Sam’s Halloween Movies Triple Bill Suggestions

It’s Halloween, and that means one thing as far as I’m concerned: THEMED TRIPLE BILLS (Good God, I’m such a nerd). So, this Halloween, I thought I’d suggest a few that you can do at home.

COMING OF AGE HORROR
May / Valerie and Her Week of Wonders / Carrie

Two American classics, and between them a truly brilliant surreal Czech obscurity. Coming of age is a fraught time (whenever it happens) for everyone, and that’s probably why it’s been a fertile subject for horror films. In these three, three young women come of age at different times, through different means, but all in some pretty nightmarish circumstances. Angela Bettis’ arrested devloper May takes her Mother’s advice of ‘if you can’t find a friend, make one’ a bit too literally. Sissy Spacek’s Carrie reacts against both her religious zealot Mother and school bullies, discovering telekinetic powers that frighten her as much as her victims, while Jaroslava Schallerova’s Valerie slips into a dreamlike state when she has her first period, and finds herself confronted with a village of vampires, demonic priests and other strange goings on.

SELF REFLEXIVE HORROR
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare / Popcorn / Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

I love the way that horror, as a genre, quite often looks at and analyses itself while telling a genre rooted story, obviously the Scream series is the most famous example, but it’s far from the only (or the best) one. For me, Wes Craven made a better analysis of the genre, and a better horror film, two years before Scream, with the brilliant and hugely underrated Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which uses the idea that Craven, in creating Freddy Kruger, trapped an ancient, real, evil, in the persona and in his films, which is now trying to break out into reality. Craven has a great time analysing horror here, but also makes the scariest of all the Nightmare films. Popcorn is a guiltier pleasure; a fun little slasher starring the unbearably cute Jill Schoelen as a film student helping put on a schlock horror festival to raise money for her course. It’s got affectionate parodies of 50′s sci-fi and horror flicks and a strong hook in which a student film made by a murderer mirrors Schoelen’s dreams.

It’s rough around the edges, to be sure, but it’s tremendously entertaining and has a couple of scary sequences in amongst the cine-literate comedy. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is the most developed of horror critiques; breaking down and reasoning out every slasher cliché through a mockumentary following a boogeyman in training. It’s brilliantly acted, incredibly incisive, and has 25 minutes of solid slasher movie bolted on to the end.

FOUND FOOTAGE HORROR:
Lake Mungo / Cannibal Holocaust / Exhibit A

I’m not overly fond of the trend for found footage films, they can be an easy excuse for untalented filmmakers, but pull one of these out of the bag convincingly and they can be deeply disturbing. Lake Mungo is an Australian film about a teenage girl who vanishes, and then appears to be haunting her family, structured as a TV documentary, it plays cleverly with your expectations and has a truly haunting ending. Cannibal Holocaust is the granddaddy of this genre, and still the best; a smart and sickening film in equal measure, Ruggero Deodato’s message still resonates and his horror sequences still shock and disgust 30 years after the film was made. Exhibit A is an almost unknown British film, and I should declare an interest in that I am quoted on the cover of the DVD release.

It’s initially the story of the life of a very normal family, seen through the tape from the daughter’s camcorder, bagged by Police as Exhibit A. Slowly, but incredibly convincingly, the film builds an atmosphere of threat and dread which ends up in a genuinely brutal and upsetting way. It’s a harsh, tough watch, but well worth the time.

If you end up doing any of these triple bills then do let me know how they go for you; how the films work both individually and together, or use the comments to recommend other themes or triple bills to me and others. Enjoy Halloween everyone.