1970s horror movie round-up

You may remember that an early October repeat viewing of Let's Scare Jessica to Death inspired me to see what other unseen 70s horror movies were out there that would give me a similar vibe. 

Well, unfortunately, I came up short on this -- not for lack of follow through or effort, but for lack of results. 

But on the second-to-last day I was watching these movies -- having known I planned to watch new horror on both the 30th and 31st -- I did finally hit.

My methodology in determining candidates was to google a variety of relevant search terms and see what came up that I hadn't seen. This produced a list of the following 21 titles on Letterboxd.

Blacula (1972)
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
The Cat and the Canary (1978)
Scream and Scream Again (1970)
Phase IV (1974)
Prophecy (1979)
Shivers (1975)
Empire of the Ants (1977)
Day of the Animals (1979)
The Swarm (1978)
A Knife for the Ladies (1974)
Piranha (1978)
Coma (1978)
See No Evil (1971)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
The Legend of Hell House (1973)
Trog (1970)
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Jaws 2 (1978)
Theatre of Blood (1973)

Each 70s release year appears at least once on this list, and you would have thought this should have been more than enough to go on. 

I picked from this list in some cases out of pure interest, which meant a rental from iTunes, and in other cases because of availability, meaning it was streaming for free on one of my services. The latter opportunistic approach left me watching some candidates that were decidedly imperfect fits for what I was looking for ... but as it happens, I was mostly striking out with the hand-picked rentals as well. 

As I was considering my final few options, I began really scrutinizing the remaining movies on the list to try to pre-empt my disappointment. I'm sure some of the remaining candidates would have been fine, but when diving deeper into them on Wikipedia, they struck me either as too hokey, too associated with a genre other than horror, or too similar to something I had already watched. I also wanted to get variety from my movies, not just all slasher films or all monster movies. 

So as I was gearing up for the final two viewings on Thursday and Friday, I called an audible and went off the Letterboxd list. One of my final two choices was uncovered in a more traditional countdown of the best 1970s horror movies, and one was found by sheer happenstance among the list of rentals currently priced at 99 cents on iTunes. And one of these two proved to be my saving grace.

Alas, the sum total of my new 1970s horror viewings for the month was only eight. That's even with watching probably the most horror movies overall that I've ever watched in October. This can be attributed in part to getting a late start (October 8th was my first viewing), in part to saving most of my viewings for weekend nights (Thursday to Sunday), and in part because I was also trying to keep up with 2021 horror, five of which I reviewed on ReelGood. At least because the cinemas have been closed here due to lockdown, I didn't have any normal new theatrical releases providing additional competition for my finite number of available viewing hours. (Cinemas just reopened Friday night. Probably a topic to expound on at greater length in a different post.)

That's plenty of preamble. Why don't I take you through what I watched?

Shivers (1975, David Cronenberg)
Watched: October 8, iTunes rental

I have a bit of a hit-and-miss history with David Cronenberg, but I generally consider his early period to be his best work, including the likes of Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone and The Fly. I thought investigating the beginnings of his obsession with body horror (which he has abandoned in his later career, to his detriment) would be a fruitful launching point for my 70s horror. Perhaps I should have gone with 1979's The Brood instead, because Shivers was a mild thumbs down for me. The setup seems to have everything I might want, as a parasite infests a state-of-the-art Montreal apartment complex and enters and exits its victims through various orifices, some of which did not previously exist. I'm not sure if I can put my finger exactly on what held me back about this one, as it does have individual moments of good body horror and even some weird deviant behavior, which I can get behind. (The parasite makes you a sex-craved lunatic. There is probably some social commentary here that doesn't translate as well 45 years later.) In the end though I felt a bit disappointed.

Blacula (1972, William Crain)
Watched: October 15, iTunes rental

Perhaps sensing that I was falling behind, it already being the middle of the month and only my second viewing, I snuck this one in on a Friday afternoon after I finished work. There was a bit of a necessary sacrifice in that, as I decided I didn't want something that would really give me the creeps, it being the afternoon at all. Blacula was perfect in that sense: It was a cool bit of period history that I probably should have made time to watch before now, and it was better than just a blaxploitation movie whose cheeky title has given it more of a humorous than frightening reputation. But as I anticipated, it wasn't scary. That's not a problem unique to Blacula -- I realize that I don't find most vampire movies very scary. Because the vampire has a sexy and urbane alternate persona, which was no less the case with William Marshall's Prince Mamuwalde, he is fundamentally more knowable than most other ghouls and goblins we might meet, leaving a deficit in his ability to terrify us. I'm really glad I saw Blacula and it might make an interesting discussion in a post unto itself, but as an attempt to give me the kind of willies I get in Let's Scare Jessica to Death, it did not scratch that itch.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976, Nicolas Gessner) 
Watched: October 15, streaming on Amazon Prime

This was a course corrective in a number of ways: 1) Time to get a 1970s horror for free, and 2) Time to see something that seemed to exist in the same world as Let's Scare Jessica, in that it represents a realistic depiction of the 1970s and contains horror elements that are more subtle than a parasite or a vampire. Unfortunately, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was subtle enough in its horror elements that I'm not even sure it qualifies as a horror movie. As I wrote about in this post, probably the creepiest thing about it is the sexual advances an adult Martin Sheen makes toward a 13-year-old Jodie Foster, and in a way, that was the kind of insidious thing I was looking for as a more psychological form of horror -- which we get in Jessica. But while Jessica does turn to the supernatural, this film remains in the purely realistic realm of a girl living by herself around whom people turn up dead, in some cases by accident and in some cases intentionally. Since this character is also our protagonist, the film is an odd duck that defies easy categorization. That said, as a movie itself, it earned one of the highest ratings for a movie in this series, 3.5 stars on Letterboxd. (And I should mention there's also something creepy about the thing that's in the cellar that you never see.)

The Cat and the Canary (1978, Radley Metzger)
Watched: October 17, streaming on Amazon Prime

And again watching a movie that was available to me for free steered me wrong. Although there are some loosely defined horror elements in this latest cinematic adaptation of a story that goes all the way back to the 1920s, this is a lot more of a comedy or a murder mystery in the same vein as something like Clue: The Movie than it is something that even has the stated ambition of scaring its audience. (I also wrote about this film here, in the context of an anachronism that appears in it.) As with The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, I liked the movie a fair bit for what it was -- 3.5 stars on Letterbox -- but what it was was not a horror movie. (I was fooled by a very convincing poster that wanted to have it both ways.) That said, there is obviously a desired connection to horror here, as the film features an actress who has been introduced to me as an iconic "scream queen" over the course of this series: Barbara Steele. They wouldn't have used her if they weren't trying to leverage her horror bonafides. (She also appears in not the next movie on this list, but the one after that.)

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977, John Boorman)
Watched: October 22, iTunes rental

After a couple missteps the previous weekend -- a whole weekend of missteps, in a way -- I decided to course correct again. What better jumping off point than my favorite horror movie of the entire decade? The Exorcist is a stone-cold classic that makes my blood run cold every time I watch it. Its sequel is ... not. But I didn't realize until afterward how great disliked it actually is. When I went on Wikipedia, I found that audiences howled with laughter when they watched it and it had come in as high as #2 on certain prominent lists of worst movies of all time. That's right -- not worst horror movies, but worst movies period. I certainly didn't like Exorcist II but I didn't find it anywhere near that bad. It's more misguided than anything, though it's true that Richard Burton's performance as the central priest is laughable in certain spots, including one bizarre moment where he turns to speak directly to the camera. It's just kind of a dumb story in which Linda Blair does appear again, but she doesn't get twisted into a pretzel like she did in the first film, and in fact, the film doesn't seem to benefit at all from four years of progress in visual effects. Instead it focuses on the purported horror value of a swarm of locusts. Yawn.

Piranha (1978, Joe Dante) 
Watched: October 23, streaming on Stan

I'm forever course-correcting it seems. I'm back to movies I can watch for free, and since I didn't get the blood and guts I was hoping for in Exorcist II, I was hoping there would be some good gore in the original Piranha -- which also seemed promising given how much I liked the 2010 remake. Wrong again! There are only very few shots of maimed and mutilated bodies in this movie, as the mayhem wreaked by these swarms of fish is mostly viewed by blurry closeups accompanied by frenzied teeth-gnashing noises, and the reactions of the people above the surface of the water as their lower halves are devoured. At worst I was hoping for some good camp in this movie, but I found it lacking in that respect as well. I was glad to watch it given the careers its collaborators would go on to have, not only Dante the director but, get this, screenwriter John Sayles as well. It fits in pretty well with Dante's later work, but given the respect accorded to Sayles for a very different sort of movie down the road, I expected to find something quite literate or clever about the script. Really, I couldn't tell the difference between this and any other creature feature. Another drawback I realized only after watching: Just because a movie features (or at least promises) blood and guts, doesn't necessarily make it a good Halloween viewing. A lot of this takes place during the day and there's no "spooky" vibe at all. (Incidentally, this is the other movie that features Barbara Steele.)

Phantasm (1979, Don Coscarelli)
Watched: October 28, iTunes rental

At last! The movie that saved the whole project. (You might have already guessed from my use of its poster as the artwork.) I was reminded of Phantasm from a list of 1970s greatest horror movies that I found on the very day that I watched it. This was a movie that was on my radar from when I was younger, but I haven't thought about it in years -- I think I lumped it in with Hellraiser back in the day, which I also didn't see until about ten years ago. It's not that type of movie really although I suppose the vibe is not dissimilar. In mining the recesses of my brain, the thing I would have remembered from this was the flying silver disk that impales people's heads and drills into their brains. That would have been the thing kids talked about on the playground. Phantasm is a lot more than that, combining a variety of bizarre horror iconography that could only come from the mind of Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-Tep). There's Angus Scrimm's The Tall Man, always striding and staring in discomfiting ways as he stalks our heroes. There's the dwarves who seem a bit like demented Jawas, and are particularly chilling when we see only flashes of them, as when they scamper behind gravestones in the opening, and we get little more than the signs of their movement. Then of course there's the animated severed finger with its milky yellow blood, which transforms into a nasty little insect. I can't believe it's taken me this long to see Phantasm, and am pleased there are a handful of sequels of surely lesser quality. 

Deep Red (1975, Dario Argento)
Watched: October 29, iTunes rental

Given how I worship Argento's Suspiria, I have no idea how I've never seen another of his movies (he has quite a few). It took randomly seeing Deep Red priced down to 99 cents for an iTunes rental to finally break that drought. Since Suspiria itself has some pretty blah passages, I wonder if part of my delay was a suspicion that the rest of Argento's filmography would be of uneven quality. Deep Red is only one other example of his work, but it does confirm that notion. There are origins here of the visual ideas I love in Suspiria, which came two years later, but they have far lesser impact. As just one example, both films contain imagery of female attack victims with their heads thrust through glass, and the bloodletting that results as their necks are pierced. As both films are obviously shot in Italy (though Suspiria is set in Germany), there's a similar reliance on piazzas to try to create an air of mystery. Plus I got a definite chill from a few signature moments, such as Argento's use of disembodied eyes hanging against a black background, and a reflection of a woman's face in a mirror that scared the shit out of me. Plot-wise, though, I found it pretty banal by comparison, maybe even a bit boring. Suspiria's highs are enough to sustain it through its own more ordinary passages; not so much for Deep Red.

Okay, this took longer to write up than I expected, as I actually intended to have this up yesterday.

While I'm here I might as well mention a few near misses that were available on streaming but I just didn't have time to see, or opted specifically not to see when I wasn't sure how well they'd fit the theme or how much bang for my buck they'd provide. Only two, actually: A Knife for the Ladies on Amazon and The Island of Dr. Moreau on Stan. Even though the former involves something plenty salacious sounding, the murder of prostitutes in a small town, it seems like more of a western than a horror, which is not the genre you would expect from the first part of that sentence. The latter seems like ... well I'm not really sure, but the image of Michael York beaming on the still they chose on Stan just put me off. I'd like to see both this and its disastrous 1996 remake (which the Val Kilmer documentary reminded me of), but maybe not in conjunction with Halloween.

I've taken up way too much of your time already (congratulations if you've gotten this far!), but I thought I'd close by giving you a small bit of context for the previously expressed opinions. This might also double as a list of recommendations, if you are looking for 1970s horror options for your Halloween night viewing.

The following are my top ten 1970s horror movies as determined by Flickchart:

10. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, Philip Kaufman)
9. Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, John D. Hancock)
8. Don't Look Now (1973, Nicolas Roeg)
7. Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)
6. Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)
5. Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)
4. Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento)
3. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Jim Sharman) - ha!
2. Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)
1. The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)

Honorable mention: The Wicker Man (1973, Robin Hardy)

If you have any must-see 1970s horror movies not mentioned in this post, leave 'em in the comments. I've still got 15 more titles in my Lettrboxd list and I could definitely see myself giving this another whirl in a future October.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Easily disprovable anachronisms

When you see an anachronism in a movie, usually it's something minor, like the watch you can see on the wrist of one of the extras in The Age of Innocence -- something that resulted from an oversight, a failure to scrub all the modern conveniences from a film that takes place a hundred years before the movie was made. (Apparently that wasn't actually The Age of Innocence, as I can't now find anything about it online.)

Sometimes, though, it's central to the plot, and the filmmakers either didn't notice or just didn't care.

I watched 1978's The Cat and the Canary as my latest in a month of trying to watch 1970s horror movies. Like the most recent film I watched, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, it's hard to say that this film's genre was primarily horror. I guess that's what happens when you cast your net using various google search terms. Not all the fish you catch are actually worth eating.

The Cat and the Canary was worth eating, but it's much more a murder mystery than a horror, and despite the presence of death in both types of movie, they are genres that barely overlap. This is a lot more like Knives Out than it is like a serial killer movie, even though the movie promises a "flesh-rending maniac" present in a house full of heirs gathered to read the will of their deceased relative. The poster above is pretty suggestive of delicious period hororr as well. (Though if I'd read a little more closely, I'd have seen it was described by a critic as "amusing" and by the poster itself as a "classic tale of mystery and suspense." It was free on Amazon Prime, so I didn't look too closely into it before watching.)

No matter. I enjoyed it, despite it not really fitting my theme.

I'm actually surprised I didn't know more about this story, given that this is at least the sixth time John Willard's 1922 play has gone before the camera, including a 1939 version starring Bob Hope. And as this play surely inspired numerous other similar stories we have seen, from Clue to Knives Out, its details felt instantly familiar to me.

The story is basically this. A rich British man named Cyrus West dies in 1914, and because of the presence of greedy relatives who want to get their hands on his fortune, he leaves instructions to delay the reading of his will until 20 years after this death. Those greedy relatives are just as money hungry two decades later, so six of them appear to lay claim to his fortune, apparently knowing that only one of them may be named. 

They'll find out who that is via a film Cyrus made before dying, in which he will reveal the heir over the course of a dinner with the gathered family. That's right, he's left instructions with his loyal housekeeper to prepare the same dinner for them that she prepared for him when he was making the film, so that the screen on which the film is projected could be set up at the far end of the table, allowing him to "join" them in the meal from beyond the grave. He's even drinking the same wine, though he notes it's too fresh for him to truly enjoy at the time. It'll be perfectly aged 20 years later. 

The twist is that there is a second film that's to be shown if the conditions of the first film cannot be met, which is that the heir needs to live through the night without being declared insane to claim his or her fortune. And since insanity runs in their family, this outcome cannot be guaranteed. A second heir will be revealed, if needed, in the second film; if the conditions of the first film are met, though, the second film is to be destroyed unwatched.

This is a lovely premise for a film. Of course, in its finer details, it is also complete bullshit.

The film takes place in 1934, 20 years after Cyrus West's 1914 death. Of course, West may not have made the film in 1914. He apparently made it after becoming aware of a terminal illness, but that means it could have been made in 1913, 1912 or even earlier.

Which, as we know, is a good 15 years before the technology of the time was able to marry sound and image.

The first film to ever have sound was 1927's The Jazz Singer, as audiences gaped in amazement when Al Jolson opened his mouth and a song came out. Even that film mostly has on screen titles, though, as Hollywood was not yet capable of making a complete film in which sound was synchronized to the images.

The Cat and the Canary, on the other hand, posits that this technological advancement might have existed around the same time that the Titanic sank. 

Not only that the technology might exist, but that Cyrus West would be so comfortable with it as to use it in really clever ways. For example, he pauses in spots to give his potential heirs a chance to respond to something he's said, for each other's benefit if not for his own. He's also envisioned exactly how the table might be set up and even when and where his loyal housekeeper should walk in order to "disappear" into the side of the film as she goes to do something for him, and "reappear" out the other end at just the precise moment to create the illusion of the same person becoming 20 years younger before returning to her current age. (This trick was probably my favorite part of the whole movie.)

Now, because the play dates back to 1922, the filmed will is obviously not original to the source material. Whether it appeared in any previous version I cannot say for sure, though the Wikipedia plot descriptions do not suggest it.

The filmed will is undeniably a good way to modernize the story, as it allows West to be a character in the film -- a pretty cheeky one at that, who openly loathes his avaricious relatives. Why then, I wonder, didn't they just push the story forward 20 years? Have him die in 1934 and have the will reading in 1954? Sure, you have to sacrifice some of the 1934 design details of the story's present day, but to be honest, the way the characters relate to each other feels pretty anachronistic for 1934 anyway. Besides, the story is set entirely within West's mansion, a holdover of an older time, so whether it's actually 1934 or 1954 makes no difference in that respect. 

The ultimate answer, though, is that it just didn't matter to the filmmakers that the film contains a glaring anachronism. Films are rarely meant to be confused for the real world, perhaps most especially in a melodramatic genre like the murder mystery. Who cares if the technology is ahead of its time?

The Cat and the Canary does contain a sort of awareness of the anachronism, whether for better or for worse. At one point in both of his will films -- spoiler alert, the second one does get watched -- he declares his will in written form by holding up poster boards, which are about the size of the cue cards that would have been used on live television. He does this as a precaution in case of "sound failure."

Or maybe in the case of sound not yet existing?