Five Horror Films You Haven't Seen

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Well, maybe you have—if you’re a student of cinema or a genre buff. Safe to add, however, that none of these five films ever had more than a fleeting presence on Milwaukee theater screens. One of them, The Babadook, was critically acclaimed and turned a modest profit worldwide. Yet even it never cracked top of the box office. What the five films have in common is an intelligent or creative angle on a genre that has always attracted clichés and has lately devolved into blood splatter or computer-generated demons.

The Ghoul (2016)

A moebius strip—an unending loop where outside becomes inside—is displayed in the office of psychotherapist Alexander Morland (Geoffrey McGivern) along with a Klein bottle, a 3D manifestation of that concept. And it’s not the only curve that bends and crosses itself in The Ghoul. The protagonist, Chris (Tom Meeten), circles at night along the ring of the motorway into London; by day the subway train he rides has spiral graffiti smudged on the window. The plot goes round and round.

The Ghoul is a looping Parcheesi board of stories hidden inside stories. It’s chockful of visual clues, starting with the foyer where a double murder occurred. At this point, Chris is a detective assigned to the curious case whose two victims continued to walk forward as if unscathed after multiple serious gunshots before finally collapsing. “It’s a head-scratcher,” another cop says. Chris looks on impassively.

Elsewhere in this enigmatic, David Lynchian debut by British writer-director Gareth Tunley, Chris—trapped in a cycle of depression—seeks help through psychotherapy. His first therapist, Helen Fisher (Niamh Cusack), steps back, claiming illness, and refers Chris to Morland, her colleague. The foyer to Morland’s office-dwelling looks like the entrance where the murder took place. The psychiatrist is an engaging, unconventional Jungian whose office is crammed with Kabbalistic symbols and books on the occult and fringe mathematics. He takes Chris on a walk to a London park, “the center of the magical world” whose coordinates relate to the lives of William Blake, John Dee and the coven of Gerald Gardner who performed an outdoor rite in 1940 to repel Hitler’s invasion.

Spoiler alert: Could Fisher and Morland be psychic vampires, plotting to prolong their lives—perhaps into infinity—by seizing the bodies and minds of young patients? Is Chris crazy? Both, neither, either/or? Some of the darkest horrors dwell in the human mind.

The Babadook (2014)

Books can be dangerous. Just ask the mom who discovered a children’s book on her shelves and began reading it to her first-grader. The contents of the oversized volume, Mister Babadook, became increasingly shocking as she turned the pages to find ominous injunctions and ghoulish pop-up art of a black-top-hat-wearing figure with a fiendish countenance. Amelia (Essie Davis) decides Mister Babadook—which suggests the work of a diabolical Edward Gorey—isn’t suitable for Sammy (Noah Wiseman). She puts the book away but the book won’t go away.

The Babadook is one of the scariest horror films in recent years, its fear factor enhanced by containing bloodshed to droplets, not buckets, and keeping frightful apparitions in the shadows where they belong. “Take heed of what you read,” the accursed book warns; opening its covers is to enter a dimension of unrelenting evil.

Shards of glass in the mushroom soup? “The Babadook did it,” Sammy insists. The electric lights flicker with no apparent cause. The dog barks unaccountably. Sammy talks of little but the malicious shape in the black top hat. Amelia tears up the pages and tosses the book into the trash but it reappears on their doorstep pasted back together.

Douse it with lighter fluid on the grill? No good. The lights keep flickering, swarms of insects emerge from the walls and a dark shape lurks. Escape? The Babadook appears in Amelia’s rearview mirror. As one of the book’s inscriptions insists, the Babadook is “growing right under your skin.”

The story plays out on several levels including the struggle of a single mother to raise a child while working for a low wage in a nursing home. She isn’t comfortable in the company of her more affluent younger sister and her friends. Sammy is a problem in school and other kids hate him for being weird. He’s disruptive and sometimes maniacal but an imaginative boy who does magic tricks. He’s first to see the Babadook. By the time Amelia sees it, the entity has already burrowed into her consciousness.

And then there’s the deep psychological aspect of guilt and resentment. Amelia’s husband died in a car accident while driving her to the maternity hospital. She gave birth to Sammy that night. The Babadook was the astonishingly well-conceived and executed debut by Australian director Jennifer Kent.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

Nosferatu (1922) includes some of the most uncanny scenes from the horror genre. In German director F.W. Murnau’s version of Dracula, the vampire, Count Orlok, is spindly with impossibly long, thin fingers; his bat ears and white-as-death countenance’s alien creepiness is deepened by an unnatural gait. The identity of the actor playing Orlok, Max Schreck, became the subject of myth. He was a mysterious character to his contemporaries and his unlikely name, Schreck, is German for “Terror.”

The legend of Max Schreck moves the plot of Shadow of the Vampire. Wonderfully cast are John Malkovich as the petulant, overbearing Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Orlok, the leering embodiment of a twisted libido. Shadow accurately renders the production’s reality and the more tantalizing myth with great knowledge and—sometimes—a light touch. Murnau really did break with studio-bound conventions by filming Nosferatu in Eastern Europe to enhance the atmosphere of medieval dread.

The comedy emerges from Murnau’s explanation of Orlok to his skeptical crew, claiming he studied in Moscow with Stanislavsky. “He submerges his personality into the character he’s playing,” Murnau says. Not unlike the real director, Malkovich’s Murnau speaks grandly of “our struggle” to “create art. Our weapon is the moving picture… We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory.” The disputes between the star director and his star actor are delicious spoofs of raging artistic egos.”

When does art become a perverse undertaking? In Shadow of the Vampire, Murnau, the high priest at the temple of Art, is willing to offer human sacrifices in pursuit of his vision in moving pictures. The film’s American director, E. Elias Merhige, has not been active in Hollywood in recent years.

The Vampire Doll (1970)

The Vampire Doll opens along a narrow road on a stormy night. A doubtful cabbie ferries an eager young man through the downpour into a remote backland where broods a mansion no one visits. Upon arrival, the young man receives sad news from the mistress of the house, Mrs. Nonomura. His fiancé, Yuko, is dead. When he glimpses a woman in white running into the woods who resembles Yuko, he follows and never returns.

Japanese director Michio Yamamoto went on to make several movies in the mode of Britain’s Hammer Studio, fake fangs and all. The Vampire Doll was his most unique entry in the genre. The mansion and its inhabitants represent Poe’s “House of Usher” transposed to Japan. The wind sighs through the crumbling Romanesque walls like a weeping woman. The Western architecture is explained by the Nonomura’s once prominent role as Japanese diplomats in Europe.

The story’s protagonists arrive uninvited at the mansion: Keiko, concerned sister of the missing young man, and her boyfriend Hiroshi. Keiko is unconvinced by Yuko’s mother (whose archaic smile represses many secrets) and will get to the bottom of her missing brother even if she go it alone. Hiroshi comes to rescue her in the end but the conclusion results from no efforts on his part.

Keiko and Hiroshi learn that Yuko has become a vampire of a species unknown in Transylvania. She resembles a pale doll and her animatronic presence is genuinely creepy, especially when her eyes light up in a blood frenzy. At times, she wishes only to end her half-life. “Kill me,” she begged her fiancé—before her eyes lit up and she killed him. While nosing around the village, Keiko learns that the Nonomuras have an ill reputation. The benign authority figure, Dr. Yamaguchi, has a hidden life. “The war ruined everything,” he says, reflecting on the ghosts of World War II.

The Vampire Doll has an old versus young subtext with the still youthful Boomers pitted against the troubled past of the Not-So-Greatest Generation.

Night of the Demon (1957)

Sparkles make points of light in the tree branches and coalesce into a bright cloud of smoke against the night sky. The strange sight catches the eye of the protagonist, Dr. John Holden, whose face turns to dismay and then terror when the smoke comes for him as if alive. Holden, an American psychologist, is in England for an international parapsychology conference. He came to debunk the occult. He changes his mind.

Night of the Demon is a British film by Jacques Tourneur, the French-born director who grew up in Hollywood and helmed such classics of low-key horror as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Although he was apparently forced by the producers to resort to a rubber monster mannequin in a couple of scenes, most of the horror in Night of the Demon is conveyed by mood, shadow, quirky sound—the demonic shriek of passing locomotives. Tourneur employed an interesting special effect, resembling photographs developing in a chemical bath, to suggest tricks of the mind.

Loosely based on a story by British gothic writer M.R. James, Night of the Demon often resembles a film by Alfred Hitchcock if the Master of Suspense had been interested in occult themes. As in many of Hitch’s films, Night of the Demon’s villain is an outwardly respectable gentleman, in this case a Satanist ensconced in a country manor and entertaining the village children with clown tricks. He has a problem with mother. Suspense is handled adeptly as Holden, played by onetime film noir detective Dana Andrews, races against the clock—and suspicious police—to evade a dreadful climax.

An edited version was released in the U.S. as Curse of the Demon (1958).