36. to 33. Infected to Invaded

33. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) 

For me, this (directed by Philip Kaufman) is the most horrific version of the classic story. Most would argue it's science fiction, but I'd still advocate for its inclusion within the definition of horror I'm running with here. Not only for its squish factor (those pods!) but ultimately for that scene, what I think of as the "Sutherland howl." I won't bother with the in-depth allegorical stuff here, but read up on how this story has been interpreted over the years, it's fascinating. (*Spoiler* Do not watch this clip if you plan on seeing the whole film.)

34. Sauna 

Also known as Filth or Evil Rising. A gorgeously stark Finnish film about the aftermath of a war and the attendant moral degeneration. Despite the awfulness of wartime acts, can we yet find redemption? This movie is relatively unknown and unseen, but its grim atmosphere, lack of supernatural cop-outs (mostly), overall contemplative tone punctuated by truly frightening moments, strong performances (Ville Virtanen is outstanding), and bleak-as-hell's-basement visuals make this a surprise late entry in some ways. Albeit a good surprise.

35. Hostel 2 

For a while there, it became fashionable to turn up critical noses at so-called "torture porn." Honestly, I think that's a cop-out. Horror is meant to horrify. It's supposed to take us out of our so-called comfort zones and shine a light on things that were once hidden yet now increasingly hide in plain sight. That's why they're scary. The word "gratuitous" should never even enter the equation; you can't be half a horror fan. So, Hostel was good. But Hostel 2 was better still. Cruel and bloody, sure, often excruciatingly so, but it asked uncomfortable questions about our world in which a tiny minority retain power and privilege and often act appallingly with apparent impunity. 

36. 28 Days Later 

Don't get me wrong, I love zombie and apocalyptic films. Dystopian narratives are my lifeblood. But it's so rare anyone gets it completely right. Director Danny Boyle made the attempt here, and I think he hit the ruined nail on its rusting head, not because the infected could move fast (boring argument, move on), but because he concentrated on the human connections and feelings, and evoked the sheer moodiness of an eerie England slowly abandoned by the authorities. In other words, one of my favourite dystopian films (Alfonso Cuarón's brilliant Children of Men) could not have been made without this.

No One Ever

After the party, we all go down by the shivering river. 

Winter, cold, but nowhere ice. Kirsten laughs at the richly carved salmon sculptures curled all perfect for the tourists, while live herring gulls circle overhead, warm someplace within their torpedo torsos, and occasionally screaming. Ornery as fuck.  

Rafe, one acquisitive eye on the tawdry sub-stripmall liquidation warehouse bargain world outlet stores, at last says this: "Let's go. Find something good. Could we?" 

And Lucinda knows she gotta head back south soon enough, cross the stupid dumbfuck border before it gets even stupider with dumbfuck holiday traffic, beat the cheap gasoline and dairy hound dogs, the Costco bandits, Walmart outlaws and Bellis Fair pillagers, and make time and peace with the toothy, chummy, American dumbfuck country mouse. (Here I might point out the green, mostly submerged and peeling boat, not so much offshore as offbank, but there have been many observations throughout our history every bit as profound yet equally and utterly ignored.)

An anticlimax, then.

The real cruelty of life is this, a gathering of negatives: We stumble on the only soul who makes us want to do nothing but sing, only to find that their song is not ours, and never will be.

After which the rains come. And boy, do they come. Gets so the local critters all abandon this place, leave their possible return to fate and the glimmering stars. Bridges, backroads washed out. Nowhere left to ford, all ravelled up in muffled acreages and submerged indeterminacies.

I probably loved Kirsten the most, who always laughed and never succumbed until the very end. She revered things with such lively aplomb. The quiet reserve, the crow score, the chicken-scratch bordello throat-song.

"You'll never follow me all the way," she taunts. And she's right. I went on some tangent, sparking off of the mainstream, reading from some profane backwoods gospel, gleaning banjo pickings in scree-fanned draws, collecting possums and coons a-plenty and hurling them half-assed and wild, aimed mainly potwise, learning their death scents too. Like I learnt her sex scent all along. Her sex scent. Near makes me pause it does.

While Rafe laughs his cynic laugh. Not because he's a cynic but more 'cause he lost all belief in being anything beyond or aside from someone won't do nothin' all that good or ere that bad. Settled for things. Best equipped to hang from the fugitive's neck and chant the death knell requiem. Which may as well be a cynic, I guess, oh lord so jaded and lost.

But Lucinda. The real Lucinda. She will return. Again and again, tires crunching cheap motel parking lot gravel, her serious face levelled athwart a serious plane. She will sit alone, her cold, hard nipples gathered like fat, dry raisins, her elbows jutting chickenwise, her lorn, gone cuntwarmth terrible in its loss and desirous in its recall, she unable to feel her twitching nose or pursing lips, her arid breath a spectre so lonely it makes loneliness itself seem near gravid with joy.

"Love is what I felt back there, and love is where I'm headed," she says, a chastened banshee, heart defiant while eyes downcast.

Rafe sneers. Sucks on what's left of his teeth.

"What the fuck you got to sneer about?" I ask, the first thing I ever said in this furious, chaotic world that ever mattered.

No one ever answers. No one ever. I think about crying and realize I got no tears, and everything moves relentlessly on, even if the world itself stops. Especially then.

___________________________

Not even sure why or how, but this post by my awesome friend Dan Mader somehow birthed this piece. Oh, and Faulkner.

40. to 37. Hellraiser to Snowtown

37. Snowtown, or The Snowtown Murders

This one's completely rooted in our reality, as unpalatable as that can be, and tells the stark story of the 1990s series of based-on-truth killings in South Australia. For me, the horror lies in addressing your reaction to the main antagonist, John Bunting, and how you reconcile your gut level need for him to meet his just deserts, and what you envision those deserts to be. A true sociopath, at heart as mundane as any, yet more persuasively ugly than most attempts to capture such banal human evil. Brilliant performances all round here, especially Daniel Henshall as the mundanely creepy Bunting.

38. Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone

Cheating here, but these two gorgeous films by Guillermo Del Toro are so completely related that I can't untangle them. Both childhood fables in which adult horror is introduced, by way of the Spanish Civil War, their mood is consistently gorgeous and very compassionately human in spite of or, perhaps more pertinently, in opposition to, the undercurrent of fascism and terror. Sure, call them dark fantasy. Whatever. But be prepared for them to enter your nightmares for a lengthy stay nonetheless.

39. The Shining

Still controversial, probably because of the largely subconscious narrative King himself was never fully comfortable with: that of a man who might easily turn on his family—whom he avowedly loves—and completely annihilate them. Makes the whole thing terrifying on a level horror films, or novels, had rarely touched on until then. So many creepy yet poetic moments. Here's one:

40. Hellraiser

One of my favourites, despite being quite dated in some ways, although the Cenobites could never be truly dated given their extradimensional origins. I'm still a huge fan of Clive Barker's then-transgressive explorations of pain, pleasure and beyond, and revisit his early short stories in the peerless Books of Blood often. It's all about the Cenobites, though. There's a depth to their realm it's awful to even begin to contemplate. Tear your soul apart, indeed.

The Criteria: Horror Stripped of Humour

So, thinking more about the criteria of these films. In order to reduce the near endless possibilities, I immediately excluded any horror movies that leaned too heavily on humour. Not because I believe humour is inappropriate in horror films—in fact, I've often said there's a direct kinship between the two emotions, laughter and terror, both of them allied in the release of tension, both so reliant on mood and timing, and both at heart so utterly serious—but because humour by its nature will leach away some of the more disturbing elements I'm attempting to privilege here.

Think of it like this: the horror/humour/jump scare alliance is akin to the funhouse at the carnival, and there's nothing wrong with that if that's your goal at the time, in the moment. Everyone loves the carny. But the movies I'm trying to find a common thread for here belong in the killing field, the charnel house, the autopsy room, the psych ward, the torture chamber, the impromptu pit dug by a human freak—real places breeding with infection and immersed in dread. I want disquiet, distress, despair, wretchedness, the bleak certainty of approaching desolation. Horror, in other words. Unadorned, pure, essential horror. Yet somehow artful or honest, at least. Even beautiful on occasion. Certainly something that stays with you, that you worry at, and turn over in your mind like some arcane puzzle. 

Sadly, the no-humour criteria immediately eliminates some of my favourites in the genre, including "the original Evil Dead films; the incredible, insane Reanimator; zombie parodies as tenuously related as Return of the Living Dead and Shaun of the Dead; and the stone-cold classic, An American Werewolf in London," as I put it in my inaugural Facebook post on this (albeit without the more grammatically pleasing semicolons). And many more besides. 

Anyway, let's get started. I'll post around four capsules at a time, beginning at number 40, and try to include clips and images as I go. Feel free to comment if you stumble on any of this in your travels through the brackish backwaters of the interwebs, but it's okay if you don't, as I'm doing this primarily for myself, to freeze in time a very personal, even idiosyncratic sensibility I don't expect a single other human to share, quite honestly.

Forty Shades of Terror

A few weeks ago, mainly for idle fun born of a misguided sense that my opinion even matters in an overcrowded world, I began to post a sporadic list of my forty favourite horror movies on my Facebook timeline. And not simply horror movies, but a specific kind of horror movie: one that stays under your skin or burrows inside your psyche and won't leave, one that truly disturbs, unsettles or frightens you... or, more accurately (since it's my list), me. I also wanted these films to burst, blur, and mock genre boundaries, somewhat. To be controversial in at least one sense or another.

After a while it occurred to me that this list, as fun and provocative as it was, would end up scrolling off and eventually become lost in the corporate purgatory of Facebook's dodgy, disposable theology. So I grabbed these little capsule reviews and impressionistic thumbnails with a view to reproducing and even building on them right here on my blog where, in theory, they will live a longer and more fulfilling life, even after their teeth wear down or fall from their drooling mouths.

But wait. This is a writing blog, not a movie blog, I hear you grouse. And not unfairly, either. Okay, somewhat lamely, I will justify it by arguing that if—by my writing—I can highlight and illuminate these cinematic gems for others, then the holy act of writing will have played its part in the greater scheme of sacred artistic endeavour. Or something. Look, it's a symbiotic thing, kind of like something you might encounter in the frigid interstellar void that crawls within your very DNA and begins to slowly chew and tear its way back out again...

So anyway, watch this space. You know, the one where no one can hear you scream. (See what I did there? Shut up.)