Binge-ful Watching: My Top 10 Favorite Scary Movies

by B Condon 6:08 PM

Sometimes it's best just to be honest. Hi, I'm B and I'm a classic horror movie addict. Torture porn, slasher movies and most modern "paranormal" movies do absolutely nothing for me. Give me a good black and white movie that relies mostly on music, shadow placement, cinematography and ambiance and I'll be a happy girl. Or a movie that shows off the talents of Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi or Vincent Price and I'll be a happy girl with raging lady wood.

 

Oh who am I kidding? You want titles....



The Haunting (1963)

Depending on the day I consider this adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House my number one scary movie of all time.

Whether you want to call this the atypical "haunted house movie"  or the mission of director Robert Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding to be more about "a woman having a nervous breakdown;" 1963's "The Haunting" has a strange power about it, whether it is coming from the subjective and unreliability of Julie Harris's Eleanor Lance or the amazing cinematography against Ettington Park Hotel that makes "Hill House" so terrifying.

"The Haunting"'s creepiness relies mostly from thumps and thuds, slow camera movements and overacting from the cast, at least reviewed from most modern viewers. But the wallpaper scene will make you change your mind instantly; if you haven't seen it, take my word for it. The movie itself is a tribute to Robert Wise's first boss and producer of another on this list "Curse of the Cat People," Val Lewton. RKO's Man in the Shadows would have approved.

 



 Cat People (1942)

Cat People started Val Lewton's gift of keeping it cheap and minimalist yet scary at the same time with the horrible titles RKO handed him. Lewton loved a challenge, especially with the title of "Cat People."

The premise itself is genius: A Serbian woman's fear of turning into a cat-like creature of her heritage escalates when she meets and marries the man of her dreams but is terrified to go to bed with him with the possibility of turning into a cat-like creature when aroused. Whether she is or isn't is entirely based on the viewer. Once the perfect man's female co-worker, Jane Randolph's Alice Moore, starts spending more time with him,  jealousy  overtakes the impeccable beauty that is Simone Simon and all catty hell breaks lose.

But that's the magic of a Lewton film; you don't know what is real and what isn't. Everyone loves to cite the "chase" scene as one of the greatest scary movie scenes which I wno't pause to disagree with but the scariest portion of the movie is after the chase where bloodied paw prints slowly change into bloodied high heels on the sidewalk. It's all about subtlety. And much like Hitchcock and his blondes, Lewton knows how to choose the most beautiful, elegant and intense women for his characters. Simone Simon is all innocence and Elizabeth Russell the woman Simon would have been "if" she gave into her ancestors' pagan sins she is terrified of. In short, brilliant.



 

The Curse of the
Cat People (1944)

Considered to be more of a companion piece in more modern times, RKO simply wanted to cash in on the box office steal that was the original movie. And once more, Lewton undermined them with a beautiful atmospheric Gothic fairytale with all the fairy tale elements that makes a good atmospheric Gothic fairy tale. A slightly creepy little girl who just wants to be loved by her father, a frightening older woman who hates her daughter, a ghostly friend (Simone Simon as Irena once more) that still has an attachment to her ex-husband and her ex-husband's child. All while against the backdrop of Tarrytown and its famous Headless Horseman legend.

 

While there is no awesome creepy scene other than the ending, if you like fairy tales and those movies that are all about coming of age, or for Oliver Reed's character, how to "grow back down." But in the general range of things; it's damned creepy that it would be his ex-wife's ghost that would make friends with his daughter, almost as if they were alike in someways. I think someday I might write a book that links the two movies together.

The Body Snatcher
(1945)

Another Lewton classic that brings two legends together and that doesn't count the incomparable perfection that is Henry Daniell. This may be a long shot, but you may remember his face in many diverse roles in Camille, Holiday, Philadelphia Story, and The Great Dictator. But of course, the two legends I speak of is Lugosi and Karloff, heartbreakingly together in only one scene. But this is Karloff's movie in the role of a grave-digger who brings illegal cadavers to the medical teacher and Doctor MacFarlane with a torturous secret only Karloff's Gray knows.

 

The last five minutes will keep your attention to your TV/computer screen, I can guarantee that. Even if you're multi-tasking, you will stop for this as Daniell's demons finally catch up with him, literally.

 

Easter Egg: in the credits, Carlos Keith helped assist in the adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's short story. Mr. Keith is no one else but Mr. Man in the Shadows Lewton himself!

The Black Cat (1934)

If there is a movie that makes me writhe over how amazing the acting of Karloff and Lugosi, The Black Cat is just perfection even after realizing

how choppy the plot truly is. While excited to be more elaborately shot as a Satanist's wet dream, it could not get past '30s censors.

 

Edgar Ulmer Jr. did not rely on shadows or any other horror movie tricks to make The Black Cat scary other than the subplot of Karloff being a leader of a Satanic cult; but what he (and Lugosi) does brilliantly is to show how far a man can be stretched until he turns into a bad guy. That's right, Lugosi plays possibly the nicest person until he enters Karloff's Poelzig's home and starts to unravel learning the fate of his estranged wife and daughter never losing his cool until the outsiders to the two men's rivalry become prisoners in the white futuristic home. Perhaps that is the genius of Ulmer, working against his expressionistic background in creating a futuristic setting.

 

If Ulmer and screenwriter Peter Ruric had been able to keep more of the original screenplay complete with Lugosi's character's fear of cats expanded on,  soul transference, Lugosi and Karloff vying for the outsider woman and more Satanism references -- I wonder if the movie still would be as amazing as it is really showcasing Bela and what makes him so wonderfully underrated as a serious actor.

The Uninvited (1944)

There's haunted house movies like "The Haunting" complete with a mind game attached to it and then there are straight forward haunted house movies like Paramount Pictures's "The Uninvited." I can only guess this paved the way for more ghostly apparition special effects in the movies later on in the '40s, as it was originally intended to be slightly Lewtonian. Luckily, the effects in the movie are much more simple.

 

Brother and sister Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald, along with their dog, fall in love with Windward House on the coast of England. Eventually they discover the house is haunted by a young woman's mother, but as the movie progresses, Gail Russell's Stella's parentage seems to be a bigger mystery than the hauntings themselves.

And like all good barely discovered scary movies, this one will definitely make you dance in your seat over how this movie never became more popular. "The Uninvited" will be released October 22 this year under Criterion complete with restoration and a small handful of special features. Hey Iowa City Public Library....

The Innocents (1961)

Another "dance in your seat" little known film that literally made my eyes bug out of my skull Halloween 2011 despite never having read Henry James's Turn of the Screw. And you don't quite have to to watch 1961's film adaptation and Martin Stephens's portrayal of the young Miles to blow you away.

 

Deborah Kerr plays a Governess and care-taker to a man's niece and nephew after the previous governess kills herself the year before. But the previous governess is not completely gone and neither is her abusive lover and the house's valet, Peter Quint. The two ghostly apparitions sometimes inhabit the young children in a peverse and incestuous undertone.

 

But it is Kerr's Miss Giddens's belief that she can fix the supernatural events from simply making the children admit they are being possessed but the plan backfires. It concludes with an amazing back and forth with Martin Stephens's Miles unwilling to admit Quint has been possessing him swearing and speaking like a man twice his age. If the ambiance doesn't give you chills, this scene without a doubt will and perhaps the results of Miss Giddens kissing the 13 year old boy on the lips.

 



House of Usher (1960)

You simply cannot be a classical movie lover without liking one or three Vincent Price movies. Even Laura almost got on this list if  it wasn't more film noir/suspense. But the House of Usher is a practically perfect scary movie.

 

I will not bore anyone with the premise, since we all had to read this in school at some point (voluntarily or involuntarily is irrelevant...) but the aesthetics really do border on not having to do much and just leaving the camera on Vincent Price and seeing what his awesome self is going to do next.

 

The dream sequence! Oh Great Goddess above, the haunted dream sequence is absolutely genius; at least before the technique wore itself out with the shift of silent movie film tints in perfect 1960s cinemascope colors. This movie is just perfect from beginning to end, the aesthetics are perfect, the acting is perfect, Vincent Price is perfect. The practically perfect scary movie.



The Pit and the Pendulum
(1961)

While House of Usher is practically perfect; Pit and the Pendulum is the quintessential Vincent Price movie. Sure, people like to think he is "hammy" and over the top, but one particular scene in "Pit..." represents why he is the God of the '60s Scary Movie but also sorely underrated in his serious acting.

 

Francis Barnard receives word in England that his sister has died; he goes to Spain and meets his distraught brother-in-law and his sister (Luana Anders) and tries to solve the reason why she died. But things aren't what they appear, including that the distraught Price has reverted into Daddy problems and goes crazy when he finds his wife is still alive and in love with the Doctor.

 

The scene where he is struck by shock and terror shows Price's genius as an actor where he literally makes a shift from being "normal" to  a version of his manaical father complete with his wonderland of torture devices inherited from the Spanish Inquisition. Maybe I have watched the scene too but you can see a click in Price's face as the camera is close to his face seeing his wife hovering over him. That's acting you can't call that hammy.

 

From that point on, Price does jump back into the ham-acting mistaking John Kerr's Barnard for his father's brother Bartolome who his father did kill back in the day as well as Price's mother. This is when he pins Barnard into the Pendulum contraption and all becomes the formula to a good scary movie. But Price is the back bone to an otherwise filmsy story and abrupt ending.

The Old Dark House
(1932)

As you can tell, my favorite scary movies are ones about situations and people complete with ambiance. And James Whale's (yes, that James Whale Ian McKellen played in '98's "Gods and Monsters") "The Old Dark House" seemingly teeters between dark comedy and a legitimate scary movie. But I suppose the scary movie part comes from the incomparable Boris Karloff as the Kemm's butler Morgan who ironically never speaks a word.

 

A group of people must take refuge in an old dark castle when caught in a rainstorm driving through Wales. The family that lives there, the Kemms, are very strange and odd complete with a creepy old man confined to a bed, a mute butler, a pyromaniac but strangely hysterical brother, their host who is convinced he is on the run from the police and a religious zealot sister. The premise is enough to notice that this is a very British-like dark comedy that has unfortunately fallen into obscurity. That is upsetting, because anytime Karloff plays a mute, there are amazing creepy results.