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Forget gorefests; Take in some real terror
By Mary Shaffer Terror, like Halloween, is a state of mind. The best fright films don't need blood and gore to be scary. They feel realistic except for some inexplicable weirdness lurking just below the surface or make reality a black comedy, finding humor in characters trapped between delusions and supernatural nightmares. For adults, Halloween monsters often come from the id within and threaten psyches as much as bodies with a violence that's frequently more mental than physical. So if you're tired of mad slashers like Freddie and Jason and have seen the classic ''Frankenstein'' and ''Dracula'' too often, you could spend All Hallow's Eve with one of these less familiar chillers, all available on video. In ''Vampire's Kiss'' (1989), Nicolas Cage plays a boss mean enough to be a vampire in this twisted tale of sexual harassment and psychological disintegration. The story starts with Cage's self-centered, swinging-single yuppie confessing to his female psychiatrist how little interest he has in women after one-night stands. But a biting encounter with an overly aggressive pickup (Jennifer Beals) convinces Cage that he's turning into a vampire and literally turns the New York literary agent's life upside down. He's transformed from someone in complete control to an ashen-faced, wildly unkempt beast feeding on cockroaches and pigeons and using his overturned couch as a coffin. Cage's way over-the-top performance is so strange you suspect he really has been possessed by a creature of the night. Like ''Vampire's Kiss,'' Director Martin Scorsese's ''After Hours'' (1985) is a comic vision of an ordinary guy trapped in an urban paranoid nightmare. Griffin Dunne is a bland word processor who meets a mysterious woman (Rosanna Arquette) in an all-night diner and spends one long night in New York City (and the rest of the film) desperately trying to get home. Everything and everyone conspire against him: reckless taxi drivers, suicidal burn victims, sado-masochistic artists, cat burglars, an ice cream truck, a waitress stuck in the 1960s, biker bars, plaster of Paris statues, cash registers that won't open, toilets that overflow, a vigilante mob and skeptical cops. Instead of a personal apocalypse, Peter Weir's ''The Last Wave'' (1977) wraps the end of the world around a murder mystery and ancient forces causing upheaval in modern-day Sydney, Australia. Something is obviously wrong from the first scene. A sunny day in the arid desert is violently interrupted by torrential rains and huge hail stones. Water runs through every scene until the last wave comes. Richard Chamberlain plays a mild-mannered attorney defending four aborigine men accused of murdering one of their own. The case touches his soul. His sleep is disturbed by dreams. He has visions while awake. He sees tribal symbols and future events without understand their meaning or why he's seeing them. Weir's early films are disturbing and eerie, a place where the physical and spiritual world converge and a naive attorney unknowingly faces greater danger than his clients confronting lifetimes in jail. Director Nicolas Roeg achieves a similar unpredictability and also mingles different realities in ''Don't Look Now'' (1973), a moody, erotic thriller set in the decaying cathedrals and moldy canals of modern Venice. From the opening scene, Roeg offers clues about the outcome, but neither the audience nor the couple played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie see things clearly until the climax. He's an architect specializating in church restorations. They go to Venice to work and recover from the accidental drowning of their daughter whose spirit may still be with them. Roeg's powerful visual style makes every character and scene seem sinister, as if everyone has something to hide. A blind psychic, a series of murders and misunderstood visions add to a feeling of foreboding. In ''The Hidden'' (1987), Kyle MacLachlan is the only character who seems to know what the killer is hiding in this other-worldly variation of the cop-buddy movie. As an FBI agent, allegedly from the northwest, MacLachlan helps Los Angeles detective Michael Nouri battle a rash of otherwise average earthlings who suddenly develop tastes for driving very fast, playing heavy-metal rock 'n' roll extremely loud and committing random violence. The odd-looking MacLachlan plays a Cassandra-like hunter, a truth-teller no one initially believes because his accurate explanations seem too far-fetched. Who is going to believe something is evil when all you see is something normal and commonplace, like a smiling politician? In ''Brazil'' (1985), the unseen evil is the suffocating bureaucracy, a monster that knows everything and can do anything because it controls every aspect of daily life, from ductwork to paperwork. Director Terry Gilliam's dazzling variation of ''1984'' opens specifically at ''8:49 p.m. somewhere in the 20th century.'' It reveals a bleak future in which life is totally regulated, devastated land is hidden behind cheery billboards and people scarcely even notice when terrorist bombs explode nearby. The main character (Jonathan Pryce), a meek government clerk, continually escapes into fantasies where he must rescue his dream girl (Kim Greist) from an invincible, monolithic samurai warlord. His fantasy turns real when he sees Greist in the flesh, asking about a neighbor mistakenly arrested when a dead fly caused the Ministry of Information's computer to print the wrong name on an arrest form. Gilliam's terrific surreal satire ends with the good guys winning by going completely mad. Doesn't that sound like a happy Halloween?. Mary Shaffer works at Cal Poly. Jerry Bunin is a Telegram-Tribune reporter. Halloween will find them watching Robert Wise's classic 1963 ghost story, ''The Haunting.'' . More Weird Halloween Films.
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