by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

1. The Lure (dir. Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2015)

I feel so lucky that films like The Lure exist. It’s so strange, so beautifully, perfectly strange in a way that feels almost too good to be true. That it not only exists, but somehow also made its way here to the states so that I can watch it whenever I want to, borders on the miraculous. It makes me wonder how many more other, similarly enchanting films I’ve missed out on over the years because they didn’t happen to be made in a certain handful of countries.

The Lure treats us to a reinterpretation of the fairy tale The Little Mermaid set in Poland in the 1980s. A mermaid and her sister join a band they encounter while relaxing near shore. Silver (Marta Mazurek) falls in love and hopes to remain on land, while Golden (Michalina Olszańska) is sucked into the seedy underbelly of the Polish club scene. That barely scratches the surface of what this movie is, though.

The visuals are gorgeous, and underpinned by the shockingly monstrous look of the mermaids when not in human form (have I mentioned they survive on human flesh?). It’s also nearly a full-on musical that’s fun without ever leaning too far towards camp. Mazurek and Olszańska put in terrific performances as our leads, and The Lure really nails the feeling of a modern fairy-tale. If this one slipped by you, give it a watch!

2. Cure (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

The US’s big Japanese horror boom in the early 2000s happened at a time when I just wasn’t into horror. In fact, if I’m honest, I was quite a scaredy-cat. I distinctly remember having to be persuaded into watching Independence Day on VHS with my dad and older brother, and having to leave the room during the scene in which Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum’s characters slowly pilot an alien craft through the mothership (which is wild, that isn’t even the scariest part). All that is to say I’ve only recently gone back to watch all of the J-horror I missed.

Cure was one of the earliest films in that wave, coming out a year before Hideo Nakata’s Ring and well ahead of other crossover hits like Ju-On: The Grudge and Kurosawa’s own Pulse. It’s hard to find something to compare it to, though Ring might be closest. Cure follows police detective Kenichi (Kōji Yakusho of Shall We Dance? fame), aided occasionally by psychologist Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), as he investigates a series of identical murders committed by random (and otherwise normal) strangers.

Though Cure does involve some supernatural elements it never seems interested in scaring the audience in the way that later films, like Ring and Ju-On, are. Instead, Cure is interested in a different kind of horror: that of Kenichi’s obsession and slow descent into madness as he repeatedly comes into contact with a mysterious young man who seems connected to the murders. Layered over that are glimpses of Kenichi’s life at home, as he struggles with his wife’s failing mental health alongside his own anger and disillusionment. Criterion just added several of Kurosawa’s later films, 2003’s Bright Future, 2016’s Creepy, and 2019’s To the Ends of the Earth, so Cure is a great way to get into his body of work.

3. The Vanishing (dir. George Sluizer, 1988)

I’m cheating a bit here because I think this film is usually referred to as a thriller; I suppose it fits more neatly into that bin but, for me, it remains one of the most unsettling viewing experiences I’ve ever had. I can genuinely say that, for months (if not years) afterward, certain scenes would bubble up in my mind and send a chill down my spine.

Saskia and Rex, a young Dutch couple, are driving through France on vacation when Saskia disappears from a rest stop. Rex pursues her disappearance obsessively and, over the course of years, he begins to uncover what happened to his girlfriend that day. This is the kind of film that rewards knowing as little as possible before going in, though, so I do really want to provide much more of a description than that.

It’s a movie that certainly is not in any hurry, which can feel a bit frustrating at times, but I think the deliberate pace only serves to heighten the impact of where the narrative ends up going. As we’re slowly shown who was behind Saskia’s disappearance (which is never really a mystery) and the mechanics of how it happened, there’s only one question that remains to be answered: what happened to her?

4. The Cars That Ate Paris (dir. Peter Weir, 1974)

Peter Weir’s career is so interesting! He’s probably most famous stateside for his mid-80s to early-00s run of films like Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander, but his career began as part of the “Australian New Wave” of the 1970s. He (along with George Miller) serves as a sort of connective tissue between the genre/Ozsploitation of Brian Trenchard-Smith or Richard Franklin and the more “respectable” filmmaking of Gillian Armstrong and Phillip Noyce.

The Cars That Ate Paris is Weir’s first feature, coming before his more well-known genre-adjacent efforts like The Last Wave and Picnic at Hanging Rock, and it’s a bit of a tonal oddity when viewed in that context. It lacks the dreamlike quality of those later films, and has a much more straightforward (and, with no disrespect meant, comprehensible) plot: A motorist passing by the isolated Australian town of Paris wrecks his car under mysterious circumstances. As he waits for his car to be fixed, he watches the different factions of the small community begin to fracture around a dark secret.

It all sounds pretty serious, I know, and if you’re familiar with Weir’s later films you might expect something on the dour side. But it’s actually fairly funny, more of a comedy with a dark side than horror with jokes. The horror mostly stems from the town’s cult-like devotion of the Paris residents to their mayor and town council before an outbreak of vehicular violence in the final act. 

5. Eye of the Devil (dir. J. Lee Thompson, 1966)

I am always in for a story about satanic or pagan cults (preferably both?) so Eye of the Devil is right up my alley. Better still, it’s a pagan (and possibly satanic) cult in rural France? Yes please!  I enjoy folk horror (and related genres) in general, and I love how the setting can have as much of an effect on the feel of the story as anything else.

A tangent that I promise will be relevant: Did you know the Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton movie Cat People was partially inspired by a short story by Algernon Blackwood? In “Ancient Sorceries,” a traveler finds themselves stranded in a medieval French village full of devil-worshipping townsfolk who can turn themselves into cats.

If you’ve seen Cat People, you know they did not retain much of that (pretty much just “turning into cats”). It’s one of the reasons this film struck a chord with me, I think; I really wanted to see some rural French horror! (And yes, I know this was filmed entirely in England.)

The cast of this film is also pretty stacked: David Niven plays a French Marquis who is called back to his ancestral estate when the crops begin to fail. His wife (Deborah Kerr) and their two children come along despite his protests, and it doesn’t take long to find out why. Donald Plaisance plays a sinister priest, and Sharon Tate and David Hemmings play siblings that are bad news. I just can’t decide if the fact that the cast doesn’t even attempt French accents is refreshing or distracting.

6. The Innocents (dir. Jack Clayton, 1961)

The Innocents is, genuinely, a work of art. It is a staggeringly beautiful gothic horror and is, to me, the perfect adaptation of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw. Yes, Mike Flanagan used the story as the inspiration for the 2020 series The Haunting of Bly Manor, but I don’t think anyone would argue that Flanagan was trying to create a faithful adaptation.

The Innocents does so almost to the letter: Deborah Kerr (who I now realize I’ve picked twice) plays a young governess, Miss Giddens, hired by an absentee uncle to care for his orphaned niece and nephew, Flora and Miles. She and the children are, save for a housekeeper, the sole occupants of the sprawling Bly Manor and its grounds. Or are they? As the days and weeks pass, Miss Giddens begins to wonder if Flora and Miles are being haunted by the ghosts of Miss Jessel, their former governess, and Peter Quint, a disreputable former employee.

As I’ve said, this film looks amazing. The aspect ratio is very wide which, rather than giving the action a sense of space, instills scenes with a feeling of claustrophobia and creeping dread. It’s amazing to read the amount of work that cinematographer Freddie Francis, not to mention the rest of the cast and crew, had to put in to achieve visuals that were simultaneously extremely dark and extremely crisp.

Speaking of the cast, this film is almost entirely Deborah Kerr and two children (Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin) and it somehow works? I don’t know that the end result is scary by current standards (though there’s some chilling imagery that has stuck with me, one scene by the pond in particular), but If you enjoy atmospheric, slow-burn horror, this one’s for you.

7. Eyes Without a Face (dir. Georges Franju, 1960)

In the mid-20th century, France gave us some of the most important films in horror history. I’ve never really associated French cinema with horror so this was a bit of a surprise, especially because of what else was going on in France at the time. Godard, Truffaut, Varda, they’re all extremely important filmmakers, but for horror it’s Franju and Clouzot. More specifically, it’s Diabolique (the next entry down) and Eyes Without a Face.

Eyes is a sort of mad scientist story infused with just the right amount of pathos (as all the best mad scientist stories are): A brilliant surgeon conducting mysterious experiments in his lonely mansion is obsessed with repairing the disfigured face of his daughter, Christiane (Édith Scob). Blaming himself for the automobile accident that caused the disfigurement, he keeps Christiane locked away in the mansion and forces her to wear a life-like mask of her face as it was before.

Though now over 60 years old, Eyes remains an enjoyably creepy watch with a few scenes that are downright unsettling. The imagery of Christiane in her mask is haunting, tapping into the rich vein of the uncanny valley in horror. In fact, it’s interesting to consider that the “creepy mask” trope is rarely applied to sympathetic characters as it is here. Halloween, Tourist Trap, Annabelle, I’m sure there’s plenty of others, but the only films coming to mind are ones in which the mask or dolls’ face hides a killer. The film wants us to feel sympathy for Christiane’s character while still being unsettled by her (accomplished in no small part by the physicality of Scob’s performance), which I think goes a long way towards explaining the enduring appeal of Eyes Without a Face.

8. Diabolique (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

This may be one of the most important milestones in the history of horror cinema, and one whose influence gets overshadowed by Eyes Without a Face and another film released in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. In fact, popular myth ties Diabolique to Psycho fairly closely: It’s rumored that Clouzot barely beat out Hitchcock in securing the film rights to Diabolique’s source material. Diabolique is also cited as a favorite of Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho, and is supposed to have been influential on the Hitchcock adaptation.

A boys’ boarding school in the outskirts of Paris is run by its cruel and misogynistic owner, Michel, who mistreats his wife Christina (Véra Clouzot) while carrying on an affair with Nicole (Simone Signoret). Christina and Nicole are both teachers at the school and, though their relationship appears icy, they are in fact hatching an elaborate plot to murder Michel and free themselves from his clutches.

For me, one of the great joys of watching movies is when a film is so engaging that my brain stops processing anything except for the story I’m being shown. I’m sure I’m not the only one whose mind wanders, trying to guess where the plot is going next, considering what a character’s motivation might be, or wondering about all the different mid-century appliances. It’s so gratifying when that semi-conscious analysis is completely overridden by the need to watch the story unfold. Diabolique took me in completely the first time I watched it, and I still find it incredibly engaging.

9. La Main du Diable (dir. Maurice Tourneur, 1943)

I don’t know about you, but I’m not very familiar with Maurice Tourneur or his work. He was, as far as I’ve been able to discover, born in France and was influential in the American film scene of the 1910s and 1920s, first in New York and later in Hollywood. Criterion’s only other film of his is from this era, a 1919 romance called The Broken Butterfly. Tourneur moved back to France around 1928 and continued his career until a 1949 automobile accident took his leg and led to his retirement from the film industry.

La Main stands out amongst Tourneur’s (substantial) body of work, as all of his other films seem to be crime, period, or romantic dramas. I wasn’t able to find mention of any other horror-adjacent films which, I suppose, makes sense. He left Europe before the genesis of horror cinema in the 20s, and left the U.S. right before horror took off in Hollywood in the early 30s.

And this is an odd little film! It’s billed as an adaptation of a work by Gérard de Nerval, an influential French author of the early 19th century, but the core of the plot is (I’m fairly certain) based on an older folktale. It centers on Roland (veteran French actor Pierre Fresnay), a failing artist who is offered a magic talisman for the price of one French sou. Only after making the deal does Roland discover that the talisman is a blessing and a curse: it makes him a successful painter, but he must sell it for less than he paid before he dies or his soul will be trapped in Hell. The sou being the smallest denomination of currency in France, Roland is in trouble. It’s a fun watch with some really interesting visuals, especially a dreamlike scene in which Roland meets all of the former owners of the talisman.

10. The Black Cat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

Poor Boris Karloff. He’s mainly remembered as the original monster in Frankenstein, and then I go ahead and recommend another film where he doesn’t speak! I am here now to remedy that mistake with The Black Cat. It’s the first of several films starring Karloff and fellow Universal monster portrayer, Dracula’s Bela Lugosi, and the plot bears a superficial resemblance to The Old Dark House (discussed last time): A couple honeymooning in Hungary are forced to stay the night in the isolated home of eccentric architect Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Karloff

The house in this film is no crumbling mansion, though; we have instead an sleek, modern building erected on top of the remains of a World War I battlefield. Lugosi’s Dr. Vitus Werdegast, also staying at the house, was left for dead by Poelzig on that same battlefield years ago, and has come to seek his revenge.

I gleaned a lot of extra context about this film from the book Wasteland by W. Scott Poole, which is a great examination of how the horror genre is tied up in the traumas of The Great War (if you like both movies and history, it’s a must-read). Lugosi served in the Austro-Hungarian army and was wounded multiple times. He was discharged due to mental trauma brought on by the war, and so the character of Werdegast, who accuses Poelzig of turning traitor and causing the deaths of countless Austro-Hungarian soldiers, must have hit very close to home for him. The fact that both he and Karloff are playing ordinary men (though Poelzig is the leader of a black magic cult) adds a different sort of depth to this film as compared to their more well-known monstrous roles.