Kim Newman

“Was it the bogeyman?”  This – John Carpenter’s 1978 original, of course – is still the perfect storm of scary movies.  Even after all the feeble sequels and misconceived remakes, it works because it’s spooky, fun (which horror films used to be, without compromising the frights) and peppered with jump-out-of-your-seat shocks (it’s as if that great punchline of Carrie came along every ten minutes).  Carpenter knows what Rob Zombie doesn’t – that slasher films aren’t about how cool or twisted your killer is, but how sympathetic and interesting your victims are.  These films are only scary if we have someone to care about, and the film takes trouble to build heroine Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her hometown as real, likeable and worth saving.  Then, we spend a long night with the girl as the masked, characterless, urban legend with a knife comes after her.  Music, camera movement, Donald Pleasence’s way with sombre exposition and a windshield-shaped widescreen are deployed to nerve-jangling effect. 

“Do you like my new dress? My new old dress?”  Directed by the unheralded John Hancock in 1971, this is a hippie-era curiosity – a film once so obscure the few who’d seen it thought it might have been a dream, which is now gaining in reputation.  It’s at once an anatomy-of-a-crack-up film constructed around Zohra Lampert’s extraordinary, fragile performance as a woman who can’t distinguish reality from fantasy, and a vampire movie about a flower child (Mariclare Costello) who drains the blood from an entire town of unfriendly, scarred folks.  The last reels manage a symphony of shudders and a succession of beautiful, creepy images.  The dead girl walking out of the lake is perhaps the single scariest image I retain from horror film-viewing in my teens.  It’s still unsettling.

“Shoot ‘em in the head.”  Made well away from Hollywood in 1968, George A. Romero’s low-budget independent film established a mushroom growth of zombie apocalypse movies – setting rules which are now followed by far more mainstream products like Zombieland as it breaks with the gothic fairytale tradition of the classic horror film.  Black and white, raw and sometimes amateurish, gruesome but shot through with satirical jabs, the original Night of the Living Dead remains surprisingly suspenseful as it mixes a groundswell of gloom and dread with sudden shocks and nasty plot turns.  Of course, it’s a State of the Nation address wrapped up in a horror comic, but that gives it a power that is lacking in any number of first-person-shooter zombie-kill spin-offs.

“Names that begin with S are the names of ssssnakesss!”  A problem with many contemporary horror films is that they are concerned with making sense at the expense of being terrifying.  If Dario Argento’s Suspiria had been through Hollywood script development or re-edited according to preview questionnaires, it would get hung up on questions like whose hairy arms reach through the window to attack the girl in the opening sequence and what exactly makes the guide dog tear out the throat of the blind pianist.  It’s about magic, and that excuses a lot.  Jessica Harper goes to a ballet school run by witches, but that’s about all the plot the film needs – what counts are the non-stop succession of brilliantly-directed set-pieces, the through-composed horror-rock score (“by Dario Argento and the Goblins”) and the consistently strange look design.  It’s just scary, which is its job.

“The man behind the mask is looking for the book with the pages torn out. He is going towards the hiding place.”  If you watch a lot of horror movies – and I’ve seen more than a lot – you can get used to them, even become comfortable with all the strategies for being scary (as set out in the “rules” explained in Scream) and learn to go along for the ride, entertained and even surprised once in a while, but you lose the capacity for actual cold, heart-wrenching terror.  That’s where David Lynch comes in.  He’s one of the few filmmakers who can consistently frighten even the most hardened horror fan, and this unloved but essential spin-off from the TV series is perhaps his most sustained exercise in the nightmarish.  It’s a sustained version of that old chestnut (cf: When a Stranger Calls) that the threatening calls are coming from your own home, as doomed Laura Palmer realises the demon abusing her is her own father, but Lynch makes this violation a symptom of a whole world spiralling into malign chaos.