100 Scariest Movie Moments: #17 A Nightmare on Elm Street

This is a series I’m a little reluctant to deal with, because my view of the franchise is so at odds with the rest of the horror community.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. However, I find the (usually despised) Freddy’s Revenge, and Freddy vs Jason to be the only enjoyable sequels. I feel that Dream Warriors, (typically regarded as the second best in the series,) turned it from horror franchise into an unusually violent Saturday-morning cartoon. And the series remained exactly that until FvJ.

The premise of the film is well known by now. Years before the film is set, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was a child-killer who was set free on a technicality. The parents of his victims hunted him down and burned him alive. So now, the surviving children of the parents who killed him are being attacked in their dreams, and are somehow dying real and bloody deaths.

For me at least, Englund’s performance as Freddy is easily the best thing about this film. The idea of being attacked in my sleep doesn’t bother me that much personally, as nightmares usually wake me up instantly. However, the idea of being under assault by Robert Englund, armed with razor-sharp claws, is unnerving.

The kids are, for the most part, well-acted. Our decoy protagonist, Tina (Amanda Wyss), is killed fairly early in the film, with Freddy framing her boyfriend Rod (Jsu Garcia), before killing him in his jail cell. The movie then shifts to Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), assisted by her less-than-competent friend Glen (Johnny Depp).

Langenkamp gives the best performance of the film after Englund himself, making us believe that she’s someone who can stay rational under fire. I am a little confused by why Freddy let her live so much longer than the others, but I'm certainly happy for it. (The remake made it clear he had molested all of them and was the most obsessed with her; one of the few positive changes.) I don’t think any of the other actors could have carried the confrontation with the same level of intensity. Nancy eventually determines that it’s possible to bring things from the dream world into the real world by grabbing onto them, so she attempts to go into the dream and drag Freddy out into the real world where he can be killed.

If the movie has a weak point, it’s John Saxon as Nancy’s father, Lt. Don Thompson. The movie clearly wants to emphasize that this is a coming-of-age story by showing him to be both an overprotective father, and a completely useless cop. He nearly shoots Rod for being near his daughter, but is reluctant to go to her when she has Freddy trapped in a bedroom and is screaming for help.

Nancy’s mother (Ronee Blakely) establishes the element of the protective but incapable parent far more effectively. She provides exposition, telling us the full story, and assuring her daughter of Freddy’s demise. She also shows us how her guilt over killing Krueger drove her to drink. Furthermore, unlike her husband, she recognizes that something strange is going on, even as she denies that Freddy could strike out from beyond.

The end of the movie was changed at the last minute by executive mandate. Nancy denies Freddy’s existence, and the entire film is revealed to be a dream. Freddy’s victims are alive again, and Nancy’s mother is giving up drinking. But then, when Nancy gets into a car with her friends, the car turns out to be possessed by Freddy, and he shows up to kill her mother. The whole “Happy Ending” was just a moment of hope created by the invincible Freddy.

Craven wanted the film to end on a happy note, with Freddy unambiguously defeated, and claims that the change was made to allow for sequels. However, the producer disputes this claim, saying that he felt that the original ending was simply boring, and that the final shock was a way of going out on a high note. I’m actually on the side of the executives in this case, because ending such a dark movie with everyone coming back to life and everything being perfect would have felt like bad parody.

We could debate the quality of the sequels until the end of time. However, the original incarnation of Freddy Krueger is an icon of horror. The only other horror icon who is so brought to life purely by the performance of his actor is Pinhead (Doug Bradley) from the Hellraiser series. And I don’t think there’s a horror fan out there who doesn’t get creeped out when they hear the words “One, two, Freddy’s comin’ for you.” This is a performance that will long outlive its actor.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #18 The Haunting

This movie should really be somewhere in the top ten. It’s a film about not only what you don’t see, but what you legitimately don’t know. It’s a movie in which the mentally ill protagonist is probably more reliable than any other character in the film. I personally assume that there’s a supernatural element in the movie, but where it begins and where it ends is debatable, because I don’t think there’s a single event in this film for which a rational explanation couldn’t be provided.

The story is told primarily through the eyes of a girl named Eleanor, or Nell for short (Julie Harris). While never stated overtly, it’s strongly implied that Nell suffers from some form of mental illness that causes her family to view her as entirely dependent. However, before her mother died, Nell had spent the last ten years caring for her. And now she blames herself for her mother's death.

Nell is invited by Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) to stay overnight at a “haunted” mansion called Hill House, and she jumps at the chance to escape her controlling sister and brother-in-law; determined to never return. How she intends to accomplish this with whatever she can earn from staying overnight in this house is not elaborated upon, and I think it’s likely a sign of her mental state that she believes such an escape can be so easily achieved.

Markway invited several people with paranormal experiences to the house as an experiment to demonstrate the existence of the supernatural by stirring it up with their presence. Unfortunately for the experiment, only two of them show up. Nell (who may have encountered a poltergeist as a child), and a supposedly psychic woman named Theo (Claire Bloom). The cast is then rounded off by Luke (Russ Tamblyn), a young man who stands to inherit the house, and has been charged by his family’s Matriarch to oversee the experiment.

The fact that the house may be haunted and that Nell is clearly unwell already provide a great deal of ambiguity as to what’s going on. Anything that we learn exclusively from her perspective may be distorted. However, the rest of the cast are all so dubious in their motives that there’s a layer to it beyond this. Each and every member of the experiment has a motivation to deceive the others, and Nell is clearly an easy target for such trickery.

Dr. Markway naturally wants to make sure his “experiment” is a success. However, he never comes across as particularly scientific or rigorous, and you could interpret him either as a deluded fanatic or an outright conman looking to become famous. In fact, even if we give him the benefit of the doubt, he seems like nothing more than a superstitious idiot who got in over his head when he stumbled into a real haunting.

Theo comes across as quite shady herself. She could be a psychic, or a card shark who’s very skilled at cold reading. There are also many hints that she’s sexually attracted to Nell, but she’s manipulative enough that you could just as easily reverse the interpretation and say that Nell is a Lesbian with whom she’s playing mind games. She makes a point of “Reading” Nell’s mind on a number of occasions, but Nell always tends to wear her thoughts on her sleeves anyway

Luke is a rich, spoiled jerk who doesn’t take anything about the experiment seriously. You could certainly see him setting up some of the manifestations of the supernatural as pranks, simply to amuse himself. And just as with Theo, Luke would likely see Nell as the obvious target.

With these factors coming together, we’re left with a troubled woman, surrounded by a pack of wolves, desperate to get away from her family and possibly under siege by spirits. But in spite of this, she begins to fall in love with the house because of the escape it represents.

The house itself is just as ambiguous. On the one hand, we’re told that it was built with bizarre angles to be intentionally disorienting. On the other, there have been a number of strange deaths in the house... or perhaps it’s just natural that a house standing for 90 years would have seen some of its residents meet their end. We’re given the deaths in an eerie flashback. But when you say “two deaths by accident, an old woman died because her nurse was negligent, and a suicide,” it doesn’t sound all that impressive to merit such fear; especially since the first two and the last two were at least half a century apart. Then again, it’s possible that the movie is creating an irrational fear within us, just as the house creates an irrational fear in the characters.

This isn’t a movie that gives you easy answers. All you know is that when people are scared, or when they believe in something, real or not, it can pose a very real threat. Nell’s desperation to stay in the house eventually drives her to her death... or the house just kills her. But in the end, the result is still the same. She prefers death over returning to her life, and so she joins the house.

If you haven’t seen this movie, watch it. Turn off the lights, grab a hand to hold, and it’s perfect for any movie night.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #19 Hellraiser

I think it speaks well of the Hellraiser series that it’s had no real success at being enjoyed ironically. Jason became far more interesting after he devolved into self-parody. I’m not a big fan of the funny Elm Street sequels, but popular culture seems to enjoy that version of Freddy even more than the original. However, Hellraiser IV: Bloodlines, the point at which the series had unquestionably been run into the ground, can find little harbor, even as a comedy. I feel this is because the other two series were always blood-soaked cash-grabs, whereas the original Hellraiser is a true work of art that can’t be improved by pissing on it.

Of course, I am a little biased because Clive Barker is both my favorite writer and my favorite director. Of his three films, I think Hellraiser is actually the weakest (noting that I’ve never seen the Theatrical Cut of Nightbreed). It seems like a more visceral horror film to me, whereas Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions are more psychological in their terror.

The movie revolves around four people: a girl named Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), her father Larry (Andrew Robinson), her step mother Julia (Clare Higgins) , and her uncle Frank (Sean Chapman). Some time ago, Frank attempted to summon “Angels” to bring him “pleasure” by opening an ancient puzzle box called the Lament Configuration, and was sucked into a sadomasochistic alternate universe by creatures called Cenobites. (As it turned out, their definition of “pleasure” wasn’t quite the same as ours.)

The remaining three characters move into the home in which this happened, the one place where Frank still has a link to this universe. When Larry cuts his finger, Frank is able to use the blood to create a skinless, almost meatless skeleton of a body and reveals himself to Julia. Julia, who had an affair with Frank years earlier, then tries to help him form a new body by seducing and murdering men and pouring their blood on the floor.

Eventually, Kirsty gets her hands on the puzzle, and solves it entirely by accident, summons the “Angels” herself. Rather than being dragged away though, Kirsty makes a deal with the self-mutilating Pinhead and the Cenobites to help them take back Frank. The Cenobites turn on her after they get him, but she’s able to escape and the whole affair is a bloody mess.

Such a quick-and-dirty plot summary makes me realize just how weird this movie is. It doesn’t fall neatly into any of the traditional categories of horror. Frank and Julia don’t fit the mold of the Slasher, with their killings being too calculated and pragmatic. Furthermore, while the sequels might venture into Cosmic Horror territory, the first film remains too thoroughly grounded around the house. The Cenobites are present, but limited in their appearances, with Frank and Julia providing most of the conflict.

There have always been heavy sexual themes in Barker’s work, and an argument could be made that they’re negative in their portrayals. I’d say it’s not so much anti-sexual though, as anti-hedonism. He tells the stories of people who get caught up in their own desires, until those desires destroy them, along with everything around them. And if he chooses to focus on sadomasochistic desires, that’s probably because it’s not hard to depict the destruction of such desires taken too far.

Beyond that, he also has an obsession with the human body as something vulnerable. As Julia feeds Frank blood, he gradually goes from little more than a skeleton to a nearly fully-formed person without any skin. It’s explained through dialogue that his capacity for human sensation is returning gradually as he restores his body. He’s effectively a vampire, stealing not only the blood of his victims, but their bodies, and their very capacity to feel.

The visuals of the film are stunning. The Cenobites embody every form of depravity and self-harm, in such a way that we as the audience understand their “pleasures,” while still being horrified by them. We all have our own unsavory desires, and we fear that in the twisted logic of the Cenobites’ minds, we might be calling them.

I know I haven't mentioned Doug Bradley here, but that's because Pinhead in this movie acts largely as the spokesman for the Cenobites. His portrayal is good, but it wasn't until later that he took center-stage. In fact, in much of the franchise his presence is secondary.

I strongly recommend this film, but the same is true of anything associated with Clive Barker. The man is a genius, and it’s a shame that he didn’t direct more movies.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #20 The Ring

It’s sad to me how The Ring has fallen out of public awareness. I think the only parodies I’ve seen of it since the beginning of the decade have been jokes about how outdated VHS technology is. That’s sad, because there are so many other sequences in this film that deserve a place in popular consciousness. Disregarding the girl coming out of the television, there’s also the suicidal horse and the guy electrocuting himself with a horse bit in his mouth. (...If ever a scene has screamed “spoof me!” that was it.) But no! All anyone remembers about this genuinely creepy film is that they used VHS tapes to transmit the curse.

The story is that a tape has somehow started circulating with a series of bizarre images on it. Anyone who watches the video immediately gets a phone call, telling them that they will die in seven days... and so, they die. A journalist, played by Naomi Watts, watches the tape, and finds herself exploring the mystery of its origin. The search becomes more desperate after her young son (David Dorfman) sees the video by mistake, dooming him as well.

The eventual revelation is that a young girl named Samara (Daveigh Chase), with psychic powers, was thrown in a well by her mother, having driven the mother insane, and is lashing out at anyone who watches the tape. I understand that the original Japanese novel had far more in the way of explanation for how all this was possible, but it’s hardly necessary. In my ghost stories, I really don’t expect the ghosts to act rationally; the ghost of a deeply disturbed psychic girl least of all.

The movie serves mainly as a set-up to a series of horrific events, some caused directly by Samara, some in reaction to her. To list them all would waste a great deal of space on plot summary. Most of these events serve only to illustrate one basic point; Samara’s life sucked, but it sucked mainly because people were, quite reasonably, afraid of her. Her father raised horses which panicked when she was around and her mother received horrifying visions. Eventually, she was locked up in a psychiatric institute, filled with people who refused to believe the blatantly obvious fact that she had psychic powers and accused her of lying when she told them the truth.

This leads to a final twist: Samara was, and still is, evil. Even once her body is retrieved from the well, she continues her curse. The only escape is to copy the tape and show it to someone else. It’s something of a bizarre anti-twist, and you can debate how well it actually works. On the one hand, the film was clearly building towards the suggestion that Samara was an innocent little girl, and it seems a little too simplistic to close by saying she’s a cackling, Evil Bitch. On the other hand however, the idea that she was a helpless little girl was so thoroughly telegraphed and fully expected that it’s hard to deny that her being the exact opposite is shocking. And she had enough control over the events leading up to the finale that you can easily argue she manipulated the protagonists, and by extension the audience, into seeing what she wanted them to.

I’m not sure what I have to say about the final moments of the film. Naomi Watts’ character decides to save her son by having him make a copy of the film to show to someone else. The movie doesn’t go out of its way to condemn or condone this, just acknowledging that it is indeed the only way to save the child.

Above all, this movie holds the distinction of actually being visually different in a world of horror movies that all look the same. I at least partially attribute this to the fact that the movie actually had a surprisingly large budget by the standards of horror movies, so that it wasn’t limited to tiny sets, could afford known actors and its special effects consisted of more than splattering blood everywhere.

Watch the movie. Watch it and don’t talk about VHS tapes. This movie is awesome, and the format by which the curse is passed is unimportant.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #21 Jacob's Ladder

I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I went into this movie wanting to hate it. Over the last several years, I’ve made several attempts to watch it, and always given up, simply because I’d convinced myself that I didn’t want to see a movie in which almost everything was a dying hallucination. Now though, finally, I’ve sat down, made myself watch it all the way through the two times that my rules require, and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a movie about death that deals with it in a much more complex manner than “good people go to Heaven, bad people go to Hell.” In fact, the protagonist is tested in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with his morality.

I don’t think the director ever intended to keep the movie’s “Twist” a secret from anyone but the main character. Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) is a dying soldier in Vietnam who’s been severely wounded and exposed to a hallucinogen. Refusing to accept his death, Jacob imagines a hypothetical future life in which he’s divorced from his wife (Patricia Kalember) and married to a woman named “Jezzie,” short for Jezebel (Elizabeth Peña). He has a series of strange experiences in which he begins seeing demons everywhere, and is led to believe the army intentionally gave him an experimental drug in Vietnam and is covering it up. The film ends with him accepting his own death, bringing his suffering to a conclusion.

This film is so wildly open to interpretation that I feel actually reviewing the movie itself would be an exercise in futility (aside from saying that it’s awesome to have so much room for interpretation). Instead, I have to give you my interpretation and review the film based on that.

I have no idea what role the hallucinogens played, but I think the life with Jezzie was created by Jacob’s mind to tie him to the real world and stave off his death. However, I see the demons in this movie as independent entities intruding into the fictional world, taking the form of government agents and sadistic doctors. Likewise, I believe his chiropractor, Louis (Danny Aiello), is an angel.

The thing that’s particularly fascinating about this movie is that Louis and the demons are not actually in opposition. It’s implied they dislike each other (at one point Louis calls them “barbaric,” and asks why they don’t just burn Jacob at the stake and be done with it), but they’re both in opposition to the fabricated life represented by Jezzie. The demons simply represent the stick trying to make Jacob’s suffering too great for him to continue tolerating, and Louis represents the carrot, trying to teach him to give up the attachments that cause his suffering. (Yes, the movie has a strong Buddhist leaning, that’s not really a secret either.) Jezzie on the other hand represents a complete rejection of reality as his own mind tries to force him to keep living.

With any movie that ends with the revelation that it was all a dream, dying or otherwise, the greatest problem is establishing whether or not anything we just saw actually mattered. In this case, I think the movie establishes real stakes with the danger of a self-inflicted Hell. I don’t personally think Jacob could have delayed his actual death inevitably, but I’m fairly certain that the demons (if they were real) weren’t going to give up on “liberating” him just because his heart stopped. We see people who appear to have been in Hell for ages (or perhaps just his projections of what he’s in store for), so we want Jacob to liberate himself quickly.

All this said, I can’t claim to have fully cracked the code of this movie. There are numerous characters who might be angels, demons, or hallucinations… or possibly in their own Hells. There are also scenes with Jacob’s ex-wife which seem to represent a secondary alternate reality in which Jezzie is a dream... or maybe they’re simply flashbacks, and he based the Jezzie-world on a dream he actually had before the war. These are questions I might have to watch the film ten more times to have answered.

It’s been said there’s no cliché that can’t be done well. This movie does a dying dream well, by using it to give us a glimpse of a fascinating and terrifying cosmology. The Universe cares about us, but there’s only so much the Universe can do to protect us from our own self-destructive tendencies. If you pay attention, you’re sure to get something interesting out of the film.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #22 Don't Look Now

Do film’s need to be interpreted outside of their historical context? I think that’s a question which is particularly relevant to movies with twists. For most of cinema history, a twist could set a movie apart from the competition. But now the market has become saturated with them, and twists are usually accepted only if they tie everything which came before together, while disregarding nothing.

That was my initial objection to Don’t Look Now upon my first viewing; the fact that it was a “Gotcha!” in which nothing that happened actually mattered to the conclusion of the narrative. However, re-examining it, I find it to actually have some interesting themes, and I believe that I can see the intention behind it more clearly.

The movie ends with John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) being murdered by a dwarf in a red rain coat. He believed the dwarf to be the spirit of his deceased daughter, who he’d been mourning for much of the film. However, the dwarf was actually a serial killer who’d been committing murders throughout Venice.

The reason I originally rejected this movie as a “Gotcha!” was that it presented itself as supernatural and I believed that the reveal killed this. After the death of their daughter by drowning, John and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) travel from England to Venice, as he’s been commissioned to restore an Italian Cathedral. (I don’t believe his exact job description is ever stated, but I can say “architect,” for lack of a better word).

However, re-examining it, I begin to see the significance of the supernatural in this film. Laura meets with a pair of sisters, Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania). Heather, who is blind, claims to be psychic, and also claims that John has the gift, unbeknowest to him. John doesn’t believe in psychics, but begins to see the figure in the red rain coat as they travel around Venice.

Does it seem contradictory that John eventually follows his own gift to his death at the hands of a completely mundane serial killer? Not at all. Throughout the film, Heather gives dire warnings and they are given reasons to leave. Their son suffers an accident, causing Laura to return to England even as John stays. He uses the premise of “finishing his commission,” but the audience is well aware that he wants to follow the red raincoat. Furthermore, John sees a premonition of the sisters and his wife onboard what he fails to recognize as his own funeral barge, leading him to issue a missing persons report for his wife who he falsely believes to have remained in Venice.

Whatever else you can say about it, John is chasing a specter. He wants “proof” of the survival of his daughter’s soul, even while her soul is telling him to run and not look back. By the end we recognize that he’s ignoring legitimate warnings from beyond, simply because he caught a glimpse of a red raincoat that happens to be like the one his daughter wore when she drowned.

The horror of this movie, at least to me, is that we really shouldn’t be questioning these things. The forces of Good & Evil are far beyond our immediate concerns, and when they deign to give us a warning, we’re not supposed to sit around and look for further evidence! We’re supposed to run like Hell! His daughter’s spirit has absolutely no interest in her existence being demonstrated to anyone whose life isn’t in immediate mortal peril.

I do recommend this movie. It’s a bit slow, a bit stilted, and I still haven’t fully forgiven Donald Sutherland for messing up the Buffy movie, but it’s a challenging film if you have any belief in the spiritual.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #23 Rosemary's Baby

Ah, another film by rapist Roman Polanski. To all those that defend him and want him to keep making movies, there are plenty of prisons that allow prisoners to study broadcasting and other related trades. I’m sure those programs could be adapted to help him continue making movies from his rightful place under lock and key. Think about it! A prison film, made in prison, by prisoners, and directed by Roman Polanski... who is himself one of the prisoners!

Anyway, to deal with the actual subject of the movie, Mia Farrow plays Rosemary, a young woman who moves into a nice apartment with her struggling actor husband (John Cassavetes) who has suddenly started receiving movie offers. Rosemary has a “dream” in which all of her neighbors and her husband take part in a Satanic ritual in which the Devil rapes her... and a short time later she finds out that she’s pregnant.

The movie has some obvious similarities to Polanski’s The Tenant, and together with his film Repulsion they are considered a loose trilogy. As I have not yet seen Repulsion though, I must limit myself to commentary on the other two. Both films deal with a person living in an urban setting who fears that their neighbors are attempting to manipulate them for some sinister purpose. The key difference here is that Rosemary’s fear is eventually resolved, whereas we never find out if Trelkovsky was insane or not. I could say I prefer that latter, but I’m not sure this story would have worked without a final reveal.

The fact that the baby is the anti-Christ is so well known at this point that I’m a little uncertain how I use that in interpreting the movie. Rosemary clearly believes that the baby is intended to be a sacrifice, but I’m not entirely sure Polanski intended for us to buy that. If he did, he likely would have been more ambiguous in showing who raped Rosemary. Instead he makes it clear that the Devil did the deed personally. So then, my interpretation is that Rosemary is simply too confused to clearly remember or understand what happened, causing her to come to the wrong conclusion, while we as the audience have already been clued in.

I’d also like to think that most viewers would see the movie itself as somewhat paranoid in light of the Satanic Panic in the 80’s, in which fear of Satanists abusing and sacrificing children led to numerous innocent people being jailed. Unfortunately, recent movies like Annabelle show that a disturbing number of people are still willing to pay to be told that a secret group of Satanists are somehow a threat to our very civilization.

Putting those issues aside however, the fear presented in this movie still feels very real. Rosemary is a housewife with her husband in complete control of her life. He decides where she lives, he decides who she socializes with and he controls what doctor she sees. He’s able to cut her off from outside influences, and if he wants to sell her womb to the Devil to get better acting gigs, then he’s going to do exactly that.

Rosemary’s position is not helped by the fact that anyone not in the cult generally assumes her to be hallucinating. At one point, she does run away and goes to her former doctor (Charles Grodin). I imagine today a doctor who had a pregnant woman come to him with a mortal fear of her husband would have a reaction other than calling the husband to come get her and threatening to send her to a mental hospital if she didn’t stop talking about witches.

The ending of the movie, while revealing the Satanic cult to be real, remains fairly ambiguous. The cult tries to convince Rosemary that her baby died while keeping her drugged, and taking her milk which they claim to “throw away.” However, Rosemary is able to make a final escape, discover the coven… and join them. Naturally, they’re more than happy to have the Anti-Christ’s mother helping them to raise him of her own free will. However, to the audience, Rosemary’s motivation remains unclear. It’s uncertain if she has legitimately been converted, if she simply wants more freedom or if she wants to raise her baby and doesn’t care about the circumstances. In the novel, her hope was to raise the baby to reject his father, but there’s no clear indication of this in the film.

Despite my utter hatred of Polanski the human being, I can only recommend this film. Yes, it’s dated, but still relatable. The atmosphere is creepy and the performances are all good. The decision to make all the Satanists seem like completely ordinary people from different walks of life benefits the film immensely, as it adds to the paranoia while also giving a sense of realism. Mia Farrow could have given more than one Hollywood leading lady lessons in how to play a distressed woman without seeming helpless or incompetent. In conclusion, this is just a really well-made film.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #24 Suspiria

I must open with a confession: my copy of Suspiria contains only an English-dub rather than the original Italian. It’s far from the worst dub I’ve ever seen and it generally works for wide-shots, but it becomes at least noticeable in close-ups. Still, I regret not having the original performances to base my opinion on.

One thing that should probably be noted about this film is that it was originally written to be about a dance academy for young girls, but there was a serious fear the film would be banned, so they simply cast adult women instead. The dialogue wasn’t really changed, and as such, the dance academy comes across oddly as a boarding school for women in their 20s. I suppose it’s possible they could be teenagers since I don’t recall any mention of age. This doesn’t really hurt the film, though. In fact, it gives it the sense of a nightmare. Who among us hasn’t dreamed that we were back in school, with our lives still being run by authority figures?

The plot involves a famous dancer, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), coming to a prestigious dance academy. Deaths and strange occurrences surround the academy. A girl who was just expelled is assaulted, stabbed and hanged at a nearby house. Maggots fall from the ceiling. A previously passive dog becomes strangely violent and eventually kills his owner. And while in some cases the special effects may be a bit outdated, they’re always frightening.

I somewhat wish the movie gave us less explanation. This is partially because the explanation we do get is the standard ‘Evil Witch’ bullshit. The dance academy, as it turns out, was founded by a witch named Helena Markos, and is still run by her coven. In the dub at least, the old professor who conveniently shows up to summarize what’s going on even conveniently says that witches can use their powers “only to do harm.”

Beyond that however, the explanation really seems unneeded and out of place. The unknown is scary, so why go out of your way to make it known? Particularly when the scene that explains everything seems completely out of place and could be cut from the movie without really losing much. It seems to be the point at which Suzy becomes a more active protagonist, working against the evil forces running the Academy. But I certainly think such an epiphany could have occurred independently of that. People are disappearing, her friends included, so why shouldn’t she take action?

The musical score of Suspiria is one thing that’s particularly notable. I’m far from an expert on music, but even I can tell it’s not the kind of mix that you get in most classic horror films. Bells are combined with a synthesizer, creating an eerie sound. I’m not going to say I’ve never heard anything like it before, but if I have, I imagine it’s only because other films ripped off this one.

The cinematography is also amazing. There’s a heavy use of red lighting throughout the film. You could call it corny, but as I said, this is a nightmare. Yes, it’s true that on a logical level, the extensive use of red lighting might as well be replaced with director Dario Argento running through the set splashing red paint on everything, as if we don’t already get the idea of blood and death. But on an irrational level though, it’s still scary. In our primal instincts, the red is scary.

The ending is a let-down. She confronts the witch (Lela Svasta), the witch turns invisible, and she stabs her anyway. The scene is still beautiful, but it gets way too talky as the witch begins gloating. She even goes out of her way to name herself as “Helena Markos,” just in case the audience thought she was confronting a different evil witch whose death caused the entire dance academy to spontaneously catch fire.

Yes, I recommend this film. It could have been better, but it’s definitely good. The story isn’t the point, it’s the visual style of Dario Argento. I’m somewhat curious to see the thematic sequels, Inferno and Mother of Tears. The latter especially, as it was made in the 2000s, a good three decades after the original. I would love to see how it compares.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #25 Phantasm

Phantasm is pure guilty pleasure. It’s the kind of movie that you enjoy, but you find yourself desperately trying to justify your enjoyment. The film was shot on a low budget with an outline instead of a script. Director Don Coscarelli mostly used his friends and acquaintances from previous films who he grabbed whenever they were available, since most of them had other projects they were involved with or other jobs.

This style of shooting creates a movie in which characters frequently spell out important plot points and events often seem to simply happen. While it’s normal for horror movies to open with an expendable character’s murder, in this film, the character is established in the next scene as a friend of the protagonist’s, and the film attempts to continue milking the death of this person we never knew for drama.

So then, what makes the movie good? I’d say it’s one of the few films to ever properly capture the logic of a dream. The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), a mysterious local undertaker, is an alien from another universe. He takes the bodies of the recently deceased (far more than a single funeral home should ever have access to), reanimates them, shrinks them down and sends them back to his home universe as slaves. It’s necessary to shrink them down because of the higher gravity of his home universe. Also, he uses flying spheres with blades to attack people, because his attack midgets aren’t sufficient. This is exactly the kind of bizarro stuff that I experience when I have bad dreams.

This sort of reality allows Phantasm to get away with giving the Tall Man the ability to do pretty much whatever is most convenient at a given moment. He can teleport when he’s off screen. He has super strength, except when he doesn’t. A door will magically open for him, but he has to punch his way through a window. Even beyond him, events within the movie can be undone, as characters die and come back to life because the story wasn’t done with them yet.

I’m not sure how to interpret the ending. This movie may have been the origin of the old “all a dream...or was it?” cliché. Only, there isn’t a question mark here. The main character, Mike (Michael Baldwin), wakes up to find that his brother (Bill Thornbury) died by means other than those depicted in the film, and he’s now the ward of his brother’s friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister), who’d also died. The final shot with the Tall Man returning and attacking through a mirror establishes that the events weren’t merely a dream. So then, what happened? Did he wipe their memories? If so, why bring back Reggie?

I understand that many consider Phantasm 2 an improvement over the first. But I have yet to see it, and I’m interested in how they even address the events of the first film. That said, I’m not sure I want my confusion at the ending of the first film to be resolved. It’s that atmosphere of the truly bizarre that makes the film enjoyable, not any story elements that could be carried over to the next movie. (You’ll notice how long it took me in this review to even mention any character’s other than The Tall Man himself).

I definitely recommend checking this movie out. It’s weird fun.