Four films for fun ways to creep out your Halloween!
Since Halloween is coming up and I am a movie buff, I will devote this column to four films that I think are wonderfully eerie and that will help people get in the mood to appropriately celebrate Halloween.
1) The Halfway House (2004). I have to first confess that I have a very slightly ulterior motive for plugging this one as a major character, Father Fogerty, is played by Joseph Tatner, a friend from the last college I attended. However, the movie can more than stand on its own as a great Halloween flick. It’s a witty and well-made combination of genres including the women’s prison flick, soft but hot porn, and H.P. Lovecraft classic horror. My review of it can be found at http://www.epinions.com/content_228992585348. It is a campy movie that is alternately funny, chilling, and a turn-on. Father Fogerty is a perverted priest who never misses a chance to make an erring young lady pull up her skirt and pull down her panties for a good, old-fashioned spanking that he delivers with glee, albeit perhaps semi-conscious glee. I published an interview with Tatner about his experience playing Father Fogerty that can be found at http://mensnewsdaily.com/2006/12/25/interview-with-joseph-tatner-who-plays-the-spanking-priest-in-the-halfway-house.
2) City of the Dead, also called Horror Hotel (1961). Centering around witchcraft, this is a superbly spooky movie that mixes elements of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with the atmosphere characteristic of classic vampire and ghost stories. Christopher Lee is in it and that almost guarantees that a horror movie won’t go wrong. I’ve got a review of this one up at http://www.epinions.com/content_240961556100. See it for thrills and chills!
3) The Haunting (original 1963 version). I consider this the very ultimate in haunted house stories. It is well acted, well written, and well directed and it shows how much can be done through suggestion. I reviewed it at http://www.epinions.com/content_250336284292 and I also wrote a blog about it that can be found at http://www.epinions.com/content_250336284292. This movie may be of special interest to Men’s News Daily readers as it goes against the woman good-man bad ideology. The chief villain is a villainess: the deceased mother of protagonist Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), a mother who was overbearing, harsh, and repressive.
4) Carrie (1976 version). This is an extraordinary horror movie. It helped launch both the careers of Stephen King, on whose first novel it was based, and that of actress Sissy Spacek who stars as the title character. Much of the power of Carrie stems from the way it speaks to so many people with its portrait of the brutality often characteristic of high school life and the feelings of a social outcast like Carrie. There is also a strong element of wish fulfillment in the supernatural gift (or curse) that Carrie possesses. The movie also resonates because, like The Haunting, it portrays a spectacularly bad mother. Played by Piper Laurie, Carrie’s mother is an unforgettable dramatization of a sexually repressed and repressive religious fanatic. Perhaps the greatest “horror†of this wonderful horror movie lies not in the supernatural aspects of its story but in its powerful depiction of this negative female archetype.
