31 Days of October

[rischka]

thx halloweenui

[rischka]

ok what is this female empowerment/new wave/eurotrash. i kind of love it? but that last half hour was tough to watch

[rischka]

i watched the being but it wasn't as good as blood diner

i'll be watching more today so i can stop looking at the news

[nrh]

the mummy is definitely one of the weakest of the fisher directed hammer horrors, with a weird shambling structure - fisher just seems too bored to even strive for atmosphere or emotion during the lengthy orientalist kitsch flashback to the mummy's origin, and the tragic eternal romance aspects borrowed from the freund/karloff version seem lazily tacked on (seriously you need to bring the "hey my wife looks exactly like the egyptian priestess mummy i spent years researching!" idea before the third act).

but there is something here that's hard to dismiss - christopher lee's mummy, arising through plot contrivance from an english bog and then desiring to return to it with his resurrected beloved is one of the greatest versions of this horror icon, removing it from by then tired orientalism and crusting it with british mud. and george pastell's egyptian gets all of the best lines - when he asks peter cushing if he doesn't feel just a little bit weird about defiling sacred spaces all cushing can offer is a wan "it's my job."

not particularly good but there's definitely something there...

[rischka]

la loba y la paloma aka house of the damned (gonzalo suarez 1974)



spanish gothic thriller with a macabre fairytale edge. pretty good but not strictly horror

[nrh]

gonzalo suarez is sfcz favorite ditirambo guy right?

[rischka]

yes that's him! an odd quirky director

[brian d]

he did a few horror-ish films in the 70s (morbo, la loba y la paloma, beatriz). they're all pretty decent in quality, more about atmosphere than actual scares. too bad his films after beatriz are all pretty bad...

[rischka]

il demonio (rondi 1963)



someone's been telling me to watch this for awhile and i finally got around to it. another tragedy of the patriarchy. great oppressive atmosphere here

[nrh]

hate to say it but the kids were right - the empty man is pretty good. slow burn detective investigates his way into his own doom movie, very carefully made mid to low budget american paranoia stuff, reminded me of richard kelly's underrated the box (though without that movie's fevered specificity). kind of doesn't land the crucial last 20 minutes or so but still works i think.

[rischka]

threshold of the void is wicked! rasmus knows what i like. i had some good recs this year, gotta see what i have left for manana

[rischka]

the shadow of the cat - john gilling 1961 i shoulda watched this on caturday oh well. wondering how closely it aligns with japanese ghost cat genre

[Silga]

Speaking about cats, this is from the horror movie The Sentinel (1977) I watched this month.

Cat named Jessabelle even had a birthday party!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gLYQBuguhs

[nrh]

not sure if it counts as horror or not but lucille hadžihalilović b. catling adaptation earwig is so relentlessly sinister in mood it fits hear as well as anywhere else. gaunt 50 year old man takes care of a pre adolescent child who he needs to fit frozen dentures into every night, harvested from her own saliva in a kind of awful mouth brace (not a good movie for anyone with childhood dental trauma).

. tons of negative space, very careful use of color and objects, almost total disregard for the kind of puzzle logic that dominates this sort of thing nowadays. great sense of physicality, just in terms of how people walk through places. impressed by it enough i ordered the book just to see what she constructed this from. it is also a kind of placeless europudding movie with everyone speaking in oddly accented english, a genre i am fond of but doesn't exist that much anymore.

[rischka]

all that sounds very interesting!



this cat movie is hysterical it is basically the ghost cat story with bonus hilarity as several grown adults are terrified of a housepet

[rischka]

i'm gonna do a double feature mexican horror if i can stay awake. more later

edit: yeah i made it through el grito de la muerte (1959) which is just la llorona with cowboys? lencho is right, the outdoor scenes are not helping with the gothic vibe. also i'm going to start calling him coyote loco. til next year

[rischka]

is this our holiday thread i already watched some movies

the unknown (1927), i dunno 3 or 4th time, restored footage but not that you can notice it. the freudian commentary was fun

and also browning's the mystic (1925), a proto nightmare alley as lencho wrote abt it

bio-zombie (yip 1998), quite silly dawn/shawn of the dead but yes, i laughed

savageland (2015) this thing has 3 directors, it's sort of found footage/true crime tv hybrid with mockumentary facet that offended me as an arizonan the trial part is a big plothole come on! we hardly ever lynch people here!

tonight i think i'll watch obayashi's school in the crosshairs (1981) edit: this is more of a scifi than horror movie

and i have maniac (1980) and maniac cop (1988) lined up



or if y'all aren't feeling it... i get it. life is scary enough these days

[Silga]

I’m participating in this too. Gonna write about what I’ve already seen later tonight.

[nrh]

i think school in the crosshairs was the second obayashi i watched, after house of course, and at the time i thought it was a let down, but i rewatched it on the kadokawa years boxed set this year and thought it was great. somehow i'd totally forgotten how wild that final section gets.

and it looks like one of his actual horror movies, legend of the cat monster, just got subs on kg! the other movie he made in that vein, the murderous child thriller cute devil, was a lot of fun.

watched bhoothakaalam from 2022, a slow burn chamber drama about a widowed mother (revathi, amazing as always) and her unemployed graduate son (shane nigam, also very good) slipping away from each other and into depression in a house that may or may not be haunted, potentially by her recently deceased mother.

suffers from an unpleasant streaming color grade (you know the kind) and i do wish the more explicitly horror mechanics in the final third were a little more...inventive? but the family dynamics in this are well-observed and truly unpleasant in a way i rarely see in these more "prestige" horror movies, just two people disintegrating in isolation and blaming each other, not without reason. one of several post-covid malayalam movies (joji, puzhu, etc) that zero in on horrible family dynamics in closed spaces, probably not a coincidence...

rewatched evil dead trap (1988) after many years, and seeing it in hd quality really helps, since it's mostly a style piece - most of this is running around empty factory corridors. a slighter film than you'd expect from director toshiharu ikeda and writer takashi ishii - their evil dead trap 3: broken love killer is a baroquely complicated psychological thriller whatsit - but it's been a long time since i've seen a slasher this elemental, and it's hard to think of any that are this skillfully made. genuinely unpleasant too, in a way these movies often shy away from.

[Silga]

Horror October so far:

1. Flatliners (Niels Arden Oplev, 2017) 3/10
2. Return of the Living Dead II (Ken Wiederhorn, 1988) 2/10
3. Triangle (Christopher Smith, 2009) 6/10
4. Critters (Stephen Herek, 1986) 5/10
5. Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) 8/10
6. Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (Joe Lynch, 2007) 4/10
7. The Menu (Mark Mylod, 2022) 7/10
8. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Anthony Hickox, 1992) 3/10
9. The Pope’s Exorcist (Julius Avery, 2023) 4/10
10. Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (William Lustig, 1992) 5/10
11. Werewolves Within (Josh Ruben, 2021) 3/10
12. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) 9/10 (rewatch)
13. The Wolfman (Joe Johnston, 2010) 6/10
14. Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright, 2021) 8/10
15. Case 39 (Christian Alvart, 2009) 5/10
16. The Mothman Prophecies (Mark Pellington, 2002) 4/10
17. Old (M. Night Shyamalan, 2021) 2/10
18. Jason X (James Isaac, 2001) 4/10

Best so far: Carrie & Last Night in Soho

De Palma created a captivating atmosphere of uneasiness and tension. Carrie feels like a story with no way out, no chance for hapiness to come through. And yet, it still holds attention to the last moment. Brilliant performance by Sissy Spacek.

Last Night in Soho is yet another example of what a perfectionist Edgar Wright is. It is distinctively his work and wonderful cast only help to enhance his immersive visual offering. Amazing soundtrack too!

Worst so far: Old

Shyamalan once again forgets how to direct or even hold a second of coherence in his film. He somehow convinced two greats - Vicky Krieps and Gael García Bernal to deliver their worst acting ever.

[rischka]

legend of the cat monster is terrific

[ofrene]

highlight of this year's shocktober is Kisapmata. Some says it's not horror movie but you know.. there are few things scarier than patriarchy with horribly oppressive head of household and this is the most claustrophobic movie i've seen in a while
also liked Mother Joan of the Angels (somewhere between The Devils and The Exorcist but slightly better than both), some images of Ganja & Hess, last episode of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath (perhaps Baba's most scary work?)

[rischka]

I'm rewatching cat people w commentary and I dunno how I never realized Tom Conway was George sanders' brother



maybe I'll have a Dr Judd double feature



he's an evil psychiatrist who preys on vulnerable women

[Silga]

Cat People! Great film!

I think the only major Val Lewton film I haven't seen is the The Curse of the Cat People. Maybe I should watch it this month.

I love pretty much every Lewton horror film.

I think I Walked with a Zombie might be my favorite.

[nrh]

I think the only major Val Lewton film I haven't seen is the The Curse of the Cat People. Maybe I should watch it this month.

curse is interesting but don’t expect a horror movie at all - more of a strange domestic fantasy (with gothic overtones). the studio pushed for the cat people connection but it’s really misleading…

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

What's everyone's favourite Corman Poe? Rischka got me to watch my first this morning (Tomb of Ligeia) and I loved it.

[nrh]

What's everyone's favourite Corman Poe? Rischka got me to watch my first this morning (Tomb of Ligeia) and I loved it.

ligeia is my favorite - beyond the wonderful style it's one of the most emotionally resonant movies in the genre, and one of the strangest. but my next favorite would be pit and the pendulum.

the one i adore but nobody else seems to care for much is premature burial, another movie about marriage, with a very strange ray milland performance (in the vincent price role) pushing it towards morbid comedy.

[rischka]

i haven't seen that one, thx! ray milland, so great in the man with x-ray eyes. and somehow cinemageddon still working



ok that was pretty awesome

[flip]

a few of the corman poe films featured near the top of our scfz roger corman poll, it looks like tomb of ligeia did very well, but house of usher, the raven, and masque of the red death were close behind:

https://letterboxd.com/fliptrotsky/list ... -poll-187/

i really should watch some of these

[rischka]

https://youtu.be/M75VLQuFPrY

DO NOT LOOK AT THE MOON

now i'm in the mood for messiah of evil