Upon initial considerations, lovers of horror films might not strike us as romantics. They seek tension and fear, and while both qualities loom large at the outset of many romantic endeavors—for we are vulnerable, and we never know, exactly, what may happen, or whether he or she will say “yes”—they often center on the ending of life, rather than notions of building one together.
But horror admits of the unknown, which allows for the possibility of wonder. That which we’ve never experienced before. Which blows our minds. May shape the person we are, and challenge us to become a version of ourselves that we hadn’t considered possible.
In this regard, love is a bit like horror, which sounds like an opening for easy jokes about your mother-in-law and the evil ex that just about everyone believes they have, but maybe what it really means is that people who have strong feelings for horror are the people better suited to allow for what someone, or something, can become. It’s tough to be a horror movie fan if one is closed-minded; and it’s likewise hard to know—and foster—true love, if the same can be said about us.
Horror fans are sharers. They love a movie, and they wish to help someone else experience it as well. They share the love. Their love. And, when you get down to it, is there a better thing that any of us can do in this world?
We think of Halloween as the holiday of holidays for the horror film aficionado, with Christmas and the shortened days of its season as the runner-up, but we’d be remiss to pull a Rip Van Winkle and sleep on Valentine’s Day.
In that spirit of keeping one’s eyes peeled for lovable, sharable horror on a day when a winged creature is said to traverse the skies, shooting arrows into human hearts—an image with at least a tinge of terror—let’s look at some movies perfect for home holiday viewing in the middle of February, kisses of terror sweet.
Cards are big on Valentine’s Day. Think of all the people who will write a note of expressed affection on this single day of the year, and none of the other 364. Some of our earliest school memories involve making a card for a classmate or mom at home. How about that time you stood and delivered your heartfelt creation to your would-be beloved by the water fountain as the shadows of late afternoon began to creep across the lawn outside? The letters we have written take us back to where we were, don’t they?
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 film Le Corbeau is our finest horror film in which the epistle is central. The crow of the title is a master of the poisoned-pen missive. We have an affair, abortions, and plenty of gossip, all of which, actually, sounds rather like high school—alas. This is a film of dirt and the dirt that kills. Clouzot was a screw-tightener after Henry James’s own heart. His horror films feel like thrillers and also locked-room mysteries, no matter that an entire town becomes embroiled in what the crow is up to. Unease prevails. No one trusts anyone else.
Those who have been hurt in life may derail relationships in the future because of an unwillingness to trust. In believing we’re protecting ourselves, we cost ourselves. What is the happy medium, and how do we achieve happiness from our pain? Revenge helps in Le Corbeau, but that doesn’t mean you should seek it, or at least not a form that results in throat-slitting.
Still, when we’ve been wronged by another, and we learn that things aren’t going so hot for them, we aren’t exactly aggrieved, are we? The film has additional resonance in a United States where women’s bodies are legislated by people other than those women themselves. The best horror doesn’t date—which isn’t a pun as to the medium’s commitment to the single life; horror fits the times to come, just as it stakes out relevant ground in its own time, and this is what we get with Le Corbeau.
Sometimes, you’re hanging out in your own private abandoned lighthouse, when the smoking-hot lady you’d been fooling around with turns up and starts giving you grief about the marriage to another woman that you’re going to enter into next week, and that can be a drag. You know how it is. Such is the premise—or the first part of the premise—of Bert I. Gordon’s 1960 picture, Tormented, a cautionary tale—one supposes—of ghostly engineered comeuppance and beachy horror.
Ghosts don’t usually hang out on the beach (the trailing figure in M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” making for a notable exception, but that wasn’t a warm beach, and thus still in the autumnal/winter tradition of the spook story). They are generally not daylight creatures and prefer colder environs, maybe on account of seeking equilibrium. Richard Carlson (who featured in another sunny and aqueous horror, Creature from the Black Lagoon) plays the flesh finagler who isn’t that bad of a fellow (until the end, anyway). But the penis wants what the penis… wait. The heart wants what the heart wants. Something like that—it’s easy to get mixed up.
Confronted at his lighthouse thinking spot by his jealous ex who threatens to expose his cheating ass, our man fails to save his “friend”—let’s go with that—when she breaks through the railing at the top of the structure, instead leaving her to plummet to her death on the rocks below. But, he reasons, it’s not as though he shoved her. (There’s no time quite like rationalization time, is there?) People fall. And hold on for dear life. And beg for help. What’s a guy to do? Losing your balance is merely part of the cost of doing carnal business. These vexatious bitches.
There’s an unusual twist in that this antihero’s undoing is a result of his soon-to-be stepdaughter, who had doted on him. Multiple forms of family dynamics on display. As they say, the horror family that slays together, stays together. Which is itself probably an untruth—and definitely not a theory you ought to try and test—but worth mulling on a beach somewhere should you escape the winter cold.
Dracula, with Bela Lugosi, was released on Valentine’s Day, 1931. The marketing angle may perplex us now, but one was meant to swoon for the Count, that dark lord of romance whose favorite body part was the neck. The movie’s Spanish-language counterpart—shot on the same sets—from director George Melford appeared later that same spring, with Carlos Villarías as the hater of crosses and cloves. Tod Browning preferred to keep the camera relatively static—especially after we left Castle Dracula—in his American version, whereas Melford desired a greater degree of mobility. Whereas Lugosi was the urbane sex symbol—his foreignness boosted his debonair appeal—of the American Dracula, Lupita Tovar is meant to be the hot dish of the Melford offering (“Do you like my cleavage, boys?”).
Despite the very cool trivia behind Spanish Dracula for any film buff—a movie shot at night after the people making one of our most famous movies headed home?—the work remains under-watched by those who you’d think would have a palpitating hankering to check it out.
When Hammer came along in the 1950s and decided to inject some lust into the monster tales of yore, they channeled something of Tovar’s performance. There’s a sense of risk-taking to Melford’s Dracula. His team cut loose in ways that Browning and company might have sought to avoid. The stasis ended up working for the American version; that and the movie’s timing, being made as it was after the death of silents and before musical soundtracks came sweeping in. Browning’s Dracula—in one of cinema’s greatest oxymoronic coups—is almost entirely interstitial, which makes it feel otherworldly. The luck of the calendar was involved. Melford—who was actually on set during the day observing Browning—appeared to be actuated by designs, plans, and the desire to translate a vision to cinema.
This is no curio. Grant it a place in the horror stable, and you are apt to find yourself returning to it for future viewings. The better you come to know Spanish Dracula, the more fun it is to contrast it with, and weigh it against, its famous undead cousin, and will in turn deepen your affection for that old flame as well. Plus, Dracula wins in the end, slaying all save those on whose blood he wished to gorge himself, unleashing his vampiric army, and reigning supreme. That’s not true. The plot is the same. But you cannot say the movie really is.
Speaking of the heart: what about when the organ comes to be buried beneath floorboards? Or so is presumed? The works of Edgar Allan Poe aren’t exactly to be confused with the warming doggerel found inside Hallmark cards, but love can make obsessives out of all of us. Brian Desmond Hurst’s The Tell-Tale Heart is the first talkie adaptation of Poe’s 1843 story and also a nearly silent film; call it a paradoxical dichotomy.
The cast was largely comprised of amateur actors, which lends a believable aspect to the fantastical conceit. Hurst was good at this kind of thing; a haunting realism runs throughout his exceedingly haunting 1951 adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (which, incidentally, came out the same year as the Poe story) titled Scrooge, and his less-than-an-hour-long Poe outing is grounded—no pun intended—in the believable, which we can’t say too often with Poe’s works (e.g., “The Pit and the Pendulum”). They feel large when they are in truth compact, the stuff of a single (oft-brief) sitting, but Hurst’s movie is potent because it has an exactitude to its workings, the sense that we’re dialed in, focused, though not dispatched via obsession into the realm of madness, as with our murderous central character.
The movie was risibly retitled Bucket of Blood for the American market, but then again, word on the British streets was that people couldn’t handle the film’s gruesomeness. Judge for yourself (and then be judged for what you were when you left this world, because fair is only fair). Less risible is that guilt is a part of romance, and certainly romances that founder. Did we do enough? Were we enough? Why did we make the choices we did? Why were we selfish? We keep the mementos, which now are often preserved for us on social media, a sort of digital graveyard of that which was, reminding us any time we scroll back of our losses, and what can prompt bouts of self-flagellation. In short, we are not far removed from the beating heart beneath those bedroom floorboards of this Hurst adaptation.
Most people can recall times that they lay in bed, thinking about the person for whom they pine, or replaying the events of an exchange with them, or some recently concluded hours that were spent in their presence, or maybe some romantic progress; and for all of the bad things we may worry over at night, there may be nothing more that we think about in that same setting than a first kiss.
The best horror movies cause a similar reaction after we view them. Sleep doesn’t come easy, as we cycle through their events again and again, as with Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film, Let the Right One In, which features an unlikely union and dead-clever idea: the affectionate friendship between a vampire girl and bullied 12-year-old boy.
Valentine’s Day is thought to center wholly on romantic love, but the most successful romantic relationships are undergirded by friendship. Every type of love admits something of friendship. This is a disturbing film that manages to be more touching than unsettling. The pool scene—in which the boy’s vampire friend comes to his rescue—is a tour de force of horror staging, cinematography, pace, editing, gore, and beauty. See it once and it’ll never leave you.
Let the Right One In makes for an apt date film, too. Because if you invite your paramour/steady/husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/what have you for a Valentine’s screening of this modern masterpiece on your couch, and whomever they may be isn’t on board with this film’s cause, you know what you must do: dump them, without hesitation, impunity, or chance for their return. Okay—that could be going overboard. But seriously, think about it.
Or else you could invite Boris Karloff into your Valentine’s viewing rotation with Edward Dmytryk’s 1941 picture, The Devil Commands, an adaptation of William Sloane’s 1939 novel, The Edge of Running Water. Sloane wrote two novels. His first, 1937’s To Walk the Night, is better—you needn’t apologize if you read it and think there’s no better American novel from the 20th century—but The Edge of Running Water holds its own. Sloane crafted literature that worked as popular entertainment, in which science fiction, mystery, terror, the dead, and friends—to add to one of our themes—were writ large but billed equally in precisely honed and balanced narrative arcs.
Karloff stars as brokenhearted scientist Julian Blair, who has lost his wife—in the Reaper sense—and will do anything to commune with her again. He’s isolated himself in New England—a region that works best for this brand of endeavor, you could say—and is hell-bent—operative word—on building a machine that restarts that love connection. Anne Revere plays the phony medium who is such a big part of the book, with which other liberties are taken, but that’s fine. In The Devil Commands, we have a man doing what he believes he needs to do, and the movie itself has a similar attitude. It’s a taut, effective picture, a hidden stalwart that you’re glad to have found when you do encounter it.
When we lose love—or lose the person who is our love—we come to know a pain that stands apart from most other forms of hurt, save in the rarest of human lives with their own unique extenuating circumstances. Who knows what we may then do. There is the bottle, the cessation of self-care, behaviors that we look back on later with embarrassment or horror of a non-cinematic stripe, and yet understanding for why we were doing what we were, or became what we did. For all of those people, this is a movie for you.
Romantic relationships that work—and you know what that means if you’re being honest with yourself—are the rarity rather than the norm. Most do not sustain; they end. Separate ways are gone. Or they never got going as they might have, prompting Cupid to declare, “Bummer,” as he restocks his quiver.
Then there is the old bugaboo of unrequited love of which the poets speak. William Butler Yeats and his Maud Gonne weren’t meant to be—or maybe one should say, never were, exculpating the fates—and so it went with the beast and his beauty in one of our most poetic works of terror cinema, 1933’s King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and screamed, let us say, by Fay Wray, the definitive horror queen in this arena.
We read fairy tales as children—which the wisest adults among us revisit from time to time—and we learn of love in a good number of them. That is, we think we do. We are exposed to the concept. King Kong is akin to a fairy tale for anyone first getting into movies. You watch it early, like The Wizard of Oz, and—again, if you’re wise—you watch it often enough. Each time that you do, the experience changes. We see love and love that could never be, through changing eyes. The same as we look back on that period in our lives when we thought we could care about nothing more than a given person. We’re like Kong atop the Empire State Building, with a clear view in all directions. Ah, but those planes. Those thoughts. Those realizations. They won’t leave us alone for a single second. May we not end up like Kong, though, falling, and falling, and falling until we hit the ground below, but instead climb down at our own pace, then make the best determination about what to do next, and try again.
We must never forget: love is a choice. If it was merely something that happened, without the full involvement of who we are, it’d be less than what it is. The stakes, to put it in horror movie terms, wouldn’t be at the level of classics we can watch repeatedly, keeping them in our hearts, but the standard fare that a cherub—even whilst bored on his day off—would click right past. The worthiest horror films have a gift for courting us. See where it goes. You’re bound to have a nice date night, at the very least. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
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