Collection of all the best frights
James Croot finds it’s hard not to like a show that is convinced a good scare is something intangible and emotional.
Everyone has at least one. A shocking scene that sends a shiver down your spine, makes you avert your eyes, or that simply haunted you for weeks after you first saw it.
As a viewing veteran of far too many – good and bad – fright flicks, I have many. From Psycho’s iconic shower scene to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare’s phone that comes to life, Hitchcock’s murder of crows gathering on the school bars and The Shining’s elevator of blood, I have four decades of nightmare-inducing imagery to draw on (I did see Watership Down when aged just 6, after all).
So I was fascinated by the premise of a new eight-part docu-series The 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of All Time (now streaming on genre specialist service Shudder).
It brings together a cadre of academics, critics, filmmakers and stars, including Netflix’s go-to horror-meister Mike Flanagan, Gremlins’ helmer Joe Dante, The Thing star Keith David and Candyman himself Tony Todd.
They discuss and dissect just what makes certain sequences of images stand out, resonate and sear into your memory.
Each ‘‘moment’’ is given its own time in the spotlight, offering viewers a chance to learn how it was created – and why it had such an impact.
From the same team who created the three-season long Eli Roth’s History of Horror, what perhaps impresses the most about the selection is how wide-ranging it is. The 13 titles featured in the opening episode span more than seven decades (from 1940s classics like The Wolf Man and Cat People, to near contemporary chillers like It Follows and The
Strangers) and aren’t just your traditional Hollywood horrors.
There’s Christopher Lee in the Horror of Dracula, ghostly Spanish goings-on in The Orphanage, the Italian anthology of frights that is Black Sabbath and the technoinfused nightmares of Japan’s Pulse. There’s even some entries you might not have thought fell into the genre, but once you listen to the arguments, you’ll be more than convinced they should.
No doubt this will help nascent and committed horror fans find new thrills, but just on its own terms. It’s hard not to like a show that firmly espouses the belief that a good scare ‘‘is something intangible, emotional – not something you can cynically recreate’’ and that ‘‘what the audience can imagine is sometimes scarier than what you can show them’’.
The 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of All Time is now available to stream on Shudder. posing the question about whether it’s time for a change. A provocative look at our history that will uncover the good, the bad and the ugly.
Cousins
(8.30pm, Sunday, Whakaata Māori)
This is an understated, yet emotion-filled tale of love and loss, of identity and the institutions that try to deny and reshape it and of the power of whānau, all magnificently played out by an ensemble of homegrown actors of all ages. Cousins is the intertwining stories of Mata, Makareta and Missy. Each has their own journey to take and challenges to face, as events bring them together and then pull them apart.
Four Lives
(9.35pm, Sundays, TVNZ 1)
Stephen Merchant, Sheridan Smith and Jaime Winstone star in this three-part BBC true-crime drama about the 2014-15 deaths of four gay men at the hands of Stephen Port (Merchant). For weeks, police refused to treat the deaths as either linked – or suspicious. However, the victim’s loved ones would not give up in their efforts to uncover the truth.