The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984): Last year, in my post about Hooper’s The Funhouse, I talked about how the horror shelf at the video store was a site of fantasy for me — I couldn’t see the movies in question, but I liked to imagine what they might be like. I recall seeing the jacket to Company of Wolves just once, at a store we didn’t go to much, but that had an amazing selection. It was in a bin near the checkout lane that I can only assume was for holding recently returned movies not yet re-shelved. The jacket prominently featured a man whose mouth was open unnaturally wide from which was protruding the open snout of a wolf (this same image appears much smaller on the poster to the left) while Little Red Riding Hood looked on, not cowering in fright, but mildly non-plussed. I was terrified. The back of the jacket offered some unrelated but equally disturbing wolf-people imagery, and I gazed on in horror until my mother noticed what I was looking at and admonished me.
The experience of the box — easily the most frightening piece of horror art I’d seen up to that point — stuck with me for years, though I couldn’t recall the name of the film. A few years ago, I was reading a book on British horror, and stumbled across a picture. Since knowing is half the battle, I promptly found a copy, and it quickly became one of my favorite movies.
One of the things that attracted me to Wolves so much on viewing it as an adult was how much it succeeds in the vein that I feel Labyrinth (and many movies of its ilk) fails. Namely, it problematizes the fantasies that underpin the coming of age story to the point where the wonders of childhood seem alien and frightening without rendering the change itself cuddly and charming. Here, George Lucas isn’t involved to insult the intelligence of his audience, and the seductions of the powerful figure don’t end with a happy return to family and the status quo. In this case, adolescence isn’t dismissed, nor is it celebrated as such, but rather painted as necessary though somewhat fraught with danger.
The Company of Wolves is based on an Angela Carter story from famous her collection of feminist re-tellings of fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber (she also co-wrote the screenplay to this film, along with Jordan) . This is, as you might imagine, a version of Little Red Riding Hood… but with the predatory possibilities of the Big Bad Wolf sexualized, and with lots of doubt cast on the veracity of the implicit warnings of the story, and on the motives of those who would choose to tell such stories. Carter was rather vocal about the influence of Jaromil Jires’s 1970 surrealist film Valerie and her Week of Wonders (Valerie a týden divu), which involves a young girl’s allegorized sexual awakening in the context of folk legend and the supernatural — the parish priest (who might also be her father) is a Nosferatu-esque vampire, etc. Valerie and the film version of Wolves speak to each other in frankly exciting ways: Wolves is not a re-make of Valerie, so much as a radical re-envisioning. They would make for a fine double feature, but for how squeamish the sexuality of Valerie makes some viewers. Not wanting to risk alienating my guests, I’ll let that one lie for now.
This one is also one of the few places I can think of where David Warner (who plays our protagonist’s father) isn’t the center of a Machiavellian scheme, and where Angela Lansbury, arguably, is.
Here’s a trailer for your further consideration:
as well as:
Cemetary Man (Dellamorte Dellamore) (Michele Soavi, 1994):
Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) has a problem. It’s not that the dead come back to life in the cemetary that he is the caretaker of (though they do). Rather, he is bored and lonely. Nothing ever happens in the cemetary; his only companion is Nagi, a loyal and devoted imbecile who is his resident gravedigger. Francesco wants nothing more than get some respect from the town that employs him and maybe to find something like love.
And so begins this existential comedy/romance, with zombies. Or, rather, this sexy splatter-horror film with a viable intellect. Or… Cemetary Man is hard to easily classify. In the right circles, it’s regarded as one of the finest horror movies made to date; in others as a pretentious, nonsensical mess. It doesn’t help that its American release was bungled first in the theater (a release two years after its moment of European critical success, a campy poster and ad campaign, an opening on six screens nationally) and then on DVD (it didn’t come out on disc until 2006, and now has fallen out of print). It took me ages after having it recommended to see it (an unfortunate comparison in tone to Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive turned me off), but even ten minutes into when I finally did get around to it, I kicked myself awfully (figuratively!) hard for having avoided it.
Nonetheless, it (and the comic book, Dylan Dog, that its source novel’s author also writes) is seen as a viable cultural production in a broader sense, with no less than Martin Scorsese hailing the film as one of the best of the 1990s, and Umberto Eco saying of the comic “I can read the Bible, Homer or Dylan Dog for days on end without ever feeling bored.” This one’s worth your time.
For symmetry’s sake, here’s a trailer for this one too:
Welcome to the Funhouse...
THE FUNHOUSE (Tobe Hooper, 1981): When I was young, I wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies. My parents were rather strict about this. I did, however, really come to like monsters, and the concept of the horror movie. To make up for this (and I undertand this wasn’t uncommon with folks of my age and circumstances), I used to roam the horror aisle of the video store, imagining what the films advertised by the graphic (in sensibility, if not gore) packaging might be like. I had some clear ideas, but these mostly, when I began actually watching horror movies, weren’t anywhere close to the reality of the genre. That’s where The Funhouse comes in. Though I don’t recall it from my youthful perusal of video jackets (in part becuase of its consistently poor advertising graphics: from its release poster to its video and DVD boxes, the movie has been burdended by some terrible and/or misleading art), it more than any other film I’ve seen captures just what I’d expected/hoped that horror movies would be like.
As a result, The Funhouse is not the best horror movie I’ve ever seen, but might be my favorite. It, for instance, is not especially frightening. It has its moments of suspense, sure, but it isn’t terrifying. But, then, I’m not usually frightened by movies. It is marred by some evident production problems. By what accounts of this movie’s production I’ve found, there were some substantial disagreements between the movie’s producers and director Tobe (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) Hooper. According to Cinefantastique (10.3), this forced the production into daily script re-writes, caused budget and shooting over-runs, and made subplots in scenes shot earlier dangle as the scenes that they anticipate were never filmed. Sounds rough, right? Dean Koontz, before his career took off, thought so too. He was given the responsibility of writing the novelization of the screenplay (under the pseudonym of Owen West), and so took the liberty of completely changing the story. Unfortunately for the film, the (unrecognizable, and much more sleazy-feeling) novelization was released months before the movie, disappointing audiences futher with the disconnect between the (popular and well received) book and the movie it was “based” on.
But the movie is better than that. For one thing, this picture captures the best essences of both the slasher/stalker pictures that were gaining popularity in the moment this film was made (Halloween and Friday the 13th being the most immediate points of comparison) and the monster movies of a previous generation. That is, there’s much more at play here than teenagers being hunted down, and also means we end up with sympathy for both the protagonists and the “monster” stalking them. The production design and cinematography are lush and mix a certain overt silliness with a shadowy atmospheric that manages to make the titular funhouse itself a character as alive as the protagonists, and as menacing as the villains.
Much of what works in this movie gets scooped up by Hooper when he revisits hisTCM five years later for Cannon, the ’80s schlock house that also made The Apple and Death Wish 3. The sexualized terror of The Funhouse’s Liz (Largo Woodruff) when she’s cornered in the labyrinthine ductwork is awfully similar to the more famous scene in TCM 2 when Stretch (Caroline Williams) is menaced at the radio station by Leatherface. Both films are likewise infused visually by what my old officemate Stefan Cieply dubbed “gothic kitsch”: an accumulation of objects of bad taste seemingly collected without irony that give the audience a palpabale sense of just how wrong the environment created by the collectors is to have stumbled upon — an element borrowed from both films by Rob Zombie in his House of 1,000 Corpses.
So that’s a lot about the movie, but not much in the way of setting up what you actually are being set up for. So: a group of four teenagers out on a double date and looking for kicks decide to spend the night in the funhouse of the travelling carnival set up on the outskirts of their sleepy town. But as they witness more than they expected, their night turns from prankish lark to terrifying fight for survival…
Here’s a trailer:
as well as:
THE BLACK CAT (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934): Though a feature in its own right, this one clocks in at a few minutes over an hour. Not quite short enough to be a short, so it’s a double bill. This is the strongest second tier horror film to come out of Universal in its golden age, and may be my favorite of the bunch (though I’ll admit to not having seen Whale’s Old Dark House yet). Though the poster claims allegiance with Poe’s (public domain) story of the same title, that simply isn’t the case. Like the last few of AIP’s later Vincent Price/Roger Corman Poe pictures, the title was meant for audience draw rather than legitimate adaptation.
That said, this movie has just about every element one would want from one of its pedigree, and is more or less swiped whole by Rocky Horror to boot. A young honeymooning couple (shall we call them Brad and Janet, though they’re really named Peter and Joan?) find themselves in the strange mansion of an even stranger host (Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Karloff) who is locked in a polite but nonetheless bitter rivalry with an equally curious figure (Dr. Vitus Werdegast, played by Bela Lugosi). Poelzig’s plans seem to include our innocent young couple, and seem to be far from kosher…
As this is an evening of atmospheric “horror”, there’s little that’s too terrifying here, though there’s plenty to conceptually unsettle, and visually haunt. This is usually a film that sticks with its viewers fro quite some time. The set designs in this movie are startling creations in an expressionist/Deco mode, and go a long way towards equating that style of aesthetic severity/economy with the Satanic. Karloff’s Poelzig is dapper, gentlemanly and sinister in a way that few screen villains are, were, or have been since (and is, by some accounts, the visual genesis of Dr. Strange!). The score includes themes from Beethoven’s 7th symphony and Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos. And, as a topper, there are some rather prominant (evan central) elements of this film that are as queer as can be. How can it go wrong? For my dime, it doesn’t!
