25 TERRIFIC HALLOWEEN FILMS

This list is alphabetical by title. Three of the films are included in my list of the 100 greatest films; these are double asterisked. Eight others are included in other 100-best lists of mine (100 Greatest Films from Germany & Scandinavia, 100 Greatest English-Language Films, 100 Greatest Asian Films, and the 100 Best French list that I am currently working on). These titles are single-asterisked.

Arsenic and Old Lace (Capra)
*The Black Cat (Ulmer)
*The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene)
Cat People (Tourneur)
The Chess Player (Bernard)
Dead of Night (Cavalcanti, Hamer et al.)
*Epidemic (Trier)
*Eyes Without a Face (Franju)
The Fearless Vampire Killers (Polanski)
Hour of the Wolf (Bergman)
The Innocents (Clayton)
*Jonathan (Geissendörfer)
*K[w]aidan (Kobayashi)
*Lost Highway (Lynch)
**Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)
The Mummy (Freund)
*Nosferatu (Murnau)
**Psycho (Hitchcock)
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Queen of Spades (Dickinson)
The Spiral Staircase (Siodmak)
Tell Me Something (Chang)
The Tenant (Polanski)
Trouble Every Day (Denis)
**Vampyr (Dreyer)

OFFSIDE (Jafar Panahi, 2006)

Beautifully written (along with Shadmehr Rastin), directed and edited by Jafar Panahi, Offside is a very funny sports comedy that builds to a heart-walloping finish, one of cinema’s most brilliant moments of liberation and robust freedom: young women, who had been prevented from viewing the game in the Tehran stadium, participating in a street celebration over Iran’s victory in a qualifying match for the World Cup. At the stadium these gals, masquerading as guys, had tried to sneak in but were confined out of range of all but earshot of the game by military guards, who afterwards were transporting them to the local police. But the film ends with the girls no longer “offside” but part of the crowd, one approaching the camera with sparklers and a dazzling smile. For all the political possibility to which this “ending” looks ahead, this is the most jubilant time I have had watching a movie in a long time.
     Panahi’s unexpected comedy—Panahi is the superlative filmmaker of The Circle (2000) and Crimson Gold (2003), both very dark and dramatic—is the result of his own attempt to bring his daughter to a game. Every Iranian father should take his daughter to see this film. Despite its worldwide praise and Silver Bear at Berlin, that is not possible. Perhaps it will become possible when all genders are allowed into the stadium.
     Much of the film is taken up with the confrontations between country soldiers and their city captives, who are much the more sophisticated, sharp-tongued and witty, and knowledgeable about soccer. A crisis occurs when one girl, escorted to the male bathroom, escapes. Meanwhile, the crowd’s roar can be heard accompanying the invisible game.
     In soccer, one is “offside” in crossing the last line of defense without the ball.

DEATHWATCH (Michael J. Bassett, 2002)

British writer-director Michael J. Bassett’s creepy, inflated Deathwatch gives the heart a few real jumps before dissolving into its foggy resolution. It follows a fearful, stressed-out World War I British company on the western front as an unseen enemy, possibly a supernatural force, takes it down soldier by soldier, even turning them murderously against one another. It’s a spooky haunted house thriller, where the “house” is a muddy, corpse-filled German trench, and that genre’s bloodier descendant, the slasher flick, also hovers about. It suggests a great film, John Ford’s The Lost Patrol (1934), but by way of an incredibly lousy one, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979); and, although Bassett’s film shifts sides and world wars, Rob Green’s The Bunker (2001) also comes into play.
     Fog is a recurrent motif; characters appear from and disappear into it, lost souls in some unchartable place. Indeed, they don’t know where they are, and Bassett drops in a dozen hints that the entire company is dead without yet knowing it. Only one of them, an underaged private named Shakespeare(?!), treats their German prisoner with respect and concern. Little do the Brits know that “their prisoner” is actually a cosmic test of their capacity to hold onto their humanity. Pretty much everyone fails the test.
     Bassett, of course, is indicting war; the horror genre is enlisted to give full vision to the theme of war’s horror. Bassett and his cutter, Anne Sopel, have fun mismatching shots so that we lose our bearings and feel, along with the film’s characters, something of the chaos of war. Still, the overall impression made by this gruesome film is one of tackiness.
     In one strikingly good scene, Shakespeare, on guard duty, whistles “Silent Night” in the silent night. In war, silence isn’t peaceful. Nothing is.