The horrorblog bounty is nigh inexhaustible these days.
Johnny Bacardi has completed his list of his favorite (he emphasizes that they’re not “the best”) horror films. It’s interesting to me that he seems to like almost all of them for the fun factor, not the fright factor. I’ve never really dug on horror movies for that reason–at least not as a teen or grownup; when I was a kid I loved good ol’ fashioned Universal Pictures creature features, and holy jeez was I a Godzilla fan. But now, I want to be scared shitless, so any list of my favorite horror films will at least have pretensions towards being a list of “the best” ones (insofar as the scariest ones are the best).
Franklin Harris offers some do’s and dont’s for cable-TV Halloween movie-watching. His list seems like a good one to me.
Franklin also talks about his favorite horror director, Italian horror pioneer Mario Bava.
Eve Tushnet does her own rambly horror round-up, summarizing four separate approaches to/explanations of horror, including my own favorite.
Meanwhile, Eve’s post on Magritte really got me to thinking about what I love in Magritte’s work, and yes, it’s undoubtedly the horror characteristics. (I think the same applies to the only other artist (non-comics, that is) of whose work I bought a book, Salvador Dali.) Magritte is a master of the monumental horror image–the bulk of his work is dedicated to showing things that ought not be shown, presenting them in the dead center of a static frame, lighting them so that there can be no room for doubt as to what you are witnessing, letting the existence of the image itself, and not any threat the image engenders, create the frisson of horror within the viewer. Look at The Pleasure Principle, Discovery, Man with Newspaper, The Tomb of the Wrestlers, The Castle in the Pyrenees, Poison, the entire series of portraits in which people are replaced by coffins–this is the pointless, debased riot of nonsense that is “reality,” he’s saying. Look. Feast your eyes.
(As you’ll notice if you track down the paintings listed above, Magritte’s titles are also chillingly brilliant, casting a pall over the viewer’s perception of what they about to see as surely as a title like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would. They’re almost as good as the paintings themselves.)
Finally, David Fiore has opened up a whole nother blog in order to expand on his already expansive theories about popular art. The thing is formatted in such a way that it’s nearly impossible for me to read it with my web browser, but you’re welcome to check it out–here’s a post on the villain in The Turn of the Screw.