The MacGuffin

I watch at least 31 scary movies in October for no other reason than I can. It’s fun, and why the hell wouldn’t I? This year I kicked off a little early on September 30^th by watching Alien on the big(ish) screen at the Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle. During my film journey this month, I’ve watched a couple of other movies that predate Alien, but are surprisingly similar to it. I don’t know for sure that the creators of Alien saw these movies, but I would not be at all surprised if they had. All three movies deal with rescue missions on inhospitable planets, but each one is enjoyable for a completely different reason. Also, for full disclosure, I can never tell the difference between airshafts and engineering access tunnels in space movies, so I’m just gonna call them airshafts. This will make more sense later.

For my last double horror feature recommendation of the month, I decided to pick two films that I have only recently seen but have fallen in love with almost immediately. Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968) are two movies that don’t really have much in common in terms of theme or style, except that they showcase the best in foreign horror. I’ve wanted to see them both for a while, and now that they are available from The Criterion Collection, anyone who is interested can see them as well. Neither falls into a basic outline of what a horror film may entail, but instead, each delves deeper into their characters’ motivations, making the psychological elements more important than the jump scares. The horror is in the minds of the people inhabiting these stories.

For my horror double feature recommendation this week, I decided to go on a more mysterious route. These two films can be categorized under the phrase “Curiosity Killed The Cat,” in which our protagonists, overcome by an obsessive compulsion to learn the truth, delve deep into their respective mysteries even when all signs tell them otherwise. Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) and George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (Spoorloos, 1988) both begin with the same premise: a man in search of a woman who has disappeared without a trace. While the films tackle their subject matter in different manners—one dealing with religious fanaticism and the other observing the twisted nature of a single human being—both end with startling and horrific revelations, tapping into the darkest possibilities of the human condition.

With the Halloween season in full swing, there is no doubt that people will be seeing their fair share of horror films and suspenseful thrillers throughout the month. For my double feature recommendation, I decided to go a little further back into the vault. I really dig older films, and I especially enjoy older horror movies. Maybe because of the fact that films in those days were restricted in what they could show. While there is certainly a place for gory movies in all of their bloody goodness, I also think there’s a place where tension, atmosphere, and suggestion can also share in the spotlight. With that said, I decided to recommend two films that delve wonderfully into those latter aspects. Those two movies are George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941) and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942).