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THE BIG SHOT RINGU When Hideo Nakata's dread-drenched horror movie Ringu bowed in Japan in January 1998, Hollywood was echoing Wes Craven's Scream by cranking out post-modern, teen-centric scare fare. Ringu, with its slow-burn plotting, grainy images and limp-haired ghost-girl Sadako (Rie Ino'o), offered a retreat to shadows, shivers and psychological torment. It ushered in a wave of J-horror titles that were remade in the West, and paved the way for US lo-fi chillers such as The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense and The Others. But while an atmosphere of dread pervades the entire film, with Jun'ichirô Hayashi's murky widescreen images, shot on 35mm, complemented by Kenji Kawai's dissonant soundtrack, it's Ringu‘s climax that guarantees its place on every list of favourite scary movies. No matter that the film's central…

01 VELVET UNDERGROUND David Lynch's work with the composer Angelo Badalamenti began here, with Lynch communicating his wants in moods: “Beautiful, cosmic, floating.” Luxuriating over an almost nauseatingly plush backdrop, Badalamenti's piercing theme sets the seductive but sickly tone beautifully. 02 COLOUR CODING Lynch dissolves and descends dreamily into white-picket-fence America, inspired by his youth, memories of Bobby Vinton's title track and the book Good Times On Our Street. Lynch considered “de-saturating” the colours but preferred DOP Fred Elmes’ hyper-real, hyper-American reds, whites and blues. 03 PROTECTION RACKET Lynch pitched Blue Velvet as a “neighbourhood picture”, set in “a world of opposites”. After a fireman waves in wistful slo-mo, children cross the road in a shot that's both idyll and warning. The crossing guard with the Eraserhead hair is there to help, yet…

01 HOT WHEELS In dystopian Neo-Tokyo, 2019, gang member Tetsuo marvels at his friend Kaneda's trickedout motorcycle… With co-writer Izo Hashimoto, director Katsuhiro Otomo painstakingly adapted 1988's Akira (out now on 4K UHD) from his own 1982 manga. The Tron-inspired bikes were also slimmed down for maximum sleekness. 02 SOUND AND VISION Kaneda reclaims his ride to confront rivals the Clowns; cue a pulse-pounding score by Japanese collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi. Otomo wanted multi-faceted music to bind Akira‘s tonal extremes. Yamashirogumi founder Shoji Yamashiro loved the storyboards and composed the whole score before seeing the film. 03 DARK CITY As the rebel gangs tear up the Blade Runner esque city, the animation pops with detail. The most expensive anime of its day at a near-$10m budget, Akira required 160,000 hand-drawn animation cels and…

If Tron was any more ‘80s, it'd be wearing legwarmers and listening to Adam Ant on a Walkman. With its arcadeinspired plot, synth-heavy soundtrack and splashes of neon, Disney's 1982 sci-fi fantasy is unmistakably a product of its time. Beneath its retro aesthetic, though, is a groundbreaking film that sowed the seeds of modern CGI, pioneering production techniques so radical it was allegedly banned from receiving a Special Effects Oscar nomination because the Academy viewed computer-generated effects as “cheating”. “I cannot stress heavily enough how absolutely terrified people in Hollywood were of what a future might be like where computers were an integral part of making movies,” says director Steven Lisberger, who had the idea for Tron when he was working on Animalympics, a kids’ animated TV movie commissioned by NBC…

MUMBLECORE A series of low-budget, naturalistic, dialogue-driven US indies led by Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha), the Duplass brothers (The Puffy Chair) and Joe Swanberg (Kissing On The Mouth). While it's the closest we've since come to Dogme, “It was never a unified movement,” claims Bujalski. “There was no manifesto.” FOUND-FOOTAGE “Quite unintentionally, we were following a lot of the Dogme rules,” says Daniel Myrick, co-director of 1999's horror mega-hit The Blair Witch Project. Still, the stripped-back, shot-on-video aesthetic of Dogme clearly fed into Blair Witch, which inspired a generation of found-footage chillers from [REC] to Paranormal Activity. F-64 Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Spike Jonze and Alexander Payne set up this short-lived collective in 2002 to take control of the rights to their work. Despite the legend ‘f64’ written on…

Don't let the cumbersome aesthetic fool you: it was a god in its day. It enjoyed a tantalising title position with ‘sex’ and ‘lies’ in a breakout indie hit. It formed a movie title with the word ‘drome’, promising illicit delights within. It spawned a rental sector, a generation of collectors and the careers of free-thinking directors. And it saw off a moral panic, endearing itself to us forever in the process. Nowadays, we are long past even the time when notes in charity-shop windows would politely ask customers to stop donating old collections. Yet even after its decline, the VHS video cassette holds a top-loaded spot in film fans’ affections. Forty-five years after it began to click and whirr towards our homes, VHS intermittently re-emerges to remind us of…

As a musician, John Carpenter has never been one to blow his own trumpet. Asked about his influence on later composers, he'll claim ignorance. He describes himself as “sort of a bum in music” or even “a second-rate bum.” “I have minimal chops,” he says of his talents. Few composers have reaped such maximal results from such minimal means, however. Over the decades, Carpenter has sired some of genre cinema's most sinuous earworms, clipped compositions carrying each film's DNA in every pulsing note or sepulchral throb. His finest music equips utilitarian principles with atmosphere and texture, range and swagger, bound tight by mood and melody. Strong roots and resourcefulness are among his core attributes. Carpenter's scoring influences range from westerns (Dimitri Tiomkin's Rio Bravo) to newfrontier “electronic tonalities” (Bebe and…

DELICATESSEN 1991 An out-of-work clown faces a cannibalistic landlord in a darkly funny dystopia. “I was living above a butchery store and I woke up every day to the sound of the knife, and my ex-wife said, ‘Oh, they are killing the neighbours and we have to leave very quickly!’ It was an opportunity to make something with just one setting. It was a very important film for France because… it was sold everywhere in the world, and it opened a door. But now I think the door is closed again. There was a small festival recently in Paris, ‘The Films You Couldn't Make Today,’ and they put Delicatessen in.” THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN 1995 A ragtag team set out to free kidnapped children from a dream-stealing scientist. “We…

IF you had to pinpoint the exact moment Canadian writer/director David Cronenberg joined the big leagues, you'd pick this gob-whalloping SFX showcase, which has balls and brains to spare. Especially brains. In an anodyne conference room, an egghead telepath (Louis Del Grande) asks for volunteers to have their minds read, or ‘scanned’. Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) wearily agrees, but he has a secret agenda his rivals – strangely – haven't spotted: he's a Scanner too, and it's not secrets he's after. The session begins, but something's not right. Del Grande (pithily credited as ‘First Scanner’) starts twitching, feral SFX swamp the soundtrack, and Revok seems overcome by a kind of primal rapture. Soon Del Grande's panting, whining, clawing at his skin until – kaboom! – his glasses fire out at…

With just a jump to the left of mainstream cinema, you will find a place where a light burns for films ridiculous and rare, subversive and strange. These are the films the box office forgot, cemented in ardent admirers’ memories. Here is a cinema of bikers and beaches, booze and B-movies, reefers and revenge, psychotic tomatoes and trippy visuals, heavy-metal morons and mavericks, freaks and geeks, artists and Asian extremists, camp classics and carnivalesque carnage, road warriors and rock stars. Like-minded armies mobilise in their support, sharing a taste for the deliciously odd and completing each other's assiduously memorised quotes. Such is the polymorphous jamboree of cult cinema, where questions of definition crave attention. What makes a cult film? When did the designation take root, and who sowed the seeds?…

It's one of the biggest ‘what ifs?’ in cinema history. How different would modern Hollywood look had George Lucas succeeded in his mission to nab the film rights to Flash Gordon in the ‘70s? Of course, what happened next has become the stuff of legend. After his advances were snubbed by producer and Flash rights holder Dino De Laurentiis, Lucas went on to create his own galaxy far, far away – and his take on the 1930s sci-fi serials he'd fallen in love with as a kid subsequently did rather well at the box office. Star Wars was so successful, in fact, that – in a bizarre role reversal – the new kid on the block was able to influence its spacefaring forebear. So with sci-fi suddenly hot property in…

in the mid-1980s, several years before Canadian auteur David Cronenberg and English producer Jeremy Thomas collaborated on an adaptation of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, they talked of having a crack at another ‘unfilmable’ book, J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel Crash. “I really wasn't taken with it,” Cronenberg now recalls of his first encounter with Ballard's prose. “I found it very cold and clinical and… strange.” When the director of such seminal body horrors as Shivers, Videodrome and The Fly calls something “strange”, you know it must be peculiar and disturbing indeed. And so it is: Crash tells of caraccident survivor James Ballard getting drawn into a sub-culture of scarred, omnisexual car-crash victims who both connect and get their kinky kicks by restaging infamous collisions (James Dean, Jayne Mansfield). Flesh merging with…

01 SADLER UP Killed by robot duplicates, loveable dolts Bill and Ted battle Death for the right to live. Die Hard 2‘s William Sadler auditioned hard for the Reaper role, arriving with Czech accent ready. Adding clogs to compensate for Sadler's shortness (5ft 8in), director Peter Hewitt encouraged the star's enthusiasm for improv. 02 FANTASTIC JOURNEY In Death's expansive chambers, the games begin… Impressed by Hewitt's Gilliam-esque short The Candy Show, producer Scott Kroopf hand-picked the Brit to direct. While Stephen Herek's Excellent Adventure was cheap ‘n’ cheerful, Hewitt wanted “something more cinematic, but with the same feeble humour”. 03 SEAL-ING THE DEAL Alongside nods to Star Trek and Powell and Pressburger's A Matter Of Life And Death, the encounters with Death raise a Swedish arthouse spectre. Hewitt styled Death as a “Bergman-esque…

GLEN OR GLENDA David Lynch admired it so much he used its wind noises for Eraserhead. Tim Burton made his best film about its maker. Even if Glen Or Glenda might not be on nodding terms with coherence, Ed Wood Jr.'s 1953 film is the kind of mess only one man could have made. Under the pseudonym Daniel Davis, Wood plays Glen, a man suspected of infidelity by his wife, Barbara (Dolores Fuller). But it turns out this other woman is in fact Glenda, or Glen in women's clothes. A crossdresser himself, Wood drew on the story of Christine Jorgensen, an American trans woman who had sex reassignment surgery in the early 50s. Along the way, the film became a barely veiled self-portrait: notably, co-star Fuller was also Wood's partner.…

Hang out on Film Twitter long enough and you'll eventually stumble across someone posing this chin-scratcher: ‘Which director is responsible for the longest, unbroken run of classic movies?’ There are cases to be made for plenty of filmmakers: Coppola, Kurosawa, Nolan, Villeneuve; but few hold a pumpkin-encased candle to John Carpenter. Between 1976's Assault On Precinct 13 and 1988's They Live, Carpenter made 12 films, most of which are considered alltimers today, even if they were rarely recognised as such by contemporary audiences and critics. Carpenter was prolific, and then some. A multi, multi, multi-hyphenate, he habitually directed, wrote, produced and composed the music for his features. He was 28 years old when he penned the screenplay for Precinct 13 in eight days, and just 30 when he changed horror…

Back in 2010, when John Carpenter released The Ward – his 17th and, to date, final movie – Total Film visited the legendary director's Hollywood pad for a chat. Here, Editor-at-Large Jamie Graham takes us on a tour… Just as Halloween's bogeyman Michael Myers wrought terror on the sleepy town of Haddonfield, Illinois, so Carpenter, master of menace, occupies a white clapperboard house behind a white picket fence on a leafy suburban street. You'd never guess that the iconic filmmaker behind such classics as Assault On Precinct 13, The Fog and The Thing would reside in such nondescript surroundings, but then it's the neighbours of serial killers who are always the most surprised. The clue is a small sign on the gate – Beware the occupant – and once inside,…

THE LOVELESS 1981 Shot for pocket change in just 22 days, Bigelow's feature debut is a biker noir that takes its cues from Easy Rider and The Wild One. Co-written and co-directed by Monty Montgomery, whom Bigelow met while studying at Colombia University, The Loveless is set in a desolate service station town on the road to Daytona during the lawless 1950s. Willem Dafoe, who also makes his credited acting debut here, stars as Vance, a road rat one year out of “storage” who's just as likely to seduce you as rob you. “It don't matter which way I'm coming from, it's which way I'm going to,” he says, making you sense hasn't once used a rear-view mirror. Eventually joining back up with the rest of his gang in a…

Born in Wellington in 1954, Kiwi Jane Campion already had a degree in anthropology and an art-school diploma before she turned to filmmaking. An early short, 1982's Peel, showed her keen eye for familial dysfunction in suburban Australia, and saw her awarded at Cannes four years later. “With shorts, you don't have as much responsibility for plot,” she later observed. “They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.” After directing 1986 TV film Two Friends, her first collaboration with longtime producing partner Jan Chapman, Campion made her feature debut with 1989 comedy Sweetie, a story of two maladjusted sisters she dedicated to her own sister Anna. The following year brought An Angel At My Table, a widely praised biopic of writer Janet Frame (played by Kerry Fox) that…

The perfect capper to a satire that's routinely voted The Greatest Comedy Ever Made, Monty Python's Life Of Brian concludes with the execution of Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman), a very naughty boy who's persistently mistaken for the Messiah. OK, so it sounds more horrific than hilarious, but crucifixion really isn't so bad once you're up, and worse things happen at sea. “When you're chewing on life's gristle, don't grumble, give a whistle,” advises the chirpy chap (Eric Idle) on the next cross, who then launches into toe-tapping number ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’, as 20-odd fellow crucifees whistle along. Written by Idle on a Gibson J-50 guitar, the tune, like so much of Life Of Brian, caused considerable outrage upon its 1979 release. “It's very difficult for…

01. THE ONES THAT ARE SO BAD THEY'RE GOOD MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE 1987 Coming at the height of the race to make ‘the next Star Wars‘, notorious hype-monger Cannon Films released a live-action version of the Mattel toy line starring Dolph Lundgren as Eternian prince He-Man, Frank Langella as evil sorcerer Skeletor, and a young Courteney Cox as the waitress caught up in their intergalactic face-off. Featuring laser-blaster gunfights, faux-lightsaber battles and cute/annoying little creatures, Masters Of The Universe was a shameless rip-off but, despite box office malaise, it wasn't without its charms. To this day, Oscar-nominated Langella still calls his pastyfaced villain “one of my very favorite parts…” THE ROOM 2003 A man of mystery who somehow spent $6m making The Room, Tommy Wiseau wrote, directed, produced and…

Some weeks into the shoot of Suspiria, American star Jessica Harper was approached by Italian director Dario Argento and handed a brown paper bag. “Inside was this mound of wriggling maggots,” she recalls, a look of horror twisting her finely drawn features. “I just about vomited.” There is no horror, only glee, on Argento's face when he recalls filming Harper brushing her hair only for a maggot to fall from her tresses, and then another, and another, until she looks up to see the ceiling undulating with thousands of writhing worms just as the cascade begins. “She was scared!” he grins. “That was good! Many hours of maggots.” Eleven hours of maggots, to be precise, and it made for just one of many grotesque, grandstanding set-pieces that punctuate a movie…

It's nice to think that maybe something you did over 40 years ago still, as we say, plays,” remarks Walter Hill, reflecting on his 1979 cult hit, The Warriors. Over four decades on, the film remains a fan favourite that lures followers to events such as the recent UK celebration at Birmingham's Edgbaston Stadium in April. For a film that's very much of its era, The Warriors has proved timeless. Perhaps its simplicity is the reason it has endured for so long after its fashions, hairdos, synth soundtrack and ‘70s vernacular have dated. A run-all-night action-adventure, it follows the exploits of the title gang, wrongly implicated in a murder, as they traverse New York fighting rival gangs, cops and the break of dawn, in a bid to reach their Coney…

Before Total Film even sits down and says a single word to Airplane! co-writer/ director Jim Abrahams, we've been punked. We should have known. Among the interview tidbits that accompanied the film in the 2005 Blu-ray release was an in-joke Abrahams shared with his co-writer/directors, brothers David and Jerry Zucker. In one of the film's many classic sight gags, the nun (Maureen McGovern) on Trans American flight 209 is reading a magazine called Boy's Life. The film then cuts to little Joey (Rossie Harris) reading a magazine called Nun's Life, which shows a nun in full habit on the cover, riding a surfboard off the waters of Malibu. While discussing how such a shot would simply be Photoshopped today, the trio talk about how Jim – a keen surfer back…

They're all going to laugh at you!” promises teenage Carrie's cruel mother as she sets off to prom in Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's novel. As much as audiences might hope the shy high schooler (Sissy Spacek) will get her happy ending, it's not meant to be. Crowned prom queen and standing in virginal white on stage, in front of her peers, a tear of happiness trickles down Carrie's face… before a bucket of pig's blood slops from the rafters above, baptising her in gore and triggering a vengeful display of her latent telekinetic powers. One of the last scenes of the film to be shot, this hellish prom was created on a soundstage at Culver Studios (where Citizen Kane was shot) using the same cheap materials…

1 GOD LOVES A TRIER Dubbed ‘The Mad Prince’ by the Danish press after winning three prizes at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival for stylised WW2 tale Europa, Lars von Trier first mumbled the word “Dogme” to producing partner Peter Aalbæk Jensen back in 1993 on a sleeper train. “We had the kind of intimate moment that you get when two men are lying naked together in the dark,” recalls Jensen. “Then Lars piped up, ‘I want to do something called Dogme.’ I said, ‘It's a stupid title, go back to sleep…’” The next time Jensen heard it, it was March 1995. Along with fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, von Trier had crafted a manifesto with 10 rules designed to purify the filmmaking process. Arriving at a conference on cinema at…

When Martin Scorsese was 11 or 12 years old, he'd visit his local picture house with his mates. “If we saw the logo of the Hammer films, we knew it was a very special picture, and we knew it was a certain type of film,” he said. He's referring, of course, to the gothic movies shot in lurid Eastmancolor that made Hammer Productions Ltd, a small, family-run studio based in a converted country house on the bank of the River Thames, an international player. With splashy genre pictures like The Curse Of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958) and The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll (1959), Hammer took the monsters of 18th-century British literature – already screen icons thanks to the black-andwhite Universal movies of the 1930s – and resurrected them with…

JUSTIN BENSON THE ENDLESS, SYNCHRONIC Obviously Carpenter's The Thing is one of the greatest films of all time. I think very few people would dispute this. Masterful dramatics aside, the technical work is still unmatched. I'm not sure those effects could even be duplicated, given the production differences of today. But beyond the obvious, if you look at They Live, Prince Of Darkness and In The Mouth Of Madness, these films are so bold in concept. Sadly, we may never see genre movies like this punk made at that scale ever again. DAVID GORDON GREEN HALLOWEEN (2018), HALLOWEEN KILLS One of the things that I've become very familiar with for Halloween 3, is Christine. So there's a lot of Christine, and a lot of The Fog in Halloween 3. If…

Cruising 1980 Al Pacino is a cop on the hunt for a serial killer who is targeting gay men… “Cruising was… challenging. The world of S&M hadn't been portrayed in a mainstream movie before – but I don't think even then people were aware of how far I was prepared to take it. In the end though, I didn't cut anything from that film that I didn't want to. I shot about 40 minutes of footage in the leather clubs that I knew the ratings board was going to cut. I knew if I'd left that stuff in they'd have ripped through the entire picture. “Pacino was not my first choice – I wanted Richard Gere. But Pacino read my script, because he had the same agent, and he really…

Born to Korean parents near Osaka, Japan, Takashi Miike's start came at the Yokohama Vocational School Of Broadcast And Film, where he was taught by Cannes-winning Japanese director Shôhei Imamura (The Ballad Of Narayama). Though Miike's work strikes a contrast with his teacher's oftenmeditative films, he began his career as an assistant director on Imamura's lurid Zegen (1987), about espionage, prostitution and human trafficking. After cutting his directorial teeth on such mid-’90s films as The Third Gangster and Shinjuku Triad Society, Miike scored his international breakout with 1999's Audition. There were walkouts (a record number at the Rotterdam Film Festival), pass-outs (medical assistance was required at a Swiss premiere), and a Tarantino approval (“A true masterpiece if ever there was one”). Whichever way you, um, cut it, Miike had achieved…