TSDK No. 58. The Horror, the Horror

Ten films for the season of the witch.

Greetings

As Halloween is round the corner, I thought I would provide you with a selection of fine horror films to help set the mood. Well, when I say “fine” that may be an exaggeration. As with my previous list of misfit horror, some of these movies are, shall we say, not quite right. Yet each one is entertaining in its own way: perhaps through a mood, an atmosphere, an image, a performance, an excess of bad taste, or in the best case scenario, all of the above. Let’s dive in.

Santa Sangre (1989)

Santa Sangre was the first film by Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky that I ever saw, and it blew off the top of my skull. Like all Jodorowsky films it is an assault on the senses, absurd and grotesque and funny and chock full of bizarre imagery. The funeral of the circus elephant, which is carried through the streets of Mexico City and then tossed into a ravine where it is devoured by the homeless, has to be seen to be believed (and then you need to see it again, to make sure that you were not hallucinating the first time). Like Jodorowsky’s other films, Santa Sangre is dense with religious and mystical symbolism, but unlike those other films it is built around a plot that I believe was supplied to him by his Italian producers who were specialists in lurid schlock. Jodorowsky takes the ingredients of a serial killer, a psychotic mother, and a series of stabbings and transforms this derivative fare into a hallucinatory oedipal tale filled with all of his favorite things, ridiculous and sublime in equal measure.

Society (1992)

When I first saw Society 30 years ago, I was as yet a teenager, just starting to dabble in art house cinema and reeling from an encounter with Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, in which a Frenchman spends a summer obsessing over a teenage girl before exorcising his desire by placing his hand on her knee. I was not yet ready for movies in which people talk a lot and nothing happens, but I was also getting a bit bored with straightforward genre films. Society seemed to offer a way forward: here was a horror film that conveyed a subversive message about social class in America, just as John Carpenter’s They Live had done a few years earlier. In the film, an adopted kid played by Billy Warlock (subsequently of Baywatch), struggles to fit in among his upper class family and their neighbors, who have a dark and disgusting secret. They are not human at all, but a different species that preys on humans while participating in grotesque orgies where they “shunt”— melting into each other until their flesh is one mass. The combination of gruesome body horror with hugely unsubtle social commentary left me hopeful that there would be more films like this in the decade to come, combining entertainment with some kind of satirical intent. Nope.

All the Colors of the Dark (1972)

I was late to the world of giallo, an Italian fusion of horror and thriller that typically features lots of stabbings and blood, avant-garde music, baroque set design, histrionic performances, bad dubbing and fantastic titles (e.g. Your Vice is a Locked room and Only I Have the Key). When I did finally discover the genre I went rather too hard on it for a while and had to take a break of several years. Recently however I felt sufficiently recovered to dive in once again, and watched All the Colors of Darkness, starring Edwige Fenech, star of That Hottie Ubalda, All Naked and All Hot as a traumatized woman suffering from nightmares within nightmares. Naturally, she thinks she is losing her mind until her helpful downstairs neighbor suggests that attending a black mass might maker her feel better. It does not, and the film proceeds to make less and less sense, with multiple stabbings, deaths and hallucinations, until the film becomes a lurid fever dream set to a bizarre soundtrack by Bruno Nicolai. Towards the end, I noticed that from a certain angle, Edwige Fenech looked a little bit like late-period Michael Jackson. This added an extra layer of horror.

Messiah of Evil (1973)

Shortly after I arrived in America, I bought a cheap DVD box set that contained something like 50 horror movies from the 1970s. Most of the films were low budget slashers, exceedingly grimy and nasty, made more so by the aging of the film and poor quality transfers. One of the films in the collection was Messiah of Evil, which I watched and promptly forgot, except for a vague recollection of its eerie ambience and the fact that it was written by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who would later destroy their careers with the Howard the Duck movie. When the Criterion Channel included Messiah of Evil in a season of films with synth soundtracks I rewatched it, yet no sooner had the credits rolled than the details of the plot began to fade away. This is a hard film to remember. What remains is a jumble of strange images: a woman searching for her father, a house full of strange murals, an albino driving a truck full of corpses, a man pursued through a grocery store at night; ships and a visitor from the sea. This moment, with the film slipping into fog but with the outlines of some shapes still visible, is when Messiah of Evil is at its best.

Vampyres (1974)

Another film from the 70s, probably my favorite era of horror. Vampyres is an early entry in the “lesbian vampire” genre. The plot is simple: somewhere in England two lady vampires are hanging out by the side of the road, luring horny men to their deaths in the stately home where they were previously murdered. What I most like about it, however, is its low-budget 1970s aesthetic, which captures the bleak atmosphere of a nation in decline. Everything is old and worn down, the cars are rubbish, the fashions dated, the lighting dim. A fog seems to pervade everything, but not a mysterious fog, just the fog of a wet island with miserable weather. A man and a woman are camping out in a caravan on the grounds of the run-down mansion, enjoying the bleakest holiday in cinematic history. In the year of its release, Britain was mired in a variety of political and economic crises and it shows, as even beautiful lesbian vampires must be careful not to drink too much blood all at once. One of their victims is kept alive and tapped slowly, like Ancient Egyptians did their cows.

The Lift (1983)

If you have ever wanted to see a movie about a homicidal elevator, then The Lift is the film for you. Set in the Netherlands, the hero is an elevator repair man who is bored in his marriage. He drives about the suburbs of some Dutch town or other (or maybe it’s Amsterdam, I don’t know) fixing lifts, but he starts to suspect that something is not quite right when people keep dying in the lift of a particular building. Eventually he meets a journalist investigating the story and he attempts to hit on her, but it quickly becomes clear that she is only interested in getting closer to the mystery of the lift. It turns out that the computer system that runs the lift has attained a higher consciousness and that (of course) means that it wants to kill people. At the climax, the repair man goes to fix the lift, and it has some goo in it. Oh, and maybe a ghost appears but I’m not sure because I’d given up trying to follow the plot.

Inseminoid (1981)

What I like most about Inseminoid is its title. When you call your film Insemnoid, it’s pretty clear that you’re not trying to make a good movie. You’re all about cheap shocks, bad taste, poor quality special effects, nudity, and ripping off Ridley Scott’s Alien. In the film a group of people are going in and out of some caves on an alien planet when one of them becomes deranged and attacks his colleagues. After he dies, and someone else dies, they go back into the caves but this is a bad idea, especially for the character played by Judy Geeson, as she is strapped naked to a table and artificially inseminated by an alien. When she returns to base this petite blond becomes a maniacal killer with superhuman strength, then gives birth to two hideous hybrids. Geeson goes all in — gasping wide-eyed as she is inseminated, then rampaging about on the shaky set, giving a performance fueled with Nicolas Cage levels of commitment, before Nicolas Cage had made a single movie. Yet her career had started so well, with To Sir With Love. Her co-star was Sidney Poitier! Gleason knows the only way is down, and Inseminoid is her silent scream.

Event Horizon (1997)

When Event Horizon was released in 1997, I ignored it because it looked like another Alien clone, albeit one with higher production values than Inseminoid. Recently however, I was exploring the science fiction cinema of the 1990s (e.g. Demolition Man, Waterworld, Johnny Mnemonic) and decided to subject myself to it, having fallen asleep during a previous attempt. This time, however, I made it to the end and was pleasantly surprised. Although Event Horizon lifts much from Alien, it also mixes in elements from Tarkovsky’s Solaris before channeling H.P. Lovecraft-style extra-dimensional horror to create a film that is ultimately rather unique. Alas, director Paul W.S. Anderson never made an interesting film again, instead cranking out dross like Aliens Vs. Predator and endless Resident Evil movies.

Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

In Vampire’s Kiss, Nicolas Cage stars as an editor at a literary publishing house who enjoys tormenting his underlings. One night he picks up a girl at a club who proceeds to drink his blood, after which he begins to turn into a vampire — or is he simply losing his mind? Vampire’s Kiss is the film in which Cage becomes Cage, delivering an unfettered, bizarre performance that is as ridiculous as it is mesmerizing. He eats a live cockroach, jumps on a table, mimics Nosferatu, visits his therapist and ultimately unravels completely. Towards the end there’s a scene where a disheveled Cage stumbles through Manhattan raving to himself; it was shot from a distance and many of the passers had no idea it was a movie. They recoil instinctively from the mentally ill lunatic. The film was not a success and director Robert Bierman spent most of the rest of his career making episodes of UK TV dramas; Cage, however, was completely liberated…

Freaks (1932)

For decades, Todd Browning’s Freaks was banned in the UK. It was one of a select group of films that you simply could not see, alongside Life of Brian and A Clockwork Orange. But times changed, and one evening it was broadcast on TV as part of a season of hitherto forbidden cinema. Although it was made in the early 1930s, the film had a visceral charge, largely down to its use of real life carnival performers who had been quite famous in their day: Johnny Eck the half boy, Schlitzie the pinhead, Prince Randian the Living Torso and others. Later, in a bookshop in London, I picked up a copy of Frederick Drimmer’s Very Special People and read about the lives of the movie’s stars. I remember the disapproving glare of the woman behind the till: society had evolved beyond such salacious gawping. Last year, I decided to show the film to my kids, and warned them in advance that there was to be no talking, or making light of what they saw on screen. The film, in fact, it is highly sympathetic to its stars and makes the point that the true monsters are the “normal” people who inflict cruelties upon them. When it was done, I asked them what they thought. My daughter’s response caught me off guard. It was a good film, she said, but she was not shocked by the missing limbs or abnormal bodies as she had seen a lot of this kind of thing on reality TV, and apparently there were social media influencers who would display their deformities while giving make-up tips. Society had evolved again.