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Films to rent for Halloween
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Tobe Hooper 1974
Don't bother with the remake, they got it right in '74. Five teenagers run into a gas shortage in the oppressive Texas heat, leading them to a family of unemployed slaughterhouse workers. Unlike the exploitive cash-cow slashers it has been lumped with (and remade into), TCM kills with an unrelenting pace. Because this film isn't baiting us along, dropping one gross fatality at a time, the pace is violently out of control. We feel as if the teens are dying because Hooper can't keep his killers off of them. Shot during insane conditions in an insane decade, the rage, chaos and bloodlust in this film is real - in one scene we actually see the actress being cut.
Dead Alive
Peter Jackson 1992
More absurd and more grotesque than the "Evil Dead" series, "Dead Alive" is one of the more difficult to stomach latex and pig guts grossouts ever filmed. Jackson ladles this campy chum with an ironic sense of humor that resembles the zombie-child of Monty Python and Douglas Adams ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"). Lionel, a lovably inept momma's boy is faced with the dilemma of trying to keep his cannibal mother (victim of a zombifying rat-monkey bite) under control while courting the girl of his dreams. Playful grossout humor at its weirdest.
Carvinal Of Souls
Herk Harvey 1962
Hours after a car of joy-riding teenagers careens off a bridge into the river, a disheveled woman emerges from the water. She decides to leave the tragedy behind and skips town to become a church organist. Soon she becomes obsessed with an abandoned circus pavilion and is stalked by silent pale-faced monsters. Herk Harvey's film is a masterpiece in simplicity, pacing and execution. It's an inventively surreal film in gritty low-fi black and white, inspired by a true location outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.
Frailty
Bill Paxton 2001
There is a litany of films addressing theological horrors. "The Exorcist," "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Omen" are all very frightening, but only one film juxtaposes the eternal right and wrong. What if what we have to fear is not the devil, but the will of God? A man confesses to the FBI that he knows the identity of "The God's Hands Killer," a religious fanatic serial murderer who believes that he is hunting demons disguised as humans. While soaking in shadowy compositions crafted by the "Prince of Darkness" (cinematographer Bill Butler, "The Godfather"), this film pushes the stock serial thriller atmosphere into thoroughly distressing territory with its fanatical take on "an eye for an eye."
Audition
Takashi Miike 2000
J-horror sensation "Ringu" may be eclipsed by the easily digestible Americanized remake "The Ring," but at least for now Japanese cinema extremist Takashi Miike's "Audition," is without an American rip-off. Miike represents a country that made brutal, intelligent and (gasp) scary horror films in the '90s while Hollywood was busy fitting teen pin-ups with skin-tight belly shirts and marching them off to the slaughter. "Audition" is an unabashedly violent seat-squirmer about a widower movie producer staging a fake audition to find a bride that spends the better part of an hour brewing a meticulously constructed feeling of uneasiness. And the finale is well worth the wait.
Dawn of the Dead
George A. Romero 1978
If you believe that Americans should buy their way out of this economic slump, then maybe you should brush up on history with Romero's "Fear of Affluenza" zombie epic. A pack of survivalists on the eve of an unexplained zombie virus take up residence in an abandoned mall. Believing that they can escape their reality by building a dream world out of material possessions, these lost souls of the "Me" generation are just as illusioned as the zombies, who are drawn to the mall by some faded instinct to be near a place where they were happy during their lives.
The Brood
David Cronenberg 1979
Utilizing Canadian film subsidies, David Cronenberg made a pre-"Alien" parasite/zombie flick called "Shivers," and a deeply disturbing trilogy in experimental biology with "Scanners," "Videodrome" and "The Brood." A woman with serious repressed anger undergoes an experimental treatment, but her venting creates a series of physical manifestations that bring deadly consequences to the targets of her bottled-up rage. Cronenberg teases our paranoid fantasies by showing how little we know about our own bodies, and how they can turn against us.
Final Destination 2
David R. Ellis 2003
This film is unique in its unchecked violence toward its characters. Not only are cute teens dying, so are little boys and mothers too. In American horror classics of the '70s, anyone could die. In this film, everyone must die and the throw-away plot doesn't get in the way. It's sketch-based homicide hell-bent on upstaging itself with every kill. However, nothing can top the opener, a large-scale freeway crash similar in scope to the epic battles choreographed by Woo-Ping Yeun ("Kill Bill," "The Matrix").
Scream
Wes Craven 1996
Wes Craven first made his mark on American horror with his primal scream from the generation who survived Vietnam, "The Last House on the Left," (1972). Later he helped start the slasher movement with '84's "A Nightmare on Elm Street." And then he turned it all into a joke with "Scream." Just when '80s schlock slashers had seemed to bleed out, Craven revitalized the genre by turning the fans loose on the fiction. And even though it started the "Isn't it cute that I know I'm in a horror movie" movie, it's still graphic and gutsy.
Halloween
John Carpenter 1978
Before "let's kill kids for having sex" became a no-brainer, John Carpenter's down-right puritanical original slasher gave fear of sex a whole new meaning. Although there is plenty of hiding stalking and slashing, the most engrossing shot hasn't been duplicated by its lackey imitations and sequels. Through the eyes of the camera, the audience stabs a beautiful naked girl. But this sick voyeurism really becomes terror when we realize that we've stabbed our own sister, and that we are six-years-old.
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