So I don’t know how the weather is where you are, but here in Poland, it is officially November: cold, wet, grey, dark, and foggy. It’s a good time for comfort – for hot tea and a blanket and a movie you’ve seen a hundred times and could at least half recite. Towards that cushy end, this week, I’ve been listing my ten favorite Comfort-Food horrors. You can find the first five here.
Again, these may not actually be my all-time favorite horror films, but are rather those that I might wrap around myself like a warm blanky on a chilly day, and they are here in no particular order (chronological, alphabetical, favoritical, or otherwise). Here are the final five.
Dracula (1992)
Now, this really was one of my absolute favorite movies circa high school and college. I remember going to see it with one of my best friends, both of us wearing vampire fangs to the cinema because we were really cool guys, his mom having bought us the tickets as we were too young. I don’t know how I ate any popcorn. But boy, oh boy, did it make an impression. I’d never seen anything like it before. So big. So sumptuous. So over the top. Just glorious.
It was sold as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” indicating that, for the first time ever, we were going to see a version faithful to the novel, and while it does include images and scenes that hadn’t made it to screen before, it also tacked on a true-love-never-dies central motif (with Mina as the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler’s long lost love) that just captivated my little 14 year old heart. Sometimes this kind of addition can grate (I could do without it in Fright Night, for example), but in this case I think it really contributes to how grand and epic the whole thing is. The costumes, the color, the sexuality, the melodrama – everything is of a piece; everything is lush and lurid and just the right amount of classy.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Wojciech Kilar’s score. I played that thing endlessly. It is so imposing and grandiose, and it pulls everything together. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel it very cleverly references a key theme in the original score that circulated in 1922 with Murnau’s Nosferatu. Have a listen and see what you think.
Finally, the horror/monster elements are just spectacular: the giant bat creature, the werewolf ravishing Lucy, the transformation into a mound of rats, the wives melting together into a three headed spider thing, old Dracula with his weird hair, licking the razor blade or chortling evilly. What is there not to love?
The Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (1987)
Just last week, I wrote about how much I love the 1984 original, and it is honestly hard to choose a favorite between that iteration and this. While the first film features the birth of this essentially scary concept (and is probably the better film), in this one, it may reach its fruition. I think here, we hit peak-Freddy, with all of the playfulness and creativity that the character promises, but without fully tipping over into the splatstick of later entries.
Everything here is just ‘more.’ The kids-vs-monsters story is so satisfying for welcoming in a whole group of troubled teens who can discover their true power within dream and choose to stand against the blade gloved fiend. Sadly, many of them don’t make it to the final reel. The dreams are more fully realized and also more specific to each dreamer, targeting concrete, character based fears – the recovering drug addict forced to shoot up against her will, Krueger’s knife fingers becoming needles, the boy in the wheelchair chased and ultimately destroyed by this object of his figurative and literal entrapment. The sense of adventure is strong, as is the grown-ups-just-don’t-understand element of the sleep center health workers trying to force these kids to sleep, thus dooming them to their dreams.
And again, such dreams. I mean, if we only saw Philip’s death sequence, the film would probably still be a classic. A maker of marionettes and a chronic sleepwalker, he dreams that one of his puppets comes to life, slices open his arms and legs, and rips his tendons out, using them as lines with which to manipulate poor Philip. He is excruciatingly forced to walk to a window, out of which he is dangled. Across the way, the other kids see him, but what they can’t see is a massive spectral Freddy against the starlit sky who cuts the lines and sends Phillip plummeting to his apparently suicidal death. It is gross, and scary, and just awesome.
Its creativity, its sense of adventure, its likable young cast (including the return of Nancy from the first film, back as a psychology grad students to help these psych ward bound youngsters), and its emotional and horror pay offs just bring me back time and time again.
Daughters of Darkness (1971)
So this collection of comfort food movies tends to swing back and forth between character/comedy and atmosphere and this next film, a pillar of the ‘Lesbian-Vampire’ subgenre, is all atmosphere: slow and languid and hypnotic. The film seduces, as does the bloodsucker at its heart, one of the many filmic presentations of Elizabeth Báthory.
A just-married young couple, Stefan and Valerie, get stranded at an off season Belgian seaside resort and fall into the tempting orbit of an ageless, mysterious countess, styled after Marlene Dietrich and embodied by the captivating Delphine Seyrig. We have an impression from early on that the couple may not be well matched (what with him beating her, a general sense of malaise that hangs over them, and also the fact that he’s actually the kept boy of an older gay man back in England whom he calls ‘mother’ – his violence perhaps an outgrowth of his own self-hatred), and the pull towards this chic older woman is strong. By the end, the draw towards both the sanguine and the Sapphic justifyingly wins out.
The thesaurus does not have adjectives enough to describe the lavish-rich-sumptuous-luscious-misty-mesmerizing-opiate charm of this film. It is a hazy dream of fascination and blood-letting and desire. This is helped by the nigh trance inducing score by François de Roubaix. It is always gratifying to indulgently abide in this deeply textured and evocative flick. It’s also funny that a film that is so visual and sensory, rather than verbal, should inspire such rhetorical grandiloquence. And it still feels insufficient.
Scream (1996)
Another film that I clearly remember seeing in the cinema, I was surprised that it became such a hit given how much the packed audience I saw it with didn’t get it. I felt like I was the only person there who liked it, and I’m pretty sure I was the only one laughing. Everyone seemed let down that it wasn’t more of a “scary movie.”
Still, it rightly went on to find its audience and to this day, it is a nostalgically comfortable place to return, a slice of mid-90s just finished high school/just started college life in which to hang out. Of course, Wes Craven deserves his plaudits here, but I really think so much credit falls to Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter; it’s very much the characters that stay with you. Neve Campbell’s Sydney Prescott is the rare final girl who comes back for all of the sequels (usually it’s just the killer). Sure, this means that her fictional life has been rather traumatic, but it is so rare that the direct draw of a slasher is the protagonist as opposed to the masked killer, and in Scream, she is allowed to really hold the center of the frame.
And all of the other characters make similarly strong impressions. It’s really easy to like Dewy and Tatum and Gale and the rest. The relationships between them are fun and funny, and generally believable. Even the characters that can somewhat abrade are enjoyably drawn and are sometimes given great moments of comedy and pathos (“My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me!”)
Also, while this is referred to as a slasher (masked killer, body count), narratively, if not in style, it is really closer to a giallo. We have a mystery and a protagonist invested in solving it. There are twists and turns and both the viewer and the protagonist are led to rule out certain suspects only to set up later revelations of murderous intent. And it all plays out in such a fun manner.
Finally, it is thanks to the inclusion of ‘Red Right Hand’ on the soundtrack that I was first introduced to the music of Nick Cave, for which I am eternally grateful.
The Old Dark House (1932)
Have a potato.
Featuring a young couple stranded on a dark rainy night, a mute, drunk beast of a man played by Karloff, a woman in a ridiculously elegant silver gown walking down dark corridors, buffeted by wind and terrorized by distorted reflections in warped mirrors, a very peculiar old chap who really wants you to shut up and eat a potato, an ancient patriarch played by a woman in drag, a young man of the lost generation, still scarred by the very real horrors of the first world war, and a pyromaniac, knife throwing madman locked in the attic, James Whale’s film (post- Frankenstein, pre- The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein) is a victory of style and comedy and atmosphere and camp. And somehow, none of these seemingly contradictory elements cancel each other out, but it’s all held in some kind of delicate balance. Having only seen this and the three other movies of his listed above, I feel that’s a kind of hallmark of his oeuvre (though I’ve never taken in any of his non-horror films, so I can’t say for sure).
I feel this one doesn’t have as high of a profile as the others, probably due to the absence of a famous horror property, but it is no less a treasure. The film making is simply beautiful, notably in the aforementioned scene in which the wife of the young couple, changing out of her wet clothes into something more comfortable – an extraordinary evening gown, is lectured on the wickedness of her white, young flesh by an absurd old woman whose face surrounds her in old, distorted looking glasses. It is, at once, creepy as all get out, funny, weird, confusing, and enticing. This is before the young woman opens the window for no good reason other than having everything dramatically blown about by the howling wind.
This is an odd duck, but a charming one, and always a treat to introduce to someone new. This is a house to which I’m always happy to return, sit by the fire, and try not to get attacked by Morgan, who’s gotten into the gin again. It’s ok if there are no beds. Give it a try. It’s on Youtube.