Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Halloween II)

Boo.

Well, here we are at last. Halloween! I am banging this one out at just after 3 PM, having literally finished watching the film in question moments ago. I do this because I want to be closer to the front door to greet the children who are expecting sweet treats and/or tricks. So, let's sort this one out as quick as we can before I get interrupted by like 20 knocks on the door. October 31st, the end of the marathon, has traditionally been the slot for the Halloween franchise. Michael Myers and all that. I've covered pretty much every film, and my options are slim. It was either The Curse Of Michael Myers, Rob Zombie's take, or this film which slipped under my radar for so long. I chose to get this one out of the way, and the slip under the radar was deliberate. I do not care for Halloween II. I did not like this movie the first time I saw it. I might have seen it a second time, I don't know. What I do know is that I gave it another shot just now, and it also failed to connect. Maybe I wasn't fair to the thing, given that I started the morning with a rewatch of the original. As one is a direct sequel to the other, in fact picking up right where it left off, maybe I'm not being so unfair. If it wants to pair itself with the original so bad, then I'll judge it by those standards.

Frezno's Comics Challenge: The Straight Story Six Part 4 (Mary Tyler Moorehawk)

Alright then, before Halloween comes, it's time to talk about another comic. Really, it's rather fortuitous that it's this comic in this month. Dave Baker's Mary Tyler Moorehawk, you see, is this curious little thing which feels like the House Of Leaves of comic books. No, I'm not doing the densely layered footnote joke again, it'd add another two hours to the post and cheapen the bit.¹ Right up front then, in declaring that this is the House Of Leaves of comic books, several questions present itself. Questions like "what does it even mean to be the House Of Leaves of comic books?" or "Can you adapt House Of Leaves into a visual medium such as the comic book?". Let's see if we can get to the bottom of this. Not to rehash everything I said on the book again, and if you've not read that go over here and do so, it's good, but House Of Leaves used the metaphor of the labyrinth to construct itself a labyrinth of words on the page. It did this in various ways, but the main two were arranging the words on the page to mirror what was happening in the story, and drowning everything in verbose footnotes as either a parody of pretentious academia, a digression into a nested narrative, a mirror of the labyrinth theme of the book, or all of the above. With that defined, let's try and answer that first question. Let's try and pin down Mary Tyler Moorehawk.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (Longlegs)

Oh, we're really dwindling down to it now. Halloween approaches, and I can feel it in the air. Those last gasps of summer that you feel during the end of September and into the beginning of October are all gone now. The crisp cold of fall has arrived, and it's only going to get colder from here. There's an obvious tradition here on the spooky marathon for Halloween itself, and so in a sense this is our last exploration. Certainly, it's the last film I've never seen before that we're doing for this one. What do we have here today, then? Longlegs is a film I knew nothing about going in, save for one tiny bit of osmosis. Thanks to my pal Sean (you'll be getting your other comic book post tomorrow, friendo) I had it in my head that this resembled Twin Peaks in a fashion. It does, but it does it with its own flourish and style completely different from David Lynch and Mark Frost do it. That's not unwelcome, however, and I found this film growing on me.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (X)

Alright, time for the Jenna Ortega half of this thing. Which, she's actually only a supporting character in this, oops. Look, I wasn't going to watch the Beetlejuice legacy sequel for this. Probably could have done a little Wednesday for it. Oh well. Look, even if she's not the focus and it doesn't end too well for her in the motion picture, I didn't know that going in. In fact, I didn't know much of anything going in except that this was a Ti West picture. We've covered his work twice thus far, first with The House Of The Devil and then technically in the first V/H/S movie. His segment was one of the better ones, it had a particular scare that used the found footage format well and a wild twist. Still had a man be shitty to a woman though, so not helping that particular film's vibes. So, again, no idea of what I was getting into when going into the movie X. What I got certainly was interesting, so let's jam with it a little.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 13 (Abigail)

In this scene Melissa Barrera shows the 
importance of masking.

Before we get going here, a little bit of a tangent on why I'm doing this film and the next one. Last year, as you may recall, there was a strike and so for the Halloween marathon that meant not talking about any struck studio films as a stand of solidarity. Included among this was 2023's Scream VI, and so true to my word I did not talk about it. I did, however, watch it eventually. I do not remember it all that well. Scream V was a master class of a self-aware slasher, updating itself both for another generation of horror movie evolution it could reflect as well as making its killers the ultimate escalation of toxic fandom: committing murders so that Hollywood would adapt them into a trope-laden slasher movie that would get back to basics and not do any innovative shit like that Rian Johnson guy done. Scream VI was too soon to have anything to say about the state of horror or fandom or anything interesting like that. It has some half-hearted messaging but its most meta moment has the movie shrug and go "It's a sequel to a legacy reboot which means anything can happen!". The anything, in this case, was a bunch of callbacks to the Scream franchise and also pissed-off family members of one of the killers from the last movie deciding they were justified in pretending to be friends with the protagonists before killing all their friends and then laughing about how they're the good guys in the climax. 

Why are we talking about Scream? Because of what happened next. Namely Melissa Barrera getting shitcanned from Scream for (gasp) saying that maybe all the Palestinians shouldn't be fucking killed! Her costar Jenna Ortega followed suit, and that left the new Scream series without its leading ladies... at which point they have just called Neve Campbell back as a desperate pandering plea to the Scream fans out there. WE'RE SO SORRY THEY SAID THE MEAN THING, THEY'RE FIRED NOW, BUT LOOK WE GOT YOUR OLD FAVORITE FINAL GIRL BACK PLEASE GIVE US MONEY! It is as cowardly and craven a business decision and appeasement to "the fans" as The Rise Of Skywalker, and the people behind it should fucking know better considering they made assholes like that the fucking killers two movies ago. As a result, here's my line in the sand. No more Scream on the spooky marathons. I really dig some of the older ones, and Scream V did light my world on fire with how much it seemed to get that toxic fandom can and would escalate into literal death for the sake of a fucking motion picture. Life does not imitate art, and they have sided with that fandom. Let them have Scream VII. They're toxic fandom, they'll probably hate it because a black woman dared to appear on screen or something.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 12 (Splatterhouse 2)

We once again find ourselves in an unexpected place, but nothing too unexpected. This did start as a video game criticism blog, after all. I haven't done that at all this year since the masochistic nightmare of Final Fantasy II, but what the hell? A quick one for old time's sakes... and I do mean old times. We previously looked at Splatterhouse on the very first iteration of the Halloween marathon, in 2016. Holy Christ that's a long time ago. It's a bit of a messy post, but what do you want from me, I was banging out 31 of these things back then. They can't all be winners. Let's try and give this one some craft to make it a winner, though, and give it some context. To wit, then: Splatterhouse was a 1988 arcade game from Namco, a sidescrolling beat-em-up game with a sense of the visceral to it. Instead of just punching dudes in the face and making them fall down, you punch ghouls hard enough that they burst into pools of bloody guts and gore. It's a neat little arcade game with a lot of depth, creepy atmosphere, and enough gross bloody stuff to interest any gore hound who loved Freddy and Jason at the time. In 1992 a sequel came out, this time on the Sega Genesis. It fits at home there, the Genesis having originally been marketed as this graphical powerhouse that could give you the gaming ideal of the time, Like The Arcade BUT AT HOME! 1992 feels a little late for that sort of thing, being post-Sonic for the Genesis, but whatever. What is happening with Splatterhouse 2?

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 11 (Godzilla Minus One Minus Color)

Now that we have that magical ritual out of the way, where were we? Ah yes. Talking more about kaiju movies, specifically one I really love. I've seen this one once before, of course. I couldn't wait for the spooky season to come around and I really wanted to see it, so I saw it. I was absolutely blown the fuck away by it. If I may be so bold, Godzilla Minus One may be the best Godzilla picture of them all. It's a stellar picture that mixes the spectacle of the giant monster with real and raw human emotion and angst, all of it born from the specific vibes that were in the air in post-war Japan. Movies like Godzilla 1984 or GMK tried to do that back to basics approach, where they were only in conversation with the 1954 original and building off of that. Godzilla Minus One does it better than any of them, because it takes a different approach: Rather than being a story-based followup building off of "in 1954 a giant fucking monster rampaged through Japan", Godzilla Minus One is a tonal twin to the 1954 original. That somber mournful tone of a country still reeling from an atomic horror, struggling to rebuild when half its world was blasted to bits by an incomprehensible thing of infinite power. Other Godzilla movies I like have struck near that vibe, of their present-day Japan using Godzilla as a metaphor for present-day anxieties like the Cold War or the 2011 tsunami. Godzilla Minus One nails it, and goes even further beyond.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween Day 10: Frezno's Comics Challenge October 2024 (From Hell)

I love it when I get to kill birds with one stone and do a combo of two running series on the blog. In this case, I get to do a spooky marathon post and deal with the main Comics Challenge for October. It's quite helpful, and we definitely have a fitting comic here with From Hell. Last time on the Comics Challenge, we got to talk about Grant Morrison. Here's another titan of comics, one Alan Moore. Yes, that grumpy old bearded Northerner what worships a snake god and hates the fuck out of the comic obsession with superheroes. I don't have much to say on the man himself, I'm not writing about any magical war he fought on the battleground of the comic book or anything like that. From Hell, however, is quite the book indeed. It alights my imagination and gives me a lot to talk about, so I'll try to keep to some form of brevity.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 9 (Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack)

It is once again time for an annual staple during this here spooky marathon thing, as we transition nicely from Japanese tokusatsu to Japanese kaiju pictures. They're in the same boat, so to speak, and we even get to talk about Godzilla again on here! It feels like it's been a while since I've done that, as I spent like three years going on about Gamera in the 1990s. Gamera 3 is still really good, y'all. The pal who got me watching those Gamera movies also got me to view this one with them, and they really like it a lot. I definitely have a swirl of thoughts about... what's the full title of this again? Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. Just rolls right off your tongue. They call it GMK for short, so fuck it, let's do that. This isn't Non-Specific November Writing Month, these things don't have a word count. What is there to say, then, about GMK?

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.

Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (I Saw The TV Glow)

 Well, here we go again. Welcome, one and all, to... what the hell am I calling this again? Hold on. I am looking it up. Ah. Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween. Catchy title. I've been doing this for several years now, you run out of titles. Regardless, please enjoy these posts on spooky media that will be uploaded on every odd day in October, culminating on Halloween with luck. What a film we have to start with. Let's get one thing out of the way, right now, as we define this. I Saw The TV Glow is not your typical horror film. There is no mask-wielding maniac, no supernatural spirit, no buckets of blood. For many this seems to be a dealbreaker... but there are layers to the terror in this, and it's of a particular nuance that seems to elide some folks. I'm going to try and pin it down for you, but first I need to tell you a story about myself. It involves events I've discussed before, but you need the full scope to understand exactly where and how this film hit me where it hurt. If you've not seen this film before... Please, for the love of God, watch it before reading it. Don't let me spoil it for you. We on the same page? Good.