A scary thing happened on the way to the Movie Forums - Horrorcrammers

I wasn't sure when it came out, but it's as good a movie as any to prove to those skeptical of Criterion that it's not just for your Tarkovskys and your Bergmans.

But anyway, I just wanted to give some background into my experience with horror and explain why some of my reviews are of the "who does this guy think he is!?" variety.

The Haunting (1963) -

This deserves to be considered one of the great haunted house movies even though Hill House is not actually haunted...or is it? That’s what Dr. Markway (Johnson) wants to find out, and he hired three very different people to assist him. They include Luke (Tamblyn), the heir to the house, Theo (Bloom), a psychic, and Eleanor (Harris), who may have encountered a ghost in her youth. The latter has an unenviable adult life that is eerily similar to the long-dead Abigail, who spent the entirety of hers in the mansion's nursery. While strange events occur during their stay, could they just be in Eleanor's head?

This movie may prove that all you need to make a haunted house scary in a movie is really good camerawork...well, a few unexplained window and door closings do not hurt, either. With the split diopters, unusual angles (conforming to Hill House's appropriately off-center construction, I might add), etc., Davis Boulton provides a masterclass in cinematography here. What makes it more impressive is how the camera makes you question if it's all a product of Eleanor's imagination. Harris's work as one of the most miserable characters I can remember seeing in a movie also makes it work as well as it does. I've read reviews about how unlikeable and annoying she is, which confuse me since her behavior, a result of spending most of her adulthood as a caretaker and in a family that would rather browbeat than help, is more than justifiable. No less effective is Johnson, who ably provides another layer of ambiguity, albeit one inspiring anger rather than terror: is he an ally to Eleanor or is he exploiting her for his own gain? The same goes for Theo's perhaps more trustworthy ally, especially for how subtly scorned she is at Eleanor not exactly believing she is one, as well as for the always amusing Russ Tamblyn's comic relief/audience surrogate.

Again, this movie earns its classic haunted house movie status despite how tangential Hill House seems to the story in retrospect. I did not find the house to be a character in and of itself like it is in other such haunted house classics like The Changeling or The Legend of Hell House, in other words. This is more observation than criticism, however, especially since the movie successfully argues that there is something perhaps scarier than a vengeful ghost: an entire life that is not only lived for others, but also for ones who neither respect nor believe you. It's been a few days since I watched it, and the haunting has been mine as much as it is the house's.

Horror can be so many different things to different people. There's so many genres and sub-genres within horror. It's not just the trashy slashers of the '80s or whatever normal people think of when they think of horror. Find what you like.

Watching Cape Fear for the first time, it’s a banger if you like Scorsese and his whole vibe. This is essentially a straight retelling of the Dracula story, only with Robert De Niro as the sexually menacing villain with a goofy accent that Nick Nolte finds himself powerless to defend against. And with Joe Don Baker as Van Helsing! --whatever happened to movies with schlubby guys like Joe Don Baker as key supporting characters?

I know we all knew, but the early 2000s? Woof.

Have you seen the original?

I find it so disturbing (in mostly a good way?) that I can't bring myself to watch another version.

Smile. I think somebody saw It Follows. This had some scary moments! Great use of creepy imagery made it an effective horror. It’s themes of trauma and psychological disorder don’t go far enough or really say much but that they’re there at all is a plus.

Yeah. I enjoyed it a lot the first time with all the twists and surprises, but it lost almost everything great on second watch.

Getting Karloff and Lugosi together on equal footing is really the great trick of this lovely little Satanic Thriller. You rarely saw them together and when you did it was rarely a real toe-to-toe bout. In Son of Frankenstein you get Lugosi wonderfully chewing scenery as Ygor but Karloff's monster is pretty quiet. In something like The Body Snatcher Karloff really gets to shine but Lugosi is reduced to a pretty pathetic smaller character.
Here you get the mano a mano and I am, as the kids say, here for it. And while Karloff is just as enjoyable as you can imagine here, Lugosi really gets the chance to do a little acting and he's good and so the movie simultaneously makes me happy and sad.
But it's also a nice little spooky movie with revenge and Satanic rites and innocents caught in the middle... and also a gimmick about a fear of cats that not only is super-convenient for the plot at times but also allows them to tie it to the title of a well-known Edgar Allen Poe story (to which this film bears literally no resemblance) to try to get some butts in the seats.
It's a charmingly macabre October movie in my opinion and at just 66 minutes it's easy to slide it into your month.
Enjoy.

Dark Skies, 2013, 2nd watch (C)


Good start, good progression, but a garbage climax that throws everything in the garbage. It's just too much. Plus the aliens look silly at the end there.


The Fourth Kind, 2009, 2nd watch (D-)


A good idea wasted on some of the worst over-directing I've ever seen. This is a movie about abductions in a rando town in Alaska, yet everything feels like a Michael Bay rip off, cranked up even higher. More music than a silent film, and louder too, awful shaky cam, and that's when they're not going for some creative spinning shots or what have ya. The only good thing was the, quote unquote, real therapist's acting. Never seen someone sound so absolutely cracked in a movie before. She totally sold it.


Cropsey, 2009 (A)


Riveting documentary, mildly about the titular Cropsey, segueing into a real story of child murders in Staten Island in the 80s. Everything was so on-the-nose creepy and disturbing, I thought it was a super well made mockumentary there for a minute. But nope, it's all real and true. One of the best documentaries I've seen overall.

Jesus, I thought this was gonna be a fun, over-the-top almost Horror-comedy romp. I thought that was the way you guys sold it to me a year or two or three ago. Expectations are a bitch. This is really a fairly serious Japanese Giallo. Not that I didn't enjoy it it was just so far off from what I was expecting and had my mind ready for.
So for those of you who don't know, so you have the right expectations, this is a fairly straightforward killer movie with some style. A TV-show host and her crew respond to a fan-letter she receives and a video-tape of torture-murders by going to investigate them. Of course, it is a trap. Lots of death ensues. And a lot of rape too. I think there were at least two rapes. And the consensual sex that occurs starts off seeming like it's gonna be a rape.
This is actually quite a violent and pretty rough movie. I found it hard to get too invested because they spend almost no time developing character so I didn’t care about or even really know one character from the other practically, so I didn't feel much when they suddenly died... but the movie's effective in other ways. Whether or not the story flows or makes much sense, it is pretty intense and has some pretty good shots and some very interesting scenes (the trap that Mako is in with the long wires was well-conceived and well-delivered). But there's no humor to it at all it's actually fairly bleak.
So, not a bad movie but so far from my expectations and again with little investment into the actual characters, it fell fairly flat with me. I'd watch it again someday but it didn't really race my motor.

I watched a bit of Hellraiser 2 on TV when I was like 8 years old, was very upset by it, and then didn't really get into horror until I was in college. I don't think I even watched a rate R movie until I was like 16 or something.

I'd say that my feelings about horror change as I get older. Movies that hit me in a certain way when I was 20 evoke different feelings twenty years later.

I think that you can not only discover horror at any age, but also rediscover it as you age.

This has always been an easy hard pass for me. "So SICK!" or "So EXTREME!" has always given me major try-hard vibes and been a turn-off.

Burial (2022). In the final days of WWII a group of soldiers are tasked with transporting a crate rumored to hold the remains of Hitler to Moscow. This turned out to not really be a horror movie but it feels like one with its macabre tone and atmosphere. Not a bad watch.


Evil Dead (2013). I didn’t like this when it first came out but folks seem to hold it in high regard nowadays, so ten years later how does it hold up? I liked it a little more this time around but still don’t love it. The characters are such uncharismatic sad sacks that there’s nothing to hold on to. The final act is still the best part and most Evil Dead-like.

The horror of being face to face with faster than lightning little grey men who tear off the limbs off grizzly bears in milliseconds. Oh, and they read your mind.

These are not the guys running the show but they're carrying out all the deeds.

Scary stuff, why isn't it a movie yet?

Nocturne, 2020 (C+)


A pianist becomes a total bitch to her sister in the name of success. Also makes a deal with the devil.


It's fine to put on when you're not doing anything else I suppose, but this isn't a particularly interesting or eventful movie. It's slow for its own sake and the interesting stuff, of which there's almost none, has been done better elsewhere.

Aw man, I love this movie, these two titans of classic horror playing off one another. Boris Karloff is so great with dialogue as an actor, it's kind of a pity he's known for roles where he doesn't speak.

Nope. My third viewing, this time in glorious 4K. Look, Get Out is one of the best movies of the last couple decades. Us is criminally underrated. Yet Nope is my favorite. I’m OBSESSED with it.


The Cell. This is another one that people hated when it first came out so I never bothered with it. But now it seems folks have come around to it, so I gave it a watch. I can see why this was made in 2000, in the wake of serial killer masterpieces like Silence of the Lambs and Se7en. It’s got a cool premise that also works as a jumping off point to have all sorts of trippy imagery. But the weak links here are the two leads. I don’t know if Lopez and Vaughn were miscast or if they made poor acting choices, or if the directer just didn’t direct them well. But J. Lo is doing like a baby voice, and while I get what Vince Vaughn’s character was supposed to be, he doesn’t have the darkness to pull it off. Of course the third lead Vincent D’Onofrio is right at home playing a monster. So overall it’s watchable with some cool ideas that doesn’t hit quite as hard as it should.

You speak the truth. He was actually just a really good actor and it's sort of a shame he didn't get more, better, and more diverse roles. I mean, once you see The Body Snatcher it's hard to understand why he couldn't be used in bigger and bigger films. Talk about being great with dialogue.

I also didn't watch horror films as a kid, hell I don't think it was until I was nearing or in my 30's that I started to finally get into them after meeting friends who were in the goth scene. It was watching Alien in a dark room on brand new and fairly big TV that kind of sold me as it was amazing despite knowing all of the surprises of the film, ie the chest burster and who survives.