Horror heaven at Film House

Pair of scary classics hit screen in time for Hallween

BARRY KEITH GRANT

Coming up at PAC Film House is a double-feature of two horror classics perfect for Halloween: Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

Although separated by a half century and considerable differences in film technology, both films have attained cult status among horror fans, and for good reason.

Browning is best remembered as the director of the 1931 version of Dracula, with Bela Lugosi for Universal Studios. That film made Lugosi a star and helped establish horror as a viable Hollywood genre.

However, Browning had a long career making silent films before directing Dracula, including a series of silent weirdies with Lon Chaney such as The Unholy Three (1925), in which Chaney appears in drag as an old woman, part of a trio of jewel thieves along with a strongman and a midget.

Although not a conventional horror film, the most disturbing of these Browning/Chaney adaptations by far is The Unknown (1927), in which Chaney plays a circus knife-thrower who has his arms amputated in order to win the sympathy of the woman he loves.

Equally as disturbing, though, is Freaks, made a year after Dracula. It tells the story of a close-knit group of physically different circus performers who close ranks and seek revenge when a beautiful outsider, the trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), marries the little person Hans (Harry Earles, who was also in The Unholy Three) for his money.

In the film’s chilling and unforgettable climax, they slither toward the freaked-out Cleopatra — and the camera — in the rain and mud vowing to make her one of them.

The final shot is such a shock that it was cut from some prints at the time.

In Freaks, it is, ironically, the “monstrous”-looking circus performers (the “freaks”) who possess a virtuous morality, embracing friendship, honesty and family values, while the “normal”-looking characters who exploit them are riven with evil.

Anticipating later horror films like Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Freaks confronts viewers with the idea that physical beauty may hide evil, that evil lurks within the normal and commonplace.

A similar view informs Kubrick’s The Shining.

Kubrick is perhaps better known for his science fiction and war films, but The Shining demonstrates an equal mastery of the horror genre. Right from the opening helicopter shots looking down on the Torrence family as they drive to the remote Overlook Hotel, the film seems unsettling.

Kubrick locates the monstrous in the figure of the father, Jack (Jack Nicholson in one of his most memorable performances), who falls under the hotel’s spell and comes to threaten the family.

What could be more condemnatory of the family patriarch than Nicholson smashing through a door with an axe to kill his wife (Shelley Duvall) while shouting “Heeeere’s Johnny!”?

Critics were initially disappointed in The Shining, expecting more traditional frights from the powerhouse combination of Kubrick and author Stephen King. We do get those: creepy crones and kids, elevator shafts of blood, tracking shots uncomfortably close to the ground.

Yet the film has resonated over time, producing numerous parodies and generating a legion of ardent followers whose obsessive analyses of the film are chronicled in the documentary Room 237 (2012).

Great horror films take us to places we may not wish to go, but they can return us to reality with an enriched understanding of our world. Both Freaks and The Shining are the work of important Hollywood auteurs who used the genres of the fantastic to challenge our cultural defined categories even as they make us shiver in our seats.