It's Halloween: How About Something Really Scary?
Review by Jerry Holt
Film Review Archive

            How does that great line go from Twilight Zone: The Movie?  "Hey--You wanta see something really scary?"

            Comes now the Season of the Witches--an indisputably great time for a really scary movie.  Too often, though, the new releases don't seem to measure up to Former Frights--particularly the great cinematic scares of our youth, the most delicious time ever for most of us to be scared--that juncture at which celluloid and subconscious could still intermingle along the fault line of some perfect Nightmare Zone.  And the revivals--whether they be theatrical, televised, or featured at your local video store--tend to be rather too familiar by this point:  Could George Romero's zombies have finally lurched out their welcome?  Have Freddie Kruger's fingers at last lost their lethal lustre?   Does a hockey mask just no longer provide the necessary Zero at the Bone??

            In short, if you're looking for something Really Scary and not so familiar this Halloween,  try a couple of the following.  Their lesser-known but truly deadly delights just might provide the chill factor you've been missing.  Here they are, in chronological order: 

            1.  Curse of the Cat People (1944):  Way back there a half-century ago, RKO Pictures wanted desperately to compete in the terror sweepstakes with the infinitely more successful Universal stable of monsters which featured the likes of Frankenstein, the Wolfman, and Dracula.  Enter a dreamy,  well-read producer named Val Lewton, who was fond of refurbishing classic works into truly sublime horror vehicles:  his I Walked With a Zombie is really Jane Eyre in thin disguise.  When Lewton hit big with the still-zappy Cat People, the studio demanded a sequel--and Lewton brought in director Robert Wise, whose credentials included the editing of another pretty scary movie named Citizen Kane.  The two of them put together a film which isn't about killer cats: it's about a neglected and probably autistic child who believes she is in communication with an unearthly protector.  Filmed on the discarded sets of the aforementioned Kane, the movie still haunts in ways which have little to do with physical terror but everything to do with the terror of the mind.  The child, not so much played as presented by then ten-year-old Ann Carter (Where is she now??), is the spiritual center of this remarkable film.   She is completely convincing--and utterly captivating.  Watch her reactions as she is read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:  here's a kid who knows more about terror that we'd ever want to. 

            2.  House of Wax (1953):  This one's been theatrically reissued in its original 3-D, and it manages to be a hell of a lot more fun than the Exorcist reissue without even so much one green pea soup sequence.  In fact, relatively little gets hurled at the audience in a true negation of the usual 50s 3-D ploy.  We're always told that's because director Andre de Toth was blind in one eye and couldn't have fully perceived the process anyway, but the truth is that the process is often used brilliantly in the film.  It's the much-remade story of the sculptor who nearly burns up in a fire but who returns, revenge on his mind, to kill victims and dip them in wax for his museum.  Set in   turn-of-the-last-century New York and displaying, even in flat print, a great sense of depth in the gaslit streets, House of Wax is filled with portentous shadows and patches of ground fog which clutch at the figures in its scenic landscape like wispy fingers.   The whole enterprise just drips with atmosphere.  Vincent Price is wonderfully loopy as the sculptor, particularly when he doffs his own wax disguise and creeps through those streets displaying his true countenance, serrated by fire but strangely sympathetic.  The most inventive sequence isn't scary at all, just great fun:  a barker with paddle balls hawks the museum by whacking those rubber balls out over the heads of the audience, even at one point bursting through our cinematic protective wall to tell us to "Watch our popcorn."  It a delight.  And watch for a then-unknown Charles Bronson as Price's mute assistant.  Despite the production's wax proliferation, Bronson's immobile features turn out to be the film's true death mask: Romero's later zombies would have nothing on the young Bronson at all.        

            3.  Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956):  Just the original, please:  Accept No Substitutes.  It was once said of director Don Siegel that he could take the fattest budget and still make the end result look like a "B" picture--and that of course was his glory.  Body Snatchers is the ultimate Cold War allegory, because it revels in having its symbolism both ways:  are those pods the Commies, or are they representative of the HUAC, attempting to regiment us all into mindless followers?  Either way, the dark doings in the little town of Santa Mira still play as creepily relevant, and the superb sequence in which one pod comes to life in the glare of a single light over a pool table is definitive noir.  Watch for legendary director Sam Peckinpah--maybe one minute of him--in the role of the meter reader:  he was dialogue director on the picture and Siegel, ever the economist, simply ran out of people to shove before the camera. 

            4.  The Innocents (1961):  Henry James has had his share of cinema time in recent years, but the movies probably never did better by him that Jack Clayton and company did in this adaptation of The Turn of the Screw.  The James tale of a dreary estate, two precocious children, and a governess who may or may not be right about their demonic possession is rendered with great intensity, thanks largely to fine performances by Deborah Kerr and by the children, played by Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens.  The original story was published, in 1895, at a nearly perfect crossroads in the history of thought: that moment when theology waned, Darwin held sway, and Freud was just around the corner.  Don't look for an interpretation here which makes the ghosts necessarily real--the screenplay was done by none other than Truman Capote, and he offers a twentieth century reading:  the governess is purely nuts and the ghosts are of her own creation.  Even so, we see what she sees, and the psychosexual terrors lurking in the shadows of that remote country house are pure edge-of-the-seat.  It's hard to find another film  sequence as erotically charged as the one in which the governess searches from room to room by candlelight, trying to find the exact chamber in which the ghosts in her mind are engaged in their truly terrifying version of the act of love.  I've always been surprised that one got past the censor. 

            5.  Repulsion (1965):  If you find the very idea of Roman Polanski scary enough, check out his early films.  This one's immersed in sexual terror, too:  a repressed young woman (a very young and quite remarkable Catherine Deneuve) is left alone by her sister for the weekend in a London apartment.  Well, the girl has got her problems--most notably the recurring fantasy of a demon lover who bears dark similarity to the boyfriend her sister has gone away with.  The scariest moments in this flick take place in broad  daylight--especially an early moment in which Deneuve pushes a mirrored door back to reveal, over her shoulder....I wouldn't spoil that one.  Thirty-five years later, you'll still jump.  And Repulsion mines the vein of Scary Rabbits in ways that leaves that much-remember Fatal Attraction sequence in the dust. 

            6.  Don't Look Now (1973):  This just might be the most frightening film I've ever seen.  Directed in crazy-quilt fashion by the always-ambiguous Nicolas Roeg, this reading of the Daphne du Maurier novella involves on every level:  as terror, as puzzle--as a very touching film about family.  An architect and his wife (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) go to Venice, still mourning the recent loss of their young daughter in a drowning accident.   There in the twists and turns of the cramped streets the architect begins to see visions of the lost daughter, clad in the shiny red raincoat she was wearing on the day of her death.  Roeg is playing for big stakes: employing a technique that takes the jump cut places it had never been before, he comes close to tapping something like a cinematic collective unconscious.  There are images in Don't Look Now which defy interpretation, but which--Wait and see--never fail to disturb a roomful of viewers in some shared, unspoken way.  A large part of the film's success comes from the fact that we really care about the two parents:  they are enduring one of life's ultimate horrors:  outliving their child.  And in 1973, Sutherland and Christie were at their attractive best.  One bonus is the film's long lovemaking sequence, in which the two of them show more about communication through sex than you're likely to see on film again for a long, long time. The notion of two people joining who really like each other may not seem like material for a frightening film--but when the people are as real as they are in this one, it's wonderfully right.  Hang tight for the horror, though:  this one's got an ending that will knock the frost right off your pumpkin.                

            Those are just a few of many fine possibilities, their common thread being the fact that they were overlooked in their respective times.  Please add your own titles, via the 12-Gauge bulletin board!  Comes that time of year when we all get that archetypal longing to see something....Really Scary.