5 Classic Random International Horror Films in Preparation for Halloween

 

1922 Häxan, Benjamin Christensen, Sweden and Denmark

This Scandanavian silent gem from Danish director Benjamin Christensen is an informative study on the history of witches that combines documentary techniques with fictionally recreated stories to demonstrate the medieval witch hunts and supposed hellish practices and rituals performed between women and demons. An impressive, sensually threatening Satan makes several appearances, portrayed by Christensen, the director himself, as he presides over the sinful festivities both behind and in front of the camera. The film is a part fiction part factual essay on witches divided into 6 chapters. The first chapter is entirely informative, explaining through Medieval drawings and paintings the history of the Sabbath of the witches, a celebration that will later be recreated as an old woman gives a detailed confession to save herself from torture, telling her prosecuters the gruesome information they seek. These scenes are the most spectacular of the film as we see the fantastically costumed and made up demonic creatures punish and dance and revel with their female admirers. The nude actresses, smokey and fiery sets, and disturbing design of the demons recreate the old woman’s tale with scary yet sexy delight. The sexual nature of the film and the critique of the church is very progressive for its time. The grand finale of the Sabbath is a parade of women kneeling before Satan’s bare ass to give it a kiss. The film is equally enthralling in its informative and theatrical sections, and tells the devastating story of the paradox of being accused of a witch - killed if you confess, tortured to death if you don’t. It displays a world where women cannot win. One young rich woman accuses an ugly poor beggar of cursing her father after a witchdoctor convinced her of it. She runs as fast as she can to see the priests and touches the arm of the youngest of them in her desperation. Here she not only seals the fate of the innocent woman she is condemning, but also her own as the young priest becomes ‘bewitched’ by her touch, unable to get her off his young sexually repressed mind. The priests themselves eat up and encourage all the dark, dirty sexual details of the Sabbath, probably more excited than repulsed by the tales of witchery they judge. The final sections of the film cover the instruments of torture used, and how what was once described as witchery, in the films contemporary times, would instead be considered hysteria, the women being treated instead of burned at the stake. In all its efforts to defend women, the last sections come across as a bit misogynist nowadays in their representation of overly dramatic women, but,for the time period the film was made, it is a surprisingly ‘feminist’ representation of the trails of women in the middle ages. With this said, Christensen’s film’s tone is not only a drama on the trails of women, but somehow creates a perfect mix of documentary, drama, comedy, and absurdist fantasy. Some classic silent filmmaking tricks are wonderfully used to show us the magic of the world of witches such as coins that appear and disappear as a witch struggles to collect them, Satan popping up and vanishing from different parts of the room as he sensually tricks a woman to follow him, a shadow of a woman getting up to answer the call of the devil as her unconscious body lays unmoving on the floor, and a group of witches flying magnificently on their brooms over a picturesque German village on a pitch black night. Christensen’s images were way before their time, and would go on to influence other directors for ages to come.

1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon, Jack Arnold, United States

One of Universal Pictures classic Movie Monsters, along with Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, and Dracula, and the inspiration for the underwater being in Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar winning Sci-Fi Romance is The Creature from the Black Lagoon. More of a B-Film than the more serious, disturbing films like Frankenstein and Dracula, the movie is a goofy good time with a greatly designed monster that is really impressive in the days decades prior to digital technology. In a film that is laughably dated in its depiction of indigenous peoples and the inexplicable pollution of a river in the name of science by actual scientists, the underwater scenes are truly a wonder to behold. On land the Creature looks like a big, slow moving plastic toy, complete with dead beady eyes. The actor must have been unbearably uncomfortable, and each tiny step he takes seems to take about all the energy possible out of the poor guy. Yet when he is swimming underwater he suddenly becomes a real threat, and there is a mystical beauty to the fish man floating this way and that between the sea weed to stalk and attack his prey. There is a burning, perhaps unintentional, homoeroticism to the underwater scenes, with the hunky scientists all too ready to strip down and investigate, and a particularly erotic man - creature battle. However, the center of the film is the typical beauty and the beast story with the monster falling in love with the only female protagonist. This leads to some excellently designed scenes as the creature kidnaps her and drags her to his underground cave complete with stunning stalactites and stalagmites, and gloomy lighting that make his impressive abode a classic setting for a damsel in distress rescue.

1964 Onibaba, Kaneto Shindo, Japan

Within tall, man swallowing reeds, mystically swaying in a seemingly deserted humid marshland, lay 2 women, as savage and merciless as animals, in wait to kill and loot samurais who make the mistake of wandering into their domain. The captivating beauty of the sea of tall grass waving in the wind, hiding the horrors that occur beneath it’s waves as a dark ocean obscures the unseen monsters below the depths, are captured by mesmerizing crane shots from above. Director Kaneto Shindo found the perfect setting for a deeply symbolic film that unabashedly details our irrepressible violent and sexual natures when pushed to the brink. In the case of Onibaba’s characters, they have been brought to the point of desperation by a civil war that has taken Kichi, the older woman’s son, and the younger woman’s husband. When one of Kich’s companions returns alone and takes an interest in the younger woman, to her mother in law’s great dismay, their sexual desires become unquenchable, like animals in heat. Based on an ancient Japanese parable, Onibaba means old witch, and when the older woman comes upon a demonic mask, she uses it to scare her daughter in law away from her lover, donning the mask and hiding in the reeds. Shindo films these scenes as nightmares, with the demonic figure rising out of the blowing grass, lit by the light of the moon and gliding through space as if she were floating. The characters are so brutal that none of them are sympathetic. Shindo films them with pulpy close-ups, the most impressive of the three being the older woman played by his future wife Nobuko Otowa. His close ups of her smirking, plotting face and her wild, untameable black hair streaked by a lighting rod of white make her look just as frightening without the mask and she does with it. Adding to the general unease felt throughout the film is a magnificent score by Hikaru Kuroda that mixes the insuppressible sound of the constant wind with drums and shouts and an unforgettable insect like clicking as the women walk through the grass at night. To top all the imagery off is The Hole, a dark pit where the women drop the bodies of their prey once they have been stripped of their possessions. Like the shark in Jaws, the pit could represent a multitude of things, from dangerous sexual desire, to the loveless pit of humankind in times of war. The final scene is brilliantly ambiguous and horrific mixing all the themes of war, sex, chance, and mythology, and any number of conclusions can be made. Shindo’s film may not be a horror film in the traditional sense of the word, but it is a dark reflection on what humans are capable of that leaves an enduring mark on its viewer, like a mask that cannot be removed once worn.

1977 Suspiria, Dario Argento, Italy

While the previous three films use their black and white cinematography to create a spooky monochromatic look contrasting shadows and light, Italian pulp director Dario Argento’s film utilizes it’s color photography to the extremes to film a kaleidoscope colored horror fantasy that is so flamboyantly playful and attractive that it makes you want to avoid blinking so as to not miss a frame of its brightly colored world. At least it would be impossible to take your eyes off it if it were not for the horrific images occurring within the crazy hues of green, purple, and red. Argento, the most successful director of the Italian ‘giallo’ genre, defined as violent suspense films and detective thrillers based on B novels, uses the elements he perfected in these bloody, disturbing features and brings them to this supernatural horror thriller about a young American girl who arrives to study in a prestigious German dance academy and begins to believe the teachers are a coven of witches after a series of strange events and the death and disappearance of several girls and workers at the school. Argento’s use of token over the top, bright red, ketchupy looking gore makes the violence much more artificial and stylistic than realistic, but it is nevertheless perturbing due to his masterful editing and an exceptionally creepy background score by the appropriately named Italian rock group Goblin. The score is so haunting and catchy at the same time that you will find yourself humming it and tapping your feet unintentionally. It is the perfect companion piece to the technicolor cinematography, impossibly enjoyable, no matter how much it is freaking you out at the same time. The cast is impeccable despite the dubbing, typical of Italian films from the time period, with an especially graceful yet offputting performance of deputy headmistress Madame Blanc by Joan Bennett in her last role, decades earlier playing the femme fatal in several of Fritz Lang’s classic Hollywood film noires. A cast of other colorful minor characters include a the tall stern German instructress, a Frankenstein looking servant, a blind pianist and his German Shepherd guide, Madame Blanc’s strangely uniformed young blond nephew, and an appearance from the wild eyed Udu Kier (whose strange looks continue to be used to effect by directors like Lars von Trier) as a psychologist. The result of all these elements combined is one of the greatest horror films of all time, equally entertaining and terrifying, a real treat full of horrible filmmaking tricks that make you want to watch it again and again despite yourself.

1995 The Day of the Beast, Álex de la Iglesia, Spain

De la Iglesia’s comedy horror cult classic has become one of the essential films in Spanish history, and it’s aesthetic and tone remains characteristic and influential in Spanish national cinema and television. It is about a priest who is convinced that he has discovered the date and location of the End of Days on Christmas of the current year in Madrid. He decides he must do all the evil he can to sell his soul to the devil and stop the birth of the antichrist. It features the director's style of self-deprecating ‘Hollywood mainstream’ filmmaking tactics that persists in Spanish pop culture. The awareness that the very idea that Madrid could replace somewhere like New York as a place important enough to feature the end of the world hints at the Spanish collective psyche’s own characteristic feeling of a lack of superiority in comparison to the strong national powers in the western world. As monuments like The White House and The Statue of Liberty are featured and later destroyed in famous American disaster films, most famously in those by disaster director Roland Emmerich, de la Iglesia’s bloody chase scenes take another self aware comedic spin in their scenes featuring Madrid’s more modest famous sights, unrecognizable to international audiences who are not very familiar with the Spanish capital city, like the towers in Plaza Castilla, or the Tío Pepe sign in the Puerta de Sol. In one scene, the protagonists, high off hallucinogens, escape out their window after calling the devil. They end up hanging on for their lives from the Schweppes building in Madrid’s Gran Via. The scene is a masterful blend of suspense and comedy as one of the characters, death metal record salesman José María, giddily tries to throw himself off the building in a playfully dangerous drug induced trip. The blend of comedy and horror, something extremely difficult to execute, is perfectly done from the very first scene where a discussion between two priests ends in an unpredictable tragedy that is both horrible and gut bustingly hilarious. De la Iglesias keeps us aloof until the end of the film between giggles and wince inducing violence, wondering if our protagonists will be able to stop the devil, if they are completely crazy, or if the end of days will destroy the world, with its epicenter in Madrid, of course.