'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

'90s Horror Poll: Day 2 - Army of Darkness

#10 (Tie) - 4 Votes

Of all the movies on this list, I'm most surprised that Army of Darkness didn't rank higher. It's the rare horror movie that is hugely popular among people who aren't particularly fans of the genre; then again, maybe that's the reason. The first Evil Dead is still unsettling in the way its low-budget scares take on a surreal, nightmarish quality; Evil Dead II is famously funnier, but it builds to the comedy gradually, allowing the laughs to come out of the pure insanity of the situation. Army of Darkness, on the other hand, is all one-liners and slapstick from the beginning. To be clear, the slapstick is mostly hilarious, and the one-liners are justifiably quoted on a regular basis by geeks of all stripes. But the go-for-broke approach might make it easier to overlook as a horror movie - almost everyone agrees Army of Darkness is a blast, but is there even a moment in the whole movie that's actually scary? To put it another way - and I say this with affection for my friends and fellow nerds - any movie that is beloved by LARPers and fans of Dungeons & Dragons probably isn't going to be, as the original billed itself, "The Ultimate Experience in Grueling Terror."

But while Evil Dead II remains my favorite of the three and a perfect blend of horror and humor, Army of Darkness was my favorite as a kid, and it's still a blast. I suspect it's the closest to Sam Raimi's own sensibilities - the first Evil Dead was a calculated choice on the director's part to create a movie in a commercial genre, but the broad humor that takes over Army of Darkness is closer to the shorts he made as a kid, and his love of the Three Stooges is evident throughout the movie. Raimi and his brother and co-writer Ivan used the third movie's comparatively bigger budget to make a feature-length goof on the monster movies of their youth, with the climactic battle serving as an epic valentine to Ray Harryhausen. It's the perfect gateway movie for kids with an interest in monsters and scary stories, and a safe one too; it's insane that Raimi had to trim the movie to avoid an NC-17, because, a few bloody bits and a flash of nudity aside, it's a PG-13. Twenty years later, the 2013 Evil Dead, which is a hundred times more violent and disturbing, was released into multiplexes with an R rating.

I must confess an unpopular opinion, though: I actually prefer what I once heard Bruce Campbell refer to as "the ridiculous John Woo ending" to the original one. I get that Ash is supposed to be an eternal heel, and having him screw up yet again is logical, but having him wake up in the future plays like a middling Twilight Zone ending. It's better to leave Ash as the hero and the king of the S-Mart, as the movie's best joke is the way it elevates this goofball to heroic status. It helps that this is Campbell's best outing in the series - it's both hilarious and endearing to see a guy who started making movies with his buddies in Michigan rise to the occasion of playing a buff, smart-ass action hero in a studio film. When Ash is wrestling with a demonic twin sprouting from his shoulder or battling a Deadite in a pit, Campbell's skill for comic timing and purely physical acting (often at the same time) rivals any of the bigger action or comedy stars of the time. As silly as Army of Darkness gets, Bruce keeps it weirdly grounded.

Sidenote: For those who can make the trip to Syracuse, the Palace Theater is showing all four Evil Dead movies on 35mm on Friday, October 24. I can't make it, but you should.

U.S. Release Date: February 19, 1993 (Also released that day: Like Water for Chocolate, Mac)

What critics said at the time: 

"Mercifully clocking in at 81 minutes, this enjoyably campy hokum combines A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Three Stooges slapstick, and frenetic comic-book pacing with special effects that seem like hand-me-downs from Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts; it's calculated for ten-year-old boys of all ages and persuasions, whose howls of glee are programmed into the mock-macho material at regular intervals. This is old-fashioned fun until the climactic battle, which almost comes across like routine bone piling after all the flights of fancy." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

"Raimi's style depends on deliberately abrupt transitions-wild, violent contrasts of silence and sound, stillness and hysterical movement, that blast the narrative forward like the succeeding stages of a rocket. At 81 minutes (including a shamelessly padded end credit sequence), 'Army of Darkness' is nothing if not compact; Raimi realizes that his film depends on sheer momentum, rather than story or character, and wisely refuses to wear out his welcome." - Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune

'90s Horror Poll: Day 1 - Arachnophobia

#10 (Tie) - 4 Votes

A quintessential '90s memory: I'm six years old, at my afterschool gymnastics class, and I can't wait for it to be over so we can pick up the copy of Arachnophobia reserved for me at the local video store on the way home. I'd missed it when it was released in theaters the previous summer, a famously crowded one that also saw the releases of movies like Dick Tracy, Total Recall and Gremlins 2. Arachnophobia did pretty well at the box office; like many of the movies released in the '80s and '90s by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, it was a solid double, delivering on the trailer's promise of a "Thrill-omedy" without reaching for greatness. The Amblin productions mostly took place in suburban worlds familiar from E.T., mixing sunny optimism and characters out of a Frank Capra movie with perverse but safely PG-13 scares. Filmmakers like Joe Dante or Martin Scorsese might shake up the Amblin formula with Gremlins and Cape Fear, respectively, but as dark as those movies got, they still took place in towns where everyone goes to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Problem Child on a Saturday night. Arachnophobia is very much an Amblin production, and probably the tamest movie on this list - while it's full of jump scares, the thrills are mostly bloodless, and all of the main characters survive. On the other hand, it did prompt Disney to create the "Hollywood Pictures" division, as PG-13 Thrill-omedies were apparently too edgy to bear the Magic Kingdom logo.

I liked Arachnophobia at the time, but even as a kid, it was never one of my favorites. This is mostly because of the main characters, Dr. Ross Jennings (Jeff Daniels) and his family, who move from San Francisco to a farmhouse in northern California around the same time that an extremely poisonous spider arrives in town from South America via the coffin of his last victim. From the beginning, Jennings whines about country life and the repairs he'll need to do on his expensive, gorgeous new house. I have difficulty enjoying movies (Father of the Bride and Amblin production The Money Pit come to mind) where the characters whine about how much money they have to spend for much of the running time. It's stressful, and it undercuts any sense of escapist fun. The film validates the whiny Yuppie family's point of view - the townspeople are mostly bumpkins and hostile to the city folk, and an elderly doctor who, for some reason, denies all evidence that his patients are being killed off by spiders. This is unusual for an Amblin production; earlier that same summer, for instance, Gremlins 2 poked fun at New York and ended with billionaire Daniel Clamp realizing the virtues of (and planning to co-opt) small town life. By contrast, Arachnophobia is smugly explicit in its message that city life is better than living anywhere else, and I rolled my eyes at it even as a kid. Also, Dr. Jennings won't shut up about his wine cellar for the whole movie.

The film's brightest spot is John Goodman as an oafish exterminator - there's not much of a character there, but he makes the most of it and steals every scene he's in (I love that he plays it like he knows he's the smartest guy in the room). Also, it perks up in the second half with the arrival of another Amblin trope, the ragtag gang of nerdy, "alternative" scientists (see also: Poltergeist, Twister). And for what it's worth, I'm not afraid of spiders, and anyone I know who is will name this one as a classic, which might explain its relatively strong showing on this poll. When director Frank Marshall (Spielberg's frequent producer) focuses on delivering spider-centric scares and gags, Arachnophobia works great. I'm particularly fond of the spider-in-the-shower scene, with the wonderfully crass sight gag of a spider crawling between a woman's breasts. I could have sworn that this scene was heavily featured in the movie's ad campaign, but it only takes up a few seconds in the trailer, so it could just be that I was a gross kid.

U.S. Release Date: July 20, 1990 (Also released that day: Navy Seals, The Freshman)

What critics said at the time:

"You wouldn't think spiders would be good visual elements for a movie. Remember that awful horror movie 'The Swarm,' in which killer bees completely failed to make an impression? But the spiders in 'Arachnophobia' are wonderfully photogenic, partly because the director, Frank Marshall, is good at placing them in the foreground, shooting them in closeup and allowing their shadows to cast alarming images when the characters aren't looking. He's also clever at establishing where the spiders are and then allowing us to cringe as the people in the movie do exactly the wrong thing. The toilet-seat scene is a splendid case in point." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"Most of 'Arachnophobia' is playful rather than macabre, with Mr. Marshall content to let a lethal spider creep into someone's popcorn bowl or football helmet and leave the rest to his audience's imagination. This relatively light touch rescues the film from the realm of pure horror, and places it more centrally in the category of humorously scary films an audience loves to hate. The model is ''Jaws,' and since more of his viewers are apt to be afraid of creepy-crawly household pests than of deep sea swimming, Mr. Marshall even has a running start." - Janet Maslin, New York Times

'90s Horror Poll: Honorable Mention - Psycho

I feel lucky to have the opportunity to share a post by Alex Jackson. Alex's site "I Viddied it On the Screen" helped motivate me to start my own blog, and his reviews of the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series, in particular, are must reads for horror fans (you can check out the Friday the 13th reviews at Film Freak Central). Here, Alex makes a case for Psycho (1998), a movie without many fans; I agree with Alex that it's underestimated and worth revisiting.

I thought about Gus Van Sant’s infamous shot-by-shot remake of PSYCHO all over again upon seeing the official music video for Ingrid Michaelson’s “Girls Chase Boys”. Michaelson’s video is, itself, a seemingly shot-by-shot remake of Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” video and does for that piece what Van Sant has done with PSYCHO albeit much more overtly- through simply gender reversal, it “gays” up an intrinsically hetero-normative property, forcing our cognizance of not only its construction as a film but of the underlying cultural assumptions in the work.

            Considering how hated this film is, it’s perhaps no surprise that few seem to have listened to Van Sant, Anne Heche, and Vince Vaughn’s audio commentary on the DVD release. Heche points out that Julianne Moore’s performance as Lila Crane subtly transforms the character into a lesbian (using coded clues that only other lesbians would be able to pick up) while Vaughn emphasizes how Sam Loomis (in the hands of Viggo Mortenson) has gone from cowboy to dreamy lover-boy. (Indeed, an ass-shot early on redirects the male gaze toward a male object). The remake seems to have reversed the gender construct of virtually all the major characters, suggesting that the delirious miscasting of Marion Crane and Norman Bates with Heche and Vaughn was completely by design.

            I’m particularly fascinated by Heche as Marion. In 1998, Heche was America’s most visible lesbian and there was talk upon the release of the forgettable SIX DAYS AND SEVEN NIGHTS that America may not be able to accept her as a romantic lead. The gap between Heche’s on-screen persona and off-screen personal life is widened here by giving the character a short pixie-like cut that renders her decidedly androgynous. Plus, with her wide eyes and long nose, she looks like a bird. Her name is Crane and Norman stuffs birds as a hobby, as constructed originally PSYCHO intends us to objectify Marion as a “bird”. With the casting of Heche in the role, this objectification is pushed to its absurdist limit.

            So is PSYCHO ’98 intended as a critique rather than homage to the original? Was the Hitchcock film sexist or homophobic and is this remake designed to bring out these attitudes? Well, yes and no. It’s complicated. There were apparently few if any other films that killed off their lead before the half-way mark before PSYCHO and after PSYCHO any attempt to repeat the shock seem to strain with self-consciousness. (Kathyrn Bigelow’s THE HURT LOCKER has perhaps come to the closest to pulling it off). This shock relies on our close identification with Marion Crane and for this reason; I don’t feel that PSYCHO could truthfully be called sexist or misogynistic. And yet her murder, nude in the shower, can’t help but have some erotic component to it particularly as this sequence is the most famous, most exciting, and most cinematic in the entire film.

            Additionally, once we accept that Marion is dead and gone our tight identification with a female character goes along with her. Right after the shower murder, there’s a great shot (duplicated in the Dilophosaurus/Dennis Nedry scene of JURASSIC PARK (or so I had belatedly convinced IMDB)) where the camera trucks over to the bag of money- the “MacGuffin”- as if to say “Now that the bitch is dead, let’s get back to what’s really important." The shot is unbelievably callous, not the least because the money barely re-enters the story again. (Similarly, the money surrogate in JURASSIC PARK—a shaving cream can full of dinosaur embryos-- is entirely forgotten about for the remainder of the film). If the death of Marion Crane has any more meaning in PSYCHO beyond salacious sadism, it is as a mere plot device.

            As for the homophobia, well I’m not really part of the community but I do feel in my gut that any representation is better than no representation. Not only was the film somewhat groundbreaking in its use of gore and nudity, this was one of the first major films to show a toilet and similarly there is a sense that a lot of the buried aspects of human life are being exposed for the first time. The debriefing by the psychiatrist at the end of the film, where he explicitly explains that Norman is not a homosexual or a transvestite, is interesting to me in that in 1960 it was probably intended to somewhat neutralize the deviancy of his actions by assuring us that they aren’t (homo)sexual in nature. Today, it registers as politically correct as though the filmmakers wanted to assure us that homosexuals and transvestites are not “psycho” like Norman. But regardless, these defenses are to a very real extent, mere excuses. Nebbish Norman Bates dresses up as his mother and murders women and this is intrinsically heteronormative rendering the homosexual (or rather those who do not fit the Ozzie and Harriet sexual mold) as “other” or deviant.

            Interestingly, Van Sant makes two small but significant deviations that alter our empathic identification with Marion and Norman. In reaction to Norman’s “a boy’s best friend is his mother” Marion now rolls her eyes. Much has been written about how Marion sees herself as similar to Norman in that they are both caught in “traps”, but she has the capacity to escape. This eye roll renders the point moot. She doesn’t identify with Norman because she knows that she is superior to him and his situation has nothing to do with her own. And then there’s the “peeping Tom” scene where Master Bates, well, now does his signature move. This doesn’t really confirm his heterosexuality as much as confirm his overall sexual deviance.  I say these deviations alter our identification with Marion and Norman, but they don’t exactly destroy them. In hating Marion, we are identifying with Norman and in hating Norman we are identifying with Marion. That empathy for both characters is still there, but indirectly, in the form of misanthropy. In the process, Van Sant’s remake emboldens as well as satirizes the ambivalently sexist and homophobic undertones of the original film.

            I left the most obvious albeit, perhaps, most significant irony of PSYCHO '98 for last. The story goes that Hitchcock made the original film so he could experience the joy of filmmaking again. He wanted to do something really quick, really simple, and really cheap and dirty. Just to blow the cobwebs away. There was also the sense that he felt he had to compete with Henri-Georges Clouzot who may have stolen his title as The Master of Suspense following DIABOLIQUE. Or that there were a lot of truly terrible exploitation movies coming out and he wanted to show everyone how to do this thing right. Any one or all three of these motivations seem perfectly plausible, but they all suggest that PSYCHO by design redeems or trumps its subject matter with pure style. That it was meant to illustrate Hitchcock’s dictum that worrying about content would be like a painter worrying about whether or not the apples he is painting are sour. PSYCHO would be an exercise in pure cinema.

            So then what does it say that a shot-by-shot remake of PSYCHO doesn’t really resemble the original? You could argue that the slight deviations that Van Sant made in the transcription created a monstrosity drastically different from the host. It seems to me though that the existence of PSYCHO 98 strongly challenges the legitimacy of formalist approaches toward film. Not only do broad highly political sociocultural influences (such as our understanding and attitude about gender) greatly influence our understanding of PSYCHO, but so does something as seemingly trivial as fashion. The original was shot in black-and-white to make it seem mundane. If it were shot in black-and-white in 1998, it would be affected and arty. PSYCHO was at trash by design and Hitchcock elevated it to level of art. And now under the hand of Van Sant, who takes it as seriously as the fucking Dead Sea scrolls, we can no longer comfortably classify it as either. 

'90s Horror Poll: Honorable Mention - Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Producer's Cut)

Our first Honorable Mention piece is from Christopher Fujino, a friend from Letterboxd, who encourages you to give the infamous "Producer's Cut" of Halloween 6 a try.

This review contains minor spoilers about the previous films in the series. Having seen all these films, I personally don't think it matters, but if you really don't want to know if Michael Myers dies at the end of the second film, you should stop reading now.

Okay, still here? Yeah, he dies.

I'm usually a stickler for official titles. It's not really "The White Album," it's called "The Beatles." The book isn't called "Alice in Wonderland," it's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." But for this series, I'm just gonna number them. First, because who really knows the difference between The Return of Michael Myers and The Revenge of Michael Myers? And second, because there seems to be no consensus on what the heck this film was titled. Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers? That seems most logical. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers? The studios started doing this in the '90s, leaving out the numbers because it was getting embarrassing. Halloween 6? I guess the studio really didn't care what they called this. And you know what, neither do I.

Further complicating matters, there exists three different versions of this film. They have been dubbed by fans the Producer's Cut (think of this as version 1), the Director's Cut (version 2), and the officially released, theatrical cut (version 3). For those who are in the behind-the-scenes goings-on of filmmaking, there's a lot of information on the difficult production of this film. For everyone else, here's the short version:

The film started as a spec script written by Daniel Farrands, a big fan of the series. It was startlingly original, pulling together various loose ends from different films in the series, and also exploring the motivation of the mysterious Michael Myers. In other words, written by a fan for the fans.

After production wrapped, series veteran Donald Pleasance died. The filmmakers put together a complete cut of the film and test screened it for a dissatisfied, confused audience that "consisted primarily of 14-year-old boys." This is the Production Cut.

A dissatisfied, confused studio seized control of the project (which, to be fair, was always supposed to be a cash grab) and cut out the most controversial and complex parts of the plot, added some more exciting kills, and shot a completely different, action-packed ending (without Pleasance). In other words, they took out all the interesting parts, and were left with an unoriginal, yet incomprehensible mess. This is the Director's Cut. But this was too graphic to get an R-rating, so they trimmed some of the most gruesome bits. Say hello to the version that disappointed Halloween fans in theaters everywhere.

Somehow, VHS copies of both the Producer's Cut and the Director's Cut circulated among hardcore horror fans, and eventually a dedicated fan spliced together the gritty VHS footage of the "Producer's Cut" together with the scenes it shares with the DVD release of the theatrical version, forming a sort of cinematic Frankenstein's monster, and sold as a bootleg and distributed on file sharing networks. As a response to this intense interest from fans (and I'm sure the realization that they were losing potential revenue), Disney/Miramax decided to include the Producer's Cut in their 15-disc release Halloween: The Complete Collection, available for the first time digitally mastered.

And so, the question which must be answered is: is it really worth all the trouble? Well, sort of. It's certainly not a masterpiece on the level of the original version of The Magnificent Ambersons, or the newly discovered footage of Lang's Metropolis. It's more akin to Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, an interesting parallel history, offering insight into the tension between the art and business of filmmaking.

For fans of the series, and especially the fourth and fifth films, it also answers a lot of questions. Why does Jamie stab someone in the fourth film? Who was the man in black who rescues Michael at the end of the fifth film? And why is he so darned determined to kill all his relatives? Not only does it answer these questions, but it does so in totally bizarre and unexpected ways. This is not an especially scary film, but it is original, and after years of watching horror films, I value originality more. And especially in the '90s, an uncomfortable period of transition for horror cinema, there were those who tried to lay on more gore, guts, and sex, and then there were those who dared to try something new, and that's what this version of Halloween 6 is. After this, the franchise would revert to recycling the original formula with the return of Jamie Lee Curtis for Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, making this one even more unique.

Ironically, the weakest part of this film is Michael Myers. Especially in the middle section of this film, Michael Myers goes through the routine, and he kills 5 or 6 people whose names I honestly could not tell you (and I just watched the movie). The problem is that this film is more of a mystery than a slasher film, and thus the important characters have to at least make it to the final act, so Michael has to kill off unimportant characters who haven't really been established. This is the stuff that should have been trimmed, but I'm sure Miramax imposed some kind of kill quota on the filmmakers. Oh well.

This film, as it appears in the Producer's Cut, was clearly made for the fans. That doesn't mean, however, that all Halloween fans love it. When I wrote enthusiastically about this film on Letterboxd, a passionate fan wrote in the comments and spoiled a crucial plot point (which I won't repeat here). When I complained that he was spoiling the movie, he replied:

“There's something more important here: deterring as many people as possible from seeing that version of the film. This is like the one time in history that we're able to stop a franchise crime from happening! The least we can do is let people know why the original version of Halloween 6 should be buried forever.”

Then again, nothing will make people want to watch a movie more than burying it!

Finally, if you're going to watch this movie, I have a little cheat sheet which I made while rewatching it. I had already seen this movie once before, and I've seen all the movies preceding, but I was still completely lost as to who was who, especially since the characters who appeared in previous films are all portrayed by different actors.

Tommy Doyle - portrayed by Paul Rudd

Not directly related to either the Myers family or the Strodes, Tommy was a minor character in the first film, being babysat by Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).

Jamie Lloyd - portrayed by J. C. Brandy

Laurie Strode's daughter, and thus Michael Myers' niece, and thus Michael Myers' niece. Her mother's character was written out of the series as having died in an automobile accident before the fourth film, thus leaving Jamie Lloyd an orphan. She was the star of the fourth and fifth films, where she portrayed by Danielle Harris.

Kara Strode - portrayed by Marianne Hagan

Laurie Strode's cousin, though not by blood. Kara's father is the brother of Laurie's adoptive father. They are also living in the Myers' house, where Michael originally killed his sister.

Dr. Terence Wynn - portrayed by Mitchell Ryan

Longtime administrator of the Warren County Santiarium, where Michael Myers was hospitalized up until his escape at the beginning of the first film. Appears briefly in the first film, where he was portrayed by Robert Phalen.

And so, this hasn't so much been a review of the film as an exploration into the strange story behind its genesis. And I think ultimately I like this movie so much because of how strange it is. It's eerie watching the legendary Donald Pleasance, knowing he would soon die and be cut out of the ending of the theatrical version. It's exciting to finally have a new villain, the man in black, take the spotlight and recontextualize Michael Myers. And, at least until that massive box set arrives, it’s a guilty pleasure to watch a fan-reconstructed bootleg of the cut that those almighty studio execs thought you were too stupid to appreciate.

- Christopher Fujino is an IT consultant who moonlights as a compulsive list-maker on Letterboxd. His favorite filmmakers are Francis Ford Coppola, the Coen brothers, and Hayao Miyazaki. He has seen every film in the Aliens vs. Predators universe, but he hates The Boondock Saints, I Am Sam, and Lost in Translation with a passion.

'90s Horror Poll: Introduction/Honorable Mentions

If there's one thing that most of the people who responded to my poll of the best horror movies of the 1990s agreed on, it's that the decade was kind of a crappy one for horror. While the '70s and '80s were treasure troves for genre fans, the decade that click bait articles repeatedly remind us we're children of was actually pretty thin on horror movies that are remembered and celebrated two decades later (though I wouldn't rule out the possibility of an "I Know What You Did Last Summer: An Oral History" article popping up in a few years for the twentieth anniversary). Horror movies struggled in a decade where pop culture was pretty much defined by irony, which would lead to one of the best horror movies of the decade and a slew of imitators. It also didn't help that, quite frankly, a lot of iconic horror filmmakers produced some of their weakest work during the decade; while John Carpenter and Wes Craven both have films on the list, it was also the decade that produced Village of the Damned and Vampire in Brooklyn, and directors like George A. Romero and Dario Argento are completely absent here.

So why devote a list to a middling decade? If these lists give us an opportunity to consider some of our favorite movies in the context of the time they were made, then the horror movies that have held up seem even more special for their diamonds-in-the-rough status. And there were some great ones, though it's telling that several of the movies on this list are ones that wouldn't even be considered horror movies by a lot of fans. The ones that played it straight largely did so by playing on our imaginations in different ways, veering into surrealism or that famous euphemism "psychological thriller" that filmmakers would use to give their movies an aura of respectability (though there are still plenty of zombies, monsters and other boogeymen included on the list as well).

There were, conveniently enough, 30 movies that got four or more votes, so I'll begin listing one a day, starting tomorrow. But first, a list of honorable mentions after the jump. Two of the people who submitted polls were kind enough to write a little bit about their own dark horse favorites; I'll be posting their pieces later today. Thanks again to everyone who submitted a poll - you can check out many of the individual top tens here.

That certainly was visual.

I was hooked on Only Lovers Left Alive from the opening scenes, as the image of what looks like a starry sky turns blurry as it starts to spin, dissolving into a spinning record; as this cover of "Funnel of Love" (performed, like most of the movie's soundtrack, by director Jim Jarmusch's band SQÜRL) begins to play, the movie cuts between matching overhead shots of its two lovers, Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton). The camera spins like that record, cutting between these two soulmates - he's in Detroit, she's in Tangiers - as they both rest among the many aging, treasured cultural artifacts they've collected, lost in and connected by a state of ecstatic appreciation of music. Of blood too, probably, as Adam and Eve are both vampires, but that's of secondary interest in this scene, and in the rest of the movie; what's important here is we've just met these two, and the movie has found an elegant, mesmerizing way to let us know that they're pretty much perfect for each other.

If that description doesn't pique your interest, than you'll probably want to skip Only Lovers Left Alive; as with most of Jarmusch's films, the filmmaker favors mood, atmosphere and understated character study over plot. Most of his films are bound to be alienating experiences if you're not on their wavelength, and his previous film, The Limits of Control, was the first that lost me (though I dug the soundtrack). Luckily, though, Only Lovers Left Alive is built on the foundations of cultural signifiers - Burroughs, romanticism, rock and roll - that click with me. For anyone able to get with the movie's languorous, sexy meditation on the beauty of entropy, Only Lovers Left Alive is a blast.

 After being separated for some time - months? years? - Adam and Eve are reunited when Eve, concerned (and rightly so) about Adam's state of mind, travels to the States to see him. Jarmusch spends a little bit of time setting up the logistics of vampire life - how Eve must time a transatlantic flight, how both keep a steady supply of blood without claiming many victims - but he's mostly interested in spending a few hours hanging out with his two lovers. It's a pleasure, and it helps that both leads are perfectly cast (I was going to write that Swinton is on a roll this year, but she's been on a roll for her whole life). We watch them dance, make love, get high on bloodsicles and, more than anything, discuss the art and music that have made centuries of life worth living.

Adam and Eve are aesthetes who look down on humans who lack appreciation for the finer things, as well as for gradually trashing their own planet. Naturally, almost every review has described them as "hipsters," and this isn't inaccurate, but it misses the self-deprecating aspect of their portrayal. Eve isn't completely averse to modern life, and early on, she rolls her eyes at Adam's latest rant about the "zombies" (their nickname for humans). And while Ava (Mia Wasikowska), Eve's sister, stands in for everything Jarmusch finds grating about kids these days, there's also Adam's friend Ian (Anton Yelchin), a fellow guitar aficionado who reminds that good taste isn't the exclusive province of the young (also, Adam and Eve make an awe-struck pilgrimage to Jack White's childhood home). Jarmusch is admitting to his own elitism here, but the movie isn't misanthropic. It simply finds the romance and pleasure in the idea of retreating from life into a sanctuary built from the things one loves. I'm currently typing this in a barn I'm gradually filling with books, records and movies, so what can I say, it speaks to me.

In the movie's darker moments, Adam and Eve talk about wars over water that they seem quite sure are around the corner, and we learn, during a visit with a very Burroughs-esque Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), that the vampires aren't safe from humanity's destructive relationship to Earth. Both the Detroit and Tangiers settings are beautiful, haunting reminders that all things must pass. And yet there's also real joy in this movie, a quiet but constant appreciation for creativity, eroticism and, especially, the genuinely loving, honest relationship at its core. Only Lovers Left Alive ends with its only real horror movie moment, a scene that is also hopeful about the enduring nature of love in its own odd, Jarmusch-ian way. While there might be other great movies this year, I'd be surprised if any make me feel as happy as this one did.