The Ringer - Horror Week2018-10-05T09:54:09-04:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/176925912018-10-05T09:54:09-04:002018-10-05T09:54:09-04:00The Horror Psychopath in 2018
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/AJXPAYJoN91m6iwR2tVmQctQiM8=/167x0:2834x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61661777/HorrorPsycho2018_NoBUG_Getty_Ringer.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Getty Images/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1978, ‘Halloween’ introduced the trope that would come to haunt horror movies—and, in certain lights, real life—for the next 40 years: the guy who won’t die. Have we come any closer to reckoning with him?</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="kCAfgR">In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek1ePFp-nBI">the trailer</a> for 2018’s <em>Halloween</em>, two iconic figures compete for viewers’ attention. The first is Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, the ex-babysitter heroine of the first two films, who is pictured at target practice, her now-grey mane flowing in the brisk fall wind, clearly indicating how long she’s been at this game. She aims her rifle at the monuments of her preparation, an assortment of bullet-ridden mannequins set up in a yard like anti-scarecrows; they’re not meant to scare anything away but to help her manage her own fear. “Do you know that I pray every night that he would escape?” she asks, in a breathy, slightly wounded, and exasperated voice. “What the hell did you do that for?” the grizzled police officer shoots back. “So I can kill him,” she replies. </p>
<p id="tUFjzK">The “him” is the second cinematic icon: Michael Myers, the masked serial killer. Strode has used her skill set to survive years of terror and abuse by her nemesis, the deranged Myers, who first started after her 40 years earlier in John Carpenter’s original <em>Halloween</em>. That film’s plot is pretty basic: In its opening scene, 6-year-old Michael Myers kills his teenage sister and babysitter. Afterward, he’s imprisoned in an insane asylum. Fifteen years later, he escapes the night before Halloween. The next day, Myers stalks and kills several girls and one boy, who is collateral damage to Myers’s attempt to kill the boy’s girlfriend. In the film’s final battle, Laurie stabs Myers twice, and Dr. Loomis, his psychiatrist, shoots him several times. Of course, when Loomis checks, Myers’s body is gone, setting up decades of seeming deaths and disappearing acts in the <em>Halloween</em> franchise and beyond. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="jn7Xp9"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Halloween Unmasked - The Ringer","url":"https://www.theringer.com/halloween-unmasked"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="Y6Hrry">In the 2018 film, directed by David Gordon Green, Laurie’s a vigilante and a grandmother and Myers is up to the same shit. He’s escaped from the psychiatric hospital again. This is a return to basics, with a crucial and timely update: Myers will be hunting Laurie, but she’s hunting him, too. Their inevitable confrontation will be between two legendary characters and two resistant horror tropes: the <a href="https://medium.com/@TheFilmJournal/updating-the-final-girl-theory-b37ec0b1acf4">“final girl”</a>—or the teenage girl or woman survivor of a horror film—and this other relentlessly alive figure—let’s call him the “guy who won’t die.” Killing him, which Laurie hopes to do, likely won’t be that easy given his track record of being both elusive and durable. The homicidal maniac is a familiar figure in horror: He shows up, stalks female characters, murders with impunity, and usually tricks police departments, private detectives, and his victims’ trusted confidantes into thinking he’s a figment of the victims’ imaginations. He then makes it to the next film and does it all over again. His invincibility is helped along by an infrastructure that disbelieves women. Still we tend to focus on invincibility as a description rather than as a trait. We take the recurring horror psychopath for granted when we see him on-screen; he’s going to come back, so that the films can too. </p>
<p id="2wsl2c">The trope is recognizable to most anyone who’s seen a horror film since the late ’70s: For one reason or another (or for no reason at all), the killer is after babysitters (<em>Halloween</em>) or camp counselors (<em>Friday the 13th</em>), or a group of teenagers with insomnia (<em>Nightmare on Elm Street</em>). The victims fight back with an impressive array of weapons and DIY traps, but it’s never enough. He keeps rising. Every time you think he’s dead, he’s either playing possum or had actually died but was somehow resurrected. This maniacal dude is in diametric opposition to the final girl’s position: He’s engineered the series of torments he subjects her to, while she’s an unwilling participant; he is seemingly infallible while she’s very evidently mortal; he’s implacable, emotionless, and she wears her feelings on her sleeve (until it’s inevitably ripped off). If the final girl is “abject terror personified,” as film theorist Carol J. Clover wrote, this recurring psychopath is the institutionalization of that terror personified. The only thing the two figures have in common is their survival. </p>
<p id="0oSE5a">When it debuted in October 1978, <em>Halloween</em> was a paradigm shift in horror cinema. As film critic David Kehr <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/movies/homevideo/25kehr.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FHalloween&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=search&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=collection">explains</a>, moving from the 1960s into the ’70s, American horror films replaced fantasy flicks and their villains with a “series of highly successful, independently produced films [that] refocused the genre on human monsters and human monstrosities.” In the politically conscious <em>Night of the Living Dead</em> (1968), the antagonists are a countless cadre of unthinking, somnambulant once-human zombies, and <em>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</em> (1974) featured a whole family of cannibals. To quote Amy Nicholson in the first episode of <em>The Ringer</em>’s <em>Halloween: Unmasked</em> podcast, “Michael Myers was different. … Myers marched into the suburbs; he marched into the bedrooms of ordinary, anytown girls who hadn’t done anything at all. There was nothing you could do to avoid him, and now no one was safe.” <em>Halloween</em>’s innovation was the single stalker type, a figure that spawned a slew of remakes, sequels, and copycats. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Nxl6d5RKzciVxMqgL9_cdOqfOYY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13220521/MV5BY2NmMTA2MzAtOGJhYS00NWI1LWEyMTItYTliNTE4ZDI4NTdkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjQ4ODE4MzQ_._V1_.jpg">
<cite>Warner Bros.</cite>
<figcaption>Michael Myers in ‘Halloween’</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="cqp9VR">What we got after <em>Halloween</em> is 40 years of maniacal dudes who won’t take “no,” or blows to the head, or machetes, or chainsaws, or bullets, for an answer. Late capitalism being what it is, the single-use monster of old Hollywood was replaced by a series of indestructible male psychopath attackers who could not only avoid apparent death in scene after scene, but from film to film, thanks to <em>Halloween</em>’s example. With <em>Halloween</em>, Carpenter and company not only struck IP gold, they extended their cultural influence well outside of the decade that inspired the film. </p>
<p id="NPHpSx">And they were also, as all horror classics do, channeling the culture outside of the film itself. “Why has this figure proved so durable?” asks Brian Baker in his book <em>Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000</em>. “The excess of desire that turns to violence surely reveals further cultural anxieties about masculinity, and it is certainly no coincidence that the crucial period for the ‘slasher’ subgenre was directly after the Vietnam War.” If <em>Night of the Living Dead</em> borrowed the cinematography of Vietnam War news reports, as Kehr observes, then <em>Halloween</em> and the films that followed it exploited the crisis of masculinity and the anxiety that synced with the reintegration of Vietnam vets back into American society. This tension played out in the genre in a few major themes for the next 40 years: the repetition of childhood sexual trauma as basis for the maniac’s behavior; the entitlement of the psychopath; the link between violent toys and the impressionable young boys who make up their main demographic; the use of the copycat trope, where young men aped the killer’s style; and the uptick of “nice guy” killers. </p>
<p id="xEOCBZ">The new <em>Halloween</em>’s entrance into the zeitgeist is just as poignant and culturally situated as the original. It’s difficult to consider the guy who won’t die trope without thinking about the ways in which the idea lives outside of the horror film’s confines. The trope of a seemingly untouchable, almost exclusively male figure who gets off on repeated abuse, particularly of women, evoked cultural realities decades before our society was willing to openly discuss them. Now we see that crisis of masculinity play out in the behavior of similar actors within our cultural and political moment. Until recently, these men’s escapes from accountability paralleled the elusiveness of the horror film’s recurring psychopaths, their repeated violations and unchecked abuses of power not unlike the sequels you find starring the genre’s villains. In 2018, we have a new <em>Halloween</em> sequel just as our culture is acknowledging another crisis of masculinity. On-screen and off, the guy who won’t die has returned, just as the #MeToo reckoning, <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a20078774/what-are-incels/">incel phenomenon</a>, <a href="https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/11/08/americas-mass-shooting-problem-is-a-domestic-violence-problem/">predictive link between domestic violence and mass shootings</a>, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2017/8/15/16141456/renaud-camus-the-great-replacement-you-will-not-replace-us-charlottesville-white">“you will not replace us”</a> white nationalists are at the center of our national discourse. All this, plus Michael Myers <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a22691506/metoo-movement-men-accused-sexual-assault-comebacks/">on the comeback trail</a>, suggest the “guy who won’t die” is more alive than ever. </p>
<p id="j3AR9K"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Eneh8l">Horror films’ gender and sexual politics are well established: Sex is bad, virgins are good, the slasher’s knife is a phallic symbol, and psychopathic killers are sexually repressed and have mommy issues. Those themes are ingrained in the genre. As Clover describes in <em>Men, Women, and Chain Saws</em>: “The cinematic gaze, we are told, is male, and [...] so it ‘knows,’ in horror, how to track a woman ascending a staircase in a scary house and how to study her face from an angle above as she hears the killer’s footfall.” Men usually play the attackers, and women are usually their victims. In <em>Halloween</em>, these dynamics are especially easy to pick up on. Myers mostly kills girls and acts as both a voyeur and a stalker. The girls’ death sequences are long and drawn out. This sets up an interesting dynamic: If Myers’s perspective is also the same as the camera, then the viewer’s default identification is with him, too. His gaze becomes <em>our</em> gaze. That makes for a titillating shot; it also makes viewers complicit in the cinematic violence. The slasher subgenre, and horror films in general, fetishize a certain kind of male form, beset with certain character quirks: one who is relentless in both his durability and his feelings of ownership and obsession over the women he stalks. While there have been <a href="https://medium.com/@nathanielhagemaster90/queering-michael-myers-and-halloween-1978-89f67047c36">attempts to recast</a> Myers as a queer figure, I don’t think that analysis holds up. He’s resolutely a beneficiary of patriarchy, of entitlement. That’s why he refuses to stay away. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="HK2be1"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Introducing the Horror Oscars: The 40 Best Scary Movies Since ‘Halloween’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/1/17921290/horror-movie-academy-awards-halloween-40-alien-shining-nightmare-elm-street-silence-lambs-scream"},{"title":"Will Anyone Remember Any of the 21st Century Horror Remakes?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/2/17915924/horror-movie-remakes-2000s-psycho-texas-chainsaw-massacre-halloween"},{"title":"Why ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Is the Other Scariest Movie of the 1970s","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/2/17924468/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-remake-donald-sutherland"},{"title":"Who Is the Best Horror Movie Monster or Villain?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/3/17929898/best-horror-movie-monster-villain"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="GSH1zK">The other guys made in the Myers mold keep coming back, too. In <em>Friday the 13th</em> (1980), which was made explicitly to capitalize off of the success of <em>Halloween</em>, the murderer is a woman. Although that film’s killer turns out to be Jason Voorhees’s mother Pamela, in all but one of the series’ following 11 sequels Jason is the slasher. The <em>Nightmare on Elm Street</em> series, which began in 1984, follows the ghoulish Freddy Krueger’s attempts, across nine films, to fuck with teenagers while they dream. In its three films, the <em>Candyman</em> series, based on a short story by Clive Barker, features the mythical figure torturing women who come across his path. They even made a doll who won’t die—for seven films! In its initial installments, the campy <em>Child’s Play</em> series played deftly with genre and gender tropes: A serial killer transfers his soul into the body of an aptly named “Good Guy” doll and tries to possess the soul of a sweet little boy, Andy Barclay, the hero of the first three movies. (It’s notable that, once the bodies start to pile up, the manufacturer of the Good Guy doll keeps closing and reopening, adding another layer to the film’s awareness of its villain’s ongoing rejuvenation.) Given the guy who won’t die trope, little Andy delivers the most ironic line when he tries to kill Chucky, his “friend to the end”: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSH9SG55kBU">“This is the end, friend!” </a></p>
<p id="utxzqK">But of course it wasn’t; the trope kept multiplying on itself in other films, too. The <em>When a Stranger Calls</em> series, starring Carol Kane as a babysitter who’s tortured by a maniac, features different stalkers; Kane appears in the original and the sequel, first as a victim, then as a mentor to the next woman who’s targeted by a copycat killer, a psychopathic ventriloquist and performance artist who paints himself to blend into walls. (The second entry, a TV movie, is notable for its Lifetime-esque showcase of the real institutions that marked women’s safety nets of that era: feminist call centers, women’s-only self-defense classes.) The multiple villains add another layer of commentary: As long as there is a system in place, cops who don’t believe her, and enough entitled assholes out in the world, a new character can be targeted by a psychopath who uses the same methods that either killed or traumatized women before her. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dqLcl1_ScQs4E0yTxSLY8dNWRmg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13220541/MV5BZDAxMDMyYjMtZTllZS00MzA3LWI5ZGEtMDUyYjBiMzdhZGMwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjQ4ODE4MzQ_._V1_.jpg">
<cite>Dimenion Films</cite>
<figcaption>Neve Campbell in ‘Scream’</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="lwHUmM"><em>Scream</em>, beginning in 1996, is the story of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a teenager coping with the death of her mother when a killing rampage begins in her town. <em>Scream</em> paid homage to the iconic phone call scenes of the first two <em>When a Stranger Calls</em> films by presenting an extended opening sequence where the viewers, like the victim, learn that <em>the call is coming from inside the house</em>. (This gag is unintentionally insightful as a metaphor for the kind of self-doubt and paranoia that infects stalked characters; the call’s coming from inside the house and also their brains.) <em>Scream</em> also featured the consummate “nice guy” killer, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), Sidney’s boyfriend. <em>I Know What You Did Last Summer</em> (1997) featured an indefatigable villain who gets hit by a car and who’s joined by his son in the next film, <em>I Still Know What You Did Last Summer</em> (1997). The only post-millennium franchise in this vein worth mentioning is <em>Saw</em>, featuring Jigsaw, the evil mastermind ultimately revealed to be a dying man stricken with cancer, who has chosen to terrorize people who he decides have not lived their lives properly. Again, that sense of one man’s entitlement over other people’s bodies finds a literal expression in horror. There have been eight entries in the <em>Saw</em> series, and although Jigsaw died in the third installment, he continues to play a role in the series, through flashbacks and the ideological impression he’s left for his followers. Given all this, Jigsaw’s not quite dead. </p>
<p id="yL2q8I">But how could he be? The guy who won’t die seems indestructible. Most often his continued reanimation defies logic. His death-defying Whac-A-Mole pop-ups are mostly meant to keep the jump scares going and lay the groundwork for his eventual reappearance in the series’ next sequel. But his indestructibility also, necessarily, serves as punishment. As Seth Grahame-Smith explains in the genre manual <em>How to Survive a Horror Movie</em>, “Horror movie characters aren’t killed by machete-wielding monsters or reincarnated psychopaths—they’re killed by ignorance. Ignorance of the mortal danger they’re in. Of the butcher lurking in every shadow. Of the new rules. Ignorance of the fact that they’re in a horror movie.” Frailty becomes a justification for his ongoing rage. </p>
<p id="BJmisn">Fittingly, given how fatal ignorance can be in this medium, the final girl often survives because of her smarts, and—aside from deus ex machina plot machinations and the fact that he needs to survive to keep the story going—it’s not always easy to tell how the guy who won’t die persists. But much of his survival has to do with the fact that he has the upper hand—his victims are on his territory, and they’re playing the game he designed. If the final girl provides “a cathartic end to the gore and gloom,” as Erik Piepenburg’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/movies/in-horror-films-the-final-girl-is-a-survivor-to-the-core.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0">writes</a> in <em>The New York Times</em>, the guy who won’t die represents the opposite of catharsis. He is an open wound that never heals, a menace who survives from generation to generation, terrorizing a new breed of women and young people who have to learn the rules all over again. </p>
<p id="lL3z22"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="S6WHUh">Sometimes making a movie is the best way to critique other ones. Brian De Palma’s <em>Blow Out</em> (1981), about slasher movies and political corruption, is one of the most incisive reviews of the slasher genre, its indomitable attacker, and the guy who won’t die outside of film. In <em>Blow Out</em>, a noir film about making films, John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a sound man for a production company that makes B-movies. When the film starts, Jack’s trying to place a scream in <em>Co-Ed Frenzy</em>, a low-budget slasher film. He ends up getting caught in a political quagmire when a presidential candidate dies in a car accident with a prostitute while he’s nearby recording sound. He rescues and then befriends the woman, Sally (Nancy Allen), who was in the car with the politician, but despite his best efforts to shield and protect her from harm, she dies wearing a wire for him. At the end of the film, still looking for the perfect scream, he uses the one Sally uttered before she died, which is captured on the wire. The last shot of the film is Jack covering his ears as he watches a new version of the film and listens to the overdubbed scream, the blue light emitting from the movie theater washing over him. The most brilliant and insidious thing about that movie is that despite Jack’s misgivings about Sally’s death and the trauma associated with it, <em>he uses her scream anyway</em>. He’s part of the system, and no matter how much he cared for his fallen friend, he chooses to keep making money and retaining his place within it. Despite his proximity to much of the same danger Sally faced, Jack survives, as do the slasher-film psychopaths he helps to foster into the world through his production work, and the political corruption the film critiques. He survives because of the system, which doesn’t explicitly target him. He survives because he knows the old and new rules. He survives because he knows he’s in a horror movie, to echo Grahame-Smith’s calculation. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="OnG5lh"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"‘Black Christmas’ Was the First ‘Halloween’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/3/17932802/black-christmas-horror-film-halloween-scream"},{"title":"John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ Was Supposed to Be a Warning. We Didn’t Heed It. We Didn’t Even Understand It.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/4/17933020/they-live-john-carpenter-america-donald-trump"},{"title":"Before ‘Get Out,’ There Was ‘Candyman’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/4/17933940/candyman-get-out-race-horror"},{"title":"Reign in Blood: The Legacy of Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/5/17939894/suspiria-dario-argento-luca-guadagnino"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="1lQDAo">Horror movies often anticipate our cultural acknowledgement of certain social issues, and in this case, <em>Halloween</em> and the psychopath were able to articulate some of our most common problems long before we had the language ourselves, or while we were developing it. The slasher film’s insistence on men who make rules and traumatize women, and who are still able to continue along in that way, has a brutal corollary in the real world. Men in power, from Bill Cosby to Harvey Weinstein to Les Moonves to Mario Batali and beyond, have consistently exerted their will over women who they think “don’t know the rules” or are ignorant of the fact that they’re in <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/passantino/donald-trump-jr-suggested-women-who-cant-take-sexual-harassm#.snAvPJMED5">“a guy’s place,”</a> or that they’re in a horror movie. What we as a society have finally begun to acknowledge is that they do know, and always have. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="2aKQbf">In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K_y1TWBOvs">an interview,</a> John Carpenter explained that his task with the original <em>Halloween</em> was to make an “exploitation horror film,” and part of what makes Laurie Strode’s vigilantism in the 2018 version exciting is that it appears to play up the exploitative qualities of the original film as well as other ’70s movies across genres: the Blaxploitation revenge flicks, the Charles Bronson <em>Death Wish</em>–style swaggering vengeance. The textual elements of gender and violence were already there: the fear and craftiness of final girls and their ilk; the entitlement of the genre’s psychopathic male figures; the gaslighting done by male authority figures; the unfair playing field; the institutional nature of the villain’s terror, which is demonstrated in his continued survival. It will be interesting to see if this year’s <em>Halloween</em> will also exploit the tensions that have ramped up in the #MeToo moment, but which have been pronounced in the culture since at least October 2014, when the Cosby scandal first broke nationwide. In January 2018, <em>Atlantic</em> writer Caitlin Flanagan <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-right-conversation-for-metoo/551732/">wrote</a> that “female rage is the essential fuel of #MeToo. Unchecked it is the potent force that will destroy it.” She could have been talking about Carrie White, whom Carol J. Clover called a “female victim-hero,” an archetype who uses feminism and the rage Flanagan mentions to enact revenge on her tormentors. Jamie Lee Curtis draws different inspiration from #MeToo in her portrayal of Laurie, who moves from a quintessential “victim” to a hero in this new <em>Halloween</em>. On <em>Halloween: Unmasked</em>, Curtis talked about her most famous character’s importance in our moment, saying “Laurie Strode could be a #MeToo voice for people who have had violence perpetrated on them. … Laurie Strode’s violence is fake, it’s not real, but in a movie to see a character come around <em>40 years later</em> and say, ‘No more, #MeToo,’ is powerful.” The patriarchy keeps showing up, like Michael Myers, and the countless copycat characters who have come in his wake. In <em>Halloween</em>, and in Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and in elevators outside the hearings, women aren’t letting these recurring villains thrive without a fight, just as the final girls don’t. But therein lies the biggest difference between the genre and real life: In horror films, there’s only one girl left standing. </p>
<p id="EcQlyh"><em>Niela Orr is an interviews editor at </em>The Believer<em> and a contributing editor of </em>The Organist <em>podcast. Her writing has appeared in </em>The New York Times Book Review<em>, </em>The Baffler<em>, </em>BuzzFeed<em>, and </em>McSweeney’s Quarterly<em>.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/5/17940476/halloween-michael-myers-psychopath-tropeNiela Orr2018-10-05T09:00:45-04:002018-10-05T09:00:45-04:00Reign in Blood: The Legacy of Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/r4RP6YDDDk6ovv6C5fmj89D3RrQ=/154x0:2554x1800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61661115/TheRinger_Suspiria_01_NO_BUG.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.alvarotapia.com/" target="_blank">Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With a reimagining from Luca Guadagnino on the way, we take a look back at the 1977 original—a hallucinatory, erotic, still terrifying Italian horror masterpiece, equal parts ‘Snow White’ and opium dream</p> <p id="qycao6">Responding to criticisms that his 1965 crime thriller <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVvhJrrgfs0"><em>Pierrot le Fou</em></a><em> </em>was too bloody, Jean-Luc Godard famously told a journalist, “It’s not blood, it’s red.” Always good for a one-liner, the French New Wave innovator was also being profound; his joke suggested that for a filmmaker, as for a painter, violence was not a matter of morality but of palette, and the screen was just another splattered canvas. </p>
<p id="3wk6Br">Godard’s snarky remark resonated in the 1960s, a decade framed at either end by groundbreaking gory horror films that eschewed color for practical and artistic reasons. The<a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/melons-syrup-twisted-morality-making-psychos-shower-scene/"> chocolate syrup</a> swirling down the Bates Motel drain in Alfred Hitchcock’s <em>Psycho </em>was evidence that the Master of Suspense was working with a TV-sized budget, but also a tacit admission of restraint. Despite his stated desire to play the audience like a piano, he understood that the swooning, hallucinatory color scheme of <em>Vertigo </em>would be too overwhelming if applied to its follow-up, a ruthless serial-killer narrative. For 1968’s <em>Night of the Living Dead, </em>George A. Romero opted for a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2HMcT_RmeE">black-and-white newsreel</a> style that looked cheap in the year of <em>Rosemary’s Baby, </em>yet lent brutal authenticity to his images of cannibalism and mutilation. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="XNoWUK"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Halloween Unmasked - The Ringer","url":"https://www.theringer.com/halloween-unmasked"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="Fj9ZE7">By the time Romero made <em>Dawn of the Dead </em>in 1978, he knew that audiences would no longer accept monochrome mayhem. The floodgates had been opened by everybody from Stanley Kubrick (<em>A Clockwork Orange</em>), to William Friedkin (<em>The Exorcist</em>), to Tobe Hooper (<em>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</em>),<em> </em>to Brian De Palma, who<em> </em>famously bathed <em>Carrie</em>’s homecoming queen in blood as a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJcTG-VnLrI">devastatingly funny homage</a> to Hitchcock’s shower scene. There was also Romero’s friend and soundtrack composer Dario Argento, whose output had by then made its way across the Atlantic and was boldly color-coded in every way. Not only did the Italian auteur work in a subgenre grouped by hue—the so-called <em>giallo </em>thriller, so named in honor of the cheap, yellowed paperback novels of the 1940s and ’50s—but his artistic mandate could be summed up by the title of one of his characteristically baroque art-slasher classics: <em>Deep Red.</em></p>
<p id="YFAO0K">A former journalist and film critic who got his start in filmmaking as a screenwriter for Sergio Leone—a director who didn’t exactly hold the sauce when it came to his delectable <a href="https://nofilmschool.com/2016/12/7-cinematic-trademarks-master-spaghetti-western-sergio-leone">spaghetti Westerns</a>—Argento made his directorial debut in 1970 with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2eknxl-A84"><em>The Bird With the Crystal Plumage</em></a><em>. </em>It’s a wild thriller that established some of the motifs that would come to define his run as the major European genre director of the decade: convoluted narratives; neurotic, pent-up heroes; faceless, black-gloved killers; hapless, helpless female victims; a fetishistic insistence on style over substance—or, more generously, style <em>as </em>substance—that simultaneously heightened and undermined any potential revulsion at the explicit, often sexualized violence. Argento took Godard’s maxim and pushed it as far as it could go: The sets, the costumes, and even the blood in his films were so purposefully florid—so <em>profondo rosso</em>—that taking serious offense seemed like the drabbest, most pallid response possible. </p>
<div id="RSuJ8D"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GD_EN0JVnKk?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="D7hZRR">Suspiria is Argento’s masterpiece. The 1977 film is<em> </em>the story of a secluded ballet school housing a sinister witches’ cult. It was recently remade by <em>Call Me by Your Name </em>director Luca Guadagnino. The new film has already stirred up controversy, both for its unfathomable brutality (<a href="https://ew.com/movies/2018/09/01/dakota-johnson-suspiria-therapy/">which traumatized its star most of all</a>) and accusations of <a href="http://www.artnews.com/2018/09/28/ana-mendieta-estate-sues-studio-behind-new-suspiria-film-alleging-copyright-infringement/">copyright infringement</a>. It received <a href="https://theplaylist.net/suspiria-luca-guadagnino-review-20180901/">wildly </a><a href="http://time.com/5384890/suspiria-review/">mixed </a>advance reviews <a href="https://news.avclub.com/quentin-tarantino-cried-watching-the-suspiria-remake-w-1827327483">(and apparently made that old softie Quentin Tarantino cry)</a> While such polarization is often the sign of an interesting movie—I can’t wait to see it—everyone seems united in one sentiment: Trying to live up to—or go beyond—a movie as canonical as <em>Suspiria </em>is either ambitious, stupid, or both at once. </p>
<p id="Tdl8xT">In an excellent <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/2/17915924/horror-movie-remakes-2000s-psycho-texas-chainsaw-massacre-halloween"><em>Ringer </em>essay</a> about why the 21st century’s glut of reverent, well-made horror remakes seem destined to be forgotten, Keith Phipps located the problem as one of superfluous, film-nerd nostalgia: “We dredge up yesterday’s ghosts at our own peril. Usually, they’re best left alone.” Or, as Argento <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2016/08/dario-argento-interview-suspira-remake-2016-locarno-film-festival-1201714247/">himself said</a> in 2016, when Guadagnino’s project was announced: “Either you do it exactly the same way—in which case, it’s not a remake, it’s a copy, which is pointless—or, you change things and make another movie. In that case, why call it <em>Suspiria</em>?”</p>
<p id="zJyCFK">The title <em>Suspiria </em>is derived from the Latin phrase <em>suspiria de profundis</em>, meaning “sighs from the depths.” In 1845, the English author and opium-enjoyer Thomas De Quincey used its conflation of hellish torment and erotic ecstasy to name a collection of essays of “psychological fantasy” derived from the visions he’d experienced during his various drug-induced trips. In the centerpiece entry, “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow,” De Quincy imagined a trinity of sisters variously embodying the ominous, tender and terrifying aspects of human experience—Our Lady of Tears; Our Lady of Sighs, and Our Lady of Darkness. “They are,” <a href="https://www.bartleby.com/27/22.html">he wrote,</a> “of one mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart; but of their dominion there is no end.” </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="fGCiFG"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Introducing the Horror Oscars: The 40 Best Scary Movies Since ‘Halloween’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/1/17921290/horror-movie-academy-awards-halloween-40-alien-shining-nightmare-elm-street-silence-lambs-scream"},{"title":"Will Anyone Remember Any of the 21st Century Horror Remakes?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/2/17915924/horror-movie-remakes-2000s-psycho-texas-chainsaw-massacre-halloween"},{"title":"Why ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Is the Other Scariest Movie of the 1970s","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/2/17924468/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-remake-donald-sutherland"},{"title":"Who Is the Best Horror Movie Monster or Villain?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/3/17929898/best-horror-movie-monster-villain"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="p6nJh9">In interviews, Argento has admitted De Quincey’s influence on <em>Suspiria </em>and his larger “Three Mothers” trilogy<em>. </em>In many ways, the film was a new beginning, introducing supernatural elements to Argento’s arsenal. Where the uncanny, unsettling events of <em>Deep Red </em>could ultimately be boiled down to an account of aberrant psychology—a nightmare rooted in contrived but concrete trauma—<em>Suspiria </em>was conceived as a tale of the occult, indebted as much to fables and folktales as the lurid, sex-and-death ethos of the giallo<em> </em>tradition. It was an influence that extended to its visual design as well as its narrative. <a href="http://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/7698/lessons-we-can-learn-from-argentos-suspiria">“We were trying to reproduce the color of Walt Disney’s <em>Snow White</em>,</a>” Argento explained, and the various crimson shades of the film’s sets and costumes function as the glistening, poisoned apple in that fairytale equation. The early sequence, in which a terrified young woman (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Ax%C3%A9n">Eva Axén</a>) is stabbed to death and dropped in a noose through a stained-glass skylight by an unseen force, is goofily kinetic and austerely beautiful; a Looney Tunes cartoon suitable for hanging in the Louvre.</p>
<p id="BazQWr">The misogyny of the imagery is unmistakable, and yet <em>Suspiria </em>complicates audience reactions—then and now—by filling its narrative almost exclusively with female characters, with the male performers (including a young Udo Kier) reduced to the sidelines. The giallo<em> </em>staple of the brooding, drooling sex-crazed psychopath is nowhere to be found. Instead, <em>Suspiria </em>burrows into archetypes of sisterhood—the ballerinas are cloistered like nuns—and, more daringly, maternal rivalry, restaging <em>Snow White </em>minus the seven dwarves (or a heroic huntsman to save the day). The “fairest of them all” in Argento’s tale is Suzy (Jessica Harper), the impossibly dewy, implicitly virginal American ballet student enrolled at the Tanz Dance Academy in Freiburg. In the indelible opening scene, we watch her arrive at the Munich airport and make her way (just like her cartoon doppelganger) through the “Black Forest” to reach her new home, which resembles nothing so much as a grimly enchanted castle. The evil Queen, meanwhile, is the aforementioned Lady of Sighs, imagined here as the Tanz’s imperious director, whose not-so-secret identity is the script’s driving enigma—when will Suzy finally realize she’s in an<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/filmeditor-horror-mia-farrow-l2YWE6cvkikqJklvW"> “all of them witches”</a> situation?—and a boringly foregone conclusion.</p>
<p id="k2mwJd">In contrast to muscular ’70s horror classics like <em>The Exorcist </em>and <em>Halloween,</em> <em>Suspiria</em>’s greatness does not derive from the conventional satisfactions of narrative set-up and payoff, nor does it offer much in the way of characterization. If Suzy makes for a sympathetic heroine, it’s more to do with Harper’s beauty as a camera subject and the alienating effect of her European co-stars’ dialogue being mostly dubbed than any kind of bravura acting, a la<em> </em>Mia Farrow in <em>Rosemary’s Baby. </em></p>
<p id="GMdtqt">Rather, like Nicolas Roeg’s splintered, subliminal masterpiece <em>Don’t Look Now </em>or Brian De Palma’s giallo-inspired <em>The Fury (</em>both of which build to deep-red money shots), <em>Suspiria </em>is first and foremost an exercise in atmosphere, drawing power from confusion and disorientation, and leaning into its nonsensical aspects. It is powered by Goblin’s throbbing musical score, which rivals <em>The Exorcist </em>and <em>Halloween </em>for ’70s synth supremacy. </p>
<p id="VU0J3f">In its best moments, <em>Suspiria’s</em> connection to De Quincey’s prose poems runs deeper than concept of the “Lady of Sighs.” Prowling through the Academy’s corridors at night, surveying its exquisitely vulnerable array of sleeping beauties, Argento and his cinematographer Luciano Tovoli generate a kind of cinematic opium daze (Tanz rhymes with “trance, after all).</p>
<p id="zkiHND">The absence of any real sobriety in <em>Suspiria’s </em>collection of gimmicks and gross-outs means that it’s possible to watch it as camp. When Lela Svasta’s decrepit crone Helena Markos—a dormant figure for much of the movie’s running time—confronts Suzy with the truth of her situation and croaks, “Hell is behind that door,” it’s more an invitation than a warning (and the film’s final scenes are worth the price of admission, bathed in giallo-plus-deep-red shades of fiery orange and anticipating the title of Argento’s next movie—<em>Inferno</em>). </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="yrq5H5">In the finales of <em>The Exorcist </em>or <em>Halloween, </em>we’re meant to be shaken by the possibility that the forces of darkness are still lurking in every stairwell and behind every bolted door, but the end, <em>Suspiria </em>doesn’t aim for that kind of eerie effect. When it’s over, it’s over, with Suzy, slightly worse for wear but wiser about the world, like any good fairytale survivor, escaping into the same pitch-black night that backgrounded her arrival. What lingers is not a sense of evil but exhilaration in how far Argento and his fellow filmmakers were willing to go to shock and delight; the movie’s sheer exuberance is the cinematic equivalent of a blood transfusion.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/5/17939894/suspiria-dario-argento-luca-guadagninoAdam Nayman2018-10-04T10:13:53-04:002018-10-04T10:13:53-04:00Before ‘Get Out,’ There Was ‘Candyman’
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8JHulA6Jw3qlc2atHW8qSG2l8lg=/167x0:2834x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61647823/LeonardoSantamaria_TheRinger_CandymanHK_sm.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://leonardosantamaria.com/" target="_blank">Leonardo Santamaria</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The urban legend about the hook-handed terror was a radical, sophisticated examination of race, history, and love that feels as powerful and essential today as when it was released more than 25 years ago</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="v4B7dd">“I know I’d rather have him do it, someone with intelligence, who’s going to be thoughtful and dig into the whole racial makeup of who Candyman is and why he existed in the first place.” </p>
<p id="jTd63F">That’s Tony Todd, the actor best known for playing the suave, hook-handed killer in Bernard Rose’s cult 1992 horror film <em>Candyman</em>, <a href="https://hypebeast.com/2018/9/candyman-jordan-peele-remake">talking last week</a> about a potential remake of the most iconic film of his career. (He wants Jordan Peele to be at the helm.) After this year’s direct sequel to John Carpenter’s <em>Halloween</em> by David Gordon Green, it would make sense to have <em>Candyman</em> return, updated for today’s particularly horror-savvy and -literate audience; with its themes of race and class, some critics might even call <em>Candyman </em>“elevated horror.” It would also make a lot of sense, as Todd claims, to have Peele put his own spin on the material: his 2017 debut, <em>Get Out</em>, satirized and made explicit the hypocrisy and the danger still at the core of racism today. <em>Candyman</em>, in many complicated ways, was a precursor to <em>Get Out</em>’s embedded social critique and sophisticated use of genre cinema language. </p>
<p id="gKya3R">Like <em>Get Out</em>, <em>Candyman</em> sees a character enter a place that is typically not welcoming, but the dynamic is reversed. Where Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris Washington feels the need to <em>get out</em> of the wealthy mansion owned by his white girlfriend’s parents, Virginia Madsen’s Helen Lyle in <em>Candyman </em>is afraid of being intrusive as a white grad student entering the predominantly black and lower-class social estate of Cabrini-Green in Chicago. Chris, with his photography, and Helen, with her community-based research, are both aiming to document the reality of those milieus as outsiders. But where Chris is anxious about being exploited (more or less literally), Helen fears being perceived as exploitative. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fb5hNK4BphNMxuZCOXqTSWOMtpE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13213613/MV5BMmFhMjNhYjgtZjQwMy00YzlmLWI0ODAtM2RlYjRhZTA4NzA2XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc_._V1_SX1777_CR0_0_1777_962_AL_.jpg">
<cite>TriStar Pictures</cite>
<figcaption>Virginia Madsen in ‘Candyman’</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="8FynyU">The young woman is visiting the inhabited but derelict estate to study its urban legends, particularly the one about Candyman, the local bogeyman rumored to have actually recently killed some people in their homes. But literal-minded Helen doesn’t believe in such myths, and even if it is with some hesitation, she does pronounce the murderer’s name five times in the mirror—and he doesn’t come, as people say he should. Scary campfire stories are perfect horror movie material: they’re meant to stretch credibility to keep us awake at night. And they can be as gory and fantastical as one wishes them to be, which can make for some powerful images. Urban or folklore legends get their power from their imperfect believability and our wild imagination. They’re too awful to be real ... but what if they were? </p>
<p id="EtLFV1">In <em>Get Out</em>, the creepy story that Chris is afraid to believe in is racism. How could a young black man like himself be afraid of being surrounded by white people in our woke day and age, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/10/2/17927532/kanye-west-saturday-night-live-i-love-it-yahndi-trump-13th-amendment">when slavery no longer exists in America</a> and his own girlfriend is white? And yet, the fear persists and finds itself justified in the increasingly strange behavior of the liberal-seeming Armitage family (in this scenario, “If I could, I would have voted for Obama for a third term” is as scary an utterance as “Candyman” five times in a mirror). But how could Chris be sure that it isn’t his paranoid mind playing tricks on him? After all, it’s normal that he should be anxious to meet his girlfriend’s parents. But of course, his fears will prove to be legitimate. <em>Get Out </em>plays as a modern fable; in <em>Candyman</em>, fables turn out to be factual.</p>
<p id="SSLJ9C">The very first sentence of Clive Barker’s 1985 short story <em>The Forbidden</em> left its mark on <em>Candyman</em>:<em> </em>“Like a flawless tragedy, the elegance of which structure is lost upon those suffering in it, the perfect geometry of the Spector Street Estate was only visible from the air.” For his adaptation, Rose relocated the story from Barker’s native Liverpool to Chicago but kept his fellow British man’s point of view and poetry to make his setting gloomy and doomed. Aerial shots—using Skycam technology, a new device at the time allowing for elevated but smooth images à la <em>The Shining</em>, but without <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2013/02/camera-operator-for-the-shining-explains-helicopter-shadows-in-opening-credits-discusses-hallorann-crash-sequence-101847/">helicopter shadows</a>—of the residence, combined with an operatic score from none other than Philip Glass, give Cabrini-Green an air of quiet death but also a majesty, like a mesmerising gothic church or an ancient sinister pyramid. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="8XJcTx"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ Was Supposed to Be a Warning. We Didn’t Heed It. We Didn’t Even Understand It.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/4/17933020/they-live-john-carpenter-america-donald-trump"},{"title":"‘Black Christmas’ Was the First ‘Halloween’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/3/17932802/black-christmas-horror-film-halloween-scream"},{"title":"Who Is the Best Horror Movie Monster or Villain?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/3/17929898/best-horror-movie-monster-villain"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="eMrHXi"><a href="http://www.aintitcool.com/node/72689">In 2015</a>, Rose explained why he was so intrigued by this aspect of Chicago: “The fear of the urban housing project, it seemed to me, was actually totally irrational because you couldn’t really be in that much danger. Yes, there was crime there, but people were actually afraid of driving past it.” For Rose, what makes dilapidated buildings like Cabrini-Green so scary to people on the outside is, again, a sort of superstition—prejudice: “It’s sort of a kind of fear that’s at the heart of modern cities, and obviously, it’s racially motivated, but more than that—it’s poverty motivated.” Similarly to <em>Get Out</em>, the rampant anxiety that seizes most people approaching the estate in <em>Candyman</em> is their preconception regarding the lives of a group on the other end of the social spectrum—but this time, the protagonist comes from a position of greater power and privilege. </p>
<p id="UtMdEy">Where <em>Candyman</em> differs most crucially from Peele’s film is the position its main protagonist occupies with respect to the Other: while Chris was anxious about the Armitages, Helen is afraid neither of the buildings themselves, nor of their people. She is a white, college-educated woman who is genuinely curious about this community and worried about its safety—which makes her a complicated character, always on the slippery slope of serving a white savior narrative. What greatly complicates her role and the film’s approach to class and racial discrimination is how directly she ties into the myth of Candyman himself.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><div id="dsflAp"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/0akK00x9E3FZysBaWOeVtK" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="Oga5fp">Rose heavily reworked Barker’s short story, not only adding backstories for both Helen and Candyman, but connecting their fates in doing so—which in turn makes the story’s social discourse that much richer and more difficult to pin down. The young woman learns early on that the building she paid a fortune to live in was actually first intended to be another social housing residence, constructed following the exact same plans as those that shaped Cabrini-Green. As a result, Helen’s detachment from this poorer social strata now seems almost superficial, a stroke of luck and an injustice. This first connection to the desolate place, however, is only a hint of what’s to come. </p>
<p id="lM7OYH">A male academic soon mansplains to Helen the origins of Candyman, and with a subtle but piercing feminist touch, the film highlights his arrogance for sitting contentedly on this piece of information and delivering it with such disdain toward Helen and the people it concerns. In Rose’s film, Candyman is African American and his demise is an explicit product of racism: not only was his father the son of a slave, but Candyman himself, although highly educated and a respected portrait painter, was lynched for falling in love with and impregnating a white woman. In the fact his acquired social status didn’t protect him from the same racial hatred that plagued his ancestors, we see hints of the thesis put forward in <em>Get Out</em>, namely that no amount of social progress can prevent outright evil from existing; worse yet, moral advancements can serve as a front for the enduring, darkest, most violent heart of intolerance.</p>
<p id="zkx5Zo">While the academic tells this somber story in a strong British accent, the camera slowly zooms in on Helen’s increasingly teary eyes. As punishment for following his heart, Candyman had his arm sawed off and the stump that remains adorned with a rusty hook, and his body covered in honey and attacked by killer bees. Behind these rather bizarre circumstances is a reference to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson#Marriage_to_a_Philistine">the Old Testament story of Samson</a>, who shocked his family by wanting to marry a Philistine, and on his way to his beloved, slayed a young lion in which bees nested and made honey. Rather than showing us Candyman’s mutilation, Rose instead focuses on Helen’s reaction to those images forming in her head. The effect is pure gothic terror, with the narrow ray of light on Helen’s gaze recalling <a href="https://youtu.be/Tq8robO5eJ0?t=42s">the original 1931 <em>Dracula</em> film</a>, but also transmits a great deal of sadness. Helen is more heartbroken than horrified by Candyman’s story of forbidden love and implacable cruelty. “The idea always was that he was kind of a romantic figure. And again, romantic in sort of the Edgar Allen Poe sense—it’s the romance of death,” said Rose. It is Helen’s compassion for Candyman’s doomed love that will push her to continue her investigation despite the risks, and that will slowly turn into a macabre attraction.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="6jrZcB"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Why ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Is the Other Scariest Movie of the 1970s","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/2/17924468/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-remake-donald-sutherland"},{"title":"Will Anyone Remember Any of the 21st Century Horror Remakes?","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/2/17915924/horror-movie-remakes-2000s-psycho-texas-chainsaw-massacre-halloween"},{"title":"Introducing the Horror Oscars: The 40 Best Scary Movies Since ‘Halloween’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/1/17921290/horror-movie-academy-awards-halloween-40-alien-shining-nightmare-elm-street-silence-lambs-scream"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="nt6IB3">Helen doesn’t meet Candyman until the 44th minute, almost at the film’s midpoint. Until then, he was nothing but the graffiti of a man’s face on an abandoned house’s wall, with the door for his mouth, his teeth surrounding the opening and his glistening eyes wide open. He was the tales that the residents would tell about his killings, and the fear that crept up their spine as they did so. When Candyman finally appears to Helen in a parking lot, he is at first only a dark figure in the distance and a deep, resounding voice calling her name. <a href="https://youtu.be/7lk6CaU3q5s">“Helen, I came for you,”</a> he says and she starts to feel weak at the knees—both literally and figuratively. “You doubted me,” he complains as he walks toward her, not exactly threatening but rather captivating and almost enticing with his soothing voice.</p>
<p id="7FmtLT">The slow and elongated pace of his speech is that of a magician, or a seducer—here, there’s no need for this distinction. Is he blaming her for doubting a killer’s existence, or a lover’s passion? Soon, Helen is entranced, her face numb, her eyes blank and unblinking—like in the film’s opening minutes, when she first heard of this urban legend—and her feeble voice mechanically responding to Candyman’s questions. <a href="https://youtu.be/ZGZhRqN-f8Y">Virginia Madsen was actually hypnotized</a> for her scenes with Tony Todd, which explains her authentically passive and glassy-eyed look. It was the director’s own idea to set up a keyword for the actress to go under on his command: he thought that instead of reverting to a typical <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/2/17924468/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-remake-donald-sutherland">strident scream</a>, a state of rapture would be a more cinematic and narratively appropriate reaction to encountering a strange and strangely seductive monster such as Candyman. Like love at first sight, Helen is immediately under his charm, no longer the fearless and capable woman climbing inside his scary drawn face in a dodgy building, but instead helpless and paralyzed by Candyman’s calm words. Finally, he uncrosses his arms to reveal his great hook, planted on his bloody stump, and commands Helen, although solemnly and politely, “be my victim.” It’s an offer she can’t refuse. Candyman could kill Helen right there, but he wants not just her permission, but her will to die. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Daniel Kaluuya in ‘Get Out’" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0pUmQXL5LwSh1u1Zvtqhmnxe4es=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9729473/2477_TP_00054R.JPG">
<cite>Universal Pictures</cite>
<figcaption>Daniel Kaluuya in ‘Get Out’</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="4RAyKi">The protagonist of <em>Get Out</em> is also—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwVWrBk_uo">famously</a>—hypnotized to reach the “sunken place” and become a victim of the Armitages, thus maintaining their system and tradition, much like Candyman wants to keep his legend alive through Helen’s death. But Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener) is more of a maternal figure to Chris and there is not a speck of romance between them: she makes him remember traumatic events from his childhood to break him. Candyman, on the other hand, wants Helen to connect to his own pain with her empathy, and he knows that her own life as well as his manipulations bring her ever closer to feeling the same heartbreak he experienced and has come to be defined by. </p>
<p id="CzkVZu">One aspect for which <em>Candyman</em> doesn’t get enough credit is the brilliant way in which it uses the cliché of the average-looking and arrogant college professor having an affair with one of his young hormonal female students (see also: <em>The Squid and the Whale</em>). Helen has her doubts about Trevor (Xander Berkeley, who would iconically <a href="https://youtu.be/PDW6YSDgqAk">lean into the shitty partner role a few years later in <em>Heat</em></a>) early on, but it’s when she’s arrested and wastes her one phone call to try to reach him at home that she knows for sure that he’s been cheating. Madsen’s performance in that moment is particularly impressive as she combines terror, confusion, and raw heartache. It’s also a key narrative point since it brings together the pain in her sentimental life and the suffering she goes through in the police station as no one believes her tales of the Candyman. She is blamed for the kidnapping of a baby belonging to Anne-Marie (Vanessa Williams), a resident who had generously answered her questions and told her more about Cabrini-Green, and also for trying to murder her. </p>
<p id="ES9iGY">As events spiral out of control, Rose’s savvy direction makes us share in Helen’s nightmarish experience, where the passing of time becomes ungraspable and the line between hallucinations and reality evaporates. Candyman now appears undoubtedly and terrifyingly real. But he is not framing Helen for his horrendous crimes simply to bring her down and prevent her investigation; his goal, rather, is to make her feel the degree of his own pain as a black man denied love and life. Ostracized by her husband, left without any friends—Candyman, intentionally cruel, kills her best friend and colleague Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons)—and institutionalized, Helen is utterly alone and reviled by all. On top of her natural empathy for Candyman’s own suffering, she now understands his anger and despair more than she ever thought possible.</p>
<p id="PDmZ3W">And so Helen finally gives in—this isn’t a horror film where the girl triumphantly comes out of her scary adventure alive. Again in a trance, she lets herself become Candyman’s victim, but this capitulation is double-edged. “All you have left is my desire for you,” the tall dark stranger tells her. As a fresco-slash-graffiti she discovers makes clear, Helen is the spitting image of Candyman’s long lost lover. “It was always you, Helen,” he finally explains. By accepting to die by Candyman’s hook, Helen also surrenders to his advances and enters his mythology as his beloved, joining him in death at last. Candyman gets to correct history and have his lover by his side for the rest of time, and both he and Helen find comfort from the hypocrisy of white men in each other’s arms. </p>
<p id="wNL40o">A white woman’s betrayal by a disloyal husband, even if coupled with accusations of insanity, is not an ordeal that can be compared to a black man’s torture and death at the hand of racist white people. Instead of such a distasteful analogy, <em>Candyman</em> suggests the less graspable but more potent possibility for compassion and desire for justice. What keeps Helen from being just another white woman exploiting the racist persecution of a black man is that she truly considers Candyman as a human being worthy of empathy and respect, and whose story needs to be discovered. She is after the truth, however ugly it might be, because she has no desire to protect her white ancestors’ reputations—much like Candyman’s lover fell for him despite her family’s intolerant outrage. She is so devoted to Candyman’s sorrow and to his past that she would—and does—die for it. </p>
<p id="K3TlS6">In a harrowing but also rather amusing epilogue, it is revealed that Helen has become a myth unto herself. At her funeral, the residents of Cabrini-Green come to deposit a hook in her grave—at once accusing Helen of all the crimes that Candyman actually committed, and showing their fearful respect. Although wrong, these allegations are welcome since Helen has truly embraced her place in Candyman’s legend as well as her reputation as the cuckold wife and murderous woman. Devoured by grief and regret, Trevor is seen hiding in his apartment’s bathroom while his college-age girlfriend half-heartedly starts cutting some steaks for dinner. Trevor quietly whispers Helen’s name to the mirror five times, at once expressing how much he misses her but also, without fully believing it himself, trying to make her appear behind him—and she sure does. </p>
<p id="Jh5G4D">When the girlfriend finds his body—and gives a rather good scream—she is perhaps not-so-coincidentally holding her sharp kitchen knife, which should help Helen make her look like the murderer. </p>
<p id="7iAUS7">This you-go-(white)girl ending, with Helen avenging herself but also now appearing like an angel of death on the mural where the story of Candyman’s killing used to be, may not be the film’s strongest moment: even though it is thanks to Candyman that Helen achieved this legendary status and, like him, uses it to attack white heartbreakers, she is still a white woman stealing the spotlight from the black hero and his particular struggle. In 1987, <a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/they-came-in-through-the-bathroom-mirror/Content?oid=871084">writer Steve Bogira wrote a long piece</a> in the <em>Chicago Reader</em> about the murder of a woman in one of the city’s housing projects. John Malkovich soon reached out to him about adapting this harrowing story for the big screen, but suggested the lead character be a white investigator. Bogira <a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2014/03/14/how-a-story-about-the-horrors-of-housing-projects-became-part-of-a-horror-movie">“was uncomfortable with the idea of a movie about poor black people focusing on a middle-class white person,”</a> but Malkovich “explained that movies whose dominant roles are black usually didn’t get funded.” Bogira never heard back from Malkovich, but recognised elements from his investigation in <em>Candyman</em> when he saw the film; Malkovich may have shown the article to some fellow producers.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="P5qhmt">In 2016, Peele’s <em>Get Out</em> was much less compromising: it lets its black lead not only survive, but kill the emissaries of the racist myth (although <em>Get Out</em> sadly didn’t end racism) and, exhilaratingly for both Chris and the audience, escape with his best friend (interestingly, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3JS7_OcPWQ">original, discarded ending</a> left him in the sunken place). Where Helen had to get in and die to celebrate Candyman’s pain and vengeance, Chris manages to get out, refusing to be defined as yet another victim of intolerance. If Peele remade <em>Candyman</em>, perhaps he would refocus the film’s denouement more squarely on its title character, or make Helen’s own pain as a betrayed and disbelieved woman another interesting theme to explore alongside that of racism, and not an eventual substitute for it. In any case, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103919/quotes/qt0354931">we are not fully content with the story, so he is obliged to come.</a> </p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/4/17933940/candyman-get-out-race-horrorManuela Lazic2018-10-04T08:59:01-04:002018-10-04T08:59:01-04:00John Carpenter Calls Action
<figure>
<img alt="Entertainment Weekly CapeTown Film Festival Presented By The American Cinematheque &amp; Sponsored By TNT’s ‘Falling Skies’ - Day 3" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lsvVpyyEFPaFSmOvjO4D7-wzpok=/170x0:2830x1995/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61646901/167944019.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Entertainment Weekly</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The legendary director joins Amy Nicholson to break down his stumbling path to the ‘Halloween’ set </p> <div id="6FGWMV"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/0akK00x9E3FZysBaWOeVtK" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="6c8GHc"><a href="https://art19.com/shows/halloween-unmasked/episodes/128f2a81-6fdd-4fc4-9f8b-4cafe61d5eec">How did four friends make a slasher classic?</a> By accident. Join Carpenter and Co. on their stumbling path to the <em>Halloween</em> set, where these goofy kids inadvertently became horror legends.</p>
<p id="BHUgvH"><strong>Subscribe: </strong><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/halloween-unmasked/id1435524582?mt=2">Apple Podcasts</a> /<strong> </strong><a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-ringer/halloween-unmasked">Stitcher</a><strong> </strong>/<strong> </strong><a href="https://art19.com/shows/halloween-unmasked">Art19</a></p>
<p id="cIXi4c"></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/4/17936096/john-carpenter-calls-actionAmy Nicholson2018-10-04T05:50:02-04:002018-10-04T05:50:02-04:00John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ Was Supposed to Be a Warning. We Didn’t Heed It. We Didn’t Even Understand It.
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fhZYKOjbb6ZxpPsPllNel5GCGPc=/186x0:3149x2222/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61640193/the_ringer_final_standard.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.efichaliko.com/" target="_blank">Efi Chalikopoulou</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The horror master’s most prescient movie has nothing to do with serial killers or vampires—it’s about greed and propaganda. And it’s truer than ever.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ThrRHU">In 1978, John Carpenter wrote and directed a movie about a mysterious, hulking loner who comes to town and slays innocent victims. Ten years later, he made another movie about a mysterious, hulking loner who comes to town, only this guy waited to kick ass until he was all out of bubblegum. </p>
<p id="Y513WE">There are other obvious differences between <em>Halloween </em>and <em>They Live</em>,<em> </em>two of the most beloved films by one of the all-time great genre auteurs<em>. </em>But here’s the one that matters most: <em>Halloween </em>became a popular horror franchise that now includes 11 films released over the course of 40 years, including the forthcoming reboot due October 19.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="F8OrNY"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"How ‘Halloween’ Brought Horror to the Suburbs and Inspired a Legion of Copycats ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/1/17922416/halloween-unmasked-episode-1-john-carpenter"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="BYTMXL"><em>They Live</em>,<em> </em>meanwhile, sort of became reality. </p>
<p id="iplzwU">Drones in the sky, conspiracies in our heads, militarized police in the streets, economic inequality in every corner of society, media that seeks to control our minds: The terror of <em>They Live </em>is more tangible and primal in 2018 than a slasher movie could ever be. Is that an overly grandiose way of describing a cheesy, semi-self-aware ’80s action flick? Am I projecting outsize cultural importance onto a cult classic starring a professional wrestler who utters awesome one-liners like, “Brother, life’s a bitch ... and she’s back in heat”? Have I been wearing these magical sunglasses for too long? </p>
<p id="E2BJee">Not if you ask Carpenter. From the beginning, he saw <em>They Live</em>—which turns 30 next month—as a fun action-adventure movie about a magnificently mulleted construction worker who saves the world <em>and </em>as trenchant social commentary. Over time, his take on the film has settled more on the latter. </p>
<p id="fY60Gy">“You have to understand something,”<a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/john-carpenter-looks-back-on-they-live-its-174619686.html"> he told Yahoo</a> in 2015, “it’s a documentary. It’s not science fiction.”</p>
<p id="7vLmsX">Based on Ray Nelson’s 1963 short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” <em>They Live </em>centers on a blue-collar cipher symbolically named John Nada (Roddy Piper). The setting of the film is also <em>nada</em>;<em> </em>it’s ostensibly Los Angeles, but the time frame is pitched somewhere between a dystopian future and a pessimistic present.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="7wXcKj"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Introducing the Horror Oscars: The 40 Best Scary Movies Since ‘Halloween’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/1/17921290/horror-movie-academy-awards-halloween-40-alien-shining-nightmare-elm-street-silence-lambs-scream"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="vV3zuM">Nada soon meets fellow laborer Frank Armitage (Keith David), who brings the homeless drifter to a soup kitchen and ad-hoc squatters’ community on the edge of the city. (Armitage, a character in H.P. Lovecraft’s <em>The Dunwich Horror, </em>is also the pseudonym that Carpenter used as the movie’s screenwriter.) Early on, we see that local TV is occasionally interrupted by a pirated signal carrying the warnings of a bearded conspiracy theorist, who declares that the human race is being controlled by unseen forces. Eventually, Nada learns that this signal is coming from a nearby church, which also contains a box of truth-revealing sunglasses. When Nada puts on a pair, he realizes that the richest, most powerful people in the world also happen to be “real fuckin’ ugly,” skeleton-faced aliens.</p>
<p id="IZVvBA">To reveal more would be to spoil <em>They Live. </em>(Seriously, though, if you haven’t seen it: What’s the matter with you?) But you can probably already spot an anachronism or two. For one thing, if<em> They Live </em>is ever rebooted, it will have to account for the internet, the outlet for all of our nightmarish ranting about the end of the world.</p>
<p id="QAXVY0">And then there’s Roddy Piper, the Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson of his time, who died in 2015 at the age of 61. To put it kindly, Roddy’s acting skills were not on par with Carpenter’s usual leading man, Kurt Russell, who achieved eternal cool in movies like <em>Escape From New York</em>,<em> The Thing</em>,<em> </em>and <em>Big Trouble in Little China. </em>Roddy is cool only in a strictly “late-’80s hair metal” sense. While Russell reimagined John Wayne as a<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(band)"> Steppenwolf</a> stan, Piper struts through <em>They Live </em>like Bret Michaels after having inhaled the other three members of Poison. </p>
<p id="3geCjA">But Carpenter liked Piper’s unpolished, meathead simplicity and lack of larger-than-life movie-star charisma. To him, <em>They Live </em>was a populist, anti-yuppie, anti-Reagan polemic.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWu9JOB-TmY"> In a 1988 making-of documentary</a>, he practically sounds like Bernie Sanders as he articulates the movie’s central idea. “All of the aliens are members of the upper class, the rich, and they’re slowly exploiting the middle class, and everybody’s becoming poorer,” he explains. “It has kind of a theme and a message to it, but basically it’s an action film.” </p>
<p id="74OUCv">Along with providing some working-class authenticity, Roddy’s wrestling-ring swagger also helped to sell the movie’s Trojan horse, action-oriented trappings. “I like that feel of somebody’s who’s not so hip and rich,” Carpenter says in the making-of doc, “and doesn’t just cruise through every situation but has to struggle.”</p>
<p id="QEQKzr">As the country moves further from the distant memory of Reagan’s America, <em>They Live </em>continues as a reference point, a meme, and, for some, even a guidebook for survival. In the process, the meaning of <em>They Live </em>has changed; it’s not just for left-wingers railing against the excesses of capitalism. Yes, <em>They Live </em>is a low-budget thriller that ends [<em>SPOILER ALERT</em>] with a naked woman making love to a man she has just realized is an extraterrestrial. But head down any number of online wormholes and you’ll discover that skeptics of all political persuasions have embraced the allegorical significance of <em>They Live. </em></p>
<p id="jNbEsd">All that’s required is feeling as though you’re oppressed by a shadowy cabal of <em>they</em>—media elites, corporations, globalists, Russian hackers, university professors, the deep state, SJWs, the Koch brothers, George Soros, or some other evil character that your conspiracy glasses have detected. </p>
<p id="DMt4y2">All of us<em> </em>seemingly live in this paranoid world now. When Brett Kavanaugh angrily speculated last week that women’s stories of sexual assault involving him were spurred by “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” he was echoing <em>They Live. </em>Kavanaugh himself is precisely the sort of privileged, upper-crust figure who, depending on your point of view, might very well be one of <em>they</em>. If you don’t believe me: <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/They_Live">Either put on the glasses or start eating that trash can.</a></p>
<p id="OUyqlA"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="2ZQGuH">Just how far afield have some fans of <em>They Live </em>drifted from Carpenter’s original intentions? In 2017, Carpenter took to Twitter—the 21st-century version of a pirated TV signal—to denounce neo-Nazis for appropriating the film as an anti-Zionist diatribe about a Jewish-controlled media brainwashing the public. </p>
<div id="iYV8w6">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">THEY LIVE is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie.</p>— John Carpenter (@TheHorrorMaster) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheHorrorMaster/status/816486706186596352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 4, 2017</a>
</blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div>
<p id="JYnQVU"><em>They Live </em>was not meant to be anti-Semitic. But because art is so easily malleable when exploited by ideologues, it’s not difficult to understand how it could be <em>construed </em>as anti-Semitic by the worst people in the world. The bearded man who appears on TV screens to “wake up” the populace uses the same apocalyptic language that’s become standard in the darkest corners of the internet. “We are their cattle,” he says. “We are being bred for slavery.” Later, he likens the human race to “a natural resource” in the eyes of the aliens. “All we really are is livestock.” Carpenter wrote that as a critique of Reaganomics, but if you remove that original context timely to 1988<em>, </em>it can apply to any supposedly fascistic regime—whether you’re against<a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/454019206167448662/?lp=true"> Barack Obama</a>, or<a href="https://twitter.com/_always_resist/status/1043673105095426048?s=21"> Donald Trump</a>, or a more subterranean world order that controls both political parties. </p>
<p id="iwIfOc">The most memorable parts of <em>They Live</em>,<em> </em>outside of the catchphrases and that fight, are the scenes in which seemingly innocuous advertisements and pop-culture entertainments are exposed as nefarious means of mind control, delivering blunt subliminal messages like “OBEY,” MARRY AND REPRODUCE,” and “NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT.” This skepticism about the media and the government overlords was implanted on Carpenter’s generation by the double-whammies of Vietnam and Watergate, which naturally resonated most with outraged liberals who justifiably distrusted the Nixon administration.</p>
<p id="EYMFbL">But in 2018, the sunglasses wearers are just as likely to come from the far right.<a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/08/03/635449555/qanon-the-conspiracy-theorist-group-that-appears-at-trump-rallies"> An NPR report</a> from August on the conspiracy-theory group QAnon quoted several Trump supporters apparently living in a real-life version of <em>They Live. </em>“He’s saying all these things about how they lead … these rich people using their money to kind of, like, manipulate the masses,” one supporter said of Q, the anonymous figure (or consortium of anonymous figures) responsible for propagating the Pizzagate conspiracy. “You’re finding out how bad and how corrupt this world really is,” another QAnon-reading Trump voter told NPR. “I mean, you knew things were bad and things were corrupt, but you really didn’t know.” </p>
<p id="86o8g7">How strange is it that <em>They Live </em>has endured in this way—or, really, at all? Upon its November 4, 1988, release <em>They Live </em>was a commercial failure, grossing just $13 million. (It was overshadowed by the more successful <em>Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers</em>,<em> </em>released just two weeks prior.) Critically, it was a mild curiosity, receiving mixed reviews from critics who appreciated the subversive message but questioned the execution. Jonathan Rosenbaum of the <em>Chicago Reader</em>,<em> </em>with some justification,<a href="https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1988/11/liberals-kick-ass/"> criticized</a> <em>They Live </em>for its “confusing blend of anti-Reagan satire and genre conventions that make the film every bit as crass, amoral, and mulishly blinkered in its many rightwing assumptions as the attitudes it is ostensibly attacking.” In other words, <em>They Live </em>is a critique of American greed in which the solution is an all-American macho man mowing down foreign intruders with a machine gun.</p>
<p id="VSvxoW">For Carpenter, the short-term public indifference toward <em>They Live </em>merely confirmed that he was ahead of his time. After all, the movie came out the weekend before Election Day, when Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, handily won his own presidential term, capturing 426 electoral votes and carrying a staggering 40 states, a stunning endorsement of the status quo by the American electorate.</p>
<p id="4e62FW"><em>They Live</em>’s poor box office showing became a moral victory in retrospect for Carpenter. “By the late ’80s, I’d had enough, and I decided I had to make a statement, as stupid and banal as it is, but I made one, and that’s <em>They Live</em>,”<a href="http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/john-carpenter-they-live-was-about-giving-the-finger-to-reagan/#/0"> he told the <em>Los Angeles Times</em></a><em> </em>in 2013. “I just love that it was giving the finger to Reagan when nobody else would.” </p>
<p id="Pfozke">But once <em>They Live </em>left theaters and became a home-video mainstay during countless middle-school sleepovers, “giving the finger to Reagan” mattered less and less to millions of teenagers. One of those kids was a voracious reader of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Gary Allen who grew up in the Dallas suburbs. Years later on his show <em>InfoWars, </em>Alex Jones called <em>They Live </em>“one of my favorite all-time movies,” adding that he had “probably seen it 100 times. It breaks down everything!”</p>
<p id="OYLaYF">When you see Alex Jones through a <em>They Live </em>lens, <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alex_Jones">his rants</a> assume the tenor of a Roddy Piper soliloquy, with emphatic protestations about “con artist pot-bellied chicken-neck pieces of garbage running our world” delivered with a sandpaper-coated bark that’s all bluster and zero brains.</p>
<p id="LYNiRs">In 2013, Jones had a chance to profess his love of <em>They Live </em>directly<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM_d2qKr1tA"> to <em>InfoWars </em>guest Roddy Piper</a>, who in turn expressed his admiration for Jones<em>.</em> </p>
<p id="9ZljTm">“I’m a big booster of you!” Piper beams at the start of the interview. </p>
<p id="fg6SN6">From there, the conversation goes about as well as you might expect, wobbling incoherently from rants about anti-globalism to an extended digression<a href="http://www.nfb.ca/film/bronswik_affair/?hpe=carrousel"> about advertisers using TV signals</a> to trick housewives into buying dog food. The overall gist is that <em>They Live </em>isn’t just some goofy cult movie, but “kind of the Cliffs Notes for what’s going on,” as Piper puts it.</p>
<p id="vprfog">But what exactly what <em>is </em>going on? Well, who’s asking? If you don’t know, you either aren’t <em>equipped</em> to know … or else you are one of <em>they.</em> </p>
<p id="9K8rXP"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="dSWf74">I should state for the record that as a fan of <em>They Live, </em>I don’t believe that aliens walk among us, nor do I think that the movie should be regarded as Cliffs Notes explaining the oppressive power structures underpinning the so-called civilized world. <em>They Live, </em>in my view, is enjoyably stupid entertainment that I like to revisit occasionally late at night when I don’t feel like going to bed. <em>It’s just a movie, OK</em>?</p>
<p id="ebg05O">But the meta-narrative of <em>They Live, </em>about the <em>fear </em>of being controlled by some massive conspiracy only you and a select group of “awakened” radicals can see, is a different matter. That is <em>the</em> story of how many of us now see reality. While the text of <em>They Live </em>isn’t all that scary, the subtext is among the most terrifying aspects of life in the modern world.</p>
<p id="wBQN9T">My favorite observation about <em>They Live </em>comes courtesy of the 2012 documentary <em>The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology</em>,<em> </em>in which the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek explores the nature of belief through the lens of cinema. The opening sequence addresses <em>They Live, </em>which Zizek calls “definitely one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left.” </p>
<div id="3vkYfb"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TVwKjGbz60k?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="hsJund">Overconfident use of “definitely” aside, Zizek does make a profound observation about the sunglasses, which he refers to as a “critique of ideology glasses.” Often, people frame ideology as something akin to glasses that affect how we see the world. “We think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our straight view,” Zizek says. When we remove those blinders, the thinking goes, we expect to see the “real” world. </p>
<p id="1GKn2r">But in <em>They Live, </em>ideology is not imposed, Zizek postulates. Rather, Nada puts on the glasses <em>in order to see</em> how things really are, because ideology is “spontaneous relationships to our social world” and therefore indivisible from reality. The glasses, therefore, finally remove ideology from the equation.</p>
<p id="aCJHUP">In the movie’s most notorious scene, Nada tries to impose this truth on another person, brawling with Armitage for several minutes in order to force him to put on the glasses. This endless fight scene, possibly the longest in cinema history, is a metaphor for the struggle to achieve enlightenment.</p>
<p id="nFabpN">“To step out of ideology ... you must force yourself to do it,” Zizek concludes. “Freedom hurts.” </p>
<p id="IaFrqd">Zizek’s interpretation of <em>They Live </em>reminds me of Carpenter’s best and scariest film, <em>The Thing. </em>In that movie, the enemy once again is an alien who subjugates humans by secretly taking over their bodies inside of a remote scientific base in Antarctica. However, <em>The Thing </em>is about the ways we are undone by our inability to see and understand other people. The real enemy isn’t external; it’s the evil that springs from the misplaced faith we all put in our own perspectives. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="Ablbn4">With <em>They Live</em>,<em> </em>many of the film’s most devoted viewers make the mistake of looking outward for the monsters we sense but can’t always see. It’s what makes the movie, like all conspiracy theories, a comforting fantasy; whatever is ruining our lives is <em>out there, </em>somewhere, even if I’m one of the only people who realize it. But the monster is not always out there, stalking us like Michael Myers. Sometimes, it’s <em>in here</em>.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/4/17933020/they-live-john-carpenter-america-donald-trumpSteven Hyden2018-10-03T12:06:01-04:002018-10-03T12:06:01-04:00‘Black Christmas’ Was the First ‘Halloween’
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PiQyX-gsx0vISdqP0iPMWlGNte0=/400x0:2800x1800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61635051/TheRinger_Black_Xmas.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.alvarotapia.com" target="_blank">Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From ‘When a Stranger Calls’ to ‘Scream,’ every great slasher film owes a debt to Bob Clark’s 1974 groundbreaking cult classic</p> <p id="OdXrEX">It’s <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/2/17928550/horror-week">Horror Week</a>, so let’s talk about Christmas! <em>Black Christmas</em>, director Bob Clark’s 1974 film, is a slasher classic. Clark, who passed away in 2007, is a fascinating figure. Who else can credibly claim to have invented the teen sex comedy (<em>Porky’s</em>), the modern nostalgic Christmas movie (<em>A Christmas Story</em>), the graffiti action thriller (<em>Turk 182!</em>), and the modern slasher? <em>Black Christmas </em>is a pioneering genre film. If you’ve seen a slasher film, almost any slasher film, you’ve likely seen the tropes that <em>Black Christmas </em>created. Nowhere is the film’s influence more obvious than in 1978’s <em>Halloween. </em></p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/K_kon7_B2sXWF1_UHH_bnFsexUw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206685/BC_1.png">
<cite>All ‘Black Christmas’ screenshots via Warner Bros.</cite>
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/IGREU3eipD9GwfJ6zI2IwUP0q68=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206687/BC_2.png">
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DK_UQs-qLdqyDEwCihhNXkdOe9c=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206689/BC_3.png">
<figcaption>The opening scene of ‘Black Christmas’</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/s1MMmCEI46lPCCh8YjROg0RWu1Q=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206767/H_1.png">
<cite>All ‘Halloween’ screenshots via Columbia Pictures</cite>
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/54QvhDtwTWZrw0EZEsdmxARt8Zw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206769/H_2.png">
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gJvOI7PUc4zZjKd8cJnV2Jfwlrs=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206773/H_3.png">
<figcaption>The iconic opening tracking shot in ‘Halloween’</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="cPY34k"><em>Christmas </em>made three crucial contributions to the genre. It was the first horror film to use the (now extremely dated) “call is coming from inside the house” device, later made popular by <em>When a Stranger Calls </em>(1979) and repackaged for a new generation in <em>Scream </em>(1996). It was the first to introduce the concept of the identity-less killer: a character with no public-facing facade (à la Norman Bates), and no motive save for a desire to commit gruesome murder. (This, it should be noted, is also a useful way to keep a film budget down, since one doesn’t need a particularly enthralling actor to accomplish the effect.) And, most importantly, <em>Christmas </em>was the first slasher film to depict events from the killer’s first-person perspective. </p>
<p id="3txgdc">“There’s no more important genre of shot in the history of horror,” Jason Zinoman, a writer and critic for <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> and the author of <em>Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror</em>, told me. This POV shift makes the violence tactile and turns the audience into accomplices. When interrogating the killer’s actions, we ask: <em>Why are we doing this? </em>Yet this technique also deepens our emotional connection to the always female protagonist who is both the hunted and the heroine. We watch through the killer’s eyes but we empathize with the would-be victim. And thus desperately want her to prevail. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PQdL3eaSATSDCVgtzYMz9doebV0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206711/BC_4.png">
<figcaption>
<em>‘</em>Black Christmas’</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/N_bZgeqsz-CQ_243WPAEUkI8Ulc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206789/H_4.png">
<figcaption>‘Halloween’</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="D8SSNk"><em>Black Christmas </em>opens with a shot of the outside of a sorority house, festooned with Christmas decorations. There’s a party going on within, and the camera peers through the windows at the young woman inside. This is our introduction to Jess, the protagonist. Next, we’re seeing through the killer’s eyes and hearing his ragged breathing. He finds a trellis, leading up to a second-floor window. His hand reaches out and up he climbs. This closely resembles <em>Halloween</em>’s<em> </em>iconic opening tracking shot in which we, the audience, see through the eyes of 6-year-old Michael Myers as he murders his sister. </p>
<p id="DaucsO">Just how much John Carpenter’s <em>Halloween </em>borrowed from <em>Black Christmas </em>is the subject of <a href="https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3413469/halloween-basically-unofficial-black-christmas-sequel/">much debate</a> in horror circles. Carpenter was a fan of <em>Black Christmas</em>. He enlisted Clark to direct a script for a project titled “Prey.” During production for the never-released film, Carpenter asked Clark whether he intended to make a sequel to <em>Black Christmas</em>. Clark was always somewhat abashed at his work in horror and was ready to move on. “I didn’t come into the business to just do horror,” <a href="http://www.iconsoffright.com/IV_BClark.htm">he said in an interview in 2005</a>. OK, but if you were going to make one, Carpenter asked, what would you do? “I said it would be the next year and the guy would have actually been caught, escape from a mental institution, go back to the house and they would start all over again. And I would call it <em>Halloween</em>.” </p>
<p id="HcoQ0n"><em>Black Christmas </em>and <em>Halloween </em>follow the almost folkloric template laid out by <em>Psycho</em>: a deranged male murderer, motivated by past trauma, stalks a place that is like home but often isn’t (a motel, a sleepaway camp, or, in this case, a sorority house and a neighbor’s home, respectively); his victims are mostly female, though he kills their male lovers and protectors; the violence culminates in a showdown in an enclosed space between the killer and the last survivor, who either kills the monster or escapes to freedom. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wLCbLqPwWRHKqsP87wPt3lYT09Q=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206713/BC_5.png">
<figcaption>‘Black Christmas’</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/nRQaiENfAw-2zGaqASVgXzRgg8M=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206797/H_5.png">
<figcaption>‘Halloween’</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="BRgVTQ">What sets <em>Black Christmas </em>apart, and why it deserves to be mentioned with <em>Halloween </em>and the other paradigm-altering ’70s slasher, <em>Texas Chainsaw Massacre</em>, is its complex and notably adult character work and themes. Today, the film feels more powerful and more present than it did even 10 years ago. </p>
<p id="r340f1">Usually, in horror, the heroine is either virginal (like <em>Halloween</em>’s<em> </em>Laurie Strode) or a tomboy (like <em>Alien</em>’s<em> </em>Ripley). In <em>Black Christmas</em>, the protagonist Jess has a boyfriend named Peter. Early in the movie we discover that she’s pregnant with his child. She tells him that she wants to have an abortion. Peter, who is studying to be a concert pianist, is against it. “You can’t do that, you haven’t even asked me,” he says. Jess is adamant. <em>Black Christmas</em>, it should be noted, was released in the U.S. the year following the <em>Roe v. Wade </em>decision. </p>
<p id="ZaloGW">Over the course of the film, Peter becomes increasingly erratic, destroying a piano with a microphone stand, breaking into the sorority house, and engaging in several heated and vaguely threatening arguments with Jess. The police, who have tapped the phone at the sorority house, overhear one of these. They, and Jess, come to suspect that Peter just might be the murderer stalking campus. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hPEOOw-764bZPwsHPvrAc76geJI=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206731/BC_6.png">
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/BuAuEGw0fZlxBxhhkikFNymIANI=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206733/BC_7.png">
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/o5dVhzhdkJdKT6VyV1XKtwJvO0A=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206739/BC_8.png">
<figcaption>‘Black Christmas’</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="Kw3RSl">Late in the film, Jess, armed with a fireplace poker, flees to the basement. This is a well-worn convention of the genre, in which the last survivor flees to what seems like a place of refuge, but which quickly becomes a place of confinement and confrontation. The house grows quiet. Then a figure outside begins peering through the basement windows. It’s Peter. He breaks the window and comes in, searching for Jess, calling her name. When he finally finds her, she bludgeons him to death in self-defense. Of course, we soon discover that Peter wasn’t the killer. </p>
<p id="KPvIRX">What’s affecting about watching <em>Black Christmas </em>today is how effective the Peter feint is. He acts overly emotional, controlling, and selfish—dismissive of her agency. When she tells him that she’s thought through her decision to have an abortion quite carefully, he becomes petulant. He has a recital that day. “Do you know how important this afternoon is for me?” he asks. At the outset, his position seems, if not quite defensible, at least understandable. He wants to have a family, Jess does not, and he’s upset about it. When he presses her, again and again, on the issue, at one point sneaking into the sorority house, he thinks perhaps that he’s being romantic or saving Jess from making a horrible mistake. But as we’re given more access, via the first-person camera, to the murderer—who is no one and has no identity, only sputtering rage—Peter’s actions begin to seem more ominous, oppressive, and threatening. </p>
<p id="vzbrOF">The local police department is, for much of the film, dismissive of the threat posed by the obscene caller. And even when the police snap into action after the disappearance of a college student (a case they initially refuse to investigate) and the discovery of the body of a young girl, we find them wholly inept. (At times, comically so: At one point, the streetwise Barb, played by Margot Kidder, convinces an officer that the phone number for the sorority house is “fellatio.”) After they arrive to find Jess in the basement, Peter’s dead body sprawled on top of her, they take her upstairs and sedate her. What happened was obvious; no need to interview the survivor. After a while, they leave. Jess is alone in the house. </p>
<p id="jpprey">As Jess slumbers the camera pans across the hall. It pauses at Barb’s bedroom and we can see a mattress stained with blood. Then it pauses at the bedroom of Clare, the first victim. The effect, which Carpenter borrows for the end of <em>Halloween</em>, is terrifying in an elemental way. It creates an almost unbearable, primal feeling of vulnerability. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/g0zAqrtU0Lw-_vEp7bXG2PokkjQ=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206747/BC_9.png">
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yDIQAtLZELLvKSluCDUOWrDhuq4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206751/BC_10.png">
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TFiRILPE8lXT0v9RvwBMa2v2M-U=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206753/BC_11.png">
<figcaption>‘Black Christmas’</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/I1csSIeW7CcTLZb3oGK6zisauRU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206815/H_6.png">
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/c5VV4FTM3V5I3U_akTYQX5xp5z4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206819/H_7.png">
</figure>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/VT-kqRDP36MszuJULKi7Rp6Ctos=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13206823/H_8.png">
<figcaption>‘Halloween’</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="8zEQCa">William Friedkin, the director of <em>The Exorcist</em>, once observed that the audience’s engagement with a horror movie begins when they’re standing in line. “Fear is generally something that is behind you,” he says in an interview in the book <em>Dark Dreams: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film. </em>“It’s generally something behind you that you cannot see but that you can feel, like a loud sound or someone touching you suddenly. Or it’s something behind the door that’s about to be opened.” The fear generated by a slasher film is powerful because it inhabits everyday spaces which should feel safe.</p>
<p id="5sgfyQ"><em>Black Christmas </em>is often left out when discussing iconic slasher films. Carol J. Clover, in her landmark treatise on gender in horror movies <em>Men, Women, and Chainsaws</em>, does not mention the movie. Charles Derry’s <em>Dark Dreams</em> skips it as well. The film has fans among horror nerds, but it has largely been overlooked. “I tend to think that the reason <em>Black Christmas </em>gets less attention is because it’s a Canadian film,” the critic Zinoman said. “There’s less of a scene over there and it was easier for horror movies to get lost back then. If <em>Black Christmas </em>was made by a USC student and released here, history might have been different.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="qkCg3r">History is what it is, unfortunately. A <em>Black Christmas </em>remake was released in 2006. This version delved into the backstory of the killer—a quite effective decision, if the intention was to make the film less scary. The original, however, remains a classic, ready to step out of the shadow of its more famous fellow slashers. Just in time for the holiday season.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/3/17932802/black-christmas-horror-film-halloween-screamJason Concepcion2018-10-03T06:10:02-04:002018-10-03T06:10:02-04:00Who Is the Best Horror Movie Monster or Villain?
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/f7TLdKiUiIRUMzK1PQXsHPkcldo=/167x0:2834x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61630379/staff_villain_NO_BUG.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Ringer illustration</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From the blank face of Michael Myers to the sheer nothingness of the “it” in ‘It Follows,’ Ringer staffers bravely make the case for horror’s most haunting perpetrators of fear</p> <p id="aJg1fD"><em>It wouldn’t be </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/2/17928550/horror-week"><em>Horror Week</em></a><em> without honoring the movie monsters and villains who have haunted our dreams for decades. Below, </em>Ringer <em>staffers make their case for who is the best horror movie monster. How brave of them.</em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="WUBpeD">
<h3 id="Fn5NgK">The Overlook Hotel, <em>The Shining</em>
</h3>
<p id="ZkqXHr"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/kate-knibbs"><strong>Kate Knibbs</strong></a><strong>: </strong>There have been flashier, more obvious monsters than <em>The Shining</em>’s Overlook Hotel. Pennywise looks like an evil clown and prances around murdering children, those giant ear spiders from <em>A Quiet Place</em> make me want to hide in a closet, and the Babadook is the most fabulous and menacing thing I’ve ever looked at with my own eyes. The Overlook Hotel, by comparison, is a classy, roomy establishment enhanced by the natural beauty of the mountains. It provides only glimpses of the sinister—a few dead twins here, a little elevator full of blood there—until it’s too late. And it makes you or your loved one insane, and then you or your loved one starts murdering everybody. There have been lots of chilling portrayals of evil in film, but the thing that makes the Overlook Hotel so scary is that it’s the home for evil, the place where it bubbles up and renews itself. (The town of Derry in Stephen King’s <em>It</em> also fits this bill, but I think the dramatic, secluded setting of the Overlook pushes it ahead in terms of awesome fearfulness.) You can run away from a person, but it’s much harder to escape an isolated location, and so the Overlook is the type of place that just keeps consuming souls and then waiting for the next to arrive. The scariest villains aren’t the kind who chase. They’re the kind who wait.</p>
<h3 id="8o4EG7">Samara, <em>The Ring</em>
</h3>
<p id="iXHIjU"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/claire-mcnear"><strong>Claire McNear</strong></a><strong>: </strong>Samara’s claims to the all-time terror throne are thus. (1) She’s a child, the creepiest kind of person. (2) She’s basically unstoppable; her weapon of choice is, essentially, fear, and no amount of sunlight or kitchen knives or Manly Men About the House (the usual horror defenses) will stop that. (3) Most importantly, <em>She tells you exactly what she’s going to do.</em> Seven days, suckers! Now it’s six! In five days, you will be deader than dead! Et cetera. Much like a vacation, the most meaningful part of grisly death is the anticipation. (Also, baddies that are so scary that their mere striding—OK, crawling—into a room gets the job done are in a league of their own.)</p>
<div id="Yc3hRs"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WA3B-AZFJIU?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no"></iframe></div></div>
<h3 id="FCfHmF">The Babadook, <em>The Babadook</em>
</h3>
<p id="sC9U3r"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/alison-herman"><strong>Alison Herman</strong></a><strong>: </strong>OK, sure, the “twist” of the Babadook is that the monster isn’t so much the Babadook as the taboo anger and resentment directed by a widowed single mother against her own child. But in the hour or so that <em>precedes </em>that psychological reveal, first-time director Jennifer Kent made a fictional Australian pop-up book character who dressed like <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/diane-keaton-babadook-comparison.html">Diane Keaton</a> into the stuff of our collective nightmares. Now, we accept the domesticated spirit as the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-babadook-is-a-frightening-fabulous-new-gay-icon">queer icon</a> it truly is; then, that rattling BA-BA-DOOOOOOOOOK had me cowering in the far corners of my bedroom in broad daylight. Maybe it’s because the monster is basically a greatest-hits collection of iconic bogeymen: children’s entertainment, check. Cursed objects, check. Weird grabby fingers like the guy from <em>Pan’s Labyrinth, </em>check. Recency bias be damned; Kent took notes from the best.</p>
<h3 id="WXJ2xd">The Alien, <em>Alien</em>
</h3>
<p id="o7kcLX"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/ben-lindbergh"><strong>Ben Lindbergh</strong></a><strong>: </strong>I’m immune to most horror movie villains because I <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/6/11/17450110/hereditary-wikipedia-horror-movie-review">refuse to see</a> most horror movies. I <em>will</em> watch almost anything that says “sci-fi,” though, so in spite of my wishes I was exposed to the most horrific creature of all: the insectile Alien from <em>Alien</em>, known as “Xenomorph XX121” to its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9YlatOiGnU">friends</a>. Just kidding: It doesn’t have friends. It has only hosts and victims.</p>
<p id="uMSc07"> The Alien is as unempathetic as Leatherface and can kill the crew of a spaceship in the time it takes Hannibal Lecter to finish sipping his Chianti. The <a href="http://www.factfiend.com/alien-alien-doesnt-eyes/">phallic, eyeless</a> H.R. Giger creation has three life phases, each as disturbing and deadly as the last: the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHSf7MXTlKM">facehugger</a>, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPA1blhzj2c">chest-burster</a>, and the nigh-unkillable <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YTIMGmZUr4">full-grown form</a>, which even when wounded sprays acidic blood as a final fuck-you. Many movie monsters are scarier off screen than they are in close-up, but the Alien is equally terrifying as an unseen stalker and an immediate, in-your-face (literally) adversary. The Alien is an ultra-adaptive triumph of evolution, which may make it more unnerving than any supernatural being whose existence seems far-fetched as long as the lights are on. Natural selection is the most formidable monster of all, and it’s not just movie magic.</p>
<h3 id="LRevRB">Hannibal Lecter, <em>The</em> <em>Silence of the Lambs</em>
</h3>
<p id="AWWyCP"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/megan-schuster"><strong>Megan Schuster</strong></a><strong>: </strong>Creepy, cobbled-together monsters like the creature from <em>Frankenstein</em>, the Babadook, and Michael Myers are frightening. So, too, are supernatural beings, elements of religious possession, and any lifeform that originates in outer space. But what makes a horror movie antagonist truly terrifying—and therefore truly great—is its proximity to our society and everyday lives. That’s why Hannibal Lecter from <em>The Silence of the Lambs</em> is the best horror movie villain.</p>
<p id="FDoJl4">Hannibal Lecter is villainous on so many levels. There’s the first, most obvious one: He’s a cannibal. The second is his psychological makeup; he’s always calmly collected, and wickedly smart, but he possesses no conscience or sense of empathy. He manipulates the people around him for sport and has no regard for the damage he causes. Finally, and perhaps most terrifyingly, he’s realistic. He’s not some strange alien from another planet that you can distance yourself from after the movie ends, or a phantom entity that you can dismiss as fiction. He seems as if he could really be out there somewhere, working as a forensic psychiatrist and lying in wait. That is the most haunting villainy of all.</p>
<h3 id="6UsBLf">The It, <em>It Follows</em>
</h3>
<p id="ERhpdZ"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/andrew-gruttadaro"><strong>Andrew Gruttadaro</strong></a><strong>: </strong>All of the horror movie monsters mentioned by my colleagues are perfectly adequate choices, but here’s why they’re all wrong: Those monsters are all <em>knowable</em>. They all have distinguishable characteristics, names, motivations. On the other hand, the “it” that stalks Jay (Maika Monroe) in <em>It Follows </em>has none of these things. We do not know what it looks like, only that it takes the form of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRGZbILssWo">bone-chilling elderly women</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnrT_zyumAM">extremely terrifying giants</a>. We do not know where it came from. We do not know what it wants. We do not know if it can ever truly be stopped. All we know is that if you have sex with the wrong person, it will follow you until it has erased you.</p>
<p id="zP2MOf">The simplicity of this villain, the sheer nothingness that typifies it, is what makes it the only horror movie monster that keeps me awake. </p>
<h3 id="DzGq7P">The Devil, Many Films</h3>
<p id="ZYEk85"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/michael-baumann"><strong>Michael Baumann</strong></a><strong>: </strong>Seldom do we see the devil in a horror movie, though there are exceptions (call me, Gabriel Byrne in <em>End of Days</em>).<em> </em>But fear isn’t about what you can see. As frightful as a vicious monster or an inbred giant with a chainsaw can be, those are corporeal fiends that can be identified and conquered. “The great Satan hisself is red and scaly with a bifurcated tail, and he carries a hayfork,” says George Clooney’s Everett in <em>O Brother, Where Art Thou? </em>and sometimes he’s right about that. But the devil can change shape at will, and his near-omnipotence is far scarier than any slasher’s meat cleaver.</p>
<p id="2wVRpK">But more than anything else, Satan is the most common horror movie villain that tens of millions of Americans, if not hundreds of millions, believe with their whole hearts to be real. A friend of mine, who was raised a devout Catholic, just up and walked out of <em>The Exorcism of Emily Rose</em> because he couldn’t handle it. It’s one thing to scream and chuck your popcorn in the air when Leatherface pops out from behind a corner, but you don’t go home and worry about Leatherface coming after you in real life. Not so with the devil, whose presence permeates every corner of society. Nothing is scarier than that.</p>
<h3 id="2Gg323">The Thing, <em>The Thing</em>
</h3>
<p id="JyIiCs"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/miles-surrey"><strong>Miles Surrey</strong></a><strong>: </strong>Some of the scariest movie monsters ever have been shape-shifters. The creature of <em>It</em> manifests itself as one of your primal fears (often a clown, because of course); the “it” of <em>It Follows</em> perpetually pursues its victim at a terrifying, glacial pace. But while these monsters take several forms, they’re easy to distinguish from regular humans. That’s why the alien creature of <em>The Thing</em> is so terrifying; it’s all about near-immaculate immersion. </p>
<p id="EMRej3">John Carpenter’s ’80s classic has a simple premise: A shape-shifting alien has infiltrated a research group in Antarctica and can take the form of anyone. That it can embody someone so effortlessly is the stuff of nightmares; imagine if you suddenly couldn’t trust the coworker you’d known for months because they might devour you. Imagine if<em> their chest cavity became a giant mouth on an operating table</em>. </p>
<div id="nUUdXG"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JjIXwkX1e48?rel=0&start=" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="5koKcQ"><em>The Thing</em> ends with two surviving characters stranded, while the identity of the creature, if it’s still alive, is left ambiguous. Whether the thing is one of the survivors—and <em>which one</em>—has been <a href="https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-thing-at-35-cast-and-crew-clarify-that-famously-ambiguous-ending">debated for decades</a>. That there isn’t a definitive answer is terrifying in and of itself. </p>
<h3 id="B1Y9EQ">Michael Myers, <em>Halloween</em>
</h3>
<p id="ln3T58"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/shea-serrano"><strong>Shea Serrano</strong></a><strong>: </strong>This is simple: Michael Myers is a scary movie monster for a lot of reasons. His mask is scary. His weapon of choice of scary. The fact he never talks is scary. His size is scary. His determination is scary. I can go on and and on and on. But the reason Michael Myers is THE SCARIEST movie monster is because he’s the most plausible. </p>
<p id="00MDi7">Everybody else—and when I say “everybody else” I’m referring to the upper echelon of movie monsters that always get brought up whenever these types of conversations happen—had an origin story that required you to believe in, for lack of a better term, “magic” of some sort. Jason Voorhees, for example, was the adult demon version of a kid who drowned in a lake and came back to kill camp counselors. Freddy Krueger was a living nightmare who hunted the children of the people who tossed him into a furnace. Pennywise was the manifestation of fear. So on and so forth and such and such. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="iaNMee">Michael Myers wasn’t any of that. He was just a guy who really, really, really wanted to stab a person in their chest or head or back or whatever. You didn’t have to believe in anything beyond evil for him to be effective. Evil is obviously real. Which means that Michael is obviously real. </p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/3/17929898/best-horror-movie-monster-villainThe Ringer Staff2018-10-02T10:33:40-04:002018-10-02T10:33:40-04:00Director’s Commentary: Arian Foster and Martellus Bennett Critique Horror Films
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/mLnLdYDcXPoOv0RbiamMxR4n9ts=/70x0:747x508/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61619367/horror_directors_commentary_thumb2.0.jpg" />
</figure>
<p>The former All-Pro running back and Super Bowl champ take a look at some horror classics</p> <p id="QlrVTZ">Former All-Pro running back Arian Foster and Super Bowl champion Martellus Bennett turn horror into comedy as they sit through famous scenes from <em>A Nightmare on Elm Street</em>, <em>Alien</em>, and <em>The Exorcist</em>.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/video/2018/10/2/17927930/directors-commentary-arian-foster-and-martellus-bennett-critique-horror-filmsThe Ringer Staff