“The Vanishing” (1988)
Were it not for its preternaturally terrifying ending, there would probably be no question hovering over whether George Sluizer‘s original “The Vanishing” should be classed as a horror, and yet it was the scene of one of our livelier debates on the topic. The thing is, right until the unimaginable terror of that poetically inevitable climax, the film is an effectively nasty and nihilist thriller, in which a man’s obsession with finding out the circumstances behind his wife’s murder outlasts even his finding the psycho who did it: In fact, it leads him to engage with him on a particularly twisted journey that ends with a flame sputtering out in an enclosed space. But there’s nothing supernatural afoot — if anything, the conclusion is merely the fulfillment of a promise the killer made quite some time before, but it just goes to show the way in which our fear receptors operate that this ending alone, without any gore or blood at all, counts as one of the most horrific moments in cinema. In fact, it’s probably because of the flat, prosaic grimness of the film until then that it feels so inescapably real — an idea borne out by the glossier American remake (also directed by Sluizer), that starred Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock, proving so remarkably unterrifying by comparison. And lord knows why they messed with that hall-of-fame ending.
“Irreversible” (2002)
The arch-provocateur at his most bruisingly provocative, Gaspar Noé‘s “Irreversible” shows how the lives of three carefree Parisians (Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel and Albert Dupontel) are forever changed by a brutal sexual assault, itself one of the queasiest rape scenes ever put on film. Were it told in straightforward fashion, it would probably feel a lot like a genre horror, complete with slasher/rape-revenge elements. But Noé’s stroke of inspiration here is to tell the story backwards, so while chronologically it’s a downward spiral, the actual experience of watching the film is of a grueling first half-hour (and a fair few Cannes critics didn’t make it that far) followed by a progressive lightening of mood, despite the brutality of what we’ve just seen. It interrogates the idea of how we use time in cinema and how we understand it and in so doing becomes more arthouse than grindhouse, though some critics maintain that the film’s misogyny, homophobia and exploitatively graphic imagery negate its value as challenging art. Like or loathe Noé, there’s no doubt that here (and also with “Enter The Void“), he is attempting a genuinely transgressive work of underground art. Unpleasant as it absolutely is to watch (it’s a film we’ll happily never sit down with again as long as we live), we’d take that challenge over the comparative toothlessness of his more recent “Love” any day.
“The Hunt” (2012)
For a film with basically none of the attributes of the traditional horror film, it’s remarkable just how much of Thomas Vinterberg‘s “The Hunt” I, and several other people at my screening, spent watching through my fingers. As brutalizing as any New French Extremity title, but with scarcely a drop of blood spilled, this is a film that deals in the horror of false accusation and social ostracization that Vinterberg and co-writer Tobias Lindholm turn into the psychological equivalent of torture porn. Aided by a deservedly Cannes Best Actor-winning performance by Mads Mikkelsen, what makes the film so borderline unbearable is our complete identification with Mikkelsen’s mild-mannered teacher Lucas, who is accused of molestation by his best friend’s little daughter (a remarkable performance from Annika Wedderkopp, who plays her role with a perfect mixture of unimpeachable innocence and vengeful spite, so that you’re never quite sure how much she understands the consequences of her actions). Resisting any desire for a tricksy did-he-or-didn’t-he narrative, Vinterberg allies us to Lucas so absolutely by allowing us to be the only ones, aside from him and the little girl, who know he is innocent, and so every unjust pillorying he suffers, every look of suspicion or disgust, wounds us as deeply and as helplessly as it does him. It might just be the “A Serbian Film” of wrongful-accusation movies.
“Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory” (1971)
There’s a fine tradition of children’s films that contain sequences that seem exclusively designed to frighten the little tykes out of their still-malleable minds (the witch transformation scenes in Disney’s original “Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs” spring to mind), and of course things that terrified us in childhood can continue to do so in adulthood. But it’s hard to believe that even the adults in the audience weren’t at least a little freaked out during parts of this “beloved children’s classic,” based on Roald Dahl‘s book, even while they were enjoying one of the late Gene Wilder’s most iconic and endearing performances as the title character. Fat German kids potentially drowning in a chocolate river, spoiled brats turning purple and inflating to the size of a compact car, irritating TV addicts being miniaturized and trapped inside a TV set, and all facilitated by a legion of orange-skinned scaled-down Donald Trumps (hands actual size). But for sheer surreal ooginess, nothing beats the psychedelic tunnel sequence, which is less the kind of teachable moment that the film deal in elsewhere and more an all-out bad-trip Dadaist nightmare. Dahl’s brilliance in general, of course, was in understanding that children delight in the grotesque. But while all the other nastiness in this brilliantly dark film tends to be someone’s comeuppance, the tunnel sequence feels scary because it’s so deeply ambiguous, and it remains exhibit A in the case for Wonka actually just being a bit of a sadist.