This post contains
spoilers for a 43-year-old movie …and I can’t believe I even have to type that,
so this is your warning from here on out that all of these challenge posts may
contain spoilers for old movies.
I watched Don’t Look
Now with my husband, and since I’ve seen it before I pitched it to him as a
classic film that’s still incredibly effective and frightening. And then the
film went on to both prove and disprove my theory.
To be fair, I haven’t seen this movie since I was pretty
young, so I only had a hazy memory of the whole thing, punctuated by the
death-by-dwarf scene. I maintain that the climactic scene is chilling to the
bone, but my husband had more of a “what the hell?” reaction to it, akin to my
reaction the first time I saw Sleepaway
Camp as a teenager. I was disturbed in more of an uncanny valley way than
anything else – why was she making that weird noise? And why did they attach
the head of a teenager onto the body of what was clearly an adult man? It was
creepy, but funny. But creepy.
Here are those two scenes for reference, though if you haven't seen Don't Look Now I do recommend watching the whole thing. I still think it's one of the more effective and accessible classics I've seen.
This got me thinking about the nature of classic horror
movies and why some people love them while other people can’t seem to connect
with them at all. Spoiler alert: I don’t have a clear answer (I warned you
these challenge posts wouldn’t be thesis-worthy, right?). I’m not sure if it’s the
nostalgia of remembering something the way you first saw it – as in, that dwarf
terrified me as a child, so I still
feel chills when I see her now. Or maybe it’s just the ability to employ a different
mindset and recalibrate your expectations while watching. I think that’s something
a lot of people today either can’t or don’t want to do, which is fair enough – after
all, I refuse to ever watch Citizen Kane
again, no matter how many film classes tell me it was groundbreaking at one
time. But I think watching classic horror requires
the viewer to approach things in a different way than contemporary
horror. The rewards are necessarily different, but not necessarily any less gratifying.
Going back to the uncanny valley thing, though, I think many
older films have that going for them as well, and the results can be genuinely disturbing.
Even when a film’s effects are shoddy and the acting is risible, it’s all just strange
and surreal and off-putting enough to unsettle you. Or maybe it’s not. It
really comes down to a big ol’ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So what say you? Are there any classic horror films that still give you the major creeps? Tell me in the comments or on Twitter! Do it!
As always, you can follow my 100 Best Horror Movies Ever Challenge with this tag on the blog, or the Twitter hashtag #100BestHorrorMoviesEver (I really regret making that hashtag so long). Next time I hope to be talking about Possession – the 1981 version with Isabelle Adjani to be specific, because man there are a lot of "possession" movies.
So what say you? Are there any classic horror films that still give you the major creeps? Tell me in the comments or on Twitter! Do it!
As always, you can follow my 100 Best Horror Movies Ever Challenge with this tag on the blog, or the Twitter hashtag #100BestHorrorMoviesEver (I really regret making that hashtag so long). Next time I hope to be talking about Possession – the 1981 version with Isabelle Adjani to be specific, because man there are a lot of "possession" movies.