24 hours of horror with Edgar Wright

6pm
"My first one, which is a film I think is fantastic, is David Cronenberg’s The Brood. So we’re in our infant stage at the moment. Not to give too much away to people who haven’t seen the movie, but it does climax in a mass birthing scene of sorts. I always think The Brood is an underrated Cronenberg film, because even though he had some famous early hits, there’s a certain portion of critics who didn’t sit up and take notice until Videodrome. The Brood is my favorite Cronenberg film, even though I love a lot of the others. I think it’s the first one of his films where his visuals start to match his ideas. And the concept is really strong, and the metaphor is really strong. And it still really is a bleak and shocking watch by today’s standards. I’ve seen it on video a bunch of times, but when I was in Toronto making Scott Pilgrim, I showed it at the Bloor Cinema. And it was really powerful on the big screen. It really still works. I actually met David Cronenberg and tried to discuss it with him a little bit, and it seemed like the actual subject matter was too painful for him to talk about still."

7:30pm
"So the next one is one of my favorite films of all time, Don’t Look Now. It’s more of a supernatural tale. It is a horror movie, but not by today’s standards, in that it doesn’t really unfold with murder and carnage every 20 minutes. It’s actually topped and tailed by its most shocking sequences. Certainly the opening sequence, with the death of Donald Sutherland’s and Julie Christie’s daughter—that’s not too much of a spoiler, because it’s in the first five minutes—is very distressing to watch. And the performances of the grieving Christie and Sutherland are so powerful. I remember watching it when I was really young and it was on TV....

Nicolas Roeg does that great trick of having a potted version of the rest of the film in the first five minutes. It’s a prologue that basically encompasses the entire theme, and prefigures the ending in a number of ways. I think there’s just absolutely brilliant editing throughout as well. Not many supernatural films stand up to Don’t Look Now, because back in the day, you might have two Oscar nominees and the hottest director around making a genre film. It’s immediately in a different pedigree to what you get most of the time now. I could just watch it again and again."

9:30pm
"I’m only going a little bit older. I’m cheating a little bit. I’m calling those two, Brood and Don’t Look Now, the infant stage. So now we’re going to schoolchildren, which is next. We’re still keeping it classy for the moment—it’ll get weirder later. I’m going for Jack Clayton’s The Innocents next. It’s a beautiful, beautiful film....

A lot of films have been inspired by The Innocents, particularly The Others, with Nicole Kidman. It’s a really poetic film, almost dreamlike. I’ll admit I’ve never read The Turn Of The Screw, and I really should—but what I love about the film is that the kids, Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens, are particularly spooky. Because they are not bad kids, but they may have been corrupted by evil. Deborah Kerr is a nanny put in charge of these children in a lush but lonely country manor where her predecessor died in mysterious circumstances. The riddle of the film is how much the kids, if at all, are possessed by spirits haunting the place.

What’s truly spooky about it, especially for a film with child actors made in 1961, is that it hints at some very dark sexual goings-on. Part of it is the time and what you couldn’t say in 1961. You had to choose your words carefully, which ends up leaving a lot more to the imagination, and it seeming even more perverse."

11:15pm
"It’s basically about this British couple on holiday in Spain who get a boat over to this smaller, rustic island and can find no adults anywhere on the island. It’s kind of like The Birds, only with young kids, where there’s little or no explanation for what’s going on, other than anyone under 10 is deeply evil and murderous. It’s an amazingly intense movie. What’s great about it is it’s all shot on location and all with natural light, so it hasn’t really dated. In fact, the cinematography is by [Pedro] Almodóvar’s regular DP, José Luis Alcaine. It’s 1976, but aside from some flared trousers in places, it feels very contemporary."

1am
We’re now in the lovers stage, and my favorite horror movie of all time: Brian De Palma’s 1976 film Carrie. The reason I love Carrie so dearly is because I feel like it’s a horror film that absolutely anybody can watch and enjoy. Maybe enjoy is the wrong word, but I think everybody can relate to it. You sympathize with the main character so much, which is unusual for horror, which frequently has no characters to truly care about. Another great thing about Carrie is that it almost plays like horror’s Grease, in that everybody can watch Carrie and say, “Oh, I was that person,” or “I was that person.” You were either the bullied, the bullier, the person who stood by and did nothing, or the person who tried to help. It’s an amazing movie. I only recently read the book, and it gave me more appreciation for the adaptation by Lawrence Cohen, because in the book, they have a lot more of the city-wide rampage. Basically, the second half of the book is Carrie blowing the town to smithereens. But because of budget, the film wisely climaxes at the prom. My favorite moment in Carrie is the lead-up to the bucket of blood falling, where it totally becomes opera.

Brian De Palma is at his best when he becomes almost like a silent filmmaker, where the plot mechanics are all in action, and it can just play out like a horrible dance of death. And the section setting up the geography of the prom, and where the bucket of blood is, and where the rope is, and who’s holding it, and P.J. Soles swapping the ballots, and Tommy Ross and Carrie White walking up to the stage is glorious. All set to that Pino Donaggio cue called “Bucket Of Blood.” I love it. It’s just amazing. One of my favorite sequences in cinema. So brilliantly conceived and edited. The score is perfect. I love this movie. If I had made something like Carrie, I’d probably retire. It’s just absolute pop perfection.

2:40am
"So we’re still in the lovers phase. I’m going to go with an Australian film called Long Weekend from 1978. And this is another film that until recently had been a little forgotten. Now, the young couple in this, unlike Carrie, are completely unsympathetic. One of the criticisms against the film—but also the central theme—is that the couple are horrible and deserve everything they get, but that’s part of the joy of the movie. It’s basically about a young couple on a weekend camping trip in the outback in Australia, and they show total disrespect to nature. They don’t help a dying whale. They run over animals. They start a bush fire. So they commit all these crimes against nature, and then nature fights back. The rest of the movie is… well, if you imagine the film Furry Vengeance, but extremely bleak and with a ’70s ending, and genuinely terrifying, then you’ve got Long Weekend. If you can imagine that."

4:10am
"If it’s 4:10 a.m., then people are getting a bit woozy. My next one is my joker in the pack, where it doesn’t really fit in with my stages of man. Well, in Shakespeare, stage number four is the soldier. If I may, I’m going to interpret that as “young professional” as well. I think that’s fair enough, because not everybody gets drafted anymore, and this is about a young man in a new job. I want to use the 1972 anthology film Asylum, which is one of the Amicus movies. The British studio Amicus Productions were rivals to Hammer Films. They mostly made anthology movies, all of which are really good fun: Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors, Tales From The Crypt, the 1972 version, which is great, Torture Garden, The House That Dripped Blood, The Vault Of Horror, From Beyond The Grave, and also The Monster Club, I think that’s one of theirs. But Asylum is my favorite one. It’s written by Robert Bloch, who wrote Psycho. It has an amazing cast in it, as well: Within the four tales and the framing story, we have Robert Powell, Charlotte Rampling, Britt Ekland, Herbert Lom, Peter Cushing. It’s an amazing cast. Patrick Magee is in this one, Sylvia Syms is in it. It’s just really good fun....

The stories themselves are really good fun: There’s killer toy robots in there. There’s a tailor who fashions a special cloth that can bring people back from the dead. There’s a person who gets dismembered, wrapped up in brown paper, and then comes back to life, and you see the different wrapped-up parts coming back to life. And of course there’s Rampling, who has an imaginary evil friend in Britt Ekland. I love anthology films, and this one is particularity good—all of the stories are memorable, and the framing story is really good as well."

5:40am
"This is perfect for the sun coming up, because this is Dawn Of The Dead from 1978. Which at least fits the soldier section of the seven ages perfectly. This, obviously, is a big influence on me, and it should be a good one to watch at 5:40 a.m. I always feel it’s like a great desert-island movie. It’s more like a Robin Crusoe movie than a horror film. It’s got more of that element of survival. In Dawn Of The Dead, you only have a main cast of four, and unlike nearly every other zombie film, you don’t really want any of them to die—even the cocky one, Roger, who’s really asking for it at several points in the film. You really care when they’re in peril, because there are so few of them.

Me and Simon Pegg bonded when we first met over our love for Dawn Of The Dead. For a long time in the UK, the film had been unavailable. I can’t remember if it was banned, or there was some copyright issue, but I remember reading about Dawn Of The Dead in the late ’70s and not being able to see it on VHS until the early ’90s. It was one of those films where the anticipation of seeing this film I’d read so much about was actually met by the film itself. In fact, it even surpassed it.

I feel like Dawn Of The Dead is one of those films where it’s not always particularly brilliantly made, but there’s such ambition and so many ideas that it feels truly epic. I especially like any sequence where George Romero goes into montage mode and shows his commercial and documentary roots. Those sequences where you just observe the zombies trying to recall their former lives, overlaid with the TV newscaster’s somber hypothesis, are spellbinding. Even though the makeup is not state-of-the-art, certainly not compared to Day Of The Dead, it doesn’t really matter, because the tone of the whole adventure is so exciting, it all feels so vivid.

I feel like it’s one of those films that I’d kind of like to live in. It’s an end-of-the-world movie, but it kind of looks like it might be fun to be in Dawn Of The Dead for real. And I think that’s why that film inspired so many of those videogames. I really think it’s Romero more than anyone that inspired so many shoot-’em-ups, because there was that survival element mixed in with the genre."

7:45am
"I’m going to pick The Omen as the next movie. I have reasons for picking it as my adult film, even though most people would say it’s a film about a child. When I saw the remake of this movie, one of the things that stood out for me as not really working is that they did that modern Hollywood thing of casting way too young. Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles really wanting a kid didn’t have as much resonance as the more veteran Gregory Peck and Lee Remick wanting a kid. And that’s the setup of the whole movie. That’s why Gregory Peck lies and accepts this mysterious orphan he knows nothing of, is because he and Remick don’t have another chance to start a family. The whole movie hinges on that little white lie at the start, and spirals into the apocalyptic.

I truly love this movie, and while I think it’s maybe not as serious-minded as The Exorcist, that makes it all the more fun for me. The Omen seems to me like the perfect airport-novel movie. Something about it has a great pulpy paperback feel, and it works as a breathless page-turner. The film was a big moneymaker, too, one that I think really perfected the science of the contemporary setpiece. While there are show-stoppers in earlier horror films, The Omen really nails the pace of having a big horror setpiece every reel. It plays like a greatest-hits collection."

9:40am
"I’m going for another mature couple, but a very different one, as far removed from Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as possible. I’m going to go for Everett McGill and Wendy Robie in Wes Craven’s People Under The Stairs. It’s another film that I feel is underrated. It is my favorite Wes Craven film. I think it’s really strong, and it’s a great little suburban Grimm’s fairy tale. I was never all that crazy about the Nightmare On Elm Street films, save for parts three and seven, maybe. I think I like the idea of the concept more than I like the movies. But this film stands out because of the tight structure, the single location, which he makes interesting for the whole film. I’m kind of a sucker for any film with hidden passageways and slides and booby traps. I remember seeing this at the cinema when it first came out, and thinking it was really good. Watching it again recently, I still think it’s a really solid film."

11am
"It’s so beautifully shot. I can only assume it was the Let The Right One In of 1971. It’s really smart and artful. A gorgeous vampire film all around. I’m sure if I had been a teenage boy when I first saw this, I would have been completely overexcited at the promise of erotic vampire shenanigans. While there’s definitely plenty of this, what elevates it into another class is Delphine Seyrig, who plays Elizabeth Bathory. Her performance is just great. It’s basically about a young married couple on their honeymoon who check into this fancy out-of-season hotel on the Belgium coast. And then another couple checks in, a mysterious Hungarian countess and her young female “secretary.”

The scene where the seemingly ageless Bathory meets the concierge at the hotel and he remembers her from when he was a little boy at the hotel 40 years before is just genius. I don’t see that that director did a great deal else, which is a shame, because this one bridges that gap between the very arty Roman Polanski or Ingmar Bergman horror movies, and the more campy, sexy vampire films of the time. It’s a great movie. I know it was a big cult film in the ’70s, but it’s a shame that not enough people know about it now."

12:40pm
"Still in the elderly stage. I’m going to go for a film about wanting eternal youth: John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, which is a great movie, extremely creepy, and also quite groundbreaking. John Randolph plays a man in late middle age who needs some pep in his life, and goes to a secret organization called The Company that can help wealthy people disappear and become somebody new. And thus he becomes Rock Hudson. I really love this movie. This is a great spooky morality tale. It’s also made at a point in the ’60s when John Frankenheimer’s visuals was getting quite avant-garde. James Wong Howe shot the film, and it’s probably one of the first instances of the now-oft-used body camera in a studio film, which is something a lot of people assume was first used in Mean Streets, also known as the Spike Lee shot where you attach the camera to the actor. I might be wrong, but certainly one of the earlier instances of this is in Seconds, in the opening sequence. It’s another one I feel doesn’t get as much play anymore, and it’s really, really strong, and has got a great dark twist."

2:15pm (aka Death Line)
"Basically, it’s about this family of cannibals descended from Victorian railway workers who got trapped in the London Underground in a collapsed tunnel, and they’ve managed to exist over many years through incest and cannibalism. And now Hugh Armstrong is the final cannibal man in the line. His wife has just died, and he goes on a murderous rampage. He finds his way back into the London Underground and starts killing people in the Russell Square tube station. Donald Pleasence is the anti-hippie, right-wing cop on the case, and he has some hilarious Pinter-esque dialogue, straight out of The Caretaker or something. As the cannibal man, Hugh Armstrong can only say the phrases “Mind the doors,” which he howls very loudly. But he has an amazing scene where he’s trying to communicate with the female lead, Sharon Gurney, and he does this very emotive scene where he only says “Mind the doors” over and over. He goes from sympathetic to terrifying, and it’s a really good performance. It’s kind of a silly idea, but Hugh Armstrong’s performance of this conceit is just brilliant. He’s just great in the movie. A classic monster role."

3:45pm
"The next one is still on death, and it features John Carradine looking about a million years old. It’s my Michael Winner film, 1977’s The Sentinel. I guess after The Exorcist and The Omen did so well, major studios were just green-lighting any successful horror novel with some pretty big budgets. I think this novel, written by Jeffery Konvitz, was written as a screenplay, turned into a novel, and then picked up to be made into a film. Firstly, I had always thought of this as something of a camp classic, because there are several unintentionally funny bits in the movie, but to be fair, there are some genuinely creepy things in it. And, as usual, Michael Winner knows no bounds in terms of taste."

5:15pm
"My seven ages of man are over, and so we go into a final film with the theme of reincarnation. And this is also where everything kind of collapses, and we’ve gone full circle from classy 24 hours ago into the unintentional, amazing, mind-blowing hilarity is the 1978 film The Manitou....

The Manitou is a completely trashy film, and I’m sure the novel by Graham Masterton, one of those pulpy post-Exorcist books, probably reads as really, really scary. Whenever I read about it as a kid, I’d just think, “That film sounds amazing.” When you actually see it, they don’t really have the effects or the visuals to pull it off. But there are moments in it that are very strange, and work in terms of, “That’s a memorable image, I’m not going to forget that one.” Tony Curtis is the star; he plays a charlatan psychic who doesn’t believe in himself and has to overcome his own demons to beat Misquamacas. And the ending of the film takes place in another dimension. Which is always nice.

So I thought at the end of this 24-hour journey, the fact that we end up in some kind of strange inner-space inside a San Francisco hospital would be a fitting end."