Smashcut 365: Week 13 — Halloween Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
85/365: Haxan (Benjamin Christenson, 1922) (YouTube)
This messy, crazy, thoroughly disreputable, frequently banned Danish silent has been theatrically resurrected as a creaky novelty a number of times since it was made — once, in 1968, with a saturnine narration read by William S. Burroughs. Hardly a serious work of art or even a visceral genre entry, the movie is nonetheless jam-packed with decaying Gothic imagery the likes of you’ve never seen before, from black masses to possessed nuns to witch burnings to multiple Lucifers ruining the lives of naked innocents and sacrificing infants. Utterly outrageous Halloween viewing.
86/365: Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Made for peanuts in Kansas (and the Utah salt flats) by a company normally busy with industrial shorts, this ghostly orphan of the ’60s is one of those movies whose ill-exposed film, stiff acting and general air of gray yesteryear poverty lends it a fantastic chill. A woman in a car gets run off a bridge — but survives, it seems, into an arid Lawrence, Kansas where the heroine (an unforgettably uncomfortable Candace Hilligoss) sometimes goes unseen like a phantom among the populace, and is herself haunted by silent ghouls. It may be a latent-‘50s adaptation of Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, but it’s the dead-air sense of menace and dislocation that makes it stick in your memory like a burr.
87/365: Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Kelly’s daunting debut saga of teenage alienation is in a more or less constant state of cultural doom and psychological cataclysm — internal or external, you decide. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a high schooler in 1988, on the cusp of the Bush/Dukakis elections, attempting to navigate his terrain despite the fact that he sleepwalks, hallucinates, is becoming convinced that the world will end in 28 days, and has decided to stop taking his medication. He’s partnered by a skull-faced rabbit figure inciting him to destruction, and his suburban school is in the grip of a messianic self-help guru (Patrick Swayze), but Donnie’s primary problem is his own flexible reality; he doesn’t know any more than we do exactly how much his mental disturbance reflects and/or causes the cosmic countdown to Halloween. A feverish cult has sprouted around this changeling, and with its sense of ominous portent and middle-class-kid holiday ritual, it may be the best Halloween film ever made, even if it’s not frightening but is instead heartbreaking and mysterious. While the film seems clearly a free-fall study in psychological meltdown, by the end you’re not so sure if it isn’t revisiting An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (yet again!) or, more aptly, simply culminating in a stunning, purely cinematic act of salvation.
88/365: The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) (Amazon Prime)
Another kind of werewolf film altogether — directed by Neil Jordan from the fairy-tale-soaked feminist stories of Angela Carter, this dream-like, story-within-a-story fairy tale uses the lycanthrope legend to take on, in all seriousness, the story of Little Red Riding Hood and its overbearing Freudian subtexts. The threat of wolf-men, even in this patently artificial-forest evocation of medieval Grimm-ness, is never less than sexual. The make-up technology is purely analog and often obviously mechanical, but like everything else it exists in a trippy, jerryrigged Halloween-movie world of the communal imagination.
89/365: The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez & Daniel Myrick, 1999) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The real deal, a radical realigning of genre prerogatives, and a lean, mean, pants-soiling machine set in the very real American scrub forest of your forgotten preadolescent nightmares. Forget if you can the astonishing hype, spinoffs, spoofs and mock-doc rip-offs this movie has generated since — that’s just history now, leaving behind the first movie that genuinely understands fear as a form of unknowing. And it really happened! No, it didn’t, but think about that lucky, traumatized first audience at the Sundance Film Festival who saw the movie at midnight, in the mountains of Utah, without being told it wasn’t a documentary. Daringly, the film is nothing more than the rough footage shot by a three-student documentary team who have decided to make an amateur film about a chunk of Maryland woods and its accompanying witch legend. What happens is simple: they can’t get out of the woods, the overnight hike turns into days of hysteria in the wilderness, and something — something — begins to reveal itself to them, in ominous nighttime sounds, pagan signs, and worse. Throughout, the fact that we see only what the beleaguered trio manage to film, and often not even that thanks to the limitations of light and focus in handheld moments of primordial terror, makes this more than just a horror movie — it’s a return to your childhood’s starkest memories of abandonment and dread. Because your vision is limited, because the actors are in reality alone in the dark, because it doesn’t even seem to be a movie but rather somebody’s home footage gone terribly, sickeningly berserk, it might be, if you let it, the scariest movie ever made.
90/365: Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011) (Amazon Prime)
Wheatley is the UK’s most promising young genre filmmaker — because he delights in nothing more than taking a small-boned, pure-hearted genre narrative and twisting it, like you’d twist the head off a chicken. We think we’re watching a particular type of movie — a domestic Brit squalor-fest, in which a young husband and wife go at each other like wolverines, and in which, we then learn, the husband is otherwise edgy because he is in fact a for-hire hitman, and he’s been out of work due to an unmentionable trauma. But then it evolves, weirdly, as the hero embarks on a series of shady hits in small English towns, and things — including the assigned victims — get stranger still, until suddenly Kill List isn’t at all the movie we thought it was. Trust us: to say more would scotch the film’s pagan frisson.
91/365: The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
The greatest film about writer’s block and paternal frustration ever made, Kubrick’s famous corker takes Stephen King’s best-ever novel, capitalizes decadently on the story’s blood-soaked hallways and ghost stuff, and converts it all into a claustrophobic-yet-apocalyptic vision of family self-destruction. Not ever realistic so much as Kubrickian (the unease begins with the opening credits), the movie’s mysteries expand with each viewing, and may in fact be bottomless. In fact, an entire other film, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 (2013), has been made about superfans’ theories as to what Kubrick’s movie actually means. See Kubrick’s by itself at first, though; it’s worth getting lost in without a guide.
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Just for fun, here’s an extra seven, for extra Halloween viewing options:
Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) (Netflix, Hulu)
Inexplicable neo-mythological horror as only Barker could craft it, and wacky and gross enough to inspire a decades-long franchise that’s still kicking. They’re all awful, except this first film, a dirty, crude, vividly imagined odyssey into sex-&-death nightmarishness that still feels wholly original and uncanny. And gross.
Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990) (Amazon Prime, Hulu)
Another Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge riff, if you can believe it, but one that generates a formidable sense of authentic dread, amid analogue hellish imagery inspired by artist Joel-Pieter Witkin. Also, maybe the most chilling horror film set in New York City since Rosemary’s Baby.
Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The least movie-geek-ish of New Wave auteurs, Herzog nevertheless took the silent Murnau vampire classic, and shot it in his own fleshy, utterly contemporary style, making this the grimmest and most decay-obsessed of Dracula adaptations. With Klaus Kinski as the living dead, which might be redundant.
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
This beloved cult film can’t quite measure up to its reputation, but it’s still a blast, following a ramrod Catholic policeman to a secluded Scottish island community that has reverted to sacrificial paganism. Otherwordly creepiness is offset by latent-‘60s flower-child campiness (and a slew of honey-dripping soundtrack folk songs about harvest-time and agrarian rituals), but the out-of-time, fish-out-of-water paranoia works, as does the wild pagan iconography, and the climactic vision is a doozy. Try to forget it was remade in 2006, with Nicolas Cage.
The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) (Amazon Prime)
Justly acclaimed, this Australian film imagines a demonic picture book haunting an already dysfunctional single mother and son, and in the process opens a secret vent on maternal rage and infanticidal urges that few movies have ever dared to take on. Beautifully designed and ferociously acted (as the kid, Noah Wiseman is a horror movie in and of himself), it’s a humdinger that dishes out more than sheer qualminess.
Errementari (Paul Urkijo, 2017) (Netflix)
The first and, we believe, only Basque horror film, this freaky ancient-legend-based yarn is about a blacksmith holding a demon (literally, red skin, tail, horns) prisoner in the Basque wilderness, and the village orphan that lets the sucker out. Not quite scary but packed with Dantean visuals, and often hilarious.
Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944) (YouTube)
Halloween as screwball farce about madness and murder — set in an impossibly quaint 40s-studio version of Brooklyn. A riot from top to bottom, with Cary Grant sputtering like hot oil, Raymond Massey as his psychopathic Boris Karloff-resembling brother, Peter Lorre as the alcoholic henchmen/plastic surgeon responsible, and much more. A classic play executed perfectly in the wartime Hollywood mode, and still, oddly, rich with atmosphere.
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Smashcut 365 is a weekly recommendation of films for budding cinephiles — seven films a week, one a day, no repeats — ranging from classic masterpieces to new and provocative indies and imports, intended to kickstart your cinephilic habit.
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