February 2009 - Horrorphile

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Horrorphile - February 2009

The Unborn

February 27th 2009 00:05

Hollywood writer/producer/director David S. Goyer has some serious credentials to his belt. He wrote the Blade vampire series (as well as producing the two sequels and directing Trinity), he co-wrote Batman Begins and provided the story to The Dark Knight (2008), and he’s currently in pre-production on the X-Men prequel, Magneto. However one should keep in mind he also produced Mission to Mars and Ghost Rider.

He’s written and directed The Unborn (2009), which is produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes company, so it’s a “high concept” horror movie, which ultimately means it’s as vacuous as a black hole, sucking all your intelligence into a void of flashy special effects and sweet little else. The sweet little else happens to be Odette Yustman’s underwear-clad derriere which, rather oddly, appears to be used as a selling point on the main poster, and in the corresponding scene(s) in the movie has garnered an enormous amount of unnecessary lewd attention (read: camel-toe). But I digress …

Odette Yustman as Casey

Young pretty Casey (Odette Yustman) is plagued by nightmarish visions and terrifying dreams after being slapped in the face with a mirror by her neighbours’ kid whom she is babysitting. One of her eyes begins to discolour and she learns she is a twin and that her unborn sibling died in the womb. Her mother (Carla Gugino) committed suicide in a mental hospital when Casey was a young girl and her father appears to be so wrapped up in his work that he’s hardly ever home.

Meagan Good as Romy

Casey begins to suspect that she is being haunted by some malevolent spirit, and after seeking out an aging Holocaust survivor, Sofi (Jane Alexander) whom her mother had known she discovers the soul of her dead twin Barto (Ethan Cutkosky) has been possessed by an evil dybbuk, a demon-like entity that refuses to remain dead and so inhabits the bodies of the living in order to seek revenge. Casey contacts Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman) and pleads for him to help her and perform a Jewish exorcism in order to drive away the demon spirit.

Gary Oldman as Rabbi Sendak

I ended up walking out of The Unborn bitterly disappointed. I loved the trailer. It’s a real pity the movie itself is so disappointing. Writer/director David Goyer totally dropped the ball on this one. What the hell kind of movie was he making? More importantly, just who the hell was he making it for?!

Ethan Cutkosky as Barto

It starts of promisingly with Casey encountering the first of her surreal grotesque visions. It is these nightmare sequences that provide the movie with its best elements. In fact, they are the only decent scenes in the whole movie (well, that and Odette in her underwear, but I digress once again). Goyer doesn’t really make any sense with his use of Hell motifs, but then neither did Dario Argento. The use of what is called a potato bug aka Jerusalem cricket was inspired ghastliness, especially if you have a phobia of large insects that look like the New Zealand weta (for reference watch the giant carnivorous cave worms and insects scene in Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake).

The Unborn Odette Yustman and Cam Gigandet

Casey and boyfriend Mark (Cam Gigandet), dazed and confused

There is one stand-out sequence in The Unborn that sticks in my mind for sheer nightmare shock effect: Casey is throwing up in a (oddly empty) nightclub toilet as the dybbuk is wreaking havoc on her general well being. Suddenly from out of a (glory?!) hole in the adjacent wall those bugs start to pour out in a river of dark putrid slime. A crack opens in the wall and large horrendous tentacles probe through flapping violently as hundreds of the bugs continue to swarm and slither out of the wall and toilet and across the floor toward a screaming, cowering Odette. Then the zombie ghost of her mother stumbles out of one of the toilet cubicles her arms outstretched, her glazed discoloured eyes dead and glazed. It’s a powerful and intense scene of pure horror. Such a shame the rest of the movie wasn’t as intensely sustained as this.

The dybbuk makes grotesque appearances

The movie actually gets worse as it goes along. It becomes sillier and sillier and less and less plausible. it’s a supernatural horror movie, so you need to suspend belief in the first place, but come on guys, don’t spend more than half the damn movie with expository dialogue). It doesn’t help a big-budget production when you can plainly see Odette’s “damaged eye” contact lenses. And how come Casey’s father was so absent, or for that matter, Romy’s parents? And how did the weird-looking diabolical kid Matty (Atticus Shafer) get to wander around the streets all the time? The screenplay is riddled with inconsistencies. It’s hard to believe the same man responsible for Batman Begins and The Dark Knight penned this insulting hokum.

The Unborn Odette Yustman and Ethan Cutkosky

Odette has a nightmare where Barto slowly tears her belly open in the movie's second best sequence

Overall the acting is barely adequate. Yustman isn’t talented enough to carry the movie, Jane Alexander is wholly unconvincing as the Jewish “oracle”, Oldman is slumming it (does he need the money this bad? Perhaps he signed on with an early draft that read well?), and Odette’s boyfriend Mark (Cam Gigandet) is a two-dimensional waste of time and space. The best performance was perhaps Odette’s best friend Romy (Meagan Good), but if I was being really sarcky I’d say Carla Gugino’s “featured extra” role was the most believable.

The Unborn Gary Oldman and Odette Yustman

The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ ... oops, wrong movie!

The first sign of trouble was discovering the movie was rated M (PG-13 in America). That’s a surefire way of making horrorphiles uneasy. The trailer made the movie look like it would be rated R (NC-17 in America), or at least an MA (R in America). But it seems the producers were keen to get as many bums on seats. So what the hell is that poster about?! It makes the movie look like it has lascivious intent … which I wish it had, it would’ve added some much needed luridness.

Odette Yustman has a turn when she realises just how bad the movie really is

The Unborn is good for a handful of “Boo!” shock-scares, but that’s about it. The score is okay, but director Goyer scuttles everything around the half-way mark when he introduces the Auschwitz angle, and the subsequent Rabbi involvement, and the last twenty minutes are just awful. If Dario Argento had directed this movie back in the early 80s it probably would’ve kicked serious ass, but in today’s world of deeply savvy horrorphiles it just doesn’t cut the mustard. The Unborn kicks out a few times, but it’s bloated and ultimately it’s stillborn.

The strangely lurid main poster

Here's the trailer:

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Jaws

February 26th 2009 00:45

As I was swimming in Sydney's Coogee surf yesterday (not too far out), I thought about how the two recent local shark attack survivors had bonded in hospital over their horrific experience, and I realised it was about time I reviewed one of the biggest horror movies ever made, arguably the biggest of them all; Jaws (1975).

Steven Speilberg’s landmark movie changed the course of Hollywood moviemaking. Jaws became the first serious event movie. The term “blockbuster” was coined in the wake of Jaws’ phenomenal box office success. Before Jaws the five biggest money-earners had been The Godfather ($85 million), The Sound of Music ($84m), Gone With the Wind ($70m), The Sting ($68m) and The Exorcist ($66m). Jaws broke the $100 million mark. And that was just in America, before even foreign sales had been made.

Roy Scheider as Chief Brody

Robert Shaw as Quint

When Jaws was released in American in the summer of ’75 it tore the roof off cinemas. Sixty-seven million Americans went and saw it! People screamed their lungs out, popcorn flew through the air, and pandemonium broke out. But most significantly, people became terrified of going swimming. The curious thing was children loved it, but adults were scared shitless. The producers managed to secure the all-important PG rating (a few seconds were trimmed of a severed leg falling to the seabed). In New Zealand it was rated GA (General Exhibition but recommended for adults), however my parents wouldn’t let me see the damn movie! And neither were several of my buddies, except one, and boy did he skite about it. I didn’t get to see the movie until many years later on VHS.

Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper

I don’t really need to describe the synopsis do I? A very large Great White shark (25-feet long) terrorises a local fishing community on Amity Island, and the Chief of Police Brody (the late Roy Scheider), along with shark expert Hooper (Richard Dreyfess) and tough opportunist sea dog Quint (Robert Shaw) set out on a small trawler called Orca in order to kill the monstrous fish.

Susan Backlinie as unfortunate Chrissy

Peter Benchley was commissioned to adapt his exceptional novel, Carl Gottlieb was then brought in to completely re-shape it (both of whom have cameos), and the famous “Indianapolis” monologue was written by Howard Sackler, John Milius and actor Shaw. Jaws marked the breakthrough movie for director Speilberg. He started working on the movie aged 26. He likened Jaws as a kind of monster kindred to his first feature, the brilliant Duel (1971), both dealing with an inhuman “leviathon” relentlessly terrorising humans. But it was Speilberg’s cinematically Hitchcockian approach to the visual narrative which lifted Jaws out of the water and thrusted it full force into the popular consciousness. He engineered a sensational nightmare thriller that has become ingrained in pop culture.

Jay Mello as Brody's son Sean

Everything from lines of dialogue (“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”), the John Williams nerve-wracking score (duh-dah-duh-dah-duh-dah …), the movie’s two perfectly timed jump-scares (the severed head poking out of the damaged boat hull and Brody grumpily throwing chum behind him as the massive shark lunges out of the water right behind him), and the famous opening sequence with the young woman having a skinny dip at night and the shark chomping on her and taking her for a fatal ride.

Someone yell 'Shark!' and we've got panic on the fourth of July

But Jaws does have a trapping. The elaborately-designed mechanical shark didn’t work properly, and the more you see of it in the movie’s second half, the less convincing it becomes. It is the movie’s first half where only a dorsal fin is shown, or the torn end of a jetty becomes a symbol for the shark, that the fear is truly palpable. The footage of a real Great White “attacking” a miniature cage which was shot by Aussie shark experts Ron and Valerie Taylor in South Australian waters certainly adds authentic weight.

One of the real Great Whites filmed for the movie

The captain always goes down with the boat

Regardless of the shark’s fakeness being so apparent the movie still works on two basic levels; the character empathy for and friction between the three leads, especially during their time on the Orca as they begin to realise just how deadly dangerous their mission has become, and the steady tightening of the fear and dread thriller screws that Speilberg applies so well. The camerawork and editing is top notch, and combined with the tense music it makes for fantastically suspenseful cinema.

Chief Brody vs. The Shark

The curiously unscary novel cover art

The poster itself is pure nightmare genius. I owned one for many years, but it got lost (stolen?). It was huge and I was constantly reminded of just how cleverly horrifying it was. It was based on the cover art for the novel, but the original artwork depicted the Great White looking more like a rising dolphin than a shark, with its mouth only slightly open and no jagged teeth exposed. Whoever made those significant changes for the movie poster should get a pat on the back.

If you’ve never seen Jaws do yourself a popcorn favour and check out just how clever Steven Spielberg was so early in his career. In retrospect he describes himself as “young, courageous and stupid”, but he’s just being humble (although he was nearly fired off the movie). It’s only time before Jaws is remade, and even if they make the shark look ten times more realistic with state-of-the-art special effects, I cannot see any director coming close to bettering the pure cinema of the original.

Here's the original trailer:

Here's an original TV spot:

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Frantic

February 25th 2009 01:43

Roman Polanski’s thriller Frantic (1988) has one of Harrison Ford’s least forced performances. Made as Ford was about to become the overpaid, overrated, heroic leading man of Hollywood, but when Ford was still capable of portraying the ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances. Apart from the effortless and extremely entertaining nonchalance of his first two outings as Han Solo, Frantic and Witness are his two best roles.

Polanski needed a hit movie. His previous effort is arguably his worst, or at least his most ill-concieved; the flamboyant, bloated mess Pirates (although curiously the Pirates of the Caribbean series seems to have been influenced by Polanski’s comic swashbuckler, even if Jerry Bruckheimer doesn’t admit it). With his ever-faithful writing colleague Gerard Brach they co-wrote (with uncredited script-doctoring from Robert Towne) a story about a wealthy and respected doctor in Paris for a medical conference whose wife mysteriously vanishes from their hotel room whilst he’s showering.

Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Walker

Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) is at wit’s end as he tries to fathom the reasoning behind what is soon revealed as abduction. The Parisian hotel and police authorities provide him with as much bureaucracy and laissez-faire as he can handle, so he assertively takes matters into his own hands. If they’ve taken his wife, then he’s gonna take serious action.

Emmanuelle Seigner as Michelle

By mistake Walker’s wife Sondra (Betty Buckley) picked up the wrong suitcase at the airport. After Walker searches the luggage he finds a lead: a matchbook and accompanying keyring to the Blue Parrot bar. It after a false “white lady” lead at the venue, that Walker eventually meets Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner), a striking young woman with a penchant for mischief. She has clues, and together they find themselves becoming further embroiled in a desperate search for his wife’s kidnappers.

One minute his wife was there, the next minute she's vanished

Polanski is a consummate director, and Frantic displays his terrific talents from start to finish. It might not be the most thrilling of thrillers, in fact the movie meanders along and provides relatively few scenes of dramatic or action intensity, but there are still some great set-pieces, most notably Walker’s dangerous scramble across the rooftops as he tries to access Michelle’s apartment as she’s being interrogated by dodgy detectives, and later, their recovery of the precious Statuette of Liberty.

Walker finds Paris communique exasperating

What was perhaps over-looked at the movie’s time of release, but which has aged well, is the movie’s sustained perspective from Walker. He’s no hero; he’s a man completely out of his depth in a labyrinthine city with a foreign tongue, and whose locals are renowned for being unhelpful to foreigners at the best of times. Walker struggles, and Frantic superbly captures his increasing anxiety and frustration. Ford sweats and stumbles convincingly.

Frantic Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner

The movie's famous (publicity) shot ...

Emmanuelle Seigner is perfectly cast as the nervous, slightly untrustworthy, charismatic white rabbit whom Walker is compelled to pursue in order to find his missing wife (she would subsequently marry Polanski and bear him two children). Polanski films Paris as a strangely ordinary, almost impenetrable city, both in contrast and in tandem to the inexplicable overwhelming events surrounding Walker and Michelle.

... But as it's actually viewed in the movie

Back in the days when Ford was actually prepared to strip for the art

Unfortunately the Region 4 DVD edition I own is a dreadful transfer with terrible artifacts and poor picture quality. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of deluxe version of the movie yet available on DVD which is a crime, only bare-bones from all region releases. Also, the opening credit sequence is far from enticing, that I must mention. It looks more like the end of some odious Euro B-movie.

Frantic might be nearly as intriguing or resonant as The Tenant (1976), Polanski’s early features, or some of his later work, such as The Ninth Gate (1999) and The Pianist (2002), but it ranks as a very excellent way to spend a rainy afternoon with a croque-madame in front of you and a bottle of Pinot Noir at your side.

Michelle won't give up without a bite (Statue of Liberty in Paris, not NYC)

Asian poster which makes the movie look like a comedy

Here's the trailer:

And here's one of the two nervewracking rooftop scenes, which Polanski had an amazing set painstakingly built for so that Ford and Seigner could do their own stuntwork:

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Shrooms

February 24th 2009 07:17

If there’s a lesson to be learnt anywhere within this try-hard creep-fest it’s that you should never go into a dark forest with dodgy mates and consume psychotropic fungi. Psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) is not to be taken lightly. Seems the teenagers in Shrooms (2006) got a little more than they bargained for when they went bush to get wasted.

Shrooms, written by Pearse Elliott and directed by Paddy Breathnach, is an Irish/English/Danish co-pro, shot on location in Ireland, but uses mostly American actors. It’s stylishly helmed by Breathnach and his cinematographer Nanu Segal, but it has more producers than you shake a gnarly branch at, which is always a fine sign of trouble. It would make a decent double-feature with The Ruins (2006) though; watch out, nature bites

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DEBATE BATTLE! CGI or NO CGI ... is that the question?

February 23rd 2009 00:12

I’m old school, but I do embrace the future. However when it comes to special effects in horror movies I’m a purist and a traditionalist; I’m more impressed by illusions when they are engineered and realized in front of the camera, not added in weeks, sometimes months, later by digital artists attempting to make something look convincingly real. For the most part there’s something intrinsically fake about CGI (computer generated imaging).

But I’d be narrow-minded, and hardly progressive, if I didn’t appreciate just how important, or at least just how spectacular, CGI can be in the right context. There are many, many movies where it would’ve been impossible to achieve the special effects without CGI. But I’m not here to discuss those movies

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The Machine Girl

February 20th 2009 04:05

And now for something completely over-the-top, no-holds-barred, utterly gratuitous, and sensationally silly: Noburo Igushi’s Kataude mashin gâru, or as its more widely known as: The Machine Girl (2008), a Japanese exploitation indulgence that can only be fully appreciated with your tongue squirming wildly in your cheek as fake blood dribbles down your chin.

Ami (Minase Yashiro), a high school girl with a heart of steel and a high kick to match, is very protective of her younger brother Yu (Ryôsuke Kawamura). Poor Yu and his buddy are bullied to death by Sho Kimura and his gang. Sho’s tyrannical father Ryûji Kimura (Kentaro Shimazu) is a vicious ninja Yakuza (!) boss. When Ami discovers the battered lifeless bodies of her brother and his friend she goes on a rampage of revenge

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The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce

February 19th 2009 02:48

An hour long dramatisation of the supposed true events that lead to the execution of a certain Irish convict in Tasmania, 1824, The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce (2008) is a superb Australian-Irish co-production made for television (it screened on Aussie ABC channel at the end of last year and will no doubt screen again).

Alexander Pearce (Ciarán McMenamin) had been sent to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land to do seven years for thieving. He escaped with seven other men and survived three months in the harsh unforgiving wilderness of Tasmania, a rugged no man’s land where natives and wildlife were scarce. He was caught eventually, imprisoned once more on Sarah’s Island, subjected to hundreds of lashings, and chained to a rock. He absconded once more with another prisoner, but fury got the better of him and he killed the young man. He gave himself up, and this time with a corpse to show for his evil ways, he was tried for murder and hanged at Hobart’s Gaol. His body was dissected for scientific purposes

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Nóz w Wodzie (Knife in the Water)

February 18th 2009 00:58

Roman Polanski’s debut feature (and the only one he made in his native tongue), Knife in the Water (1962), is a brilliantly constructed thriller; a psychological ménage-a-trois where the sexual tension swings like the volatile boom on a yacht, and the power-play between the two men becomes an obstacle course as they fight for pole position, whilst the woman dangles the checkered flag like a carrot in front of a pair of donkeys.

40-something Andrzej (Leon Niemczuk) and his younger wife Krystyna (Jolanta Umencka) are bickering as they drive to a marina. Fate intervenes as a young hitchhiker - who is never named - (Zygmunt Malanowicz) blocks the road, and the couple end up giving him a lift. He coolly charms his way onto their yacht and the attraction and competition between wife, stranger, and husband begins to play out

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My Bloody Valentine

February 16th 2009 00:47

My Bloody Valentine (1981) is legendary among horrorphiles. Until this year the Canadian slasher flick only existed in a heavily butchered version that was ruthlessly savaged by the MPAA. The producers were forced to cut most of its gore effects out in order to receive the R-rating (back then an X-rating – now called an NC-17 - was the kiss of death).

To coincide with remake Lionsgate have coerced Paramount to allow the archived cut footage be re-instated into the original movie and released as a Special Edition DVD. The results are for the most part very satisfying

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My Bloody Valentine (2009)

February 13th 2009 01:06

Woo hoo! An R18 movie in 3-D! So does that mean we’ll get big bare boobies bounced into the audience, as well as spliffs being thrust and pick-axes being thrown, my brother and I mused with grins on our faces. We got more than boobies; we got the full buck naked monty running around screaming her tits off until she was gutted like a fish and her heart plopped into a heart-shaped valentine box. As you can probably tell, I’m in a sarcky mood.

Eventually all the cult classic slasher flicks will be remade, but for now, we’ve got two of the more infamous being released almost back-to-back: My Bloody Valentine (2009) and Friday the 13th (2009). My Bloody Valentine is being released in 3-D (or to be precise REAL-D, as the producers like to call it, which is more or less the same thing only the old red and blue goggles have been replaced by these nifty polarized spectacles made in conjunction with the filming process). Friday the 13th is released today in America, and Friday March 13th down under

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What MOVIE would you REMAKE?

February 12th 2009 06:20

As the steady stream of remakes/re-envisionings, reboots/retakes, re-jigs ... re-whatever, begin to overwhelm the movie market I decided to play Devil’s advocate and pose the question: What movie would you like to see remade and which director would you have at the helm? Keep in mind I’m referring to the “nightmare” criteria I base my blog on.

Here are five movies that were released more than twenty-five years ago, which is decent enough gap between versions. These five movies were all relatively low-budget and were considered trashy at the time, and are generally considered trashy now. A couple of these are downright terrible

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King Kong (2005)

February 11th 2009 00:45

I was lucky enough to see Peter Jackson’s epic remake of the classic King Kong (1933) on arguably the biggest screen in Australasia (well, that used to be its claim to fame); The Embassy Theatre in my old stomping ground of Wellington. This is the same cinema that Jackson invested a substantial amount of money into to have completely redecorated (back to its art deco glory) and refitted with the latest cutting edge audio-visual technology so that The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) could have its Australasian premiere there.

On the day my wife and brother went to see King Kong (2005) the huge cinema had only a few people in it, so we chose prime seats and stretched our legs out. We were suitably primed for what we anticipated to be a real spectacle. And boy was it just

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The THRILL of TALKIN' HORROR

February 10th 2009 03:53

Every Friday from 5pm til 6pm Sydney’s AFTRS (Australian Film, Television & Radio School) hosts an hourly talk with screen and broadcast industry folk offering insight and perspective on different topics. It’s called "Friday on My Mind".

This Friday is the 13th, so the discussion is called Thriller Night
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Man On Wire

February 6th 2009 01:55

Man On Wire (2008), an English-American co-production, is an utterly compelling documentary about one man's obsession and the friends and accomplices who assisted him in realising a nightmarish dream. To most it was a death wish, but to Philippe Petit, it was destiny.

By the sheer fact that the doco deals quite openly with one of my greatest fears: extreme heights, makes it a perfect inclusion for my nightmare blog. This is quite obviously at the “high art” end of my criteria. A superbly constructed and beautifully realised documentary about French acrobat Philippe Petit’s infamous “artistic crime of the century”; his 1974 wirewalk between the two towers of the World Trade Center

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DIY J-HORROR and THAT INFAMOUS HEART-SHAPED BOX

February 5th 2009 01:28

I was surfing on youtube, searching for something or rather, as you do, and inadvertently discovered a couple of semi-precious gems, as you do. Those brief little vignettes put together by someone with perhaps a little too much time on their hands; little crazy raisins lost in the giant fruit salad that is youtube. But I found them. And I’m putting them up on the Horrorphile pedestal.

I’m sure there are countless other raisins like these, but these little wrinkled grapes tickled my fancy. If you like your J-Horror, in particular the brilliance that is Ju-On and Ringu, then you’ll love these cleverly contrived pieces of editing and After Effects which appear to be viral ads for a tutorial site called www.homegrownhorror.com. I’m not sure quite how they do it, but it’s very impressive all the same

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Festen (The Celebration)

February 4th 2009 01:21

Festen (1998, The Celebration) was the first feature produced under the controversial, but widely heralded manifesto known as Dogme95; a Danish creative initiative co-founded by filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. The basic concept was thus; under a “Vow of Chastity” the director of each movie had to comply to series of strict rules and restrictions in order to liberate the filmmaking process and thus achieve a kind of pure cinema – to be precise, to steer as far away as possible from the Hollywood school of filmmaking where, as the director of the fourth Dogme film Mifune explained “a director can be raped by technology … be tyrannised by all the expensive gear”.

The Dogme95 "Vow of Chastity" states that shooting must be done on location, no props can be brought to location, the only sound used must be heard on location (music can only be used if it occurs naturally within a scene), only available light can be used, the camera must be handheld at all times, the film must be in colour, the story must take place in the here and now, no superficial action is allowed (ie murder), genre movies are not accepted, the final format must be Academy ratio 35mm, and the director can not be credited. And finally the director must agree to the following statement: “Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a "work", as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations

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Spoorloos (The Vanishing)

February 3rd 2009 00:41

Spoorloos aka The Vanishing DVD cover art

I first saw the Dutch-French psychological-horror Spoorloos (1988, which in Dutch translates as Without Trace) at a film festival after it was first released. It was under its English-language title The Vanishing. The movie finished and left the entire audience aghast at the denouement; what a brilliantly evil construction. Based on a novel called The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé, who also wrote the screenplay adaptation, and directed by Geroge Sluizer, The Vanishing is easily the most chilling nightmare movie that’s ever come out of the Netherlands.

Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia Wagter (Johanna ter Steege) are young Dutch lovers on vacation in France. There’s an unsettling incident at the beginning where they run out of petrol in a mountainside tunnel. Rex takes the gerry-can and abandons Saskia in the car, much to her dismay. He returns, but she is no longer in the car. He drives toward the light at the end and her silhouetted figure appears. She is upset, but forgives him

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FACES of HORROR

February 2nd 2009 01:50

An American Werewolf in London nightmare

I decided to put together a gallery of some of the most recognisable and most affecting faces from horror movies. With the exception of Max Schreck as Graf Orlock in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), all the figures presented are from the modern horror era. I was tempted to put Boris Karlof in amongst them, but to be honest, as seminal as his bolted-neck, square head is, he’s strangely endearing in a mutant teddy-bear kind of way.

I’ve listed them in chronological order, so there’s no this face is more horrifying than that. It’s simply a list of thirteen faces that have come to define the genre. One can argue that several of these mugs have become over-exposed, and so their shock effect has been softened. And one can argue that several of these are not about the actual face, but what exactly is behind the mask …? The mask becomes the face which enhances the mystery which intensifies the dread

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Posted By: Bryn - Category: lists

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