Good evening, friends. Happy Halloween.
The Halloween season has always been an odd one for me. I love October in general; it’s probably my favorite time of year. I love wearing my fall wardrobe. I love the feeling of anticipation in the air that I think all former teacher’s pets experience when a new school year is starting, even if they aren’t participating in it themselves. I love seeing the leaves change, I love the brisk autumn breeze, I love the low light in the afternoons. I love baking warm bread and cooking hearty vegetables. It’s a time of year that lends itself to horror, I think, regardless of the timing of Halloween, because it’s a time of things changing, and it’s a time of decay that looks beautiful. The leaves are changing color, after all, because they’re dying and making way for bare branches and eventually green leaves. I’ve said before in this space that horror is a liminal genre - it’s about the shifting and blurring of boundaries: between alive and dead, between real and unreal, between beautiful and terrible. Autumn is like that too.
So it sometimes surprises people that I don’t really celebrate Halloween in any ostentatious way. My house is not decorated. I haven’t dressed up since I was in high school except briefly for my son’s first Halloween, when I was the Log Lady from Twin Peaks and he was the log. This was a low effort costume as I already basically dress like the Log Lady. I don’t host or attend Halloween parties, usually. The only way I celebrate the season is by watching and reading a lot of horror – but I tend to do that all year.
I’ve written a lot about horror in fiction and film over the last few years, and I think I’ve been slowly working my way towards a definition: what it is that makes horror horror. I’m not quite there yet, but I think writing a bit about my twenty-five favorite horror films will get me closer. I want to stress that these are my favorites; they might not be yours. Some are classics acknowledged by everyone, some are less well-known. I have deliberately avoided actually ranking these films; I listed them as they came to me, but the order of presentation shouldn’t be taken as the order of my preference for them. I love all of them, for different reasons. On different days, each of these twenty-five could be my favorite.
If there’s something that ties all of these films together, apart from genre, it’s that they scare me – and they scare me with more than just jump scares or gore. I think the horror that really stays with you has to be about more than that. It’s a sub-genre of speculative fiction, after all, and like all speculative fiction there’s always a “what if” at the center. What makes horror different is that the “what if” is not one that opens up possibilities; it only ever upends whatever we want and need to have trust in. Horror, at its best, asks questions we don’t really want the answers to.
The Haunting, 1963. Directed by Robert Wise.
What it asks us: What if evil clings to some places no matter who is there? And what if evil clings to some people no matter where they go?
There aren’t any answers in The Haunting, only suggestions. Maybe this, but maybe that. Maybe the house is haunted. Maybe Eleanor is mad. Maybe she’s haunted, and she brought the hauntedness with her. You’ll never really know, and Eleanor herself won’t either – it’s not even clear which answer she’d prefer. Julie Harris’s performance as Eleanor Vance is remarkable in its vague suggestiveness – she’s paranoid and shy, childishly selfish and childishly fair-minded, sweet and mean, high strung to the point of terror and placidly happy in the face of terror. She trusts others instantly and then just as quickly pulls back in suspicion. Her fragility is tied to her strength; she’s more affected by, and more afraid of the house than anyone else but she’s also the only one brave enough (or mad enough) to love Hill House.
This is a love story, which might be the sickest, darkest thing about it. Eleanor loves Hill House with a passion, as she’s never loved anything or anyone, despite its torment and torture of her. What’s more, despite all the torment and torture it inflicts, Hill House does not hate Eleanor – it loves her back with an equal passion and that’s much, much worse. Hill House is like an abusive partner who despite signaling with everything they do that they want you to suffer still won’t let you go. Eleanor, like Shirley Jackson maybe, is a true horror fanatic - inevitably drawn most to what frightens her most. She’s one of us, which must make us think: would we leave Hill House if it wanted us? Could we?
If you liked this: just read the book. It’s the greatest horror novel of the twentieth century, by one of American horror’s greatest masters (give or take a Poe). After that, read everything else Shirley Jackson wrote. Stay away from the Netflix miniseries, which we will not dignify with any attention here.
Black Christmas. 1974. Directed by Bob Clark.
What it asks us: What if the world won’t let us keep the places where we find refuge?
A killer on the loose in a sorority house has become, in the years since Black Christmas, something of a horror cliche – you can see why. It allows for a lot of titillating voyeurism, and a lot of female bodies to objectify before killing. What sets Black Christmas apart is its warmth – a warmth that might seem inexplicable until you remember the other Christmas classic Bob Clark directed (look him up).
The sorority is a refuge - it’s not a haunted house, and it’s not a dangerous place that is being exposed as such. It’s warm, and comforting. It’s fun. The young women who live there aren’t perfect, and the community they make is flawed. Several of them seem to be barely functioning alcoholics, a pattern that is played for laughs until it isn’t. But their love for each other is obvious. They provide support and protection from overbearing parents and controlling boyfriends. They tell each other secrets no one else knows. They have fun.
If the killer is never revealed, it’s because the identity of the killer hardly matters – patriarchy is the killer. The world of male violence is the killer. The house provided a respite from that world, but only a temporary one. I can’t think of a horror movie that made me angrier on behalf of the victims – just ordinary, likable girls who wanted to live and enjoy their lives, and who deserved the time and space to do that. Patriarchy hates that, it tries to kill it every day, and that’s the real horror: the idea that we can never beat it back.
If you liked this: Black Christmas would honestly make for a good double feature with Bob Clark’s other Christmas movie. Another sort-of feminist slasher variation is Slumber Party Massacre, originally written as a satire by radical feminist and lesbian activist Rita Mae Brown, before it was mostly defanged by the studio. It’s not as artistically successful as Black Christmas; fewer good performances, less beautiful camera work, and its ideas are a bit of an incoherent stew. But it’s definitely interesting as a piece of art at war with itself.
The Innocents. 1961. Directed by Jack Clayton.
What it asks us: what if some people are bad past the point of saving? What if some of those people are children?
The creepy child is a horror staple. Children in danger always crop up in horror and thrillers, for obvious reasons: they’re more vulnerable than anyone else, generally, so the danger seems more vital. There’s more at stake. But children who are the danger are just as common, again for obvious reasons. All children occupy the liminal space in which horror is at home; they’re uncertain and unstable figures, inherently. They’re innocent, but that innocence makes them corruptible. They’re ignorant, but always learning and sometimes learning more than we know. They’re under the power of adults but have thoughts and feelings that adults can only guess at. They’re lovable but also sources of constant anxiety for the people caring for them.
The Innocents, like its inspiration The Turn of the Screw, is a story about how caring for children can make you go insane. It’s also a story about how children can appear to go insane before your eyes, how despite your best efforts you can’t make them be good. It’s about how it is, sadly, much easier to damage children than it is to repair them. I’ve written before in this space that the most hopeful idea we have is “it’s not too late.” Horror is all about how sometimes it is too late. That’s the most terrifying thing you can think about children, that it might be too late to help them.
Deborah Kerr is pretty incredible in this film, rarely better. The governess’s highly-strung nature is apparent from the beginning but the full weight of it sneaks up on you; you trust her until you don’t, much like her two pupils do. There’s a particular kind of person who is very invested in the idea of themselves as a savior or helper of children, and that person is not always safe or reliable. You can never decide while watching The Innocents whether you should be more afraid of the kids or of the governess: that’s as it should be. Again, uncertainty is where horror lives.
If you liked this: The Turn of the Screw has been adapted many times, but I don’t think it’s ever been done better. The book is unsettling in the same way this film is, and worth reading like all Henry James novels are worth reading. Jack Clayton was an interesting director. His adaptation of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is very different from this, but it has a similar kind of ambiguous dread.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. 1974. Directed by Tobe Hooper.
What it asks us: what if we become what we do?
This is a film about work. It’s about other stuff too; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of those films so stuffed with ideas that watching it with attention can make you feel a little drunk. It’s about class, and disability, and the performance of gender. It’s about the decay of the post-industrial south. Tobe Hooper insisted that if the film was about anything, if it had any message, it was an argument for vegetarianism. He was right that the film was also about that; one of the many things I think when I watch it is “this is what it must feel like, to be a cow.” But even more than that, more than it’s a film about being a cow, it’s a film about being a butcher.
The family in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been so degraded and hollowed out by both industrial capitalism and the fall of industrial capitalism that they’ve stopped being human. They used to work at a meat plant; everyone in the area did. Their community in east Texas was dependent on that plant, and the plant’s workers defined themselves through their work slaughtering cows. Now the plant is gone, and what are the slaughterers to do? They can’t do anything but keep slaughtering and keep looking for meat to kill. They have a system, it seems, for luring and then killing people. They’ve become a grotesque parody of what they used to be because they became their jobs and now their jobs are gone.
Space matters so much to this film, as it matters to all American horror. This is a film about the ghosts and monsters of industry, regardless of the lack of supernatural elements. It’s about what’s left over, who’s left over, after the slaughterhouse of capitalism has done its job on people. It’s as terrifying a portrait of America as any I know.
If you liked this: Tobe Hooper was a true horror auteur; beloved by genre fans but oddly underappreciated by the mainstream. His sequel to this film is very different and nearly as interesting; it’s worth watching even if the rest of the series has diminishing returns. His Poltergeist is another masterpiece.
The Uninvited. 1944. Directed by Lewis Allen.
What it asks us: what if the most beautiful places, and the most beautiful people, are the most dangerous? What if they can begin good, but become evil?
The house, as we’ve discussed, looms large in gothic fiction – because it can stand in for so much. A house is family, safety and security, but also their opposite. What The Uninvited gets right is what the best gothic does, in that it knows that you can fall in love with a house in much the same way as you can fall in love with a person. A new house is pure hope: it allows you to imagine any new kind of life for yourself within it. What The Uninvited also gets is the fact that no new house is ever really new – every place has a history. Every house comes with something or someone already attached to it, and they may not want to make room.
The Uninvited is a love story between people and a house much like The Haunting; what makes it different is the poignant longing. This house is beautiful, and it should be a haven. You get the sense not that the house is evil, but that it has been corrupted by something. It’s significant that the haunted young girl in this film does not come to the house; she comes with it. She wants, desperately, to defend it from outsiders; its haunting is her haunting. This is probably the most hopeful film on the list, because a good life is imaginable to these characters – they can see it. The horror is in the good life they want being ever out of reach, just beyond their grasp.
If you liked this: The Uninvited’s lead Ray Milland is one of those actors we don’t make anymore; he had this weird nervy charisma that made him great in horror and thrillers because you never really knew what he was going to do next. Hitchcock used him best of all in Dial M for Murder.
And that's part one! Come back tomorrow for the next five films.