Word: horror
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...plane was in the air no more than a few minutes when disaster struck. Witnesses say black smoke belched from the aircraft's fuselage. Seconds later the plane was engulfed in a ball of fire, and villagers on the ground watched with horror as it plummeted to the earth, tumbling nose over tail like a toy as it fell. The huge turboprop bounced twice after hitting the sandy plain, then came down a third and final time, exploding on impact. All 30 people aboard were killed, including Zia, 64; Raphel, 45; Brigadier General Herbert Wassom, 49, the chief...
That became even clearer when he took the central seat in the Leonardoesque composition of a dozen or so lunchers around a long table. Early on, Bush tried to put himself at ease by telling the students, all brimming with horror stories they are encouraged to tell, "I don't want to talk about what you don't want to." This left the sandwich-room disciples speechless for a moment, each about to be deprived of some carefully prepared item of testimony. But so strong was their sense of mission that soon, despite Bush's signals of anxiety...
...overthrow the Ottomans. The Pasha is greedy, his minister conniving and threatening to those who stand in his way. His Turkish subjects are best described by their predilection for sacrificing sheep. One scene shows a man selling knives used for this purpose, with an American woman shrinking in horror at the thought of this barbarity. And later in the film, the title character sees such a sacrifice and recoils in horror. The point is, these people are cruel and uncivilized...
...thunk it? A horror movie with brains and guts. That is, as it happens, the theme of George A. Romero's Monkey Shines: a battle of intellect vs. instinct, the moral vs. the feral, Allan man vs. Ella monkey. Ella learns to know Allan, through a kind of transspecies ESP, and to love him, with a frightening intensity. He is seized with visions, from Ella's point of view, of the creature's nocturnal rambles as she acts out his jealousy and frustration in the most violent form; and Romero films the images as if through a late-night monkey...
True to the genre, Romero runs clever twists on mandatory horror-movie citations like the Psycho shower sequence (Mrs. Bates is a monkey) and The Old Dark House climax (Ella pulls the power switch). And at the end, Monkey Shines soars into that rarefied sci-fi air where melodrama meets metaphor. Romero, best known for Night of the Living Dead 20 years ago, has grown up here, grown past Hitchcock homages to fix on the war of mind and body that everyone ceaselessly wages. While he's at it, he has made the smartest dark fantasy since David Cronenberg...