Begotten (E. Elias Merhige, U.S., 1991). Despite desperate comparisons to David Lynch's nightmare Eraserhead, nothing else on film remotely resembles Begotten, deeply disturbing debut film of E. Elias Merhige (Shadow of the Vampire). This smudged, grainy b&w hallucination chronicles down-and-dirty myth, the bloody death and birth of gods, their ritual worship and dismemberment. Joseph Campbell territory, to be sure, but don't expect any "follow your bliss" prettification in these environs. Dredged out of some primal soup of the imagination, Begotten's fiercely beautiful images - there's no dialogue - look like archetypal snapshots framed by a proto-human Mathew Brady. "One of the 10 most important films of modern times," raved Susan Sontag. At the very least, the best "metaphysical splatter film" ever.
Death Line aka Raw Meat (Gary Sherman, Britain, 1973). Waayyyy back in the day, some friends and I wheeled into the Kenmore Drive-In to talk back to something deliciously infra dig called Raw Meat." Our Mystery Science Theater wisecracks soon petered out as this authentically creepy tale of subway cannibalism and class cruelty took hold. When an unconscious government bigwig disappears from an Underground station, sharp-tongued cop Donald Pleasance investigates. Seems that descendents of tunnel workers trapped in a cave-in at the turn of the century have survived by snatching mates and food from stations above their hellish lairs. Butchered and retitled for the grindhouse circuit, Death Line still generates awful pathos from the plight of the devolved offspring of the abandoned laborers. "Mind the doors!" one of them moans horribly. Though the phrase's original meaning is as buried as the creature's humanity, the urgency of that warning galvanizes a casualty of indifferent progress.
Kairo / Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2001). Kurosawa deftly works the horror genre as a Rorschach for what ails us, the prime directive of the best scary movies. Instead of vampires and Frankenstein monsters lurking in shadows, poised to leap lasciviously on Victorian beauties, Pulse is populated by computers with screens buzzing with hungry menace, colorless city spaces and sites that loom and bulk as though inimical to the wispy young people who drift through them. The very air seems clotted, and the imperceptible movement of an opaque plastic curtain hanging in a doorway tickles like death's feather on the nerve. Modern alienation is the crux here: dark ghosts thrive in those computer monitors; they have more weight, substance, than the aimless souls who use the machines. In Pulse, angst literally erases life, leaving behind only a charcoal smudge, like a Hiroshima nuclear "shadow" marking the place where a human being once breathed. Kurosawa's existential scare tactics make him a fellow traveler of Michelangelo Antonioni, once the cinematic poet of human isolation in indifferent landscapes.
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1966). A great actress (Liv Ullmann) freezes during a performance of Antigone: she is empty, no feelings, no passions left to express or project. A nervous breakdown, her doctor diagnoses, and sends the patient off to recuperate on an island in the company of a sunny-souled nurse (Bibi Andersson). During their sojourn, the boundaries of identity begin to blur and slip, and a species of vampire comes out to play in the dark night of the soul. No matter how many times one witnesses the justly famous shot in which the halved faces of Ullmann and Andersson merge into a new persona, it's viscerally devastating, a violation of some fundamental tenet of reality. One of the top 10 masterpieces of all time, Persona is visually ravishing, absolutely resonant - for starters - with horror, the power and ruthlessness of art, the beauty of women, the fragility of self.
SEE ALSO Richard T. Jameson's Halloween rental recommendations[[In-content Ad]]
