The Salt Lake Tribune Culture Vulture column: Culture Vulture: Even scarier than the economy: These flicks

Sep 30, 2008 (The Salt Lake Tribune - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- TWX | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- When I was 16, I made the mistake of staying up late one night -- alone and with the lights off, mind you -- to watch John Carpenter's 1978 slasher classic "Halloween" on HBO.

That was, without a doubt, the scariest movie experience in my life (unless you count the time I went to an Adam Sandler movie and the projector didn't break down).

A close second was when my wife and I saw "The Blair Witch Project" at the midnight screening at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Seeing it before the hype set in, when we could suspend our disbelief and buy the premise that produced that shaky video footage, it was easy to get sucked into the plight of college kids Heather, Josh and Mike lost in the woods. It was so believeable that when stars Heather Donohue and Joshua Leonard took the stage, many in the audience yelled with genuine concern, "Where's Mike?!?"

If you want to program a scary home-movie night, those two movies are a great place to start. Here are some more suggestions:

-- You can't beat Hitchcock: If you want a milder thriller, the classics "Vertigo" (1958), "Rear Window" (1954) and "North by Northwest" are hard to beat. But for out-and-out scares, go for "Psycho" (1960), "The Birds" (1963) and the lesser-known, but supremely cringe-inducing, serial-killer tale "Frenzy" (1972).

-- Trashing the classics: At the risk of sacrilege, skip the original "Frankenstein" (1931) and go straight for "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), which boasts more shocks, as well as pathos, humor and the amazing performance by Elsa Lanchester as the Bride. While I'm debunking the Universal Studios canon, if you plan to see Tod Browning's "Dracula" (1931), also check out the Spanish-language "Dracula" (1931), filmed on the same sets for the Latin American audience -- it's sexier, and just as chilling.

-- Which "Dracula"? Some swear by Gary Oldman in Francis Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992) or Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's atmospheric remake of "Nosferatu" (1979) or Louis Jourdan in the 1977 BBC production. My favorite is Frank Langella, suave and seductive in the 1979 movie version, co-starring Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing.

-- Superior remakes: Philip Kaufman's 1978 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead" are both scarier than the originals.

-- A modern monster: Ridley Scott's "Alien" (1979) perfectly grafted horror into the science-fiction mix and gave us in Sigourney Weaver's Lt. Ellen Ripley, the most kick-ass woman to be terrorized by an eggplant-headed monster.

SEAN P. MEANS also writes the Culture Vulture in daily blog form at blogs.sltrib.com/vulture. Send tips, contributions and comments to vulture @sltrib.com.

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