SunBreak Roundtable: Our Favorite Scary Movies

Halloween is almost upon us, which means time to trick or treat, consider our own mortality and/or revel in it, or just take the convenient excuse and dress slutty.  It's also a good time to watch scary movies, which have been airing pretty much nonstop lately on AMC and IFC (if you've got the cable).  If not, you can always head over and visit our good friends at Scarecrow Video.  Here, we've got a few recommendations for you:

Constance: Pretty much anything by Tim Burton--because he's TIM BURTON--is good for Halloween. But for true horror, I like The Craft. Neve Campbell whines, Fairuza Balk scowls, Skeet Ulrich smirks...the only thing wrong with this movie is that there is no teen-witch-orgy scene. Otherwise, it's utter perfection, right down to Robin Tunney's weave, which is arguably the scariest part of the film. It's HORRIFYING!

And The Witches of Eastwick, in which a great cast does their very best to make a terrible film and succeeds. It's a trainwreck: Nicholson drunkenly shreds scenery, while the four main actresses spin in place. The script is so uneven that it requires a backhoe, and director George Miller was so busy fighting with the producers that he let the production spiral out of control. By the end, I just can't look, which is fine because the ending makes no sense, and in fact has no relation to the rest of the movie at all, it was just a way to use up the rest of the FX budget. Oh, the HORROR!

Jeremy: Okay, there's lots of great horror movies out there, but these days, the best of them are usually cross-genre works, a la Shaun of the Dead (horor-rom-com?), or ironic comments on horror movies, because apparently we're all too knowing to actually ever enjoy a scary movie. For my money, I've only seen one outright horror movie--no irony, no meta--made in the last decade or so, which actually managed to be scary: the Spanish zombie flick [REC]. Sadly, this movie was awfully remade as Quarantine in the US a couple years ago, but the remake pales in comparison (in [REC] you don't actually want the main characters to die). The ending actually induced nerve-wracking tension and at least one scream. So, um, yeah. Seriously. Check it out.

Seth: I do not like scary movies, they make me whimper like a girl. I saw The Shining when I was 16 and I couldn't sleep well for a week. It features Jack Nicholson playing himself. I suggest the Halloween classic It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, with music by Vince Guaraldi. Lovable Charlie Brown awaits the appearance of the legendary Great Pumpkin. Existentialist hijinks ensue. Airs at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday nights on KOMO-4.

Constance:  I'm with Seth, I don't like actual scary movies. They *scare* me, and I'm high strung. If I had to be serious or something, three movies that kept me from sleeping are:

1. Hound of the Baskervilles, 1939, starring Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce.
2. Cat People, 1942 (the 1982 remake with Natasha Kinski is more sexy than scary)
3. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956 (not the 1979 remake with Donald Sutherland, never seen that one)

RvO:  Constance, you named a couple of great ones. Hound is fantastic, and at the end, Rathbone actually says "Quick, Watson, the needle!" referencing Holmes' lamentable cocaine addiction. As for the 1979 Body Snatchers, it's actually very, very good. It has a great final scene and Kevin McCarthy, the star of the '56 version, shows running down the highway yelling, "They're here! They're here!," a nice riff on what should have been the finale of the earlier film.

Clint: Cue the hollowly-screeching Donald Sutherland pod-clone: I watched that Snatchers a couple of weekends ago to see if it was as horrifying as my still-bruised inner child's psyche believed.

It is.

Terribly lame bubble-froth-in-space opening sequence aside, it's a very effective, very tense horror film. Don't let the PG rating fool you; there's skin, gore, and a dog sporting a human head. (Also: alarmingly young and blossoming-into-cool Jeff Goldblum and lithe Veronica Cartwright, pre-Alien.) They don't make them this way anymore.

Thanks to you, Jeremy, I stumbled upon [REC] at the library and gave it a spin. Wow. Everything following the setup is ruthless and intense. Whatever that thing is at the end rivals the most horrifying of all movie creatures: the alien/human hybrid of Alien: Resurrection.

MvB: I second It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown choice because of the "I got a rock" line. But one movie that goes very well with the season is Arsenic and Old Lace. IMDB sums the plot up nicely: "A drama critic learns on his wedding day that his beloved maiden aunts are homicidal maniacs, and that insanity runs in his family." In fine Capra tradition, the film is both profoundly creepy and screwball, never quite settling on one or the other. Cary Grant is the drama critic in question, spluttering and harried, and his prison escapee brother Jonathan is a glowering Raymond Massey--looking like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein because his cosmetic surgeon, Peter Lorre, has a drinking problem.

Audrey: As a child, I was traumatized by a slumber party viewing of Creepshow.  There was also some '80s movie, title unknown, with a little evil girl trying to kill her mother (or stepmother?). The final scene has the girl visiting her mother, who's now been confined to an asylum. The child runs a pizza cutter down a banister, while the mother shrieks in terror from her bed, knowing what's to come.  That has stayed with me for decades. 

Out of more recent movies, I like 28 Days Later, less for the zombies and more for the creepy shots of a completely empty city.  Also recommended: Rosemary's Baby, for Mia Farrow's gorgeous Vidal Sassoon 'do. 

Tony: Asking a horror obsessive like me for just a few scary movie recommendations is a real Sophie's Choice, but here go a few random picks, any of which would be great goosebump accompaniment:

Want surreal and scary? Try Uzumaki, a 2000 manga-based Japanese horror film in which a small town becomes swirled in a vortex of terror--literally. Director Higuchinsky creates an utterly immersive atmosphere of dread and spooky disorientation here--almost Lovecraftian in its cosmic nightmarishness. It's my favorite of the new-ish wave of Japanese horror, in no small part because (unlike the much better-known Ringu) it doesn't try to tie up its universe in a neat expositional bow.

Subtler chills exist in a couple of my favorite old classics. Cat People, producer Val Lewton's 1942 classic, wraps Freudian sexual awakening in a beguiling dark fairy tale cloak. Its characterizations ring with positively contemporary complexity, and the noir visual palette still elicits goosebumps. And Nosferatu's skeletal Max Schreck remains the most terrifying vampire to stalk a movie screen some 88 years after the movie's initial release.

Last but not least, a shout-out to an underrated but terrific new-ish chiller: The Burrowers is a really effective 2008 horror/period western hybrid; sharply written and directed, shot with dusty elegance, and possessing as creepily nihilistic a soul as John Carpenter's masterful 1982 remake of The Thing.

Jay: Eraserhead. As a food writer, the Cornish game hen scene still haunts me. 'Nuff said.

RvO: Halloween is a time for monsters, and there is no better monster movie than James Whale's eccentric, electric Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The film's genius is that is simultaneously frightening, hysterically funny, creepy and, well, moving. Boris Karloff plays the lonely, sad monster and, typical of director Whale's sense of wit, he's the only likable character in the movie. The monster approaches Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and demands that the good doctor create a mate. The doctor objects on moral grounds, but is enticed to try by the deliriously mad scientist, Dr. Pretorius, played by Ernest Thesiger. Thesiger defines insanity so completely in this movie that you will think twice about ever going for a checkup again. The two doctors create the title character, but when she sees the monster, she shrieks and rejects him. The monster flies into a rage. Hell hath no fury.

Tony: Great choice, Roger. I ADORE Bride. The script's a model of urbane wit amidst Gothic shudders, it still looks breathtaking on a big screen (saw a revival screening at the Egyptian a few years back), and the Franz Waxman score is one of the best film soundtracks of the 1930s. I'm also a sucker for Whale's gallows-humorous touch on 1932's The Old Dark House, and on the definitive screen adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man (1933).

RvO: I LOVE The Invisible Man (1933), the debut of the great Claude Rains, though he is, ahem, not "seen" until the last quiet shot. It has one of my favorite exchanges in any movie. Victim (tied up in and sitting in a car): Please! Please! Don't kill me! I'll do anything you ask! Invisible Man: You will? That's fine. Just stay where you are. I’ll give the car a little push. You'll roll down the hill, smash into a rock and break your pretty neck! (hysterical laughter)

James: Scary is even more personal than funny, so I'm going to recommend something nightmarish instead: 1955's Night of the Hunter, the only film Charles Laughton directed and a masterpiece of American expressionism. Robert Mitchum's performance is the stuff of childhood nightmares, a murderous hybrid of Billy Graham and Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood" wolf. Night of the Hunter works because it tightrope-walks the line between terrifying and ridiculous. (You're as likely to laugh as you are to scream, safe in your jaded grownup 2010 perspective.) But the heart of the movie is a tale of two children failed by every authority figure they know who have to go on the run and fend for themselves. In the middle of The Depression. With a charismatic serial killer on their trail. Scary? Maybe. Stunning? No doubt.

Tony: Speaking of scary Mitchum performances, his work as Max Cady in the original Cape Fear (1962) makes for one helluva companion piece to Night of the Hunter. Cady's sleepy-eyed mug provides the perfect camouflage for a ferociously sharp mind and a bottomless well of vindictive hatred: He's the ambling, lazily charming dog who never lets on that he's about to rip your throat out.

Josh: Does Donnie Darko count as a Halloween movie? I think that it takes place over a Halloween, though like many teenagers, it's more "creepy" than "scary."

Also like most high school students, it's a bit less profound than it thinks it is. Still, this movie about the ultimate adolescent and solipsistic interpretation of the End of the World includes plenty of haunting images: a rabbit far more frightening than anything in Night of the Lepus, the horrifying face of a commitment to Sparkle Motion, and the possibility that beating Jake Gyllenhaal in a staring contest might allow you to see trippy bubbles of time.

Constance: I kept thinking "It's EVIL HARVEY" all during that movie, and laughing like a loon.