DEN OF GEEK CRITICS’ PICKS
The Ninth Gate
Though director Roman Polanski is a horrific figure himself, this 1999 neo-noir horror film, The Ninth Gate is superb. Thirty years after Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski conjured the devil once again and injected it with some of the pulp from his noir classic Chinatown in a movie that finds Johnny Depp as a man in Satanic Detective mode. Depp is a classic book authenticator hired to authenticate De Umbrarum Regis Novum Portis (The Nine Doors To the Kingdom of Shadows), a book believed by cultists capable of raising Satan to Earth.
The Ninth Gate doesn’t provide cheap thrills; it tightens the suspense like a noose. Polanski subtly creates an uneasy atmosphere using minimal effects. The director knows where evil lives and lets the settings and sound make the invitations with subliminal references to recognizable horror and cinematic danger, using framing and music similarly to Stanley Kubrick. The Ninth Gate packages its scares with classy style that the characters deliver with sexily provocative intelligence. Dean Corso may be Johnny Depp’s greatest spiritual transformation, from odious to ultimate evil and the audience cheers on his descent, happy to ride with him straight to hell.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Perhaps the world’s first horror film and a go-to example of early German Expressionist filmmaking, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has been unsettling audiences for over a century.
The film’s main story centers on two young friends, Francis and Alan (Friedrich Feher and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), who, while jockeying for the affections of Jane (Lil Dagover), visit a local traveling carnival. There they take in the act of the mysterious, top-hatted and wild-haired Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss). As they watch, Caligari awakens his somnambulist subject, Cesare (the great Conrad Veidt), who under hypnosis answers questions from the audience. When Alan jokingly asks when he will die, Cesare responds “Before dawn.” We’ll let you guess the rest.
The film isn’t remembered much for its story, but for its arresting visual style, featuring painted backdrops that make the entire production feel like a fever dream. The painted townscape is filled with curved and pointed buildings teetering at dangerous angles, almost as if they were alive and shrieking. Roads twist and spiral to nowhere. The perspectives are deliberately mismatched and inconsistent, with the props and sets sometimes being too large for the characters, and others too small. The result is a transgressive, deeply influential film that has been unsettling audiences for over 100 years.
The Exorcist III
Based on his 1983 novel Legion, writer-director William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist III arrived 17 years after William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Despite the still-looming pop culture presence of the original, The Exorcist III is sneakily the most interesting film in the series. Less a horror movie than a psychological thriller with supernatural and spiritual overtones, The Exorcist III takes place 17 years after the events of the first film, and with no reference whatsoever made to the events in the second. It finds Lt. Kinderman confronted with the apparent reappearance of two figures from his past who had supposedly died. The first is father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), who had died after bouncing down an endless flight of steps while performing an exorcism in the original movie, and the Gemini Killer, a serial killer loosely based on the Zodiac Killer that had been executed 17 years prior. However, there’s been a new string of murders around town carrying all the hallmarks of the Gemini.
