An exemplar to future film makers

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2007)

If I were teaching a film class, and I wanted to put together a list of films that highlighted how to make a great film in various genres ..... this would be the one representing horror. After 28 years, as far as horror movies go, I feel only John Carpenter's "The Thing" has even approached the elegance of this Gothic masterpiece.
When a scientist uses the word "elegant", they usually mean in the most complimentary way possible that something is as complete and as simple as possible. That's what I mean here: while no detail appears to be overlooked, no attempt at adding "more" was made. True, this followed from the "Star Wars" look of the "lived in" future .... but there is a noirish grittiness that was not seen before in science fiction (and would be taken maybe even more extreme when Scott did "Blade Runner" a few years later. This film drips with darkness and despair in much the same way that the early scenes of the original "Dracula" did. As a fan of "Star Trek" which showed the world of tomorrow as hopeful, this was the anti-"Star Trek": we're all screwed, you can't trust anyone, and the universe does have real monsters out there.
Another amazing thing to me is that after all this time, it is not dated. Sure, there are little things that will key you into its late 1970s origins, but they are for the most part small and easy to overlook.
This is one of the few films that I will watch about twice a year, and yet I never really get sick of it. Only in recent years have I finally gotten the nerve to watch it alone at night with the lights out. For people who have never seen this, and are not used to horror: get warmed up first. If you call yourself a horror fan, you are not a fan until you have seen this film.