Aggravastard Aggrebastard

September 24th, 2009

d26-rko-pictures

  • Wouldn’t call myself a horror movie buff, because I didn’t even run to the cinema to watch the last Jason movie, and just because  ‘buff’ is one of those words I will never use without killing myself quickly after. However this list of the 20 Greatest Horror Films You Haven’t Seen is a total red rag to a (hhmm… so if not ‘buff’, what is the right word to use? Ah yes -) bellend like me. In the interests of disclosure – I have seen merely one of these films, and it’s the obvious Argento one at the end, the condescending sop to my pride.  Back in, y’know, yore, this list would have motivated me to go and dig around the shadier video shops in town, look in the ads in Fangoria, called that bootleggy piratey guy I used to know who’s always got a line on that kid of thing. Thankfully none of those semi-social and potentially rewarding activites are necessary in this day and age – look at the shit you can find just with a bit of typing into google!!!
  • The weather may be brighter and better than we’ve had in ages, but this time of year still means just one thing to me and the Favourite: dark and chilly evenings, on the sofa, watching creepy movies. Any kind of creepy movie will do in  a pinch, but if Boris Fucking Karloff is involved the fear-fun factor just goes crazy and Friday nights will never be the same. Number whatever on Total Film’s list, Isle of the Dead.
  • Lemora – ‘Lovecraft, Barrie, Buñuel, Lang, Lewton’. Stop there, I’m sold.
  • Spider Baby – Corman gives us the dark story behind that whole Peter/Mary Jane/Mephisto menage a three thing – thanks Rog!
  • Hour of the Wolf – One you can talk to your real friends about – it’s Bergman, it’s art, it’s allowed.
  • So all that took about ten minutes to find. Got to guess that as many as half the twenty could be found online if you had a proper dig. While flicking around also came across The Devil’s Messenger. Not had the chance to watch it yet, but apparently it’s a ‘movie’ hacked together from three episodes of the never-broadcast, Lon Chaney-fronted, Swedish-produced horror series 13 Demon Street. It’s a weird (in the technical sense of the word) show, with that eerie b-grade atmosphere that David Lynch refined into its own meta-psycho-horror aesthetic. If not for the fact that it’s almost impossible he could ever have seen it, it would have to count alongside Carnival and Orphee as a key source-text for Lynch, so close is the feel to Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and the creepier bits of Twin Peaks.
  • The bit from Orphee that tends to stick in my mind is him inside his car, inside his garage, picking up impossible and suggestive number station transmissions through the radio. Zom was kind enough to explain to me what number stations were circa the first season of Lost and the Rousseau transmission (wait a minute: Rousseau-Cocteau, oh just got that). This documentary originally broadcast on Radio 4 is an absolutely fascinating look at this global ‘mystery’.

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