Halloween Video Playlist-3

Everyone can knock off a list of their favourite horror films including the people who swear up and down that they can’t stand the genre. Everyone has something that creeps them out throughly and somewhere in all of the thousands of  miles of footage, from the Lumiere brothers first experiments to what’s playing at the cineplex this Friday, there are moments that “get” even the most jaded and discerning filmgoer. People love to share these moments as much as clips of baby’s first steps or cute stunts their cat does and the internet is loaded with the stuff; such stuff as nightmares are made of.

The general theme behind this instalment is “creepiness”. We’re going to go light on the splatter and prosthetics. This is about mood. Let’s start light and cheery. Send in the clowns. What is it about these guys? How did they come to be so closely associated with the homicidal? Before cinema  there was opera with the wife murdering buffoon Pagliacci and the vengeful hunchbacked jester Rigoletto defining  a line that reaches up to Heath Ledger’s  Joker. The make-up can’t mask the ugliness and that at its heart all humour is aggression.

Eddie Jaceks is an independent video maker who is very good at mining a John Waters/David Lynch/Cramps aesthetic. His “Scary Dancing Clown” piece on YouTube  is a miniature classic. It disturbs in so many ways. Looking like some strange, private ritual it is frightening and absurd and that just makes it more frightening. It’s like you’re in the last reel of the serial killer movie. The investigators have found the madman’s lair and there among the grizzly trophies and obscure diagrams painted on the wall, this is what’s running on the ancient VCR ; over and over again.

The use of old pop songs in horror films is an interesting trope. The psycho killer is always a victim of arrested development and he reads something between the lines of an otherwise innocent ditty. For sheer creepiness it’s hard to beat David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” which wasn’t just satisfied with appropriating one song by Bobby Vinton but had to do it to one by Roy Orbison as well…

Running behind that scene lies one of the key myths of the modern self; its relation to memory whether repressed or expressed. The great 20th century Boogey Man, the Freudian subconscious, haunts Lynch’s characters as they run through their psychotic ruts. Note how Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell’s characters are both mouthing the words to the song without really singing. The past overshadows the present; Hooper’s Frank Booth understands the power of memory and in the next scene the song is reprised as he mouths the words again to humiliate and threaten the story’s hero.

Hey, this supposed to be about Halloween, let’s not get too carried away with “creepiness”…I’m getting a bit tired of the guys in lipstick thing…how about we end on another song?  The Fleischer Bros. cartoons were pure anti-matter to the Disney Studios product of the 1930’s. Streetwise and pleasantly sleazy, they featured great soundtracks by Cab Calloway. The imagery for this one is pure Halloween and humour is delightfully morbid. Take it away Cab…