Farrow and Cassavetes’s performances as a couple disintegrating serve Polanski well in his attempt to make the potential alienation of everyday family life feel horrific, and the faux-naive score, evoking lullabies, makes the whole affair feel doubly creepy in the most heady way possible.Ĭast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss There are some more explicit key scenes – a potential nighttime rape and a chilling climax – that serve to get right under our skin without making the whole premise seem ridiculous. This is the intelligent, subtle face of horror, as Polanski limits the specifics to a minimum and keeps us guessing as to how much is going on merely in the mind of Mia Farrow’s character as she comes to believe she’s been impregnated by a creepy bunch of well-to-do Manhattanites with a connection to the occult. It’s hard enough moving into a flat and trying to start a family without having to wrestle with the enveloping suspicion that your new neighbours might be satanists dead-set on parenting a demon child via you. And make no mistake: The Exorcist is most definitely a horror film: though it may be filled with rigorously examined ideas and wonderfully observed character moments, its primary concern is with shocking, scaring and, yes, horrifying its audience out of their wits – does mainstream cinema contain a more upsetting image than the crucifix scene? That it still succeeds, almost four decades later, is testament to Friedkin’s remarkable vision.Ĭast: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon In cutting from the clanging bazaars of Iraq to the quiet streets of Georgetown, in blending dizzying dream sequences with starkly believable human drama, Friedkin created a horror movie like no other – both brutal and beautiful, artful and exploitative, exploring wacked-out religious concepts with the clinical precision of an agnostic scientist. The first to achieve that blend with absolute certainty was The Exorcist – which perhaps explains its position as the unassailable winner of this poll. The first film to attempt to bring the two together was Rosemary’s Baby, but Polanski’s heart clearly belonged to the surreal. On the other, there were the more outrageous dream-horrors popular in Europe, the work of Hammer Studios in the UK and Mario Bava and Dario Argento in Italy, films that prized artistry, oddity and explicit gore over narrative logic. □ The 15 scariest horror movies based on true storiesĬast: Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydowīy the ’70s, horror had divided into two camps: on one hand, there were the ‘real life’ terrors of Psycho and Night of the Living Dead, films that brought horror into the realm of the everyday, making it all the more shocking. □ Cinema’s creepiest anthology horror movies □ The best new horror movies of 2023 (so far) Written by Tom Huddleston, Cath Clarke, Dave Calhoun, Nigel Floyd, Phil de Semlyen, David Ehrlich, Joshua Rothkopf, Nigel Floyd, Andy Kryza, Alim Kheraj and Matthew Singer Here are the 100 greatest horror movies ever made. So if you’ve spent too much of your film fandom dismissing horror, consider this your guide to everything you’ve missed. The recent artistic and commercial success of films like Get Out, A Quiet Place and Talk to Me have brought retroactive respect to a genre once synonymous with schlock. Not long ago, it was mainly a niche interest, ignored by mass audiences and shrugged off by critics. Of course, horror hasn’t always been a moneymaker. Even if a movie doesn’t necessarily touch on the things that personally scare us the most, allowing ourselves to be scared at all helps us confront and ease the anxieties and fears that keep us paralysed. Perhaps that explains why horror has grown into one of the most popular of all film genres. But deep down, even the most posturing tough guy harbours deep-seated fears. It might be something specific, like spiders or snakes or heights, or something less tangible, like death or failure.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |