Quelle Horreur! The marvelous world of subtitled horror films.

There are lots of good things about America; McDonalds, F-100s, the right for the common man to possess an arsenal of arms to rival some third world nations, but quality horror hasn’t been one of those things for a long time.

Sure, the good old US of A has given us a plethora of horror films. Some early American films, like Tod Browning’s 1932 classic ‘Freaks’ and the Universal Monsters films were actually pretty good, and have gone on to become classics today.

But, as the century wore on, the films wore out.

As film makers battled with censors, with production companies wanting to make a quick buck and with stars demanding top billing, American horror has become a shadow of it’s former self, a cheap production line of campy remakes, spin offs and cash ins.

Luckily, as any good horror fan knows, there is a whole wide world of horror producing nations out there and (gasp!) some of them don’t speak English. So today, my little monsters, I’d like to tell you about some of my favourites.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

'Låt Den Rätte Komma In' (Let The Right One In) directed by Tomas Alfredson and based on the amazing novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, is a breathtakingly beautiful Swedish film about youth, isolation and Vampirism.

'Låt Den Rätte Komma In' follows Oskar; a bullied and emotionally detached boy, and Eli; a child vampire, as their friendship blossoms and ultimately puts both in danger.

While it's themes of friendship and childhood love will warm your heart, it's unflinching depictions of violence and horror will chill your blood.

With the recent slew of Vampire films, it's refreshing to see a film like this one, that deals with Vampirism in a mature, horrifying and, if this is even possible, in a realistic way.

Unfortunately, 'Låt Den Rätte Komma In' is the latest foreign horror film to receive a sub-standard American remake, but I encourage anyone who has an interest in horror films (or quality films of any genre) to watch this visually striking and surprisingly sentimental gem.

LOS SIN NOMBRE (THE NAMELESS)

Los Sin Nombre (The Nameless) is directed by the brilliant Spanish director, and one of my personal favourites, Jaume Balagueró and is adapted from the novel by Ramsay Campbell.

Dealing with every parents worst nightmare, the abduction and murder of a child, the film is more suspense/thriller than horror. But given the subject matter, no one could argue this isn't an horrific film.

Five years after her daughter is found murdered, Claudia (Emma Vilarasau) begins receiving phone calls from the presumed dead daughter, Angela, saying that she is still alive and needs her help. Claudia teams up with a detective to find her daughter and is plunged into a world of darkness as she delves deep into the world of occultism and human sacrifice.

Given the films subject matter; the occult and child sacrifice, it is by no means an "easy watch". This film has one of the most shocking endings I have ever seen and will no doubt leave the viewer a little shaken.

I feel this film perfectly sums up Balagueró's directorial style. ‘Los Sin Nombre’ features occultism, children as a thing of horror and also sympathy, and abandoned buildings and these themes and visuals would become a staple of Balagueró's later films such as "Darkness" and "Frágiles".

Definitely one worth watching.

SAUNA

'Sauna' is a beautiful, atmospheric and genuinely frightening film.

Set in 1595, the films follows two brothers as they mark out the Sweden/Russia border with a group of Russian soldiers after the end of a 25 year war between the two nations. While traversing an unchartered swamp area, they come upon a mysterious town and the titular sauna.

This film brilliantly conveys it's themes of guilt, brutality and physical and emotional filth. The film explores the importance of rituals and mythology in Finnish culture and employs a sense of dread and bleakness that you just don't get in American horror films anymore.

SPOORLOOS

To say that 'Spoorloos' is a film filled with dread is an understatement! The 1988 Dutch film directed by George Sluizer, is heavy on the impending doom with a brilliant and satisfying pay off in the end!

The films tells the story of Rex and Saskia, a happy-go-lucky vacationing couple. When the pair stop at a truck stop, Saskia disappears. Three years after her disappearance, Rex starts receiving letters from Saskia's abductor offering clues to her location.

This film was remade in the US in 1993 as 'The Vanishing' starring Kiefer Sutherland. I haven't seen the remake, so I can offer no judgement on it's quality.

[REC]

Another Jaume Balagueró film, this time he teams up with fellow Spanish director Paco Plaza to present a fresh take on the Zombie mythos that is so popular at the moment.

Filmed in the vérité style, [Rec] follows a reality television crew that chronicles a night in the life of a squad of fire fighters. When they respond to a call to assist the police at a Barcelona apartment building, they are confronted by the residents who, one-by-one, succumb to a rabies like zombie virus. When the building is locked-down by the Center for Disease Control, they are left to fend for themselves while they conveniently continue filming.

It is obvious that Spain's Catholic heritage and superstitious culture have heavily influenced Balagueró and Plaza's film and given a fresh approach to what could easily have been a clichéd, standard horror film.

[Rec] has spawned a sequel, [Rec]2 with two more sequels, [Rec]Genesis and [Rec] Apocalipsis, already planned. [Rec]2 certainly doesn’t disappoint, with more action, a more cohesive story line, and further elaborating on the mythology of the “Medeiros Girl”.

LES YEUX SANS VISAGE

'Les Yeux Sans Visage' (Eye's Without a Face) is a 1960 French film well and truly ahead of it's time.

'Les Yeux Sans Visage' is about a Parisian doctor obsessed with restoring his disfigured daughter Christiane's beauty. Along with his assistant/accomplice, he begins abducting and murdering local girls in order to graft their faces onto his daughters.

A dark and dreamy film, 'Les Yeux Sans Visage' has given French Cinema one of it's most enduring and sinister images, the blank white stare of Christiane's masked face.

This is just a small list of my favourite foreign horror films. While previously hard to get, all these films and thousands of other great non-English language horror films are now easily obtainable online. As horror fans becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Hollywood movie machine, more and more international writers and directors are being given the opportunity to create terrifying masterpieces. And while for the time being they may be being released straight to DVD or given limited cinema releases, I believe that as the demand for these films increases we will hopefully see more international titles getting the full theatrical releases that they so deserve.

Never sleep again...

Horror fans are a unique breed. They know what they like and, even more so, they know exactly what they don’t like. They are fiercely loyal and will come out, guns blazing, to defend their favourite film or director. So, when New Line Cinema and Michael Bay’s much maligned Platinum Dunes announced they had plans to remake arguably the most popular horror film of all time, the internet horror community erupted into vitriolic revolt against anything and anyone connected to what was perceived as the most vile and offensive sacrilege.

This was neither a challenge to our right to free speech nor a threat to our religious, social or reproductive rights; no, this was much more serious. This was A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Wes Craven’s 1984 film gave horror audiences a new killer to love. After watching busty teenagers running from faceless killers like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, Nightmare’s blade gloved child killer, Freddy Krueger, was a breath of fresh boiler room air. He was a killer with personality, he had pizzazz and we rooted for him. The film was a box office success and was positively received by critics and film fans alike. With seven sequels, a television show, a spin off film and millions of dollars of merchandise, Nightmare on Elm Street had cemented its place in horror film history and in the cold, black hearts of horror fans the world over.

When Platinum Dunes announced in early 2008 that they would be “re-imagining” the film, fans were worried. When they heard the directing job would be handed to the inexperienced Samuel Bayer (a music video director best known for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit), they were horrified.

Not me though. But before you grab me by the hair and drag me into your boiler room, let me explain.

Like any good horror fan, Freddy Krueger holds a special place in my heart. I remember as a six year old, desperately wanting to go to a dress up party as Freddy, despite never having seen the film. So, off my mother and I trundled to the local video store to hire the film that would begin my lifelong love affair with horror cinema. While my mother watched it and took notes on my costume, I watched with absolute delight as Freddy slashed and impaled his way through an attractive cast of adults masquerading as teenagers. I squealed with laughter as he dropped one liners that I could not possibly have understood and clapped every time he appeared on screen.

I was excited, enraptured and in love.

But, even as a six year old, I wasn’t scared

While I love all of the Nightmare films, I would never put them in a “Scariest films…” list. Freddy is a caricature whose horror, despite being grotesque in appearance, has been rendered impotent by the ridiculous things he says and the filmmaker’s seeming desperation to include as many product placements and pop culture references as possible.

While the first few Nightmare on Elm Streets didn’t rely heavily on referencing pop culture and current technology, as the later films grasped for storylines and relevance, they screamed desperation and that made me feel sad (and queasy). At any moment I’d expect Freddy to start hawking a George Foreman Grill.

I also struggled to reconcile the idea that Freddy was a child murderer, yet we were supposed to, in a way, identify with him and laugh along with him. He was our buddy, we were on his side, yet if we left him alone with our children he’d kill them and incinerate their bones. As an adult, this dichotomy proved almost overwhelming to me. In the original film, humour is present but kept at a minimum; in the later films he’s basically a stand-up comedian. I can’t help but feel that the film makers lost Freddy somewhere between 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master, released the following year. They had given up on him being a monster or every parent’s worst nightmare, and were happy to let him become a parody of himself.

Which is why I (and it is possible that it was only I) was so excited about the impending release of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. Platinum Dunes are known for their horror remakes, in fact, that’s pretty much all they do, and they have had varying levels of success since they began pumping out the cookies in 2003. While I found their remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday The 13^th to be thoroughly average, I enjoyed The Amityville Horror and felt that the divergences from the original film’s storyline really enhanced the horror and the narrative quality of the film. Keeping in mind that the original 1979 Amityville is a wonderfully terrifying and incredibly well respected film, they certainly had some big shoes to fill.

So how did Michael Bay (a man known most notably for blowing things up and being compared to Hitler by Megan Fox) and Samuel Bayer (an inexperienced feature film director) fare in their attempts to re-write the horror bible? In my opinion: pretty well.

Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is sleek, scary and well paced.

His history in music video directing is evident in the production values and editing choices made in the film. The plot (including Freddy’s backstory) has been fleshed out, and because of this, the film needs to move at a faster pace to include all relevant points. I don’t usually say this, but the movie could have gone for a bit longer.

While it follows the tried and tested Krueger formula, it still manages to feel fresh and honestly frightening. The basics are still there: the vigilante parents and attractive teens, the bloody deaths and the burned dream stalker with the razor fingered glove. But that’s where the similarities stop.

Gone are the one liners and the kitschy post modern references, and in their place is an evil, sadistic and clever killer. With a cast of respected actors such as Academy Award nominee Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy and Clancy Brown as local father Alan Smith, the film has a classiness that the original lacked.

Haley is brilliant as Freddy. There really is no comparison to Englund’s Freddy as they are as different as two characters can be. Neither does a better job than the other because they are poles apart in their portrayal and also in the way the writers have crafted them using dialogue and their appearances. The fedora and shirt are still there, but Haley’s realistic burns are grotesque in the light and horrifying in the darkness, courtesy of make-up artist Karen Lynn Accattato. Unlike the original film, the audience is not encouraged to identify with Freddy or to laugh along with him; we are repulsed and terrified that a man – let alone a creature – like him could exist. Haley’s Freddy truly is the monster of your worst nightmares, delivering his dialogue in a dry, rasping and truly scarring way. His voice will linger with you long after you have left the cinema.

Relative newcomer Rooney Mara brings a new angle to the main protagonist as Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp in the 1984 film. Despite only making her debut five years ago in a bit part in Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, Rooney makes Nancy feel real. The other members of the young cast do a good job, including Kyle Gallner from Showtimes Big Love.

The real stars of the show are the impressive sets featured in the dream and flashback sequences, as well as the industrial locations used in Freddy’s death scene. The use of literally dreamlike imagery creates a world we can really imagine Freddy inhabiting. Cinematographer Jeff Cutter and Art Director Craig Jackson have done an amazing job of bringing Freddy’s world to horrifying life.

While fan opinion is divided about this film, I loved it. I came out of the cinema as excited as I had entered. This is not Gone With The Wind, it’s not going to go down as one of the greatest films of all time, but that’s not what A Nightmare on Elm Street was ever about. It’s a fun and scary film and, I think, definitely worth seeing.

Oh, and the costume my mum made was awesome.

Heading back down the Yellow Brick Road

It seems only fitting to celebrate one of the most horrific children's films of all time on the birthday of it's star, Fairuza Balk.

Despite being produced by Disney, "Return to Oz" is an amazing example of how dark children's films can really be. If you like headless princess, electroshock therapy, turn of the century asylums and cross-dressing stone men, then this is the film for you (or your maladjusted child).

The 1985 film is loosely based on L. Frank Baum's novels 'Ozma of Oz' and 'The Marvelous Land of Oz' , two novels in the thirteen book series. While it was marketed as a sequel to MGM's 1939 box office behemoth, 'The Wizard of Oz', it has very little in common with Judy's technicolor nightmare.

Picking up six months after the events of the MGM film, we find Dorothy, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry rebuilding their tornado ravaged farm. Concerned about their nieces increasingly bizarre rants about the strange Emerald City she visited, they do what any reasonable adult at the dawn of the 20th Century would do and they cart her off to an insane asylum for a cutting edge and experimental "treatment". Given that the film is set at the dawn of the era of electricity, this exciting new treatment is the completely child appropriate and at the time largely untested, electro-shock therapy.

Arriving at the incredibly sinister "hospital", Dorothy is greeted by the malign Nurse Wilson and the suspiciously comforting Dr. Worley, a pioneer in the field of electro-therapy. Once she's strapped down on the gurney and said Doctor is about to zap her back to health, a storm hits, cutting the power and plunging the hospital into chaos.

With the help of a mysterious young patient, Dorothy escapes the hospital. Falling into a nearby river, she loses consciousness and wakes up in Oz with her trusty hen, Billina. Finding the previously magnificent Land of Oz destroyed, she sets off to see the two antagonists responsible, The Nome King, who has stolen all of the Emerald City's Emeralds and imprisoned it's rulers, and his second in command, Princess Mombi.

Pursued by the evil Wheelers, a band of roller skate-limbed punk henchmen, Dorothy picks up friends along the way such as TikTok; a robot soldier from the former Royal Army of Oz, Gump; a talking hybrid moose-sofa and Jack Pumpkinhead; a 10ft scarecrow with a gourdy jack-o-lantern for a head.

They first meet Princess Mombi (pictured right with Dorothy) who, in similar style as the MGM film, is portrayed by the same actress that played Nurse Wilson. Mombi has the not very Disney friendly hobby of collecting the decapitated heads of beautiful women and keeping them in a viewing gallery so she can wear them as she pleases. Realizing Mombi's evilness, Dorothy and co head off to find the Nome King and ask him to return Oz to it's former glory and restore the monarchy that he overthrew.

Finally finding the Nome King (aka Dr Worley), he tells them he has turned all the former residents of Oz into statues in his treasure room. He tells Dorothy that if she can guess which ornaments are her friends, he will free them. In typical Evil Villain style, he welches on his promise. Dorothy and her friends engage in shenanigans and, to cut to the chase, Dorothy frees her friends and the baddies get their comeuppance (in Oz and Kansas).

What makes this film great (apart from everything previously mentioned) is that it doesn't condescend it's child viewers. It's dark, bleak and horrific, all within it's appropriate rating and still managed a Disney seal of approval. It didn't fare well at the box office, but has developed a cult following and is easily obtainable on DVD.

"Return to Oz" is a steam punk fantasy, a nightmare world sapped of colour and warmth, presenting real evil in it's characters.

They don't make children's films like this anymore, and that's sad.

You are now entering the Twilight Zone...

Welcome to Darkness and Decay and The Red Death, a place that celebrates all that's dark and dreadful in the world of entertainment, art, fashion and literature.

I hope to include reviews and articles on all aspects of horror in culture and entertainment.

I'll be reviewing new release films, DVDs, classic horror films, literature, horror mags, websites, fashion and anything else I come across that tickles my morbid fancy.