Spooks, Slashers & Cut-Ups

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The New York Sun

Fear of the unknown is a basic human feeling. So why do so many horror movies see evil in ways that are tatty, tacky, or just depressingly literal? “Scary Movies 2,” the Lincoln Center’s horror series that starts today and runs through November 11, has plenty of these misguided flicks on display. But they’ve unearthed a few gems that are downright evil.


The best films here reduce the horror-movie formula to its bare bones – a woman, alone, menaced by unseen forces. Things get down to business on All Soul’s Eve itself, with four actually terrifying movies featuring four great actresses: Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween” (October 31); Margot Kidder in “Black Christmas” (November 1); Jessica Harper in “Suspiria” (November 5 & 9); and Barbara Hershey in “The Entity” (November 2).


“Halloween” is considered the slasher movie that launched a thousand cheap knock-offs, so it’s surprising to learn it was preceded by 1974’s “Black Christmas.” Set on a bleak Canadian college campus, this film is about a sorority house menaced by obscene phone calls from a psychotic Elmer Fudd. Featuring all the roving point-of-view shots, heavy breathing, and innovative forms of murder that would define the genre, it’s also stuffed with terrific B-movie actors – exploitation stalwart John Saxon, “SCTV’s” Andrea Martin, “2001’s” Keir Dullea, and “Superman’s” Margot Kidder – it’s also better written and better acted than “Halloween.”


A comparison of the two actually points up the disturbing minimalism of “Halloween.” There’s no script to speak of, a repetitive score, and an anonymous suburban setting – and that’s part of what makes it so unnerving. The story of Michael Myers’s escape from the loony bin and return to his hometown to kill babysitters taps into our primal fear of slow-moving, bulky men wearing masks. The movie’s lack of gore seems positively quaint today, but the conviction of Donald Pleasance and Ms. Curtis works miracles.


“Suspiria,” Dario Argento’s one-of-a-kind Italian eye-scorcher, is plagued by indifferently dubbed dialogue in its English version, as well as a complete disregard for character and logic in any version. But the movie is a candy-colored tour of a dream world filled with clutching hands, burning eyes staring back from the darkness, and rooms full of barbed wire. Jessica Harper plays an American ballet student who goes to a conservatory in Germany, which turns out to be the front for a coven of witches. Argento does everything but jump out from under the theater seats in an attempt to scare the bejesus out of the audience.


“The Entity” hinges entirely upon Ms. Hershey’s performance as a working mother who is repeatedly sexually assaulted by an unseen force. Doctors say she’s crazy, her children don’t understand what’s happening, and the only sympathy she gets is from faith-fueled parapsychologists. Bleak, uncompromising, and frighteningly explicit, it’s one of America’s best horror movies.


Most of the films on offer are quaintly nostalgic rather than truly frightening. England’s musty Hammer Studios is well-represented by “The Devil Riders Out” (October 30), “Demons of the Mind” (November 8 & 11), and “Vampire Circus” (November 7). In the last, evil often walks the earth in the guise of a swish pirate with fangs.


Roger Corman’s lush Edgar Allen Poe adaptations – “The Tomb of Ligeia” (October 29 & 30) and “Masque of the Red Death” (October 29) – picture evil as Vincent Price slithering around plastic skeletons like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Shelley Winters gives Price a run for his ham in “Who Slew Antie Roo?” (November 5 & 8), which features a beehived Winters at her worst, looking like she’s just eaten the scenery and would like seconds.


The most amazing movie in this line-up is also the least known: Robert Mulligan’s “The Other” (November 1). Mulligan is famous for directing “To Kill a Mockingbird”; “The Other” is more accomplished but less likeable. A sun drenched American Gothic set on a farm in 1935, “The Other” concerns two 11-year-old twins who seem to be losing their grip on reality. Full of surreal touches and fine acting, this evisceration of childhood is so savage that, by the end of the movie, no one is left standing.


Mulligan shows evil as a tow-headed, sun-kissed child with good manners – exactly the opposite of the shadowy stalker or the blow-dried vampire, but somehow much, much worse.


The New York Sun

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