Mr. Clarke, I will get cracking on the homework later as soon as I can root out ‘Isle of the Dead’.
The list is indeed interesting and strikes me as being a kind of syllabus that Mr. Scorsese created in preparation for ‘Shutter Island’, rather than an honest consideration of his favourite horror films. I would have thought that ‘Peeping Tom’ would have assumed precedence over ‘Psycho’ for Mr. Scorsese if he really wished to enumerate his favourites. In all but one on the list, (‘Night of the Demon’), the Gothic theme of, (often architecturally specific), confinement is important, which is why I think that the list reads more like a module to assist in the analysis of ‘Shutter Island’. In any case, he does introduce it as the list of the ‘scariest’ rather than of his favourites, which might imply that it is possible to have a favourite horror film which doesn’t frighten.
I am not all that surprised by the choice of ‘Isle of the Dead’, (although again I would have assumed that ‘The Seventh Victim’ would have resonated more powerfully with Mr. Scorsese). Most of the choices on the list are tasteful if not downright canonical. However, I think that the real surprise is ‘The Entity’, which scuppers the mundane credulity of its setting with the aggravated bad-taste of the assault sequences. Scored with music which sounds like something Trent Reznor might produce during a bout of gastroenteritis, it so desperately wants to shock that it borders on kitsch.

I’m surprised Don’t Look Now and/or Les Diaboliques didn’t make Scorsese’s list.

I love the way that Scorcese seems particularly willing to share his inspiration with the world in a genuinely loving sort of way. Sure, a few directors will namedrop in interviews, but Scorcese will narrate documentaries and horse-trade Shutter Island to ensure that The Red Shoes is shown at Butt-Numb-A-Thon.

That’s a guy who really loves cinema right there, with the same sort of eager enthusiasm as Tarantino.

@4

Once again, Red Frame, anal though such conversations are, we get into the business of genre definitions. As a pal once said to me on this very issue, if Don’t Look Now is a horror film then so is The Seventh Seal. Polanski’s version of Macbeth is very like a horror film.

@5

You are quite right to scowl, Greg. If you can get a DVD and have access to a home cinema then that is the ideal way to watch it. I think, however, we can forgive the odd glance at a film on YouTube.

After all, I first saw these films on a flickering TV interspersed with advertisements.

On that point, anybody else remember UTV showing all the classic horror films on a Friday night in the mid-1970s?

Ahhh….

Fecking right you should watch it, Neary old man. I think it’s the best of the Lewtons. It’s inspired by Jane Eyre, don’t you know.

Don’t worry Mark. I will be covering all new domestic releases. Looking forward to it.

Errrrm. I think you overstate the case a little Lazarus. True, Gangs and Aviator were massive bores, but The Departed — though no classic — is a very good thriller.

But, yeah, I would admit that none of his dramatic features over the past decade is a patch on either No Direction Home or My Voyage to Italy.

scorsese being called “america’s most overrated living filmmaker” is the most ridiculous statement i’ve yet seen in these comments.
incidentally, i checked ‘the king of comedy’ out recently for the first time in far too long, and i was utterly blown away by it in all-new, fresh ways. it’s certainly the most underrated of america’s greatest living filmmaker’s pictures, and an absolute masterpiece.

Agreed, Yeah. I think The King of Comedy might be my favourite of his films. I’m meeting him this week and I’ll pass on best wishes.

Apologies to Niam for the delayed approval of your comment. It got a bit tangled in the wiring. Won’t happen again.

btw, screenwriter of ‘king of comedy’ paul zimmerman wrote an unproduced script called “‘back again’, in which a perfectly preserved adolf hitler is taken to america’s bosom when he writes a book saying he’s really sorry for all the suffering he caused.”
i’d like to see that.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-paul-d-zimmerman-1496416.html

>>Errrrm. I think you overstate the case a little Lazarus. True, Gangs and Aviator were massive bores, but The Departed — though no classic — is a very good thriller.

Donald, ‘Tha Dahpahted’ is a bloated, underwritten, overlong mediocrity that wastes arguably the best male cast of the last few years & features, hands down, Jack Nicholson’s worst ever screen performance. If the same film had come from any other director I think people would be more willing to acknowledge that it’s not even close to ‘a very good thriller.’ It’s really rather poor & I’ll bet you that in decades to come, if that film is remembered at all, it won’t be as a great film or a great Oscar winner (it is neither) but simply as ‘Oh, yeah, that thing Scorsese got his Oscars for.’

There’s an unhealthy critical deference to Scorsese amongst far too many reviewers on the basis of the (IMO, undeserved) reputation of some of his earlier work & one that leads lazy reviewers to relexively give every mediocre effort of Scorsese’s a pass. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to play that game. I don’t even much like his earlier work!

His best films for me are ‘After Hours’ & ‘The Last Temptation of Christ.’ Both hew closely to personal themes of the director & both find their most effective expression in these movies. But too many of his other films stumble badly because Scorsese is a clumsy storyteller & though capable of great individual shots & scenes he cannot sustain that level at feature length.

Equally he hasn’t shown much growth over the course of his career & it’s revealing that he should finally win his Oscars for a film that played like reheated leftovers of earlier glories. Yes, Scorsese has tried other genres & we can applaud him for trying but when you look at the results they are, to be charitable, disappointing. Marty had no more feel for musicals with ‘New York, New York’ than he did the Merchant-Ivory sub-genre with ‘Age of Innocence.’ He had as little understanding of that WASP family of Nick Nolte’s in his awful remake of ‘Cape Fear’ than he did Jake LaMotta in ‘Raging Bull’, or Howard Hughes in ‘The Aviator.’

Away from the Italian-American context of his best work Scorsese often seems lost. He lacks the versatility of other directors like, say, Clint Eastwood, who can tackle a variety of genres with a chameleon ease.

>>scorsese being called “america’s most overrated living filmmaker” is the most ridiculous statement i’ve yet seen in these comments.

Not if you’ve actually watched Scorsese’s films with a critical eye it isn’t. There is no other working American director of his stature who has directed more disappointing movies this last decade & for whom the title of America’s Most Overrated Living Director’ is more deserving. It may sound harsh but that doesn’t make it any the less true.

>>incidentally, i checked ‘the king of comedy’ out recently for the first time in far too long, and i was utterly blown away by it in all-new, fresh ways. it’s certainly the most underrated of america’s greatest living filmmaker’s pictures, and an absolute masterpiece.

‘King of Comedy’ is decent. Both Lewis & Bernhardt are very good & the film is a familiar if effective satire of fame. The weak spot for me is DeNiro who delivers a performance that feels wholly unbelievable & jarringly at odds with the rest of the film. So not great, not a masterpiece, but, yeah, a decent effort.

>> in “the last 20 years”, apart from the ones clarke cited, we’ve had scorsese’s heavenly ‘personal journey through american movies’, ‘the age of innocence’, ‘kundun’, ‘casino’, and, er, the mediocre rubbish of ‘goodfellas’ in 1990.

‘Goodfellas’ is a wholly familiar rise & fall of a gangster tale & one greatly enlivened by Scorsese’s ability with a camera. I acknowledge that. But as good as that is it can only go so far & by the time of the botched airport robbery & its aftermath the film quickly runs out of steam yet insists on plodding on for another hour with uninteresting scenes of marital strife & drug addiction. The film is also structurally flawed with an unimaginative use of voiceover that plugs narrative gaps the filmmakers can’t otherwise deal with & one that insists on counter productively ramming home heavy handed points that are self-evident from the visuals. That the characters are just impossible to care about is an ongoing problem for Scorsese even when he’s not on gangster turf. ‘Goodfellas’ is okay, occasionally good but overall nothing special. The rest of the features you mention are indeed ‘mediocre rubbish’ & the ‘Journet Through American Movies’ docco simply underlines my original point; that Scorsese is far more interesting a filmmaker when enthusing about other peoples movies.

Despite my reservations about Scorsese I am keeping my fingers crossed for ‘Shutter Island’ if only on the basis that having made so many turkeys in the last decade the odds are bound to change eventually.

Elastic Man asked others to nominate their fave horror films so I’m running with it!

I found Exorcist III to be one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen, despite the terrible ending. Some of the scenes, such as the camera panning back to reveal an old woman beetling across the ceiling, and the nurse being decapitated at the distant end of a long hallway gave me a furious case of the willies.

The Omen – those opening credits, that music… Far scarier than the flouncy Carmina Burana. The casting of the sensible and patrician Gregory Peck was perfect. I think his bemusement at finding himself in the middle of all this fantastic schlock translated perfectly in his performance. Suffice to say, I can’t quite warm to people called Damien ever since…

Could you ask marty, whats the latest on the proposed adaptation of “I heard you paint houses” ?

Hated “The Departed”, but “The Aviator” could be Scorsese’s last film that took a few chances (the colour scheme for one). I have the same problem with Leonardo: when he WAS a boy he was good; that baby-face is doing him no favours (acting-wise, of course).

Hello folks. Alas, I have been slow at adding new posts or comments because — how appropriate — I have been in London at the Shutter Island junket. As ever, boring though it is, I can’t say much about the film due to embargoes, but I can (I think) say that Martin was good value on Isle of the Dead. He told me that, though he recognises it is no masterpiece, it took him three attempts to watch it all the way through as a kid. He ran out screaming in the last act the first two times. Poor wee guy.

@ 24 Yes! Someone else loves Exorcist III. It’s a terrifying movie and the scenes you mention really freaked me out. I liken it to Carpenters underrated Prince of Darkness.

Looking forward to Shutter Island at the JDIFF…

I guess the intensity of the horror experience can depend on who you are watching the film with. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Dir. Albert Lewin (based on novel by Oscar Wilde), will forever remain in my consciousness a trigger to offset pure terror. I had an aunt who was not well — as in, outside of the recognised sanity spectrum. Sometimes when she was alone in her dark dreary house either a sibling or myself would be asked to accompany her of an evening. One evening during ‘my turn’, my aunt (who was quite the intellectual) invited me to watch “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, which was showing on tv. I must have been only about 12 years old, and come to think of it, perhaps it was a version of the movie that was adapted for television. Very scary’s all I’m sayin’. I also remember our grandmother giving my sister and I pocket money to go to a matinée showing of Dracula at the cinema (the cinema was close to her town house and all the children would go to this). Our poor beloved Granny didn’t realise that Dracula was a scary movie and my sister and I spent the whole film on the floor practically under our seats huddled together in absolute terror and arrived home in tears. But now — having been terrified to death as a child — I would classify Titanic, the movie, as horror. I mean I am horrified — as in horror struck — at the notion that such rubbish could be deemed worthy of acclaim. The horror, the horror …….But I will always love Nosferatu (1922), Dir. F.W. Murnau and starring the darlingest of all vampires Max Schreck.

Oh, ok, if we’re talking films that we saw when we were way way waaaay too young for them, please bear in mind that I saw this on Hallowe’en night when I was 8.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjgHbRrnjhU

Now THAT will mess up your childhood.