LET`S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH

Director: John D. Hancock
1971

After an extended hospitalization for a nervous breakdown, Jessica and her husband, Duncan leave the hustle and bustle of New York for a quaint New England farm. Accompanied by their pal, Woody, the trio are greeted at their new home by a mysterious girl who has been squatting there. Jessica takes a liking to the girl and invites her to stay, but, soon, she begins to suspect that the stranger has her designs set on Duncan. Things get worse as Jessica discovers the local lore surrounding the home she and her husband purchased, involving the mysterious drowning, vampirism, and disappearances. As Jessica begins to see and hear things, she fears she may be losing her mind, or, worse yet, that the local tales about the house are true.

Filled with the gritty, creepy atmosphere that seems to permeate most low-budget 70's flicks, Let's Scare Jessica to Death is an absolute freak-out. From the opening scene, I knew I was in for an unnerving experience, as Zohra Lampert's Jessica sees what appears to be an apparition, and we hear Jessica's inner-voice calming her down, telling her "Don't tell them what you've seen, because they won't believe you", and "Just act like nothing happened". The haunting, fragile beauty of Lampert, whose performance here is as heartbreaking as it is terrifying, scared me the moment I saw her on the screen. She just seems like such a broken soul that it's almost difficult to watch, and the moment she extends the welcome to Mariclare Costello's uber-creepy Emily, we know Jessica's in for a world of trouble.

There is an intense psychological element to this film that is predominant throughout. We know from the offset that Jessica is mentally unstable. Just because she's been released does not mean she has been entirely cured. So, when these strange and horrific things start happening, we don't really know whether they're real of fabricated within the constraints of her own mind. That adds a whole new level of uncertainty to the film.

MANIAC

Director: William Lustig
1980

The setting is New York. The nights are dark and there’s a constant sense of fear in the minds of the city’s inhabitants. There’s a killer on the loose and only we can see who it is: Joe Spinnell AKA Frank Zito. At 1 minute 40 seconds we witness his first murder when he cuts the throat of a young girl awaiting her lover’s return as she lies on a dark beach. Her boyfriend gets his when he returns, complete with twitching foot spasm. Frank then wakes up in his bed, screaming and rocking back and forth like a madman – it was all a dream! It is clear to us that even after about 3 minutes of film, that Frank Zito has got some rather pressing mental health issues.

Maniac is one hell of a challenging film. It’s depraved and disgusting, and not one for repeat viewings unless you have problems. The issue is that it is very well made and is further strengthened by some strong performances, especially from the Maniac himself – Joe Spinnell. Maniac, like so many other horror movies throughout the years, was a labour of love and had an initial budget of $48,000. Lustig and Spinnell deserve credit for battling against the odds, like any independent filmmaking teams who deliver the goods do. Tom Savini’s gore effects are first-rate and could not be more convincing.

What it comes down to is a matter of taste and whether this particular piece of work is going to suit your palate. Those female groups who protested outside theatres which showed Maniac actually had a point. It IS sick. It IS depraved, but due mostly to Spinnell’s presence, there’s nothing quite like it. It IS Maniac.

SPOORLOOS

Aka: The Vanishing
Director: George Sluizer
1988

Spoorloos represents one of the most extraordinary realisations of the psychological thriller captured on film. The heartbreaking, yet horrific ending of the film leaves the spectator in no doubt of their own vulnerability in the battle of human nature against a society in which random acts of madness occur.

On many levels comparisons can be drawn by the obsessive nature of both protagonists. The obsessive curiosity of the boyfriend, Rex (Gene Bervoets), to reveal what has happened to his girlfriend, Saskia (Johanna Ter Steege), who was abducted from a service station on route to a holiday destination, is mirrored by the abductor's, Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), own curiosity of human nature's darker side, and its ability to manifest itself through evil deeds. The abductor's approach and rationale are entirely scientific, thus allowing him to distance himself emotionally from the actual deed. This approach allows him the luxury of maintaining a seemingly happy marriage and family life, unlike the boyfriend, whose very ability to have insight and uncalculated emotions causes his ultimate demise.

The continuation of Raymond's exploration of his dark side, without any thought of redemption or forgiveness, amplifies the depth of his pathology. Over a period of years Rex's search for Saskia is brought to public attention by his poster and TV campaign through which he hopes to gain knowledge of her whereabouts. Raymond's very normalcy juxtaposed with his victim's anguish creates superb filmic tension.

The film's lulling pace and parallel plot line takes the audience on a terrifying journey as the eventual fate of Saskia is revealed in the final minute of the story. The ensuing shock is created when we realise that Rex, who has insisted that the madman tell him what has happened, drinks spiked coffee in exchange for this knowledge, awakens to discover he has been buried alive. The climax of the film is surely one of greatest shocking moments in cinema.

An intricate examination of the human condition, Spoorloos represents the emergence of a new wave of psychological thrillers. A thoroughly discomfiting film, Spoorloos succeeds through its expert storytelling and the absolutely jolting denouement. In the 1993 American remake—an insult to the original film version—director George Sluizer was unable to translate Tim Krabbe's vision from his novel The Golden Egg.

THE HAUNTING

Director: Robert Wise
1963

The scariest ghost story ever filmed in black and white began as a 1959 novel by acclaimed author Shirley Jackson. Robert Wise, the film's director, read the novel and optioned it for MGM, and used the skills he honed from his Val Lewton days to create a good old-fashioned ghost story where the unknown is more frightening than what is known.

With a cast headed by Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn, and Rosalie Crutchley (gotta love that name!), THE HAUNTING tells the story of Eleanor Lance (Harris), a lonely woman looking for her place in the world after caring for her ailing invalid mother for eleven years.
As a result of Eleanora´s past dabbling with the supernatural, she is invited by psychic researcher and haunted house analyst Dr. Please call me John Markway (Richard Johnson) to stay at Hill House and make observations. This becomes her ticket out of a stifling existence with her sister, brother-in-law, and niece.

THE HAUNTING broke a lot of ground for motion pictures in the early 1960`s: the film begins with a wonderfully creepy montage sequence that explains the back story of Hill House; lesbianism is hinted at throughout the film and this compliments the film`s restrained style of implicitness; the film was a breakthrough for its use of the Panavision lens which yielded a much wider image and due to elements inherent in the not-yet-perfected lens it produced some distorted images; the eerie opening shot of Hill House against the night sky was shot using infra-red film. Humphrey Searle has provided a brilliant score that, sadly, has not seen the light of day as a soundtrack album. It does for this film was Hermann's score did for PSYCHO.

The film was remade in 1998 as THE HAUNTING and was released the following summer. The only reason to sit through that travesty is to watch Catherine Zeta-Jones (as Theo the lesbian!) parade around the monstrous set looking painfully beautiful.

ROSEMARY´S BABY

Director: Roman Polanski
1968

The image was simple yet surreal: A black baby buggy, stranded atop a dark cliff.

Underneath, the tagline: Pray for Rosemary's Baby.

That was how one of the finest horror films ever made was first presented to audiences 40 years ago. And unless they'd read the best-seller it had come from, they had no idea what they were in for.

Roman Polanski's first American movie and his second masterpiece of horror (REPULSION was released in 1965) is set under the sunny skies of modern-day New York City. There are no creepy characters and no eerie locations, just a happy young couple expecting their first child. Newlyweds Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and unemployed actor Gus (John Cassavetes) have just moved into their new apartment in a gothic Central Park building (shot in the famous Dakota, home of the late John Lennon). Their neighbors, the elderly Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer), are friendly but a bit intrusive. Rosemary learns that she is pregnant but feels a strange sense of anxiety. She seems to remember a vague dream in which she was raped by a savage beast. She has mysterious scratches on her stomach. Her doctor prescribes a curious elixir. It's perhaps not surprising that Rosemary becomes fixated by the idea that she has been impregnated by Satan and is now carrying his unholy child in her womb while living among a coven of witches.

Truly frightening because so much of it is so plausible, ROSEMARY'S BABY is one of the finest examples of modern horror, a milestone in the evolution of the genre. Although the subject matter is ultimately supernatural, the treatment is very realistic. Perhaps the film's most disturbing aspect is that the fears and anxiety that Rosemary experiences initially seem like an understandable response for a neurasthenic young woman to have when an "alien" being is growing within her. The brilliance of the film is that it takes this realistic basis and builds upon it with supernatural metaphors that make pregnancy a rich and strange condition.

SUSPIRIA

Director: Dario Argento
1976

A tumultuous thunderstorm of drumming, both primitive and achingly familiar, the gurgled throbbing of a bass line and sinister voices chanting and howling as a young woman races through a night forest in the midst of a deluge. Lightning flashes revealing snatches of something in the woods running along side her. The music crescendos, lightening hypnotically strobes, the colors are supersaturated deep reds and blues and screaming fills the cool night air.
So begins Dario Argento’s crowning work of horror, Suspiria, the finest work of cinematic terror to very been unspooled across a film screen before a quaking audience. It is not a tangled web of psychological frisson nor is it a diabolical ode to witchcraft, but it is a flawless representation of a cinematic nightmare: a Goya print come to life relying solely on visual and audio mastery rather than plot or pacing.
Argento serves up some of the most deliriously frightening scenes imaginable: the aforementioned chase sequence that plays up Goblin’s riotous score for the film, a gruesome scene in which a woman falls through a stained glass dome, a black-lit room filled with enormous spools of razor wire, the deep gasping breathes of the Mother of Sighs. The film slides forward in disorienting bursts, a somnambulist nightmare comparable to Caligari’s.

Suspiria tells a genteel story, a fairy tale for adults. Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) is a student at an elite ballet academy slowly learns that the academy harbors a coven of witches. The plot, however, takes a back seat to the visuals almost as soon as the film begins. Suspiria is an exploration of subconscious horror imagery and atmosphere, the film is drenched in uncanny colors and ripples with a swirling chaos of bizarre sounds. Argento digs his fingers into the vast collective unconsciousness that gives birth to monsters and pulls from it a wild feast of imagery that has never since been duplicated. The tagline on the poster for Suspiria read, “The Only Thing More Terrifying Than The Last 12 Minutes Of This Film Are The First 92.” Truer words about a film have never been spoken.

HELLRAISER

Director: Clive Barker
1987

Though its sequels have been steadily dwindling in quality over the years, Hellraiser remains an entertaining and downright creepy piece of work - with writer/director Clive Barker's stylish visual choices certainly playing a key role in the movie's enduring success. The story follows bickering married couple Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Julia (Clare Higgins) as they move into a creaky old house, where Julia eventually discovers a blood-sucking monster living in the upstairs attic. Said creature is inevitably revealed to be her former lover Frank (Sean Chapman), who - after escaping from Pinhead and his demented band of Cenobites - must now feast on the blood of human sacrifices to regain his human form (Julia reluctantly agrees to provide a series of would-be one-night stands for this very purpose). Barker has infused Hellraiser with an exceedingly deliberate pace that admittedly does take a while to get used to, as the film initially possesses the vibe of a decidedly non-horrific familial drama. There's little doubt that the slow-moving atmosphere proves instrumental in building an atmosphere of dread, however, and it's subsequently impossible to deny the effectiveness of the gruesome (and sporadically frightening) third act. Ashley Laurence - cast as Larry's estranged daughter (and the ultimate hero of the piece) - turns in a surprisingly affecting performance that essentially anchors the film, though it's obviously impossible to overlook Doug Bradley's work as the iconic Pinhead (his delivery of the film's most famous line - "we'll tear your soul apart!" - itself justifies Hellraiser's entire existence).

BLACK SUNDAY

Aka: Mask Of Satan
Director: Mario Bava
1960

Black Sunday is a genre classic. It was a success that produced a deluge of continental (primarily Italian) horror. Hammer had already fired up a massive Gothic revival in the previous three years and in the USA Roger Corman had had similar success with a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. With Black Sunday, director Mario Bava defined a set the tropes that would become the continental Gothic formula. As opposed to Hammer’s product the Italian horror film placed an emphasis on sadism, particularly facial mutilation; and as, opposed to the Anglo-horror film, which is very much rooted in the battle between reason and suppression, the continental Gothic became a genre that was very much based in the past (most Italo-horror films are set in the early 19th Century or earlier) and firmly on the side of superstition – science and reason never enter into these films, there’s rarely ever a Man of Reason like Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing.

For a period like 1960 when camera set-ups where still largely static, Bava’s camerawork is incredibly sinuous and fluid, always on the move. The shock opening with Barbara Steele being tied up, her back bared and the letter ‘S’ branded into her flesh, then the spiked Mask of Satan placed onto her face and hammered on with a crunch and a spurt of blood still holds some power thirty years later. (It was this scene that had Black Sunday banned in the UK until 1968). What is most striking is Mario Bava’s instinctive feel for Gothic mood, the most extraordinary sequence in the film is the luring of the professor to the castle, which is filled with images like the black coach appearing out of the mist and racing through the forest in slow-motion with Arturo Dominici on top maniacally whipping the horses along; and the luring of the professor into the castle where Dominici and his lantern move further and further ahead, while giant embossed doors boom shut unaided by human hand, slowly trapping the professor deeper and deeper into a claustrophobic maze of underground passages.

Although the film makes some claim to be based on the Nikolai Gogol short story The Vij (1835), there is virtually nothing of this in the finished script. The Vij was set around a night in a crypt as the hero waits for the witch to arise from her tomb while she marshals occult forces against him, a scene that is puzzlingly missing from the film. The main sequence of The Vij would have been perfect for the film’s extended climax, but isn’t used – indeed the climax the film has is oddly anti-climactic. In subsequent films Mario Bava showed himself to be a director less concerned with plot than with visual set-pieces. Nevertheless Black Sunday is a classic.

HORROR HOTEL

Aka: The City Of The Dead
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
1960

Although movies about Satanists are a dime a dozen today, one of the first films to accurately portray Satanism is the 1960 classic, Horror Hotel. This excellent exercise in atmosphere -- about a New England town ruled by a coven of witches -- falls just short of greatness thanks to an excessive. reliance on horror movie clichés (e.g., sinister residents of said town staring ominously at the hapless protagonists). Yet while the lack of subtlety and refinement relegate the film to the ranks of entertaining spook shows (rather than genre classics), the four-star level of weirdness earns Horror Hotel a place alongside the most memorable cult movies ever made. On top of that, it sports what may be the best, most terrifying (happy) ending ever seen in a horror film -- a genuine tour-de-force that is so powerful in its imagery that it almost single-handedly erases any reservations one has about the rest of the movie.

And it is strange. Horror Hotel is one of those lucky films whose missteps and limitations somehow magically fall into place, creating a weird alternative universe -- a sort of Twilight Zone in which the incredible seems completely natural. To begin with, there is not an actual exterior location shot anywhere in the movie, which was filmed entirely on studio sets, creating a claustrophobic sense of being cut off from the world at large. The "normal" world of college and homes is scene only in interiors, mostly brightly lit and cheerful. The film's second major lucky break lies in the fact that it is an English production set in New England. The British cast strives with varying degrees of success (Christopher Lee best among them) to affect mid-Atlantic accents, and the result is a stilted artificiality that almost makes the film sound dubbed. However, as with the unreal (or surreal) exteriors, the strange vocal inflections only increase the off-balance sense of being set apart from the real world, adding another layer to the perception that we are trapped in a dreamy, imaginary landscape.

STAGE FRIGHT

Aka: Deliria
Director: Michele soavi
1987

The good ole' days of the slasher genre were grinding to a halt by the late 80's. We had pretty much seen everything there was to see... or had we? Michele Soavi made his directorial debut with StageFright an unapologetic slasher film from start to finish, but it had the "Soavi touch" as I like to call it. StageFright was considered to be a financial failure overseas, domestically it was a hit, and the slashers were back.

StageFright is a simple story, simple yet utterly disturbing. While practicing a bizarre musical, involving rapes and murders committed by a character wearing a huge bird head a group of actors are locked in the theater with a real live maniac. Early on two of the participants sneak out to visit a doctor (at an insane asylum no less) and bring back more than a cure for a twisted ankle. StageFright gives us everything we'd expect from a balls to the wall slasher flick. There's death by pickaxe (and regular axe) stabbings, power drill, disembowlment (and dismemberment) and of course chainsaw.

StageFright is not exactly a paint by the numbers slasher film either. Soavi is a very "artsy" director and it shows. An Argento protégé Soavi retains his mentor's style (also in The Church and The Sect) until Dellamorte Dellamore well into the late 90's when his own style truly shines through. There isn't a whole lot of freshness in the story, but don't let that dissuade you. Slasher fans can have their cake and eat it too.

THE BEYOND

Aka: Seven Doors Of Death
Director: Lucio Fulci
1981

The Beyond is considered to be the best film in the long and active career of Lucio Fulci, who died in 1996 at the age of 69. Like the other two Italian horror masters, Dario Argento (Suspiria and Deep Red) and Mario Bava (Black Sunday and Blood and Black Lace). Fulci took conventional horror stories, added extreme and colorful gore, and combined them with the artiness of Federico Fellini's films. Throw in the zombies from George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead, and you have Fulci's The Beyond.

And talk about a plot! An attractive blonde woman, Liza (Catriona MacColl) inherits an old hotel. We see in a flashback that an artist was crucified in his room, and that the hotel holds the location of one of the seven doors to Hell. Liza tries to fix the place up, and people keep dying. A blind woman tries to warn her about the history of the house. A plumber accidentally opens the door, his eyeballs are gouged out, and he becomes a zombie. And after watching her mother's face devoured by a jar of acid, a little girl becomes blind, and then later a zombie. Liza meets Dr. McCabe who refuses to believe any of it ("I'm a doctor, dammit -- I must have facts... proof!"). Room number 36 is supposedly the haunted room, and a mysterious book keeps turning up and disappearing. Then, all the zombies come out and try to eat Liza and the doc. This is when the doc keeps wasting perfectly good bullets shooting the zombies in the chest.

This movie is gory, though. We've got three different scenes of eyeballs being gouged, poked, or pulled out. We've got a spider attack, a zombie dog attack, a human head eaten by acid, nails through wrists, and chunks of glass impaled in someone's face. And we've got blood; lots and lots of blood, spurting and spraying, welling up in pools, and creeping across the floor.
Lucio Fulci had this to say about The Beyond, “My idea was to make an absolute film, with all the horrors of the world. It’s a plotless film, there’s no logic to it, just a succession of images.”

ZOMBI 2

Aka: Zombie, Zombie Flesh Eaters
Director: Lucio Fulci
1979

One of the most infamous Italian zombie-fests to hit the silver blood soaked screen, Zombi 2 was originally born as a pseudo sequel to Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Stealing the name Zombie (Dawn's European title), Lucio Fulci's answer was Zombi 2 (It retained the title Zombie in the US, confusing - eh?). While the film is light on just about everything that made Dawn so great (character development, social commentary, clever writing) Zombi 2 would soon become a legend in its own right. Even after all of these years, the film still stands as a gritty, no holds barred entertaining 42nd street style gore-fest, with nary a slow or dull moment to hold it back. This is the kind of cinema that your mom warned you about, and any 'normal' critic would sincerely discount this film on pure content (or lack there of) alone. But we're in the world of a horror fan's wet dream right now, and Zombi 2 (or Zombie, whatever the hell you want to call it) does indeed belong in the collection of just about every undead horror nut roaming gods green earth today.
Who couldn't fall in love with a film that features a scene of a young lady scuba diving topless, subsequently being attacked by a zombie underwater? But wait, there's more - follow that with the same zombie in a full on wrestling match with a shark, and you've got some true cinematic genius. In addition to this magical underwater ballet, we're treated to more undead types roaming the island with oatmeal covering their faces, and more flesh tearing than you could shake a dismembered arm at. Of course, who could forget the granddaddy of them all, the young woman who gets a wood splinter shoved in her eye, one of the most memorable gore effects from a horror film...ever.

DAWN OF THE DEAD

Director: George A. Romero
1979

Released in 1979, ´Dawn Of The Dead´ is Romero's follow-up to his 1968 classic, ´Night Of The Living Dead´. The zombie plague that began in that first film has spread, causing chaos and mass hysteria in major cities around the country. Martial law has been instituted as the powers-that-be bicker endlessly, trying to decide how best to deal with the epidemic. When traffic helicopter reporter Stephen (aka Flyboy, played by David Emge) decides things are getting out of hand he steals the whirlybird, along with girlfriend Frannie (Gaylen Ross) and SWAT team members Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott H. Reiniger), and they set off for a better place. The better place takes the form of a deserted shopping mall on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. While the four initially only stop in order to stock up on supplies, the allure of all those material items at their disposal entices them into staying and setting up a homestead once they've cleared out the zombie inhabitants and secured it from outside attack.

Where ´Night Of The Living Dead´ was a straight up horror film (with some minor social commentary buried beneath the ever-present threat of the shambling undead), ´Dawn´ is something a bit more intriguing. Sure, much of ´Dawn´'s first thirty minutes or so has the same unrelenting feel of the earlier film, but once our heroes arrive at their final destination, the tone changes. It`s something of a hybrid a horror film with sociological impact. The film features some richly satirical moments between the explosions of violence and gore moments that illustrate our own consumerism run amok as it raises the question: just who are the real zombies? The shambling undead or the four characters who become trapped by their lust for the easy life inside the mall?

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Director: George A. Romero
1968

Night of the Living Dead (1968) came out of nowhere, and turned into the most influential horror film since Psycho. George Romero`s remarkably assured debut, made on a shoestring, about a group of people barricaded inside a farmhouse while an army of flesh-eating zombies roams the countryside, deflates all genre clichés. It traded the expressionistic sets of the traditional fright flick for a neorealistic style—Romero's use of natural locations and grainy black and white gave his gorefest the look and feel of a doc. And this was not Transylvania, but Pennsylvania. —this was Middle America at war, and the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam. In this first-ever subversive horror movie, the resourceful black hero survives the zombies only to be killed by a redneck posse, and a young girl nibbles ravenously on her father's severed arm—disillusionment with government and patriarchal nuclear family is total.

Almost universally panned by reviewers when released, the film gradually became a cult phenomenon, playing on the midnight movie circuit for more than a decade. Its success has spawned innumerable sequels, remakes, clones, and forgettable imitations, here and abroad, as zombies of all nations replaced vampires as the centerpiece of the world's horror movies. Romero himself made two sequels.
Night of the Living Dead is the first genuinely modern horror movie, shot more like a documentary of the apocalypse than the gothic horrors that defined the ’60s, and it bled right into the fabric of the culture. It changed the face of American horror movies: for better (it blazed the trail for the transgressive horror renaissance of the ’70s), for worse (all those crappy copycat zombie knockoffs) and forever.