LIST: The Ten Best Horror Films of the Fifties

A few days ago, movies news site SlashFilm linked to the Top Ten Horror Films of the 1950's, as determined by Brian Douglas, who's qualified to tell people because...hell, being qualified has nothing to do with this.  It's the Internet.  I wasn't a fan of his list or presentation, but I do think he hit on a good choice for a decade.  The fifties were a crazy time for horror, what with the co-mingling of Gothic scares, nuclear fear, and the first glimmers of serial killer psychology.  So here's my response, since I have internet too (asterisks denote carry-overs from his list):

The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)
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The story's stage origins result in most of the horror here being implied, rather than shown, but that increases the tension and claustrophobia.  Christine Penmark (Nancy Kelly) suspects her heavenly daughter may be hiding a hellish secret, and that secret ties in to the identity of Christine's mother.  The idea of serial killing as something hereditary feels hoary, but the film is as lean and mean as its little antagonist; Patty McCormack gives one of the most impressive child performances in horror-film history (see also: Matt O'Leary in Frailty, Eun Seo-Woo in Phone).

A Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959)

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A pitch-black satire of beatnik identity.  A Bucket of Blood stars Dick Miller as a dummy so desperate for the esteem of proto-hippies like Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton, hilarious) that he kills people and casts them in clay - the resulting statues impress local crowds with their uncanny accuracy.  Sure, the story's a lift from Mystery at the Wax Museum, but the movie moves at a brisk eighty minutes, features a lot of laughs, and shows Dick Miller's particular blend of endearing and idiotic.  Corman would repeat the formula a year later with Little Shop of Horrors.

*The Creature From the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954)

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Creature functions as both an adventure in machismo, akin to Jaws, and classic Universal Horror, with its terrific monster effects and Ricou Browning's graceful underwater performance.  Like Frankenstein's monster and the Mummy, the Creature is a weary soul, desperate for a bride not out of any reproductive need, but more out of loneliness.  Jack Arnold also directed the thoughtful sci-fi thriller It Came From Outer Space and the awesome Matheson adaptation The Incredible Shrinking Man, which makes him some sort of genre God.

Curse of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

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Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, The Leopard Man) essentially recaps everything he learned with Val Lewton back in the forties.  Curse of the Demon (Night of the Demon outside the USA) centers on cult leader Julian Karswell, who threatens skeptical detective John Holden with a three-day curse that will end with a horrific demon killing him.  The monster that bookends the film doesn't quite convince, but, thankfully, every other piece of the film furthers the grim atmosphere; moments as small as a sudden windstorm thrum with buried possibility.

Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

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Is it a horror or a thriller? I'm not sure, but whenever I'm not sure, I include it.  The film emphasizes mystery, bathes its story in deep shadows and expressionistic lighting, features an eerie story that keeps us wondering about the limits of death, and its ending features one of the great "final shocks" of horror.  Henri-Georges Clouzot made plenty of thrillers in his day, but Diaboliques is the only one that feels nightmarish.  Side-note: the authors of the original story, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, wrote the stories that became Vertigo and Eyes Without a Face.

Horror of Dracula (Terrence Fisher, 1958)

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One of the coolest things to watch, in the fifties and sixties, is the wedding of gore and the Gothic.  Corman didn't push this stateside until his Poe films in the early sixties, leaving it to Hammer auteur Terrence Fisher to make icons like Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and Dracula feel transgressive again.  His efforts with the former two are laudable, but Horror of Dracula works best.  Christopher Lee gives a spry, sexualized performance, Peter Cushing's Van Helsing is equally energetic, and those two performances give the film a real energy and personality.

I Bury the Living (Albert Band, 1958)

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Director Albert Band (father of Z-movie kingpin Charles Band) directed this spooky chiller.  Shortly: a man plugs black pins into a cemetery map, and then he grows worried when the owners of those plots fall down dead.  Just what the hell is going on here?  The answer may surprise you.  A minor influence on later "fantastic" horror pictures like The Haunting and Seance on a Wet Afternoon, I Bury the Living offers plenty of ghostly mood without ever committing fully to the supernatural...which only adds to the discomfort.

*Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)

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Arguably the best horror film of the fifties, the best science-fiction film of the fifties...frankly, it's one of the towers of genre film.  Kevin McCarthy stars as a doctor in a small town where people aren't quite acting like themselves.  While he tries to uncover the source, the illness grows, and the solution proves terrifying in its simplicity.  Since its release, the film's been re-made three times and turned into a cultural touchstone, and while it's cited as a critique of the Red Scare, the film's fear of unchecked groupthink is universally and eternally applicable.

*Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954)

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The film ends poorly, with some guy praising God's mercy, despite the fact that ants have perverted His creation by (a) mutating to enormous size and (b) murdering countless people.  It's a fault similar to to the cornball ending of War of the Worlds, where "God, in his infinite wisdom" saw fit to repel evil aliens with microbes rather than just avoid the evil aliens thing altogether.  But I digress.  Here, we can appreciate the great suspense of the project, which consists mostly of smaller hints (a mute girl, sugar) and unsettling sound effects (the ants' chattering).  Stars James Whitmore, a million years from Shawshank Prison.


The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1953)

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John Carpenter honored author Joseph Campbell's vision, but this film transplants the eerie Antarctic locations and circumstances into a more upbeat, patriotic story; the result is still fun as hell.  Granted, the monster (a vampire carrot), doesn't feel too threatening once we see it clearly (as is the case with Them!), but you wouldn't know that from the first hour, which builds and builds and builds.  Some claim that producer Howard Hawks directed this more than Christian Nyby.  Suffice to say, whoever directed did a damn good job.