Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

In the spirit of the season, we asked a select coven of horror mavens (including a couple of our own) to write about their favorite Criterion scarefests.

CHUCK STEPHENS
Equinox: The Eyebrows of Mr. Asmodeus

There are myriad ways into Equinox, and almost no way out.

I like to start with the eyebrows of Mr. Asmodeus, the film’s creepy park ranger and ultimate incarnation of drooling evil: two giant worms of squirming fur threatening further metamorphosis while actor/writer/director Jack Woods contorts the rest of his face into a ridiculous rubber succubus of extraordinarily cretinous sexual desire. Starlet (and future minister) Barbara Hewitt cringes in vain as Asmodeus (his name is that of the Hebrew bible’s king of demons, elsewhere known as the demon of lust) advances upon her—a string of slobber unspooling from his hideous maw and nearly coating the anamorphic excesses of the image with a nauseating scrim of saliva—for there is no escape from this grimacing, groping, leg-humping letch from another dimension!

Hired by producer Jack H. Harris (The Blob) to turn future Oscar-winning Industrial Light & Magic guru Dennis Muren’s independently produced, Ray Harryhausen–induced virgin voyage to the lost continent of stop-motion-style special effects into a theatrically releasable feature film (and soon-to-be classic of late night television horror-whatzit-psychotronica), veteran sound editor Woods (who’d go on to sculpt the sonics on everything from the pilot episode of MacGyver to Critters 2: The Main Course) jumped in face-first. Talk about making your mark on a movie: Woods’s decision not only to rewrite and reshoot Muren’s film but also to star as its narrative-altering new main character ensured that he would sign “his” only film as a “director” in indelible spittle and demon seed—and in so doing, forge one of the darkest statements on the nature of auteurism in twentieth-century film history.

There are, perhaps, easier ways into Equinox. One might start with the debt owed it by such later and better-known horror
hoedowns as Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm and Sam Raimi’s Evil Deads, to name but two Equinox-idated examples of anything-goes cinefantastique. Or one might zero in on the sporty white socks and loafers shown off so enthusiastically by the film’s young supporting star, Frank Boers Jr. (soon to be known to living rooms around the country as Frank Bonner, WKRP in Cincinnati’s unctuously polyestered Herb Tarlek), as he haggles with the demonic Asmodeus over the fate of his friends’ picnic in the woods . . . and possibly the fate of the world itself! “All the money in the world, kid!” Asmodeus gleefully bellows as he tempts young proto-Tarlek into some sub-Faustian folly. Director, tempt thyself!

Such is the genius of Equinox, this extraordinary mutt of a movie that, while directed by far too many, finds in its very directionlessness its most impressive quality of all.

After the jump, writers Michael Atkinson, Marc Walkow, Michael Koresky, and Susan Arosteguy on their favorite scary films from the collection.  

Fiend Without a Face

Arthur Crabtree

1958

92 min

1.33:1

Jigoku

Nobuo Nakagawa

1960

101 min

Color

2.35:1

Carnival of Souls

Herk Harvey

1962

83 min

1.33:1

Equinox

Jack Woods

1970

82 min

Color

1.33:1

Sisters

Brian De Palma

1973

93 min

Color

1.85:1

The following tribute to Sacha Vierny by Alain Resnais (pictured together above, Resnais left) was published in the October 2001 issue of Positif. It is based on an interview conducted by François Thomas and was translated for Criterion by Nicholas Elliott. Vierny, one of the most influential European cinematographers of the past fifty years, shot seven of Resnais’ features, including Last Year at Marienbad, Stavisky . . . , and L’amour à mort, and was also a faithful collaborator of Raoul Ruiz’s and Peter Greenaway’s. He died in May 2001.

My earliest memories of Sacha Vierny go back more than half a century, to our first meeting in 1948 or 1949. I can’t remember if we met through a phone call, a chance encounter in a stairwell, or at the counter of a brasserie. I had shot a few 16 mm films in Kodachrome, one of the first monopack color processes, which combined three ultrathin emulsion layers on a single strip of film (this was before Eastmancolor). So Vierny introduced himself with: “We won’t have Kodachrome in professional 35 mm for several months. I’d like to talk with you about the ups and downs of your experience with color film.” He was exaggerating—my knowledge was empirical but limited—and I was truly flattered that someone in the business wanted to talk shop with me. Probably I was a little sorry that I wasn’t a cameraman. Had I been in better health, I would have applied to the cinematography department at the IDHEC [Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, the French state film school] rather than the editing department. But to be a cameraman you had to be able to climb up Mont Ventoux carrying a 35 mm camera and its tripod on your shoulder, with cartridges and batteries in tow. In any case, we hit it off right away. When I made some short films a few years later with the great cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, Vierny served as his assistant. Then I asked him to shoot Le chant du styrène in color CinemaScope. I even asked him to appear in a scene, as the only human being you really see—face on, shot from the waist up. He was very photogenic.  

Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais

1961

94 min

Black and White

2.35:1

In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,” essentially because it is science fiction, because it is a genre film. You can easily understand why Tarkovsky felt this way, given his topos and metaphysical concerns, but what’s shocking is how little the filmmaker apparently understood about his own film, and about the purpose of science fiction in general. The key to the genre is its functionality as metaphor—if it’s merely space opera (Star Wars or the new Star Trek or whatever), then it’s kiddie stuff, and as close to real science fiction, as it’s evolved, as the old Buck Rogers serials. Real science fiction, the only genre defined by ideas, is closer to satire than to fantasy or horror: its battery of metaphors is used as speculation and commentary about the present, hyperbolically exploding whatever mitigations might couch an issue in real life, so we can see the fallout rain down. (In ideas begins morality, and pulpist Edmund Crispin was only the first to note that science fiction is “the last refuge for the morality tale.”) The critic who got this best was the late Brit writer Philip Strick, whose modest but electrically philosophical 1976 volume Science Fiction Movies was an epiphany for me as a movie-struck tween.

Solaris is a science fiction movie about love and grief and responsibility, and how those quantities mutate with time, and Tarkovsky himself might be the only person to have ever dismissed it as just a genre film. The young Japanese filmmaker Kanji Nakajima certainly couldn’t, as his new film, The Clone Returns Home (2008), playing at the New York Asian Film Festival next week, is essentially an homage to Solaris, in its themes and conjured enigmas, and even its imagery. But Nakajima’s strategy is inside out. Instead of our perspective aligning with a man whose suicide-dead wife returns and reignites the immolation of their marriage, we walk with an astronaut who tragically lost a twin brother when he was young, and who consents to cloning treatment as insurance against deep-space accidents. Thus the dead twin is reborn, kind of; when the astronaut is killed, the clone is awoken, into a state of loss, and impulsively begins a cross-country odyssey off the grid, searching for the other self/twin he cannot locate in himself. Then a second clone is produced and woken . . .

Nakajima is all about finding the poetry in the sci-fi, and The Clone Returns Home is closer to Solaris—closer to its replicated identities and unattainable verisimilitude—than Solaris is to that old Star Trek episode “Shore Leave” (which critic David Thomson claims to prefer), or to Duncan Jones’s new Moon (2009), another riff on the theme. The Japanese film’s tone is pensive, Tarkovskian even, and the filmmaker knows when to lunge for those coup de grâce images: the dead spaceman seen from Earth, floating in a blue sky; the anticlone protesters grimly holding portraits of their late-but-cloned loved ones; the clone collapsing after carrying the space-suited corpse (or empty space suit, depending on which perspective we’re experiencing), only to have the suit groggily sit up, pick up his “brother,” and continue the march.

Science fiction tropes like “body snatcher” films have often utilized the interpersonal anxiety psychopathologically manifested as Capgras syndrome (the delusion that someone has been replaced by an identical impostor)—an acute and inexhaustible project, it seems to me—but in these two films, we get something more, well, spiritual: dramatic images and constructs that ask about the meaning of love (fraternal and romantic), if the object of our ardor is somehow different but somehow exactly the same, if there are two or three or more versions, indistinguishable and yet as separate as versions of ourselves in our memories. Which is, of course, what the symbologies boil down to: memory and its tenuous rescue of the past, just as Tarkovsky’s film ends in a dream of childhood home and parental immortality.  

Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky

1972

166 min

Color

2.35:1

We’ve pieced together comments from production designer Donald Burt and property master Hope Parrish of working with the supermeticulous and precise David Fincher on perfecting the atmosphere and historical accuracy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. You can click here for a closer look at one particular aspect of Parrish’s astonishing work: Benjamin’s postcards and diary. And our special edition DVD and Blu-ray releases feature hours of interviews and behind-the-scenes footage exploring the Academy Award–winning visual effects.

Donald Burt: Working with David is rewarding because he is so very detail oriented—and always for the purpose of the story. He absolutely knows his film and is able to clearly articulate it. It is a wonderful experience to work with a director so committed to his vision and with a passionate work ethic.

Hope Parrish: I think that one of the reasons I love to work with David Fincher is that he is so meticulous. As I said in a Christmas letter two years ago, David pushes me beyond best. He has an amazing eye for detail. I am not always sure when I have nailed it, but he lets me know when he says, “We’re done.” He sometimes can be a real challenge for me, but he has hired me to make it happen for him and his film. This was my second film for him, and each time I know I walked away having learned more from him. To me, he is a prop master’s dream.

Donald Burt: Our initial visual approach to the film was based on historical research of scripted locales, within specific time periods. Restraint was as important as consistent tonality in representing the passage of time visually in the film. We were especially conscious with the set dressing and propping in this regard, not wanting to proliferate sets with objects that blatantly reflected an era but rather to have a “progressive mix” of elements that would show a change in period without disregarding the history of things that are carried through life. We also wanted to maintain a certain mundaneness to this expression, so as to keep it very real and subtle. This approach was particularly important in portraying New Orleans in the story. New Orleans is very much a city of suspended time, not only socially but visually. It was important for us to keep the visual language of the film simple and consistent.  

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

David Fincher

2008

165 min

Color

2.40:1

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button property master Hope Parrish writes: “When it came to the postcards and the diary, David was involved every step of the way. I found hundreds of postcards that he narrowed down to the ones he liked: we had them for Caroline’s birthdays over the years, and then the postcards in the box with ribbon from Benjamin to Daisy. Each was handpicked, and the messages on the back of them needed to be in Brad’s handwriting (something the audience doesn’t actually see, but it was great for Julia as a working tool to help her with her performance), which artist Jules Kmetzko managed to copy perfectly. She also did all the writing in the book. It was a very long process. But David saw updates and added or changed little things as it grew. It was important that the diary had layers. I had the diary made from scratch. Once David signed off on the writing and images, I had the pages bound, and then the real fun part of my work began: aging it and putting all the bits and bobbles in."  

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

David Fincher

2008

165 min

Color

2.40:1

When science fiction guru Forrest J Ackerman died last December, he was remembered for many firsts. Born November 24, 1916, Ackerman (known as Forry by fans and friends) purchased his first science fiction magazine in 1926. He founded the first science fiction fan group (the Boys’ Scientifiction Club) in 1929, and wrote for the genre’s first fanzine (The Time Traveler) in 1932. That same year, he published the first known list of fantastic films (thirty-four titles). Forry printed Ray Bradbury’s first story in 1938, and in 1954 coined the term sci-fi. Working with publisher James Warren in 1969, Ackerman created the iconic comic book character Vampirella—a bloodsucking femme fatale from outer space.

But it was Forry’s editorship of Warren’s Famous Monsters of Filmland that knocked the earth from its axis and spun it into an entirely new dimension. Published from 1958 to 1983, “the world’s first filmonster magazine” inspired generations of young moviemakers and ushered horror fandom into the mainstream. Filled with behind-the-scenes articles, rare photos, and Ackerman’s trademark puns (“You Axed for It!” was the title of a regular feature), Famous Monsters was the Cahiers du cinéma for fright flicks. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Guillermo del Toro all count the magazine as an influence, and thousands of other “monster kids” spent their adolescence experimenting with stop-motion dinosaurs and ghoulish makeup effects under Ackerman’s tutelage.

For decades, Forry gave public tours of his Los Angeles “Ackermansion”—a Taj Mahal of terror containing the world’s largest collection of sci-fi/horror memorabilia and movie props. Among his estimated fifty thousand visitors was a teenage Dennis Muren, who conspired with a group of other Famous Monsters fans to make the cult DIY creature feature Equinox (1970). Muren would later help revolutionize modern visual effects with his Oscar-winning work on films like Star Wars (1977), The Abyss (1989), and Jurassic Park (1993).

Sadly, many of Forry’s prized possessions were sold or stolen over the years, and much of what’s left will be auctioned off on April 30 and May 1. Despite his steadfast efforts to do so, Ackerman never found a permanent home for his treasure (a portion of it can be viewed at Seattle’s Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame). The myriad of marvels to be sold this week include a monocle worn by Fritz Lang during the making of Metropolis (1926), prosthetic teeth from Lon Chaney Sr.’s makeup kit, and a first American edition of Dracula, signed by Bram Stoker, Bela Lugosi, and Christopher Lee.

Some of these relics will find their way to fans eager to share them as Forry did. Others may vanish forever. But even as the Ackermansion slips into memory, monster kids of all ages know that Forrest J Ackerman will never die. The wonder-packed pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland—collected, studied, and adored to this day—endure as his living museum.

For more information on the Ackerman estate auction, click here. And watch a clip of Ackerman talking about Equinox, a film he championed in the pages of Famous Monsters (“because it showed the talents of young readers like Dennis Muren and Mark McGee” and “gave hope and inspiration to others to follow in their footsteps”), from an interview on Criterion’s 2006 release.

Equinox

Jack Woods

1970

82 min

Color

1.33:1

Next week, we release a definitive, three-disc set of the short documentaries of Jean Painlevé (1902–89), the pioneering French scientist-educator-filmmaker (and sometime Dadaist) whose mesmerizing studies of marine life, especially, have been attracting wide audiences and new fans for decades (including the rock band Yo La Tengo, which regularly performs with the films, and whose eight-film score is included on the release). By way of an introduction to this truly unique artist, we present his “Ten Commandments,” originally published in the notes accompanying his touring “Poets of the Documentary” program in 1948. On first glance, they may seem simple enough, but once you’ve watched the films, many more layers of meaning will become evident. On the second commandment, for instance, “one might wonder how scientifically informed nature films can be said to express convictions,” film scholar Scott MacDonald muses in his essay for the release, “but it is precisely Painlevé’s implicit (and sometimes explicit) reasons for selecting the organisms he does and his manner of presenting them that reveal his attitudes.” Among those attitudes seems to be an interest in confronting conventional ideas about gender, MacDonald writes, evident in his films on sea horses (male and female collaborate on child birthing), daphnia (self-reproducing females), starfish (hermaphroditic), and the stunning Acera (bisexual), which, when mating, “do a kind of ballet during which the cloaks that encircle their bodies fly open, evoking tutus.” Painlevé’s film about these last creatures, notes MacDonald, is “reminiscent of moments from Oskar Fischinger films and from Disney’s Fantasia.”

Here are all ten of Painlevé’s filmmaking convictions, practiced over six decades and more than two hundred luminous films:

1. You will not make documentaries if you do not feel the subject.

2. You will refuse to direct a film if your convictions are not expressed.

3. You will not influence the audience by unfair means.

4. You will seek reality without aestheticism or ideological apparatus.

5. You will abandon every special effect that is not justified.

6. Trickery will be of no use unless the audience is your confidant.

7. You will not use clever editing unless it illustrates your good intentions.

8. You will not show monotonous sequences without perfect justification.

9. You will not substitute words for images in any way.

10. You will not be content with “close enough” unless you want to fail spectacularly.

Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé

Jean Painlevé

315 min

Color & Black and White

1.33:1

Writing the screenplay for The Last Metro with Suzanne Schiffman, I intended to do for the theater what I had done for the cinema in Day for Night: the chronicle of a troupe at work, within a framework respecting the unities of place, time, and action. There was a notable difference between the two projects, which is that my acquaintance with the theater is superficial and that, in any case, putting on a play is very much less rich, visually, than shooting a film.

The occupation does not constitute a theme in itself but simply a background and, for me, who was eight at the start of the war and twelve at the Liberation, a background rich in sensations, emotions, memories. In 1958, writing The 400 Blows with Marcel Moussy, I regretted not being able to bring in a thousand details from my adolescence connected with that period of the occupation, but the budget and the New Wave frame of mind were not compatible with the notion of a “period film.” From that standpoint, Jules and Jim in 1961 constituted an exception.

It was in 1968, after having made Stolen Kisses, that I again felt I wanted to reconstruct that epoch. But at that point I was stopped dead in my enthusiasm by a remarkable film, Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity, which, by the use of documents and interviews, mingles past and present with a Proustian felicity. The Sorrow and the Pity is certainly not a film of fiction, yet it is not a documentary either, but rather an impassioned reflection of such a richness that several viewings do not suffice to exhaust it.  

The Last Metro

François Truffaut

1980

131 min

Color

1.66:1

If Dillinger is dead, who will take revenge? There were movies once that began, “Custer is dead,” in which you could reckon that a lot of Indians were going to pay the price. This bizarre film by Marco Ferreri (only just released in the United States, forty years after it was made) is a most peculiar story about the way in which one man on the brink of alienation deals with his wife and his mistress and gets away to Tahiti as a ship’s cook on a three-masted schooner.

The man is Michel Piccoli. He seems to be an executive at some chic factory that makes masks that will enable workers to function in toxic atmospheres. A colleague reads him an article asserting that the masks are a metaphor for dehumanization. Has everybody got the point?

Dillinger Is Dead was made in that disgusted blast against advertising and the modern age that is also in evidence early in Godard’s Pierrot le fou, as the film travesties the language and languor of commercials. But whereas Jean-Paul Belmondo is a forlorn fighter in Godard’s great film, desperate to hold on to love, no matter that he only believes in lost love, Piccoli here is . . . well, he’s Piccoli.  

“Let me have men about me that are fat.”
—Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 2

Just as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe admired small, brave men who stick to their principles, I like—in the movies at least—heavyset, flamboyant types who walk and talk as if life were a poem, whether dainty or grating, lyrical or bombastic. Not least because they pose an alternative to “lean and hungry” male leads, Oliver Hardy, W. C. Fields, Orson Welles, Sydney Greenstreet, Raimu, Francis L. Sullivan, Robert Morley, Philippe Noiret, Burl Ives, and Robbie Coltrane have privileged cinema with their weighty presence.

Charles Laughton (1899–1962) would have been extraordinary whatever his girth, but ampleness lent him enormous emotional heft. The screen can barely contain him at times: when, in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), his disgruntled Henry bloody-mindedly mocks Tudor politesse by tossing hunks of cooked fowl over his shoulder; when his Captain Bligh, a porcine sadist who might have been drawn by the eighteenth-century cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson, tells Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable) that he’s “a mutinous dog” in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935); when his pumped-up Lancastrian bootmaker, who lords it over his daughters in Hobson’s Choice (1954), half dances home in a beery haze. Laughton harnessed his bulk to his characters’ emotions rhythmically.  

The Private Life of Henry VIII

Alexander Korda

1933

96 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Rembrandt

Alexander Korda

1936

85 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Hobson's Choice

David Lean

1954

108 min

Black and White

1.33:1