My Horror Anatomy: Tom Blake dives deeper into horrifying storytelling

Welcome to My Horror Anatomy, a terrifying series in which artists and creators dissect their five most influential horror films.

There’s a visceral poetry that only horror can capture. It’s dark and insidious, almost impossible to explain. But you know it when you see it. Films like Carnival of Souls (1962), Black Christmas (1974), and Cat People (1942) perfectly ensnare the brutal beauty of being alive, being yourself, and being the hero/heroine of your own story. Poet and music journalist Tom Blake excavates his own version of transcendent art that speaks to greater, deeper, and more profound notions.

Whether he’s pouring his blood onto paper in his own writing or analyzing music albums, there’s an astute way he cuts to the heart of the matter. He shines a spotlight on themes and details you might otherwise overlook or completely misinterpret. In the age of constant layoffs, music journalism and art still matter. And don’t let ChatGPT tell you any different. Tom Blake’s Peach Epoch is out now.

Below, Blake walks us through the five most transformative horror films in his life and work.

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Venice is the most interesting character in this film. You get the sense that director Nicolas Roeg is clambering about in the dark, gothic recesses of the city. Darkness for Roeg is a feeling, and he approaches it using various techniques, one of which is saturation. In this film about darkness, there is an incredible amount of light and color. The immediacy of the color red is famous, of course: the visual rhymes, the echoes (it is a film about time and its echoes). Then there are those other contrasting colors of stone and water (and glass), difficult colors to pin down or to name. Don’t Look Now teaches you a lot about the dangerous enchantment of ambiguity, and how hope and horror are two sides of a coin. Its darkest message is how grief feeds on hope.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

Amid the deserved praise heaped on the three leads – Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, and Klaus Kinski – it’s sometimes forgotten how visually stunning this film is. It’s like a piece of architecture. Herzog understands better than anyone the structure and the ambiance of the Gothic. Every second of every scene feels like a testament to the gothic imagination, a built artifact, an obelisk. Herzog’s level of control is beautiful and mesmerizing and slightly evil. He balances this gothic abundance with a technique that is minimalistic to the point of asceticism. This balance creates a strange tension that no other director has quite mastered. I’m constantly envious of these visual poems.

Candyman (1992)

So much has been written about this film – about its depictions of race and social inequality and colonial history, about the Philip Glass soundtrack, about its perfect setting in the Cabrini-Green housing project – that I don’t really want to go over old ground. What I will say is that there is a character in Candyman that no one ever mentions, and that I think is integral to the overall feel of the piece as a visual experience. Not a human character, and not a monster. A building. The Sears Tower (or whatever they call it now). In the outdoor scenes, the tower looms over everything, a dark Satanic edifice. It makes Chicago look like fucking Mordor. It represents unreachable power. The power of the white ruling classes. And the irony is, it’s black. It’s probably only in the film for a few seconds in total, but its presence creeps me the fuck out. So uncanny.

Ring (1998)

Ring and Don’t Look Now have more in common than you might think. There are themes of time and circularity. The death of a child. Both films are about an all-consuming curse, which gets stronger the more you fight it. In Don’t Look Now, the curse is grief. Ring’s curse is historical, societal. We speak of a ‘family curse’; in Ring, family is the curse. Both the protagonist (Reiko) and the agent of evil (Sadako) are trying to escape from an inherited burden: the burden of being a woman in Japanese society, where traditional values are stringently upheld. Like all good horror films, it’s not just a horror film. But Ring works better than most when it comes to visceral fear. The image of Sadako emerging from her well and from the television screen is one of the most frightening things I’ve seen on film. It’s frightening because Sadako is so desperate. She is the unstoppable force hitting the immovable object of tradition. And, as I’ve hinted, it is scary because it is eternal. Beyond tradition (the well), there is only modernization (the videotape), and that is just another curse or trap.

A Field in England (2013)

One of the most visually arresting, visceral, hallucinogenic pieces of cinema in the history of horror. Every scene is shot through with strange meaning. Something huge and terrible always seems just beyond the grasp of the viewer. As you might have noticed, I’m a sucker for a striking aesthetic, and there are few films with more powerful visual symbolism than this. I could have chosen any number of horror films based purely on the way they look: Suspiria, The Shining, The Love Witch, Enys Men. I went with A Field in England because it makes us acutely, uncomfortably aware of the way our physical surroundings constantly bear down on us, and of how mutable and subjective and treacherous those surroundings can be. It’s also a Beckettian buddy movie, an absurdist comedy, a satire of the way we learn about history. A masterpiece.