Black celebration
True horror stays with you. Over the past several years in this space, I’ve made it a tradition to make lists of films for suggested viewing during Halloween. Rereading them, I’m glad to say that all of the entries hold up; that come Oct. 31 even the most wayward of my suggestions will manage to give a good and proper scare to even the hardcore aficionado. They run the gamut from acknowledged classics like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to less known, low-key entries such as David Cronenberg’s The Brood, the true-to-life terrors of Mike de Leon’s Kisapmata to the grisly realism of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, silent shockers like Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan — the umlauts in the title alone are scary enough — and the whispered creepiness of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents. Even today, these movies retain their power to unsettle if not surprise the present-day viewer.
This year, I decided to ask several other writers to offer up their choices of a favorite horror film not only because I couldn’t think of any new ones to suggest but because I was genuinely curious as to what they would recommend. I’m happy I did and will add the following titles listed on my playlist when I turn the lights out, turn up the air-conditioner to very, very cold, and prepare to be frightened witless.
Ian Rosales Casocot
Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead stays with me because this was the one horror film that seriously haunted my childhood. I must have been eight or nine years when I caught this on a neighbor’s Betamax machine. The sheer visceral horror the film offered was guaranteed to make me sleepless for many nights. There was none of the exquisite, almost formal evil that I saw in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Instead, this one was edgy and rough around the edges and unholy in its no-holds-barred provocation (a tree raping a woman?) — and it bit hard, too. Until today, I still remember one of the possessed clutching this pencil (or pen?) and using it to stab another character, and then we see the wound quickly becoming “infected,” and then we see the victim’s skin veining out like cracks to produce another monster. It was horrific also in that sense: you can’t trust anybody. Not even your friends — because they can become monsters, too.
Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others (2001), on the other hand, is a horror film whose greatness lies in its restraint and refusal to bow to cheap horror tricks and effects. It’s driven by atmosphere and suggestion and the growing horror of Nicole Kidman’s paranoia. It’s all about shadows and lighting in all the right places. And when the twist finally comes in the end, it proves to be both inevitable and surprising.
Richard Bolisay
For a horror film to be effective, it must leave an impression that lasts even after the movie is seen. Shock value is important, but the best horror movies, the ones that scare as much as they confound, are those that don’t make you scream but leave you trembling inside. One fine example is Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 film, Kwaidan, a film based on Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of Japanese folktales. Love, death, revenge, mystery, ghosts, samurais — nearly everything is here — and rooted in something so terrifyingly deep that the images don’t need words. The film is built on a kind of silence that asphyxiates its characters and landscapes, burying the stories in an earth full of ants, each segment screaming with pain and tragedy. Kobayashi builds up the terror with as little violence as possible, moving the camera as if everything is happening in the corner of the viewer’s eye. Kwaidan is a frightening existentialist piece, but who says horror movies can’t do that?
Yvette U. Tan
Richard Somes’ Yanggaw is my favorite horror movie, period. It’s an aswang movie, but instead of tackling it like your usual monster-invades-isolated-barrio film, it shows it from the inside out, drawing you into the lives of the characters and painstakingly laying out for you the consequences of the disease. The film is in Ilongo and is brilliant in every way — acting, directing, production design, script. It stars veteran actors Ronnie Lazaro, Tetchie Agbayani, and Joel Torre, as well as Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles (a very fun film!) director Eric Matti as an albularyo. Yanggaw’s horror doesn’t come from the fact that there’s an aswang on the loose. It stems from the decisions that each character has to make, and how it affects their humanity. True horror, after all, isn’t about the monster, but about the emotion it evokes in the humans around it.
Philbert Dy
Some horror movies are gory. Some are atmospheric. Some have characters fending off horrific creatures. Others take a more psychological tack. Few can do all of these things. The Descent is that rare horror film that has everything, grabbing tricks from every page of the horror movie handbook to construct an endlessly tense, terrifying experience.
