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)
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 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.
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
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.
*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.
