Traditional Horror
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
One of the earliest "slasher" films, or even a precursor to that genre (depending who you ask), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the only such film I've seen that has truly creeped me out. The serial killing and gruesome deaths don't get to me as much as the familial perversion - the group desire for carnage and cannibalism. I was about 14 or 15 when I first saw the film. My best friend was spending the night and I lived in a relatively rural, sparsely populated area with neighbors who were known to be crazy and aggressive. After the movie was over, we were both legitimately terrified by the possibility of a real-life version of Leatherface's family living nearby. We couldn't sleep at all. Every time a dog or coyote howled, we jumped in terrified certainty that some depravity of humanity was coming for us. What made, and still makes, this movie so scary to me is the thought that someone could, feasibly, with training and an intelligence level similar to Leatherface's, become an unwitting killing machine. And people are weird. People do all kinds of messed up stuff to their kids and teach them all kinds of weird things. You know, like in Frailty.To add to that, while one psychopathic monster might be conquerable, an entire family of crazies enabling each other is pretty hard to overcome. Especially when even the strangers you turn to for help don't have your best interests in mind. Look at movies like Deliverance, or even White Lightnin' and Winter's Bone. People in backwards, isolated places get crazy and dangerous and they kill people. And it's just par for the course. When the humanity of not just one person, but of an entire family, gets degraded to the point of murder for sport and food, that's pretty horrifying. For that reason, House of 1000 Corpses was no less terrifying, despite it's similarity to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That's not behavior I can get acclimated to.
For more crazy family bizarreness:
Spider Baby (1964)
Admittedly more of a camp-fest than a horror film, Spider Baby nonetheless contains a lot of weird family members again enabling each other to be totally not socially appropriate. And cannibalism. And basement-dwelling people, which totally get me every time. (Though I don't consider it to be a horror film, check out The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, where Jodie Foster has a sort of dungeon family of her own.) There is, again, a lot of depravity of human nature, though this time it has an alleged genetic cause. What the movie lacks in atmosphere and effective suspense it makes up for in sheer outrageousness, leading me to wonder just how insane the writer and director, Jack Hill, might be himself. Also, keep an eye out for Sid Haig. That's right. Sid Haig of House of 1000 Corpses Captain Spaulding fame. It's all starting to come together.
I think most of us can agree that The Shining is a pretty darn creepy film. I'm no fan of Stephen King and even less a fan of his mostly innocuous magical-slice-of-life stories (that, admittedly, often get turned into pretty legit horror films). The Shining as a novel is more about alcoholism, topiaries, and a magical negro a la John Coffey in The Green Mile. But Stanley Kubrick evolved all these otherwise goofy details into an incredibly sinister and tense whole where the distinction between madness and the supernatural becomes blurred into something malicious, rather than mystical. One of the reasons The Shining is so effective is the same reason it used to irk me a bit as a teenager: there is so much left unsaid. The hotel is haunted, yeah, I get it. But how do all these strange images come together to make a coherent story? They don't. That's what's so unsettling. And this movie contains the single most heart-stoppingly terrifying scene I have ever seen in any film ever. You're following Shelley Duvall's journey up a staircase at a weird angle. The genius soundtrack is incorporating these demonic chanting noises. There's a room at the end of the hallway and you don't want to look in because you know what terrible things are in these hotel rooms. Shelley Duvall's at the farthest edge of terror; she can't get any more scared. Something weird is going on in that room and you don't want to know what it is. But the camera forces you to see, zooming in cruelly on two faces staring back at you, TOTALLY BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL. LIKE THEY CAN ACTUALLY SEE YOU, THE VIEWER! You stare at them, they stare at you. The room is dim and your brain can't react quickly enough to process what you're seeing. Then it's over, but you know what you saw. Shelley Duvall saw it too. Somehow you and a character on your TV/movie/computer screen just stumbled upon the same thing - something neither one of you were meant to see. Too intense. Stephen King, by the way, "remembers hating" this film.
The Orphanage is filled with all kinds of creepy images: burlap sacks over heads, dolls where babies should be, the bones of murdered children. The protagonist, Laura, loses her son and must piece together a series of supernatural clues in order to find him. There are some pretty scary scenes, which include mysterious noises in an old house, a (possible) ghost child playing hide-and-seek, and a total twist of fate for a suspect old lady, but the creepiest parts of the film are the things you discover when the mysteries are solved.
A year before Stephen King wrote The Shining, a movie came out about a couple and their son who house-sit an evil-spirit-possessed mansion. One of the reasons Burnt Offerings is so interesting is that it contains so many elements that reappear in later movies. There's a mysterious elderly relative who stays upstairs in a locked room and "sleeps most of the time; you won't even see her; leave her food outside her door," later recreated in the throwback film The House of the Devil. There's also a menacing undertaker/chauffeur(?) ready with a casket, a lot like The Tall Man in Phantasm, but this guy's way more foreboding (trust me). Side note: My favorite scene in the film is when the hearse-looking automobile you know contains that sunglassed-out creeper is coming up the drive in the distance and it's just a matter of time before you'll have to deal with his not-at-all reassuring smile again. Burnt Offerings isn't the best ever and actually can be a little plodding and redundant at times but there's a pretty good payoff at the end and I'll graze a spoiler just close enough to say that it again resembles The Shining. As you probably already know, the house always wins.
Psycho (1960)
I don't have a whole lot to say on this one because I feel like everybody else's love for this film greatly overshadows my own. Ninety percent of the movie is pretty disposable to me - yes, even the shower scene (blasphemy, I know). I really only included it because of how much the ending shocked me as a kid and how it kind of made me want to become a psychologist (which I am now studying to be). If I'm a sucker for anything, it's emotionally upsetting twists and this movie has the mother of them all. (Psycho puns never get old!)
Non-Traditional Horror
I imagine Picnic at Hanging Rock is not typically considered to be a horror film because it doesn't contain any of the traditional trademarks of horror, like cheap jump-inducing scares, gore, or monsters. It is, however, the most frightening film I have seen, by a large margin. A group of Victorian-era Australian girls goes to a nearby picturesque location for a lazy, pastel-toned picnic away from their boarding school. There is sexual tension, socioeconomic prejudice, and headmistress cruelty, but all of these interpersonal aspects are painted in with the most watered-down of watercolors. The real conflicts here are time and nature and discovery. Some of the girls go missing while exploring a landmark of giant labyrinthine formations known as Hanging Rock, an ominous title in its own right. We are distant, demigod viewers. We witness things happening, but we can only guess at their meaning or cause. It's like Edouard Manet's painting The Luncheon on the Grass (forgive my brain for connecting the obvious) - we have visual evidence but we still can't deduce the absolute truth. We can only guess at what has happened and what is happening. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, there are any number of culprits: strange young men, a greedy headmistress, a sadistic teacher, jealous classmates, devil worship, pagan rituals, accidental misadventure, or the cold and uncaring brutality of Nature itself. What makes this movie so unsettling is the impossibility of making solid and completely inclusive sense of what we have seen. We are witness to some incriminating behavior but it doesn't all add up and, frustratingly, it never will. No matter how many times I watch the movie and how much evidence you show me to support your theory of what happened, I will never be fully convinced of any specific explanation. And, of course, it isn't so much what happened that's important. It's the meaning behind it - that we can and will be swept out of existence at any moment to who-really-knows-what fate. And as much as we feel that something sinister and unnatural (or maybe completely natural) happened, and as much as our brains try put together a coherent explanation, it's the pieces that were left out - the unknown - that are so effective in this film. It's a strange feeling to have your mind work on overdrive to make sense of something unfamiliar or unrecognizable (like the dog/bear scene in The Shining) and Picnic at Hanging Rock takes that to an extreme.
Hot damn, this is a fantastic film. Ultra-threatening Robert Mitchum is the prototypical obsessive sociopath, bent on obtaining stolen treasure from a dead man's family. Eerily pronouncing himself a reverend, Mitchum's character marries and kills the man's widow while tormenting her children to find out the location of the hidden money. Night of the Hunter is atmospheric as all heck, taking place mainly (you guessed it!) at night and making use of shadows better than, I'd argue, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The two resourceful and fortune-toting children make their way along the Depression-era Ohio River, a pretty bleak scene on its own. Mitchum is always in middle-distance pursuit, having apparently otherworldly tracking skills and a death-proof drive for the very money the children possess. The tenacity of Mitchum's character alone is frightening, but his actual persona, complete with the iconic love/hate knuckle tattoos, is hellish. You know the fate of the children must be death - he's already killed their mother and there's no way a couple of kids can outsmart or outfight a grown man. But then (spoiler?), salvation comes in the form of a super tough grandmother figure with endless Christian charity, played by Lillian Gish (!), who takes the children in and protects them through the night, shotgun in lap, while Mitchum's figure waits tauntingly in the yard. In one of my favorite scenes, Gish sings a church hymn duet with Mitchum because, you know, she's tough enough to sit down with the Devil and out-intimidate him. Shot-by-shot the scariest movie on this list, it's also the only one where evil is vanquished. Proof, I guess, that horror films can also be heart-warming.
The Innocents (1961)
Take all the threat of the unknown from Picnic at Hanging Rock, add in some good old fashioned ghosts possibly possessing creepy kids, and you have The Innocents! Poor Deborah Kerr is always at the mercy of some powerful sinister force that corrupts those under her authority. In Black Narcissus, it was some ancient, native, sinful, but ultimately unnameable force (again, Picnic at Hanging Rock-style). In The Innocents, it's the corrosive spirits of deceased servants who used to work at the home where she's taken a job as governess to two young children. The male servant was apparently The Worst Ever and was violent and sexual toward his girlfriend, the children's old governess, in front of the children. Now he's a ghost and he might be possessing one of the children, who turns out to be kind of creepy and flirtatious with Deborah Kerr. Or maybe it's all in her head and she's seeing things that aren't there and maybe the kid acts creepy because of what he was exposed to. In some ways, the beginning of the film is like Suspiria or Rosemary's Baby. People are acting a little weird and something might be awry but surely our heroine can't be in danger! While the girls in the other two films discover the unholy truths of their respective residences, Deborah Kerr gets a little creepy herself and starts badgering the kids about ghosts and imposing figures in the distance. The best parts of The Innocents are the scenes where the "ghosts" can be spotted - a black-clad woman across a pond, a shadowed head atop a tower, a face in a dark window. These are the things that propel the film into truly scary territory. Though more effective in the novel the film is based on, The Turn of the Screw, the ambiguities in the characters' relationships are also unsettling. This comes to a head at the climax of the film (oh, Henry James, I hope you'd be proud), and again, there is no distinct resolution, only more uncertainty and unsavory possibilities. As is becoming clear to me as I write about these films, ambiguity is horrifying.
The Road (2009)
The scariest people-eaters are not slow-moving, dense, decaying zombies; they are living human cannibals, equipped with the mental function to stalk, manipulate, and stockpile their victims. The Road is a washed-out nightmare-apocalypse tale of an average dude and his son trying to survive in a world where everyone is basically killing each other all the time. Although there luckily aren't a ton of people around, the dude is still terrified that someone might come across him and his kid and, considering the dwindling number of bullets in his gun, his only form of protection, he decides that he would rather kill his son than allow him to be captured. Because, as it eventually becomes clear, being captured means having your body parts harvested as food. The stark, disarmingly beautiful cinematography makes a sort of depressing poem out of the film (likely staying true to the novel it was based on, which I haven't read), as opposed to a grotesque slasher flick. I think that's why the movie's horror aspect (which is only a small part of film as a whole) appeals to me. Flesh eating isn't ravenous or messy or campy. It's just sad. It's the sad reality that developed when people ran out of other things to eat. Eat strangers or let your family starve. The man and his son, however, have managed to not resort to cannibalism and they are on their way to what is apparently some better place. So there is hope for them. The first (in order of appearance, not level of horror) Most Horrifying Scene happens when the boy and his dad go into a house and discover some basement dwellers (my favorite!), who are both innately terrifying and innately tragic. (SPOILER: This is absolutely the most scarring and the most real-world-plausible human meat market I have seen in a movie. /SPOILER) The second Most Horrifying Scene comes at the end of the film, when ambiguity again rears its ugly head and leaves us wondering about the fate of the boy, who is maybe the last good and innocent person left on the planet and NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED! What we are left to imagine are a couple grisly outcomes, and one almost impossibly optimistic outcome. The Road builds amazing suspense, seemingly out of nothing, and includes some scenes of breath-stopping terror, but it also takes things that are scary - scary because they hunt us, plainly, without any supernatural or occult element - and peels back the layers until they just seem unfortunate. The depressing reality of fate, no matter what hopeful stories we tell ourselves. But that last scene, maybe taking pity on us, leaves open the possibility that our stories were true, that maybe suffering and sacrifice can lead to something good.
So what have I discovered makes a movie scary for me? These things, probably in this order:
Ambiguity
Figures in the distance
Staring / breaking The Fourth Wall
Cannibalism
Perverse familial sadism
Twist endings where someone turned out to be crazier/more awful than you previously thought
Darkness
Basement people
