Supplemental Horror

The discerning readers of LewRockwell.com recognized at once the urgency of appending to any list of great horror films, the companion list of shameful omissions. Here then, is my penitent codicil and my ready admission that there remain still hundreds of masterworks too sophisticated for my sensibilities or too frightening for me to watch!

“The Shining” (1980)

After Dr. Strangelove, this is arguable Stanley Kubrick’s most cogent film in terms of narrative force. Jack Nicholson’s performance is an unequivocal triumph of obsessive madness and ironic urbanity.

“Phantasm” (1979)

Don Coscarelli’s hypnotically surreal exploration of a haunted mortuary and its evil proprietor, Angus Scrimm, who robs graves and creates zombies, slaying the innocent with a flying silver ball that drills his victims’ brains. The violence in this film is wry and inventive. If the story is unclear, it is because Coscarelli does not divide his universe between day and night, but between dreams and nightmares.

“Silence of the Lambs” (1991)

Johnathan Demme’s effortlessly lyrical investigation into the darkened oubliettes of sexuality was the first horror film ever to win an Oscar for best picture; in fact, almost everyone involved won. Despite Jodie Foster’s wildly inauthentic West-Virginia accent and her performance’s absurd feminist inflections and a terrible editing blunder in the night-vision scene with Buffalo Bill (you can see the shadow of his hand on her shoulder even though it’s supposed to be pitch black as he stalks her with infra-red goggles), here is an occasion to witness Sir Anthony Hopkins create from the dross of a Hollywood screenplay, a portrait of terror that reimagines Rosetti’s Goblin Market as a grimoire of exquisite suffering.

“The Innocents” (1961)

Jack Clayton reconsiders Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw” as an explicit encounter with the Other. Deborah Kerr is truly splendid here as the governess terrorized by her interior doubts and an unknowable world.

“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962)

Joan Crawford. Bette Davis. What else does one need to know?

“Suddenly Last Summer” (1959)

This deliciously oblique film explores the circumstances leading to the murder of a gay man who preys on adolescent boys. Katherine Hepburn is magisterial as Miss Venable, the mother who haunts a fortress of denial. Her perfectly insane daughter, the beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, weaves a tale of terror and desperation in this film’s legendary final scene. Joseph Mankiewicz was never more resourceful or successful.

November 2, 2000

Scott Wilkerson is curator of the Ward Library at the Mises Institute.