A touch of evil

Getting spooked never really goes away with age. In a sense, it’s essential that one always find something to scare him or her, given that a fearless life is not only dull but probably the greatest horror of them all. (Called “sinister” by Isaiah Berlin, British author Graham Greene was described by the philosopher’s friend John Gray as one who “turned to the dark side of life as an escape, toying with the idea of evil as an antidote to depression and boredom… He used the idea of evil as a stimulant, and he was able to do so because he did not believe in it.”)

The point is, it’s not only human to be frightened but it certainly becomes profound when the source of that terror is inexplicable, unexplained. Even in this supposedly secular age, even the most determined and rational seeming minds still titillate themselves silly with the prospect of evil — for atheist thinkers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, religion plays the part of the bogeyman these days — or feign shock at how irrational everyone else is. If anything, it’s a healthy exercise for one’s imagination to find how tenuous our realities are.

In the cinema, there’s always something to recommend for the enthusiast on Halloween. Knowing what scares you onscreen — or in any medium for that matter — is really even more idiosyncratic and an individual preference than any other genre or mode of entertainment. (Generally everyone still laughs at fart jokes just as boy-meets-girl is still the best way to make even the men swoon. A cursory trawl through the Internet shows that even the most deviant pornography is still very much Victorian but for the bad lighting.) For the truly imaginative, there are always new horrors to be found.

Funny Games (U.S.)

(Director: Michael Haneke)

A shot-for-shot remake of the original by the same writer-director. Unlike Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, though, this retains much of its gristle. On paper, it adheres to the “home invasion” type of movie, a nasty sub-genre that emerged from ‘80s slasher flicks and the videocassette boom of “snuff” footage (i.e., a nice family is terrorized in their own home by unknown persons). Starring Tim Roth, Michael Pitt and Naomi Watts (who also acts as the film’s executive producer), it is similar to the Liv Tyler starrer The Strangers but is even more disquieting for not playing it straight. Unlike the former, it is decidedly meta-fictional — knowingly acknowledging that it is fiction made by the director for an audience — and is especially damning in its implication than most. Haneke makes this known early on: as the family ride in their car playing a game guessing classical composers and pieces played on their stereo, he violates the scene by plastering the title of the film in bold, red letters across their faces as John Zorn’s Naked City abruptly cuts in. Let the games begin.

Cruising

(Director: William Friedkin)

To describe the film as seedy would be apt but wanting. Al Pacino stars as cop Steve Burns who goes undercover into New York’s “heavy leather” scene to find a serial killer who brutally knifes his victims. He fits the killer’s “type”: Italian-American stag, reminiscent of John Travolta’s disco lothario Tony Manero. Filmed at actual gay clubs with regulars as extras, it presents a pre-AIDS subculture, thriving in its utter perversion of male machismo. The sex is ritualistic and flagrant, with details such as the color-coded handkerchiefs to indicate if you are into water sports, for example. During one scene, Pacino’s character is asked to leave by men in police costumes because it’s “Precinct Night.” Condemned by the gay community and the critics at the time of its release, it remains unassailable as a claustrophobic, bleak vision of virulent sexuality that manages to remain ambiguous and unapologetic in its grime.

Hour of the Wolf

(Director: Ingmar Bergman)

Although many cineastes would balk at the Swedish auteur being cited as a maker of horror movies, one need only point out that Bergman’s themes and imagery as presented in films such as Seventh Seal or the justly-praised dream sequence at the start of Wild Strawberries did display an affinity for the genre. (In fact, his best films like Persona, Through A Glass Darkly and Cries and Whispers were always better for the appropriations.) But it’s this film that stands out as his most obvious excursion into horror. Inspired by the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, its protagonists are a painter and his wife, living on an isolated island. He also happens to be going mad. (Admittedly that isn’t exactly a stretch for Bergman.) Suffering from delusions and psychotic episodes — which writer/scholar Kim Newman says “draw on transvestite, masochistic, homosexual, gerontophile and necrophile themes” — it starts to invade the couple’s everyday existence. Made after the success of Persona, it was greeted with dismissal by Bergman’s admirers. However, the director himself described it as “terribly personal” and a demonstration of the “sore of his soul.” (Incidentally, both films were drawn from the same manuscript that the filmmaker composed while suffering a nervous breakdown.) Although not as highly esteemed — but thankfully not as overtly scrutinized — it hasn’t dated and retains its mystery, holding us at arm’s length to observe its madness.

Séance

(Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Adapted from Mark McShane’s 1961 novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon, Kurosawa’s was not interested in making a mystery movie or raising questions about the protagonist’s capabilities as a medium. In the original source, this is left vague; in the film (made for television) it’s considered legitimate from the start. At its heart, both are stories about struggling marriage. (“There just happens to be a dead girl involved,” notes Jerry White in his book about the Japanese filmmaker.) The wife, Junko, wants to prove that her psychic abilities are real. She sees the perfect opportunity when a kidnapped girl somehow insinuates herself into the trunk of her husband Sato’s car. Just then a detective arrives just as the missing girl wakes up. Trying to keep her silent, he accidentally smothers her. Now the haunting begins. Much like his namesake (but not blood relation) Kurosawa uses the source material as a template but grafts it seamlessly into the corpus of his own work. It’s also in the differences from the novel that distinguishes his perspective as unique from his Western counterparts. “Ghosts are very passive… daily life can continue more or less normally even in their presence… It’s the horrifying, awfully close presence of death.” In Séance, he makes a film that is aware of human frailty and its constant presence even in the most extraordinary of circumstances, casting a dark shadow of apprehension similar to Highsmith’s Ripley but as starkly immutable as those cast in the walls in Hiroshima.