Ligottian Horror Flicks

The Bunker has a vaguely Ligottian vibe to it - quite an understated and rather effective film. Think The Keep, but told through the atmosphere of Session 9, and removing any image of a guy in a rubber monster suit.

I think that Argento's Inferno is more Ligottian than Suspiria was. Suspiria is effectively (my favourite Argento - the soundtrack, mise-en-scene, and use of colour are all amazing) a slasher flick with grotesque supernatural imagery. Inferno is far more cerebral.

If we're talking J-horror, then I'd probably throw Infection into the mix. Not as outright creepy as Kairo (Pulse) or Kourei (Seance), and a little heavy on the gooey stuff, but worth a look.

Can I also recommend A Tale of Two Sisters, a K-horror flick, before the inevitable Hollywood re-make defiles it?

Also, a recent watch, Takashi Miike's "Gozu" had a very hefty Lynchian vibe, thence recommending itself to Ligotti fans, in my not-so-humble opinion, although the black comedy is hammed up a little too much for my taste.
 
Yesterday I saw Last Year at Marienbad (dir. Alain Resnais, 1961) at the Film Forum in Manhattan, where it's playing in a limited engagement until March 27. If any of you on the board live in or near NYC, try not to miss it! I was immediately put in mind of "Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes" by an early scene in which elegant spectators in formal dress sit rapt before a stage performance in a grand, ornate hotel. These "fancy persons" in a "baroque room" of a "fancy house" are subject, like their counterparts in TL's story, to tricks of the most fantastical kind. Memory deceives and eludes them; events in their lives occur and distortedly recur. And, in the movie's most eloquent sequences, the director's camera literally freezes them in their tracks, making mannequins of them. The atmosphere of dread that pervades Marienbad has impressed a number of contemporary filmmakers, including Dario Argento, whose Inferno -- discussed in the previous post by Mr. Intolerance -- not only extrapolates the earlier film's eerieness into full-blown horror but also features one of its stars, Sacha Pitoëff. I'd be interested to know what other Ligottians make of Last Year at Marienbad . . . I think that, as films go, it's an enigma and a marvel.
 
I love Last Year at Marienbad.

It never occurred to me that it could be Ligottian. It has atmosphere and mystery to spare - but not gloomy like an upbeat Bergmann film;)

I'll have to rewatch it.

Thanks for reminding me that it exists!
 
Mr Intolerance said:
Can I also recommend A Tale of Two Sisters, a K-horror flick, before the inevitable Hollywood re-make defiles it?
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Excellent movie, and I agree: hopefully Hollywood will stay away. With the exception of the first Grudge (and then just barely), these remakes are aqueous crap.

One of the few times a film scene has made me physically jump -- excepting those cheap shots of cats springing from bushes -- was in this movie, A Tale of Two Sisters, when one of the girls suddenly appears crammed into the cabinet beneath a kitchen sink. Sounds odd, yes, but somehow it works in context.

I also agree that Guillermo del Toro is the man. I look forward to his movies as much for the DVD commentary as for the films themselves. He's one of my favorite people, and someone needs to introduce him to Ligotti (if it hasn't happened already), because he definitely is fit to translate TL into cinema.

I have yet to see The Orphanage, however -- any thoughts on this one? Is it somehow related to Devil's Backbone?
 
I can't wait to see Last Year at Marienbad when it plays at the Music Box the first week of May. I have not been excited for a film in a long time.


Daisy said:
Yesterday I saw Last Year at Marienbad (dir. Alain Resnais, 1961) at the Film Forum in Manhattan, where it's playing in a limited engagement until March 27. If any of you on the board live in or near NYC, try not to miss it! I was immediately put in mind of "Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes" by an early scene in which elegant spectators in formal dress sit rapt before a stage performance in a grand, ornate hotel. These "fancy persons" in a "baroque room" of a "fancy house" are subject, like their counterparts in TL's story, to tricks of the most fantastical kind. Memory deceives and eludes them; events in their lives occur and distortedly recur. And, in the movie's most eloquent sequences, the director's camera literally freezes them in their tracks, making mannequins of them. The atmosphere of dread that pervades Marienbad has impressed a number of contemporary filmmakers, including Dario Argento, whose Inferno -- discussed in the previous post by Mr. Intolerance -- not only extrapolates the earlier film's eerieness into full-blown horror but also features one of its stars, Sacha Pitoëff. I'd be interested to know what other Ligottians make of Last Year at Marienbad . . . I think that, as films go, it's an enigma and a marvel.
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DeathfareDevil said:
Mr Intolerance said:
Can I also recommend A Tale of Two Sisters, a K-horror flick, before the inevitable Hollywood re-make defiles it?
Click to expand...

Excellent movie, and I agree: hopefully Hollywood will stay away.
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Sorry DeathfareDevil, it's already underway, but under the title "The Uninvited" to give it some distance from the original, I suppose. You can read about it here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815245/

Hope that link works, I'm a dreadful yutz when it comes to things technological...
 
the_havoc_man said:
I can't wait to see Last Year at Marienbad when it plays at the Music Box the first week of May. I have not been excited for a film in a long time.


Daisy said:
Yesterday I saw Last Year at Marienbad (dir. Alain Resnais, 1961) at the Film Forum in Manhattan, where it's playing in a limited engagement until March 27. If any of you on the board live in or near NYC, try not to miss it! I was immediately put in mind of "Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes" by an early scene in which elegant spectators in formal dress sit rapt before a stage performance in a grand, ornate hotel. These "fancy persons" in a "baroque room" of a "fancy house" are subject, like their counterparts in TL's story, to tricks of the most fantastical kind. Memory deceives and eludes them; events in their lives occur and distortedly recur. And, in the movie's most eloquent sequences, the director's camera literally freezes them in their tracks, making mannequins of them. The atmosphere of dread that pervades Marienbad has impressed a number of contemporary filmmakers, including Dario Argento, whose Inferno -- discussed in the previous post by Mr. Intolerance -- not only extrapolates the earlier film's eerieness into full-blown horror but also features one of its stars, Sacha Pitoëff. I'd be interested to know what other Ligottians make of Last Year at Marienbad . . . I think that, as films go, it's an enigma and a marvel.
Click to expand...
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We'll I just saw Marienbad the other night. I was blown away by this picture. It was one of the wildest rides that I have experienced in the theatre in a while. The stark elegant Black and White photography reminded me of old Hollywood. The lavish chateau setting reminded me of the words of Poe and Radcliffe. The editing and camera shots of this fim were amazing. i definitely believe that both David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick are fans of this film as well. I could not help but, think of how much the tale was in relation to Thomas Ligotti's work. The mannequin quality was very disturbing. Sacha Pitoeff was a terrifying presence with his sunken cheak bones. The Girl was very chic and beautiful in that French New Wave style that I love just like Anna Karina or Bardot. One other film that I was reminded also was Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls from 1962. I am still contemplating the film and also would love to hear from others thoughts if they have viewed Last Year at Marienbad.
 
One of my all time favorite films is very Ligottian in a subtle way. I am thinking of "Dr. Strangelove." (The full title is "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.") Any comedy about the end of all life on earth due to an Air Force general going nuts and lanching a first strike against Russia is my kind of comedy. Great cast, too. George C. Scott, Slim Pickens, Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers in three roles (including Dr. Strangelove himself). The real kick is realizing what you were laughing about. I wonder how many viewers really understood this film at the time.
 
Mr. D. said:
One of my all time favorite films is very Ligottian in a subtle way. I am thinking of "Dr. Strangelove." (The full title is "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.") Any comedy about the end of all life on earth due to an Air Force general going nuts and lanching a first strike against Russia is my kind of comedy. Great cast, too. George C. Scott, Slim Pickens, Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers in three roles (including Dr. Strangelove himself). The real kick is realizing what you were laughing about. I wonder how many viewers really understood this film at the time.
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I love the Black humor of Strangelove. It is one of Peter Sellers greatest moments as an actor.
"Hey you can't fight in here this the war room."
I think that it is one of the funniest movies of all time.

"A fella could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all this..."
 
The Loved One is a wonderfully deranged film. I hope someday that my canine casket might be launched into outer space, too. Why not? The film's peak moment is Mrs. Joyboy's dangerous encounter with the refrigerator. Recommended!
 
I just watched Hour of the Wolf and didn't see it mentioned here.
For shame:o

Amazon.com: Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) : Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Gertrud Fridh, Georg Rydeberg, Erland Josephson, Naima Wifstrand, Ulf Johansson, Gudrun Brost, Bertil Anderberg, Ingrid Thulin, Mikael Rundquist, Lenn Hjortzberg, Folke Sundquist

Amazon.com: Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) : Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Gertrud Fridh, Georg Rydeberg, Erland Josephson, Naima Wifstrand, Ulf Johansson, Gudrun Brost, Bertil Anderberg, Ingrid Thulin, Mikael Rundquist, Lenn Hjortzberg, Folke Sundquist, Agda Helin, Mona Seilitz, Ingmar Bergman...
www.amazon.com
 
No one else mentioned Barton Fink? Barton, a successful New York playwright, goes to Hollywood with dreams of crafting a story that will resonate with the common man. But all he finds is disillusionment, both with his idols and his art, and becomes trapped in a decaying hotel, confronting an entity that may be the devil, a supernaturally-endowed psychopath, or perhaps even a creature that sprang from his damaged subconscious, considering that this is both a recurring theme in the Coen Bros. work (i.e. bumbling ex-convict Hi's daydreams birthing the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in Raising Arizona) and Barton's deepest yearning is to discover "the life of the mind." "I'll show you the life of the mind!" roars the thing, and indeed it does - Barton's conception of the human mind as inherently rational and cultured is torn away to reveal the murderous, twitching lizard-brain impulses that the hunk of gray tissue in our skulls is constructed from.

Other Ligottian aspects are the aforementioned setting most of the story plays out in - a once-grand hotel gone the way of dust and cobwebs - and the plot's gradual progression from the petty annoyances of reality (i.e. Barton's writers' block) to inexplicable, dreamlike terror that may in fact be derived from those petty annoyances. Is it coincidence Barton's writers' block, which is portrayed as almost an infectious disease, appears around the same time as the being who will provide him ultimate revelations about the nature of his perceptions of reality? Nobody knows but the Coen Bros., and they aren't talking.
 
for me there are only really two films that are ligottian:
1. Kairo (aka Pulse). This film has a deep deep sense of despair and of being haunted by beings that remind you of your own mortality. The movie deals a lot with suicide and hopelessness. Very much like Ligotti.

2. Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things. This is a very black comedy where the horrors just seem to serve to mock the characters. It makes the victims into petty jokes and is savage with its mockery of human relations. Grim humor just like Ligotti.
 
Brian Yuzna's Society is quite Ligottian, if only because it's a film that updates the aesthetic of Lovecraft without namedropping any Elder Gods or Arkham locales. However, the grotesque reveal at the end is somewhat similar to the nightmarish amalgamations in "The Mystics of Muelenburg".
 
The most ligottian movie I can think of is Rubber, in which a tire rolls around using telekinetic powers to destroy stuff. The opening monologue from one of the apparent police who are pretending to try to stop the tire is what does it for me:
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the second most ligottian movie I can think of is Bruiser. it is in the same vein as My Work is Not Yet Done and Falling Down, with the added interesting twist that our human-doormat-turned-antihero begins his rampage after waking up one day to find that his face has become a blank white mask, and only by violently standing up for/avenging himself can he regain some semblance of an identity.
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I have some out of the box suggestions. The thing is they don't classify as horror in almost any sense but vaguely existential horror in one case and a zero sum game resolution with the other.

I Heart Huckabees: In particular there's a scene where Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin break down Jude Law to a set of routines. He tries to not do them but everyone in his life is so enamored with the stories wrapped in the routines that they don't let up until he reluctantly resumes it only to psychically collapse. The movie in general succeeds in this regard for a majority of its playtime but the ending undercuts it. David O. Russell thought his head was up his ass when he made this movie but I think it's more honest than Silver Linings Playbook.

Falling Down: Michael Douglas plays a dude who's just fed up. Maybe I'm applying Ligottian too broadly. I am not sure how to explain my position without just synopsizing it in full.

Even in TCATHR, it references a movie that isn't horror but details a worldview that highlights a truth or lack of it with a blithe nihilism, "Hero." So I have a small precedent in offering these two up.

Huckabees is probably more defensible though. I have a lot now to check out thanks to this thread. Thanks all :)
 
I suggest "Take Shelter" :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5U4TtYpKIc

There's a heavy dose of family drama, but the film maintains a constant anxiety throughout. And, most uniquely, the film features a "bright darkness"; the protagonist is haunted by dreams and hallucinations of a stormy day, where he's harassed by shapeless stalkers who are only ever seen through rain-soaked glass or heavy down pour...

...the film is set in Elyria, Ohio - which in so many ways is typical of the rundown towns that dot Ligotti's geography. Furthermore, the bleached skies and rainy weather that feature so prominently in the film are a mainstay along the Lake Eerie coast, right up to Detroit...
 
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