The Guardian put together a good read today by grabbing 10 genre directors and getting them to dish on their personal favorite horror flicks. Here’s a sample:
Eli Roth, director of Hostel
Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Takashi Miike makes around seven or eight films a year. Nobody knows how he does it, not even Miike (I’ve asked him: I gave him a cameo in Hostel as an excuse to talk to the guy). He claims he’s like a shark, always moving forward, and will direct absolutely anything. That is evidenced by the unevenness of his films; some are total misfires, while others like Audition are masterpieces.
Audition is the story of a man who, after losing his wife to cancer, holds an audition for a non-existent movie as an excuse to meet women only to be caught up in a surreal living nightmare. It’s a slow-burn horror film and brutally sadistic, so when the violence finally arrives, you ve completely let your guard down. Even the most jaded horror fans have to watch the last 10 minutes through the cracks of their fingers.
Audition is a horrific film you have to commit to, but if you can make it to the end, you’ll probably wish you’d never seen it.
Neil Marshall, director of The Descent and Dog Soldiers
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
I’ve always loved films about monsters, and Alien is the perfect monster movie. It’s the darkness of the piece that’s so enthralling its twisted nature, its explicit sexuality. There’s the life cycle, the impregnation by the face hugger, the obvious phallic nature of the alien somebody’s taken the trouble of working out an entire biology for this creature. But Scott knew not to show us the alien in its entirety until it is unveiled towards the end; for most of the film we just have back-lit shots or close-ups of it hissing steam or dripping mucus.
Crucially, Scott managed to create an utterly believable environment for the action to take place in; he establishes this atmosphere of reality, then places on top of it a fantasy creature. None of it would have worked if you didn’t believe the environment could be real.
So hurry up and go grab the rest of the goodness my friends. Preferably over beers with friends who like to argue loudly.
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