Summer of Slash: Eyeballing a Meme
Hans from the always wonderful Quiet Cool blog has pegged me for the latest meme making the rounds. This meme started over at The Dancing Image. The inspiration for the meme is "a gallery of images chosen by you to stand for so much of what makes Cinema such a rich and exciting medium." Here are the rules(cut and pasted from Hans' site):
1. Pick as many pictures as you want - but make them screen-captures. These need to be moments that speak to you that perhaps haven't been represented as stills before.
2. Pick a theme, any theme.
3. You MUST link to original gallery at The Dancing Image.
4. Tag five blogs.
I'll tackle the last part first: I'm going to ape what Ed Howard did and simply invite all readers to participate. It's just better that way.
Okay, so my theme for this meme came to me pretty easily since I'm already doing a theme for the summer. Naturally, most of the movies I have at my disposal are horror movies, at the moment, so I went ahead and tried to think of one element that I love about horror movies, and I my mind went to eyes. The Italians love 'em and so do I. There's something about the eyes: cliches like "windows to the soul" are apt for horror films; there's something seductive and alluring about a close-up shot of the eye; there's something vulnerable about seeing an eye exposed, which leads to many cringe-worthy moments in horror films where eyes are injured (again, a favorite of the Italian's); and there's just something cool about the way eyes are often framed in horror movies. So here is my gallery of 'eyeball images' from an array of horror films. Pictures and titles of the films come after the jump...
The pictures are from the following films (in order of appearance):
Poster art from the giallo, Eyeball (Umberto Lenzi)
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento)
City of the Living Dead (Lucio Fulci)
Deep Red (Dario Argento)
Friday the 13th: Part 3 (Steve Miner)
Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)
Midnight Meat Train (Ryuhei Kitamura)
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper)
The Beyond (Lucio Fulci)
The Church (Michele Soavi)
Opera (Dario Argento)
Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes (Lucio Fulci)
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava)
Zombi 2 (Lucio Fulci)
Zombie Holocaust (Marino Girolami)
Very cool! This was a lot of fun, wasn't it? When I was writing a post today, I had Barbara Magnolfi's beautiful eyes in my thoughts. I love how some of the images that you picked are quite beautiful and some of them are quite horrible. Great stuff, Kevin, and I hope all's well.
ReplyDeleteThere's something particularly sadistic about violence against eyes in movies - since what we're using to watch them is what's being violated. Lots of great pics, even without recourse to Un Chien Andalou! Jamie's "Guess the Pic" from The Prowler a few weeks back probably also would have qualified...
ReplyDeleteBtw, I'd be remiss not to mention Stephen's gallery, which originally spurred the meme. Can be found here:
http://checkingonmysausages.blogspot.com/2010/03/gallery-is-open-accepting-submissions.html
Thanks, Hans! It was a fun meme...which isn't always the case with these things.
ReplyDeleteMovieman:
ReplyDeleteI had Un Chien Andalou ready to upload and I just didn't feel like it fit with the other pictures (I don't know if I'd really call that a horror movie)...so I dumped it figuring someone would make mention of it, because after all it is probably one of the most famous images in all of film. Sure, it fits the "violence against eyes" theme well...but I wanted to stick primarily to horror films as they are represented here (read: more generic/easily definable horror films).
Thanks for making mention of Stephen's site. I copy and pasted the intro from Hans' site, and I see he mentioned Stephen's blog...I don't know how that got deleted. Woops.
Thanks for the comment. This was a fun meme, and I've been enjoying other people's gallery's.
Youch! Makes you wonder what an eye really would look like being popped out of a head. I guess there would be a lot of meat following it up, but I dunno. Surprised that the flying eye from EVIL DEAD, and Denueve's eye in REPULSION isn't here. Anyway, great theme!
ReplyDeleteDean:
ReplyDeleteREPULSION (and of course EVIL DEAD) is a good one, but sadly I didn't have it at my disposal...plus it hadn't crossed my mind when I was putting these pics together, but now that you mention it that would have been a good one to try and get off of Google images.
Thanks for stopping by and for the comment. Much appreciated!
Obviously, there's a lot of Fulci on the list here. But I really love the fakeness of that ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST cap. Hilarious, fella.
ReplyDeleteSurprised there's no Requiem for a Dream eyeball shots up here. :)
ReplyDelete