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I completely forgot that part of the film (it's been forever since I've seen it). I certainly wouldn't attempt to argue it as anything other than mediocre, but I think it does sort of work, just not as a horror film.

I remember offending Herr Schreck with my take on The Eye a few years ago so I am a little hesitant to discuss it here. But I have the same issues Mr Sausage notes with the incredibly annoying jump scare soundtrack, which seems ridiculous for a film about eye transplants! I also have a particularly strong revulsion at the coda:

Spoiler

which seems to suggest, in the happy and newly re-blinded walk towards camera that ignorance is bliss! (as well as a worrying implicaton that blind people should be happy with their lot and shouldn't experiment with techniques to enable them to see again) As much as M. Night Shyamalan is a divisive director these days, The Sixth Sense beautifully tackled extremely similar material and instead of retreating back into safe ignorance after failed attempts at exorcism, had its main character see helping the ghosts as a kind of duty that he had been tasked with. Which is why the protagonist of The Eye is not a good fit for a 'Ghost Whisperer'-type character, as I seem to remember that she utterly fails to understand anything to do with the ghosts! I would instead bracket this character together with the one Michelle Pfeiffer plays in What Lies Beneath, since both end up totally misinterpreting the situation and end up seeming like more selfish, egotistical characters for that lapse.

But this is a fascinating area - I wonder if it is a cultural barrier that is preventing me from appreciating this film. Perhaps it works better in a more 'moralistic' Thai milleu? Or perhaps that is trying to give the film too much credit.

So I see it more as a wildly off kilter 'moral lesson' film which fits in with the Pang Brothers crime drama (Bangkok Dangerous) and romance drama (One Take Only) films, and works much better in those genres where star-crossed lovers and anti-heroic yet lovable characters getting their comeuppance fit better (Bizarrely their adaptation of Alex Garland's The Tesseract, which like The Beach is a searing book about crime and clashing cultures, manages to almost totally sidestep any of the moral dimensions of the excellent source material. It also changes the location from Manila to Bangkok, which ends up compounding these issues by further removing the characters from their original contexts).

However I did quite like the Pang Brothers segment (the final one) of the portmanteau horror Bangkok Haunted, which is a film that deals with the fascinating clash between modernity and Thai traditions in an interesting way throughout all of its segments.

There was also that unpleasant thematic thread running throughout the movie about it being much preferable to be ordinary than to be special or notable, a point that the movie seems to reinforce with its coda.

Mr Sausage wrote:Uzumaki (Higuchinsky, 2000): This seemed like the perfect excuse to go absolutely wild with the visuals and effects, and yet the film is oddly reticent to go for broke. I don't know why, it's clearly just using its strange scenario about a small Japanese town falling increasingly under the thrall of spirals to indulge in bizarre imagery. And yet the total chaos at which it constantly hints is never allowed a full depiction. Most of the movie is taken up with people behaving oddly in the manner of a Saturday morning cartoon while the camera occasionally frames them from equally odd angles. Yet for a movie that exists mostly for its imagery, this is a bland looking film. The predominant colour is this drab green that doesn't so much saturate everything as oppress all other colours to the point where everything ends up looking the same. The direction varies between basic, unimaginative set-ups and unmotivated 'crazy' angles. But mostly there's no energy to the thing. It plashes around in its own quirky atmosphere without ever diving right in and indulging in the visual feasts it keeps hinting at. An all around disappointing movie.

I certainly agree that it is a frustrating film. Even though it only tackles material from the first third of the manga, it piles in so many narrative threads from the early chapters and most of them entirely peter out without any of their resolutions - to take one example, the 'queen bee' girl at the school whose hair turns into spirals becomes a kind of Medusa figure. That is dealt with to some extent in the film but it misses out the 'climax' portion of the chapter devoted to this story in the manga as the heroine's hair also starts to go all spirally as well, draining her energy as it becomes bigger and more ostentatious and both she and the other girl end up having an all out hair battle for dominance on the school playground! With the heroine only being saved from corruption at the last moment while the other girl illustrates the horror of being fully taken over (this is the big theme of the manga - people becoming almost willingly corrupted by their own desires or natures, and becoming rather reductive spiral-themed examples of a particular aspect of their nature. With the heroine sort of fighting to remain a fully rounded individual. Although of course while our heroine is saved from many of the horrors in the early standalone chapters, the worst is still yet to come!)

Or take the stalker character who, after his 'wrapped around the axel wheel of a car' suicide (which the film climaxes his character with), has his storyline furthered into incredibly grotesque areas as he returns as a zombie (with a car spring/spiral inside what's left of his body, enabling him to leap great distances) and has to be re-killed.

That's examples of the payoffs to the various storylines that the film just doesn't deal with at all (see also the heroine's father's obsession with the flames in his kiln and the water from the lake). It's all there in the manga but the film stuffs so many beginnings of each of the stories into its running time without any resolutions whatsoever (except in the eerie but rather unsatisfying coda) that I'm tempted to call it the heir to Bunuel's Phantom of Liberty!

However I still think that the casting and look of the film is just right. That can just make the experience of watching the film all the more frustrating though!

I've read the "anthology backdoor" section of the Rules and am still confused. Would Fellini's "Toby Dammit" stand alone or would I have to vote for the entire "Spirits of the Dead"?

You'd have to vote for the entirety.

That seems to be how domino has specified in the rules (which makes sense given how a lot of horror anthology films are structured) though for the decades projects you would be able to vote either way.

Yeah, I ran into confusion when, upon searching for posts on "Toby Dammit" in the Lists forum I ran across an old post of Zedz's from 2005 noting that Fellini's segment showed up in the also-rans for the '60s.

I understand the need for a general rule although the segments of
"The Spirits of the Dead" stand on their own, the only connecting piece being that the segments were Poe short story adaptations if I understand it correctly.

The other two parts are good enough that you shouldn't feel bad if you vote for the whole just for the Fellini. In fact I'd argue the Malle while less flashy is the equal of the Fellini in terms of cinematically exploiting character for an odd theme.

While I don't agree with you on the Malle segment I appreciate the advice. Thanks knives.

Spirits of the Dead, like all anthology horror films, can only be voted for as a whole

Is anyone likely to put Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits on their horror list? It is a stretch certainly but I've been giving its inclusion on my list some consideration in light of an article I just read which argues for the influence of Mario Bava's imagery on Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and Toby Dammit. Totaro makes a convincing argument especially with the images he has posted that accompany the article.

That aside, on an experiential level, I find Fellini pushing Juliet into the realm of horror later in the film as Juliet's psychic demons assert themselves more forcefully into Juliet's dreams and memories as she contemplates a tryst with Suzi's nephew and decides what to do with her husband's cheating. These scenes, with the numerous voices in Juliet's head reaching a fever pitch, were particularly terrifying for me. There was a great dread at having no idea what would happen next, having no idea which voice would assert itself next, hoping that the burning death angel would disappear completely from the available options. The dread I felt was something akin to what I experienced when watching Lynch's Inland Empire, another borderline horror I'm considering for my list. Dread can be particularly heightened when the storyteller is not following a particular horror formula, not showing obeisance to any particular genre, but moving swiftly in and out of a horror mode. Fellini and Lynch get that this movement between scary, funny, confusing, etc. is how dreams work and how dreams can be terrifying as a result.

Anyway, wondering if any of you are considering Juliet for your list.

Juliet of the Spirits is my favourite Fellini, but I don't consider it a horror. I think if it's in any genre, that genre is probably comedy. Don't let that stop you from voting for it, tho'.

I've put together a list, but it's far from final. I'm specifically hung up on trying to decide whether a few films count as horror. Specifically, I think that both Zodiac and Dogtooth would place very high on my list, but are these horror films? I know that of the two, Dogtooth is very far from your traditional horror mold, but I'll be damned if it doesn't freak me out. Any thoughts?

I don't think either one is horror, but I'd be curious to hear other opinions.

Here's how I look at this issue:

There is a difference between a horror element and a horror movie much the same way there is a difference between a comedic element and a comedy. There is some funny stuff in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly--will I be voting for it in the Comedies List? No.

Some movies have funny or scary or dramatic stuff in them, but that does not determine their genre. Those things lie on the surface. There must always be a deeper structural reason for a movie being assigned to a genre. Hence I'll be voting for L'annulaire and not Zodiac even tho' the latter frightened me more: because the former is a dark fairy tale crossed with a mad scientist film and therefore shares more structural and thematic ties with the Horror genre than with any other, whereas the latter is clearly in the police procedural/detective/noir genres.

Granted, noirs and detective movies can bleed into horror (The Seventh Victim, any giallo), but that indicates only that they share points of contact, not that there is an equivalency.

The line is invisible, but like Sausage, I have a personal sense of approximately where it lies, and serial killer films are a good example of the kind of films that straddle that line. A vast number of them are straightforward horror films, but they don't have to be, and for me it all depends on the film's emphasis.

Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Landscape Suicide are all based on the Ed Gein case, but they approach it from different perspectives (and they're all masterpieces of their kind). I don't think anybody would dispute that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a horror movie or that Landscape Suicide isn't one, but people might be a bit more uncertain about Psycho. Even though it was unambiguously a horror movie on release, and meets most standard criteria, its patina of an Oscar-nominated auteurist classic and its frequent euphemization as a 'thriller' might have eroded some of its genre cred over the years.

I'm considering voting for The Boston Strangler, but couldn't include Zodiac, even though they're practically cousins. For me, the focus of Zodiac is far more on procedure and less (for understandable reasons) on the titular 'monster', but with Fleischer's film that balance is nudged back towards the Psycho end of the spectrum. It's still going to be a marginal horror movie, and I might end up excluding it as ineligible, but it's got enough of the DNA of the genre to sustain an argument. At the moment, it's probably the best example I've got of a borderline case, and as such it's been a convenient measure: is Film X more or less of a horror film than The Boston Strangler?

Mr Sausage wrote:Here's how I look at this issue:

There is a difference between a horror element and a horror movie much the same way there is a difference between a comedic element and a comedy. There is some funny stuff in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly--will I be voting for it in the Comedies List? No.

Second thoughts: Considering your example here, I think I'd treat comedies differently, since the first think I thought about the Leone wasn't "it's a different genre entirely" but "it's not funny enough to be a comedy," which suggests that, if there were more and better gags, I might include it. As it is, I know I'd put Sherman's March near the top of any comedy list I'd compile, even though that's not a comedy either, in strict generic terms. And by the same token there are films that I like a lot which tick the 'comedy genre' box, but which don't make me laugh, so I couldn't include them on any such list in good conscience.

zedz wrote:Considering your example here, I think I'd treat comedies differently, since the first think I thought about the Leone wasn't "it's a different genre entirely" but "it's not funny enough to be a comedy," which suggests that, if there were more and better gags, I might include it.

Well, comedy is problematic in its own ways (and originally wasn't even used to describe things that were funny, eg. the Divine Comedy). But, yes, if enough of the movie is given over to making the audience laugh, then it could be a comedy, which goes back to your earlier point about focus. Leone's film isn't a comedy because that isn't where its focus lies, but that does not preclude it from including some funny or amusing moments. Same with Zodiac: if it had focused enough on suspense and terror, it would be a horror; but as it stands, its focus is elsewhere, and those frightening or tense moments serve another purpose than they do in actual horror films. In the serial-killer-as-horror film, the frightening elements are either the end in themselves (Halloween) or used to help bring the viewer inside the demented and grotesque headspace of the killer (Maniac, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer). In Zodiac, they are there to help bring the viewer inside the headspace of the journalists and the detectives and to give a sense of a historical time and place. So they are not used for a horrific end.

Speaking of Juliet of the Spirits, has anybody on this forum seen a little ol horror film called THE DEMON (Il demonio, 1963) directed by an Italian gent by the name of Brunello Rondi?

It's an Italian language film, directed by the screenwriter of Juliet, plus 8 1/2, Satyricon (as contributor), also contributed to Flowers of St Francis and La Dolce Vita . . . this notwithstanding his own directorial canon.

It's quite an interesting film, stylish in it's own quietly rustic way. Shot all on location in a tiny village in the south of Italy (where the fervent belief in demons and spells still ran rampant), and claiming to be based on a true story, the narrative concerns a young peasant girl who is excessively infatuated with a gent in her village. . . who is himself already engaged to somebody else.

Unable to accept her rejection by this man, the young lass begs, pleads, at one point becoming a leg warmer to him, clinging to his thigh and pleading her love and proferred servitude to this man while dragging over the dirt via his strides, while he walks away trying to shake her off.

Her obsession only grows as the young man marries, and she resorts to what she believes are spells to win his love; eventually the young man and the rest of the town are so shaken by her absorption with this world, that they begin to see her as the root of any evil that may befall their lives. Eventually she is subject to all manner of superstition via the townsfolk who cast her even further outside the circumference of their society, until she is a genuine pariah. Here's a nice little blurb from the mere two reviews for the film on imdb:

Daliah Lavi plays Purificazione,a young woman who after having her amorous advances rejected by young man in her town resorts to witchcraft to try and win him over.When the townsfolk realise what she is doing, everything untoward that happens is blamed on her.Soon they have her pegged as being possessed by a demon and an exorcism is carried out in the local church..."The Demon" by Brunello Rondi is an overlooked Italian horror film from early 60's with excellent central performance of Dalilah Lavi.The infamous 'spider walk' across the church floor scene obviously inspired William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist".The climax is tragic and unforgettable.8 exorcists out of 10.

Puri is eventually subject to multiple forms of exorcism, and indeed--as mentioned above-- features a spider-walk sequence by the lead actress (without the assistance of harnesses, gymnast doubles, or special effects) who slithers across the floor in the exact same fashion as in Friedkin's redux of his famous film. There is no way on gods green earth that he didn't lift this scene wholesale from Rondi's film.

Shot with a quiet simplicity--using essentially neorealist means, achieving a feel via the use of peasant locals, real centuries-old locations, a sense of the cast's own religion and superstition infusing the subtext in the manner of Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew-- that that is nontheless loaded with eerie subtext, this film is a true hidden gem that deserves more eyeballs. . . wondering if anybody has seen it around here. If not, throw it on your to-watch list. You'll be glad you did.

The Wicker Tree
Now the original is one of my favorites period being damn near close to a perfect movie so this Evil Dead II styled sequel was never going to live up and while it suffers from more than its share of problems the film on the whole winds up being rather okay. As per usual this film is gorier and dumber than the original with the Christian characters not being treated with as much understanding as Sergeant Howie was, but I think that begins to reveal how differently things are today than even as recently as the '70s. These characters are far less complex for the narrative by in a way being far more complex as characters with a personal battle with religion just striking up a slick hypocrisy which may work in a character piece, but this really doesn't function as such. An other weak point is how much McTavish makes one yearn for Christopher Lee who does manage to make a cameo. That's not to say he does a bad job in the role, but again his performance and character makes the film less complex through the attempt at a more complex character. The film at large just manages to hew too closely to The Wicker Man to make any of the changes it does make work.

Frankenstein: The True Story
I haven't seen this since it was last on television sometime in the '90s, but I remember loving so much that it is probably the thing that got me so thoroughly into the Frankenstein mythos in the first place. Hopefully I come across as fair despite nostalgia. Anyways the first real big thing is that the film shows its television origin much to its detriment. It begins with an odd introduction that had me pinning for the Universal films and then a trailer for the film itself. Was this a common thing to do for television movies? Also despite claiming to faithfully adapt the novel several things are changed particularly the first act and the bride's demise (though it is so creepily done here that that should be forgiven). Also I'm not sure who stole from whom, but there's a scene here identical to one of the Hammer Frankensteins from the same period.

Getting to the movie itself it's radically different from the only other Smight film I've seen, but shares Harper's tightness and pacing. Despite the enormous runtime and deliberate attempt to keep the story grounded it wizzes by as if it were no time at all. Most of the muscle is in the acting which breaths a great life into the picture and allows for this tonally different interpretation to fit perfectly. None is more important than Michael Sarrazin in his one of a kind performance as the monster. This is really where the true story part comes in as he embodies the book so perfectly. He just manages even before his decline the horror and pain of the novel in all of the right ways. There's a true misery to his situation and the slow realization of it is as great a performance as any you'll see. Likewise Leonard Whiting's Doctor so strongly goes against the titan performances by Lee and Clive that it can stand beautifully as its own thing with the torture of failure lining every action. It is given a pop psychology reasoning within the film, but his drive and actions as shown by the performance is truly sad. As a film it causes more tears than scares, but that seems right.

Time After Time
I suppose all it takes is '70s era David Warner and Malcolm McDowell as time traveling historical figures to make a movie fun, but any description can't really begin to describe how good the movie is with an intelligent script and superb, fluid direction (between this and the two other films of Nicholas Myer I've seen he's really evidenced himself as at least an underrated talent). The film could have been a historical and literary winking fest and with the oblique references occasionally seeming to take place of the whole, but the film becomes concerned with much more. Wells is right at the start something of a naive hopeful talking about the good hope of a socialist utopia and the film deals with how that bright hope is destroyed by the bleak present perfectly summed up by Jack the Ripper who's portrayed with such slimy glee it's hard to remember how easily Warner came make a rightful bastard sympathetic. The film makes this obvious only in the beginning presumably to keep it on mind so as to keep this in the form of a fun blockbuster without losing intelligence (or fun if Meyer decided to keep hitting us over the head of how much further we can go). That's not to say it gives up on those things as Wells is constantly confronted with defeated hopes (an especially funny scene is when he nearly lapses into religion early on only to be thrown on his ass).

Though given the strong leaning upon adventure the big question (in terms of the list) becomes if this really is a horror film. After all much of the film doesn't use the language of horror cinema and does not intend to evoke the atmosphere of such either. So is it even worth posting on? Yeah, it's pretty excellent after all even if it's not the horror film I was sold on.

Time After Time is great but I agree that it could just as easily be fitted into culture clash comedy (beating out Kate & Leopold by a mile) or sci-fi romance (making it a good double bill with Mary Steenburgen's other time travelling romance, Back To The Future III! I wonder if her appearance in the Zemeckis film was a conscious nod back to this one? The sci-fi romancer seemed quite a common thing around that time with films such as Quest For Love and Somewhere In Time too) as into the horror category.

But the horror moments inside it are quite shocking, contrasting well with the rather naive Wells, and that scene where Jack The Ripper shows Wells all of the violence going on in the world on the TV set in his hotel room (and says something to the effect of "ninety years ago I was a freak. Now I'm an amateur!") is a nice piece of biting social commentary! Meyer always seems to be able to add some vivid horror elements into films mostly situated outside of that genre - I'm thinking in particular of that ear-worm sequence from Star Trek II! knives, have you seen his film about the Thuggee strangulation cult, The Deceivers?

On 70s TV movies featuring preview trailers, I don't know how common it was but my TV edit of Tobe Hooper's Salem's Lot starts with a "coming up" trailer just before it begins (as well as a more expected "last time on Salem's Lot" spot before the second part), which works very well in the sense of keeping the viewer watching during the long buildup to the horror moments. In fact I think the "coming up" trailer for the slow burn opening episode features very little vampire action but instead focuses more on the chap who finds his wife and lover in bed (and in their underwear) and confronts them with a gun! So it is taking a more soapy approach to advertising its drama!

knives wrote:Likewise Leonard Whiting's Doctor so strongly goes against the titan performances by Lee and Clive that it can stand beautifully as its own thing with the torture of failure lining every action.

Did you mean Cushing?

Mr Sausage wrote:

knives wrote:Likewise Leonard Whiting's Doctor so strongly goes against the titan performances by Lee and Clive that it can stand beautifully as its own thing with the torture of failure lining every action.

Did you mean Cushing?

Now that's an embarrassing mistake.

As to Colin, The Deceivers was actually the first film of his I saw. Not a great film, but certainly one deserving a better reputation than it has gotten.

I'd like to include some worthy books on the genre for the first post. If you know of some, please either PM me or post about 'em. Thanks!