He’s been called the Master of Suspense! Alfred Hitchcock is, without argument, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Horror is habitually chided by mass audiences as juvenile throwaway films. The genre rarely get nominated for awards and are often placed as mere footnotes in film history books, so calling Hitchcock films “horror” has been considered, by many, an insult and people seem to be more comfortable referring to them as “suspense films” or “psychological thrillers,” but those are branches of the horror and, with Hitchcock, he always seems to straddle all three genres!
     REAR WINDOW (1954) – This is my favourite Hitchcock film to date, winning out on Vertigo by a whisker! This is a film about voyeurism at its best (or worst, as the cast may be). L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) is a restless international photographer who’s caged up in his bachelor apartment due to his broken leg and to pass the time and to cope with the appalling summer heat and humidity by watching the comings and goings of his neighbours outside his window and suspects that he might have witnessed a murder across the way. This unassuming, everyday kind of setting turns into an area of intrigue! Quintessentially, this seems like a simple story, but it’s laced full of subplots, both humourous and moving, and the most of the movie is set entirely in the apartment, giving a kind of claustrophobic effect, which is relieved by the escapism through Jeffries’ binoculars and camera lenses, and his roving eyes that swoop down across the courtyard into the lives of the 31 adjoining rooms, entering the mind-set of the photographer seeing the world through his images. It’s a thriller, a romance, a mystery, and a gross comedy of manners that’s both mesmerizing and frightening.
     VERTIGO (1958) – Based on a novel The Living and the Dead by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, San Francisco police detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) was forced to retire due to his severe acrophoba (fear of heights) and he’s hired as a private investigator to shadow the wife of an acquaintance (Kim Novak) who is supposedly having an affair with another man. He believes this is his chance to put the past behind him, but sometimes the future becomes even darker, as he falls in love with Novak and the love turns into this dark, twisted obsession that becomes deeper and deeper as the film progresses. Hitchcock, like with all his films, uses a complicated story, interesting characters, lavish visual detail, deliberate pacing, and fine musical scores to produce a mysterious, almost unearthly, atmosphere, as you watch the character’s downward spiral of madness. It’s hypnotic, emotional, surreal, haunting, sinister, brutal, grim, sick, and cruel: It’s the ultimate “mind fuck” masterpiece!
     PSYCHO (1960) – Whether you’ve seen this or not, everybody has at least heard of this film! What can I say about a film that's been talked about to death? If you looked up “horror film” in the dictionary, a photo of Janet Leigh screaming in the shower should be printed next to it. Marion Crane (Leigh) is a bored office drone who decides to steal some loot from her boss’ obnoxious client and parlay it into a new life with her all-too-distant boyfriend. All is going more or less according to plan until she stops in at the wrong motel, where she befriends an unassuming desk clerk named Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) whose overbearing mother “is not herself today.” The most epic understatement EVER! Even to this day, most horror film killers are portrayed as inhuman, grotesque, unimaginable monster in order to scare the audience out of its wits, which comes off as generic. Psycho does not adhere to these restraints and clichés. The story is incredible, the acting is excellent, the cinematography is godly, and the soundtrack is iconic. This film is perfection, it’s flawless, there is nothing out-of-place!
     THE BIRDS (1963) – It could be said that the plot of The Birds is ridiculous, and it is. The idea of birds, a type of animal, as aggressively attacking humans, despite living with us for millions of years, seems preposterous, but it is here where the film’s potency for horror lies. Humanity has outstayed their welcome. Nature has gone to war! Sounds silly, uh? Well, I thought so when I first saw it...but when the birds started migrating by the millions that fall, perched over every tree, telephone wire, traffic light, rooftop, and I locked my car doors and rolled up the windows in complete terror and dread — still do every migration — and there begins my introduction to all things Hitchcock! This film is a masterpiece of misdirection, starting off like a romantic chick flick and then Hitchcock suddenly pulls the rug from under your feet and the plot takes a harsh, unflinching left turn into uncharted territory, so begins a sequence of events that proceed at the vertiginous crescendo of domino’s falling, as the birds amass by the billions and attack with increasing ferocity. The scene where four characters trapped inside the house with the birds waiting outside resemble the relentless zombies from George A. Romero’s classic The Night of the Living Dead (1968). My favourite scene is when the heroine is stuck in a tiny phone-booth, as watches millions upon millions of birds attack the city and try to smash through the glass. It doesn’t get any better than this...

Hammer paved way to the horror revival of the ‘60s, bring back gothic horror and leading the way was writer-producer-director Roger Corman with a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s works have never been adapted perfectly because it’s difficult to translate a short story or a poem visually into a feature-length film, but Corman Poe series did a great job, paying tribute to the author and his legacy, with the irresistible Vincent Price as the star.
     HOUSE OF USHER (1960) – This film began the Corman Poe series and is, undoubtedly, my favourite of all the films (and my favourite of Poe’s stories). The cadaverous Roderick (Price) and ghostly Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey), a pair of siblings, are the last of their family line tainted with criminality, depravity, and madness. Young and handsome Phillip Winthrop (Mark Damon) travels to desolate, decrepit mansion to whisk Madeline away as his wife, but Roderick objects to this rival, wanting the Usher family curse to die with him and his sister. This is a beautiful gothic thriller of immorality and decadence. It’s stunning from the first shot all the way to the end, from the moody atmosphere, gorgeous art production, tomb-like sets, solid story, brilliant acting, and it’s was first to retain the incestuous themes of the original story. It’s surreal, sick, disturbing, erotic, elegant, and so poignant.
     THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1961) – Set in 16th-century Spain, a young Englishman (John Kerr) visits a forbidding castle to investigate his sister’s mysterious death, meeting the brother-in-law Nicholas Medina (Price). During dinner with family physician, he reveals that Nicholas’ wife died of a massive heart where she “died of fright,” as she became obsessed with Nicholas’ past. His father Sebastian Medina was a prominent member of the Illuminati who slowly tormented his victims in the torture chamber below the castle, among them his wife right in front of their son’s eyes. This is one of the rare cases where the film is superior to the original story. The narrative was created in the vein of Poe’s style, while the original story itself, which was only two pages long to begin with, takes place in during the fantastic and suspenseful climax. Vincent Price proves that horror can be an actor’s medium: It’s one of his best performances!
     TALES OF TERROR (1962) – This is one of the best horror anthologies ever! Three individual Poe shorts in one glorious film: The first segment “Morella” is about a young woman dying of cancer who travels far to meet with her long-lost father (Price) who was once a man of respectable now a drunk, drugged out chronic depressant who keeps his wife’s rotting corpse on his bed where she died during childbirth. Morella’s spirit returns, kills the daughter, takes over her body, and tries to seduce her horrified husband. It’s a merry-go-‘round of necrophilia and incest, yeahhhh! The second segment “The Black Cat,” which also combines with “The Cask of Amontillado,” is about the alcoholic Montresor Herringbone (Peter Lorre), taking a rare advantage of the actor’s comedic timing, who hates his beautiful wife Annabel and her adorable pet cat. He crashes a wine-tasting event and challenges the world’s foremost wine taster Fortunato Luchresi (Price) to a contest, wins, and Luchresi begrudgingly has to escorts him home, and meets his Herringbone’s wife. Eventually, Herringbone finds out Luchresi and Annabel are having an affair right under his nose, kills his wife, drugs Luchresi, and walls them up in the basement. Hurrah for debauchery! The final segment “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is about the elderly Valdemar, dying from a painful disease, employs a hypnotist named Mr. Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) to alleviate his suffering, however Carmichael has an alternative motive and he places Valdemar under a trance that places him between the world of the living and the dead, as his body decays in bed, and blackmails Valdemar’s wife to have sex with him in order to have him die in peace. Dude, it’s Rathbone! Say “Yes!” The film really suffers from its budget, reusing footage from House of Usher (as well as the Roderick Usher’s dramatic floor-length red coat, which looks ravishing on Rathbone).
     THE MASQUE OF RED DEATH (1964) – I always thought this story was unfilmable, so it was a shocker and a delight to see this film and see it done so well. The corrupt Satanist Prince Prospero (Price) invites several dozen of the local nobility to his castle for protection against an oncoming plague, the Red Death, terrorizing a plague-ridden peasantry while merry-making in his colourful castle with his courtiers, with the stipulation that no one is to wear red. During the masked ball, a mysterious hooded figure dressed in red amidst a general atmosphere of debauchery and depravity of the party. This is a visual spectacular; it’s luscious, with the exquisite seven coloured rooms and the magnificent costumes, and yet this is an unsettling story, showing the worst of humanity, with its foul, repulsive characters whom take delights to be controlled by Prospero’s every whim. This is really the “ugliest” story of all the Corman-Poe series.

Up to this point, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film as brutal and as vindictive as this! Is this a “horror” though? I suppose it’s like calling Mommie Dearest (1981) a horror. It’s a psychodrama, a black comedy, a suspense thriller, and a gothic horror in one. The story is very character-driven and dialogue-heavy, with few action scenes, yet it’s so tense, unnerving, merciless, sadistic, and physiologically violent that the film becomes a too gruesome to watch at times. Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis) was once a famous song-and-dance child star on the vaudeville circuit in the 1910s. By the 1930s, the spoilt Jane fades into obscurity while her shyer sister Blanche Hudson (Joan Crawford) becomes a renowned Hollywood dramatic film actress, but she becomes paralyzed after an accident and Jane, who was drunk behind the wheel, is blamed. It’s now present-day 1960s, the two aging sisters turned into recluses in their decaying, claustrophobic mansion, where Jane “cares” for the wheelchair-bound Blanche, as she lives in a world of false hope, thinking that she may be able to reprise her childhood career, putting on the same makeup and keeping her curly hair intact day-to-day, and her continued jealousy burns on as Blanche’s films re-run on television, and increases her twisted and sadistic verbal, emotional, and physical abuse. Throughout the film, we watch the sister try to out “bitch” each other, as Jane spirals further and further madness and Blanche grows weaker and more helpless as the abuse goes on. It’s like a grown-up case of sibling rivalry between two of Hollywood’s leading women being so openly “ugly” in front of the camera that they become parodies of themselves. It is kind of ironic, also, as it was well known that Davis and Crawford despised each other behind camera, they were both major award winners with legendary status in cinema, practically rivals themselves, which could have played into the way they treated each other in the film. That aspect of their lives and careers is embraced — if not exploited — in the film. Needless to say, they’re both fan-bloody-tastic and completely insane in this film! The character of Baby Jane Hudson has become of the greatest horror “monsters” in cinema history, as a precursor to the “psychotic women” horror trope, who is terrifying, repulsive, delusional, funny, and yet so extremely tragic!

This is a delightful horror comedy, along the same vein of The Raven (1963) and “The Black Cat” segment from Tales of Terror (1962), bring together four horror greats — Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone. I had always known Price and Lorre were great comedians, with Champagne for Caesar (1953) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), but Karloff and Rathbone came as a surprise. Rathbone had been in comedies with Red Skelton and Danny Kaye, but only as the straight man. Karloff did comedies with Kay Kyser (with Lorre and Lugosi, actually) and Abbott and Costello, but he played them as serious roles. So not only are they all hysterical in this film, bouncing off each other, but you can tell they’re having the time of their lives just being together (as the four were all great friends) and hamming it up for the camera!
     Set in the 19th-century, the sarcastic, amoral drunkard Waldo Trumbull (Price) of a decaying undertaking business, who loathes his voluptuous, opera-loving wife Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson), mistreats his deaf, senile old father-in-law (Karloff), and lords over his hapless servant Felix Gillie (Lorre), who’s smitten with Amaryllis, murders people in their own homes in order to keep himself in business and to have enough money for more drink. To escape his debts, he decides to kill his imperious, Shakespeare-loving creditor Mr. Black (Rathbone) and stuffs him in a coffin. However, Black suffers from catalepsy that places him in a death-like sleep and he wakes up shouting lines from Macbeth, forcing Trumbull to kill him again, and again, and again. What can I say? I adore this film! The verbal gymnastics alone are worth the price of admission, yet also has wonderful visual gags and wacky slapstick. There are moments in the film that are sick and unsettling, such as when Price takes a pillow, gently fluffing it up, and suffocates his first victim, as we hear the ghastly cry of his final breath echo down the hallway of his home, and yet there are scenes that are so endearing and sweet that make me squee “Awwwwwwww!” and scenes that are so uproarious that I might cough out my spleen by laughing so hard. It’s a magnificent, witty little black comedy! It’s a must see! (Some slight spoilers in the clip, but the trailer doesn't really show off the film all that well...)

I’ve met people who got ill while watching this film, I’ve met people who vomited during this film, I’ve been people who walked out twenty minutes into the film in tears, I’ve met people who fainted during this film, and I’ve met people who went into therapy because of this film. I even heard a story, which I have no idea if it’s true, where a man killed his entire family and attributed it to this film. So how do I talk about what is arguably considered “the scariest movie ever made” whose power still retains its potency 50 years later? This isn’t a film with wall-to-wall, credit-to-credit montage of gore that passes as a plot, nor does it have “boo” moments, where things leap out of the darkness, or false scares, with a hissing cat poppin’ out of nowhere, nor is it a film with gimmicks or clichés, where a group of stupid kids isolated in an environment with a “monster” on the loose carrying a sharp object. The Exorcist was a different kind of horror film that centres around an everyday 10-year-old girl from a modern-day suburbia neighbourhood who is possessed by the Devil himself. And everyone remembers the pea soup, the head spinning, the spewed vulgarities, the moving furniture, the levitation, the crucifix masturbation, the infamous cut (now restored) spider-walk, and they’re all show-stoppers in special effects, yes; but what makes this film memorable to me was how it builds and builds into this fully developed story, with fleshed out characters, associated arcs, and fantastic performances. This film doesn’t even want to admit itself what’s going on is true, it doesn’t want admit and embrace the prospect, trying to explore it with medical and psychological possibilities until they exhaust them, and it’s almost magical how the movie finally acknowledges the little girl’s only hope is when the mention of the words “possession” and “exorcism” fall into the equation, questioning the mystery of faith in its rawest form — the epic battles of good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, heaven vs. hell, the saint vs. the demon, etc. There’s no blood. There’s no gore. There’s no nudity. There’s no sex. There’s no glorious fanfare, nor is there boastful ultimatums. There’s nothing humourous or tongue-in-cheek about it. This film does not tiptoe cautiously around the subject, instead it surrenders to it, as we watch in terror at the images before us! It’s a “thinking man’s” film, but how this film affects you is truly a personal experience — and I’m going to leave it at that...

The year 1974, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Munich Olympics massacre, at the height of the Watergate scandal and the legal investigation into the shootings at Kent State, was the age of the exploitation films whose main attraction for an audience is sex, blood, and violence. I had the opportunity to watch this film at a grindhouse drive-through late at night at age 12 with my (then) college-aged uncle on a date and I fell promptly asleep in the first ten minutes, right after all the food was gone; so, for the longest time, I thought this film must have been crap if it was unable to hold my attention. Then I saw it, in its entirety, at the age of 20 and I learned that I saved myself years of therapy for not seeing as a youth! With its print in the permanent collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art, this film is truly a classic in cinema history.
     The film doesn’t even feel like a film. It runs like documentary, with a monotone-voiced radio newscaster introducing the events as true, when in reality it was only loosely based off murderer-necrophiliac-cannibal Ed Gein, the same one Psycho (1960) was based on, and starts off as a bit of a cliché: A group of teenagers take a roadtrip down an isolated stretch of countryside in Texas (and I live in Texas and, I tell you, it’s a dull state), pick up a crazed hitchhiker, and go exploring in a lonely farmhouse where they meet a deranged, cannibalistic family, as they get stalked and killed. It’s a storyline that has since became the staple for slasher movies; it’s simplistic but functional; and what the film is really about is creating an experience of sensory terror and doom by piling on images and sounds! The feeling of dread and mounting paranoia creeps over in slow but steady waves and the power of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre lies in its atmosphere, with its gritty and raw images, all-too-realistic visuals, and puzzling sounds of buzzing insects and machinery, like an avalanche of macabre spilling out of each frame that is impossible to stop once it starts. The performances are so believable that I’m still not sure if the cast was made up of actors who could act crazy or crazy people who could act. The monsters aren’t vampires, zombies, demons, or supernaturals; they’re real psychopaths, as you enter into their world with all its perversions and rituals. And I feel the genius of the Chainsaw is that the audience sees nothing: It’s remembered as one of the bloodiest and goriest film ever made, yet there’s essentially no blood and no gore! It’s all done behind closed doors, that the fear of the unknown, and audience makes up the rest — and what we see in our minds is ten times worse than whatever could be on screen. This film is bold, granular, relentless, revolting, visceral, offensive, and now I feel like I need shower!

Here’s a horror film for the ladies: Two women from the big city come to the quaint, idyllic little suburbia of Stepford, Connecticut, but soon discovers there lays a sinister truth that the men are murdering their wives and replacing them with perfect robots replicas who are designed to do nothing but cook, clean, and have sex. It’s an variation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), with connotations that tap into a woman’s worst fears, where your identity as a woman is stripped from your being, where you are no longer adequate, where your lover, your husband, your partner, the man you sleep beside for years, desires you with no identity, no personality, no individuality, no substance, no emotions, no bonds, no relationships, where a woman become an object of masturbation, servility, and submission. And you ask yourself, “Is this what men really want?” And the honest answer, to an extent, is “Yes...” (And vice versa...)
     The film, save the ending, is entirely illuminated with vibrant colours and clear whites oversaturated with bright light and cheery backgrounds, as if drunken leprechauns just vomited rainbows all over the screen! The men are portrayed as sloven and gross. The “liberated women” are presented as natural beauties and post-modern, career-driven feminists of the ‘70s, with loose, free-flowing hair, no makeup, casual clothes, restless minds, and rebellious natures. The Stepfords look like factory-made supermodels that somehow transported themselves into the ‘50s, with perfect hair and perfect bodies in cute, little happy dresses with cute, little happy aprons. It’s a film that is rooted in the ‘70s Women’s Lib movement, an era in which “a woman's place” was hotly debated on a national level, and still exceptionally holds well twenty years later. The film is intelligent, forthright, suspenseful, outlandish, satirical, funny, and politically incorrect, but that just makes it better!

If you’ve been keeping track of my list, you’ve probably noticed how many of these films are “gothic horror” because I love that subgenre, with extreme emotions, awe inherent sublime, unshakable atmosphere, dark characters, Romancesque melodrama, and terrors that are both psychological and physical. The Alien series, the first two films in particular, is a gothic horror in space, where “no one can hear you scream.” The sequels never quite had the same subtlety and evocativeness of the original two.
     Alien (1979) starts slowly as the audience familiars themselves with the rough and tough crew of the ore mining spaceship Nostromo, is returning home from a routine mission and responds to a S.O.S. and set out to explore the hostile new world and come upon a derelict spacecraft where an alien stowaways onto the ship and, as it evolves, it kills off the crew one by one. Alien, whose plot is actually a spin on the “haunted house” story mixed with the sci-fi IT! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958), is so filled with dread by placing us in an environment not of earth. At least, in a haunted house, you can run out the front door; but here, you’re surrounded by the vacuum of space, where you’re stuck, the terror is so genuine and claustrophobic which was something never seen and felt before. Ghostly steam, clinking chains, long dark corridors where anything can be hiding, the suspense is unbelievably suffocating and we actually don’t see the “monster” until the climax. The alien, however, is not the only menace to the all-too human crew; there are also soulless corporations and short-circuiting androids to be dealt with on top of everything else. Faced with these dilemmas, every single crew member of the Nostromo are absolutely believable. They're tired, stressed out, rude, bitchy, and they spend a good lot of time griping and snapping at each other, but they drop what they’re doing and stand together, protecting one another without hesitation when they must. It’s a grim, visceral film, which is extremely Freudian, with themes of violation and rape, filled with phallic and vaginal symbols courtesy of artist H.R. Giger. (Kudos to actor John Hurt for re-playing his role as Kane in the comedy Spaceballs (1987), making him the awesomest guy on the planet!)
     This was the first film where a theatre ever gave me complimentary barf bags and I just knew I was in for something special to come! Now that we know what the xenomorphs look like, let’s add hundreds upon hundreds of them to the “haunted house” in space formula, and we get the sequel known as Aliens (1986)! Now the character of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is fully developed, waking up 57 years later from hypersleep to discover that a terra-forming colony has been set up on LV-426, the planet wherein Nostromo first encountered the titular aliens. When Earth-based communications loses contact with colony, a band of marines are sent to investigate, taking Ripley and a representative. Its sequel took a different route — to make a fast moving, slightly tongue-in-cheek, boisterous action extravaganza, yet the suspense and terror of its gothic horror heredity remain in full in a seamless transfer. Instead of one alien, we get the entire nest, pushing the characters into a corner until there’s no escape and descend further into the labyrinthine bowls of hell in the climax in the greatest “cat fight” in cinematic history. Filled with amazing performances and an abundance of thrills, this film is one of the greatest of any genre it attempts — whether it's action, sci-fi, horror, or drama — and definitely one of my all-time favourite films! (Forgive the late addition of this film, life has its distractions.)

One of the great originators of contemporary “body horror” is David Cronenberg. It’s a mistake to describe “body horror” as mindless blood/gore exploitation films; no, that’s not what it is: It is a the “man into monster” story, which is an exploration of corporal transformation and violation, the graphic destruction or degeneration of the body, to an “unnatural” state, whether scientific or supernatural. It’s not only grotesque and terrifying but beautiful and tragic; it’s both physical and the psychological — and, with Cronenberg, always cerebral as well. He straddles genres of drama, thrillers, suspense, gothica, sci-fi, and horror — often all at the same time. They’re thinking man’s films and I’m going to talk about my four favourite of his “body in revolt” flicks:
     SCANNERS (1981) – The vagrant Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is kidnapped off the streets and inducted into a top secret government program designed to develop the powers of “scanners” — people of telepathic and telekinetic abilities considered a threat to national security, if not controlled or quarantined — as weapons, with the help of a scientist named Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) and a mental suppressant drug called Ephemorol. Vale goes undercover and infiltrates an underground group of renegade scanners, led by the sinister Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) who is intent on building a new world order. The film has a general feeling of starkness and sparseness that brings an apt feeling of coldness and isolation, which is profoundly Cronenberg; it is a subversive, visceral, fly-on-the-wall take on racism and government, viewing the world as an outcast, dark and dysphoric!
     THE DEAD ZONE (1983) – This is perhaps my favourite of the Cronenberg’s “body horrors” yet, out of the four films, it’s goreless but equally as powerful as his other film; however, this film gets gravely overlooked, which is unfortunate because it’s a powerful film! Based on the novel by Stephen King, schoolteacher and all-around nice guy Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) wakes up from a five-year coma after a horrible car accident to have his job, his girlfriend, his family, his legs, and his life pass by him and it’s replaces with a gift — or is it a curse? — of precognition to see the past and future. Everyone he touches is an open book and, as his powers grow over time, poor Johnny gets more and more out of touch with humanity, becoming a recluse, and becomes more and more weak as the spells take what little life he has left. This is an emotional, sorrowful tale of loss, grief, and sacrifice. Johnny is no superhero, no butt-kicking killing machine out to stomp the bad guys, but a sad, lonely man with a terrible case of bad luck. The pain of the character haunts Walken’s expressive face of throughout the entire film, and the rage he feels at the rotten hand that life has dealt him is understandable, believable, shattering, and frighteningly intense. This is a man who has suffered every pain and loss that a man can suffer, yet is still determined to make the world a safer place for those he loves, even if it means losing them forever. You cry for this man! It’s a drama, a romance, a thriller, a horror, a tragedy, and a social commentary.
     VIDEODROME (1983) – This is perhaps Cronenberg’s weirdest film, which is saying a lot actually! I’m not exactly sure where to start with this one. It’s a surreal LSD, mixed with Draino, trip that is not for the faint of heart. Max Renn (James Woods) is a sleazy, low-rent TV producer who rapidly becomes obsessed with an unusual pirate satellite channel broadcasting perverse, exploitative torture, murder, mutilation, and pornography that may become a next new wave in television, where the nature of reality or the “perception” of reality will be either altered or distorted by television which has become in Dr. Oblivion's words, “the retina of the mind’s eye.” I feel this film was The Matrix (1999) of its day, ahead of its time, as a reality-morphing and philosophical “cyberpunk” social satire, which still hasn’t lost its power over the years, particularly now with the age of the internet! Cronenberg foresaw the importance of the media for mankind, influencing people with sublimated messages, manipulating audiences, and becoming very powerful, and how violence on screen can generate violence. It’s visceral, perverted, revolting, warped, and psychedelic. “Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!”
     THE FLY (1986) – A remake of the classic 1958 film mixed with Frankenstein (1931), the film follows a pretty archetypical horror premise of “science gone wrong” — horribly wrong! Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is an independent scientific visionary who has been slowly designing a device that will “change the world as we know it” — a teleporter! When he shows his invention to his would-be girlfriend Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a journalist, but the wrinkles in the technology are still being ironed out, so Brundle takes one small step for man and tests the machine on himself. Unfortunately, during the teleportation process, his DNA is mixed up with that of a common housefly, and the two species soon begin to genetically merge and transform Brundle into a creature that has never existed before. Cronenberg, of course, never shortchanges his audience with graphic gore, which is sickening and just plain putrid, none more so than Goldblum’s slow physical transformation. What makes this whole affair really outstanding, however, is his psychological transformation: The truly disturbing thing is how front and centre the humanity of the characters and their world is kept. Davis and Goldblum are the doomed lovers in this regard — their chemistry is palpable, and her affection for him struggling against her disgust at what he is becoming, coupled with his own struggle to keep the fly in check, create the kind of riveting discomfort usually only commanded by train swerving out of control.

Bruce Campbell is the “Brad Pitt” of the horror! Guys wanna be him; girls wanna jump into bed with him! He plays the Ashley “Ash” J. Williams, the ultimate horror protagonist who fights evil spirits known as “Deadites” summoned by the Book of the Dead, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis. Here’s the three films that make up the trilogy, taking the “cabin in the woods” trope into a new, fresh level:
     THE EVIL DEAD (1981) – This is the one that started it all and, unfortunately, it’s the least appreciated of the bunch. It was a serious horror film; it was not played intentionally for laughs, and it’s an excellent one at that: A group of four teenagers go to an isolated cabin in the woods for the weekend, but accidentally play a recording of a passage translation from the Book of the Dead and the Deadites answer the call! Poor Ash watches his sister, his best friend, and his girlfriend turn into zombies. The film took over 10 years to make, with a small, independent budget and guerrilla film-making tactics, and it was extremely controversial for its graphic terror, violence, and gore, mainly due to its infamous “tree rape” scene, and received a NC-17 rating in the US, while it was downright banned in other countries.
     EVIL DEAD II: DEAD BY DAWN (1987) – Now with a far bigger budget, director Sam Raimi took the opportunity to remake his first film, rehashing the events in the first five minutes, and then expanded upon it, allowing the story continue further, but this time for laughs! This is truly one of the greatest horror comedies in creation, and poor Ash takes twice the abuse of the first film in a kind of schizophrenic frenzy, but takes it in stride, even to the point of cutting off his possessed hand and wearing a chainsaw on the stump. To get the film to a wider audience, the gallons upon gallons of blood that geyser in every direction were changed into different colours, such as yellow, orange, black, purple, and blue. Those silly censors and their silly fixations of red bodily fluids, what do they know!
     ARMY OF DARKNESS (1992) – By the end of the second film, Ash is transported to medieval 1300 CE England and is on a quest to return home by finding the Necronomicon. He finds, on his search, three books and must say a magic phrase to find the real one; however, he forgets it and it unleashes the Deadites, and Ash leads an army of war-weary knights in battle against the undead, led by his evil twin. This film is nowhere as bloody and gory as the first two films, instead it relies more on Three Stooges-esque slapstick. “Hail to the king, baby!”