Tag: horror movies

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Fright Night (1985)

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I talk a lot about growing up in the 1980s and how the slasher genre helped shape my cinematic aesthetics. I loved the Jasons and the Freddys. But the truth is I watched those films at home, edited on basic cable. It wasn’t until years later that I watched them as intended and in order. But there was another set of horror films that I watched unedited even back when I was a kid. These were, well, not family-friendly as such, but they were more palatable to the grown ups allowing us kids to watch them on videotape.

Films like The Monster Squad (1987), House (1985), and my favorite, Fright Night (1985), fall into the comedy horror genre. They are goofy and silly but still provided some good scares. I loved them as a kid. But once I grew up, I more or less forgot about them.

About fifteen years ago, not long after my daughter was born, I rewatched Fright Night and its sequel. I was a little disappointed in both. They didn’t live up to my nostalgia. But the first one has been popping up in my streaming feeds the last few weeks, and I decided to give it another revisit. I seem to be doing that a lot lately – revisiting film I loved decades ago. Trying to see if they still hold up, I guess.

I liked Fright Night quite a lot this go ’round. It is a film from the 1980s that loves classic horror, and even Hammer-era horror. It is fun, and funny, and makes great use of practical effects, and has some very decent thrills.

Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) loves old horror movies. He watches them on a local station hosted by Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), a Peter Cushing-esque old horror star. Whatever happened to those old shows where they show old movies with introductions by goofy, sexy, creepy, hosts?

We’re introduced to Charley as one of those old movies plays in his bedroom. He’s making out with his girlfriend Amy Peterson (Amanda Bearse), but when it cuts to Peter Vincent talking about one of his movies, she stops with the face sucking to tell Charley he should watch. She knows he’s a huge fan. But he’s got other things on his mind. Mainly losing his virginity. They fight over it a bit, but then she finally agrees, takes off her top, and crawls into bed. But then he notices something strange in the neighbor’s yard. Two men seem to be carrying a coffin inside.

Amy feels increasingly insecure and practically begs him to come to bed. But he’s too fascinated with what’s going on out there. She leaves in a huff, and it is only then that he seems to notice her again.

It is a fascinating way to start the film, as it tells us so much about these characters. He’s desperate to have sex with her. So much so that he doesn’t care about catching his favorite show. A show she is quite aware he loves (thus she cares about him, knowing what he likes) and uses it as an excuse to get his paws off of her for a bit. She becomes vulnerable, admitting that she’s just scared about losing her virginity and is willing to finally lose it with him. But then something real and weird and scary happens outside, and he suddenly forgets all about his girl.

That becomes something of a theme for this film. He’ll periodically declare his undying love to her, but then immediately become distracted by oncoming horror.

Anyway, over the next few days, he sees very attractive women entering the neighbor’s house but never leaving. One night he gets a binoculared view of the new owner, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon), getting sexy with one of those ladies when suddenly he grows fangs. His new neighbor is a vampire!

He tries to convince Amy and his best friend Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) of this, but they aren’t having it. He tries to enlist Peter Vincent to help him destroy the vampire, but he thinks Charley’s crazy. Vincent’s having a bit of a hard time himself. He used to be an important actor. Or at least he was working. Making cult films. Now he’s hosting a cheesy late-night show for local television. And he’s just learned he’s been fired from that. Because these days “all they want to see are demented madmen running around in ski-masks, hacking up young virgins.”

Amy and Evil Ed convince Peter Vincent to lend them a hand. Not in destroying the vampires but in convincing Charley that he’s mistaken about the whole thing. They figure they can visit Mr. Dandridge, give him a few vampire tests, and all will be well.

But of course, Dandrige is a real vampire, and the tests backfire. Now the gang will have to destroy him for sure, before he turns them into bloodsuckers.

Tom Holland wrote and directed the film, and he does a nice job blending the scares with the laughs. It isn’t really scary (or all that funny if I’m being honest), but I found it quite entertaining. It has a very enjoyable vibe.

The practical effects are terrific. When the monsters die, they die slowly, transforming into goopy, bloody corpses. There is a werewolf transition that rivals the famous one in An American Werewolf in London (1981).

Roddy McDowell is great fun. He plays the pathos of this aging actor perfectly, giving him a wonderful vanity mixed with terror as he realizes that all those monsters he fought on the movie screen are real, and that he doesn’t have near the courage his characters did. Chris Sarandon is a bit miscast in my opinion. He’s clearly having fun, which is infectious, but he doesn’t have nearly the sex appeal or menace a great vampire has.

This isn’t great cinema, but it’s great fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Beyond the Door III (1989)

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Beyond the Door (1974) was an Italian horror film that basically rips off The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. The Italians were good at that. They’d take a popular American film and remake it without giving credit for the original story and make a few bucks. Rinse, repeat.

The Americans are good at it too. Beyond the Door was quite successful. So in 1977, when Mario Bava directed a supernatural film called Shock, when it came to American theaters, they renamed it Beyond the Door II. More than a decade later, the Italians made a completely unrelated (to either film) supernatural horror flick, and some crude individual dubbed it Beyond the Door III.

It is surprisingly good.

A group of American students travels to Yugoslavia to witness a sacred ritual that is only performed once every 100 years.  They are told it is a Passion Play, but also that it takes place from the time before Christ. Which should have probably been their first red flag.

They are met in Yugoslavia by Professor Andromolek (Bo Svenson), who seems very nice.  We quickly learn he is not so nice when he receives a telegram for Beverly Putnic (Mary Kohnert), one of the students (and our main protagonist), informing them that her mother has died in a tragic accident, and he rips it up without telling her.

He puts them on a boat, and they travel to the middle of nowhere, where they get off, walk through the woods, and come upon a small village full of strange people in Eastern European peasant garb who just stare at them menacingly.

Without further ado, they put the kids to bed. Everybody but Beverly is asked to sleep in a single cabin, but Beverly is taken on her own to a special place. They give her a white nightgown and probably drug her, for once she’s asleep an old hag checks to ensure she’s a virgin (gross!).

In the morning they set fire to the other student’s cabin.  All but one escape with their lives. Beverly awakens from her slumber, and they take off running. All but two of them jump on a train rolling down the tracks.  One girl misses it, and a chivalrous dude jumps off to be with her (hurting his leg in the process.)

The train is full of more strange-looking characters who are utterly unhelpful. And then things get really weird. There is a supernatural force that causes all sorts of blood-soaked harm. This is a film that isn’t afraid to let its freaky gore flag fly. It has some terrific kills with some gooey practical effects.

The train is apparently unstoppable. Sometimes the magic flips the rail switch, and it will just run straight into the ground and keep on going (making great use of some very cool miniatures.) Interspersed with these scenes are some cuts to some presumably Yugoslavian government workers who seem to be monitoring the train’s movements.  They presumably speak in Slavic, definitely not English, and AMC+ did not provide English subtitles. I assume they were just freaking out about the runaway train, but who knows?

The cinematography by Adolfo Bartoli is surprisingly great.  This film looks amazing. There are lots of scenes at night and in the dark, but it is so well lit you can see everything beautifully. This is especially true during the numerous scenes lit by fire. Seriously, this film has no reason to look this good.

It has no reason to be this good. I mean, the plot is rather silly, and the acting isn’t great. But for a little low-budget sort-of (but not really) final part of a horror trilogy, Beyond the Door III is well worth watching.

We Bury the Dead (2025)

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I love me a good zombie movie. We Bury the Dead is a very good, if not particularly original, zombie movie. Daisy Ridley stars as a woman who goes to Australia, where some kind of massive bioweapon was released, killing almost everyone but leaving a few in a zombie-like state. She’s there to help with the cleanup but also to find her husband, who she hopes is still alive (even if he is a zombie). It is a pretty slow-moving film, but I dug it. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Whistle (2026)

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I get pretty spoilery in this post so if you don’t like those stop reading.

ted me. It begins with a scene that takes place before the real movie sets in, designed to give you a little fright before it has to do the boring work of developing characters and building a plot. 

There is a high school basketball game. Our presumed heroes are down by a few points, and there are only a few seconds left. Our presumed main character takes the ball and makes a basket, narrowing the margin to one more point. Then he sees something in the stands. Smoke billows, and there is a strange figure standing there.  He shakes it off and gets the ball again. He runs. He shoots. He…the basketball does that thing it always does in basketball movies where it bounces back and forth around the rim in slow motion before it goes in. While it is doing that, a smoky, charcoal creature appears before the boy.

He runs to the locker room, takes out some kind of relic, and begs for his life. The creature appears again, and the boy smashes the relic. The creature disappears. Hurrah. The rest of the team comes in, and our boy takes a shower. Then he’s burnt to a crisp by the monster.

Flash forward three months. Nobody cares about that dead kid. He isn’t our hero. Neither are any of his friends or family. He exists so we can so the film can start with a bang.  Oh, and I guess so our actual main character can easily find the relic.

She’s Chrys Willet (Dafne Keen), and she’s new to the school. She gets the dead boy’s locker, and even though it has been three months since he died, and presumably that was a tragic event for the school, no one has bothered to clean out his locker. She grabs the relic and puts it in her bag.

She makes a few friends who seem to be the only people at this school. Seriously, she goes to her first class, and the only students are like the five people she just met in the hallway. They aren’t really her friends either. She just met them, and two of them were mean to her. One stared at her like she knew who Chrys was, but she doesn’t like her. The other is her cousin. They will become friends in the next scene because the film needs them to be. It needs some characters it can kill off to keep things exciting.

The relic does look cool. It’s kept inside this black crystal-like box, but the real thing has a groovy skull on one side and a little whistle thing on the other. When you blow it, death comes knocking.  You see, when you are born, your death is also born. Death spends its, um, life looking for you. When it finds you at the slated time, it kills you.  But the whistle summons your death early. Each person’s death looks like them at the slated time of their death, and if death comes early, you get killed in the manner you were always going to die.

This makes little sense but does create some fun kills. So, let’s say you are supposed to get run over by a bus in twenty years. You blow the whistle, and death comes calling sooner than expected. When it finds you, your body gets mutilated just like it would if you were hit by that bus.

I’m probably saying too much. I’ll have to add a spoiler tag at the front. But honestly, this film is dumb.  I can’t really recommend it anyway.

Our heroes (and us in the audience) learn this lore through the typical creepy old lady character we always find in this type of movie who collects ancient artifacts and knows all about spooky spells.

This movie reminded me of The Craft. Partially because it is about a weird new girl coming to a school, bonding with some newfound, and fighting supernatural powers. But also because it really isn’t that great, but I fully suspect there’s a group of teenagers who will become extremely nostalgic about it in twenty years. 

At least The Craft took some time developing its characters and developed its story. This film just throws everything together without bothering to make something cohesive.

Nick Frost is in it, and that’s always a good thing.  He plays the teacher who is the first adult to get a look at the relic and figure something out about it. But then he exits the film way too early. So much so I’m surprised someone of his status agreed to the role. Sophie Nélisse is one of the friends who becomes the love interest. That seems to be her thing now.  But I’m here for it.

Whistle is a dumb movie. It doesn’t take the time it needs to tell a good story. Instead it just jumps from scene to scene, advancing the plot in very familiar ways. But it never made me care about these people and their story.  It tries very hard to be cool. Chrys is a goth and a lesbian, and she listens to bands like The Cure and Iron Maiden on vinyl. At one point the film has her lying on her back, the camera shooting her from above, her super cool records neatly laid out around her head like a halo. Like I say, this is a film a certain type of teen will identify with, and I look forward to their essays on how misunderstood it was when I’m a much older man.

But the thing is, I kind of had a good time. The actors are decent. The directing does what it needs to do. The kills are pretty fun, even if they do use too much CGI. I won’t watch this again, and I certainly won’t feel nostalgia over it in a couple of decades, but I don’t hate myself for watching it.

Death Ship (1980)

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Death Ship is one of those movies that kept showing up in my feeds. Every time I went looking for a horror movie to watch, there it was. It looked fun, but I kept putting it off. Then the Blu-ray landed in my lap, and here we are. It isn’t a particularly good movie, and for a movie about Nazi ghosts on a death ship, it is rather dull for its first half, but things do pick up, and it becomes pretty fun in its back half. And it has George Kennedy in it, and that’s never a bad thing. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: They Will Kill You (2026)

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They Will Kill You had the utter misfortune of being released at the same time as the Ready or Not sequel. The studio did it an even bigger disservice by creating a trailer that made this film look like a clone of the other one. But despite some similarities – a young woman being trapped in a large building and hunted by the rich – They Will Kill You has a lot of surprises up its sleeve.

Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) gets a job as a maid in a swanky hotel run by the mysterious Lily Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette), but she soon discovers that everyone in the hotel is part of a cult that plans to make her the evening’s sacrifice. 

I’m afraid to say much more about the plot would spoil the fun. This is a film that gets a lot of mileage out of its many twists and turns. I especially appreciated how it did differentiate itself from Ready or Not, and those differences were worth being surprised about. 

I will say this is an incredibly enjoyable and thoroughly weird film. This is a film where everyone involved just decided to go for it, and it mostly works.

Sometimes it doesn’t. It brings up several threads and then never follows through with them. For instance, there is a moment where it is implied that each floor of the hotel corresponds with one level of Dante’s Inferno, but the only one we get a hint at is the “Fuck Floor.” A few times the film will hint at fun things it could have explored, and then it just doesn’t. 

The action is quite good, and the camera movements are very florid, but it does that thing where it often relies on computer effects instead of practical ones. This is true even in scenes where they could have just built a real set and made things look much more real. But modern movies tend to do that a lot.

But Zazie Beetz is a freaking star. She’s so much fun in this. Patricia Arquette is absolutely chewing the scenery, and the rest of the cast (including Tom Felton and Heather Graham) seem to be having a blast as well.

I had a ton of fun watching this, and I highly recommend it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Twins of Evil (1971)

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I suspect if you were to run some statistics on The Midnight Cafe, you’d find that I’ve reviewed more movies from Hammer Studios than any other one, and that Peter Cushing would be somewhere in the top in terms of actors I’ve written about. He is my seventh most watched actor, with some 37 of his films having been watched by me. I’ve written about eight of those films, most of which were Hammer Horror films. I’ve written about 24 different films from that studio.

That seems weird to me because Cushing isn’t one of my favorite actors. I mean, I do love him, but if I were to make a list of my favorites, he wouldn’t be on it. And I imagine if you took my ratings of all the Hammer films and averaged them out, the number you’d get wouldn’t be that high.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I keep watching these films. That’s not true. I do love me some Hammer Horror even while I can admit they aren’t always the greatest of films. It is interesting to me that I keep turning to them and that it’s only been the last decade that I’ve become a fan.

Anyway, Twins of Evil is pretty great.

Cushing plays Gustav Weil, a stern Puritan who leads a gang of dudes who love burning pretty young women at the stake. I mean, sure, they declare them witches first, and there does seem to be quite a few folks getting horribly murdered, lending credibility to some kind of ungodly horror going on, but really it’s just fun to burn girls out in the forest.

Up on the hill in his castle overlooking the village, Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) dabbles in Satanism (and I absolutely love that all the summaries of the film use that language, “dabbles in Satanism.”) While doing a bit of pretty young woman sacrificing of his own, he accidentally awakens Countess Mircalla Karnstein (Katya Wyeth) from her grave. She immediately turns him into a vampire.

Meanwhile, two twin sisters, Freida Gellhorn (Mary Collinson) and Maria (Mary Collinson), arrive in the village due to their parents dying. They take up residence with the good Gustav, their uncle. Now Maria is a good girl who wants to please her uncle, but Freida is a bad girl. She likes to sneak out at night and get into trouble. When she meets the Count, she’s all over that stuff.

Because this is a Hammer film and one made in 1971, both girls love to show off their cleavage and spend a great deal of the movie in their nightgowns with strategically placed camera angles.

The girls are a pain in their uncle’s neck. He believes them to be evil (one might even say Twins of Evil, actually Gustav says exactly that at one point.) Slowly everyone realizes the Count is a vampire, and Gustav will finally use God’s name in the service of fighting actual evil.

As per usual with Hammer, the production design is impeccable. The sets and costumes look great; the lighting is gorgeous. Cushing is wonderful. Unlike a lot of characters in films like this, he isn’t driven by an insane need for power, but rather he is a true believer. He truly thinks Satan is out there destroying the world. That warped faith drives him to do mad things. One could probably say something about how his Puritanical sense of sex drives him to burn beautiful young women at the stake, but I’ll leave that be. The Collinson sisters are a delight. Madeline especially has a lot of fun as the wild Freida.

Also, as per usual with Hammer films, the script isn’t great. It introduces the vampire aspect but doesn’t do a lot with it. The vamps do recoil from crosses, but don’t seem to mind daylight. But the look of the film and the performances make it well worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Evil Dead Trap (1988)

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I’ve talked about the J-Horror craze of the 2000s in these pages a few times. Generally speaking, Japanese horror from this time period relied more on mood than gore. Their stories often involved elements of folklore, and the villains were often ghosts or other supernatural elements. 

But there is another side to the J-Horror phenomenon that is part of the larger Asian Extreme horror movement. Folks like Takashi Miike were making films filled with heavy violence and gruesome depravity.

Evil Dead Trap falls into the latter category. 

It is the kind of film I would have loved back in the late 2000s, when I was first discovering horror films outside the slashers I loved as a teenager and the classic Universal stories I loved in college. Back then I loved extreme horror. I thought it was cool to discover these weird little films that took gore to the max.

These days I prefer my horror a bit more gothic and subdued.

This film starts out promising. Nami Tsuchiya (Miyuki Ono) hosts a late-night TV show. It is the sort of thing that likes showing off the wild and the weird. She often asks folks to send her videotapes of their crazy stuff. One day she gets a tape showing a woman (that looks remarkably like her) having her eyeballs sliced open and her stomach stabbed. It looks real. She is intriged.  She takes her fellow showmakers to an abaonded military base where she thinks the film was shot.

Naturally, things go bad.  A killer starts picking them off in some pretty gruesome ways. It feels a lot more like those slashers from the 1980s than a typical Japanese horror movie.  This is especially true in the buildup. Our heroes consist of five girls and one guy. Of course they split into groups to explore the grounds.  Nami goes at it alone. The guy and the girls have sex. Then he hides and jumps out to scare everyone.

Nami runs into a creepy guy, Daisuke Muraki (Yuji Honma) who says he’s there looking for his brother. He warns Nami to stay away from the place, then goes off on his own. There is a touch of Saw in one scene with a complicated trap set, forcing one of the girls to kill the other.  The score is reminiscent of something Goblin would do for Dario Argento, with a main theme repeating every time the killer comes near.

It is unnerving, and it pushes hard into the extreme horror ideas with lots of gore and a pretty horrific rape scene.  The last act gets really goofy, weird, and gross. 

It really is the kind of film I would have loved twenty years ago. It is one of those things I’d love to ask other people if they’d seen it, feeling cool because they hadn’t.  And then going into some of the wilder details.

These days I can admire what it’s doing and appreciate the weirdness, but I can’t say I really liked it.

Awesome ’80s in April: Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

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In elementary school I can remember bragging about how many times I’d seen the original Star Wars. I’d even brag that my brother had seen it more than me, something like 27 different times. My mother says it played constantly on HBO, and we’d watch it every time it was on.

But then I also remember when I was a young teenager renting the original trilogy, and it felt like new. I knew I had seen the films before, but I only had vague memories of them. And I can remember excitedly talking to my friends about it like it was a new discovery. 

Yet I also remember watching Return of the Jedi in the theater. I would have been seven years old.  

I don’t know what to make of all that except that memory is a weird thing.

I don’t remember ever seeing Poltergeist II: The Other Side before. I’d never logged it on Letterboxd or IMDB. For the first two thirds of the film, nothing was familiar. And then the family ran into the garage to flee the ghosts. Suddenly I remembered that they were about to get attacked by power tools. Suddenly I remembered talking about that scene with my friends right after we watched the movie. We felt it was the best scene in the entire film.  Clearly I had seen the film before; I just couldn’t remember it.  

Like I say, memory is a weird thing.

Truth be told, other than that garage scene, most of the movie is rather forgettable.

Poltergeist was so popular a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was how do you make a sequel to a haunted house movie when the haunted house was completely destroyed at the end of the movie?

The reasoning for the haunting in Poltergeist was that they built the house on top of an old cemetery and only bothered to  move the headstones and not the actual corpses.

For the sequel, they retcon some business about how underneath the Freelings house not only was there part of a cemetery but also a big cave where an insane preacher incarcerated his flock because he felt the end of the world was nigh.  They all died there, and the preacher has now turned into a spectral beast that’s now hunting poor Carole Anne (Heather O’Rourke) because of her time spent in the netherworld, and maybe she can help get him out.

Or something. It is all a lot of silly hogwash.

The preacher (Julian Beck) can manifest into a physical form and looks a bit like a reject from Children of the Corn. He’s actually quite creepy and makes for the second-best part of the entire film.

The Freeling family has moved in with Diane’s (JoBeth Williams) mother. They are trying their best to forget about the past and move on with their lives. But Carole Ann keeps having psychic visions, and that darn preacher keeps showing up. Then the old psychic from the first movie, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), shows up declaring all sorts of terrible things to come.

The thing I loved about the first film is that it slowly revealed what was happening. It allowed us to get to know the Freelings, and the scares were doled out a little at a time. That built the tension over the course of the movie.

It isn’t that things come too fast in this movie, for it too takes its time before the real scares come, but the buildup just isn’t interesting. Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg made those early scenes fun to watch. Here it’s just a lot of myth building that the first film didn’t need.

There are some good scares. The preacher is creepy, and that garage scene is great. There is another moment where Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) eats the worm in a bottle of tequila, and things get really nasty. 

But mostly this feels like a sequel that was rushed into production without much thought being given to why it should exist at all.

The Awesome ’80s in April: Poltergeist (1983)

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I was too young to have seen Poltergeist in the theater, but I discovered it not long after on home video and cable television. It became one of the defining movies of the 1980s for me. But unlike films like The Goonies or Harry and the Hendersons, Poltergeist still holds up remarkably well all these years later, even watching it as an adult (and I say that as someone who still enjoys The Goonies but recognizes its many flaws).

It certainly helps that it had Steven Spielberg as a cowriter and a very hands-on producer. This is Spielberg in the 1980s, the absolute peak of his powers. There is actually a bit of controversy over how much work he did on this film. Tobe Hooper is the credited director, but it has long been rumored that Spielberg did most of the helming. He was in the middle of making E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial at the time, and his contract on that film said he couldn’t direct anything else while making that film.

As far as I can tell, Hooper did direct it, but Spielberg was on set most days, was very enthusiastic about the picture, and likely persuaded Hooper to his way of directing in numerous moments.

Whoever directed what, this is still a great movie. I made my daughter watch it with me last night, and she loved it. I still do, too.

Something I noticed this time around was that the Freeling family are good people. They all clearly love each other, and there aren’t any real problems going on between them. Spielberg’s parents divorced when he was 19 years old, and it had a clear impact on him and his art. Many of his films deal with broken homes, so it is interesting to see how solid the marriage is in this film.

I love how deliberate the film is with its storytelling and the manner in which it doles out the horror. It begins with Carole Ann (Heather O’Rourke) putting her hands on the TV playing static just after the patriotic sign-off (and I had to explain to my daughter that TV used to shut down for the night) and talking to it. The next night she’ll do it again and utter her famous “they’re here.”

Before that, the boy Robbie (Oliver Robbins) will get frightened by a storm, the creepy tree just outside his window, and a clown doll (that freaking clown!), both of which will come back later in terrifying ways. But then we’ll see the dad, Steve (Craig T. Nelson), come in to comfort him. He explains how you can tell a storm is moving away by counting the time between the lightning flash and the thunder (something I did for years after watching this.). When the storm moves closer, the two youngest will wind up sleeping with Steve and their mother, Diane (Jobeth Williams,) but not before Steve tells his oldest daughter, Dana (Dominique Dunne), to get off the phone and go to bed.

All of this allows us to see that this is a real, loving family. We’ll later see Diane fixing the kids breakfast and Steve trying to sell a house to a nice couple. These are nice, normal people.

The frights are slowly dropped into these domestic scenes. The dining room chairs stack themselves onto the table. It gives Diane a fright, but then she’s curious about it. She experiments with them. By the time Steve gets home, she’s figured out if you place a chair in one spot, it will slide to another. She’s even marked the starting spot with a circle on the floor and drawn arrows down to indicate its path. She’s more fascinated by this than scared. She’ll even allow Carol Anne (with a football helmet on) to slide across the floor.

This is the most Spielbergian moment in the film to me. There is a sense of wonder about what’s going on here. It reminds me of that scene in Close Encounter of the Third Kind where the little boy stands in front of a doorway with this immense bright light shining down on him. His early films always had this sense of marvel and delight at the unexplained and unknown.

Then, of course, all hell breaks loose. The ghosts come, Carol Ann disappears, that freaking clown attacks. The horror amplifies. As an audience member, I am thrilled. They bring in parapsychologists to study the phenomenon. A powerful medium, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), comes to try and contact Carol Ann. She gets a great entrance, marching into the house as everybody moves out of her path until she comes into the living room, her hair pulled back, her big glasses shining, her small stature feeling so big.

All of this allows the film to pull back a little from the horror. So many horror films lean into the monsters; they push them into our faces so we’ll be scared. This film studies the phenomenon, allowing the audience to feel slightly safer. That sense of wonder remains. But then again the scares come, and we are unsettled. It is a brilliant balancing act, pushing and pulling us between that sense of wonder and being scared out of our wits.

I forgot how much I loved this film, but watching it again with my daughter made me relish just how brilliantly it is made and how fantastic it still remains.