In my continuing efforts to disavow all holidays, I will be celebrating Halloween by working at my dad's network tonight. Nonetheless, the last vestiges of my holiday spirit cropped up yesterday and demanded that I do a film-based retrospective.
So here we are. It should come as no surprise that the subject of this retrospective will be horror, one of my favorite of all movie genres. Something about the grotesque... the unknown... the tangible becoming intangible... intangible becoming tangible... it gets me.
Horror fans tend to obsess over their pet genre, tracking down obscure gems and popular turds alike for voracious consumption. My knowledge isn't nearly as encyclopedic as most horror enthusiasts, but hey, that's what the rest of my life is for. In the meantime, I'll focus on what I have experienced.
What you are about to see is not a list of the best horror films I have ever seen. You won't find horror masterpieces like The Thing, The Shining, The Cabin in the Woods, or Psycho. Rather, this is a list of the ten films that scared me the most when I saw them. It's a purely personal compilation. Well-constructed horror films are more likely to terrify, but each of us is frightened by such idiosyncratic things. Bob 1 might find insects terrifying but is unfazed by the threat of stalker psychos in a character's backyard. Bob 2 is unafraid of insects unless they talk, and unafraid of psychos unless they don't. Bob 3 finds anthropomorphic appliances disturbing on a deep existential level. It's a crapshoot: one that I find endlessly interesting. In fact, I would love to hear about your scariest movies.
I'm not a person who scares easily--it takes a lot for a movie to elicit any sort of visceral reaction from me--but we are about to embark on a tour of the ten movies that have done the most to shape the disturbances of my conscious and subconscious imagination.
As they say in the I Spy: Haunted Mansion computer game that I used to play: Enter if you dare... you're in for a scare.
Everything rhymed in that game.
10. One Hour Photo
Nothing is scarier than the decision Robin Williams made to take his own life. Months later, we are still reeling with the loss. Part of that is because while he was with us, Williams showed more depth and breadth as a performer than one could rightfully expect from a manic stand-up comedian. He built up such an incredible body of work that if you ask ten people, you're liable to get ten different favorites: Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, World's Greatest Dad, Dead Poets Society, August Rush, Patch Adams, The World According to Garp, Good Morning Vietnam, Good Will Hunting... for that last one he won the Oscar. Even among other comic actors who have shown an impressive gift for dramatic roles, like Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Will Ferrell--none of them come close to touching Williams' filmography.
Perhaps more surprising for the zany, energetic Williams was his capacity for villainy. We first saw this in 2002 with Christopher Nolan's justifiably underwatched thriller Insomnia. Williams, playing a killer opposite Al Pacino's renowned but troubled detective, was by a good margin the best part of that movie. He played mind games with Pacino's character; behind a benign physical appearance and a facade of civility, Williams generated a palpable air of quiet menace.
It was this unassuming menace that he refined and perfected for One Hour Photo, released that very same year. Williams plays our protagonist, Sy Parrish, a photo development technician who leads a simple life, but cares a great deal about the quality of his work. He is a shy, quiet man, always dressed in white and washed out in the fluorescents under which he spends all his time. He doesn't have friends, or a family, but he enjoys providing little kindnesses to his customers, especially those he is particularly fond of.
This movie made me identify with Sy Parrish. Something is very wrong with Sy Parrish. Proof that a horror movie doesn't need jump scares to crawl under your skin and set up camp there for years.
9. Donnie Darko
Donnie Darko is the kind of movie that when you're a teenager you think, "Wow I can't wait until I'm smart enough to understand this movie!" and then later you realize you didn't understand it because all the exposition that explains everything was in a bunch of clunky scenes that were cut from the movie. They probably made the right decision. There is a certain power to having no idea what the hell is going on, as any Twin Peaks fan will tell you. Of course no American filmmaker is as good at that as David Lynch, but Donnie Darko is a contender.
All that existential dread really riled me up as a teenager. Donnie's struggles with nihilism, the uber-present memento mori, the picked-up and put-down questions of science and religion. It made an entertaining, confounding, disturbing stew for a mind that was just starting to learn about philosophy and the world of ideas.
Then there's that bunny. Frank. Perhaps the single scariest image of my nascent movie-watching career. The existential dread and scary bunny man neatly collide when Donnie and his girlfriend are ate a late night movie, and Frank is suddenly just sitting there.
I would later channel Frank into my own performance of a disturbing bunny-man.
Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
8. Alien
I am not overly familiar with Alien, having seen it one time about a year ago. As far as I was concerned, it lived up to every piece of hype I had ever heard. Every time I think about the movie, as I do every so often, it grows in my esteem. The dark corridors stalked by the silent creature have approached mythic proportions in my imagination (all the more thanks to James Cameron's sequel Aliens, a bombastic action movie that makes the first all the more sinister by juxtaposition).
Alien may have the most fully and flawlessly realized horror creature ecosystem of any movie I've ever seen. The practical effects are unparalleled. Now, I love what CGI helps us accomplish, but it's easy to believe we won't be seeing any more films as unsettling in their tangibility as Alien. The titular beastie, designed by Swedish surrealist H. R. Giger, is nightmare made manifest. And I'm not even touching all the other effed up stuff that happens in this movie.
7. Black Swan
The best movies open up whole new worlds for the viewer. Just so with Black Swan. I never would have expected the world of professional ballet to be perfect fodder for the one-two punch of psychological and body horror, but it absolutely is. Director Darren Aronofsky has us cringing at the brutality of these ballerinas' training regiments before we even get to the trippy messed up stuff.
And it is trippy and messed up indeed. It's been almost four years since I've seen it, and certain scenes and images stick in my head as if it were yesterday. No, not that scene, get your mind out of the gutter. I was thinking of a certain infamous peeling of skin...
6. The Forgotten
I don't remember most of the things that happened in this movie. I don't remember the actors or the director. I don't remember how or if things are resolved at the end. I'm not even sure the above picture is actually from the movie. This is one of those movies from my distant childhood that I'm honestly not sure whether it's any good, or if I would appreciate a re-watch... but it triggered something in my young impressionable mind that has never left me alone.
The premise is that the main character (who appears to be Julianne Moore after a cursory Googling) has a little daughter (or son?) whom she loves very much. S/he's probably ten or something, I don't know. Anyway, one day she wakes up to find that her child is gone. Just gone. Not only that, but when she starts to ask for help from her friends and neighbors, each one of them gives her a funny look and declares that she's crazy, she has never had a son (or daughter?) in the first place. Then she realizes that all pictures of her child... all stuffed animals... all records that s/he ever existed have been expunged from reality. Even her child's room is furnished like a guest bedroom. Everyone calls her crazy, but she knows she remembers being a mother.
Little Ryan was floored by this scenario. This is the same little Ryan who cried when he heard the song "You Are My Sunshine" because he thought it was about a child getting taken away from a mother. Maybe little Ryan had abandonment issues. Probably more like issues with the existential angst surrounding the potential of his existence being wiped from the universe.
Anyway, vague spoilers ahead--later in the movie she realizes her friends are acting suspicious, like they're in on some sort of cover-up. Then, just when she has finally convinced her one friend to let her in on the truth of what's going on... the friend literally gets pulled screaming up into the sky by an invisible force.
WHAT.
5. The Village
The Forgotten may have been an early trauma of mine, but I distinctly remember The Village as the first straight-up horror film I was allowed to watch. This was an Event.
Now, I know M. Night Shyamalan has become a joke, but he was my first ever favorite director, partially owing to my experience with this movie. People dump all over The Village, I guess for its juvenile twist ending. But I'm pretty sure if M. Night had bounced back rather than crashed and burned, this movie would be held in higher esteem.
The concept is that there are these people living isolated in the woods, and the village lore is that the color red is evil, and you are never supposed to go into the forbidden woods because there are monsters. The movie does a great job of building tension around the color red such that even the smallest wildflower can inspire dread. Part of that is Shyamalan's patented slow burn directing, but much of it has to do with Roger Deakins, one of the greatest living cinematographers. The way he manipulates color is tremendous. Not that I knew any of this at the time.
What I did know was that the first time I caught a glimpse of one of those red-cloaked monsters, it was bad bad Bad Bad BAD.
4. Maniac
Maniac features Elijah Wood being a creepy little killer of women. Sounds disturbing, right? Like a reprise of his work in Sin City? Well. You don't know the half of it.
Maniac is also a French POV film. Meaning that the camera is showing what the serial killer sees at every moment. We are his eyes and ears. We are him. Frankly, the only thing worse than watching a disturbed individual kill young people onscreen is killing them ourselves--and being forced to understand the psychoses that drive him to do these depraved things against his will. It's a supreme study of the male gaze, and is 1000% guaranteed to make you feel all icky inside for a long, long time.
My Review.
3. Session 9
Session 9 is either psychological or supernatural horror--or both, a la The Shining--it's kind of impossible to tell. But what becomes immediately apparent is that it is perverse how horrifying this movie is.
This is a slowly unspooling narrative about a group of people whose Hazmat Elimination Company is tasked with making parts of an old abandoned insane asylum asbestos-free for the sake of impending construction. Even more disturbing than the dialogue, or the plot, or the direction, or anything else at all is the eerie setting--they used an actually abandoned insane asylum shortly before it was demolished. What you see on film is a real place. They didn't even change it that much. They just inhabited it, and let its demons live on screen. The dark corridors of Alien's Nostromo ship are one thing, but the asylum in Session 9 is a monument to human insanity and suffering. The walls scream it.
2. The Exorcist
I watched this by myself in a dark room during a hurricane after the power had gone out.
1. Sinister
Anyone who has ever heard me speak of this movie should have known it would be number one. It was the single most traumatic movie-watching experience of my adult life thusfar.
Sinister is about an ancient demon-ghoul-thing named Bagul who gains power over you once you look upon his image. The main character is investigating a bunch of deaths, and eventually makes the Bagul connection. It doesn't go well for him.
Maybe it was the kicker of a first scene, a grainy home video of a family standing in a line with nooses around their necks, who are apparently hanged by the spontaneous breaking of a tree branch.
Maybe it was the ever-worsening series of cheekily titled film reels that the main character finds and watches, only to encounter brutal family murder after brutal family murder.
Maybe it was the sublime sound design that could evoke panic and dread by the simple sound of a projector reel flipping on in the middle of the night.
Maybe it was the philosophical implications of an evil being who becomes tangible through signs and signifiers alone.
Maybe it was the fact that I had never really seen a scary movie in a movie theater before.
Maybe it was that when you're watching a movie with scared people, you get scared, which makes them more scared, and repeat.
At any rate, Sinister was by a wide margin the scariest movie I have ever experienced. Maybe even the scariest thing period. Around the midway point I actually became physically ill in the movie theater. I was so scared I could feel it nauseating my stomach. I waited with bated breath for the daylight scenes, because at least then I knew that probably nothing terrible would happen.
After the movie my friends and I rushed out of the theater and collapsed against the wall in the hallway for a good five minutes. Driving home in the dark was an experience.
That night I realized I had lost my wallet there, so I returned with a friend the next evening. The manager said the theater we were in was empty, so we could go ahead in and check. We walked into the theater to find that it was not in fact empty. Rather, it was playing Sinister. We scrambled through the dark in search of the wallet, trying not to look at the scream (I meant to type "screen"--Freudian slip), reliving our trauma from the earlier night.
Much like Bagul in the film, it was like Sinister just wouldn't leave us alone. I still talk with my friends about Sinister sometimes, when it comes up in conversation, or to make an illustration. Those conversations invariably end with someone saying, "I don't want to talk about Sinister anymore. Let's talk about something else."
Sinister isn't the best horror movie. The plot is shoddy, the dialogue kind of clunky. But between a fantastic premise, brilliant sound design, and the just-right viewing situation, it may end up being the scariest movie I will ever watch.
The stuff of nightmares.
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