Horror Films, Best of

Joseph B. has a horror film meme started: probably not the only one. List of the best 15.

This is harder than it seems. Listing the best films in a genre raises the difficulty - do I rank them as films (that happen to all be horror films), or do I rank them for how good they are at being horror films? If I do the latter - don't I have to define the genre? What makes a horror film? Any kind of break down - "scariest", "most disturbing", "the films that scarred me for life" (using Joseph's criteria) - is basically a variation on the same problem. How shall I answer this difficulty? damned if I know. Probably in the most roundabout and inconsistent way I can.

1. Nosferatu - well this, at least, is easy, for this is the best of the bunch by any criteria. It's a great film, period - beautiful and perfectly put together; it'll give you shivers; and it's definitively a "horror film". It seems to me - the horror genre depends on the notion of the monster. (There's more to it - the sense of fear, say - but I'll try to work that in...) It depends on monster that play fairly specific roles. The monster in a horror film is either our Other - a thing we fear from outside ourselves; or our Double - something we fear about ourselves. Or - more commonly - they are both. The monster is a projection of our fears - it is a foreign thing that invades us, but is, in fact, a projection of ourselves. It is, very often, a projection of our fears and desires blended into one being. And the emotional effect of horror is, partly, the recognition of this - horror films evoke the Other, then show that it is in fact our Double - that the fear we seek to control is part of us.... In the movies, Dracula and Frankenstein are the definitive monsters. Dracula the seducer, our sexuality made into murder; Frankenstein's monster, perhaps, our fear of death, of helplessness, abandonment, of all the desires we can't rationalize. As the genre develops, they also evolve into a distinct approaches to language - Dracula is the articulate seducer, the talker, the whispering voice, beautiful (at least for the moment), self-aware, knowing what he wants and how to get it. Frankenstein is the silent, inarticulate threat, deformed and horrible, exuding raw anger and fear, cut off from love, from community, from humanity. Nosferatu dates from before this split became commonplace - Murnau's vampire is horrible, though still seductive - he is a force of power and desire, but he is unable to speak, to express his desire in anything but murder. This makes him more like the later Frankenstein model - and more like Mary Shelley's version of the monster, a character who covers the full range of possibilities, from silent, inarticulate, helpless, to an educated, sophisticated talker.

2. Ugetsu - this is more like a romance than a horror film. The woman is less monster than a temptress, in either case, not implicated in Genjuro's psyche quite the same. So despite being a ghost story, I'm not sure I'd call it a horror film. So it can't be number 2.

2. Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein - I will treat them as one, because magnificent as either one is, they are even better together. The better question is, why should they be second to anything? They aren't, as horror films - as films? They're still magnificent, but Nosferatu is - more than that, even.... They are the perfect horror films, especially taken together, and from a structural point of view. The monster in these films is set up to function both as a horrible thing for the audience to fear and loathe - and quite explicitly as an object of pity, to be identified with. The play between the monster as Other and monster as our Double is very clear in these films. Add to that the way they work together as a bildungsroman - the story of a boy becoming a man - matching the anxieties expressed through the monster with the experience of growing up. It's truly great stuff.

3. Dracula - and here's the other side. It's an odd film - lots of it is very stagy and awkwardly put toegther - but it looks absolutely gorgeous, cheap sets and all (thanks to Karl Freund, mostly), and Lugosi is spectacular.

4. Dead of Night - As a film, the structure, the slow steady buildup of fear, to the magnificent dummy sequence, and the general creepiness of the frame story, makes it a joy to watch. And I don't think I have to explain how ventriloquist and dummy stories fit my thoery of doubles and others.

5. Eraserhead - again, definitively - the monster baby, that is other and double, our child.... Children - the fear of parenting or the memory of the fears we felt as children - are also central to horror as a genre. (I won't be the first to suggest that the Frankenstein model revolves around children - fathers and sons, the monster, especially the inarticulate monster, as a child, etc.)

6. The Mummy - this is Karloff's chance to play the articulate monster. And he is more than equal to the task. He might even be better - he gets a lot more of the sadness of the character than Lugosi did (Shrek did to some extent, and Kinski nails it in Herzog's remake of Nosferatu.) The film overall, though, is marred by a really silly story and some flat direction and editing - though it looks beautiful, frame after frame - those Germans knew how to photograph things.

7. Don't Look Now - we revisit the role of children in horror - here, the loss of a child. The links between sex and death. The externalization of our fears.

8. Vampyr - another vampire film, this one animated by a very powerful dream logic, characters and objects and plots moving with a kind of symbolic association. Includes the quintessential expression of the fear of death - a character dreaming his own death, and POV shots from inside the coffin.

9. Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night - Herzog's remake of the Murnau film with Klaus Kinski as Orlock and Bruno Ganz as Jonathon Harker. Haunting and wonderful - those shots of the city, Isabelle Adjani moving through the empty streets.

10.Kingdom/Kingdom II - Lars van Trier taking on american television, ghost stories, soap opera, surrealism... with monstrous babies (who better to play a monster baby than Udo Kier?) and all the rest...

11. Bride of the Monster - wait: this isn't really a horror film. It's perhaps inexcusable to put an Ed Wood film in such an exalted position - I understand that, though the fact is, this film is this enjoyable. I suppose this is where the pure pleasure of watching a film overcomes a strictly dispassionate assessment of it - and yes, some of the pleasure is in the badness of it. On the other hand, you have Lugosi's performance - hunkering down for one last bit of acting. Martin Landau might have won the oscar, but he did it in part by imitating Lugosi, who is wonderful and damned near oscar worthy himselve - "home? I have no home".... But all that said - this really isn't a horror film. It's science fiction. So I have to pretend I didn't actually list it.

11. Evil Dead II - I suppose I could combine it with Evil Dead I like I did the others, but whatever. Modern horror films like this do tend to take away the sense of the monsters coming from inside us - well - this one does. Who cares? This is funny and thrilling and gory and perfect. Though all this talk about monsters - I don't know. There is nothing really horrifying about it. I am very tempted to rule it something else - a disguised adventure story (like Army of Darkness) - a Romance, in the old fashioned sense. I should, because that would let me put Reanimator on in its place. Reanimator has the same tone - the jokiness, the gore - but fits a lot better into the horror film scheme I have outlined. Sex and death - desires and fears - blended together, made explicit. It's a great film. And it's almost as funny as the Evil Dead ("who's laughing now?" vs. "more passion!") Parse this as you choose.

12. Night of the Living Dead - I'm not going to write a book on all these films. I've kind of made my point. This is less psychological than social though, which is an interesting twist that I plan mostly to ignore.

13. Suspiria - gorgeous film, creepy and cool...

14. Black Sabbath - beautiful movie, Bava's experience as a DP showing. Nicely covers the possibilities of Italian horror - an old fashioned ghost story, a giallo, and that magnificent Karloff vampire story.

15. Funny Games - Stunning post-modern horror film, the monsters infiltrating everyday life (the classic family—father, mother, son) and wreaking havoc. These monsters come from the TV. They also destroy everything. A very complicated film, really, though on the surface it is simply one of the most unsettling horror films I have seen in ages. This is one (and there aren't many) that gave me bad dreams - I dreamed it, a night or two after I saw it. Not to be recommended. In terms of sheer disturbing power, this might be the winner of the whole freaking poll.