2 Horror Films That Out-Halloween "Halloween"

"He has his father's eyes."
Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Halloween is in four days. It's now or never to get your scare on. I’m back with a couple more seasonal suggestions -- one obvious, the other, less so.

Joe and I have been partying the month away by half-watching AMC’s FearFest, a celebration of mediocre-to-execrable horror films mostly from the ‘80s and ‘90s. These offerings reflect the paucity of intellect that afflicts the genre.

 

But not all horror films are garbage. The best ones – like 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and 1961’s The Innocents – give your brain a workout while offering chills and thrills. In these, the quality of storytelling, the suspense, and the psychological fear evoked without graphic violence, put the whole messy Halloween saga to shame. 

 

Why do horror movies matter? Because the best ones manage to be about two things at once – they are both entertaining and topical, alluding to societal phobias, bodily threats, and collective neuroses in well-told stories that reveal themselves with mounting suspense. 

 

Take Rosemary’s Baby. I have relished it so many times that it is practically committed to memory. Rewatching the Roman Polanski film is one of my October rituals. Despite my familiarity with it, it still manages to frighten me. The theme song, the claustrophobic phone booth scene, the closet passageway to the neighbors' apartment, the coven's paradoxical banality, and the final reveal -- all of this still gives me the creeps. Today as when it first came out, this thriller can be taken as a powerful allegory of women’s fight for bodily autonomy; but it succeeds because the allegory works hand-in-glove with a scary, occult story. 

Unthinkable
The Innocents (1961)

Another chilling supernatural tale, Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, also works on two levels: as a pre-Freudian allegory of repressed sexuality and as a grand old-fashioned ghost story. The two interpretations vie with each other – there is the consummate ghost story asserting “this is just a ghost story,” and there is Freud, waiting in the wings to remind us that the only real ghosts live in our unconscious minds. All of this was made into a completely shocking 1961 film, The Innocents starring Deborah Kerr as the troubled governess; it dares to go into taboo territory that is still unimaginable in a less nuanced film. 

 

Today’s Halloween films lack any nuance and do not lead to a sense of discovery or revelation. They strike a mood, but the content is violence for its own sake. They are cinematic wallpaper. 

 

Whether you opt for devil worshippers at the Dakota or a psychologically compromised governess in a Victorian mansion, Rosemary and The Innocents are films of enduring quality that represent scares done right. It is not just me, but Truman Capote who “likened [Rosemary author Ira Levin] to Henry James.” The two films have much in common: the power of suggestion, and rising suspense driving toward inevitable and ghastly conclusions. 

 

For the first or the fiftieth time, watch one of them tonight.