Arbitrary but fun value judgments: III
Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge is the creepiest movie in the world.
Now, perhaps there are films that have more creepiness in them frame by frame, like, say, Father of the Bride. But the parameters of this Friday’s arbitrary but fun value judgment are confined to critically acclaimed films—“serious” films, if you can stand that term—and not, say, The Cell or Hollow Man. And what do I mean by “creepy”? Glad you asked. I mean something very much like “icky” (I know, I know, all this barbaric postmodern jargon), except deeper, more corrosive, harder to wash off the next day.
Here’s the back story. Recently, Janet and I and another academic couple were talking shop, and I mentioned Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—not as some kind of wry metacommentary on the conversation itself, mind you, but for the minor point that Martha lambastes George for (among other things) not having the ambition to become department chair. I find this highly amusing. Anyway, that started Janet on Carnal Knowledge, which not only creeped her out when we first saw it eight or nine years ago, but which sparked one of those Interpretive Conflicts (Spousal Version) over whether the movie was misogynist. (Eventually I settled on something like, “I think you’re wrong not to credit the film as a critique, but then again, I can’t say that Jules Feiffer’s script is kind to its female characters, either.”) So all four of us planned to rent Carnal Knowledge and see it again.
This time the creepiness lasted for days. I did see a bunch of things I’d missed the first time around—the brilliance of the editing as Candace Bergen dances with Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, the tennis scene in which all the tennis-playing is off camera, the extreme close-ups, the stripping away of almost everything in the world except these few characters—all of which left me with a nasty sense of claustrophobia as well as creepiness. (I’m sure I’m thinking of all those incredibly tight shots because I saw The Passion of Joan of Arc this week.) But Art Garfunkel at dinner with Jack Nicholson, tugging on his cigar as he muses over the inadequacy of his sex life with Candace Bergen? Ann-Margaret’s descent into abjection and immobility? Garfunkel’s defense of his love for the barely-postpubescent Carol Kane? Everything about Nicholson’s character from start to finish? Creepy, creepy, creepy.
I’m sure there are similarly good/ serious/ creepy films out there, so (as usual) suggest ‘em. I have one question, though. Look at what happened to the principals: Ann-Margaret was plunged into depression for years because of her role in this film. Art Garfunkel disappeared and was next seen on a milk carton somewhere in Central Park. Jack Nicholson basically became his character, Jonathan Fuerst (and sometimes even plays older or parodic versions of him, as well). And Mike Nichols, after opening with Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, and Catch-22 (not bad for a start), followed this with Day of the Dolphin and then . . . nothing, really, until he resurfaced in the mid-1980s as a director of bland, airplane-movie things like Heartburn and Regarding Henry. Only Candace Bergen seems to have been left untouched by the movie’s soul-destroying creepiness, and I imagine that’s because her character escaped early, and is nowhere to be found in the second half of the film (except for that still in Jonathan’s “Ballbusters on Parade”). I think that’s the sign of a powerfully creepy movie—its effects last for years, decades. God only knows what happened to the gaffer and the key grip on this one. But does anyone out there know just what happened to Nichols in the 1970s?
Have a good uncreepy weekend.
This is probably too easy an example, but someone has to say it.
A Clockwork Orange
Took Malcom McDowell’s career decades to recover…
Posted by Steinn Sigurdsson on 05/06 at 01:22 PMAltman’s 3 Women. Sissy Spacek and Shelly Duvall = very, very creepy. Didn’t have, so far as I know, the nasty aftereffects of the Mike Nichols thing, but still creepy.
Initially I wanted to disqualify 3 Women because it’s so self-consciously creepy, but then I thought: why knock off points for effort and intent? That would be pretty anti-intellectual of me.
So, just for the hell of it, can I suggest a slight tweaking for those who enjoy such tweaks: extra points for movies whose creepiness seems accidental or in excess of whatever other effects were intended? For example, Reflections in a Golden Eye, which is hella creepy, by intent, but gets extra creepiness from the future careers of Brando and Liz Taylor.
Or, The Long Hot Summer or Lady from Shanghai because I never can sleep after hearing Orson Welles try to do an accent. A man of many talents, but that wasn’t one of them.
Posted by on 05/06 at 01:30 PMA Clockwork Orange
Took Malcom McDowell’s career decades to recover…
Hm! And you could argue that Kubrick never really recovered, either.
Posted by on 05/06 at 01:30 PMCarnal Knowledge is as good a choice as any, sure. Particularly when you think about Art Garfunkel, whose creepiness even seems to make his hair do what it does, and who stars in what’s at least a runner-up for creepiest film--Bad Timing (A Sensual Obsession). When the distributor of that Nicolas Roeg film called it “a sick film made by sick people for sick people,” he knew he had accomplished something. Especially when the distributor is named Rank (I know, it’s Arthur Rank, who is esteemed, but let me be creepy and have my pun).
My vote for creepiest, however, goes to Straw Dogs. Yeah, it’s easy to go for a Peckinpah, but the Dustin Hoffman character is so set up--pasive, passive, passive, BOOM, active, a man--that it’s just ridiculous. Really it’s the only film that I felt like I had to go home and shower after viewing.
And then there’s Susan George, whose film work features Mandingo, one of the most embarrassing films of all-time. Plus, the poor thing once dated Prince Charles.
The whole creepiness comes full circle when you realize she raises Arab horses in England and Mike Nichols did the very same thing in the Santa Ynez Valley back in the 1980s. There’s just something creepy about a stud farm, I guess, especially when you try to milk the horse like our President has done.
Posted by George on 05/06 at 01:33 PMCheap shot, Michael. Barry Lyndon is probably my favorite Kubrick film, possible gross miscasting at the top notwithstanding.
As for creepy, you can’t beat Happiness.
Posted by norbizness on 05/06 at 01:52 PMP.S. On second reading, that comment is a cheap shot. Substitute “No way, man!” for “Cheap shot, Michael.”
Posted by norbizness on 05/06 at 01:54 PMhere’s a little story: some friends and i had a little dinner party and rented a couple of movies. first was best in show. oh, how we laughed. then we followed it up with todd solondz’s happiness. after it ended, it was as if the party turned into a funeral. nobody wanted to even look at each other and everyone kinda went home right after that. probably the creepiest movie i’ve ever seen.
a couple others…
requiem for a dream - maybe more heartbreaking than creepy, but it’s so good i have to recommend it
in the company of men - creepy. meanspirited, ugly. creepy.
Posted by random on 05/06 at 01:55 PMI wasn’t aware there were any women in *Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf* at all!! I thought it was about 2 male-male couples!!
Posted by on 05/06 at 01:58 PMIn the late 60s we (meaning postpubescent postbachelors) all sweatingly awaited the film version of our favorite dormitory masturbation book, Terri Southern’s Candy. Indeed, the circa-1968 film version seemed to capture well the episodic nuttiness of the book, as each avatar of maleness collapsed into self-parody. At the time I thought a good night of movie-viewing would be pairing the yin-yang fables of Candy (the “female point of view") and Dr. Strangelove (the “male"), another well-wrought Southern film.
For whatever reason, the rerelease of the film took decades to be issued, finally making it to retail a few years ago. Watching it after all that time revealed it to be discomfitingly creepy and coldly misogynistic. I guess the male perspective of society has, at least in this respect, become a bit more realistic/sympathetic; and/or then again, turns out that 60-year-old hormones are just not the same as 20-year-old ones, despite my quiet yet unceasing lusting after women in short skirts.
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:02 PMIn the Company of Men and Straw Dogs : I’ll accept “meanspirited” and “ugly” but they’re so irredemably stupid that they can’t be that creepy (maybe Candy as Kit describes suffers from this too?). For almost the same reason, (and this is just to head people off at the pass), I’ll throw in Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock as movies that seem very creepy at first, but the more I think about them, the more pissed I get.
Can I complain that Solondz is trying too hard to be creepy to be capable of making a really creepy movie? Can I request that we disqualify those directors whose métier is creepiness in favor of those works that seem to have stumbled into creepiness or to have revealed a hitherto unsuspected creepiness in otherwise non-creepy directors?
And, anyway, Todd Haynes’s Safe is far creepier than anything Solondz has ever done, and Haynes, we know, isn’t a one-trick pony.
Chuck & Buck much creepier than Happiness also.
I’ve been wanting to see Myra Breckinridge for years. Is it creepy or just weird and inept?
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:09 PMHow about Safe (though it might be trying too hard to be creepy)? Incidentally, this is also my nominee for the film that most divides people who see it. I love it, and have met plenty of others who do, too. But I’ve also met people (many of whom often share my taste in films) who completely detest it.
And some older films…
Sweet Smell of Success certainly deserves mention, as do Sunset Boulevard and Night of the Hunter.
Anyone think of anything from before 1945 (especially anything made in Hollywood before 1945) that deserves mention?
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:18 PMThe creepiest movie I’ve seen in a while, and which creeps me out in similar ways as Carnal Knowledge, is The House of Sand and Fog. Not only is it awful and soul-destroying, it carries this smug conviction that the “race parable” it’s telling is vital and real and instructive - hey, I’m doing you a favor - when in reality it’s the embodiment of pandering Hollywood schmaltz, the kind of self-congratulatory P.C.-message movie that can barely hide how thoroughly racist it is.
Incidentally, my sophomore theology teacher (a Jesuit priest) showed us Carnal Knowledge in class to ward off the temptation of premarital sex—just so we wouldn’t end up a bunch of 15-year old Nicholsons.
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:22 PM> Can I request that we disqualify those directors whose métier is creepiness in favor of those works that seem to have stumbled into creepiness or to have revealed a hitherto unsuspected creepiness in otherwise non-creepy directors?
my answer would be no.
if i’m creeped out by a film i don’t then go through a process to re-evaluate whether i was simply lured into feeling that way by a manipulative director and therefore my reaction lacks validity and i now feel just dandy. usually, i just want to take a shower.
Posted by random on 05/06 at 02:26 PMMuch creepier than it seems to think it is: Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:28 PMDead Ringers, Videodrome, and eXistenZ are all candidates for the creepy title, I’d say. Cronenberg is a twisted cat.
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:29 PMThe House of Sand and Fog and Chuck and Buck made my skin crawl—the one for its intolerable smugness (and all those ponderous shots of the ocean! the fog! the ocean!), the other for everything right down to its soundtrack. I avoided seeing In the Company of Men altogether.
Great creepy suggestions, all.
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:32 PMTwo people beat me to my nominations, so I suppose I’ll just have to second. Dead Ringers is a very, very twisted movie. Felt ill for a while after the finale of that one. And Ben, I’m really happy to see someone nominate Night of the Hunter, but don’t you think that’s less “icky” creepy and more just plain creepy?
Posted by Marita on 05/06 at 02:41 PMI just answered my own question re: Hollywood before 1945: Freaks.
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:42 PMSo, just for the hell of it, can I suggest a slight tweaking for those who enjoy such tweaks: extra points for movies whose creepiness seems accidental or in excess of whatever other effects were intended?
Yes. Call it the Solondz Clause: it’s easy if you mean to.
That way, we can arrange candidate films along an axis from Happiness to The Piano, with The Talented Mr. Ripley somewhere in the middle.
Happiness was creepy as hell, but it didn’t penetrate, because Solondz used the camera as a sledgehammer. Ripley was worse, because the characters were actually developed and, in the main, sympathetic. And The Piano squicked me for days. The buzz was that it was an incredibly artistic movie favored by feminists, so its profoundly misogynistic storyline was able to creep me out entirely the way something like Reservoir Dogs never could have.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 05/06 at 02:49 PMSunset Boulevard is phenomenally creepy.
Double Indemnity is one of the creepiest film noirs, almost entirely because of casting ("Fred MacMurray brings delightfully leaden creepiness to traditional wooden acting”—my back-cover blurb).
But jeez, guys, what about Fritz Lang’s M! Does it get any creepier? The whistling, the balloon, Peter “Creepy” Lorre…
Posted by Alex on 05/06 at 02:51 PMHow about The Hand That Rocks the Cradle? OK...it’s not a “serious” film. But it has a particularly poisonous blend of misogyny and racism that structures all aspects of its plot. Deeply, deeply creepy in unintentional ways.
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:54 PM*Blood Simple* was creepy, but the guy I went to see it with was much creepier. (He borrowed my car the next weekend to drive to a rugby match and returned it with the contents of the glove compartment and both side-door pockets rearranged. Neatly.) The principals and directors have done pretty well since then, however; well, maybe not John Getz. I wonder what happened to the Creepy Date?
Posted by on 05/06 at 02:57 PMHey, nice to take me back to my film major days at PSU, where the department owned a copy of “Carnal Knowledge” and screened it at the slightest provocation. And it IS that creepy. Kudos to the panel for their comments on Solondz, La Bute et al. To me, they inherited the worst of David Lynch: an urge to parade creepiness for its own sake or to make the artist more world-weary, wise or just plain with it than the rest of us. (And this only soils the honest scenes in the work) Pardon my suspicious mind, but I always got a whiff of the shallow, oh-so-hip show-off everyone of us hated in college at some point in their works. The way these guys parade the plainly quotidian awfulness of humanity reminds me of what the someone once said about Bernard Shaw: “He announces the obvious in terms of the scandalous.”
Tell you two really creepy ones by Godard, though: “Masculine/Feminine” (are there two more contemptible leads, both male and female, anywhere else in film?) and “Weekend.” A shower won’t do after the last one. You want a dip in acid.Posted by on 05/06 at 02:58 PMThe song about the fish is very creepy in Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And if you take your 8 year old son, you may wish to warn him that they destroy the earth about 10 minutes in. Didn’t think about it myself until he asked his mom “why did they do that?” Hope that’s not a spoiler for anyone
Posted by on 05/06 at 03:00 PMA Sick Six. Previously mentioned Requiem for a Dream and Straw Dogs. Plus: Magnolia. Reservoir Dogs. A Boy and His Dog. The Deer Hunter.
Posted by The Heretik on 05/06 at 03:01 PMBlue Velvet and Boxing Helena. Creepy Creeperton McCreepsville.
Posted by Elise on 05/06 at 03:04 PMOK, Heretik, now it’s time to play Deer Hunter Roulette with your six. . . .
Posted by on 05/06 at 03:05 PMDonnie Darko creeped me out for days. Especially the original (non-Director’s) cut. The voice-over, the countdown, the dread of inevitability. it get scarier the more time passes.
Anytime Buñuel does a dream sequence it creeps me out.
Posted by Konczal on 05/06 at 03:05 PMIn the Dear Hunter: John Savage in the water with the rats. Michael, Michael . . .
Posted by The Heretik on 05/06 at 03:06 PMI love, love that old hack Cronenburg—except for Crash , whose fault is that’s its too faithful to a dumb, dumb book—and I love The Brood especially, but I’ll invoke the “Solondz clause” (nice: thanks Chris Clarke) for him.
I don’t know about Sunset Blvd. If it weren’t for the voiceover, it’d be a favorite, but , yeah, the scene with all the oldsters playing bridge is marvelously creepy. I’d say Night of the Hunter (another favorite) is more scary than creepy.
I like Ben Alpers’ pre-1945 question. Freaks and M are what I would have said if I had my hand on the buzzer.
Ooo, ooo! I know! Gilda! Very creepy. And 1946 is almost 1945. Makes my skin crawl, and not just because Glenn Ford bugs the hell out of me…
Posted by on 05/06 at 03:47 PMGilda‘s a fine choice. I just saw it for the first time a couple weeks ago. And it is deeply creepy. For instance, this little bit of dialogue (courtesy of filmsite.org) about Mundson’s (George Macready) dagger-cane:
Johnny (Glen Ford): Well, just a few weeks ago, we drank a toast to the three of us.
Gilda (Rita Hayworth): Well, who was the third one then? Should I be jealous?
Mundson: Hardly darling. Just a friend of mine.
Gilda: Is it a ‘him’ or a ‘her’?
Mundson: That’s a very interesting question. What do you think, Johnny?
Johnny: A ‘her.’
Gilda: Oh!
Mundson: Why that conclusion?
This film couldn’t have happened without the strange confluence of popular Freudianism, the arrival of what would later be called film noir, and the continuing restrictions of the production code. What a weird and wonderful flick!
Posted by on 05/06 at 03:57 PMDead Ringers. Very creepy.
Posted by on 05/06 at 03:58 PMOh, I almost forgot: Clearcut.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 05/06 at 04:12 PMNot really a film connoisseur by any stretch, but Dancer in the Dark was pretty ‘creepy’ in the way I see the term being invoked here. Haven’t gotten around to checking out von Trier’s latest, but the previews made it look as if it had been cut from a similarly creepy cloth.
Posted by on 05/06 at 04:15 PMOk, less obvious:
“The Sea” directed by Baltasar Kormákur (2002)
and actually “Angels of the Universe” also, for different reasons.Also “The Tin Drum” - the movie was creepy and disturbing a way the book was not; still can’t shake it.
I find “Cold Fever” very disturbing as well, but that is because I was peripherally involved in the incident on which the story is based. (Death of several japanese geologists in a glacial river; I was in the camp across the river, and stayed the next night in the hut they had stayed in their last night - found their last words in the guestbook in the hut). It is not intrinsically creepy, I think.
Posted by Steinn Sigurdsson on 05/06 at 04:18 PMAny movie with Doris Day. That lady seriously creeps me out.
Posted by on 05/06 at 04:21 PMYou’re reminding me why I don’t go to the movies much. This stuff and the audience, which I frequently find creepy enough.
Chinatown creeped me out even more that it was supposed to, I think. Jack Nicholson’s creepy even when he’s not being creepy, but aside from that I went home and spent several nights waking up with the distinct feeling that my teeth were rotting rapidly and all the walls in the house were thin coats of paint over some black, crumbly, maggot-rich substrate, the foul odors of which leaked throughseveral lengthening cracks.
Anything Jack Palance is in affects me that way too, and it’s not just because he once played a goddamn Pinkerton who’s cast as a hero. Though I hold a grudge for that, I’ll admit
Posted by Ron Sullivan on 05/06 at 04:42 PMI vote for Clockwork Orange. It was much more effective as a pro-rape than as an anti-rape film. (I go both ways, so I know).
As an infant, Mike Nichols (nee Peshkowsky) had a small role in Weimar Berlin, whence he escaped in 1938, age 7.
Posted by John Emerson on 05/06 at 04:42 PMNobody, but nobody does creepy like Lon Chaney.
Plot of THE UNKNOWN: Chaney is a master thief, who hides from the police by disguising himself as an armless knife thrower in a travelling circus. There he meets young Joan Crawford, who has is terrified by the thought of men touching her. She tells Chaney that the fact that he is armless makes him the only man she ever could marry. So, Chaney finds a surgeon who will remove his arms, but when he returns to the circus, Crawford has fallen in love with the StrongMan, arms and all. Chaney plots revenge.
Or WEST OF ZANZIBAR, where Chaney discovers that his wife has been unfaithful, and arranges for her child a life of degredation in the brothels of East Africa, only to realize too late that the girl is his own daughter.
The best of it is that the TV ratings, because these are silents, give them a rating of TV-G.
Posted by on 05/06 at 04:49 PMGriffiths, Broken Blossoms (1919)
Tarkovsky, The Sacrifice (1986)
Zaillian, Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)
Branagh, Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
Radford, Il Postino (1994)
Benigni, Life is Beautiful (1997)
Ozon, Les Amants Criminels (1999)
Crowe, Vanilla Sky (2001)
Gallo, The Brown Bunny (2003)“The most beautiful way that I see the world is when I see deer and bunny - when you see them on the golf course or in the back yard or in the forest or in the desert. When I see a deer or a bunny, I feel like that’s a safe place, a very nice place to be, because they’re very fragile. And, if they can live there, then it must be a safe place. Wherever they exist is where I want to be....Even in a carnivorous way I like them, they are my favourite meats. When I see them together I feel that is a safe place.”
--Vincent Gallo
Posted by on 05/06 at 04:57 PMWhat about “The Vanishing”. French version - I didn’t see the remake. Eeewwww.
Posted by on 05/06 at 05:22 PMIt’s an obvious choice, but no one’s mentioned, and all the bunny talk—Donnie Darko and The Brown Bunny—made me think of it: Repulsion.
Posted by on 05/06 at 05:23 PMThe Strange Love of Martha Ivers or Eye of the Devil with Deborah Kerr and David Niven, where David lets David Hemings and Sharon Tate (who appear to be in a rather enthusiastic incestuous relationship) ritually sacrifice him to propitiate the crop gods, although he whips David Hemings along the way. Donald Pleasance plays the priest. No, I am not making this up. Runner up: Jimmy Stewart in either the Charles Lindbergh story or Rope.
Which Father of the Bride? Because I really love Spencer Tracy.
Posted by julia on 05/06 at 05:31 PMoh, man, how can I forget the Conquerer? Killed John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Dick Powell and a goodly chunk of the rest of the cast and crew filming on location in the midst of sand full of nuclear fallout, which they then shipped back to Hollywood to decorate the set for further shots.
They say Howard Hughes watched it over and over again after he went around the bend (he produced it)
Posted by julia on 05/06 at 05:33 PMThe Truman Show.
Posted by on 05/06 at 05:42 PMLe Bonheur—unless it’s too dark.
Posted by jayanne on 05/06 at 05:50 PMGod, I am SOOO glad other people think “Carnal Knowledge” was creeeeeeepy. And “Straw Dogs,” too. Though “Carnal Knowledge” was much creepier.
Posted by on 05/06 at 06:05 PMWhen the recent spate of freeway shootings hit LA LA land, i was reminded of one of the creepiest films of ‘68(though Kit’s nomination from that year is pretty good). One of Boris Karloff’s last efforts before he died, the film was called Targets, and was shot just a few months before the 405 freeway opened. It took me years of driving through the interchange between the 405/101 before i could not think about that film. Directed, written, starred in by Peter Bogdanovich this predated the Last Picture Show, another pretty creepy film, not to mention that Sharon Tate was in it too.
After seeing the uncut, full length, original version of Clockwork Orange can anyone ever hear the song Singing in the Rain and picture Gene Kelly???
Posted by on 05/06 at 06:12 PMSeveral people already picked Dead Ringers (Creepiest. Movie. Ever.), so I’ll have to fall back on a few choices that haven’t been mentioned:
Breaking the Waves (Von Trier got an advanced degree in Creepy Cinema--The Kingdom is equally creepy in a completely different way, and from the sound of it his last two give BtW a run for its money)
Eraserhead
GildaPosted by on 05/06 at 06:18 PMTangentially (prompted by mention of Happiness), here’s a quick quiz: Which of the following films is the funniest?
a) House of Mirth
b) Happiness
c) DespairPosted by on 05/06 at 06:22 PMThe King of “creep” Harvey Keitel in The Bad Lieutenant
P.S. I’m saving the comments section of this post because of the list of great movies it’s produced!
Posted by DK on 05/06 at 06:45 PMThe Ice Storm is a great movie, but the scene when Christina Ricci simulates sex with the kid wearing the Nixon mask is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen.
Posted by on 05/06 at 06:56 PMIn “Once Upon a Time in America” where the kid gets
a fancy pastry with white frothy stuff coming out of it, to get in good with the whore. Whom they later catch fart-face the cop with, on the rooftop.Posted by david ross mcirvine on 05/06 at 07:16 PMRecent Creepiness: the “That Yellow Bastard” segment of Sin City. It may be because I’ve read the original comic, which differs in subtle ways, but it’s a near pean to statutory rape. After all, NOT sleeping with the young, nubile, blonde, under 20 and robotic Nancy Callahan leads to the sixty year old Hartigan getting ganked in the shower by Junior. And Nancy has no problem with sleeping with him. But there’s just something...so...wrong about the whole situation that I actually left the theater for a few minutes.
Posted by on 05/06 at 08:01 PMI am not sure if someone mentioned this, very tired after a day of commencement (which is ironically the most deadening, halting moment in any academic year).
But my vote is Eraserhead. Stoned. You cannot out-creep that. No way, no how, nuh-uh.
Posted by on 05/06 at 08:11 PMAnyone seen Sante Sangre’, starring a rotund Guy Stockwell as a circus knife-thrower who cut’s off his wife’s arms because he suspects her of adultry. There’s a scene where the entire village holds a funeral for an elephant in the land fill that creeps me out just typing this.
I saw it on tape in the mid 80s and haven’t been able to find it again.
Posted by Chris Moore on 05/06 at 08:12 PMBut my vote is Eraserhead. Stoned. You cannot out-creep that. No way, no how, nuh-uh.
Did mention it a little up-thread. Watched it straight, but as a teenager, which is a lot like being stoned. I was so traumatized that I had to go home and eat for a half hour straight.
Posted by on 05/06 at 08:25 PMAny of you ever see The Reflecting Skin? That was a good-but-creepy film directed by the Canadian Philip Ridley, whose only other film, The Passion of Darkly Noon, was quite awful.
Mike Leigh’s Naked was fairly creepy. But completely briliant.
And Alan Arkin’s performance as Harry Roat terrorizing a blind Audrey Hepburn in 1967’s Wait Until Dark was pretty damn creepy…
By the way, I though Happiness was a cheap trick. I also absolutely HATED Safe as did my wife although one of my best friends and his wife absolutely loved it. Did I miss something?
Posted by on 05/06 at 08:38 PMChris M, yes I’ve seen Sante Sangre’. It’s a creepy classic. Available at Amazon on VHS.
Posted by on 05/06 at 08:57 PMHas any one ever seen the Spanish film In A Glass Cage? And what about Salo? These movies are a whole other kind of creepy.
Posted by on 05/06 at 09:05 PMJaglom’s “Eating” was creepy in that “omigod-I-KNOW-a-lot-of-people-like-this-and-am-sometimes-one-myself” kind of way.
Posted by on 05/06 at 09:47 PMAlso would have to say “Breaking the Waves” was pretty damn creepy. What anyone thought was great about this movie I’ll never understand.
Posted by on 05/06 at 09:49 PMI saw Eraserhead when I was about 14, stoned, in a double-feature with Night of the Living Dead, at the Charles Theater in Baltimore. I’ve not been the same since.
Anyone remember the John Waters “thank you for not smoking” clip they used to run before movies at the Charles? A film of Waters thanking the audience for not smoking while he himself slowly, and with great visible pleasure, smokes a cigarette, french inhaling past his pencil moustache and oohing and aahing all the while…
Posted by on 05/06 at 09:51 PMBeing John Malkovich
Posted by on 05/06 at 09:59 PMAre we counting intentionally creepy as well as inadvertently unwatchable? If so, let’s not forget (some are documentaries):
Edison, Electrocution of an Elephant (1903)
Wiseman, Titicut Follies (1967)
Pasolini, Medea (1969)
Herzog, Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
Maysles, Grey Gardens (1975)
Pasolini, Salo (1976)
Argento, Suspiria (1977)
Greenaway, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989)
Kieslowski, Blue (1993)Posted by on 05/06 at 10:03 PMMore Seventies creeps:
The Night Porter. Seven Beauties. Don’t Look Now. Marathon Man. Is it safe?General creep; anything with James Woods in it.
Posted by The Heretik on 05/06 at 10:03 PMOh, and the remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Much creepier than the original which was a hoot.
Posted by on 05/06 at 10:07 PMHmmm, lots of people are posting creepy films in the best possible sense of “creepy.” Whereas Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is not merely intentionally creepy as well as inadvertently unwatchable, but also insufferably pretentious and astonishingly obvious. Furthermore, it sucks. Thanks for the reminder.
I saw Eraserhead on a first date—in 1979 at the Waverly, on a double bill with the surrealist animation short, Asparagus. I loved it. But then again, I always knew there were puffy-cheeked women singing under the radiator.
The date went OK.
Posted by Michael on 05/06 at 10:47 PMI’m just not sure how you can beat “Eraserhead” for distilled, 99.999% pure creepy-ness.
No one has answered your question, Michael, about what happened to Nichols during the 1970’s. No, he was not holed up in a cheap motel in Bakersfield with a succession of bottles of Jack Daniels trying to recover from the Carnal Knowledge Effect. He was working, very successfully, on Broadway. He won or was nominated for 5 Tony Awards during the 1970’s (if I can count). Here is an excerpt from his bio:
Has won six Tony Awards: as Best Director (Dramatic), in 1964 for “Barefoot in the Park,” in 1965 for “Luv” and “The Odd Couple,” in 1968 for “Plaza Suite,” and in 1972 for “The Prisoner of Second Avenue;” as Best Director (Play) in 1984 for Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing;” and in 1977 as one of the producers of Best Musical winner “Annie.” He has also been Tony-nominated seven other times: in 1967 as Best Director (Musical) for “The Apple Tree,” in 1974 as Best Director (Dramatic) for “Uncle Vanya;” in 1977, twice as Best Director (Play), for “Comedians” and for David Rabe’s “Streamers;” in 1978, as Best Director (Play) and as one of the producers of Best Play nominee “The Gin Game;” and in 2003 as co-producer of Special Theatrical Event nominee “The Play That I Wrote.”
This might blow your Carnal Knowledge Effect theory out of the water. However, you could argue that as the director of the film, he was the primary midwife of the Effect and therefore not subject to it. The actors were at much greater risk. Those Method actors take their lives in their hands.
Oh, and the key grip for Carnal Knowledge, Clyde Hart, worked on 11 other films in the 1970’s, but it seems his career in film ended in 1991, on his 21st film, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. His first film was Carnal Knowledge in 1971. So, if the Effect got him, it was delayed. And he worked on some pretty good films.
I can’t find any information on the gaffer. Sorry. Maybe you could look up Clyde and ask him.
Posted by on 05/06 at 10:50 PMMy very first date with a girl to go see a movie was “Equus”.
The date went OK. We got married.
That film has a pretty significant Creep Factor.
Posted by on 05/06 at 10:55 PM*Blow-Out*: really the only de Palma film I like, as his sensibility is objectionable, usually.
Posted by david mcirvine on 05/06 at 11:03 PMI had the misfortune of watching Polanski’s Ninth gate. It was both bad and skin crawlingly creepy. Incidentally, I found even “The English Patient” creepy. I felt there is something simply wrong (and obsessive) about the main love story.
Posted by on 05/06 at 11:21 PMCreepy-stupid: Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Way too many apostrophes in the title, too.
Posted by on 05/06 at 11:26 PMThanks, Roland. Damn! So much for my theory. I was so sure of the Bakersfield-motel scenario, I completely forgot to check Broadway.
And thanks for running down Clyde Hart, too. Most people say he went downhill after Ordinary People, but me, I think 1988’s Arthur 2: On the Rocks is one of the more subtle, underrated sequels in the business. Hard to beat his work on 1978’s Fonda-Fonda Fest, Coming Home and Comes a Horseman, though.
Posted by Michael on 05/06 at 11:37 PMJohn Wayne died of cancer shortly after that movie—its name escapes me just now—in which he played a gunfighter with cancer! Maybe it was with Katharine Hepburn, who didn’t live all that many years afterward herself. You want to talk about creepy, career-stunting movies, try that one.
Posted by on 05/06 at 11:45 PMI’m going out on a limb here too, and I’m suggesting the recent Korean film OldBoy (dir. Park Chanwook). If you can deal with some ultraviolence (and if you’re watching A Clockwork Orange, you can), this is a twisted puzzle film that I think isn’t solved by the end of the film --in part because what the film is setting up is the audience as part of that puzzle. The puzzle is more than just the plot; it has to do with how people respond to constructed narratives/images that already predetermine what that response could be. And it takes on a different sense once you realize that you in the audience are experiencing the same sort of manipulation by the director that the protagonist is by his antagonist.
I can’t argue at all with the Kubrick selections or The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Another I’ve never really gotten over is Medium Cool, mainly because the final scenes were accidentally shot during the 1968 DNC riots in Chicago --it moves from film to a weird documentary, and Wexler edits the whole thing to work this conjunction together in an unsettling way. (Pay attention to the journalists talking --there’s a ghost in that scene.)
Posted by Joley on 05/06 at 11:58 PMGood lord, how is it possible that no one has yet mentioned Larry Clark’s Kids? “Creepy” barely even begins to describe it: watching Clark’s voyeuristic ode to his own masturbatory fantasy of juvenile depravity was like getting felt up on the subway. Probably the only movie I’ve ever watched that left me with a serious desire to do physical violence to its director: being a city kid just out of my teen years at the time, I came out of it feeling objectified, mortified, used and slandered.
The sad thing is, from a technical perspective, it’s not a bad film at all: it’s beautifully composed, shot and edited, and the characters are compelling. It’s the most luminous testament to self-loathing middle-aged ephebephilia ever financed and released by a major studio. Creepy, creepy, creepy.
Worse yet, it launched the ‘careers’ of Harmony Korine and Chloe Sevigny, for which there can never, ever be proper atonement.
Its sole saving grace is that it gave us Rosario Dawson.
Eraserhead is a runner-up for completely different reasons. Kids made me want to scrub my own skin off, but Eraserhead is one of two films that has ever rendered me unable to sleep in sheer terror of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The whole visual flow of the film moved in exactly the same manner as my most inchoate nightmares: deformed humans hiding in the edges of the visual frame, strange visual non-sequitors, human rage that overflowed to shake the entire room… yeesh, getting creeped out just thinking about it.
(The other film that rendered me sleepless? John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. Creepy and exceedingly nasty.)
Posted by Doctor Memory on 05/07 at 12:01 AMn.b. Nichols is, as we speak, back on Broadway, directing Spamalot.
Posted by Doctor Memory on 05/07 at 12:02 AMSpeaking of Harmony Korine, I don’t think Gummo is exactly the type of film Michael was looking for, but the scene of him eating spaghetti and a chocolate bar while taking a bath is one that disturbs me to this very day.
Posted by on 05/07 at 12:09 AMChris Moore: holy hell, I’d nearly forgotten about Santa Sangre. That was one genuinely deranged movie.
Posted by Doctor Memory on 05/07 at 12:22 AMGiven all the above, it’s hard to understand why Hollywood has such influence in the Democratic party, but easy to see why it doesn’t cut much ice with voters.
Posted by on 05/07 at 12:35 AMJohn Schlesinger’s film of Day of the Locust at the end when Donald Sutherland [SPOILER ALERT] stomps that obnoxious kid to death still disturbs me some 27 years later.
Posted by Randy Paul on 05/07 at 12:42 AMSince Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre has come up, let’s add his earlier crazy films El Topo and The Holy Mountain to the list.
Posted by on 05/07 at 01:17 AM1972’s The Wicker Man with Christopher Lee [the king of creepy] and Edward Woodward [straight-man to the creepiness surrounding him] must get an honorable mention. The horny dance near the end of the admittedly B-movie by Britt Ekland has to be one of the creepiest sexy scenes ever filmed—or should that be sexiest creepy scenes? I forget.
The ending hit my paranoiac bits like a ton of Medieval Scottish back-alley bricks, and I was shivering and quivering in creepsville deja vu for days afterwards. Very worth the effort to track down.
Posted by on 05/07 at 01:38 AMAnd here I was thinking I would be the only one to mention Dead Ringers. I still have the laserdisc.
Well, here’s one nobody has mentioned - another one by Todd Solondz - Storytelling. I can’t decide if it’s less creepy than Happiness, more creepy, or just differently creepy. A typically good performance in it by Paul Giamatti, though.
Posted by Craig Carlyle Clarke on 05/07 at 03:32 AMTetsuo, The Iron Man blows all that other shit away. Talk about carnal knowledge!
Posted by on 05/07 at 03:48 AMOh god, how could I have forgotten… Now, this one is not critically acclaimed or anything, but I have to give credit to The Believers (starring Martin Sheen) as having been the only film creepy enough to give me a genuine phobia, one I have to deal with every day. I’m pretty much terrified of electricity as a result of the first few minutes of that movie.
After that it goes on to the less creepy ritual animal sacrifices and stuff.Posted by Craig Carlyle Clarke on 05/07 at 03:56 AMOne more to mention: Gummo.
Posted by Craig Carlyle Clarke on 05/07 at 04:28 AMAh, Greenaway—How about The Pillowbook? Kind of multimedia art,creepy psychosexual revenge movie with lots of calligraphy.
And what was that horror movie Bill Paxton wrote and directed, where he teaches his two young sons to be serial killers? Yowza! Oh yeah, Frailty.
The Night Porter: Dirk Benedict and Charlotte Rampling. Even thinking about Rampling licking jam off of broken glass is kind of giving me the willies.
Great moments in creepiness, non-film: Angelina Jolie kissing her brother when she won the Oscar, Farah Faucett on Letterman, any episode of Anna Nicole Smith’s show, the X files where the two “Bush voters” keep their limbless mother under the bed on a mechanic’s creeper and it is implied that they may be their own father or something, naked pictures of Dr. Laura, Hannity procreating, Coulter without the eye patch, Michael Jackson, six-inch long Hawaiian centepedes, potted meat product.
Posted by Chris Moore on 05/07 at 07:33 AMI remember seeing CK when it came out and thinking it was a smart critique of a certain kind of male self-absorption that poisons everyone around the guy, but over time - although I haven’t watched the film again (the thought depresses me) - I have realized that the late scene with the prostitute is really all wrong. But it was a common misaphrension of the time that a lot of people still mistakenly believe in.
Posted by Avedon on 05/07 at 08:38 AMSpeaking of prostitutes, Pretty Woman was pretty damn creepy.
Posted by on 05/07 at 08:55 AMRe: The Night Porter. The Seventies were different. As I recall, ads for The Night Porter said: “Does for jam what Last Tango in Paris did for butter!”
And “Makes the Last Tango in Paris seem like a light hearted romp.”
Both the ads were quite accurate. Whenever one friend of mine would see himself or someone in a tough situation, he would pull out that phrase about the lighthearted romp. Oy.
Posted by The Heretik on 05/07 at 09:27 AMYes, REPULSION. Then, CRASH. Then any Joseph Losey movie.
Posted by on 05/07 at 11:32 AMMaybe Kenneth Anger’s *Fireworks* should be in here too. rough trade fantasia by a fifth-rater is usually what you can expect from KA, but here the fantasia is probably less contaminated by Anger’s association with the subculture of the occult.
*Fireworks* was filmed in Anger’s parents’ house, while they were on vacation, and it is a masochist fantasia in which the dreamer gets rowdied up by a bunch of salty sailors. Mr. Bill meets many Mr. Sluggos (Sluggoes?). Given that most (all that i can think of) occultists are d n’ d playing pencil-necked wankers (Jack Burdon speakin at ya), *Fireworks* is at least an honest admission of the sexual and personal esteem demons that torment, say, the average still-lives-at-home-with-his-parents member of the O.T.O. while it doesn’t have the name-dropping value of *Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome* (where anais nin plays Astarte, if I remember right--at any rate she eats the moon) or the comedy value (unintentional of course) of *Scorpio Rising* (winner of the Cannes
Attempt at Serious Film that most Looks Like A House Of Guitars Commercial
award), *Fireworks* gets maje props from me for being the last film Kenneth Anger made with at least a few seconds of non-pretentiousness or honest self-examination. Indulging in gay rough trade fantasias as he lived in his parents’ house and dreamed of attaining gnosis, Anger came up with a small testament to the psychological roots and social realities of modern occultism. IO PANTIES!!Posted by david r mcirvine on 05/07 at 11:40 AMI may have missed it, but someone really aughta put in a good word for the creepy-verite masterpiece Capturing the Friedmans. Maybe Errol Morris’s Mr. Death, too. In both cases, the creep factor goes through the roof when you realize that they’re, you know, real folks.
Posted by PJ on 05/07 at 11:40 AM"arbitrary but fun value judgments,” how very extreme left-wing of you, Michael, and thank-you for that; the third installment, yet; I do hope “Doctor Ho” is monitoring.
Wonderful comments.
Avedon, re: CK, yes, that was exactly the take of most of the group that I trecked to the picture show with to see it, I loathed it; felt like the film itself was cursed with male self-absorption, but I was too intimidated to say so, which made it doubly creepy, although not until the moment I read Michael’s post did I realize it was creepiness I was dealing with back then.
I see the Heretik has a real eye for this stuff. “Night Porter” and its advertising campaign, yes. “Seven Beauties” deserves a special place
in hellin the annals of creepy movies, as does it’s other side of the coin little brother, “Life Is Beautiful,” which I watched with the same creeped out disbelief that the audience in “The Producers” first watches “Springtime For Hitler.”Yes, too, to RP’s comment on “Day of the Locusts,”
although except for that scene, the film was less creepy than condescending; I believe Kael’s title for her review of it was “The Darned.” A big “yes” to Dr. M’s comments re: “Kids. In a similar vein, the more recent “Thirteen,” all the more creepy for so much fine acting in the service of an incoherent story meant to creep out parents that no amount of love and attention will save their kids from the horrors of peer hell.Am I the only person who was creeped out by “Welcome to the Dollhouse?” Aside from what Solondz intended, who in the film was more creeped out by “Dawn” than the man who created her. Or maybe it’s that affectless presentation of wrenching suffering I’m reacting to.
“Spirited Away,” which I loved, has some seriously creepy elements. In the annals of intentional creepiness, masterpiece division, surely a special place has to go to “Exterminating Angel.”
Posted by Leah A on 05/07 at 12:13 PMThe creepiest film I’ve ever seen was the late 70’s drive-in stoner classic, Phantasm.
Man, this flick was radical and creepy for its time! [Note: the copious bong hits of “Colombian Gold” (Mmmmmm!) certainly didn’t hurt.]
It was like a drug-induced nightmare, fraught with murderous dwarves, creepy hippie psychos, flying alien orbs that sucked the blood out of the victim, severed human limbs coming to life, and, most of all, that tall, gaunt, mortuary director from hell chasing the kid around, screaming, “Come here, boyyyy!”
I think the filmmakers, like its stoner-laden audience in 1979, had been doing way too many mind altering substances to make anything coherent or logical, and yet somehow this enhances the creepiness of this horror classic.
Posted by mat on 05/07 at 12:55 PMThis so often happens in online threads like this one, I’ve noticed: people don’t quite understand what is being discussed, so the recommendations drift or creep way off. (I remember a “guilty pleasures” thread somewhere that quickly became a “my favorite movies” thread.) In this case, “creepy” drifts toward “cool.” Or “kewl.” (As in, “Whoa, the guy ate a _live octopus_, dewd! That is sooooo radical, y’know?") Still, people have done better here than usual.
I also get a slight feeling that homosexual content smells “creepy” to some of the folks, but I haven’t seen all the films mentioned so I can’t be sure. I haven’t seen “Fireworks” in so long—35 years, yikes!—that I can’t say much about it. (And I never saw anything else by Anger, though I did read his creepy “Hollywood Babylon.") When I saw “Fireworks,” I was still fearfully closeted, and at the time I remember well that I reacted to gay imagery or content with attraction/repulsion. Stuff that creeped me out in my teens seemed quite reasonable and realistic after I got out in the world more.
So that might be my main contribution to this thread: “creepy” very often implies some ambivalence in the viewer. Something like “Night and Fog” isn’t creepy, it’s just horrible and human. Or Lee Chang Dong’s brilliant “Peppermint Candy,” about a South Korean businessman who’d been a cop torturing dissidents under the dictatorship: it’s sad, disturbing, but not creepy. Something like, oh, say, “Eraserhead”, on the other hand, plays to very widespread and deep-rooted ambivalence about women, bodies, and birth; so it’s creepy. Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” was simply vile, by contrast, and it says something that virtually all the arty undergrads I knew when it was released loved it. “Wild at Heart” was a laugh riot, though still misogynist and nasty. It says something about Lynch’s level of transgressiveness that although Sailor is as seduced by Bobby as Lula is, Lynch can’t go so far as to get Bobby to grab Sailor’s dick. Now, *there* would be an image: Nicholas Cage cheek to cheek with Willem Dafoe ...
Posted by on 05/07 at 01:04 PMI few years ago I heard that Harmony Korine was shooting a film called Fight. Apparently, he and a cameraman would approach random burly looking guys taller than Mr. Korine, and then Korine would badger them into kicking his ass.
At the time I heard the story he’d apparently been arrested thrice, lost two teeth and had about 20 minutes of usable film.
Posted by on 05/07 at 01:05 PMHouse of Sand and Fog was creepy and thoroughly depressing. Carnival of Souls was a creepy little movie, too. I agree with the person who mentioned Freaks. That was one bizarre movie.
Posted by Trish Wilson on 05/07 at 01:22 PMEraserhead is also very disturbing. It made my skin crawl. David Lynch puts out some creepy movies.
Posted by Trish Wilson on 05/07 at 01:24 PMAnything with Udo Kier in it is creepy in my book. That includes Lars Von Trier’s “The Kingdom,” as someone here already mentioned.
Posted by Trish Wilson on 05/07 at 01:27 PMHere’s another creepy film - Tetsuo’s Iron Man. I thought it was hard to watch. The scene in the remake of Cat People where Malcolm McDowell eats a bit of flesh stuck to him made my gag reflex go crazy.
Posted by Trish Wilson on 05/07 at 01:30 PMCreepy? “Frosty the Snowman.” Gather round children, because he MELTS at the end. He. Melts. At. The. End.
Posted by on 05/07 at 01:37 PMWhat about The Rapture (1991) with David Duchovny and Mimi Rodgers?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102757/
This is one seriously creepy and disturbing film.
This is the story of a young woman (who lives in Los Angeles) with a very boring job. At night however, she and a male partner cruise the bars as swingers. After a time, she begins to believe that a conspiracy exists and decides that she must become a born-again Christian.
Mimi Rodgers’ character kills her young daughter so her daughter can be with Jesus.
Posted by on 05/07 at 01:38 PMI don’t know about you, but I was totally creeped out by Seven. At root, A Boy and His Dog was a little weird, too.
Posted by on 05/07 at 01:55 PMOh, you want creepy? Watch “Jacob’s Ladder.”
Posted by Trish Wilson on 05/07 at 02:01 PMA creepy one I liked: Polanski’s The Tenant. A creepy one I despised: Looking for Mr. Goodbar. You can compile a decent list of things to see and avoid from the responses to the original post on Carnal Knowledge here.
Posted by on 05/07 at 02:11 PMStarship Troopers and RoboCop. Paul Verhoeven is pretty much the creepiest director I have ever watched. He seems to be creating a spectacle out of our worst contemporary excesses (especially the corporatization of violence and its consequences) without any sustainable critique. Sure, the remediation of commercials and “Faux News Bulletins” about the in-apocalypse situations of the characters points a bloody finger at the viewer, but it doesn’t point to any way out of the glorious military-industrial-media-security violence machine. I not only wanted to take my money back from the box office window, I wanted to take a shower and then scratch my own skin off. I get the shudders just writing this.
Posted by DocMara on 05/07 at 02:41 PMWant to watch a film that’s VERY hard to wash off? Watch Werner Herzog’s *Stroszek*. Quite funny--especially if you think of the upper midwest as generally a bleak place--but somehow utterly, utterly depressing, too. (Think slower-paced, less violent, more existential *Fargo*, but with desperate German immigrants rather than desperate American car salesmen.)
The auction sequence is amazing.
Posted by on 05/07 at 03:27 PMThe absolute creepiest film I’ve seen in recent years is Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. Semi- and non-consensual sadomasochism—ick!
Not long after I saw it, I and some friends were in a cafe in San Francisco. A troubled man looked through the front window of the cafe, saw some friends of his at another table, and came in and sat down with them. I overheard him say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I just saw this movie, The Piano Teacher, and I’m so upset that I have to talk to someone about it....” I knew exactly what he meant.
Posted by Alan Bostick on 05/07 at 03:53 PMMaybe I missed someone eles mentioning it, but I vote for Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer as the creepiest movie I’ve ever seen.
Posted by on 05/07 at 04:17 PMI noticed some good ones, Repulsion, etc… But no one mentioned the two creepiest films I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s cause they’re modern european.
Funny Games (directed by Michael Haneke, who went on to do two substantialy less creepy filmes, The Piano Teacher, and Time of the Wolf) left me feeling dirty for hours. The casual brutality, and the way they fiddle with “reality” made several people I was watching it with leave the room.
Also, the creepiest movie I’ve ever seen, one that still bothers me to this day
I Stand Alone. By Gaspar Noe.
Listening to the misanthropic monologue going through the butchers head was unpleasent after half an hour, it was unbearable by the end. Plus, it had that double ending that forced you to choose which was the slightly less morally repugnant option. Neither one left me feeling particularly good about myself.
Also, most Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl, etc...) movies creep me out.
Posted by on 05/07 at 07:35 PMInteresting selections. I would add Water Drops on Burning Rocks and The River, a Taiwanese movie which I couldn’t decide whether it just creeped me out or whether I was mad at it for trying so hard (the latter a la Happiness, Piano Teacher, or David Lynch).
Posted by Ezra on 05/07 at 08:27 PMMy vote for creepiest movie and all time winner of the “Criminal use of film” award goes to Glengarry Glenn Ross.
I get disgusted just thinking about it.
Posted by on 05/07 at 08:54 PMCarnal Knowledge is definitely high on my list. Recently, the creepiest thing I’ve seen is a South Korean movie, The Isle, directed by Ki-Duk Kim. It’s probably more than creepy—I really had trouble watching it.
Posted by Matt Cheney on 05/07 at 10:26 PMThe trouble with Starship Troopers as satire is that the kids being indoctrinated into a life of violence are played by subpar actors who can’t grant depth to them that the script so sorely lacks. There doesn’t seem much of a loss when the likes of Casper Van Dien doesn’t mind having his mind read. Plus, the argument that the bugs may be innocent of throwing the metors, which people have thrown at me, doesn’t hold water because there’s not hints that they are or aren’t, and their actions to defend themselves are horrible.
I’ve noticed that most people who love, absolutely love that film, have a deep and abiding hatred of Heinlein. Were I able to finish one of his books without lapsing into a coma, Imightbe able to understand where they’re coming from. Still, calling a movie brilliant just because it pisses thoroughly on a sci-fi writer who never had much of an audience outside of sci-fi and political views that the viewer found repugnant seems a flimsy excuse for enjoying stupid people being chopped in half.
Posted by on 05/07 at 11:19 PMWow, was this an experiment on Michael’s part, defining creepy so vaguely? So many different notions of it here...I guess different people get creeped out by different, uh, you know, things. It seems that the criteria for creepiness are less standardized than those for many other quality realms. Movies that make you wanna take a shower afterward--that really IS subjective, isn’t it? That which conditions each person’s creepiness reflex differs, and yet it sinks in so deeply that it feels as natural and instinctive as, well, a reflex.
Okay, so which films creeped me out? I agree about Old Boy, the S. Korean film--wow, I felt that one went to far in attempting to, and succeeding, in getting under my skin. The Isle, also from S. Korea, has that visercal cringe factor going too. In fact, having spent time in Korea, I can say that there’s something more visceral in general at the heart of Korean culture. . . There’s another film from there that includes a dog butcher that’ll keep you you awake past your bedtime too, even if you don’t have a problem with eating doggies.
But I sense that Michael’s after films whose makers don’t seem exactly INTENT on creeping out the viewer? One film that really creeped me out, and maybe in that way, is Joe, about an American bigot who ends up blowing away his own hippie daughter. And Looking for Mr. Goodbar has something that goes beyond the moral indignation its makers seem intent on inducing, with the main character’s weird back problem, and especially the stabbing scene at the end. One more: Harmonie Corrine’s Julian Donkey boy is creepy in a GOOD way.
Posted by on 05/08 at 01:40 AMI’m honor-bound to put in a good word for Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, which is not a bad film. You just have to view it as a farce, and it works.
Park’s Oldboy isn’t creepy--but his film prior to that, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, is very creepy.
I can’t believe that only two people have mentioned Salo. Or that no one has nominated Even Dwarfs Started Small by Werner Herzog, or Peter Greenaway’s Baby of Mâcon.
That said, the most recent film that most weirded me out was The Polar Express.
Posted by A D Jameson on 05/08 at 03:10 AMOne person on this whole thread mentioned that German movie, ‘The Tin Drum’. weird synchronicity in this discussion as just yesterday my husband and I had a discussion on whether a movie like that, which creeps you out and you never forget, is therefore a great movie (I was pro and he was con). (We got on this discussion while watching “Hook” on TV and discussing J.M. Barrie’s reasons for writing Peter Pan.) I thought the Tin Drum movie was great, but awful, at the same time, and it disturbs me to think about it to this day (I saw it 7 or 8 years ago).
Posted by Anna in Cairo on 05/08 at 04:45 AMThe dream scene from Vertigo with Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart). An aging Jimmy Stewart with psychedelic pinwheel effects and wind in his hair--creepy.
The “Red” Bali Hai scene in the 1958 version of South Pacific. VERY creepy.
Posted by DocMara on 05/08 at 10:06 AMSeven: profoundly creepy. Hook: seriously creepy. Lots of foul, creepy suggestions here generally. I never saw Kids for the same reason I never saw In the Company of Men—I heard it was just too damn creepy. Also, I caught fifteen minutes of Toys on cable the other night. I hear that one is embarrassingly creepy.
Willie Mink asks:
But I sense that Michael’s after films whose makers don’t seem exactly INTENT on creeping out the viewer?
Yep, that’s about it. I’m also after films that think they’re critiquing X while wallowing in it (male self-absorption in Carnal Knowledge, say, or rococo, gruesome violence in Seven—and dozens of films like it). Phantasm (yep, I too saw it when I was 17) is creepy in a kind of weird cool stoner way. Whereas Hook is just so full of that strange mix of schmaltz and self-loathing—you know that can’t be intentional—as to be creepy in a really creepy kind of way.
Posted by Michael on 05/08 at 10:30 AMHas anyone here seen Léolo? It’s a French-Canadian film from 1992, and definitely one of the creepiest films I’ve ever seen, particularly the ending. I felt unclean for days after watching it. The worst thing was that my friend & I went to see it because the trailer made it look like a comedy......<shudder>
Chris Moore mentioned Santa Sangre: it’s not only out on VHS, but has recently been released on a special 2-disc set on DVD. The second disc includes a short by one of Jodorowsky’s sons, and quite a long feature on Jodorowsky himself that was done several years back.
How about Phantom of the Paradise? OK, in a lot of ways it is quite silly and fun, but there’s something about Paul Williams’ character that just makes me go all squirmy inside.
And has anybody mentioned American Beauty yet? The whole premise was so nasty and disgusting that I still get pissed off thinking about it. The fact that it was being hailed as some sort of modern masterpiece at the time made it doubly creepy for me.
Posted by on 05/08 at 10:54 AMNot a ‘serious’ film, but It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World always creeped me out with its wanton destruction (Let’s crash cars! Let’s demolish garages brick by brick! Let’s have middle-aged actors fall 20 stories!). And I happen to like most of the comedians in the cast.
Posted by on 05/08 at 10:56 AMAh, the unbearable creepiness of American Beauty! Good one.
Posted by Michael on 05/08 at 11:06 AMThe beauty of the bag in American Beauty! Like the plastic bag, that mess of a movie (complete with post-production voiceovers that make no sense) has to be mocked.
The zombie wife of Chris Cooper reminded me of the skit from <i>Twilight Zone: The Movie<i> in which the child with unlimited wish power wishes the mouth away from his sister. (I think I have the genders correct) Creeeeeepy.
Posted by DocMara on 05/08 at 11:51 AM"Carnal Knowledge” was indeed, disturbing. Ironically, it was just about the only critically embraced film Candace Bergen did and one of her few good performances. “Five Easy Pieces” is another disturbing film from the same era--not the “Toast” sequence which is a classic--but the later sequences at the father’s birthday party. Nicholson had a real gift from bringing creepiness to a film. Roger Corman taught him well.
“M” is definite creep show esp. when you consider when it was made. “Kids” isn’t nearly as creepy as the more realistic “River’s Edge”. Nothing like Dennis Hopper to round out a skin crawling movie. Now wonder it’s perfectly sensible for him to be a Republican.
Soldonz’s and Greenway really don’t fit the “creepy” genre in the manner of Hollywood films. Greenaway’s films are filled with nihlism and a need for decent editing--incoherent, self-indulgent attempts at being provocative. More pretense and trash than creep. Soldonz is a much more skilled provocateur, one whose characters and situations are much more grounded in real life---Lots of kids can identify with Dawn Weiner. “Happiness” captures aspects of child molestation that are very true to life (I’ve worked with perpetrators & victims in the past). American Beauty is a sort of high-gloss attempt at doing what Soldonz usually does; too slick and Hollywood to be creepy---it’s not hard to see what’s going on with Chris Cooper and the Cooper character’s wife is a bit of stereotype (Stepford goes back to the 70s, after all). Much better is the Spacey character, his wife and her lover. The silly motivational-speak is dead-on. I live in Atlanta, where that paces for smart discourse.
“In the Company of Men” has something of a cop-out ending, but is more of a fable than anything really creepy. Chances are, you’ver known less exaggerated (or perhaps full-on) versions of these guys at some point in your life. The Ben Stiller character reminds me of why I wonder how Stiller became so popular an actor (he’s perfect here but tiresome in his more comic roles). The lesbian subplot and the use of the art gallery “assistant” as a unifying character seem more lame and cliched than anything else.
Posted by on 05/08 at 12:18 PMhere’s a little story: some friends and i had a little dinner party and rented a couple of movies. first was best in show. oh, how we laughed. then we followed it up with todd solondz’s happiness . after it ended, it was as if the party turned into a funeral. nobody wanted to even look at each other and everyone kinda went home right after that. probably the creepiest movie i’ve ever seen.
Christopher Guest deals with essentially the same types of characters as Todd Solondz does, only with much more dignity. I’d even be willing to call Guest a better overall filmmaker than Solondz.
Posted by on 05/08 at 12:39 PMOh, I am so grateful for the commenters here.
Thanks, wtfwjd? for a wonderful nostalgic recovery of something I’d forgotten: Anyone remember the John Waters “thank you for not smoking” clip they used to run before movies at the Charles? A film of Waters thanking the audience for not smoking while he himself slowly, and with great visible pleasure, smokes a cigarette, french inhaling past his pencil moustache and oohing and aahing all the while…
And to several commenters upthread for letting me know I’m not the only one completely creeped out by Sunset Boulevard. I walked out on it in college, tried again in my thirties, still twenty years later have been unable to watch the whole thing.
Carnal Knowledge is still the creepiest movie that I’ve managed to see all the way through. I know myself well enough not even to try many of the films cited in this thrtead…
Posted by on 05/08 at 12:40 PMYour Friends and Neighbors seriously creeped me out. I swore I’d never have sex again for weeks afterward.
Wild At Heart was creepy and offensive. I thought it was a giant Fuck You to all the people who’d discovered Lynch through Twin Peaks.
For a film that’s creepy in a fun way, I like Mad Love, with Peter Lorre as a surgeon in love with an opera singer. Her husband is a pianist whose hands are injured in a train accident, and Lorre attaches a dead murderer’s hands to him, and, and.... It’s skeddy!
I guess Sunset Boulevard and Night of the Hunter are creepy, but in a good way. The first time I saw Hunter, I turned out all the lights for the full effect. Whoo! Laughton really nailed a child’s nightmare world. I kept expecting the preacher to pop up at the end and kill ‘em all. Musta been The Jason Effect.
Posted by on 05/08 at 03:50 PMFor creepy in the entirely unintentional and not good way, how about Dances With Wolves? Overblown, self-congratulatory, and phoney through and through. But what makes it creepy is its portrait of Native Americans. While there’s a fair bit of noble (savage) about the Lakota, the best Indians in the movie are white Indians. And the Pawnee are basically cardboard cutout, movie villain Indians. And then there’s the end credit that basically says that, tragically, the Lakota are no more (tell that to the Lakota!). Bonus awfulness (if not exactly creepiness) points for Costner’s company’s apparently promising the actually existing Lakota a lot during filming and then not following through.
(BTW, since I brought them up first, I wanted to agree with hamletta that Night of the Hunter and </i>Sunset Blvd</i> are creepy in a very good way.)
Posted by on 05/08 at 07:21 PMOK, this probably sounds silly, but I was creeped out by Babe: Pig in the City. While a brilliant sequel, it completely changes tone from the first Babe and contains one of the most disturbing scenes from anything that can even be called ostensibly a children’s film. When Babe befriends a puppy near the hotel, the dog tells his story: “My owner tied me in a bag and throwed me in the river.”
Egads. Enjoys kids.
Posted by on 05/08 at 08:21 PMHow about the overall creepiness of The Magdalene Sisters?
Posted by on 05/08 at 08:43 PMPaul Chaat Smith, a Comanche author who came to UVA when Kevin Stork was NASU prez, once said that his initial reaction to *Dances with Wolves* was that it was “The Ken Doll meets the Care Bears.”
However, the complexities of Indian reaction to depictions of Indians in the cinema of the dominant society are, uh, complex. Paul has some good writing about it. I recommend, inter alia, his piece in Rayna Green’s *Partial Recall* (and I recommend the whole book--hi Auntie Rayna!!)
Posted by dave mcirvine on 05/08 at 09:52 PMWow, I *am* going senile. That’s LUCY LIPPARD’s *Partial Recall* (with great essays by Rayna Green and Paul Chaat Smith).
Posted by on 05/08 at 10:02 PMA D Jameson,
Interesting story about Even Dwarves Started Small. There were so many mishaps during the making of that film that Herzog promised at one point that if no one else got hurt, at the end of the shoot, he would jump off a wall onto a cactus.
Everything went smoothly, so the day came with the dwarves poised with Super 8 cameras and still cameras to capture the event and Herzog jumped onto the cactus. Not unusual behavior for someone who once boiled and ate his own shoe.
Posted by Randy Paul on 05/08 at 10:26 PMHey, Randy, I saw him do that. Joe and I had gone to see Even Dwarfs Started Small and the rest of the evening was a complete surprise.
The shoe was something resembling a Clark’s desert boot, IIRC, and it had been simmered in some garlicky stock for several hours by Alice Waters, no less. The sole had become weirdly swollen.
Herzog was equipped with knife, fork, poultry shears, ketchup, A-1 steak sauce, and lots of Heineken’s beer. He ate the shoe in small bits and declined to eat the shoelace eyelets or sole, as even at a KFC he wouldn’t eat the bones… or some such excuse.
And that wasn’t the damnedest thing we saw that night. The damnedest thing we saw that night was Errol Morris’ first movie, Gates of Heaven, which was the occasion of the bet that Herzog was eating his shoe over.
I assume the link there is to Les Blank’s film about the event. I’m crazy about Les Blank, and the subject matter (particularly the garlic broth; OK, Herzog too) was a natural for him, but I have to think of the whole thing as a cinematic intussusception.
The entertainment was such that I have no recall at all of what the dwarf movie was like. We saw it, but it was completely overshadowed.
Posted by Ron Sullivan on 05/08 at 10:55 PMThanks Crys T for mentioning the creepy in the creepy sense “Phantom of the Paradise.” Just a weird film I must have watched a hundred times in the early days of cable t.v. Jessica Harper boogying down the line after her audition is unforgettably awkward and creepy--and yet oddly attractive. Eddie singing about suicide as he’s getting assassinated with split-screen precision. Essentially the same scene as later appeared in the also creepy “Untouchables.” Strange rock and roll excess being lampooned with ham-fists by a cast, crew, and director so obviously in love with strange rock and roll excess. I’d say this fits the bill.
Oh, and the strangest singing by a lead character in a musical EVER. (unless you count Rex Smith in Pirates of Penzance)
Posted by BP on 05/08 at 11:20 PMOk, lots of us are talking about Herzog, so I guess it’s time to bring in Wim Wenders. I don’t want to talk about the whole film *Kings of the Road* (*Im Lauf der Zeit*)--just the scene where one of the lead actors takes a full-on dump, right on camera, totally unedited, on the side of the road next to their RV. That will have us non-European audiences reaching, Monk-like, for our sani-wipes every time. Or, at least, it did me. (And don’t get me started on German toilets--maybe the “Dieter” side of Michael’s personality can elaborate on those inexplicable contraptions.)
As an aside (though a very long one), I have to say, you people are being pretty hard on *American Beauty*. Sure, it was hailed as one of the most original films of its time (of all time, I think). That, of course, was crap. It was totally unoriginal: suburbanites can’t deal with the banality of existence (not to mention the norms that we try so hard to conform to, but can’t, always), and shit gets out of hand. Wife screws around. Husband fantasizes about teenage girls. Daughter and semi-abused friend think they’re really artsy and rebellious. Been there, done that. But never that well, in my opinion. I’ll grant you that there’s not much critical distance between the narrator/POV and the actual “coolness” of the bag dancing in the wind, but then again, it is kind of cool. So, no, the film’s not original, but it IS one of the best treatments of those themes I’ve ever seen. Hell, the film itself says as much--that is, it knows there will be no surprises here--in that it announces from the beginning precisely what the outcome will be. So, that’s one vote for *American Beauty*. (But this is coming from the guy whom Michael once castigated for choosing *Bravehart* to analyze as an example of pomo ahistoricity. I have to go on record, by the way, as saying I *don’t* like *Braveheart*, and it *is* a good example of what I was talking about.)
Posted by on 05/08 at 11:40 PMScorsese’s The King of Comedy is one of the more unsettling films in his entire canon. The film does an excellent job of portraying the obsessive fan; so excellent, in fact, so thorough in revealing and (sometimes only mildly) exaggerating every wart and blemish that it’s painful to watch in places.
I also recently re-watched Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, and the Philip Seymour Hoffman-Anna Paquin subplot slithered its way under my skin very uncomfortably. There’s something about Hoffman’s nebbishy persona that makes his character’s arc that much creepier than if he were some dashing lothario.
Come to think of it, Rupert Pupkin’s social skills were rudimentary at best. Maybe I just have some unresolved hang-up about my own nerdy youth.
Posted by on 05/09 at 12:58 AMLance, what made American Beauty creepy for me was the fact that I got the distince impression I was being asked to sympathise with Spacey’s (utterly repulsive) character, even if I was supposed to find him somewhat pathetic. Also, it creeped me out no end that the filmmakers were trying to make out they were ridiculing the middle-class man’s “mid-life crisis” and his infatuation with a girl the same age as his daughter while simultaneously forcing us as the audience to accept this behaviour by showing both Birch and Suvari in nude/nearly nude overtly sexualised shots. To me, it’s one of those films that actually endorses and exploits what it pretends to be critiquing.
Also, my impression was that I was supposed to see Bening’s character as a valid excuse for Spacey’s general awfulness: if she hadn’t put out on the new sofa, he wouldn’t have “had” to try to seduce a teenager. Right. Bening’s character was the only one I felt any pity for at all.
Posted by on 05/09 at 04:59 AMEven more creepy was the <cultural studies>marketing surrounding the movie that reinforced the themes that Crys T mentions. The bare belly with a rose held tantalizingly above in the movie poster; the “Suvari on the ceiling as Jezebel” scene played over and over in commercials; the “I rule!” Spacey shout as punchline in movie trailers. Even the voiceover with the stupid “You’ll see” declaration just flattens the entire movie into a celebration of male puerile vouyerism. It’s like test audiences couldn’t handle a movie that evades the male gaze for two seconds, so they have to build an entire cultural edifice around it to make sure audiences can bypass any real nueance...just in case they might be offended.</cultural studies> That’s why the bag hurts me so much more. We can’t just watch it swirl. We have to embed it in the narrative of a really lame Stephen Daedalus. We HAVE to watch what could be interesting through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old male spoiled brat.
Posted by DocMara on 05/09 at 07:15 AMThanks to Duncan for pointing out the thread drift. His definition of creepiness gave me something to work with. But I still don’t understand Michael’s point about creepiness. Did Mike Nichols intend Carnal Knowledge to be creepy? If so, then it’s achievement is less than any film by Fellini, Godard, and most films by Bergman (whose bio is kind of creepy in the Duncan definition). Fellini’s Satyricon is a monument to creepiness but it’s so central to the film’s art that I hardly think it qualifies. Ichikawa’s Fires On the Plain is pretty creepy, with it cannibal subtext, but its theme of Japanese guilt in WWII defeats it’s creepiness. I even think Eraserhead has to much art to qualify as the creepiest film though Duncan argues well in its favor. And I can’t disagree more with those who think M is creepy though it does deal with alot of creeps. For those mentioning Verhoeven, above, try The 4th Man if you want him at his creepiest.
I thought Porky’s was the creepiest film I ever saw but Michael procribes against it when he insist that the film should be acclaimed by the critics. Birth of a Nation may fit the bill but a better choice is Gone With the Wind. I mean, Ashley Wilkes had run off to a Klan rally when Ward Bond came looking for him, right?
Posted by on 05/09 at 08:52 AMI see a few David Lynch films mentioned, but not Mulholland Drive, which creeped me the hell out. The tension in the scene at the beginning, when the weird guy is telling his therapist (I assume) about his dream, just kills me.
Also, Moulin Rouge creeped me out when it started, but eventually it got really boring. I think Jim Broadbent just generally creeps me out, although I think he’s a fine actor.
Posted by maurinsky on 05/09 at 08:53 AMCrumb! And the monkeys at the end of Aguirre. Yikes.
Posted by on 05/09 at 10:09 AMI was racking my brain for the creepiest movie I’ve seen, And I couldn’t stop thinking of “Paint your Wagon.” When I read this:
“But jeez, guys, what about Fritz Lang’s M! Does it get any creepier? The whistling, the balloon, Peter “Creepy” Lorre… “
A shiver ran down my spine, and I could follow the slowly spreading goosebumps that spread from there, over my shoulders and down to my hands and back again. The creepiest aspect for me was the successful evocation of sympathy for a child killer. The way Lorre became everything his victims must have been - helpless, confused, desperate, terified - was disturbing in effect.
Posted by on 05/09 at 10:10 AMI just typed a longish reply, and it got swallowed up by the internets… so here’s the short version.
1. Yes, the Charles Theater was amazing. The Waters short, followed by William S Burroughs “Thanksgiving Prayer” made a hell of an intro.
2. I can digest a lot. An art film, a performance piece, whatever—these things get limited circulation, and come with a built in set of ironic quotation marks. What really creeps me out? Paul Verhoven. Sleeping Beauty. Yes, American Beauty, too. The Little Mermaid. And, for the love of you-know-who, what about The Passion of the Christ?
MPT
Posted by on 05/09 at 10:58 AMI’d like to 2nd the nomination of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. Of course, that (as were most of the other films named above) was designed to be creepy.
The creepiest moment in a film not intended to be creepy would be the moment in Schindler’s List when the Nazis dash across a city square in a perfect diaganol line. Spielberg’s fetish for geometric compositions turned the Nazi’s into June Taylor Dancers.
Posted by on 05/09 at 11:17 AMTom, I had blocked out _Babe 2: A Pig of the Streets_ from my memory. You are right; it’s the creepiest movie I’ve seen (half of) in decades. Thanks for reminding me, I guess.
Two definitions of creepiness resonate with me here:
-- the movie that actually celebrates what it pretends to critique (_American Beauty_, _Carnal Knowledge_)
-- the movie which thinks it is telling truths in artistic fashion, when in fact it is exploring sick, vile, false, or immoral visions in masturbatory fashion.The third category is the intentionally creepy movie; I think MPT is right that these come with genre-based quotation marks around the material which prepares us for the icky stuff.
I think _Seven_, _Babe 2: Into the Slaughterhouse_, and all of Paul Verhoeven fit in the second category.
I disagree that there is anything remotely “brilliant” in _Babe 2: Mortal Kombat_. The filmmakers misunderstood entirely what made the original _Babe_ (book and their own movie) such a classic. All they seemed to understand was that their first movie “didn’t talk down” to kids. It had themes of death, abandonment, loss of innocence, social ostracization, etc. So they thought they should just turn up the dial on those themes. But, of course, it also had themes of hope, love, acceptance, community, and transcendence, and it ended in triumph. And its humor was really humor, based on character, not a set of sadistic jokes. And the dark themes were safely esconsed in an idyllic-enough universe to keep it on a fairy-tale level.
We walked out of the sequel at the point where a small dog, unable to hold on to the side of a speeding truck with his teeth, is flung across the pavement, skidding up to the camera with cries of pain. We should have left at the scene where a dog dangles at the end of a rope above a canal—I can’t remember if he was strangling or hanging on to keep from drowning—but it took Babe about 45 minutes to rescue this slowly dying crucified dog, I think. And the depressed family of orangutans was just ....... creepy. Especially after the father orangutan began drinking and the girl orangutan was forced to sell herself on the streets after the . . . well, that didn’t happen, but there was the scene where stormtrooper animal-control officers raid the place in riot gear . . . ick.
Darn you, Tom. I was better off with these memories stuffed down deep somewhere.
Verhoeven . . . 4th Man, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, and even the stupid but creepy desecration of PKD in Total Recall . . . . What gets me about these vile movies is that he makes all kinds of artistic-seeming gestures toward meaning or resolution or truth or significance of some kind, but in the end they are all shaggy-dog stories. They explore a shameless violent fearful misogynist psychic place, and then say, “Okay!” None of those ironic distancing quotes that could help us see the ickiness as telling us something about the human heart. Nope, just “wasn’t that fun?”
Posted by on 05/09 at 01:20 PMCreepiest movies for me: American Beauty and Breaking the Waves. So leaden, so trivial, so vile.
And in defense of Verhoeven, whom I love unreservedly, I’ve always thought he gets such a bad rap because so many of his viewers expect to see irony and subtlety where none exists. People find it so hard to believe that he would make a movie about showgirls and not say anything at all meaningful about misogyny or a movie like Starship Troopers without even trying to make a greater point about a completely militarized society. He’s a stone genius.
Posted by on 05/09 at 04:14 PMCaleb,
Right. You can see genius in it if you like.
I think viewers “expect to see irony and subtlety” because his movies signal that irony and subtlety are coming. They hold the pretense of being serious about telling a story. Then, in the end, each movie turns out to be a bunch of creepy colored lights playing around on a screen.
Posted by on 05/09 at 04:58 PMRe: The Night Porter. The Seventies were different. As I recall, ads for The Night Porter said: “Does for jam what Last Tango in Paris did for butter!”
And “Makes the Last Tango in Paris seem like a light hearted romp.”
I’ve heard similar things about In the Realm of the Senses (well, not about jam specifically). There’s a Japanese horror movie whose name I can’t remember that was pretty creepy. It involved hypnosis and water.
If David Lynch made a movie of Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, that would be the creepiest.
Posted by ben wolfson on 05/09 at 05:11 PMJan Svankmajer’s films are supposed to be pretty creepy, too. I’ve only seen Little Otik. The closeups of people eating in that movie are definitely creepy, and gross.
Posted by ben wolfson on 05/09 at 05:18 PMCan I just add my voice to the small chorus lamenting that the majority of the posts on this thread don’t seem to understand the topic under discussion? Or am I fooling myself?
Hitchcock’s The Ring (1927).
Posted by HP on 05/09 at 06:52 PMAD Jameson: Hear hear on The Ninth Gate. I thought it was pretty nifty.
My feelings about American Beauty are summed up best in one scene- Kevin Spacey’s character berating Annette Benning for being concerned about her couch- while at the same time we’re supposed to celebrate the fact that he bought that cherry red mustang he always wanted. They’re both materialists. Why does he get to take the moral high ground? Because Alan Ball worked for some really mean women in his sitcom days, apparently. We’re given a scene early on where Benning’s portrayed sympathetically but after that it’s full-on bitch mode.
Six Feet Under has similar problems, but the women get a fair shake every once in a while.
You know what movie I find seriously creepy, the more I think about it? Attack of the Clones. Watching that you start to wonder if Lucas has actually spoken to a woman in the past decade. Anakin’s interactions with Padme are just all wrong- he’s been obsessed with her since he’s eight and that somehow turns her on? The hell?
Posted by on 05/09 at 07:33 PMThis one’s for HP:
Alien! I couldn’t sleep for days!!!! Soooooo creepy.
Posted by BP on 05/10 at 12:10 AMEven Dwarfs Started Small and West of Zanzibar are excellent choices. Along other lines, there are the up-with-people up-with-dinner spirit of Sweet Movie (I heard a Harvard audience boo and hiss!) and Billy Wilder’s curdled Kiss Me, Stupid. For intensified Carnal Knowledge creepiness, though, I’d recommend any film, feature or short, by Jean Eustache.
Posted by Ray Davis on 05/10 at 12:42 AMI didn’t want either to wash or to puke after seeing it, so maybe this movie doesn’t quite fit the definition, but one that smacked me back pretty hard was Merchant of Four Seasons. In fact I didn’t want to do anything afterwards but sit and wait to die. Boy, that one sure rang the bell.
Posted by W. Kiernan on 05/10 at 07:25 PMOkay, CARNAL KNOWLEDGE is creepy for a whole different reason. It was widely rumored after the shooting of that film that one of the scenes between Garfunkel and Bergen was actually a filmed rape, and that the director and camera man finally ralized what was happening and pulled him off her. How creepy is that?
My votes go to SANTE SANGRE, which freaked me out so much I could never get past the first fifteen minutes; anything by Peter Greenaway (with a special nod to ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS, which features a glorious and slow close up of maggots eating a dead zoo animal), DEAD RINGERS which is enough to scare women away from OB-GYNs for eternity, IN THE BEDROOM, which was just flat out depressing, pointless and creepy. FREAKS was pretty bad. But what about REANIMATOR? Now THAT was one creepy film. Come on!
Posted by on 05/11 at 03:02 PMOK. I’ll bet the one actor who appears in more of the films mentioned above than any other is Philip Seymour Hoffman. Yet only one post (#140) manages to mention him. Whattup w/ that?
Posted by on 05/11 at 11:32 PM"It was widely rumored after the shooting of that film that one of the scenes between Garfunkel and Bergen was actually a filmed rape, and that the director and camera man finally ralized what was happening and pulled him off her.”
??? I don’t want to sound too naively idealistic about 1960s folk icons, but I find that one pretty unbelievable. Has anyone else heard that one?
Posted by on 05/13 at 01:29 PMI found The Butcher Boy too creepy to turn off. Also, something about The Butterfly Effect ( lighting? ) left me feeling unclean in a Pet Sematary sense of unholy dirt.
Posted by on 05/13 at 04:44 PMThere’s a daytime soap in the UK called Doctors. The way it’s shot in a faux verite close ups, pan and zooms kind of way makes it creepy as hell. Also, the main doctor is played by Christopher Timothy - best know as James Herriot on BBC and PBS fave All Creatures Great and Small. James Herriot and human patients. I rest my case. Admit it, just the thought of it is creeping you out even now isn’t it?
Posted by on 05/13 at 06:10 PMCarnal Knowlege is creepy and brilliant. (And I don’t care how many plays he directs, I will never forgive Nichols for Working Girl… It’s not creepy, just an advertisement for everything that is odious in our culture).
I think the CK subgenre of creep is really “striking depiction of human loathsomeness” (versus the more visceral creep that derives from scary gynecological tools, adventures with glass, etc. In which category: Cries and Whispers!) In the former category, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet (I think that’s the one--with the bulimic daughter who hides candy under her bed)? is one I found pretty hard to rinse off. People will insist that Leigh actually has empathy with his characters but it seems to me he just gets a free pass because they/we think he has a lefty political analysis. Feh!
Oh, and thank God someone else mentioned Breaking the Waves for being hateful… but not, I think, creepy. Like Solondz and La Bute, Von Trier seems to fetishize his own contempt for human frailty--and get called a genius for it. What irked me about that movie was the relentlessness of the Hand of Dramatic Fate. I think that’s why he had to employ those meaningless musical sherbet courses (Python Lee Jackson?!? Great call!) He knew that no one could stand the unrelieved screeching of the narrative gears, otherwise....
Posted by on 05/14 at 06:46 PMFrom a David Edelstein review:
LaBute often cites the Mike Nichols/Jules Feiffer movie Carnal Knowledge (1971)—in which a loutish Jack Nicholson attempts to teach Art Gurfunkel how to exploit a series of mostly dull-witted women—as a seminal influence. I can imagine him seeing it at an impressionable age and exclaiming, “That’s it! That’s what great art can do: show us the ugly truth about human relationships!” I can’t help wondering, though, if this revelation had been preceded by any, um, hands-on experience. It seems more likely that LaBute spent a lot of time alone in his college dorm room listening to Elvis Costello sing things like, “He said, ‘I’m so happy I could die’/ She said ‘drop dead’ then left with another guy!” and going, “Yeah! That’s what women are made of!” I’d say he needs to meet a nice girl—but I’m not sure any nice girls need to meet him.
http://www.slate.com/id/2082750/
Posted by Anders Weinstein on 05/20 at 02:12 PMOne of the creepiest movies I thought was Event Horizon, everytime I watch that movie it gets to me. Check it out when you get a chance, very creepy!
Posted by Erik Chase on 10/15 at 01:41 PMCool!I’m impress…
Posted by Nick Sunderson on 12/06 at 05:49 AMHi,
The creepiest moment in a film not intended to be creepy would be the moment in Schindler’s List when the Nazis dash across a city square in a perfect diaganol line.
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