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Night Warning (1981)

Unfortunately brushed-off as another derivative early-80s slasher, and unfairly banned in Britain as part of the infamous “video nasties” list, you’d be hard-pressed to find a wilder and more gleefully deranged horror film than William Asher’s Night Warning, aka Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1981). Neither of those titles really have anything to do with the film - or can in any way prepare the viewer for Susan Tyrell’s explosive, insane, tour-de-force performance as Aunt Cheryl.

In truly shocking opening sequence that sets the tone for what is to come, the parents of 3-year-old Billy Lynch are killed when their car brakes fail. His father is decapitated by a log on the back of a flatbed truck - an image repeated in other horror films such as Final Destination 2 (2003) and Death Proof (2007) - and his mother dies when the car drives off a cliff, falls into a lake, and explodes. Flash forward, and a shirtless Billy (Jimmy McNichol) is asleep in his bed on the morning of his 17th birthday. Aunt Cheryl enters, finds an offending condom in Billy’s wallet, and then proceeds to wake him by rubbing herself against him and purring like a cat. 

Cheryl’s incestuous desires for Billy are repressed, but only just barely so; her unhinged performance draws frequent comparisons to Isabelle Adjani’s in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981). As Billy’s relationship with his girlfriend Julia (Julia Duffy) heats up and he begins to voice dreams of leaving to play college basketball, Cheryl breaks down. Her first victim happens to be a gay man in a secret relationship Billy’s basketball coach - which prompts the sneeringly homophobic Detective Carlson (Bo Svenson) to jump to the conclusion that Billy is both the murderer, and gay.

With a setup so absurd, where could Night Warning go but completely off-the-rails? When Susan Tyrell’s wig comes off (somehow, the first two acts expect us to believe it’s her real hair), the film lurches into a climax that must be seen to be believed, concluding with a hilariously off-key epilogue that doesn’t truly clear up any questions about Billy’s trauma or his sexuality. Like the “hagsploitation” films it descends from, Night Warning leaves us in a place of doubt and discomfort with the madness lurking behind the American family.

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Halloween (2018)

The night HE came home - again. And again, and again, and again.

David Gordon Green’s rather unhelpfully named Halloween (2018) sets the clock back on the weighty slasher franchise, positing that the boogeyman himself, Michael Myers, was captured and institutionalized on the very night he terrorized Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and murdered her friends. 40 years to the day later, someone at the Smith’s Grove Sanitarium decides that October 30 is a great day to transfer their most notorious criminal to a new facility. Naturally, he escapes - giving Laurie, now an iron-haired doomsday-prepping grandma with PTSD and a drinking problem, the chance she’s waited for to finally kill him.

At a trim 105 minutes, Green’s Halloween moves along at a brisk pace, while still finding time for some striking imagery and set-pieces; the opening sequence in the yard at Smith’s Grove, a teenager pinned to a wall with a knife, and a SteadiCam shot tracking Michael through a garage that recalls 1981′s Halloween II (as featured in the trailer) are standouts. Callbacks to the original series abound (keep an eye out for the masks from Halloween III: Season of the Witch), including Laurie addressing Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) as “the new Loomis.” Whether that line elicits a chuckle or a cringe will tell you a lot about how you feel about this film’s sense of humor, which sometimes threatens to wander too far into post-Scream “wink wink, nudge nudge” territory. For the most part, though, this Halloween plays it straight. Its best joke is a visual one - Laurie’s self-help-spouting daughter Karen (Judy Greer) answering the door in a Christmas sweater.

All in all, Halloween is just about as good of a sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 film as could be made in 2018. Rather than the fanboy imitations of Rob Zombie’s reboot and sequel, it evokes the original in its stark chiaroscuro cinematography and clever updates to Carpenter’s original score. However, the thing that eludes Green’s take - the thing that is inaccessible to any Halloween film, so many years and sequels later - is the extreme, rigorous minimalism that made the original great. Carpenter’s film was almost plotless; “the Shape” had no psychology, no real motivation, just a drive to stalk and kill. 40 years of attempts to explain Michael Myers have made it impossible to get back to something so simple, so primal as the original Halloween. Like Laurie and Michael, we are all so very old now.

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Spider-Baby (1967)

A truly delirious horror-comedy, Spider-Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told (Jack Hill, 1967) feels like if John Waters’ Multiple Maniacs (1970) had somehow found its way onto the drive-in circuit in the guise of a conventional exploitation picture. Centered around a performance by Lon Chaney Jr. (who also sings the “Monster Mash”-esque theme song), the film is really belongs to Jill Banner, Beverly Washburn, and Sid Haig, as the last scions of the deranged Merrye family. As a result of inbreeding, the children suffer from “Merrye Syndrome,” a unique condition that causes them to regress into animalistic savagery and (implied) cannibalism. When gold-digging cousins and their lawyer arrive at the dilapidated family mansion, things clearly cannot end well.

Strangely enough for a film originally titled “Cannibal Orgy,” one of the most striking things about Spider-Baby is how sweet it is. Chaney’s Bruno, the family chauffeur, is unconditionally devoted to the Merrye siblings (as well as their mutant aunts and uncles in the basement), never shaming them for being exactly as they are. The Merrye house is a happy, if warped, one until it is disturbed by the  outsiders with greedy intentions - a sort of charming Grey Gardens. There’s a weird message of acceptance buried somewhere in all the mayhem: if you want to be a spider, be a spider.

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Strait-Jacket (1964)

As a brief prologue tells us, Lucy Harbin (Crawford) took an axe and gave her husband forty whacks, and when she saw what she had done, she gave his girlfriend forty-one. 20 years later, she is released from the sanitarium and reunited with her daughter, Carol (Diane Baker). Attempting to readjust to life outside of a cell proves extremely difficult for Lucy - especially given her upwardly-mobile sculptress daughter’s tendency to depict lifelike severed heads (including Lucy’s own). As the inevitable bodies pile up, we begin to question whether Lucy’s “crime of passion” was an isolated incident - or an indicator of a deep rot at the roots of the family tree.

Fresh off the controversy of the 35th Academy Awards, a late-career Joan Crawford made the (solo) starring turn in William Castle’s Strait-Jacket (1964), continuing the streak of “hagsploitation” pictures made in the wake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962). While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of that film (which drew on the off-screen rivalry between Crawford and Bette Davis for its sadistic sizzle), Strait-Jacket has many grotesque pleasures of its own. Never known as an especially naturalistic actor, Crawford’s performance leans in to the more surreal aspects of the film, revealing the psychosis bubbling just under the surface of the American heartland; in this way, Strait-Jacket prefigures the work of David Lynch.

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Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936), produced for Universal, is less of a sequel to Todd Browning’s iconic Dracula (1931) than something of a remix. It freely combines elements of Browning’s film, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella “Carmilla” (1871), and Bram Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest,” while almost entirely ignoring the text of Stoker’s original novel. Perhaps owing to the five years that passed between the first film and its sequel, or the replacement of Browning as director, Dracula’s Daughter tramples the continuity of the preceding film, dispensing with all the characters from the original film aside from Edward Sloan’s Professor Van Helsing (who has for some inexplicable reason been renamed “Von Helsing”). 

With Dracula killed by Von Helsing at the conclusion of the first film (a wax cast of Bela Lugosi was for the body), the film instead focuses on his daughter - the soulful, tormented vampire Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden). Countess Zaleska seeks to escape her dark urges, first by destroying her father’s body, then through the wonders of modern psychiatry. In a strange choice, the film fuses this gothic storyline with frequent doses of broad humor (Scotland Yard is comically inept) and screwball-comedy hijinks between Doctor Garth (Otto Kruger) and his secretary Janet (Marguerite Churchill) - who will of course becomes the target of Countess Zaleska’s attentions.

Universal released Dracula’s Daughter with the marketing taglines, “She gives you that weird feeling!” and, more tellingly, “Save the women of London from Dracula’s Daughter!” It is, arguably, the first definitively queer vampire story in the history of cinema - even if it, unsurprisingly, depicts the Countess’ queerness as a monstrous. Interestingly, however, the film also shows her queerness as much stronger than her desire to repress it; despite her wishes, Countess Zaleska is unable to remain in the closet - or the coffin, as it were. Production Code-era censors excised some of the most overt lesbian overtones from the film, but the subtext of struggling with forbidden desires remains.

Hilariously, owing to the Transatlantic accent employed by the majority of the actors in the film, every time an actor in Dracula’s Daughter mentions Doctor Garth, it sounds as if they are talking about “Doctor Goth” - appropriate for a film that Anne Rice cites as a major influence on her “Vampire Chronicles.”

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A few days late: the 2017 list. First writeups coming soon...

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#7: The Witch Who Came From the Sea

Don’t be fooled by the title, or the lurid artwork - Matt Cimber’s The Witch Who Came From the Sea (shot in 1971, but not released until 1976), isn’t a film about witches, and is certainly not a slasher film about a woman wielding a scythe and brandishing severed heads.* While it is definitely an exploitation shocker, it is, more than anything else, a study of a woman experiencing dissociation as a result of traumatic sexual abuse during childhood; the violence is minimal, and largely offscreen. This didn’t stop The Witch Who Came From the Sea from being included on the infamous British “video nasty” list - although the film was not prosecuted, it was not released uncut in England until 2006.

Molly (Millie Perkins) is obsessed by glowing memories of her father, a ship’s captain - a feeling that she transfers into a fixation on hyper-masculine men. In a memorable, psychedelic opening sequence, she takes her two unlikely-named nephews, Tadd and Tripoli (Jean Pierre Camps and Mark Livingston) for a walk along Muscle Beach, where they encounter a group of body-builders. The camera becomes Molly’s gaze - a female gaze - zooming in to extreme close-up on the weight-lifters’ crotches, before suddenly changing to hallucinatory visions of the men gruesomely killed by their own athletic equipment. This sequence is a microcosm for the rest of the film - men are destroyed when an object they believe they can control (in this case, a submissive, sexually-available woman) turns the tables on them. The painting of Venus on the halfshell and the mermaid Molly has tattooed on her stomach halfway through the film both symbolize this revenge of the feminine - as well as the return of Molly’s own repressed memories of childhood trauma.

The thing that separates The Witch Who Came From the Sea from the average horror film is the attitude taken toward its own violence. Molly doesn’t truly gain any satisfaction or pleasure from the violent retribution she exacts from men (or perhaps, interestingly, from masculinity itself), especially as she commits her atrocities in a dissociative state, seeming to have no recollection after that fact. When confronted with her actions, she seems to express remorse. She is not an unrepentant murderer like Norman Bates, or an empty cypher with only the urge to kill, like Michael Myers; she is a woman deeply damaged by her father’s abuse, as well as the patriarchal violence of all men.

* The “witch” referred to in the title is, for whatever reason, Botticelli’s Venus.

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#6: What’s the Matter With Helen?

Like Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965), Curtis Harrington’s What’s the Matter With Helen? (1971) was produced in the wake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), and bears a debt to that film (albeit a much larger one than Bunny Lake). Even the title of Harrington’s film echoes Baby Jane, as did many other films in the “psycho-biddy” micro-genre that film spawned, such as What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice (Lee H. Katzin, 1969), and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971), which reunited Harrington with his long-suffering Helen star, Shelley Winters.

What’s the Matter With Helen? opens with Adelle (Debbie Reynolds) and Helen (Shelley Winters) as two grieving 1930s mothers, whose sons have just been convicted of a brutal, Leopold-and-Loeb-esque murder. Fearing reprisals, the dominant Adelle pushes Helen to ditch Iowa for Hollywood. The pair open a dance studio for young girls looking to become the next Shirley Temple (for a horror film, Helen contains an inordinate amount of “Toddlers in Tiaras”-style child dance numbers) as guilt-riddled, codependent Helen slides deeper and deeper into madness. Winters stunningly brings the thankless part to life - perhaps due to the fact that she was suffering from a real-life nervous breakdown while making the film. Winters was reported to have caused a great deal of trouble with her behavior on-set.

Harrington planned for a much more dramatic and horrific film, but the studio interfered, asking him to remove some of the more graphic violence, and play down the lesbian themes of Helen’s fixation on Adelle (a scene where Helen kisses Adelle on the lips after disposing of a body was cut for ratings). Strangely, by today’s standards, no one seemed concerned that Helen’s dead rabbits were real. Harrington tangled with the studio again, when the marketing campaign for the film prominently featured an image of the dead Adelle, making What’s the Matter With Helen? something of a landmark in the history of the “spoiler.” Harrington, Winters, and Reynolds (who was the film’s uncredited producer) all remembered it fondly but bitterly, seeing it as a film that should have been much more successful than it was.

Despite this lack of success on its release, there’s much to admire about What’s the Matter With Helen?, particularly in the production design and costumes (it was nominated for an Oscar in costume design). Its shadow in the horror genre was arguably much longer than expected. The camp appeal of its casting, dramatic tonal shifts (from dancing children to dead bunnies), Hollywood Golden Age setting, and grande dame leading ladies makes it an important film in the development of camp horror and the New Queer Cinema (Harrington himself is a big part of this as well, owing to his work with Kenneth Anger and involvement in queer-occult circles). Shelley Winters would go on to appear in numerous horror and suspense films, including Auntie Roo, and even Debbie Reynolds (after a number of rocky years) would find herself cast as a witch in the Disney Channel’s popular Halloweentown franchise (1998-2006).

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#5: Bunny Lake is Missing

Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) was once considered a failure by critics and the great director himself. While a minor work in Preminger’s oeuvre, it has nonetheless received something of a critical reappraisal around it’s Bluray re-release in 2014. In Bunny Lake, Preminger takes the classic elements of Gothic horror and drops them squarely in mid-60s Swingin’ London - with a television appearance by the Zombies, no less.

The plot of Bunny Lake is Missing somehow manages to be simultaneously thin and confusing: a young American single mother, Ann Lake (Carol Lynley), searches for “Bunny,” a daughter who either disappeared, or never existed in the first place; this is probably the source of the film’s poor reputation at its release. However, to focus on the plot of Bunny Lake is to miss the point entirely. The resolution of the “mystery” is clumsy and anticlimactic, because this film is entirely about mood and atmosphere. Bunny Lake’s London is a madhouse, overrun with little old ladies hiding in attics listening to recordings of children’s nightmares, spooky “hospitals” for Victorian dolls, and unmistakably queer, sexually predatory landlords (the latter played by the inimitable Noël Coward). The film boils with black humor as the proper Londoners (including Laurence Olivier’s Superintendent Newhouse) mock the grieving (or delusional) mother without remorse for, among other things, calling her daughter “Bunny.”

Ann’s increasingly frantic search for Bunny, in the grand Gothic tradition, leads to increasing amounts of hysterics from her, and more sinister antics from her brother Steven (Keir Dullea, of my personal favorite slasher, Black Christmas). This culminates in the final sequence - a fascinating, harrowing parade of dissociation that echoes the conclusions of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), but at much greater length. It is in these gestures that Bunny Lake succeeds: it’s the “Alice in Wonderland” mirror of daily life when horror strikes, the Cheshire Cat telling us, “We’re all mad here.”

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#4: The Haunting

Shirley Jackson’s novel “The Haunting of Hill House” is lauded as one of the greatest ghost stories of all time - and its genius is expertly captured in Robert Wise’s 1963 film adaptation The Haunting  (best to forget the execrable 1999 Jan de Bont remake, which runs roughshod over Jackson’s plot with a cast of A-listers who should’ve known better). In spite of its reliance on voiceover narration, The Haunting is a master class in “show, don’t tell” - in withholding the object of fear to inspire terror in the audience (Mr. de Bont - the library is open). As Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) points out, the greatest source of fear is the unknown; it is this fear that the film preys on, slowly but unrelentingly, as Eleanor Vance (Julie Harris) is terrorized, fascinated, and driven mad by the supernatural power of Hill House.

Without the appearance of any on-screen ghosts and few “real” manifestations of the supernatural, The Haunting relies primarily on camerawork and production design to create its unsettling effects. This begins in the first shot of the film - the exteriors of Hill House (shot at Effington Park, a purportedly-haunted English country house) are shot on infrared film, with totally blacked-out windows for an uncanny effect. This primal fear - of an empty, black window or doorway, no idea what waits on the other side - is exploited repeatedly throughout the film, helped along Elliot Scott’s lavish sets. Wise and cinematographer Davis Boulton made use of an in-development, imperfect 30mm wide-angle, yielding many distortions to the image; coupled with near-constant pans, tracks, jump-cuts, and nearby objects obscuring parts of the frame, The Haunting strives to reflect Eleanor’s fragile mental state.

An early treatment of the script portrayed a totally psychological explanation for the haunting, which Shirley Jackson herself refuted, insisting that “The Haunting of Hill House” was a tale of the paranormal. The completed film expertly blends these two approaches, as the house feeds on Eleanor’s guilt over her mother’s death, repressed sexual desires, and hidden, seething rage. The Haunting is notable for a complex, feminine, and non-predatory portrait of a lesbian character, Theo (Claire Bloom). Eleanor oscillates between seeking Theo’s attention and turning from her in revulsion, while also vying for the affections of the married Dr. Markway; in the end, however, her sexual fixation turns mostly to Hill House itself. Denied agency so long by her ailing mother, Eleanor longs to belong to something, anything - to be consumed into the darkness of Hill House’s empty doors and windows.

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#3: The Hitch-Hiker

Another film noir-horror hybrid, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) is arguably the first major female-directed horror film. Starting out as an actress under contract with Warners - check out Road House (Jean Negulesco, 1948), a personal favorite - "the English Jean Harlow” (or, in her words, “the poor man’s Bette Davis”) found herself frequently on suspension due to her fiercely independent streak and tendency to reject sub-par parts. This left her a lot of time to observe production and editing, and she discovered a passion for directing. With her husband Collier Young, she formed the company “The Filmmakers” to produce low-budget, issue-driven genre films, of which the The Hitch-Hiker was one. The film follows two fishing buddies in Baja California who are held hostage by a psychopath.

The Hitch-Hiker opens with a warning that the film is based on real events, echoed in its ominous tagline: “Who’ll be his next victim... YOU?” Like Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), which was to follow, The Hitch-Hiker relocates the classic noir from the big city, moving it into the deserts and small towns on the US-Mexican border. William Talman, in his performance as titular hitch-hiker Emmett Myers, gives a performance by turns menacing and playful, that could be seen as an antecedent to similar figures in films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986), and the entire “ride along with a serial killer” sub-genre. In her focus on sweeping Southwest landscapes, the total blackness of the desert at night, and the repeated failure of the victims to communicate with Spanish-speaking locals, Lupino’s keen direction emphasizes the helplessness and isolation of its protagonists, and Myers’ perverse pleasure in their despair. Coming from a woman working in the Hollywood studio system - especially one with a reputation for being “difficult” - the oblique comment on both toxic masculinity and emasculation is telling.

Ida Lupino’s contributions to genre films - and the contributions to women filmmakers to genre in general - often go overlooked. She left her legacy primarily in the nascent medium of television. Active as an actress during her directing career, Lupino has the distinction of being the only woman to direct episodes of The Twilight Zone, as well as the only director to star in her own episode. As the first female horror/noir director, she’s earned an important place in the canon - and keep an eye out for her later on this list in The Devil’s Rain (Robert Fuest, 1975)!

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#2: The Seventh Victim

The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943) was the first film produced by Val Lewton for RKO after three iconic early horror titles directed by Jacques Tourneur: Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Leopard Man (1943). Crossing the psychological horror and mounting dread of these films with film noir, The Seventh Victim follows young Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) on a search for her missing sister, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks), who has run afoul of a Satanic cult in Greenwich Village.

Despite being produced during the heyday of the Motion Picture Production Code, the film is famously bleak and pessimistic, and trades in themes typically far too outré for the Hays Office (Satanism; suicide; lesbian undertones). Warned to stop making “message movies,” Lewton famously characterized the message of The Seventh Victim as, “Death is good!” At times, the gloom even seems to verge into self-parody, as with the incredible dialogue exchange: “Who are you?” “I’m Mimi, I’m dying.” 

In a way, The Seventh Victim is a sort of promise for what horror would become after the fall of the Production Code in the 1960s. An ominous shower scene, in which Mrs. Redi (Mary Newton) confronts Mary to tell her to call off her search, would be echoed in a much more famous scene in Hitchock’s Psycho (1960). The Palladists, The Seventh Victim’s mannered coven of New York armchair Satanists, read as a blueprint for a more nefarious group in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) - although none are as indelibly tacky as Ruth Gordon’s Minnie Castevet. Through insinuation and sheer guile, directors and producers during the era of the Hays Code laid the foundation for later filmmakers, who would be able to show the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” more openly.

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#1: Island of Lost Souls

“Are we not men?”

This is the central question of Island of Lost Souls, Erle C. Kenton’s Pre-Code adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (which would later go on to inspire the band Devo, as well). Wells reportedly disliked the adaptation - in focusing on the horror elements, he felt it ignored the larger philosophical implications of his novel. Genre fans should be thankful for this: in addition to getting the film banned in 12 countries, it was also responsible for establishing many of the conventions of the horror genre we know today. It was also the first cinematic adaptation of the story, followed by versions in 1977 (with Burt Lancaster as Moreau) and 1996 (with Marlon Brando). Here, Charles Laughton delivers an iconic performance as the whip-cracking doctor, torn between sadism and idealism; Richard Arlen plays Edward Parker, an innocent dropped on his island following a shipwreck.

Shot in flickering black and white by famed cinematographer Karl Struss - whose credits include work with F.W. Murnau and Cecil B. DeMille, as well as genre classics such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and The Fly (1958) - the image takes on an allegorical character in Island of Lost Souls.* The island itself is largely lost in inky darkness, an object lesson that what suggested always more frightening to suggest than what is shown outright. The white clothes worn by the leads, typical of sailors and tropical adventurers, seem to shine with their own inner light: Parker’s with the power of his unshakable morals, Moreau’s with the conviction of his own godlike authority. Frequent shots through gates and windows, and the use of gobos to create sharp patterns in the lighting, echo the zoo cages in which Moreau holds his experiments in progress.

These Manichean conflicts haunt every frame of Island of Lost Souls, a story caught up in fantasies of colonialism and eugenics, fears of miscegenation and revolution. With contemporary eyes, the racist implications of the story are hard to ignore, especially in beast-man Ouran’s (Hans Steinke) sexual obsession with Ruth (Leila Hyams), and in famous lines such as Laughton’s, “The natives are restless tonight.” The film tempers these implications with its focus on the universal nature of pain - by enforcing his pseudo-colonial rule with torments in his “House of Pain,” Moreau plants the seed of his own demise, and the failure of his “civilizing” project. As Bela Lugosi’s Sayer of the Law intones at the end of the film - “Law no more!”

* The new digital restoration of the Island of Lost Souls, compiled from multiple print sources by Criterion in 2011, is absolutely gorgeous, and enough reason in and of itself to watch the film.

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Here it is: the 2016 list, featuring a special BINGE PURGE segment of all three films in the Purge franchise. Once again, these are all horror movies I haven’t seen or would like to revisit, and I’ll be writing about each one here.

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#7: The Reflecting Skin (Philip Ridley, 1990)

“Poor Seth - it’s all so horrible, isn’t it? The nightmare of childhood. And it only gets worse.”

Not exactly a horror film, per se, Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin (1990) finds both wonder and terror in the coming-of-age trials of Seth Dove (Jeremy Dove), an eight-year-old boy in rural 1950s Idaho, who becomes convinced that Dolphin Blue, the “English lady” down the road (Lindsay Duncan), is a vampire. Ridley’s camera (Alberta, Canada stands in for Idaho here) renders the expansive landscape into a gothic Edward Hopper nightmare - a Surrealistic world of exploding frogs, crumbling farmhouses, and danger lurking just below every surface. While Seth fixates on the idea of Dolphin as a literal monster, the the “monsters” that terrorize the isolated community in The Reflecting Skin are all too human, driven by unexpressed desires and a fear of (or attraction to) death.

Seth himself is something of a monster. He is the only one who discovers the culprits of a string of brutal murders, mostly of children: a gang of greasers who cruise through the fields in a hearse-like black car. At first negligently, then intentionally, he is complicit in their continued killings, using the gang to fulfill his own appetite for destruction.

Seth’s behavior and environment - physically and emotionally abusive parents, destruction of property, violence towards animals - fit the classic profile of a budding sociopath (most disturbingly, he keeps the petrified body of a newborn child under his bed, speaking to it and calling it an “angel”). His screams at the setting sun that conclude the film - evoking the ambiguous ending of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) - could be seen as either a howl of rage and disgust at the destruction he has caused, or a cry of victory.

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#6: White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932)

Other than providing the name for Rob Zombie’s eponymous band, White Zombie (1932) is remembered as the first-ever zombie film. White Zombie is responsible for establishing a number of the conventions of the sub-genre, most notably the sluggish, staggering gait and dead-eyed stare that are still the norm for filmic zombies - the controversial “fast” zombies of films like 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) notwithstanding; although most later films, particularly after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), did not maintain White Zombie’s use of the traditional ideas of zombies as slaves created through the dark side of Haitian vodou.

While White Zombie may have established the conventions of zombie films, it was not particularly well-received, due to its melodramatic performances and cliched storyline. Of classic Hollywood zombie films, the Tourneur-Lewton production I Walked With a Zombie (1943) is definitely far superior. Where White Zombie succeeds, however, is in its creative use of matte effects, and its subtly expressionistic mise-en-scene. Shot largely on recycled horror sets from the Universal Studios lot, White Zombie incorporates pieces of the sets from iconic horror films such as Dracula (Todd Browning, 1931) and Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) - accounting for the incongruous placement of a gothic castle in Haiti, and building to an otherworldly effect.

The film frequently deploys overlays and superimpositions in its depiction of the supernatural - most frequently Bela Lugosi’s malevolent, staring eyes. In one notable sequence, Neil (John Harron), mourning the loss of Madeleine (Madge Bellamy), gets drunk in a crowded bar where the other patrons are visible only by their shadows; further adding to the Surreal effect, he is visited by Madeleine’s ghost, a glowing figure floating through the frame via a matte effect. If these images seem a bit hackneyed, it’s with good cause - White Zombie is (either in in spite of, or because of its questionable quality) a foundational text of the genre.