the october country

Vincent Price interview on the set of The Masque of The Red Death (1964)

Now think, what a world-astounding collaboration we should be, you and I, together.

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) dir. James Whale

There's something about seventies horror that reminds me of live theatre, actually. The sets and costumes are often cheap, and when it comes to period pieces, more 'inspired by' than accurate; the makeup is big and visible; even when the effects are really good, the blood is usually unnaturally red. The acting tends toward the broad and stagey.

And yet, it's also clear that realism is not the goal. Rather, the movie works to draw you in to a unified fiction, to get you to share in its nightmare. The best seventies horror I've seen has a dreamlike, Vaseline-lensed quality, a sense that it doesn't matter whether or not everything that happens in the movie is likely or even possible in real life. We've stepped outside of real life into a self-contained bubble with its own logic and its own sense, a dark fairy tale where the corpses of young girls might transmute into hares or eternally hungry floating heads, or the night of All Hallows might summon a stalking, unkillable masked evil from the past, or a ballet studio might be entirely controlled by witches. Even the lowest-budget, most exploitative Hammer flicks don't escape the touch of that dreaminess, that velvety, enfolding unreality. The movie suggests a world, and we, if we are wise, gladly succumb to the power of that suggestion.

Eighties horror, on the other hand, is all about the goo.

Actually cannot stop watching this

in the silent era of horror, the word "horror" began to be used as a generic signation, and more often instead used was the words "weird" and "mythical and mysterious." this is a time when adaptions were so rapidly made like frankenstein and edgar allan poe's works dominated this era. horror as a genre wasn't specifically "created" or the word wasn't used until dracula in the 1930s.

“This is only a dream. I’m asleep… and all this is a dream.”

Valerie a týden divů / Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) dir. by Jaromil Jireš.

I came up with this at 2am.

"I am thingnough"

FAUST – A GERMAN FOLKTALE (1926) dir. F. W. Murnau

HORROR FILMS + paintings

The Haunting (1963) dir. Robert Wise

“It’s staring at me. Vile. Vile! Get away from here. Get away at once. It’s my chance. I’m being given a last chance. I could turn my car around and go away from here, and no one would blame me. Anyone has a right to run away.”

But the horror…the horror was for love. The things we do for love like this are ugly, mad, full of sweat and regret. This love burns you and maims you and twists you inside out. It is a monstrous love and it makes monsters of us all.

Crimson Peak (2015) dir. Guillermo del Toro