no overt scre
aming in
Safe. But there
is a demon:
an unending sense of dre
ad
at the polluted emptiness of modern life.
Barton Fink (US, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 91)
The Coen Brothers were, themselves, dealing with writer's block when they decided to tackle their enemy head on. This resulted in
Barton Fink, the only film to ever garner three major awards at the Cannes Film Festival (jury president Roman Polanski--who you KNOW loved this movie--pressed it into victory for the Palme D'or, Best Director and Best Actor). It stars John Turturro as the title character, a snooty New York Jewish intellectual whose recent success on Broadway has garnered him a ticket into 1930s Hollywood, where his collaborators have a much more perverse view of success. Barton says he wants to uplift the common man--much to the distress of the studio boss (an electric Michael Lerner), a downtrodden underling (Jon Polito), and a dyspeptic producer (Tony Shaloub). All they want is a B-level wrestling picture, preferably with Wallace Beery. But Barton can't make get his brain operate that way--that is, until he comes in contact with a neighbor in the ominous L.A. hotel he's booked in. Enter Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a sweaty, big-boned salesman who attempts to show Barton the way to horror. Confusion ensues with Barton's introduction to his idol, a Southern alcoholic (based on Hollywood veteran William Faulkner), played elegantly by John Mahoney. He's "assisted" by his paramour, lavishly assayed by Judy Davis. With all of these characters swirling around in his high-topped head, Barton attempts to find his way through a cutthroat world of competition, with undeniably hideous results.
Barton Fink is obsessed with the notion of heads and what is inside of them: "Things are all balled up at the head office," "I'll show you the life of the mind," "I
t's when
I can't write I can't escape myself, I want to rip my head off and run
screaming down the street with my balls in a fruit pickers pail," "Good luck with no fucking head." Ultimately, the film hinges on an unopened box, and a girl--in pictures--who asks what's inside of it. But Barton, smart as he is, doesn't have a clue. This is a a sly horror film in disguise, and it never lets up.
The Silent Partner (Canada, Darryl Duke, 79)
This Canadian landmark is really a noir offering, but it creeps into horrorville oh-so skillfully. Written by Curtis Hanson (
L.A. Confidential) and based on Ander Boldersen's novel, it follows a bored bank official (Elliott Gould) as he enters into a bizarre collaboration with a psychopathic thief (Christopher Plummer, in my favorite performance of his long and recently rejuvenated career). I don't want to let on to what happens in
The Silent Partner, because I think it would ruin so many of its tense moments. But suffice it to say that Plummer makes a lizardly villain, with Gould as his intelligently poised foil (it's my favorite showing by him as well). To boot, Duke's film features Susannah York, Gould's discombobulated co-worker, as a needed voice of reason, Celine Lomez as a batch of comely bait, and John Candy as a porky side-salad of comedy. The film's twists will have you gasping for breath, and you'll feel yourself faint inside when Plummer's villain peers menacingly through the mail slot in one unforgettable moment. Don't doubt it--
The Silent Partner is a dark and foreboding scarefest of the first order.
Collapse (US, Chris Smith, 2009)
A year or so after the demise of the Twin Towers in New York, some cynic laid on me this crude videotape called
Truth and Lies of 9/11. It focused on Michael Ruppert, a squat little man--a former CIA and LAPD operative--who used documents simply displayed on an outdated overhead projector to illustrate how 9/11 was a plot to keep the heroin trade in Afghanistan afloat amidst the poppy-burning activities of the Taliban. A veteran of the 1980s' well-established US government-stamped cocaine trade, Ruppert perilously made a case for why 9/11 had to happen, because so much of the world economy depended on the drug trade. It follows, according to Ruppert's logic, that the United States government--indeed the world's government--could not be trusted with the well being of the planet's inhabitants. Now, I don't really want to get political here, but I had to admit, there might be something to Ruppert's claims. He has, after all, given up much of his life to trying to expose these things, and he indeed has been privy to some extremely inside information.
Truth and Lies of 9/11 was so frightening that it began to taint my mind, and and that of others whom I tried to let see it. I found myself showing it to them, only to have them beg me to cut it off halfway through because it was starting to make THEM paranoid, too. I managed to put the piece out of my head for years--it seemed like a fever dream--until Chris Smith (director of the excellent
American Movie) delivered
Collapse, an unforgettable one-man-show with Ruppert set against a stark background as the film's nervously chain-smoking star. In the movie--where Ruppert's jittery visage is interrupted only momentarily by effective stock footage--the subject is seen positing a vision of the world in which evil is king and idealism, as well as the individual, is rotting dead meat. Ruppert's a smart guy, and I think he knows what he's talking about. And I hope I'm wrong. As for the filmmaker, I think he sees Ruppert as a fascinating eccentric. But, still, the way the film is constructed--I think it's a tale of terror or, at the very least, a quizzical insight into the impossible possible. At any rate, even if you choose not to believe its claims out of self-protection,
Collapse will have you looking over your shoulder at every turn.
Ticket to Heaven (Canada, Ralph L. Thomas, 81)
In this superb Canadian film--only recently made available on DVD--Nick Mancuso plays David, an unbalanced musician who stumbles into the clutches of a manic cult who systematically rob him of his personality and his mind (the film was a major influence on the more recent
Martha Marcy May Marlene). Its structure might feel ultimately hopeful, as David has a bank of devoted friends and family members (led by a terrific Saul Rubinek) who volley hard to win David back to reality. But, still, one cannot shake the ease in which David falls into this trap, and you cannot get it out of your mind that THIS--this, of all things--is a threat for which you have to constantly be looking out. It truly defines the concept of horror.
Ticket to Heaven made my teenaged blood run like ice water as I watched it on cable TV at 2 am in the morning. That is the prime way to see it--when you're sleep-deprived and vulnerable, as David certainly is throughout.
Birth (US, Jonathan Glazer, 2004)
Glazer's remarkable film begins with Harris Savides' stalking camera, backed with Alexandre Desplat's racking, ticking score, as it follows a nameless man jogging through Central Park before he crumples into death. The movie then takes up years later as his uptown, one-time fiancee Anna (the unforgettable Nicole Kidman) is ready to be married again to a perfectly kind gentleman (Danny Huston). But, at the announcement party, she's surprised--to the utmost--by a visit from a child (the excellent Cameron Bright) who claims that he is the reincarnation of her departed lover. He knows all their intimate details, and has a wisened demeanor that suggests an old soul. This is too much to take for the still-shaken Anna, who puts up all the expected arguments against the possibility of this case being true. But, still, shucking the advise of her family (headed by mother Lauren Bacall) and her new fiancee, she gives in. And here I stop, because the film poses unlikely questions that are rarely approached in film.
Birth--gifted with Desplat's fine, unsettling score--is a movie about hope, yes, but it's also one about terrifying disappointment and the endless, nagging query into what could have been.
As a bonus, here's a photo gallery of thirty more perhaps more straightforwardly horrific, and perhaps expected, and hopefully unexpected choices, in case you've seen all of the previous films:
Our Mother's House (UK, Jack Clayton, 67)
Midnight Express (UK, Alan Parker, 78)
High Plains Drifter (US, Clint Eastwood, 76)
Southern Comfort (US, Walter Hill, 81)
Zodiac (US, David Fincher, 2007)
The Vanishing (Netherlands/France/West German, George Sluzier, 88)
Detour (US, Edgar G. Ulmer, 45)
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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thailand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
Brazil (UK, Terry Gilliam, 85)
M (Germany, Fritz Lang, 31)
Missing (US, Constatine Costa-Gavras, 82)
The Parallax View (US, Alan J. Pakula, 74)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (US/UK, Lynne Ramsay, 2010)
Blow Up (UK, Michelangelo Antonioni, 66)
Nightmare Alley (US, Edmund Goulding, 47)
Neighbors (US, John G. Avildsen, 81)
Fail-Safe (US, Sidney Lumet, 64)
Macbeth (UK, Roman Polanski, 71)
Funny Games (Germany/Austria, Michael Haneke, 97)
Shoot (US/Canada, Harvey Hart, 76)
Bad Lieutenant (US, Abel Ferrara, 92)
Sorcerer (US, William Friedkin, 77)
Woman in the Dunes (Japan, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 64)
Contagion (US, Steven Soderburgh, 2011)
The happiest--or so it may seem--Halloween to you all!
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Marlon Brando, THE GODFATHER (won as Best Actor) (2nd: Joel Grey, Cabaret, followed by: Ned Beatty, Deliverance; Robert Duvall, The Godfather; James Caan, The Godfather; Eddie Albert, The Heartbreak Kid; Burt Reynolds, Deliverance; David Lochary, Pink Flamingos; Peter Cushing, Tales From the Crypt; Bruce Dern, The Cowboys) 
MAKEUP: THE GODFATHER, Cabaret, 1776
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