100 Scariest Movie Moments: #8 Carrie

Given how much the idea of watching Audition freaked me out (mainly because of the scene where the man eats vomit), it’s odd how I always somehow go into Carrie without any real anxiety about seeing it again, and then get a sock in the gut. I never seem to remember just how utterly disturbing this movie is, in ways that have nothing to do with the supernatural elements. There isn’t anything inherently evil about Carrie’s power. Instead, this movie is about the human evil that would drive a tormented young girl to commit mass murder.

In the unlikely event that this review will be read by anyone who hasn’t seen the film, the plot is that a girl grows up to be socially awkward and unpopular because of her crazy, religious mother (Piper Laurie). Because of her mother’s puritanical beliefs, Carrie (Sissy Spacek) doesn’t know about menstruation. So when she has her first period, she freaks out in the locker room and is pelted with tampons, humiliating her. Eventually, this spirals into a chain of events, leading to the ballot box being stuffed to make her Prom Queen, so that the leader of the girls (Nancy Allen) can dump pig’s blood on her in a misguided attempt at revenge. In retaliation for this, Carrie slaughters her entire school using newly-awakened psychic powers.

Her psychic powers seem to wake up in response to her puberty. A girl who has been repressed for years is suddenly hitting the point in her life when her emotions an anxiety become the strongest, and they're breaking free. As her powers gradually awaken, no one but her mother is aware of them, her mother calling Carrie a “witch.”

The events of this film are inevitable. Nothing is shocking or surprising. Human beings attack a target they perceive as weaker than themselves, and eventually, the target responds violently. Everyone dies, Carrie included. And once the events have been set in motion, I don’t think there’s one viewer who doubts for even a single moment that it’s going to happen. Most horror films work with shock. This film makes the horror omnipresent throughout its entire run time.

TVTropes uses the term “Hope Spot” to describe a point in a story in which it appears that things are going to be OK, before they get worse. Carrie subverts this tendency by having scenes which appear to be Hope Spots, but framed in a position in the story to make it clear that no, things are still going to suck. Most notable is Sue, one of the girls from the initial assault, asking her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom. Between the instability of Carrie’s mother, Carrie’s psychic powers and Chris (the aforementioned leader of the girls) plotting against Carrie, we know instinctively that such an offer can serve only to set the battleground for the eventual confrontation. It’s obvious that the state of affairs cannot hold.

While I haven’t read the book, I have seen the remake and find this to be easily the superior version. The characters are far less black and white. In this version, rather than evil, the antagonists are made out to simply be stupid teenagers. They have yet to develop the level of empathy that would have prevented the situation from occurring at all. Likewise, Carrie has yet to develop an understanding of her life beyond her teenage years.

On the flip side of the coin is Tommy Ross. Rather than the pure hero of the remake, Tommy is initially fairly indifferent to Carrie. While he would certainly never raise a finger to harm her, he mocks her on at least one occasion, and has to be all but forced by Sue to take her out at all. He’s a completely normal, nice, popular teenager.

Hollywood always struggles to make revenge films because they simultaneously do and do not want the revenge to seem satisfying. For example, the 2002 version of The Count of Monte Cristo had two endings rejected by the studio as too depressing, because they would have hammered home the fact that Dantes’ quest for revenge had left him with nothing. The decision to give Carrie two climaxes seems like a fairly successful compromise In this regard. You get the big, special effects-laden climax at the prom, and then the incredibly depressing scene in which Carrie returns home, is greeted by her now-homicidal mother, who she kills. And the house is then destroyed, killing her too. So we see the exciting revenge, and then we see the aftermath, with Carrie as a scared, traumatized girl.

I certainly don’t recommend this movie to everyone. No matter how good it is, it’s one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen. I can barely handle it, so far be it for me to tell other people what they can or can’t deal with. That said though, it’s still a classic.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #9 Night of the Living Dead

This is an intimidating movie to talk about. This may not be the #1 movie on this list, but I doubt another film on this list could challenge it in terms of sheer influence. It came out in 1968, just as the Hayes Code died. But having said that though, I don’t think the Hayes Code could have touched it anyway, since it was also the dawn of Indie film making and the rise of the Film Brats. What Easy Rider was to cinema as a whole, Night of the Living Dead was to the horror genre specifically.

This movie is considered the origin of the “Zombie” genre as we know it today. Many people believe that the word “zombie” was never uttered in this film due to an artistic choice. However, director George A. Romero has confirmed that was not the case. When the film was made “zombie” was a word used exclusively to describe people resurrected by Voodoo, it was only later that the word was applied to films such as this with the dead rising in mass. This movie focuses on several people caught up in the “ghoul” attacks (the word Romero used, I don't believe that term was uttered either), who are forced to take shelter in an abandoned farmhouse.

I think it’s time of release was a major factor in what makes the film so memorable and important to this day. The filmmakers were freed from the old ways, but were flying blind in a totally new genre they were making up as they went along. At first viewing, it looks like a horror film from the 30s or 40s, with black-and-white, grainy images. But then, a black man is the hero, and there’s mild nudity and gore. I remember watching the film on TCM as a kid, and being surprised that an “old” film could have even that mild level of graphic content.

While I don’t want to hold this up as a positive or negative feature, another striking aspect for a modern viewer is the portrayal of both Ben and Barbara (Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea), and to a lesser extent, the other female characters. While black protagonists (if rare) are not unknown in horror movies, I don’t know of a single other film that makes the character’s race so completely incidental. Ben is the second of the seven characters locked in the house we’re introduced to, and he’s immediately established as the compassionate voice of reason. Not a single person in the entire movie even comments on his race. However, many do consider his death, shot by cops who mistook him for a zombie without bothering to check, to have been racially motivated. And while Romero likely didn’t intend that, I think this is a time when ‘Death of the Author’ applies.

Barbara on the other hand comes across as surprisingly pathetic. While there are still plenty of female victims in horror films, a woman who literally just sits there and cries in shock is no longer very well accepted. Beyond her, the two other adult women in the film do almost nothing, not even helping to board up the windows. (I’m giving the injured little girl a pass on that.) I think it’s literally a full hour before any of them make an active effort to help. (Making Molotov cocktails, under the instructions of man.) Hell, at one point one of the men says that they’ll be better off if “the three of us work together,” despite the fact that there were six adults in the house! I’m not sure what it says that this movie is less racist, but more sexist than horror films released nearly half a century later.

The movie has long lulls between the action, but it still never seems to drag. This is mainly because Romero utilizes every second to his benefit, often using both our eyes and ears to provide us with new pieces of information simultaneously. The radio is constantly giving us news reports as we watch characters prepare, new characters are introduced, (Barbara, the character we initially follow meets Ben at the house, then it turns out that the other characters are holed up in the basement), and the characters make plans for how best to survive.

And then the arguing starts. It’s actually a highlight of the film, because all of the characters are portrayed realistically and given unique perspectives on the situation. (…well, all of the male characters that is). This film has a reputation for portraying “humans as the real monsters,” which to me is quite inaccurate. Very rarely until near the end of the film do the characters do more than insult each other, and each of them argues for a course of action that makes some degree of sense. Ben wants to board up the entire house and keep a lookout for the zombies, being prepared to flee out of the back if the situation becomes hopeless. Harry (Karl Hardman), the older man, thinks that the upper part of the house is not sufficiently defensible, and that they should board themselves up in the basement. And the final man, Tom (Keith Wayne), attempts to mediate; ultimately suggesting fortifying the house, but keeping the cellar as a fallback option.

By the end of course, everyone is dead. Ben’s plan fails because the zombies get in. Then Harry’s plan fails because they were locked in the basement with a dying little girl who promptly becomes zombified. When dawn comes, as mentioned above, only Ben’s still alive, and he’s shot by the zombie-killing mob working its way through the county.

It’s a bit disappointing that I always have to close these reviews by gushing praise upon whatever film I happen to be talking about. Then again, I probably shouldn’t have decided to go through a Top 100 list if I didn’t want to review only good movies. So although I know I’m repeating myself, this is an awesome movie! See it!

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #10 Wait Until Dark

Wait Until Dark is a tense, chilling thriller for it’s first fifteen minutes and its final half hour. In between, it never actually becomes a bad film, but loses a lot of its drive. The story revolves around a con game being played on a blind woman and on the way in which it unravels, largely because the con men assumed her to be helpless.

The setup is more complicated than I want to fully explain, but a man named Sam (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr) is asked to hold a doll, not knowing that it contains heroin. Lisa, the woman who planted it on him (Samantha Jones), is killed by an associate named Roat (Alan Arkin). Roat recruits two of Lisa’s former associates, Carlino and Talman (Jack Weston and Richard Crenna) to try to find the doll which Sam and his blind wife Susy (Audrey Hepburn) are unable to locate because it’s been taken by Gloria (Julie Herrod), a young girl who helps Susy with chores.

The opening, after the set-up with the doll, is tense as it establishes the characters of Roat, Carlino, and Talman. Their initial meeting is designed to demonstrate Talman and Carlino as being hostile to Roat, cooperating solely for profit. Roat is shown as being a brilliant but vicious tactician, able to easily manipulate the other two and predict their every move; constantly calculating how to make it just barely worth the trouble to work with him.

From here, we eventually wind our way into the con, which is convoluted as Hell. Perhaps that was the point, trying to convince Susy that they couldn’t possibly be making this stuff up. Or maybe it was just padding. Either way, Susy is introduced to a “friend” of her husband’s named Mike, a cop, and the husband and father-in-law of a woman they claim Sam was having an affair with. She is eventually convinced that the doll is evidence of her husband’s connection to Lisa’s murder, so she has to give it to Mike so that he can get rid of it.

The con eventually falls apart as the men underestimate Susy. It never occurs to them that when dealing with a blind woman, changing shoes would be a more critical part of their disguise than changing their hair color. They’re also unaware of Gloria’s presence, which does give Susy insights at key moments which they never intended her to have.

Eventually, Roat kills his companions and resorts to far more direct threats to get to the doll. It’s at this point where the movie again takes off. Roat chains Susy and himself in and threatens to set the apartment on fire, while Susy kills the lights, knowing that she’s better able to fight in the dark than Roat. While it’s true that the idea of a blind person having an advantage in the dark is nothing new to us, this movie came out in 1967, when such an idea would have been far more novel. (...Or so I suppose, because I wasn’t alive in 1967.) The confrontation eventually turns into a game of cat-and-mouse with two knives, matches, gasoline, and the refrigerator light being used as weapons.

Alan Arkin’s performance in this film is astounding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more frightening villain of purely-human origin in a film (yes, I’m including Hannibal Lecter, I’m going there). He’s smart, vicious, and entirely focused on his goals.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot positive to say about Hepburn’s character. I have nothing against the actress herself, and she did an excellent job. But Susy comes across as a very weak character. While it’s true that she figures out she’s being conned, once she does, she comes across as surprisingly helpless. She reacts to most revelations by screaming and crying. Furthermore, when facing Roat, she seems to be unable to take the initiative to do anything when there’s light. After he’s been stabbed, can barely stand, and is slowly limping towards her (making plenty of noise to give away his location), her reaction is to desperately try to unplug the refrigerator to extinguish the final remaining light, rather than grabbing the nearest blunt object and attacking the already severely-wounded man.

I should also note that I have no idea what her motivation to deny the men the doll was, at least after she realizes it isn’t evidence against her husband. She seems to indicate it’s out of some generic desire to not assist “Evil” people, even when they’re about the kill you, and you have no particular interest in the thing they want.

All that said, I do recommend this movie. It could be more tightly-written, but Alan Arkin alone makes the experience more than worth it.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #11 Audition

Audition is a movie I feel almost unqualified to talk about. The film, while Japanese, is mostly easy to follow for a Western viewer. However, the real problem is how to interpret the main character, the widower Aoyama Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi). As a Western viewer, I see him as unquestionably sleazy. He goes along with a completely immoral scheme concocted by his friend and co-worker, Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura), to use a casting call for a movie to find potential brides, so that Aoyama can “comfort” one of the women who’s rejected.

I suspect, but can’t confirm, that having Yasuhisa come up with this plan was an attempt to keep our sympathies with Aoyama. However, I’m uncertain of the extent. At best, I see Aoyama as a weak-willed Yes Man. And at worst, as a sleazy opportunist, eager to pass the buck to someone else in his own mind. During the first act, he periodically reminds us of how uncomfortable he is with the idea, even as he makes no effort to end the plan. Who’s to blame here may seem unimportant, but it leaves me uncertain whether this film is supposed to be about sin and punishment, or a man having horrible things happen to him through no fault of his own.

Just their luck, the woman Aoyama selects happens to be a serial killer named Yamazaki Asami (Eihi Shiina). The reveal for this is slow, as she’s initially treated as a perfect romantic partner, even after Yasuhisa is unable to confirm any of her references. For this period, it appears that she’s going to open up to Aoyama about a dark and troubled past that he’ll help her to overcome.

Don’t get me wrong, Asami’s dark and troubled past is there. She was physically and sexually abused by her amputee stepfather. She’s a damaged person, incapable of forming normal attachments. We’re shown her apartment, which has no furniture, just a phone, and a man being held prisoner in a bag. This is literally the first shot of the movie to hint at the horror genre, and it comes an hour into the film. Asami sits next to her phone, unmoving, waiting for Aoyama to call.

From this point on the film still holds back the horror for the final act, but ceases pretenses regarding what it is. The music becomes more foreboding, the lighting becomes subtly dimmer, and Aoyama discovers that one of Asami’s former employers was murdered, and another is currently missing.

Asami’s wrath being brought to bear against Aoyama is inevitable. The thing that sets her off is a miscommunication which I’m, once again, somewhat limited in my ability to interpret. Asami asks Aoyama to confirm that he loves “only” her, and he affirms this. However, she later discovers that he is a widower and has a teenage son (Tetsu Sawaki). My ability to interpret sympathy is not limited in this case strictly by cultural barriers, but by simple language barriers. As I do not speak Japanese, I have no idea if the “love” she was asking him about would have been strictly romantic, and if it would have included a deceased partner. Without this context, I’m uncertain if he lied, or if she overreacted.

In contrast to the earlier scenes, I think that on this point Western sympathies are with Aoyama who merely left out extraneous qualifiers while declaring his love to the woman of his dreams. On the other hand, in Western society, a woman demanding that a man declare his love for “only me” would be seen as a gigantic red flag that the woman was emotionally unstable, and likely to be extremely jealous.

While it’s only in the last act of the film that Asami becomes a direct physical threat, she easily makes this the most memorable part. The comparison to Misery is obvious, particularly when Asami removes Aoyama’s feet with razor wire to keep him immobile. However, I found Asami to be far more frightening that Annie Wilkes. This is likely a case in which the film’s cultural divide works to its advantage. Asami, unlike Annie, never yells or screams. She giggles while torturing Aoyama, retaining her poise and grace in a way that seems unnerving to American viewers.

The final act of the movie does an excellent job of playing with the viewer’s perception of reality. We’re treated to Aoyama having fantasies, or perhaps visions, that we can tell are in his head, mixed with other increasingly ambiguous imagery. However, even the most obvious hallucinations raise further questions.

A good example of this is Asami’s bagman. He seems to simply appear to Aoyama, and then disappear at one point. However, Aoyama never encountered him outside of his delusions. So how would Aoyama’s unconscious mind be aware of him, unless the entire concept of Asami holding a man hostage in a bag was all part of some elaborate fantasy? Hell, earlier in the film, before the hallucinations were implied to have begun, Aoyama interacts with Asami’s stepfather who she murders in flashback.

Probably the most clever trick the director pulls is to show Aoyama hallucinating himself next to Asami in bed, trying to escape from the pain... or perhaps just waking up from a guilt-ridden nightmare, only to drift back to sleep and finish out the dream. While simply having the movie be a dream would have been a cheap cop-out, leaving us there staring and wondering certainly gives an added edge to everything.

The mindscrew continues right up until the very end of the film where Asami is knocked down the stairs by Aoyama’s son and paralyzed. She begins to speak to Aoyama, repeating her words from their second date... or she’s dead and Aoyama is hallucinating... or this is all a bad dream.

You can probably already tell that I could easily write a book going through this movie scene-by-scene to determine exactly what it means. However, the biggest question is simply whether or not it’s scary. And the answer is yes, absolutely, unquestionably, this movie will scare you. See it if and only if that’s what you’re looking for.

Wednesday Review: The Darkness

Jason Blum returns with another idiotic movie embodying everything I hate about his studio. The story is the generic tale of a family being attacked by demons. Rather than a traditional plot summary and review, I have literally decided to just make a list of things I hate about this movie:
1) The entire family in this movie seems to be defined exclusively by their dysfunctions. The son has autism (which the movie implies attracts spirits), the daughter is bulimic, the mother is an alcoholic, and the father had an affair. None of these characters seem to have any real identity outside of these traits, and only the autism plays any role in the plot.

2) While I'm a High Functioning Autistic, and have little experience with my Low Functioning counter-parts, the portrayal of young Michael seems inconsistent. There are plenty of scenes which make it clear that he's perfectly verbal, but when he says something unsettling his parents make no effort to get him to elaborate.

3) The demons attacking the family were apparently responsible for the destruction of the Anasazi civilization. However, the Anasazi trapped them in five stones. Did they destroy the civilization from inside the stones? If so, what was the point of trapping them? Had the damage already been done when they were trapped? I need some serious elaboration here.

4) When will Hollywood learn that you can either use the real legends and mythology of a real ethnic group, or you can just make up a fake ethnic group. Call me an SJW, but taking a real Native American group (albeit one that no longer exists) and claiming they believed your fictional mythology seems both racist, and stupid. I seriously doubt that the Anasazi believed that their gods turned evil, started abducting children, but were trapped by their shaman in five stones.

5) One scene references multiple people having been killed by these spirits, apparently after removing the stones from their cave. How did the stones get back?

6) When the family needs an exorcism they find a Hopi woman. This makes sense. I checked and the Hopi do appear to be one of the Tribes descended from the Anasazi. However, this woman addresses the spirits in Spanish, a language that was not spoken in the New World until hundreds of years after they had been locked away. Granted she may not speak the language of the Anasazi, but at least speaking to them in Hopi would be the correct language family. If the spirits can speak any language, why not address them in English?

...and the final, biggest problem I had with this movie was (opens the envelop):
7) Not one single moment in the entire film is actually scary, suspenseful, or frightening in any way!

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #12 Misery

I would like to open this review by gushing praise at Kathy Bates. And as I do so, please consider that I’m in the process of writing reviews of 100 of the scariest movies ever made. I’m also a horror movie fan in general, and I’ve seen this movie before. But even taking all of those factors into account, Kathy Bates in the movie still terrifies me!

It’s surprising to me that this film was made in 1990, as it feels very much like a 70s film. The opening doesn’t immediately tip you off with music and lighting effects that you’re watching a horror movie. You’re supposed to figure that out from the fact that horrible things happen.

The movie initially presents itself to us as being about Paul Sheldon (James Caan), a writer trying to move on with his career after killing off the main character from his previous series, Misery Chastain. Paul makes a trip to a remote hotel where he finishes his next novel, a more serious dramatic story about slum kids. He attempts to drive home through a blizzard, and ends up crashing his car.

He’s saved by his “Number One Fan,” retired nurse Annie Wilkes (Bates), who tells him that the roads are closed because of the blizzard. Thus, he’ll need to stay with her for a time. Annie is initially presented to us as a kind, if somewhat eccentric, woman, and Paul believes that he’s lucky. Gradually however, Annie is shown to have a violent temper which can be set off by the most minor of nuisances. She lives in a fantasy land, and anything that interferes with her delusions is a cause for retaliation.

When the last Misery book finally comes out and Annie finds out that Misery is “dead,” things escalate into a full-blown hostage crisis. Paul has to attempt to write another Misery novel, bringing his character back to life (in a dramatically satisfying manner), while also trying to keep Annie calm, and trying to find a means of escape whenever she’s away.

Kathy Bates was perfect for this role because of her ability to play Annie as a dichotomous character. On the one hand, she seems to sincerely believe she’s in a romance novel, where she has to “save” Misery and fall in love with Paul Sheldon. On the other hand though, to simultaneously remain a constant threat, she also has to be aware that he wants to escape and thus be able to take measures to prevent this from happening. Her intelligence here doesn’t take away the level of sympathy we have for her. It’s clear she has severe impulse control problems and an inability to deal with reality.

James Caan’s real talent here is his ability to let the audience know when he’s playing Paul Sheldon and when he’s playing Paul Sheldon putting on an act for Annie. Most actors would simply telegraph in-character performances by making their characters terrible actors, but Caan never resorts to such cheap gimmicks. When sweet-talking, Annie he comes across as a good actor forced to read terrible dialogue, but still giving it his all.

The movie doesn’t limit itself entirely to the two of them, but they take up the vast majority of the run time. We’re given a few scenes with a local sheriff (Richard Farnsworth) trying to locate Paul (eventually being killed off by Annie). I don’t have a lot to say about those scenes. I enjoyed them, they had some nice touches of humor, and Farnsworth does a good job as Sheriff “Buster.”

By the end, Paul has figured out that Annie is a full-blown serial killer who’s killed parents, rivals, and even innocent children, and who wants to live out an insane fantasy by dying with him. As the end of the novel grows near, Paul realizes that all of this will inevitably come to a head.

The ending of the movie is fully satisfying. I’m a bit confused about how Paul was able to get home with two broken legs afterwards. The only other person who knew he was there had been killed by Annie. But that’s really not a point that I found myself dwelling on

Anyone who hasn’t seen this movie definitely should. It’s a rare horror film that wins an Academy Award for Best Actress, and there is a damned good reason this film did. It’s tense as Hell. The characters are understandable without ever being simplistic. It’s just a great movie.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #13 Scream

In analyzing Scream, it’s important to realize that it did not introduce self-awareness to the slasher genre. That honor, to the best of my knowledge, goes to later Friday the 13^th sequels; particularly Part 6, and Jason Goes to Hell. The latter actually made the FBI anticipating Jason’s slasher-film behavior a plot point. It’s this tendency that actually makes the later Friday the 13^th films a lot more fun than the earlier ones.

Scream was something of an ironic backfire for Wes Craven. He set out to destroy the slasher genre by making the cliches so obvious that no one could take the format seriously anymore. I somewhat wonder if he still would have made the film if he had possessed a crystal ball and known that the coming age of the internet would make almost all entertainment dependent on its ability to be enjoyed ironically.

What makes Scream still unique among black comedy takes on horror is that the film does not attempt to separate the horror from the humor. The scenes often contain mixtures of the two, but the film never feels disjointed. It would be useful to compare this to a more recent self-aware slasher, You’re Next (which I do highly recommend). In that film, you feel almost as if you’ve watched two movies; a serious horror film about a house under siege by killers, and a black comedy about those killers finding out that one of their victims is highly proficient with improvised weapons. (I’d say that the latter movie begins when one of the killers comes through a window, and is promptly thrown on the floor and beaten to death with a blunt object.)

In Scream however, the killers will spout off movie references even at the most dramatic, terrifying moments. This doesn’t take away from the drama or the fear. We realize that the movie references are an expression of the madness of Billy and Stu (Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard). They see life itself as a fiction that they’re creating, and because of this, they feel no remorse at killing.

Scream could be said to be the film that gave birth to the 21^st Century; a time when we’re all plugged into the formulas of entertainment and find them just as engaging as the stories themselves. We’ve realized, as much as we’re reluctant to admit it, that magic tricks are no less impressive when you can see how they’re done. They remain captivating, and often times even gain a certain element as you lose the false impression that they’re as simple as waving a magic wand.