The era of the horror remake is upon us—they're cheap, fast, and decidedly not out-of-control, and their cynicism as products is doubled in the amoral construction of their violence. The garbage pile at this point (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Fog, Black Christmas, Pulse, The Omen) is such a steaming, stinky mess that it’s perfectly understandable that one would greet the prospect of Rob Zombie’s updating of John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween with, well, horror. Carpenter’s original isn’t simply iconic (a holy grail for slasher generics that many viewers return to over and over, thrilling to its elegant terrors year after year); it’s also a master class in filmic fear, along with, maybe The Innocents, the greatest example of how much anxiety and anticipation can be elicited simply through frame and composition. While Halloween’s necessity as a guidebook for Carol Clover-esque musings on sex and violence is debatable, its craft is unimpeachable and the lore created around it undeniable. Rob Zombie has publicly stated that he will never do another remake, presumably for both artistic and personal reasons (one can only imagine the headaches involved, with the Weinsteins as creative collaborators and the project’s instigators); yet despite his own misgivings, and regardless of the film’s slightly muddled, structural imbalance, Zombie’s Halloween is a force to be reckoned with, and definitive proof that Zombie’s risen above the others in his woebegone generation of gorehounds.

Where Halloween first goes right is in its refusal to try and restage the elements that made Carpenter’s original what it was; by acknowledging the impossibility of re-creating the experience of the first film, Zombie actually pays greater respect to Carpenter than if he had simply done a full-length homage. The 1978 Halloween remains its own discrete work, and the two films do not cancel each other out. Zombie’s fetid, grunge aesthetic is antithetical to Carpenter’s clean, unaffected symmetry, as is the film’s central conceit, which is to psychologize and therefore “humanize” the heretofore seemingly mindless “boogey man” Michael Myers. Carpenter normally forgoes this sort of sentimental editorializing (see also The Fog, The Thing, Prince of Darkness), instead letting evil simply exist among us. This Halloween is undeniably its own entity.

So, the big question, of course, and it’s a valid one, is why? Why doesn’t Rob Zombie just make his own serial killer movie, possibly even jumpstarting a franchise, in which we follow the making of a maniac, from abusive, outcast childhood to his destiny as an unstoppable killing machine? The fact that Zombie, who seems more interested in showing sympathy for his devils than in creating straightforward stalker narratives with clearly defined victims and monsters, projected onto Carpenter’s pre-existing material shows that he fits right in, for better or for worse, with other American filmmakers of his generation, weened on overmarketed imagery, often televised and videotaped, easily accessible and repeatable. To them, the instant iconicity is as important as the craft. Yet like Tarantino, who with the great Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Death Proof has been moving toward ever-more inventive ways of reappropriating pop culture, Zombie is smart about playing with audience’s expectations as well as emotions. Kill Bill seemed the ne plus ultra of epic pop collage (it created its own symphony of colors, sounds, and cinematic intuition); and Death Proof took seemingly familiar “trash” tropes and then stretched and pulled time like taffy, creating an entirely new experience, almost a visual essay, on the very films Tarantino only seemed to be aping. Halloween isn’t quite so heady an experience, but in subtly shifting perception, in making us identify with Michael Myers (a shocking, sickening prospect for the audience), we engage with the film’s mythology in new, invigorating ways.

Of course, the filmmaking itself helps, and Halloween helps further cultivate Zombie’s emerging horror aesthetic, less borrowed from music videos (leave that to the Tarsems and the Nispels) than from heavy-metal music itself: self-consciously “alternative,” punkish, prankish, fixated on its own outsider status, reliant on transformative costumes and punishing grotesquerie. As evidenced by House of 1,000 Corpses (just feeling out the territory, but undeniably scary) and The Devil’s Rejects (an obvious heart-on-its-sleeve auteur piece), Zombie likes getting his audiences trapped in claustrophobic, mentally deranged funhouses. This is why his Halloween has a stronger initial half: he extends Carpenter’s best, most horrific bits (one five-minute-or-so take, originally) into an entire first act. It’s uncharted territory, and it’s extremely upsetting to wait for the heavy-lidded, blonde-haired prepubescent Michael to finally exact revenge on his abusive father, teasing sister, and school bullies. The way Zombie stages these scenes may be crass (his parents, William Forsythe and, of course, Sheri Moon Zombie, scream and spittle and swear like actors in some hellish dinner theater production), but as it builds to gruesome violence it attains a certain dignified grandeur. By comparison, Michael’s Halloween night rampage decades later goes through the motions a bit too much; Zombie’s not as interested in staging stalker scenes as he is at thrusting us into depraved mindsets.

Yet if he doesn’t want to startle with cheap jumps or buzz his viewers’ seats, Zombie does scare us with the physical exertion of killing. Nobody in American horror today is as good at the labor and viscera of murder, and what the late scenes of Michael endlessly going after the babysitters and his sister Laurie (and yes, the no-nonsense Jamie Lee Curtis is sorely missed) lack in calibrated tension they more than make up for in frightening size and speed. When Halloween was over I felt fittingly terrorized, and not in any sort of hollow way; Zombie’s version is audacious (emotionally) in its simultaneous repackaging and refuting of Michael Myers as a symbol of evil. He may forgo the hallowed notion of ambiguity in horror (too many believe that grants instant artistic integrity), but in peeking behind the mask Zombie does manage to complicate and cultivate our relationship with a figure who’s been, for almost thirty years, a fixture. And as resolute as a gargoyle.

Alejandro Amenabar's The Others holds the singular distinction of being the only film I've ever seen that caused a fellow audience member to throw a bucket of popcorn into the air in terror. The Others only has two or three big scares—the popcorn-tossing came about halfway through, when Nicole Kidman's Grace falls to the ground after a door slams into her face—and each of its scream-inducing moments involves an unexpected physical jolt. In a film that's all about mood, mystery, and the unseen—the ghosts who may or may not be lurking just around the corner or hidden somewhere in the darkness—it's the abrupt intrusion of physical menace that really terrifies.

Set just after the end of World War II in a musty old house on Jersey Island, The Others is essentially a haunted house tale. Grace (Nicole Kidman) shares her magnificent, eerily empty home with her two photosensitive children (Alakina Mann and James Bentley), as well as three spooky servants (Fionnula Flanagan, Eric Sykes, and Elaine Cassidy), who arrive shortly after their predecessors mysteriously vanish. The children's photosensitivity is so acute that no sunlight is ever permitted in the house; the servants share secrets and make knowing, obtuse references to their past in the home; strange sounds, unexplained disturbances, and the children's reports of ghostly apparitions have Grace worried that her home is haunted, even though the suspicion flies in the face of her deeply-felt religious faith. Sets, mise-en-scène, lighting, and editing conspire to create some moody atmospherics, but we never quite know what's actually going on or whom to believe: Are the children lying to get attention? Are the servants malevolent, or just misunderstood? Is Grace the only sensible person in the narrative or the one person too stubborn to admit the obvious truth that something supernatural is going on?

The Others directly recalls and inverts Jack Clayton's masterful Deborah Kerr vehicle The Innocents. Like that film, it relies almost entirely on cinematic form—shot composition, sound, and lighting—to evoke fear, and hinges on a remarkably effective, histrionic star turn from its female lead, as well as formidable supporting performances, particularly by the children. A permanently darkened old house, things bumping and clattering in empty rooms, and a woman pushed to the point of insanity: it's perfectly formulaic and old-fashioned in the best possible way. The big third-act twist, when it comes, serves only to reconfirm the movie's commitment to narrative coherence: it doesn't so much upend the story as complete it, making sense of the disparate pieces while giving the film a hefty emotional punch. After the movie's mystery is resolved, we're left with a simple tale, well told, an unnerving portrait of a family dealing with loss and shut off from the outside world. You could call it sturdy; you might also call it classical—a horror film as elegant and sad as it is frightening.

Claire Denis isn’t generally ranked amongst horror’s foremost auteurs, but if she were to be judged solely on the basis of her overlooked (yes) masterpiece from 2001, Trouble Every Day she’d far outshine the competition. Even if I Can’t Sleep flirted with amorphously terrifying serial killer hysteria, and No Fear, No Die’s cockfighting sequences were marked by a filmmaking intensity that her cool elliptical sensibilities generally seemed to belie, Trouble Every Day seems almost to spring from nowhere. Almost. Her previous film, Beau travail, though far from horrific or scary, mounts an impressive desert-bound dread that explodes in the pure catharsis of its final dance sequences. If horror filmmaking need succeed at anything, it’s not in the creative application of plasticine gores or twisted pretzel-logic murder sprees, but in simply, effectively building and releasing tension. And it’s in Beau travail where Denis announces herself master of this simple, yet elusive function.

So what’s scary about Trouble Every Day? Basically, everything. Denis keeps audiences almost completely in the dark about the scientific experiment gone awry that’s mutated the sexuality of leads Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle, and the weight of potentially awful happenings hangs heavy over the film—what is Dalle up to that forces her husband (Alex Descas) to nail her door shut? Why is it that Gallo, in wintry Paris for his honeymoon, cannot consummate with his young bride (Tricia Vessey), in one startling sequence initiating sex only to run into the bathroom in terror to masturbate? At this point in her career, the building blocks of narrative are merely her playthings—she can do what she likes with her captive audience as a result. Unlike real science fiction, Denis isn’t interested in explaining the specifics, which only opens up room for horror to crowd in once the blood starts to flow.

Which it does, and in grand fashion. Prior to the massive bloodletting at its core, the film’s color palette is largely muted—grey skies, coats, rooms. Think of that signature image of Gallo on his hotel balcony: he’s so ashen he almost dissolves into the twin grays of his peacoat and the stone gargoyle he’s standing in front of. Contrast that to Dalle, soaked in blood head to toe from literally devouring an unsuspecting gentleman caller, prancing through the most beautiful sexual carnage on celluloid, idly tracing her hand through blood. It terrifies not only because the Grand Guignol portrait is painted so seductively but also because of the raw sexuality that led to it—who hasn’t wanted the heat of passion that makes one want to consume their partner? Same goes for Gallo’s deadly cunnilingus performed later in the film. What begins as the kind of abrupt sexual courtship between strangers not altogether unheard of in French cinema ends with unholy shrieks and a pool of blood. (Hopefully the orgasm was a good one.)

To be sure, this is horror for the art-house set, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily an impenetrable experience for those weaned on the more hyperkinetic multiplex scare. Denis, one of the few filmmakers working who is in full command of the seductive power of great images paired with the right sounds, might just be able to play to the cheap seats.Jonathan Rosenbaum opined about her equally as assured 2004 feature L’Intrus, “Like many other films by the gifted and original Claire Denis, this ambitious and mysterious 2004 French feature is something I admire without especially liking.” I wonder what he thought of Trouble Every Day, but there’s no review on the Reader site to suggest an answer. Saying one “likes” Trouble Every Day may be to align oneself with the forces of darkness, but fuck it—this is Halloween after all.

Here's something strange: a not-quite-supernatural, almost-horror, killing-free, absolutely terrifying late Eighties British film. Still not available on DVD in the U.S., Paperhouse, from Bernard Rose (who went on to make 1992's unsettling, if ultimately excessive racial alle-gory Candyman), is one of those movies that largely takes place in the literal world of nightmares. This sort of narrative framework usually gives filmmakers carte blanche to go to any lengths necessary to achieve their effects, atmosphere, scares, etc--to abandon logic in the face of dream space and temporality. The results can be predictable, lazy, or unrestrained; outside of David Lynch's sui generis oeuvre, the dream world is difficult to capture yet easy to exploit. Even the slasher granddaddy of dream films, A Nightmare on Elm Street, quickly degenerated into a random assemblage of creepy pops and jolts; and (with the exception of the ridiculously coherent gay metaphor in Part 2: Freddy's Revenge) the sequels aren't even worth writing about.

The film-as-dream, horror-as-nightmare metaphors and attendant psychoanalytic theories are too tidy to bring up here, and too easily deployed to buoy lazy filmmaking; yet Rose's Paperhouse earns the distinction it so clearly invites. While much of the film plays like a full-moon fever dream, it's mostly grounded in a specific reality: that of childhood. Anna, a sullen, pre-teen adolescent girl with divorced parents, haphazardly doodles a rough drawing of a house during a school lesson. Soon enough, Anna is diagnosed with glandular fever, which sends her off into states of delirium and odd fantasies in which she enters the world of the drawing: the crummy pen-on-paper stick house becomes in her alternate dream reality a stark, foreboding house desolated on a grey moor. As she falls further into sickness and her own delusions, she begins to realize that she can adjust her dream world to her whim: therefore she sketches a boy's face in the upstairs window, peering out a sad, downturned frown. When she sleeps, the boy appears; yet he has his own reality to contend with.

Thus, Paperhouse's major difference from other films about dream states is that Anna can, seemingly, control her own subconscious; rather than fearing sleep, she embraces it, at first, as an alternate world she can command. What's even more magical then, is that the film, aided in no small measure by a wonderfully low budget, never takes Anna away from this single, washed-out setting; it never opens up into an elaborate "world of fantasy," and its eventual terrors come from utterly surprising, and thoroughly upsetting directions. For most of its running time, Paperhouse plays like one of those children-retreating-into-fantasy-world films, although what sets it apart is that it doesn't paint in broad, black-and-white strokes: Anna isn't escaping abuse or real-world terrors so much as normal preadolescent anxieties and parental distrust, and her unspoken fears and hopes play out in abstracted form where no one can see, or hear, or abort them. Unlike the more literal Heavenly Creatures or the deplorably simplistic Pan's Labyrinth, this film doesn't posit the dreamworld as a viable opposition to "real" fears.Rose is careful to never spell out her neuroses, allowing the dreams to fill in the character's blanks. The film respects the odd, insoluble dictates of childhood: often it feels more like the great children's book The Velveteen Rabbit than any film, with its wish fulfillment turned insidious, enacted within the boundaries of a feverish child's bedroom.

Despite these comparisons, when Paperhouse gets scary, it gets scary: in ways both motivationally sound and horribly inexplicable. Imagine this: a silhouette of a man, off in the distance, perched against a darkening night-time sky, his hand clutching an elongated hammer, bellowing "I'm blind!" To describe who he is, how he got there, or where he's going would ruin the experience. Once the images, sounds, and moods from Paperhouse get into your head, they're lodged there permanently--sort of like, it must be said, nightmares from your childhood you never forget.

Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Don Siegel's rightfully beloved 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers has always been embraced as a successful reimagining of the classic existential terror of identity theft made sci-fi--yet has it ever gotten its full due? Aside from a memorably hyperbolic review by Pauline Kael upon its release, Kaufman's film has always seemed to receive a general pat on the back for its efficiency as a scare machine (undeniable) and the cleverness of its conceit, updating the metaphor of aliens propagating mass conformity from the American suburbs to the post-free love urban anxiety of San Francisco (tenuous). Yet what Kaufman most gets right is something more direct: an almost perfect intermingling of the physical and the psychological, a horror film that functions as an emotional, humane allegory on the difficulty of maintaining the self as well as a confrontation with the sickening realities of the flesh.

In a sense, Kaufman, who never made another horror film, gets at the pallor and grit of body horror better than even Cronenberg ever has (with perhaps the exception of The Fly, another remake). Much of the fun of Kaufman's Invasion comes from the decimation of the new-agey psychobabble uttered by Leonard Nimoy's celebrity quack doctor, and Jeff Goldblum's incredulous reactions to it (a precursor to his Jurassic Park skeptic); but most of the unpleasantness (a must in horror) comes from Kaufman's refusal to shy away from the actual physical transformation--implosions, disintegrations--that must occur for the alien seeds to fully take over our planet. No longer simply a tidy way of getting at the anxieties of the modern age (all the Invasion adaptations, including this year's woebegone, machine-tooled update, take a stab at social relevancy), this revision makes the interior exterior, the horror coming from within and without. Cronenberg foregrounds his theses too much, especially in this period of filmmaking, basing his films seemingly solely on his own studied theories on the body politic, and the narrative strain always shows. Kaufman's film, from a superlative script by W.D. Richter (who also wrote, oddly, Jodie Foster's wonderful Home for the Holidays), is developed with character, plot, motivation...the narrative directess that so often eludes Cronenberg.

Body Snatchers '78 works in the same register as John Carpenter's terrifically scary 1982 The Thing, creating an agonizing, "who can you trust?" situation and then letting the fears explode from within. Carpenter's film is slightly less fearful of being tagged as a "B-movie," which makes it even more trustworthy than Kaufman's film, which aspires to something more self-consciously artful. Yet Kaufman's technique feels appropriately off in the way it mixes the methodical paranoia thriller of the 70s (Sutherland's phone-booth montage, in which everyone seems to know his name at every government hotline he calls, feels right out of Pakula) with the yucky creature feature. Two unforgettable moments are only achievable through prosthetics: Matthew surmising a gradually forming double of himself that's slid out of a pod, before hacking its face to bits with one thwack of a garden hoe (in sickening close-up); and a remarkable shock cut to a pod-person that's inadvertently been transformed into a dog with a human face, a mutation that's all the creepier for the casual way in which the other pod people regard it.

Kaufman's most famous addition to the Body Snatchers legacy was the memorably horrific sound the pod people make when they open their mouths; with Edvard Munch-like gaping maws, they screech an unholy otherworldly sound, meant to identify those who haven't been transformed yet. This leads to a final scene that's not only the scariest in the entire series but also perhaps the greatest ending in the history of horror films: the final five minutes of Kaufman's film are so expertly directed, acted, and calibrated to audience expectations, so smartly adhering to the manner in which we watch movies and the way we allow editing and composition to relate stories to us, that his final trick is like a slap in the face. The effect is devastating, even more so than that hand from the grave in Carrie. And all that's left is silence; Kaufman zooms into a mouth's black hole, traps us inside the body, and as the credits roll, doesn't even give us the comfort of music.

Even in The Wicker Man, where Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle persists in propagating the rural town’s pagan beliefs against a forfeit crop, the moment of judgment—as Sergeant Howie condemns him for the inevitable day when the islanders offer Summerisle instead as sacrifice—makes Summerisle as sympathetic as Howie. Lee’s was a career of monsters, and like all great monster men, he is an actor profound for asking our empathy at all times. But the flip side is that Lee was, perhaps, more naturally the first-class stalwart the better angels of his evil natures only suggested. He was too infrequently cast as the good guy, when the grand Holmes of Billy Wilder’s lovely Private Life or the regal Duc de Richleau of Terence Fisher’s The Devil Rides Out suggest how really admirable so few protagonists are.

The Hammer films in general, of which The Devil Rides Out is one, have aged terribly; the on-the-fly atmosphere looks cheaper than cheap today, embarrassingly eclipsed by the handheld independents that made horror movies anyone’s game (Night of the Living Dead was released the same year as The Devil Rides Out, 1968). Why watch Terence Fisher’s Dracula when you can watch Browning’s, Murnau’s, Herzog’s, Madden’s, or even Coppola’s instead? For Lee, of course. But after Lee, what then?

But The Devil Rides Out is an exception, on a very modest scale, with a sense of fear almost palpable in a resolutely stripped-down approach to nightmares. Lee plays the Duc, who vows, with a few friends, to recover the out-of-touch son of an old comrade. They find the kid, named Simon, on the verge of immersion into a Satanic cul—the Left Hand Path—led by the commanding, ingratiating Mocata (Charles Gray). The date is nearly May Day, half a year from Halloween, but the feel of fog on country roads and candles in old British manors is nothing if not late October.

The Duc spends days in the libraries of London, speaks of “esoteric doctrines” in his rolling timbre, and summons God’s might (with God’s own voice) in his climactic incantations. He is a blue-blooded sartorialist, like his friends, who promote with their demeanor the temperate pluck of honest, titled British landowners that the far-wandering crazies who populate the equally rich Left Hand Path demean, invert, and offend. The Duc’s friends enjoy brandy—“we can certainly make use of these,” smiles the Duc to his guests of a haunted evening—and their best clue comes about by one of them recognizing a young protégé of Mocata’s from the baccarat tables in Biarritz.

Like Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon or Mark Robson’s The 7th Victim, The Devil Rides Out clothes its Satanists to the nines. But The Devil Rides Out is more properly kin to Night of the Demon, though all three are occupied with the psychology of persuasion over lonely men’s souls. The 7th Victim is as true to human sadness as any movie, but is not, at its heart, supernatural; its Satanic cult summons no demons, no wraiths. The men and women are powerless but for the cheap degradation they realize on still weaker souls than they. In The Devil Rides Out, like Night of the Demon, hell is physically manifest in monsters in place of metaphor. In fact, neither film can accommodate the special effects needed to procure a larger-than-life ghoul of necessary terror. But they try. An “infernal spirit” in The Devil Rides Out recalls nothing so much as the lidless Carrefour from Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie, but that is as near as the beasts get to frightening.

Far more successful is the deeply elemental nature of The Devil Rides Out’s agenda of dark magic: fear of somnambulists, of bodily possession, of the sudden drop in temperature of a warm room or the inexplicably failing intensity of a candle’s once-bright flame. Eyes are everywhere prominent in dewy, piercing close-ups. Simon tries to choke himself in a bout of demonic epilepsy, Mocata communicates through mirrors and dreams. There are séances, circles drawn on hardwood floors in chalk—where the Duc pours water into a small dish and salts the flame to communicate with the dead—and even a basket of chickens kept in the closet in an observatory at the top floor of an ancient estate.

At one point, Mocata returns to the manor of the Duc’s allies to intimidate them. Mocata is alone; after leaving his card with the butler, he hypnotizes his hostess, and leaves only when the fortuitous intervention of a young girl interrupts his exercise. Deterred but nonplussed, Mocata departs by the front door. The hostess, through a window, watches him leave, and there is something, as Mocata saunters off with his hat on his head and a cane on his wrist, that is simply, fundamentally unnerving in its ordinariness. The Devil Rides Out, but for Lee, is just that—ordinary—and that is where its strangeness steals through. --Nathan Kosub

Let’s face it, those of our generation who grew up fascinated by horror movies didn’t spend our impressionable early years mulling over the hidden, sophisticated treasures of Bava, Tourneur, Lang; in fact we might not even have seen a Romero film until we knew it was sanctified as “good for us,” and Cronenberg was still only as effective as his trashy-looking video boxes (that Scanners cover art, with its pulsing, shaking, about-to-explode head was freaky dynamite). For me, horror worked best not due to any clandestine, cult following it may have had, but in its most seemingly relevant form, as a viable mainstream Eighties product. And with no true horror director consistently working within the genre to capture the imagination, the most recognizable “auteur” was obviously Stephen King. Not a director himself (save Maximum Overdrive, his awful 1986 adaptation of his own short story “Trucks”), King nevertheless had a name that lorded over horror in the Eighties, for better (The Shining, with a little help from Kubrick; The Dead Zone, from Cronenberg; Creepshow, from Romero), or for worse (remember Firestarter? how about Silver Bullet?), or for middling but nevertheless iconic (Children of the Corn).

Of course, we grew up, and King’s writing, with its folksy, New England banter and pop culture digressions, seemed increasingly infantile, the lack sophistication in his sentences outweighing his undeniably captivating storytelling abilities. The heyday of King seems a distant memory, dotted as his oeuvre is now by middlebrow male weepies like The Shawshank Redemption and loopy, camp nonsense like Dreamcatcher. Yet his horror movies remain, and none continues to snarl as loudly and viciously as Lewis Teague’s 1983 adaptation of King’s Cujo. Everyone knows the name, but how many remember the movie? Plagued by a Warner Bros. ad campaign in 1983 that refused to reveal the identity of its central villain as “merely” a rabid dog, rather than reliably supernatural, or a serial killer (the poster was just a bloody fence and the tagline reading “Now there’s a new name for terror”), Cujo has always been easily derided for its subject matter. Yet rather than the gore-drenched variation on “When Animals Attack!” that many might assume it to be, Cujo is a surprisingly robust tale of guilt, infidelity, and trauma.

Tense, sad, and cathartic, the sweat-drenched Cujo is also, first and foremost, and without shame, character-driven. This isn’t unnoteworthy for a genre that often simply wants to shuttle viewers from one thrill to the next. Cujo, a massive Saint Bernard and the roaring id of a crumbling Maine family, doesn’t attack the central characters until well over an hour into the film; instead we get expertly plotted build-up, detailing the socioeconomic differences between the middle-class Trentons and the backwoods working-class Cambers. Donna and Vic Trenton are dealing with increasing marriage strains, made the worse by Donna’s affair with the “local stud”; meanwhile, dissatisfied car mechanic Joe seems to have loathed and resented his wife, Charity, for years. Each couple has a son: the snub-nosed adorable Trenton tyke is Tad, who’s scared of monsters in the closet, while the Cambers’ son Brett takes care of his beloved Cujo, shown in the opening sequence being bitten on the nose by a screeching bat. The only connection between the two families is that Joe has done work on Donna’s prone-to-stalling Pinto; it’s only a matter of time before Donna, with Tad in tow, breaks down at the Cambers' distant outpost.

Teague (who also directed the far more tongue-in-cheek Alligator and Cat’s Eye, another King collaboration) crafts his film with direct, effective, mostly unfussy precision (with excellent, merciless editing by The Edge’s Neil Travis), though at times he allows cinematographer Jan De Bont (who went on to direct Speed) to indulge in too many show-offy Big Shots—a vertiginous 360 rotation around the interior of the car is so egregious as to make De Palma’s spinning prom dance in Carrie seem downright static. And whatever inherent misogyny there is in the film’s conceit (that Donna is forced to reclaim her family and save her little boy’s life by literally fighting a rampaging beast to the death) nearly disappears in the face of Dee Wallace’s emotional agony and towering strength as Donna. Too often relegated to ineffectual mom roles (E.T.) or screeching weirdo side characters (The Frighteners), Wallace was given a prime piece of raw meat to chew on here, and it’s a nearly classic performance. The last third of Cujo takes place almost completely inside of a stalled car, baking in the summer sun, and Wallace emotionally navigates the tiny space with aplomb (and she’s helped immensely by Danny Pintauro’s distresing, difficult physical work as terrorized Tad).

With her mix of panic and pity, Wallace gets what makes Cujo such a thoroughly untraditional horror movie: the central monster lacks motivation, it’s just a lumbering, besotted animal, yet its insatiable hunger forms a nearly insurmountable obstacle. When the unforgiving hostility of a diseased nature comes banging at the car door, all that’s left for Donna to do is react with maternal instinct. Stripped down and bloodied, forced into desperate action, Wallace finally makes for one of cinema’s most plausible action heroes.

This time last year, enervated by the hollow experience of watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and then energized by a late-night viewing of John Carpenter’s lovely and terrifying The Fog, I began a week-long blog expedition to reclaim horror for myself, with a little help from my friends, of course. Sure, the films we discussed were recommendations to readers, but also ways to revive our own enthusiasm for a film genre that seemed to be either treading water or had descended into empty, gory nonsense. Of course, a year hasn’t made much of a difference. From the derivative insults and camptastic idiocies of Joshua to the useless “verité” of 28 Weeks Later to the tired excess of Robert Rodriguez’s waste-of-space half of Grindhouse, Planet Terror, and, finally, to the granddaddy of all badness, the loathsome, self-congratulatory Hostel Part Two, 2007 hasn’t exactly been a banner year for horror. Sure we had The Last Winter (but for God’s sake, we recommended that last Halloween), the tidy French import Them (but for God’s sake, too tidy!), and Rob Zombie’s expertly ruthless Halloween redo (but for God’s sake, it’s the eighth Michael Myers movie … or something). But two of horror’s essential elements, surprise and the unknown, seem to be in short supply.

These days the gritty, grimy, and handheld seem to be the prized aesthetic virtues of the horror film, and this pretty on-the-nose visual approximation of what “horror” is supposed to be has all but destroyed the possibility of beauty out of the genre. And whatever qualms I’ve had in the past about the nearly pathetic storytelling abilities and barely interested characterizations of Italian horror director Dario Argento seem to be dissipating with each passing year. At this point, I’d sacrifice ten motivationally sound, “realistic” scare machines for just one example of a horror film with the exquisite formal control of Argento in his heyday. The luscious Suspiria is rightfully lauded as his most tightly composed widescreen pleasure, Deep Red may have some of his most memorable death scenes and something nearing an actual protagonist, and Opera certainly remains his most eye-popping, literally and figuratively, yet upon this week’s viewing, Inferno seemed to me to be his most consistently gorgeous—it’s basically an endless series of dazzlingly colored and framed compositions, and it glides from one terrifying set piece to the next with devil-may-care fleetness.

The plot is, of course, a big, sweaty wad of dumb, but in the face of such a carefully crafted hallucination, why bother with such niggling details as coherent story? Meant to be watched late at night, and often through protective fingers, Inferno is the second in Argento’s haphazardly conceived “Three Mothers” trilogy, after Suspiria and before The Mother of Tears, his long-gestating conclusion, which, this year, finally premiered to the usual mix of cheers and chuckles at the Toronto Film Festival. It has something to do with a coven of evil witches who control powerful outposts in Freiburg (Suspiria), Rome, and, in this case, a suspiciously, gorgeously artificial version of New York City. Illuminated by bordello reds and emerald neon greens, this Manhattan is made up of basically a single block, containing a gothic apartment building, and Central Park, realized as a dreamlike composite, shot in Rome with New York skyscrapers superimposed around its perimeters. It’s dazzlingly cheap stuff, and when its lead “characters” skulk and are stalked around its environs, it seems as though it could all tumble into a sea of paper maché and cardboard at any moment.

Perhaps the lack of character is least conspicuous in Inferno because the film foregrounds its own attention to architecture and indeed, that’s where its horror derives from—like if Rosemary’s Baby had foregone its profound psychological terror and instead extended its opening credit sequence to become a visual essay on the Dakota building. Even more so than in its gruesome, creative killings, Inferno locates its fear through hallways, basements, shadows, colors, and crawlspaces. There’s a stunning bit of set design inside a mausoleum-like Roman library, which Argento surveys with a fascinated, lushly rising camera all the way to its disjunctively modern roof, and a truly unforgettable bit in which a regrettably nosy student goes diving into an underground room that’s been completely submerged in water. It’s tense, drawn-out, and paced to necessarily match the slowed-down underwater movements; while there’s a chintzy necessity to the filmmaking (there’s an obvious, if lovable, inability to capture the action from too many angles in such restricted spaces, resulting in limited coverage) this scene gets at the basic, undeniable seriousness with which Argento makes his essentially ridiculous movies. He wants to scare you by showing you things you haven’t seen before, or perhaps couldn’t even have imagined seeing.

*****

We’ll bring you at least a movie a night until October 31. And in case you missed last year’s great pumpkins, here are some handy Halloween links.

The Fog

Don’t Look Now

Creepshow

The Innocents

The Last Winter

Häxan

Poltergeist

Forbidden Planet

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

And no Halloween is complete without:
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

or

”Candy candy candy candy candy candy!!” (thanks to Sarah Silver)

Tim Burton’s 1999 Sleepy Hollow was truly one of the most disheartening missed opportunities in all of film—a ground-up genre pulp riff on Hammer films by way of Washington Irving that not only bore no resemblance to its alleged source material but also had no personality, soul, or narrative heft. Burton’s “adaptation” is more like a badly related story from a dorky kid who claims to have read the book but can only rely on third-hand information: “Yeah, it’s about a headless horseman…and he kills people…and stuff.” Hence, it’s a monotonous series of elaborately (read: dully) staged beheadings, with endless lines of Burton’s child-scrawled scarecrow grotesques dotting the landscape. At least we still have the real deal: Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, thirty-five minutes of clever, tuneful, and surprisingly gripping animated joy, originally packaged alongside The Wind in the Willows (also excellent) for the 1949 release The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Even as it’s greatly geared towards the kiddies, Legend of Sleepy Hollow manages to be more, satiric, exhilarating, and evocative of its story’s time and place than Burton’s backbreakingly art-directed fluff, which seems to have spared no expense.

While it may not be the Greatest Pumpkin of them all , Disney’s Sleepy Hollow trails a close second to Linus’s faithful night in the pumpkin patch in the animated Halloween Olympics. Narrated completely by (a probably soused) Bing Crosby, it’s Disney at the top of its craft; made when the studio was in somewhat of a downslide after the war, the film was one of a series of shorts within omnibus films that they were making at the time, almost exclusively. With other subjects such as Pecos Bill and Johny Appleseed, Disney was constantly propagating Americana throughout the decade, for better and for worse, but Sleepy Hollow remains the best of them, a perfectly pitched example of Disney’s penchant to condense literature into an accessible package, without sacrificing nuance or detail. In fact, a lot of care seems to have gone into adapting Washington Irving’s highly allegorical tale: Irving’s gently sarcastic omniscience becomes Crosby’s sassy, tuneful narration (complete with a host of toe-tapping numbers filled with ironic remove); and sketchy schoolmaster Ichabod Crane’s voracious opportunism is reimagined as a slapsticky, rapacious appetite for women and food. In this passage from Irving’s book we see the makings of Disney’s literalized metaphors: “He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spell-bound region.” Though thin as a rail, he’s often seen wolfing down entire roasted chickens and swallowing pies in one nasty gulp.

Most impressively, the film maintains the ambiguity of its story’s central Dutch-settled, New American mythmaking. The Headless Horseman, a spirit summoned up by fireside storytellers to scare children—as well as itinerant teachers given to local superstitions—represents new-old-world cold comfort at its least forgiving. Is the horseman, supposedly beheaded by a cannonball during the Revolutionary War, more fearsome because it might be a vengeful human in disguise or because it might not be? (The bullyish local Brom Bones drives out Ichabod, not just because he’s stealing the eye of the thoroughly flirtatious, loathsomely manipulative Katrina, but also because Ichabod represents an unwanted intrusion to the enclosed community.) Not just faithful, the film is also exquisitely designed to terrify: even before Ichabod’s final fateful Halloween ride through the midnight woods, there is an exquisite use of multiplane animation in which the branches and trees of the nighttime forest literally close in on Ichabod, with overlaying animated cells. It’s a beautifully cartoonish evocation of fear, and exactly what children’s filmmaking should do: boil things down to their primal core, with simple visual metaphors.

Then, the slow, suspenseful build-up (far off hooves clomping ever closer; the moon cupped by the hands of grey clouds; frogs croaking out Ichabod’s name in foreboding) to the deliriously exciting finish—Ichabod’s desperate face, the Horseman’s headless indifference, the race to the hallowed ground of the bridge and church. It’s simply thrilling, with more of an understanding of basic narrative mechanics that Burton could ever grasp. Then, the shattered pumpkin.

Happy Halloween, everybody.

RS

Fred M. Wilcox’s 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet may seem an odd addition to our Halloween spectacular, especially given that it’s more famous for its most memorable character, the bibendous, fey, talking robot Robbie, than actual scares. But I’ll proudly stand up and say that my regular childhood viewings, even those on sunny weekend afternoons, were marked with liberal doses of sheer terror. Whether it’d still work for me as truly scary now is perhaps questionable, but the terrific conceit of a gigantic, invisible monster stalking the unawares at night (I won’t ruin the surprise of its origins, one of my favorite all-time ideas of the genre) still compels me to think on it from time to time. Wilcox does a terrific job of teasing out our knowledge of the creature: starting with depressions in the ground caused by invisible, clawed feet, graduating to metal structures damaged by an obviously large beast, and then its initial terrible illumination by laser/taser fire in a massive firefight. In and amongst more placid sequences, these evening attacks play as any good business featuring a stalking murderous interloper should. By the film’s climax, as the whole forbidden planet is literally falling apart at the seams, and the creature stages a final attack, its true nature has been revealed and the film’s vaulted into the realm of one of the headier sci-fi confections of the day.

From the instant Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his crew land on the distant planet Altair-4 to investigate a lost colony, things are, most decidedly, “off.” And given the planet’s remaining population of three—Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis), and their servant Robbie—when corpses start piling up, questions mount even more quickly. Cyril Hume’s screenplay, loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (when was the last time we’ve been able to say that about a new science fiction film?), is populated with a sense of creeping dread that questionable delivery from leads Nielsen, Francis, and Pidgeon can’t quite squash (it may well be that some of what’s so great about 50s sci-fi lies in how performance independent it can often be)—Planet ably pulls off the sci-fi/horror hybrid that’s flummoxed more than a few filmmakers. You wouldn’t expect this kind of slow-burn from a director who’d put out three Lassie movies in the years prior, but assisted by massive amounts of Theremin, spot-on production design which overflows with a feeling of fragile isolation, ingenious sound work and what were once state-of-the-art FX that remain surprisingly impressionistic, the whole thing adds up to well more than the sum of the average MST3K knock-off. It's the perfect Halloween film for those who prefer science fiction to more traditional scary flicks.

Even if you don't know me personally, it may not come as much of a surprise that I'm fairly familiar with Poltergeist: take a look at my username. Hailing from the same era as so many cultural phenomena which defined a generation, Poltergeist stands apart from the Star Wars, Alien, and Indiana Jones pictures for its singular generic makeup: it's a haunted house picture as special-effects roller coaster ride. It's the creaky ghost-house redefined for Spielbergian family values, reconfigured in prefab suburbia, and rigged up in state-of-the-art blue-screen and prosthetics. it's thoroughly aware of its own placement in the blockbuster cosmos--Robbie Freeling, middle-child, terrorized by malevolent kid-eating trees and diaboliocally grinning clown dolls, packs his bedroom with memorabilia: Darth Vader, sci-fi posters, a jacket emblazoned with that latter-day Wolf Man, Chewbacca.

It's not surprising then, that Poltergeist, for many kids now in their twenties, was their first horror movie. Famously rated PG (which in part, along with other Spielberg products made to terrorize tots, including Gremlins, helped establish the PG-13), the movie is something like a particlarly gruesome Little Golden Book; it could be subtitled "My First Horror Movie." Not that the film isn't at times truly horrifying: it can still send shivers up the spine (those skeletons popping up from underground in the family pool; that persistent stuffed circus freak) and cause stomach discomfort (a man--with the aid of an off-screen Spielberg's own two hands--rips his own face off in pulpy chunks in front of a bathroom mirror); but what makes Poltergeist so oddly accessible for the young mind is the film's forthright placement in the everyday goings on of an average family. Despite its foreboding opening (with little Carol Anne perched in front of the TV late at night, talking to its black and white fuzz after it's signed off for the night), Spielberg's script takes a lot of time to establish the humorous, very normal, interactions of its various family members: former hippie dad turned real-estate agent Steven, trying to find his conservative side (he's seen reading a Reagan biography, in full camera view); live-at-home mom Diane juggling three kids, housework, and her once active '70s open mind (she smokes pot when the kids are in bed and hides the stash when the kids come complaining they can't sleep); eternally pissed teenager Dana; timid, yet brashly masculine 8 year-old Robbie; and of course, angelic, impressionable 5-year-old Carol Anne, who will be swept away into the otherworld, through the spiritual conduit of the TV.

A joint production between Spielberg and director Tobe Hooper--a renowned "collaboration" which resulted in much, much, much confusion on set and in the press over who had creative control over the film--Poltergeist is always considered, easily, an odd mix of Spielbergian sentimentality and Hooper-esque gore and grime. If only it were that simple: Spielberg's always shown a penchant for scaring the living shit out of people (particuarly tots). What is Hooper's and what is Spielberg's has always seemed reductive--what matters is that the joint effort forced both filmmakers to do something just a little different...it's Spielberg's first ever full-throttle scare machine, and it's Hooper's most character-driven, satisying emotional narrative.

Poltergeist's concerns with the spirit world (it devolves into a lot of tantalizing mumbo jumbo about the "light" and crossing over) often seem to take a back seat to its primary power as a supreme sound and light show (it's the one film where Spielberg's need to flood everything with backlighting actually has a narrative context). No doubt, Poltergeist is touching, and its literal rebirth narrative--in which a mother must reclaim her daughter and push themselves back through a goopy plasmic birth canal into our world, i.e. the living room--gives the haunted house genre some metaphorical heft; but it's most memorable as a gallery of beasties and eye-popping wonders.

More than anything, it's the sheer awe with which the film views the spirit world that makes it not just scary, but transcendent. When the ghosts first invade, and their intentions seem rather harmless (they simply move some furniture around and break some glasses), Diane embraces the intrusion with childish delight, jumping up and down and clapping her hands. She even sets up floor diagrams in the kitchen to demonstrate the otherworldly power for her baffled husband. Such glee is shortlived. (It's all fun and games, till somebody loses a child...) It's the most refreshing twist on the haunted house genre I can recall--and a brilliant evocation of misguided 70s hope and freedom transitioning to 80s disillusionment.

I’d need to consult an early-cinema historian, but Benjamin Christensen’s silent curiosity Häxan (1922) (a 1966 re-release featured a wretched free-jazz score and dead-serious, director-derided voice-over narration by William Burroughs; both cuts have been sturdily enshrined on DVD by Criterion) is almost certainly the first feature-length movie to feature boiled babies. The little dumplings are being prepared in honor of a midnight meeting between Satan and a coven of broomstick-riding witches. Said confab is just one of several spectacularly realized, vintage-woodcut style friezes dotting Christensen’s well-and-truly certifiable pseudo-documentary, one of the most visionary – and lethally pointed – horror-comedies ever made.

Not only does the film, a portentous-on-purpose tour of occult lore featuring overwrought, beautifully detailed “dramatizations” of “witchcraft through the ages,” have it both ways, but it does so with such nimble-fingered skill (it fairly teems with Expressionist-ish brio) that those ways have no choice but to take it and like it. Its contents – artifacts, paintings, breathless descriptions of the black arts, nude nymphos, moonlight Bacchanals, corrupted priests, Christensen himself as a fork-tongued, dirty-minded Devil whose ass is literally kissed by his disciples – are gloriously lurid, but the director is callow like a fox.

As the straight-faced tone crinkles into a barely suppressed grin, it’s evident that this peep-show inventory has a very real subject: the hypocrisy of fear-mongering religious institutions that loudly decry the very hysteria they’ve helped to massage in their constituency. Häxan goes into exacting detail about Inquistion-era torture devices, explicating their effects on the human anatomy in clinical detail. It’s a prurience born of empathy – the unmissable point is that the countless “witches” murdered and mutilated in the name of religious purity were victims of force-fed misogynist panic and pulpit-sent communal naiveté. (As if these Church-baiting postulations needed reinforcing, the film presents the clergy as either smiling sadists or weak-kneed slaves to temptation.)

Christensen organizes the final segment of the film around the thesis that the poor wretches previously taken for witches were in fact sufferers of garden-variety “female hysteria.” Whether or not Christensen’s heart is in this specious sociology (surely the superimposition of a classic broomstick-riding witch onto a photograph of a female aviator is done with tongue so firmly in cheek as to produce choking), the underlying suggestion that we’ve merely refined our intolerance (much is made of present day’s society’s compassion in incarcerating, rather than incinerating, its outcasts) has some sting to it.

As Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest, the self-derivative Retribution, has temporarily disappointed those who believe a genuine horror auteur can exist—a filmmaker who can expertly work within genre conventions even as he pushes far beyond the safety of the genre’s borders—one can take heart from the fact that Kurosawa’s example has spread to an American disciple. The masterful touches scattered throughout Larry Fessenden’s first two efforts, Habit (1997) and Wendigo (2001), portended a masterpiece to come. Five years hence, Fessenden’s career-suicidally ambitious The Last Winter, while far too flawed to ever qualify as a masterpiece, triumphs through its own ultimate “failure.” Put another way, it has to fail as a horror film in order to achieve its aim: to burst through the generic borders and images that hem its horrors in and strike us at our most naked, vulnerable, fearful point.

Unlike the comfortable “archetypes” (read: clichés) with which so many “ambitious” would-be horror directors skim across any real investment in their material—see, or rather don’t see, Lucky McKee’s upcoming The Woods—Fessenden has an actual subject—a subject so pressing, horrifying, and unthinkable that the great majority of us, of necessity, push it to the back of our minds. As with Kurosawa in Charisma, Fessenden does not use the horror form to allegorize, or exploit, the ecological apocalypse he forecasts in The Last Winter. He uses it to break that dread open, to give its terrifying formlessness a transitory form. And as he gathers portents of a horrible revelation to come, he deliberately pushes the abilities of cinematic representation to incarnate that unimaginable fear.

So The Last Winter thus creates and maintains two levels of suspense throughout its length. The first is Fessenden’s, in his often brilliant command of the horror tropes he employs: over and over again, he creatively undermines our expectations by stifling or cutting short the expectedly “scary” bits and introducing jagged rhythms and unsettling discrepancies into what should be the rest periods between scares. The second is ours, as we wonder, hope, that the revelation can possibly equal the masterful build-up Fessenden has given it.

To put it simply, it doesn’t. But the gonzo insanity of the last ten minutes, so drastically breaking with the slow, gathering dread that preceded it, almost seems a humble confession on Fessenden’s part: a confession that nothing he puts on the screen could possibly be more frightening than the reality he’s concerned with. The Last Winter ultimately isn’t “satisfying” because there is no real-world satisfaction for what it speaks of. This horror cannot be contained in our stories or our images. It has a logic of its own so alien to ours that even our best attempts to decipher it must fail, and our knowledge be limited to an awareness of its implacable approach. Hoots and jeers might accompany the finale of The Last Winter, but they’re only a coping mechanism for the terrible truth it uncovers: what it knows about that which is impossible to know.

The pedigree of The Innocents is so estimable that one would think the film to be bronzed upon delivery: Henry James adapted to the screen by Truman Capote (!) starring British Hollywood royalty Deborah Kerr, and directed by an up-and-comer named Jack Clayton, whose prior film, the kitchen-sinky Brit new waver Room at the Top, got a Best Picture nomination. What’s most surprising, even forty-five years later, is that The Innocents remains one of the least compromised, most genuinely unsettling studio films of the 1960s, a horror film in both the metaphysical and psychological senses, brought to the screen with more care and craftsmanship than the haunted-house genre probably ever received before or since. Robert Wise’s The Haunting, similarly black-and-white and predicated upon the thin line between possession and madness, stole its thunder two years later, and seemingly for the rest of the century: the latter, a slightly more resolved and narratively accessible trip into the supernatural, shows up regularly on Scariest Movies of All Time lists, while Jack Clayton’s devastating journey into the interior world of the haunted has been greatly forgotten.

What a shame, because anyone who pops in the recently released DVD of The Innocents is in for a big, wide shock: this Cinemascope adaptation of James’s The Turn of the Screw is one of the most exquisitely modulated ghost stories ever shot. When I say that The Innocents is the most “classical” of horror films, I refer primarily to its view on death. Death is here something to be profoundly feared, something that can’t be quantified; the ghostly realm exists not as a concept but as a reality and an end point. Vividly representing that fear is Deborah Kerr’s increasingly wide-eyed Miss Giddens, the pastor’s daughter who takes the job as governness of two young orphans at a remote British estate; her transition from tremulous truth-seeker to manic madwoman, as she begins to suspect that young Miles and Flora are possessed by the spirits of the dead, is so gradual as to be imperceptible, and her invocation of fear is breathtakingly palpable, even as we begin to distrust it. Yet young Pamela Franklin and, especially the preternatural man-child Martin Stephens (who one year before was in Village of the Damned, natch) are every bit her match; theirs is a secret world (the world of children, perhaps nothing more?) that Miss Giddens begins to greatly distrust, until she tries to violently snap them out of it.

What’s most remarkable about The Innocents isn’t merely its tonal and narrative faithfulness to Henry James’s story (it is simply shocking that the film has the same grim ending as the book), but that in so doing, Clayton still manages to make something uniquely, utterly cinematic. The Innocents features some of the most effective 2.35:1 compositions in film history, as well as the best use of the dissolve cut I can recall in a mainstream movie (often one scene will fade out onto one another, slowly, lingering as though draped over the next like a vapor, or a death shroud). There are more grab-your-throat gasps and literal hair-raising moments in this film than even in its soul sister, Alejandro Amenabar’s masterful 2001 homage The Others, which managed to create its own unique world while trading in Clayton’s same hushed, candlelit setting.

The Innocents is a ghost story (faces materialize at nighttime windows, a woman dressed in black appears amongst tall reeds by a rippling pond, shadows and silhouettes seem to dance at the corners of every wide frame), yet it’s not content to just be a ghost story. Even James’s sexual frankness, and intimations of pedophilia snake their way onto the screen—preadolescent Miles’s supposed possession by the “handsome” lothario Quint makes for some seriously perverse magnetism between he and his “pretty” governness. The Innocents hasn’t dated a day thanks to its sophisticated ambiguity; here, explanations mean nothing, and nobody has answers, just an endless tangle of secrets, hazy motivations, and impenetrable facades. As close as we get to Kerr’s unraveling governness, the less we know her, until it’s far too late.

George Romero is known primarily for his Dead series, that increasingly self-conscious, ever more political, ongoing trash epic. From its trenchant, bargain basement beginnings to its outwardly satiric middle period, to last year's thoroughly underappreciated, smartly timeless social commentary Land of the Dead, the Dead films have always displayed the odd congruence of humor and terror that Romero wields with the slickness of a grand ham. It's almost something like whimsy--especially interesting when, in the Dead films, that blitheness is mixed with a genuine social awareness. There's depth to Romero's work; that's why his seemingly negligible Stephen King anthology, Creepshow, seems rather anomalous. Creepshow was an homage to EC horror comic books of the 1950s, and a precursor to the HBO series Tales from the Crypt. Yet as obviously laden with nostalgia and gleeful gore as it may be, Romero's film takes itself surprisingly seriously.

Hugely stylish, with its gross-outs and shockeroos rendered in crazy-comic histrionics, Creepshow looks and feels unlike Romero's other, more naturalistic horror films. Split into five tales of varying success, penned by King at the height of his popularity, the entirety of Creepshow is nevertheless tonally cohesive. And with its gallery of grotesques, puppets and masks designed by Dawn of the Dead makeup master Tom Savini, the film feels as pleasurable as a tour through a Haloween haunted house...each boo is followed by generous bouts of laughter. "Father's Day" is a classic back-from-the-dead, "Who Goes There?" treat, complete with an exquisitely designed worm-infested walking corpse;"The Crate," the film's lengthiest segment, is a nasty, delightful bit of misogynist wish fulfillment in which Hal Holbrook's sad-sack university professor gets to feed his ball-breaker wife (Adrienne Barbeau, a nastier harridan than she even was in Back to School) to a ten-inch fanged wildebeast someone left in a box under the stairs; "They're Creeping Up on You," the most Romero-esque in its depiction of self-motivated isolation, concerns a particularly dreadful cockroach infestation in a high-rise apartment inhabited by a megalomaniac obsessed with social order and cleanliness.

The quick-witted, fleet comic book storytelling is a perfect match for Stephen King's dime-store sense of vengeance and tidy resolutions, which in turn provide a neat little stage on which Romero can hone his comic gross-out skills. The tension created in the space between fear and parody was nothing new even at the time of its release (most of horror is set right in that in-between realm), but it's not as easy to pull off as Romero, or often, Carpenter, make it look: Wes Craven's been trying to accomplish the same tenuous balance for years. (A weekend watch of his 1991 People Under the Stairs for me exemplified the gigantic gulf in his work between concept and execution; he's woefully inept. Romero, on the other hand, knows when to mete out the scares, and when to keep the laughs quarantined.) Creepshow may remain as hopelessly one-dimensional as the pages from which it sprung, but I'll take its paper-thin stylings over Sin City's comic approximation of "human experience" any day: in Romero's film, there's not an ounce of cynicism.

Cross your fingers that remake never happens…every moment of Don’t Look Now is unthinkable in any other form, or with any of its shards moved even an inch out of place. Director Nicolas Roeg is often accused of coldness, impersonality, and of jumping so quickly between tones and genres that he lacks a distinct imprint. But what Roeg and Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie were able to accomplish in Don’t Look Now still feels unmatched in the horror genre: the ultimate coupling of love and death, both represented in their extremes. Don’t Look Now may be famous for its “creep-outs”—and rightfully so: all that time it devotes to watching Sutherland’s mourning father wandering the decrepit nighttime streets of a Venice drained of tourists at the end of the season puts even Visconti’s Thomas Mann adaptation to shame—but why it sticks with us so many years later is that its horrors are so completely dependent on sadness. And it’s a real, true, gut-wrenching sadness, one which the supernatural can try to assuage, but for which it is ultimately meaningless.

The infamous sex scene isn’t renowned for its graphic nature so much as its delicate editing conceit: Sutherland and Christie’s John and Laura Baxter, in Venice both for his art restoration work and for their post-trauma necessity, make love, gently, while Roeg and editor Graeme Clifford intercut their quiet passion with postcoital dressing for dinner. The result is one of the most intimate scenes of marriage ever put on film (Soderbergh ripped it off for Out of Sight, and, as usual, was praised for his inventiveness…but it didn’t work as well as a casual one-nighter between cops and robbers). Even more remarkably, Roeg lets the scene speak volumes about their pain: Having just lost their little girl in a horrifying drowning (shot in terrifying, empathetic slow motion at the film’s surreal opening), John and Laura’s attempt to reconnect isn’t fraught with any verbal psychoanalyzing; it simply plays. Which makes the horror to come all the more terrible.

Few films end more frighteningly, both in their visual shock and their metaphysical implications. For those who haven’t seen the film still, it’s not worth ruining, for Don’t Look Now is indeed a puzzle, but one that never calls attention to itself as such. Roeg conceives of extra sensory perception so organically, and the supernatural is woven into the fabric of the film so graciously and imperceptibly, that it can’t help but take you by surprise. The final bloodletting remains, for me, along with Hitchcock’s Psycho, one of horror cinema’s great ruptures—in which the genre gives way to such melancholy and unfairness that all that’s left is a rush of primal emotion. This is the film’s final testament: despite all of its intellectual concerns (its narrative and temporal audacity) and its “twist” ending, there’s really nothing to solve or be resolved. Roeg lays bare horror’s capacity for all the world’s sadness. Why haven’t more filmmakers been able to capture that?

I knew what I was getting into, but after putting myself through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning this weekend, I started to question and distrust my own taste for the macabre. Of course, this was only a momentary lapse spurred on by the soul-deadening experience of Jonathan Liebesman’s effectively gory yet ill paced, plotted, and conceived prequel to the Chainsaw series. This continuing tale needs an “origin” story like it needs a hole in the head (or abdomen as the case might be)…a psychoanalysis of Leatherface, blaming an abbatoired ubringing and mocking schoolmates? Uh, yeah. Leatherface only works as an image of the unthinkable, not as a full-fledged thinking individual; he thus loses his power as a conceit. However, more importantly, the film simply feeds into the recent trend of pure torture overtaking the suspense and playfulness the genre used to wield. Sure, Hostel at least tried for some sort of poltical commentary-cum-satire and the Saw films are memorably grotesque, but neither are as clever or well-crafted by half as the films their filmmakers all claim as influences (Tobe Hooper’s Chainsaw original, Halloween, etc.)

So, feeling depressed by the sheer lack of imagination (why have shock and depravity been completely substituted for ingenuity and ideas in the current glut of gorefests?) in current horror hits, I’d like to put forth a list of some great examples of the genre, just in time for Halloween. These films will run the gamut from solely atmospheric to deeply intestinally unpleasant, so a proper opener is someone who has always dabbled a bit in both, the singularly unsingular John Carpenter. Never overdecorative in his art direction, never overtly showy with his camera moves, Carpenter nevertheless quickly eked out a place for himself as one of the finest craftsmen in horror, using equal parts restraint and violence, emphasizing sound and image at once, in wholly unexpected and sense-heightening ways.

There may be no better place to start the Carpenter oeuvre than with his independently produced 1978 breakout Halloween, but for me, there’s really no finer example of Carpenter’s elegance than his much-anticipated follow-up, 1980’s The Fog. A more effective example of how setting and composition can make a scary movie than even Halloween, The Fog is one of just a handful of horror films I would call “beautiful.” Its first fifteen minutes, and much of it thereafter, are made up of gorgeously ominous shots of the natural environs of its location, the North Californian fishing village Antonio Bay, composed in elegant widescreen, and often accompanied by Carpenter’s own delicate piano chords. What’s most surprising about The Fog, and why it holds up so well 26 years after its release and one year after its severely loathed teeny-bopper remake, is that its central ghost-story hokum (about long-dead leper fishermen who have returned to the cursed Antonio Bay hundreds of years after the town’s elders murdered them and stole their gold, looking for revenge) works in perfect deference to the lovely imagery.

Most importantly, The Fog is utterly earnest in its telling—as exemplifed by John Houseman’s cameo prologue as a crusty seaside storyteller and the Edgar Allen Poe quote that precedes it, The Fog believes in the power of a good-old fashioned ghost story. The tale seems dog-eared and stale, yet there’s no ironic removal or self-referentality. True, the characters seem slightly secondary to the superb photography, but the host of late Seventies/early Eighties genre standbys (Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook, and Janet Leigh) play their parts with an infectious, likable enthusiasm that transcends any thinness in the characterizations.

No one would make claims for The Fog as a great artistic statement, but it has so many memorable creep-outs and such expertly paced scares, all done with such low-budget ingenuity, that it leaves you giddy—there’s more primal, shivery goodness in one handsomely composed shot here than most films can achieve in their entirety. Halloween may be more iconic and narratively satisfying, and The Thing (1982) does display some of the most dazzling, horrific sights crafted during the heyday of horror effects, but The Fog could stand as Carpenter’s true testament to the genre he so loves; along with Jacques Tourneur’s comparably silly yet superbly accomplished Cat People, it could be an effective study aid for future horror filmmakers on how to use editing and cinematography to heighten tension and create visual nuance. All the more impressive for its being a relatively negligible flick about angry ghost pirates.

For more good current reading on some classic horror alternatives to TCM: The Beginning and the imminent Saw III, also check out Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s third annual “31 Days of Horror,” always an incisive and fun round-up, especially Leo Goldsmith’s new appraisals of Demon Seed and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Tom Huddleston on Murnau’s unforgettable Faust, Ian Johnston on Kobayashi’s Kwaidan.