LITTLE ROCK — People ask me all the time about my favorite movies, and it’s always a question I struggle with. I don’t really have a list, and every movie I think of leads me to three others. Ask me again in 15 minutes and I’ll have a completely different way of looking at the question.
I’m especially disappointing on the subject of horror films. The truth is that I’m not really much of a fan of the genre. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the cognitive dissonance of being afraid while knowing I’m perfectly safe, it’s just that I have trouble allowing myself to be scared. I never have to remind myself it’s only a movie - movies are by their very natureresistible. Just as you don’t have to buy a ticket to any given film, you don’t have to make yourself available to any given film’s advances. There’s always an escape hatch, a well-lighted exit sign we can escapethrough if we like.
We are complicated creatures who bring all sorts of goodies to the theater with us - lots of us don’t go to horror movies to be scared so much as we go to make fun of the conventions of horror movies, an ironic gesture enshrined in the Scream and Scary Movie series.
While any movie might momentarily catch you off guard with pop-out ghosts and ringing phones, or shock you with escalated levels of gore and violence, the key to a genuinely scary movie is the voluntaryenlistment of the audience in the cause. We have to want to be scared.
I guess I don’t want it badly enough.
I appreciate the technical accomplishments of horror movies but I’m not scared by them (and I bet a lot of horror fans are like me; they wouldn’t hoot at the beheading if they perceived it as a beheading - they laugh because they recognize it as a more or less accomplished illusion). I don’t think much of gore for gore’s sake, for torture porn or The Human Centipede.
To my mind, the scariest movie opening today is the Sundance award-winning documentary on the surprising consequences of natural gas drilling, Gasland. Flammable drinking water freaks me out more than any of Jigsaw’s convoluted morality plays.
My first brush with deeply frightening films was Rosemary’s Baby, although I can’t remember exactly what it was about the film that disturbed me in 1968. I doubt my 9-yearold self was equipped to understand much of Roman Polanski’s subtle gothic masterpiece (I’ve seen it many times since, and now I get it as a sort of comedy) but I do remembera sense of vague unease that hung around for days after seeing the movie.
On the other hand, The Exorcist still bothers me. I wouldn’t dispute the conventional wisdom that it’s the scariest movie of all time. I saw it a few weeks after it premiered, probably in February 1974. And, a couple of weeks ago, when I walked through the same Georgetown neighborhood where it had been filmed, I felt the hairs rise on the backof my neck. The Exorcist is a haunting film.
I don’t believe, however, that The Exorcist succeeded in disrupting my sleep habits because of its special effects or shock shots. What was terrifying about the movie was the pervasive atmosphere of tension and dread director William Friedkin was able to build and sustain. It builds slowly, almost subconsciously, through the funereal pacing of the first hour of the three-part structure. What’s really scary about the movie is the way Friedkin manipulates our mood, punctuating this oppressive tone with torrents of graphic language and grisly atrocities inflicted upon Linda Blair’s pre-teen Regan MacNeil.
Since The Exorcist, I’ve not encountered too many movies that met my standards for authentic scariness. While I liked the movies, I can’t say I was scared by Jaws or The Shining or any of the usual suspects.The trashier - and I mean that in the best sense of the word - scream operas like the Halloween, Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street films never laid a glove on me.
One that did - probably the most unnerving movie I’ve ever seen - was George Sluzier’s Spoorloos, a 1988 Dutch-French production that’s also known as The Vanishing (and which resembles the current Ryan Reynolds suspense thriller Buried).
Five years later, Sluzier remade the film for American audiences, with Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock in key roles. That version - with its Hollywood ending - hardly made a dent in my consciousness, but the understated original, with its unknown (to me, at least) castand its low-tech, documentary-style textures, is a haunting, spooky movie that will freeze your heart.
All that is prelude. People like lists. So here are my Ten Favorite Scary movies, in a vague order of spooky ookiness.
1. The Exorcist
2. Spoorloos
3. The Devils (1971) - Ken Russell’s take on the historical Loudun possessions of Ursuline nuns in 17th-century France starred Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave.
4. Suspiria (1977) - DarioArgento’s story of a young American ballerina who discovers the prestigious European ballet company she has just joined is actually something much more sinister.
5. Don’t Look Now (1973) - Nicolas Roeg directed this reasonably faithful version of the Daphne Du Maurier short story, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple mourning the drowning death of their daughter.
6. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) - I’m cheating a little here. Guillermo del Toro’s film is less scary than sad; but it’s beautifully realized, poignant and moving in a way that transcends all genres.
7. Videodrome (1983) - A creepy, hallucinogenic tale about a bad TV habit, by David Cronenberg, with James Woods and Deborah Harry. (I could have gone with Cronenberg’s disturbing Spider [2002], with Ralph Fiennes.)
8. Rosemary’s Baby
9. Janghwa, Hongryeon (A Tale of Two Sisters) (2003) - Korean Ji-woon Kim’s masterpiece of family dysfunction.
10. Psycho (1960) - I’ll have a piece about Alfred Hitchcock’s last great movie on my blog, Blood, Dirt & Angels (blooddirtangels.com), today.
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MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 10/29/2010