At the movies: Weapons.

 It is such a relief when The Discourse focuses on a film that's genuinely good and interesting. Like this one.

I also love the fact that JG's hair is perfect for both Madonna and Justin Timberlake. She's great in this, btw.

At the movies: Slotherhouse.

 

Slotherhouse is a delight.

At the movies: The Black Phone.

 

An upsetting work that sticks in my mind. As far as the controversy regarding Ethan Hawke's character's mannerisms, and if it's meant to be 'gayface,' I didn't get that vibe. But I'm also feeling fraught around the spikier discourses these days, so I'm happy to let others take the lead in this discussion. 

At the movies: Show Yourself.

It’s rare to find horror films that successfully manage to crosspollinate with other genres; it happens every now and then with comedy, with classics like (Shaun of The Dead, Slither, and Evil Dead II), or with Science Fiction (the Alien series, The Stone Tape). But those combinations are blends that we as audiences recognize. So what happens when something really unexpected comes along. Think along the lines of Rahtree: Flower of the Night or Lake Mungo, where you have a horror film that has found a way to expand the reach of the genre into truly unexpected territory.

Billy Ray Brewton’s film Show Yourself is like that. It’s a ghost story, and a weirdness in the woods tale, but it’s also an immersive nostalgia piece (think The Big Chill, or Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean), and that’s a unique mesh of elements. It also dabbles in self-help actualization and unsublimated tension, which is quite the reach for such a modest indie. It’s basically a one-man show, as Travis (Ben Hethcoat, who works his ass off onscreen for pretty much the whole movie) returns to the forest where he and his buddies would hang out back in the day. Only now, that group of friends has fragmented, with the recent suicide of Paul (Clancy McCartney) throwing previously held certainties into entirely different frames of existence.

Travis is back in these woods to spread Paul’s ashes, and also start learning a new script. He’s got technology on his side, as well as an uproarious one scene cameo from national treasure Robert Longstreet as the cabin’s owner. But he’s also, for the most part, a decent dude working his way through some heavy shit. So when supernatural things start happening, it’s hard to have an instantaneous response. Writer/Director Brewton has us in unfamiliar territory, and that is an ever rarer wonder. We understand, instinctively, ghost stories, We get home invasions, and we understand hostage narratives. Show Yourself isn't something you've seen before; it's an experience that the viewer most process in a new way.

Le us also praise Hethcoat’s performance, because without it, the film wouldn’t work. It’s a lot of heavy lifting to do, being in almost every scene, and he finds a way to never react to any situation in exactly the way you might suspect. It’s an endearingly weird performance, and that’s just fine, because Show Yourself is an endearingly weird film. It’s rough around the edges, but it gets inside your thoughts and haunts the viewer even after it’s over. It's a film that remains vibrantly alive in the subconscious, more than a year since I first saw it. And it continues to evolve, after the second and third viewings as well.

At the movies: I Am The Doorway.

I AM THE DOORWAY

Stephen King’s short stories have always been his finest achievement- timeless and unrestrained portraits of humanity in crisis that remain as unsettling and effective forty years down the road as when they were first published. There’s a power in those works that works on a level different from his rightfully acclaimed legacy of novels and their many adaptations across countless media. But anyone with memories of the cover of the mass-market paperback of Night Shift will remember its key image- a hand, covered in bandages and eyes. I Am The Doorway, which lent the collection that striking image, was Lovecraftian SciFi of the highest order, so rich in ideas and tableaux that no one attempted to take it into the realm of the visual. But now, from the Czech Republic, a filmmaker has pulled off the cinematic equivalent of alchemy, taking that story and telling it visually without dialogue and with a subjective camera. In fifteen minutes, Director Robin Kasparik delivers artful cosmic horror, creative mise-en-scene, and the finest Stephen King adaptation in years. Be ready for a bold new voice in horror and science fiction.

The Decline of Western Civilization 2 and Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

 I am fortunate to have an outlet for publication that will follow me into some weird-ass places. Thus, you have this number, wherein I discuss how you could spend one night at the same theatre watching both Wes Craven's New Nightmare and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. Just give it a read- I have a theory and such.

At the movies: The Visit.

Sometimes a film just has the ability to get into your sense of self and start jiggling things around. The Visit does that.

At the electronic outlet: The Canyons.

So yeah. This is the piece where I bring down some anger my way. I dug The Canyons a lot. Most people may very well hate it. Here's a quick test... Look at the image below. You see that '70s sweater La Lohan is wearing? If you don't feel immediately intrigued as to that combination of elements, then this may not be the film for you. 

At the movies: John Dies at the End.

You need to see this. Seriously, dude. You need to see this.

At the movies: Silent Hill: Revelation 3D.

The PROs:

1) There's a creature in this film that I'm calling the spidermannequin. It is featured in the trailer, though it skitters quickly (and with such overstated CG speed) that you can't appreciate what an exquisite slice of nightmare fodder it is. This is up there with the Trilobite in Prometheus, or any of the reanimated pets in Frankenweenie. I've always said that a good monster can make up for a multitude of sins in any movie- this is a very good monster.

2) Deborah Kara Unger realness. She only has one scene, but she gets third billing. Damn right. She'll always be Catherine Ballard to me, and she brings all the good will she brought into the first SH to this one.

3) The nurses. Like a fusion of the Stygian Witches from the original Clash of the Titans and The Weeping Angels from Doctor Who (even though, yes, I know the Silent Hill nurses predate the Weeping Angels), these stop/start contortionist slice-and-dice artistes are remarkably effective. Unfortunately, their sequence is edited a bit too haphazardly for one to really appreciate the tension that the 3D adds to this particular sequence.

4) A carousel kept in motion by jagged pectoral hooks.

5) Some masterfully composed deep-focus shots that use stereoscopic images in an effective and unsettling way.

6) a child's birthday party turns into what looks like a meeting of the Kiss Army.

7) I hope Clive Barker got some money from this production, because this movie has a Cenobite axe battle as its climax. It's not staged particularly well, but its set-up is good, and there's a nice transformation that precedes it.

8) the female lead (playing the grown-up version of diva Jodelle Ferland from the first film) is good. She's got presence and gravitas, and she's got a Michelle Williams vibe going on that is a nice touch. The script gives her nothing, and she turns it into something.


The CONs:

1) This is a terrible script. No dialogue that isn't cliched. No motivation that doesn't feel like a cutscene (rightfully) excised from a game. No effort spent on establishing 'the real world.' No strong characters whatsoever- say whatever you want about Roger Avary, his script for the original Silent Hill had superb characterization, including five great roles for actresses. There are entire studios that haven't released five great roles for women in their entire 2012 lineup. And there's just nothing here that doesn't depend on an awareness of either the first film or the series of games. I bet dubbed into another language, this film plays like gangbusters, though.

2) It looks like they had about a tenth of the budget of the first film to work with. That's not the filmmakers' fault, but it is something you need to keep in mind.

3) There's none of the Italian horror dream logic that proved so refreshing in the first film.

4) There's no telekinetic razorwire massacre, or anything that comes even close to the transgressive, gleeful savagery of that sequence.

5) The male lead is just not very good. Part of it is that the script gives him nothing to work with, but he's also never really convincing.

6) Everybody from the first film who returns in this one... one scene each. Sean Bean, he gets a couple, and (surprise) he doesn't die (literally), so that's something. But there's a decent amount of stars involved in this film, and they all get the traditional scream queen treatment of one scene and out. When Malcolm McDowell shows up, you just have to accept that.

7) The 3D is really inconsistent. Some scenes and sequences are absolutely gorgeous, with amazing uses of depth separation and perspective shifts. Others look flat and post-converted.

8) What happened to Carrie-Anne Moss' career? She was the ass-kicking diva of the new millennium thanks to The Matrix. And she's worked continuously since the late '80s. But she deserves more- she gets to be the evil queen in this film, with pale skin and no eyebrows, but she only shines when the CG and stuntperson take over when she grows sawblades and becomes a Barkerian warrioress. She does get a great 'take him to the Asylum and cure him!' moment that resonates, but like everyone else in the cast who speaks, she is left adrift by the script. She doesn't get anything on par with what Alice Krige does in the first one, and that's sad.

9) I'm sure the studios involved were ecstatic that this entry runs just over an hour and a half, but there's never a chance to absorb any of the environments the film presents. Everything looks kind of cheap. The cinematographer, Maxime Alexander, shot Haute Tension and the remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and The Crazies- this is a man who knows how to light things beautifully. And this film looks haloed and overprocessed.

So I can't recommend Silent Hill: Revelation to you. If anything, it's the most disappointed I've been by a sequel to a film I loved since Basic Instinct. Though, in all honesty, Basic Instinct: Risk Addiction had Sharon Stone going full-tilt crazy, and there's nothing so lively or refreshing to be found here. Oh well...

At the movies: Prometheus.

In theory, I've been waiting for this film since 1987.

At the movies: The Cabin in The Woods.

One of my favorite films I've seen so far this year, I got a chance to talk about this unique little mind-melter in The Scene. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did seeing, then writing it.

Famous People Talked to Me: Roxanne Benjamin.

In honor of V/H/S making its Nashville premiere at this year's Nashville Film Festival, I got to talk with producing phenom/former co-worker/Renaissance woman Roxanne Benjamin. Have a look, won't you?

At the movies: Silent House.

A mess of a film with a staggering lead performance, this is the kind of movie that I recommend to actors and people who dig on seeing just how weird some films can skew. If anything, the in-home experience with this film might prove even more rewarding. It's not a particularly good film, even, but Olsen is spectacular. Have a look see...

What's New in the World of NSFW Movie Trailers?

First and foremost, nothing in this post is appropriate for viewing by anyone with any sense of decency or a well-adjusted moral compass.

As a critic and media prophet, it's my job to be aware of what's coming your way in the world of transgressive cinema. It's also something that I- well, let's not say enjoy, but it's something that I'm more than willing to do.

I don't endorse violence and degradation in real life.

Movies are not real, but they can express aspects of the human condition just as any art form does.

And now that we have that out of the way (and seriously, this is your last chance warning; if you don't regularly discuss contemporary art cinema, please skip this piece and move on to the photography and the section where I talk about Tyler Perry), here we go...



SHOWGIRLS: THE RETURN

This film's director Marc Vorlander is apparently battling it out with Rena Riffel (you know, Penny/Hope from the original) for dueling Showgirl movies.

I say "please, y'all, may I have some more." Everyone should make a Showgirl movie. Quentin Tarantino, Claire Denis, Philippe Grandrieux, and Gaspar Noe should all make Showgirl movies. Because I have no idea what to think of this. It's just under five minutes, and has been trimmed from the unending ten minute monstrosity at the film's official website. And the music feels like a riff on John Carpenter's Halloween music over the beat from Schooly D's "PSK (What Does it Mean?)."

Notable fan of timeless American values and human decency Erik S pointed out, quite accurately, that this totally looks like a Fantom Kiler movie.
Also, just for comparison's sake, here's Rena Riffel's trailer for her own Showgirls sequel.

"How bad do you want it? Bad..."



ENTER THE VOID ("Soudain Le Vide")

Gaspar Noe is kind of awesome. A few years back, he hosted a night at the IFC Center in NYC where he showed 35mm prints of Seul Contre Tous and Salo, and in between the two I got to talk to him for a couple of minutes about his work, Kubrickian motifs, and Bruno Dumont's Flanders; he even signed my ticket, so full props to him.

He's made two beautiful misanthropic masterpieces (the aforementioned Seul Contre Tous and the staggering Irreversible), and now here comes his third feature, with an inordinate amount of sex and drugs and pinballing through the streets of Tokyo. Music by Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk, no less. Here's the Japanese trailer.

The colors... I've actually talked to people who have seen this, and I am super-pumped, especially since (unlike every other film discussed on this page) it actually has U.S. distribution from the lovable freaks at IFC Films. And seriously, how can you not love one of the most twisted characters in the world cinema game who confesses to crying when they killed HomeTree in Avatar?



KINATAY (which, for some reason has been given the English language title of "The Execution of P")

This film, like Enter The Void, premiered at Cannes '09, where its director Brillante Mendoza (who made the porny, atmospheric Serbis a couple of years ago) won the Best Director Award and Roger Ebert lost his mind about it. It's about corruption, Catholicism, misogyny, dehumanization, and the darkest parts of physical space and the human heart.

There's no English-friendly trailer yet, but this French-subtitled one gets the point across (though I actually think it soft-pedals the film's brutality and experimental quality- this could easily be an American trailer for a foreign film, the way it focuses on aspects of family and moral choice).

Kinatay sur Comme Au Cinema

The actual translation of the title is "Butchered" or "Slaughter." You probably guessed that, though.



and that brings us to the big nasty.

This film hit Texas this week with the force of several hundred dropped jaws, countless buckets of tears and vomit, and dozens of spontaneous religious awakenings. I'm talking, of course, about...



A SERBIAN FILM ("Srpski Film")

If even an eighth of what has been said about this film is true, I fear it may cause crops to wither, pregnant ladies to explode, and sex to stop happening across the board. Explicitly political and super-upsetting, this is currently the most scandalous film in the world.

Now my question is this- what is the song used in the latter half of the trailer? Y'all know I love squelchy synth drones as a counterpoint to shock and horror.

So, that brings us to the end of this compendium of What's New in the World of NSFW Movie Trailers. Many thanks are due the lovable freaks at Twitch Film and Zack H for bringing some of these to my attention, and big ups to you for making it this far.

The Terrifying World of Nature.

Giant jellyfish. Kurosawa's Bright Future doesn't seem so far removed from reality, now does it?

At the movies: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

A shameful, incoherent blurt that seems to think potty humor and graphic violence go hand in hand with children's toys, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen gives us eighties nostalgia gussied up to disguise an all too familiar agenda for that time and space: we get giant robots in order to spur military spending and nostalgia for the expansion of the military complex. Reagan’s Star Wars fantasies are the honest precursor to this monstrosity; SciFi stripped of ideas, war as ‘entertainment,’ and militarized playthings to keep the gears turning.

This is certainly the first film to explicitly look back with fondness on the George W. Bush years, in the process name-calling President Obama for how he would respond to a giant robot attack and portraying anyone who isn’t 100% in support of unqualified military might as squirrelly and bad for the planet. As has been the case since Bay’s first features, jingoism and antiquated masculine codes of behavior are in plentiful supply.

Analysts (the people who evaluate a film’s worthiness by how much money it makes) expect this to be the summer's biggest movie in terms of box office, and it's certainly the biggest in terms of explosions, dollars spent per second of film, and horrifyingly racist caricatures. We actually have a pair of cars who shuck and jive all over the screen, eagerly proclaiming their ignorance (unable to read and equipped with gold teeth- these are cybernetic aliens who were apparently designed according to the end credits of Bamboozled) and willingness to battle some ‘punkass Decepticons.’ It's Amos and Android, and it's emblematic of the horrifying disconnect between this film and all that is decent.

Two decades past their initial media domination, Hasbro's enduring toy line again rears its head under the creative aegis of Michael Bay, who never met anything he couldn't blow up.

So what happens in this film that requires over two and a half hours to depict? Our hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoeuf, whom I still can’t hate despite coming back for another helping of this excrescence) heads off to college, forcibly gets made out with by a robot, gets his mind overloaded by alien secrets, becomes a pawn in an intergalactic robotic civil war, then has to save 1) the planet, 2) the sun, 3) his parents, 4) his relationship with the lovely Mikaela (Megan Fox, who has nothing to do here but jiggle and occasionally blowtorch out an optic sensor or two), and 5) the majority of the U.S. and Jordanian military/ How, you might ask? By talking to robot gods on the border between this world and the next. In the clouds, no less…

If that wasn’t enough, it also appears that the Decepticons have mastered hot chick technology, unleashing a naughty robot with the outward form of a sexually liberated sorority girl (played by Isabel Lucas) and the inner form of a cuisinart. The audience know she’s up to no good because she violates the rule established by the first film that the only female appearing in the movie without breast implants is Julie White (who'll always be Nadine from Grace Under Fire in my heart), who plays Sam’s mother. So it’s not a surprise that she busts out a prehensile tongue-chain-rotor and starts trying to destroy a library. This development in technology is summarily never spoken of again.

It's kind of staggering to think that Orci and Kurtzman (who also wrote the equally reprehensible first Transformers flick) also wrote the most recent Star Trek film, which at least gave the impression that it featured actual people. There have to have either been some major rewrites on this film or on Trek, because it is simply impossible that the same minds could have produced such wildly divergent scripts.

Deadening would be the best word for this expulsion. Eye-deadening, ear-deading, soul-deadening.

The only life in the film comes from the altogether amazing interviews the two leads have been giving as of late in order to promote it. LaBoeuf’s affable but crippling insecurity and overwhelming need to be liked and remembered, Fox’s cutting-to-the-chase deconstruction of what modern day hotness means as both opportunity and liability; this is absolute gold. They’re so left adrift by the utter banality of this Transformers film that they’re letting us into some place surprisingly intimate. I respect them, though I wish they could have had something to do besides pose in front of the endless explosions and effects.

But as I’ve always said, there were twenty amazing seconds in the first film, and this one manages to increase that number, up to about two minutes. Just a collection of little moments that indicated that someone amongst the army of computer effects programmers had a little bit of artistry in what they were doing. Here, it all deals with Soundwave, who in the 80s was a boom box, and who now is a satellite, orbiting in space, never involved in any of the interminable battles but still a major player, launching his animalized minions to wreak havoc on earth.

The design of the Soundwave satellite is impressive because of its alien geometry and because it was crafted by aesthetics not subservient to military excess (like 90% of everything else in this film). But just as exciting in terms of its distinctiveness (again, not something you get a whole lot of) is one of those minions, a razor-sharp operative organized out of thousands of nanotype ball bearings that, when fully assembled, is molecule thin, disappearing when it turns at certain angles. It’s but a drop in the film’s runtime, and yet, for a moment, there was that glimpse of what the slightest amount of artistry can yield when hundreds of millions of dollars in processing power get dumped on it.

But just like the first film felt the need to display its abhorrent ideology by moving a pitched battle sequence from a secure desert location to a highly-populated urban center (terrorist logic if ever I’ve seen it), so this film feels the need to express its base nature by destroying places of learning (library, dorms, part of an administration building at a college). And then, as if that wasn’t enough, Bay and his digital conspirators decide to have a forty-odd minute firefight in Egypt, destroying a pyramid or two and raining explosions and firestorms down on the birthplace of knowledge and civilization.

What does human life mean to you, Mr. Bay? What are you defending? Sweaty bosoms, shiny machines, bloody flesh, and everything exploding, each one bigger than the one before it. Such an empty void of expression…

At the movies: Friday the 13th.

Platinum Dunes must be stopped.

Their remakes of The Hitcher, The Amityville Horror, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre took beloved (well, except for Amityville) horror films of eras past and remade them as slick-looking, empty-headed drivel. And now, in taking the most brain dead of horror franchises, the Friday the 13th films, they've managed to take dumb films and make them even dumber.

They spent countless millions of dollars on production value (and the locations all look beautiful), but all the money in the world can't replicate the idiotic charm of the original Friday the 13th films, and the cast has absolutely nothing to do except get killed. Aaron Yoo, from Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, makes the best impression, but even he is simply bogged down by the utter ineptitude of this new Friday. And as for ostensible lead Jared Padalecki, he is much better served by his show Supernatural than he is by this film.

A new bunch of idiot teenagers is on their way to Camp Crystal Lake to see the sights, swim, do drugs, take part in some topless waterskiing, and have premarital sex. Naturally, they're doomed, and legendary slasher Jason Voorhees is sharpening up his machete, antlers, woodchipper, hatchet, archery set, and chisel to carve up some teenage meat. But without the subtext of the initial run of Fridays (up through Part VII or so), which combined reactionary mores, Cold War nuclear dread, and the shameful "me first" ideology of the 80s, there's simply no reason for this film to exist.

We have a few good kills, one exceptional kill (it involves a sleeping bag, but not in the way you'd expect), no quotable dialogue, and a pittance of gore. I was never dreading this remake, because the original Fridays weren't exactly a sacred text to begin with. But lo and behold, Platinum Dunes have managed to once again snatch defeat from the jaws of a beloved franchise. And they want to tackle A Nightmare on Elm Street next? Blasphemy.

At the movies: My Bloody Valentine 3D.

Call it another example of Polar Express syndrome. That film, viewed simply and in two dimensions, is borderline unwatchable. In 3D, it’s worth seeing if just for its use of physical space and imaginative sense of movement. Most films are improved by the addition of that extra dimension, even if it only makes a passable film into something interesting. As a regular, two-dimensional offering, My Bloody Valentine is yet another remake of an 80s semi-classic (and while countless reviews of this new version refer to the 1981 original as being minor, poorly-made, and even badly-shot, don’t you believe it for a second- there’s a grace of camera to that version that few slashers could touch) that, while light years ahead of messes like the remakes of The Fog, Prom Night, and April Fool’s Day, still doesn’t understand what its originator did right.

It’s got one big, movie-derailing problem that is handled dishonestly and in as stupidly Scooby-Doo a fashion as possible, and the three leads all seem way too young to be dealing with the ‘real life’ issues of their characters. That said, My Bloody Valentine 3D is an absolute joy. Stepping up and giving the audience real fear, fake blood, and a pickaxe-wielding psycho with some unresolved issues, this film is gloriously stupid and filled with the violence, nudity, sex, and pokey-things-which-actually-do-damage that 3D cinema has been needing. This movie opens with three consecutive massacres, and that’s just the first ten or so minutes. It has none of the subtlety, subtext, or gorgeous camerawork of its progenitor, but it delivers the kind of unironic jolts that horror movie fans and thrillseekers have been needing for what seems like decades.

Something scary.

So here's one of my all-time favorite pieces. Done for the Nashville Scene's sorely-missed Late Edition, this is my take on the thirteen scariest movie moments of all time (up until October 2005, when the piece was initially written).

I've also posted the text of the article below (the actual Scene page has weird formatting from the last site redesign) for your viewing pleasure.



Scary can mean a lot of things to different people, though I maintain that anything can be scary with the right perspective. What about basset hounds, you may ask? Sure, a basset hound isn't intrinsically scary. But if you found yourself in a room full of about 60 basset hounds, and they were all completely quiet and staring right at you, you would be rightly creeped out. But I digress.

What follows is a little something for people who might be looking for something to view this Halloween weekend. You're not going to find the big daddies of the genre here, for the most part. Films like Halloween, The Shining, Psycho, and Jaws all have their devotees and their charms, and they can be readily had by anyone with a video-store membership or library card.

These are the 13 moments in all of movies that scare me most. Maybe some people will disagree, and that's fine. But maybe there's something in one of these films that'll make your heart quicken—or even better, make you think about what scares you and why. Beware of spoilers, and enjoy.

13. PET SEMATARY (1989) Mary Lambert's nasty, nihilistic take on Stephen King's dark-side-of-life-after-death novel has several particularly gruesome and creepy moments (Achilles tendon, anyone?). But is there anything that compares to wife and mother Rachel Creed's memories of her sister Zelda, confined by spinal meningitis to a dim room in the back of the house? It's a minor part of the plot, but Zelda is why this film remains as horrifyingly potent today as when it was first released.

12. MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944) When it comes to the dark veneer of the traditionally staid community, David Lynch and John Carpenter have nothing on Vincente Minnelli. I'll never forget the Technicolor nightmare of Margaret O'Brien as little Tootie traversing her darkened neighborhood. It echoes in Carpenter's own Halloween, in the dark places on familiar streets. Children, you see, are allowed to be scared. Adults, however, with our jobs and obligations, are not. But a good scare reduces everyone to their childhood self again.

11. THE HAUNTING (1963) Robert Wise's take on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is one of the most graceful and elegant ghost stories ever made, and its enduring lesson to all future films of a dark and suspenseful nature is that implication really is much stronger than displaying something completely. In this black-and-white Cinemascope minefield of subconscious terror (G-rated, nonetheless), there's a moment of boundless horror when a shifting light source slowly turns a section of bric-a-brac next to the terrified Julie Harris into a monstrous, quasi-demonic face. It doesn't roar, it doesn't detach from the wall, and if you were of a completely assured countenance, you could say that it was still only a small fissure. But people of completely assured countenances don't understand the art of fear, even as the strange geometry of Wise's Hill House would doubtlessly frustrate their certainties. In the darkness, Harris grasps the hand of her roommate, Theo (Claire Bloom), only to be met with a cold, clutching grip. The house’s unseen terrors are finally too much, and she turns on the light—whereupon she learns Theo is on the other side of the room. "Oh God," she says, "what was holding my hand?" Delicious.

10. STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986) The things that scare us are deeply personal things. Granted, multitudes of differentiated fears can be reduced to anxiety about death— that's something universal. But the weird fears, the phobias, this is when you get into the uniquities of people. Me, I have personal issues with spiders, elevators, and whales. Thanks to our friendly local brown recluses and black widows, I maintain that it is not unreasonable to be afraid of spiders if you live in Tennessee. Likewise, people do die in elevator accidents all over the world (though thankfully not very often). But why whales? Especially living in Tennessee? All I can say is that whales best embody the creeping unease that keeps me from going in any body of water of which I can't see the bottom. The idea that below me an unseen something dwarfs me—it is nearly unbearable. The time travel sequence in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home illustrates this unnamable feeling. A featureless human body, suspended in space or underwater; behind/below/beyond it, coalescing into view, a giant cetacean. It speaks volumes without saying a word, the image forever burned into the hippocampus—the part of the brain where nightmares live.

9. FOUL PLAY (1978) Librarian Gloria Mundy (Goldie Hawn) sets about shelving some errant books after having closed the library she works at. Of course, she isn't alone, and the teasing quality of the pas de deux that she and a chloroform-wielding albino assassin are dancing through the shelves becomes almost maddening with tension. The grace note arrives when she removes a book from the shelf, revealing the killer's eye, staring back at her. Because of this scene, the two and a half years I spent working at a used bookstore were neverending exercises in the most cruel kind of fear; even today, every tome I take from a shelf is done so with a steady hand, for fear that there's someone right on the other side waiting, watching.

8. THE KEEP (1983) The horror of trespass is a particularly effective one when dealing with a sense of entitlement. The sudden or gradual realization that the terrain is unfamiliar, that one no longer holds the upper hand, or that not listening to a warning is going to reap a terrible price—all these are examples of the horror of trespass. A lot of times, it goes talon in talon with the Embrace of the Monstrous (see A Nightmare on Elm Street and Candyman below), not always consensually. Equally visionary and ridiculous, Michael Mann's adaptation of F. Paul Wilson's monsterpiece The Keep is a flawed gem that contains what may be my favorite single shot in all of film history. Some German soldiers, occupying a Romanian fort during World War II, have started investigating the hundreds of crosses that line the interior walls. "Never touch the crosses," the blind caretaker had warned them, but if they had listened to the caretaker, there wouldn't really be a movie, now would there? Hundreds of nickel crosses are embedded in stone blocks, except for one… this cross is silver. And this block moves. The soldiers explore where this newfound passage leads, and we find a cavernous space. The camera pulls back from the ever-smaller soldier and his flashlight, further and further away. At last his flashlight is but a tiny dot near the top of the frame, and we pull back further still, as gradually we can see walls around us. When the camera stops its movement, we are hundreds and hundreds of feet away, motionless in murky earth as something hideous arises. That shot is a masterful representation of one's sense of self, world, and physical space being challenged by something monstrously greater.

7. PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987) "This is not a dream.” Now immortalized on DJ Shadow's Endtroducing… (as well as albums by Marilyn Manson and, ahem, DJ Nomi), the mysterious transmissions from the year 1999 in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness never cease to send a chill up the spine. A tracking shot along the front gate of a church, which hides a cosmologically horrifying secret, ends with a mysterious dark figure emerging in triumph from the building's interiors. Like the phantom beacon on Alien's planet LV-426, the image beams, in this case back through time, in hopes that someone will understand its dire portent.

6. THE SENDER (1982) John Doe #83 (Zeljko Ivanek) is a young man admitted to a mental hospital with a severe case of amnesia and suicidal tendencies. Unbeknownst to the hospital staff, he is also capable of broadcasting his dreamlife directly into the minds of those around him. This means that reality becomes pretty much meaningless. Of course, think the higher-ups at the hospital, what John Doe #83 needs is a slight dose of electroconvulsive therapy. It's okay, you see, because he'll be sedated. He won't feel a thing. What happens when the hospital staff activates that ECT machine is something you can't easily describe. I'll say this: it is impossible to envision the world that Chris Cunningham creates in his art and film without this particular sequence. It is a graceful chaos of motion and raw physical power, and certainly one of the finest FX setpieces in the history of filmmaking. Like its younger brother in 1982 horror, The Thing (see below), The Sender does things that no computer could approximate. But great effects are not necessarily scary. What lingers about this sequence is the effortless shift from clinical reality to photovoltaic nightmare without tipping its hat once. It is simply masterful.

5. SUSPIRIA (1977) There is an instance of awareness for any animal in mortal danger—a specific point at which the phrase “life or death struggle” becomes an analysis, not a hypothetical. Dario Argento's mad fairy tale Suspiria serves up one of the finest, as ballet student Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) finds herself abandoned in her school’s sinister dormitory, as the whole school has gone to the theatre. She calls one of the few outsiders she can trust, only to lose the phone and the lights in a vicious storm. The lights return; the phone does not. And that's when Suzy realizes: "I'm next." She'll gear up and wage battle, to be sure, but the finest moment in this hallucinatory nightmare is Harper's when the phone fails—there for but a flash, and then gone.

4. THE THING (1982) At an Antarctic research lab, the crew is told they are going to explore a spooky building. "And why are we going there," the men ask— a good question when a shape-shifting monster is devouring anyone within reach. Research scientist Kurt Russell points to the remote shack, where a light burns from within. "Because," he says, "when I left there yesterday, I turned the lights out." The matter-of-factness is what sells it: he could just as easily have said, "Gentlemen, here comes the shit," or, "I know where some alien horror is…" It's a moment of visceral fear that nonetheless gives us a glimpse inside the character. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

3. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) First we see that Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) has been cut, badly, and her arm is bleeding. But with her other arm, from under the sheet she pulls a rumpled brown hat— the hat belonging to long-dead child-killer Freddy Krueger, burned alive by the neighborhood parents. Attention, both in the onscreen Katja Sleep Clinic and from the offscreen viewer, naturally fixes on Nancy, But watch her mother's reaction to that hat. Marge Thompson (Ronee Blakley) sees a real-life souvenir of the horror of trespass, while her daughter looks near-giddy with the possibility of what has just happened; she can bridge between the worlds of the conscious and the unconscious. This is the embrace of the monstrous.

2. ALIEN (1979) Yeah, I know: the monster bursts out of John Hurt's chest and people lose their fucking minds. It's a milestone of shock, but is it really scary? Sure, it encompasses cancer and anticipates HIV fears in a particularly visceral manner, but does that chest-bursting provoke intense dread? As if anticipating this, the film (in its original version, not the 2003 “director’s cut”) follows up that sequence with a one-two punch of abject terror, starting with the protracted sequence where Harry Dean Stanton's Brett searches for the ship's cat and finds only alien nastiness. But that's just the first part, because Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt— the biggest star at the time, and thus the least likely to die) has an engagement in the ship's air ducts. The sound is a mesh of Jerry Goldsmith's sinister strings for the movie Freud, the pulse of an agitated heart, and the beeping of his tracking device. The most chilling moment is folded into the other sounds, but when Veronica Cartwright as Lambert screams, "The other way! No, the other way!" just as the alien introduces itself to Dallas, it'll get to you. There isn't a single false moment in the whole sequence, a symphony of light, shadow, and propulsive fear.

1. CANDYMAN (1992) There's a very specific scene in Bernard Rose's Clive Barker adaptation that elevates it from exceptional to one of the finest horror films ever made. Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) has been charged with the murder of her best friend, is under suspicion in the disappearance of a baby, has been forcibly committed by her louse of a cheating husband, and is now tormented by the affections of a supernatural death-dealer. She's just been shown video footage of herself in the midst of a horrifying confrontation with the legendary fiend known as Candyman, and only she can be seen. The doctor turns off the monitor and asks her what she really thinks about the whole situation. Helen then sloughs off all the things of this world by uttering a simple phrase: "I can call him." The bloodletting that follows is impressive, as is the story's action-packed and deliciously resonant resolution. But this is the moment that we never get to see at the movies. Time and time again, in many different genres, characters find themselves in the midst of the wild and weird and interesting and unreal, and they always scuttle back to the safety to their own planet, their own time, or their own narrow existence. Helen Lyle simply has nothing left to lose, so she decides to expand her horizons and ride the whirlwind. "I can call him," she says, and she does. The resulting chill makes you question your own philosophies. And that's the best kind of fear.