(1941)
Dir - Jules Dassin
Overall: GOOD
This is another cinematic re-telling of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, this time by Alfred Hitchcock's assistant and future blacklisted director Jules Dassin. Serving as Dassin's debut, it is an appropriately moody and psychologically tense interpretation of the source material. Joseph Schildkraut's unnamed character is on the verge of snapping from the very first shot of him and once he does, the tone is kept tightly wound. Dassin's atmospheric use of lighting and sound, (and perhaps even more importantly, silence), show a clear nod to his old boss Hitchcock. The film has also been compared to Citizen Kane which was only about a month old when this was released. Poe's story would continue to get remade a fair multitude of times, but this one serves as the first legitimately strong one.
(1942)
Dir - William Hanna/Joseph Barbera
Overall: GOOD
Besides being the first Tom and Jerry short to feature a horror theme, Fraidy Cat is also the forth over all from the duo as well as the first that featured Tom's trademark yelp, as well as the very politically incorrect character Mammy Two Shoes getting attacked by said feline for the first time. Featuring a parody of the radio program The Witch's Tale in which Tom spooks himself out while listening to it and thereby opening up the opportunity for Jerry to ghoulishly fuck with him, it is full of relatively tame violence as well as fun set pieces like a vacuum cleaner and a white nightshirt being mistaken as a supernatural entity.
(1949)
Dir - Kenneth Anger
Overall: GOOD
Known occultist and openly gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger's debut Fireworks was made independently and mostly in his parents house with a 16 mm Bell & Howell camera that he had received as a birthday gift. Considered the first US film with a deliberate and unmistakable gay narrative, it fairly stretches the boundaries of what could be considered "horror", but the tag can arguably be applied due to some rather shocking violence and gore for the time, as well as Anger himself being an Aleister Crowley disciple who would regularly weave elements of Thelema into his works. It is as avant-garde as they come, with some borderline ridiculous imagery such as a lit roman candle sticking out of someone's crotch, Anger's head being turned into a Christmas tree, arbitrary religious symbolism, shirtless men flexing, and nostrils being fingered to the point of gushing blood.
(1948)
Dir - Carl Theodore Dreyer
Overall: GOOD
A road safety film commissioned by the Danish government, De nåede færgen, (They Caught the Ferry), was based on a short story by Nobel Prize winner Johannes V. Jensen. One of a number of shorts that Carl Theodore Dreyer made in between Två människor and Ordet in order to pay the bills, the director allegedly was not very found of making such fare for an easy paycheck, compared to his much lauded full-length works. That being the case, he still gets plenty of mileage, (har, har), out of the concept of a guy and his gal on a motorcycle who are in quite a hurry. The majority of the movie is a tension-fueled race down country roads with captivating camera work that gets up close and personal with both the bike and its passengers while moving. The macabre finale is fitting with a mysterious representation of Death emerging, providing the inevitable outcome for the impatient motorists.
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