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Five lists in now and only two films, both released in the same year, appear on 4/5 of the lists. Neither is the title alluded to earlier. Still looking like overall thin representation, but there's still many lists yet to come

Great write-up of Isabel, by the way M Sausage! Glad to see some of my prized pets won't go away empty handed, even if it looks like I'm in for a real heartbreaker overall

LQ wrote: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

Spoiler

Killer Joe

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

And it's got 97% on the Tomatometer

I wasn't really planning to watch any more horror flicks before the deadline, as there are just so many unseen films I didn't get to that I knew I'd leave the impossible-to-complete binging process far worse than if I just rationed the remaining titles out after the lists were tabulated. But I did make an exception for a pair of films that have been in the back of my mind for a while-- good thing, since one of the two will be placing quite loftily on my (and only mine, so far-- c'mon) list!

Triangle (Christopher Smith 2009) A hard film to talk about in-depth without revealing the fun central idea guiding its increasingly insane premise. Suffice to say, though, that once said premise is revealed and complicated and expounded endlessly into a hellish mobius strip that makes Primer look as narratively straight-laced as the Notebook in comparison, the film doesn't pull its punches in taking the scenario(s?) to their inherent dolorous extremes. It only helps matters that the film is smartly shot and presented in gorgeous 'Scope, and the violence has a primal bursting energy that stops it from ever being gratuitous (some feat, given the scenario!). Star Melissa George seems to have fallen into the same rut as Radha Mitchell (Token Australian qt ready to be filled into thankless tank-toppable horror roles ad infinitum) but she fares better than usual in a lead role that initially appears not to command much ability until the insanity of the plot reveals its necessary character elements. It's nothing to rival George's unparalleled work on In Treatment, but it's a step in the right direction as far as her genre work goes. Everyone, it's not too late to edit this one back into your list!

Lady in the Water (M Night Shyamalan 2006) I'm used to being pariah of unpopular opinions by now, so I fully expected to love this since no one else did. No such luck, though it was unsurprisingly nowhere near as terrible as I'd been led to believe. Having recently thumbed through a couple dozen of the original Grimm fairy tales, the ping-ponging of fantastical rules and complications brought forward by the film, while sloppily executed, is no more ridiculous (or competent) than even the sanest of its genetic brethren. This is a very silly movie, but I'm not convinced Shyamalan takes it all quite as seriously as his detractors have accused: there's a (not particularly funny) sense of humor to the whole thing, and Shyamalan's much-maligned supporting performance is as competent as any other in the film. Employing Bryce Dallas Howard to reprise and amplify the lesser aspects of her waif act from the Village seems a wasted opportunity, as subsequent films (and that one) show her to be a fine actress, but she may as well have been played by Lindsay Lohan for all the actorly acumen she's called upon to muster here. If there's anything here that begs reconsideration, it's in the film's clear lack of coverage in how it was filmed-- Christopher Doyle's work in the film is beguiling: There are almost no establishing shots, and the film is composed primarily in unbroken medium shots, eschewing shot-reverse shot and even basic spatial relations between characters/locations depicted. The mise en scene is disorienting and frankly just weird, but it is also the primary reason to see this above any other half-hearted defense I could muster.

I'm going to have to agree with you at least broadly on the Shyamalan in the sense that while I find the script very annoying it is wonderful to look at. I've been on the fence about buying triangle for a while, but if I can get to it before the deadline I certainly will.

Mr Sausage wrote: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.

You're welcome. I'm glad you got a chance to see it. I know exactly what you mean about the way the film sets off, with a veritable crescendo of ridiculous shots, but the sinister shifting reality of the film claws it back into darkness, even if that screwy / skewed tone never entirely departs. To this day I have no clear idea what the actual 'reality' underpinning the narrative is (if indeed there is one), but there are enough glimpses to convince me that it's very unpleasant indeed.

There are a lot of Ruiz films in a similar vein. L'Oeil qui ment / Dark at Noon even counts as a radical remix of Dracula if you squint from the appropriate angle. In terms of the horror list, though, The Territory is the other big contender, so I hope you have an opportunity to see that too before the polls close. (And if you do, just grit your teeth through the bad acting in the first fifteen minutes: it evens out / becomes less and less relevant as the film progresses).

It also constitutes one of the most unlikeliest of unions: Raul Ruiz and Roger Corman.

Cold Bishop wrote:It also constitutes one of the most unlikeliest of unions: Raul Ruiz and Roger Corman.

And the strangest thing about that is that the film is almost exactly the kind of film you'd imagine such a weird combination would yield.

I thought that having submitted my list, which features many of the usual suspects - unsurprising and unexciting choices but films that I simply cannot do without - that I might champion some films that are on my 51-100 list. domino has already talked about Triangle above, which sadly is just outside of my list.

Mute Witness (Anthony Waller, 1994)

This is a neat little film, part snuff horror film, part farcical comedy and part Cold War thriller. The central conceit is that while making a low budget slasher film in Moscow with an international crew the heroine, Billy (a mute, SFX technician), an American working late witnesses a snuff movie being filmed and eventually drags her sister and the sister's director boyfriend into a spiral of paranoia, action and multiple red-herrings and double crosses. Billy tries desperately, first to hide from the killers and escape from the locked studio (the horror film section), then convince others of what happened (the farcical comedy section) and then to turn the tables on the bad guys (the 'Cold War' double crossing paranoid thriller section).

All this is complicated by the 'stranger in Moscow' cultural differences and Billy's muteness, both aspects which get milked for all they are worth, but always in an effective way and often these two subjects inter-relate in an interesting way. For example when Billy finally reaches her friend one of the bad guys under a guise of concern holds her hands down to try and prevent her from signing what she has seen. The bad guys also play up a kind of stereotype of 'uncomprehending Russian' persona to draw attention away from their more nefarious actions.

The sequence of hiding and escaping through the film studio is incredibly tense with a beautiful use of the 'zoom in and dolly out' famous from Jaws shot in the final sequence as the heroine (chased both by the bad guys and by light itself as the spotlights in the studio hem her in, and then the flourescent lights in the corridor get turned on) races down a long corridor to reach the emergency exit.

The sequence after that, which I class as the 'comedy' section (or which could be seen as a little giallo-inspired, as it covers similar material that often turns up in Argento's early films), is quite a tonal shift after all of that tension but ends up working pretty well too. This is where the bad guys are trying to cover up the murder by suggesting it was all a fake film - films get switched around for the one featuring the awful over-actress from the opening sequence, giving the police a laugh; lots of fake blood and prop knives get bandied around; and Billy starts to get nervous that she actually did imagine the whole thing (expressed in a really neat 'falling asleep in the bath tub' scene which is one of the few films to capture that spacey sense of hearing things whilst your ears are underwater, capped by perhaps one of the few justifiable jump scares in horror, because it has been built up to so convincingly. The scene inevitably got repurposed for the somewhat misleading trailer), but cannot forget the actual look of fear on the face of the woman being murdered that she clings to as evidence that the killing was real.

Of course this cannot last forever and eventually Billy gets menaced in her apartment as a loose end that needs to be tied up. We get a few amusing elements thrown into what could have been a standard scene due to Billy being mute, such as her device that translates text into a computer voice to communicate on the telephone which is both an agonisingly long-winded way of sending an urgent message for help, and doesn't really work when the operator on the other end of the line does not speak English anyway!

Or, being unable to shout for help, the novel breast-baring method that Billy employs to attract the attention of the voyeur across the street. Unfortunately she has the misfortune to pick the milisecond that he has decided to break off his surveillance of her well-lit windows! (Thereby embodying every voyeur's worst nightmare that the moment you stop looking, someone is going to immediately dance naked in front of their window! Strangely enough when this was first shown on television, I remember it being, weirdly appropriately, shown in the same "Scared to Death" season with Body Double!)

The sister and her boyfriend turn up to get involved in the more farcical sections, such as having to confront the upset neighbours after Billy has long escaped from the apartment, or having to deal with both real and fake cops, or fumbling around with how to work a gun, and so on!

Meanwhile whilst Laurel and Hardy are stumbling about one step behind and trying to catch up, Billy has run into a strangely shady Russian chap who has been watching from the shadows. He says that he is with the authorities and is a double-agent pretending to be a member of the gang. But can she trust him to protect her and not to hand her over to the head of the organisation? This is the paranoia section, featuring car chases, "You have to trust me!!" speeches and a return to the film studio where numerous fake (or are they?) deaths can take place.

Surprisingly this all hangs together quite well to make for an extremely entertaining film that takes a few potshots at filmmaking itself for good measure. It even throws in a last minute cameo by a 'Mystery Guest Star' to really punch up the drama of the final scene.

Spoiler

You can easily see who this is on imdb, but it is still kind of shocking to see Alec Guiness roll down the window from the back of his chauffered car! Apparently Waller had approached him a few years before the film actually began production and took the opportunity to ask Guinness if he could just speak some generic "Is the package safe and everything taken care of?"-type lines without really knowing how he would use them, and then ended up putting him into this film as the shady boss of the snuff film business.

For something so removed from the rest of the film, it works surprisingly well, and makes for a neat final role for Guinness.

The film does have some flaws: the idea of acting scared versus the expression someone has at the moment of real death is made rather too clearly defined, and unfortunately a chunk of the film revolves around an expression being 'real and truthful' compared to ones that are faked for the film. This can make the film feel a little bit overly superior in the way that it can suggest that this is real fear, when of course the entire film itself is acted, even the bits that are supposed to signify that they are 'real'! (It is a bit complicated to explain and I don't think I am doing the best job of explaining it, but it is the major flaw of the film)

These 'face of fear' moments also play into the problem with the score. Much of the score is overwrought - nicely so for most of the time (such as the chase scene) - but unfortunately the 'face of death' moments, as if the filmmakers realise that they have to do something to differentiate these moments from 'fake' deaths, use a number of over-emphatic musical stings over edit-ins to the person's expression to show that 'this is really happening!', something which tips what should be tense scenes into being too comedic.

But it is definitely worth a watch. Don't worry if you are upset about snuff films - the murder scene here is presented (relatively) discreetly. The director Anthony Waller went on to tackle the sequel to a horror classic, An American Werewolf In Paris (with Julie Delpy), which unfortunately wasn't particularly successful, mostly due to an over reliance on CGI wolves. But Mute Witness is a real cult classic that deserves to be unearthed again (It's kind of the Berberian Sound Studio of the 90s).

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

Great post, Cold Bishop. Your locating the film more broadly within the genre as a whole - the gender and family issues at play - helped deepen my appreciation, though as I recall, I didn't particularly enjoy the experience of watching the film.

Spoiler

The "queen bee" revelation pushed the terror into horror parody for me

Kudos to you for your thoughtful writing.

Deathline [aka 'Raw Meat'] (Gary Sherman, 1973)
Another film from the Robin Wood file: he once called it "arguably the finest British Horror film". The modesty of the film's successes work against such laurels, but there's no denying it's a significant entry in the 70s Horror boom. People have begun going missing from the platforms of London's underground metro. Into this mystery becomes involved a young, free-and-easy couple (David Ladd, Sharon Guerny) and a sardonic, cynical Police Inspector (Donald Pleasance). What they find down there is too terrible to be imagined! Okay, fine... they find cannibals, as mole people invariably turn out to be. What distinguishes Deathline is that it may truly be one of the final films bridging the traditional archetypes of Classical Horror with the more visceral shocks of New Horror, making the transition final. The film has been called the British equivalent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and not without reason. It's gory, grungy stuff, epitomized by the film's famed unbroken 7-minute tracking shot, bringing the film's "underworld" into sordid relief with the same sense of terror as accompanies the house in Tobe Hooper's film. Yet, on a closer glance, the structure and tropes of the film are precisely those that accompanied the classic Universal films: the healthy "normal" couple as the protagonists, the monstrous "other" that antagonizes them. This monster, as usual, has his own underground lair/"dungeon"/"castle". He invariably becomes smitten with the woman and kidnaps her. Finally, the male journeys into the underground to vanquish the monster and save the girl. Here, Donald Pleasance fills the Edward Van Sloane role, the older mentor that helps the young couple vanquish the monster (although, evoking the generation gap, he fills that role reluctantly here). And in true Universal fashion, the young hero is pretty much wooden and unmemorable, the true fascination being with the monster.

This is one place where the film really makes its mark as something unique. Sherman manages to ring genuine pathos out of the pathetic "The Man" while never sugar-coating just how truly terrible the deeds committed are. We may recoil at horror when Frankenstein goes on a rampage that leaves children dead. We may also feel sympathy when he's separated from his one true friend in life. What Sherman does is destroy the gap between revulsion and empathy in a way that the gap almost ceases to exist, and all that's left is the terrible ambiguity. It's an ambiguity that also exist in Pleasance's fantastic performance: his role is ostensibly comic, an angry, blackly humorous character constantly trading quips and insult with all those around him (including a cameo by a very funny Christopher Lee). Yet, the final impression of Pleasance isn't that of a humorous character, but an incredibly sad and lonely one. There's also a certain level of social allegory at play here: the film opens with a member of the British elite preying on those beneath him at the very bottom of society... only for him himself to be preyed upon by those from a lower strata than he can ever imagine. The Man may be a murderous serial killer, but he's killing to preserve the only way of life he's ever known, as monstrous as it may be, from a complete amorality, unable to fathom that what he's doing is anything other than commonplace and necessary. David Ladd's early line, on coming across an unconscious man in the gutter: "In New York, you walk over these guys." It's a throwaway line that becomes filled with irony and resonance as the film rolls on. You'll never hear the words "mind the doors" the same way again. An essential film.

And some spotlight titles:

Der Student von Prag (Arthur Robison, 1935) - for swo17
I don't know what I can say... I like the film, but I don't feel any particular passion for it. A young student (the great, great Anton Walbrook) falls in love with an opera singer. Convinced that it is class differences that keep them apart, he makes a metaphorical deal with the devil, in the form of the mysterious Dr. Carpis, for money and success. But unbeknownst to him, Capris is a former admirer of the singer as well and is determined to destroy him. Also unbeknownst to him, the deal may not be so metaphorical. In essence, the film is a mish-mash of Faust and Dorian Gray, placed within Vienna's belle époque. I confess ignorance of both Robison's directorial career and of the two prior versions of this story. I suspect both would give me more pleasure out of this film: the two earlier versions seem to lay the supernatural on more thickly, and I suspect recognizing the interplay between this film's more ambiguous approach with those of its predecessors is part of the fun. Likewise, the way Robison inserts his expressionist background into the more invisible, elegant style of the period might be worth singling out. As it is, the film is mainly attractive as a showcase for Walbrook, and he truly delivers. Namely, the frightening intensity of his scene with the dice, as well as the touching sorrow of his final scene with the mirror. It all shows what a wonderfully versatile actor he was, even as earlier scenes find him completely dashing and charming, a potential rival to Errol Flynn had he ever taken up the various offers given to him by Hollywood. Truly, like Cary Grant, a singular once in a lifetime actor. The rest is very well done, but doesn't quite rise up that standard. If I'm choosing one foreign-language Faustian horror film from the period of the Third Reich, I'm going with my boy Maurice Tourneur (and it's worth nothing that the initial set-up of this film also seems to be directly echoed in Edgar Neville's Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks, although both films go decidedly in different directions).

The Sorcerers (Michael Reeves, 1967) - for Dr. Amicus
Another films whose pleasures are so modest and stealthy, you can't quite place the moment it goes from being a passable programmer to something genuinely good. Boris Karloff is a disgraced hypnotist who has devised a new hypnotic breakthrough that gives him complete, remote control of another human being: choosing bored mod Ian Ogilvy as his mark. Not only does the breakthrough give him psychic power of suggestion over the man, he is also able to feel his sensations and see as he does. Together with his long suffering wife Catherine Lacey, they start to literally live vicariously through the young man. The premise is both incredibly silly and more attuned to sci-fi than horror. Nonetheless, the film touches on tropes that are quite common to the horror film - namely, the Invisible Man-esque horror of absolute freedom mixed with the horror of bodily possession. The Sorcerers approaches both these tropes from a new, novel direction, stacks one on top of the other, and comes up with a surprisingly original concoction in the process. It starts off rough, the editing and set-ups seemingly abrupt and amateurish, the swinging sixties style touching on the kitsch... but when the film gets going, you feel that Reeves was just trying to get the ridiculous set-up out of the way as quickly as possible. One of the film's pleasures is the way the narrative just snowballs forward with an increasing sense of abandon, so that the film slowly and surely sneaks up on you. Even then, you're bound to be blindsided by the ending: like Witchfinder General, it's both completely unexpected and terribly inevitable, a bleak and cruel "happy ending" that's anything but. I see some people find a metaphor for movies in the film's premise, and it's fun to play around with, even if I'm not wholly convinced. Both Karloff and Lacey use the "entertainment" of the young man as a way to escape their dreary existences. If following that line of thinking, it's interesting to note that the central conflict becomes one of two auteurs fighting over the "final cut" of their "movie". One want to use it simply for the thrill-and-kills sensations of exploitation cinema. The other tries to instill the "movie" with some moral purpose and, failing that, at least tries desperately to tack on a happy ending. I'm not part of the cult that sees Michael Reeves as the Jean Vigo of British Horror, but there's no denying he showed promise in a way few genre directors did at the time.

BTW, has anyone seen The She-Beast? Is it worth tracking down?

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes, 1964) - for LQ
This film is many things: expertly acted, tautly suspenseful, beautifully shot. But there's one thing it's decidedly not: a horror film. As a crime drama, it's up there with some of the best of the decade; perhaps not the kidnap-masterpiece of High and Low, but a worthy contender. But, even allowing for a touch of ambiguity in the final scene, the film is not a horror film, beyond the situation it portrays constantly threatening to turn terribly tragic. The real reason to see this film is, once again, the acting. I admit I first tracked down this film to see the stage legend Kim Stanley in one of her rare film roles, but on re-watching it, I'm convinced Richard Attenborough may give the better performance. Not an actor I usually like, but he's brilliant here in an expertly quiet and understated performance. His voice rarely rises above a murmur, but he's able to relay an endless amount of anxiety and terrible sadness. This film is worth seeing just to see two of the greatest acting performances ever filmed, lensed with some of the finest black-and-white cinematography of the era. Everybody here should probably give the film a whirl... for the 1960s list. But I see no way to justify putting this on my list.

FWIW, I'd seen the two previous versions of Student of Prague before catching the Robeson, and part of what I loved about the latter was how much life it breathed into the story, perhaps akin to how the Hammer Dracula plays against your expectations of what the first film in a Dracula series should be.

And I'm right with you on Seance. Now is probably as good a time as any to mention that I've discovered many excellent films from the great recommendations in this thread, some of which are probably better than half the films that I will be including on my list, but that I just don't consider horror enough (or at all) to merit a spot.

Speaking of borderlines that are probably better than what most will vote for I have to recommend my spotlight, Shanks, again because even though it is not yet available on disc (Olive is working on it as I last heard) it is one of the finest oddities ever. Castle's a great director and an even better promoter turning that later talent into one of the finest arts possible (certainly enough to gather envy even from Hitchcock). So it comes as a shock with Shanks that he turns that promoters talent toward making as noncommercial a project of despair and loneliness possible. Every trick and story turn in the film seems almost built against gaining an audience in favor of nakedly observing his life postmortem. Castle seems to be both the scientist who gives the world sound and the deranged Shanks who is merely desperate for love creating a cataclysm of thoughts and temperaments. If only for the painful yet joyous finale this should be on everyone's viewing lists even if not final fifty.

Likewise Bill Gunn's Dreyer inspired Ganja and Hess is a freakish genius that could only be found in '70s slime cinema as it deals both in macro and micro with problems of the time period which have unfortunately stretched and morphed into the present leading his vampire metaphor to seem even more prescient than what the time dictated. Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead fame gives a performance for the ages as the educated professor turned hopeless addict. In fact looking over my list I've found it to be dominated by films which have their horror defined by the tragedy of life's misfortunes.

I've saw Shanks a while back and I simply can't say I was won over by it. I think the silent film throwback, while undoubtedly made with genuine affection, doesn't quite work: it was more than the lack of dialogue that made silent horror so potent, but also the sheer archaic strangeness of the medium and techniques used. He certainly has a game performer in Marcel Marceau and he certainly has some interesting ideas, but he's not able to recreate/update that strangeness.

The film's most interesting idea doesn't emerge until the last 15 minutes. When the bikers show up, the film tries to do something fascinating, set up a conflict that is essentially Classic Horror vs. New Horror. Marceau representing the elegant, subtle ideal of silent horror, the bikers all the vulgarity and trashiness of the 70s drive-in and grind-house bloom. It's like Lon Chaney rising to the grave to torture and punish the characters from Last House on the Left, and show them how it's done. But the bikers, despite the genuinely shocking twist, are simply too goofy, too much like something from a sitcom, for this to work. It's a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation: if Castle made the bikers more genuinely vicious and frightening, he'd come close to making the sort of trashy, unpleasant brand of horror film he's otherwise decrying. It's definitely an oddity, and definitely worth a watch, but I don't see a masterpiece here.

I can understand that point of view and certainly the film is most interesting in that conclusion. I suppose a love versus a like of the film must come about through how the first part of the film touches the individual audience member. I rather like it which makes the tragedy of the last few minutes all the more powerful for me. I at first was similarly lukewarm towards the film until a few days after seeing it when reflecting on the ending while walking home from the grocery store I just broke down and cried. In many respects the film is an intentional swan song and how Castle decides to show that aspect of the film touches me in a very personal way. So I don't disagree that it isn't necessarily a great film or even Castle's best, but all of the things it does right it does perfectly while even the things it flops on is pretty fascinating and revealing about Castle in the way only a mess could be.

Great write ups of Death Line and The Sorcerors Cold Bishop! They make me want to re-watch them again immediately!

I think I might be one of those people though who see Reeves as, if not the horror film Jean Vigo, then perhaps the 1960s Christopher Nolan!

Cold Bishop wrote:BTW, has anyone seen The She-Beast? Is it worth tracking down?

Yes, it is a fascinating curio but this one is extremely rough hewn and rather amateurish throughout. However the filmmakers do the best thing when faced with those limitations to truly effective horror and make the film into much more of a horror-comedy!

The film is definitely worth one watch though - it features an opening sequence of the witch being burnt at the stake (with a few great cursings out of the assembled townspeople), which both anticipates the more brutally realistic Witchfinder General but also harks back to Barbara Steele's role in The Mask of Satan.

Ian Ogilvy and Barbara Steele are the leads here, as a pair of tourists returning to the female leads home town, where she promptly gets taken over (shades of the Sorcerors to come!) by the family curse, and Ogilvy is left to team up with a crusty old comic relief Van Helsing-type gentleman wielding books of mythology in his attempt to save her.

This is definitely best approached as an attempt to do a Roger Corman kind of cheap and fast B movie, probably best illustrated by the story that they got Steele in by saying that she would only need to work one day, and then made that 'day' stretch out to around 18 hours to get everything they needed of her!

EDIT: Here is the Eurotika episode from 1999 dedicated to Michael Reeves that tackles all of his works including The She Beast, which received what was apparently its world premiere screening straight afterwards!

Cold Bishop wrote: If I'm choosing one foreign-language Faustian horror film from the period of the Third Reich, I'm going with my boy Maurice Tourneur

Der Student von Prag, Le Main du Diable, and The Queen of Spades have become so horribly mixed in my head that I can't figure out which scenes happened in which anymore. I think I'll just end up voting for all three out of despair of actually untangling that web!

Amer (Cattet and Forzani, 2009): A conscious homage to Dario Argento and 70's Italian horror cinema in general (the score especially announces its debts). As best I can tell, as a child Ana suffers a sudden, traumatic intertwining of sex and death that comes to dominate the rest of her life. She spends most of the movie uncomfortably aware of the dominating presence of male sexuality, while simultaneously taking conscious pleasure in her own sensuality--the slide of her short shirt, the taste of her hair, the feel of her skin. She is both alive to, and fearful of, sex. The film is built on a number of symbolic associations, the primary one being that of water, which represents tears (of fright and sexual ecstasy) as well as vaginal lubrication. In an early dream, just after the moment of trauma, water drips onto Ana's face and seems to originate from a vision of her parent's love-making that hovers on the ceiling. In another, she masturbates in a tub and her sexual arousal fills it with water (tho' the house's plumbing doesn't work). There are other symbolic webs in the film, and they, more than plot, are chiefly responsible for its organization. I suspect the filmmakers are genuine aestheticists, as sensory detail, texture especially, plays a significant role in the film's style and themes. Indeed, people are often reduced almost entirely to textures, unpleasant ones in the case of every single male who shows up on screen. The male becomes increasingly animal in the film, composed mostly of close up shots of teeth and body hair and an ever-present animal-like panting. The uniformity of this comes close to being off-putting, but I think the fact that this movie is taking place within the mind of the lead defuses that, and indeed the final moments belie the idea that all the males have nothing but sinister thoughts on their minds. The film is so luxuriously in tune with the very physical presence of the world, down to feel of air itself, that it comes close to sensory overload. I liked that; there is an appropriate push-and-pull in the film's style between pleasure and discomfort that mirrors the divided nature of the protagonist. Good movie. The opening third is the closest anyone's ever come to matching the baroque grandeur of Suspiria, and is by far the best section of the film. Probably the best Italian genre pastiche anyone could ever make. Thanks for the recommendation, swo17.

Amer is pretty exhausting, and it never lives up to that first sequence, but you have to admire the filmmakers for committing to their idea 270%. I'm certainly eager to see what they do next.

I actually like the second segment best. I think I described it before (this segment in particular) as a horror film about the fear of being alive.

zedz wrote:Amer is pretty exhausting, and it never lives up to that first sequence, but you have to admire the filmmakers for committing to their idea 270%. I'm certainly eager to see what they do next.

You can tell that the filmmakers got most of their experience from shorts, because it's really a compendium of three short films on the same subject. Because of that, the film often repeats itself for extended periods and does seem to run out of ideas at times. But the first section is masterful, and the other two are filled with striking moments (the way a childish chase after a loose ball is filmed and edited so that the frenzied forward motion suggests the runners are engaging in sexual activity). I did like a lot of the symbolism throughout, even if it did sometimes push into the overblown and the vulgar (the moment where Ana wipes her hand on some tree sap that resembles ejaculate comes to mind). It was nice, tho', that the dialogue in the film wasn't responsible for carrying any of its meaning.

Even if it might not be wholly successful, I liked Amer a lot. I'm also pretty eagre to see more from this duo.

Hopefully The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears will be coming out pretty soon. It's been in the works awhile. And they had a segment in The ABCs of Death.

swo17 wrote:I actually like the second segment best. I think I described it before (this segment in particular) as a horror film about the fear of being alive.

What I like about that sequence is that it's basically a pretty banal and inconsequential everyday encounter shot like it's the most terrifying thing that's ever happened, anywhere.

Speaking of borderline cases (somebody was, right?), I'm sorting out my list and excluding lots of not-horror-enough borderline cases while including plenty of probably-not-horror-enough-for-everybody-else ones. Which makes me wonder whether this might end up being the dullest list we've ever done, with the most interesting also-rans.

So anyway, here are the dodgiest current inclusions (not including some I've already mentioned, like Oh! I Can't Stop. . . and To Sleep with Anger) on my list for your consideration:

Night of the Hunter - Like To Sleep with Anger, this is a hybrid work with a healthy proportion of horror in its DNA.

Curse of the Cat People - This is probably the least horrific of any of the films on my list, but everybody thinks it's a horror movie, and it does have a ghost in it.

Street of Crocodiles - So, why wouldn't this be a horror movie? It's animated, I suppose, but if somebody did a claymation Last House on the Left, that would be a horror movie, right? Its narrative is kind of obscure and / or incoherent, but there are a lot of authentic horrors with the same claim to infamy. Ultimately, it's here because it's the finest cinematic evocation of the uncanny that I know, and provides a concentrated does of horror's trademark shudder of revulsion / fascination.

The Decay of Fiction - As is the case with Outer Space, I'm including this because I'm prepared to accept that a horror movie can be bereft of conventional narrative (I bet I'm not the only person voting for Eraserhead). Content-wise, this is a haunted house movie filled to the brim with ghosts and with its fair share of creepy goings-on half-glimpsed through the veil of time.

Elephant - If the post-70s trend in horror was to string a series of brutal set-piece killings together with only the barest sinew of plot and character holding things together, Alan Clarke's devastating masterpiece is the reductio ad absurdum of that approach. One of the most nihilistic films ever made, but an understandable response to the political realities of the time.

Klute - I always think of this as a detective story / straight thriller, but having watched it again recently (not with this project in mind) it seems very clearly a post-Psycho horror movie, much more focussed on Fonda's terrorized girl than on the process of finding the villain. Plus there are bravura stalking set-pieces and that score.

Re: Curse of the Cat People. I'm probably not going to vote for it, it's not quite horror to me; but if I did I would likely put it in my top ten. There's something magic about it. But the frightening parts of it just seem like one aspect of the swirl of childhood emotions in it. I can't imagine any honest movie about childhood not dealing with fear, but the presence of fear has to dominate on some level for me to consider it a horror, and I don't think it does in Curse. Loneliness and melancholy are closer to the dominating emotions.

I love Klute but you're crazy! In the spirit of craziness, though, I'll share my marginal cases:

Hard Candy, the best rape-revenge film I've seen, and since that's small praise, it's also the best cinematic two-hander since Sleuth. I Married a Witch plays for laughs not scares, but I like it more than most films with alternate aims. Matinee is more concerned with how audiences received atomic-age horror films than spooking modern audiences. And of course my Number One, Single White Female, is a superior thriller concerning identity that has no other votes yet, so maybe it hasn't occured to other voters yet. I don't really have any other questionable genre entries, but all four of these are in my top ten!

Re. I Married a Witch: I think that a certain kind of supernatural content automatically puts a film within the genre, however much the film itself might try to drag itself kicking and screaming out of it (or, in the case of one of my inclusions, Ugetsu Monogatari, be blithely unaware of it). So if you've got witches, or ghosts, or monsters in your movie, you're playing in the horror sandpit, whether you like it or not.