halloween – UCL Film & TV Society

Film Soc Shares their Favourite Frightening Films

Alex Dewing — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 18:00:58 +0000

A selection of our writers review and recommend their favourite horror films to add to your Halloween watch list. Check them out if you dare.

Dumplings (2004)

Fruit Chan’s Dumplings is the original Mukbang. The original cannibal Mukbang, that is. Originally released as one of the ‘Three…Extremes’, a collaboration between three directorial teams – Lilian Lee, Park Chan-wook and Bun Saikou with Haruko Fukushima – from three East-Asian countries – Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, Dumplings was later released as a full-length feature after a positive reception from critics and audience alike. The film follows Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung) as she attempts to regain the attentions of her straying husband by purchasing a new lease of life. To do this, Mrs Li seeks the help of Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), who attributes her preternatural maintenance of the vitality and figure of a twenty-two year old to a special dumpling-consumption regimen. ‘Ick’ ensues, as a cacophony of audiovisual-clues reveal that something a little crunchier than spring onions is encased in the opalescent folds of dough. Reflecting on the disastrous consequences of criminalising abortion, Dumplings represents the best of social-realist horror, which has seen a welcome resurgence in the past year, with films such as Jordan Peele’s Us and Ari Aster’s Midsommar topping box offices. Put simply, this is not for the faint of heart, but a multi-sensory treat for anyone endowed with a strong stomach.

Xara Zabihi Dutton

Angel Heart (1987)

Angel Heart is a creepy neo-noir psychological thriller that follows drifting private investigator Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) and his descent into a cryptic missing person’s case in 1950s New Orleans. Hired by the mysterious Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro), Angel stumbles around chain-smoking between visits to dusty colonial mansions, gritty blues shacks, and steamy gumbo huts, detangling the bigger mess of secret love affairs, black magic, and much spilled blood. The film’s atmosphere goes hard with the Louisiana imagery, obviously capitalising off New Orleans’ ‘voodoo’ reputation (is there potential for critical discussion of this — probably yes), producing a spooky, uneasy vibe. The film also features a very young Lisa Bonet as the seductive, seventeen-year-old Epiphany Proudfoot.

If you don’t watch this for the slow thrill, artful soundtrack, or X-rated erotica, watch it for DeNiro’s character’s innovative technique for peeling a hard-boiled egg: tap, tap, tap, crunchy roll. I can confirm it works really well and changes the game. And if that’s not enough, Christopher Nolan has also cited it as heavy inspiration for Memento.

Sofia Kourous Vázquez

The Evil Dead (1981)

Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead is a deeply cool film. It wears dark glasses and a leather jacket, and listens to bands you haven’t heard of. It feels effortless. But, like all things cool, behind the veneer of indifference lies a great deal of hard work. Without much in the way of professional training between the entire cast and crew, Raimi & co. set out to create a fiercely imaginative film with all the debauchery and violence promised but never delivered by triple feature horror B-movies. The plot faintly gestures at the ‘kids stay at the evil cabin in the woods’ prototype, but it is a half-finished thought that steps aside fairly quickly in favour of blood, guts, and gore. Tim Philo’s intense, relaxed yet incredibly precise cinematography lets Raimi show off the incredible make-up and practical effects by Tom Sullivan, a novice who seemingly only ever worked with Raimi. The camera swings around and upside down, zooming along the ground as restless as the angered spirits. Throughout all of this, Bruce Campbell (and his chin) dominate the screen as he bleeds, screams and brutally massacres what remains of his friends. The Evil Dead is a riveting, fascinating experience which leaves you breathless, chuckling, and desperate to get out into the woods with a bucket of corn syrup and a gaggle of misfits.

Jamie Cradden

ERASERHEAD (1977)

Surprise! Your girlfriend reveals she’s pregnant and gives birth to what looks like a reptilian demon-baby. We’ve all been there, and David Lynch’s 1977 debut film turned cult-classic Eraserhead revisits this relatable dilemma. Swap jump scares for low-grade dread by watching tall-haired Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) care for his baby’s inexplicable blisters; because nothing’s spookier than parenthood and the fear that your offspring will look like a fleshy sperm with nostrils. Drifting across the film’s monochromatic interiors, you’ll encounter a cadre of friendly faces such as the Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk) and Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Anna Roberts). My personal favorite is the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near), who grins and sidesteps with the delight of an older, deformed Shirley Temple. Put bluntly, watch this movie if you want to feel like you’ve been dropped into a sensory-deprivation tank and left there for so long that you lose to ability to distinguish between seconds and minutes, before and after, and what it’s like to have a body and have it move through space to meet a form of resistance that isn’t a wave or ripple; and to grip something hard, so hard that the solidity of the object presses deep into your hand and makes it numb or bloat or crumble; and to eat a tomato, to have a ripe tomato to pop and sink in your mouth like a loud vivid-red deflation; so that you can feel the film of the skin slide between your teeth and tongue and shred it into thin strips with the sharps of your molars, quickly, before you forget what a tomato is, or what eating is, or mouths are, or red, or words, or thoughts, or forgetting—

Harry Mizumoto

The Thing (1982)

Described upon release as “instant junk” and “a wretched excess,” The Thing paved the way for visually repulsive horror (John Carpenter walked so Ari Aster could run!) onscreen. The film follows a group of American researchers in Antarctica who encounter “the Thing,” an alien parasite that can assimilate and imitate any organism. Once they realize any one of them could become the Thing, the group grows increasingly paranoid and frenzied, leading to a complete derailing of their mission. The film is worth watching for its special effects alone ($1.5 million of the $15 million budget was spent on “creature effects” such as rubber and food products), but isn’t for the faint of heart. In one particularly disgusting scene, the Thing bursts out of someone’s chest, bites off the arm of a doctor, and then turns into a disgusting spider creature. Equal parts horrifying and fun, The Thing takes everything you love about 80s movies and completely ruins them; kind of like Alien, but worse.

Maria Düster

‘Dead Line’ Review: The Eerie ‘Inside No. 9’ Live Episode

Alex Dewing — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 17:47:49 +0000

Alex Dewing reviews the live Halloween special of the BBC dark comedy anthology series.

The deliciously dark duo of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who over the course of twenty-three years working together have introduced viewers to the twisted League of Gentleman and the equally wicked Psychoville, enter new territory in their latest project Dead Line. If the first episode is anything to go by, the upcoming fifth season of the anthology series Inside No. 9 will continue to make audiences laugh and scream in equal measure. This episode may surprise viewers not because it was broadcast months ahead of the rest of the show, but because it is the first episode to be broadcast entirely live. As one could expect from the creators of a series that features a musical episode, a single-shot episode written in iambic pentameter, and an episode shot entirely through CCTV cameras, Shearsmith and Pemberton continue to tackle more and more audacious ideas, raising the bar both for themselves and for TV itself. Dead Line, by far the pair’s most ambitious, and perhaps most enjoyable, project to date, went off without a hitch (so to speak).

This episode follows Arthur Flitwick (Pemberton) as he seemingly communes with the dead through an old flip phone found in the local graveyard. In his performance, Pemberton invokes the old whimsy of his beloved Psychoville character Oscar Lomax. Stephanie Cole brings more farcical humour in the ditzy Moira, friend of the lost phone’s owner, while Shearsmith makes his entry as the suspiciously saintly Reverend Neil – unfortunately alongside a brief technical glitch leaving the audience without audio.

Sadly, this slight glitch was not the only one to occur on the night of the live episode: as the transmission fell silent again a BBC apology placeholder appeared, the continuity announcer apologising for the “gremlins” in the system. A rerun of the popular episode A Quiet Night In was temporarily played as the sound issues were dealt with. The duo seems aware of how people are excited by such errors: “I think that’s what people want to see,” Pemberton himself said to the BBC Media Centre. Few others would be as excited about the prospect of technical failings as these two. However, it is this understanding of their audience that allows them to create a brilliantly harrowing experience in spite of the issues that befell them during transmission.

By the time Dead Line finds its footing again, the audience is thoroughly engaged and it takes no time at all for the scares to start rolling in. With a variety of filming techniques – including voyeuristic CCTV footage and found footage-style scenes reminiscent of BBC’s 1992 Halloween mockumentary Ghostwatch – there is a depth to this very traditional horror narrative that compels you to carry on in spite of every fright. Dead Line’s scare tactics are scattered assuredly throughout the episode on a backdrop that is exhaustively seeped in an eerie atmosphere. It climbs and crescendos at an easy pace that only Pemberton and Shearsmith would have the confidence to attempt.

When asked before shooting if this episode would follow in the footsteps of The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge or The Devil of Christmas as one of the few episodes taking on period settings, Pemberton said: “[Dead Line] is going to be contemporary.” This assertion is a complete understatement; Dead Line feels as if it could only exist in our world, a world in which losing a mobile phone is comparable to losing a life (and a world in which fans are quick to turn to Twitter to sympathise or scold the team for technical issues). The episode’s surprisingly simple setup permits it to instead turn meta and find its scares in the audiences’ own technological anxieties – and with such flawless execution, what scares they are! Whether you’re a fan of Pemberton and Shearsmith or if this is the first time you’ve heard of the duo, Dead Line is a piece of TV that deserves a watch.

Inside No. 9 will return with its fifth series in 2019. Dead Line is currently available to view on BBC iPlayer.

PODCAST: Ghosts, Zombies and Hannibal Lecter – A Halloween Special

Xinyi Wang — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 16:20:32 +0000

In our Halloween special, Alex and Joe sat down and chatted all things spooky and horror – from Tim Burton to Hereditary, the duo debate and celebrate scary film.

Illustration by Byron Eggenschwiler for The New Yorker

PREVIOUSLY: To All The Rom Coms I’ve Loved Before

The Monster of Misogyny: Analyzing Sexuality in ‘Halloween’ and ‘It Follows’

Sabastian Astley — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 17:56:14 +0000

Sabastian Astley examines the role of sex and misogyny in two classic horrors.

The genre of horror has often been inseparable from the now-staple trope of teenagers having sex, with Friday the 13th (1980) and Prom Night (1980) to the parodist nature of Scream (1996) and The Final Girls (2015). While it is mostly used for no further meaning and instead as an easy activity to write characters into, there are two films in the sub-genre which transcend this simple use. Both John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) explore sexuality in a metaphorical sense which is not immediately clear, with Halloween reflecting both an embrace and a rejection of the ‘Sexual Revolution’, while It Follows‘ titular monster is itself a misunderstood sexual metaphor.

To understand Halloween‘s sexuality, we must first look at the contextual backdrop within which it was produced. The ‘Sexual Revolution’ ended abruptly by the latter half of the 1970s, following through the blunt reality Vietnam’s failure alongside with the rise of Ronald Reagan, and his amalgamation of a rhetoric that was political in its motivation but religious in its metaphors. America’s subscription to Christianity was something that Reagan played off to an incredible response, and therefore inadvertently this idea of Christian values became the foundation of the American society throughout the Reagan era. These values include the traditional stigma against pre-martial sex, and the consequence of sin for indulging in the activity – Carpenter, albeit unintentionally, incorporates this rise of religious conservatism in America into Halloween itself; he does this through the diametric characters of Laurie and Michael.

Viewing Halloween through this lens of a rejection of the ‘Sexual Revolution’, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie represents the ‘ideal’ or the stereotype for such a society – she’s educationally driven, uninterested in sexual matters to the point of embarrassment upon the mere discussion of potential romantic feelings. Her friends go so far as calling her behaviour as “prudish”, thereby highlighting this seemingly negative attitude toward purity by the fellow teenagers of Haddonfield. The polar opposite of this metaphoric purity is Michael; the physical manifestation of sin accompanying pre-martial sex, displayed through the serial killings of lust-driven teenagers originating in the murder of his own sister. Constantly lurking within the darkness, furthering this malicious intent and aura that he exudes throughout the film, Michael only appears directly before or after sexual acts enter the narrative, e.g. choking Annie immediately before her departure to her boyfriend’s house.

Laurie’s survival throughout the film can be attributed to her lack of sinful pre-martial lust, conforming to her conservative stereotype to the point of taking on a motherly role, protecting both terrified pre-teens Lindsay and Tommy from Michael. This continuous conservatism is both a fantastic parallel to the puritanical outrage toward the Sexual Revolution as well as a striking contrast to the more liberal attitudes her friends display, reflecting the hedonistic attitudes of the Baby Boomer generation and concluding in a gruesome fate at the hands of sin that is delivered through the vessel of Michael Myers.

Alternatively, Halloween can also be read as an embrace of the ‘Sexual Revolution’, exposing the dangers of sexual repression.

This reading depicts Michael as the epitome of sexual repression, as a result of an incestual obsession with his sister culminating in his forcing himself upon her in an incredibly violent yet simultaneously intimate act of penetration – stabbing. Michael’s murderous actions throughout the events of Halloween reflect a furthering of this repression – there are two types of murder committed: the phallic and disconnected (male), and the intimate and personal violence (female), seen through the murder of Lynda and Bob. Bob’s murder is over in a matter of seconds, impaled with the iconic kitchen knife with a lack of effort or even care from Michael. However, with Lynda’s murder there is visible emotional reaction from Michael through his trembling grip and the actual act of strangulation.

This idea of sexual repression also translates to Laurie, being sexually repressed herself through her conservatism. Ironically, this makes her the only individual in Haddonfield with the ability to face Michael, allowing herself a violent nature similar to Michael’s, being his ‘equal’ in a sense. While this idea of sexual repression could be simply explained through the intimacy between Michael and the multiple girls he murders throughout the movie, Michael specifically targets Laurie due to her triggering that same individual obsession. This explains his attempts to penetrate Laurie with the kitchen knife similar to his penetration of Judy, as an outlet for his sexual repression. The idea is developed through Michael’s seemingly supernatural immortality throughout the latter third of the film, despite being both stabbed in the neck and later eye by Laurie, an act that also breaks Michael’s obsession due to the disconnect between Judy’s ironic passivity through sexual activity and Laurie’s active violence through her sexual repression. Ultimately however, neither is able to kill the other – as stated before, they are one another’s ‘equal’.

Halloween‘s use of sexuality is difficult to fully plot metaphorically, at times subscribing to one notion and at other times to another. However, it’s clear that its approach toward sexuality is multi-fauceted, and albeit unintentionally, influenced by the Sexual Revolution.

It Follows similarly uses the idea of sexuality, once again having a dual metaphoric pathway, with the former being the idea of sexually transmitted disease.

The idea of the ‘demon’ only appears following the sexual encounter between Jay (Maika Monroe) and Hugh (Jake Weary), and its lingering presence and malicious aura throughout the film reflects the social stigma of being inflicted with a sexually transmitted disease, as well as the dangers certain diseases pose. However, this analysis of the use of sexuality of It Follows is mostly rejected, and this is on the basis of a further appreciation and analysis of the opening sequence, to which a conclusion is reached: It Follows is about a sexual survivor.

Jay is presented as the typical modern teenage girl with an idealised view of romance, to which she monologues towards Hugh about; she expects her encounter with him to be this postcardesque date of holding hands with a cute boy in a car. This imagery is shattered immediately by David Robert Marshall with a horrific reality – from Hugh’s use of chloroform and subsequent rape of Jay (in narrative context, to pass on the ‘demon’) to the constant paranoia and distrust Jay treats everyone with throughout the rest of the film, the allegory of surviving sexual assault becomes clear. Additionally, the inability for others to see the ‘demon’ reflects the inability of friends and family of a sexual assault survivor to understand their mental state, and this difficulty to understand transforms into a subconscious disgust toward the behaviour of the sexual assault survivor, in this case Jay’s hysteria.

Despite the ending offering an initial glimmer of hope, with Jay finally facing and overcoming this distrust and the ‘demon’ through the aid of Paul (Keir Gilchrist), David Robert Marshall reminds the viewer that this scar upon Jay’s life is permanent through the final shot of an ominous lurking figure behind the pair as they walk together holding hands. It’s a painfully truthful reminder that sexual assault can leave one with a plethora of life-long issues such as post-traumatic stress, as well as the paranoia that Jay goes through.

It Follows displays an incredibly complex telling of the story of the survival of a teenage woman following a sexual assault, decorated with the idea of the horror being the physical manifestation, when in actuality, the horror lies within the mental torture that Jay faces and may have to face for the rest of her life.

Both Halloween and It Follows transcend the stereotypical sexual tradition of their genre, achieving through the metaphorical significance placed upon sexuality within their respective narrative contexts. The two films show two strikingly different eras of sexuality, and their comparison only brings to attention the development of societal attitudes toward sex in the decades that separate the two. Carpenter’s Halloween reflects a view of sexuality forever trapped between eras, partially liberated by the significance of the Sexual Revolution that precipitated it, while simultaneously carrying the weight of the Sexual Revolution’s corpse upon it with the rise of Reaganism. David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows shows us that some horrors are sickeningly human; depressingly timeless in its subject matter, highlighting an all-too-realistic horror. The film contains a message that is only increasing in relevance with the rise of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements.

True horror seems not to originate in the acts of masked murderers or demonic curses, but rather in the male mind.

Halloween was released in 1978 and It Follows was released in 2014. Halloween (2018), a direct sequel, is currently released in cinemas everywhere. Check out its trailer below: