Chainsawnukah 2013 Holiday Wrap up!

Chainsawnukah Holiday Wrap-Up

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

It's been a wild Chainsawnukah that took more than a month til the end of the goddam year to wind down. What have we learned? Let's break down the numbers!

LITERARY ADAPTATION: 12. I’m Not counting EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, since it’s just “characters created by” and is in fact a sequel to another movie, not directly to the book. No Lovecraft adaptations and only one (incredibly shitty) Poe adaptation this year, a big shift from last year. Robert Bloch got the double-dip this time, with both THE SKULL and THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, plus we got some oddness from Edogawa Ranpo (WATCHER IN THE ATTIC) M. R. James (NIGHT OF THE DEMON) Marc Randall (THE HAND) and of course Shirley “The Lottery” Jackson (THE HAUNTING). But the big winner this year was classic horror stories: Dracula (adapted into NOSFERATU and to a somewhat, ahem, looser extent LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES) and Frankenstein (CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN).

It was not just the stories, though, but rather their authors who took center stage here: Edgar Allen Poe shows up in TWIXT to help Hall Baltimore solve a vampiric mystery, as well as going on a claymation epic in ANNABELLE LEE (too bad I watched THE RAVEN already, huh? Coulda gone for the hattrick). Mary Shelly, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Piladori turn up to sex it up in GOTHIC. The Marquis de Sade shows up (in skull form) to torment Peter Cushing in THE SKULL. And in a more modern twist on the same thing, John Carpenter shows up as the Crypt Keeper/narrator in BODY BAGS and Carol Clover, author of the seminal slasher study Men, Women and Chainsaws, shows up in the semi-fictional S&MAN. So all in all it was a year of artists getting involved in the action. The final word on the dangers of being a storyteller in your own story, though, has to belong to the childhood fibbers in POISON FOR THE FAERIES.     

SEQUEL: 11

Has a Sequel: 3 (ANNABELLE LEE, CHILD’S PLAY, CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN)

IS a sequel: 1 (VHS 2)

Is a Sequel AND has a sequel: 7

*WATCHER IN THE ATTIC, CHILDS PLAY II-IV, RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD and EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES are all in the middle of a series.

Biggest Sequel Surprise: that SOCIETY doesn’t have like 19 DTV sequels.

REMAKE: 10

Has a Remake: 6 (APRIL FOOL'S DAY, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, WATCHER IN THE ATTIC, GOTHIC, THE SHINING, THE HAUNTING)

Is a Remake: 4 (MANIAC, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, SEANCE, NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE)

Most Surprising lack of a remake? PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS. You just know there’s gotta be some jackass at Platinum Dunes devoting every waking moment to thinking about how to ruin that one with a grim, shiny remake that negates everything good about the original. But as of now, it ain’t happened.

HAMMER STUDIOS: 4. Didn’t get to as many Hammer films as I thought I would, but if you include the two Amicus entries (THE SKULL and HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD) it comes out to a more reasonable 6. Blame the fact that I didn't get to all the FRANKENSTEINs that I expected.

SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: 4. Did I really only watch four Italian horror films? Weird. I guess with the Spanish RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD, Mexican POISON FOR THE FAERIES and American Giallo ALICE, SWEET ALICE it ended up feeling like more. But not to worry, AUTOPSY and EYEBALL are really, really Italian.

FOUND FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK? 4. Not an official category, but since I spent so much time talking about it in THE BAY I thought I’d run the numbers anyway. Can’t believe I watched the same number of Hammer, Italian, and Found Footage films. That’s gotta mean something, right? I suppose THE BAY is probably the best consistent example of this medium that I saw, but the highest point is Gareth Evan’s segment from V/H/S 2. I gotta admit I enjoyed the heroic idiocy of Renny Harlin’s DEVIL’S PASS, too, even if it’s a long way from being even mildly tolerable as a movie.

MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? 5. Again, I was expecting to get at least one more Frankenstein film in there, oh well. Next year we’ll get more.

SLUMMING A-LISTER: Geez, I don’t even know who counts anymore. Wes Craven? Brian Cox? Barry Levinson? Jared Harris (who appear twice!)? Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick featuring Matisyahu? Michael Caine? Ving Rhames? Gabriel Byrne and Natasha Richardson? Dana Andrews and Niall MacGinnis? The cast of TWIXT? Telly Savalas? Elijah Wood? Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani? Koji Yakusho? Carol Clover? Jack  Nicholson? Mark Hamill, Debbie Harry, David Warner and Twiggy? I’m always happy to see all those folks in horror movies, but I mean, it’s not exactly surprising to see Michael Caine in some chintzy genre flick. Once you’ve done THE SWARM you pretty much don’t get to claim to be slumming in anything.  Doesn’t make him less awesome, just not quite a slumming A-lister. I dunno, I guess only Elijah Wood and Jack Nicholson would really count at the point of their careers they starred in the movie in question. And they were both in really good ones so it doesn’t really count as slumming. So I guess I just have to salute all those excellent actors for representing the genre I love.

BOOBIES: 14 (this number represents the total number of movies featuring boobies, not the total number of observed boobies. That would be way higher, presumably at least twice as high if we’re counting boob by boob.)

DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: 20

eyeball loss: 4

Head Loss: 11

Head loss was the most common dismemberment, but I think the eyeball punishment ended up being more memorable and a more distinct theme. Heck, EYEBALL pretty much sells itself on that concept alone.

ENTRAILS? 10. Mostly Zombie-related, but occasionally you get an oddball like the exploding Hobo in STREET TRASH.

CULTISTS: 5. This is always a hard category to pin down, I thought I made it easier for myself by downgrading from the more specific “Satanists” last year to the more inclusive “cultists” this year. But it didn’t really help; still a lot of gray area (and not enough gray matter). I decided it is a vampire cult in LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, but ended up not counting the nutty evangelicals in FROM WITHIN or the nutty cannibal family in WE ARE WHAT WE ARE.

ZOMBIES: 10, if you include Zombie Poe from ANNABELLE LEE, which I do. Zombie movies started out a little weak this year with the lamest section of V/H/S 2, the incidental (and sometimes cartoon) zombies in EXIT HUMANITY, the coy ZEDER (good movie, not much Zombie action) and the grating CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS. They finished strong with PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, though, ending up the single most common antagonists I counted. The 10 counted include two counts of Frankenstein’s Monster, which I decided after much soul-searching does indeed count as a zombie.

VAMPIRES: 5. Obviously Klaus Kinski is gonna win this category.

SLASHERS: 9 This fuckin category is again causing problems, because serial killers, psycho killers, and slashers are not the same but have a lot of crossover. To me, a “Slasher” represents a very specific type of killer-on-the-loose movie, nearly always a whodunit, with a specific style of murder scene that frequently places emphasis on creative gore. So something like ALICE, SWEET ALICE  or EYEBALL seem obvious, but man, what about THE SHINING? I mean, he slashes, right? Or WATCHER IN THE ATTIC, which would probably count if it wasn’t from the perspective of the killer (but is is, so it doesn’t. Also there’s no slashing)? Still, I thought there were enough solid, clear examples to feel confident about these 9.

CURSES: 5. Ugh, another vague one. I gotta get a more specific term. These five count only cases where a curse is specifically mentioned. And exclude CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN since despite the title, no curse is evident.

(UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS? 12. This is a category I had to add along the way, as I noticed a disturbing trend developing. Between the Chuckys and the unnerving mannequins in TOURIST TRAP and MANIAC, this category started to fill out pretty quick. And then I started seeing dolls just fuckin’ everywhere. I wasn’t sure if I would be allowed to count the doll-faced killer in ALICE, SWEET ALICE, but then the problem got solved anyway because there’s a completely inexplicable three-faced doll in there apart from the killer. That’s when I knew I was onto something, that this was the year of the doll. And I did it all without a single “Hello Dolly” pun.

OBSCURITY LEVEL: ( Chart based on my own subjective interpretation)

High                                       Medium                               Low

IIIIIIIIIIII   IIIIIII  II   III    I I    IIIIII  II IIIII I                     I         IIIIIIIIIIIII

ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: After an incredibly strong start, sleepiness began to take over by the end of Chainsawnukah, maybe around movie 35 or so. I have no explanation as to why that might be; as a scientist, I’m merely reporting what I see. Although, now that I look at it, it’s virtually identical to last year’s 14/10 spread.

Yes: IIIIIIIIIIIIIII 15

No: IIIIIIIIII 10*

N/A: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII 28

*Plus one we’re not gonna talk about.

2013 SUPERLATIVES!

TRASHIEST: STREET TRASH, and proudly so.

CLASSIEST: THE HAUNTING, NIGHT OF THE DEMON, maybe WE ARE WHAT WE ARE.

BIGGEST SURPRISE(s): The surprising greatness of TWIXT, SOCIETY, and MANIAC (REMAKE). Other big surprise? Who knew the original CHILD'S PLAY was actually pretty good?

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT(s): The much-vaunted but kinda lame HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS. That John Carpenter's THE WARD is only OK. And that somehow they failed to make a killer baboon movie funny in SHAKMA.

MOST INEXPLICABLE: WATCHER IN THE ATTIC by about a mile, although MY SOUL TO TAKE is pretty high up there, too.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR BRAVERY IN THE FACE OF STRAIGHT UP STUPIDITY: DEVIL'S PASS, THE CAR

Final Thoughts: Well, so far this was the most successful Chainsawnukah ever, topping my previous high (last year’s 43) with a remarkable 54 movies! I don’t know if I’ll be able to go any higher than that and retain whatever fleeting bits of sanity remain, so enjoy it while it lasts. I think overall this year ended up producing more genuine treasures than last year, although I have to admit I held off on a couple classics to save ‘em for next time. Actually the real disappointments came with the lower tier stuff; there was nothing as interestingly awful as EXORCIST II this year, most of the real low scores were thoroughly earned by boring, unimaginative crap (though admittedly nothing offended my delicate sensibilities as much as the repugnant OPEN HOUSE from last year, either). If I had to pick an unexpected favorite (leaving aside known classics like THE SHINING and THE HAUNTING) it would probably have to go to either the socially-conscious nightmarish thrill ride of PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or the inexplicable arty beauty of TWIXT. But TWIXT stars Hall Baltimore, so that automatically circumvents the usual rating process, putting it in a different category of godlike glory and solidifying the 2000s as the Hall Baltimore millenium. Which I guess makes it the winner by a nose. So I say unto you all, go out there and live as Hall Baltimore would: get wasted, pass out, and have the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe solve all your problems. And watch out for, I guess, vampires?

Thanks for the best Chainsawnukah ever, everyone. And if you enjoyed going on this journey with me and would like more, check out my buddy Dan P’s own Halloween odyssey.

Rankings! Pinhead Sez:

Transcendent Greatness (1 puzzlebox)

The Haunting

The Shining

Genuinely Fuckin’ Terrific. (5 hooks)

Plague of the Zombies

Seance

The Signal

The Cure

Nosferatu: The Vampyre

Society

Maniac (Remake)

Twixt (The Hall Baltimore Story)

Night of the Demon

Zeder

People Under the Stairs

Enjoyable but Flawed (4 hooks)

John Carpenter’s Body Bags

Devil’s Pass*

The Curse of Frankenstein

Bride of Chucky

Alice, Sweet Alice

Poison for the Faeries

Reincarnation

We are What We Are

Resolution

Lisa and the Devil

Child’s Play

Tourist Trap

Gothic

From Within

April Fool’s Day

Street Trash

The Hand

The Skull

The Possession (barely)

Exit Humanity

The American Scream

Serviceable Genre Crap (3 hooks)

Eyeball

S&man

The House That Dripped Blood

Autopsy

Child’s Play 3

Head Trauma

Child’s Play 2

Watcher in the Attic

House on Haunted Hill

V/H/S 2 (but the Gareth Evans segment by itself is a five-hooker)

The Sleeping Car

The Ward

The Bay

Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires

Barely tolerable, possibly salvageable through copious consumption of mind-altering substances. (2 hooks)

Devil’s Pass*

The Evil of Frankenstein

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things

The Car

My Soul To Take

Unwatchable Garbage. (1 hook)

Return of the Blind Dead

Shakma

Edgar Allan Poe Volume 1: Annabelle Lee

*Somehow this is both a 4-hook and a 2-hook effort. Live with it.

HAPPY CHAINSAWNUKAH everyone! See ya next year!

The Haunting: Chainsawnukah Epilogue

The Haunting (1963)

Dir. Robert Wise

Written by Nelson Gidding

Starring Julie Harris, Clare Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn

For the very last film of this Chainsawnukah season, I went with a classic: Robert Wise’s 1963 Black-and-white* masterpiece. It seems a fitting end to this season, since I began by discussing, in my exceedingly long and digressive take on THE AMERICAN SCREAM, what I perceive to be the great personal and psychological good that my love of horror has done me. THE HAUNTING is about psychology too, but it’s certainly a different take on the subject than I had, if not an out-and-out repudiation of my position. It’s about a haunted house, sure, but much more than that it’s about our relationship with our fears, and what happens when we face them and they overwhelm us before we can overcome them.

But hey, what do these characters have to be fearful of? Just because they’re staying in Hill House, the famed site of deadly accidents, suicides, and madness over the course of three generations, doesn’t mean there’s something evil going on here, right? If so, it wouldn’t make sense that a scientist named Dr. Markaway (Richard Johnson) would be conducting paranormal research of questionable scientific value while staying on-premise with a caustic lesbian psychic (Clare Bloom), a snarky rich kid (Russ Tamblyn, Dr. Jacoby from TWIN PEAKS!), and a repressed, unstable assistant named Eleanore (Julie Harris). I mean, that would just be silly.

Yeah, she looks like a good choice for this sort of high-stress work environment.

Fundamentally, the premise is almost identical to any number of similar films, for example BURNT OFFERINGS, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, or THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (this one was based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, for what it’s worth**.) There’s only so many different setups you can use to get a group of people into a haunted house in order to be menaced by its supernatural denizens, so I guess that’s not too surprising. The difference is in the kind of horror that Wise is trying to tease of of the concept: while other films (including the woeful 1999 remake) are interested in milking as many supernatural shenanigans and effects out of the concept as possible, Wise has his eye on something far more mysterious and troubling: the human brain.

See, maybe there are ghosts in Hill House (not Hell House) and maybe there aren’t. Certainly, some things seem mighty suspicious, for example the wooden door that bulges outwards like it was made of rubber. But Wise is from the Val Lewton school of horror (in fact, his first film CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE was made for Lewton) and he’s strongly invested in suggesting --not broadcasting-- the horror. Seeing a ghost is scary, but not nearly as scary as fearing there’s a ghost there that we can’t see. So the movie becomes a series of artful implications, a distorted glass through which we can see something is amiss, but can’t quite pin it down. And what’s more frightening than that? If you can identify your fear, you can take steps to protect yourself. But how can you fight what you don’t understand?***

The Scooby gang.

It’s not really ghosts or ghouls that are at the top of the worry list for our mousy protagonist Eleanore, however. She’s got a whole mess of personal issues to deal with, starting with the death of her invalid mother who she’s spent her whole life cloistered up in a small apartment caring for and maybe --just maybe-- resenting a little. She’s been living with her bitchy sister (Diane Clare, who I liked so much in PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, what are the odds she’d be in this too?!) and seems completely adrift, unsure what to do with her life or even really how to live her own life, period. She’s possessed of a powerfully conflicted character, desperate to reclaim her own life but terrified and paralyzed by the vastness of the world which has suddenly opened up to her. She’s both claustrophobic and agorophobic.**** Dr. Markaway seems to think that her experiences with her mother will in some way help trigger the paranormal denizens of Hill House, but for her part she’s much more interested in Dr. Markaway than she is in any ghost. She’s likely never had another adult pay this sort of attention to her (even though Markaway is married and his interests appear to be purely professional) and consequently its emotional impact on her is enormous even though to him their interactions are quite mundane.

All this fear and hope and desire and confusion put Eleanore in a dangerous mental place. And Hill House is not the best place to be in that frame of mind, especially not when it’s being filmed by Robert Wise. The interiors are all oddly designed, no right angles anywhere, baroque decorations cluttering your view in every direction. It feels claustrophobic, chaotic, menacing. Wise almost never resorts to visually depicting unexplainable phenomena, but he doesn’t need to. His command of light, shadow, and texture make certain that whatever he’s showing, we’re afraid of what’s behind it. In one of the movie’s best sequences, he cuts back and forth between Eleanore’s face and a closeup of flowered wallpaper. And it’s terrifying.

A white-knuckle high-octane thrill ride!

The whole place is designed to cause anxiety and paranoia, but Eleanore seems particularly susceptible. And we know this because, in an unusual move for film, we can actually hear her inner monologue. Every painful question she asks, every time she tries to reassure herself, we hear her quavering voice echoing in her own head. It’s an odd device, but I think it ultimately works because we can relate to it. After all, we all have our own little inner monologue, don’t we? Hearing Eleanore makes her all the more vulnerable; she can’t even fool us with the thin veneer of bravado she tries to put up. We’re inside her head, aware of all her deepest fears, aware of all the thoughts and wild terrors that torment her every minute of  the day. And as things get more and more frightening, we can see the dangerous turn her mind is taking.

This is obviously a great movie, but you know that already. So what I’d really like to talk about is her fear, and the way it takes her already fragile mental state and warps it, gradually turns it in on itself until she disappears into it. When I started this season, I talked about how being afraid and then being forced to face my fears as a youngster started me down the long and happy road to being a horror fan. I talked about how living with the fears and embracing them and making them a part of myself helped make me a smarter, healthier, and -- I believe -- better person.

But that’s not what happens to poor Eleanore. The fear doesn’t reveal itself as easily to her; she can’t or won’t come to terms with her anxieties and the reasons behind them. They stay, like the house itself, mysterious and undefined, for all the world like ghosts in her head. She feels constantly under assault from invisible, unknowable forces, deathly afraid of losing the paltry autonomy that has just recently entered her life. And each fear seems to trigger a flood of other apprehensions until she can barely stay afloat in the roiling, ever-rising tide of generalized terror.

Trust me, there's an upside.

I mention all this, because one of my main fears these days has to do with fear itself. I look out into the world everyday and I see an awful lot of scared people. Just like Eleanore, their fears are vague and undefined, but all consuming. They’re struggling, just like she is, to try to stay afloat in a world which sometimes seems to be sinking very fast; just like her, they’re wildly unprepared to be dropped into a world without support, without direction, but with just enough nagging, desperate hope to try and fight for. They too seem to hear ghostly voices; invisible threats always menacing from just beneath the surface.

And certainly, the world is not without it’s real dangers, just as Hill House exhibits plenty of classic horror movie tells that it is indeed haunted. There will always be things to fear, threatening things which we don’t understand and can’t control. But no ghost lays a hand on Eleanore. It’s her fear of them that slowly pushes her to hysterical, paranoid reactions, and in the end it’s her own actions that lead to her undoing. And in truth, that’s what I see when I look out across America’s cultural landscape. Lots of scared people, people who feel vulnerable and beset by powerful malevolent forces beyond their control. People whipped into a frenzied panic by the whispering cultural voices always echoing from somewhere far away on the other side of the TV screen, like malicious spirits haunting society at large. The more frightened they get, the more they react out of anger and paranoia, and the less they think (or worse, the more warped and self-confirming their thinking becomes). And in turn, we get a society which lurches from one mostly-imagined panic to another, lashing out violently and randomly sometimes in a mad, headless effort to flee from the spectres and phantoms that lurk behind that mundane wallpaper.

The fact is, unless you live in Syria or somewhere, you’re living in the safest world anyone has ever inhabited -- ever. So why are we so scared? Like Eleanore, we feel out of control. The world has gotten so much bigger and more complex, and our ability to feel in control of it hasn’t caught up with the ever-expanding world of possibility. Even as we’ve become ever more able to shape our lives and environment as we see fit, our understanding and awareness of the vastness of the world has grown so much faster. Like THE HAUNTING, we’re at the precipice of a new world, thunderously shocking in its vastness and mysteriousness. The potential gains to be had in such a world are staggering, and the potential for loss even more so. And to add to that, though we’re wealthy beyond our ancestors' wildest dreams, our splintered economy has pushed so many people closer to the edge than ever before, precariously balanced on the precipice of a plunge that would land them on the forgotten side of a culture roaring by them. And then, the ghosts: terrorism, banking debacles, self-serving politicians, suspicious strangers all around. Theft, infidelity, pedophiles, holocaust deniers, cheats, liars, thieves, violent brutality nuclear war global dimming religious zealotry animal cruelty addiction heart disease death depression sexual dysfunction the water bill the West Bank and more TRANSFORMERS films. Always whispering from behind that wallpaper at us, interrupting our frantic inner monologue, brushing against our ears in the dark. Egged on by those bodiless spirits behind the computer screen or the twitter handle or the newscaster’s haircut. Real fears, genuine fears, but implacable, hidden, lying in wait. Filling the dark places of our minds with the shadows of what they could be, while craftily hiding their real shape in the chaos of the screeching hurricane of general anxieties. Just like the ghosts of Hill House, these are the shadows of the past, jealously trying to take the present for themselves, too.

Bill O'Reilly said what!?

Well, I love horror, and I love a movie that can scare me. Hell, I watched 55 of them in October, finding at least something entertaining in every one. But you know, I’m not scared much anymore. It’s not that I don’t acknowledge that the world is full of genuine things which could hurt me or the people I love. Rather, as someone who used to spend much of my time in the company of fear, I know the terrible burden it forces you to carry. Bad things can and will happen; I’ll do my best within reason and within the boundaries of the rich life I hope to live to protect myself and the people I love, and beyond that I’ll simply have to deal with anything that comes up as it happens. But I refuse to be burdened by the great tyranny of the unknowable. I’m as helpless against the dangers of the world as anyone, and a good deal more vulnerable than some. But I have control over my own mind, and I can decide who I want dominating the conversation in there. We’re all afraid, all vulnerable; it’s the human condition. And we all sometimes feel like Eleanore does, that we’re at the center of some kind of malicious and intangible conspiracy to push us until we crack. The trick is to be solid enough within yourself to withstand the furies of the world, both real and imagined, and come out whole.

Eleanore can’t do that, but I hope that I can. And I think the reason I might has a lot to do with why I ended up writing about horror movies to begin with: the more you understand about yourself and the world, the less terrifying it becomes. A world full of vague shadows is endlessly terrifying because you’re powerless against them. But a world full of real but concrete dangers is one which you can practically and productively  take reasonable precautions for, and then get back to the business of living in. And it’s not enough to merely learn about the world; you’ve also got to learn about those ultimate arbiters of this world: your own senses, your own soul, your own mind. That’s where the horror movies come in. Horror isn’t, in my view, about wallowing in misery or macabre subjects; it’s about exploring what they mean to us, how we relate to them, how they manage to sometimes get the best of us. People who spend their lives avoiding these things simply don’t have any experience dealing with their own reaction to the darker side of life; it’s liable to push them in bizarre and extreme ways, as we see with Eleanore, or Fox News. But those of us who have made it part of their life’s pleasures to explore the world of the phantasmic nocturne... well, we know where we stand with it. And we know that while it may always be there, whispering from behind those menacing angles and banal wallpaper… that’s all it can do. We’re all permanent residents of Hill House, but what we make of it says more about us than it does about the dead.

That’s it, that’s all I got. Happy Chainsawnukah/ New Years (sorry, next year I swear I’ll get some of these reviews under 10,000 words and hopefully wrap up a little sooner), and may Chainsawnta Claus bless us (with more HELLRAISER sequels), everyone!

*In fact, Wise’s contract with MGM specifically limited the film to being made in black and white; when Ted Turner tried to colorize it later for TCM, Wise successfully prevented him from doing so by pointing to the original contract.

** Leaving “The Hill with a House that was Haunted” as the only remaining variation on the name

*** Unless you’re a evolution denier, then you fight using lawyers.

****By the way, poor actress Julie Harris was going through severe depression during the movie's filming, and I bet having to spend a lot of time in this bizarre, unnerving house set didn't help. I suspect a lot of the crushing vulnerability she projects here derives from that.

Talk about playing all the angles.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Yes, from Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House. Not be to confused with THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, or THE HAUNTING OF HOBBIT HOUSE (coming soon from director Peter Jackson in eyeball-punishing 48 frames for 30 or so hours).
• SEQUEL: No, but ripped off by basically everyone ever.
• REMAKE: In 1999 director Jan de Bont thought this would work better with a bunch of cheesy 90's CGI and Owen Wilson. History will vindicate him.
• HAMMER STUDIOS: No
• SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: No
• MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: No
• BOOBIES: Nope, you get some strongly implied lesbianism, though.
• DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: Nope
• ENTRAILS? No
• CULTISTS: No
• ZOMBIES: No
• VAMPIRES: No
• SLASHERS: No
• CURSES: It's suggested the house itself is cursed, but they're never explicit about it.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS? No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Low. Well-remembered classic.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: No. But remember, this is movie 55, people.

Like THE SHINING, this one should get a hypothetical 6th hook for being an unambiguous classic. But I can't find a happier picture of Pinhead, so just try to imagine it.

Women talk to each other quite a bit here, about a variety of topics.