When asked about his 1959 film A Bucket Of Blood, director/producer Roger Corman postulated his theory that “Horror, sex and laughter are all connected in strange ways.” Mercurial Danish director Lars Von Trier must’ve been paying attention, finding much wisdom in the words of the B-movie auteur. (One can’t put it past the self-proclaimed “Masturbator of cinema.”)

A truly unsettling experience, Von Trier’s The Kingdom is a TV series devoted to chronicling the mad goings-on in a Danish hospital – “The Kingdom” of the title – whose occupants are madder still. These include: A cancer specialist so determined to bypass all the red tape and get the world’s largest tumor that he has it transplanted on his own body; an intern who likes to play practical jokes with severed heads to impress his loved one; and the ugliest baby (a dead-ringer for Von Trier staple Udo Kier) emerging head first from the womb of its horrified mother. Oh, by the way, did we mention that the place is haunted?

Only the first two of the three part series has been so far released on video. But with Part Two upping the ante for the grotesque, most sane viewers are finding the gap a little bit of a relief lest they slip into its abyss. Not so for those confessed nutters for Von Trier’s brand of cinema who just can’t seem to wait – like lobotomized tenants – to re-enter its bowels.

Cannibal Holocaust (Dir. Ruggero Deodato)

It’s a simple premise. Three Western filmmakers – two males and one female – who go into a remote part of the Amazon to make a sensationalistic documentary about a tribe that indulges in the “last taboo.” They were never seen again. Some time later a search party finds the disappeared filmmakers’ footage in the jungle. Brought back to civilization, the film is pieced together, revealing the gruesome fate of the three. Sounds familiar?

This 1979 film is, however, a much more savage affair than its progeny. Rarely screened in its entirety, Cannibal Holocaust derives its shock not only from its depiction of cruelty upon humans – of which there are plenty, including a scene wherein a woman is impaled through her vagina up to her mouth – but by unflinching footage of real animal slaughter. Thus, we are treated to the unsavory sight of a tortoise being skinned alive and roasted by the more seemingly civilized Westerners.

A former assistant of noted Neo-Realist director Roberto Rossellini, Deodato takes pains to give the impression that what we are seeing is really “found” footage by putting awkward zooms, scratches and even laboratory marks (where the hell did they process the film?). He couldn’t resist, though, using particular stylistic devices such as putting saccharine-sweet music to the sight of natives being kept inside a burning hut. A sick cinematic joke but still nonetheless affecting.

Häxan (Dir. Benjamin Christensen)

“Lock them out and bar the door/ Lock them out forevermore!” intones cult figure and Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs at the start of the 1968 version of this silent classic. Collaborating with avant-gardists such as Antony Balch and cut-up technique proponent Brion Gysin and musicians like Jean-Luc Ponty, Burroughs narrates the film with a death’s head grin audibly on his face. He maintains a penumbral presence throughout, hovering like a maleficent deity at its edges of the screen, giving much credence to Scott Garceau’s branding of him as the “Holy Ghost in the Beat Trinity.”

Yet what startles about the film is that even its 1922 version, unadorned by Burroughs voice or Ponty’s violin, manages still to astound with its sheer visual eloquence. Taking much inspiration from painters like Bosch and Goya, Christensen conveys much of the horror of the witch trials and the fevered delusions of unfortunate women forced by circumstance to confess a dalliance with the devil. (One can imagine Burroughs, an alleged misogynist, licking his lips while explaining their condemnation.)

Although eclipsed in stature by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu – which was released a year before – Häxan has made its imprint with what surrealist film historian Ado Kyrou calls its indictment of “the criminal church, its inquisition and its instruments of torture.” It is also very comedic, with the director – also an actor who played the role of an ageing homosexual artist in Carl Dreyer’s Mikael – casting himself as the devil. This disparate mix of elements surely won him many admirers and one can see his influence in later horror films like 1968’s critical favorite Witchfinder General starring Vincent Price and directed by 25-year old Michael Reeves who committed suicide shortly after making the film.

Zuma (Dir. Jun Raquiza)

To ask if there’s anything scarier than a barely-clad, green-skinned muscle man with a two-headed serpent on his shoulders begs the obvious retort if there’s anything funnier than what is basically Mr. Clean only green and with snakes. Yet no one can deny the sleepless nights this monster has caused, sometimes leading to real adult traumas (one UNO editor comes to mind, eh Mr. De Veyra?) Also there’s the number of sequels it spawned and the brief career it afforded its lead actor, which can’t be easily put down to mere camp value.

Sure, the direction is awkward, the script incoherent and the acting passable only if seen as a postmodern exercise but those who only watch this film for kitsch might soil their Scooby Doo underpants. This is due largely to the fact for the first half of the film we hardly see Zuma at all. He is there stalking in the shadows, his features engulfed in darkness. One particularly effective shot shows him munching on something we are told is a human heart: we can’t see anything but the beast’s maleficent eyes fixed in an intense stare, enjoying unspeakable pleasure. On another point, the film succeeds in making something so innocuous and ridiculous as a little blot of fetus being pulled by a string a cause for women all over to press their legs tightly together.

Of course, there are many more acknowledged masterpieces of Pinoy horror (such as Mike De Leon’s Itim or Gerardo de Leon’s Curse Of The Vampires) but Zuma is surely more popular fare. It deserves no less attention for that.

This 1973 film is more often than not more well known for its quite graphic yet achingly romantic love scene between two respected mature actors (namely Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie – once Swinging London’s It-Girl). Rumors even circulated that the two actually had sexual intercourse for director Roeg’s cameras; it was that convincing. This should not obscure the fact that this supernatural thriller is a particularly accomplished piece of filmmaking.

Adapted from a novella by Rebecca and The Birds author Daphne du Maurier, the film concerns a couple recovering from the death of their daughter. After the sad incident, the husband (Sutherland) takes an art-restoration job in Venice, hoping that the work and the ambience of the city will help heal the loss. It works, and the couple enjoy themselves but for the nagging sense of dread which seems to fritter the ends of their fragile threadwork of solace. Things get weird especially when Sutherland starts glimpsing a little figure in a red raincoat flitting at the periphery of his vision. The ghost of his departed daughter? Or something more evil?

Although slow by today’s quickened pulse approach of fast-cuts and banal one-liners designed to sell us the same film again and again,Don’t Look Now builds its suspense by making us actually care about the characters who inhabit its vertiginous and irrational world. In short, it places human beings at its center, pulling our heartstrings and leading us to the edge of the precipice, cutting it off as we take the next step.

Cure (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Serial killers are already common fodder: the only variations being the peculiar quirks you give to your villain. The rate things are going it wouldn’t be surprising if the next Hannibal Lecter or Jack the Ripper listens to ABBA, wears a tutu and kills his victims by smothering them with his original Care Bears pillow cushion. (Of course, he will reminisce by collecting their fallen hairs and ingesting each strand while weeping – and all because his pre-school teacher didn’t allow him to go to the toilet during class!) Charming these individuals might seem – especially when faced with wooden counterparts played by anyone from Hollywood’s endless supply of bland beauties – it only serves to drive home how a genre film can easily devolve into becoming an unwitting parody.

Cure starts out pretty safely: a dead murdered body – apparently not the first. All victims have an X slashed across their necks, severing the carotid artery and jugular vein. Suspects for the otherwise random crimes are suffering from amnesia and cannot recall what they did at the crucial hours. Enter world-weary detective Takabe (Koji Yakausho) who soon follows the thread to a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara). Also an amnesiac, Mamiya was studying medicine before he disappeared and was apparently very interested in mesmerism.

There is no mystery here. From the very start we know it is Mamiya who’s hypnotizing people to kill. As played by Hagiwara (who is the spitting image of Batang Westside’s Yul Servo) Mamiya is blank: he drifts in and out of coherence and asks the same questions even after they’ve been answered. One might be even tempted to say that he is without personality, only snatching the nearest thought balloon that comes into orbit, yet he is more real than any Hollywood killer in recent memory. As for the plot, it’s really just a retelling ofThe Cabinet of Dr. Caligari only with a heightened sense of despair that only the Japanese seem to fully understand. Deliberately oblique, its integrity is intact as no comforting answers are forthcoming even as the credits roll.

(Originally published in The Philippine Star, October 24, 2003)