Review: 'The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film'

Horror movies are horror movies because they're scary, but there are many more reasons to watch them than the thrill of a good jolt. For the most veteran, and therefore calloused, of horror viewers, the possibility of being scared is a hell of a lot less likely than simply enjoying some rich Gothic atmosphere, cool monster makeup, the fine acting and directing one finds in a good movie of any genre, or, for the baser of us, vats of gore. You know who you are.

Review: 'Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia'

As a place for me to babble about my favorite rock music and horror movies of a century that only exists in the rearview, Psychobabble is nostalgic by definition. So a book like Ghost of an Idea, which ostensibly studies and derides the tendency of the horror film to look back with both fear and longing, probably isn't aimed at me. Nor is the almost willfully dense academic voice that dominates the first third of the book. 

Review: 'Adapting Stephen King Volume 1: Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining from Novel to Screenplay'

Joseph Maddrey begins Adapting Stephen King Volume 1 with the statement that Stephen King is in the Guinness Book of World's Records as the guy whose work has inspired more movies than any other writer. That means Maddrey really has his work cut out for him since Volume 1 only covers adaptations of King's first three novels published under his own name, and it covers the scripting processes of Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining in great detail. He follows King's debut from its early stages as an apparently disappointing adaptation from revered screenwriter Stirling Silliphant through Lawrence D. Cohen's unquestionably successful adaptation. Along the way he explains where the drafts veer from King's source material, analyzes how those alterations affect the story, and explains how the directors and actors' interpretations of the scripts alter the work further. Maddrey also gets into the reinterpretations as each of King's first three novels have been brought to screens large and small more than once.

Maddrey's approach is as resourceful as his information is thorough and insightful. Adapting Stephen King Volume 1 is mainly a novel-to-script-to-screen study, but it also includes oral history interludes and interviews with the screenwriters responsible for the most significant adaptations (the only screenwriter he does not personally interview is King himself; oddly, he selects an interview from the run-up to Kubrick's Shining in 1979 to illustrate the section on the Shining miniseries King spearheaded in 1997). Clearly, a lot of work went into this book which means it will likely be years before he gets around to my favorite King novel, It. Get cracking, Maddrey.

Review: 'Stephen King at the Movies: A Complete History of the Film and Television Adaptations from the Master of Horror'

Early in Stephen King at the Movies: A Complete History of the Film and Television Adaptations from the Master of Horror, Ian Nathan drops some stunning statistics. Apparently, the Master has written or inspired some 65 movies, 30 TV programs, and 7 episodes of TV anthology series. That must be some sort of record, and it certainly justifies the existence of a book like Nathan’s. Fortunately, the author knew just what to do with this overdue project.

Stephen King at the Movies is part photo book, sneering with nasty full-color images culled from the many King screen works, as well as some neat behind-the-scenes looks at these films and shows’ creations. Nathan does not allow the photos to do all the heavy lifting though. He supplies satisfying making-of accounts and critiques of each of the numerous pictures he discusses in an entertaining tone appropriate to his subject matter and with the critical distance to acknowledge that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is great despite what King says and that the King-approved mini-series version is thoroughly mediocre.

For the most part, Nathan allows a couple of pages to pore over each film, but for the cream of this creepy crop—Carrie, The Shining, Misery, Stand by Me, etc.—he devotes as many as eight pages. Along the way, there’s some interesting trivia, such as a nuggets about how Warner Bros. offered Stanley Kubrick The Exorcist and Warren Beatty almost played the James Caan role in Misery. Visual and textual fun, Stephen King at the Movies should keep fans occupied as they suffer the always brief wait for another King project to splatter across the screen.

Review: 'Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film'

From his decision to adapt the scandalous Lolita to the world-annihilating cynicism of Dr. Strangelove to the unflinching anti-storytelling of 2001 to the horrific physical and psychological violence of A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick made a career of shocking viewers. He seemed to save up his most unrelenting succession of shocks for what turned out to be his final film. Kubrick’s decision to film a lengthy orgy extreme enough for U.S. censors to demand its actions be obscured with digital censors was shocking. That the film required an excruciating 18 months to shoot was shocking. The way the long, long, long awaited film from the man many rated as cinema’s greatest living artist baffled, repelled, and bored many viewers was shocking. Kubrick’s sudden death shortly after completing the first cut of Eyes Wide Shut was the biggest shock of all.

Even if you are among those viewers who loathe Eyes Wide Shut, the shocking nature of its making may still compel you to read Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film. Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams uncover new shocks that enrich the story of an already labyrinthian film. Although I knew that the film gestated in Kubrick’s mind for a long time, I was surprised that it did so for as many as 40 years. Kolker and Abrams imply that Kubrick’s obsession with bringing Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle to the screen may have infused much of his earlier work, including Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining (Kubrick annotated his copy of Stephen King’s novel with ideas for scenes that seem straight out of Schnitzler’s), and unproduced projects such as Burning Secret and Laughter in the Dark. Though there is a lot of humor in the finished product (particularly in its oft-misunderstood orgy sequence), I was also surprised by the wealth of evidence that Kubrick seriously considered adapting Traumnovelle as a comedy, and that he’d considered casting Woody Allen and Steve Martin in the lead role and communicated with Terry Southern about writing it.

While I noticed at least one exaggeration (Kolker and Abrams called the Eyes Wide Shut shoot history’s longest, but the 12-year shoot of Boyhood and the 5-year shoot of Eraserhead easily beat its 18 months), the book is well researched (materials include Kubrick’s personal faxes and notes he made on scripts and in books) and doesn’t oversell its conclusions. I’m not sure if it will spur Eyes Wide Shut haters to reevaluate the film, but Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film will give them some fresh insight into the seemingly impenetrable mind of Stanley Kubrick.

Review: 'Kubrick’s Music—Selections from the Films of Stanley Kubrick'

Stanley Kubrick’s work is often more like world’s you visit than movies you watch. The galactic emptiness of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The grimy yet candy-colored near-future dystopia of A Clockwork Orange. The cavernous, ice-encrusted hotel of The Shining. The opulent dream vision of NYC in Eyes Wide Shut. The oil painting landscapes and chiaroscuro interiors of Barry Lyndon. Even the desolate suburbs of Lolita are inhabitable environments that engulf you, shutting out any trace of our real world for two or three hours. Kubrick put an absurd amount of thought into how to best create these fully dimensional worlds visually, but he put a great deal of thought into the sounds swirling between their borders as well. He’d spend hour upon hour researching music, and the fruits of his labors are clear to anyone who cannot separate the visuals of great spacecraft tumbling through the cosmos without hearing “The Blue Danube Waltz” or a tiny car traversing a treacherous path swarmed by foreboding forests without hearing Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s “Dies Irae”.

Much of the music to which Kubrick bestowed additional dimensions can be heard on El Records’ Kubrick’s Music—Selections from the Films of Stanley Kubrick. This set is both fascinating and frustrating. It is frustrating because so many essentials are not present. The Shining’s sprawling soundtrack is largely reduced to the jazz-age tracks Kubrick used to stir the ghosts of the Overlook’s bloody past. “Dies Irae” only appears within Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique”, a stirring piece of bombast far removed from The Shining’s brooding tone. Carlos and Elkind’s chilling synth production is not present. The same is true of the synthesized music from A Clockwork Orange: the pieces only appear in traditionally orchestrated versions. While we get an eerie prelude by Ralph Vaughan Williams that Kubrick considered using in the stargate sequence of 2001, we do not get the more transformative and disturbing Ligeti piece he ultimately used in the film. While pop songs are present in the use of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” (Dr. Strangelove), Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” (A Clockwork Orange), and a non-soundtrack song Sue Lyon sang on the B-side of the “Lolita Ya-Ya” single, none of the great pop songs used in Full Metal Jacket appear. In fact, that film, as well as Killer’s Kiss and The Killing, is completely unrepresented.

However, some of these issues also point to one of the more fascinating aspects of Kubrick’s Music since we get to hear much of what inspired Kubrick to use the music he ultimately used, and the inclusion of discarded ideas such as the Ralph Vaughan Williams prelude makes Kubrick’s Music a sort of enlightening look at Kubrick’s musical sketchpad. So while this is hardly a definitive collection of Kubrick soundtracks, it is an educational one, and with such great pieces as John Coltrane’s “Greensleeves”, Nelson Riddle’s “Lolita Ya Ya”,  Rimskey-Korsokav’s “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship” (incidentally, a piece shut out of the original Clockwork Orange soundtrack), and several movements from Ludwig Van’s glorious “Ninth”, there is quite a lot of gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh to slooshy, o my brothers.

5 Superior Adaptations of Horror Lit

Adapting literature for the cinema is always tricky, and this can be especially true when dealing with stories intended to raise shivers. What is terrifyingly evocative on the page can flop like a sack of wet leaves when realized with a dude in a zip-up monster suit on screen. Acts unimaginably awful when described cease to play on the imagination when depicted with a rubber knife and karo-syrup blood. Some of horror’s greatest literary works, such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, It, and I Am Legend, have never received ideal screen adaptations. Some page-to-screen trips have been more lateral with stories such as Frankenstein and Dracula offering very different yet equally essential elements when turned into movies or ones such as The Haunting of Hill House and Rosemary’s Baby being faithful enough to be genuine cases of “six of one/half dozen of another.” On occasion, a film goes above and beyond, reinventing the story upon which it is based in ways that make the original text virtually irrelevant. Here are five of those superior horrors.

Monsterology: Monster Houses

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

Welcome home! You’ve had a tough day digging ditches in some inhospitable mound of dirt or hacking away at a keyboard in an even less homey office cubicle. What you need now is to hang up your boots and settle into your lazy boy. Your home is your castle, your one bit of security and privacy in an increasingly insecure and inprivate world. It is so inprivate that we have to make up new words like “inprivate” to indicate how inprivate it is.

But wouldn’t it be a stone drag if you were settling in to relax in your sanctuary and the walls started bulging unnaturally or bleeding even more unnaturally? Wouldn’t it simply ruin your night if that thing you haven’t even finished paying the mortgage on yet sucked your precious little daughter into the electrical system or made you want to pick up an axe and chop up your precious little son?

Monsters come in all shapes, sizes, and smells, but one thing that unites the mass of them from werewolves to robots is that they somehow resemble organic beings. One of the few exceptions is the monstrous house. The fact that it has no arms or legs or teeth makes the monster house highly unusual and really very wrong (though not completely beyond anthropomorphization, as we shall see). The fact that a house is such a mundane thing, a thing intended to protect and comfort, makes it highly insidious, especially when it turns against the children who dwell in it, as it so often does.

First of all, we must distinguish the monster house from the haunted house. In a haunted house, the monster is some form of ghost. It may make the windows rattle or the chairs fall over, but that ghost is the central threat, not the place it chooses to haunt. That would be like blaming Dracula’s castle for the vampire’s poor behavior, which would be unfair to a perfectly fine castle. The nasty things a ghost does can be accomplished by any breathing, visible asshole. Ghosts or other such entities may be responsible for making a monster house monstrous, but a true monster house takes on a life of its own; it is the threat.

The first truly enduring monster house remains the definitive one. Published in 1839, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” largely passed over specifics to dwell on off putting descriptions of the title building. The unnamed narrator approaches the house, and it instantly casts its spell on him, bashing him with waves of depression and unease. He has not even interacted with its weird inhabitants before getting a very strong sense that the House of Usher is a bad place. He even emphasizes its inherent monstrousness by trying to describe it in anthropomorphic terms, noting its “vacant and eye-like windows.”

Is it the house that has seemingly poisoned Roderick and Madeline Usher, both of whom suffer from odd maladies such as Roderick’s intense aversion to sound and his sister’s general malaise and tendency to lapse into catatonic states? Is it responsible for the subtextual moral decay of the siblings, whose relationship may not be entirely platonic? As the narrator drifts through the foreboding house, it reacts violently to the presence of one who might uncover its strange and dirty secrets. It begins cracking in disapproval. When the ultimate abomination comes to light—Roderick’s premature burial of catatonic Madeline—the house has a total nervous breakdown. As the short story’s title spoils, the House of Usher falls—quite literally. The building collapses, claiming the poisoned siblings as its victims while the narrator manages to escape the domestic tomb. In a perversion of home security, the house would rather self-destruct than allow its family’s ugly secrets come to life, even if that means wiping out the family in the process.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 63

The Date: December 2

The Movie: The Shining (1980)

What Is It?: No amount of Stephen King’s whining can make Stanley Kubrick’s hotel-sized horror less iconic or enjoyable. Ghosts, cabin fever, anger, and tumblers of imaginary scotch send Jack Nicholson into an axe-swinging fit of redrum.

Why Today?: December 2^nd is the day the redrum shit hits the fan in King’s novel.

Review: 'A Brief Guide to Stephen King'

Don’t fret over the title of A Brief Guide to Stephen King, or the idea of the writer’s gargantuan body of work being boiled down to a mere 265 pages. Paul Simpson’s career overview may be brief, but it is satisfying. He covers every one of King’s novels, novellas, short story collections, digital and other uncollected stories, screenplays, and comic book scripts to date, as well as a nuts-and-bolts biography and overview of select non-fiction work. Each entry includes a short synopsis before getting to the goods with a pretty lengthy look at the tales’ genesis, the reactions it provoked, and adaptations it inspired (yes, that does include the Shining porno spoof Naughty Little Nymphos 5). The structure and content reminded me quite a bit of Marc Scott Zicree’s essential Twilight Zone Companion right down to his refusal to hold back spoilers. Simpson is less critical though. Since he clearly knows his King, it would have been nice if he’d provided a bit more personal assessment for each title so that his book could also provide recommendations better. For the most part, he remains neutral, allowing quotes from the critics of the past—many of whom are most certainly not Stephen King fans— to give each work the “yay” or “nay.” So you may just have to make up your own mind about whether or not you should read about preteen sewer orgies and shit weasels.

Review: 'Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art 2'

If boring stuff like a pond of water lilies, some girl wearing pearl earrings, and Jesus having dinner can inspire great works of art, then who’s to say that awesome stuff like Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me can’t do the same? Not me, brothers and sisters. In fact, some of the most eye-bursting contemporary art you’ll see is compiled in Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art 2, Gallery 1988’s follow-up to their first installment published in 2011. Snobs expecting to see a bunch of sub-tattoo-parlor smudges will be knocked out by the breadth and technique on display in this collection, with pieces owing to the expected comic book and graphic arts, but also splashing into photorealism, surrealism, pop art, and Soviet art, as well as three-dimensional mixed-media, sculpted, and plush works. The quality is as (for the most part) consistent as the styles and subject matter are diverse. As Seth Rogen points out in his foreword, this is an art book for people who usually don’t care too much about art. What he doesn’t note is that it is also an art book for people who care deeply about art, and at this point in history, anyone close-minded enough to not accept Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Shining, or even Scott Pilgrim vs. The World—a lousy movie that still inspired some very good pieces scattered across the six-page spread that concludes Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art 2— as viable art topics has no business judging art in the first place.

Review: 'The Stanley Kubrick Archives'

Stanley Kubrick’s background as a still photographer was fully apparent in his cinematic works. His images held up magnificently when editor Alison Castle floated them from the screen to the pages of her 2004 book The Stanley Kubrick Archives. These shots “scanned directly from the film reels” constitute Part 1 of Castle’s massive tribute to our most awe-striking filmmaker. She allows these iconic images—Jamie Smith wielding a mannequin in Killer’s Kiss, Sterling Hayden watching his fortune blow down a runway in The Killing, James Mason painting Sue Lyons’s toes in Lolita, Slim Pickens riding a bomb in Dr. Strangelove, the moon and sun aligning with a looming monolith in 2001, the 50mm paintings of Barry Lyndon, the blood-flooding elevator of The Shining—to speak for themselves, reminding us of how the essence of filmmaking is pictures not words and how often dialogue was unneeded in so many of Kubrick’s most powerful scenes.

Review: 'Horror Films of the 1980s'

John Kenneth Muir took an ambitious chomp out of horror history with Horror Films of the 1980s. His 2007 book surveys more than 325 films released during the Reagan/Bush years, tying almost every one into the broader context of that scary, conservative era. Overall, Muir’s reviews are intelligent, well written, and historically astute, which makes it hard to take him to task for some of his opinions. This guy is very forgiving and very, very fast and loose with his four star ratings, which may please horror devotees who get annoyed with critics who crap on their favorite films. For the most part, he does make strong arguments for his opinions. While I would never rank Night of the Comet as a better movie than An American Werewolf in London, Muir analyzes both films clearly enough that I understand why he does.

 Yet there is the occasional disconnect between his star ratings and his analyses. His four-star write-up of Fatal Attraction briefly prefaces the film as “brilliant” before launching into an extended finger-wagging session aimed at its “shameful” and “despicable” agenda. We get no sense of what is allegedly “brilliant” about this movie aside from its ability to manipulate the audience, which may make for a brilliant con man but not necessarily a brilliant film. Perhaps Muir based his star ratings on his uncritical enjoyment of the films while saving his more impartial insights for the reviews. It’s a little confusing though.

There are some strange entry choices too— this is certainly the first time I’ve ever seen the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple studied as a horror film—but when you’ve read enough about horror, you come to realize how subjective its definition can be. Like any critical collection, Horror Films of the 1980s is ultimately subjective despite instances like the Fatal Attraction entry discussed above, but Muir balances that nicely by including other perspectives of these films. Each entry is introduced with a selection of period review excerpts and new ones written by his fellow critics and horror fanatics. The juxtapositions can be really fascinating, as when an assortment of terrible and glowing reviews lead into the entry on The Shining. Today it’s easy to forget that this classic—and its creator, Stanley Kubrick—were not always universally revered. It’s also easy to forget that Reagan— that pioneer of contemporary extreme conservatism— swelled the federal government, the number of American’s living in poverty, and the national debt, as Muir reminds us. Often, Horror Films of the 1980s is just as valuable as a history lesson as it is an appraisal of horror movies, and it’s praiseworthy for that reason too. In fact, it might be a good book to buy for kids who can’t stomach cracking that social studies text.

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 7: The 1980s

In this feature, Psychobabble creeps through 100 years of horror cinema to assemble a highly personal list of the genre’s 200 most monstrous works, decade by decade.

(Updated in September 2021)

122. The Shining (1980- dir. Stanley Kubrick)

January 8, 2010: Five Classic Monster Movies for a Snowy Day

I don’t know where you are, but here in Jersey City, there’s a thin layer of snow on the ground. While this is hardly the product of some punishing blizzard, it’s still early in the season, and if the amount of snow we’ve gotten so far is any indication, this is going to be another snowy winter. That means there will be plenty of opportunities to watch some snowbound monster flicks.

Watching a film that captures the desolation of a snow-swathed landscape or the paranoia of being snowbound as a winter storm rages outside your window really heightens the horror of such a film. It’s like watching a haunted house flick in an actual haunted house. Here are five classic monster movies you might consider watching today or the next time your area gets the business end of a blizzard.

1. The Invisible Man (1932)

The first sound monster film to really take advantage of snowy landscapes is James Whale’s masterful adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man. Snow plays a rather practical role in the film: without it, the cops wouldn’t stand a chance of capturing a creature who can only be detected via his footprints, therefore there would be no sense of risk. And let’s face it: Whale wants us to identify with Claude Rains’s Dr. Griffin, who is simply bursting with malevolent mischievousness and nasty humor, not the dull cretins who would foil his diabolical plans to “rule the world…” to “rob and rage and kill!” Still, I’ve always wondered why Griffin doesn’t just die of the flu long before the end of the picture, since he spends so much time running around in the snow buck naked.


2. The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Released just a few months after The Curse of Frankenstein, Val Guest’s The Abominable Snowman was only the second genuine monster movie produced by Hammer Studios. As such, it is quite a different beast from the colorful Gothic horror pictures for which the studio was best known, yet its minimalism and the bleakness of its Himalayan setting make it no less creepy. There is also a subtlety and poetry to The Abominable Snowman that is lacking in some of Hammer’s more lavish productions. Studio mainstay Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker play scientists on a quest to find the fabled snow creature, who has been leaving his size-18 footprints all over the surrounding area. While the creature is not among Hammer’s more expertly executed creations, the film provides one of the studio’s most intriguingly sensitive denouements.

3. The Shining (1980)

Stephen King was no fan of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but fans know that it is not only the greatest adaptation of King’s work, but it’s also the ultimate snowbound horror film. We can debate whether or not Jack Nicholson was the right choice to play a character who is supposed to go mad gradually, rather than come off like a wacko right out of the gate (which was King’s main gripe about the movie), but The Shining is still a masterpiece of palpable cabin fever. Notice how the snowy environment incrementally devolves from the picturesque-quality of the opening sequence, as Jack Torrance (Nicholson) and his little family head to the cursed Overlook Hotel, to the more blanched-out haze seen when son Danny (creepy Danny Lloyd) and wife Wendy (frantic Shelley Duvall) go for a pleasant walk in the hedge-maze to ultimate darkness and overwhelming nothingness when Torrance goes completely off his rocker and hunts his son through that maze at the picture’s climax. As is the case with a few other Kubrick films (2001, Eyes Wide Shut…), the environment is just as much of a character in the picture as any of the humans, and while The Overlook may be the most obvious environmental character in The Shining, the snow-laden world that surrounds it is an equally complex and terrifying entity.


4. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)

Howard Hawks’s 1951 sci-fi monster picture The Thing From Another World is generally rated as one of the great films of its ilk, but I actually prefer John Carpenter’s 1982 remake in spite of my yen for all things really, really old. With its cast of grizzled, hard-drinking, tough-talking dudes, John Carpenter’s The Thing is as much a macho action movie as it is a monster picture, but a suffocating air of doom ensures that the picture’s true agenda is to horrify. The ostensible enemy in the film is a grotesquely metamorphosing alien that can take the shape of any living thing it sees, which exacerbates the trigger-happy paranoia of the research team quarantined at a station in Antarctica. However, the barren environment is just as formidable as the monster bumping off the men (and causing them to bump off each other). As the picture reaches its cynical, hopeless conclusion, that unforgiving tundra seems like it will be the beast that will wipe out humanity for good.



5. Gremlins (1984)

In contrast to the grim landscapes present in most of the other movies on this list, the environment in Joe Dante’s Gremlins is a winter wonderland straight out of a Courier and Ives print. Placing the demonic, havoc-raising gremlins in such a pleasantly bucolic location is fully in-step with the film’s ironic tone, and the Christmas setting provides plenty of opportunities for grotesque set-pieces: the gremlins going door-to-door to shriek shrill carols, a dog strung up in Christmas lights, the beasties swarming a hapless dude in a Santa suit, Phoebe Cates’s positively awful story about how her father croaked after jamming himself in his own chimney while playing Santa for his kids. And, lest we forget, Gizmo, the fluffy little thing responsible for much of this violent mayhem, was, itself, a Christmas gift.