Turner Classic Movies Offers Up a Classic Horror Collection for Halloween

It’s very difficult to really scare moviegoers anymore. I mean how can movies compete with such real life monsters as serial killers, Islamic terrorists and Katie Couric? Horror movies today seem intent out out-gorifying each other, but where’s the artistry? With the exception of The Ring it’s hard to think of any horror movie in the fifteen years that has actually had a style to it, and you have to go all the way back to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to find a horror movie that really scares you. That is why I am urging fans of horror movies to boycott the gorefest this Halloween and check out the lineup today on Turner Classic Movies.

The highlight of TCM’s Halloween lineup are four movies from famed horror producer Val Lewton. Lewton was able to do more with a low budget and unknown actors than most producers today do with 200 million and the biggest stars around. Lewton’s horror films aren’t particularly scary—they probably weren’t scare back then—but they are positively overloaded with atmosphere. Anyone who appreciates The Shining will tell you what makes that the best horror flick of all time isn’t some “boo!” moment, but a never-ending claustrophobic ambience heightened by Kubrick’s long, slow camera tracking and minimalist but highly effective emotive soundtrack.

Kubrick no doubt studied Lewton’s films, especially Cat People. That movie will air at 8:45 AM and is a brilliant tale of repressed sexuality coming to the fore in the form of violent jealousy; jealousy that is represented in the transformation of a woman into a cat.

The Leopard Man, airing after Cat People, might naturally be assumed to be a movie that takes the opposite tack, in which a man turns into a bigger, more powerful feline. In fact, the movie doesn’t feature that at all, but instead is about an actual escaped leopard. Catch the sequence where the young girl comes home from the store to see an example of how artistry beats gore for sheer gut-wrenching terror every time.