Some the films mentioned in this thread and this thread brought to mind certain movies that are purposely vague about what kind of movie they are. Usually, you know from the get go that a horror movie will be a horror movie and a drama will be a drama. Each genre plays by certain rules and, in the case of a drama, you don’t expect some sort of supernatural or fantastic element to intrude. (Incidentally, I’m not including religious movies here.) However, there are times when a film will actually flirt with the fantastic without explicitly crossing the line. For example, Hitchcock often did this in his movies (The Birds being the only exception). With that in mind, the purpose of this thread is to discuss those films that, at one level, have a rational explanation for the events that occur within them, but also hint at a supernatural answer. (This includes movies that, at the very end, show you all their cards and reveal on what side of the reality-fantasy line they are on.)
The Duel
No blatant hints at anything supernatural. The truck just seems to find him whever he is. It looks demonic too. You also never see anything of the driver except his arms.
Pulp Fiction. The bullets missing Samuel Jackson’s character. The glowing briefcase. Which brings me to
Kiss Me Deadly, which also had a glowing whatis that was some nuclear or somesuch device.
Started out as fantasy, shifted to horror, and ended up as science fiction. I didn’t like it much
Although I haven’t seen it, I don’t know if Dreamcatcher would fall in this category. From the way you’ve described it, it seems from the onset the movie deals with matters unknown in the real world.
A couple movies I probably should’ve suggested in my OP are Point Blank and Diabolique (both versions but preferably the original). In the case of Point Blank, there’s the possibility that Lee Marvin’s character (Walker) has been dead all along. While in Diabolique, the movie goes back and forth on whether it’s a ghost story or not.
Event Horizon. Sci-fi with a definite horror tint.
Roger Corman films always seem to be sci-fi mixed with horror or a “thriller” element, mixed with erotica.
Donnie Darko
You’ve got your time travel and your discussion about God and your disturbed teenagers and your horror-movie rabbit and your comedy moments and so on and so forth. I’m still not sure what kind of movie it’s supposed to be.
Star Wars
No, really…
Though it is billed as the first of the modern blockbuster sci-fi movies, its story is a classic theme in fantasy. Even the whole issue of What Is The Force (?) is clearly left as fantastical (or mythic) until the last crop of SW movies.
For fans, the latest in the franchise is pure horror. [wink]
Alien - essentially a haunted house/monster tale on a cargo ship in space.
Donnie Darko. I have no idea what genre it was intended to be, but it certainly seems to touch on horror (kinda?) and sci-fi or fantasy. (Maybe?) Tough movie to place, IMO.
“What Lies Beneath” definately is one of those movies. It spent most of the movie making you think Claire was only imagining these little hints and it was just a gothic horror (but completely in this world). Then at the end it goes BANG completely going into the supernatural.
Also, on a literary note, I always felt that “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was always suppose to skirt this line up until the end when the Headless Horseman IS revealed to not be of this world.
It’s been a long time since I saw it, but I think House on Haunted Hill fits (the original, with Vincent Price). Great mystery/thriller/sorta-horror blend.
Stalker (1979).
In a bleak, unnamed city, two unnamed men meet with a “stalker”, a professional bounty hunter who, we find out, will lead them into “the Zone” in search of a legendary room which is said to grant wishes. They slip past armed guards and steal a rail car that takes them into a semi-rural landscape long abandoned and now overgrown, full of deserted, deteriorating buildings, factories and vehicles.
There’s a supernatural air hanging over the often lush, beautifully photographed scenery, and the landscape often seems as if it has been contaminated by some alien industry. The stalker advises the visitors obliquely that in the Zone, the shortest path between two points is rarely a straight line, and periodically throws metal nuts tied to a piece of cloth at the path lying ahead, as if to see if it would disappear.
Tarkovsky stripped of most of the overt science-fiction elements from the Strugatsky brothers’ magnificent and ingenious novel Roadside Picnic, which explicitly concerns the aftermath of an alien visitation, albeit one where the aliens – who, one character muses, might have left behind their Zones full of strange waste like the garbage left behind by a family at “a roadside picnic, on some road in the cosmos” – have never been seen, nor explained. You can easily view Tarkovsky’s version as science fiction given this background as well as the scattered hints throughout, but it could just as well be viewed as magical realism.