[Favourite] psychological horror*

“A premonition of a horror film”

– tagline

Real horror is not found in broken dinner plates or corpuscular masses of light. It's in what the mind does with that input, in how those lux morph into human-like shapes. In how gusts of wind becomes larynx-touched voices. Cut up the neatly filed research papers and be left with the whispers of the mind.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

[A] favourite horror movie overall*

”'M. Valdemar,' I said, 'are you asleep?' He made no answer, but I perceived a tremor about the lips, and was thus induced to repeat the question, again and again. At its third repetition, his whole frame was agitated by a very slight shivering; the eye-lids unclosed themselves so far as to display a white line of the{n} ball; the lips moved sluggishly, and from between them, in a barely audible whisper, issued the words:

'Yes; — asleep now. Do not wake me! — let me die so!'”

– Edgar Allan Poe, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) (via)

A man agrees on being hypnotised while in the state of dying. This particularly haunting and efficiently gory film – the first in the genre – is the result.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

[A favourite] Bela Lugosi film*

“No, I never left the wheel; not for a moment.”

– Anton Lorenzen

A post-Dracula Lugosi demonstrates that he's more than the cursed aristocrat. An efficient early Hammer production, made just a year after their founding.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

“This is my supper, you see. Lindhorst, who knows the world, says that old harlots have a morbid desire to satisfy their mouths and stomachs.”

– Gamla Fru von Merkens

A [favourite] Frankenstein film.

 

One wet, ungenial summer in 1816, lovers Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley, and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, visited a dear friend at Villa Diodati. That friend was Lord Byron, exiled and residing in the Swiss villa with his physician Dr John Polidori

“There are no ghosts in daylight. You'll get used to our nights at Diodati. A little indulgence to heighten our existence on this miserable Earth. Nights of the mind, the imagination. Nothing more.”

– Lord Byron

Forced indoors, over the cause of three days they turned to the occult, to laudanum, to stories from the Fantasmagoriana, and the horrors of their own. That summer, Frankenstein saw the light of day.

A translator for International Translation Day

“This mirror reflected a painting… with words. Chinese idiograms. 'The she-crane calls in the shadow. Her cheek answers.'”

– Alice Campos

Alice, the always fantastically brooding Florinda Bolkan, works as a translator when all of sudden she loses her job and finds herself on the small island of Garma. People tell her she has been there before, recently, but she knows this is not possible.

 

Some English-language posters try to sell Le orme as an action-ridden sci-fi giallo, but oh boy leave that perception behind and you're in for one unsettling treat! Le orme can be placed somewhere between Don't Look Now and that other Alice film, Chabrol's Alice ou la dernière fugue. Drifting and elegant, distant and claustrophobic.

 

Black, in food or fashion*

“It is vital to be photogenic from head to foot. After that you are allowed to display some measure of talent.”

– Musidora

Possibly the first, and definitely the most, iconic catsuit in cinema is worn by Musidora as Irma Vep in Les Vampires. Skintight and scandalous, Musidora's screen presence in the serial further cemented the popularity of the vamp and set the scene for many man-eaters to come.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for August is not date-related but lists, for the most part, the colours of the rainbow.

Black: a building or structure*

“I first noticed it in Spring last year. […] It was from [my home] that I first saw it—its crest protruding over the roofs on the other side of the road. Surprised that I hadn’t noticed it before, I wondered what it was and then forgot about it for several weeks.”

– narrator

A man becomes aware of a formerly unnoticed black tower. Surely it's nothing, yet as the weeks pass, its looming presence takes over.

 

The black tower was a real structure, first noticed by filmmaker John Smith when he moved to East London. The building, actually the upper part of a hospital's water tower, was painted pitch black, and on sunny days appeared to be a cutout in the sky. By framing the shots in such a way that only part of the surroundings is visible, and editing them in a narrative framework, Smith creates a new context suggesting movement. This style of montage called creative geography, or artificial landscape, was developed by Lev Kuleshov and enables filmmakers to expand existing material and narrative into something that usually is only available to prose poetry.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for August is not date-related but lists, for the most part, the colours of the rainbow.

Violet: a building or structure *

“Is it the form of the clouds, or the tints of the sky, or the colours of the surrounding objects which are so changeable, which have troubled my thoughts as they passed before my eyes? Who can tell?”

– Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla, 1887 (via)

Objects and rooms have distinct colours ranging from the deepest blues and violets to a pale lavender, a muted silver and shocks of yellow. The usage of colour in Le Horla is striking throughout and reminds me of how Van Gogh's paintings became increasingly colourful as his madness enveloped him.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for August is not date-related but lists, for the most part, the colours of the rainbow.