No fucking around, no Leprechaun gimicks this time. But I did also do stuff other than watch films and I'd like to talk about them too.
1. Godkiller - Edgey AF "action comic" with a shockingly good voicecast for something so trashy. My inner teenager enjoyed it immensly.
2. Baghead - Duplas brothers pseduo horror. It's fine but not great. Not a patch on Creep or any of their subsequent work.
3. Odd Noggins - I stuck this on at random after browsing Prime for stuff. Looked like it might be a fun low budget indie horror, and I was right about most of that. I guess they had a lot of fun making it but it wasn't funny and unless seeing pretty normal looking middle aged people bone is supposed to be scary, not scary.
4. Where The Dead Go To Die - one of the great works of "disturbing media", bad 90s / 00s CGI animation doing some really gross stuff. Like a lot of extreme media (eg, the novel Cows), I don't know how far the tongue is in the cheek on this one, but I feel like they are self aware to some extent. Kind of reminds me of The Shivering Truth but with a hard X rating.
5. Inseminoid - 80s "classic". Eh, it's fine.
6. Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter - Rare re-watch. I recall seeing this as a child and rather liking it. Its great, Hammer doing a rare original IP and it all (script in particular) is just better and goes far harder than they typically did back then.
7. There's Nothing Out There - self aware po-mo 90s indie horror that supposedly Wes Craven stole the ideas from for Scream, or at least thats what's implied in the short Copycat (also on Mubi). Jury is well out on that one. It's fine.
8. Talk To Me - recent A24 darling that is doing the rounds, this years St Maud and about as devisive. I really liked it. Good premise, well executed lots of creepyness and some good scares.
9. Cobweb - Another new one, great stuff. Creepy as balls and lots of good scares and gruesome kills. Homelander is in this as the Da and he's grrrrreat!
10. Soft and Quiet - Actually more of a thriller than a horror but for that it has some of the most genuinely terrifying characters you'll ever see on screen. Nazi Karens! Karenazis! The horror, the horror....
11. Dawn Of The Dead - I watched the long version on Youtube that has everything in it from all the various cuts. Even though that's not a version any professional editor or Romero intended to put out, it still was an incredibly enjoyable experience that mostly holds up really well.
12. Moon Garden - Oh, I love a good dark fairy tale horror. Great effects for what was apparently a really tiny budget. The child actor that plays the lead was brilliant.
13. VHS 1985 - Fine. I've come not to expect a whole lot from the VHS franchise and this delivered. Nice degraded media and glitch aesthetic-y stuff, good atmosphere in some sections but a lot of the individual stories and performances weren't up to much.
14. Freaky - I genuinely enjoyed this. Absolutely delivered as anything you could want from a horror slasher comedy and wrung all you can from the premise. My only regret is not watching it the day before on the actual Friday The 13th
15. Medusa - Disappointing. Didn't go anywhere interesting, do much with the premise and no good scares or kills. The social / policical commentary was all there and was all well and good but it didn't tie the elements together in a satisfying way.
16. Bad Things - Queer horror film. Not great, felt like they were trying to do elevated / post-horror but didn't land any of the punches thrown.
17. The Lodge - Oh this was much better. Simmilar to bad things, elevated subtle vibes-y horror but this had a lot more teeth and doesn't take long getting right in your face and under your skin. I guessed the ending really early on but it delivered so brutally and brilliantly that it didn't deminish it one iota.
18. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers - the one from the 70s with Donald Sutherland. Re watch, haven't seen it since I was wee. Still great, brilliant script, good performances, creepy, eerie vibes and good scares.
19. Perfect Blue (rewatch) - One of the greatest, one of my absolute all time favourites. Kon knew how to do layers with visual storytelling and here in one of the stand out animé debut features of all time deploys all that to brilliant effect.
20. Paranorman - nothing says halloween like a bit of creepy stop-motion. Brilliant, if not quite as great as some of Liaka's other work
21. The Guardian - William Friedkin died earlier this year so instead of watching The Exorcist like someone normal I watched this bonkers (in a fun way) evil nanny movie he did in the 80s. Nicely atmospheric and a great ending.
22. Husera: The Bone Woman - really interesting and well done LGBTQ+ horror from mexico. A woman settling down into a nice comp-het lifestyle with a baby and opposite-gender life partner is haunted and stalked by her own queerness, with some preggo body-horror thrown in there.
23. No One Will Save You - good creepy alien-home-invasion horror with great atmosphere and genuinely creepy SFX. The whole "no dialogue, just visual story telling" thing really worked. Should have been called Alien Vs Cottage-core.
24. The Last Broadcast (rewatch) - the original and by far the superior of the early FF Horrors of the late 90s / early 00s. I love how the scariest thing about it is how prescient it is of the modern post internet cultural landscape considering when it was made and released.
25. M3GAN - Creepy evil doll robot, using the uncanny valley intentionally for horror is a masterstroke tbf. A lot of fun.
26. The Raven (rewatch) - Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre in the intentionally funny Poe adaption. Classic tbf, the Wizards Duel at the end really gave me a hankering to play Magic The Gathering again.
27. Good Madam - I always like to try to get something in from each continent when I'm doing these. This Peele-esque satirical chiller from South Africa with dialogue mostly in Xhosa was maybe a bit more effective as a bit of social / political commentary / exploration of post-apartheid race relations than as a horror film. Good tho all the same.
28. The Sect - early 90s Giallo, produced by the don himself Dario Argento. A lot of fun bloody kills early on (and one really good one involving a rabbit at about 1hr 30 in) but its a bit too long and the plot meanders all over the 2nd act. It's fine.
29. Titane (rewatch) - One of the best films (in general, any genre) of recent times,best film of 2021 and in the top 5 of the decade so far. Uncompromising, visceral and has some extremely gnarly scenes, yet surprisingly sweet and wholesome. It's about Faahmly!
30. When Evil Lurks - New horror from Argentina that is getting a bit of a rep as one of the best of the year. I can see why, it is unrelentingly bleak like The Dark And The Wicked but amped up, and throw a bunch of creepy murderous children into the mix and you have a heady brew there. Brutal in the best way.
31. Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (rewatch) - Always nice to round these off with an old favourite. The king Bruce Campbell riffing further on the plot and lore of the original, with a lot of inspired camera work, impressive practical effects and genuinely funny physical comedic acting. Still one of the level best in the genre.
Other things:
TV-
I watched the TV series Castlevania: Nocturne and Fall Of The House of Usher on Netflix. These are both updates to long running prestige Netflix projects, Nocturne being a new adventure set a couple of centuries after the original series and Fall' being a new Mike Flanaghan project with multuple returning cast members from his previous works for the channel. Both were excellent.
Nocturne updated the stylish dark action fantasy of the previous series to a different time period - this time 1792 during the bourgeois revolution with native-Americans, Haitian characters and the egeneral theme of revolution and counter-revolution as an important constituent part of the story. Great writing, complext character dynamics, bitching animated action and aesthetic in general. Can't wait for the rest of it to drop.
Fall of the House of Usher was a somewhat silly but very well produced modern riff by Flanaghan on the Edgar Allen Poe canon of work. It also throws in a bit of contemporary anti-corporate discourse and the main family is based to a degree on the IRL horrors of the Sackler family's empire of pain. Still, its not brilliant satire and best enjoyed if one doesn't take it too seriously. Good acting and writing, some fun kills and it does a lot more with the source material than say The Haunting did with the Shirley Jackson corpus.
Books-
I also read a bunch of horror fiction. I'm more of a sci-fi and fantasy head. As much as I like my stuff dark straight up horror doesn't generally do a lot for me. But this being the season I decided to get stuck into some horror literature relevant to my interests.
Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff - A queer, feminist and Irish take on The Walking Dead post-Zombpocalypse type story. It was alright.
Your Body Is Not Your Body - an anthology of body horror / weird fiction by Trans and other LGTBQ+ writers. As you'd expect from such a tome, even the stories that weren't that great were packed with interesting ideas and perspectives.
Revival by Stephen King - A relatively recent one and supposedly one of his best. I wasn't overly enamoured with it. A lot of the emotional core of the story is predicated on Boomer nostalgia. Where it touched on themes and ideas more relevant to my experience and interests I didn't think it hit the mark. The ending fell a bit flat, but probably because I'd already had it a bit too hyped-up.
Never Whistle At Night - An anthology of dark fiction from Native American authors. As with the previous short story collection, if you want effective horror you go to people that have some serious IRL shit to process and this one also delivers. Even the stories that are not as good as horror as some of the rest have a lot of great ideas in there.
The Shee by Joe Donnelly - Gloriously dumb, old school mass market paperback horror from the 90s with a bit of
an Oirish-y twist. Archaeologists digging up a New Grange style passage tomb accidentally unleash The Morrigan, which for the purposes of this novel is a female beasty with It skillset and MO on a small Irish fishing village on the Connaght coast. It was very much of it's time, has a lot of old school misogyny, ableism and
ridiculously stereotyped Irish characters but it's fun and dumb enough
that it's difficult to take proper offence. It has some deliciously
gnarly kills that lean quite heavily into the monstrous feminine
imagery, sexual and maternal stuff being a running theme. Personally I found
it incel-y enough to be laughable. It also has a little bit of 'troubles'
discourse, just to really "Irish" it up, which is again borderline
offensive - like one could imagine a Garth Merenghi story saying all Irelands woes
from time immemorial through to an gorta mór and everything in the last
century is down to a witches curse. Anyway, 'tis enjoyable for what it is but best not to take it too seriously.
So that was my October. I did also get out to a few gigs, saw Fear Factory and guests in Belfast on the 30th, which was a lot of fun. I still have other stuff on, films I "aquired" or ermarked on streaming that I didn't get to, and a showing of the silent horror Häxan from the 20s with a live orchestra to look forwads to on Thursday. Spooky season is by no means over yet, it never really ends to be fair.
