Halloween Special: No Exits

TMI Dept. Since requests for general cinematic advice come with my job, the lovely new couple who just moved in upstairs from us asked me yesterday if I had any Halloween movie recommendations. Now, usually when I’m asked for movie recommendations, every movie I’ve ever seen vanishes from my memory, but I blurted out a couple of titles and then got to thinking about scary movie genres and subgenres. A number of films suddenly fell neatly into the category of I'm Trapped And I Can’t Get Out, a hardy phobia that stretches back well before cinema (see Poe, E.A.) and in fact tickles a primordial part of the human brainstem, since it stymies the fight-or-flight response that seems hardwired into our nervous systems. (What if you can’t fight or flight? Eek!)

So here’s a list of ten movies that strand a viewer along with their characters in places from which there’s no escape without a little loss of life or limbs along the way. Some veer into the existential, others insist on blunt physicality, all are available on streaming platforms. I’ve avoided buried-alive movies because they’re too on the nose and have skipped the whole “Saw” franchise just because. In chronological order, then: 

“The Old Dark House” (1932, streaming on Kanopy, $1.99 rental on Prime Video, $4.99 rental on Apple TV) – The title is a tip-off that there’s more than a bit of deadpan comedy in this, James Whale’s riff on what even then was a hoary basket of cliches. Whale was coming off “Frankenstein” (1931) and had yet to make “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), but he’s clearly flexing his directorial wit in this tale of four citified travelers (including relative newcomers Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart, the last decades before she was the old lady in “Titanic”) stranded during a torrential rainstorm and forced to take refuge in the Femm mansion. The inhabitants include sepulchral Ernest Thesiger, playing as queer as he and Whale could get away with, as Horace Femm, Eva Moore as his crabby, deaf sister, Brember Wills as a crazy little firebug upstairs, and an actress Elspeth Dudgeon playing the 102-year-old Femm patriarch. The star attraction, though, is Boris Karloff, fresh off playing the Frankenstein monster, as the scarred, grunting butler Morgan – and this, dear reader, is the movie from which Charles Addams got the idea for Lurch. For reasons unknown, my college media department owned a 16mm print of “The Old Dark House,” and a bunch of movie-addled friends and I screened it one night, having no idea what to expect and charmed beyond measure by the offbeat dialogue (“Have a po-ta-to” became an immediate in-joke) and a delightful camp sensibility that we young ‘uns had no idea existed in 1932. Well, of course it did, and it’s part of every adolescent’s education – or should be – that previous generations were every bit as ironic and hip as they think theirs is. More so, even.

“Wait Until Dark” (1967, $3.99 rental on Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home) As I wrote in a round-up of Audrey Hepburn’s later filmography: "An admirably lean suspense thriller about a blind woman trapped in her apartment by three villains seeking a heroin-filled doll, it hasn’t dated a whit and still has the power to jolt even the most jaded audience. It’s also the rare Hepburn vehicle that she holds down on her own, without a romantic co-star, but you do get the bonus of a fabulous young Alan Arkin as the smartest and creepiest of the bad guys."  Note: If this is just too old for you, I can recommend “Don’t Breathe” (2016, $3.99 rental on Prime Video, Apple TV, Plex, Spectrum and Fandango at Home), which has the same home-invasion theme but switches out Hepburn’s imperiled heroine for a blind maniac played by Stephen Lang and adds a tad more blood. Okay, more than a tad.