Autumn is my favourite season and, of course, October is my favourite month of the year. There are several reasons for this including the weather being more to my liking, the beautiful fall scenery in the area where I live and various annual events taking place (including Light Night in Leeds) but key among them is the Halloween period being a perfect excuse to indulge in my love of Horror films and literature.
For my birthday this month I was very fortunate to receive the recent Studio Canal Blu-Ray of Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death, which showcases an impressive restoration by Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation.
On the reading front I got a copy of 'The Wine-Dark Sea' by Robert Aickman and 'Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters', a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's correspondences edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Lovecraft was probably the most prominent name in this month's immersion in Horror fare. More on him later.
I've got a long watchlist of Horror titles on my laptop so this month was an ideal time to work through some of the list. As usual the aim has been to watch at least 31 Horror titles by the end of the month, which I'm happy to say that I've accomplished, although it did mean missing a chance to see The Last Duel at cinemas and postponing a viewing of the new James Bond flick No Time to Die. The idea is to have a fairly eclectic range of choices, ranging from different countries, decades and subgenres. I wanted to take the opportunity to return to some old favourites but in the end I mostly took odd detours in to the genre's murkier realms.
Here's a link to the list of titles that I've watched over the course of the month.
I think I managed to cover a lot of ground, including a classic I'd not yet seen (1931's Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, with Frederic March), short films (The Death of David Cronenberg, My house walk-through), animation (Season's Greetings), a new cinema release (Halloween Kills - see review), the silent era (The Avenging Conscience & The Portrait), an anthology film (Necronomicon) and a chance to reassess one of the genre's landmarks (The Blair Witch Project).
The month got off to a lively star with Dead Silence, a semi-forgotten entry in the filmography of James Wan, being relatively obscure next to other titles of his like Saw, Furious 7 and Aquaman. It is a key entry in his work though, signifying some of what was still to come in the likes of Insidious, The Conjuring and Annabelle (which he produced). Having seen Dead Silence I can honestly say that the crazed excesses of his recent fright flick Malignant don't seem quite as uncharacteristic now.
I continued to work my way through two iconic franchises and have now reached part three of both the Phantasm and Final Destination series. I had delayed watching Phantasm III for quite some time after the crushing disappointment that I felt watching the second film. Fortunately the third entry feels like a much truer continuation of the original film and I look forward to moving on to part four eventually. I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I hadn't seen a Final Destination film until earlier this year. At the time the first film was released over twenty years ago I think I rather unfairly lumped it in with the cringe-inducing wave of post-Scream meta-Horror films that flooded screens in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Just to be clear, the Final Destination films are much smarter, wittier, more inventive, fun and worthwhile than anything Kevin Williamson has ever been linked to. FD3 doesn't reach the giddy heights of the previous two films but is a solid entry all the same.
As I mentioned earlier, H.P. Lovecraft loomed large over this month's choices. I finally got around to reading 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward', which prompted a rewatch of Roger Corman's 1963 adaptation The Haunted Palace. For commercial reasons it was marketed as one of Corman and AIP's Edgar Allan Poe cycle, most of which starred Vincent Price. It uses Poe's poem for the title and it bookends the film in Price's voiceover but otherwise has little to no connection to his work. It's a fascinating effort but the script by Charles Beaumont feels a bit torn over which author it is meant to be serving. Necronomicon, a Lovecraft-inspired anthology film from 1993 is a little hard for me to judge as the picture and sound quality of the version I watched were pretty dreadful but I thought the final segment ('Whispers', directed by Brian Yuzna) was by far the best. The Curse of the Crimson Altar is a 1968 adaptation of 'Dreams in the Witch-House', although it uses relatively little of Lovecraft's tale and doesn't even acknowledge the original story in the opening credits. It pales next to Stuart Gordon's 2005 'Masters of Horror' episode derived from the same story but with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee in the cast it was always going to be an enjoyable watch. Barbara Steele is the other Horror icon featured in the film and she's sadly underused. I wonder if some of her scenes were cut.
On a related note, I took the time to look up a couple of films that had been recommended by the late, great Stuart Gordon. On Trailers from Hell he discussed William Castle's 1961 chiller Mr. Sardonicus and Goodnight Mommy is a 2014 Austrian film which he championed in his Talkhouse column. Storywise the latter is very reminiscent of Robert Mulligan's The Other, which I watched in my 2020 October Horror marathon.
I've seen most of the classics of 1940s Horror (Cat People, Dead of Night, The Uninvited and so on) but it remains an underexplored period and relative blind spot in my knowledge of the genre's history. The Vampire's Ghost is notable as the first film credit of one of my favourite screenwriters, Leigh Brackett, and manages to effectively conjure an exotic, otherworldly eeriness on a shoestring budget. 1943's The Return of the Vampire was Bela Lugosi's last lead role in a major studio film, in this case Colombia Pictures. Watching Bela Lugosi when his career was on the wane after the incredible run he had in the 1930s is a rather painful task. It's sad to see one of the all time greats in irreversible decline. It has some impressive atmospherics and unconventional qualities for its period to distinguish it such as the plot using the setting of the London Blitz to bring about the revival of its bloodsucking antagonist (named Armand Tesla to avoid disputes with Universal who had done multiple Dracula films by this stage) and a female Van Helsing-like figure, played by Frieda Inescort.
I managed to cover a fair amount from the UK over the course of the month. Pete Walker is a celebrated figure in British Horror cinema but Frightmare was the first time I've encountered one of his works. The Flesh and the Fiends is one of the better takes that I've seen on the true case of the Burke and Hare graverobbings and murders in 1820s Edinburgh, although the ending feels woefully misjudged and has an almost certainly unintended satirical quality. Hammer Horror has been well served on the Blu-Ray* market in recent times and 1965's Fanatic (a.k.a. Die! Die! My Darling) received the deluxe treatment from the Powerhouse label last year. It's one of a number of psycho thrillers that the studio did rather well but it is much less heralded for these than some of its Dracula and Frankenstein movies. Despite its UK setting it has an unmistakable Southern Gothic feel. Tallulah Bankhead (in her final film performance, I wish she'd done more big screen roles) dominates proceedings and that's certainly not a bad thing.
Two films from 1999 were revisited this month. I'm happy to say one of them was even better than I remembered it being. Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate is surely one of his most underrated films. It's thematically rich and has an intense enigmatic feel to it that never wavers. The twisted black humour and labyrinthine plotting make the film a joy to revisit. Like with other renowned filmmakers I feel that many of Polanski's films after a certain point in his career get overlooked in favour of the more celebrated earlier works (the outstanding exception of this trend in his career would of course be The Pianist). Special shoutout as well for Wojciech Kilar's unsettling and haunting score which is in the same class as his remarkable work on Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Portrait of a Lady.
I originally saw The Blair Witch Project at the cinema in London in October 1999 so I got to experience the film when it was making its initial impact on cinemagoing audiences. It's easy to forget now what a huge phenomenon the film was on release. Today, films that gross over a billion dollars globally barely cause a ripple on a popular cultural level and are more or less forgotten within a few months but Blair Witch made a huge impact that had a lasting impact on Horror cinema. After all the buildup and hype surrounding its release I was pretty underwhelmed by what I saw. It seems to have attained the status of a modern classic of its kind but I have to say that on a second watch over twenty years later my opinion of the film hasn't changed a great deal. I admire the DIY ethic and it feels a lot more authentic than most found-footage films. For me, the film is more of a milestone in terms of marketing and as a publicity stunt, using the internet and other media to create a sense of mystery and reality about the film that no one has been able to pull off quiet so effectively since**. Found footage Horror has of course been done to death since the rather baffling success of Paranormal Activity in 2007 and in most instances I find it to be a quite restricting format A somewhat similar precedent to the Blair Witch phenomenon happened on UK television with Ghostwatch, a BBC Halloween TV movie special in 1992 that certain viewers mistook for an authentic live broadcast. I initially heard about it from a friend at school who had watched it on the night it was shown and it has taken me close to thirty years to finally watch it.
Besides the major highlight of The Ninth Gate, I also had a few notable discoveries including Short Night of Glass Dolls, D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience and two extraordinarily bleak Japanese nightmares - Jigoku and Demons. Beyond a doubt, the low point of the month was Halloween Kills, on which I've given my thoughts elsewhere. Despite that travesty, I'm cautiously optimistic about the current state of Horror cinema. After the doldrums of the 2010s I've come across a whole crop of interesting Horror titles from 2020 in recent months - The Wolf of Snow Hollow, Smiley Face Killers, The Stylist & 12 Hour Shift to name a few - that have given me a sense of hope about where the genre may be heading over the next decade.
In Leeds we are spoilt for choice this Halloween as 3 masterpieces of the genre are being screened in and around the city centre. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is showing at Leeds University Union and Nobuhiko Obayashi's House is playing at The Carriageworks. A friend and I have opted to see F.W. Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu (with a live score accompaniment) at the Howard Assembly Room and I can't think of a better way to end this year's Horror marathon.
Happy Halloween!
Recommended links:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/hammer-horror-locations
*Speaking of Blu-Ray releases I realised how many titles that haven't yet been given a much deserved UK release yet. I read Dario Argento's wonderful autobiography 'Fear' this month and it occured to me that while I have splendid copies of most of his work from his stunning 1970 debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage right through to his 1987 masterwork Opera his subsequent work has been poorly served on the home video market on UK shores. To be fair, the films that have come since are not seen by fans as being part of his "classic period" but titles from the 1990s and 2000s like the criminally underrated Trauma (as far as I'm aware this has never had an uncut UK release), The Stendhal Syndrome, The Phantom of the Opera, Sleepless and The Card Player look better and better with each passing year. I still remember seeing a region 1 copy for sale of his 2005 TV movie Do You Like Hitchcock? at a film festival stall in Manchester 15 years ago and deciding to wait for a UK release that never materialised. I regret it now furiously of course.
John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness has not had a home format release in Britain since the VHS era. I have a region 1 copy but as this is now widely regarded as one of the best Horror films of the 1990s surely a decent Blu-Ray wouldn't go amiss? (Please take note Arrow, Second Sight, Powerhouse or any other adventurous labels). Last year in North America there was a highly regarded Blu-Ray restoration of one of my favourite films (Roman Polanski's The Tenant) but there are no signs of a similar release over here, perhaps due to cancel culture, whatever the reason I'm stuck with my basic 2004 DVD release from Paramount unless I decide to invest in a multi-region Blu-Ray player. Besides a very fine Criterion disc of Cat People, none of Val Lewton's 1940s RKO productions have had a decent release in the UK. As it's Halloween, I should also mention that I'm also jealous of film collectors across the Atlantic who have been blessed with a special release of the Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers: Producer's Cut Blu-Ray in 2015 and a recent 4K restoration of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (my favourite of the franchise by some distance). Anyway, enough about my UK Blu-Ray wishlist. I could carry on all day but those are some Horror titles that I think deserve to be given a decent UK release.
**Side note, the much maligned sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 released the following year is a guilty pleasure of mine.
