Halloween 2022

2022 October Horror Marathon

Real life intruded in unusual and at times conflicting ways to this year's horror marathon. We've had something of an Indian Summer this year and while it created idyllic conditions for doing walks and enjoying pleasant weekends, the blue skies and sunshine during much of October kinda ruined the autumnal vibes that I'm used to experiencing at this time of year. I'm certainly not complaining as I've saved plenty on heating bills during a cost of living crisis. More pertinently, having got through Covid-related illness over the summer I seem to be struggling with Long Covid symptoms including extreme tiredness and fatigue which means that I struggle to watch things without getting drowsy. At home I rarely manage to watch a film from start to finish in one sitting these days. It's quite often that anything longer than an hour and a half I need to break up in to two or three viewing sessions. 

Prompted by a Film Twitter poll, I was watching westerns throughout September. I could easily have gone another month going through some of the interesting titles that came up in individual ballots that I hadn't yet seen. However, duty calls and it didn't take long to be immersed in my annual horrorthon. What made the transition somewhat easier was a late September viewing of the 2008 western/horror hybrid The Burrowers. I actually thought it worked better as a western than as a horror flick when it resorts to fairly standard genre tropes in the second half and charisma void Karl Geary becomes the main focus of the film. Seriously, how the hell did that guy get a film career?

My current lethargic state certainly dictated many of my viewing selections. Horror films of the 1930s and 1940s were often a go-to choice due to their brevity. A great number of those films come in at under 75 minutes, a trend I continually wish would get revived as it can bring a rigour and discipline to the work that so many modern films lack.

Bela Lugosi was a prominent name in this month's lineup, quite appropriate as it marked his 140th birthday. Born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blaskó on October 20, 1882. Happy 140th Bela! By the early 1940s his career had definitely hit the skids but it seems that occasionally some of the old magic was still there, as was apparent from The Devil Bat and Invisible Ghost. I haven't ventured much in to his post-golden era career but have been convinced by others to look further. I draw the line at 1952's Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, for now at least. His contemporary and professional rival Boris Karloff appears in The Man Who Changed His Mind, one of a few returns he did to the U.K. after his Hollywood career took off and I also took the opportunity to revisit their finest pairing in 1934's The Black Cat.

Early on in the month and towards the end of the month I watched two of the better known adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera. I saw the 1925 version with Lon Chaney on television in the 1990s but was relatively new to silent films in my teens and besides Chaney's performance it didn't register much. Seeing the restored version with a live score at Howard Assembly Room was phenomenal. Last year it was Nosferatu that got the Halloween slot and I hope the tradition of silent horror screenings every October continues for many years to come. I had never seen the 1943 version with Claude Rains and wasn't even aware it was in colour until the film started, which makes it somewhat unique among the Universal Horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. The forties version was a childhood favourite of Dario Argento and he has said that the impression it made in his youth made him a film addict. With that connection it seemed like a good time to return to his dazzling 1987 masterwork Opera which, although not an official adaptation (Argento would get around to that in 1998), is a modernised variation of Gaston Leroux's classic story. His latest film (Dark Glasses) arrived on Shudder on 13th October and I'm pleased to say that it's every bit as good as I'd hoped it would be. Argento announed at the Sitges film festival this month that his new film will star Isabelle Huppert and starts filming next year. I couldn't be more excited about this news.

This October I went through my DVD/Blu-Ray library more than usual to revisit old favourites and to get a fresh perspective on some I hadn't seen for a long time. Some of these choices were informed by my current reading. I finally got around to reading Stephen King's novel 'Pet Sematary' this month, which gave me a perfect excuse (as if I needed any) to go back to Mary Lambert's brilliant 1989 adaptation. I prefer to try to forget that the 2019 remake exists, an inexcusably bland and listless telling of King's tale. I also read 'Cinemaphagy', a career spanning study by Scout Tafoya of the filmography of the great Tobe Hooper. It prompted me to check out Lifeforce again for the first time in far too many years. While I've seen all of Hooper's feature films, the book has compelled me to look further in to his TV work, including episodes of 'Amazing Stories' and 'Tales from the Crypt'.

I had previously only seen Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure in a grainy online version. This time I watched the U.K. Blu-Ray by the Eureka/Masters of Cinema label. It's easy to see why it's considered to be Kurosawa's breakthrough film and is still among his finest. 

My Blu-Ray collection has grown exponentially since I got my own place and the Halloween season always spurs me on when it comes to adding more horror titles to my shelves. For my birthday I got the 1967 Nikolai Gogol adaptation Viy, another exemplary release by the Eureka label. I purchased Mario Bava's 1977 swansong Shock and Brian De Palma's The Fury and Raising Cain from Arrow's annual Shocktober Sale. The Shameless label was doing a two films for £15 offer at HMV, which allowed me to add more Sergio Martino (Torso) and Edwige Fenech (The Case of the Bloody Iris) films to my collection. Two of the month's finest discoveries came courtesy of fellow Euro Horror luminaries Lucio Fulci (The Psychic) and Jesus Franco (Female Vampire), both filmmakers like Jean Rollin whose work I'd had mixed experiences with in the past but am now more accepting of the fact that their extensive filmographies have inevitably got some rough spots.

The BFI Player had some fascinating offerings in the form of Japanese anthology film Orgies of Edo and recently rediscovered British folk horror The Appointment. One of my most eagerly anticipated films of recent years was Lucile Hadžihalilović's Earwig and I was finally able to see it on video on demand. It would have been nice to see it in cinemas but sadly there were no local screenings in my area.

Inevitably I was lured back to a few long-running film series'. The dreadful Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) put me off going any further with the 'Universal Horror' series of the 1930s and 1940s for a while. It's a major comedown from 1939's Son of Frankenstein and while it's perhaps unfair to expect the series to maintain that standard after three entries it was one of the biggest drops in quality between two installmentrs that I've ever witnessed in a legacy horror franchise. After watching the following year's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man I've now convinced enough to see it through to the end. It's more effective as a sequel to 1941's The Wolf Man than as a continuation of the Frankenstein films. Seeing Bela Lugosi play the monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man makes me even more glad that the original plans for the 1931 film with Lugosi starring and Robert Florey directing never came to fruition. How different film history may have been without the iconic James Whale/Boris Karloff film is interesting to contemplate. Not only did it launch several extraordinary careers but it was a cornerstone of the entire genre for decades to come. Along with Tod Browning's Dracula the same year it also helped rescue Universal Studios from financial ruin during the Great Depression.

Part four of the Final Destination series (confusingly titled The Final Destination) was a lazy effort but having now seen the fifth and (to date) final entry from 2011 I was pleased to find that they wrapped things up rather nicely. It stands proudly as one of the best horror franchises of the 21st century so far. Others that come to mind are the Ginger Snaps trilogy of the early 2000s and Ju-On: The Grude series. Laying dormant for over a decade now it's surely not long until an inevitable reboot comes along. 

This annual marathon is a 31 films in 31 days challenge so it seems appropriate enough that the 31st film that I watched was Halloween Ends. Colour me shocked. Against all the odds, I kinda liked it. It probably led to my final viewing of the month, John Carpenter - Live Retrospective, a decent recorded souvenir of the series of concerts that Carpenter and his band did in 2016. I wrote at the time about the miserable experience that I had at the show in Manchester six years ago. It was a nice little corrective to that unfortunate little episode. A behind the scenes documentary by the same production team has been put out on Blu-Ray in the US this month, which I'll hopefully find a way to see at some point - I don't have a multi-region Blu-Ray player. Carpenter himself has two new soundtrack LPs out this month, scores to Halloween Ends and the Firestarter remake that came out earlier this year to little fanfare. Two great additions to a sort of secondary career which has been given a very welcome extended run in recent years. 

As I write this I'm already planning ahead for my next viewing project in November - the annual Leeds Film Festival. I attended the programme launch on 12th October. A few horror titles caught my interest, including The Harbinger, which will hopefully build on the promise that writer-director Andy Mitton showed in 2018's The Witch in the Window, and New Normal - an anthology horror title from South Korea. Sticking to the present though I'm just going to savour what remains of my favourite month of the year.

Happy Halloween!🎃

Here's a list of the horror titles that I've watched this October. Standout titles are marked with an asterisk (*), films I revisited are marked in red:
 The Devil Bat
 Phantom of the Opera (1943)
*Orgies of Edo
 Supernatural
*Cure
 Invisible Ghost
 Satan and the Virgin
 The Tell-Tale Heart
*Earwig
 Werewolf of London
 Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
 The Man Who Changed His Mind
*The Telephone Box
 The Infernal Cauldron
 Valley of the Zombies
*Opera
 Biotherapy
*The Psychic
 Dance of the Damned
 Dark Glasses
*The Pit and the Pendulum (1964)
 The Mistletoe Bough
*Poison for the Fairies
 Final Destination 5
 The Last Theft
*Lifeforce
*The Black Cat (1934)
*Kill, Baby... Kill!
 Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God - Part I
 Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell
 Halloween Ends

 The Appointment

*Pet Sematary (1989)

*Female Vampire

 The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

 John Carpenter Live - Retrospective

https://letterboxd.com/willowybeing/list/october-2022/

The only break I had from the horror genre that I had this month was a cinema showing of Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave. It proved to be rather apt that I watched it on the same day that the UK Prime Minister resigned.

Recommended reading:

John Carpenter on Film Scores:

https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/john-carpenter-film-scores-interview.html

The Devil's Child:

https://theschlockpit.com/2022/10/25/the-devils-child-1997/

Cure still haunts by Adam Nayman (Criterion):

https://www.gawker.com/culture/the-devil-made-me-do-it-cure-on-criterion

Corman Poe

http://reverseshot.org/features/3011/corman_poe

From Beyond:

https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-place/2022/10/25/stuart-gordons-1986-hp-lovecraft-adaptation-from-beyond-is-a-masterpiece-of-body-horror-on-par-with-david-cronenbergs-best-work

New Soska Twins feature! On the Edge

https://bloody-disgusting.com/exclusives/3736952/on-the-edge-trailer-the-soska-sisters-deliver-pain-and-pleasure-exclusive/

Toolbox Murders

https://outlawvern.com/2022/10/31/toolbox-murders-and-the-reclamation-of-tobe-hooper/

George Romero Goosebumps article

https://bloody-disgusting.com/exclusives/3732916/george-a-romeros-goosebumps-unearthing-the-kid-friendly-horror-movie-romero-almost-made-exclusive/

https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3736530/must-be-the-season-of-the-witch-halloween-iii-turns-40/

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/adventures-set-werner-herzogs-nosferatu

https://filmschoolrejects.com/26-things-we-learned-from-the-night-of-the-living-dead-commentary-1f0ef17cda1e/

Dementia 13

https://read.kinoscope.org/2021/10/01/first-fright-francis-ford-coppolas-dementia-13/

Criterion VHS

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7967-blood-guts-and-videotape-80s-horror-and-the-rise-of-home-video

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have an obsessive tendency when it comes to quotations. Here are some of my favourite horror quotes:

"It is precisely the impure mixture in me of supernatural and evil that I fear." - Simone Weil

"I'm blind to all but a tenth of the universe...I'm closing in on the gods." - THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES

"I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness … a light that glows, changes … and in the center of the universe … the eye that sees us all." - THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES

“Why shouldn’t I write of monsters?” - Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

"It's a perfect night for mystery and horror. The air itself is filled with monsters." - Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

"The absence of love is the most abject pain.” - Nosferatu the Vampyre

“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.” - H.P. Lovecraft

"Horror and sex go hand in hand; I think that the two are life and death." STUART GORDON

“Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows’ Eve.” — Ray Bradbury, “The Halloween Tree”

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!” — Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein”

“They cannot be seen because they creep only in the dark.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “The H.P. Lovecraft Collection”

“They thought of All Hallows’ Night and the billion ghosts awandering the lonely lanes in cold winds and strange smokes.” — Ray Bradbury, “The Halloween Tree”

“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Short Stories of H.P. Lovecraft”

“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.” -Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” — William Shakespeare, “Macbeth”

“There is something haunting in the light of the moon.” — Joseph Conrad

“We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Collected Works of H.P. Lovecraft”

“Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.” — William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” — H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

“Suddenly the day was gone, night came out from under each tree and spread.” — Ray Bradbury, “The Halloween Tree”

“Fear has many eyes, and can see things underground.” — Miguel de Cervantes, “The Adventures of Don Quixote”

“Evil only has the power that we give it.” — Ray Bradbury, “Something Wicked This Way Comes”

“Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.” — Aristotle

“Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.” — Walt Whitman

“A deep sleep fell upon me — a sleep like that of death.” — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum”

“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.” — William Shakespeare, “Macbeth”

“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.” -Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray

"Such are the autumn people. Beware of them." — Ray Bradbury, “Something Wicked This Way Comes”

“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” — T.S. Eliot

"When I write, I must not censor my own imagery or connections. I must not worry about what critics will say, what leftists will say, what environmentalists will say. I must ignore all that. If I listen to all those voices, I will be paralysed." - David Cronenberg

"It's important to have scary demons in our world on film. We have them in the world. That is why we are afraid, it is nice to have a visual and to have a confrontation with it." - Brad Dourif

"Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee."

- The Flea by John Donne

"A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain"

-  V. What the Thunder Said from 'The Wastleand' by T.S. Eliot

"A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality." ~ Alfred Hitchcock

"I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film" - David Cronenberg

"It's funny... the world is so different in the daylight. In the dark, your fantasies get so out of hand. But in the daylight everything falls back into place again." - Carnival of Souls (1962)

"Sleep.
Those little slices of Death.
How I loathe them." --Edgar Allan Poe

"Horror films are a rehearsal for our own deaths." - Stuart Gordon

"In the grim comedy of life, it has been wisely said that the last laugh is the best" - He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

“I run to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday”. - John Donne’s Holy Sonnets