Happy Halloween!

Kate Laird over on Facebook asked for some Horror movies to watch for Halloween, which made me start thinking about some of my favorites, so I thought I'd post a couple.

First off, "Horror" movies have mutated a lot over the decades. Horror movies used to be exclusively Monster Movies - the Frankensteins, Draculas, Wolfmen, Mummies, and the like. Later, they also became Giant Monster movies with Godzilla, Them, and such. With "Psycho," Horror movies became psychopathic killer movies as well, and of course, the "Saw" movies brought the Grindhouse ethos out of the defunct drive-in circuit and into the multiplex.

So, to keep this simple, I'm going to stay with horror movies that are scary but not catalogs of brutality and butchery. I'll throw one of those in and the end and explain why.

To me, one of the best horror movies ever made is one that changed the game even though people have never really been aware of it until recently. Dario Argento was an Italian filmmaker who was having a nice career making eurokiller mysteries like "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" and "Deep Red" when he decided to plunge a little more into the supernatural, and built a story inspired by his girlfriend's tale of a witches coven at the school she once went to. Being an Italian horror movie in 1976 meant you weren't seen by very many people, but the people that saw "Susperia" didn't forget it. Instead of being a gloomy, black and white horror film with ominous music, "Susperia" was a widescreen, color and design drenched film with loud, jangling music by "The Goblins." Argento actually found and used an old three-strip Technicolor camera and filmstock and manipulated the color values to create vivid washes of blues, reds, and purples. It also stared Jessica Harper, a waif-like actress who had caught people's attention in "Phantom of the Paradise". Starting early with one of the then-most violent deaths ever shown on film (which was usually heavily censored), the film was little shown in America, but like the debut of the Velvet Underground's impact on music, young filmmakers who saw "Susperia" were instantly liberated and set out to make comparable films. Films directly influenced by "Susperia" include John Carpenter's "Halloween" and Don Coscarelli's "Phantasm".

One of the best "traditional" horror movies is the original "The Haunting". It scared the crap out of me as a kid and is still pretty potent today. It tells the story of four ghosthunters who come to Hill House, a huge and gloomy mansion deserted during the night where several people have taken their own lives. "The Haunting" never answers the question whether there are "real" ghosts or not, but the house is such an awful, airless, and joyless setting that it's easy to believe this is where dead spirits would live. If you look for this film, be careful to get the original and not the godawful remake.

For depressingly real-life style horror movies, probably one of the best, if you can call it that, is another rarely-seen and widely-banned movie, Pier Palo Pasolini's notorious 1976 film "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom." This adaptation of the Marquis DeSade's final work by the Marxist/Homosexual Pasolini, moves it to the final days of World War II and sets out to show all power corrupts absolutely in the most vile and horrifying ways. The story is simple enough. A group of wealthy and powerful men representing the government, business, and the church in the Italian republic of Salo, kidnap a group of young girls and boys, strip them naked, then set out to corrupt them physically and emotional. Those that learn to enjoy this, they are told, will survive; those that don't, will be tortured and killed at the end. Part of the power of the film is the story of Pasolini himself. Starting as a relatively optimistic filmmaker, "Salo" is the ultimate expression of nihilism - there is no moralty, only power; who has it, can do whatever they want. Shortly before the film was released, Pasolini, who frequented male prostitutes for rough sex, was supposedly killed by one who drove a wooden board with a nail through his skull, but it was also suspected that Pasolini had actually been assassinated and his death designed to look like a sexual murder. Though actually fairly tame by today's standards, "Salo" so shocked film boards and audiences that it was largely banned around the world and rarely seen except at special film festival screenings and on video bootlegs. When the Criterion Collection finally released it as their seventeenth release on dvd (it also had an earlier laserdisc pressing) it was quickly snapped up, becoming one of the most expensive dvd's to buy when it went out of print, commanding prices in the hundreds of dollars. (It has since come back into print.) In short, if you ever want a depressing movie to watch, "Salo" is it.