31 Days of Horror: Halloween II (1981)

I have always thought that John Carpenter directed Halloween II. Up until today, I would have told you that he didn’t want to direct it, but after the massive success of the first one, he was told by the studio, the producers, or some such higher-up that they were going to make a sequel with or without him, and he decided it would be best if it was with him.

Turns out I was wrong on the first part, and the second part I guess I just made up. It is true that Carpenter didn’t really want there to be a sequel, had no interest in making one, but was pressured into making it. But he was never given an ultimatum, and he never agreed to direct. That job fell to Rick Rosenthal. Carpenter did write the script, along with the original film’s co-writer Debra Hill. He was also a producer and, depending on who you believe, Carpenter either came in during the filming stage and directed a few scenes himself, or had a large hand in post-production, adding in some extra violence and gore.

It is easy to see why I believed this was a John Carpenter film. His name is featured prominently in the credits (I guess I always overlook the Directed By card), he did write and produce this one (he basically completely bowed out of all the other films featuring Michael Myers after this – he did produce Halloween III, but Myers isn’t in that one), and this looks and feels like a John Carpenter film. That feeling is helped by the plot of this one taking place immediately after the original one; it stars most of the same cast and utilizes the same cinematographer, and Rosenthal has stated he intentionally mimicked Carpenter’s style in the first film.

This one gets a lot of hate in certain corners of the internet (and I now wonder if that isn’t because it was helmed by Rosenthal and not Carpenter), but I unabashedly love it. True, it isn’t as good as the first one, but it looks fantastic, has some great deaths, and the hospital setting is terrific.

It really does begin just as the original ends. Actually, it begins a couple of minutes into the ending of the first one. We revisit Michael Myers getting “killed” by Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), but from a slightly different perspective. Then we watch him walk away.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to the hospital with some cuts and bruises and a pretty banged-up leg. Weirdly, Jamie Lee Curtis doesn’t have a whole lot of screen time in this film. She’ll spend the first half of it basically lying in a hospital bed. She gets plenty of action in the back half, though. But first, we’ll spend time with various nurses and staff members of the hospital. They will mostly become cannon fodder for Michael Myers.

Myers will spend that first half of the film wandering around the town of Haddonfield, randomly killing folks. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) will do a poor job of hunting him down. Eventually, Myers will hear someone say something about how Laurie was sent to the hospital, and he’ll head that way. It all leads to a long showdown between Laurie, Loomis, and Michael Myers.

The stuff in the town is fine. There are some good kills, and it helps build tension to the hospital showdown. Pleasence plays Loomis even more hysterically than he does in the first. Having shot the man multiple times at the end of the first film, he’s now more sure than ever that Michael Myers is not human but something like a demon.

The hospital stuff is well done, if a little silly at times. One of the nurses, after getting yelled at for being late, decides to slip off with a boy to the lower decks, where there is some kind of therapeutic hot tub where she gets sexy (and dead). It always drives me a little crazy when hospital lights are turned off or dimmed. Sure, you can turn your room lights off, but hospitals are notoriously bright. They have to be. Doctors, nurses, and staff can’t function if they can’t see. But yeah, it makes the movie a lot moodier.

Those long hallways are used effectively, and Michael Myers still has a way of popping into a scene seemingly out of nowhere. I’d argue that Halloween is not only one of the greatest horror movies, but is a great movie on its own merits. Halloween II is a great slasher, but not a particularly good movie.

Still, I love it so.

31 Days of Horror: Sweet Sixteen (1982)

At the heart of this relatively obscure, early 1980s slasher is Marci Burke (Dana Kimmell), a teenager and daughter of the town’s sheriff (Bo Hopkins). She’s bright, outgoing, and a bit of a detective herself. When Sheriff Burke comes across a murder scene, she is with him. But she doesn’t recoil from it; she’s enthralled. She gives her Dad ideas on how to best investigate. He calls her Nancy Drew and tries to keep her away from the gore.

The scenes with her are delightful. I could watch a whole movie of her and her dad solving crimes in this small town. But this isn’t a fun little mystery movie; this is a slasher horror, so of course we don’t stick with those two.

It is Melissa Morgan (Aleisa Shirley) who is our protagonist. She’s the fifteen-year-old who thinks of herself as much older and wiser than the kid she really is. She’s also new to town; her father has moved her there for some kind of Native American archeological dig. And she’s a big flirt. The film begins with her walking to the seedier side of town, talking a boy into giving her a ride home, and almost immediately making out with him.

The thing is, every boy she flirts with gets himself brutally killed. Naturally, she becomes a suspect. But Sheriff Burke is a good cop. He’s not going to arrest a 15-year-old girl right before her Sweet Sixteen birthday. Bo Hopkins has such a natural screen presence. I immediately like him, and he plays the Sheriff with real warmth.

There is a lot of typical 1980s slasher nonsense in this film. We get a skinny dip in the local pond, a bit of sexing, some blood-soaked gore, and a whole lot of racism. The film tries to be on the right side of history for that last part. There is a native American character, Jason (Don Shanks). He is repeatedly harassed by some local rednecks. The film clearly depicts them as racist, but it still seems to delight in those scenes. He’s also a little too stereotypical for my tastes.

Most of the men in this film, including some of the “good guys,” do an awful lot of leering at Melissa. Jason practically wags his tongue at her.

If you can overlook those things (and admittedly it is quite a lot to overlook), there is a pretty good film underneath. Seriously, I would have loved a whole series of films with the Sheriff and his daughter solving crimes.

31 Days of Horror: The Burning (1981)

John Carpenter’s Halloween is one of the most successful independent films of all time. Its budget ($300,000) to box-office results ($70,0000) made it the most profitable movie for a long time. It arguably started the slasher boom. It certainly helped create many of the tropes of the genre and spawned numerous imitators.

Friday the 13th was one of those imitators. Its massive success solidified the tropes, and it spawned its own imitators. The Burning is one.

I was far too young to have seen Halloween, Friday the 13th, or The Burning in theaters. But the success of the first two films meant I did see them years later on cable TV and home video. But The Burning was not so successful and thus didn’t get repeated on late-night TV. I don’t recall ever seeing it in the aisles of my local video stores. Which either means they didn’t carry it, or possibly that the VHS cover just wasn’t that memorable.

But lately it has been showing up in my feeds. I see it nearly every time I browse through my streaming services for something to watch, and it pops up regularly on my Bluesky and Reddit accounts. I don’t know why that is, except that we are probably all unknowingly led by the algorithm.

Presumably, The Burning is cheap to buy the rights to, which leads all the streaming services to put it on their services, presumably around this time of year. And then it adds that to the recommended lists of horror nerds like me. Some of us watch it, and then we talk about it on social media, which makes more people watch it, and that tells the algorithm to recommend it more, and the circle continues.

The Burning was also the first film credit for a young Jason Alexander, and Holly Hunter has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role. No doubt that adds fuel to the algorithmic fire.

I finally watched it, and it’s not bad.

Like Friday the 13th, this one is set at a summer camp with a bunch of horny teens. Unlike it The Burning’s camp doesn’t have a horrible past. That would be another camp not far from Camp Stonewater. In our opening scene, we see some campers play a prank at the other camp. This is five years before the events of our story really begin. Camp Blackfoot is run by Cropsey, an alcoholic arsehole whom the kids all detest. Their prank goes wrong, and Cropsey finds himself burned alive. He doesn’t die, but is grotesquely mutilated. Five years later, he gets out of the hospital and starts chopping up kids at Camp Stonewater (Blackfoot having been shut down after the incident).

At Camp Stonewater, we get the usual nonsense with the usual assortment of characters. There is the awkward nerd, the buff jerk trying to make it with the hot girl, the attractive counselor and his girl, and the jokester (Jason Alexander). Plus an assortment of others playing pranks, sports, and generally goofing around.

It is all more or less done well. There is nothing new here, but the characters are enjoyable enough. There is a lot of stalking by the killer in the first half. The now-common view of things from the killer’s POV from behind some bushes and the like happens quite a bit. That amuses me. The killer stalks these kids for like two days before he does any killing. Funny to think of this burned-up man standing around in the trees all that time just spying on them.

The older kids (who make up our main cast and get rid of most of the extras) go on a long canoe ride for a couple of days. That’s when the killings begin. The killings are pretty good (the effects were done by Tom Savini). Who lives and who dies is a little surprising. And the conclusion is pretty cool.

I’m using faint praise because this isn’t a great movie. It isn’t as good as Halloween or the original Friday the 13th, but it is better than a lot of slashers, and if you like the genre, then this is well worth watching.

31 Days of Horror: Let Us Prey (2014)

One of the main reasons I enjoy doing monthly movie themes is that it pushes me to watch movies I might not otherwise watch and to discover films I’ve never heard of before. Let Us Prey falls into the latter category.

It starts out pretty strong. It has an interesting story with convincing lead actors, but then it falls down a hole of ridiculousness.

PC Rachel Heggie (Pollyanna McIntosh) has been reassigned from the big city to a tiny little town in Scotland. On her way to her first day of work, she witnesses a speeding car smash into a man walking on the street. The driver is Caesar (Brian Vernel Sargison), and he is both panicked and belligerent. The man he hit has disappeared. Rachel arrests Caesar even though he says that without a victim there is no crime.

She takes him to the station, where she meets Sgt. Jim MacReady (Douglas Russell), a laid-back man who is exactly the kind of police boss you meet in stories like this, where bad things are about to happen in places where bad things don’t usually happen. Rachel tells him the story of Caesar and how the guy he hid has vanished. He calls in to PC Jack Warnock (Bryan Larkin) and PC Jennifer Mundie (Hanna Stanbridge) to be on the lookout for a wounded man. We meet them as they are having sex in the patrol car.

Caesar is thrown into the slammer next to a cell occupied by Ralph Beswick (Jonathan Watson), Caesar’s former teacher and intellectual who likes to beat on his wife.

Warnock and Mundie do find the injured man (Liam Cunningham), except he’s not all that injured. But he is strange and prone to making prophetic proclamations. He also seems to have some supernatural powers.

Things will get weird, and dark, and scary from there.

It is a pretty great setup. I love small-town stories where strange and horrible things occur. I like Liam Cunningham, and Pollyanna McIntosh is good. But the film’s second half turns into one big action/horror stew that’s mostly really stupid.

There is a character who shows up wearing a bunch of barbed wire fencing wrapped around his torso. That’s about the point I rolled my eyes and decided things were just going to go downhill from there.

31 Days of Horror: The Haunting (1963)

Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) is a meek and mild middle-aged woman who has spent most of her adult life caring for her invalid mother. Now that her mother has died, she doesn’t know what to do with her life. She’s wracked with guilt, thinking she is responsible for her demanding mother’s death, but also filled with a new hope that she might actually do something with her life.

When Dr John Markway (Richard Johnson) invites her to Hill House, a supposedly haunted old mansion, to study the paranormal activity there, she excitedly accepts. Also on the adventure is Theodora (Claire Bloom) a much more worldly and cunning young woman, and Luke Sannerson (Russ Tamblyn) the heir to the house who would rather it not be haunted so he can sell it for a large profit.

The film is slow and meditative. There are scares, but they rarely jump out at you, and you are never quite sure if they are real or not. This is slow-burn horror, designed to build a mood and atmosphere, not to make you leap out of your seat.

Theodora is clearly coded as a lesbian. It is interesting how this mainstream 1960s film deals with that and how the other characters react to it. She attempts to seduce Eleanor, who is completely oblivious. Theodora says kind things to her and comforts her when she’s scared. Late at night, when things go bump, she’ll hold her hand and hold her close. It is never overt, but it’s there. Later, Eleanor will say something cutting and mean, letting Theodora know she knows what’s been going on.

The main focus is on Eleanor. She’s a jangle of nerves and anxieties. Dr. Markway encourages her at first, but the more disturbed she becomes, the more he begins to think she should leave. But she refuses. She tries to be strong. But the house, the noises, the strange occurrences all seem to be happening to her and no one else.

Director Robert Wise shoots it in stark black and white (with some gorgeous cinematography by Davis Boulton). There are plenty of disorienting angles in this monstrous house. This is very much a mood piece. Perhaps a little too much. With a run time of just under two hours, I could have used a little more straight horror.

The acting is good. Eleanor’s emotional plight is an interesting one. I especially enjoyed her ever-changing relationship with Theodora. It is a good film, just don’t go expecting any real ghosts.

31 Days of Horror: Alone in the Dark (1982)

Dr. Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence) is one of those wacky doctors who thinks the patients at a psychiatric ward shouldn’t be called crazy or locked up and heavily medicated. They need kindness and understanding. They should be more or less allowed to do what they want, and instead of correcting their delusions, you should just run with them. Except for the people on the third floor. Those guys are nuts. They have to be securely locked away.

Even then, they make the floor look rather cozy. Oh, there are big, strong doors that can swing shut and lock in an instant, and if anyone tries to open a window, barricades come down fast. But if everyone behaves, then the place looks like a nice place to live.

The film makes a big deal about the electric locks. Those doors open and shut electronically. The windows are the same. A guard says they are perfectly safe as long as the power doesn’t go out. So naturally, the power goes out.

The four guys on the third floor escape and wreak havoc. They will eventually find their way to Dr. Dan Potter’s (Dwight Schultz) house. He’s a new psychiatrist at the hospital, having just replaced a guy who moved to another town. But the third-floor guys think he must have killed that guy, and now they want revenge.

The back half of the film becomes a station-under-siege film. It’s pretty good.

It’s also pretty weird. The third-floor guys are played by Martin Landau (as a pyromaniac preacher), Jack Palance (and a disturbed former POW), Erland Van Lidth (as a child molester known as “fatty”), and a dude who only shows his face at the end and is only known as “Bleeder.”

Before they lay siege to Potter’s house, they go into town where everybody is looting because all that stands between society and chaos is a little power outage. They have some fun and get some weapons. It is a bit silly, really.

Our villains are having a lot of fun. Donald Pleasance isn’t really given enough to make his character interesting. Once the siege starts, things get interesting. I love a good base-under-siege story, and this one’s done well.

It is a film I’m happy to watch during Spooky season, but not one I’m likely to ever return to.

31 Days of Horror: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

My wife and I are pretty big fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV series. We came to it late. I had some friends in college who loved it, and I gave it a shot back then, when it was originally airing, but I found it to be cheap-looking and cheesy. It wasn’t until years later, after my daughter was born, that we finally got into it.

When our daughter was a baby, we spent a lot of time binge-watching TV shows. We weren’t big on taking her out on the town – way too much prep work for our tastes – so we’d just sit with her watching TV. That might have been the beginning of our homebody years, come to think of it.

We’ve since watched it a couple of times through, and we’re currently watching it with our now-teenage daughter, and she’s become a fan, too.

But before the series, there was this movie. Joss Whedon wrote the script for the movie, but he was quite dissatisfied with the result. The studio removed a lot of his jokes, toned down some of the darker elements, and apparently Donald Sutherland did a lot of improvisation in his dialogue.

It’s probably a good thing the movie didn’t turn out as well as Whedon wanted it to, for this caused him to create the TV series. And it is kind of amazing that someone gave him the money to do so, as the film bombed.

The film, like the series, follows Buffy Summers (Kristy Swanson), a stereotypical California valley girl. She’s blonde and pretty, a cheerleader who cares about fashion and boys. One day, she is approached by Merrick (Sutherland), who tells her she is the “Chosen One,” a vampire slayer, and that she has a calling.

It takes him a while to convince her, but when the vampires attack and she’s able to easily kill them, she decides to listen. There is a fun training montage, and some decent jokes, and then a final showdown with the head vampire (Rutger Hauer) and his main minion (Paul Reubens).

This is not a good movie. You can see the beginnings of something special, the bones of what became the TV show, but something feels off. Swanson is good. You get a sense in those early scenes that she’s not exactly happy being the ditzy blonde. Like she doesn’t really like her friends, but this is the lot that’s been chosen for her, so she just runs with it. It is interesting to think about how things would have gone had she been given the role in the TV series.

Sutherland can’t seem to get the tone right. He’s good at playing mysterious men who know more than they let on, and he can play the jokester as well. But he doesn’t get the blend right. And yeah, his improv isn’t great. It is a little difficult to understand who he is and what he’s doing.

Paul Reubens is the only one who seems to truly understand what kind of movie he’s in. He’s wonderfully campy and funny. It is no wonder they show some of his outtakes as the credits roll.

It isn’t a terrible film, but it certainly isn’t a good one. Worth watching if you are a fan of the series, just to see a different take on the material.

31 Days of Horror: The Conjuring (2013)

I’ve been married for twenty-four years or so. I love my wife. I enjoy spending time with her. I enjoy watching movies with her. We share an interest in animated films and fantasy films, certain types of comedy, etc., but she has little to no interest in horror. For most of our married life, we only had one television. So, when I wanted to watch a horror film, I had to wait until she was in bed or gone somewhere without me. We now have two televisions, so I can go upstairs and watch what I want in our bedroom. But before then, it was a bit of a challenge.

Several years ago, she took our daughter to visit her parents in Kentucky. I had a lot of work going at the time, so I stayed home. For the first few days, it was a lot of fun; I felt like I was single again. But then I just missed them and counted the days down until they came home.

With nobody home, I watched a lot of horror movies. Including The Conjuring.

Obviously, I love horror. I watch a lot of it. But I got to say watching two or three horror movies a night for several nights in a row and then going to bed in an empty house proved a bit much for me. By the third night, I started freaking out a little. I’d lie there in bed, eyes wide open, jumping at every little creak or crack, knowing some monster was out to get me.

After that, I started watching comedies.

The Conjuring is a movie that’s capable of giving me nightmares, even if I hadn’t watched numerous other horror films over the course of those few days.

A lot of modern horror just throws jump scare after jump scare at you. As if all we need from a horror movie is for something to jump out at us from the darkness or for the editor to make stark cuts.

Good horror movies know how to build tension over the course of a film. They can create a mood and build on it. That’s the kind of thing that gets under your skin and stays with you long after the initial fright of a jump leaves your memory.

The Conjuring does a great job of mixing the two. It takes time to develop its characters and build its story. It creates a mood of tension and builds upon it. But it also utilizes some great jump scares. Jumps can be effective, especially if they come out of the story. Anybody can have a maniac or a monster or a cat jump out at you unexpectedly. That will generally elicit a scream. But a good jump scare has been well developed. It makes sense within the realm of the story. There is background to the scare.

The film begins with some college girls telling a story. They were dabbling in the supernatural and were talking to a spirit. They invited the spirit into a doll called Annabelle. The doll started acting up. It started to scare them. They are telling this story to Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga), two self-described demonologists who study the supernatural and help those with infestations or possessions.

From this brief scene, we understand who the Warrens are, what they do, and that within the confines of this film, the supernatural is real. Then the movie pulls out a bit, and we realize the story we’ve just been watching is actually being told to an audience at a college seminar by the Warrens. The Annabelle story is in the past; it has been solved. The Warrens use it as an example of what they do to academics and students.

Then our story shifts to Roger and Carlyn Perron (Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor) and their five daughters. They’ve just bought a big country farmhouse. We watch them move in, unpack, and play. They are a nice family. The film takes its time with them; it lets us get to know them and like them. Nothing bad happens at first.

For its first half, the film will move back and forth between the Perrons and the Warrens. The Warrens will give more talks. We’ll see them go to a possibly haunted house and determine that the spooky noises are coming from the pipes and the wind. Not every case is real, you see. The Warrens are good people, not charlatans or fakes. If your house isn’t really haunted, they’ll let you know. But if it is, they are here to help.

This has drawn quite a bit of criticism from critics because the real-life Warrens were charlatans and fakes. Their cases have been proven to be false. Their personal lives have been inspected and found severely lacking. This film and its sequels make them out to be saints. I’m not here to criticize those decisions or really to talk about the real-life people. I’m here to talk about the movie, and it’s a good one.

Slowly, weird stuff starts happening at the Perron house. There are strange noises and terrible smells. The dog refuses to come indoors. They discover a basement whose entrance has been covered over. One of the girls begins sleepwalking, banging her head into a wardrobe. One of them creates an imaginary friend.

As the horror escalates, eventually the Warrens are brought in. There are some nice scenes between the families before things get crazy. Again, the film takes time to develop relationships. The Warrens are caring and kind. The Perrons are frazzled, but they take comfort in their new friends.

The Warrens bring a crew with them. They set up cameras and audio recording devices. They need to prove the house is haunted before the Catholic church will do an exorcism. These scenes are so well done. They bring a new edge to the thrills and terror. It all culminates in a big showdown between the evil spirit and these two families.

Not everything works. Some of the stuff with the Warrens before they meet the Perrons runs a little long. They keep returning to the Annabelle doll, and after a while it really feels like they are just prepping us for the inevitable Annabelle movie.

I’ve seen this movie three or four times now, so the jump scares no longer thrill, and it no longer keeps me up at night. That’s to be expected. But I do keep coming back to it. That’s the sign of a good horror movie – when you watch it again and again even though it no longer truly scares you.

31 Days of Horror: Invaders From Mars (1953)

I love 1950s sci-fi and horror movies. The anxieties over the newly discovered nuclear powers and the real possibility of space exploration created some wonderful films. A lot of those films were decidedly low-budget, but they still managed to create some pretty terrific special effects.

Invasion From Mars isn’t a particularly good film. Its story is pretty basic, and its low budget is a little too present, but there are some good sets and the alien design is wonderful.

David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) is a young boy who loves astronomy. Lucky for him, there is a giant telescope in his hometown. One night he’s awakened by a terrible thunderstorm. He looks out his window, and he sees a flying saucer touch down on a sandy beach just behind his yard. He tells his dad about it, and he promises the boy he’ll check it out in the morning.

But Dad is a bit of an astronomy nut himself, and he decides to check the story out that night. He isn’t back when his wife wakes up, so she calls the police. They check out the spot David said he saw the UFO land, and they, too, disappear.

Later that morning, Dad shows back up, but he’s acting strange. He shouts at the boy to never mention what he saw again and gives him a good smacking when he asks questions. Dad’s also got a weird scar on the back of his neck.

David almost immediately figures out what’s going on and runs to the cops. They get him to talk to Dr. Pat Blake (Helena Carter), who believes his story and gets the military involved. They’ll blast a hole in the sand and discover a series of underground tunnels and eventually the Martians.

Most of the Martians are dudes in goofy-looking suits, but the king (or emperor? or something) is this big, round head with a human face, spray-painted gold, with some tentacle-looking things sticking out of it, all encompassed in a glass dome. It is kind of awesome. The cave system is pretty cool too. It’s covered in these wild bubbles.

The story is all standard stuff. I did appreciate its similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the aliens basically controlling humans and it being difficult to tell who was ok. When the military comes in, we see a lot of stock footage of tanks and other armored vehicles moving about. And when I say a lot, I mean a whole lot. They keep cutting back to tanks, but because it is all stock footage, we don’t see them interact with anything else in the film. They also reuse a lot of footage of Martians and soldiers running around in the caves.

It gets a little dull after a while, but those sets do look good, and the little Martian is awesome.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Amityville Horror (1979)

For the last several years, I’ve tried to watch every film in a horror franchise during the month of October. I’ve seen the Friday the 13th films and all of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, plus Halloween and Scream and their respective sequels. It has been a fun endeavor. Everyone knows that horror sequels can take a pretty steep decline in quality the further you get into them. For a long time, I tended to avoid them as I didn’t want to taint the originals with terrible sequels. But since I’ve become a bigger horror hound, I like being able to say I’ve watched an entire franchise.

And it is true, oftentimes the sequels are dreadful. But sometimes they can be quite good. Or at least they can take things into interesting new dimensions.

This year I’ve decided I want to tackle The Conjuring universe. Well, I’m not sure I’m going to watch all of the films, as there are a lot of them, depending on how deep you want to go. This is where I definitely say I won’t be reviewing all the films in this franchise.

The Conjuring films follow Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), real-life demonologists who studied the supernatural. There are currently four Conjuring films, but it has also spawned a couple of spin-offs. Three of them follow a possessed doll, and two involve some kind of evil nun.

The Warrens also visited the house in Amityville that contained so many horrors. Amityville Horror spawned two official sequels (which I reviewed here) and a remake, but because you can’t copyright a town’s name, there have been loads of unofficial sequels. I definitely won’t be reviewing all of them.

I’m also not sure if I’ll watch all the Annabelle and Nun movies. I’ll probably dip my toe into them, but if the first ones are bad, I doubt I’ll watch the sequels. But I will definitely watch The Conjuring movies and write about them.

To start this series off, I thought it would be fun to go back and watch the original Amityville Horror. Without it, there would be no Conjuring films.

I’ve seen Amityville Horror a few times now (and I even reviewed it here). It is not a good movie. The pacing is weird. There aren’t enough scares. It never builds any real sense of dread, and in the end there just isn’t any boogeyman or villain.

But there is something about it that makes me keep returning to it. Every couple of years I’ll get a hankering to watch it again, despite me knowing it isn’t as good as I want it to be. I think I want to like it, and after a few years I forgot how not good it is. But I do remember James Brolin’s big hair and awesome beard, and how amazing Margot Kidder looks in it. So I watch it and then go “oh yea, this film is bad.” Give me a couple more years, and I’ll probably watch it again.

One thing I always forget is that Ed and Lorraine do not make an appearance in this film. I always expect them to show up at the end, but they never do. I don’t believe they appear in the book this film is based on. My understanding is that they did show up at the house for some kind of TV special after the book became a hit. So, I guess this film really shouldn’t be included in The Conjuring universe, but as I say, there would be no Conjuring films without this one.

I pretty much stand by my original review, so I don’t think there is any need to rehash those thoughts. I was thinking about the screenplay as I watched it this time, and it is a bit of a mess. My guess is that it follows the book pretty well and, in a supposed non-fictional account, the book is probably pretty scary (at least if you buy into any of this stuff. I should probably note that this is all nonsense. The Warrens were charlatans. They made up most of their stories out of whole cloth and likely fed into the delusions of many others.) But reading a book about a haunting can sound real. Watching a movie like this borders on the ridiculous.

Because unlike something like The Exorcist or Poltergeist, there doesn’t seem to be any real villain in this film. A couple of chairs move on their own, a girl gets locked inside a closet, a priest gets attacked by a bunch of flies, etc. Even at its most hysterical, all we hear is a voice, and a door gets blown off its hinges. We never see the entity or get any kind of explanation for it. The priest (an overacting Rod Steiger) thinks it’s the devil, but his story never really gets going.)

The film literally ends with them just driving away. Nothing really tries to stop them. And that’s it.