Ten Days of Terror!: The Innocents

Film: The Innocents
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

As with any genre, there are various grades and styles of horror films. Many of them go for the straight gross out; they’re horror movies because they present something disgusting or horrible to see. In general, these are the horror movies that interest me the least. I don’t mind gore when it’s warranted, but disgusting things for the sake of showing people disgusting things doesn’t interest me. Others go for the scare, getting the audience to jump at shadows and maybe spend a night or two sleeping with the lights on. And then there are those that go for something deeper, something that makes us question our reality, to not jump at shadows, but to consider those shadows and what they might contain carefully. The Innocents is this sort of film.

The goal of a film like The Innocents isn’t to make us sleep with the light on, but to occupy our thoughts at odd moments. It’s not to make us too scared to close our eyes, but to force our eyes open with thoughts that come unbidden and unwanted. The Innocents, and I include films like The Haunting and The Others in this same category, aim for that existential horror that keeps us staring at the ceiling. It doesn’t go for the gross out or the boo, but seeks to dig deep into our psyches, to question the reality that we experience.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Serpent and the Rainbow

Film: The Serpent and the Rainbow
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

Before I get into The Serpent and the Rainbow, I need to put on my pedantic shoes for a minute and clear up some terminology. Those things that we call zombies—risen from the grave, shambling, craving human flesh—are technically not zombies. I mean, I call them that, too, but if we’re going to be precise, those are ghouls. A zombie, in the strictest term, is a reanimated corpse, or something like it, created through the power of Vodou. When we call The Serpent and the Rainbow a zombie film, we’re talking about the more traditional style here: blowfish powder, chanting, people being ridden by a loa.

Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman) is a modern-day Indiana Jones, exploring the forgotten and forsaken parts of the world in search of various plants that may have medical properties that can be used by major pharmaceutical companies in developing new medicines. Early on, he is given a head trip by a shaman that, through the course of events, causes him to wander on his own through the Amazon rain forest back to civilization. After this adventure, he is contacted by a pharmaceutical executive who wants him to go to Haiti. There is some evidence, not incredibly convincing, mind you, that a man named Christophe (Conrad Roberts) died and was buried, but has recently been seen walking about. In short, Christophe is a zombie. The company has hopes that whatever caused him to be in this state may have use as an anesthetic. So off Dennis goes to Haiti.

Ten Days of Terror!: Inferno

Film: Inferno
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

Dario Argento’s Suspiria is not only thought of as the quintessential Italian horror film, it’s also surprisingly divisive. There are those (like me), who see it as one of the great visions of its decade within the genre and those who, not without reason, find it kind of silly. Inferno, Argento’s film from 1980, builds on much of the world created in Suspiria, and at the very least is its visual sister. In a real sense, Inferno is the middle film of a trilogy starting with Suspiria and concluding with The Mother of Tears, which Argento made within the last decade.

Sad to say, this is also lesser than Suspiria for a number of reasons. Primary in this is that the plot is a lot more opaque than in the first film. Here, we appear to be introduced to people specifically so that Argento can have them killed off, admittedly in inventive ways some of the time. Still, there are multiple characters who exist here just long enough for us to get a name before someone stabs them or does something else nasty to them. More or less, Inferno is an excuse for Argento to kill off a bunch of people in a variety of inventive ways and to show us some gore without worrying too much about such niceties as a story that makes a lot of sense.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Howling

Film: The Howling
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I like to think that at least on paper, werewolf movies have a lot of potential. I mean, you’ve got something that’s human but also not, it’s bestial and terrifying, it can kill horribly, and it has the power to infect the innocent with its evil. The problem is that most werewolf movies don’t really do much for me even though I really want to like them. The Howling, as it happens, is pretty well thought of in horror circles, even though it’s the second-best werewolf movie of 1981 (An American Werewolf in London came out the same year). And while there’s a lot going for The Howling, there are also some real problems with it that are two halves of the same coin. First, it looks its age (while American/London does not). Second, even if it didn’t, the effects don’t measure up to its werewolf cohort film.

We start with Karen White (Dee Wallace) is a television anchor who has been stalked by a creeper who authorities and the resident psychologist Dr. George Waggner (Patrick Macnee) believe to be connected to a recent rash of killings. In an attempted sting, she agrees to meet the stalker in an adult bookstore, but technical difficulties cause problems with her transmitter and she loses the police detail. Long story short, the cops show up just as she’s about to be ravaged and the perp, who turns out to be named Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo), is gunned down.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Act of Killing

Film: The Act of Killing
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

The Act of Killing is not what would typically be thought of as a horror film because there is nothing supernatural on hand for us. Hell, it’s not even fiction. Because of this, because the horrors that we are seeing, while simulated and not truly real, are all the more terrible because these are reconstructions of what really happened. The idea of the film—mass killings and executions not from the perspective of the villains but from those who committed the acts of atrocity is unique in my experience, although there are certainly moments of this in a film like Shoah. This is a more than sobering experience. This is a true show of horror and terror, one that I think it is impossible to watch without being deeply affected and without walking away with a strong feeling of revulsion.

I’m going to do my best not to wax to philosophic when discussing this film, but that might be completely impossible. The Act of Killing is evidence that nothing we can create in fiction as a species, no horror we can concoct can match that which we are capable of in reality. “Man’s inhumanity to Man” doesn’t begin to cover it. And see, there I go waxing philosophic in the very paragraph where I said I would try not to. That these dangers are still real and these events still happen is evidenced by the number of people who worked on this film credited as “Anonymous,” afraid of reprisals even now, fifty years after the events depicted.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Omen

Film: The Omen
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

There’s a reason I avoided watching The Omen for as long as I have. It has nothing to do with being scared of it; after all, I don’t believe in a Satan or an Antichrist. No, the reason is that The Omen appears in “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time,” and I’ve learned to respect the opinions in that book. Of the films I’ve seen from it, apathy is the best of managed. I’ve outright hated a few of them. This didn’t bode well for The Omen. I’m not the sort of person who revels in bad film unless those films are being narrated by Joel/Mike and the bots.

This time, Harry Medved and Randy Lowell have let me and the rest of us down; The Omen does not belong in their book. This is a very solid thriller that is smart enough to merely hint at the supernatural despite its subject matter. That subject matter, as hinted at in the previous paragraph, is the birth of the Antichrist. So while there are obvious religious implications here, the film very much plays things straight. There are certainly aspects of the supernatural in evidence, but for the wholly skeptical (at least within the film), everything that happens can be written off as coincidence.

Ten Days of Terror!: Maniac Cop 2

Film: Maniac Cop 2
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on various players.

Robert Z’Dar has a lot of face. I don’t state this as a problem, but merely a fact to be taken in. Seriously—go Google the man’s name and look at the images page. It’s like someone made a face out of clay and then stretched it in all dimensions before kilning it. He looks sort of like Eric Stoltz in Mask after Clearasil and his IMDB trademark is, in part, “enormous face.” I say this only because when you have a face roughly the size of a frozen turkey, you don’t tend to end up with the girl at the end of the film. You end up with a career in B-movies, and often as the monster. So it’s no surprise that with the film Maniac Cop 2, Robert Z’Dar is the title villain.

The film picks up where the first film left off, presumably; I haven’t seen the first film, so I don’t know much about its plot or what happens in it. But we see what looks like the closing scenes of the first film here. It ends with our maniac cop, Matt Cordell (Z’Dar) being forced off a pier in a burning car by two other cops, presumably drowning. I can’t be sure, but what I gather from this film is that Cordell was once a good cop who was set up to take a fall for his superiors, then killed in prison, then came back as a sort of revenant who started killing indiscriminately to take revenge on the men who framed him.