| marc10-horror |
        Top Ten of the Decade, Part Five: Horror
Let no one forget, I can make an idiosyncratic list. I have thought more about this horror list, and have watched more films for it, than any of the others – and not just because my friendship with John Freiler is on the line (he might never respect me again). This Top-Ten required so much thought because the horror genre, more than any other, showcases what I love about filmmaking and by extension, art in general. I have always been a combination of the cerebral and sensational, and horror at its best is a glorious melding of the two – a melding no other genre can touch. I truly believe my list represents what I feel is important to the genre – this includes the honorable mentions. I look forward to discussing with everyone the nuances of the list, it’s very near to my heart.
The Almost Made-Its: Inside, the Descent, Drag Me to Hell, Jeepers Creepers 2, Halloween (2007)
Dir: Takashi Miike
After re-watching this revered Miike masterwork, I considered removing it from the list entirely. The five-minute hallucination/flashback comes close to destroying the movie on repeated viewings, but Audition’s impact on the decade is impossible to refute. Seeing everything that has come to pass since Audition (in close concert with Miike’s later Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q) showcases just how groundbreaking the film really was. Foretelling the decade of torture is a feat in its own right, but Miike, unlike many who’ve come since, is able to codify his visceral base and use it to augment a twisted visual story, compelling in its telling, and soap-operatic in its scope. No doubt the largest part of the film’s success is the pacing. The two-hour movie, basically a 90-minute tongue-in-cheek melodrama followed by a horror short, satirizes not only our own (specifically the Japanese’s) commodification and compartmentalization of women, but even the idea of intimacy, jealousy and love. And rather than simply turning sharply and jerkily switching gears, the film uses what has come before it to inform what comes after, analogizing the blinding power of love. In many ways, it’s comparable to the shift in David Lynch’s, Mulholland Drive. In the hands of a less-capable director, either film could have become pointless, but in the hands of Miike and Lynch, the film turns gold.
A hidden aspect of Audition’s achievement is its perfect sound design (and anything “perfect” in a Miike film is worth noting – when a man releases a Corman-like six films a year, perfection is rarely the aim). The film uses exterior sounds amazingly. Outside noises, like pounding rain or passing cars, are shut out completely, then, without warning, total invade over all dialogue and action in the scene. The characters are able to keep myopic for a certain period of time, but outside influences inevitably crash the party. Audition is a great film to begin the list, as it’s one of the biggest reasons the decade became how it is.
Dir: Frank Darabont
The number nine slot on this list is almost more a promise than a congratulations – sort of like Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. With two box-office successes in a row, Frank Darabont had proved himself the only man capable of adapting Stephen King faithfully and watchably. (That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but even the good King adaptations can rarely be viewed with wincing at something, and that’s getting kind of old.) But perhaps Darabont’s success was less attributable to his talent than to the fact that he adapted two of King’s dramas (the Green Mile and the Shawshank Redemption) rather than his horrors. Prior to 2007, the closest thing to King horror Darabont attempted was “The Woman in the Room” segment of the Night Shift Collection - hardly a monster-centered gore fest. But all that changed with The Mist. Starring Thomas Jane backed up by an incredible supporting performance by Marica Gay Harden, Darabont showed us that he could make King work on screen without major thematic shifts, or Jack Nicholson. And the only major script change he made, the ending, was a powerful addition, reinforcing King’s original themes, rather than subverting them.
The film is a claustrophobic’s nightmare, pitting hapless Maine residents trapped in a super market against unimaginable evils enshrouded in fog. The relentless dread of the work would make Lovecraft proud. Surely the premise has been done before, but what really sells the piece is Harden’s mutiny from within. Watching the Thing-like scheming and general distrust among the crowd makes you long for the vast unknown outside the clouded glass windows. Originally intended to be black and white, but vetoed by the studio, Darabont restored the grayscale of the film for the two-disc special edition. Though the shadows aren’t perfect (you can sometimes tell shots were intended with color in mind), the aura surrounding the film gains a late-50s monster-movie air, and sells the CG much better. I could have picked many films for this slot, but number nine is a promise, and a hope: Mr. Darabont, please adapt more Steven King horror films, and don’t stop.
Dir: Alexandre Aja
If this decade of horror will be remembered for anything other than the mainstreamed, pseudo-Neo-Pinku torture porn, it will be for the return of splatter-gore and home invasion – almost single-handedly from France. Borrowing in equal parts from 70s Italian horror and 70s and 80s American, French filmmakers like Alexandre Bustillo and Pasal Laugier gave us films like Them, Inside, Frontier(s) and Martyrs. All are successful to varying degrees, but none balance the gore with the home terror quite as well as Alexandre Aja’s High Tension. The punctuated moments of extremely grotesque kills are highlighted by the constant feeling of unease and discomfort of being terrorized in an unfamiliar home in an unfamiliar town. The voyeuristic views to each one of the kills is a subtle attempt to display the director’s intentions for the end of the film. I will be the first to admit that Aja takes his story off the rails into the stupidest plot twist I’ve seen in a while, but I almost prefer to think of the film as 10 minutes shorter than it is. With that tiny concession, you are blessed with some of the best 80 minutes of nail-biting horror around. Including, but not limited to, my favorite decapitation of the 2000s. And like any on-the-run horror film worth its salt, the variety of murder weapons is great. Each death is met with a different weapon, utilized properly. And that, is a beautiful thing.
Aja has been a part of some great horror so far this decade, including the awesome the Hills Have Eyes remake and P2, and with Piranha 3-D currently in post-production, it’s a safe bet he isn’t going anywhere.
Dir: David R. Ellis
If you don’t think the premonition sequence in Final Destination 2 isn’t one of the best kill scenes in horror, we have no business talking to one another. Surely the next 75 minutes doesn’t match the first fifteen, but the Final Destination series stumbled onto a brilliant premise that the sequel was the first to capitalize on: You get to kill everyone in the film twice. The original Final Destination doesn’t admit to its conceit enough and is too straight for its own good. FD2 represents when the series became aware of its place in the horror canon and became fun. Instead of trying to make characters relatable or likeable, we are given the bare minimum of characterization, and what we do know about these assholes, we don’t like. This way, the audience just bides its time waiting for the next jerk on the chopping block. Only one death scene in the film really fails (the hospital explosion), but every other kill either provides suitable surprise or inventive gore, or both.
Final Destination 2 represents the far end of a spectrum of horror that is rapidly devolving into crap – the serial film. Horror sequels are a dime a dozen (as Saw has so aptly proven); so much so, we’ve begun making sequels to remakes – gross. This film, along with a few others (most notably Jeepers Creepers 2) truly understand what worked well and what didn’t in the first outing and capitalizes on the idea to the fullest. If I could give a nomination to the credit sequence from the new, 3-D the Final Destination I would, but oh well, I guess it goes to the best balls out car crash this side of the Burnout video game series.
Dir: Danny Boyle
Is there any type of film this man can’t make properly? Danny Boyle’s only directorial snafu in a career of genre-shifting is a Life Less Ordinary, and I attribute that more to the 90s in general than to directorial lack of vision. Boyle’s short foray into horror in 2002 provided a great fun, a killer leading role for Cillian Murphy and a revitalization of the zombie film (or “virus” film; the distinction between the two is more minimal that purists make it out to be). Sure there have been misfires in the zombie-outbreak resurgence, but with genre-benders like Shaun of the Dead and the stellar, if capricious, the Signal, it’s safe to say the movement was more than worth it – and much the same could be said about a certain unnamed film in the current aberration of a vampire movement. 28 Days Later… is unpredictable, bleak, and a stunning display of digital filmmaking. In a Vanilla Sky maneuver, Boyle was able to get shots of downtown London and the MI freeway entirely deserted, and believably so.
Some say the film takes a turn for the worse as soon as our survival company enters the military compound, but I enjoy the divergence and subgenre swap. Almost directly speaking to similar turns Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland make in the Beach and Sunshine, the tonal shift allows the film to intensify its relentlessness without suffocating the viewers.
Another aspect of the filmmaking a cut above the rest is the soundtrack. Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Grandaddy, Brian Eno, all appear alongside John Murphy’s haunting, atmospheric rhythms. The music calls attention to itself to a larger degree than I usually enjoy, but it’s more than worth the divergence. Oh, and Cillian Murphy, at certain points in the film resembles Dolph Lundgren’s wimpy little brother. And its makes the gritty violent scenes even better. I doubt we will see Danny Boyle returning to horror soon, but when he does, I’ll be ready.
Dir: Ti West
One of the main reasons for the recent remake crazy is a growing cultural affinity for nostalgia. In fact, there’s an entire subculture based on only nostalgia for culture itself – it’s called hipster. Culture is a self-spiraling, degenerate disease that merely begets more and more, just ask VH1’s billion iterations of “Flavors of Love”. Our own fascination with ourselves and our own history creates the phenomenons like Transformers, Family Guy and endless sequels. And though culture engenders itself, there’s an uncommon byproduct from that culture-culture relationship – art. And art is exactly what Ti West has created with his nostalgia-drenched House of the Devil. Instead of making a horror film ripping off early-80s American horror, or remaking a film from that era, West simply made an entirely new early-80s American horror film. Very different from a throwback film like Jeepers Creepers, Hachet or Eight-Legged Freaks, West painstakingly recreated the age’s environment down to the smallest detail – from hairstyles to film stock. The technology, dialogue and set pieces are so close to the period it’s safe to say future anthropologists will surely lump House of the Devil into the American 1980s by mistake.
The other distinctive aspect to West’s 2009 outing is the pacing. Slowing down the pace to a Polanski-like crawl, the film concentrates all its action into the smallest of bits, savoring the flavor only for the most perfect of moments. There is a reveal in the middle of the film so surprising all I could think of was Audition. At a certain point, the contents of a room are shown in such an ingenious Tenant-like fashion, I could think of nothing else for the next fifteen minutes. Every shot is merely a portal to the previous grisly reveal.
Ti West has said he’s interested in moving out of the horror genre for the time being, lest he be pegged as “that Horror Guy”. It’s very sad to hear him say that because we need people like West in the fight to transform our self-fulfilling culture into self-mutating culture. And plus, I already think of him as “that Horror Guy” – so good luck convincing a narrow-minded producer otherwise. If you like this film, I highly suggest his very early film The Roost. It’s not perfect by any means, but shows without a shadow of a doubt, where this man is coming from.
Dir: Roert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright
I think every list I make includes a stretch. This maneuver is not purposeful, but a natural occurrence of making so many regimented Top Tens. United 93 and a History of Violence are not traditional Action films; Amelie is not a traditional Comedy; and for some reason people think Monsters, Inc. is not a traditional Sci-Fi/Fantasy. As such, I’m sure many people not only consider Grindhouse two separate films, but also would rather consider it Action than Horror. I understand, but respectfully disagree. For me Audition is one, segmented experience that contains one action movie (“Death Proof”), one action trailer (“Machete”) and one horror movie (“Planet Terror”) and three horror trailers (“Don’t”, “Werewolf Women of the SS”, and the brilliant “Thanksgiving”). Overall, I think the scales tip slightly in the horror direction.
Genre distinctions aside, Audition is very nearly a masterpiece. Tarantino can balance that nostalgia-reinvention idea from number five like no other, and applies it to a cinema that could use a reinvention, or reinvigoration (at least as far as Austin, Texas is concerned): grindhouse cinema. These five directors were able to put together a piece of candy so palatable, I watched it twice in a row in theaters, even though the entire work is three hours long.
The project got so many things right, down to the trailers, the advertisements and most importantly, the strength of the double-bill. The trailers are an essential part to the experience and Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright run a spectral gamut of what to expect from often-ridiculous classic trailers. And the classic double-feature bill balances what either movie alone fails. Rodriguez’s dialogue and plot in “Planet Terror” leaves a great deal to be desired, while Tarantino’s “Death Proof” needs a gore injection, stat. Luckily both films supply what the other does not. And in a very interesting turn, both films are “missing a reel”, and both those reels contain what the directors have the most trouble with. “Planet Terror” is missing essential plot and rising action, whereas “Death Proof” is missing a sexy striptease. The film callbacks to everything from gearhead, to infection, to women-in-prison exploitation, to the short-lived “Don’t” series, to Fu Manchu. Everything you need and nothing you don’t. That’s the motto of Audition, and I believe it lives up to every word.
Dir: Jaume Balaguero, Paco Plaza
When it comes to traditional horror films, not the genre-benders or gimmicky one-shot projects, I believe Jaume Balaguero’s and Paco Plaza’s [REC] is the best. I wouldn’t change one frame of this film. At a blazing 78 minutes, the film knows where its bread is buttered and gets in and out before you know what hit you. Thanks to its almost one-building setting and verité camera work, [REC] kept its budget very low and maximized the strengths of low-budget filmmaking while minimizing the weaknesses.
Though this film is more cinematic than the others of its kind, it’s the most effective shaky-cam film to date – much better than the Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield or Paranormal Activity - though the latest in that list was also very inventive. [REC] also uses a brilliant conceit often overlooked or used improperly – the unknown plot. Without an outsider handy to explain what’s going on, the plot of the film can be summarized in one sentence. “Residents are quarantined in a building for unknown reasons; there may be something bad going on…” We are led in just as blindly as our oblivious reporter and the firefighters she’s following. The directors compound this effect by surprising their actors during filming. Many of the largest scares in the film are real reactions from the actors. With extremely long shots throughout, the actors were forced to go with whatever events were thrown at them and act in kind. There’s a level of realism achieved in this film rarely reached in horror.
The American shot-for-shot remake Quarantine loses most of its punch for that exact reason. With the actors simply being aware of what’s going to occur, you’re yanked out of the picture that crucial extra level, adding an unnecessary and disappointing level of artifice to a film hinged on realism. Quarantine is yet another stunning example of the lack of vision that has been presented to us from Hollywood horror. Just reasserting the dominance of remakes. Making my number two pick better in light of it being-remade status, and my number one pick all the more poignant.
Dir: Tomas Alfredson
Perhaps not a traditional horror so much as a drama with a veneer of vampires and gore, 2008’s Let the Right One In was one of the most surprising events in genre filmmaking in a while. This seemingly low-key Swedish film left the gates with a strong start, but then, it just kept gaining momentum. With each passing scene of elegant cinematography, understated dialogue, and creepy, creepy scenes, the film gets keeps better and better. Aside from a slight sidetracking (thanks to CGI cats), the movie somehow gets more graceful with every sequence. And one of the most difficult parts of adapting a novel that centers on children acting dramatically (this film is based on a bestseller by John Ajvide Lindqvist), is, well, getting children to act dramatically. But both of the leads (age 13) perform their roles perfectly. They embody a burgeoning love affair between kids too young to understand “burgeoning” (even though there is more to one than meets the eye).
Let the Right One In is close to perfect filmmaking. Much of how the narrative changes from the book suites the screen and the plot threads left hanging only deepen the world further. The film, like most, is about connections, but more specifically all those certain connections we form as children for reasons that seem trivial to the untrained eye – not unlike the relationship in Punch Drunk Love, except one of the lovers is a vampire. This film takes adolescent (or pre-adolescent) love and pushes it to the realistic extreme. Kind of like Twilight but in the opposite direction – an anti-Twilight, or “anTwilight”, if you will.
Alfredson’s film is a reminder that no matter how silly or overblown the marketing hype machine gets for “crazes”, there will always be some byproduct that makes the trip worth it. As 28 Days Later… made up for all the zombie crap and Let the Right One In is good enough for me to put up with five more Twilight films with all their Mormon goodness. Oh, and be sure to steer clear of the Cloverfield director’s remake coming soon, oh-so-Americanly titled Let Me In because the first title was deemed “too long”. Ah, remakes. Where are you number one?
1. Funny Games US, 2007 Dir: Michael Haneke
After all my bitching, all my complaining and whining about the 2000s being the decade of horror remakes, I have the audacity to put a remake at number one? Yes I do. But there’s only one reason for doing that: Because it’s the best. Michael Haneke has the uncanny ability to piss anyone off he wants to, simply by making art. I assume he figured this out at a very early age, because now, nearly 70, he’s very, very good at it. Fresh off his Palme d’Or at Cannes for White Ribbon this year, Haneke makes his movies like the Piano Teacher and Cache unrelenting portraits of modernity and humanity at their most bleak and petty.
In 1997, Haneke released his original Funny Games (with admittedly better performances from the likes of Arno Frisch and Ulrich Mühe) as a brazen derision of the sensationalist violence in the media at the time. Journalism had retreated into nothing more than shocks, and Haneke was pissed. Using purposefully antagonistic means, the film lulls you into a generic home-invasion framework and then punishes you for enjoying other people’s misery. Haneke literally makes fun of his audience for watching his film, repeatedly; and it’s hilarious. All the extreme violence, sans one shot, is done in cutaways, promoting the façade of taste, but the style only makes you long to see the violence (or else, why would you be watching the film?). And finally, when the one shot of violence appears, almost as a pressure release from the anxious tension, Haneke rebukes you again. <Photo 13> So fast forward to today. Those are all the reasons that 1997’s Funny Games was so good, but why the remake? I admit that I have always prioritized concept over product, and conceptually, Funny Games US, is perfect. Haneke’s original masterpiece was an intelligent, oppositional censure of the news media’s glorification of suffering and violence, but that was back in ’97. Nearly ten years later the landscape had changed. The infection had spread from the news into film, and specifically, into horror film. By 2007, the “torture-porn craze” or whatever people decided to call it was in full swing and people were paying good money to be Saw-ed and Saw-2-ed and such and such to increasingly ridiculous degrees. And many of the films weren’t even original! The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake had a decidedly more torturous (and tortuous) bent that didn’t seem to hallow the original more than hollow it.
I’m sure Haneke’s outrage was palpable. He must have said to himself, “I have to make a film about this!” But quickly he realized, “Oh wait, I already did!” And that’s when the light bulb went off. That’s when the man who’s so good at pushing buttons realized he had an opportunity. Not only to encapsulate the current horror fad in a bottle and condemn it to death, but he could, in the same fell swoop, do the same for remakes as well. So he did. Haneke made a shot-for-shot remake of his own film less than a decade after the original. And every second is still flawless. The actors and languages had changed, but that was because his culture of chastising had changed as well. Haneke was originally upset by specifically German journalism, so Funny Games (1997) was in German; so why not make the ’07 film in the language of Hollywood?
Funny Games US takes everything amazing about the first film and adds yet another layer of artistic brilliance. This movie is the best horror film of the decade for many reasons, but mostly because Michael Haneke proves so successfully and irrevocably, that the horror is us.
And Finally, Coming Soon: Top Ten Dramas |
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