Happy Halloween: 13 More Scary Movies You Might Have Missed

Last Halloween I featured 13 horror movies (well, 15) that might have escaped your attention. This year I've got 13 more to recommend for a chilling evening's diversion. This year's a little top-heavy with zombies (zombies are cool), westerns (surprise!), and at a glance 2008 was a vintage season. But there's still a little something for everyone....

#13   La Horde (France 2009)

This brutal little film opens at a funeral. A band of crooked cops have lost one of their own and are planning revenge on a gang of Nigerian criminals. They enter an abandoned Paris highrise housing project, and after a tense shootout, find themselves in the middle of a zombie acopalypse. The action is gripping and gory and there are some really cool sequences, like when the downstairs guard realizes something has gone horribly wrong, and when the "hero" (Jean-Pierre Martins) realizes he's not getting out. You'll notice the word "hero" is in quotation marks. That's because if there's a quibble I have with this film, it's that it's pretty bleak. You know you're in trouble when the most sympathetic character is a vicious Nigerian warlord (Eriq Abouaney). Still, it's well worth a look. (In French with English subtitles)

#12   Slither (US 2006)

Slither is both cover-your-eyes gross and utterly hilarious. Nathan Fillion is Sheriff Bill Pardy, who's mooning for his lost sweetheart when the local deer hunting festival is overrun with alien slugs, who begin, in the immortal words of the local mayor "driving people around like skincars." I highly recommend buying the DVD for the kick-ass extras. (Hi, I'm Bill Pardy!) This film features one of my favorite movie scenes of all time:

#11   Fido (Canada 2006)

Keeping the humor vein momentarily, Fido is a zombie comedy set in happy 1950's-esque suburbia where, following the Zombie Wars, the Zomcon Corporation has found a way to fit the dead with remote control collars to turn them into servants. With a really good cast (Billy Connelly as Fido, Carrie-Ann Moss and Dylan Baker as a suburban mom and pop, Henry Czerny as the face of Zomcon, and Tim Blake Nelson as the eccentric next door neighbor), this is really a delightful little film. (In Canadian without subtitles.)

#10 Dance of the Dead (US 2008)

Yet more zombies, as high school outcasts prepare for the school prom and find that there's been a mishap in the local graveyard and the dead have risen. This indie film looks a million times better than it's budget should probably indicate. The acting is really good (I'm partial to Jared Kuznitz, who looks so like one of my best high school friends) and the writing is sharp and funny. Shows that indie films can outdo mainstream films, especially when it comes to keeping a genre fresh and entertaining.

#9   The Midnight Meat Train (US 2008)

An adaptation of the Clive Barker story of the same name, The Midnight Meat Train is about a photographer (Bradley Cooper) who find himself on the trail of a subway serial killer. He's really not going to like what he finds at the end of it. One of the few adaptations that does justice to the bloody, unsettling dread in Barker's work, this is the kind of movie that makes you turn the lights on.  Top notch supporting cast, including Vinnie Jones as a creepy butcher, and really fine directing make this an instant classic that WILL give you nightmares.

#8   Romasanta (Spain 2004)

With lyrical cinematography and understated performances, Romasanta is loosely based on the mid-19th century Werewolf of Allariz case, in which a series of murders, mutilations, and disappearances were blamed on Manuel Blanco Romasanta (portrayed by Julian Sands), who admitted to the murders but claimed he was a victim of lycanthropy. It's an interesting treatise on the intersection of myth and murder, and the understanding of the modern serial killer. (In English)

#7   The Valley of Gwangi (US 1969)

When we were kids, my brother and I were quite the little cinephiles. And, boy, did we love the fantastic and the frightening. One of our early favorites was The Valley of Gwangi. We must have watched it scores of times. Starring James Franciscus as a cowboy stuntman and Gila Golan as his feisty ex -- an equestrienne and owner of a failing circus -- the movie featured everything a kid could want: an dusty old archeologist wandering the desert, a gypsy brimming with curses, cowboys roping dinosaurs, and a spectacular ending when the monster finally gets loose and goes on a rampage. This still ranks as one of my childhood favorites.

#6   Tremors (US 1990)

Speaking of favorites, Tremors is an almost perfectly crafted monster movie and a deserving cult classic. Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon are spot-on as Earl and Val, itinerite handymen in the tiny desert town of Perfection, who band together with the townspeople against giant subterranean prehistoric worms, dubbed "Graboids" by the local general store owner (Victor Wong). Funny, scary, and thrilling, while it was a box-office disappointment, it exploded on DVD and spawned numerous (inferior) sequels. It's one of those movies I never get tired of watching.

#5   Frailty (US 2001)

The directorial debut of Bill "Game Over, Man" Paxton, this psychological thriller will keep you off-balance to the very end. With great performances by Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, and Powers Booth, this is the story of an apparently psychotic father who drafts his two young sons into his mission to rid the world of "demons," but nothing is ever as it seems. Tense and well-crafted, this will have you thinking about it long after it's over.

#4   Shiver aka Eskalofrio (Spain 2008)

Suffering from a rare case of photophobia, a young boy (Junio Valverde) and his mother must move from the city to small village in the mountains of Spain that is almost always in shadow. Once there, a series of murders place suspicion on the boy, so he and some newfound friends attempt to unravel the facts behind the crimes. While the film begins slowly, it builds to a terrifically suspenseful conclusion and a dandy little mystery.(In Spanish with English subtitles.)

#3   Dead Birds (US 2004)

This is a truly creepy indie film, starring Henry Thomas as a leader of a group of Confederate soldiers who rob a bank and hole up in an abandoned house in the midst of an abandoned cornfield. Bad things ensue. Really bad things. While it borrows a lot of the conventions of both horror films and westerns, it puts everything together so well, it doesn't matter.  The film is dark and lovingly shot, building up to understated ending.

#2    Night Visions (US 2001)

This isn't a movie, but an anthology series that lasted one season (13 two-story episodes) on Fox. Narrated by Henry Rollins, the show features top-tier talent on both the acting and directing sides, and great scripts, many from excellent short stories. The problem with TV anthologies is you've often got a lot of clunkers: pieces that just didn't work, or relied on cheap twists, or were dumbed down from the source material. This is the rare exception in that every story works, and some work really stupendously. While it's not on DVD, it's well-worth trying to catch repeats on SyFy or Chiller. My three favorites: "A View Through a Window" starring Bill Pullman and taken from the superb and terrifying short story by Robert Leman; "Harmony" starring Timothy Olyphant as a guy who stumbles onto a town where music is outlawed (think "Footloose" gone terribly wrong); and "Patterns" with Malcolm McDowell as a psychiatrist that tries to cure a patient (Miguel Ferrer) of his obsessive compulsions with disastrous results.

#1   The Burrowers (US 2008)

The Burrowers is a great little film that works both as strait horror and as a pretty swell western. The premise is simple: a pioneer family has disappeared and a posse, thinking they've been abducted by a local Indian tribe,  is put together to go find them.  The cast is excellent (Clancy Brown, William Mapother, Laura Leighton, Karl Geary, Sean Patrick Scott) and while the film unfolds slowly, it allows for a real investment in the characters and the building of an internal logic that really makes the film feel authentic. The movie also explores racism, genocide, and ecological disaster in a way that most horror films would just gloss over. The creatures, when you finally see them, are superbly awful and the ending is real punch in the gut.

Have a scary movie to recommend? Leave a comment. And until next year - leave the lights on.

Somewhere Somebody's Doing Something: New Horror Series?

According to a headline in my RSS feed yesterday, "Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk Return to FX with Series Pilot 'American Horror Story.'"

Sounds interesting, so I read the attached story and find out nothing, save for the fact that Murphy and Falchuk (Nip/Tuck, Glee) are doing a pilot for FX called "American Horror Story."

FX president John Landgraf sounds extremely enthusiastic about the project, calling it a “wildly brilliant original series.” Given how creative (and oftentimes dark) FX’s original series’ are, I doubt he’s exaggerating all that much. Details are vague on the project other than that, “it’s a horror show with ‘subversive sensibilities.’”

I'm always a bit suspicious when there are no details. Usually that means either someone's trying to create a buzz by keeping things "mysterious" (which generally annoys me no end) or the details sound so ludicrous that no one wants to say them aloud. With the poor track record of horror on television, I automatically fear that it's the second one.

I guess we'll have to wait and see...

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us: Taking the Train to Zombietown

The Walking Dead has been quite a smash on AMC, which make me gleeful because I think horror is vastly underrated as an art form. But that's a topic for another time. The question is why so popular now? I think one of the reasons is the way that art reflects society, and how society embraces art.

When I was a kid one of the first movies I remember scaring the daylights out of me was 1953's Invaders from Mars, in a which a kid discovers that all the adults he's supposed to trust have in actuality been taken over by aliens. Of course no one believes him. In retrospect the movie is kind of cheesy in the special effects department, but it also has a stark truth about it. There is something utterly terrifying about us not being us.

Elementally, we don't like representations of ourselves that are too close. Ventriloquist dummies, the clockwork Stepford Wives, the mannequins in "The After Hours" from the original Twilight Zone, the inhabitants of the Uncanny Valley. Now take that one step further and hollow us out, fill us with something that is fundamentally not us, or even worse than that, just the absence of us.

In 1968, George Romero directed Night of the Living Dead.  It came at a time when the world was flipping upside down. The Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movements, the sexual revolution, women's lib. Conventions were being torn down, and all this coming on the heels of the McCarthyite era when there was a commie around every corner, well, people were a tad unsettled. Who do you trust? Your government, your neighbors, your kids, no one over 30?

Night of the Living Dead is an embodiment of the '60s. I take George Romero's word that he pays no attention to subtext when he's making a film. The great thing about subtext is that it sometimes just inserts itself, either by luck, by the quiet working of  the artist's subconscious, or by some unknown machination of the universe. Whatever the case, Night of the Living Dead works as well on a subconscious level as it does on a superficial scare level.  Little zombie girl hacking up her parents with a trowel? She would have just have become a hippie in the Haight, and isn't that really the same thing?  Good ol' boys with guns shooting the hero, who just happens to be black? At a certain point, it doesn't matter what was intended, the art takes on a life of its own.

Romero, the zombie godfather, followed up with Dawn of the Dead, where we  are just shells that consume for the sake of consuming, and Day of the Dead, where the military/industrial complex seems to be the last institution standing, or shambling, if you want to look at it that way.

Romero spawned an entire zombie culture. Without Romero, you have no Sense and Sensibility with Zombies, you have no World War Z, you have no The Walking Dead. Which takes us back to my original question. What about zombies gets under our skin?

Right now, the world is an uncertain place. I was a tiny kid in the '60s, so I don't remember it all that well, but it seems like a lot of the things we thought were settled are unsettled. I sure as hell feel nervous. We have come to divide, to another point in time where the populace has fallen into a "them versus us" trap.

The zombie is an all-purpose monster. It's a blank canvas you can spatter with the guts of whatever scares you the most. You're a right-winger? Why the zombie can stand in for every brown/gay/liberal/foreign invader who's come to wrench away everything you hold dear. There are hordes of them. And they keep coming. The only way to protect yourself is to hole up with your guns. You a left-winger? The zombie is the unthinking/unbending/unreasoning/unempathetic other, who can't be argued with, who can't be swayed with decency, who only acts out of the basest instincts. It only wants to destroy you. And the worst thing of all, the absolute worst thing, sometimes that unswayable alien other is right there with you, it's your mom or your husband or your kid.

Apocalyptic fiction has been popular since the Bible. It's a test run, just in case. It's a release valve.  It's a way to play out our fears and walk away at the end of the page, at the end of the episode. A zombie apocalypse is the worst we can image, because it means we are our own destruction, we will devour ourselves.

There is one single thing that every being on earth shares. We all die. We all are dust in the end. Whatever your religion, whatever your belief system, no one really knows what makes us us. And when we cease to be here, where we go. We're all supposed to be wonderful unique snowflakes, but what if in the end we're just meat puppets?  The horror of severing our "us" from our bodies has been around since we first walked out of the caves and told tales around the fire. It's there in "The Monkey's Paw," it's there when the father buries Gage in the Pet Semetary, even after he saw what happened to the cat. It's there when Boris Karloff's monster utters, "We belong dead."

The fitful dead are with us always, and they're not going away anytime soon.

(Next Installment: There's No Crying in Zombietown)


Pop culture recommendation: any iteration of Ray Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven." If you can find the original radio play, it might actually kill you.