Halloween only comes once a year, but we celebrated every day this month with the October Daily Double: A recommendation every weekday of themed scary movie double feature!
Let’s start with a tribute with Tobe Hooper, who passed away in August and shaped the face of modern horror with
Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Made on a $300,000 budget and shot documentary-style, Chainsaw would become among the
most profitable movies ever, as theaters – grindhouse, drive-ins, and mainstream alike – booked it to shock
audiences with Hooper’s detached imagery, chilling plausibility, pervasive tension, and
implied violence.
Meanwhile, “implied violence” and “plausible” are the last phrases you’d use to describe Pieces, a splatterfest
supposedly set in Boston but filmed entirely in Spain, directed by Juan Piquer Simon. Expect goofy dialogue, pig
guts with red herrings, and one very real chainsaw — the authenticity of terror on these actors’ faces as
they’re being menaced and massacred is up to your interpretation. And let’s not forget the ballsy shock ending!
The easiest way to watch this is on Blu-ray via Grindhouse Releasing; if you do, watch the American version – it’s faster-paced with a better soundtrack.
The Watcher in the Woods (1980, 43%) Lady in White (1988, 64%)
These two are good to watch with your kids, or simply if you want to watch some horror movies starring kids with legitimate scares, since the nation’s in an It kinda mood. Watcher in the Woods takes place on a rural forest estate whose new owners’ daughter begins receiving astral visions of a girl pleading, suspended somewhere in time. Watcher is an uncharacteristically dark movie from Walt Disney Productions, though this era would also produce the bleak Dragonslayer and grimy Black Cauldron.
Lady in White treads the same kind of ground. It’s a nostalgic movie set in 1960s upstate New York, about a long-deceased girl who returns as a ghost to haunt and impel a local boy to solve her death, along with other children’s murders at the school. The quaint, small town scenery and scenes of daily Italian-American home life give Lady a little flavor, and, like Watcher in the Woods, it’s entirely without gore, except for a scene of sudden violence which knocks it into PG-13 territory.
Prophecy (1979, 23%) It’s Alive (1973, 69%)
Prophecy is an eco-disaster mutant bear movie by John Frankenheimer, directed probably while he was drunk, and features the best sleeping bag kill in cinema history. Yes, even besting Friday the 13th: The New Blood‘s. Here’s my headcanon for this double feature: Prophecy ends with the pregnant wife, who ate fish from the contaminated lake, unsure if she’s about to give birth to a freak of nature. The answer lies in It’s Alive…
The Devil’s Backbone (2001, 92%) The Orphanage (2007, 87%)
After Mimic got stomped on at the 1997 box office, Guillermo del Toro looked to be the latest victim in Hollywood’s game of courting young international directors only to see their careers implode on our studio backlots. Del Toro returned to Spain and put together Devil’s Backbone, an exquisite classical ghost story set at an orphanage and about the young boy who unravels its grim past.
Years after Backbone, Del Toro was in position to foster new filmmaking talent, producing J.A. Bayona’s directorial debut: The Orphanage. Here, we shift to an adult point of view: a mother whose son goes missing just as she attempts to re-open the orphanage she grew up in, now ostensibly be occupied by spirits. A terrifying and tender picture.
Dawn of the Dead (1978, 93%) Chopping Mall (1986, 57%)
Closing the week with another tribute. George A. Romero, the godfather of modern horror who, like Tobe Hooper, passed away earlier this year. The towering Pittsburgh native released six Night of the Living Dead movies in as many decades, the best in the series (and one of the best horror movies ever) being Dawn. It moves like an action movie, has plenty of gore and head trauma, and features Romero’s most palatable social critique: That the zombies gravitate to a cherished place in death, in this case a tacky mall where our motley crew of survivors have holed up.
But if there’s one mall you want to get out of in horror, it’s the Park Plaza in Chopping Mall. Four couples break into the place after hours to test the goods at the mattress place and desecrate the food court, but after an electrical storm set the security robots to KILL, these store’s bargains start getting paid in blood. Sex, big hair, exploding heads, and teenagers who look like twentysomething actors from Burbank…get everything you expect from Chopping Mall!
Final Destination (2000, 34%) Sole Survivor (1983)
An airline passenger avoids a timely demise after their plane goes down; afterwards, the passenger’s friends begin dying all around, as though Death wants to claim what it’s owed. Know the plot? Not only is it the starting point for the Final Destination franchise, but also the premise to tonight’s other recommended flick, Sole Survivor. FD director James Wong was obviously inspired by Survivor (he originally planned it as an X-Files episode), though there’s a key difference between the two movies: while Destination features its victims getting caught up in mystical Rube Goldberg-esque scenarios of doom, Survivor actually has zombies walking around trying to take the heroine.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970, 100%) Alice (1988, 100%)
If you were one of those kids watching Alice in Wonderland and thought “Sweet cakes, this is kinda creepy”, then Czechoslovakia has got you on that one: The former European country produced two unsettling films inspired by the Lewis Carrol tale decades apart. First is 1970’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, a fantastical parabale of puberty as creepy pale dudes and animals emerge from the woodwork to vaguely menace the title character. Then there’s 1988’s Alice, a dark, more direct adaptation featuring the White Rabbit, Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat, along with stop-motion animation and a layer of dust and decay over each location.
Lifeforce (1985, 67%) Species (1995, 36%)
Another week, another Tobe Hooper movie! As it crystallized for Hooper that he’d never match Texas Chainsaw‘s impact and that 1982’s Poltergeist would be his commercial peak, the director made the most out of being alive in the ’80s and unleashed the outrageous Lifeforce, starring Mathilda May as Space Girl, aka naked comet-riding vampire come to turn the greater London population into zombies. Bizarre sci-fi/horror material with sublime special effects.
10 years later, Species took the same idea and downplayed the metaphysics and upped the titillation. It was the ’90s and Hollywood churned out R-rated mainstream sleaze on the regular, though rarely involving beautiful women spilling out of oozing cocoons or tongue-through-skull puncturings. A pleasant guilty filthy pleasure.
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2011, 84%) The Cabin in the Woods (2012, 92%)
In this riotous send-up of the secluded cabin blueprint, Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk, Tyler Labine) play two vacationing hillbillies when a group of annoying stock teenagers come upon them in the woods and promptly deduce the two are serial killers. Through their own incompetence, the teenagers start offing themselves in wacky, unpredictable manner, leaving T & D baffled at the bloody proceedings.
Cabin in the Woods brandishes the same basic premise, but with some huge sci-fi bookends that diminish and mock horror tropes. I’m personally not a fan of Cabin as it’s directed with obvious contempt for them undignified slashers, but critics and a majority of fans who discover the movie love it, and it pairs well with Evil.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984, 25%) Sleepaway Camp (1983, 84%)
The Final Chapter, the best in the Friday series, came at a crucial juncture in franchise history. Parts 2, 3D, and Final Chapter are set over a few days, with Jason starting as resilient bastard and the story slowly introducing the unstoppable zombie conceit we know now. Final pushes viewer suspension of disbelief to the bleeding edge (‘Did Jason really just come back to life at the morgue?!’) and helmer Joseph Zito (hot off the underground success of The Prowler) sagely throws in misdirections and obscures Jason’s figure for the first two acts to keep the audience in a state of confusion. And whereas in later sequels Jason is framed and fetishized as some kind of anti-hero (a mistake IMO), his strikes in Final Chapter are so fast and sudden, Jason’s like the shark in Deep Blue Sea and everyone else Samuel L. Jackson. A total rush, and that’s not even mentioning the nimble camerawork, photography (seriously, this movie looks good), and unusually memorable characters: Crispin Glover dancing can only be described as a Seinfeldian full body dry heave. Final opens with a recap of the first three films and has a conclusive ending, so if you watch only one Friday the 13th, this is it.
And if you watch only one more summer camp horror flick, make sure it’s Sleepaway Camp. The characters and kills are fairly derivative, but there’s a few cutaways to surreal, John Waters-esque suburban life to give the movie a unique taste. But I’m mostly recommending this for the ending — it’s the cutest little thing!
Event Horizon (1997, 24%) Sunshine (2007, 76%)
I initially watched Event Horizon as a double feature with Good Will Hunting…hey, you make do when the only rental option was a Blockbuster across from home. While Good Will‘s idea of adult R-rated scenarios put me and my brother to sleep, Event Horizon had us jumping from the sofa with its heavy guitar intro theme. We were fans of Doom like all good suburban kids, so Event‘s deep space descent through portals of Hell resonated. And the movie remains a propulsive ride — not too scary, but about as entertaining a movie featuring blood orgies and Dr. Alan Grant as you’re gonna get.
Next: Sunshine, big budget sci-fi from Danny Boyle, following a ship with a nuclear payload heading towards the galaxy’s center to reignite our dying sun. Like Event Horizon, Sunshine‘s a space sprawler that trades on isolation and madness, but it’s not a horror movie per se. It does, however, tweak the genre: Most villains in slashers (which this movie gradually turns into) operate in darkness and shadows; here, Boyle challenges himself to shoot the villain in full blinding light, drawing from a toolbox of dazzling visual tricks to mostly pull it off.
High Tension (2005, 40%) Martyrs (2008, 53%)
We recently put up a slightly mis-monikered video called “13 Horror Movies Too Rotten To Miss,” detailing Rotten films that have an Audience Score of at least 60%. One of those movies is High Tension, an extreme French film that was relatively rejected by critics for its unearned, implausible switcheroo in its final minutes. Up to that point, it’s a breakneck flick.
Tonight’s other film that fits this category that we didn’t feature in the video is Martyrs, another exemplar of the French wave of boundary-pushing horror from a decade ago. The performances here are fearless (France seems the best in nurturing these actresses), fully developing Martyrs‘ lucid, sickening themes. Every few years, we get a movie that becomes a horror litmus test to see what depths a viewer is willing to dive through with the genre. This was one of them.
The Witch (2016, 91%) It Comes At Night (2017, 89%)
Yesterday, we featured two Rotten horror movies that audiences loved. Today, vice versa: two Certified Fresh horror movies that audiences collectively gave a sub-60% score, and they both happened to be put out by fan-favorite distributor A24. The Witch, a bleak folktale set in authentically recreated 17th century New England, confounded mainstream viewers with the thick accents and lack of a strong ending. And It Comes At Night was marketed as a supernatural spooker when the terror is actually psychological. Both are strong films if you approach it on their terms, but in an age when it’s all about the consumer and their myriad platforms to voice displeasure, buyer booware!
Ravenous (1999, 45%) Raw (2017, 90%)
Cannibalism and female directors. Two great tastes that…I don’t know where I’m going with this. What I do know is you should check out Ravenous (directed by the late Antonia Bird) for a slice of biting, mordant horror. It stars Guy Pearce as a disgraced 19th century Army soldier banished to the High Sierras where he’s greeted by more soldiers with tales of a Wendigo nearby feeding on humans. Ravenous‘s setting was the last place I expected ’90s snark and attitude, but here we are — this is a movie as funny and as it is bloody.
Nearly two decades later comes Raw (written/directed by Julia Ducournau), an oppositional take on the cannibalism taboo. It’s set in contemporary Belgium and larded with symbolism, following a young vegan girl who begins craving human chops after a hazing ritual. Female coming-of-age stories are frequently attached to horror (where fear, sexuality, and ecstasy co-exist), but rarely ever this elegantly disgusting.
It Follows (2015, 97%) Only Lovers Left Alive (2014, 86%)
“Horror changes and gets reinvented each generation,” John Carpenter said recently to the L.A. Times, “It’s continually being modernized.”
The legend was right: just look at how horror was modernized as an extension of economic anxiety for two Detroit-set films. In It Follows, director David Robert Mitchell redefines the stalking horror camera as a literal invisible force, but can be read as the pervasive dread of a post-automobile society. The shuttered, dilapidated buildings loom over star Maika Monroe like Snow White running through the forest.
Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch’s sublime hipsters-as-vampires mood joint, puts Detroit on display as a microcosm that chugs along, fine with itself while giving the finger to everyone on the outside looking in. It’s a place of private worlds to kick out the jams, to hoard ancient tomes and analog equipment, to hide and literally vamp it up. Only Lovers is pure rock ‘n’ roll. And both that and It Follows use horror as a vehicle of social critique, and a mirror to expose our dark side.
Let the Right One In (2008, 98%) A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014, 96%)
Continuing the theme of last week’s closing film Only Lovers Left Alive, we recommend two more vampiric films: Let the Right One In and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Both chronicle lonely young female vampires hiding under society’s nose, and both have an international touch: Right is Swedish, and Girl is purportedly set in desolate Iran (though was actually shot in the far-off wonderland known as Bakersfield, California).
Eyes Without a Face (1962, 98%) The Skin I Live In (2011, 80%)
Who would believe that Los Angeles, city of vaginal rejuvenation billboards on every street, wasn’t home to the world’s worst plastic surgery problems? First, look to France for Eyes Without a Face, an eerie and deeply haunting movie about a father who murders young women, using their skin to reconstruct his daughter’s car accident-damaged face. Director Georges Franju shot documentaries before Eyes and he uses those learned tactics on this film’s infamous surgery scene — it’s so matter-of-fact and quiet that it casually burrows into the mind.
Afterwards, hop on over to Spain for Pedro Almodovar and Antonio Banderas’ first collabo in decades. The Skin I Live In is also about facial reconstruction, along with rape and gender-bending — squirmy subjects that Almaodovar expertly treats with his usual flourishes of passion and color.
House (1986, 50%) House (1977, 90%)
Bet you can’t guess the connection between these two horror comedies! The American House stars William Katt as a writer whose son disappears at his aunt’s house and decides to move in after she commits suicide by hanging. The Japanese House, never seen in the U.S. until 2010, is a decidedly more bizarre affair. Several schoolgirls are beckoned to their aunt’s house, which begins devouring them one-by-one. As wacky as both movies can get, they operate within their own established twisted logic, and subsequently became hits within their home countries.
The Neon Demon (2016, 57%) Starry Eyes (2014, 75%)
Elle Fanning, the model with no past, arrives in The Neon Demon‘s Los Angeles eager to penetrate
the city’s highest cultural echelon, which involves joining a coven of starlets and Keanu Reeves as a scumbag landlord. Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s film is windy and eager to displease, but worth watching for the splashy vacant visuals and a Cliff Martinez soundtrack that works overtime.
Starry Eyes, also about the L.A. acting scene, is smaller in budget but bigger in cosmic scope, with a notable lead performance from Alex Essoe as the actress who pulls apart and succumbs to the industry’s sinister secret. The occult and cannibalism feature into these movies; they’re still not as far-fetched as La La Land.
Popcorn (1991, 29%) Dead End Drive-In (1986)
Time for a killing at the box office! Popcorn is a tasty little comedy slasher set during an all-night horrorfest set up by teens…who each start getting killed when a Leatherface wannabe starts slicing from the shadows. Follow that up with Dead End Drive In, an Ozploitation flick about New Wavers and gutter punks who become trapped by adults in a post-apocalyptic outdoor movie venue. I originally bought Dead End thinking it was going to be some trashy undead flick. There’s no undead but it is trashy with some wicked car stuntwork, and it’s also a surprisingly palatable allegory on how fascism foments among disaffected youth.
The Guest (2014, 89%)
Tonight, think twice before crossing Dan Stevens with science! The Guest is a hybrid mixing horror, action, sci-fi, and mystery topped with a wicked soundtrack, starring Stevens as an American soldier who has apparently undergone some kind of super-soldier experiment. Stevens shows up at the Peterson home claiming to be a platoon friend of their son, who was killed in Afghanistan. He ingratiates himself into the family (which includes Maika Monroe a year before her breakthrough It Follows) and this fun, unpredictable thrill ride takes off from there.
Silent Rage (1982)
Chuck Norris is Dan Stevens! That is, he plays Sheriff Dan Stevens, chasing down a psycho killer who’s been genetically endowed by unscruplous science lab dwellers with superhuman strength and regenerative powers. Norris as Sheriff Stevens may roundhouse kick his way through the scenery as usual, but make no mistake: this was shot and edited as a horror movie. The antagonist is framed like a slasher villain, there’s a few single-take Steadicam shots to creak up tension, and the movie throws a Jason-jumps-from-the-lake scare in its final frames. (You might also recognize this movie from Hot Fuzz as one of the movies Nick Frost contemplates purchasing at the supermarket.)
Trick ‘r Treat (2007, 83%)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, 37%)
We’re concluding this series with two of the most October-thirty-firstiest films widely available. First on the bill is Trick ‘r Treat, Mike Dougherty’s interwoven collection of modern interpretations of Samhain fable and legend. The movie’s playful tone and top-shelf scripting has made this a cult classic, humble origins for something that was denied a general release for years, which now has its own dedicated zone during Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch was released when the Michael Myers saga ostensibly concluded after the second Halloween movie. The idea going forward was to regale aduiences with a new annual spooky tale, starting with Season‘s yarn of popular trick-or-treating masks featuring a nasty bit of built-in obsolescence: they melt the faces of anyone wearing them. One wonders why these chintzy masks would be all the rage with kids (especially with ColecoVision having launched that year!!), but that’s one of the goofy charms of this franchise black sheep. Happy Halloween!
