I forgot I'd already seen Ingmar Bergman's The Hour of the Wolf (1968). It's Bergman so it ain't crap, but I don't care for this one. Unrequited love this pathetic doesn't sit well with me. Like his other works, this straddles genres, but I think it is better termed drama than horror
Photo: me whenever anything happens during the pandemic
Wow, The Wicker Man (1973) was incredible! This is one of the great horror classics I had not seen, and it did not disappoint. I saw the much-hyped Midsommar last year and was sorely disappointed in it -- even more so now that it seems a tawdry rip-off of this film. I was however delighted to recognize strong echoes of this film in my fav American Werewolf in London. Clearly this is an influential film, and for good reason! 🙌🙌
Frenzy (1972) was terrific. I love Hitchcock. It's been years and years since I've seen most of his work (though I don't think I'd ever seen this one), it's incredible how shocking it still feels, nearly 50 years later.
The original teen slasher. This movie terrified me when I first saw it, and it still does. I can never look at a glass sliding door the same way again.
Now THAT'S what I call horror! House of Usher has it all - Vincent Price, a haunted house, a family curse, a woman who sleepwalks nightly down to the crypt... "Evil is not just a word, it's a reality."
Loved Diabolique - snappy dialogue, a nice chance to practice my French comprehension, and a surprising denouement...
Silence of the Lambs is so brilliant. And plucky Starling, d'awww, so fierce and inspiring!!
Rosemary's Baby is the best horror movie of all time. It is the rare perfect movie. Mia Farrow is captivating. The pacing is brilliant. The aesthetic is compelling. The camerawork is striking. The movie itself is thrilling, and the ending is satisfying. But most of all, the story stays with you, because it taps into deeply felt horrors, which are emotional and cerebral and visceral - no cheap thrills here.
This film perfectly epitomizes (and was seminal in developing) two central horror tropes --
1) A person leading a normal life is exposed by chance to the dark, seedy underbelly of the world. Experiencing this new truth radically transforms the hero's view of society and of their place within it. As the hero probes deeper into this new, ugly truth of the world, they are inexorably dragged deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. If they conquer the dark forces and emerge successfully, they are forever altered.
~ This trope is profitably explored in Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), for example.
2) Others refuse to validate the new truth the hero is experiencing, and the hero is forced to choose between denying the truth of their own experiences (and thus accepting that they have gone mad), or believing that everyone around them is out to get them, and is involved in some great conspiracy at the hero's expense. This tension fills the hero (and vicariously, the viewer) with terror and uncanny revulsion, at the loathsome prospects of insanity, or betrayal. The need to resolve this tension is what drives the hero deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
~ In this blog, I have used the tag "I know yall think I'm crazy but..." to identify films with this theme.
~ Hitchcock of course inspired the term "gaslighting" with his eponymous 1944 film.
