Culture Slut: Ooky Spooky Movie Recommendations
Make it stand out
Well, here we are, October is upon us. The year is flying by, leaves are falling from the trees, the darkness is creeping in and the spooks are ready to come out and play! It feels as though no one is actually prepared for Halloween yet, summer never really got going and then was over in a flash, September was warm and dry for once and now shops have pumpkin decorations and even the beginnings of Christmas aisles.
In less than three months its going to be 2022. Did anyone know this was coming? Has the passage of time altered? How long have we been inside? Why are there so many bottles of wine in my recycling? Do shops have stock? Is the petrol thing sorted out? Why are there no bus drivers any more? Why has Sainsburys stopped regularly stocking Ouzo? Is it because of Brexit? Has Covid disrupted the chain of supply? Is it Halloween? Are we allowed to have parties? Aren’t the numbers going up again? Didn’t people predict another lock-down? Is it time to start making a costume? Is this my life? Putting on my silly little costume and doing my silly little tasks? Am I really running up this silly little hill and making a deal with a silly little god? They’re all going to laugh at you!
At the end of last month I found myself doing the first Halloweeny thing of the year; I went to a cinema screening of Brian De Palma’s 1976 masterpiece Carrie, and my God it was good. I had always loved the teen horror classic, the wide eyed retribution of Sissy Spacek, the sinister histrionics of Piper Laurie, the sociopathic bitchiness of Nancy Allen, but seeing it on a giant cinema screen really gave it new powers. This is how this film was designed to be seen, projected larger than life in a dark room, and it filled every inch of the space with gorgeous gore and horrid beauty. The score is so good, and the religious imagery is so strong, I realised how much of an impact this film has had on my own visual and performance practice. The audience, a small collection of older horror fans, kitsch seekers and queer kids on dates, knew all of Piper Laurie’s lines and reacted to them with glee, or said them along with her “I can see your dirty pillows!”
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Carrie was the best cinematic experience I’ve had in a long time and it has inspired me to put together a short list of some favourite horror films I’m going to recommend this spooky season. In choosing these, I’ve gone for some of the less lauded gems of indie horror, not the same ten films you see cropping up everywhere. Like many queer people, I really love horror, and the genre speaks to us a lot about finding power in having an identity that is -other-. Female rage and sexuality can be weaponised against the cishet men that have kept them down for centuries, and we can look incredible whilst doing it. There is often an element of camp in these great 20th century horror movies, we as an audience are aware of the tropes of horror and that knowingness allows the film to play with and against our expectations. We are writhing in anguish thinking about the flash of the knife in the darkened room, but also welcoming it with open arms. The Oscar Wilde quote “The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last,” is very apt here.
Lust For A Vampire (1971)
This film is a great place to start, a forgotten gem in the crown of camp vampire Hammer Horror. Set in the vague past in a vague European country, a young writer stumbles across a vampiric castle in ruins, and a top class finishing school for only the most gorgeous and nubile young women. He becomes an English master and falls in love with the statuesque student Mircalla, but soon some of the girls are found dead, drained of their blood. The legend of the Karnstein vampires surfaces, particularly of the gorgeous vampire queen Carmilla (no prizes for seeing through that anagram subterfuge) and the truth is eventually uncovered.
Its everything you could want from this kind of 70s vampire treat. The girls are beautiful and frolic happily in the school and gardens, bathing nude in the rivers, and even sharing soft sweet kisses in their dormitories as they float around in sheer night gowns. The score swings wildly between nondescript and absolutely absurd. When one of the other masters reveals himself to Mircalla, claiming to know her secret and wanting to pledge his allegiance (and flesh) to her, the most incredible song plays, the most glorious piece of kitsch and camp. Lust For A Vampire has the honour of being labelled “one of the worst films ever made”, a judgement made by one of it’s own stars, no less, so you know that means its got to be good.
Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988)
One of the rare times I think the sequel to a popular horror film surpasses the original. In the first Hellraiser, wayward teen Kirsty battles with her evil step mother Julia and her undead boyfriend, brought back to the flesh thanks to a group of demons called Cenobites. Kirsty manages to defeat all of them but is promptly taken to a mental hospital when she tries to tell her story, which is where the second film picks up. Kirsty is attended by a doctor who has been researching Cenobites and their mysterious puzzle box for decades and is experimenting on his patients trying to call them forth. The doctor resurrects Julia and even manages to become a Cenobite himself. The final act shows Kirsty fighting her way through Hell itself, trying to destroy Julia and the doctor, and rescue her fellow patients from eternal torment.
This film is a glorious testament to the genius of 80s gore, the special effects make up is beyond reproach. The style and art direction of the whole piece is next level. What stands out most to me is the scene when Julia is first returned to a human form, without her skin, and wears white silk pyjamas over her bare bloody muscles, standing in the middle of the doctor’s stylish minimal white apartment, drinking whiskey. She is played by Claire Higgins who I am a massive fan of, and even had the good fortune to see play Jocasta in Oedipus at the National Theatre with Ralph Fiennes. She is mesmerising in this role, sinister, sexy, suave, powerful and pissed off. Even the vision of Hell here is surprising, opting not for the cliché fire and brimstone, but for a vast concrete labyrinth with different rooms for torture leading off of it, and a giant shadowy diamond in the centre looking over them at all times. What gets written off as 80s schlock is in fact an incredible original stylised ode to a femme fatale and a Brutalist underworld we have never seen before.
“Horror is a place where marginalised people can feel powerful, perhaps not in the healthiest of ways, but it makes a change from either being minimised or completely ignored.”
Martyrs (2008)
This one is a little different in tone to the two previous films, but nonetheless is a truly incredible horror experience. Martyrs (the original French film, not the 2016 American remake) is part of the New French Extremity movement, a genre of French horror films that focus on extreme depictions of taboo subjects such as abuse, suffering and loss. It has its philosophical roots in Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and the duality of good and evil in the writings of the Marquis de Sade, and has produced some of the most powerful and uncomfortable films of the 21st century, such as Frontier(s) (right wing uprising in France and killer neo-nazis), A l’interieur (trying to steal a pregnant woman’s unborn child), and Climax (a dance party that devolves into Dante’s Inferno-esque visions of Hell).
Martyrs follows the story of a girl called Lucie who was experimented on and abused as a child coming back to murder the family that tortured her. After she succeeds, a mysterious organisation appears and we learn what the torture was in aid of, and watch as a new subject is taken through the process. I won’t give too much away but honestly, if you have a strong stomach, I highly recommend this. I couldn’t turn away during my first viewing, the direction it goes in is truly elevated and becomes a total transcendental experience that will stay with you forever.
Horror is a place where marginalised people can feel powerful, perhaps not in the healthiest of ways, but it makes a change from either being minimised or completely ignored. The fears of the white western heteropatriarchy manifests as strong female murderers, sometimes sexy, sometimes not, foreign or domestic, always disruptive. Mircalla from Lust For A Vampire is sexualised school girl, a romantic fantasy which is shattered when we realise she is a multi-century old vampire. Julia from Hellbound is a smart, sophisticated older woman, a surrogate mother who is in fact reanimated flesh drawn from the remnants of bloody mattress who wears the skins of murdered girls to hide her monstrous body. Lucie was a young child whose pain was used to benefit the family she lived with, until she returns as an adult to obliterate the mother, father, children and pets that inhabited the house that served as her prison. All of them destroy the traditionally feminine roles prescribed to them.
This post-Sarah Everard world is bleak enough for women and femmes facing violence and persecution. Assuage those violent revenge fantasies this Halloween by watching some good horror, crack open a pinot grigio and watch the blood flow, living vicariously through the women we will never be allowed to be, women who pick their teeth with the bones of violent men, women who can never truly be victims again, women who command respect and fear and admiration. Let us be women who can walk through the night unafraid. Let us be women who control their own destinies.
Words and Images: Misha MN
