Last year, The A.V. Club revived our 24 Hours Of marathon series with a list of Gothic classics selected by Nosferatu filmmaker Robert Eggers. Now, we’ve asked another of the hardest-working filmmakers in the genre to plan out a full day of horror viewing, just in time for Halloween. The director of The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Gretel And Hansel, Longlegs, The Monkey, and November’s upcoming Keeper, Oz Perkins has played in a lot of different horror subgenres, and experimented with many tonal shifts over his filmmaking career. So it’s no surprise that his picks for 24 straight hours of horror films are as eclectic as his own output. They range from very recent releases, to 1980s classics, all the way back to one of the very first talkie horror blockbusters. If you’re looking for something to do this Halloween, or even to finish off the season over the weekend, Perkins’ picks for a full day of scary movies have you covered.
Oz Perkins: I guess there’s a conception or a belief that those of us who make horror movies only think about horror movies or watch a lot of horror movies. I kind of don’t. I like the ones that I like. I’m certainly not the guy who will go see anything that’s put forward.
We’ll start with a movie called Oddity. Oddity is wonderfully weird. Has a great last shot, which is such a hard thing to pull off, where you punctuate your movie with a last shot that’s surprising and fun and unexpected, but at the same time, “Oh, of course that’s what they were doing all along.” Oddity is really a weird wild movie.
The A.V. Club: It has the best jump scare of 2024: the moment when the woman looks at the camera to see what pictures have been taken.
OP: So good, so good with her tent. The tent in the house was… Yes, all that stuff was excellent. I really appreciated the way they timed that out.
OP: Tony Scott’s The Hunger, which is Tony Scott’s first movie and just a beautiful dip into pure ’80s: kind of a neon vibe, neon lights, cold blue, a beautiful performance by David Bowie with a great sequence where, as sort of a dwindling vampire, he literally dies in the waiting room at a hospital waiting to be seen, which is sort of funny and sad and beautiful and great. Has a beautiful, young Susan Sarandon in it and has that great detached sadness that vampire pictures should have.
Is that your favorite vampire film?
OP: I would say that’s my favorite vampire film. That movie really works for me—and [there’s] Catherine Deneuve on top of it all.
2 a.m. The Omen (1976)
OP: The Omen is a classic that I assume most people have seen, although I feel like it’s one of those that sometimes falls in the cracks. One of my dearest friends and mentors is David Seltzer, who wrote The Omen as an original script, which was hard to do at the time when things like The Exorcist were dominating movies from books. And David sort of said, “Well, what if I just made something up and then actually wrote the book after? What if I reverse-engineered a book from a movie?” It’s got great set pieces in it. The kill scenes were really influential when we were designing The Monkey. It has a ghastly gallows humor to it, which I really appreciate.
Great performance by a great classical film actor, Gregory Peck, and it’s just sort of a staple of the “Satan is in command” subgenre.
I think The Omen can be overlooked because it had the misfortune of following the one-two punch of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. But it has a lot to offer that those films don’t.
OP: It has a lot of cinematic dynamics, which those other movies don’t really have. The Exorcist is essentially a one-room, one-act play, which works. I mean, obviously great. And Rosemary’s Baby is a much more languid, vibey thing. There’s a propulsion and energy to The Omen, which is very special. And then you get into Richard Donner, and then you go watch a proper Superman movie like his Superman movie and you start to feel really good.
OP: It Follows is a really great contemporary horror, a masterpiece in that sweet spot when things were sort of changing for horror and I had made my first movie and then [Robert] Eggers came on the scene and then [Ari] Aster and all these guys who started to do this new…”elevated” is such a neutered word, but doing this new authored form of horror, which was more stately and romantic and poised.
It Follows is an extremely poised movie, and every time I watch It Follows, I’m surprised by how much reserve and restraint it uses and how beautifully done it is. And Maika Monroe obviously, star of Longlegs, that was her breakout movie. When I told Nic Cage that he was going to be playing opposite Maika Monroe, of course, he immediately said, “Oh, It Follows, what a great movie.” And it really is. It’s a very clean and simple, unadorned, stately and poised movie. I really love it.
OP: The Gore Verbinski one, which like The Omen also has that sort of dynamic, shiny Hollywood touch to it, which, done well, when applied to good material, is really fun to watch. It’s a good movie. The Ring is not pretentious, it’s not elevated. It’s a good, old-fashioned creepy-crawly with really great visuals, really great jump scares. The jump scare in the closet at the beginning is still one of the top things, and it’s brutally unfair. In the way that It Follows earns its jump scares, the jump scare in the closet at the beginning of The Ring is a total cheap shot, and such a good one. One of the great cheap shots in all of movies and works every time.
And it’s a detective story, so it has a, not noir, but there’s an investigation spine to the storytelling, which is really satisfying. The imagery is just spot-on, and even as potentially goofy as it gets when the girl crawls out of the screen, by the time that happens, you’re in part and parcel with what they’re doing and you’re happy to have it. I can always watch The Ring again. And also a great performance by the creepy kid [David Dorfman]; in the constellation of creepy kid performances, her son is pretty great.
OP: Fire Walk With Me, which is a terrifying movie and was so gratifying. I was at the exact right age to experience Twin Peaks served in real time, where you saw the first episode and you’re like, “Well, huh?” And you saw the second episode, and then there was the dream episode with the backwards talking in the red rooms and the Black Lodge, and just the level at which our consciousnesses were stepped up by that show, then felt weirdly constricted because it was network television, so they sort of were able to do what they were able to do, which was mind-blowing.
But then when Lynch was unleashed and able to make a proper, really grisly R-rated movie? That was taking the rock up and having all the bugs scatter. Fire Walk With Me was very impactful for a generation because it was, for a lot of people—I guess me too—like this baptism into Lynch World. We had gotten this network television version, as amazing as it was, and then we got this full shot in the arm. It’s about as dark as a movie can get, and like all of Lynch’s movies, it’s about as beautiful as a movie could get.
It’s one of those movies where I never forgot it and I never forgot the feeling of it, and so I’m sure it bled through the things that I try to do. Instead of trying to rip things off one-for-one, you try to go for the experience of things, and Fire Walk With Me was a really drenching experience.
OP: We say things in superlatives, but Cabin In The Woods to me is a pretty perfect movie for what it is and what it wants to do. Such a beautifully original concept. So well-played, the dry humor mixed with the actual scares. The mythology of it, so clever. When they end up in the hall of monsters and the glass cases containing all of the various horror iconography, that felt like, for those of us who grew up in the Star Wars era, when you would look at the back of the box of a Star Wars figure and see all the different characters, all the figures that you wanted. Then you had that nearly obsessive moment of, “Oh my God, there’s all of these looks and all of these creatures and all of these characters and all of these images.”
And it did that with that beautiful underground collection of monsters and killers. So unexpected, but one of those things where it’s such a good idea because it’s hiding in plain sight. And then they just executed perfectly. Just a fun time at the movies. If you’re going through 24 hours of horror and you’re starting to feel a little kind of bogged down, Cabin In The Woods will reset your meta-meter in a really pleasurable and beautifully executed way.
OP: I’ll say Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, which is available to you only on Amazon, which is a horrible thing for me to sit here and say. I don’t mean to send anybody to Amazon to watch their movies, but in the case of this, you have to go there.
I’ve quoted it a couple of times recently, him saying that he couldn’t remake Suspiria, he could just remake the experience that he had or what he felt when he saw Suspiria as a young man, as an Italian movie. The original Suspiria to me is just okay, feels a little dated. I don’t think that [Dario] Argento’s movies are necessarily as alive as some other older movies are, at least not for me.
But the remake is really beautiful and thoughtful, and some of the set pieces are great. The dance where the girl gets bent apart is really, really good. Tilda Swinton, of course, always great to watch, and I just love the vibe of that movie. You feel like you’re in that school with those girls and the fecklessness with which the witches operate is great, and it has a super crazy weird ending when the demon, the witch, or whatever you want to call it, shreds everybody in that slow-motion scene where everybody just explodes into these blood bombs. So profane and gnarly, I really love the Suspiria remake.
OP: Next, Tod Browning’s Dracula, which is in the encyclopedia under “They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To.” Tod Browning’s Dracula is probably as high up on that list as you can get. It’s a carnival of great old-fashioned Hollywood moviemaking. The sets are unreal. The matte paintings are unreal. The gaudy performances are unreal.
There’s a couple of stunts that are great. There’s a bit where, I think it’s Renfield, does a proper tumble roll down an impossibly long flight of stone steps, and I watched it and still today I’m thinking, “How did they do that? How did they do that?” There’s a couple of those old movie tricks which still work really well.
The representation of his brides is extremely beautiful. It’s a photograph that I reference a lot and it’s something that I show to my designers from time to time, the image of the three wives in the white dresses walking away from camera. Pretty great.
Also, apart from the opening music, a completely score-free film.
OP: There’s always the desire to make a movie that doesn’t have any score at all. Just to see what that experience is like, because silence is so noisy. And the bold choice of doing it that way in Dracula, especially set against the sumptuous look of it, the sumptuous sexiness of it, the sensuality of the movie, to be then devoid of music, it creates an interesting balance.
4 p.m. Brian De Palma mini-marathon
OP: I just wrote “De Palma.” Maybe this is the end of my list, it’s just to say “De Palma.” Body Double, Dressed To Kill, Sisters—all of those movies which are other movies, which are [Alfred] Hitchcock movies refashioned into these opulent, semi-ridiculous, but so affectionately done movies.
I love Brian De Palma’s movies because it’s all affection, right? It’s all love for movies, and for someone to be such an unabashed fanboy at that stage and to snuggle up so close to classics, and to repurpose them to your own style is both brave and totally vulnerable. De Palma is such a weirdly vulnerable filmmaker. Carrie, needless to say, is easily the best Stephen King movie, certainly the best Stephen King movie that he approved. I mean, we’ll keep The Shining as a Kubrick movie. We won’t call that a Stephen King movie. But De Palma’s affectionately goofy middle-stage horror pictures are all pretty perfect to me.
In that era of De Palma, do you have a favorite?
OP: On a personal emotional level, Body Double is so my childhood, right? It’s so Los Angeles 1984, and he made a point of really making it a tour of a workaday actor’s life. And when I was growing up in Los Angeles in 1984, I was certainly surrounded, through my parents, by all kinds of workaday actors’ lives, both movie-star-level like my dad, and then the people who were just trying to work all the time. And so, less than being a scary movie, it is also a nostalgic triptych, and all the locations are great. I try in my movies to have some humanism going on, and maybe some of these movies on the list don’t really care very much for humanism, but there’s something about those De Palma movies—especially the one which says, “Look at this poor schmuck doing his best,” and then he gets embroiled in this mess with the great Melanie Griffith.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
