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!

Let's Scare Jessica to Death turns 50

That subject is a bit of a joke. When using the wording "turns xx," where xx equals some number of years, in a headline about a movie, you're usually talking about something much more central to cinema history, whether it's a Star Wars or a Casablanca or a Titanic or a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A semi-obscure horror movie from the early 1970s does not fit the bill.

But I've been wanting to rewatch this movie ever since I first saw it on Halloween of 2009, and it was just a coincidence that that desire reached critical mass in October of 2021, when John D. Hancock's 1971 film turns half a century old.

We're actually six weeks past the 50th birthday. While nowadays it would be smart to release a movie like Let's Scare Jessica to Death at the beginning of October, to capitalize on viewers' newly reawakened desire for horror content, August 27th seemed to Paramount the best date to release it back in 1971. Of course, this was still four years before Jaws codified some of our modern understandings about when to release big films to maximize their impact on the audience and at the box office.

Saturday night, twelve years after my first viewing, it still scared the shit out of me. This is not a horror movie of big gestures or grand guignol kills. It's eerie in the little details, only occasionally building toward something more graphic, and it's all the better for it. It's soaking in glorious 1970s atmosphere and has some really chilling performances at its center -- from both the sinister characters and the innocent ones, making it confronting and complex as well.

As I was watching, and thinking generally about the great horror of 1970s cinema, I asked myself the following question: What other Let's Scare Jessica to Deaths are there out there?

Surely there are other semi-obscure 1970s horror movies I could name that I've already seen, but for the purposes of this exercise, I'm interested in those I haven't.

So I'm going to use the 26 remaining days before Halloween to try to dig up some great gems that might give me that Jessica vibe. Even if it means -- gasp -- renting them on iTunes, rather than just relying on what's available on streaming. (Kanopy would probably be the best resource for this but it can be a bit hit or miss.)

At first I thought I would watch only 1970s horror to scratch this October's horror itch, but since then, I've already noticed at least one new release that I want to watch within the next few weeks. So instead I'll just lean toward that goal, which will be easier to do, given that I've already scraped the bottom of the streamer barrel for horror movies worth watching from the past decade.

I can't wait to see what movies I find. I hope they scare me to death as much as Jessica did.

Diluting Halloween

I must not have much of a social life, because for the last five Halloween nights, I've been home watching a scary movie. Or at least a movie that was trying to be scary.

Up until this year, I have had a decent excuse. The previous four Halloweens fell on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. And yeah, you might go out for Halloween on a Friday night, but not if you're old, like my wife and I are. In fact, people less old than we are would go out any night of the week, and damn the consequences.

This year? Well, the Halloween party we usually attend was held on the previous Saturday, and my wife is in the midst of a really (I mean really) busy time. We did stop briefly by the Halloween bash being thrown by our next-door neighbors, which included karaoke, people who had flown in just for the occasion, and nearly 100% participation in wearing costumes. But we stayed for only 10 minutes, so I hardly think that counts. Besides, we had to get back to watch ... another scary movie.

And because those previous Halloweens all fell on weekdays, I'd seen nothing but scary movies on Halloween since that 2005 starting point of the current five-year streak/tradition. (I started keeping track of the dates I'd seen movies in 2002, but didn't watch anything on Halloween in 2002, 2003 and 2004). By that I mean none of them were days when I realistically could have gotten two movies in, since I was working. I guess the notable exception there was 2006, when Halloween was my last day of freedom before starting my current job. I did watch a second movie that day, and while it doesn't quite qualify as a horror, it is pretty damn grisly -- the craptacular Caligula, which includes gruesome disembowelments and plenty of other violence. So I count that as sticking with the theme.

This Halloween was a Saturday, which meant I had a full day open for potentially watching movies. Errands? Around-the-house projects? P'shaw. (Actually, I did get my hair cut). And my wife was out all day with one of those many things that are keeping her very busy. Even more of an opportunity for a mini-marathon.

So I diluted my Halloween horror streak about as blatantly as I could, watching a romantic dramedy about a highly mischievous dog: Marley & Me.

I actually had a handful of choices in the scary movie category. I'd borrowed both Poltergeist and Let's Scare Jessica to Death, a 1971 horror I knew nothing about except the title, from the library. But I didn't know which one we might watch that night, and besides, I started watching Marley & Me with my morning coffee. Horror before 9 a.m. just isn't that scary.

So sometimes I just like to let the choices come to me randomly, to cherry-pick them off the selections available OnDemand. When I saw Marley & Me, I knew that was probably going to be the choice. I like both Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, and had read an A- review of it in Entertainment Weekly when it came out last December. So Marley & Me it was.

Since that was all I really wanted to write about today -- the not-as-interesting-as-I've-made-it-out-to-be "irony" of watching Marley & Me on Halloween -- I might as well make a short story even longer by giving you a quick rundown of the titles we've entrusted to scare us over the last five Halloweens.

2005: Saw (2004, James Wan). My love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the Saw series began on this date four years ago, my last Halloween that I lived alone. Perhaps it was being alone in the house that made this one creepier than it would have ordinarily been. After all, some of my friends left the theater laughing after Saw. But it worked for me, and got me excited enough about these films' potential for squirmy gore that I saw the execrable Saw II in the theater less than two weeks later.

2006: The Hills Have Eyes (2006, Alexandre Aja). Aja's High Tension has one of the most bogus endings you will ever seen in a movie, but up until that point, it was pretty freaking great, so I was interested to see what he could do with the Hills Have Eyes remake. (Despite not having seen the original.) I lived with my wife/then-girlfriend by this point, and she was okay with it too. Invigorating technique and some exquisitely graphic and disturbing scenes, but weird structure: Instead of killing off the innocents one by one throughout the movie, the ones that die are killed off within a ten-minute period in the middle of the movie.

2007: Cronos (1993, Guillermo del Toro). Pan's Labyrinth had whetted our appetite for del Toro's earlier work, and we'd heard this one was creepy. I honestly don't remember it that well, but his interest in bugs -- seen a few years later in Mimic, then regularly in the rest of his work -- was already present here. It was macabre and squirmy enough to do the trick on Halloween.

2008: One Missed Call (2008, Eric Valette). For the first time in this tradition, we did not prepare by renting something, so we let OnDemand dictate what we might watch. Bad move. One Missed Call came up massively short of the standards set by its predecessors, failing even to be as good as most bad Hollywood knock-offs of Japanese horrors that probably weren't as good as they were hyped to be in the first place. Please, I don't want to laugh on Halloween. I've got to learn not to let a good poster (featuring a ghostly face with two screaming mouths for eyes) hold undue sway over my better judgment.

2009: Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, John Hancock). Ah, the 1970s. Back then they really knew how to creep you out -- no sophisticated gore effects necessary. I'm surprised I'd never heard anything about this film, since it absolutely gave me the willies for almost the full running time. A mentally disturbed woman, her husband and one of their friends leave the city for the countryside in order to try to clear her head, but end up in a mansion that's known to locals as the potentially haunted home of a woman who drowned in the lake behind the house in the late 19th century. Hancock does more with a vacant look, a whispered voice and an eerie soundtrack than all the buckets of blood and startle scares used by hacks in the last 20 years of horror filmmaking. Highly recommended. An additional testament to the film -- even the fact that karaoke was blasting through our closed windows didn't break the mood. (On a side note, we were referring to it as Let's Make Jenny Scared all night because that's the title my wife absorbed from a quick glance at the DVD cover.)

Happy (late) Halloween, everyone.