MIND OVER MATTER

If a random poll was conducted to compile a list of cinematic names that instantly evoke terror, surely many of the same names would come up over and over again. In the two name category there’d be Michael Myers, Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees, Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter and perhaps even Darth Vader. In the single name category, Pinhead, Leatherface, Jigsaw and Candyman don’t count as those are all nicknames, but there’s still Chucky, Damien, Dracula and Frankenstein to complete a top ten list.

For Hollywood genre screenplay writer Stephen Susco, the names Benson and Hector would probably need to be honorable mentions. Who the hell are they? Hector is the 8-foot robot in the 1980 science fiction film “Saturn 3,” which starred Kirk Douglas. Benson was the name of Harvey Keitel’s character, who reprograms the android, thus sharing his homicidal nature and lust for Farrah Fawcett’s character Alex.

“I would have the worst nightmare about that film,” Susco admits. “Just the whole concept of this thing that moves real slowly, but eventually it’s going to get you and you have nowhere to go - that scared the hell out of me.”

“I literally destroyed my video store’s copy of ‘Saturn 3’ because I would rent it every other week,” Susco adds. “Finally I just wore it down. I watch it now and I’m just, ‘Okay, come on. It’s not that scary.’ But I saw it before I saw ‘Day of the Dead,’ ‘Dawn of the Dead’ or any of the Romero films and it got to me. Of course, once I saw the zombie movies the nightmares were then in full force.”

So perhaps“Saturn 3” doesn’t have quite the same effect it once did on Susco. The writer of “The Grudge,” one of PollyStaffle.com’s favorite PG-13 horror films, and its sequel, which is a part of the Starz 24-hour Fear Fest on October 26, is mostly into thinking man’s horror. He admits to having seen every one of the films in the classic franchises – “Halloween,” “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” but says slice and dice movies and blood and gore dosn’t really work on him too often. “I love those franchises, but slasher films have never been my favorites,” Susco said. “If I was on a desert island, there are other movies I’d pull ahead of most of them.”

“Jaws,” “Poltergeist,” “The Omen,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Sixth Sense” and “28 Days Later” are a few favorites he’d bring along to an island. But at the top of his recommended Halloween watches are some of his formative influences like “The Haunting.” No, not the one with Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Owen Wilson. The original black and white film directed by Robert Wise in 1963.

“That is a very frightening movie,” Susco said. Not only is the classic based on Shirley Jackson’s novel “The Haunting of Hill House” scary, Susco also feels it is worth a look for aspiring horror writers and directors. “It should be mandatory,” Susco said. “It shows you how you can create horror out of nothing. You don’t need gore. You don’t need visual effects. It flies in the face of where horror has gone. It shows you don’t need a lot to dress it up. Horror can be very simple and small, and be absolutely terrifying.”

While “The Haunting” was able to terrify with its simplicity, Susco says “Jacob’s Ladder” showed him how the genre is not a closed system. “Horror is not just guys walking around with knives,” Susco said. “It can be about horror of the soul.” The 1990 Adrian Lyne film starred Tim Robbins as a traumatized Vietnam war veteran. “That movie blew me away,” Susco said. “It’s the only movie I ever left during the end titles, bought another ticket and went right back in. I had never done that before and I’ve never done that since.”

“The Shinning” was another big influence on Susco. The 1980 Stanley Kubrick film, based on a Stephen King novel, starred Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. The story shows evil influencing the father into violence while the family is at an isolated hotel for the winter. Susco said the films shows how to effectively use horror of the silences and very deliberate slow pacing.

Then there’s Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror classic “Alien,” which Susco even referenced ever so slightly with the opening scene in “The Grudge.” “Killing off Bill Pullman was an idea I had that was a nod to ‘Alien,’” Susco said. “It’s a slight nod of the hat at killing off the recognizable actors and having the survivor be a face you had never seen before. It was just a tip of the hat to that. Of course nobody got that, but that’s okay.”

The creature feature starred Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt and Ian Holm, and made its own rules in scaring audiences. “It was so different,” Susco said. “The first 45 minutes of that movie are so slow like ‘The Shinning,’ but they really work. It was also perfect expression of the rule: the less you see, the more frightening it is.”

Though John Carpenter is best known for using that same rule in his 1978 masterpiece “Halloween,” Susco is bigger on his 1982 film “The Thing,” which took an opposite approach. “The Thing” has been called “a carnival of fun gooey times” by John Fallon at ArrowInTheHead.com, with “a bullet in the head, self-inflicted scalpel wounds, bit off arms” and a slew of “over-the-top and totally crazy creature-at-play effect set pieces.”

“It was the first movie I was not able to finish watching,” Susco admits. “When the dog’s face peeled back, I ran out of the room. I could not handle that visual. It was just so terrifying, evocative, mysterious and unexplainable.”

Of the more recent horror films, Susco recommends “Kairo,” “Session 9” and “The Descent.” Susco, who played a huge part in getting Ghost House Pictures to take a chance on turning Takashi Shimizu’s “Ju-on” into “The Grudge,” was involved very early in the advisory stage of “Pulse,” an English remake of “Kairo.” He also did a surgical edit on the script, which was co-written by Wes Craven and Ray Wright, before Jim Sonzero shot the film. “Only one line that I created got used in the movie,” Susco said. “And it was in the trailer.”

Though many were disappointed with “Pulse,” Susco calls Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 original truly extraordinary and describes it as being about the dead spilling over into the land of the living and what takes place when that happens. “Watch it at night with the sound way up and don’t be tired,” Susco said. “It’s a very slow movie, but that is part of the magic. So much of it is about the pacing. People are really torn on this one, but to me it is probably the best of the Asian horror movies that I have seen. It’s the one that shook me the most.”

“It’s a lot different than ‘Ringu,’” adds Susco, comparing “Kairo” to Hideo Nakata’s 1998 film that “The Ring” was based on. “The interesting thing about ‘Ringu’ is it’s actually a very western horror film. It’s completely subverted at the end of the movie, but it is still pretty western. ‘Kairo’ is very uniquely Asian.”

“Session 9” is another 2001 film Susco is big on. Directed by Brad Anderson, “Session 9” focuses on an asbestos cleaning crew in an abandoned mental hospital. David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, Paul Guilfoyle, Josh Lucas, Peter Mullan and Brendan Sexton III star in the psychological thriller with the tagline “Fear is a place.”

“What Brad Anderson did with that movie was so remarkable,” Susco said. “It’s great. Every time I pop it in, it unnerves the hell out of me.”

Neil Marshall’s 2005 cave adventure “The Descent” had a similar effect on Susco. He called the film, which was essentially a girl power campout gone horribly wrong, brilliant and went as far to say its former editor turned director is “out of this world.”

“I think the claustrophobia that he visualized, the way he shot it and the sense of dread that he built very, very slowly was really brave,” Susco said. “He took what could otherwise be a very common trope - six people go into a cave and something happens to them down there - and he brought a directorial vision that created so much depth around what that movie was. It was one of the most visceral and frightening theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. The first half had no creatures in it, but I was on the edge of my seat.”

Despite a great deal of respect for Susco, PollyStaffle.com has to disagree with him on “The Descent.” We inform Susco that we’ve always seen it as a remake of “The Goonies.” He laughs. “That’s one of the things I love about the horror genre,” Susco said. “It’s most devoted fans will come to blows over movies. Two people that ravenously and equally love horror will fight each other over a movie that one guy thinks blows chunks and the other guy thinks is absolutely genius.”

“A lot of people I know absolutely detested ‘Blair Witch’ and didn’t find it scary at all,” Susco adds. “It’s a film that there’s a lot of division over and to me that’s the key to a really good horror film. Some people are going to really like it and some aren’t. ‘The Descent’ got me big time and so did ‘Blair Witch.’ I thought they were really unique.”

- CCF, October 2007