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Post by lune7000 on Oct 3, 2021 16:09:09 GMT
By definition, this thread is about movie endings and therefore must contain spoilers- so read at your own risk.
Supernatural evil is a force that exists outside of individuals. There is a sense that it controls the lives of people under it's grip. Today, many horror movies end with such evil winning.
The first film that I can find where supernatural evil wins is Eye of the Devil (1966) where a man (David Niven) must be sacrificed to save a dying farm region according to an ancient pact of some sort. The power of the force is revealed when, after the sacrifice, the land returns to health with rains. Evil wins further as the mother (Deborah Kerr) fails to prevent her son from becoming the next victim.
Is there any film before this where supernatural evil wins?
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Post by petrolino on Oct 3, 2021 16:24:23 GMT
How about 'The Seventh Victim' (1943)?
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Post by claudius on Oct 3, 2021 16:24:36 GMT
The Haunting?
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Post by mattgarth on Oct 3, 2021 16:43:18 GMT
THE INNOCENTS (1961) -- Miss Giddens is unable to prevent young Miles from being a victim of Peter Quint. |
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Post by lune7000 on Oct 3, 2021 22:12:07 GMT
How about 'The Seventh Victim' (1943)? That is an interesting movie in that the cultists receive no punishment for their actions. But Jacqueline committing suicide in the end is her Hays Code approved punishment for murdering Irving. Also, the evil has no supernatural presence in the story, everything can be explained as the result of social phycology.
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Post by lune7000 on Oct 3, 2021 22:14:45 GMT
THE INNOCENTS (1961) -- Miss Giddens is unable to prevent young Miles from being a victim of Peter Quint. A great movie- but is there really a supernatural presence or is Miss Giddens mad herself and imagining everything? Her kissing the dead boy on the lips in the end hints at the latter.
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Post by lune7000 on Oct 3, 2021 22:23:02 GMT
Good candidate- and 3 years earlier. The only concern is whether there was really a haunting or was Grace going mad. The action of the car steering wheel seems to suggest supernatural power, but it could have also been her madness. It's not definitive, but I will say it's a strong candidate. With Eye of the Devil there is outside verification of supernatural power with rains (but then this could have been a coincidence also). It seems like film only very slowly inched towards an open acknowledgement of the superiority of magic evil forces in the 60's. What film blows this all open is what I am trying to find.
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Post by london777 on Oct 3, 2021 22:40:57 GMT
... is there really a supernatural presence or is Miss Giddens mad herself and imagining everything? The latter. She was batshit crazy. She had gone mad in the Himalayas fifteen years previously and pushed some poor nun off a bell-tower to her death.
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Post by mattgarth on Oct 3, 2021 23:02:16 GMT
As I recall -- the sex-starved, crazy 'poor nun' was trying to push HER off the cliff!
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Post by jeffersoncody on Oct 4, 2021 5:55:37 GMT
The Omen (1976) - which, in Apartheid South Africa, came with a No Persons 2 to 21 Age Restriction and had the last 10 minutes shorn off. Hell, I grew up thinking Gregory Peck killed Damien at the end of the movie. Until I saw the sequel.
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Post by Dr. Miles Bennell on Oct 8, 2021 20:35:03 GMT
How about 2000 Maniacs, Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1964? Has to do with a group of northern-state visitors to a remote town in the Deep South to attend its centennial, only one by one they get bloodily slaughtered in typical Lewis gore-splatter fashion. At the end, the last two escape, return with the police, and find the town and all its inhabitants vanished. It develops the town was last extant in the Civil War, as a Confederate stronghold, and was demolished by American troops in 1864; the Confederates swore revenge by coming back from the dead every 100 years to kill off some "Northerners" - and, by the movie plotline, got away with it: we see the lead "ghosts" in the last shot, walking off into the fog and swearing to return in 2064. Earliest one I can remember ending this way.
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Post by london777 on Oct 8, 2021 23:11:47 GMT
As I recall -- the sex-starved, crazy 'poor nun' was trying to push HER off the cliff! Of course that is what she claimed afterwards, but there were no other witnesses. Rumer Godden and I know the truth. If you fall for that, you probably think Gracie Fields was a Jihadi bride.
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Post by london777 on Oct 8, 2021 23:16:33 GMT
The Omen (1976) - which, in Apartheid South Africa, came with a No Persons 2 to 21 Age Restriction It was OK for those under 2 to see it, then? |
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Post by mattgarth on Oct 8, 2021 23:27:37 GMT
As I recall -- the sex-starved, crazy 'poor nun' was trying to push HER off the cliff! Of course that is what she claimed afterwards, but there were no other witnesses. Rumer Godden and I know the truth. If you fall for that, you probably think Gracie Fields was a Jihadi bride. We came We saw It happened
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Post by jeffersoncody on Oct 9, 2021 0:01:42 GMT
The Omen (1976) - which, in Apartheid South Africa, came with a No Persons 2 to 21 Age Restriction It was OK for those under 2 to see it, then? LOL. It was indeed London777. Women in Love, and a good few other films, were rated No Persons 4 to 21. Which means only those younger than 4 and over 21 could see it. Likewise the No Persons 4 to 18 restriction. Or the 2 - 16. I think the idea was that young couples' who couldn't afford a babysitter could bring their infants, who would then sleep through the movie. When Helga (1967) * - which featured a graphic childbirth scene, was screened, it was only rated Strictly No One Under 17 - after being hotly debated by the Nats in parliament; "Does it have educational value?". But, women and men were not allowed to see it together, so on Monday the board outside the box-office said Strictly No Persons Under 17: Men Only. On Tuesday the board outside the box-office said Strictly No Persons Under 17: Women Only.
Apartheid Era South-Africa was a strange, deeply f..... up place. I was 7-years-old when Helga was screened and I remember, like it was yesterday, my late mother explaining the sign outside the cinema across the street from us to me and seeing the same sex queues everyday (it was a big hit, and of course there was no TV allowed in SA then). When I was in a military prison in Cape Town in 1979, they showed us a black and white documentary featuring an explicit childbirth scene. Many of the prisoners (a rough, bunch all aged between 17 and 21 - with a few incredibly dangerous exceptions, passing through - on their way to other institutions - so to speak) masturbated frenetically in the darkened hall in the DB as the 16mm projector droned. Dark places, dark times, but what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. I hope the last bit of my post was not inappropriate, it seemed to me a fitting end to the first part of the post. * www.imdb.com/title/tt0157743/
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Post by lune7000 on Oct 9, 2021 12:23:00 GMT
How about 2000 Maniacs, Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1964? Has to do with a group of northern-state visitors to a remote town in the Deep South to attend its centennial, only one by one they get bloodily slaughtered in typical Lewis gore-splatter fashion. At the end, the last two escape, return with the police, and find the town and all its inhabitants vanished. It develops the town was last extant in the Civil War, as a Confederate stronghold, and was demolished by American troops in 1864; the Confederates swore revenge by coming back from the dead every 100 years to kill off some "Northerners" - and, by the movie plotline, got away with it: we see the lead "ghosts" in the last shot, walking off into the fog and swearing to return in 2064. Earliest one I can remember ending this way.
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Post by Dr. Miles Bennell on Oct 9, 2021 14:49:18 GMT
How about 2000 Maniacs, Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1964? Has to do with a group of northern-state visitors to a remote town in the Deep South to attend its centennial, only one by one they get bloodily slaughtered in typical Lewis gore-splatter fashion. At the end, the last two escape, return with the police, and find the town and all its inhabitants vanished. It develops the town was last extant in the Civil War, as a Confederate stronghold, and was demolished by American troops in 1864; the Confederates swore revenge by coming back from the dead every 100 years to kill off some "Northerners" - and, by the movie plotline, got away with it: we see the lead "ghosts" in the last shot, walking off into the fog and swearing to return in 2064. Earliest one I can remember ending this way. Depends on how far you want to take the definition of "evil". I notice a significant change in movies, especially "fantasy" movies - and future fantasy, at that - at Christmas 1959 when ON THE BEACH premiered: the bombs went off, the world ended, The End. All the "fun" 50s sci-fi-horror story films came to a halt after that and AIP introduced its Poe films and the like, straight-up horror movies, back to the supernatural and madness motifs of earlier decades; but with the death of the MPAA seals and censor boards, soon enough along came gore and splatter and demons and devils, all mixed up with sex which was parting from love, and of course drugs and teenage angst, and psychos and psycho-delics and psycho-analysis... When was PSYCHO, anyway - wasn't it 60 or 61? - that's another hallmark change, I think, in horror movies. TV already had Grim episodes of ALFRED HITCHCOCK (from a half hour to an hour!) and Grim Sci-Fi in episodes of TWILIGHT ZONE, and when did THRILLER come along, about the same time? Now big changes in film fantasica in the US - also imported from parts of Europe, and Japan, where things were already more graphic. It's all mixed together with a congealing of social changes that came along in the 50s as a result of "combat fatigue" from WWII and amplified in the Korean War, and of growing awareness among the growing-up teens and pre-teens who were the major target audience for more and more movies of the perils of nuclear science and nuclear warfare. The removal of movie censorship by 1965 just removed the last obstacle to a full-scale cinematic assualt on the popular psyche, of crazy dystopian ideation - which was already loosely contained or disguised in more major genres of movies, and which quickly became a dominating obsession in the guise of "artistic freedom".
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