HORROR FILMS 3

Hitchcock's 60s Masterpieces:

Another suspense/thriller director Alfred Hitchcock, whose early silent film The Lodger (1926) explored horror's themes, brought out his most horrific film over 30 years later at the start of the decade. His film changed the face of all horror films ever since. Pure archetypal horror was now to be found in the dark shadows of the human soul itself - in a psychopathic, cross-dressing Bates Motel operator and taxidermist (Anthony Perkins). The low-budget, television-influenced, B & W Psycho (1960) could be considered the 'Citizen Kane' of horror films, with its complex Oedipal themes and schizophrenia. Its most famous scene was the classic shower murder in which the heroine (Janet Leigh) was savagely stabbed, with Bernard Herrmann's violin-tinged memorable score. The scene still invokes sheer terror, and the film itself would come to influence all subsequent Hollywood horror films - especially the 'slasher' horror film subgenre.

Hitchcock's next horror masterpiece was Universal Studios' apocalyptic The Birds (1963) about the invasion of coastal town Bodega Bay by avian flocks. A spoiled heiress (Tippi Hedren), her potential boyfriend (Rod Taylor), his mother (Jessica Tandy), and a schoolteacher (Suzanne Pleshette) all suffered from the many bird attacks. The theme of Man vs. Nature running amok remained unresolved by the film's end.

Roman Polanski's Horror Films in the 60s:

Polish director Roman Polanski's first film in English, the potent and scary British production titled Repulsion (1965), depicted a young, sexually-disturbed beautician's (Catherine Deneuve) unstable descent into hallucinatory madness in a London apartment. After his public acceptance for the film, Polanski directed the offbeat ghoulish comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers (1966) starring his wife Sharon Tate (a victim of the gruesome Manson 'family' murders).

Polanski's greatest commercial hit was his adaptation of Ira Levin's best-selling book Rosemary's Baby (1968) that dared to show the struggle of a young pregnant woman (Mia Farrow) against witches and the forces of the devil (found among friendly senior citizens on Manhattan's Upper West Side, led by Oscar-winner Ruth Gordon), culminating in the young woman's delivery and mothering of the devil's child.

George Romero's Horror Contributions: Zombie Films

George Romero, now known as the Master of the 'zombie film,' debuted as director with the low-budget, black-and-white, intensely-claustrophobic, unrelenting B&W cult classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), a milestone 'splatter' film about newly dead, stumbling corpses/zombies that returned to life with ravenous hunger for human flesh. The amateurish, allegorical film made in just one month showed rotten human corpses walking with outstretched arms and threatening a few trapped survivors who sought refuge in a Pennsylvania farm-shack. By film's end, the townsfolk discovered that zombies could be killed by shooting them in the head - although they mistakenly shoot Ben (Duane Jones) after his desperate fight for survival.

Romero's most notable horror films -- his calling card -- included his Dead trilogy (now totaling five) -- about flesh-eating zombies who walked slowly and stiffly (due to the effects of rigor mortis), in a 'cult of the dead':

• Night of the Living Dead (1968) - this naturalistic, documentary-style film inaugurated an entire horror subgenre (zombie films with flesh-stalking cannibals), shot in stark and grainy black and white


• Dawn of the Dead (1978) - the gore-filled sequel with survivors who sought refuge in a deserted shopping mall, with a further perverse critique of the mall culture and its mentality, and the classic statement by Peter (Ken Foree): "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth"; remade as Dawn of the Dead (2004) by Zack Snyder (his feature film debut)


• Day of the Dead (1985) - about surviving scientists and military officers who performed experiments on zombies in a bunker to find a cure for the plague, until the zombies revolt
  


• Land of the Dead (2005) - a symbolic 'haves & have-nots' story, between the elites who live in walled-off, luxurious urban skyscrapers in an embattled city called Fiddler's Green (led by feudal overlord leader Kaufman played by Dennis Hopper) where they are protected by mercenaries who battle the flesh-eating zombies, and the lower class masses who live in squalor


• Diary of the Dead (2008) - a "film-within-a-film," supposedly a documentary (with long takes and hand-held camera shots) made by aspiring film student Jason Creed (Joshua Close), who was interrupted while making a B-grade horror film titled "The Death of Death" and decided to film the aftermath of an attack of flesh-eating zombies, with footage of interviews of survivors telling their experiences; considered as an updated 21st century presentation of the zombie story for the YouTube and myspace.com media-saturated generations

Zombie Horror Films in the 30s/40s and Beyond to the Present:

Zombies are 'walking dead' creatures, often with decayed flesh, that are destructive, malevolent, prey on human flesh, and almost impossible to 'kill.' The word zombie was derived from the Bantu language of Angola (n-zumbi meaning ghost or departed spirit), and zombies (involved in Haitian voodoo) debuted in William B. Seabrook's book The Magic Island. It could be argued that the 'somnambulism' in the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) was one of the earliest examples of a hypnotic, sleep-walking state similar to that exhibited by zombies.

The first 'true' zombie film was director Victor Halperin's and UA's low-budget, atmospheric White Zombie (1932), with Dracula (1931) star Bela Lugosi as 'Murder' Legendre - an evil voodoo master, necromancer and hypnotist. He runs a Haitian sugar mill with empty-faced, mindless zombie slaves and enters into a perverse pact to control and win the soul of a bride-to-be (Madge Bellamy). Its sequel or 'continuation' film was Revolt of the Zombies (1936), with another preposterous plot, poor acting (from Dean Jagger), and ineffective direction. During the war years, King of the Zombies (1941) from 'Poverty Row's' Monogram Studios, told of a crash-landing on a remote Caribbean island with a suspicious Nazi-spy/doctor (Henry Victor) and a horde of zombies ready to be released. In its B-film sequel by Monogram, director Steve Sekely's Revenge of the Zombies (1943) (aka The Corpse Vanished), John Carradine starred as a Nazi scientist building a zombie army in a Louisiana swamp. This 1943 film was Academy Award-nominated for Best Scoring for a Dramatic Film! [Both films featured African-American character actor Mantan Moreland in a stereotypical role as a bug-eyed manservant - for comic relief.]

One of the better zombie films of the 40s was RKO director Jacques Tourneur's (and producer Val Lewton's) atmospheric, intelligent and spooky I Walked With A Zombie (1943), based loosely on the Jane Eyre novel. Its most famous scene/moment was the encounter with a sinister zombie guardian (Darby Jones) in West Indies sugar cane fields. Monogram's Voodoo Man (1944) recycled Revenge of the Zombies (1943) and brought back Bela Lugosi as practicing voodoo master Dr. Marlowe, and John Carradine as a retarded manservant. The zombie sub-genre declined after the mid-40s, although there were a few notable entries, such as Republic's 12-part serial Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952), producer Sam Katzman's The Zombies of Mora Tau (1957), Voodoo Woman (1957), and Hammer's The Plague of the Zombies (1966) - notable for a realistic zombie decapitation in a dream sequence.

After the late 60's, Romero's first zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968) inspired many other mutated examples in the horror genre:

• The Plague of the Zombies (1966, UK), d. John Gilling, from Hammer Films, with a voodoo cult centered in Cornwall


• Astro-Zombies (1967), again with John Carradine as a mad zombie master who revitalizes corpses as super-human agents


• Voodoo Girl (1974) (aka Sugar Hill), a blaxploitation horror film


• Phantasm (1979), a great low-budget horror film with an arachnoid undertaker villain known as The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), with series sequels in 1988, 1994 and 1998


• Night of the Zombies (1981), d. Joel Reed


• The Evil Dead (1981), d. Sam Raimi; a splendid trilogy of gore-comedy, with the remake Evil Dead II (1987) and the sequel Army of Darkness (1993)


• Lifeforce (1985), d. Tobe Hooper, a sci-fi film about London over-run by zombies


• Re-Animator (1985), based on H.P. Lovecraft's book


• The Return of the Living Dead (1985), d. Dan O'Bannon, followed by two sequels: Ken Wiederhorn's Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988), and Brian Yuzna's Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993)


• The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987), d. Wes Craven, based upon the autobiographical book with the same title from Wade Davis, about a Harvard researcher sent to Haiti to investigate voodooism and drug-induced zombies


• Zombie High (1987), with Virginia Madsen


• Pet Sematary (1989), based upon Stephen King's book, with a sequel in 1992, features demonic revival of the dead


• Night of the Living Dead (1990), a re-telling of the original (with significant changes in the character of Barbara and advanced production design/make-up), based on an updated script (by executive producer Romero) and shot in color by makeup wizard and Romero's special effects expert for NOTLD's two sequels, Tom Savini (with his feature film directorial debut)


• Voodoo Dawn (1990) (aka Strange Turf), d. Steven Fierberg, adapted from a horror novel by John Russo (who scripted Night of the Living Dead)


• From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), d. Robert Rodriguez and by screenwriter Quentin Tarantino


• The Dead Hate the Living (1999), debut film of writer/director Dave Parker


• I, Zombie (1999), the first film produced by horror magazine Fangoria


• Resident Evil (2002), d. Paul W.S. Anderson, but originally to be directed by George Romero, adapted from the popular video game and with numerous Alice in Wonderland references; with a sequel in 2004


• 28 Days Later (2002), a sci-fi horror film set in London - that has been overrun with crazed, diseased zombies


• Dawn of the Dead (2004), a remake from Zack Snyder (his feature film debut)


• Shaun of the Dead (2004), a horror comedy by director Edgar Wright, featuring star and co-writer Simon Pegg, about two London slackers experiencing a zombie invasion


• Undead (2005, Aus.), a sub-par independent film that was both a serious film and a parody


• Black Sheep (2006, NZ), d. Jonathan King, a horror-comedy, about a genetic engineering experiment gone awry by renegade geneticist Dr. Rush (Tandi Wright), that produced 4-legged blood-thirsty mutant killer "zombie" sheep!

Horror Films in the 70s:

In 1968, the MPAA created a new rating system with G, M, R, and X ratings, in part as a response to the subversive, violent themes of horror films.

In the 1970s, nightmarish horror and terror lurked everywhere. One of the top box-office hits in the early 70s was Willard (1971) about a wimpish 27 year old loner (and Mama's boy) who trained his bloodthirsty pet rodent friends to vengefully attack his co-worker enemies - it launched an equally awful sequel Ben (1972) (with an Oscar nomination for Best Song for its title song - performed by Michael Jackson). [The cult classic was remade by writer/director Glen Morgan as Willard (2003), starring Crispin Glover as the title character.] Master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's controversial A Clockwork Orange (1971) was a brilliant adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel about rape, murder, and behaviorist experiments to eradicate aberrant sex and violence. And in the kitschy The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), madman Dr. Anton Phibes (Vincent Price) let loose Biblical plagues against his victims - physicians who failed to save the life of his wife (Caroline Munro).

Future director Steven Spielberg's first notable film (originally made-for-TV) was the paranoic Duel (1972) about a monstrous and malevolent gas-tank truck without a driver. Director Nicolas Roeg's psychological thriller Don't Look Now (1973) duplicated Hitchcockian terror in a tale of disaster in Venice for Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Although it was a musical/comedy, the cult-campish Frankenstein classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) was set in a haunted castle with a group of transsexual aliens, and starred a young Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, and Tim Curry. The weird and bawdy film soon became a cultural institution and phenomenon as it played for many years in packed midnight showings, with costumed audience members participating in the screenings. Jack Starrett's fast-paced horror chase film, Race With the Devil (1975) starred Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as innocent vacationers - with their wives (Loretta Swit and Lara Parker) - who are pursued by Satanists after inadvertently watching them perform a human sacrifice.

As the decade of the seventies progressed, the horror genre was subjected to violence, sadism, brutality, slasher films, victims of possession, and graphic blood-and-gore tales. Director John Boorman's terrifying Deliverance (1972) examined primeval human evil and included graphic mutilation and sodomy by crazed hillbillies upon an unsuspecting group of wilderness adventurers.

Two of the most effective, box-office successes of the 70s included the camp classic It's Alive! (1974) about a murderous baby, and Tobe Hooper's exploitative, low-budget, hand-made cult film - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). The notorious first film about a terrorized group of teenagers was loosely based on the true crimes of grisly, notorious Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, as was Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Three on a Meathook (1972), Deranged (1974), and Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The lead horror character Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) was both repulsive and muscular, in his Grand Guignol pursuit of victims to butcher. [There were four sequels to the TCM film: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) also directed by Hooper, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 (1990) directed by Jeff Burr, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995) directed by Kim Henkel and featuring future stars Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger, and producer Michael Bay's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) with Jessica Biel as one of the terrorized teenagers.]

John Carpenter's influential, and acclaimed independent-sleeper horror classic Halloween (1978) with a creepy soundtrack, featured Michael Myers as the deranged, knife-wielding killer of teenage babysitters (notably Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of Janet Leigh who had earlier starred as the 'scream queen' in Hitchcock's Psycho) who had returned to his old neighborhood of Haddonfield, Illinois after an escape from a mental institution. His spooky doctor (British horror actor Donald Pleasance) pursued the mad slasher as he wreaked havoc. [This popular slasher, serial killer film inspired numerous, mostly inferior sequels - seven more by the year 2002.] Steven Spielberg's second horror film Jaws (1975) - was a terrific summer blockbuster about a threatening great white shark off an Eastern beach community - Amity Island. Horrible conflicts could occur with supernatural, Jaws-like monsters in space, such as in director Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), with the tagline: "In space, no one can hear you scream." The monster's defeat called for a superhuman power or effort to destroy the threatening evil. A heroine (Sigourney Weaver) challenged the murderous alien invader within the dark and creeky Nostromo. An adapted Stephen King tale provided the basis for Stanley Kubrick's masterfully-directed gothic film The Shining (1980) about a crazed husband (Jack Nicholson) with personal demons in the Overlook Hotel, closed and snowbound for the winter in Colorado, with his emotionally-abused wife (Shelley Duvall) and psychic young son.

Italian cult horror film director Dario Argento featured gory, blood-and-guts special effects in the malevolent, art-horror, stylistic classic Suspiria (1977) that starred Jessica Harper as an American dancer in a European ballet academy run by witches. Argento also directed the bloody thriller Unsane (1984) (originally titled Tenebrae).

Master of Horror Brian DePalma:

In the early 1970s, shock director Brian DePalma (often using film techniques comparable to horror Master Alfred Hitchcock) emerged as a significant contributor to the horror genre, breaking out with his original mainstream film Sisters (1973), followed by his first commercial hit Carrie (1976) - an adaptation of writer Stephen King's best-selling story about a socially-outcast, shy schoolgirl (Sissy Spacek) possessed with retributive telekinetic powers, and her religious fanatic mother (Piper Laurie). His next successful film was the erotic horror/thriller Dressed to Kill (1980) with an imitative Psycho-shower scene, and a marvelous seduction-stalking scene in a museum.

Devil-Possession Films:

Evil spirits possessed the body of a young 12 year-old girl (Linda Blair) in director William Friedkin's manipulative critical and box-office success The Exorcist (1973) from William Peter Blatty's best-selling novel, with extravagant, ground-breaking special effects and startling makeup. Its twisting head, pea-soup vomit spewing, and other horrific visuals terrified audiences. The blockbuster, about the attempted exorcism of the demonic entity by two priests (Max von Sydow and Jason Miller), inspired inferior sequels of its own:

• Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), d. John Boorman


• The Exorcist III (1990), d. William Peter Blatty


• Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), d. Paul Schrader and uncredited Renny Harlin; a prequel

Some of the better devil-possession sequels in the late 70s and early 80s were The Amityville Horror (1979) about a devilish haunted house, Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982) - a supreme ghost story about menacing spirits that kidnap a young child (in a film produced, co-written and 'co-directed' by Steven Spielberg) by sucking her into a TV set ("They're heeere!") and taking her into a parallel dimension. Poltergeist encouraged two sequels in 1986 and 1988. The Omen (1976), with a memorable score by Jerry Goldsmith, about a young adopted son (of parents Gregory Peck and Lee Remick) named Damien - Satan's son, also inspired two sequels to compose a trilogy: Damien: Omen II (1978), and The Final Conflict (1981)). There was also a made-for-cable TV sequel titled Omen IV: The Awakening in 1991. Other devil films included: Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate (1997) with tempting Al Pacino, and Peter Hyams' action horror thriller End of Days (1999) with Gabriel Byrne as the seductive Devil Lord.