ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1933)
This is the original screen version of the H. G Wells story that has more recently been filmed and re-filmed under the title The Island of Dr. Moreau. While the Brando-Val Kilmer version is to be respected for its pure freak-out quality, this early talkie is still the most effective in terms of conviction and scare power, mainly because Charles Laughton's performance as Moreau is one of the all-time great prototypes of the mad scientist: a bloated power junkie with Fu Manchu facial hair and a fondness for the whip, he inspires none of the "Gee, he meant well!" sympathetic understanding that, say, Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein earns even at his most overwrought and barking mad. It's a measure of how strong a presence Laughton has here that the shop steward of his crew of half-human mutants is played by Bela Lugosi, only two years away from his own screen triumph as Dracula. Years later, after the roles dried up and the drugs took over, Lugosi would be a sadly depleted version of his former self, but at this stage in his movie career, you had to be one convincingly satanic son of a bitch to wade into his turf and start handing him orders.
INVADERS FROM MARS (1953)
This independently produced sci-fi horror movie was directed by William Cameron Menzies, best known as an art director and production designer so imaginative and assured that even the perfectionist (i.e., anal to the nth degree) producer David O. Selznick had absolute trust in him. When Menzies directed the 1935 sci-fi movie Things to Come, from a script by H. G. Wells, the futuristic design swallowed up the story, but here, the stylized look of the film does a bang-up job of conveying the paranoid hopelessness of the hero, a little boy who looks through his bedroom window one night and sees something weird coming in for a landing, and then has the devil's own time trying to find a trustworthy and open-minded authority figure who'll listen to his complaint that his mom and dad aren't...themselves. This one sets the standard for the subgenre of the scare movie seen through the eyes of a kid, a kid much like all those pop-eyed little ragamuffins in the audience.
MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)
This Warners film may be less well known now than the 1953 remake House of Wax, which was in 3-D and also helped launch the horror phase of Vincent Price's career. But this version is the one that really packs the goods. Lionel Atwill is the scarred-face sculptor whose waxworks sure do look realistic as all get out; Fay Wray, who had earlier teamed with Atwill in the 1932 Doctor X, gets to show off the lung power that made her the original scream queen for the first movie era when you could actually hear the screams. Also, the fact that this is a Warners movie means that it's more contemporary and lively than the Universal classics, which sometimes seemed to have been made to utilize a lot of Bavarian-villager costumes that the studio had picked up on the cheap. Like Doctor X, the representatives of the straight world here are wisecracking newspaper reporters, a constant of Warners films, because they had so many actors on the payroll who couldn't play anything else. And it's in color, but an early, unreal shade of Technicolor that adds to the sense of unease: the people look as if they've been hand-painted even before they get dipped in wax.
THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)
An especially choice example of the sci-fi film as monster movie: while the 1982 John Carpenter remake earns its props for the amazing special effects work by Rob Bottin, this one is hard to beat for the old-school pleasures of watching its hyper-competent, well-oiled crew of military men and scientists, plus a babe and a lovably slap-headed, wisecracking reporter, go about determining the best way to cope with the arrival of a homicidal "intellectual carrot" from outer space. (The carrot was played by James Arness, for twenty years the star of TV's Gunsmoke, and odds are that this is the closest he ever came to getting to play an intellectual.) Special kudos to Robert Cornthwaite for taking one for the team by playing Dr. Carrington, thus creating the indispensable but hard-not-to-snicker-at prototype of the "man of science" who, in this and a million sci-fi movies to come, would rush between the monster and the guys with the tanks and the flamethrowers and deliver a speech that goes something like, "Wait! Wait! This visitor has come to us from a civilization far advanced than our own! It must have had a good reason for hollowing the president out and using him as a hand puppet!"
TOMB OF LIGEIA (1964)
This was the last of the eight movies that Roger Corman directed based on the works, or at least the titles, of Edgar Allan Poe, and while it would go against everything Roger Corman stands for to suggest that practice may have actually enabled him to get better at something, this probably is the best of them. It may have helped that then-unknown Robert Towne wrote the script, but Corman also got some wild fever that compelled him to splurge on actual outdoor locations in the English countryside, which give this film a rooted, atmospheric quality and an edge over the ones set mostly inside a cardboard castle. Elizabeth Shepherd is fine as the doomed romantic heroine, and Vincent Price, the mainstay of the Corman-Poe films, cuts a striking figure in his top hat, black cape, and John Lennon sunglasses.
TIME OF THE WOLF (2003)
Just as The Fly showed us that cinema can transform something as banal as the fear of sickness into phantasmagoric terror, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf showed us they can wreak utter horror out of something as ordinary as simple helplessness. Haneke’s nickname is “the Master of Everyday Horror”, but what is in many ways his most effective film doesn’t take place in his usual everyday setting of bourgeois comfort. That’s where it starts, as a couple find strangers occupying their cabin in the country; but it soon becomes clear that they’re fleeing something extraordinary. Haneke never tips what has caused a widespread breakdown of law and order: it could be a war, or an environmental disaster, or a plague. But one thing is clear: from this point forward, everyone is on their own. Authorities have disappeared, and people like Isabelle Huppert and her two young children find themselves at the mercy of the goodwill of others – a quality that, it soon becomes apparent, is decreasingly available. Nothing much happens in Time of the Wolf: it’s not gory, it’s not sensationalistic like many post-apocalyptic films, and most of its violence is implied rather than seen. But the more society falls apart, even in microcosm, with prejudice, sexual violence, strongarm tactics, and the specter of deprivation always increasing, the more the film creates a horrible, almost unbearable sense of unease. It may be Haneke’s most human film, as he seems to actually care about the fate of his suffering creations; but it’s also one of the bleakest, most depressing films ever made.
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Contributors: Phil Nugent The Ripper, Dr. Jekyll & Leonard Pierce