100 Scariest Movie Moments: #2 Alien

Alien is a film that has been analyzed in every conceivable way by every person to have ever believed themselves to be worthy of analyzing movies. And the usual interpretations are that it’s either a story about the horror of rape, or a haunted house film in which the audience has an answer to “why don’t they get out of the house?” (It’s space, so there’s nowhere to go.)

I certainly don’t claim either of these interpretations to be wrong. They both have perfectly valid logic behind them. However, I’ve found myself connecting to the film on a slightly different level, by focusing on what comes after the rape; a horrifying, painful pregnancy and a “child” who is destructive and dangerous. To me, this is fundamentally a story about the horror of bad pregnancy and a bad offspring. Now go and watch Prometheus with the assumption that it’s an inversion of the Alien formula, and is about a repressive parent... it just improved a lot, didn’t it?

The film is surprisingly realistic by the standards of horror films, which all too often function only because people in them are idiots. Instead, this film has people making mistakes that seem logical, at least for a fairly undisciplined cargo crew. It’s true the entire plot is set off because they ignored quarantine procedures, but they only did so because they feared for the life of one of their shipmates (John Hurt) who’d been attacked by an alien organism.

As it turns out, the thing that assaulted him had also impregnated him with yet another alien organism which eventually bursts out of his chest and begins growing and attempting to kill the crew. It’s a very simple premise, and it works mainly because the film is so well directed, acted and designed.

The main complication that happens later in the film is the revelation that the company the crew works for set up the entire scenario to capture an alien specimen for research, and that their science officer, Ash (Ian Holm) is an android sent to make sure that this is exactly what happens. This is clearly a terrifying realization to the crew, but I’m not sure how much it really affects the film for the audience. The idea of evil Mega Corporations sacrificing people for profits is an old cliché, although perhaps not as old when the film was made. Ash is dispatched quite quickly, with his parting words wishing them luck. In a more modern film, he likely would have been kept alive to provide a secondary threat to the crew, and I’m torn on whether this would have been preferable.

Eventually, the crew is whittled down to just Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). Any modern viewer will know this because of Ripley’s now-legendary status as an unstoppable badass movie heroine developed in later movies. Here though, she’s at best presented as slightly smarter than the other members of the crew, and her survival seems to be largely a matter of luck. She spent most of the movie as one member of an ensemble.

The final showdown is a let-down. There’s no denying that. Ripley blows up the ship, but makes it out in an escape pod, not realizing the alien made it in there as well. The Xenomorph costume is just too cheesy when we finally get a good look at it, and the film might have been better off without a final shock. However, that’s a fairly minor criticism for a movie that’s otherwise truly amazing.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #3 The Exorcist

As all film buffs know, the 70s is widely regarded as the greatest decade in American film history. I’ve mentioned this before. The censorship of the Hayes Code had been lifted and the Film Brats were hard at work reinventing cinema. Sadly though, their egos got the better of them. They spent way too much money on vanity projects and the whole house of cards came crashing down upon them, leading to the bureaucratic mess that Hollywood is today.

My personal view is that the 70s were separated from the rest of American film history not by talent, (there are filmmakers today who could do exactly what the Film Brats did,) but by a rejection of genre. Every film that gets funded or released nowadays must be easy to classify. In and of itself, that’s not horrible, it certainly meets Poe’s requirement for a “Single Effect.” But it also prevents many of our films from striving for real greatness or expanding their scope to show a complete world. For example, Guardians of the Galaxy became an unexpected hit by giving us just the smallest taste of a movie that was slightly (very slightly) fuzzy about how to classify it.

The Exorcist embodies this genreless spirit of the 70s. Were the film made today, we would either see Egypt only in small rooms by night, or we’d be told about it. After all, seeing wide landscapes and Egyptian dig sites are strictly reserved for adventure films (hence the genre shift of the Brendan Frasier Mummy movies). Muslim calls to prayer must be reserved for political thrillers, bashing us over the head with commentary on oil politics. If there are scenes between a mother and daughter in a horror film, then they must be ominous, never heart-warming or sweet. And how dare a horror film offer commentary on the politics of Vietnam!

Certainly though, pop-culture has put The Exorcist back in a box. Literally, all most people remember about this movie is a priest yelling at a possessed little girl in a bedroom and being vomited on. Hell, I don’t think most people even remember that it was Father Karras (Jason Miller) who was vomited on and not Father Merrin (Max von Sydow).

The effect is that this film takes place in a real, functional world. These are people with pre-existing lives to whom horrible things happen. The majority of the film is spent observing Regan (Linda Blair), a young girl, and her mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn), a famous actress. Until the final act, the movie closely resembles The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a movie that would come out decades later and be hailed as original for only ripping off the parts of this movie that pop-cultural osmosis didn’t preserve in the collective consciousness.

Regan begins showing signs of mental illness, believing herself to be under supernatural assault, stumping doctors and psychiatrists. Eventually, her mother calls in Father Karras, a priest trained as a psychiatrist undergoing a crisis of faith following the death of his mother. He finds the evidence to be conflicting, walking a line between mental illness and possession.

The final act of the film, the part that most people remember, is actually the least interesting part to me. Father Karras, at the urging of his superiors, calls in a more experienced demonologist, Father Merrin, to perform the exorcism itself. Suddenly, we start seeing head-spinning, bed-floating, and a demon that can jump victim-to-victim. I much prefer the earlier parts of the film where Regan’s status was left far more ambiguous. That’s not to say the movie’s final act is bad by any means. It’s creepy as hell, using special effects to their full capacity. What we see isn’t treated as simply a show for the viewer, but as something truly sick and unnatural.

The movie’s treatment of the issue is actually much more sensitive than Emily Rose. Even the doctors, who are shown as lacking faith acknowledge that an Exorcism could conceivably do some good to a patient who genuinely believes she’s possessed. Likewise, the religious authorities are shown as quite insistent that all psychiatric options be exhausted before an Exorcism even be considered. This level of sensitivity is certainly what puts it above films like The Conjuring and Annabel, which leave you not feeling that you’ve watched the fight against evil, but simply that you’ve observed the paranoid ravings of religious lunatics.

Honestly, I think this movie was robbed of the #1 spot on this list because both of the top 2 have more famous directors. I can’t think of a single film that’s more universally chilling. Watch this movie if, and only if, you want to be scared.

Wednesday Review: The Conjuring 2

I’ve honestly never gotten James Wan’s popularity. I certainly don’t think he’s bad, but I feel as if he simply uses standard horror cliches somewhat better than more traditionally awful directors. Chris Stuckman has singled Wan out specifically for his tendency to makethe audience jump from loud noises only when those noises are causedby things the audience is actually supposed to be afraid of, as if this is some great innovation. He’s certainly never made anything as good as The Witch or It Follows, which makes me suspect that either audiences not familiar with such films are grading on a curve, or audiences prefer Wan’s easier-to-digest films over more challenging story-telling.

This isn’t helped by the fact that I’m not a huge fan of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Honestly, both in the film and in real-life, I find them to be self-righteous bores who believe that God personally chose them to fight the forces of evil. My dislike may be fueled by the fact that I identify as pagan, and thus find Catholicism in general to be somewhat stuck-up, but cards on the table, there you go.

That said, however, I do agree with critics who are saying that The Conjuring 2 is substantially better than the first film. For most of this movie the family being haunted are the primary characters, and Ed and Lorraine Warren don’t even come to England to investigate the haunting until an hour into the story (in real life they were barely involved in this case). I find the family to be far more relatable, and many of the supernatural events actually come across as scary.

The film also benefits from a more nuanced view of those investigating the haunting. While it’s pretty clear from the start there is something going on, the skeptics are treated with a great deal of respect, and many of their concerns about the case are acknowledged as valid. We never deal with anyone who is dead set on proving their view in the face of evidence.

This movie does, however, share one common problem with it’s predecessor: the climax. This is a problem that embodies why James Wan is not the best choice for Haunted House films. Wan is a director who tells complete stories. However, hauntings are scary precisely because of how much information we don’t have. As with the last movie, the film eventually turns into an action thriller, with the Warrens explaining everything that’s going on, and dispatching the evil forces. In real life the Enfield Poltergeist is famous because of just how mysterious and controversial the events are, so why would we want to know in such pain-staking detail what was happening?

That said, the film is better than Annabelle. I’d probably be giving it better marks if it hadn’t already gotten it’s happy ending from Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not bad, I like the non-Warren characters, and the first two acts are unsettling. The atmosphere is creepy, and the scares are done well. You could do a lot worse with your weekend viewings.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #4 Psycho

Ah, another Hitchcock… another classic. The classics are always the hardest to discuss. Sure, I can talk all day about Zombie or The Vanishing, or even Suspiria. But with movies of this stature, not only has everyone already seen it, but everyone has already read other reviews expressing every possible opinion I could give. And the most controversial opinion of Psycho I have to give is that “while I agree a lot of the psychobabble at the end was unnecessary, I wasn’t bored, so I find it acceptable.”

That said, Psycho is well remembered for switching plots roughly one-third of the way through the film. A woman named Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steals $40,000 from her boss and flees to give it to her fiance so that he can clear his debts and they can be married. (This plan is clearly idiotic as the theft is blatant.) During the first act of the film, she’s followed by a police officer who seems to be the film’s antagonist.

One thing I do note about this part of the film is the use of voice-overs as she’s driving to show us various scenarios ash she imagines them happening elsewhere. For example, her boss discovering the theft, and planning her capture and his retribution. I interpret this as a psychological trick on Hitchcock’s part. I think we’re supposed to understand that this is all going on in her head and that the real events playing out might be different. This digs us in even further, seeing her as the protagonist and expecting the film to be from her perspective. And in so doing, Hitchcock was setting us up for another Rear Window, in which we as an audience were exclusively given information available to one character.

As you likely know, she’s bumped off when she stops at an Inn run by a young man named Norman (Anthony Perkins) and his mother. We’re led to believe that the mother is the killer (a figure in a dress with an old woman’s hair style stabs her in the shower), and that Norman covered for her. Thus, the film undergoes a sudden, dramatic shift, removing our protagonist and leaving us with Norman as the only character to sympathize with. And yes, if you know anything about this film, you know that Norman’s mother is dead, he dressed in her clothes and stabbed Marion to death while under the control of a “Mother” persona.

The remainder of the movie however builds up to this revelation. We follow a private investigator (Martin Balsam), Marion’s Sister Lila (Vera Miles) and her aforementioned fiance (John Gavin) as they investigate the disappearance. We’re led to one wrong conclusion (...or rather, the audience who saw it before it became a classic were...) as the characters are led to another. We believe Norman’s mother to be the killer, while they believe that Norman killed Marion for the money and is isolating his mother because she knows the truth. I think Hitchcock probably intended a level of irony in the fact that, by sheer dumb luck, the investigators come to a conclusion closer to the truth than our own.

Yes, this movie is scary, but not so much so that I can see anyone being unable to sit through it. It’s tense, it’s exciting and it is awesome. If you haven’t seen it and know it only through pop culture references, parodies and analysis, then watch it.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #5 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I made a trip to Texas for a few weeks. A friend of mine actually begged me not to go because she had just seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and was convinced I would be killed by Leatherface. I know that sounds silly, but it does tell you just how much this particular film can affect people.
 

With many of the films on this list, I find myself struggling to write enough for a review. With this film however, I find myself trying to decide what I actually need to say and what can be cut. (An early version of this review contained a rant about why the movie Cry Wolf bombed, just for some perspective.)  This is a film that affects everyone who sees it, and the mystique surrounding it is as great as the film itself.

This movie came out shortly after Black Christmas, when the slasher film was still in its infancy. As such, it’s often noted for not featuring many of the staples of the genre. Only one of the four protagonists is unlikable at all, and his constant whining is offset by the fact that he’s confined to a wheelchair. There’s fairly little blood and gore (reportedly Tobe Hooper wanted a PG rating), and the killer’s motives aren’t extensively explored. (Although we get more information about them than we did in Black Christmas, which made the killer’s identity and motives a complete enigma). The killers are also made out to be quite human. Even Leatherface, while strong, never shrugs off a gunshot or ploughs through an army the way Jason Vorhees routinely does.

The single most subtly bizarre thing in the movie is probably that the victims actually have a plot-relevant reason for traveling to the place of their deaths, rather than being “on vacation” or having some other half-assed reason to travel out to the middle of nowhere. Several graves have been robbed in a small, rural cemetary. So a girl named Sally (Marilyn Burns), her wheel-chair bound brother Franklin (Paul A Partain) and their friends Jerry (Allan Danzinger), Kirk (William Vail), and Pam (Teri McMinn) go to make sure their grandfather’s grave is still intact. The local gas station is out of gas and they don’t have enough to get home. So they decide to stay overnight at their grandfather’s house. Once there, they realize that the house next door has a gas generator, and they decide to send one of their group to ask if the residents could spare some gas to get them home.

Obviously, they quickly fall victim to Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), the mentally retarded vanguard of a family of cannibals. From that point on, the movie becomes an exercise in tension. By the end of the film, four of the five are dead, and the final survivor is likely insane. However, despite the low body count, not one death is wasted. One is stretched out to emphasize the suffering (the victim first impaled, then locked in a freezer to die of cold or suffocation), one is quick to emphasize surprise (the titular “chainsaw” murder), and the other two seems designed specifically to fall between these two extremes (killed with a hammer). So the movie uses the deaths perfectly to hit every button we have, rather than throwing everything at us to see what sticks.

The most famous scene is the dinner, at which the final survivor is tied to a chair, and tormented by the family. This scene is one of the most perfectly horrifying I’ve ever seen. All the characters communicate their roles flawlessly, and the villains actually seem to have no concept that what they’re doing is wrong. Leatherface doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand. Drayton (Jim Siedow), the older of his brothers, seems to see murder as a duty. Nubbins (Edwin Neal), the younger, sees it in the same way a child might see frying an ant with a magnifying glass. And then there’s “Grandfather” (John Dugan), who is so feeble that there’s literally no way to get a read on him or how much of what’s going on he even understands.

A lot of modern horror seems to shy away from using the ‘Other’ as the thing to be afraid of. I can understand this sentiment, as many in today’s world are afraid of inciting hatred against those who are different (a sentiment I fully share). Still, it’s kind of hard to deny that the ‘Other’ is effective as a way to induce fear. And the threats presented in the top five films on this list (in descending order) are, rednecks, an insane person, a demon, an alien and a shark. (I know it’s a spoiler, but this list is over a decade old anyway).

Leatherface makes an excellent ‘Other,’ and it’s hardly fair to expect one of the scariest movies ever made to be politically correct. I didn’t watch this movie to get a treatise on why rednecks deserve respect and compassion. And anyone who hasn’t seen this film and can handle it definitely should. It’s a part of cinema history.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #6 The Shining

I’ve never read The Shining, but I have seen the mini-series that more faithfully adapted the original story. So, I understand the basic conflict between Kubrick and King. While the antagonistic forces are more clearly supernatural rather than psychological in King’s version, King’s also comes across as the stronger character piece. This was one of the movies in which Nicholson didn’t so much “act” as “stood in front of a camera being Jack Nicholson.” While Steven Weber on the other hand portrayed a much more conflicted character.

I also preferred Melvin Van Peebles in the mini-series over Scatman Crothers in the movie. I’m going to limit my comments on that to simply saying that I preferred it. Talking about why could potentially take me into a discussion of race that I don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole.

This certainly doesn’t mean that I dislike the Kubrick film. To me though, it’s an art film. It puts the actors through Hell in the form of bizarre visuals with no explanation given (or at least no definitive explanation). It’s creepy and disorienting, but still has enough plot to prevent us from being jaded.

I've actually encountered people who haven’t seen this movie and don’t even know what it’s about. So to clarify: a recovering alcoholic named Jack Torrence (Nicholson), his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and his psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) move into a hotel that closes down for the winter. Jack has been hired to maintain the hotel during the off season, and wants to use this as a chance to write a novel while far away from the temptation of alcohol.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, the hotel is haunted by many past guests who want to drive Jack insane and get him to kill his family. Whether there was something special about Jack or if the ghosts simply target anyone vulnerable is a matter of much dispute in analyzing this film. I’m honestly uncertain which way I fall on this matter, as there’s clear evidence for both sides. In fact, most of the evidence could be interpreted either way… assuming you even accept that anything in the film is literally true at all.

One surprising thing I find on this list of movies; quite a few of them don’t feature any actual killing until near the end of the film. A major factor in creating horror is giving the audience some idea of who these people are and why we should care that they’re dying. That certainly seems to be the case in this film, in which I believe there are only two onscreen deaths; Jack himself, and Dick Hollarann (Scatman Crothers); a psychic cook who returns to the hotel in response to a supernatural distress signal sent by Danny. Both of these deaths, as well as Danny and Wendy’s near-brushes with death, are far more impactful than Jason Vorhees tearing through an army of anonymous High School students, precisely because the film spends so much time building up to them. These are human lives to be valued by the viewer, and we learn why.

If there’s a true weakness in the film, it’s Shelley Duvall. This came out two years after Alien, and we have an entirely stereotypical damsel in distress. When confronting a clearly insane Jack, she can’t even hold a baseball bat effectively. Even when Jack directly threatens her life, her attempts to defend herself look like she’s trying to shoo away an annoying house cat. She whimpers, screams, and cries throughout her role. I’m sorry, but she doesn’t come across as sympathetic, she comes across as pathetic. The idea that she successfully overpowered Jack Nicholson at one point was probably the single most unbelievable thing in this movie. I understand that Kubrick cut a fair amount of Duvall’s lines because he was unsatisfied with her performance, and I don’t blame him one bit.

I recommend the film. I recommend watching it in close proximity, if not back-to-back, with the mini-series (yep, came back to that again), as they represent such vastly different vision of the same basic story that I can’t imagine anyone not being fascinated by the contrast. Even on its own though, the movie is good.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #7 The Silence of the Lambs

With many of the movies on this list, I enjoyed them more with later viewings. Sometimes, I really just didn’t get them the when I first saw them. Sadly though, the opposite has happened with Silence of the Lambs, as I began to see its flaws. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great movie, but it’s also a very emotionally manipulative film. Many scenes simply ring false, with an assumption that there’s always an underlying logic to all human behavior. However, I don’t want to focus on the negative aspects of such an otherwise fine film. Besides, it’s not as if Silence’s many imitators aren’t infinitely more guilty of painting a picture of criminal profilers as some kind of magicians.

To give the obligatory summary, FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodi Foster) is sent to interview serial killer and cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) to get information on another serial killer nick-named Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) before he kills again. As we follow her, we witness Bill’s latest kidnapping, and Hannibal plays mind games as he tries to entertain himself and regain his freedom through any means necessary.

I think Hannibal Lector is a famous villain mainly because most people imagine themselves to be such special snowflakes that we don’t think he’d kill us. Even if we don’t think he’d love us, we at least imagine he’d want to be our friend in some way. We’re not the kind of “rude” assholes he eats. We’re interesting subject’s he’d want to study extensively. I, on the other hand, fully expect that he’d eat me, either out of sheer boredom or annoyance.

Does this mean I don’t like him as a villain? Hell no. He’s a brilliant chess master, always one step ahead of everyone else. Anthony Hopkins absolutely steals the show in portraying this cannibalistic madman. He’s funny and charming, and always entertaining to watch… it’s just that I don’t want to let him too close to me.

Of course, Hannibal himself is only a small part of the equation that makes this film work. The movie as a whole strikes a perfect balance between action and drama. The stakes are kept high enough that dialogue scenes still resound with us and we never grow bored. Foster and Hopkins both won Oscars for their performances, but not nearly enough credit has been given to Ted Levine and Brooke Smith as Buffalo Bill and his next victim. Smith never comes across as weak while filling the role of a damsel-in-distress. Levine on the other hand strikes a fascinating dichotomy of a blue-collar hick crossed with a geek.

I should note that I sometimes find the criminal profiler explanation of Buffalo Bill as somewhat at odds with the person we see. I’m not sure where the disconnect is, but the investigators see Bill as someone who creates his own world and fills it with things he values... but then he shoves moth larvae down the throats of his victims as some kind of message to investigators. I feel like he should value the moths more than that. Perhaps this was to show the fallibility of the investigators, I don’t know. Maybe they didn't understand Bill as well as they thought they did.

That said, what we see works. Every scene builds towards the climax. Every character encountered contributes something to our understanding of the world and the situation. Then, it all comes down to a simple confrontation in a dark room.

I'm writing the final draft of this review in September of 2015, to be uploaded in June of 2016. As of now, the show Hannibal is officially canceled, but the creators are still shopping it around to other distributors, hoping they can still adapt the remaining books in the series. If they succeed, then I imagine the show’s writers will have a nightmare on their hands when they adapt Silence. As it’s highly doubtful, even with a full season’s running time, that they could come close to matching the original.