31 Days of Horror: All the Movies

frankenstein

I’ve watched horror movies in October for as long as I can remember. In 2022 I started blogging about them under the title 31 Days of Horror. Here’s the complete list of all the movies I’ve written about for that theme.

Black Christmas (2006)
The Blob (1988)
The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)
Body Snatcher (1993)
Castle of Blood (1964)
Cursed (2005)
Day of the Dead (1985)
The Descent (2005)
Doctor X (1932)
Don’t Look Now (1973)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)
Fascination (1979)
Final Destination 2 (2003)
The Final Girls (2015)
The Fog (1980)
The Forever Purge (2021)
Frankenstein (1931)
The Girl in Room 2A (1974)
Gremlins (1984)
The Grudge (2004)
Halloween (1978)
Halloween (2007)
Halloween II (2009)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1984)
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
Halloween Ends (2022)
Happy Death Day 2U (2019)
The Haunted Palace (1963)
Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988)
The Hidden (1987)
Hocus Pocus 2 (2022)
House of the Long Shadows (1983)
In the Folds of the Flesh (1971)
The Invasion (2007)
The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
The Invisible Woman (1940)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Jeepers Creepers (2001)
Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)
Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003)
The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974)
Lady Morgan’s Vengeance (1965)
Macabre (1980)
Mark of the Vampire (1935)
Messiah of Evil (1974)
Mimic (1997)
The Mummy (1959)
The Mummy’s Hand (1940)
Murder Rock: Dancing Death (1984)
Murders in the Zoo (1931)
Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)
Near Dark (1987)
The Night Stalker (1972)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 7-Film Set
Nothing Underneath (1985)
Perfect Blue (1997)
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Ready or Not (2019)
The Return of Dr. X (1939)
The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
Salem’s Lot (2024)
The Secret of the Blue Room (1933)
Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll And Miss Osbourne (1981)
Talk to Me (2022)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Thirteen Women (1932)
The Thing From Another World (1951)
Torso (1973)
Totally Killer (2023)
Trick ‘r Treat (2007)
Urban Legend (1998)
The Velvet Vampire (1971)
Waxwork (1988)
Werewolf by Night (2022)
What Have They Done To Your Daughters? (1974)
What Lies Beneath (2000)
Who Saw Her Die? (1972)

31 Days of Horror: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

texas chainsaw massacre dark sky selects

One of the fun things about being a physical media collector is getting to display your stuff. Digital collections are great, but all you have to show for it is a hard drive (yes I know it is the actual art – the music, the films, the writing – that truly matters not the physical objects, but still…).

I love Steelbooks, collector’s editions, and Blu-rays with fun artwork. Sometimes the releases come with collectibles. Sometimes they come with really cool collectibles. The new Dark Sky 4K UHD edition of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a lifesized plastic chainsaw! How cool is that?

The movie is great, too. An all-time horror classic.

You can read my full film review and the set over at Cinema Sentries.

Bring Out the Perverts: In The Folds of the Flesh (1970)

in the folds of the flesh poster

This is the only film in the collection which I had not previously watched. It also happens to be the worst of the bunch, and I’d hardly call it a Giallo at all.

I’ve talked before about how most Gialli don’t make all that much logical sense. They often have plot inconsistencies and characters will behave in a nonsensical manner. But In the Folds of the Flesh is on a whole new level of nonsense. Honestly, I’m not sure I could describe everything that goes on in this film, or how any of it fits into the plot.

But I’ll try.

A convict escapes from a mental hospital. He comes across a woman who has just killed her husband and is burying him in her yard. But before he can do anything he is captured by the police. Many years later a long-lost cousin shows up to the house and is promptly murdered. Then an old friend comes to the house and he gets his head sliced off. Then the convict finds his way back to the house, tries to blackmail the family, and finds himself in an acid bath.

I think there is a police investigation and there are definitely flashbacks to a Nazi concentration camp, and probably a bunch of other stuff too. I really can’t remember. It all happens so haphazardly it was difficult to keep up. Or to care.

It is shot with psychedelic glee. There are a lot of flash zooms and kaleidoscope-y split screens. The kills (which feature quite a few decapitations) are pretty fun. And goofy.

It is overwrought and trashy. And a little bit of fun. But not enough to make me recommend it.

31 Days of Horror: The Blob (1988)

the blob poster

As I wrote in this week’s Pick of the Week, I love 1950s-era science fiction/horror films. They are oh-so-very cheesy, but often they are made by good craftsmen and they can be quite enjoyable to watch.

The 1980s saw a string of those old movies being remade. John Carpenter turned The Thing From Another World (1951), an actually pretty great Cold War metaphor into his masterpiece, The Thing (1982). David Cronenberg turned the wonderfully silly The Fly (1958) into one of the all-time great body horror films. (We could also mention Phillip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but that would bring us back to 1978 and I want to stick to the 1980s.)

In 1988 Chuck Russell got into the game and remade the goofy The Blob into a goopy, gnarly little horror film. It is my least favorite of these films, but it is still pretty great.

One of my favorite things about the film is that it introduces several characters in the beginning, people who give off Main Character Energy whom you figure will make it to the end of the film, and then it brutally murders them within the first half hour. It gives the movie that Game of Thrones feeling where nobody is really safe.

A meteorite lands just outside of a small town in California. Inside it is some gelatinous goo that feeds on human flesh and grows bigger every time it does.

The film takes time with its characters. It gives us some nice beats letting us understand them a little bit, even when it kills them soon after. This gives the movie the feeling of something more than just a big glob of goo murdering everyone.

Those kills are pretty sweet though. The special effects crew do a great job of making the blob look, well not realistic in any way, but effectively cool. The kills are varied and violent and bloody.

The plot gets pretty silly – there is a whole thing about a government agency swooping in to keep the blob safe in order to use it as a biological weapon (or did they invent it in the first place?), and the acting (led by Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith) is less than stellar. But mostly it is a lot of fun.

31 Days of Horror: 2024

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This will be the third year in a row for me writing about horror movies in October. I’ve been watching horror movies in October for a lot longer than that, and I did a hashtag on Twitter (when I still posted to Twitter) for a couple of years before I started blogging it. This was one of the first themes I did when I started doing non-music posts again at The Midnight Cafe and it remains one of my favorites.

For some reason, I always try to write about horror movies in October every single day of the month. With all my other themes I only write about them a couple of times a week at best. I guess because it is “31” Days of Horror my brain tells me I need to write 31 articles. I probably will miss a few, but be ready for lots of horror talk. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

31 Days of Horror: Halloween II (2009)

halloween 2

John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) essentially created the slasher craze of the 1980s. It either popularized or outright invented many of the tropes of the genre – a final girl, deaths coming to those who are promiscuous or otherwise “sinful”, killers’ point of view shots, etc. – and created a slew of knock-off holiday-themed horror films and generally influenced a decade of horror films.

It was followed by seven sequels and then was remade by Rob Zombie, that remake got a sequel and that was followed by the David Gordon Green trilogy which pretended none of the sequels happened and set the story 40 years after the original.

Rob Zombie remade the original film in 2007 and as I noted in my review, it is pretty terrible. Its sequel improves upon the first one a great deal, but it still isn’t great.

Scout Taylor-Compton returns as Laurie Strode some two years after the events of the original film (or the remake of the original film, or…whatever). She’s having a rough time. She’s in therapy, she’s taking a myriad of pills, and she’s having nightmares about Michael Myers every night. In a word, she was deeply traumatized by the events of Halloween night two years ago.

Now, horror movies about trauma may have been new in 2007. Certainly, a great many slasher sequels had the Final Girl return as bad as ever. They were able to shake off the events of the first film and come back after the evil villain with renewed vigor. But that isn’t reality. Surviving an attack by a vicious killer is traumatizing. It likely takes years, decades even, to overcome such a thing.

It is refreshing to have a horror movie’s protagonist have to deal with the trauma of the first film. Or it was back in 2007. I guess. In 2023 it feels like every horror film is about trauma. Hell, even Avengers: Endgame was about trauma. Certainly, the David Gordon Green Halloween films were about trauma. So watching this film now, and seeing how it deals with trauma feels a little old hat.

It isn’t as if Rob Zombie was doing something really interesting with the idea either. As mentioned, Laurie is in therapy, she’s popping pills, she has nightmares, she dresses like a punk goth, and covers her room in hard rock posters and “edgy” things like anarchist symbols and the number “666.” That isn’t a bad thing for this type of horror film, but it isn’t exactly original either.

It doesn’t help poor Laurie Strode that Doctor Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is back in town pimping another book about Michael Myers. In this film, he is a shallow huckster, trading stories about the murders for fame and fortune. His new book gives the audience new details that have come to light since his last one, including how Laurie Strode is actually Angel Myers, Michael’s sister. When Laurie finds this out it sends her spiraling farther into despair.

Meanwhile, Michael has apparently spent the last two years wandering the countryside, hiding out in old farms, eating the raw corpses of animals he’s killed, and waiting around for the second anniversary to come find Laurie and finish what he’s started.

In Carpenter’s original Michael Myers was the face of evil. He was an emotionless, soulless, killing machine. There is a scene in the original film in which he stabs someone to death, his knife holding the corpse to the wall, and Myers crocks his head just a little as if admiring what he’s done.

Zombie spent the first film examining just exactly what made Michael Myers a killer, completely destroying what made Carpenter’s character so terrifying. He drops most of that with this sequel though his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) and a version of himself as a child (Chase Wright Vanek) continue to haunt him like memory specters.

What saves this film are some truly scary kill scenes, and some wonderful, even beautiful imagery. The carnage is a bit too visceral and gory for my tastes these days, but there is no doubt he blocks them in really interesting ways.

If you strip away all of the Halloween stuff, if you just look at it as a horror film, as a slasher, I think it is pretty good. But as another entry in the Halloween franchise, it doesn’t really work for me. It is a great improvement on Zombie’s first entry, but there are so many other better films in this series I don’t see myself ever returning to this one.

31 Days of Horror: Halloween (2007)

John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) didn’t invent the slasher genre. It has its roots in the Italian Giallo and films like Black Christmas (1974) came out earlier and contain all the elements of the genre. But Halloween really set the template for what slavers would become, and its immense popularity meant that it would be copied over and over again throughout the next decade.

It remains the greatest slasher ever made and is a truly great horror film. Much of this comes down to Carpenter’s economic direction. In just over 90 minutes he tells a complete story without an ounce of fat. It isn’t that the film is nonstop thrills either. There is a lot of exposition, we spend a lot of time just hanging out with the characters. But Carpenter makes them count. He lets us get to know the characters, especially Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in a career-defining role), which allows us to actually care for them when the horror comes.

As Doctor Loomis (a wonderful Donald Pleasence) constantly lets us know Michael Myers is evil personified. The film doesn’t provide a back story. We don’t learn anything about who he is or why he kills. We don’t need to know.

Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween is a terrible film. It takes all that makes Carpenter’s film great and chucks it out the window, then stomps on it with its dirty boots.

A good half of the film is filling in Michael Myers’s back story (played by Daeg Faerch as a ten-year-old boy and Tyler Mane as an adult). His mom is a stripper, her boyfriend is an alcoholic, abusive cripple. He’s bullied at school. Etc., etc., and so forth. It is all basic, boilerplate reasons for becoming a psychopath.

Here he doesn’t just kill his older sister as a child, but his entire family (excluding his baby sister, of course). We then spend a bunch of time with him at the mental institution where Doctor Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) tries to cure him. Or at least show him some kindness. Or at least talk to him. His mom visits every week, but Michael shrinks back into himself. He stops talking but continues to make little paper masks to put over his face and hide his true self from the world.

None of this is very interesting and it is all superfluous. Again, we don’t need to know why Michael Myers is a killer. Trying to give him human reasons for being who he is takes away the horror of who he was in the original.

When we finally arrive at Halloween night in the present (where the original film spends most of its time) I’d stop being interested in what this film was trying to do. Unfortunately, I had to keep watching for another hour.

Scout Taylor-Compton plays Lauri Strode in this version and all apologies to the actress, but she is not good. Jamie Lee Curtis portrayed the character as kind and good (it literally began the trope that the Final Girl in these films would be virtuous and a virgin), but also tough, a fighter. She’s innocent, but not naive or weak. Taylor-Compton turns her into a mostly whiny brat. Her girlfriends are even more obnoxious.

In the original, the teens do a bit of drinking and sexing, but Carpenter’s camera never leers at them. Zombie’s camera is nothing but leers. It lingers on the sex scenes, is zooms in on the nudity. There is a rape scene early on in the asylum that is as gross as it is gratuitous. The violence is more visceral as well, and not in a good way. I love horror movies and I’ve seen more than my fair share of gore and gratuitous sex. Maybe I’m just getting older, but so much of this film just felt like way too much.

I first watched this film in 2008 while living in Shanghai, China. In those days you could buy bootleg DVDs super cheap. There were literally guys on the street corners with boxes full of them. As soon as a film came out in the States we would get flooded with copies (usually cam copies where folks literally filmed the movie inside the theater). Sometimes we’d get weird cuts of films. After watching Halloween over there I was looking up reviews and realized I had seen a different cut than everyone else.

Apparently, there are three different versions of the film. There is a theatrical cut, a director’s cut, and an original version that was sent to test audiences. That last version didn’t do very well so they added some scenes and cut some things out. At a guess, I’d say what I originally saw was that first version. But I really don’t remember.

I believe what I watched tonight was the Director’s Cut. Whatever I watched, it was bad. Really bad. Just terrible actually.

I only watched it because the only film in the entire franchise I’ve never seen is the sequel to this. I was hoping to watch it on Halloween night. I guess I still will, but now I’m not looking forward to it.

31 Days of Horror: Castle of Blood (1964)

castle of blood

Alan Foster (Georges Rivière), a journalist meets Edgar Alan Poe (Silvano Tranquilli) at a pub. In the film’s reality, Poe is not a writer of fictions, but a documentarian of actual supernatural occurrences. He tells Foster this, but the journalist is a skeptic. Poe makes him a bet that he cannot spend the night in a haunted castle. Foster agrees.

Once there he is accosted by the usual haunted house trappings – spooky noises, candles getting blown out, strange sounds, and paintings that seem to stare back at him.

Then the ghosts come.

Luckily two out of the three ghosts are beautiful women (Barbara Steele and Margarete Robsahm), the other is a handsome, musclebound man. They were each murdered on the premises sometime in the past and now, once a year they must take the soul of a living human in order to remain in existence.

Ah, but Barbara Steele’s character falls in love with our hero and decides to help him survive the night, even though that will mean her own destruction.

Castle of Blood is pretty light on plot, but oh is it heavy on atmosphere. The camera investigates and lingers on every gothic inch of the castle. It is cobweb-filled, shadow-dense, and incredibly creepy. It longingly gazes at Barbara Steele who has a face custom-built for films like this. She is both incredibly beautiful and eerily terrifying.

This is the type of horror film my squeamish wife can watch with me. It is exactly the type of film I love.

31 Days of Horror: Murders in the Zoo (1931)

murders in the zoo

Here’s another Pre-Code film that couldn’t have been made just a few years later. Murders in the Zoo is an astonishingly violent film for its time, I’m rather surprised it got a full release even if it was made before the Production Code was in full effect.

It begins with a man getting his mouth sewed closed (and as you can see the film delightfully gives us that image) because he dared kiss another man’s wife. Several other people are murdered by snake bite and one woman is tossed into an alligator pit where she’s ripped to shreds.

still from murder in the zoo

Obviously, there isn’t a lot of gore in this film made some 90 years ago, the blood and guts are decidedly off-screen, but that’s still a lot of violent deaths for such an early Hollywood film.

Lionel Atwill is Eric Gorman, our murdering psychopath. He’s a big game hunter and zoo owner who is insanely jealous of his wife Jerry (Gail Patrick). Admittedly, she regularly seems to have affairs and wants to divorce him, but that doesn’t quite call for brutally murdering everybody who looks longingly in her general direction.

Randolph Scott is the doctor who comes up with an antidote for the snake venom (something that will come in handy when he gets bit). Oh, the snake is a super poisonous mamba. Gorman brings one back from Africa and uses it to kill a couple of his wife’s suitors.

Charlie Ruggles is Peter Yates a newly hired press agent who is scared silly of pretty much all the animals in the zoo. He’s ostensibly our hero and very much the comic relief.

The story is mostly silly, and the comedy mostly didn’t work for me, but it gets good use out of its animals. There are big cats, and alligators, and snakes, and the film gets its money’s worth out of them.

What really makes the film worth watching is just how much they got away with. I’m not a big fan of acting like modern audiences are more sophisticated, or intelligent, or even less prudish than audiences from times before. There were intelligent, sophisticated people 90 years ago. They understood violence. The papers were full of it. And yet, the violence on screen in this film does seem shocking. That opening scene where the guy gets his eyes sewn shut is wild. You know it is happening off-screen and watching it I sat there wondering if they would actually show it, thinking there was no way we’d get something like that in a film from 1933.

And then he came out, eyes shown shut.

That’s one of the many reasons I love Pre-Code cinema.

31 Days of Horror: Murder Rock: Dancing Death (1984)

murder rock

Lucio Fulci is often called The Godfather of Gore, and it is true, he did make a lot of horror films with copious amounts of violence, buckets of blood, and tons of gore. But he worked in many other genres throughout his long career including westerns, sword and sandal epics, and even comedy. What one would not expect from him is a musical, which is exactly (well, more or less) what he made with Murder Rock: Dancing Death.

It isn’t technically a musical since the characters don’t actually sing, but there is a lot of music (which was written by Keith Emerson) and a whole lot of dancing. But it is really a horror movie. Actually, it is the best-looking Giallo Fulci ever made.

It takes place at a New York City dance studio where one by one the female dancers are being stabbed through the heart with a long, needle-like hairpin by a black gloved killed. The studio is so hardcore that after the first girl is killed, the instructor basically tells the other dancers to stop whining and get back to work.

Meanwhile, Candice (Olga Karlatos) begins having dreams of being murdered by a man she’s never seen before. When she sees the dream man’s face on a billboard she tracks him down only to discover he’s a disheveled drunk. Instead of shrugging it off or running away in terror, she decides to sleep with him.

The film is filled with red herrings and a cop (Cosimo Cinieri) who is both lackadaisical about the whole thing and rather sadistic. It is all a bit complicated and rather silly, but I really kind of loved it. I mean most Giallos are complicated and silly, but this one pushes it to the edge and then some.

But it is stunningly gorgeous to look at. Fulci and his cinematographer have lit the heck out of it and filled it with beautiful, colorful images. The music and dancing give it an unusual energy and it’s just a lot of fun to watch.