Shaun of the Dead (2004):  After a month of watching horror movies (or, at least, movies trying to be horror movies), I decided I finally needed to watch something with the goal of making me laugh.  Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s first full-length movie collaboration did the trick and even threw in a horror theme of zombies just to keep me somewhat on topic.  A fantastically clever script and a unique take on the zombie-apocalypse premise, I’ve probably watched this movie 50 times since seeing it in the theater at its U.S. premiere…and it still makes me laugh.  Beware, though, the movie does take a dark turn near the end, finding a very unique mix between drama and comedy that few writers can pull off.

Suspiria (1977):  Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece about an American who enters a German dance academy and finds herself discovering the source of many strange occurrences.  With nearly every scene washed in vivid, unnatural colors and a disturbing, prominent soundtrack by the band Goblin, this movie stimulates the senses while providing a pretty decent tale.  Heavy with gore at times and often absurd, even if the climax seems to be a bit of a letdown in comparison, the road to get there is worth traveling.  Most importantly, this movie sets the standard for most-impractical interior design features with a “razor wire room;” a place that brings an untimely end to a panicked student in a remarkable fashion. 

Trick ‘r Treat (2007):  Closing out the holiday with our traditional Halloween Night movie.  Multiple stories interweave through the celebration of ghouls and monsters in a small Ohio town where badness begets badness.  This is a clever movie, tricky and entertaining, and a great way to close out October.  Happy Halloween.

The Woman In Black (2012):  As his first feature film lead after the Harry Potter series, Daniel Radcliffe brought the brooding and desperation of the teenage wizard to a remorseful and loving widowed father and lawyer in charge of extracting documents from a remote house outside a tiny village.  Met by unwelcoming locals, Radcliffe gradually learns the house frightens the them through the curse of a young, wronged, and of course dead woman.  I probably wasn’t the only person to sarcastically refer to this film as “Scary Potter” when it first came out, but Radcliffe played a strong and convincing role worthy of shutting me up.  The movie itself was a also well done, reaching back to ghost story / haunted house method that relied on dark views of isolation in an ordinary setting to build tension from beginning to end.  In the middle of this, while alone in the house, Radcliffe carried a nearly fifteen minute scene of terror and discovery that might be one of the best horror movie sequences I have seen in a long time.  This film was the surprise of the year for me and a nice addition to the October Movies collection.

Cat People (1942):  When a young Serbian girl meets a mannequin-like man at a zoo in front of a panther cage, it takes about eight minutes to realize they are going to be an annoying as hell couple that the audience is going to have to suffer through.  We suffer through an awkward courtship in which mannequin-man buys the girl a very pretty siamese cat that hates her (you can always trust a cat), a bird that replaces the cat that the girl ultimately kills, and their marriage which is not thwarted by any of these happenings.  But as the marriage progresses, the girl admits she fears she is cursed to turn into a cat; while it is unclear if this is a dangerous cat or just a house cat that wakes its owner up early on a Saturday morning, her return visits to the panther cage teases the creature might be a supernatural sibling.  Her depression, mixed with her paranoia that the mannequin-husband is having an affair with a co-worker (which is reasonably valid; the mannequin-dork is carelessly friendly with the woman), drives here to an unstable state that starts to become compelling.  Events occur that mask whether or not the curse is real or imaginary through to the movie’s climax, and the rough beginning becomes bearable by the end.  The sequel, which I saw prior to this viewing a few weeks ago, had virtually nothing to do with this film beyond reusing the same characters a few years later.  But seeing how those characters declined from urban, annoying dopes to suburban, really annoying dopes, was perhaps a comical commentary on the irritating characters established in the first film.  

Macabre (1959):  Another Castle film, this one extends the level of hokeyness by starting with an obligatory statement, “if you see your neighbor in the theater reacting negatively from horror, please call the manager.”  After this warning, we quickly learn a doctor’s young daughter has been kidnapped and, supposedly, buried alive, and it is up to the doctor and his young nurse-assistant to try and find the girl before it is TOO LATE. So begins a series of grave digging, subsequent murders, and flashbacks to fill the suspenseful tale.  As easy as it is to make fun of the silliness of this film, it is actually remarkably suspenseful, somewhat gruesome at times, and very hard to predict the ending (for a change, given these movies).  As if to recognize this lightening-in-a-bottle catch, the narration at the end of the film pleads to not give away the ending to our friends.  So, in respect of the holiday, I won’t.  

The Tell-Tale Heart (1953): Cheating here a little as this wasn’t a movie, but a UPA cartoon of Poe’s classic story. With surreal imagery, creepy over-laid characters, and a haunting narration by James Mason, this was a remarkable 8 minutes to present the first Poe story I ever read in my young days.

Carnival of Sinners (1947): We start the film in a snowed-in lodge in the Alps where a bunch of half jolly, half grumpy patrons ponder their isolation when a one-handed stranger appears shortly after the sound of gunfire. Exhausted, terrified, and angry, the man is panicked when a small package he was carrying disappears during a mysterious blackout. Despondent, he sits with the other inn patrons and begins to tell his story in the form of a flashback. His situation, mapping in a similar fashion to The Devil and Daniel Webster, leads him to the Alps in attempts to bury a talisman with its former owner. The Devil, of course, gets his due, but the story moves along pretty well despite some silliness and remarkable continuity problems…not the least of which, the final scene occurring outside where there is not only a complete lack of snow, but seemingly a very pleasant summer evening. Calling Ed Wood…

The Fall of the House of Usher (1949):  There may be no movie title that can instill such fear and dread into me…not because these are scary movies, but because they are usually so awful.  In fairness, Poe’s short story is about one page of action and 19 of mood setting and Poe’s own brooding, so to put together a feature length film from the text requires a lot of elaboration which is, of course, where most screenplays fall apart.  However, this Ivan Barnett direction version interestingly differs from my previous judgments.  While, true, it does deviate greatly at times from the text, it also follows the tale step by step at points with dark, sinister imagery.  Like the story, the movie is slow moving; in fact, even at a short 70 minute runtime it is quite possibly the slowest moving film I have ever watched.  But in the process it builds mood and forces severe attention to the very creepy Usher estate which is worth the viewing.  This may not be a classic, but in a Poe-heavy October Movie collection, this one stands above the rest.

The Plague of the Zombies (1966):  Two years before Romero’s masterpiece, zombies were still mind-controlled, resurrected lumps often called into being by voodoo and the obligatory African-like tribesman pounding bongos.  This film fit that description perfectly; as a doctor and his daughter visit old friends in a small town, they quickly come across a series of strange deaths that seem to have a connection to the town’s wealthy squire.  The doctor spends an afternoon reading up on witchcraft and becomes fully prepared to fight the supernatural plague that is infecting the town and challenging the life of his daughter.  The doctor’s love for his daughter, characterized by a loving quip in the beginning of the movie when he states “we should have drowned you when you were a baby” in response to her strong-willed, adult mentality, prevails over the squire, his living henchmen, and his hoards of undead.  Jokes about murdering daughters, stereotypical tribal drums, silly henchmen “evil masks,” and a slave-labor zombie workforce aside, the movie boasts a certain amount of tension and some fairly gruesome looking zombies to create a respectable October Movie showing.

Dread (2009):  Based on a Clive Barker short story in the old but memorable Books of Blood, an obviously psychotic college student inevitably dupes a boy and his two friends (possibly girl friends; it is all a bit blurry) into exposing their deep fears for which the psychotic recreates in their tortured lives for his own amusement.  Although the entire movie is presented in that annoying dark, olive-colored, graining filter that The Ring first made popular years ago, the imagery is compellingly miserable and, at times, I was able to believe that it captured what a Clive Barker nightmare might feel like.  Still, horror movies about college students take a certain amount of patience that I ultimately lost before the film was over and it degraded into a torture-fest with little tension or reason for me to care about the outcome.  Granted, the short story was pretty miserable too, but it never seemed to lose sight of the fact that it was telling a story, not just trying to be nasty. Like most recent film adaptations of Barker’s stories, this slowly but surely grows into a disappointment.

The Gorgon (1964):  Woman with snakes in her hair, men mysteriously turning to stone…the premise for this one is pretty simple.  It is true, many of the movies from this time period aren’t so much about discovering the source of the mystery as much as they are following the grim and horror to the ending, but this film provides no tension whatsoever.  As the small town police try to discourage the finding of the evil woman, the apparently only woman in town walks around with a sweet yet creepy presence as we wait a long 90 minutes for her unveiling.  I’m pretty open minded about most of the films I watch during the October Movie cycle, but this one was pretty rough to get through, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing notwithstanding.

The Devil Rides Out (The Devil’s Bride, US) (1968):  While calling upon the son of an old friend who they hadn’t seen in a great while, Christopher Lee and his dopey sidekick find the young man loitering with a creepy, although always smiling, gang of Satanists.  Lee, who apparently had recently read a book that gave him an encyclopedic level of knowledge on Satanic rituals and how to fight them, abducts the young man in hopes of saving him prior to his soul-ending baptism into service of the dark lord (satan, not Voldemort).  Car chases, dead goats, and an appearance by the Devil himself (who, I might add, had really, really creepy chest hair) keep the film moving rapidly for the first hour or so.  But then, Lee suggests the best defense from the devil was to hide in a small circle drawn in his big house where we spend a painful fifteen minutes or so watching a foursome of annoying people cower from threats that can’t break the barrier.  Still, a young woman dies, and a child (who, apparently, wasn’t important enough to hide in the safety circle) becomes abducted, and we are led to a climax of crosses, holy water, and even some time manipulation.  Albeit silly at times, there are worse satanic panic films and Christopher Lee’s performance as a hero versus a villain is strong, even in his absurd ability to have a perfect answer to every hell-created problem.

Dawn of the Dead (1978):  Growing up about 40 miles outside of Pittsburgh, a trip to Monroeville Mall was typically a bit of a treat.  It was bigger than our local malls, had record stores deep with tapes and vinyl that captured my attention, and kept me entertained for hours.  Interestingly, the most notable aspect of this building wouldn’t be revealed to me until years after I outgrew my fascination with shopping malls, and that fact was its center-point of George Romero’s second zombie film.  Four characters, in a stolen television traffic helicopter, take refuge in the mall and begin to adapt to the apocalyptic world.  As they cleanse the mall of zombies and begin to reach the doldrums of high living, their safety turns to frustrated boredom which is ultimately attacked and destroyed by both zombies and man.  Never shy of poking at political, racial, and social fallacies, Romero drags this film out a good 30 minutes longer than its entertainment value to feed us his message.  Although the very fun 2004 remake removes the commentary and provides us with only good old horror and gore, there is still a soft spot in my horror-based heart for the original flick.  With cherry-red blood and purple zombie faces, this isn’t the best of terror times, but it is a classic and worth an October viewing.

Night of the Living Dead (1968):  George Romero unintentionally, yet single-handedly, transformed the mind-controlled, hapless human definition of a zombie to a hungry, flesh-eating ghoul that would, and continues to, haunt movie screens with the most fascinating monster known to man.  Tense yet witty, the script is incredible as a hoard of slow-moving, yet unstoppable monsters munch on a collection of defiant, yet ultimately menu-destined humans.  As the first duplicated movie from this blog’s 2011 October Movie list, it would be nothing short of a shame to not watch this classic at least once before Halloween; if one doesn’t consider this the best horror movies ever, one certainly has to admit it is one of the most influential.  Note, however, that starting a game of “chase the Sharpie Marker under the ottoman with the cats” at the beginning of the film does decrease the tension of the opening half hour, so be sure to treat the viewing with better respect than I did one dark October evening. 

Dead Snow (2009):  Seven med students travel through the snow to go to a cabin in the woods (which, pretty much scene for scene, was effectively mocked by Cabin in the Woods discussed here only a few days ago) where they would ultimately be harassed by war-criminal Nazi zombies.  The movie goes about 45 minutes before any badness occurs (outside a silhouetted, vague opening scene) which is just kinda silly as there isn’t much suspense as to what is going to happen (maybe somebody thought the film will evolve into a live-action version of Ice Age, but not me).  But once it gets going, the killing is gory and fast until the film seems to reach a point that it realizes it is just like every other 20-somethings get slaughtered by zombies flick.  From here, it turns into a half horror / half comedy spectacle of goofiness which, as far as war-criminal Nazi zombie movies go, is fairly fun to watch.  So, watch Cabin in the Woods, then tune in about one hour into this film to skip all the stupid, predictable stuff and enjoy the mayhem.  

Fright Night (2011):  I didn’t give this remake much of a thought when it was released last year.  The original, silly and certainly dated, was a fun enough film to watch in the day and I gathered a revised version would just be full of modern teenage angst, bad music, and unnecessary modification of an old script.  It is true, the modern teenage angst was rampant, but for us Doctor Who fans watching David Tennant being a remarkable twit and Colin Farrell, impressively, being a nasty vampire, this film carried a slick and fast moving new script very well.  I can’t say “fast moving” enough, especially in the first half of the film which broke a lot of horror movie formulas and made for a genuinely intense presentation.  By time the second half of the film became more thoughtful and plodding, it was hard to look away.  This may not fall into the “repetitive cable viewing” category that seems to define how much a movie is enjoyed in our home (at least, when nothing else is on television and we just want some harmless background noise), but as far as remakes of 70′s and 80′s horror movies go, this one is above most for providing solid entertainment.

Evil Dead 2 (1987):  Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi return to the cabin in the woods where a dark evil continues to terrorize them having been awoken by an unintentional reading of the Necronomicon.  Campbell, the sap-turned-survivor in the first film, rapidly evolves into a wise-cracking heroic fighter against the onslaught, setting the stage for his character-defining appearance in the finale of the trilogy,  Army of Darkness.  While the first movie in the series seemed to confusing border on an edge of horror and comedy, this great sequel dove head-first into extreme monsters, characters, and gore, making it a smile-inducing spectacle without the arrogance of trying to make the audience jump in their seats with silly, sudden bumps and bangs.  This movie would define a lot in the horror genre for years to come as well as setting the stage for Raimi and Campbell to have great successes in directing and acting.

Dead of Night (1945):  An architect entering a house full of five strangers knots as many stories together as he is convinced he dreamed of the companions in recurring nightmares.  The five tales, each told by a member of the house, are based around ghosts, premonitions of death, and other weirdness as the storytellers recount events in their past that support the architect’s claim of supernatural concerns.  While one of the stories is a light-hearted spoof told by a house member making fun of the poor architect, the other four span the range of peculiar horror.  Interestingly, two of the tales would be retold, nearly exactly, in future episodes of The Twilight Zone.  While the movie borrowed its tales from other films and short stories, Dead of Night might have been the motivation for many television horror shows in the next couple decades.  

13 Ghosts (1960):  A family with no money, recently having their furniture repossessed in a comic, angry wife scene, mysteriously inherit an old mansion right after a really, really annoying boy wishes for it on his birthday.  With mallet-over-the-head foreshadowing, we realize the house is haunted by guess how many ghosts who seem to be responsible for murder, breaking things, baking bad food in the kitchen, and possibly hiding lots of money from the previous owner’s secret stash.  With a dopey faced lawyer hanging around way too much for anybody’s good, it becomes pretty obvious the attorney is snooping for the cash while ghosts make fairly harmless appearances throughout the home.  The dimwitted dad, concerned about the well-being of his family just enough to maybe leave the blood-thirsty apparitions in a few days after they are threatened with death, lucks into his boy finding the hidden cash while the ghosts possibly kill the lawyer, much to everybody’s amusement a few hours later.  Unsure if it should be scary or funny, threatening or laughable, and sympathetic or disgusted towards the cast, this movie just stupid and hard not to insult in an MST3K kinda way.  The only saving grace of the film is the uncertainty of  the haunted house being truly haunted or rigged by the gold-digging lawyer…and I’ll leave that bit of suspense for your consideration.

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971):  Three hippies roll into a small town in a hearse (cheaper than a station wagon, you know) to assume an old house, fleeing the city for a wholesome farming lifestyle.  They find another girl hippie squatting in the home, and before long the four of them are singing and swimming and bringing out my inner Futurama Dr. Farnsworth for wanting to throw a brick at them.  But through all this, we learn that Jessica, one hippie, is prone to voices and fears of insanity that the found-girl hippie (who also appears to be a ghost of sorts) begins to take advantage of.  With a few twists and turns, and an obligatory evil town that all seem to want to kill hippies for reasons other than the fact that they are hippies, this isn’t really that bad of a showing.  Add an interestingly creepy soundtrack driven often by a solitary piano, and I can easily sit through this film.

Eyes Without a Face (1960):  A scientist, distraught over causing a car accident which horribly disfigured his daughter’s face, experiments on a regeneration procedure that will allow for grafting skin from one person to another with the goal of giving his girl a new face.  With a woman accomplice who, on a smaller scale, was a success of a previous regeneration surgery, they kidnap young woman, remove the faces of these victims, and attempt the grafting procedure.  The daughter is torn between the desire to regain her beauty yet horrified by the experiments on innocent victims, all the while wanting to contact her former lover who believes her dead.  Although there was a lengthy face-removing scene that was apparently quite the shocking presentation in days before face-removal in movies was more common and enjoyable, the film was much more psychological and artistic than the subject would lead one to believe.  Haunting yet beautiful, this movie has well-earned its designation of classic and influencial.  

Beyond The Black Rainbow (2010):  With an obvious callout to David Cronenberg’s dark, peculiar filmmaking in works like Videodrome, Black Rainbow uses a creepy, synthetic soundtrack, extreme closeups, and peculiar imagery to minimally tell a story of a captive girl and her troubled persecutor.  By means of a supernatural, triangular object that seems to possess the power to control minds, kill, and distort reality, the persecutor torments the girl until she manages to escape the futuristic holding cell (interestingly placed in a future 1983 despite nearly thirty years prior to the film’s creation date).  The bleak story is overshadowed by an exceptional effort to be artistic and weird, but by the end it seemed to wreak of the effort to be clever more than one of telling a good story.

The Haunting (1963):  A scientist (specializing in ghost finding, apparently) calls upon three people to help him determine if a notorious house is haunted by supernatural beings.  The center of the crew is an awkward woman burdened by the death of her mother who she was caring for exclusively for years.  Timid, yet aggressively angry when insecure, she becomes the center of attention amongst a snooty, urbanite woman and the young male heir to the house when strange events begin to occur.  The four characters are presented in remarkable complexity for a movie in the time period and the tense moments of haunting and unknown are simply fantastic…dare I say, even a little scary.  Directed by the notable Robert Wise, this movie stands above most horror movies of the time period and is genuinely entertaining.  

The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933): When I included House of Wax in last year’s October Movies, I had no idea it was a remake of this 1933 version with Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill. Shot in red and green, two-color Technicolor, the peculiar look added to the creepy story of a despondent, permanent injured artist who makes up for his lack of usable limbs by murdering people and turning them into his wax museum sculptures. Although the story was nearly identical to the Vincent Price 3D fiasco that would follow years later, this 1933 version had an added detail of a stereotypical, fast-talking reporter who was relying on a big story to save her career. She stumbled upon the wax museum mystery and helped carry the film with dozens of comical, witty jokes and insults at the expense of her counterparts as her roommate, the ever in trouble Fay Wray, finds herself within seconds of becoming a wax figurine. There is plenty to date this film as sexist and silly, but the strong cast carries the effort well nearly 80 years later.

The Curse of the Cat People (1944): In a sequel to the 1942 Cat People, this film apparently has little to do with the original other than reusing some of the same cast to take advantage of an unsuspecting public who didn’t have the internet to call shenanigans on such a feat. We start with a “dreamer” girl who becomes a victim of her imagination and seemingly inability to interact well with the world to include not being able to make friends, being constantly harassed by her Dad to be normal, to even putting all the invitations to her birthday party into a “mailing tree” that doesn’t, in fact, mail the invitations and leaves her rather partyless. Still, on her fantasy-driven adventures, the girl discovers two friends, one in an old woman and another young woman; the first proving to be real albeit somewhat confused if not crazy and the second proving to be a ghost of her dead biological mother. The amount of family dysfunction in this film is quite remarkable; the father of the dreamer goes on massive mood changes as he tries to normalize his daughter including a creepy, closed-room “discipline action,” the old woman does not recognize her caretaker daughter as a family member which drives the young woman to make murderous threats, and the second-wife of the father seems hopeless when trying to make sense of the daughter’s mental lapses. This really probably doesn’t qualify as a horror film, but it was disturbing enough to fall into an October Movie review and did throw in a ghost for good measure. Despite its flaws, it was a fairly entertaining, supernatural presentation with a happy ending that, in my opinion, should have set the stage for the trilogy finale where the crazy girl goes on a demonic, murderous rampage…if only I were a 1940’s filmmaker…

Tales of Terror (1962): Roger Corman directed this collection of three tales focused on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and centered, once again, around the creepiness of Vincent Price. With a screenplay written by Richard Matheson and additionally supported by the acting talents of Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone, this film that might be easy to laugh off as another hokey attempt at terror carries itself fairly well forty years after the fact. Starting with a dismal “Morella,” a drunken and despondent Price welcomes his estranged daughter who ultimately becomes possessed by the mother who died during her birth. In contrast, a goofy, drunken Lorre engages us through “The Black Cat” which happily buries Price behind a cellar wall in a crossing with Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” Whatever levity the drunken-vision-tortured Lorre brought was squashed by a vicious Rathbone in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” which seemed to truly touch on Poe’s demented angst. I haven’t been shy about gently and respectfully laughing at Corman and Price’s occasional horror flops, but this film made me smile much more out of enjoyment of the genre the two worked so hard to build over the years.

Pit and the Pendulum (1961): In the isolation of an oceanside castle (apparently before the days of the real estate boom), Vincent Price mourns the tragic death of his wife while his brother-in-law pays a surprise visit to investigate the young sister’s demise. Price melodramatically explains that his poor wife died from fright after becoming obsessed by the family torture chamber in the castle basement while the brother-in-law, played by John Kerr, matches the classic horror icon with a presentation that seemed to be the influence for Futurama’s overacting robot Calculon. Although it seems like a valid argument to blame Price for the death since, after all, he maintained a torture chamber in the basement for no real apparent reason (winning the movie’s Suspiria “Razor Wire Room” award for interior design worthlessness), Price was actually innocent until his mind finally snapped from an unfaithful, deceitful wife. From there, the pendulum, the pit, and one fairly nasty torture device play a fun role in the movie’s finale (that is, until the screen decays to a psychedelic oil slick of fancy colors for no apparent reason). Although plodding, the film has a worthy payoff for those who can make it through the seemingly long 80 minute runtime.

The Devil Inside (2012): In 1968, Night of the Living Dead evolved the cinematic version of the walking-dead zombie to terrorize, if not take over, the world. This would be the foundation for hundreds of knock-off, if not rip-off, movies of the ghouls that would terrorize mankind. The films that followed from Night’s influence weren’t always good, but they typically maintained the horror of zombies true to the original presentation. In 1973, The Exorcist had the most powerful, evil, mythological creature pick on a little girl, say a few dirty words, and spit up green goop that would become the foundation of Nickelodeon’s 1990′s kid game shows. This MST3K-worthy film would be the foundation for dozens of devil-possession flicks, perhaps none that exemplify the stupidity of the genre as The Devil Inside. A couple of rogue exorcism priests, fed-up with the church’s refusal to raise a good fight with a demon, try to help a girl’s possessed mother all while being followed by a cameraman who was documenting the old lady’s plight (just to add another tired horror-movie gimmick to the mix). Apparently they should have been wearing those paper-mask respirators because they all inadvertently caught devil-possession and, as a result, did all kinds of bad things. Pathetically gross, stupidly foul, and boringly plotted, the 75 minutes they managed to stretch this stinker was not only painful but also laughable, not in that they couldn’t make it a standard 90 minute mess, but in that they encouraged us to read more about the pathetic story on their website before running the credits.

The Reptile (1966): From the fine horror folks at Hammer comes a small town terrorized by a mysterious murdering creature who manages to turn all victims into green-skinned, frothing-at-the-mouth corpses. A young couple who inherited a cottage from one of the victims move to the town, receiving the collective cold shoulder of the population complete with warnings to get out of Dodge. Slowly, people die while the young couple find themselves closer to the tragedies than most, leading to a climax that gives the newcomers the opportunity to end the town’s terror for good. Too formulaic to be good, yet with enough effort to be obscenely bad, this film reaches an unfortunate distinction of not being entertaining neither for fine production values nor unintentionally comical, making it just bland.