Something to divulge, I’m afraid
CONFESSIONS FROM A FILM CRITIC WHO DOESN’T LIKE SCARY MOVIES
Last week, in preparation for the release of David Gordon Green’s sequel to Halloween, I did something I’d been too scared to do for 40 years.
I watched the original. Granted, I was 9 when it first came out, which was probably too young. But in the VHS era that followed, I avoided it. Sure, I loved its star Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda. I became a huge fan of director John Carpenter’s hilarious Dark Star, his gritty Escape from New York, even his sappy Starman. And I thought Donald Pleasence was great in The Great Escape and You Only Live Twice. But despite all these draws, Halloween was scary, and I didn’t do scary.
This is an odd confession from a film critic, so let’s be clear; I watch horror movies all the time now — for work. I still don’t seek them out for pleasure. And yet in recent years I’ve discovered some great films that are horror movies, and vice versa.
Take 28 Days Later ..., Danny Boyle’s 2002 film that helped kick off this century’s craze for fast zombies. Or Drew Goddard’s directing debut, The Cabin in the Woods, a Frankenstein’s monster that nicely spliced together elements of horror, science-fiction and comedy. This year alone has delivered John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place; Hereditary, from firsttime feature filmmaker Ari Aster; and Annihilation, Alex Garland’s follow-up to Ex Machina.
Or look back to the original Halloween, which I can now confidently report is a remarkably tense, wellplotted tale, especially in the second half when things start heating up. It’s fun to see Curtis as a teenager in her big-screen debut, and I enjoyed Charles Cyphers as the semi-useless cop; investigating a break-in at the hardware store, he blithely reports that the thief took nothing more than “Halloween masks, some rope and a couple of knives.”
Nothing to worry about here!
Horror sometimes gets a bad rap from film lovers, and to be fair most horror movies (and most comedies, dramas, westerns, science fiction, etc.) are less than stellar. But to ignore the genre would mean turning your back on early works by filmmakers as diverse and talented as Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead), Peter Jackson (The Frighteners), Oliver Stone (Seizure, The Hand) and Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark). You’d also have to ignore some great new voices like Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) and Ana Lily Amirpour, who made A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and The Bad Batch.
Since I came late to the Halloween party, I can conjure an embarrassingly long list of classics I’ve still not seen, including The Fly, Rosemary’s Baby, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nosferatu, The Exorcist, Videodrome, The Wicker Man, Ringu, The Omen, Poltergeist, The Blair Witch Project and Frankenstein. I have seen Young Frankenstein more times than I can count, but it’s frightening how much I still don’t know.
Meanwhile, work and other circumstances have conspired against my natural cowardice to have me catching up with other greats. They include The Thing (homework for a review of the remake), Carrie (remake), Dawn of the Dead (um, remake) and The Shining, which I watched in preparation for the documentary Room 237, and now count among my favourite movies. That one also unlocks a host of film references, from the sly (in the recent Canadian movie Knuckleball) to the bleeding obvious (see Ready Player One).
I should add that I’ve also managed to take in A Nightmare on Elm Street (high school film class), Psycho (date night that included an exciting mid-movie power failure) and An American Werewolf in London; the last was playing in the common room of a youth hostel in Interlaken, Switzerland, and I was too exhausted to do anything else.
And I was an early fan of Alien, I think because I convinced myself it was sci-fi, not horror.
Expressing disdain for horror is akin to professing a dislike of an entire musical genre, note-unheard. You may not like most heavy metal, but there are probably one or two tracks out there that speak to you. Similarly, I’ve had great times getting scared silly recently in everything from Green Room to Get Out. So while I won’t leap at the next horror flick the way I do at Star Wars sequels or anything Denis Villeneuve cares to make, neither will I dismiss it out of hand.
Great films can come from anywhere, including the darkest recesses of our collective fears.