10 Czech Fantastique Films You Must See

The Cat Who Wore Sunglasses - A charming, innocent fantasy film about a small town, particularly the elementary school of the town, that is disrupted by the appearance of a traveling circus and a cat wearing sunglasses. When the cat's sunglasses are removed, everyone's true colours are revealed (literally); moreover, everyone ends up in a ballet-like trance. Consequently, some of the towns morally dubious folks conspire to do the cat in.

Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians - An adaptation of a Jules Verne novel, it begins with hints it might be a ghost story, but it quickly transpires that it is an over-the-top comic (in the Mel Brooks fashion) mad scientist film. An opera singer has tracked his kidnapped bride to a castle in the Carpathian mountains--a MYSTERIOUS castle. This castle is owned by an insane technological genius who uses his various contraptions to thwart the opera singer.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders - Whenever someone asks about the greatest vampire movies ever made, the more pretentious lot on the board (like me) will mention Valerie. A young girl begins menstruating. At just that time, a procession of friars comes into town. In the lead is the Constable, a Nosferatu-style vampire in black cloak and carrying a distinctive handfan. The Constable is trying to get Valerie's magic earing by seducing her grandmother. Meanwhile a lot of strange *beep* happens.

Who Wants to Kill Jessie? - An engineer trying to solve a lifting problem at his factory gleans inspiration from a comic book he finds involving superheroine Jessie and her antigravity glove. Meanwhile his genius (but shrewish) wife has invented a machine that can read dreams; only it malfunctions and turns dreams into reality. Just so happens, the engineer has been dreaming of Jessie, her antigravity glove, and the supervillains who want it. All come pouring into the real world, complete with speech bubbles.

The Cremator - An eccentric crematorium operator, under the pressures of concerns for physical and spiritual purity, turns to the Nazi side in German-occupied Prague. Known for its abstract and psychologically deep approach to horror, it's also a black-as-night comedy.

The Vampire of Ferat - From the same filmmaker who brought you The Cremator, the Vampire of Ferat concerns a futuristic car that runs on HUMAN BLOOD! A doctor and a vampire hunter team up to investigate.

Svankmajer's Faust - Ostensibly a telling of Goethe's Faust, it's really quite different. A man receives a mysterious message (from a huge egg, if I recall) leading him to a theater where puppets perform. Here he's made one of the puppets temporarily and is participating in a performance of Faust. Behind stage more Faustian goings-on are occurring, as well as some surrealistic shenanigans that I won't even try to explain.

A Case for a Young Hangman - Part Alice in Wonderland, part Kafka, part Gulliver's Travels, the film is about a man, Gulliver, searching for his lost love in the land of Balnibard. Balnibard is a surreal, nightmarish world, in which Gulliver finds goals frustrated.

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone - Yay! It's a post-apocalyptic sci-fi and Amazon warrior movie all in one. After a nuclear war, a band of women rove the land and commit some acts of animal cruelty. Eventually they come across an old man. Do they want to be impregnated or have they lost all concern for life?

The Damned House of Hajn - An odd psychodrama wrapped in an old dark house film with surrealistic touches, Damned House concerns a young married couple travel to her family house and he discovers how odd they are, particularly her invisible and horny Uncle Cyril.

Most of these films are available with English subtitles.

Top 10 Horror Poems

10. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (Robert Browning) - Childe Roland has weird taste in porn, huh? Actually, the idea derives from a line spoken in passing in King Lear--by a guy pretending to be mad. Browning turns the poem into a delirious nightmare about a knight approaching a dark tower in some decaying landscape. Browning also wrote the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which is kind of creepy; and Porphyria's Lover, which basically describes a man murdering a girl. That Browning, a right character he was.

9. "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard" (Thomas Gray) - Haunting and melancholy, Gray's masterpiece, the Elegy, is the pinnacle work of the Graveyard Poetry movement. The Graveyard Poets wrote metaphysical meditations on the subject of death and mortality, making use of macabre imagery and sometimes fantasy. As in Robert Blair's "The Grave,"

Wild shrieks have issued from the hollow tombs;
Dead men have come again, and walked about;

The dead women, however, stayed at home and did the cooking.

Gray was more subtle than the other Graveyard Poets, but his poem packs more of a punch. It can be read here, http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/Elegy.htm

8. The Changing Light at Sandover (James Merrill) - Sandover is an inherently creepy poem. A lengthy epic, it was composed laboriously over twenty years by means of a Ouija board. Merrill and his partner used the board to contact the spirits of dead poets, such as Plato, Ephraim, and Yeats, and with these spirits produced a haunting apocalyptic vision. Apparently plagiarizing the undead is legitimate.

7. Christabel (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) - A young girl named Christabel, praying in the woods, encounters a girl named Geraldine who claims to have been abducted from her home by strange men. Turns out Geraldine is a demon who is trying to insinuate herself into Christabel's life and perhaps become her lover. That's what you get for praying in the woods. This was a major influence on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla.

6. Les Fleurs du Mal AKA Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire) - A collection of French, decadent poetry influenced largely by Poe.
Here's a sample: "The Vampire's Metamorphoses" (Baudelaire) - A short poem about a man being seduced by a vampiress when the sun suddenly rises (oops!). http://fleursdumal.org/poem/186

5. Maldoror (Lautremont) - Twisted, surreal, gory, Gothic, the poem centers on the satanic Maldoror, someone trapped amongst humanity, warring against god, pursued by police as evil incarnate, he goes through one nightmarish event after another. Many who read this find it to be life-changing.
Several underground filmmakers got together to make an avant-garde movie out of Maldoror, each taking a segment. You can see a good portion of the result here: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B05F5E46C492F31D

4. Faust Part I (Goethe) - The classic story. Actually, Marlowe wrote Dr. Faustus quite a bit before Goethe, but it's Goethe's version that's the real masterpiece. Dr. Faust, tired of getting knowledge only through hard study, is given a rare treat by Mephisto: the opportunity to live a little! Most exciting is when Mephisto takes Faust to the Brocken (a mountain where witches gather) for Walpurgisnacht.

3. The Bacchae (Euripides) - Dionysus is in town and he's entranced all the females. These female followers of Dionysus (Bacchus), God of Wine and Ecstasy, are the Bacchae, women driven to their deep, atavistic core by the influence of the god. They tear apart a cow with their bare hands and later their own family members. Later they appear on the Jerry Springer show.

2. Dante's Inferno - While most of the Inferno is actually Dante getting revenge on people he hates by pretending they're in horrible torments in hell, it is still full of fiendish tortures. Also, some clawed creatures called the Malebranches give Dante a chase at some point. Satan is seen chewing on some bodies, Judas and Brutus, to be exact. Yum, Kellogs' Judas-Os!

1. "The Raven" (E. A. Poe) - It had to be The Raven. Come on!

Top 15 Non-Horror Films for the Horror Fan

The properties of horror: revulsion, suspense, unease--these feelings are sometimes created in unique ways by films not of the horror genre, but are created so successfully and often influentially that the horror buff will do well to have seen the films in which they reside. Here are the ones I think most worth seeing. I also include recommendations of similar movies that didn't quite make it to the top 15 or are actual horror films.

15. Lisztomania - If this were meant to be taken as a serious biopic, it'd be downright libelous. Russell depicts Liszt as a sex-crazed rocker who battles the Nazi vampire-Frankenstein's monster Wagner in a spaceship of love. A lot of other things happen.
More obvious Ken Russell choices are: Gothic, Altered States, and Lair of the White Worm.

14. The Shooting - Monte Hellman's existential Western. A child is killed by accident and the men flee, save one. That one and a simpleton who works with them are suddenly asked by a mysterious woman to escort her on a journey that becomes an increasingly surreal and sinister depiction of destiny.
Other westerns worth watching: High Plains Drifter, Django Kill

13. Wax, or the Discovery of Television Amongst the Bees - Presented as a documentary, with constant narrator, the content suddenly switches gears into Gothic, apocalyptic terror: something about bees, television signals, and the dead.

12. La Grand Bouffe - Four successful, rich men, each from different professions, gather in a countryhouse to feast and feast and feast--in fact, to feast themselves to death. And that they do.
Others: Themroc

11. Sweet Movie - Makavejev's follow-up to WR: Mysteries of the Organism topped its predecessor in wildness, but ended up losing the comedy to the truly shocking content, not unlike some moments in a Pynchon novel. This includes lovers being joined together in a candied mess.
Others: Naked Lunch

10. Confessions of an Opium Eater - A starring role for Vincent Price as the hero of Confessions of an [English] Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey. Ah, but if you were expecting de Quincey, that's not what you get. Instead, you get a Chinatown adventure film involving slavetrade and, of course, opium. Moments of surrealism, especially one opium-induced slow-motion segment, are particularly fascinating.
Others: Dragonwyck

9. The Exterminating Angel - Luis Bunuel's surrealist film about a group of bourgeois diners who find they can't leave the dinner party.
Others: Simon of the Desert

8. Juliet of the Spirits - More surrealism, this time from Fellini. Fellini's wife stars as a patient housewife who gradually discovers her husband is having an affair with a younger woman. At the same time she meets her neighbour, who appears to be a rather unique madame of a whorehouse. This reality and the odd events it produces collide with her powerful imagination to produce bizarre hallucinations of--spirits.
Others: Satyricon, Casanova

7. Lot in Sodom - One of only two films by Watson and Webber. While The Fall of the House of Usher gets most of the attention, Watson himself claimed Fall was toying around, whereas Lot in Sodom was the work of serious filmmakers. Using all the avant-garde techniques their optical printer allowed, they give us a phantasmagoric depiction of the final days of Sodom and Lot's flight therefrom.
Others: The Fall of the House of Usher, Tscherkassky's Dream Work.

6. La Belle et la Bete - The Jean Cocteau depiction of The Beauty and the Beast is far from Disney. The innocence and charm is all there, and the magic is beyond Disney. But so is the revulsion at the Beast, the terror at his powers.
Others: The Orpheus Trilogy

5. A Zed and Two Naughts - Peter Greenaway's tale of two brothers who lose their wives in a crash become obsessed with the process of decay, moving from the lowest organisms to the highest (humans); meanwhile they form an odd relationship with the survivor of the crash, who is being unnecessarily subjected to amputations by a Vermeer-obsessed surgeon.
Others: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover; The Baby of Macon

4. Faster Pussycat... Kill! Kill! - Russ Meyer's film about three tough women who kill a guy and take refuge at a farmhouse, where an old man and his two odd sons live. It won't take long before they're trying to kill each other. It's girl power vs. man power. There would be no Tarantino or any of the American fanboys without this film. Except Russ did it better.
Others: Motorpsycho, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

3. Blue Velvet - This had to be here. It's not really a horror movie, but no horror buff is complete without having seen most of David Lynch's films--and Blue Velvet is probably the most important, if not the best. Kyle McLachlan is Jeffrey, a young man obsessed with the mystery of Dorothy Vallens. Vallens, it turns out, is a forced sex slave of the psychopath Frank Booth.
Others: Mulholland Dr., INLAND EMPIRE

2. Celine et Julie vont en bateau - A witch librarian and a cabaret magician stumble upon a cursed house where a bizarre soap opera plays out daily to those who enter. If only they can infiltrate it and rescue the young girl inside.
Others: Scorsese's After Hours

1. Aguirre: The Wrath of God - The pinnacle of a nightmare without any overt horror, Aguirre concerns nothing more than a doomed expedition of Conquistadors floating down a river on a raft and gradually all dying off. Klaus Kinski is the mad Aguirre who dominates the expedition with inhuman ferocity.
Others: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Even Dwarfs Started Small

Top 10 Horror Stories in the Bible

I used to read the Bible often. Oh, I'd say I read it religiously. And you know what? I encountered quite a lot of horrific stuff in there. (Many of these stories are only in the Catholic and Orthodox editions--further proof that Protestants are boring.)

10. Daniel slays a dragon - At the end of the book of Daniel, after all the prophecies are out of the way, Daniel goes for some good ol' fashioned dragon-slaying. Actually, first he has to destroy a statue that apparently eats food, or else he dies. Much to the king's surprise, he uses detective work to prove there's a trapdoor in the statue's sanctuary and the priests have been feasting. So the king kills them all.
But the king has another god: a dragon. And Daniel can only prove it's not a god by killing it without a sword. So he makes a homemade bomb, gets the dragon to swallow it, and it bursts.
Then Daniel is thrown to the lions anyway. He magically is untouched. It's fun being a prophet.
(Daniel)

9. Heads roll - As a Philistine general named Holofernes terrorizes a Jewish city, a pious widow decides to save the day. She seduces the general, drugs him, and decapitates him as he sleeps. A good exploitation movie plot, there.
(Judith)

8. Satan vs. Job - Satan challenges God in a little vignette and God gives Satan authority to make Job's life a living hell. Satan does this for a good long time before God shows up in a whirlwind and mocks Job. Job loses his wife, children, and all his possessions in this struggle. But no harm done, right? God gives him a prettier wife, better children, and even more possessions in the end.
(Job)

7. The haunted pussy - This is an odd one. Tobit wants to marry a pretty girl. Turns out she's had seven husbands already, but is still a virgin. Why? A demon has possessed her and apparently lurks in her womanhood; 'cause her husbands all die in the bridal chamber. Just so happens, though, that Tobit made friends with Raphael the Archangel, who tells Tobit how to defeat the demon (using fish liver to, yes, STINK the demon out).
(Tobit)

6. Samson goes apeshît- The Philistines kept trying to kill Samson, much to his amusement. While he came up with a variety of ways to kill Philistines, one stands out. He found "a fresh jawbone of a donkey" and slaughtered a thousand men with it! Yes, Samson bludgeoned a thousand men to death with a jawbone. Then, as if that wasn't enough, he sang a song about it:
"With the jawbone of a donkey,
heaps upon heaps,
with the jawbone of a donkey
I have slain a thousand men."
(Judges)

5. Jesus is crucified - This needs no explanation.
(The gospels)

4. The entire book of Revelations - Ah yes, the End of the World. We have John to thank for rendering it in a particularly grotesque style. He presents a world full of creepy angels, horrible dragons, and terrible disasters.
(Revelations)

3. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah - You knew this one was coming. Actually there were five cities, although only two are named and only Sodom has lent its name to both Europe's favourite pastime and a German thrash band. Sodom is singled out for the hoard of homosexual rapists who stupidly try to rape an angel. Oops! God gets angry and rains FIRE AND BRIMSTONE, reducing all the plain cities to rubble. Oh yeah, and Lot's wife is turned to salt for regretting the move of fleeing destruction.
(Genesis)

2. Frying up the family - You've probably not heard of this one. Seven brothers and their mother are being tortured by King Antiochus so that they'll lose their Jewish faith and eat pork. Since they refused to eat, each brother was scalped, had his tongue cut out, his hands and feet cut off, and was then fried to death in a frying pan while the living brothers and mother watched. Last of all the mother is killed.
(2 Maccabees)

1. A Levite chops up his girlfriend - The single most horrifying story in the Bible. A Levite and his concubine decide to spend the night in the city of Gibeah. Wrong move. A God-fearing old man tries to shelter them, but it's too late. The townsfolk surround the house and demand something to have sex with. The old man, a swift-thinking old fellow, throws the concubine out of the house. The people of the city rape the concubine all night long--to death. Yes, she is raped to death. The Levite exits the house the next morning to find her lying on the threshold. He tells her to get up and when she doesn't assumes she's dead. He throws her over his horse and rides on home, where he proceeds to cut her body into twelve parts.
So what's the good news? He sends the a part to each of the twelve tribes and has them exact revenge on Gibeah, slaughtering everyone in the town. Who says two wrongs don't make a right?
(Judges)

I've left out some other stories that are potentially scary: the plagues of Egypt, the flood, the ark of the covenant's power to zap people to death, Peter commanding the death of disciples who try to hide money from him, etc..