For the past couple of years I've found myself watching more and more horror films in the run-up to Halloween. Usually I start to obsess over them toward the beginning of October, but this year I started way back around the 4th of July and I haven't slowed down since. I don't have much of a taste for the current breed of horror filmmakers so I tend to focus on older things. I've seen a lot of great and not-so-great movies over the past couple of months, so I thought I'd share three of the better ones in case anyone out there is looking for something spooky to watch this week. As far as I know, all of these are new to DVD as of this year.
Let's Scare Jessica To Death is definitely the brightest gem in any of the major studios' pre-Halloween DVD dumps this year. The titular character in this 1971 film is a burned-out and gaunt young woman, possibly some kind of drug casualty, who is released from a psychiatric ward and moves into an old house in the country with a couple of hippie friends. They find a squatter hiding out in one of the rooms and quickly befriend her and invite her to live with them. Jessica soon becomes overwhelmed with paranoia and anxiety. Is her new roommate sleeping with her boyfriend? And is she a vampire? Or is Jessica just losing her mind again? This movie is genuinely scary. Apparently it's slated for a big budget remake, but producer Robert Evans decided to use only the title and completely scrap the story.
Cemetery Man or Dellamorte Dellamore, an Italian film from 1994, stars Rupert Everett as the lovelorn caretaker of a zombie-plagued graveyard. He becomes infatuated with the beautiful widow of a freshly-buried tenant, and when they proceed to consummate their relationship at the foot of his tombstone the dead man rises from the grave and attacks. Everett's character is unable to save the girl in time, but he continues to have a passionate affair with her after she joins the cemetery's legions of undead. Later, his mute assistant Gnaghi embarks on fling of his own with a dead girl's severed head. There's an awful lot of necrophilia and dismemberment in this one, but like Evil Dead 2 it's a comedy at heart.
I wasn't sure if I was going to include this last film or not as it's more of an exploitation film than it is a horror film, but after giving it some thought I decided that any movie with this much sacrilege and a climactic self-immolation scene is appropriate Halloween fare. Don't Deliver Us From Evil is a French film about two teenage Catholic school girls who reject Christ and vow to sin and serve satan. There's not really any gore at all and
the movie never ventures into the softcore porn territory that you
might expect from the image on the cover. It's actually just an unusual and surprisingly poignant story of rebellion against
old-fashioned culture and morality. Unbelievably, the film was banned in France at the time of its original 1970 release due to its strongly anti-Christian themes.
If you've got any other offbeat horror recommendations, please share them in the comments section.
my theatre showed Let's Scare Jessica To Death a couple weeks ago (35mm print!)...I only got to catch a few minutes of it but it definitely had that severe creepiness to it that only something like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre achieves. It also has a great moog-heavy score!
Posted by: fatty Jubbo | October 30, 2006 at 04:10 PM
I too go into a horror frenzy leading up to Halloween with a taste for older stuff.
Though I can't recommend it as particularly great or even remotely scary, I was highly amused by "Burnt Offerings" from 1976 starring Karen Black, Oliver Reed, and Bette Davis concerning a hapless family who agree to take care of a crumbling mansion with over the summer in which there may or may not be a reclusive old woman in the attic.
Terror ensues.
Not really terror, but lots of stiff, awkward dialogue, over the top performances, and tons of Karen Black.
Also, I have to recommend the ludicrous "Day of the Dead" simply because it was filmed in my hometown and I fondly remember Fort Myers, FL being overrun with zombies of every stripe. Plenty of gore, too.
Posted by: bunbun | October 30, 2006 at 04:13 PM
As far as recent film goes, I loved The Descent, though it isn't wholly original (the director definitely studied his John Carpenter films). I was genuinely scared, and the audience I saw it with jumped and shrieked at all the right moments (especially the first clear shot of one of the cave creatures, cleverly placed in the background of one shot where you're not expecting to see it, rather than the foreground).
Posted by: James | October 30, 2006 at 04:43 PM
Well I agree wholeheartedly with your acclaim of "Let's Scare Jessica To Death." I've always found this film to be an under-the-radar masterwork of serious 70's horror film creepiness (with an underrated soundtrack!) My first exposure was as a rerun on afternoon TV as a small child. It creeped me the fuck out then and it creeps me the fuck out now. I've said so much about "L.S.J.T.D." that I think I'll just shut up and agree with you. And "Cemetery Man?" For some reason since Rupert Everett is in this film (whom I like) it's always had a comical edge to me. Any film with flying, biting heads is OK in my book though. Related but several decades earlier, have you seen the 1957 film "I Bury the Living"?
http://monsterhunter.coldfusionvideo.com/IBuryTheLiving.html
Never seen "Don't Deliver Us From Evil" but have reserved it on Netflix already. The only film that I can think of that maybe captures the *really* nightmarish creepy factor, besides a few already mentioned, is Lucio Fulci's 1980 film "City of the Living Dead"
http://www.dvdmaniacs.net/Reviews/A-D/city_of_the_living_dead.html
Oh, that and Sharon Stone in "Scissors." Truly terrifying.
Posted by: Mark Allen | October 30, 2006 at 07:07 PM
'last house on the left' is a good one to drop at a party where you want to COMPLETELY kill the vibe. not halloween-y horror - serious sicko horror. a friend once called it a 'snuff film without a sense of humor.'
Posted by: craig | October 30, 2006 at 09:46 PM
Man, if you like Don't Deliver Us From Evil you will love School of the Holy Beast, which just came out on DVD last year. This is a Japanese nasty nun murder thriller with a Satanic bent. But best of all, this is a film that deee-livers in every way! Here's a blurb about it that I wrote for a film screening I did back in Boston:
Dario Argento meets the Marquis de Sade in this artfully filmed '70s sexploitation gem. Nubile beauty Maya (Yumi Takigawa) leaves her swinging modern life behind, taking vows as a sister at the Sacred Heart Convent in hopes of learning the secrets surrounding her mother's death. And as soon as the convent's doors close, she finds herself immersed in a world of unholy sin: blasphemous rites, sadistic torture practices, burning sapphic desires, and a lecherous, god-hating archbishop who's at the very center of this debauchery -- and the mysteries of Maya's past. Bad habits indeed.
Posted by: Account Deleted | October 31, 2006 at 12:07 AM
Every so often I like to see a film that just totally fucks you up around Halloween. Check out "The Reflecting
Skin" if you're in the mood to be tense, sick, astonished and totally riveted to the screen. Another relatively
sick yet entertaining flick would be "Freeway" starring Reese Witherspoon. It's a nasty retelling of er, um..
"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut". For more light hearted brain scrambling there's "The Forbidden Zone" (with a soundtrack by Danny Elfman (possibly his first?) and Oingo Boingo).
Posted by: jeffersonic | November 01, 2006 at 01:16 PM
Too little too late? Oh well, this website has a bunch of suggestions for future Halloween viewing marathons:
http://www.hotaslove.com
Posted by: tobydammit | November 01, 2006 at 02:30 PM