Halloween is my least favorite viewing season because genre is a curse and horror films carry an extra curse—the curse of gore. I consider it a dereliction of directorial duty for horror films to yield to disgusting the viewer—and not only because I’m squeamish. I’ve said often that doing justice to the extremes of human experience in filmmaking demands extraordinary artistry, because such extremes—whether involving violence, sex, the demonic, or the divine—involve primal, powerful emotions that fall at the limit of the representable. The curse of genre, though, pulls in the opposite direction, allowing filmmakers to rationalize a movie’s ordinariness as adherence to convention. It’s precisely such ordinariness, such deference to formula, that turns so many horror films’ depiction of monstrous violence not just revolting but morally repulsive, not just trivializing but pornographic.
That said, there’s a formidable tradition of films that express horror according not to a set of established guidelines but to freely expressive impulse, evoking, through far-reaching imagination rather than blood and guts, the emotions of fear, dread, foreboding, and a sense the uncanny. Here are ten of my favorites. Some of these movies start with classic stories; others graft well-worn tropes onto sharply observed realities and, in the process, transform both. All convey a sense of awe in approaching the mysteries of mind, of family, of desire, of history, of existence—and of the cinema itself. They suggest the extremes of experience that are evoked by the very effort to explore the supernatural, the haunted, the tormented, the dreadful, both outward and within.
“Vampyr”
(1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
For his surprising venture into horror, the Danish director avoids following the lead of his only peer in the genre, F. W. Murnau, in “Nosferatu” (1922)—he avoids showing a monster at all (no fangs or bat wings or pointy ears). Instead, Dreyer offers a meticulously rational story (loosely based on tales by Sheridan Le Fanu) of a vampire curse that spreads on contact from person to person like a plague. The story is centered on a man who enters a vampire-poisoned household; Dreyer depicts the man’s terror and confusion in the face of the deadly curse using a hallucinatory repertory of images, featuring shadows and reflections, distorting angles and multiple exposures (and, though I didn’t count, seemingly even more shots of ceilings than in “Citizen Kane”). What’s more, Dreyer elicits stunned and eerie performances from a cast composed almost entirely of nonprofessional actors. “Vampyr” is perhaps the most effective and most radical Surrealist movie ever made.
“Carnival of Souls”
(1962, Herk Harvey)
One of the most distinctive and original of American independent films, “Carnival of Souls”—made for a mere thirteen thousand dollars in cash—was released at a time when there was hardly an outlet for such work. Its director, Herk Harvey, was a Kansas-based maker of industrial films; its screenwriter, John Clifford, was his colleague; its spark of inspiration was an abandoned amusement park in Salt Lake City that Harvey saw during a road trip; and its story—of a woman (Candace Hilligoss) who, after a catastrophic car accident, returns from the dead to live a seemingly ordinary life until her nonexistence catches up with her—veers from the merely macabre (which it delivers lavishly, in hectic, Gothic flourishes) to the profoundly socially isolating. With boldly imaginative effects that defy the scant budget, Harvey leaps out from the company of Ed Wood and George Romero to join that of Michelangelo Antonioni as a poet of post-industrial alienation. He died in 1996 without making another feature.
“The Other Side of Underneath”
(1972, Jane Arden)
Another classic shocker trope, chaos in a mental institution, gets a sharply avant-garde expansion in this chaotic yet hypnotic film by the British playwright, theatre director, and feminist activist Jane Arden. The ramshackle institution’s patients are all women, as are its doctors and attendants; the film’s allusive and symbolic extravagance blasts down the boundaries between physical reality and psychotic delusion. Terrifying performances of dissociated patients veer into theatrical tableaux of double-talk and outlandish costumes, of religious rites merging with marriage fantasies, music-hall bawdiness with rock-club slasher games. There are visually intricate tricks with mirrors and ingenious effects involving movies projected onto bodies; along with frenetic camera movements, they render the occasional interludes of stillness all the more chillingly warped. A special aspect of the movie’s hallucinatory power is the music by the cellist Sally Minford, which she performs live on-camera as one of the inmates.
“The Vanishing”
(1988, George Sluizer)
I shiver even recalling watching this drama of primal terror, about a Dutch couple vacationing in France when the woman (Johanna ter Steege), who’d been haunted by a recurring nightmare, vanishes at a gas station and her partner (Gene Bervoets), obsessed with finding her, encounters a man who claims to be her kidnapper (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu). Sluizer isn’t among the more original stylists, but the literalness of his direction suffices to evoke the horrific and monstrous possibilities lurking behind the façades of ordinary life.
“The Juniper Tree”
(1989, Nietzchka Keene)
The American director’s first feature, made in Iceland, stars the pop singer Björk in a cruel medieval tale of witchcraft and revenge by the Brothers Grimm. Two wandering sisters, Margit (Björk) and Katla (Bryndís Petra Bragadóttir), have fled their village following their mother’s execution on a charge of witchcraft—because their own mystical powers pose risks to them, too. In the rocky wild, the two young women encounter a widowed farmer named Johann and his young son, Jonas. Katla marries Johann and becomes Jonas’s stepmother, sparking the resentment of the boy who remains loyal to his late mother’s memory. In response, Katla conceives a vengeful plot that leads to catastrophe and unearths ancient transgressions. In Keene’s rough-textured, stone-cold black-and-white images (with cinematography by Randolph Sellars), spells and spirits, legends and reminiscences, animistic forces and mystical visions tremble with age-old violence and unslaked fury.
“The Rapture”
(1991, Michael Tolkin)
Though Tolkin has had success as a screenwriter, his first feature should have launched him as a director (instead, he has made only one more film). It stars Mimi Rogers as Sharon, a telephone operator in Los Angeles who compensates for her daily boredom with sexual encounters—until she experiences strange visions meshed with strangely overheard snippets of dogma and becomes a devout Christian obsessed with the impending, apocalyptic Second Coming of Jesus. The frozen metaphysical stillness of Tolkin’s manner—conjuring a world that exists outside of human time—is matched by the quietly hypnotic ferocity of Rogers’s performance. It’s one of the most terrifying of religious films; an astounding synthesis of style and subject, it that merges the meticulously practical and the terrifyingly visionary with a breathtaking audacity.
“Eve’s Bayou”
(1997, Kasi Lemmons)
Writing and directing her first feature, Kasi Lemmons offers an inside-out horror film—a coming-of-age melodrama replete with visions, curses, and a haunted family backstory that lands in modern times with the unredressed force of history and of patriarchy. Its protagonist is Eve (Jurnee Smollett), a ten-year-old Black girl in small-town Louisiana, around 1960, who sees her family falling apart because of the infidelities of her father (Samuel L. Jackson), an esteemed local doctor, whom she soon suspects of more grievous misdeeds. Eve possesses the gift of clairvoyance, and she focusses her gift—and summons the power of a voodoo priestess (Diahann Carroll)—to do justice. Lemmons pursues the story with a sharp-eyed, naturalistic clarity that emphasizes the family’s authentic emotional pressures along with the strangeness of the supernatural powers that impose a higher responsibility—and a grim burden—on the young heroine.
“Shadow of the Vampire”
(2000, E. Elias Merhige)