So, here are a few of my own horror recommendations. These aren't necessarily my all-time favourites, but they are films that I feel deserve more attention than they get.
The Stone Tape One thing that often bugs me about ghost movies is their lack of curiosity about the ghosts. What are they? How do they "work"? Are they intelligent, or more of a "pattern" left behind, like the sand after a wave has passed over it? How are they visible, despite having no physical substance to reflect light? The Stone Tape to the rescue! This movie, while decidedly low-budget, excels in displaying true scientific curiosity about the ghosts it describes. The characters actually do the things I would do - e.g. get some thermometers to test whether it
actually gets cold when the ghost enters the room, or if it just
feels cold. The screenplay was written by Nigel Kneale, writer of the famous Quatermass series and the original Woman In Black, and while it probably won't chill you to the bone, I recommend it to anyone who likes intelligently-written science fiction with horror sprinkled on top.
Sapphire and Steel Another low-budget British horror effort, this time a TV miniseries rather than a movie. I had never heard of Sapphire and Steel until recently, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was the obvious inspiration for the game Dark Fall: The Journal. (And also Slenderman and a lot of other cool stuff.) Sapphire and Steel are a sort of hyperdimensional Mulder and Scully, investigating temporal anomalies and combating the bizarre horrors that they create. An interesting twist, however, is that Sapphire and Steel are clearly not human - they
look normal, but they have strange powers, and their reactions to events are always just a bit... off. It's as though they have emotions, but not the same emotions that a human would have. It's also subtly hinted throughout the series that their true nature may be almost as horrific as that of the entities they battle. Sapphire and Steel's special effects are laughable (e.g. shining a flashlight on the floor to create a spot of light for a "time creature"), but somehow it just... works. It gets by on its strong writing and atmosphere, and the fact that the characters sell the menace by actually acting properly terrified of it. Check it out, and make sure to watch at least the first two story-arcs, as the second is vastly superior to the first.
The Carrier Okay, let's take a break from intelligent, well-written horror and talk about some trash! The Carrier is one of my favourite unknown jewels of the "So Bad Its Good" category. Here's the premise: The main character is attacked by what I can only describe as "a metaphor for homosexuality in a cheap gorilla suit" and as a result is infected by a "virus". I think that the creators of this film do not understand how viruses work. This one does nothing to the main character, but any inanimate object he touches becomes "infected", causing it to instantly melt any
other living creature it subsequently comes into contact with. When the residents of his isolated rural village discover the plague of death-objects, they do the only sensible thing: they start collecting cats to rub on everything to test if it's safe! This leads to a cat shortage, and pretty soon the town is embroiled in a mad-max style gang war over dwindling cat supplies. It also leads to some of the goofiest dialogue I've ever heard in a movie ("Cats or death!! CATS OR DEATH!!"). And no, it's not trying to be a comedy - it's trying to make a meaningful point about AIDS. Or something. If you like movies that are just amazingly, catastrophically bad on every level, check this one out!
Blood Car This one's really a black-as-sin comedy moreso than a horror movie, but I'm gonna plug it anyway because it's
awesome. Blood Car tells the story of Archie Andrews, a vegan environmentalist elementary-school teacher who wears t-shirts that say things like "dolphins are dandy", living in a future where gas prices are so high that only the richest can afford to drive. Archie tries to invent an engine that runs on wheatgrass, but accidentally invents one that runs on BLOOD... HUMAN BLOOD! (The film gives this about as much explanation as it deserves, i.e. none at all.) Discovering that having a running car gets him laid, Archie immediately throws over all his moral principles, and the film becomes an absurd serial bloodbath in his quest for more fuel for the Bloodcar. This is one of those movies like Dead Alive that positively
revels in its own depravity, but what really pushes it over the top is the final scene - in which an agent of "The Governemnt" [sic] sits Archie down and tries to talk him into revealing the Bloodcar's secrets, using one of the most transcendently bizarre sequences of Christopher Walkenesque nonsense I have
ever heard in a movie. If you don't like Blood Car... well, then you're probably a decent person. The rest of you should go watch it!
Uzumaki I'm probably going to take some flak for this one, as most people seem to hate it. But personally, I think Uzumaki is the bee's knees! It has two distinguishing characteristics for me: first, it is the only movie
ever to give me the same sense of horrific cosmic weirdness that I get from reading Lovecraft stories. And second, it is the only movie
ever to have a scene that reveals a previously hidden creepy thing, which turned out to
actually be creepier than what I was imagining in my head! I'm not going to tell you much about the plot (it would be pointless to try), but in essence, it concerns a small Japanese town that becomes infected with... spirals. Yes, the shape. That's your monster in this movie - spirals. The movie starts out with a very long, slow-burn setup as things and events in the town become increasingly "spirally", but by the final act the movie has gone flat-out gonzo insane, with reality warping in the kinds of unthinkably weird ways you might actually see if one of Lovecraft's Outer Gods actually made its presence felt.
Here's a picture to whet your appetites:
http://foreclectictastes.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/uzumaki_dad.jpg
