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)

My response? Underwhelmed.

Actually, the more I think about the more I am disappointed. Why?

♦ Introduced by two Twilight actors. Way to demonstrate that you really don’t get it.

♦ It’s just a bunch of clips picked out by some 20 somethings with a fairly obvious knowledge of horror and little sense of history. Michael Myers appeared about six times, Universal horror got about 5 seconds. Leprechaun? Really? Leprechaun?

♦ There were no horror movies made outside the US? Hammer films never existed? No Christopher Lee, no Peter Cushing?

♦ They go to all the trouble of giving Roger Corman an Oscar and they didn’t include even one clip from the Poe movies? No Vincent Price? Chuckie gets a couple appearances, though.

♦ Apparently, the golden age of horror was the 1980s, according to the Academy. Did I mention they spotlighted Leprechaun?

Just confirms my previous point: the Academy has not been kind to horror. Disappointing and patronizing.

Ann Radcliffe, The Supernatural in Poetry

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakspeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one ; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?

Devendra Varma in The Gothic Flame (1966):

The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.

Sigmund Freud

Religions continue to dispute the importance of the undeniable fact of individual death to postulate a life after death…Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter of surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation.

Sadly, we have regressed to a society where list-making substitutes for real writing, where entire magazines are nothing more than pictures, lists, and five paragraph “articles.” A lot of “Best” lists are generated with rigged, questionable choices designed to generate controversy and attention.

But one list that I have no qualms about is Bravo’s “100 Scariest Movie Moments.” It’s an excellent, well considered list with top-notch commentary from a lot of interesting people. I don’t have any complaints about any of the movies that are included on the list and I commend Bravo for having mixed artsy, more obscure choices with obvious, popular moments.

I’ve trimmed the list down to ten of my favorite moments that artfully scare:

10. (97) Cat People (1942) – The pool scene, a masterpiece that should be taught in film school…

9. (49) Les Diabolique (1955) – The final shock that kills Christina…

8. (15) Freaks – The final scene, in the rain, with the freaks crawling and hopping, amazing that it was made in the 1930s…

7. (38) Peeping Tom – A movie so disturbing that it ruined the career of the director…

6. (84) Blue Velvet – Where do I start? One disturbing scene after another…

5. (26) Seven – The guy on the bed…

4. (45) The Wicker Man (1973)- A skillful build to a horrifying ending made more believable by Edward Woodward’s performance…

3. (55) The Vanishing (1988) - I saw the end coming, but it still creeped me out…

2. (11) Audition – The scenes in her apartment, the guy in the bag…

1. (5) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) – The greatest horror movie ever made…

What all of these moments have in common is that they aren’t merely well crafted shocks or jolts, they are culminating or key moments in deeply involving stories. Some of them are dislocating endings that leave you walking out of the theater in a daze. It’s the implications and the dawning awareness of greater horrors that make more than a momentary impact. These are moments that linger…

…who doesn’t love a shiver of remembered horror?

In an earlier post, I criticized the highly regarded Vampyr (1932) because it had failed to utilize sound effectively. I characterized Dracula (1931) as a partial success in this regard and had praised Frankenstein (1931) for demonstrating for the first time just how powerful effective use of sound could be in a horror film.

I recently viewed Dracula with the modern Philip Glass score; I found it annoying and distracting. At times it actually overwhelmed the few scenes where director Tod Browning had effectively used sound effects. It was especially apparent in the initial appearance of Dracula and his brides rising from their coffins in the cellar of his castle.

After that scene and the next, where Renfield arrives at the castle and meets the count, Browning abandons sound as a tool. Once Dracula arrives in London, Browning leans far too heavily on the original stage play, and the remainder of the movie is driven mostly by dialog. As a result, the movie loses steam and drags to the tame end, where Dracula is dispatched offscreen with groan.

But there was one other sound effect that was sucessful in Dracula: Lugosi’s voice. For me, the high point of the movie comes early on, when Lugosi, after welcoming Renfield, stops half way up the cobwebbed, crumbling stairs of his castle as a wolf howls outside. He smiles sardonically and says:

“Listen to them. Children of the Night. What music they make!”

How many movies have become instant classics based on the delivery of a memorable line? I think this was the moment when Dracula became not only a hit but a cultural touchstone.

Lugosi’s performance saved Dracula. Without it, all the faults of the movie would have been magnified and the end result would have mostly tedious. And try picturing Dracula a silent film, even with Lugosi. It could have happened, if Universal had only chosen to produce it a few years earlier. It may have retained some of the power of his performance, but it would have been lacking that one magical ingredient that even people who have never seen the film can imitate. That familiar Hungarian growl…

“I am…Dracula.”

He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species.”

It is tempting to think that, before the rise of mass media, Horror had a respectable place in Western culture. But truthfully, the stages of 19th Century England, France, and America were stained with stage blood and fake entrails, thanks to the Grand Guignol and adaptations of penny dreadfuls like “Varney the Vampire.” Novels like Dracula or The Picture of Dorian Gray enjoyed some standing, but most Horror fiction and art were relegated to sideshow status.

What mass media accomplished was to permanently stigmatize Horror as low culture. It was easy to limit Horror to pulp magazines, mass market paperbacks, drive in movies, and comic books since Horror has always been popular and therefore, was easy fodder for producers and publishers looking to make a quick buck.

But genuine expressions of True Horror have emerged from the ghettos of popular culture nonetheless and remain as guideposts. My goal with this blog is to acknowledge familiar acheivements, uncover forgotten or overlooked gems, and to discuss the place of Horror in Art.

That isn’t to say that this will be a genteel expedition into mild goosebumps. I believe that True Horror stabs deep into the unconsious and is more dependent on psychic dislocation than on fear. I believe that fear actually springs from the dislocation that a truly horrifying event generates. Our minds are conditioned to maintain equilibrium but True Horror threatens that by exposing old wounds, exploring terrifying new possibilities, and unleashing primal fears from the oldest corners of human consciousness.

For that reason, I may occasionally stray towards art that shocks and revulses, and may sometimes drift into realms not normally considered part of the Horror domain, such as Film Noir or music. I am, if nothing else, committed to breaking down artifical divisions and classifications that have hindered the development of True Horror in Art.

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
Edgar Allan Poe