Tag: horror

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This Week At The Cinema: Horror Classics and the Search For Clean Water

The Convent

The week in cinema starts off with an all-time great horror film. Halloween is one of the most influential movies ever made. John Carpenter’s 1978 film launched Jamie Lee Curtis’ career, basically created the entire slasher subgenre, and jump-started the director’s miracle decade which produced stone cold classics like The Fog, Big Trouble In Little China, Starman, and They Live. It’s rolling tonight at the Paradiso at 7 p.m.

This Week At The Cinema: Horror Classics and the Search For Clean Water (2)

50 Meters Underground is a documentary by Argentinian director Lucas Van Esso. Located in the north of the country, the Wichi people, an indigenous population, are forced to toil long and hard to find sources of drinkable water. Presented by Mariano Pozzi and the Human Rights Film Festival of Buenos Aries and the Environmental Film Festival of Buenos Aries, the documentary is a work in progress that has screened in very few other places in the world. The film begins at 7 p.m., Tuesday Oct. 9th at Studio on the Square. Tickets available here.

50 Meters Underground

Pozzi will also be on hand on Wednesday, Oct. 10th for a second documentary from Argentina. Piripkura, by directors Mariana Oliva, Renata Terra, Bruno Jorge, is a search through the South American jungle for the last remaining members of the Pripkura tribe. It won the Best Documentary award at the Rio de Janerio Film Festival, and the Human Rights Award at Amsterdam’s IDFA Film Festival. It plays on Wednesday, Oct. 12 at 7 PM at Studio on the Square, and you can get tickets here.

This Week At The Cinema: Horror Classics and the Search For Clean Water

On Thursday, October 11th, at the Paradiso, more seasonal horror. Bloody Disgusting’s Retro Nightmare Cinema Series presents a double feature of slashers and chillers, beginning with Jim Santos’ 1983 film Sweet Sixteen.

This Week At The Cinema: Horror Classics and the Search For Clean Water (3)

Then it’s something of a precursor to this year’s horror hit The Nun. The Convent would have been a more accurate title for The Nun, seeing as how there multiple demon nuns involved in that one. But since it was already taken by a 2000 film by Mike Mendez, whose previous credits include Big Ass Spider!, I guess they just went with the singular. Frankly, The Convent, a gonzo-religio-spat-fest starring immortal genre goddess Adrienne Barbeau and also some other people, looks ten times as much fun as The Nun. Put this in your peepers:

This Week At The Cinema: Horror Classics and the Search For Clean Water (4)

See you at the cinema! 

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It Comes At Night

It Comes At Night is a monster movie about an invisible monster.

The invisible monster here is not like the invisible monster in the similarly named It Follows. The unseen antagonist in David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 creeper is a definite, distinct entity with an agenda. If you are pursued by it, there are concrete steps you can take to save yourself. The threat in It Comes At Night is amorphous, seemingly coming at our protagonists from everywhere and nowhere. It is impossible to know whether the actions they take are helping or harming their cause. It is, in this way, a strong metaphor for our age.

The deadliest threat in human history (so far) was not war or famine, but a disease. The 1918 flu pandemic killed a million people a week for eight months. Then it got worse. As much as 6% of the population of the world succumbed to the virus before it burned itself out in 1920. When It Comes At Night opens, a family is facing the same agonizing situation that plague survivors have faced since the beginning of time. One of their own is infected, in this case grandpa Bud (David Pendleton). No words are exchanged wondering about the nature of the unknown disease, but with pustules spreading over Bud’s body and his delirious fever, it looks like good, old fashioned bubonic plague. Bud’s son-in-law Paul (Joel Edgerton), grandson Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) and daughter Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) are as yet uninfected, but they have to figure out at what point the needs of the entire family outweigh the needs of the sick patriarch.

They’re not the only ones having to make these hard choices. There’s a full pandemic raging, and society has broken down. The family made their way from the city to Bud’s cabin in the woods, where they have holed up to wait for things to blow over. But the relative safety of their isolation is shattered when Will (Christopher Abbot) breaks into their cabin. His family of survivors mirrors theirs. He and wife Kim (Riely Keough) have a toddler son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner). After a brutally tense confrontation, the two families decide to work together for survival. But that’s where things get complicated. There’s another menace out in the woods, unseen and more quickly deadly than the dreaded plague. The combined threats and confined space ratchets up the tensions between the two families until it becomes unbearable.

Like many of the current crop of art horror films, director Trey Edward Shults’s film has a strong social subtext. Like most zombie movies, it’s about what happens when society fails and it’s every man and woman for themselves. But by removing the zombies from the equation, its solutions to the question become much more stark. What happens in a hypercapitalist society where everyone is heavily armed, resources are scarce, and cooperation is taboo? It looks something like Travis’ nightmares, which provide the spooky counterpoint to the brutal, bloody realism of the rest of the film. What is the frightening “it” that comes at night? It’s us.

It Comes At Night

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Get Out

In his 1983 HBO comedy special, Delirious, Eddie Murphy had a bit about why the protagonists of horror movies are always white. Black people, he said, would just run at the first sign of supernatural trouble. He imagined a black couple inserted into the Amityville Horror scenario, buying a house that turned out to be haunted. “Oh, baby, this is beautiful. We got a chandelier up here, kids outside playing, the neighborhood is beautiful. …”

Then a spectral voice whispers “Get oooout.”

“Too bad we can’t stay!”

I don’t know if that’s where Jordan Peele got the name for his killer new horror flick, Get Out, but it makes sense. Both Murphy and Peele are black comedy geniuses in the vein of Richard Pryor, so Peele almost certainly remembers Murphy’s routine. Get Out runs with Murphy’s basic premise — that the black guy is never the protagonist in mainstream horror movies — and teases out the full implications. On the surface, the joke is that white people act stupid in horror movies, and that black people would be smarter in those situations. Ha ha, my team is better than your team. But the deeper joke is that white people are so swaddled in privilege, they can’t imagine anything bad could really happen to them when the house whispers “Get out!,” but black people, who get the shaft every day, are rightfully more paranoid.

Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya star in Jordan Peele’s new horror film, Get Out.

For the younger crowd reading, yes, Eddie Murphy was once a cutting-edge stand-up comedian with something to say, not just the Nutty Professor. Peele is in the same place in his career that Eddie Murphy was in 1983: trying to successfully manage a transition from TV to the movies. Murphy morphed into an action-comedy leading man, while Peele seems much more interested in being behind the camera. If Get Out is any indication, this is a wise move.

I’m a firm believer that if you can do comedy, you can do anything. Comedy is just technically harder than drama; so much depends on precise timing, crisp delivery, and a perfect reveal. These are also the tools of horror, so I wonder why it’s taken so long to see a comedian make the genre move. Peele is going to be the biggest boost for the horror comedy genre since the coming of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. But Raimi’s idea of horror comedy is anarchic slapstick, while Peele is following his own race relations muse.

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is getting ready for a trip to rural New York to meet his girlfriend Rose’s (Allison Williams) parents. Since Chris is black and Rose is white, his friend, Rod (LilRel Howery), warns him to not to go. Obviously, this upper-class white girl’s parents are going to freak out when they find out she’s dating a black guy. But Chris and Rose are quite smitten with each other, and he feels like he’s got to get over this hurdle in their relationship. Besides, Rose urges, her parents are totally cool. Her dad, Dean (Bradley Whitford), is a doctor, and her mom, Missy (Catherine Keener), is a psychotherapist. They’re educated professionals, so they’re naturally liberals. Dean, Rose assures Chris, would have voted for a third term of Obama if he could! Later, when Dean repeats the same line to Chris, it sounds rehearsed — one of the many red flags that slowly raise Chris’ paranoia level past the “GET OUT!” threshold. Turns out, Rod was right: Chris shouldn’t have gone home to meet the parents, but not for the reason Rod thought. He envisioned a nightmare weekend of microagressions and racist sneers for Chris. Instead, our hero finds himself in a nest of gaslighting hypno-slavers with dashes of Re-Animator and Being John Malkovich for existential seasoning.

From the John Carpenter references (Rose’s last name is Armitage, which was Carpenter’s pen name for They Live) to the finely tuned tonal clashes that make an innocuous garden party into a skin-crawling creepshow, Peele shows his total control of the proceedings. By working on both the level of social satire and scary horror flick, Get Out is one of the finest directorial debuts in recent memory.

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Don’t Breathe

Judging from this year’s crop of horror films, Americans must be longing for escape from something. I would say three films is officially a trend, and the three best horror movies of 2016 are all about being trapped in a claustrophobic space with someone — perhaps several someones — up to no good. First we were locked in a bomb shelter with John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane, then neo-Nazi Captain Picard wanted to burn down our punk rock party in Green Room, and now we’re trapped in a house with a psychotic blind man in Don’t Breathe.

To be fair, the three “heroes” in Fede Alvarez’s new horror film pretty much deserve what’s coming to them. Rocky (Jane Levy), Money (Daniel Zovatto), and Alex (Dylan Minnette) are a trio of burglars, kind of like a Detroit version of The Bling Ring, enabled by Alex’s access to keys and info from his father’s security service. Alvarez, an Uruguayan filmmaker whose last project was a remake of Sam Raimi’s classic Evil Dead, concentrates on building sympathy for Rocky, who lives in an abusive situation with her alcoholic mother and longs to buy her and her little sister passage to California. After a less-than-successful job, they learn of a sure thing: the last inhabited house in a dying neighborhood, where a blind Gulf War veteran (nameless, but played by Stephen Lang) is believed to be sitting on a huge stash of cash from an insurance settlement. After a little persuading, Alex agrees to help with one last job.

Dylan Minnette (left) and Stephen Lang in Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe

From the slavering Rottweiler guarding the house to the four locks on every door, the signs are that there’s something worth guarding in this home, a relic of Detroit’s better days. Once they’re inside, our sneak thieves discover that the Blind Man is hiding more than just a stack of bills.

Alvarez’s greatest strength lies in his eye for moody photography. He uses strategically placed light sources to paint Rocky and the Blind Man in chiaroscuro tones. When Alex and Rocky are trapped in a darkened basement, Alvarez uses the opportunity to crank the image contrast down as low as it will go, evoking claustrophobic feelings with only vague, moving gray shapes. He is also a master of timing, getting a lot of mileage out of opening doors at the perfect moment.

Don’t Breathe can best be described as a series of steadily escalating variations on a theme. From being trapped in a ventilation duct with a rabid dog to slowly inching across broken glass, Alvarez is evoking the feeling of wanting to flee, but seeing your options for escape slowly dwindling. The effect is chilling enough to overcome a late-film flurry of false endings and the occasional disbelief-killing logical stretch. You may find the feeling of getting squeezed strikes an unexpectedly familiar chord.

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Horrortober: The House Of The Devil (2009)

The House of the Devil (2009; dir. Ti West)—The ‘00s were a terrific decade for horror fans because goodies arrived from every part of the world in all shapes and sizes. Visionary remakes like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, foreign monster movies like Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host, grimy Southern Gothic trash like Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, claustrophobic ersatz regionalism like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, and classy modern ghost stories like J.A. Bayona’s The Orphanage were just a few of the films from the past decade that offered cold-blooded, skillfully-timed shocks for newbies and connoisseurs alike. Throw in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, David Lynch’s pair of psyche-strafing 21st-century dream labyrinths, and the decade’s finest horror movies look even stronger.

Jocelin Donohue

But don’t’ forget about The House of The Devil, Ti West’s slow-burning, highly effective period-piece about Satanic cults, full moons and the terrifying subtext of The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads To Another.” Devil was initially released in both DVD and VHS formats; the VHS tape came in a clamshell case that paid homage to all those cheap, long-forgotten, straight-to-video 1980s horror flicks that once lined the bottoms of countless shabby video store shelves. West’s film, about Samantha (Jocelin Donohue), a cash-strapped college girl who takes a sketchy baby-sitting job at an ominous country house, is a spare, nearly perfect attempt to convey what it might feel like for someone to discover that they’re inside a 1980s horror movie. The bloody, messy revelations of its final third matter much less than the luxurious sense of dread West cultivates like a crazed botanist who’s just discovered a strain of poisonous fungus long thought extinct.

Greta Gerwig

West’s film inhabits a grayish, stick-crackling late-autumn dryness that combines with his eye for telling, funny period details to revive universal horror imagery; when he zooms out to show Samantha alone in a mysterious upstairs room, or cuts in to show her clutching a kitchen knife in front of a heavy wooden door, it’s like he’s gone back in time to those precious moments just before Michael Myers burst onto the screen and sent everyone running for their lives. And with Greta Gerwig and Tom Noonan, West casts a pair of aggressive, twitchy, businesslike scene-stealers to play Samantha’s best friend and the guy who gets her to stay the night by quadrupling his initial offer. The double voyeurism throughout the film’s middle section goes on and on, its voluptuous dread punctuated by nonsense phrases like “Hello, fish” and the final words of the damned everywhere: “It’s OK. Everything’s fine. She’s fine.”

Grade: A-

Horrortober: The House Of The Devil (2009)

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Horrotober: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

FILM TITLE: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

ELAPSED TIME: I watched it all.

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? Rosemary cedes to Satan. Hail Satan!

Before we get started, I want to apologize. Apologize to myself because this isn’t a review of what I think may be my new favorite spooky movie, A Halloween Puppy, about a silly boy who accidentally magicks his mother’s boyfriend into an English Bulldog. D’oh! I’ve never actually seen A Halloween Puppy but if it is as good as A Talking Cat!?! — the other movie IMDB suggests for people who want to see A Halloween Puppy — it has to be great, right?

Or at least better, for my purposes, than The Exorcist, which I thought about watching last night but couldn’t because I think there’s someone living in my attic and/or my kitchen pantry. A bad, evil, possibly possessed person. I mean, I don’t know for sure, because if this person was living there, primed to kill me, they definitely wouldn’t reveal themselves until I decided to watch The Exorcist alone at midnight. It’s like a Schrodinger’s Cat thing. I’m sure you understand.

I don’t want to let you down (“I came here for CONTENT,” you are doubtless yelling now. “FILM WRITING CONTENT!”) so I watched Rosemary’s Baby. What a relief! Rosemary’s Baby isn’t scary, at least not like The Exorcist. There is a lot of portent, for sure. There is the telling murder of a young dope fiend who has been resuscitated and then possibly killed by a couple of weird old people, the Castevets, who live next door to Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her husband, Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes.) And by the continued illusions to the death of children, all while the misty-eyed and dewy-skinned Rosemary avows her desire for a baby. There is that freaky half-lullaby theme that makes the first half of the movie (which, sans soundtrack, is exclusively about 1960s home design) into something foreboding.

But when the shit is actually going down, when Rosemary is raped by the Devil in a dream sequence (and to hide the truth her husband claims that he did it because he was “loaded” and “it was fun in a kind of necrophiliac way”?!?), the feeling isn’t so much fear is it is familiarity. The movie takes place on the very edge of the utterly normal, turning normal conversations about picture hangings into something slightly nefarious. Perhaps the scariest thing about Rosemary’s Baby is how, in the cumulative scene — when Rosemary discovers that everyone is, in fact, conspiring against her, and that she has, yes, birthed the son of the Satan — there is almost nothing, tonally, to differentiate it from a mundane cocktail party scene. Except that everyone is yelling “Hail Satan!” The movie ends with Rosemary learning she isn’t crazy, and then quietly realizing that she must accept her child and become crazy, because the world is crazy. Everyone she loves and knows is crazy.

It isn’t scary, but it is haunting. Especially considering Mia Farrow’s terrible real-life abusive marriage to Woody Allen, and the fact that director Roman Polanski eventually fled the country to avoid rape charges. And perhaps the most haunting thing about Rosemary’s Baby is not that it is about Satan, but that it is a hysterical rape myth (Satan, Polanski? Really?) constructed around a world that quietly condones the real deal.

On second thought, I’ll take The Exorcist. 

Horrotober: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

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Horrortober: Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

OZ: Original Zombie


FILM TITLE: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

ELAPSED TIME: 13:22

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? Blonde lady discovered desiccated body

If there is one reigning moral in horror movies that I can really get behind, it is that a certain amount of forbearance when it comes scary shit will pay off in the end. See: the different between Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and her rube of a brother in the opening scene of Night of the Living Dead (1968.) Barbra and bro drive up to a rural cemetery in order to place a wreath on the grave of a dead relative. It’s a dreary scene, and Barbra’s hapless brother is all complaints: “A lot of good the extra daylight does us,” he says. “You think I want to blow Sunday on a scene like this?”

Judith O’Dea as Barbara.

Barbra, on the other hand, is reverent at the grave. Her brother teases her, recalling a time when they were kids and he scared her. Haha, he says when she winces, “You’re still scared.” Barbra demurs, but she easily could have responded, “No shit. There are fucking zombies in this cemetery, and they are about to kill you, you worthless scrub,” because that is the direction that everything goes. A big ole zombie, a sentient member of the 1960s undead (you can tell it’s the 60s because the zombie wears a suit and has nicely coiffed hair), emerges from over the hill and knocks out broseph. Barbra escapes the cemetery, at least for long enough to barricade herself in an old farmhouse.

The point here is that if you don’t tempt the undead by being a sarcastic jerk, you have a better chance of escaping when they come for you. So why — why?? — would I exercise anything but utmost caution and fear while reviewing a movie about zombies. “Ha ha, zombies are fake,” another critic might write, flaunting their critical thinking skills and rational brains. Not me. Memo to zombies: I think you’re very scary. Leave me alone, please.

So Barbra makes it to this half-lit farmhouse, where she grabs a knife from the kitchen. Nothing comforting about this place at all, except that it temporarily contains no zombies. (Aside about these zombies: they seem smarter, in general, than zombies do now. A little more expressive and mobile. The scariest contemporary zombie movie I’ve seen is Shaun of the Dead, but I can tell you that those zombies are dumber than 1960s zombies, which seems to bode ill for us as a culture. Even our nightmares are getting dumber.) Barbra makes her way around the farmhouse, climbs some stairs and sees a desiccated body, presumably of farmhouse owner. A body that is just eyes in a chewed out skull.

Our columnist did’t get this far into the movie.

For more information about this classic piece of cinema, I will refer you to the Rotten Tomatoes page, because I stopped watching at 13:22. “You’re so scared,” you might say, doing an impression of the guy who gets killed in the first 5 minutes of Night of the Living Dead. “I’m going to survive this horror movie we call life,” I say back to you as I stockpile peanut butter and duct tape in my cubicle. I’ll see you on the other side. 

Horrortober: Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

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Horrortober: The Invisible Man (1933)

There’s one thing that sets The Invisible Man apart from the rest of the classic monsters: He’s a jerk. Frankenstein Monster, the antagonist of director James Whale’s groundbreaking 1931 film, is dangerous, but childlike. King Kong, who made his screen debut in 1933, the same year as Whale’s The Invisible Man, is a wild animal driven mad by captivity, but he’s not evil. Dracula is a post-human predator, but at least he’s got excellent table manners.

But Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains), the chemist who worked for five years to make himself dissappear, is evil in a banal way. He’s in it for the money. Or at least he was before monocane, the exotic chemical that renders him invisible, turns him into a psychotic megalomaniac. He’s something rare these days: a villain with a realistic motivation and a plausible plan.

Horrortober: The Invisible Man (1933)

Whale is the first of the great horror directors, creating three bona fide masterpieces in a busy four years in which he turned out an astonishing ten films. The Invisible Man is the middle of those, made between the groundbreaking Frankenstein and the gothic majesty of Bride Of Frankenstein. Like Victor Frankenstien, Griffin is a rouge scientist who “meddled in things man was not meant for.” The influence of Mary Shelly on H.G. Well’s 1897 science fiction novel is clear, which may explain why Whale was drawn to the story.

For Rains, this was the role that launched a 40-year career in which he would appear in such indelible classics as The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Casablanca, and Lawrence Of Arabia. When he was a villain, directors would ask him to cloak his evil in gentility. Not so for Whale, who never met a melodramatic flourish he didn’t like. Rains roughly insults and assaults the hapless inkeeper, Mrs. Conner (a hilarious, histrionic Una O’Conner), while ordering her to “bring me food!” He strangles policemen, tips over prams, and blames his victims for his actions.

Whale’s special effects crew pulls out all the stops to bring the Invisible Man to life. They developed a very early version of chroma key, a double exposure technique that is ubiquitous today, for shots such as the darkly comic moment when Griffin steals a policeman’s trousers and chases a terrified milkmaid through the countryside. But even though you know they’re doing it all with wires, such as the classic moment when a bicycle rides itself through the village square, the effects are always expertly deployed so as to create the sense that there is a real person moving through space.

The Invisible Man is overshadowed by Frankenstein and Dracula but it’s every bit their equal, and considerably more sophisticated in its special effects. The simplicity of Well’s premise (“He’s mad, and he’s invisible!” as the police chief says) is spun into a surprising level of psychological and moral sophistication. If no one could see you, you could do whatever you wanted. What would you do? 

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Horrortober: Dracula (1931)

FILM TITLE: Dracula (1931)

ELAPSED TIME: 85 minutes (plus or minus a few in the middle)

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? The Dracula was killed!

I’m not a fan of horror, but I find it hard to equate the mistily lit estates and silken gowns of Depression-era Dracula with “horror”. This movie is a horror as Miss Mina, Dracula’s would-be bride, pronounces it: “This horror,” she says, lifting pearly hand to porcelain face. The music swells. When Dracula’s three flapper brides leave their “earth boxes” and float eerily towards their caped husband, gruesome and Gatsby-ian, an undead convalescence seems almost attractive. I’m reminded of the essayist Leslie Jamison’s judgement that, in art, “The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars…. Violence turns them celestial.”

I watched an anniversary edition of this movie that was paired with a newish Philip Glass score, something I didn’t realize until halfway through the movie. I thought, “Wow, the 1931 version of Dracula sure does strike a lot of the same emotional notes as The Hours.” Glass’s score is quietly urgent and romantic, designed, as he put it, to fit the “libraries and drawing rooms and gardens” of the classic film. It lights on the mournful and disregards suspense. Even the freakiest of monologues (“Rats. Rats! Thousands! Millions of them! All red blood! All these will I give you if you will obey me!”), paired with Glass’s composition, feels more sad than scary.

Bela Lugosi is unlike anyone before or since as the sharp-toothed aristocrat from Eastern Europe. I found myself wondering whether my great grandfather’s generation actually had more corporeal stillness, or if Dracula’s unearthly composure was simply another facet of Lugosi’s mastery. His foil, the crazy-eyed Renfield (Dwight Frye), is as seething as Dracula is sadistically controlled. And then you have the strong-willed Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), a doctor whose strength of character allows him to embrace certain dark truths. “For one who has not lived even a single lifetime,” says Dracula, “You are a wise man, Van Helsing”

An uncle of mine, a fan of the vampiric, once made a point that has stayed with me— that Dracula is a sort of inverted Christ-figure. Instead of giving you his blood to drink, thus allowing for salvation, he drinks yours and keeps you away from heaven forever. So it is fair to see these characters eventual defiance of the Dracula as a heavenly allegory, as well as to accept the premise that to get to the light, you have to accept that real darkness exists. It’s an idea as transcendent as it is terrifying, which is probably why I made it through all 85 minutes of this one. I may not be as stolid with Dracula’s more recent incarnations. 

Horrortober: Dracula (1931)

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Horrortober Is Upon Us!

“October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”  -Ray Bradbury

I love October, which might explain my love for Ray Bradbury and Halloween—or it might be the other way around. This October, I had the idea that we could write about some great, and maybe not so great, horror movies. Longtime Flyer film correspondent Addison Engleking loved the idea, and will kick off his month of columns next Wednesday with John Carpenter’s The Thing. But when I asked Eileen Townsend to participate, I made a startling discovery, as you will see from our Google Hangout Q&A: 

Chris McCoy: You have never actually finished a horror movie, correct? 

Eileen Townsend: I’ve seen the beginning and the very end of plenty of horror movies, just not the stuff in the middle. I like the scenes where they move into the scary house, and then the ones where they drive away, never to return. Basically uninterested in whatever happens in between.

CM: So, when you were in high school, and people got together to watch horror movies, you were pretty much out of the room? 

ET: Let me put it this way: When “Are You Afraid of the Dark” came on television, I read the encyclopedia in another part of the house. That is how I got where I am today.

CM: What is it that turns you off of horror movies?

ET: Loud noises, suspense music, death gasps, chainsaw massacres, people in masks, people taking off masks, weird shapes emerging from televisions, innocuous family members who turn out to be ghosts, eurotrips gone wrong. But I think really it’s that I know I’m watching a horror movie so something very bad is going to happen at some point and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. 

CM: Horror movies are one of the oldest and most successful film genres. Why do you think that is? What do you think people get out of watching horror? 

ET: In terms of horror movies that involve ghouls and demons and bats out of hell, I think the world building aspect of it is probably alluring. Like, we have all these infinitely re-definable sorts of things that go bump in the night. A vampire in 2015 is not the same thing as a vampire in 1970. If I weren’t so freaked out, I’d be interested, too. 
In terms of movies about ruthless killers who walk amongst the living, I think we need some fantastic vision of murder and torture to avert our thoughts from the ordinariness of evil.
A dark outlook, maybe.

CM: There’s an aspect of sexual punishment in a lot of horror movies, especially the 80s slasher genre.
Women who enjoy sex are the first to be killed, and virginal women are the ones who survive. 

ET: It’s always better to be reading a book in your bedroom than making out with dudes in a hot rod.
If you want to avoid MURDER. 
[It’s] a great example of how genre/fantasy movies often have a better cultural pulse than Films, capital F. When you’re making a movie about zombies, you’re already working with a level of imaginative hyperbole. There’s less preciousness about the kind of things that are getting said or done in B flicks, and that’s cool. 

CM: Are you bothered by explicit violence in all movies, or is there something about the horror movie that makes it especially troubling? 

ET: It’s not seeing the gore, it’s the suspense I can’t take. You could show me a movie called “The Surprise Party” with an hour and a half of creepy violin solos leading up to a 6 year olds birthday party and I would be equally as freaked out as I was during Saw. Hypothetically. I’m the sort of person who shouts “WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN?” during longer commercials.

CM: Personally, I can’t take the Saw/Hostel Torture Porn subgenre. A movie like Dracula or The Thing is great, but just gore for gore’s sake is troubling to me. And there’s something about the politics of Torture Porn, which originated during the Bush War On Terror period, that seems really gross and horrible.

ET: I don’t have any high falutin theories about why people like that stuff, except that it seems to me like it exercises our brains in a certain easy way. We see: SEX DEATH SEX DEATH FAST CARS and we don’t have to think much. It’s the film equivalent of bungee jumping. I think eventually people must lose sensitivity to that stuff, though, and they have to start sawing off prostitutes arms in more fucked up ways.  

CM: So, for Horrortober, you’re going to be trying to watch some horror movies and reporting back on your impressions. Does this constitute torture for you? 

ET: I’m going to need one of those eyelid-opening devices from A Clockwork Orange to make it through.

CM: So what’s up first in your list?

ET: I’m thinking Dracula, if only because I once wrote an essay for a book called “Vampires, Zombies and Philosophy”.

CM: Thank you for subjecting yourself to this experiment. 

ET: I don’t really know what I am signing up for. 

CM: Maybe we can get Contemporary Media to pay for your therapy in November. 

ET: I’m probably not going to sleep for all of October, so I’ll at least need bedrest.