Notorious is the quote, “Be my victim”. Candyman is one of the best examples of studio horror in the 1990s. This is a terrific movie, a rare example of an R-rated studio film that matches the Indies for intensity and grotesquerie but leaps ahead with a real budget, a professional cast, and a talented director.
Candyman is based on the Clive Barker short story “The Forbidden” from his collection The Books of Blood. The short story follows a young semiotician in Liverpool researching the meaning of graffiti in Council Housing.
She hears rumors about a series of murders, but is unable to find any record of the killing with the police or in the media. Her investigation leads her to a monster that exists only through the communal fears of the residents.
The film moves the action to Chicago and the protagonist, Helen (Virginia Madsen) is now a graduate student completing her thesis on urban legends. Over the course of a series of interviews she hears the legend of the Candyman. A hook-handed killer who can be summoned if you repeat his name five times while standing in front of a mirror. He appears behind you and “splits you from groin to gullet”.
Helen’s investigation leads her to the notorious housing project Cabrini-Green, where there have supposedly been twenty-five similar murders. A professor friend of Helen’s explains,
“The Candyman was the son of a slave. His father had amassed a considerable fortune from designing a device for the mass producing of shoes after the Civil War. Candyman had been sent to all the best schools and had grown up in polite society. He had a prodigious talent as an artist and was much sought after when it came to the documenting of one’s wealth and position in society in a portrait. Well, it was in this latter capacity, that he was commissioned by a wealthy landowner to capture his daughter’s virginal beauty. Well, of course, they fell deeply in love and she became pregnant. Hmm… poor Candyman. Her father executed a terrible revenge. He paid a pack of brutal hooligans to do the deed. They chased Candyman through the town to Cabrini Green, where they proceeded to saw off his right hand with a rusty blade. And no one came to his aid. For this was just the beginning of his ordeal. Nearby there was an apiary. Dozens of hives, filled with hungry bees. They smashed the hive and stole the honeycomb and smeared it over his prone, naked body. Candyman was stung to death by the bees. They burned his body on a giant pyre and then scattered his ashes over Cabrini Green.”
After a run-in with a gang-banger dressed as the Candyman in one of Cabrini Green’s restrooms, Helen starts to share the inhabitants fear of the killer. Her fear summons the real Candyman played with aching romanticism by Tony Todd. At this point the film transforms into a lush gothic romance permeated by scenes of unremitting terror.
Director Bernard Rose began his career working for Jim Henson (he played a major behind-the-scenes role in Henson’s fantasy film The Dark Crystal (1981)), then transitioned into music videos during the height of the MTV era. He brings all of his assembled visual tricks and imagination to Candyman. The score written by minimalist composer Philip Glass soars, and is certainly among the memorable film scores on this list.
The Candyman has become an iconic horror character, and has even been spoofed on the show South Park in the season 11 episode “Hell on Earth 2006”.
Scream (1996) – Wes Craven
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 was the highest grossing movie of the 1980’s slasher cycle. It was released in 1988. By the end of the eighties the genre was recycling through diminished returns. By the mid-1990s the horror genre was almost considered dead.
The iconic slasher series were winding down. There was a glut of direct to video trash. Then came Scream. Scream was hip. Scream was self-referential. Scream was for teenagers who had grown up with the slasher film, and now had left it behind to rot. Wes Craven, who had partially invented modern horror, returned to revitalize it.
The first thing that set Scream apart from the old slasher flicks is that it had a real cast: Drew Barrymore, Friends’ Courtney Cox, David Arquette. These were popular actors. The new actors were no slouches either: Neve Campbell, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan. However, there’s one more thing that sets it apart besides Wes Craven’s career-best direction; Kevin Williamson’s witty and memorable script. Williamson created teenagers who actually spoke like teenagers.
On top of that, these kids went to the movies, they knew all the insider info: Tatum tells final girl Sydney that if you pause All The Right Moves in just the right place, you can see Tom Cruise’s penis. Moreover, the kids were experts on horror films. Randy, the kid who works at the video store, has even mapped out the rules to survive a horror movie.
Much of the film’s self-referentialism also works as comedy. This is not to say that Scream is a comedy. Actually at the time of its release Scream was controversial for its extreme level of violence. At the end of the opening scene a girl is graphically stabbed, disemboweled, and hung from a tree.
For critic Roger Ebert, the ironic use of the self-awareness and the clever jokes diffuse some of the violence and gore. For some of you that won’t be the case, so count this as a word of warning before streaming this movie.
Scream’s opening scene is a doozey. The film’s biggest star is making popcorn before watching a movie. To leave some suspense for the minority of you who have not already seen this fantastic film, I will not name the actress.
Anyway, the phone rings. The man on the other side of the call flirts with her. She hangs up. He calls again. He threatens her. Finally he forces her to play a game in which she has to answer trivia questions about horror films.
The scene soon descends into a very well orchestrated game of the killer chasing the big breasted girl through her house. Unlike most slasher killers, this particular killer is fallible. She can trip him. Maybe she can also hurt him. It has to be noted how much Marco Beltrami’s memorable score elevates this scene and the whole movie. What happens next? Just watch the movie.
Scream was followed by two popular sequels that arrived hot on its heels and an unnecessary but still memorable fourth go-around in 2011.
Ringu (1999) – Hideo Nakata
By the late 1990s, Japan was making the only interesting horror movies in the world. That’s why in the early 2000’s American audiences had to wade through a glut of J-Horror remakes.
In Japan, Hideo Nakata was leading the trend of great horror movies and Ringu was his trump card. It has a perfect high concept narrative. There is a haunted video. If you watch the video you will get a phone call that says you will die in seven days.
After the death of her niece, a female journalist sets out to track down the video, believing it only to be an urban legend. Ringu was the highest grossing horror film in Japan. To say anything more would be telling.
Hollywood released a very solid Gore Verbinski directed remake in 2002. Also check out his stunning if overly long gothic horror film A Cure for Wellness (2016), that effortlessly rekindles some of the horror genre’s earliest fascinations in some truly sick ways.
This is just the kind of gonzo wacked-out big-budget insanity that the Hollywood can never seem to churn out these days.
Dark Water (2002) – Hideo Nakata
Japanese clinical psychologist Masami Ohinata describes the intense devotion in Japanese ideology towards the figure of the mother as the ‘Mystique of Motherhood’. The mother – child bond is the strongest imaginable.
The strength of the mother’s relationship with her child has been closely tied to the strength of Japan since the Meiji Era; be it through fukoku kyohei (rich country, strong army) in which the mother’s job is to raise a strong soldier or the more modern concept of the mother raising a strong worker for the late 20th century labor force.
The idea of motherly love was sanctified and idealized. The key to a child’s development and education is the mother’s love and devotion rather than the community. [While Japanese society may pride conformity, it has never been collectivist] Ohinata also stresses the point that a mother’s love is thought to be unbreakable, a mother whose son is being escorted to the gallows, loves her son as much as the mother of a captain of industry.
In Japanese culture praise is heaped upon the mothers of great men – conquerors and leaders. It is believed that the men were only able to accomplish their great achievements because of their upbringing and their mothers’ devotion.
Dark Water is a film of love and abandonment, mothering and neglect. It is a work of social realism written in blood and shadows. Dark Water may not have the slick high concept of Ringu, but in my estimation, it is the subtler and and richer film. Dark Water, like Ringu, is based on a story by water obsessed novelist Koji Suzuki, and revolves around a water tower on a decrepit apartment building rather than Ringu‘s well.
Wells and water have long been features of Japanese horror stories and Japanese mythology in general. Dark Water tells the story of Yoshimi Matsubara, a divorced single mother fighting for child custody. She moves into an old apartment building with her six year old daughter.
Water spots keep appearing on their ceiling causing constantly worsening leaks, and Yoshimi’s daughter keeps finding a child’s red bag with a Hello Kitty-style bunny logo. Soon, they will both glimpse yellow raincoat-clad long-haired ghost girls.
Dark Water is a tonally precise and scary film, that moves slowly and deliberately to an unescapable conclusion, that hits the exact right notes. Dark Water never cheats, no matter how much we sometimes hope that it will.
Dark Water is passionate recognition of the glory of motherhood and the necessity of a strong family unit. SPOILERS. Throughout Dark Water, Yoshimi is constantly willing to do anything she has to do to possess and build a life with her daughter.
At custody hearings she answers pointed questions, even relating how a job proofreading sadistic novels landed her in psychiatric care and how she used to sleepwalk after her own parents divorced. She takes a job at a small editing firm that is below her intellectual level so that she can support her daughter.
At the job interview she rushes out mid-interview to pick her daughter up for school, so Ikuko can have a happy and more importantly consistent life. Her daughter disappears or becomes ill numerous times throughout the film, each time this happens Yoshimi is panic stricken, she will always put her daughter before herself.
In the end, she sacrifices herself to save her daughter’s life. She is willing give up everything and become the mother to an abandoned drowned girl to save her daughter. In the epilogue, the daughter finally realizes the extent of her mother’s devotion and sacrifice.
As a high school aged seemingly well adjusted Ikuko walks away from the apartment building she has an epiphany, she thinks to herself that her mother has actually been with her all this time. She may have been died to ease the the suffering of one of Japan’s many lonely isolated young children, yet through her maternal devotion she has protected her daughter from all the evil in the world. Few films on this list have a message so timely and relevant.
John Landis said that Audition is too horrific even for him. It is directed by the amazingly prolific Takashi Miike. He has directed over ninety films since 1991. The first half of Audition feels like a gentle beautifully shot melodrama, maybe with lightly comedic overtones. A widower is urged by his son to start dating again. A friend of his, who is a film producer holds a fake audition, so the widower can choose his next wife.
Enter Asami – submissive and friendly, she seems like she would be the perfect Japanese wife… You’ll never get more out of me. See the film if you dare. Let me warn you…Scream is a family film compared to this.
Miike can be a real sicko and has released an amazing amount of movies of varying quality. I’m particularly fond of his twisted psycho-teacher movie Lesson of the Evil (2012) (The name does not translate well.).
Lesson of the Evil is overly long and does not concern itself with good taste, but I assure you it’s the kind of movie that you’ll either love or hate. Don’t watch it if you can’t handle a very intense school shooting that Miike stages for maximum excitement.
David Sporn is a professional filmmaker, historian of cinema, writer, political scientist, philosopher, and gentleman for all seasons.
David joined TGNR in 2016 serving as an Entertainment & Arts Contributor, and authors his film focused column CadreCinematique.
