Ligottian Horror Flicks

[simon p. murphy]

Re-awakening topics Moste Antiente, I have to say that 'Dark City' has more than one Ligottian element. Actually, that is a bit of an understatement...

-S.

[unknown]

I can see Dark City having a few Ligottian elements...a dark organization manipulating and controlling the minds of its citizens...doesn't sound too far off from Q Org and TG Enterprises

[paeng]

Thank you! There are lots of suggestions in this thread; I can't wait to watch many of them. I agree with views concerning Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which I saw only recently. I did not enjoy The Golem that much but read somewhere that the 1915 version is like Caligari.

Unfortunately, I'm new to Ligotti. Would Naked Lunch be considered Ligottian? (It's not horror, though.)

[simon p. murphy]

Naked Lunch is certainly some disturbing stuff. I watched it with a friend who found it so disturbing that he insisted we turn it off after the first twenty minutes. Still, I had almost the same experience with Eraserhead.

I recently enjoyed a nice little flick called Angel Heart (1987) starring Robert DeNiro as SATAN and a young, handsome Mickey Rourke as a cool as private detective (if my face looked that good, boxing wouldn't be my first career choice). It's a good film, very dark. I couldn't call it Ligottian - too much voodoo, too much good/evil polarity.

Anyone seen Polanski's film adaptation of The Tenant? I can't find a copy in my neck of the woods. Just finished the book (original translation) and it really disturbed me (the idea of someone elses identity merging with my own is one of my most hellish nightmares). For the first half of the book I was expecting a 'Beckoning Fair One' scenario, only to be pleasantly surprised at the very Leiber-esque twist.

Anyone have any comments on Pan's Labyrinth? I loved this film, although I certainly wouldn't say it was Ligottian, with the exception of the 'pale man' sequence.

[The Forgotten Flame]

I thought Pan's Labyrinth was amazing. Somewhere I read his spanish films are a lot better than his english films. The Devil's Backbone is supposedly really good and also connects to Pan's Labyrinth with the fantasy/civil war parallels. Maybe someone has seen the Devil's Backbone? Crazy ghost story of some kind.

[Severini]

I watched Devil´s Backbone about 4/5 years ago and I remember enjoy it very much.
I heard the director was working on an adaptation of "At the Mountains of Madness".
It would be great...

[Patrick Mullins]

Devil's Backbone is indeed an excellent film and does have the civil war element connecting it to Pan's Labyrinth. I enjoyed Pan's Labyrinth more, I liked the overt fairy-tale aspect of it. Supposedly it was partly inspired by Machen's The White People-I have no verification of that, but it doesn't seem unlikely. Del Toro's earlier film, Chronos, is quite creepy in an understated way, haven't seen it in a while, but I remember quite enjoying it.
Here is a link to del Toro's web site page discussing the adaptation of HPL:
http://www.deltorofilms.com/ProjectPage.php?projectid=9

[trieffiewiles]

The final 30 or so minutes in Hour of the Wolf , or Vargtimmen, as it was called in Swedish, specify well I would say.

[the_havoc_man]

I would say that David Lynch's Mullholland Drive and Inland Empire are both very Ligottian in my opinion. I would also say that a lot of the work of Val Lewton would fall into this element as well like Cat People,The Seventh Victim and I Walked With a Zombie. Just curious what do people think are the qualifications for a Ligottian film? I believe that one would be a realistic setting tweeked into Nightmarish Ways like the sinister Los Angeles that Lynch presents in both of his latest films, or the unseen eerie quality of the Nightmare Noir that Lewton created in the 40's.

[Daisy]

The perception that human beings are not what they think they are, that the self is no more than an illusion, is at the core of Thomas Ligotti's fiction and serves as the pedal tone of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. It is perhaps for this reason that Ligotti's works are not, and may never be, translatable as cinema. Moviegoers do not want to see a film that portrays human beings as nothings and nobodies; like most people, they would rather be entertained by tales of transcendent selves -- action heroes, star-crossed lovers, villains, etc. Of the films I've seen, only one seems to approach the Ligottian view of existence, however obliquely: George Romero's Martin (1977). The title character, still in his teens, believes himself to be something that he is not: an eighty-four-year-old vampire. While Martin's sense of self is more radically construed than that of an average person, his relationship to the world around him is not much different from anyone else's. Working a thankless job and living with his overbearingly religious, superstitious cousin, Martin is haunted by an agglomeration of vampiric images generated by Hollywood as much as by his family's traditional lore. Acting according to what he believes to be his nature, he kills, and attempts to kill, others along the way. Though he is mostly timid and apathetic at home, Martin in the end is persuasive enough as a vampire to turn his zealot of a cousin fatally against him.
Martin's conviction that he is someone or something is just another illustration, though a striking and memorable one, of what TL defines in the poem "Insanity and Nothingness" as the "bottom line": "No one is in the market / for nothingness, / while insanity, / since time began, / has always been / flying off the shelves." In addition to being a fascinating meditation on insanity and nothingness, Martin is a great, jolting horror movie. Unlike other screenwriters and directors, who take care to preserve the lives of their main characters, Romero more often than not precipitately and violently dispatches them, right at the moment when viewers care about them the most. He does this -- legendarily, of course -- in Night of the Living Dead, as well as in Martin.
I'll make one final comment about Martin. The film was shot in an old industrial town, a place as grotty and run-down as many of the settings of TL's short stories. And, like TL, Romero uncovers real beauty behind, and within, dilapidation and decay.