It’s easy to take pot shots at newspaper articles but sometimes they deserve it. Yesterday The Guardian published an article titled Guardian writers on their scariest horror villains. All I was left with was a bitter taste in my mouth that suggested all of the writers involved didn't have a clue what they were talking about and had only ever seen three horror movies in their whole lives. When you’re one of the countries biggest newspapers, why not get somebody who knows what they’re talking about to write it? It makes me deeply suspicious of the rest of the content to be frank.
Annie Wilkes in Misery? Seriously? Nancy from The Craft? Rose the Hat from Doctor Sleep - a movie nobody has ever seen? Michael Myers? The lamest horror movie villain ever created (until Rob Zombie remade it into a genuinely great movie)? I don’t think so.
Thus, I spent all day thinking about where it had gone wrong for them. Determined to make a far superior list by drawing on my 40 odd years of horror flicks, I ended up with nothing more than a wall full of post-it notes for most of the day but eventually, I whittled it down to a top ten that at least satisfies me… and will allow my friends to text me saying: “you don’t know what you’re talking about…”
This is the way the world works.
In no particular order, let’s get it on:
Pinhead (or The Engineer to give him his original name)
Let’s focus here on the original 1987 movie not any of its nine (nine!) sequels nor the recent ‘reimagining’. By 1987, I’d watched pretty much everything that was available in every video shop in town - and a fair few that weren't too thanks to the back pages of Exchange & Mart where a spurious trade in bootleg tapes of video nasties lurked.
Already a big Clive Barker fan (mostly because I thought Rawhead Rex was fantastic but I might have been alone on that front), Hellraiser was a no-brainer to go and see - one look at the movie poster and I was all in. It just seemed different:
I’d never seen anything like it. It was everything I wanted in a horror movie. It looked cheap, it was dirty, all of the human characters were unlikable in the extreme, so by the time the Cenobites show up to take what’s theirs, you were rooting for them all the way and they didn't disappoint. Much like my first experience of a Harryhausen movie, the creatures don’t make any sense and that’s always a win in my book.
Pinhead also had all the best lines in the movie, including:
"Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell!"
“No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.”
and of course:
Hellraiser made over $14 million in the US but only £763,412 in the United Kingdom - £763,000 of which I suspect was my money. Genius always needs repeat viewings.
(A year or so later when it came out on VHS, I managed to convince the owner of the largest video store in town to sell me a promotional cardboard cutout of Pinhead which I appropriately nailed to the door of a cupboard. I miss the 1908s more than you’ll ever know..)
Black Phillip
One of the great things about horror movies is most of the great ones only have a very small cast - in the case of The Witch, if memory serves correctly, there are four… and a monstrous black goat called Black Phillip. Not strictly speaking the villain of the movie, but close enough, Phillip is made all the more wonderful owing to the fact that he’s a real goat. No CGI or costume (although he is substituted with a puppet at one point), just a monster goat. Even if you hate horror movies, you should read about him here. Such is his legend that I own a Black Phillip t-shirt and my buddy Nate has a Funko Pop! of him on his dashboard:
Anyway, what a great movie. There’s nothing about it that’s not great - including the movie poster:
Folk horror is fast becoming The New Black - I wrote a few weeks back about Starve Acre, but The Witch (released in 2015) is probably the first movie since the 1970s that really tapped into how effective it is.
(Nobody wants to know his real name is Charlie either. All hail Black Phillip).
The Babadook
I’m on a roll. This next choice is nothing more than a drawing in a kids book - and boy, what a scary movie this turned out to be. Another example of a fistful of people in the cast leaving so much room for the movie to play out properly, it’s a wonder nobody else has figured out that this is by far and away the best way to make a chiller.
The movie’s premise is actually an opportunity to explore parental grief but it’s so much more - including being the only Australian movie I rate. Ever… although I might give Picnic a Hanging Rock a nod of the head.
Babadook is the invention of the director Jennifer Kent and is improvised from the Serbo-Croatian word for the boogeyman: Babaroga. So good is this film that William Friedkin (director of The Exorcist) names it in his top five of all time.
I can’ resist it… here’s a clip:
Pazuzu
Unless you’re a total horror nerd, the name probably doesn’t mean a lot to you but you absolutely know who he is. He lives inside of Regan in The Exorcist. An assimilation of Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, you don’t even get to see him and he still reigns supreme. (For the record, unlike most sequels, The Exorcist III has one of the spookiest moments known to man in it. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about.)
Here’s a pic of the old man… not an actual picture obviously. I’d get banned from the internet:
I don’t think I need to say anything else about The Exorcist. Let’s move on.
The Pale Man
You can’t argue with this one. Let’s take a closer look at him:
We’re talking about one of the best movies ever made here. Not simply horror… but actually one of the best ever made - and it’s Spanish with no dubbing, making it a major win also. From the casting, to the creatures and screenplay, Del Toro made a masterpiece here and while Pan himself is the big draw, the Pale Man is uber-valuable to the telling of the story and the creepiest creature ever committed to cinema.
Spoiler: here’s the whole scene in which he appears:
Brilliant.
I’ll post the other half of the list tomorrow.