Quelle Horreur! 10 Foreign-Language Horrors To Freak You Out This Halloween

“Nosferatu The Vampyre” (1979)
Considering that, well, he’s Werner Herzog, it’s surprising that he’s has only made one film that fits neatly in the horror genre pocket. Typically, Herzog didn’t shy away from grand ambitions, remaking, in 1979, F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” one of the earliest, and still best, examples of the genre, itself a copyright-baiting adaptation of Bram Stoker’s seminal “Dracula” (thanks to the rights expiring, the director is able to bring elements of the novel back in, although it still differs greatly, most notably in its shocking coda). It’s one of the most-adapted tales of all time, but Herzog finds fresh blood, as it were. It’s partly thanks to Herzog’s regular collaborator/tormentor Klaus Kinski, in their second film together. Not for Kinski is the suave aristocrat of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee’s portrayals; here, the Count is a true monster, an inhuman creep that’ll haunt you for some time to come. It’s not, it should be said, the scariest vampire movie you’ll ever see, with the director finding a very different pace, one that instills dread rather than fear, and shying away completely from simple jump scares. You may think you’ve seen every possible version of the tale, but until you’ve seen Herzog get his hands on it, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

“Kuroneko” (1968)
1968 was an important year for horror. In America, “Rosemary’s Baby” rattled the country with its portrayal of upper-class Satan worship, and in Japan, director Kaneto Shindo (who helmed the similarly unsettling “Onibaba” four years earlier) unleashed “Kuroneko” aka “Black Cat.” The movie, which recently got the deluxe Criterion treatment, is the tale of a band of marauding samurai who rape and kill two women in the countryside (and set their home on fire). Awoken by the titular feline, the spirit women vow their revenge on samurai. Things get complicated when one of their intended victims turns out to be the son of one of the women and the husband of the other, long thought lost in battle. “Kuroneko” is eerie and emotionally riveting, particularly towards the end, in which a twinge of psychosexual suspense enters the picture. It’s also gorgeously photographed in black-and-white, with the ghostly cat-women gliding through the bamboo forests, thirsty for bloody vengeance.

“Amer” (2009)
Like surgeons, Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani co-directed “Amer” not so much as an homage, but an operating table autopsy, bringing it back to life with the use of new ideas and concepts, but also the reinvention of older ones. The vignette-like story involves the adventures of a young woman coming of age at various points of her life, her sexual awakening tied to the threat of a gloved stalker, a local gang, and any of the aggressively chaotic sensory avalanches constantly threatening to capture her whole. “Amer” is sexy like a knife, utilizing gorgeous cinematography and intense close-ups to present the mindset of a giallo character, awash in decadent colors, heightened gore and absurd melodrama. It’s both parodic and straight-faced, lovingly detailed down to the beads of sweat on our hero/victim’s skin like a fresh soft drink. Most importantly, “Amer” is not dryly academic, but instead hallucinatory and unforgettable, filled with images that, divorced from context, are sure to be nightly fixtures in your darkest dreams. A must for the beard-stroking horror fan.

Honorable Mentions: We could go on forever with examples, but if the above gets you hooked on subtitled scares, there are plenty of other places to go. Dario Argento is one of the masters (at least until the last couple of decades), and “Suspiria” is probably the best place to start for newcomers. Bonkers Japanese flick “Hausu” is extraordinary stuff, and was only excised from the list because we designed last year’s Halloween feature entirely around it — read that here.

Anyone turned on by the gory French horror revival embodies by “High Tension” above should also seek out either 2007’s “Inside” or 2008’s “Martyrs,” both of which is genuinely boundary-pushing, each with at least one scene that can turn even hardened horror fans a bit queasy. Similarly disturbing, although lighter on the red stuff, Michael Haneke‘s “Funny Games.” And yeah, stick with the 1997 Austrian original there, rather than the remake.

Slant this week called “Kairo” the best horror movie of the last decade-and-a-half, and, while we wouldn’t go that far, it’s strong stuff, a cut above the ghost-haunting-some-kind-of-technology films that dominated turn-of-the-millennium Japanese cinema. On a vaguely similar theme, although very different: body-horror “Tetsuo: The Iron Man,” which only just missed the list because, as one staffer put it, “it transcends genre.” For a laugh, give it to your nephew and tell them that it’s that Robert Downey Jr superhero movie.

Finally, two stone-cold classics that aren’t quite horror, but certainly move in those waters; Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s “Les Diaboliques” and George Sluizer‘s “The Vanishing.” Both are perhaps closer to Hitchcockian thriller than anything else, but they’ve got plenty of scares, including particularly memorable, chilling ends in each case. What else is out there? Anything we should include next time around?

– Drew Taylor, Erik McLanahan, Gabe Toro, Oliver Lyttelton