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You Don’t Know These Ten Horror Movies, But They Will Melt Your Face

New this week is Grady Hendrix’s novel, Horrorstör, a traditional haunted house story in a contemporary setting (and full of current fears).

Not only a truly absorbing novel, but also one of the most stunning and effective book designs I’ve ever seen. Horrorstör looks like a retail catalog, including illustrations of ready-to-assemble furniture and other, more sinister accessories.  You’ll never be able to step foot into an IKEA again…

Grady was generous enough to include us on his blog tour, so without further adieu, take it away Mr. Hendrix…

So many horror movies, so little time. So why waste your time with ones that are boring. Here are ten that made my brain hurt in all the right ways.

THE BABY (1973) – no gore, no nudity, and still the most upsetting movie that will ever make you dance up and down underneath a steaming shower screaming, “Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!” A kindly social worker discovers that the latest “child” on her client list is a grown man kept living as an adult baby by his mother and two sisters. Unable to walk or talk, Baby is fed and changed by his cigarette-sucking mama who flies into rages at the slightest offense, grabbing the cattle prod whenever Baby acts naughty. And since Baby is a grown man in diapers, he gets naughty quite often. If John Waters ever directed a straight-up horror movie, it would look a lot like The Baby, which is rated PG for some unknown reason. Because while The Baby can be seen, it can never be unseen.

WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? (1976) – this flick confirms what I always suspected: give a child half a chance and they’ll happily murder you. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds only with ten-year-olds instead of seagulls, this Spanish production kicks off when a British couple arrive on the island of Almanzora for a little peace and quiet. At first things are quiet, then it turns out that they’re a little too quiet: all the adults have been hung up like pinatas and murdered by their kids. Now, the kill-crazed kiddies surround the two Brits and move in for the kill. If crowds of zombies make you break out in a cold sweat, wait until you’re surrounded by a soundless, staring mob of blank-eyed tykes. Then you’ll know that terror wears a romper.

HOUSE (1977) – when venerable Japanese distributor, Toho, realized they had no clue what “the kids” wanted to watch they turned over the keys to their studio to experimental filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi who enlisted his seven-year-old daughter as a screenwriter and turned out the psychedelic HOUSE, the movie that stings like LSD and leaves a monsoon in your mind. A gang of schoolgirls go on a field trip to a haunted house where they encounter blood waterfalls, cats with glowing eyes, people-eating pianos, flying heads, and more fake smoke and primary colored laser lighting than a Pink Floyd light show at the local planetarium. With a tone that veers wildly from You Can’t Do That On Television, to surreal, Freudian nightmares about dead mothers, this house is haunted by Salvador Dali.

THE MAFU CAGE (1978) – “I want my Mafu!” Carol Kane whines. At first it’s charming, and then you realize what, exactly, a “Mafu” is and if you weren’t totally hypnotized into helplessness by this film at that point you’d quickly turn it off. Grey Gardens meets Planet of the Apes this flick plays like Hannah and Her Really Weird Sister as astronomer and older sister/caretaker Lee Grant tries to hold her feral little sister (Carol Kane) together after the death of their anthropologist father. One way she helps her cope is by procuring a series of “Mafus”: large primates that Carol Kane imprisons, befriends, falls in love with, and eventually murders for imagined betrayals. Only now they’re running out of Mafus and li’l sis wants to have her very own pet human instead. Director Karen Arthur (who also directed lots of episodes of Cagney & Lacey) delivers a sensitive movie about the love (and hate) between two sisters (and some primates) that has never been rivaled.

BOXER’S OMEN (Hong Kong, 1983) – if House made your jaw drop, Boxer’s Omen will make your jaw drop off, become infested with maggots, crawl across the floor, then explode in a shower of green pus. Ostensibly about a Buddhist monk taking on a Thai witch, it’s really just an excuse to unleash some of the most insanity-inducing visuals ever put onscreen. Ever seen a monk attacked by an army of animated alligator skulls inhabited by bats with glowing red eyes who burst into flames when they encounter an enormous placenta lined with Buddhist sutras, causing the evil wizard to eat raw chicken guts, vomit them up, and summon a flying alien head with a whip-like spinal cord out of the mess? No? You will.

NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR (1985) – an attempt to rescue three unsuccessful horror movies by cutting them down and stuffing them into an anthology film, Night Train To Terror is like nothing you’ve ever seen before, which is a good thing since it’s been proven that watching it causes permanent brain damage. A train containing a terrible New Wave band (singing “Dance With Me” over and over again) is rocketing down the tracks while God and Satan sit in one compartment and tell stories that will determine the fate of mankind. Or something. With Claymation interludes, suicide clubs that come complete with their very own “electrocution computers,” and cults of undead disco Nazis, this movie makes absolutely zero glorious sense. 

RED TO KILL (Hong Kong, 1994) – director Billy Tang had made horror movies before, but in Red to Kill he plumbed the depths of human depravity and actually touched bottom. A necrophiliac serial rapist is stalking a group home for mentally retarded adults, but that overheated logline doesn’t do justice to this film. Shot in harsh geometric compositions and scored to the sound of asthmatic breathing and underwater sonar pings, it’s an impeccably made masterpiece, which makes it that much more horrifying as it devolves into a savage battle of the sexes involving sledgehammers, fake flowers, and table saws. 

GINGER SNAPS (2000) – Ginger and younger sis, Brigitte, are united in their hatred for the boring suburb where they live, but then puberty comes for Ginger in the form of a wolf bite. Now Ginger has, quite literally, gotten “the curse.” Once a month her body turns hairy, her moods get erratic, and her hormones go out of control. Also, she turns into an enormous killer wolf. Touching, tender, tragic, and with enough smartly written snark to fill an entire season of Buffy, this movie stands up there with The Mafu Cage in its genuine depiction of family relationships and makes you wonder why sisters always seem so much more authentic in horror movies.

DUMPLINGS (2004) – with a classy big budget sheen, Dumplings is one of the most stomach-churning and emotionally-devastating horror movies of the last 20 years. Miriam Yeung plays a TV star entering middle age, desperate to hold onto her husband who has started to dally with younger women. After trying every beauty product on the market, she goes underground to Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), who serves youth-restoring dumplings. The only catch? They’re made of fetuses. Understated and elegant, Dumplings is so deeply upsetting that watching it feels wrong.

LATE BLOOMER (2004) – this low budget Japanese oddity needs to have more champions because it is one of the greatest films about disability ever made. Director Go Shibata worked for five years with Masakiyo Sumida who has cerebral palsy to make this movie about a speed metal fan with cerebral palsy (played by Sumida himself) who becomes a serial killer when he can’t take the patronizing way the world treats him anymore. Sumida’s home health care worker is a young woman who pats herself on the back for treating him just like a “normal” man, but little does she realize that her harmless flirting is sending all the wrong messages. When she recoils in horror from Sumida’s understandable advance, it’s the final cruel straw that breaks his back: if people won’t respect him, then Sumida is determined they will fear him. 


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