The Tingler (1959; dir. William Castle)—This claustrophobic, stitched-together, thoroughly ridiculous little thriller about (get this) the super-strong, extremely dangerous jumbo crustacean who lives inside human beings and crushes their spines whenever they get too scared to scream (see what I mean?) really freaked me out when I saw it on late-night TV thirty-some years ago. Granted, I was only eight or nine years old at the time, but I had an overactive imagination and I hadn’t taken biology yet. After re-watching The Tingler on TCM last Saturday afternoon, I’m happy to say that 1) it’s in no way as scary as I once thought it was and 2) it works anyway. It’s a lively and surprisingly self-aware slab of artisanal American cheese.
If Vincent Price is this scared, you know it must be bad.
Relaxed, kinky and amoral Vincent Price stars as Dr. Warren Chapin, a cuckolded pathologist who wants to prove the existence of the vertebrae-cracking monster he calls “the Tingler.” The only problem is that he can’t get his hands on one; the Tingler tends to disappear whenever a person screams in terror. And everyone screams when they’re really scared—except, that is, for Lucy Stevens (Pamela Lincoln) a deaf-mute woman who runs a silent-movie theater with her husband, Ollie (Phillip Coolidge). You don’t need a master-class in B-movie tastelessness to imagine what happens next: Warren meets Lucy. Lucy is conveniently left alone one evening. Pretty soon Lucy starts seeing all kinds of crazy stuff in her apartment—machete-wielding zombies, hairy monsters throwing hatchets, sinks filling up with blood, that kind of thing. But Lucy can’t scream to keep the Tingler at bay. And just like that, Dr. Chapin has his latex-gloved hands on the creepy medical breakthrough of the century. If, that is, he can keep it locked in that metal container he put it in…
What’s not to love about a movie that begins with an appearance by director William Castle, who warns you that “some of the sensations…some of the physical reactions which the actors on the screen feel…will also be experienced for the first time in motion picture history…by certain members of this audience” while trying not to burst into giggles? What’s not to appreciate about that meta-textual stretch near the film’s climax wherein the movie itself appears to break down, the screen goes black, and a voice in the darkness urges you to scream as loud as you can because your life depends on it? What’s not to admire about a self-promoting whiz like Castle who rigged several theaters with motors that delivered mild electrical shocks to people sitting in certain seats during the film’s most suspenseful moments? And what’s stopping you from pairing The Tingler with Joe Dante’s Castle-inspired 1993 comedy Matinee for the kind of dream double feature they simply don’t program anymore?
Sir Christopher Lee’s hair stars in The Wicker Man
When I say The Wicker Man is a cult film, there are several layers to that statement. The traditional film critic-speak definition of a cult movie is one that was not successful in its original release, but has collected a devoted group of fans over the years. Think The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Evil Dead. The 1973 British film The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy and written by Anthony Shaffer, certainly qualifies under that definition. It barely even got distribution in the states beyond the drive-ins, and yet, four years after its release, it was called “the Citizen Kane of horror movies.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the restored version currently in circulation and showing on Turner Classic Movies is no doubt a cut above your average splatter fest. The film’s cult was big enough to prompt a remake in 2006 starring Nicholas Cage, but that version has been relegated to a punch line along with most of Cage’s late-period work.
Diane Cliento and Edward Woodward
The second layer to The Wicker Man’s cult movie status is that it is literally a movie about a cult. According to Wikipedia, the film had its genesis in a conversation between horror actor extraordinairre Christopher Lee and screenwriter Shaffer. Lee, who had been the star of a string of increasingly fraught horror hits from the British studio Hammer, wanted to do something a little more cerebral and serious, and proposed a story based on “old religion”. Lee would go on to play Lord Summerisle, whose estate is a remote Scottish island with a seemingly normal population of 70s rural Scots. But when police Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward) is dispatched to the island to investigate the mysterious death of a young girl, he discovers that there are secrets bubbling beneath the islanders’ placid exterior. At first, no one seems to remember the little girl. Then, a schoolteacher Miss Rose (Diane Cliento) admits that yeah, little Rowan did exist, and yeah, she was probably murdered, but it’s not really such a big deal. In fact, it was a good thing. The islanders are part of a pagan cult surviving from pre-Christian days who have existed in secret and isolation to avoid persecution. The devoutly Christian Howie is completely scandalized by the pagan’s free sexuality and bizarre religious practices, but as the film progresses, he is too slow to realize that he is being led into a trap.
Nope. Nothing creepy going on here at all.
Lee’s performance is one of the best in a storied career that spanned into the twenty first century playing Saruman in Lord Of The Rings and Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. He manages to make upbeat happiness blood-chillingly creepy. Woodward, who would later go on to play The Equalizer on American television, is his perfectly uptight foil. The film follows the familiar exploitation template of “one hour of talking, thirty minutes of blowing stuff up”. But in this case, the windup is the payoff, with a series of bizarre images and scenes of the islanders’ rituals juxtaposed with everyday British life in the 1970s. Odd are you’ll get a few laughs at poor Sgt. Howie’s expense, particularly in the scene where he cowers from a beautiful naked woman who just wants to get it on with him. As it turns out, if he had just given in to her advances, things would have gone a lot better for him in the end. And that’s also true of a modern audience’s reaction to The Wicker Man. Just go with all the weirdness, and you will ultimately be rewarded with a killer climax whose imagery has filtered down through pop culture for 40 years.
Beetlejuice is not a horror movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it almost was, according to IMB:
The original script was a horror film, and featured Beetlejuice as a winged, reptilian demon who transformed into a small Middle Eastern man to interact with the Maitlands and the Deetzes. Lydia was a minor character, with her six year old sister Cathy being the Deetz child able to see the Maitlands. Beetlejuice’s goal was to kill the Deetzs, rather than frighten them away, and included sequences where he mauled Cathy in the form of a rabid squirrel and tried to rape Lydia. Subsequent script rewrites turned the film into a comedy and toned down Beetlejuice’s character into the ghost of a wise cracking con-artist rather than a demon.
And while Beetlejuice is most certainly a comedy, and arguably director Tim Burton’s best film, it is filled with plenty of true-life scares: goth teen poetry, modern furniture, bad art, spackled paint, polyester suits, small closets, living in Connecticut, etc.
The plot: the Barbara and Adam Maitland live an ideal life out in a quaint country home and then they die. The Deetzes, straight from New York, move in and disturb the peace, so the Maitlands call a bioexorcist, Beetlejuice, to spook the family out.
Beetlejuice is a lesson in economy; every second bounces along for its compact 90 minutes with many great moments, such as the Netherworld waiting room scene and Calypso-spiked dinner party.
Winona Ryder, with to-die-for bangs, as Lydia
The cast is sharp as well: young Winona Ryder (with to-die-for spiky bangs) as Lydia Deetz and Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara as her clueless and pretentious parents; Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as the Maitlands (Baldwin at his most personable and harmless); plus Dick Cavett and Robert Goulet! But the film belongs to Michael Keaton as the title character, a centuries-spanning creep who put the ouch in louche.
If you haven’t seen Beetlejuice, stop what you’re doing and watch it now. It’s that good. And, if you’re wondering what a comedy is doing in a series about horror films, get into the spirit of the season. We have Beetlejuice, after all, for all those great Halloween costume ideas.
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014; dir. Ana Lily Amirpour)—Like zombies, vampires are built to last. They’re scary, they’re sexy, and they’re walking metaphors for everything from urban ennui to drug addiction, bottomless greed to everlasting love. They also assimilate into other cultures with supernatural ease; the first time I heard about Amirpour’s self-described “Iranian Vampire Spaghetti Western,” my first thought was “What took her so long?” Then I remembered some of Iranian cinema’s rules and restrictions—like the one that says actresses can’t be shown onscreen unless their hair is covered—and started wondering how anyone who lived there could tell a meaningful vampire story without showing the requisite orgasmic neck biting or arterial sprays. Besides, hadn’t Michael Almeryda already done something similar with 1994’s Nadja?
Still, I thought there might be something exciting about watching a skillful, creepy contemporary feminist horror parable that had to play by the rules of the American cinema during its Hays Code heyday. However, Girl begins with a surprising and shocking dose of sex and gore that upended everything I thought I knew about Iran and the movies. That is, until I discovered that the English-born Amirpour used Taft, California as a geographic stand-in for Iran. Turns out she didn’t need to worry about censorship after all.
The locational ambiguity of the fictional Bad City, Iran, fits Amirpour’s slow, lovely-to-look-at feature debut. Its nodded-out vibe lets it slowly float into an as-yet-undiscovered fictional space somewhere between the abandoned Detroit theaters of Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and the chilly Scandinavian hovels of Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In. Highly aestheticized yet highly scuzzy—the story takes place in one of those broken cities where people dump corpses in open pits—Girl’s secret weapon is its sense of resigned playfulness, which wouldn’t be out of place in an old Peanuts cartoon. It may not be It Follows or The Babadook, but like its unforgettable image of an undead girl in a chador cruising down a dimly lit street on a skateboard, it’s an encouraging sign of life and fresh new blood.
Grade: B+
Horrortober: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in Silence Of The Lambs
FILM TITLE: Silence of the Lambs (1991)
ELAPSED TIME: 100%
WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? Hannibal has an old friend for dinner.
I usually make a policy of not reading reviews of movies before I write my own, but after finishing (that’s right — I finished it. All of it.) Silence of the Lambs last night, I went on a minor googling tear about the movie’s creation and initial reception. Because as soon as you see a movie as good as Silence of the Lambs, the next thought is necessarily, “How the fuck did they do that?”
I found a Roger Ebert review, penned in 2001 following the release of Silence of the Lambs’ underwhelming follow-up, Hannibal. Ebert writes that though Silence of the Lambs is not slasher-film disturbing, it has several genuinely frightening moments: Clarice’s first meeting with the eerily still Hannibal, the Kafka-esque removal of the moth from a victim’s throat, the elevator scene after Hannibal escapes, the back-and-forth cuts between Buffalo Bill’s real house and the false one, and the extended sequence in Bill’s basement at the end. Ebert’s point is that these moments aren’t just gross or suspenseful, but psychologically unsettling in a way that makes them timeless. Because they take place within an airtight character drama, they feel necessary, rather than excessive.
Silence Of The Lambs would be a character drama, except this happens.
As a first-time viewer and someone with little-to-no horror watching experience, I have to say that Silence of the Lambs was revelatory for me. Imagine if you thought you hated comedy but the only comedy you’d ever seen was Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser. You’d probably think comedy sucked, right? But then someone showed you Airplane! You’d realize you were wrong. I thought horror sucked because I’d never actually seen a horror movie before Horrortober, and of the handful of very good movies I’ve watched, Silence of the Lambs is the one that has felt the most worth it. The element of fear is engaging, not gratuitous, because it is presented a part of that old question: what, exactly, is evil?
Jodi Foster as Clarice Starling
I think the movie’s greatest accomplishment is that, despite the grandiosity of its subject matter, it manages to feel understated the whole way through. The scariest moment in the final sequence, when Clarice confronts Buffalo Bill, is not the scene where she sees his skin suits, but the scene where he contorts his face and asks of Clarice, faking ignorance of a previous victim, “Was she a very fat person?” It is scary because Ted Levine, as Buffalo Bill, perfectly captures the hairs-breadth difference between how that question would be posed by an innocent person, and by someone fucking crazy. It is way more unsettling than the half-decomposed body in the bathtub that we run into moments later.
Ted Lavine as Buffalo Bill, animal lover.
So, readers, I think I get it now. It is possible to make a great horror film if the point is not blood and guts, but if blood and guts are a necessary byproduct of a truly frightening inquiry of human darkness. Of course, it also helps if you have Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster leading your movie. But to make horror into art, you mostly just need to take Hannibal Lecter’s advice: “Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?”
Some people will believe anything. Those people are invariably armed to the teeth.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the toilet it’s time to discuss The Legend of Boggy Creek, a low-budget documentary-style tingler about a three-toed Arkansas Sasquatch that will flat knock you off the pot. With Halloween just a week away, it’s also time to talk about what it means to be genuinely afraid. See, it’s easy to make an audience jump in their seats. But those momentary jolts? Those are nothing compared to the big furry fear that followed a lot of people home from the drive-in movies back in 1972.
The Legend of Boggy Creek isn’t campy, it is kitschy—an authentic souvenir from a time before slasher films existed as a genre. Before the proliferation cable TV and pagers, when people felt a little more alone, and a little less entertained. But Boggy Creek doesn’t quite fall into the so-bad-it’s good genre of horror schlock, either. It’s a legitimately terrible campfire story of a film that comes on like a populist political candidate, gaining credibility from its rough edges and ineptitude. The things that make it silly beyond belief — from its Ken Nordine-esque narration to its wildly inappropriate musical interludes — are indistinguishable from the things that make it convincing.
A card at the film’s opening reads, “This is a True Story. Some of the people in this motion picture portray themselves… in many cases on actual locations.” Authenticity is seldom clever or slick.
Boggy Creek was shot in and around Fouke, Arkansas and features a cast of drawling homespun locals, right out of central casting. It’s sometimes described as the Blair Witch Project of its day because both films were cheaply made faux-artifacts that earned millions in revenue. But Boggy Creek is also the big bang of modern bigfoot culture. It’s the prototype film for cheaply made docu-horror and much of the History Channel’s inexplicable monster programming. Written and directed by autodidact/auteur Charles B. Pierce, this independently produced feature crawled out of Texarkana and started attracting crowds like a tent revival. Not only did it turn audiences into true believers, convincing them Bigfoot was real, it convinced them he was violent and wouldn’t hesitate to attack victims while they were pooping. That’s the stuff terror is made of.
If you don’t know what it is, shoot it.
Boggy Creek plays out like an ambitious home movie because in so many ways that’s exactly what it is— an ambitious home movie made for ordinary folks, by ordinary folks. Ordinary folks who live out in the boondocks where they fish, whittle, drink Coca Cola, and love shitty music unironically.
This seems like as good a place as any to randomly insert the lyrics to the film’s impossibly saccharine theme song, “Lonely Cry,” as performed by Chuck Bryant (AKA writer/director/producer Charles Bryant Pierce).
Horrortober: The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)
Lonely Cry
This is where the story plays,
A world on which we seldom gaze,
A page from the book of yesterdays,
Birds and beast and wind and water.
Here beneath the bright blue sky,
No man smoke blinds the eagle’s eye.
And things that crawl or swim or fly,
Feed and breed and live and die.
Here the sulfur river flow,
Rising when the storm cloud blows.
And this is where the creature goes,
Safe within a world he knows.
Perhaps he dimly wonders why,
There is no other such as I.
To touch, to love, before I die,
To listen to my lonely cry.
(spoken)
Where he searches where he goes
This of course nobody knows.
But once you’ve heard his lonely cry
You can guess the reason why.
Whether he’s a beast or man,
what drives him wandering across the land,
Is love for others of his clan
And loneliness he cannot stand.
(sung)
Perhaps he dimly wonders why,
There is no other such as I.
To touch, to love, before I die,
To listen…
To my lonely…
Cry
Like a perfectly respectable church propaganda film about Hell torture (for sinners), or the dangers of gay Satanic drug cults, Boggy Creek’s awkwardness proves its earnestness. The reporting is fair and balanced too, thanks to the testimony of Herb Jones, a grizzled old hermit who likes his privacy as much as he likes his tobacco and who walks with a limp because he shot off part of his foot in a boating accident. Jones swears he’s been living in the bottoms for 20-years and has never seen nor heard any consarn monster. If that testimony doesn’t confirm Boggy Creek’s journalistic integrity, I don’t know what can.
Herb Jones, grizzled as shit.
F is for fake, according to master hoaxter Orson Welles (and the alphabet, I suppose). It’s also for Fouke. And Boggy Creek concludes with the filmmaker, Charles B. Pierce himself, stepping into the frame to silently explore the ruins and grounds around an old shack where he grew up listening to a depressed wild man scream his fool head off. As the melancholy filmmaker pokes about the woods and the wreckage, first-person narrator Vern Stieman gives audiences permission to doubt the story they’ve been watching. Then he ties the whole thing up in a spooky, weirdly sentimental bow reminiscent of the epilogue from Welles’ War of the Worlds. And his commercial voiceovers too.
“I decided to drive out to our old home place, now run down and abandoned,” Stieman says in voiceover, as sunlight fades and Pierce walks through the Arkansas countryside. “Standing out in this field it all comes rushing back and an icy tingle starts down my spine when I recall that terrible, lonesome cry. It was so long ago it seems incredible that the creature is still out there somewhere. Maybe even watching me. Of course you may not believe that, or any of this story. You may think the whole thing’s a hoax, and that’s your privilege. But if you’re ever driving down in our country, long about sundown, keep an eye on the dark woods as you cross the sulphur river bottoms, and you may catch a glimpse of a huge hairy creature watching you from the shadows. Yes, he’s still here. And, you know, I’d almost like to hear that terrible cry again, just to be reminded that there is still a bit of wilderness left. There are still mysteries that remain unsolved, and strange unexplained noises in the night.” Cue the bullfrogs, roll the credits.
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.”
Audition (1999; dir. Takashi Miike)—The first twenty-five minutes of Audition feel nothing like Ringu, The Cure, Pulse or similar J-horror masterpieces; in fact, they are so mundane and quiet that you might start to wonder whether someone has replaced the gory provocation you expected with a sweet and sour Japanese rom-com. What’s all this about a middle-aged widower named Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) who, with the help of his film producer buddy Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), sets up a series of casting calls for a nonexistent movie in hopes of finding Aoyama a new girlfriend—preferably one who’s “beautiful, classy and obedient”? What’s with the sprightly elevator music playing in the background during these light-comic audition scenes? Is this the same film that sent droves of people from the theater during its premiere at the Rotterdam film festival?
It is. Be patient.
At first, you probably won’t notice the tiny cracks and fissures threatening Audition’s tone, subject matter and structure early on. However, like thunder on the horizon, they portend grave danger if you’re unprepared. Twenty-seven minutes and forty-five seconds into the film, Aoyama takes a break from the auditions, wanders into the waiting room and notices Asami (Eihi Shiina), a young girl dressed in white who’s sitting at a table and reading, her back turned away from the rest of the eager, friendly girls eager for their big break. This is the girl for her, Aoyama thinks. Eight minutes later he’s calling her up and asking her out. She says yes.
Thirty-seven minutes and ten seconds into the film, Yoshikawa tells Aoyama “something isn’t right” about Asami’s background story. At 41:32, Yoshikawa informs Aoyama, “We can’t reach anybody who knows her” and urges his friend to “Cool down a bit.” At 43:22, there’s a sudden cut to Asami in a small apartment that’s empty save for an old stereo system, a giant black rotary phone, a pair of pink ballet slippers, and what looks like a large folded-up tent in a canvas sack. At 47:45, Miike cuts to an extreme close-up of Asami in profile, her lips opening into a smile that suggests a venus flytrap closing around an unsuspecting insect. At 48:10 comes the most bracing cinematic shock since Jaye Davidson dropped trou in The Crying Game.
That’s also when everything, including a reliable and conventional sense of narrative or cinematic time, falls apart. Asami and Aoyama’s dreamlike weekend getaway by the sea is suffused with a miasma of pedophilia and bodily mutilation. As she talks, Asami—tall, bony, distant, slightly asymmetrical—starts to sound less like the perfect woman of Aoyama’s dreams and more like a mythical demon who’s temporarily assumed human form. Barriers separating facts, speculations and dreams gradually crumble. An afternoon-to-evening time-lapse sequence lingers just long enough to remind you what conventional film poetry looks like before it’s trash-compacted into oblivion.
Sixteen years later, Audition’s notorious finale still stands above and apart from its misbegotten torture-porn children like a buoy afloat on a sea of blood and body parts. It’s notable for the way it combines the psychological scars and deviant psychology of the greatest J-horror films with the ultra-violence of Asian action cinema. But what makes it really great—as far as these things go, anyway—is that it doesn’t stop there. It pins moviegoers to the wall, forces you to cover your eyes and ears and won’t stop until it goes deeper, deeper…deeper, deeper…
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.
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?
