Five Horror Films That Will Leave You Gleeful

[As we count down to Halloween, Overthinking It presents you with a guide to some of the best in horror, compiled by our resident master, Stokes. –Ed.]

At first we were just going to do a top ten list… but after three rough drafts, I got tired of comparing apples and oranges.  Is Murnau’s atmospheric classic Nosferatu a better horror film than Hiltzik sublimely, uh, campy Sleepaway Camp?  Well obviously it is (by most rational standards of goodness)… but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to slap it in the DVD player at my Halloween party.  So instead of one top ten list, we’re bringing you four top fives, beginning with the horror comedy.

A couple of notes on the selection process:  I didn’t bother putting Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness on the list, because I couldn’t figure out anything to write about them.  Suffice it to say that if you haven’t seen them already, you should do yourself a favor and add them to your netflix cue.  I also disqualified all movies that are unintentionally funny, like the infamous Plan Nine From Outer Space.  In my experience, these movies might make you laugh, but they don’t make you happy.  That much failure crammed into 90 minutes is never anything but depressing. Now on to the winners!

5) The Stepfather

Some people will tell you that all horror movies from about 1970 on have been all about demented father figures trying to exert control over their surrogate families.  The Stepfather seems to have been made by these people.  That means that instead of Michael Meyers (representing the parents, or at least the patriarchy) chasing down and punishing a bunch of horny teenagers (representing his “children”), we get an actual father figure menacing his actual (step)child.  The titular Stepfather is a man with some simple needs and desires.  All he wants is the perfect suburban life:  a house, a wife, a job, and some adorable little kids.  If something gets in the way of his dream, he reacts… badly.  And the problem with adorable little kids is that before you know it, they’re bratty little teenagers, running around at all hours of the night, accusing you of murder, and kissing boys. Something will have to be done.  We need a little order around here, dammit!

The plot alone would push the movie’s symbolism waaay over the top.  Obviously this is a coming of age tale about a child growing away from her controlling father, only now the father is a stepfather (to make it psychologically acceptable to the mass audience), and he has a knife (to make it awesome).   But the movie doesn’t stop there.  No, this movie needs to highlight the girl’s journey to young adulthood by dressing her like a toddler in the earliest scenes and gradually skankifying her outfit throughout the film until in the final confrontation she winds up entirely nude.  This movie needs to have the villain put a tiny replica of his suburban dream mansion on a twenty foot pole in his front yard:  it’s ostensibly a birdhouse, but it’s actually a convenient way for the filmmakers to shout “THIS CHARACTER REINFORCES THE MALE-CENTRIC MALE-OCRACY!”  In short, this film wants to have its symbolism and eat it too.  It’s hilarious fun.

Random Trivia:  I’m sure that Terry O’Quinn (aka Locke from Lost) isn’t exactly burning up the server space over at the celebrity nudity database.  Nevertheless, I’m sure there are a couple of people who will be excited to know that he totally shows his penis in the first, like, sixty seconds of this movie.

4) Sleepaway Camp

I reccomend this film with a caveat:  you kind of need to already be a horror fan to really get a lot out of Sleepaway Camp.  To the uninitiated, it will just seem like the most cliched horror film in existence.  It hits all the familiar notes:  kids at a summer camp, unresolved childhood traumas, elaborately orchestrated death sequences… you know the drill.  But NO other horror film is THIS cliched.  Compared to our mental image of what slasher films are like, Sleepaway Camp just seems like another example of the genre.  Compared to actual slasher films, it comes off as an incredibly sly parody.  I refuse to believe that this was accidental.  Everything’s just a little too… off.  First of all, I know it was the 80s, but did camp counselors really dress like this?

And the murder set-pieces are outlandish.  One guy dies when the killer tossing a beehive into the outhouse he’s using.  It’s Saw as directed by the Three Stooges.  By the way:  DO NOT read any other reviews of Sleepaway Camp – or even its Wikipedia page – before you see it.  Unlike %90 of horror movies, this one has secrets that are worth keeping secret.  I don’t mean the fact that Angela – the spooky little girl with the tragic past – is the killer.  OBVIOUSLY she’s the killer.  I’m talking about the… look, just see it, okay?

Random trivia:  Sleepaway Camp spawned two sequels, neither of which involved the original writer/director/producer Robert Hiltzik.  Hiltzik shot a sequel of his own in 2003, which will finally be released sometime next month after FIVE DANG YEARS of tuning the special effects.  Which means that Return to Sleepaway Camp is either going to totally suck, or it will be the greatest film of the 21st century.

3) Mr. Vampire

If you ever watched Ghostbusters and found yourself thinking, “this movie is pretty good, but it needs more flying kicks to the head,” I may have just what you’re looking for.  It’s Mr. Vampire, a 1985 Hong Kong classic that pits a unibrowed Daoist priest against a menagerie of old school Chinese undead nasties.

The titular “vampire” is actually a Chinese hopping ghost, which means that instead of biting you, he stabs you with rigidly extended fingernails.  It also means that garlic, stakes, and crosses are out; sticky rice, scraps of paper with prayers written on them, and the aforementioned jump-kicks are in.  And yes, they do hop:  according to folklore, rigor mortis prevents them  from walking normally, so they have to jump around like frogs.

Typically for Hong Kong cinema, Mr. Vampire seems almost charmingly overstuffed to western sensibilities.  One subplot involves one of the unibrowed excorcist’s assistants getting bit (well, finger-jabbed) by the vampire, and then trying to stave off his transformation by grinding his fangs down with a file.  (Yes, he grows fangs, even though these vampires never bite anyone.  Don’t ask me why.)  Another involves a ghostly hooker with a heart of gold, who has a great pratfall early in the film where she gets knocked off a bicycle by a tree branch, while a children’s chorus on the soundtrack sings (according to the subtitles) “The lady ghost looks for a lover/ who would accept so shady a bride?”

In addition to being a laugh riot, Mr. Vampire is actually pretty damn creepy.  Most of the ghosts can’t see, instead detecting their prey by smelling their breath.  Naturally, this leads to a lot of unspeakably tense scenes where the heroes have to hold their breath until the monsters have left the area.  If you don’t catch yourself holding your breath along with them, you are beyond help.  Also, while the low level cannon-fodder hopping ghosts play up the ridiculous aspect of the folklore (i.e. the hopping), the Big Bad is somehow really menacing.  It’s all available on youtube, but this is really a movie to rent so that you can giggle over it with your friends.  Make sure no one gets *too* drunk, though:  the mangled subtitles leave it more confusing than your average fare, and nothing kills the mood faster than having to catch someone up on the plot every five minutes.

Random trivia:  The original Cantonese title translates more accurately to “Mr. Stiff Corpse.”  This kind of thing happens a lot with Hong Kong movies… did you know that Hard Boiled is actually called “Spicy-Handed God of Cops?”

2) Lair of the White Worm

I wrote a full review of Ken Russell’s looneytunes art-horror project here, so I won’t spend too much time on it today.  Still, it’s a must see, if not for the strange arty visuals, for the psychosexual weirdness; if not for the psychosexual weirdness, for the young Hugh Grant; if not for Hugh Grant, for the scene where a bagpipe-playing archaeologist in full highland garb tries to kill a vampire with a mongoose.  Yes, that really happens.  See it! See it!

1) Shaun of The Dead

Ah, Shaun.  (Or I suppose I should say, “Shaaaaaaauuuuun!”)  The reigning king of the horror-comedy genre.  What’s nice about the Wright/Pegg/Frost deconstruction of George Romero’s Dawn of The Dead is that their palpable affection for the conventions of the genre is matched by an equally strong affection for their characters.  And you *really* need that human touch in this movie.  Zombie apocalypses are pretty grim to begin with, and when you add the brilliant but chilly formalism of the movie’s structure into the mix, it could have been a punishing slog.  But it’s defused by the easy chemistry between the lead actors, and the writing team’s determination to make even the least likable of their creations (that’d be David) recognizably human.

About that formalism:  watch it again and notice how much of the second half of the movie calls back to the first half.  Of course there’s that famous pair of shots of Shaun wandering out to buy the morning paper before and after Z-day, too hung-over and self absorbed to notice that society has collapsed overnight.  But also note how in an early scene, when Nick Frost is arguing with his roomate, Peter Serafinowicz, Serafinowicz tells him “Why don’t you just go live in the shed?!”  Kind of a weird thing to say, right?  Unless you know how the movie ends.  There are loads of these little details scattered throughout the film.  Many relate to the timeline thing, but there are also random gags like Pegg trying to get reservations at a restaurant that’s literally called “The Place that Does All The Fish,” and Frost shouting “We’re coming to get you, Barbara!” to Pegg’s mother.  It makes it a film that rewards repeat viewings.  Preferably drunk, and with friends (also drunk).

Coming up next:  Horror movies that emphatically do not reward repeat viewings.