Cinefantastique Online

Seems like we just got done dissecting a best-of list earlier this week. Well, here we go again. Phillip Matthews at Second Sight takes the Cahiers du Cinema’s list of Top 100 FIlms to task for a series of gross omissions: “No action, no horror, the canonical science-fiction film (2001), the canonical western (The Searchers).”

As a matter of fact, Cahiers du Cinema picked at least a couple of horror films, Tod Browning’s 1932 FREAKS and Murnau’s “canonical” NOSFERATU (ugh, not again!). Otherwise, the list is typically French, if somewhat eccentric; nevertheless, a handful of borderline genre titles do show up:

• M (with Peter Lorre)
• Vertigo
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman includes a ghost story in a subplot)
• La Jetee (time travel short subject that inspired 12 MONKEYS)
• Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau’s 1940s live-action classic)
• King Kong (1933, of course)
• Laura (a mystery film but with a strange, almost necrophiliac vibe)
• Mulholland Drive (a typically surreal Lynchian trip through bizarro world.

Yes, there are many great science fiction, fantasy, and horror films that were overlooked (I’m surprised those Tarkovsky-lovers did not select SOLARIS), but we have to be grateful for these few scraps.

And hey, at least those French cineastes resisted the compulsion to fil the list with Jerry Lewis titles.