Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Halloween Kills/Halloween Ends)

Here we are! The spooky night itself, when the kids run around in the dark in masks and want candy from us folks who are staying in and throwing on spooky media. Like this double bill. Actually, to be truthful, I am writing this part the day before because I watched the first movie the night before. I'm a SPOOKY SPECTRE OF THE RECENT PAST OOOOOOO. Basically I knew I was going to cover this film, but I did not realize the finale of this modern Halloween trilogy was also like, available on streaming stuff? So I can just watch both of them and put a cap in the trilogy. You get a double treat tonight, a metaphorical full size Snickers bar from my house. Let's hop on back to Haddonfield, Illinois, and encounter that Michael Myers again starting with...

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (Mandy)

 You ever watch a movie so good that its one major flaw pisses you off? That's the boat I'm in tonight, having watched the film Mandy earlier today. Let me be clear. Mandy had the chance to be a transcendental thing, almost an experience rather than a film, something which used the language of cinema not to tell a plot but to invoke a mood, an idea, an ethos in the one sitting in front of it. It could have been one of my favorite pieces of spooky media ever. Then it does something at the halfway point which I cannot forgive, which lowers its status down to a still pretty good movie. Oh, but how I lament what could have been. What was burned at the altar of plotting decisions for the sake of that which I cannot sanction. Let me talk about those halves. What could have been, and what is instead.

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (Cure)

Ahh, once again it's the kind of film that makes me scratch my head and wonder just what I'm going to bullshit about until I get a sufficient amount of words in the Notepad file to deem this postable. Helpfully, though, it's quite serendipitous that I should have to cover this film on the blog directly after Larry Cohen's God Told Me To. In a madcap way, they're sort of mirrors of each other. In another madcap way, they're both opposite. Yes, that's contradictory, but let me explain by way of example, and in doing so get an analysis of this neat little film.

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 13 (God Told Me To)

THEY'RE BRINGING LOVE, DON'T LET THEM
GET AWAY!!!

It's always fun when I shut one of these films off and just stare blankly at my TV and wonder A) what in the hell I just watched and B) how in the hell I am going to attempt to say anything coherent about it for my blog. Then I remember that I'm a finely-honed master of rambling and bullshitting and have been doing it for close to 25 years. Then I remember how old that makes me feel. Anyway, here's God Told Me To from Larry Cohen. We've encountered Larry Cohen before, as he worked on The Stuff. Does God Told Me To have anything to do with The Stuff? Not at all. It's just a weird little factoid, but in doing so I've filled out an intro paragraph and made enough buffer space that I can talk about the movie I just watched. See, I told you. I'm terribly clever at all this, and the conversational tone just helps. Okay, for real, what is this movie doing?

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 12 (Scream [2022])

THESE BETTER BE YOUR FAVORITE
SCARY MOVIES!!!

Man, oh man. If ever there were a fucking horror movie to watch a few scant hours before Chris Chibnall's Doctor Who tenure comes to a close. I don't know what I was expecting going in to another take on Scream, perhaps the meta-slasher series of them all. I kind of hoped that, without the late Wes Craven, the movie still had something interesting to say like the others did. I have neglected to cover Screams 3 and 4 on the blog, but I remember them vaguely. I liked the killer twist of Scream 4, but that's about all that sticks out a decade later. Anyway, all of this is to say that this new Scream floored me. It almost flawlessly updates its sly knowing meta-slasher status for the modern age, delivering a film that had me hooting and hollering. Let's not run down the whole damn thing. Let us be quick and cutting, like the swift motion of a blood-stained knife wielded by a ghostfaced maniac.

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 11 (Coraline)

Well, this was something. I'm really not sure how I am going to describe it, but I'm going to take a shot at it for an amount of time. I'm no real stranger to Neil Gaiman, of course. I really liked Sandman and for many years I considered The Doctor's Wife to be the best episode of Doctor Who ever made. (These days it's top 5 material, though lord help me if you asked me what the other four were.) Pair Gaiman's storytelling with the fabulous stop-motion visuals of Henry Selick, and you get Coraline, a film which is a generation removed from me but I'm sure is a foundational text for those Gen Z kids who laid eyes on it a decade and change ago. Many a wise scholar has said that the best media for kids sticks in your mind with a handful of unsettling moments and visuals, and if that's the case then Coraline must be a fucking masterpiece.

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 10 (Cube)

Oh, Canada. It's time to cover some homegrown horror, with a spooky minimalist film made in Canada! Hooray! It's an abstract film about a bunch of people stuck in a murder cube that refuses to define itself or its reason for being! Ah. You're throwing me into the deep end here, and forcing me to try and wrangle some symbolic deeper meaning from the film without just describing what goes on in it, I see. Or maybe there is no deeper design behind what the film is doing and it's just nihilist anarchy for its own sake, 80 minutes of cube murder and terrible people. Could be, could be! Or maybe... just maybe... I'm marking time until we get a sizeable opening paragraph to transition into what I took from the abstract murder cube movie. What could be the truth?

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 9 (Gamera 2: Attack Of Legion)

With the spooky season comes that oh-so-familiar time of year. It ain't just slashers and found footage that become seasonally appropriate, oh no. It is officially KAIJU TIME BAYBEE!!! Last year a pal suggested I view 1995's Gamera: Guardian Of The Universe, a gloriously fun movie about a heroic turtle kaiju beating the shit out of a giant bird kaiju with a message about environmentalism and spiritual psychic links to said heroic turtle kaiju. I enjoyed it. I guess a bunch of people in Japan also enjoyed it because a sequel got made, and I sat down to watch it with that pal. What giant turtle adventures did we discover?

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Old)

Oh, God. Well, it's our first dance with M. Night Shymalan on this here blog. I remember seeing The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable at the time they came out. I think I even knew the big twist of The Sixth Sense at the time, and I'm not sure how I came to know that considering it came out in like 1999. I tapped out somewhere around Signs, save for the last movie of his I watched. That would be The Last Airbender. Readers, I trust you will forgive me my reluctance to return to his filmography after that. Regardless, somehow we made it here. I have to talk, for a certain length of time, about M. Night Shymalan's 2021 film about The Beach That Makes You Old. Let's, uh... let's try to do that?

I say try because I bounced off of this movie hella hard. It is not as if this movie's premise is too rock fucking stupid to work. A bunch of people trapped on a secluded resort beach which rapidly ages them, from which there is no escape due to the metaphysical fuckery of the advanced aging giving them the sci-fi bends if they try to leave the way they came? It could work. Some parts do work, like the slow descent into madness of the doctor character or the fucked-up payoff to his wife having a calcium deficiency that eventually leads to body horror. Or the bit where someone's tumor rapidly expands and has to be surgically removed. It is not as if this film is total garbage all around. Other parts, like the kids who rapidly grow up and "play" and then one of them's pregnant? What in the fuck? More to the point, the acting and dialogue all around just put me at a distance from the film. I don't usually complain about that shit, but here we are. And yet, there's still some poignancy, like the scene where the main couple of the film age to death and share one last bittersweet moment together. 

Of course, being Shymalan, there has to be a twist ending to it all. The twist ending is that this is all grotesque experiments by Big Pharma, to test out drugs against various conditions by slipping people with said diseases the test drugs and then tricking them onto the beach which makes them old, to monitor how they react to the drugs over a lifetime in one day. It's cruel capitalism at its worst, parading around in a "needs of the many" mask. OH, YOU WANT TO TAKE YOUR CHILDREN TO THE BEACH? YES! YES, I WILL TRICK YOU AND YOUR KIDS ONTO THE BEACH! I CONDEMN YOU TO DEATH IN THE NAME OF MY RESEARCH! The end of the movie papers a line about how this whole scheme gets uncovered and the people behind it punished in the end, but like... Man, why didn't you make a movie about that? Shymalan kind of did, I guess, in that this was what was happening all along. On another level, it's just a microcosm of people getting old rapidly and surprise, it was capitalism. M. Night Shymalan has done what I thought impossible: he made a movie critical of capitalistic death drive at the expense of ordinary people and made me bored of it. I honestly just should have rewatched A Cure For Wellness again, if that's the kind of spooky movie I wanted tonight, and you should too. Let's just leave this movie to age to death on the beach and something something I'm done.

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare)

Here's a sobering thought that I can share with you all. Somehow or another, I have been doing this Halloween blogging thing long enough to have covered every mainline Nightmare On Elm Street film. After this, all I have left is Freddy Vs. Jason and the 2010 reboot, neither of which really excite me enough to want to cover at the moment. Time will tell, I guess, but for the time being this is the spooky marathon's last dance with Mr. Krueger. Fitting, I guess, that this is the movie which decided to kill him and put an end to the series. In a way, I guess it did: New Nightmare is a meta thing and the 2010 reboot is a reboot, so all you have to do is tangle Freddy Vs. Jason as a movie in Jason's continuity and not Freddy's and there you go, this is the last true Freddy movie. There's a lot going on here before they kill him, so let's poke at it.

I keep mentioning Freddy Vs. Jason, so let's signpost that with a fun fact: As big dumb 80's slashers, I value the Freddy films way higher than the Jason ones. I find Friday the 13th to be very one note "the teens have sex and then I cut their throats" nonsense. Freddy, on the other hand, has had two things going for him to catch my interest time and time again. The first is the novel approach of killing people in their dreams, which opens up all sorts of creative liberty and gonzo approach to how to kill the teens. So, for instance, you have the madcap Looney Tunes-like malarkey going on in this fucking movie. Parasitic hearing aids that amplify sound and make a deaf kid's head explode, or the bit where Breckin Meyer gets high and passes out and goes into a TV world where Freddy is playing Nintendo to try and kill him before whipping out a knifed Mattel Power Glove and winning at the game/plunging Breckin Meyer into the depths of hell. Yes, this is rock fucking stupid and a total decay from the original horrific concept of Freddy, and it's like a shock of cold water in three years when Wes Craven comes back and makes him scary. On the other hand, I kind of don't care. This slasher film slapstick approach, this... slashstick, let's call it, is gloriously entertaining. It reminds me of Busta Rhymes roundhouse kicking and electrocuting the balls of Michael Myers in Halloween Resurrection. People hate that movie for that, but I am here for that dumb shit.

I said there were two things these Nightmare movies had going for them over other slashers, and the second was interesting themes and subtext. From the gay undertones of 2 to the state of mental health in 3 to grief and loss and memory in 4, there has usually always been something really intriguing going on under the hood of these movies beyond just kids getting killed in their dreams. Nightmare 5 kind of skipped out on this, to the film's detriment, but you better believe there's something happening in this movie. It's about the cycle of abuse. All of the troubled teens in the movie are victims of abuse in one form or another, from one extreme to the other, and in their deep dark nightmares they are confronted by it; some killed by it. For all the slapstick Nintendo dork shit happening with Breckin Meyer, it's notable that the first enemy in his game is his jock dad yelling digitized cries of BE LIKE ME! before Meyer beats him over the head with a tennis racket. You get other more serious cases of abuse with the other characters, and it creates an interesting tonal whiplash.

We haven't even gotten to the main lead, Maggie, yet. Who, spoilers for a 30 year-old movie where a slasher monster dies, is Freddy's daughter who was given up for adoption after his heinous crimes. It's implied that Freddy losing his daughter is what drove him to come back from the dead as a vengeful dream killer ghost, taking everyone else's children from them. Indeed, much like Halloween Resurrection earlier, the film opens with his victory. He's killed every kid in Springwood, Ohio, and now after a quick recharge from killing off part of this movie's cast he wants to go out into the world and kill more. Every town has an Elm Street, and Freddy's an immortal unkillable thing thanks to some bullshit dream demons... but forget them for a second. Let's focus on that cycle of abuse, as we learn in the climax when Maggie dream dives into Freddy's twisted mind, IN THREE DEE, and finds his own lurid history of abuse at the hands of his own father. Freddy harnessed the pain, laughing it off and deciding to inflict it instead. He's convinced of this cycle. His father abused him. He became a child killer, in life and in death. Now he's convinced it's in Maggie's blood, and that she'll put on the glove and be unable to resist becoming a monster.

Maggie, who saw her own mother killed at the hands of Freddy, responds to this by ramming Freddy's own fucking glove into his chest, and also a pipe bomb, and blowing him up. The cycle of abuse isn't a sure thing, much like the guaranteed continuation of an 80's slasher movie series. Sometimes you can break out of it, shove a pipe bomb into its chest, and break free. The cycle's broken, the dream demons are dispersed, and Freddy's fucking dead, baby. That's the movie, and I'm honestly a little impressed by it. I would be remiss if I didn't close by mentioning that it was directed by Rachel Talalay, who would go on to direct all the Peter Capaldi finales of Doctor Who. Those are spectacular fucking episodes, and her direction in this is sound. I really don't know much about that side of things, but the way this movie looks is just stunning. You can tell the same person directed Heaven Sent, is what I'm saying. Amusingly, I saw her name pop up again in a franchise I've grown invested in: I was sitting here watching the fourth episode of the new Quantum Leap, only to see that "Directed by Rachel Talalay" credit and perk right up. Still, that's neither here nor there. I should close out fittingly, since the movie opens with a quote by Nietzsche about dreams (and also "Welcome to primetime, bitch", for some reason).

Freddy is dead. Freddy remains dead, and we have killed him. 

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 6 (One Cut Of The Dead)

KEEP FILMING, ASSHOLE, I WANT THAT
PALME D'OR!!!

So this film was on my radar for a while, having been watched by a pal or two of mine. I thought for the longest time that I'd gotten the main "twist" of the film via osmosis by sheer accident, and I'd ruined what would otherwise have been a subversive masterpiece. Cue my surprise when I turned out to be completely wrong, and the movie twisted itself in a way I did not expect but found utterly welcome. As such I have to tackle it a little differently and actually kind of care about "spoilers", so if anything I say about the movie in the next two paragraphs intrigues you, then please close the tab and seek out the movie and come back. There. I gave a bit of advice, now I can say whatever I want.

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 5 (Winter Of '83)

Good lord, have I got an interesting one before me tonight. We've dealt with the idea of "analog horror" before in these marathons, with pieces like Local 58 or the WNUF Halloween Special. Media which aims to weaponize that lo-fi VHS aesthetic and glitch it out to create something unreal and terrifying in its simplicity. We've also dealt with the spooky side of the creative mind behind this, Lewis Lovhaug, who some may better know by his online handle of Linkara. He was a major part of A Voice From The Dark, a horror-themed audio drama where he and other people formerly of the Channel Awesome website worked out their feelings about that mistrust in a Lovecraftian nightmare house. 

Got all that? Okay, so on April Fool's Day of this year he releases this thing, the gag being "ha ha ha I am going outside my usual wheelhouse of comic book reviews to do an analog horror film, April Fool's!". Then he manages to make his genre-hopping [[shitpost]] actually a pretty effective piece of analog horror. It's not quite as esoteric as Local 58, but it doesn't frustratingly break its own aesthetic rules like the WNUF show. It would fall somewhere between those, but higher on the quality scale. You get a little bit of everything with Winter Of '83. Obviously you have the analog horror of an 80's public access station getting its signal intruded upon and glitching out to broadcast sudden shocking images and creepy text overlays, but this... movie? Miniseries? It originally aired in parts but I watched the 70-minute compilation, so let's just call it a movie for now. It does more than just a TV signal flashing gore and disturbing text. You have elements of both found footage and the audio drama like in Voice From The Dark, and it all mixes together to form this patchwork of panic.

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (Perfect Blue)

(TW: sexual assault)

Ahh, back to the comforting embrace of anime! And this one even has a pop idol in it, just like the last time we checked in with anime on the blog back in the spring! Boy howdy, what utopian songs are we going to sing about this time? Oh. Oh, it's not about singing and friendship. It's actually unsettling psychological horror with an uncomfortable descent into uncomfortable themes that blurs the line between artifice and reality. I knew that coming in tonight, of course. Notably, however, I did not really know that coming in to it the first time I watched the movie. Going in blind, so to speak, kind of fucked me up and left an impression upon my internal landscape. A little bit of flinching fear whenever remembering that movie. Sometimes it's a good idea to face one's fears, and so I decided to take a second look at the film to talk about it. Let's.

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 3 (Arachnophobia)

Okay, let's move away from ghosts and busting them and talk about... spiders? Good lord, that's half of you running for the hills then. I don't fear spiders, but I wouldn't want them crawling on me or anything either. Still, this movie lingers on them in a lot of ways and is also doing some neat stuff structurally. It's executive produced by Steven Spielberg so some part of me is connecting it to other films with his name on them. Maybe that won't bear much fruit, but it'll give me something to talk about. The lush opening in South America with helicopters and waterfall vistas and treks through the jungle led by indigenous guides gives me Raiders Of The Lost Ark vibes, for instance. We don't stay here long, though, as we quickly get spiders biting a guy and killing him before hitching a ride with his body back to the USA.

From there the movie is very low-key but also quite effective. In broad strokes to compare it to Spielberg again, this feels like Gremlins with spiders. A colorful cast of humble small-town folks encountering a strange thing from very far away which reproduces to cause havoc and death throughout the whole town. Of course, Gremlins also had Joe Dante on hand to give things a dissonant tone of wackiness along with the dark horror element. Arachnophobia lacks that, but one wonders what kind of movie that would make. No, this is a played straight movie with spiders biting people and making them go "argh" before falling over dead, and then cutting to their funerals. The editing's brilliant and efficient in that regard, almost taking the restraint from early Friday the 13th. Yeah, they got bit, you don't really need a scene of them choking to death and going "argh", you get the idea.

At the center of it all is Jeff Daniels, the titular arachnophobe who has to overcome his fears to save the town. I kind of like the subversion that he and his son are spooked by spiders, while the women in the family are undisturbed, at least until the spooky killer spiders enter the picture. It was a strange experience, watching this movie. It was very low-key played straight, and honestly not particularly impressing me but not infuriating me either. There are only so many ways to play the tension of "oh no someone is going to get bit by a killer spider", after all. Then the climax happens, with Daniels' home overrun by fucking spiders as they crawl everywhere out of the woodwork as the family tries to escape, leading to Daniels falling off the second floor and through the floor into the basement, with a final encounter with the main spiders and their big baby nest egg. This is good shit! This is genuinely great and gripping tense stuff and it all happens in a cramped wine cellar with some spider puppets and a beat-up Jeff Daniels! 

I guess my main problem is, I wish that the second act of the movie had the energy of the climax, and that the climax had an energy level even higher. The movie's so low-key that it shifts too late and I wanted to see it shift into overdrive. That, and I wanted to see more of John Goodman. He's in this as an exterminator and his every scene is wonderful, as John Goodman so often is. He's not sinister like he would later be in 10 Cloverfield Lane, but he plays shit just right and I would have loved to see more of him. As it stands, the spider movie is fine. Don't even think of looking at it if you actually have arachnophobia, though, because it will fuck you up. Speaking of getting fucked up, let's throw caution to the wind and throw on a film which fucked me up the first time I saw it...

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 2 (The Real Ghostbusters)

And here we are. Back in 1986, when the Ghostbusters did original shit. Having faced down the ideological opponent that was Afterlife, I have plunged myself into the source of all that Ghostbusters nostalgia. At least, I'm pretty sure a kid-friendly Saturday morning take on the Ghostbusters is the reason why there are so many Ghostbuster traditionalists out there these days. The point is, I always wanted to contrast Afterlife with this on the blog for one simple reason: The nostalgic Saturday morning show seemed to have way more originality than the big movie. You got new ghosts and mythological creatures and weird shit every week, whereas Afterlife gave you the same four spooky things from the first movie and one eyeball ghost (WHO I LEARNED IS A FUCKING TOY FROM THE CARTOON, ORIGINALITY ZERO FOR AFTERLIFE) to tickle the nostalgia bone. Let's look at like, three or four episodes of this show real quick and talk about some interesting stuff.

Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (Ghostbusters Afterlife)

It is once again October, and it is once again time for SPOOKY MONTH! Welcome, one and all, to Sixteen More Screams For Halloween, the marathon where we say something about something spooky and do that sixteen times because 31 is too many these days. Boy, did I pick a whopper for the introductory one. I'm writing this shit at like 7 in the morning because I got shit to do this morning and need to bang out the writing. So, in a slightly groggy state, let's see if I can shake off the sleepies and be coherent against this movie. I can sum up the hot water I found myself in by firing it up in a sentence: I liked the 2016 Ghostbusters movie. I am in the minority on that opinion, and the majority revolted so much that this movie was made, a panicked pull of the reverse lever to go back and do a proper Ghostbuster movie which plays off of the old stuff and is steeped in old Ghostbuster continuity reference and reverence. For quite some time I built it up in my head as an affront to my ideology, another feather in the cap of nostalgia baiting reference culture, right up there with Doctor Who circa 2020 to right now or The Rise Of Skywalker.