Vampyr, 1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer. Semi-silent.
The silent film era birthed some of horror's finest talents. Directors and writers were finding their feet in a new medium, and an entirely new craft was invented: cameraman. Sometimes the results were less than satisfactory, but that didn't matter because you could put together a solid film with next to nothing in the bank. Many did.
One of the silent era's significant advantages was any film could be shown anywhere. Without language getting in the way, the audience could concentrate on what was happening on-screen. Sound broke that market, ushering in a new era where films had to stay in their home market to find any kind of success at all.
Dreyer, a Dane, was an orphan and had an unhappy childhood. He first worked as a journalist but switched to writing title cards for film, eventually graduating to film direction. Vampyr was very nearly his last feature, as it was a commercial failure and he was unable to find work for almost a decade afterward.
Vampyr is just at the cusp of silent and sound. Perhaps because of this Dreyer intentionally included as little dialogue as possible. Basing his plot on two Sheridan Le Fanu chillers, Carmilla and The Room in the Dragon Volant which features live burial, he cobbled together a serviceable plot about a young traveler who finds himself caught in a spectral drama. The plot's good but not great; what makes this film sing is its dreamlike imagery. The dancing shadows, the burial in the glass-fronted coffin, the corn mill - those stick with you years after watching Vampyr.
Cat People, 1942, Jacques Tourneur.
Produced by Val Lewton for RKO's low budget horror studio, this gives the horror world one unique artefact which I know you're familiar with: the jump scare. Or, as it's known then, the Lewton Bus, as the first known example involves a bus.
Young Serb immigrant to the US Irena Dubrovna fears the dark, because she thinks she knows what lives in the dark. The people she comes from tell stories about witches who can turn into savage beasts, a gift given them by Satan. Though good King John punished them for their many bloody crimes, a few survived and thrived in unhappy places up in the mountains. Irena's terrified their wickedness lives in her, and is careful never to become too exited, too passionate, in case their curse overwhelms her. Even so her American friend Oliver persuades her to marry him, only to bring doom on them both. She refuses to make love, terrified that passion will awake the beast. So he, in his misery and frustration, turns to his friend and work colleague Alice for a shoulder to cry on. Jealousy provokes Irena, and before long her passions get the better of her.
This, and Lewton's other films, show what can be done with imaginative camera work, clever editing, and above all a good story. If for no other reason than to see the very first jump scare, you should see this film.
Night of the Living Dead, 1968, George Romero.
Romero and his buddies, most of whom worked making cheapo commercials, became frustrated watching fourth and fifth rate horror flicks. Anyone could do better. Hell, they could do better. All they needed was a bunch of young people, plenty of blood and guts, and some nudity. That was what the kids in the drive-in wanted to see.
So that's what they set out to do, on a next-to-nothing budget. Movie legend says it was $12,000, though it ended up being more than that. About $60-70K in cash, plus extra in credit and equipment, or a little over $100K total. The main camera was second-hand, and the costumes came from Goodwill. The house was borrowed and due to be demolished, so they could do whatever they liked. For actors, they turned to friends and neighbors. Those friends and neighbors soon became investors - after all, the film's cash had to come from somewhere. Every single person you see on screen, zombies or otherwise, had at least a couple bucks invested. It was a hectic shoot, and nobody had only one job. You weren't just the woman who did make-up, you were the ghoul who ate the live bug and worked on sound too. They were young, inexperienced and ready for anything - and it shows.
John Russo, one of Romero's partners, is the zombie you see set on fire about halfway through the film as well as another zombie seen stabbed through the head by hero Ben. The fire story is one of my favorite bits of film trivia. Like pretty much every other special effects sequence the production team had very little idea how to do it. These days the sequence would be carefully plotted out for maximum safety. In Night of the Living Dead, they dressed Russo in several layers of baggy clothing and threw a Molotov cocktail near him. "I was trying to hit a stone out there," recalls Hardman. "Sometimes I hit it, and sometimes …I just can't believe, to this day, that I thought I could hit a stone that was really, what, twenty-four inches across, from the second floor window, over the porch roof." Some strategically pooled gasoline and a match would then set Russo on fire. It was Russo's plan. He felt it was unreasonable, as written, for Harry to throw all those Molotovs and not set a single zombie ablaze.
The idea was Russo'd catch fire and run off-shot, where he'd be extinguished. "I just went until I felt my hair burning." The look on people's faces as he ran past them, "this worried look mixed with glee," he remembered later, stuck with him the rest of his life.
Night of the Living Dead is my go-to example of how budget doesn't matter, experience doesn't matter, when making a movie. The only thing that counts is a willingness to get out there and shoot the film, no matter what.
Onibaba 1964, Kaneto Shindo.
Japan is wracked by civil war, and the country is falling apart. Two women, a mother and daughter-in-law whose husband has gone off to war, fend off starvation by killing straggler soldiers and selling their equipment to a middleman. Then one of their neighbors returns from the battlefield with stories to tell, and he settles in nearby. The son isn't coming home, he says. He was executed for stealing food.
The lonely young widow sneaks out to see the young man every chance she gets, much to the displeasure of her mother-in-law who blames him for her son's death. She concocts a plan: with the help of a hideous mask she stole from a samurai's corpse, she pretends to be a demon spirit to keep the daughter-in-law at home through fear.
Thus begins the reign of Onibaba: the Hag Woman.
This is how you do a lot with a little. There's practically no set. Everything takes place out in the rushes next to a river, and in two rough huts. The only complicated bit was the hole in which the women disposed of the corpses, and into which the mother-in-law has to crawl in order to steal the mask from the samurai's body. It was impossible to dig any kind of hole where they were, as it immediately filled in with water. So they built a 'hole' above ground in a kind of tower supported by scaffolding, in order to get the shot.
Yet those night sequences, particularly once Onibaba shows her masked face, will stick with you forever. I don't want to spoil, but I will say that the ending sequence in particular … brrrr. Chills.
Dead of Night 1945, various directors. Black and white.
An architect, Walter Craig, is asked to visit a house in the country to advise on alterations. When he gets there he discovers he's seen the place before, in a recurring nightmare. What's more all the people in the house are the people in his dream, except he can't remember exactly how it ends. He knows it ends badly ...
This is an anthology movie, one of the earliest - possibly the first. Each person in the house tries to reassure Craig by telling him their own stories: the young kid with a bad experience at a house party, the racing driver who had a nasty dream after a car crash, the young bride who got a very dangerous wedding present, the psychiatrist who once had a patient whose delusions might not have been delusions. Each story is a short sequence, perhaps ten minutes long. Some of the stories are almost pleasant. You may recognize one or two, as they're based on famous short fiction.
Then comes the end, when Walter Craig finds out what happens after the lights go out.
I couldn't find a version of the trailer that didn't give away significant plot points so if you want to see this unspoilt, don't search YouTube.
This is an Ealing Studio movie, and while Ealing is best known for its comedies it could produce serious dramas when it wanted to. This is a rare example of Ealing's chiller side, and it works very well. It's hokey and creaky at the start, and then it begins to tighten the screws. By the final moments like Walter Craig the audience is hopelessly ensnared. What happens when the lights go out? What happens when the lights go out?
R-Point, 2004, Kong Su-Chang.
In 1972 South Korean High Command in Vietnam is worried about a series of radio messages received from a platoon that High Command thinks is long dead. They say they're lost at Romeo-Point and beg for extraction. Is this some sort of hoax? An enemy broadcast? Can anyone really be alive out there?
Heroic Lieutenant Choi and a group of cooks and ne'er-do-wells is sent to find out. It's a kind of Lost Patrol of the malingering and useless. Nobody expects them to find anything, and God forbid actual effort's expended to find soldiers lost out in the jungle. Except they do find those missing soldiers, and much more besides, out at the old colonial plantation house at the heart of R-Point.
It's got all the war movie goodness you'd expect and in many ways it's not much more than solid B-class filmmaking. But. But. It does the right thing. It lets the atmosphere carry the film, not the special effects or gung-ho guns blasting heroics. That means the creeps start in your mind, and once your mind is caught everything else follows.
Apologies for the non-subtitled trailer, but while there are subtitled trailers none of them are HD, so I went for pretty over convenient.
Ju-On 2002, Takashi Shimizu.
OK, either this or the Ring was going to be on the list. I went for the Grudge because of the two it was the first one I saw, and stuck with me the longest. It's loosely based on a short by Lafcadio Hearn, who you may remember me mentioning before.
This is actually the third in the series, but the first to see a theatrical release. The shot above is one of the earliest in the film, where social worker Rika Nishina goes to a house to check on an invalid. The invalid's an elderly woman who's supposed to be in her son's care. Rika discovers the old woman abandoned, the son nowhere to be seen. But the house isn't empty ...
The core concept is that, in folklore, a person who dies while consumed in a fit of rage comes back as an angry ghost. In the original story that spirit is obsessed with completing a task, and will never stop until the task is complete. In Ju-On the ghosts just come back angry, not obsessed - but whoever they encounter is infected by their curse, and whoever those people encounter also become infected. It operates on zombie movie mechanics, where first bit spreads the contagion until everyone's bit.
Kudos to Rika for carrying on, by the way. Was it me, no amount of dedication to the job would have had me set foot in that house.
Atmosphere does a lot of the work here. It helps that this is very much a house-next-door story. Many spooky house dramas take place in cobwebbed mansions. This is a perfectly ordinary suburban house. What could possibly happen there?
Well ...
Seoul Station 2017, Yeon Sang-Ho.
A precursor to the better-known Train to Busan, this zombie story focuses on events the night before Busan. Things are just starting to kick off, and one man's tragedy soon turns into citywide chaos and devestation.
OK, so far so zombie but what makes this work is not the animation nor the gore - though there's plenty of gore. It works because Yeon Sang-Ho has the sense to focus on three characters: a runaway daughter turned prostitute, her wannabe-pimp boyfriend, and her raging father. Those three carry the film. It's never just about zombies. The boyfriend and father comb a city on the verge of collapse trying to save the daughter, and it's their struggle above all else that really makes this work.
In that sense it's a spiritual successor to Night of the Living Dead, which also had the sense to focus on the characters and not the action surrounding the characters. Sure there was plenty of gore in Night - those zombies were chomping down on actual guts sourced from a slaughterhouse, after all. That wasn't what the audience was interested in. The audience desperately wants to know who will live and who will die, and that's because the audience quickly becomes invested in the characters.
The same is true in Seoul Station. Right up to those last few terrifying minutes, you want to know what will happen next to those three lost souls.
Hardware, 1990, Richard Stanley.
I was in two minds whether to put this or Stanley's Dust Devil on the list. They're both excellent, atmospheric films but I've seen Hardware more often and keep wanting to see Hardware more often, so I suppose this is the better pick.
If you know Stanley it's probably because of his recent Lovecraftian release, The Color Out of Space. This is Stanley at the start of his career. Up till now he's been shooting music videos for the likes of Field of the Nephilim. He's just this minute come back from Afghanistan, where he shot a documentary about the Soviet-Afghan War and the USSR's withdrawal from that bloody conflict. He goes from the battlefield straight into Hardware, and you can see the influence it had on his story. Chunks of the shoot feel like goth rock tracks too.
Yet where this works is in the visuals. Like R-Point there's a lot of solid B-picture filmmaking on display, and the SFX are about as ropey as you'd expect from a cheapo Miramax product of the '90s. Like Night of the Living Dead Stanley opts for violence, blood and nudity as those sell. However the visuals are what really makes it sing, just as they do for Vampyr.
For a very long time controversy prevented this getting a DVD release, but it finally became available in 2009. It can be difficult to find, but if you do get a copy, settle in for a midnight showing with a six-pack to hand. You won't regret it.
That's it from me! Next week, something completely different.
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