31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 31 (Halloween III: Season Of The Witch)

Boo.

WOOOOOO! HAPPY HALLOWEEN! The night of terror, of danger, of children in masks asking for your candy! With equal parts fun size potato chips and mini Chips Ahoy, I did my part to live the little ghosts and goblins their treats. I saw one kid as a Mario with a like inflatable Yoshi around his torso. Adorable. Very few actual masks though. The spooky kind, not the safety kind, I mean. This is probably for the best since according to Halloween III a spooky mask will MELT YOUR FUCKING FACE INTO BUGS AND SNAKES. Maybe I didn't ease you into that one gracefully enough. We're finishing a journey that lasted two years on the blog. In 2018 I had to watch a Halloween movie, but this wasn't available digitally and the 2018 Halloween movie had like... just come out in theaters that I'm not near. I had to settle on Halloween 4, of all things. 2019 let me watch the previous year's Halloween film, and it was pretty good. For 2020, a year which went to hell in such a way that the sequel to the 2018 Halloween film has been delayed to next year? I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Blu-Ray of this sucker. Here, at long last to close out the spooky marathon... is Halloween III.

Oh, to live in a universe where this idea took off. Turning Halloween into an unpredictable genre-changing horror anthology with every entry. You can almost see how it would have worked. Horror at the core, but different flavors every time. Like Final Fantasy. What should have been the Final Fantasy VII of movies instead is the Zelda II of movies. That analogy is going to fly right over the head of anyone without intimate knowledge of old video games. I blame Halloween 2 for immediately following up on the Michael Myers stuff. Really I blame Halloween 2 for a lot. Maybe next year we'll tackle that sucker and take it down once and for all. Anyway, that left poor Halloween III going the anthology route without any ties to Michael Myers. Then Halloween lay dormant for half a decade, and they started right back up with Michael Myers slashing the teen girls and... we're still here. Oh, what could have been. The Final Fantasy VII analogy is still apt, though. Not in a "this is the greatest movie of all time" sense, but in tone and theme. VII departed from the fantasy trappings to go in a futurist techno-fantasy setting. That's Halloween III.

Hell, the opening even mixes the two. Scanlines over the credits forming the image of a pumpkin. Technology circa 1982 melded with horror. Whereas the last two Halloween movies were slashers, Halloween III meshes sci-fi with the occult to create a techno-thriller mystery. Instead of mask-wearing knife guys lurking in the dark, we have men in suits with incredible strength who can snap your skull in half or rip your head off with their bare hands. They're rather like Myers in that they never talk and are emotionles killers, but the effect is still jarring. The central mystery of the film is just what the hell is up with this Halloween mask factory in this creepy town. Shit clearly isn't right, as bums are getting their heads ripped off and a woman's face melts when she pokes a microchip with a hairpin. I can only imagine how Halloween III hits when you don't know what in the fuck it's leading to. If you're one of those people, for the love of god stop reading me and fire up the movie. Don't let me ruin it for you, I'd love to hear your reaction to going into this sucker blind. For the rest of you, now I'm going to blab about the antagonist's grand plan.

Technology and magic, melded together in a dark pagan ritual of vast proportions. Our boy Cochran runs the mask factory, and he's also some sort of paganist looking to serve the power of Samhain. According to him the planets are in alignment for another mass sacrifice, and so his grand scheme. He's stolen a piece of Stonehenge, put little chunks of it in microchips, affixed them to his masks, and then hyped the utter shit out of the masks via a marketing campaign. HEY KIDS, PUT ON YOUR MASKS AND WATCH THE TV AT 9 FOR A BIG GIVEAWAY! Cochran got his start in the business by making prank toys and other things, and this is the ultimate "trick" in trick or treat. Broadcasting a signal on TV at 9 on the dot that will activate the microchips in the mask and melt the head of any maskwearers watching, turning their heads into bugs and snakes and shit. We get to see this shit happen to some poor kid they test it on, who also happens to be the son of the best mask salesman in the country. Good job making me money, Buddy, here's your bonus! I TURNED YOUR SON'S HEAD INTO RATTLESNAKES! JOKE'S ON YOU! It's absolutely ghoulish, a gonzo mix of high-tech and pagan magic. Speaking of high-tech, those guys who rip people's heads off are super-advanced robots. A totally wild twist, but a welcome one in fitting with the movie's weird themes.

The climax starts in a wild way, with our hero tied up and forced to watch TV with his mask on... and what's on the TV before the commercial? It's Halloween. The original movie. It's fictional in this world, but it's so odd to hear the ominous score for Halloween as Laurie walks to a crime scene... in a totally different tense scene in another movie. Our hero gets out, scattering those death microchips everywhere and knocking out all the robots. This also creates an energy circle, not unlike a magic circle, all around a ring of computers. Literally the theme of the movie plopped right there in front of your eyes. The ending itself is an ambiguous bleak thing that doesn't let you know if the death broadcast which will melt the heads of every kid in America got through or not. I like the ambiguity. It's just vague enough to make you question, just intriguing enough to make you theorize. I slept on this movie a little when I first saw it, but I have to say it grew on me more rewatching it for this. It should have done better. Who knows what kind of gonzo genres and mashups Halloween could have gone in? Ah well. It did what it did, and it exists as its own historical curiosity. So, too, does this marathon. It's done. The long dark November is ahead, and more writing beckons. Not just NaNoWriMo, but Symphogear. I've got a lot of cooking ahead of me. You, though? You all have a good Halloween. Be seeing you when I see you. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 30 (Kid Dracula)

And now, a little bit of lighthearted levity before the spooky day is upon us. Sometimes we need a little break, and replaying this thing was a good little break for me. I'll gladly talk about the game itself, but the circumstances around me getting it are memorable to me. It was not a Halloween purchase, but a Christmas gift. I don't recall the exact year offhand. Sometime in the mid to late 90's. Christmas break was coming and I made a little lending trade with a friend at school over the break. I lent them my Gameboy and some games, they lent me some Super Nintendo games. I remember Starfox was among them and I really liked playing that. My family dropped some hints that maybe I shouldn't have lent out my old Gameboy over the Christmas break, but I dismissed that. Come Christmas Day, here I am with fresh copies of this game as well as Operation C, the Game Boy Contra game. Don't I look like a fresh dumbass now, with two brand new games I can't play? I either waited for the New Year or got my Game Boy back with haste, but either way I played this game. I really loved it. Years later I lent it to another friend, and when I was leaving for college he asked if he could keep it because his little sister loved it. Sure, I said. What the hell. I got what I wanted out of it. In the end the joke was on me again, because it turns out that game was rare as shit and worth hundreds of dollars. I guess when it comes to Kid Dracula, I got varying degrees of trick and treat.

The tricks I've detailed, but the treat is the actual game. Maybe it's just childhood nostalgia and the old memories of how to play it popping back when I fired it up again, but it's a cute and breezy little action platformer experience. Funny enough the Famicom version this is a sequel/remake of is now easier to get one's hands on, having been included as a bonus in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection last year. Yes, this is technically a Castlevania game. A cute tongue-in-cheek parody of it, in which the titular Kid Dracula is supposed to be Alucard, I guess. The entire game is goofy and irreverent, with lots of stock horror monsters drawn in a goofy style. You got your zombies, your bats, your Frankenstein monsters, et cetera. As a child I just took it as a funny spooky game. Maybe it helped interest me in horror, who knows? Later you go to space and deal with aliens and obvious Xenomorph parodies. The one that always got me was the stage 2 boss, who is a burly masked man who attacks you with a hatchet and then a shotgun. I always just thought it was making fun of Jason, but now I'm fairly certain it's a dig at Splatterhouse, because that game has prominent shotgun use too. Splatterhouse also got a cutesy parody game in this style, but I've never played it. Next year, maybe.

As far as how it plays? I kind of love it. Knowing what I know, it was easy enough to rack up enough lives that I didn't have to worry. The bonus games you can play at the end of the levels help you in this regard, and I could easily get 10 lives on the balloon popping one. That's the best one, but after a certain point I didn't need the lives. A newcomer might, but if you do they're there. There's a lovely sense of progression as well with the powers you unlock after beating the stages, from a bat transformation to homing bullets to walking upside down. The stage hazards themselves are good and varied; everything from collapsing bridges to Gradius-style flame arcs to a tube in space level which is an autoscroller. It really is just a fun little game with just the right amount of challenge, and one I certainly loved at the time. Pity I gave it away, but what can you do? Ah well. That'll do for my little nostalgia trip with Kid Dracula. I highly suggest you give it a whirl before the spooky season ends. Speaking of, the night approaches. Ghosts. Goblins. Kids in masks knocking on the door asking for candy... and I hope they're wearing the safe kind of masks under the spooky kind of masks this year. Poor kids have been through a lot, like we all have. They deserve the fun sized potato chips we bought to give out to them. The kids will come a-knocking, as they have every year... but in between those knocks, for me? The final spooky movie of the season. The new beginning has reached its end. Oooooo. See you on All Hallow's Eve, y'all.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 29 (A Creepshow Animated Special)

Another unexpected choice, but one that turned out neat. We're winding down here in the marathon, and when I wind down I kind of just pick esoteric whatevers for the final few posts to get us to the finish line. To that end, I literally just load up Shudder to find an esoteric whatever to blast through for the evening when I found this. Fresh content, recently released! And it's even something I'm interested in. A brief primer, since it's been probably four years since we covered this series. Creepshow started as a 1982 horror anthology movie, a homage to the old EC horror comics of the 50's. George Romero directed, Stephen King wrote, and Tom Savini did special effects. A true meeting of horror minds paying homage to the tales of terror from their childhoods. It's a pretty good movie. More in this vein continued to be made. You have Creepshow 2, which is okay. Then there's the Tales From The Darkside movie as well as Creepshow 3. Both are unofficial sequels, though the former's spiritual and the latter is fanmade. Again, they're also pretty good. I legitimately do not remember if I covered Tales From The Darkside on here or not. Finally, there's a Creepshow TV series I haven't seen. I gather this animated special is them cobbling together a quick spooky something for the season. You get two spooky animated tales of terror, so let's start off with a Stephen King tale that only took 40-odd years to get an adaptation...

SURVIVOR TYPE

We've been here before, actually. Not the animated adaptation, which is new. I mean the actual story. I covered this back in 2017, and I remember writing it in an absolute hurried fever pitch before I had to go on vacation. I don't remember what I said about the story itself so let me just go and peek really quick. Oh. Not much. Jesus, I really was pressed for time, huh? Anyway this is the narrated story of a guy stranded on a desert island, resorting to eating seagulls and later amputating parts of his legs so he has food to survive. The short story itself is an effective slow descent into madness on the part of its narrator, the final entries only growing more and more incoherent. As an animated adaptation, this one really gets to show the absolute visceral horror of what our narrator has to do to survive. The killing of seagulls, the amputation of his own foot, it's all real gross shit to witness. Special props go to Keifer Sutherland as well. We saw him as a vampire a few days ago, but he definitely gives this guy character with his performance. It really sells the descent to hell when you can hear it. Come to think of it, both these stories only have two voice actors in them. Did they actually put this thing together in quarantine? If so, that's impressive. I hope they played safe and animated from home and stuff, but impressive nonetheless. The final line about ladyfingers is just as spooky here as it was in the story, so let's move on to something a little more modern and unknown with...

TWITTERING FROM THE CIRCUS OF THE DEAD

All the snide snipes at bloggers in this one make things a little too real. This is indeed a story for the age of social media and the kids on their telephones. It's also written by Joe Hill, and I've never read a Joe Hill thing before but I know him by reputation. Joe Hill, you see, is Stephen King's son who also went on to become a spooky writer. Helpfully, he also has a cameo in the original Creepshow as the kid in the framing device of the movie. It's neat to see him come back, and it's really neat to see the generations of Kings getting adapted for a Creepshow cartoon. Anyway, whereas Survivor Type was presented as a rambling narrated journal entry, this story plays with the times and is narrated as a livetweet thread by a bored teenage girl on family vacation. In typical rebellious teenage girl fashion she complains about her mom a lot and shares some funny stories, all while livetweeting the drive. They eventually end up at the titular Circus Of The Dead, and this all gets livetweeted as well. It's incredibly clear that this place is employing actual zombies and keeping people as captives, but our livetweeter and her family don't see it until it's too late. We get absolutely wild shit like a zombie shot out of a cannon and exploding, zombies lit on fire, zombies mauled by lions, lions eaten by zombies, and pretty soon all absolute hell breaks loose and our livetweeter is trapped and crying. We're not even sure if she's really tweeting this shit any more, but eventually they come for her too. Some canny ghoul then swipes her phone and tweets promotion for the circus, stating our livetweeter will be the next act, and that's that. It's an interesting tale, to be sure, and the zombie circus is a ghoulish bit of dark comedy. I also kind of like how the livetweeting makes this like found footage, in a way. Livestreamed footage? Oh fuck, there's a horror movie idea. Either way, let's bail from this scene. Two more days till Halloween. This was good, it's worth a watch if you've got Shudder, and I may check out the series in my off time. For now, though, I've got just a few more things to talk about...

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 28 (Ghost Story)

Yeah okay, that's another weird one to try and explain. You know me, though. As long as I can squeeze three paragraphs out of it, I've got a post. Believe me, I've been rambling like a verbose idiot for 22 years. I got this shit on lockdown. So. Let us talk about Ghost Story. I admit to some fascination with the movie, considering I'd read the book first. I've only read the book once, however. Shall we talk about how I remember the book? It's by Peter Straub, an author I only found out about because of my own Stephen King kick. The pair collaborated for a novel called The Talisman, which is quite the evocative little book. But we are talking about Ghost Story instead, and Ghost Story was quite haunting. You know, a macabre tale of loss and grief and dark secrets and... yes, ghosts. I remembered the basic beats of the plot, just enough to keep me from being lost going into the movie. I thought the book was pretty neat, which is why I was intrigued by the movie. Was the movie as neat? Well.

I don't think so, but that doesn't mean it didn't still hit a particular mood. The mood it hits oddly makes me think of David Cronenberg's Dead Zone adaptation. That movie was set in winter, and the atmosphere combined with the subject matter and the score to create this very cold and haunting movie. That's the vibe that Ghost Story gives me. It's arguably the best part of it, but we'll poke some more. The actual scares are limited to OH GOD SHE'S GOT A FUCKING MONSTER FACE AAAAAH, but I gotta give them props. They are very good goopy monster faces. There's also the cast, primarily made up of film alumni at the twilight of their careers. Fred Astaire is in this. The dancer from the 40's, but he's a haunted old man regretting the dark secrets of his life. Same with all the other old guys who get together and tell scary stories, but then their sins come back to haunt them. Their sins being the ghost of a lady they killed back in the late 20's. A terrible and tragic accident we see full well at the end of the second act, when the survivors confess their tale to their dead friend's son. A flirty woman they were all sweet on got her head banged in a moment of anger from one of them, they thought she was dead and tried to hide her body by putting her in a car they pushed into a pond, but oops she was only knocked out and you drowned her. Her spirit haunts the sons of one of her killers, starting romantic relationships as some form of revenge. As she memorably says, she'll take them to places they never could have imagined and also drain the life from them.

So what doesn't work? I don't really know how to quantify it. It's a long movie at 110 minutes, and it feels like it needs to be shorter and longer. Longer because the opening bits had me, who had read the book but years ago, a little lost and confused. Shorter because the flashbacks do take up quite a bit of time. There's also a subplot with escaped asylum patients doing the will of the ghost woman that I legitimately do not understand the point of, because I don't remember what they were up to in the book. It's not even that it's an unfaithful adaptation. It hits all the beats. There is just some intangible quality about it that does not quite make it hit. Maybe it's the adaptation decay, maybe I'm just misremembering the quality of the book itself. Either way, this is just fine. Maybe worth a watch, but the best part about it is that cold atmosphere and that score. They're really good, especially here at the end of October. It snowed in parts of my home island this week, you know. The cold's a-coming. The dark oppressive months ahead. That's the real spooky stuff. Three days remain...

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 27 (She Dies Tomorrow)

Okay, so since I don't know how much analysis I can wring out of something like this, I'm afraid I'm going to have to start by just getting honest and morbid. Alright, here goes. I'm an anxious person with mild hypochondriac tendencies who's not in great shape and was born with a heart defect. Thus, sometimes I kind of feel like shit and worry it's a cardiac episode. A little pain in the left arm and oh god no I'm going to fucking die this is it. I've even gone so far as to write shit like "Tell Facebook" on a notepad, convinced that I'm going to die in my sleep and worried that the people I care about online will never know what happened to me otherwise. I told you it was morbid, but I'm being honest. I mention this because the movie I just watched is about people dealing with the sudden existential horror of their own mortality, and the anxiety that comes with the bad part of their brain knowing for sure that this is it, it's the end of their life and there's nothing they can do about it. Let's poke on that for a bit and talk about She Dies Tomorrow.

I'm going to call this an existential horror movie. There's no grand explanation for why the events happen, no greater lore to draw on. Searching it on Youtube to rent it yielded an "ENDING EXPLAINED" video, and that's the wrong lens to use in analyzing this. It defies explanation. That isn't the point. The point is the unsettling nightmare of it all, the way the various characters react to it, and the metaphors at work here. It is a movie about the existential nightmare of mortality, and it lingers on this for the whole film. We're introduced to a girl named Amy, and she's clearly depressed and in a bad way. We see her listen to the same song over and over, drink wine, touch the floor, looking at cremation urns online. It's when her friend Jane comes over that the movie explains Amy's mood. Amy is convinced she is going to die tomorrow. Jane dismisses this as Amy being drunk and leaves, but here's the really spooky part about She Dies Tomorrow. It isn't just that the existential certainty of the dark recesses of your brain has you convinced that you'll die tomorrow. It's that this goddamned horror of mortality is contagious. Jane catches it, runs to her family in panic, and spreads the horror and certainty of incoming death to them. 

There's no big explanation for this, no lore dump, nothing. This is the movie. People convinced all of a sudden that they're going to die tomorrow, and how they deal with that. How, then, do they deal with it? Amy goes off on a memory tour, and we see flashbacks of her with a boyfriend. She wants to ride a dune buggy one day, and one night they get high as fuck and order pizza when her boyfriend answers the door, and the obvious intent of the scene is that the pizza man passed on the existential dread to him. Amy goes dune buggying in the present, returning to the house where she and her boyfriend were on vacation, and finding his body. It's not really clear how he died, but he did. Jane's brother and his wife console their daughter, who soon is weeping over not wanting to die... and again, you're left to fill in the lines here yourself, but it seems fairly obvious that they go to kill Jane as revenge for passing on the existential dread to them before they die. Brian and Tilly, two guests at the birthday party of the last pair we talked about, go and unplug Brian's father from life support and lament their relationship was pretty much doomed anyway. Jane gets to end the movie bleeding to death but swimming in a swimming pool as two other girls have the existential dread. The movie ends on Amy flipping between "It's okay" and "It's not okay". Which, mood.

That's She Dies Tomorrow. Uhhh. I don't know. There's something at play here, something about depression and anxiety and memento mori. Beyond that, it's a tone piece of existential dread and horror at our own mortality. It affected me for sure. I'm fairly certain I will live through tomorrow, though. Good lord, no, that's way too much of a downer to end this one on. Uhhh. Hm. Gotta think of a good way to end the thing now. Oh! Uhhh how about tomorrow we watch a ghost story? Yeah, that sounds like fun. Okay. That'll do it for this one. Sorry the tone's fucked, but what can you do?

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 26 (The Lost Boys)

Man, RIP to a real one, huh? The late great Joel Schumacher directed this one, so I figured I'd pay my dues and watch it. Definitely a lot of mirroring with Fright Night, as it's an 80's vampire movie I've only seen once before, 20-odd years ago. Schumacher did a lot of movies that weren't his Batman duology, but the Batman ones will always stick with me. If I may, oh so briefly. I saw Batman Forever when I was 10 and without having seen the Tim Burton movies, which is the absolute perfect way for someone to experience Batman Forever. I still have an attachment to it. Batman and Robin is harder to love, but I can appreciate its turn to full goofy. I will always remember 1997 at the former Bayview Cinema in Grand Bank, seeing that movie on the big screen during my summer vacation. I don't remember how I felt on the movie since the Internet's freakouts over it have fucked with my memory, but I remember the experience. And now, to remember Joel Schumacher for something other than Bat credit cards, it's The Lost Boys.

The Richard Donner production credit and one cast member in particular gives this movie a certain feel later on, but the eerie and evocative mood it sets before all that comes in is a strange one. Santa Carla is a dark carnival of a town, night sky lit up by fairground attractions and roller coasters and flashing lights, but outside the bright lights is a darkness. Missing posters all over the place, people out of work and homeless. There's something bad here even before you get to the goddamned vampires. Once again, we're in a weird world where vampire fiction exists alongside the actual monsters lurking and preying on people in the night, but some people in Santa Carla seem to be in the know that this is happening and believe in it. It's not treated as a existential panic like Fright Night, but just an annoyance and a constant danger. Fuck, vampires are real. That fucking sucks, I'd better be careful at night at stuff. Our new kids in town are not careful and one of them falls in with the wrong crowd.

Ah yes, Keifer Sutherland's merry band of vampire boys. The title's a cute pun here. It's both referring to Peter Pan and his merry band of boys who never grow up, and also using "lost" as a synonym for the loss of innocence. 'Cause they're immortal creatures of the night who go out murdering folks to feed on their blood. Our boy Michael here has his own fall from innocence, and the obvious metaphor is a good boy falling in with the bad crowd. Except, again, the bad crowd in this case go out every night and murder people. That's a big yikes. The movie plays with the interesting concept of half-vampires; that is, you have some vampiric traits and weaknesses but can still walk in sunlight. Only actually making your first kill turns you fully, and that's the precipice Michael is on now. That leads us to his little brother, who gets in with a duo of vampire hunters. One of them's Corey Feldman. So you got your Richard Donner/Goonies connection right there, but that's only kind of what the movie is getting at. Kind of.

The last act of the movie goes balls to the wall, with Feldman and his vampire hunter pal going into the lair of the vampires (which is one hell of a set, gotta say) and staking Alex Winter before he can travel in time in a phone booth. Right, snark aside, this shit's fucked. They're sleeping like bats and the blood pours out and all kinds of other shit, but Keifer Sutherland swears revenge. Then the movie becomes a hybrid between Goonies, Monster Squad, and Home Alone. Bearing in mind the latter had yet to come out at the time, this is impressive. The vampires come, but they get totally fucked up. I swear, the climax of this movie is rad as shit. You got vampires melting in tubs of holy water while their blood spews out of every sink and water pipe in the house, and a vampire shot through the heart with an arrow into a stereo whose HEAD FUCKING EXPLODES FROM ELECTRIC SHOCK! HOLY FUCK! The final confrontation with the real head vampire is brief but he blows up better than a shmup boss, the grandpa gets a good line about how he can't stand the goddamned vampires in this town, and that's The Lost Boys. I really liked this one. Better than Fright Night, at least. What a rad little thing. Thanks, Joel. You really were a real one. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 25 (Fright Night)

Last week of October! Woohoo! Just got a few more of these to power through and then the spooky night is upon us! Why, we even have a beloved 80's vampire movie to talk about tonight. Well, I think it's beloved. I dunno. I actually saw this one once, like over 20 years ago. I remembered the general plot beats, and going in again... yeah, I basically remembered all the big bits rightly. It's definitely interesting, to say the least. Funny that I encountered it back then, 20 years ago. I guess this would have been right when I was pushing my own horror boundaries. Post-Alien but pre-Stephen King, in my personal spooky chronology. It absolutely would have scared me shitless 30 years ago. In the present day? Fine, with some gnarly bits. Let's poke at it.

Parts of this feel like Dracula 1985. I don't know if there's a Dracula movie that came out in 1985, but this take on the vampire is very traditional with the rules and weaknesses and all. Has to be invited in, turns into bats and wolves, weak to holy stuff and garlic and stakes through the heart. All stock and standard, but let loose upon the NINETEEEN EIGHTIES! Well, specifically suburbia. Which I guess is 80's enough. The first 50 minutes of this sort of play on the aggravating "NOBODY BELIEVES I SAW A SUPERNATURAL THING" trope. Not as aggravating as it could have been, but you really feel poor Charley's desperation as he finds out his new neighbor's a vampire, tries to stop him and fails, and has nobody believe him even as this vampire is like HA HA HA CHARLEY I AM GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU TONIGHT. It's spooky shit to have to deal with, but Charley tries to enlist an expert... and this is where we get the wonderful Roddy McDowell as Peter Vincent. The name's obviously meant to invoke Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, as he's a former movie star famous for playing vampire hunters who now hosts a late night horror movie show called Fright Night. 

Actually, let me poke at that for a bit, because this is fun to think about. The universe of this film is one in which someone like Peter Vincent can make a career out of playing vampire hunters in movies. It is also one where fucking vampires exist. When the vampire meets Vincent later for the "test" to try and keep Charley from fucking murdering a guy, he mentions he loves the man's work. It could be bullshitting, but like... Do you think the vampire resents this guy for making a career out of pretending to kill vampires? It's something wild to think about. Either way, 50 minutes into the movie, Peter Vincent finds out vampires fucking exist and damn near loses his shit. Like you would if you spent 20 years pretending to kill a pretend monster for a living only to find the fucking things really exist and want you dead. This leads us into the madcap second half where the vampire goes after Charley's friends. He straight up turns one, but Charley's girlfriend he goes after in a much more seductive way. It's an old horror movie trope where the female lead is a dead ringer for the monster's long-lost lover from 100 years ago or whatever, but I find it all a little weird in an age-gap sort of way. Not even in the fact that the vampire's hundreds of years old, but like... he looks like a dude in his 30s and he's puttin' the moves on this girl on the dance floor. Uh.

To say nothing of the scene where he has her back in his lair and turns her, which. Uhhhh. The last bits of this movie are some wild vampire fightin' action as Charley and Peter Vincent team up. There may be a little metacommentary here. Peter Vincent, earlier in the movie, gets fired from his TV host job because the ratings are down and all kids want to see these days are slasher villains in ski masks. That isn't the exact line, but he's lamenting the changing tastes of the Kids These Days, and the shift from gothic horror of the 60's and 70's to the slashers of the 80's. Except his unique skillset and knowledge come in here, in this situation, so he's relevant again. One wonders if they asked Peter Cushing himself to do this. That would have clicked that whole "old horror hero faces the return of the old monster in a new age" theme click. Anyway, the climax slaps. You got monster face Amy, a zombie dude melting on screen that's really gnarly, and the final defeat of the vampire with some gonzo effects. Yeah, that's Fright Night for you. It's neat. No goth David Tennant, but it's pretty neat. I wonder if there are any other 80's vampire movies I can peek at.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 24 (Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street)

I didn't really plan on doing this documentary this year. Really, it just popped out at me while browsing Shudder so I was like "the hell with it, that sounds interesting and I can probably squeeze a post out of it". It's horror adjacent, which is close enough for me. The horrors in this documentary are frighteningly real, though. A gay man who lived through the hellscape that was the AIDS crisis of the 80's, who lived through lord knows how much homophobia and trauma and loss. I can't fathom how it felt for the poor guy, but he got through it somehow. He even went and took part in this documentary to tell his story, get it out there, and get his closure. Right, we should probably talk about who the subject of this documentary is, huh?

This is the story of Mark Patton. He's done much in his life, but the thing most people know him for is playing the lead in Nightmare On Elm Street 2. Elm Street 2 is considered the odd sequel out for a lot of reasons. Yeah, you got Freddy coming back to life by hijacking a guy in the living world. You got him coming through to the real world and slashing up teens at a pool party, which gels really weird when you think of the other movies. The biggest thing people want to talk about, though, is the fact that this movie is filled to the brim with gay subtext. I talked about it two years ago for the blog and barely touched it. I didn't feel qualified and wanted to poke more at the alchemical themes of the movie, along with some other stuff. It has to be said, though. It's in there. It's in there and it's done harm and good. Harm in that the writer denied it was there for years, implying that Patton himself added something to the character on the page and made him gay just like he was. That bus-throwing left Patton with obvious resentment to the writer over the years, and as he admits he used the writer as a focal point for the resentment he had from this movie. It's hard to blame the guy. The hateful comments they flash on screen regarding the movie's reception turn my fucking stomach to look at. 

Yet, there's also good to come from it. It inspired and uplifted so many LGBT horror fans, and they get to share what the movie means to them in this documentary. They get to share that, if only so briefly, with Patton himself. For Patton, this grand tour of the horror convention circuit is an act of healing. Between the reception to the movie and the AIDS crisis, Patton withdrew himself from the public eye. He lost partners, he fought HIV himself, and he powered ever onward, making a life for himself. That one defining fact about his life remains, though, and so Patton wants to get his closure from it all. He wants to find the good after 30 years of harm, and so he's off on tour to meet his fans. He's off to share his story with this documentary, and let the world know Mark Patton's story beyond "he was the gay guy from that really gay Elm Street movie". I know it now, and he's a pretty cool guy who weathered through more hurt and heartache than I ever have. He gets to meet his fans, he gets to reunite with cast and crew from his one big movie. He even gets to speak with the writer after 30 years, share his pain over what the writer had said in denying the subtext and shifting the blame all those years ago, and get an apology. An act of healing and moving on if there ever was one. That's really all I've got to say on this. I quite enjoyed the documentary, and I'm glad Patton got to share his story and get his closure. Elm Street 2's not a favorite Elm Street, but it's interesting enough to be up there for me. As for Mark Patton? I hope he's doing good down there in Mexico with his husband and his cute little dog. Guy's earned it.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 23 (Still More Angry Video Game Nerd Halloween Episodes)

At this point, this is a tradition in our little marathons. Me taking an off day to just talk about a couple of shortform comedy gaming videos with a loose horror theme. So here for you, once again, are brief capsule form thoughts on three more Angry Video Game Nerd videos. Eventually we'll run out of these since I do three a year and he only makes one spooky themed video a year, possibly two if we're really good. Even so, we can raid the backlog for a bit yet. That's exactly what I did, actually. All three of these videos are over a decade old, and in fact we're starting with the very first that James Rolfe ever did. That's right, strap in, it's...

You know, I've always been at odds with this video. I had this game growing up. I got it at a flea market in the 90's on the cheap with no preconcieved notions about Castlevania or anything like that. I also eventually was gifted a Nintendo hint book with a chapter on this game. Those two facts definitely skew my opinion of the game. I think it's fine. Pretty enjoyable, even, in the here and now when we can know all the shit. That does poke at an interesting observation I want to make with this video, though. This is the one, though. This kickstarted the whole thing. Not just AVGN, but people hating on this odd little game I liked as a child. The same thing happened with Zelda 2, but Zelda 2 is arguably a better game, and even this video has Rolfe admit it's pretty good. You've got all the standard complaints that have become infamous. The long day to night transfer, the cryptic clues, the need to grind for hearts. Among those are some oddly personal ones like there being few bosses. There are ROM hacks out there to "fix" all that if you truly care. What I find most interesting are the infamous crystal kneeling complaints. They're the sort of stuff that got me stuck as a kid too, but I just had fun roaming around the world in it. Rolfe is right in saying they're cryptic, but said complaint has been seen by millions of people. Those millions now know the solution, even if they agree it's cryptic. The popularity of the video could be argued to have eliminated the cryptic nature of the game. It's wild to think on, but don't think on it too hard. We'll move on.

This one, on the other hand, I remember renting for a while there back in the day. It certainly wasn't the greatest and I never beat it, but I don't seem to have missed much. I said it before when I talked about all the movies on here once before. I have no brand loyalty to Ghostbusters. They're decent movies to me, not tentpole 80's classics (and one reboot like nobody but me seemed to like) so Rolfe's disappointment at the bungling here doesn't hit me as hard. There are definitely some good highlights in this video, though. Even if I know the car vacuum prank call is rigged so it's just one of Rolfe's friends on the line, it's still amusing to think on. It becomes this slow descent into angry nerd madness with all the balls in the air to keep track of while playing. Then we've got that stairwell climb, which... Jesus, that's brutal on your thumb if you have no turbo. I don't think I've ever seen a non-cheated play of it, but I would like to in order to know how in the fuck such a thing is even possible. There's a strange feel to it, especially when that ending screen hits with its wild typos. It's a decent episode, and so we move to the last of the three.

This game has an interesting sort of issue thanks to being reviewed by AVGN. It shares the same fate as Silver Surfer, though on a far lesser scale. A B-list game that, all of a sudden after the AVGN video, everyone has played and deemed one of the hardest games on the NES. I haven't actually tackled it myself (though I bought the cart once) but looking at a longplay it just looks like a really tedious slog based on the bad part of Blaster Master. Unremarkable, but not infamous. Yet Rolfe seemed to think so in part, as he chose to tackle it. There are certain prickly points of the game design he gets to needle, like the gun downgrades and there being no technical continue function. The latter I know is because they didn't have time to program it in after the fact, or just plain forgot. Some oopsie along those lines. I have played about as much as Rolfe has, and I can't say it's the greatest but I don't hate it, either. I've certainly played harder and I've definitely played worse. Even so, it's an enjoyable episode and must have taken a hell of a time to shoot with all the retakes of him as Addams Family characters to put on the screen at once. The Genesis Addams game he looks at seems okay enough as well. That'll put a bow on AVGN for another year. Next time, I dunno.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 22 (Happy Death Day)

I just keep dovetailing into these, don't I? We went from retro-styled 80's horror to retro-styled 80's found footage to found footage trying to find a unique gimmick. The unique gimmick part is what we've dovetailed into here. This movie's unique gimmick, its premise, its main selling point? It's really easy to just say it. Let us get it out there. It's like Groundhog Day but as a horror murder mystery. I will add that I have never gotten around to seeing Groundhog Day. I bet it's a very good Bill Murray comedy beloved for good reasons. Never got around to seeing it. It happens. No need for pitchforks. Besides, that pitch opens so many wild doors. We'll see the results of them... how about nowish?

Meet Teresa, college sorority girl. To quote another massive tale, bluh bluh huge bitch. She's not a very nice person, as we discover over these opening moments. Total mean girl. Making out with her married professor behind closed doors. The kind of girl you wouldn't blink twice at if you saw her get stabbed to death in a slasher movie. Oops, look at what happened. The babyface mask of the killer here is Ghostface-parallel, but still evocative and creepy. It's a good design and I like it. Shame Teresa got stabbed to death-- OH WELL WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT? THE DAY'S STARTED ALL OVER! I'll just reveal it right now. There's no in-movie explanation for the time loop that Teresa's caught in. I gather from talking to a pal that A) Groundhog Day didn't explain it either and B) the sequel to this movie goes in-depth on the explanation of it. I don't know if I want an explanation. I had my own gonzo theories as I watched that would have been radical if they were it. The serial killer discovered in the third act could have time loop powers, gathering energy by killing his chosen victim over and over again for nefarious purposes. The professor could have been engaging in an elaborate quantum physics experiment. Even Teresa's dad could be in on this shit, doing something to his ungrateful daughter to revive his dead wife. 

It was fun to theorize as I watched, but the movie wasn't concerned with that. It was concerned with the mystery and the character arc. The mystery we've already explained; who the hell keeps killing Teresa and why? Well, I haven't explained it, but you know already that the time loop part gets no explanation. There's payoff to the killer, but first we gotta get the character arc stuff. This nightmarish hell loop actually makes Teresa self-reflective, and think about the better person she could be if she ever manages to break free from her karmic curse of revival. It's not infinite, though, as there is residual damage in each repitition from all the violent murder. Bit of a race against time, there. I'm pretty sure this is the same story as Groundhog Day. A mean jerk gets caught in a time loop and, over the repitition, learns how to be not such a big mean jerk. I really like the Teresa that blossoms over the movie. She doesn't lose her snarky bitchiness, for lack of a better term, but she does grow empathy for others. In what she thinks is her last loop she's very upbeat and nice to everyone around her, lets all her regrets out, and genuinely tries to be a better person. Then she goes to kill the serial killer fuck who locked her in this loop, she does it, and...

Whoops. Back again. Yeah no, turns out it was her roommate the whole time, who resented her for being a terrible person and sleeping with the professor. Girl even poisoned Teresa's birthday cupcake, and Teresa finally eating it in that last loop is what clued her into the motive. She finally fends off her attacker, and gets to live another day. A new day, even! This breaks the time loop somehow or another, and I'm fine with that. It's symbolic. This was a neat little movie! Such a simple little pitch, tweaking the formula of a popular movie into a different genre. Yet it works! It really works, and it isn't even too gory or violent. I can live with that. Maybe one day I'll poke at the sequel. It might even be soon. Until then, this can sit as a nice little experience, no matter what the bullshit explanation for the time loop may be. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 21 (Found Footage 3D)

I sort of stumbled into this one on accident, but you know what? I was on Shudder and needed something for tonight and this popped out. Pun unintended. I did not actually watch Found Footage 3D in 3D because I don't have a fancy television or glasses or whatever the fuck. It really doesn't impact the experience. At no point beyond the movie introducing 3D cameras did I peg that anything was an obvious 3D gimmick. I can pinpoint moments in hindsight, mind, but I wasn't thinking of it at the time. I was invested. Right then. I have only a little experience with this genre, but you can tell that people are constantly trying to innovate and mash it up with other stuff to make their found footage movie stand out. Cloverfield mixes it with a Godzilla picture, WNUF Halloween Special mixes it with a shitty 80's VHS recording, et cetera. From the title, you'd think Found Footage 3D is mixing found footage with the 3D movie fad of the 2010s. It technically is, on a literal technical level since it is that. Using just that as your hook and filming some cliche cabin in the woods nonsense would be gimmicky bullshit. Thankfully, Found Footage 3D agrees with you. 

No, what it's actually doing is mixing the "self-aware of horror tropes in a horror movie" style of movies like Scream or Cabin In The Woods with the found footage genre. The found footage artifice is a behind the scenes documentary of the making of a shitty found footage movie IN THREE DEE. The filmmakers in charge of Spectre Of Death, the in-universe movie, are right there with you saying shit like the opening titles are cliche, or that the movie needs a big innovative dumb hook like Sharknado had. The people making this found footage movie know the pitfalls and the tropes of the genre, and alternate between emulating them and trying to avoid them. Director Derek is an absolute narcissist of a creator who comes up with the dumbest shit imaginable and lazily tries to justify it by saying shit like "well how would the audience know that?" and calling us dumb motherfuckers for eating this shit up. We're meant to dislike him, and boy howdy do I. He's an antagonistic selfish filmmaker prone to angry outbursts against his cast and crew, and he can't come up with an ending without making himself look good. He tries to make himself sole survivor of the movie, but nobody's having it. Found footage rules, man. Everybody dies. The negativity on set only swells as actual creepy shit starts to happen. Kids, you're not just making a found footage movie. You're in one.

There's a wonderful scene wherein Derek is trying to write the ending, and the producer helpfully critiques that he's explaining way too much about the monster. They have a big waffle about explanation vs ambiguity in these movies, and Derek's eventually only swayed on the side of ambiguity because it means he can explain more shit in the sequel and get 15 bucks a head 'cause it's 3D. The movie itself, however, gets to have its cake and eat it too. It explains the themes and motivations of Spectre Of Death plain as day to you. It's up to you, dear viewer, to think critically and apply those themes and motivations to Found Footage 3D. The artifice of this being a found footage movie about making a different found footage movie means it gets to explain the inner one and leave the outer shell vague when the shit hits the fan. This even gets signposted early on, when the film crew put up some old guys on a bench to do the stereotypical horror movie thing where they ask for directions and the guys say "oooh, stay away, that place is baaaaad". When they then cut from making the movie and mention in conversation where they really are going, the old guys actually tell them to stay away unironically because it's a bad place. A real found footage movie happening inside a fake one. Or, to put it another way, the fake one poking out of its box and influencing the real one.

Yes, what you've got here is a good old-fashioned case of metafiction. Spectre Of Death is all about the crumbling marriage of characters Derek and Amy, played by the director and his ex-wife. Specifically it's about how the negative emotion of their breakup creates a supernatural demon that terrorizes them before ultimately killing them both, but not before helpfully leaving the expensive 3D camera behind for someone to find and show to the audience later. As a found footage movie plot, it's utter stock bullshit. The interesting thing is how you can read it. Shudder's synopsis of the movie seems to agree with this reading, but the movie never explains it in lengthy exposition like Derek would want. Throughout the movie we see the negative tensions on set, and the real raw angry emotion between the ex-lovers as they try to make the film. Pair that with filming in an actual cabin in the woods where murder happened, and bang. The fictional negative energy demon from Spectre Of Death is now haunting the cast and crew of Found Footage 3D. Things escalate worse and worse, and that leads us to our final act with the terrified documentarian running from a murder ghost in the woods while holding his camera.

Earlier in the movie, the producer mentions that a good found footage movie has to answer two questions. One, why is the cameraman filming? Two, to paraphrase: Why the fuck is the cameraman STILL filming when nightmare ghosts or goblins are trying to kill them? Spectre Of Death answers the first quickly, but never gets to answer the second because Found Footage 3D goes ass up with ghosts and murder. Found Footage 3D answered the first question with the making-of documentary. Its answer to the second question is that the goddamned phantom or spectre or whatever the fuck can only be seen via a camera, and thus documentarian Mark has to use it to see if the damn thing is trying to murder him as he tries to get away. It's a unique answer, only playing on the metafictional artifice. Of course the ghost wants to be filmed. It's broken free of one movie and wants to be in another. The end scene, with Amy and Mark in a wrecked van, even plays to this. Amy, possessed, asks for the camera to be on her. That's the ghost, that's her fictional negative energy made manifest wanting its final close-up. Her last line is all about the first rule of found footage movies, she goes monster in 3D, cut to credits. Found Footage 3D is definitely interesting, to say the least. It's got this shimmer of metafiction behind it, and the nesting of one found footage movie within the other lets it poke at the common tropes of bad ones in really interesting ways that I haven't seen before. It really didn't need the 3D, but if that got it greenlit, so be it. I enjoyed it for what it was.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 20 (WNUF Halloween Special)

Having just watched this, I'm really more in love with the gimmick behind it than I am the actual execution of what we get. On paper, what a goddamned concept. It's your typical found footage movie situation, exploring a condemned house where grisly murders took place 20 years prior and trying to contact the spirits within with terrifying results. The artifice of it, though, is that it's a 1987 live news broadcast on Halloween night. More specifically, a shitty VHS recording of it complete with fake 80's commercials and some unseen watcher of the tape fast-forwarding through whatever bullshit they deem uninteresting. Paranormal Activity by way of the fucking Star Wars Holiday Special. That's an absolutely gonzo idea in the same vein of The House Of The Devil (and WNUF, too, deals with the Satanic Panic of the time a bit) but going about it in a different direction. It's just crazy enough to work, and it... kind of does? I won't lie. I had a fun time with it and got spooked, but there are some issues. It ain't perfect, and allow me to nitpick.

In the end, I think the commercials kind of overstay their welcome. I definitely get the shifting intention of them, mind. They start as cute nostalgic snapshots of the time, and they're varied. They're also all original in-universe things, which is amazing dedication to the craft. This thing took a lot of work to make, without a doubt. Only a few of the ads repeat, as well. This, along with a snapshot of the Evening News at the beginning of the tape helps to set the ambiance and mood. 1987! Halloween! There's some spooky shit and tragic stuff but we mostly fast-forward past the tragic stuff, and hype up our spooky Halloween special in a real haunted house! There's also some Christians who think Halloween is the devil's night and will pray for it to be stopped, so keep that in mind. Once we get past the halfway point, though, and shit starts going bad in the haunted house and we keep cutting to commercial... that's when it gets a little grating. On the one hand, I get the vibe. It's trying to do the same thing The House Of The Devil did, building tension by making you wade through nothing spooky happening. It also adds some dissonance to the affair, with spooky shit happening and then cutting to the happy 80's commercials. In the end, the different format hurts WNUF. When nothing happened in The House Of The Devil, I was still scared shitless. When I had to sit through two more minutes of fake ads for heavy metal tapes and fake horror movies, I was very much in "GET ON WITH IT" mode and hoping the unseen tape watcher would fucking fast-forward.

Which brings us to another nitpick, the camera. I got completely taken right out of this movie because of the way the camera works. This is a live broadcast on location, and yet the camera keeps cutting and doing its own stuff like shot/reverse shot. Just like a normal movie would. Except this is a live broadcast/found footage movie. You never see these other cameramen, even though you very well should when it's cutting back and forth between the host and the person he's interviewing. I'm full aware this is a nitpick, but it really did lessen the experience for me. It would have felt way more real if we saw these other cameramen, or if they did it in one big take like a real news broadcast. Hell, you've got a producer in the van to cut back to if you need to split the take. Hell, you split the take every three minutes for more of those fake commericals! Despite these annoyances, atmosphere is definitely built up. Are there spooky scary ghosts in this house? Are they fucking with us and will we see a ghost live on camera?

Nah, not really. We eventually get the found footage staple of OH NO SOMETHING'S COME FOR ME and then the cameraman drops the camera and we see a body. In this case it's fuckers with axes. Not ghosts. Everything in the movie is easily explained as "fuckers with axes fucked around while the crew wasn't looking". Even the poor paranormal cat which gets offed. Poor kitty. The station goes off due to technical difficulties, but what we see after that is the tape cutting to the host having been kidnapped by those Christian fundamentalists from earlier, who killed everyone and proceed to cut out the host's tongue before the tape cuts to a news broadcast post-Halloween about how all those guys are missing. I peeked at Wikipedia, I'll admit, after watching. Not to like examine the plot, just for curiosity. Whatever Wiki person wrote this reads this scene as having been dubbed onto the tape by the killers themselves. It's a fucked up reading that totally recontextualizes the way we're watching someone else watch this recording, and opens the door to theories of how it all went down. They taped this. They set the VCR for the Halloween special, knowing full well they were going to kill these fuckers for sinning on the devil's night or whatever. They're watching it back, fast forwarding as they please... and with that knowledge I'd really like to go back and see exactly what ads and things they speed past. It's almost a recursive bit of found footage; footage of a killer watching the VHS recording of the live special in which they lurked in the background and committed their murders. Absolutely wild. WNUF is not perfect by any means. It's got some definite nitpicks for me. Nevertheless, the unique nature of it means it's at least worth your watch. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 19 (The House Of The Devil)

Well, fuck. Back to the movies again. A thing I'd never heard of before setting up for this year, but it was a pick that seemed interesting. In these brave and bold times of wistful nostalgia ruling all, it's at least a little interesting to go with a stylistic homage rather than one reminding the viewer of an IP or spooky monster or what have you. To that end, The House Of The Devil is a 2009 movie that absolutely looks and feels like a low-budget horror film from 25 years prior. I'm no cinema expert, but it's one of those cases where I know it when I see it. The filming and cinematographic choices made in this movie make it feel like a horror movie from 1985. The fact that it's set in the 80's also helps, with payphones and Walkmans and Thomas Dolby. Oh, and Satanic Panic. The movie opens with a title card about that, and it's called House Of The Devil, so you know what you're in for. They delay that for as long as possible though. 75 of 95 minutes, to be precise. What in the holy hell do they spend the rest of their time on with this movie?

Atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere. This movie is absolutely setting a mood, with tension unlike any I've seen in a while. Actually, that's getting ahead. Nothing scary actually happens until 37 minutes in. The rest of the movie is a very quiet affair, as we mostly watch our protagonist Samantha walking from place to place. Walking the hallways of college dorms, walking the campus, walking back to the dorm. The fall colors and Samantha being bundled up in warm winter clothes really make this movie absolutely perfect to watch at this time of year. It wouldn't work as an October 1st movie, things are still green. October 19th, though? When the trees and grass are really dying and you can feel that chill in the air? Absolutely. The plot itself is simple enough for those 37 minutes. Samantha needs money, she accepts a babysitting ad, it's out in the middle of nowhere and is actually for an old lady but her son-in-law is willing to pay 400 bucks for Sam's services. As a viewer one's obviously suspicious, but Sam's pal Megan drops her off and drives off. It's when she stops for a smoke and meets up with some other guy that you get a little spooked, but things are going okay. Then, 37 minutes in, he shoots Megan in the fucking head. Dear reader, I yelped loud enough to worry people. Just out of fucking nowhere shit got real. Oh fuck. This situation is fucked up. What's going to happen now?

Nothing. That's the fucked up part. It settles right back into that nervous tension, the next 40 minutes being Samantha in the house. Ordering pizza, watching TV for a bit, exploring her new surroundings and eventually playing pool while listening to tapes on her Walkman. It sounds like a dull nothing of a movie, but when you're actually sitting there watching it and don't know these things, you're just holding your breath. There are some jumpscares like a ringing doorbell for the pizza guy (who's the same fucker who shot Megan in the head), and they hit even harder than usual because you've been so tense for this whole quiet movie. Even Sam is getting more and more paranoid at the sounds and the weird inconsistencies of this place, and every time you think you've found a big spook that'll relieve the tension, it doesn't come. That is, of course, until 75 minutes in. The pizza was drugged and Sam passes out. I neglected to mention this is the night of a total lunar eclipse. That becomes important because of the how and why of the next 20 minutes. This was all a Satanic ritual, and Sam is bound at an altar and forced to imbibe Satanic blood. She breaks out, killing a few of the cultists, but something's clearly infected her. It is an absolutely fucked up 20 minutes, and it ends with the clear implication that Sam has somehow been impregnated with what I can only assume is the Antichrist or something. That's the movie. Fuck. I cannot remember the last movie I watched that scared me so much. The sheer tension on display is masterful for a movie with about four scares over 75 minutes and an admittedly horrific climax. I'm kind of impressed, still a little on edge, and generally happy I got to experience such a specific spooky experience for this year. On to the next one!

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 18 (Bloodstained Curse Of The Moon 2)

It's a tricky tightrope, trying to make a sequel to a spiritual successor. Often times the thing you're inspired by already had a sequel. Do you go in that direction, or do you just do more of the thing you were spiritually successing in the first place? Such was the dilemma at the heart of Bloodstained Curse Of The Moon 2. The original Curse Of The Moon is a love letter to the pre-1997 Castlevania games, the ones from the 8-bit NES. It had specific affection for Castlevania 3, structuring itself much like that that game with branching paths and multiple characters. It also, being a spiritual successor game made almost three decades later, smoothed out a lot of wrinkles in that formula and made lots of quality of life improvements. It was a very good game, and one I cherish a great deal. A sequel to it came out this year. Curse Of The Moon 2 is, just by looking at it, going back to that well. Stage-based action platforming with branching paths and multiple characters, in that exact same style. I don't know if I like it as much as the original, but Curse Of The Moon 2 is sort of like a fine wine. It gets better as you play it.

On the face of it, it really does seem like business as usual for this game. The only change is in your roster of other characters. The all-rounder Belmont-esque Zangetsu is back once again as your lead, but the last game's trio of characters who fit into the Castlevania 3 supporting cast roles are absent. In their place are three new pals. Dominique, a character with a big role in the Ritual Of The Night game, is playable and comes with a spear. She plays a lot like Eric from the Sega Genesis Castlevania game, Bloodlines, and has some very powerful magic of her own. Robert is a frail old man with a gun. Long-range attack, slow reload time, and very low health. Useful for dealing with things in a pinch, but takes a lot of skill. Last is Hachi. I love Hachi. Hachi is, and I am not kidding here, a corgi piloting a giant steampunk mech. Big, heavy, punchy, and can also hover over gaps and turn on invincibility. Hachi is the best boy and I love him. The game is pretty good as you go through, though there are some major difficulty spikes. When you reach the end, Dominique gets taken by the demons and you enter a new playthrough. 

This is where things get interesting (and a bit bullshit). Curse Of The Moon 2 wants you to beat it multiple times to unlock a load of new game modes and uncover the full story. To that end, the next episode has you go through a harder version of the game with the original Curse Of The Moon cast. Miriam is a whip user with good subweapons, Alfred a frail old man with low health but powerful magic, and Gebel has a bat swarm attack and can turn into a bat to fly. It worked for the first game, but the harder boss fights here are a pain. Stage 6 in particular has a mummy boss, and things are just way too goddamned busy in that battle. You have masks on the walls shooting arrows, rising platforms, lightning raining down on them, and it's all just too much multitasking to be fun. It took me lots of tries and wasn't the most rewarding clear. A few bosses are like that in the run, and they lowered my overall enjoyment of the game. Regardless, you beat a new demon with annoying attacks and save Dominique... but now you unlock the final episode. This is where shit gets wild.

First of all, you get a proper stage select and can tackle them in any order. Secondly, the companions and collectible upgrades are all randomized. You might find Hachi at the end of Stage 1 in one playthrough, but in Stage 5 on another. You really get to plan what you want to do first, based on character preference, who you've got on you to get powerups, and how difficult the stage would be for you. Both trios of playable characters merge here, giving you all seven to work with. Then, and I am not kidding, you enter a shoot-em-up stage which takes you to the moon for the final battle with the ultimate demon. Or you can just go it alone with Zangetsu for a different ending. I did that. You can also unlock solo mode with all the characters, and you'd better believe I cleared the whole damn game with my steampunk mech piloted by a corgi. In the end, that's Curse Of The Moon 2. It's a solid new retro-styled action platformer, to be sure. Not quite as good as the original, but let's not hold that against it too much. Some parts are a bit much, but overall I felt it was worth sinking all that time and playthroughs into. I'm wondering if the Bloodstained brand will go on, or if it will poke at other styles of Castlevania game. Only time will tell! For now, I need to get back to movies. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 17 (A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master)

Right, it's story time again. Last time I talked all about The Stuff and seeing it at the video store but not watching it. This movie... I might have seen at the video store. Couldn't tell you for sure. What I can tell you about is a summer day in 1994, when I was hanging around with friends. This was my "scared shitless of horror movies" phase, and I've got at least one more story about that with my friend group at the time. Anyway, we're hanging out in a friend's basement and they all unanimously decide to throw on this movie here. I remember trying to brave it out, but once the New Line Cinema logo fluttered forward, a fight or flight response in my brain flipped. The primal instinct within my mind shouting THOSE ARE THE LOGOS TO THE MOVIE, THE MOVIE IS STARTING, YOU SAW THE COVER AND IT IS THE MOST TERRIFYING MOVIE KNOWN TO MAN, RUN FOR YOUR FUCKING LIFE! I didn't run, per se, but I did get the holy fuck out of dodge. I vividly remember repeating the refrain to Queen's We Will Rock You as I walked home. Because it was tied in with the John Goodman Flintstones movie advertised at the time. A goddamn litany to keep my near-fear experience at bay. We will, we will rock you. We will, we will rock you. We will, we will rock you. All the way home. What the hell do you want from me, I was a dumbass kid! Now this dumbass adult will tell you about the movie.

For the fourth entry in a goddamned 80's slasher movie franchise, this movie's actually got some shit going on under the hood. I was honestly expecting an inferior and more tongue-in-cheek version of It, you know? Ha ha ha hey kid, you got this special interest/defining feature? Let me torment you with it in a nightmare and then murder you, gotcha bitch. Some of the kills in the movie take that form, yes, but it's what happens after that's interesting. It's what happens before that's also a little interesting; namely the last three survivors of the previous movie getting picked off by a revived Freddy. The last movie, if you'll recall, had this running subtext of mental health care being an incompetent joke that let poor people slip between the cracks and die terribly. This is the logical endpoint of that. The three who lived survived, but in the end their demon got them. Their demon being a razor glove dream demon rather than any mental illness, but one must work with what one's given. Kristen, the girl who got to scream that incompetent mental health workers were letting them die, gets a similar belter to go out on. Her mother slips her sleeping pills, thinking a little sleep will make her all better, and as Kristen struggles to stay awake. she flat-out says it. "Mother, you just murdered me.". She ends up being right, as well. Freddy gets her. She's gone. 

Of course, this being a full-length movie, that's not the end of it. Kristen had the power to pull people into her dreams, and she accidentally tugs a new friend into hers before she dies. Alice here somehow inherits the dream-pulling power, and Freddy needs to use this to his advantage because Kristen was the last child of the adults who roasted him alive. He can't get to anyone else unless Alice pulls them into her dream, and Alice can't control it so she ends up tugging close friends along every time she falls asleep, and Freddy ends up killing them one by one. Sounds like standard stuff, but there's some interesting shit going on under the hood here. Let's poke it with a wrench. First of all, Freddy's continued bloodlust for killing teenagers in their own nightmares. It's interesting because when Kristen dies, Freddy's effectively won. He's gotten his revenge on the parents who burned him alive. Every one of their children has been murdered by him, cut down in their prime. It took him three and a half movies, but he did it. By vengeful ghost logic he ought to vanish... but we also have slasher villain logic. Freddy's popular and makes the dollars, so he can't be done. No, he just really likes killing teens with ironic nightmares now, and Alice is his conduit to do it. A fresh meat supply, so to speak, using her close friends and taking them from her.

Which neatly leads us into the other powerful theme of the movie, grief and loss. Really. The movie even dovetails that from Kristen to Alice with Kristen's last biting line to her mother. Her mother has now suffered the loss of her daughter, and will mourn. So, too, will Alice lose her friends one by one. The symbolism gets a bit obvious, but shockingly poignant for a movie about teens getting murdered. Alice has this mirror in her bedroom covered by the photos of her friends. As they die, she takes the photos down, revealing more and more of the mirror and seeing more and more of herself. As they die, her dream powers mean she takes on aspects of them. Smoking like Kristen did, even though Alice doesn't smoke. Being able to use nunchucks like her late martial-artist brother. The friends also leave behind keepsakes, things Alice treasures that remind her of the friends she's lost along the way. Though they're dead, they live on within her in her memory. T

here's some absolutely gonzo shit about titular dream masters and dream gates, positive and negative. Alice is gathering the positive memory of her friends, their power. Freddy is gathering their souls, trapping them within himself as sustenance for his negative energy. Alice and Freddy are mirroring each other, and when Alice heads into dreamland for her final confrontation, she fucking dropkicks her way into the fully uncovered mirror in her bedroom. She fights back against Freddy, not alone, but with the power of her friends. Her brother's martial arts. Her brainy friend's soundwave device. Eventually it's a rhyme from her dead mother which reveals that Freddy's weakness is seeing his own reflection, at which point the souls rip Freddy to shreds in a ghoulish goddamned sequence. That's Nightmare Part 4. I really did not expect anything quite so deep and rich as this from a slasher, but fuck. We got it. I might actually like it more than 3 for those rich themes. Neat. See you next year for Part 5, which I hope won't botch things in a silly way. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 16 (The Stuff)

This was about 30 years in the making for me, personally. The Stuff is one of those movies for me. I would see it at our local video store every weekend while looking for movies, and it looked like your typical 80's horror movie. I, an impressionable child scared shitless of horror, never wanted to go near it. Even later in life, when I got brave and rented Friday the 13th movies and shit from them, I never rented The Stuff. God knows where all those VHS tapes ended up. A landfill? The video store's basement? Either way, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I watched The Stuff in 720p quality. Wow! I should have turned it down so it would look like an old shitty VHS, but compression doesn't work the same as tape artifice. Anyway then. What the hell is The Stuff? Well, it's something wild that doesn't always work, but when it does I dig it. A satire of 80's hypercapitalism and Big Junk Food featuring mind-controlling goop people dug out of a hole and sold to the American public. Oh, now that's fun. Let's play with that for a second.

There is a movie I've seen that this movie reminds me of, but I won't tip my hand to it. You'll find out before the month is over, I promise you. The thing is less an outright horror movie and more a corporate thriller with some spooks and dread. You've got an industrial spy trying to find the secret of the titular Stuff, which is... literally goop people found bubbling out of the ground that tastes really good, that got mass marketed. Said goop quickly makes you addicted to it but there's plenty on store shelves and nobody really seems to fight over it. There's enough supply for the demand, and eventually the demand is that this shit takes you over completely. All while the company pumping it out of the ground is making all the money on Earth. Oh, sure, when our industry spy finally finds the Stuff mine, there's this talk about ending world hunger and forming a new order of life. It all sounds very utopian, but it's all in service of the almighty dollar and the Stuff. Even the Stuff's ad slogan, "Enough is never enough", is them all but saying "YOU'LL GET ADDICTED TO THIS SHIT AND MELT YOUR BRAIN AND GIVE US MONEY, HA HA HA!". People addicted to the Stuff can grow violent at the drop of a hat if you snoop around, willing to kill or make you ingest the shit. Now that's fucking brand loyalty. SEE THAT MAN? MURDER HIM! HE'S GOING TO DISCOVER THE SECRET OF THE STUFF! EAT THE STUFF! SERVE THE STUFF! KILL KILL KILL! The shit hollows you out and you're basically its host. What's an industrial spy to do?

Hire a goddamned militia. This is, admittedly, a bit of a tonal misstep for the film. The militia our spy ends up working with is led by an anti-Communist crackpot who's also just a tiny bit racist. Just the teensiest bit. That isn't great, and even though it's 1985 and anti-Communist sentiment is high... you're basically taking the piss out of capitalism with this movie. It's not the best of looks, but there's a kind of redemptive way out of it where they tell the crackpot Colonel what he wants to hear. Using advertisement savvy to get him to their side. That doesn't excuse the rest of it, but it's a potential thing happening. The ending, at least, is definitely some capitalist rebellion. The crackpot's live radio show message about how the Stuff will fucking kill you actually works, and people burn the shit en masse. It turns out, though, that the Stuff execs and the ice cream execs who hired the industrial spy in the first place have joined forces and merged their products into The Taste. The Taste is 88% normal ice cream, and 12% Stuff; enough to make you a Stuff addict, not enough to control your mind and hollow you out as a Stuff host. Our industrial spy reacts to this callous display of capitalist greed by pulling a gun on the guys and making them eat tubs and tubs of Stuff. As he so memorably says, "Are you eating it, or is it eating you?". It's a neat cap to the anti-cap. I kind of dig The Stuff. It's not perfect, but it has its heart mostly in the right place for me to have enjoyed it. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 15 (Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night)

An interesting bit of out-of-sequence discussion, but the hell with it. It's spooky, I played it, I remember it, we can make something of it. All I've got to do is waffle for a couple hundred words and we've got ourselves a post. It's fitting we do this out of sequence, almost. Last year I almost did the game this is a spiritual successor too. I didn't finish it. Sometimes anxiety just pops up and you get a negative association with the thing and don't want to touch it any more. So, before we square away what this is, we need to square away the legacy it's following: Castlevania. Castlevania, as a series, can be divided into distinct eras/styles. You have Classicvania, which are (mostly) linear stage-based action platformers of a certain vintage. In 1997 a new form of Castlevania came about for the Playstation, when Koji Igarashi and his band of Konami pals mashed the aesthetic of Castlevania into a Metroid-esque exploratory platformer. Thus, a new style of Castlevania was born. People like to portmanteau it as Metroidvania, but we'll call it the Igavania. 

Over the next decade there were six more games from him in this style, and they have their fans. I honestly prefer the Classicvania style, but I have played and enjoyed most of the Igavanias. They don't light my world on absolute fire like they do for other people, though. So, years later when Koji Igarashi and new pals kicked off a Kickstarter for a spiritual successor to the Igavania style of game named Bloodstained, I was like "neat" but didn't back it. As it turned out, a stretch goal met for this Kickstarter was a Classicvania-style Bloodstained game. That I was into. Bloodstained Curse Of The Moon was one of my favorite games of 2019. It took Classicvania in the style of Castlevania 3 and improved upon it with snappy quality-of-life features. I adored it. What, then, of Ritual Of The Night? The new Igavania game, the whole reason for this Kickstarter? It seemed neat but the Igavania wasn't my jam, so I held off on buying it. 

Good thing I did, because I got a copy on the Switch as a holiday gift. I appreciated the gift very much, and played the thing once a patch came to fiddle with the Switch version's apparant notorious glitches. I cannot blame my giftgiver for those, however. Anyway, I had a copy of Ritual Of The Night! The grand return to form for Igavania! I played it. It was fine. This is where my own perspective differs from the big fans of this style of game. Curse Of The Moon, I felt, was an improvement upon the foundation of Classicvania, spiritually succeeding it and making it quicker and better. Ritual Of The Night, to me, felt like another Igavania. Another one of those. If there were quality of life improvements, I didn't notice them. It played with the same mechanics as a particular Igavania duology, Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow. Aria and Dawn are very good Igavania games, and cribbing their mechanics also made Ritual Of The Night good. It didn't make it feel like an improvement, though.

Nevertheless, it was enjoyable. Just like all the other Igavanias are enjoyable. There's a huge amount of enemy soul powers you can siphon to gain their special abilities, all to mix and match in order to beat foes and traverse to new areas with mobility powerups. A lot of the puzzles are quite neat, and the difficulty can definitely get up there. I don't want to seem too down on it. This is a fine game. I appreciate the gift. It just didn't light my world on fire like Curse Of The Moon did. That's just fine, you know. We can chalk that up to personal taste. I'm glad that Ritual Of The Night got its funding and got made. Not just because I got Curse Of The Moon out of it, but because all the Igavania fans out there got another one of those. I hope it was everything you wanted and it improved upon the formula for you. For me, it was fine. I spent very little of this talking about the mechanics of anything, but sometimes you just gotta use this space to tell a story. Also I had a bad day and needed a breather. Sorry. Tomorrow, if I'm feeling good, I'll watch something and not talk about Bloodstained. We're not quite done with Bloodstained, though, but that's for later down the line. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 14 (Godzilla Vs. Mothra)

GET THESE DAMN MOTHS OUT OF MY ROOM

 Okay, this one was pretty neat. On a bit more of a serious level than our previous two versus kaiju movies, but it delivered the best kaiju action of the three. That's mostly owing to it being 20/30 years ahead of the others, as it was made in 1992, but still. The kaiju action is really good in this one. I enjoyed it, and I'm going to talk a little in-depth about it. But only a little. We've had chats about Godzilla on the blog, of course, and we also poked at the original Mothra. I got to make a total Death Of The Author reading about it being climate change. I don't quite get to do that here, but part of the movie does follow the same beats as the 1961 Mothra movie. Let's take a peek and see what we've got.

The opening wastes no time, really. A meteor comes down from space and wakes Godzilla up from his ocean nap. From there we go into the human story to set up before the big monsters go smashy, and the setup here almost feels like a Raiders Of The Lost Ark scenario. Archeological mission to Infant Island, down-on-his-luck ex-con going with his ex-wife. I kind of like the vibe the movie gives for just a few moments, exploring this strange place and uncovering ancient wall paintings of Mothra. They even do a thing with a spotlight symbol lighting up the place as the sun rises that's a lot like the Map Room thing in Raiders. Then we find a giant goddamned egg, and also the two tiny girls from Mothra! The story they give is not just about Mothra, but a sort of dark mirror to Mothra called Battra. It's absolutely gonzo shit about ancient advanced civilizations and the natural order of the Earth. Again we have the environmental/natural harmony theme going, with Mothra being the protector who can and will fuck you up for fucking with that harmony. Battra's already shown up in Japan and is fucking shit up, by the by, with lightning blasts and other assorted shit. So that's harmony getting fucked with.

Mothra will later fuck with that harmony, but before that her egg gets fucked up by Godzilla. It's a wild scene, they're towing Mothra's egg by boat and Godzilla just shows up to be a giant asshole. Mothra hatches as a grub and we get them throwing down immediately. Battra shows up as well, just to be a huge dick, and this is wild. The three kaiju movies I picked for this year are a 1v1, a 2v1, and a 3-kaiju free-for-all. There's some real neat underwater fighting between Godzilla and Battra and the pair of them sink into a lava fissure until the third act. In the meantime what we get is a mini-reprise of the '61 Mothra. You know, an arch-capitalist wanting to make a shitload of money off the two tiny girls, and the two tiny girls summoning Mothra to FUCK EVERYTHING UP because this greedy bastard's upsetting the natural order. There's a twist when it turns out the ex-con from before stole the girls from the capitalist to try and sell them, but his ex-wife and daughter chew him out for this as Mothra's attacking and he relents and lets Mothra see them to make her stop fucking shit up. 

She cocoons then, and everything seems nice until Godzilla bursts out of Mt. Fuji to fuck shit up. Mothra soon hatches in a pretty visual stunning scene, but Battra has a grisly moth form now too. What follows is even more kaiju throwing down, and it's pretty wild. Moth lasers, moth lightning, and atomic breath galore. There's a scene where Mothra and Battra are on the ground together, seeming to come to some sort of utopian understanding while Godzilla's out for the count. Then Godzilla gets back up and the two of them team up to wreck Godzilla, but in the end Godzilla gets Battra and the pair fall into the ocean, at which point Mothra seals them up with some purifying Mothra dust power or... something. She also gors off into space to stop a meteor that Battra was going to stop in 1999. A lot of this was plot summary, but I had fun with this one. Mothra's a cool kaiju, as is Battra as the dark enlightenment version of her. Godzilla gets some good rampaging in too, if not beaten out by the flying pair, but it's still a fun watch. A good cap to our kaiju marathon. Next is... Well, I haven't decided yet. Find out tomorrow, like I will. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 13 (Godzilla Vs. Gigan)

You know, when I started watching these Godzilla movies, they were the serious-minded ones where the giant rampaging death lizard symbolised some serious anxiety of the time. Godzilla, Godzilla 1984, and Shin Godzilla are a perfect trilogy of movies about this sort of thing. I adore them very much for it. Godzilla also had a shitload of other movies that featured lots of other monsters beating the shit out of each other and smashing up Tokyo. I dismissed them for a time, but now I'm watching movies like that. Movies like King Kong vs. Godzilla, or today's film. These two movies did have some theme underpinning them, to be fair. They weren't entirely shallow. Nevertheless, what I took from them is that they are absolutely dumb as shit and had me cackling and grinning. Nothing exemplifies this more than Godzilla vs. Gigan. It is completely dumb as shit and I kind of love it for being unashamedly that. Let's poke at it.

Usually the human drama which hooks us into the giant monster stuff is just sort of there. In this case, I was a little more invested. The first half hour of this movie is... well, what is it? As I was watching, I was going to call it a corporate thriller/mystery involving a down-on-his-luck manga artist working for a guy building a children's theme park about giant monsters. He quickly gets wrapped up in the shady business of the park behind closed doors, teams up with some other folks, and investigates. So I was going to say it was an intriguing sort of mystery plot. Then I talked about the movie with a pal and the phrase "Japanese Scooby-Doo gang" came up, and it's an absolute perfect fit for the tone of this investigation. What the investigation turns up is simultaneously batshit gonzo and horrifying. The folks behind the park are actually alien cockroaches wearing dead human beings like outfits, plotting to take over the world by unleashing giant monsters.

Before we talk about the monsters, let's frame the theme of the movie here. These cockroach aliens are doing this because they're the last survivors of a planet which choked itself to death via pollution and nuclear waste and all the other shit humanity itself's been doing to planet Earth. They're working to create a world of peace. For them. By killing all of us with giant monsters and stopping us from polluting the place. That's sort of an environmental message, I guess. Right. So, with the title, you'd expect Godzilla to throw down with a Gigan. That happens, eventually. This movie's actually a tag team match. Godzilla and a monster called Anguirus have teamed up in this movie, and they live on Monster Island with all the other monsters. (Don't look at me, I don't know what the fuck either.) They also talk to each other. In warbling record scratches. While speech bubbles appear next to them. Like a manga. (Cause the main human character's a manga artist, get it?) The aliens send down two monsters from space to wreck the Earth. One's the titular Gigan, a cool-lookin thing with sickle hands and a buzzsaw in its tummy. The other is fucking King Ghidorah.

Yo, holy shit. King Ghidorah. That's an iconic giant monster. Interesting to see that one show up. This movie becomes a big spectacle of Ghidorah and Gigan smashing the everloving shit out of Tokyo. It actually goes on a bit too long for me without anything to break it up like the other two monsters showing up. The initial visceral thrill of shit blowing up got a bit much. Once they do fight, shit gets wild. It even gets a bit bloody with Gigan's buzzsaws drawing blood. Somehow or another the key to the aliens' plan is destroying Godzilla. I forgot to mention their base is a Godzilla-shaped tower. It's also got a laser cannon. You see this tower in the first few minutes and it's a Chekov's Gun. Godzilla has to smash that fucking thing by the end. Well, in the end it's the humans sending up a bunch of dynamite through the elevator which blows off the head of the tower and stops it from fucking Godzilla up with lasers. Then Ghidorah hurls Godzilla into the thing and Godzilla smashes it from there. Close enough. There's more of a throwdown and tag teaming that goes down, and that's the movie. I liked it. It put a big dumb smile on my face. Sometimes that's enough, you know? One more big kaiju battle left, and these two are iconic. We've even covered them both before. Godzilla and Mothra. What a match.