Halloween Movie Marathon: The Omen

There's a scene in The Omen (I am speaking about the original, Richard Donner-directed version, the other one isn't really worth mentioning) where I was suddenly very, very uncomfortable and I couldn't figure out why. And then I realized it was because I was looking at the scene from an unknown point of view. And then moments later, I realized I was watching the scene from the POV of those devil dogs who were watching over Damien. And long before I knew what "subjective point of view" was, I was experiencing it. And it was creepy.  Twelve years after being scared to death by the movie, I ended up working for Donner and his producer wife Lauren Shuler Donner. And all these years later, I'm still working for them as a freelancer. They are the best kind of Hollywood people and I hope to work for them forever.
But I was talking about The Omen.
Movies about creepy and evil kids are often very effective. There's the original Bad Seed, of course, but the first really creepy movie about children I ever saw was The Other, based on the best-selling book by Thomas Tryon. (The Other got extra points for being an evil twin story as well.)  There was something truly perverse about The Other.  (I read all of Tryon's books and thought the most effective was Harvest Home, which was made into a terrifically cheesy miniseries called The Dark Secret of Harvest Home. Bette Davis starred as the creepy matriarch of a small town where men had just one use. But more about that on another day.)
Elijah Wood, who starred in Donner's movie Radio Flyer and would later become everybody's favorite hobbit, starred in another creepy kid movie, The Good Son. The star was Macauley Culkin (as the title character) and though Culkin is a good actor, Elijah just acted him right off the screen. Check out the trailer.
The Omen was a classy horror movie, like the original Haunting or the Sixth Sense. It depended on atmosphere and intensity for its shocks and above all it was intelligent. Timing was everything--like the moment where you know David Warner's character is going to be decapitated by that sheet of glass and there's nothing he can do about it. You can't look away and yet instead of lingering on gore, the way a lot of torture porn horror movies would have, we're on to the next moment. There was something ... elegant about the horror and the understated nature of the story helped to sell it. The Omen was a great horror movie precisely because it was rooted in the familiar, in the very realest of real-world settings. It was much creepier than Rosemary's Baby, at least in my opinion. (I saw Rosemary's Baby at a midnight show when I was in college and I was bored. I thought the book was a lot scarier.)
I saw The Omen again a few years ago ad it holds up.  the acting (by Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, and Dr. Who's Patrick Troughton) is first rate. This movie should definitely be on your playlist for the holiday.

Halloween Movie Marathon--The Haunting

The 1963 version of The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House, is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. And yet ... it's all done with dutch angles and music and suggestion. (That was not true of the remake from 1999. I was working at DreamWorks at the time the remake was released and we were shown the trailer during one of our story meetings. The trailer line was, "Some houses are born bad." I laughed out loud, was not the reaction they were looking for.)
I am a big, big fan of the novel, which I believe is flat out the best haunted house story written in the 20th century. If you haven't read it, give it to yourself as a Halloween present. It's a fast read and available used online at a zillion places.  And any reasonably stocked library should have it on their horror shelves as well.
the movie stars Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Russ Tamblyn, and Richard Johnson as the paranormal researcher. Of the four, Johnson had the lowest profile. He was a theater actor who'd mostly done television in England. (He's still working, and had a multi-episode arc on MI-5.) Russ Tamblyn had had a huge hit in West Side Story two years before this movie came out, but he worked mostly in television after that. (One high-profile gig was his role on Twin Peaks.) Julie Harris was a well respected stage actress whose breakout role had been recreating her part in A Member of the Wedding.  She was also in East of Eden and Requiem for a Heavyweight, playing "good girl" ingenue roles.  Like Tamblyn, she then divided her time between television and features and theater. (She was last on-screen in 2009.)
The movie is in black and white, and the lighting is moody and creepy. It was directed by Robert Wise, who also directed the classic The Day The Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and the first of the Star Trek movies.
If you're putting together a night of Halloween movies, this movie should be in the mix.