The Morbid Imagination

Here’s one of the better “Best” lists I’ve seen for horror movies. It should be a good list, the judges were people like Guillermo Del Toro, Alice Cooper, Simon Pegg, and Clive Barker. The thing I love about it is the plenitude of foreign films and even oddball picks, like Come and See (1985) (pictured above) and Saló (1975).

Many of the picks on this list have previously been reviewed or spotlighted on The Morbid Imagination. Check out the category Movies to scroll through them.

The 100 Best Horror Films

BTW, I got an 89 out of 100 on “How Many Have You Seen?“…I guess I have some catching up to do.

My personal top five list:

1. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
2. Repulsion (1965)
3. Let the Right One In (2008)
4. Psycho (1960)
5. Freaks (1932)

Joel-Peter Witkin is an artist who actually works directly with death – some of his morbid tableaux feature actual corpses or body parts.

His scratched, distressed photographs look as though they are rediscovered crime scene evidence from a Victorian era horror. Nude men and women mix with animal parts, masks, random bits of machinery, severed limbs, or bowls of fruit. Some of his works are borderline pornographic; most are deeply disturbing.

Witkin was a war photographer in Vietnam and claims to have touched the decapitated head of a  little girl following a horrific car accident when he was a child. Raised Roman Catholic, Witkin combines an old world gothic sensibility with an intense interest in deformity, perversity, and death.

In the 1980s, Witkin advertised for models, asking for the following: “Pinheads, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people with tails, horns, wings, reversed hands or feet, anyone born without arms, legs, eyes, breast, genitals, ears, nose, lips. All people with unusually large genitals. All manner of extreme visual perversion. Hermaphrodites and teratoids (alive and dead). Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.”

This attraction to depicting the ill-formed and strange is reminiscent of the photographs of Diane Arbus or Robert Mapplethorpe. The same debate of “is it art or is it exploitation?” that surrounded their work is often thrown at Witkin. How do I feel about it? Hey, I revere the Morbid Imagination, where do you think I stand? Perversity, deformity, decay, death, pain, and alienation are just as valid as subjects for art as sunsets and royalty. To me, Witkin has a definite style that is compelling and admirable.

Here is a link to some of his works

I have repeatedly made the case on this blog that Universal Studios is squandering one of its greatest assets: its legacy of classic monsters. Recent comments by studio head Ron Meyer give us an insight into why this might be.

“One of the worst movies we ever made was Wolfman.  Wolfman and Babe 2 are two of the shittiest movies we put out, but by the same token we made movies we believe in. ”

Really? Wolfman is one of the shittiest movies you ever made? Is there a reason you didn’t mention Van Helsing (2004) or The Mummy, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)? Or were those two movies you really believed in?

Do you know what was shitty? The fact that The Wolfman was released at a time of the year when it had no chance. That some dil-hole executive  thought seven-time Academy Award winner and monster fanboy genius Rick Baker’s werewolf makeup wasn’t good enough. You know, the guy responsible for American Werewolf in London (1981).

Here’s a list of the good horror movies produced by Universal Studios in the 16 years asshead Ron Meyer has been in charge: Drag Me to Hell, Slither, Dawn of the Dead. Here’s a list of some other horror movies Meyer is responsible for: the remakes of Psycho and The Last House on the Left, The Seed of Chucky, Devil, The Thing prequel, Doom, and Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. Did I also mention Van Helsing?

Here’s another list of movies – the updates of classic monster movie updates provided by Universal Studios in the last 40 years: Dracula (1979), The Mummy (1999), The Wolfman. Oh, and Van Helsing. Way to exploit your  legacy, Universal.

Throw this track record and these comments in with the decision to kill Guillermo Del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness, and you have the portrait of a studio run by people who have no clue whatsoever when it comes to horror or the cultural value of classic Universal horror. Take a look at the long list of non-horror drek that Universal has vomited on movie viewers and you get a feeling you could produce a better track record of success with a dart board and six chimps.

So I guess I shouldn’t be holding my breath for that kickass remake of the Creature of the Black Lagoon. Maybe I should be praying it doesn’t happen.

See Mr. Meyer’s remarks here.

I confess that I don’t intend this list to have anything to do with 9/11 – it’s just a convenient cutoff point to review the best recent horror films. 10 years, 10 films. After reviewing a list of all the horror films from this period, I don’t really detect any real influence of the events of that tragic day, except perhaps the sustained interest in apocalypse/zombie/contagion movies.

If there was one overriding trend the last ten years, it was remakes. For the most part, it was an unfortunate trend, wasting millions of studio dollars on terrible or pointless movies. There were a few (very few) gems among the dross, but not one surpassed the original that it was based on.

And the intrusion of the new genre of paranormal romance into horror? Shudder…

I’m sure there are one or two obscure movies I missed, but I feel good about every movie included here and have about a half dozen more that were hard to exclude.

Let the Right One In (2008) – My personal favorite on this list and a film I think deserves consideration as one of the greatest horror movies ever. This is a perfect example of why the best horror films are about something other than monsters or death. In this case, the something else is the tragic nature of childhood alienation. It is also a great vampire movie, returning to the time tested depiction of vampirism as a curse and a source of death and horror.

Matyrs (2008) – This is a close second on my list. On the surface, it seems like yet another torture porn movie, but instead it is a mind-bending descent into bleak horror worthy of another French classic Les Diaboliques (1954). As each twist unfolded, I marveled at the artistry of its conception and its willingness to forswear any easy outs for the audience. Deeply satisfying and original.

The Mist (2007) – Speaking of bleak horror, here’s another movie that’s not afraid to go there. This is based on one of my favorite Stephen King works, by his best adaptor, Frank Darabont. Like any good King story, realistic characters drawn from real life confront intruding horror, aided here by a great cast. And the ending! I walked out of the theater, shaking my head, amazed that they went there.

The Descent (2005) – The Cave, released the same year, explored (spelunked?) the same territory: a group trapped in a cave with monsters. The difference? Neil Marshall and an all female cast. Marshall wisely refused to resort to exploitation and put real characters into believable danger. The weird ending was wonderfully ambiguous.

The Road (2009) – Based on Cormac McCarthy’s nihilistic masterpiece, the film adaptation spares little of it’s apocalyptic power. The horror springs from the nearly hopeless situation – you want to root for the last flickering lights of humanity to triumph, but you know that it’s a false hope. It’s the journey that matters, but it’s not a trip to anyplace nice.

Paranormal Activity (2007) – There may be one or two other movies that might be more deserving, but I had to acknowledge a movie that did a great job of wringing scares out of audiences with mood, tension, and misdirection. The fact that this series has been successful at the box office is heartening, and I hope that studios follow suit with more of the same. The found footage thing, however, is getting close to being played out. Can’t we just stick to spooky scares?

Rec (2007) – Speaking of found footage, here’s the movie that did it best. Just a tour-de-force of filmmaking.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – If Guillermo Del Toro isn’t the master of horror, I don’t know who is. A little girl escapes either into her own dark imagination or a real, nightmarish underworld – which may be better than the grim reality of her real life. Del Toro suspends her between two dark universes, and this fairy tale may have no happy ending. This film proves Del Toro was born to adapt Lovecraft.

The Wolfman (2010) – This film has it critics, but I think they’re all wrong. This is exactly what Universal Studios should be doing with its goldmine of monster properties. It is just reverent enough to the original to soothe hardcore fans but savvy enough of a modern studio horror movie to appeal to a wider crowd. It was dumped into the market in February, when it should have played during Halloween. Why couldn’t Universal release a new monster movie remake every year in the spooky season, helmed by fanboy directors like Guillermo Del Toro or Joe Dante? (sigh)

Cabin Fever (2002) – My last choice is the winner of the “Best Dead Teenager Movie” award, narrowly edging out The Ruins (2008), mainly due to a better horror ending. If you are going to kill a bunch of teenagers, kill them all. I like this movie more than Eli Roth’s more successful Hostel (2006), mainly because of the gleefully crazy tone this movie sometimes adopts. I also really like that most of the characters are horrible and selfish, but the two nice kids also meet awful fates, despite their intact virginities. Good horror is random.

Reading, of all things, an article at Cracked.com called: “6 Mind-Blowing Ways Zombies and Vampires Explain America,” I got stirred up enough to finally address an issue I’d long pondered. Namely, The Politics of Horror Movies.

Every so often, one of the major media outlets will notice the popularity of contemporary horror movies and will try and attach some kind of political or social significance to their success. This usually turns out the be the sort of glib association that doesn’t bear close scrutiny. The Cracked article is typical; it puts forward the notion that vampire movies are successful when Democrats are in office because conservatives are afraid of sex and foreigners and zombies are popular when Republicans are in power because liberals fear mindlessness and conformity.

This premise is easily disrupted by a few simple points. A) Conservatives fear the mindlessness and conformity of political correctness as much as liberals fear consumerism and neo-fascist conformity. B) Vampire movies are generally conservative, since the sexually liberated undead almost always wind up defeated and sent back to hell and vampirism most closely resembles a sexually transmitted disease. C) Box office success for horror movies tend to be the result of clever advertising, quality product, built-in audiences (Twilight), or fortunate timing. Any “trend” in the genre is driven almost exclusively by the exploitative, imitative nature of the business.

This is not to say that horror movies exist in a vacuum. But most of the failed attempts to politicize horror movies are due to confusion between The Social versus The Political.

Politics is about the distribution of power in a society. By that definition, there are very few political horror movies. The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and Day of the Dead (1985) maybe, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), absolutely.

What most critics label as political is actually social. The decaying family, the dissolution of civil society, the relationship of the sexes, the weakening of parental authority, and the predatory nature of sex are all social issues – problems with how people relate to each other within a society. Night of the Living Dead (1968)  reflects the violent, racially charged era of the Vietnam Era, when society seemed to be coming apart at the seams. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) extended that devolution to the nuclear family. The Exorcist (1975) betrays parents’ fear and ambivalence about their own children.  Cloverfield (2008) is a meditation on post-9/11 anxieties. Etc.

Here, horror is a powerful medium, since great horror is built on psychological tension. The vast majority of horror movies, however, are intimate and personal in their scale. They focus on a small group of individuals under assault. This is the classic form of the slasher movie, and even epic, apocalyptic zombie movies revolve around a small group of survivors. Threats to the social fabric isolate and alienate individuals and make them more vulnerable, thus making them perfect horror movie foils.

Horror movies have been continuously successful since at least 1957, often independent of their times, many are timeless classics. This is what bothers me about these “trend” articles, they overlook the enduring popularity of the genre. This is due entirely to the snobbery of America’s cultural elites, most of whom refuse to take horror seriously as art. The longstanding relegation of horror to a cultural ghetto, now that’s political.

Here’s a pretty good list of “9 Vampire Movies that Ruined the Genre.” Can’t disagree with most of the choices, except Near Dark (1987), which I think is a minor classic. Lance Henrikson as a vampire cult leader? That’s a slam-dunk.

Here’s my take on Twilight, BTW.

And my favorite Vampire Movie.

I found a link to Mena’s show at the B. Hollyman Gallery in Austin, TX and was seduced by his images. Mena interposes objects into scenes taken from 1950s science fiction movies to create dreamlike images of strange apparitions or alien vistas impinging on reality.

Mena is indeed a dark artist, treading on ground familiar to fans of Jack Arnold. (From his website) “I’m fascinated by humanity’s proclivity to fear, and explore the disorienting space between reason and reality. I reconstruct the equation, remove crucial elements, introduce unexpected variables, and disrupt the usual formula. And I question the limits of our social and collective experience, and challenge the assumptions of our given world.”

The show, “While I Sleep” runs through September 24. Mena’s website may be found here: http://www.albertomena.com/

I’m not sure why I overlooked this from the start, since I have been a fan since I was a kid, but I’ve decided to focus some attention in the blog on Horror Comics. Naturally, I will focus more on the art and artists than anything else.

Where better to start than with ground zero for horror comics: EC Comics? And when most people think of EC horror comics, chances are you recall one of Johnny Craig’s unforgettable covers. Dear God, here was a man who knew how to sell a comic book. EC Comics came under fire in the 1950s for the violence, sex, and horror they peddled to impressionable young minds. All you have to do is look at some of the covers Johnny Craig did for Shock Suspensestories or Crime Suspensestories and you might think, “maybe the critics had a point.” There was no shortage of lurid comic book covers in the era, but Johnny Craig, a meticulous draftsman, elevated lurid to an art form.

But for me, what I loved most about Johnny Craig, were his women. Oh sure, Wally Wood and Frank Frazetta delivered more voluptuous maidens, but only Johnny Craig could perfectly render that particular type of seductively poisonous noir temptress. Not even Hollywood in the golden age of Film Noir could top Johnny Craig’s vicious vixens.

In my last post, I spotlighted Harry Clarke’s 1919 etchings for an edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. From 1905 to 1909, the Italian artist Alberto Martini created a series of 132 ink drawings inspired by Poe’s stories. Whereas Clarke’s illustrations were rendered very much in the style of the day, Martini’s nightmarish creations exist in a world apart, and are pure expressions of an artist’s dark imagination.

Like so many artists before and since, Martini seems to have been deeply inspired by the writings of Poe. The best work of his career followed his work with Poe, although you could make the argument that these drawings are his best work.

Martini is considered a forerunner to the surrealists, and you can see why in some of his Poe work. A few images are nearly abstract, but still manage to evoke strong, dark emotions. In this sense, Martini is fishing in the same waters as his contemporaries, the Expressionists.

Harry Clarke’s reputation as an illustrator was made by his striking black and white etchings from a 1919 edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allen Poe. His style, while arresting, was very much in the Art Nouveau-esque vein of the day for book illustration. For Clarke, book illustration largely paid the bills, his real passion was stained glass, at which he excelled.

After the initial success of the first edition, a second one with additional color plates from Clarke was published in 1923. This book is prized by book collectors; a beautiful reproduction is available currently from Amazon books.

“Contemporary culture, human folly and an obsessive curiosity for the macabre provide the fuel for my subject matter.” – Sandra Yagi

Hmmmm. Sounds like the perfect Morbid Imagination artist.

Yagi, after a decades long career in the business world, turned to expressing herself through painting, in a style that is both grotesque and whimsical. She literally peels back the layers of humanity to expose the ugly truths underneath.

And her monster Barbie art is really fun.

Go to Sandra Yagi’s Website

While searching for something else, I ran across Arnold Bocklin’s “Medusa” (above) and shortly afterwards, found a few more works on the same subject, i.e:  the severed head of the Queen of the Gorgons.  I present them here for your pleasure.

Peter Paul Reubens, “Haupt de Medusa”

Caravaggio, “Medusa”

Sandra Yagi, “Medusa Hair Barbie”

Roland Torpor is best known outside avant garde circles for his work on the animated film Fantastic Planet (1973) – he co-wrote the screenplay and provided the design and look of the film. I really like Fantastic Planet; I view it as a dark bookend to Yellow Submarine (1968), with Torpor’s surrealistic terrors supplanting the dayglo visions of Peter Max.

Within avant garde circles Torpor is known as a co-founder of the Panic Movement in the 1960s, along with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal.  Together, they staged provocative performance art which skewered the conventions of surrealism, along with the usual targets of the day.

Torpor was involved in other films, writing, and even television, but what I am spotlighting is his artwork, which was often obscene or scatological. Torpor reveled in the role of provocateur, but there is a consistent quality to his work which I find interesting. Like many of the other artists spotlighted in the Morbid Imagination, Torpor has created a dark fantasy world, peopled with grotesque figures, weird landscapes, and terrible fates.

A good survey of Torpor’s work may be found at the blog linked below:

Click Here

Black Swan (2010) deftly combines some very old gothic conventions – the doppelganger, a heroine pursued by shadowy figures, and the cannibalistic mother - to create an operatic horror movie of the highest quality.

Black Swan stands as a terrific entry into the Horror of Personality sub-genre; movies that revolve around mental degeneration or the awful consequences of untreated mental illness. Director Darren Aronofsky has created a film that compares favorably to the summit of the type: Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).

Unlike Repulsion, where the source of the madness of Catherine Deneuve’s character is never explained, in Black Swan, Natalie Portman’s character is a victim of the stress of winning and holding the lead role in Swan Lake and the predations of her failed dancer mother.

While it is not immediately apparent that Portman’s character is losing her connection to reality, it isn’t long before she finds herself being stalked by her doppelganger – popularly known today as The Evil Twin. The doppelganger is a literary character as old as horror itself, arising out of folklore and appearing in the 19th Century in Dostoesky’s The Double and Poe’s William Wilson. The doppelganger was also the monster in The Student of Prague, which was filmed several times in Germany, mostly during the silent era. Generally, the doppelganger appears after the victim has committed some moral lapse, threatening to erase their existence and replace them entirely.

Black Swan also features Barbara Hershey as the cannibalistic mother, a gothic figure found often in Grimm’s Fairy Tales and carried through to the present to a variety of oedipal dramas such as Psycho (1960), The Grifters (1990), or David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990). Invariably, the cannibalistic mother does not actually consume their victim, but instead destroys them from within often providing the impetus for their misdeeds.

Indeed, Black Swan is so drenched in it’s Gothic roots, that it would fairly easy to transpose the setting to the 1880s, leaving virtually every detail intact. You would have had to excise the lesbian interlude between Portman and Mila Kunis, of course, but it would have made a splendid Victorian melodrama.

Hopefully, Black Swan will garner a few Academy Awards next month, certainly for the very deserving Natalie Portman at least. A few of the golden statuettes would elevate it into the class of previous classics like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and Silence of the Lambs. That would go a long way towards making up for the Academy’s previous neglect of the Horror genre.