Guest Picks: Writer Roger Luckhurst

The collective experience of audiences in a cinema watching great films is at the heart of what Park Circus is about. We love films, shared stories and escapism, and have asked some of our friends from across the film industry to recommend some of their favourite films for audiences to enjoy as it becomes safe for cinemas to reopen.

To inspire your Halloween viewing, writer Roger Luckhurst talks us through some of of his personal favourites. Roger Luckhurst is author of the BFI Classics books on Alien and The Shining, a feature writer for Sight and Sound, and teaches literature and film at Birkbeck College in London.

I texted a friend the other day and asked how he was doing. ‘It won’t feel normal again until I’m in a cinema, settling down with the opening credits’, he replied. A lot of cinema-lovers have been feeling precisely this pain in these difficult days: we have missed the touch and feel of the velvet dark and silver light.

I suppose there are two attitudes: to confront the anxiety full on, or to seek a magical escape for ninety minutes. I have a soft spot for the horror film, but even so The Andromeda Strain feels a little too on the nose for me just now. Those lights blinking out on the screen as each person in the complex succumbs to the contagion? Not for me, thanks.

Yet there’s a common view of horror as a way of packaging up anxiety and allowing it free run in a displaced and exaggerated set of conventions. Maybe we can process our dread by watching Ridley Scott’s Alien, which opens so evocatively with the camera roving through the empty corridors of the Nostromo. This mash-up of the haunted house and ‘then there were none’ murder mystery comes with the satisfying kick of knowing Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley will probably survive to fight another sequel.

Or maybe we can deal with the inevitable domestic tensions of family isolation by watching the ultimate lockdown, The Shining. Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall may have mastered social distancing by wintering in the mountain hotel, but the family romance soon goes a bit off colour. By the way, if you think you know The Shining it may be time to revisit this, particularly if you haven’t seen the longer American version, which has extra scenes that make more sense of that dysfunctional family dynamic.

It doesn’t have to be horror, though. The amazing 2018 documentary Free Solo is the unexpectedly hilarious and utterly terrifying story of the climber Alex Honnold’s training and attempt to be the first to climb a 2000-foot rock face entirely without ropes. It is so crazy, they even give Alex an MRI to see if there is something wrong with his brain. The culminating ascent gives you an adrenaline rush, but the white-knuckle tension (and amazing cinematography) is always off-set by the sheer comedy of his relationship with his new-ish girlfriend. The film is worth seeing just for her face. She stands in for the audience watching this bizarre heroic and lunatic act unfold.

If you want to go away from the fear, there is always the safety of the musical – provided you steer clear of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, which a recent discussion on the Film Comment blog nominated as a kind of slow creeping horror film. Maybe it’s time to bellow along to Les Misérables or Mamma Mia.

For me, though, I find comfort in the harsh black and white world of 40s film noir, the comfort of strict codes of gumshoe honour and brassy blondes intent on betrayal. It is such a ritualistic, structured universe that I have This Gun for Hire, Criss Cross, The Naked City, Laura and Double Indemnity on a perpetual loop.

I’ve been digging deeper into minor noir classics and also that rush of neo-noir in the 1980s and 90s: Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress or John Dahl’s Red Rock West, which comes replete with a typically stylized turn from Nic Cage as a cursed man who simply can’t find a way out of a small town without encountering catastrophe. It’s funny and twisty and satisfying in a way that blocks out the world for just a little while.