Horror in Any Language

To help you celebrate Halloween a bit better, I've compiled a list of foreign films that are either horror or just downright creepy. I asked my brother (who watches a lot more films than I do) to help me come up with this, and his blurbs are listed with his initials: BS (as opposed to mine, which are DS). This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but I think you'll find a lot to choose from here.

Some of these are silent films, and it would be a shame to leave them off the list just because there is no spoken foreign dialogue. Plus, if you can find a copy of any of these from the original country, then you should be able to read the intertitles in the target language. Many of these are available from the Criterion Collection on DVD (or Hulu). A good number of them are available on YouTube as well, if you look hard enough.

Figure de Cire (The Man with Wax Faces)
Director: Maurice Tourneur
Country: France, Language: Silent, Run time: 11 min, Year: 1914.

A quick tour through a wax museum ends badly. The available print is so damaged that the warped quality of the film seems to constantly invade the scene with ghosts from another dimension. BS


Умирающий лебедь (The Dying Swan)
Director: Yevgeni Bauer

Country: Russia, Language: Silent, Run time: 49 min, Year: 1917.

Ballerina makes tragic decision to join crazy, death-obsessed director's theater troupe. BS


Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
Director: Robert Wiene
Country: Germany, Language: Silent, Run time: 67 min, Year: 1920

For me, this film is all about the arresting expressionist visuals, but it is also about a murderous somnambulist, the doctor that pulls his strings, and madness. DS


Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage)
Director: Victor Sjöström
Country: Sweden, Language: Silent, Run time: 93 min, Year: 1921

Last man to die during the year automatically has to take over the role of grim reaper for the next one. You would think that upon hearing this on New Year's Eve, the film's protagonist would try really hard not to die that day. Only then the movie would only be five minutes long. BS


Häxen (Häxen: Witchcraft Through the Ages)
Director: Benjamin Christensen
Country: Sweden, Language: Silent, Run time: 87 min, Year: 1922

A bizarre amalgam of history lesson, modern parable, and special effects extravaganza, Häxan frightens with vivid imagery as it presents its thesis on witchcraft, superstitions, and the occult through slideshow, visual essay, and spirited reenactments, drawing parallels with then (and often now) relevant social issues and pleading the case for reason in the face of inexplicable phenomena. BS


Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror)
Director: F.W. Murnau
Country: Germany, Language: Silent, Run time: 81 min, Year: 1922

An unauthorized German-remake of Dracula with some all around frightening visuals. Plus, Western Slovakia stands in for Transylvania, with the Orava castle being used as Count Orlak's castle. DS


狂った一頁 (A Page of Madness)
Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
Country: Japan, Language: Silent, Run time: 70 min, Year: 1926

One of the earliest known surviving Japanese films, a visual approximation of the mind of a madman. BS


La Chute de la Maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher) Director: Jean Epstein
Country: France, Language: Silent, Run time: 63 min, Year: 1928 

This version of the Edgar Allan Poe tale (the too loose adaptation of which prompted Luis Buñuel to quit as assistant director) is a slow-burning visual feast of spectral illusions and creepy creakings at the titular house of Usher, artfully evoking the trauma of watching a wife slip away into dementia and death, and all culminating in a transcendental, impressionistic maelstrom of fog, lights, and horror. BS


Vampyr 
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Country: Germany, Language: German, but mostly intertitles, Run time: 75 min, Year: 1932

For having nominally created one of the great enduring classics of vampire lore, Dreyer seems less concerned with the mythology surrounding those rascally creatures of the night than with sustaining a general sense of dread that could easily be transplanted to a film devoted to any other class of ghoul. In fact, the subtitle to Murnau's Nosferatu may have been more apt here: A Symphony of Horror. BS


Une Nuit sur le Mont Chauve (Night on Bald Mountain)
Director: Alexander Alexeieff & Claire Parker
Country: France, Language: None, Run time: 8 min, Year: 1933

A pinscreen animation set to Mussorgsky's piece of the same name. BS


Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague)
Director: Arthur Robison
Country: Germany, Language: German, Run time: 87 min, Year: 1935

Man comes to regret not having agreed to more precise terms in his deal with the devil. I love this movie so much. BS


Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath)
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Country: Denmark, Language: Danish, Run time: 110 min, Year: 1943

In a small town in Denmark where accusations of witchcraft run rampant, an older pastor marries a young woman in exchange for not burning her mother at the stake. In true Dreyer fashion, the ending is as chilling as it is ambiguous. DS

Spalovač Mrtvol (The Cremator)
Director: Juraj Herz
Country: Czechoslovakia, Language: Czech, Run time: 95 min, Year: 1969

After the Nazis have occupied his Czech homeland, a smalltime funeral director is all too eager to prove to them his mettle. You seriously need to watch this movie right now. (There is a little adult content.) Also recommended is the same director's Morgiana. Also, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is supposed to be a great Czech vampire film, though I haven't seen it yet. BS

La Femme qui se poudre (The Woman Who Powders Herself)
Director: Patrick Bokanowski

Country: France, Language: None, Run time: 18 min, Year: 1972

A catalogue of vaguely creepy Lynchian visuals, including, yes, a woman powdering herself. BS

La Cabina (The Telephone Box)
Director: Antonio Mercero
Country: Spain, Language: Spanish, Run time: 35 min, Year: 1972

Man gets trapped in phone booth, learns patience, is not rewarded for this. BS


Suspiria
Director: Dario Argento
Country: Italy, Language: English with some German and Russian, Run time: 92 min, Year: 1977

This one is technically a cheat since the movie is mostly in English. I'm allowing it though because Italian films back then dubbed all their dialogue anyway for the target market, even in English, so if you bought a copy of the Italian version, it would be just about the same, with the same overpowering prog-rock soundtrack to boot. Plus it features traveling to Europe to study, which seems fitting for this blog. The only thing is, the school in Suspiria also specializes in the occult. As such I imagine this incredibly gory film would probably be a more accurate representation of what Hogwarts would actually be like. DS


La Ville des Pirates (City of Pirates)
Director: Raul Ruiz
Country: France/ Portugal, Language: French, Run time: 111 min, Year: 1983

May or may not be just a dream that I had once, with actually little to no pirates. Assuming it exists, you seriously need to watch this movie right now. BS

Riget (The Kingdom)
Director: Lars von Trier
Country: Denmark, Language: Danish, Year: 1994 

This finally converted me over to von Trier. Delicious hospital-set horror comedy, somewhat episodic like Twin Peaks. BS

Outer Space 
Director: Peter Tscherkassky
Country: Austria, Run time: 10 min, Year: 2000

A slasher film where the victim is the film stock. BS

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Country: Sweden, Language: Swedish, Run time: 115 min, Year: 2008

This film features a young human and vampire following in love. One of the characters is a pale, lifeless looking female. Basically, what I'm trying to say is if you loved Twilight, I am going to force you to watch this movie. DS

Martyrs
Director: Pascal Laugier
Country: France, Language: French, Run time: 99 min, Year: 2008

My friend Alissa recommended this for me, but I haven't been able to see it yet. From what I can tell it is an incredibly bloody revenge horror thriller.

Katalin Varga
Director: Peter Strickland
Country: Romania, Languages: Hungarian and Romanian, Run time: 82 min, Year: 2009

More of a revenge thriller than a horror film, though the ending is quite horrific. Also, it still takes place in Transylvania, which is enough to earn it a spot on this list. DS

So that's our list. What are your thoughts? Is there anything we missed? Have you seen any of these? What's your opinion? Feel free to leave a comment, if you have.

Crisitunity

Crisitunity

Should the link above stop working due to its being removed from YouTube, there's an episode of the Simpsons where Lisa tells her father, Homer, that the Chinese word for "crisis" is the same as their word for "opportunity." Homer replies that he does know this, and the word is "crisitunity." Obviously, the portmanteau "crisitunity" is not actually a Chinese word, but how valid is Lisa's claim? After all, politicians and motivational speakers have been making this claim for years. Armed with a very basic knowledge of Chinese (and a little bit of help from this Wikipedia article), I decided to investigate, and found the word for crisis to be Wéijī. You can see the character for it in Figure 1.

 

Figure 1. Wéijī, meaning "crisis," with different elements colored.

Before analyzing this, if you'd like a quick review of how Chinese characters work, check out my previous post here. The first character,  wéi, is colored red and orange. The orange section means "danger" and is actually a picture of a person standing on the edge of a cliff. The orange part beneath it is also a picture of a figure crouching below. It doesn't get much more sinister than that. 

The second character is jī, which also has two components. The green character means "wood," which is why it kind of looks like a tree. The blue part is a picture of a small table. There is a nice idea here, that the wood is an opportunity to make a table. In traditional Chinese The second character would actually be a little bit different, 機. Instead of meaning "table" the second character here means "subtle," which I think provides an equally nice image, that some wood is a subtle opportunity to build something.

So I should probably say right here that this is not the word the Chinese use for "opportunity;" it means and only means "crisis." When you hear that they have the same word for both, you immediately think that it's one word with two meanings (like esperar in Spanish, which means both "to hope" and "to wait"). At the very least you'd hope they the two words were homographs, that is, two words with the same spelling but different meanings. Of course, I think most English speakers would think it odd if someone from another country claimed that Americans have the same word for flying mammals that only come out at night as for what athletes use to hit balls. So what exactly is the word for opportunity in Chinese? I have it below in Figure 2.

 

Figure 2. Jīhuì, meaning "opportunity," with different elements colored.

You will notice that the first character is exactly the same as the second character in wéijī. The second character, huì, generally has to do with meeting or assembling. So assembling your jī is the definition of an opportunity.

Those who argue that "crisis" and "opportunity" are the same word in Chinese point to jī, the common element in both of these words. They say that wéijī could essentially be considered a compound word, something along the lines of danger-opportunity. The problem with this is that jī by itself doesn't really mean opportunity. It also combines to form 机场 (Jīchǎng), which means "airport;" 机密 (Jīmì), which means "secret;" and even 机枪 (Jīqiāng), which means "machine gun." To say that the Chinese have the same word for crisis and opportunity makes about as much sense as saying that they have the same word for opportunity, airport, secret, machine gun, AND crisis. (Although now I realize in writing that sentence that I may just have been put on some kind of list by the TSA).

The second point is that just because a word has a similar root as another doesn't mean that those words have the same meaning, as guitarist Nigel Tufnel learned in This is Spinal Tap.

What's wrong with being sexy?

So as is often the case, know-it-all Lisa Simpson is just spouting information that isn't actually true (like when she claimed the Coriolis effect makes drains run the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere).

The Revolution Will Be on Film

 Lyukas Zászló - Revolutionary Flag with a Hole

On October 23, 1956 revolution broke out in Hungary. Students protested in the streets and cut the communist symbol out of their flags, leaving a hole in its place. At first it seemed a success, where chants of "Ruszkik Haza!" (Russians go home!) were met with the Russians actually going home. Imre Nagy, the prime minister, made plans for a new democratic government. It seemed like the tiny Hungary force had defeated the mighty Russian empire, until the Russians turned their tanks around the crushed the revolution with full force.

It's said that the revolution didn't fail, it just took several decades to succeed. Thirty-three years later, on October 23, 1989 communism officially fell in the country and the Third Hungarian Republic was declared. Since then it has been a national holiday and the subject of a number of films. For those who want to improve their Hungarian and celebrate the holiday as well, here is a review of some films dealing with the revolution or the communist era. If you were able to get a hold of all of these films, you could actually have a pretty decent (and fairly depressing) film festival. In reviewing them, I'll do my best to avoid spoilers, but it's kind of like avoiding spoilers in Titanic. You know the boat is going to sink in the end, and in the case of these films you know that the Russians are going to come back in the end.


Napló Gyermekeimnek (Diary for my Children)
Directed by: Márta Mészáros, 1984, 106 minutes.

Juli and János

I know this technically takes place a little bit before 1956, but I feel like it sets the stage well for what happens later. Also, it was the only of these films actually filmed during the communist period, at a time when criticism of Stalinism was more acceptable. It's also directed by one of Hungary's most famous directors, Mészáros Márta, who also directed a later movie on this list. It centers around Juli (Czinkóczki Zsuzsa), who is taken to her new adoptive family. Her father was an artist, and so he did not fare well when the communists came to power. Her new adoptive mother is Magda (Polony Anna), who is a ranking member of the communist party. Juli doesn't like her adoptive mother or the things she stands for and constantly misbehaves. She often ditches school to go to the cinema, and a lot of the film involves actual movie footage from the era (including an eerie propaganda piece where a party member chastises a music conductor for being too bourgeoisie).   Juli feels closer to János (Jan Nowicki), another member of the communist party, but who is an engineer and is less ideological than Magda or the other members of the party. 

There are some fantastic scenes in this film. One involves Juli going to a classmate's birthday party. The classmate's father is a high-ranking member in the party, and so no one everyone is a little on edge and afraid to enjoy themselves.

Napló Gyermekeimnek is available from Amazon in the US and UK. Since it was made in the communist era, there is no inappropriate language or violence.

Szabadság, Szerelem (literally "Freedom, Love"; Released as "Children of Glory")
Directed by: Goda Krisztina, 2006, 123 minutes.

 
Trailer with English Subtitles

Of all the films on the list, this seems the most like it could have been produced by Hollywood. This may be because several of Hollywood's Hungarians worked on the film. The screenplay was written by Joe Eszterhas (who also wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls) and the film was produced by Andrew G. Vajna (who produced the Rambo and Terminator films). It also seems to follow the same formula as Titanic or Pearl Harbor in that it takes a historic event and frames an unlikely love story around it. In this case, our star-crossed lovers are Károly (Fenyő Iván), who plays for the national water polo team, and Viki (Dobó Kata), a student and leading member of the revolution. It also features Csányi Sándor as another water polo player, which is only worth mentioning since he's also in Kontroll, which is an awesome movie in its own right, but it has to do with subway ticket checkers, not the 1956 revolution, so I'll end this digression here.

The film starts at a water polo match in Russia, where the officiating is clearly rigged, so the Russians win. After the game, Károly gets in a fight with one of the Russians. Upon his return to Budapest, he is picked up by the ÁVO, the Hungarian secret police, where he basically gets a slap on the wrist and is told not to hit the Russians back. He later finds himself at the university at a student rally, where word of the uprising in Poland is given to the students. Viki gives a big speech and helps organize a solidarity march at Bém square (named for the Polish general who fought for Hungary in their 1848 revolution). At first, Károly is simply attracted to her, but he later becomes a full believer and participant in the revolution. Together they manage to find themselves at all the important events of the revolution; they go to Kossuth square in front of the parliament building and hear prime minister Nagy Imre's speech, and they are present when the ÁVO opens fire from the Hungarian Radio building. After fighting the Russians off, Károly goes back to his water polo team to prepare for the Olympics. When the Russians return, Viki is still in Budapest, but Károly is on his way to Melbourne (where he ultimately plays in the famous "Blood in the Water" match). Spoiler alert: Things end really well for only one of them.

Of all of these, I think this one is probably the best place to start for people who are not familiar with Eastern European cinema (since it feels more like a Hollywood production). It also provides the best overview of the revolution, making it again a good place to start. Still, I would actually say it's probably the weakest of all the films on this list.

Szabadság Szerelem is one of the easier of these films to get your hands on. It is available on Amazon in the US and the UK. It has several scenes of intense violence, some language not appropriate for children (since several of the main characters are water polo players), and a brief sex scene with female nudity.

A Nap Utcai Fiúk (The Sun Street Boys)
Directed by Szomjas György, 2007, 89 minutes.

The boys and Juli in front of the Nap Filmszínház

This film takes also takes place in the days following October 23, 1956, only it's much smaller in its scale than Children of Glory. It's the story of some boys from Pesterzsébet, an outer suburban district of the city. They hear about the revolution and want to join up so they can shoot Russians. They choose to defend a city block on Nap Utca (Sun Street) and make a movie theater on it their base.

Getting ready to light a Molotov cocktail

With nothing but guns and Molotov cocktails, they take down a Russian tank. As teenagers, they're very interested in the West, as seen by the fact that once the Russians leave, one of the first things they do is procure a copy of American rock music to dance to. When they're not defending the theater, they watch movies, including what appears to be a Stalinist propaganda film.

Gábor and Juli share a victory dance

The focus of the film is actually much more on the love triangle between Totya (Czecző Sándor), the leader of the group, Juli (Gáspár Kata, daughter of Bánsági Ildikó, who was Juli's actual mother in Diary for my Children), his girlfriend, and Gábor (Bárnai Péter), Totya's best friend and the narrator of the film. The film has more to do with their relationships than water polo matches or the fall of Budapest.

A Nap Utcai Fiúk is not available on Amazon. It could be purchased and shipped from Hungary directly from this website. It has some scenes of violence, but they aren't as bloody as Szabadság, Szerelem. There is some inappropriate language, which is to be expected from teenagers.    


A Temetetlen Halott (The Unburied Dead)
Directed by Mészáros Márta, 2004, 127 minutes

Nagy Imre in solitary confinement

I actually saw this one in the theater when I first lived in Hungary, since they took all of the seniors at the school I worked at to see it. There were no English subtitles, and my Hungarian at the time was very weak. In addition, at the time I really didn't know anything about the 1956 revolution, so I couldn't fall back on previous knowledge to follow the movie. A Temetetlen Halott focuses entirely on Nagy Imre (Jan Nowicki, who also played János in Diary for my Children), who became prime minister of Hungary during the brief period when they were free from the Russians. The film starts with his giving a speech at the window of the parliament building to the excited crowd on the evening of October 23, 1956. His plans for the government are foiled when the Russians return, and he and his families take refuge in the Yugoslav embassy (which still stands in Budapest off of Heroes square as the Serbian embassy). A deal is made with the Russians where he believes they'll let them all go home. Instead, he is taken from his family.   

The new Russian-approved government needs a scapegoat for the revolution, and they choose Nagy to take the fall. A good portion of the movie consists of interviews and a show trial where they try to prove that Nagy was responsible for the rebellion, but he holds firm throughout.

A Temetetlen Halott is available from a third seller on Amazon in the US. There's really no violence or inappropriate language, though like all of these films, it really isn't appropriate for children.


Moszkva Tér (Moszkva Square)
Directed by Török Ferenc, 2001, 88 minutes

One of the most important squares in Buda is Moszkva square, or Moscow square. At least it was. In 2011 the government changed the name back to its precommunist name, Szell Kálmán square. This was especially confusing the last time I was in Budapest on a bus I thought was going to Moszkva square, but then I couldn't find the stop anywhere on the train schedule.

Buli, csajok, verda - Party, girls, cars

In the film, Moszkva square is where a group of high school students hang out in 1989, just a few months before communism comes to an end in Hungary. History is happening all around them, but they're too interested in girls, cars (even if it's the cheapest, ugliest car they can get) drinking, making money by forging train tickets to the West, and cheating in school to even notice. And speaking of history, they're all in history class together. In one of the opening scenes their teacher informs them that on the exit exams the years of the communist era won't be covered. Holding up the textbook he says, "There are a lot of good things in this book, but strictly speaking, most of it is not true." Later, there's a great scene where they're all watching the news, and it's reported that Nagy Imre is going to be re-interred. None of them knows who Nagy Imre is, and one suggests that he might be related to Nagy Lajos (who was king of Hungary in the early 14th century).

Petya and Zsófi

The film's main protagonist is Petya (Karalyos Gábor) who is also romantically interested in his classmate Zsófi (Balla Eszter, who is also in Kontroll), and both are very good in the film. I also really like how much of the film takes place in a school, since it reminds me a lot of the two years I spent working in schools in Hungary.

Unfortunately, I cannot find any place that will import this film to the US. I did see a copy of the entire film on YouTube, but it doesn't have English subtitles. There really isn't any violence, but there is a lot of teenage drinking, plenty of language my mother wouldn't approve of (it would be a good primer for learning Hungarian profanities), and some nudity. 

Bear in my mind that nearly all those are going to be Region 2 DVDs, and so you would need a player that is capable of playing it.

Another film option would be the documentary Freedom's Fury (2007), which is about the aforementioned blood in the water match. I haven't seen, so I can't review it. What about you? If you've seen any of these films, what do you think? Are there any that are missing from the list? As always, feel free to leave a comment. 

Ngram Viewer

Something I've been playing on entirely too much (instead of doing work) is Google's Ngram viewer. What this does is lets you compare words from the corpus of your choice (i.e., search millions of books) over the past 200 years. You can choose the corpus of American English or British English, and I've found the differences to be fairly interesting. For example, in American English, we spell the word "color," while the British spell it "colour." The results are too wide to post here (but you can see the whole chart here). I've posted the relevant section below in Figure 1:

 

Figure 1. Colour (red line) versus color (blue line) in American English.

The red line represents use of the spelling "colour," while the blue is the now standard American English "color." We can see that previous to, say, around 1845, "colour" was the more dominant spelling in American English. After that, it changed over to without the "u."

Another one I tried was the difference between "math" and "maths" in British English. As some of you might be aware, the British generally shorten the word "mathematics" to "maths." I've had it explained to me that they do this because mathematics ends in an "s" and so must obviously be plural (like in "physics," "linguistics," or "Christmas," hey, wait a second...). How long has this been the case? I got the following results here and posted the relevant section to Figure 2.

  

Figure 2. Maths (red line) versus math (blue line) in British English.

Two things are of interest here. First, previous to the 1970s or so, there wasn't a lot of usage of either word in writing, but in general math was the preferred form of the two. Then "maths" overtook "math" as the standard form around the 1970s (around when people became confused about how plurals work).

You can also use the Ngram viewer to test for other languages, though I couldn't think of as many interesting queries. I decided to try the words "escoger" and "elegir" in Spanish. They both basically mean "to choose," only that "elegir" is preferred in Latin America since "escoger" sounds a little bit like an obscenity in their dialect (at least this was the case when I lived in Argentina). The results (found here) do show that, in general, "elegir" has been the preferred word over time.

I've done some other ones I found to be fairly fun. Like soccer versus football in British English, or cricket versus baseball in American English. I know the later two aren't synonyms, but the chart is still interesting because you can see pretty much the exact point when baseball overtook cricket in popularity in the United States.

And with that raise of the finger, cricket in America was given out for a duck.

So check it out and have fun with it. If you find anything interesting, feel free to share it with others in the comments section.