Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Kamen Rider Shin)

You know, it wouldn't be a spooky marathon if we didn't get some Japanese media in here. In the past I've dabbled in anime, and of course a little of kaiju cinema. Good old Godzilla will be showing up soon enough, I promise, but before that it is time for Kamen Rider. I've been dabbling in karate bug men for quite some time now, having been on a podcast which covered all of the Zero-One series and is now partway through covering the Build series. I also did Shotaro Ishinomori's Kamen Rider manga as one of the Comics Challenge things, I believe as part of the Straight Story Six. Most helpfully, perhaps for this, I've seen Hideaki Anno's Shin Kamen Rider. That movie is quite distinct from Kamen Rider Shin, which we'll be talking about today, but it's quite good. It's a real love letter to 70's tokusatsu and karate bug men guys beating each other up while ruminating on the cycle of violence and the hateful spread of fascism. It is, I'm sorry to say, a better movie than Kamen Rider Shin. That's not to say this doesn't have its charms, just that I didn't have enough of them. Let me try and explain.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (A Dark Song)

Okay, so I got a little carried away there. Whoops. Still, I'd like to think I did that particular book and its intricacies justice. With that out of the way, it's time for another one of those ones that I didn't pick, but that friends of mine did. A Dark Song is not a film I'd ever heard about, or indeed knew anything about going in. I just sort of sat there and let it wash over me. It was an interesting experience, and there's quite a lot going on here but now I get to sit here and try to make sense of it. That's what we do here, and it's what I'm going to do again, so let's talk about this weird little object of a motion picture.

A Dark Song is a magical ritual movie. I don't think the actual film itself is an invocation of anything, but the narrative focuses in great detail on a magic ritual to summon an angel and the movie reflects that in some ways. Rather than a quick scene of casting an incantation and offering a sacrifice or something, the ritual in this movie takes up the majority of the film. It is a slow, laborious, and detailed process that takes literal months with two people locked together in a house, surrounded by a magic circle, and taking every step in order to eventually complete this ritual. It is a tense and fraught thing as the magician hired for this job by our protagonist butts heads with her on several occasions, can be downright mean, and does some real heinous shit in the name of "purifying" the ritual and keeping it on track. It's deeply unpleasant stuff, bordering on watching an abusive relationship play out before our eyes. Though the movie has more visceral horrors in its climax, this is the real horror lurking at play for most of the movie: the fact that this man could snap at the woman at a moment's notice.

That sense of isolation permeates the movie, its setting, and its main theme. Our main protagonist, Sophie, is that isolation. She has retreated to this house to perform this complicated and torturous summoning in order to get vengeance on the occultists who killed her young son. She has isolated herself from the family she has left, in dogged pursuit of this, and endures unspeakable pain and torture in pursuit of this purpose... but the one thing she won't do is ask for forgiveness. That isolation and self-loating is at the very heart of the movie, at the very dark heart of Sophie herself as she goes through the painful months of the ritual. Many of the reviews I saw after watching it called it a "slow burn" movie and it's easy to see why. It just ruminates in this space, these awful feelings, this terrible mood... and then escalates. Its ending is what set the movie a step above for me, though, and I'm choosing not to spoil it but let us just say that enduring this pain and even more causes Sophie to change her mind and find something new to cut against that isolation and hate. Shall we say, perhaps, that Sophie believes in the song in her heart? Cheeky reference, I know, but that's what I got to close this one out. This is a pretty good one, and it grew on me. I don't have much more to say on it. Sometimes, counter to the luxuriously detailed ritual, less is more. Take that less, and enjoy it, and maybe seek this one out this spooky season if you can handle the subject matter.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 6 (House Of Leaves)

(Special thanks to Sean and Lena for once-overs and ideas. For best results, read in a browser.)

Ba da ba ba

I'm haunted

By the hallways in this tiny room

The echo there of me and you

The voices that are carrying this tune

Ba da ba ba¹

This has been a long time coming. For over 15 years, House Of Leaves has been one of my all-time favorite works of horror. Why, then, have I never covered it for these myriad of marathons? Part of it was the time commitment needed to delve into it, with life being busy in addition to having to juggle 31 other writeups and the time to watch or read them. Even when I slashed that number in half for my own sanity and free time, the book eluded me. This was the year I decided to finally revisit it, and to my delight I discovered that my critical analysis skills had grown enough to be able to cover it. Thanks to my work all year on the Comics Challenge², I have gained the ability to properly talk about the brilliant and strange things this book, this tome, this mysterious artifact contains within its twisty little passages. I am only scratching the surface of House Of Leaves, but that is all I need to do for this. A peek inside the labyrinth. If you choose to delve fully into its maze, then be it on you. For now, just a peek.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 5 (Nothing But The Night)

 Let's just run with this theme for a bit, shall we? Last time we talked about a strange piece of British media that I likely never would have covered had it not been suggested by a pal. This time, we are going to do that again. Whereas The Worst Witch was family friendly, this is not. Thanks to my British (allegedly) pal Rain, I put my eyes in front of a piece of 70's British horror called Nothing But The Night. Hey, it's got Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in it! You know, from all that other British horror! And it was written by Brian Hayles, who also wrote a whole bunch of good Doctor Who like Curse Of Peladon! And also created the Toymaker. Oh. Oh dear. Well, nobody's perfect. Still, there are good things to say about this film and there isn't a racist cartoon in it so that's always a plus. Let's do our usual thing and dive into it, because it was certainly a film that I watched.

I'm going to be honest. I spent the majority of this watch wondering why in the hell I was doing it for this marathon. Not because it was bad, it was a quite fine example of old British character actors talking to each other and stuff, but it was more of a mystery thriller than anything spooky per se. Yes, the movie opens with bodies being disposed of in various ways to hide how they were murdered, like shooting them at point-blank range to make it look self-inflicted or putting them in a car and having it go off a cliff. There's even a wild fakeout where what seems to be the dashing young protagonist of the movie gets it like 20 minutes in. Someone's picking off these people, and everyone who isn't the assumed protagonist is a trustee in some orphanage so the assumption is that they're being bumped off to get the trust funds or whatever. There's also this traumatized orphan girl who was in a bus crash having nightmares about shit being on fire, and her estranged mother's this problematic ex-con who killed a bunch of people. She's the red herring of the movie, but lord do they spend a lot of time with her crazed vendetta of getting back at the orphanage or... whatever she was up to.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (The Worst Witch)

Sometimes I encounter shit on this blog and wonder what in the world I'm doing putting it in front of my eyes. The open suggestions are a good thing, usually, but at times they lead to oddities like this. Thanks to my pal Kat, I therefore find myself looking at something that once again steers away from the blood and gore of spooky slashers to something with more family friendly Halloween vibes. A classic tale about magically adept youth at a British school for witches-- NO NOT THAT ONE JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND SHE WANTS HALF OF THE FRIENDS I CARE ABOUT TO FUCKING DIE GOOD GOD NO!!! No, we're talking about The Worst Witch. I remember they had a show based on this in the late 90's, probably imported from Britain, and it aired on YTV up here in Canada. I only know of it, however, and so I instead sat down and watched a 70 minute children's movie about witches today. It was alright, and a little weird in places.\

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 3 (V/H/S 85)

See? Something spooky and scary, with blood and gore and screams and other such macabre stuff. The fact that I'm even back here again to begin with is something of a small miracle. Last year we covered the first entry in the V/H/S series. I really didn't like it. It was lurid in ways beyond just handheld camera footage of people getting stabbed in the throat, as many of its segments were just fucking mean to women in a gross frat boy kind of way. Juvenile misogyny of the worst kind on screen. That and the fact that I'm still not over one of the segments of this creepy VHS tape horror anthology being done in the style of online video chat. The fact that it's decent body horror (albeit once again shitty to women in the form of gaslighting them) is irrelevant in the face of abandoning the goddamn gimmick of the movie you're making. I don't think it's too much to ask for all your segments to share the VHS tape aesthetic. Point is, I would have written this whole thing off if it weren't for pals telling me that some of the later ones are really good. So I gave it a shot with this, from just last year. If they can't nail the found footage VHS horror anthology aesthetic in a movie whose segments are set in the 80's, then there's little goddamn hope.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 2 (Miami Vice: Shadow In The Dark)

Would you look at that? We're back here again. At the start of the year (which feels like it was a million years ago now) I sat down and watched all of Miami Vice. In April, I wrote about it. I had much to say, but I specifically saved one bit of discussion and sent it forward in time by six months. That brings us to the here and now, to one particular episode which aired in the third season on Halloween night of 1986: Shadow In The Dark. Even back then, all those months ago, I knew this episode was something special. Now that I have the knowledge of the whole show with me, I can declare that not only is this episode a pure distillation of one of its core themes, but it actually does it better than some of the big dramatic arcs to come. What terrors await in the humid dark of Miami? Come, and let me show you.