The conclusion to the October scary movies saga!
From final girls to freaky plot twists, the final third of the month contained some of my favorites from the scary movies list! I effectively doubled my watch time during the last week. As a result, this list will be broken up into two parts, like Game of Thrones or Twilight. Everyone loves those, right?
Kick back, relax, and be surprised with the fun!
TRIGGER WARNING: Not only do spoilers lurk below, but references to sexual assault, rape, and suicide can be found in these brief analyses. Please proceed with caution!
Scary Movies: More Bleak than Creepy
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
This was a foreign film, and I felt very excited to use subtitles! However, the synchronization of the audio (not even the subtitles, the AUDIO!) was off with the actions onscreen. As a result, I had to pull the movie up on my computer AND my television and play them at a slight delay to stay focused! Eyes Without a Face (or, Les Yeux Sans Visage) portrays a young woman with a scarred face. Forlorn and isolated, she quarters in her home while her father, a doctor, and his assistant, a former patient, find a suitable woman to use for a face transplant. Dr. Génessier leaves behind a grisly trail in his wake, hoping that his daughter may find a new life once his surgery succeeds. But for how long can the disappearances last?
Like in several of the scary movies in the past ten days, I felt more pity than terror. Christiane, the principal of the film, has, to use a colloquial expression, “been through it.” As a result of the accident that scarred her face, her father fakes her death and vanquishes her to her bedroom. Consequently, her engagement to a lovely man, Jacques, falls apart. Not only has she lost her face, she’s lost her love, and her freedom. She quietly sits alone, with no friends, as her father kidnaps and mutilates women in the hopes of giving her a second chance. However, I couldn’t help but wonder if he wanted to give HER a second chance, or himself a chance at redemption?
I liked this movie, but I wanted more from the ending. Christiane finally achieves her freedom, but like the attempts to repair her beauty, it comes at a cost. From beginning to end, you wonder: is all the horror worth it? Thankfully, in this day and age, Christiane would have been able to receive several facial reconstruction surgeries to mostly put herself back to normal. While adjusting to a scarred face would be a process, at least Jacques, who seemed to love her truly, would be at her side to assure her! Love is all you need. Beauty is just a bonus.
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962)
I must say, my eyes were glued to the screen for the entirety of this film. To clarify, I didn’t take many notes, I was so focused! Baby Jane Hudson, a former child star, lives in a mansion with her older, more successful sister, Blanche Hudson. Envious of her sister’s success, Jane takes care of Blanche, who lives mostly in her room, unable to access the rest of the world from her wheelchair. Blanche, a kind hearted soul, lives in fear and fierce denial of her sister, who treats her with cruelty and the bare minimum of care. Tired of her fading star, Jane attempts to stage a comeback of her long dead career. But what happens when Blanche wants to leave?
Of all the scary movies I’ve watched, this was one of the toughest. I just couldn’t handle Jane’s cruelty! Blanche treated everyone in her life with kindness, even her abusive sister. To see her treated so horribly broke my heart. Credit must be bestowed onto Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who played Baby Jane and Blanche Hudson, respectively. It’s a true horrorshow, and I couldn’t look away, even though I wanted to at times! I’d had quite enough at the “parakeet scene,” and that’s relatively early in the film! I almost wish that there could have been a prequel to the film. The in-between only takes up about eight minutes of screentime. A full story about Baby Jane’s fall and Blanche’s rise certainly seems like a story in and of itself!
The Seventh Victim (1943)
L. Ron Hubbard definitely looked at this movie and said “This better not awaken anything in me.” Spoiler alert: it did! Got an affinity for film noirs and cults? Have The Seventh Victim, a quiet thriller about a schoolgirl named Mary on a quest to find her missing older sister. Mary comes to find that Jacqueline, her sister, has sold her cosmetics business to a woman who provides little help, nor interest, in finding her. With the help of a detective, a poet, a doctor, and Jacqueline’s lover, Mary searches for the truth, finding only horrors untold.
I had mixed emotions about The Seventh Victim. I liked it and found it suspenseful, but the ending really messed with my mind. For that reason, and with the acknowledgment that many find the editing of this film confusing, I will spoil this ending. Nothing confused me more when Mary confessed her love for Gregory Ward, her sister’s husband. HUSBAND. As opposed to Jason Hoag, the poet who probably fell for her the moment he saw her!
I felt so confused, until moments later, when Jacqueline acquiesces to the desires of the cult she joined, and kills herself! THEN THE MOVIE ENDS. THAT’S HOW IT ENDS. The woman, broken and alone, and lowkey betrayed by both her husband and her sister, commits suicide, out of fear of the cult that “hasn’t technically killed anyone” because the “six other people chose to end their lives” after a “discussion.” Are you kidding me?! What a colossal bummer! Justice for Jacqueline.
Scary Movies: I Was, In Fact, Unsettled
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
It was certainly a surprise to see this movie listed under the ‘horror’ genre in my anthology! However, after one of the other films on my list proved too hard to find, I decided to add this classic to my ‘scary movies’ list. It had been on my list for so long! Randle McMurphy arrives at a mental institution to receive a medical evaluation. An argument claims that he should be placed in an asylum, away from his work farm. Truly, he’s insane, not an intentional criminal. At the helm of the psych ward is Nurse Ratched (which, after having watched “Ratched” prior to seeing this film, makes her introduction all the more interesting), who requires order and looms her power over the other residents of the ward.
The residents range from the truly insane to the merely nervous. Randle brings his bold and brash energy to the ward with zeal, enriching the lives of the inmates, much to Ratched’s chagrin. It is a brutal story of mental health, especially in the time of Vietnam violence and the overwhelming rejection of radical systemic authority.
I’m going to be honest: this felt like a less heartfelt version of “Girl, Interrupted.” “Girl, Interrupted” thoughtfully goes into the lives of many of the patients in the psych ward. That film depicts how “otherness” doesn’t equal crazy. Angelina Jolie’s Lisa Rowe felt more sympathetic than Randle McMurphy. Granted, Lisa was a sexually abused child, and Randle McMurphy created one. Randle has a history of violence, and the straw that breaks the camel’s back and gets him sent to a work farm is the statutory rape of a fifteen year old girl. YOU WANT ME TO FEEL SORRY FOR HIM? I DON’T. For the majority of the movie, I wondered why we were supposed to root for him.
I’m not saying I rooted for Nurse Ratched, but I lamented some of her thinking. Routine changes can be devastating to people with special needs. Ask the mother of an Autistic child what it’s like to change the routine spontaneously. I fully understand why changing a work schedule would be problematic. However, I did feel strong contentment when Randle began to narrate the baseball game as though it were on the screen. A lot of his actions felt self-serving, but I still felt sad when he was brought back after being “punished” for the Christmas party. The system is not one-size-fits-all.
There have been great strides made in treating mental disorders in the past forty five years (give or take), but there is still a large stigma for it all. Stories like this provide a perspective of what it means to live with crippling anxiety, fear, and depression, among others. I’ve said it before while completing this adventure, and I’ll say it again: the monsters aren’t Frankensteins, vampires, or zombies. They live among us, in our darkest moments.
The Wicker Man (1973)
Truthfully, I can summarize this movie with three words: too many penises. That’s not what you want in your cult film! I love a good cult movie as much as the next person, and this is sort of the Citizen Kane of cult movies. However, I was not prepared for what I was to behold. Sergeant Neil Howie arrives at Summerisle, an island off the coast of Scotland, to investigate a purported missing child. However, he finds the inhabitants passive-aggressive, denying the existence of the child, and outright refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
When not giving him a hard time, the townspeople engage in sexual dialogue, have sex in public places with reckless abandon, and teach the children the glories of the penis in school. Sergeant Howie, a Christian, finds this to be the tip of the iceberg, as he uncovers more and more about this grisly people, all leading up to their MayDay festivities, where horror and fires await… him.
Between the obscene dancing by the schoolboys on the MayPole and the keeping of foreskins by the town pharmacist, there was just a lot of dick in this movie. I’m no amateur; certainly, to be a compelling cult, you have to have a weird sex thing going on amongst the people. However, the involvement of the children made things a bit too squickish for my taste.
At one point, the Sergeant, an engaged Christian man attempts to sleep in his room. Simultaneously, the innkeeper’s daughter walks into the room next to his, with a shared wall. She immediately strips down to nothing and serenades him with a siren song, slapping herself between verses in seduction. He ALMOST falls for it, which just had me rolling my eyes. YOU’RE JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, YOU PERVERT. I would have had more respect for him had he just knocked on the door and said “Can you keep it down, I’m trying to sleep.”
All that said, it was very fun to see Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle, the leader of this cult, and I did find the movie to be quite engaging. Being the seminal folk horror film, I could totally see the ending of this film blending into Florence Pugh’s grinning face. However, again, there was just a lot of sex involved, to the point that it felt more uncomfortable than fun.
Scary Movies: Black and White Sad Boys with Hair
The Wolf Man (1941)
This movie helped me come to this inevitable conclusion: I think my favorite era of film is the forties. I love the glamour, the overtures, the swelling scores, the barely-there to overt Transatlantic accents, all combine to a soothing cinematic experience. In this film, Larry Talbot returns home to Wales to bury his brother and reconcile with his estranged father. While in town, he falls for a local shop lady and escorts her and a friend to a traveling carnival for some fortune-telling. However, a large wolf attacks Larry, and he eventually turns into a werewolf and wreaks havoc on the townspeople.
Lon Chaney, Jr. portrays Larry Talbot. Yes, the son of the Phantom of the Opera and overall “Man of a Thousand Faces” himself, Lon Chaney. He has such a kind face, and such sad eyes. His brother has died, he has barely spoken to his father in years, and falls in love with a woman engaged to marry another man. Oh, and yes, he gets cursed with the werewolf life! I loved the score of this film. The effects were of the time, but my particular favorite moment came during the transition of man to werewolf (and back). Rather than showing the full body transition, the film only shows the feet going from human to wolfish paws and back! It’s rather gruesome, dark, and dismal. So, for me, a great way to kill an hour or two!
Eraserhead (1977)
No. Thanks, but no. You’re sweet, but no. No, dude. Just, no. Thank you, David Lynch, for all that you do, but I nearly tapped out of this one. Spencer, a sad looking man, finds himself in a bleak situation when his girlfriend Mary tells him she’s pregnant. They marry, much to both of their chagrins. Soon after, Mary gives birth to a small, monster-like creature. Mary leaves the child with Spencer, who has been experiencing disturbingly lifelike visions of absurdity from the beginning.
Of all the scary movies I watched this month, I think I liked this one the least. I felt disturbed by a lot of this movie. I nearly put it in the other category, but Spencer and Larry Talbot both just look so sad the whole time. As a result, I felt they deserved their own section. Eraserhead had a lot of unsettling bits, from the man-made chicken to the removal of the child’s swaddling.
The child is so grotesque and creepy, and all I wanted to do was smother it and take it out of its misery. Does that make me crazy? Maybe. Does the fact that I nearly cried when Spencer “cut the swaddling” make me crazier? Probably. At any rate, I couldn’t tell what the message was of this movie. The others felt so clear-cut: “Capitalism is bad.” “The Vietnam War was too violent.” “The Media is bad.” “We live in a society.” What was I to get from this?
In conclusion, the narrative was nearly nonexistent, and I ended the movie more confused than when I started it. Michael Scott summed up my exact thoughts as the credits rolled.
Scary Movies: It Makes You Think, Right?
Don’t Look Now (1973)
I don’t know what I thought would happen when I went into this movie, but it had my attention from beginning to end! John Baxter and his wife, Julia, sit in their country home in England when John has a premonition. He rushes outside to find his daughter, Christine, drowned in a nearby pond in her red raincoat. Sometime later, he and his wife visit Venice for a work project. One day at lunch, a clairvoyant tells Julia that she’s seen Christine and that she’s happy. Terror and the bizarre begin to haunt the couple. The clairvoyant warns them of an impending danger. An alleged serial killer haunts the canals. Above all, John has begun to see a small figure around him, in a red raincoat. Christine’s raincoat.
There was so much to enjoy about this film. In the beginning of the film, John moves from the blur in his slides to the blur of his daughter’s imminent death. It’s beautiful storytelling! I also enjoyed seeing Venice again, especially in this context. At one point during my visit, I walked the canals alone. As pretty as it was, there was a bit of foreboding dread that made me hasten home! I’m glad to see it’s not an uncommon emotion. I couldn’t help but kick myself at realizing that I probably would have enjoyed this film even more if I spoke Italian.
The ending was a surprise that I did not expect! In the first few moments, I laughed. John feels haunted by brief glimpses of a small figure in a red raincoat (his daughter, Christine?) throughout the film. It’s an eerie thing to see, the majority of the film. However, in the final glimpse of the figure, the mysterious red raincoat person waddles like an Ewok. It’s very funny. Then it’s not. I will say this: the ending stayed with me! For fun, I would absolutely go back and watch this again to see if how many warning signs I missed.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956):
I think that most people know the sequel more than the original, particularly for the ending sequence. However, I’d say the original is not to be missed! Dr. Miles Bennell returns home from a trip, finding that multiple people in his town request his help with the same affliction: something is not right with their loved ones. Sure, these parents, friends, and family members look, talk, and dress the same, but something is off. Miles soon realizes that his town alien lookalikes replaced his town with lookalikes. These aliens seek to take control of the world, one subservient duplicate at a time.
I appreciated so many little nuances of this movie. Profoundly unsettling, town kid Jimmy knows that his mother isn’t his mother. The adults in his life suspect he’s acting out, but he is persistent that his mother is wrong. A son knows his mom. Consequently, it’s all the more chilling when the next day, the clearly replaced Jimmy sits contentedly with his mother, as though nothing has happened. As well, Jack, the boyfriend of Becky’s friend Wilma, gets a cut on his hand early in the film. A duplicate later molts into with the same cut on his hand! I could definitely see shades of this movie in “Us,” in that duplicates have snuck into our society, with a desire to dominate.
Interestingly enough, in the era of McCarthyism, the director specifically set out not to preach in his movie. There’s no intentional message of then-current political atmospheres making for a nightmarish reality of conformity. I find the idea of entertaining rather than critiquing refreshing! The initial cut of the film ended with Miles running through the streets, crying to the new townspeople, and then the audience: “YOU’RE NEXT.” A happier (or at least, hopeful) ending exists instead. I almost prefer that! The idea that the aliens have arrived, and do live among us, waiting to strike, scares me to my core. The real scary movies are the ones that feel real.
The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
I haven’t seen enough of Vincent Price to know for sure, but seeing his name attached to this film had me prepared for a good time. Thankfully, I wasn’t disappointed! I know him to be a master of horror, so I hope to see him in more scary movies in the future. In the medieval era, Prince Prospero kidnaps a village girl, Francesca. He also kidnaps her lover and her father to his castle. The surrounding towns find themselves victims of a violent plague. Prospero delights in the gloom, making clear his embracing of Satanism. Francesca finds horror in Prospero and his wicked indulgences, but nothing can prepare her for the horrors of his masquerade bash, where “the red death” proves itself nondiscriminatory.
The thing that grabbed my attention the most, honestly, was how much Bill Hader nailed Vincent Price’s accent. Outside of that, I loved the atmosphere of the movie. It felt eerie, and the final disturbing scene of the ball felt almost trippy to go with it! I have never read the source material by Edgar Allen Poe. I have to believe it’s just as macabre as the film, if not more so! Death, in this film, wears a red robe and has a chilling omnipotent presence. In his final moments onscreen, he quietly says “Why should you be afraid to die? Your soul has been dead for a long time.” In a modern-day plague, this moment felt oddly transcendent.
I’ll pause here, for a breath of air. Part 2 (or should I say, part 4?) of scary movies in Spooktober incoming later this week!