Night of Nights

I've been asked what I'd screen as one of Turner Classic Movies' guest programmers. My first instinct is to program a night of Nights (featuring absolutely nothing by M. Night Shyamalan).

• Night of the Living Dead (1968): One of my all-time favorites. A seminal horror film and simply great movie, it ushered in a new cycle for the genre, one featuring an almost documentary approach, graphic violence and a bleak (read: realistic) view of human nature. If, during the Vietnam era, you had feared that the United States, if not the world, was going mad, that it was coming apart at its seams, you'd find no comfort whatsoever in George Romero's masterpiece. His zombies only accelerated the process by clawing at the social fabric along with everybody else. Some programmers might hold this title over for the midnight or cult-film slot, but it would be my centerpiece. Watch this space (without holding your breath) for a more detailed assessment.


• Night of the Demon (1957): Speaking of detailed assessments, I have already discussed this title, the British -- and extended -- version of the stateside Curse of the Demon, at some length here. This film, which resides at the nexus of horror and noir, features a guy (Dana Andrews) and a girl (the fetching Peggy Cummins, who, as Shandon notes, also co-stars in the delightfully lurid Gun Crazy) endeavoring to get to the bottom of a supernatural mystery and has inspired me to create, along with Shandon, a story involving those basic elements.


• The Night of the Hunter (1955): A wonderful American Gothic nightmare and the only feature-length directorial effort by Charles Laughton, renowned British actor and professional weirdo. (That's a compliment, by the way, as I aspire to that level of strangeness. And he married the Beard -- I mean, Bride of Frankenstein!) Shandon has featured this movie as part of her evening of noir, and I fondly recall the evening we saw it together on the big screen. The film is sui generis, occurring not in any real-world locale, but in a highly stylized and symbolic representation of the darkest recesses of our individual and collective imaginations. A place where we are frightened children fleeing a dark force as much as we are that dark force itself. I'm still haunted, in particular, by a lingering underwater image. Brutal, exhilarating and heartbreaking.

Finally, I do have a midnight-movie double feature. The first is Night of the Creeps (1986), in which these sluglike parasites enter their victims' mouths, rendering their hosts zombies (the homicidal, Romeroesque variety of zombie, not the lobotomized Britney Spears VMA-performance strain). Bodily invasion is central to sci-fi horror -- think Alien and a good portion of the Cronenberg oeuvre -- but Creeps is just good, silly, late-night, late-slasher era fun. (Cool tagline: "The good news is your date is here. The bad news is . . . he's dead." Perhaps not as uncommon as the filmmakers thought.) Many of the victims are campus Greeks, too, so there's that to recommend it as well. The second half of the double feature is Night of the Lepus (1972), featuring personal fave Janet Leigh, along with Rory Calhoun and that "Bones" guy from Star Trek. The plot is simply and breathlessly detailed on IMDb: "Giant mutant rabbits terrorize the southwest!!" I have nothing to add.