Schlocktoberfest: Ten Off-the-Radar Horror Movies

As a disclaimer, this was originally published in my university newspaper, the Lesley Public Post. You can view the original article here. Halloween may be over, but horror is perfect for any season!

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Halloween is soon to be upon us, and that means late nights snuggled in blankets with popcorn and horror movies. But instead of the usual suspects, why not check out something a little weirder and wilder? Here are ten off-the-radar horror movies worth checking out. None of these are for the squeamish or easily offended.

#10: The Cremator (1968) Dir. Juraj Herz

Gloriously grotesque and sublimely beautiful. A strange tale of a cremator in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia who sees himself as a cross between the supreme Aryan and the Dalai Lama. As he sinks further into his own madness, the cremator sets about trying to “liberate” everyone around him from the clutches of reality. Only through the baptismal flames of death can they be freed and reach a higher plane of existence. This is horror at its purest; the horror of how one can so easily fall prey to fascism, and how ideas can be warped and twisted and turn men into killers. Chilling in a way few other movies are.

#9: Killer Butterfly (1978) Dir. Kim Ki-young

It all starts innocently enough. Yong-gul, a college student, is out camping with friends when a beautiful young woman tries to poison him. He barely survives, and loses all will to live. Soon he finds himself harassed by an elderly book salesman spouting the words of Nietzsche who survives even after being stabbed, buried alive, and cremated. Oh, and there is a skeleton that comes back to life as an attractive young woman that must Yong-gul’s liver in order to stay alive. But when he refuses she turns back into a skeleton. Depressed again, he holes up with an anthropologist involved with underground grave robbing rackets and his equally suicidal daughter. And that is just the beginning. By turns absurd, erotic, and terrifying, Killer Butterfly is a movie that needs to be seen to be believed. Best of all, the Korean Film Archive has made it available to watch free and legally on YouTube here.

#8: Planet of the Vampires (1965) Dir. Mario Bava

The original “In space, no one can hear you scream” horror flick. When a ship receives a distress signal coming from a mysterious, fog-covered planet, they land only to find themselves at the mercy of mysterious, yet invisible entities. As always with Bava, this one is all in the lush visuals, deliberate pacing, and rich atmosphere. The color photography and exotic sets, the leather space outfits all scream retro. Planet of the Vampires is very much of its era in terms of aesthetics, but it is hard not to love, and Bava subverts all of the conventional sci-fi tropes into something quite sinister. This is a scary movie, genuinely terrifying. Watching this in the dark one begins to hear things, and honestly, you will be constantly on the verge of running through the house and turning on all the lights, but you are just so hypnotized by the proceedings on-screen that you cannot budge, even just a little. Bava’s work is a textbook example of how to make a great horror film. The visuals alone are just a complete punch to the gut; there is an expressionistic bravura and deliberate artificiality to them that sci-fi films today just do not have.

#7: All the Colors of the Dark (1972) Dir. Sergio Martini

The Italians really do make the best horror movies. Called giallo, these flicks usually feature a potpourri of expressionistic violence, gratuitous nudity, twisting mysteries, pseudo-Freudian psychology, bad dubbing, and a healthy dose of Satanism. And in this respect All the Colors of the Dark has everything a great giallo needs. The proceedings in this one are beyond ridiculous. A young housewife dreams of her mother’s murder every night, and begins to have acute panic attacks. Her sister has her see a psychiatrist, but she is soon stalked by a mysterious blonde man, and initiated into a Satanic cult presided over by a man with the longest fingernails I have ever seen. Veering from bombastic fun to sheer terror, All the Colors of the Dark puts its modern-day successors to shame.

#6: Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989) Dir. Shin’ya Tsukamoto

If you have ever seen David Lynch’s Eraserhead, that should provide something of a blueprint for this one, but only just barely. In Tetsuo, a young man with a metal fetish slices open his thigh and attempts to fuse a giant screw into it, but his operation goes horribly wrong and he runs outside screaming in pain, only to be run over by a salaryman and his girlfriend who dump his body in a ditch. But the fetishist survives, and uses his psychic powers to wreak revenge upon the salaryman by turning him into a hunk of living machinery. The entire film is an audiovisual nightmare shot in grimy black and white, boasting kinetic camerawork, and an angry, industrial cyberpunk soundtrack. Tsukamoto’s images are still shocking and transgressive twenty years on. An inferno of psychosexual violence for the digital age.

#5: Gozu (2003) Dir. Takashi Miike

Most famous for his 1999 film Audition (yes, that one), the honor of Takashi Miike’s scariest movie actually belongs to Gozu. A yakuza hitman is ordered by his boss to kill of his “brother”, who is hiding out in a small town. But when he gets there his brother has disappeared, and he is forced to stay at a local motel that acts as a front for a sinister conspiracy involving the selling of bottled breast milk. When his “brother” later returns as a woman, the two embark on an impassioned carnal relationship that only drives both deeper and deeper into the realms of the unknown. Gozu is the most Lynchian film not made by Lynch. Its narrative defies any sort of logic. Why does a woman give birth to a full-grown man? Who knows. But it happens. Things happen. Scary things made only scarier by their resistance to be explained.

#4: The Third Part of the Night (1971) Dir. Andrzej Zulawski

WWII. Nazi-occupied Poland. While taking a walk in the woods with his father, Michal’s wife, son, and mother-in-law are brutally slaughtered by the Germans. Consumed by grief and a desire for revenge, he decides to join the resistance and kick some ass, but before he even gets a chance to do so, the Gestapo intercept the meeting and Michal flees for his life. He winds up in the apartment of a woman in labor who just so happens to look exactly like his dead wife. The rest of the movie involves Michal wandering around the streets of war-torn Warsaw, participating as a “feeder” for lice used in the manufacturing of the typhus vaccine, engaging in pseudo-philosophical shouting matches, and drowning in his existential angst. History as a fevered nightmare full of images straight out of hell.

#3: House (1977) Dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi

Another movie that defies any sort of logic. Like all of the other movies on this list, House is guaranteed unlike anything you will have ever seen. A group of schoolgirls go out to the country to stay with their ringleader’s aunt who just so happens to be a witch that eats teenage girls in order to stay young and beautiful forever. Oh, and she has a demon cat painting that comes to life. Using elaborate sets, animation, conflicting musical scores, abrupt cuts and fades to black, improvisation, dance numbers, and oh, so much more, House must be seen. Imagine an episode of Scooby-Doo directed by a druggie with a PhD. One character even dies by saying the word bananas over and over again until he turns into a pile of bananas.

#2: Possession (1981) Dir. Andrzej Zulawski

This film exists as if in a vacuum; the viewer is just thrown into this nightmare of such proportions that by the time it is all over one is not sure what to think. Set against the backdrop of a gray, apocalyptic and divided Berlin, Sam Neill plays a spy returned from a top secret mission only to find that his wife has turned suicidal and completely out of her mind. What follows is screaming, a lot of screaming. More screaming that you will ever hear in a movie again. The complete disintegration of a marriage between the two most self-destructive people in the world. And just when you think it cannot get any worse, Zulawski dives right into full-on surrealist horror. There is a creature in this movie; the creature, a physical manifestation of sexual anxiety; the slimy, oozing, filthy horror of it all. The apocalyptic ending leaves no room for hope.

#1: Mystics in Bali

From Indonesian schlockmeister H. Tjut Djalil (famous for such classics like White Crocodile Queen and the Nightmare on Elm Street “remake” Satan’s Bed) comes perhaps the definitive no-budget, exotic, horror trash flick. It is all simple enough: a beautiful American writer doing research on the occult arrives in Bali to learn the ways of Leák, the dark magic practiced on the island. With the help of her native friend Mahendra (who comes replete with an afro, porn stache, and tight clothing), she is introduced to the Leák Queen who takes her on as a disciple. There are no words that can accurately describe the experience of sitting through this one. It is mind-melting. Something like this should not exist in any sane world, yet it does. If you watch just one horror movie this Halloween, make it Mystics in Bali.