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Fer
Chrissakes, this is the fifth time I’ve used the word
“horror” in the title of one of my articles! What
is it with this morbid obsession? I better listen
to Mommy and get back on my anti-psychotic meds...
All
kidding aside, Dileep’s spirited and intelligent response
to my critical drubbing of The Shining is certainly
a rebut I would expect from one of the film’s innumerable
devotees. What the fans of the Kubrick film might fail
to realize, though, is that many prestigious critics
of the time hated the film. Here’s a sampling:
“Intriguing
but ineffectual adaptation of Stephen King’s thriller....Nicholson
goes off the wall so quickly, there’s no time to get
involved in his plight. Some eerie scenes, to
be sure, but the film goes on forever.” -- Leonard
Maltin, Movie & Video Guide
“Given
the intense audience interest in The Shining, prior
to its opening, this may be Warner Bros. biggest box
office disappointment since Exorcist II. With
everything to work with, director Stanley Kubrick has
teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that
was so terrifying about Stephen King’s bestseller.
The
truly amazing question is why a director of Kubrick’s
stature would spend his time and effort on a novel he
changes so much it’s barely recognizable, taking away
whatever originality it possessed while emphasizing
its banality....Compared to the exciting if somewhat
corny conclusion to King’s novel...Kubrick might as
well have finished with a blank film. In fact,
he almost did.”
-- “Har”, Variety
Many
film buffs agree that the late New Yorker film
critic Pauline Kael was probably the greatest film critic
that ever lived. A sampling of her review of The
Shining:
“Probably
most of us go to a gothic eager to be manipulated by
someone with finesse. But we don’t know how to
read Kubrick’s signals; it may be that he simply doesn’t
know us well enough anymore to manipulate us successfully.
Again and again, the movie leads us to expect something--almost
promses it--and then disappoints us.
What’s
increasingly missing from Kubrick’s work is the spontaneity,
the instinct, the lightness that would make us respond
intuitively. We’re starved for pleasure at this
movie...(Kubrick) was locked up with this project for
more than three years, and if ever there was a movie
that expressed cabin fever, this is it.”
Digressing
back to Dileep’s article, while myself and other detractors
of The Shining would disagree with many of
his kudos for the film, he does bring up a fascinating
point. He wrote, “The emotion of horror and its
kin, fear, are very difficult to describe. They
are the very things we spend our lives, as Sartre and
Camus would have it, trying to build a wall against
and die.” BINGO! This immediately clicked
an association in my head to another film: Sidney
Lumet’s brilliant 1965 film The Pawnbroker.
The following rave review of The Pawnbroker from
Mick Martin and Marsha Potter’s Video Movie Guide
sounds exactly like Dileep’s preceding point:
“This
is a somber and powerfully acted portrayal of a Jewish
man who survived the Nazi holocaust, only to find his
spirit still as bleak as the Harlem ghetto in which
he operates a pawnshop. Rod Steiger gives a tour-de-force
performance as a man with dead emotions who is shocked
out of his zombielike existence by confronting the realities
of modern urban life.”
The
Pawnbroker contains some of the most horrifying
scenes ever put on film, and yet I don’t consider it
a horror film. However, the genre can be a subjective
and amorphous one. Ivan Butler, in his book The
Horror Film, also gives it a rave review and extensive
coverage. Regardless of whether you consider it
a horror film or not, I urge readers who have not seen
it to go out and rent it. The horror in this film
puts the contrived shocks in Kubrick’s film to shame.
These
thoughts on The Pawnbroker
bring up another point: What the hell is a horror
film anyway? To my mind, a horror film has to
contain a creature created by science (Frankenstein),
superstition (Dracula), or hideous deformity
(Phantom of the Opera). While Hitchcock’s
Psycho is a classic, brilliant film, I have
never considered it horror. The book on which
it is based is a fictionalized account of Ed Gein, a
1950’s serial killer. In my view, horror has to
be a fantasy; Psycho, which is based on real
events, is something that could and did happen.
Therefore, as far as I'm concerned, it is not a horror
film.
Using
this as criteria, what do I think are the greatest horror
films ever made? I'm glad you asked. The
following are listed in chronological order:
Noseferatu
(1922)
Phantom of the Opera (1925)
Frankenstein (1931)
Freaks (1932)
Island of Lost Souls (1933)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Dead of Night (1945)
Horror of Dracula (1958)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
The Exorcist (1973)
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
I’ll
give an honorable mention to a relatively recent film:
Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999).
Halloween
is coming up shortly and I can think of no better horror
films than these to watch on an eerie, fog-shrouded,
moonlit night.
See
ya soon.
Steve
can be reached at steve@babblog.com.
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