'90s Horror Poll: Day 17 - Lost Highway

 

#7 (Tie) - 7 Votes

While Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was considerably darker and more abrasive than the series, it still contains enough deadpan comedy that, along with the way it ends Laura Palmer's sad story with a disarming moment of grace, makes the question of whether it's a horror movie or not a debatable one. With David Lynch's next feature, Lost Highway, there's very little debate - it's basically a two-hour nightmare, one that ends without any moment of resolution for its protagonist(s?) or the audience, and what little humor it contains is very grim. While the story relies on noir staples like the seductive girlfriend of a violently jealous gangster, the villain here is most likely the protagonist's own disturbed mind. Lynch has said that he realized, after making the movie, that he was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial, which actually makes perfect sense; it's a movie about a guy who creates an alternate life for himself to forget a terrible thing he's done, only to find that his own mind - in the form of the creepiest character Lynch has ever created - won't let him escape.

The movie begins with couple Fred (Bill Pullman) and Renee (Patricia Arquette), who are living in a sort of monosyllabic horror show of a failing marriage even before they start receiving videos showing the outside and, eventually, the inside of their house (I was annoyed when Michael Haneke either unintentionally repeated or blatantly stole this device for Caché and everyone was apparently fine with it). As with most mysteries in Lynch's movies, the tapes aren't a puzzle to be put together as much as a harbinger of darker things to come, which manifest themselves in the form of a guy in Kabuki makeup (played, in a queasy coincidence, by future possible wife murderer Robert Blake) who approaches Fred at a party and informs him that they've met before. The guy also tells Fred that he's at Fred and Renee's home right now; Fred calls home, at the mysterious man's insistence, and the man does indeed pick up at the other end. The scene is a perfect example of Lynch's amazing gift to take a scene that, on the page, could play like a lesser Twilight Zone episode and, by staging it just right, eliciting the right performances from his (presumably very trusting) actors and, especially, knowing just when to cut to tighter close-ups on his actors, creates a scene that works as a horror story in miniature.

The story soon jumps ahead to Fred in prison, accused of killing his wife, which he doesn't remember. One morning, after suffering a headache that looks slightly less painful than the one Michael Ironside gives Louis Del Grande in Scanners, Fred wakes up as a different person. Pete (Balthazar Getty), an auto mechanic in his early 20s, doesn't remember how he got there, but the movie switches tracks with him. Pete soon begins an affair with Alice (also Arquette), the mistress of a gangster named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia). Just as the movie seems to be veering into Double Indemnity territory, bits of Fred's life start to intrude on Pete's story in strange ways, until the whole thing folds back on itself. The movie has a great deal in common, thematically and structurally, with Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, but while those movies end on a note of liberation for their trapped heroines, there's no exit for Fred at the end; it's easy to imagine the end credits simply looping back to the movie's beginning.

It's not quite as strong as the two later films, and once you start to understand what's happening to Fred/Pete, some of the details might start to seem unnecessarily obscure. But it contains some of Lynch's best work - the scene where Mr. Eddy assaults a tailgater is the most memorable in Loggia's filmography (other than his Minute Maid ad), and there's a great sex scene between Pete and Alice, scored to This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren,"* that takes a hairpin turn from beautiful to chilling (Arquette's performance is very underrated). And whenever the movie seems ready to fly off the rails, Blake returns to bring everything into frightening focus. Blake may be playing the devil (this was Blake's interpretation), or a projection of Fred's conscience (co-writer Barry Gifford thought so); personally, I think he's like the subconscious characters in Inception (albeit in a less literal way), determined to eject Fred from his own dream. Whatever the case may be, Blake is completely terrifying; late in the movie, there's a POV shot of Fred, from the driver's side of his car, pulling away as Blake approaches with a camera, grasping at Fred as he drives away, that is as suspenseful as any protracted chase in a slasher movie.

Given the theme of this month's poll, it's also worth noting that Lost Highway is immediately identifiable as a late-'90s movie. Lynch's films often feel like they're taking place in the present and the recent past at the same time, and Lost Highway sort of tries that with the noir elements. In this case, though, the wall-to-wall industrial soundtrack, as well as the industrial influence on the production design and costumes, make it much more recognizably of its time. This hurts the movie a little bit - it takes me out of the dreamlike atmosphere Lynch is working so hard to build when Marilyn Manson and Henry Rollins show up in cameo roles. While I don't doubt that Lynch is a fan of Manson, Nine Inch Nails and the other artists on the soundtrack, it sometimes feels like he's straining for relevance in a way that none of his other work does. It's a minor nitpick, though, as the movie is still fascinating and often very unsettling; let's just say that, while a David Lynch movie isn't improved by putting a Rammstein song on the soundtrack, being on the soundtrack of a David Lynch movie makes Rammstein a little more interesting.

Sidenote: If you haven't read this David Foster Wallace piece about Lynch, focusing on a visit to the set of Lost Highway, I can't recommend it highly enough.

*Lynch wanted to use this song as the soundtrack for Jeffrey and Sandy's dance scene in Blue Velvet; when he found out he couldn't, he wrote the lyrics to "Mysteries of Love" during a lunch break.

U.S. Release Date: February 19, 1997 (Also opening that day: The Empire Strikes Back (Special Edition), Rosewood, Blood and Wine)

What critics said at the time:

"In Eraserhead, there was a rapturous quality in even the most grisly images. Amid the terrible loneliness of human (and industrial) life were flecks of opalescent beauty, and of connection. In Lost Highway, the plugs have been pulled, and what's left is a misanthropic cackle that echoes in the void. It's distressing to think that Blue Velvet was the climax of Lynch's hopeful phase, that his view of humanity has been downhill from there. It's not that the vision here is so bleak, but that it's so reductive, and that it leads nowhere. Lost Highway is Eraserhead without the wonder, Eraserhead conceived by an angry man recycling stale genre movies and making them staler and more primitive yet." - David Edelstein, Slate

 

"Lynch has landed us in storytelling territory so weird and new that a more precise plot synopsis would probably be incoherent, like the handbook for the afterlife that the dead are required to read in Beetlejuice. Yet from beginning to end, Lynch keeps us anchored in a very plausible, slightly comical, hypnotically humdrum world where people drive cars, go to work, and haunt their own apartments. For all that these characters relentlessly transform, inside and out, their world is solid and constant--and from the get-go, this is a reassuring indicator that Lynch knows exactly what he is doing. We are never anywhere except where he and co-writer Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart) want us to be." - F.X. Feeney, Mr. Showbiz
 

'90s Horror Poll: Day 16 - Bram Stoker's Dracula

#7 (Tie) - 7 Votes

The November 1992 issue of Fangoria - the cover of which refers to Bram Stoker's Dracula as "The Horror Event of the Decade!" - features an interview with director Francis Ford Coppola about his then-new film. Coppola talks at length about his attempt to make an experimental film out of Bram Stoker's novel, while the studio wanted a big, lavish A-list horror movie. At the end of the interview, he concludes:

 "The irony is that even though this film didn't turn out as experimental as I originally planned - I got maybe 40 percent of what I was going for - it's still not your conventional movie. Certain aspects of it got away from me, got bigger than I intended; I was looking at making a smaller, stranger, artier version, and what I got is a big, strange, artier version."

It's a familiar narrative turn of events in Coppola's career, the intention of making a small art film ballooning into something much larger. In this case, though, Dracula turned out to be the rare unqualified hit of Coppola's post-'70s career, largely thanks to a very effective marketing campaign - the movie's gorgeous poster was ubiquitous that fall, as were the many bits of cross-promotional ephemera (the VHS release featured ads for the soundtrack and the Sega Genesis game). The movie itself didn't prove to be the horror event of the decade, and it remains divisive among horror fans, but Coppola did succeed in making a uncommonly idiosyncratic blockbuster - with its opulent, romantic approach to horror, Dracula is very much of its time, but there hasn't been anything quite like it since.

Personally, I've always been a fan of the movie, which I wanted to see as badly as most of my peers wanted to see Home Alone 2: Lost in New York that fall. I had to wait until the following summer to see it on video; admittedly, my attention flagged a bit in the last half-hour, by which point everyone in the cast is yelling all of their dialogue, but I liked the movie for the reason many critics didn't, the way it aspired to elevate Dracula to the level of high art while still indulging in gratuitous T&A and as much onscreen bloodletting as the average splatter movie. Seeing it on the big screen several years later, I was able to fully admire Coppola's attempt to tell this story in purely visual terms, as though it were a silent film; the movie's over-the-top visual spectacle may not always be dramatically coherent, but between the lavish production design, the extraordinary costumes by Eiko Ishioka (who deservedly won an Oscar for her work on the film), frequent Fassbender collaborator Michael Ballhaus' cinematography, and the stunning visual effects (supervised by Coppola's son Roman), which were mostly achieved in-camera, the movie's accomplishments are unique and ambitious enough to forgive its occasional missteps. It's playfully inventive and proudly disreputable in a way that Coppola's films wouldn't be again until his most recent, Twixt.

The first thing people are apt to remember about Dracula, of course, is Keanu Reeves' performance as Harker, particularly his oft-parodied British accent. Ever since I read an interview with Coppola where he mentioned that he wanted Johnny Depp for the part (the studio didn't think he was a big enough star at the time), I can't help imagining an alternate universe Dracula that, with that one change, is celebrated as a classic. Beyond that, I'm the fan of all the performances - yes, everyone is chewing the scenery, especially Anthony Hopkins, but naturalistic performances would have been drowned out by the scale of the production. It's the kind of movie where a curly-mustached Cary Elwes can burst into a room and bellow "What the devil is going on hee-ah?" and it just feels right. Other standouts in the cast include Tom Waits playing Renfield as a bug-eating Tom Waits, and Sadie Frost, who takes the typically thankless role of the best friend who Dracula seduces first and makes something special out of it - she's sexy in a way that made me uncomfortable as a kid and probably more so as an adult (the whole movie is luridly sexual - it's probably unnecessary, but I'm not complaining). And while the character of Mina doesn't require as much from Ryder as her much more interesting performances in movies like Heathers and The Age of Innocence, this might not matter if, like me, Winona circa 1989-1994 was one of the earliest and most influential crushes of your formative years.

It's Gary Oldman, though, who steals the movie; he's my favorite screen Dracula after Christopher Lee, and his chameleon-like talents are perfect for Dracula as conceived here. Managing to convincingly act through the several complex makeup designs created by Greg Cannom (also a deserving Oscar winner for his work here), Oldman is equally convincing as a decrepit elderly Dracula, a young heartthrob Dracula, or a six-foot-tall bat. His romantic scenes with Ryder are straight out of a Harlequin novel, but he's persuasive enough that when he bares his bleeding chest for Mina to drink from, you can see how she might be into it. Dracula was one of the first in a wave of movies, like The Crow and Interview with the Vampire, that took a Gothic, romantic approach to dark subject matter that appealed to young audiences, particularly teenage girls. Years later, it's easy to trace a line from these films to the Twilight series, though fans of Dracula would likely sneer at the comparison. The truth is, they tap into the same fantasies, though, compared to Stephanie Meyer's chaste sexuality, Coppola's film is practically pornographic, and delightfully so - I can't believe I've reached my conclusion without discussing the blood-drinking orgy scene. Ah well, another time, perhaps.

U.S. Release Date: November 13, 1992 (Also released that day: Traces of Red, Love Potion no. 9, Tous les Matins du Monde)

What critics said at the time:

"For one thing, the 130-minute drama goes on forever. For another, it feels like neither a success nor a failure, living in its own world of maddening oppositions: It's enthralling in many places, dull in others. It's as wondrous as it is overextended. You can't tell if this is a flawed masterpiece or an intricately designed bag of wind." - Desson Howe, Washington Post

"Boring? Empty? These adjectives accurately describe most Hollywood pictures I see week after week, all of which have easily definable heroes, plots, conflicts, and resolutions, and as few ideas of any kind as possible--visual, thematic, stylistic, or otherwise. If anything, Bram Stoker's Dracula suffers from a surfeit of such ideas, not to mention a surfeit of characters and action. If you require your entertainments to be easy to follow and to synopsize or review afterward, you'd be better off heading for Aladdin." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Readers

'90s Horror Poll: Day 15 - Ravenous

#8 (Tie) - 6 Votes

I skipped Ravenous when it was dumped in theaters in the spring of 1999, received mixed-to-negative reviews (though Roger Ebert and a handful of others were fans) and quickly disappeared. A few years later, I caught it on cable and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The movie has built up a small cult following over the years; as is often the case with black comedies, Ravenous was difficult to market (check out the pretty terrible trailer below) and eventually found an audience appreciative of its peculiar charms through word of mouth. Mixing horror and comedy is always a delicate balance, and Ravenous has the added challenge of working as a period piece, but it works as well as it does because the setting, characters and performances remain credible even as the action grows increasingly loony.

Set in 1847, Ravenous stars Guy Pearce as Captain John Boyd, who is transferred to a remote outpost in the Sierra Nevadas as punishment for an act of cowardice during a battle. Soon after Boyd's arrival, a settler named Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle) appears at the camp, near death and telling the terrifying story of his party being lost in the mountains and having to resort to cannibalism. The soldiers assemble a rescue party to search for survivors around the camp; I'll stop describing the plot here, because it's a pleasure to see the unexpected turns the story takes. Screenwriter Ted Griffin does a fine job of repeatedly raising the stakes throughout; every time we think the situation can't get worse for Boyd and his fellow soldiers, Griffin turns the screws a little tighter, all while maintaining a cheerful sense of gallows humor.

The production of Ravenous was famously troubled, with Antonia Bird taking over three weeks into production after the original director, Milcho Manchevski, was fired. So while the movie nods in the direction of playing as satire of American exceptionalism, it's probably best not to read too much of a personal signature into what was clearly a for-hire job. That said, aside from the anticlimactic final scenes, the movie doesn't feel like the product of a troubled production at all. Bird gets the tricky tone the material needs to work without losing sight of the sense of verisimilitude needed to keep it from veering into camp territory - it's a very funny movie, but moments like Jeffrey Jones' final scene are legitimately unsettling. Bird also gets strong performances from her ensemble cast - both leads are strong, and the ensembles cast, which includes Jones, Jeremy Davies and Neal McDonough, offers strong support, which is crucial in a horror movie that relies on an isolated setting. Anthony Richmond's gorgeous widescreen cinematography makes the most of the movie's locations (Slovakia makes a surprisingly good double for the Sierras). And, last but not least, the score by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn is one of the all-time great horror soundtracks; not since Deliverance has a banjo sounded so threatening.

U.S. Release Date: March 19, 1999 (Also opening that day: Forces of Nature, True Crime, The King and I, I Stand Alone, The Book of Life, Sparkler)

What critics said at the time:

"The film is one of those accursed self-styled 'outrageous' comedies that play the horrific for broad laughs, with a comically inflated style of dialogue that's so hip one doubts it could have been conceived before 1997, much less 1847. It's 'Eating Raoul' in buckskins. But the movie is also coarse and bloody (blood seeping, splattering, gurgling, gushing or blackening into aspic in the sun, is the visual motif) and uses far too many horror movie tricks, like the shock of the mutilated body or the unexpected plasma squirt." - Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

"The screenplay, by Ted Griffin, provides nice, small moments of color for the characters (I liked the way Jeffrey Jones' C.O. seemed reasonable in the most appalling ways), and short, spare lines of dialogue that do their work ('He was licking me!'). I also liked the way characters unexpectedly reappeared and how the movie savors Boyd's inability to get anyone to believe him. And I admired the visceral music, by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn, which calls attention to itself (common) but deserves to (rare). 'Ravenous' is clever in the way it avoids most of the cliches of the vampire movie by using cannibalism, and most of the cliches of the cannibal movie by using vampirism. It serves both dishes with new sauces." Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

'90s Horror Poll: Day 14 - The Faculty

#8 (Tie) - 6 Votes

The Faculty was released near the end of the post-Scream wave of self-referential, self-consciously hip teen horror movies that dominated the second half of the decade. Written by Scream's Kevin Williamson - whose other credits, in the two years between Scream and The Faculty, were I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream 2, Dawson's Creek and uncredited rewrites on Halloween: H20 - it's a calculated mix of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Breakfast Club. When an alien parasite starts taking over the minds of the teachers at an average suburban high school, a group of very different students - including a brain, a jock, a popular girl, a bullied Goth girl and a misunderstood delinquent - have to work together to stop it from taking over the school and, presumably, the world. In the process, they have lots of feelings and learn that they're not as different as they thought. It's a blatant mash-up of elements from popular movies, and I'm not sure if the fact that the movie acknowledges that it's stealing (Elijah Wood and Clea DuVall's characters actually discuss Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Heinlen's The Puppet Masters in one scene) makes it more or less cynical than if it played dumb. And when characters spoke in Williamson's trademark hyperarticulate dialogue, I honestly couldn't remember if it was an accurate reflection of how teens talked back then or if they started talking that way because they saw Scream and Dawson's Creek, and I was one of those teens.

While I have tried to avoid reducing my write-ups to click bait-y "Remember this? Does this make you feel old?" stuff, I must say that The Faculty might be the quintessential '90s horror movie. Just the sight of the Dimension logo lighting up, with The Offspring on the soundtrack, had a Proustian impact. If anyone were to make a parody of late-'90s teen horror movies, it would look a lot like The Faculty. The characters are introduced with freeze-frames and title cards showing their names - I'm bad with font names, but it was that paint splatter-looking one, kind of like the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas font, but more '90s and extreme (I'm sure it was an option on Microsoft Word at the time). Usher, Wiley Wiggins and Danny Masterson show up in small roles, and Harry Knowles has a cameo as a teacher. Jon Stewart shows up, just before he took over The Daily Show, rocking a sweet goatee (the scene where he gets stabbed in the eye was a go-to punchline on The Daily Show for years). The soundtrack even features an ultra-'90s supergroup - Layne Staley on vocals, Tom Morello on lead guitar, Stephen Perkins on drums and Martyn LeNoble on bass - that was assembled specifically for this movie to provide a shitty cover of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)." If you added a Jesse Camp cameo, a character who is really into rap metal and a reference to the Taco Bell chihuahua, this would be the perfect 1998 time capsule.

Probably the most of-its-time element of the movie is that Josh Hartnett's sensitive badass character is a drug dealer who sells an unspecified powder. The character is clearly modeled after Judd Nelson's character from The Breakfast Club, but Bender just had a bag of weed in his locker. In The Faculty, Hartnett selling homemade amphetamines to his classmates is both supposed to make him charmingly roguish and demonstrate that he's a smart kid who needs to apply himself. I didn't think anything of it as a teenager who knew almost nothing about drugs, but as a 30-year-old, I was mortified. There's also the suggestion of a romantic attraction between Hartnett and a teacher played by Famke Janssen, a weird recurring theme in Willliamson's work. So there was a brief moment in popular culture where a movie could confuse Jesse Pinkman for John Bender and have us rooting for him to have sex with his teacher. The '90s were weird.

I was surprised how well The Faculty did in this poll; I'm guessing that, if I'd been a little younger when I saw it, I'd have more affection for it. It's not bad, though, and it's especially fun when it gets to let loose with its The Thing-influenced creature effects by KNB. Director Robert Rodriguez does a fine job of aping Wes Craven's work on Scream, though his work here was the first hint that he'd be less of an auteur than Tarantino or his other contemporaries and more of a..."hack" is a strong word, so we'll say a commercially-minded journeyman. The casting of the teachers is inspired, with Robert Patrick and Piper Laurie, in particular, riffing on their most famous genre roles. And it was fun to spot a ton of familiar faces near the beginning of their careers, especially Clea DuVall as Ally Sheedy.

U.S. Release Date: December 25, 1998 (Also released that day: Patch Adams, Stepmom, Mighty Joe Young, The Thin Red Line, Hurlyburly, A Civil Action, The Swindle, The Theory of Flight)

What critics said at the time: 

"A sci-fi/horror thriller so derivative that it thoughtfully acknowledges its principal influences in the dialogue, screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Robert Rodriguez's wise-to-its-audience shocker is nevertheless exactly the kind of sporadically clever, button-pushing fright-fest that keeps genre fans hanging on until something more fulfilling comes along." - Matland McDonagh, TV Guide

"Amid the traditional year-end deluge of prestige pictures, a smart, lively and unpretentious exploitation picture is always a welcome treat. And that's exactly the pleasure of seeing 'The Faculty,' a rip-roaring collaboration between director Robert Rodriguez and writer Kevin Williamson. It's a consistently funny and clever teen horror flick that in the Williamson 'Scream' tradition of hip references to old films also offers nods to 'The Thing,' 'Forbidden Planet' and 'The Puppet Masters." - Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

'90s Horror Poll: Day 13 - Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man)

  

#8 (Tie) - 6 Votes

The first time I saw Dellamorte Dellamore (released in the U.S. as Cemetery Man), it was very late at night, and the next morning, I wasn't sure if I was remembering the movie accurately or if it had inspired some very strange dreams as I drifted in and out of sleep. Later on, a second viewing confirmed that Michele Soavi's film was exactly as strange as I remembered. Based on a novel Tiziano Sclavi (who also created the cult comic Dylan Dog, whose hero is modeled after Dellamorte Dellamore star Rupert Everett), Cemetery Man starts as a deadpan horror comedy only to make several jarring tonal shifts, becoming erotic, violent and surreal before ending on an inexplicable existential question mark. It shouldn't work, and it didn't work for a lot of critics, but Soavi - who worked as an assistant director for Dario Argento and Terry Gilliam, citing both as influences on his work - completely commits to the story's morbid take on love and death, and even as you're repeatedly asking "Wait, what just happened?", in the end it's true to its own (arguably batshit insane) logic.

Everett stars as Francesco Dellamorte, a cemetery caretaker in a small Italian town who, as of late, has had to deal with the problem of dead people escaping from their graves. While the movie's roving cameras remind not only of Gilliam but also Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, Soavi's approach to horror comedy is comparatively low key - the joke here is that, for Dellamorte, shooting zombies in the head becomes just another mundane aspect of his job. This changes when Dellamorte, whose only companion is his mentally challenged assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), falls for a newly widowed young woman (Anna Falchi). Sadly, the woman is bitten by a zombie after she and Francesco have sex atop a grave, but after he dispatches of her, she reappears to him as various other characters (Gnaghi also has a romance with a severed head). As Francesco starts to wonder if he's going insane, he's visited by a very Gilliam-esque Death, who encourages him to start killing the living, which is where things get really strange.

Dellamorte Dellamore isn't a particularly scary film, as the zombie outbreak proves to be the least of Dellamorte's worries, and Soavi is more interested in gross-out than suspense; everyday human activities like eating and sex are given a sickly quality, reminders of our mortality. The movie grows more unnerving as Dellamorte turns his gun on the living, and we're uncreasingly uncertain if what we're seeing is a dream, a hallucination or something else altogether. The movie's ending, which I won't spoil, is one of the strangest of any movie, horror or otherwise. It's a seemingly out-of-nowhere philosophical question mark, and while, after having seen it a few times, I'm not sure if it fits the movie, but I admire Soavi for swinging for the fences. Soavi left the film industry for a long time after Dellamorte Dellamore for personal reasons; there are two more recent movies listed on his Wikipedia page, but there's very little information about either, and they don't appear to have gotten U.S. releases. It's a shame, as Dellamorte Dellamore is one of the most unique horror movies of the decade, and horror movies could use Soavi's offbeat sensibility today.

U.S. Release Date: April 26, 1996 (Also released that day: The Quest, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, Sunset Park, Mulholland Falls)

What critics said at the time: 

"The worst thing that can be said for 'Cemetery Man,' which opens today in the Bay Area, is that it's out of control. It's as if the film makers were following random impulses, tossing anything on screen and then repenting by flailing in all directions for a meaning to it all. Some patches are dull, others are irritating and puerile. In the end, 'Cemetery Man' seems to be a pointless exercise" - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

"The visual effects are a hoot, with camera angles from inside underground coffins, and a severed head that follows Gnaghi adoringly around the graveyard. Soavi offers a skewed comic world where a dead lover is as good as a live one - maybe better, since the dead always return. With Hollywood grinding out a raft of coming big-budget, heavy-artillery, live-action versions of comic books such as `Barb Wire,' `X-Men,' `Men in Black' and `Wonder Woman,' this sweet-spirited Italian import recalls another era with its naughtiness, creative verve and endearing lack of pretension." - Amy Dawes, Los Angeles Daily News

 

'90s Horror Poll: Day 12 - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

#8 (Tie) - 6 Votes

While I don't want to devote a lot of space to the question of whether or not Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a horror movie, David Lynch is unparalleled in making movies that defy easy genre classification with their ability to make us feel multiple conflicting emotions at once. Eraserhead, for instance, is a movie that many consider horror, but as unsettling as it can be, I've always found it hilarious. One of the many ways that Twin Peaks was a radical departure for network TV was the way it juggled so many different genres and moods in a way that, at the show's best, seemed effortless. A single episode could include goofy comedy, eroticism (by network standards), soap-y melodrama, suspense, surrealism, poetry and genuine pathos, all within the parameters of a mystery procedural. While the show's many tonal shifts weren't always smooth, they were unified by a very real emotional center - the way that the grief over Laura Palmer's death touches every resident of the town and, once the identity of Laura's killer was revealed, the all too real horror of a seemingly happy family hiding unspeakable abuse.

There are long stretches of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch's follow-up to the series, that can't really be classified as "horror." The opening half hour, following FBI agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) as he investigates a murder that took place a year before Laura's, is a self-contained deadpan comedy featuring exact opposites of many of the main characters from Twin Peaks. It's as if Lynch was deliberately trying to frustrate fans' expectations. There's also a brief interlude with David Bowie as a FBI agent returning from the world where Bob and "the man from another place" reside that is equal parts compelling and baffling. Also, given that it's a prequel (and because Kyle McLachlan asked to have a smaller part), Agent Cooper's mostly passive role knocks the movie off-balance as it descends into the underworld of Twin Peaks without its goodhearted, pie-loving Virgil.

But once the movie returns to Twin Peaks and the story of the last days of Laura Palmer's life, it's nightmarish in ways that go far beyond what a TV show at the time would allow. We watch Laura's psychological torment in what feels like slow motion, and it's almost too painful to witness; while Lynch has specialized in abstracting real life evils in Twin Peaks and throughout his work, he deserves a lot of credit for dealing with the literal evil of incest literally and unflinchingly. Though Bob remains frightening in the film, the sickening reveal of Laura finally seeing his real face - her father's - is more terrifying than any supernatural being. Lynch's leads deserve a great deal of credit too - Sheryl Lee gives the rare performance that deserves to be described as brave, throwing herself completely and without vanity into Laura's descent, and Ray Wise is just as brave in finding the broken humanity in a character that is at once monstrous and pitiful. Throughout, the movie has a genuine, heartbreaking sense of compassion for victims of sexual abuse; Lee has remarked that survivors of rape and incest have thanked her for helping them work through their own experiences.

While the letters sections of Wrapped in Plastic indicate that the movie had passionate fans from the beginning, it was mostly rejected by audiences hoping that it would answer some of the show's unresolved questions. Instead, they got an incredibly downbeat character study, minus the show's offbeat humor, that raised more questions than it answered. Since then, it's found a loyal audience, including many who insist it's Lynch's masterpiece; at the very least, it's one of his most technically accomplished (the sound design alone is astounding), and a remarkably uncompromising, difficult film. The news of a new season of Twin Peaks, to be directed by Lynch and written by Lynch and series co-creator Mark Frost, has been greeted by some (including me) with the same kind of anticipation others feel for the new Star Wars trilogy, with a lot of speculation about what shape the story might take. My guess is that a fair amount of people will be disappointed; if there's one thing Fire Walk With Me proves, it's that Lynch follows his own muse, audience expectations be damned. But if Showtime is smart enough to let him do his thing, having Lynch back in the director's chair, returning to the medium he helped reshape, is cause for celebration. I, for one, can't wait to be surprised.

U.S. Release Date: August 28, 1992 (Also released that day: Honeymoon in Vegas, Pet Sematary II, Freddie as F.R.O.7., Storyville)

What critics said at the time:

"Everything about David Lynch's "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" is a deception. It's not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be. Its 134 minutes induce a state of simulated brain death, an effect as easily attained in half the time by staring at the blinking lights on a Christmas tree." - Vincent Canby, New York Times

"The film's many moments of horror- an excursion into a drab room in a picture given Laura by a spectral old woman and which turns out to be one of the entrances to the Lodge,' Laura's hysterical and numbed laughter as Bobby is shocked by the murder he has committed: the alternations of the glowering Leland with the insanely evil Bob - demonstrate just how tidy, conventional and domesticated the generic horror movie of the 80s and 90s has become." - Kim Newman, Sight & Sound

'90s Horror Poll: Day 11 - Alien 3

#8 (Tie) - 6 Votes

Earlier this year, I saw Aliens on the big screen for the first time. Even having seen it countless times, it was a completely different experience on the big screen; by the end, I was exhausted and relieved when the movie faded to black on Ripley and Newt safe and asleep. So while I've always understood the reasons why audiences loathed Alien 3 when it was released, for the first time I fully appreciated why fans who'd seen Aliens on the big screen in 1986 were so offended by the offscreen deaths of Newt and Hicks between movies. It's a slap in the face to audience members who were emotionally invested in the characters, especially the surrogate mother/daughter relationship at the core of Alien 3; at the same time, it gives the movie a bleak sort of integrity. Depositing series heroine Ripley at "the ass end of space," having literally lost everything, and ending with her ultimate act of self-sacrifice, David Fincher's first film took audiences to dark places they'd rather not have gone (graphically killing a dog in the first reel was probably a bad idea), but at the same time, it's more of a piece, aesthetically and thematically, with Ridley Scott's original than James Cameron's crowd-pleasing sequel was.

The prison planet Ripley crash-lands on, with its population of murderers and rapists, makes a literal, human parallel to the alien's metaphorical threat of rape. Weaver's performance here is her best in the series - she remarks of the alien at one point, "You've been in my life so long, I can't remember anything else," and she plays Ripley as haunted, with Fincher's close-ups of her bald visage recalling Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (the resemblance occured to me before I saw Scout Tafoya's excellent video essay on the film, but I highly recommend it). Alien 3 has frequently been described as nihilistic, but there's a pronounced (if atheistic) spiritual aspect to the film, with Ripley helping the same inmates who pose a very real threat to her early in the movie to ultimately redeem themselves. Ripley's final scene, too, can be interpreted as an act of martyrdom; I'm glad the movie was released in the pre-internet era, as the ending was a complete surprise to me even seeing it months after the movie's released. The ending shocked me, but in retrospect, it feels like the only correct one.

Alien 3's development and production were famously chaotic, with Fincher and his actors forced to improvise scenes as they went along. The movie sometimes suffers as a result, with repetitive action in the second half and some gaping plot holes, some of which, like the Ripley's impossibly intact sleep chamber, are fixed with the longer cut originally included in the Quadrilogy box set. Also, some of the visual effects don't work, which usually isn't a big issue, but is more noticeable in a movie that follows two movies with impeccable effects work. Fincher has disowned the movie, and it's easy to see why; in his recent Playboy interview, he said, "It was an absurd and obscene daily battle to do anything interesting with what we were allowed to do." Still, the movie is visually stunning and more thematically interesting than a second sequel to Alien needed to be, and it contains scenes, like Andrews (Brian Glover) being pulled into the cafeteria ceiling, or the famous two-shot of Ripley and the xenomorph, that are as frightening as almost anything in the first two movies. It's not Aliens, but it's also far more interesting than an attempt to duplicate Aliens would have been, and though James Cameron hates it, he also prefers Alien vs. Predator, so who cares.

U.S. Release Date: May 22, 1992 (Also released that day: Far and Away, Encino Man, Zentropa)

What critics said at the time:

"Just at the point when Alien 3 should kick into high terror gear, it becomes clear that this hushed, somber sequel doesn't know how to deliver the goods. Fincher has style to spare -- and the sets, cinematography and special effects are all first rate -- but the nuts and bolts of storytelling elude him." - David Ansen, Newsweek

"For once, an MTV veteran knows what he's doing with actors. Fincher gets thoughtful performances from Charles Dance as a fallen physician who cleaves, all too briefly, to Ripley, and from Charles S. Dutton as a horn-rimmed rapist who is humanized by his eloquent pragmatism. The scenes with the other prisoners have a bombed-out comic nihilism reminiscent of the Mad Max pictures. As for the alien itself, it is seen mostly in feral glimpses (sometimes you wish the shots were held longer), and it has been subtly reimagined as a skittery, helmeted spider sucking the life out of its victims." - Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

'90s Horror Poll: Day 10 - Sleepy Hollow

#9 (Tie) - 5 Votes

One of the best moviegoing experiences I've had was seeing Sleepy Hollow on opening night with a sold-out audience who jumped and screamed in all the right places. I loved the movie as a teenager, and I still like it, though it's easier to see the movie as a turning point in Tim Burton's career. The director's first decade was one of the best streaks any filmmaker has enjoyed, but his last film, Mars Attacks (one of his best), was a box office bomb, and Sleepy Hollow followed his aborted attempt at making Superman Lives with Nicolas Cage. As much as Sleepy Hollow was a good fit for Burton's visual sensibility, it also feels distinctly like a for-hire gig. While even the Batman movies, especially Returns, feel like blockbusters made with a personal vision, Sleepy Hollow feels like it could have been made by any number of directors. On top of that, it suffers from clunky dialogue ("Perhaps there is a bit of witch in you, Katrina, because you have bewitched me" - barf) and an overload of convoluted plotting and nonsensical action sequences, like an exploding windmill that has no effect on the plot and was seemingly just included as an opportunity to blow something up. I think Burton's recent work gets a bit of a bum rap - it's just that his worst movies, outside of Batman and Batman Returns, are his highest-grossing ones - but Sleepy Hollow was the first of his films that was visually striking but emotionally and thematically, er, hollow.

Still, there's a lot to like about it. Ichabod Crane is one of Johnny Depp's most interesting performances, and I love that he cited Jessica Fletcher as an inspiration. The supporting cast is terrific; when you put Richard Griffiths, Michael Gambon, Jeffrey Jones and Michael Gough together in a scene, you've already done half the work. Christopher Walken is fun as the Headless Horseman (when he has his head, that is). It's great eye candy, thanks to Rick Heinrichs' production design and Emmanuel Lubezki's gorgeous, monochromatic cinematography. Also, I have to appreciate any big-budget movie that is this gleefully bloody. It's a fun ride with some effective scares, but it never sticks with me for long after watching it. It's as infused with Burton's love of classic horror as any of his movies, but beyond the visual references to Hammer and Mario Bava, it feels for the first time like Burton is coasting; it's a pretty good movie nonetheless, but if it had a heart, it'd be one of Burton's best.

U.S. Release Date: November 19, 1999 (Also opening that day: The World is Not Enough, Liberty Heights)

What critics said at the time:

"The galloping eruptions of the headless horseman, played by Christopher Walken, are startlingly ghoulish, and the cast, which also includes Christina Ricci as a dour dumpling with eyes for Ichabod, is chosen with a horror maven's eye for terror. It's a peculiarly adolescent conception of terror, though: Burton, for all his skill, never ranges beyond the thrills of the obvious; he doesn't enlarge the meaning of the horror he shows us, the way a Brian De Palma might. As a filmmaker, he's in a perpetual state of Halloween: a sicko treat-or-treat specialist." - Peter Rainer, New York

"The plot falls short on discernible logic now and then, but that’s hardly an issue. 'Sleepy Hollow' is all about visuals, music and mood, about being swept away by what’s on the screen. Danny Elfman’s music is haunting and jaggedly elegiac, the perfect underpinning to the movie’s look. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki brushes nearly every frame with a bluish cast: This Sleepy Hollow is a wonderland of misty coolness, of horizons defined by craggy trees, of shaded woods holding tight to their secrets. The Horseman himself is a magnificent and horrifying creature, galloping out from the maw of nowhere, his sword brandished like a warrior’s spear, his cape floating around him like malevolent squid ink." - Stephanie Zacharek, Salon

'90s Horror Poll: Day 9 - The Sixth Sense

 #9 (Tie) - 5 Votes

I usually have good instincts, when watching trailers for upcoming movies, of which ones are must sees for me and which are skippable. The Sixth Sense, however, was one of the exceptions; based on the trailer, which mostly consisted of Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment speaking to each other in hushed tones, I thought the movie looked like a ponderous bore being dumped in late summer by Disney. Also, I must confess that the line "I see dead people" made me giggle the first time I heard it. A few weeks into the movie's blockbuster run (fueled almost entirely by word of mouth, unusual then and almost unheard-of now), I gave The Sixth Sense a try, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I was mistaken.

What impressed me most about The Sixth Sense, then and now, was how it worked as a throwback to classical ghost stories like The Innocents and Don't Look Now, relying almost completely on the hushed, chilly atmosphere M. Night Shyamalan was able to sustain for two hours for its scares. One of the reasons ghost stories are my favorite horror subgenre is that you don't necessarily need any special effects to be scary - if done correctly, a film can frighten its audience with the well-timed appearance of an actor in a space where they simply should not be. Shyamalan pulls off several moments like this, and though The Sixth Sense is a model of restraint, it nails its "Boo!" moments. Between it and The Blair Witch Project, it was a refreshing moment, after a few years where self-aware slashers dominated the genre, to see horror movies that relied on audiences' imaginations finding big success at the box office.

It was the film's twist, of course, that fueled word of mouth, and it's a good one, but it wouldn't have resonated the way it did if we weren't already invested in the story and characters. The performances are great all around - Osment is remarkable, of course, but it's Willis who has to carry the movie. He's one of the best actors around when he's invested in the material, and one of the dullest when he doesn't care; here, you can tell he cares, and it's fascinating to rewatch the movie, knowing where it's headed, and notice the subtle choices Willis makes that reflect what his character does and doesn't know. Toni Collette and Olivia Williams are also strong in roles that could have just been plot functionaries, and Shyamalan was wise to take the time to make them relatable, sympathetic characters, making the resolution of Willis and Osment's storylines as emotionally resonant as they are.

It's still Shyamalan's strongest movie as a director, too - the movie's subtle but carefully designed visual compositions, particularly the use of color, suggest that the director is a gifted visual storyteller with a remarkable career ahead of him. It's a shame that Night took the wrong lesson from the movie's runaway success, though, attempting to replicate the impact of its twist with diminishing returns. I like his next two films, and The Village is well made for such a completely ridiculous movie, but it's all downhill from there. Once he cast himself as a writer who is literally the savior of humanity, as he did in Lady in the Water, it's clear that he mistook himself, the storyteller, as the star of his movies, rather than the stories themselves. Still, The Sixth Sense holds up well enough to hope that Shyamalan might still be capable of surprising us.

U.S. Release Date: August 6, 1999 (Also opening that day: The Thomas Crown Affair, Mystery Men, The Iron Giant, Dick)

What critics said at the time: 

"There are some horror movies, like 'The Innocents,' poetic enough to get by on mood. Shyamalan, though, is a pedant. He appears to think he’s creating an eerie atmosphere layer by layer with the movie’s unrelievedly dingy look (it was shot by Tak Fujimoto) and the funereal pacing of each scene. But the tempo only makes you wonder where the movie’s connective tissue has gone." - Charles Taylor, Salon

"The Sixth Sense (atmospherically shot by The Silence of the Lambs’ cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto) is actually a drama—its spooky, effective ad campaign is misleading. Only because I was expecting something different did I notice—rather, feel—the movie’s running time, which is just shy of two hours. The story unfurls slowly but engrossingly; its unexpected finish is definitely worth the wait. I’m not sure said big twist ending is bulletproof, but I admired its audacity." - Bill Chambers, Film Freak Central

'90s Horror Poll: Day 8 - Ring

#9 (Tie) - 5 Votes

While looking up information for this post, I was reminded that Hideo Nakata's Ring (referred Ringu in the U.S. to avoid confusion with the remake) was never given a proper theatrical release, only appearing on DVD as a tie-in with Gore Verbinski's version five years after its release in Japan. Nakata's film was a big hit there, but over here it initially had the same fate as many other notable Asian movies then and now, its reputation growing thanks to festival screenings and, mostly, people passing around import and bootleg copies of the movie. This was a fitting means of distribution for a horror movie that is so much about the technology and media at the particular moment in time that it was made. The central conceit of a haunted tape that curses anyone who sees it could only have made sense at a time when the beginnings of social networking created a greater opportunity to share obscure or offbeat movies and other media but, in the absence of YouTube and BitTorrent, people still relied on physical media to do so (only a few years later, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse used webcams as a paranormal plot device). When someone inevitably reboots The Ring, they'd be wise to make it a period piece; unfortunately, it seems a lot more likely that we'll get a movie with a pun-y tagline about "going viral."

But while the movie's VHS-centric plot and hallucinatory images have led some to compare it to Videodrome, Nakata isn't as interested in the technology itself as Cronenberg. The author of the Ring novels, Koji Suzuki, has cited Poltergeist as an influence; as in that movie, where paranormal activity was the result of a then-modern real estate development being built over a cemetery, Ring uses TV as a means for the past to communicate with the present. While my knowledge of Japanese cinema isn't comprehensive enough to make any sweeping claims about what a film is or isn't saying about the culture, in every Japanese ghost story I've seen, the ghosts are mainly a reminder of the past intruding on the modern. In the case of Ring, the malevolent ghost Sadako exists to remind, as ghost stories in every culture often do, of past sins that refuse to be forgotten.

Sadako's backstory is the least interesting part of the original or the remake, and the U.S. version's makers smartly trimmed it down, as the investigation slows down the middle third of Nakata's film with flashbacks and exposition. The terrific ending more than makes up for it, though, and comparing how each films handles Sadako's (or Samara's) appearance is a great illustration of differing approaches to horror. In Verbinski's version, Samara's trip through the TV screen is heavily aided by visual effects, and she's given a monster-movie makeover by Rick Baker. It's still very effective, but in Nakata's film, the scene is comparatively still, and more terrifying for its stillness. The visual effects that transition Sadako into the real world aren't as slick, but it doesn't matter; the emphasis is entirely on the uncanny effect of this being who absolutely should not be in the room occupying very real space. The lighting is shadowy, but not to the point of horror movie expressionism; the setting is ordinary, which makes Sadako's appearance seem all the more unnatural. In The Ring, it's a great jump-out-of-your-seat "Boo!" moment, but Ring's subtler approach gets under our skin. They both work, but it's Nakata's ghost that lingers uncomfortably in our memories.

What critics said at the time:

"The images, it transpires, are images from the mind of a psychic with a nifty line in high-tec hexes. Nicely shot, and with an intriguing premise, this gets throttled by its over complexity, duff plotting and a distinct lack of actual action. Part of a trilogy by popular horror author Koji Suzuki, apparently." - Adam Smith, Empire

 "Director Hideo Nakata manages to strike a genuinely alarming balance between the cultural depths of Japanese folklore and the surface sheen of latter-day teen culture. With its video curses, late-night television links and matter-of-life-or-death phone calls, Ring has more than enough techno-friendly trappings to ensnare the average channel surfer. But lurking at the bottom of its well of intrigue is a timeless terror more attuned to the mature sensibilities of an adult audience. And it is this unique combination of old folk devils and contemporary moral panics which gives Ring such a nerve-rattling edge." - Mark Kermode, Sight & Sound

'90s Horror Poll: Day 7 - The Frighteners

#9 (Tie) - 5 Votes

The Frighteners is a kinder, gentler version of the low-budget splatter comedies Peter Jackson began his career with. After his true crime drama Heavenly Creatures (still his best movie), Jackson and his co-writer and wife Fran Walsh were hired to write The Frighteners as a Tales From the Crypt Presents movie for Robert Zemeckis to direct. Eventually, it was decided that Jackson should direct, with Zemeckis producing. A variation of Ghostbusters, starring Michael J. Fox as a paranormal investigator who uses his ability to communicate with ghosts to con people (the ghosts work for him and leave on cue), The Frighteners has seemingly more in common with Zemeckis' films than Jackson's Bad Taste and Braindead (aka Dead Alive). The gleefully puerile gore is replaced with goofy comedy and manic, CGI-heavy setpieces. Zemeckis had already made Death Becomes Her and Forrest Gump at this point, and The Frighteners also signals the direction Jackson's career would take - since then, he's made six Tolkien movies, King Kong, and a "smaller" film, The Lovely Bones, that relies on computer animation almost as much as the others. 

So if The Frighteners was Jackson's deliberate attempt to make a crowd-pleaser, the reasons it failed to connect with audiences are the same reasons it's better than the average summer blockbuster. While Jackson intended to deliver an audience-friendly PG-13 movie, the MPAA inexplicably rated it R, though it's less gory or violent than Raiders of the Lost Ark, for instance. In a way, this is a compliment to Jackson. The over-the-top comic gore of his earlier films feel like a live-action adaptation of the bloody notebook scribblings of a kid with an overactive imagination, finding the sick comedy in our mortality and our fragile bodies. While The Frighteners nixes the gore, it's still pretty dark at its core, with the plot involving a Grim Reaper-like "soul collector" and a murderous couple inspired by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. Fox's character, Frank Bannister, is emotionally paralyzed by grief after the death of his wife, and The Frighteners, as much as Braindead, is a film that uses comedy as a response to death anxiety. I'm not saying that Jackson is Ernest Becker, but the movie is essentially morbid in a way that Ghostbusters isn't.

The movie's weakest moments are often Jackson's attempts to lighten the tone, particularly some of the cringe-inducing jokes between Bannister and the ghosts who live with him. The worst is Chi McBride, playing an African-American ghost who died in the '70s, who is stuck with a series of non-jokes about his "black ass" (topical humor is not one of Jackson's strengths). It's the rare horror-comedy that works best as a horror movie; Fox is convincing and surprisingly sympathetic in his last leading role to date, and the movie's effects sequences are fun and inventive (the CGI is dated, but all effects date - what matters is the imagination, or lack thereof, behind them). And though this was Jackson's first attempt at big-budget studio filmmaking, the spirit of B-horror is well represented in the casting of Dee Wallace Stone, John Astin and, especially, Jeffrey Combs as neurotic FBI agent Milton Dammers (as much as I like Re-Animator, Dammers is my favorite Combs performance). With his Hobbit trilogy almost over, here's hoping that Jackson might take a cue from Sam Raimi and return to his horror roots between blockbusters for old times' sake. It's probably unlikely, but one can dream.

U.S. Release Date: July 19, 1996 (Also released that day: Fled, Multiplicity, Kazaam, Trainspotting)

What critics said at the time:

"I guess if you're disposed to get involved in the convoluted horror-comedy plot of Peter Jackson's The Frighteners (Zemeckis served as executive producer) you might discover some sort of continuity beneath the barrage of special effects. But the ugly, aggressive, proliferating effects were all I could begin to contend with, and trying to keep interested in them was like trying to remain interested in a loudmouth shouting in my ear." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

"The Frighteners' plot gets crazily complex as patterns appear to develop in all those deaths and Bannister attempts to put a stop to them. Fortunately director Jackson, at home with all kinds of excess, keeps everything spinning nicely, not even losing a step when the mood turns increasingly disturbing." - Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

'90s Horror Poll: Day 6 - Wes Craven's New Nightmare

#9 (Tie) - 5 Votes

In the 1990s, Wes Craven made three horror movies about horror movies. We'll discuss Scream later, and its first sequel has some great moments, particularly its Demons-influenced opening sequence. The first, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, wasn't nearly as big a hit as the Scream films; I was surprised to be reminded, while fact-checking on Wikipedia, that it's the lowest-grossing Nightmare on Elm Street movie (though it had the misfortune of opening on the same weekend as the movie that defined '90s American cinema). It's also the best reviewed, and one of the most popular among fans of the series today. Movies about movies are as old as talkies, and there's a long list of self-referential horror movies before Craven attempted it, but at a time when mainstream horror movies were becoming increasingly stale, New Nightmare and the movies that followed were a breath of fresh air. 

As Craven wrote him in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger (called "Fred" in the original) is a very dark, unsettling creation, and while it features the kind of imaginative dream sequences as its sequels, they serve a very different function. As the series progresses, the nightmares become increasingly literal manifestations of the characters' worst fears - in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, for example, a girl who is afraid of bugs is turned into a cockroach and squished. Craven's film is truer to the cryptic logic of real dreams, and its most famous sequences, the deaths of Tina (Amanda Wyss) and Glen (Johnny Depp), are incredible, surreal moments made more powerful by their inclusion in a low-budget slasher produced with no expectations of huge critical or commercial success. And while Freddy makes a few wisecracks in the film, they're meant less as funny one-liners than as a creepy reminder of the pleasure he takes in tormenting his young victims.

There have always been contradictory accounts of the direction the series took next, but Craven wasn't involved with any of the subsequent sequels, except for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, but his script for that movie was heavily rewritten by Frank Darabont and director Chuck Russell. However, an impressive list of very talented people worked on the series; the documentary Never Sleep Again gave me a greater appreciation for how, while not every movie in the series works, each was an attempt to take the series in an original direction. Still, pretty much everyone agrees that the series was hurt by the increasingly comedic direction Freddy took, and later sequels featured the pedophile and child murderer skateboarding and playing Nintendo. Craven referred to the character in an interview as "Shecky Greene with claws." After Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare supposedly ended the series, Craven got the opportunity to make his creation scary again. 

From the beginning, Craven directly acknowledges that Freddy had somehow evolved from a monster into the hero of the series. There's an early scene where Nightmare on Elm Street star Heather Langenkamp, playing herself, is surprised during an interview by Robert Englund in full Freddy makeup; Freddy is greeted with enthusiastic applause by the audience, an idea inspired by Craven and Englund's own confusion when Englund began to be approached for autographs by children in Freddy costumes (I also enjoy the suggestion that Freddy had become mainstream-friendly enough to appear on a bland daytime talk show). With the stars, co-star John Saxon, Craven and even execs from New Line playing themselves (I love that Robert Shaye is the movie's Stuart Ullman), New Nightmare takes place in "reality," where Freddy's face has been used to market toys and video games, and introduces a darker incarnation of the character, who is the newest face of an ancient, primal monster. It's a sixth sequel that serves as a self-deprecating yet insightful justification for existing - it's only when we stop reincarnating these monsters on film, giving them context and resolution, that they can really hurt us. 

The movie's most interesting choice is to have Freddy target Langenkamp's young son, Dylan (Miko Hughes). Craven was disturbed by the Freddy's popularity with children, and New Nightmare explores the reason for young audiences' fascination with the character. In the talk show scene, the host asks her if she's concerned about any effect seeing her movies might have on young children, including her son, and later, as the movie starts to resemble the second act of The Exorcist, a well-meaning but wrongheaded doctor (Fran Bennett) suspects that Langenkamp has warped Dylan's mind by exposing him to the movie. In a decade when movies that were violent or sexual in a way that didn't reflect a very specific idea of traditional values were a hot button topic for debate, New Nightmare is a defiant defense of the positive role scary stories can play in giving a child a safe context to explore their own anxieties. As with Nancy, Langenkamp's character in the original, the adults who try to protect Dylan by shielding him from his fears almost get him killed, and it's only when he and his mom purposefully play their roles in the movie they've been written into that they're able to escape. 

The last stretch of the movie, where Dylan and Nancy confront Freddy in his own personal hell, is also the weakest part. It's a great idea on the page, and the Dante-inspired production design is interesting, but I'll never be able to look at this without laughing. Freddy, who Craven smartly keeps offscreen for most of the first half, is scarier earlier in the film; the makeup design by KNB is excellent, recalling A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 makeup artist Kevin Yagher's description of Freddy as a "male witch." The character here lacks whatever flicker of humanity remained in his earlier incarnations, and Englund, who is great in the series' best and worst entries, is great both as Freddy and as himself (by all accounts, the friendly, intelligent Englund we see here is close to the real thing). The series took its longest break after New Nightmare; Freddy vs. Jason better than a horror icon mashup had any right to be, but the 2010 remake is boring and nearly unwatchable. New Nightmare serves as a fitting coda to the original series, even as it signaled the direction that Craven and horror movies in general would soon take.

U.S. Release Date: October 14, 1994 (Also released that day: Pulp Fiction, Little Giants, Exit to Eden, Hoop Dreams)

What critics said at the time: 

"I can't imagine anyone but lifetime subscribers to Fangoria magazine getting excited at the prospect of seeing these people play themselves. Wes Craven's New Nightmare lacks the trancelike dread of the original Nightmare, and it features almost none of the ingeniously demented special effects that made the series' third installment, Dream Warriors, a hallucinatory exercise in MTV horror. This one is just an empty hall of mirrors." - Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

"Serious fans of horror movies relate only in a secondary way to the chills themselves; they're connoisseurs of the genre, the special effects, the makeup, the in-jokes. They're going to love this movie, which seems to have been made not only for but by Fangoria fans. But it also works for general audiences. I haven't been exactly a fan of the 'Nightmare' series, but I found this movie, with its unsettling questions about the effect of horror on those who create it, strangely intriguing." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

'90s Horror Poll: Day 5 - The People Under the Stairs

#9 (Tie) - 5 Votes

Over the years, horror movies have proven to be a way for filmmakers to deliver powerfully blunt political statements. While George A. Romero has said that the subtext of Night of the Living Dead only occured to him after the fact, his zombie movies since then have all been angry satires that are very specific to the time they were produced. John Carpenter finished the 1980s with They Live, a cynical, deliberately lowbrow attack on the social and economic inequality that we accept as the way things are. A few years later, one of Carpenter and Romero's contemporaries, Wes Craven, made his own bloody social commentary with The People Under the Stairs. While Craven's movies, even the weaker ones, had always been loaded with subtext, the story of a kid from the ghetto (Brandon Adams) who breaks into the house of a corrupt landlord and his wife (Everett McGill and Wendy Robie), only to discover that they're more sinister and depraved than he could have imagined, is his most overtly political movie. While it's not entirely successful, it stands out in a decade where horror movies largely avoided any kind of political point of view.

While Craven is certainly well-known, he's always been a bit underdiscussed outside of Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street and, to a lesser extent, The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. He's not as stylish a visual storyteller as Carpenter, and even his best movies can be a bit uneven. But he's also unusually smart about storytelling archetypes and their thematic underpinnings, though his movies are philosophical in such an unpretentious way that it makes their ideas easy to overlook. With The People Under the Stairs, the message is impossible to ignore - the perverse husband and wife keep children they've abducted locked in their basement for disobeying their rules, and they torture the adolescent "daughter" they've stolen (A.J. Langer) for minor infractions. They live comfortably off the money they've purloined from their tenants, who live in squalor, and they keep their riches locked behind an absurd series of security systems and booby traps. The analogy for the one percent, before we called them that, isn't completely coherent - it's never clear why, exactly, they abduct and imprison children - but it's still pretty potent, with McGill and Robie's characters serving as a freakshow version of a "traditional" way of life that masks all sorts of exploitation and general weirdness.

The movie mashes together a lot of elements from different sources, with varying degrees of success. Casting Twin Peaks couple McGill and Robie nods towards Lynchian weirdness, and the dark fairytale aspect of the story makes for an interesting contrast with the more realistic scenes of Adams' life in the slums. But Craven also includes Home Alone-style slapstick, with Adams foiling his captors, that doesn't work at all and serves to make the villains less threatening. On the other hand, the many sudden tonal shifts make for an entertaining, unpredictable ride - I can't tell you exactly how the movie arrives at McGill wearing a gimp suit and brandishing a shotgun, but I'm glad it does. The People Under the Stairs isn't Craven's strongest work (I'll actually be writing about one of his better movies tomorrow), but it's got a brain and a point of view, and I appreciate that it's a totally unique experience at a time when the genre was becoming increasingly reliant on formula.

U.S. Release Date: November 1, 1991 (Also released that day: Highlander 2: The Quickening, Billy Bathgate, Year of the Gun, 29th Street)

What critics said at the time:

"Into this nightmare world comes Fool, suffering gladly once he teams up with the latest snatchee, Alice (A.J. Langer). They become avengers, racing through a house that has more hidden passages than 'Finnegans Wake' and setting up an ending that both Danny DeVito and Frank Capra would appreciate. Unfortunately, all this is totally ludicrous and badly set up." - Richard Harrington, Washington Post

"Propping up this story are a myriad of issues and themes that range from social injustice, racial prejudice, child abuse and community solidarity. It's a distinctly urban horror tale that looks at the sinister pathologies that go on behind closed doors. It's also wryly funny. When Woman exclaims 'You children will be the death of me' or Man bellows at the noisemakers below 'Don't make me have to come down there,' it's like some typical family portrait as seen through a refracting surface of parody." - Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle

'90s Horror Poll: Day 4 - Event Horizon

#10 (Tie) - 4 Votes

Paul W.S. Anderson, director of Alien vs. Predator, Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil and its last two sequels, has been praised as an auteur by a surprising number of critics and cinephiles in recent years. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, have these people actually seen Alien vs. Predator? On the other, I'm all for shining a light on talented filmmakers who work with disreputable material, and Anderson is a strong visual storyteller, with a sturdy sense of spatial continuity that most of the other Vulgar Auteurists lack (if you don't know what Vulgar Auteurism is, there's a Wikipedia entry you shouldn't look at, because you don't want to know).

Event Horizon is Anderson's best film (of the ones I've seen, at least); while the script is a grab bag of ideas from The Shining, Alien, Hellraiser, Solaris and others, Anderson's approach to deep space horror is very effective. The early parts of the movie are genuinely unsettling; as the crew of a rescue vessel explores the seemingly abandoned titular starship, Anderson, cinematographer Adrian Biddle and production designer Joseph Bennett do a fine job of creating a tense, foreboding atmosphere, occasionally teasing us with brief moments of hallucinatory imagery. Anderson also smartly followed Ridley Scott's example by assembling a cast of seasoned character actors, led by Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne, that lend the movie's scares credibility. While the movie goes off the rails by the end, with a more standard explosive finale then the first half promised, getting there is an enjoyably creepy ride.

Though Event Horizon was a flop when it was released, it's developed a cult following over the years. Fans of gory special effects, in particular, dig the movie's more gruesome bits, particularly an impressively sick scene that shows the starship's original crew's descent into madness and Hellraiser-esque bodily mutilation in brief, near-subliminal images that leave the viewer asking "Wait, what did I just see?" Anderson's original cut ran 30 minutes longer, before he was forced to trim down the movie to get an R rating and appease the studio, who wanted a more mainstream-friendly horror movie. Even in its current form, though, it deserves credit for going darker and more grotesque than almost any studio horror at the time. And I'll always admire it for inspiring the "Woodland Critter Christmas" episode of South Park ("Hail Satan!").

U.S. Release Date: August 15, 1997 (Also opening that day: Cop Land, Steel, The Full Monty)

What critics said at the time:

"But the nerdy imaginationless punk inside of me was extremely dissatisfied with the ultimate explanation for the phantom of the space opera, which proved to be both obvious (think of Doc Frankenstein screaming 'It's alive!') and unresonant. My inner atavistic teen boy, on the other hand, liked the clammy sense of intensity and the several neat movie deaths, space explosions and other scenes of gore and ick (Hell is envisioned as an endless landscape of crucifixion: cool!)." - Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

"As the captain, Laurence Fishburne, working with a barely written role, turns himself into a soldier of stoic cool (even his voice is square-jawed), but he is finally staring into the face of hell — a De Sadeian theater of violated flesh, served up in razory shock cuts that dig into your subconscious. Event Horizon could have used a decent script, but the director, Paul Anderson, is a stylist to watch." - Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

'90s Horror Poll: Day 3 - Cube

#10 (tie) - 4 Votes

Christopher Fujino shares his thoughts on Cube, a movie I should revisit, given how much I've enjoyed director Vincenzo Natali's work on Hannibal.

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

Our story begins with seven strangers waking up in a mysterious structure of cubes. Some of the cubes are rigged with deadly booby traps. The strangers don't know where they are and they can't remember how they got there. But the seed of paranoia, anger and dread which percolates among them is the question: why?

Director Vincenzo Natali sort of pulls a bait and switch with us with the film's opening scene, as we open with an impressive special effects shot where a character is gruesomely killed. I won't describe how, but it's a memorable image. It's a great scene that really gets you pumped for the rest of the film. And the rest of the film is nothing like it. Unlike Saw, which is heavily indebted to this film, this film isn't about creative kills. In fact, I think the majority of the film's special effects budget was expended on this one scene. Instead, we get people trapped in a room talking. In this way, it's almost like a play. I recently watched Hitchcock's one-room suspense drama Rope, and it's brilliantly claustrophobic in a similar way.

This may sound bizarre to younger horror fans out there, those conditioned to believe that horror films are about seeing horrifying visuals, but here the horror is of the imagination. Natali is very coy with the explanations, and we are left to try to reason with the characters. Who could have built such a structure? For what purpose would they have done so? Why were the strangers selected? Are they supposed to succeed or fail in their quest to escape?

The strangers all have different social and philosophical perspectives, and each their own interpretation of what the cube means. Holloway is an anarchistic free clinic doctor who instantly recognizes the cube as a scheme of the Illuminati-like powers that be, always manipulating the strings of the little people. Quentin is an authoritarian police officer who doesn't question the task before them, but believes that by following "orders," so to speak, and fulfilling the mysterious purpose of the cube, things will ultimately work out. Worth is an existential, bureaucratic office drone who sees no purpose behind the cube, no great scheme, only the madness of meaninglessness.

From the way I describe it, you could obviously say that the cube is a metaphor for life, but I appreciate that Natali is never really makes this obvious. I would say that, if anything, this is a subtext to the film, and not Natali's agenda. No, Natali's agenda is to use these perspectives to weave together a tapestry of terror. Everyone in the cube is afraid, but they each bring their own nightmarish fears as to why. A film like Halloween has a very simple fear: the boogie man is lurking in the shadows, and he's coming to kill you. We can all relate, and it plays upon a very primal fear. And though Cube does use the threat of death in the form of the traps, this is a necessitated convention of the genre. The fears the film taps into are more cerebral ones: does my life have meaning? Will my death have meaning? Is there someone out there, and if so, what do they want from me?

Cube was inspired by "Five Characters in Search of an Exit," a brilliant episode of The Twilight Zone. Of the many adaptations through the years, Cube is the one that I feel best captures the spirit of the original show. In the first section, it juxtaposes ordinary characters with a science-fiction premise. In the middle section, it uses that premise to distort reality into a nightmarish fantasy world. And for the finale, it hits you with the irony that the nightmare just might be our own.

 - Christopher Fujino

U.S. Release Date: September 11, 1998 (Also released that day: Rounders, Simon Birch, Without Limits)

What critics said at the time:

"With basically a single set and a limited cast, the producers get the most of their limited budget, particular with a couple of spectacular death scenes. However, since they have cast some obvious stage actors who are projecting to the back of the theatre, the whole picture can often seem like “Doctor Who” on crank." - Ron Wells, Film Threat

"Even though there are tedious stretches with less-than-riveting characters, the film gradually pulls you into its claustrophobic spell and becomes acutely suspenseful in its final half-hour." - Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times