The critics were horrified!!!! 4 undervalued scary movies on DVD

You might say horror movies are the mutant black sheep of the cinema. Some film devotees deem them too ungainly and disreputable to be taken seriously, as if they were deformed, illegitimate stepchildren who should be quietly locked up in the attic and not talked about. And yet... and yet... I suppose you can dislike (if not quite dismiss) entire sub-genres -- Hollywood musicals, maybe, or biblical epics -- but I don't see how you can seriously call yourself a film lover if you don't have some appreciation for horror movies. After all, they are so near the core appeal of the medium: Was there ever a genre better suited for shadowplay, unspooling in the dark before the collective (un-)consciousness of a crowd of spectators?

Critics can be particularly rough on horror pictures. It's so easy -- too easy, sometimes -- to make these spook-shows sound risible and preposterous in synopsis, especially once you remove them from the darkness of the theater and examine them them in the harsh light of black and white newsprint (or monitor pixels). But the horror films I like best are not the abundantly bloody shockers critics love to loathe (though George Romero's extravagantly gory Grand Guignol "Dawn of the Dead" (1979) is a treasured favorite), but the ones that are the most atmospheric and creepy -- that suggest far more than they depict. In his playful rumination on all-things-horrific, Danse Macabre, Stephen King described the self-defeating psychological mechanism that's built into our response to most horror movies, where veiled threats must eventually be made more-or-less explicit. For example: after mounting apprehension about the fear we are about to confront, somebody eventually has to respond to the scratching sound at the door and throw it open -- only to reveal, before our terrified eyes ... a ten-foot-bug! And no sooner do we register that fear -- hairs standing erect on our necks, gooseflesh crawling up our arms -- than we begin assessing and processing it; in an instant, an equal-and-opposite reaction sets in, tinged with disappointment: "Oh," we think. "A ten-foot bug. That I can deal with. I was afraid it was going to be a hundred-foot bug!" No wonder so many horror movies carry with them a slight feeling of deflation the moment that rush of "I survived it!" adrenalin begins to dissipate. The most compelling horror films, for me, are are not just about bugs, no matter what the scale, but movies that work both sides of our brains simultaneously. They're about something besides flesh-and-blood monsters or zombies or things that go slash in the night.

Every horror movie is about mortality, the fear of death in all its forms, but the best ones delve deeper into thes universal terrors. The aforementioned "Dawn of the Dead," for example, which sees its suburban zombies, attracted to the mall like undead moths to an infernal flame, as a commentary on the nature of another deep, psychological hedge against the fear of death: acquisitiveness, capitalism, consumerism as a futile way of staving off the inevitable (or at least fooling yourself, on some level, into feeling you are). In philosophical terms: "I buy, therefore I am." This is precisely the dimension missing from the even gorier, but far less scary (and funny), 2004 non-Romero remake. What follows is a list of four horror films of which I am quite fond (that is, scared) -- films that give me shivers on the visceral and intellectual levels at the same time. The majority of mainstream critics loathed, ridiculed, or scoffed at them, one way or another, when they were first released (hey, they did the same to "Psycho," too), but which have either grown in critical stature over the years or are due for a critical re-assessment. Three of the four are, I submit, neglected masterworks. And they're all now available on DVD, too. So, if you appreciate horror films with higher aspirations, give these movies a chance. At the very worst you'll have an off-the-beaten-path and agree with the conventional wisdom of the time in which they were released; but you might just discover something neglected that retains the power to really opens your eyes.

(Oh, and be sure to register your own critical opinions about these and other movies discussed on RogerEbert.com by first signing up on the site and then going to the original reviews.)

(David Cronenberg, 1979) Cronenberg's third feature is one of his most fully realised -- a chilly and, well, brooding piece whose somber, atmospheric tone prefigures "Dead Ringers," "Naked Lunch," and "Crash (1997). Yes, it's a long-underrated masterpiece -- and I was thrilled that Canadian director Don McKellar ("Last Night") gave a special presentation of "The Brood" at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival. I myself did a similar presentation of "The Brood" at the American Film Institute back in 1988, and for the last ten years I've been trying to get Leonard Maltin to change the BOMB rating assigned to it in his Move and Video Guide -- but, so far, to no avail. (Reconsider, Leonard!) Even Roger Ebert, an admirer of Cronenberg's who gave the director's early "Shivers" (aka "They Came From Within") a positive review, wrote of the misunderstood "The Brood" in 1979: "Now here's a particularly nasty little number. "The Brood" is an el sleazo exploitation film, camouflaged by the presence of several well-known stars but guaranteed to nauseate you all the same...." He even called it "boring"! But forget, for a moment, that "The Brood" is a genre piece; it's a deeply serious film about the terrible legacy parents may leave their children, the passing down of physical and psychological damage from one generation to the next. Wounds to the psyche (from divorce and other traumas experienced by the kids) emerge in later years as physiological symptoms: alcoholism, depression, neurological skin conditions, cancers. Cronenberg reputedly wrote it in the middle of his own bitter divorce and child custody battle and, like the emotionally fractured nuclear mommy Nola Carveth (played by Samantha Eggar) here, he gave shape to his own nearly inexpressible rage through his filmmaking. Horror movies don't get more personal, more intimate than this one. "The Brood" begins as an inspired satire of 1970s psychological "therapy" cults, with best-selliing author (The Shape of Rage) and new-age therapist Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) treating, through role-playing, a patient who was emotionally abused by his father, the man-child's repressed agony manifesting itself in the form of skin lesions. At the wonderfully named "Institute for Psychoplasmics," patients are encouraged to express their innermost anguish and unexpressed fury in ways that (to borrow a phrase from Cronenberg's comparably brilliant "Videodrome") are "made flesh." In a nod to Nicolas Roeg's great "Don't Look Now" (also about parents, children, and family grief), Nola literally gives birth to "children of rage" who act out her long-stifled anger with her estranged parents (also divorced), her ex-husband, and perhaps even her young daughter.

To quote from McKellar's notes in the 2004 Toronto programme: “'The Brood' got under my skin (to put it Cronenberg-ianly) not just because it exposed me to an illicit world of transgressive, exhilarating cinema, but because it taught me the secret of great horror – allegory. It showed me how someone could transform personal pain – and the subject was clearly autobiographical – into imaginative, grotesque, liberating metaphor. In fact that’s pretty much the plot of the film: unresolved emotions from an ugly divorce give birth, quite literally, to terrifying manifestations.

“It was also the first film I recognized as undeniably Canadian. Unnervingly so. The all-too-familiar architecture, the design style, the gestalt of seventies psycho-slang: all were exploited, brilliantly, for maximum creep effect. And what other film, before or since, has captured so chillingly the horror – the horror! – of snowsuits?”

Other recommended Cronenberg films: "They Came From Within" (aka "Shivers"), "Scanners," "The Dead Zone," "The Fly," "Videodrome," "Dead Ringers," "Naked Lunch," "Crash" (1997), "Spider"...

(Roman Polanski, 1976) Coming on the heels of "Chinatown" -- that rarest of rarities: a mainstream masterpiece that's as close as the movies ever get to perfection -- it's not hard to understand why Roman Polanski's "The Tenant" was dismissed as a grotesque disaster. Even Roger Ebert wrote: "'The Tenant''s not merely bad -- it's an embarrassment." Well, it's certainly queasily embarrassing at times -- since it chronicles the Kafkaesque humiliation and utter dissolution of a naive and timid creature (played by Polanski himself). I think it's also a masterpiece -- though unlike "Chinatown" it's a deliberately (and deliciously) awkward and uncomfortable one. The most Polish of Polanski's features (even the only one actually shot in Poland, his debut "Knife in the Water"), "The Tenant" is steeped in dank, Eastern European melancholy and absurdity -- mostly set in and around the carcass of a once-grand Paris apartment house that has wilted and gone to seed, gorgeously photographed by Sven Nykvist in various shades of mildew and decay. The dizzying, spiraling opening shot -- catching shadows and glimpsed reflections of spooky, furtive figures in the darkened, lace-curtained windows facing the building's interior courtyard as it descends to the pavement (figuratively tracing the trajectory of the movie's title character -- bears comparison to the ledgendariy serpentine camerawork at the beginning of "Touch of Evil" and "The Player." The title character is a milky little man named Monsieur Trelovsky, a relative of Kafka's Joseph K. (as well as the buggy protagonist of "The Metamorphosis") and Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, cowed and bullied at every turn by everyone he encounters -- not just authority figures but waiters, co-workers, fellow tenants, even total strangers -- who moves into the apartment of a woman who has recently thrown herself out of the window. The flat has all the charm of a rotting corpse, with "new" plumbing that rattles and groans like a body in its death throes, and a convenient view of the toilet across the courtyard/abyss (yes, this is a major plumbing movie), which is down and around the corridor, and which always seems to be occupied by strange people just ... staring -- sometimes directly back at him. What happens is, the tenant (being none too solid a personality himself) inevitably but unwittingly starts to take on characteristics of the apartment's previous occupant. Indeed, the stifling atmosphere -- any little thing he does seems to generate complaints from the neighbors -- seems to give him little room to move. It's as if everyone around him has cast him in this role, and he is helpless to assert his own identity. (One delicious touch is so subtle you almost miss it: M. Trelovsky orders a martini in a cafe, but when he returns to his table and starts sipping his drink, it's brown and in a tall glass. He doesn't raise a word of complaint, just accepts reality on anyone else's terms but his own.) The movie is cut from the same personality-unravelling fabric as Bergman's "Persona" and Altman's "Three Women," and similarly explores confounding questions of individuality and identity. "At what precise mjoment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is? " wonders M. Trelovsky, hypothesizing about the meaning of various forms of dismemberment, including (literally) losing his head. "If you cut off my head, what do I say: me and my head or me and my body? What right does my head have to call itself 'me.' " The "tenant" of the title is really what we might call a personality or a soul. So is M. Trelovsky inhabiting his apartment, or is it (or its previous occupant) inhabiting him? The peculiar dubbing job into American -- not English, American -- actually adds to the disconcerting sense of dislocation. The climax -- with M. Trelovsky in drag, bloodied and broken, dragging himself up the spiral stairs as if stuck in a Sisyphean suicide-loop (how's that for a nihilistic metaphor for existence?) -- is indeed horrifically funny. "The Tenant" is a comedy as much as it is a horror film, a paranoiac giggle in the manner of Kafka and Dostoyevsky -- and one that might also remind you of the Coen brothers' "Barton Fink" (which was inspired by "The Tenant," and which won the 1991 Palme d'Or at Cannes from a jury headed by Roman Polanski, a quarter century after "The Tenant" itself met a disastrous reception at the same festival). Wonder what was in that box Barton carries out of the ruins of the Hotel Earle at the end of "Barrton Fink"? If you've seen "The Tenant" you will have little doubt about its contents... P.S. Frequent collaborators Polanski and Gerard Brach based their screenplay for "The Tenant" on a novel by Roland Torpor, whom movie fans will remember as the insane, bug-eating Renfield in Werner Herzog's "Nosferatu."