Five In Focus

Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath is the author of two story collections and eight novels, including Port Mungo, Dr. Haggard’s Disease and Spider, which he adapted for the screen, and which was filmed by David Cronenberg. His novel Asylum was shortlisted for both the Whitbread and Guardian fiction prizes in the UK and was filmed by David Mackenzie. Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now was published in 2005. His seventh novel, Trauma, was published in 2008. Estranged, his most recent novel, is forthcoming. He lives in New York.

1. |

Funny Games

Two posh boys invade the comfortable lakeside home of a nice American family and playfully destroy it. They behave with languid courtesy toward their victims, their insane violence coming to resemble the workings of a cruel and implacable destiny. There is no redemption for anybody here.

2. |

Eyes Without a Face

This nightmarish mad-doctor story concerns an obsessed, guilt-ridden surgeon determined to restore beauty to disfigured women. The film is dark both literally and morally, and rendered all the more creepy by its black humor and air of clinical authenticity.

3. |

Nosferatu

For sheer otherness it doesn’t get better than Max Shreck’s gloriously saurian vampire. At one point his Count Orlok stands drooling in the arched doorway of a bedroom not his own, an unforgettable portrait of evil that stands at the very heart of gothic cinema.

4. |

Night of the Living Dead

The first and greatest of our flesh-eating zombie movies, which after all these years still gives pleasure every time. The true horror here of course is in the casual execution that occurs early the following morning.

5. |

Carnival Of Souls

This is a deeply strange movie about death. It concerns a young woman who plays the church organ and is haunted by ghouls. The atmosphere throughout is unsettling in the extreme, and the final reveal is magnificently horrible.