Still From Rosemary's Baby
The past haunting the present, the presence of evil in a world that wants to make nice—there’s something about late October in the Northern Hemisphere that puts us in the mood to contemplate the shadow cast by reality. With their potential to weave vivid nightmares, film has been a medium of horror since the early days of the motion picture. Here are five especially chilling or unsettling films for the Halloween season.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Hannah Arendt didn’t coin “the banality of evil” to describe the elderly couple next door in Rosemary’s Baby, but casting the Satanists as doddering old-timers was brilliant. Mia Farrow plays the protagonist, a woman who wants a nice home and child with her husband (Nick Cassavetes) who strikes a Faustian bargain behind her back. Farrow is pushed into a frightening situation for which there is no help—they are either with them, or won’t believe her.
The Babadook (2014)
Motherhood is also central to this Australian horror film as a single mother gradually sorts through the increasingly odd behavior and acting up of her young boy. She finds that the source of the trouble might be a scary children’s book that turns up in their home—and keeps turning up despite her efforts to get rid of it. The ancients understood something many of us have forgotten: books have power.
The Haunting (1963)
The setting is high gothic—a disreputable old mansion legendarily haunted by terrible spirits. The situation, however, is modern, as an academic paranormal researcher gathers a group of misfit volunteers for a weekend in the mossy old place in order to record what may or may not happen. Black and white cinematography has seldom been used to such suggestively chilling effect—and even the angles of the mansion’s architecture are wicked and unsettling. Don’t bother with the ‘90s remake, which is as frightening as a hangnail.
Penumbra (2012)
When an arrogant young Spanish attorney inherits a condo in Buenos Aires, a city she regards as hopelessly provincial, she hopes to rent the property as quickly as possible. She has no idea that a circle of mysterious people has their sights on the apartment for a ceremony to be conducted in conjunction with a solar eclipse. Her fate is sealed because of her bad attitude in this South American homage to Roman Polanski. Since no one likes her, no one will help.
The Black Cat (1934)
It was a great double billing of top horror stars. Bela Lugosi plays an emotionally damaged psychiatrist and Boris Karloff a Modernist architect (and high priest of Satan) in this dark, sadistic tale set in the hinterlands of Hapsburg Europe. Borrowing its title and mood (but not its story) from Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat shows how the past haunts the present with greater force than any chain-rattling ghost, and that evil isn’t an abstract concept but a reality concealed behind respectable facade
