ok lets all shit our pants to something old: pre-2006 horror film thread

I think Cure is Kurosawa's masterpiece

Possessor on deck; I think this is best watched tonight as the madness kicks into high gear

the sound design in Pulse is pretty special iirc. shame about the ott ending and appalling cgi.

recently watched Possession (1981). it's like... david cronenberg directing a james bond film written by rainer rilke? lmao. seriously chilling sexual horror. spellbinding lead from isabelle adjani.

"The role was emotionally exhausting for Adjani. In one of the interviews, she stated that it took her several years to recover from, which J. Hoberman called "a veritable aria of hysteria".[8] It was rumored that she attempted suicide after filming completed,[18] which was confirmed by Żuławski.[19] Time Out magazine compared the behavior of her character to the actions of "a dervish of unrestrained emotion and pure sexual terror".[20]"

I'm not that big on Pulse (agreed that Cure is great) but I love that scene with the weirdly moving woman.

I don't need it but I would like a good bluray edition of Let's Scare Jessica To Death.

I'm a little baffled that Lemora still isn't getting much love, I thought it's reputation would grow.

In the last few years, there have been whispers that Carpenter got the basic idea for Halloween not from Yablans but from the Canadian filmmaker Bob Clark, who died last year in a car crash. Clark’s 1974 sorority-house thriller, Black Christmas, introduced several elements that would become famous in later movies. There is a crank-caller that prefigured the one in 1979’s When a Stranger Calls (which Wes Craven later satirized in his 1996 hit, Scream) as well as extensive use of the killer’s-point-of-view shot that famously opens Halloween. The killer in Black Christmas is even more mysterious than Michael Myers. We know literally nothing about him.

Carpenter and Clark had worked together for a time on a horror film called Prey, which eventually fell through. According to several old interviews with Clark, including one on the DVD of Black Christmas, Carpenter asked Clark what he would do if he ever made a sequel to his holiday-themed hit. Clark said the serial killer would be caught, sent to a mental hospital, escape the next fall, and start killing girls. The title: Halloween. (Clark never made a sequel to Black Christmas, but he did go on to direct Porky’s and, oddly enough, the holiday perennial A Christmas Story.)

Carpenter denies getting the idea from Clark, and even denies admiring the man’s work. “I remember coming out of Black Christmas thinking, I don’t know about that,” he says.

Is Carpenter kind of a dick or is that just my impression? I mean, I have issues with Black Christmas too, mostly about the ending, but is this guy ever gracious? He hates Val Lewton films too, that's kind of a tell.

Well, he is notoriously cranky, but I don't know if he's a dick. Clark himself didn't consider the idea stolen.

I think it might be a case of hating Val Lewton fans who use Lewton as an exemplar against violent horror and that they did overrate him quite a bit. The annoying "why did we need to see that?" crowd.

OK. I'm sure he didn't steal from Clark, I was just thinking of the way he talks about other directors in interviews. Seems arrogant. I like Halloween and The Fog, so not slagging him.

xpost but Carpenter takes the opposite extreme - "why aren't you showing us anything?"

I think Carpenter (who I've interviewed a couple of times) is kind of jaded and cynical, which informs his films but also his personality.

Josefa - yes and there is a bit illustrating that in Horror Cafe and he follows it with a very funny story about an audience member hating ambiguity (ambiguity is important to him).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TosdCShzD4g

As I said upthread, it's probably very subjective and I like all approaches to some extent but my favorite thing is seeing a face that you just can't fully process and it terrifies you.
Not all of these are good examples but a lot are.
http://horrordigest.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Scary%20Face%20Club

Junji Ito said that the thing that scares him most is a face in an extreme situation, you can see lots of scary faces in his work.

Even though most of the audience may want to see something scary I think a lot of people underrate it because it's so rare and difficult to create, so almost forget how well it can be done. And some people confuse the seen with the unknown, but seeing something you can't understand or process can be as intense as anything.

Good link, RAG. Many of my candidates are there. Tar Man from ROTLD hits that button for me (the near cartoonishness of his skull face makes him that much more horrible, somehow). See also: the vagrant behind Winkie's in Mulholland Drive, mid-transformation Martin Short in Innerspace, the dead kid from Stand By Me. I'm sure I'll think of more.

For the longest time, I couldn't even bear to glance at the subliminal Exorcist face featured so prominently on that blog but now I have an empty can of Pazuzu Ale perched on my desk and I think it's fair to say that casually soaking in every horrific contour for hours every weekday has inured me a bit.

I always found the Creep from Creepshow's face especially creepy and didn't discover until fairly recently that Savini used AN ACTUAL HUMAN SKULL which I guess explains that.

Carpenter can be effusive about other directors - he's never disguised his debt to Hawks (even recording a commentary track for the original Thing From Another World), and has often mentioned Argento's Suspiria as an influence on Halloween (you could, I'm sure, make some interesting shot comparisons between the two, especially in relation to theIr shared colour palettes). Against that, I know he and (the equally cranky) Dan O'Bannon had a spectacular falling out over Dark Star, with Carpenter distancing himself from the finished film ("not my favourite").

I'm pretty certain you have to be at least a bit of a jerk to get any feature film made.

that appears to be the case based on most (all?) of the filmmakers I've ever met

lucky mckee was super nice when I talked to him at least

yeah... and I guess there's nothing wrong with a director having strong opinions; I probably just overacted to seeing Carpenter put down a couple of people, and then hearing this Bob Clark thing

Dan O'Bannon has a cameo in "The Fog," so he and Carpenter must have somewhat buried the hatchet.

We're taling very mild jerkness here, as far as I can tell.

some people confuse the seen with the unknown, but seeing something you can't understand or process can be as intense as anything.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, November 8, 2020 4:58 AM

I meant to say that people equate the seen with the known, which is not at all the same thing. I hope my meaning was clear enough.

Here's another link to much of the same stuff but for some reason my first link didn't show Mulholland Drive but one of the links on this page does
http://horrordigest.blogspot.com/p/stuff-you-need-to-know.html

I know I said it's subjective but I have to admit I'm still skeptical of people who say that The Haunting (which is do think is very scary), The Innocents and Val Lewton is intense as the nightmare power of the scary faces in Salem's Lot, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Watership Down.

I've had several nightmares about seeing a face that I can't turn away from soon enough and wanting to run for miles. And it does feel really conflicting to want to see it later on once I've woken up. That's the fun of horror though.
I remember roughly 15 years ago I was camping in woods with friends and walking into the darkness and loving the feeling of being scared but unable to go past a certain distance. Now Lyme disease worries me too much to be in the woods much but I wonder what I could do to feel like that again and how much pleasurably intense fear I've got left because it dissipates when you chase it but not chasing it isn't a good alternative.

RAG I find your take on the aesthetics of horror quite fascinating on here and think you're otm re scary faces. You really don't spend much time in woods because of lyme disease?

Thanks.

I live nearby a lot of woods and farms and it is something I hear about often enough. A local farmer got lyme disease and I've just heard so much about what it can do to people (last year a woman called into the radio about it, she was crying and near-screaming for the whole call) so I don't go into woods as often as I would like and even wary about tall grass.

I've had Lyme, it infected my knee when I was 13 and I had to have surgery. Not fun, but really not worth avoiding the pleasures of the woods or fields. Just do a tick check every. Time.

Fields I'm mostly fine with, especially with boots but in the woods there is more heights for ticks to climb on.

Yeah, I mean I've lived in the woods for years at a time, to each their own.

Anyone seen Mindwarp? I think I'll go for this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzQUtbmb6fE

how is there a Bruce Campbell movie out there I've never heard of

Conquest - Barbarian fantasy by Lucio Fulci. People weren't kidding when they said this is a dreamy druggy eccentric oddity. Heavier gore than the genre tends to have, monster men and transformations (that metal headed woman and her metal god boyfriend were wolves? What happened?). Don't expect much from the special effects or acting but I'd recommend this as a good stoner film.
Watched it on amazon prime.

Fulci For Fake - Firstly, I don't feel like I've properly seen this film because the english subtitles are very poor. I didn't think there was much point in the presenter/interviewer acting as Fulci but I guess he's a celebrity in Italy.

His films before the 70s are spoke about very dismissively and there's a general view put across that the horror films were his truest self, I had always heard that he felt trapped by the genre, like a lot of directors but this isn't touched on. No mention of Conquest, sadly.

There's a bunch of home movies, in one of them Fulci talks about his misognistic feelings and the documentary seems to say that this anger mixed with his grief over his first wife's suicide, his daughter's spinal injury, his general fears for womens' safety and erupts into all the violence you see in his films; some focus on New York Ripper being made after his daughter's accident.

His two daughters, Fabio Frizzi and other associates are interviewed. Camilla Fulci is interviewed more than anyone else, talks about working with her dad and further film work, her death is noted in the credits.

john carpenter's "hair" is proto tim and eric, incredible

bless stacy keach for being this game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCGh1ysvlQA

Enjoyable thread

OK, let's dig into this. (Thread)
1) The example is nonsense and means nothing beyond the fact that our film industry had a tiny makeup budget and absolutely zero aptitude in special effects. It was basically theater on tape and relied on the viewers' ability to suspend disbelief https://t.co/s7hET5FnO9

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) February 15, 2021

yah fun read

I Bury the Living is INCREDIBLE! Like Val Lewton meets The Twilight Zone. I'm completely dumbfounded that nobody ever talks about this thing.

You've sold it to me with that description.

After reading the great England's Screaming I was persuaded I needed to see Frightmare so picked up the Pete Walker coffin box collection. Outside of Die Screaming Marianne (which doesn't really fit being more of a straight eurothriller and most worth of it because of the commentary, where Walker and Johnathon Rigby argue about whether Walker's memory or IMDb is right) they are all quite excellent and undeservedly written off as cheap exploitation because of his background.

I've been curious about I Bury The Living for a long time, I hear good things about it now and then but also a lot of people saying it's just okay; Morrissey named a song after it? I always associate it with Strangler Of The Swamp, which I haven't seen either but they were in the same era in a guide I have.

Actually, I thought I recalled and just now confirmed that Stephen King included I Bury the Living among his 'six scariest movie scenes' in The Book of Lists (which I presume means he also talked about it in Danse Macabre but it's been a long while since I read that). The scene in question is scary mostly in terms of what it implies, and is directly followed by a sequence that almost certainly inspired a certain sequence in Creepshow.

It's a movie Shyamalan wishes he was good enough to make, with an ending that was less a 'DO U SEE' twist than a 'well, here's an explanation for what just went down which clearly doesn't hold water or convince any of us but maybe for the sake of our sanity we should just agree to speak no more of it' pseudo-ending.

(Also the title is totally misleading as the movie has basically nothing at all to do with burying the living, but that's exploitation titles for you.)

xpost

I didn't realise that England's Screaming also contained discussion of 'real' films.

I love the sheer visual grubbiness of the Walker/McGillivray movies; in their way they're as socially realist (of 70s England) as any Ken Loach movie.

One of these Kino sales I'm gonna finally pull the trigger on their Pete Walker sets. I'd been curious but y'all nudged me off the fence.

I didn't realise that England's Screaming also contained discussion of 'real' films.

Are you confusing England's Screaming and Studio of Screams?

The former is a kind of ur-novel which builds the protagonists of various 'real' folk/occult horror films into a single narrative and timeline. The latter (which I'm currently halfway through) is an overarching novel about the erasure from history of a film studio from the Amicus/Tigon scene held together by novelisations of four of the films; but the linking pieces refer to real people on the film scene.

I am indeed a ball of confusion, thanks for the clarification.

Looks like there's a pretty dece print of I Bury the Living on YouTube so may well give that a go at the weekend.

It doesn't help that they both have scream in the title and Graham Humphreys dust jackets.

I Bury The Living has a free version on Bezos Prime so that'll do me.

Ah, I also have Prime so will see which print is better (they could well be the same one).

Prime prints are often shocking - I watched one teen camp exploitation flick that was genuinely the worst quality I've seen since the days of tape trading - but at least they're what they're supposed to be and complete.

Yes, it's kind of amazing that the world's biggest internet company offers such shoddy, dubious prints so often - or maybe it isn't. And in a way, I like that shonky VHS dupe quality, some of the time, for things like 80s slasher movies. It's closer to the feel of going to a High Street Video Shop in the glory days of the Video Nasty and seeing a bewildering selection of cult/exploitation obscurities than it is to the predictable experience of a trip to Blockbuster.

And of course there are no ads on Prime, whereas YouTube movies often seem to have quite frequent ad break.

My copy was surprisingly solid, considering it was one of four movies crammed onto the same single-sided DVD. I went in assuming it was gonna be akin to watching an Edison kinetoscope.