Tuesday, November 6, 2007
It’s over. The Annual Keck Horror Festival is over. And what a fest it’s been. Of all my movie fests, this is my favorite. Mostly tried and true stalwarts I’ve seen many times. There were a couple of new kids on the chopping block, but for the most part they were worthless. There was one that stood out. Not that it was great, or even exceptionally good. Would that I were so lucky. It was a respectable little horror piece, though. You could call it ‘pretty good.’ It was called Dead Meat, and it was made in Ireland. Or at least everyone, with the exception of the female lead, talked with Irish accents so I guess it’s an Irish production.
Directed by Conor McMahon, its low budget look and effects are deceiving. But as it goes along, it gets better and better, until finally you find yourself taken in by this little cubic zirconian. It’s not Romero or Carpenter quality, of course, but if you’re a horror, and especially a zombie film fan, it’s well worth watching.
Now, onto the real masterpieces of horror we find in the fine art of cinema.
They said that Hitchcock was the master of suspense. They were right. Case in point, Psycho. It’s actually not a horror film, even though you often find it in that category. If you examine it closely, you’ll notice that it’s really just a movie about a crazy guy who kills people (see my column, The Taxonomy of a Genre, April 2007). But because it’s so smooth and so well done, and because Anthony Perkins is so creepy, it’s considered horror. So, I add it into my yearly horror festival. And it is amazing. The scene where Perkins and Janet Leigh are sitting in his parlor, talking, will make your blood chill. A fantastic film by any standard. That was among the last of this year’s fest and a nice slight divergence from the horror genre.
Another Hitchcock film that made the fest this year was The Birds, taken from a short story by Daphne du Maurier. It’s an excellent movie, and has the wonderful Jessica Tandy in it. The Birds is another of Hitchcock’s suspense superiors–he has so many–and it keeps you glued to the screen, hardly letting you breathe. Rod Taylor does a fine job and although Tippi Hedren is easy on the eyes, her acting leaves much to be desired.
But Hitchcock is in fine form here. There is a scene where Jessica Tandy’s character discovers a dead body. For this scene Hitchcock makes a directorial decision that to me is nothing less than genius. Where most directors would have an orchestral cacophony of dissonant or minor underscoring blare out at the moment the body comes into frame, Hitchcock did something different: Silence. Not a single note was heard. And to my amazement, it was so much more powerful this way. The lack of music accompanying the on-screen visual makes it more deeply disturbing, more visceral and real. There are many memorable moments in this film, but that particular bit of directing demonstrates why Hitchcock commands the respect that he does.
Like the shower scene in Psycho, if you do see The Birds, the sight of masses of those feathered friends gathering on a power line will never be the same.
We finish up with John Carpenter’s The Thing. A buddy of mine told me just recently, that it is the greatest horror movie ever made. Although he wasn’t too far off, there are at least two reasons that this is not quite accurate. For one, technically The Thing isn’t horror, it’s science fiction (again, see The Taxonomy of a Genre). The other reason is because, although it is one of the greatest horror-science fiction films ever made, it’s not the greatest ever made, Night of the Living Dead is. However, as I said, this is one of the best films of the genre that you are ever likely to see, so I’ve decided to close out the horror fest with it. A ‘Thing’ from another planet travels to Earth, crash landing in the Antarctic and freezes in the ice. It is awakened by Norwegian researchers, “Probably not in the best of moods,” as Kurt Russell’s character says, and the story begins. Through the curiosity of a group of American science researchers in another outpost not far away, the frozen monster is brought into the camp after they find that the Norwegians have destroyed their own camp leaving no survivors. Not realizing what they have, the Americans simply store the ‘dead’ creature in a room allowing it to thaw and the rest is it’story. It has elements of both sci-fi and horror and both are skillfully built into the plot with a seamless blend. With an ensemble cast every actor is superb, even the dog, and I’m not kidding. The dog is so convincing it’s almost weird and you wonder how Carpenter pulled it off. Russell is fantastic as Macready and delivers some lines with such a subtle strength that only a truly great actor could make it believable and moving. It’s one movie that grabs the macho guy in all of us. Well…all of us macho guys, anyway.
The adventure is riveting, the suspense is palpable and it isn’t cluttered with romance; there are no female characters in the entire film. As Seinfeld would say, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” but a woman in this film would have detracted from the power and strength of its intensity and would have, in my opinion, damaged it overall.
It may not be the greatest movie of its genre ever made, but it is definitely one of a handful of top A-list contenders for the title, and one that horror film historians will talk about in glowing terms for many years to come. A wonderful way to end the horror fest.
Well, that’s it campers. It will be another twelve long months before we embark upon the dank, dark, drearies of such dreaded delicacies.
I miss them already.
So until next year, in the frightful month of All Hallows Eve, allow me to wish you many macabre and malevolent movies, and may all your horror experiences be good ones.
Keck
