The only criteria for selecting a movie for Krevborna Theatre was that it had to have atmosphere similar to the setting. For posterity's sake, and so I don't repeat any movies if I do this again next year, here's what we watched:
Hands of the Ripper
Brotherhood of the Wolf
Captain Kronos--Vampire Hunter
I Sell the Dead
The Pit & the Pendulum
Black Death
Blood From the Mummy's Tomb
Dead Hooker in a Trunk
The Lords of Salem
Machete
Terminal USA
Eaten Alive
The Doom Generation
Now that's a heady line-up! Also, this list is being recorded here for posterity and so that I make sure to show different movies in next year's PMF Film Fest.
The most shocking thing about The Matrix: Resurrections is that it's a mostly decent movie. It's also a decent encapsulation of the experience of watching the original trilogy. The first half most closely resembles the first movie in the series: it's stylish, action-packed, and leaves you wondering what exactly is going on. Unfortunately, the second half mirrors the latter two movies: way too much talking. The talking is an issue on at least two fronts; as ever, the dialog has been written with a leaden ear and the more the movie tries to explain itself, the more it reveals the vacuous Philosophy For Dummies underlying its Big Ideas. It even doggedly sticks to the notion of ending things on an anticlimax.
The last installment of October's horror movie rush:
Dracula's Fiancee
Dracula's Fiancee is a late-era Jean Rollin film, which in some ways is a true testament to his obsession with certain images and themes because it is very much in tune with his earlier, more celebrated vampire films. As it typical of a Jean Rollin film, Dracula's Fiancee doesn't make a ton of sense; it's a dreamlike tale about vampire hunters pursuing Dracula through his minions and the nuns who have been driven insane imprisoning the vampire's secrets. Nice to see Brigitte Lehaie as one the vampire lord's compatriots, and also nice to see that they let her ride a horse for this role.
The House of the Dead is an anthology film, with four segments and some frame narrative bits to hang it all together. The segments include: a mean schoolteacher is terrorized by something or someone in her house when she thought she was alone, a creep who likes to film himself killing women, an American detective and a British detective battle it out for the title of Next Top Detective, and a man find himself trapped in an abandoned building that has been converted into a torture chamber. Each of the tales has a moral bent to them, exposing a particular foible imagined to be over-present in the American psychological makeup.
One thing I found interesting is that this movie was directed by a woman, and an important woman at that as she would be the first woman to win the Director's Guild of America Award, and yet I've never seen this movie listed with the usual suspects on any of those "horror directed by women" lists. Overall, The House of the Dead is pretty fun for what it is!
X
I was honestly surprised by how much fun X was. There's a fine line between homage and pointless exercise in nostalgia when a horror movie tries to present a retro experience, but thankfully X is much more the former than the latter.
The plot of X is 1970s-tastic: a group rents out a guest house on a farmer's rural property so they can cash in on the porn boom and film a skin flick on the cheap. Of course, there's something deeply fucked up on the farmer's land and they end up being hunted one-by-one.
Although Knife For the Ladies has a name that feels like it should belong to a giallo, it's actually a strange mash-up of slasher flick and Western. On paper, those are two genres that should work really well together given their native propensities to ponder mortality, the unsettling competition between the civilizing impulse and the dark heart of mankind, and the cheapness of life in general, but the combination doesn't always work in Knife For the Ladies. There's nothing glaringly wrong with the movie, and it's entertaining enough for what it's attempting, but it does sometimes feel like two movies competing for space on the reels.
The horror movie train don't stop for no one. Here's more of what I've been watching in October as I marathon horror movies:
The Majorettes
Sometimes you're just in the mood for a trashy 80s slasher movie and nothing else will hit the spot. The Majorettes was surprisingly not bad for this sort of thing. It's got all the elements you expect (murders, shower scenes), but it also has some unexpected texture to it. Oddly, toward the end it effectively stops being a slasher movie and morphs into a "criminal delinquents on heat" sort of movie. Everything comes full circle, of course, but the brief interlude of gunplay and explosions did serve to liven up the formula a bit.
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I saw The Old Dark House for the first time last year, but I enjoyed it so much that I was totally down to watch it again when my girlfriend requested an old black and white spookfest as our next movie pick. With its characters straight out of central casting, its titular old dark house, and the charmingly dated elements of the movie, you just can't go wrong with The Old Dark House. All that and Boris Karloff? Get out of here! Unbeatable mix. This is one of the few horror-comedies that really gets it right, in my opinion.
What an absolutely garbage movie! Shame on the director for fooling us with the first film in this trilogy, which actually seemed intent on both enlivening the franchise and exploring trauma as an aspect of horror. Halloween Ends betrays both of those goals. Not only does it come up empty on figuring out something new to do with Michael Myers, who doesn't even show up until over forty minutes into the flick, it ultimately has nothing worth saying about trauma too. Add in some ridiculous turn of events that don't make much sense in the context of the trilogy as a whole, some oddly placed boomer romance, a meet-cute that beggars belief, and a lack of any tension, and you got yourself a recipe for frustration and disappointment. At least we can all get back to pretending that there is only one Halloween movie and that the sequels don't exist.
Unfortunately, the movie bit of The Demon Lover doesn't hold a candle to the great painted-on-the-side-of-a-1970s-van art from the poster. The premise is pretty funny: a black magician feels jilted when his coven, who are only in it to party, man, get fed up with his dictates and leave him. In revenge, he summons a demon to kill them off. The only even slightly interesting thing in this movie is that the warlock character is very much a type I've encountered in real life: way too into the occult, way too into karate, and when you go to his house for the first time you're dismayed to see a Nazi flag inexplicably hanging on the wall. Oh yeah, a bunch of character names in this are references to horror and comics luminaries, but with a movie this bad it feels more like a slight than an honor.
Oddly, The Undead has nothing to do with the undead; it was instead a cheapie horror flick created to capitalize on the then-current cultural fascination with reincarnation! As an experiment, two scientists send a prostitute's psyche back in time to experience her past life as a medieval maiden accused of witchcraft. Interestingly, this movie has a real moral dilemma to it: is it better for the medieval woman to face her execution and insure that she will live other lives, even though some of those lives are terrible, or is it better for her to escape immediate death and live with the man who loves her? Really fun little movie. Also, the brunettes in this movie are something else.
The Witch Who Came From the Sea
I was not adequately prepared for The Witch Who Came From the Sea! Frankly, I was expecting some sort of supernatural element--an actual witch, instead of metaphor. What I got was an insane psycho-sexual murder spree thriller in which a woman's idolization of her abuser creates a thirst for blood and...television?
Anyway, I love that Daphne and her never-ending avalanche of pills is frequently referenced by characters in the film, but we never actually meet Daphne. Stay mysterious, Daphne! Also, as my friend Steve pointed out, that badass poster is a total rip of a Frazetta work.
I first saw Audition on Halloween night in Whitby, and you know...I don't think I'll ever be fully prepared for the intensity of the last twenty minutes of this movie.
A widower makes the terrible decision to "audition" women to be his next wife under the guise of hiring someone to star in a forthcoming production. Of course, he gets more than he bargains for with the woman he chooses.
Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, Audition will leave a mark.
Dementia 13
Made with the leftover funds from one of Roger Corman's movies, Dementia 13 was Francis Ford Coppola's first "real" film. It's definitely a Psycho ripoff, but it's admittedly a pretty good one. When a man's grief-stricken mother plans to leave the family's wealth to charity in the name of her deceased daughter, his wife begins scheming to get her hands on the loot. Little does she realize that there is more going on in Castle Haloran than she initially suspects.
One thing that's pretty funny about this one is that the Irish Haloran family has nary an Irish accent to be heard!
Shock was Italian maestro Mario Bava's last film, and to be honest it isn't among his best work. A late entry in the craze for films about possessed children, there's nothing inherently wrong with Shock, but there isn't much that is noteworthy about it either. There are some instances of strong imagery, but the real attraction--at least for me--is Daria Nicolodi's knock-out performance as a widow who returns to the house she lived in with her husband before his untimely death. Nicolodi does not get enough credit as a scream queen, in my opinion.
When I worked at a video store in the 90s, I did my absolutely best to watch everything in our measly "foreign film" section. Sometimes you'd get stuck with a ponderous, post-war meditation on sadness, but sometimes you'd hit on a real firecracker like Diabolique. Diabolique works in the Hitchcockian mode; an abusive man's wife and mistress conspire to kill him and free themselves from his tyranny, but not all is what it seems--especially when his body disappears before it can be found publicly and his death confirmed.
Here's a really excellent documentary series on history and folk horror:
Every year in the run-up to Halloween I pack out my viewing schedule with as much horror as I can handle. Here's what I've watched so far. (Spoilers ahead, obviously.)
Nope is another triumph for Jordan Peele, although I have to admit that I like each new movie of his just a little bit less than the one that came before it. Which really isn't much of a criticism as I've enjoyed all of them quite a bit. Even so, Nope's greatest strength is how beautiful it is to look at on the big screen. From the monster design to the general sense of place, Nope is simply a visual delight. I found it a little light on scares (but then again aliens aren't something that especially gets under my skin), although I do think the visual spectacle makes it more than worthwhile.
Prey
It is both a surprise and a delight that this sequel to Predator is pretty good, especially after the massive waste of time that was Predators. Although I wouldn't say Prey is pitch-perfect--there's some strange dialog that feels oddly modern--the premise of a Predator versus a Native American woman looking to prove herself as a huntress is pretty solid and the action pops along throughout.
The Changeling
I've been meaning to scratch The Changeling off my list for years, and I finally got a chance in early September. The Changeling belongs to the style of horror movie I tend to enjoy most: it's focused on creating a haunting atmosphere and it does a lot of work with very little.
While the film is a bit slow, it's tale of a grieving composer who moves into a house haunted by a perverse tragedy features some truly unnerving and memorable scenes. Also, like The Haunting, one of my all time favorite haunted house films, it uses sound design to good effect. In a spooky bit of synchronicity, I watched this the same night as I read Daniel Mills' Among the Lilies, a short story that also combines classical music with flights of terror.
I was pretty surprised that Black Phone was a pretty good movie! One thing that was interesting to me was that the violence perpetrated by the serial child killer is basically given a tertiary place in the story; the movie shows far more graphic depictions of the violence of bullying and the kind of child abuse that happens at home. That felt like an apt way of pointing out where the real threats to children are more likely to come from.
Also, although a lot of design went into the killer's variable two-part mask, I didn't really feel that him being a "masked killer" added much, if anything, to the movie. He'd be just as effective, and perhaps more so, if he were just an average guy with a pair of aviators. This is an instance where a "look" or aesthetic isn't really necessary.
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Adding a gloss of "addressing LGBT issues" fails to enliven this absolutely by-the-numbers camp slasher movie. You will be able to predict every move this movie makes, even the ones that don't make much sense in the context of the film.
I also doubt that anyone will even want to claim They/Them as a triumph of representation, as all the characters are at least moderately annoying. Things are not improved by the musical sequence.
The ending is also trite, gutless nonsense.
The real gut punch for me came at the end credits, when I realized that John Logan, whose Penny Dreadful is one of my favorite things of all time, was responsible for this boring mess of a movie.
Barbarian
It's pretty rare that a modern horror movie impresses me, but there's a lot to praise in Barbarian. The cast is solid throughout, the cinematography is varied and inventive, the sound design works well to create an atmosphere of unease, and the effects are certainly memorable. (On that last point, I'm not sure if the fx are all practical, but they look damn good if they were done digitally.)
I don't want to say too much about the plot in case anyone was planning on seeing Barbarian, as I think it works best going in cold, but the basic gist is that two people have booked the same Air BnB and are forced by circumstances to bunk down in a strange house together...and then they discover that they aren't alone in the house. There's a Psycho-esque shift in characters to keep you on your toes, and a bunch of twists and turns that keep things nice and uncertain.
Pearl
Despite the gruesome murders that feature prominently in Pearl, I'm not sure it's actually a horror movie. Instead, Pearl is a character study clothed in layers of sumptuous aesthetics drawn from old Hollywood. Trapped with her immigrant parents, one crippled with illness, the other a hardened and empty disciplinarian, Pearl dreams of leaving her dreary life behind for a place as a dancer on the big screen. And when her aspirations are frustrated, things get bloody.
Sometimes more a mood than a movie, Pearl gets by with its stunning visuals and a powerful performance from Mia Goth. Her monolog near the end of the movie is hard to forget; rarely does an actor get the chance to actually lay it all out on the screen out like that.
The Wicker Man
There are some movies that you just love so much that you end up watching them over and over again. The Wicker Man is one of those for me, and it never gets old. The Wicker Man essentially set the formula for what we consider "folk horror," but it's never really been equaled. The crucial difference between The Wicker Man and something like, say, Midsommar, is that The Wicker Man is unafraid to be weird. Deeply, deeply weird.
Phantasm
Speaking of deeply weird, even though I like Phantasm, I cannot explain its popularity among horror fans or why it was a perennial favorite of the Friday night movie rental circuit. Nothing in the movie really adds up, and although it looks pretty exceptional for what is an indie horror film made with amateurs, by the end you're left with a vague fever dream born of a young boy's grief. Still, I have to admit that several scenes from Phantasm have lived rent free in my brain ever since I first saw it.
Hellraiser (2022)
It would be no exaggeration to say that the 1986 Hellraiser was a game-changer for me. I was already well and truly steeped in horror movies, but I had never seen anything as transgressively weird as Hellraiser up until that point. That fateful viewing turned me into a Clive Barker obsessive in general and a Hellraiser fan in specific; after watching it I was on a path to read the original book, collect the comics, and write my own DIY rpg about characters who had escaped from the cenobites' clutches.
All of which means that the 2022 reboot of the film franchise had a lot of live up to. While I wouldn't call it an essential film, I feel it's safe to say that it's the best Hellraiser movie we've gotten since Hellraiser II, and by a wide margin at that. (Though I do have a soft spot for the oft-maligned Hellraiser IV.) The new film manages to capture some of the original's fetishistic energy, and it doesn't skimp on the gore either. The plot might be a little too self-involved for its own good, but I had a surprisingly good time watching this one.
The Good
Overall, yeah, I'd say it's pretty fun. The animation is generally well done, the voice acting is great (it should be since the cast are professional voice actors by trade), and it has some pretty memorable sequences and story beats. In particular, I thought there were some great fight scenes, especially where the undead were involved. The undead look really good throughout The Legend of Vox Machina. If you have good, creepy undead you've already managed to go a long way toward selling me on your project. But I digress.
As someone who doesn't tune in every week to watch Critical Role, I really had no idea what this arc would be about. I know very little about the campaign that catapulted them into the livestream spotlight. Being unfamiliar with the arc allows for nice moments of surprise; for example, I was absolutely delighted by the villains of this season. The Briarwoods are so arrogant, imperious, and nefarious that I'm genuinely a little jealous that I didn't invent them first. Also, it's wild to me to see a big-budget cartoon featuring Vecna. Okay, they have to call him "the Whispered One" for legal reasons, but it's still damn cool.
The Surprising
It's interesting that the Crit Role folks decided to go full-on adult content with this series. I saw somebody complain about the swearing in the first episode; if they stuck around, I'm sure they got an eyeful of stuff they weren't anticipating. It's got plenty of bloody violence and some viscerally gross bits that I enjoyed. It's got depictions of torture and execution that are actually a little harrowing. It's got tits, cunnilingus, and anal beads. It really doesn't hold back in that regard. Caveat emptor.
The Critique
I know the character is beloved and everything, but the bard's musical interludes are the kind of thing that make me grind my teeth. The "theater kid" energy coming off those scenes is palpable. It's a relief when they end. This stuff is not for me, but I can definitely imagine that it will appeal to others. After all, people like Hamilton and go to see Welcome to Night Vale live of their own volition.
Also, although this is a common element of modern animated series, I still find the combination of traditional animation and CG graphics to be a bit distracting at points. It's not a deal breaker, but even with all the money behind it I can't help but think that the pairing can look a little cheap.
There are also some artifacts of translating a D&D game to the screen that become narrative problems in the series. For one, it feels like there are too many characters in the main cast. Crit Role plays at a big table, but as the protagonists of a story the large cast feels crowded. Some characters (the gunslinger, the twins, the druid) get more narrative weight, but that makes some of the other characters (the barbarian, the cleric) feel unimportant enough that it's not clear on a narrative level that they really even need to be there. At one point, the barbarian got knocked out and it wasn't until he got up later that I even remembered he was in the cartoon.
The concessions to the players made during a game also make the story an odd fit to a cartoon series. For example, one of the players in the campaign couldn't make all the sessions due to filming a tv show, so her character wasn't present for all the action. The show tries to shore that up by having her character experience a crisis of faith that entails her taking a solo trip to get her mojo back. That's a good enough rationale for a home game, but as an element of the show it just feels like a fairly pointless side trip that's afforded little gravitas.
Overall, though, even with my caveats the show is fun. It's a good time and a decent piece of fantasy media. If you aren't scared of animated breasts and can stomach the occasional musical number, give it a shot.
Don't Go in the Woods
Don't Go in the Woods was banned in the UK as a "video nasty" for a long time. However, aside from the final scene, I thought the bloodshed in this was actually pretty tame. And yet, I'm not sure people should ever be exposed to acting, writing, and cinematography this poor.
The premise is simple: an insane woodsman is murdering hikers, campers, and whoever else he happens to encounter, but many of the murder scenes are inexplicable and hard to follow visually. One early killing has a character's arm drop off suddenly, and it is unclear what has wounded him. Don't Go in the Woods has the feel of a movie made by effete city-slickers who imagine that every stick found in the woods could impale someone to death if thrown...because that's exactly what happens several times over the course of the movie's runtime. This one is barely watchable.
Don't Look in the Basement
A pretty young nurse comes to work in a home for the mentally ill where the doctor in charge believes that rehabilitation of the violently insane can only happen...if they are given free rein. Which, in this case, includes letting them swing an axe around to master their aggression. I don't have a medical degree, but that seems like a bad idea immediately. And it is: one crazy immediately kill the doctor.
Ultimately, the "doctor" left in charge after the original guy dies is an insane woman who believes she is a doctor and manages to fool the pretty young nurse for a while. It's a bit of a Tarr and Fether situation. Also, despite the title, going through the basement is the only way the nurse can escape the literal madhouse, so maybe don't take it as life advice. There is a shocking bit of implied necrophilia that I didn't see coming, so that's something.
Don't Look in the Attic
This Italian film is mercifully short, and unlike the previous two it isn't a slasher movie. Two feuding brothers and their psychically sensitive cousin are drawn to the house of the relatives they never knew with the promise of inheriting their villa in Turin, but something dark and occult is afoot in the house.
The supernatural elements are admittedly a bit murky; thrills and chills are thin on the ground. Also, as with Don't Go in the Basement, the Americanized title of Don't Look in the Attic one is a bit misplaced: looking in the attic is actually essential, for reasons of exposition and plot!
Don't Go in the House
Don't Go in the House is an extreme Psycho riff. A damaged loser is abducting women and burning them alive to show his dead, but still puritanically castigating, mother who's boss.
In one noteworthy scene the killer goes to a clothing store to get an outfit for his night out at the disco (!!!) and is assisted by a clearly gay clerk. The clerk's sexual orientation is obvious, but never mentioned, and oddly for a movie of this era, it isn't played for laughs or for moral condemnation. Also, imagine if Psycho had a disco scene.
Don't Go in the House isn't great, but it's got enough off-the-wall ideas to keep things moving. The corpses of the main character's victims aren't convincing as charred remains, but they have a gribbly charm that is unsettling on their own merits. It ends on a didactic message: don't abuse your kids or they will grow up to be serial killers, mmkay?
Don't Answer the Phone
Don't Answer the Phone has that classic "grimy" feel that you rarely get in modern horror movies. A porno photographer with daddy issues is strangling and raping women in Los Angeles. The cops are hot on his trail, but are portrayed as surprisingly inept as a matter of course; at one point they shoot their only lead to death before they get a chance to question him.
The film is mostly memorable due to the strange touches that set it apart from similar movies of its ilk, such as the scenes where the killer is inexplicably pumping iron and having a mental breakdown simultaneously. I suppose this is meant to set-up the fact that he's strong enough to bust out of handcuffs (!!!), but it's a very odd recurring image in the movie. There are a few lines in this movie that should be better known, such as the killer terrorizing a women while saying "Shut up, or I'll tear your tit off!" and the handsome cop stating "Adios, creep" after he's sent the killer to his grave.
What follows is a recap of the horror movies and tv I watched in October. Fair warning: there may be spoilers.
Fantasmagorias
Fantasmagorias is a collection of short animated films that retell the supernatural legends and murderous tales of Latin America. And I do mean that the episodes are short; each one is about 2-4 minutes long, essentially the perfect length to get a nice quick dose of Halloween feelings. I loved Fantasmagorias; from the Sin City-esque art style to the grim folklore it details, it was a pitch perfect fit for my interests.
A married man with a child on the way buys a fixer-upper to make into a home. This is his second chance at treading the straight and narrow path after being caught defrauding his financial customers of their life savings. Of course, the house is haunted. Obviously so, in fact. Look, if you don't realize that a house shouldn't be constantly jizzing all over the place and randomly shitting out marbles, don't try to do the home repairs yourself. The last third of the movie is complete bullshit; oddly enough, the most eerie part of the film is the opening credit sequence before the movie proper even starts. Girl on the Third Floor also wants to SAY SOMETHING about how MEN who TREAT WOMEN POORLY should be PUNISHED, but the moral is compromised by the way that innocent people (and a dog!) get caught in the crossfire.
Three teenage girls on their way to a heavy metal concert in the midst of a spate of Satanic ritual slayings meet up with three boys in band...surely the killings and this chance meeting couldn't possibly be connected, right? Well, they are, but with a twist you're likely to see coming a mile away. We Summon the Darkness is mildly fun, but it also feels like a series of missed opportunities; not enough thought was put into the characters' behavior or how to stitch the film's various tangents into a coherent whole. As always I want my Satanic murder sprees to be more Satanic.
The first rule of making a horror movie about demonic possession is that it can't be boring. The Vatican Tapes unfortunately pays that rule no mind. Everything in this movie can be found done better in a superior movie. There's a seen of uncanny vomiting...that absolutely pales in comparison to The Exorcist. Add a little levitation, a little bodily contortion, and what do you get? A by-the-book checklist of obligations that adds nothing new. However, there was an unintentionally funny riff here. The main character was selected for demonic possession because her mother was a prostitute, but her father insists that he wasn't a client; he was just giving her money to get her out of the lifestyle. Don't kid yourself, man. You were paying her for exclusive access to her services.
A young woman flees her toxic family and finds a room for rent in an exclusive apartment complex that seems too good to be true. It is, in fact, too good to be true. Despite a strong performance from the lead, this film just doesn't go anywhere interesting; it suffers from a malady common to the modern horror film: it just isn't willing to go to an extreme place, even thought the potential for real horror is there, which works against the genre it tries to claim some space in. Also, it is very weird how her aspirations as a fashion designer are noted in the film, particularly with lingering shots of her sewing machine, but that doesn't end up being a matter of any import in the movie.
Devil's Gate squanders a strong premise: an FBI agent is called in to investigate a missing woman and her child, while the husband and father is holed up in his trap-laden remote farmhouse standing guard over something unnatural kept in a basement cage. Unfortunately, the movie doggedly insists on getting steadily worse as each minute ticks by. By the time the resolution of the movie is clear, it's impossible to care about the convoluted mess on display. It doesn't help matters that every character in the movie acts in ways that fail to resemble recognizably human behavior. That said, I did rip off the plot line mercilessly for an rpg session that was quite fun, so I managed to get something of a return on my hour and half investment watching it.
A traumatized wife is convinced by her husband to move into an ultra-deluxe apartment building boasting cutting-edge security and internal surveillance. It turns out about as well as you'd think; she soon finds herself plunged into the world of conspiracy theories and the possibilities of technological mind control. It just doesn't really work; I think we're supposed to be thrilled by the ambiguous nature of the threat--is it real or is our protagonist mentally ill?--but it's super clear from the outset that whatever is going on cannot be blamed on her mental state. Also, I find it hilarious that supposed to believe that Christina Ricci is using the internet in a cafe and only has ONE tab open on her laptop. My suspension of disbelief can only handle so much.
I'm a simple man: you give me a moderately atmospheric horror movie set in the Middle Ages with ominous monks wearing plague doctor masks and a creepy witch lady and I'll be happy. On top of that, The Appearance is the rare Gothic-inspired horror flick where the agent of the Inquisition is the good guy. Called to an abbey to investigate a mysterious murder that has been blamed on a caged young woman who is suspected to be a witch, out heroic yet troubled Inquisitor finds himself embroiled in a far darker history than he had any reason to expect would be awaiting him.
A Polish man living in Paris moves into an apartment that suddenly became vacant after the previous tenant jumped from the balcony in an apparent suicide attempt. The former tenant's life begins to invade his own; for example, the owner of the nearby cafe insists on serving him the usual order of the now deceased woman. He starts to suspect that the people around him are trying to turn him into an uncanny replication of the former tenant. And yet, part of his replacement of the dead tenant is due to his own seemingly willful strangeness; why does he go out of his way to befriend a beautiful young woman who was friends with the former tenant? (And their relationship really strained my suspension of disbelief, although it does have the prefect date moment: making out while watching Enter the Dragon.) The Tenant had some really striking imagery and direction, as you would expect, but ultimately the movie just feels weirdly cheap and limp in comparison to Rosemary's Baby or Repulsion.
Clive Barker's Books of Blood collections were absolutely formative horror short fiction for me. The good news about this mediocre adaptation of them is that they bear so little resemblance to the stories they're based on that you can't really feel all that disappointed by their many failings. Barker's stories pulled no punches, but their film versions seem obsessed with keeping things nice and watered down. Also, I laugh out loud every time these movies feature a professor character with an on-campus office the size of a small apartment. I suppose that's something that exists somewhere, but that is entirely alien to my personal experience.
There's an invisible man, sleepin' in your bed--who you gonna call? Well, don't call the cops because even after it's revealed that your genius ex has made an invisibility suit they won't believe you that he's been using it to stalk you and murder your loved ones. Elisabeth Moss kills it in the lead role, but The Invisible Man stretches credulity by granting the evil ex the physical strength and uncanny coordination of a Marvel villain, which actively works against the real horror of narcissistic, possessive former partners that the movie is ostensibly trying to delve into. Frankly, the mundane reality is more terrifying than the exaggerated monstrosity this movie plays with.
Monsterland is a horror anthology adapted from the stories in Nathan Ballingrud's North American Lake Monsters, a collection that I thoroughly enjoyed. Though not every adaptation in the series is successful, I thought that about half the episodes were fantastic; the remaining episodes range from poorly conceived to just a little flat, which is par for the course when it comes to a wide-ranging anthology series that is the work of diverse hands taking the wheel. The best of the episodes preserve the incisive intensity of the original stories. The worst of them lose the plot, especially when they jettison the context of Ballingrud's critique of toxic masculinity--the powerful through-line of North American Lake Monsters. Fair warning, though: many of the episodes in Monsterland bring a naturalistic bleakness to the table that won't be for every viewer.
Horror of Dracula is the first entry in Hammer's long-running series of Dracula films. Although it takes some huge liberties with the source material, it's an exceptionally fun riff on Bram Stoker's ideas. Really, you can't beat Christopher Lee as Count Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. And aside from the most iconic duo in horror movie history, everything else falls nicely into place: the side characters are well portrayed, the costumes are exquisite, and the backdrops are perfectly Gothic. The breakneck conclusion to the film still feels impossible after you've seen it; a quick glance at the clock and it will seem like things can't be resolved in the few minutes left in the film's runtime, but things fall neatly into place--what a ride!
I'm not sure how unpopular an opinion this is, but I sincerely think The Wolf Man is one of the best of the classic Universal horror movies. Dracula and Frankenstein are certainly more visually iconic, but they both suffer from being slow and overly talky in places. The Wolf Man, despite being a product of its fairly tame time, feels much more visceral and emphatic. It also feels like a movie with more to say; Larry Talbot's wolfish pursuit of Gwen, which includes violating her privacy by spying on her with a telescope and hoping to get her alone in the woods despite her avowed engagement to another man, eerily presages his descent into bestial bloodlust as a werewolf.
Three interesting Youtube videos about Japanese horror.
So it begins! The yearly horror movie binge is upon us. Here's what I've watched so far:
