The announcement of the Criterion Channel’s October lineup has become something of an autumn holiday for me, a harbinger of Halloween. Many of the streamers play the horror-movie binge game to various degrees, particularly Peacock, which has a shockingly varied selection of titles, and Tubi, which suggests a late 1990s-era discount DVD bin at Wal-Mart all year around anyway, but Criterion is the streamer of record.
Criterion has a deep sense of history and boasts eclectic programming that can’t be found anywhere else. Over the last few years, it has even made a greater allowance for pop filmmaking, which unites the channel unexpectedly with Peacock. Add interviews and trailers and you’ve got Halloween, cinephile style, without the ads and especially without that insidious, god-awful attempt to force another movie on you before the credits of the first one have even rolled. Cinephiles don’t roll like that. No one should.
Several new series are now up at the Criterion Channel to suit the season. “Horror F/X” is a mostly a survey of the American monster movie, with a few other efforts like David Cronenberg’s 1981 “Scanners” as well. The James Whale-directed “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein” are here and if you’ve never sat down with these classics, they are moving gothics that deserve their reputations. So does the more obscure and chilling 1932 “Island of the Lost Souls,” with Charles Laughton as Dr. Moreau. This film is quite in sync with the sexual kink of stories that blend humans with animals, and Laughton’s go-for-broke performance is intense and feverish.
Those films speak for monsters of the 1930s. The ‘40s aren’t accounted for here, though the 1950s is represented by the iconic “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” a fun creature feature that is brought up several pegs by fantastic monster design and atmospheric underwater photography. For the 1960s, there is one of my favorite Hammer horror movies, “Curse of the Werewolf,” with Oliver Reed, and one of my favorite movies period, George A. Romero’s immortal “Night of the Living Dead.” The third part of Romero’s “Dead” trilogy is here as well for the 1980s section, the underappreciated “Day of the Dead,” which blends Reagan-era anxieties and Frankenstein mythos.
Per the title of the survey, these films collectively speak for the power of make-up, models, puppets, prosthetics, matte paintings, you know, things that have weight and volume and aren’t layered into the frames months after the films have been shot. I know that bemoaning the state of modern CGI-based effects has become a cliché for a certain kind of Gen X movie obsessive, but said cliché happens to stand up in the court of common sense. Watch these beautiful films and then watch a modern blockbuster of your choice. Which has unforgettable, emotional, poetic images?
Yes, it’s stacking the deck to compare classics of yesterday with filler of today, but branch off from these benchmarks into more anonymous programmers of their respective eras and you will probably come to a similar conclusion. Tactility is better, and the hands of an artisan matter more than manipulations of a keyboard. Topping off this set is an interview with KNB EFX maestro Howard Berger.
Also up on Criterion Channel this month is a series on “Japanese Horror,”
which primarily concerns the wave of “J-Horror” that swept America in the late ‘90s through the early aughts. Here, the overrated (“The Grudge”) mingles freely with the astonishing, such as Miike Takashi’s “Audition,” which flips “Fatal Attraction” inside out, blending it with the neuroses of “Psycho” and the free-associative beauty of David Lynch. The dark humor and powerful, patient staging and quiet moral queasiness are all Miike’s own, however. He is a definitive artist: daring, uneven, and ferocious.
Nice to see Kurosawa Kiyoshi accounted for here as well. Kurosawa is still going strong: his “Chime” is the best horror film I’ve seen this year, and “Cloud” is a singular and thrilling new parable of the corporate age that should find a release in the States sometime in the next few months. For a head start on what “Cloud” is doing, check out Kurosawa’s “Pulse” and “Cure,” both in this series, which use supernatural motifs to reflect the alienation of an age that spends most of its time isolated on devices.
Kurosawa favors muscular framing that emphasizes what is at the edge of the frame, encroaching upon us. This subtlety is also a svelte form of protest: Kurosawa is not just pushing back against the impersonal isolation of the modern age, but its allergy to nuance as well. Above all, the films are scary, and this set includes his under-seen 2016 film “Creepy,” which earns its title. Also on the Channel this month, but not in this series, is the 2003 Kurosawa film “Bright Future.” I haven’t seen it yet myself, but I’m impatient to catch up with it.
No series on Japanese Horror is complete of course without Hideo Nakata’s 1998 “Ring,” the movie that kicked J-Horror off here and inspired not only a popular American remake but many imitations. Its influence is still formidable, as it essentially invented a genre perhaps best described as “socially transmitted demon.” “It Follows,” “Talk to Me” and “Smile” among many others are unimaginable without “Ring,” which remains an unnerving ghost story. Rounding out the Japanese Horror series are other formidable films from outside the J-Horror trend. From the 1960s, there is “Onibaba” and “Kuroneko,” which have uncanny imagery that would inspire J-Horror. From the 1970s, there is the gorgeous and absolutely bonkers “House.” And from the 1980s there is “Tetsuo: the Iron Man,” with its memorable mechanical body horror.
The Criterion series “Witches” might be the most creatively curated of the lot, with Nicolas Roeg’s “The Witches” listed side by side with classics like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Black Sunday” and more obscure films like the 1960s-era titles “Il demonio” and “Viy.” I haven’t seen all of these films myself, and again I look forward to expanding my palette. Believe it or not, there’s even room here for Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Meanwhile, a short series devoted to “Stories by Stephen King” includes underrated titles like “Delores Claiborne” and John Carpenter’s beautiful and poignant “Christine.” The director’s cut of “The Lawnmower Man” is here, and I’ve heard it’s much better than the theatrical cut that failed to captivate me even as a child.
I wonder what happened to Stephen King movies. From the 1970s through the early 1990s, King’s books reliably attracted auteurs or at least interesting voices. Every King adaptation you view with affection is probably from this period, unless you’re willing to settle for those blunt, broad, spectacularly pointless “It” movies. The new “Salem’s Lot,” which just dropped on Max, is cut from the same pitiful contemporary cloth.
Nothing that matters from King’s book, one of his finest, is onscreen. Nothing: character relationships have been discarded entirely, the villains are mostly off screen, and almost every set piece has been jettisoned save for the famous bit with the boy vampire floating outside a bedroom window. If you aren’t interested in community, you aren’t interested in King’s novels beyond genre hugger-mugger. On the page, “Salem’s Lot” and “It” are epic portraits of small towns. In their most recent screen incarnations, these stories have been reduced to CGI-ridden games of whack-a-monster.
If you’re looking for contemporary horror this week, skip “Salem’s Lot” and check out “V/H/S Beyond.” This is the seventh in the “V/H/S” series, a set of horror films that updates the anthology format to tickle nostalgia for VHS cassettes and camcorders and the like. The films are found footage-ish, in other words, though that conceit is fluid.
It remains fluid in “Beyond,” which has six stories that include a first-person shooter zombie short with a weird and effective coda, a short co-written and co-directed by Justin Long that seems informed by his appearance in Kevin Smith’s “Tusk,” a visceral skydiving meets GoPro meets aliens sketch, and so on. Kate Siegal’s “Stowaway” is the highlight though, for its eerie and mesmerizing atmosphere. In general, “Beyond” is a confident and consistent piece of anthology horror, the most effective rallying of a long-in-the tooth series since the unexpectedly substantial “Saw X.”
“Horror F/X,” “Japanese Cinema,” “Witches,” and “Stories by Stephen King” are all now streaming on the Criterion Channel. “Salem’s Lo” is now streaming on Max, and “V/H/S Beyond is streaming on Shudder.
