It’s Halloween and it’s time to travel to the dark corners of the minds of some of cinema’s masters. With eerie unease and uncanny atmospheric chills for the scary season in a year filled with no shortage of these feelings in reaction to real-world events.
These are not gory, bloody mess horrors, but they’re no less effective than their spatter-filled contemporaries in creating deeply disturbing visions of strange, unnerving worlds. From a teenager’s bedroom to a remote Scottish isle and the garden of a Parisian doctor, these films linger uncomfortably in the darkest corners of the distinctively twisted imaginations of their creators.
Grab a blanket to cover your eyes and some popcorn to keep you fed; turn off the lights and share the scares with some friends for maximum “skrik” effect.
THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – Mubi.com
Before last year’s much-acclaimed eerie fantasy I Saw the TV Glow, trans director Jane Schoenbrun announced their presence as a serious new talent in the realm of creepy atmospheric unease with this debut from 2021. Anna Cobb makes her feature debut as teenager Casey, a young woman battling with personal and identity crises who finds initial solace in participation in an online creepypasta horror challenge called “The World’s Fair”. In the challenge, participants say a phrase three times, prick their fingers and watch a creepy video made up of hypnotic surreal imagery and sounds, all the while documenting their experiences for anyone on the internet to see and moving up the ladder to the next unknown but promised scary steps.
Set entirely in Casey’s bedroom with her face lit by the glow of her computer screen, it’s an increasingly unnerving journey from sanity to madness, held together by Cobb’s wire-walking performance and kept intriguingly engaging by Schoenbrun’s assured control.
We know very little about Casey and the details of the real-world battles she’s fighting. Though we may begin to think that we know what her participation in the game is doing to her, a final clever twist throws everything back into the realms of uncertainty as we replay everything in the light of new knowledge.
Though it’s more of a film that skirts the genre of horror than embraces it completely, the final results are in the best traditions of the genre: uncanny, goose-bump inducing and undeniably disturbing.
THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC
The Wicker Man – Rent or buy from Apple TV +
Robin Hardy’s 1973 film has become the gold standard for the folk horror genre that’s spawned such acclaimed recent classics as Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Ari Aster’s Midsommar. More than half a century later it still stands as a very chilling masterpiece whose imagery is disturbingly bizarre and atmosphere perfectly pitched to unnerve even the most stone-faced of viewers.
When a young girl goes missing on the remote Scottish island of Summerisle, mainland policeman Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) arrives to investigate. There, the conservative Christian bobby finds a community of creepily cultish Pagans who claim that his assistance isn’t required because the girl he’s looking for never existed.
Their adherence to dangerously immoral sexual freedom only further serves to convince Howie that something wicked is going on, and when he’s lured into temptation by the attractions of Willow (Britt Eckland), daughter of the enigmatic seeming-leader of the community, Lord Summerisle (horror legend Christopher Lee), he’s set on a path to moral and spiritual destruction that he has little chance of escaping.
Though he remains dedicated to solving the mystery of the missing child, the question remains as to what price he’ll have to pay.
It all ends with a sequence much memed, much emulated and seldom surpassed for its sheer terror, and though Hardy struggled mightily to find a distributor for it at the time, it’s since enjoyed its deserved place within the horror canon.
THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
Eyes Without a Face – YouTube
French director George Franju’s 1960 body horror, psychological-chiller classic is one of cinema’s most chilling tales of obsession and guilt, both genuinely terrifying and emotionally resonant.
The mysterious and darkly bizarre tale centres on a renowned French plastic surgeon specialising in the process of “heterografting”, where living tissue is transferred from one person to another. His obsession with the process stems from personal tragedy — his once beautiful daughter has been disfigured after a terrible car accident. She now wanders the grounds of their house, wearing a mask to cover her face, while her father makes plans for his unwitting secretary to serve as a donor for the process that will return his daughter to her former beauty.
Mixing gruesome medical precision with atmospheric unease, it’s a classic of moody horror that uses its imagery rather than plot to make its uncomfortable gothic points about the power of guilt and the tenuous bonds of family relationships. Franju, who first found fame as a co-founder of the legendary Cinematheque Francaise, earned further acclaim through his forays into the horror genre, which still stand as masterclasses in creating terror through implication and unease.
