The Criterion Channel made its anxiously-awaited debut this month. The new streaming service offers films from Criterion’s extensive library of classic, arthouse and cult cinema, fantastically restored and – in many cases – presented with extensive and illuminating special features.
Criterion may be best known for their prestigious releases of French New Wave and Italian Neorealist movies, but don’t let that fool you. They’ve got a weird streak a mile long, and The Criterion Channel is chockablock with horror films and other off-putting oddities that are practically too strange to quantify.
We can only scratch the surface today, but let’s take a look at some of the scariest movies on The Criterion Channel!
The Brood (1979)
The films of David Cronenberg are Criterion favorites, and two of his violent classics are already available on the service: Scanners, the head-exploding cult classic, and The Brood, which is arguably his scariest film. Oliver Reed stars as a psychiatrist using a new technique called “psychoplasmics” on his patient, played by Samantha Eggar. Meanwhile, her child is being attacked by mysterious homicidal children; how this all connects is one of the most disturbing moments in Cronenberg’s gruesome career.
Carnival of Souls (1962)
Most people don’t know the name of Herk Harvey, a prolific short filmmaker whose industrial videos about personal hygiene and social etiquette were often featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But although he spent most of his career making shorts like “Why Study Industrial Arts?”, he also made one feature film… and it’s considered one of the best horror movies ever made. Carnival of Souls is an independent production about a church organist, played by Candace Hilligoss, whose near-fatal accident left her with ghostly, ominous visions, and those visions linger long after the movie reaches its conclusion.
Cronos (1993)
Guillermo Del Toro’s first feature film, a vampiric fairy tale about a grandfather transforming into a monster, is still one of his finest achievements. Cronos stars the great Federico Luppi as an antique dealer whose latest discovery, a windup scarab with a sharp proboscis, turns him into a blood-licking vampire, and sets him at odds with a dying millionaire who will stop at nothing to steal that perverse immortality for himself. Cronos is, at turns, intimate and grand, horrifying and tender, and that bizarre balance only makes it more disturbing.
Cure (1997)
One of the most terrifying films of the 1990s, Cure stars Kōji Yakusho as a police detective investigating a series of baffling murders, all of them perpetrated by people who have no idea why they did it. At the center of it all is a curious sort of man, played by Masato Hagiwara, who wanders into people’s lives, speaks to them in puzzling ways, and lights a Zippo lighter. Directed with Kubrickian intensity by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cure uses subtle visual and audio techniques to lull us into a shocking trance.
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Stylish and ghoulish, Georges Franju’s horror classic Eyes Without a Face stars Pierre Brasseur as a brilliant plastic surgeon whose daughter, played by Édith Scob, is horribly disfigured in an accident. He begins a search for the perfect victim, whose face he intends to transplant onto his child. The grotesque storyline brims with eerie imagery, like the face in the title, a featureless mask that would go on to inspire the iconic appearance of Michael Myers in Halloween.
Funny Games (1997)
Funny Games appears, on the surface, to be a simple home invasion film. But as Michael Haneke’s terrifying tale continues, it becomes clear that the true horror is inside you… the audience. Arno Frisch and Frank Giering play posh teenagers who invite themselves into the vacation home of a small family, and abuse their hospitality until – before anyone really realizes it – they’re all abducted and forced into unspeakable situations. The villains aren’t just evil, they’re self-aware; they know we’re watching them, and we know we expect them to commit acts of unspeakable violence. By the time they’ve done their job, sensitive viewers won’t just feel frightened. They’ll feel guilty.
House (1977)
There aren’t a lot of horror films weirder than Nobuhiku Obayashi’s House, and that’s really, really saying something. A group of schoolgirls travel to a haunted house, where severed heads are also watermelons, pianos eat fingers, and nightmare cats leap from paintings. Their only hope – a professor slowly en route to the scene of the supernatural crime – has a fate which can only be described as, well, totally bananas. Chuck logic out the door because House will test your sanity… and to the best of knowledge, nobody has ever passed the test!
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)
Before Alfred Hitchcock became a household name he had to make a name for himself, and the master of suspense finally found his niche with the atmospheric horror story The Lodger. The British film stars Ivor Novello as the mysterious title character, who takes a room in the middle of a serial killer’s crimewave, and whose disturbing behavior makes him the prime suspect. Made only a few decades after the real-life Jack the Ripper murders, Hitchcock’s eerie analogue is a tense masterwork, an early, silent preview of the many shocks he would eventually unleash into cinemas.
M (1931)
The first sound film by acclaimed German filmmaker Fritz Lang, M stars the impossibly creepy Peter Lorre as a serial killer whose victims are all children. His crimes are so unforgivable that the criminal underworld rises up against him, so he’s hunted on all sides. Lang resists the urge to rely on sound, even though it’s finally one of the tools available to him, and he still lets swaths of M play out in uncomfortable, terrifying silence. But he does use the technique to recontextualize “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite No. 1” into an anthem of pure horror.
Sisters (1973)
Brian De Palma’s first Hitchcockian thriller, of many, is still deliriously disturbing. Sisters stars Margot Kidder as a model whose identical twin sister murders her boyfriend, attracting the attention of a reporter, played by Jennifer Salt, who lives across the hall and is determined to prove them guilty. Halfway between giallo and old-fashioned Hollywood murder mystery, Sisters takes one demented turn after another, weaving a stylish and unpredictable web of psychological terror and cinematic showmanship.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
David Lynch’s deeply disturbing prequel to his cult hit TV series “Twin Peaks” stars Sheryl Lee, in a powerhouse performance as a seemingly perfect teenager, tortured by unspeakable abuse. The film’s harrowing portrayal of Laura Palmer’s tragic life, leading directly up to her brutal murder, would be terrifying enough on its own. But Lynch doesn’t stop there, expanding the supernatural mythology of Twin Peaks with inexplicable story elements and surreal imagery, which wouldn’t be explained until over two decades later in “Twin Peaks: The Return”. That is, if it was explained at all. The nature of reality is elusive in Lynch’s films, and never more frightening than in Fire Walk With Me.
The Vanishing (1988)
A young couple stop at a gas station, but only one of them leaves. Gene Bervoets stars as a man whose girlfriend goes missing and becomes obsessed with solving her disappearance, and Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu co-stars as the calculating sociopath who begins stalking our hero. George Sluizer would go on to remake The Vanishing in English, in a version starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges, but the American version turns the terrifying finale into something rousing and false. The original is where the real terror is at.
Vengeance is Mine (1979)
One of the greatest, yet underappreciated serial killer movies, Shōhei Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine stars Ken Ogata as a monstrous human being, who slaughters his way through life, coldly and without consideration or remorse. The film teeters between engrossing crime drama and an objective exploration of the shallowness of evil, and Ken Ogata’s performance is one for the ages: an unforgettably despicable man, the likes of which have rarely been brought to such off-puttingly realistic life.
