fantastic Cinema : 15 impressions of déjà-vu

“It’s weird, coffin that slowly opens creaky, it reminded me of something.”

Yes, the film is full of winks accomplices and references more or less explicit in the earlier works, become classics or forgotten. So here is a selection of 15 prints from already-seen from the heritage, fantastic.

 

SLEEPY HOLLOW…

In this film by Tim Burton, released in 1999, the inspector Ichabod Crane seeks to remove the mystery surrounding the crimes committed by the headless Horseman. Although it evolves in a universe of death, worthy of the Hammer Films, the investigator attempts to keep a scientific mind and beliefs, cartesian. To explain how the character has forged the rational mind, the director sprinkles his narrative of flashbacks, bringing Crane to his childhood traumas.

…A TRIBUTE TO THE MASK OF THE DEMON

Tim Burton has always claimed the influence of the horror film from Mario Bava, released in 1960. Also, when it comes to make images of the children of Ichabod, he chooses to interpret his mother, his muse and companion of the time, Lisa Marie, and make it an icon gothic also remarkable for the retina, the sublime Barbara Steele. The scene of the virgin of Nuremberg is an obvious tribute to the fate suffered by the bewitching Barbara at the beginning of the masterpiece Italian.

THE SKIN I LIVE IN…

Released in 2011, La Piel Habito that is an adaptation of a novel by Thierry es jonquet signed by Pedro Almodovar. With the eccentricity that she is known for, the Spanish filmmaker tells the story of dr. Robert Ledgard, a surgeon who keeps his wife Vera captive in their mansion, in order to test on his body the synthetic skin that he has invented.

…PAYS HOMAGE TO EYES WITHOUT A FACE

If the experience of dr. Ledgard applies to the whole body of his wife, disorder, as it lays in the mind of the viewer is accentuated by the fact that the face is hidden behind a mask, during a major part of the film. Almodovar has unsealed in the novel of origin, a kinship evident with Eyes without a face by Georges Franju, was released in 1960, because her heroine is the prisoner and the patient to a surgeon. Where this resemblance between the masks worn by the two young women.

BITTER…

In Amer ‘s Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, a young woman remembers three defining moments of his life, and to live by the same occasion to the spectators, experience the sensory and sensual, sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes frightening. In the segment devoted to her childhood, the heroine makes the mistake of approaching a little too close to the corpse of an old man wearing a ring on one of his bony fingers.

…PAYS TRIBUTE TO THE THREE FACES OF FEAR

The couple Cattet/Forzani offers a cinema, ultra-referenced, using their benchmarks cinéphiliques to put images to the tension between chills anxiety and chills erogenous. Their references are mainly Italian and honor the giallo of the seventies by flashy colors and effects fixtures bold. The couple of filmmakers shoot the tribute and complicity with cinephiles, taking up the atmosphere and the corpse terrifying of the Three Faces of fear.

KILL BILL …

Released in 2003 and 2004, the diptych Kill Bill is an excuse for Quentin Tarantino to show his extraordinary lovers. Small detail that makes the filmmaker that much more likable and brings more sincerity to its approach, it is a whole piece, denigrated or forgotten, of exploitation cinema in which it wishes to pay tribute. If the story is constructed in order to place the maximum of references to movies, martial arts hong kong dollar and japanese, and Italian westerns, the director-screenwriter still found the way also to mention other genre films.

 …A TRIBUTE TO FRIGHTS

The craftsmen Italian of exploitation cinema have known a second glory thanks to the admiration that their door Tarantino, and among them Luico Fulci , a specialist home of the zombie film in the seventies who is awarded two citations visual in Kill Bill. In addition to the reuse of the tears of blood, which represent one of the plans-signatures of Fears, we find another scene borrowed from the horror film of 1980. The Bride finds herself buried alive in a coffin, just like the heroine of the film from Fulci, and it is noted that Tarantino transcribed with care, the atmosphere and the light of his model.

DEAD SILENCE…

The shot of the puppet demonic, are you already done ? It must be said that it is a classic pattern in the fantastic cinema; classic which seems to be of particular interest to James Wan, the film tends to marry the two approaches of the terror, the atmosphere and the effects of voltage (jump scares). After you have used a puppet in a memorable scene from Saw, and before he has presented the terrifying Annabelle at the beginning of The Conjuring, Wan deepened the furrow in 2007 with Dead Silence, where a ghost ventriloquist began in the beyond.

…A TRIBUTE TO DEAD OF NIGHT…

With his little suit and his little bow tie too cute, the puppet from Dead Silence is not without recalling that of the segment, the most famous of Dead of night. Released in 1945, this film sketches a british inspired many anthologies of stories horrific, films Amicus with Tales from the crypt, and was the first to make you shiver the audience with a history of ventriloquism exceeded by his puppet.

…AND THE CHILLS OF ANXIETY

In the genealogical tree of the puppets evil, we can follow the lineage that leads to Dead Silence through The Chills of the anguish of Dario Argento which was also a disturbing character wearing a bow tie. Please note that this doll is a creation of the great Carlo Rambaldi (E. T, Dune, Alien…)

THE TERRITORY OF THE DEAD…

It can be one of the patriarchs of the fantastic cinema, to be quoted by generations of filmmakers, and do-it-yourself-studded meanly winks to the work of his contemporaries in his own films. The proof is with George A. Romero, who comes again to tease the zombie in 2005, with The Territory of the dead, then that he was himself the precursor of the genre forty years earlier, with The Night of the living dead.

…PAYS TRIBUTE TO CARNIVAL OF SOULS

Romero is a tribute to a film that presents some similarities with his cult movie The Night of the Living Dead. Released in 1962, six years before this last one, Carnival of Souls was also shot in black and white with a tiny budget, and this work is atypical among other american productions of the era, has found its place over the midnight screenings in the unconscious mind of fans of fantastic cinema. Among them was definitely Romero, marked by the scene where the “somnambules” come out of the water.

MESSIAH OF EVIL…

A sense of déjà vu may be caused by a little more than a plan or a stage tribute ; the kinship between the two films does not only appear by the visual, the story also has its role to play in this game of resemblance. Other pearl underground, Messiah of Evil is the work sick and orphan of the couple Willard Huyck and Gloria Kutz, themselves offspring of the new Hollywood. Released in 1973, this film tells the strange sojourn of a young woman in a small town at the edge of the Pacific, whose inhabitants exhibit a behavior that is disturbing and more aggressive towards this stranger.

…THINK OF CARNIVAL OF SOULS

Messiah of Evil is therefore part of the category of “film spectator”, in which the story is not supposed to bring a drama to a dénouement, clear and appropriate to the characters of the protagonists and their troubled history. No, in this kind of ufo film, and the wanderings of a character is a pretext for a sensory experience, where all the landmarks are distorted for an hour and a half. The two heroines of the respective films, are living a nightmare awake, in a city cut off from the reality without understanding if they are surrounded by demons, ghosts or sect is unknown.

THE HOUSE OF A THOUSAND DEAD…

After Tarantino, let’s talk about another film now director : Rob Zombie. The rock star of the horror seems to have a soft spot for the psychopaths to believe his remake ofHalloween, and especially his masterpiece of ultra-violent, The Devil’s Rejects, where one is surprised to feel empathy for the Firely, a family of killers out of kilter. In 2004, two years before the implementation percussion, the producer signed his first film, House of a thousand dead, which unleashed already the family Firefly.

…MAKES US THINK OF SPIDER BABY

When we speak of “family of degenerates”, we think first and foremost that of the texas chainsaw Massacre; but if we look at the style cartoon and grand-guignolesque of The House of a thousand deaths, we can see more to the film Zombie, the influence of Spider Baby, small, series B of 1964 in which there was a sort of outgrowth of the Addams Family. Moreover, the cabotin Sid Haig who plays Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie, was already in Spider Baby.

ALIEN, THE EIGHTH PASSENGER…

At its release in 1979, Alien, the eighth passenger caused a sensation thanks to its art direction new signed H. R. Giger and Dan O’bannon. The collaboration between the two artists, the survivors of the project Dune, gives birth to a world strangely different from xénomorphes, where the human heroes become easy prey, thus giving a severe blow to old science-fiction of the fifties and sixties.

…MAKES ONE THINK OF THE PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES

But if the visual aspect ofAlien is without a doubt innovative, the script of the movie takes as its material matrix, a series B Italian (really !) signed by the genius that is Mario Bava (really !) output in 1965. In addition to the central idea of the Planet of The Vampires who is also an alien threat that seeks insidiously a host, we note that the scene of the discovery of a ship wreck there as well in the film of Bava than in that of Ridley Scott.

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE…

In 2014, Jim Jarmusch brings together the silhouettes lustful of Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston to interpret the couple of vampires of Only Lovers Left Alive. Imposing a slow pace and a constant impression of loneliness in his film, the champion of the independent film american seeks to recreate the state of mind of his two protagonists, outside of time and ordinary mortals.

…MAKES US THINK OF THE PREDATORS

By presenting his characters as aesthetes, whose culture and refined taste have been confirmed over the centuries, Jarmusch creates a striking resemblance to those of the first film of Tony Scott, The Predators. Appeared in 1983, the couple David Bowie/Catherine Deneuve , sailed already between rock culture and classical culture, and was a major part of the time cloistered in a luxurious house, away from the vulgarity and the ignorance of mortals.

CRIMSON PEAK…

Many of these impressions of déjà-vu can be explained by the fact that the film feeds from its first hours, of literature and myths, transverse to the different civilizations. And for almost as long, the film feed of the film, thereby constructing a bill of materials underlying that allows to identify the codes of a main story and match it to a genre or even a sub-genre. We find a beautiful example of this reading grid in Crimson Peak from Guillermo Del Toro, released in 2015, which expresses explicitly the fact that he is aware of belonging to a kind of narrative, inherited from the culture of gothic anglo-saxon.

…MAKES US THINK OF THE VENGEANCE OF LADY MORGAN…

In a dialogue of Crimson Peak, the young Edith is the fact that the distinction to be made between two terms : “ghost story” and “history with ghosts” ; into the abyss strong about, since it itself will be the heroine of a romance and gothic where the paranormal creeps in by keys gradually in his daily life. If the ghosts appear frequently to move the plot forward, the node drama of the film lies in the plot in which Edith is the victim, as it is mentioned in The Vengeance of Lady Morgan, released in 1965. In this movie from Massimo Pupillo, we must also wait for the last part of the story to understand what is the place of the supernatural events in the drama.

…WHICH MAKES ONE THINK OF HAUNTING…

As this was routine practice, in the theater of operations Italian of the sixties, The Vengeance of Lady Morgan takes whole swathes of the scenarios already exploited by Hollywood a few years earlier. Here we can see for example the concept of “gaslighting”, which consists in the manipulation of a character by another in order to the making them doubt his mental health. And where does the term gaslighting ? The original title of the Haunting, classic George Cukor, released in 1944.

…WHICH MAKES ONE THINK OF REBECCA

But if one goes back four years before the release of’Haunting, one finds another thriller where a young woman is trapped in a large house, at the mercy of those who manipulate it, to know Rebecca, adapted from a novel by Daphne du Maurier by Alfred Hitchcock. Also, the character sneaky of the governess was also declined in Obsession and in The Vengeance of Lady Morgan.

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