When reality bites

I’ve been away a few weeks. And as I return to the Philippines just in time for Halloween, I find myself thinking about scary things to write about.

And then I pick up a week’s worth of newspaper headlines, and real life takes over:

• The US government restarts its engine — but only temporarily — after submitting Americans to a senseless political poker match for two weeks.

• New radiation leaks from the Fukishima Nuclear Plant raise long-term fears of water contamination in Japan. (On the upside: they’re now looking into building offshore windmills!)

• The National Security Agency is caught spying on its allies’ leaders. (Not the first time, surely.)

• The Boston Red Sox are down 2-1 in the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals after a bizarre “obstruction” call at third base prevents an extra inning in Game 3.

• Lou Reed writes 30; R.I.P.

• Kim Kardashian says she was “shaking the entire time” Kanye West was proposing to her in Las Vegas.

Yes, all of this is enough to make you draw the covers up over your face and raise your eyebrows in horror. But another thing that bothered me was the pointless remake of Stephen King’s Carrie. Really? Do we honestly need another desecration of a horror classic? Is it a postmodern necessity to slice and dice the movies that we grew up loving to be scared by — Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, The Omen, and now Carrie — just to make us suffer? How sick can you get?

Carrie, directed by Kimberly Peirce, has already made people’s “worst horror remakes” list. Singled out for derision was the fact that Carrie — played by Chloe Moretz — is a little too glam next to bug-eyed Sissy Spacek in the original. And not only that, this update makes Carrie White savvy enough to do her own clothes designing and use the Internet, yet somehow completely clueless about the arrival of her first menstruation cycle. Hello! Plug it up! Or should we say: Google it!

Yes, the horror is enough to make me reach back into my DVD collection and recall how Brian De Palma’s Carrie — along with a handful of other underappreciated horror flicks — did it right.

• Carrie (Director: Brian De Palma, 1976) What a great Bicentennial gift to America cooked up by director De Palma: a bloody-red, gothic celebration of teenage dysfunction and the tyranny of high school life. Not so much filming Stephen King’s first novel as amping it up to “11”, De Palma’s classic is a tour de force journey into one character’s deepest, darkest rage cage. From the score by Pino Donnagio — lurching from gentle oboes to Bernard Herrmann Psycho strings in the blink of the eye — it set the tone for decades of “shock” horror moments onscreen. The camera shots are as carefully orchestrated as the music, whether following a rope held by lip-glossed Nancy Allen up the gymnasium rafters to a bucket of pig’s blood, or the final dream sequence of Amy Irving (shot in reverse! Watch carefully!) as she ventures to Carrie White’s grave, only to be grabbed by a clutching, undead hand. This is De Palma’s true masterpiece. And nobody should try to remake it, or else… They’re all gonna laugh at you!

• Vampire Lovers (Director: Roy Ward Baker, 1970) If you can forgive the patented slowness and typical Hammer production, this one’s a pip. For one thing: lesbian vampires. Need we say more? Well, they’re played by the great Ingrid Pitt and doe-eyed Madeline Smith. There’s more exposed cleavage and ripped bodices in this Hammer “erotic horror” than True Blood, and more genuine eroticism than all the Twilight movies combined, and that’s saying something. Yeah, it’s vampire softcore porn. But it also has pedigree; it’s based on early vampire novella Camilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Hammer actually filmed it as a trilogy, along with two other vampire films), a work that was ahead of its time in featuring the erotic nature of vampiric possession.

• Suspiria (Director: Dario Argento, 1977) One of the things that makes this one so memorable is the use of anamorphic lenses and deep imbibition Technicolor (the kind of saturated colors used in The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind). Argento didn’t just want to show you a horror movie; he wanted you to feel each frame creeping along your skin. The blood-soaked reds of each murder and lurid Art Nouveau interiors of the Munich ballet school where Jessica Harper uncovers a coven of witches keep your eyes popping, and the relentless score by Italian rock band Goblin is truly one of the most effective in horror movie history.

• The Brood (Director: David Cronenberg, 1979) Crude and creepy, Cronenberg’s early outing casts Oliver Reed as a psychotherapist who takes transference therapy a little too far. His “psychoplasmics” technique helps patients externalize their inner conflicts — resulting in mallet-wielding little demons who scurry around in raincoats and bash in people’s heads. It gets even more demented with Samantha Eggar’s loony turn as a mother — one that nearly rivals Piper Laurie’s loony turn as a mother in Carrie — who gives birth to literal monsters.

• The Descent (Director: Neil Marshall, 2005) Australian director Marshall takes you out of your comfort zone from the opening — a roadway collision after a whitewater rafting trip leaves Sarah’s husband and daughter impaled by steel construction rods, though she survives — and then slows things down as a group of adventure-seeking women head out for a weekend spelunking in the Appalachian Mountains. After they find themselves trapped by a tunnel collapse, tough chick Juno admits she led them down an uncharted cave, so nobody will be rescuing them anytime soon. The game becomes survival, intensified by the presence of mutant cave people who have a nasty habit of tearing out people’s throats. Pair this with 127 Hours for the perfect anti-spelunking double feature!