Top Thirteen Horror Films, Novels and Short Stories, part III

Here is Lynda E. Rucker's top thirteen horror film list.

THE FILMS

It’s kind of surprising to me that this was a harder category to narrow down than the books or short stories, as I am a reader before I am a film lover. But there’s an awful lot to choose from. I have an intense and shameless love of horror films. I will watch reams of crap, whereas I am intolerant of crap reading (well, except for my pulp weakness discussed on the novel list). I am forgiving of schlock and cheese and lousy acting. Having said that, most of these films feature superior acting, scripts, and production values, as well as scares all round.

This is the list which am most likely to regret in the morning, the one in which I feel I was forced to make the most arbitrary cuts to get it down to thirteen. I have not limited myself to one film per director, but I have tried to avoid listing any film I’ve only seen in the last couple of years. (Check back with me at some future Halloween and see if, say, The Ring or Donnie Darko survived the test of time.)

Also, in compiling this list I discovered that, apparently, I kind of think the 1970s were a golden age for horror cinema.

All films available on DVD and VHS in the United States unless otherwise noted.

1. The Seventh Victim (1943)—Watch this on a double bill with Rosemary’s Baby for an earlier look at the unlikely urban Satanist. A moody, striking film about a young woman’s (Kim Hunter, in her film debut) search for her beautiful and enigmatic older sister through a shadowy underworld. (Available only on VHS.)

2. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)—A paranoid, unsettling film which owes much to the source material—it is very faithful to the Ira Levin novel, down to the dialogue—but the acting and Polanski’s directing are fine as well. Ruth Gordon’s performance is hilariously and memorably crass. I also find this an interesting (and horrifying) film for what it reveals of the gender politics of the time: the men in Rosemary’s world (doctors, husband) treat her with a sickening paternal condescension. The gorgeous Dakota apartment building is a character much like the Overlook Hotel of The Shining. Welcome to the Year One! Hail Satan!

3. The Exorcist (1973)—An automatic choice for this list, an all-around brilliant, frightening, sad film about the problem of evil and the problem of faith, and ironically Friedkin the unbeliever conveyed these themes more effectively in film than the devout William Peter Blatty did in his novel (or his own preferred cut of the movie). Also, the origins of my unseemly priest fetish probably began here. What I love best about it, though, is that for all its flamboyant trappings, it’s a grown-up horror movie at its very best.

4. The Wicker Man (1973)—It’s a musical! No, it’s a horror movie! Another movie about faith, albeit of a very different sort, as straight-laced Christian policeman Sgt. Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) visits a remote Scottish island where paganism continues to flourish under the aegis of the mysterious Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee). A weird and haunting film that owes a great deal to Woodward’s convincing and even sympathetic performance. Get the soundtrack as well!

5. The Tenant (Le Locataire) (1976)—Roman Polanski directed several fine horror movies, and this is perhaps the strangest of the lot, a tale about an ill-adjusted Eastern European immigrant in Paris who becomes obsessed with or possessed by a former tenant in his rented apartment. Extremely creepy, with a strong subtext of alienation.

6. Suspiria (1977)—My favorite Dario Argento film keeps changing; for a while it was Tenebre (1982) and then it was Phenomena (1985) but lately it’s been this twisted Gothic fairy tale. If Dario adapted a short story by Angela Carter it might turn out like this film. Gory and stylish like all of Argento, this tale of a young American dance student who discovers her school hides a coven of witches was purportedly much-influenced by Argento’s now ex-wife, Daria Nicolodi.

7. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)—I like all three of the body snatcher movies—yes, that includes the 1993 Abel Ferrara remake Body Snatchers that everyone hated. I am a sucker for body snatchers in the same way I am a sucker for zombies: because body snatchers usually bring on the apocalypse! This version is the best of the bunch, paranoid, and almost unbearably suspenseful.

8. Dawn of the Dead (1978)-The middle film in Romero’s Living Dead trilogy. I suspect that Night of the Living Dead might actually be a better horror film, but again we have a more full-on apocalypse underway here. Also, a satire of consumerist culture in the mix. Why do all the zombies end up at the mall. “It reminds them of something that comforted them when they were living.” Ooooh.

9. The Shining (1980)—Stephen King said Stanley Kubrick didn’t understand the horror genre. I see King’s point in one objection to this film: that Jack Nicholson’s character is supposed to deteriorate over the course of the story as opposed to being over-the-top wacked out from the opening scenes. But, really. That was the book, and this is the movie, and Stephen King should be so lucky as to get so fine an adapatation of one of his books again. Shots of long, empty corridors have never been so foreboding, and Kubrick captures the palpable evil of the Overlook Hotel in every scene.

10. Prince of Darkness (1987)—I championed this movie for years when everybody else, critics and regular viewers alike, said it sucked, and over time it has come to be much more well-regarded than on its initial release. Make no mistake—this is one of the exceptions to the superior qualities I noted above. I know this is a rickety film. I know that a lot of the acting is lousy, and I’ve heard it described as “too talky” although I never noticed. It is not John Carpenter’s best by any objective standard, but it is my favorite, wildly entertaining, and it contains one of my all-time most frightening images: the mysterious staticky transmission, about which I will say no more.

11. Dark Waters (1994)—Chosen because it gave me nightmares, and no supernatural horror film has given me nightmares for longer than I can remember. A young woman travels to a remote and spooky island where her now-deceased father funded a mysterious monastery, only to discover demonic nuns and more! (Released on VHS and DVD in the US as Dead Waters.)

12. The Kingdom I and II-(Riget I and II, 1994 and 1997) My beloved Lars von Trier filmed these tales of a haunted hospital as mini-series for Danish television and they had a limited theatrical release in the United States. Funny and moving, frightening and outlandish, replete with zombies, bizarre births, ghosts, haunted ambulances, murder attempts, soap opera intrigue, and my favorite, the Dane-hating Swedish doctor Stig Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Jaregard, now sadly deceased). (The first series is available only on VHS in the US; the second is unavailable in the US.)

13. Lost Highway (1997)—Much of Lynch’s work is in the horrific vein and his imagery every bit as nightmarish as anything I’ve seen in a straight horror film. Lost Highway, an intriguing, reality-bending nightmare (or, if you prefer Lynch’s description, “a twenty-first century horror-noir”) was unfairly drubbed by both critics and audiences. Who is Renee/Alice? What does the Mystery Man have to do with it all? And most importantly, what really happened in the front yard of Pete Dayton’s house that fateful night?

Top Thirteen Horror Films, Novels and Short Stories, part II

The second list is by my wife Lynda E. Rucker -- novelist, short story writer, and my greatest co-conspirator. Lynda is likewise a full-on Joss Whedon fan. She's also a closet Steven Seagal fan. Well, to be exact, she's been known to watch Seagal's 1990 opus Hard to Kill with glassy-eyed fascination. Is her appreciation of this murder classic ironic? Who knows any longer . . .

THE SHORT STORIES

These lists. These lists kill me. How can I pick a “best of”? I become panicky, constricted. Surely items will be left off, and the day after this is posted I will be kicking myself for what I forgot to include and what I didn’t say. Every list of this type has a few standard, non-negotiable no-brainer choices, but then the agony kicks in. And then there are the rules: what if it’s a novel I haven’t read in ten years but it was one of my favorites way back when? What if it’s a movie I saw just a few months ago—can I trust my impressions of so recent a viewing to stack up fairly against films that have stayed with me for years and years? Should I limit myself to only once choice per director? What about the fact that my film list is so heavily weighted to movies from the 1960s forward, and my short story list is stacked with old stuff? And yet the allure of the lists is too strong to resist the urge to make them.

In the end I decided to just stop worrying about it. Here they are, my ramshackle lists, reflecting exactly what I was feeling at the moment that I wrote them. Maybe we should call it Lists of Exceptional Books and Movies and Stories You Should Really Check Out If You Have Not Done So Already, rather than “best”, per se.

I’m waffling, aren’t I? Without further ado…

In compiling this list I found I leaned more toward stories I read years ago and consistently go back and re-read, rather than work more recently encountered, if only because those stories for me formed a kind of core for my appreciation of horror fiction. Maybe next Halloween I’ll make two short story lists, one reserved for more contemporary pieces. This list, probably more than any other, clearly reflects my biases and likes (and probably, by omission, my dislikes). I am a big fan of older supernatural fiction, ghost stories, and unease created by suggestion and mood rather than explicit imagery. I limited myself here to one story per writer and am, even as you read these words, agonizing over the absence of such masters as M.R. James, Thomas Ligotti, Terry Lamsley, Ambrose Bierce, Steve Rasnic Tem, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, Russell Kirk, and many more.


1. The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
Though widely (and rightfully) hailed as a feminist masterpiece, this story wouldn’t make my list if it didn’t also work on a purely aesthetic level, and it is a chilling and disturbing tale of either a malevolent haunting or a woman’s frightening mental deterioration. You could ignore the subtext completely and still come away having read a prime example of the best the genre has to offer; however, the oppressive, claustrophobic environment in which the narrator struggles to tell her story makes for a particularly harrowing journey.

2. The White People, by Arthur Machen (1906)
Machen’s bizarre and dreamlike tale of a young girl who is consumed by dark mystical visions is written mostly in the form of her journal, and is rightfully described by T.E.D. Klein in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural as seeming to be “an actual product of such an encounter, an authentic pagan artifact.” Possibly my all-time favorite work of weird fiction.

3. The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood (1907)
Many consider this not only Blackwood’s masterpiece, but one of the finest pieces of supernatural fiction ever written, and with good reason. A chilling story inspired in part by a canoeing trip the author took through Eastern Europe in his youth, this is Blackwood the mystic at his very best as campers are menaced by a kind of indifferent, awe-inspiring cosmic force that tugs at the fabric of reality. Like most of my favorite horror stories, this blends a sense of wonder with its terror.

4. The Beckoning Fair One, by Oliver Onions (1911)
A classic tale of a writer’s obsession with a malevolent spirit in the guise of a beautiful woman, and his psychological disintegration under its spell.

5. The Colour Out of Space, by H.P. Lovecraft (1929)
This was a tough one; it might as easily have been, say, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" or "At the Mountains of Madness" or any number of favorite tales. Unlike a lot of readers who discovered Lovecraft in their teens and then outgrew his purple prose and hysterical narrators, I actually found him a bit turgid and dull when I was younger and with each passing year love his bleak, infernal, and awe-inspiring cosmology more and more. "The Colour Out of Space" is the story of an old farm where a meteorite’s landing precipitates the decay of both the land and the people on it, and while it doesn’t deal directly with the “mythos” (not a term Lovecraft himself used), it has the same feel as those stories in its suggestion of cosmic forces that dwarf mankind’s puny existence.

6. The Summer People, by Shirley Jackson (1950)
There are other Shirley Jackson stories that could also go here, but this is a perfect example of her strengths: a spare, brief story, consisting mainly of just a conversation between a husband and wife which ends on a dreadful note of doom.

7. A Good Man Is Hard To Find, by Flannery O’Connor (1951)
O’Connor is one of my favorite writers of all time, and The Misfit remains one of the most chilling human monsters in fiction. It’s the mundane details, the finely drawn characters, that make this story so nightmarishly effective.

8. Don’t Look Now, by Daphne Du Maurier (1971)
Daphne Du Maurier’s sad and haunting story of a British couple who have gone to Italy in hopes of healing from the tragic death of their young daughter, only to encounter twin sisters, one a psychic with a enigmatic message, the meaning of which comes clear too late.

9. The Sentinels, by Ramsey Campbell (1973)
I wanted to put a Campbell story in here and I had a terrible time deciding which one; I chose this, about a group of young people who visit some standing stones, because of one very chilling, haunting, and memorable image which has remained with me for years. I am also very fond of Campbell’s erotic horror collection Scared Stiff (which has just been reprinted by TOR) and his early Lovecraft-inspired fiction; his short story collections are numerous and you can’t go far wrong with any of them.

10. Sticks, by Karl Edward Wagner (1974)
I first encountered Wagner’s "Sticks" as a young teenager, before reading any of the older pulp authors this pays homage to. As with so many of the authors on this list, it’s hard to choose a favorite Wagner, but this came first for me and ignited my imagination in untold ways. Some people have speculated that the weird stick bundles in this story were an inspiration for The Blair Witch Project. Karl Edward Wagner’s fiction meant an awful lot to me and his death of the untimeliest sort still breaks my heart.

11. The Mist, by Stephen King (1980)
A siege story (you’ve got me right there) during an apocalypse (if the siege didn’t get me, the apocalypse will) in which Lovecraftian-type monsters rip through a hole in reality and terrorize the world (now I’m in heaven). King is generally at his finest in the short or novella-length form, and this is one of his best works.

12. The Hospice, by Robert Aickman (1981)
One of Robert Aickman’s most enigmatic stories (and that’s saying something), this is hard to describe on the face of it—a man’s car breaks down and he’s forced to take a very strange night’s lodging in a place where things just are not right. Wonderfully, subtly unsettling, like always seeing something horrible just outside your range of vision.

13. The Great God Pan, by M. John Harrison (1988)
One of my favorite horror stories of all time became one of my favorite books ever, the extraordinary (and extraordinarily strange) The Course of the Heart, but first there was this chilling story about the repercussions of youthful “experiments” with the occult and adults trying without success to escape a tainted past.

Top Thirteen Horror Films, Novels and Short Stories, part I

I like lists. So considering that we've entered into the Halloween season, I thought that it would be amusing and interesting to ask some of my comrades if they would like to write a little about their favorite horror films, novels and stories. Luckily they agreed to my nefarious plan, so after this initial trial run, Nightmare Town hopes to see them roaming these lonely streets more often.

The first list is by Lisa Moore – playwright, short story writer, and hardcore Joss Whedon fan. She also exhibits a strange fondness for actor Stephen McHattie. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

FAVORITE HORROR FILMS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:(all available on DVD and VHS unless otherwise noted)

The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988): dir. Wes Craven
A beautiful, hallucinatory film about Haitian voodoo in the last days of the Duvaliers. An exceptional cast rises above the considerable cheese factor. Watch it late at night and sleep-deprived for full effect of the zombification scene, which Craven leads you through by the hand as if it were happening to you.

Arnold (1973): dir. George Fenady
Stella Stevens marries a corpse for his money, but something is gleefully murdering people, and it seems to be the dead man himself. Want to see Roddy McDowell get his innards squeezed out by an evil sweater? Stella Stevens squashed in the shower with her illicit lover? You do! Absolutely you do. I haven't seen it since I was nine since it's never been released on VHS or DVD, but I can't believe it doesn't hold up. The incomparable Elsa Lanchester is here as well, and I seem to recall a smashing lose-your-face-to-acid-in-the-cold-cream scene.

Don’t Look Now (1973): dir. Nicholas Roeg
Slow-building creepfest set mostly in Venice. Roeg sets you up slowly with its strange atmosphere and pays off in spades at the end. Scared the piss out of me when I was a kid, and I still get jumpy around bright red raincoats.

Dead Ringers (1988): dir. David Cronenberg
Cronenberg in his best slow and creepy mode. You don't have to be a woman to keep your legs crossed hard during this tale of twin gynecologists sinking into decay and depravity. This is the film Jeremy Irons ought to've won his Oscar for. Somewhere during the first forty minutes I completely forgot he was playing both roles.

Ravenous (1999): dir. Antonia Bird
This is one of the most exhilarating movies you'll ever see, particularly about cannibalism. There's not a weak performance in it, not a weak element: music, script, editing, pacing, story, all right on. Once you've seen it, try and forget Robert Carlyle's manic fit in the snow outside the cave or Jeremy Davies' anguished cry, "He was licking me!" Or the marvelous endgame, in which two men caught in a bear-trap are playing Whoever-Dies-First-Gets-Eaten.

The Company of Wolves (1985): dir. Neil Jordan
If there's a chick-flick among horror films, this is it. A reworking of Angela Carter's werewolf stories, it follows fever-dreams from the troubled sleep of a girl as she enters into puberty. Everything in the film is symbolic, as in a dream. Sound awful? Weirdly, it's not, largely due to the world Jordan creates with meticulous care: a world of nightmarish fecundity in which nature is constantly encroaching and man constantly battling it back. It's filled with strange, good images (Terence Stamp as the Prince of Darkness, brooding on a memento mori) and performances (Angela Lansbury as Red Riding Hood's disturbingly creepy grandmother).

Prophecy (1995): dir. Gregory Widen
Who wouldn't love to live in a Miltonian universe in which angels vie with men for the love of God, in which the heavens are perpetually rent by war between seraphim, where Christopher Walken is the ruthless archangel Gabriel and Viggo Mortensen, best of all, is Lucifer himself? For two hours and two sequels, you can! Revel in the Manichaean angst, and don't be afraid of the sequels: the first one, especially, is well worth the effort (look close for a cameo by Glenn Danzig).

The Dead Zone (1983): dir. David Cronenberg
Gripping and unpretentious rendering of the Stephen King classic. Christopher Walken gives a brilliantly low-key performance as a man who emerges from a coma with unnatural powers, and you'll never watch The West Wing easily again once you've seen Martin Sheen's powermad senator Greg Stillson.

Theater of Blood (1973): dir. Douglas Hickox
Vincent Price, Diana Rigg and a cast of distinguished British theatre actors tear it up in this mad romp through the dark side of bardolatry. A disgruntled actor murders his critics in gloriously gruesome ways inspired by Shakespeare himself. Poorly paced and smirkingly camp, but wait until you see the Titus Andronicus murder.

Pumpkinhead (1989): dir. Stan Winston
It's a Manly Wade Wellmanesque world where monsters erupt from the rich loam of back-hills folklore. Lance Henriksen is extraordinarily moving as a country-store owner who conjures up a demon of vengeance when his boy is killed by careless city-folk. Henriksen explores a depth of emotion that you may never see rivalled in the genre, and the night scenes are lit with eerie effectiveness.

Angel Heart (1987): dir. Alan Parker
Some of us remember a time when Mickey Rourke was heralded as the DeNiro of his generation, and this is his best work. It's after WWII and Rourke's unkempt, charming PI who has "a thing about chickens" follows a missing persons case steeped in voodoo from New York to New Orleans. Under Parker's unfailingly deft hand the sense of dread grows to unbearable levels. Music, flashback and strange images weave a hypnotic spell, and if it weren't for two badly miscalculated elements (the glowing eyes and the obviousness of Louis Cyphre), this would be a perfect movie.

The Legend of Hell House (1973): dir. John Hough
Richard Matheson wrote the script from his own source material; think of it as The Haunting of Hill House on steroids. Three psychic investigators and one spouse spend a week at Hell House to divine the secrets of its evil. The remarkable thing about this one is that through daring use of camera angles and a near-brilliant manipulation of sound effects Hough brings the house to life, makes it a constant, lurking and genuinely frightening character through whose eyes we see much of the action. Some overwrought acting and absurd plot points, but well worth it.

The Fool-Killer (1965): dir. Servando Gonzalez
Beautifully filmed in B&W, this is another good one to watch while feverish or sleep-deprived for the full, dream-like effect. Reminiscent of The Night of the Hunter (1955), it follows a boy (Edward Albert) on his travels though post-Civil War America. He's on the run and he hardly knows from what, but it's embodied in his mind by the mythical demon of the title who may or may not be his mysterious travelling companion. The tent-revival scene is a surreal moment of genius, not to be missed. Available on VHS only.

The Exorcist III (1990): dir. William Peter Blatty
A word of warning: I have never found anyone who agrees with me on this one. I don't get why. Jason Miller and Brad Dourif are outstanding (Dourif later basically reprised the role for an X-Files episode), and Viveca Lindfors will never look the same again after she's crawled across the ceiling. Sure, there's cheese (what's with the hedge-trimmer?) but there's a scene in the middle that's unsurpassed for suspense involving a nurse and security guard on night-shift, a glass of melting ice, a nametag, a coffee vending-machine and long, stationary takes of the lobby. Blatty is a sucker for that extreme Catholic imagery (statues of the BVM weeping blood, lots of roses and crucifixes and saints with their eyes rolled heavenward), but who isn't?

Bring Me the Head of Brian Yuzna: The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival

Well, the 10th edition of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival was held here in P-town October 9th through the 12th at the historic Hollywood Theater. Lynda, our good friend “Walkout” Joe Pettit, Jr. and I attended the eldritch festivities. This was our second year going to the festival, and although it started inauspiciously (more about that below), the wealth of interesting things to see Saturday and Sunday more than made up for Friday’s rotten feature-film offering, the Lovecraft-anthology Necronomicon (1993). Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to anything other than Necronomicon on Friday since we spent most of the evening having drinks and food at the great British pub, The Moon & Sixpence, which is located down the street. Joe and Lynda were interested in seeing Brian Yuzna’s recent film, Beyond Re-Animator (2003), but I managed to convince them that it would be a let-down since I had seen a little of it the week before when the film premiered on cable. I got them to see Necronomicon, instead. I’d read some very positive reviews about it and had always heard that it was pretty good. Man, what a fool I was. The film is a trilogy of short films very loosely based on Lovecraft tales -- The Drowned directed by Christophe Gans (who later went on to direct Brotherhood of the Wolf), based on “The Rats in the Walls;” The Cold, directed by Shusuke Kaneko; and Whispers directed by Brian Yuzna. The latter two entries were “inspired” by “Cool Air” and “The Whisperer in Darkness” respectively. Gans’s short film is the best of the three, although it would be difficult to be any worse than Yuzna’s and Kaneko’s horrible contributions. The less said about them the better. But the question must be asked, Have Brian Yuzna or Kaneko actually ever read H.P. Lovecraft? After the screening the three of us returned home pissed off and dejected.

Luckily, Saturday’s offerings were a lot better. We caught the Shorts Block 1, which consisted of some very cool films, most notable of which were The Imperfect Solution (a fantastic adaptation of the fourth Herbert West – Re-Animator serial “The Scream of the Dead”) and Cutethulhu, a 2-minute anime-inspired cartoon with a hilarious punch line. Afterwards we checked out the screening for The Shunned House, an Italian made feature film that, although interesting at times, seriously lacked any sort of narrative drive. Later in the evening we caught what turned out to be the highlight of the festival, Shawn Owens’s documentary about Mr. Lovecraft and his contribution to pop culture entitled The Eldritch Influence. Containing interviews with horror writers Ramsey Campbell (the greatest living practitioner of the genre) and Brian Lumley, fantasist Neil Gaiman, director Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon), and Lovecraft biographer S. T. Joshi (who was also an attendee at the festival), the documentary was an excellent primer on the attraction of all things Lovecraftian.

Sunday afternoon we attended the “Secret Screening” of Nigel Kneal’s The Stone Tape. Originally made for British television, the film is a fascinating and occasionally disturbing chronicle of a group of scientists, led by the sociopathic Peter Brock (a completely over-the-top Michael Bryant), who stumble upon the existence of a ghost within their new research lab. Filled with ideas, some genuine unpleasantness, and enough hysterical performances from its large ensemble cast to rival Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985), The Stone Tape should not be missed. Afterwards, we took in the Shorts Block 2. Memorable entries were: Beyond the Wall of Sleep by Bradley A. Palmer and Bryan Moore’s splendid Cool Air, starring Jack Donner. Nice black and white cinematography, a literate script, and excellent performances by Donner and Moore easily made Cool Air the highlight of the shorts. It’ll be interesting to see what Moore and company will come up with next. Moore and Donner were also in attendance and held a nice Q & A session after the screening. What else can I say? We were exhausted after the whole thing. And we didn’t even get a chance to see everything. But there’s always next year. . . .

UPDATE COMING SOON!

Yes, that's right. I'll start updating this blog within the next couple of days. Honest. My apologies for those of you out there in the dark who still give a damn. But you can look forward to more film and book reviews and a few other surprises such as my comments about the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival that just ended this past weekend here in town. So stay tuned!