BOO! Before I make my Halloween horror recommendations, can I assume that you’ve seen The Others? Those of you resisting a theatrical viewing are missing one classy scarefest, with a literate script, a great castle setting, a cool, pale star turn by Nicole Kidman, and three or four scream-out-loud ghoulish jolts. I even savored the surprise ending.

And if you plan to curl up at home with creepy movies and seasonal candy corn? Here’s my video-store checklist of the 25 greatest horror flicks ever produced: Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (the greatest), David Cronenberg’s The Brood and Dead Ringers, Kurt Neumann’s The Fly (the original), Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People and Curse of the Demon, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, John Carpenter’s Halloween, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Erle Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls, Charles Barton’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, James Whale’s Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Tod Browning’s Freaks, Karl Freund’s Mad Love, Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death and The Little Shop of Horrors, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, George Waggner’s The Wolf Man, Terence Fisher’s The Horror of Dracula, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (silent), Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat, and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Filmmaker Jacques Tourneur, the subject of a knowing 1998 scholarly volume, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, by my Phoenix colleague Chris Fujiwara, is represented on my list by two eerie films; and a third Tourneur horror movie of distinction, I Walked with a Zombie (1943), plays Halloween night at the Harvard Film Archive. In this slimmed-down, mini-budget West Indies retelling of Jane Eyre, a nurse comes to Haiti to minister to her brooding boss’s flipped-out wife, who has come under a disruptive voodoo spell. Tourneur evokes an oneiric Caribbean of the mind, and the final scene, in which a tall, lank, mesmerized native holds the wife in his arms and sleepwalks into an inky sea, stands as one of cinema’s grand surrealist gestures.

One supernatural movie not enough for a night out? Note that this Saturday the Coolidge Corner will have a midnight-to-noon (that’s midnight Saturday to noon Sunday) All Night Horror Movie Marathon, with six features plus what the Coolidge calendar describes as "gruesome shorts, bloody surprises, and plain old evil." The program includes Scream (the 1996 original!), The Exorcist, and The Evil Dead II. My favorite film in this collection is The Howling (1981); this 20th-anniversary showing celebrates a prime werewolf work by a pre-Gremlins Joe Dante, who had grown up writing fanzine articles for such magazines as Castle of Frankenstein. That’s why The Howling is populated with a supporting cast of genre-movie icons: John Carradine, the post-Lugosi Dracula; Kevin McCarthy, the paradigmatic paranoid from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Kenneth Tobey, the stalwart hero and mutant-carrot killer from The Thing; Dick Miller, the nebbish star of The Little Shop of Horrors. The Avengers’ Patrick Macnee plays a psychiatrist named Dr. George Waggner, in homage to the director of The Wolf Man. And there’s a Roger Corman walk-on.

The Howling is half-goof. The jokes are in the hip script by John Sayles; the horror comes from the master designs of then 21-year-old Rob Bottin. Our hero, Eddie, does a two-minute on-screen makeover, sprouting shrubby hair, a hideous snout, foul claws, a Superman barrel chest, and teeth magnificently yellowed from chewing illicit carrion. "All the script said was ‘Eddie turns into a werewolf,’ " Bottin explained when I asked. He said that having a basketball-player-sized werewolf was something he’d picked up while working on Roger Corman’s Humanoid from the Deep: "Corman walked up to a humanoid and said, ‘Stand up and be big. Big is scary.’ "

The Coolidge all-night-of-horror is completed with George Romero’s Monkey Shines (1988), in which a drugged-up homicidal monkey acts out the anger of his wheelchair-bound owner, and The Bad Seed (1956), the schlock movie (John Waters’s favorite!) based on the kitsch Maxwell Anderson Broadway play from the spurious William March bestselling novel about a merrily murdering eight-year-old girl. Both films are fun in parts but wear out their welcome with unconscionable running times. But they’ll be great places for 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. snoozes.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.

Issue Date: October 25 - November 1, 2001