Horror Hall of Awesome: 1960s
To celebrate Halloween — which is surely the finest holiday of the year — I’ve decided to count down the best horror films of all time – by decade. Here’s the score: every day between now and Halloween, I’m posting a list of 10 indispensable horror flicks per decade. And on Halloween, I’m going to tell you which one of these films is the GREATEST horror flick of all time.
I’ve chosen the 1960s as a starting point for this horror blog-o-rama, not only because so many horror films began appearing during this decade, but also because so many genre formulas were born or greatly refined.
Naturally, I expect that there will be disagreement about these choices. So I hope that you’ll weigh in with your choices. What do you think is better, scarier, gorier, MORE awesome?
Ready? Here we go….
Top of the Awesome – 1960s
1. Night of the Living Dead (1968). Prior to the zombie renaissance of the past few years, Night of the Living Dead largely had the reputation of being a grainy, low-budget shlockfest, thanks to a lot of cheap copies made from crummy prints. (Not true! It’s actually full of all kinds of lovely black-and-white cinematography and wild, lurching comic book angles.) However, it’s disappointing how many zombiephiles have actually seen Night of the Living Dead. It plays thoughtfully on the boundaries between human and zombie, it’s gleefully gory, and the still frames of the ending are positively chilling. It is the single most influential film on this list. Bonus: it’s full of Aristotelian poetic goodness!
2. Peeping Tom (1960). British slasher/thriller Peeping Tom is an impressively prescient film. Not only did it provide a sharp, scary, and psychologically complex portrait of a killer, but it also anticipated about thirty years’ worth of film thrillers (and, correspondingly, became central to about thirty years’ worth of film criticism about film violence and cinematic pleasures). The film centers on a young man, Mark Lewis, who works as a focus puller in a film studio, who becomes obsessed with both the effects of fear and spectacle of it (thanks to his experience of being the subject of numerous fear-based experiments conducted during his childhood by his father). So, naturally, Mark becomes a compulsive killer who stalks women, kills them, and records their terror as they die. As creepy now as it probably was when it was released (albeit for different reasons), Peeping Tom is an absolute must-see.
3. Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Although I kind of loathe putting a Polanski film on a top list of anything right now, there’s just not many films that can match Rosemary’s Baby for generating such an eerie, macabre tension without resorting to all-out scare tactics. (Who needs special effects when you have Ruth Gordon?) Rosemary’s Baby also really lays the groundwork for the gadzillion demonic pregnancy films that followed in its wake, although few can match the terror in Mia Farrow’s performance as a woman moving from denial to acceptance of her satanic pregnancy and progeny. You know, the truth is that this film creeps me out more and more as I get older.
…And rounding out the decade’s horror hall of awesome….
4. Psycho (1960). I’m not sure I have much to write about Psycho that hasn’t already been written. But I’m pretty sure that some of you would happily arm wrestle me to try to get it into the top three.
5. Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face) (1960). No, I’m not talking about the Billy Idol song. I’m talking about French director Georges Franju’s film about a crazymadbrilliant surgeon who murders young woman and attempts to graft their faces onto his disfigured daughter. Seriously, uncannily, freaky. (I’ve always wanted to dress up as the daughter for Halloween, but thinking about wearing that mask scares me too much. Yeeps.)
6. The Haunting (1963). A surprisingly subtle and very frightening adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House. There just aren’t many good film adaptations of Jackson’s books, but The Haunting manages to carry over some of the psychological complexity of her Jackson’s haunted house tale, and that’s an achievement-and-a-half.
7. Village of the Damned (1960). This little horror pic still resonates today with its visually striking blonde, glowing-eyed telepathic children, despite the fact that we’ve become pretty accustomed to seeing children with powers beyond our own on film.
8. The Birds (1963). It’s always kind of irked me that Hitchcock equates the malevolent, terrifying phenomenon of nature at the center of The Birds with Tippi Hedren’s freewheeling femininity. Nonethless, The Birds is a powerful and menacing film, and one of the most effective on-screen visions of nature gone wrong.
9. Carnival of Souls (1962). With an Ambrose Bierce-inspired twist and a harrowing organ score, Carnival of Souls is a pretty worthwhile little flick. Very deserving of its cult status.
10. La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday) (1960). This Mario Bava film about a bloodthirsty vampire/witch helped usher in the Italian horror aesthetic that made Dario Argento famous. I’ll admit that it’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen Black Sunday, but it’s stuck with me as quite a bloody, visual feast. One to see again!
(Whoah. 1960 was a monster year for horror films!)
Also, a note to fans of Hammer horror films: I get it. I know how much campy fun can be had watching Hammer films. I grant you how crazy lush and bizarrely erotic they are. But let’s face it: most of the Hammer films produced in the 1960s were crummy, unscary, forgettable sorta-sequels to their mediocre Dracula and Frankenstein originals. As such, they just don’t rate on a top ten list. But, yes, I am definitely psyched when I catch one of them on TV. Especially when Elvira is hosting.
Tomorrow: the 1970s!
