The Friday Night Horror Movie: Halloween (1978)

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I don’t remember the first time I watched John Carpenter’s Halloween. I don’t think I saw it while in high school; it was probably college that found me first seeing it. Whenever it was, I’ve seen it many times since. It has become part of my DNA. I love it deep down in my bones. So I was surprised to realize that I’ve never actually written about it. I’ve written about several of the sequels and the remakes, but never the original. I’ve gotten into the habit over the last several years of watching one of the Halloween movies on Halloween, so I decided it was high time I watched the original on this, the spookiest of evenings, and then finally wrote something about it.

Reading some of my other Halloween reviews, I find that I’ve talked quite a lot about Carpenter’s film and its place in popular culture, so I don’t want to go too heavy in that direction here. Though it is often cited as the first slasher, you can actually go back as far as Psycho and Peeping Tom (both released in 1960) to find films that fit the mold. Italian giallos certainly had a lot of influence over the slasher genre and could even be considered slashers themselves. Technically Black Christmas, a very good slasher itself, was released a few years before Halloween. But it was Carpenter’s film that popularized the genre and solidified the tropes.

While this is true, I would argue that Friday the 13th (1980) truly solidified everything the slasher would become over the remaining decade. Sean S. Cunningham was clearly inspired by Halloween‘s success, and he distilled the Carpenter film down to its very essence. It has a group of sexy teens getting killed off one by one by a blade-wielding maniac. The final girl is virginal and thus pure in the film’s point of view. The killings all stem from something in the killers’ past. Etc. Even the title is taking the holiday premise from Carpenter. Friday the 13th takes the tropes established in Halloween and grinds them down, then exploits the hell out of them. The sex and nudity are more gratuitous, the violence more gore-filled.

Carpenter is on record stating that the notion that Laurie Strode survives Halloween due to her “purity” was purely accidental. And it’s true, Laurie isn’t some paragon of virtue. We see her smoking in one scene, and she doesn’t seem opposed to drinking or the fact that her friends are screwing their boyfriends at the drop of a hat. Her virginity seems to be more of a product of her own shyness and lack of confidence than any sense of morality. She is a “good girl” in the sense that she tries hard at school and genuinely seems to care about the kids she’s sitting with (unlike one of her friends who constantly yells at her charge and dumps her off at Laurie’s as soon as possible.)

Friday the 13th doubles down on the tropes. Its success led to many more slashers in the ensuing years, and most of them kept the distilled versions of these ideas and codified them.

It is always surprising to me how much Halloween takes its time getting to the killing. There is a murder in the opening flashback and then a long period of nothing. After a fantastic credit sequence (featuring a beautifully lit jack-o’-lantern and that iconic score), we open in 1963. A long POV shot shows us Michael Myers stabbing his sister to death (after she’s had some sexy fun times with her boyfriend). But the sex is off-screen, and the violence is fairly tame. Even the nudity feels not particularly gratuitous.

Then we move to the present day (1978) and find Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) for some reason driving to the asylum where Michael Myers is kept with a nurse in the middle of the night. Michael has escaped, attacks the nurse, and gets away. Dr. Loomis tracks him to his hometown of Haddonfield, IL. Loomis is our expositional bank. He keeps finding people to talk to about how Michael Myers isn’t human, he’s evil incarnate, he’s an unstoppable killing machine. Intercut with his hunt for Michael, we find Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) going to school and hanging out with her friends Annie (Nancy Loomis) and Lynda (PJ Soles.) They are typical teenagers. They smoke, they drive around town, and they talk about boys. Laurie gets teased because she cares about her grades and she’s shy around boys, but they genuinely seem to like each other.

In the background is Michael Myers. Standing tall, dressed in coveralls with that weird mask on, just stalking them. We’ll see him driving around, following Laurie. He’s standing outside her bedroom window or her classroom or down the road, but then he’ll quickly disappear. Because Loomis is constantly telling us about how evil Myers is, we feel that tension. Even when Laurie is doing something perfectly boring like making popcorn for the little boy she’s sitting, we know Michael is out there, just waiting to kill her.

The sequels will give Michael Myers a connection to Laurie. This will give him a reason to constantly be coming after her, but in this first film that connection hasn’t been made. His obsession with her is random, and all the more terrifying for it.

When the killings do come, they are fairly tame. There is very little bloodletting or gore. Michael does stab one guy so hard the knife pins him to a wall, and there is another scene in which a body is staged on a bed, and others fall out of closets, but they’d pass a TV edit these days.

But they work because they are so well staged by Carpenter. The way he sets them up and films them, the way he has spent the first 45 minutes setting up Michael Myers as this merciless killer, makes them incredibly effective. Dean Cundey’s cinematography is evocative. A lot of the scenes happen in darkness, but he finds a way to let just enough light in to shine across Michael’s face, or his victims as they flee in terror.

It isn’t a perfect film. There are times when it’s a very small-budget show. You can see some of the seems, but I don’t care. I just love every loving minute of it. It doesn’t get better than Halloween in terms of slashers.

31 Days of Horror: Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

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Time is a flat circle, but I can’t remember where I put my reading glasses. I look at Trick ‘r Treat, and I see that it came out in 2007, but I can’t place that within my own timeline. It is a film I had not previously watched, but I don’t ‘remember it coming out either. I don’t recall people talking about it back then or me having any desire to watch it. The poster with the kid in a scarecrow outfit is familiar, but that’s about it.

In the years since, I’ve seen it around, but something about it gave me the feeling that I wouldn’t like it, so I’ve always ignored it. I was probably living in China when it came out, and I wasn’t paying much attention to what movies were hitting the theater then (because there weren’t any theaters to go to – that I knew of anyhow), so it probably just came and went without me really knowing it existed.

For reasons I can’t begin to understand, the film has been popping up in my feed a lot this year. People have been talking about it and mostly saying good things about it, so against my better judgement, I gave it a watch this afternoon. I should have listened to my internal judges. This movie is not good.

It is a movie that, had I watched it at just the right time in my life, (though I’m not sure when that would have been, probably not 2007, for I was far too into J-horror at that moment, but maybe when I was a teenager had I been a teenager in 2007 or if this film had somehow been released in 1993), I would have loved it. I would have considered it dumb, but fun. Now it just seems dumb.

It is an anthology film, and I have to admit from the start that I don’t generally like anthology films. In the same way I don’t like short films or short stories even, anthologies rarely give their individual stories enough time to really tell their tale or develop their characters. They often rely on gags or tricks at the end to punch you with emotion. This one does better than most, interweaving its stories in interesting ways. It bounces back and forth in time, allowing you to see characters that just died in a previous story once again – like Pulp Fiction, only dumber and with more teenaged killing.

What’s weird is that kid on the cover with the burlap sack on his head, looking like a scarecrow; he feels like our guide, our cryptkeeper to these stories, but he’s not really. Except for the final story, he doesn’t really do anything. At some point during each story, usually at the end, we’ll see him just kind of standing there. At one point I thought he might be a demon, possessing others to do his evil deeds.

Actually, according to Wikipedia, that kid is named Sam, and he is a demon who punishes people for breaking the “rules” of Halloween. I’m not entirely sure what the rules are or how they all broke them. They certainly aren’t explained in any clear way through the film.

But whatever, it doesn’t matter. This is a film that clearly hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking things through or taking itself too seriously. It is a film where a horror hound could take his not fond of scary movies date and still get to make out afterward. It is a film practically designed to watch with a bunch of friends. It has enough violence, jump scares, and just a little bit of gore to satisfy horror hounds, while not making those who are a little more squeamish run away.

Like I said, it is a film that I really would have liked earlier in my life. If you can turn your brain off and not think too hard about it, there is fun to be had in it. I just couldn’t do that. Within fifteen minutes I was annoyed.

None of the stories are bad. There are some fun kills and some fun allusions to other horror films (I caught nods to Halloween Parts 1 & 2 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2). But it just didn’t really do it for me. I started to break down all the parts that got on my nerves, the plot points that didn’t make sense, etc., but this is already long. I will say the one segment I did enjoy was the last one with Brian Cox as a crotchety old man, and that was mainly because Brian Cox is awesome.

So, yeah, this was definitely a not for me at this stage of my life kind of film.

31 Days of Horror: The Thing From Another World (1951)

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Friday night I realized my wife had never seen John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). She’s not really a horror fan, and I was afraid it might be too much for her, so I decided to give her an appetizer to help warm her up to the idea. That appetizer being the original film, The Thing From Another World. Officially Carpenter’s film is an adaptation of the novella “Who Goes There?” and not a sequel to the 1951 film, but Carpenter is clearly a fan of that film (it is the movie playing on the television in Carpenter’s Halloween (1978)).

Anyway, there is some dispute about who directed The Thing From Another World. Officially Christian Nyby gets the credit, but it is sometimes claimed that Howard Hawks took over most of the directorial duties as the film progressed. Hawks was a producer on the film, and he was clearly a guiding hand, but it is unclear if he did any actual directing or was just there to give Nyby a hand. It certainly does have Hawks’ stamp all over it.

This film and Carpenter’s share some basic plot elements, but they differ quite a bit as well. Some of this would be due to the Production Code at the time not allowing for certain elements, but a lot of it had to do with the limited budget of this production.

An unusual aircraft crashes in the North Pole. Captain Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) is sent to investigate. Journalist Ned Scott (Douglas Spencer) tags along. At Polar Expedition Six, he meets a group of soldiers and scientists. They head out to the crash site and find a UFO buried beneath the ice. They use thermite to try and melt the ice, but it completely destroys the ship. Nearby they find a body frozen in ice. They chip it out but leave it inside a large block of ice.

Back at the base, Hendry denies Scott the opportunity to send out a story and lead scientist Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) the ability to study the creature. He sends a message to base, awaiting further orders. The men are ordered to guard it, but one of them gets scared of staring at the thing and covers it with an electric blanket. The ice melts, the alien comes to life, and it attacks everybody.

In the book and in the Carpenter film, the alien is a shape-shifter, but in this film they couldn’t afford that effect, and so the alien is just a tall dude with some prosthetics on his head and hands, or, as my wife stated, a “Frankenstein reject.” Whereas in the Carpenter film the main tension comes from never knowing who the alien has turned into, here the argument is over whether or not science should be able to study the creature, or the military should completely destroy it.

The film makes great use of its claustrophobic sets. It mostly takes place in cramped bunkers and long hallways filled with supplies. It is fascinating to compare it with Carpenter’s film, and I’m glad I finally watched them back to back. Both films are very much products of their time. Made in 1982, Carpenter’s film is filled with 1970s paranoia where nobody can be trusted. I love that his characters have clearly let the isolation of the Arctic setting get to them. They are haggard and worn out. Nobody seems to care. They smoke pot and get drunk, and it doesn’t feel like anyone is doing any actual work.

But this film is full of hardworking people doing their jobs the best that they can. The tension is between a scientist who sees a major discovery and a soldier who is willing to follow orders above all else. But there is also a bit of postwar paranoia. They’ve seen the horrors of World War II, and now live in the atomic age. Anything seems possible, and that’s terrifying.

Carpenter’s film is nothing but dudes, but this film gets a leading lady (Margaret Sheridan even gets top billing.) She plays Nikki Nicholson, who is the love interest, but she’s also a scientist, smart, and more than willing to get things done.

This film also spends a lot of time discussing what the alien is. The scientists do get some time to study the creature, or at least some pods it leaves behind, and we’re subjected to a lot of science-y nonsense. Whereas Carpenter’s film is more or less happy to just let the alien exist on its own accord.

I could go on, but I’ll stop here. The Thing is the superior film. Carpenter had a real budget, and it looks fantastic. It is incredibly tense, and filled with wonderful effects. The Thing From Another World had a tiny budget made at a time when films were only allowed to show so much, and all of that shows. But despite all of that, it is still a thoroughly enjoyable film. Highly recommended.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)

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As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been slowly working my way through the classic monster series from Hammer Studios. This is the second film in the Frankenstein series. The first film, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) very loosely adapted the novel from Mary Shelley. Apparently Universal Studios was all too ready to sue them if they adapted it too closely, or if they copied any of their designs for the castles or the monster so it is a very loose adaptation, but a good one.

At the end of that film, Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is set to face the guillotine for his crimes. At the beginning of this film, we learn that with the help of a hunchback named Karl (Oscar Quitak) a priest was executed in his place and he escaped. Three years later we find him living in Carlsbrück, Germany as a successful doctor named Victor Stein.

He’s become very popular amongst the rich (much to the chagrin of the medical council (as he refuses to join their club), but he also runs a clinic for the poor. Naturally, he’s also continuing his experiments into creating life (and probably hacking off a few body parts from the poor for that purpose.)

He teams up with Doctor Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews) a man who recognises him from his past and is excited about the work he did with reanimation. They will successfully remove Karl’s brain and implant it into a much healthier body. Things go pretty well, until of course they don’t. It wouldn’t be a Frankenstein film if he didn’t wind up going at least a little bit crazy.

The thing I’ve learned about Hammer Horror, especially their early entries, is that they are all about setting a mood. They have these wonderful sets and costumes that look both real and artificial. They create scenes that feel like they take place hundreds of years ago, yet there is an artificiality to it as well. Like you know you are watching a movie, but are still transported anyway.

The plots are often convoluted, and if I’m being honest, a little dull. And it often takes a while for the action and horror to take place, if it even comes at all. This film is like that. There is very little action or violence. It takes an incredibly long time for the monster to do anything. Instead, we spend time with Dr. Stein and Kleve talking about what they are going to do. Stein shows off his lab, which had a rudimentary experiment in it (there is a severed hand in one box of water, and a floating pair of eyes in the other, and they respond to one another).

There is a potential love interest, and some complaining by the board. Etc. It is more like a drama that just happens to have a reanimated corpse in it rather than a straight up horror film, but I still completely dig it.

I find I have to be in a certain mood for these films. You have to let them wash over you and enjoy what they are doing instead of what you might expect. But when you can’t, they are a lot of fun.

31 Days of Horror: The Forever Purge (2021)

forever purge poster

31 Days of Horror is the theme that I’ve consistently been good at. I typically try to write about one horror movie every day during October. With all my other themes, I’m lucky to talk about more than a handful of films in the month, but I usually nail my horror month.

Obviously, that hasn’t been the case this month. I’ve just been busy, I guess. And I had gotten out of the habit of writing about movies like that. Or something. Actually, I’ve had a lot of other writing duties to attend to. I’ve had a lot of movies to watch for Cinema Sentries, most of which haven’t been horror films.

I’m now in the middle of watching the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and I will write about that, but since I will be reviewing the entire set, I don’t feel like talking about each movie (except last week when I made the first film my Friday Night Horror movie, and possibly this coming Friday when I may do the same for one of the later films.)

So here we are. I’ve now seen four films in the Purge franchise, and frankly I’ve not loved any of them (you can read my review of the first three here). I unintentionally skipped the fourth film in the series, The First Purge (2018), and landed on this one, the fifth in the series.

At the end of The Purge: Election Year, a new President was elected who promised to end the annual Purges for good. Well, naturally this sequel isn’t going to be set in a land without Purges, so it begins some eight years later with it being reinstated. And as the title suggests, some really committed racist assholes decide that one 12 hour period in which all crime (including murder) is allowed just isn’t enough. The Purge needs to last forever. Or at least until they can get rid of everyone that doesn’t look like them.

The undertone of the entire series is that The Purge was created by rich white supremacists, and so this film isn’t exactly coming up with a new idea. But there are a few interesting things to be found.

We begin on a Texas ranch that hires a number of Mexican immigrants. The owner of the place (played by Will Patton – always great) is a decent dude. He treats his workers well. He even gives them money on Purge night so they can buy some protection (though he does not offer to let them stay on his fortified compound.) Apparently, there are places where those who are not rich and white can find shelter for Purge night (for a price). That’s an interesting idea.

Purge Night goes by pretty smoothly, but then morning comes and they are still Purging. Our Mexican heroes head back to the ranch and wind up teaming up with the rich white guys that run it. One of them is the type of racist who doesn’t think he’s racist, but just thinks that everybody “ought to stick with their own kind.” Naturally, he’ll learn the error of his ways by film’s end.

Our heroes load into a semi-truck and head to the border. The film seems to think it is really clever by having a group of rich white dudes try to cross into Mexico for safety. The film is not all that clever in any of its parts. But it is more or less thrilling. The action scenes are well staged and I was entertained. That’s really all I need from these films at this point.

31 Days of Horror: The Descent (2005)

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Three best friends come together one year after a terrible tragedy. It has been a difficult year, not only because of that tragedy but because it ripped their friendship apart. They have gathered in the Appalachian Mountains, along with three other women, for a little spelunking adventure, and hopefully to mend their friendship back together.

As one might surmise, things do not go that well for them. As some of the girls are not hardcore cavers the initial plan is to take a relatively easy expedition. Not too easy, mind you, as all the girls are adventurers and like a good challenge, but nothing too difficult or dangerous. As you might surmise, that plan is dropped. One of the girls, without telling the others, leads them to an uncharted and unnamed cave.

After a brief introduction of the characters and the setup, director Neil Marshall literally drops us into the main action. To get into the cave, they have to drop a good hundred feet straight down. The film makes great use of the setting’s darkness. Things are only illuminated by flashlights, the red glare of flares, and occasionally phosphorescent rocks. It uses the tight, claustrophobic spaces to great effect as well. There are times when our characters must squeeze through the tiniest of openings, or avoid falling into dark pits. The danger is palpable.

A cave-in pushes them into desperation. With no map or guidebook, they’ll have to use their wits to get out. And then something even more terrifying occurs. They realize they are not alone. The last chunk of the film moves into more gore-centered slasher territory, which I found to be a letdown. But until then, The Descent is one hell of a thrill ride.

An interesting side note. I originally watched this when I was living in Shanghai, China. About the only way to see films there was to buy bootleg DVDs. With those, you never knew what you were going to get. Sometimes they were cam rips, created by literally filming it inside a movie theater. Other times you’d get some old VHS rip. It was difficult to watch non-English films because the subtitles were often translations of the Chinese translations of the original language.

Usually they were rips of the DVD releases, and even then you never knew what you were going to get. I watched a copy of Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake, and when I went to read the reviews, I realized the film I watched was not the same film everyone else was talking about. I had some kind of alternate cut.

While watching The Descent on the Criterion Channel, I realized the ending was different from my memories. Looking it up, I found there is an American version and a much bleaker European cut. I guess I originally watched the European cut.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: What Lies Beneath (2020)

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Robert Zemeckis had an incredible run in the 1980s through the 1990s. It started with Romancing the Stone in 1984 and ran through the Back to the Future Trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Death Becomes Her, and Contact. I was a big fan. When I learned he was making a thriller with Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford, I was completely on board. I believe I saw it opening weekend in the theater. I was highly disappointed. I’ve not seen it since.

The Criterion Channel is currently running a bunch of horror films from the 2000s. This is one of them. Lately, I’ve been revisiting films from my youth that I didn’t much care for at the time to see if the decades since might have made me more attuned to their wavelength. This is especially true for films that my critic friends seem to like.

So, I figured it was time to revisit this one and see if I’ve changed my mind. Friends, it still stinks. Well, okay, it isn’t that bad, but it is a bit of a mess.

This is basically Zemeckis doing Hitchcock, but that’s not really a thing in his wheelhouse.

It begins like a Rear Window homage. Claire Spencer (Pfeiffer) and her husband, Norman (Ford) live in a big, beautiful, lakeside house in Vermont. He’s a fancy researcher at a fancy college. She gave up her musical career to be a mom. As the film begins, they are saying goodbye to their daughter, who is headed off to college. Claire is having a hard time with this. She’s lonely and bored.

She notices the new neighbors are often fighting. Loudly. One rainy night she spies him loading something (a big covered something) into the trunk of his car. Did he just murder his wife? Suspicions run even higher when she stops by with a welcoming package and realizes that the wife’s car is in the garage, but she seems to be gone. And the husband is being cagey.

But just as that idea gets going, the film shifts gears. Now Claire is seeing ghosts. She hears whispers, the front door keeps finding itself open, and the bath is filled with hot water when nobody’s home.

All of this works well enough. Ford and Pfeiffer are too good of actors, and Zemekis too talented a director for it not to, but it never rises above. It never quite thrilled me. I never really believed the ghost angle, and without that there isn’t much more to the story. I kept half expecting the neighbor to show back up and to be an actual killer. I think I would have preferred that to what we actually get.

The trailer for the film famously spoils half the movie and the big twist towards the end. I won’t do that in case you haven’t seen it. The first time I watched the film, I felt the ending really killed the film’s momentum, but this time I found the final act to be the most interesting. That’s when Zemeckis goes into full Hitchcock mode, allowing himself to move away from the problematic script (by Clark Gregg!) and into pure direction. Although, I’ll still admit there are some really silly bits to its conclusion.

It isn’t a terrible film, just not a great one. And with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see how this marks the beginning of a downside to the director and his two stars.

31 Days of Horror 2024: All the Movies

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For the last several years I’ve watched one of the films in the Halloween franchise on Halloween and I decided to hit up Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) this year. I’ve seen it before and written about it (here) so I don’t feel the need for another review (one day I’ll rewatch and review the later films in the franchise but today is not that day.

Instead, I thought I’d talk about all the horror movies I watched this Spooky Season. I’ll do my usual write-up on every movie I watched this month tomorrow, but I wanted to say a few things about the horror movies I watched this month and didn’t get a chance to write about. For the ones I’ve already written something about I’ll just link to my previous thoughts.

Jeepers Creepers (2001)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

A giant mess of a movie. Winona Ryder returns as Lydia Deetz, the girl who could see the ghosts in the first movie. Now she’s a TV star on a show where she does paranormal investigations. Jenna Ortega plays her daughter with her own issues. Lots of other people play lots of other characters. There are too many of them with too many subplots and Tim Burton doesn’t seem to know what to do with any of them. At least Michael Keaton seems to be having fun.

13 Ghosts (1960)

A very silly, gimmicky film from William Castle. A family inherits a castle full of ghosts. The trick is that whenever the ghosts appear the film uses some special filters so that the audience, wearing special glasses, can see them. Not having those glasses the ghosts appear only faintly.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

Werner Herzog’s remake of the silent classic (which was the first-ever cinematic adaptation of Dracula) is a slow, moody masterpiece. As ever, Herzog has more up his sleeve than meets the eye. Klaus Kinski plays Count Dracula to perfection.

Beetlejuice (1988)

My wife really wanted to see the sequel so we revisited the original. Winona Ryder was my first celebrity crush because of this film. It is still a fun time at the movies, but I don’t really love it.

The Fog (1980)
The Girl in Room 2A (1974)

The Wolfman (2010)

I did not realize this film with Benicio Del Toro as the Wolf Man and Anthony Hopkins as his daddy was a true remake of the classic Universal film. It updates the original and fleshes out the story. I’d say I liked it more than the original, but nothing really beats the way the first one looks.

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974)

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

I linked to a very old review in which I didn’t much enjoy this film. As I state in my editor’s note in that review I’ve come to absolutely love it. Watched it this time with my daughter who seemed to enjoy herself.

Day of the Dead (1985)

The Wolf Man (1941)

The story is pretty silly, and I’m not a huge fan of Lon Chaney, Jr, but the sets looks fantastic and the cinematography is on point.

Final Destination 2 (2003)
Cursed (2005)

The House of Seven Corpses (1974)

A film director shoots a horror movie in a house in which some ghastly real murders were committed. Unsurprisingly, things go bad. For the characters in the film and for us as an audience because this film is not good.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

A pretty fun, if completely unnecessary mix-tape of all the Alien movies.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Invisible Agent (1942)

In this fourth installment of the Invisible Man series, the Invisible Man battles Nazis. It starts out promising with Peter Lorre as a nasty…um…Japanese agent, but then it quickly becomes a very silly, and rather dumb comedy.

Night of the Werewolf (1981)
The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman (1971)

Spanish writer/director/producer/actor Paul Naschy made eleven films in which he played Count Waldemar Daninsky a werewolf. As far as I can tell most of the films have no real connection to each other other than the character and there doesn’t seem to be any continuity within the character either.

I watched these two back to back. Their plots have kind of blended together at this point, but also, they were kind of similar to begin with. In Night of the Werewolf, a couple of girls dig up Elizabeth Bathory the famous serial killing noblewoman from the 1500s, whereas in The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman a couple of girls resurrect a vampire. In both films, Count Daninsky saves the day, but also turns villainous. I really dug them both.

Torso (1973)
The Invisible Woman (1940)
Salem’s Lot (2024)
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Who Saw Her Die (1972)
Mimic (1997)
The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
The Grudge (2004)
House of the Long Shadows (1983)
Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (2003)
Ju-on: The Grudge (2002)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
The Blob (1988)

31 Days of Horror: Jeepers Creepers (2001)

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I’ve talked many times on these pages about how much I like Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) and to a lesser extent the many sequels that followed. Oddly enough I didn’t actually watch a lot of the many (many) films that followed in its wake and were influenced by its winking, meta-narrative.

There are a variety of reasons why that is true. I was becoming a true cinephile around then which meant I was more interested in the Coen Brothers, Steven Soderberg, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut and the like – directors who made “real” cinema rather than horror which wasn’t great art. I had started dating the woman who would become my wife and she doesn’t like horror movies.

But mainly my horror interests were changing. I was starting to discover J-Horror and Giallo. There was this wonderful world of world horror that I had previously not known existed. Suddenly my desire to watch silly little American horror starring hip, young TV stars disappeared.

Over the last few years, I’ve enjoyed going back and watching a lot of those films from that period that I missed the first time around.

Mostly. Some of those films weren’t very good and I was smart to have skipped them.

Jeepers Creepers begins with a car ride across a lonely stretch of Florida. Siblings Trish (Gina Phillips) and Darry (Justin Long) are coming home for Spring Break. They talk and argue, and they play the type of silly games you play on long road trips.

Suddenly a large, old truck begins tailgating them. It weaves back and forth and honks its horns, scaring the two half to death. Finally, it passes them and all is calm. Sometime later they spy that same truck parked next to an abandoned old church. A man gets out of it carrying something wrapped up in a sheet tied shut with ropes. Our heroes have seen the same scary movies we’ve all seen so they naturally assume it is a body. The dude then throws the object down a drainage pipe. As he turns around he realizes those two have seen him do it.

He gets into his truck and rushes after them. Apparently, this old truck has a souped-up engine because he catches them quickly and rear-ends them multiple times. But when he finally runs them off the road he rushes on ahead instead of stopping to kill them.

Instead of acting like normal, intelligent people who would zoom as fast and as far away as possible and perhaps call the police when they get to a safe space, these two decide to go back to the church and have a look around.

Maybe one of those people tied up and wrapped in bloody sheets is still alive Darry muses. Maybe they – these two people without any medical experience – can give them emergency care before calling in any real help.

The pipe goes deep underground leading to what was the old church basement. Darry tries to take a look and instead slips falling to the bottom where he discovers…well I won’t spoil that but it is pretty gruesome.

I will spoil that the guy in the truck isn’t a guy at all but a monster. A poorly designed monster who is on the hunt. And now he’s got the scene of Darry and Trish.

Though there are periodic meta-references to other horror movies these two characters make all the dumb maneuvers people in dumb horror movies make.

After the first attack, seeing the horrors in that basement, and then watching the policeman they finally tell about all of this get ripped to shreds, they do not get the heck out of Dodge as fast as they possibly can, but rather stop at some random house in the middle of nowhere. Trish declares they need to call someone. Exactly who she wants to call and what she will tell them is unclear. Even after Darry asks those exact, and very reasonable questions.

While watching this insane monster do insanely horrible things the two just sit and stare at him. Again, they don’t run. This film is all reaction shots. Over and over again something horrible will happen and the characters will just sit there, mouths agape. The camera cuts between the action and their reactions. Back and forth. Back and forth until I’m screaming that someone needs to do something. Maybe that’s supposed to be shock or something. Maybe real people would act that way when exposed to something so traumatic. But in a horror movie, they need to run or start shooting.

The acting is passable, the script isn’t half as clever as it thinks it is, and again the monster design is bad. Yet, I think I kind of liked it.

It has this laid-back, breezy quality to it. The film never takes itself seriously, but it isn’t winking at us either. It isn’t a hipster film smirking at its audience. The in-film stakes are very high – life and death – but the film never really expects you to care all that much. It wants you to have a good time watching a movie and that’s exactly what I did.

31 Days of Horror: The Fog (1980)

the fog poster

John Carpenter’s The Fog begins with a cheesy old campfire tale told by an old man that essentially gives us the backstory to the movie we’re about to see. Both the backstory and the actual story are pretty silly. The monsters are goofy, and the ending somewhat anti-climatic. Yet I love the film through and through.

Carpenter is the master of creating a mood and The Fog finds him at his moodiest. Since time immemorial (or at least the time in which films have existed) movies have used fog to create a spooky, eerie mood. Fog was made for cinema. It is both opaque and translucent. It obfuscates your vision and yet seem to reveal. It crawls in and moves with the wind. And it looks great when lit up.

One hundred years ago, on a dark foggy night the founders of Antonio Bay, a small coastal town in Northern California murdered a group of lepers for their gold. Now as the town celebrates its centennial anniversary the fog is back, as are the lepers and they are looking for revenge.

Our heroes are Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) who owns and DJs the coolest looking lo-fi radio station inside a lighthouse, fisherman Nick Castle (Tom Atkins), and Elizabeth Solley (Jamie Lee Curtis) the hitchhiker Nick picked up one foggy night.

Stevie spends most of her time in the lighthouse talking to her listeners (and us) whilst playing light jazz records. She acts almost like a narrator, feeding her listeners (and us) information. Nick and Elizabeth run around trying to figure out what is happening.

The monsters apparently only appear between the hours of 12 midnight and 1 AM. They show up the first night mostly messing with electronic equipment and freaking everybody out, and then on the second night, the night of the actual anniversary they start killing people.

Whatever, the story takes second chair to the general creepiness Carpenter is creating. As usual, Carpenter wrote his own score and it is terrific. The film looks terrific and there is an enormous amount of creepy fog drifting into town across the bay, floating across streets and into rooms. The film lights it up giving it a hypnotic look.

It isn’t particularly scary and there are just a few scenes of genuine violence (although none of it is bloody) but the general vibe is excellent.