Charlie Ellbé (MA, 11; MLIS, 17) is the moving image coordinator at the Visual Collections Repository (VCR) in the Faculty of Fine Arts. She is also a horror buff.
Her film studies master’s thesis focused on set design in Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s. She has taught at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies: a small course on classical Hollywood horror and a class on the notion of the monstrous-feminine. She also co-edited a book on 1940s horror cinema, in which she has an article focusing on horror radio shows of the era and the Inner Sanctum film series.
Ellbé has a superb knowledge of the over 41,000 titles in the VCR’s moving image collection. This Halloween season, she has compiled a list of some of the most haunting movies found at Concordia.
Why “haunting” instead of the more common emphasis on scary?
“‘Scariest’ tends to feed into a cycle of praise for movies with high production values, values that are often necessary for the scares to be effective,” Ellbé explains.”There are a few exceptions to this, such as The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez, Kevin Foxe, USA, 1999) and the Paranormal Activity film series (USA, 2007 - 2015) but still, I find that the lists of “scariest” films tend to be a little predictable and redundant.
“The vagueness of the term ‘haunting’ allows us to move away from the canon of the horror genre and to delve deeper into movies that explore different forms of trauma and surprise in the way they leave their impression on the viewer.”
1. Behind the Door (Irvin Willat, USA, 1919)
The heartbreaking story of a German-American man being violently persecuted by his neighbours never stops spiraling downward and dives into a terrifying story of brutal attacks and revenge. None of the horror is explicitly shown on screen but the images chosen to illustrate them are some of the most powerful I have ever seen. The most complete and recent restauration of Behind the Door is available to watch on Blu-ray at the VCR.