Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 14 — Halloween Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
92/365: The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Kubrick does his weird hoodoo on the Stephen King novel, and though King hated it, the movie absolutely trumpet-blasts the book’s thematic gist — which is, in essence, the nearly supernatural anxiety caused by the very Kingian troika of maddened states of being: writer’s block, emasculated fatherhood, and alcoholism. Of course Kubrick does more, and there’s often no explaining it (that ghost in the bear costume?), leaving us with many of the genre’s most indelible images, from the Big Wheel turning blind corners, to the twin dead girls, to the elevators’ tsunami of blood.
93/365: The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) (Amazon Prime)
A fairly faithful version of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” Clayton’s primally frightening film is a psychological nightmare masquerading as a classy, even typical literary adaptation — it lures you in and then sets the ghosts on you. It’s a familiar story, yet one we never truly saw before: Deborah Kerr plays a somewhat nervous governess appointed to care for two precocious children in a remote, empty country estate a year or so after the last governess killed herself in the nearby lake. Slowly the rather high-strung woman discovers that the crumbly manse is haunted by the ghosts of her predecessor and her sadistic lover — a brutish manservant — and the children, who were infatuated with the two crazed lovers when they were alive, seem to carry on a secret relationship with them now that they are dead. Kerr’s heroine is herself a wild card; no one seems to see the ghosts but her (are these strange kids lying or are they truly “innocent”?), and her concern for the children’s welfare quickly mutates into a mad obsession fueled by her implicit sexual yearnings. Masterfully done and in a handful of moments filthy with goosebumps.
94/365: The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu)
A decidedly modern, un-Gothic attack of a film — in which only a young girl, not even a whole house, is possessed by a demon — but one with so much meticulously crafted atmosphere and apocalyptic frostiness that it marks your life calendar like a lightning strike on a tree ring. The gritty realism and focused acting of the ’70s definitely gives the thing’s grim medieval scenario its extra bite, and from its early domestic portents (the party urination scene is a grim experience, hinting at so much emotional subtext) to its full-on confrontation between hellfire and mortal piety (in a refrigerated bedroom set), this movie moves like a shiver machine, and the ways in which it makes us uncomfortable about basic daily things — household spaces, children, furniture, etc. — is profound and daunting.
95/365: The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
This Shirley Jackson-derived humdinger must come as a big surprise to genre fans born since 1980 — without seeing much of anything at all, and without F/X of any kind, this Old Dark House classic is undeniably dread-drenched, a take-no-prisoners mega-dose of whazzat anxiety confronted for us by one of the genre’s greatest characters: Julie Harris’ neurotic, febrile nowhere-girl spinster, for whom the possibility of a malevolent inhabitation of the grotesque mansion is almost a godsend — the family she never had. The scenes of supernatural siege are all the more alarming and scarifying for being so granular that you hope you’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing. Not to be confused with the 1999 remake, which is less frightening than a car alarm.
96/365: The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) (Amazon Prime, HBO Now)
Another kind of werewolf film altogether — adapted from the Freud-soaked meta-fairy tales of Angela Carter, this dream-like, story-within-a-story puzzle uses the lycanthrope legend to take on, in all seriousness, the story of Little Red Riding Hood and its overbearing Freudian subtexts. The make-up technology isn’t up to the near-contemporaneous An American Werewolf in London, but the trippy Grimm-ness and overt sexual imagery make it a much stranger experience.
97/365: Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) (Tubi, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
Murnau’s classic silent version of Dracula — a German Expressionist milestone that is at the same time oddly realistic, shot not on shadowy sets but almost entirely on real, rotting-medieval locations — may still be the creepiest. A large part of the reason is Murnau’s way of making the genuine locales (northern Germany and Slovakia) seem otherwordly, but the lion’s share of credit must go to Max Schreck, the skeletal, rodentine-faced actor playing the vampire. Freaky as he is, he doesn’t seem to be wearing much makeup, and for years rumors (abetted by his name, translating roughly to max fright) wondered about who he really was, why we never saw him in anything else, and whether or not he was merely an… actor. (See 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire for a satiric fictionalization of the myth.) Crepuscular and rich enough to be stolen from for decades, notably by Francis Ford Coppola in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
98/365: Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006) (YouTube, Vudu, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
High-concept digital animation brought down, definitively, to a trick-or-treater’s level, and a forgotten Halloween-season winner. The myth of everyone’s childhood neighborhood — of the darkened, unkempt house on the block no one knows much about, and which may well be the site of unspeakable creepiness, or worse — is exploded out into a carnivorous piece of rotting architecture, swallowing hapless children (or at least their toys) and inspiring endless prepubescent schemes and surveillances. The climactic battle is naturally too long and loud, in the Spielberg mode (he and Robert Zemeckis were producers), but the draughtsmanship is imaginative, the voices (especially Jason Lee and Steve Buscemi) are sharp, and the tunnelvision of kids on a self-scaring tear is pungently evoked, a rare achievement all its own.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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