Seven Chillers Without Drillers for Halloween
Halloween is a uniquely fun holiday because it turns Man’s most unwanted emotion, fear, into a source of entertainment, with the experiencer in on the irony. To accomplish this dichotomy, it draws from the millennia of terrors stretching back to the Middle Ages, when witches, werewolves, ghosts, and goblins seemed all too real. The motion picture medium appeared tailor-made to exploit the weird desire by using its tremendous power to project the horror from the imagination to the screen. And before the Horror Film devolved into the Slasher Film (Friday the 13th 2-20), then the Torture Film (Saw, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1-20), film artists succeeded beyond our wildest nightmares, through storytelling talent rather than CGI gore.
Below are my top seven film recommendations for a haunting, not grotesque, Halloween, excluding classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, Psycho, and The Exorcist. All feature a now forgotten archetype — a male hero who understands and confronts the evil. Which makes them movies even your young trick-or-treaters can enjoy.
I Walked with a Zombie (1943). The best of producer Val Lewton’s nine horror pictures for RKO, where he turned low budgets into atmospheric gems. Zombie works as an engrossing gothic romance — Jane Eyre with zombies on a Caribbean island. We care about the star-crossed lovers, marvelously played by Hollywood underused actors Frances Dee and Tom Conway (brother of George Sanders) under the direction of a master, Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past).
The Uninvited (1944). A Paramount ‘A’ picture rather than an RKO ‘B’, this has everything a great ghost story should, set in a nest of them — the English seaside. Top-tier star Ray Milland portrays a new homeowner trying to solve the haunting of his (of course) beautiful young neighbor, the ethereal Gail Russell (when male heroes did such feats). It’s like the anti-Poltergeist with subtlety instead of spectacle when you see what you see.
Curse of the Demon (1957). The great Jaques Tourneur (again) delayed fading star Dana Andrews’ (Laura, The Best Years of Our Lives) descent into supporting actor territory with this engrossing little creeper. As an American ghost hoax buster in a sleepless, sleepy English village, Andrews encounters an evil he cannot expose and soon cannot escape. What impatient viewers may deem slow today used to be called plot development, and nobody did it better than Jaques, all the way to the gripping climax.
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). Not only the finest screen version of the iconic Sherlock Holmes novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — out of the two dozen made — but the best Sherlock Holmes movie, period. Peter Cushing embodies more than portrays the immortal detective safeguarding a country squire, the great Christopher Lee (in a rare sympathetic role), from a possibly demonic threat on the Yorkshire Moors. “Do as the legend tells and avoid the Moor at night when the forces of darkness are exalted.” They don’t write or say lines like that anymore.
The Tingler (1959). I can hear some people scoffing at me for including this one. Yes, William Castle, though a film marketing genius, was mostly a hack. And, yes, the title creature resembles a black rubber lobster being pulled by a string. But, the movie has three great things going that elevate it to a must-watch level: a typically delightful dominant performance by the legendary Vincent Price, a decent execution of the scares, and a fascinating original conceit — that screaming is the only thing that can save you from a monster. Thus, the Tingler always goes for your throat first. Good fun.
Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966). Christopher Lee played Dracula 10 times, and better than anyone else, yet never as frighteningly as in his second outing, where he doesn’t say a word. His presence alone drives the terror. Hammer ace director Terence Fisher (The Hound of the Baskervilles) understood what Bram Stoker did, yet most vampire filmmakers don’t. That the vampire’s most fearsome power is not the ability to kill, but to corrupt. Here, beautiful, great actress Barbara Shelley’s transformation from mortal prude to undead temptress is unforgettable.
Fright Night (1985). Writer-director Tom Holland realized the same thing as Fisher and Stoker, and made female corruption a key element in his vampire movie. He also couldn’t get his idol, the ailing Vincent Price, to star, but got the best fill-in, Roddy McDowall, in a brilliant performance as horror-movie host turned vampire hunter, Peter Vincent. When frustrated teen Charley (William Ragsdale) can’t close the deal with his virgin girlfriend Amy, he starts spying on mysterious nocturnal neighbor Jerry Dandridge. Dandridge has the perfect counter to Charley’s snooping — turn Amy into his sultry vampire slave. And does Married with Children’s Amanda Bearse ever go for the transformation.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
The Fall and Rise of American Culture
A Novel Look at the Culture War
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