Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/31.

"I asked the world to send me a list of 31 films that scared the pee out of them," writes Ed Hardy Jr. "Many more people than I would have thought possible heard, and answered, the call. 183 films were nominated and voted on. The resulting list is not perfect, but it is a fascinating picture of what our little community considers canonical horror cinema."

"From fetid canals to glitzy high rises, the physical aspects of his home city of Amsterdam repeatedly inform [Dick] Maas's [site] work..., at once serving to ground his films in the believable everyday world, display how the everyday can be horrifying, and present a distinctly Dutch take on the horror/thriller genre." Not Coming to a Theater Near You wraps its 31 Days of Horror with Dark Passages: The Films of Dick Maas, a collection of four pairs of succinct takes on four films: Leo Goldsmith and Thomas Scalzo on The Lift; Adam Balz and Rumsey Taylor on Amsterdamned; Balz and Jenny Jediny on Silent Witness; and Goldsmith and Jediny on The Shaft.

Updated.

"Fuck hyperbole - George A Romero's debut film Night of the Living Dead may be the purest horror film ever made," proposes Rob Humanick, capping off his 31 Days of Zombie! Related: a double bill at Facets Features: "Remakes generally fall into the "bad idea" category, but on occassion one comes along that holds its own against the original work," writes Phil Morehart. "Tom Savini's Night of the Living Dead (1990) is one such film. Yes, George A Romero's 1968 original is an untouchable zombie masterpiece, but Savini brings a unique flair to the events, most notably regarding the undead."

"Like Bram Stoker's Dracula, its much more successful companion piece, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein aspires to combine the intellectual depth and philosophical preoccupations of art with the visceral, lurid sensuality of pulp - a feat Coppola, who produced Frankenstein, also pulled off in The Godfather," blogs Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Instead Frankenstein combines the ridiculousness of pulp with the pretensions of art."

"[T]he modern haunted house film is fundamentally about gentrification," argues Sam J Miller in PopPolitics. "Again and again we see fictional families move into spaces from which others have been violently displaced, and the new arrivals suffer for that violence even if they themselves have done nothing wrong."

"Now this is how to make a list," writes Jim Emerson, pointing to Richard Corliss's "Top 25 Horror Movies" for Time. "Argue all you like with RC's choices (that is the point), this list strikes me as a brilliant balancing of the expected and the unexpected, the mainstream and the marginal, from 1896 to 2004." Also, there's his own "4 undervalued scary movies on DVD."

"Over the next six months, a crew of able young women will be duking it out for audience affection in an array of horror-thrillers that will showcase the power of the Y chromosome," writes Rachel Abramowitz in the Los Angeles Times. Among them: Rachel Nichols (P2), Jessica Alba (Awake), Emily Browning and Arielle Kebbel (A Tale of Two Sisters, "a redo of the highest-grossing Korean horror film of all time"), Brittany Snow (Prom Night, "the remake of the Jamie Lee Curtis artifact from the 1980s") and Sarah Michelle Gellar (Possession, "another Asian redo").

At Bright Lights After Dark, C Jerry Kutner casts a ballot: "This is my ranked list of 31 Essential Horror Films culled from Ed Hardy, Jr's 183 Official Nominees for the 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies List." Also, Erich Kuersten recommends Let's Scare Jessica to Death: "A fine example of a 'is she is or is she ain't a nutcase' horror picture that's lived a consistently below-the-radar life since its brief theatrical premiere in 1971, Jessica contains almost no gore but watching it alone late at night a few months ago, I finally understood the term 'spine-tingling.'"

Doug Cummings has a recommendation, too. The Testament of Doctor Cordelier is "a pretty fun and fascinating film, both as a dark variant on Renoir's typical themes and as a technological experiment: the film was shot with multiple cameras and long takes to capture the actors' energy with few interruptions and prove that feature films could be made cheaply with television methods. (Hitchcock would himself use a black-and-white television crew to film 1960's Psycho.)"

For Craig Keller, the last 15 minutes of Michael Curtiz's Doctor X "are among the greatest in all of American cinema."

The Hollywood Bitchslap team names their Halloween picks.

For the Guardian, Jeremy Dyson pits Christopher Lee's Dracula against Max Schreck's Nosferatu. Related: At Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson on Murnau's Nosferatu and Richard von Busack on Werner Herzog's Nosferatu. Meanwhile, the Dracula Blogged project rolls on, a reminder from Thom at a Film of the Year, where he's also pointing to Frankensteinia and Final Girl, devoted to "the slasher flicks of the 70s and 80s."

"As someone who's required to pay attention to cinematic trends, I think it's reasonable to assume that studios and other purveyors of film and video products now anticipate the weeks leading up to Halloween with same drooling relish they once reserved for the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas," writes Gary Dretzka at Movie City News. "Although there's never been a drought in the supply of fresh horror flicks, the quantity, quality and diversity of niche titles has never been greater."

Michael Guillén notes that Herschell Gordon Lewis will be on hand for two "outstandingly rare screenings of The Wizard of Gore in San Francisco at midnight on Friday and Saturday. And Cheryl Eddy talks with him for the Bay Guardian.

Dennis Cooper's been posting Halloween entries and tops off the series today with a 1991 essay on the Friday the 13th movies.

"The Others directly recalls and inverts Jack Clayton's masterful Deborah Kerr vehicle The Innocents," writes cnw for Reverse Shot. "Like that film, it relies almost entirely on cinematic form - shot composition, sound, and lighting - to evoke fear, and hinges on a remarkably effective, histrionic star turn from its female lead, as well as formidable supporting performances, particularly by the children."

"The Tall Man has to be one of the best original monsters of the past few decades." Adam Ross revisits Phantasm.

David Austin's got three capsule reviews at Cinema Strikes Back: The Manitou, Feast and Them!

At Cinematical, Monika Bartyzel lists seven "Halloween Flicks That Could Ruin Relationships." And James Rocchi rounds up Cinematical's Halloween madness. It's been going on all month, you know.

Catch up with Sam Katzman, suggests the New York Post's Lou Lumenick.

For Shahn, it's Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase.

Ted Pigeon looks back on "Memorable 'Slasher' Title Sequences."

Via Dwight Garner comes news that John Updike is writing a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick: The Widows of Eastwick.

John Coulthart's got a Halloween playlist, a followup to last year's list. Related: Kenji Fujishima at the House Next Door on Gustav Mahler's "unsettling" Sixth Symphony. Michael Tully's got a scary tune for you, too.

Online browsing tip. I Am as You Will Be: The Skeleton in Art at Cheim & Read, via Coudal Partners, where you can read and/or listen to Jim's essay, "All Hallows'."

Online browsing tips. Kimberly Lindbergs rounds up several fun links.

Online viewing tips, round 1. 10 Zen Monkeys presents "10 Best Monster Ads."

Online viewing tips, round 2. The Guardian's Kate Stables has eight shorts for you. And more from Phil Hoad.

Online viewing tips, round 3. Andrew Bemis's Halloween trailers.

Updates: Really fine piece from Noel Vera:

An especially vivid passage from Dickens's Oliver Twist gives us, I think, a clue as to why Romero's zombies are so much more memorable [than the running kind]:

- these fears were nothing compared to the sense that haunted him of that morning's ghastly figure following at his heels.... He could hear its garments rustling in the leaves, and every breath of wind came laden with that last low cry. If he stopped, it did the same. If he ran, it followed - not running too - that would have been a relief - but like a corpse endowed with the mere machinery of life, and borne on one slow melancholy wind that never rose and fell.

See, it's those words, "it followed - not running too - that would have been a relief," that nail it for me. Romero's zombies are frightening because they're never in a hurry; they operate on a different sense of time from our own, and we feel, no matter how fast we run, that they will somehow overtake us - if not now, later; if not today, tomorrow. With today's sprinting zombies, you feel as if a tranquilizer and a long hot shower might help improve their mood. Not so with Romero's undead: they seem as inevitable as the cold that will someday creep up our bones, and invariably, inevitably claim us for its own.

"So, the big question, of course, and it's a valid one, is why?" At Reverse Shot, robbiefreeling on Rob Zombie's Halloween: "[L]ike Tarantino, who with the great Kill Bill Vol 1 and Death Proof has been moving toward ever-more inventive ways of reappropriating pop culture, Zombie is smart about playing with audience's expectations as well as emotions. Kill Bill seemed the ne plus ultra of epic pop collage (it created its own symphony of colors, sounds, and cinematic intuition); and Death Proof took seemingly familiar 'trash' tropes and then stretched and pulled time like taffy, creating an entirely new experience, almost a visual essay, on the very films Tarantino only seemed to be aping. Halloween isn't quite so heady an experience, but in subtly shifting perception, in making us identify with Michael Myers (a shocking, sickening prospect for the audience), we engage with the film's mythology in new, invigorating ways."

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth has more online viewing - fun stuff.

Posted by dwhudson at October 31, 2007 10:47 AM