The Movies’ Top Five Scariest Living Dead
In The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment not only sees dead people, he hears them as well. Bruce Willis, for his part, sees and hears what he wants to see and hear.
The Day of Dead ended on this meridian about five hours ago. But the Night of the Dead is still here. It isn’t quite midnight, yet. (It wasn’t; it took me longer to write this post than I expected. Even so, it isn’t midnight in Hawaii, yet.)
In honor of this Christianized pagan holiday — the pagans came up with some of the most important Christian holidays — below is my list of the movies’ Top Five Scariest Living Dead. By that I don’t mean actors, characters, or real-life people who just go through the motions while they’re on screen — or on this plane(t), for that matter — but real dead people who refuse to lie still.
I know, oftentimes it’s hard to differentiate the walking braindead from the walking dead, but I’m doing my best here. In case you have authenticated proof that one (or more) of those listed below were not dead when they scared the hell out of me, please drop me a line. I’ll remove them from this list and will instead include them in some other category come next Halloween.
Note: No Japanese horror movies are listed here because I avoid Japanese horror movies like the plague. I know myself. And I know I need to get some sleep at night.
Max Schreck in Nosferatu (1922)
Many consider F. W. Murnau’s 1927 romantic melodrama Sunrise to be his masterpiece. As far as I’m concerned, nothing Murnau did (that I’ve seen) beats Nosferatu, thanks in large part to Herr Schreck, the movies’ most undebonair vampire.
Peter Wyngarde (above, with young Martin Stephens) in The Innocents (1961)
I loved Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (adapted by Truman Capote from Henry James‘ The Turn of the Screw) when I first saw it as a kid. Admittedly, The Innocents is the kind of movie that could have turned this Catholic school student into a remorseless serial killer — what with incest, child sexuality, repressed female libido, and a highly eroticized male ghost (Peter Wyngarde) — except that my vulnerable psyche had already been ruined by another 1960s repressed sex-unrepressed ghost tale, The Haunting (1963). So, instead of becoming an insane murderer, I just developed an insane fear of the dark that haunts me to this day. Thank you, Peter Wyngarde.
Julian Beck in Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)
Brian Gibson’s Poltergeist II is probably one of the worst horror movies I’ve ever seen. But it did have one memorable sequence featuring avant-garde theater multitasker Julian Beck, who died in 1985 while working on the film. As a demonic Christian, Beck doesn’t do much in his brief role; his underplaying, however, ends up making his character’s malevolence all the spookier. In fact, I think Beck’s deeply wrinkled, gargoylish face — so much like that of a couple of priests at my Catholic school — is much scarier than the better-known, fully decorated mugs of, say, Jason, Freddy, or Norman Bates’ mom.
The voice recording in The Sixth Sense (1999)
Scarier than Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment (both above), the myriad plot holes, the phony melodrama, the dishonest ending, and the dead people you get to see was the dead person you don’t get to see in M. Night Shyamalan’s hugely successful The Sixth Sense. I’m referring to that voice in the recording that must be played backwards so you can hear a desperate Spanish-speaking man saying he doesn’t want to die. That almost killed me then and there.
It didn’t help matters that I was with a seance-ist friend who claimed he could sense "presences" in the movie theater. And that was in Century City — the old Fox backlot. Who was he sensing, I wondered. Betty Grable? Tyrone Power? Linda Darnell? Marilyn Monroe? Jane Darwell? And why did he have to tell me that?
Worst of all was that I had to spend that night alone in bed. Well, I take that back. I had hundreds of ghosts (Peter Wyngarde among them, of course) keeping me company in my head.
Junio Valverde in The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
When it comes to making my skin crawl while sitting in a movie theater, the pool scene near the end of Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone — in which a very young and very dead boy embraces horrified meanie Eduardo Noriega — takes the top prize. What a disturbing, macabre, ghoulish, sinister, creepy, eerie moment. I hope I’ve made it clear that I was scared fucking witless.
Come to think of it, there are other such moments in del Toro’s atmospheric film as well. In fact, Peeping Toms and Janes should avoid The Devil’s Backbone at all costs. Else, they’ll never want to look through a keyhole again.
Anyhow, I believe that The Devil’s Backbone was the very last horror movie I saw. That says something.
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Tags: Guillermo del Toro, Horror Movies, Jack Clayton, Julian Beck, Junio Valverde, M. Night Shyamalan, Max Schreck, Nosferatu the Vampire, Peter Wyngarde, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, The Devil's Backbone, The Innocents, The Sixth Sense
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