After John Carpenter’s highly successful Halloween, he tried his hand at horror once again with this eerie ghost story. Adrienne Barbeau’s small town deejay serves as a kind of narrator to the events that unfold in the unsuspecting town of Antonio Bay as townsfolk prepare for its centennial. Though it’s quite a comedown from his slasher classic, it still has his signature suspenseful style.
What is quite possibly the first slasher film (unless you want to get all semantic with The Lodger, another Hitchcock classic). Psycho‘s unusual story structure caught audiences off guard when the star of the movie resolved to be not the top-billed actress but the legendary scene in which she appeared. The nefarious proprietor of the infamous Bates Motel isn’t even introduced until 20 minutes into the story, but once he is, things get unnerving very quickly.
Director Tobe Hooper was inspired by both a hardware store and a famous serial killer when he wrote what would become The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Filmed on a shoestring budget under an unforgiving Texas sun that overexposed most of the film, the end product is a film with a tone that looks and feels so raw and real that it has caused nightmares for nearly four decades now.
It’s easy to see how Alfred Hitchcock earned his moniker of “Master of Suspense” with this, his first surviving film, wherein he pays homage to the mystery that was Jack the Ripper. This adaptation of a play by Marie Belloc Lowndes has a mysterious lodger appear at the home of a couple with a room to let at about the same time a series of brutal murders terrorize the city.
This follow-up to Clive Barker’s original is a far more interesting examination into the paradoxical concept that pain is pleasure and vice versa. Barker has an oddly intoxicating fascination with the flesh (as can be said of genius Seth Brundle). In this film that fascination is on full display, in particular his affinity for skinless people who have returned from the dead.
In many ways this is superior to Tod Browning’s lifeless original. Gloria Holden plays it straight as the infamous count’s feminine offspring, infusing his undead lineage, perhaps for the first time, with the plaintive anguish that would follow vampires into the late 20th century and beyond.