The Power of 8: Horror Films

It's Halloween! Not quite sure what that means for everyone else, but for me, it's a chance to explore some dark(er) history, and enjoy some good ol' Horror flicks. Now, before I move forward with this list, let me just say that, as with most any story, I enjoy Horror movies that make me think. I prefer my Horror to be more than just a bunch of stupid teenagers running around in circles while some maniac chases them with various sharp objects. That said, off we go.





8. Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Yeah, this one probably won't be popular with most people, but to me, the third Halloween, beyond the first one, was the most daring and outgoing of the franchise. The reason it failed to perform was because the fans of the day only wanted more of the same, and when another Halloween came out and didn't have Michael Myers, they freaked. Which is a shame, because it was one of the few films to delve into the roots of the holiday. 

The anthology series the creators wanted to make would have been beautiful. If Halloween III had been successful, the next movie would have been a ghost story, and every film after would focus on new themes and characters, all set on Halloween. But no, instead we got Slasher after Slasher until the series became a parody of itself and died off ... then was further ruined by Rob Zombie a few years later....

Since this is one I don't think as many people have seen, I won't go into the plot, but it's something that should be experienced by any true Horror fan.


7. Scream 1&2

I typically don't like Slashers very much, but when they're played as smart as the first two Scream movies were, I make an exception. Instead of relying on the same, tired tropes, Scream dared to call out those tropes. Yes, some are still followed, but it blazes trails in other areas. The characters are all unique and well-written, and Sydney Prescott is easily among the strongest female protagonists in Horror cinema. But, in Wes Craven films, strong female leads have come to be expected.

The film starts out simply enough, with a young girl sitting down to watch Horror movies. She gets a phone call that starts innocently enough, then takes a quick turn for the worse as the voice on the other end threatens her. After watching her boyfriend gutted in front of her, she's chased down and murdered by the killer. Like I said, simple. After that though, as the body count rises, a particular movie buff starts to see a pattern and tells everyone what to watch out for to survive.

For me, the killings pretty much being called out by Randy before they happened added another layer of tension. You start to think maybe, since it's been so blatantly called out, that character has a chance to survive. And the whodunit element in the first two movies made them both even more fun to watch.

I recommend the first two films to anyone. Especially if you like watching strong female leads beat the crap out of their tormentors. The climax on the second movie will always make me cheer. After all the torment Sydney's been through, she fights back with a vengeance. It's what I always wanted to see in a Slasher flick. Now, I can't really recommend the third Scream, because, even though it gets off to a pretty strong start, the ending falls completely flat and ruins it. I can't speak for the fourth, because I haven't seen it yet, but the first two are worth watching either way.


6. John Carpenter's The Thing

A remake of 1951's The Thing From Another World. I prefer it to the original (even though both are great in their own right) because Carpenter's focuses more on the trust issue of the story. The Thing could be anyone, even the guy right next to you who seemed fine five minutes ago. That element is what made the movie so terrifying to me. If you can't trust the guy next to you when you're up against something so big and scary, what are you supposed to do? You can't even adequately fight against The Thing, because you HAVE to constantly watch your back unless you want it to take you too.

The special effects in this movie also deserve a gold star. They might be dated now, but for 1982, they were fantastic and gruesome and wonderful. The head-spider scene always comes to mind when I think of think of The Thing, and if you've seen the film, you know exactly what I mean.

Needless to say, this should be on your watch list tonight. Just don't watch it alone ... or maybe it would be safer that way. Can you really trust the person next to you?


5. Horror of Dracula

In 1958 we got our first taste of Christopher Lee's Dracula, thanks to Terence Fisher and Hammer Films. But more importantly, we got Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, and that's what gets this movie on the list. Not only did Horror of Dracula put an interesting twist on the story at the beginning, but it also gave us a Dracula film with a lot of blood, which was, sadly, kind of rare at the time, even for a movie about the "original" vampire.

The story is basically the same on the whole, but the actors in this version gave us something special. Peter Cushing is the best Van Helsing ever put on film, and throughout the Hammer Dracula films, he always performed like he was shooting for an Oscar, long after Christopher Lee stopped trying. So, if you want a good vampire movie to check out, and you want to see Cushing in action, give Horror of Dracula a shot. You won't be sorry.


4. House of Usher

No Horror list would be complete without at least one Vincent Price film. I love the man far too much to put into words, but I'll try to keep my gushing to a minimum.


The story starts with a young man approaching the House of Usher, searching for the love of his life. She ran off because she was ill, and her overbearing brother (played by Price) says it's a family curse. Our "hero" doesn't buy it, and thinks that she can be helped with the right doctors. As you might expect, overbearing brother is against her leaving and does everything in his power to keep her there, even going as far as to bury her alive in a coffin.

House of Usher features one of Price's best performances. You can feel the pain of his disease as he describes it in one of the earlier scenes. There are a lot of Price films I'd like to have on this list, but for the Halloween season, this one seems to fit best.


3. A Nightmare on Elm Street

Before the series descended into ... what it descended into, Wes Craven crafted one of the most clever Slashers of our time. The subtext of the movie, if you care to dissect it like that, is really thought-provoking. But, I won't get into all that right now.

The movie starts with a young girl being chased in her dreams by some creepy guy with a burned face and a claw on his right hand. What's that you say? Oh, you thought this girl might be your lead? Too bad she gets killed shortly into the movie!

Enter Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp, you're real lead. Her parents are divorced, forcing her to live with her alcoholic, neglectful mother. Of course her mother doesn't believe her when she says Freddy Krueger is the one killing the Elm Street kids. Understandable, seeing as Nacy's parents were among the group who burned Krueger alive years prior for, you guessed it, killing children.

This was before Freddy was being played for laughs like in the later movies. He still had personality, but wasn't throwing out one-liners every three seconds. And what made him even more scary was where he attacked you. Your dreams are supposed to be a safe haven, where you don't have to worry about death or pain. Freddy took that away from you, forcing you to think twice every night before you drifted off to sleep.  


2.  Dracula

This 1931 Universal masterpiece still holds up today, especially if you watch it with the updated score by Phillip Glass. Bela Lugosi gives a brilliant performance as Dracula here, and gave every Dracula that came after a template to follow. Dwight Frye also deserves praise for his portrayal of Renfield, specifically after he's enthralled by Dracula and driven insane.

Unlike the Hammer films, this is one you watch for Dracula and not for Van Helsing, although Edward Van Sloan makes a solid Van Helsing. But what really sells this movie for me is Lugosi's eyes. The shots where the camera zooms in on his eyes are downright entrancing.

I'm sure almost everyone has seen this one by now, but it's always worth another look. And if you've never watched it with the Phillip Glass score, do yourself a favor and find it. (It's on youtube as we speak.)


1. Wes Craven's New Nightmare

I finally got my wife to watch this one with me for the first time a few months ago, and throughout the movie she kept saying "This is so meta!" And she was right. New Nightmare is anything but your standard Horror film, and in case you haven't figured it out, it's pretty darn meta!

Any time of the year I can sit down and watch this movie, and it seems like I get something new out of it every time. Just like in the first Nightmare, Freddy isn't played for laughs here; he's a terrifying creature Wes Craven has kept trapped by making movies. But now that a new movie hasn't been made for awhile, the demon is breaking into the real world, and so Wes Craven (playing himself in the film) is writing a new script, and it starts coming true as he writes it. Heather Langenkamp is forced to take on the role of Nancy one last time, because she's the only one Freddy sees as a threat.

It's a really smart story with good special effects and an ending to remember.



Honorable Mentions

Like I said before, there are some other films I would've loved to put on the list, but there just wasn't room. So here are a few honorable mentions.



Freddy vs. Jason
I don't really consider this one a Horror movie, or even a good movie for that matter, but I laugh so hard every time I watch it, I have to recommend it.



Masque of the Red Death
Another Vincent Price gem. In this one he plays a Satanist leader who thrives on cruelty and the suffering of others. Worth watching, especially on Halloween.

Halloween, Halloween II and H20
The first Halloween was terrifying not because of what you saw, but what you didn't see. The second one wasn't as good, but it was a decent conclusion to the story.

H20, while most people hate it, I find entertaining because of one particular scene. Laurie has been forced into hiding for twenty years, constantly looking over her shoulder, so when she finally confronts Michael, she's had enough, and proceeds to let him have it. Even at the end when everyone else thinks he's dead, she knows better, and steals the ambulance he 's being carted off in.  She's not going to let him come back this time; she pins him to a tree with the ambulance and cuts off his head with an axe. Yeah, she finally got her revenge. I like to pretend this is the true ending of the series, and the abysmal Resurrection never happened.






And that's about it. Hope you guys enjoyed this little list. Happy Halloween!

The Horror! The Horror!

Well guys, we're on the back-end of October and Halloween is almost on top of us. With that in mind, I thought it'd be a good time to explore a topic near and dear to my heart: Horror.

Now, unlike most people I know, I didn't have a love for Horror growing up. For one, I was never allowed to watch it growing up, and other than a passing curiosity, I never cared enough to explore it. Instead, my love of the genre came in around the time I turned 20. 

At first my approach was very slow. I'd read Frankenstein and Dracula growing up, and those were a very different kind of Horror than I was about to dive into. Those books were more social commentaries than straight Horror, I think. Yes, I still consider them Horror, but those elements seems to only be a backdrop for the issues the authors wanted to explore. But I digress.

Anyway, after Frankenstein and Dracula (both wonderful books, by the way) I decided that Horror was maybe more than I'd been told all my life. If these books were any indication, the genre wasn't all mindless smut used as an excuse to show as much gore as possible. The Horror genre could be used as a vehicle to explore things that no other genre readily allows you to. As a writer, that idea fascinated me, and I couldn't wait to see what else I could dig up.

Stephen King was the next logical step for me. Again, this was a writer that my family had convinced me was not only a, most likely, devil-worshiping, goat-sacrificing, "spiritually disturbed" mess of a human being, but also just another drone in the Horror machine that perpetrated the smut I referred to earlier. First of all, not only is Stephen King a Horror writer, (even though that's how he's generally labeled) but also a brilliant Fantasy writer ... and a Pulp writer ... and Drama.... You see my point? The man writes a little bit of everything, and even though not all of it's to my taste, I admire his ability to jump from genre to genre like that. It's something a lot of writers today can't do. But, a constant theme in his work is the everyman overcoming the unspeakable evil. He likes to play with hard good and evil contrasts, whereas a lot of writers today tend to place their villains in a moral gray area. There's nothing wrong with that, but it gets a little tiresome when that's ALL you see. King's evil is the sort that makes those gray area-dwellers piss themselves, and I find that entertaining.

But, to keep things moving, I'll go ahead and move on to the main point of this post. You see, once I moved on to Clive Barker, then into Wes Craven and John Carpenter films, then the horrendous slasher cliche's like Friday the 13th, I realized that Horror was arguably the most primal, personal form of storytelling in existence. The horrific parts of the stories weren't always the blood-soaked killings, but rather the personal issues the characters were forced to face. The Silent Hill series of video games (specifically the second one) excels at this, and I'll say until the day I die that Silent Hill 2 is the single most terrifying fictional story I've ever been exposed to. Had that been a first person shooter series, the story Silent Hill tried to tell would have been impossible. You weren't a one man army slaughtering hoards of demons on mars, you were just some guy with a dark past unlucky enough to step into the fog. From there, you couldn't escape until you, literally, faced your personal demons (both literal and figurative) and overcame them.

So, for me at least, Horror is one of the most essential form of fiction we have. And yes, it gets a bad rap because of your Friday the 13th ripoffs (which were bad ripoffs themselves) but I maintain that those aren't even really Horror. Seriously, when was the last time you watched a Friday the 13th film without laughing hysterically at the repeatedly dumb decisions made by the protagonists, or the over-the-top deaths, like when Jason caught someone completely zipped up in their sleeping bag and beat them against a tree while they were stuck in it? Even Freddy vs. Jason, which is a guilty pleasure of mine, is much more comedy than Horror. With the Scream films, at least Wes Craven and company were aware of those stereotypes and poked fun at them in-film while still crafting a well done story that kept you guessing and gave you chills.

When you dissect some of the truly great Horror stories, you find things you might not expect. The easiest example would be Freddy Krueger, who represents loss and neglect, and according to Robert Englund himself in reference to the second Nightmare film, homosexual repression. And that's just the monster; try really taking a look at Nancy in Nightmare 1, 3 and New Nightmare. And so we've come full circle with that. Just like Dracula and Frankenstein, the best Horror has something to say. It can be much more subversive than those novels, but the thrills and chills, and the very nature of the Horror structure allow so much freedom for writers. Fear and Love are two of humanity's strongest drives, both of which Horror can handle like no other genre could ever hope to.

And there you have it. That's what Horror is to me. I hope I covered all my bases well enough and didn't make any of that too confusing. I'd also like to hear from everyone else about what Horror means to them.

Until then, it's Halloween guys. Read some Clive Barker, watch some Wes Craven, and have fun. It'll be a real scream!