The best Netflix movies to get ready for the release of Tim Burton's Dark Shadows . Which means: Vampires! Vincent Price! Creepy castles! Weird sex! Demons!
If you're in the mood for a campy horror hoot with a bunch of old pros at the tops of their games: The Comedy of Terrors (1963, Jacques Tourneur)
Check this cast list: Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone. A lot of genre heavy-hitters show up for Jacques Tourneur's ghoulishly cheerful black joke The Comedy of Terrors. So there's something irresistibly cheeky about a film with this kind of firepower giving a starring credit to a cat.
Price takes the lead as Waldo Trumbull, a delightfully snide undertaker with a fondness for the drink and a poisonous contempt for everything else. Lorre is Felix Gillie, his long-suffering bumbler of an assistant, well-meaning yet terminally inept, and an amusingly addled Karloff plays Trumbull's father-in-law, an ancient man whose faculties are long gone yet his body refuses to shut down. The ensemble, rounded out by Joyce Jameson as Trumbull's wife, a ditzy would-be opera singer who bears the brunt of her husband's scorn, plays terrifically off each other — the majority of the early laughs come from watching these disparate personalities clash and bang together at odd angles, whether it's Price's exasperated declaration of, "I'm going out to drink myself into a state of stupefaction," Lorre's meek pride in a hand-built coffin that crumbles at the merest touch or Karloff's yammering about the burial rituals of the ancient Egyptians ("...yank their brains out with a hook!"). A story eventually emerges, and in doing so it provides a framework for more slap-happy goings-on. (Rathbone's dying burlesque on "Macbeth" is killer stuff — a gag drawn out past all logic, past of the point of losing the joke and around to where it becomes funny again simply by duration.) The Comedy of Terrors is a macabre lark — a bit weightless, but grand fun anyway, if only to watch a bunch of big names compete over who can slice the most ham.
If you're in the mood for vampires, panthers and malevolent dwarves: Vampire Circus (1972, Robert Young)
"One lust feeds the other..." Sex and death are often intertwined in the horror genre, rarely more effectively than in vampire movies. And if it's a strong shot of bloody perversity for which you're hankering, you could do a lot worse than Vampire Circus. This Hammer production leaps out of the gate with a vampire chowing down on an adorable little blonde girl, then sexing up the wife of one of the local villagers. The village doesn't take kindly to this and storms the castle, managing to slay the vamp after a bloody battle. With his dying breath, the vampire lays a curse on the town; cut to fifteen years later, and the plague is romping through the area, leaving the little village quarantined. It's about this time that a mysterious circus comes to town, featuring animals and acrobats and magic mirrors and all manner of unusual sights.
It's no secret what the circus is (hint: look at the title), and to the film's credit it's working more with the Hitchcockian definition of suspense rather than surprise — we're sitting waiting for the vampiric attacks to begin with bated breath. In the interim, the notion of the vampire as decadent, worldly sex fiend is contrasted against the good, upstanding villagers; it's an old, familiar formulation, but it's still fascinating to see how far Vampire Circus runs with it — past mere seduction into darker, stickier areas like incest and bestiality. (The tiger dance seen during the circus's first performance is one of the most sexually fucked up scenes of the '70s.) There's also the clear correlation of the swath of death cut through the town by the vampires and the similar path run by the plague. Stir in the gloomy atmosphere and the doom-laden score and the overall effect is one of a society rotting away from inside and fighting to keep the sickness at bay. All of which is to say that Vampire Circus takes its careful time setting up its conflicts and then lets the dominoes fall as they should in a creepy-cool explosion of vamp action. Wild cats eat people, evil clown-faced dwarves cackle and a good number of bodices are ripped. What's not to enjoy?
