View image Don't look now, little girl, but the children of rage (mummy's rage) are about to get you.
Los Dias de los Muertos begin today, October 31 (aka "Halloween") through November 2 (aka All Souls Day -- and Tara Mulan Sweeney's birthday). Time to recycle my appreciation of four critically undervalued horror movies from a few years back: David Cronenberg's "The Brood," Roman Polanski's "The Tenant," Neil Jordan's "In Dreams," and John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" ("The critics were horrified!!!!"):
Critics can be particularly rough on horror pictures. It's so easy -- too easy, sometimes -- to make these spook-shows sound risible and preposterous in synopsis, especially once you remove them from the darkness of the theater and examine them them in the harsh light of black and white newsprint (or monitor pixels). But the horror films I like best are not the abundantly bloody shockers critics love to loathe (though George Romero's extravagantly gory Grand Guignol "Dawn of the Dead" is a treasured favorite), but the ones that are the most atmospheric and creepy -- that suggest far more than they depict.Continue reading here...
I'm always glad to see "The Brood" get some love. His style and vision were fully formed from the beginning. People who hated his early work and are loving him now should go look at films like "Rabid" and "The Brood" again. That's the same man at work, with the same obsessions and the same visual sensibility. By the way, I loved your Close-Up movie/post/essay. Forgive my plug, but it was one of my inspirations for a Halloween photo-essay I made for my horror film blog at www.zombievamp.blogspot.com
Great choices (In Dreams is the only one I haven't seen), especially Brood and Tenant, which are, depending on the day, my favorite films by each of their directors. Cronenberg's always called the former his Kramer vs. Kramer, as well as his only film devoid of humor. Of a filmography full of both deep and shallow thematic and stylistic connections, The Brood remains by far his most personal and harrowing examination of the body's ability to externalize personal, psychic trauma, and I'm glad I'm not alone in praising its, as you say, "fully realized" disturbing and chilly earnestness.
Well I consider myself a fan of horror, but I haven't seen any of these! I've been catching up on Cronenberg's earlier work recently (much of which I haven't seen), as well as Carpenter. Within the past few months, I've watched Scanners and Escape From New York for the first time. I liked them both, but wouldn't consider them among the finest work from either director.
That said, I stil have a lot of catching up to do regarding each of their 70's and 80's films. Now having read this article of yours again, I think I might start with Prince of Darkness and The Brood.
I'd be interested to know your early-Carpenter and early-Cronenberg favorites, Jim. Mine would probably be Videodrome and The Thing, which are two of my favorite movies, period.
My only problem with The Brood in watching it was the lead actor was so stiff, was so poorly miscast, it was really difficult for me to believe what was happening to him. It's interesting how one piece of the puzzle can ruin the whole picture sometimes.
"Prince of Darkness" is a kind of forgotten Carpenter flick, and probably the one that induces the greatest feeling of dread. I still remember snippets of the professor's lecture about "everything" dies ("fruit rots, water flows downstream," etc.). And hey, it's got Alice Cooper!
Another critically panned film, "8mm" (Nicholas Cage, James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare, Juoquin Phoenix), also produces some of the same dreadful feelings.
Ebert's old collegue Gene Siskel used to differentiate good horror from that which induced guilt and despair because of their cruelty and low morality. This is not what we usually want in fright films. "Prince" and "8mm" rise above, I feel, because both force viewers to contemplate real notions of evil in ways that I would argue are thrilling, maybe even cathartic.
I'm also in the camp of "8MM" fans; I was frankly amazed a movie that bleak was released commercially as a star vehicle. And grateful; the movie works quite well.
There's a Japanese movie, not released here in the U.S., that stands apart from the waves of J-Horror productions by dint of being a) based on a true story and b) centered around the same sense of guilt and trammeled morality that is hinted at in the other movies here. "Concrete" is the name, and it's a dramatization (with many fictional liberties) of an incident where a teenaged girl was kidnapped off the street in broad daylight by four boys her age, then held in one of their houses and tortured for weeks on end until she died of her injuries. It's actually more of a true-crime flick, where (to quote Ebert's words about another movie) people with no real moral guidance drift into actions so hideous even they're appalled by them.