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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 12, 2014 19:37:06 GMT -5
Silent horror recommendations:
Faust by F.W. Murnau
West of Zanzibar with Lon Chaney and Lionel Barrymore. (It's like having a nightmare before going to bed.)
He Who Gets Slapped with Lon Chaney The Unknown with Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2014 19:48:11 GMT -5
Ah -- Caligari. Forgot that one; saw it in the student center theater at Arizona State.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Sept 12, 2014 19:52:27 GMT -5
The silent version of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame is a worthy horror film as well
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Sept 12, 2014 20:04:41 GMT -5
Three of the silent films mentioned on this page of the thread will appear later on the list  I've watch two silent films and struggled through both despite interest in the story. Though I think the length of Metropolis is why it wasn't watched in one sitting as oppose to Nosferatu, which I watched long ago but don't remember being 3+ hours like Metropolis which I watched a few years back on Netflix. Metropolis is one of my favorite films of all time, but even I rely upon watching different versions depending upon my attention span. I rarely ever watch the full length complete restored version. I sometimes watch the more traditional (but mercilessly cut) 80 minute versions, but I most often watch The Giorgio Moroder cut, which condenses the film down to 84 minutes while maintaining nearly all of the original plot elements and adding subtitles instead of title screens, as well as tinting and an 80s industrial pop soundtrack. It was an odd experiment, but it captures the spirit of the full original cut, and it's a favorite guilty pleasure of mine
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 12, 2014 20:10:18 GMT -5
I was not a big fan of Metropolis until I saw it in a theater in Los Angeles. Since then, I love it! But it's not one of the films I watch over and over. And I've never watched a three-hour version!
I saw it two or three years ago. It was a DVD version of a rather shabby print, but it was watchable.
I've never seen the Giorgio Moroder cut, but I would like to watch it some day.
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 12, 2014 20:13:42 GMT -5
The silent version of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame is a worthy horror film as well It's not one of my favorite silent films, but I know a lot of horror movie fans who love it, and I've seen it two or three times over the years.
The one I love is the 1939 version with Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell and Edmond O'Brian. I just saw that a few weeks ago! One of my favorites ever since I was a kid back in the 1970s. |
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Post by Jesse on Sept 12, 2014 20:41:11 GMT -5
Silent horror recommendations:
Faust by F.W. Murnau
West of Zanzibar with Lon Chaney and Lionel Barrymore. (It's like having a nightmare before going to bed.)
He Who Gets Slapped with Lon Chaney The Unknown with Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari The silent version of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame is a worthy horror film as well I would add The Phantom of the Opera, The Monster and The Phantom Carriage to this list. |
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Sept 12, 2014 21:13:54 GMT -5
Two more films have now been mentioned that will be on the list  |
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Post by shaxper on Sept 12, 2014 22:13:26 GMT -5
I've never seen the Giorgio Moroder cut, but I would like to watch it some day. There's a free version of the Giorgio Moroder cut on youtube. The quality isn't great (it's taken from an old VHS copy), but it sure is free: |
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Sept 12, 2014 22:56:44 GMT -5
#48: Freaks (1932/USA) Director Tod Browning once traveled with a circus, and his experiences during that time necessarily informed this unusual film taking a sympathetic look at circus freaks. In an age in which most of the terrible diseases that caused the most severe of deformities are a distant memory, one amazing quality of this film is the ability to see true specimens of human deformity as you would never see in the civilized world today. It's an admission ticket to a circus side-show with a relatively generic plot and a surprisingly sympathetic view of "freaks," all for the price of one. But then you're probably asking yourself how this counts as a horror film. Well, for the first sixty minutes of this sixty four minute film, it isn't. Instead, we simply get to know and care for the "freaks" as the most beautiful people around them reveal themselves as the true monsters. We yearn and yearn for some kind of karmic retribution and, in the last four minutes, our prayers are answered -- but not how we expected. Though Browning spends the first sixty minutes of the film imploring us to see beyond the deformities and glimpse the souls within, in those last terrible minutes, we watch that all change, as the cast of characters we've learned to love and care about turns righteously indignant, terrifying, their cruel and demented bodies suddenly the objects of horror we've tried so hard not to see them as, while they pursue their deserving victim with mercy totally absent. It's truly and unforgettably terrifying stuff, and Browning's final message becomes unequivocally clear -- DON'T MESS WITH FREAKS. Watch Freaks tonight at the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/freaks1932
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Post by Jesse on Sept 12, 2014 23:12:17 GMT -5
Easily my favorite Tod Browning film which is no small task given his body of work. Watching Prince Randian, a man with no arms and no legs, take a match from a matchbox and light a cigarette using only his mouth is still one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen.
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 12, 2014 23:20:14 GMT -5
"Freaks" is in my Top-Five-of-All-Time list.
In the 1990s, I taped it off of TNT and I watched it all the time. By the time I switched over to DVD, I felt I had seen it enough and didn't need my own copy any more. It's on TCM every once in a while, or I can get it from Netflix.
When Hans is yelling at those guys for saying Cleo should ride around like Godiva, he says: "What have you on your shoulders for heads? Swill pails?"
I'm pretty sure of that. There's a whole thread on IMDB for dialogue that's hard to understand.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Sept 12, 2014 23:23:51 GMT -5
Easily my favorite Tod Browning film. We'll be seeing more from Browning on this list |
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Post by shaxper on Sept 14, 2014 0:05:04 GMT -5
#47: The Haunted House (1906/France) The earliest horror films were brief (often less than ten minutes in length) experiments in early special effects. Georges Méliès and his studio had tremendous fun using the supernatural as an excuse to explore the potential of cinematic trickery, and so these early horror shorts have no intention of being anything more than fun and dazzling. However, presumably out of fear that these stunning effects might truly terrify audiences, Méliès and his company were often careful to relieve any shocks they created with over-the-top childish humor. The Haunted House, already one of many films about people wandering into a dwelling inhabited by ghosts and demons by 1906, is also one of the most exceptional -- pulling off some of the most impressive stunts/effects, and also diligently following each and every trick with humor that's so over the top that it borders on the ridiculous. Though this would never qualify as anyone's favorite horror film, it's incredibly fun if you can get past the bad humor, and it's brilliant in its execution, especially when you consider most of Western Civilization didn't even have electricity yet when this film was released. I could watch this one again and again. Make time to watch this 6 minute film tonight on Youtube:
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Post by Deleted on Sept 14, 2014 6:55:40 GMT -5
As I know I noted in the original CBR incarnation of this list, I first saw Freaks in a Halloween screening at some small theatre rented by the Phoenix Fantasy Film Society (I believe it was called) for the purpose back in 1981, only a couple of months after we moved out there from Arkansas to go to grad school. They also showed Dr. X & Vampyr, neither of which I'd seen before, either, & maybe a 4th movie that I've lost all memory of over the decades.
Needless to say, that was a helluva night. (It was made even more memorable by the fact that I was still getting used to wearing contacts, which my wife had gotten me for my birthday 6 weeks earlier, & during one of the movies while rubbing my eye I managed to have one of them fall out of my eye. Somehow eventually found it on the floor, shriveled to the consistency of a cornflake, while sitting there in the dark. Don't recall which movie was playing at the time, but I suspect I was distracted.)
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