Baby’s First Exorcism: 10 Movies to Desensitize Your Kids to Monsters and Murder

Every new parent faces the same serious dilemma: When do I first show my child The Exorcist? Age 3? 4? 7? It’s a pickle, indeed, and the answer is a bit convoluted, because if you sit little Johnny or Suzie in front of Regan MacNeil’s pea soup vomiting and crucifix…errr… “play” too early, you might do serious damage to his or her psyche. Wait too long, and your child might spend the rest of her or his life watching the same damn Barney tape over and over, never conditioned to take in hardier fare.

No worries, Big Johnny or Suzie, because I am an experienced parent equipped to guide you down the perfect path toward ensuring your child will one day join you for marathons of horrifying, terrifying, disgustifying movies all Halloween Season long. The key is to systematically expose your child to the following 10 movies guaranteed to desensitize your kids to monsters, murders, and anything else your favorite horror flick may lob at them.

Step 1. Curse of the Cat People

We begin with a film that does not quite qualify as a horror movie despite being a sequel to Jacques Tourneur’s chilling masterwork Cat People. A sequel may seem like an odd starting point, but Robert Wise’s Curse of the Cat People really has very little to do with Tourneur’s picture about a woman with serious sexual hang ups who turns into a blood thirsty panther (or at least thinks she does) whenever she gets horny. Clearly, that movie would not be very appropriate to show to your three year old, but Curse of the Cat People has more in common with Alice in Wonderland. Oliver Reed and Alice Moore from the original film have an over-imaginative little daughter named Ann who finds a photo of her dad’s ex, the now deceased cat-woman Irena Dubrovna, and fantasizes her into existence as a ghostly playmate. Ann also makes friends with an old actress with a penchant for telling especially vivid tales of the Headless Horseman. Curse of the Cat People is ultimately a very charming, moving tale of growing up fit for any tot, but its ghost and scary stories will gives your kid the heads up that there are things more intense than Cars 3 out there.

Step 2. The Wizard of Oz

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 220

The Date: May 7

The Movie: Curse of the Cat People (1944)

What Is It?: RKO demanded a follow-up to the smash hit Cat People, so cheeky producer Val Lewton reused that film’s three main characters and nothing else, basically turning the characters into completely different people too. The original Cat Woman, Simone Simon, is now a ghost guide to a sweet little girl with an overactive imagination. This is a beautiful, enchanting, and somewhat sad fairy tale about putting away childish things.

Why Today?: On this day in 1904, Val Lewton is born.

Review: 'The Very Witching Time of Night: Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema'

I’m ashamed to say I’d never read any of Gregory Mank’s books until The Very Witching Time of Night: Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema. This is a major oversight since he’s regarded as one of our top horror historians, but also because I’ve always really enjoyed Mank’s charming presence in David Skal’s documentaries on The Mummy, Frankenstein, and Bride of Frankenstein. Apparently, Mank’s previous books were quite focused, tackling Frankenstein, women’s roles in thirties horror movies, Karloff and Lugosi’s collaborations, and Dwight Frye, so The Very Witching Time may be an odd starting point. Aside from the general horror theme (which is even tenuous in a chapter or two), the book is unfocused by definition, each chapter taking on a different dark corner of horror history that didn’t quite fit into any of his previous books. There’s a chapter devoted to Helen Chandler, Mina of Browning’s Dracula whose personal life was more miserable than anything she suffered in her most famous role; one on Paramount’s infamously lurid Murders in the Zoo, and an interview with the son of that film’s star, Lionel Atwill; exhaustive production diaries on the very unlike Cat People and Curse of the Cat People; histories of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and the far-more horrific Hitler’s Madman, a historical horror show about Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich starring genre-staple John Carradine; and so on.

What unites this variety of nightmares is Mank’s attention to detail, his often-lyrical writing, and the common issues many of these disparate films faced. Censorship was a plague. Scandal dogged a number of the stars (both Atwill and Cat People’s Simone Simon suffered career damage when reports they’d hosted orgies surfaced), making The Very Witching Time occasionally read like a less-overheated Hollywood Babylon. In two of its wilder recollections, the set of Murders in the Zoo turns into a devastating and depressing real-life wildlife battle royal and John Barrymore’s drunk son personally exhumes his father’s fluid-leaking corpse 38 years after it was put in the ground.

There is a lot of dishing in The Very Witching Time of Night, but it is always relevant to the histories and hardly the book’s sole fascination. Some of the chapters are short on revelations (the interview with Atwill’s son and the piece on Boris Karloff's time at Warner Bros., for example), but Horror fans will find the parallels between the lovely and intimate Curse of the Cat People and producer Val Lewton’s life and the inclusion of the Monster’s deleted dialogue from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man riveting stuff. They may also pray he expands his delightful chapter on "Shock! Theatre" with its huge transcript chunks into an entire book. If nothing else The Very Witching Time of Night has finally lit a spark under me to read more Mank.

10 Non-Horror Movies That Think They're Horror Movies

We expect monsters and suspense and shocks and disturbing images when we watch horror movies. They’re all part of the gravestone-littered territory. But what happens when such elements creep into dramas and crime pictures and kiddie-flicks and musicals and sci-fi spectaculars and pseudo documentaries? They may get under our skin even more assuredly because they don’t belong; they’re wrong, and horror has always drawn much of its power from showing us very wrong things. Thus some of the scariest movies are not horror movies at all, but movies that apparently think they’re horror movies. Here are ten of the most horrifying.

1. The Curse of the Cat People (1944 – dir. Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch)

We begin with an exception to the rules delineated above. Val Lewton may be horror’s most renowned producer, yet most of his films could just as easily have found a place on this list because he so emphatically avoided commitment to the supernatural. RKO pictures handed Lewton goofy titles like I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and Cat People, expecting him to make cheapo monster flicks to turn a quick profit. He in turn paid as little lip service to standard horror as possible, mining these pictures for unsettling psychological insight and allowing his stock company of directors— Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise— to realize them with artful light and shadow. RKO wasn’t getting exactly what it asked for, but it was getting hit films. Cat People was one of the biggest, so a sequel was a natural demand. Not only did Lewton barely bother to tie The Curse of the Cat People to its predecessor, but he made almost no effort to imbue it with anything recognizably horrifying. There is a ghost—former cat person Irena (Simone Simon)—but she is probably just a figment of little Amy’s (Ann Carter) imagination, and she is hardly an entity of horror. Rather, the once murderous monster has been totally rewritten as a benevolent presence, a beautiful and gentle playmate for a lonely girl whose parents (Kent Smith and Jane Randolph from the previous picture) don’t like her wasting her young years daydreaming. The Curse of the Cat People is a truly lovely piece of work—beautifully filmed and bittersweet—that was Lewton’s first to really give horror the heave ho. However, RKO was still able to market it as such because of its lurid title, its ghost, and a single scary sequence in which a local Miss Havisham (Julia Dean) tells Amy a story about the headless horseman that pitches the girl’s overactive imagination into hyperactive mode. There’s also a slight danger that the old lady’s daughter (Elizabeth Russell) is going to wring the kid’s neck in a fit of daughterly jealousy, but come on, that obviously isn’t going to happen in such a sweet film that really only thinks it’s horror.

2. Sunset Boulevard (1950 – dir. Billy Wilder)

When horror fell out of favor in the ‘50s, it immediately began assimilating into other genres. This is clearest in the decade’s sci-fi pictures that exuded fear more readily than the celestial and technological wonder at the heart of the genre. Horror also worked its way into noirs such as Kiss Me Deadly, with its apocalyptic finale, and The Night of the Hunter, a true genre straddler with a villain who is equal parts swindler archetype and boogeyman. In his 1950 noir Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder absorbed horror in subtler ways. Dimming star Norma Desmond (silent film legend Gloria Swanson) skulks through a Gothic old dark house replete with rat-infested swimming pool, Chas Addams-style dead chimp, and wheezy pipe organ on which the grim butler (one-time silent filmmaker and later-day horror character actor Erich von Stroheim) plays the classic horror signifier “Toccata and Fugue”. Norma, herself, is both beautiful and eerily possessed; a dead ringer for Gloria Holden’s Dracula’s Daughter. In his book American Gothic, Jonathan Rigby draws numerous fascinating parallels between Norma and Dracula senior, and her thrall over Joe Gillis (William Holden) is easily comparable to that of the Count over Mina or Renfield, even if the reason is more economic than supernatural. Though Rigby’s treatment of Sunset Boulevard as true horror is a stretch, there is no question that its final image of Norma— now completely insane, floating toward the camera, her eyes ablaze with madness, her predatory, claw-like fingers reaching for the audience—is among cinema’s most terrifying.

3. Vertigo (1958 – dir. Alfred Hitchcock)