It's Halloween horror filmathon time. Here are the films I intend to watch over this despicable season... 

Evil Dead 2

For me, the king of all horror-comedy and my personal favourite horror film. It does look a little rough around the edges these days, and the claymation bit especially looks as dated as Ray Harryhausen's classics (which I also love), but the affect of the film is not. Bruce Campbell plays our hero, Ash, attempting to survive the night against an evil entity that not only animates physically to attack him but also assaults him mentally at every opportunity. It's a a tour de force of horror film-making. The evil viscerally and audibly permeates every beam and wall of the cabin as it tries to force its way into our reality and Ash is forced to loosen his grip on his own sanity in order to stay ahead of the malevolent force. But who needs sanity when you have a chainsaw attached to your stump? "Who's laughing now!" We are. very, very much.

I should probably have left it for later in the film season but I'm impatient. It's just too good.

Rubber

Post-modern, experimental, amusing and unique, Rubber is a horror oddity. An inanimate tire comes to life and ‘realises' (literally, the tire's learning curve and reaction is masterfully directed) that it has the power to kill.  Rubber is an artful exploration of the anthropomorphised monster and of surrealist horror storytelling. It possibly drags on a little in the middle third but the film is too distinctive and weird to suffer greatly from it.

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978)

The 1970s version of this film is the best of them and probably of the bodysnatching sub-genre itself (with The Thing possibly running a close second). It is dialogically adult and its dramatic approach, especially the conceptual discussions of the main characters, bed the film in the zeitgeist and social construct of the period.  The slow, cultural replacement of Donald Sutherland's group of friends and confidantes sets up the terror of this inescapable foe, one which will replace you if you fall asleep. The end is shocking, bleak and wonderfully depressing.

Cronos

Guillermo del Toro's first venture into big-screen horror and it is, as you would expect, both dark and elegant. A bejewelled, metallic, scarab-beetle looking device is created that imbues its wearer, once its claws are sunk in to them, with immortality. Ron Perlman seeks to find the device, his search set against the touching, yet still sad, story of a young girl and her now-immortal grandfather.

Dawn of the Dead (1974)

George Romero's masterpiece, and the best of the true zombie films. By true, I mean that they are the shambolic, decayed, mindless flesheaters they should be, and none of this nonsensical free-running parkour undead that seems to be expected nowadays. In this film, with the outbreak slowly taking over the entire US, a group find and secure a mall to live in. The inevitable, inescapable fall comes, but throughout the film is replete with social commentary and bleak human analysis. THE prototypical zombie film

Let the Right One in

I only ever saw the first twenty minutes of this one (I'd downloaded a copy that only had the audio description subtitles ‘Snow patters, a wind rustles through the leaves...) however I'm fairly confident I'm going to love the rest of it.

Braindead

Before Lord of the Rings and King Kong, Peter Jackson was a gore-fest director. Bad Taste won special effects plaudits but my favourite is Braindead, a wonderful comedic horror, following a doting son who finds he is required to kill his mother, and much of the local populous due to a Sumatran Rat Monkey bite zombifying them. Weapon of choice; lawnmower...

The Shining

Still not as good as the book but, although fiercer Stephen King fans than I may decry how far it strayed from the book's premise and theme, Stanley Kubrick's Overlook Hotel is cavernous, sumptuous and, with Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall's phenomenal performances, quite terrifying. Redrum! Redrum!

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

I remember borrowing a bootleg video of this when I was fifteen, closing the curtains and settling down to watch it before my parents came home from work. I managed to get through the first half hour before having to stop it, after deciding it was too nasty to watch alone. And it was. Bloody brilliant. Slightly dated now and the series crawled downwards in quality as they went on, but this first chapter was horrible. I owned, and loved, a Freddy Krueger knife-glove for many years...

Shadow of the Vampire

Sublime, in both concept and execution. Shadow of the Vampire follows the film director, FW Murnau, played by John Malkovich, as he struggles to complete the filming of possibly the most famous vampire film, Nosferatu. The film, being shot entirely in Romania, has an eccentric star in Max Shreck who never departs from his character, supposedly due to being a student of Stanislavski's method style of acting. However, Shreck, masterfully played by Willem Dafoe, is in truth an ancient Vampyr, and Murnau has hired him to play the lead, on the proviso that he may feed on the leading lady when the production is finished. Rich, stylish and funny (Eddie Izzard and Cary Elwes ably support), Shadow of the Vampire is a wonderful piece of metafiction horror.

Event Horizon

A horror film that actually scared me as an adult, this science-fiction horror is to some extent a Hellraiser in space, as the lost ship Event Horizon is rediscovered nine years after its experimental engine had taken it out of the known Universe. When it returns, only glimpses of the inhabitant's video-log can hint at the horrors that the crew experienced, and what it brought back with it.

The Thing (1982)

Kurt Russell is brilliant, and somehow not the typical, comedy caricature of himself he generally plays  in other films. His whisky-drinking helicopter pilot, Mac ready, serves as our focus within the Arctic scientific outpost that the alien attacks. This monster is no hulking evil but an organism that corrupts and perfectly replaces it's victims. It skulks and picks off, bides its time and multiplies. The atmosphere of tension and paranoia that is created is palpable and the explosive body-horror of the creature(s) when exposed is brilliantly realised, graphically gory and even, despite the mood of the film, humorous.

Pan's Labyrinth

Guillermo del Toro's second entry in the horror-thon and it is dark and beautiful. A true fairytale, I was in love with it from the moment, sat in the cinema, that Captain Vidal brutally smashed in an old man's teeth with a bottle. Blimey! The film's dark, magical realism offsets the visceral brutality of Ofelia's actual reality. Sorrowful, disturbing and powerful, Pan's Labyrinth is phenomenal. And the peek-a-boo ‘playing' Pale Man is horrifyingly brilliant.

A few extra titles that didn't quite make it into this season:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare Before Christmas/Corpse Bride, An American Werewolf in London, The Frighteners, Eraserhead, Wolf Creek, The Devil's Backbone, Rec, Fido and Tucker and Dale vs Evil.

Obituary – Peter O’Toole

Originally posted on the 19th December 1013.

Peter O’Toole’s portrayal of TE Lawrence in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 is undeniably his most celebrated role and immortalised him in film history. However, he did not receive an Oscar for his performance. In fact, across his career he would receive an Oscar nomination a further seven occasions, without once winning.

Outside of his portrayal of Lawrence asking what the next most memorable screen role that Peter O’Toole played is, in part, a question of generation. To ask my parents, they would boast of his subtle performance in Goodbye Mr Chips, or his theatrical presence in The Lion in Winter. For younger generations, strong performances such as Colonel Blount in Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, or as Priam, the wise ruler in Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy may be their more memorable film roles.

For myself, my favourite moment of his is from the opening scene to Keith Waterstone’s Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. As the lights rise on the interior of a pub in the dead of night, O'Toole's Jeffrey Bernard wakes from under a table and begins coughing fitfully. He rises, struggling and searches for his coat. Bent double from his wheezing, he finally locates the jacket and reaches into the pocket. Still hacking wretchedly, he eventually pulls out a cigarette, raises it to his mouth, finally lights it and inhales before the coughing abates. Jeffrey Bernard breathes deeply, and begins to tell his story.

Although Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell is a stage play, I was watching the show on video. Such was the popularity of O’Toole’s performance when it ran in 1991 that tickets were exchanging hands outside the theatre for £500. The play, written by Keith Waterhouse about the life and times in Soho of his friend, the alcoholic Spectator columnist Jeffrey Bernard, detailed through many humorous, foolish and sometimes touching stories what it was to live this roguish life of alcoholic indulgence. The play’s title is a reference to the line that would regularly replace his column when he was too drunk to submit his article.

O’Toole plays the titular role with a battered grace and humour that elevates his misadventures beyond the lonely, diminished reality of the lifestyle and the reminiscences over so many dead friends, to give Bernard’s wandering homeless drunk a sense of tragic, charming grandeur.

The ease with which he carries off this performance must in some way be due to the fact that he himself had lived a similar lifestyle. Though often criticised of squandering their talents, alongside legendary drinkers Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Richard Burton (who shares O’Toole’s record of eight Oscar nominations and no wins), O’Toole was an unrepentant hellraiser and tales of the group’s outrageous debauchery ensured O’Toole a status of beloved roguish infamy, as well as Hollywood fame.  

Peter O’Toole was awarded an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2003 which he initially intended to reject, quipping that he would rather “win the lovely bugger outright.” Unfortunately, he never did, but with performances such as TE Lawrence and Jeffrey Bernard, and such a wealth of stories of his drunken excesses, he will remain an unforgettable figure. The last of the great screen hellraisers of the 60’s has died. 

Some Are Born To Sweet Delight - Dead Man

‘Well, that doesn't explain... why you've come all the way out here... all the way out here to hell.’

‘l... uh... I have a job out in the town of Machine.’

‘Machine?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s the end of the line!’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes!’

As the train makes its way across the American frontier toward the edge of civilisation, the driver portentously warns Johnny Depp’s character, William Blake what he might expect. 

‘You’re just as likely to find your own grave.’

And so begins Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, an indie film Western like none other you might have seen before. 

I was once a huge Johnny Depp fan. I still am, I guess, but my respect for him has diminished over the last decade, under the weight of the increasingly wearying Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, a paucity of great roles that he has chosen and the deteriorating quality of the creative output from his collaborations with Tim Burton.

However, in 1995 it was different; Depp was my favourite actor. I loved him, not just for his performances but also for the integrity of his choices. Attempting to exorcise his 21 Jump Street driven teen icon reputation, Depp eschewed offers to play mainstream Hollywood lead roles in favour of working with maverick indie filmmakers and embarked on a number of bizarre cinematic projects. This resulted in such wonderful film offerings as Edward Scissorhands, Arizona Dream, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Ed Wood.

As such, when he signed up to work with cult indie director Jim Jarmusch on Dead Man, I was excited. At this point I had only seen Jarmusch direct the unconventional film narratives of Mystery Train and Night on Earth so was intrigued by what he and Depp would produce together. I certainly wasn’t expecting the film to be a black and white Western.

However, to pigeonhole Dead Man as a mere Western would be an insult. The film does not fit into the easy genre divisions of the John Wayne heroic cowboy type, nor the same type of gritty realism as the Clint Eastwood or Sergio Leone models. It could be described as a metaphysical journey toward death, and the set pieces within the script format could as easily lend themselves to a stage performance. It is an oddity, a film peculiarity that is hard to categorise. Of course it is, it’s a Jim Jarmusch film.

Depp plays an accountant, William Blake, who travels across the American frontier to the town of Machine for a job, but upon arrival finds the position filled. He spends his last coins on a bottle of whiskey and is taken home by a paper-flower seller, Thel, whose ex-lover, portrayed unsettlingly by Gabriel Byrne, returns as they lie in bed. Byrne kills Thel, to which Blake clumsily manages to shoot him in reply with Thel’s gun. However, the bullet fired at her had passed through and into Blake’s chest. Wounded, he steals Byrne’s horse and escapes. Byrne’s character turns out to be the son of Mr Dickinson, the owner of Machine’s metal-works, played magnificently by Robert Mitchum, in his last screen role. Dickinson puts out a reward for his capture, dead or alive, despatching bounty hunters and the law after Blake. The chase is on.

So far, so typically cowboy film, you’d be forgiven for thinking. It is a chase film, but as the film progresses it easy to forget this. Jarmusch does not so much mesh the narrative together seamlessly as connect a series of staged scenes together, developing the odd interactions to their peak, and ending with an almost frozen vignette, such as when Thell, after being pushed to the muddy floor in Machine, looking directly at Blake, states ‘Why don’t you just paint a portrait?’’. These vignettes are beautifully composed, with cinematographer Robby Muller’s creation of a supremely rich black and white palette, producing a sumptuously crisp effect.

The entire soundtrack to the film was provided by Neil Young. Improvised, it was recorded alone in a studio, while watching the film on an early full edit. His powerful but minimalist guitar work underscores the entire film like a gathering storm, each note punctuating and inter-seaming the individual scenes. 

The narrative’s mixture of mysticism, unreality and philosophy is embodied in every scene by the array of amazing cameos that permeate the film. Each scene is supported by powerful and evocative performances by its phenomenal cast, including Crispin Glover, John Hurt, Alfred Molina, Lance Henriksen and Michael Wincott. A particularly funny scene involves Blake’s encounter with three trappers, Billy-Bob Thornton, Jarred Harris and Iggy Pop.

However, it is the film’s central relationship between Blake and his ‘Indian’ companion, played by Gary Farmer that defines the film. Farmer’s character calls himself Nobody. He is western educated, having been captured as a child and taken as a peculiarity to England. On returning, years later, his tribe take his tales for lies, calling him Exaybachay ‘he who talks loud, say nothing.’ As he explains, he prefers to be called Nobody. When he finds out that this ‘stupid fucking white man’ is called William Blake, he is taken aback, having learned the poet’s work in England. Nobody will not be dissuaded from his belief that Blake is the embodiment of the poet’s soul; ‘it is so strange that you don’t remember your poetry’, and commits to taking Blake to The Mirror Sea in order to be joined again with the Great Spirits.

But this is not just a quirky affectation applied to a stereotypical character type for the sake of humour. Jarmusch has a deep love of multiculturalism, and often inserts scenes with characters of different languages, unable to understand each other, as exampled in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and the relationship between Forrest Whittaker’s English-speaking Ghost Dog and Isaach De Bankolé’s French-speaking Raymond. Jarmusch revels in such cultural interactions and demonstrates his joy at Nobody’s childish innocence as well as venerating his natural wisdom. Furthermore, as the film progresses, through Blake’s exhausted acceptance of his situation to his transformation into the poet gunslinger Nobody sees him as, it is hard to discern what the reality of the story truly is. In the end, Blake ties his fate to his gun, fulfilling Nobody’s portentous statement, ‘That weapon will replace your tongue. You will learn to speak through it. And your poetry will now be written in blood.’

This narrative development from the East to the West, from the town of Machine to the sea is the canvas upon which Jarmusch sculpts his odd directorial musings. From the industrial to the natural, from lawlessness and order to lawlessness and mysticism, from reality to unreality, Dead Man takes us on a funny, brutal, intriguing and poignant journey. It is a masterpiece of unconventional storytelling.

‘Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.’

     -          William Blake