Good evening, friends. Happy Halloween. Read parts one, two, three, and four. Reminder: this list is not in order!
Psycho. 1960. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
What it asks us: what if everything contains its opposite?
Hitchcock understood horror, and he understood horror fans. If there’s any one theme that underlies all of his work, it’s nothing more than “you like this don’t you, you little freak?” He was scared of so much about the world, but more importantly he was endlessly fascinated by everything that scared him and he knew other people were too. He was eternally the little boy picking at scabs to see what would happen, turning over rocks to see the grubs underneath. Even his non-horror films demonstrate the conviction that there’s nothing weirder than everyday life, and no one weirder than the people walking around you in plain sight.
Nothing supernatural happens in Psycho – but the threat that it will is always present. That’s part of the point, surely: that the natural is horrific and contradictory enough on its own. Norman Bates is a nice young man. Norman Bates is a killer. Norman Bates is a man. Norman Bates is a woman. Mrs. Bates is dead. Mrs. Bates is alive. Marion Crane is an innocent victim. Marion Crane is a criminal. Marion was in the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of her own. Marion was always doomed to a fate like this. Norman likes Marion. Norman kills Marion. Mrs. Bates kills Marion. Norman defends Marion. Norman loves his mother. Norman fears his mother. Norman hates his mother. Norman is his mother. It’s all true.
The instability of identity and sanity is a named theme in Psycho, hence the mostly hated penultimate scene in which a psychiatrist explains it all for us. What sets Hitchcock's film apart from its many imitators is the way he subtly places the audience in that state of instability, so subtly that I think most audiences don’t even realize it has happened to them. Once you notice though, it’s hard to look at yourself the same way. Watch the film and wait for the scene where Norman sinks the car into the swamp. Notice your breath catching as it gets stuck, notice yourself hoping it will sink further – your allegiance has transferred from Marion to Norman, so instantly that you want her murder to be covered up moments after it happens. What does that say about you? Continue to the scene where Marion’s lover Sam interrogates Norman, notice the way you get annoyed with Sam for his suspicions when logically you know he is right to have them – you want Sam to leave Norman alone. What does that say about you?
“Who, exactly, is the psycho in Psycho” is a seemingly simple question without an answer. If it’s Norman – sweet, shy Norman, trapped by his loyalty to his mother and by his own rage at what the world has dealt him – than it could be anybody else too. It could be us.
If you liked this: I don’t need to sell Hitchcock to you, do I? Every Hitchcock film is worth seeing; the critic Mark Cousins described him as “second only to Picasso as the most important image maker of the 20th century,” and I don’t disagree. Every film he made is beautiful and strange and unsettling and very, very funny. Anthony Perkins, so perfect as Norman Bates, struggled with type-casting in the years afterwards. He eventually made some not-great Psycho sequels, which at least have his acting to recommend them if nothing else. His son Oz has turned out to be an interesting horror director as well.
The Night of the Hunter. 1955. Directed by Charles Laughton.
What it asks us: what if the devil comes dressed in God’s clothes?
This is another film that was a flop when it was released, though it has only grown in reputation since then. Its initial reception broke Charles Laughton’s heart, and he never directed another film. This is a tragedy; he was an incredible actor, but we lost an incredible director. The entire history of film might look different if he had been able to fully explore his gifts.
The Night of the Hunter is a beautiful film, odd and transfixing, owing more to the heightened reality of midcentury southern literature by people like Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner than to any American film that came before it. It has a dreamlike, surreal quality yet its gaze into the banal ugliness of human behavior is unsparing. Its point of view is a child’s point of view: a perspective of life as something magical and inscrutable yet very, very clear in a way that is lost to adults. Among other things this is a story of children learning how complicated and difficult the world is, and it’s a story about adults battling over how much children should learn, and when.
The villain in Night of the Hunter is one of the most frightening in film, yet the film is careful not to make him insurmountable. Harry Powell’s strength is merely an ability to notice and exploit the ordinary human needs around him, most especially the need vulnerable people have for love. He is no smarter, no braver, no stronger than they are. John’s inability to testify against him at trial, his instinctive antipathy for any violence done to Harry, are not weaknesses – they are evidence that in spite of everything he retains his humanity in a way that Harry does not.
Yet this humanity does leave a space for Harry, and the many Harries of the world, to enter in – nearly everyone in the movie falls for him at some point. Even Rachel Cooper, who sees through Harry better than anyone, can’t help singing with him at the climax of the film. You’re never sure until the end that he won’t be allowed in again, that he won’t escape, that he won’t fool everyone as he always has. Night of the Hunter expertly walks a very fine line: it accurately portrays a psychopath as basically empty, uncomplicated, finally childish in his greed and weakness, but it still allows that the people who are taken in by him do not deserve contempt. The devil would fool you, too. That’s what the devil does.
If you liked this: Oh, if only Charles Laughton had directed more movies. He was very fun to watch as an actor; my favorite performances of his are in Witness for the Prosecution (co-starring his wife and scream-queen Elsa Lanchester) and Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (a minor Hitchcock, but enjoyable). Robert Mitchum, who called Harry Powell his favorite role, was also always great. My second favorite Mitchum film is probably The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the kind of sad, squalid movie full of craggy faces that they don’t make anymore.
Cat People. 1942. Directed by Jaques Tourneur.
What it asks us: what if you were in danger and nobody believed you?
“She never lied to us.” If there is a definition of horror that I’ve been reaching towards, it’s that it has to see and tell the truth, when sanity depends on ignoring the truth. Yukio Mishimi wrote that “the special quality of hell is to see everything down to the last detail,” and I suppose he would know. That’s true of horror, too – it shows everything, down to the last detail, down to the details we don’t want to see.
Cat People is an unflinchingly honest film, which is a little funny as it is also famously a film that doesn’t show you everything. You never see the monster. You never see Irena as anything but a person, but that’s the point: she is a person. She’s just a woman, and she’s honest. She never evades, never obfuscates, and never lies about what she feels or about what is happening to her, but no one listens and no one helps. The people who are supposed to care for her fear her. She’s too honest for them; she can’t pretend happiness she doesn’t feel, and can’t turn herself into a good American wife when she’s supposed to.
The world has a way of punishing honest women. Irena is frightening, especially when she is in her animal form, but she is more frightened than any other character. She is the truest, and finally, the only victim in the film. Cat People has continuing power because of the deep sympathy it holds for Irena’s predicament. It can be frightening, and frustrating, to be married to a person like that, but it’s worse to be that person.
If you liked this: Jacques Tourneur made a number of really interesting horror films with Val Lewton, who wrote and produced a number of very interesting horror films with other directors. My next favorite of their collaborations is I Walked With a Zombie, but something all their work has in common is an insistence on the humanity of those seen as monstrous. Their films are all atmospheric and beautiful, and all worth seeing.
Frankenstein. 1931. Directed by James Whale.
What it asks us: what if creating life means creating a monster?
This is not a very good adaptation of Shelley’s Frankenstein, but it is (to date) the best filmed version. The only other film that comes close is Whale’s sequel, which has even less to do with the novel. James Whale managed to find the pure essence of Frankenstein, the most interesting and vital parts, and make something new. He took another body, and made new life out of it. Funny, that.
It’s a story I think only a mother could have written, though. There’s so much ambivalence about parenthood here, once you know to look for it. The famous scene by the lake, where the monster innocently kills a little girl without knowing what it means, reminds me of nothing so much as my toddler and the way he can break things without meaning to. Youth never knows its own strength; it’s a parent’s (exhausting, thankless) job to make sure children learn before they can cause harm. No one is doing that job for the monster; his only parent hates him for being born.
Boris Karloff’s performance is one of the most astonishing put to film, in any genre, and all the more so for being silent. He’s terrifying and pitiable; intelligent and animalistic. He acts with his hands, with his shoulders. He moves like a creature who isn’t sure of everything his body can do — so like a child learning to walk. He reacts to kindness like a flower to the sun, and hurts people terribly without ever meaning to. The pain he causes is real pain, and is given all due attention. He is never harmless.
James Whale had a comedian’s sense of timing. The entire film is balletic; little dialogue is really needed and the most effective sequences don’t have any. It’s a rare movie that influenced almost every horror and science fiction film that came after it yet still has the power to move and shock. Whale knew when to let a scene drag on and when to cut, when to use sound and when to use silence, when to engulf his characters in shadow and when stark daylight would be scarier. He was a genius. This is a perfect, perfect horror movie.
If you liked this: Bride of Frankenstein is probably equally brilliant; I honestly flipped a coin to decide which one to put on this list. It’s talkier, and it loses a bit by changing Karloff’s makeup to allow him to talk. But it’s also gayer, by far, one of the gayest films of its era, and even more concerned with the ethics of making life. And Elsa Lanchester is, of course, one of the greatest of all scream queens, so iconic you forget she’s only on screen in that costume for a few minutes. Whale’s other films are worth seeing, too. I especially like his gonzo horror comedy The Old Dark House, which also has a very good Karloff performance. Karloff was good in everything.
The Exorcist. 1973. Directed by William Friedkin.
What it asks us: what if God is silent while the devil speaks?
The strangest thing about this film is that the writer and the director thought they were telling two different stories. William Peter Blatty’s novel (which is very good) is almost evangelical, in the small e sense, in that he apparently very much believed in the truth of what he wrote about and believed as well in the necessity of telling the world about it. To him, The Exorcist is a hopeful story, in which God wins and so does belief in him. The priests are heroic, unambiguously so, and their flaws are almost comically minor, the kind you bring up in a job interview. Oh, Father Merrin isn’t able to devotedly love every person he meets until he realizes that his personal feelings don’t matter. Oh, Father Karras is so intelligent and perceptive that he can’t help but see how evil the world is, until he realizes that the good is still worth fighting for. They sacrifice themselves, heroically, the survivors mourn and remember them, and life goes on. The end.
Friedkin’s perspective is a little different. He was a director who was very difficult to pin down, ideologically, and he seemed to like it that way. His personal religious beliefs apparently shifted over time. His priests are very human men; heroic, but on a small and human scale. It’s a difference in seeing it, I think; you see the slump of Karras’s shoulders and the way his brow can never quite unfurrow even when he’s laughing. You see Merrin’s sweat in the desert, the way his hands shake when he takes his medication, the way he flinches when spat on. They both seem tired. The fight they’re in is a long one. You see the trash on the streets, the poverty inside and outside, and that too is the work of evil. The film ends more or less the way the novel does, but there’s little hope. There isn’t despair, either, but that’s the troubling thing: the devil doesn’t win, but he also never loses. Life goes on, but so does the fight, forever.
This might be one of the most analyzed horror films ever made, and there are others on my list with dozens of books written about them. You can talk about gender; you can talk about the fears of parenting children who will grow up in ways you can’t expect or control; you can talk about post-Vietnam, post-Manson paranoia. It’s all there. The critic David Greven once called Friedkin’s films “ideological gumbo.” He threw everything he had in there, everything that was floating around the culture at the time. It’s confusing and contradictory the way the world is.
“Confusing and contradictory” are more signposts on my way to a definition of horror, which is still elusive. The Exorcist, like all horror, doesn’t make sense until it makes sense in a way that we can’t accept. Mothers can’t protect you. Neither can God. Children can do and become terrible things. Sometimes, some things are too broken to ever fix. None of those things should be true, and the mind revolts at them. They are all still true. That is the horror of life.
If you liked this: William Friedkin never made a bad movie and you should watch all of them. Cruising is controversial, but I think it’s excellent, and can definitely be read as a slasher. Bug is a late horror film that’s nothing like The Exorcist but is a similarly unsparing look at the ugliest parts of life. Sadly, the sequels to The Exorcist contain more misses than hits. The third film, which Blatty directed himself, is interesting if overrated. It’s got one excellent sequence, and the most damning thing you can say is that if you’ve seen the movie you know the sequence I mean; it’s the only really good bit in the movie.
And that's a wrap, my friends! Stay scary out there.