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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTimely repeat from 2017: Field of Vision "A Night at the Garden" Is the Most Terrifying Movie
Video: Marshall Curry/Field of Vision
A Night at the Garden Is the Most Terrifying Movie You Can Watch This Halloween
The obscure 2008 movie Synecdoche, New York, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, originated when Sony Pictures Classics approached Kaufman about creating a horror film. Kaufman, best known for deeply wacky scripts like Being John Malkovich, agreed. But he wasnt interested in making the kind of paint-by-numbers movie for teenagers that appears to take place in another dimension. Instead, he later said, he wanted to make a horror film for adults, about things that are scary in the real world, and in our lives.
I can attest that Kaufman succeeded. In fact, I found Synecdoche, New York so frightening that Ill never watch it again. Slasher movies like Friday the 13th and its 11 sequels are ultimately pleasurable they end and you wake up from the dream buzzing with the adrenaline evolution gives you to escape predators, yet realize you are not in fact being stalked by Jason Voorhees. But when Synecdoche, New York is over and the lights come up, you understand that what was hunting its characters is hunting you too, outside the theater, in reality.
No other movie had ever given me the same jolt of pure dread until I saw the new Field of Vision documentary A Night at the Garden, directed by Marshall Curry. (Field of Vision is a division of First Look Media, as is The Intercept.)
Currys film, watchable above, is just six minutes long, and is a tiny masterpiece. It should be taught in history and filmmaking courses, as well as in classes about human psychology.
On its surface, its simply about a rally held by the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the old Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan.
The Bund meaning federation never metastasized to any appreciable size. Estimates vary, but its dues-paying membership did not top 25,000. However, it was allied with the Christian Front, an organization inspired by the notorious anti-Semitic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. Tens of millions of Americans tuned into Coughlins weekly radio show; one of his slogans was Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity.
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/29/a-night-at-the-garden-is-the-most-terrifying-movie-you-can-watch-this-halloween/
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)bringing the horror home.
But one of the scariest things in the movies was this gem:
I still shiver.
BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)context of their greater plan, it is scary as hell. One of the creepiest hair raising scenes.
USALiberal
(10,877 posts)rurallib
(62,444 posts)TexasBushwhacker
(20,211 posts)SP plays a prison psychiatrist and Bobby Darin plays an American Nazi and member of the Bund who was imprisoned for sedition. Really good.