BEING THERE'S HALLOWEEN FRIGHTFEST

For a film that's more than 75 years old, Un Chien Andalou is still creepy as hell.  It's not a horror movie in the traditional sense.  There are no stalking slashers, no babysitting damsels in distress, no formulaic storylines about the forces of good struggling with supernatural demonic entities for dominion over the earth and its people.  In fact, there's no storyline at all.  Directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Buñuel and Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou is a pure surrealist film.  It has no discernable plot, but is rather a collection of non-thematic images, drawn from dreams and nightmares.  The film was meant to shock the viewer, literally to attack the eye.  This is explicitly demonstrated in the first few iconic moments of the film, in which a man (Buñuel himself) sharpens a straight razor and proceeds to slice into a woman's eyeball in extreme close-up.  We know logically that it's a trompe l'oiel - we're not really seeing Buñuel slicing up a human eyeball, with the inner contents of the orb gushing out - but the shot is so provocative and so well done that it elicits a gasp of horror even from the most seasoned viewer of horror films.  That famous shot is followed by sixteen densely-packed minutes of terrifying images and imagery that have been alluded to again and again in later films: a woman pokes a severed hand with a stick (Kurosawa put it in a dog's mouth); a man stares at a colony of ants emerging from a wound in his hand; a man drags two pianos across the floor, on top of which there lay two dead, bleeding mules (Coppola had to have had this image in mind when making The Godfather); the same man removes his hand from his mouth to reveal that his mouth has vanished completely (it was no more convincing or terrifying in The Matrix); the camera moves slowly into a close-up of the skull on the back a death's-head moth (quid pro quo, Clarice).  Sixteen minutes may not seem like much, but this film packs more unsettling imagery into that quarter hour than most full-length horror films.  It may just be the most disturbing film yet made.  Besides Showgirls, that is. (RB)


2. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)

Even after the inferior sequels, the atrociously misguided remake and the wholesale pilfering perpetrated by the entire low genre of slasher flicks, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has lost none of its power since it was first unleashed thirty years ago. A big part of why that is is because not only is Massacre the original, it's one of the few modern day horror films that has any originality to it at all. The films that have followed in its footsteps all make the mistake of not trusting the simplicity of the story and, among other missteps, they fall back on broadly-drawn stock characters (the brainy one, the virgin, the stud, etc.) and in each successive rip-off the backwoods, inbred family of murderers get a little more cartoonish and the whole thing becomes a burlesque.

The beauty of Tobe Hooper's film is that the plot is so simple that it could be a precocious high school student's home movie; kids go out in the country to make out only to get murdered one by one by a family of ghouls. There are no back stories on the kids, none of them have any real identifying characteristics (save for the one in the wheelchair) and, frankly, they're not even all that likeable. But instead of lessening the impact of their deaths, it sucks us in because of how real it all seems. In the final reel, the local sheriff or the county coroner does not pop in to explain to us why, let's say, "The old Johnson house" was the town's epicenter for depravity. Instead, what we get for an ending is Leatherface wielding his chainsaw out on the county road while poor Marilyn Burns screams and screams in the back of a speeding pickup truck. Evil does not get conquered, it's still out there getting crazier and more desperate by the minute and whether Hooper intended anything so profound or not, what you are left with is a cold, clear vision of a world gone wrong. (ZR)


3. Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987)

One night I attended a Halloween party put on by our high school marching band at some band member's house. After we had had enough of dancing, eating chips and M&M's, and running around, we all settled down in the darkened living room in front of the TV to watch the recent VHS release, Hellraiser. For some reason, the mere fact that the movie's title had the word "Hell" in it intimidated me. I was a very religious kid and to think that a moviemaker had actually put that word in the title spelled danger. This was only my second or third horror film experience, and even though I had never been truly scared by another film in the genre, I still wasn't sure that there wasn't a different kind of horror flick that I couldn't handle.

All I can remember from that night nearly twenty years ago was leaving the party immediately after the movie ended absolutely terrified. My friend Chris had been at the party, too, and left the same time I did.  We didn't speak to each other when we left.  A few days later I mentioned to him that Hellraiser "scared me to death" and asked him what he thought about it. He said that it had kept him awake all night and that, like me, it was the only movie that had ever actually terrified him.

I'm being absolutely serious when I say that watching Hellraiser scared me so much that night that until last week I had not been able to muster the courage to see it a second time.  Only one image from the film had stayed in my mind all those years: the iconic Pinhead character addressing some main character, standing near a bedroom wall with a section of the wall exposed to reveal a portal to another dimension. This remembered image itself didn't actually frighten me.  But as in an actual nightmare, I knew that some incredible fear was associated with the image: I just couldn't remember what it was.

So one day last week, at around 12 noon and with all the lights on, I faced my life's great fear and watched Hellraiser for a second time.  And what I discovered during that hour-and-a-half is how very cold, objective, and unfeeling I've become as an adult. Nearly everything about Hellraiser - the acting, the dialogue, the lighting, the misogynistic attitude, the clothes (!) - just seemed laughably dated and bad. I spent the majority of my time watching the movie trying to figure out how it had frightened me at all as a teenager. 

I decided it must have had something to do with my religious beliefs at the time. In one scene from Hellraiser, Pinhead threatens the film's heroine with "tearing her soul apart," and hearing this must have made my metaphysical imagination go into overdrive. What must it be like to have one's soul torn apart? Terrifying. And then there's the scene where, just before Frank gets torn apart by the hooks chained to his flesh, Frank looks at the heroine in a lascivious manner and quotes the Bible verse, "Jesus wept." His exceedingly painful predicament, combined with both his ability to leer under those conditions and his strange bible quotation (not to mention the image of his being torn apart, which was definitely not something I was used to seeing) must have horrified me because it was so inexplicable and blasphemous. And I wasn't even sure it was blasphemous, I was so disturbed and confused.

Now that I'm not quite so religious and have twenty years under my belt of watching scenes nearly as graphic on TV, Hellraiser doesn't affect me much. I'm more horrified, in fact, by the padded jackets, the dubious sweaters, and the acid-washed jeans in Hellraiser than I am by any of its monsters. Which, I guess, means I'm ready now for my next horror flick challenge. Nightmare on Elm Street? Haven't seen that one yet.

I know, I know. (MP)


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