Atomic Nerds

It’s Halloween eve and once again our place is deserted. Guess we’ll have to keep all those king-size packs of Reese’s cups to ourselves, sob. The combination of the poor lighting on the street and the fact that many of the driveways nearly qualify as a vigorous nature hike in and of themselves means that our abode is usually avoided except by all but the most intrepid teenage sugar fiends.

In any case, I’m stuck for material yet again and may as well do something thematic, so let’s talk scary movies. Horror is probably my favorite genre; some women like to watch movies about close-knit groups of women friends as they live, love, and inevitably one of them dies in great but photogenic suffering. I’m not big on those. I like movies about groups of friends as they live, love have hot sex, and are mostly killed off one at a time in photogenically grisly ways, according to just how annoying each one of them is and how much sex they’ve had. While slasher movies are great for nights of beer and candy such as… uh… Halloween, my favorites, the ones I can watch over and over again, tend to be much more in the line of psychological thrillers than splatterpunk. There’s still a bit of splatter, though.. wouldn’t be a horror flick without it.

Oh, and before we get to the listing? Heresies first, before you ask me why they’re not on the list. (Also, there are spoilers in this part, though there won’t be in the list. But given that every movie I talk about is over twenty years old and a giant of the genre, I don’t think I’m being too evil here.) I think The Exorcist is mind-numbingly boring after the first watch. I mean Christ, what was that, forty-five minutes of that one guy looking really stressed out in Iraq? And I’m sorry, but Linda Blair was pretty good, but not that great- Jennifer Carpenter’s turn in The Exorcism of Emily Rose made her look as though she could reasonably have been replaced with a Tickle Me Elmo doll.

I’m also mostly bored by Jaws, although it’s one of Stingray’s favorites, and while I’m sure he’ll kill me in my sleep once he reads this for saying so, no matter how awesome the effects were at the time, I can’t watch it now without feeling like I’m being menaced by the giant rubber shark I used to have for a tub toy. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the performances were awesome, but the only moment I find truly creepy is the one in the very beginning of the movie, where you can’t see the shark- because the damn thing shatters my suspense of disbelief each time.

What else? Alien isn’t on here. It’s pretty good, and before you leap out of your chairs to tell me so, I’m aware that it looks cliched now because it was the the one to CREATE all the cliches in the first place and was wildly original at the time. My problem isn’t so much that as it is by the fact that most of the irritating crewmembers didn’t die fast enough for my satisfaction, and the series in general was rather tainted for me by the way it went out of its way to make sure everyone you DON’T want dead in the first fifteen minutes eventually dies in the most horrible and pointless way the writers can possibly come up with. The first movie’s fine, though. They let the cat live. I’m pretty sure he was the only sympathetic character in four movies that did, except for the part where he might have died of old age before Ripley was rescued. So scratch that.

So, in no particular order because figuring out the order would actually take more effort than writing the entire rest of the post, my favorite horror movies.

1. Event Horizon. So far as I’m concerned, this one’s a lot better than Alien. They get the “welcome to outer space, you’re on your fucking own, buddy” vibe down pat, they did a very good job of sketching out the characters in just the amount of detail they needed to be flawed but likeable without wasting a lot of time that could be spent terrorizing the audience on tedious backstory, and it’s scary, which is the important part. With Alien, the whole conundrum for the crew is that there’s a giant acid-spitting flesh-eating monster roaming about the ship turning people into kibble, which I grant you is a not-insignificant problem, but the only thing there is to wonder about is whether or not it’s behind you or in that duct or whatever. Event Horizon gives you some mystery- about the ship, about the crew, about who’s going to survive, about whether or not you can watch the airlock scene without crawling into the sofa cushions.

2. Wicker Man. To the guy still mad about Jaws who’s going to accuse me of not liking a horror movie unless it’s got slick special effects- and I can practically see you, dude- here’s my riposte. And no, I am not talking about whatever abortion Nicholas Cage perpetrated on this horror great, which I have not seen and will never see unless I wake up in a trap contrived by the guy from Saw where my only choices are watching the remake or eating my own eyeballs or something. (I hated Saw, too.) This movie is a masterpiece example of what can be done with a shoestring budget, a decent unknown actor, a nice setting, and some freaking imagination. Watch the director’s cut/extended version- the new scenes look rather horribly fuzzy, but you won’t care, because a lot of them are really cool. (And there are naked people!) I also nominate this movie for managing to achieve a mind-bending mixture of horribly creepy, sexy, and inexplicably wholesome in one particular scene that will never, ever be topped. Especially not by anything Nicholas Cage does EVER.

3. Session 9. Most of the time when your audience gets to the end of the movie and thinks “Okay, what the FUCK just happened there?”, that’s a bad sign. Not so much with this movie, because if you’ve been paying a decent amount of attention- and not just sitting lazily back expecting to watch a nice straightforward monster or ghostie eating the cast- you can piece it back together. And then, lucky you, you can watch the movie again knowing what IS going on and it will be three times as creepy. The star of the movie is the setting, an abandoned insane asylum played by an actual honest-to-goodness abandoned insane asylum, which is every bit as creepy as such things really should be but usually aren’t. THIS is how you do atmospheric psychological thrillers, folks.

4. Haunted. I’m pretty sure there’s more than movie titled this, so I’ll clarify that it’s the pretty period piece with Aidan Quinn and Kate Beckinsale and based on a James Herbert novel. If you like ghost stories, folks, this one’s for you- and if you’re fans of a good mindscrew of a story, this also fits the bill. (Dear M. Night Shayalaman: this is how you do a twist properly, without making your viewers want to throw things at you.) Did I mention it’s also very, very pretty? The camera is quite in love with the English countryside on display here, not just with the actors. Like Session 9, this one is also much creepier when you watch it with the full understanding of what’s going on.

5. The Orphanage, or El Orfanato in the Spanish you should watch it in. (I hope subtitles don’t bother you. They don’t bother me.) I hear they’re making an American remake. If I believed in Hell, I’d believe in a special pit of it reserved specifically for directors that take a gorgeous, lovingly done and excellent foreign film and decide that what it really needs is to be more American and much, much worse. The excellent Guillermo del Toro, of Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy fame, produced this one, and his fingerprints are all over it- and yes, it is visually STUNNING. Also very, very creepy at points, and this is coming from someone who has seen so much of this stuff that it’s now very difficult to actually scare me as opposed to getting golf applause and a “Oooh, nice decapitation.” I won’t ruin the ending for you… or, well, most of the story, which is genuinely mysterious and interesting. And creepy. That damn kid with the sack on his head… brrr.

6. The Fog. Yes, I know there was technically a remake, but there is really only one The Fog, and that was the one made by John Carpenter in 1980 with Adrienne Barbeau and Jamie Lee Curtis and some dude that Jamie Lee bangs in the movie. I’m sure he’s some important actor in his own right, but he’s not the most interesting character in the movie- which are Adrienne, Jamie Lee, the fog, and that preacher guy, in that order- so I haven’t bothered to remember his name. John Carpenter deserves the title of horror master a lot more than some (I am looking at you, Wes Craven and Clive Barker), and this movie shows why- if it’s 1980 and your budget isn’t big and your premise is a little cheesy, make the star the atmosphere rather than the monster(s). There’s some sort of zombies or ghosts or something and they’re pissed off, but the source of the tension is the thick blanket of fog, Adrienne Barbeau’s voice, and some nice acting.

7. Army of Darkness. It’s not really scary, but it’s most definitely a creature of the genre, and god damn is it fun to watch. Bruce Campbell makes it (and makes you wonder why Sam Raimi ever went on to do some stupid emo spider crap with Tobey Maguire instead of making things starring Bruce Campbell for the rest of his career), and the zombies and other monsters are his medium of art. There’s a chainsaw hand. And a shotgun. And implausibilities abounding that you instantly forgive because you’re having so much fun. And it’s so quotable I’ll pull a first for anybody ever mentioning this movie and not quote any of them- if you’re not one of the zombie horde that can already pull five out of your head on a moment’s notice, then go watch it and join the horde.

8. Exorcist III. Yes, I’m only meh on the original, while this one rates inclusion in my top ten. That’s because this one’s better than the original, and it was seen by about six people including me- better writing, better acting, and it’s probably because William Peter Blatty, the novelist who wrote Exorcist (yes, it was a book first) was heavily involved in writing the movie. It has George C. Scott in one of his later roles being awesome, and Brad Dourif also being awesome, and if you’ve seen Brad Dourif in anything remotely horror, you know he’s a card-carrying member of the Creepy Motherfucker guild. Great psychological horror with some fantastic individual scare moments, even if the ending was a little weak.

9. In the Mouth of Madness, another John Carpenter movie. This is definitely a “your mileage may vary” movie, mostly because it feels like a love letter from Carpenter to horror fans. References and thematic riffs abound, and it’s got Sam Neill in it, which you know is your horror recipe for quality. Stephen King fans and H.P. Lovecraft fans will be especially pleased. It also has Charlton Heston being Charlton Heston, America’s creepiest little old lady, and a general prettiness combined with wrongness that makes for Horror Fun.

10. Dead Alive. Or Braindead, depending on where you live. Speaking of “what a great writer and director can do with not much money”, this is an early effort of Peter Jackson, who was clearly having obscene amounts of fun. It’s quite a sweet love story set in New Zealand (with Jackson’s characteristic loving touch with the landscape), about a boy, a girl, the boy’s mother, and their zombie-related difficulties. It has a kung-fu priest. It has zombie sex. It has a Giant Rat of Sumatra (sort of). It has the most traumatic afternoon out with the baby in the stroller ever. If you’re a fan of zombie movies, you have to see it just to see the part with the lawnmower.

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