For this week's Q&A we asked for questions that would get us in the Halloween spirit. So let's talk sexual vampires, scary monsters, queer horror, and unsettling auteurs.
Let's jump right in to nine creepy spooky occasionally queer questions, shall we?
Ryan T: What are your favorite vampire performances onscreen, film and TV?
The glut of bad vampire movies over the past couple of decades may have killed my former passion for bloodsuckers but nothing can kill the love of great acting so this must be answered. With due respect to the Lugosis, Schrecks and Lees who pioneered, let's fast forward to contemporary-ish cinema and television after the jump...
It's always a relief to see actors embrace the erotic charisma of the undead so Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger and Alexander Skarsgård on True Blood are frankly where that's at. All of that. They're everything. Lady Gaga and Matt Bomer's amped-up lewd fashionista swingers were delicious in the first episode of American Horror Story: Hotel... up until the slaughter then ewww. (Are we tired of them already? maybe a little. Also Ryan Murphy keeps asking people not to call them "vampires" but that's ludicrous: they drink blood, they never age, they "turn" others, sunlight disagrees with them).
When actors aren't focused on the supernatural seduction the other most admirable vampiric performances come from those who really embrace the insanity that would come from mass murder, living forever, and drinking other people's blood for fun, pleasure, sadism, and sustenance.
So on TV we bow down to Juliet Landau as Drusilla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (just...singular) and on the big screen that's Kim Ok-bin in Thirst who impressed yours truly so much she ended up in the Best Actress race. The latter terrifies and sells every single moment of her journey from inexplicably macabre human horniness through the turning and on to her supernatural viciousness. Park Chan-wook made the English language Stoker (2013) a few years later sans actual vampirism but in many ways it plays like a weaker variation on similar themes, character arcs, and story beats.
Performances that don't fit this proposed seductive/insane binaries but are beautiful in their own way: definitely Willem Dafoe in Shadow of the Vampire and Tilda Swinton in the lushly realized Only Lovers Left Alive
STiNG: What movie monster do you think could actually get a date if he actually started dolling him/herself up and going out?
LOL.
It's the very drama that tore the Dr. Frankenstein creations apart in the 1930s and still does today in new iterations (Penny Dreadful). The Bride wows with her trendy hairdos and elegantly placed scars and can even make hospital gowns beautiful with her model-like carriage but you can't take the lumbering awkward stitched together monster out of Frankenstein's Monster!
Except for Nosferatu's unfortunate buck-fanged progeny, most lines of vampires can pull off the dolled up and dating look and there's more than enough people into fur for werewolves to regularly get some.
MARSHA: Do you think Lynch films (esp. Inland Empire, Fire Walk With Me, Blue Velvet) work well as horror movies? Do their surreality and confusing narrative make things more frightening or do you find it all too abstract to be really scary? They scare the hell out of me tbh.
I do think you can argue that David Lynch's creepier efforts are horror films but in the specialized and totally superior subgenre of Horror of the Soul. Twin Peaks -- and particularly Laura Palmer in Fire Walk With Me -- scared the hell out of me regularly and 'The Face' in INLAND EMPIRE along with a few other sequences can haunt for weeks afterwards. I saw INLAND EMPIRE at the IFC center when it was new and I haven't been there in a while but at the time they had this elaborate setup where you had to walk down dark red curtained hallways to enter the theaters and let's just say that there's never been a more ideal way to enter a David Lynch movie; we were already there before there even unspooled.
TOM: What director/actor who isn't known for making horror films would you like to see attempt to make one?
I think most cinephiles with eclectic tastes (I know I have some very obvious Favorite Things but I like a little of every genre and brow altitude in my movie diet) fantasize about their favorite directors trying different genres. Pedro Almodóvar sort of did one... or got close to it with The Skin I Live In to pleasing shake-him-up results. I would absolutely love for Kathryn Bigelow to make another one because Near Dark is very good and she's grown a lot as an auteur since. Your suggestion of the Coen Bros is amazing because they have such patience with their editing and camera and such command of sound design (all of which are crucial for great horror). No Country For Old Men plays quite a lot like a masterpiece of horror in Anton Chigurh's scenes. I wonder a little - don't judge me - what a Lee Daniels horror picture would look like but then I shudder because it would probably be as sloppy and messy with personal issues as Ryan Murphy's idea of horror is.
This is actually a hard question. NEXT.
JAMES: Favorite queer-themed horror films? The topic's on my mind since I just discovered that Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is sometimes considered a gay classic.
I've never seen that. Nor have I seen much Queer Horror (that I know of? I think I need a list to work from) though I consider Silence of the Lambs to be a very good one. There were gay protests at the time which was understandable. If you view only Buffalo Bill as a tranvestite serial killer it's easy to balk at the depiction. And to be fair the movie is grotesque and uncomfortable even if you view all three principals -- Clarice, Hannibal, Bill -- as queer characters (which I actually do... and was very easy to do in context before other interpretations of the characters arrived) but horror movies if they're any good are always going to be uncomfortable. So...
What was the question again?
Derreck: If trapped in a slasher film, would you be one of the lucky ones to make it out alive?
Doubtful as I am neither a virgin nor a girl. I think that's how it works? I don't watch slasher movies. I think I've seen a total of three in my life: Halloween, Scream and the original (if you count it) Psycho. I've warmed up to Horror in general but not this particular wing except for Psycho which is one of my favorite films of all time because it's genius from first frame to last. But what it spawned? No thanks.
MARK: Recast The Witches of Eastwick.
NEVER. IT'S PERFECT AS IS. Well, not the movie exactly but the actresses. Ohmygodthoseactresses. I mean...
SANTY C: What horror movie does your cat simply refuses to watch?
All of them. He only likes three movies: Dancer in the Dark, Microcosmos and just this year he added a third favorite film much to my surprise when he was glued to Paddington. None of those are horror films to my knowledge though Björk's fate and Paddington's bodily function CGI are both horrifying.
JAKEY: Have you ever done a film-inspired Halloween costume, and if so, which was your favorite?
This.