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I think you and me were both way ahead of the filmmakers then, because they still insisted on staging the reveal, as well as providing various bits and pieces of contradictory 'evidence', such as the

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razor slashes across whatsername's back, which would have been all but impossible to 'unconsciously' self-inflict.) Methinks the real reason for this whole thing was marketing: their desire to put glimpses of an attacking 'monster' in the trailer - he says, not having bothered to look at the trailer.

The one thing that immediately endeared Sightseers to me was its mention of the Crich Tram Museum on the killer's itinerary! All I need now is a chase thriller to be centred around the Beaulieu Motor Museum, an alien invasion of Flambards and a remake of The Village taking in Beamish and I will be confident that cinema has tackled all of my childhood holiday destinations!

zedz wrote:Earlier in the thread, there was a discussion about the film's big twist (as it had been related to us) being theologically dodgy, but now that I've seen the film, it's so flimsy and so dodgy that it doesn't even really qualify as theology.

I agree, but I always like to make these kind of arguments on my my 'opponent's' terms. More likely to be persuasive if you maintain for the sake of argument that the movie is indeed trying to make coherent theological (or social) claims.

You can really see its emptiness and cynicism, tho', in the fact that (SPOILERS I guess) there is no psychologically plausible reason for the woman at the end to withhold her revelation.

1. If she did get a vision of heaven and it was a rewarding vision, she has any number of reasons to share it but no reasons not to (unless whatever was on the other side really likes torture and wants the group to go on torturing, which, if true, silences all claims that the film is trying to undermine the group's religiosity as a kind of social comment).

2. If she got a negative vision that condemned her acts:

A. She's not going to kill herself. That's jumping out of a cold frying pan and into the fire of an adjacent burner. But even granting that she would:
B. She's not going to withhold the fact that heaven just condemned their acts. That makes no sense. You don't come to feel enormous guilt over the awful things you and others have done and then engineer a situation where the rest of them will carry on committing their horrible crimes. That's not a recognizable human behaviour. There is nothing in that that matches any understanding of guilt I've ever encountered.

That moment only exists because the filmmakers need its ambiguity to maintain their pretension. It has no origin outside of that, neither in any internal theology nor psychology. It is the definition of a cheap trick.


There's also the fact that the two halves (which each centre around a set-piece of transgressive violence) are unnecessary to each other. No revelation in the second half is necessary to explain the events of the first. You can come up with a dozen alternate explanations for that girl's capture by that family and none of the first half needs to change. The pseudo-religious aspect is unnecessary as a motivator.

The film is plainly conceived around its transgressive set-pieces, not around any real idea. It's empty, but hasn't the courage to admit it.

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer 2009) Needlessly loud and brash zombie "comedy" that did not make me laugh even once (Though I did smile at Jesse Eisenberg's no doubt improvised line about the Ghostbusters theme song, so there's that). When the fabled extended celebrity cameo sequence pops up, the response isn't hilarity but befuddlement: Why is this actually happening? That's a good question to pose here in general. There seemed to be at least some production budget employed, but the whole thing is shot like bad TV (overcut, few establishing shots, no breathing space) so why did they even bother? The film is needlessly cavalier under the auspices of being "cool," but it comes off as tone-def video game dicking around. A total lack of dramatic risk or danger is not necessarily a deal-breaker (see: the Die Hard films), but the level at which zero-stakes zombie slaughter is foisted on the viewer is exasperating and quickly grows tired-- like, within minutes of the film starting. The whole experience comes across as lowest common denominator teenage male pandering (Amidst the non-stop gratuitous and annoying gunplay, Eisenberg's Code Red-swilling nerd is paired with both Amber Heard and Emma Stone-- of course he is), but not in any fashion that affords pleasures for others. If you've ever known the touch of a woman, you are not the target audience.

Two lists already submitted, with a total of one film in common-- and here I thought the musicals list was spread thin!

Has anybody seen Anatole Litvak's 1962 film Five Miles to Midnight? Not really a horror film per say, but a disturbing drama on a number of levels (one of those early-mid sixties Hollywood productions that you can't really believe was a Hollywood production), and after it finished I couldn't help but believe that certain shots/moments greatly inspired the original Friday the 13th and the first Jeepers Creepers (seriously!), and one particularly disturbing element (handled with amazing 'if you blink you miss' subtlety) even points to a key part of Unbreakable!

Anthony Perkins, a favorite of mine, raises the bar for creepiness here - his excellent turn as Norman Bates seems impossibly tame by comparison, and I really and truly despised this character. Sophia Loren is also great as his wife, taken deeper and deeper into a truly insane and desperate (& morally/emotionally unsound) situation that goes completely out of control. It's a ride that ends with a feeling akin to our heads being beaten by a frying pan & it all resonates with outstanding power for me (even if it makes me feel a bit queasy).

To top that off, we get extraordinary production design by Alexandre Trauner, which the material doesn't really call for but Trauner sets are always welcome (and if you've seen Paris Blues, Children of Paradise or any number of Billy Wilder films you surely know what I mean!). The b&w photography is lovely, as usual for the Litvak films I've seen (like Goodbye Again, also starring Perkins and designed by Trauner) and we get a Mikis Theodorakis score too!

Now for some big time spoilers for those who've seen Five Miles to Midnight that elaborates on the parts of later films I believe it inspired:

*re: Friday the 13th -

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the final shot of both films is more or less the same, and communicates the same unsettling feeling of "is such and such dead, or... ?" - much more profoundly eerie here because of the overall tone that preceded it

**re: Jeepers Creepers -

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the scene where the brother and sister repeatedly run their car over the Creeper is more or less a redo of a very similar scene here

***re: Unbreakable -

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the idea of a character committing an extreme act of terrorism to fulfill a sick and selfish personal need... now, this idea is merely suggested in Five Miles to Midnight, which made this part of the film waaay more disturbing to me - the scene in question is where we see Anthony Perkins' reaction to the newspaper headline about the plane crash he survived... his expression is one of comical glee and great satisfaction... then the film completely drops this and never goes back to it! That disturbed the hell out of me.

Actually, screw it, I'm calling this a horror film because it arguably turns into one. But one thing's for sure: an incredibly bizarre and chilling oddity, with an unusually beautiful design for such creepy material. Recommended.

domino harvey wrote:Two lists already submitted, with a total of one film in common-- and here I thought the musicals list was spread thin!

I can see that, if they went obscure I went with balance. But if you aren't going to say what that film is could you at least give a hint (year it was released, number on my list, director).

It's from the 70s and is one of the films mentioned in my initial write up of thumbnails. That said, it's a moot clue with a third list coming in sans the film, meaning already there's no consensus title on every list!

Its a good job I checked the lead-off post: I thought the next due date was Paddy's Day.
Seems I've got a lot of horror-watching to catch up on

Well I do hope we get to more than one title on the final list.

Ha, there's several overlaps on 2/3 lists, so there is in theory a working list of eligible films

I'd like to see that 'Five Miles to Midnight' before the polls close, but I somehow doubt it, even if its on DVD.
That poster tells me everything I need to know about the film, though

The thing that I've learned most from this list as it went on was just how much I haven't seen. To the point were part of me feels that I don't have any business submitting a list of the best horror films.

I will anyway, tho'.

Anyone person is unlikely to ever see even a quarter of any eligible films for any one list so choosing if to submit by what you haven't seen seems like just a masochistic way of looking at things.

A more fun game than guessing the final list is guessing how many orphans you'll have-- I'm still at 47 with four lists, h8 y'all

City of Pirates (Raul Ruiz, 1983): What a mesmerizing film. I was somewhat dubious of the overtly artificial dialogue and general artiness at first, but after half an hour I was completely sucked into this bizarre phantasmagoria in which the most horrible things get obscured by a mix of childhood fantasies and games, and not obscured very well. Trauma, violence, guilt, repression, and sex are always bubbling up through the cracks and distorting the fantasies. In an odd reversal, you keep waiting for reality to finally invade through the fantasy rather than the opposite. This is the only movie I can think of that begins inside the protagonist's delusion rather than leading us into it gradually ala Repulsion or any other movie about people slowly going insane. The best description of this movie is one of its own images: paper boats set aflame in a pool of blood. Beautiful, wrenching movie, one that will certainly get a place on my list. Thanks, zedz.

Isabel (Paul Almond, 1968): I'm always impressed by movies in which nothing really happens and yet everything is so engrossing. Icicles have never been more unsettling, nor a collapsing snow bank more menacing. No one in this movie acts particularly sinister, and the landscape itself doesn't offer any particular danger (even the promise of a nasty storm goes unfulfilled); so it's a testament to how deeply this movie pushes into its heroine's subjectivity that even harmless moments are fraught with unease. The fact that there's nothing obviously menacing about most of the interactions in this movie makes that unease all the more disturbing. There is nothing to grip on to except mood and suggestion, and the slippery nature of what, actually, is occurring--how much is just a feeling and how much is a real threat--makes it difficult to keep your balance. I'm still not entirely sure what I saw. Maybe nothing at all. Everything that happens here is so out of a made-for-tv Canadian drama that you'd hardly think it was such a frightening movie if I described it. A girl moves back to her small town from the city, takes care of family members, rekindles old acquaintanceships, reminisces about her past, gets in touch with her former self/life, takes up with a local boy. It's all so innocuous and familiar, yet none of it sits right. Does the movie's total immersion into its heroine's subjectivity make it impossible for us to judge the moments in the movie objectively? What are we to make of her sudden terror of being pressed slightly against a fence by an old horse? Surely, growing up on that farm, this should've happened often enough. And why do all of her contacts from outside the town suddenly drop her all in one moment, as if she'd skipped off the edge of the world? That said, for a movie that generates so much unease out of so little, the fairly action-heavy scene in the barn at the end is the most frightening thing I've seen so far for this project. I don't know how to interpret the final scene, except to say that it weaves together two tonally different moments from earlier: the happy whirl and flashing faces of the different dance partners in the dance scene, and the flash of straw, faces, and bodies in the barn scene. Harmless non-sexual activity and sexual violence seem to converge in that final scene, which itself could be protective, or sexual, or violent. It's hard to say. I loved this film, tho'. Thanks Domino for recommending both this and L'annulaire. They're both figuring high on my list.

The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979): I feel the need to put in some defense of this film. Attacking it for "externalizing the metaphorical" strikes me as preposterous, as it's not simply the m.o. of the film (based as it is on psychosomatic disorders), but it's the very means by which the entire horror genre is built on! Without that externalization, you simply have allegory; it's by turning our fears and traumas into some sort of external monster that the horror film comes to life. The 70s horror films certainly made these externalizations more grisly and more literal - some could decry the whole cycle as heavy-handed and unpleasant - but they can get away with them, as the the concrete nature of these manifestation increase exponentially with the genre's potency in exploring and evoking the psychic trauma that is at the heart of all horror. To me, The Brood is one of the absolute signature films of the 70s (North) American Horror cycle. Robin Wood (rightly, in my opinion) distinguishes the cycle as bringing the Horror genre back to its fundamental source: the family. This strikes me as one of the supreme achievements in that regard, focused as it is on the terrors of divorce, childhood and familial dysfunction. Of course, Robin Wood hated this film, which brings us back to its final scene: if I can't win domino harvey over to the film, I can at least it criticize it better than he does.

To me the ending is much more than hitting us over the head with a metaphor (Nora literally birthing children of rage). It actually opens up and adds a new layer to the film... although not necessarily a positive one. If there's one flaw with the film, it is its attitude towards maternity and women, stacked as it is wholly against the mother (It's not called the Horror Kramer vs. Kramer for nothing!). In that final scene, it stops finding horror simply in womanly hysteria, but instead casts a terrified glance at the very female reproductive system as a whole. Some (like Wood) may never forgive the film for that; I personally think that's him doing a disservice to his own notion of an "incoherent text". Cronenberg may get into some pretty troubling water, but he doesn't get there simply because he has an axe to grind (although he does; it was his divorce film). The fear of the female reproductive system strikes me as one of those fundamental Freudian terrors which exist whether we like it or not. Cronenberg may not be immune to this, but you can't ignore the ambiguity he surrounds it with. Shivers may look with horror upon human sexuality, but Cronenberg never completely disavows the possibility that the mad doctor may be right in blasting humanity back into a reptilian orgy. So here, he may seemingly damn maternity while letting the patriarchs get off easy - a "Reactionary Horror Film" reacting against the horrors wrought on the family by feminism - he nonetheless recognizes that this femininity is inescapable. Nowhere does he suggest that it's at all possible for the patriarchy to be restored, and the film is as much about the failure of men to understand and contend with the womanhood surrounding them and necessary for the proliferation of the family. At the end, Frank tells Candice that they're going home, without realizing that such a thing no longer exists (directly echoing one of Wood's pet films, Arthur Penn's The Chase, and its evocation of the "American Apocalypse" which is certainly at the heart of the 70s horror film). I feel no assurance or satisfaction from the death of the matriarch and restoration of the patriarch from the film's final shots. Cutting back in forth from the bumps on her arm to the dazed, fixed glaze in Candice's eyes I get only one feeling: that the atomic family has been an insoluble institution, and its failure constitutes a psychic battleground whose scars we carry for life. The horror of the film comes from the notion that it is these scars, and not the nurture of the family, that truly shapes us and makes us the people we become.

But stop me from babbling on... it might not be Cronenberg's best film, but it does strike me as his best Horror film, the film that best meets the basic tenets of the genre while equally meeting his own pet obsessions and style. Pair it with It's Alive and Possession and kill any hope you may have in having a loving marriage and raising a successful family.

Cold Bishop wrote:Cutting back in forth from the bumps on her arm to the dazed, fixed glaze in Candice's eyes I get only one feeling: that the atomic family has been an insoluble institution, and its failure constitutes a psychic battleground whose scars we carry for life. The horror of the film comes from the notion that it is these scars, and not the nurture of the family, that truly shapes us and makes us the people we become.

Great post, Cold Bishop. What I love about that ending is the sense that the monster isn't dead, it's just been shoved deep down inside again and will have its out some other way, perhaps when Candace has her own family. The physical monsters may've been the creation of a that genre trope, the mad doctor, but the rage and pain that animated them is the creation of something not genre specific or defeatable: the family institution itself. Frank hasn't really saved his daughter from anything; much like Nola's own father, he's now simply a key piece in the creation of her own psychic hell.

Cold Bishop wrote:The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979): I feel the need to put in some defense of this film.

Does that mean that some people are actually attacking this Cronenberg Masterpiece???

Yojimbo wrote:

Cold Bishop wrote:The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979): I feel the need to put in some defense of this film.

Does that mean that some people are actually attacking this Cronenberg Masterpiece???

Domino expressed his dislike for it here.

Mr Sausage wrote:

Yojimbo wrote:

Cold Bishop wrote:The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979): I feel the need to put in some defense of this film.

Does that mean that some people are actually attacking this Cronenberg Masterpiece???

Domino expressed his dislike for it here.

Ah, that's ok, then
Dom's our resident iconoclast!

I know it's late in the game and I haven't been nearly as active in the project as I wanted to be, but I have to throw in a quick recommendation for the exuberantly wicked Texas Chainsaw Massacre-by-way-of-John Hughes Aussie horror flick The Loved Ones (Sean Byrne, 2009), which is available for digital rental on Amazon. The action revolves around a deliriously deranged performance from Robin McLeavy, playing a mousy highschooler Lola, undeterred by the polite decline she receives upon asking her crush to the big dance. I'd advise against watching the trailer, as it spoils a great deal of the fun involved in watching the film play out - it's the rather rare experience where you sort of know where the film is heading next, but can't help thoroughly enjoying the ride. The impressive visual flair of the cinematography, a delightful soundtrack, and a supporting cast of modestly but genuinely drawn characters all add to the quality of the film but it's really Lola's (and her creepy enabling father's) party.

As an aside, this is the 2nd film I've seen this year where a drumstick is used as a tool of menace. I'm still giving the edge to

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Killer Joe

but applaud a solidly squicky effort from The Loved Ones in this highly specific category of Humiliation & Violation by Chicken.

The Lady of Burlesque (William Wellman, 1943): I think knives recommended this one as a proto-giallo, and I can kind of see what he means even if I don't agree. I think it's very much a traditional murder-mystery: it takes place in a single location and after each murder the suspects are all gathered into one room so the detective can lay out the clues and portion out the suspicion. That said, in one or two spots it seems to push out of the traditional murder mystery and into giallo territory, eg. having the lead character be not only a victim and the constant witness of all the foul play, but herself putting on the detective role. The film doesn't quite make the final leap, so to my mind the giallo proper wouldn't get started until two years later with Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase; but Wellman's film is still quite fun, and while it won't make my list, I'm glad I saw it. Hard not to love all the backstage bitchiness, delivered with pitch-perfect venom by Stanwyck and co.

Contains one of my favorite wartime Hollywood lines: "I wouldn't wear that dress to Tojo's funeral."

Matt wrote:Contains one of my favorite wartime Hollywood lines: "I wouldn't wear that dress to Tojo's funeral."

Loved that line, although my favourite bit wasn't really related to the film at all. As I pointed out to zedz in a pm, the opening shot is a pan down a lighted marquee on which the bottom two names read:

Lolita la Verne
Dolly Baxter.

A coincidence Vivian Darkbloom himself wouldn't have failed to enjoy.