Bunch Of Fives: Duncan Falconer

So here we are, trying to choose my horror ‘bunch of five’. Well. As the organiser of a horror festival, I didn’t think I could just go down the usual route of picking a few of the obvious choices for a top 5 horror films list, so I thought I’d give you a ‘if you like this classic, try this one you might not have seen’ list. So here goes my bunch of five classic horror films, and five films that feel similar that either aren’t as well known or maybe haven’t quite made it into the ‘classic’ pantheon just yet:

 

Yes, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a stone cold horror classic. Telling the story of the Torrance family’s stay at the overlook hotel and showing what some describe as a descent into madness and others state is just showing us a man who’s is completely unhinged from the very first scene of the film. We all know Jack Nicholson’s famous line and I doubt there are many people who haven’t seen this film. However, if you’re looking for another (very respected but less seen outside horror geek circles) film that tells the story of isolation driving someone to the edge of sanity…

 

Robert Eggers’ follow-up to his debut hit, The Witch, is a beautiful black and white tale about two 19th century New England lighthouse keepers, played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, who slowly unravel as they antagonise each other through their time on the remote island. The film has a lot of Eggers’ now-trademark touches, from acute attention to historic detail to his use of long takes and the naturalistic camera style of his regular cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, so it’s definitely an acquired taste, but if you’ve ever wanted to see Willem Dafoe get irate about lobster!

 

I love Halloween. I think it’s the perfect slasher film, complete with a genuinely threatening masked killer, a picture perfect quiet suburb and a lot of teens getting punished for doing the sorts of things that teens like to get up to and the introduction of the sublime Jamie Lee Curtis. But what elevates John Carpenter’s 1978 classic from a lot of pretenders (I’m not knocking Freddie, Jason or even The Leprechaun, but Michael Myers is the OG) is John Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey’s masterful use of negative space in the frame, holding shots for just long enough to have us wondering where ‘the shape’ is hiding in those shadows. Well, if you’re digging squinting into the negative space…

 

Now, It Follows is hardly an unknown, obscure film, but what it does do better than almost any American horror film of the 21st century is have you not fully trusting what you’re seeing.

In case you somehow missed it, It Follows is a horror about an STI, essentially, in that the plot revolves around teenage Jay (Maika Monroe), who after a sexual encounter with a new boyfriend, finds out that he’s passed on the curse of being stalked by an entity that stalks you slowly and methodically, appearing sometimes as someone you don’t know and sometimes as a friend or family member, but never stopping until it catches and kills you. From the opening scene, the creeping dread is heavy and it never really stops until the end of the film’s brisk 100-minute runtime. With never knowing if a face in the crowd is just a random person or if it’s the entity walking slowly towards us until it’s almost too late to get away, It Follows shares a brilliant use of negative space and a slow but unyielding protagonist with Carpenter’s 1978 smash hit.

 

Last year’s breakout horror hit took a sly look at ageing, body image and how society controls women’s thoughts and opinions of themselves, even turning them against themselves, and it does it in a funny, at times grotesque way. With amazing performances from Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, as well as on fire Dennis Quaid revelling in his ageing misogynist role, and some truly brilliant makeup effects as the film goes on, The Substance is a clever and thought-provoking take on what it is to be a woman at different stages of life. Now, if you like your stories with a sprinkling of body horror, you should really go to the master and maybe his most interesting work…

 

While there’s some debate about Cronenberg’s treatment of women in certainly his earlier films, with arguments about whether films like The Brood and Rabid are misogynist or feminist in nature, and some of the treatment of female characters in Videodrome may not be as nice as you’d hope narratively, the story of James Woods’ sleazy, sexist tv producer and his search for smuttier and more degrading lurid content (as we know now, clearly a big stretch for Woods to play such an abhorrent character!),  we see him grow a metaphorical and possibly very physical female orifice that is penetrated in gooey, sloppy glory on his spiral into madness as he descends down a very dark rabbit hole. Quick mention to David’s son Brandon Cronenberg, all of whose films are excellent and pick up his dad’s early career mantle.

 

In 1973, William Peter Blatty’s smash hit novel about demons and priests was turned into a dark rumination on faith in crisis, told brilliantly by William Friedman. The film contains some amazing physical effects and some very memorable lines, mostly involving a possessed 13 year-old, but it’s the film’s earnestness and seriousness that seems to elevate it above a lot of more schlocky horrors, even though there are many fun and silly lines. Father Damien’s relationship with his recently deceased mother has a big effect on the plot of the film and it’s this relationship that really grounds the film and gives it a more somber tone than pretty much every exorcism film that has followed (and copied) it. But if you’re looking for a fun film about possession which contains serious undertones about family, belonging and grief…

 

Making a film about how a bunch of teenagers might deal with possession, i.e. film it and post it online as part of a drinking game, probably seems just about on the money. This film updates the possession film for the social media generation, and really brings a new lease of life to the genre. The film is in turns fun, disgusting and heartbreaking, giving you characters you care about and then absolutely ruining their world. The film follows 17 year-old Mia, trying to fit in with a group of friends as she tries to get over the death of her mother. 

The film moves at such a pace it doesn’t come up for air, and you enjoy being part of the gang as they have a wild time bringing out the dead. Until things go a bit far one time and somebody gets hurt. There are some amazing set pieces that rival those in The Exorcist, and some really harrowing scenes, meaning there aren’t many horror fans who won’t like this film.

 

Seeing as how we’re having the one and only Craig Conway at Terror on Tyne, it would be remiss of me not to mention this absolute tour de force of terror that is The Descent. Neil Marshall’s claustrophobic subterranean shocker about a group of female spelunkers is tense enough just watching them navigating uncharted caves as their predicament gets worse and worse, then adding the mid-point twist in just ratchets up the tension to almost unbearable levels, with Mr Conway excelling in his antagonist role amongst an almost all-female cast at the absolute top of their game. But if you like your horror intense and at very close quarters…

 

Possibly the best found footage-style horror film you’ll see, the Spanish language shocker has us following a news crew around a Barcelona tower block as they cover a night in the life of a fire crew, called out to a disruption in one of the apartments. Once inside, we find panicked residents, some of them a bit bitey, and then we discover that the team have been locked inside, with the building apparently under a government quarantine due to some sort of vague disease outbreak. With the film coming out in 2007, it preceded Covid by 18 years, but watching it since then, it adds an extra layer to the terror. As the team work their way up the block of flats, we find more and more people infected by…something, and the more they find out, the worse it gets. Full of jumps and ‘what was that in the corner of the screen’ moments, the film is absolutely terrifying. And as for the pitch black/night vision scene in the attic. Absolutely terrifying!