ok lets all shit our pants to something old: pre-2006 horror film thread

Also Fritz Lieber as crazy old man!

Saw Equinox as a kid, on family vacation with other kids, late night, all clustered around an old tv. Stuck with me, with the stop-motion animation, the creepy park ranger, and the last scene with its eerie music cue. Will have to reborrow that from the library.

I've been very curious about Equinox as, on paper, it seems like kind of an outlier among the films generally Collected by Criterion.

I certainly doubt it would have crossed their mind to issue it if not for the Dennis Muren connection.

I'm glad that Criterion over past decade or so has definitely been branching out to restore more obscure/cult/non-prestige films

You know, every once in a while I try to give Fulci a chance, but I think he's just really shitty. Like, I was watching "Zombie" today, and it's just so dull and dirty, badly acted and badly shot, not unlike '70s porn. Just shoddy and barely plotted, with the occasional shaky close up of something gross. I know at some point or another I've seen "City of the Dead" and "The Beyond," too, and same thing: just totally artless. It's like they boil down to "this is the one where the zombie, nude woman and a shark tussle underwater," or "this is the one where the person vomits their innards." Just don't get it. Unlike Argento, who has, I dunno, an aesthetic, I guess, and something in the way of directorial chops. Just imo, I know the guy (Fulci) has his fans.

whoever has written this blog has done some sterling work in analysing and writing about folk horror films

https://chariotrpg.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1

Josh- I'm with you on some of that but I don't think he's totally artless. There's good stuff in some of his films and occasionally they have a compelling look.

Dog Latin- I must read that link soon.

Josh, have you tried Lizard in a Woman's Skin? It's obviously part of that wave of gialli ripping off the Argento animal films but it really has a unique style to it and (in my memory at least) leans more into the post-Antonioni/Blow-Up urban anomie stuff. Or at least, while it's still silly- sinister hippies, etc- it at least seems to understand what it's stealing from and gleefully turning into exploitation, unlike most Italian horror films that fail to do even a little bit of their homework and are content to just make a copy of a copy of etc.

Two other things to note: one, it does have an extremely gross shock dog vivisection moment (thankfully not real animal cruelty as in yr various Mondo/cannibal films, but an upsettingly realistic simulation of same from E.T./Possession's Carlo Rambaldi), and two, it has a better Morricone score than anything he did for Argento. By miles and miles. Seriously, it's so much better than the three animal films' scores that it's kind of embarrassing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELTBBDyk2mI

Intriguing! Reads a bit like a trashy take on Cat People. I don't mind giallo films, because they tend to be more atmospheric, so I'll give it a shot.

Disagree that Fulci is 'artless', though his best work hasn't always been well-served by home video presentations. Interesting interview here with film restorer James White, who oversaw Arrow's delicious Zombie Flesh Eaters restoration from a couple of years back - this is the most relevant passage:

The reviews we've received for Zombie have been overwhelmingly positive - considering how it was represented on VHS here in Britain for so many years, I think people were amazed to see the film looking as good as it did! That said, It shouldn't really surprise anyone familiar with Fulci's work - he's a director with an amazing eye, the camerawork by Sergio Salvati is frequently stunning, and the combined use of locations, colour, and music by Fabio Frizzi make Zombie one of the best films of its kind. That said, it does bring up something interesting in terms of your question about properly serving a given film's aesthetic. Might some viewers actually prefer the rough VHS-era representation they grew up with, complete with faded colour, horrible sound, video snow and tape damage? It certainly makes for a very different viewing experience, but one I suppose that should be treated as just as valid, as it was viewed by so many people, particularly in this country, in exactly this way.

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2013/03/film-restoration-in-the-digital-domain-a-chat-with-james-white.html

I generally don't like that fetishization of dated reproduction but I must say I'm a little attached to my washed out looking copy of Tokyo Fist, but I do want to see the remastered version someday because the stills looked great.

It is a good question, one that no doubt Tarantino and Rodriguez took onto consideration. Anyway, the copy of "Zombie" I watched certainly looked like shit, but I think it was ripped from the/a Blu Ray. Regardless, the problems I have with it, no degree of restoration would help. I don't like the acting, the writing, the camera work especially, basically everything technical and beyond that imo makes a movie "good." Like, I'd describe the first "Friday the 13th" movie as pretty "artless," too, and I even like that better than "Zombie." Just to bring up Argento again, or even Sergio Leone, something doesn't have to be perfect on all fronts to be a masterpiece. Those guys clearly put a lot of thought into every single shot of many of their films. But at least when it comes to "Zombie," it feels rushed and sloppy and half-assed, like it was made over a weekend (with an extra day of stolen NYC footage). "He's a director with an amazing eye, the camerawork by Sergio Salvati is frequently stunning," come on, not in this case. From the shaky gratuitous zooms into equally gratuitous piles of grue to the boring scenes of babbling people in between the almost randomly distributed set/shock pieces, I stand by my '70s porn comparison. Romero isn't the most artful of directors, either, but "Zombie" half-cousin "Dawn of the Dead" is Malick by comparison.

I suppose I like the set decoration of "Zombie" ok, so there's a plus, if you're into plates of rotting food and cluttered island hospitals.

No, I think lots of the shots in Zombie are excellent (the opening sequence on the boat with the fat zombie, or the splinter in the eye moment, have become iconic genre imagery), they're just not always framed or presented in the 'acceptable' style of dominant Hollywood cinema (though the way the zoom camera is used in Fulci and Franco movies has things in common with Altman's visual strategies in the 1970s). Fulci's best films are stylistically consistent and easily identifiable - they have an atmosphere that speaks to a unique European Gothic sensibility at work.

I'm not really a fan of Zombie but my favourite part is the zombie out of the ground. I like my corpses properly rotted.

Yeah, that specific Zombie is great, even if it's one of those make-up jobs that makes the actor all but immobile. It just sort of awkwardly rises from the grave, bites that woman who is just standing there watching, and then gets its head bashed in. I recognize scenes like that as iconic, it's the rest of the movie as a whole I have a problem with. I did think of Altman, actually, while I was watching and thinking about the zooms I didn't like. One difference is that Altman's zooms added to the narrative, often, by picking things out of the crowd. But literally the first scene in Zombie, before the credits and the boat, is a covered corpse sitting up in its hospital bed, a man shooting it in the head, and then a long, slow, shaky close-up of the brains leaking out.

So this deviation from "acceptable" style you note, xpost, was this ... intentional? Like, as an affront to "dominant Hollywood cinema?" Or was it largely ad hoc and improvised? It never occurred to me, tbh, to consider what I think of as "artless" as any sort of aesthetic. I've never read an interview with Fulci.

"City of the Living Dead" I recall having a lot of that Gothic stuff at work, like a grimmer, grittier take on Hammer's mist and graveyards and stuff. I just never feel there's a script supporting everything on screen, just a load of ... stuff happening, to various degrees of grossness and competence. If the films of his I've seen were all sort of fever-dreamy I could get with that, but there's just enough of a pretense toward, well, sense that it just makes it all the more apparent (to me, I guess) how far short they're falling. Again, to bring up Argento, is "Suspiria" perfect, or "acceptable," or in the style of dominant Hollywood cinema? No, it's garish and over the top, and borderline incoherent at times. But no one could say it lacks vision. Fulci ... is his lack of vision in fact his vision? (Which is a similar tack to "are his films better the worse they look?").

My ranking of the Fulci I've seen

Black Cat
House By The Cemetery
City Of The Living Dead
The Beyond
Zombi
Manhattan Baby

I know people really rate Lizard In A Woman's Skin and some like New York Ripper but I'm not interested. I'll like to get the soundtrack of the former though.

The Beyond made no sense, but had some really great visual, effects, atmosphere, and music. Seems like this is common for Fulci films

As I've suggested in some form elsewhere, I wish the Blu-ray/dvd release of every vhs-era genre film came with a fuzzy, washed-out version of the movie (maybe with like five minutes in the middle of the movie missing because your brother accidentally used the tape to record something else) as a special feature.

watch Lizard, Duckling, Beatrice Cenci, and Four of the Apocalypse. Then we can talk about whether or not Fulci was an artless director.

Scream Factory just did the "Retro VHS Version" thing as an extra on their BD release of brand-shiny-new throwback slasher Fender Bender. the movie was nothing special, but the retro presentation is undeniably preferable.

Similarly, my all time favorite horror movies (TCM, Eaten Alive, Hills Have Eyes, Deranged, The Corpse Grinders, Basket Case) are all ones I saw first at a drive-in or midnight theater showing. Setting definitely made those experiences better than sitting in front of my TV.

I always thought Candyman was pretty clever. Its probably the only horror movie with a Philip Glass sound track. Tony Todd also did a really creepy Xfiles around the same time.

The thing for me about Fulci (and a lot of other Italo directors) is that they are definitely not artless - they just rate style over sense, and often their style ideas are beyond their budget, and then it becomes a strange mishmash of beauty and trash. But they clearly have a vision and a purpose, and it makes for great if slightly perplexing films.

Maybe artless was too strong a word; the guy has made a lot of films and, totally, the odds are that a few of the many/most I have not seen are OK. But re: Zombie specifically (because it's the one I just watched and the only of his I have seen more than once, and probably his most iconic/referenced film), there is just nothing about it that's any good. Aside from a couple of "did you hear about the scene where ..." shocks, there's really nothing objectively going for it. Again: acting, script, direction ... it's not scary, it's not funny, it's not smart, it's definitely not stylish. It's just kind of grim and gormless and zombie-turgid. Which is perhaps appropriate, given the subject. Just a slow-moving, maggot-spewing ugly corpse of a movie.

Fulci was first and foremost an intellectual. a scholar and critic turned artist. he craved acceptance into the inner circle of Italy's creative elite. as a studio screenwriter and filmmaker, he'd had a string of commercial successes, but the politics of his more personal projects - and particularly his scathing contempt for the Catholic Church - made him persona non grata, if not thoroughly toxic to those he was so eager to impress. they were willing to regard him as a colleague but not as a peer, and the graphic excesses of his films gave them an excuse to dismiss him as a inferior artist. it may not seem so to us now but, as an unofficial sequel to Romero's Zombi, Fulci's modestly budgeted Zombi 2 was a relatively high-profile project. Fulci was chosen to direct because of his eye for grue, not in spite of it. banned in some countries, censored in most, the combination of carnage and controversy gave Fulci his biggest worldwide box-office success. it also brought him unexpected adulation from the grindhouse crowd, whose appreciation Fulci grudgingly embraced. he resigned himself to being a somewhat successful exploitation director, and his art suffered. he never denied it, though i think the appreciation became more reciprocal as his health and career were both in decline. there is no doubt that he consciously pandered to his new fans' appetite for gore. i'd still say that even his most nonsensical films excel in conveying atmosphere, in the best tradition of countrymen like Freda and Bava, and that he was always able to get the best out of longtime creative collaborators like Frizzi and De Rossi.

I saw Cat in the Brain recently which was this kind of ridiculous satire of... something. Critics of his horror violence? It didn't seem like he took himself or his career too seriously with that one! But granted this was Fulci towards the end of his life.

Cat is his debased 8 1/2!

I had the bizarre experience of seeing most of Black Cat with the reels out of order at an Exhumed Films event here in Philly a few months ago- it was (iirc) the third film on the bill, so people were a little tired to begin with, and the general hallucinatory atmosphere didn't help, but at one point Mimsy Farmer's character met- for the first time- a character she'd been sharing scenes with for like 20 minutes and it clicked. I'm still waiting for the appropriate amount of time to pass to try it again, because I do remember really enjoying what I saw. And not just because I'm a sucker for anything with Mimsy Farmer, or Patrick Magee, or Pino Donaggio's music.

i wish Arrow had included that version of The Black Cat as a bonus.

you should watch Polselli's The Reincarnation of Isabel. it's a bit like that. on purpose, i think.

I'll check it out! Descriptions I'm seeing make it look absolutely mental, which is job one for this kind of movie

CASTLE OF THE LIVING DEAD

A theatre troupe comes to the castle of Christopher Lee, who collects people like statues in his gallery, preserved forever. Donald Sutherland plays two characters, including an old witch. Some of the film is shot in the Bomarzo Park Of Monsters.
It's not very good but not particularly bad either, a bit more action orientated than most gothic horror films, running around the castle and garden. The heroic dwarf might have been unusual for the time but the crappy romance wasn't. The dubbing is often an annoyance.

I've got another 25 films lined up for this thread, ohohohohohoho!

MANSION OF THE GHOST CAT/BLACK CAT MANSION

Follows much the same formula as Ghost Cat Of Otama Pond and similar films. This film is less shy about showing you the old ghost cat woman (and her silly ears), and she practically dances with her prey as she pulls and pushes them around, which is quite fun and enlivens the overfamiliar plot.

I have to say I am a bit tantalized by the Bomarzo/Donald Sutherland as old witch/heroic dwarf combo...?

I had no idea Sutherland was the witch when I was watching. Oddly the british certificate for the film is 18 but it's fairly tame. Maybe the hangings jacked up the certificate.

THE WOMAN VAMPIRE

Another Nakagawa horror film but in black and white. It's not great but there's quite a number of unusual things about it.

- It's set in modern Japan (1959) with some jazz in the soundtrack and cubist art in the galleries.
- The "castle" looks like a heap of rocks from the outside, as if designed by a cubist architect, some of the interior rooms have this quality too.
- The vampire has a dwarf servant, which isn't unusual but he also has a big topless bald guy who keeps his arms wide apart like a warrior deity statue.
- This mythology has shogun and Christian history
- The vampire is a painter who hates the moon, when he's exposed to it he turns more vampiric and gets the urge to bite women. He tends to favour rubenesque women (maybe this was normal in 50s Japan?), who he immortalizes and keeps in a gallery (kind of like Christopher Lee in Castle Of The Living Dead, but they died in that film without decaying).
- The vampire seems to immortalize women by beating them in the chest with a candle-staff.

THE LAST WINTER

A Larry Fessenden film with Ron Perlman. Environmental/mythical horror. It's okay, I think it really damaged itself with the cgi and some odd song choices. The survival drama is its strongest aspect. In the credits it says they used footage from a Herzog film.

Yeah the last winter didn't quite work for me.

DRACULA/HORROR OF DRACULA
DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS
DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE
TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA
SCARS OF DRACULA
DRACULA A.D. 1972
THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA

In case you're not aware, these are all the Dracula films Christopher Lee did for Hammer (there's another Lee Dracula film by Jess Franco which I haven't seen, apparently the "making of" documentary is better than the actual film).

Apart from Scars, I got all of these in a Spanish box set, which has a few glitches in some of the films.

I've seen a few of these before and I was well aware I probably wouldn't love any of them, but I'm so into gothic horror style that they might have been worth a shot.

Horror, Prince and Risen are okay, roughly as good as each other, then Taste and Scars drop the quality a bit. 72 is really bad but Satanic Rites is bloody atrocious, the worst by a long distance, incredibly boring.

Horror and Prince are the most consistent in their style. 72 and Satanic Rites are set in the 70s and are very stylistically messy. 72 is just a laughably silly attempt to update the series but that's much preferable to Satanic Rites' woeful attempt at modern sophistication.
The first five films have enough pleasant gothic images to make them fairly enjoyable and Lee looks really great when his eyes are bloodshot. Risen has this odd recurring habit of framing some scenes with a hint of yellow.

There's not much attempt at keeping a consistent mythology or set of supernatural rules, and I don't really mind that, so I thought it was a mistake for Prince to open with a recap.

They recycle lots of things and people do often complain the films are too similar. There's a few instances of bar-men going all quiet when anything to do with Dracula is brought up. There's three films in which vampire women pretend to be innocent, pleading for someone to help them escape. Two films have a decadent dandy who persuades people to do a dark ritual.

Unintentional Humor: old British vampire films have a problem with teeth baring scenes. Scars has a silly scene of a priest gently trying to fend off a bat that's eating his face. 72 has all sorts of silly stuff.
It isn't particularly bad but Taste has a funny scene of Dracula going around throwing heavy things at the heroes.

Horror Of Dracula has two really badly integrated comic relief characters.

Scars has some really awful cheeky British sex humour that slips into Carry On and Confessions Of A Window Cleaner territory.

Scars and 72 have blatant "look at these breasts!" scenes. Like on the level of anime fanservice.

Taste opens with an odd scene in a carriage. Is that guy supposed to be disabled? It seemed pretty clumsy.

These films have some of the most pathetic deaths for a major movie monster. In Prince he's scared by small areas of running water and falls under the ice. In Taste he's repelled by a few crosses, has a bad memory then feebly falls to his death. In Satanic Rites he's misled into thorny tree bushes which make him so helpless he can't defend himself against a stake.

I think Brides Of Dracula is a better Hammer film than these even if the male vampire isn't as good as Christopher Lee.

THE GHOSTS OF KASANE SWAMP/THE DEPTHS (1957)

Pretty standard stuff. Social ranks, bastards, betrayal and tricky ghosts. It's okay.

I got to intvw Fessenden once. Neat dude.

I might try Wendigo sometime.

Wendigo is OK, like the snow one it's more spooky than scary.

At this point, scary is so rare that you can't really fault something for not being scary. And there's some types of scary that don't interest me.

yeah. the best horror is the stuff you think about the next day and then the next week and even a month later you're saying 'you know what? I can't shake that idea'. 'scary' is ephemeral. the best horrors stick with tou

For me, the ideal horror and fantasy is all about ecstasy and beauty.

I want to feel like this little girl.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njATcf2roio

I love that vid/gif more than p much anything else on the web

Xpost There are aspects of Wendigo that are supposed to be scary - like the titular monster. But the general mood is enough to make up for the lack of scares, just as his snow movie's mood made up for the lame vengeful snow spirits.

Was thinking today how genuinely scary/stressful/dread inducing the first couple of Paranormal Activity movies are, even when you know what's coming. Can't remember what anyone here thinks of them.