[heart pounding]
[tense music]
♪
[all screaming]
♪
- With many films,
but particularly with horror films,
there are images that stay with you forever.
And I always find it fascinating
how long they're actually on screen.
I always think about that
with the film "Black Narcissus,"
is there's a scene towards the end of the film
where Sister Ruth reappears.
[dramatic musical flourish]
And in my head, that was, like, a whole scene.
When I rewatched it, it was on screen for 1 1/2 seconds.
But the image of it was burned into my brain forever.
So that's a testament to the power...
- [screaming]
- Of images within a film.
[all shouting]
And from, like, movie to movie,
most of the things you would talk about within this series,
there are different reasons why you remember something.
- They're here.
- And obviously, with the horror genre,
a lot of these moments are trading
in sheer nightmare fuel,
all of the terrors of your subconscious made flesh.
- It doesn't seem to matter
whether it's a terribly good movie or not.
[growling]
My friend Mike Finnell, who has produced many of my movies,
used to tell me about this scene that he saw in a movie
when he was a kid that was so terrifying.
It's a guy in a cape, and a light came down on him,
and he fell down in the cape and it was--
he was a skeleton.
[dramatic musical sting]
And I said, "Mike, that's from 'Plan 9 from Outer Space.'"
When you're a kid, you don't have
those kind of value judgments.
You just--it's just the imagery that gets you.
And it stays with you.
[ant squealing] - [screaming]
- I mean, those giant ants from "Them,"
I still see them in my bad dreams.
[ominous music]
♪
- Pretty much you can't talk about Japanese horror
without talking about "Ringu."
It is absolutely essential and has
one of the scariest endings ever put on film.
- Tomoko!
[speaking Japanese]
- "Ringu," or "The Ring," as it might be better known
in the United States, it's a film
where there's this cursed videotape,
that if you watch this videotape,
seven days later, you will die.
- [gasps]
- The tape itself is terrifying.
The tape itself is another thing
where you don't really know how to process.
It's essentially video art.
♪
And all these eerie images coming at you
that feel cursed, that feel wrong.
- And so, you know, you can joke
that this is a film that's about a fear
of experimental filmmaking.
But on another level,
it's tapping into a register of images
even if you don't quite know exactly what's happening.
But absolutely, it's sort of just--the very nature
of those images themselves are partly what's so terrifying.
[suspenseful music]
♪
- So the moment that got everybody is,
you think the movie's over.
You know, our heroine has solved the mystery.
She has found the bones of this girl,
the remains of this girl at the bottom of a well.
All is well. She's back home.
And the movie's still going.
And you're like, "Well, it's not a slasher film,
"so what could possibly happen here?
What's going on?"
♪
And it turns out that her ex-husband,
who has seen the tape-- she's passed it on...
He hears the static on his television and looks up.
And, of course, we finally see Sadako
in all of her vengeful glory actually climbing
out of the television.
- To me, the scariest stuff is the stuff you can't explain.
- [gasps]
- When you see that, you can't explain it.
If you could explain it, you can quantify it,
you can measure it, it loses its power.
The idea of this thing that can actually come
out of the well on the TV,
it's kind of, like, the ultimate nightmare.
[heart beating]
- And it's actually sort of a sequence of details
that make it really scary.
So the first thing is, is that she's crawling out of the TV,
breaking that fourth wall in a very good effect,
but also one that only happens for one setup.
The next thing you see is her, like, fingers
on the carpet with no nails.
Because she's, you know, tried to get out of the well,
and, like, her nails have, like, been wrenched out.
Then you've got the backwards performance
where the performer playing Sadako
is obviously filmed in reverse
and then is walking backwards,
and they reversed the film
so she's kind of moving forward
and a really unnatural way.
And that's really creepy.
And then that final image
of, like, just the one eye in the hair.
That's what people see before they die.
All intercut with the actors,
like, sort of completely catatonic,
frozen in fear,
crawling back against the wall,
trying to get away.
Her pursuit is inexorable.
- The worst-case scenario for every horror film
is, the thing that you're terrified on the screen
all of a sudden comes out
and is able to, you know, grab you.
That image stays with people
because it's kind of tapping into, you know,
fear of horror films
or fear of images to a certain extent.
- [screams]
[both speaking Korean]
- "Train to Busan" is interesting
because it is a film
that shows the legacy of melodrama
in South Korean film and television...
- Where it's mostly about families,
and it's about sort of, you know,
these connections and sometimes over-the-top emotions.
[zombies growling]
In some ways, you can say it's kind of like--
and I don't mean this in a disparaging way--
but it's kind of like a soap with zombies.
- [screaming]
- But it's all sort of in this context of, you know,
these zombies who are moving incredibly fast.
[screaming]
- Appa!
[intense music]
♪
- We've had fast zombies before,
but they were fast zombies in a swarm.
And those two things together are very, very scary.
♪
'Cause they're fast and there's too many of 'em.
And so they just look impossible to defeat.
[zombies screeching]
- Granted, we had seen a little bit of that
with "World War Z,"
but there was just something highly effective
in seeing it in this movie.
- The way they moved just felt unique.
And that's what I liked about "Train to Busan,"
is it just felt fresh.
- When the Shaw Brothers started making movies
in Hong Kong...
- [grunting]
- It was just assumed that if you hired stunt people
or if you hired martial arts people,
they would do whatever you asked them to do.
And they did not have the rules that we have
for stuntmen in America.
[all yelling]
[tense music]
And so people like Jackie Chan did
these incredible physical stunts.
[both yelling]
And this carried over into Korean films
and Thai films...
And mainland China films.
[both grunting]
And obviously, it carried over into "Train to Busan,"
because these guys do
death-defying things all the time.
[intense music]
- It showed us images of zombie mayhem
that we had never seen before--
in particular, the train
dragging an anthill of zombies with it.
♪
[somber music]
But that movie already had me, you know,
just based on characters alone.
- [sobbing] Appa! Appa!
- "Train to Busan" has just got so much heart.
♪
- It's one of the few films that can actually make me cry.
- The ending of that film, it gets me every time.
[ominous music]
- Listen, Mr. Oswald, if you sleep in this house
it's just gonna do terrible things to your head.
- In "Sinister," Ethan Hawke plays an author
who uncovers these home movies in his home.
And you come to realize
they're supernatural in some way.
At first, Ethan Hawke doesn't know what to make of them
but then is investigating further,
so, of course, you're watching them with him
and exposed to these terrible acts.
- This film is about the act of watching a film.
And we're showing bits of all these home movies
that are involved in killings that have been committed
with these families, and where one
family member has disappeared,
where a kid has been taken away.
♪
- The twist of, you know,
where the scariest thing that happens
is the guy sitting and watching moving images,
it's interesting.
- It continues a tradition going back
to Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up"...
Coppola's "The Conversation"...
- Kill us if he got the chance.
- Brian De Palma's "Blow Out."
[static crackling]
This idea of obsessing over the granular of the image.
And oftentimes that obsession and trying to blow things up
and figure out, "What does this mean?"
is usually what brings about your ruin.
- It was a good scream.
- I mean, I think we can all agree
that the scariest part of "Sinister"
is the lawn mower scene.
[laughs] Wouldn't we all agree with that?
[intense music]
That scene is so disturbing, is so disarming,
because we're all Ethan Hawke in that moment.
We're not guarded in any way.
We just know he's gonna watch something disturbing,
but how disturbing is it gonna go?
- So we look in at this family just having fun in the house.
And then the next thing you see
is, like, this person, like, getting the lawn mower.
And it's, like, a little tiny spotlight,
and you can't really see around it.
And it's silent at first.
- It's so quiet.
What is up with all these quiet things
that just work every time?
All you can hear is your breath.
And that scene with the lawn mower,
it's just going...and going.
- All of a sudden, you see a body laying on the lawn.
The sound makes-- cranks to a 12.
[inhuman shriek]
- They don't show us what happens,
but Ethan Hawke sees it.
- [breathing heavily]
- And the look of abject terror on his face is just so--
[inhuman shriek]
Man, he can act.
It looks like he saw the worst thing ever.
[projector whirring]
- I don't know that I could process
being laid down in the grass
and a lawn mower running over my head.
That's truly upsetting.
[inhuman shriek]
- But we don't actually see sort of the messiness.
[ominous music]
- [gasping] - Party's over.
- This is not Peter Jackson's "Dead Alive"
or "Braindead"...
[zombies groaning]
Where we do see what a lawn mower can do to people.
Or to zombies, I guess.
What Derrickson is suggesting is really graphic,
but it's usually just the overall atmosphere
and how it stays with us that is really effective.
- Editing is everything in "Sinister,"
from the reveal of Ethan Hawke's son
coming out of the box upside down--
you know, it's just like, how much are you seeing that
before you cut to reactions?
- [screaming]
- I would ask every aspiring horror filmmaker
to watch "Sinister."
I think it's one of the best of that decade.
[ominous music]
- What are you doing here?
- My bed was shaking.
I can't get to sleep.
- "The Exorcist," based on the novel
by William Peter Blatty,
it is such a '70s movie.
[subway rumbling]
So downbeat, so nihilistic.
- She was living by herself, and I guess she was dead
a couple of days before they found her.
- "The Exorcist" says that God is not really there for you.
- [yelling demonically]
- Because the victim in "The Exorcist" is an innocent.
- Yes.
- That was what was so scary about "The Exorcist."
- [growls] - Ah!
- It wasn't the pea soup vomit
or the head turning around.
- Amen.
- [growling]
- It was the fact that it was a little girl.
all: ♪ Some people think it's the home of black eyes ♪
- The pin that unhooks the wheel
that starts the axle breaking of "The Exorcist"
would never have happened without Linda Blair
standing there and delivering the line...
- You're gonna die up there.
- Every single person that watched that film,
the first time you watched that film,
when she said that line,
it stuck right in your heart,
and you were like, "Oh, man, where are we going?
"This is not good.
This is really not good."
- Still today, I don't think a movie has yet
to make me feel so uncomfortable--
where you see the actors so uncomfortable.
- Regan.
Oh, my God, honey.
- And giving this little girl--
just her body being taken advantage of,
it's very dark.
- The scene with the crucifix,
you know, it's sort of like "Blazing Saddles."
I don't know if you could do that today.
[laughs]
- Ellen Burstyn is downstairs, hears screaming from upstairs,
goes up.
[screaming, crashing]
Number one, like, the whole, like, room is being trashed.
- Let Jesus fuck you! Let Jesus fuck you!
- And then Regan is masturbating with a crucifix.
[both screaming]
And then grabs her mother's head
and puts her mother's head into her crotch...
- Lick me!
- And throws her across the room...
- Ah! - [screaming]
- In, like, a really gnarly-looking stunt
where I think Ellen Burstyn actually hurt herself.
- [screaming]
- And then her head spins around.
And then she says..
- You know what she did,
your cunting daughter?
- [screaming]
- This is all in the space of about 90 seconds.
And so, like, that movie has suddenly,
like, just gone from cruising
at a creepy kind of, like, pace
to kind of just going at 200 miles an hour.
♪
- I think the thing for me that was always perfect was,
the door was closed to her bedroom.
And whatever happened when you opened it
was worse than whatever you could imagine would happen
when you got on the other side.
- That's the genius of "The Exorcist."
You have to go to the killer.
You have to go to the monster, into the monster's lair.
Because in "Texas Chain Saw Massacre,"
it's like, "Don't go in that house."
Or with Jason Voorhees it's like, "Be careful.
Like, Jason's gonna get you."
[nail gun cracks]
- [gasps]
- But in "The Exorcist,"
they're trying to solve a problem.
- [growling]
- They want to save Regan.
And the only way to do that is to go into the room.
And they know every time they go into the room,
something terrible is gonna happen.
- [howling]
[eerie music]
- It's just like pictures in a book, Danny.
It isn't real.
- "The Shining"--
what do you say that hasn't been said?
♪
- We watch a man who's maybe had some history
of kind of emotional instability,
who's now in this isolated place,
you know, recently sober--
- Here's to five miserable months on the wagon.
- With a kind of a fragile, needy wife,
and a son who's just an average kind of,
what, six- or seven-year-old.
[dramatic musical sting]
And we watch him unravel.
- [screams]
[laughs]
♪
- I feel like that is a film
that's full of iconic images...
That endure.
- Part of "The Shining" has to do
with this sort of collapse of time-space...
both: Hello, Danny.
- That Danny could look at the hallway
and see the twins,
and then see their corpses,
and then see the twins' ghosts again,
and then see their corpses again.
It's time-space collapsing on itself.
Both of these things are happening simultaneously.
It's the same thing with the woman in 237.
We are all our youngest, most beautiful selves...
And also rotting corpses at the same time.
- [cackling]
And Jack doesn't want to be confronted with that.
- Did you find anything?
- No. Nothing at all.
- Then we follow Wendy.
And she's in this, like, very terrified moment
where she's going to tell him that she is leaving.
[suspenseful music]
And then she walks up to the typewriter
and sees the paper and sees the--
the repetition of the line.
He has not, in fact, been writing
his great American novel this whole time.
And all of the venom that she has absorbed
from listening to him and kind of doting on him
and trying to give him what it is that he wants
and what it is that he's asking for--
that all of that was for naught.
- How do you like it?
- [screams]
- We realize in this scene
how, like, completely unhinged he is.
- What do you want to talk about?
- It's not a matter of speculation anymore.
- Have you ever thought for a single, solitary moment
about my responsibilities to my employers?
- One of the scariest scenes to me in that whole movie
is him advancing on her when she has that bat.
- Get away from me!
- 'Cause there is something about someone menacing you,
and you know that you can't do anything.
He's, like, so slowly--
just taking his time, not in a hurry--
this beautiful cat and mouse dynamic.
- I'm not gonna hurt you.
You didn't let me finish my sentence.
- You're grabbing your throat the entire time.
Where is this going?
It just keeps you right here...
- I'm not gonna hurt you.
I'm just gonna bash your brains in.
- All the way up until she hits him,
finally, with the bat.
- [shrieks] - Oh, God da--
♪
- Oh, my God.
- [screaming]
- Certain horror scenes just break through
memory and reality in a way
where you can just almost mimic,
and people instantly get what you're talking about.
- No!
- You can even say lines, like, "Here's Johnny."
- Here's Johnny! - [screams]
- And, automatically, somebody will be like,
"'The Shining.' Have you seen 'The Shining'?"
"Oh, no, I haven't seen it,
but I know that's from 'The Shining.'"
- [screams]
- The acting is what saves this from going off the rails.
It could have easily been,
like, Jack Nicholson being crazy.
But, you know, you have Shelley Duvall,
broken as she was filming this thing--and she was aware.
I mean, she was a very, very smart,
very erudite woman.
- I mean, we had the same end in mind.
It was just that sometimes we differed in our means.
- We're fucking killing ourselves out here,
and you've gotta be present. - I am too.
I'm standing right by the door. - Should we play mood music?
- And she knew exactly what Stanley Kubrick was doing
and why he was doing it.
- [screams]
- She just allowed herself to become
totally fucking exhausted.
I mean, 127 takes--
I don't know.
I don't know if I could do that.
- And by the end, the means met.
♪
[tense music]
- Do you know what I do about unhappiness?
I buy it off.
Are--are you unhappy?
- The great thing about "Psycho" is that
it doesn't matter how much you know about it already
or how much you've-- how many times you've seen it.
- [gasps]
- It's such a movie to be admired
that you can see it any number of times
and it's almost like the first time.
- There are shots in that film where they're--
they're not even the 30th most famous shot,
and yet they're still better than shots
in other directors' whole careers.
I was watching it recently, and there's a shot
in the latter half where Vera Miles is
waiting for kind of some news,
and she's in Sam Loomis' shop.
And she runs towards the camera in silhouette.
And I just remember looking at that shot thinking,
"Oh, my god.
That shot is amazing."
And yet it isn't in the top 20
of most famous shots from "Psycho."
- Well, everybody knows the iconic scene in "Psycho,"
which is the shower scene, which is, you know--
it was designed by Saul Bass,
who did a lot of drawings for it.
And it's pure cinema.
It's all about editing.
It's not about what you see, it's what you think you see.
- Nobody had really attacked-- literally and figuratively--
a murder scene in this sense, in just a picture puzzle
of a multitude of shots and put them together
in an order that just throws you for a loop.
[suspenseful music]
It becomes frantic as the murder is frantic.
You know, there's a bloodlust and a frenzy
to the construction of this scene
that is belied by the banality of each of those shots.
There's nothing in there that is all that
provocative or transgressive.
It's only when it's been constructed
with that masterful Bernard Herrmann score--
a black-and-white score that is only strings.
[driving string music]
- [screams]
- It screams at you, and it's unbelievably potent.
[dramatic music]
- Hitchcock creates a great sympathy for Norman Bates,
because we are so in his shoes
when we're dealing with the aftermath
of his mother murdering Marion Crane
and him having to clean up the evidence.
- Do you mind if I look at your book?
- We are bothered and tense
when Martin Balsam is questioning him.
- Did you spend the night with her?
- And we fear that Norman Bates is going to be caught.
We don't want him to be caught, because Alfred Hitchcock is
playing on all of the vulnerabilities
of Anthony Perkins' persona and character at the time
for you to root for the deadliest character
in the narrative.
[ominous music]
- Your anticipation
of Martin Balsam dying is already high.
You know something really bad is gonna happen.
- Bates?
- You know, obviously, there's a killer
and you assume the mother is somewhere there.
But this is a private eye.
This is not a naked lady in the shower,
like, completely helpless.
This is a private eye that is
kind of ready for it, right?
He's ready for the encounter.
He assumes something's wrong.
And as soon as he walks into the house
and he's walking around,
there's nothing more terrifying of that,
of like, walking in someone else's house.
And then just that strange shot of the stairs going up,
which you already anticipate something strange might happen
because Hitchcock puts the camera
in kind of a strange place,
with a strange depth of field.
- The top of these stairs
that the second murder took place.
- The kind of genius move there is, whilst you're waiting
for something terrible to happen,
is, it's the cut to the overhead angle.
Why do they cut to that overhead angle?
Because they don't want to show that the killer is
either Mrs. Bates or Norman.
They don't want to show the face,
so it's a practical decision.
Oh, we'll cut to a high angle, and then you won't
see the face of the killer.
- She came out of the door there,
met the victim at the top.
- But what it does is, it takes you into an unnatural angle
just at the point where you're expecting something terrible
to happen, it cuts to that angle,
and then the door opens and the figure comes out.
And it's so brilliant, because it's not a shock.
Usually, like, a shock moment
is revealing something in frame.
Like, in a "Halloween" film, Michael Myers would
suddenly appear in frame.
- [screaming]
- But here you're cutting to a wide shot,
and the wide shot is scary.
[driving string music]
- Now, by being at that top shot,
you get to see he's coming, but he wouldn't see him,
so then he gets completely blindsided.
♪
And then, obviously, you know, the classic--
which I still don't understand.
What was supposed to be happening?
I think he's just stepping backwards or something.
But it's just--you know, it's a classic,
you know, cinematic moment.
- The victim tumbled and fell with a horrible crack.
I think the back broke immediately
when it hit the floor.
- And then she goes there and stabs him again,
like, which makes it, like--
you know, you think it's overkill, but no.
He falls down the stairs on his back
and gets stabbed again.
It just--for me, the most scariest thing in that movie.
[light, tense music]
♪
- One of my favorite films of all time
is a little movie called "Audition"...
- [groaning]
- By Takashi Miike, one of the great auteurs
of the last 25 years.
That movie just brands your brain in a way
that, once you see it, you're never going to...
Not think about it.
One of the best things about that film
is that the first act really plays out
kind of like a good old indie drama-comedy.
- It's about a widower who wants to find a new wife.
And with the help of a film producer...
- [speaking Japanese]
- Auditions young women--
and it's notable, I think,
that they're mostly young women--
for the part of his new wife.
- The title "Audition" refers to the fact
that he's throwing these audition processes
in front of a video camera
completely under false pretenses.
He's looking for, you know, his next soul mate.
You know, these girls think, "Oh, no.
I'm going for an audition," you know,
which in itself is a lie.
- And so there's sort of these inklings
of, you know, this romantic story.
You know, is there sort of this--
this hope of a happy ending here?
You know, when he first meets Asami...
- It's almost too good to be true.
And then it turns out it was too good to be true.
[ominous music]
- There's a really famous scene in that film
where she is waiting by the phone.
And we get our first real view of her in her element.
And she's in this room,
and there is a bag on the floor.
And you don't know what's in the bag,
but you know it's not good.
[phone ringing]
- The phone is ringing, and she's slowly,
like, raising her head
as if she's about to pick up the phone.
[phone ringing]
And the genius of that shot is,
you're fully concentrating on her reaction.
[phone ringing]
- [growling]
- And it's at that point that the bag moves really violently,
that there's obviously somebody still alive inside the bag.
[phone ringing]
You're already kind of, like, feeling uneasy.
And then your worst fears are confirmed
whilst you were concentrating on something else.
- [growling]
- It's really, really terrifying,
but not quite as terrifying as the last 30 minutes.
[suspenseful music]
- The first half of "Audition" is like a Lifetime
Movie of the Week.
And then it turns vicious and strange
and kind of wonderfully violent.
- [yelling]
- The scenes where Asami uses the acupuncture needles...
- [groans]
- Are among the most disturbing images
ever put on film.
- [groaning] - But it's very effective.
- "Audition" is sort of a critique of rom-coms,
because if you look at them, most romantic comedies
are pretty screwed up.
I mean, they're about very sick people
who probably should not be together,
when you really break it down.
Because they usually involve people lying to each other.
- I'm a writer for "The Baltimore Sun"
and a friend of Laurie Johnson's.
I'm doing a piece on how people handle bereavement,
and I understand you had a caller the other night,
some guy from Seattle.
- But we've been trained by movies
to think, "Oh, that's great.
That's what I should want from a partner,"
which doesn't make any sense at all,
because no, you don't want that.
No rational person wants that.
- It was right. It was real.
It was-- - A movie.
That's your problem. You don't want to be in love.
You want to be in love in a movie.
- Romantic comedies kind of destroyed
a lot of people of, like, how they think things should work.
Oh, a girl doesn't want to go out with you?
Keep on asking her.
A girl breaks up with me?
She just needs to be convinced to.
Get a boom box, put it over your head, you know,
which is, you know, harassment and stalking.
And, you know, she says she wants to break up with you,
tell her she's wrong.
- And that's what's so great about "Audition,"
is just that--all right.
You want to try and do that stuff?
You want to try and, you know, have
this kind of romantic comedy life?
Well, they're not gonna to go as planned.
- [screams]
[ominous music]
- Why are you scared of me?
- I never wanted to be your mother.
- [laughs] "Hereditary."
- Then why did you have me?
- It wasn't my fault! I tried to stop it!
- Every time I think of that movie, I laugh and laugh.
No, I'm kidding. It's not funny.
- I tried to have a miscarriage.
- I laughed so hard at that movie
because I was so terrified.
- You tried to kill me.
- I did not. - You did!
- I love you. - You tried to kill me!
- I feel joy when they terrify me
because they got me.
- Why did you try to kill me? - I love you!
I didn't! I was trying to save you!
- Why did you try to kill me?
- Every aspect of that movie, to me, was joy.
- [crying]
- The first part of the movie, you're kind of thinking,
"Oh, what is this about? There's some little miniatures.
Like, there's something going on with the mother."
It is scary. It's very creepy.
But you don't exactly know where it's going.
But then you get to this part
where Peter, the older brother,
takes his younger sister, Charlie, to a party.
- Oh, shit, look.
They're giving out chocolate cake.
- Not to everyone.
- Yes, to everyone. It's a party.
- And she is kind of a strange girl.
And she has an allergy. She has this allergic reaction.
- Peter.
- Charlie. [coughs]
- And she starts not being able to breathe.
- Are you okay?
- I think my throat's getting bigger.
[suspenseful music]
- So he throws her in the car.
He's driving really fast.
And she's in the back and she's--
you know, she's choking.
She's--[gasps]
- You're watching her head out the window.
And you know the pole is coming
and you're going, "They're not gonna do this.
They're not gonna do this."
- [gasping]
And then they do.
[tires screeching]
- Every time I've watched it,
whether it's been in the cinema or with other people at home,
the gasp of that happening is extraordinary.
But then what happens next is where Ari Aster
sort of does something unconventional
in terms of subverting your expectations
of what you're going to see, and then un-subverting them.
So the thing that happens after that is,
he leaves the car in the drive,
with his sister's decapitated body in it,
and goes to bed.
[unsettling music]
- He's in shock.
And he just falls into the bed and the camera stays on him.
- I'm running out for some balsa wood.
You want anything?
- And then you hear the parents
start to go downstairs.
And now you're feeling the same--it's not even dread.
It's such a complex, horrific feeling that he's feeling.
Because he hears them going out to the car,
and he knows what they're gonna see.
- [screaming]
- And it's all happening kind of off-camera,
and it stays on him.
It stays on him for the duration.
And it's just--it's grueling and it's human and it's real
and it's just--it's one of the most affecting scenes
I've ever seen in a movie.
- [screaming]
- And then just when you think you've got through the scene,
then he shows you the decapitated head...
- [screaming]
- On a desert road, covered in ants.
- Oh, my God! Oh, my god!
- Oh, my God. - [screaming]
- When you watch that with an audience,
it takes them a long time to recover from that sequence.
Then towards the end of the film,
there's the sequence where Toni Collette
is waiting in the darkness.
- The scare of the scene is
that you're looking at this shot,
and it's a wide shot of the kid,
like, waking up in his bed,
and, you know, he's mainly hit by moonlight or something.
[ominous music]
- Mom?
- And sadly--this is what happened to me.
I was in the movie theater...
- Dad?
- Not seeing anything disturbing, apparently.
You know, it was-- it's a dark scene.
And suddenly I hear this murmur in the audience.
[murmuring incoherently]
What the f--
oh, shit!
And then your eye sees what's in the corner of the frame.
[suspenseful music]
- It's a testament to that movie
that it creates these images
that are so powerfully shocking
that it then needs, like, half an hour
to reset for the next one.
Because the audience are all completely freaked out.
- [clicks tongue]
- How's it coming in there?
I said, how's it--
[roaring]
♪
- John Carpenter's '82 "The Thing" is
the best monster movie ever made.
- [growling]
He says that it's not as good as the original.
That's because he's a self-effacing, modest guy.
- [growling]
I believe it blows the original out of the water.
And, to this day, there is nothing like it.
- [growling]
- I won't say it was a perfect movie,
but I can't think of another movie that's more perfect.
It's like, everything from the pacing of it,
storytelling, performances, effects--
I just love that movie to death.
- Isolation horror is one of my favorite kinds of horror.
You're out in this wintry base,
just watching this group of men working together.
And then, all of a sudden, there's a creature.
But what is it? Where is it?
What does it look like?
Oh, it looks like us.
- You see, what we're talking about here
is an organism that imitates other life forms.
And it imitates them perfectly.
- [howling]
- That is scary.
- I just cannot believe any of this voodoo bullshit.
- If the Thing were to imitate you,
you wouldn't even know it wasn't you
until the Thing was threatened
and its sensibility was threatened.
And then it would reveal itself.
- [screeches]
[screaming]
- But until then, it would keep imitating you,
pretending to be you,
to the point where no one around you wouldn't know
it wasn't you.
- All these different sequences
with one of the most imaginative
makeup effects creators ever, in Rob Bottin,
who was unbelievably young and ambitious and brilliant,
and John gave him full steam ahead
to come up with these ideas.
[ominous music]
- One of the most iconic moments--
I mean, it's endless of iconic moments of "The Thing."
But how you think one of the characters,
after he had a heart attack...
- Clear!
- And it's not bringing him back to life.
[mimics paddles]
It's not working. - Clear!
- And just before they try to revive the guy...
[growls] - Clear.
- [screaming]
- And you just see how the poor man's arms get just eaten.
- [screaming]
- Oh, wow.
That was incredible.
That was some of the most incredible
movie magic I had ever seen.
They had a man who was a double amputee.
I don't think he was as tall as Dick Dysart.
But when they put that wig on him to match Dick's hair,
and they put prosthetic arms on him...
- [screaming]
- In the moment of, "Pow!"
and those arms flew off, and that blood was like--wow.
It was--it was something to behold.
But it was as exciting watching the end product
in the movie as it was
to see the setup in the studio.
It was beautiful.
It was just beautiful.
[suspenseful music]
- And then just, like, green goo explodes.
♪
Then the guy's neck starts to rip off
and it becomes a spider.
- You know, I'll never forget it,
because it doesn't contain just one shock.
It contains one enormous shock,
followed by mind-boggling shock after shock...
And actually ends kind of in a laugh.
- You gotta be fucking kidding.
- It's really virtuoso filmmaking.
[contemplative music]
- It never stops fascinating me,
the magic of the movies.
[screaming]
Because it's all about appearances.
It's illusion.
It's what it looks like, not necessarily what it is.
♪
- [laughs] I see things.
You laugh at an old man.
[laughs]
There's them that laughs and knows better.
- It's so hard to quantify when people say to me,
"What's the best horror movie of all time?"
If there's something that kind of noses ahead
and is right in there,
it's always Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."
- [screaming]
- That's the thing that checks all the boxes for me.
- My grandpa's the best killer there ever was.
- It has social commentary.
- [screaming]
- It has horror unlike any unspeakable,
brutal, visceral horror we've ever seen in a film before.
[ominous music]
It's got a monster and a family of monsters
that will haunt you for the rest of your life.
- [screaming]
- And it's funny in its weird, wonderful, wacky way.
- [screaming]
- Get her!
- The movie's as complex as a Hitchcock movie...
[maniacal laughter]
And yet, at one time, just the name
"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" was considered shorthand
for the decay of American society,
the decay of American morals.
- But I think the most violent thing in the film
is the title, "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,"
just the images that it draws up.
Tobe, my old friend Tobe,
did such a masterful job doing that.
♪
- Five friends-- two women, three guys--
they're looking to investigate the desecration
of a grave site of one of the women's grandfather.
And they go into the wilds of Texas, run out of gas,
and they stumble upon this house.
- Anybody home?
- The buildup of him walking into the house
and looking around and staying in that wide shot--
it just built up so fantastic and just--
when he open-- and he has that screech,
which sounds like a pig squealing.
- [squealing]
♪
- It's such a quick, brutal scene.
And also, having grown up on a farm--
sorry, PETA-- but, you know, my family--
you know, we killed-- we had to kill animals to eat.
So I knew that thrash from on a personal level,
but I'd never seen that
portrayed so realistically in a film.
[door slams]
- The door slam just sticks in everyone's mind.
And without that sound cue, I don't know if that scene
would be as iconic as it's become.
That sound is the sound of death.
[door slams]
- You're stunned.
You thought something might be creepy about the house,
but that's not what you expected.
And, from then on, it's like, "Oh, my God.
What's going on?"
- [screaming]
- Probably the most iconic scene in the movie
is when Leatherface puts Pam on the meat hook.
- [screaming]
- That was the number one walker scene--
you know, the scene where people
would walk out of the theater.
They would actually leave the theater when that happened.
- [screaming]
- The way Tobe shot it,
that hook's perfectly in the foreground.
You see the hook, he comes through the door,
and then he raises her up.
You never see the hook penetrate her back.
- [screaming]
- Even when you have the character
that's in the wheelchair... - Is somebody out here?
Stop. Stop. - Leatherface shows up.
[mimics chain saw revving]
[both screaming]
You never see anything.
- [screaming]
- There's no, like, fake body
that you're cutting into pieces
or any of that kind of stuff.
- [screaming]
But it's so terrifying,
because it's what you think you see that is horrific.
It's such a classic element of cinema
and filmmaking of that time.
- Tobe Hooper was a super sweet guy.
But if anybody's like,
"Who's captured madness on screen?"
there you go.
That's "Texas Chain Saw Massacre."
- [screaming]
- When Sally gets away at the end--
which I think is, to me,
the scariest moment in that movie--
there isn't the, like--[sighs]
You look in the eyes of someone who is fucked up for life.
- [screaming]
- Just devastated and altered
in ways that she will never come back from.
And, like, yeah she got away, but to what end?
You know? What happens now?
- [laughing hysterically]
- That's it. That's all you get.
And I really appreciate that horror can do that.
[chain saw buzzing]
- One of the neat things about the genre
is that, yes, we love to be startled--
- [screams]
- And yes, we love to be frightened
and sometimes we love to root for the killers.
- [hissing]
- We can pour all of our kind of base instincts
into sympathizing with the slasher.
- [cackles]
- It lets us do so many different things.
It's cathartic in so many different ways.
But it also, in all of its expressions,
is just an invitation...
[crash]
For us to be a little bit braver
in processing what we go through as people,
whether that's dealing with...
- No!
- Loss, trauma,
violent fantasies, universal fears,
fear of the unknown, fear of death itself,
or just fear of what we are capable
of doing to each other.
- [screams]
- All of those expressions of the genre
all invite us to try to be honest about that
and to try to be a little bit courageous--
just brave enough to make it through the scene,
just brave enough to make it through the movie,
just brave enough to make it through the episode.
[dramatic music]
And we collectively get that little bit braver.
♪
I think that's why the genre will always, always endure.
[heart beating]
[ominous music]
♪