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

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.

The Prime one is good enough, a bit dark maybe.

Anyway, this was great, I really enjoyed it although the early Twilight Zone (having just blasted through the bluray set) is the obvious reference point. Actually, the OB scenes reminded me in a lot of ways of Night of the Living Dead.

Yeah, in terms of mood and visuals it's probably the most NotLD-esque pre-NotLD horror film I've seen.

OK, I looked (have not yet watched) and Prime UK has it in two versions - it's clear that the film is one of those ubiquitous out of copyright specials, in Europe at least. As you say Aldo, one of the prints on Prime is acceptable if a little dark; the other seems to be a degraded copy of this print and v much to be avoided.

The print on YouTube is the sharpest and brightest, and appears to be ad free on a very quick skim. Pleasingly, this print has the old BBFC certificate at the beginning.

Based on your description, looking forward to watching.

recently watched Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time and I think it one of the scariest horror films I've ever seen

went from that to Poltergeist, which is basically a Spielberg film

Lucky! Wish there were more classics I could watch for the first time.

The scariest part of TCM is how badly I wanted to see Franklin eat a chainsaw.

the last movie i saw in a theater may have been a double feature of texas chainsaw massacre 1/2. tcm on the big screen... you get very intimate with the sight of a gigantic panicked human eyeball

Out of nowhere I just want to talk about two scenes that I still think about.

I feel like I might have said this upthread but: the scene of Nosferatu with Orlok appearing in the doorway and then coming towards the guy on the bed. I listened to a commentary that speculated about that as a sexual fantasy and I found it difficult to see it that way because I just couldn't see Orlok like that. But in years since I've imagined a lot of scary women coming to me in a similar fashion and it makes a bit more sense. Still hard to imagine Orlok having sex.

Mad Love (1935), when Frances Drake says she's going to kiss every man in the room (what, really?) and she slightly recoils at Peter Lorre, such a sad moment.

Need to rewatch Mad Love. It truly is quite mad.

recently watched Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time and I think it one of the scariest horror films I've ever seen

Otm. I know many reviewers have noted its black comedy aspects, but no other horror film has worked its way into my psyche like TCM. I still have occasional nightmares about being in that house.

My first time seeing it was a sparsely attended midnight showing, and the print was kind of beat up, which added to the grind house aspect. I knew nothing about it going in, and from the moment of the infamous door slam I was just like hoooooly fuck, what have I gotten myself into?

it used atmosphere better than most other 70s horror films. got correct what most other slasher films that came later didn't.

Burns's screaming was terrifying in its own right, in how real they seemed.

The Comic - Somewhere between Eraserhead and A Clockwork Orange. Online reviews I've seen for this are about as negative as they could be, but this is actually pretty good. A lot of things don't work as well as they were supposed to but this strange dystopian night world, the stylization and the exaggerated performance of the lead actor are all worthwhile. I would like more stuff like this with a higher budget but the director's other films seem to be mostly in a more straightforward style.
It seems like barely anyone has seen this and I think it could be found by a more sympathetic audience. Even though it didn't satisfy quite the way I hoped and the director said he only managed to get the film 1/4 right, it works well enough to recommend.

People on imdb completely shitting on it.

the brood was on TV last night and if you'd've asked i'd've said I'd seen it before but i watched it over breakfast and it was all new to me. also, ick.

Would be curious to know what medications the kids in the classroom scene from The Brood are using to cope with their PTSD.

I keep on meaning to rewatch it after Stephen Bissette's massive tome analysing it, but don't make the time.

realized after watching The Brood, Videodrome, The Fly, and eXistenZ again recently that I am not really on board with Cronenberg's fantasy body horror films.

I watched it yesterday and enjoyed it fine, but followed it with Testsuo The Iron Man which was much more my sort of extreme body horror tbh.