Truly scary stuff

From murderous clowns to harrowing modernity, Salon staffers pick a terrifying lineup of spooky movies and TV shows.

Oct 31, 2002 | We've seen the scary movies cable networks trot out this time every year, and frankly Fox News is far more frightening. A truly scary movie doesn't need gore or heart-attack thrills. It should creep up on you. It should terrify you with what you don't see, let your mind devise its own worst-case scenario.

Barring that, there are always evil clowns. That's a way of saying that Salon's writers tried to come up with a list of scary films and TV shows that you won't see on the USA cable channel -- and we only partially succeeded. But hey, clowns really are scary, and you know you were once terrified of Freddy Krueger too. If Salon owned a cable network -- insert demonic laugh here -- these are the films and TV shows that we would schedule in our Halloween marathon.

"The Vanishing" (1988)

Horror movies have held me in their grip ever since I first watched "Night of the Living Dead" on my dad's black-and-white J.C. Penney set. But in all those years, from "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" to "The Ring," there's only one scary movie I wouldn't be willing to sit through again.

George Sluizer's "The Vanishing" (or, in Dutch, "Spoorloos") is at the outset an almost innocuous mystery set amid contemporary middle Europe. Saskia disappears from a French rest stop in broad daylight. Her boyfriend, Rex, is investigated and released; the police pronounce themselves baffled. Rex refuses to give up the search, and his suspicions eventually settle upon Raymond, a family man and pillar of the local community. As Sluizer's clean, even filmmaking sharpens itself to a point, it becomes clear that Rex is willing to risk anything to find out the truth.

Nothing I say can quite prepare you for the ending of this movie. "The Vanishing" is so terrifying precisely because of its unremarkable, anonymous landscape, totally free of Gothic architecture, dark basements or bolts of lightning. Europe, Sluizer seems to argue, has not really conquered its demons but merely repressed them -- and they are beginning to adapt to their new circumstances. Sluizer remade "The Vanishing" in 1993, as a Hollywood film starring Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland, but removing the story from its European setting (and, of course, softening and moralizing the ending) ruined everything.

-- Andrew O'Hehir

"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" (1986)

"Who you think you're associating with anyway?" Henry says to his roommate's sister. He's kidding because she'd been surprised that he has a credit card, but the line is central to this terrifying little picture, which is scary precisely because you never know who you're associating with. This polite, unassuming guy Sis is growing sweet on is a compulsive, dispassionate murderer who kills everyone in his path.

Chainsaw-wielding mutants in hockey masks or "Blair Witch" ghosties might symbolize our fears, but most of us never run into anything even remotely resembling them. Henry, though, is the real deal. He's the guy who bends over to pet your dog on a street corner, sits two stools over at the diner and nods hello. We watch Henry randomly meeting people and then just as randomly deciding to follow and kill them -- or let them go with a shrug. Horror movies don't scare me, but the first time I saw John McNaughton's "Henry" I walked the two blocks home from the theater on the lookout for my killer, and once I got home I took a good look in every closet. Real closets, I mean. Not metaphorical ones.

-- King Kaufman

"The Haunting" (1963)

Director Robert Wise's adaptation of Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" proves that what you don't show is always much more terrifying than what you do.

An anthropologist with a special interest in psychic phenomena invites two psychic researchers, plus one wiseacre skeptic, to spend a few nights at a mansion known as Hill House, which is thought to be haunted. The walls of Hill House don't bleed or anything like that -- but they're alive for sure, and Wise taunts us with flickers of that life, things that we don't so much see as sense. And if the subtle visuals don't get you, the sound surely will -- the aural effects alone make "The Haunting" one of the most unnerving movies of all time. Whatever you do, don't ever wake up in the middle of the night, alone in the dark, and think about it. Just don't.

--Stephanie Zacharek

"The Exorcist" (1973)

As in most truly terrifying movies, the people in William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" don't make any stupid mistakes. They don't go into the basement, or run upstairs instead of out the front door, or swim in shark-infested waters. Chris MacNeil and her daughter, Regan, are simply living their ordinary, comfortable, modern lives when evil descends to rip the girl's soul apart.

Regan's possession is like an illness -- her body spasms, excreting vile fluids, raping itself. And to me, illness has always seemed scarier than, say, psycho killers: It's invisible and formless and there's nothing you can do to keep it away. I saw "The Exorcist" before I should have, sneaking downstairs when I was 7 years old to watch after my parents had gone to sleep. That's why I could never tell them about the nightmares that plagued me for weeks afterward. Somehow, the movie has been conflated in my memory with the moment I realized there were vicious forces and random calamity in the world, and that no one at all is ever completely safe.

-- Michelle Goldberg

The Kingdom (1994)

So much of "The Kingdom" is cornball melodrama. Director Lars von Trier's Danish television miniseries about a hospital built on an ancient bleaching ground is usually called a combination of "ER" and "Twin Peaks." At its core, though, it's mostly an old-fashioned soap opera. In my favorite scenes, a stiff Swedish doctor summits the Denmark hospital where he works and shouts, "Danish scuuuuuuum!" You want to hiss every time he comes on camera. There's plenty of funny, bizarro stuff too, including a phantom ambulance, a ghost-hunting hypochondriac and two actors with Down's syndrome who work in the cafeteria dish room and seem to know what the future holds. Amid all the wackiness, however, is a creepy supernatural story, helped made hyperreal by von Trier's shaky hand-held camerawork and proto-Dogma 95 filmmaking technique. How scary is it? Well, the thing comes chopped up in four hour-long episodes, and a certain ghost girl kept me from making it all the way through the final one. Von Trier, however, soldiered on in another four-part series, "The Kingdom II." I don't know a thing about it.

-- Jeff Stark

"Repulsion" (1965)

"Are you asleep?" a pampered London salon patron snaps to her eerily distracted manicurist in the opening moments of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion." Carol doesn't know the answer herself. Played with nail-gnawing timidity by Catherine Deneuve, Carol is a creature who, in another era, would be given to headaches and long holidays in the sanatorium. In Polanski's world, however, she's stuck in swinging Carnaby-era London, a hub of unrelenting noise and leering catcalls.

When her sister goes on vacation, Carol's tenuous grip on sanity deteriorates as rapidly and gruesomely as the rabbit meat she's forgotten on the counter. Carol doesn't go docilely into her psychosis. She's takes down those who wander into her path, a lecherous landlord and a hapless suitor alike. Victim or victimizer, where the film truly becomes disturbing is in its depiction of mundane urban horror -- in the way terrible things can happen practically right in front of the little old lady next door, the way we can be seemingly surrounded and still desperately, fatally alone.

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams

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