28. to 25. Flapping Jaws to Buzzing Saws

25. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 

Ha, I can feel the hardcore horror fans starting to lighten up a little now (while mainstream fans balk). Just you wait. ;) But yeah, Tobe Hooper's low budget slasher film was a benchmark of massive proportions. As with Psycho, it was inspired by the repulsive exploits of real-life killer Ed Gein, although it took that inspiration in a whole different direction, but another predecessor deserving of a nod would be Deliverance, made just two years earlier. And since, there have been hundreds of TCM wannabes, most of them pale shadows. There's a scene where Leatherface slams shut a sliding steel door that still gives me inexplicable nightmares. And it's odd: the reputation of this film doesn't prepare you for its reality. It's not particularly gory, for one thing—plenty of smart misdirection and suggestion precludes the need for it. It's just kind of insane, creepy, and frightening. (And yes, I know the image is from one of a kazillion remakes, but I like its feel; for me it captures some of the dread of the original, and I like minimalist road shots. Whatever.)

26. Se7en  

Ditto. You could flip this and the last entry around. Both are doing a very similar thing: demonstrating the bleak, nihilistic heart at the centre of the police procedural/ forensic psychology subgenre (without these films, we may never have arrived at a CSI, a Dexter, or now, of course, a Hannibal). Crime, horror? The distinction melts away, along with any sense of justice, redemption or hope, with the now-infamous ending. But before we even get there, we've tripped over a series of gruesomely tormented corpses and witnessed some of the worst things humans are capable of. This is some dark and frankly terrifying shit. Casting and performances, as with the previous entry, were nigh on perfect.

27. The Silence of the Lambs  

This is the point where people get upset with me and say Silence is not a horror film. Well, its my list, dammit, and you can go make your own (aw, sounds meaner than I meant it to), and if you think this is a stretch, wait till you see what I have even higher up the list! But I say if this isn't horror, then what is? It's not just Lecter and his taste for both intrigue and human flesh, it's Clarice's courageous yet aching vulnerability throughout, it's the liberal use of real life serial killer awfulness to "flesh out" the backstory, it's creepy as hell from start to finish and finally, how can a movie featuring a man who is trying to fashion a woman suit from the skin of his victims not be deemed a horror film? Every bit as sharp as Thomas Harris's source material with an added feminist sensibility. A film balanced perfectly on its moment in time.

28. Night of the Living Dead  

Without Romero's classic film, we almost certainly wouldn't have had the relentless zombie mania of the last few years. And it always makes me smile that such a bleak, violent, and even subversive film made its debut between the so-called Summer of Love and Woodstock. Ha. Schizophrenic much, America? But like the Body Snatcher movies, Living Dead was read by more thoughtful critics as social commentary, in this case critiquing anything from the '60s counterculture, Vietnam and the Cold War, to American racism. And in terms of its reception, the critical arc went from "junk film" to the Library of Congress adding it to its National Film Registry. (This trailer is funny, yet the film really isn't.)

Mr. Glamour Review

Having also read Richard Godwin's Apostle Rising very recently, I arrived at the soon-to-be-released Mr. Glamour in what I term the "Godwin mindset"; essentially, primed for a police procedural with significant elements of fairly graphic psychological and visceral horror. I wasn't disappointed.

First, though, allow me to dispense with a couple of negatives: the brave new world of independent authors is plagued with what I consider shoddy or inadequate presentation, whereby simple formatting and proofreading, let alone deeper line editing and grammatical issues, are either given a cursory glance or dispensed with altogether. Unfortunately, independent publishers can also find themselves beset with similar problems. While Mr. Glamour improves on Apostle Rising in that regard (in the latter, a pub named The Crooked Key inexplicably becomes The Crooked Fork in one scene), there still remain those irritating typos and misused homophones (cheap/cheep, horde/hoard) that take you immediately out of the narrative. While these issues are not the train wreck endemic to a certain percentage of indie authors, they remain a distraction, albeit one significantly improved upon in the interim between Godwin's two novels.

So, the even better news? Godwin's writing has grown tighter. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed Apostle Rising, but there were a few flabby sections and the occasional lack of focus. In truth, the novel could have been shorter. Not so Mr. Glamour—which, in its way, is every bit as nasty and sadistic as its predecessor, yet more honed, with much of the fat sliced away. Godwin has sharpened his storytelling edges from those of a well-stropped straight razor to something more akin to the fabled samurai sword that can slice a human hair lengthways. Perhaps that is overselling it, but the relentlessness of the narrative has improved markedly from something that was very good in the first place. At this rate, Godwin has a Silence of the Lambs in him.

Sharing the male/female dynamic of the cop team with his debut, Mr. Glamour takes more twists and turns with the psychology of the killer this time. And not only the killer: these particular examples of the law enforcement side of the equation—Flare and Steele in place of Castle and Stone (could there be a message or clue in their very names?)—are themselves every bit as nuanced and flawed as their adversaries. Okay, perhaps not quite as flawed, but still...

I mentioned sadism earlier, which in the context of such novels is by no means a negative criticism; and this particular sadism is earned every step of the way by the twisted pathology of the antagonist. While not lingering so long on the scenes of literal torture this time around, Godwin has managed to make that leap to the less-is-more school of horror. Again, he doesn't flinch, but he also refuses to leave the camera running throughout, so to speak. Yet the horror doesn't suffer one bit. No, the victims suffer, and so do we the readers, as we find ourselves inside their tormented heads more often.

In short, Godwin has once more created a seamless hybrid of crime and horror novel while retaining some of the dark lyricism, ramping up the atrocities, and tightening both the noose and the narrative, an altogether impressive achievement.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.