The Morbid Imagination

In the course of writing this blog, it dawned on me that most of the movies I was praising fell in one decade. But it was not the 1930s, during the height of  Universal Studios’ horror cycle, or the 1980s, as the Academy Awards would have us believe. No, in my opinion, the 1960s was the Golden Age of Horror Movies.

The ground for a horror renaissance was laid in the prior decade. Horror  went through a long drought in the 1950s, as science fiction took its place at the dark end of the cinema production line. Even movies like The Werewolf (1956) or Frankenstein 1970 (1958) had to provide a scientific basis for their monsters. Universal Studios turned away from mist shrouded castles and flapping bats to the creeping cold war paranoia of Jack Arnold.

Then in 1957 Hammer Films released The Curse of Frankenstein,  launching a whole new horror cycle. The timing of the film was perfect, aligning with both the release to TV of Universal’s monster classics and the loosening of limitations on sex and violence in movies worldwide. Hammer quickly followed up with Dracula (1958) and science fiction began to fade before the onslaught of blood, cleavage, and the undead.

The decade of the 1960s opened with two startling classics: Peeping Tom and Psycho. Both were sexually frank shockers helmed by highly regarded directors; Psycho was a smash at the box office, Peeping Tom was buried under a wave of revulsion by critics. The success of Psycho created a wave over the next few years of one word/insane killer movies: Paranoiac, Strait-Jacket, Berserk!,  Homicidal, Maniac, etc…

The rest of the year included such minor gems as: Blood and Roses, Eyes Without a Face, and Black Sunday.  But most significantly, spurred on by the success of Hammer, in 1960 Roger Corman began his Poe cycle with The Fall of the House of Usher.

1961 ushered in Jack Clayton’s subtle masterpiece, The Innocents and Curtis Harrington’s equally subtle Night Tide. 1962 featured the eerie minor classic, Carnival of Souls and introduced Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to horror with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock returned to horror with The Birds, Robert Wise paid chilling tribute to his days with Val Lewton with The Haunting, and Francis Ford Coppola got his break in movies with Dementia 13.

Japan contributed two classics in 1964: Kwaidan and Onibaba. Roger Corman released the twin apogees of the Poe cycle: Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia.

1965 featured Roman Polanski’s masterpiece of degenerating sanity, Repulsion.  Two minor, overlooked films, The Nanny with Betty Davis and The Collector with Terence Stamp provided nice bookends for Polanski’s masterwork. Milton Subotsky, taking his cue from Dead of Night (1945) established the horror anthology film with Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors.

In 1968, two sub-genres of horror films were spawned by Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (The Religious Horror Movie) and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (Zombies).

All throughout this period, Hammer was releasing a flood of movies, some of which (Brides of Dracula, Curse of the Werewolf, The Gorgon, Plague of the Zombies, The Devil Rides Out) were really terrific. The Italian Horror Film industry churned out a steady stream of titles, of variable quality. Hundreds of lesser films rounded out double bills at drive-ins with titles like Spider Baby, I Eat Your Skin, Blood Feast, or the memorably named Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

This was the period when sex and violence were married to horror films forever. Hammer’s trailblazing moved from cleavage to nudity and their trickles of blood on Dracula’s chin or severed limbs in Frankenstein’s lab were quickly surpassed by others, like Hershell Gordon Lewis, with fountains of blood and heaps of guts. It’s interesting to note, however, how few of the movies I highlighted were explicit, although most at least featured suppressed but tangible sex, violent shocks, or both. Note also how many of these movies were filmed in black and white and did not need to show red blood or naked pink skin to achieve their ends.

You could put together a list of the best Horror Films in other decades, and it would be likely be an impressive list. But the high end of the 1960s horror cycle surpasses any other decade because it includes the greatest number of intelligent and artistic Horror Movies ever attempted. These movies often featured real characters in situations where the supernatural element was suggestive or missing completely. Some of these movies were directed by men who were either at the height of their skills or just beginning their brilliant careers.

As the doors to more explicit violence and sex opened wider in the 1970s, Horror Films began to settle into the modern pattern of gore effects, gratuitous nudity, and not very subtle shocks. What was left behind was a sense that the Horror movie was not a restrictive, cheap form, but a vehicle for the highest levels of expression. There have been exceptions since then, of course, but these were exceptions. In the 1960s, Horror as Art was the rule, and that is why the 1960s ruled as the Golden Age of Horror Movies.

It may seem somewhat out of sync with this blog’s promotion of quieter, more refined horror movies, but I do believe that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is the greatest horror movie of all time.

In my previous post, I spotlighted several contenders for Greatest Horror Movie, stating that they were perfectly rendered portraits of alienness and inhuman evil. TCM transcends them in that regard, and in intensity. In fact, I think TCM is the most intense movie ever made, with dread preying on the viewer’s nerves from the very first frames and no real letup in stress until the final shot.

TCM delivers a straightforward message: the world is a brutal place, with murderous, awful forces lurking just around the corner waiting for innocents to stray into its web. The same thesis underlies every clumsily made slasher movie, but the difference here is in intent and execution. TCM is not seeking to merely thrill or titillate, it aims to bludgeon the viewer and disconnect their ties to the reassuring promise of normal movie conventions.

What separatesTCM and the slasher movies that followed (including the lame remake) is the difference between a normal roller coaster ride and one where the people in the car in front of you are decapitated and dismembered and you are showered with their blood.

The key sequence in TCM begins when two of the teenagers find a normal looking farmhouse off the road and decide to see if they can find a phone. This includes the famous low angle shot of Teri McMinn walking languidly up to the front door. Moments later, she is hanging from a meathook. That follows the stunning ambush murder of her boyfriend by Leatherface. All aspects of normalcy vanish in those minutes and the rest of the film is a blur of horror and suspense.

It’s clear that director Tobe Hooper intended the farmhouse and its evil inhabitants to stand in for early 1970s America and the disintegrating family. Inside a facade of normalcy lies madness, evil and rot. The cannibal family mirrors the stock family of TV sitcoms: the weak and ineffective Dad, the troublemaking son, and a transvestite hulk wearing a human skin mask standing in for Mom. It’s “Mom” who punishes and chases out the interloping young girl in confusing suggestions of predatory sex and oedipal violence.

Hooper’s documentary style, along with the shockingly realistic, yet discreet violence, unsettles the viewer in ways that the typical slickly produced modern horror film does not. It is Hooper’s unwillingness to soften the impact of the violence and madness in TCM that elevates it above so many other films in the genre. Hooper’s genius is to spare the bloody details of the victim’s deaths without shortchanging their brutal impact.

Like Psycho or Repulsion, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a film with roots in exploitation that transcends shock value with artistry, honesty, and a willingness to assault the viewer’s normal assumptions. All great horror films remove the safety net from the audience at some point; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does that from beginning to end. True horror is not redemptive, it is damaging, and it is the damage done to the viewer that no other film has matched since.

In my last post, I made the case that Roman Polanksi’s Repulsion (1965) merited consideration as one of the greatest horror movies of all time. What other films should be on that list?

How about the film that inspired Repulsion, along with dozens of other movies in the early 1960s? Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) was a box office smash and a cultural milestone. It didn’t invent the psycho killer movie (that might have been Hitchcock’s own film The Lodger) but it cemented it as a distinct genre and laid down some of the rules. (Killer driven by childhood trauma, hidden identity, shower scenes, etc…) It’s fair to say that, without Psycho, there would have been no Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), or Repulsion.

What makes Psycho such a great horror film? I think that it is the collision of the seamy, everyday small evils of flawed humans with murderous, inhumanly insane evil. It’s not that Marion Crane deserves her awful fate but that her own very human weaknesses and desires lands her in a place where real evil awaits. Psycho gets us to identify with Marion, feel ashamed for sharing voyeuristicthrills with her killer, experience horror at the final revelation, all at the same time. Brilliant.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is also a psycho killer film, but one turned inside out. While following the pursuit of one killer we meet one that is ten times worse, but safely incarcerated. Instead of a familiar, linear string of spectacular murders, we are drawn in to the interplay between the insecure young FBI agent and the deadly, brilliant Hannibal Lecter. In fact, only three people die during the course of the movie, one of them the killer Jamie Gumb at the hands of Agent Starling.

What makes The Silence of the Lambs a great horror movie? For me, it is the slow buildup of the character of Hannibal Lecter. We hear all kinds of anecdotes about how terrible and dangerous he is, but his scenes with Agent Starling render him almost likable. Then he escapes and in the course of doing so, confirms every fear that he is not only dangerous but utterly inhuman and evil. He is the bogeyman, and the lamer, lesser bogeyman is brought to justice but he escapes.

My final runner-up for greatest horror movie is Freaks (1932). Directed by Tod Browning, Freaks remains the most unexpected mainstream film release ever. In the successful horror movie cycle that began a year early with Browning’s Dracula, Freaks was greenlit without much apprehension. Imagine the shock that studio executives experienced when Browning delivered a film where physically repellent mutants were the sympathetic figures and “normal” humans were the monsters.

What makes Freaks a great horror movie? It’s the fact that after making us comfortable with the freaks, Browning turns things around in the last act and makes them figures of horror wrenched up from our ids. The final effect is disorienting, leaving us questioning the nature of humanity.

I have narrowed the list of what I consider the greatest horror movies down to these four and my final choice based on the fact that I consider all of them perfect films that could not have been improved in any way. There are other films like Frankenstein (1931), Night of the Living Dead (1968), or Peeping Tom (1960) which are great horror films, but which in some way or another just miss the cut.

Also, what these five movies all share is that they render alienness and inhumanity in ways that burrow deep into our subconcious and make the threat they pose more than just existential. We might not only die, these films say, but we may die at the hands of something that comes out of the darkness in our own souls and minds. 

Next post: The Greatest Horror Movie Ever.

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) is one of a handful of movies worthy of consideration as the greatest horror movies of all time. It merits this status due to an intelligent blend of skillfully delivered shocks, a pervasive sense of claustrophobia, and an uncompromising commitment to ambiguity.

Repulsion is a deceptively simple film. A young girl, Carol, who seems out of synch with the world around her, is left alone in the apartment she shares with her sister when her sister goes on  a two week holiday with her married boyfriend. Left alone, Carol slowly descends into madness, with tragic consequences.

Like some other great horror films, Repulsion establishes a sense of dread and dislocation from the opening shots. It’s clear that Carol (brilliantly portrayed by the beautiful Catherine Deneuve) is not quite right. But it isn ‘t until she is left alone that eccentricity devolves into hallucinogenic madness. The walls come alive, she is assaulted by imaginary figures, and the apartment itself degenerates along with her mind.

Repulsion was originally intended as a exploitation shocker, but it was transformed when Roman Polanski was hired to direct. He co-wrote the script and insisted that Gilbert Taylor be brought in as Cinematographer. Taylor, who had done brilliant black and white work on Dr. Strangelove (1964) brought the same masterful use of shadow and light to Repulsion.

Perhaps the best thing about Repulsion is that Polanski refuses to explain Carol’s madness and that he does little to make her a sympathetic figure. She is neither a cartoonish raving maniac nor a victim of some past trauma; she is merely alien, out of step with the world around her and devoid of normal emotional reactions.

Like Peeping Tom (1960) and Psycho (1960), Repulsion rises above its exploitation foundation to deliver shocks and chills, but also to leave indelible images of horror behind in the mind of the viewer.