“Horror is the future. And you can not be afraid. You must push everything to the absolute limit. Or else life will be boring. People will be boring. Horror is like a serpent; always shedding it’s skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can’t be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our unconscious.” – Dario Argento
Horror has become the dominant force in my movie purchases, movie viewings, and movie contemplations simply because I was introduced to the genre as a child and because they’re fun to watch. I seek out every horror movie there is, good or bad. I first saw “Night of the Living Dead” when I was seven, and it was horrifying. I have nothing but a petrifying fear for zombie movies. I’ll watch whatever horror movie you want me to, but I’m scared shitless of zombie films no matter what film and when it was made. My first glimpses of the walking dead feeding on an arm, chewing off the flesh scared me and it was the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen. Just talking about it makes me look over my shoulder in fear.
I first saw Creepshow when I was very young; this movie is quite a novelty for the way it approaches horror like an old EC comics issue with panels and word bubbles. EC made the best comics ever and they were shot down by some pompous ego-maniac who declared comics as the leading cause of homosexuality and violence in America. “Creepshow” is a fun exploration of horror with stories of death, loneliness, marital woes, extra-marital affairs and bugs with that added sick twist. What do you expect from George Romero and Stephen King? And then there was Halloween which I laid my eyes on when I was a boy. I can remember looking on in horror and being frightened at Michael Meyer’s blank face and white mask he used to cover his true face. We only get a glimpse of his face in the original film, but who needs to see him when he’s dressed in his white mask and overalls?
I remembered getting chills whenever Carpenter would amp up the score whenever he stalked someone, and I remember being frightened to tears in the great scene where Curtis’ character is running from Michael and he’s slowly following her as she tries to get into her house to escape, and that ending where Loomis looks down and Michael Meyers is gone is still a scene that gives me goose bumps. We get Loomis looking down and sighing in disappointment, the ground vacant of Michael, and then we cut to Curtis crying.
She doesn’t have to be told what just happened, because deep in her heart, she knows the boogey man isn’t dead, and then we follow a montage of short sequences exploring the dark corners of Haddonfield, then we explore the Meyer’s house as Michael breaths ever so lightly in the background and as a final touch Carpenter adds the pumpkin which is blown out in the darkness, but by whom? All of which were new exciting and horrifying experiences for me, but they only helped my unhealthy addiction to horror. I was never something simple when Halloween came around. I always anxiously awaited the holiday to arrive so I can dress up as something monstrous. I was always a devil, a monster, or Jason Voorhees. More times than none, I was Jason Voorhees.
Try to imagine a short skinny kid with an oversized Jason mask on his face, a blue NY Yankees jacket, brown jeans, and a gray rubber machete. Then every year I’d alternate, one year I painted blood on the mask, then one year my dad spray painted blood on my pants, and another year I took one of those small rubber snakes you could get in the quarter machines in the supermarket and taped it on the inside of the mask with its face sticking out through the eye hole. People loved it. Yes, I’m one of thousands and my love for horror movies is rather passionate, in fact many of my movie reviews of horror movies are, I’ll be the first to admit, rather lenient because it’s hard to not have a bias towards something when reviewing a movie, because horror is just excellent to put it simply, I have a soft spot for the genre and the wizards can give you frights, wizards like John Carpenter, George Romero, Dario Argento (Check out “Profundo Russo”), Lucio Fulci, and—Alfred Hitchcock.
Hitchcock once said, “Always make the audience suffer as much as possible”, which eventually attributed to my love for his art. His horror films are different kinds of horror films; his explore the inner depths of human fears and the darkness of our soul. He’s made espionage movies and a few dramas, but his horror films are the best. He has the formula to stretch out a tense sequence for as long as possible. People will get scared with the jolt of horror, but if you stretch it out long enough you leave the audience edgy and tense and irritable. Put a kid with a bomb on a bus, he doesn’t know he’s holding a bomb and have him have to deliver it before time runs out. The bus is stalling, the stop lights are going off, people are stalling the driver and you will definitely be at the edge of your seat. Hitchcock was, as many agree, a genius.
He explored nature versus man, death, murder, espionage, and the notion that our loved relative may not be who we think they are after all. A lot of Hitchcock’s films are great, but my three absolute favorite films of all time from are “Strangers on a Train”, “Psycho”, and “Rope”. These are the three films in his filmography that really resonated with me. “Strangers on a Train” is a claustrophobic thriller about a man forced into an impossibly inescapable situation. One man offers the other to exchange murders and no one will be none the wiser and while he refuses the murder is committed and now he has no real way to prove his innocence, it’s a sharp and taut film that Hitchcock perfects with emotions of terror and desperation against impossible odds.
“Psycho” is a sheer masterpiece and the original slasher about a woman who steals money from her bank and flees town stumbling upon a motel on a dark and stormy night, The “Bates” motel. She befriends Norman Bates, a shy mama’s boy who displays a sense of rage within his love for his mother and most likely bears an Oedipus complex as well. This movie was marketed by Hitchcock who would not let movie-goers go into the movie halfway in theaters even if they paid for the ticket; it’s a daring stunt that would never be pulled today. Shocking, dreary, and dark this thriller is truly scary with many surprises I won’t ruin if you haven’t already seen it.
“Rope” is my favorite of Hitchcock’s because of his eight minute camera experiment that never took. It’s the story of two men both aristocratic with a homosexual-themed relationship who murder their friend simply to see if they can get away with it. Their egos will not let them admit defeat, so they host a dinner party with their murdered friend only inches away. Hitchcock has a really sick approach towards this because in this party, the centerpiece is a book case, a book case that is being used for a food table and inside is their dead friend’s body and the audience is aware but the party-goers are none the wiser. Hitchcock plays tricks on the audience as people become interested in the case wanting to open it and explore it and we’re played with in an almost endless ride and it’s my favorite.
Any critic who says they have no bias in their review is basically lying, because it’s hard not to lean towards or against a certain actor, actress, genre, or director when watching a movie. It happens, and with me it’s horror movies. I love them. I love slasher films, particularly the “Friday the 13th” films because good or bad it’s entertaining. With horror films you can’t go wrong, the good ones scare you, the dumb ones entertain you, and the bad ones make you wish for the good ones.
