Halloween 2023

2023 October Horror Marathon

An October where the 13th fell on a Friday sounded too good to be true and the pessimist in me was unfortunately proved right on this occasion. I did manage to get a nice week-long holiday earlier in the month but that was sandwiched in between two bouts of illness and a very busy spell in my workplace. All things considered, it's quite an achievement that I was able to watch anything for my annual October Horrorthon. I had to try to make the most of the limited free time that was available to watch as much genre fare as I could. With all the constraints I had, there wasn't much of a framework or general theme to this year's viewing season. It was more of a case of working my way through a lengthy watchlist that I'd built up since last October and selecting whatever my mood and schedule allowed. I did manage to repeat a concept from last year's selection, where I watched both the silent and 1940s version of The Phantom of the Opera, by seeing both the 1923 and 1939 versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney and Charles Laughton respectively. 

Casting the Runes (1979)

I started my seasonal viewing with the 1979 ITV Playhouse version of Casting the Runes by M.R. James, which turned out to be a perfect choice as it was filmed in my native Yorkshire and was the first of several British Horror titles that I would watch over the next 4 weeks. Others include two lesser known Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (The Tell-Tale Heart (1934) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1950)), an early Boris Karloff chiller (The Ghoul (1933)) and the sublime 1989 TV adaptation of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, plus two short shockers - Panic (1978) and Lonely Water (1973). I plan to do a list of great British Horror films at some stage, so stay tuned.

As always I'm trying to keep things varied. For instance, a month of vampire flicks sounds like fun but I imagine it would get a little tiresome after a certain point. As well as delving in to the Silent era (Satan's Rhapsody (1917) and Danse Macabre (1922)) and Animation (Transylvania 6-5000 (1963) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1972)) there was also room for pure, unbridled schlock (Corpse Eaters (1974) and Blood Rage (1987).

Given that we were celebrating Friday the 13th, I had to find a slot for Jason Vorhees and I chose to revisit Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988). Although severely undermined by MPAA cuts that removed a lot of gore and inventive gruesome details from the film I do consider it to be one of the high points of the series. 

In terms of blindspots, I have to confess that Nightmare On Elm Street 4 and 5 were two unwatched entries in the series for me. Not sure how I let that go unchecked for so long, well over 20 years in fact. As a teenager, like with Child's Play and Friday the 13th, I would watch the films in the series in random order, fairly confident that knowledge of a previous entry wasn't essential. Freddy's Dead made it clear that the series had resorted to self-parody so it may have dampened my enthusiasm for some of the others. Perhaps I was a bit more blasé about the entries that didn't have Wes Craven's involvement. This month however I got hold of a Blu-Ray boxset of the series and now only have part 5 to cover, as I have zero interest in the 2010 remake. Finally, having done both a Freddy and Jason title it would be remiss of me to neglect Michael Myers at this time of the year and so I closed proceedings on the 31st with a joyful rewatch of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. A nice palate cleanser after suffering through the generally wretched Halloween reboot trilogy by Blumhouse in recent years.

Not surprisingly, there was little of interest in cinemas. Saw X and David Gordon Green’s Exorcist reboot were hardly enticing. Looking ahead, I have two films booked at next month’s film festival in Leeds that seem to come under the Horror banner. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is said to be a Frankenstein-like tale and Conann looks to be a sort of dark fantasy. I know very little about either of these films but the latter especially comes highly recommended by some genre fans I know via Letterboxd.

I've continued to explore 1940s Horror. Besides some of the more celebrated titles (films of Val Lewton, The Uninvited, Dead of Night, The Spiral Staircase) I'm not terribly well clued in on this period. Weird Woman (1944) and Cry of the Werewolf (1944) were two I chose mostly for their brevity with both clocking in at just over 60 minutes. The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) was one of the films that I had prioritisied for this month's marathon. It reunites the director Robert Florey and the star Peter Lorre but doesn't quite reach the delirious heights of their previous collaboration (1941's The Face Behind the Mask), partly because Lorre is relegated to a supporting role and has much less to do on this occasion, but it does allow for some inventive visual trickery that harkens back to Florey's early avant-garde/experimental short films of the 1920s. 

I'm still working my way through the Universal Horror series of the 1930s and 1940s. Son of Dracula (1943) has some striking moments and an inspired Southern Gothic/Louisiana setting but is badly hampered by the miscasting of Lon Chaney Jr. as the Count. Perhaps the studio felt that they needed a recognisable name in the role but one can't help wondering how much better it would have played with Bela Lugosi or John Carradine as Alucard/Dracula. I'm trying to go through the films in roughly chronological order to get a sense of how the series developed and have officially reached the Monster Mash stage. Numerous Invisible Man, Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man and Mummy sequels await my viewing pleasure, as well as meetings with Abbott and Costello.

Two of my viewings were influenced by my choice of reading. 'Corman/Poe' by Chris Alexander was published earlier this year and it’s a brief but entertaining survey of the series of Poe adaptations that Roger Corman made in the early 1960s, most of which starred Vincent Price. It's also blessed by having interviews with Corman himself to give the reader some greater insights. It therefore seemed like a good time to revisit 1963’s The Raven. This was the first film of the cycle that I watched, when I caught it on a late night showing on ITV in the 1990s. Needless to say it was by far the least fresh in my memory. I certainly got more out of it this time, being familiar with the other titles in the series. I was also more prepared for the film’s comedic tone which was somewhat unexpected on my first viewing all those years ago.

I seem to be have taken a greater interest in biographies as of late. Earlier this year we got Sam Neill’s autobiography ‘Did I Ever Tell You This?’, which proved to be engaging in parts but felt a bit flung together and needed a good editor to put it in better shape. It's also marred by some superfluous passages and overly opinionated remarks. The highlight of the book for me was a chapter where he recalls the making of Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 masterpiece Possession, which Neill rightly considers to be one of the best films he ever made. It gives so many fascinating insights in to Zulawski’s obsessive methods and the considerable emotional toll it took on the people involved (Isabelle Adjani in particular) that much of the rest of the book seems lightweight and frivolous by comparison. This month saw the publication of Werner Herzog’s autobiography ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All', which I aim to get to over the next couple of months. With Herzog himself as the subject, it will almost certainly be a fascinating read.

For me, this year's most eagerly awaited film text was Stuart Gordon’s recently published memoir ‘Naked Theater and Uncensored Horror’. Its Gordon’s final gift to fans like myself and a nice companion piece to last years essential 'Interviews' volume. It also gave me the perfect excuse (as if I needed one) to revisit his 1985 feature debut Re-Animator. This month’s viewing marks the first time I’ve actually seen the film uncut. Although I watched it numerous times on VHS when I was first getting in to Horror cinema, the notorious “head giving head” scene was excised by U.K. censors, who were not exactly renowned for their sense of humour in the 1980s. 

This month's viewing did serve as a reminder of the great opportunities that the Horror genre has allowed over the years for sometimes undervalued performers to flourish. In particular, there was several actresses who stood out in remarkable turns in the films that I watched, notably Carol Kane in Office Killer (1997), Soledad Miranda in She Killed in Ecstasy (1971), Sondra Locke in A Reflection of Fear (1972), Louise Allbritton in Son of Dracula, Jan Francis in Casting the Runes and Louise Lasser in Blood Rage.

Nightmare Castle (1965)

I should mention some of the highlights here. Besides a few that I've already mentioned, Nightmare Castle is a superior slice of Italian gothic with the always-mesmerising Barbara Steele in a dual role. The Walking Dead seems like an attempt by Warner Brothers to combine its 1930s gangster cycle with the mad doctor themed Horror titles of the period. Its graced by some incredible atmospherics, under the direction of Michael Curtiz, and a soulful turn by Boris Karloff as the doomed subject. This month's biggest discovery for me though was Jean Rollin’s extraordinary Two Orphan Vampires, which was blessed with a comprehensive special edition treatment by Powerhouse/Indicator* earlier this year. It’s taken me a while to come to an appreciation of Rollin as a filmmaker and this was a clincher for me. It’s become a new entry in my Horror canon. 

Two Orphan Vampires (1997)

Happy Halloween!

🎃👻🦇💀🦇🕷️🍂🎃

*The last month or so has given us some exceptional new Horror releases in the U.K., several of which I've added to my Blu-Ray collection. They include:

Tod Browning's Sideshow Shockers (Criterion)
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (Radiance), Visible Secret (Radiance), Messiah of Evil (Radiance)
The Funhouse (Arrow), The House By the Cemetery (Arrow)
Lips of Blood (Powerhouse/Indicator), Fascination (Powerhouse/Indicator)
The Guard from Underground (Third Window), Door & Door II: Tokyo Diary (Third Window)
Targets (BFI) 
Crimes of the Future (Second Sight), Ginger Snaps Trilogy (Second Sight)

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

Stuart Gordon: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers series)

Stuart Gordon: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series) 

Edited by Michael Doyle
University Press of Mississippi

I may have to consider buying another bookcase. My collection of film books is growing at an alarming rate and putting a serious strain on my bookshelves. This is something that the filmmaker Jamie Blanks tweeted about recently with a similar problem. 

Until this book of interviews came along I'd been able to find relatively little in print on the life and career of filmmaker Stuart Gordon, who passed away in March 2020. When the term "genre ghetto" is used it feels more appropriate with relation to typecasting and the level of the recognition a filmmaker achieves rather than the actual quality of their work. Written features in old journals, fanzines and interviews online have shed some light on the man and his work while DVD extras, booklets and audio commentaries have also been useful sources of information. I felt that such a distinctive filmmaker and body of work deserved a worthy volume on his career and when I heard about the University of Mississippi Press releasing a collection of interviews spanning from 1968 to the late 2010s, it almost sounded too good to be true.

Simply put, this is by far the best of the UoM series that I've encountered so far. Most of the other filmmakers they have done volumes on have been covered in greater detail elsewhere and have well documented careers in print but this collection felt revelatory. It illuminated such a great amount of detail about its subject, that I ended up taking notes from nearly every page. This spans the whole breadth of Gordon's career in both theatre and cinema and hearing about it from the man himself as his career progresses gives a direct commentary and narrative to proceedings. In certain cases, this is the first time that the interviews have been published in their entirety. 

Gordon is a very generous interviewee - informative, intelligent, honest, humourous, gracious and perceptive, with no delusions about his work or achievements. He's simply glad to hear that someone liked his films. Gordon flourished in the cult arena, never quite managing to draw attention away from the notoriety and shock value of his debut feature Re-Animator, which may be a reason why to this day he still seems like a hugely undervalued figure in American cinema, especially at a time when it seems that it has lost its ability to shock, provoke or even entertain in many cases. In a later interview he remarks, "Re-Animator has become my middle name". Like Tobe Hooper with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and George Romero with his 'Living Dead' films it was the work he was synonymous with. While graetful for how it launched his career it's a shame that other films didn't get as much of a following. I hope other films will get more attention as time passes. Books like this are very helpful in that respect. 

Stuart Gordon saw horror as a medium for subversion, a quality he shared with his forebears from the 1970s such as George Romero, David Cronenberg, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and John Carpenter. It's sometimes forgotten that the 1980s produced its own distinctive breed of filmmakers of this ilk. Along with Gordon there were such notable figures as Frank Henenlotter, Brian Yuzna, Michele Soavi, Jorg Buttgereit, Shinya Tsukamoto and Clive Barker making their mark as directors and they all sought to bring an incendiary quality to their work. It was far from being the era of derivative slashers and franchises that some make it out to be.

The book sheds light on his theatre work in which Gordon was an active participant in Chicago in the 1970s and early 1980s, a period which also saw such emerging talents as David Mamet, Dennis Franz, William L. Peterson, Joe Mantegna, Gary Sinise and William H. Macy launch their careers. This was where Gordon developed his rapport with actors and an ability to tackle ambitious subjects with limited resources but boundless imagination and creativity. Some of the projects - pirate adventures, science fiction - had a cinematic quality and as a lifelong movielover it made the transition to filmmaking a logical next step in his career. He already had experience with gore effects when the time came to make his first feature in 1985. 

The book made me aware of just how crucial the cinematographer Mac Ahlberg was to his work and how so many of the building blocks of Stuart Gordon's cinema were present in his debut film. Gordon reveals how Ahlberg taught him many of the fundamentals of filmmaking. There are numerous instances of this throughout film history, such as Gregg Toland schooling a young Orson Welles when he made Citizen Kane and Woody Allen said he learned a great deal about the technical side of cinema from Gordon Willis in his early work. His creative partnership with producer (and later director) Brian Yuzna reminded a little me of how Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur complimented each other in their seminal trio of RKO horror films in the 1940s. With Jeffrey Combs, Stuart Gordon found his ideal leading man and stock company member. He was a De Niro to his Scorsese, someone who occupied the worlds of his films so completely that it's hard to imagine anyone else in those roles (Herbert West in particular). Dennis Paoli was a lifelong friend of his who wrote numerous films for Gordon, some of which never made it beyond the initial screenplay stage. 

As well as discussing the films he did make we also learn a great deal about some of his unrealised projects. It's fascinating to learn about all the films that Gordon had hoped to make but was unable to get the required funds to bring them to fruition. Some of the projects discussed in the book include adaptations of Joe Haldeman's 'The Forever War' and Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho', a pirate adventure titled 'Bloody Bess', 'Berserker' (written for Arnold Schwarzenegger), 'Florian', 'Iron Man', ''68' (an autobiographical film about his involvement in late-1960s activism and the founding of The Organic Theatre), 'Kingdom Come', 'House of Re-Animator', 'Gris Gris', Soulmate (a ghost story that was eventually directed by its writer Axelle Carolyn, with Gordon's blessing) and at least two further proposed Lovecraft adaptations: The Lurking Fear and The Thing on the Doorstep. At least we have The Black Cat, one of his two 'Masters of Horror' episodes and something of a dry run for his play 'Nevermore', a one man show for Jeffrey Combs which he also hoped to turn in to a film. He gives his approval for Abel Ferrara's work on 1993's Body Snatchers, another film that Gordon was lined up to make before it got caught up in major studio politics and one that came out remarkably well under the circumstances. Earlier in the book, there are several mentions of a film version of Lovecraft's story 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' as far back as 1986. It was initially planned as his follow-up effort to Re-Animator so it's heartening to know it would finally get made as Dagon in 2001.

It seems nearly every filmmaker has a cursed production at some stage in their career and Robot Jox certainly had more than its fair share of setbacks. External factors beyond the filmmaker's control are made clear. Don Coscarelli shares similar stories in his autobiography 'True Indie', with relation to Bubba-Ho-Tep. Gordon talks about how 'Fear Itself' was taken off the air half way through the season to make room for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Despite decent ratings the remaining shows weren't broadcast when the games were over. Of the films that did get made he laments that certain titles never got a chance to find an audience in cinemas, in particular The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (made for Disney's Home Video division) which got caught up in a dispute between warring factions at the head of Disney and Dagon (which went straight to DVD). It's especially galling today when the multiplexes have become such a wasteland. Like many others, I discovered Gordon's work on VHS and later DVD, a reminder of how pivotal home viewing has been for film lovers over the last 40 years or so. He points out that Robot Jox did very well on VHS, despite its reputation as a flop. The home video market allowed his films to find an audience in ways that cinema distribution never could. 

Severe stress and health concerns surrounded the making of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and eventually forced him to drop out two weeks before the film was scheduled to begin shooting. He says that the finished film is not too far removed from what he set out to make, because much of it resembled the work he had already planned and storyboarded. It could have taken his career in a very different direction and garnered other major studio assignments. It's a fascinating "what if?", much like with David Lynch being offered a chance to make Return of the Jedi in the early 1980s. I consider the period from Robot Jox (1989) through Daughter of Darkness (1990) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1991) to Fortress (1992) to be the least impressive stretch of his career. Just for the record, I still find all of these films to be highly watchable but I think they lack some of the zest of his best work. The professional struggles he encountered and difficulties working with studio meddling as well as the many projects that floundered in Development Hell may have had a detrimental effect on his work but there is never a stage in his career where one might have lost faith in his abilities.

He accurately predicted there may not be too many more films left in a 2006 interview. It's sad to read during the most productive phase of his film career that he wasn't sure how many films he had remaining in him and made me wonder how long his health issues (his death in 2020 was a result of multiple organ failure) were effecting him. Many film enthusiasts didn't realise how lucky we all were to have John Carpenter until he stepped away from directing after the hostile reception to Ghosts of Mars in 2001. Gordon's film career similarly came to an abrupt end. That no new films would get made by him after Stuck is a perfect example of the sorry state of American film since the financial crash. If such a thing doesn't already exist, there is probably a great thought piece to be written on US cinema since 2008 and how the industry has gradually bottled out of investing in any project that carries the slightest element of risk, uncertainty or even vaguely challenging ideas, something that has been exacerbated by the rise of streaming platforms.

After reading this collection, Stuart Gordon's post-2008 career now seems like a much more productive and fruitful period than I had previously thought. For a long time I held out hope that another feature would get made but I should have been searching elsewhere. Despite several film projects failing to get off the ground, resulting in a huge array of unproduced scripts, he remained active in other fields, and got to make acclaimed theatre work, a radio play and an autobiography (see below). The later theatre projects 'Nevermore: An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe',* 'Taste' and 'Re-Animator: The Musical'** all sound like  he was open to risky and challenging new ventures. There was also the radio play "The Hound" from Tales From Beyond the Pale, which actually gives us a further addition (or addendum) to his series of Lovecraft adaptations. This collection also made me aware of other projects he was involved in and I made sure to add The Dentist and Progeny (both of which he co-wrote) to the top of my rental list. Like Joe Dante (another worthy subject for film studies), Gordon was an engaging cinephile and made several entertaining contributions to the Trailers from Hell website in which he covered films such as Nightmare Alley, Ride the High Country, Mr. Sardonicus and Cannibal Holocaust. A chapter where he discusses two of his favourite filmmakers - Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick is full of great insights in to their work and what made makes them masters of their craft. It also contains lovely tributes from the likes of Barbara Crampton, that really brings home what made his work so special and a splendidly detailed bibliography of articles and weblinks. 

While scrolling through the bibliography I noticed a mention of 'Naked Theatre and Uncensored Horror', a book written by Gordon with a 2022 publication date. This had escaped my attention until now but it seems that Gordon had written his memoirs prior to his death two years ago and FAB Press had announced in 2020 that it will be publishing the book in the near future. Wonderful news and much like with Tobe Hooper it seems that fans and film scholars will have two incredible resources to draw on for assessing this remarkable career with plenty of information coming directly from the subject himself. At one point Gordon states: "I think movies have life spans" (pg. 65) and his work certainly lives on and only gains in stature as a result of this excellent collection. Already a major highlight of 2022 for me.

* A one-man show, featuring Jeffrey Combs as Poe. I don't think there is a film or audio version of this show available. Gordon was interested in doing a film version but according to Combs, he was opposed to the idea of doing a taping of the show.

** It's a source of regret now that I may have been able to see a performance of this at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival had I known about it sooner.

Links:

FAB Press announcement: https://twitter.com/fab_press/status/1557692979393007618

FilmInt book review by Thomas M. Puhr: http://filmint.nu/stuart-gordon-interviews-michael-doyle-review-thomas-m-puhr/

Wicked Horror.com review: https://wickedhorror.com/horror-reviews/stuart-gordon-interviews-a-singularly-subversive-spirit-book-review/

Halloween 2021

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. 

Halloween Kills

"To die, to be *really* dead, that must be glorious!" - Count Dracula in Dracula (1931) 

I'm more than half way through my annual October Horror Marathon and will give a full writeup on that at the end of the month but thought I'd do an early post about the recently released Halloween Kills, which I saw in cinemas today - Thursday 21st October, 2021. I have seen every film in the Halloween franchise to date as I am a completionist with these sort of things but recent developments have caused me to possibly reconsider this tendency of mine. 

David Gordon Green's 2018 Halloween reboot, pitched and marketed as the "true sequel" to John Carpenter's original 1978 classic by discarding and disparaging the earlier sequels that followed over the next two decades or so (although they are clearly not above lifting numerous ideas and plot points from those films) was an abomination. It reminded me of both The Force Awakens and Jurassic World, with a creatlively bankrupt Hollywood system trying to refashion old properties for contemporary viewers and through a combination of shrewd marketing and a contrived reverence for a classic film's legacy it connected with audiences. I found it disheartening that the film was so well received. Its stated aims for "legitimate" sequel status and its constant reminders of moments from the original film obviously worked for some. The 2018 reboot seems to have achieved a respectability with the critics and viewers that had eluded the series ever since the original followup in 1981*. 

For obvious reasons I like to watch a film from the Halloween franchise every October if I can. My original hope was to finally see the legendary "Producer's Cut" of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. This was the original cut of the sixth film in the franchise, much bootlegged over the years, and radically different from the version that was released by Miramax in 1995 after numerous rewrites, reshoots and re-edits. The earlier version has about 45 minutes of footage not included in the release version, which altered various character and plot details as well as giving it a new ending. Frustratingly after all these years I'm still unable to track down a full version that I can watch. The alternate version did get a US Blu-ray release in 2015 but is still unavailable in the UK unfortunately. 

With this new film on general release I thought I'd give it a shot, despite the unpleasant memories of the 2018 film. Halloween (the 2018 version) was quite accurately dubbed 'The Shape Awakens' in some quarters. Did anyone suggest 'H20 Part II' or 'H40' for a title? Simply reusing the basic 'Halloween' title was honest in some ways. It was so keen to regurgitate details from the original film and was so bereft of ideas that it was an acknowledgement of sorts of its own inept mimicry. They couldn't even be bothered to think of a new title and that basic lack of creativity and effort showed in the resulting film. Taking the Disney Star Wars analogy a step further, Halloween Kills could be referred to as 'The Last Myers' and next installment 'The Rise of Strode'.

I can tolerate bad sequels and remakes but I also know when a classic is being horribly desecrated**. Whether the series is being deconstructed, subjected to revisionist attitudes or revamped to suit current mainstream media views, it's rather painful to watch. Halloween Kills very much continues in the vein of its predecessor. Perhaps it could be christened 'Halloween: Genisys' or 'Halloween: Dark Fate' as all the retconning, fan service, old characters shoehorned in purely for their recognition factor and bringing back ageing cast members for the sake of nostalgia is starting to resemble the woeful Terminator franchise. 

Like many people I wondered why anyone besides Laurie Strode would care so much about the events from the first film 40 years earlier and turning her character into a paranoid, Sarah Connor-like survivalist was unconvincing and a complete betrayal of the grounded, resilient character who survived the events of the 1978 original. It's kinda funny how the 2018 film chose to erase the infamous "twist" of 1981's Halloween II and the entire sequel timeline only to come up with the kind of convoluted nonsense that they are trotting out in these films. In its own way the plot contrivances are as far fetched and laughable as anything in previous entries, which included delving in to the Myers family bloodline, reality TV broadcasts and druids. 

Again, it is directed by David Gordon Green from a script that he co-wrote with Danny McBride among others, which perhaps explains why certain characters look as though they have wandered on from the set of 'Eastbound and Down'. Jamie Lee Curtis has gone to great lengths to state the new film's topicality and contemporary relevance in interviews and promotion for the film, which is off-putting in itself. Season of the Witch (the outlier of the franchise) aside, I don't really associate the Halloween series with social or political commentary and I think whatever the series has had to say about any issue until this recent reboot has been more incidental than overtly thematic. I didn't think it would be possible for me to dislike a film that features Judy Greer (by far the best thing in this film) and Jim Cummings*** in the cast but no screen performer (dead or alive) could make this thing worthwhile. One of the few pleasures I got from the film was the score, which like the 2018 film was composed by John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies.****

One of the trailers that preceded Halloween Kills was for a sequel/reboot of Wes Craven's Scream, imaginatively titled - you guessed it - Scream. The prospect of another Scream film is far more terrifying than anything in David Gordon Green's hideous recent efforts. The Halloween franchise isn't exactly sacred to me at this stage (I'm more of a devotee of the Chucky and Friday the 13th series) but Halloween Kills marks a new lowpoint. While watching it I couldn't help thinking about the scorn that greeted Halloween III: Season of the Witch in 1982 for telling an ingenious and compelling story of its own and daring to take the series in a bold new direction. The passing of time has been very kind to that film and had it been more successful we may have been spared these recent travesties. If nothing else Halloween 2018 and Halloween Kills have helped me to see the much maligned Halloween Resurrection from 2002 in a far more favourable light and may even prompt a wider reassessment of Rob Zombie's 2007 remake and its 2009 sequel. Next up is Halloween Ends in October 2022.  Given how disposable it all feels, when the series gets its next inevitable reboot I hope they will erase any trace of Green's trilogy of films. 

Notes

*1998's Halloween: H20 was a partial exception to this trend as it was also wildly overpraised for its tiresome callbacks to the original and for bringing Jamie Lee Curtis back to her starmaking role after a lengthy break. 

**Case in point, the truly dismal 2007 "adaptation" of Richard Matheson's brilliant 1954 vampire novel 'I Am Legend', starring Will Smith.

***SPOILER ALERT: Cummings has little screen time as he is killed off in the opening prologue set in 1978 so he is at least spared the embarrassment of being in the rest of the film.

****Besides a new John Carpenter film score, probably the best thing to come from the film was the red carpet event which featured Jamie Lee Curtis dressed as Marion Crane and Judy Greer as Annie Hall. 

Masters of Horror

An appetite for Horror has stuck with me in November. I decided to follow my October Horror Marathon with a run of the remaining 'Masters of Horror' episodes that I hadn't yet seen. By chance this coincided with the show's 15th anniversary, which was recently marked by show creator Mick Garris on his Post Mortem podcast.

Until this month, I had seen 20 of the 26 episodes that were made over two seasons of the show from 2005 to 2007. I never managed to watch all of the broadcast episodes and set out to finish the series for the sake of completion. Perhaps I was too focussed on the "must see" episodes by the filmmakers I most revered or put off by some of the weaker entries. Having finally got through the whole set of episodes and with 20/20 hindsight I can see how the show went from being a major event to what some saw as a squandered opportunity. 

I still remember the excitement I felt about the show when it was announced in 2005. At this point I was probably at the peak of my Horror fandom. Horror seemed alive and dangerous again after the genre had fallen out of favour with mainstream audiences in the early 1990s. There were exceptions of course, but while they didn't hide their gruesome side some of the more notable crowd-pullers of this time had been marketed with a classier sheen and big stars. The Silence of the Lambs was presented to audiences as a superior thriller and Bram Stoker's Dracula (tagline: "Love Never Dies") played up its gothic romance. Generally speaking it was a rather dormant stage in the genre's evolution. This was marked by diminishing box office clout and franchise fatigue, which was fairly evident in titles like Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. That all changed when 1996's Scream became a phenomenon that would lead to a significant revival of interest in scary movies and this was further cemented by two runaway hits in 1999 - The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project. Both of these enjoyed a cultural and commerical impact that confounded even the wildest expectations. At the start of the millennium, films like Ginger Snaps and May convinced me that Horror was once again entering an exciting phase. Working in a video store at the time I found a growing number of low budget, foreign and independent genre titles that grabbed my attention. I attended Frightfest screenings quite reguarly and showings of Freddy vs. Jason and Seed of Chucky from the same period were some of the best cinemagoing experiences I had at that time. The DVD market was unearthing obscure treasures as well as giving us better quality versions of certain classics and in the UK censorship on gory titles had eased up considerably since the 1990s. 

The early years of the new century now looks like a thriving period in the genre's history. Asian imports were becoming more widely available to western audiences and the J-Horror boom churned out multiple gems. The "Splat Pack", which included the likes of Rob Zombie, James Wan, Greg McLean, Alexandre Aja and Eli Roth, was emerging and bought us a new generation of Horror auteurs. There was also "New French Extremity" films like Trouble Every Day, In My Skin and High Tension. A new wave of zombie films would follow on from the success of 28 Days Later... and Shaun of the Dead. Remakes of classics were in full swing, with new versions of House of Wax, Willard, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead turning out better than expected. 2005 marked the return of George A. Romero after a long absence with Land of the Dead. We also got Tobe Hooper's last great flurry of activity with Toolbox Murders, Mortuary and his two episodes of 'Masters of Horror' all coming out over the space of a couple of years. Perhaps it was the timing of all this or a kind of nostalgia at work but I've not really felt that same buzz in the years since where Horror is concerned. 

Having learned about several leading Horror directors taking part in a new series that was designed to give them a free reign over their respective episodes I was ecstatic to say the least. In addition to the filmmakers involved it would feature adaptations of stories by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, Richard Matheson, James Tiptree Jr., Koji Suzuki, and F. Paul Wilson. As a Horror fan it felt like a dream come true. I even made a special trip to Brighton to see a UK premiere screening of Dario Argento's first episode, Jenifer, at the Duke of York's Picturehouse in 2005. I still have the standalone DVD releases by Anchor Bay of Cigarette Burns and Dreams in the Witch House. Plans changed in the UK and each series was broken up in to 2 separate box sets with 6 or 7 episodes each instead of individual releases for each title.

There was a sort of precedent for this kind of project. In the past films such as Spirits of the Dead and Two Evil Eyes were Horror anthologies inspired by Poe stories that emphasised the directors of the different segments. Twilight Zone: The Movie had paid tribute to the legendary TV show with four segments made by hotshot directors of the time (including two future "Masters" - John Landis and Joe Dante). The most impressive example I know of filmmakers being showcased on televsion was a series made in France in the 1990s. 'Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge' was a set of 60 minute films about adolescence that gave us outstanding works by the likes of Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas and Andre Techine. 

Among the participants, Don Coscarelli and Stuart Gordon made the most of the opportunity presented by the series, seeing it as a perfect chance to film previously unrealised projects. Dreams in the Witch House would end up being the last of five Lovecraft adaptations by Stuart Gordon. Coscarelli talks about the experience of making Incident On and Off a Mountain Road in his autobiography 'True Indie' and how the series was the ideal form for a relatively simple tale by Joe R. Lansdale that wasn't exactly feature length material. I wish that more episodes had been developed along the same lines. Too many episodes felt like random assignments rather than material the directors were engaged with but a personal stamp was sometimes in evidence. Cigarette Burns can be seen as a companion piece to John Carpenter's 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness* (many noted the similarities between the two) while Pro-Life** revisits his beloved siege scenario from earlier films like Assault on Precinct 13, Prince of Darkness and Ghosts of Mars. Although by no means the first person to bring humour to macabre fare, Deer Woman and Family continued the unique mixture of comedy and Horror that John Landis had developed in An American Werewolf in London, Something Scary and Innocent Blood. Both were very much of a piece with his earlier work and are among his better latter day efforts. 

Several long term star-director collaborators were reunited for the show - Angela Bettis and Lucky McKee (Sick Girl), Robert Englund and Tobe Hooper (Dance of the Dead), Michael Moriarty and Larry Cohen (Pick Me Up), Robert Picardo and Joe Dante (Homecoming), Jeffrey Combs and Stuart Gordon (The Black Cat). It was also something of an opportunity for father and son bonding - Richard Christian Matheson did the screenplay for Dance of the Dead, which was based on a short story by his father, Max Landis co-wrote John Landis's first episode, while Cody Carpenter provided the music for both of his father's entries in the series. The show was designed as an auteurist project giving filmmakers creative control in television, a medium where writers, producers and showrunners are the more dominant figures. In many ways, the true auteur of the series was show creator Mick Garris, who penned 4 episodes (two of which he directed) and who already had a well established history in television with his miniseries adaptations of Stephen King's The Stand and The Shining.

Unfortunately, certain names that would have been a perfect fit for the show's premise didn't get involved. At different stages early on both George Romero*** and Roger Corman were set to direct Haeckel's Tale before John McNaughton finally took the helm. While not shy of his genre association, David Cronenberg ushered in another phase of his career in 2005 with A History of Violence, one that was very much a step away from the Horror fare that made his name. In a 2005 interview John Landis stated that Sam Raimi and Hideo Nakata were both set to do an episode****, although neither were ultimately involved with the series and may have had to drop out due to other projects and commitments. It's tempting to think of other names who might have been called on had the series fared better. I would loved to have seen episodes by the likes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Eric Red, William Lustig, Mary Lambert, Wes Craven, Ronny Yu and Bernard Rose, all of whom have the credits to justify the "Master" label. 

The names attached to the series were its drawing card but also in some ways a hindrance. 

The show was sold to audiences on the directors involved. By proudly boasting of exciting new works from the makers of such beloved titles as Halloween, Suspiria, Phantasm, Poltergeist and Re-Animator it may have created unrealistic expectations. These were after all fairly low budget one hour TV movies shot in roughy 10 days. The episodes have a nice variety in tone and story but many look and feel too similar stylistically, in part due to the same crews and locations being employed on several episodes. 

The biggest letdowns for me were the two Argento episodes (Jenifer and Pelts) and Carpenter's Pro-Life, which is perhaps the worst film of his career. The satire of Peter Medak's The Washingtonians and Joe Dante's Homecoming felt clumsy and far too heavy-handed, very much dating the show to the George W. Bush/Iraq invasion era in which they were made. Several directors had been involved with struggles with censorship in the past, which may have indirectly caused them to overindulge here. The gore felt overdone in several instances, as though they felt a need to compete with the emerging torture porn craze of Saw, Hostel et al. and push the envelope given the lack of restrictions. A few trims were made to Jenifer before it was screened but Takashi Miike's episode Imprint evidently crossed a line as Showtime chose not to broadcast the episode in the US. Some of the younger talent fared well, with Lucky McKee and Brad Anderson more than holding their own against the veterans with Sick Girl and Sounds Like respectively. Ernest Dickerson managed to bring some of his trademark visual flair to The V Word and William Malone's Fair-Haired Child is arguably his best work to date. 

Fewer prestigous names were attached to the second season, although some returned for a second outing. The poor reception of the later episodes may have led to the show being cancelled and later revived as 'Fear Itself' on NBC in 2008, which no longer had Mick Garris involved. I've only seen one episode of 'Fear Itself' (Stuart Gordon's final directorial outing Eater) so that series may be a viewing project for another time perhaps. 

Several of the talents showcased were near the end of their careers or at least edging towards long inactive spells. Pick Me Up would be Larry Cohen's swansong in the director's chair. Stuart Gordon's two episodes were among his final works, sadly no longer making films after 2008. Tobe Hooper would make just one more feature before his death in 2017. Joe Dante has mainly worked in television or anthology shorts ever since. Besides 2010's The Ward John Carpenter has showed no signs of returning to directing features and Dario Argento's workrate has slowed down considerably over the past decade or so. If the show wasn't exactly a defining moment for many of them it was a nice way to recognise their earlier achievements, which had enriched the genre immeasurably.

The show had its share of disappointments but seen from a distance advanced hype and heightened expectations may have caused the series as a whole to be judged too harshly. Even the worst episodes are watchable and viewers accustomed to the Horror anthology format will feel very much at home with its highs and lows. I have a special fondness for Cigarette Burns, which begat the Willowy Being moniker for this blog. Along with Ghosts of Mars it's probably the Carpenter film that I revisit most frequently. 

It was ahead of the curb in some ways with many established filmmakers (including Steven Soderbergh, Jane Campion and Park Chan-wook) choosing to work in television in the years since, and finding greater freedom there than in feature filmmaking. The show came along at the perfect time for me and I enjoyed it more as an event and for its individual highlights than I did for its overall quality. By my count, the show gave us at least 5 titles that were among the decade's finest Horror films and for that alone it was a worthwhile undertaking. 

Footnotes: 

*The mysterious film director Hans Backovic character feels reminiscent of the missing Horror novelist Sutter Crane in In the Mouth of Madness. For me, Cigarette Burns is more of a hybrid of Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate (1999) and Gore Verbinski's US remake of The Ring from 2002. 

**There's a deliberate callback in Pro-Life to the infamous spider-head sequence from The Thing. It: Chapter Two (2019) also explicitly lifts from this sequence. Both instances seemed like ill-judged homages to me.

***Romero's involvement is inferred in the above 2005 trailer video clip when it mentions Night of the Living Dead among the credits of the "Masters" involved)

****http://www.clivebarker.info/haeckeltv.html 

Halloween 2020

I do sometimes feel like I'm set in my ways where Horror cinema is concerned so this October I saw it as a bit of a challenge to broaden my horizons by seeking out cult oddities from the past as well as looking at more contemporary fare rather than simply revisiting old favourites. I did mention on this blog how the 2010s felt like a period of stagnation in Horror cinema but I'm still ever hopeful of finding potential modern classics that have so far eluded me. Over the years I've come to see Horror cinema of the 1990s and 2000s as a much more fecund period for the genre than I did at the time the films of those eras were released.

Here's a list of the titles I watched for this year's October Horror Marathon.

My viewing choices certainly had an international flavour this year, with films featured from countries such as Hong Kong (Mr. Vampire), the Netherlands (The Lift), Spain (Cuadecuc, Vampir), France (The Beast), Iran (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), Australia (The Babadook), New Zealand (Kitchen Sink), Mexico (Alucarda), Japan (Blind Beast), the former Czechoslovakia (The Ear), the UK (The City of the Dead), US (Wendigo) and Germany (Anatomy). I was greatly aided in my selections by a copy I borrowed of the splendid BFI Screen Guides book '100 European Horror Films', edited by Stephen Jay Schneider. I had seen just over half the films listed at the start of October and was able to catch several more that were mentioned over the past 4 weeks. I will certainly use it to help inform future selections. 

Through streaming services I looked at some of the more acclaimed modern Horror titles, including The Conjuring, It Follows, The Babadook and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The modern "contenders" all felt a bit too calculated for my tastes, with similar scare tactics employed in all of them and a certain pretentious quality that has helped coin the "Elevated Horror" label that I actively loathe. Alas, none of these were the major discoveries that I'd hoped for, lacking the grace notes of the best Horror fare, but it wasn't for want of trying and they all helped me gain insights about recent trendsetters. I got more enjoyment from 2013's rather less-heralded Willow Creek. It was available on Shudder, to which I signed up for a free 7 day trial. Shudder also made it possible to see 2020's lockdown Horror sensation Host and a Creepshow Animated Special. Netflix have catered well to aficianados this month by adding to their selection the likes of The Haunting of Bly Manor, His House, Cadaver & Hubie Halloween. I only caught the last of those titles but the others are on my watchlist. Several of my best finds were from the 1970s - the sensual, blasphemous delirium of Alucarda, Robert Mulligan's disturbing childhood tale The Other and Jean Rollin's The Iron Rose, which, much to my delight, takes places entirely within the grounds of a giant cemetery over a single night. 

In many ways I think Horror found its ideal medium in the cinema and the way (to paraphrase Ingmar Bergman) it can delve in to the subconscious like no other form. I feel the opposite way about science fiction, which has its perfect outlet in literature and most SF films or TV cannot hope to achieve the depth and intellectual rigor of the best novels in the field. Although I've read several Horror classics I realised recently that I've explored relatively little Horror literature over the years. My Horror and Horror-related reading this month included 'Songs of a Dead Dreamer' by Thomas Ligotti, 'Fear' by L. Ron Hubbard, 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson and 'The Odyssey and the Idiocy', the memoir of actress Candace Hilligoss, which I mainly got hold of for the chapter on her starring role in Carnival of Souls but have found the whole thing to be a very engrossing read. Recently I got a copy of 'Fear', the autobiography of Dario Argento, as a birthday present and to which I greatly look forward to delving in to. I also intend to read the recently published 'The Living Dead', a novel that George Romero was working on before his passing that has been finished by Daniel Kraus.

It's already something of a cliche to talk about how 2020 has developed in to a nightmare worthy of the Horror realm. The genre scored one of the last major successes in cinemas before lockdown with Blumhouse's The Invisible Man. Among the many high profile titles that have been pushed back in the release schedules were potential Horror hits like A Quiet Place Part II, the Candyman remake and Halloween Kills. While I had little interest in any of those it is pleasing that other macabre new offerings have been made available via streaming/VOD such as Gretel & Hansel, Relic and Robert Zemeckis's new version of Roald Dahl's The Witches. Another welcome announcement was the news of John Carpenter releasing a new LP, titled 'Lost Themes III', in February next year. 

Among the many bits of devastating news we've had this year was the death of Stuart Gordon in March, which undoubtedly factored in my decision to rewatch Dreams in the Witch House this month. Also sadly gone in April was Nobuhiko Obayashi, whose 1977 masterpiece House I intend to revisit soon.

I did watch several Horror titles during lockdown but there's something about the Autumn atmosphere that adds immeasurably to the viewing experience of these films. As someone who doesn't feel safe returning to cinemas any time soon I'll be skipping this year's Leeds Film Festival in November, besides some titles I would like to see via their online player. One of the few things that hasn't been cancelled or radically altered for me in 2020 was my annual October Horror marathon so this feels like an achievement of sorts. Somewhat unusually, I find watching Horror films to be a source of actual comfort and joy right now.

Happy Halloween!