Hello Boils and Ghouls, today is Halloween, and as CB’s resident lover of the obscure and bizarre it has fallen upon me to make a list of horror films that you most likely have never heard of, and certainly will scare the living crap out of you. So when you spend your Halloween night shitting your pants in fear as you cower from your TV screen you’ll have me to thank. Enjoy.
Eyes Without A Face – Don’t hold the awful Billy Idol song against it. This film is something special. The things a doting parent will do for their child. Sweet sixteen parties, full rides at college, serial killings. When the daughter of a famous surgeon is horridly disfigured in a car crash, he does what any sensible parent would do. He stalks the streets of Paris killing beautiful women and then tearing off their faces so he can graft them onto his daughters. That’s devotion I tells ya.
The film is like a demented fairy tale and together with Peeping Tom and Psycho it broke horror out of the “big bug” funk it had been in for the past 15 previous years or so. It has a surreal, sickening beauty to it, as the disfigured girl mournfully witnesses what’s being done in her name with two unbearably expressive eyes that peer through a blank plastic mask. The film is truly horrifying, with its cold ruthless villain made all the more terrifying by the fact that he acts out of love. This movie is better than scary; it’s haunting.
If you happen to catch this on the Criterion DVD, check out the director’s documentary on Parisian slaughterhouses. Between it and the film, I guarantee you won’t get a good nights sleep.
The Crazies – This would normally be the spot where I extol the virtues of George Romero’s “Dead” pictures. Do I really need to anymore? The films are awesome and I’ve written about them at length on this site and other places. Fine a quick rundown: Night one of the best horror films ever made period. Dawn best post Strangelove satire. Day opening and closing sequences make up for the flaws of the middle. Land A beautiful thing. Their genius is well known and if you haven’t seen them yet you’re only hurting yourself. And since this is supposed to be about films that fly under the radar I’ve decided to choose one of Romero’s other films. He has made other films you know. There are many choices to make here: Martin, a vampire film that gives new meaning to the word gritty, Creepshow his candy colored loving tribute to EC Comics, or even Knight Riders, his bizarrely heartfelt retelling of the Arthurian legend with Biker Gangs.
Instead I’ve chosen his leanest meanest film The Crazies. It is as freaky and ahead of its time as Night Of The Living Dead was. Most of the “innovations” in 28 Days Later showed up 30 years earlier in The Crazies, including the fast moving “Not Zombies” caused by a military virus. The Crazies starts out intense with a family man butchering his family and then burning down his house, and gets progressively worse for that. Settle down to good 90 minutes of complete cinematic anarchy. You’re not going to forget it.
Deranged – So you want some real Grindhouse cinema. The resurgence in the genre's popularity post Kill Bill has caused many a dazed hipster to wonder what the hell they are watching when they try a dose of the real thing. To use the words of Thomas Hobbes, most Grindhouse cinema is nasty, brutish and short. The Deranged is all three of these and takes rueful pleasure in being so.
Before The Blair Witch was a twinkling cash cow in anyone’s eye, Deranged told the story of Ed Gein in documentary style. Following the barely coherent of raving amateur actors as he sleeps with corpses, cuts up pretty young things, and taxidermies his mother, Deranged is about as exploitive and crazy as grindhouse gets. See it if you’ve got the guts, cause this movie does.
Near Dark- The vampire film has been done for so long with so many variations that whenever anybody does something new the results are shocking almost by default. Near Dark takes the entire genre and deglamorizes it, giving the film a feral ferocity. Caleb is an amenable hick who makes the mistake of trying to pick up a strange girl from out of town, he soon finds himself adopted into a family of vampires who make the Firefly clan look about as lethal as the Von Trapps. They include Lance Herikson at his embalmed best and Bill Paxton giving his role a twisted biker’s energy that he has long since lost. There are no gothic castles, or Blade style underground mansions here, the vamps cross the back roads of the American Midwest in a beat up RV feeding on truckers, hitchhikers, and whoever else is unlucky enough to cross their path.
The film attacks genre cliché’s with the same intensity that the vampire’s kill people, nobody elegantly sips blood in the moonlight. They catch it as it spurts from sliced veins, and in one unforgettable sequence they massacre an entire bar. When the standard issue “child” vampire moans “Do you know what its like to be an old man with a small body” Paxton snarls “You know what its like to hear about it every night?” The film can be funny but unlike most Horror films with wit it is also seriously frightening. Katherine Bigelow has devoted her career to proving she can make films that are as hardcore (Strange Days), and stone cold stupid (Point Break) as any man. Yet she has never come close to making anything as intense, original, or plain drop dead cool as Near Dark.
Motel Hell – Motel Hell is another piece of Grindhouse cinema albeit a much cheerier one then Deranged. Motel Hell follows the adventures of Farmer Vincent (“It takes all sorts of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s Meat Fritters” A line so good that Ebert still quotes it in reviews) a cheery down home farmer who just happens to like to kill people and put them in pies, without preservatives of course. Motel Hell is a downright cheery movie with its tongue firmly in cheek. Farmer Vincent murders an entire punk band named Ivan and the Terribles, and who ever is unlucky enough to pass by, he also enjoys wearing the head of a giant pig while he duels with Chainsaws. Motel Hell is simply put a lot of fun, and by the time Farmer Vincent reveals his horrible(er) secret (His other one), and faces a rebellion from his angry products, you’ll love it as well.
Videodrome – Most films with twists tend to be stupid and derivative, they are either completely arbitrary or implausible, or they want you to be amazed by something stupid. You’re supposed to look at the screen and gasp, “But that’s his sister, and his SISTER IS DEAD!!!” So when a true mind fuck come out and slaps you upside the head, you can’t help but be impressed.
James Woods at his slimy best plays the owner of a small time TV station notorious for “softcore sex, and hardcore violence” but he’s completely unprepared when he stumbles across Videodrome, a pirate TV station that broadcasts pure brutal torture snuff films 24 hours a day which seem to be completely real. Convinced that this is the next big thing, Woods begins to track the signal, and gets a hell of a lot more then he bargained for when he comes under attack from Government agencies and revolutionaries. And this is all before a Vagina starts growing on his chest, his hand melts into a gun, and videotapes begin to control his mind.
The film invokes an intense paranoia as it spews half formed conspiracy theories about the Moral Majority and Marshal McCluen. Thanks to a twist midway through its quiet possible that none of this is actually happening and we’re simply taking a leisurely tour through the mind of a crazy person. But despite all of this Videodrome is never maddening but is instead endlessly intriguing. It’s a film that rewards repeat viewing, playing like a twisted version of The Matrix, in which the freeing of one’s mind leads only to madness and unspeakable terror. ALL HAIL THE NEW FLESH!!!
Angel Heart – There are movies that are dark and then there is Angel Heart. Directed by the great chameleon Alan Parker, the film was so controversial that Bill Cosby briefly fired Lisa Bonet from the The Cosby Show for partaking in it.
Taking place in postwar New York, the story follows hapless private eye Harry Angel, played by Mickey Rourke. He’s hired by the mysterious businessman Louis Cypher, played with magnificent malevolence by Robert De Niro, to find a singer who owes Cypher a mysterious “debt”.
The film follows Angel as he travels through increasingly dark and bizarre circles. From a rundown insane asylum, to a Satanic Church in Harlem, to the witchcraft and voodoo circles of New Orleans. As he comes closer to the truth he realizes that the knowledge and consequences of the truth are far darker then he could imagine.
It’s a thoroughly unique mix of horror, film noir, and Greek tragedy, with an ending that’ll hit you like a 2x4 to the face. See it with someone you’re sure of.
May- May more or less completely fell through the cracks. Lucky McKee’s first film is unique, perhaps too unique for its own good. It was too tame for Gorehounds, only going crazy in its final nightmarish sequence. And those looking for a few safe scares are sure to be put off by its genuine unhinged manner. Many films claim to be nightmarish but May actually captures the illogical unsettling creeping unease of a nightmare.
May follows the story of an odd girl, who has more or less lived a solitary life. Ostracized as a child because of her lazy eye and crazy mother she has created her own fantasy world that she alone inhabits. And when people start to broach that world… bad things happen.
May is a wonderfully creepy film with a final shot that is perhaps the sickest punchline to a film that I can remember.
Devil’s Backbone – Guillermo Del Toro is hands down my favorite horror filmmaker working today. Hellboy and Blade II both captured the giddy feel of old school John Carpenter, with a kinetic blast that Carpenter couldn’t dream of, while films like Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth have a bizarre and eerie elegance, that is simply incomparable to anything else.
Probably the best of the latter form is the wonderfully spooky The Devil’s Backbone. Like Pan’s Labyrinth it takes place during the Spanish Civil War. Unlike Pan’s Labyrinth it takes place in the (mostly) real world. At an orphanage where the only thing worse then what is currently happening, is what has happened in the past. An unexploded bomb looms ominously in the playground, a collection of deformed fetus lay in displayed in an office, and the rotting ghost of a little boy haunts the ground.
The Devil’s Backbone is one of the most profoundly unsettling films I’ve ever seen; I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Frailty – The trendy ad line for Jesus Camp has been to call it, “the scariest horror film of the year” (Note to critics An Inconvenient Truth called, they want their semi-clever tagline back.) But if you really want some horror in the fundamentalist vein, then check out this little doozy; a film guaranteed to have you looking sideways at those Baptist’s across the street for a month.
Frailty follows the story of two little boys. Their mother’s dead but they have a kind and loving father, and as the movie opens their biggest concern is whether to go see Big Trouble In Little China or The Warriors over at the Bijou that weekend. Then suddenly out of the blue their father wakes them up in the middle of the night to tell them that God has come to him in a vision and given him a list of demons. The end of days is coming at it’s his duty to kill them before the war begins. Only problem is the demons look and act just like real people. Daddy’s never been crazy before. What do you do?
Frailty doesn’t lay on the gore and guts, but is probably the most disturbing film on this list. It gets inside your head and does some damage there. The mental thumbscrews keep twisting as you are put directly in the place of these two boys. It does its job with a Hitchcockian level of skill. And in a time when Religious fanatism (I’m a practicing Catholic so no pissed of emails please) seems like it's about to swallow up all remnants of rationality, it’s truly frightening.
Devil’s Rejects – The Devil’s Rejects captures the Grindhouse feel better then Kill Bill could ever dream of. While Kill Bill was campy, fun and sent you out of theaters with a movie buzz, The Devil’s Rejects remembers just how gritty and nasty these films could be. The film feels real, un-merciless and dangerous and without a single impulse to tone it down. It’s the sort of movie that makes you wonder just what your shoes are sticking to on the floor, and that’s when you’re home watching it on DVD.
So of course the film flopped at the box office. People wanted to support the high quality, imaginative, and the completely un-derivative fare of the Final Destination and Saw series. Even Hostel couldn’t get the level of nastiness that The Devil’s Rejects effortlessly conjured, that film was a huge hit because of it’s faux hardcoreness. Hostel and Roth are pretenders to the throne, Zombie is the real thing. He just hits way too hard to be financially successful.
And since it's Halloween and we here at Cinema Blend love ya, watch the video below for a bonus something guaranteed to creep you out.
Happy Halloween, be safe, have fun, get drunk, and don’t say your Uncle Bryce didn’t warn you.
