Welcome to the Halloween special of Couchzone Movie Club. As Negan would say “Hope you’ve got your shitting pants on!” because I’m going to exploit the hell out of the favourite holiday of Goths and Emos if they’re still a thing.
If I wanted to appear cool I’d come up with some bullshit Tarantino style story about how I was really into horror movies as a kid. You know, something along the lines of how when I went to the video store with my parents I was enticed by the lurid, painted covers amongst the wall of horror tapes and how I’d take quick peeks at them while my folks weren’t looking. And probably add some tale of how the tomboy daughter of owner of our regular video shop would sneakily pass me x-rated tapes such as driller killer and Evil Dead which I would have to come up with some creative way to watch without my parents knowing.
The truth is was I wouldn’t take to horror films at least until my late teens (which may seem odd as I was reading Stephen King when I was about thirteen). Those lurid video covers that every video store dedicated a good portion of it’s shelves to (rivalled only to the space given to the porn section or “blue movies” as they were called back then) gave me the creeps and I’d do my best not to avoid even looking in their direction.
When I was at school the country was gripped by a media panic over the craze of “Video Nasties,” and it became a badge of honour to be able to claim to have seen the likes of Cannibal: Apocalypse movie or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But while other kids could brag enthusiastically about being allowed to watch the most notorious of these features I felt no jealously or inclination to check out these movies. I was doing just fine working my way through the video store’s offering of science fiction, war, action and Smokey and the Bandit ripoffs.
That said there were a couple of horror films so inciting that I felt compelled to watch. Such as:
American Werewolf in London (1981)
I can vividly remember one morning my dad telling me I really should watch a scene from a film he and my mum had watched the night before. My parents were not horror fans either but they had rented a tape called “American Werewolf in London” which they’d heard good things about.
We popped in the Betamax tape (yeah my Dad got convinced that Betamax was going to be the dominant brand in the video wars of the early 80’s, although the beta machine being a lot cheaper than the VHS probably swayed him too) and my dad played for me the incredible scene of the werewolf transformation. I watched transfixed as a young man suddenly starts howling in pain and stares in horror as his limbs begin to stretch and transform into those of a wolf. The metamorphosis over the three minute scene is a wonderful mix of ahead of it’s time makeup, animatronics and clever editing that makes it seem seamless as his body changes to the shape of a wolf, his skin becomes covered in fur, his human screams drift into deep animalistic growls and most stunning of all his face sickeningly forces itself to expanded into the long snout and lupine jaws of a werewolf. Most impressive of all is that this scene happens all in the view of a viewer in a well lit room and does not cheat by hiding it in the shadows.
An American Werewolf in London begins with two amiable American backpackers David and Jack trekking across the UK who pick the wrong night to pass through a remote and spooky “locals only” village in Yorkshire. After accidentally offending the locals of the pub “The Slaughtered Lamb,” the two are forced to leave on the night of a full moon and are attacked by a vicious wolf. Jack is killed and David wounded and later finds out he has become a werewolf and on his first transformation kills six people on the streets of London. He’s also stalked by the physically deteriorating ghost of Jack and his victims who are trapped in a limbo state of the undead until the bloodline of the werewolf is ended and they urge David to kill himself before the next full moon.
Directed by John Landis the film is a departure from the usual horror films set in England (although this is an American production) by having the majority of the story in the bustling city of modern London as opposed to remote villages and stately homes. This makes the plight of the victims scarily relateable at times, especially chilling is the stalking and hunting of a commuter on a near deserted London Underground.
The film also manages to avoid the poe faced, intensely seriousness of horror with a large amount of humour. When David wakes up after his first night as a werewolf he’s naked in a wolf enclosure at London Zoo. He’s forced to steal balloons from a child to cover himself (“A naked American just stole my balloon”) and later he meets up with a horde of his victim in a Soho cinema showing a laughably cheezy porn film.
But while the humour lightens the mood of the film there are still scenes of gore. As well as the awful state of the near skeleton Jack by the end of the film there is the decapitation of a policeman by the werewolf and a serious of violent, surreal nightmares for David, sometimes involving weird wolf soldiers in Nazi uniforms. The film doesn’t draw back on the scares either, as Landis makes the audience jump not simply with the popular double scare gag but with a triple scare that gets the heart pounding.
With it’s mix of true horror and fun laughs American Werewolf in London holds up really well today. Even the special effects remain impressive. The wolf is genuinely scary and formidable looking and while the transformation scene would be easy to accomplish with CGI today, I’m confident it would not be able to match the original for creativity and in conveying the pain involved in the stretching of bone and flesh.
It’s a great, fun horror movie that makes you feel for the plight of it’s lead character and also gets Jenny Agutter naked.
Omen (1976)
Another rare horror film I sat down to watch in my younger days was when ITV aired the entire Omen trilogy over three consecutive Saturday nights sometime in the 80’s. And lucky for me I did, because the Omen remains today one of the best crafted and subtly disturbing Horror movies I have ever seen.
In the Omen, Gregory Peck is an American diplomat who’s child dies at birth. On the same night at the hospital a woman dies giving birth to a healthy son and at the urging of a chaplin (and unknown to his wife) Peck secretly takes the orphan child in place of his own lost son to raise as his own and names him Damien.
Years later a series of violent events start to plague the family. Damien’s nanny commits suicide and is replaced by a mysterious, manipulative woman at the same time as the appearance of a rottweiler. A priest who tries to warn Peck that Damien’s origins are not what they appear is killed in a bizarre accident when he is impaled by a lightening rod. The hospital where Damien was born has mysteriously burned down and Peck’s wife has a miscarriage due to an accident caused by Damien.
As Peck investigates Damien’s real mother he finds the death of his real child and adoption of Damien is all the plan of a Satanist cult who believe the child is the Antichrist and are attempting to guide his rise to a position of power.
The Omen is chilling and there are subtle but terrifying moments that build the unease surrounding the child Damien. A trip to the zoo sees most of the animals scurrying away from Damien and takes a nightmarish turn when a ride through the monkey enclosure sees the family car attacked by a pack of outraged baboons (apparently actress Lee Remmick was genuinely terrified when filming this scene). Also the first visit of the family to church sees Damien increasingly agitated and distressed the closer they get to the religious iconography of the building and screams and attacks his mother rather than go into the church.
Incidentally this moment I can actually relate to how Damien was feeling here. When I started school at five I was sent to a Church of England school which was a tough change for me as I didn’t come from a religious background and I had no idea who this God guy is that everyone was talking about in assemblies. Worse though was to come the first time they held a full mass ceremony. The sight of all these scary assed guys in white cloaks solemnly singing around an altar while carrying candles was bad enough for me, but when kids started going up and getting on their knees and being seen to drink from goblets that they announced as THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, I fucking lost it thinking I was about to be forced to drink blood.
A teacher had to sit with me and explain what was going on. Looking back I often wonder if the regular visits of the nit nurses to our school wasn’t to check our hair for infestation but instead to check our heads for any birthmarks that looked like a 666.
The gore and deaths while few are more the memorable for it, especially the infamous window pane accident that leads to a decapitation that we see from several angles in a spilt second.
But of all the jump scares, the scene that gave me the most chills is the moment where they track down the grave of Damien’s natural mother. The moment they dig her up to reveal a skeleton of a jackal is a disturbing and creepy holy shit moment.
A lot of credit for the film’s success has to go to the portrayal of Damien. Aided by the scary as hell witch like nanny, Damien is a frightening kid. What the film does really well is in allowing Damien to come across as a normal, innocent looking child but with a spooky aura around him. The film does not let the talents of a child actor to overwhelm the role (a trapping of most kids roles which often I feel sacrifices the realism of a child character) instead Damien barely says a word throughout the film and comes across as an introverted, quiet child. But my God that kid Harvey Spencer Stephens (who apparently won the role when director Stephen Donner invited him to attack him and was impressed by his rage, especially when he punched Donner in the bollocks) can pull an expression, even without trying. The suspicious looks he gives people and the blank expression when he watches his mother dangling from a ledge are just oozing with sinister intent. And if that final scene where Damien smiles at the camera with the haunting Omen theme music menacingly beginning to play does not make you want to send your kids off to their grandparents for a week I don’t know what to tell you.
The Omen was the first part of a trilogy. Part II, Damien was an ok sequel, but the slow menace of the original was sacrificed in favour of more elaborate deaths, with a twelve year old Antichrist lacking the unease of a spooky child. The third part with Sam Neil as an adult Damien in Final Conflict is boring tosh, even worse was a fourth film that tried to continue the saga with the discovery that Damien had a daughter.
The Omen was a film that sent me to bed really in a state of real unease, especially that bible quote that the film ends on which seems to predict the coming of the Antichrist with “Here is wisdom, let him that hath understanding, count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man and his number is 666.” Because if it’s in the bible it most be right….plus Iron Maiden quoted it on their Number of the Beast album.
Paranormal Activity (2007)
If ever there is a film that should only be watched once and preferably in a cinema this is the one.
Paranormal activity came to screens with a massive amount of hype (helped by Paramount only giving the film a slow build release in select markets this increasing the demand and anticipation), proclaiming this found footage movie of a haunting caught on camera as the scariest movie in years. Personally I was cautious having been burned by the hype for a similar found footage movie known as The Blair Witch Project which proved to be utter shite and the only reaction I had from it was not of the scares but of nausea from the camera constantly panning in all directions and having to watch a close up of snot running down someone’s face.
Paranormal Activity is divisive amongst audiences. Some boldly proclaim the film had no effect on them and they couldn’t fathom what the fuss was about. Others simply admit the film scared the fuck out of them and turned them to a gibbering wreck by the time the 85 minutes had passed.
My reaction leaned more to the latter as in common with most of the audience in the small theatre that I shared the experience with, I had the shit scared out of me by this film.
It’s a simple enough premise (and conveniently cheap and easy to film) a nice young couple Katie and Micah (although he’s a bit of annoying, but she seems really lovely…unlike the judgemental bitches I met at my attempts at speed dating) believe a poltergeist is stalking Katie and set up a video camera to catch any unusual happenings on tape. Incidents escalate from moving objects, doors slamming until the demon’s presence gets greater with chilling screams and actual physical assaults on Katie who it seems is slowly becoming possessed by the creature.
It’s a slow build and at the time in the theatre the tension got unbearable. My heart was racing, my body seemed to be gripped with perpetual shaking but in a weird sort of enjoyable way. Every time I looked around at my fellow audience members, partly for reassurance I saw a similar look in faces of those around me, people looking terrified but not actually hating the experience. One guy sat on my row who was built like a rugby player had zipped his jacket up all the way so that it went over his mouth and nose and with his arms folded tight seemed to be trying to make himself as small as possible as if this could protect him from any threat that could come out of the screen.
Deep down I think we all shared the certainty that the spookiness was going to escalate and we knew that bad things were ahead, because this wasn’t a film that was going to end well for the protagonists and it was that waiting that was unbearable and had us forming our bodies into as many self hugging, comforting shapes as the small cinema chairs would allowed. When we came to the end of the ride with the film ending with that one last shock to allow our minds and bodies that weird therapeutic release to the knots we’d tied ourselves in, the lights came on immediately and the audience seemed to come together. Strangers smiled at each other with a knowing sigh of relief, some laughed nervously, it was as if we had bonded having endured this fun but frightening experience together.
Paranormal Activity is the rollercoaster ride of horror movies. You scream and jump and for a moment when you’re climbing up one of the hills for what takes forever knowing the sharp drop is coming you’re questioning why you got on in the first place. But it’s the fun kind of being scared, it doesn’t leave with the unpleasant shaken aftertaste of a truly horrific horror film. You leave the theatre laughing at yourself knowing you’ll be perfectly safe walking back home in the dark and can sleep fine tonight.
When I rewatched it on television sometime later I struggled to see what had scared me so much the first time around. I still thought it was a good well paced film, with a likeable leading lady that makes what she is having to go through all the more horrible. A good aspect of the video filmed footage that the film made good use of was the trick of fast forwarding through hours of footage which could convey the spookiness of Kate be stood watching her boyfriend for a long amount of time. Also the two reviewing the footage from the night and seeing the paranormal events they’d slept through and thus catching up with us the audience is a neat trick.
But the scares and tension are missing when watching a second time.
Since the film was cheap and made just short of 200 million at the box office it stood to reason that Paramount who’d bought the movie was going to franchise the fuck out of it (on buying the film Paramount had the ending changed so that Kate survived instead of her original fate of her cutting her own throat on camera, so her story could go on). A good companion both prequel and sequel made up part two, while a full on prequel of Kate as a child was made for part three which expanded on the identity of the demon “Toby” and began to open up the story that a cult of Witches was playing a part in the direction of the saga. However the fourth and fifth films (as well as a spinoff) stretched the credibility of the concept especially with elements of time travel being added and with Toby gaining the upper hand in every instalment the films became tedious.
But nothing can take away the experience of watching the original film that one time.
Babadook (2014)
“Turn that awful film off now!” This was the advice of a friend who I’d been texting one Halloween night to describe the horror film I was watching rather than gatecrashing one of the many parties I’d failed to get invited to. In truth I was texting my friend as an attempt to create the illusion of company to help me getting through the said film that was frankly freaking me the hell out.
The Australian made Babadook is a very tense, unsettling film and also happens to be a masterpiece of 21st century film making. It carries a harsh, blank, downbeat tone throughout the film even before any elements of horror are introduced.
Amelia is a widowed single mother (her husband was killed in an accident driving her to the hospital to give birth) with a six year old son Sam who is suffering from emotional problems. The two suffer through a very dire existence, their house is cold and sparse with little life, they seemingly have little in the way of company (to be fair the kid has obvious problems and the mum isn’t exactly a laugh a minute) and what family they have falls out with them when Sam is gourded into attacking his nasty bitch cousin. There is a noticeable lack of colour in the film, with a white, black and grey tinted feel throughout that expresses the isolation of the mother and son’s isolated life.
Grief over her husband and unable to cope with mothering an unstable child, things get worse when Amelia reads a pop up book to Sam that has mysteriously appeared in their home. The really creepy drawn story is of a sinister top hat wearing creature that torments a young child which naturally further traumatises Sam who already is paranoid that monsters are in his room and now believes the Babadook is out to get him. Here’s a tip to parents, read through any picture book before you read it to your child especially if they’re the sort of child who’d get freaked out by the excellent but potentially upsetting “Not now Bernard” by David Mckee.
Only trouble is Sam’s right because reading the book has released the Babadook onto the family, slowly taunting and terrorising them. Even when Amelia destroys the book it returns intact with an even worse story.
The Babadook (with a nod to the 19th century German children’s character Der Struwwelpeter ) is a terrifying creature. It appears fleetingly, in the shadows, scurrying on ceilings with glimpses of it seen in mirrors and behind curtains. It’s presence is so unnerving and had the potential for it’s appearance had me so tense that the sight of a door opening on it’s own scared the living shit out of me. But it’s grim, guttering voice with it’s booming growl of BABADOOK!!! really sent me wanting to find a sofa to jump behind.
Babadook is not a pleasant film to get through but it’s an amazing and clever movie. It’s not simply a monster movie, it’s a film about grief and depression and anxiety, about the difficulties of parenthood. There are times when both mother and son either through what they are wearing or the way they stand resemble the Babadook and it’s presence brings out the worst traits in both of them, their fears, their paranoia and in particular with Amelia the anger she keeps bottled up and an implied resentment towards Sam blaming him in part for losing her husband and her happiness with life.
Speaking of Ameila, the performance of Essie Davis is incredible. She portrays Amelia as someone who is ready to fall apart at any moment, a range of grim emotions etched on her face at any one time. You can see the hurt, despair of what she is going through and how she looks ready to snap at Sam at any moment and at times looks like she is uncomfortable to be in his company and how ultimately motherhood seems to be draining her.
Babadook is horror at it’s best. It’s disturbing, threatening, but also thought provoking and has symbolism beyond the immediate menace of the monster in the room. It also has an ending that is surprising and open to interpenetration with possible ideas both troubling and uplifting.
So if you need some Halloween viewing this year I demand you choose one from this quartet of terror.
Next time out there will be a change to the Couchzone Movie Club concept. I’m still going to be choosing four movies as always but I will be ditching the cult, black and white, foreign language and film from the last ten years format. The fact is I’m finding it difficult to come up with a variety of black and white and foreign language movies that I feel motivated to write about on a near weekly basis. I want this column to be about films I feel passionate about or have something interesting I want to share about them and the way I was going I was in danger of having to accommodate well known classics and endless Hong Kong gangster films just to stick to the format when I could be writing about a variety of others,
Therefore from this point on I will be choosing a theme each month and choosing four films to fit with that. I really think this will give me more freedom at this point and give me the chance to choose some really great stuff. So to get me started next week begins the first of a series of columns dedicated to four films from a particular decade. Beginning with the 50’s I’m going to be working my way up to the present day.
So join me next time for a new start and if anyone has a suggestion for a theme of the week feel free to message me on my twitter @dazzabookseller
Til Next Time
Dazza
some genuinely great blog posts on this web site, thanks for contribution.