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

Distinguished by a Humphrey Searle score as well (see also The Haunting)

What Dreams May Come - One of those extremely sentimental Robin Williams films that everyone hates. Based on a Richard Matheson novel. Very beautifully shot, special effects mostly hold up very well, lots of panoramas of heaven and hell based on classic paintings (all credited at the end too). Herzog makes a brief amusing appearance in hell . Quite a few characters swap skin colour in heaven.
It doesn't modulate the sentimentality quite the right way to totally work for me but I think this is really underrated. The ending is very cute (there is an alternate ending with a questionable concept of atoning for suicide, which I gather is from the novel) and this is a better Vincent Ward film than Navigator.

Mystics In Bali - Indonesian film which is sort of an underground classic now; the best known flying headed witch film. Special effects are creaky, actors are of an extremely uneven ability (one of the supporting actors is an old pro and the lead actress was just an ordinary German tourist who had no acting experience) but it works well enough because it's got an unreal, oddly sedate tone to it (nobody seems overly impressed by all the crazy shit happening) and everyone is dubbed with cartoonish voice actors. The old witch is fun and there's little novelties like the fireball fight.

I love Mystics In Bali, yes the effects are almost Bollywood standard at times but it rattles along splendidly and everyone's performance is at least enjoyable.

KURONEKO was damn good. Gorgeous.

I like it slightly better than Onibaba, there's so much black onscreen.

Coscarelli's book may be of interest to some of you.

http://thebedlamfiles.com/nonfiction/true-indie/

Groves delivers again.

http://thebedlamfiles.com/commentary/the-taiwanese-inferno/

THE OTHERS (2001) - Nicole Kidman looks goddamn amazing in this. The whole movie has a great palette and style. Unfortunately it's been so long I already knew the twist going on, but it was still a cool, stylish throwback to '50s horror - sort of a black and white film done in early '00s color.

M. Night Shyamalan's THE VILLAGE (2004) - I'm seeing some very positive appraisals on Letterboxd and... no. This is bad. Good cast and some decent film-making overall (Deakins helped a lot), but the story and infamous twist ending is so awful it makes the movie pretty irredeemable - everyone was right back then. Really glad Shyamalan's learned to rein himself in as I liked his last two, THE VISIT and SPLIT. Looking forward to GLASS.

the village is bad, though like all the terrible shyamalan films, it has a fantastic JN Howard score

didn't realize he used the same composer all the way up through After Earth, damn

I've been practically living at the Quad Cinema in the West Village lately, taking in as many of their Sapphic Vampires series as possible. Very impressed by the diversity of approaches to this basic idea - the Hammer Films style is nothing like Jean Rollin's style which is nothing like Jesus Franco's style, and so on...

Hammer's The Vampire Lovers works brilliantly thanks to flawless casting, Ingrid Pitt foremost, but really all the women in this are perfect. The film uses subtext expertly. Twins of Evil is an amusing follow-up; the actual twin actresses have a loony appeal, and the moment when Peter Cushing announces his realization that he's dealing with actual TWINS OF EVIL is priceless.

The Belgian Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness deserves its high reputation, with the casting of Delphine Seyrig as the main vampire being crucial. Too bad the 35mm print the Quad showed was so washed out because this is a film with an amazing color palette.

I have plenty of time for the bold weirdness of Jean Rollin's films: The Nude Vampire, The Shiver of the Vampires, and Fascination are all audacious and right out there on the edge of incoherence. These films' eroticism is uniquely matter-of-fact, not teasing, and the director seems to be starting from a comfort zone of transgression and coming to horror, rather than the reverse.

Jesus Franco's Vampyros Lesbos may be the most genuinely erotic of them all, something of a masterpiece - certainly one of Franco's best films. Again casting is crucial, and he nails it with Soledad Miranda and Ewa Strömberg. Franco does the reality/dream confusion better than anyone.

Tony Scott's The Hunger is solidly entertaining, though I wish that the idea suggested by the earlier scenes - that it's all a sort of music video - had carried through the entire film. I think Susan Sarandon is right that the ending doesn't really make sense.

It's in Vicente Aranda's The Blood-Spattered Bride that the theme of the inadequacy of men, common to all these films, is most pronounced, with the lead actor here being the creepiest in a field of creeps.

Of the films in this series I missed, I'm most curious about Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses, which predates the circa-1970 explosion of this mini-genre by ten years.

I would also recommend Universal's Dracula's Daughter (1936) as an all-subtext precursor to this particular subgenre.

Right, that was in the series too - I saw that years ago, time to revisit

I gotta get to the Quad one of these days, love the programming they have there.
Vampire Lovers is great, didn't realize there was a series of these movies.
Vampyros Lesbos is all-time, I love it.
The Hunger is awesome. The ending doesn't make sense because it was studio-mandated to leave it open for a sequel, it really should've ended like five minutes before.

Josefa- Have you seen british film Vampyres (1974)? It's definitely in this type.

I do appreciate the matter-of-factness in Rollin.

Twins Of Evil is my favorite of the Karnstein (?) trilogy.

Wish there were a few more films like The Hunger.

Yeah, I've seen Vampyres and own the DVD - that's another to rewatch, I remember it being well made

Damn, '50s version of War of the Worlds is as uncompromising as any film I've seen from that era. Kinda figured they'd pussyfoot with the genocide and destruction and apocalyptic vibe but nope. Really well done, to boot.

in addition to lords of salem last weekend, i watched another satanic horror called evilspeak from 1981, the message of which is that satan is incredibly awesome and will help you destroy your enemies if you summon him through a computer. i loved this movie so much though i should warn anybody sensitive to it that there's a pretty brutal dog death (not directly on camera) in it

fell asleep during the Blackcoat's Daughter last night :(

pretty sure that's the intended effect

(but this is the pre-2005 thread shakey)

haha oops

Brad, when you're trying to sell people on Evilspeak, it's important to note that it's an essential entry in the 'past-prime Clint Howard inexplicably trying to pass himself off as a teenager' subgenre (see also: Rock n' Roll High School). I think they mention in one of the special features that he was actually wearing a toupee for the film.

Why they ever tried to pull this trick with him of all people is beyond me. Dude looked like was in his early fifties as a child actor.

In a July 2017 interview for Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast, Howard also revealed that the film's producers made him pay for his own toupée.

lmao

howard is really great in it

but yes he does not remotely look like a high schooler

The label Screenbound uploaded this trailer but isn't showing up on amazon and there's no details of the release date or format. But then another source says Second Sight (a better label) is releasing it on bluray next year, so I'm guessing it changed hands but it's still on the Screenbound site and youtube page. The trailer looks stylish and great, so I'm tempted to get the Australian bluray (part of the Ozploitation Classics series) rather than wait. But Second Sight are such a great label so I should wait.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGhpQWhlzsw

i was just completely blown away by bob clark’s deathdream/dead of night. it could be the best horror film of the ‘70s? so sad and haunted and traumatized, the performances of the parents are outstanding, the cinematography is perfectly desolate and dark. i love black christmas to death but what i just saw was someone’s masterpiece

great movie!

Bob Clark had the weirdest fucking career

I was a tad let down by it but it is pretty decent. What I remember most was Ormsby in the commentary saying how awful he felt about making his son cry for the film.

Clark definitely has a weird career, he was planning to remake Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, I'm quite fond of the orignal. A Christmas Story and Murder By Decree are supposed to be good but I never cared enough to try them.

deathdream rules, deserves to be much better known

i was just completely blown away by bob clark’s deathdream/dead of night. it could be the best horror film of the ‘70s? so sad and haunted and traumatized, the performances of the parents are outstanding, the cinematography is perfectly desolate and dark. i love black christmas to death but what i just saw was someone’s masterpiece

Agreed with every bit of this. Of all the movies not typically mentioned when the topic turns to great American horror movies c. 1968-1978, Deathdream is maybe the one movie I deeply wish was commonly accepted as being up there with Texas Chain Saw Massacre, NOTLD, Carrie, etc.

I want to see it so bad now!

(Loved the hell out of Black Christmas)

The Singing Ringing Tree - I mostly heard about this film as something that scared children and was supposed to be particularly strange, so I was disappointed. It feels overlong for such a short film but it does have a bit of charm, just doesn't stand that high as a fairy tale film.

The Female Vampire - This is even more directly pornographic than a lot of similar vampire films and it helps that it's Lina Romay. It could have used a tighter edit (but the alternate "horror" version of the film is much shorter, I only watched parts of that, it has bloody biting that isn't in the main version), perhaps more could have been made of the setting and some of the sex music spoils an otherwise nice elegiac tone. Similar to Rollin's Iron Rose, a lot of the otherworldly stuff is conveyed through the dialogue. I think I like this most of the small handful of Franco films I know.

I saw Succubus a while ago and it was by far my least favorite, with all that lazy lounge party stuff I hate from this era. Sort of reminds me of Spring Breakers (I don't expect anyone to come with me on this), I could almost hear James Franco whispering "spring break...spring break..."

A film Old Lunch mentioned above that I'm very excited about coming on UK bluray: White Reindeer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECyp3fJBI20

joe bob briggs did a phantasm marathon for his holiday special on shudder and it is a delightful way to watch those movies, whether for the first or thousandth time

they’re also all masterpieces except for the last one

even/especially iii, the genre-confusion middle chapter

White Reindeer being released in the UK is the first time I've seriously considered getting a region-free player. I doubt it'll get a US release.

been thinking about going region free for a while. there's of stuff that never comes out here from Hong Kong and Arrow Video releases in the UK

xp shiiit maybe i'll actually sub to Shudder for that

Sometimes Criterion goes for films in the Eureka Masters Of Cinema series.

I've had a multiregion dvd player since 2007 because it was an absolute necessity for a UK horror fan in the dvd era, because our selection was utter shit. But the bluray era has been very good to the UK.

I still don't have a multiregion bluray player, I've been scared by stories of software updates overwriting the region capabilities. Since there are only 3 regions now, it isn't totally outrageous to own 3 bluray players.

starting to seem more and more like the exorcist iii is my favorite movie

no movie looks or moves quite like it, except of course the ninth configuration

god I need to watch the ninth configuration again

My mom took me to see Exorcist III on my 13th birthday, so it's a sentimental favorite on top of being very good.

Fun story that reifies the thread title: when I went to see Exorcist III in the theatre, someone actually shit their pants in the big jump-scare scene.

i am an inveterate Exorcist II booster yet... I have never seen III

i love exorcist ii too of course but iii is a legit great movie (like i don't have to prepare anyone for how much of a weird messy misfire it is like ii), just very strange. it's very funny in its quieter moments which can be disarming bc the loud moments are so frightening. it's also a great sequel in that the overwhelming sadness of the first one is carried into it and deepened

also like just an all-time great scenery chewing performance from brad dourif, he's terrifying

really beautiful soulful george c. scott and ed flanders performances too